Like A Hurricane

Last Saturday at Kevin's birthday party I hooked my MacBook Air up to the speakers on top of the hutch in the kitchen and played a mix of mp3s and Pandora.  As the party moved along, suddenly guests were on my computer, choosing songs, and then it was decided I didn't have good enough music, so guests searched YouTube videos and began playing them, and the rest of the evening was taken over with their YouTube DJing.  I felt more than a little violated by this, mostly because all these fingers and eyes were touching my computer.  Kevin and I share another laptop and a desk computer, but unless we're traveling together, not even Kevin touches this one.  I'm typing on it right now.

I've been thinking about the intimacy of our computers, or as Ariana Reines recently called hers, our "instruments."  When Eileen Myles was here in November she found herself without a laptop, so I lent her our 13-inch MacBook, which usually sits on the kitchen table.  When I got it back I discovered that Eileen didn't clear her trail.  Drafts of her writing dotted the desktop, and when I clicked Gmail and FaceBook, I went to her pages—my computer had saved her passwords.  And last week when I tried to log on to online banking, I went to her login page.  Her online banking ID is a riot, but of course I'm not going to repeat it here.  Eileen had infiltrated my space, and I enjoyed following her trail, it was like the ghost of Eileen was waving to me.  Valiantly, I logged her out of everything and resisted the urge to snoop.

When Lindsey Boldt was YouTube DJing she put on Sissy Nobby, who I instantly loved.  I spent a fair amount of time looking up Nobby as well as New Orleans bounce music.  (Sissy Nobby and I have two mutual FaceBook friends: Marcus Ewert and Billy Miller.)  The video I can't get out of my head is "Like A Hurricane":



I find this video to be both silly and profound, it's like it creates a new category:  the profoundly silly.  The butt bouncing looks so fun, like something babies would do because it feels so fucking good.  In post-Katrina New Orleans, to chant "Like A Hurricane" with such exultation is so complicated and kinky, I'm not sure how to position myself in relation to it, which is great, as all this bending over and ass-shaking is a big fuck-you to rationality, a delightful fuck-you.  Ass backwards.  Ass over teakettle.  It's impossible to watch this video and not think of Katrina and the havoc it wreaked; it's as if the dancers have felt the core of Katrina's destructive power, and returned to embrace that indiscriminate energy of upheaval, have absorbed it into their bodies.  The asses, jiggling so quickly, like humming birds, a pumping blur, aren't so much sexual as libidinal.  In them I see the throbbing essence of aliveness, and the marvelous obscenity of our tenacious clinging to life.  And I love the queerness of Sissy Nobby, whose gender-bending rap is known as Sissy Bounce, a term not without controversy.  According to queer rapper Katey Red, "Ain't no such thing as 'sissy bounce.  It’s bounce music. It’s just sissies that are doing it."  When women and queers get together and act nasty, as in "Like A Hurricane," it's an occasion for joy.

Here's a mini documentary about Sissy Bounce: