Archaic Slips
Have I traveled all the way here to find that perhaps "culture" is not such a dirty word? Bhabha writes of the complex time of the national narrative in connection with Freud's use of the word "surmounting" in his essay on "The Uncanny." Cultural unconsciousness is repressed as a liminal, uncertain state of cultural belief when "the archaic emerges in the midst of margins of modernity as a result of some psychic ambivalence or intellectual uncertainty" (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 206).
What is my archaic?
Joo once said to me, "Shao, you don't have Freudian slips. Urm, you just kinda slip." Lately, I do not know what has become so slippery, that which is my psychic ambivalence or intellectual uncertainty ...
At Charlie O's last Friday, John Heard, nearly 70, was still a pup from his Charlie Parker and Art Blakey days. The trumpeter was getting too Dizzy Gillespie without any composition right in the morning of the garbage can. I knew that my company, at least one half of it, was expecting more skunks from Coltrane and Coleman. However as the other half took over the conversation with more spins on the girded, professional loin than I needed to know, west coast jazz met an early night in the name of sexist-ageism.
Of course I'm implicated in sexist-ageism the entire time, cursing when I fail to glimpse a shadow of Zizou in the French team this Euro Cup, shaking my head when Lehmann attempts a whimper nowhere near Kahn's roars. Only to realize that what I'm missing is also those nights two years ago when we went out all night watching the games and you took a half-hour nap at my place before those insane early-morning assemblies. What I'm missing are not just those passing players (and literally, did they know how to pass) but also the pratas that we would gulp down before we return for the 5am games, the loving grumbles that my mum gave when my dad demanded ESPN.
Fortunately, what a friend said to me during that last World Cup turned out to be false: "Shao, stay till the end because no one will be watching soccer in the United States." Wherever I am, no matter how old, culture will watch. Even if it means staying till penalty kicks.
---
I don't know how to love a foreigner.
What is my archaic?
Joo once said to me, "Shao, you don't have Freudian slips. Urm, you just kinda slip." Lately, I do not know what has become so slippery, that which is my psychic ambivalence or intellectual uncertainty ...
At Charlie O's last Friday, John Heard, nearly 70, was still a pup from his Charlie Parker and Art Blakey days. The trumpeter was getting too Dizzy Gillespie without any composition right in the morning of the garbage can. I knew that my company, at least one half of it, was expecting more skunks from Coltrane and Coleman. However as the other half took over the conversation with more spins on the girded, professional loin than I needed to know, west coast jazz met an early night in the name of sexist-ageism.
Of course I'm implicated in sexist-ageism the entire time, cursing when I fail to glimpse a shadow of Zizou in the French team this Euro Cup, shaking my head when Lehmann attempts a whimper nowhere near Kahn's roars. Only to realize that what I'm missing is also those nights two years ago when we went out all night watching the games and you took a half-hour nap at my place before those insane early-morning assemblies. What I'm missing are not just those passing players (and literally, did they know how to pass) but also the pratas that we would gulp down before we return for the 5am games, the loving grumbles that my mum gave when my dad demanded ESPN.
Fortunately, what a friend said to me during that last World Cup turned out to be false: "Shao, stay till the end because no one will be watching soccer in the United States." Wherever I am, no matter how old, culture will watch. Even if it means staying till penalty kicks.
---
I don't know how to love a foreigner.
posted by msl at 11:42 PM
2 Comments:
well then, you don't know how to love.
that was meant to sound way less hostile than it does lol
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