My dad, who books the poets and other writers who read their work at our events, this time invited the Oaxacan poets Efraín Velasco Sosa, Bertha Cenobio, and Haydee Ramos Cadena to read their work, along with the US born, Oaxaca based writer and translator Jay Miskowiec.

It was nice to have Jay reading some of his work at the party, since he and his wife Lourdes Cué were the ones who inspired my parents to start a cultural center in the first place!

When I was growing up in Brooklyn and starting to play a more active role in the music scene, I had sometimes tried to encourage my parents to open up our apartment for house shows when I was growing up, especially since the local and international house show circuits were incredibly kind to me in the early years of my career, and I wanted to do something to pay it forward – like I’ve often said, when I was growing up, pretty much all the best concerts in NYC (and beyond) were in someone’s house that they’d turned into a makeshift venue, and often these were the most well-paid gigs for the artists, since the “venue” had far fewer expenses and wasn’t usually trying to make a profit from our work – we usually went home with way more money when we played at someone’s house as opposed to an “official” venue.

Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to give back to the community by putting on my own house shows back then, it always seemed like our apartment was a little too small for it, and we were also just waaay too busy back then to put in the time and effort to make a good house show happen at our place – and then, around when my parents retired from their teaching careers and moved to Oaxaca, I got pretty busy with my 2016-’19 World Tour, which meant giving back to the house show community was more a matter of organizing shows for other musicians in other people’s houses, since I didn’t really live anywhere at that point in my life.

But then, as my parents settled into life in Oaxaca, they got to know Jay and Lourdes – Jay invited my dad to give some readings of his poetry in the cultural center that they run in their home, and Lourdes invited my mom to have a show of her paintings there – Jay and Lourdes even invited me to perform there on some of the Mexican dates of my 2016-’19 World Tour, and – eventually – my parents and I realized we could do something similar with our home – thus, the Centro Cultural was born, and we inaugurated it in the summer of 2022, with the release party for my double album Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue, which doubled as the celebration of my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary.

Since then, we’ve hosted several events there, always with a combination of live music, poetry, and visual art from local and international artists.

My dad also read some of his own poems at the party this month – some from the recently published Chicatanas with Efraín reading the Spanish translations he’d recently done for the bilingual edition of the book, and some from a new book of his that will be published by the New Orleans based Lavender Ink in 2025 – for the latter, Sue Creamer joined him on piano with some brilliant pieces she composed for the brand new poems, and I even backed them up with a bongo drum for one of them (the same bongo drum that Beth Heuer used to play in my first ever band, The Band Of The Land, over 20 years ago!)

And, for the music portion of this event, I also invited the singer/songwriter Avtar Khalsa, who finally said yes to performing this time, after we’d been trying to book him for one of these events for years and he’d always already been booked to play a festival somewhere.

Next → Page 3: Cannonball Statman at the party

or jump to:

Page 1: Dancing dogs and insects in the days before the party, visual art and guests start to arrive

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Page 4: Winter in Wales, recording the new album in Somerset

Page 5: Spring Romantic Punk touring season in Europe and the UK

Page 6: Summer performances in Mexico, digging through the archives in Oaxaca and Puebla

Page 7: Autumn reflections on the NYC underground scene and the power of music

Page 8: What am I doing in 2025?

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