I just came across this video. It’s Patti LaBelle’s performance as Funmilayo Ransome Kuti in the Broadway play Fela!. Watch out for the octaves going high and low. What a woman. What an amazing performance.
There hums a fan four feet behind the chair in a closed office. Outside, the sun recedes into the end of where the eyes can reach and heat pervades the day. The bustle of traffic is as unpredictable as the flight of the geese around the neighbourhood and on the surface everything goes on as it always does, this time only with a little more gusto as commuters disperse with the wind heading somewhere, heading nowhere.
There, as usual, is a magic to the simpleness of the atmosphere, something about the order and ordinariness of the programmed chore of day in a working metropolis. In the middle of such broth of movements is a yet unknown idea bubbling around the edge. Everyone seeks it in some way or another. Some find it, and some don’t. And some don’t collide with it a few times in a day’s work. And in many other parallel worlds, there are replicas in this rote and eventuality. Only one thing stands out of the urgency of each second: the futility of it all.
There now hums more than just a whirling fan. There is music, and company, and noise – the same old rote of living.
Pictures taken over a long period of people taking pictures of other people, or getting their pictures taken.
It will be another “month after” youknowwhat by the 18th of this month, and I want to take this moment to say it’s been a great pleasure ride of new experiences. It’s a travelogue, right? So everything I observe has to be in line with the overall acceptance of the transience of every passing situation and the potential of every little event to illuminate, to entertain and to inform. Thinking back, I think the best decision I made was to keep the blog open after the first long travel experience. Sometimes when I go back into the blog archive, I myself get amazed at the kind of things I read from myself, things that I’ve forgotten that I wrote, but which bring back a sweet memory.
Overall, I find it interesting that everything in life can actually be situated in a travelogue frame, considering that we are all travellers in one way or the other. So that whether or not I move from where I am, the progress of life constitute a kind of parallel journey out of which to draw whatever strength needed to move on and about. Hopefully, it only gets better.
So any new observations about the United States so far? No, except that studies have threatened to totally drown my creativity and leisure space. Or am I growing too old? I’d better steal myself back before grey hairs sprout up to compete with those on the president’s head. Well, see you guys around. I just wanted to leave a few words. And please do keep coming back 😉