This music video -- produced for the new movie, Star Trek Beyond -- takes us to an amazing otherworldly world, which we arrive in with wonderment, with wide open eyes. But I am not the first to say 'otherworldly' here, as a link I give below amply shows. Sledgehammer is a deeply spiritual offering, and evokes the same levitation 'arts' that some suspect explain the transportation from distant and still unknown quarries of huge building blocks of stone the kind which became Egypt's grand pyramids. The seeming desolation of the terrain in which we find Rihanna, and her facial makeup, speak to this awesomeness and this spectacular theme. What she wears, and her body language, blend without a seam into a desert place, and accentuate the image of an African phenom with cosmic powers, in a parallel universe. The inexplicable expanse of the cosmos seems somehow within the reach of her powers and, through her, our grasp as well. She is one with it, indeed, and so are we. She seems stranded in a volcanic fossil, for now. Pity, though, that her words (the lyrics) emit less power than the language (the demeanor) of her seemingly indestructible body in the music video. But the swarm of birds that soon enough begin to fly past her with full intent, at jet speed, seem responsive to secret powers and hidden machinations that only she can possibly muster in these desolate and easily unforgiving parts at the very margin of chaos. And she waits for something, it seems, or someone -- no one knows what, or whom. A thing! We can't wait to see.
NOTE: More, or less, on this unfinished post should Time allow.
I suppose Sarah Kaplan's account sums up the awe and the questions with which we humans have always encountered a truly new phenomenon at a distance. But Star KIC 8462852 got me really thinking: Is it truly an alien megastructure? Are we in the cusp of another Galileo moment? This is it, is it? Is our view of ourselves and the universe and creation just about to change forever? KIC 8462852 is some 1,814 light years away, though. Thus, we're told, the images we're reading about are 1,400+ years old, as light travels! But that's recent, compared to the Egyptian Pryamids at Giza, or even Stonehenge. So who knows what an "odd display" of the 6th century A.D. might look like in a light display of right now? (Pity, we on earth would have to wait until the 35th century A.D. to know) [Click here for a Sixth Century Timeline on Earth . Pity, we have no feasible prognosis for the 35th century A.D.] READ MORE: Sarah Kaplan (October 2015) "The star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure
Nikikutazama, a Kiswahili phrase for "when I look at you", has an undeniable happiness-inducing beat about it. The artistes, likewise, have a happy, calm and collected, comedic mien. Truly infectious. A few months ago I was at a Kenyan wedding in Nairobi where the chorus of this anthem of a song was cheerfully and naughtily 'misread' by the MC, a well-known comedian, as: "O Aoko O, O Aokoo..." Aoko, it so happens, is a girl's name. In DhoLuo it means, as I reckon, "Girl from the Outside". And on that fine (sunny, sunny) Saturday aft, when matrimony happily joined two ethnic identities, it was promptly added to the bride's name -- a Samburu beauty (with a name that seems to trace back to the era of the pyramids) getting married to a fine Luo groom.
I don't think that Aoko features in the extant Samburu dictionary, or vocabulary. Perhaps it will in the distance. But no matter. Everyone was so much the happier for that union on that wonderful day. Me and mine certainly were.
