every tuesday and wednesday evening I walk out my door and start my 45 minute journey to a creepy, abandoned train station/grass roots cultural center for my classes in ensemble percussion. Sometimes I get lazy and start thinking of the commute as a “same ‘ol same ‘ol” situation…routine.
On one particular evening, though, I was walking along, listening to my Shuffle, when a song by brian’s jonestown massacre came on. I’m not a diehard fan, in fact the lead singer, who many consider to be a visionary genius-madman, seems more like a junkie-wacko-charleton to me. however this particular song has that spacy, early pink floyd-esque, languid pulse to it that just cries out “I’m somebody’s life-soundtrack!”. And as I walked along I started noticing a bunch of little details that I’d already passed a dozen times before without noticing.
The song helped me gain a slippery perspective that I find so important but so difficult to keep ahold of: that “mundanity”, boredom, and routine are just words to describe a lazy mind.
the next tuesday I brought my camera along and filmed things that caught my eye. and I listened to the BJM song the whole time, put it on repeat.
for every image i tossed into the video, a hundred escaped me because I wasn’t ready, or was too timid to shoot, or understood it only after it had happened.
They’re not “amazing” images, they’re not “startling” or “disturbing”…they’re just things that I’d passed many times without taking the time to absorb, appreciate…things I never allowed to surprise me; juxtapositions, shapes, colors, angles…the geometry of every-day, of work-life, of commute-time, of urban-routine.

here’s the vid:

Back in late april I went to a percussion show with a few friends. beforehand I was imagining it to be either a glorified hippie drum circle or a glam-schlock-fest like stomp has become, but what i found was an amazing, unique percussion group that mixes improvisation with the guidance of a director. Using hand signals, the person in charge of the other percussionists shapes and molds, bends and reshapes the rhythms and sounds of the rest of the players…the result is always surprising and often nothing short of amazing (at least while watching it live). These guys get together every monday and play for 2-6 thousand spectators who run the gambit from timid head-bobbers to rampaging mosh-pitters (along with the grateful dead-esque dancers, the modern dancers, the interpretive dancers, the arhythmic dancers, the stoned dancers, the drunk dancers, the quite-possibly-psycho dancers, and the graceful dancers.)

Here’s a short video of one night with la bomba de tiempo…and this is one of those events that video just doesn’t do justice to.

later

I orginally titled this post “Blong”, not even imagining that the made-up word already had a meaning…a blogger who writes mean, untrue stuff about others).  However, my trusty friend “jimbo baggins” brought it to my attention with his recent comment, for which I’m eternally grateful (and a little stunned that he’d know the word “to blong”) .

So the verb of the  day is now to Blose, I’m a bloser, a blogger who’s a loser for his tendency toward less-than-frequent posting…I’m trying to move through my blosing ways, though.  trying.
I finished shantaram today. I’d recommend it, I guess. (Dude escapes from prison. Dude flees to India. Dude lives in Bombay. Dude joins organized crime ring. Dude falls in love with the country, the people, etc.)
Pretty gripping book, but could easily have been 300 pages shorter…in fact, except for a couple nice moments, the latter third of the book seemed like a repetition of the same old thing: fights, near death, longing, fear of incarceration, ponderings on good and evil, more violence, another near-death experience, another beloved friend cut down in the prime of life, torture, more pining for an unrequited love etc.
What the book did do is get me fired up to travel to India some day. That and to become a gangster and a heroin addict. I’m jazzed about all of it.
Johnny Depp is going to play the lead in an adaptation of the book set to film next year. He should nail the heroin addiction bit just fine, being participator in the smackathon back in the day.
There’s a drug I’d do if I was sure of the purity and dosage of the stuff, and if I had the entire staff of ER, Grey’s anatomy and even Scrubs (if they were all real doctors, of course) on hand to help me if things went awry. But alas, they’re all actors, and some of them not very good ones, so I’ll never try it. Unless I meet Johnny depp. He could probably convince me to try it…cool guy like him. Captain Jack Sparrow himself. Spike a vein with ol’ eddie scissorhands himself.
Fútbol season is over here (soccer for any unitedstatesian reading this) which has a numbing, disconcerting effect on the general population as if all of the churches and shrines in a devoutly religious community had suddenly up and closed their doors for two months.
The same thing probably happens in the States, but with 4 major sports taking turns filling the calendar, the diehard sports fan can get his/her fix at will. Not so, here where the 2 most popular sports are Fútbol, and in close second, Fútbol.
An example of the Argentinean love of kicking a checkered sphere around a rectanglular patch of grass:
Recently, Boca Juniors, the most storied and popular football team in argentina. (picture the Yankees or Manchester United or that always annoyingly dominating jesuit high school sports team in your community) was playing a semifinal match in an important South American tournament against a Brazilian team called Fluminense (which sounds like a a special kind of chimney cleaner or nasty upper respiratory illness).
Kickoff time was around 10:00 p.m. I’d just gotten out of my percussion class and was walking to the bus stop in a dodgyish part of town. Every little café I passed was filled to capacity with garbage men, lawyers (really just well-paid garbage men), plumbers, dockworkers, bankers, businessmen, conmen (really just business men without the suits), and, what I later realized must have been taxi and bus drivers. Every one of them, a liter bottle of Quilmes beer stationed in front of them like a Pillar of Truth, stared avidly at a television set tucked high up against the ceiling of the place.
From the outside, hidden from the source, it looked as though they were all raptly watching some glowing, pulsating-blue spider build its web.
The folks who couldn’t afford their own Pillar of Truth were relegated to watching the spider’s weaving from the sidewalks, peering through fogged up windows, faces pressed against glass.
All of the cafés and bars, like a series of magnets, were swathed in fleshy, clothed iron filings, everyone huddled close, pressing anxiously, pulled there by the invisible force of FÚTBOL.
I crossed the train tracks and made my way to the bus stop on Rivadavia Avenue, and waited for the trusty old 86 to grind and squeal up to me, creak open it’s double-hinged maw and trundle me off toward home.
And I waited.
Something seemed a little off, but I was lost in the echoes of my drum ensemble class and didn’t really try to figure it out.
And I waited some more.
It was only after standing around for 20 minutes (for a bus that usually passes every 3 or 4 minutes) that I realized that the four lane avenue was eerily empty of cars. This is a street that is usually one massive belching grumble of traffic. On this night…it was filled with the closest thing approaching silence you’ll find in a city.
Some trucks and the occasional car passed. But no 86 bus.
“Fuck it” I decided, “I’ll spring the 4 bucks for a taxi”. There are, purportedly, 40,000 yellow and black taxis in the city. They alone could make most streets look busy. Tonight. Nothing. I waited some more.
“This is insane!” I mumbled under my breath. “Is everyone watching the friggin’ game except me?” As if in response, a muffled roar surged up from side streets and apartment buildings.
Have you ever been half a city away from a big stadium when someone scores a touchdown? Or parking your car, late to the concert, when you can hear the crowd start to go crazy for some leather-clad rocker as he/she steps on stage? That’s the sound.
Then, as if on a 5 second delay, all of the cars and trucks still on the streets started to honk and blare their horns at the same time a chaos of blat! and bleet! and hrrrnk!
A man leaned out of a passing delivery truck and yelled at the top of his lungs at me, at anyone, at the world “GOOOOOOL, CARAJO!!!!!!!” (”Goal, Fuck yeah!” Or “Goal, fucker!” Or “Fucking A, goal!”)
Only Latin Americans can take the tiny, abrupt, monosyllabic word that defines the successful placing of a ball into a netted space and stretch it into the longest word on the planet. “GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL! GOOOOL! GOL! GOL! GOL! GOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!”
I smiled, then. Tucked my hands into my jeans pockets, hunched my shoulders up against the early winter cold, and pressed my face up against the nearest foggy pane of glass alongside others who, like me, couldn’t afford a Pillar of Truth, and watched that blue-glow spider spin away.

Gol, baby, Gol.