Benin Urban Groove Compilation

I was wrong about the Stern Grove show, delightfully wrong. I took my time in getting over there, taking the 6 Bus into the clouds and getting off at the same stop as a young woman who seemed convinced that my intention was to rape her. She was not entirely wrong, and I followed her up some stairs which had been given a street sign, and then reassuringly turned in the opposite direction once we got to the top.

There was a park with North Face wearing people and their dogs. I walked past them, past a playground that wasn't loaded with signs saying Kids Only and Don't Come Round Here After Dark and into a collection of bay trees and old cypress. The trees held a strange fruit, computer chairs (because the dot coms burst) and muni benches (because I just got off the 6) held together and to the tree by nailed planks at random angles. I bent my way into the Muni Bench, saturating my ass with Eucalyptus oil and fog residue, and I sparked a bowl. It was then I noticed there was trash everywhere.

The tree with the chairs faces out on the Sunset, in one of the hills near Noriega street where the elder Bush kicked some ass and there are also pastel colored houses. I took a bus down the hill, got on the 28 route and immediately studied my busmates to see which of them was going to this music scene. There were a lot of likely contenders, but then I also felt that way about the 6. I can convince myself that you are not who you say you are through your clothes and mannerisms. There is very little about my reality that I would say is objectively true.

The walk down to the grove was lined with opportunistic kids, legally hustling donuts and vitamin water. Fucking kill me now if I'm ever buying vitamin water, unless the proceeds go to a young hustler's ego. The rhythms were familiar and slow and Afro centric, the angle of the walkway steep. It's a free concert in the park, but many people are working there with stickers and barriers and other civilizing elements, so that we don't ever think we're just dancing in the streets. Seu Jorge either has some crazy Archestra of voodoo accomplices, or I am seeing one of the sons of Fela Kuti.

And indeed I am. Although the father may have complained about Nepotism as being a problem in his Nigeria, apparently when it comes to music the concept is not so bad. He plays Suffering and Smiling, and the injured rasta in front of me raises his staff and drinks from a conspicuously empty clear water bottle. It is, as James Baldwin says, the very cup of trembling. Where Fela would have been backed by maybe a dozen background singer wives, the son was more modest and had only two or three. I heard a group of hipsters behind me, one of them saying unconvincingly that "his father is... One of my favorites", as if to dismiss what we were being a part of today. And maybe a year ago I would have agreed with that sentiment.

But this music is not western music, and the emphasis is not on the songwriting prowess or encrypted symbolism. The emphasis is on the event, the captivating rhythm, the audience's participation, and the dancing. Mr Kuti is just a small fraction of what is going on, and that he is not original when he covers his fathers songs is irrelevant, nothing in our lives will be original and we're always just coming back to the same themes of life, triumph, and death, because that is all we have. I dance like I don't have a messenger bag on, swinging my hair like it had it's own percussion, and fade into a mass greater than myself.

I left Stern Grove feeling healthy like I didn't need food to live, only sincerity. The boys hustling the donuts still had dozens left, apparently they misread the crowd, but people don't buy a dozen protein bars at a time. I made my way to 24th street and struggled to finish a burrito. The 33 took me home, and I read the Richard Brautigan short story anthology "Revenge of the Lawn", laughing a lot and attracting some book reading young woman to sit next to me and decidedly look in all but my direction. I tried to prop the pages so she could see, read the fictionalized accounts of diffused casual sex between San Francisco strangers, but it was not enough, and she got off the bus near her house.

As usual, I was the last person off of the 33, and walking through Laurel Heights I heard a fence straddling semi-hipster describe to his decidedly non-hipster walking companion about a video he saw where it started with a pond, zoomed out to focus on our galaxy, and then it zoomed in all the way on a single cell, and we notice that it too looks like a galaxy. I am familiar with this footage, computer generated as it is. The pond always seemed lovely, I think it was in the Netherlands.