If you drilled a hole through the center of the Earth, starting at Thailand, where do you think you’d come out (yes, I actually do stuff like this)? Wrong. Guess again. Wrong again. Okay, so pull out the globe if that’ll help. No, you don’t have to actually drill the hole, but you could pull a string around the widest point then mark the half-way spot and do it again. It’s probably easiest to just check the co-ordinates and do some simple math starting with base sixty Sumerian multiples that have been handed down as the number of degrees in a circle. Disregard the fact that the world is not a perfect ball, actually somewhat pear-shaped, and pretend that the center could actually be defined as a certain exact point. If you’re lucky you’ll come out somewhere in Peru. If you’re unlucky you’ll come out somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, depending on your specific starting point. Thailand’s a big country. So is Peru. If you started around Chanthaburi, you’d come out in Lima. You might be disappointed. It ain’t pretty, most of it, outside the Plaza Mayor and Plaza De Armas. Neither is Bangkok in my humble nature-loving opinion. Try to find a park there! For much of it though you probably wouldn’t notice much difference. You’d see the same brownish swarthy skin all over punctuated by a lucky few much lighter. You’d see the same noisy streets. In small towns you’d see the same crowded pungent markets. Until you listen to the language being spoken and the food being eaten, they could be almost interchangeable. In terms of cultural evolution the language is the main thing. But what a difference when you go outside the cities! The rice fields of Thailand are gone and potatoes reign supreme in Peru, all two hundred varieties of them. The pine trees and mangrove of Thai coasts are gone and the desert rules eternal in Peru, some places that haven’t seen rain in a hundred years. The lowlands of Thailand are gone, the Mekong Basin only a few hundred feet high a thousand miles from the sea, and the Andes shoot straight up from the Pacific Coast, only to fall off again and forever into the endless green expanse of the Amazon Basin.
Still the natives of both places are not so dissimilar, perhaps because of their common origins, whether via a land route or sea, though long separated in both time and space. They’re two of the most enigmatic cultures in the world, however lovable, though they know little or nothing of each other. But they’re all here in LA, and for the most part have little to do with each other, people largely staying within their own group for social intercourse, Asian women and Anglo men being the most likely exception to that rule. It’s a pity, that the various cultures of the world connect what little they do, only via the predominant English-speaking one, by insinuation if not actual assimilation. In the process indigenous cultures get lost and the dominant one maybe becomes more diverse racially but not culturally, people lost in the shuffle in a nation ‘of laws, not men.’ I’d like to change all that, and music seems the place to start, being the universal language in my opinion (equations don’t express emotion). LA’s wealth is that of its immigrants’ diverse ethnic origins, and I’d like to devote some of this time and space to bringing them a little closer, at least to us if not each other. That’s always been my goal as traveler and trader, so it must be part of my make-up psychologically (where’s my mascara)? So if evolution loves a mass extinction, then so does this blog. It has to reach the end of its current trajectory before it can become something else. And so it shall I hope. Given its current scatter-shot catch-all forum for whatever I happen to fancy expounding on at any given moment, this is good. Though part of this catch-all title was to gain rank in the Blogosphere by using keywords and meta-tags where and when such things matter, much of it was simply my own lack of focus and assumption that it would be a de facto combination travel/ex-pat blog which seemed feasible and which has defined my life for the last few years, hyper travel (while dabbling and indulging in world music) with a base in Thailand. Both travelers and ex-pats are fairly avid bloggers and readers and forum participants, perhaps intrinsic to their circumstances for lack of other outlets in which to merge their urge to ‘stay connected.’
But things change, and so must this blog. I’ve learned some things by affiliating with Technorati, Feedburner, and Google, etc. the last half year. If you google the words ‘Thailand’ and ‘Timbuktu’ simultaneously, we’ll still come up #1. We might still twenty years from now. These are messages in bottles that don’t always wash up. That’s OK. And it takes some time to write over a hundred pages in a few months for something that’s a labor mostly of love. But above all it’s always been a personal blog, and so it shall remain. The new off-shoot will not be. It’ll be a world music blog, based in and around LA, for now at least, and hopefully bound for glory, or at least greater professionalism, links to Amazon and all that jazz. Hey, you gotta’ have dreams. As I’ve already mentioned such acts as Seun Kuti, Tcheka, Son de Madera, and Ricardo Lemvo are scheduled for Grand Performance at Cal Plaza this summer, and that’s not the half of it, much of it for free. In the last three days I’ve seen no less than Seun Kuti, Dengue Fever, and Mexico’s Kinky, and missed no less than zydeco’s Terence Simien and Gene Delafose. There were Pasadena’s ‘Make Music’ Festival, Long Beach’s Bayou Fest, Olvera Street’s Latino reggae/ska festival, Santa Monica’s solstice hippie-fest, and even a Mariachi blow-out at Hollywood Bowl, ALL IN ONE WEEKEND. I chose Pasadena, partly for Tang to see the ‘real America’ of white people and picket fences and of course the music, including everybody’s favorite Cambodian band that I missed last week because the blue line to Long Beach is undergoing repairs. What I’d really like to do is penetrate the seamy Latin underbelly of music here and hear the stuff coming through from Latin America that maybe never even makes it to MySpace. Much of that is late late night at the Hollywood Park Casino, way off the bus line, but there’s El Floridita not far away and maybe I’ll check out GuateLinda in Hollywood soon. Hopefully it’s still got some Latino stuff, though it’s now trendy with its Thursday night ‘Club called Rhonda’ for the emo-, metro, poly-sexual crowd (cracker anyone?).
So the new blog’s up and running, ‘synesthesia’ at http://hardiek.blogspot.com/ , so check it out. Meanwhile I’m busily tacking on widgets and trying to make it look and maybe even sound good. That’d be nice, since it’s about world music and film. There are plenty of both here in the entertainment capital of the world. The music aspect will focus on world music in general, but particularly what’s playing in LA and from a west-coast perspective, i.e. closer to Latin America and Asia. Most world music is more likely to be East Coast/Europe/Africa-oriented. I’ll be more ‘occidented.’ World film is huge, also, and hugely overlooked, so I’ll try to toss some reviews in as I come across them. ‘Opening weekend’ is hardly an operative concept for foreign films anyway. It’s interesting to be back stateside US after a decade and see what happened to all the cutting-edge musical acts I was listening to in the 90’s, before I got world religion. Grunge is dead, of course, along with its chief protagonists, but Himmelman and Michael Penn are now scoring movies (and rewards), and Lanois and T-Bone are the hottest producers around. Sam Phillips is doing some gigs now while T-Bone is touring with Alison and Robert Plant, same as Penn and Aimee. On an even more Hollywoodish note, Juliette Lewis has a band now, likewise Billy Bob Thornton; too bad Juliette’s band isn’t composed of Brad’s exes. There’s some powerful connections there with Jennifer now Jon Mayer’s main squeeze and Gwyneth the Cold Play girl. So Sheryl Crow and Sarah Jessica battle it out on the billboards for ‘big hair mama’ of the month, with locks that would make the cowardly lion blush and the rest of us just flush. Aren’t you glad world music’s nothing like all this paparazzi pap that dominates the Hollywood scene? And who’s Marie Digby anyway? But I still like Death Cab for Cutie. Stay tuned. And don’t try drilling that hole through the earth just anywhere. It’s mostly water. You could get lost out there.
p.s. While this blog was sitting in the can the last day or two I just got notice that I have another poem being published, coming out in December at http://languageandculture.net/. See? I told you I was a writer. Not surprisingly it’s less of an inner-circle poetry e-zine than most, and considering they carry translations of heavyweights like Apollinaire I could almost get giddy (git getty?) imagining the possibilities, like me some modern-day Rambo e-mailing in his poems to Verlaine from SE Asia… (There, I’m better now.) So that’s cool and now I can refer to my publication credits in plural, but the funny thing is that the poem being published is based on the same little thought experiment of the first paragraph above. Now that’s spooky; or is it sympathetic magic? You decide. And don’t forget my new world music and film blog. Check it out if you got time. That’s http://hardiek.blogspot.com/ and since I’m feeling a surge of self-confidence, remember http://hkarges.wordpress.com/ for you hard-core m-f’s who like really pretentious stuff. SUBSCRIBE!
p.p.s. Well, all these new widgets up above certainly make it easy to subscribe to the other blog, but I didn't intend it that way, so it's problematic with third-party services all confused. So I guess I could commit blogicide on this one, or go back to the original 'new blog' I first started at
http://worldmuse.typepad.com/world_muse/ . Any opinions?
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