Two Songs for a Friday

Hips Don't Lie // Shakira featuring Wyclef Jean

Trumpets are an enormous part of the Latin American music scene, as are the beats that follow throughout this song. Every time we heard the first trumpet diddy that is played in this song on the radio on the crazy Panamanian buses and in the pick-up trucks we rode in the back of and out on the hot, sweaty streets, we thought it was this song... but realized that it's just how ALL songs start there. These beats resonated through Lauren, Riki and I as our hips told the absolute truth throughout the Isthmus.

What's Love Got to Do With It // Tina Turner

We realized that in pretty much all ways, but especially music, Panama is just a little bit behind the times. Songs from the 80's and 90's blasted from small radios held by town locos and scratchy cab speakers through the dark Panama City nights. This one in particular got us going pretty hard. Because I don't ever really go back this far, and because everybody's Friday needs a little TINA.

The Stupendous Tedium of Adventure

I remembered early on in our journey through the southernmost Central American country the stupendous tedium of adventure. The balance of dread and surprise, the fact that endurance merits comfort, that the hair stank of ugliness eventually becomes beautiful, vivid, dreamlike. Sometimes it's the other way around, sometimes it happens erratically, like the score of a well matched basketball game. Bliss - 10, Horror - 8, then suddenly Bliss - 10, Horror - 22, and you feel like the players, all of them at once, running back and forth across the court, downtrodden with exhaustion, sweaty from brow to ankle, keeping up.

You stand in front of a park near the city center, waiting for a local bus, and the town loco decides to harrass you with his rye-stinking breath, strange white paint on his chin and forehead, a small radio blasting in his hands, dancing suggestively at you with dozens of onlookers laughing, not helping - egging, not shooing. The moment you see his backside, pants nearly all the way down, white underware soiled with brown, you gag and your companions do too, so you decide to hail a cab instead. Any price, just to get you out of there. The cabbie in turn, ends up playing Tina Turner's "What's Love Got To Do With It" and you all screame it out the windows and at each other, despising one loco local and loving another, as he asks you in Spanish what the lyrics of the song mean.

You endure an 8 hour midnight bus ride from the capitol city to the beach, wearing sandals and shorts, a tanktop and a book. You pretzel yourself in a way that is warmest, as the air conditioner pours icy pockets of deathly friged air onto your bare skin, rendering the idea of a full night's sleep (or any sleep at all) impossible. But the bus ride from a freezing hell brings you to a boat, then, which takes you to a remote island in the Pacific, where equator-hot sunlight dances across your face through the leaves of the mangroves and the palms, and you sleep among howler monkeys, preying mantus' and a salty breeze in a hammock, swinging happy and free.

You spend the morning in a touristy island town dodging haggling boatmen, trying to give you the "best deal" to go to the "best beach," trying to bring them down a few bucks and being laughed at by open mouths and toothy grins. You get through it though, and somehow, for a dollar and fifty cents, you are taken to an island far away from the rest of the foreigners, and you find yourself bathing in a clear, coral surrounded pool of Caribbean water, eating the mangoes that you found on your forest walk to paradise. You lay back in the water and take in the absolute blue of the sky, the rustling perfect green of the trees, and the warm glassiness of your worldly tub. And life is good.

You stand in line at a bus terminal in the middle of the country among dozens of people with skin darker than yours and you are plucked out of the crowd, taken to the newest and fastest moving bus, you step on with an embarrassment of luck, that you get special priority because you are white, that you're treated differently because they want to ensure foreigners contentment and comfort. You realize that what this actually means is that you'll have a nice, squashy seat that reclines and lulls you into a dreamy catnap, until the first stop an hour later and then you'll be moved to a little narrow hallway in the front of the bus, accompanied by a family of five - your legs taking on yogic shapes and your feet falling asleep under you. You realize that you are a stowaway, you are extra money to them, paying cargo, cattle. But the bus will eventually take you to a city that has an airport that has airplanes with wings that will fly you quietly and comfortably Home, where you will peel this adventure off like a big backpack off an aching back, like sunburned skin from a shiny shoulder, only to get ready to do it all over again.

Two (Car) Songs for a Friday

YouTube is no longer allowing me to embed... so links will have to suffice from here on. They're cleaner and crisper anyway, so I'm okay with it.

*Note: The following two songs are best sung/listened to in a moving vehicle.

These Words // Natasha Bedingfield

Scene: It's a balmy, sun drenched mid-July afternoon in 2005. Two girls glide between corn fields and cow fields on a spur-of-the-moment road trip to a cabin on a lake in Marquette, Wisconsin. They met recently, blending smoothies and sharing secrets about sex and forming every sentence into a title by George Orwell. There were no hesitations from the get-go. There was instant sisterhood. On this road trip, these words lifted out of their lungs in truth, for each other, for a long long time, even forever.

Five years later, one of the girls asked the other to be her bridesmaid. Tomorrow, they will celebrate freedom, insanity, vanity and the true exquisiteness of the words I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU!

Hurricane // Bob Dylan

Scene: A foggy late night in April, 2011, just south of Burlington, Vermont. A boy. A girl. A song, a test. The lyrics burst out of them like their hearts had been for 3 months previous. Every word came out like Maine maple syrup, passionate and precise. She loved that he knew it, he loved the way she sang. They discussed the fact that they were in the midst of a genius, a legend, a prophet. It seemed only appropriate as they had driven through Paterson earlier that day, and even more appropriate seeing as they had been screeching their tires away from the pigs of law.

Mice and Pigs : A Children's Story

One day, a little mouse was about to leave to pick up her mouse sister and her sister's new mouse husband at the big airport uptown.
Her friend chicken said, "You should use my little van."
"Okay," said the little mouse. "Thank you!"
She propped her nose up on the steering wheel and stretched her little feet as far as they would go to push on the gas and slam on the brakes, as she wove and weaved through the Big City traffic.
"Great to see you sister mouse!" the little mouse's sister said.
"I like your hip clothes, and your neighborhood!" the little mouse's sister's new mouse husband said.
They went to take the little van back to the nice chicken. On the way there, the mouse's sister noticed that there was a pig driving behind them, with his red and blue lights flashing bright and shiny on the shiny spring windshields.
The pig walked up to the little mouse's window on two of his dirty hoofs and he tapped his two front hoofs on it. The little mouse nervously rolled down the window and gave the pig her driving card and a slip of paper with a bunch of numbers and official words on it.
The pig tap-tap-tap'd back to his car on his hoofs, and came back what seemed like hours later. The three mice had been shaking and shivering in a fever of fear while they waited. "You shouldn't have turned left at that stoplight, little mouse," the pig spat, dirt crusting from his nostrils and crust dirtying his eyelids.
"Okay," said the little mouse, crying. She took the yellow piece of paper that had a large amount of dollars that she owed on it. They drove away.

A week later, the little mouse invited her mouse boyfriend to come to the Big City to play in the grass with her and eat cheese with her. They played in the grass and ate cheese and smiled into the sun. Then he invited her to come up to his home six hours north of the Big City. She said yes, and she was excited to drive with him through the mountains and fields.
The little mouse's boyfriend drove for a while, and they listened to boys playing banjos and British men reading books about wizards. Then, they stopped for gasoline and bad sandwiches and the little mouse began to drive the car.
"You're good at this," said the little mouse's boyfriend, impressed.
"Thank you," the little mouse said, smiling.
They drove into the dark and passed many cars and stars and felt warm and happy.
All of a sudden, the little mouse noticed that there were familiar red and blue lights shining in her rear-view mirror. She yelled out, and her mouse boyfriend gulped loudly.
"Was I going too fast?" the little mouse asked him, and he held her hand.
Two hoofs came out of nowhere and a big snout snotted all over the little mouse's driver-side window. She rolled it down slowly, tears welling up in her little black mouse eyes.
"Do you have any idea how fast you were going little mouse?" the pig said, green drool dripping from his lips.
"Not that fast, I don't think," said the little mouse, giving him her driving card and a slip of paper with a bunch of numbers and official words on it.
When the pig clippity clapped away on his dirty hoofs, she turned to her mouse boyfriend with tears streaming down her fluffy cheeks. He tried to say nice words to her but she just cried. He kept holding her hand. She let him do that.
Soon the pig came back from his big ugly SUV and the little mouse took the yellow piece of paper that had a large amount of dollars that she owed on it.
"Not again," she sighed, sniffing the tears back into herself.
"I'll drive," said the little mouse's boyfriend.
And he did.

Yellow Pen Adventures

There's something about a good pen that just makes you want to write. My skinny-tipped yellow pen has been a part of my life, made me want to write, since my first days standing in front of 32 Thai cherubs. A gift from one of their parents, proud of their king, telling me that everything that is yellow in their country is good, right, strong. The yellow pen followed me, tucked into the spiral wires of my traveling notebooks, clutched between my fingers and drawing out my experiences in letters to Robbi, Pat, Lindsay. I packed it for Brazil, wondering if its ink would last another four months worth of scribbling madness and recounting green leaf afternoons. It did. And so, when I settled my stagnant ass in a seat that I'm sure at least three other bored, battered souls have sat in, farting and adjusting their underware, I placed this yellow pen in a black wire cup next to the other pens that Scholastic had ordered me from Office Max. The standard Bic's stand up straight and proud, waiting for this ink to fade, for me to pick them up so they can do their duty with black, solid dignity. But this yellow pen lived through all of it, kept spreading blue. After my ass left that chair for good, I brought the little yellow pen home, placed it on my dresser. It still helps me with my cluttered thoughts and long lists and plans. It still keeps telling the pages what I'm thinking.

Two Songs for a Friday

Vibrant Thing // Q-Tip

Friday mornings are for gangstas... especially when you spend them with two fly Sconnies like my sister Colleen and her husband Gianni. I picked them up from Laguardia last night, and as we drove down the BQE through Queens and then down into Bed-Stuy, I had a warm fuzzy family feeling. It felt quite vibrant. Like a vibrant thing.

Empire State of Mind // Jay-Z & Alicia Keys

I'm always given a new perspective on the city when people come to visit. I look at the buildings from a slightly different angle than I do when I'm alone. I go on boats, to look at them from water, I climb to the top of them to see others from above, I appreciate them from an outsider's vantage. This is the song that I played on Christmas Eve for Coco & G, giving it to them as a hint of what was to come. And as we wave "one hand in the air for the big city" today, we'll likely also be singing this.