Amid the internet-wide arguing about whether Harlem Shake videos have redeeming cultural value or demonstrate the "real" Harlem Shake (answer to the latter being a clear negative), I think the point is lost.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Friday, February 22, 2013
Tale of the Badu Night PART FOUR
Start at the beginning.
AS WE LEANED against a wall backstage--me awkwardly, Adria looking inexplicably at ease--a fellow passed by and smiled and asked if we were having a good time. He was the selfsame fellow who'd been in front of us onstage, with the triceps and the cornrows.
AS WE LEANED against a wall backstage--me awkwardly, Adria looking inexplicably at ease--a fellow passed by and smiled and asked if we were having a good time. He was the selfsame fellow who'd been in front of us onstage, with the triceps and the cornrows.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Tale of the Badu Night PART THREE
Read PART ONE HERE and PART TWO HERE.
I wish I could better, or more narratively, remember the show. I recall it only in kaleidoscopic pieces, as befits a religious experience. We positioned ourselves in the left wing of the stage, behind scattered members of Badu's band (the one directly in front of us had cornrows, broad shoulders, nice triceps) and I could clearly see Erykah's colorful bra straps, and when she tired of and removed her heels I could see her toenail polish, which looked white. It is silly to worship people as idols, but I couldn't help it: being that close to Badu made me feel imbued with magic powers.
I wish I could better, or more narratively, remember the show. I recall it only in kaleidoscopic pieces, as befits a religious experience. We positioned ourselves in the left wing of the stage, behind scattered members of Badu's band (the one directly in front of us had cornrows, broad shoulders, nice triceps) and I could clearly see Erykah's colorful bra straps, and when she tired of and removed her heels I could see her toenail polish, which looked white. It is silly to worship people as idols, but I couldn't help it: being that close to Badu made me feel imbued with magic powers.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Tale of the Badu Night PART TWO
Read PART ONE here.
When I found Adria and the five others they were already several phases into devising crisis strategies. The coreligionist who had bought the tickets simply could not find them. She had hoped to offer records of the purchase at the box office, but this was to no avail. Online tickets leave a trail, but tickets bought the old-fashioned way are like cash: terrible to lose. She was willing to re-purchase for everyone, but the show was sold out. Any personage who seemed to work at the Fox had been pleaded with, also to no avail. No scalpers were in sight. One of the ladies had even been lured by a shady-looking character who swore he could get us in backstage, but when he started leading her around the dark street corner she turned tail.
When I found Adria and the five others they were already several phases into devising crisis strategies. The coreligionist who had bought the tickets simply could not find them. She had hoped to offer records of the purchase at the box office, but this was to no avail. Online tickets leave a trail, but tickets bought the old-fashioned way are like cash: terrible to lose. She was willing to re-purchase for everyone, but the show was sold out. Any personage who seemed to work at the Fox had been pleaded with, also to no avail. No scalpers were in sight. One of the ladies had even been lured by a shady-looking character who swore he could get us in backstage, but when he started leading her around the dark street corner she turned tail.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Tale of the Badu Night PART ONE
A funny thing happened to me in the last moments of the old year and first moments of the new one. It also happened to my friend Adria, the only person I know whose Baduizt fervor might exceed--yes, exceed, my own. I'd dreamt for years of going to see Badu with Adria. I knew that no matter how zealous and ridiculous I became at the high holy day service of Badu, Adria would be no less zealous and ridiculous.
So when Adria told me Erykah would be at the Fox Theater in my very own city on New Year's Eve--just in time for me to be sufficiently spine functional to stay out all night doing something fun, which I'd not done in a couple years-- you can imagine my delight. A plan quickly hatched, involving we two and five other coreligionists, one of whom worked near the Fox and kindly offered to buy everyone's tickets at the box office, so we wouldn't have to pay online purchase fees.
As the Eve approached I felt nervous. I never really know how my spine will behave. It's more like I guesstimate the odds. In the week before, I was able to predict a 25% maximum likelihood that a spinal disaster would ensue, and decided I couldn't say fairer than that. I dishonestly texted my mom that I was doing great and was quite sure the show wouldn't be a problem.
I took precautions. I planned to arrive late, and miss The Coup, who were opening. I declined a pre-party invite from the coreligionist who'd bought the tix. Adria stopped by for a pre-pre-party at my house, and made me a shirt with iron-on Badu lyrics, to match the one she'd made for herself. Her back said, You don't have to believe everything you think/We've been programmed, and my chest had the next line: Wake up/We miss you. We were gloriously nerdy in our shirts.
We smoked a few puffs before Adria took off. We'd meet at the Fox. I spent the next hour stressing about parking downtown on New Year's, about spine, about which shoes would be least aesthetically and ergonomically offensive. But I made it, happily sacrificed $15 for a few hours in a $5/day lot, and headed toward Broadway in my coat and leggings and boots. I'd hardly been downtown the last couple years, and here I was amid the hip New Year's crowd, cold air in my face, hair flying. I was feeling myself. I called Adria, but the connection sucked. I figured I'd find her there. She called back, however, because she had to tell me something rather dire.
The tickets. They were gone.
So when Adria told me Erykah would be at the Fox Theater in my very own city on New Year's Eve--just in time for me to be sufficiently spine functional to stay out all night doing something fun, which I'd not done in a couple years-- you can imagine my delight. A plan quickly hatched, involving we two and five other coreligionists, one of whom worked near the Fox and kindly offered to buy everyone's tickets at the box office, so we wouldn't have to pay online purchase fees.
As the Eve approached I felt nervous. I never really know how my spine will behave. It's more like I guesstimate the odds. In the week before, I was able to predict a 25% maximum likelihood that a spinal disaster would ensue, and decided I couldn't say fairer than that. I dishonestly texted my mom that I was doing great and was quite sure the show wouldn't be a problem.
I took precautions. I planned to arrive late, and miss The Coup, who were opening. I declined a pre-party invite from the coreligionist who'd bought the tix. Adria stopped by for a pre-pre-party at my house, and made me a shirt with iron-on Badu lyrics, to match the one she'd made for herself. Her back said, You don't have to believe everything you think/We've been programmed, and my chest had the next line: Wake up/We miss you. We were gloriously nerdy in our shirts.
We smoked a few puffs before Adria took off. We'd meet at the Fox. I spent the next hour stressing about parking downtown on New Year's, about spine, about which shoes would be least aesthetically and ergonomically offensive. But I made it, happily sacrificed $15 for a few hours in a $5/day lot, and headed toward Broadway in my coat and leggings and boots. I'd hardly been downtown the last couple years, and here I was amid the hip New Year's crowd, cold air in my face, hair flying. I was feeling myself. I called Adria, but the connection sucked. I figured I'd find her there. She called back, however, because she had to tell me something rather dire.
The tickets. They were gone.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Rain
THE CHANGING of seasons can be especially welcome when life has not been going very well. Because the best fact pertaining to hard times is this: Things change. New seasons are solid reassurance of just how deeply rooted this fact is. Some places have four true seasons, but California really just has the one great switch, sun to rain and back again. Where I grew up, in the desert, the rain part wasn't much. Maybe that's why rain does not carry, for me, the gloomy associations it does for many.
I miss rain now just as much as I miss sun each February. It's October and hot. My spine didn't quite work well enough this summer for my garden care to compete with four months of pure Cali sunshine. The south-facing slope is Riverside-baked. Ten-foot cardoon skeleton. Strawberries leaves brown and crisp. Young lavenders are pulling in on themselves. The alyssum is all stem and seed stalks. Even the crabgrass is yellowed, though still cocky as shit. The Gambusia fish in the water garden are sick to death of having to rely on me to treat water for chloramines and add it to their habitat.
The Gambusias are waiting for rain and the plants are waiting and the worms are waiting and the dusty car is waiting and I am waiting for rain.
We humans can only be briefly in love with the feel of rain. It is exhilarating for a few dozen drops (more if you are in The Notebook or East of Eden), but irritating after that.
But the smell of rain! Ah! What is it? Is it made in the atmosphere or does it result from drops contacting the stuff of Earth? Is it an earthy smell or, like Steinbeck says, "the sweet odor of ozone"? How much of it can be replicated watering a dry yard? This would be a good test.
And the sound of rain! Really an orchestra of sounds: water drop percussion on every exposed surface. Floppy drumming on calla leaves, soft and absorptive concrete contact, pattering on windows while you sleep.
You can grow tired of rain--or sun, or snow. But a force of nature you haven't experienced in a while has magic. No point trying to remember what it felt like to be sick of rain, and longing for sun.
I miss rain now just as much as I miss sun each February. It's October and hot. My spine didn't quite work well enough this summer for my garden care to compete with four months of pure Cali sunshine. The south-facing slope is Riverside-baked. Ten-foot cardoon skeleton. Strawberries leaves brown and crisp. Young lavenders are pulling in on themselves. The alyssum is all stem and seed stalks. Even the crabgrass is yellowed, though still cocky as shit. The Gambusia fish in the water garden are sick to death of having to rely on me to treat water for chloramines and add it to their habitat.
The Gambusias are waiting for rain and the plants are waiting and the worms are waiting and the dusty car is waiting and I am waiting for rain.
We humans can only be briefly in love with the feel of rain. It is exhilarating for a few dozen drops (more if you are in The Notebook or East of Eden), but irritating after that.
But the smell of rain! Ah! What is it? Is it made in the atmosphere or does it result from drops contacting the stuff of Earth? Is it an earthy smell or, like Steinbeck says, "the sweet odor of ozone"? How much of it can be replicated watering a dry yard? This would be a good test.
And the sound of rain! Really an orchestra of sounds: water drop percussion on every exposed surface. Floppy drumming on calla leaves, soft and absorptive concrete contact, pattering on windows while you sleep.
You can grow tired of rain--or sun, or snow. But a force of nature you haven't experienced in a while has magic. No point trying to remember what it felt like to be sick of rain, and longing for sun.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Hurston, Moses and the Responsibilities of Freedom
SUMMER BOOK REPORT
Moses, Man of the Mountain
Zora Neale Hurston
HERE CAME ZORA, to tell me a story I've heard thirty-three times and make it new. Moses, Man of the Mountain is the Exodus story, which I've heard each year on Passover, told in a 1930s southern African American voice. It's like Siddhartha's half-black half-Jewish cousin.
Hurston's biblical characters are not idealized. Aaron is flagrantly annoying; Miriam is bitterly asexual and petty (a far cry from the feminist hero of Debbie Friedman songs and lefty Haggadahs); Zipporah is kinda superficial; Pharoah is not an avataric demon, but a man flawed by grudges and pomposity. Moses is heroic, but in the manner of a real person: arguing with himself about the right things to do, mad at the feebleness of others, forever hated upon.
MOSES SUFFERS the burdens of leadership, and his poll numbers swing with the Israelites shifting fortunes. They are capable of idolizing him when things go well, but even happier to blame him when things go wrong, at which point they go on about how they were better off under Pharoah. Instead of assessing the man and what he has done or tried to do, they take a look around and wail, He's in charge! And everything sucks!
Leaders make sacrifices. Hair grays; privacy disappears and responsibilities never do. You might want to just go hoop with Malia or whatever, but the lives of other people are in your hands, and a true leader is acutely aware of the fact. For all the worry: you may never see the Promised Land.
THIS BOOK also concerns what my Bat Mitzvah speech rather bombastically called 'The Responsibilities of Freedom.' Much as a slave yearns to be free, and celebrates when freed, the moment of liberation is actually only the beginning of a rough climb. Just the unshackling is not freedom. The enslaved have been robbed of the opportunity to grow minds and wills of their own; the Israelites spent forty years in the desert battling to become free selves before they could enter the Promised Land.
Hurston writes:
Moses, Man of the Mountain
Zora Neale Hurston
HERE CAME ZORA, to tell me a story I've heard thirty-three times and make it new. Moses, Man of the Mountain is the Exodus story, which I've heard each year on Passover, told in a 1930s southern African American voice. It's like Siddhartha's half-black half-Jewish cousin.Hurston's biblical characters are not idealized. Aaron is flagrantly annoying; Miriam is bitterly asexual and petty (a far cry from the feminist hero of Debbie Friedman songs and lefty Haggadahs); Zipporah is kinda superficial; Pharoah is not an avataric demon, but a man flawed by grudges and pomposity. Moses is heroic, but in the manner of a real person: arguing with himself about the right things to do, mad at the feebleness of others, forever hated upon.
MOSES SUFFERS the burdens of leadership, and his poll numbers swing with the Israelites shifting fortunes. They are capable of idolizing him when things go well, but even happier to blame him when things go wrong, at which point they go on about how they were better off under Pharoah. Instead of assessing the man and what he has done or tried to do, they take a look around and wail, He's in charge! And everything sucks!
Leaders make sacrifices. Hair grays; privacy disappears and responsibilities never do. You might want to just go hoop with Malia or whatever, but the lives of other people are in your hands, and a true leader is acutely aware of the fact. For all the worry: you may never see the Promised Land.
THIS BOOK also concerns what my Bat Mitzvah speech rather bombastically called 'The Responsibilities of Freedom.' Much as a slave yearns to be free, and celebrates when freed, the moment of liberation is actually only the beginning of a rough climb. Just the unshackling is not freedom. The enslaved have been robbed of the opportunity to grow minds and wills of their own; the Israelites spent forty years in the desert battling to become free selves before they could enter the Promised Land.
Hurston writes:
[Moses] found out that no man can make another free. Freedom was something internal...All you could do was to give the opportunity for freedom and the man himself must make his own emancipation. He remembered how often he had had to fight Israel to halt a return to Egypt and slavery. Responsibility had seemed too awful to them time and time again.
THAT IS also a perfect example of how Hurston wrote. She chose simple words when fancy ones were not needed. Her version of the Exodus helped me think about two peoples, hers and mine, and the struggles they have faced in that long desert between Egypt and the Promised Land.
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