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Universal, 4. Februar 2011, 14-15 Uhr, Conversation with Agassi F. Bangura on "Shaman comes to Wall Street, Fishing and Hunting and Reactions am Main".
Jungle and Fishing
Reaktion am Main
Shaman-Comes-Wall-Street
www.washingtontimes.com/weblogs/fishwrap/2008/Sep/27/shaman-comes-wall-street/
The shaman comes to Wall Street
Rod Lamkey
Published on September 27, 2008
NEW YORK - Remember those horror movies where Godzilla or King Kong would pull the subway car from its tracks, shaking it like a baby's rattle, and peeling the roof off like a piece of wet tissue paper? Then you'd see poor souls screaming bloody murder as they fall to their deaths into the traffic below.
Or just maybe, the train gets commandeered by a band of commandos firing automatic weapons and RPGs, taking screaming women and children as hostages, blood splattered all over the bullet-ridden windows, bodies all over.
Well that's kinda like how it feels riding the subway cars in New York City. You just never know.
So you're in New York City on the subway packed in like a can of sardines, when your hand inadvertently touches someone else's hand or other body part because your mind is drifting off into a fantasyland, and then as if on cue, somewhere in the can of sardines a little girl screams to high heaven, a high-pitched scream that turns your blood into cottage cheese. Car 54 where are you?
Inside the New York Stock Exchange, with its noble columns and U.S. flags hung, blowing in the cool afternoon breeze, traders and brokers, moneymen wearing neat colored jackets over pressed white shirts and ties, with tidy name tags and numbers embroidered on the sleeves, make their way through the controlled chaos of money and stress and sweat and fear.
This is the center of the financial universe, and the men and women who zip past back and forth, trading, yelling, screaming and dealing make up the Milky Way of Ben Franklin.
On the outside of this cocoon of money a shaman, witch doctor, or medicine man, is dressed in a grassy skirt, face and half-naked body painted, chanting and dancing, his sculpted figure moving in motion to the beat from another universe unlike the one inside the stock exchange. He blows his whistle, plays a percussion instrument, and chants.
Tourists watch in utter amazement, jaws open, happy snap cameras going full speed and filling up mega pixels with images of the shaman. Fingers point, and people talk because you know full well that you can't find this kind of action in Des Moines, Iowa! And some ignore the man with the painted face and grassy skirt, rolling their eyes while does his voodoo...that voodoo, that he do, so well. This is no sideshow, no sir, Agassi F. Bangura is from Sierra Leone, Africa, and he came here to the site of the New York Stock Exchange specifically to cast a positive voodoo spell called "Borro" to help lift the stock market, the financial institutions, and the traders and lenders, and borrowers out of the abyss.
You know it's gonna be a long ride when a shaman has to come to Wall Street and lift the money curse with voodoo! Kind of like the curse of the Billy Goat and the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field, or the Boston Red Sox and the Curse of the Bambino!
Oh, yeah, and then Uncle Sam came striding by on stilts while the protestors with their handmade signs disappeared into the crowd of moneymen and tourists, not unlike what you'd find in People's Park in Berkeley, Calif., minus the moneymen of course.
Excuse me, but when the train came to a stop this morning, the sign read "Wall Street"...next stop the Twilight Zone, voodoo and all.
Rod Lamkey Jr. Staff Photographer The Washington Times |
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