Desemboque

Somewhere near the crossroads of the sun, the sea, the dust and a fiercely guarded isolation is the essence of this tiny Seri village on the Sonoran coast of Mexico.

Desemboque is a wild study in contradictions, both rich and subtle, starting with its thudding juxtapositon of desert and sea. As well as I know and love the Sonoran Desert, it seemed inconcievable to stand on the edge of a low-tide beach, staring at waves in one direction and saguaro in the other.

My visit was unexpected, a short-notice invitation from a linguist friend who studys the one-of-a-kind Seri language and how these indigenous people describe the landscape and the spatial relationships between its objects.

We left Tucson early Monday morning, speeding away in a Chevy Blazer before the day's heat could catch up with us. The road there, which was new teritory for me from the moment we crossed the border into Mexico, took us through Hermosillo before heading west. The final hour or so of dirt road was spent trying to sit tight despite the relentless washboard bumps.


We stayed in a decades old brick house that emphasized shelter over comfort. The electricity had been cut the week before we arrived, and an outhouse served for nature's business. We cooked with a camping stove - and actually ate very well.

The people of the village speak Seri - or cmiique iitom as they call it - and most speak Spanish as well. My friend and our hosts - a Mexican anthropologist and his wife - were the only people there who spoke any English. I speak - or rather, I understand - very little Spanish. So I just took it all in, making sense of some things along the way, but generally feeling a bit removed.

I took this picture late on Tuesday, the first of two full days in Desemboque. The setting sun created a tremendous bright orange glow in between the ocotillo branches that made the fence around the house. The landscape is absolutely beautiful and the sea breezes were a great respite during the day's peak.

I spent most of my time sitting in the shade outside the house, watching the coming and going of Seri visitors and the rhythm of the interactions. It was mostly women who came, dressed in colorful long skirts and usually bringing shell necklaces to sell. They talked with my linguist friend and the anthropologist, spreading news of the village and the upcoming Año Nuevo celebration.

I didn't have an agenda or expecations other than to see Desemboque, to tag along out of curiosity and just mainly for the experience. And it was like nothing else I'd seen or experienced before - and likely won't again.

DOWNLOAD:
Roger Clyne - Mexico (acoustic)
moe. - Mexico (live)

Greetings from S.F.!

(Photo from the San Francisco Chronicle. More here.)

Howdy everybody. What a time indeed out here in San Francisco! Great friends, great weather and yesterday I got to participate in one of the strangest events on the planet, the annual Bay To Breakers, "a party disguised as a footrace" as it was described by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Outlandish costumes were the rule for the more than 60,000 folks who wound their way through the heart of the city. Some ran it in all seriousness; the vast majority turned out simply for the festiveness of the damn thing.

Freaktown and I went as the Dude, if the Dude were going jazzercizing, sipping Caucasians along the way. Not too bad, and I was surprised we saw no other Dudes along the way. There were at least four Viking ships, tons of pirates, an elaborate 1970s disco group, at least two groups representing Team Zissou, several Never Nudes and all manner of other nonsense, including, as I was warned, a sizable contingent of folks who decided not to costume at all.

Other than that, I've been sharing and talking music with my wonderful hosts and other friends. Reminiscences of my last visit and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, another free and uplifting gathering of tens and tens of thousands of people, have been great, and we've been listening to several of those performances, especially Jeff Tweedy and Emmylou Harris. And don't look now, but Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2008 is around the corner and even few acts already announced are very impressive. I'll be back - S.F. is already a second home.

So that's the quick update. I'm now back to vacationing.

DOWNLOAD:
Jeff Tweedy - Pecan Pie (live, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival 2007)
And check out the whole show at Owl and Bear's amazing Wilco archive.

Upon Return...

A deep and overriding exhaustion, more mind-altering than the beer that took control of my last night in Brooklyn.

Manhattan skyline

Here's the view from my cousin's apartment in Queens. That's the Empire State Building prominent on the left, with the UN obscuring all but the tippy top of the Chrysler Building. Foreground to the right is the back of the Pepsi Cola sign on this side of the East River. Nice digs.

Dispatches from the East

Currently sitting on banks of East River staring at Manhattan skyline Stop Bars and comedy show last night in Queens and Art Brut and The Hold Steady in Philly Stop Ansel Adams and Annie Leibowitz exhibits at the Corcoran and boating on the Potomac and a rooftop party in view of the Capitol Stop Air & Space Museum World War II memorial and the Mall Stop Friends got married on lunch hour Stop Many great friends and laughter and incredible sights and sounds and steady consumption of Yuengling Stop Returning Sunday Stop

Catfish off to the East Coast

Well, I'm leaving in the morning as soon as the dark clouds lift...
Not actually, but there's nothing better to announce the night before you take off for someplace else. I'm thrilled to be headed to D.C., Philly and NYC. And the news from Felix Hurn tonight makes the whole trip even better: Next Tuesday we'll rock out at the Hold Steady show. Boo-ya!
Untold hours of fun and adventure await. It's time for another 'Ninjas of Fun' stealth attack -- East Coast style.

Catfish at the bluegrass festival with a half million other people, part two

After loading up with beers, Freaktown and I got into the park Saturday just in time to hear Guy Clark singing out LA Freeway on our way to catch James McMurtry on the way to John Prine. And in the only really large music festival I’ve attended, I immediately came to grips with all the concessions you have to make to time and space and crowds and hunger and restroom breaks and moods and everything. But I settled easily into the see-who-I-can-see-but-make-sure-the-festival-is-about-fun-and-friends mentality and let that drive everything. We met up with S and D and C and family and after the Flatlanders settled in on a few blankets in front of the main stage. (Thanks to those who staked out the place.) From there it was Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby, Gillian Welch and Steve Earle. If my favorite song day one was Remember the Mountain Bed, day two’s was Gillian and David doing Queen Jane Approximately.

Many of the songs I enjoyed most during the festival were covers and I think that make perfect sense in the realm of bluegrass (and hardly strictly bluegrass) music. Country and folk have always been about the standards, with everyone of note giving his or her or their own interpretation of the great songs. While the songwriter may seem king in this arrangement, it’s really more about the performance. If everyone’s playing the same songs, that sets a level playing field and the better rendition comes out on top. And some songs are just perfect in a bluegrass festival setting. Walking back toward the main stage later Sunday, with a good bit of the festival under my belt, I just felt like Dylan’s You Ain’t Going Nowhere would be just perfect. And, no shit, within a half hour, Earl Scruggs and his boys were belting it out: “Ooh whee, ride me high, tomorrow’s the day my bride’s a-gonna come / Oh oh, are we gonna fly, down in the easy chair.”

And then there’s the universal truths offered by a lot of the best country and folk music. Steve Earle said it best as he was tuning between songs: “Same girl, different harmonica.”

We were down at the park Sunday in time to catch the Sadies, and just as I was sure she would, Neko joined in, singing Evangeline, with her in Emmylou’s role just forming a great bookend on that day. We were all looser with Sunday’s schedule, settling in a ways back from our main-stage camp of a day earlier. I ate the best corndog ever. A couple of us made a beer run after realizing that the day’s supply was woefully insufficient – and in doing so made a few bucks selling later on to fellow festival-goers as their own supplies dwindled. I ran over to see Dave Alvin on a smaller stage that seemed even more crowded. The boom operator there had a much easier time passing the camera right over the crowd, and I tried giving a different look or gesture each time it caught me. Maybe there’ll be a DVD of the festival, and thousands of people across the world will have documented proof of my existence…

Sunday was the heaviest bluegrass day, with David Grisman, Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson leading up to Emmylou. It was the first time I’d seen the legendary Queen of country-folk and her set was incredible (as I can prove to anyone with the bootleg I’ve snagged). Highlights were Pancho and Lefty, Red Dirt Girls and Sin City, but really the whole thing kept me moving in that half-dance thing I described earlier, a swaying, twisting, head-bobbing casual sort of shimmy thing.

I couldn’t have asked for better companions throughout, reconnecting with several people I’d hardly gotten to see in years and realizing why the hell I’m friends with all these awesome people to being with. Overall I feel as though I pulled some minor logistical miracles getting together so many people who I knew but didn’t or barely knew each other.

At the close of the festival we all assembled, stuffed too many people into a two-door Honda and then a studio apartment, ordered Burmese food and re-upped on some beer and Fernet. We listened to a Wilco bootleg I’d brought as a gift for my hosts, watched a bit of the Wilco documentary to zero in on that Santa Cruz record store owner, and talked about the city and life and Arizona and how so many people managed to start in Tucson and end up in San Francisco. I was invited a few times to move there, encouraged to make Bay City my home too, to take part in such notable occasions on a regular basis. What could be more convincing? What could make a better argument than those friends and that weekend? It’s hands-down the highlight of the year.

Catfish at the bluegrass festival with a half million other people, part one

Blogging things a week late is never good form, but the price extracted for my tremendous San Francisco vacation was way too much work and stress immediately upon return. Plus, most of my computer time since has been devoted to tracking down bootlegs of the performances I saw, with surprisingly good luck.

It was a relatively unplanned vacation, all starting with an email from Freaktown saying that I should do everything in my power to make it to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. Yeah right, thought I, noting that it’s barely a week before my long-planned swing to the East Coast and short-notice airfare is as big a discourager as anything. But I kept looking over the list of artists: Jeff Tweedy, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Dave Alvin, John Prine, Gillian Welch, plus a whole host of actual bluegrass legends. Had I never known it was coming I couldn’t possibly hate myself for missing it, but now that it was presented as an actual option, how could I not? So I searched out a decently priced flight, scammed an extra day off work and ultimately spent the whole weekend feeling like I’d won some damned contest.

I stopped and started writing this a few times, and at each step the words fell far short of the magic that I felt while listening to the music. But live music is like that – fleeting and powerful, at times transcendent and at times a buoyant current you ride for a while, and try to hang onto as it flows through you. At times during the performances I tried to see the music, to let my eyes fall somewhere, a tree or a bird or a section of the massive crowd, and watch it move, watch for moments it matched the music, as if the sound was a wind. Other times my own body was what got caught up in the tunes, more of a set of loose sways and twists than anything resembling an actual dance, but it was mostly bluegrass and that’s pretty much how I roll anyway.

Tweedy in particular was mesmerizing. One man, one guitar, one voice, an occasional harmonica, and a set of songs that stack up very favorably with anything every written or performed. I don’t say that lightly, or with hyperbole. It’s a very measured and purposeful statement, but everyone who stood near me as those songs washed over us in the dying afternoon, sunset and early dusk of a perfect San Francisco day in the park would agree.

I’ve long said that Remember The Mountain Bed – a collaboration across time and space between Tweedy and the legendary Woody Guthrie – is probably the best song ever written. I’ll just include one favorite verse, but measure the rest of the lyrics yourself here:

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands.

And in just the second song of Tweedy’s set I was absolutely thrilled, hanging on the transformative wisdom of the words and the intricate, hauntingly beautiful guitar work, all the while aware that I was in the midst of one of the greatest musical moments I’ve ever experienced.

Just as Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks is an album that comes stunningly close to offering a definition of life, “Remember The Mountain Bed” is a song that nearly circles the total of humanity. (And if you think Blood On The Tracks is a nothing but a brilliant break-up or divorce album, with songs of pain and sorrow, you’re sadly missing out on a great deal.)

Tweedy was in a great mood, joking throughout, with his kids sitting on the side of the stage and at one point he dedicated a song to his wife.

The set list was great, opening with Sunken Treasure. I loved the mix of stuff from throughout his career, from old Uncle Tupelo stuff to an almost forgotten Golden Smog song to the title track from the latest album.

In the crowd during the Tweedy performance, Freaktown and I recognized a guy who was in the I Am Trying To Break Your Heart documentary during one part. It was unmistakable – he’s a record store owner in Santa Cruz who was backstage when Tweedy performed a show in San Francisco. He’s unmistakable, with a pretty thick beard that goes a bit further down the neck than most, and thick, straight, somewhat longish hair underneath a ball cap. It was so weird to actually see somebody from that movie in the crowd (having apparently many more viewings of the film under his belt, Freaktown also recognized somebody else, but I couldn’t place her), but then at one point this guy turned around and held his camera aloft to get a crowd shot. Holy shit, I thought, that guy from the movie now has a picture of us! For a while after that I let myself get lost in the trippy, circular ruminations around the fact that a perfect stranger and I both have documented proof of the other’s existence.

Taking the train over to the park Friday, Freaktown and I ran into SW practically the moment we boarded. Now there’s a little synchronicity to kick off the weekend, I thought. Then we met up with Tony and found our way in just before T-Bone Burnett started. We knew his special guests were Neko Case and John “Cougar” Mellencamp (never forget the “Cougar” part), but how that was going to all tie together was beyond any of us. Neko played Hank's Alone and Forsaken and another one I didn’t recognize. After a few more, out came the Coug (“The COUG!" we shouted). There was some song about Jena, then the real highlight, “Pink Houses,” with what I can only guess is the first and last time Neko sings “Ain’t that America” to back the Coug. Nice.

Then after Tweedy we all headed down to the Haight for sausages and beers, taking it easy with the knowledge of two more tremendous, long days of music ahead of us.

Bait and Switch

So I'm back from Portland and done with a visit from the folks and just chillin' in the post-vacation vacuum, supposedly content, but really just wanting to get out of town again. I've figured out that it's never the duration of the trip, nor precisely what I did or who I saw, but some other, harder-to-define internal thing that determines to what degree a vacation relaxes me vs. just inspiring more freedom and travel. Three years ago, I took a trip to Prescott for a friend's wedding, then flew out to Chicago and took a bus up to Madison, in total spending more than 10 days out of town, and it was the most relaxing, rejuvenating time I could have hoped for.
But this trip did little more than make me want to move to Portland, or take a long trip to San Francisco, or Chicago, or D.C. or New Orleans or wherever I have a couch and good company. So it is.
As far as specifics, we had an overwhelmingly bar heavy night on the front end of my trip, then chilled out the next day on a drive through the Columbia Gorge out to Hood River (the Full Sail brewery's tap room was closed for renovations -- damn). Son Volt was that night. Then it worked out that the sunniest day of my trip, one of those perfect days in which a rainy city wakes up to the warm sun after months, Chair and I hit a great disc golf course. Other highlights include a jaunt out to Astoria, numerous more bars, Powell's, and a dinner, cool tunes and Taboo with some cool canvassing kids.

So now it's just returning to routine, hoping for some good shows to break up the days (which by the way are quickly turning hot). Arlo Guthrie is coming to town. Robyn Hitchcock. Alejandro Escovedo with Drive-by Truckers. The Little Morts at Club Crawl. Social D. The Hold Steady. And my local favorites.

Favorite new quote of the day (honorable mention): "I am like a whore up front and a nun in the back." -- The General.

Favorite new quote of the day: "It's so much more fun to be the bait than the switch." -- Arnie.

Catfish in flight

I'm just hours away from jettin' off to visit Mr. Chair, Ms. Lippy and various other folks in the wonderful city of Stumptown U.S.A. You might wonder why someone would leave 75 degrees and beautiful sunshine for 57 and drizzly rain, but that slides right on past the point. This is a damn well-earned vacation and it'll be lived up to the fullest.
Wednesday we'll go catch Son Volt, who have a pretty damn outstanding new album. For years and years I was neutral on the Uncle Tupelo split, giving equal props to the first two albums from both Tweedy and Farrar. I even caught Son Volt on the Wide Swing Tremolo tour and still think Medicine Hat is one of the best Dylan songs that Dylan never wrote (lyrics here).
But then came Summerteeth and I finally had a preference for Wilco over Son Volt.
Still, I've followed everything Farrar has done and dig the new tunes. The show should be something special, definitely.
Little else is planned out ahead of time for Portland, but I'll get to visit an old friend I grew up with and haven't seen in 10 years. I 'spose myspace can be a good thing from time to time if it brings folks out of the woodwork.
So here's to a decent week for everybody and though I'm not promising, perhaps I'll get a bug up my nose to send an update from the Northwest.