Banana
This Raspa’s banana(s), b-a-n-a-n-a-(s)
I’m feeling wistful as I write this. And when I’m feeling wistful, I listen to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.”
“I took my love, I took it down. I climbed a mountain and I turned around.
And I saw my reflection, in the snow covered hills,’til a landslide brought me down…”
A rising, a growing, a new day beating back the onslaught of night. A sunrise
reflected in snow covered hills.
A raspa
whose ice looks like a pale sunrise, more yellow than orange but just slightly orange, still.
A sunrise, a line in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: “After a winter's gestation in its egg-shell of ice, the valley beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow.”
This week’s raspa is the pale moist yellow of an egg-yolk sunrise.
Midnight’s Children, a book I’ve tried to read twice. Third time’s the charm?
A friend of mine, a pre-med double major in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and English, wrote one of her theses on Midnight’s Children.
“HOW TO SWALLOW THE WORLD: Magical Realism and Historical Narratives in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.”
I’m waiting to read it until I’ve read the book.
(“HOW TO SWALLOW THE WORLD” isn’t a bad name for this blog.)
A book I have read, and recently, too, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude.
The philosophy behind it is a version of Raspa Theory: everything is everything.
The banana flavor of this week is a part of the banana plantations that the Americans build in Macondo, the setting of Cien años de soledad, the banana plantation in Macondo is the United Fruit banana plantation in cualquier country in Latin America colonized by United Fruit, the quintessentially American corporation; the United Fruit banana plantation became the Chiquita Banana plantation because the name United Fruit is too connected to colonialism, and colonizers don’t want to be reminded that they’re colonizers, and colonizers don’t want to remind anti-colonialists that they’re complicit in colonialism because then they might cause trouble, like the banana plantation workers in Macondo caused under the leadership of José Arcadio Segundo, who’s the great-nephew of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a man who, in between his military victories and defeats, tinkers with little metal fish made out of gold, fish that come to represent Aureliano Buendía, whom a friend of mine is role playing as in a sandbox medieval simulator called “Mount and Blade Bannerlord:” In “Mount and Blade Bannerlord,” my friend, much like Col. Aureliano Buendía, made his money as a craftsman, declared war on the world, and marched under a banner bearing a little golden fish, a little golden fish perhaps the pale moist yellow of an egg yolk sunrise, the color of a banana raspa. Everything is everything.
About those banana plantation workers who caused trouble in Macondo: they’re massacred by army men in league with the American corporation.
When I wrote Cien años above, I made sure to include the tilde. Otherwise, it would have been Cien anos. One hundred anuses.
Make sure to include the tilde, my Spanish professor once told me. Otherwise, you’ve written anuses.
Banana. One of the first pieces of internet culture in which I ever partook: peanut butter jelly time. I always heard “there he go, there he go there he go” as “basil, basil, basil.” It never made sense to me. I recently learned that there’s a similar phenomenon that can be described by the word mondegreen, which is itself, a mondegreen.
Peanutbutterjelly, peanutbutterjelly, peanutbutterjelly with a baseball bat.
Titus Andromedon playing “Beat That Bitch With a Bat” at Kimmy Schmidt’s birthday party in Netflix’s “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”
Mole women.
A former coworker who tried not to listen to music describing violence against women or the objectification of women.
“I can’t fix America,” says Titus.
Driving around D.C. with my coworker, hearing No Doubt’s “Hella Good” for the first time in years.
Gwen Stefani was a part of No Doubt, and Gwen Stefani is the artist behind the song from which the above photo caption comes. Gwen Stefani’s music videos? That shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s, girl, that shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s!
I remember watching the “Rich Girl” music video and feeling embarrassed: I didn’t want my mom to know that I liked the music, liked the dancing. I especially liked Eve’s lyrics: “Come together all over the world / From the hoods of Japan, Harajuku girls / What, it's all love / What, give it up / What…”
An Eve song I like that begins with the imperative Ya gotta shake ya ass!
A suggested song on YouTube after finding “Tambourine:” “Lose Control” by Missy Elliott, featuring Ciara and Fat Man Scoop, a song I once sent to a friend and who I told, you, me, and your girlfriend should all perform this live.
Let’s do it, he says.
I want to be Missy, I say.
I know I’ll never be Missy but maybe I can be Mary Halsey: my favorite part of that video is what she’s holding in her hand. What is it? It seems biblical, which really adds to the gravitas behind her and Missy’s words.
Also, I know Ellen is canceled, but this was pretty great.
Also also, can you believe the lines after “put my thing down, flip it and reverse it” are literally reversed? Cue Anna Navarro.
Also also also, a word so nice I said it thrice, did you know that the little girl in this music video is Disney star Alyson Stoner?
As I listened to “Work It” for the above lines, I couldn’t help but focus on the lyric “Girls, girls, get that cash, if it’s 9 to 5 or it’s shaking your ass, ain’t no shame ladies do your thing, just make sure you ahead of the game.” It reminded me of Cardi B’s opening on Get Up 10: “Look, they give a bitch two options, strippin’ or lose, used to dance in a club right across from my school, I said “dance” not “fuck,” don’t get it confused, had to set the record straight ‘cause bitches love to assume, Mama couldn’t give it to me had to get it at Sue’s, Lord only knows how I got in those shoes, I was covered in dollars, now I’m drippin’ in jewels, a bitch play with my money, might as well spit in my food, bitches hated my guts, now they swear we was cool, went from makin’ tuna sandwiches to makin’ the news, I started speakin’ my mind and tripled my views, real bitch, only thing fake is the boobs.” A legend if there ever was one. And she can see the future, too.
Back to Banana…banana…Lana Banana…Lana! Lana Lana Lana Bo-bana, banana-fanna Fo-fanna, fee-fi-mo-mana, Lana.
I have an aunt who always used to play The Name Game with my sister and me when we were kids. Patty! Patty, Patty, bo-batty, Banana-fana fo-fatty, Fee-fi-mo-matty... Patty! We always used to laugh at “fatty.”
Banana, it’s what’s on the cover of The Velvet Underground’s album containing the song “Heroin.”
Heroin (dreaming about.)
Marzipan (dreaming about.)
“Heroin” was the song a person I really liked — a person I was in a kind of love with, maybe — told me was their favorite.
The song is sung by Lou Reed. Lou Reed was a dick. Some say he was a genius. The person I really liked, was in a kind of love with, maybe, was a dick. I sometimes thought they were a genius, but I think that was just the kind of love talking.
The banana on that album cover was designed by Andy Warhol: read more about that process here. “Written on the album cover above the banana was the invitation to “Peel Slowly and See.”
Words that live in my head rent free: kneel, and come. Kneel, and come.
Come, and see. See, and come.
Innuendo aside, that phrase above the banana reminds me of Shrek. “Layers,” Shrek says. “Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.” Peel and see the layers fall away. You get it?
I learned a lot about Andy Warhol from Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. Warhol, in many ways, was a sad man. He had trouble making friends because he had trouble talking to people, and because he had trouble talking to people, he had trouble being close to them, close with them. Enter visual art. Enter the camera. Enter the audio recorder he carried around with him everywhere.
From an essay in FT by Olivia Laing:
“It’s a truism to say that Warhol set the mould for a 21st century of Instagram influencers and YouTube deities. But when I first began to work on him 10 years ago, I was struck not by the familiarity of his pursuit of fame, but by the way he deployed technology to manage his emotional needs… A gay man who found it difficult to expose his body or be touched, Warhol longed for closeness but was terrified by the demands of other people. What do you do if you want to look but fear displaying yourself? What do you do if you can’t bear to be alone but are frightened both of rejection and invasion? Warhol’s answer to these conundrums predates the smartphone era by half a century.”
“He deployed a panoply of recording devices to manage contact, to lure it close and to ward it off, an avatar of our own compulsive romance with technology. With these charismatic tools, he could at once attract people to him and evade or deflect them. He was a butterfly collector, gathering essences for perpetuity, subjecting the chosen to the Warhol makeover, the ravishing process of duplication…[Warhol] acquired a Philips tape recorder that became so permanent a companion he nicknamed it ‘my wife’.”
“‘The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had,’ he explained in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, ‘but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape, it’s not a problem any more.’”
I can relate, says a friend of mine when I tell him about Warhol using a camera as a barrier between him and other people.
Warhol’s collected diaries sit on the bottom of my bookshelf. I lost the dust cover. I don’t like dust covers.
The book is bright yellow. Bright yellow like a banana.
“You know, not everybody likes onions.” Donkey says.
***
Go Bananas with a Banana Split, Only 3.99, reads the Dairy Queen sign I pass on my way to pick up the raspa. That Dairy Queen is where my parents decided not to separate, where a phone rang and a voice on the other line said, I’m scared you’ll never love me after the hurt I’ve caused you, where a parent and their child stood outside a gold-colored car, the loose gravel of the parking lot crackling underneath their feet. Go Bananas with a Banana Split, Only 3.99.
Why do we use the word bananas for when we mean crazy? Find some unsatisfying answers here.
A banana can be used as a weapon in Nintendo’s Mario Kart. You drop the peels from your car, forcing other cars unlucky enough to drive over the peels to spin out.
Coincidentally, if you type “Mario Banana” in an attempt to find a video of the banana being deployed in Mario Kart, you’ll come upon this Andy Warhol film starring Mario Montez, whose original name was René Rivera.
The “slipping on a banana peel” gag first appeared on the big screen in a 1915 film entitled “By the Sea.” It starred Charlie Chaplin (who else was around in 1915?). The joke comes from the fact that bananas were once considered public hazards, according to this Mental Floss article. “Today it’s quite rare to see a discarded banana peel on the sidewalk, but it is still ingrained in most Americans the perils of crossing paths with one.”
I have no first cousins by blood, but I have four by family friendships. One of them just became a Marine. His favorite color is green. And when we were younger, playing Halo or Call of Duty or Smite over Xbox Live, he’d sing a simple refrain into the microphone. Ring ring ring ring banana phone, banana phone! We gave him a lot of shit over the fact that he “ate his mic,” breathing into it so heavily that all you heard was his breathing. He also once accidentally turned off my Xbox with his ass — the downside of touch-sensitive power buttons, I suppose.
When I was younger. What a phrase at 22. And yet, can there be any doubt that the age of Disney’s “Pass Your Plate!” has long since passed? How long has it been since Léa uttered the famous “jULiaNnE dat ez nawt red bell pepur, dat is a SpIcEEy pweppuu!” as one YouTube commenter put it? Since an African chorus quietly proclaimed “Banana-nah!” in Pass Your Plate’s Banana episode? Can there be any doubt that we are older?
But times makes you bolder, even children get older, and I’m getting older too.
Kimora Blac appeared as Princess Banana Lady on Episode 3, Season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. She’s a look queen, a sickening one, I suppose, but I was turned off when, forced to sew in a design challenge, she reminded the camera that “[she] likes to pay designers to make her stuff. I don’t work in a sweatshop, that’s not what I signed up for, this is not America’s next top sweatshop.” My reaction can only be communicated by invoking the great and terrible Bianca del Rio: Really queen?
Incidentally, that video is captioned in Portuguese because its creator — Muniz — is a Brazilian YouTuber famous for his “RuPrise” videos, recap parodies of Drag Race episodes. He’s probably eaten Robson’s dish from Pass Your Plate’s Banana episode, arroz com feijao e banana.
One more Drag Race-Brazil connection: one of Muniz’s jokes is to insert the phrase “É a Gretchen, a cantora,” or, “It’s Gretchen, the singer” every time season 9’s Trinity Taylor appears: They kind of look exactly the same. Here’s a link if you’d like to read more about who Gretchen the singer is. Just click on the comment “Could someone explain that meme?” I found the thread enlightening for many reasons. I hope you do, too.
***
Did you know that the banana “as we know it may…be on the verge of extinction?” So says this Time Magazine article, which attributes the increased risk of losing this phallic fruit to Big Agriculture’s reliance on monoculture.
A Time magazine reporter once tried to interview me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti. *hisses*
Jk lol, but I really was interviewed by Time magazine for a piece about “How COVID-19 Will Shape the Class of 2020 For the Rest of Their Lives.”
“It’s not clear to the Class of 2020 how the pandemic will play out. They just know it will change their lives. ‘Everything’ is at stake, says Yale history major Adrian Rivera. ‘It’s this pivotal moment where we’ll never forget what’s done,” he says. ‘Or what isn’t done.’”
That one line comes from an hour-long conversation I had with that reporter. I don’t remember two percent of what I said, but I know it was a lot more substantive than that one line. This is what it feels like to be on the other end of the reporter’s microphone, I suppose.
I think that I was largely excluded from that article because I wasn’t optimistic about the future. I wasn’t pessimistic, either. I think I was just trying to put together what I had seen, what I was seeing.
I later learned that that reporter wrote a book called “The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.”
I thought about the premise behind that book, thought about what I had seen, what I was seeing. Every generation thinks it will change the world, that it is the one to save society from the mess created by the preceding generation. Then nothing really changes. And then that generation produces a new generation of people who think they will change the world, that their generation will be the one to save society from the mess created by their parents, and then nothing really changes.
To think that our generation — which is just a concept made up to describe a new set of people on the Earth — is somehow inherently different from the previous, to think that any generation is somehow fundamentally different from another generation is, to my mind, deeply hubristic. Millions and millions and millions and million and millions and million and millions and millions of people have preceded us on this Earth. Are we really so vain to think that we’re that much different from them?
Back to bananas disappearing forever. I once gave a presentation on the dangers of monocultural farming practices. Farmers breed the “best” crop and then plant that crop as much as they can. Fields as far as the eye can see will contain only that one kind of crop, the “best” ear of corn, say, the sweetest, the most-cost effective, the one with the best mouth-feel, the one easiest to maintain, the one most resistant to disease. But like any other living organism, this “best” strain of corn isn’t entirely impervious to disease, and should the day come when a natural pathogen sets its sights on our corn — or when somebody engineers a pathogen with the sole purpose of destroying our corn — it’s gone faster than this corn eating goes left.
I gave that presentation along with two other people at the Yale Young Global Scholars program in the summer of 2015. At the beginning of the presentation, we passed out snacks to anybody who wanted them. That gesture served three purposes. First, and most importantly, it allowed me to get rid of leftover food I had without having to throw it away. Second, it ingratiated the audience toward us because they were feasting on our salty goodies. And third, we later returned to the snacks in our presentation. The effects of the corn monoculture are all around us, we said. Those chips you’re eating? Corn. That Gatorade you’re drinking? Corn. Everything’s made out of corn, we said.
Banana raspa syrup is made out of corn, too, I’m sure. Everything’s made out of corn.
I liked the way this week’s raspa looked more than I liked the way it tasted. It tasted too artificial, too much like something trying to be banana, but not really banana.
I remember that I once told some of the people in my dorm that I preferred the taste of artificial strawberry ice cream to ice cream made with fresh strawberries. I was a freshman and nervous and didn’t really know what I was talking about since I had never actually had ice cream made from fresh strawberries. Afterward, I felt bad. They had looked at me with the revulsion with which the rich look upon the poor, which is what a conversation about fresh versus artificial flavor actually boils down to, I think.
But regardless: the Banana raspa I ate this week. I won’t be returning to it. And yet, I suspect that the Banana raspa will, in various forms and manifestations, return to me regardless of whether I choose to return to it. Everything is everything, after all.
