WANT TO GET OUT, GOT TO GET OUT, GOT OUT,
ESCAPE FROM THE CITY OF ANGELS
FIVE DAYS LATER, WHAT HAVE I GOT?
I'M IN ANOTHER PLACE WHICH IS SUNNY AND HOT.
THE DIFFERENCE HERE IS THAT I'M FREE AS A BIRD.
NO GUN TO MY HEAD, NO BLOOD ON THE CURB.
("Escape From The City Of Angels" from Ithaka's album, Flowers and the Color of Paint)
ITHAKA DARIN PAPPAS WAS THE BLUE SURFER . He was a real, hardcore L.A. street dude who moved to Lisbon to start his life again. He said the waves brought him. Ithaka only wore blue. Never any other color. The same shade of blue, all over. It was a whole body thing. His apartment: all blue. Walls, ceilings, fridge: all the same blue. His artwork...same tone of blue. He had a huge "cross" in the kitchen made from two blue surfboards. Shoes painted blue, some with fins, sat at his front door. Blue photos of belly buttons covered the walls. Blue, he said, was the colour of his blood. And a little bit of his blood hangs on my wall.
With no contacts on the ground, Ithaka bought a one-way ticket for his twenty-sixth birthday and just sort of showed up. I loved his bravery. There he was, this total L.A. surfer who chose to pack up and leave to live in Portugal with a whole new language to deal with and a whole new posse to find.
He wasn't a blond-haired, blue-eyed, pretty-boy stereotype. He was inner city. Real street. He hung out on the streets of Lisbon with his boys. He spoke slowly. He wore hoodies and baseball caps. His dark brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he sported a goatee. With charisma and a kind of street cool, he projected pure confidence.
Ithaka totally infiltrated the Lisbon art community. He had his art exhibited and managed to get General D and Cool Hipnoise to contribute to his CD Ithaka: Flowers and the Color of Paint. The sound is smooth vocals with nice background groove, and a little Portuguese rap dropped in. It's good. Ithaka was so out there, doing his own thing. People liked him.
He speaks his lyrics and has some great lines:
"I've been poor and I've been rich,
I've sat behind a desk and I've dug a ditch.
Rode on a skateboard and in a private plane,
I've been nobody and I've had a little fame.
I've got a lot of thanks for the ocean blue,
because she helped me out more than a lot,
keeping my mind off the have and have-nots,
my loyalty don't lle in street commotion,
I give my praise to the motion of the ocean,
she kept me out of trouble she kept me alive,
she kept me off the street away from knives."
I wouldn't say it was an impulse buy. Something about owning a surfboard (even though I don't surf) appealed to me. I had to buy one of his pieces from the series The Reincarnation of the Surfboard. Ithaka took old surfboards with broken backs and then made them into sculptures. Of course they were blue and this one was covered in blue fake fur. It was about six feet tall with shapes cut out from the middle that made it look like the wing of a furry blue fly. He told me I could comb it anyway I wanted but it would need a serious amount of Johnson's "no more tears" before I attempted that. More important, I had to get it home in one piece.
So there I was, walking down the narrow cobblestone streets of Barrio Alto with a furry blue surfboard that was taller than me. Laughing all the way, my cameraman, Steve Gelder, helped to carry it until we saw a cab. This was the start of an interesting journey home.
Without a fuss the cabbie allowed us to stick it in the trunk with the fin part shooting out the back. I guess he was used to this, being a driver in Lisbon. We made it to the hotel, surprisingly without a scratch. Next we had to tackle the airport. At the check-in I was handed a couple of long clear plastic bags and some tape. I marked it FRAGILE and crossed my fingers. (Didn't even get charged for extra baggage!) At that point it had become my new friend and it would have been a disaster if it didn't survive.
The Reincarnation made it across the ocean, the same ocean Ithaka crossed, and now hangs proudly in my house. It never fails to make me smile.
_________________________________________
Excerpt from by Jennifer Morton's 2004 book
Belong: A TV Journalist's Search
for Urban Culture
from Beirut to Bamako, from Havana to Ho Chi Minh City
Purchasable at this link:
https://www.amazon.com/Belong-Journalists-Search-Culture-Beirut/dp/B008SLYBPI
Title Belong: A TV Journalist's Search for Urban Culture from Beirut to Bamako, from Havana to Ho Chi Minh City
Author Jennifer Morton
Publisher Insomniac Press,
2004
ISBN 1897415702, 9781897415702
Length 193 pages
Subjects SOCIAL SCIENCE › Sociology › Urban
About the Author
Jennifer Morton's background in the entertainment industry spans a lifetime. While working as a reporter/producer on The NewMusic, Jennifer envisioned the concept for tvframes, an edgy, internationally syndicated show about art, music and culture in cities around the world. As producer/director, photographer and host, she received three Gemini nominations. Her photographs have been exhibited in galleries throughout the country and sold to private collectors.
https://books.google.com/books?id=gYmgrNYVCFAC&pg=PA39&dq=so+get+up,+ithaka+darin+pappas&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiXusTS_9iRAxUvJ0QIHV7UIGcQ6AF6BAgEEAE#v=onepage&q=so%20get%20up%2C%20ithaka%20darin%20pappas&f=false
No comments:
Post a Comment