complications and creations

One of my friends had an extra ticket for Fela! last night so after I got off work I met up with her and some of her friends, and our seats were pretty good, up really close. I wondered how many people would care about  The live band backing the songs was fantastic, the visuals stunning though the second half had some kind of weird digressions that made me wonder if there was concern about how to actually plot the thing, and given that we were among the handful of white folk there (which surprised me a little but then again college radio can be its own ivory tower), the general interplay between audience and actors was interactive in a way that worked well given the nature of the musical, which came across as less play and more concert.

I've loved his music since one of my college roommates got me listening to something other than cracker tuneage and I wish she could have been there with us. It's powerful stuff, these long jams that fill an entire album side at a time, and Tony Allen's in his eighties still being amazing. So it's a little disorienting when they're truncated into relatively bite-sized pieces, but that's to be expected, especially in a mass-market production that bears the prominent names of the likes of Jay-Z and Will Smith and features a former member of Destiny's Child. I wonder what the level of cognitive dissonance is here when the first couple are big fans.

And these songs criticizing the corruption, the heavy-handed military power, the way that multinationals are prone to plunder, a state that treats life cheaply, still resonate with a universality that makes it potent. These songs started riots and led to his being arrested 200 times, the death of his mother, and serious implications for his band.

And this is where I know too much, to completely suspend disbelief, and it's hard to sever the power of the music with the complications of the person who is its architect. He was charismatic, but I wonder how he would have run things. I wonder how many people applauding when he asks his backup dancers to marry him and calls them "queens" realize that he didn't treat them all that well. I'm surprised that there's no mention that he died of AIDS in 1997. But anyways, free ticket, good conversation, and a night out in a swank theater, which is always welcome.

carnivalesque

Summer in Clevelandia officially begins with the first of the street fairs and festivals all over the city and last night, me and one of my fellow Parmastanis made a pilgrimage out to the Hessler fair to meet up with sundry folk and mingle with the tiedyed masses fighting the conformity of The Man by engaging in overpriced capitalism of another kind, as we observed the sartorial performance art of art school kids and boomers clinging to their glory days, busking musicians, and the kind of beat-writer inspired poetry that will be eternally terrible. It's strange to me that the more "leftward" I've swung politically (as far as being fed up with the whole perpetual warfare goonsquadery both at home and abroad), the less patience I have for the Lennonistas and their ilk.

It was hard to not openly chortle at the Che Guevara crepe paper festooning one of the booths, considering that the jerkface who got iconic by being good-looking had no use for arty folk or gay people in his concept of revolucion and what's more capitalistic ultimately than $10 parking (we parked down the street and walked), overpriced (vegan) fair food and $40 batik skirts? But I digress. After all, I've sold out as it is and was disappointed in the lack of Jamaican chicken and rice and ended up eating one of my friends' couscous plate because he didn't like it.

I'm also convinced that afrobeat will eventually undergo the transformation into cracker party music the way ska did in the 1980's and especially the 90's, because it takes a legitimate and often political black music form with an intense sociopolitical history that you can co-opt to make party music with all of your nerdy friends from marching band. Mark my words, you heard it here first.
 

That being said, I had a good time hanging out and such, drove back through Parmastan to drop off my traveling companion and continue the conversations that we usually have, and then drove home under sunsetting skies, made peace in the garden with relevant parties, drank tea and watched Buffy with the cat.  It was a good weekend, and much harder to come back to the routine when the sun and the breeze just feels so perfect.