There's a song by Rush, i think it is "The Freedom of Music", where they simultan-
eously quote Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" while giving it a reggae
twist, then immediately reverting back to their hard-rock framework. It's thrilling, &
i think not only because of the wit & dexterity involved. I remember the time it came
out, call it the late-Seventies of after-the-revolution-but-we-haven't found-out-yet-we-
lost; & particularly in relation to another phenomenon which only became visible in
retrospect: the re-segregation of pop music, a sad thing indeed, & truly terrible in its
consequences for the ensuing depleted genres of white & black music alike... At around
that same time i guess, Eric Clapton's "I Shot the Sheriff" was also taking a reggae flavor;
& both of these (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to introduce a new form (not even as
"exotica" did it endure, alas) feel like a spice wind from the Third World, tantalizing &
unattainable. They promise the brotherhood of all races, tangentially. Something we don't
even dare dream of, anymore.

The ethnic as signifier. Consider: as branding (Greek kitsch in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding";
everywhere tourists go, what they expect they find), as protest (beats looking to Castro's Cuba,
hippies to Hindu India, punks to England's dole-kids), as recovery (everyone can find a genealogical
flavor to their whitebread loaf, if they go back far enough), as alien (the Islamic Other, suspect by
virtue of their clear absence from Television Reality, until now), & as blik ( artists fascinated by
Japan, or Mexico, or Greco-Roman Antiquity, adopt whatever they can understand, or misunderstand,
for their own uses). And even those born to a real tribe, in a deracinated world, come to their own
culture as outsiders--as tourists. Their homeland is the new global order, in which they have no place,
except as raw material & labor for the factories of Octopus Corp; is it any wonder that a desperate few
opt for the protest angle, even if they have to violently distort their own tradition? Yes, "al Qaeda" is
our own kind of barbarian. No wonder we find the reflection intolerable.

Though there are foolish & hateful forces at work now who want to criminalize nonstandard sexualities,
they ultimately cannot succeed, for the division runs right through society, from the army to the halls
of government; but certainly a "chilling" if not a return to the closet, could ultimately ensue: & a stifling
of what is for me (as an outsider) the interesting development of, if not orientation-subcultures, at least
the cultural effects of selfconscious difference ("queerness" valorized). In places where abundant, it
almost feels like an ethnicity... I was particularly fascinated by the Seventies lesbian movement to find
out what a woman (or "womyn") -centered society could be like. Too bad the artificial language Làadan
never caught on. This was a genuine philosophical inquiry, of the sort academic philosophy has been
dead to for generations now... It was snuffed too soon, & too few monuments remain; i would have
liked to see what came after, once the debt to Rousseau was digested & outgrown. (What i think about
the differences between men & women: (1) differences of Jungian typology count for more, & are invariably
confused with & dichotomized into, according to the type of the theorizer; (2) only after we have achieved
a society that is gender-blind & propaganda-free, will we even be at a point where we have a "control
group" for this experiment; (3) woman are more rational, men more irrational--it's not that men are more
violent, but more likely to jump to the absurd conclusion that violence solves anything--in keeping with
the different causal timespans of, respectively, pregnancy (most of a year) & conception (part of an hour);
(4) it's probably pheromones that cause us to see this as a polarity, & not a universal yin-yang continuum;
& (5) the sexuality of women is rhythmic, men arrythmic: how can this not influence cosmology?

The Man: "Stuff just keeps getting more, & more, & more...until *BOOM!* the Eschaton: all different."

The Woman (to herself): "In the morning I know I'll have to put the toilet seat down again, like every
other morning."

   "Inverse Proportion

Is your voice silence?
Then your unsung song I clearly hear--
Your voice is silence.

Is your face darkness?
Then with closed eyes your face I clearly see--
Your face is darkness.

Is your shadow brightness?
Then when you are gone, at the dark window your shadow shines
Your shadow is brightness."

--Yong-un Han, ibid