In Which We Are Arranged On A Gray Rag Of Rotted Calico

Near the Inlet

by REBECCA HUVAL

My family heard news of capsized boats in Florida’s Jupiter Inlet, but kept motoring through that aquamarine keyhole to the Atlantic. Its insidious current swallowed revelers from the adjacent park and overturned nautical professionals. Indifferent to irony, the water lapped up wading tourists—and their rescuers. Several years ago near the inlet, my mother’s friend with decades of scuba diving experience drowned.

There’s something sinister in that tropical wind. Elizabeth Bishop recognized the mercilessness of Florida’s seascape, despite its grace—the dead oysters that “strew white swamps with skeletons” and the seashells “arranged as on a gray rag of rotted calico.” Like a siren, the state with the prettiest name draws admirers only to ensnare them in its maw. As a child growing up in South Florida, I flung myself at the crushing waves barbed with jellyfish, shielded by a sense of youthful immortality. At dawn my mother and I plowed our kayaks through the surf to arrive at the placid horizon, shadowed by spinner sharks that I suppressed from my thoughts. We coasted through the swamp waters of the Loxahatchee, eye-level with alligators. Once, my 12-year-old brother forgot about gravity and tried to kayak up a small manmade waterfall in the Loxahatchee River, capsized, and forced my mother to rescue him as water pounded the boat down on his head. 

We didn’t always walk away unscathed. When I was kneeboarding, water pooled over my board, and as the boat sped up, the tip pounced on my forehead. Blood masked my face. My father drove me to the ER and, as a doctor, he stitched a slanted Frankenstein line on the left side of my forehead. Hardly chastened, I started 5th grade proud to wear bobbed hair and a battle scar. But later, my brother suffered more acutely. While he was wakeboarding (the equivalent of snowboarding behind a boat), he lost control of the board and simultaneously sliced his knee and popped out a front tooth by the root. The brackish intracoastal waters infected his knee badly, and my physician parents swabbed out the wound daily. I remember his screams. He was too ashamed to smile and reveal his fake front tooth for years, and still errs on the side of concealment though his teeth are immaculate.

Karen Russell has joined the pantheon of Florida writers who chronicle its treachery and machismo. Her 13-year-old protagonist of Swamplandia!, Ava, wrestles alligators. Like me, she was a fearless girl who courted Florida’s deadliest features and was proud to overcome them. Like me, she often went too far, like when she nearly had her feet snatched by an alligator. There’s a beauty in this danger that Russell and Bishop both acknowledge. In her poem named after the state, Bishop ends with that same iconic creature: “The alligator, who has five distinct calls: friendliness, love, mating, war, and a warning—/ whimpers and speaks in the throat/ of the Indian Princess.” For Bishop, the spirit of oppressed Native Americans lives on in the alligator, sublimating Florida’s shameful past into something lovely, dangerous, and unknowable.

Floridians don’t always heed the alligator’s warning. In 2007, Justo Padron was breaking into a car at the Miccosukee casino west of Miami when he heard police sirens. He tried to escape by jumping into a nearby lake with a sign warning potential swimmers: “Danger Live Alligators.” His dead body was found the next day perforated with teeth marks. Death awaits the criminal and the innocent, the forewarned and the oblivious alike. The year before, 28-year-old Yovy Suarez Jiménez stopped along her nightly jog to dangle her feet by a canal. Construction workers later found her floating body, and her arms were discovered in the belly of a 9’ 6” alligator.

My mother’s friend, Eva Schwartz, drowned surrounded by her friend and her fiancé. She was snapping underwater photos of fish, their “shapes like full-blown roses/ stained and lost through age.” Eva was a nurse in the pediatric ER where my mother worked. She spent most of her free moments diving and told my mother what would later seem ominous: “I would rather be underwater than above water.” She signaled to her diving partners that she was going to the surface, but they never saw her alive again. The autopsy results didn’t reveal why such an experienced diver would drown.

Last December, my brother once again glided on his wakeboard through the mangrove-lined intracoastal near our childhood home. He lifted the board in the air and sailed across the boat’s bumpy wake with ease.

As we nervously looked on, my mother confessed that his leg had been so badly infected by the brackish water, “he nearly had to have it amputated.” When everyone pressured me to get back in the water, I refused. My childish bravery has left me. I recognize Florida for what it is—a place where, as Bishop writes, “Thirty or more buzzards are drifting down, down, down,/ over something they have spotted in the swamp.” A paradise riddled with peril. When we reached the Jupiter Inlet, we turned the boat around.

Rebecca Huval is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. You can find her twitter here, and her tumblr here. She last wrote in these pages about her life in Mexico.

In Which We Open A Mexican Time Capsule

photo by katie day good

Returning to Something

by REBECCA HUVAL

Just before I moved to Mexico City, I listened to Os Mutantes for the first time. As I drove around the Montana countryside with my parents, ignoring their protests to my imminent departure, Os Mutantes' psychedelic samba inflated my dreams of what the next year would bring. I had swirling visions of boozy costume parties and dancing in glass towers above the city with faceless friends I hadn't met yet. Somehow, it all really did happen. 

"Ah Minha Menina" was my battle cry. Jorge Ben's nasal sneering made me feel aggressive enough to smack down my own fears. The cheery Beatles-influenced Portuguese helped me to realize how the things I love might be translated into a different culture. Only later did I realize that Ben is singing about how dreams can materialize real happiness.

Cheirando a alegria (smelling happiness)

Pois eu sonhei (because I dreamed)

E acordei pensando nela (and I woke up thinking of her)

I had no idea where I would live in Mexico City and no job, but felt compelled to go. I had just broken up with a boyfriend and was adrift in the states. So my dad drove me to the Helena airport at four in the morning, when suddenly I got a case of food poisoning and stopped at most of the Lucky Lil’s Casino Gas Stations along US-12. Instead of Montezuma’s Revenge, I had his Warning not to go to Mexico. But I left the next day. On the plane, I blared “Ah Minha Menina” in my headphones as if drilling determination straight into my brain, and watched the Mexico City smog give way to the date palms along Paseo de la Reforma, where I would soon make my home.

photo by alfred megally

Now anchored in the U.S., I've been searching for other musical relatives of The Beatles that could transport my fantasies. There’s even an adjective to describe The Beatles’ many kin: Beatlesque. We already know about The Monkees and Oasis, but I’ve uncovered a few international examples that translate a childhood sound into something uncanny — in the Freudian sense of something familiar, yet strange.

Czerwone Gitary was the first example I came across. For many of their songs, this 1960s Polish band’s four-piece sound is so wholesome and sunshiny, you almost glare at the brightness. But the songs I connect with are their balladic Eleanor Rigby’s and Yesterday’s: "Kwiaty We Wlosach" and "Anna Maria." The first song in particular fills you with the kind of nostalgia that weighs down your bones. The singer Krzysztof Klenczon slouches from flat to resolved, a lonely guitar riff whines, and the Eastern European melody echoes as if in an alleyway.

I searched online for a translation of “Kwiaty We Wlosach” lyrics to find out why the song feels so bittersweet, and was perplexed by a barrage of pictures featuring women in elaborate floral updos. The lyrics answered all my questions:

Flowers in her hair ruffled in the wind,

So why go back to those years?

Lost days will not find you anything,

Without memories sometimes it’s easier to live, not returning to anything.

What a punch in the head, or the hair flower, as it may be. This song warned me specifically from trying to recreate memories of Mexico in my quest for the global Beatlesque. Why dwell over memories when “lost days will not find you anything”? Because, as Godard wrote in Pierrot Le Fou, “Life may be sad, but it is always beautiful.” An echoey alleyway is occasionally where we want to be.

Ironically, in singing this song, the narrator is disobeying his own rule of abandoning his past. The music video shows the bandmates (with sideburned mop-tops!) filing 16-mm film canisters in some sort of warehouse. They shuffle through recordings of lost moments in time and stare wistfully into the distance. 

It’s true that we can’t resuscitate our memories, and that in trying, we only disappoint ourselves with a funhouse distortion of what happened. In reminiscing, what I want most of all is to feel the way I once felt. I have never returned to Mexico, partially out of fear that I will discover how irretrievable those emotions are: The naked loneliness I felt in my first week there, sobbing in a hostel bunk bed, when all the buildings seemed bleak and streaked with algae. Then the inexplicable surprise of finding friends as it seemed like the whole city surged into technicolor — the flush of purple Jacaranda trees and a school bus splattered with brilliant paint.

I might never go back to Mexico City, but I will continue to listen to “Ah Minha Menina” and search for other iterations of the Beatlesque. The only true emotional time capsule is music.

Pop Yeh Yeh was the next Fab Four descendant that gripped me. This 1960s movement captures the whimsical feeling of Os Mutantes, despite its violent historical backdrop. Singapore seceded from Malaysia in 1965, but during the same decade, the two countries were united in their love of psychedelic rock. Amidst modernization and race riots between Malay, Indian, and Chinese populations, Pop Yeh Yeh somehow flourished. A Malaysian journalist coined the term “Pop Yeh Yeh” to describe the Beatlesque sound, as in “She loves you,/ Yeh, Yeh, Yeh.”

Last year, the compilation Pop Yeh Yeh: Psychedelic Rock From Singapore And Malaysia 1964-1970: Vol. 1” brought overdue attention to the movement. The uncanny really rings true with these songs: They are cheerful, yet haunting. Surf-rocky guitar reverb accompanies Middle Eastern vocal embellishments, as in Roziah Latiff and The Jayhawkers’ rendition of “Aku Kecewa” and Orkes Nirwana’s “Shorga Idaman.” Roziah’s and Orkes’s mournful female vocals create a sense of unrequited love, much like the great Middle Eastern divas Fayrouz and Umm Kulthum. Orkes trills on devastating high notes.

The California surf rock makes me feel grounded in the current state I call home, while the expressive Bollywood singing beckons elsewhere. These songs are cinematic in the way that Os Mutantes was for me. They conjure up scenes of new possibility, the most cheerful of which is “Budi Bahasa” by The Rhythm Boys and Adnan Othman. It also brings back the way I felt when salsa dancing on top of the tallest skyscraper in Mexico, Torre Mayor, with my motley team of Mexican friends — Fulbright scholars, an architect with an impressive moustache, an ex-Mormon, and several stoners among them. I felt sweaty and loved.

After finding Pop Yeh Yeh, I heard Jacques Durtronc on the speakers of a sun-washed cafe in San Francisco. I stopped what I was working on to dance discretely in my seat. The 1960s French singer dripped with sarcasm, and was accompanied by light doo-wop background vocals that could only have been a joke. When I later watched the music video, my suspicions were confirmed.

Jacques Dutronc's laconic style in 1966 foreshadowed the social satire of "Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (1968). In the music video of “Les Playboys,” Durtronc comments on the French bourgeoisie. Ladies with enormous sunhats smoke cigarette holders as long as batons, and men scarf down caviar. Dutronc laughs at it all with his blasé expression and cheeky dance moves, such as clapping with just his index fingers (you really have to watch it). 

There are playboys by profession

Dressed by Cardin, shod by Carvil

Who drive around the beach and town in Ferrari

Who shop at Cartier as well at Fauchon

You think I'm jealous? No, not at all!

The song is also reminiscent of “Rocky Raccoon” in its regional exaggeration, as the songs amplify the musical signifiers of the rural U.S. or France. At the end of the song, Jacques neighs like a horse in a glissando that apes classic French singers like Edith Piaf. His song mocks our simplistic understanding of French-ness — and me specifically for wanting to exoticize The Beatles. Yet I love it and the other Beatlesque songs I’ve discovered all the same.

Still, nothing Beatlesque will grip me in the same way Os Mutantes’ "Ah Minha Menina" did and does. Even when I hear it on lame car commercials, I’m transported to Montana and Mexico City all at once, to the quixotic girl I was.

On one emblematic night, I traveled from Mexico City to Paracho, five hours west, to visit the family of a guitar maker I had met in the Ciudadela craft market. I wanted to write a story about his deep-rooted guitarrero traditions. At night, I boarded a bus full of Ciudadela crafters, and around three in the morning, we arrived at his family’s home. The guitarrero asked his two grandchildren to sleep in one twin bed while I took the other. For most of that night, the two boys snickered at the crazy güera (white girl) trying to sleep in the kid’s room.

I felt brave and vivacious, listening to “Ah Minha Menina” and traipsing about the world without the tethers of caution. I can still inhabit that boundlessness through music, where dreamscapes are the places where I live out my most daring exploits. But when I turn the music off and remember my life in Mexico, I laugh like those boys at the daring, wonderful things I did: crazy güera.

Rebecca Huval is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in San Francisco. You can find her twitter here, and her tumblr here.

photo by rhona taylor

"Catfish" - Waxahatchee (mp3)

"I Think I Love You" - Waxahatchee (mp3)