D.I.Y. Grass Cutting!

I would like to convince the owner of the lot that long grass is "cool", but he'd think i was looking for an excuse to be lazy. There is a difference between being lazy and "over-doing it", where in I lie - in the grass! Cutting it does help to take inventory of lot contents. In this case cutting the grass is like a magician pulling up his sleeves, or like an arrestee welcoming a frisking. Why is it that we assume dereliction, impulsivity, and epicureanism with long hair, and the same for long grass? What decadent grass, what random grass, what a drummer-in-a-band grass. Maybe my lot just needed lots of time to think, but now it was time.

Before

After

More cut grass

with a machete!


May freak-out neighbors, but this is how i've been doing it since december. I started with a kitchen knife, doing it at night. A car once parked outside a neighbor's house and made me a little self-conscious. The police had been round, slowed down and kept going, so i figured it was legal-enough. Sure it's dangerous, and bad for the back, but Lukas Strzelec once relayed to me a phenomenon he had experienced during a stint in Ghana. There, it was not uncommon to see people out on their lawns, cutting grass with a machete, scythe, or a "big knife". The rhythm such chores like that and others required (things done by hand) moved him to postulate that rhythm commonly seen in dancing and in relation to sound stems in a large part from us using our bodies as machines, performing repetitive movement. (Thinking about this since, I have also wondered whether Bossa Nova comes from the rhythm of 2-cylinder engines interpreted by an ear accustomed to Samba.) Does the rhythm of slimming lawns with a blade translate through the body as a means of coordinating the limbs with one another, "congealing" the motor system via the introduction of choreographed impulses? I think Luke was onto something. Let's just look at all of the dances of old days, and try to abstract a task from their movement. What the fuck were those germans doing bending their knees while bringing up their elbows!? I dont know. I could make a conjecture, but it would offend my german readership. JK. Another wealth of evidence for Strzelec's theory comes from the anecdotal observation that it's not hard to get someone to dance by asking them to adapt a complex routine they now consider perfunctory, this time to the music. Take "the dish scrub", "the ironing long pants", "the shopping cart", "the bus driver", "the cyclist". It is not surprising, though i haven' noticed until now that it was Strzelec, himself, who, in his characteristically tempered exuberance, had demonstrated for me "the lawn mower" some time ago. Oh ho ho, the times we had...ho ho. Anyway, I haven't noticed any cross-over from grass cutting to better rhythm of any sort, but I do find that whilst in the act, I take to a shuffle reminiscent of the dance from the wedding scene in the film version of Fiddler on the Roof (know what i'm talkin about?). There could be more on this task, but using the machete is getting easier.

Luke's current blog is at http://yinzinmali.wordpress.com/ he's in Mali