SWEET ELECTRA- BLACKER TERCIOPELO… SINCE THEY ABANDONED MEXICO

Mexican music is hopping. While half-breed Lila Downs runs with the Frida Tehuana mantle and makes music more Mexican than the Mexican itself; and Brooklyn transplants Pistolera make better conjunto music than the Texicans themselves; and Mexican wanna-be Dan Zanes from Del Fuego (Ushuaia I think) makes the cutest music to satisfy the inner Mexican child in all of us… meanwhile real Mexicans ex-TJ No!/Mexpop superstar Julieta Venegas gets recast as an American indie and does duets with Nelly; and border-blasting bilingues Kinky and Nortec Collective play to large crossover audiences at festivals in LA; and Santana-buddy classicos Mana’ fill venues larger than the rest put together for hispanicos norteamericanos that the English-only audience in another US dimension neither knows about or apparently cares.

Then there’s Sweet Electra from Mexico City, now transplanted to New York City, and releasing their third album ‘The Day We Abandoned Earth’. Now there have always been cultural affinities between NYC and DF, though I’m not sure anyone noticed or cared except me and maybe the Spanish master filmmaker Luis Bunuel (Los Olvidados- ‘The Young and the Damned’- was made a full 4-5 years before ‘Rebel without a Cause’), but it’s there nonetheless- the density, the darkness, the death wish… and the artistry. Now I don’t really know what Sweet Electra did on their first two albums- neither the website nor MySpace are giving it up freely, and I can’t find anything on the shelves here in Antananarivo- but they came to the right place. This album is pure NYC, as NYC as Lou Reed or Laurie Anderson put together (yeah, I know), albeit without the hype or any other H’s… Lila may have the huipil Tehuana, but vocalist and co-composer Nardiz Cooke has the Mona Lisa smile (at least I think that’s a smile) and ‘programmer’ Giovanni Escalera has the multi-track feedback sensibility. The only question is: is it sustainable?

The album leads off with the ambiental ditty ‘Ignition’, and then moves right into their single ‘A Feeling’… ‘inside of me… forget about everything’ which pretty much sets the tone for the album, sparse but evocative lyrics and drum kit-driven ambience. ‘Love You More’ ups the emotional ante without really coming to any conclusion- ‘Every time I look at your empty face… I know I love you more… I didn’t mean to be this way, but I never thought I’d feel so empty…’, leaving us in a swirl of ethereal ambience and disembodied voices. ‘Backyard’ then leads us to the graveyard, crashing into chaos with strings- ‘I just wanna’ see the world from my backyard… see your face one more time. Is anybody out there…?’ ‘The Killer Silence’ is one of the album’s best tracks, with succinct lyrics- ‘the killing silence, the killing time, the killing loneliness, the killing words’- and a succinct melody… with good ol’ guitar. ‘I Am’ is a bit of an enigma, reintroducing the album and re-establishing the ambience with vocal wails over drum and keyboard-driven instrumentals, but then ‘It's Over’ returns to lyrical top dead center, the pain of love and the pain of just being- ‘I was wondering what would come next… I realized we’re together pretending… it’s all over, my love’.

The two parts of ‘Give Up’ then paint a beautiful, if stark, vision of life in the city, the first a percussion-driven version with guitars grating, the second a more orchestral version of the same thing. ‘Te Fuiste’ (‘You left’) seems to be thrown in almost as an afterthought- as if we gueros might not appreciate anything sung in espanol, but in fact is one of the albums better tracks, and if nothing else serves to prove that the sparseness of the English lyrics is not due to scarceness of English chops. The Spanish lyrics are sparse, too, not much more than road-signs to suggest something to meditate upon while you swim in the ambiance. After the spacey instrumental title track, another ‘DJ re-mix’ version of it and ‘It’s Over’ close the album… no comment. I’ve already expressed my feelings towards duplicative, if not duplicitous, ‘re-mixes’, AND THIS FROM AN ‘ELECTRONICA’ ALBUM! Fer Chrissakes, it’s all re-mix! Make up your m-f mind already! Maybe someday someone will come up with a musical ‘auteur’ theory to decide who gets the final ‘director’s cut.’ Maybe I’ll do that over lunch. ‘Re-mix’ tracks at the end of an album are starting to seem about as relevant as bloopers during a movie’s credits. How’s that for ‘no comment’?

But I like this album, even with its flaws, it settling in my mind somewhere at the crossroads of sub-conscious earth-bound pain and escapist ethereal ambiance. I can relate. Sometimes the only way to tolerate a world of human cruelty and incompetence is to create a parallel world of non-human perfection, whether it be mathematical precision or hyper-emotional ‘happy ending’ caricature. The crossroads and border areas are always fertile ground for creation and heterotic survival. To say that there’s a lot of repetition on this album would be to repeat the obvious (pun intended), but that’s not a criticism, just a ‘heads-up’. Repetition is one of the programmer’s tools, but if it all starts sounding like one never-ending song, then it’s time to go back to songwriting fundamentals of chorus and verse. Need another ‘H’ for New York? Consider ‘hooks.’ I ask again, “Is it sustainable?”

Of course there are other questions, too, like… does ‘electronica-twinged pop’ have to be sung in English, and… does it have to eschew all regional and historical influences? I doubt it. ‘Indie’ music certainly doesn’t. Café Tacuba has been doing that for years (but that voice!), and you’ve got to see ‘Maneja Beto’, an Austin group. And while you’re there, check out Del Castillo, who re-infuses ‘rock en espanol’ with classical Spanish guitar. Austin, that’s where I’ll be in a couple of weeks. See you at SXSW. Till then, check out Sweet Electra and ‘The Day We Abandoned Earth.” Because I said so, that’s why.

‘MARIACHI CLASSICS’ FROM MARIACHI REAL DE SAN DIEGO- IT’S ALL ABOUT LOVE… AND RESPECT

Mariachi music is like the Rodney Dangerfield (remember him?) of music genres- they don’t get much respect. Maybe that’s what happens when you sell yourself too easily, as mariachi music does every night of the week in numerous towns around La Republica Mexicana, playing for pesos. If it all looks romantic in Guadalajara’s Plaza de los Mariachis or Mexico City’s Plaza Garibaldi, musicians strutting their stuff while tourists line up for the privilege, the reality elsewhere is another story, competing with grown-up girls in under-age school uniforms in Tijuana’s red-light district or competing with themselves in Ensenada, where the mariachis almost outnumber the drinkers, at least the parts of town that haven’t been Hussong’d out of business by the new ear-pounding discos. It gives new meaning to the term ‘border blaster’.

So what’s a mariachi band to do to gain a little respect in this world? Mariachi Vargas- the genre’s most famous act- plays large arenas. Other prominent mariachi groups have adopted permanent associations with Mexican food restaurants (two enchiladas and a cucaracha to go, please?). With ‘Mariachi Classics’, Mariachi Real de San Diego take another strategy in their attempt to reach a wider whiter audience. They’re sticking to the classics, not necessarily the most popular mariachi songs of history mind you, but the classics. They even claim to have rummaged old record bins in Tijuana looking for material that might otherwise have been lost (so THAT explains why the antique stores in TJ are always such a mess). This is old-school mariachi, pure and simple. There is no ‘Guadalajara’ here, no ‘Cielito Lindo’ (the “ay yay yay yay” song), nor God forbid ‘La Cucaracha’ (would somebody please put that crippled cockroach out of its misery?). No, some of the songs here have been out of rotation for many years but include such chestnuts as ‘Las Mananitas’/‘Little Mornings’, a rumination on birth and awakenings, ‘Las Golondrinas’/‘The Swallows’, a rumination on death, ‘Mexico Lindo’/ ‘Beautiful Mexico’, and the spooky ‘La Malaguena’/‘Lady from Malaga’ (‘es hechicera’- ‘she’s a witch’).

There is nothing by Antonio Banderas here either, though he and film director Robert Rodriguez have certainly done much to popularize the genre with the popular ‘El Mariachi’ film trilogy, and whose one big Lobos-backed hit- ironically in non-Mariachi style- gets more plays than many long-suffering journeymen. Though there are plenty of instrumentals here- e.g.‘Las Chiapanecas’/’The Chiapans’, ‘Jugueteando’/’Just Playing Around’, and ‘San Diego’ (actually ‘San Diego’ has two words- guess which two?), lyrically these songs, and mariachi music in general, tend to revolve around the theme of love- love of country, love of nature, and the love of a woman. For all its machismo posturing, esthetically at least, Mexico’s imagery and inspirations tend to be largely female. Whether it’s the Virgen of Guadalupe or poster-girl Frida herself, the rich vibrant colors, exaggerated sentimentality, and the mish-mash of emotion tend to predominate. Mariachi music is no different. Even a song as patriotic as ‘Mexico Lindo’ just barely stops short of getting down and dirty on the dance floor- ‘yo le canto a sus volcanes, a sus praderas y flores, que son como talismans del amor de mis amores’ (I sing to the volcanoes, to the meadows and flowers, that are like talismans of the love of my loves’). Oooohhh… I like it.

They say mariachi music can be traced to one particular village in the state of Jalisco, specifically the village of Cocula, though Texcalitlan- the home of Mariachi Vargas- is equally legendary. ‘They’ say a lot of things, of course. In their attempts to Mexicanize and autochtonize the national tradition, some academics have attempted to prove indigenous roots for mariachi music, even going so far as to say the word itself comes from the Aztec language Nahuatl, meaning something like ‘song and merriment’. This is probably going too far. For one thing the Nahuatl word for ‘song’ is cuicatl- everybody knows that (and I don’t remember a word ‘mariachatl’). For another thing la raza Mexicana is truly a hybrid, probably more than any other place in the Americas, with the possible exception of Brazil, including major influences from native American, Spanish, and even Arab (la reconquista was only completed in 1492, remember) traditions. From there comes the cowboy culture that Mexico came to excel at and even teach the anglosajones in Texas. The American vocabulary is full of it- lazo/lasso, vaquero/buckaroo, la reata/lariat, juzgado/hoosegow, etc. This is the tradition that modern mariachi culture owes most to, Mexican charreadas- highly stylized rodeos- and the Mexican revolution as conducted on horseback by Pancho Villa. So it’s no accident that the Mariachi tradition originates in Jalisco, a state that looks north and west, even if it does owe much to village-based son.

But I’m sure it’s also no accident that ‘Mariachi Classics’ closes with ‘Noche de Ronda’/ ‘Night Rounds’, a song better known for its version by crooner Luis Miguel- ‘Dile que la quiero, Dile que me muero de tanto esperar, Que vuelva ya;/ ‘Tell her that I love her, That I’m dying from so much waiting, That she come back now’. This is not a bad place to be, commercially or esthetically. It’s a win-win situation- LM fans might give mariachi music a more serious listen, and people like me, who’d likely never listen to someone who looks like a model for men’s cologne… will gladly listen to the mariachi version. It also gives weight to the theory of hybrid origins in French-era bandas marriages. Though they may have deep roots in native and busker traditions and modern affectations that owe much to La Revolucion and charreadas, their raison d’etre lies with celebrating love and celebrating its fruition. For best results, listen to ‘Mariachi Classics’ with someone you love… preferably in Mexico… on a beach… along a coastline… that will zigzag halfway around the world… just to come right back to you.

TRAILS OF TWO CITIES- NOODLE WARS, BUDDHIST DESIRES, HOT SHOWERS, AND THE FREE TEMPTATIONS OF TRAVEL (part 2)

My current considerations for choice between TJ and Ensenada are more basic, like which place is more convenient, with better prices, with cable TV, and especially Internet. Two years ago finding a café with free Internet in Ensenada seemed pretty hip, harbinger of great things to come. Now it’s still the same, at a time when wi-fi is fairly standard fare in US hotel/motels, even cheap ones, and fairly easy to find world-wide, especially when you book online. But that’s not the case in Ensenada, with only a few high-end places showing up on my screen. In fact you’re lucky to find cable TV, or a movie channel at all. They must’ve cracked down on the cable guys. I’ve stayed all over town, moving on when a place renovates and raises its rates. I’ve only got one bottom line- no depression. But the blanket at my regular place is now getting holes, the water only gets hot for about three minutes, and the second-storey railings are dangerous. Cable or wi-fi wouldn’t matter much if I were still drinking y/o single, but… yeah, I’m gettin’ older 2. So it’s time to say good-bye to my trusty third home. I’ve already waved off Chiang Rai and Flagstaff this year, so it only seems fittin’. Everything’s different now.

So I get a room on the Revolucion strip in TJ with free wi-fi, scalding showers, morning sun, and plenty of room to work out, all for $22 Sun-Thurs. I’m in cheap hotel heaven. There’s no cable, but local TJ and San Diego’s okay as long as I got wi-fi. Being an Internet couch potato’s better than TV, right? The first night’s rough with the disco across the street going until 4am, but that’s fixable. I’m still nursing a tooth extraction on the #30 molar, so sleep’s not exactly a dream anyway. The doctor’s sixty-five and says it’s the toughest he’s ever done. I tell him that’s why I chose a doctor with experience. He tells me that’s why he charged me fifty extra pesos. The Thai dentist cracked it on a root job; an Arizona dentist x-rayed and diagnosed it; Mexican dentist jerked the mother. First tooth of mine’s ever had three countries and three languages. I thought he was going for the crowbar at one point. But TJ’s okay. There’s only one problem.

Last night thirty-three people were killed in TJ (including nine de-caps, and I don’t mean tire blowouts) as drug turf wars rage on. Two of the victims were children. One of the incidents occurred in a grocery store. That’s getting close to home. Weird shit’s going on everywhere, Mumbai not the least of it, as the world gets crowded. And doing things the much-touted ‘Thai way’ hardly seems enlightened, passivity as philosophy, allowing anti-democracy protesters to shut the country down. These are the same people who protested FOR democracy fifteen years ago, before they found out that idiots would elect sweet-talking ‘big men’ handing out favors every time. The conflict has spread to Thai Town in LA. Oord’s noodle shop makes the help wear red on Sunday. Those are PPP colors. Local PAD supporters say if they don’t wear yellow, or at least stay neutral, they won’t eat noodles there any more. PPP people claim that PAD ranks back home are being swelled by opportunists, reprobates, and prostitutes… but I won’t go there.

What’s a poet/blogger/traveler to do? Travel… and write. Future archeologists won’t believe it. Hopefully they can download the computers they’ll find in middens. The dollar’s stronger than in years and gas prices have been granted a reprieve. That won’t last forever. The US economy sucks… so the dollar is strong. Go figure. Recession is not so bad for us fiscal conservatives who don’t feed on credit. It’s my turn. So with one trip barely over, I plan the next, Caribbean al invierno. The Chilean gypsy’s love potions seem to have worked, so I’ll revolve around my wife in LA. The Caribbean’s still America, right, so close enough? For now I’ll just hang in TJ and listen to Tinariwen on MySpace. The sun sets at 4pm now, but temps are still mild. There’s a parallel reality, a real Mexican city, parallel to the Revolucion strip, just one block away. There’s a cultural center and an annual film festival here. Manu Chao and Lila Downs play concerts here regularly. But where do the people who make fun of TJ go when they visit? The Strip of course. Me in TJ? Or even LA? Who’d’ve ever thought? Life’s weird; you can quote me on that.

I almost feel guilty, that so many people are undergoing economic hardship right now and I’m traveling the world, but… naah. I’m just doing what I always do. Others spend denarii like it’s going out of style when times are good; now they cry when the credit’s gone. I never ask for credit, though I certainly could. It’s just not my way of life. People usually call me a tightwad when they’re not calling me a wastrel traveler. But I don’t spend that much and still manage to enjoy. The numbers are finally in from this last South American trip, $17-1800 for fifty days in four countries over thirty degrees of latitude and probably half that of longitude. That includes every thing but the flight from North America to South America, which was a freebie from points. Even for a paid flight that would have been only fifty dollars a day, not bad for some righteous travel. I don’t sleep in bunk beds either. You can’t live in LA on that, not like a human at least, and you wouldn’t see much if you did, just some pissy streets and lots of attitude. At least the food is good, and the music. Though immigrants can certainly do it for less, they’ll eventually upgrade or go home. They’ll live better later. That’s what I’m doing. We’re all immigrants here, or used to be, at least. I still am.

If the goal is to visit every single sovereign nation in the world, then I’ve still got a long way to go. I’m not a flight attendant, and doing mere airport stops wouldn’t account to much anyway. If someone’s been to them all already, then I haven’t heard about it. The guy who gets all the press and the ‘Good Morning’ gig for ‘most traveled person’ works from some list of 692 ‘significant places’ of which he’s covered maybe ninety percent. But I don’t know who compiled that list or what makes those places so significant. I’m looking at the UN list. At least maybe I’ve got as many countries as I’ve got years now. That’s a start. Europe’s got a quarter of them, of course, so that’s gravy, since you don’t even need visas for most, just the old USSR. Hopefully you won’t pass through one in the middle of the night unbeknownst to you. Europe’s got lots of cheap flights now, but flyovers don’t count. You have to stand on solid ground; that’s the rule.

For now the Caribbean Basin is the project. There are lots of little countries there and they’re scattered around. Any increase in flight fares could be disastrous. So I’ll start in Jamaica and take it from there. Barbados and Trinidad and Guyana are already booked, and some others should fall into place, Surinam at the least. That’s one of those back-water plums of international travel, a back-packer’s wet dream of cultural, linguistic, and sensory masala... or not. That’s the gamble. I’d like to go to Cuba of course, but that would be wrong. Uh huh. It’s a good time to use those frequent flyer miles. They’re cracking down on unused accounts. The trick is to work from your computer anywhere in the world. Or better yet, work from your world anywhere in the computer. The clock’s ticking.

TRAILS OF TWO CITIES- DRUG WARS, CATHOLIC DESIRES, COLD SHOWERS, AND THE THREE TEMPTATIONS OF EVE (part 1)

Tale of two cities, TJ and Ensenada? This must be some kind of joke, right? Tijuana and Ensenada are a joke, right, just cheap kicks for the Homies, though as close as many will get to a foreign country? I consider such slights to be misplaced, not only out of consideration to the million souls who call the area home, but for the fact that the area is truly unique in the world. The entire US-Mexico border is; never has a line divided so much, Latino-Germanic, control-freedom, centrality-sprawl, pessimism-optimism. But beyond the Roman sandals, red tile roofs, and Latin language, Mexico is essentially an Indian country, more than any other country in Latin America, with the possible exception of Guatemala. While Peru and Bolivia may have large percentages and the official ‘Indian’ languages of Quechua and Aymara’, they also have large purely white populations who dominate the country, at least pre-Evo. Such is not necessarily the case in Mexico, where populations have long mixed freely and cuisine, appearance, and custom are arguably more indigenous than European. The ‘rez’ in Arizona looks uncannily similar to Mexico, from populations long separated by a border.

The first time I visited the Mexican border was back in the old days of donkey shows, Boys’ Town, and choc-a-block whore houses. They closed all that down long ago. Now the girls stand on the sidewalks not a hundred yards from the silver arch, wearing cheap make-up like neon signs for cheap hotels where they line the entrances. This is a vast improvement over discreet internal goings-on, girls in Catholic-school uniforms now selling sex on sidewalks. That’s not fair. Somebody’s downloading my subconscious, not that I would prey on their youth mind you, but I might pray on their religion. My tastes in women are Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish, anything but Muslim. But I’m married now. Still back then I was enthralled at the possibilities for sex, drugs, and r&r. The food was wild, the gas smelled weird and the taxi drivers were eager to please. I was hooked, and the rest is history. I was convinced this was the weirdest place in the world. Now I know why. It is. I quickly moved on to more exotic and far-flung locations, from whose lofty vantage the US-Mexico border seemed quaint at best, hardly the ‘real thing’, maybe even a perversion.

After traveling and dealing handicrafts from many countries for many years I finally re-visited the border about a decade ago as a tax maneuver. Now that I have a foreign ‘tax home’ (how’s that for a misnomer?) complete with foreign income, to avoid paying taxes on it in the US I need to stay out of the country. Though Thailand was/is the ‘tax home’ of record, the Mexican border certainly qualifies as another country, so is useful for killing some time in and around the US. Welcome to Ensenada. It seemed pretty nice, especially a decade ago when I was still single and anxious to compare it tit-for-tat with Thailand after a couple years there. I also needed to revive my use of Spanish language, in serious atrophy after being displaced by Thai, though never a problem before, like linguistic civil wars. Ensenada was rockin’ back then in several bars I liked, ranchero, salsa, and jazz for the price of a beer. That was when I could not only drink every night, but drink in several different places every night, just like Thailand but better music and fatter girls.

All that’s changed now. As Tijuana degenerates into drug cartel turf wars, its party scene is going south, mostly to Rosarito but also Ensenada. Hardly more than a stop sign ten years ago, Rosarito Beach is now party central, less than half an hour from TJ and open for business, complete with double-decker discos and border-blaster boom boxes. Ensenada is not immune. Though larger and better able to maintain its original identity, it’s under increasing assault, mostly self-inflicted. Hussong’s, formerly a funky cantina with a far-reaching business plan, has long since one-upped itself with ‘Papas ‘n Beer’ and ‘Mango Mango’, lines stretching out the door. What’s the big attraction anyway? Aren’t California bars good enough? Not if you’re eighteen years old, they’re not. In Mexico teen-age American girls can dance on the bar and do all the other things that drive the local boys crazy, especially the ones who’ve seen ‘Girls Gone Wild’. What will happen if and when new passport regs are applied to the border areas is uncertain, but the likely economic impact is real enough that special consideration was given at the last minute, and implementation was postponed.

The two cities themselves long represented divisions as real as the border itself symbolized- TJ the cheap and tacky, Ensenada authentic and self-sufficient. The same symbolism has long defined other cities of my consideration, including LA-San Fran, Chiang Mai-Chiang Rai, Sedona-Flagstaff, all representing a fundamental difference in lifestyle. Sedona people don’t DO Flagstaff, and vice-versa, generally speaking. Even though the two are only thirty miles and thirty minutes away, that three thousand foot difference in elevation seems to speak volumes. If nothing else, the age difference is palpable. Falling on ice probably isn’t much fun over sixty. San Fran’s more romantic and intellectual, while LA’s more physical and image-conscious. Chiang Rai is the ‘real’ Thailand; Chiang Mai is Interzone. Well Ensenada’s changed a lot in the last ten years and not just with the TJ party scene. Cruise ships land now with regularity and have come to define the town. Chinese walk the streets in throngs, but I suspect they’re investment tourists. They’re not snapping photos; they’re snapping up opportunities. Chinese restaurants have vastly improved beyond the chop suey fare of yesteryear and buffets are down to $3 a head. Elsa’s pollo con mole is still $2 a plate, with tortillas made creamy only by the use of lard, pure lard. Loosen that belt.