In addition to being the setting for countless movies including Clint Eastwood's "Escape From Alcatraz" and Burt Lancaster's "Birdman of Alcatraz" the island of Alcatraz aka "The Rock" has also been the setting for some music videos. Eighties metal guitar gods the Scorpions chose the former prison setting, smack in the middle of the San Francisco Bay as their set backdrop for the video of their  popular song "No One Like You." (see clip below).

The next decade horror-core, hardcore Sacramento producer/rapper Brotha Lynch Hung  got permission to shoot on Alcatraz for scenes for one of his music videos. During the overnight shoot Brotha Lynch Hung swore on his life to me, in an interview for XXL at the time,  that he witnessed a ghost in one of the creepy abandoned old cells on the small island.

Listed as a historic landmark for over twenty years the best way to access daily tours of Alcatraz (home to the oldest operating lighthouse on the west coast) these days is by taking the ferry from either the Fisherman's Wharf in SF or from the other direction: Angel Island and Tiburon. For more information on Alcatraz, which is well worth a visit and is administered by the National Park Service click here. 

Like the close by and even bigger  Angel Island, where you can even camp by booking in advance, a lot of times people who live in the immediate Bay Area tend to never bother to visit (outside of mandatory guided trips when they are kids in school) and this is too bad because often what is on our own doorstep is worth a visit over a lot of out-of-town destinations. The state park of  Angel Island, is  probably the best and most immediate rural , remote-feeling getaways for those who live in SF but who don't have a car to drive for miles/hours on end.

 

During the 80’s and early 1990’s, there was an effort by Hollywood to make movies about Latinos but rarely did you see Latinos actually played by Latinos. During my back injury I watched a slew of movies from that era, including Scarface and Carlito’s Way. In Scarface, Al Pacino played a Cuban refugee with F. Murray Abraham as a Cuban as well. In Carlito’s Way, Pacino played a Puerto Rican. In each role Pacino had a terrible accent. I also watched Altered States with Thaao Penghlis, a Greek actor from Australia, playing the role of Prof. Eduardo Eccheverria, a professor from Mexico. In the movie, Thaao doesn’t try to hide his Aussie accent. I guess Hollywood figured his dark skin would suffice. To top it off, I watched Lou Diamond Phillips play Ritchie Valens in La Bamba and Angel Guzman, a former Chicano gang member turned math wiz in Stand And Deliver. Phillips is everything but Chicano. He, according to his bio, is of American of Scotch-Irish, Hawaiian, Cherokee, Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese descent.


During that time period, it seemed like no effort was made to use Latinos in staring roles, even if the movie was about Latinos, unless you were James Edward Olmos. Olmos played most of the big roles during that era. He played Jaime Escalante in Stand And Deliver, Abraham Quintanilla in Selena, police Lieutenant Martin Castillo in the television series Miami Vice and starred and directed the prison gang classic, American Me. This led to the classic joke by La Cucaracha’s satirist Lalo Alcaraz,
“He’s in Olmos every movie!”

The only other Latino actor that worked as much as Olmos during that time was actress Lupe Ontiveros. Lupe was a graduate from Texas Woman's University in Denton Texas who relocated to Los Angeles and got into acting by accident. She claims to have played the role of a maid over 300 times in her career between her stints in movies, television and theatre. She portrays a maid in El Norte, Goonies, Charlie’s Angels and Fame, just to name a few. One of the only roles that she didn’t play a maid or a women with a heavy accent was in the movie Chuck And Buck, made by Puerto Rican filmmaker Miguel Arteta, in which she plays a Beverly Hills executive. Even the pseudo-ultra hip, Sex In The City had her as a maid. Perhaps there was liberation for rich straight white females, but not for the Latinas.

VidAmerica 948

So I’m back after a small hiatus. First, my back kept me in bed for a week. All I could do was lie on my back and watch endless hours of T.V. After my back got a little better, it was time to hit the studio with my band, Monte Carlo 76. We have been writing our second record for close to three years now and to finally hit to the studio is a welcomed relief. During this time it has been painful to sit for long periods of time. Even as I write this I am on my knees with my laptop on my bed rather than sitting at my desk. I still managed to check out a few bands (Calle 13, Ely Guerra and Manejo Beto…more on them later) and I recorded all my keyboard tracks. I just had to do all this while standing up.

If you are under 25 and you are reading this, remember this; Take care of yourself because the older you get it becomes so much harder to recover from injuries, especially if you don’t take care of yourself. I will recover, but like I said, it’s taking a lot longer then it used to.