Graffiti

Those are real bricks

"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding."

Chicken Bus Fever: Part V: North

The distances I covered in Guatemala are not remarkable. The whole country is slightly smaller than the state of Tennessee. Would anyone applaud if I said I took a bus across The Volunteer State? No, but crossing Guatemala by public mini-bus is a different matter. As I said, the distance from Huehuetenango is only 110 miles, but it required 10 hours of torturous, violent driving in a little mini-van with 17 people and a goat. I already explained that the only way to average 11 miles an hour over 10 hours is to reduce speed to 1 mph through the speed bumps and pot hole and land slide areas and then floor the accelerator to reach the next pot hole area at maximum velocity. 

Losing Bobby

It's a sad day, but the #1 post I ever made involved Bobby Peru from David Lynch's movie Wild at Heart is now gone. I took a screen capture of Bobby throttling Peanut (Laura Dern). It was frivolous at the time, the scene had so much character and Bobby is who I consider is the most evil villain in cinema. And that silly screen capture became the single biggest reason anyone ever came to this self-absorbed pity fest. I took it down once before because I didn't think it sent the right message about my blog. Then I put it back up again because I thought it was sort of clever. Then I made a .gif animation of Bobby and that became popular too. I didn't even care that this is blatant copyright infringement.

Well, I spent some time in Guatemala with a television and the violence against women or women with guns, or women being slapped or women being raped or killed or chased was completely out of control. It was actually like a scene from Wild at Heart where every radio station is news about a beheading or some ghastly tragedy and Peanut goes crazy and then Sailor finds a rock station and they dance in the desert. Every channel I turned on involved a woman being slapped or assaulted or else a woman cop dressed in skin tight slacks and 2 inch heels and a huge perm of hair gunning someone down in cold blood. It simply became too much. Maybe I am sensitive again to the insane amount of violence on television and y'all will think this is being prudish. But I saw that the Bobby Peru photo was still getting traffic and I decided the only way to purge it would be to delete the whole post and any post I had of Bobby menacing poor Peanut. I love that movie, and I love Lynch and the characters are not generic and the violence is not frivolous; it is a smart film, violence is not glorified or used gratuitously in it, but I can't leave that photo up anymore. It makes no difference because surely someone copied it off my page and it will be out there beyond my control along with a million other screen captures, or someone could recreate it in about two minutes, but I renounce it. I renounce the casual use of violence on television. I boycott all commercial advertisers who encourage such filth. I do not think they should be censored; I believe they should only broadcast movies about beauty and animals. They should choose life. Does violence on television cause violence in real life? Yes, the violence on television IS violence against the viewer but mankind loves to experiment with himself. The rage and distress the viewer feels is violence. Sometimes we want that, but we are now being overdosed. Does that rage and distress translate to acts of violence against people who didn't even watch the television? How can it not? Yes, victims tend to attack others, even those who are not the source of the attack. It's a chain reaction.

Does it matter to my blog? No. It's only a minor detail that I share with you as part of my due diligence. I deleted some other posts that I decided were in bad taste or else the topic was too tasteless to promote. Goodnight, Bobby Peru. You blew your head off after the bank robbery went bad, but that doesn't mean I will worship your evil here. Rot in hell you repulsive monster. I love you, Peanut.

Chicken Bus Fever: Part IV Jungle Love

I don´t actually know what insect attacked my arm in Coban. I was asleep and then woke up and felt an angry itch under my arm. I am not immune to mosquitoes and usually sleep with a mosquito net to avoid the red welts that appear after a mosquito has feasted on my blood. But the infection that followed this insect bite in Coban was like no mosquito bite I can remember and it looked nothing like sample mosquito bites. It looked like makeup for a zombie movie, veins bulging, skin decaying, ragged diseased appearance. I thought I would have my arm amputated but the only ill-effect was itching. Thus began the lowland chapter of my Guatemalan travel.

Chick Webb

I understand that when people think of Jazz they think of Charlie Parker or Miles Davis and the Kind of Blue album. Jazz has been linked to that album through flawed propaganda and easy mystique and even I am guilty of combining vastly different eras into one playlist of my music program called "Jazz", but honestly I skip every Miles Davis tune until I get to Chick Webb or Glenn Miller. When I think of Jazz I think of Chick Webb and Count Basie and Duke Ellington and also Bob Wills because these were band leaders and arrangers and sometimes even composers. Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were instrumentalists and sometimes composers of melodies that sound good when stoned on heroin. Big dance bands of the '40s required complete reconstruction of the prim and proper musical considerations of the '20s. Davis and Bird had nothing to do with that. The whole smooth and fusion jazz era was fueled by opiates and an acknowledgement that there was no way to top what Basie and Ellington had done. It's like what happened after the Romantic Era in classical music, composers gave up the sonata form because it had reached a peak with Beethoven and Mozart that no one could ever improve on. They could only pay homage, which is boring, so Stravinsky and Schoenberg experimented. If you've never listened to classical/orchestral music then why would you ever start with Schoenberg, and then conclude 'Classical' music is not for you? Schoenberg is the classical equivalent of Charlie Parker, without the heroin. 

Jazz has a shorter history, but it went through remarkable changes in a short period of time. I watched the Jazz series by Ken Burns and was sort of disappointed Bob Wills didn't get featured, since Wills is the whole reason I went to Texas, and also Wills swung as hard as anyone with a fiddle for dancers who never heard of Ellington. But many key figures are highlighted in the series, like the provincial Webb, who built the New York City swing movement. 

I think people get confused when they hear big band music and believe all the notes were written out like with a symphony, but band music only notates the melody and certain fills, while the music that makes up 3/4 of the recording is improvised at the moment the recording started. The arrangement, when certain instruments play certain notes, is so important and then the musicians had to learn it and in some cases black musicians were expected to be illiterate so they had to memorize the melody and play without written music to appease the ignorant white dancers.

I define Jazz as a type of music where the musicians were expected to improvise to demonstrate their musicianship in the course of playing a melody. If you are curious about Jazz then save Kind of Blue for your suicidal/divorce/junkie period and start with Chick Webb. That will get you in the right direction.