my spelling has become an embarrassment, and i think everything needs a hyphen. this could be a result of my master's program, because in folklore we're all about isolated cultures meeting modernity, modernity defining "the folk," hybridity, cultural integrity, and the consistently contemporary nature of the past. all folkloric events are events in the margins of history. right. thus, the hyphens.
honestly, it all makes very little sense to me. i'm trying, these days, to get underneath the words. and in the effort, the words have followed me into my dreams. i'm not sure what the anxiety is, but it's very palpable. there is always, in my dreams, a panic of violence -- of people enacting unseen atrocities towards other peoples, emphasis on "unseen." while asleep, i see people fighting over jazz as if it were a plot of land and walt disney stealing grimm's fairy tales. i also see the children who watched disney growing up grow up to realize that there is no single evil to vanquish and no castle in the sky. and it's like watching the re-death of santa clause, but worse. when i wake up, i feel helpless. and scared, i'm always scared.
there are always faces across a table -- there is a man arguing that rock n' roll was a black man's creation, "you only think of it as a white man's sound because that was the face that sold the records" (circa 1950's), and then there is another who replies, "yes, that was wrong. but times have changed and haven't we made contributions since then?" then there is the liberal idea of forgetting; it's time to forget, time to move on and reconcile. let us be a color-blind society. and then there is the backlash, "what do you mean forget? you never remembered us to begin with, and color-blind is just another word for white."
and somewhere in there, there are the voices that are not black or white but something else entirely, though, of course, then you have to ask if a voice has a color at all. what happens when a chinese girl decides to dance salsa? nothing. she's just dancing. but that's also what elvis said.
he said he was just playing music, whatever came naturally to him. but history reads him differently. he stole chuck berry's knees. he stole big mama thorton's hound dog blues. he was a white man, said his producer, who had a black sound, and that made them a million dollars (though according to NPR, kurt cobain is now the highest grossing dead musician. sorry elvis.) the question teachers like to ask in class is "what is our responsibility?" i want to know what that question means.
for myself and for now, i think i have the fortunate misfortune of just not being particularly good at what i do. because obviously it's not a problem until somebody notices. mediocrity unite.
