Paco de Lucia

Paco de Lucia, the Master of Flamenco guitar has passed.

66. Playing on the beach with his children.

Born into a humble family on December 21, 1947, de Lucia grew into a musical giant who blended jazz, pop and classical influences with the folk tradition of flamenco.

He said his father, a singer of gypsy origin, introduced him to music and encouraged him to practice for hours.

"The gypsies are better since they listen to music from birth. If I had not been born in my father's house I would be nobody. I don't believe in spontaneous genius," the guitarist once said.

From the age of 12 de Lucia was out playing and earning at flamenco "tablaos" -- the intimate bars that are home to the authentic form of the tragic gypsy lament and dancing.

Read more

Duende

She had duende, a fundamentally untranslatable Spanish word, literally meaning possessing spirit.

It signified a charisma manifested by certain performers - flamenco dancers, bullfighters, shamans and weavers overwhelming their audience with the feeling they were in the presence of a mystical power.

The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca produced the best description of duende: “Years ago, during a flamenco dance contest in Jerez, an old woman of eighty, competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, carried off the prize by simply raising her arms, throwing back her head, and stamping the platform with a single blow of her heel; but in that gathering of muses and angels, of beautiful forms and lovely smiles, the dying duende triumphed as it had to, dragging the rusted blades of its wings along the ground.”

She’d followed a tribal trail to Lacilbula where, after weaving morning pages, she returned to the Rio Guadalete below Grazalema flowing from the Sierras to Cadiz.

The battle of Guadalete was fought on July 19, 711 when 7,000 Yemenis and Berbers led by Tariq ibn Ziyad defeated the Visigoth King Roderick.

Rio needed cleaning. Thick autumn yellow, green and brown leaves trapped between rocks clogged river sections. Liquid backed up to mountains beneath fast gray storm clouds. Using her walking stick, she clamored down a slippery slope and worked her way up the Rio clearing sticks, leaves and stones blocking the flow.

One leaf could do a lot of damage.

There were green maple, silver aspen, brown oak leaves. Old black water logged decayed colors danced with fresh green and orange pigments.

She was the unimpeded flow. A child playing near water in her dream world. Serenity and sweet water music with rock stepping-stones, small pools and meditation zones where she felt peaceful. Bird music darted up the canyon.

She cleared leaves long past twilight, staggered up the muddy incline facing the Rio in silent gratitude and performed healing chants next to a bare Aspen tree. She passed a ceramic Virgin Mary statue behind a locked gate illuminated by melting red candles in a rocky crevice.

Mary’s blood flowed over jagged dolomite gray stones flecked with green moss. She collected a hemoglobin sample for weaving, crossed a stone bridge and returned home. She lit candles, started a fire, enjoying a deep breath before bleeding river words dyeing loom fabric.

The loom was her instrument of transformation and wool the hair of the sacrificial beast which women, by a long and cultured tribal process, transformed into clothing. Weaving skirts the sacred and the violent. 

Her power at the loom was both derided and celebrated, transforming like birth into a language and symbol, a metaphor with new, positive ends and duende.

A Century is Nothing

Subject to Change

after morocco

Well before sunrise in March 2002 on his last morning in Morocco, before seeing a sunburst orange ball on skylines flying toward Amsterdam, west to Seattle, and east over the Cascades; before leaving Sad’s family furniture factory home in Casablanca, a scribe, who’d been up all night anticipating another Exit, took a gigantic shit over a hole in the ground before sweeping a sweet smelling kid’s sanitized paper wipe over his skinny little ass.

He poured water from an old green bottle into the holy plumbing system, waking the dead on their life highway crowded with whiners, complainers and ghosts, before stumbling through darkness with Rex the German shepherd on his heels.

The toilet paper was crap in Spain. In Morocco it was nonexistent.

It felt good to blast yesterday out of his system. He knew all the bilingual time and surprises were worth it. Miniature adventures were a refreshing drink of water, a desperate invigorating breath during a climb for a clear perspective.

Slanting dawn light wrapped tentacles around an anonymous scribe gathering unfiltered and uncensored evidence of post 911 fear. Light cut the sky severing white villages, crude broken stone paths, scarred Moorish brown doors, ageless idle men, shifty eyed one-armed merchants and sad-eyed unemployed dissatisfied immigrants surviving with poverty and despair.

The scribe traversed light, space, and time intervals near sixteen blue, yellow, and green starred mosaic vaulted arches. He kissed everyone on cheeks, shaking hands, confirming an exile's flight.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with hesitancy, this delayed boarding card question.

Their visa stamp bled through indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses, and woven fabric designed by millions of minimum wage children in twisted alleys without a visa. They needed a bread visa, a scrap of meat visa, a tea visa and a chance visa. They craved sweet green tea to mix life’s colors with dust.

The plane taxied down the runway. Rainbows illuminated western clouds. The moon danced in cobalt blue sky. Above clouds, thunderheads formed a white billowing future infinite dream machine of air and water molecules.

Zooming over Canadian ice fields toward heightened U.S. military airport security and stateside psychosis after 9/11, global FEAR merchants had a never-ending consignment sale.

A Century is Nothing.

Children's story hour

He was in Morocco on 9/11. He didn't take possession of that event. Fate said hello, hah, hah, hah. 

After two months he shifted to Cadiz, Spain with Omar, a blind Touareg writer.

His forward observer position allowed him to witness young and old sexually repressed Catholic couples steal kisses at night under yellow street lamps. They hid in recessed Moorish doorways getting a quick feel. Passion with a purpose.

Meals with a Gypsy family timed down Gades days with a simple breakfast of toast, butter, jam or muesli, a lunch of thick soup, fresh salad, bread, water, and a main course at 2:30 p.m. He read Don Quixote...true history...the crux of fiction, harder to read than fantasy. The world of floating images.

It was shifts, frequencies, and transitions moving from pre-terror North America to North Africa and old Southern European worlds. Everyone was connected by history in the making: Phoenician, Romans, Berbers haunting conquests, establishing bases in Europe, Moors fighting Christians, morphing cellular structures.

In Andalucía citizens exchanged belief windows, values, attitudes, construction projects, and 3,000 years of icon free Arabian art. It was about agriculture, water, light, form, and substance. Equality was the word at a Muslim burial exhibit at the Mondragon Palace in Ronda.

Cadiz was founded by Phoenicians in 1100 BC. They called it Gadir and traded amber and tin. It was a Roman navel base.

Greeks and Phoenicians introduced the potter’s wheel, writing, olive tree, donkey and hen to Spain. They replaced iron with bronze. Metals became currencies. People developed agriculture as growing populations built walls, towers, and castles for security. Romans contributed aqueducts, temples, theaters, circuses, and baths. They gave the Iberian Peninsula Castilian language based on 2,000-year old Latin.

Their desire, wanderlust and greed established communities to satisfy their impulse for cuisine, sex, music, and trade expanded their nation-state.

The Museo de Cadiz was filled with Roman artifacts. Humans wandered through archeological epoch discoveries from settlements in Gades along the coast extending inland to Seville and Cordoba.

Travellers discovered estuaries, towns, villages, isolated tight white pueblos and rooms full of coins, maps, heads, pottery and faces. They discovered vases, dynasties, ruins, Roman legion armor, burial sites, aqueduct maps, temples, theaters, masks, busts, sculptures, marble, glass, and utensils.

Three million-year old human remains slept in stoned chambers. Sharp sewing bones rested in dust.

Scientists collected anger, desire, jealousy, pride, and ignorance. Minute grains of mica. Archaeologists and mobile blood donation units explored rain forests and hacked through Angkor Wat jungles discovering isolated oceanic islands above simmering volcanic eruptions.

ACIN

STC

The skin I Live in

A film by Pedro Almodovar.

All the thematic elements your little heart desires.  A meditation on memory, grief, violence, degradation, and survival.

words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skin_I_Live_In

images: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EolQSTTTpI4