Zaidi Kidogo

“I like to think that some small canister of hope and tranquility washed ashore that day and we, in the right place, found it.  These are the things I imagine all lovers wish for amid the hot commencements of love and promises, their histories and failures washing ashore like flotsam, their innards girthed against those architects of misery, desire and restlessness; their hope rising against the air as it fondles the waves and frolics them skywards.  I like to think that, if the heart pauses awhile in a single place, it finds a home somewhere, like a vagabond lured by fatigue to an unlikely town and, with a sudden peacefulness, deciding to stay there.  I like to think these things because, whether or not they reach fruition, they provide the heart with a  kind of solace, the way poetry does, or all forms of tenderness that issue out amid the deserts of failed love and petulant desire.  I like to think them because, meditated on amid this pattern of off-white and darkness, they lend themselves to a kind of music, not unlike the music a dove makes as it circles the trees, not unlike the sun and the earth and their orbital brothers, the planets, as they chant to the heavens their longing for hope and repetition amid orderly movement, not unlike the music these humble wishes make with their cantata of willfulness and good intentions, looking for some pleasant abstractions amid our concretized lives, something tender and lovely to defy the times with, quiet and palpable amid the flickers of flux and the flames of longing: a bird rising over the ashes, a dream.”

-Michael Blumenthal, Wishful Thinking

Muzik, Errwhere

Belated dispatch from Park Street subway stop, Good Friday 2012.  The underground goin’ down.  A band of good-looking white boys has set up stage against a wall, and between songs they shout: “We’re the Relevant Elephants, look us up on Facebook!”  Over and over, a perfect four-beat: “We’re-the-REL-uh-vant-uh-EL-uh-phants-uh-LOOK-us-up-on-FACE-book.”  Part of the subway platform is undergoing construction, and the plywood walls are covered in ballpoint revelations: “Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful,” “Smash capitalism AND the state,” “Liam’s boner wuz here,” “And the days are not full enough and the nights are not full enough and life moves by like a field mouse not shaking the grass” (thanx to E. Pound), “Domestication is just sedimented violence,” “Where is the nudity?” “I believe in Sherlock Holmes.”

The underground is getting ever-more crowded, and two neon-vested platform officers are talking to each other across the tracks. Their feet poke over the edge of the tracks, even though no one else is allowed to come close.  The music in my headphones matches the scene: “Don’t push me CUZ i’m close - to - the - edge…”   Today I am sad, so I’m wearing a black hoodie: classik mourning garb for the angsty twenty-first-century twenty-something.  All day the only words running through my head are, “Do I look delicious?” 

Every man got a right to decide his own destiny,
And in this judgment there is no partiality.
So arm in arms, with arms, we’ll fight this little struggle,
Cause that’s the only way we can overcome our little trouble.

-Bob Marley, Zimbabwe