Saturday, May 01, 2004

Jungle Fever!
well just as i was experiencing concurrent weeks of paradise, ideal solar-sonic studio conditions with the RV situation... even surviving the Semana Santa invasion to my private little jungle beach, the trip takes on a more serious tone: SURVIVAL!!
a weird domino chain of events: first, the RVs fridge dies, rather drastically changing my diet, as i had to revert to backpacking in supplies of non-perishable food from the closest habitacion, as well as my water supply (the RV wasn't easily drivable from its jungle beach perch on Playa Mal Paso, literal translation: Beach Shitty-Road). so no problem, nice exercise to Sayulita and back every few days. BUT, i guess in retrospect the death of my fridge drastically changed my diet, 'cause combined with my round the clock hours on the computer n such, my immune system got rather weak, and i caught Varicela (sounds nicer in Spanish), translation: ChickenPox! (from the Alien Children during Semana Santa?) so OK, time to leave the jungle perch anyway, a day-long proposition involving bribing a local landowner's caretaker to unlock a gate to a side path for me, 'cause what goes down doesn't always go back up so easily, when it comes to a 12,000 lb. RV with front-wheel drive. so this gets me past the steepest and rockier parts. but then i can't get up the final incline! after 3 blazing attempts, gravel flying and wheels spinning, it was looking like tow-truck time... till i got the bright idea to try it in reverse. insane, with the amount of momentum i needed, but... success! so i'm back on wheels for the first time in 5 weeks. Straight off I go get my ChickenPox medication and call up some new friends i had recently met on the beach, who live on a nearby nature reserve and had extended an invite for me to stay there. sounded like a perfect place to recuperate, right? El Rancho de la Laguna is a breath-taking bird-sanctuary, and my friends turned out to be incredible hosts, and my Spanish vocabulary soared within a week of staying there, as my pox symptoms dissipated. So i was even able to get back to a little bit of work... even burn a DVD for my friends... of the jam we had done during Easter Week when i met them all on Playa Mal Paso (excerpt of which will certainly be on the upcoming Eklektro DVD).
So flash to 2 days ago: i'm feeling almost 100% again, and decide to finally take a mountainbike ride into the thicket to check things out and see if i could spy a crocodile.... I take a tumble on the bike and the handle-bar stabs me pretty hard in the gut and i limp home and call it a day. i wake up the next day with a fresh new fever. go back to the doctor. by this time i'm dizzy and breaking out in a cold sweat. did the pox return? or did the accident indeed cause a little internal injury? Liver or spleen or??..... at least this is what i THINK my Spanish-speaking doctor is trying to tell me as he's probing around my gut and i'm nearly passing out on the exam table. but let's not forget that La Laguna is a nice breeding ground for mosquitoes... So what brought on the new fever: trauma, malaria.... or? I get referred from the clinic to the regional hospital in Puerto Vallarta. i can't reach any of my local English/Spanish fluent-speaking friends on the phone (as i lack, as does my dictionary, much of the more precise verbiage as a medical diagnosis may require). i take an aspirin and the fever breaks just long enough for me to drive myself to the hospital. As i write this, i've just exited the hospital, and thankfully my doctor spoke about as much English as i speak Spanish, so we got thru it: He's 80% sure there's no internal injury, though this MIGHT've brought on the fever, since my system was already stressed. but he's also 80% sure that i've got Typhoid... which in rare cases is transferable by mosquitoes, but more likely i caught from fridge-death fall-out: eating in a streetside restaurant. I can't believe that i'm almost relieved to hear that i've got Typhoid.... hmm.. didn't Kerouac catch that in Mexico City near the end of "On The Road"? Well if i can't revel in the epic nature of this trip, the bad with the good, then i've got no business being down here for the past few months... but i'm finally diggin the thought of soon returning to the USA... and getting a fresher start on winter down here next year... with a new fridge!

update: lab tests came in today: its neither typhoid nor malaria, so the origins of my mysterious 2nd bout with Jungle Fever remain unknown... despite all this, i'm actually pretty impressed with Mexican health services.

BTW: for those of you who might be wondering, i still haven't finished part 4 of Breakbeat of the Week's "Revelations" episode, parts 1-3 of which were uploaded on 4/15.... for the obvious reason: i woke up the next day with part one of the fever. but since then, in feverish spurts, the movie has expanded way past BBotW standard internet length anyway... about 15 minutes of crazy storyline so far... musical soundtrack DnB/IDM, created on-location during the week leading up to: The Invasion of the Alien Children... featuring an impromptu tribal jam with loads of characters... which i can hardly believe actually got recorded and filmed, and just ties the whole trip together for me. Dig it on DVD, soon. snippets to the website, sooner (http://www.eklektro.net/ek-desperados.html). voice-over text excerpts as DVD taste-test teaser, below:

The road just goes and goes...
and all the more so with this... solar-studio
the things i've seen.... the things i've come to know
the things that.. fell out of the sky...
just landed in front of my lens, totally un-contrived
burned onto hard-drive...
if i could transcribe this never-ending storyline
for the ears and the eyes, in a quest for real-time
the cosmic intention: the core of the creation...
From simple life-support to full-time inspiration,
Everybody needs a space-ship
to best draw in the divine intervention of the muse
And the mission? to find the art of life
the interplanetary search for vital bits of light
why NOT migrate to Mexico, where it seems near everything is... improvised?
and somehow sustainable, as this jungle beach has more than satisfied...
(despite the typhoid!)
with the electrolyte, the circuitry, and the bio-rhythms that have become me:
REVELATIONS
this is a wake up call for those who see a studio as something stationary
for those who see recording as an industry
or energy only-in-terms of a commodity, as something finite.
your dinosaur days are as numbered as the common copyright.

feverishly,
e>k>G


ps: maybe not totally eco-friendly, but a step in the right direction:
shy of fuel cell technology to propel an RV,
next year we're converting this rig to Mex-friendly propane!
cleaner-burning, cheaper, cool-looking tanks to mount on the roof and definitely more appropriate as Rocket-fuel!!