Undo

Time

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:27:20 +0300

I actually was quite in a dillema before this news about the death of Michael Jackson popped the waves. I kept asking myself, for a long time now, how this man was going to re-invent himself and re establish his supremacy.

It felt quite sad, the way he was being dissed by the media, the way he was kind of lurking within his own shadows, afraid of the wild that once adored him.

On the death of MJ, there are/is no statement that can summarily act as the last word - to close this case-its much bigger than anything we can just forget.

For MJ, for Lennon, for Presley, for Marley, for B.I.G, we are going to just hold on and wait for the return of the son of man and the unveiling of Paradise, so that we can once again, get them to sing for us live.

We are going to talk about MJ for forever, at least some of us. There is nothing for me to say that can prove I am/was more of a fan than the next blog chap you will find. However, what my candid bathroom can testify to is that I have made several of those crisp MJ moves many times in my lifetime.

Many musicians will continue providing the missing link-outcrop music that reminds us of the king of pop.

And of course, In my playlist, the list of dead mens’ music has expanded. Several Kbytes added to the 6GB of music in the Dead Mens’ Section…This man will the join the likes of Hendrix, Lennon, one song by Selena, Miles, Presley, B.I.G, Tupac, Morrison, Marley, Joplin…

As a kid, my favourite scene in the videos was the when the zombies were dancing…well, Salute for the king and shout 15.

Hero’s day, a Ugandan day on the street.

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:06:00 +0300

This is a public holiday that rather hit me when I was well working on getting to work. The process of undoing my work thoughts was a challenge and I spent about two hours wondering what to do. I listened to the 3 doors Album at the Sanfoka Internet café and by this time I had not had breakfast. When I finally decided to move home, I passed an elegant procession that was matching on Obote Avenue in Lira. Perhaps a few of our only representatives at the celebration of “our” Heroes day for several years.

“Patriotism: An essential factor in heroism,” the banners the school children held read.

The rallying call was being made and I well, wanted to savour the lost feeling of matching to the legendary band notes the police band was belting out. I can innocently claim I didn’t know which hero’s glory we are heralding but I guess each person apart from the public servants had a hero in their lives they were swinging their hands and legs for.

So I followed the procession for the whole length of the Avenue. Next to the school children, the women from the various institutions were the happiest lot, matching in a kind of care free dancing walk. Patriotism, I thought, is it not lost in history lessons and a few songs I had heard lined in my music library?

These women and children are all dancing/matching for the mere obligation of being in an institution that has to take part. For the students, it was the only way to keep out of the confines of school today, meet the opposite sex and perhaps escape for a few minutes to shop in town. For the women, they had to attend because the men have not shown any commitment to appear...for every group of adult women there was one man.

One woman I talked to said her heroes included Namaganda, the girl who died saving her friends in a school fire, Jesus, the people who have tirelessly made to bring peace to the northern Uganda, her sister who held household as head of family when their parents died.

Many other people didn’t know much about heroes and needed some few minutes to summon them into their minds. This is what actually also happened to me when one of the people I was talking to turned around and asked for my heroes. I wondered to myself which hero I would be matching for and it seemed I was quite out of it…I almost mentioned film actors like one of the students I talked to. Then I thought, who exactly are the heroes…are they the ordinary people that pull you out of a fix? Are they the friends that buy you beer on some terrace in the city centre? Are they the people that advice you on how you should mend that relationship with the girl who has thrown you out or is it the people who decide what road should come to your village?

The illusion of patriotism is further lost in the lack of demarcation between the NRA heroes and other national heroes. At some point it seems the NRA is asking everyone to celebrate their heroes primarily. What markedly points this is the overall arrangement; the speeches are all pro-yellow unavoidably, the top officials, the public service has gone to great lengths to summon all department to attend without fail. There is no space for the other political parties to slip in an agenda item. The patriotism of the chosen few.

Can we have patriotism without heroes? Or can we have heroes without patriotism? How can we as a country share a common hero? Should we be patriotic to notice many of the country’s heroes? We need to set down a database of our heroes and perhaps even build a monument with their names inscribed onto it. The real heroes and the real slim…

Of course, my real heroes are these guys who make music that clears my mind from the dark it tends to wander to, the people who write the books that change my life, the beer friends who change the course of my ship for some evenings.

Citizen /soldier- 3 Doors Down

Route: At the midnight hour at Karuma

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 13:20:00 +0300

Night bus travel is a humbling undertaking. It starts with the dark pealing away the scenery to look at, and then idleness hitting on everyone in the bus. People turn away drowsily in mid sentence and don’t turn back. Lost forever to lapses of sleep that involve jerks of remembrances.

“Where are we?” one starts

“Ah, we just moved ten kilometres”

He looks surly around and slides back to sleep. Waking after another ten minutes to ask the same question. Finally tiring and resoluting to suffer without bother.

Night time is a brisk scale into supernatural. A bright spot appears delusional, and in entwines your soul into a wave of misjudged apprehensions. The bus in the night is one place to build such apprehensions. There is a spirit that controls the vehicle. An incantation starts, as a hypnosis swaying in-there is the silent swash of the wind outside, a din building within the bus cabin when all the windows get shut. Then,

The sway, the duck and the stealth with which it overtakes, leaves one breathless. It’s like being under water. The thrill is (a mix of the hope that the water surface is just a level away waiting and knowing that you could sink further and never get to see the surface at all. It’s a choking feeling emerging, bringing – breeding unease.

It’s a shift from fear to desperation. To relief when you suddenly realise the hurdle is overcome. You come to the water surface, take a deep breath and sink right back. There is moment to count your luck…It’s a continuous relapse into fear, imagination and adventure. Sixty seven people live this maze of tactic, wit, luck, trepidation, and a stretch of accident hungry 346km road.

At the midnight hour at Karuma, the moon gleams palely onto the tarmac. The pale pasted night air is wet with mist as we thrust through it. It decorates our wind shield with a whitish sheen from the inside that the driver keeps wiping away. Our headlights beam into a turmoil of smoke that veers away to let us through to the black spot in the future of the road. The spectral black we aim at hidden in the sphere of mist eludes us, gives us an excitement that worries.

At the midnight hour at Karuma, the mist rains onto the windshield creating alternating seconds of blocked view that are wiped away; this exercise of cleaning is repeated so fast it draws us into a kind of hypnosis of taking our eyes one way then the other. The driver’s eyes droop and his grip on the leather wheel is so tight it’s doubtful, so is my grip on the music and the surroundings.

The midnight hour at Karuma is an hour of light thought, furtive grasps at reality - dead-end speeches, and wide-eyed sleep, dreams of reality. There is an outburst of sleep filled hot air, an air of decay congesting itself, permeating into other open noses and passing on the taste of sleep, drowsing others into it.

The bus grows quieter as it gains speed, hurtling into a darkness that unsparingly envelops the bus. Cascading into wavy circles of light and dark. The headlamps peer into the heart of the dark, penetrating into 200 metres of distance ahead, trying for a destination, poking hope. It flickers lightly to taste the length, search for obstacles, and to ascertain the security of the road ahead. Then it blasts full, hungrily, unsparingly, ferociously acknowledging its supremacy.

The monotony of the bus drone, the passing swish of night images. More and more people keep dropping off drowsily. So that when you look sideways, to the back and to the front, most of the lot has been drawn to sleep. The bus driver maintains machinery pose that shifts only to the swing of the wheel either right or left. There is nothing human about the man turning that wheel, slowly. He also isn’t aware neither of his presence nor his role here. It’s beyond him, the power in his legs propelling the massive machine. The machine droning and yanking all this weight.

Behind the bus, it’s like this a large blanket of darkness is clouding and tailing us, trying to absorb us in its evil scheme. There is a plot out there; it’s a ghost ambition that haunts all night buses, all open eyed drivers battling with sleep, the night travelers, the dogs prowling the roads, and impatience of many trying to overcome the inadequacy of time to do everything in the daylight. The silence of ways…ways stretched with uncertainty.

Its scary looking at people sleeping, it’s like they are spinning our fates in their arduous, adventurous dreams. As we hurtle on the tarmac, quickly eating up the distance that spreads ahead of us. Distant darknesses approach and get dissolved by the prongs of light that reach out, paving the way, waving away the darkness.

At the midnight hour at Karuma, when Pink Floyd sings Brain damage on my ipod, I don’t know which side of the world we are! Behold, the grey water grumbles below the Nile, fighting not to go away. We ride over the bridge, grinding our weak shock absorbers onto the thin meshed gulley at the entrance to the bridge, it scrapes right to our spines, bounces away and we settle to quite another laborious battle to keep awake. Across the Nile, leads us to another level in this puppet story, the rivets are fastened stronger as we levitate into deep unconsciousness.

Thinly strapped grisly old women idle on road corners contemplating crossing the road. The driver sits slumped in his seat, widening his drooping eyes and nodding each time he knocks down an old woman, leaving them braying behind us. The women that don’t cross the road stand grotesque. Leaning against their walking sticks, hair flailing in their own aura, they stare at us with hollowly eyes. Their trembling breath stretches across the road as a web of isolation, claustrophobia, insomnia, and dewy memories. That, sieving through it creates a disability of emotion that grips us, losing our selves to guilt, trepidation, paranoia, procrastination!

That, Alas, somewhere! Beyond this trance, beyond the night, someone else listens to Pink Floyd with yet another complete dilemma. So that when Shine on you crazy diamond plays, I am completely absorbed from this world, taken away by the magic of the electric, into the guzzle of the Nile, into the pale tarmac, into the allure of the moon, into the world of deceptive perspectives. What then, compels me to wake up when Pink Floyd stops singing?

Inside this grayscale landscape, the black box that contained us has shifted continuously past the ghost hour, before the moon turned away or before the rain cloud obstructed it. When, we examine ourselves for a feeling of having existed earlier. It turns out it’s now a trip past the madhouse blues.

There is a proclivity to forgetfulness after it sleep has gone. That the hour before, or perhaps minutes earlier, we all kind of slept. That I didn’t get to listen to the rest of the Pink Floyd album. It’s the sour taste in the mouth, the kind you get after you have slept. The patched feeling, the clear-headedness, and the cloud-headedness..

That while at sleep, we had moved several miles along the way this far

trailing the duck

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 18:35:00 +0300

There were moments on that canoe that elapsed as reflexes of disabled time…you think a little and smile alone…listen to the silence of the wind…look over at the green water and smile more…then we landed, at an obscure point of volcanic rock stepping into the lake. The ducks lazily flew away but the kingfishers stayed on, on the shrubs.

"...my spirit moved upon the sea like wind,
which round some thymy cape will lag and hover,
though it can wake the still cloud, and
unbind the strength of the tempest; day was almost over.

…I stood upon a point of shattered stone
(water)...ebbing round me, and my bright abode before
me yawned-a chasm desert, and bare, and broad..."
The revolt of Islam-Shelley Percy

Leaving the boat brought a heap of silences, a blued-out Alf, a contemplative HFS, a lapping lake waiting for dusk.

DAY: Calipsoed

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Mon, 14 May 2007 16:15:00 +0300

Following one's preference in this world is a quick way to exit from it..."
-Bartleby the Scrivener

The so called calipso dance has so overtaken conscience, young kids, old men, kindergarten chaps are so into it you could raise the subject be included on the national curriculum. This is written by a chap who scorns dancing it or rather cannot dance it.

OmaGod! Is every dance supposed to turn out calipsoed? Music plays dance strokes start with calipso and end with calipso. It makes for weird thinking-that every musician wants to have a calipso in their videos even when the true look of things cast the dance out of place.

Well, the people are happy about it, as is wont the nature of pop culture, no one can stop it especially when you greatly despise it, it will wane and reappear in another form of annoying stroke of magic, perhaps. It keeps overtaking itself, building on until we don't even remember who exactly can claim to be the re-inventor.

It's disputable. Who among the 21st century Ugandan musicians re-introduced it? This here is a salon argument that would last the whole day. Some say it was Bobi wine's Bada fame; some allege it couldn't have come together but for the efforts of Phina Mugerwa Masanyaraze. No, it Bebe cool. Aaahaa! It's Rebecca Jingo.

This argument is taking us no where. I find it better to settle with the thought that the one who dances it worst must have re-introduced in here. Simple, Ugandans are good at copying and bettering any thing new. Didn't they hijack Lingala?

There is space though for question, now that kids have abandoned the awkward kiddish dances for calipso. What is that new form of calipso they are dancing called? You know, it's not the mechanical calipso, its improvised, rule less and a formidable creative art that involves half strokes, staring lapses, and a break dance in between. I don't really hate calipso I realize.

DAY: luo-pop

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Tue, 08 May 2007 16:20:00 +0300

For the lack of interest, tomorrow is cancelled...

Ruby-kaizer chiefs

It may not have blasted Kampala radio waves yet, held in the northern fold thumbing, thrusting off many systems (radios) in many households and night hangout places. But Luo music is hot stuff.

It has created many 'superstars'. Forged a new generation of bling, style, badass, and cool. Even with the intrusion of outside music (music hitting radio waves in Kampala), the creation of a hip-hop, luo-pop, gulu-pop class has taken music to a twist of popdom.

So that when the music starts. Bobi wine stands along with Otim Bosmic, DJ Laguna, Lumix, Twongweno boys, Smokie and as is with these lists you can't finish the names. It's a society on the rise, role-plays, wannabes, fakes and the real stuff all haggling out their tunes of pastiche.

The stars are visible on the streets, they own the streets. They could as well declare be a road of superstars. Bosmic sang that...the world changes, turns, and luck comes around...and everyone has a bite..." It's their turn to bite.

The stars wear some of the fanciest cloths, something you will not find in Gulu's boutiques, white sneaks are fav. Dog tags, baggy jeans, bulky T-shirts to swagger cool with their CDs in hand waving for the 'crowd'. They drive flashy coronas with shiny rims playing loud music elbows thrust out "Kabanlole" style.

Their music takes in a lot, talks loudly of a society suddenly observant of change leaving them for the better. There are the sad ballads, rather painful and burrowing into what is etched on many souls. Themes of 'war is over, no more suffering, peace is here' being overtaken by a free spirit chant about courting the woman of your heart.

Then there are the obsequious songs, these we keep for the independence cerebrations. Having caught on with the fad in Kila, people just wanna pare (party) with themes of 'lets party the whole night'. Its much more appealing healing music. In the dance halls, the excitement is eminent. You feel it ebbing into the crowd like a controlled breeze, who can't help singing along.

A projection of a different society now. Leaving behind all ambivalence, a kind of post poignant abandonment of empty nestings, having tasted a new strange fruit of hope, embraced its taste, aroma and become addicted to the sweetness. The consequence of the radio era has hit hard. It's reminiscent of the radio scene of Kampala 93-95. Everyone suddenly is welcome to the 21st century.

You may want to ask how it all began, but then, its more incomplete to surmise it's a result of a far away ray of that happened to flash a second glance this way. It's unstoppable-where it is, it's headed for unfathomable straightness. No one wants to stop, there are no red lights on this street way, and no one is bothered.

DAY: whiling

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:15:00 +0300

“…you cannot read loss only feel it…”
Memories of a Geisha

Edwin called it dry mud, I didn't see the sense of his summation until we were deep into it. (The following sets of descriptions may be inappropriate but just imagine them applied to a dry place). The road was soggy, silted, patches of it were hard to ride through, and sticky. There had to be two or three revolutions to make a forward thrust. Of course you only felt it if you thought about it.

There was the possibility of stalling or even falling over, it certainly would be a soft fall, with a soil cushion spread wide out. It wasn’t a comfortable thought either so you were lucky not to harbour it. The motorbike struggled through the heaps of congealed soil…continually the thought of falling off the bike crept. I suggested I get off the bike so Edwin pushes it alone through but he insisted he could manage to go through…so I sat hapless as he wiggled the bike about the “dry muddy patch”.

At the shops along the road, drunkards cheered us on, wavering high in their disability, they beheld us playing in the road, one even broke a piece of stick to come discipline us for being childish…I thought well…here we are…watching the roadside refusing to pass by the motorbike…its is like thinking of …the missing links in…a sequence of unexpected…interrupted…good music.

We decide to stop when we reach a clearing. There is a hot wind swirling inside our shirts, I privately keep thinking it should bring relief, but it just perpetrates a hot feeling. We stop and sit under a tree shade. I lie on my back and I am overcome with the greatest of temptations-sleep.

I rise to a sitting position knowing this is the best way to avoid sleep now. Edwin too looks drowsy. Our water has run out. We have a ten-minute ride to town left but we can’t help sitting here quite. It feels happy here. The football fields of Gulu High School are litt ered in activity, kids in different groups playing football.

A chap comes by, “God help you,” he says.
“God help you too,” we retort and continue looking and doing nothing.
“God help you,” he repeats.
We stare at him wondering what he is up to, we reply thinking perhaps that he didn’t hear our reply the first time.
“God help you,” he says giving us a stiff smile. We look left, then right, then at him and he is still smiling. Saliva slides from the corner of his mouth and hangs in a long tail that is kept flowing by the open mouth.
“What do you want,” I demand.
“God help you,” his eyes are excited. He pulls out a sachet of alcohol (Empire), which he sips from and passes towards Edwin. He refuses but the chap places it in his hand. Edwin looks nervously around and thrusts the sachet into my hand. I hand the sachet back to the guy.

He is still smiling. I whisper to Edwin that this man is not smiling and that he is paining. I give him 500 shilling to buy another sachet. He looks at me with an alternation of squint and big eyedness, and then pockets the money. After standing silent for a while. He thinks he finally recognizes me from somewhere. He pulls out 500 shilling and says he is going to buy me a whole sachet to drink alone

“God help you,” he keeps repeating and the production of hanging saliva is increasing. The kids seated nearby are laughing. They call out to him by the name “God help you”
And tell him that he is very drunk. He tells them he is going Sacred Heart church for confession and that he is the new choirmaster.