El Paso 3 - Saturday

It wasn't predicted at 8 AM when I looked at the forecast.  Nevertheless, I am having a fine view of a spectacular thunderstorm rolling in fast over the mountains now at 3 PM MST.  Thunder cracking, and lightning, lightning whips reflected in the windows of the hotel's wings on either side of our room.

And now it's over. So fast, it's as if the storm never happened.  The pavement didn't even look wet.  As hot as the pavement is, the rain must have turned to evaporation upon impact.  The temperature was 96º, with a 'real feel' of 101º when the front rolled over us.  The southwest!

Among the events hosted by the hotel today is a bachlorette party. Evidently Mexican culture does these parties very differently than we see in the movies? Because there wasn't a cocktail in sight -- but the desserts were so luscious one gained ten pounds simply by looking at them.

The bride must have hundreds of female friends and relatives, as the dining room was entirely given over to the party and every chair was occupied.  The guests celebrating the bride were of all ages, from very elderly women to tiny girls in the cutest clothes and hairstyles, who behaved even more cutely (can one use that usage?

 Those little girls -- there were some who were maybe three years older than the littlest ones, and like -- I assume cousins everywhere, the older girls are adored by the younger ones, who follow them everywhere, and hug them every chance they get.  The older girls are careful and tender with the littler ones. Latin culture does inculcate that sort of attitude of children to each other.

Turned on the tv for the first time, to see what is up in that.  It maybe because this is a hotel, but the screen resolution was poor, particularly as used to high def and so on as I am from watching solely online. Commercial breaks as ubiquitous as ever.  But imagine the shock when thinking I'm settling in on a PBS overview of the Presidents of the U.S., from Washington to Lincoln.  Narrated by Newt Gingrich, co-written with his wife Calista, Rediscovering Religion in America (2007) proved how fundamentally religious each of the presidents was, and how they believed religion was more important than government to government. Religion here means protestant christianity only, and specifically evangelical protestant christianity.  The program was interrupted with endless, lengthy commercial breaks to sell many kinds of insurance from many insurers to senior citizens.  This is not a PBS as I have ever seen it.  This must be PBS in Texas ....

Gotta say: the women of El Paso are poised and stylish, with that extra elegance and bounce that is part of a latina woman's culture, from whichever hispanic background she hails.  A woman seated at my table at the theater tonight, now retired, used to own her own clothing design business.  She told me that fashion was really big business in El Paso, meaning designers as well as fabricators and manufacturers, though in the last ten years it went pfffffftttt, which is why she's now retired.  But the influence of it once being a big part of the city's economy and cultural life is still evident whenever you see a young or youngish woman, or a little girl.

However, there is still El Paso Fashion Week. I've met many women who worked in fashion in NYC, or whose daughters are now working in fashion in NYC, or who are going to NYC this fall, to study fashion or design at Pratt, FIT, NYU, and so on.

Most of the oxygen today was taken up by preparations for tonight's performance. Which paid off.  It was revelatory.  Las Vidas Perfectas continues to evolve, and shall for as long as it is performed.  The amount of talent assembled on that stage was breathtaking.  The amount of work, perseverance, faith and skill -- as well as the creative and artistic talent -- by so many individuals, to make this so successful can't be measured.

Super Moon, El Paso, Saturday, July 12, 2014

The first performance was a spectacular one, though the performers are all complaining about what was poor, what went wrong, how they effed up, etc. Artists are never satisfied with themselves.  It was spectacularly received too, and I know so, because I heard what audience members said.  For example: a young man, dressed in universal young hipster style, after the first section's applause died down, sighed to his companions, "O, I feel I've gone to New York.  It must be like this all the time there!"  (Ha!  It sure as heck is not, at least not anymore. But I remember what it is was like when I lived in Albuquerque, and artists from Europe or the coasts came in.)

In other words, it was an event worthy of an El Paso super moon!

Tomorrow night, Sunday, with the performance in Mexico, in the Museo de la Revolutión, will surely be even more so, as Ciudad Juárez is entirely Spanish-speaking.  As well, in the latino world, the arts and intellectual pursuits are far more respected than in the U.S.  Artists and intellectuals are part of the political discourse -- the entire spectrum is far more lively than anything you find in the U.S.  Print magazines remain important and vital in the nations south of us, whereas here, it's all gone online, whatever is left, and it's all about entertainment. If something takes longer than 164 characters to look at, make fun of it and dismiss it.  Unless it's filled with non-stop mindless violent action.  Then we can stare at it for days at a time, and so we do, getting to ever higher levels of The Game, whatever The Game may be.

However, in so many parts of some of these countries, violence is a way of life and politics that artists, intellectuals and the people themselves are desperate to change, particularly since so many of them are specific targets of the violence.  It's not a Game.

El Paso 2 - Friday

Needing a break from the room, and el V's constant Las Vidas' practice, we went walking in what had been El Paso's city center, back when el V was a tad and his father was teaching biology at what then was Texas Western College, now, folded into the UT system, is the UTEP -- University of Texas at El Paso.  El V, back then, knew and loved this downtown - central business district of El Paso, filled with record stores and movie theaters as it was,

This is the El Paso Main Public Library when el V was a little kid.

The El Paso History Museum is in the foreground; the Main Public Library is in the background.

The museum's ground installations are a fringe benefit for the library.

and the public library.

Like so many cities, El Paso destroyed its downtown by tearing down much of the historic, attractive part, driving away the thriving smaller businesses, in order to build a sterile convention center, sports stadium, etc. The city also employed the Great Terminator upon the very neighborhoods and communites, that give a city a soul, the soul that make cities attractive and liveable:  El Paso drove a damned interstate through the rooted neighborhoods and mercantile centers, killing them dead under concrete, killing the soul.

So, with its downtown  deader 'n a doornail, like so many other cities, El Paso's revitalization wish fullfillment is to upscale the attraction of what remains in the old city downtown center, renting the spaces out to young(ish) entrepreneurs in the, usually vain, expectation these expensive camera cuisine restaurants, and the high fat food plus expensive imported beer sports bars will attract local business and tourism. Throw in the inevitable crafts mall, art galleries, a farmer's market once a week for part of the year, and First Friday Nights special offers, etc. How many small cities and towns have we seen doing this since the 1980's?

The real kicker is how the wealthy corps and politicians count on artists to fix the urban blight that they created themselves, and, then, if by chance the plan actually works -- as in NYC -- grab the real estate back and dump the creatives into the street -- but not these streets. The creatives fixed 'em so they're no longer welcome. Then begins the sterilization process all over again as the prices rise higher and higher and higher, with nothing inhabiting the real estate again except that from which anybody looking for any real fun and surprise will run from at 100 MPH.

There is construction everywhere, just like in every city that anyone wants to live in everywhere in the world, covering ever more open space under asphalt and cement, pretending to be public gardens and recreational territory.

Hotels abound throughout this area, as there are regional headquarters for every national / international bank, mortgage company, real estate moghul, and every kind financial and insurance corporation here -- not to mention those of such light "industry" as textiles and light furnishing finishing, that employ international cheap labor and ship internationally. The busy execs flying in and out, making deals, arming drug dealers, smashing progressive governments and labor movements need places to stay.

But where do they eat?  Probably in the strip clubs, which are further away? they aren't in these restaurants.

Then there is the tourism.  Where do they eat? Well, tourist college kids, think going to Juárez will give them better deals on getting so drunk they must crawl and more exotic and cheaper sex workers.  So there isn't enough enough clientele to make these places profitable 7 nights a week.  Partly, too, it's because they don't really want Spanish speaking clientele.

(It's más pleasant that our hotel's staff is bi-lingual, and so are the guests.  The staff were puzzled by el V and EVF's Spanish though -- they had to tell them it was Cuban.  Then there's E's Spanish-Spanish, pure Castillian -- she's from Madrid.)

What is great here though is the El Paso Historical Museum -- there is a lot of history -- the El Paso Art Museum -- and the El Paso Public Library.  The library is still where it was when el V was a little kid, though the building is not the same. It's open 7 days a week!  You see all kinds of people in it.  It reminds me of Greenville, Mississippi's public library. What else does this library do beyond all the things public libraries are providing these days, including wi-fi connection, computers and a/c?  It is showing the World Cup games for all those who can't watch at home, can't afford to be or don't want to be in a sports bar.  Is that public service or what?

The Kress Building has survived, but everything around it has been torn down, so it sits within a construction site; the streets around it are closed.  This historic post card doesn't show what a glorious jewel of a building it is.

It's nearly impossible to photograph the Kress Building now.

There are some buildings that didn't get torn down during their urban renewal, and I love those. So many Spanish-Moorish styled buildings, that are beautiful.  So we were out photographing madly early this AM while the sun was in the right place to have shadows and not glare.

It's such a pleasure to have all these recognizable bits come together that have not changed about being in the southwest: the clatter of cicadas, big sky, the dry heat, hearing "Mexican" Spanish, local tribes people, the Moorish-Spanish influenced design of buildings, fountains, patios, plazas and courtyards, the food (which though el V can't eat it, isn't stopping me from eating Mexican dishes every chance I get -- the hotel has some of the best red and green chili sauces for breakfast ever) -- and, this is SO TEXAN! Shiner Bock, my beer of choice for this trip.

Or so it felt as the sun rolled down, while the super moon rolled up,  turned yellow, big as a super-large cotton ball, over the mountains, then turned red in the smog for awhile.

El V had hired a car to drive us along the scenic route, as well as look for spots from his childhood days here. The driver was a self-educated tour guide, from India, who has lived in El Paso for 30 years. He was filled with information about everything to do with El Paso and Juárez, and enjoyed sharing.  He seized the opportunity to fact-check various things from the 1960's downtown and campus against el V's memories of the time.

These days though, West Texas is about to go into recycling toilet water, so depleted is the water table from irrigation, and how arid it is, now that the grasslands have been taken out for over a century.  Recycled toilet water won't preserve this profligate water way of life in a region that has always been arid.

Chihuahua grasslands now.

How all the Chihuahua grasslands used to be, only a century plus about twenty years ago.

It's painful to have those instinctive reactions to flying over the Franklin's flatlands, seeing it as ancient, primeval desert monster -- while the facts are that a century ago -- or perhaps a decade or so before that -- those flatlands, mesas and plateaus were grass tall as your knees and the clutching spread of claws on the twisted limbs sand channels were streams and rivers of flowing water. Cattle and cotton and oil .... (In the Sahara it was goats, among other things.)  How quickly we destroy the environment, yet insist we have no responsibility for that or any obligation to it.

This is what is keeping us from ever returning to the southwest -- water. The northeast we are water rich. Doubtless other regions will be going to war with us about this most precious resource of all, in the fairly close future.  Hey -- I've lived to see the return of the wars of religion -- it's not that unlikely I shall see water wars too. If I live, that is.

Dune feels more prescient all the time.

El Paso 1 - Thursday

The flight from Dallas-Ft. Worth to El Paso is over  some of the most desolate arid landscape on the planet.  You see dried to the bone river bed after river bed. twisting and twining like bizarre, ancient reptiles.  It is said, or it used to be said, "The West begins at Fort Worth."  Maybe what was meant that this is where the water ended.

However the last 35 minutes of the flight, when you begin to hit the mountain landscape of the Chihuahuan Desert, is a spectacular sight.  Bluffs, cliffs, passes, an occasional peak thrusting far above the surrounding bedrock, sand and river beds, which here though dry now, still have greenery running along them, This is particularly so along the Rio Grande, which still has some water down here.

There used to be grass on the flats and mesas in season between the mountains, canyons and cliffs. Now the flatlands are bare,

covered with creosote bushes a/k/a greasewood in English, and chaparral and gobernadora in Mexican Spanish,

or  mesquite.

These days the Otero Mesa Grassland of the Chihuahuan Desert, straddling both Texas and New Mexico's border (which is why El Paso, TX and Las Cruces, NM, are considering themselves part of "the larger El Paso-Las Cruces metropolitan region), remains as the largest grassland left on American public land (though the cattlemen have done a damned good job of about finishing it off -- their cattle eating your grass for a nominal fee, which they don't bother much paying).

Easy walking distance from the hotel (wearing sunscreen and a broad-brimmed hat) is Mexico, over the bridge and through the pass to Ciuadad Juárez, which gives El Paso its name: the pass through the Franklin Mountains into el norte, through which, when it was all still part of the Spanish Imperium, and Mexico, traders, military and migrants traveled what was named the camino real -- the royal road to New Mexico, Colorado and California.  Los Indios were using it long before the Spanish arrived.

Historic view of the bar-lobby from ye grand olden days.

Our hotel, on the registry of historic hotels, is thus named el Camino Real, and has been around in one form or another since the Mexican Revolution.  It's gorgeous in that late nineteenth century way of opulence (like the Hotel Nacional in Havana, where the bullet holes in the walls are preserved from the days of the Cuban war of Independence -- mine and many others' favorite Havana hotel). The pool is beautiful, the breakfast is anything you want, literally from fruit to nuts to oatmeal to yogurt, to toast-eggs-bacon, to refried beans-sausage-red or green chili salsa, etc.

Our company of traveling players is made-up of superb professionals, all of whom are more than socially competent and have good personalities. Everyone already knows each other well already from previous Las Vidas Perfectas gigs.  We even have the requisite child who is experiencing all this for the first time with a child's sense of wonder and excitement, the five-year-old son of one of the producers and his performer-costumer wife.  He has his nanny too, so when E has to work she's free to do so.  The Son flew for the first time yesterday, got his photo taken with the plane's captain, got to go swimming and play monsters with one of his favorite playmates (el V).  Glory be though, he slept through almost all of both flights, waking up for bathroom visits and orange juice only.  In other words the Son is a really good kid, and, as per usual for me these days, seems far more mature in his use of language and in social interaction than kids used to be.  That includes me when five, that's for sure.

The producers are immensely pleased with the performance spaces, the tech crew, the sponsors and the way both cities are supporting the performances of Las Vidas Perfectas. They are proud to have this program in their cities, and show it in every way they can.  The producers -- who arrived some days earlier to organize matters for set-up and rehearsals in El Paso and Juarez -- told us last night that the professional theater tech crew are more professional and do things better than in NYC -- and they care more. This all bodes well.

Last night when we gave up walking around due to exhaustion and altitude, it was still 90º.  The moon was hanging over the southern tip of the Rockies, the Franklin Mountains, which cut El Paso in two (el paso del norte), and surround El Paso and Ciudad Juárez on three sides.  Huge, white and nearly at the full, July 12th's full moon is the third of 2014's five super moons.

Today, people are, working on their parts for Las Vidas Perfectas, getting haircuts, depositing their per diem checks into their accounts, resting, perhaps exploring a bit, shopping.* Tomorrow it's rehearsal, spot, sound check and so on at the historic Tricky Falls theater.

I'm working on The American Slave Coast, re-reading again and making editorial comments, even though it's with TW.  Besides Las Vidas, el V's also working on Afropop Worldwide HipDeep proposals.  Hopefully, by tomorrow morning, we'll be acclimated enough to get up early while the sun's in the right part of the sky to do some photography.

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* el V got himself a dashing pair of spectators, black and white, at one of the Mexican tiendas along what used to be the main street, and now is a zócolo.  And pairs of superfine sox!

Headin' On Out

Packed.

Comin' on up in the wind shield:

What Matters

The television writer-director-producer tells it true:

DAVID SIMON says:
July 3, 2014 at 11:06 am
The older I get, the more I think a happy family and an earned reputation are the only assets that matter.

Let it be made clear, crystal clear, right here, in the now: David Simon was never ever fired from the Sun; David Simon was never ever accused of ethics violations; David Simon never ever compared The Wire to Moby Dick. And etc. etc. etc. of the bs that patheric excuse for an academic scholar and critic accused David Simon of in that excerpt from her book forthcoming from a university press for which so many of us have had such respect,  on that pathetic aggregate of mindless digital bs that I won't honor by even naming. 

SHAME the writer.. SHAME the press. SHAME the website.

SHAME.  SHAME.  SHAME.

Cool July 4th

72 degrees. Deeply overcast. Raining at the moment, though not hard.

I find nothing to celebrate today about this country, other than some people keep trying to push back against the protected, openly armed cadres that are ready to go if anyone attempts to bring back the former democracy that was in place before Reagan's first term.

They've got all the structures firmly in place now. Excellent planning on the part of the One percent. They did an impeccable job getting all these people to go against their real interest in favor of acting out hatred with impunity in a phony facade of superiority as white men and women against all women, African Americans, immigrants and all the others of us.

Spending today organizing packing for the Texas trip and reading The Outlaw Years: The Land Pirates of the Natchez Trace (1930) by Robert M. Coates * -- dedicated to Malcolm Cowley. I must I stumbled upon mention of this work via reading in Mississippi writers, as it's all new to me. I found the text from a search in Bobcat, which directed me to the U of Michigan, which has a google digital edition that one can download as pdf, complete with illustrations.

It opens with a b&w reproduction of an Audubon painting of Natchez circa 1805 -- before the slave market was pushed out to the Forks in the Road, which we can see in the painting. That bluff above the river we see on our left? That where the slave traders threw the bodies of the dead and dying merchandise, creating "a noisome and pestilential nuisance" which was never cleaned up until the market was closed with the Civil War.

Now it's paved over and lined with automotive shops of all kinds. You can still see those steeples from there though.

All the following -- plus even more!  is in the first chapter.

We get going with Daniel Boon [sic] ** (1760) and labor in James Calk's starved 1775 expedition that follows in Boon's path.

In 1779 the Overmountain Men party set off, including Colonel Donelson  (he for whom Fort Donelson is named) and his daughter Rachel (the future wife of Andrew Jackson) is with them. Their flatboat is aptly named the "Adventure"  as their river journey is a non-stop hair-raising series of events, all the way to Muscle Shoals (located right at the borders of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee). Indians hunt them the entire way. Many members are lost, to Indians and to the river -- an entire boatload to both early on -- and to the weather. This section quotes copiously from Donelson's:

Journal of a voyage, intended by God's Permission, in the good Boat Adventure, from Fort Patrick Henry on Holston river to the French Salt Springs on Cumberland River,
kept by John Donaldson.”
Decem. 22 1779

From there they drift down the Tennessee, in search of the Ohio River. More privations, starvation and other dangers are surmounted, and thus Donelson, James Robertson and the Overmountain men found Nashville in 1779.

From Outlaws:

Few of them lived long, or died in any way but violently. Anthony Bledsoe was killed in July, 1787, his brother Isaac in 1793: both, fighting Indians. Two sons died in the same way. Captain Hall was
attacked while moving his family to the settlement at Mansco's Lick; he and his son were killed and scalped. But while they died, others came to replace them. One sees them, their figures shadowy and gigantic, like the figures of men seen moving in a mist. . .

This is just the beginning The Outlaws. These are Andrew Jackson's people. Nobody these days is as tough as they were.  I am not sneering here.  I mean it. The guys running around today,waving their prosthetic masculinity enhancers in your face open carry are pathetic poseurs when you measure them against a Donelson or Jackson -- or even, when it comes to enduring horseback and other kinds of travel, considering how much they traveled, John Adams, George Washington, and even Abigail Adams and Catherine, John Quincy Adams's wife.

This is a lush book, despite filled with violent event after violent event.  For an example of what I mean, here's this:

... the dreamed-of Mississippi, that lay like a liquid spine in the wilderness' midst.

The metaphor of the Mississippi River as the nation's "liquid spine" runs shivers down my own.

Waiting for the rain to end, so I can pick up a few things from the supermarket. The rain will be over, we are promised, by the time we head off for Lincoln Center. It's supposed to be very nice the rest of the holiday weekend that celebrates Rah Rah Rah USA We Got Even More Guns Today!

Considering my state of mind since the Hobby Decision it's probably for the best that we were too under the gun to join our friends at the beach house on Long Island for the long weekend.

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* Coates is an interesting figure in his own right (1895 - 1973), who for years was The New Yorker art critic, and wrote fantastical fiction.  One wonders what prompted him to write this book about the history of the Natchez Trace region.

** Perhaps one can no longer assume these days that everyone is familiar with the iconic American figure of Daniel Boone.  Is this so?

The Witches of East End: Season 1

The Witches of East End is a fairly adorable, fast moving, supernatural series, concerning a family of female witches. Many of the special effects, though small budget, are not only clever, but interesting and generally not what we've seen before. They're also attractive, in harmony with the show's overall clever and witty attractiveness. The tone in this first season overall is light and graceful, rather than grave and portentous. Though there is ample tension, danger and suspense, these get resolved quickly.

Witch mom Joanna, played by the adorable Julia Ormond,

her sister witch, Wendy, played by the equally adorable Mädchen Amick, and Joanna’s two daughters, Wendy's nieces,

Freya the bartender, played by the adorably sexy Jenna Dewan-Tatum,

and Ingrid the Public Librarian played by the adorably smart Rachel Boston.

Joanna and Wendy’s immortality has been cursed. Joanna’s two daughters always die in their early – middle twenties, and she is condemned to rebirth them. Wendy, like the cat with nine lives, has a limitation on how many times she can resurrect. This is her last time ‘round.  A unknown shapeshifter from their past is out to kill all four of them permanently.

There are the inevitable wealthy feuding brothers, Dash and Killian Gardiner. Equally inevitably, daughter Freya is involved with both brothers. Which one is good, which one bad?  Is the Gardiners’ mother, Penelope, merely a blousy crass snooty rich bitch, or is there more to her?

Extra added attraction for some may be Tom Lenk,who was the justifiably loathed Andrew on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in an occasional appearance as Hudson, an assistant to Ingrid the Librarian,.

Some of the action is due to witch mom Joanna having kept her daughters ignorant of their witchy heritage, even refusing to train them – they get up to speed with their powers almost immediately once they learn who they are. Some is due Wendy’s sudden, unexpected reappearance, as Joanna and Wendy having been estranged for the last 100 years, and Daughters do not know she exists.  All this information and set-up whizzes by, along with firecracker dialog, before the first episode is finished. That it works so well means the writers must be very good. This isn’t easy to script – particularly since most of the audience sees it first on broadcast television with commercial interruptions, unlike me seeing it the first time and all the way through, streaming.

Other part of the action is due to the Beauchamp ladies having run away from Asgard, whatever that may be, and thus somehow, perhaps, related to the shapeshifter who wants to kill them all. Asgard seems not to be the Asgard of Nordic mythology, for there  are no more non-Nordic appearing people than these characters. Plus, that family name, Beauchamp?

The Beauchamp house is huge, with a kitchen, dining room and living room just made for living expansively and o so comfortably, not to mention garden and yard so lush and gorgeous it befits being owned by a witch, not mention befitting North Carolina.  The set dressers for the series must find this a dream-come-true job, so scrumptious is everything, though the beats are so fast moving we never get to properly feast our eyes.  It’s impossible not to wonder who the help is, who keep this humble abode (humble only in comparison to the Brit style landed ruling class mansion of Dash and Killian) so spic and span, and shining.  OTOH, the owner is a witch and really, kids hardly ever notice how much work it is for their mom to keep up the house – even when she is a public school art teacher.

The house also possesses the additional adorable charm of being inhabited by four women, who love each other, who are having a lot of sex with very sexy fellas, who all are equally, in different ways, sexy, attractive, charming, delightful women, plus the cat, which witch Wendy frequently is.

The Beauchamp home is in an atmospheric location,  which is ... a small town? city? ... on the sea ... which is where? Ah, ye internets answer this question – it's on Long Island!  But the series is shot in the South -- Macon, GA, and Willmington, NC (where the first two seasons of the late, unlamented Revolution were shot).

Criticism is the usual.  There are three non-white characters.  They are not regulars, i.e. in only some of the episodes.  The likable and attractive African American librarian who works with Ingrid we see seldom and briefly. The African American detective dies.  The East Asian woman dies.

The series is adapted from the first so-called adult novel by YA writer Melissa de la Cruz.  I surely couldn't have been able to stand reading the book, but as only 10 eps on Lifetime TV, watching is the equivalent of eating candy – without being bad for either teeth or waistline.

Second season premieres Sunday, July 6th (photos here). First season available from Netflix on dvd and streaming.  It can also be watched streaming on the A&E site.