I’m in an internet café, and its nearing one and this place is a buck an hour, so there are no head phones, but they have Kaaza?so I am listening to Tim McGraw, in an attempt to remember what else I want to put on a list of contempary chart country, and the person behind me is listening to Arabic pop from Lebanon, so its not quite as undulating as the Arabic pop from Saudi Arabia and next door Garvey?s Chicken Shack (named after Marcus Garvey) is playing dub so loudly it drifts through the back door (what would the king of Back to Africa who was scared of the Diaspora think of it coming from the speakers of a restaurant in his name) , and two blocks down the private Greek Club has had the same singer on for a week, and she screams, in that my country was grand and now it is being ripped apart by the Turks way that was so popular in the twenties and now has become as mannered as white suburbanites at a blues festival, except the blues had all of the rock and rollers to redeem it into possibility and no one listens to live Greeks. Soon I will walk home and the Brazilians will play some Tropicalla, and the tricked out caddies will play hip hip from 105.9 the flow, and sometimes if I?m luck the Italian grandmothers will sit on there porches and sing lullabies, and it all works.
I could finish this up with a bullshit liberal humanist, lets all hug and sing Kumbaye coda-tonite, because I?m tired and homesick and worried about my mom in the hospital, and because I?ve had a decent meal and a couple of drinks?I like the noise of the street, I like the chaos of the neighborhood that?s okay with playing what it wants to play. A different day, a different set of circumstances, a different ethnographic make up and I would be pissed off. The metonymy here then, is a lesson about liking cities and having that like sometimes spill over into love.
(BTW?Garvey?s Chicken shack also makes a lamb roti that deserves a special place in heaven.)