The Pilgrim’s Progress

November 7 2006

Greetings from Manhattan,

The air in this city is chowder, and the parkade where I had to leave my car just to escape the traffic is charging me $50 for 24 hours. But I'm here, about to complete the circle (a pilgrimage from Canterbury to the Bronx).

After two months of relentless studio recording, capped by a lavish book launch, I have embarked on my third tour of 2006 with The Rap Canterbury Tales. Last night I performed at the University of Hartford, Connecticut (insurance capital of the USA), for a typically mixed crowd of ghetto kids and tweedy professors. My hosts who put me up in the suburbs of Hartford informed me that we were five miles from where 50 Cent recently bought a multi-million-dollar mansion, much to the horror of the gentrified neighbours. He even (so I'm told) put in a bid to run for town council, but I haven't heard the outcome of that one.

This morning I performed in front of two hundred twelfth-graders at a high school in Waterford, CT. This was an unusual gig because the principle went out of his way to phone me weeks ago to "go over the material", and his conclusion was that I would be welcome to perform so long as I omitted the Miller's Tale ("because we're a bit conservative here in Connecticut"). I grudgingly complied, but then during the question session this morning when the students demanded that I prove my cred by freestyling I accidentally let a few expletives slip into the rap (it's much harder to censor improvisation). The students were duly titillated, and proceeded to ask their usual fanciful questions (who's your favorite rapper? how did you come up with this idea? are you single? etc).

The last few days have been golden, but this tour actually started out on a pretty low note, since I was rejected at the border when I first attempted to cross. The reason for this affront had to do with the nuances of US immigration law, which requires different visas for musicians, academics, entertainers, authors, etc, (what's a multi-disciplinarian to do?). I tried to cross as an entertainer (rapper) and they wouldn't let me in, so I was stuck in Toronto for three days trying to sort my legal status out. The ivy-league professors who had booked me in Massachusetts even tried to get their congressman involved, but to no avail. I had to cancel my gigs at Harvard, Wellesley, and Holy Cross last week.

In the end, I managed to cross the border by wearing a different career hat. I am NOT, repeat NOT, a rapper on tour, but rather an author promoting his new book. All of the gigs I am here to do are "readings" of the poetry from my book, but these are NOT performances, merely readings - very animated readings. The Harvard gig has been rescheduled for two weeks from now, and the tour goes ahead as planned, notwithstanding the semantic and logistical differences.

Speaking of disobedient civility, yesterday I went swimming in Walden Pond and visited the site of Thoreau's cabin. My first stop after finally crossing the semi-permeable membrane was my second cousins' vineyard (http://www.turtlecreekwine.com) in Lincoln, MA, only ten minutes from the historic pond (actually more of a lake). New England is crayola-tinted at this time of year.

Tomorrow morning, however, may be a different story. I am performing for high school students in the Bronx (birthplace of hip-hop culture) in a matter of hours. The first place I visited after completing a rap translation of Chaucer was Canterbury, England, back in the fall of 2000. Now, six years later, the Rap Canterbury Tales pilgrimage will reach a symbolic milestone. It took six hundred years to get from Chaucer to hip-hop, but my versions always seem to get abridged in translation.

As a final lark, check out this article that ran last week in the Vancouver

Sun, in which I am proclaimed to have achieved "universal respect":

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/arts/story.html?id=7df3333e-53bc-4bb1-89ac-71f599e820e3

It almost makes me want to retire.

Almost.

Baba