Bolivia is, truly, something else.
But before I get into that I would like to nominate myself for the award of worst blogger ever. I mean seriously. It’s been months. All of you dedicated readers have lost your faith, and for that I apologize. I’m going to start this up again. And I really do want to inform you about Carnival, how I became a Uruguayan rock star, and other tales, but that will have to be later. Now I will tell you how I came to be a coca growing farmer in the Bolivian lowlands, because that’s what’s on my mind.
My three peaceful and accommodated months in Uruguay were a respite from the journey that is to follow – the pace of my journey has changed dramatically. After spending a couple of days in Buenos Aires, I flew to Sao Paolo, Brazil to meet my pops and drop off my luggage, and three days later I landed ABOVE the clouds, into the impossible mountain fantasy world that is Bolivia. I decided sort of last minutely, against all possible odds (read: having to apply for a visa like any South American dose to get to the US), to make a short trip to the poorest South American nation to take a listen to the saya afroboliviana, and to be a little hardcore again after three months of languishing in delicious first world excesses.
I’ve been feeling quite a bit like some international man of mystery these days, or some jet setting famous person, hopping from country to country a couple of days at a time. Sao Paolo is a shocking and incomprehensible place. It’s one of the biggest cities in the world, some 25 million people, and buzzes like some science fiction nightmare, endless towering skyscrapers as far as the horizon in ever-stranger shapes and clapboard shantytowns creeping through like kudzu, clinging to spare spaces, hoping to be invisible. Traffic moves at a standstill day in and out, a cloud of smog hovers above the city at all times, and it all just makes you tired. The amount of wealth that is in that city is just staggering, there is no place in Latin America with so much stuff, and in the fashionable Jardins district you might as well be in Beverly Hills. Of course the favelas are never too far away. It’s a strange place, and I’m sure it has its pleasures, but it seems so inherently un-Brazilian, un-caipirinha and invisible-bathing-suit and un-unapologetically insane, that I can’t wrap my mind around it.
La Paz is a dream world in a different way. The city, which is the highest large city in the world at 12000 something feet, started out in a broad valley in the cruel Andean altiplano, has since sprawled up the sides of the mountains that surround the city, the little brick houses clinging to steep hillsides looking like shining stalactites in every direction. The Bolivian tourism association advertises the country with the vomit-worthy catchphrase “where the authentic still exists”, but for those of us who kind of get off on going back to a time before the shoppingmallification of the universe, they kind of have a point – Bolivia is, basically, really hardcore. It is the most indigenous country in the Americas, with some 60% of people pure blooded Aymara, Quechua, or one of endless other tribes, large swaths of the population don’t even speak any Spanish, and life outside the city in many ways goes on as it did in pre-Incan days.
La Paz is an incredible place because modernity lives side by side with the ancient, briefcase toting businessmen hustle by wrinkled witches selling dried llama fetuses, and nobody blinks an eye. Old colonial glory, soaring skyscrapers, and tin huts all compete for eye space and it all kind of fits in, in a way. The most characteristic Bolivian character, by far, is the chola, or traditional indigenous woman- mouths full of gold, these ladies of deceivingly small girth wear countless layers of patterned skirts, scarfs, and a comically small, high bowler hat pinned to a head of long tough braids- these incredibly tough mamacitas line the sidewalks of the entire city hawking every possible product imaginable, and occasionally throwing a rock at a tourist who dares to take a picture of their ancient glory. But, especially now with the pro-indigenous socialist government of rabble-rouser Evo Morales, being chola is kind of hip in its own way, and the Aymara ladies of the aliplano villages and La Paz shanties wear their top hats with pride, even the youngest of generations.
I’ve said this about a lot of places, but I think I’ve never seen a place with as much bustle as La Paz, even if Santo Domingo wins for the hustle. The streets are just clogged with celphoning mestizos, llama toting cholas, lost gringos, every which kind of vehicle flying in every direction town impossibly steep hills, it’s a functioning madness, but the conspicuous lack of traffic lights that makes crossing the street and exercise in blind faith. This has led, though, to what I think is probably the best-conceived social program in the world- the government has hired people to dress in zebra costumes and dance in intersections to direct traffic during rush hour. Swear to pachamama.
The other drastic change in my lifestyle was rapid reinsertion to the international traveller scene – my first week in La Paz I was staying in a place called Loki Hostel, and its just absurd, hundreds of beautiful young Europeans drinking cocktails day in day out in a bar swanky enough for your local bohemian hood, mostly in Bolivia to go dance at all-gringo clubs and go on three day coke binges in the cities many barely-concealed drug dens, and really I cant help but being a little disgusted by it all, and remember to feel lucky that I managed to avoid the gringo trail almost entirely on this trip. At the same time, I’ve met a lot of great people, and had some quality hippy sing-along, and finally adapted to remembering how to speak English, but I was kind of freaked out for a moment.
The other shocking random tidbit is that there about 300 Israelis currently in La Paz, which has become one of the biggest post-army backpacking destinations, leading to a whole industry of countless falafel restaurants, Israeli-specific hotels and bars, just to cater to the masses. I now have entirely new concepts about how one should dance to electronic, just watch some wilding Israelis. And those of you who know me intimately know about my very intimate relationship with falafel. But it’s another element in the mind-blowing bizarreness of this place.
Part two and pictures to be added tomarrow!
miércoles, 23 de abril de 2008
viernes, 22 de febrero de 2008
Fast Times in The Switzerland of the Americas
Ok – so I admit it, I’ve been terrible at keeping up with this blog lately. Two months in Uruguay and nothing. For all you dedicated readers, if you exist, my bad.
Currently I’m living in Montevideo, Uruguay researching candombe, percussion-battery music that dominates Carnival here, which as Uruguayans love to point out, is not the biggest Carnival in the world, but the longest. Living in Uruguay is quite a change of pace from the last bunch of countries I’ve been in. Nicknamed “The Switzerland of the Americas,” Uruguay is unusual for Latin America for being economically and politically stable for most of its history, It’s the only country in Latin America that has no official religion – Easter Week is renamed Vacation Week and Christmas is Family Day. Uruguay also has the distinction of having completely killed off the indigenous populations who once lived here, so unlike Argentina which basically tries to pretend that a large mestizo population simply does not exist, Uruguayans are almost entirely the descendents of European immigrants: Italians, Spaniards, Jews, Russians, etc.
I’ve come up with a list of criteria for how I know I’m living in a pretty developed country. If you live in a country where people voluntarily leave their homes and sleep in a tent for vacation, you ain’t too third-world. When there are meters in your taxis, hot water in every apartment, and an Urban Outfitters in your city, and more art cinemas that you can count on one hand, you ain’t too third world. My hippie friends hate to lose their developing world credibility, but I have to say, my life here in Montevideo is not to different from my New York life, in a lot of ways.
This of course isn’t the whole story – there are glaring inequalities, and despite a large middle class, a huge wealth gap. There are shanties on the edges of every city, leading to the growth of a vaguely criminal and very visible sub-culture of planchas, who can be found in all parts of Montevideo intimidating people into giving them money and cigarettes. This is how you recognize a plancha: skinny dudes with Nike baseball caps tilted upwards, Nike sneakers, soccer jerseys, capri jeans going to their ankles, bling in one ear, and brilliant bright dyed blonde hair. Especially where I live, I got accosted constantly by such people, but they never really seem to be dangerous, and besides, I can’t feel too intimidated by gangsters who kiss each other hello.
Right now I’m living in Ciudad Vieja, the historic old city that is filled with tourists and bankers during the day and stalked by junkies by night. It’s a strange, bipolar and melancholic neighborhood, and there is a lovely sort of loneliness watching the cargo ships get loaded up by rusty old dinosaur cranes every night and head off into sea. I’m sharing an apartment with a diverse crowd: an Iranian quantum physicist, a Mexican fashion student, a Dutch biomedical engineer, and an Uruguayan acupuncturist. My first month however, I spent couch hopping in various apartments of friends of friends (all leading back to my Argentine host-family) until it seemed inevitable that I should find a permanent place to settle in. One such house was shared by Uruguayan blugrass-indie-rock musicians, funk aficionados, and a socialogist who founded Uruguay’s Marijuana Liberation Party. (Go to viejahistoria.com and closet.com.uy to see the websites of the bands I was living with). It was an absurd place, and my housemates were very amused to learn from me that they were perfect specimens of hipsterism. Theres no word for it here yet, but hipsterism is incredibly alive here in Uruguay – bicycling tight-pantsed, pink wearing, gigantic sunglass-toting, armchair philosophizing hedonists who live in former ghettoes are everywhere.
My first week here I had my first taste of hostel living with the international-South American-backpacker crowd. Montevideo tends to be a one-day stopover for people on their way from Buenos Aires to the famed beaches of Uruguay, such as super-luxurious Punta del Este, where as everybody knows, Shakira summers. As such, the hostel was re-populated by another 60 people every night, ranging from Brazilian backpackers to large groups of Australians who would get funnel beers and piss in the plants. (As a side note – I find it funny that of all the people I’ve met on the road, its rarely the Americans who are the biggest assholes, though I still find most people amazed that I am not an ignorant war-loving capitalist). There was something both fun and maddening about telling my life story to 60 new people every night, but the worst part was being suddenly surrounded by the one-upsmanish of travllelers, who tout their travel experiences as unique badges of hardcoreness and passive-aggressibly criticize everyone else in order to protect themselves from realizing that other people share those experiences. I found myself completely guilty of this myself, and decided I needed to get out of there as fast as possible to not become that asshole.
Uruguayans are mostly chill folk, but if there’s something they get riled up about, its not being Argentina. Argentines, on the other hand, casually all joke that Uruguay is just a province of Argentina. After all, there are just 3 million people in this little country (that’s less than the population of Brooklyn), and they share mate, tango, good meat and Italian last names with their big Argentine cousins. The one-sided rivalry (something like the Boston-New York baseball rivalry) has heated up because of a bunch of paper mills Uruguay put up that Argentines claim will pollute touristic parts of their river, and there are protests and harsh words being exchanged on this silly topic all the time. I have to say though, that after living here, I have to agree that Uruguayans have their own thing going on – the culture is just more chill, maybe because of all that beautiful beach, and Brazilian music and culture has a big impact here. Cumbia and other Latin Music is popular here, if not as popular as rock nacional, and people front just a little less. I think I’m being converted, despite my love for Argentina.
But none of this has anything to do with why I’m here – which is Carnival, the central event of the year for millions of Uruguayans (the other million can’t stand it). For those used to seeing pictures of Brazilian Carnival with their scantily glad samba dancers and mad tropical fornication in the streets, you will have been misled. As one might expect, Uruguayan carnival is more, well, relaxed. The month focuses on competitions and performances by groups in various categories, but the most important are murga and candombe. Stages, or tablados, are set up all over the city ranging from rickety barrio productions to corporate-sponsored arenas, and local street-parades in various neighborhoods go on every day. This all prepares for the competitive event, nightly performances in a huge open-air amphitheatre called Teatro de Verano, where groups get one hour to show what they got. (To former Stuyvesant students – think a large scale Sing!, because that’s really what its like.)
Murga is a weird but great Spanish-decended type of comic opera, in which 15 dudes dressed in ridiculous medival-looking costumes sing political commentary in crazy four-part harmonies to a battery of bass drum, snare, and cymbals. Strange as it is, this is immensily popular here, espcially among the lower-classes. I guess I was kind of skeptical the first time I went to see one, but its actually incredible. Even understanding only around 15% of what they sing, its hilarious, and the harmonies are really amazing. This has led to Uruguayan music in general to be really on top of vocal harmonizing. Here’s a clip.
On the other side of the spectrum, is Candombe. Coming from the relatively small afro-Uruguayan minority, the drums of candombe have exploded into the top symbol of national culture, with kids from every race and social class enthuiastically picking of drums and marching through the streets during Carnival time. The biggest event of Carnival is really Las Llamadas, a two-day parade in which 30 plus candombe groups thunder down a narrow cobbled street in the old decaying Afro-Uruguayan neighborhood, and its immense. If I wrote about it now, this blog post will never end, so I’ll have to continue at a later time. Heres a taste of what a candombe comparsa looks like, however:
Currently I’m living in Montevideo, Uruguay researching candombe, percussion-battery music that dominates Carnival here, which as Uruguayans love to point out, is not the biggest Carnival in the world, but the longest. Living in Uruguay is quite a change of pace from the last bunch of countries I’ve been in. Nicknamed “The Switzerland of the Americas,” Uruguay is unusual for Latin America for being economically and politically stable for most of its history, It’s the only country in Latin America that has no official religion – Easter Week is renamed Vacation Week and Christmas is Family Day. Uruguay also has the distinction of having completely killed off the indigenous populations who once lived here, so unlike Argentina which basically tries to pretend that a large mestizo population simply does not exist, Uruguayans are almost entirely the descendents of European immigrants: Italians, Spaniards, Jews, Russians, etc.
I’ve come up with a list of criteria for how I know I’m living in a pretty developed country. If you live in a country where people voluntarily leave their homes and sleep in a tent for vacation, you ain’t too third-world. When there are meters in your taxis, hot water in every apartment, and an Urban Outfitters in your city, and more art cinemas that you can count on one hand, you ain’t too third world. My hippie friends hate to lose their developing world credibility, but I have to say, my life here in Montevideo is not to different from my New York life, in a lot of ways.
This of course isn’t the whole story – there are glaring inequalities, and despite a large middle class, a huge wealth gap. There are shanties on the edges of every city, leading to the growth of a vaguely criminal and very visible sub-culture of planchas, who can be found in all parts of Montevideo intimidating people into giving them money and cigarettes. This is how you recognize a plancha: skinny dudes with Nike baseball caps tilted upwards, Nike sneakers, soccer jerseys, capri jeans going to their ankles, bling in one ear, and brilliant bright dyed blonde hair. Especially where I live, I got accosted constantly by such people, but they never really seem to be dangerous, and besides, I can’t feel too intimidated by gangsters who kiss each other hello.
Right now I’m living in Ciudad Vieja, the historic old city that is filled with tourists and bankers during the day and stalked by junkies by night. It’s a strange, bipolar and melancholic neighborhood, and there is a lovely sort of loneliness watching the cargo ships get loaded up by rusty old dinosaur cranes every night and head off into sea. I’m sharing an apartment with a diverse crowd: an Iranian quantum physicist, a Mexican fashion student, a Dutch biomedical engineer, and an Uruguayan acupuncturist. My first month however, I spent couch hopping in various apartments of friends of friends (all leading back to my Argentine host-family) until it seemed inevitable that I should find a permanent place to settle in. One such house was shared by Uruguayan blugrass-indie-rock musicians, funk aficionados, and a socialogist who founded Uruguay’s Marijuana Liberation Party. (Go to viejahistoria.com and closet.com.uy to see the websites of the bands I was living with). It was an absurd place, and my housemates were very amused to learn from me that they were perfect specimens of hipsterism. Theres no word for it here yet, but hipsterism is incredibly alive here in Uruguay – bicycling tight-pantsed, pink wearing, gigantic sunglass-toting, armchair philosophizing hedonists who live in former ghettoes are everywhere.
My first week here I had my first taste of hostel living with the international-South American-backpacker crowd. Montevideo tends to be a one-day stopover for people on their way from Buenos Aires to the famed beaches of Uruguay, such as super-luxurious Punta del Este, where as everybody knows, Shakira summers. As such, the hostel was re-populated by another 60 people every night, ranging from Brazilian backpackers to large groups of Australians who would get funnel beers and piss in the plants. (As a side note – I find it funny that of all the people I’ve met on the road, its rarely the Americans who are the biggest assholes, though I still find most people amazed that I am not an ignorant war-loving capitalist). There was something both fun and maddening about telling my life story to 60 new people every night, but the worst part was being suddenly surrounded by the one-upsmanish of travllelers, who tout their travel experiences as unique badges of hardcoreness and passive-aggressibly criticize everyone else in order to protect themselves from realizing that other people share those experiences. I found myself completely guilty of this myself, and decided I needed to get out of there as fast as possible to not become that asshole.
Uruguayans are mostly chill folk, but if there’s something they get riled up about, its not being Argentina. Argentines, on the other hand, casually all joke that Uruguay is just a province of Argentina. After all, there are just 3 million people in this little country (that’s less than the population of Brooklyn), and they share mate, tango, good meat and Italian last names with their big Argentine cousins. The one-sided rivalry (something like the Boston-New York baseball rivalry) has heated up because of a bunch of paper mills Uruguay put up that Argentines claim will pollute touristic parts of their river, and there are protests and harsh words being exchanged on this silly topic all the time. I have to say though, that after living here, I have to agree that Uruguayans have their own thing going on – the culture is just more chill, maybe because of all that beautiful beach, and Brazilian music and culture has a big impact here. Cumbia and other Latin Music is popular here, if not as popular as rock nacional, and people front just a little less. I think I’m being converted, despite my love for Argentina.
But none of this has anything to do with why I’m here – which is Carnival, the central event of the year for millions of Uruguayans (the other million can’t stand it). For those used to seeing pictures of Brazilian Carnival with their scantily glad samba dancers and mad tropical fornication in the streets, you will have been misled. As one might expect, Uruguayan carnival is more, well, relaxed. The month focuses on competitions and performances by groups in various categories, but the most important are murga and candombe. Stages, or tablados, are set up all over the city ranging from rickety barrio productions to corporate-sponsored arenas, and local street-parades in various neighborhoods go on every day. This all prepares for the competitive event, nightly performances in a huge open-air amphitheatre called Teatro de Verano, where groups get one hour to show what they got. (To former Stuyvesant students – think a large scale Sing!, because that’s really what its like.)
Murga is a weird but great Spanish-decended type of comic opera, in which 15 dudes dressed in ridiculous medival-looking costumes sing political commentary in crazy four-part harmonies to a battery of bass drum, snare, and cymbals. Strange as it is, this is immensily popular here, espcially among the lower-classes. I guess I was kind of skeptical the first time I went to see one, but its actually incredible. Even understanding only around 15% of what they sing, its hilarious, and the harmonies are really amazing. This has led to Uruguayan music in general to be really on top of vocal harmonizing. Here’s a clip.
On the other side of the spectrum, is Candombe. Coming from the relatively small afro-Uruguayan minority, the drums of candombe have exploded into the top symbol of national culture, with kids from every race and social class enthuiastically picking of drums and marching through the streets during Carnival time. The biggest event of Carnival is really Las Llamadas, a two-day parade in which 30 plus candombe groups thunder down a narrow cobbled street in the old decaying Afro-Uruguayan neighborhood, and its immense. If I wrote about it now, this blog post will never end, so I’ll have to continue at a later time. Heres a taste of what a candombe comparsa looks like, however:
jueves, 7 de febrero de 2008
Till Now: Hippie Pirate Islands, Broken Heads, and Other Tales
Coming back from the jungle, I was officially on vacation. Well unofficially. But with visits from Irina, the family, and Lynas in row, I had a basically a month for not being by myself in the middle of nowhere, and yes, I know that a vacation from what is essentially a year-long paid vacation sounds decadent, and I have nothing to say about that.
Irina and me decided to go check out Utila, one of the famous Bay Islands of Honduras lying jewel-like off the Caribbean coast, and Honduras’ top tourist draw mostly for what is know as the cheapest scuba certification in the world. Of the three islands, Utila is known as the dirty-hippie-backpacker island, and the best place in the world to see the whale shark, which is a very very big fish. We thought this was a great combo.
Arriving in Utila Town from La Ceiba, Honduras is similar to the experience of arriving to another planet, I imagine. Getting off the boat on the little dock cluttered with cinder blocks and other flotsam, we were immediately accosted by a chorus line of 30 or so be-dreaded and bearded hippies aggressively pushing their dive shop in various languages, which we avoided nimbly, only to find ourselves in a very strange place, a seaside English village a surreal dream. Utila is definitely a unique place. The “locals,” both black and white, are the descendants of English pirates who marauded the Central American coast and immigrants from nearby Cayman Islands, and speak the world’s strangest English, a sort of salty, crackheaded Irish accent mixed with Jamaican English, that is almost completely unintelligible. Most are crew-cutted, tatted-up, wifebeater-wearing sorts, with a sort of inbred-looking flair among the white islanders especially. The town has one road stretching along the coast, dotted with English-style homes in various states of disrepair, ramshackle seafood eateries, crunchy Oregon-style cafes with Wesleyan-worthy vegan menus, traveler-friendly bars. The islanders, once living on this bizarre island in relative obscurity, now share the island with adventure-sport-type hippies who bartend and work at dive shops, salty old sea captains of various nationalities who drink beer and play horseshoes all day, and enterprising Hondurans attracted by the thriving economy.
Transportation on Utila is a fascinating concept. There are virtually no cars on the island, yet the narrow paved road is usually jammed with a combination of ATVs, motorcycles, golf-carts (I shit you not), pedestrians, bicycles, scraggly dogs. We once, on foot, were stuck in such a traffic jam actually unable to move. By nightfall, the famous Utila nightlife comes alive, in what is really a vaguely post-apocalyptic display of firecrackers, roadside barbeques, ATVs and motorcycles zipping past at Roadwarrior-worthy speeds, and country music. I noticed the country phenomenon in La Ceiba, but its serious here, with Nashville ballads blasting out of all the islander clubs, legend has it because the fishermen back in the day could only pick up Alabaman gulf coast radio on their boats when out at sea. The traveler scene, on the other hand, follows a strict schedule of starting out drinking in a swanky bar built into a treetop, and then to the oceanside bar-clubs. We went to a party on the beach, where there was techno and fire-jugglers. The concept of a place where you could walk around at night in Honduras was amazing. I never really left the house after 5pm in Ceiba, those back-pocket pistols being kind of a deterrent.
We stayed in what might be, and I risk exaggeration, the most zany hotel in the universe – a nearly indescribable complex called Nightland of walkways, tunnels, catwalks, overhangs, gazebos, cabins, all covered in colorful class bead sculptures and kitschy plastic toys, a sort of slightly more sinister Dr. Seuss universe. This is all the personal vision of a vaguely autistic Californian artist who reigns over his acid-inspired kingdom, spawning a slew of mixed-race Jewish hippie island children.
Then it rained. After all this is Honduras, and it rained and oh it rained, kind of forestalling further adventuring plans to other islands, but really this only became a problem on the day we tried to leave, in which on arriving at the port it was announced to a group of angry travelers that the port was closed, and there were no boats leaving the island for days. This led to a Lost-like dilemma of “we have to get off the island!”, in which people were frantically calling to charter planes, boats or anything they could to catch their flights out of Honduras. Together with some Israeli girls we considered leaving with island dude who insisted he could make it in his little boat, which seemed sketchy to us because he was a crew-cuted, tatted-up, wifebeater-wearing dude on a motorcycle, and decided not to risk it in the end. (We later saw said dude, who turned back after 15 minutes because the seas were too rough). Luckily, the port opened up in the afternoon and we managed to make it home, but it was dramatic for a while.
Then began my journey to Buenos Aires - it essentially started with hitchhiking down a jungle mountain near la Ceiba with Irina and an old dude with a machete, and ended in posh, fondue-restaurant laden Bariloche, Argentina. Which is quite a contrast. Inbetween, there was a brief and awkward drama with Aurelio’s son who may-or-may-not have tried to steal my iPod, many buses. Then the Miami airport, with the deja-vu rituals of Doritos, stocking up on American magazines, other consumerist pleasures, waiting in the evil Miami security line trying to pick out what spoken Spanish came from which country, unconsciously sneering at ruddy-faced screechy Floridians, and boom, another live lived, and other lived died and there I was back in Argentina.
Arriving in Buenos Aires from Honduras is some serious culture shock. Honduras, for example, has maybe one building over 4 stories in the whole country. Driving through the endless urban jungle of Buenos Aires, its buildings, cafes, and people and then staying in the fashionable neighborhood of Reccoleta with its face-lifted, Gucci-toting chetos – I was a world apart. I was guiltily excited for it, after all Buenos Aires is like a second home to me, and I was looking forward to being around cool young people with their cool clothes doing cool things, and jazz scenes, and streetside café-con-leche sipping afternoons, the mullets, and other vanities of the comparatively “developed world.” (Did he say mullets?). I did eventually come to enjoy these things (they are here in Montevideo too), but my first impulse was a sort of unavoidable repulsion. Being in the Mosquetia just weeks before, I couldn’t help but being weirded out by the excess of luxury, even hot-water showers seemed unnecessary to me, the obsessive self-consciousness of porteños.
Yeah, I got over it. That’s the good and the bad about people – we adapt like you would never think you could. As easy as I fell into comfort with third-world material reality, I fell into old excesses. That’s just the way it is. The secret is to see if one can not forget what it felt like to be part of another past reality.
Back in old Buenos Aires, I delighted in remembering the streets I once knew so well, complained about the hike in taxi fares, marveled at the new skyscraper projects undertaken. Ate gnocchi. Though in some way I realized that Buenos Aires belonged in another time, and I felt a strange emptiness too a city I once thrived in. Been there, done that, I suppose. My family had come to visit for Christmas, and it was great to have the comforts of home for a week. Then Lynas came down for a week of bike journeying through southern dilapidated neighborhoods unexplored, live music, and hanging out with the incredibly cool Jimenez clan (Lynas’ relatives in BA). I stayed in an unmarked hostel owned by an old friend, and marveled at the joys and vagaries of constant Internet access.
Among the extraordinary that happened in these weeks:
Firstly, when hiking with my family on a glacier in Patagonia, I foolishly did not wear sunscreen. Glaciers reflect sun, in your face, strongly. It burns you. It burnt me, second-degree blisters all over my face that hardened into lizardy scales. I looked like a monster, besides being in incredible pain, but got the unique experience to seeing how people treat you differently when you have a grotesque skin condition. Then, in incredible bad luck, I had a very geriatric accident – I fell in the shower, hard, and split open my head. In the moments of adrenaline, I leapt out of the shower, spurting blood all over the place in great quantities, and managed unlock the door before I lost too much… the incredible luck is that I was 10 feet away from my mom and her boyfriend Noel, two emergency physicians, who quickly and calmly wrapped me up and brought me to the hospital to get stitched up. Eight stitches in the head, thank you. The incredibly irony of this is that the one time I seriously hurt myself, I’m not gallivanting in drug-smugglish regions of the Honduran jungle, but in a luxury Buenos Aires apartment 10 feet away from my family.
A week later, I was waiting outside of Lynas’ apartment on my bicycle at, lets, say 2am (Argentine early evening), and in my boredom, making music with the bicycle bell in what seemed to me, interesting polyrythms, but I imagine to anyone else, the most annoying thing a person could do, at 2am. All of a sudden, a bucket of water is poured on me from a balcony above. No “Quiet down you rapscallion”, no “Va fa culo”, or “Callate hijo de puta, concha de tu madre”. Nope. An annoyed neighbor handled the situation with a well-aimed bucket of water. I couldn’t be mad, it was too hilarious.
In another episode, me and Lynas were at a country-house of his relatives in the outskirts of the city, on our way home in an ancient car, when something happened that was, as Lynas put it, very reminiscent of 28 Days Later. Going over a muddy road, we get stuck. We’re really stuck, and we can’t push the car out of the trench. Meanwhile its getting dark, and on the periphery of our vision, zombie-like types from the nearby shanties seem to be congregating. We rush to find dry grasses to put under the tires and propel us out. It works, I like to think, in the nick of time. Don’t fuck with zombies.
Then there was New Years, with the reveling Peruvians of Abasto lighting off absurd quantities of fireworks in the street. The presence of firework stores in the middle of a city larger than New York is just great. Petition anyone?
Then there was tango, that old obsession, the beauty and darkness of the milonga and the crash of the bandoneon and the sexy slinkiness of tangueras and the heartbreaking bittersweet melancholy of it all.
And then there was Uruguay – Lynas helped me transfer my absurd quantity of luggage to Montevideo, and then we skipped to distant Punta Del Diablo, a windswept and quiet surfer town, where my former host-cousin was renting a beach house with his friends. We had fun. Fin.
And after weeks of this fun nonsense, I’m here in my third country, then 5 months through with my journey, and zipping around like busy ethnomusicologist again, now in a much different sort of place. Updates on all this to come.
Irina and me decided to go check out Utila, one of the famous Bay Islands of Honduras lying jewel-like off the Caribbean coast, and Honduras’ top tourist draw mostly for what is know as the cheapest scuba certification in the world. Of the three islands, Utila is known as the dirty-hippie-backpacker island, and the best place in the world to see the whale shark, which is a very very big fish. We thought this was a great combo.
Arriving in Utila Town from La Ceiba, Honduras is similar to the experience of arriving to another planet, I imagine. Getting off the boat on the little dock cluttered with cinder blocks and other flotsam, we were immediately accosted by a chorus line of 30 or so be-dreaded and bearded hippies aggressively pushing their dive shop in various languages, which we avoided nimbly, only to find ourselves in a very strange place, a seaside English village a surreal dream. Utila is definitely a unique place. The “locals,” both black and white, are the descendants of English pirates who marauded the Central American coast and immigrants from nearby Cayman Islands, and speak the world’s strangest English, a sort of salty, crackheaded Irish accent mixed with Jamaican English, that is almost completely unintelligible. Most are crew-cutted, tatted-up, wifebeater-wearing sorts, with a sort of inbred-looking flair among the white islanders especially. The town has one road stretching along the coast, dotted with English-style homes in various states of disrepair, ramshackle seafood eateries, crunchy Oregon-style cafes with Wesleyan-worthy vegan menus, traveler-friendly bars. The islanders, once living on this bizarre island in relative obscurity, now share the island with adventure-sport-type hippies who bartend and work at dive shops, salty old sea captains of various nationalities who drink beer and play horseshoes all day, and enterprising Hondurans attracted by the thriving economy.
Transportation on Utila is a fascinating concept. There are virtually no cars on the island, yet the narrow paved road is usually jammed with a combination of ATVs, motorcycles, golf-carts (I shit you not), pedestrians, bicycles, scraggly dogs. We once, on foot, were stuck in such a traffic jam actually unable to move. By nightfall, the famous Utila nightlife comes alive, in what is really a vaguely post-apocalyptic display of firecrackers, roadside barbeques, ATVs and motorcycles zipping past at Roadwarrior-worthy speeds, and country music. I noticed the country phenomenon in La Ceiba, but its serious here, with Nashville ballads blasting out of all the islander clubs, legend has it because the fishermen back in the day could only pick up Alabaman gulf coast radio on their boats when out at sea. The traveler scene, on the other hand, follows a strict schedule of starting out drinking in a swanky bar built into a treetop, and then to the oceanside bar-clubs. We went to a party on the beach, where there was techno and fire-jugglers. The concept of a place where you could walk around at night in Honduras was amazing. I never really left the house after 5pm in Ceiba, those back-pocket pistols being kind of a deterrent.
We stayed in what might be, and I risk exaggeration, the most zany hotel in the universe – a nearly indescribable complex called Nightland of walkways, tunnels, catwalks, overhangs, gazebos, cabins, all covered in colorful class bead sculptures and kitschy plastic toys, a sort of slightly more sinister Dr. Seuss universe. This is all the personal vision of a vaguely autistic Californian artist who reigns over his acid-inspired kingdom, spawning a slew of mixed-race Jewish hippie island children.
Then it rained. After all this is Honduras, and it rained and oh it rained, kind of forestalling further adventuring plans to other islands, but really this only became a problem on the day we tried to leave, in which on arriving at the port it was announced to a group of angry travelers that the port was closed, and there were no boats leaving the island for days. This led to a Lost-like dilemma of “we have to get off the island!”, in which people were frantically calling to charter planes, boats or anything they could to catch their flights out of Honduras. Together with some Israeli girls we considered leaving with island dude who insisted he could make it in his little boat, which seemed sketchy to us because he was a crew-cuted, tatted-up, wifebeater-wearing dude on a motorcycle, and decided not to risk it in the end. (We later saw said dude, who turned back after 15 minutes because the seas were too rough). Luckily, the port opened up in the afternoon and we managed to make it home, but it was dramatic for a while.
Then began my journey to Buenos Aires - it essentially started with hitchhiking down a jungle mountain near la Ceiba with Irina and an old dude with a machete, and ended in posh, fondue-restaurant laden Bariloche, Argentina. Which is quite a contrast. Inbetween, there was a brief and awkward drama with Aurelio’s son who may-or-may-not have tried to steal my iPod, many buses. Then the Miami airport, with the deja-vu rituals of Doritos, stocking up on American magazines, other consumerist pleasures, waiting in the evil Miami security line trying to pick out what spoken Spanish came from which country, unconsciously sneering at ruddy-faced screechy Floridians, and boom, another live lived, and other lived died and there I was back in Argentina.
Arriving in Buenos Aires from Honduras is some serious culture shock. Honduras, for example, has maybe one building over 4 stories in the whole country. Driving through the endless urban jungle of Buenos Aires, its buildings, cafes, and people and then staying in the fashionable neighborhood of Reccoleta with its face-lifted, Gucci-toting chetos – I was a world apart. I was guiltily excited for it, after all Buenos Aires is like a second home to me, and I was looking forward to being around cool young people with their cool clothes doing cool things, and jazz scenes, and streetside café-con-leche sipping afternoons, the mullets, and other vanities of the comparatively “developed world.” (Did he say mullets?). I did eventually come to enjoy these things (they are here in Montevideo too), but my first impulse was a sort of unavoidable repulsion. Being in the Mosquetia just weeks before, I couldn’t help but being weirded out by the excess of luxury, even hot-water showers seemed unnecessary to me, the obsessive self-consciousness of porteños.
Yeah, I got over it. That’s the good and the bad about people – we adapt like you would never think you could. As easy as I fell into comfort with third-world material reality, I fell into old excesses. That’s just the way it is. The secret is to see if one can not forget what it felt like to be part of another past reality.
Back in old Buenos Aires, I delighted in remembering the streets I once knew so well, complained about the hike in taxi fares, marveled at the new skyscraper projects undertaken. Ate gnocchi. Though in some way I realized that Buenos Aires belonged in another time, and I felt a strange emptiness too a city I once thrived in. Been there, done that, I suppose. My family had come to visit for Christmas, and it was great to have the comforts of home for a week. Then Lynas came down for a week of bike journeying through southern dilapidated neighborhoods unexplored, live music, and hanging out with the incredibly cool Jimenez clan (Lynas’ relatives in BA). I stayed in an unmarked hostel owned by an old friend, and marveled at the joys and vagaries of constant Internet access.
Among the extraordinary that happened in these weeks:
Firstly, when hiking with my family on a glacier in Patagonia, I foolishly did not wear sunscreen. Glaciers reflect sun, in your face, strongly. It burns you. It burnt me, second-degree blisters all over my face that hardened into lizardy scales. I looked like a monster, besides being in incredible pain, but got the unique experience to seeing how people treat you differently when you have a grotesque skin condition. Then, in incredible bad luck, I had a very geriatric accident – I fell in the shower, hard, and split open my head. In the moments of adrenaline, I leapt out of the shower, spurting blood all over the place in great quantities, and managed unlock the door before I lost too much… the incredible luck is that I was 10 feet away from my mom and her boyfriend Noel, two emergency physicians, who quickly and calmly wrapped me up and brought me to the hospital to get stitched up. Eight stitches in the head, thank you. The incredibly irony of this is that the one time I seriously hurt myself, I’m not gallivanting in drug-smugglish regions of the Honduran jungle, but in a luxury Buenos Aires apartment 10 feet away from my family.
A week later, I was waiting outside of Lynas’ apartment on my bicycle at, lets, say 2am (Argentine early evening), and in my boredom, making music with the bicycle bell in what seemed to me, interesting polyrythms, but I imagine to anyone else, the most annoying thing a person could do, at 2am. All of a sudden, a bucket of water is poured on me from a balcony above. No “Quiet down you rapscallion”, no “Va fa culo”, or “Callate hijo de puta, concha de tu madre”. Nope. An annoyed neighbor handled the situation with a well-aimed bucket of water. I couldn’t be mad, it was too hilarious.
In another episode, me and Lynas were at a country-house of his relatives in the outskirts of the city, on our way home in an ancient car, when something happened that was, as Lynas put it, very reminiscent of 28 Days Later. Going over a muddy road, we get stuck. We’re really stuck, and we can’t push the car out of the trench. Meanwhile its getting dark, and on the periphery of our vision, zombie-like types from the nearby shanties seem to be congregating. We rush to find dry grasses to put under the tires and propel us out. It works, I like to think, in the nick of time. Don’t fuck with zombies.
Then there was New Years, with the reveling Peruvians of Abasto lighting off absurd quantities of fireworks in the street. The presence of firework stores in the middle of a city larger than New York is just great. Petition anyone?
Then there was tango, that old obsession, the beauty and darkness of the milonga and the crash of the bandoneon and the sexy slinkiness of tangueras and the heartbreaking bittersweet melancholy of it all.
And then there was Uruguay – Lynas helped me transfer my absurd quantity of luggage to Montevideo, and then we skipped to distant Punta Del Diablo, a windswept and quiet surfer town, where my former host-cousin was renting a beach house with his friends. We had fun. Fin.
And after weeks of this fun nonsense, I’m here in my third country, then 5 months through with my journey, and zipping around like busy ethnomusicologist again, now in a much different sort of place. Updates on all this to come.
jueves, 24 de enero de 2008
Into The Jungle
So what in the world happened to Marlon Bishop? It’s been well over a month now since I’ve last written here in the blogosphere – the truth is that I’ve been constantly on the go since then, basically on vacation from my vacation, with visits from all sorts of loved ones. I’m secretly here in Montevideo, Uruguay, living among the liver-destroying hedonism and squalor of hippie-laden hostels, and I really can’t wait to find myself a nice little Montevideo apartment. But anyway, ignore all this, because now I’m going to write a couple of entries detailing the ample adventures of this last month.
In my last weeks of Honduras something unexpected and amazing happened – a Brazilian documantarian decided to come to Honduras to do an episode on Aurelio and the Garifuna for Brazilian TV. The amazing part, is that they decided to film it as a road trip with Aurelio and his band to his hometown of Plaplaya, the most distant Garifuna town of all nestled in the middle of the Mosquetia rainforest, the biggest and baddest patch of jungle in the New World outside of the Amazon. I naturally decided to tag along for the ride.
Being in the jungle is really about getting to the jungle, and its no easy task. It involves cars, boats, rafts, rivers and seas, the end result total peace, hammocks, and killer mosquitoes. From La Ceiba we stuffed the pickup truck with speakers and other types of gigantic musical gadgetry, spent some hours waterproofing it all, and headed on our way. The crew: the great Aurelio Martinez, the aforementioned Chiche Man – giant-baby-genius, Luis – a skittish and sprightly little Brazilian man with a very expensive video camera, and Luisito – a small and soft-spoken ladino piano player who both looks and talks exactly like the Beaker from the muppets, and who’s only true loves in life are classical music and prostitutes.
After some hours, including various stop offs with brief visitations to some of Aurelio’s illegitimate children sowed across the country, we arrive at Bonito Oriental, the place where the paved road ends and thus a sort of frontier town bustling with the commerce of people who only come once a month to buy things from stores. From here on out its straight-up Discovery Channel mode, and as we turn past the police checkpoints and hurtle down a poorly-kept dirt road into the lonely expanses of the rainforest with the setting sun, the warm tingle of the unknown settles into my toes. From there on its hours without passing a house or car or be-muled campesino, we hurtle past crater-sized potholes and across various rivers. Many of the bridges are busted out from the recent rains, so we just drive through the river. Soon its getting dark though, and it becomes obvious that we are not making it all the way today. At the same time, we are passing through a string of Garifuna villages, Aurelio stops to chat, flirt, and thunderously laugh with passersby, he’s letting the world know that THE Aurelio Martinez has come back to the jungle, and youguns’ who never met him shriek with boy-band-induced hysteria, soon everyone will know we’re in town.
We stop off for the night in a nearby town just in time for the inauguration of Honduras’ very first hospital in Garifuna lands, of course put together by the tireless Cuban doctors that, of all the 5 million NGOs from 17 thousand countries operating in Honduras, seem to be the only people actually doing anything. Aurelio is convinced to play a song, but once Aurelio plays one song, he can’t stop, and soon word spreads through the region and two-by-two the people arrive with their flashlights and what follows is the true Garifuna musical experience, four hours of unmitigated wilding, of course replete with miraculous bootyliciousness, and raucous sing-a-longs, all in the near complete darkness of a land before the time of electric light. I try to grab a bass or piano when nobody’s looking, and play until Aurelio shoots me a disapproving look. When it finally winds down, the Cubans are drunk and clamoring for salsa; when salsa is finally delivered they begin to dance like professional actors in a movie about people dancing in Cuba, it is unreal to me just how amazingly they danced salsa, and I am suddenly filled with envy, knowing that as a un-Cuban person I will never be so effortlessly cool. We of course don’t know where we are going to sleep the night, but it is of course nothing to worry about given Garifuna hospitality, we are quickly put up in an empty old house. Luis, Chiche, and I hang out for a while by candlelight conversing, smoking spliffs, and grubbing little cooked fish with cassava out of a plastic bag. This strikes me as amazing, how in the lord’s name has the universe conspired to but three people from entirely different worlds in empty house in the jungle in the middle of the night, eating little fish and discussing universal topics like morning bowel movements in a language that none of the three grew up speaking. You can’t write poetry that good.
At 5:30 in the godamned morning Aurelio wakes us up, the inhuman senator/pop star of course fresh as a freshly bloomed daisy, and we get back in the pickup for yet more journey. We eventually meet up with family (everybody more or less seems to be family) who are waiting with a boat in a river – load up said boat, and head out to the ocean through a river, where we travel at seemingly insane speeds along the shore for two hours, jumping over very tall waves and landing with very big splashes which comically seem to deposit several gallons of water exclusively on me, every time. We head back into a river, and all of a sudden it’s the jungle for real, not in the flippant way I might use the word to describe any place jungle-ish, but the real deal motherfucking rain forest, and its breathtakingly beautiful.
Plaplaya, for the few days I was there, felt like Paradise. It was, puzzlingly, comparatively prosperous next to the rain-beaten miserable stick hut villages we passed by, and its people did remarkably well for themselves considering their myriad challenges of living in the middle of the jungle. The town was all stilted wood houses with thatched roofs, flimsy porches overhanging majestic rivers for drinking beers on, upturned canoes dozing on shores, endless empty windswept beach, lying in hammocks, killing the ceaseless onslaught of malarial mosquitoes, sitting outside an talking about things, playing soccer, fishing, eating freshly picked coconuts, and no running water or electricity to be seen. We spent our days walking around town and catching up with people Aurelio hadn’t seen for years, all somehow related, playing music, lounging in hammocks. I imagine a town probably seems friendlier when you come with its most famous citizen ever, but I couldn’t imagine being treated better. We spent our nights drinking beers with whoever was around in open air bars, mostly talking about music, laughing nervously every time Luistio said something about wanting an underage girl, turning off the music and hushing when one of the drug-smuggling boats slinked guiltily by in the middle of the night, eventually walking home in a darkness and silence that I never knew possible – with no refrigerators buzzing nor televisions flickering, there is a true peace, freedom from the white noise of modern life, only the white noise of your own over-active brain to worry about, and then there’s just the night and its countless mosquitoes.
Plaplaya is really only Garifuna town in the Mosquitia; the vast forests are mostly populated by the Miskito, another Afro-Indigineous mixed ethnicity with a whole different language, culture and history, who very successfully live from lucrative but dangerous lobster-diving and other junglish pursuits and mostly don’t bother to learn Spanish. Alongside are various enterprising ladinos (mestizos, but disparagingly called “indians” by the Miskito) driven to the jungle by land shortage and hoping to burn down a little homestead for themselves. In recent years, the jungle has been a major conduit for Colombian cocaine, which has made some of the Moskito towns both rich and dangerous. Further upstream live the Takawah and Pech, the real original inhabitants, now surviving off selling to the Miskito giant canoes outfitted with little motors (tuk-tuks), the general means of transportation in these parts.
The amazing thing to me is that this bizarre world of rivers and canopies more-or-less works. Quite a large number of people live somewhat modern lives here without roads or telephones, and despite the enormous difficulty of getting any kind of goods or services to such a godforsakenly inconvenient place, there are nice wooden houses and functioning schools and corner stores and canoe-buses punting the rivers with 10 foot polls getting people around. Far from stereotypes of clueless “traditional” indigenous people, everyone I met was well educated and well spoken in their second language, many having traveled the world in fishing boats and oil tankers, seeing everything and eventually coming back home. And – try not to roll your eyes at Marlon-style romanticism – people say they are really happy, and wouldn’t leave unless they had to. Plaplaya, at least, was fairing a whole lot better than the urban slums of Santo Domingo or the rural poverty of inland Honduras. And despite encroaching modernity threatening the Garifuna from every which way, the traditions are strong here, and the kids still speak, and people still live from the bountiful land instead of waiting for fat New York checks, and its in some ways its really a better deal.
Soon after arriving, Brazilian Luis found out that his camera equipment got royally soaked due to poor placement in the boat, and proceeded to blood curdlingly scream, then cry, then whimper, in a pathetic human puddle on a dock facing the river. This was not cool with Garifuna. Whatever you do, you have to be chill. Aurelio spent the rest of the trip snickering at his wimpy documentarian when he wasn’t looking. The show went on, however, and we organized a badass spontaneous concert for the community, and I took many interviews, and it was good.
I didn’t want to leave, truth-be-told, but it was time, and because we couldn’t get a ocean-side boat all the way to our car, we had to start off at 3:30 in the morning in order to catch the 5 o clock trucks that provide the only land transportation to and from the Mostquita. We squeezed a good 20+ people into the boat, and wove our way through twisted rivers in the crisp sunrising morning, past various Miskito towns with their English-style little wood houses, past all sorts of river traffic already out and about in the extremely early morning. We tied our speakers and guitars to the top of a converted pick-up, settled down on skinny wooden benches in the back, and bounced down paths leading out of the Mosquetia, dodging fatal branches coming to decapitate. Here we passed the most traditional villages in the country, places of unprecedented hardcoreness, hurricane battered collections of huts where tough women in tall boots lugged huge loads of firewood across hills while presumably their husbands were catching sustenance for the day. When the path ended, the truck lumbers onto the beach, where for the next several hours drives in the surf. This, to me, is insane. The most insane part, however, is when it reaches every one of four rivers too big to ford (think Oregon Trail, again), they have to put the truck on a raft, block the wheels, and a guy on the other side pulls it across with a rope. After the fourth time, we get to the dirt road, and things are relatively sane from there on out. The whole experience, however, was definitely the greatest travel adventure of my life, thus far.
More updates of what I’m doing in Uruguay and how the hell I got here, to come.
viernes, 7 de diciembre de 2007
Livin´ La Vida La Ceiba with Aurelio Martinez and other tales
Here I blog in the last days of my La Ceiba existence - tomarrow I head into the Mosquito Rainforest with my host Aurelio and a team of Brazilian documentarians, which I am incredibly excited for, and then there are visitations and plane rides and then holy shit I´m in Argentina.
I´ve mentioned a bunch of times that I life with a pop-star/senator named Aurelio Martinez, but I don´t think I´ve communicated exactly what its like to live with a popstar/senator named Aurelio Matinez. Well first of all, he´s a pop star. Hailing from Plaplaya - the deepest, most isolated, most traditional Garifuna town in the country - he played with a bunch of Punta Rock conjuntos untill leading his own called the Bravos del Caribe, who became famous with the subtly-named "pompis con pompis" (ass to ass), which as maybe you can imagine comes with a special dance. Since then, he´s departed into the lucrative and less bootylicious genre of "world music", exporting deliciously sad Garifuna blues to all over. Then, at about age 30, he got elected as a sentor - the first black senator from his province in Honduran history. He´s basically the man.
With amazing kindness, upon hearing that I came all this way to study Garifuna music, Aurelio offered to put me up for practically nothing. Living in his half-built mansion in the ghetto is hilarious. Being the man, he decided not to hire archeticts and instead design the house himself. As a result, its basically the strangest house ever, huge (on Honduran standards) but with no space to do anything, filled with endless hallways yet no rooms. You walk through the bathroom off the kitchen to get to his office; rooms are bizarrely shaped and uneaven. On top of this, its decorated entirely in motel-quality landscapes alternating with endless award plaques he´s won over the years. Our little family consists of Aurelio, his brother, his son, the maid, and a rotating cast of people, whom I honestly still can´t figure out who they are and what they´re doing there. It´s really a wonderful and bizarre place to live.
I realize I tend to give Aurelio a hard time, due to his slightly megalomanical personality, but the truth is he´s an amazing guy. He´s basically a born rock star - the kind of guy who can do or say anything and people will think it´s cool. He possses a certain level of swagger that makes you not question him when he walks around in a white jumpsuit with a USB pen around his neck. He has an electric and spontaneous personality, a thunderous earthquaking laugh, insane dance moves, and a magic touch with the ladies.
On top of being a rockstar, he really works himself near to death, selflessly fighting for his people in a senate characterized by sticky-fingered old-money crooks. Being Aurelio´s friend has given me access to Garifuna communties in an incredible way: he´s incredibly loved and respected, and people assume that if Aurelio is down with me, I´m allright. Countless times I´ve showed up to a village and knocked on doors of freinds of his, and have been instantly treated like family.
I´ve spent a lot of the last few weeks teaching Aurelio how to record himself with his shiny new Macbook, and we´ve basically put together a demo of his new album. Recording with Aurelio is humbling. I never realized how great a musician he was untill we began to overdub him playing every godamn instrument, nailing the parts on the first time, inventing harmonies on the go, like clockwork in time with the metronome. With one shitty mic, Garage Band, and my minnimal recording know-how, we´ve made some really incredible recordings, and its just proof that serious talent is really all you need. Maybe he´ll let me put one of the songs up here, who knows.
I´ve also been going out to a nearby, incredibly tranquilo village called Corozal to take lessons with a guy going by the name "Chiche Men," which is Garifuna for "Baby Man." And in a way, he is like a big, grown-up, genius baby. Chiche lives in a former cassave factory in a little room filled with endless instruments, and basically spends his days jamming, eating delicious food brought to him, and smoking giant blunts pretty much constantly. To give you an idea of the kind of skills this man posseses, Belizian Gariufna music producer Ivan Duran calls him his "secret weapon," responsible for the arrangments on Andy Palacio´s recent WOMEX-champion album. Lessons with Chiche were more like long musical chill-sessions, as sometimes he´ll just take a nap in the middle, and then we´ll go hang out on the beach and play dominoes, and then play some more music. He´s kinda like a big teddy bear that teaches you everything you ever needed to know about Garifuna music.
Other than that - I took a trip last week to Tela Bay to visit some more villages and meet musicians. Triunfo, a town of endless bycicles driven by children and old ladies heading in endless directions, was especially alive in culture, and I interviewed anciently-wise and kind Neta who runs the best folkloric troupe around. Then I headed to Tornabe on a bus stacked to the seams with fish, bus the bus broke down, so I had to walk a bunch of miles, and pay a dude 20 cents to ferry me across a river with a canoe, to get there, wherupon I hung out in a similarly ridiculous mansion owend by Victor Arzu, a former Spanish-reggae star and NY-based producer who was really the nicest guy on Earth, possibly.
Played my last expat-gig (on Honduran TV yet again, but no dancing this time!), said goodbye to the crew, and ya me voy volando.
I´ve mentioned a bunch of times that I life with a pop-star/senator named Aurelio Martinez, but I don´t think I´ve communicated exactly what its like to live with a popstar/senator named Aurelio Matinez. Well first of all, he´s a pop star. Hailing from Plaplaya - the deepest, most isolated, most traditional Garifuna town in the country - he played with a bunch of Punta Rock conjuntos untill leading his own called the Bravos del Caribe, who became famous with the subtly-named "pompis con pompis" (ass to ass), which as maybe you can imagine comes with a special dance. Since then, he´s departed into the lucrative and less bootylicious genre of "world music", exporting deliciously sad Garifuna blues to all over. Then, at about age 30, he got elected as a sentor - the first black senator from his province in Honduran history. He´s basically the man.
With amazing kindness, upon hearing that I came all this way to study Garifuna music, Aurelio offered to put me up for practically nothing. Living in his half-built mansion in the ghetto is hilarious. Being the man, he decided not to hire archeticts and instead design the house himself. As a result, its basically the strangest house ever, huge (on Honduran standards) but with no space to do anything, filled with endless hallways yet no rooms. You walk through the bathroom off the kitchen to get to his office; rooms are bizarrely shaped and uneaven. On top of this, its decorated entirely in motel-quality landscapes alternating with endless award plaques he´s won over the years. Our little family consists of Aurelio, his brother, his son, the maid, and a rotating cast of people, whom I honestly still can´t figure out who they are and what they´re doing there. It´s really a wonderful and bizarre place to live.
I realize I tend to give Aurelio a hard time, due to his slightly megalomanical personality, but the truth is he´s an amazing guy. He´s basically a born rock star - the kind of guy who can do or say anything and people will think it´s cool. He possses a certain level of swagger that makes you not question him when he walks around in a white jumpsuit with a USB pen around his neck. He has an electric and spontaneous personality, a thunderous earthquaking laugh, insane dance moves, and a magic touch with the ladies.
On top of being a rockstar, he really works himself near to death, selflessly fighting for his people in a senate characterized by sticky-fingered old-money crooks. Being Aurelio´s friend has given me access to Garifuna communties in an incredible way: he´s incredibly loved and respected, and people assume that if Aurelio is down with me, I´m allright. Countless times I´ve showed up to a village and knocked on doors of freinds of his, and have been instantly treated like family.
I´ve spent a lot of the last few weeks teaching Aurelio how to record himself with his shiny new Macbook, and we´ve basically put together a demo of his new album. Recording with Aurelio is humbling. I never realized how great a musician he was untill we began to overdub him playing every godamn instrument, nailing the parts on the first time, inventing harmonies on the go, like clockwork in time with the metronome. With one shitty mic, Garage Band, and my minnimal recording know-how, we´ve made some really incredible recordings, and its just proof that serious talent is really all you need. Maybe he´ll let me put one of the songs up here, who knows.
I´ve also been going out to a nearby, incredibly tranquilo village called Corozal to take lessons with a guy going by the name "Chiche Men," which is Garifuna for "Baby Man." And in a way, he is like a big, grown-up, genius baby. Chiche lives in a former cassave factory in a little room filled with endless instruments, and basically spends his days jamming, eating delicious food brought to him, and smoking giant blunts pretty much constantly. To give you an idea of the kind of skills this man posseses, Belizian Gariufna music producer Ivan Duran calls him his "secret weapon," responsible for the arrangments on Andy Palacio´s recent WOMEX-champion album. Lessons with Chiche were more like long musical chill-sessions, as sometimes he´ll just take a nap in the middle, and then we´ll go hang out on the beach and play dominoes, and then play some more music. He´s kinda like a big teddy bear that teaches you everything you ever needed to know about Garifuna music.
Other than that - I took a trip last week to Tela Bay to visit some more villages and meet musicians. Triunfo, a town of endless bycicles driven by children and old ladies heading in endless directions, was especially alive in culture, and I interviewed anciently-wise and kind Neta who runs the best folkloric troupe around. Then I headed to Tornabe on a bus stacked to the seams with fish, bus the bus broke down, so I had to walk a bunch of miles, and pay a dude 20 cents to ferry me across a river with a canoe, to get there, wherupon I hung out in a similarly ridiculous mansion owend by Victor Arzu, a former Spanish-reggae star and NY-based producer who was really the nicest guy on Earth, possibly.
Played my last expat-gig (on Honduran TV yet again, but no dancing this time!), said goodbye to the crew, and ya me voy volando.
martes, 27 de noviembre de 2007
Garifuna 101
I realize that many of my faithful blog readers (assuming I have faithful readers, there’s no way to know really) may not have a clue what the word Garifuna means, and since this is what my stay in Honduras is all about, I thought I’d give a little crash course, and share awesome videos and music and so forth.
The Garifuna, once known as Black Caribs, are a really unique and practically unheard of ethnic group, of about 250,000 people, who live along the Caribbean coast of Central America, though mostly in Honduras. As the story goes, during the Caribbean colonial era, two slave ships got shipwrecked on St. Vincent, a little island given by the French and English to the last remaining indigenous Caribs and Arawaks in return for an end of indian raids on the colonies. The Caribs accepted the Africans into their society, whose numbers increased as escaped slaves throughout the Caribbean made their way to the island. Over time, they adopted the language and culture of the Carib, and became the Garifuna, and became fairly prosperous farming and selling goods to colonists on other islands. The ever-greedy English hungry for more cane-growing land of course broke the treaty and began to clear plantations on the free island. Just at this time, French Revolutionary ideas and the nearby Haitian Revolution sparked a war between the Garifuna and English. Eventually, the English won, but had such a hard time doing so that they decided to just deport the entire population to Central America.
Those were the early 1800s, and since the Garifuna have spread up and down the coast. They are the only black population in Americas to have never been enslaved, and the last living speakers of indigenous Caribbean languages. Up until the 1960s or so, they lived very traditionally on a subsistence basis – the women harvested yucca and coconuts and men fished the sea; houses were made of sticks, adobe or palm fronds, with thatched roofs. People were catholic but practiced elaborate ancestor-worship ceremonies called dugu. They are without doubt beach people – no Garifuna really lives more than a couple of hundred feet from the sea, and seafood (especially conch soup) makes up most of the diet.
Times have changed though, and the two big bad words “globalization” and “transculturation” have shaken things up. Little known fact is that a huge percentage of Garifuna live in the Bronx, and people from the communities go back and forth a lot legally and illegally. Being very comfortable out at sea, many Garifuna men a generation ago found work in the merchant marine or on international cruise ships, and used that mobility to find their way to New York. As a result, the reality of most Garifuna lies somewhere on the spectrum of traditional and American ways of doing things. And it’s all very hard to get a grasp on. Garifuna in Honduras tend to claim that they are extremely poor – while I am in no position to really refute that, Garifuna communities don’t look poor, not at first sight, and not at all compared to rural Honduran campesinos you see throughout the country living in collapsing wooden shacks, or the crowded squalor of the Dominican barrios I worked in. Most of the palm-and-stick homes have been replaced with comparatively spacious suburban-California-style concrete houses, most people have TVs and stereo systems, and mostly everybody is rocking some kind of designer or clever imitation ghetto-wear. Indeed, black American culture has successfully been imported to the seaside villages, and most everybody under thirty sports either fitted caps and basketball jerseys or hardcore Jamaican rasta stylings. Yet at the same time many people in the communities are going hungry. While many people still harvest their yucca or go out at night in oar-propelled canoes into the ocean depths to catch dinner for the week, many sit around and wait for remissions from relatives in the states. While the picturesque but probably not-so-much-fun-to-live-in palm and thatch houses still abound, most have been converted into tool sheds or bathrooms, or spaces to perform rituals for the ancestors. The towns are also pretty isolated – to get to one called Santa Fe, I bumped along a mud road for an hour, crossing four rivers in the back a pick-up truck, only to incongruously land in what looks like a middle-class American town dumped onto a dirt road in the jungle. Or maybe I just forgot what America looks like.
The oldest generation, especially women, is wearing traditional patterned dresses and head wraps and gabber unintelligibly (to me) in Garifuna, while the youngest kids run around in the ocean all day signing Panamanian reggae songs and don’t speak a work of the language. Most people in-between these extremes can speak Garifuna, but mostly speak Spanish, switching over for the occasional anecdote, or sentence (or I suspect, to make fun of the weird gringo hanging around and asking where to find musicians.) It seems to me that there is a pretty obvious divide between Garifuna with family in the states and those without. One of my teachers in Trujillo, named Pancho, had no family abroad, and was very poor as a result. He lived with his seemingly endless children in a tiny dwelling and was definitely hustling to get by. Yet at the same time, he was the most impressive person that I’ve met, living and breathing the traditions. While others sat on their asses drinking moonshine, he would wake up and make a drum, then go fix a boat, and then spend all night fishing, and then play a concert the next day.
While Garifuna towns still alternatingly laze in the midday Caribbean sun and bustle with Caribbean exuberance, they are communities in crisis. Among people old enough to care, there is a lot of talk about culture – people understand that that Garifuna beat is unico-en-el-mundo and incredibly important to hold on to, and they are losing it before there eyes. Garifuna struggle to hold on to their communal land rights in the face of encroaching land-starved mestizos and strong-arm developers who want to sea the beautiful Honduran coast dressed in high-rises. They struggle to modernize and keep their traditions at the same time; they struggle to get their kids to learn to speak their language, just a little too little too late. They struggle, first and foremost, to find opportunities – there is just no work, anywhere, at least not without going to larger Honduran cities, and so people leave, because it’s the only way to make anything change. And due to immigration, Garifuna really has improved their material conditions incredibly. But nobody knows exactly how to go forward and keep proudly living Garifuna style at the same time.
One interesting twist is that practically nobody in the villages still host dugu, an elaborate ritual that takes a year to fully complete. Its just too godamn expensive. Yet relatives in the states who feel the need to placate the ancestors (“forgive me grandma for choosing the Bronx?”), host several in every town every year. It’s that the going rate for the ceremony is about $13K, only affordable on an American salary and even then not so much. Yet this has created a way for, spirit mediums, drum-makers, musicians, and dancers to eek out a living.
Anyway what I’m really here for is the music, and there is plenty of it. There are many traditional styles, played on drums of various sizes sporting jury-rigged snares out of guitar strings, sea turtle shells, and maracas. They range from a Christmas mask dance called jancuru, to ritual music played on giant versions of the drums, to social commentary dance songs called hungunhugun. These styles are mostly played at traditional or folkloric events, at specific times during the year. My favorite stuff though, is parranda. It’s the Garifuna blues – tragic minor key soul jams played on guitar, played with a strum that is really hard to understand. Sadly, very few young people play guitar, and the music is fading. My senator-pop-star host is among the only young people driving the music forward. Parranderros, as the bluesmen are called, are universally awesome tired-eyed and sun-scarred badasses. This video is of a parranda played by Pancho, who I mentioned earlier. His hands are kinda messed up and had trouble playing, but you can get a glimpse of the awesome.
Better known though is punta, a modern adaptation of, bizarrely enough, funeral music, which is played by modern-style electric bands and has come to be the national music of
Honduras. The basis for this, as Aurelio tells it, that Garifuna believe that when a man dies, another man must replace him. Velorios, or wakes, are thus festive events celebrating human fertility, and women dance around a beach bonfire doing a provocative dance in order to symbolically fulfill the creation of a new person, aka, sex.
Somehow or another this turned into pan-Caribbean party music that took off in the late 80s and 90s known as punta rock. Despite the penchant of some musicians for synthesized horns and drum machines, its really cool stuff, combining elements from merengue and soca with the off-kilter 6/8 Garifuna groove that’s hard to get a grasp on. The dance involves incredibly high speed booty shaking, that I am either not doing right or is just really exhausting. Punta was the most popular music in Central America for a while, though just now it’s being supplanted by the cancer that is reggaeton. One common Garifuna complaint many ladinos, as mestizos are called here, used the image of Garifuna culture to sell punta on the international scale – the first band to take off in the style, to give you an idea, was called the Banda Blanca (uhh, White Band). Indeed there’s a difference between Garifuna punta bands and those that just threw in one drummer for good measure. But business-savvy ladinos get the lion’s share of the pie, and just aren’t quite as good.
Though I was having trouble finding a live music scene, ironically, in the country’s party capital of La Ceiba, it is alive and well in Trujillo. I already wrote in my last post about the dance parties I went to, but not enough can be said. It makes any other party you ever go to forever after comparatively lame. Despite modernization and what not, people still really get down in an old-school way. The hot band in town is Renovacion Lunu, a bunch of young guys who play punta rock and parrandas at high speeds, only with percussion and voice, so its modern Garifuna stylings that sound like traditional music. On my trip to Santa Fe, I recorded a demo for them, which you can here a little of (unprocessed), right here: Lunu2ndSong.m4a
I passed my week in Trujillo meeting a million people and taking lessons and just being in the awesomest place ever, and I kinda regret not choosing to be there the whole time. I had not one but two Thanksgivings, one with Lillian’s awesome family, and one with Naomi and the 5 million American volunteers in her little town of Cofradia. Much more to be said, but this post is already very long, and you have things to do.
The Garifuna, once known as Black Caribs, are a really unique and practically unheard of ethnic group, of about 250,000 people, who live along the Caribbean coast of Central America, though mostly in Honduras. As the story goes, during the Caribbean colonial era, two slave ships got shipwrecked on St. Vincent, a little island given by the French and English to the last remaining indigenous Caribs and Arawaks in return for an end of indian raids on the colonies. The Caribs accepted the Africans into their society, whose numbers increased as escaped slaves throughout the Caribbean made their way to the island. Over time, they adopted the language and culture of the Carib, and became the Garifuna, and became fairly prosperous farming and selling goods to colonists on other islands. The ever-greedy English hungry for more cane-growing land of course broke the treaty and began to clear plantations on the free island. Just at this time, French Revolutionary ideas and the nearby Haitian Revolution sparked a war between the Garifuna and English. Eventually, the English won, but had such a hard time doing so that they decided to just deport the entire population to Central America.
Those were the early 1800s, and since the Garifuna have spread up and down the coast. They are the only black population in Americas to have never been enslaved, and the last living speakers of indigenous Caribbean languages. Up until the 1960s or so, they lived very traditionally on a subsistence basis – the women harvested yucca and coconuts and men fished the sea; houses were made of sticks, adobe or palm fronds, with thatched roofs. People were catholic but practiced elaborate ancestor-worship ceremonies called dugu. They are without doubt beach people – no Garifuna really lives more than a couple of hundred feet from the sea, and seafood (especially conch soup) makes up most of the diet.
Times have changed though, and the two big bad words “globalization” and “transculturation” have shaken things up. Little known fact is that a huge percentage of Garifuna live in the Bronx, and people from the communities go back and forth a lot legally and illegally. Being very comfortable out at sea, many Garifuna men a generation ago found work in the merchant marine or on international cruise ships, and used that mobility to find their way to New York. As a result, the reality of most Garifuna lies somewhere on the spectrum of traditional and American ways of doing things. And it’s all very hard to get a grasp on. Garifuna in Honduras tend to claim that they are extremely poor – while I am in no position to really refute that, Garifuna communities don’t look poor, not at first sight, and not at all compared to rural Honduran campesinos you see throughout the country living in collapsing wooden shacks, or the crowded squalor of the Dominican barrios I worked in. Most of the palm-and-stick homes have been replaced with comparatively spacious suburban-California-style concrete houses, most people have TVs and stereo systems, and mostly everybody is rocking some kind of designer or clever imitation ghetto-wear. Indeed, black American culture has successfully been imported to the seaside villages, and most everybody under thirty sports either fitted caps and basketball jerseys or hardcore Jamaican rasta stylings. Yet at the same time many people in the communities are going hungry. While many people still harvest their yucca or go out at night in oar-propelled canoes into the ocean depths to catch dinner for the week, many sit around and wait for remissions from relatives in the states. While the picturesque but probably not-so-much-fun-to-live-in palm and thatch houses still abound, most have been converted into tool sheds or bathrooms, or spaces to perform rituals for the ancestors. The towns are also pretty isolated – to get to one called Santa Fe, I bumped along a mud road for an hour, crossing four rivers in the back a pick-up truck, only to incongruously land in what looks like a middle-class American town dumped onto a dirt road in the jungle. Or maybe I just forgot what America looks like.
The oldest generation, especially women, is wearing traditional patterned dresses and head wraps and gabber unintelligibly (to me) in Garifuna, while the youngest kids run around in the ocean all day signing Panamanian reggae songs and don’t speak a work of the language. Most people in-between these extremes can speak Garifuna, but mostly speak Spanish, switching over for the occasional anecdote, or sentence (or I suspect, to make fun of the weird gringo hanging around and asking where to find musicians.) It seems to me that there is a pretty obvious divide between Garifuna with family in the states and those without. One of my teachers in Trujillo, named Pancho, had no family abroad, and was very poor as a result. He lived with his seemingly endless children in a tiny dwelling and was definitely hustling to get by. Yet at the same time, he was the most impressive person that I’ve met, living and breathing the traditions. While others sat on their asses drinking moonshine, he would wake up and make a drum, then go fix a boat, and then spend all night fishing, and then play a concert the next day.
While Garifuna towns still alternatingly laze in the midday Caribbean sun and bustle with Caribbean exuberance, they are communities in crisis. Among people old enough to care, there is a lot of talk about culture – people understand that that Garifuna beat is unico-en-el-mundo and incredibly important to hold on to, and they are losing it before there eyes. Garifuna struggle to hold on to their communal land rights in the face of encroaching land-starved mestizos and strong-arm developers who want to sea the beautiful Honduran coast dressed in high-rises. They struggle to modernize and keep their traditions at the same time; they struggle to get their kids to learn to speak their language, just a little too little too late. They struggle, first and foremost, to find opportunities – there is just no work, anywhere, at least not without going to larger Honduran cities, and so people leave, because it’s the only way to make anything change. And due to immigration, Garifuna really has improved their material conditions incredibly. But nobody knows exactly how to go forward and keep proudly living Garifuna style at the same time.
One interesting twist is that practically nobody in the villages still host dugu, an elaborate ritual that takes a year to fully complete. Its just too godamn expensive. Yet relatives in the states who feel the need to placate the ancestors (“forgive me grandma for choosing the Bronx?”), host several in every town every year. It’s that the going rate for the ceremony is about $13K, only affordable on an American salary and even then not so much. Yet this has created a way for, spirit mediums, drum-makers, musicians, and dancers to eek out a living.
Anyway what I’m really here for is the music, and there is plenty of it. There are many traditional styles, played on drums of various sizes sporting jury-rigged snares out of guitar strings, sea turtle shells, and maracas. They range from a Christmas mask dance called jancuru, to ritual music played on giant versions of the drums, to social commentary dance songs called hungunhugun. These styles are mostly played at traditional or folkloric events, at specific times during the year. My favorite stuff though, is parranda. It’s the Garifuna blues – tragic minor key soul jams played on guitar, played with a strum that is really hard to understand. Sadly, very few young people play guitar, and the music is fading. My senator-pop-star host is among the only young people driving the music forward. Parranderros, as the bluesmen are called, are universally awesome tired-eyed and sun-scarred badasses. This video is of a parranda played by Pancho, who I mentioned earlier. His hands are kinda messed up and had trouble playing, but you can get a glimpse of the awesome.
Better known though is punta, a modern adaptation of, bizarrely enough, funeral music, which is played by modern-style electric bands and has come to be the national music of
Honduras. The basis for this, as Aurelio tells it, that Garifuna believe that when a man dies, another man must replace him. Velorios, or wakes, are thus festive events celebrating human fertility, and women dance around a beach bonfire doing a provocative dance in order to symbolically fulfill the creation of a new person, aka, sex.
Somehow or another this turned into pan-Caribbean party music that took off in the late 80s and 90s known as punta rock. Despite the penchant of some musicians for synthesized horns and drum machines, its really cool stuff, combining elements from merengue and soca with the off-kilter 6/8 Garifuna groove that’s hard to get a grasp on. The dance involves incredibly high speed booty shaking, that I am either not doing right or is just really exhausting. Punta was the most popular music in Central America for a while, though just now it’s being supplanted by the cancer that is reggaeton. One common Garifuna complaint many ladinos, as mestizos are called here, used the image of Garifuna culture to sell punta on the international scale – the first band to take off in the style, to give you an idea, was called the Banda Blanca (uhh, White Band). Indeed there’s a difference between Garifuna punta bands and those that just threw in one drummer for good measure. But business-savvy ladinos get the lion’s share of the pie, and just aren’t quite as good.
Though I was having trouble finding a live music scene, ironically, in the country’s party capital of La Ceiba, it is alive and well in Trujillo. I already wrote in my last post about the dance parties I went to, but not enough can be said. It makes any other party you ever go to forever after comparatively lame. Despite modernization and what not, people still really get down in an old-school way. The hot band in town is Renovacion Lunu, a bunch of young guys who play punta rock and parrandas at high speeds, only with percussion and voice, so its modern Garifuna stylings that sound like traditional music. On my trip to Santa Fe, I recorded a demo for them, which you can here a little of (unprocessed), right here: Lunu2ndSong.m4a
I passed my week in Trujillo meeting a million people and taking lessons and just being in the awesomest place ever, and I kinda regret not choosing to be there the whole time. I had not one but two Thanksgivings, one with Lillian’s awesome family, and one with Naomi and the 5 million American volunteers in her little town of Cofradia. Much more to be said, but this post is already very long, and you have things to do.
domingo, 18 de noviembre de 2007
Rain Rain Go Away
Its been raining. For a long time. In fact, its been raining pretty much without stop since I arrived in La Ceiba. Apparently they don´t mess around when they speak of the "rainy season." Living in a coastal city during hurricane season means that there is pretty much water everywhere at all times. And this a sort of rain that only can happen in the tropics - thundering down with terrifying force, unrelenting. Now, my first reaction to the rain was stay inside and get some quality reading/lazing time, waiting for the rains to end. Then I realized that I was bored, and that Ceibenos seem entirely unfazed, going about their business. Bycycling with an umbrella is a popular move. So I eventually got used to riding on streets with water up to my bike pedals, and accepted that I would spend most of my time in Honduras kind of damply. Wet becomes state of being, state of mind.
Where we last left off, I didn´t have malaria, which is awesome. However, a couple of days later I was back in the hospital, and it turned out I had BOTH ameobic and bacterial dysentery. You know, that thing the kids died of in Orgegon Trail in your 3rd grade computer class. After halucinatorily panicking with fever for a few days, I got better.
So between sickness and rain, I lossed a lot of time, but then finally the sun came out, and I started going to the villages and creepily asking around for musicians, and doing interviews and being a the busy little "musicologist" that I apparently am being paid to be. As it turns out La Ceiba is surrounded all around by beautiful jungle waterfalls, and I´m determined to find them all.
I´ve spent most of my time chilling with the surprisingly large Ceiba expat crew (if theres one thing I´m learning, its that theres Americans, Danes, and Australians living in every forgotten corner of the Earth. You are never really more than a stone´s throw away from a Peace Corp member, Bilingual School volunteer, or some weird overwieght and hawaiian-shirted propreitor of something.) Though I do miss being really part of a local community, they are great, and I´ve gotten to feel settled. Its a different kind of thing. On Wednesdays me and some buddies play a gig doing drunken acoustic covers of American pop songs, with repetoire ranging from Bright Eyes to Gorillaz. It´s really fun wilding out on the melodica to Kanye´s "Goldigger", but I think the irony/hilarity is maybe lossed on our largely middle-aged Honduran audience.
I´m now spending the week in Trujillo, an isolated and sleepy town built on a hill overlooking the most beautiful godamn stretch of Carribean beach, in the shadow of emerald towering mountains from storybook chilhood imaginings, and I´m getting some serious grandma treatment from Lillian´s abuela, and its awesome. That means delicious things to eat at all times of day, and an insistance that I not lift a finger to do anything. We watch soccer all day long and indulge in family gossip. Something great about being here in, well, the middle of basically nowhere and seing a Wesleyan flag on the wall.
Trujillo is the site of the first Garifuna mainland settlement, and is unique in being the only really urban Garifuna community. And I´m realizing I should have been here all along. While everywhere I´ve been I´m found people lamenting the shriveling up and dying of hundreds of years of tradition, here culture runs deep. Last night I went to a "disco" in which a group of 8 traditional punta drummers was leading a ridiculous dance party that mixed the traditional music and dance, normally played for wakes, with a modern context of Saturday night wilding. People make a circle, which a girl enters rocking out with rules-of-physics-defying hip swinging, and eventually a guy comes in following her aroun, but never touching. Its straight up traditional, but all young kids dressed in shirt-dresses and yankees fitteds, and in the set breaks All around town people are playing this game that i think is called Santo Malo, in which a dude in a mask and full body paint runs around town chasing kids and blowing a whistle, who have to give him some money if they get caught. This results in hordes of children running around and screaming, and while maybe bizarre, looks like everybody is having fun. Meanwhile I´ve been invited to a nearby village to record yesterday´s drumming group, so you know, moving on up.
Its still raining, but I guess I don´t care.
Where we last left off, I didn´t have malaria, which is awesome. However, a couple of days later I was back in the hospital, and it turned out I had BOTH ameobic and bacterial dysentery. You know, that thing the kids died of in Orgegon Trail in your 3rd grade computer class. After halucinatorily panicking with fever for a few days, I got better.
So between sickness and rain, I lossed a lot of time, but then finally the sun came out, and I started going to the villages and creepily asking around for musicians, and doing interviews and being a the busy little "musicologist" that I apparently am being paid to be. As it turns out La Ceiba is surrounded all around by beautiful jungle waterfalls, and I´m determined to find them all.
I´ve spent most of my time chilling with the surprisingly large Ceiba expat crew (if theres one thing I´m learning, its that theres Americans, Danes, and Australians living in every forgotten corner of the Earth. You are never really more than a stone´s throw away from a Peace Corp member, Bilingual School volunteer, or some weird overwieght and hawaiian-shirted propreitor of something.) Though I do miss being really part of a local community, they are great, and I´ve gotten to feel settled. Its a different kind of thing. On Wednesdays me and some buddies play a gig doing drunken acoustic covers of American pop songs, with repetoire ranging from Bright Eyes to Gorillaz. It´s really fun wilding out on the melodica to Kanye´s "Goldigger", but I think the irony/hilarity is maybe lossed on our largely middle-aged Honduran audience.
I´m now spending the week in Trujillo, an isolated and sleepy town built on a hill overlooking the most beautiful godamn stretch of Carribean beach, in the shadow of emerald towering mountains from storybook chilhood imaginings, and I´m getting some serious grandma treatment from Lillian´s abuela, and its awesome. That means delicious things to eat at all times of day, and an insistance that I not lift a finger to do anything. We watch soccer all day long and indulge in family gossip. Something great about being here in, well, the middle of basically nowhere and seing a Wesleyan flag on the wall.
Trujillo is the site of the first Garifuna mainland settlement, and is unique in being the only really urban Garifuna community. And I´m realizing I should have been here all along. While everywhere I´ve been I´m found people lamenting the shriveling up and dying of hundreds of years of tradition, here culture runs deep. Last night I went to a "disco" in which a group of 8 traditional punta drummers was leading a ridiculous dance party that mixed the traditional music and dance, normally played for wakes, with a modern context of Saturday night wilding. People make a circle, which a girl enters rocking out with rules-of-physics-defying hip swinging, and eventually a guy comes in following her aroun, but never touching. Its straight up traditional, but all young kids dressed in shirt-dresses and yankees fitteds, and in the set breaks All around town people are playing this game that i think is called Santo Malo, in which a dude in a mask and full body paint runs around town chasing kids and blowing a whistle, who have to give him some money if they get caught. This results in hordes of children running around and screaming, and while maybe bizarre, looks like everybody is having fun. Meanwhile I´ve been invited to a nearby village to record yesterday´s drumming group, so you know, moving on up.
Its still raining, but I guess I don´t care.
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