Deaf Jam

Krikor Daglian
January 18, 2002

I was greatly saddened a few weeks ago by the realization that one of my favorite neighborhood institutions was gone. I'm talking of course about our resident bag/crazy lady, who used to lurk near the park shouting out non-sensical obsenities at passersby. My particular favorite was yelled by her towards one of my friends - I believe something along the lines of "They don't want no niggas in China. I ain't go, oh no!" Recently, however, she was nowhere to be seen. I figured she had found another neighborhood to haunt and holler in. Until, that is, a few nights ago when I walked to the 24 hour deli around the corner. I can't be sure, but i swear that she almost ran me over with her newly acquired Little Rascal. Who knows how she picked up this little 6 MPH roadster, but I'm proud to see someone on this block moving up in the world in the face of this recession. I assume that she decided for her Crazy Lady enterprises to span a greater radius of blocks, and thus the personal conveyance vehicle is a must. But how long before she gets a Segway/IT?

I went to the Roots concert yesterday in Avery Fischer Hall at Lincoln Center. I'm under the impression that it was the first rap concert to ever be held in those storied halls, and it showed. The opening act's sound was totally screwed up, and the guy was essentially talking to the crowd the entire time about how he'd been screwed over, how pissed he was, and how his stuff was really good, despite the performance that night. The Roots came on a little later. They played their first song completely in darkness - I'm not quite sure if that was intentional, since the lighting work seem incredibly amateurish the entire time anyway. The big problem was the sound volume. Avery Fischer Hall was built to convey the sound of an orchestra, playing unmiked, and thus has good acoustics, unlike, say, the average club a rap group may perform in. Unfortunately, whoever produced the show didn't understand this, and as a result the audience was subjected to outrageously loud sound levels. I put up with it for a while, even as I could not tell the difference between the vocals and a NYC subway announcer, but after they brought out a female singer [Jaguar Wright] who managed to breech the threshold of pain at the top of her range, I decided to take off. Apparently I missed Jay Z - too bad, I guess I'll just catch him when he's back to touring small colleges a few years from now.