Indian Festival

I was glad when this weekend arrived – work has been very stressful. Fortunately, the people I work with tend to relieve stress with humour, and that helps ease the tension. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I work with a lot of British expats, and we traditionally go out for curry at Friday lunchtime. This Friday, we started to discuss some of the stupider things we’d done as schoolboys. By far the best was a game that one of the guys used to play in the library. It’s delightfully simple: someone comes into the library, sits down, and whispers “bollocks” to the person next to him. The only rules are these: firstly, that person has to repeat the word to someone else; and secondly, he has to say it louder. Apparently, the game usually finishes with someone running out of the library screaming “bollocks” at the top of his voice. Who said all-boy schools were a bad idea!

So by the time the weekend came, I’d had no time to think of anything to do. Fortunately I heard on the local radio that there was an American Indian Festival in Dallas. It turned out to be very interesting (as unplanned things often do).

I parked the car, paid my $8 entrance fee, and quickly toured the site. I decided to eat first: Indian tacos from “Choctaw Vicki”. An interesting cross-cultural culinary experience. Very similar to Mexican tacos, but served on fried Indian bread. Indian bread is somewhat similar in taste and texture to, if you can imagine it, a savoury doughnut (and I mean an American doughnut, not the pale British imitation). It’s a risen dough, deep-fried, and very tasty. I picked an empty table and sat down on the hay bale that provided seating, to be approached by a young lady who asked if she could join me. I had no objection, particularly as there seemed to be many more tables than available seating. As she sat down, she slid her business card across to me, at the same time beckoning to her companion: “Rita – Michael Motorcycle Hair Salon”. “He’s my boss”, she said, as someone who looked remarkably like an aging biker approached. After they had been sitting for a couple of minutes, I broke the ice by asking if he was “Michael Motorcycle”. To cut a long story short, it turns out he was, and he was fascinated to discover that I was from England, because he had just been there doing interviews with the BBC. It seems that he does Jerry Hall’s hair, and she had been singing his praises in London, so that he’s now thinking about opening a salon in London. He invited me down to his ranch, but I didn’t go yet, mostly because he’s only just bought the land and hasn’t yet built the ranch. But it is in a very pretty part of Texas, on a hill with good views (and hills are rare in these parts), and the land is wall-to-wall Texas blue-bonnets in the Spring. He drew me a map, and said I was welcome to wander about the many trails, so I probably will one of these weekends.

After lunch, I watched Allenroy Paquin on stage. He’s an Apache-Zuni dancer, musician and story-teller. From him I learned that there are 563 American Indian tribes that are officially recognized by the American government. Now we’ve all heard of the Apache, Cherokee, Choctaw, Zuni, Hopi, Seminole, etc., but 563! How many of these will manage to survive after the appalling treatment they received at the hands of “the white man” I don’t know. The systematic attempt at their genocide is, tactfully, hardly ever mentioned by them; and, conveniently, mostly forgotten by us. He was a softly spoken man, and passionate about his heritage and his art.

He told a story that I will repeat here. I won’t get it exactly right, of course, but then he probably didn’t either – that’s what story-telling is all about. But it’s still his story.

“There was once a time when all creatures could talk to each other, and lived in harmony. And in that time there were two sisters who loved each other very much. They loved to play together, and especially they loved to dance. And the time they loved to dance best of all was at twilight – when the weary day was done, but the night was still fresh and young, and the silver moon cast hazy shadows on the ground.

“One evening, they noticed an owl, high up in a tree. They climbed up to the lowest branches, sat down, and looked up at the owl. ‘Hooo, hooo, who are you?’ said the owl. The older sister replied, ‘We are sisters, and we love the moon. In fact, we hope to marry the moon one day.’.

“The owl said, ‘If you love the moon so much, I’ll tell you a story about it:

“When the world was new, monsters roamed the land and terrified the people, and so all the tribes came together and agreed that they should slay all the monsters. But nobody came forward to volunteer, except for one. This brave man single-handedly went out amongst the monsters, and slayed them all. When he returned to his village, they gave him a new name. It was an Indian name of course, and so wouldn’t really mean anything to you, but, translated, it means “Monster Slayer”. They also gave him the highest honour that could be bestowed on anyone: a pure white buckskin robe that was dazzling just to look at. As time went by, Monster Slayer became restless, because there were no more monsters to slay; so he announced that he was going to the Moon, to slay all the monsters there and make it safe for the people of the Moon. Everyone thought he was crazy, but he ignored them. He made a huge bow and arrow from the largest trees he could find, and when he was finished, he took a length of rope, and tied one end to the arrow, and the other to himself. As the Moon came up, he pulled back the bow as far as he could, and unleashed the arrow. It shot up in the air, over the water, and disappeared from view; then the rope went taut, and Monster Slayer, too, went up in the air, over the water, and disappeared from view. The people thought he must surely have drowned, but their curiosity brought them back to the same spot the following evening, when they saw that the Moon shone brighter than ever – they thought it could only be the light reflected from Monster Slayer’s white buckskin robe.”

‘Go home now and pray, and if you pray hard enough, you may be able to marry the Moon.’

“And so the two sisters went home and prayed for four days and four nights, until they fell into a deep sleep. And as they fell asleep, they heard a distant voice saying, ‘If you want to marry me, you must be patient. You must keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them.’ The two sisters could feel themselves being lifted up, and hear the wind rushing by their ears. This went on for so long that the younger sister couldn’t resist opening her eyes to see what was happening. The instant she did, she started falling back to earth, but, just as she was about to hit the ground, she woke up from a deep sleep. She turned to tell her sister what had happened, but her sister wasn’t there.

“Meanwhile the older sister heard a voice telling her to open her eyes. When she did, Monster Slayer was standing before her, and she squinted at the light reflected from his glorious robe. Monster Slayer said to her, ‘I bow to no-one except you, and now we shall be married’. He took her by the hand, and she smiled, because she could hear faint music that was growing stronger; it was a tune she recognized, that she had heard many times before: the Indian Wedding Song. And she was happy.”

And at that point, Allenroy Paquin played the Indian Wedding Song on his flute: a plaintive, haunting melody that I’m sure is as evocative to Native Americans as the Wedding March is to us.

Discover India

The local TV station website told me that the annual “Discover India” celebrations were happening today in Annette Strauss Artist Square, in downtown Dallas. It was free, and so automatically wins out over truck-racing at the Texas Motor Speedway (which I’d love to go to, just once, but not for $25), or Cirque du Soleil (at a whopping $195!), or the last weekend of the State Fair (I saw enough fat Texans last year).

So I headed towards Dallas, and parked 100 yards from the supposed site. Since it starts at noon, and it’s already 11:55am, I’m already thinking that something’s wrong. Either I’ve got the date wrong, or Annette Strauss has, because it’s completely empty. I walk over a block towards the “Arts District” (which is difficult to fit in the same sentence with “Dallas” and still sound credible), and find two of Dallas’ finest on their bicycles (yes, bicycles – and this is probably just as well, given that, as they freely admit, 20% of the Dallas Police Department’s motorized vehicles are out of commission at any one time, and most of the others are older than they legally allow taxicabs to be). I ask them where the “Discover India” activity is, and they don’t know; they call into their central command station, and they don’t know either. I thank them, walk one block, and fall over it. Not only is the street blocked off, but there are joint exhibits with the Dallas Museum of Art, the Childrens’ Museum, and the Crow Museum of Asian Art. I’m beginning to think that the first “D” in “DPD” doesn’t stand for “Dallas”.

It was small, but delightful. A street market with about 20 stalls, with a stage at one end. The first act was a group of 7-8 year olds, performing classical Indian dance. They had to stop half way through because the sun had heated up the outdoor stage, and they were dancing in bare feet. Resourcefully, the organizers quickly laid carpet, and everything continued, albeit half an hour behind schedule. I lunched on Chicken Tikka Masala with Mango lemonade, and watched Indian classical dance, “Bollywood” dance, and classical ragas on violin and tabla (it was difficult for me to tell when they had stopped tuning and started the raga – but that’s my ignorance rather than their imperfection). I never cease to be amazed at the range of sound that can be produced from what look like a simple pair of drums, although the violin, being fretless, is ideally suited to producing music based on a musical scale radically different from our own.

Before heading back to the hotel, I visited the Dallas Museum of Art. I concentrated on European art, and Contemporary art, because there’s rather too much to take in all at one go. To my eyes, “contemporary” art is 50% thought-provoking and 50% rubbish. At the same time, there are some whose views are diametrically opposed to mine, just as there are some poor souls who think that it will be a good idea to vote for George Bush on November 2^nd.

Motorcycle Diaries

I saw two movies today. I’d only planned on “Motorcycle Diaries”, but then a colleague at work recommended “Primer”, which is only released to four theatres in the US this weekend. Since one was local, I had to take advantage of it.

“Motorcycle Diaries” was not easy to find. An award winner at Sundance, it was generally released in late September, but seems now to be relegated to the smaller independent theatres. So I found myself in the precocious “West End Village” of Dallas, surrounded by the Mercedes-driving, Starbucks-drinking, NY Times-reading Sunday morning crowd. The movie is based on the early, formative years in the life of Ernesto Guevara (to become later better known as “Che”), and his “road trip” across South America from his home in Argentina shortly before he was to graduate as a medical student specializing in leprosy. It starts as a tale of two young men, one frivolous, womanizing and seeking adventure, one more deep-thinking, and probably in search of his destiny, as well as accompanying his best friend. Both young men grow to adulthood during the journey, and their attitude to life changes until they are similarly idealistic. Their paths separate at the end of the movie, but they are re-united again some 11 years later in Cuba. Che was, of course, later captured in Colombia as part of the revolutionary movement, and executed with the CIA’s tacit approval. Some of the images in the movie, of dis-enfranchised natives of Peru, Chile or Venezuela will live with me for a long time. Think of it, perhaps, as a “Michael Palin” documentary, but from the perspective of the have-nots.

“Primer” is a self-confessed low-budget movie. It’s been reviewed as a movie you either love or hate; having seen it, I interpret this to mean that it’s a movie you either understand, or you don’t. The plot makes “Donnie Darko” look straightforward; I’d like to say it was science fiction, but it almost defies categorization – it challenges our idea of “time” in the same way that Sartre challenged our idea of “being”, and is a movie that I think you have to watch more than once. But then maybe I’m just getting slower.

I wouldn’t recommend either of these movies generically; I’d simply say that, if these are the kind of movies you like, you’ll like these movies. I certainly did.

Blunderers all

This trip Hertz gave me a Mazda 3. This is a weird car that has a dual personality – functioning either as an automatic or a stick shift. I’m sorry, but people who can’t decide whether they want automatic or stick shift in the comfort of their living rooms shouldn’t be allowed to make split-second potentially life-threatening decisions on the road. If the automotive engineers wanted to come up with something really useful, they’d invent a transmission that changed gears at random, for people who can’t decide what gear they ought to be in. This is how most people seem to drive anyway, so they’d be catering for a larger market segment.

Anyway, enough of all that …

Bush, Longhorns and Columbus: blunderers all.

Last night I watched the second presidential debate between George Dubya and John Kerry. I honestly don’t know who to believe. “Spin” has become such a way of life for these people that I think they’ve really convinced themselves they’re being truthful. The audience dutifully asked their questions, and then sat looking thoroughly bored as the same old answers (and evasions of answers) rolled glibly from the politicians’ mouths. At least a two-party system has advantages: the nation is so polarized that whoever gets in (and sadly, I think it will be Bush again), the gridlock will be sufficient to prevent either side from doing anything. In England, the also-rans will steal so many votes from the only party that could provide an effective opposition that Tony Blair will once again be handed carte blanche to pursue his misguided policies. The fact remains that George W. Bush committed one of the biggest blunders of modern history by invading Iraq.

Today is the “Red River Shootout” – Oklahoma University (OU, or the Sooners) are playing the University of Texas (UT, or the Longhorns) at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. This is an annual, highly-charged college football game that OU have won for the last four years. The Red River, by the way, is the river that separates Texas and Oklahoma. Watching the Longhorns blunder about on the field, they did well to lose by only 12 points to 0.

And Monday is Columbus Day. According to the book that Lucy gave me (“1421 – The Year China Discovered the World”, by Gavin Menzies), Columbus’ blundering voyages around the world were probably not quite so heroic as was previously supposed. Far from venturing into the unknown, fearful of sailing off the edge of the world, he was following maps produced decades earlier by the Chinese. And “discovering” lands that he well knew had been discovered before.

Blunderers. A coincidence? I don’t think so.

Life is too important to take seriously. Seriously.

Mesquite, TX

I just got back from a truly American experience – the Rodeo at Mesquite (about 25 miles from here). It started at 8pm, but it was suggested to me that I should get there when the doors opened at 6:30pm, so I could look around first. “Looking around” took at least 15 minutes, but I did get a good parking space.

One thing that hits you as you walk in is an unmistakable smell – I suppose you get used to it if you go often enough, or if you spend your life around horses. If you’ve ever been to a hockey game, you’ll have seen the Zamboni going round, turning the churned up ice into a mirror-smooth playing surface; the rodeo equivalent is a tractor with a contraption on the back that chops up and blends the horse and cattle dung into the underlying sand and clay. I now know why the riders stay on the bucking broncos so long – not so much to win as to avoid being dumped unceremoniously into the cunningly disguised faeces beneath them.

Rodeo action

And, you know, the really odd thing is that they have a strict no-smoking policy. I think they ought to work a little harder on training the horses and cattle to crap before they come to work (I could easily get side-tracked here on why dog-owners are expected to clear up after their pets when nobody takes responsibility for clearing up after foxes, badgers, ducks, geese, seagulls, etc. – but I won’t).

You’ll never hear an announcement that begins “Will the owner of a white Mercedes, license plate … “ at a rodeo. Those aren’t the sort of people that go. The sort of people that do are all good Americans, but they’re all, shall we say … “cowboys” (or “cowgirls”) at heart. Nothing wrong with that, but you should be prepared to eat hot dogs, drink Jack Daniels (the sponsored drink of the PRCA (Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association)), and wear a Stetson to really fit in.

I was really annoyed by the country band that started the proceedings. My musical tastes are pretty diverse, but one instrument I can’t stand is the slide guitar, and this band featured it, big time. It’s lucky for them I’m naïve with firearms, otherwise they’d have been looking for a new band member. He was a big guy too, right up front – easy target.

You might think I didn’t have fun, but I did – bull riding, steer wrestling, bronco riding, chuck wagon racing. And the thing that Americans do much better than Brits: involve the kids. They had all the under-8s line up in the arena (goodness knows what their shoes smelt like in the car on the journey home) while a young calf, with a blue ribbon tied to its tail, ran from one end to the other. The winner was the first to get the ribbon. The kids had fun, and I suspect the calf wasn’t too upset by the attention, either.

Cowboy Church

Val would be proud of me. I just got back from church. Cowboy church. If you think I’m kidding, check out http://www.cowboychurchofelliscounty.org.

The service is a little more, shall we say, unstructured, than I’m used to. First a little background. Cowboy churches are springing up all over Texas (though when I say “springing up”, there are currently only a dozen or so). Their premise is simple (as stated by the pastor of the church I went to):

"Most people only know two ways to do church. They know the traditional style with the hymnal, organ, piano, carpeting and padded pews and stained glass and lots of committees and the contemporary music churches with drum sets on the pulpit and folks in white shirts. Our floor is the same dirt-brown as the sand out here, so you can come to church straight from riding or feeding your stock. We don't pass an offering plate because a lot of people think churches are just out for their money. There's a little wooden church on a table in the back where they can leave an offering. We don't ask people to come down in front of a crowd and accept Jesus; we let them drop a note in a box in the back and tell us if they want us to call. We get people who will not go to church anywhere else, people who haven't been in 30 or 50 years. They've got issues. They may have a divorce, a child in jail, a drinking or a drug problem. That's why a cowboy church sermon is different. We preach about love. Our people already know their lives are screwed up. They need me to tell them there's a God who knows this and cares and wants to help them get back on track."

Cowboy church is a spirit, not a place, and they often attract people from “buck-out” sessions, where they’ll put on a rodeo (every Thursday out back at this church), and then feed everybody afterwards.

The cowboy version of the Ten Commandments, by the way, are these:

Just one God.
Honor yer Ma & Pa.
No telling tales or gossipin'.
Git yourself to Sunday meeting.
Put nothin' before God.
No foolin' around with another fellow's gal.
No killin'.
Watch yer mouth
Don't take what ain't yers.
Don't be hankerin' for yer buddy's stuff.

The service I attended started with a bluegrass band playing religiously-themed songs (nothing I recognized, so none of the usual hymns). Then followed a PowerPoint presentation of the recent Youth Mission trip to Arkansas. Then a prayer, followed by more country-religious songs. Then the sermon. I would say it was fairly typical TV-evangelical style, except that the pastor was amusing: not bible-thumping, not too erudite, but easy to listen to. There was a playroom for children right at the back of the church, and parents could drop them off there or bring them into the service at any time before or during the service. They served coffee and doughnuts before and after the service, which finished with everyone singing “Happy Trails”.

Corny? Maybe. I’d have no hesitation going back another day. It doesn’t fit completely with my idea of religion, but then I’m not sure I’ve found anything yet that does. It’s about people, about fellowship, about love and respect for each other, about simplicity, and not about money or pomp and ceremony or putting your beliefs above anyone else’s. And this comes pretty close.