I've been thinking I should get myself back in the blogging mode in preparation for India, and why not tonight, when last week featured both the presidential election and my trip to NYC to hear Chris DJ at the Guggenheim. No, I'm not suggesting that both of those events are on the same plane (certainly not for the nation!), but they were both quite exciting for me. I don't know if anyone who is much younger than me can have the same kind of appreciation of Obama's election -- if you don't remember vividly, as I do, a time when blacks were killed for attempting to register to vote, is it quite as redeeming to see one elected president? Certainly I understood why Jesse Jackson -- who after all, as a young man was standing right next to Martin Luther King when he was assassinated -- was sobbing in Grant Park on election night. But even young people who didn't have this history in their bones seemed quite elated. Now the fun will be seeing who he is as president and what he does. I kept thinking during the campaign that the man we were seeing wasn't really the man who wrote his autobiography, "Dreams of My Father," so I'm not sure what exactly to expect. Perhaps someone more daring and less mainstream, as the book would lead you to believe, or perhaps in the very course of becoming president something inevitably pushes you more toward the center, not necessarily just out of expediency, but because of the very things you do, see, hear. We shall see. . . .
As for Chris at the Guggenheim, that was joy of quite another nature, but certainly joy nonetheless. The rhythmic, throbbing, music; the crowds of people; the look of absorption and intensity on Chris's face as he twirled his dials, consulted his computer, listened to his earphone, scratched his vinyl -- being there, with the loud sound carrying me up beyond the day-to-day, out of my body, was a kind of drugged experience without drugs, an hour and a half entry into a different universe. This is music as transport, and more power to it, I say -- why not celebrate a week that brings us a historic election with a glimpse into another world?
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I'm glad you blogged about both Obama and Chris!! Obama, there's certainly been plenty (of other) good stuff written about.... the jubilation on Election Day night, the pictures and weeping all over Grant park. Dancing in the streets in Philly, Central Square/Cambridge, and certainly in NYC, London and every other place on earth that is ready to be done with Bush and last 8 years.... But Chris at the Guggenheim!!!? Well, that I missed, and I'm grateful that you wrote aobut it so eloquently as to bring me/us there.... Still waiting for the teletransport technology that will let us be in two real places at virtually the same time.
xo
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