Carnaval, Veracruz

I never thought I would hate marimbas. I always loved the rich timbre and trance-inducing repetition. But familiarity breeds contempt. Sit in the zocalo square of Veracruz for more than an hour, and by the tenth rendition of La Paloma (the peanut song) you will be headed for a breakdown. Especially when the old guy comes around and puts his guiro (a notched gourd played like a washboard) to your ear to leverage open your change purse.  Even worse is the possibility of a trumpet band gathered around your table. Mexico is unique in the extent of unrequested performances. Clowns, jugglers, comedians, singers, flamenco guitarists and marimba players compete for space with a seemingly limitless army of hawkers. And it’s not only for the tourists. On the Mexico City subway, every stop sees another someone get onboard to loudly try to sell you chewing gum, books or CDs. The CD sellers have back-mounted speaker systems which pack massive, train-rattling subwoofers. The trade is facilitated by the fact that 4 pesos (35c) gets you one unlimited trip on the subway. On restaurant terraces and sometimes inside them for that matter, as on local buses, the management avails similar access to the sitting-duck public. In the Veracruz zocalo you have to turn down offers of peanuts, pens, sunglasses, model ships, marimbas and therapeutic electrocution approximately once a minute while you are trying eat breakfast. Maybe I am being curmudgeonly, but it is hard to understand how everyone tolerates it. Of course, the phenomenon is driven by economic need. There is not that much pure begging in Mexico, except by old Indian ladies. These people scrape by on what little margin they can derive (CDs are sold for a dollar) and sometimes the musicians are good. Actually I often give a few pesos. Young people in circus garb offer amazing juggling performances in front of cars stopped at red lights. Quite taken the first time I saw this, I tossed the guy a couple of pesos, which he promptly dropped. We both thought that was pretty funny.

The streets of Veracruz are also packed with soldiers, especially, I guess, during Carnaval. Here they take the level of armaments to a new level. They have the usual automatic rifles but also wear full-face balaclavas to prevent off-duty pay back from the dreaded narcos, I presume, and have rounds of 20 millimetre shells strapped around their torsos. If they actually fired those things, it would put a hole right through a building. They seem far too explosive to possibly use in a public space, and obviously are meant to impress. Apparently, Veracruz is much less dangerous than it was a year ago, so it must be working. The soldiers are all young guys, with pretty, innocent looking eyes peering through the black headgear. If you give them a smile and a wave, they sometimes wave back. I felt empathy for them. What a ridiculous situation.

Then came the Carnaval parade on Sunday morning. We waited for an hour on the bleachers while the security guys did their thing and did it again. In front of me was a troop of grey and black paramilitaries. They had so much gear on they looked like Transformers, and I don’t mean Lou Reed. They goofed around waiting for clearance, smoking and playfully beating each other with their night sticks. Elsewhere, riot police and under-dressed Naval MPs wearing only loose white navy duds and a matching helmet milled around. Eventually the crowd started jeering but at last some kind of clearance was given and the paramilitaries formed a V-shaped phalanx. They proceeded down the road ready to beat down any wayward spectators who strayed into the parade route. I was happy they had it covered. We wouldn’t suffer any further security related delays. Then it occurred to me – maybe, somewhere along the way here, the line between anti-narcoterrorist security measures and policing the general public has got just a little blurry. The parade itself started well with some exciting floats – marine themes, castles, the Carnaval Queen looking dazzling in her crown and sequins and booty shaking handmaids in attendance. Then came troops of salsa dancers. And then more. The costumes were various, a few outlandish. Flamenco frills. Some majorettes. Some non-descript advertising floats. More salsa. I don’t like salsa. I was getting bored. The most amusing events were the late arrivals racing to catch their troop dressed as Captain America or riding an ostrich. I left a little early but got a view of the remaining floats anyway. Some of these were the best but only because they were corporate sponsored – massive starbursts of orange Fanta exploding skyward.

In the evening there was a concert “massive” down near the bland waterfront with its plastic strewn little beach. There were about a million people there but hardly any music. Quite a lot of shouting by a couple of guys sporadically trying to get a call and response going while talking crap in a vaguely rhythmic way. Most of the Carnavalistas couldn’t see even the on-stage big screen they were so far away and were not very engaged by the call and response. A lot of them, the short ones, did have periscopes though, the manufacture of which was clearly a major cottage industry, and through which they could see some palm trees or the vaguely luminescent dark square of the stage blocking the usual view of an oil rig or two. The only alternative was the The zocalo plaza, fringed by the cathedral and my hotel amongst others, and now centred upon a another very big stage all professionally lit and with raucous rappers grabbing their crotches and swinging around followed by, of course, salsa. The locals dance fabulously well, pulling some magic moves.  I suck, pretty much. Some guys came running through beating on some other guy in revenge, apparently, and within a minute a dozen lads were being frisked down on the cathedral wall by the same battalion as led the parade. The best thing I saw all night was the Carnaval from Rio on the terrace-bar TV. It was un-bloody-believable. Visual sumptuousity on an epic scale. Floats of heavenly proportions, led by the angelic host, actually in the air, and squadrons of nymphette samba dancers with more feathers than Qetzalcoatl. I hope to catch that party later.

For visual coverage check http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruaryj/

Monarchs and Silver Cities

The central highlands of Mexico weren’t looking their best in the fallow, dry winter but luckily the land was studded with silver cities. Not actually silver, but built with the wealth from mining the stuff. My trail led first through Uruapan, a city blessed with one of the finest urban parks ever, actually a national park. The Rio Cupatitzio arises from nowhere at the head of a canyon around 2km from downtown. It gushes straight from the limestone in torrents. The park follows the river down a series of cascades passing under a dense subtropical canopy. It was quite beautiful. Patzcuaro was next; a fabulously atmospheric old town of cobbled lanes largely populated by Purepecha people. The public library was graced with an outstanding 10m high mural covering the whole back wall; a semi-surrealist frieze depicting the entire history of Michoacan State. The Purepecha once maintained a large state of their own known as Tarasco. Unfortunately, the Spanish put them under the administration of Nuno de Guzman, a conquistador of such heinous disposition that he was recalled by the crown and jailed for life. He must have been really bad for that to happen. His crimes were gruesomely depicted in the library mural. Probably he was punished because he was destroying the local economy. The cleric who took over tutelage of the Purepecha was outstandingly nice, establishing crafts co-operatives, the fruits of which still continue on. It is a pretty common thread in Mexico, that decent, god-fearing types did what they could to stop the depredations of the colonial military. That didn’t happen much north of the border. I don’t know if it’s also a local tradition, but the street tacos in Patzacuaro were peerless, in my limited experience. Next I arrived in Morelia, a town full of more gorgeous old edifices. Many hip restaurants and bars occupy the interiors decorated in tastefully ethnic and weird styles. My home town of Edinburgh boasts similar situations but Mexicans do so much more with them, as a matter of course. All these towns were charming. It is unfortunate that conditions in most of the little rural places between them were much less salubrious.

I went north to the finest silver city of all: Guanajuato. Totally over the top, set astride a high, dry mountain valley, ordinary local housing is prismatically painted and the split level centro historico is jammed with intricate, period piece architecture, plastered with sculpture. The streets are full of students any time, but a festival was in full swing. In Mexico that means street theatre, especially comedy. Not too far away lies San Miguel de Allende, another very cute place. Before I left California I primed myself by reading ‘Mexican Days’ by Tony Cohan; a philosophical travelogue covering much of my intended route. His other well-known book was ‘On Mexican Time’ about his move to San Miguel in the nineties. Unfortunately for Tony, whether or not due to the success of his book I don’t know, the town has, in the interim, become a haven for other Americans retirees – and lots of them. They swarm the streets patronizing over-priced eateries and laze in the sunny plaza watching musical performances by generic “indian” musical ensembles – those that play flute and shell rattles over synthesised atmospheres while chanting “hey-wah-hey”. Since I had had my fill of colonial architecture in any case, I hussled along.

It was a hard days’ travel, under the influence of a fresh, virulent cold, to get to Zitacuaro; base for visiting the monarch butterfly reserve. There was a fiesta in town the next day with a big parade. Unfortunately this meant I couldn’t find a hotel room. I padded the streets wearily in an increasing state of anxiety being turned away by a half dozen establishments. It was a sketchier town that I was used to in Mexico, with sweaty residents slurring directions and brats shouting “rico, rico” at me (rich, rich). I didn’t want to be on the street. One off-centre hotel was being used as a base by a huge squadron of flack-jacketed, helmeted Federal Police, bristling with weaponry as they mingled amongst seven or eight armoured vehicles. I assumed they were there to oversee the parade. While Michoacan has seen its’ share of “narco” problems, this miniature army seemed utterly ludicrous. One of their number gave me a tip for another hotel in a friendly, American-tinged voice, which actually panned out. I found the place far up the same street and, surprisingly, it wasn’t too bad.  Due to a forecast of inclement weather on subsequent days, I had to go straight up the mountain in the morning, despite my illness, so I took a taxi, and then a horse. The steep pine forest was lovely but my little horse Oscar just wasn’t into it, tossing his head around, stubbornly stopping, and then trying to kick me when I remounted after giving him a break on the severe inclines. My thirteen your old guide kept impressing on me that I had to give Oscar a good whacking to make him go and after a while I got over my initial qualms. It took about ninety minutes to reach the monarchs. They winter in these mountains at the end of their famous migration from the northern USA, arriving in such numbers as to weigh down the fur tree branches in huge clumps and blankets, thousands taking off into the sky at a hint of sunlight with the sound of forest wind emanating from their wings. It was a lovely sight, although park services rope off the roosting area so you can’t get very close. Upon returning, I rode with one of the staff (on a new horse, thankfully) to the other park entrance, at a much prettier village, where I was fed excellent local trout in his mothers’ rustic restaurant, shaded beneath a large plant-bedecked porch. During my meal Vicente told me of his four or five attempts to cross the border to the states with a “coyote” guide. Finally he succeeded, after great expense. He hid in a car under the wide skirts of a lady who posed as pregnant to explain the presence of his head under her blouse. According to local tradition, Vicente continued, the butterflies are spirits of the dead. They start arriving shortly before Mexican Halloween, Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) on November second. As Vicente had it, the butterflies flit around in a disorganized fashion until precisely on Dia de los Muertos when, en masse, every year without fail, they alight on the trees for the first time. Back in town the post-fiesta come down involved some pranksters setting off great quantities of enormous, solitary firecrackers (M-80 explosives?) that kept shaking the hotel room while I was trying to rest and watch the movie “Vantage Point” (with also involves innumerable explosions). Perhaps it was intended to tease the Federales. It certainly got me going.

From the mountains it was only two hours by bus to Mexico City. I was surprised that the urban sprawl was not as vast, nor as dilapidated, as I had been led to believe, at least not approaching from the west, and that the air quality was not that awful. For 75c I jumped on the metro which was quite full of groggy looking capitalinos this Monday afternoon and rode about ten stops to near the centro historico where I checked into the cheap yet stately Hotel Isabela. I got a third floor room overlooking some heraldically emblazoned cupola. Everything appeared to function and the toilet paper was all concertina-folded on the end.  For the first time in weeks I had a good bowel movement – chopped a log as my friend says -and headed straight out. The street leading to the Zocalo, the vast central plaza, seemed something like Edinburgh during the festival. It was mobbed with shoppers and families engrossed in their ice-cream, organ grinders (that’s music), comedians, religious nuts, Barcelona style human sculpture. The plaza is surrounded by great historic buildings including the enormous and eclectic cathedral (it took hundreds of years to complete and incorporates styles from all the colonial periods) and the Palacio National with the offices of the President and the treasury. Cortez famously destroyed the Aztec (more correctly Mexicana) Plaza Mayor and had the cathedral built on top. Excavations of the Aztec site, heart of the pre-Hispanic Mexican world, lie off to one corner. Inside the plaza which was also, of course, thronging with humanity, there was a massive stage where dancers were leading about a hundred of the crowd in an aerobics work out, tents giving out free trees to help improve air quality, a wrestling ring full of feisty children, a free-for-all volley ball court, medical services and multiple groups of “Aztec” dancers trying to evoke something of the spirit of the past but looking more like package holiday makers giving it a go, despite the impressive feathered head dresses. Step outside the confines of the plaza and enter a world of extreme street vending with every conceivable type of junk being hawked at top volume, and yet more Aztec dancers. If this was an overcast Monday afternoon, I couldn’t wait for the weekend.

For visual coverage check http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruaryj/

Good Morning Mexico

Mexico holds a fascination for me, a grand romance. The country is brimming with nature in all its diversity and the relics of a fabulous, tragic history. Fiestas, fine food and friendly people all add up to a pretty awesome travel destination. And yet, ask an average American and they would be perplexed. What could possibly drive you to go to such a dangerous and grimy place? However, it is neither, even in these difficult days. There are many problems, but even more negative propaganda. I flew into Guadalajara, Mexico’s second city, hoping for a soft landing after three months in comfortable but relatively lifeless California. It was sufficiently soft. My Spanish was enough to reveal that the people were being genuinely helpful and I soon felt settled.

Guadalajara is a big city packed with amazing colonial architecture, broad plazas and lots of activity. Tuesday afternoon shopping seemed like Saturday anywhere else. At night the bar scene was also animated with grunge rock and low-brow techno blasting into the street. My first dinner was in one of the central plazas adjacent to the golden spires and domes of the enormous main cathedral. It’s an imposing and beautiful 17^th-century structure, all gilded, melodramatic iconography and towering ribbed arches reminiscent of the inside of a whale. Mexico is full of such jewels. The sheer beauty and sanctity inside makes even me want to kneel and pay homage. You can pick your idol, but Mary always seems to be front and centre. Seated outside at restaurant La Antigua I was presented with a sizzling meat stew in a pumice pot that appeared to have been freshly cooked in one of the nearby volcanoes. The plaza was full at 9pm but I was expecting a bit of old-time ambience. I was therefore perturbed when a classic rock cover band started up at the adjacent eatery. They were pretty good, but tastelessly scheduled. Such clashes of eras are common. In another antique plaza we were assailed by tympanum-perforating techno-pop beamed directly at families waiting in line. Later in the small city of Colima, I was pleased to find a festival of traditional music and dance underway in the plaza but bars on the periphery continued blasting Abba covers during the performances. But then that is Mexico; a jumbled volcanic mélange of contradictions: ancient and modern, sweet, religious and respectful, oppressed and lawless, virgin and whore (as Mexican women are proverbially and prejudicially seen).

Perhaps it is the Mexican identity itself that has to contain such contradictions. The contradictions of a colonial land where the majority are mixed blood mestizos. Young people in Guadalajara look like they just hopped in from Barcelona but move out of the fashionable centre and people rapidly get darker, poorer and rounder, evidently enjoying a less that healthy diet, but not so for want of calories. Semi-officially, however, modern Mexico has come out in favour of los indios – in favour of itself, essentially. Cortez the Conquistador is viewed as a scoundrel and the heroes are Mayan chiefs and fomenters of revolution like Hidalgo and Pancho Villa. Nonetheless, most Indian descended folks you see in the city are sitting around trying to sell luridly coloured candy and corn puffs, which is itself also a rather poignant and demeaning fate for the great Indian maize. The indigenous people of the south in fact are known as “people of the maize”. Nobody really understands where maize came from. It was created by the natives somewhere around here but scientists remain baffled as to what miraculous feats of bio-engineering could have produced it.

Despite the bad graffiti, Guadalajara felt modern, clean and safe, however clearly all is not well in the heart of Mexico. The well-known American inspired drug wars have been causing great stress in the society. As the main shipping route to supply America’s unquenchable appetite for cocaine, Mexican drug gangs became so powerful as to operate with impunity while murdering huge numbers and corrupting the social fabric. Drugs are a 13-billion dollar-a-year business here. President Calderon launched an all-out war on the gangs and deaths went up 500% while guns, flowed south from the US market, supplying the gangs with their armoury. Of course, the US government had to sell lots more guns to their Mexican counterparts in order to counter this. Nowadays, there are an amazing number of police on the street. They drive around with their lights flashing like some outdoor discotheque while beat cops patrol the plazas. Many are atypical – middle aged or female –and not to speak disparagingly of their ability it appears almost anyone can get hired since they need so many new recruits. Even at the quaint festival in Colima, the plaza contained a dozen cops with sub-automatic weapons. Army trucks roll around country roads and at the little beach resort of Barra de Navidad, they were busying themselves searching peoples vehicles. According to my taxi driver informants, the soldiers are far more trustworthy, being new to the game and less crooked. It certainly doesn’t look good for civil liberties south of the border but then they never have been very well respected. The party of the revolution “institutionalized” itself 70 years ago, remaining in power until 2000. This led to predictable and intractable corruption. In ’68, just before the Olympic Games, the government response to peaceful student protest was to massacre them by the hundred in the square. A glance at one day’s front page of the English language paper in Guadalajara provides a snap shot of the problems facing the country. 1: Drug gangs posted notices around the city stating that they were going to kidnap school children to hold ransom against one of their number who was residing in the slammer, causing parental hysteria and massive school absenteeism. 2: A bus on the freeway “spontaneously” burst into flame. The driver drove off the road then ran away and was still missing. 3: A sick puppy found in the suburbs had been confirmed as rabid. All the vampire bats by the lake were marked for extermination.

Despite such challenges, Mexicans really know how to enjoy life. While much solace appears to be taken from junk TV shows which are ubiquitous and loud, family life and partying make for abundant enjoyment. There is definitely no shortage of cheese, meat or beer. You could die from the cheese alone but then it is a good way to go. It is very hard to find an American style veggie burrito. If snogging in the plaza was an Olympic sport, Mexico would be world champions. Whilst so engaged both of the pair sneak glances to see who is watching while the guy shields his less than faithful seňorita from the world using his body. Carousing starts young and despite successful family planning programs, there are still plenty children around and the whole extended family comes out to delight in them, gathering together in the plazas. Half the time there is some ridiculous clown performance. It all seems quite wholesome.

Music is everywhere though not always, to my mind, the best of most genres. I wouldn’t put Mexican traditional music at the top of the world music rating, though certainly that’s a pretty suspect scale. While some of the sounds at the festival in Colima were entrancing, typically the arrangements of traditional tunes are reminiscent of Bavarian “oom-pah” music except that the band is even more drunk. In place of lederhosen we have wide-brimmed sombreros and frilly cravats. Later, however, I was really impressed by the live rock bands I saw in bars and the street. The best thing I saw in Colima was a group of a dozen teenagers playing traditional forms combined with a tap dance which incorporated bullfighting as courting metaphor – with the boy as the bull, the girl used her skirts as a matador’s red muletta. Instruments included guitars in various sizes, a drum, cow-jaws used to produce both a rattle sound and washboard effect on the teeth and a something like a gigantic African thumb piano for bass. After the stage show, they did an informal gig in front of the highly ornate bandstand typical of plazas in this region.  The plazas I have seen were all lovely places, often filled with tropical foliage. Not so for the beach where the wreckage of over-development was evident, providing a backdrop of broken concrete and twisted rebar like the bones and ligaments of some great, stupid beast.  Mexicans love their visual arts too taking the mural to its apogee. Public art fills the street which is very impressive for a poor country.

Just up the road from Colima, I visited Comala, and old whitewashed village almost in the shadow of the suitably named, 3,800m, Volcan de Fuego. Here working in a beautiful old hacienda that provided a taster of the magical Mexican countryside, the Spanish descended painter Alejandro Rangel Hidalgo worked to produce his immaculate and charming gouaches that seemed to me to capture something very Mexican. With a peculiar magical realist vision his works often depict little Indian child-angels, naïve but authentically detailed. Around the same village, a great stash of 1,500 year old antiquities was discovered in shaft tombs apparently belonging to a peaceful agrarian culture quite unrelated to its more famous and warlike neighbours. The artist collected the finds and created a small museum. Judging from the collection, the culture had a great penchant for making all kinds of ceramic chihuahuas.

Driving mountain roads in Mexico the verge is decorated with so many white crosses and floral memorials marking the sites of fatal accidents. Machismo kills. The luxury coach I had previously ridden was exceedingly comfortable with headsets provided for those foolhardy enough to watch “Fast and Furious” as we zoomed along. I had already seen this movie on a bus in Indonesia where the driving is truly insane. It must be some kind of in joke played on the passengers. Now headed to Puerto Vallarta the bus was a grade down, still comfortable, with a continuous soundtrack of accordion music at a sensible volume. The western highlands of the Sierra Madre were forested, greyed by partial winter leaf-fall (winter is the dry season) but also brightened by occasional, huge, subtropical blossoms. Lower down, the range of cactus species like organ-pipe and giant prickly pear extends down from the north and intermingles exotically with the woodland. Up in the higher reaches, the forest had that incredible tropical mountain diversity with everything from palms to pines, stately hardwoods and bouganvillas. Vallarta itself has a lovely natural setting, backed by jungle clad mountains, with an island-split river passing through shady reaches downtown and emerging at the rather spectacular, art-adorned waterfront. It’s a fun party place. Luckily for my liver I was only staying two days.

I had to return to Guadalajara for my second dental appointment with a friendly, almost-retired dentista, recommended and very well-qualified, who had already drilled a big hole into the corner of my lip. She was so sorry about that but didn’t give a discount, just some calendula to help the healing which worked. Saturday night saw a big, high quality craft fare on the main drag, packed to the gills until 11pm and featuring street musicians that included a sizzling electric blues band, so hot that my face involuntarily warped in response to the guitar licks, hurting my lip. Next day I was ready to head east, further into history and the lovely volcanic landscape of Michoacan, where I would begin to see the rather shabby indian villages that demonstrate why Mexico is still a “Third World” country.

For visual coverage check http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruaryj/

Folk Art in Southern California

You don’t need to have a degree to make art. “Folk” make art too. The people with degrees call it “folk art”, which could be seen as reasonable, “naïve art” – how paternalistic – or “outsider art”, which implies either that the folk are apart from something essential or that people with degrees are not folk. It feels like the way that immigration services speak of aliens, illegal or otherwise, as if they were from another, stranger planet. I speak from experience on both these counts. The folk artists don’t seem to care too much about it and would be quite happy if the people with degrees would just folk off. They are too busy doing the art to analyse it much and some of it is quite remarkable, often for the sheer perseverance required in its making. It seems their only qualifications are determination, a pinch of madness and home brewed engineering skills. Seeing these works were, for me, the highlight of our trip to southern California.

LA is famous for its Chicano murals. Strictly speaking, the term Chicano refers to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent but clearly some of these creatives are outside artists and aliens – a heady mix that makes for powerful concretions of radical politics and Aztec mythology. Some of the works are clearly inspired by the great Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and occupy various public spaces like freeway overpasses, but many are collaborative works; community property depicting alternative histories and the shared experiences of life in the barrios and the fields. One that we came across in Silverlake, near Hollywood depicted some kind of urban Aztec mushroom shaman with accompanying proverbs extolling spiritual transformation as the gateway to political change.

We headed north through the San Gabriel Mountains. Immediately, you pass into the high Mojave Desert, rather bleak in December. We stopped in the non-descript town of Victorville. After breakfast in a genuine 1950’s diner, replete with gleaming soda fountains and such, we went in search of the bottle tree ranch. It wasn’t easy. The place is not famous on the scale of our two later destinations. Eventually we did get to its location with a Route 66 sign out front. Created by a redneck hippie dude, the roadside property has been entirely given over to welded iron “trees”, rather like giant clothes hangers. A copious collector of brick-a-brack, the artist, whos name I didn’t get, managed to find hundreds of coloured bottles; clear, green, brown and blue (where did he get all the blue ones?) and installed them on the peg-like branches. Filling the gaps with miscellaneous car parts, typewriters, shell casings and animal bones, his translucent, man-made forest gleams away in the bright desert sun with no apparent purpose beyond the fun of creation (and the tips he now receives from the invariably impressed visitors).

From there we made our way southeast by way of Joshua Tree National Park and over-priced but nifty Palm Springs to the fabulous Salton Sea. Once an ephemeral sink, the “sea” was created when a canal diverting water from the Colorado River to Imperial Valley agricultural land ruptured catastrophically in 1905. Soon it was attracting wild fowl and water sports enthusiasts so authorities allowed enough influx for it to become the biggest inland body of water in California. Unfortunately ever increasing salinity and fertilizer induced algal blooms have led to massive fish die offs with overpowering stench and entire beaches made of bleached fish parts. Standing by the forlorn, dilapidated marina where The Beach Boys used to play, watching tilapia dying in the anoxic water, it is quite a surreal scene. Luckily there are some redeeming features in the area. One is Slab City, a former military base that has become a winter home to flocks of weird and independent and otherwise homeless mobile home owners, freaks, ravers, art car artists and derelicts. It’s a pretty unique situation and worth a visit. Directly adjacent is the not exactly magnificent but compellingly intrepid art installation known as Salvation Mountain. Created by Leonard Knight over a 25 year period starting when he was in his mid-50s, this epic structure, made purely to promote the idea that “God is Love”, consists of a small hill extended with cement and adobe to a height of 100’ and covered in vast quantities of multi-coloured acrylic house-paint. Like some demented scene from the Wizard of Oz, a yellow path winds up the face to the tall crucifix on the summit. Off to the side, Leonard attempted to create a complete cupola out of straw bales pierced with half-trees and old telegraph poles, all garishly painted. It almost collapsed but still stands tall, curving inward, suggestive of a cathedral and thoroughly precarious looking. Unfortunately the remarkable creator was institutionalized with dementia right before we got there. Other, younger zealots appear to be carrying on the work and the state of California has made Salvation Mountain an officially protected site.

A similarly heroic installation greeted us on our return to LA.  Also jutting 100’ skywardbut this time from the hood way down in South Central, Watts Towers was the work of another one-man phenomenon, an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia, who created them over 33 years ending in 1954 when he suddenly quit and left. The 17 towers were made from scrap rebar and piping, brilliantly engineered on an ad hoc basis, and covered in mortar imbedded with glass, ceramics and found objects. How he could have created these huge structures by hand is, in much the same way as Salvation Mountain, completely remarkable. Reminiscent of works by Gaudi in Barcelona, the now deservedly famous towers have also been protected. Sadly the creator didn’t live to see his efforts appreciated properly. He wasn’t the first. Just ask Van Gogh, who never went to art school either.

Amtrak

The train was weird. For one, it was a double decker. Tight stairways led to the roomy upstairs from which you could view the drab, mousy hills of a dry, California December.  Downstairs were more reclining seats, a lot of luggage and some old video games. There was a traditional style dining car and sleeping compartments for those going the whole way. The Coast Starlights (four of them) run up and down the west coast from Seattle to Los Angeles every dayand brought a hint of old fashioned travel romance to our 380-mile trip from ‘Frisco to the city of angels. Unfortunately it takes at least 13 hours. It is comfortable, intriguing and potentially relaxing but not convenient and costs 40% more than flying. Why would anybody do it? Some are train buffs. Others, like my travelling companion Koko, think it’s the only way to travel, watching the world drift by from the high windowed viewing car. Others bypass their fear of flying and terrorists. On our train was a group of archaically attired Amish, the Dutch descended Christian sect that shuns modern machinery but evidently make are willing to make some reasonable accommodation with technology if they need to make such a journey. God knows what was taking them to LA. Even passing through would be a shocker. American passenger trains are run by Amtrak with government support, as they usually run at a loss. Particularly in the west, the service is clearly intended to be recreational. There is no business class. It’s a place to catch up on sleep. Certainly, Amtrak has its charms though. They employ affable old conductors at the stations to provide that old time feel right from the get go. The in-train intercom intermittently provides corny but amusing commentary apparently at the whim of the inconsistently witty staff. On the right you will see some cows. These cows are deservedly famous. They are out standing in their fields. Yes, good one. Worth a chortle. Bringing your own booze is not permitted so the company can gouge on beer in the lounge. Friendly warnings are issued for this and against smoking. For those of you who might want to smoke something please remember that the bud does not make you wiser. Of course, they didn’t mean bad beer. You know you are in California, where a couple of hundred thousand “patients” have medical marijuana prescriptions. The main reason Amtrak trains are so slow is because the company doesn’t own the tracks it uses. They trundle along at painfully slow speeds much of the time, waiting for 2km-long Union Pacific freight trains to clear the tracks up ahead. Somebody even has to physically present a paper-printed (or hand-drafted for all I know) safety clearance to the driver for certain sections which can take an unpredictable long time. California may be a world leader in high-tech, but when it comes to trains it’s like 1890 all over again.

Once in LA, we rented a car and Koko tackled the 6-lane, multiple interchange, 50 mph speed differential highway system. It was fairly terrifying. LA drivers overtake on either side and are usually too busy on the phone to be paying attention to the road despite anti car-chat legislation. We were surprised to learn that contrary to popular belief the LA area does have an excellent bus system some of which, remarkably, run 24-7. There is also a metro light-rail service. We wondered why we were going through driving hell, even avoiding, as we were, the massive rush hour congestion. Unfortunately, LA is so huge that any form of travel can take ages. We soon headed out to the open desert but even in the middle of the Mojave traffic can be heavy and fast. There is just no escaping cars in California, except perhaps on Amtrak.

Neighbours

The neighbour seemed like an alright bloke to me; a handy, affable black guy in his fifties. He was taking care of an older woman who had suffered strokes and often yelled in frustration. She was pretty batty. They fought a lot too. They were married after all. Sometimes people would come and go from their house at strange hours but the visitors were always quiet. One day the neighbor ambled up the drive. He wanted access to K’s property in order to size up his bedroom window for sound proofing.  Leaning over the gate, he gave the frame a perfunctory prod with a yard stick and nodded approvingly. His old lady was so noisy when he was banging her, he grinned, and he didn’t want the racket to bother us. He really meant old lady too. She was in her 70’s. A few days later he accosted K on her porch some time around midnight. This time he requested a knife – for cutting tape, he said – an exacto or – anything. Rather disturbed, K complied with reservation, and dug out her exacto-knife. The neighbour asked if he could keep it. Hell no! We didn’t see him or the knife again. We disappeared too, for a week or so, and when we came back there was still no sign of either of them. A sharp looking black dude of impressive girth was waiting outside one day, leaning on his gratuitously expensive car. He inquired as to the neighbour’s disposition. Don’t know, K shrugged. Maybe he is just lying low. A few days later a white terrier appeared snuffling around in the street. We thought it a stray at first and tried to feed it but the owner turned up a couple of days later. He was a stout, middle-aged, white guy who explained that he was son of the old lady. But now he was our neighbour. He launched immediately into an astounding monologue. Apparently, his mother was in hospital. She had almost died twice from starvation and beatings. All her meals-on-wheels were stacked in the closet uneaten. Our previous neighbour was a polygamist, the new neighbour informed us, and was still at large, probably in Oakland. The lady had quite a collection of antiques. We had seen a stuffed zebra head through the recently parted curtains. Yup, very valuable that one – an endangered species. The old neighbour had stolen and embezzled sixty or seventy thousand dollars from his wife to feed his crack habit, the guy continued. The bedroom was full of pipes. The old lady was talking of gang rapes from her hospital bed. She thought her former spouse might have killed someone else so the son’s friends were digging holes in the backyard, looking for a body. All this information was delivered in a surprisingly curt, light-hearted tone as if he were divulging the humourous peccadillos of some acquiantance. Over the next few days nary a policeman was seen and presumably no corpse was exhumed.  Despite the dire scenario depicted, the new neighbour and his crew were all were enjoying quite a bit of hilarity and joshing around while loudly discussing half-remembered right-wing conspiracy theories out front. The mother returned home a week or two later and everything returned to what passes for normal in these parts.

At least we figured out where the dog came from.

California Dream-Mine

California is different from other states. Availed sumptuously along the left bank of the continent, it lies at the end of a hard, golden road and faces an unfathomable ocean. To progress any further you have to come up with new stuff. California thrives on novelty. It embraces emerging technologies and ideas like a feeding whale, a great consuming maw, or an incubation chamber. Some folks are carried onward by pioneer momentum and fall off the edge and into a new realm where our only maps read ‘here be dragons’ or proclaim criminal penalties. Sometimes these new ones leave us messages that seem like off-planet, internet flotsam strung out along a cool, jewelled beach. Others get wet feet standing at the edge of the churning surf. They soon return to the city’s hard comfort. Even there though, in the anodyne, designer suburbs, where newness is adopted with complete disregard to uniqueness, people are squeezed by the great forces which press on the western fringe of the world. You can’t stop the tide. Everyone knows the big one is coming.

A short history. First Turtle Island lived free. Then people came. They were pretty cool but they killed off all the giant ground-sloths. Eurocentric self-identity sprang into being with the crazed onset of the goldrush in 1849. Since that sudden, muddy orgasm of desperation, individuality, experimentation and materialism have ruled OK. In modern times a weird amalgam gradually arose with the native, black and Asian peoples and blood-sucking WASPs that came on the Mayfower. California is a big old bowl of Mexican rice and beans after all. Well fed, the people were fruitful and multiplied into metropolises. They suckled on homogenising media while the vampires suckled on them. The WASPs learned how to keep bees and then how to be just like bees. Everyone tasted multicultural honey. The humans jostled against each other like ping pong balls in a bingo blower so the rich raised fences and boiled their oil. Trust fund mediocrity took over the meritocracy. Whites became a minority and the scene was set to be occupied in 2011.

Few in this new land of freedom are true innovators. Consumerism breeds passivity and vice versa. All our finest dreams are commodified. If the dream is dreamable, then there’s sure to be a market. The consumer herds dream up around the soccer posts clutching some culture magazines, hopeful to poach an image-augmenting  goal.  A broad subgroup of the middle class want to get tagged with an ersatz individualist piercing. Nine out of ten young professionals long to be branded with a designer outdoor label before everybody else shows up with it on the summit. These are our soul-free adventures in the name of simulating real personality by association. The sophisticated ape pushing the known limits of mimicry. Even though originality must come from the ground of being most people move too fast to touch that source. They surf the shallows as the ever-more crowded wave rolls in, sunk in the latest shell-suit, devoid of content. Such hollowness of heart and voidness of vision spurs yet greater craving for demarcated, inviolable individuality and, by implication for pharaoh-like immortality. The perceived impossibility (or at least the current unaffordability) of that goal leads to further frantic packing in of all things artificial in an attempt to undo fate by sheer weight of illusion. The image must suffice in this battle against time.

All that artifice makes lots of money for people orphaned or liberated from historic continuums, leading, for better or worse, to both random novelty and outlandish simulacrums of old culture like Disneyland and Hearst Castle. In the dream market we create luxuries for the dreamers who are asleep at the wheel while the rest of us get the dream prefabricated. The dreamscape must conform to the necessities of mass distribution and the dream designers are at hand. The big money is in advertising, image consultancy, public relations, Hollywood and propaganda. Much of the juice is channelled back into the mainstream economy, but some is inevitably spilled like seed outside the furrow where it sprouts and regenerates like hydra’s teeth. The new growth dedicates itself to redefining the culture from which it sprang, forming a nexus that we know as counterculture. Here, as in the old formulation, anything is possible, since reformulation is the name of the game, but early results showed the need to recognise the systemic limits which had, until now been breezily blown off, externalised and subsumed in the culture project. Mind at liberty found reason to doubt the assumptions of the goldrush, policed that dream and dredged up wellbeing. This was a turn from resource acquisition to contemplation and acquiescence. Nature awoke like a sleeping giant with a vast ambient yawn. It was slowly recognised that America is indeed bound by the ocean and must consciously engage natural law. Still, most are dedicated to the enshrined “pursuit of happiness”, as opposed to being happy, so Californians are impeccably active in work and play, but often not very happy, despite even the terrific weather. Dissatisfaction continues to drive the economic machine to our destruction. Despite the stereotypical lack of differentiation of liberty or novelty or ecological principles from consumerism and mind control, the sloshing around of the California fresh juice has changed the world. Something good must be going on.