SANTERO RETURNS REGGAETON TO ITS ROOTS

It’s time to re-think urban music- rap, hip-hop, and especially reggaeton. Despite its huge popularity, and its sociological acceptance as the voice of frustration emanating from its most honest protagonists, it’s never really been socially acceptable. The rap against rap, just like reggaeton, has always been its perceived misogyny, its glorification of violence and crime, its obscenity, and its adolescent posturing, i.e. more attitude than music. Reggaeton has always had more music than hip-hop of course, which is essentially a spoken-word genre which almost no one would dare call poetry. Yet despite its adoption and adaptation by almost every culture and language in the world as a voice of the oppressed, the old charges still stick. It’s the lyrics, dummy. You can’t undo them. You can hire Ice-T to play a cop on TV, but you can’t change the lyrics to ‘Cop Killer’. In Puerto Rico the police and National Guard were even called out to confiscate reggaeton music wherever they could find it in an attempt to stamp out the cause of the island’s moral decay at the source. Then ‘Gasolina’, the hit by Daddy Yankee in 2005, went platinum and all that changed. All of a sudden reggaeton was okay, a true crossover success, transformed overnight by a cute little novelty song, fought over by politicians instead of being fought against.

But on 'El Hijo de Obatala' Santero goes beyond all the hype, on the one hand returning reggaeton to its musical Caribbean roots, and on the other taking it in a new direction as a potent moral force for those same people for whom it was once a cry of anguish and hate, and little more. As the name suggests, reggaeton has its origins as an adaptation of reggae music into the Spanish language and its derived culture in the Americas, particularly Panama and Puerto Rico. If it got its start with the Jamaican laborers on the Panama Canal, it got its real push with Bob Marley’s surge to mass popularity and poster-boy acceptance as a hero to downtrodden third-world peoples everywhere. Many reggaeton lyrics at first were English-language reggae simply translated to espanol and sung right over the original melodies. It’s no accident that this would occur in the Hispanic countries most closely associated with America and the English language. As time passed and reggaeton evolved it adopted Jamaican dancehall and especially American hip-hop as its primary influences, gradually moving away from the optimism and philosophical balancing act of Bob Marley into something more materialistic and sometimes sinister.

Santero puts the spirituality back into reggaeton, all the while never losing the edge that makes it reggaeton in the first place. Thus a path that started with his birthplace in Guatemala comes full circle. With its traditional Maya culture and spectacular landscape, Guatemala may be one of the most beautiful countries in the world, but underneath it’s also one of the ugliest. I used to think that Lake Atitlan was the coolest place imaginable- until they found a dead body in the ravine next to our house- and the war was on. Everybody knows about the political violence of the 80’s, but may not know about the traffic in babies and body parts that continues to this day. Traditional Mayas may worship the old gods carved on stones on isolated hilltops, but evangelical Christians are the primary religious force in a country still nominally Catholic. A traditional Maya woman may still wear the huipil that identifies her place of birth and binds her to a lineage stretching backward into a remote infinity, but that doesn’t help the Guat City street urchin scrounging for scraps and for whom glue is the drug of choice. That’s the social and cultural milieu into which Santero was born. He left with his family when things got so bad in the 80’s that anything would be better.

Fortunately Santero always had music in his life, his father being the leader of a regionally popular cumbia and salsa band in Guatemala, a vocation he continued with at least some belated success in the US. This made a huge impression on the young Santero, he quickly absorbing current American musical influences, but maybe slightly less than the impression ultimately made on him by Santeria, a misnomer for the Yoruba-derived religion especially popular in Cuba and even quietly immortalized by Desi Arnaz in ‘Babalu’. Even in the back streets of Communist-to-the-death Havana, to this day you can still find shops stacked head to foot with items of adoration to the Orishas. But Santero went farther than that; he was initiated as a priest, disciple of the deity Obatala. The rest is history. His music from that point onward became a manifestation of that discipline and that spiritual presence. It’s served him well apparently. It even works for me, and I’m hardly what you would’ve called a reggaeton fan, at least not until recently…

El Hijo de Obatala (Son of Obatala) is the culmination of that spiritual infusion into Santero’s music, and the lyrics are full of it. From the opening song ‘Abre Camino’ (‘Open a Path’) to the final tribute to the warrior-saint ‘Ochosi’, Santero sings of inner city frustrations- “los que caen son los innocentes… ando buscando la justicia” (“the innocent are the ones who fall… I go looking for justice”), but without being defeated by it. His religion is his savior, just as it was for his hero Bob Marley. In ‘Baba Ade’ the divine Obatala himself “siempre me perdone sin reproche… alivia mi pena… accompaneme siempre” (“always pardons me without reproach… relieving my pain… always accompanying me”). He evens deals with environmental issues in ‘Agua del Mar’- “el calentamiento… parece suicidio” (“global warming… seems like suicide”), but the issues are mostly personal. A true ‘spirit walker’, as Santero calls himself, must even deal with death, and that he does, in ‘Madre de Nueve’- “el dia que me muere no me van a enterrar… nadie va llorar… recibeme” (the day that I die they won’t bury me… nobody will cry… receive me’). If he had omitted that pesky little detail of life- its opposite, its denial- I might have been skeptical about his spiritual enlightenment. He’s the real thing.

If you think you’ll need to brush up on your high-school Spanish to enjoy Santero, don’t worry- the music will carry you through. The surprising thing is its diversity, hardly a song repeating another’s licks in a genre I’d long given up as a one-off. The cumbia and salsa background serve Santero well here, and he dips liberally into both to keep the beat hopping. That means congas, brass, and flute, the works. The Marley influence is still there, in both words and music, lilting and optimistic. But maybe what’s most surprising is another voice from the grave, being properly coaxed and channeled- Marvin Gaye, complete with female back-up in English, to help re-align the focus. These days, after all, what better describes our dilemmas better than a phrase from another chaotic era- “What’s goin’ on?” Give DJ Santero’s ‘El Hijo de Obatala’ a listen- you just might be pleasantly surprised. I was.

INBAR BAKAL’S MUSIC TRANSCENDS POLITICS

The debut album by Inbar Bakal, ‘Song of Songs’, is a wonder and a revelation, with its lush harmonics and rich melodies. This also fills a much-needed niche within the field of Semitic-language music for those for whom Tinariwen is too raw, Algerian rai too slick, Rachid Taha too French, and Ethiopian music too… weird (comparisons to Niyaz are obvious, but they are mostly sung in Farsi, so non-Semitic… more later). The irony is that Inbar Bakal is neither Arab nor Tuareg nor Berber nor Ethiopian. She’s Jewish, an Israeli by birth, via Yemen and Iraq parentage. For those of you who don’t know, there is a pre-Diaspora scattering of ‘oriental’ Jewish people that is the result not necessarily of emigration, but of conversion. Ethiopia was a Jewish nation before its conversion to Christianity, as was Yemen before Islam. This is an important point to remember, since at that time, the similarities between them outweighed their differences and monotheism itself was the powerful belief (and economic benefit?) that defeated a plethora of lesser gods and their demands for tribute. Until the foundation of the Israeli state, Judaism not only survived but even thrived in enclaves within the Islamic world, far better than they fared in Europe in fact.

So Inbar Bakal helps bring Israel and its musical heritage full circle, back to its origins in the Middle East. She does this by looking for modern clues in ancient texts, adapting Yemeni melodies to Torah-inspired lyrics. Her songs are of ascendance, meditation, and worship, the struggles for Yerushalayim and the struggles of an unwilling bride in an arranged marriage. If photos of her at first seem oddly ultra-sexy, given the subject matter and background, notice that they also are extremely enigmatic, of a soul half-divided, an innate tension that plays itself out in song, half-crying and half-laughing. She one-ups Mona Lisa in walking an emotional fence with a combination of resignation and resilience, faith and humor, all lying just slightly below the surface, close enough to sense if not touch.

If Bakal has a talented band of diverse musicians, her chief collaborator on ‘Song of Songs’ is Grammy-nominated producer Carmen Rizzo, himself a co-founder of the Persian/Sufi/Indian-inspired group Niyaz. Thus the question arises as to whether we’re listening primarily to Carmen or to Inbar. This is the same situation as with other artist/producers such as Daniel Lanois or T-Bone Burnett. It doesn’t matter of course, certainly not on a studio album, as long as the music is good. And it is. Ms. Bakal’s voice matches the music perfectly. If this typically takes the form of a melancholy lament, I see no reason why it should always be so. It would be interesting to see how she would interpret more up-beat material. You probably don’t want to play her song ‘The Bride’ at your wedding. Somebody might change his or her mind.

There is another story here of course, one of politics. Ms. Bakal proudly served in the Israeli military, as all citizens must, but she even attained the rank of officer in the Israeli air force. The fact that she advertises this fact rather than obscuring it, all the while playing with musicians of other faiths, including Islam, is commendable. Maybe it’s naïve to think that music might accomplish what negotiations can’t, but then again, maybe it’s not. When you have movies like ‘Heavy Metal in Baghdad’ making the circuits and people in Zagreb camping overnight to be the first in line to buy tickets for U2, there’s obviously a power there that’s more than just muddy metaphor and silly simile. The new album by Inbar Bakal adds an important new dimension to the extant library of modern Middle Eastern music. I want more, and I want it live, but for now the album will suffice for a few more listens. That’s the ultimate test, which she passes with flying colors.

OLIVER ‘TUKU’ MTUKUDZI ROCKS ADDIS ABABA

There was supposed to be a ‘festival’ two weekends ago in Addis Ababa called Selam Music Festival sponsored by a group whose initials are SEANM, some Swedish-Ethiopian musical something or other promising conferences and workshops and live music in clubs around town, which apparently degenerated into a few shows at ONE club called Club Alize’. Now while I didn’t come here specifically for that, and I’ve experienced other such dubious ‘festivals’ which are frequently little more than mutual admiration societies for egocentric cliques, I’m still disappointed, more as a promoter and supporter of the arts than personally, that such opportunities for communion amongst diverse groups are missed. So when I found out that Oliver ‘Tuku’ Mtukudzi was playing in a show sponsored by the African Union I didn’t hesitate to grab a ticket. I’ve got habits to feed, too, and they’re always hungry.

‘Tuku’ is apparently a pretty big star in his native Zimbabwe, though I’m not sure how often he gets back to check, given the situation there and his star status on the world music circuit. He’s been featured several times on Putumayo compilations and has appeared in numerous world music festivals. The only time I saw him before was in Globalquerque! in New Mexico a couple years ago, so it was nice to hear him again without multiple stages competing for my attention. He was in good form even if the sound system wasn’t, frequently backfiring and even causing a fifteen minute disruption at one point. Tuku persevered with his smooth breezy Caribbean-like sounds. This is Reggae without the Rasta, ear candy without all the quasi-philosophical baggage which a non-adept may or may not be able to ‘overstand’ or even tolerate. It suits me just fine; I want more. Tuku is a showman also, with his own ‘moon-walk’ which he’ll gladly take to the bleachers if that’s what it takes to move butts. Too bad there weren’t more there to move, with the Africa Union’s ticket prices a bit steep for local budgets. Don’t let that stop you.

SEATTLE’S GOT RHYTHM! (IT’S IN THE WATER)…

Two weekends ago Seattle was the scene of the World Rhythm Festival, sponsored by the Seattle World Percussion Society (SWPS or ‘swoops’). And what a scene it was, too, with the sound of drumming absolutely taking over Seattle Center, home of the famous Space Needle, in case you didn’t know. On the surface Seattle might be the last place you’d expect to see a percussion festival. I mean, it’s hardly a great center of salsa or Afro-beat. But that’s not the most important thing when you’re talking about drum circles and such. The most important thing is hipness, and Seattle is nothing if not hip, perhaps rivaled only by its little brother and little sister cities Portland and Vancouver. This is an area after all where local public radio still has a Grateful Dead hour (what year is this? 14AD?) and RatDog is heavy on the marquees with ‘The Dead’ not far behind. Apparently this is Ground Zero for drum circles and while I’m not sure what the connection is between hipness and drumming, Mickey Hart maybe, but most likely ‘the late great’ Babatunde Olatunje, I DO remember them at least as far back as the one Oregon Country Fair that I went to back in 1983 or so, and this is the sixteenth year for the SWPS event.

I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs of the world of drum circles, but I do know they’re a lot of fun, and probably quite therapeutic for those of you stuck behind your desks all day every day, bless your hearts. Mine goes out to you, when I’m not jealous of you with your ‘real’ jobs and your kids and your lives. Arthur Hull is apparently the godfather of the official ‘movement’, complete with facilitator/practitioners, and he was there in full force, cutting up and hamming it up when he wasn’t actually mustering the troops into rhythm with drums and shakers and whatever instruments happened to be at hand. It seemed like everyone was carrying a drum, typically swathed in African cloth and slung over the shoulder for toting. Of course there were real live Africans there, too, in addition to other ethnicities, and this was the true value of the event, at least for me. These included Manimou Camara, Mapathe Diop and Modibo Traore (and that’s just the ‘M’ listings) representing most of the countries of Western Africa, which just so happens to be the most populous region of Africa and the mustering yard for the diaspora, of both forced slavery and Bantu expansion.

After Africa and African-style drumming, the other ethnicities and drumming styles represented included Latino (including Brazilian), Arab, Asian and good ol’ American. The levels of professionalism varied but in general were good, though in an open field like this there will always be some pretenders to thrones who do more invoking (of various spirits and gods) than evoking (of rhythm and movement), and some dancers more than willing to seize the opportunity to show off some pecs and ‘ceps just in case the moon is right and the mood is willing. But in general it was all good and fun, with highlights including didgeridoo playing, Japanese Taiko, and possibly my favorite, Egyptian dumbek featuring Raquy (pronounced ‘Rockie’) Danziger and her Cavemen. They get my Golden Finger award for sheer talent AND mixed origins. That lady has got some fingernails that mean business, and I don’t mean retail, and a no–nonsense approach that put some other flashier performers to shame.

Though broad swathes of the globe were represented, there was at least one glaring ethnic omission and a surprising one at that considering the Northwest’s political correctness- Native American, with some very respectable drumming of its own and chanting that not only carries a message with its medium but highlights the voice as a percussion instrument in a way rarely matched. In fact Native American drumming may be THE origin of the drum circle concept and is actually the first one I saw way back when in Portland, though I don’t think it was called that. There were also some gaps in the musical spectrum at both ends, percussive art and the most popular percussion instrument of all, the trap set used by every rock band from Seattle to Shanghai. As I found out last year in Buenos Aires and Montevideo respectively, not only can the traditional drum trap set can be a lead instrument in the right hands and the right jazz band, but there is a category of percussion that could hardly be considered drumming at all, and is best described as art. Marimba music falls somewhere between the two, music but not drumming, and was well represented by a group of kids known as the Shumba Youth Marimba Ensemble. You haven’t heard marimba until you’ve heard a half dozen of them together.

Yes, the festival was heavy on drum circle enthusiasm and enthusiasts and another side of that world was eventually revealed to me, drumming as a motivational technique. Arthur Hill himself doubles as a motivational speaker and others radiate the same self-centered glow. Maybe if everybody played drums, TOGETHER, then there would be no more war? It’s worth a try.

WARSAW VILLAGE BAND’S REINCARNATION TO INFINITY

I’m not always kind to musicians wanting to ‘get all philosophical’ or even intellectual, depending on how well they do it of course, but more typically it plays out in direct proportion to the quality and quantity of the month’s stash. I’m especially reminded of one singer’s self-deprecating reminder to herself last summer at a show in LA to ‘shut up and play’. I’ll have to admit, though, I find Warsaw Village Band’s notes to ‘Infinity’ especially timely and endearing. Maybe for me it has to do with global climate change or nuclear blackmail or water-boarding to flush out terror (!?) or whatever, not to mention over-population (which is apparently taboo to speak about), but for them it’s simply the birth of a child, which I hear can put you through some changes- “you start to think about the countless, nameless generations that preceded us… have accumulated their every trace in music, art, language – in a word – CULTURE.” As the external linear time-line measured by calendars looks increasingly challenged, the internal one measured by generations and shared memories takes on increasing importance. This is the psychological landscape that Warsaw Village Band tries to evoke in various ways on ‘Infinity’. But can you dance to it?

You can. Sometimes Warsaw Village Band, especially in previous work, sounds like nothing so much as Irish folk music… played with a double-time vengeance and supernatural intensity. The best example of this on the new album is the opening song, ‘Wise Kid Song’. This naturally ignites the chicken-egg controversy of which came first and who influenced whom, the Celts leaving music behind to be taken up by successive immigrants or borrowing it themselves from across the continent at a later date; it’s probably more the latter, but unimportant really. Other songs contain an ethereal chanting that extends that metaphor, evoking the Lindisfarne Gospels and a time when the solution to a crumbling Roman world’s chaos was best found internally, in sanctuaries and private meditation. To this day Poland and Ireland are the most devoutly Catholic of European countries, and that influence gets internalized into the music.

On ‘Infinity’ that sound gets broadened, with the help of other musicians and traditions, into something at times more abstract and Oriental as on ‘Circle #1’, at times more moody and dramatic as on the klezmer-inspired ‘1.5 hours’. Overall, though, the album seems to veer away from ethereal chants toward more down-to-earth blues, maybe not necessarily the Delta or Chicago kind so much, as on ‘Little Baby Blues’, but some sort of meta-blues that appears in the minor keys and plaintive cries of all musical traditions. There are songs here that evoke church gospel choirs and others that remind one of plantation field hollers. But the closest thing to good old-fashioned pop hooks comes on ‘Skip Funk’, which is pretty self-explanatory, just straight-ahead infectious boogie that sticks to your ribs. For my money they could explore that groove further.

Be forewarned- Warsaw Village Band uses a lot of violin(s), so if that’s your pleasure, then you’re in for a real treat, some soaring and screaming licks not often found on studio albums. If that’s a problem then start with small doses; it grows on you, and that’s probably the best test of any album, the repeat listen. I’d be very curious to see what these guys (and girls) can do live. The potential is there to go incendiary. I hope to find out soon (just leave the kid with a sitter, please; that’s all I ask. He’s cute as a bug, and I love kids, but work’s work. The last time somebody brought their kid onstage I was outta’ there and on the Metro before everbody else got finished going, “AAWWwwww (falling tone)…”). One thing interesting this band does is give most of their songs English titles, though sung in Polish. This is an interesting solution to world music’s ‘language problem’. I don’t know how well they actually match the content of the song, but still it’s nice to have some kind of verbal handle to attach to a song, a catchy refrain, even if the music IS the most important thing (90% of the time it is).

One more thing- this band LOOKS GREAT. I’ve got some exes who’d go ape-shit for these guys based on looks alone. Etran Finatawa’s got nothing on them there, except for the spooky eye movements at a distance. They could be the poster parents for anybody’s retro/vintage wear boutique. ‘Infinity’ by Warsaw Village Band is infinitely (pun intended) worth a listen. Check ‘em out.

‘SLEEPWALKING’ DVD DOCUMENTS MULTI-KULTI FANTASY

So maybe you’re a college student who listens to ‘indie’ music and you’ve heard a novelty song or two recently that you liked from the Cambo-American rock-a-delic ‘world music’ band Dengue Fever. And maybe you figured this is another case of some foreign model-cum-singer-cum-actress raised on English language and white bread working with some American musicians to provide her some backup and some LA street cred while she tries to parlay her good looks and sweet voice into some sort of Hollywood E-tainment career? Once she’s got some press, then maybe she’ll revert to the standard Celine solution of middle-road mainstream generic English-language pop mixed with an exotic foreign accent, maybe become an Anggun for America? Think again. For one thing, the band found her, not the other way around. For another thing, Ms. Nimol doesn’t model or act, so far as I know. She’s the real thing, niang srey Kampuchea jahk Battambang who’s seen her share of reality, and I don’t mean ‘American Idol’. Finally, and most importantly, this band is first and foremost about the music, not any hype that might rise and fall with the tides. Hopefully you listened to more than the one or two songs that made the college radio circuit and found in the larger oeuvre something that made you want to know more… and listen again…

Or maybe you’re like me, and you’ve been wanting to see this documentary film ever since you showed up at the Bangkok International Film Festival almost two years ago, scanned the schedules and saw a title from a song you knew and realized that this documentary you’d heard of was screening… yesterday! ­*&^%$#! Being a world music fan, you’d heard the rumors and legends, knew it had been documented on film, but not that it had already had its premier at the Silver Lake Film Festival in LA earlier in that year and now was in the other ‘City of Angels’ (Krung Thep). Since then it’s been playing the festival circuit and universities and museums (never coinciding with my schedule btw), wherever there might be interest in an off-beat documentary that’s stylistically straight-forward, but about a real-life story that’s the stuff of multi-kulti musical fantasy. I mean, come on now- musician and friend wander through the Cambodian outback, then friend gets sick, whereupon they stumble on to an incredible long-lost musical genre? Musician and musician brother then search for a Khmer karaoke queen who unknowingly carries the musical gene, find her, and finally convince her to sing for an American public who have no idea what to expect when this band of freaks hits the stage? Yeah, right, and it’s coming soon to a theatre near me, starring both Harrison Ford AND Brendan Fraser, yada yada blah blah. Cut to chase scene. Cut to happy ending. FADE TO BLACK. Great log line yeah, but who’s gonna’ buy that script?

What’s that, you say? You’re not a college student who listens to indie music? And you’re not like me, some half-crazed hack with a laptop and a passport full of visas? Why not? So what in the holy Hell am I talking about? Perhaps a word or two of explanation is in order. Here’s the Reader’s Digest™ condensed version: musician DID discover an incredible long lost musical genre in Kampuchea, though it’s definitely a polished urban style, not rural gantreum. Now there are a lot of foreign musical genres out there that have yet to be properly documented, much less marketed, and many have come and gone with little notice. What makes 60’s Cambodian pop so unusual is: 1) this is from the early 60’s. Most Western pop music didn’t get heavily exported until the 70’s when R&R became Big Business; 2) 60’s Cambodian pop disappeared because most of its proponents themselves disappeared in Pol Pot’s myopic sui-genocidal attempt to remake Cambodian society in his own perverted image; and 3) the music is GOOD; I mean really really GOOD.

Dengue Fever’s early remakes only give you a glimpse into that era and a hint of the breadth of that genre. Fortunately the old videotapes still exist, can be ordered, and you can watch the Cambodian equivalent of American Bandstand for hours on end, the Cambodian counterparts to Paul Anka, Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Lesley Gore, Neil Sedaka, etc. singing some of the best pop music ever produced, apparently without a clue that what they were doing was something special in the cultural history of the world. Apparently they kept playing right up to the moment when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge/K’mai Grahorm mustered their forces on the city’s outskirts, without a clue as to what was about to happen. The rest is history; it wasn’t pretty. People had a hard time smiling the first time I visited in 1998.

Or you can go to Sihanoukville like me and instead of hanging out on the beach or in bars, you can watch it all on Cambodian TV nonstop. But you said you’re not like me, didn’t you? Then you might want to cut to the happy ending and get a copy of Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. To continue: After becoming hooked on the music, musician and brother musician DID look for a Cambodian singer and finally found one right in Long Beach’s own Khmer neighborhood. She’s Ch’hom Nimol. The rest is history, this time prettier. Not only did the band find a groove, but also a common cause in wanting almost immediately to take the music back to its source in Kampuchea, almost as if to ask for its blessing. By 2005 after all, Kampuchean people finally had something to smile about, what with beaucoup Chinese investment money and memories that had finally laid down their weapons after Pol Pot’s death.

This is the story that Sleepwalking Through the Mekong documents. Soon after forming, soon after finding a place on the soundtrack to Matt Dillon’s City of Ghosts about a foreigner’s misadventures in Kampuchea, but long before finding a real audience for their eclectic brand of music, Dengue Fever went to Phnom Penh to play for the locals during the Bon Om Dteuk water festival. Director John Pirozzi’s experience with music videos and as a cinematographer in feature-length films, including City of Ghosts, serves him well here, mostly in focusing on the esthetic potentials of both the music and the landscape, and letting the story tell itself. In the best documentaries after all a script emerges only after the shooting has taken place and available footage is diced and spliced. This usually involves reams of footage to be culled through, resulting in a very high footage-to-final cut ratio, vis a vis narratives. Here I suspect that ratio is much slimmer and may account for the rather unusual 67 minute length, too long for a short film and too short for a full-length one. If this is a problem for presenters, it’s certainly not for viewers. Why add filler to a story that tells itself in its own good time, or worse still, cut-to-fit? This is the MySpace era after all, the new musical democracy. Can a film democracy be far behind? Give YouTube some time.

This whole project must have come out of some late-night conspiracies during down time on location for City of Ghosts, and the aspect of ‘winging it’ is one of the endearing qualitites of the film, the killing fields becoming a field of dreams, gods willing. The tossed mixed salad of locations is a treat, too, from live Cambodian TV to dark dingy night clubs to remote production stages. The story of a country’s search for a future and a past intertwine with the story of a band’s search for its own voice and its audience. They’re planting new seeds where they found old roots in hopes that the tree will grow proud and strong and bear much fruit. They’ve got some help from the locals, kids and grannies too, and eventually another story emerges, our own universal love affair with pop music and the warm rich feelings that not only emerge upon listening, but can re-emerge to some extent with each successive listening. Thus the living library of pop music becomes a guided tour and an ever-expanding catalog of our own collective emotional lives and the complex psychologies that arise to explain and enhance it. While this may usually involve the typical boy/girl dynamic and the added extras that make everything so frustratingly triangular and inconclusive, still this is the best clue we have as to how our nervous systems actually operate and the basis for much subsequent philosophy. More importantly these same frustrations that threaten to tear us apart also bind us together as humans with common experience.

At least now you don’t have to learn Khmer language to listen to Dengue Fever in the original so much anymore, as they’ve added more songs in English to their latest album Venus on Earth. Still, if the number of plays is the final measure of an album’s worth to me, then Escape from Dragon House still remains the magnum opus. How they can create such hauntingly beautiful songs composed back-and-forth between English and Khmer is a mystery to me and no small feat I assure you. It’ll be interesting to see what they do on their next album. They’ve come a long way from their first album of Khmer-language covers. Me, I’m just looking for a lobotomist who can remove the title song from Escape from my own internal play list, not that I don’t like it, but just the opposite. I want to get on with my life. But on second thought, naaah… I like that feeling. Sleepwalking Through the Mekong is available now on DVD in all the usual places. Enjoy.

CHILLIN’ WITH FELLINI AND LUCINDA IN RIMINI, THEN HOME VIA ROME

The best thing about Rimini is Federico Fellini. He was born here and revisited periodically in his films, most notably ‘Amarcord’. A full twenty years before his death Fellini was already mining his memories for material, because for him Rimini was not so much a place as a ‘dimension of memory’. Ahhh… thank you, Federico, for foreshadowing me. How many times have I used that same phrase without knowing its precedent? There is a street here named for every film Fellini ever made, all in a row, even the ones where he served only as scriptwriter for Rosselini (e.g. Roma- Citta’ Aperta), and even some I’ve never heard of, curse me and my protracted periods of escape from civilization! Who better captured the zeitgeist of post-war Europe, especially Western Europe, especially Italy, the horror and sheer absurdity left to befall the world’s most advanced civilization after its mass fratricide and imaginary Maginot lines, henceforth only to be moved eastward to cordon off Slavic lands with a spur through Berlin? Antonioni maybe? Naahhh… Truffaut or Godard perhaps? No way. Bunuel maybe, but he pre-dates the war and includes Mexico in his oeuvre, so I respectfully avoid any comparison there.

And Fellini, as with Bunuel, accomplished his task without resort to pop music props or cheap shots across the bow of politics. He accomplished it through the heart, not intellect. Even my mother got it, may she r.i.p., though she never saw a Fellini film. When I compared our Sunday dinners to a Fellini movie, she got it. The concept that something was ‘Felliniesque’ was something that you just intuited; it couldn’t be explained. The fact that anybody could ‘get it’ is a tribute to our collective subconscious. The fact that something could be hilarious and horrible at the same time makes no rational sense, but it makes film sense, and it mirrors reality. Of course he had and still has many copycats. Get a group of Italian kids together and tell them to act like their parents and you’ve got a film right there. Of course it takes more than that to equal Fellini’s art.

But I’ve got more mundane decisions to make, i.e. do I stay or do I go? The weather’s good, so warm in fact that I have to open my hotel window to let the radiator heat escape. I certainly wasn’t having that problem across the water in Croatia… what was it… less than a month ago? It seems like a lifetime. It’s so warm I buy a gelato and walk down the street slurping it like I’d almost forgotten how. My hotel room’s okay, if small, but they charge by the hour for Internet. That grates heavily against my modern sensibilities. I don’t like to use Internet with the meter running. That ain’t surfing; that’s swimming laps. In countries like Italy, and many others with a technology gap, to get Internet with your room you’ve got to go to the most expensive hotels or the cheapest hostels. Go figure. So where do I go? Jammin’ Party Hostel, $36 total and all the Internet I can surf, right in the privacy of my room. That’s convenient. Price is almost the same, except Net instead of TV. There’s no heat, but that shouldn’t matter. Rimini doesn’t come alive until summer, you see, so heat’s not an issue except in the ‘aperto tutto l’anno’ places. Many shops and restaurants don’t open until summer. It must be zoo-illogical by then.

Of course the weather turns cooler the minute I make my move. Without sun this California beach playground quickly becomes an Oregon beach playground, sun burning off late in the day if at all. And hostels are pot luck by definition, so when the players for the Ultimate Frisbee Championship come to town everybody else has to move to a satellite location for the duration. It’s not like there’s any shortage of rooms. This town is nothing but rooms… and other tourist ephemera, e.g. beachwear, fast food, and playgrounds for kids. There are even British pubs here, one of the U.K.’s most famous exports, along with pot-bellied pub owners. They’ve also got automats here; remember them? You probably don’t if you never lived in New York City in the 1960’s. I never saw them any other place or time… until now. I can vividly remember that being one of the first things we went looking for during our trip to the 1960’s World’s Fair, like Mississippi hicks looking at fast food behind plexiglass and going, “Gawww… lee! Shazaam (two syllables)!”

What has all this got to do with Lucinda? Well, she was here; or at least her voice was, blasting out across the street from the most unlikely of white satin/chrome/glass eating & drinking establishments. I couldn’t believe it. I stood there and listened to “The way you move…” until it finished, and then got ready for “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” (and I don’t even like the smell of bacon; hate it in fact). It didn’t happen. It was just a one-off, but still that’s significant, to me at least. Surely these people can’t really understand what she’s talking about. I mean you can’t really understand what Lucinda Williams is talking about unless you’re from Lake Charles… or Nacogdoches… or Jackson… but still they get it. How do I know that? Because of all the diverse music to emanate from my CD/MP3 player in northern Thailand, guess which one always got a response? Guess. Lucinda won invariably, every time. Interestingly, like Fellini she also works from memory, relentlessly mining it for language and texture and nuance… but most of all feeling, just like Fellini.

So Rimini’s not SoHo, North Beach, Amsterdam, Berlin, Chelsea, the West Bank, the Left Bank, the Central Bank, Ginza, Gaza, Interzone, or any of the other cool hip groovy dangerous ungodly places in the history of the world, just a beach town with plenty of rooms… and oh yeah, they’ve got plenty of cheap Chinese instant noodles here, the sons of Zheng He having long since arrived with their fleets of Chinese junk(s). Between that and whole roast chicken for $5+change, I’m content… at least for a week. Unfortunately they don’t have blood (red) oranges, which I’d wanted the seeds from to take back. I’ve been saving it for last- bad idea. All they’ve got here are the navel variety. Why would I come to a beach town for navels? The tomatoes are good, no small feat for store-bought. They’ve got ‘that smell’ that you usually only get walking through the garden and brushing up against the leaves, maybe because they’ve still attached to each other by the vine. Maybe that’s WHY they’re still attached to each other.

Oh well, in a few days I’ll be home eating ribs (ha!) and making plans to do it all over again, some other place and some other time, in this case the Horn of Africa /Anatolia /Scandinavia. I’m on a roll. I got my ticket back to Roma today, so it’s just a matter of time until I catch my flight back to LA. Till then I’ll just watch the Frisbee championships and walk the beach and arrange and rearrange words as if I were God playing with DNA and… I just found out it’s Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter, the whole schmear! I’d have never known if someone hadn’t told me. You can’t tell it from any increased activity around churches or such. I guess that’s a sign of the times. All I see at the churches are obituaries hung up for notice. Happy Easter.

Finally on Easter Sunday I get a glimpse of Rimini the way it must look during summer, gridlocked with weekend revelers, general chaos and major mayhem. They claim to have a tradition of sunrise breakfast when all the previous night’s party fools chow down before going home. They also claim to have had a party bus shuttling people around the clubs all night, operational for the last twenty years, a fact they’re proud of. Wow! With ‘traditions’ like these, who needs degeneracy? It even starts to warm up a bit again finally. Maybe my clothes will dry after all. Temps are about exactly the same as LA on the western side of the globe where I triangulate myself, where love lies waiting if there’s a God. It’s supposed to be up around 30C-86F there by Sunday. YEOW! I know somebody who’ll like that. Then the day after the holiday’s over here, WHOOSH! It’s like a ghost town again, people gone back to work, and the gelato prices come back down ten percent, yummmm…

The Ultimate Frisbee championship is over and all the bozos have gone home to their own American and European countries, including Russia and Ukraine. Apparently the US won the big awards. There are miles of beach just waiting for the next holiday, then the Big One… August! I won’t be here, couldn’t take it if I were. Italians are like Thais; they like crowds. I don’t. Sometimes I think that the world is divided into two types- warm countries and cool countries. They talk on cell phones ALL the time; we don’t. We like ‘the other’; they like each other. Think beaches are ‘freer’ on the Adriatic Riviera, full of nude women strolling past you like Paz Vega in that movie whose name I can’t remember? Naah, not here, the only fur showing here is around the necks of fashion frou-frous strolling the shopping strip as the sun goes down and the cool night takes over. The beach itself by that time has drive-up campers jockeying for curb space as they ready the kids for bed and make sure the noodles are al dente. It might as well be Corpus Christi. I think the nudest beaches are in Spain, with an axe to grind against the Pope, or maybe a cross to bear. There was a funny commercial a few years ago where guys on the beach dreamed of America, where ugly women were forced to cover up. Tomorrow I catch the train to Roma; next day I catch the plane for LA. I’m outta’ here.

On the train I’m thinking I should re-think my previous attitudes toward Italy, and France too, after previous problems. France was not so much a problem, just an attitude toward foreigners or dissatisfaction at its own decreased status in the world that annoyed, but ITALY… now you’ve got to count your change carefully there. They overcharge and short-change to an extent that would make a North Vietnamese blush… then smile. Of course that’s in direct proportion to the number of tourists in the area you’re in, whether it’s high season for tourism or low, and whether you’ve been ‘made’ as a tourist. If the vendor gets a little shit-eating grin as he pulls out his calculator, look out! You’ve still got time to change your mind. I’ve had direct experience of this in Venice, in Rome, and even on trains, all in one week! But I’ve had no problem the past week or so in Rimini. People seem as sweet and nice as they could possibly be.

I knew if I waited one more day to finish this, then I’d have one more chapter. So when we pull into the station at Roma Termini, I decide to go ahead and buy my ticket to the airport for the next day. It’s €11. I put my money in the machine. It takes the €10 note, but eats the €1 coin, nothing showing in the count. I press the return button, but no luck. So finally I cancel and it spits me out a credit slip, instead of cash. *&^%$#@! Now I have to go stand in line, the very thing I wanted to avoid! There I lay down the credit slip and a €5 note, but the guy needs to see my documents for the re-imbursement, so I breathe deep, cross my fingers, and lay down my US passport. After the requisite signatures and flurry of button-pushing he hands me my ticket and a 1€ coin in change.

No way, dude. “Altro tre’ Euro,” I blurt. He feigns a look of surprise, like ‘Huh?’ “Ti ho dato cinque; resta altro tre’ Euro,” I assert rather boldly in Italian that may or may not be correct. He fumbles with his hands and change, and then thumps down another three coins. ‘Ha! You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on Hardie K,’ I think to myself as I walk to my hotel. Simple mistake or attempted rip-off, you decide. Then as I dump my change out on the desk back in my room I look at one of the coins closer. It’s a 100 CFA Franc coin, currency for several countries in Western Africa, but not much good anywhere else, almost identical in appearance to €1, just lighter in weight. Now I don’t remember the exchange rate, but I’m betting it’s worth less. Somebody woke up earlier than me today I guess. And this is Trenitalia, the national train company, for God’s sake! Things like this leave a bad taste. Welcome to Rome. Oh well, the rest of Italy is still nice, except Venice, same deal. I’ve still up-graded France on my list, and as fate would have I just might be going to those French-speaking CFA countries later this summer. This two-month trip came in at less than $3000, so I’m good financially, cost me more to live in LA.

The rest of the trip is uneventful. I go see the ruins of the Colosseum at sunset. I catch the plane the next day. Immigration and Customs are a breeze. Maybe they’ve got a new poster boy. There are rocking chairs in the Philadelphia airport. I rent a Mustang, see friends and run errands in San Fran. I catch my final flight to LA. I’ll hang here and TJ for a week then go to Seattle for the Seattle World Rhythm Festival. Then I’ll head for Ethiopia, go to the Selam Music Festival there, get my visa for Somaliland, Djibouti, etc., no big deal, just another day on the job. See you there.

TALE OF TWO BEACHES

Coming to France from Italy is like entering another dimension. The language becomes soft and swirly instead of clipped and crispy. So does the food. The pizze and panini (that’s plural, Homeboy; trust me) become crepes and quiche. It’s raining when I first arrive, but the sun comes out almost immediately in some sort of sympathetic magic. The Africans are selling sunglasses, not umbrellas. I think they’re all from the same hometown (the Africans not the umbrellas). The only common culinary denominator is the cheese and bread. Being an American, where bread is a minor component of any meal, except in sandwich form, I never realized the historical importance of it until I went to Thailand, where they constantly compare its importance to that of rice for them. And they’re right; I just never knew it. Of course I might have if we’d had better bread in my childhood. Pasteurized homogenized Bimbo white just doesn’t cut it. Fortunately we’ve largely returned to our Northern European roots in that respect, whole-grain brown and rich with flavor. Ditto for cheese, may Velveeta rest in peace. Finding brown rice in Bangkok is getting easier also btw, right there in the buffet line at Siam Square and almost any vegetarian ‘jay’ restaurant. You heard it here first. Cheese is still practically unknown there. Pigs are well-known of course, but not in ‘jay’ restaurants.

So in Cannes I immediately start looking for some Chinese stuff, food that is, since I obviously have a thing for it. We won’t talk about that other ‘thing’. It’s there, Thai too, but it ain’t cheap. Thais love places like this, sunny and superficial, so they’re here in force. Odd thing is, I kinda’ like it, too. It may be pricey in high summer, but not now, cheaper than LA and right close to the beach. I manage to find the most untypical place of course, down a long winding narrow off-center corridor which I finally find after immediately getting lost right out of the train station. That’s what happens when the tourist office is closed and I don’t have a map. It’s not deluxe but I’ve got wi-fi and a market close by. The market is incredible, too, vegetables and fruits and mushrooms that I didn’t even know existed. I’m in heaven, or as close as I can get without a Chinese takee-outee. And I’m warm for the first time in months. This is the French Riviera, deluxe apartments lining the beach and yachts lining the coast. There’s even a section for ‘historical’ boats, sailing rigs from times gone by, still ready to work, the teak only growing more beautiful with age. When I’m not in my room booking my June Scandinavian trip by Internet, I take long walks on a beach that extends to the horizon, punctuated by rocky outcrops and snack bars.

There’s supposed to be an African film festival in town, and I show up at the appointed places at the appointed times, but I’ll be damned if I can find anything festive going on, nor even any schedule, nothing. Festivals are supposed to be festive! That means balloons, flashing lights, etc. This is Cannes for God’s sake, home to the biggest film festival in the world! If I have to ask questions to find it, then something’s wrong. That’s the second time in as many weeks that a film festival has gone dud on me. Don’t they realize some people take this stuff seriously, even travel to attend? Fortunately all is not lost, though I don’t think this is the epiphany I’m looking for, i.e. the cheap chill spot to climax on. Rimini in Italy on down the line looks good, too, so I may have to go check that out while there’s still time before the trip home from Rome (homa from Roma?) mid-April. Since it’s the connection point for San Marino, another of those 192 countries on my list, I really have no choice. Frou-frou French dogs won’t give me the time of day here, either, the pure-bred snobs. Give me an old yellow dog any time, hybrid vigor and the works, please. Hold the mustard. Who needs these psychotic store-bought poodle pronto pups anyway? They couldn’t catch a rabbit if their pathetic lives depended on it.

Daylight savings time has gone too far. We’re barely past equinox and the sun is already setting at 8pm here. I guess I won’t have to go to the Arctic Circle to see the midnight sun. Just move the clock up like they do in China, and put Urumqi on Beijing time. That’s not the deal though, of course. The deal is to see the sun above the horizon all day long, just rimming the edge and rising up on a tilt to do it again without ever really setting. You need to get above the Arctic Circle around summer solstice for that, though, and given the price of accommodation in northern Norway, that may not happen any time soon. If I have a Russian visa for the Black Sea anyway, though, and it happens to be multiple entry… Murmansk is the largest city above the Arctic Circle anywhere in the world, and strangely enough Russia’s only ice-free port (with the help of ice-breakers) with unrestricted access to the Atlantic Ocean.

I get back on the train, still looking for my epiphany, next stop Rimini. To do that, I’ve got to go up to Milano, then back down through Bologna. Italy is so narrow, you’d think that crossing it would only be a question of where. But as they say, all roads lead to Rome. That’s because the Romans built all the roads of course, but small consolation for me. It’s like tacking a sailboat back and forth to get where you’re going. Fortunately railroads were built in a more modern era. Sometimes I think that the glory that was Rome was nothing more than one giant construction project. Almost every town in the Balkans had at least one Roman bridge, the ‘Rimski Most’. They’re still standing, many of them. Almost no roads were built between the Roman era and the advent of the bicycle, except for the Inca Trail in another world unbeknownst. That’s over a thousand years, a MILLENIUM for God’s sake. Of course that has more to do with the advent of the stirrup and alfalfa than the decline of Western Civilization. Sometimes we DO indeed get the cart before the horse, at least when it comes to riding bareback.

Did you ever imagine what Italy might be like without all the baggage of history, without all the tourists, or I should rather say ‘all the foreign tourists’? It just might be Rimini. Rimini harkens back to a day when beaches were for fun, just pure dumb kids’ fun, long before all the eco-tourism or the fashion promenades along the boardwalk. There’s little or nothing here for cultural tourism, just more hotels than you can shake a stick at, whatever that means. I’m not sure I’d want to see it in the height of summer. It must just be an anthill of sunburnt tourist butts strolling down the streets in search of pizze and gelati and giochi for the kids to play. But right now it’s okay, almost like a ghost town. I don’t like to hang around when the party’s over, but I don’t mind it when it’s just getting started, everybody painting and refreshing and remodeling, even though we’ve all got our fingers crossed, all of us, knowing that the people who get hurt in hard economic times like these are not the ones who caused it; it’s the rest of us with bills to pay and kids to feed. Pray to ‘em if you got ‘em, gods that is. And book your travel last minute this season if you’ve got the option; last-minute deals are opening up.

This isn’t exactly what I had in mind for my epiphany/climax/whatchamacallit for this trip, but then neither was Vina del Mar nor Montego Bay for the last two. Hmmm… there seems to be a pattern forming here. Do I like provincial tourist resorts that are maybe just slightly past their prime? I’ll save the existential musings for later. Right now I’ve got a country to catch, San Marino that is, should be about number 80 on my list, almost half way, give or take a medieval principality or two. San Marino lies at the top of a hill about an hour out of Rimini, and if Rimini’s got the hotels, then San Marino’s got the castles, eight or nine at last count. But who’s counting? There are some good views there, but not much more than that for me. Shopping is not my favorite sport. Sex is, but I prefer the home court advantage, so it’ll have to wait. I’ve still got another week or so in Italy to kill and I have to decide where to kill it. Decisions decisions, life’s hard. The problem with Italy is Internet, or lack thereof. Search for hotels in Rome on Expedia and you’ve got thirty pages to peruse. Specify ADSL and you’re down to seven or eight real fast. This is a country for which the great paradigm shift of the last decade is cell phones, not Internet. They’re not the only ones. At least I’ve finally got a day over 20C-68F on this trip here in Rimini, so for the moment I’m content. Decisions will have to wait… until tomorrow.