Zona

Happy Birthday Dad

Today would have been my dad's 80th birthday. On his 50th birthday I asked him what he was going to be like when he was eighty. He told me that he didn't want to live that long.

He didn't.

I mentioned that to my daughter and she asked me if I wanted to live to be eighty.

I was holding my grandaughter and I told her that I wanted to live forever. I wanted to see this one (looking at the baby in my arms) grow up.

Updating the Bolivian news:

My wife made it safe and sound and was eating breakfast when I called. Her mother is improving according to her sister. My wife was enjoying the company of her two sisters and one of her brothers. This weekend her younger brother will drop by the house and it will mark the first time in almost 5 years that they have all been together. A couple of hours after the phone call they were going to the hospital to visit her mom.

Quick decision

My wife gets on a plane tomorrow for Bolivia. Her mother has been ailing for some time and is not improving so she's decided that the situation down there outweighs anything here.

Her sisters and an aunt have been taking care of her mother. The doctors have been saying that she's basically okay but in the last week she's been unable to eat and has lost four more pounds.

Right now the plan is for two weeks.

If I get the dreaded phone call I would fly out the next day to a place I love for a sad reason.

Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope for better health news.

UPDATE:

My wife flew out this morning. Last night she called her sister to tell her she was coming. Her sister broke down in tears. My mother-in-law has been hospitalized with kidney problems.

Oruro. Part 2

The wife and I leave the house at the same time. She's off to church and I'm off to eat saltenas at my favorite saltena place on the planet. Those are our Sunday rituals.

After church she returns home and relaxes. After saltenas and various stops for conversation I pop into the radio station for my weekly jazz broadcast. Jazz Domingo has made me somewhat of a local celebrity beyond just being an american. From noon to two every Sunday I play selections from my personal collection and people here lap it up. I had an offer to do the show in La Paz and the guy was baffled at first when I asked why I would want to drive 6 hours round trip to La Paz every Sunday to play two hours of music on the radio.

It took a while but he finally figured out that I don't want to move to La Paz.

Listening to a radio station from Oruro, Bolivia over the internet transport my mind there. It's 2:30 in the afternoon. Saturday. Most of the stores closed at noon. Vendors in the market are sweeping in front of their stalls with hand brooms. The doors of the cathedral are open and I can see the candles burning inside as a pause for a moment.

It is the first days of autumn and it's sunny out so I sit at a outside table at the restaurant. Right on the main plaza. People walk by with the green of onions hanging out of their market bags. At the table next to me a guys pours beer for his three friends. I can smell the beer and the cigarette that somebody lights at another table.

I love this time of day. A space between the bustle of the morning and dinner time. The noon rush to get home is over and just the last dinner grocery shoppers. We're over the hump.

PAUSE

It's Sunday morning now. 6AM. No Bolivian radio is playing but in the Oruro house of my mind the sun is leaking through the curtains. Noise from the occasional car passing and dog barking and the distant rooster. Then there's the paper boy. I can hear him coming from way down the street.

"Presencia, presencia, DiarioooOOOOOO".

The maid opens the door and gets both papers from the boy. I love newspapers.

I wonder if San Jose is playing at home today.

Zona Boy reviews the movie Hard Candy

Let me begin by saying that I watched this movie on my iBook and I was AMAZED at the quality of the picture.

Now let me break the movie down into elements and address each one.

Cinematography: OUTSTANDING

Script: OUTSTANDING

The characters: OUTSTANDING

Ellen Page (the main character) F'ing OUTSTANDING

Yeah, that's right, I really dug this flick.

It's a suspense thriller that will carry you along and at the end it will................

Go rent it boys and girls.

Five fistfulls of popcorn out of five.

People come up to me and answer questions I haven't asked. Lost people ask for guidance and when I point out the simplicity of it they become angry and blame me for their own ignorance being pointed out to them by a stranger. People believe in values that should be respected. Their values. Values based on television shows and junk food diets. Your values carry no weight in this exchange.

Other people believe they can lead from behind by launching threats and cracking a whip. The mule's gonna pull the cart regardless so why not let him enjoy doing it without being ridiculed along with the other mules just so you can enjoy sitting on your butt and waving to people in the street.

It is a cold foggy day here in the Vancouver and my mind wandered as I walked down empty corridors. Off to Bolivia in 5 months time. From the lake to the yungas and throughout the neigborhoods of the big city and down to the valley to drink corn beer with my brother-in-law.

Photos will abound and flood my blog and my flickr site and you will all be ooh and aah as I post from South America.

And of course there will be postcards and trinkets for all.

Now that I am back where I should be and the room has emptied out my mind wanders to it's normal subject matter.

WEEMON.

Screw the Irish!

I ordered my mac book pro yesterday.

soon I will be cool

soon I will be hip

soon chicks will dig me

thank you Steve.

I'm looking out the windows as the sun goes down sans grey clouds and the plum tree in the front yard explodes in bloom. I realize that yes, I AM coming out of this two month long funk. But who's coming with me? Somebody I have never met in person reached out in email and now I really want to bounce over and give her a hug and bounce back.

I bought a new printer and it's making some very good prints of what I've shot for the last six months and beyond.

I want to meet so many of you people and throw my head back in laughter.

If the planets line up and Matthew Good tours Canada when I'm not in Bolivia I am going to pop over to Toronto to meet peeps over there and party.

Yep, Spring is coming.

Last week I listened to the complete Matthew Good CD Hospital Music in the mixing room of The Warehouse Studio. It's just plain amazing, boys and girls.

Want to know something even more cooler?

I'm listening to it now.

I have it on my iPod. (It's just been mixed and hasn't been mastered yet)

What's cooler to you? That I have a much anticipated CD, or that I have finally bought an iPod? (4 gig nano)

I have BOTH. Wicked cool.

I listen to it over and over and over and over.

Evil Zona wonders what hard core FEMALE fans of Matt's would do for a listen.

And if you're a computer hacker whiz superstar I can save you some time and effort. It's NOT on my hard drive.

The iTunes on this computer is controlled by my 16 year-old and believe me, his musical taste is crap.

My favorite winds

I miss the wind that used to send my kite flying above an empty lot of my youth
That lot's is full of apartments now
I miss the wind that blew in my face in an Altiplano neighborhood
It's still there and I long for those days
I miss the wind that brought in the summer thunderstorms around my birthday
I'm many candles gone from there

So it's my day off and I awoke at 3:30AM with nary a hope of getting back to sleep. I hate to just lie in bed caught in between not wanting to awaken my wife and listening to her quiet snore until she shifts.

So I got up and went down stairs and put Babel in the DVD player. A friend lent it to me. A friend who is a movie nut and pretty much scared to give me any movie recommendations because I thought the last movie he lent me sucked and that The Departed sucked and he loved it. He's going to be happy when I return his movie and tell him that I loved it. What a great story beautifully presented.

Last night I popped down to the studio where the boys are in the last days of mixing Matthew Good's latest CD. I took dinner down for everybody. In honor of it being FRIDAY and LENT and me NOT being catholic I took steaks. Andrew grilled them for us.

Matt told me that he was supposed to have been going to Las Vegas next weekend to be a guest of his friend Dale Earnart Jr. at the NASCAR race but that he couldn't because of my "fucked up country". So I ask, how did we fuck up this time? Matt told me that his passport is expired so he can't get in because of the new law (that requires valid passports when flying into the U.S. and that took effect on Jan 23rd).

I told him that there is a 60 day "grace period" and that he would be able to travel without any problem. Then he asked if I was sure. "Dude!! This is ME talking. You'll be fine".

OH MY GOD

It was like Christmas morning and he was a 9 year-old after that moment. Matt prepared to make a flurry of phone calls and emails to line everything up but first he looked at me and asked, "Do you want to come"?

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

TWO 9 year-olds.

All I have to pay for is airfare. Everything else is taken care of.

Maybe that's why I can't sleep?

Later today I have to go into work (it's my day off) and ask/beg for the time off. Then I have to buy an iPOD nano so Matt can have his new CD put into it when the mixing is done.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

Oh, rent/buy Babel.

4 and 1/2 fistfulls of popcorn.

Baby takes a dump