blogger entry: 3/20/04
spring equinox!
spring comes to mexico, and so much has changed in the past 2 weeks, mainly my perspective... drastically! numero uno, Paolo having to depart northward and back to life, instead of being able to gallavant further south with me... in general, so many uncertainties about being able to make this project self-sustaining, down here where the roads eat vehicles alive... i certainly understand Paolo's reasons for having to get back... but have a feeling i'll soon see him again down here in these climes... so then, from Mazatlan: the next 9 hours drive, further south... a big question mark... and a gracious landing... in the sweetest of jungle towns: Sayulita, to which i wrote an ode :)

i am overblown, Sayulita, and yes i know timing is everything...
after a 9 hour day of driving: indeed
an hour before landing having bought some mysterious jungle fruit
from a smiling woman street vendor (later come to find this fruit is an aphrodisiac)....
and so i've never come to so quickly love a place,
a village... this throbbing jungle mini-city
or at least it seems a sort of homecoming,
with homefires burning many times that what Zipolite could ever be...
ie) unspoiled: enchanted: Sayulita
Just that one more tankfull of gas
and that last bit of bumpy mileage that has in fact spared me.
maybe subconsciously Mazatlan scared me, or justifiably put me on guard;
But it was immediately apparent, now, as i touched down in the townsquare
about an hour after sunset on a tropical saturday evening....
center of activity, maybe still 75 degrees... a mild ocean breeze:
there is a purity and prosperity around Sayulita...
beautiful people, beautiful night, a rhythm and flavor just right...
and i walked right into it, a dusty astronaut beat from the road-burn..
...to a hero's welcome (welcome home to the well-kept secret): Sayulita
for anyone who understands, instantly with a smile, what they've found... Sayulita
twilight arrival in a jungle-town... like stumbling upon BurningMan, in progress! Sayulita
like i'm 16 again, summer and sneaking out at night... Sayulita

looking for my friend Eva, at the internet cafe,
the hub of the well-scrubbed jet-set and their social activities...
an artful artery on the info super-highway (is this still Mexico?)
I walked in (or was i levitating?)
with a fixture of a smile, like through the gates of heaven,
half a dozen girls that made my jaw drop, dressed jungle-sexy
Eva was out for the night...
instead a great guy who bought me a beer, and his beautiful wife, ex-patriots:
they were already living my dream... that i'd dreamt up on the Zipolite beach:
and i return 8 years later, with an RV, computers, solar panels...
and via walkie talkies, they led me to their perfect little jungle house...
and the next day, the perfect jungle beach, HERE: at the bottom of this hill...
and now with my RV indeed stuck, blissfully (too steep a climb for front-wheel drive)
in the middle of the night (the sound of waves and jungle noise)
beautiful beach: where next week we'll throw a bitchin jungle party...
and then we'll absolutely need a tow-truck to come rescue me!
or perhaps i'll stay lodged right here... absolutely safe from anything
safe from uncertainty... under swaying palms... mi estudio y yo...
camping out in the wilds, just a mile from the "city", not a fear in me: Sayulita
i have been taken under her wing / i have been given the brass ring
like Kerouac's mecca, in On the Road, the finale:
except that these best things are free: atmosphere and energy: sustainability...
and i know that this is just the beginning...
nomadically speaking, this is a home i know i'm not soon leaving...

...and a few days later, the ode comes true:
presenting, Sunday 3/21: Eklektro Equinoxio
solar-powered electronic drum circle all-day
electronic music and campfires all night
"Playa de Passion"... just a half-mile walk from Sayulita...
and this perfect location just landed in my lap...

and as i learn more about the area, i come to learn what a fantastic
arena it is for new sounds, with world travelers always passing thru...
with casual beach locations ever-ready for the enterprising...
how easy it is to throw live events....
and how great to come to meet Aaron (DJ Propane Albatross)... and his wife Andie ... sailors, turned Mexican homesteaders... or eklektro "home-fires" as i like to say....
I have a feeling this party is only the beginning...
and while Aaron's extra 2 solar panels turned out to be a fantastic loaner...
given how much shade we have to deal with here in the tropics.. near the beach,
the vegetation grows thick... but we have solutions for everything...
I have a strong feeling this area will come to be my half-the-year kinda home...
and i'm not soon leaving...
but when i do, i suspect it will be a quick trip back (june?), and I will be leaving the RV down here (thru BurningMan, and rainy season here)...
going back for 3 months or so, to fix the Camel, to consolidate storage...
to further liquidate, and try to find a ride back down.. amongst my friends
who might want to get a jump on the season... after Burningman...
bring broken stuff back to get fixed...
bring more stuff down, to perfect the systems...
Eklektro Mexico... who knew?

once again fallen behind on the blogger, though NOW, while i've finally got a bit of TIME, and we've certainly found the PLACE, we're currently just a bit challenged by cyber-SPACE in that we're currently situated in Mazatlan, Mexico, and internet cafes are either too-touristicly expensive, or a bit of a cross-town drive. this, i grant you, is very little to complain about, as the situation otherwise is pretty damn ideal! although indeed epic in every sense, as i look back: a trip exactly like this (with a solar-powered studio/RV/domicile as transport/turtle-shell) has been several years in the making. when i first traveled to the tropical Mexican coast (1990, playa Zipolite, state of Oaxaca), there was no such thing as internet. As i returned over the years, i began to fantasize about having my whole bedroom recording studio transported down for the winter, and then, without interruptions, i would finally have the clarity of thought and the inspiration of new vistas to allow entirely new works to flesh-out. so goes the theory. so I suppose that I began this process from the minimal side back in '97, when i returned to Zipolite with some fresh new portable technology in my backpack: a Roland MC303 Groovebox that i had converted to run off battery power. Hammock plus headphones, and i began my first explorations into Drum n Bass music. Laptops were still not quite feasible audio recording or editing devices yet, but that very next year, i would travel to Amsterdam with a sort of porta-studio based on a Mac Powerbook 3400c... continuing on to a deserted little Greek isle for a month, armed with some relaxing reading: 3 thick owner's manuals for the Kurzweil K2000 sampler. and then, soon after relocating semi-permanently via RV from Boston to Los Angeles, the grand-daddy of airborne studio trips, Arabic style, The Morocco 2001 festival, where we not only performed with the new super-portable Roland HPD-15 electronic hand-drum, but also brought dual Mac laptops, DV cameras, a mobile video editing suite... and dual LCD video projectors to provide custom created-on-location visuals for the festival. So, yes tech-travel has been a fascination, and i suppose a specialty of mine for quite some time, and most of the time (amazingly-so), on a shoestring budget.
Last winter i attempted a grand-scale revisitation to Mexico, via RV (the first trip since an exploratory RV journey into Baja in '99) with much updated gear, and all housed inside my retro-fitted '76 silver GMC motorhome. the pitch was that i was not going to return without a CD of music composed during the trip... via the mobile studio fueled by solar electricity. I had 2 lovely Israeli girls as my traveling partners, camera-helpers and expert cooks... so i could concentrate on work. But multiple systems breakdowns converged on us, from 2 dead hard drives, to a bad laptop logic board, to as simple-but-vital a scenario as 2 deep cycle batteries failing on me (the Mexican welding shop back in Los Angeles had accidently burned a hole and battery acid slowly drained out). When i returned to LA (without the CD), the transmission promptly decided to go back south... and so much for that particular attempt to go solar-sonic.
So flashing forward to the present day's journey, and today's blogger entry: when i mention that this trip has been several years in the making, believe me that this is no casual remark. Meanwhile many skills have been learned in the process, and the gear itself continues to get ever-more powerful and ever-more portable.... in other words we've raised the bar a bit: We're not returning without an original music and video DVD, of multiple theme...of multiple location... but in general celebration of the marriage of mobility and creativity: when and where one ideally wishes to pursue it (spontaneously? not exactly, but this is the dream). and today, this is where we're pursuing it: we're not kicking it poolside at some Mazatlan highrise, rather we're parked in one of the most beautiful half-forgotten sandy beachfront parking lots between hi-rent properties, and we've even picked up jobs: keep the parking lot clean, and we can stay overnight free! you can have your palm-lined $20/night RV parks, with tennis courts and hot showers. we're sittin pretty right where the local people go after a hard day of work, to drink a cerveza by sunset, or for a weekend hang-out: this beach is the REAL place to be. and its especially nice to be accepted by the locals, as an exception to what they most commonly see: the pampered vacationing gringo: they take us at face value, for what we are. not that i give tours of the interiors of the studio per se. i just tell them in my basic Spanish that i'm a drummer and a writer... working in Mexico... and then they see us picking up the grounds: hard-working gringos.
So as i sat down to write today's blogger entry, i was going to start out by saying how ecstatic and fortunate we are to have made it where we are, and when looking back, how it was some 3 serious months of planning, garage-work and studio preparation to get this RV outfitted, systems backed-up (like Noah's Ark: two by two: 2 laptops, 2 cameras, 2 HPD-15's) bulletproofed, and transported all these bumpy miles down here... studio intact! The last 3 months especially, driven at a winter nomad's maddening pace to get outa' Dodge. after the holidays, it still took us a month and a half to settle various details for a trip of such amazing potentials and uncertain horizons... and then just cross that border! and so now there's no specific time frame other than "no regreso sin DVD"... desperado style. Eklektro Karavan's Breakbeat of the Week has expanded its storylines (and its camera angles, thanks to the karavanning Paolo and his self-contained studiovanagon), and so, while back on track thematically, Breakbeat of the WEEK has totally missed its weekly deadlines... whatever... as long as the sun keeps us fueled, as long as the creativity flows, as long as the roof doesn't leak, as long as the banditos.... umm... i don't even want to think about that.
Hasta la Vista!!
e>k>G