You might be wondering why an experienced, published journalist would bother with an obscure blog. Here are my reasons:

1. I came up with a blog name, inspired by the X song.

2. I'm working on a book -- my first -- and I'm having a hard time adjusting to the looong writing process and even longer lag time between writing and publishing, especially since I get ideas that I want to write about.

3. It's a repository for stories I've written but, for a variety of reasons having to do with the vagaries and cruelties of freelancing, never published, like this one, which I completed nearly two years ago:

Each spring, thousands of penitents pay their pre-Easter respects at a modest adobe chapel in the forested foothills of northern New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

They arrive at El Santuario de Chimayo with a wish and leave with a promise, in the form of a handful of the sandy dirt scooped from the sanctuary’s sacred pit.

The price for this prized soil, as pilgrims in recent years have learned, is a journey past homes fortressed behind barbed wire and chain link fences, snarling dogs bred to attack, and irrigation ditches choked with beer cans and liquor bottles.

They have also grown accustomed to an addition to the sanctuary’s interior decor.

Once the provenance of crutches and baby booties, offered for miracles sought or granted, its walls now share space with photos hung by the families of local heroin addicts.

The irony is not lost on Chimayo’s residents, many of whom frequent El Santuario and trace their lineage back to the construction of the village’s central plaza in 1740.

“Chimayo is celebrated as this place of incredible spiritual presence,” says Don J. Usner, author of Sabino’s Map, an historical account of life on the plaza. “But it’s equally riven by drugs and violence.”

For the past decade, Chimayo has been the flash point in a county with the nation’s highest rate of death by drug overdose.

Annual death rates can rise and fall, only to rise again, so state epidemiologists hoping to get a better handle on long-term trends group the information in two-year segments.

For the most recent increment, 2003/2004, the rate was 40.8 deaths per hundred thousand people, the highest it’s been since 1999/2000, and more than double the 14.9 state average.

Preliminary results suggest that the 2005 death rate will be about the same. A current national comparison does not exist, but best estimates put the nationwide rate at around 6. In the entire country, only the city of Baltimore compares.

One independent drug treatment agency, whose northern New Mexico service area included Chimayo, left in 2003 after four years, frustrated by “one of the most entrenched, highly toxic drug cultures” it had encountered in more than 30 years in the field.

Theories abound as to the cause of this local scourge. It’s a rite of passage that occasionally gets out of hand.

It’s a genetic weakness resulting from the intermarriage of local families.

Someone gave out free drugs and everybody got hooked.

If the culprit could be found, the thinking goes, the ever-elusive solution might finally become clear.

But among those who know Chimayo best – its longtime families – there is the sense that the answer is as complicated as the history of the village itself.

Irvin Trujillo, a 51-year-old sixth–generation Chimayoso, was the first person in his family to attend college, earning a degree in civil engineering from the University of New Mexico.

More than 20 years ago he and his wife Lisa opened Centinela Traditional Arts, a weaving studio where they combine time-worn methods with a pop-art aesthetic.

One of Trujillo’s rugs, called “The Spider from Mars”, is housed in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. “We came back here because we knew we could tap into this rich resource,” Trujillo says. “So many people learned to weave like I did, from their fathers, who learned from their fathers before them. You can trace everything that goes on here back for generations.”

As Centinela flourished, so did the village drug trade. By the 1990’s Chimayo was an established destination and distribution point on the pipeline that smuggles black tar heroin from Mexico.

Addicts began appearing at Centinela’s door.

“I felt sorry for them, I felt shame for them,” says Irvin Trujillo, who describes himself as a recovering alcoholic. “I wanted to help make things better.”

The Trujillos lent out looms and took on apprentices, often with disastrous results. One addiction-addled employee came to work oblivious to what she had been taught the day before.

A neighbor began selling drugs a few doors down from the Trujillo’s shop. Then a relative sneaked into Trujillo’s elderly mother’s living room seeking refuge from a deadly drug dispute.

Not long after, on an afternoon when Irvin Trujillo happened to be standing outside his sister’s house just across the road from his shop, he saw a truck pull into the driveway and heard a loud bang. A drug-dealing cousin had just been shot.

“One thing is for sure,” says Lisa Trujillo. “I’ve been to more funerals than weddings.”

Virtually every Chimayo family has similar stories to tell.

In this village of 2,900 inhabitants, the dealers and the shopkeepers, the elders and the addicts are bound together by blood or habit.

In 1996, a 14-year-old boy died at a drug house of a heroin overdose.

In the space of three days in the fall of 1998, two local men died of gunshot wounds to the head.

A year later a dealer from the village set to testify in a drug case was murdered by a Chimayo man who later said he’d been promised $1,000 in drugs from yet another local dealer for slitting the man’s throat, cutting an ear off and crushing his head with a barbell.

“It was like the old West, where the cowboys and the outlaws were fighting it out in the town,” Irvin Trujillo says. “Here they all knew each other.”

* * *

In the early 19th century, Chimayo families bartered chilies and apples for clothing and other necessities and sold hand-woven goods to eager tourists.

But after New Mexico was annexed to the United States in 1846 many farmers lost their livelihoods, either to unscrupulous land speculators or to the government, which did not recognize their stakes in communal property.

Drought, the Great Depression and the construction of a highway that bypassed the heart of the town all contributed to Chimayo’s gradual decline.

With it came increased tolerance for mind-altering excess.

During his childhood, Irvin Trujillo recalls, men from the village would congregate in his family’s windmill for days-long binges. When villagers were killed in drunk driving accidents, “everybody just accepted it,” he says. “That was how it was.”

Lacking in local jobs, Chimayo became a bedroom community for the affluent neighboring towns of Los Alamos and Santa Fe.

Eventually the highway that took away the tourists and the workers brought in the drug dealers, who recognized the utility of a base that is both remote and relatively easy to access.

They also found customers. Only half of Chimayo’s employment-age residents have jobs or are seeking work, and 20 percent of its households subsist below the poverty line.

“You’re emptying the area of healthy adults,” says Lauren Reichelt, director of the Rio Arriba County Health Department “That’s how you are spreading this epidemic.”

The priority, for now, is bringing overdoses under control. Last fall, the state opened an inpatient rehab center about a half-hour’s drive from Chimayo.

Staffed with nurses trained in addiction treatment, it is the first center of its kind in Northern New Mexico.

The center has only 17 beds for detox, and the wait for a spot is two months. On a brisk January morning, one of its clients, a 42-year-old grandmother, described the ordeal of trying to kick the habit --for the sixth time.

Until recently she worked at Chimayo’s lone restaurant, and many of her customers were visitors to El Santuario. For her, heroin brought its own kind of miracle, relief from the punishing stresses of her life.

But the respite was short lived while the problems only seemed to grow worse. “Every time you go back to using it’s so much harder to stop,” she said, tears pooling in her eyes. “It’s so much harder to climb out of that hole.”

In the spring of 1999, the Trujillos joined an anti-drug march along a two-lane highway frequented by dealers and addicts.

Within months federal drug agents descended en masse, making 34 arrests and shutting down four of the area’s biggest drug dealing families.

Former drug dens were seized for community use, the governor granted $1.5 million in aid, and in 2001 New Mexico became the first state to legalize the distribution of Narcan, which can halt a potentially fatal overdose.

“Now it’s not cool to be a dealer,” says Chellis Glendenning, a Chimayo resident and author of Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade. “It’s not cool to be a user. It changed the whole feel of what it is like to be here.”

But even as heroin loses some of its cache, other worrying trends are emerging.

From 2002 to 2004, cocaine or alcohol were found to be contributing factors in 91% of the area’s heroin overdose deaths.

Preliminary data for 2004-2005 for two northern New Mexico emergency rooms that serve the Chimayo area show an overdose death rate among multiple drug users more than double the rate for those admitted for heroin use alone.

“Even if black tar heroin vanished tomorrow, the addiction problem would not magically disappear,” Reichelt says. “This is much, much deeper than the abuse of one drug.”

According to police, nearly all of the dealers arrested in the 1999 raid are back on the street, and some have resumed dealing.

“If someone gets out of jail or comes out of a treatment program and there isn’t a job waiting for them, they’re going to fall back into the same circle of influences that got them in trouble in the first place,” says Rich Newman, deputy chief of the New Mexico State Police. “We’re not going to arrest our way out of this problem.”

At Centinela Traditional Arts, the Trujillos have become more cautious about who they hire.

When locals come into the shop looking for work, Irvin Trujillo sometimes tells them stories about being in college, about jobs and opportunities outside of Chimayo.

“I am not one to say how a person should live his life,” he says. “I only want them to see that there is more to life than this.”

On the first installment of this last season of the superlative HBO series The Wire, which aired Monday night, a miserable newsroom hack relegated to research at the declining Baltimore Sun confides to a co-worker that his dream is to hit the big time.

Meaning what, she inquires. The Post, he responds, or the Times.

He doesn’t mean LA.

To be a journalist in Los Angeles is to be made aware, sooner or later, of the second-class nature of this particular occupation in this particular place.

Here in LA we have no Bob Woodward, no David Halberstam, heck, for all she annoys me with her compulsive narcissism, not even a Maureen Dowd.

We are left to settle for the transplanted pugilism of Steve Lopez (who made his name on the East Coast) and the reactionary warblings of Caitlin Flanagan.

I worked at the LA Times in the mid-1990’s, well past the two-decade golden era of Otis Chandler (1960-1980) but close enough to be surrounded by acolytes running on its fumes.

I wrote for the Ventura County bureau of the paper, which existed, depending on whom you believed, either to stanch the hemorrhaging of precious Southern California ad revenue or to stoke the ego of Mr. Chandler, who made the county of citrus groves-turned shopping malls north of LA his home.

He was reputed to relish steering his beloved motorcycles down the hairpin turns from his house in the hills of Ojai to the Oxnard warehouse where he stored his collection of bikes.

Whatever the explanation for its existence, the Ventura County bureau put out its own section every day (for a time separate east and west county sections) and I spent my days scrounging for stories on tumbleweed abatement and traffic control to fill the gaping news hole.

When I moved to the San Fernando Valley-based Daily News, I found the lack of pretension refreshing but the devotion to the bottom line self-defeating. (On my first day I was made to sign a ledger for my allocation of two pens and a notebook. When I requested more I was told to come back when those ran out.)

After about a year I moved to the LA Weekly. As an “alternative” paper, the Weekly never had to face the pressure of competing head-on with the esteemed East Coast dailies. Instead, while Sue Horton was editor, writers could pick and choose, reporting and writing deeply on whatever they were passionate about.

It was during that time that Howard Blume developed his incomparable investigative expertise about the LA public school system, a knowledge that, years later, when he became a casualty of one of the paper’s ugly staff purges, led to a reporting job at the LA Times.

It was during those years that Erin Aubry Kaplan honed her considerable talent as an observer, thinker and writer on the intersections of race, the self, culture and politics.

And it was during those years that executive editor Harold Meyerson, through his Powerlines column, solidified his standing as the city’s leading political analyst.

Where do LA journalists go when their platform collapses? After a stint as an editor at the Jewish Journal, Blume eventually landed the LA Times job, and the paper’s education coverage is reaping the benefits of his work.

But the good news ends there. Erin Kaplan had a gig as a columnist on the Times’ op-ed page (the first African American woman to hold that position), but they nixed it without explanation last spring. Harold Meyerson decamped for the American Prospect and the Washington Post– no surprise, considering his appetite for politics in a town not known for its interest in such matters.

It’s disappointing that we (as in the collective “we” of journalists in Los Angeles) couldn’t muster the imagination to hold on to him.

Meyerson’s work appears now and again in the local press, most recently on the cover of the Sunday Opinion side of the LA Times' weekly flip-doll pull out (the upside-down-reverse being the Book Review).

Of course, the entire notion of old school, place-based journalism is a bit nostalgic in the era of blogs, the 24-hour news cycle and the bottom line-driven phenomenon known as Sam Zell. Still, when it comes to creating content based on original reporting, traditional media remains far ahead of the web.

Meyerson’s piece examines the upcoming County Supervisor race between State Senator and ex-city councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas and Councilman and ex-police chief Bernard C. Parks.

The piece is classic Meyerson: energetic analysis and information delivered in a clear and absorbing way that leaves you smarter about, more invested in and less cowed by this most unwieldy town.

With characteristic wit, Meyerson likens the election to that of a pope: “once in, they’re sitting pretty.” The piece reminds us that the whole supervisorial system, in which one person at the local government level somehow represents 2 million constituents, is incredibly bizarre, not to mention undemocratic.

"The five supervisors represent districts so vast, have campaign kitties so deep (coming in good part from companies having business with the county) and remain so consistently indistinct to voters that incumbents seldom face serious challengers," Meyerson writes. "Unlike popes, they're not actually expected to die in office, but they generally take their leave on their own terms."

As Meyerson observes, only two people have held the 2nd District post since 1952. Since then it’s changed from predominantly white to predominantly black to increasingly Latino. And here’s this race, between two leading African American pols, to see who will be the newly anointed one.

Meyerson boils it down to a fight between business (Parks) and labor (Ridley-Thomas) for the allegiance of L.A.’s black community.

Who knew?

It’s a story worth reading about a battle worth watching. And it’s a tantalizing tidbit of what we might be enjoying on a regular basis if we took ourselves seriously as a news town.

Saturday January 5, 2008

        My Prince obsession, which began in 1980 in seventh grade with Dirty Mind, didn’t have as much to do with the lyrics or the music as with the mere taboo of the scandalous cover featuring the man himself in a black g-string. It intensified with Controversy, for the resonance of the lyrics (“I just can’t believe all the things people say. Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?”) and with Purple Rain for the otherworldly rhythms, the shrieks of “When Doves Cry” and raw sexuality of “Nicky,” all balm for my adolescent hurts. (I saw the movie at least half a dozen times when it came out, and was moved to tears repeatedly, though when I tried to watch it recently the melodrama and comically terrible acting made it clear how much of a teen movie it is.)

        At my high school in the mid-80’s the prevailing fashion was preppy, the music du jour new wave/Euro. Michael Jackson, with his narrowed nose and ever-whitening skin, was as black and sexy as was remotely permissible (“Thriller” was popular with the cheerleaders). In that milieu, to love Prince was to label oneself a misfit. Relegated to the outsider camp, I embraced his persona.            
        Through the latter part of high school I wore purple prodigiously, kept my asymmetrical hair short, curly and draped over one eye and waited in the pre-dawn cold of downtown Chicago to buy concert tickets.

        For one of my high school’s annual walkathons along Lake Michigan’s Gold Coast, I brought my boom box and a cassette recording of “Delirious,” which I played over and over after attaching myself to a group of speed walkers led by the school’s most venerable Latin teacher, who was known for finishing first.

        They were the uber geeks and they treated me warily at first. But they soon surrendered to the song’s bounce and zip (and, dare I say, lyrics like “I’m gonna explode and girl I got a lot”), crossing the finish line in record time. During that time I broadened my collection with For You and Prince and bought the work of his protégés, the Time, Sheila E., the Bangles, and Cyndi Lauper, whose cover of “When You Were Mine” was good, though not, of course, as good as the original. The day Parade was released, during my freshman year of college, my friend Colm (probably the biggest Prince fan I knew, other than myself) and I skipped class for a trip to the local record store. It was a delicious moment, hooky as rite of passage, and who better to inspire it but the master rule breaker himself?
       
        With Sign O’ The Times my Prince obsession began to wane. Socially, college was a much better fit for me than high school and I no longer needed the validation he’d provided. By the time LoveSexy came out, the nakedness of his album cover self didn’t resonate as it had back in my junior high days. I’d become enraptured with Billie Holiday and her exquisite renderings of ache and longing, which soothed my own serial collegiate heartbreaks.

        During those years I was a voracious consumer of music with a massive album collection that I moved in its ever-expanding entirety multiple times, first when I left Chicago for college in Annapolis, then for a year in Santa Fe, then back to Annapolis and then, after college, to various shared flats in San Francisco. My knowledge of my collection wasn’t particularly deep. I’d buy stuff that looked interesting and pick up the discards of friends and family (when one sister started dating a heavy metal-head I inherited her entire Beatles collection, and when another sister broke up with her boyfriend I got all the Blondie and Bowie records he’d given her).

        These things would go into the crates with everything else, waiting for the moment when I’d pull something out that I hadn’t heard in a while – or something I’d never heard -- to see what it sounded like. That’s how I discovered Blue. I can’t say for sure how Joni Mitchell wound up in my collection. It may have been the Columbia Record of the Month Club, which I patronized for years and through which I was introduced, most memorably, to the Pretenders and Earth, Wind and Fire. For all of my self-perceived musical openness, when I put Blue on that first time, which was the first time in my life            
            I had heard Joni Mitchell sing, it sounded to my ears whiny and pretty much unlistenable. Back it went into its sleeve, forgotten for years. After college, at my first job in San Francisco (as an order-taker for a bike messenger company) the book keeper and I struck up a friendship. Like many people who choose to live in a desirable place for reasons other than work, he was incredibly overqualified for his job, which made him, to me, inherently interesting. He was a couple decades older than I and we spent our lunch breaks through the winter of 1990 looking for the intersections in our world views and cultural influences (the Billie Holiday connection helped).

        When he told me he was a huge fan of Joni Mitchell I chalked it up to sentimentality. But that night, in the early evening darkness, I pulled out the dusky record and set it on the turntable. Sitting in the armchair of my third-floor walkup I watched the fog settle in over the traffic sliding down Golden Gate Avenue. I listened to the first side. Then I flipped the record over and listened to side two. Then I listened to the whole thing three more times. It wasn’t love at first listen but by the end of the night Joni Mitchell’s mournful observations had insinuated themselves into my 22-year-old self.

        By then my days of obsessing over an artist had passed. The complications of finding and keeping a job and an apartment, of making a life in an unknown city beyond the cocoon of school and family, had obliterated such self-indulgence. I was still on the lookout for songs. The kind that transport you, that take you out of where and who you are while at the same time clarifying those very things. The kind you can listen to thirty times and still want to listen to thirty more. Songs that are perfect, or as close to perfect as anything can be. “A Case of You” was one of those songs. I was glad that song had found its way into my life, that I could add it to the list of things that made me appreciate the beauty of music and the creative gifts some rare few people possess.

                                                    ----

        Fast-forward 17 years, to a couple of days past Christmas, 2007. I’m sitting in the kitchen at the home of my husband’s cousin and her family. There’s a fire going in the fireplace. Their kids and ours are romping, dinner is cooking. We’re sipping wine and listening to a new CD somebody got for Christmas. I hear Bjork and Cassandra Wilson, both of whom I greatly admire, but they barely register, the background accompaniment to a lovely evening.

        Then comes a song that snaps me to attention. It’s “A Case of You” but in place of the sitar-esque guitar and Mitchell’s canuckian virtuosity (“I drew a map of Canada, Oh Canada”) are Prince’s gospel-esque piano chords and a tak-tak metronomic beat, his pitch-perfect falsetto infused with a mesmerizing churchy reverence (“You’re in my blood like holy wine, you taste so bitter and so sweet”).

        I repair to the CD player, turn up the volume and play it again and again, with each listen drawn deeper into the intense beauty of this version, as different as can be from the original, and, like the second child you can’t believe you could ever love as much as the first, as perfect. On the drive home the following day, and over the next few days in that luxurious lull between Christmas and New Year’s, I ponder the multiple revelations of this song. How it has returned my Prince to me, a different Prince from the singer of my youth, as tender as always, but infused with an adult introspection. How this is the first time in my life I’ve ever liked a new version of a song as much as a song I deemed perfect in its original form, and what degree of genius is required to achieve such a feat. How this song, first recorded in 1971, sounds, on the cusp of 2008, some 37 years later, contemporary and meaningful. How it is as rare for black artists to cover songs written and recorded by whites as it is common for white artists to cover songs written and recorded by blacks.

            And, most significantly for me, a white person who grew up in a black part of Chicago, listening to Caruso at home and Cameo with my elementary school friends and who now, at nearly 40 years old anticipates that for the rest of her life will continue to parse the connections and meanings of that intersection, how Prince has drawn the line from himself to Joni Mitchell, a line that through his immense artistry appears, like a difficult balletic feat, clear, direct and inevitable. A line I never saw, never knew existed except in some inexplicable place inside of me.

A Case of You