Month: January 2013

  • Chavela Vargas Costa Rican Singer who Lived in Mexico

    Chavela Vargas

    B. 1919  |  By SANDRA CISNEROS

    Illustration by Ali Cavanaugh

     

    ONCE, WHEN MEXICO WAS THE BELLYBUTTON of the universe, Isabel Vargas Lizano ran away from home and resolved to make herself into a Mexican singer. This was in the 1930s, when Europe was on fire, the U.S. out of work and Mexico busy giving birth to herself after a revolution.

    At 14, Isabel was busy birthing herself, too. Cast off from her Costa Rican kin for being too strange, she would become Mexico’s beloved Chavela Vargas.

    It was the country’s golden era. Visitors came from across the globe. Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, Leonora Carrington. Mexico was a knockout, and everyone was crazy about her.

    At first, Vargas made her living doing odd jobs: cooking, selling children’s clothes, chauffeuring an elderly lady. She was adopted by artists and musicians and sang at their parties and favorite bars. When she was not yet 25, she was invited to the Blue House of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Coyoacán. “Who’s that girl, the one in the white shirt?” Kahlo asked. Kahlo summoned her over, and Vargas sat at her side the rest of the night. Because Vargas lived all the way up in the Condesa neighborhood, Rivera and Kahlo offered her lodging for the night. Rivera suggested she take to bed some of their Mexican hairless dogs. “Sleep with them,” he told her. “They warm the bed and keep away rheumatism.” Vargas had found her spiritual family.

    Eventually Vargas apprenticed with Mexico’s finest musicians: the composer Agustín Lara and Antonio Bribiesca and his weeping guitar. She fine-tuned her singing style listening to Toña la Negra and the Texas songbird Lydia Mendoza, among others. The songwriter José Alfredo Jiménez became her maestro with his songs that “expressed . . . the common pain of all who love,” Vargas said. “And when I came out onstage they were mine, because I added my own pain, too.”

    With just a guitar and her voice, Vargas performed in a red poncho and pants at a time when Mexican women didn’t wear pants. She sang with arms open wide like a priest celebrating Mass, modeling her singing on the women of the Mexican revolution. “Amexicana is a very strong woman,” Vargas said, “Starting with la Adelita, la Valentina —mujeres muy mujeres.” Chavela Vargas belonged to this category of women-very-much women.

    Even when Vargas was young and her voice still as transparent as mezcal, she danced with her lyrics tacuachito-style, cheek to cheek, pounded them on the bar, made them jump like dice, spat and hissed and purred like the woman jaguar she claimed to be and finished with a volley that entered the heart like a round of bullets from the pistol she stashed in her belt.

    “She was chile verde,” remembers Elena Poniatowska, the grande dame of Mexican letters.

    Vargas lived and sang a lo macho. She sang love songs written for men to sing without changing the pronouns.

    Her big hit was “Macorina,” Poniatowska said. “ ‘Put your hand here, Macorina,’ she sang with her hand like a great big seashell over her sex, long before Madonna.”

    In her autobiography, Vargas writes: “I always began with ‘Macorina.’ . . . And lots of times I finished with that song. So that folks would go home to their beds calientitos, nice and warm.”

    Because she immortalized popular rancheras, Vargas is often labeled a country singer. But she kidnapped romantic boleros and made them hers too. Her songs appealed to drinkers of pulque as well as of Champagne.

    The critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto remembers the Vargas of the early ’60s. “I used to see her at La Cueva de Amparo Montes, a club frequented by the underground in downtown Mexico City. She dressed in black leather, and would roar over on a motorcycle with a blonde gringa on her back.”

    Someone else told this story. In a Mexico City club, Vargas serenaded a couple. Then she slipped off the man’s tie, lassoed it around his woman’s neck, gave it a passionate yank and kissed her.

    She had a reputation as a robaesposas. Did she really have affairs with everyone’s wives? A European queen? Ava Gardner? Frida? What was true, and what was mitote? You only have to look at Vargas’s photos when she was young to know some of the talk was true. In the town of Monclova, Coahuila, go ask the elders. They’ll tell you: Vargas came to town and sang. And then ran off with the doctor’s daughter. People still remember.

    Judy Garland, Grace Kelly, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor. . . . She was invited to their parties, danced with the wives of powerful politicos, claimed to have shared un amor with “the most famous woman in the world” but would not say more.

    And then, somewhere in her 60s, Vargas disappeared. Some thought she had died, and in a way, she had.

    “Sometimes I don’t have any other alternative but to joke about my alcoholism as if it was just a one-night parranda,” she said. “It was no joke. . . . Those who lived it with me know it.”

    Before Pedro Almodóvar and Salma Hayek featured her in their films, there were friends who helped Vargas walk through fire and be reborn. The performers Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe invited Vargas to make her 1991 comeback in their Mexico City theater, El Hábito.

    “There were only a few minutes left before her entrance, and the place was packed,” Rodríguez remembers. “All the hipsters of that era were waiting. No one could believe Chavela was returning to sing.

    “She was very nervous. Well, she’d never appeared onstage without drinking. When we gave her the second call, she panicked and asked for a tequila. Liliana and I looked at one another, and then Liliana said, ‘Chavela, if you drink, it’s better if we just cancel the show.’ ‘But how?’ said Chavela. ‘There’s a full house.’ ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ we said. ‘We’ll just give everyone their money back, and that’ll be that.’

    “Chavela looked serious for a few moments, then she took a deep breath and said, ‘Let’s go!’ We gave the third call, she climbed up on the stage, stood there like an ancient tree and sang for . . . years, without stopping, without drinking.”

    Her voice had become another voice. Ravaged but beautiful in a dark way, like glass charred into obsidian.

    Vargas’s specialty was el amor y el desamor, love and love lost, songs of loneliness and goodbyes in a voice as ethereal as the white smoke from copal, but as powerful as the Pacific. Songs that sucked you in, threatened to drown you; then, when you least expected it, pulled down your pants and slapped you on the behind. Audiences broke out into spontaneous gritos, that Mexican yodel barked from the belly and a lifetime of grief.

    Mexican parties always end with everyone crying, the journalist Alma Guillermoprieto once noted. Vargas satisfied a national urge to weep. She embodied Mexico, that open wound unhealed since the conquest and, a century after a useless revolution, in need of tears now more than ever.

    This summer, at 93, Vargas returned to Mexico from Spain. She was sick. On Aug. 5, death came at last and ran off with her.

    Sandra Cisneros is a novelist, poet and essayist. She is the author, most recently, of “Have You Seen Marie?”

     

    Copyright. 2013. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

  • Disruptions: The Real Hazards of E-Devices on Planes

    A pilot uses the FlySmart with Airbus app on an Apple iPad. The F.A.A. has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane’s avionics, but it still perpetuates such claims.

     

    Airbus, via European Pressphoto AgencyA pilot uses the FlySmart with Airbus app on an Apple iPad. The F.A.A. has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane’s avionics, but it still perpetuates such claims.

     

    DECEMBER 30, 2012, 11:00 AM

    Disruptions: The Real Hazards of E-Devices on Planes

    By NICK BILTON

    Over the last year, flying with phones and other devices has become increasingly dangerous.

    In September, a passenger was arrested in El Paso after refusing to turn off his cellphone as the plane was landing. In October, a man in Chicago was arrested because he used his iPad during takeoff. In November, half a dozen police cars raced across the tarmac at La Guardia Airport in New York, surrounding a plane as if there were a terrorist on board. They arrested a 30-year-old man who had also refused to turn off his phone while on the runway.

    Who is to blame in these episodes? You can’t solely pin it on the passengers. Some of the responsibility falls on the Federal Aviation Administration, for continuing to uphold a rule that is based on the unproven idea that a phone or tablet can interfere with the operation of a plane.

    These conflicts have been going on for several years. In 2010, a 68-year-old man punched a teenager because he didn’t turn off his phone. Lt. Kent Lipple of the Boise Police Department in Idaho, who arrested the puncher, said the man “felt he was protecting the entire plane and its occupants.” And let’s not forget Alec Baldwin, who was kicked off an American Airlines plane in 2011 for playing Words With Friends online while parked at the gate.

    Dealing with the F.A.A. on this topic is like arguing with a stubborn teenager. The agency has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane’s avionics, but it still perpetuates such claims, spreading irrational fear among millions of fliers.

    A year ago, when I first asked Les Dorr, a spokesman for the F.A.A., why the rule existed, he said the agency was being cautious because there was no proof that device use was completely safe. He also said it was because passengers needed to pay attention during takeoff.

    When I asked why I can read a printed book but not a digital one, the agency changed its reasoning. I was told by another F.A.A. representative that it was because an iPad or Kindle could put out enough electromagnetic emissions to disrupt the flight. Yet a few weeks later, the F.A.A. proudly announced that pilots could now use iPads in the cockpit instead of paper flight manuals.

    The F.A.A. then told me that “two iPads are very different than 200.” But experts at EMT Labs, an independent testing facility in Mountain View, Calif., say there is no difference in radio output between two iPads and 200. “Electromagnetic energy doesn’t add up like that,” said Kevin Bothmann, the EMT Labs testing manager.

    It’s not a matter of a flying device hitting another passenger, either. Kindles weigh less than six ounces; Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs weighs 2.1 pounds in hardcover. I‘d rather be hit in the head by an iPad Mini than a 650-page book.

    In October, after months of pressure from the public and the news media, the F.A.A. finally said it would begin a review of its policies on electronic devices in all phases of flight, including takeoff and landing. But the agency does not have a set time frame for announcing its findings.

    An F.A.A. spokeswoman told me last week that the agency was preparing to move to the next phase of its work in this area, and would appoint members to a rule-making committee that will begin meeting in January.

    The F.A.A. should check out an annual report issued by NASA that compiles cases involving electronic devices on planes. None of those episodes have produced scientific evidence that a device can harm a plane’s operation. Reports of such interference have been purely speculation by pilots about the cause of a problem.

    Other government agencies and elected officials are finally getting involved.

    This December, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, sent a letter to the F.A.A. telling the agency that it had a responsibility to “enable greater use of tablets, e-readers and other portable devices” during flights, as they empower people and allow “both large and small businesses to be more productive and efficient, helping drive economic growth and boost U.S. competitiveness.”

    A week later, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, also sent a letter to the F.A.A. noting that the public was “growing increasingly skeptical of prohibitions” on devices on airplanes. She warned that she was “prepared to pursue legislative solutions should progress be made too slowly.”

    If progress is slow, there will eventually be an episode on a plane in which someone is seriously harmed as a result of a device being on during takeoff. But it won’t be because the device is interfering with the plane’s systems. Instead, it will be because one passenger harms another, believing they are protecting the plane from a Kindle, which produces fewer electromagnetic emissions than a calculator.

    E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

     

    Copyright. 2013 THe New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

     

  • In Victory for Google, U.S. Ends Antitrust Investigation

     

    J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

    Jon Leibowitz, the F.T.C. chairman, said Google’s search engine actions were “not undertaken without legitimate justification.”

     

    January 3, 2013
     

    In Victory for Google, U.S. Ends Antitrust Investigation

     

    By 

     

    WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday found that Google had not violated antitrust or anticompetition statutes in the way it structures its Web search application — handing a big victory to the search giant in its ongoing dispute with regulators.

    But the commission found that Google had misused its broad patents on cellphone technology, and ordered Google to make that technology available to rivals.

    Google’s competitors, including Microsoft, have pressed vigorously for federal officials to bring an antitrust case involving its search business. Last year, an F.T.C. staff report recommended that the commission bring such a case.

    The F.T.C. found that although Google sometimes favors its own products when producing search results with its ubiquitous search engine, its actions were “not undertaken without legitimate justification,” said Jon Leibowitz, the F.T.C. chairman.

    Google agreed, however, to take certain actions to address what Mr. Leibowitz called “the most problematic business practices relating to its search and  search advertising business.”

    The trade commission’s inquiry has been going on for at least a year and a half. Google disclosed in June 2011 that it had received formal notification from the commission that it was looking into Google’s business practices.

    Google has long defended its search business, saying that it offers results that are most relevant to consumers and that the “competition is just a click away.” It contends that users who believe a Google search is not meeting their needs can easily move to another search engine, like Microsoft’s Bing.

    Google has also said that the barriers to entry into the search business are so low that it cannot abuse its market power, even though it has more than a 70 percent share of the search business in the United States.

    Companies that rely on Google to drive traffic to their sites have complained that Google adjusts its search algorithm to favor its own growing number of commerce sites — including shopping, local listings and travel.

    But the trade commission faced an uphill battle in proving malicious intent — that Google changes its search algorithm to purposely harm competitors and favor itself. Antitrust lawyers say anticompetitive behavior cannot be proved simply by showing that a change in the algorithm affects other Web sites and causes sites to show up lower in results, even though studies have shown that users rarely look beyond the first page of search results.

    The commission was pressing to wrap up its case before Monday, when a new commissioner will be sworn in, a development that could have affected the result of the Google investigation. Joshua D. Wright, a professor at George Mason University, was confirmed by the Senate this week to take one of the two Republican spots on the five-member commission. Mr. Wright had previously said he would recuse himself from any Google matters for two years, because he has done work for or about the company including co-authoring a paper arguing that Google has not violated any antitrust statutes.

    Mr. Wright will replace J. Thomas Rosch, a commissioner since 2006. If the Google case were not settled by Monday, the commission faced the prospect that a vote on whether to charge Google would deadlock at 2-2.

    The commission voted 4-1 to settle the patent charges, and voted 5-0 to close its antitrust and competition investigation.

    “The F.T.C.’s credibility is eroded when confidential details of internal discussions are revealed to the media, as has continually been the case in the investigation of Google,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said in a Nov. 26 letter to Mr. Leibowitz, the commission chairman. Mr. Wyden also said there was plenty of evidence that adequate competition exists in the search business. He cited the recent introduction of competitors like DuckDuckGo, which has a no-tracking privacy policy inspired by some consumers’ complaints about the tracking of consumer behavior that Google and other search engines perform.

    “Compared to almost any other market in the history of antitrust regulation, online search has effectively zero barriers to entry,” Mr. Wyden said.

     
     

    Copyright 2013. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved