The Urban Soup (Part XIII)

Two doors down from me: temporarily a pounding den of undergroupd hip-hop; temporarily a stopping point for repeated police and fire brigade visits. In short, the kind of place that makes me feel like a square. I stopped in to their pirate/ninja themed party for a little while, stone sober. I was a pirate--a half-assed pirate--a "software pirate"; i.e. a dude with glasses and a t-shirt. And here, in this squat of a house with phoenixes and bumblebees and dragons graffitied into the walls with dripping black spraypaint, I caught my occassional glimpse into a life of my values put into action in extreme cases. Kids with hoodies who kitchhike everywhere between here and Costa Rica, vans with the contents of a life--a mattress and a canoe--piled in, shameless dancing and blasting of noise, come who may. It is what I've been tryng to capture with the bus trips out of towns; it is the ineffable lifting of creativity to be the ruling force, pushing you here and there in a world that is transient, but the transience is quitel yaccepted, because you know the people you've met are carried with you: in candles you light, not on the internet; in romantic nights of self, not in trinkets you've hoarded. It was a whirl of darkened and bearded faces, rags everywhere, hoods and face masques everywhere, a girl who has a rat living inside her clothes--if anyone remembers the reference: a daemon. Scary dudes with sharp cheekbones and lipstick smeared all over their eyes in some attempted emulation of schizophrenia. There was one kindly bearded face who looked so much like Allen Ginsberg that I wanted to take him and drum with him and recite some ancient lines from the now-forgottne 50s. But he was waylaid by the red ninja and that never came to pass. I'm not makin this up.

So that's the romantic description. It's not all like that: underground hip-hop was the watershed of white middle-class privilege. Exuberant jumping bowed the rotting beams in the floor. The crowd forgot to take into account the increasing alienation of its malcontents, and that is what broke its admirable enthusiasm. So there is the grotto-like shadow that casts a cold, flickering halogen light. So it goes.

Consider: "Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is ------- (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means 'submission'. The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done."