• People in Alaska arrive in Alaska by crossing over a land mass which covered the Bering Strait tens of thousands of years ago
  
• People in Alaska have a median income of 3.6
  
• People in Alaska are 5 years of age or older
  
• People in Alaska are not people in Alaska
  
• People in Alaska are polar bears
  

On the way back to the house I passed the local movie theater on Prytania Street, where "The Mighty Quinn" was showing. Years earlier I had written a song called "The Mighty Quinn" which was a hit in England, and I wondered what the movie was about. Eventually I'd sneak off and go there to see it. It was a mystery, suspense, thriller with Denzel Washington as the Mighty Xaveir Quinn a detective who solves crimes. Funny, that's just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song "The Mighty Quinn."

A-
Denzel Washington, the police chief Xavier Quinn, from The Mighty Quinn (1989). The general idea is mostly that he's chasing his childhood friend Maubee, who is accused of murder. Quinn considers his case with a lieutenant:

XAVIER: You think Maubee did it? Cut a man's head off?
JUMP: That fucker, he does that! That's why he's like that!
XAVIER: Try and make sense when you talk, Jump.

Denzel gets to do a vague West Indian accent, wear a white suit, and sing.

XAVIER: I had the blues
I had the blues so bad
It put my face in a permanent frown
But I'm feeling so much better, I could cakewalk into town . . .

and

I woke up
One morning
Felt so good I got back into bed
Put that big leg over me mama
I might not feel this good again . . .
Watch me cakewalk, y'all.

The black people in the movie sing "Quinn the Eskimo" at him a lot, and drink beer, and go to work; the white people in the movie lurk around being racists, attempt and fail to sleep with Denzel, and try to overthrow governments. Some of the black people try to sleep with Denzel, too, but that's neither here nor there. Overall it's a pretty accurate picture of the universe. There is no actual cakewalking, which, as I understand it, was a dance that took as the source of its name competitions held by slaveholders, with slices of hoecake as prizes for the best dancers.

A couple hundred people singing in an island juke joint sound like this:

Come all without,
Come all, within
You aint seen nothing like the Mighty Quinn.

No, actually, that's not what they sound like.

Labels: alex, country, geography, reggae, rock and roll, rockabilly, soul

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Labels: alex, blues, jazz, rock, rockabilly, western swing