Bosnian Rainbows: Blasts from the Past and Scaffolds of the Future, A Los Angeles Experience
by Armando Ortiz
“Perhaps when you watch all your dream lovers
die
You’ll decide that you need
a real one.” – Townes Van Zandt
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| Bosnian Rainbows |
A few days ago I went to see the
Bosnian Rainbows perform at the First Unitarian Church, which is located on 8th
Street, a few hundred feet east of Vermont Avenue; it was the first time in
many years that I’d walked down Vermont let alone 8th. The band is made up of Omar Rodriguez Lopez, guitarist and overall excellent artist, Deantoni Parks, avant-garde drummer, Teresa Suarez a.k.a Teri Gender Bender, vocalist and performer, and keyboardist Nicci Kasper. Before that I
had been waiting for my friend at the corner of Wilshire and Vermont, a major
transit point in the city, sitting on one of the benches while reading Bolano’s
The Third Reich. On this intersection
there is now a subway stop and I can no longer see what it is that was here at
this crossroads a few years back. In the past I’ve waited for friends by
stations like this one, but outside of Los Angeles in other countries, so I did
not think much of the experience. Nonetheless, sitting on one of the benches
near the exit I got to see the flow of people; all kinds bodies coming and
going, resembling the flow of an airport runway and a conveyor belt of
suitcases being loaded and unloaded that were students, daily workers and quasi
professionals, all under different hues of skin and wearing different kinds of clothing
exiting and entering the underground station. Finally, my friend, Scott,
arrived and we walked to the venue. As we made our way there we discussed Lev Vygotsky’s
Thought and Language, with him
explaining how author argued that language, in a sense, makes us conform to
certain boundaries, and identified the difference between teaching, instructing,
and learning from experience, yet as we moved toward our destination, I could
not help to recall the many times I had walked through this part of Los
Angeles, but many years ago, as a child. Hoover Elementary school is only a few
blocks away, and as I reached my destination I also remembered walking with my
uncle around this area, and looking for a wedding ceremony that he had been
invited to attend, and was immediately transported to that day where we
aimlessly walked around trying to find the address, it seemed like a distant
dream, since these days we use GPS. As we were about to make a left on 8th
street my memories took me back to the day I bought a Chuck Norris action
figure from a small toy store that was down the street, and I also recalled how
I’d walk back to my house every day after-school. The duplex where we lived was
located on Berendo Street off of Olympic Boulevard.
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| First Unitarian Church, Los Angeles |
Today the streets were lined by a
caravan of parked cars, and the movement was unusually heavy for being Los
Angeles. Though, in contrast to the past the traffic hustle and bustle of
people was significantly more, though not a new thing for this particular area
of the city. Across the street from where I waited for my friend the massive
steel scaffolds surrounded the metal infrastructure that in a few months will
become luxury apartments for the new urban people that will quickly fill the empty
rooms and walk on its marble courtyards. The residents that once called this
district will most likely be displaced in the coming years, due to the rising
costs of living in the city. The church, had a tall four sided tower that pointed
to the sky and iron gates at the entrance that quickly let the people that were
waiting in line. I doubt there ever was a line of church goes waiting to go
inside to hear the sermon, but life is strange. As we entered we saw the beer garden
that was located on the brick tiled courtyard, the sun’s lingering light was
slowly disappearing, the sky was now a faint yellow and the flood lights were
slowly beginning to emanate their electric white glow.
I had once gone to a church that had
been converted into a club in Shanghai, China, but I’d never been to church to
see a rock band, so this was a new experience. Like any typical Sunday service,
you had the early arrivals, the dedicated people who get to sit close to the
stage, and get to choose the right spot where they will be able to see everything
that is going on the platform at their preferred angle, taking me back to the
days when I’d arrive to church and see the early arrivals kneeling on the
ground with their elbows resting on the red upholstered benches, while others
were reaching to the sky like baby hoping to get picked up by a loved one. They
were praying for something, maybe for some type of relief or a request, but we
were there to get good seats and have a good listening spot. Soon the lights
dimmed and Sister Crayon, the first band, began their performance and gave an
excellent show.
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| Kali |
As soon as the opening band was done, the stage
lights began turning purple and the shadows neon green. Standing there and checking out the band one
went from being in a live music performance to drifting from a Sunday sermon into
an opera experience of the netherworld. Teresa Suarez's dance resembled Kali, with
movements that mimicked the ancient deity that destroys all men, making you
wonder where she had come from, definitively an outer space being possessed her
body. The wails that emanated from her larynx became calls to the other world and
opened up the gates to the gods of old. I thought, what if there was
reincarnation, and we returned to this earth, and then remembered the words
Marcus Aurelius saying that the good thing about life is that we only have one,
all of us have one life and that is it, and again I wondered, what if we had to
return to this world as a punishment, like Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, who
returns only to live in a world of personal nightmares and into a place where
everyone was a not allowed to enter the gates of heaven. The image of the
mountain people coming down to the village and selling their trinkets amidst
the rain and cool weather immediately came to mind and at that point a high
pitch holler resonated with me and I was there, with the lights flooding the
stage and the audience, purple everywhere, with shadows of green. Then a mental
image came to life and I saw a series of wooden crosses in the middle of the
desert matching the still life photography of Rulfo.
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| Juan Rulfo Photography |
A particular song of theirs,
“Morning Sickness,” made me think of the people we meet and wondered if we ever
mutually think of each other at any time of the day. Relationships come to an
end and there is always an aspect about a person that though not present is
still within our memories and within our psyche. She might no longer be next to
you or beside you when you wake up but the faint traces of her smell still
lingers. Sometimes though, we think a connection has been made, maybe we are stuck
reliving a Garcia Marquez short story, where we only meet our lovers in dreams
and wake up to a world of solitude. We might in fact be more selective with the
people we choose to remember and the type of outlooks that they might have of
the world. Still the very thought that to another person we might not have been
adequate or perhaps someone in our life was not able to fill a space in our
long term memory might be more telling of the things we find to have value.
True beauty, in this sense, is like our memories, selective of the things we
wish or have no choice but to recall. As this carousel of thoughts and memories
went round and round my mind I returned to my temporal moment, and took a sip
of beer. The ceiling was high enough that wails seemed to reach the skies. The
haunting cries of a distant love and of a birth untold that yearns to grab hold
of something tangible was my impression of the voice that performed on stage.
Soon the roof disappeared and all one could see was a collection of stars in
the middle of a forest of thoughts, and for a moment the distant galaxy that’s
closest to earth came into focus. In between this musical ceremony, we took
swigs of our beer, and the rhythmic, and hypnotic dance of the guitar and the
base became an old ritual dance that included a synthesizer, and yet I was
there in a spot that I had been and walked by many years ago, listening to a
band that I’d wanted to see live since the first news of their visit to Los
Angeles. Bosnian Rainbows momentarily transported everyone to a world of music, universal sound
waves and merged with the resonance of the planets. It was a good show indeed.
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