Tijuana Diary: Fabricated Poverty

So this was it. We were homeless now, crouched low in the overgrowth behind a university gym. To us, home. Smoking cigarettes, our hands placed over our sleeping bags and blowing twisted smoke rings at the branch canopy above us.

"This is the taste of freedom," Levi was saying. "The best cigarettes are the ones under a night sky."

"Isn't this kind of patronizing, condescending, you know?" I puffed, cringing, paranoid of every sound. "Like, we're homeless, but we're only tourists. We can escape this whole thing tomorrow if we wanted."

"What do you mean?"

"We chose this. We had a bed for the night and we chose this. Urban camping. But is it belittling to those who can't choose it?"

"Even if this experience is fabricated, it still means something," Levi said.

In Rotation: AM Taxi / Paper Tongues

Emo’s death throes and imitation arena rock
By Troy Farah
Published on 05/13/2010 in Flag Live!


AM Taxi
We Don’t Stand A Chance
Rating: 1/5

It’s still early in the decade, so give it a couple more years before those awful, stereotypical emo bands completely die out—bands like AM Taxi. It seems this new act is riding the last wave of this tired teenage fad and that crushing surge can’t come soon enough.

As you know, emo is just punk turned inside-out. When you can’t be angry at your government, teachers or parents, instead you’re just mad at yourself. In other words, emo is punk without anything to say. Bands like this are an easy target, but that doesn’t stop major record companies from pushing this swill onto airwaves.

Dressed like half the garage band garbage on MySpace, complete with jet-black-dyed hair and fake British accents, the Chicago band’s debut, We Don’t Stand A Chance, is a melancholy collection of tunes about razors, pills and suicide. It’s a soap opera that makes “Days of Our Lives” look tame.

The album starts with tales from “Dead Street,” yet another “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” where every kid has hung-up hopes and is hooked on heroin.But really, it’s just a rip-off of the Offspring’s “The Kids Aren’t Alright.”

“The Mistake” is one of those songs for 15-year-old girls who lost their virginity to the wrong guy and are trying to make up for it by sleeping with the entire football team. So they have another cigarette, another drink, instead of actually coping with their issues.

“I am the mistake/worst you ever made” sings vocalist Adam Krier, his voice dripping with self-loathing. What makes it more disgusting is the amount of groupies who will fall for that.

Even when tracks like “Fed Up” encourage angry adolescents to fix their problems, the message is smothered with gimmicks. Krier pushes every stereotype from death to vampires to how much his hometown blows. “We may as well sleep in body bags/Living in the town was a drag.”

“Tanner Boyle Vs the 7th Grade” is just evidence of what age group this band appeals to—AM Taxi is ideal for brats who think angst is equal to individuality and complaining is equal to artistic struggle. But the band is right about one thing: gee whiz, life sure isn’t how we thought it was gonna be! Yet if all you’re doing is drowning in your sorrows, you really don’t stand a chance.

In RotationPaper Tongues
Paper Tongues
Rating: 3/5

Even if they’re not quite there yet, Paper Tongues are a new act trying very hard, almost too hard, to imitate arena acts like Muse, Queen or U2. The package is complete—superficial lyrics with a stress on chanting and an echoing emphasis on “humanity needs to join together.” There’s the hip-hop beats, the occasional rapping, and Aswan North, the vocalist with pipes like Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala. And most of all, their main focus is how loud and famous they can get.

Their eponymous debut is filled with scattered influences, borrowing strongly from Queen, Led Zeppelin (without much guitar) and the people-unite mantras of Rage Against the Machine. Unfortunately, Paper Tongues don’t have much identity themselves and the album doesn’t head in any clear direction.

“Ride to California” details the true story of how the Tongues raised money for a trip out west where they started their careers after a chance encounter with a well-known producer. There, another chance encounter with Randy Jackson made the American Idol judge their manager.

After that, the Tongues’ rise to fame was like taking an elevator and up is the only direction they’ve got left. So far they’ve opened with Muse, Anberlin, 30 Seconds to Mars and AFI, and it won’t be long before they’re selling out at Wembley Stadium.

The seven members definitely have strength as a group, on “Trinity” for example, where the band all seems to be fighting for the cause of the poor orphans and widows. They increasingly spread the cheesiness on thick with “Soul,” an anthem attempting to unite everyone who is “lost and needs to be found.”

They even get sentimental with Styx-style piano on “Strongest Flame” when North reminds us that love is the greatest force on earth. In case, you know, someone forgot.

Paper Tongues have gotten astronomically lucky thus far and it seems like they’re here to stay, so long as they don’t try too hard. Musically they’re talented but have yet to make anything that stands out. However, as their growing popularity shows, that doesn’t really matter.

An (Unfair) Comparison of Fight Club and Up In The Air

Up In The Air was Jason Reitman's latest campy romance, another decent story told the wrong way. And the more I watched, the more I realized Up In The Air was the exact opposite of Fight Club.
It's a bizarre, almost unfair comparison, but stay with me. I think I can use David Fincher's masterpiece to point out the flaws in Air's philosophy. I could do this with a lot of movies by just comparing them to better ones, but I think Fight Club and Up In The Air have a lot in common.
Well, first we have to admit that Fight Club's central themes are accurate. For the sake of argument, we will.

The Mexican Bible

This was written by my father in 2006. It's a true story and it reflects some of the issues Arizona's latest and greatest fascist stupid law, SB 1070.

Someone left a Bible in the back seat of my taxi recently.
I know he was an illegal alien because of the nature of how the book got left there. It was Halloween night, and I received a telephone call from a colleague of mine. There were three Hispanic men standing outside a convenience store. They spoke only Spanish. He spoke only English, and was not going to take the trip. Maybe the trip would be worth something. Would I like to talk to them?
I hate to turn down an opportunity without at least looking at it. And besides, I have learned enough Spanish to get by. I drove up to the convenience store to see what I could do.
Three young Hispanic men stood in the shadows by the pay phone. As I eased my taxi to a stop, one detached himself from the shadows, and approached my car. We greeted each other in Spanish, and he proceeded to tell me that he had to get to Los Angeles to see his fiancé.
I know enough about the law to know when to ask questions and when not to. Plausible deniability is not just the prerogative of presidents. I could surmise why they were not taking a bus or airplane. I named a price; they agreed. The trip was uneventful until we got to the Arizona California border. The three men were nervous about the border check point. I told them to relax, the authorities were only checking for fruit coming across the border. I don’t know if it was true or not, but it sounded good. They relaxed.
We swung into a gas station outside of Twenty-nine Palms to fuel up. There was a police cruiser in the parking lot, and once again, the three men in my cab hunkered down, and tried to stay out of sight. I filled the gas tank, and shook my head. My suspicions of their immigration status had been confirmed by their behavior. I didn’t tell the cop. I’m not that kind of person. Besides, I didn’t want any trouble for myself. It might not be legal to cross state lines in a taxi with a cargo full of undocumented migrants. I was not really in a mood to find out.
A few miles away from the gas station, we witnessed a bad car crash. I dialed emergency services on my cell phone, but did not stick around to see the police show up. Again, the less trouble the better.
The rest of the trip was uneventful. I left them at a house in Los Angeles. It wasn’t a real upscale neighborhood, but it wasn’t a slum either. Sort of a middle class home that everyone in America dreams of owning some day.
I was home before I noticed the Bible.
The bible is a Spanish version, small, with a battered black leather cover. Inside it had a few notes on small pieces of paper. The New Testament was heavily thumbed through, and the pages of Mark and Luke were rather dog-earred. Many verses had been underlined. The Bible has sat on a shelf in my bedroom since the day I found it. I had not even thought about it until I was tidying up today, while a talk radio station played in the back ground from my clock radio. The host was on some rant about W’s new immigration policy.
I wonder if the talk show host realizes that these illegal aliens have lovers? That they have expectant, future father in laws, who are glad to see their new son in laws, yet somehow apprehensive for the future of their daughters? Does the radio talk show host know the fear these men felt waiting in a gas station for a cop to leave? Does he know the joy on the faces of these men as they stepped out of the taxi in Los Angeles? Does this same radio talk show host that almost every day claims to be a good moral conservative Christian know that an illegal alien left his Bible in my cab? A Bible that had been studied, and marked by some one just as devoted to the same faith as he? Or would such thoughts put too human a face on the issue? Would thinking these things mean that we have to deal with real problems involving real people, not just abstractions of law breakers?
And am I the only one who finds it ironic that the very Bible that both the radio show host and the young Mexican man read says to be kind to the strangers in your land?