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.

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.

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.

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.

Sickly in Ceiba

This blog post will probably be short/nonsensical because I have malarial dizzyness and can´t quite think straight.

Well actually, as it turns out, I don´t have malaria, but I´ve spent the last few days violently shaking in Central American hospitals, interspersed with gems of American cinema such as Harold and Kumar goes to White Castle. Hopefully this sickness leaves soon.

Where we last left off, I was dancing punta on national Honduran television. I had really hoped that nobody in Ceiba saw that, but alas, I go to get my bicycle fixed (oh yeah! I have a bicycle, its great), the next day, and the guy behind the counter start laughing and says "I saw you dancing on TV with that leeeetle guitar." Sigh.

That Saturday, I went to an backyard expat Holoween party, shocked and amazed to find large quantites of Americans and Europeans living here in little La Ceiba, dressed as wizards and geishas, dancing to classic rock covers played by a Honduran cover band. This was very exciting, as I hadn´t really talked to a single human being minus my hosts since getting into town. The completely open bar led to too much Gifiti, a lethal Garifuna concoction of moonshine and various herbs and grasses, which in turn led to me vomiting on the side of the highway the next morning after approximately 2 hours of sleep. I was going with Aurelio to a Garifuna catholic youth meeting with lots of music in a dope thatched-cabins-on-the-beach town, but more on all that later.

Some absurdities about life in Honduras so far:

- public transportation is all in tricked-out American yellow school busses that got handed down at some point - little seats for little legs and all.

- Though Spanish is indeed the language here, people for some reason say the phrase "rice and beans" exclusively in English.

- Before I got here, I would have to introduce myself like this: ¨My name is Marlon¨¨ ¨WHAT?" "Marlon like Marlon Brando" "Ohhhh". Well... it just so happens that there is a large fried-chicken chain here in La Ceiba called ¨Pollos Marlon," so I get to say "Marlon, you know, like Marlon Chicken"

- My host Aurelio, ridiculous in many ways, among them his extremely tacky and ostentatious mansion (well, a normal house on American standards I guess, but really out of place luxurious here) and his favorite activity of choosing where to hang his countless awards. Which is not to say anything bad against him - he´s a really incredible guy, a brilliant musician, and a person who really works tirelessly for his people. BUT I was shocked that on the 2 hour drive to the Garifuna village he actually listened to the same song on repeat the entire time. Actually. Its his favorite song, an incredibly tacky country song called "Put Your Troubles On My Shoulder"

OK feeling weak, gotta roll.

Nuevas Tierras

A new place, new things.

Been in Honduras little over a week, and suddenly I am surrounded with new people, new cusines, new language, new reality, and its time to readjust. I spent my first bunch of days in a dusty little cowboy town called Cofradía, where Naomi and 9 other Americans live cramped together in an awesome little compound, where they teach large numbers of rowdy little people how to speak Enlgish, and other life skills. Though I was in an abusrd forgotten corner of the Earth, it was pleasantly college-like living there, spending the night cooking communal meals, drinking beer in hammocks, and making fun of the fat and/or stupid kids in their classes. I guess starred in Miss Naomi´s class as a visiting music teacher, and instructed the 4th grade on the art of beatboxing. Really fun, and hilarious, hopefully I will put a video of the spectacle up here.

Let me tell you about Honduras, or least the part of it I started ot in - think Texas 200 years ago. Really, though, its the wild wild west. Firstly, there is a conspicious lack of people, and endless, gorgeous emerald jungle covered mountains everywhere. The towns are dusty dirt road kind of places where women stay indoors, and cowboy-hated and mustachioed men in sober serious faces play pool in hard-drinking saloons. And when they go out, all cary an old-school revolver in their back pocket. Insanity. The only vehicles are pickup trucks, who will seemingly always stop for you to hitch a ride, and riding in the back of some farmer´s truck through the moutains is an excellent way to fulfill any romantic travelling fantasies.

The food is Mexican-ish, but a little blander, with beans, tortillas, and salty chunks of cheese seeming to make up a large part of the diet. Many restaurants serve three things: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, breakfast and dinner are identical, and pretty similar to lunch. I can´t say I yet understand anything.

Took a weekend trip with Naomi to Copan, famous for crazy Mayan ruins, but I was more impressed by the bizarreness of the town. Due to the backpacker nature of tourists that come to Copan, the place is the Burlington of Central America, the sort of place where Honduran cowboys and curried thai tofu live peacfully side by side. Its absolutely bizarre, though, as the town is filled with sleek cafes and bars owned by painfully-cool-blonde-belgian-expats, fairtrade art stores AND even a higher cowboy hats per capita rate than in Cofradia. The other thing, is that there were no actual tourists there. It was as if they are all waiting for the tourists to come.

All thats past now, and after 6 hours of winding through beautiful jungle mountains, I arrived in my new home, La Ceiba, where I am currently living in the half-built mansion of senator and pop-star Aurelio Martinez. La Ceiba is like a whole other country. It sits sweating on the Carribean Coast, filled with a diverse group of hispanic Hondurans, afro-indigenous Garifuna (more on them later), English-speaking decendents of imigrants from Grand Cayman, and decendents of Americans and Europeans that came to administer or work on the banana plantaions. Built entirely by Chiquita banana, the town looks more like a Southern American city, maybe New Orleans, and has a sort of pan-Carribean culture, where you never know what language to address anybody in. And the only nightlife in Honduras to speak of, with a bustling beachside club strip. No cowboy hats, lots of doo-rags. Every other person is selling lychee nuts on the street, I don´t know why. Most insanely, American country music is one of the most popular music styles here, with thugged out types dancing the latest Nashville two-steps.

Aurelio invited me to play with him headlining a benefit concert for disabled children on national TV. Crilaton 2007, as the event was named, went down last night in a school gym, and had a sort of high-school-talent-show thing going on. Once again, sound failure in the last moment prevented me from being able to play, yet somebody Aurelio tricked me me into dance on stage with him, feebily shaking my hips on national Honduran television. Hopefully nobody in town will remember this.

I did meet some cool musical expats there however who invited me to play a weekly gig with them, and to go to a Haloween party tonight at the subtly-named "Expatriate´s Bar." I am excited for this, but somewat feverish (malaria? dengue? dysentary?), and need to find a costume.

Till the next update, all my love.

Bored in a Miami Airport, Goodbyes, and Maybe Americans Really Do Suck

I’m in Miami, well, in the airport. Its funny, to me, to reflect that this is the most time I’m going to spend in America for the next year. I was excited for the prospect of a 3 hour layover with wireless internet connections to lose myself in the sweet surrender of email. But actually, I really was looking forward to joys of internet, a lot, and this disturbs me. Alas, no wireless in the Miami airport. Other than that I’ve gorged myself on American things, National Geographics, Starbucks Coffee, Kettle Chips. Strangely… unsatisfying. But how lovely to be able to throw toilet paper in the toilet. It’s the little things.

But really on my mind are the goodbyes, there were many, and how sad to leave a place that really became home. My last week in DR was spent getting ready for the next leg of the journey, doing little things, having fun with Dominican crew. Since my eviction I crashed on the couches (metaphorically) of various members of Santo Domingo’s artist community, eventually ending up renting a spare room in the colonial house of an impoverished gay writer. The kicker – a pool and a roof terrace. Went to the beach in the hippie-mobile of my friend Guillermo, passed up an opportunity to jumpstart my acting career as a French soldier in a History Channel rendition of the Haitian Revolution. Had a goodbye party in which we played music all night in the park, gave hugs and said “nos vemos” and ya, me fui ya.

Amazing though – my recorder that was stolen in the robbery got back to me. How this happened is a long and convoluted story, but basically I went back to Villa Mella a couple of times to talk to community members, tell them about the assault, and ask for them to do their best to help find my stuff, above all my recorder. A drummer fiend Giovanni, who happens to be a brujo or witch, told me it was going to turn up, though I was pessimistic. He spent three whole days entirely investigating my situation, found the thieves through their mothers and girlfriends, found the corner store they traded it to for a night of free beer, bought it back from grocer, and got it to me hours before my flight, all without asking for a penny. This is true kindness. I gave him a bottle of vitamins in return (he said he always wanted vitamins…) a bizarre trade in the last moments of Dominican life in a Santo Domingo pizzeria.

But really, truly sad to leave, but this is the nature of my life now. Get there, get comfortable, get going. I sometimes think I know more people in Santo Domingo than in New York. I can’t help but think that I worked so hard to make a life that worked, and its gone like the dust with a snap of the fingers. But this blog wasn’t supposed to be about feelings.

Being an American living and traveling in the Dominican Republic is met with about three basic responses. One is “I’ll give you 8 thousand dollars to marry me for papers.” Another is, “Oh I have a tio in Washington Heights, I’m waiting for a visa to go myself.” The third is, “Yuck, Americans suck,” translated into the appropriate Dominican slang. To the first two, I sometimes will just smile blankly or will try to explain that although I understand the economic impetus to want to bounce out of the DR, that America’s streets aren’t actually paved in gold and there are certain things about the quality of life that really are better on the island. To the third, I try to convince people otherwise, that the bullshit on American television and in American government doesn’t represent the real people, that we have a rich artistic aesthetic of jazz, diners and beatniks, that we aren’t really that bad. I try to be an embassador of American chillness.

However, on being back in America for three hours, I have to say, maybe Americans really do suck. At least ruddy-faced, frumpy, screechy voiced and unfriendly Floridians. I can already tell it’s going to be rough to be back.

Which is not to say I don’t miss you New York, and all of you beautiful people in it.

Next time in Honduras!