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[menschlichen]

i'm watching german rap videos, surrounded by paris rap city, and we know london is grimy also. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C4aAt2wKDw for example; bushido, the french rap scene is pretty well known (enough so that andy beers is into french yoboy bands) a theme thats been running through this time for me has been: berlin and paris are now more mine and more similar to me than rural USA, (remember that DC conversation with hunter and sam about faulkner, that holds even more true; today in paris styles with new york dreams and berlin music i am even more freakish outside the reseau/network of cultural capital that spreads from paris and berlin and london to east seaboard, LA, shanghai, these urban cultures which i grind over and grind into me. the thing is that the culture i always thought of as totally indigenous is now global to the point its no longer a cute joke; on my wall hangs a poster that, if it wasnt of my paris neighborhood and in french, could be a CNN poster from 95; the rap music that has always been a backdrop by which the impoverished comprehend the built world (look at the trains, streets, cars, clothes, objects in rap videos- how big of a role they play- something most people dont think about when they think of rap music is how more than any pop music before it strains to comprehend crime and punishment and economics and every human issue, not just teenage love (though it ALSO does that). so paris and berlin and probably most european cities now feel as natural to me as buenos aires as richmond as every city i've ever lived in, and looking down the dark narrow corridor of my twenties i'm just starting to walk into, i know when i leave charles de gaulle that i'll be back soon, same with berlin, same with these other cities; we'll miss each other but can you believe the cosmopolitan feeling of, i was about to meet a friend from beijing in berlin (he lives there now but will be out of town)
this feeling of integration into global culture is really reassuring to me but at the same time its as if the world has chosen the culture i idolized for the last dfecade and idolized it itself. finally my tastes converge with the popular at least in some degree. hunter and i've been talking lately about how intellectually stimularting, if hard, this summers been. it has been but- here i'm freed into a feeliing of ambivalence- new york paris berlin? its not the same, but equally familiar now (if anything i know new york the least)