Saturday, August 2, 2014

Free Fridays




Pat, pat, pat.   Pitter, Splash!  A car breaks and then the rumble of the F Train overhead.  I’m back in Brooklyn.  Rainy morning.  And the leaves of the sycamore trees are waving about wildly out the window each in its own manner but each somehow coordinated by the wind, reminding me oddly of the Atlantic from the tip of Cabo Sao Vincente.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed to find out something was for free as yesterday when I showed up yesterday at the MoMA, for our planned assault to find out it was “Free Fridays.”  Oh dear.  People of all stripes, Korean tourists, Argentine tourists, hipsters, septuagenarians, a peer in a gray blazer, and pink slacks who looked sick in the bath room but is now strolling about confidently.   Packed, our squad felt right at home.  水泄不通[1], it’s just like every day in China.

One daughter is not feeling well.  The other has a headache.  On the ride up after a lunch above Grand Central we used Uber.  I don’t have the app, though having had people use it for me now in SF, Shanghai, and New York, I suppose it’s about time I downloaded it.  There is always some trepidation getting in to a “private” car as opposed the standard, predictable low expectations one has in a licensed taxi.  This gentleman, Gavin, was a retired New York City cop.  Handsome, shaved dome, he quickly established himself as a friendly sort, and I took him for a peer, which he was, hence my concern at his retirement.  But apparently New York’s finest can retire after twenty years of service and that’s what Gavin did.  Now he’s driving for Uber, raving about the money.  Presumably he’s well prepared for any knucklehead fares that New York might throw at him. 



Arriving at the Museum my strategy was simple.  Go to the gift shop first.   American Museum’s certainly set the standard for commercializing their collections.  And, with experience I know that If I whet my daughter’s appetites with something available in the gift shop that they then must track down and find the original of, we will have that much more fuel in the tank, as we set out.

Everyone needed to go to the bathroom.  “No.  You can’t go past this point with the bags.”  “Not even to the bathroom?!”  “The line is over there for the coat check sir.” I took all the daypacks and let others go pee, and got in the imposing line to check them.  “No, no sir, you must first have a ticket.”  “To store my things?  Why?  Isn’t it “Free Friday?”  “The free ticket line is outside.”   The free ticket line is two blocks long.  What’s the point?  Open the gates.  Let us in to what Ishmael Reed once called the “Art Detention Center.”  Stand in a three hundred yard line for free tickets.  OK.  At least it is fast.  Then the bag-check line, which was shorter and much slower, was grinding. 

Vibe now thoroughly depleted for everyone except yours truly, we set out.   By the time we were in the second room full of Late Nineteenth Century masterpieces most of the party was out of gas.  I feverishly raced around with my little one by the hand trying to cram in Impressionism, and Cubism, and Pointalism and Naive works.  And, to her credit, she was fascinated and asked good questions that somehow made the whole effort worth it.  Down in the gift shop, she recognized (a mercifully small reproduction of) Henri Rousseau’s  “The Dream.”  “It’s yours.”  “Hey we saw that guy too!”  “Yes.  OK.  Fine.  A post card of Vincent van Gogh’s mournful “Portrait of Joseph Roulin”?  You got it.”

Our family party broke up.  Everyone was ready to do their own thing.  Our unit headed back to Brooklyn.  On the way we got good old-fashioned yellow taxicab.  In the back my girls looked they were recovering from basic training.  In front I met Emanuel, a lovely gentleman, from Kumasi.  And we talked and talked and talked about Ghana as we cut down the FDR to the Brooklyn Bridge.  Ghanaian history, politics, local international relations and of course, music.  I mentioned CK. Mann and he reached for a C.D., which would have been splendid but he couldn’t locate it.  I recently taught a detailed case study on Ghana and was so glad to be able to dig in.  After my nineteenth point of inquiry, he had to remind me he hadn’t been there for six years and knew more about New York these days. 



I entered Ghana in 1992 en route from Burkina Faso and traveled by bus down to Kumasi.  On the way, in every place I stopped I asked of the music, cassettes were all you could find, though vinyl would have been better.  In Accra I found a very cool looking cover “Funky Highlife” by CK Mann and his Carousel.  The first tune was “Afaso Beesoun”, which is just about the single most funky introduction to a song that is humanly conceivable.  I remember feeling so excited hearing it.  That special feeling where you know you are going to blow the minds of every friend you know with good taste you, once you play this tune at full volume, that no one else has and absolutely no one could find in two minutes on Youtube, like I just did.  It builds, adding a wah guitar and and organ to a crescendo that flattens out into lovely, characteristic Ghanaian highlife harmonies and a lovely swaying groove for the remaining seven minutes or so, though, somehow, oddly the potential of the intro isn’t fully realized. 

It is the intro speaks to that apogee of rhythmic sophistication uniquely positioned there, in the Volta region. Lyrics and grooves and melodies and harmonies may build out differently to make songs, of say Fela that I ultimately enjoy more. Everyone borrows something and just about all popular music of the last century borrows from West African rhythmic genius.  But to my ears, nothing can touch that Ghanaian rhythmic trigonometry that always seems like you’ve stumbled upon a the seminal source spring for so much of the world’s fresh water.  You don’t need to go to Accra these days.  Just listen to the opening yourself on the link below.  Emanuel was in full agreement. 




[1] shuǐxièbùtōng:  lit. not one drop can trickle through (idiom); fig. impenetrable (crowd, traffic)

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