2001-08-16 - 10:41 p.m. - drum, baby, drum!!!
as i was leaving the lesicester square tube stop today there was a rastifarian guy playing a hand drum and singing spiritual lyrics over the beat. i was going up the escalator watching him as if nothing else existed, not even noticing when people dropped loose coins on to his satchel. i watched him all the way up the escalator and he just looked straight up the whole time, focusing on either the plain white cieling-ugly in a sterile sort of way- or perhaps whatever magic was hiding on the other side of the ceiling. beautiful.on the way back into the tube he was still there, the rhythmic pulse of the drumming was, by now, beating a rhythm so regular but intense and complex that it could only be likened to a heartbeat and his singing wrapped around the groove of the rhythm and tied it together as if the music, as it built to a fever pitch, was becoming a living human being. i dropped some loose coins on his satchel and he smiled and nodded. not to anyone else who did before me, but just to me. like he knew i knew that what he was doing was cutting through every myth we have built up about our species and hold close to our chests (but not our hearts, they know better) as truth. that smile and nod said: "you fuckin get it man...you fuckin know."
and its strange that more people don't know. like everyone here is so sad. i am slowly realizing that i hate big cities. there is no such thing as identity. everybody is somebody is nobody. sometimes its nice to be anonymous but i wonder how beautiful things are made here with so much sadness and seperation and lack of identity.
and right now there is some wird sex show on the BBC TV...like female sex secrets revealed. this is hbo fair but its on public tv here. this place is so fucking different than home. like from the air dayton looks likea grid and within this grid people follow patterns along asphalt and sidewalks but somehow can manage to somehow break free from the pattern and create something new and beautiful. here the streets are nothing like a grid. from the air the streets look like a random assemblage of lines that sometimes cross and meet up. this city is more a result of its rich history than its beautiful present and that leaves very little room, at this point in time to make something beautiful. like when was the last time beautiful popular art came out of england, radiohead? the most dense, paranoid and isolationist music of the last year. i think maybe that is important in understanding this place. such a wierd place. i'll take ohio.
hope you are all well.
i miss you.
let's ask ourselves: is this the best we can do?
we can always do better.
we are only the accumulation of history until we create our own history.
what happens when all history has been made?
what do we do then?
where can we go?
we will never run out of history.
we are beautiful.
use more exclamation points in yer writing!!!
i love you.
i hope all of you feel loved.
xoxo
listen to: ted leo, tindersticks, atom and his package, hot water music, the white stripes, aloha, lovesick, stereolab(they are like fucking gods here to the indie kids), bobbie 'prince' biily( or something like that), stephen malkmus.
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