Petronia

DJ Dave presents Zoukompa 2009

On the 2nd I went to a concert (a ball, really, held in a banquet hall in Anjou) with a couple of guys who're active in the Haitian cultural community; radio work etc. The link above is a promo mix one of them made of the year's popular tunes: zouk is French West Indies party music, kompa is I guess to Haiti what bossa nova is to Brazil. Montreal has one of the largest Haitian diaspora communities in North America - enough to put on gigs like this, hosting popular bands on tour outside Haiti - but I haven't really known anyone Haitian since high school. In twenty years I hadn't gotten off once at Henri-Bourassa metro station, where we'd arranged to meet. I've never been anywhere in the Caribbean, either. I was going to blog about it afterward, when I found the time, but you know how it is.

If there had been no earthquake, and I'd gotten around to it, this would've been burbling as per usual: how griot and red bean rice are awesome when you suddenly find yourself ravenous in the middle of the night (even if the rice tasted oddly soytastic like what I imagine a Chinese restaurant in Port-Au-Prince would serve up), how I was told you need at least eight good players to make a kompa band so it's hard to keep an amateur group together for any length of time, how Creole is incomprehensible even if it sounds like one ought to be able to understand it, like Cantonese or Korean. How all the security was white and involved full-body patdowns going in and out of coatcheck, and my inability to ask my friends what they thought of this WTFery even though I couldn't imagine that happening at eg. a Chinese community event flying in second-tier Hong Kong pop idols for the edification of a crowd skewing more toward 50s marrieds and 20s young professionals than rowdy teens. I don't know what I'd've said if they'd thought nothing of it because it was normal.

Then the earthquake happened and I end up thinking instead about how nothing is ever Someone Else's Problem anymore, the way it was when I was a kid; like 9/11, like the tsunami, it's always happening to someone I know. I don't know if that's good or bad (certainly it always seems to create new and improved opportunities for me to put my foot in my mouth, eg. emailing someone to bother them about the cell phone I lost in their car and only realizing hours later what they meant when they said "cannot meet today as must wait at home for news about my family"). Either way, though - and this is vague in my head but it feels important - when you read the articles and look at the awful pictures, don't think it's all dirty drinking water and gangsters and flattened shanty towns? Haiti is this close to bona fide failed statism and this natural disaster may well push it over the edge, but it has pop music and required reading in schools and an educated diaspora that struggles with whether they can do more for their country by going back or by staying abroad. Its people are resilient and love to dance. One day they'll get there.

• 22:38 We are drinking up in Canuckistan too guys, IT'S A PARTAY #
• 23:26 Watching McCain concession speech now... #

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If you'd caught me any time last week (and probably this one) you would have gotten a rant on the state of the North American economy and/or the Chinese tainted milk scandal which I find as upsetting as anyone could who's not directly affected - for cripes' sake there's a global recall on White Rabbit candies, that's like the Chinese equivalent of Kraft dinner being tainted, it's just not right. I'd been seriously considering moving back to Shanghai to work for a while, but then the idea comes that it's nuts to leave Canada for a place where smog is normality and infant formula isn't fit to drink. That never used to be a consideration, but as I get older it sort of... is. :/

Anyway, the point was more that I don't want to talk about stuff like that on the internet. XD Instead I'll talk about LUCKY☆ STAR, which T. and I are currently watching. This series is like hanyaaaaan~~~ XD Relaxing, I guess, because of the note-perfect evocation of coasting through high school, even though I wasn't even an anime fan back then (and online gaming barely existed). BAD STUDY HABITS R 4 LIFE. Kagamin is my ideal, in practice it's a combination of Tsukasa and Konata to this day - sleep patterns especially. Meanwhile T. is procrastinating hardcore on her Ph.D. thesis, she says the table of contents alone is 18 pages and counting. We had a serious discussion re: how by some measures we're becoming less responsible, since before we used to panic and/or feel guilty about not getting stuff done or cutting daily-life corners and now it's just like, whatevs! Ecksdee ecksdee.

In other news, ladysisyphus wrote me some farfuture!Vaan and Penelo as part of a request meme, and there is some mindbogglingly awesome fanart happening at bangbangwhimper. (My stuff if anyone wants to try. XD By the evidence people want to do f/f pictures though, don't they.) I'm also thinking of standardizing SSBB's logo, but that's a design job in and of itself.

Is anyone else following this story? Iran has no internet now as a result. I have a Lebanese classmate who's frantic because he can't call home.