California or Bust

The infamous 'Hotel California' conjures up many things to many people in its many variations and widely debated interpretations. Probably the most famous or popular reference is from the Eagles 1976 international hit song 'Hotel California' (On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair. Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air...) about some sequestered hotel south of the border, presumably in Baja California, Mexico.

According to Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, 'Hotel California ' (nicknamed by the CIA) is the place where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the notorious terrorist and mastermind behind both attacks on the World Trade Center (the failed attack in 1993 and 9/11/01), captured in Pakistan in March 2003, was flown to - 'presumably a facility in another cooperative nation, or perhaps a specially designed prison aboard an aircraft carrier.' (1)

For me, the Hotel California has a few different personal connotations. First, there is a residential hotel near my old flat in West Oakland called the California Hotel on San Pablo Avenue just down the street from The Oaks card room which I could see from my back deck, standing there as an anomoly right next to the 580 Freeway - inhabited by the poor, outcast, drug-addicted, and mentally insane. Second, there is the Hotel California pictured above in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay - near the Gran Casino Paraná situated on the banks of the Rio Paraná, bordering Paraguay and Brazil. And finally, there's the mythological Hotel California that represents some kind of fantastical Shangri La or El Dorado-like reprieve; like R&R after being in the shitstorm of war - a break from the daily ins and outs of life, for example, like living here in sometimes surreal Buenos Aires. This Atlantis or fool-like paradise vision is much different than that of the place where Kahalid Mohammed is currently being detained, I imagine.

On August 23 I am fortuned and thankful to have been granted a slight repreive from my life here in BA and am heading back home to California - land of dreams and gold - for a short but glorious two weeks; not to a specific hotel but rather to my motherland, back to see friends and family, back to experience first hand the wonders of the Sierra Nevada del Norte and back to reignite that internal flame of inspiration from that small slice of heaven that I call my home away from home.

1 - From Jon Ronson's latest novel: The Men Who Stare at Goats