This affair starts early.
Usually, people wait till dark to do their exorcisms, but this bunch has already laid their body in the street in front of a business and are stuffing papers down its pants.
In a world of camera phones, nothing goes un-noticed and un-reported. These participants don’t care if people are watching. It is probable this is a replica of their boss and they are, as a group, telling him what they think of him. It takes a few matches before smoke comes with fire close behind.
There is something eerie about seeing a body set on fire, even if It is a make believe body.It calls up images from the Mid East where real people are set on fire, heads cut off, and people blow each other up with explosives..
This bloodletting will be over tonight and tomorrow shops will close, streets and sidewalks will be hosed down, and people will spend time with family.
Exorcisms are best finished quickly, and remembered for a long long time.
While parents like to see their children participating in this parade, it helps their children to see their parents next to them on the parade route. When the parade comes to a stop, waiting for something ahead to clear up, families hug each other, adjust their costumes, and wave at spectators along the street.
The adults dancing today do it because they want to. Their energy expended is palpable. You can see them breathing hard as they spin, twirl, lock hands and kick up their feet in old time folk dances. They put their hands on their hips and look down at their feet, catch their breath while they can.
Dancing, their movements are precise, yet flowing, and the old time costumes are colorful, proper, and hand sewn, some passed down through families..
It is a shame that what used to be common is now worn and brought out only once a year, for a parade.
Returning to the past is like trying to stuff a Genie back into a bottle.
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It warms adult’s hearts to see children doing dances they did themselves when they were little.
There is always concern by one generation that the following generation is going to hell,but traditions do get passed down and kept alive.
These children are wearing traditional clothes from the past, but, at home, these days, they are all about choosing their own clothes, friends, and attitudes, much to their parent’s chagrin.
This celebration makes me feel years younger than I think I am.
Watching kids reminds me there is still plenty of life for adults to discover too, even after they think they know everything about everything.
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Gilberto is trying a new reed. Sue is playing clarinet instead of soprano sax. A different bass player is sitting in. It is Wednesday, the middle of the week.
At showtime, it doesn’t matter how many hours you practice, how much theory you know, how many times you have played a song.
Live jazz is irrevocable. You can’t erase what you play, You are the bottom line.
When the light turns green you play.
When a song is over, it is over, except for a few bars that resonate in hearts that causes people to whistle your melody as they walk home in the dark.
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This morning there is a Christmas concert in progress across the Rio Tomebamba, in Cuenca, Ecuador.
Two young boys have decided they aren’t going to walk up or down the river to either of the bridges to cross so they roll up pant legs, leave tennis shoes on, grab sticks for support, and cross the river with only a few rocks to balance on.
When they see me they wave.
The voices of the choir gives them a heavenly send off.
Catching these moments is like catching butterflies with holes in your net.
This band is from Otavalo, Ecuador and is playing on a corner by the Cuenca New Cathedral.
Dressed in costume, the musicians play, sing, dance,and pose with a European tourist who wants his wife to take a photo of him playing an Andean pipe. Managers and friends sell band CDs and crafts on the sidewalk in front of the performers as they entertain.
While the group is performing, a policeman asks for the band’s permit papers, stamped and signed.
The bands leader produces their authorization,and, moments later, the cop returns papers to him and walks away, satisfied.
Winay, is energetic, surprisingly contemporary, and draws a crowd.
We all like to be entertained and when these musicians dance they look like feathered dervishes drawing circles on the sidewalk with their toes and bare feet.
The spirit that makes them dance captures us too.
The police man, like all government officials, satisfied with seeing proper paperwork in order, has moved on.
I see him, emotionless, slipping a traffic ticket under the windshield wipers of a nearby delivery van, illegally parked by the flower market.
Laws, after all, are laws.
If we don’t have our laws, aren’t we the same as savages dancing to multiple Gods, under sparkling stars ,on dark windblown mysterious nights?
This evening we are treated by an American jazz musician who has a home in Cuenca. She slips into the Jazz Society club with her instrument in its case, takes a seat and listens to the band, puts her horn together, finds a reed, and joins the boys for the concluding song of the first set.
Musicians don’t have to speak English or Spanish or French or Swahili. Jazz has its own language, history, theory, super stars. If the girls in the audience a few tables away from me would have quit gossiping in the corner while she soloed, I could have heard the music even better.
When music is on fire, you shouldn’t be doing things that put it out.
Quality is quality is quality.
Sue swung the whole room to her way of playing, and, being a gracious lady, was endearing.
Lots of jazz musicians find better living and playing conditions outside the United States where jazz was created.
Jazz has always been an equal opportunity music, but all audiences for it are not created equal.
By the New Cathedral, on a cloudy afternoon, these performers stand motionless.
Then, they move and beckon to a little girl to pose for a photo with them with her mom. After the photo, they blow them a parting kiss and return to their rigid pose. They work for tips, depending on generosity to fill the bowl on the ground at their feet.
What is unseen is that this little girl, twice earlier, walked to the bowl, bent down to take a ten dollar bill until her mother called her back.
I should have left coins.
Temptation, especially for kids, is never far away, and succumbing is all too human.
Ecuador has a new changing young generation.
A still small number of its children have adopted the music, talk, style of other big city children around the world. There is graffiti in Cuenca. You see some tattoos, some ear piercings and dyed hair, torn levi’s with holes in them, a liking to turn raucous rap way way up.
At a Gazebo in Parque Calderone, where adult protesters recently yelled against government tyranny, these kids are peacefully practicing dance moves. Each individual on the stage has his own routine, his own steps, his own personality.
Ecuador is a country where you watch young people taking the arm of mom or grand mom as they walk down a bumpy sidewalk. It is a country where older men, and women, still wear traditional attire of their village, bright skirts, black hats, braided hair, stoic looks.
This new generation moves us into new times with a few bumps and grinds..
There are, however, worse things these kids could be doing than dancing in the park on a Monday night.
If only all generational change were this easy.
When people are shut out from having a say about what happens to them, by those they have elected, protests are inevitable.
Some protests move into chaos and violence,some are contained, others are snuffed out like the tip of a burning candle.
I make myself invisible, slip away, and don’t get home till late because streets are blocked off, going and coming.
Protests seldom lead to solutions, but they create emotions.
Governments can be toppled on emotion.
No government exists that will give us what we want without taking away what we need.
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