Shinichi Osawa in Tijuana

Friday night (June 27) there’s no place I’d rather be than at The Lobby in Tijuana to see the handsome electrotastic Shinichi Osawa.  Straight out of Tokyo, Japan, the man is a master of the hypnotic type of computer pop you’d be silly (or just dead inside) not to want to dance to.

Sigur Ros in Tijuana

D-Town Tijuana is shaping up to be the biggest and best thing that’s happened to Tijuana since the cesar salad (yep, the cesar salad was invented here). The lineup includes Sigur Ros, Album Leaf, Shark Attack, Buddy Akai and mucho, mucho mas. Buy your tickets online. Do it now. Do it for me. Do it for Tijuana.

UPDATE: I just got word that the Sigur Ros has been canceled.  Damn.

From CityBeat’s Summer Guide

“Mercado HIdalgo” by Kinsee Morlan

This was first published in San Diego CityBeat’s Summer Guide 2008 issue, which came out Wednesday, May 21.

10 reasons to go to Baja California

1. Lots and lots of wine: In Season 4 of South Park, Kenny ends up in Ensenada and is convinced he’s in Hell. But the Ensenada Wine Harvest Festival/Fiestas de la Vendimia shows just how wrong Trey and Matt can be. With wine events happening in Ensenada’s gorgeous Valle de Gaudalupe from Aug. 1 through Aug. 17, the port city is waaaay closer to the fluffy clouds of heaven than the fiery pits of hell. E-mail fiestasvendimia@hot mail.com for details.

2. Dogs running after cute little fake bunnies: The dog races at Hipodromo de Agua Caliente are entertaining whether you bet your hard-earned cash or not. Experts check the stats of each beautiful greyhound for betting purposes, but we recommend putting your money (or just your gentleperson’s bet with a friend) on the dog wearing the cutest little jersey. The stripes! The stripes! Check out bet.caliente.com.mx.

3. Mercado Hidalgo: This open-air farmers market (corner of Sanchez Toboada and Avenida Independencia in Tijuana’s Zona Rio neighborhood) is fun and functional. Go for the produce and homemade Mexican candy, but stay for the strange Mexican curiosities, the excellent food at little taco joints tucked here and there and the totally Tijuanense atmosphere.

4. D-Town Tijuana: This new arts and music fest is being shaped as we speak, but with Sigur Rós and MSTRKRFT already booked, it looks like things are taking the shape of awesomeness. The events are going down June 6 through 8, but you should get your tickets now at www.dtowntijuana.com.

5. Julieta Venegas: A beautiful Mexican girl who can play the accordion and the piano while singing heart-wrenching love songs—that’s more than enough reason to cross the line, right? Venegas is the pop princess of Latin America, but unlike Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson, this woman has a soul and a brain and a heart and a little something they call talento down south. The lovely lady takes the stage at El Foro in Tijuana July 19. Call 619-734-2333 for tickets.

6. Sweet treats: El Mejor Pan de Tecate, the fabulous bakery located at 331 Av. Juárez in Tecate, has a mouthwatering selection of cakes, donuts, conchas, breads and other colorful, fresh-baked delicacies. Founded in 1969, El Mejor Pan has been a staple for Tecate residents and tourists alike. Bread is still warm and the quinceañera cakes are to die for, so grab a tray and load up with goodies before you head back to the border. Visit www.el mejorpandetecate.com for details and recipes or call 011-52-665-0040.

7. Camping: Fresh air, stunning mountains and an abundant wine country are just a few reasons to abandon the beach and set your tent up in Tecate. Rancho Ojai is a working ranch and campsite located in Tecate’s countryside, about 13 miles from downtown. The site has room for tents and RVs, or you can rent a wood cabin with full electrical service if you’re into that whole camping-with-amenities thing. Call 011-52-665-3014 for reservations. www.rancho-ojai.com.

8. Fairs and fiestas: Art, culture and beer abound in Tecate in summer. The usually quiet town takes a few weeks to celebrate with the Feria Tecate en Marcha, which falls in July some years and August in others. In addition to parades and rodeos, the annual fair showcases crafts from Tecate’s thriving arts community. To learn more, contact the Tecate Tourism Trust at 011-52-665-654-5892.

9. Dead bulls: That’s right—bullfighting. We know we’ll get some concerned e-mails from the PETA folks, but the Mexican consulate called and won us over with the old cultural-importance argument. The season kicks off May 25. www.tjbullfight.com.

10. Men in masks: Tijuana’s Lucha Libre fights feature some of the sport’s most voracious men in spandex. The luchas smack down on Friday nights throughout summer. You wish you could easily order tickets online and show up an hour before to get to your seats, don’t you? Well, leave your sense of American privilege behind and drive down at least three hours early to purchase tickets (which start around $10) at the box office, located at the Auditorio Municipal on Agua Caliente Boulevard in Colonia El Parais (best bet: take a cab; otherwise, you’ll get lost). To find out when the fights are happening, call 011-52-664-250-9015 or 888-775-2417 or visit www.seetijuana.com.
—Kinsee Morlan and Athena Davis

Three ways to not get kidnapped in TJ

1. Don’t look too American. Get a dark tan, wear a straw hat and refer to everyone as “ese.” You’ll be brushed off as part of the local working class immediately.

2. Don’t flash money around. In fact, try paying for your 2×1 cervezas with Monopoly money (better to have them think you’re slow than well off; plus, pesos look a lot like Monopoly money so it may actually work).

3. Don’t wear Crocs. Just don’t. Trust us.
—Kinseee Morlan and Enrique Limón

Four ways to get kidnapped in TJ

1. Wear snake-skin everything and walk like George Jefferson while whistling the “Moving on Up” theme song loudly.

2. Go ahead and let that annoying guy with a whistle poor tequila down your throat, then walk along Revolucion at 4 a.m. proudly yelling at natives, “Si yo quiero, te compro, cabrón!” (“If I want, I can buy you, fucker!”).

3. Wear Crocs.

4. Visit the Red Zone and buy yourself a $30 hooker. When you wake up to find your wallet missing, get all huffy and indignant, find her pimp and threaten him with promises of how well-connected and important you are.
—Kinseee Morlan and Enrique Limon

Goa Gil in Rosarito

“Playas for Life” by Kinsee Morlan

Wow. I made it. I survived. There was one point when I didn’t think I’d make it. I was in a tent somewhere outside of Rosarito, and as an inordinate amount of flashlights streamed by the broken flap in the tent, I tried my hardest to look away from the lights and focus on the rapid-fire Spanish the crowd of Tijuanenses surrounding me were speaking.

I picked up every sixth word or so and began to freak out as my mind went into dark places it doesn’t belong. I felt alone, alienated, confused, stupid and out of place.

Full disclosure: I may have partaken in the pot brownies. Maybe. I’m not admitting anything here, I’m just saying that I was suffering from the worst case of paranoia I’ve felt in a long, long time.

As Goa Gil played his speedy set of spiritual techno outside on a stage built into the trees, I sat inside that damned tent, freaking out like a chihuahua on crack.

“What the hell am I doing here?” I started to think, as more and more kids tried to talk to me in Spanish and I was barely able to respond.

But as 2 a.m. turned into 4 a.m., I calmed down and eventually slipped into my roll as the outside observer. A beautiful little lesbian Tijuanense crawled into the tent and talked to me about what she wanted out of life. She tried her best to speak in English while I tried my best to pull out my Spanish.

And the boy who had invited me to the two-day rave — isn’t there always a boy behind these type of things? — eventually got me to calm down, too. We talked about cow bones (he says he uses cow bones in the handmade electric guitars he makes in Playas) and other such nonsense and we intermittently tried our best to go back outside the tent into the world of black lights, loud music, stars and trees, only to gyrate for a few moments before we’d give each other this look like, “Man, it was just so much nicer inside that tent, wasn’t it?”

In the morning, when the dust from the all-night dancing and partying had settled, I finally got to see the true beauty of the place. Apparently, every year the same party promoter rents out a ranch off of kilometer 81 on the free road from Rosarito to Ensenada and they invite the Great Goa Gil to play. And the kids (as in kids as young as 14) come swarming –they pack up their little tents, or casitas as they call them — ‘Where’s your house?’ they kept asking me all night — and sleeping bags and head out for two days of dancing.

When we first arrived, our tent had been one of just a dozen or so, but by the time I woke up we were surrounded by hundreds of tents filled with kids who would have been full-blown hippies if only they’d been born two decades earlier. And for a moment, while picking my way through the squashed Tecate cans and empty plastic water bottles, I felt as young and as free as they all seemed.

Fun with naked men

“This Girl Proceeded to Manize Him” by Kinsee Morlan

Zokalo is a relatively new upper-class lounge in Tijuana. I’ve ignored it for the past year due to a $20 cover and what I imagined would be crowds filled with bags so large and douchey that I wouldn’t be able to breathe, let alone dance and enjoy myself.

But last Thursday night, my curiosity got the best of me. It was ladies night, which meant I got in free and drank free all night. Sometimes, having a vagina really pays off. And as if the freebies weren’t enough, at about midnight, the male strippers made an appearance. Ah yes, male strippers — a party favor that isn’t offered anywhere in conservative old San Diego.

Would I recommend Zocalo to my hipster friends who tend to hate fancy bars outfitted with LED lights that change color constantly, lighting the white pleather lounge furniture as well as the trying-waaaaay-too-hard faces of the people sitting on it? No. But for all you girls out there who haven’t enjoyed the pleasure of letting a male stripper take a dollar bill out of your pants with his teethe, I’d say you just found something to do on Thursday nights.

The Lobby

Using the concession stand lobby of an old burnt-out movie theater turned live-music venue that housed punk-rock legends and groups as big as Nortec for the last few years as a new and improved uber-hip, semi-posh nightclub is — as if I need to say it — an excellent idea.

The Lobby is Tijuana’s latest and greatest edition to the nightlife scene. I saw Digitalism last Saturday and had one of those did-that-all-happen-in-one-night sort of nights that I’ll never forget. Errr, uh…at the very least, I’ll remember it until I have another one of those nights.

Noche Bohemia en Rosarito

Last Friday night, I found myself in Rosarito. Since I’m past the age of getting treated to a spring break every year, I totally forgot that end of March/beginning of April is vacation time. I was shocked to see the poor place — which, 90 percent of the year, is a quiet Mexican beach town — turned into a gigantic drunk tank.

Poor Rosarito was freakin’ nuts. It’s sad and embarrassing for me to see the hoards of American kids treating Rosarito like an amusement park where anything goes. They piss on the streets, puke indoors, try to have sex with anything that moves and walk around with open bottles of alcohol because they think they can just pass a cop a $20 and get away with it. Truth is, most of the time they can just pass a $20 and get away with it. Un ciclo viscoso, no?

Anyway, I wasn’t there to listen to Snoop Dog at deafening levels and get tequila poured down my throat. I was there for an art show by my friend Memho Sepulveda and something called Noche Bohemia, an event held the last Friday of every month in front of CEMAC.

As if the ignorance of spring break wasn’t enough to make me feel old, the crowd of painstakingly hip young kids gathered at CEMAC made me feel ancient. Kids in Mexico these days are ridiculously hip and, if you ask the older Mexicans, hilariously emo. They wear skinny jeans, hide their faces behind their hair, worship Morrissey, skateboard if they can and aren’t afraid to wear huge sunglasses at night.

Some of the kids, though, are actually genuinely cool. Just look at those DJs above. What are they, 10 or 11? The music they were playing wasn’t bad at all, and look at how cute they are. Those three boys are headed toward a lifetime of coolness. If only the drunk American kiddos could stop drinking long enough to find a cool hobby.

PJ night in review

The party at Papas & Beer was absolutely nuts, as I had predicted. It was MTV Party to Go times a thousand — half-naked girls doing skank dances on platforms, thug-like dudes grabbing girls’ asses at will and the worst mainstream hip hop you can imagine blasting through the speakers in the main room of the over-sized club.

But tucked upstairs in a smaller, quieter room, the music was better and the girls and guys less oversexed. It was what you could consider the electronic-music room, and even though a large percentage of people were on some kind of drug, it was a much, much better vibe.

Tijuana kids, thanks to Nortec Collective, have a deep and passionate love for electronic music of all kinds. The most interesting aspects of the whole night were, first, the way the DJ I went with, Mark E Quark, was treated, which was like some sort of uber rock-star complete with a hotel room, free drinks and anything else he wanted. And second, the way in which the group of people I met treated me — they were friendly, accommodating and, in short, amazing.

At one point, a girl explained that she loved to make Americans feel welcome and at home when they visited Mexico. She said this as she handed me a drink, a cigarette and showed me where I could stand and feel a cool breeze blowing into the sweaty club. I wish we Americans treated Mexicans the same way, but I think it’s safe to say we don’t. Mexican people are just warmer.

The warmth of their culture continued to tickle me as I watched the orange sun rise from the balcony of a house at the after party. No one at the place really knew me, but there I was being given water, beer, a bed if I wanted it…I can barely speak their language, but there they all were, making sure I felt right at home.

From the mouth of a horse

Pictures of the border line by Kinsee Morlan

The last time I went to a show at Tia Juana Tilly’s, I danced like Elton John’s tiny friend. The next day, I happened to walk by Tilly’s at about 1 p.m., and I swear I saw what must have been the last of the other tiny dancers stumble out.

What I’m trying to say is that parties at Tilly’s go ALL NIGHT LONG. Plus, the show coming up on Saturday came recommended by club dude extraordinaire, Justin Roberts. This is a night not to be missed.

Come to Tijuana. Don’t be scared.

UPDATE:

The show was okay. Just okay. Not great, as I had expected, but I had a blast with fellow CityBeaters who put my meager attempt at dancing all night (I went home at 4 a.m.) to shame. You two know who you are; you rock.

The nightlife side

I was feeling dirty and depressed Saturday night after a long day of failed apartment searches so I grabbed a book, curled up in bed and was asleep by 10 p.m. At 1 a.m., my phone rang. It was my friend Jorge Tellaeche (one of the best young artists in Tijuana in my opinion) and my friend Jamie Davis who works at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

If you know either one of these two, you know how hard it is to say no. Before I knew it, I was up and out of bed getting dressed for what would be a long night out. See, in Tijuana, the nightlife really doesn’t get going until around midnight. By 2 a.m., the after-party begins, and you typically don’t make it home until the sun comes up — there’s usually a late-night taco session involved somewhere in the mix.

Jorge, Jamie and I stopped by Tentaculo first. It’s a bar promoted by Radio Global, a Tijuana-based Internet radio station, so the DJs are always fantastic. We danced amongst the 18-years-olds, I hit on the bartender (he gave me his myspace page address; what the hell is the dating world coming to?) and by 2:30 a.m. we were ready for the after-party.

We headed to Plaza Fiesta in Zona Rio. Jorge whispered something in Spanish to the bouncer at the famous Tijuana Swiss Bar. The guy opened the gate and we walked upstairs to a salon. The place was packed. There was free booze and food (a tray of marshmellows and a candle by which to roast them was part of the super sweet spread) and music provided by Mark E. Quark, a San Diego DJ who played the funkiest electronic music I’ve ever heard. We danced until 5 a.m. then headed home when we all started feeling a bit puke-ish.

By the end of the night, my depression magically disappeared. I was reminded why I love Tijuana.