Guadalajara Airport

Scribbled whilst waiting for a plane :

In the airport in Guadalajara, watching one of my favorite combinations of people.

There are full on cowboys - Vaqueros with clean hats, big leather belts, handle-bar mustaches, and snakeskin boots, craggy faces weatherbeaten.

Casual businessmen with nylon jackets atop crisply collard button-downs.  Shoes are like the cowboy boots but without tops.

Families, los niños in bright oranges and pinks and blues, teens in super tight hip jeans or athletic gear and ball caps.  Soft shoes, stylish but understated, like they are from Buenos Aires or Barcelona.

Old men with walking sticks.

Incredibly curvy women with heels adding danger, teetering, catchable if they fall?

Policemen and soldiers are more similar in GDL, both carrying bigger guns around than the average airport security in the US.  Polished, poker faced.

As the announcements play en español and then english, loud and distorted over 4 inch JBLs I dream of a future when I am fluent.  I'm resist the urge to use my phone until Houston, where the WiFi won't cost me 99 cents a minute.  The advertising overhead is almost obscene in its incongruity - a blonde girl in skintight clothes showing a lot of skin and some impossibly expensive jewelry floats over the heads of paisans in denim and palm sombreros.

{Earlier I saw a sign on a catholic church for classes on the rhythm method of "family planning" next door to a bodega selling ice cold Corona and red hot Cosmopolitan covers to sunburnt gringos}

A man is selling paintings even here, in the airport - next to the duty free store peddling tequila and marlboros which cost more than his works of art.

This incongruity, the gap between have & have not, the English and the Spanish, the foreign and the local could really twist a man up.  I do feel like a clumsy invader - maybe its the curse of having grown up in a tourist country watching the fat burnt people rudely ignoring the conservative vibe of the locals, drinking and wearing next to nothing in public.  I don't want to be that guy.  It would be a mistake though to just sit here feeling guilty (Black Gringo?!?)  The people have as much agency as I.

So - I'm stealing a word from the english-spanish dictionary and making it mine.  Instead of the turista feo, I will be a sabandija - a creepy crawly, a scuttling quiet wierdo, clever and happy in my strange skin, slowly finding my places and my place in the culture.  Just like in Seattle...

Go here to watch the space in between (pun intended)
Teleritmo!

See you soon.  Hasta luego

Sleep Deprivation

This is an extremely dangerous thing.  I am going to sleep now.

2012, and a new band for Farfetcher

The new year caught me running, and this is the first time I'm stopping to scribble a bit.  I had to let go of many of the bands, now I'm down to two regular ones and a few I'll play it if I can gigs.  Still rolling with BC Campbell, who is mid recording and not playing out as much at the moment.  Also excited to be playing with Shannon Stephen's - a wonderful singer I  met at a gig.  I'm enjoying the songwriting, and struggling along learning the parts from previous recordings - once again I find myself listening to Jeff Fielder (yup he's on the record!) and trying to get it right, though we play completely differently.  The overlap is increasing though, I'm even playing some things only with fingers ha.

You can check out the band in the video at the end of the blog!  Or go see the shows coming up -

2/2/12 on KBCS in Bellevue at 1pm - the show that was "lunch with folks" is now "Outskirts"
2/2/12 at Conor Byrne in Ballard (Seattle WA)
2/3/12 at Doe Bay http://www.doebay.com/   On Orcas Island in the San Juans - Whale up what!?
2/4/12 at the Old Foundry in Bellingham http://www.oldfoundry.org/


Here's a you tubey for youey