JQR’s secret city

(Every once in a while, Google Analytics's list of keywords that bring
you, Dear Reader, to my blog comes up with good ideas to write about.
The scary thing is that converse of the truism that there is someone
writing about pretty much anything on the Internet holds true: there
is someone searching for pretty much everything on the Internet. Et
voilà today's post, inspired for you by the intrepid Googlenaut
searching for "Written description of how soukous women have their waist". My blog was at
no. 3 when I wrote this post; I should hope it rises somewhat.)
 
The Dany Engobo/Coeurs Brisés videos, where the mild and inoffensive
zouk tunes clearly play a supporting role to the hypnotic
tummy-shaking of the Coeurs Brisés (Broken Hearts) troupe of dancers,
could be, if you took them lightly, campy as all get out, but I don't
see them that way. Instead, there's something deeply serious about the
attractiveness of lissome women moving hypnotically to the middle-aged
male head of family. Strangely enough, watching such dance videos for
an hour or so, or the length of a VHS tape, always proved relaxing,
like a nice afternoon nap, rather than erotically stimulating.
 
A couple years later I met the guitarist Diblo Dibala after a summer
concert at South Street Seaport. My buddy from work Rose was a friend
of one of his two backup dancers, the older one. The younger one had
managed to shatter boundaries by being a Brooklyn girl (bizarrely
nicknamed Electra) who was touring the world as an African dancer.
This only reinforced to me the complete inauthenticity of soukous
music and soukous-dancing videos; these were products of late
20th-century cultural capitalism, not the honest and straightforward
expression of prelapsarian village life that is the default approach
to African cultural products. In other words, folks were watching
these videos (and Diblo's dancers) not because they had some kind of
cultural relevance to the viewer, but because they liked the dancing,
or the physiques of the dancers, or both. My interest was validated; I
didn't have to come from some Kinshasa faubourg in order to
appreciate it.
 
Here are some examples:

Loading mentions Retweet

I could watch these highlights of the Girls Write Now event last
weekend all day; they just get better and better. Erica's poem in the
clip below is pretty powerful ("red velvet cupcakes of indifference,"
anyone?), but Samantha speaks with such assurance she just knocks the
whole event onto a different level.

Loading mentions Retweet

For my visual learners out there, here's a slideshow about
Presta-valve tubes. They come in differing stem lengths, and I usually
end up with many tubes on hand, all of the wrong length. Not an
insuperable obstacle, however; watch the slides for details.

Loading mentions Retweet

Since I moved to the tent,
I've been enjoying the latest in luxury accouterments: a bidet.
Actually, my choice of bidets, since every one of the seven toilets in
each of the two toilet-trailers has one installed and working. The
tincans I used to live in had one bidet installed in one trailer, and
that one was disabled shortly after I had discovered it.
 
Note for self: next time someone suggests spending a couple months
down in a secret city somewhere, make sure the bidet is installed and
working before agreeing.
 
Here's the device in action (not in full glory, mind you, just action).
 

Loading mentions Retweet

 
There was a whole group of people standing around watching these two
cats hiss at each other.

Loading mentions Retweet

On the bike today, out for my afternoon ride, I hopped off the curb
into the road and all of a sudden, everything was calm, like a smooth
and tranquil lake of asphalt. It was like that moment diving into
Craig Pond first thing in the morning, when the lake is so still and
the water is chilly but it just swallows you up into it, so softly.
 
(No pictures of Craig Pond handy, unfortunately, so here's one from
Oregon instead.)
 
The ride went OK. I attempted to psyche myself up beforehand by
listening to Tune-Yards' "Sunlight,", but it was another song, Stereolab's "Metronomic
Underground" that proved to be the key to victory.
 

 
As you can tell, it's pretty hypnotic, and just humming to myself,
"Crazy, sturdy, a torpedo" helped me keep up that steady energy needed
for the long back stretch with the wind, past the dump. Of course,
first I had to figure out what song it actually was, which is kind of
difficult, since my Stereolab sampler is on a single CD that I used to
play whenever I would drive around the secret city in the truck.
 
But it worked! I finished lap no. 2 in 22:48, or 18.4 mph. I was
pretty much toast afterward, however, and rode home kind of slowly,
still in a daze from hearing the song in my head over and over again.

Loading mentions Retweet

Hey kids, it's Farkas cat!

 Check this one out:

 "Are you coat?" at 0:27 has become an instant classic line for me
ever since I first saw the video last week. I love the subtly menacing
monologue. She could do it, too: make a little cat-coat. I saw a guy
named Farkas the other day but hesitated before showing him and his
buddy the video: I didn't want him to be nicknamed "little cat-coat"
for the rest of the day.

Loading mentions Retweet