– PB

Sometimes, though, it’s just frustrating. I’m reminded of the more frustrating aspect listening to Wale’s debut effort, Attention Deficit.

There’s a twofold problem in listening to rap past a certain age. First off, it’s a young person’s game. Artists like Chuck D, the Beastie Boys, and KRS-ONE, for instance, are among the genre’s elder statesmen; it’s hard to envision some of these artists still doing it when they’re pushing 70, a la Jagger-Richards (though Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, the elder statesmen’s elders, point a possible way forward).

Second, it’s also, just maybe, a young person’s game if you’re a listener as well.  If you’re of a certain age—say, mid-thirties or older—you’re old enough to have caught pretty much all this stuff, from the Sugarhill Gang and UTFO to the first, second, and all subsequent comings of LL Cool J, to Pac and Biggie to Jurassic 5 and Kool Keith to NWA to Outkast to Eminem to whatever comes next. Hip hop brings with it a sense of history; it’s been around long enough that it’s splintered into different subgenres, it’s gone global, and it’s had its fair share of mindblowing moments.

So I come to Wale with a certain set of expectations, the same as I would an album from any other genre. I can’t shake all that’s gone before, and Wale isn’t helping matters any. A new disc, by any artist — especially one I’ve never heard before — is all possibilities. You put the CD in the player, cross your fingers, and wait for the moment when, if your mind isn’t blown and your way of seeing the world at least subtly altered, at least you will have heard something which, by virtue of its creativity and newness, makes you want to rush out and tell your friends. You think, in short,  “This could be it.”

This isn’t.

I can’t fault Wale for not being MC 900 Ft. Jesus, not being the Roots, not even being Jay-Z or Kanye (not that I think the latter is much to aspire to). From the sound of it, he’s just trying to be Wale, which is all well and good, only he’s not altogether there yet. Some of the disc chugs along to an old-school vibe that’s agreeable enough but not all that adventuresome (the radio-ready “Beautiful Bliss”), while some of the rest tries too hard to be au courant (“Let it Loose”) or sounds like someone else’s castoffs (the Jurassic 5-inflected “Mirror”).

From the disc’s opener, “Triumph,” to the last notes of its closer, “Prescription,” Wale hints around, and gives glimpses of, some genuine potential. Sometimes, though, you really have to dig for it to even begin to dig it. There’s some bright spots to the backing tracks, which throw snippets of Kool and the Gang, Yann Tiersen (!), A Tribe Called Quest and a ton of other stuff into the mix. The lyrics veer from oh-shit creativity (you kinda have to give props to somebody who can name check Bret Harte and Brett Favre in the same phrase) to stuff that’s, well, a bit of a disappointment; there’s at least as much internal contradiction as internal rhyme here. Alright, not everybody’s going to be Foucault on wax, but the lyrical high points on the disc (like the Chrisette Michele collaboration “Shades,” where Wale takes a long, hard look at black-on-black racism, including his own) get dragged back down into the muck, even on some of the catchier tunes like “World Tour,” by the usual dick-grabbing egotism and I-gots-mine tropes that too often pass for “keeping it real” these days. You can’t help but wonder how different the disc might’ve sounded had Wale and co. just been their own bad selves rather than worrying about proclaiming themselves arbiters of the “real.”

Guest spots are all over Attention Deficit, which — for this listener at least — isn’t always a great move. Sometimes these casting decisions (and they are that) come off as though they’re more about marketing, than artistic, considerations. 50,000 Lady Ga Ga fans can’t be… well, maybe they can. Never mind. But I digress. If they’re not done right, the artists with the higher star “wattage” end up stealing the thunder of the person who, by rights, is supposed to be the headliner. By way of analogy, go back and listen to “Scenario,” by A Tribe Called Quest. For a crew with a less-defined sense of self, or a still embryonic artistic identity, that Busta Rhymes cameo could well have been the kiss of death, instead of being a defining moment for all parties involved. It’s hard to see, in most cases, exactly who gains what by the cameos on this outing. K’Naan’s turn on “TV in the Radio” steals the spotlight (the Somali rapper not only turns in a pretty convincing performance, he literally gets in the last word on the track); Lady GaGa’s cameo on “Chillin’” doesn’t do much but make you think how much better the cut would’ve sounded with MIA doing MIA than GaGa doing MIA. And don’t get me started on Pharrell, who’s as ubiquitious as dogshit lately, and about as useful.

Hip hop has a saviour about every, oh, six months or so, half self-anointed and the other half anointed by a music press that promptly forgets them just as soon as the next messiah crops up. It’s hard to say which of these categories Wale falls into. But the simulatneous shame and promise of this disc is that it begins to hint at what Wale might be capable of if he stops believing the hype, regardless of whence it comes.

A lot of the usual influences are here, including Charly Garcia, Luis Alberto Spinetta, and the ever-present shade of Cerati’s former band, Soda Stereo. There are also surprises here in the echoes of George Harrison and Todd Rundgren. There’s a stopover (“Magia”) in the same ZIP code previously occupied by ELO, and a riff on “Amor Sin Rodeos” that would do a certain Mr. Petty* proud.

But perhaps the biggest surprise about Fuerza Natural is the country influence that pervades the album. It isn’t exactly Hank Williams (I, II, or III) territory. It’s a kissing cousin to country, with bits of the Byrds woven among a few stray Wilburys, a bit of “Here He Comes” or “Lay My Love” by Brian Eno, or the same left-field sonics that cropped up on Dressed Up Like Nebraska, Josh Rouse’s Thom Yorke-does-Nashville debut outing.

One reason among many that the disc works as a whole is that Cerati keeps one foot in the familiar while the other steps into new territory. What that means here is plenty of rock to balance the experimentation. There’s the previously considered “Deja Vu,” or the three minutes worth of punchiness that is “Desastre,” that wouldn’t have been out of place on Cerati’s last outing. ”Dominó” could be mistaken for an outtake from Franz Ferdinand or the Killers, at least ’til you remember that Cerati was doing his thing when the New New Wave was in diapers. There’s plenty here to keep fans both old and new (that is to say, Soda Stereo fans and those who came to the party later) perfectly happy.

*that would be Tom Petty, not Mr. Petty my high school biology teacher, though I’m sure he would’ve dug it, too

Cerati’s website
A short documentary (in Spanish) about the making of the disc

Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza: Alone in the Crowd. Garcia-Roza’s Espinosa mysteries, of which this is the seventh, need not necessarily be read in sequence. This is a good thing, since that makes this book as good a place to start as any if you’re new to the author. Some series — Armistead Maupin’s beloved Tales of the City books come to mind — tend to rely too heavily on back stories and on the sense of connection that some readers develop with authors’ characters, to a point where the authors seem to skimp on other things that count, like a compelling narrative. It’s to the author’s credit that in this case, as much sense has been paid to crafting a story worth telling, and reading. I won’t spoil the plot (there’s plenty of spoilers available online); suffice it to say, if you’re a fan of Chandleresque detective fiction, with a twist, you’ll find much to enjoy in this book.

Chuck Klosterman: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Criticism can be dismal business. I’m reminded of this as I read things that start from the assumption that you can’t say something intellingent about something without a ranking or a handful of stars attached, and some wiseass will likely be reminded of it while reading this. 

Here’s what I dig about SDaCP: Klosterman reminds me a bit of Lester Bangs, in a good way. He’s not one of these guys (and they’re almost invariably guys) that tries to be more like Bangs than Lester was. Rather, he writes about things you likely wouldn’t give a second thought — Saved by the Bell, The Real World, Guns n’ Roses tribute bands — in ways that make you take notice and actually think about them. Besides this knack for making the mundane seem interesting, it’s also that he doesn’t treat culture as a mere commodity. The approach is one of engagement with culture (the arts, and all the unnecessary things that make life interesting) rather than as a consumer.

Eoin Colfer: And Another Thing… I fully expected this book (the sixth book in the by-now-ridiculously misnamed Hitchhiker’s Trilogy) to be awful, and had to go back over it to make sure I enjoyed it because it was good, and not just because it didn’t suck. Thankfully, it actually was good. The characters, story line, and inherent silliness are all kept intact from the original series, and Colfer manages to evoke Adams’ style without resulting to mere mimickry, or making the book come off as overwrought fan fiction. The only slightly discordant note, ironically, comes from the Guide entries themselves. In the original series, these were usually used to explain some character, plot device or other; here, it seems as though Colfer’s having such fun with the H2G2 itself that the entries sprout like weeds. The end result is that sometimes the guide entries feel more like speed bumps in the narrative, as though David Foster Wallace decided to weigh in on Arthur Dent; they sometimes detract from an otherwise thoughtful and funny story that, while it’s not as iconic as the original, is a worthy addition to the Hitchhiker’s canon.

As with any other trip — whether around the world, or around the block — a little persistance pays off. If you’d like something unique from your stay in Puerto Rico, there are two places that we’d highly recommend. This will sound like an advertisement, but rest assured we didn’t receive compensation from either place; we were just overjoyed to find somewhere that wasn’t hawking the same chintzy t-shirts, beach towels, and license plates that you could probably get on the NJ Turnpike (though if that’s your bag, you’ll find no shortage, either in San Juan or in Ponce).

First, a couple of doors down Calle Teutan from the aforementioned Tourist Trap, visit the Galeria W. Labiosa. The Labiosa in question is Wilfred Labiosa, an affable American expat who exhibits the works of a dozen or a score or so local artists alongside his own cheerful watercolors. I should add that not only the scenery (buildings and street scenes from San Juan, the Festival de San Sebastian, and elsewhere on the island) but also the styles are distinctly local, which is to say you won’t find any Mona Lisas in tropical garb.

Bear in mind that you’ll see these prints and watercolors in shops all over Viejo San Juan, including one higher-end (read: pricey) shop that advertises that the works they sell are entirely by local artisans and craftspeople.¹ But they’ll be much more expensive, and you won’t have the distinct pleasure of chatting with Wilfred in his little gallery.

We chanced upon the other shop on our last, enforced, day in San Juan (I say “enforced” ’cause we’d missed our flight, and we sure as hell weren’t going to chance missing it a second time by going back whence we’d come). We must have passed The Butterfly People (257 Calle de la Cruz) three times, at a minimum, the first time in San Juan, but were glad to have stumbled upon it regardless. The first, most striking, thing you’ll notice is wall-to-wall butterflies under glass. Very artfully presented, mind you. This isn’t the stuff of seventh grade science projects (unless you were a lot more artistically gifted in seventh grade than most people); these are some serious lepidoptera.

Fear not; if insects under glass aren’t exactly your cup of tea, there’s other things besides wingèd crawlies. There’s an assortment of other bits and pieces, from silk scarves to jewelry made… well, from more crawlies, but you’ve got to see them. They’re cool. Well, if your idea of “cool” extends to wearing a scorpion in what looks like Perspex. They’ll even go with your coqui t-shirt, if you cave in and buy one.

¹ No, I don’t remember the name of the shop, and I didn’t write it down on purpose. The staff weren’t very helpful, the pricing steep, and I’m skeptical when I see a shop charging that much for things supposedly locally-made, because I always have the suspicion that the shop is pocketing a much steeper markup than they’ve passed along to the person who did the hard work in the first place.

El Morro: This fort is one of a string of fortifications–along with San Cristobal–that defended Old San Juan. If you’re coming to Puerto Rico from the mainland, this can be quite an experience, given that there’s not much on the mainland that’s any older than about three hundred years old, and many of our landmarks are more recent than that. While Puerto Rico has undergone its fair share of development, luckily it hasn’t all been at the expense of a sense of history.

The fort, one of a string of fortifications built starting in the 1530′s, can be quite a hike if you’re getting there on foot (you can get a trolley here from one of several points in Old San Juan), and in 90-degree-plus temperatures, you stand to sweat a quart or so by the time you’ve worked your way through the several levels. Since it’s run by the National Park Service, El Morro was open when many of the other cultural attractions had been closed by the strike.

Museo Pablo Casals: The legendary cellist spent many of the later years of his life in Puerto Rico. The museum–a smallish house located on the Plaza San Jose that dates to the 18th century — has several items on display from his long and illustrious career. His cello, for instance, is on display, as are numerous programs and posters from the annual Casals Festival. It’s not the kind of place where you’d go to kill an afternoon, but since the price of admission is only a dollar, you likely won’t mind.

Bosque Seco:  It is, as the name suggests (or would, if you spoke Spanish) a dry forest. This is, according to our more-or-less trusty travel guide, to distinguish an area that gets an average of fifteen inches of rain per year from areas in Puerto Rico that get upwards of fifteen feet. Puerto Rico is, we’re told, the only place on earth with a dry forest in such close proximity to a rainforest. Of course, our luck being what it is, rain clouds were gathering overhead and thunder booming in the distance by the time we reached the park.

Not wanting to spend too long in the forest (we had a dinner engagement later in the evening to which we’d wanted to be more or less on time), we took one of the shorter trails. The rugged paths were bordered with a variety of ferns, cacti, trees, and shrubberies,¹ some of which would have left an experienced botanist scratching her head in wonderment.

El Castillo Serralles: The Serralles family are distillers of rum, and have been since the 1860′s. This mansion, located in Ponce (and affectionately dubbed El Castillo by the locals) was sold to the city of Ponce for a fraction of its estimated 13 to 18 million dollar worth — with most of its furnishings — and turned into a museum. The exterior is lovely, from the formal gardens, to the Pedro Adolfo de Castro y Besosa-designed Spanish Colonial Revival mansion itself. However, this barely begins to hint at the museum’s interior, which is nothing short of breathtaking. Your tour guide will tell you that this building boasts one of the first elevators to be installed in Puerto Rico², but this pales next to the attention to detail paid first by the architect, builders, and craftsmen when the mansion was built, and then by the museum staff, who have taken great pains to find scores of period artifacts with which to dress the dozens of rooms (very tastefully, might I add; at no point does the museum have the look of an Applebees or a TGI Friday’s, thank God). I realize that I haven’t quite done justice to this site, but if you see it for yourself — and please, do — you’ll understand why I’ve fallen short.

The site also has two more attractions close by. There’s the Jardín Japonés (Japanese Garden), the proximity of which to the Castillo makes it somewhat less incongruous in Ponce than it might otherwise have been. It’s a well-designed, lovingly maintained, very Japanese-seeming oasis of tranquility in a city that… well, isn’t. There’s also the Cruceta del Vigía, a largish late-modern monument to a site in the city that served as a lookout point for Ponce as well as a refuge during earthquakes and other disasters (visible from much of the city).

Parque Ceremonial Indígena de Caguana:First, a word of caution. Your travel guide, or your GPS, may advise you to take the 128 to Utuado in order to get to this site. Ignore it. Find a map, or a local, and take some other route. The 128 is a two-way highway that’s only about 1 1/4 lanes wide. On straight roads, this would pose a handful of challenges, but the 128 is anything but straight. Verily, it looks like a Slinky with blacktop. It’s one of those mountain roads that looks like the ones you read about in the papers from time to time that carries busloads of Peruvian nuns and American tourists to their deaths.³

But enough about the road. What’s interesting is what’s at the end of it. The Ceremonial Park is a site dating back roughly 1,200 years that was excavated starting in 1915. It’s thought that the grounds were a meeting place for the Taino who were located throughout the area. The dominant features of the park are a series of ball courts bordered by petroglyphs (stone carvings), ranging from smallish rocks bearing representations of Taino deities, to much larger ones whose function may have been to represent the area’s sacred mountains. There’s also a visitor’s center here, which contains a smallish bookshop, a research area, and classrooms.

The visitor’s center at the Parque Ceremonial, actually, is as good a place as any to come back to the beginning of the story: the strike, and the reason behind it. Puerto Rico has been hit hard by the economic downturn. Looking around the island, it’s obvious that it wasn’t an economic powerhouse to begin with, and the state of the economy has only served to make things that much worse. Unemployment hovers around 20%, and some urban areas — like Ponce, for instance — have a murder rate of something like two a day. Against this backdrop, the Governor of Puerto Rico laid off somewhere upward of 18,000 government workers, prompting the strike. The net result of this is that many of the island’s cultural attractions (aside from those like El Morro, which are run by the National Park Service) have been shuttered, and the rest, once they reopened, were understaffed. In order to conserve on payroll, experienced guides and docents like the gentleman we spoke to at the Parque Ceremonial who was slated to lose his job in the beginning of November are being laid off in favor of younger, less-experienced people who don’t have to be paid as much.

The net effect of this is threefold. First, there’s a not inconsiderable addition to the island’s already swollen unemployment rolls. Second, there’s a perceptible brain drain as experienced people are cast off in favor of newer, cheaper blood (the aforementioned park worker at the Parque Ceremonial said he’d worked there twelve years and had only begun to scratch the surface of all there was to be learned about the site). Third, this cannot help but hobble the tourism industry in Puerto Rico. I may have joked in an earlier entry about the profusion of Americana on this island, but there are people who will come here for more than sun, rum, and cheap souvenirs, and who will be disappointed to find that much of what they’ve come for isn’t accessible, or doesn’t provide the same experience that it would’ve with a more knowledgeable guide.

This may not seem like much on the surface, but tourism is a vital part of the local economy, and anything that hurts that industry isn’t likely to help the economy of the island on the whole. What it may also mean to you, as a traveler, is that the attractions listed here, along with a host of others, may remain perfectly accessible, but that you may be your own best guide while the new employees learn the ropes.

¹ I have always wanted to use this word outside a discussion of Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. The Bosque Seco looked like it might’ve been a suitable summer home for the Knights of Ni, though I doubt if they would’ve looked quite as imposing in summer garb.

² Despite its age, it probably still moves faster than the shitbox of an elevator at the Howard Johnson’s on the Plaza de Armas, which would appear to have been operated by an arthritic 79-year-old man using a hand crank.

³ Because it’s written in some law, earthly, cosmic, or otherwise, that no fatal bus accident is complete without at least one nun aboard.

What’s ironic, though, is that Puerto Rico–at least outside of Viejo San Juan–wasn’t exactly an embarrasment of riches when it came to Puerto Rican food either. Luckily, however, it’s not all Chinese, McDonald’s and Pollo Tropical. Read on for a bit of what we found.

Conventional wisdom has it that if you want the good stuff, you ask the locals. As you’ve seen if you caught the previous entry, the locals were in the habit of suggesting McDonalds and Pollo Tropical. My attitude (starting out, at least, before we’d seemingly exhausted our local options) was that I didn’t come all this way for a freakin’ Big Mac, but we lucked out when one old-timer turned us on to Cafe Manolin (San Justo street, Old San Juan), a smallish cafe that looks to have been in San Juan since about the 1940′s (going by the decor and layout, which don’t appear to have changed since the place opened). We had Mofongo Relleno con Camarones (Mashed Green Plantain Stuffed with Shrimps) and Empanada de Lomillo (Breaded Beef Steak), both of which were inexpensive and flavorful, served up by an attentive staff.

El Patio de Sam (102 Calle San Sebastián, San Juan, PR) You can get burgers here, one bit of evidence that they cater to a fair amount of tourist traffic (I don’t know, any time I see burgers on the menu of an otherwise nice restaurant, I just assume they cater to Americans who are scared of arroz con gandules or something). But luckily, you can also get an appetizer plate that consists of various empanadillas, containing minced meats, fish, and veggies that’s a perfectly light way to whet your appetite while waiting for your main course. These include items like shrimp in garlic sauce with a pretty good side of rice and beans, several criollo (creole) dishes, steak, chicken, and seafood in any number of guises. The flan is tasty, the key lime tart refreshing… and the beer and sangria even moreso, especially when you’ve been sweating out a few quarts hiking to and around El Morro, located nearby.

Sabana Grande, a town about thirty miles east of Ponce, isn’t the first place that leaps to mind (or from the pages of the Frommer’s guide) when one thinks of Puerto Rico, but if you find yourself in the island’s southwest, there are two places here worth stopping for a bite to eat. For a quick, informal dinner (or lunch), check out Sandwich El Buren (11 Rafael D Milan, Sabana Grande), Puerto Rico , which offers a variety of tasty sandwiches and desserts. We shared “El Cacique,” a Katz’s/Carnegie Deli-sized sandwich featuring seven kinds of meats, plus onion, lettuce, tomato, cheese, and mayo, on bread that’d been baked on the premises. We were only able to identify a handful of the meats (pastrami, chicken, ham, roasted pork, turkey, and a cured something else that may or may not have been salami) but the whole of it was delicious. For your own sake, share the sandwich, because it’s the only way you’ll be able to walk afterward, much less to stop off at Rex Cream for dessert.

Rex Cream isn’t Baskin Robbins, it’s not Cold Stone, and it’s not Haagen-Dasz. It’s a little neighborhood spot (or series thereof; it’s actually a smallish chain based in Mayaguez), a gelateria basically, that features flavors you’d expect (vanilla, chocolate, cookie dough, cake batter and the like) alongside some that aren’t too surprising given the setting (pineapple, orange, and passionfruit) and some that would be surprising — though pleasantly so — anywhere you came across them. I saw a pumpkin ice cream, which was intriguing, but sold out. So I glanced over the flavors on offer, and saw it. Maiz. Yep. Corn. There’s a slight “WTF?” factor when you see corn ice cream on the menu, so of course I had to try it, while my wife had the Pineapple. We liked them, and decided to go back the next night. Quality control, mind you. Still no pumpkin, so it was one more Corn and one more Pineapple. Third time was a charm; they had the pumpkin, which turned out to be worth the wait (and repeated trips), which tasted like pumpkin and not like the byproduct of an unknown industrial process.

So: it’s not impossible to find Puerto Rican food in Puerto Rico. Difficult, perhaps, even time consuming. But worth the legwork when you finally find the pot of mofongo at the end of the rainbow.

We’d been warned 1,277 times (conservative estimate) about not drinking the water and told to avoid the streets of San Juan after dark, but this advice, however well-intentioned, only goes so far. The following article picks up where the usual advice leaves off, letting you know where you can find those little touches of home throughout the island, so that you can alleviate homesickness, and so you need not be exposed to the local arts and culture, much less the locals themselves. Fear not; you’ll find reminders of home nearly everywhere you go.

McDonald’s: Really, what trip overseas would be complete without a pilgrimage to the Golden Arches? Forget El Morro; San Juan is just one of dozens, if not hundreds, of places that hosts the Temple of Kroc. Billions served? ¡Sí!

Starbucks: Sure, you could find a charming little cafe that’s locally owned and operated, but then you’d miss out on the unique charms of Starbuck’s. Who needs ham, egg and cheese on fresh-baked, still-warm pan de manteca when you can have a cut-rate latte with stale pastries, served up with snooty baristatude, Boricua-stylee?

Church’s Chicken: One could, I’d imagine, suffer through any number of the local variations on chicken, from arroz con pollo, chicken mofongo, or chicken criollo to chicken encebollado, but then you’d be depriving yourself of the culinary wonder that is Church’s Chicken. Besides, I don’t think you can get those Honey-Butter Biscuits just anywhere. It should be noted that wherever there’s a Church’s, a Burger King can’t be far off, sometimes even sharing the same parking lot. And besides, we know you didn’t come all the way to Puerto Rico just to eat KFC (though they generally aren’t far if you just can’t resist)

Subway: I didn’t have the opportunity to watch much television while on vacation, so I’m not sure if Subway has a pasty, rather goofy-looking Jared-doppelganger spokesdoofus pitching their wares on Univision or Telemundo. But no matter; if you speak loudly, clearly, and slowly enough, your Cold Cut Combo should come out just fine. Subway: Comer Fresco!

El Meson: Somehow, a company started 37 years ago in Puerto Rico has managed to survive on the island among so much American competition. Fear not, however; they’ve since undertaken joint ventures with Dunkin’ Donuts, and the location in Yauco shares a building with a Baskin Robbins (which, incidentally, didn’t even look like it had the requisite 31 flavors), which should result in the kind of mass-produced product and diffident service to which you are accustomed.

Finally, Honorable Mention goes to Pollo Tropical. If you ask the locals for a good place to get authentic local food, they will — nearly without exception — direct you to this Miami-based purveyor of faux Cuban food. They even have tostones just like Mom would have made them picked up if she happened to be driving down Route 3 in Clifton.

Of course, you’ll need to do other things on your vacation besides just eating. You can visit any of the numerous Home Depot locations on the island, for instance. There’s a Walgreen’s in seemingly every hamlet with more than fifty people, no shortage of K-Marts, the occasional Payless, multitudes of Radio Shacks, a few Marshalls, and Walmarts galore.

Come to think of it, Walmart deserves its own paragraph. Those price rollbacks that they advertise? Don’t count on them here. Appliances are through-the-roof expensive, and household goods don’t fare much better. Case in point: a set of Corelle dishes that’d retail in the States for $39.95 sells at Walmart for over twice that. $85 dollars. Once we’d collected our jaws from the floor, we were able to return to our primary mission, and the real reason we’d come to Walmart: people watching. I’m pleased to report that Walmart shoppers are the same everywhere. They’re… well, they’re just special. Oh, and if you’re coming from, or returning to, colder climates, be encouraged. Walmart has — in this place where the temperature never dipped below the upper eighties during daylight hours — a lovely selection of winter outerwear.

Enjoy your trip!

*With apologies to Robert Benchley

The investigation would stretch on for weeks, with passengers, crew, and experts being interviewed and cross-examined. Much as the disaster had been the first to be covered on the radio, so too would the investigation be brought into people’s living rooms. What unfolded may have struck some like a soap opera; passengers accusing seamen and officers of neglect of duty and gross incompetence, while the ship’s crew in turn blamed the passengers for panic and drunkenness and blamed one another for lack of foresight and dereliction of duty, just for good measure. The press, in the meantime, found no rumor or innuendo too small or far-fetched to report. The Morro Castle had run guns to Cuba, and this raised speculation that Communists had set the blaze; the commission also allowed that it might have been spontaneous combustion. Rumors also circulated of looters, stolen jewels, officers shooting sailors, and any number of other things. This is perhaps understandable, in a sense; when the “safest ship afloat” burns in sight of shore with the rapidity of celluloid, anything else must also have seemed possible. In the meantime, the ship’s radio operator George Rogers let slip–after a show of hesitation–that he suspected his assistant radio operator, George Alagna.

··· — — — ···

This last fact would turn out to be one of the whole affair’s great ironies. Rogers would be hailed as the disaster’s hero, having stayed at his wireless set as the smoke and flames closed in; had anyone bothered to investigate his past, they would have uncovered a history of lies, petty theft, and arson stretching back nearly to childhood. While George Alagna was blacklisted, Rogers would not be taken seriously as a suspect by anyone with the authority to do anything about it. Indeed, not until he tried to murder a superior at the Bayonne Police Department a couple of years later, or succeeded in murdering his elderly neighbors nearly twenty years later, did anyone begin to doubt that the “hero” might not be all he’d cracked himself up to be.

But all of this was, in a sense, postscript. While the Hauptmann trial would shortly knock the story of the Morro Castle to the newspapers’ back pages, its impact would continue to be felt. For one thing, the hearings led to trials in 1936, which in turn led to the convictions of William Warms, Eban Abbott, and Henry Cabaud (the latter, of the Ward Line). The former found their convictions overturned a short time later; Warms, in particular, was said to have done the best he could under very trying circumstances, and had after all stayed on the bridge ’til it had burned out from under him. The courts were more circumspect about Abbott, and lamented the fact that statutes allowed such a paltry punishment against Cabaud and the Ward Line in the face of conduct that had cost 134 lives.

In addition, as had happened in the aftermath of the General Slocum fire 30 years before, the Morro Castle blaze led to an extensive overhaul of the maritime codes. The Morro Castle had, in some respects, been a wooden ship on a steel hull; going forward, this would not be possible. For example, designers of the Panama, built and launched in the late 1930′s, would boast that the only flammable thing on her was her fuel. The days of floating hotels with sumptuous cloth and wood appointments went up in smoke along with the Morro Castle.

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Was the fire set? The evidence, while damning, is nearly all circumstantial–as is the case against the purported arsonist, the disaster’s unlikely and subsequently fallen hero, George Rogers. Certainly, the man had the means, motive, and opportunity to have done so; this does not, however, mean that he did, in fact, start the fire. One fact that the histories of the Morro Castle up to this point seem to have omitted is that anyone who is a psychopath and inveterate liar–and George Rogers was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, both of these things–could easily have led investigators on a wild goose chase by claiming “knowledge” of  the disaster that he simply did not have. Another, equally plausible, theory would be put forth some time after the fire by maritime authority William McFee.

In an essay appearing in The Aspirin Age, 1919-1941, McFee draws on an incident from his own time at sea, noting that the Morro Castle’s forward funnel–the one that actually worked and wasn’t just there as ornament–ran right behind the locker in the ship’s Writing Room. The place, in other words, where the fire was thought to have originated. The fire spread, remember, with such speed and ferocious intensity that passengers awakened mere minutes after its discovery thought it had been raging for hours. McFee says that it may well have been; few things conduct heat better than metal, and the funnel could easily have been heating the metal decks and bulkheads all through A and B decks for hours. Opening the door of the locker in the writing room may only have represented the tipping point at which everything began to go terribly wrong.

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In the end, of course, it won’t matter to disaster afficionados any more than the idea of a lone gunman does to those who, to this day, debate the JFK assassination. The cause of the Morro Castle fire are not likely to be solved in the fashion that the Hindenburg fire was; it will always, therefore, be a source of debate and speculation, fuel for conspiracy theories in the same way that the ship’s construction fueled the fire itself.

There’s something else at work here, as well. Many of us love a good conspiracy. Events before, and during, our lifetimes bear this out. Pearl Harbor, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the attacks on 9/11, the Kennedy assassinations, the Oklahoma City bombing, and a host of others have all been surrounded by myths and conspiracy theories for good reason. Myths, after all, are the stories we tell ourselves to explain the inexplicable. The greater the magnitude of the event–especially a catastrophic event–the greater the difficulty we have in ascribing it to a single individual, much less to natural causes. Some malevolent force or forces, some grand evil machinations, must have been at work for such a tragedy to play out; it’s difficult to wrap our minds around the idea that a constellation of human error, fallability, design flaws, nature, and coincidence can lead to such destructive ends. Perhaps this is also why we perpetually plan for the last disaster in much the same way that generals fight the last war, and why we’re caught flat-footed by the warnings all too often hidden in plain sight.

Postscript: A page of links and information on the Morro Castle

The more passengers awoke, the greater the confusion in the ship’s smoke- and fire-choked passageways. Some passengers were roused by the smell of smoke, some when friends and family pounded on stateroom doors; still others woke to the sounds of stewards clattering pots and pans, or one of the ship’s musicians blowing reville. Nearly all were astonished to find that the fire had not, in fact, been raging for hours while they slept; it was nearly incomprehensible that so much of the vessel should burn so quickly.

The fire’s rapid spread, and accompanying smoke, quickly made the ship’s elevator impassible, and the stairways in public spaces fared no better. While the ship’s crew were aware of, and made use of, steel-sheathed companionways to move between decks, most passengers (save for a few who had been directed to the companionways by crew members) were unaware of their existance. Some passengers were also reluctant to brave the smoke and flames to reach the boats when the fire was less intense, only to find that the way was impassible when they’d finally mustered the courage to try for the lifeboats.

Consequently, most of the passengers, and many of the crew who had tried to help them, found themselves faced with a grim choice: jump–chancing the dark, churning waters in terrible weather conditions–or burn. Some of the crew had, when the fire first broke out, thrown anything bouyant that they could find overboard, in hopes of giving those who jumped over the rails something to cling to. Before the ship’s engines were shut down and the anchor dropped, however, this simply meant that the ship–moving at close to 20 knots into a headwind of about 20-30 miles per hour–left a long wake of flotsam as she moved up the Jersey shore. The fact that the ship was underway also meant certain death for many who jumped overboard and were sucked into her twin screws.

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By the time Acting Captain Warms ordered the anchor dropped off Sea Girt, roughly half the ship’s lifeboats had burned in their davits. The boats that were launched, meantime, did not have enough people aboard to control them in such rough seas, meaning that they were at the mercy of the waters, and unable to rescue people who swam or floated around them, some individually, others in small groups.

The elements themselves seemed to conspire against those in the water. Even a strong swimmer would have found it difficult to make the six-mile swim to shore as he was battered by the waves. Those suffering from second- and third-degree burns and smoke inhalation would have found it more difficult still, if not well nigh impossible.

Against this backdrop–a group of officers huddled on the ship’s bow, clusters of passengers and crew far aft on C and D warily watching the approaching flames, and a collection of humanity in the water running the gamut from joking and singing to floating, dead–a small armada was making its way toward the burning ship. A coal-fired pilot boat steamed from New York Harbor. Picket boats from nearby Coast Guard stations set out, while the Coast Guard cutter Tampa was headed south from Staten Island. Pleasure craft and fishing boats struggled out of docks in Monmouth and Ocean counties. The Furness liner Monarch of Bermuda was steaming south at top speed, her captain having turned her about so quickly that passengers were nearly thrown from their bunks; and two workhorses, the Andrea Luckenbach and the City of Savannah were also under way.

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It’s likely that nothing could have prepared anyone for the sight they would encounter as they approached the scene. The Morro Castle was aglow like one of the circles of Dante’s Inferno, and the sea around her was dotted with those who had jumped, fallen, or been bodily thrown over the sides of the ship. The Luckenbach, first on the scene, lowered lifeboats into the water and began looking for survivors. This ritual would be repeated as the other, larger vessels arrived; seamen struggled to get as many of the survivors into their boats as possible.

In the meantime, help came from an unlikely source. New Jersey governor Harry Moore had taken to the air in a National Guard plane, acting as a welcome spotter to the sailors in the lifeboats, the crews of the fishing boats Paramount and Diana,  and the host of other craft in the water. Many of the survivors, precariously balanced between life and death, found their hope renewed by this flamboyant, slightly reckless gesture. Lifeboats were nearly overturned in the rough seas, and more than one person found themselves pulled overboard as they tried to pull swimmers from the turbulent waters. Hundreds would be saved, often at no small risk to their rescuers.

As dawn broke, volunteers on shore–alerted by the radio coverage of the morning’s events–gathered on the beaches of a dozen shore towns, preparing clothes, food, and first aid for the survivors that were beginning to come ashore, as well as preparing for an as-yet unknown number of dead. Before long, the first of the Morro Castle’s lifeboats would come ashore in Spring Lake. If the sight of chief engineer Eban Abbott, in his dress whites, pulling off his rank insignia and tossing them aside, muttering to himself, “Surely I will be jailed for this,” went unnoticed among the volunteers, it didn’t escape the notice of those who had made the long journey to shore with him. Before long, those words, and much else that had surrounded the last strange voyage of the Morro Castle, would receive a very public airing.

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Tomorrow: Morro Castle, Part 3: Aftermath

Postscript: A page of links and information on the Morro Castle