(16) stereo mcs, "Connected" upsets (1) los del rio, "macarena" 235-124

Read the essays, watch the videos, listen to the songs, feel free to argue below in the comments or tweet at us, and consider. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchfadness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 8th. 

aimee nezhukumatathil on "macarena"

1. Just on the cusp of berry season, the town square of my sleepy little village in western New York burbled over with a small sea of saris on the day of my wedding in 2005. Reds, violets, liquid onyx—every color really, but mostly various shades of teals and turquoise, the colors of the wedding.
2. Arms: The first step starts with your arms. You should know exactly how the song goes and how exactly are you going to use your arms in order to complete the Macarena dance. It starts with your right arm. You stretch it forward, and then you do the same with your left arm so that they are both stretched out right in front of you. Once you are done with stretching both your arms, now is your time to flip your palms up straight. First flip your right palm and then the left palm; the position of the hands is going to be the same as if you are trying to push something with them.
3. We made the front page of the paper. Our small town had never seen that many saris and Barong Tagalogs (men’s formalwear of the Philippines) all gathered together before or since that day.
4. A Barong Tagalog is usually made of piña fabric, hand-loomed from pineapple leaf fibers. Someone gave us one as a wedding present, sized for a tween. But what if we don’t have a son? I sighed to my husband as we opened gifts. What if we don’t even have a child?    
5. Fast forward 12 years later: we have two young sons, still too little to fit the single Barong Tagalog tucked away in my husband’s bottom dresser drawer.
6. Shoulders: After you are done with the arm gestures, now is the time for you to move to your shoulders. You first move your right hand and put it on your left shoulder. During this time your left hand remains straight with its palm flipped up. Now, you need to repeat the step with the left hand, but you put it on your right shoulder. So now your arms are basically making an X; as if you have hugged the air.
7. Bridalguide.com says “Macarena” is #10 on the Top Ten Songs That Belong on Your ‘Do Not Play’ at Your Wedding Reception List. Other songs include: “YMCA,” and “I Touch Myself.”
8. We had only three songs on the ‘Do Not Play’ list for our wedding DJ: “Strokin’,” “The Chicken Dance,” and “Macarena.”
9. We exited the church as husband and wife to a rain of coral rose petals. Our relatives from Kansas, Philippines, India, California, Florida, and Colorado were already clapping and laughing together like old friends even though most had only met the day before at our rehearsal.
10. It had rained during the ceremony, and, as if on cue, a rainbow arched wide across the sky as we spilled out from the church. Several strangers walking by had stopped and gathered and joined in—taking pictures of our wedding party, various aunties’ saris, the rainbow, and various aunties’ saris below the giant rainbow. If I didn’t see it all myself and have photographic proof, I’d think I was lying about all the color that afternoon.
11. Hip: Once you are done with putting your hands on both your shoulders, move to your hip. First use your right hand and put it on the right-side of your waist. During this time, your left hand is still touching your right shoulder. Now, move your left hand on the left-side of your waist. Now you are standing with both your hands on your waist.
12. When we were on the party bus on the way to our reception with the rest of our wedding party, my husband received a text from our DJ saying he came down with a case of the shingles, but don’t worry, he’s sending a great replacement and will knock $100 off our bill.
13. For months before the wedding, I was so nervous about my stoic relatives from childhood mixing and mingling with my husband’s decidedly not-stoic relatives. When the first dance song played, 90% of the reception took to the floor to dance, so of course we were thrilled. But mostly, people danced in small circles of who they were originally seated with.
14. The replacement DJ’s first wedding reception he’d ever worked was our reception.
15. He claimed he had none of our songs we had meticulously requested months in advance: not the father/daughter dance, not my first song with my husband, and of course he didn’t have our two lists: Must Play These Songs and Do Not Play These Songs.
16. In 1996, I was a senior in college and “Macarena” stayed in the Billboard Top 100 for sixty weeks. No other song would top it until Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” came along fifteen years later.
17. “Macarena” was the song that set off a world record for The Most People Gathered to Dance in One Location: fifty-thousand people did the infamous dance at Yankee Stadium.
18. Because the replacement DJ’s collection of music ranged from approximately 1966-1996, my friends frantically ran out to their cars to find any CDs they had to help ‘supplement’ his offerings with anything from the last decade.
19. The dance floor soon cleared after four or five songs. People were still smiling, drinking, chatting. But no one was dancing. Frantic, I scream- whispered to my new husband, “Tell him to play ANY upbeat song!”
20. I recognized those rhumba notes at once.
21. But something extraordinary happened: not only did everyone take to the floor when the replacement DJ played “Macarena,” but because of the interactive nature of the dance, everyone was dancing with each other. My husband’s cousin from western KS was facing my second uncle from India with outstretched hands. A distant cousin was shaking her hips wrapped in a pink sari at one of my best friends from grad school. My husband’s grandparents popped their hands behind their head alongside the co-founders of Kundiman. How did everyone know this dance?!
22. The video of “Macarena” from 1996 is a riot of color: the featured dancers wore turquoise hot pants, orange headscarves, a pouf of lavender hair, bare midriffs galore, chunky platform shoes. Skin color was a rainbow among the dancers too—I think it was the first time I had seen an Indian woman in braids and a bindi on MTV. There was a Nordic platinum blond, an East Asian with a crown of spiky hair-knots, a gorgeous lead dancer with blond locs. The lead singers, Antonio Romero Monge and Rafael Ruíz,. each wore a dapper black suit— one wore a silver tie, one wore a copper tie. Each looked as if they were going to a wedding themselves as soon as they were done shooting the video.
23. Just how did so many of my friends and relatives aged 12-65 know these lyrics enough to sing them out loud:
    
    Now don't you worry about my boyfriend
    The boy whose name is Nicorino
    I don't want him, couldn't stand him…
    Now come on, what was I supposed to do?
    He was out of town and his two friends were sooo fine…
24. Clap: You are almost there, and only the easiest step is left. Once you are done with putting your hands on your waist, now you should time yourself perfectly. Use the clap when the singer says ‘Hey, Macarena!’ Right when you clap during the time, you have to turn left so that you can continue with the same steps all over again. And again.
25. I know it’s the worst ear worm. I know the video is obnoxious with glee. I know this song is now banned from most weddings. But didn’t your foot tap just a bit when you first heard the song? Wasn’t the rhythm just sexy enough to make you crack a slow smile when you first heard those notes? Even just a teeny-tiny bit? I’m so glad there was never another big follow up for this duo—how could there be, really—And just know that for one evening, at the beginning of a summer filled with new love and joy, a cacophony of color and laughter and dancing signaled the start of a bright love story, unexpectedly born and grown from the wheat fields of Kansas and the tropical shores of India and the Philippines. And I’m betting in a few months this couple’s eldest son (who loves to dance and has been taking dance lessons since he was three) will soon be lanky enough to fit his very own Barong Tagalog when he needs to dress up, here in northern Mississippi. With so many of us dancing in our own separate circles again—if we are even dancing at all—isn’t that a kind of wild and wondrous joy?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s fourth book of poetry, Oceanic, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon, and her nature essay collection, World of Wonder, is forthcoming from Milkweed, both in 2018. She is poetry editor of Orion and is the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi's MFA program. twitter: @aimeenez

steve wasserman on "connected"

“Each angled to its point of flux & so on & with so much its place removed, the leakage in moral sense to the “error signal”, making the rainfall restless, unstable: the loop not connected but open & induced to nothing.”  J.H.Prynne, “Air  (iap  Song”

“Somethin’ ain’t right. Gonna get myself, I’m gonna get myself, gonna get myself connected.” Stereo MC’s, “Connected”

Get Yourself Connected #1: “The writing’s on the wall”

A WH Smith newsagent window, Market Street, Cambridge, October 1992. Dissociated-me shoving a Cranks’ Date Slice into my gob, registering but not taking note of the over-saturated colours of this poster advertising an album that has not been branded in any way for my affinities: volcanic eruptions! psychedelic mushrooms! snakes! lubricious orchards and passion flowers! extra-terrestrial transmissions! the band as shamanic explorers pushing through the dubfunkacidtriphop undergrowth, whilst sampling/stealing hooks from more likeable, effortlessly groovy indigenes.

A few months after releasing Connected, the Stereo MC’s would flog both it and the instrumental B-Side (Disconnected) to Carphone Warehouse. The Warehouse, founded the same year I started university (1989), was soon to become one of the largest mobile phone retailers in the UK.

Referring to themselves as ‘Communication Centres’, they would use Connected and Disconnected for a decade or more as the stomping sonic backdrop to their incessant shlock-and-bore advertising, so that the memory of the song is now almost entirely blistered over with irritation and aggravation.

Maybe you’d be watching The X-Files, or Frasier, or Friends, or The Big Breakfast Show, no matter. Wherever you’d be getting your primetime fix, the motivational neurocircuitry of your brain would also be getting “connected”, dosed up every ten minutes or so with the prescient message that virtual association via mobile telephony and this thing we now call the internet was going to be the answer to your most fervent prayers and fantasies.

Something ain’t right? Existential dread and ire? Gotta get yourself, you gotta get yourself gotta get yourself connected, bruv!

GYC #2: “If your mind’s neglected, stumble you might fall.”

It soon became clear to me, even by Christmas 1989, that I was not clever enough or sophisticated enough to maintain the kind of conversational connections that fuelled the intellectual and social life of Cambridge, so I disengaged, bypassing opportunities for affiliation, tucking myself away.

Rather than go to Hall each evening where my cohorts, begowned in their navy blue academic robes with black velvet trim, sparkled and shone with Brideshead Revisited wit and banter, I would eat my main meal of the day at an Indian restaurant, a fifteen minute walk from the University Library which usually shut its stacks at 7.15 pm.

I was particularly fond of the vegetable Jalfrezi, but usually limited myself to a side-dish, a Saag Chana or a Tarka Daal with some basmati rice. I liked the restaurant because it was as disconnected from the grandeur of the University and its social expectations as I could possibly find.

Once I became a regular there, they would often give me a vegetable samosa or garlic naan for free. It was perfectly OK to sit and read my book as I ate my meal, no obligation whatsoever to engage “in wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation, with protocols promoting maximum civility…which can be educative at the time as well as lead to further networking beyond the confines of the occasion” (notes on Formal Hall from my college prospectus).

How far through this world could I go without exchanging a spoken word? Without any force, just not actually speaking when you didn’t need to? My record was two and a half weeks. This mealtime routine was one way of dispensing with the pressure to talk, to perform a self for which I had had no prior training up to this point.

So Lent, Easter, and the following Michaelmas Term passed with me living an intensely isolated life, increasingly aware that the profound joy and meaning I usually found in reading and writing (“You’re good at this sort of thing, have you ever thought about applying to Cambridge?”) was progressively being drained away, until finally I stumbled and fell.

GYC #3: “Ya dirty tricks, ya make me sick”

That we seek and need to be connected goes without saying, but is connection an end in itself or is the push towards gratification through other people the means to that end?

We don’t like to think of ourselves as inherently selfish which is why a narrative of relational reciprocity (connection for connection’s sake) now dominates the discourse in most fields. But perhaps President Trump and those for whom he speaks and rules might be asking us to revisit an older, Freudian narrative?

In this Connected/Disconnected Story, we begin with some kind of bodily tension, a libidinal impulse for food, sex, or the latest Netflix offering. This then gets converted into an aim or setting (a supermarket, Tinder, or streaming media), where we might look for as well as serendipitously find the object of our desires.

Add to this a set of elaborate defence mechanism to keep more socially unacceptable drives repressed or diverted into harmless activities like writing cultural critiques or watching music videos on YouTube, and you’ve got the transformation of neurotic misery into the more bearable state of everyday unhappiness.

Melanie Klein, the psychoanalytic Mama of the Connected/Disconnected fairytale goes one step further, by splitting off the connective drive and our disconnected resistance into two separate containers: good breast and bad breast. Or in the parlance of popular culture: good cop/bad cop. Or as political ideologies: Hilary and The Donald (if you’re a Trump supporter: The Donald/Hilary).

If connection to the object (person, song, piece of writing) releases our libidinal buildup, we are rewarded with the happy life-sustaining sensation of gushing nutritious goodness. However the same object, or some variant of, can just as quickly flip to a deprecatory position, where our empty bellies and aching needs become projectively identified with the Bad Breast, against which we might hold some pretty intense and destructive retaliatory fantasies.

“Ya dirty tricks, ya make me sick,” howls Psychic Baba at Bad Breast, gnashing down on its impervious nipple. A minute later, spotting Good Breast hoving into view, oblivious to the fact that both offer ways of connecting to a caregiver, he turns away from the “Bad” to the so-felt “Good”, humming all the while: “Gonna get myself, I’m gonna get myself, gonna get myself connected.” [Slurp].  

GYC #4: “I see through ya, I see through ya.”

I’d now like to say something about Jeremy Prynne’s breasts. Jeremy Halvard Prynne, described by the Paris Review last year as “the mage of the Cambridge School”, but also, in 1993, the Director of Studies at my college. Prynne having thus played an important role in the connective matrix of my academic psyche, a double-breasted Attachment Figure of sorts.

In my drop-out year, I’d pushed myself to read more of the people he liked and admired (Olson, O’Hara, Dorn, Wordsworth, Celan) thinking I might try and write a kind PoMo mash-up so as to make up for being a negligible presence in the two years preceding my stumble and fall.   

This began as a little chapbook called More Games For The Super-Intelligent, the poems emerging from the detritus of all my lecture and reading-for-essay notes that I had spent the last three years accumulating in what seemed to be depressing, and increasingly useless quantities. Working in this way, I could somehow deflect the input of personal preoccupation so that the interior of the poems was sometimes interchangeably positioned with the exterior, there being at some point no clear arbitrated priority between those aspects.

I presented the manuscript of More Games for The Super-Intelligent to the most intelligent person I knew (Prynne), the chapbook at this point serving the multi-media purpose of a script for a play that clearly needed to be performed. The other day I googled the names of the three people who performed More Games with me on 15-20 February 1993 at the Cambridge Playroom (Eva Czech, Dallas Windsor, Natasha Yarker), and not a single LinkedIn or Facebook profile could I find. Was the whole thing a psychotic episode, the poems, the play, me studying at that university in the first place?

Prynne read the poems and in his somewhat mannered and formal way was very kind and generous with his comments. I asked if I could get a discount on photocopying 100 copies to give away at the performances the following month and he suggested I use his non-carded photocopier in the librarian’s office, coming down to open up for me at midnight. I also photocopied a number of A3 posters of myself as Vitruvian Man, the thought of which now fill me with horror. It was the same image used on the cover, a gaudy self-indulgent Gesamkunstwerk in a desperate bid for connection through the warped lens of indecent exposure.

How did I repay Mr Prynne’s kindness? For starters, by stealing a valuable first edition of White Stones from his library (not on the night itself, but later), the college library, which he presided over as part of his duties in a Mother Hen kind of way. But worse than that as far as propagating shame, I then spent the next 25 years selectively remembering Prynne not as a mage but a Wizard of Oz, a kind of impenetrable and frustrating twit.

How in my imagination had he become so lopsidely Bad Breast? What was the empty belly frustration about: his shyness and obtuseness? The resistance and difficulty of his own position? This position was put forwards as a kind of manifesto in an essay Prynne penned his early 20s, an essay describing how the reality of the external world can’t help but be predicated on the resistance it offers to our awareness. “The stone’s hard palpable weight is the closest I can come to the fact of its existence,” he writes, ”and the reserve or disagreement of my neighbour is my primary evidence for his being really there.”

GYC #5: “Ya terrified (I wanna do it again)”

“Humiliation,” writes Wayne Koestenbaum, like other educating experiences, “breeds identity”. He cites Jayne Eyre, whose identity as “unlovable outcast” evolves in response to being locked in a red room for stealing a book that she too cares little for, utilising it as a kind of shield-cum-escape-hatch against the dreary November day and her punitive guardians, the Reed family. “Humiliation isn’t merely the basement of a personality,” notes Koestenbaum, “or the scum pile on a stairway down. Humiliation is the earlier event that paves the way for self to know it exists.”

I think he’s right, although I would rephrase that last sentence by saying that humiliation paves the way for “a self” to know it exists: more specifically the besmirched, exposed, shamed self, a self that all of us spend a good amount of time either repressing or covering up, deflecting and sublimating through other selves. Selves that have socially valued skills (I’m a psychotherapist), selves broadcasting their affiliations to groups they want to be included in (“Can I write an essay for your literary magazine?”), selves trying to connect with more powerful selves through the language of “Liking” and “Replying”, a game of Impression Management that make the Carphone Warehouse TV and radio ads of the 90s now look like child’s play.  

I wonder how the Stereo MC’s deal with their tainted selves when the Carphone Warehouse jibes start piling on? Or maybe they’re no longer a trigger for shame, maybe the MC’s did good things for themselves and others with their advertising moolah?

Maybe for them, the shamed self is more liable to pop up like a weed from the soil of humiliation when critics lay into their follow-up efforts with the sadistic glee of Bronte’s truculent John Reed or the castigating clergyman Brocklehurst. “Generic self-help guff,” carps Reed (aka The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey). “An uninspired stew of stale ideas and careless execution” moans Brocklehurst (aka fellow music critic/gravedigger Peter Petridis).   

I can try and neutralise some of my own University shame and humiliation by sending that stolen copy of White Stones back to Gonville and Caius Library, or by writing about the oftentimes puzzling and worrying antics of my younger self as I have done here. But how does one finally lay to rest and meaningfully disconnect from the chiding chatter broadcast forevermore on that exterior searchable channel called Google, as well as the interior associatively connected circuits of memory, the inner-net?

The other day I asked a colleague to EMDR-me-up whilst I sat and read aloud from this text. This involved her, after each segment, waving her fingers back and forth about ten inches from my face, so generating bilateral eye movement, checking in occasionally with my humiliation appraisals via a Subjective Unit of Disturbance Scale. Describing and visualising my naked self on that photocopied cover of More Games For The Super-Intelligent gave me an initial SUD rating of about a 9 (out of 10). We got it down to 6.5.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing as kooky as it looks and sounds is a well-respected treatment for meliorating traumatic memories. A more ancient treatment comes in the form of writing essays, short stories, poems, and maybe even slightly naff songs like those on the March Fadness roster. The academy of course frowns on writing-as-therapy, but in the words of Mr Robert Birch and Mr Nick Hallam, Stereo MC’s, “I ain’t gonna go blind for the light that is reflected. Hear me out, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again, I wanna do it again, I wanna do it again.”

Steve Wasserman works as a psychotherapist in London. Currently connecting via Read Me Something You Love (a read-aloud, short story/essay podcast) and Gardening/Life (a blog). Twitter: @stevewasserman_