La Musica

Here are the lyrics to the song that accompanies our Train float. This song will be sung about once out of every four or five song played during the parade. The other songs will be traditional conjunto songs from the Valley.

Jane and Gary Norian and I met yesterday to work on the music (OK, Gary and Jane worked on the music and I just said I like it). Of course, if you have been reading the blog, this will make sense, since the float is based on that old photo of four bandits who captured an old steam engine and we're gonna have them represented by four pinatas. Imagine Mexican accordion ballad, 12 string guitars, fast pace, drama, etc.):

FOUR YOUNG BANDITOS

Four young banditos took over a train
They went looking for treasure
But weren’t expecting the rain.

One of them said “revolution’s on high”
But he murmured to himself, “I don’t want to die!”

The second young bandit
He spun and he spoke -
“I wanted a life
For a broken cowpoke.
But I’m just a grave robber
No pride on my part.
I’m only the driver
This ain’t no fresh start.”

The third bandit he cried
From his horse and his throat
“I wanted to love
Ever note that I wrote.
But I’m never a poet,
always a clown -
Just a green cowpoke laughed out of town."

I’m the last young bandito
I’m so sad to say.
If my mother only knew
She would die before the day...

So I thought of my mother
and just walked away.

If you need a bandito
And you want a new start
Just go your own way
I’ll take my own part


Too many boxcars
Too much old smoke
Too many lawmen
In love with the rope

Four young banditos went looking for fame
Each whispered to me, “I’m sorry I came.”


Actually, these lyrics have changed a tiny bit, but you get the idea. Jane is on board for singing it during the parade and I've asked Rey, the guy who runs the Conjunto Hall of Fame in San Benito, to line up Gloria Jean and Raymond, who were on last year's float. Gloria is probably the best female accordion player in the State of Texas, no bullshit, and she's no where near 20. Raymond is amazing on the 12 string bass guitar (the baja sexto) but is also pretty crazy at hard-core rock rifts on a stratocaster.

I will know in the next couple of days if they can do it but Rey thinks they will. He also thinks that the whole Conjunto Estrella band might be available (Gloria Jean and Raymond play in that band). We'll see.


Here's the band in a prior performance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8at46Ws2Cjo

There's also an awesome clip on youtube of Gloria Jean playing a solo with Lil Joe y La Famila, perennial Latin Grammy Winners, and blowing Lil Joe's audience away. She shows up at the 4:45 mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yGy4vrlWuk

And another of her doing an old Freddy Fender song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZjw9LiQRww&NR=1

I asked Gary to reassure me -- as he was dolling up the bandito song -- that the band could learn the song quickly, but when I told him a little about them, he just dismissed my concerns.  There shouldn't be any problems with that.

I also found the perfect bushel basket in Houston to serve as the smokestack for the locomotive (and to house the smoke machine which I now proudly possess).

Jane and Kristy and Rachel are in Mission on Friday to start the decoration of the floats. Yay!!!

Two Auctions and a Skinned Boiler

So Friday we were all set to go to work and a friend calls and says that there are storage shed auctions all day long.  Judd and I set out to look.  Judd wanted things he could resell.  I wanted to find diaries, great photographs, and Picassos.  

This lady went looking for a new toe.

 But this is all we found.

So we went back to work, struggling to get into the spirit.

The boiler was complete on the outside but needed its first layer of skin.

Forget it.  Time for a late lunch.  We went to a place called Pepe's, where no one spoke a word of English.

However, the food was SO MUCH BETTER THAN EL PATIO!!  (We got it to go.)
  

Danny was still working on the motorized wheels.  The little paint mixer motors didn't have enough power to work the wheels, which we estimate to be about 20+ pounds before any decoration is added.

Judd and I started cutting up the green material for outdoor, above-ground swimming pools.

It scuffed easily because it has been living out in the sun for a long time.

We are regularly visited by Danny's grandkids, and when we are, all work stops.

So I tried showing what the bandit outfits are gonna look like.  I got tired and went home.

The next morning, I showed up to an empty shop.  Apparently the rats had eaten the kids.

One of the kids had left a momento.

Looking at the board carefully, you can see that our plans have changed here and there.

That green swimming pool material was staring us in the face.

But there was a hardware store going out of business in San Juan and everything was being auctioned off.  So we went.  We bought 45 gallons of paint, a truck-load of screws, bolts and other fasteners, and a bunch of other stuff to re-stock Danny's shop.

And most of the candy.

Oh, and we have the first skin on the boiler.  Maybe it's starting to look like a train.

The world according to Doyt

I drove back to Houston from Mission for New Year's.  Danny works 4 days on and 4 days off, some alternating nights and days, so I tend to return to Houston when he has to go back to work.  It's about a seven hour drive to Houston, unless you speed a lot, then it's about six. 

This lets you catch up on things like Cormac McCarthy books-on-tape (like The Road, which is a particularly harsh book to hear while while driving through the hours of desolate, flat brush country that is South Texas), or thinking about people you haven't seen in too long, or places you've been or are going to, or things you should have done but didn't (insert yourself here).
 
 Doyt shared a couple of keepers while we are building the float.  First, he owned that the manufacturer of the tires on the trailers (which keep going flat and we keep airing back up) is, he guesses, a company called Mayblo.

Second, after listening to me go about how I'm in charge and they all ought to just do what I say, he provided a helpful fable:

A brain and a heart and a sphincter were working on a job but they all argued about who was in charge.  The brain said "I'm the smartest of us, so I'll be in charge."  The heart said, "Without me, ain't nothing gonna happen.  I'm in charge."  The sphincter said, "but I'm never the boss and I think it's my turn."  The other two laughed at him, so the sphincter said, "Fine.  I'll stop working for a while and we'll see if you change your mind."  After a couple of days, the brain was swollen and woozy and the heart was beating so hard it couldn't even think.  Finally, they gave in.  The Moral:  You don't need a brain or a heart to be the boss.  You just need to be an asshole.

I would like to thank Doyt for his wisdom.

So this is where it stands now:  Two trailers, the carpentry on both close to being done.  The one with the 4 foot circle on it will be the engine.  The one to the right and a little behind is the car. 

Here's a side view of the engine as it sits today.  Four of these four foot disks will represent the steam boiler.  Behind that will be a cabin for about 6 people to stand or sit in, where the engineer would be.  Off the front of the platform will be a cowcatcher made with the roughest left over wood we have, hopefully 4x4 or larger.  We need the weight on the front since it's going to be so heavy in the rear.

 I thought it was important to show that I actually have done some physical labor, so I asked Judd to photograph me with my iPhone while I held a  disc in place. 

The drive wheels, the 3 foot wheels on the back of the engine, will turn with electric motors.  The smaller, 2 foot wheels, in the front, will to.  They will all turn at the same speed, though each of the wheels will have its own motor.  In this photo, they are just there to make everyone understand the layout.  The whole engine will be pretty tall.  The platform on top of the bed of the trailer is three feet off the ground.  So the whole thing will be over 9 feet tall, from the BED of the trailer, or about 13 feet tall from the ground.

 This material is 36" wide and 36 feet long, and is made for building outdoor swimming pools.  It's going to be the skin on the boiler.  After it's in place, we'll wrap it with a black mesh called Grout-Stopper and paint it so it is round and looks like a steam engine.

 The earlier plan was to use these clear plastic pipes as an armature, holding the 4 foot discs in place for the engine.  Let's just say that didn't work.

 When we put these 12 foot screws through the first four foot disc, it became clear we could finish this float around August 22, 2011.  So we're holding the discs together now with 2x4 boards.  Once we conceded that this was a better way, it was time for dinner.  At El Patio.  Where one does not order the Caldo de Res. 

 During dinner, one of Danny's grandkids stopped talking long enough to emote in a non-lingual fashion.

While we were working on the float, an old friend of Danny's was hunting.  He sent a short video of what would soon be dinner.  

So, the Upper Valley Art League has agreed to have a show in February we're going  call Portrait of Mission.  This has little to do with the parade, other than that's where I'm going to distribute 100 more free cameras.  the UVAL exhibit will be something like 2,000 4x6 snapshots by Mission residents and I'm going to serve a quasi-curatorial function and select 10 of the best of these to print and present as "art photographs."  The others will be displayed in a grid on 5 large temporary walls in the gallery.  Last years' video portrait of Mission from the Conjunto Float will also likely be shown, maybe as a projection on a wall, maybe on a tv screen.  Some of my less controversial Mission photos may be framed and shown as well, probably landscapes.  Tomorrow, I'm going to start looking through all of last years public parade photos and trying to winnow it down to the top ten to scan and print.

I've also written lyrics for a song called "Four Banditos," slightly mirroring the four pinatas that are supposed to be mounted on the cow-catcher.  I'm hoping we can get the intro done by Gloria Jean on conjunto-style accordion.  If all goes well, Jane will finish writing music to go along with it and the band can perform it during the parade.

 As usual, law work must still be done, and my return to Mission is likely delayed while I spend a day thinking about a plan of reorganization, a disclosure statement, and a motion to establish voting procedures for a case in San Francisco. 

a little bit of progress

So this year, the theme for the Citrus Fiesta's Parade of Oranges (there's always a theme) is "the Railroad in South Texas." I'm thinking of building a two-trailer float, with the first part being a replica of a steam engine and the second an old-timey open-air railroad car carrying a single, absurdly large, grapefruit. The second car is based on a real photo, hand colored postcard from around the turn of the twentieth century. If we do this, the huge grapefruit would be made out of papier mache, painted yellow and dusted with dried citrus rinds. The name of the railroad company will be stenciled on the matte black sides and filled in with prickly pear cactus squeezed through a french fry cutter.


I haven't given much thought to the name of our train, but the Mission Chamber of Commerce, which covers Mission and the very small adjacent towns, has this to say about one part of town called Alton: "The City of Alton was established as a stop on the San Benito and Rio Grande Valley Railroad around 1910. It was named after the Alton Railroad, whose officials were from Alton, Illinois. Alton is an agricultural area surrounded by numerous citrus orchards, mainly grapefruit plantations. The city was incorporated in 1978 and is located right next door to the larger city of Mission on Highway 107. Alton's population has been growing steadily and is currently 3,361. Students attend Mission Consolidated Independent School District schools."

So maybe we're the San Benito and Rio Grande Valley Railroad or maybe we're the Alton Railroad. I like the former, since my sister, Martha, works for the city of San Benito. But Alton sounds good too.

The Alton railroad may have a slight lead, since there's a really cool photo story to accompany the northern version of the railroad:
In 1900 the Chicago & Alton Railroad Train co. , commissioned Lawrence with the manufacture of the largest camera ever made and the largest photo ever shot in order to promote a new train. The whole attempt costed 5.000 $, a really extreme sum for that period, since it was equivalent to the construction cost of a huge house. The enormous print was hosted in the international salon of Paris and attracted great interest. The promotional campaign costed significantly less than it would have costed if the actual train had been sent. The attempt had such a response that a Paris representative was sent to verify that the camera was actually ever made.
Plus, their trains looked cool, and there's that Chicago connection:




One problem is I haven't read the parade rules this year and don't know if an articulated (i.e., two part) float will be granted a permit. Another problem is that this will double our work. Danny and I went to the Citrus Fiesta office to get a permit and read the rules, but it was closed today, so I'll have to wait until Monday to find out if this idea is going anywhere.

The steam engine will be included either way, and the smoke will be either dry ice or a cheap disco smoke machine.

I want to keep it simple, but Danny wants to make the wheels go around and maybe include a few other fancy tricks. I tried to tell him about relational aesthetics today, but he refused to listen.

The pinata lady who, last year, made life-sized pinatas of me and Jane, agreed today to make 5-9 custom pinatas of bandits to sit on the steam engine.
Danny and I went to the Hidalgo County Historical Museum to try to find the photo both of us remember (but which neither of us can find) of about 5-9 Mexican bandidos posing on a captured steam locomotive captured during the Mexican Revolution. I've spent many hours looking for the photo on line with no luck.

I got contact info for the Senior Curator ( Barbara) and the Information Technology Specialist (Esteban) at the museum and will set up an appointment with them to try to find the image to bring to the pinata shop to make life-sized custom pinatas to put on the train. I did get a few photos of old steam engines and trains in the Valley in the late 1800's.


Scale is always an issue.

A few of the photos of trains that actually ran in South Texas were in the Hidalgo County museum and a couple of those had people in the images. That will help with setting the scale.

We already have one large trailer (22 feet, 2 1/2 inches long and 9 feet 6 inches wide), borrowed from the Mission chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It's the same trailer we used last year to build the Conjunto float. Danny and I then went across the street to Doyt's and found the base of an old travel trailer that will be the second float -- the railroad car with the giant grapefruit -- if we are allowed to use it. We unloaded the old metal and wood that was on it (with the help of Doyt and his grandson Judd), aired up the old tires, and brought it back to Danny's shop. We then stripped it's rotting wood foundation and decided it looked pretty good. We're going to cut off the skid plates and turn the axles upside down to make it a little bit higher and start building a new platform for it.



Doyt's old jackass, who I met a year ago, and included in a country and western song I'm writing with Jane, and who I mistakenly thought was a female and a mule and named Sarah, watched and was a little upset that we were shaking up his yard. After all, it's basically like we removed the couch from his living room without asking permission before hand. He's lived in this pasture for 19 years. (And he's not a female, and not a mule, and didn't have a husband, and his name is Curly.)


Danny remembered that he's got an authentic railroad lantern and a bunch of kerosene lamps. We will probably use all that.

Tomorrow was supposed to be a parade workday for me, but I have a legal client who needs me to do a significant amount of work, so Danny's on his own tomorrow. He's going to remove the skids and start laying the platform on the old trailer.

New Year, New Parade: The Back-Story

It's late December, and I'm in Mission, Texas. That can only mean one thing: it's time to build a float for the Texas Citrus Fiesta's annual Parade of Oranges. The event has been happening since 1932. Most of you know that my parents moved to Mission in the mid 1940s. Thus, for all of their ten children who survived to adulthood, the Citrus Fiesta, and its annual Parade of Oranges, provide a vivid part of our collective childhood memories, though each of us likely remembers it differently.

Last year, while finishing up an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was working on a multi-part photo based project about Mission and decided to build a float for the parade as a means of making the town's collective "portrait." The problem at the time was how to get as many residents in front of a camera at the same time and the Parade seemed an obvious way to go about it. I envisioned a deadpan video of the residents of Mission waving and smiling to the camera. The best way to get them to wave seemed to be to enter a float in the parade.

Two brothers, Danny and Donnie, and several sisters, including Charlotte and Martha, pitched in. Many other family members and friends and friends of friends, mostly residents of Mission and the Lower Rio Grande Valley, helped too. We ended up with an inaugural float celebrating conjunto music in the Rio Grande Valley, complete with an 8 foot tall, 12 foot wide accordion (with keyboards that lit up in the dark), two extraordinarily accomplished young musicians (an award-winning accordion player and baja sexto expert), covered with sliced grapefruit, prickly pear cactus, powdered citrus leaves, corn husks (a la tamales) and almost life-sized pinatas of me and my girlfriend, Jane.


The float was titled, "Conjunto: From the Valley to the World," and it was quite an engineering feat. But it failed to win any prizes because we were too late lining up. Part of the problem was my own poor planning, the heart attack (or was it a stroke?) of the 83 year old conjunto hall of fame nominee originally scheduled to play accordion during the parade, and the extraordinary amount of thorns that had to be burned off the cactus we put on the the sides of the float. But this year will be different.

This Blog will catalog the evolution of our entry in the 2011 Parade of Oranges. Wish us luck!