Calexicatharsis: Tucson's Music Scene in the Flesh

The Rialto Theatre has been around for almost one hundred years. Initially a prime venue for silent movies and vaudeville shows, it was downtown Tucson's pride and joy, switching hands several times before finally succumbing to the recession of the 1960s and the consequent exodus of human and animal life from Tucson. With no humans (much less animals) to cuddle in the cinema seats, the Rialto fell into disrepair, and eventually became one of those movie theaters that you read about in horror stories - dusty seats no longer imprinted with the fine (or less-than-fine) lines of the viewer's thighs, furniture stacked up and eagerly as a bungee-jumping venue by local spiders, used as a storage space by a nearby shop, which itself was likely owned by a sad man with no clients. Then, in a serendipitous turn of events, somebody had an idea: the Rialto would reopen as El Cine Plaza, initially catering to the Spanish-speaking population of Southern Arizona, but quickly transforming its pitch into the only thing a formerly respectable theater could become: a porn theater. This was in the 1970s - a time when arson was a much more popular form of individual expression than it is now (not counting tires and cars during demonstrations). And so it was, in a beautiful case of moral relativism, that one unhappy housewife embarked on a crusade to bring the words of the song "The Roof Is on Fire" to life. While she failed in her repeated attempts to burn down the house in a vengeful pyre of divine punishment, she did succeed in burning down a staircase - and in true outlaw fashion, was never caught. Today, she's probably happy that the Rialto Theatre, British spelling and all (origin unknown), no longer caters to vile, wretched, ungodly beings like it did before.

Today, the Rialto stands proud and revamped, its resurrection funded by the City of Tucson in a successful attempt to make people realize that it does have a downtown (a fact that, for the longest time, I myself was oblivious to). It stands opposite the Hotel Congress, constructed at the same time, and possibly one of the (externally) least impressive higher-class hotels in this part of the United States. And it audience has changed as well. The Rialto, reopened in 1995 as a non-profit venture, now hosts an impressive array of performers every week, each more famous than the next, and is one of the best places for culture in the Tucson area. (Incidentally, not a single theater in Poland that I am aware of - movie or otherwise - displays its shows or movies on a classic marquee like the one in the picture.) While currently the Downtown area is one big hodgepodge of roadworks - largely dedicated to the insane idea of constructing a purposeless 4.9-mile-long streetcar line for $300 million slicing through the middle of town - the Rialto is accessible, and that's what matters.

Not two weeks ago, I was at the Rialto on a Monday, to see AWOLnation - a group that went viral when BASE jumper Jeb Corliss performed feats of great insanity to the epic, oozing, grinding, quirky, glitchy screams of the lead singer. While AWOLnation were overshadowed by their supporting act, Imagine Dragons (observe the floating man closely), the show was nothing short of spectacular, and the mallets pounding the drums felt like they were using your heart as a xylophone. On that occasion the Rialto was filled with people ranging from Rather Normal to Teenage Dirtbag (not mutually exclusive) to Rebel Without a Cause (also not mutually exclusive), and they were moderately rowdy as the performers convulsed around the stage. The house was packed. On a Monday night, that is both flabbergasting and awe-inspiring.

This time, it was different. Calexico are, first of all, a local band, and possibly the greatest combination of quality and popularity Tucson has to offer. Second, the music is different: far from the synthesizer-amplified indie rock of Imagine Dragons and AWOLnation, Calexico are one of those bands that weave between genres like a contortionist through an obstacle course. An eight-man band whose centerpiece are two long-time members, Calexico does what could be described as desert rock Americana - or frontier rock, or Tex-Mex rock, or what have you. Their members, all multi-instrumentalists, switch between a mariachi trumpet, an electric guitar and an accordion within the space of one song. It is a rock band that includes xylophone and cello in its array of instruments. It is a band whose lead singer carries the dry, rasping voice of the Sonoran desert, a band whose music is steeped in the tradition of Mexican corridos, American Southern rock, a smattering of country music, borderland badland genres like Tejano and cumbia, and well-executed intrusions of jazz, all summing up to a total that has been described as "desert noir". Naturally, I am crazy about them.

The third difference was the audience. This may have been a factor of Friday unofficially being Halloween night, which became readily apparent as a cardboard robot with the word "AWESOME" scrawled on it entered the Rialto Theatre in the company of Evel Knievel. Several Karate Kid-like skeleton were in the audience as well. The second most represented demographic was made up of men with suspiciously long and suspiciously unkempt beards, but generally kempt enough to be viewed more as aging backpackers than homeless. The crowd was also older, more mature, more sophisticated, and the proportion of people wearing glasses was greater - a far cry away from the first concert I went to, at which The Offspring (themselves excellent) were interrupted once or twice by half-naked drunks eager to turn a mosh pit into a battleground for fistfights. Though the alternative crowd was prominently represented, the spectators were as eclectic as the music they came to hear - a testament to Calexico's knack for fusions of all kinds.

The fourth difference was that Tucson is not your regular, run-of-the-mill town to celebrate Halloween. Tucson's Halloween tradition is submerged in Mexican frontier folklore, and heavily draws from the Dia de los Muertos - one of the single most amazing celebrations this world has to offer. This, in effect, means that posters featuring decorated, candied skulls are plastered all over the walls of the town trumpeting the local (and large) All Souls Procession, for which I will be one of the thousands drawn to the heart of Tucson several days from now. Calexico's show was centered around their new album, Algiers, which moves away from the desert sands to the mud-green swamplands of New Orleans and its endemic symbolism of water, water and more water. This meant that, despite the looming Day of the Dead, they did not hang a giant skull above the band members - and perhaps, for their own safety, they were better off that way. And for me, a fifth difference was that I was not alone, but accompanied by a good friend who, much like me, is ready to sacrifice essential sleep time for unique experiences. It makes a difference when you're not awkwardly standing in the middle of the floor, twitching to the music without any company whatsoever.

It is impossible to describe Calexico's show in a few words without succumbing to logorrhea. There is a reason why they attract a dozen different demographics. The concert was introduced by none other than Gabrielle Giffords, the former congresswoman who became even more notable for being shot in the head by a frightening, eyebrowless 22-year-old man in Tucson early last year, and subsequently recovering from her injuries. (It might be pertinent to mention that her husband is spaceman Mark Kelly, who was also present and is himself notable for having commanded the final voyage of the Space Shuttle Endeavor; Giffords, who cites Calexico as her favorite band, chose "Slowness" [or, by some accounts and perhaps less fittingly, the amazing "Crystal Frontier"] as her husband's wake-up song while he was floating around the exosphere.) Calexico rolled into the show with guns blazing. While it would be redundant to describe it song-by-song, it can be said that they are masters of their craft: the crescendos they create are not only within a song, but throughout a string of songs, and they have the unique ability to keep a 10-minute song going without once allowing any hint of boredom to enter as each member showcases his talents. Whether it's blaring mariachi horns whose blarers can do more than one could think would be possible with a trumpet; the shimmering xylophone that underscores much of what they make; the rollicking closer into which Calexico inserted bits and pieces of Manu Chao's "Desaparecido"; the echoing blare of the train that ran as background noise to one of the songs and is such a typical feature of Tucson life; or lead singer Joey Burns' tendency to switch between three guitars within the space of one song, it was a festival of sound, and a beautiful ocean of noise.

When the show was over and the feeling of catharsis wasn't showing signs of subsiding, I did what I am never inclined to do and dished out $25 for a t-shirt. I didn't regret it one bit. At midnight, I walked my bike to the Hotel Congress, and as I stood outside it watching Count Dracula trailing behind the Abominable Snowman, I tuned in to a live band playing cumbia - a genre that can't be performed quite as genuinely in most other parts of the United States - in the back patio of the hotel. And at that moment, at the stroke of midnight, I bowed my head, concealed an idiot's grin, and thought to myself that yes - sometimes, frontier life in windswept Tucson is one hell of a life to have.

Snippets from Tucson Town

Arizona is a wonder in and of itself. With a hardline governess that some have argued is a despotic, anti-Mexican, xenophobic wacko (while others have vehemently defended the smiley blonde against such nonsensical allegations), it is a state where the fun and entertaining group activity of disemboweling a cactus, stuffing it with explosives and blowing it up in a shower of fireworks and razor-sharp needles has been practiced commonly enough to warrant its own name (cactus plugging). Needless to say, this is illegal. Fortunately, there are plenty of legal things to do in Arizona. For instance, it is technically legal to blatantly flout and ignore flood warnings and bypass barricades and roadblocks set up to prevent motorists from entering a potentially (or easily) flooded stretch of road. Now, a few days here are enough to understand that Arizona is no stranger to freak weather occurrences, and a flash thunderstorm here descends as suddenly and crushingly as an obese kid falling from a treehouse. Fortunately, the State of Arizona is prepared for such acts of in(s)anity: the "Stupid Motorist Law" stipulates that any motorist whose car is found half-submerged in a newly-created raging current that used to be called X Road or Y Avenue is to suffer the financial consequences of his or her rescue - literally pay the tow truck for his or her stupidity. Again this suggests this actually happens. I suspect many of these slight violations of the law are perpetrated by overambitious pickup trucks with hydraulic suspension.

Whether landing in Tucson, in Denver or Phoenix, I noticed with astonishment that I didn't notice when the aircraft landed - one moment it was in the air, the next it had touched down - no, transitioned, to the ground. This marks a significant difference from the bouncy-castle tradition of some of the landings in the cheap European airlines I'm used to flying with. And even at the level of the nine airports I traveled through within the first week of arriving in the U.S., I noticed some things were not at all like back home. Airports, in fact, are usually the first hurdle to jump over and our first meeting with the unfamiliar. Public water fountains, for example, are a fictional presence in Poland, and every one of the 500 or so I've seen until now has seemed to scream DRINK ME. The airport also graced me with my first experience with a public payphone, which consistent mostly of me standing with the receiver in my hand, eyebrow raised and mouth hanging open, trying to figure out how in the hell this thing is supposed to work. The airport also introduced me to the American tradition of slapping a taxless price onto products, only to have the client realize with much confusion that tax is only added at the cash register and his cheap purchase is slightly less cheap in the phase of entering the brown paper bag. My disorientation at this fact was such that, when I asked why the quoted price was lower than the final price, I only thought I heard the store clerk blurt out something about "stacks". In America, you pay in stacks. Apparently this explanation satisfied me.

Turbulence at the airport is far from unknown to me, so I was grateful that this time around the only casualty of my arrival in the States was a sizable sausage a man called Groucho, Garcon or Gounash (my memory fails me) extracted from my backpack, inexplicably speaking French to me while shaking the kielbasa vigorously and menacingly pronouncing the words "Bonne arrivée" and "Welcome to America". It is a known fact that meat products aren't allowed into the United States. My humble confession on this public forum is that I had more dried sausage in my checked luggage, and that carried the additional threat of looking like several perfectly aligned sticks of dynamite. These last meat products arrived happily and are now fraternizing in the freezer. Go figure.

But ah, Tucson. My first memory connected to Tucson comes from 2000, when as a naive and innocent boy of 10 I was mad about all things that clinked like the spurs on cowboy boots and smelled like the smoky barrel of a revolver. One video game of old in particular had been filmed in Old Tucson Studios, a few miles and a world away from what Tucson is right now. Back then I pronounced it "Tuckson", the way an American would pronounce the Mexican version of the town's name. To me, today, Tucson (now correctly pronounced) is where I hang my hat, although I don't yet have a coat rack to hang it on. I'm here to start a Ph.D. in Government & Public Policy (a daunting prospect because I have never truly studied Political Science before), while several other members of the Oklahoma Orientation Crew are following their own programs, whether in Second Language Acquisition, English and Spanish, Arid Land Studies (surprise surprise, an Arizona exclusive), Public Health or any other of a wide selection of programs. We're the survivors that stumbled to the end of the beginning of the Fulbright road. In many ways (and this is true of other cases as well, rumor has it), "we Fulbrighters" enjoy some kind of preferential treatment on the part of our universities from the get-go, and the word "Fulbright" can be used effectively as a reaction tester, usually evoking some kind of admiration. Uselessly: we are only worth as much as we will prove to be throughout these coming months and/or years.

Tucson itself is not, perhaps, the Star of the South, nor does it bewitch and bedazzle with fantastic architecture. (It also seems to lack a city center, an unsurprisingly common feature of many American cities that were never forts.) What it offers is something different. Under siege on all sides by the Sonoran Desert and a whopping five mountain ranges, Tucson's specific microclimate and rogue thunderstorms undoubtedly make the Stupid Motorist Law pretty popular around here. It is also a city where the buildings lie close to the ground, providing an unspoiled skyline and some of the biggest stretches of sky I have seen in a relatively well-populated city. A vast sky also means a vast thunderstorm when it really hits the fan, and one of my first experiences was a cascading, apocalyptic wall of water battering against the windshield of the car of my wonderful host family (further praise upcoming :)), lightning ripping through the evening sky like ephemeral roots through the flesh of the earth. Not quite what you would expect of a land where even the cacti are complaining of the heat. But Tucson is also a reality quite unlike any I've experienced until now, and that is good. Difference is good. Variation is good. (And here my black-and-white vision of the world says howdy.) The giant saguaro cacti strewn all around are again symbolic of how new and different everything is. The strangling heat is not that big an annoyance because it all constitutes part of the transition - although I will probably sing a different song the next time I'm panting and slobbering like a dog pedaling all the way to the university campus in the arid blaze.

And blissfully, I'm speaking Spanish. My first interaction with a human being here involved a Salvadoran taxi driver with whom I negotiated a slight cut in the price of a midnight ride to town, and who proceeded to recount poems he had written for his mother and other people he deemed important. Of course, the greatest source of wealth here has been my host family, with whom I feel like I've been dipped in pure Mexican culture and being taught the wonders of the language of Sonora, the culture of Sonora, the people of Sonora, the fantastically well-defined food of Sonora. It is said that the only place in Tucson where you can hear more English than Spanish is the university, and by a single spree in the mall, I testify that there is much truth in that. As such, Tucson is a linguistic reawakening for me, an experience that gives that old familiar feeling of actually not having lost much at all, and the building blocks of the skills one has acquired in a language are always stashed there in some dark corner of the brain, latent, prowling, dormant like a volcano. No one's language skill ever "deteriorates" - it just takes time to bring it back up to what it was before one got disconnected from the language.

Tucson is a small city, one where you can waltz out of a store that lacks a changing room, holding a number of t-shirts, with the blessing of the store clerk to try them on in a public restroom (another word I finally have to get used to). Even if in commercial situations, trust and friendliness are not alien here, and people are far removed from the cold rush that characterizes some of the metropolises of the world. But of course, Tucson follows most of the patterns of American reality. I have never written out a check before, or used my credit card to pay for a phone call or other basic services that usually take cash overseas - and it seems like the ruffling of the checkbook, in this way or another, will be an essential part of this particular reality.

And while this post is essentially just a random, jumbled collection of musings and snippets from reality, it is also important to add that this is home. While on campus, with a prickly pear cactus looming dangerously behind me and its spines aimed straight at the part of me that sits, and while gazing out onto a boulevard of palm trees toward an unknown, distant mountain, I felt a moment of pure happiness wash over me. And while it was gone in an instant, being satisfied with where you are is a feeling that is sometimes all too rare.

In the Shadow of the Saguaro: Welcome to the Trail

The silhouette of the towering saguaro cactus is the iconic image of the American Southwest. A hundred years in the making, the full-grown saguaro reaches the size of a most definitely unclimbable tree that provides temporary housing to creatures of the day and of the night attempting to avoid getting scorched by the merciless Southwestern sun. The saguaro is unique to the Sonoran desert that straddles southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora, with shy incursions into California, and is completely absent from Texas, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, the other states historically associated with the badlands of the American South/West. In its thousand and one forms, the saguaro invariably stretches its long spear and numerous side limbs towards the sun, posing with a kind of comical and suspiciously phallic majesty. The saguaro lives all its century-plus-long life fastened to the arid ground, embedded in the desert or the sands that invade the towns of southern Arizona, soaking up what little water falls with infrequent downpours and challenging the relentless sun with stiff determination, every day. The saguaro is a symbol of surviving and thriving despite a hellishly difficult environment, defying the oppressive, destructive heat with ambition and greatness bordering on grandiosity. It knows no other reality, but has championed the art of surviving in the reality it's literally buried in. Who knew a cactus could be such an inspirational story.

The saguaro has decades to cope with the fact that it ain't budgin' and learn to stand all the punishment of the extreme conditions it's in. We humans are more mobile, and don't grow spines (although there are exceptions), and our life changes according to our determination, our stubbornness to pursue a goal and our innate capabilities - but also, we have the liberty of doing whatever the hell we want with our lives. Sometimes life does whatever the hell it wants with us. This page, starting now and probably ending at some hopefully distant point in the future, aims to provide an account of one experience that is part this, part that: the Fulbright Experience (that might be a ™).

What is the Fulbright experience and why is it special, and why the hell does this guy seem to be gearing up to writing a novel? As in any recipe that's worth its salt, the basics will come first: the Fulbright Program is an exchange program set up by a congressman with big ideas who came up with the ludicrous concept of receiving and sending out scores of people with a brain they're not afraid to use in hundreds of different directions, to hundreds of different countries, under the banner of one scholarship that would be attainable in almost every area of study imaginable. The Fulbright experience is supposed to be a forge, a training ground, a refinery of people whose ultimate aim is not fame and glory and showers of flowery praise, but contributing something useful to the world and themselves. And the idea is that their world is supposed to be Big, capital B intended. They're supposed to carry a flame and lead with their own example, and sit astride two or more cultures as the cultural ambassadors of their own nation in a foreign land. Wherever a Fulbrighter goes, those in the know will look at him as part of a competitive, barely reachable elite. The funny thing is, in my brief experience, the Fulbrighter disagrees.

When news came on a gloomy February afternoon that I had been admitted to the Ph.D. program in Government & Public Policy at the University of Arizona in Tucson, my jaw dropped so low I felt I had to collect its shattered pieces from between the floorboards. The wild card had worked. After an education in Modern Languages and a naggingly incomplete supplementary program in regionally focused Anthropology, a change of tide was in store. While I was trying to express my happiness in anything but the incoherent babble that came as a natural reaction, it dawned on me that, for the first time, I would have the opportunity to cross something off my bucket list - and that Arizona, saguaros or not, was one place I had always dreamed of. For me, Fulbright is not at all about blowing my own horn - it's an unexpected chance to do something useful. So mine is also a tale of luck, of a string of fortuitous events that have led me to this sunstruck place, feeling invigorated, recalibrated and eternally grateful for having the chance to set out on this road without necessarily having any deity to be grateful to. But my story is not unique, and my achievements pale in comparison with the experience of future engineers extraordinaires, humble circuit designers with a deep-seated power in their minds, and radiant architects with a future as bright as the flaming sun of Arizona. This blog is as much about me as it is about them, and as much about them as it is about the entirely new reality that surrounds us. Its point is at once to break down reality - from the most practical to the most abstract - to keep track of my movements and those of others, and to scribble down notes that, when looked back on, should show some kind of transformation or progress as the months (and perhaps years) go by. Also, the entries will be shorter and less rambling than this, and so should work worse as a cure for insomnia. ;)

How special is Fulbright? Someone wrote that the Fulbright difference is not worn on a sleeve, and that few Fulbrighters fully realize the long-term, road-defining, self-transforming weight of the experience on a daily basis, just like few fish think about water. They don't see themselves as the cultural ambassadors they are to be, and yet feel a responsibility associated with maintaining the kind of image that doesn't involve intentionally breaking the law, stumbling in zigzags around the street in a drunken stupor, or bringing the house and the cops down because the dBs from their house party are deregulating the elderly upstairs neighbors' heart rate. As a wise young Brit recently said, Fulbright is something different for everyone: sometimes life-changing, other times life-saving.

And aside from a good academic record, they're looking for people with a story to tell - both in past and future tense. This point was driven home at an orientation in Oklahoma, attended by a ragtag band of some 60 people representing 35 different nations - a hodgepodge bucketload of world, what Mexicans would call a revoltura cultural. Soon after things got underway and each of us realized just how far (yet close) our respective countries were from each other, I noticed how underrepresented Europe was: there was no Spain, no Italy, no Belgium, no Netherlands, no Portugal, no Switzerland, a lone Scandinavian (Swedish here), a lone Pole, a lone Brit, a lone Bulgarian, a lone Macedonian and a whopping two Ukrainians. I felt like a piece of Europe breaking off the mainland and floating away to far-off lands with the fascination and naïveté of a kid on his first visit to Disneyland, soaking up everything that was being said, restructuring my mind to envelop the whole cultural cocktail that we were, regardless of our academic profiles. For a mere four days, we interacted with each other, creating bonds meant to last, sometimes even more frantic to use the little time that was available to us to connect - not, as one of the lecturers vigorously suggested, to network and fish for people who are useful to know, but as new friends bound by riding the common Fulbright wave. There was no blatant clique-making, no childish friend-picking - it just clicked. The 46° heat, complemented by a gentle breeze that mirrored the interior of a furnace and made breathing an unpleasant addition to our daily schedule, did not deter us from launching into the Oklahoman reality and cross-cultural bridge-building. Three days and nine t-shirts later, on the day of departure, it struck me that while the organizing team did one hell of a job keeping the strings all tied together, this orientation was less about seminars, workshops and events than it was about us. The sidewalk conversations. The dormitory revelations.

Personal bonds aside, Oklahoma was also a good place to start for the sheer extremity of its differences with regard to many of our cultures. The flatlands on the way to Norman, pockmarked by motels and partially convincing Mexican food joints, were alive with pickup trucks of extra-large sizes which I have since grown accustomed to, but which at the beginning seemed more a parody of the gas-guzzling local culture than anything else. Many a proud pickup owner had tossed in a hydraulic suspension system that transformed their trusty four-wheeler into a half-baked monster truck. The university itself, stretching far and wide, was no less of a revelation, and real proof of where the thousands of dollars are being poured into: lush green squirrel-friendly parks filled the space between buildings designed in a dozen classic styles, marvels of technology abounded (including an ever-popular hand-wash machine with two holes that might well have been a recycling bin after heavy tuning or a convenient hand amputator), and the famous university stadium was an elaborate maze and a more convincing shrine than most places of religious worship I have seen. (It is also worth noting that it must be peculiar to have one's own statue cast in bronze and standing in a public place at 25 years of age, as some of the university's accomplished athletes do.) We all saw it, we all appreciated it, and then we dispersed - but not to become anonymous to one another.

Each of us is different, each of us will serve a different purpose, and all of us are peppered throughout the whole country like randomly dropped marbles that keep on rolling with a sense of mission and that familiar electric, tingling thrill that accompanies the start of a new adventure, one that may make us veer off onto a road we never thought we would follow. The Arizonan saguaro is endemic to the southern, barren, parched reaches of the United States, and does not venture away. But Ann Arbor, Oklahoma, Boston, Berkeley, Ohio, North Carolina and a hundred other places all have their own utterly unique fauna and flora with surprising attributes that the saguaro will never know. It is in connecting the uniqueness and diversity of many that the strength of the whole makes itself known.

Loud and clear.