DENGUE FEVER OUTBREAK IN FLAGSTAFF- Dozens Will Die Happy

I’m sorry for the delay in this blog, but that’s what happens after a profoundly moving experience. I usually reserve such superlatives for Great Moments in Thought, Religion, or Love, but there are exceptions. That’s why I got into the music business after all, or why it got into me. I always knew it had the capability for profound effects on the region of the upper chest area, and Dengue Fever did not disappoint. I first saw this group on TV somewhere, either in Thailand, US, or UK, sometime either 2004 or 2005, long before they started climbing world music charts. The blurb was about a Cambodian group making waves in LA. They didn’t look all that Cambodian to me, but they were certainly memorable, a petite Asian with a monster voice singing in Khmer while a band of renegade Angelenos backed her up, playing a type of music I’d never heard before, 60’s Cambodian pop/rock. I planned to see them at SXSW in 2006, but that was before I’d ever been to SXSW and knew what a traffic jam it was. They got lost in the shuffle. So I started following their web site looking for a place to catch them in the flesh, all the while catching snatches of their songs. It wasn’t just that I liked them, but with our mutual connection to Asia, it was something I needed to be on top of. That opportunity came in September of the same year at Bumbershoot in Seattle on my way back from Alaska. If SXSW was a traffic jam, Bumbershoot was a certifiable cluster-fuck. Fortunately Dengue Fever came on early, and they were great, but nothing like last Tuesday’s show in Flagstaff. That was transcendent. Or maybe it was just because it was MY show. I guess I’ll have to catch them again soon, just to know for sure.

The music business is pretty flakey, and ‘World Music’ is even flakier, probably because no one really even knows what it is, or what it should be. For an English-speaker, it tends to be “none of the above” in the ‘multiple choice’ of listings, and considering the English-speaking world’s dominance of the music and entertainment industries, that’s probably the way it should be. Tell that to the people who book world music festivals. Whether because of their legendary quirkiness or more likely to provide backfill logic to the fact that world music is going nowhere fast, there’s always someone who’s going to book a bluegrass group or a blues band or something, explaining dryly, “America’s still part of the world, isn’t it?” This does not help promote the genre, though it might help promote an otherwise struggling bluegrass band, of which there are many in the US. Ditto for Mexico where groups who are nowhere near the top of the charts in their own country find themselves written up in encyclopedias as representatives of their respective genres, all because at least one member of the group fearlessly promotes them in the English language, while an all-Spanish group like Mana’, who hit number 4 in the US charts overall with millions of sales, gets no mention whatsoever. So world music execs toss out big words like ‘indigenous’ while simultaneously falling right into the hands of those with the best marketing department. Dengue Fever certainly is second to no one in the category of ‘mixed origins’- they hired her after all- but then they mix metaphors in time as well as space and offer no apologies, nor should they. This is psychedelic surfer sixties Asian pop, remember. If some critics sniffed “wayward eccentricity” after their GlobalFest showcase in New York in 2007, tell that to the hundreds of Cambodians who flock to their shows when ever and where ever they play. I wish we’d had them in Flagstaff, for while the show was a huge critical and sensory success, the Tuesday night crowd was not enough to turn a profit. But that’s my problem.

Ch’hom Nimol is a wonder to behold. While not the group’s founder, she is its pretty face, and the direct link to the group’s spiritual origins in Kampuchea. Nimol is a cross between Cinderella and an Asian Janis Joplin, the fragile soul in the glass slippers boozily belting out Asian pop hooks in a voice much larger than her own small frame should logically accommodate. It’s not an act. For a girl from Battambang raised in refugee camps (she speaks good Thai btw) to now be touring the world at the head of a LA rock group is truly the stuff of fantasy and legend. Maybe they’ll let me write the book some day. If the Khmer lyrics leave you wondering what she’s really singing about, then have another drink. Isn’t that Asia’s biggest attraction anyway, tradition and family and folk wisdom packaged in a shroud of mystery for sale to the highest bidder? If it all seems chaotic and frenetic and frenzied under the harsh glare of sunlight busily cracking through urban skies, it’ll get better when the sun goes down and the little multicolored twinkling lights come on and you listen to sweet melodies reminiscent of Chinese brush paintings in misty country sides. Or maybe you’d rather pretend that the lyrics are about Zen enlightenment or Triad treachery. The Khmer lyrics let them be whatever you want. So what if they’re mostly silly love songs adapted and modified to many different beats, similar but different? That only proves what I’ve known for a long time: it’s about the music, not the lyrics. Only a very few artists depend on lyrical content, if you can even understand all the words anyway. Dengue Fever can do well on that count, too, what with lines like, “you called me up because I’m sober and you wanted me to drive.” But however much Nimol may want to ‘connect with her audience,’ the bottom line is, mysteries sell well. Most Asian girls have Teddy bears back home on the bed, not whips nor opium pipes, but you don’t need to know that. Mysteries sell. These guys play infectious entertaining, and downright addictive indie pop with an Asian flavor, and that’s the bottom line. Think tom yam rock and roll.

I don’t usually include pictures in this blog, simply because there are too many of them out there and their content is too easy to slosh around the mouth and then ultimately spit out, while the US populace becomes increasingly illiterate by the day. But this time is an exception. For one thing I want it to be clear the headlines refer to the music, not the disease. For another thing I want to show the band backstage, rather than their usual publicity photos, which you can find anywhere. These are a bunch of really nice people after all, driving their own van cross-country and then playing their hearts out like it all has meaning. It’ll be a sad day when I book them or see them and it’s ‘just business,’ playing the set lifelessly and then going on or going home. It’s probably inevitable, though. I don’t see how they can maintain such an energy level forever. Actually I’d probably include some concert pics here also, but my wife Tang cut off Nimol’s head in the photo, so that’s that. I’m sure that was no Freudian slip, though I confess to enjoying my quick hug. They enjoyed Tang’s massages, too. Stay tuned for the further adventures of Jack Free and Thai girl in America.

Thai Girl inna Hopiland

My life is one long crescendo, eventually leading to what, I don’t really know. I just know it’s accelerating at the same time that my body succumbs to gravity, in inverse relation to the square of the distance from the source. By some quirk of fate I find myself attached at the hip to a Thai girl in America, my name on her visa and now on our marriage license. I used to wake up in Thailand and ask myself rhetorically, “What am I doing here?” Now I wake up in America and ask, “What is she doing here?” It’s not just that these are the vagaries of marriage and togetherness, though they are, it’s just that this face has never been a part of this landscape. Marriage is a life sentence, a life chapter, a life story. They’re there when you need them; they’re there when you don’t. So now we find ourselves in the country of her dreams, the legendary America, much discussed but little known. There are Thais in Thailand who make their living doing nothing but being experts on America. That doesn’t even count the far greater number that make their living being English language go-betweens between the local Thai culture and the big world outside. Has anything really changed that much since Suzy Wong charmed the socks off viewers and the drawers off dressers, or the sailors in ‘Sand Pebbles’ waxed existential about ‘shacking up with a Chinese girl and opening up a bar’? Apparently not much. GI bars line the streets of Bangkok and Pattaya long after the war’s over, and well-heeled refugees from modern western countries find themselves washed up on the beach there in some version of its immoral equivalent. I can’t denounce it since I’ve done it, though I couldn’t denounce it unless I’d done it, either, so let’s just split the difference. Do what you have to do to make it through the night, but don’t sign any contracts under the influence or under duress. Loneliness deserves a remedy, but if you want a wife, then find a good girl. That’s what I did. Marriage is not subject to negotiation, and compromises should be with your partner, not your God.

Thais love to travel, but I’m not sure they ever really go anywhere, since they usually take all their friends and family with them. For Thais traveling in Thailand it’s not a question so much as to how many people will travel as to how many vehicles. Then when the caravan starts off people start piling in so that you don’t usually even know how many you’ve got until you get there. Houses or rooms get rented and people flop just about anywhere, thirty people going to one famous site after the other, sitting down to eat all together and flopping in piles at the end of the day. So to travel in America is a totally different affair for my wife. It’s as much about the other as it is about each other. For me that means culture, history, art, science, and religion. For Tang that means the bus driver, the maid, the guy with the tattoo, or the girl with the pierced something or other. For her the world is comprised of people and everything else is an intervening and seldom entertaining vacuum. Usually that means her family and friends Taen, Jiap, Tik, Nuay, and countless others with whom she’ll frolic like a puppy till the sun goes down (or comes up), funds permitting. However much my friends and family mean to me, my life simply is not about them. It’s about experience, both internal and referential, or external and infinite. Fortunately that world of people extends to strangers, so they become the other for my wife and many typical Thais. This is where we find common interest, so I find myself chatting up the maid about her Navajo origins and so forth, all to be translated to the delight and amusement of my wife. She’s still trying to learn the difference between Native Americans and Mexicans, why the one speaks good English while the other doesn’t, or may or may not speak one of several different native languages. They want to know about her, too, because truth be told she could pass for one of them and they both know it. They just need to know the details. Fortunately Tang’s openness and lack of pretentiousness takes over where her command of English leaves off and she manages to communicate with smile and innuendo what she lacks in perfect grammatical inflection, where others of greater skill might clam up in self-consciousness at their imperfection.

So it is against this psychological landscape that we toured the Navajo and Hopi reservations. Fortunately the physical landscape is a bit calmer and more inspiring, for it is nothing if not vast, and that’s much of its appeal. So we start off on I-40 to Winslow, and then go north from there up to Second Mesa, I giving speeches on the similarities and differences between Navajo and Hopi, both historical and cultural, while she dozes unceremoniously. Fortunately there were ceremonies at Moenkopi, so that saved the trip from being no more than a tour through a past of John Ford westerns and missed opportunities. Moenkopi is the Hopi part of Tuba City, an otherwise Navajo town and far from the Hopi ‘rez’. They may have more ceremonies just to remind themselves of their ‘Hopi-ness. This is a situation not unlike that of Hano on First Mesa, a Tewa village on the Hopi rez. The famous village of Old Oraibi was interesting, a 1000-year-old village still intact and inhabited, but the dances and ceremonies are the main event, and unless you’re a tribal member, these are hard to schedule. Fortunately we got to Moenkopi right on time, right as they were finishing one ‘set’, so got to see the next one in its entirety. This was an eye opener for Tang, for although they’ve all heard the legends of ‘Red Indians’, they never realized that those people might look very much like themselves. They certainly dressed differently, though, at least for the ceremonies, costumes not unlike those used a century ago. Many in the audience were dressed in their Sunday finest, too, and standing on rooftops for a better view. This was just like I saw in the same place some eight years ago, as if nothing had changed in the intervening time except that I’m older, hopefully wiser. After some time of dancing, soon they’re giving away food and provisions, presumably to emphasize the unity of community and the religious obligation to donate of one self’s time and possessions. I scored some yeasty bread in the shape of a flower blossom.

America holds many treasures within its boundaries, often overwhelmed by the predominant consumer culture and overlooked by its own inhabitants. Much of this is in the form of Nature, with such phenomena as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone rarely matched and never excelled anywhere else in the world. But America has ethnic wealth, too, in the Native culture still extant and the African culture transplanted, among others. Though often reviled and frequently mistreated, these people are Americans too, and more often than not proud of it. The dominant white culture should be proud of them too.

Jet-lagged in Flagstaff: Training for Iceland and Dreaming of Timbuk2

The plane glides down to the runway over images of grid-work houses and corporate-scheme commercial areas. This is California. America! Now there’s a concept, village life long relegated to the back pages of memory and a kind of nostalgia usually associated with young children at Christmas. Christmas! Now there’s another concept! But I feel nothing, either for America or Christmas, nothing but loyalty, the kind usually reserved for a long-suffering spouse, not like the passion aroused from more obscure objects of desires. This is Los Angeles, cold and abstract, giving action-packed thrills to Homies around the world, giving nothing but heartache to its own children, bastards of an Anglo/Espanol forced marriage that would never be resolved philosophically, but would be forever pacified under an avalanche of entertainment. That’s the American way, winning us a Cold War and, if Dubai is any measure, hard at work against the jihad. If it weren’t for home computers and the dot.com boom, we might all be speaking Russian instead of Chinese, and searching the aisles for BVD’s instead of DVD’s.

So here I am, freezing my butt off in the northern Arizona desert and thinking about the Sahara while training for the Arctic. I swore I’d swear off Flagstaff when the Hong Kong café closed down, but here I still am, long after the HK was replaced by a combination sushi/tapas bar. Think fusion, that’s the modern Flagstaff, no more the Indian reservation border town with Navajo ladies wearing their bank accounts in turquoise. Flagstaff has long been sanitized for the back-flow of Californians looking for new sushi and burrito and noodle opportunities. That’s OK. I like those things, too. It’s just that the HK was my kitchen during my Dark Age here, kinda’ like Hop Sing’s for that Communist on Seinfeld. It also represented a direct link to a remote frontier past of Chinese cooks on railroad crews, chasing the dragon (I forget her name), when it was illegal to park in front of an opium den. That was a time before Chinese restaurants were categorized as Mandarin, Cantonese, or Szechuan. Back then there was only one kind: ‘chop suey.’ That era is fast drawing to a close, though you might still find it in out-of-the-way places like Gallup or Grants, NM, places where motels still go for twenty bucks a night and time has long stood still. But Flagstaff’s still OK. There’s still the incomparable natural beauty and the Hopi ‘rez’ is only a couple hours away; can’t get that in Cali. The influx of Trustafarians doesn’t make things any easier for the rest of us financially, but it can be still be more than ‘poverty with a view’ for anyone with some fresh ideas and initiative.

Today is the shortest day of the year. That seems like a good time to have jet lag, as if things aren’t weird enough already. Jet lag kills me. For the uninitiated, this occurs with drastic changes in time zones, and means that your body’s circadian (circa dia= 24+/- hours, get it?) rhythms are disrupted, meaning you want to stay awake at night and sleep during the day. Sound like someone you know? Some say it only happens when traveling east to west or west to east, but I don’t know. All I know is it’s like some druggie hangover and for me it can easily last a week. It’s like someone is following me around all the time, and that other person is me. Many people claim to have cures, but I only know misery. At least it doesn’t happen north to south. That much I know. The trip Rio to San Fran proved that. That’s a long flight, mostly south to north but also east to west. Nothing. No jet lag at all. It was almost like being normal, whatever that’s like. I’ve even gone more than half the way around the world, as if trying to outrun the jet lag, go so far that you’re normal again. Don’t do that.

The weirdest experience was when I was in Reykjavik in June watching the sun set at around 11pm and the strangest sensation came over me, as if the great conductor were cueing the orchestra from above. You guessed it, jet lag, coming on like a twenty-four hour virus. I’d only flown a few hours that day, from London, so any effect from those few time zones was inconsequential. To me that proves jet lag’s perceptual link to the Sun’s position in the sky. It was a fitful night, but I managed a few zzz’s, and in the morning, I felt fine, no jet lag. That trip only fueled an already-growing obsession with the Arctic Circle, defined by the fact that I have yet to actually get there. Since then I’ve been to Fairbanks, AK and Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories in Canada, but all of these fall a degree or two short of the full Circle, the degree of latitude that corresponds precisely to the degree of the Earth’s tilt, meaning that the Sun rims the horizon to a greater or lesser degree all year, never getting any higher than that same 23 ½ degrees in the sky. Sound good? I’m planning a travel guide to the Arctic Circle. Order your advance copies right here. Global warming, anyone? Let’s surf the Arctic!

So I’ll be back in Iceland mid-January for the first time since that trip 3-4 years ago. If you’re going to write a guidebook, you’ve got to see it during that long winter, too, don’t you? No problem, it’s only one night. That’s the nice thing about Iceland Air. Not only do they have some of the cheapest flights to Europe from the East coast, but you can stopover up to three days at no extra charge. I’d stay longer, but I’ve got to get down to Mali for the music festival season. It’s the strangest trip I’ve ever planned, and this is the revised simplified version. Originally I had planned to go to Norway, but then thought better of a week in darkness, once I got the Iceland Air bro’ rate, that is. Those rates are only good for one a month excursion, and… a week in darkness? If it sounds like a diet of frozen buns, be assured that this is as warm as it gets at the Arctic Circle during the winter, bathed in warm Gulf Stream waters, and sitting on the volcanic mid-Atlantic ridge. Should be about like Flagstaff, actually. Notice the symmetry? So how do you pack for Iceland and Mali at the same time (and including New York, which I haven’t even mentioned yet)? Very carefully. Stay tuned. And Merry Christmas! Let’s eat!