38 years ago on the road

We pulled into the city of Barcelona after a dry and dusty bus ride, but we expected comfort. The expression, "it isn't the Ritz" was not appropriate as this actually was The Ritz we were booked into. We crossed the vast lobby, "we" being three black men and three white, three bearded men and three clean-shaven, but still totaling six musicians altogether, plus two great roadies there to schlep things, check us in and pay. This group of 8 males ranged in age from early twenties to late forties. A fairly wide sample of humanity with, as a bonus, one of us wearing a turban. He was also carrying a bag with 12 bottles of Louisiana Hot Sauce.  

The moment we had entered what must have been a wondrous place 40 years earlier, a svelte Russian-looking woman in what would be called stretch-slacks had been following our sauntering gait across to the desk, and when I sat on my road case, her eyes settled on me. (Why?) I was tired, and as I gazed over I was thinking of a middle class suburban housewife on vacation, but it didn't seem right. As I reflected on the anomalies, she rose and walked directly over to me. 

She was at least twice my age, perhaps more but she was not bashful when she said, "You are artists? My husband is an artist." The accent was there, fairly strong but unrecognizable to my then inexperienced ear. Not Spanish, though, at any rate. Coming from Los Angeles, I naively believed I'd have recognized that. As we moved through Spain I realized this too was an illusion.

Photo: FirstRozic

"Yeah, I guess you could say that." I managed, in a neutral tone, already losing interest. "Maybe you have heard of him," she intoned. "Salvador Dali?" I looked at this woman for the first time, directly, and my own Russian background from two generations back saw something in those eyes that went deep and yet, I somehow didn't believe what she had just said. It wasn't until I later asked the hotel concièrge who this woman was and heard his incredulous answer, "But you didn't know, Senior? that is Senora Dali." 

 
Continued here: http://randulo.posterous.com/200911-second-meeting-with-gal

I just had a funny experience and it pointed out something about our humanity and how we differ from machines even when we talk via cyberspace. A songwriter I met in Fresno years ago touched base with me on the social newtork I hate to hate. Since I don't use it to communicate, I asked him to email me which he did. He said hello and asked about me. I know about the fame he has acquired through a mutual friend. What was funny was that a lyric of one of his songs popped into my head and I wrote back to him, "Did you wirte this line?". He immediately wrote back saying, "you're probably the only person who remembers this song, other than me me!"

This gave me a kind of thrill, because I only know I heard the first line in a song by a guy who went on to become a hugely successful songwriter, played to me by our mutual friend, also a great songwriter in a far off California town, probably over 40 years ago.

I've never thought much about that song or the first line, but it just popped back in my head from an era when the whole band was living together in a big house on Grant Steet, with someone's cousin from Oklahoma cooking big breakfasts for us every morning. We used to go out on the roof at sunrise after a night of... what I suppose my parents might have called some kind of "degenerate behavior". Once I went up there at sunset. I remember telling my mom in a letter that "the sunset was just as beautiful as the sunrise", thinking it was "'heavy", and you know, she was younger than I am now!

Why do I remember the name of my elementary school principal (about a half century has passed) but not the name of the foxy Japanese-Americal girl I was so into in high school, with those legs that went from Alaska to Baja California? Are you out there, D...? I remember looking at an old oscilloscope in a junior high friend's garage, and a lot of the names of people I only hung with for less than one year. I wonder how many names I could write down of people I've met in my adult life? Could I write a blurb about each one I spent more than a few minutes with?

What I find is that we remember humans more easily than things, yet humans are the most complex entities in memory, are they not? They are networks, connected to other networks with so many attributes. Each person has different attributes with different values for each of those. If you had to put together a database of humans with a level of detail sufficient to show their uniqueness, how much memory would you need?

Enough reflection. What's for dinner?

On the subject of the cultural sameness, I loved Robert Silverburg's "Schwartz Between the Galaxies", written oddly enough the same year as the moments I'm about to share! Here's a quote from that book jacket note.

It’s not easy to be an anthropologist in the 21st Century. All the primitive cultures are gone, assimilated into a neo-Western global socio-economic sameness. Professor Thomas Schwartz is that useless anthropologist, globe-hopping from lecture to lecture, from Montevideo to Port Moresby, New Guinea, and all the cities are the same. But in his fantasies, he travels on a great interstellar liner surrounded by the representatives of many alien cultures–something to study!

 
How funny it seems today that when we left LAX for Tokyo, I saw a billboard for Suntory Whiskey and upon arrival, I saw one for Johnny Walker! Both claimed to be number 1. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
 
We played at an outside venue where the trees looked like broccoli stalks, and this without the help of controlled substances. Every single head out there had black hair, which I'll bet is no longer true in Japan. I'm going to guess that the broccoli trees were near Kyoto, but I can't recall that detail, only the image.
 
When in Tokyo, we went to a disco/bar and were kind of partying when a Japanese woman walked up and literally tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to her, expecting a question or comment in more or less stilted English. I was surprised when she instead lifted a small phrasebook up to my field of vision. It had a few phrases in Japanese on the left page and English on the right. She pointed to the English side which read: "I long to feel your manly arms around me." I laughed, certain it was some kind of cultural joke and went back to whatever was happening before, but the woman pointed to another, even more explicit phrase. She was not kidding. Her name was Akiko. She wore a crucifix on a chain around her neck.
 
Cut to the hotel. We walked to the elevator and a bunch of the staff came over, three or four bellboys, who grabbed her just as the door was closing and pulled her out. Although I expected her to show up later she didn't. The desk people explained to me the next day that "this sort of thing didn't go on in their hotel".
 
Fortunately, Akiko came back to the club the next night and when we got to the hotel, the 5 other band members, much more imposing physically, ran interference for us at the elevator. Don't expect any details from that night, the part I told above is  what I think was worth sharing.
 
However, I did hang out with Akiko for the week we were there. I tried communicating with her in French and English, she spoke a tiny bit of each, but in fact, we were not able to say much to each other without the phrase book. I took her to a movie, which it turns out was about the most inappropriate one possible, The Exorcist, but I thought at least it was in English. In the first scene, with subtitles in Japanese and Arabic being spoken, I thought it possible that the entire movie was going to be that way. Not speaking Arabic or reading Japanese, I was nervous until English came in a few minutes later. That was the scariest part, those minutes where I didn't get anything.
 
Akiko came over one day with lunch, which was adorable. She had brought both a typical cheeseburger/fries-based tray from McDonalds and a tray of Japanese sushi-looking stuff, which was very cool. You should know that in those days, sushi was not at all known in the way it is today. I thought that said a lot about the image of Americans abroad, not wanting to try anything. The image is confirmed when I walk past a Parisian McDonalds, filled with Americans who pretend they're there because it's cheaper.