"Ian McDonald - Fat Tuesday" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

hundred televisions donated by a variety of Pacific Rim electronics
companies; last Seu Guantanamera accompanied by strolling mariachi
musicians and girls dressed as lightning bolts.

Tercero: the batteria, made up of dockers from Drowntown and
construction workers from the new Todos Santos arcosanti over by Poco
Venecia - during the marching season, drumming in the lunch-hour ousts
even football - all dressed in mauve and yellow and led by El Batador
himself, as he has led them every year for the past twenty-five years.

Cuarto: the mobile sound-stage borne on the backs of three tank
transporters (some general down in Chihuahua owed La Baiana, but what
he was not prepared to say); complete with sound system lighting rig FX
backing musicians and roadies in mauve and yellow. Here Annunciato and
RosтАЩaтАЩJericho will amaze the city.

Quinto: two hundred maidens dancing.

Sexto: two hundred lords of the caba├▒as a-leaping.

Septimo: a wedge of open-topped bunting-and-flower decorated cars
in which the sambaderos and sambaderas of former days, too old now to
dance all the way to the square of Our Lady of the Angels, ride in honour
and splendour, decked with synthetic feathers and often wearing ludicrously
decorated glasses.

Octavo: a rearguard of assorted devos freakos pervos rubberboys
leatherboys bike-fetishists SM enthusiasts etc. etc.

El Batador is already sounding time on his plastic bucket tucked
under his arm, crazy old black man. Annunciato is scared three kinds of
excretaless, only RosтАЩaтАЩJericho looks like she knows what she is doing. Her
silver lam├й suit is covered in clip-on microphones wired into a transmitter in
the small of her back and beaming tight and righteous into her sampledeck.
No recordings, no found sources; this Fat Tuesday her source is her city
and she mixes in real-time the sounds and music of carnival itself, snitched
and snatched and crammed rammed jammed through her mixing desk.

La Baiana takes his position in the gilded cupola at the back of the
portable sound-stage, looks to make sure every-thing is ready. Which of
course it isnтАЩt but if you waited until it was you would never get anywhere.

тАШOkay, my little chikadees.тАЩ He slips a Little Thunderer between his
ice-cream pink lips, blows a mighty blast that sets even the letters up on the
hill reverberating. тАШLetтАЩs go!тАЩ

Last census Alto California had a population in the region of thirty-five
million people. Looks like every last one of them, plus eleven satellite
channels, turned out this Fat Tuesday. The streets are canyons of sound
and colour, cheering voices, whistles, banners, streamers, balloons with the