La Mancha

Good Night.

2011-01-06T10:45:00.000+01:00

Death of the Liberal Class

2010-11-18T08:33:00.001+01:00

First Witness

2010-10-27T17:14:00.002+02:00

When the Lord learned of this, he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

⁴Now he had to go through Samaria. ⁵So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

⁷When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?" ⁸(His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

⁹The Samaritan woman said to him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.^a]">[a])

¹⁰Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."

¹¹"Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? ¹²Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?"

¹³Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

¹⁵The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water."

¹⁶He told her, "Go, call your husband and come back."

¹⁷"I have no husband," she replied.

Jesus said to her, "You are right when you say you have no husband. ¹⁸The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true."

¹⁹"Sir," the woman said, "I can see that you are a prophet. ²⁰Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem."

²¹Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²²You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. ²⁴God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

²⁵The woman said, "I know that Messiah" (called Christ) "is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us."

²⁶Then Jesus declared, "I who speak to you am he."

The Disciples Rejoin Jesus

²⁷Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, "What do you want?" or "Why are you talking with her?"

²⁸Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, ²⁹"Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ^b]">[b]?" ³⁰They came out of the town and made their way toward him.

³¹Meanwhile his disciples urged him, "Rabbi, eat something."

³²But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about."

³³Then his disciples said to each other, "Could someone have brought him food?"

³⁴"My food," said Jesus, "is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. ³⁵Do you not say, 'Four months more and then the harvest'? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. ³⁶Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. ³⁷Thus the saying 'One sows and another reaps' is true. ³⁸I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor."

Many Samaritans Believe

³⁹Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, "He told me everything I ever did." ⁴⁰So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. ⁴¹And because of his words many more became believers.

⁴²They said to the woman, "We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world."

His Name Is Alive

2010-10-16T10:30:00.007+02:00

I've been up since 5 AM for some reason. Weird dreams involving labor unions, moderate denial and waiting on either a Greyhound bus or a train leaving from somewhere in East Texas. Wasn't able to get back to sleep, despite watching some pretty boring lectures on the internet. My head's crowded. I have watched the morning slowly spill its light into my room over the last few hours. The entire time I've only wanted to listen to these two songs:

D'Angelo - Brown Sugar (screwed by DJ Screw) (stream)(download)

His Name Is Alive - Playing (stream)(download)

Lemchaheb En Concert

2010-09-27T19:29:00.002+02:00

The Flames, without their flame-themed clothes, live. Sit back, relax, enjoy:

Back in the Bardo

2010-09-20T17:47:00.006+02:00

Soon I will be only a story
But the same is true of you.
I hope the bardo will not be empty
But people do not yet know where they live.
Past and future all mixed together,
Let those trapped birds out the window!
What then remains? The stories you no longer
Believe. You had better believe them.
While you live they carry the meaning.
When you die they carry the meaning.
To those who come after they carry the meaning.
You had better believe in them.
In Rumi's story he saw all the worlds
As one, and that one, Love, he called to and knew,
Not Muslim or Jew or Hindu or Buddhist,
Only a Friend, a breath breathing human,
Telling his boddhisattva story. The bardo
Waits for us to make it real.

CO-PAY

2010-09-14T15:59:00.001+02:00

[via Tinta Negra]

Sufi Music at the Holiday Inn

2010-08-26T04:45:00.005+02:00

Houston Psychedelic

2010-08-11T21:00:00.005+02:00

Oh yeah! I'm in Houston right now-- my hometown, the heart of toxic psychedelia. Here's a piece from Screwed Anthologies: Improvised Music Under the Influence of DJ Screw, which you can read more about here.

David Dove and Lucas Gorham - Track 02 (stream) (download)

Aquel famoso dia

2010-07-25T23:32:00.015+02:00

Aida and I will be in Houston in a couple of days. As I get things ready, I'm listening to some of the cumbias rebajadas Jace turned me on to last week. The standout for me so far is this song, a thick slice of psychedelia rich with dark humor and war. And yes, Native Americans:

Los Yes Yes - Señor Apache (rebajada)(stream)(download)

Aquel famoso día
se lanzó la caballería
a una lucha cruel
pero al llegar los indios
desde atrás una voz temblorosa
empezo a decir:
"Que hago yo aquí?"

No señor apache,
no me pegue usted.
No señor apache,
pues me va a doler.

Yo no quería venir
sabia que me iban a fundir
pero me dijo mi mamá:
"Andale hijito, vete a luchar"

[...]

Hey!
Cuál será la palabra india para decir "amigo"?
Mmm, sí, "Quimosabi", eso es!, "Quimosabi"
Oiganme! Yo, quimosabi! (Tsss!)
(Glup!) No, esa no es,
señor apache,
que le parece si nos vemos mejor la próxima semana?

[...]

Senor Apache!
Que le parece si mejor
bailamos una cumbia?
Es mas...Le dejare un cassette
De ritmo andino!
Si. Darme el cassette.
Y tambien el andino.
JU JU JAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJA

Aquel famoso dia se ha ido contando de generacion a generacion. Eso es lo que ocurre con estas historias. Lo que ocurre con la memoria es un poco mas complicado. No cambia tanto lo ocurrido como lo que utiliza uno para justificar su implicacion y, posteriormente, intentar pactar.

Los 60:

Mas recientemente:

Maghrebi music special on DJ/Rupture's Mudd Up!

2010-07-21T20:02:00.009+02:00

As you probably know, I'm a long-time fan of DJ/Rupture's work. So naturally, I was delighted when he asked me to be the guest on his show Mudd Up! on WFMU and pick a special selection of Maghrebi tunes and chat about them. The timing couldn't have been more fortuitous, as I had just taught a summer school seminar at UPF on rai music and the French-Algerian diaspora and several of my students expressed interest in hearing some of the roots of that music or other, more modern fare.

Anyway, it's been quite some time since I've been on the radio (the last time was in 2006, on my mentor Andy G's Music Beyond Borders on KPFT, to which I arrived an hour late), and I was extremely nervous. Plus I'm a bit embarassed by my difficulty in answering some of the questions, but it's mostly the result of having a lot to say and not knowing where to start, especially if people don't have prior knowledge of the music. I'm not embarassed, however, of the selection of tunes, which are all exceptional. Listen for yourself by following the link below. The show starts off with the song linked in my last post:

Mudd Up! North Africa Special with guest Carlos Delclos

Intimate Silent T'ghani

2010-07-17T15:52:00.005+02:00

Drama:

1510s, from L.L. drama "play, drama," from Gk. drama (gen.
dramatos ) "play, action, deed," from dran "to do, act, perform."

The space between desire, intention and action is time, a spell. Within it, silence is only the illusion of nothing. Tension is the wake of that illusion's transience. Haj Med El Anka and the players behind him know this and play with it. Time is stretched and compacted to show and conceal open spaces in which emotions (not just sensations) intensify. It is in these spaces that the soul dwells.

Haj Med El Anka - H'mama s'maetha t'ghani (stream) (download)

* * * * *

I just discovered that there's such a thing as iDosing, wherein "binaural beats" are used "to alter one's brain waves and mental state". It sounds like this:

And looks like this:

Tariq Ali: Obama, Pakistan and the US Empire

2010-06-26T11:23:00.002+02:00

River of Transfiguration

2010-06-01T21:29:00.010+02:00

Ben Chasny has been one of my favorite musicians for some time now. Besides the strength of his musicianship, what amazes me most about him is how he manages to be so prolific and yet maintain such a high level of quality. Through Six Organs of Admittance, August Born, Badgerlore, Current 93 and Comets on Fire, his guitar and voice have been directly involved in some of the most powerful psychedelic music of the last decade. More recently, he's been focusing on his work with psych-folk supergroup Rangda, with drummer Chris Corsano (who starred in my last blog post) and Sir Richard Bishop, of Sun City Girls.

The piece below, however, is from Six Organs of Admittance's 2006 album The Sun Awakens. It's a long one, featuring David Tibet (of Current 93 fame) and, following the trend of my recent posts, requires a lot of your time and attention. Enjoy!

Six Organs of Admittance - River of Transfiguration

Chris Corsano

2010-05-18T09:53:00.001+02:00

Orange Clouded Cover

2010-05-03T00:11:00.012+02:00

A mix of rain and rain-clouds, light pollution, Red Label scotch whiskey and Charalambides have turned Barcelona into Houston on a late Sunday night. It almost feels like a crime to speak in geographic terms about this weather and atmosphere, since more than either of those cities, it is a place in my imagination, on the border of my subconscious, which I sense being transported to. And yet here it is now, the place where mud is made, where white light shows its presence through the grey of low-hanging clouds. Where the water from above is unfit to drink. Here is where I watch a terror enter the scene at my beckoning.

Charalambides - Black Bed Blues

She wears red to alarm, kneels to pick something from the ground and is promptly led off-scene by a determined hand. She did not see the blinds part slightly, low in the window of the house she has her back to. Why’s she just out like that, in the middle of the street with her good heels on, he asks, looking out over the yard his father does not keep. He knows the rain will make the weeds even bigger than they are now, their base more like a tree’s, so that pulling them seems so violent, but not as much as when Dad uses the shears. It’s just not right unless you get the roots, too.

Well, it’s a

delicate balance.

It’s not always the

right note when

you first

hear

it.

'While planes flew over the plantations, leaving a wake of glyphosate in the air, and the helicopters escorted them to prevent guerrilla attacks, the soldiers went into the forest to search for peasants who fled,' a coca grower, who requested his name withheld, told IPS.

On the Ecuadorian side, farmers reported that approximately six hours after the spraying they saw extensive areas of yucca, or manioc, with burned leaves.

Glyphosate, one of Monsanto's most important chemical herbicides, was introduced in Latin America 25 years ago, marketed principally under the name Roundup with annual sales of 1.2 billion dollars.

It is an herbicide classified as a Category III Toxin, which calls for caution in handling because it can cause gastro-intestinal problems, vomiting, enlargement of the lungs, pneumonia, mental confusion, and destruction of the red corpuscles in mucus membrane tissues.

But the Ecuadorians also fear that in the eradication of coca, the Colombian military is using the transgenic fungus Fusarium oxysporum. The fungus is an alternative Washington proposed to the Colombian government, but has been denounced by scientists and environmentalists around the world because of the dangers posed by its release into the environment.

Lucía Gallardo, of the Acción Ecológica organisation, conducted research on the potential environmental consequences of Plan Colombia in Ecuador and stresses that “Fusarium oxysporum would threaten the biodiversity of the entire Amazon region.''

“It causes damage to various cultivated plants, leading to different types of diseases and wilting of the leaves, rotting fruit and even killing the plant. It can also cause illness in humans, especially in patients with depressed immune systems, with cancer or AIDS,'' she added.

Gallardo also says the fungus has the ability to genetically mutate and scatter itself, killing other crops - it is an organism that easily adapts to its surroundings.

source

But what's really making me nervous is the green liquid in the tube.

Over the past three years, rumors of a new strain of coca have circulated in the Colombian military. The new plant, samples of which are spread out on this table, goes by different names: supercoca, la millonaria. Here in the southern region it's known as Boliviana negra. The most impressive characteristic is not that it produces more leaves - though it does - but that it is resistant to glyphosate. The herbicide, known by its brand name, Roundup, is the key ingredient in the US-financed, billion-dollar aerial coca fumigation campaign that is a cornerstone of America's war on drugs.

source

Pause on Vibrate

2010-04-29T22:40:00.008+02:00

One of the things I love about truly great psychedelic music is its intrinsic relationship with process. The current indie landscape favors immediacy in a way that really separates it from the one I knew when I started getting into the culture, as artists mainly strive to build up to and hit that one chord at the exact, perfect time and maybe save a listener or two's life for the time being. With "tracks" battling it out on shuffle, it's understandable that this approach should be the most effective way to increase play counts in peoples' increasingly diverse libraries. But I don't really think results like that are the end-all be-all, and I've found myself feeling nostalgic lately for the disorientation and intrigue I used to experience upon first listening to a Highly Recommended Album, as well as the amount of time I'd spend with it. Listening on headphones (while sitting still), I'd make an effort to let all the weird sounds surprise me and, eventually, sink in to the point where it was just that moment in that song.

Psychedelic music basically gives you two choices: tune in to the vibe, or turn off. Tuning in involves altering your state either chemically or by listening very closely and being receptive. It's the latter that attracts me, especially lately, and it's safe to say that the amount of music I've been taking in has dropped significantly as a result. It feels good; not only have I managed to vanquish the post-sugar rush ennui that mp3 culture so easily induces, but I've also rekindled my love affair with the process of exploring vaguely known but often overlooked artists. Currently, I've been sucked in by Sam Shalabi's Eid. While it's not exactly a perfect album (none of his are, except maybe Shalabi Effect's The Trial of St. Orange), it has some amazing moments and the sequencing is pretty nice. There are a few really good songs there, especially the heavy title song and the lovely "Billy the Kid (Part 2)", but my favorite is definitely "Jessica Simpson". What's jarring in the tune becomes very affecting after a few listens, but I'll spare you the spoiler and just point you to the Alien8 label's site, where you can stream the entire thing.

The other album I've been enjoying on long bus rides is Houston psychedelic icons The Red Krayola's 1967 album The Parable of Arable Land. I love the way that, on the album, this tune grabs the torch from an exhilirating exploratory passage and just runs with its energy, shouting, "War sucks!":

LISTEN TO BARRY PATEMAN

2010-04-07T16:14:00.005+02:00

On health inequalities

2010-03-25T15:43:00.002+01:00

Source:

	The Chief Medical Officer’s Ten Tips for better health	Alternative Tips
1	Don’t smoke. If you can, stop. If you can’t, cut down	Don’t be poor. If you are poor, try not to be poor for too long
2	Follow a balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables	Don’t live in a deprived area. If you do, move
3	Keep physically active	Don’t be disabled or have a disabled child
4	Manage stress by, for example, talking things through and making time to relax	Don’t work in a stressful low-paid manual job
5	If you drink alcohol, do so in moderation	Don’t live in damp, low quality housing or be homeless
6	Cover up in the sun, and protect children from sunburn	Be able to afford to pay for social activities and annual holidays
7	Practise safer sex	Don’t be a lone parent
8	Take up cancer screening opportunities	Claim all benefits to which you are entitled
9	Be safe on the roads: follow the Highway Code	Be able to afford to own a car
10	Learn the First Aid ABC – airways, breathing and circulation	Use education as an opportunity to improve your socio-economic position
	Source: DoH (1999) Saving Lives: Our Healthier Nation. London: The Stationery Office	Source: Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research, University of Bristol

Health Care Reform

2010-03-19T16:50:00.010+01:00

As most of you may already know, the topic of health care reform is extremely important to me. At an impersonal level, I spend a lot of my time doing work for a group that researches health inequalities at the global level. My participation in this group has helped me to understand the degree to which those of us who live in rich countries are privileged to have technology and health institutions that are capable of handling these types of issues. At a more personal level, this appreciation was enabled by a very serious health problem that I endured while living here in Spain. For those who do not know, last October I was rushed to the emergency room in a state of septic shock provoked by Lemierre's syndrome, an extremely rare and (if not diagnosed in time) deadly illness whose main cause is essentially bad luck and being young and healthy. I was kept in the ICU for about three weeks, in the hospital for a total of one month, and then passed on to home care, since I lived one block away from the hospital. All of this, including daily visits from nurses, was covered by Spain's national health care system because, in Spain, health care is a basic human right. Had this occurred in the U.S., I would be about a hundred thousand dollars in debt, if not far worse off. The experience changed my mind about a lot of things, the least important of which were certain aspects of my personal politics. To be brief, let's just say that I don't think a horizontal organizational and decision-making structure would necessarily have been as effective in treating me or any of the other people in the ICU as what actually took place.

This weekend, it appears that we will see the United States Congress come to a decision on what is being touted as "health care reform." The story goes that, while it does not declare health care a basic right or even include a public option, the bill in question will expand coverage to 30 million Americans (or 12 million or 15 million, depending on who you ask). There is even talk about how it establishes a framework from which we could work towards health care as a basic right for all Americans and a single-payer system. That said, many of the bill's self-described "pragmatic" supporters argue that, regardless of whether or not you believe health care to be a human right, expanding health care coverage to 12 million people is better than expanding it to none. Maybe if it were as simple as that, I would agree.

No sensible person would argue that numbers don't mean anything. Instead, process and legal precedent are what people tend to avoid talking about. No matter what, health care reform is going to entail the establishment of new precedents and new mechanisms because the U.S. Constitution doesn't declare health care a right or a duty. The question is, what is the mechanism for expanding access? One way to go, which is being completely dismissed by cynics who don't care for real democracy and which has been met with outright aggression by insurance company hacks, is an amendment which declares health care a basic right (like voting, which we've also expanded access to over the years via the federal government).

The other option, which is the one in the health care reform bill in question, is to federally mandate health insurance coverage, thereby obligating people to purchase coverage from private health insurance companies. Health care, instead of being declared a right, is now being declared a duty. I don't understand why this is viewed as feasible or even realistic; it is as radical a change as declaring it a right is. Furthermore, it gives fear shamans like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones more power when they manipulate working class peoples' inherent, healthy skepticism towards Big Brother. Besides, even if you want to say that it's perfectly fine to go with the mandate, how could you possibly do this when there is no baseline competition, such as a public option, to set the benchmark for pricing and quality standards? Paying out-of-pocket for the mildly reformed but still deeply shitty coverage typical of the status quo directly undermines the reasons for which it is argued that people need health care in the first place. The free market doesn't give people what they need or even want, it gives them whatever it can get away with giving them. The only imperatives are profit and growth, each of which go down any time an insurance company foots a bill. People who defend the view, even tacitly, that there is such a thing as a right to health care should not support this bill, because moral imperatives are not moral imperatives once they have profit motives.

This brings me to a final point regarding progressive politics. Too often, people with democratic values are content to hide their preferences for fairness beneath a facade of pragmatism. Given the nature of our economic system, the result tends to be that arguments are ultimately placed in terms of economic rationality, which is always motivated by self-interest. Hence, wars are argued against because they are "strategic blunders". Failing, cheating companies get obscene amounts of taxpayer dollars because they are "too big to fail". Military spending increases to maintain our "comparative advantage". Health care and pensions are progressively relegated to the private sphere because they are too "costly" for the government. And, of course, conservatives and religious people are "irrational" or "stupid" because they don't understand our "logic". Frankly, I'm tired of this type of argument because I can't make it honestly and I don't believe this type of reasoning justifies anything, especially when it comes to rights and liberties. I don't want to be involved in wars, arms dealing, bailing out con artists, leaving sick people to die, or insulting people because I think this is all just morally wrong. And, as a human race, it hasn't just been our economic systems or governing structures that have progressed; our morals have too. I mean, do you really think anyone today would argue that women shouldn't be able to work because their participation in the labor market has contributed to increased disparities in household incomes?

Capricho Arabe

2010-03-14T16:43:00.004+01:00

Andres Segovia is a pretty complicated figure to assess as a person; I don't agree with folks like John Williams that he is all that complicated to assess as a musician. Beyond his obvious technical skills, the degree to which his playing was unique, expressive and, above all, beautiful is something I don't think is really open to debate. I suppose being commonly referred to as "the greatest" at anything is always going to open one to criticism that is harsher than necessary. In any case, the following piece (his interpretation of Tarrega's "Capricho Arabe") is a personal favorite of mine:

On more than one occasion, Slavoj Zizek has referenced mystical poets who supported atrocities against the human race (in fact, new-age spirituality is a frequent target of his criticism). I was reminded of his view when I read about Segovia's five goals:

To extract the guitar from the noisy and disreputable folkloric amusements...
I requested the living composers not in the field of guitar to write for me. This was the second of my purposes: to create a wonderful repertoire for my instrument.
My third purpose was to make the guitar known by the philharmonic public of the world.
... to provide a unifying medium for those interested in the development of the guitar. This I did through my support of the now well known international musicological journal, the Guitar Review.
I am still working on my fifth and maybe the last purpose, which is to place the guitar in the most important conservatories of the world for teaching the young lovers of it, and thus securing its future.

So it goes, I suppose. An artist whose fascination with his instrument started in the 'disreputable' world of flamenco, whose love for the instrument was frowned upon as crass by his own family, seeks a solution not in the deconstruction of the conservatory but in its expansion.

Ammon Hennacy

2010-03-08T22:51:00.006+01:00

From Lovarchy.org:

On Thanksgiving Day 1949, Ammon Hennacy wrote:

LOVE without COURAGE and WISDOM is sentimentality,
as with the ordinary church member.
COURAGE without LOVE and WISDOM is foolhardiness,
as with the ordinary solider.
WISDOM without LOVE and COURAGE is cowardice,
as with the ordinary intellectual.
Therefore one with LOVE, COURAGE, and WISDOM
is one in a million who moves the world,
as with JESUS, BUDDHA, and GANDHI.

Ammon Hennacy tells this story of an incident which occurred in the 1930s, when he was a social worker in Milwaukee. He had gone to the home of a man who was on relief, and the man pulled a knife on Ammon.

He would prance around and swing his fist at me to frighten me and breathe down the back of my neck and tickle me with the point of his knife. I was not frightened for I had learned in solitary not to be afraid of anything. He threatened me on for nearly an hour. I did not answer back a word nor hang my head but looked him in the eye. Finally he came after me more energetically than before and said that I had to do something.

I got up and said, "I will do something, but not what you think." I reached out my hand in a friendly manner saying, "You are all right but you forget about it. I am not afraid of that false face you have on. I see the good man inside. If you want to knife me or knock me cold, go ahead. I won't hit you back; go ahead. I dare you!" But I didn't double dare him...

He shook my hand, and with the other hand was making passes to hit me in the face. I did not say anything more. Slowly his grip loosened and he went to the door and opening it, pulled up the blind and put the knife away.

"What I don't see is why you don't hit back."

"That's just what I want you to see," I answered.

"Explain it," he demanded.

"What is your strongest weapon? It is your big fist with a big knife. What is my weakest weapon? It is a little fist without a knife. What is my strongest weapon? It is the fact that I do not get excited; I do not boil over; some people call it spiritual power. What is your weakest weapon? It is your getting excited and boiling over and your lack of spiritual power. I would be dumb if I used my weakest weapon, my small fist without a knife, against your strongest weapon, your large fist with a knife. I am smart, so I use my strongest weapon, my quiet spiritual power against your weakest weapon, your excited manner. And I won, didn't I?"

If I had told him, "Don't hit or knife this good Christian anarchist who returns good for evil," he would have laughed at me. When I showed no fear and dared him to do me up, it woke him up to the reality and took his mind off his meanness. The good was in him the same as it was in the warden and the District Attorney, but it had to be brought out by the warmth of love which I showed, and not by the blustering wind which provoked only more bluster.

"And when do I go to court?"

"You won't go to court. I don't believe in courts; you have learned your lesson."

When I left the house my knees were shaking from the strain although I had not wavered a bit all along.

I C U

2010-02-25T00:39:00.011+01:00

I Ching/RNA Descending sequence
Produced by Bob Phillips for MythMathFilms

A sound anesthetized, when it beats rhythmically in time with your faltering senses,
is no less cacophonous than it was before its edges were dulled.
"A digital cowbell in a digital pasture," Mom said, "just think of it like that."

It can mean that your heart is acting up, beating too fast or just inefficiently.
It can mean shock, relay that to people standing upright,
shock them to that signal,
countless times daily.

More often than not, it just means that your finger's sweating.

Wails a failed suicide, it's there despite its own sound.
Sounds its own alarm and it just wants some water.
Not to hydrate (that's already happening),

but to drink.

* * * * *

Since the Lemierre Incident, I've been more drawn to what Erik Satie called "furniture music" in 1902. As Kenneth Goldsmith puts it, this was essentially the first ambient music, "music as wallpaper, music to be purposely not listened to." One aspect that I keep coming back to in my justifications of this fact is the desire to hear the air in a space in which a sound is resonating. No matter what one does with reverb, there is no air inside of a computer. Digital sound can be as claustrophobia-inducing as an MRI.

David Grubbs - Pianoless Vexations

This is not to say that I have become some sort of technophobe. In fact, the pieces that resonate most with me lately play with this tension by including live electronic and acoustic elements. For example, play one of these mp3s while playing and watching the clip I embedded up top. Bent notes subverting the oppressive constancy of sine waves, irrational numbers to these more 'natural' coefficients; undulating phrasing expanding perceptions of time and space within the confines of an authoritarian beat clock--it's not music that pulls one in because it forcefully changes his or her mood. It opts instead to put one in relief by extracting a tense background from silence and creating a situation that is more easily shared as a result of its new explicitness.

Kenta Nagai - Pianoless Vexations

Moving Forward

2009-09-23T10:58:00.006+02:00

The line between "pragmatism" and "resignation" is actually a smudge; just think of using a bad eraser to correct a mistake committed to paper.

“It is past time to stop talking about starting negotiations; it is time to move forward,” Mr. Obama said Tuesday after meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the president of the Palestinean Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly's opening.
“Permanent status negotiations must begin and begin soon,” Mr. Obama said, flanked by Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas. “So my message to these two leaders is clear: despite all the obstacles, all the history, all the mistrust, we have to find a way forward.” [source]

These statements capture the degree to which Obama and the Democratic Party have co-opted the concept of progress and reversed its meaning. As happens with any other signifying buzz-word during election season, this term's role in the candidate's discourse was intended as a way of sending a signal to progressive's brains, one that told them that this was their guy and that the link between this boss and their hearts was direct. Of course, this was never true and I'm sure that most Obama fans know it. It's just such a buzz-kill to talk about this fact. So let's kill the buzz outright: "moving forward", Obama's favorite stand-in for "progress", means ignoring the causes of present points of conflict. The statements I cited above are not the only instances where he uses this verb phrase; he's also used it in reference to prosecuting Bush and Cheney for war crimes or holding top-ranking CIA and DoD officials accountable for manufacturing intelligence or torture.

The entry before this one recounts, in Spanish, a tale told to Subcomandante Marcos about the politician's habit of "forgetting" history and interpreting the present as how things have always been. In short, "moving forward" or "progress" are buzzwords designed to conjure the magic which makes the public forget their own history and believe the accounts of power-mongers. Thus is history in the present-continuous: an endless stream of ever-shifting excuses. Witness the makeover:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Exclusive - Bill Clinton Extended Interview Pt. 2

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Healthcare Protests

Beyond just being strong evidence of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart's new role as the establishment's most sophisticated mouthpiece, this chummy interview with Bill Clinton also outlines that most post-modern version of authoritarianism, where we are invited to understand our masters as people, not institutions, and our government as a reflection of our society, more a circle of friends arguing over who's right than a reflection of a radically lopsided distribution of power.

This just says something about how inadequate our institutions actually are, as well as the degree to which it is perceived that we, the public, know it. What we're witnessing is an endless stream of excuses made by people admitting that these structures cannot possibly deliver on the promises that make their jobs exist in the first place. It's not exactly something to be shrugged off or chuckled away.

An Inverted Periscope

2009-09-21T00:53:00.002+02:00

Extraido de Un periscopio invertido (o la memoria, una llave enterrada):

Cuentan que los más primeros dioses, los que nacieron el mundo, tenían muy mala memoria y rápido se olvidaban de lo que hacían o decían. Unos dicen que era porque los más grandes dioses no tenían por qué acordarse de nada, porque ellos ya eran desde cuando el tiempo no tenía tiempo, o sea que no hubo nada antes de ellos y si no hubo nada antes entonces no había de qué tener memoria. Quién sabe, pero el caso era que todo lo olvidaban. Este mal lo heredaron a todos los gobernantes que en el mundo son y han sido. Pero los dioses más grandes, los más primeros, supieron que la memoria era la llave del futuro y que había que cuidarla como se cuida la tierra, la casa y la historia. Así que, como antídoto para su amnesia, los más primeros dioses, los que nacieron el mundo, hicieron una copia de todo lo que habían hecho y de todo lo que sabían. Esa copia la escondieron bajo el suelo de modo que no se confundiera con lo que había sobre la superficie. Así que debajo del suelo del mundo hay otro mundo idéntico al de acá arriba, con una historia paralela a la de la superficie. El mundo primero está bajo la tierra."
Le pregunté al Viejo Antonio si es que el mundo subterráneo era una copia idéntica a la del mundo que conocemos.

"Fue", me respondió el Viejo Antonio, "ya no". Y es que -explicó- el mundo de afuera se fue desordenando y desacomodando al paso del tiempo. "Cuando los más primeros dioses se fueron, nadie de los gobiernos se acordó de mirar abajo para ir arreglando lo que se iba desacomodando. Así que cada nueva generación de jefes pensó que el mundo que le tocaba así era de por sí y que no era posible otro mundo. Así que lo que está abajo de la tierra es igual a lo que está arriba, pero es en forma distinta".

Dijo el Viejo Antonio que por eso es costumbre de los hombres y mujeres verdaderos el enterrar el ombligo del recién nacido. Lo hacen para que el nuevo ser humano eche un vistazo a la historia verdadera del mundo y sepa luchar para acomodarlo de nuevo como debe ser.

Así que allá abajo no sólo está el mundo, sino que está la posibilidad de un mundo mejor.

-¿Y estamos también los dos? -pregunta la mar somnolienta.

-Sí, y juntos -le respondo.

-No te creo -dice la mar, pero con discreción gira sobre su costado y se asoma por un huequito que una piedrita dejó en el suelo.

-Deveras -le insisto- si tuviéramos un periscopio podríamos asomamos.

-¿Un periscopio? -murmura.
-Sí -le digo- un periscopio, un periscopio invertido...

Mas Vida

2009-09-06T20:34:00.010+02:00

So a few weeks ago, during my vacation from blogging and a lot of other things, I spent a few days in Form entera with Aida. For those who don't know, Formentera is the smallest and southernmost of the Balearic archipelago's Illes Pitiuses group. If you're into Spanish films, you may know it better as the 'mysterious' island from the film Lucia y el Sexo (Sex and Lucia). What's most striking about it is the fact that the beaches are untouched by tourism cash-grabbing tackiness. The main way to get there is by taking a half-hour ferry from Ibiza to the port at La Savina.

We had plane tickets and no set plan or lodging; everything we had seen on the internet beforehand was hovering around 240 euros a night, which neither of us have the money to pay. Something told me that this price range was not entirely representative of what we'd find once we were there, though, so we went anyway. Plus, my friend Monica had given me some contact information in case we needed help finding a place to at least crash, in case things didn't pan out.

Sure enough, things didn't pan out. Every hotel/hostal/apartment that we looked at was overbooked, with only the occasional luxury suite available. So, we decided to call the number we'd been given. The woman who answered, Dorita, said that she may have something on her farm, although she had to meet people before charging them to stay there, since she wanted to make sure that they were people who'd appreciate what she was offering. I'll admit that I was a bit irritated at all this mystery, mostly because I was stressed about having brought my girlfriend along on this little getaway and not being able to deliver.

It turns out that all this mystery was about something Dorita called her Silent Space. Basically, it was a lovely farm with cabins for rent and spaces for meditation, in which people were compelled not to speak in anything but the most hushed tones. The first thing we heard upon our arrival was, "Would you like to lay in the hammocks under the fig trees?" After a lot of stressful aimlessness, there's really only one answer to that question.

So we spent a few days in silence. Of course, it wasn't so much silence as it was a dramatic reduction in the amount of people-noise: wind rustling leaves, wooden wind chimes, locusts, the occasional hum of people in the meditation cabin and tibetan mortar and pestels:

The experience was a cleansing one, to say the very least. I'm past all of my little BCN-doggin' spells at this point, as I'm finally comfortable calling it home, but I did need to get away from the cement and the capitalist chaos that passes for a beach around here, if only for a little while. Fitting then that when I got back, I saw that this had just come out. So, literally, the first music I heard after this silent retreat was this right here:

Jahdan Blakkamoore - More Life

This and other subtly amazing shots by Aida can be viewed on her Flickr page

And the tune I've been feeling the most? Definitely the one below, more for the vocals than for the beat. Double props to 77Klash for riffing on Radiohead's (read: my favorite band ever's) "Climbing Up the Walls."

Jahdan Blakkamore feat. 77Klash - Best I've Ever Had Freestyle

El titulo de lo de arriba va dirigida a la compañía. Gracias por todo, amor.

Not Dead

2009-09-01T10:40:00.004+02:00

This blog is not dead; it is simply listening to all of the unlabelled gnawa music that Abdul burned on a CD. Each song is a world, each guembri line a foot-worn path. Each demands one's time, transforms it.

It's likely that not understanding the lyrics to these songs forces my perception to latch on to the wandering, womb-like warmth of these bassy tones. I don't mind the fetal character of the phenomenon. In a regression of this type, it becomes most obvious that repetition is really just familiarity and that familiarity is form.

hyana wai v1.mp3

I've often told language students and non-multilingual folks that you are always growing up inside of a language. This is why, no matter how native my accent sounds, I always feel like I express myself in Spanish as if I were younger than I am in English. For (timid) people who are trying to learn a new language, this is often discouraging; if a bilingual person doesn't feel completely comfortable speaking Spanish, when they've been speaking it since they first uttered words, how can a "latecomer" ever become comfortable in another language?

My answer to this isn't all that satisfying for these folks. In short, although it depends on the person's attitude and disposition, I think it's unlikely that a latecomer will ever be fully comfortable expressing his or herself in a language they weren't fully socialized in. The thing is that it shouldn't really matter, since people who discriminate based on how good people are at expressing themselves (and not how good they themselves are at understanding other people) are assholes/colonizers.

In any case, I think that my own experience with this next song is kind of illustrative of the feelings involved in what I'm talking about, in an abstract sense. Each morning, I wake up to a Hassan Hakmoun CD (I do not care that it is not precisely fashionable in some circles to dig his more "modern" take on gnawa, since the easy warmth that characterizes his work is a very pleasant thing to hear first thing in the morning). Since I do not put the CD player on shuffle, I always start the day with the same song. This means that I've got every second of the tune memorized, in an auditory sense (i.e., I know how it goes despite not knowing what it says). So, after about four new but not unfamiliar minutes of the following tune (which I only know as 01 piste en mic entree.mp3 from my Gnawa from Abdul folder), the guembri takes a solo as an opportunity to transform the song, and I hear exactly one second of sound that cues me in on how the next few minutes are going to go.

01 piste en mic entree.mp3

That's kind of how a deep knowledge of a vocabulary works: it's not some specific note or word I heard that told me that I know this song. Rather, it was my experience with a certain order of notes, expressed in a certain way, that gave me that sense of familiarity which is so comfortable in a "foreign" context.

Reaction Time

2009-08-05T12:57:00.005+02:00

1/99

Breathe. The imperative is a conditional illusion. It will take a slice of you for itself, call it Time; whisper, "I am me, NOT you is I! No one here would comprehend that."

Nina Simone - Sinnerman (edit)

"I know this, I think. I know something is coming..."
Familiarity in the abstract procedural;
equally an intention behaved at a distance.
There are limits there, too.

1/99

2009-07-08T12:16:00.002+02:00

Eddenya

2009-07-06T10:48:00.005+02:00

The more interesting my real life is, the less I spend on the internet, and vice versa. That's how it works. Take now, for instance-- I should be working, so I'm on the internet, uploading music just for you. Specifically, a personal favorite by The Flames. Nothing to say about it except that, if you choose to listen all the way through, you will be rewarded.

Lemchaheb - Eddenya

IRAN IS NOT THE PROBLEM

2009-06-18T22:41:00.001+02:00

Iran is not the problem.

Iran is not the problem.

PROTECTIVE CUSTODY

2009-05-23T16:45:00.006+02:00

+++++

It's not just a Philip K. Dick short story from the 50s that something like "prolonged" or "preventive" detention evokes. Filastine recommended I check out the Topography of Terror exhibit when I was in Berlin. It's very good, extremely eye-opening and worth a lot of your time, should you ever get the opportunity to see it. Zoom in by clicking:

Extracted from the above:

The formal legal basis was provided, among other things, by the abolition of fundamental rights in the "Reichstag Fire Decree" of February 28, 1933. "Protective custody" orders gave the Gestapo (Secret State Police) virtually unlimited executive authority. It could impose "protective custody" as part of its own state police jurisdiction. The Gestapo could, however, also take persons already sentenced by the courts "whose behavior endangered the existence and security of the people and state" into "protective custody" after they had served their sentences and hold them for an indefinite amount of time if it appeared opportune.

EMOZIGH FILTER

2009-05-17T12:22:00.007+02:00

I am a melodramatic human, and an online presence is a good way to hide that sometimes, be it through the form of a blog, Flickr, a social networking 'space', message boards, etc. We select the various snaphsots we upload, tag, untag, mention, don't mention. A comment-post automatically distances us in time from the moment of expression commented upon and recontextualizes it. So goes the self-portrait in the present continuous: a person self-policing from the perspective of the silent and anonymous observer, aware of voyeurs in the abstract only.

One thing I've been criticized for by loved ones is the transparency of my expressions. I'm not too good at hiding what I'm feeling even when I talk around it, nor am I too interested in controlling this.

+-/*+-/*+-/*+-/*+-/*

Anyway. I can't really know what my face looked like when Abderrazak first played this Mohamed Ruicha song on the speakers at the Maghrebi music shop. I do know that the first notes made me look straight at the ground and shut the fuck up. I wasn't going to make everyone there listen to all of an 18 minute song right then, so I just said, "Este si lo quiero," about five seconds after the drums kicked in.

Mohamed Ruicha - Track 01

"You always like the depressing songs," Abderazzak says, smiling. That makes sense. The first Maghrebi song that saved my life was a 10-minute live version of "Mahmouma" by Nass El Ghiwane. That title means something like "deep existential sadness". I think it's the word Abderazzak reaches for when he says, with multilingual hesitation, "Esta cancion es una de...tristesse? Tristeza?"

Ruicha sings in Arabic and Tamazight, two languages I'm enchanted by but do not understand. I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't matter that I don't know what the words mean while I'm listening, because this is a distance I wish to cross. The thing is, you don't always need concrete to bridge a gap; I'm willing to take the rope-bridge with things like mahmouma, acrophobia be damned. I only know that songs like this usually involve romantic love, passion, heartbreak, the passage of time, open wounds, pain, death, fear, despair; that there are strong notes and strong beats; that repetition is the key to illusion and an illusion-in-itself; that Ruicha knows what it means to be bilingual and has played the "rustic" kozar in cosmopolitan settings; that there is warmth in distortion; that semicolons are always indecisive and functional(ly vague).

+++++

I just got back from Berlin, where it was sunny this past week. After the conference I was "there for", I made sure to spend a lot of time outside. I didn't spend a lot of it with headphones on, but when I did, I was listening to Timeblind's Flora Mix, which is amazing in the city's spring. Upon touching down in Barcelona, re-attuned to its brighter colors, I put this song on repeat. It is by Oumghil Mustapha, in Tamazight. In contrast to the Ruicha tune and its oxidized hues, this song is all shiny autotune and phased delay.

Oumghil Mustapha - Track 03

Linkdump in No Order

2009-04-25T15:55:00.008+02:00

As my own personal(ized) contribution to Google's data-mining efforts, here's a seemingly random collection of shit I've clicked on and into recently. I'm sure it provides an extraordinarily detailed, albeit incomplete, window into my consumption preferences, likely career and educational paths, political affinities and reproductive behavior.

First up, in the context of Gov. Rick Perry's secession "threat", here's a fairly accurate glimpse of what an independent Texas would probably look like. There's a problem of scale though, since the writers seem to forget that everything's bigger in TX. That makes it a lot easier to think that, in the end, the little guy teaming up with the bull will get rid of that grey, psychological mess that is the bureaucrat:

More on Mohamed Rouicha next post, but for those of you with some time on your hands, YouTuber mohamedkarimy ups what appears to be an entire live show of his. Gorgeous Amazigh folk/pop in appropriately hypnotic and lavish settings. I'm especially digging the production value and camera work:

En espanol, un documental de Javier Bauluz sobre la frontera sur de la Europa Fortaleza. Se centra en las pateras, por tanto es bastante facil que se interprete como una mirada un poco sensacionalista del tema de la inmigracion. Sin embargo, aunque en terminos cuantitativos las llegadas al Estado Espanol por patera no representan gran parte del total de las llegadas a Espana, no deja de ser una realidad brutal e infrahumana en terminos cualitativos. La primera escena, en el momento que los migrantes llegan a casa de un espanol, es quizas la cosa mas fuerte que he visto en mi vida. Si te provoca sensaciones desagradables, mas sera por las imagenes que estas viendo que por cualquier exageracion de Bauluz:

Top ten plays from the first week of the NBA Playoffs. I can't fucking stand the Lakers, but Ariza's finish on the break is just sick:

Speaking of illness, I have no idea what this is (via illuminarcy):

And finally, the Narcicyst's video for P.H.A.T.W.A. is extremely good:

Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex

2009-04-20T18:28:00.006+02:00

Last week, I had the pleasure of catching The Ex live on their 30th anniversary tour. Simply put, it was amazing and you should catch them if they're in your area. Three guitars and drums, but Andy Moor pitches his bottom string the fuck down to get some majorly heavy stew bubblin'. The only drawback was that Getatchew Mekuria didn't fly in to drop some deeply moving Amharic saxophonic wandering over all this heaviness. There's documented proof of this having happened, though, and it's transcendent:

Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex - Aynotche terabu/Shemonmwanaye

Pirates of the Toxic Gulf

2009-04-14T15:48:00.012+02:00

Jeremy Scahill, the investigative journalist who properly cracked the ice on Blackwate r and, in my opinion, is the current heir apparent to the legacy of Seymour Hersh, has been holding it down lately on the issue of Somali piracy over at his blog. Here he skewers Craig Crawford (the media's annointed Expert on Piracy in the Gulf of Aden) and the major news networks' selective myopia with devastating efficiency:

Craig Crawford, editor at CQ Politics, has been one of the “experts” brought on by the corporate media (who can’t seem to find a Somali to interview) to discuss the Somali “pirates.” With all of the white-collar journalists, pundits and military officials, there just isn’t room for the Somali side of the story. Crawford just posted a quote on Twitter from a commenter on his CQ blog that Crawford says “nails it:”

“One pirate one bullet. Now that’s keeping an eye on the taxpayers money”

Really? How much did it cost to have multiple US warships, Boeing spy drones, FBI hostage negotiators, Navy SEALs and the rest of Gen. Petraeus’s surge in the Indian Ocean to rescue Capt. Phillips?

By the way, the Somali “pirate” the US now reportedly has in custody is said to be 16 years old. He had surrendered before the killing of the other three Somalis by US snipers to seek medical attention for an injury to his hand inflicted during the initial raid on the Maersk Alabama.

There are longer posts in there which are worth more of your time, and he and his sources get a lot deeper than the little bit that I've pasted above. But, in case you prefer talking about things without actually researching them, here's a brief cartoon that may explain some of the issues underlying the criminally moronic narrative farted by the mainstream media:

+++++

As part of our Global Economic Crisis Sale (act eventually, it's for an unspecified but ostensibly limited time only), La Mancha and youtuber puntlanddd are also offering the following, more detailed video on the matter for the low, low price of just eight and a half minutes of your time:

*****

Scahill is especially right to point out the absolute dearth of interviews with actual Somalis discussing the governmental situation in Somalia, especially considering that there's an especially prominent and eloquent Somali artist currently gracing and embracing global pop culture. Here's his take:

"..we are the issue that people are talking about. Whenever Somalis get together and talk about pirates, the pirate scenario, we talk about it them as if they are coast guards of the country. We don't talk about them as this evil kind of group that's disturbing European trade."

/////

On a more personal but related note, I've recently joined a campaign to shut down immigrant detention camps. Through this campaign, I've met a lot of folks from widely disparate ideological persuasions, but many of them tend towards a No Borders type of critique of statism and nationalism. I've had very interesting conversations in the last few days about the issue of rich countries dumping their nuclear and toxic waste into areas held by illegitimate governments or otherwise failed states and how this raises important questions about what exactly the aim of a No Borders movement ultimately is. The situation in Somalia leads me to sympathize more with an immediate goal of affirming individuals' right to free movement across borders than I do with the elimination of borders and states in general. This is not to say that I sympathize with statism or nationalism. Rather, I am simply reaffirming that critiques which blur the line between individuals, on one side, and corporations or other commercial/governmental entities, on the other, directly serve the interests of the currently powerful social actors who equate individuals with capital and wish to quantify and capitalize 'culture' for their own profit. Thoughts?

Andando

2009-04-10T04:28:00.005+02:00

First, for those that didn't notice, I've updated my last post on G20 a couple of times with video. A lot of it may be less appealing to folks who don't like to listen to anarchist folks talkin' bout anarchist stuff, but whatever your political leanings, I think it's important that you watch the video about Ian Tomlinson.

...so my sleeping schedule is fucked tonight due to a two-day caffeine binge, brought to me in part by (bcn) squatter coffee. I've been burning the candle at both ends lately trying to combine activism and social work with my work at the university, which besides caffeine junkiness, also means that I've spent a lot of time in transit, plugged into my mp3 player. This 37-second burst of awesomeness, from Jarring Effects' free and brilliant JFX Bits #3, speaks volumes to me whenever it shuffles in:

France Loisir - Le Peuple Est Une Fiction

Off the same comp, here's Ben Sharpa over a very nice slice of unorthodox boom-bap rap:

Ben Sharpa - B to the E

It's also been a special treat whenever this favorite off of Many Lessons has come on lately:

African Akhlou Bi - Andando

THE WORLD'S MOST POPULAR MAN

2009-04-02T05:21:00.009+02:00

An embarassing puff-piece from the Guardian. I won't bother to link it:

President Barack Obama kept trying to wrap it up, get out of there and get on with it all.
All right?" he said conclusively after dealing with the same question about global markets for the umpteenth time. His impeccably frozen listening position had held out a good 45 minutes of the press conference with Gordon Brown, as had his eloquent gestures and language. But the world's most popular man was getting fidgety beneath this heavily gilded Foreign Office ceiling.
[...]
If Brown's delight at the visit was sad in its way, the public's was effervescent. Among the crowds greeting Obama with American flags were many black Britons, including Rose Ellis, a nurse who had taken the day off with her boyfriend, Lucas. "He's my favourite person in the world," said Rose. "He's exciting, he's a leader of all people of colour and, well, he's cool, I mean he's HOT!" Lucas, a little less enthusiastically, added: "Yeah, he is."
But more than any previous visit by an American president, yesterday was charged with history - deep history, that is, dating back to the American revolution of 1776; a sense of restlessly creative America embarking on an adventure while the ancien régime plods on the edge of fin-de-something. Fin-de-Labour, for sure, with nothing other than the Tories to replace them, the party despised by America's founding fathers.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away, "a veritable tide of anticapitalists cornered the police". If you don't watch anything else here, please watch the last video below, as it is extremely important information about the death of Ian Tomlinson, a bystander at the London protests:

Tales from the Frontline

2009-04-01T16:42:00.007+02:00

My Arabic teacher recently turned me on to the documentary Bil'in Habibti (Bil'in My Love). It's about the Palestinean town of Bil'in:

Bil'in is a Palestinian village that is struggling to exist. It is fighting to safeguard its land, its olive trees, its resources... its liberty

It was voted Best Documentary by the Jerusalem Film Festival. Here's a teaser:

She also turned me on to Ramallah Underground, a musical collective based in Ramallah, Palestine, attempting to rejuvenate Arabic culture through their music. Multilingual rapping over some pretty decent boom-bap. This track's in English. It's about Iraq:

Ramallah Underground - Tales from the Frontline (feat. Paracat)

Their free, downloadable album (in the music section of this site) also features the occasional instrumental that rings like a less dark Mutamassik:

Ramallah Underground - Dameer Mustater 73

Those aren't even their best tracks, so check'em out! Speaking of Mutamassik, here's a fantastic tune in 5 off of her recent The Commo EP:

Mutamassik - 5x8 Cell

And a video/slideshow, for a different tune off the same EP:

Are you serious?

2009-03-16T23:22:00.002+01:00

Yes dude. Fucking presence.

Bakunin refutes capitalist "individualist freedom"

2009-02-27T02:03:00.003+01:00

THE LATEST SONG

2009-02-13T13:41:00.007+01:00

One day, Anansi and Brer Tiger went to the river to wash themselves, and Anansi looked over at Brer Tiger and saw what a big and handsome man he was. So he said to Brer Tiger, "Brer Tiger, as you are such a big man, if you want to bathe in that nice spot, that big blue hole, with your big balls you're going to drown yourself, you'll be so weighed down. You better take them off and leave them here on the bank." Tiger said to Brer Anansi, "Well, you have the same problem, so you take yours off too." Anansi said, "You take yours off first and then I will."

So Tiger took off his first, and Brer Anansi said, "Go on in the hole, Brer Tiger, let me see how light that makes you." So Brer Tiger got in the water and started to swim, and he didn't pay attention to anything else but how light he was in the water. Brer Anansi never did go in; instead he grabbed the balls that Tiger had left and ate them up.

But Anansi got frightened at what he had done, so he ran away from the river and went to Big Monkey's town. He found Brer Monkey, and said to him, "Brer Monkey, did you hear the latest song they are singing down at the riverside?" Anansi sang:

Yesterday about this time
I at up Tiger's balls.
Yesterday about this time
I at up Tiger's balls.
Yesterday about this time
I at up Tiger's balls.
Yesterday about this time
I at up Tiger's balls.

Now Big Monkey was never much of a singer or dancer, so he drove Brer Anansi away, saying that he didn't want to hear songs or any other kind of nonsense.

So Brer Anansi left and went on down to Little Monkey's town, and when he met Little Monkey there, he said, "Brer Monkey, I was down by the riverside and I heard a sweet song there. Everybody there was singing it, it is so sweet." Anansi sang:

Yesterday about this time
I at up Tiger's balls.

And he sang it all the way through.

Now, Little Monkey, he was one who loved those songs. He said, "Sing that song again, so we can all hear it." So Anansi began to sing again:

Yesterday about this time
I at up Tiger's balls.

Monkey just fell in love with that song, and had a dance that night just so everybody could hear it. And when Brer Anansi heard that he was glad, because now he could go back to Brer Tiger.

When he got back to the riverside, there was Brer Tiger looking all around for his balls. Tiger said, "Brer Anansi, I can't find my balls any place." Anansi said, "Ha! Ha! Just now I heard them singing a song in Little Monkey's town." And Anansi sang:

Yesterday about this time
I at up Tiger's balls.

Brer Anansi said, "Brer Tiger, if you think I'm lying, just come with me to Little Monkey's town." So he and Tiger went.

When they got there, Anansi told Tiger they had to hide behind a bush to listen. And when they did, there was Little Monkey dancing and playing that same tune, and Tiger heard. Anansi said, "Brer Tiger, what did I tell you? Didn't you hear me say that they were singing songs about you and calling out your name making fun of you?" And all this time Monkey kept on singing:

Yesterday about this time
I at up Tiger's balls.

Now Tiger heard that Brer Monkey was going to have a big dance that night. So he marched right up to Brer Monkey and asked him for his balls back. Monkey said that he didn't know anything about his balls, only the song that Brer Anansi had taught to them. So Tiger said that he was going to fight everyone there. But Little Monkey sent a messenger to Big Monkey and asked him to send a lot of soldiers quick to beat Brer Tiger and Brer Anansi too. So when Brer Tiger and Brer Anansi saw how it was going, Brer Tiger took to the bush and Brer Anansi to the housetop. And that's where they have lived ever since.

Jack Mantora, me no choose any.

--Jamaica

[From Afro-American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World,
edited and selected by Roger D. Abrahams]

Braintrust

2009-01-24T02:10:00.014+01:00

So, since I often mention my academic work here (tangentially, anyway), and given that I've recently been super-centered on my doctoral thesis, Fertility, Immigration and Cultural Differences: The Spanish case at the Turn of the 21st Century, I figured now would be a good time to share some stuff from a lot of the researchers I tend to read that, unless you're in the academic rat race yourself, you may not have heard of. There's some other stuff thrown in there to stimulate synapses, but the link between everything is transnational : local.

Yes, everything below is pretty long. But, if you've got the time, I think it's important y'all hear from these cats, because many of them are likely to be strong influences on the Obama administration (U of Chicago - Harvard continuum, represent...). If you've been following the president's weekly addresses, or listened intently to his inauguration speech, you may have noticed that he's frequently been citing the importance of statistics when he's deciding what policies 'work' and don't.

An aside: if you're turned off by the title of my thesis, kudos. You should be. The idea is that I'm using sociodemographics (read: stats) to deconstruct terms like 'immigrant' or 'cultural difference' to reveal the powerful, institutional relationships that they hide. I know it's not quite fashionable to be into this type of social science in the blogular circle I run w/(Foucault and Zizek are a lot more fun to read), but my reasoning is basically that somebody's gotta be working on those studies that supposedly show stuff. Plus, numbers can be really illuminating when you get really into figuring out what they mean.

Anyway, first up is a talk with Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey and some other guys who are far less interesting to me, or xenophobic/useless. Massey is widely recognized as the guy on migration issues, and is a moderate-voiced advocate for the free movement of people across borders. Migration is an extremely tricky issue to study, and I'd argue that no one has done more to refine methodological approaches to migration studies than him.

Fences, Amnesty or the Status Quo?

If you're a fan of The Wire and its realist depiction of the role of institutions in how a city functions, you're most likely being convinced by William Julius Wilson's sociological perspective. Show creator David Simon himself has stated several times that The Wire is basically his own journalistic experience + Greek tragedies (just peep the Avon and Stringer scenes later in the show) + Wilson's work (in particular When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor and The Truly Disadvantaged). Here's a talk given by Wilson at Harvard's conference on The Moynihan Report, in which he discusses the relevance of the report's (positivist, lazy, editorialized) use of language and its interpretation at the time of its release. It contrasts really nicely with Wilson's extremely deliberate word-choice.

The Moynihan Report and Research on the Black Community

Next up, a fun brain game with animation and voice-overs that I find hilarious. Basically, mathematicians have figured out how to turn a sphere made of an abstract elastic material inside out without tearing it.

Outside In

Here's a lecture by economist MR Venkatech. "The seeming success of globalization is its failure. What is the seeming success of globalization? The seeming success of globalization is America."

Global Imbalance - An Imminent Dollar Crisis

Here's an ACLU documentary on the (juvenile) cases of Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad [via Illuminarcy].

Obama's [inherited] Child Soldiers

Finally, here's Bruce Western, who studies the sociology of crime and punishment, social stratification, and political sociology. He's at that same Harvard conference.

The Black Family and Mass Incarceration.

Mixed signals

2009-01-19T00:01:00.005+01:00

Sorry folks, my attention is divided. Here are some choice links, though, until Jan 28th (Research Proposal, Take 2).

How to Organize an Insurrection [via crimethinc]. Must read interview with the Greek insurrectionists.

Do you think troubles in the economy are as important in these events as the corporate media is saying?

The young people from the many rich areas of Athens also attacked the police stations of their areas, so even the class war Marxists have serious troubles to explain what is happening: the separation of the rich and poor doesn’t seem to matter as much as long-existing solidarity and participation in the fight for equality and social justice.

On the other hand, Greeks between the ages of 25 and 35 cannot make families and have children, because of the economy. Greece is the most underpopulated society in all Europe. But we don’t talk about that here as the cause of the revolt. Young people are angry and they hate the police, capitalist cynicism, and the government in a natural, instinctual way that doesn’t need explanations or a political agenda. The local media tried not to speak in depth about social conditions here the way the English, French, or US media have. The local corporate TV stations attempt to pass off lies about chaotic “masketeers” with no ideas and no social identity, because the moral influence of anarchists is so strong now in this society that if they start to talk seriously about our ideas on television, society could explode. With the exception of some TV programs and newspapers, most of the mass media are trying to separate economic issues from the chaotic revolt.

Even the leftists from the May ’68 generation, when they speak to the media, say that the smashing and the riots are not political expressions of the needs and the hopes of the people—that the anarchists and young people don’t have the ability to express a political agenda, and the people need other kinds of political representation. Of course, all this has little influence on the young people who will participate in the social struggles of the future, as after this struggle there exists high tension and a great distance between the younger people and any kind of political leadership or authority.

The West's Selective Reading of History - This academic meandering was really, really entertaining for some reason (and damning of a certain class of 'continental' academics).

Shortly after the first world war, the French literary critic and historian Henri Massis (1886-1970) preached a crusade against the dangers threatening European values and thought – largely identified with those of France, in his mind. He wasn’t entirely misguided: across the world, colonised nations were in revolt. He wrote: “The future of western civilisation, of humanity itself, is now under threat... Every traveller, every foreigner who has spent any time in the Far East agrees that the way in which the population thinks has changed more in the last 10 years than it did over 10 centuries. The old, easy-going submissiveness has given way to blind hostility – sometimes genuine hatred, just waiting for the right moment to act. From Calcutta to Shanghai, from the steppes of Mongolia to the plains of Anatolia, the whole of Asia trembles with a blind desire for freedom. These people no longer recognise the supremacy that the West has taken for granted since John Sobieski conclusively stemmed the Turkish and Tartar invasions beneath the walls of Vienna. Instead they aspire to rebuild their unity against the white man, whose overthrow they proclaim” (1).

These fears are resurfacing today in a very different context, also marked by a series of cataclysmic events: the end of the cold war, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and above all the restructuring of the global order in favour of new powers, such as China and India. Various authors, many of them highly regarded, have picked up on the Manichean view of history as an eternal confrontation between civilisation and barbarism as they excavate the roots of what Anthony Pagden calls the “2,500-year struggle” now bathing the world in blood.

Edward Said's last interview (deep, dark, shitty compression)

Betelehemu / Hilarious body language

2008-12-25T00:50:00.010+01:00

Happy winter solstice, y'all! I'm back in Texas doing the family + holiday thing, so regular blogging will resume in a couple of days. For now, a Christmas tune.

Ten years ago, during my sophomore year of high school, we (the mixed chorus I was in) recorded this, a pretty well-known Nigerian Christmas carol:

St. Agnes + Strake Jesuit Mixed Chorus - Betelehemu

Also, every moment of this is really, really funny to me:

Luis Aguile - Ven a mi casa esta navidad

But maybe not as funny, allbeit for the exact same reasons (body language), as this:

Raphael - La cancion del tamborillero

Actress

2008-12-14T19:54:00.003+01:00

Sort of pensive today, probably moreso tomorrow. Warm, droney hip hop instrumentals are just what the doctor ordered. If you like Flying Lotus, Kode9, or Burial, you should check out Actress's new album Hazyville. Sink in...

Actress - I Can't Forgive You

COP BUSTERS

2008-12-08T02:34:00.006+01:00

From Odessa, TX:

Weird.

Apparently this guy is a fella (edit: former cop!) named Barry Cooper. Via the official-sounding South Carolina Criminal Defense Blog, who cite the following from somewhere:

KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.
The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster's attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster's secret mobile office nearby.

The attorney was handcuffed and later released when eleven KopBuster detectives arrived with the media in tow to question the illegal raid. The police refused to give KopBusters the search warrant affidavit which is suspected to contain the lies regarding the probable cause.

Teklidi y Teclados

2008-12-02T13:31:00.003+01:00

Despite the fact that I have no clue what is being said, I am convinced that, as far as pure sound is concerned, Arabic is the tightest-sounding language to rap in. I think it may be something about the variety of sounds for consonants that does it for me.

For proof, check out this tune, off of the Album of the Year here at La Mancha (yep, I just decided this), Maga Bo's Archipelagoes. If Bigg's vocal at 2:24 doesn't illustrate my claim, I dunno what to tell ya.

Maga Bo & Bigg - 3akel

Incidentally, I don't know if this is the case for everyone, but my copy of DJ/Rupture's Uproot lists the amazing Timeblind + Maga Bo blend as using the acapella from this song, when it's actually from "Nakhil," the first track on Archipelagoes, which was performed by K-Libre.

Anyway, there's a ton of North African rappers with compelling voices out there, but that's not so much the case for beats from the region. Fnaire's teklidi (traditional) rap is an exception, though. Here are two of their early hits, off of a CD called Best of Fnaire that I bought at a place that only had half of the two-CD set available to sell.

Fnaire - Matkich B'Ladi

Fnaire - Sadats (Remix) feat. DJ Chab I Sabbah

The first, whose title means "Don't Touch My Country," features a really nice banjo fused with laser synths while the second is all triplets and what sound to me like krakeb, cymbals that are kind of like a Gnawa equivalent to cumbia's characteristic guiro. This fusion of traditions nested within the Moroccan state makes sense when one considers the content of and the YouTube discussion surrounding their video for "Yed El Henna" (quotes selection mechanism = languages Carlos understands):

malvestita: i love the beat, it's sick and y'all know fnaire represents the best of marrakchi rap, but the politics in this video are a bit much...from the portrait of m6 to the miniature green march...why don't you just have the un referendum that morocco agreed to 10 years ago? p.s. stop hating on algeria.

palaciodeinvierno: Yep. I agree... it's a pity. They sound pretty cool. Any ideas on where to find their lyrics in Spanish or in English? Thanks

sohairx33: Somebody translate for me?

ghettofight: th song is basically about uniting the whole peopel in morocco from the sahara and moroccoo, hand of henna trying to unite all people

queenbeegeneva: dude everybody loves hip hop true - the rapping is tight and sounds good but the beat is missing some bass :) i wonder what that green leaves is he is dropping on the ground? some cilantro?

llocko: Esto es musica o propaganda politica?buah

alhafa: eso digo yo,

samrox92: OMG this sux asses
france & morocco both sucks
fuk them all nigars

sam064: without a comment "fuck you"

rbendez: Du rap tres politiquement correcte, mais c'est beaucoup moins stylé qu'un bigg par exemple

mestupgrrl: omg, my name is henna!
hahaha, nice song (:

DimaMoro:
ViVa Marruecos
Viva Marrakech
Viva Mogador
Viva Madrid

kitmamed: +5 l'équipe fnaire et bon courage pour vous et n'oublie pas que vous étes les merveilleux artistes de ma ville marrakech

And so on and so forth. Taken as a whole, I think these comments speak for themselves and I simply wish to underline the extremely complex interplay between the local and the foreign in the non-space that is the internet. English-speaking Spanish folks tipped off to the situation in the Western Sahara, adolescent racists with shitty spelling, French and Spanish kids of Arab descent, stereotyping hip-hop fans, a French speaker from Marrakech, all participating in the politics of a music video with a political bent of its own. YouTube as a behavioral economist's nightmare: a true Tower of Babel in which transient avatars are speaking in different languages, exchanging imperfect information with no shortage of subjectively invisible linguistic violence, slicing through a vast majority made up of Arabic-language commenters.

Puri-fire

2008-11-25T11:42:00.005+01:00

Obama's appointments are disappointing. Jeremy Scahill's aware (props to Marko). If voters had wanted a Clinton administration, I imagine they would have voted for it.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn't lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."

Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton's boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.
Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the "New Military Humanism." Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

So with that in mind, let's talk listening. I can safely say that there's no song I've listened to more times over the last month than Cherif Hassan's "Khali el Hal Iben amoul zaouia," off of the Regada - Allaoui & N'Haria compilation [buyable].

Cherif Hassan - Khali el Hal Iben amoul zaouia

Every second of this song is powerful: from the synthetic, too-cool-to-be-New-Age intro to the stunning vocals to the gorgeous, cleansing keyboard riff that answers each call and response. As this tune soundtracks Barcelona's artificially-lit autumn nights going baroque with flickering Christmas lights and premature nativity scenes, things only seem present, that is, current, when I skip through my mp3 player on shuffle till I get to this tune.

Hyphens join-Hyphens subtract.

If you're feeling these vibes, check out Jace's review of the Urban Rai 2008 compilation in The National. As usual, in his blog he ups and writes provocatively about the collection's most inventive and irresistible banger. But there's other great stuff on here as well, like these two sweet, frolicsome tunes [buyable].

Nancy Ajram - Ah W Noss

Mohamed Allaoua - A Siega

BASBAUM

2008-11-10T21:59:00.007+01:00

Você gostaria de participar de uma experiência artística?

Would you like to participate in an artistic experience?

Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? starts with the offering of a painted steel object (125 x 80 x 18 cm) to be taken home by the participant (individual, group or collective), who will have a certain period of time (around one month) to realize an artistic experience with it. Although the physical object is the actual element which triggers the processes and starts up the experiences, it in fact brings to the foreground certain sets of invisible lines and diagrams concerning all kinds of relations and sensorial data, making visible networking and mediation structures.

What is NBP?

The website is far more poetic (that is: profound and succinct) than I could ever be in describing it. I'll just say that this project has far-reaching implications for migration, cultural, and network studies. One thing I really like about it is that its title is its selection criteria, highlighting the attention to very relevant considerations for even the quanti folks, specifically selection effects.

Gaze through the window:

From an interview w/Daniel Reyes Leon for Arte y Critica (en español):

- DR: Algunas líneas de análisis plantean la posibilidad de una constante hibridación cultural basada en las estéticas migratorias y una disfunción entre la cultura y la economía ¿Cuanto de esto ves en tu relación profesional con los sistemas de circulación del arte contemporáneo y específicamente en el trabajo que presentas en el Aue Pavillon?

- RB: La instalación en documenta 12, como ya he dicho, funciona como membrana entre el proyecto “¿Le gustaría participar de una experiencia artística?” y el evento documenta 12. Se trata de un modo de albergar la documentación sobre el proyecto, construyendo las necesarias aproximaciones entre tales documentos (vídeos imágenes, websites, textos) y el evento en sí. Al mismo tiempo, la estructura presentada no es un simple albergue. Es una estructura arquitectónico escultórica que se abre a la experiencia sensible y propone un espacio para ser asimilado en cuanto a vivencia. No una vivencia de cuño meramente estético, pero si, en cuanto a percepción que no separa obra y evento, experimentando el espacio y su entorno: su contexto.
Me gusta hablar de la instalación “¿Le gustaría participar de una experiencia artística?”, en el Aue Pavillon de documenta 12, como un museo dentro del museo, una arquitectura dentro de la arquitectura, en el sentido de producción de un espacio autónomo y transitorio en medio del evento. Instalación que está a tiempo completo para negociar los límites de su autonomía y de su inserción. Esta autonomía es fundamental para crear la necesaria distancia entre la acción político cultural y la inserción económico profesional de la obra –distancia que disminuye en velocidad acelerada, una vez que las estructuras económicas del mercado capturan las obras con voracidad, siendo importante resguardarlas-, instrumentalizándose para que no pierdan la contundencia propia frente a ese momento.

From Dakar, Senegal.

I HOPE THAT JOE THE PLUMBER GOT A EMPTY ROOM FOR MCCAIN

2008-11-04T17:41:00.007+01:00

Folks back home:

My absentee vote can do far less than YOU to turn Texas BLUE. Get on it.

FUCK MCCAIN. FUCK PALIN. STOP CHAMPIONING MEDIOCRITY.

*****UPDATE*****

xxxxx: Dude, so there is this Hispanic girl in my office that was just telling me about some weird shit she saw today by her house and around the polling places. Mind you, she lives in a relatively poor area. She was just now telling me she has seen more cops, city cops AND state troopers(who are not allowed to patrol the streets) out pulling people over today than normal. She told me they are all over the area (her area) and all around the voting places. This sounds really fucked up to me man. I want to just say it’s a coincidence, but for some reason, maybe because its election day, I feel this is a way to round minorities up or scare them from going out to vote.
Just wanted to pass that along to you. It’s kinda cool that someone that works with me finds that weird.
xxxxx: Where at?
xxxxx: The north side. North of 610, along I-45. Aldine area. Tidwell and all that. The hood.

*****UPDATE*****

Television Española has just said that if Obama loses, there is fear that there will be riots in the largely black neighborhoods.

Who's nailin' Palin?

2008-11-03T15:01:00.004+01:00

Answer: Les Justiciers Masques

A CHAIN OF WON'TS

2008-10-28T10:41:00.007+01:00

Rain does not wash away the dust indoors. Exhale->Sigh->Blow.

Don Antonio Chacón - A dar gritos me ponía. Album de Oro 1909 [peep]

Wilmouth Houdini - Blow Wind Blow. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore 1927-1948 [peep] Extra thanks to Dave for this one.

A story from Afro-American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World selected by Roger D. Abrahams:

Sometime back, I went to the market and picked up a ha'penny. All I could buy with it was a little stick. I asked the stick to beat my goat. It said, "I won't beat the goat; it hasn't done me any harm." So I said to my cutlass, "Cut the stick, because the stick won't beat the goat." "No, I won't cut the stick, because it hasn't done me any harm." Then I begged the fire, "Fire, burn the cutalss." Fire said, "No, because the blade hasn't done me any harm." So I cried, "Water, put out the fire, please, because the fire won't burn the cutlass." Water said, "No, I won't because the fire hasn't done anything to me." So I passed a bull, and said, "Bull, drink that water because it won't put out the fire." But Bull said, "No, because the water hasn't done me any harm." So I ran to the butcher and said, "Butcher, cut up that bull," and he said, "No, because he hasn't harmed me in any way." So I saw a rope, and I told it to hang the butcher. "I won't hang the butcher for he hasn't done anything to me." So I ran to the grease, there, and said, "Grease, grease that rope." "I won't grease the rope because it's done nothing to me." I met a cat: "Cat," I said, "eat that grease." "I won't eat that grease because it has not harmed me in any way." So I ran to my dog and said, "Dog, catch that cat." "How can I catch that cat when it has done nothing to me?" Now I got very vexed. "Dog, catch that damned cat, for the cat won't eat grease, grease won't grease rope, rope won't hang butcher, butcher won't cut bull, bull won't drink water, water won't drawn fire, fire won't burn cutlass, cutlass won't cut stick, stick won't beat kid, and I'm not going to get home before midnight the way things are going."
-Montserrat

On the edge of association: Migrant agricultural workers in northern Spain.

2008-10-23T17:00:00.007+02:00

Here is a piece I wrote for inclusion in a book by the Employment Conditions and Knowledge Network (EMCONET), part of the World Health Organization's global Commission on Social Determinants of Health. It's probably going to be edited between now and when the book is finally published, but this is the version I like the best. Thoughts are appreciated!

On the edge of association: Migrant agricultural workers in northern Spain

Associating wine with blood is hardly an original rhetorical trick. In fact, earnest scholars and magicians often warn their audiences of the dangers inherent in the ease with which one can basically associate anything with everything else (thus undermining the logic underlying how they associate things with other things, creating a chaos in which blessings and curses become indistinguishable incantations).

However these abstract considerations only occur to me now, as I write this reflection. While I, a city mouse in almost every sense of the term, was recreationally participating in a northern Spanish wine harvest, the association was quite literally visceral: I had cut my hand deeply without realizing it, and could not tell the extent of the bleeding due to the mixing of blood and grape juice that had been taking place on my hand over a length of time I wasn’t entirely aware of. I only knew that I was feeling a bit light-headed.

I had not noticed the occurrence of what turned out to be several gashes because the sharp and quick pain of those sharp and quick lesions was strongly outweighed by the sustained, increasingly heavy discomfort in my lower back, the result of awkwardly hunching over to push apart vines and leaves in order to get to the bunches of grapes that I wanted to cut.

"There must be a better way to do this that I’m not aware of," I thought, so I decided to approach one of the paid workers and ask him how he went about avoiding these cuts and awkward positions. The man closest to me, black and therefore (in this part of the world and performing this task) presumably from sub-Saharan Africa, looked about my age and had also happened to stop cutting grapes for a moment, so I approached him.

One of my friends, the owner’s wife, had already told the workers that I was from the United States and spoke English, Spanish, and French. This coupled with the ridiculous-looking borrowed clothes I was wearing so as not to soil my own essentially meant that there was little need to introduce myself or ask the occasionally awkward question of what language we should communicate in. It also meant that I was not surprised when, after greeting the man in Spanish, he answered in perfect English.

“Hey man. Hard work, isn’t it?”

“It really is,” I replied, “I don’t know how y’all do this all the time. I just cut my hand a few times and didn’t even notice because my back hurts so much.”

“Yeah, that’s OK,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his stylish baseball cap. He wasn’t wearing gloves either. I asked him if he knew any way to reduce this pain in the lower back. He told me you just get used to it and went right back to picking grapes. I followed suit.

“So where are you from, in the States?” he asked. I told him I’m from Houston. “Ah, Texas,” he replied, which surprised me. Most folks I’ve encountered abroad (native, tourist, or immigrant) usually ask what state that’s in, after making sure they’ve said, “Houston, we have a problem,” in whatever language. I asked him where he is from, which is Dakar, and his name, which is Kulu. I found out that he’d only been in Spain a couple of months and had been working the wine harvest in various towns for the previous three weeks. He also told me that he would never have dreamed he’d be stuck in agricultural work, that he’s a carpenter by trade but that there’s simply much more money in this work here than back home.

After discovering that I was eager to practice my rusty French, Kulu spoke to me in a potpourri of three languages that were not his native tongue. His proficiency in each was stunning, but especially so in Spanish, given the extremely short amount of time in which he had picked it up. Over the course of about four hours, I learned that we were exactly the same age at the time (24), felt equally out of place in a rural setting (although his cosmopolitan clothes, the same brands as the ones I didn’t want to dirty, were caked in mud and grape juice), and were equally passionate fans of many of the same hip-hop artists. This last similarity was what we talked about the most, since he was surprised at the fact that I knew of several mainstream Senegalese rappers and because Akon, a superstar in the United States based in Atlanta, is Senegalese.

Kulu then introduced me to Samba, another Senegalese man who was working a vine near the two of us. Samba did not speak English, so we communicated in a mix of (my) broken French and (his) Spanish peppered with Catalan words. It’s this last language that led me to believe he lived in Catalonia, so I was surprised to find that he actually lives in Cantabria. When I asked him where in Senegal he’s from, he just laughed and said, “Don’t worry, you don’t know. Even Senegalese don’t know!” Kulu clarified that Samba is from a small town. “Do you like Akon?” Samba asked me.

The owner’s wife approached us carrying two large buckets overflowing with grapes and a large bottle of water. She told us to drink up, which I did, but most of the African and all the Pakistani workers refused. Thanks, but it’s Ramadan, they explained. Samba smiled and took the buckets from her hands and emptied them into the flatbed of the truck. “Muchas gracias,” she said, to which he replied, “Si, si. De nada.”

“Yes, yes, always you’re welcome,” taunted another worker in a mix of French and Spanish. He was standing, smoking a cigarette, just as he had been every twenty minutes or so throughout the day. Samba ignored his comments with a knowing grin and a slight shake of his head. Through my short conversations with the man, I learned that he is from Cameroon and despises agricultural work. Despite having introduced myself by name, he would only refer to me as “cher”, an affectionate French term, like “my love”, which also happens to mean “expensive”. However, I could not tell from his tone whether this term was being used ironically or casually, and I either never learned or cannot remember his name.

It is tempting to reflect on this experience in light of reports on the incidence of bad job-matches among migrant workers in Spain. To do so could help researchers associate the elevated risk of occupational injury among migrant workers in Spain with a lack of specialized training. But this response is an obvious, logical one which, like believing in a superstition, does not require much empirical evidence and ignores the complexities underlying what is not evident to the observer, the very complexities which determine the limits of a solution’s scope and which I wish to highlight here. If one only observes an individual’s demographic, occupation, and a selected outcome, and from this builds a conclusion, what is actually being said? Even magicians have various spells for different contexts.

Baches / Carencia

2008-10-20T12:23:00.004+02:00

One's accent is a big deal in Spain. And like all big deals, it is adamantly policed. My friend G is from Venezuela, where Spanish is spoken with an especially beautiful accent and, as is the case for all of Latin America, a much richer vocabulary than the King's Spanish. On our way back from a soccer game, he asks a Catalan man for directions to the metro stop (we're not too used to being on the shiny side of town). After asking him to repeat himself a couple times, this man starts to 'correct' G's pronunciation, superimposing his own glottal Catalan accent. G's got dreads. Spanish folks often can't tell if he's black or white (the only two possibilities perceived), instead employing terms used to describe what type of coffee one takes. What they do know, it seems, is that Spanish is obviously not his language. This is what colonial distance looks like.

I often surprise folks here, and I usually do it on purpose. Here's a list of questions I usually get asked within the first 15 minutes of meeting someone new. It should be said that, because Barcelona is such a (recent) multicultural city, a lot of folks ask some of these questions. But the difference between when a German person asks me this and when a Spanish person does is similar to the difference between curiosity and fact-finding.

"Wait...Where are you from?"
"Why do you speak Spanish with no accent?"
"If your parents are Spanish, why do you look like a guiri?"
"Do you feel more American or more Spanish?"
"What language do you think in?"

???????????????????????????????-Alai Beliah

I've been bilingual since I could speak, which basically means that I've spent a lot of time compartmentalizing meaning (some little boxes are shared). It also means that I encounter a lot of gaps, either self-created or inherent in the disconnect between the two languages I speak naturally. Melody, rhythm, tonality. Simple delay. That's how I've always filled these gaps, and this is the only answer I can think of to that last question today.

Obama wins

2008-10-20T01:40:00.005+02:00

This is from some 24 hr news network. The emphasis in bold is mine.

Reporter: Sir, what part did McCain's negativity play in your decision, the negative tone of the campaign?
Powell: It troubled me. We have two wars. We have economic problems. We have health problems. We have education problems. We have infrastructure problems. We have problems around the world with our allies. So those are the problems the American people wanted to hear about, not about Mr. Ayers, not about who's a Muslim or who's not a Muslim. Those kinds of images going out on Al-Jazeera are killing us around the world.
And we have got to say to the world, it doesn't make any difference who you are or what you are, if you're an American, you're an American. And this business, for example, of the congressman from Minnesota who's going around saying, "Let's examine all congressmen to see who is pro-America or not pro-America" -- we have got to stop this kind of nonsense, pull ourselves together and remember that our great strength is in our unity and in our diversity. And so, that really was driving me.
And to focus on people like Mr. Ayers and these trivial issues, for the purpose of suggesting that somehow Mr. Obama would have some kind of terrorist inclinations, I thought that was over the top. It was beyond just good political fighting back and forth. I think it went beyond. And to sort of throw in this little Muslim connection, you know, "He's a Muslim and, my goodness, he's a terrorist" -- it was taking root. And we can't judge our people and we can't hold our elections on that kind of basis.

I love seeing the first Republican they interview in this next video here (different TV news source, sort of), the boy wonder-lookin' governor from Missouri, as he stammers through his robospeak. Sounds like the ol' drawstring was fugginUP! In any case, I wouldn't be surprised to see Powell become the next Secretary of Defense, i.e. the new face of the Iraq War.

John McCain and Bill O'Reilly on White Power

2008-10-15T19:55:00.006+02:00

I'd prefer it if Obama won. But more than anything, I want to CAP the sentiment above. As Wayne so accurately commented when I wrote about Obama's great speech on race, the 'patriotic' and (my add here, dunno if he'd agree) nationalistic tone is a key part of both candidates' rhetoric. So I don't think either of them is above fanning the flames.

Now, before you say "Hey, man there's a difference between the types of nationalism they're talking about," I'm gonna say that there's a difference between the types of natoinalism they're talking about. As this post's title (nearly the same as the video's as posted on youtube) implies, the nationalism McCain is trying to remove from heat these days (without letting it cool too much) is that one based on nostalgia for slaveownership, puritan cities upon hills, and movies and TV shows about the 1950s.

Obama's more subtle nationalism is indisputably more inclusive. It is also certainly not on the same level of, y'know, Nazism as McCain's supporters'. But neither was Bill Clinton's, and that just made the US a more effective bully on the international scene. The main difference I see between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, though, is the situation they inherit. Whereas Clinton oversaw massive economic growth on the domestic front, thus allowing him to focus on 'global' issues (including 'global' security, which at the time was still understood to be intrinsically tied to US security), the Bush administration has left Obama with a major mess on the domestic end as well as the international one. It's a mess that challenges the basis of the US's national identity ("We're #1"), and, writing from Europe, I can say that the folks who suffer the process of states' defining their identities the most are immigrants.

Just watch out for that shit. The fact that Obama's going to win doesn't actually mean anything yet. Here's hoping...

Laughing baby steps

2008-09-22T20:50:00.008+02:00

I'm in Alexandria, Egypt right now for my one week of vacation. Multiplied by Ramadan and a culture shock of a most welcomed variety, it has proven to be enough to wash away the negativity i've accumulated over the last year/year-and-a-half in Barcelona (with this multiplied by the rejection of my research proposal).

Walking along the Corniche today, and killing a bit of time before the adan at sundown, I stopped to sit across the road from the new Biblioteca Alexandrina and look out at the other side of the Mediterranean, something I'd been longing to see since I was a child (due entirely to a question I asked myself as a kid, 'What's on the other side?' and not at all with any inherent curiosity about culture, etc). Two boys were playing with the multimedia on their cellphones, a computer tower between them, being sprayed by saltwater as waves crashed on the rocks behind the chain-link fence separating us from the beach. They played this thing, and I busted out laughing:

They saw that I liked that, so they played it a few more times. We started talking in broken English (for which they relied heavily on computer terms such as 'update' or 'reply') and phrasebook-fueled Egyptian Arabic. Gaps were filled by just watching funny or cool videos on their cellphones: a skinny old man dancing wildly to a darbuka-circle on the beach, Ronaldinho's old bag of tricks, Jay-Jay Okocha's balletesque football grace, a man diving over a charging pig (followed by a slo-mo replay), 50 Cent's 'Candy Shop'. Not knowing any other adequately affectionate expressions, when we shook hands and parted ways, they stuck to what they knew: "I am love you. Very happy to meet you."

Sometimes, that's just more than enough.

PCS.4

2008-09-15T23:25:00.008+02:00

PATIENT-CENTERED SERVICES STANDARD NO. 4

The primary care center informs patients and families about its care and how to access those services

Measurable Elements of Patient-Centered
Services Standard No. 4

2. Based on screening, the patient is matched with the primary care center's mission and resources.

OUTSOURCE TO BABEL

2008-07-28T19:41:00.003+02:00

So since I'm moving + writing a boring scientific article on data collection + taking care of doctoral ish + winding down a work contract + medical translating

I AM FUCKING ****WIRED**** ON COFFEE

And have been for a few days now. So when you throw an interesting and thoughtful conversation at the always thought-provoking Dutty Artz into the equation, well...you get a lot of scatter-brained comments out of me. It's about music, projection of fantasy, social responsibility and really just so much more. Ripley totally brings it in the comments section:

I often wonder what the relationship is between the way people make music, and the music itself. I haven’t found it predictable that good music is made as conscientiously as that, although often (the way it is made) is something I like to know, a factor in appreciating it, and sometimes perhaps I can say it explains why a sample ‘works’ musically in a song, or why it doesn’t. It’s even less predictable that music made so conscientiously as that is going to be good music, I think.

SINKING

2008-07-03T15:40:00.003+02:00

"During a segment in which Fox & Friends co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade labeled New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe "attack dogs," Fox News featured photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe that appeared to have been digitally altered -- the journalists' teeth had been yellowed, their facial features exaggerated, and portions of Reddicliffe's hair moved further back on his head." [from Media Matters]

NOBLE SOCIETY

2008-06-24T03:44:00.004+02:00

I have no idea why I'm just finding out about these two videos now, but Jah Dan's talent is a blessing. Noble Society backstage at the Bowery:

Noble Society - Highest Region

Do not sleep on Diego Campo Fuego, though. Mama's name says it all:

Noble Society - Word to the Wise

World Reconstruction

2008-06-07T13:03:00.005+02:00

Strange Maps ups a stunner:

From the really nice, detailed write-up:

Mr Gomberg possibly took his cue for this map from US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose speech about Four Freedoms and a Moral Order (from his State of the Union to the 77-th Congress) he quotes, before outlining his own vision (at the bottom of the map):

“As the USA with the cooperation of the Democracies of Latin-America, the British Commonwealth of Nations and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, assumes world leadership for the establishment of a New World Moral Order for permanent peace, justice, security and world reconstruction.”

/////////////////////////

There's a reason 70s prog is such a nice sample source [viaviaviaviaviavavivavaia]. Though I only ever post Amon Duul II, it's secretly one of the genres that I'm most into. Germany though--I don't really know what was going on over there during this period (maybe it was just coming out of Mr. Gomberg's quarantine) but some of the sounds and songs on records from this period resonate beyond all borders:

Amon Duul II - Mozambique

Clap your hands
Because you're gonna die

Every victim is searching for his hangman
Every hunter is stalking his prey
Victim find a victim and hang the hangman
Better to die as a free man than to live as a slave
Clap your hands
Because you're gonna die

The white beast is in the villages
Dealing only in death
With his soul left behind him
He is
The raper of women
Mutilator of children
Murderer of men

Unite and fight

********************************

Where do fantasies go?

Random

2008-05-21T13:07:00.005+02:00

'Bipolar' just about sums up the weather in Barcelona over the last few weeks. Impossibly gorgeous and sunny days are followed abruptly by grey skies and rain. In a peninsula that is projected to look less and less like a tropical paradise, and more and more like the Sahara over the coming years, heart and mind disagree over what a blessing actually is.

I tend to think they're both wrong because they're both right. Anyway++

Here's a morsel of rai love that brightens my sunnier days (such as today) and makes my damp days damper.

Cheb Hasni - Menayfa
(from the album Menayfa)

Funny how a song (or is it a day?) can do that. Matias rightly pointed out to me the contradictions underlying my aversion to twee pop/my attraction to rai love, and rainy days bring this out even more. On a grey day, in transit (which is how I listen to the bulk of the music I listen to these days, but waaaay more on that soon), it is basically impossible for me to listen to this song as it is shuffled into my mp3 player's playlist.

Instead, I'll skip songs (still on shuffle, maintaining that illusion of the Pleasant Surprise) until I come upon something more like this:

Amon Düül II - Green-Bubble-Raincoated-Man
(From the album Wolf City)

dancing in the rain then as now is was always punctuate or capitalize wherever it suits

ANGST prompter

2008-05-15T00:53:00.001+02:00

Sweet/Sour

2008-05-01T14:50:00.008+02:00

Lil Wayne. Autovox. Michael Watts.

Lil' Wayne - Lollipop

That's off of Swishahouse's new one, Blow One. Mixtape of '08 so far, here at The Stain, fwtw. The second half is especially strong, as Michael Watts puts you in a trance only to abruptly remind you of his presence before unleashing a fleet of space-caddies led by Juvenile, T-Pain, Bun B, Sean Kingston, Yung Redd (sick, every time), Archie Lee, E-Class, Lil Wayne. An often future-dramatic sausage fest.

Speaking of Bun B and Sean Kingston, Pitchfork misses it by a mile or two on their video review for That's Gangsta. They go so far as to question Sean Kingston's involvement in the song entirely, basically because he's not from Houston or appropriately 'gangsta':

But then there's the Sean Kingston problem. He sure isn't in the video. Could they not have chosen someone from H-town? It just seems incongrous that Kingston was chosen to sing the hook on a track that's so locally-oriented. And then he's absent from the block party. His vocals kill it, yes, but even if he is gangsta (a fact that is, if internet chatter is to be believed, somewhat debatable), he's most certainly not a gangsta from Texas.

'Now That's Gangsta' is an anthem (emphasis added), and as such, it deals more with 'gangsta' the archetype (that image that goes beyond 'local' borders due to the repetition of certain of its themes in different places, at different times, dependently or independently). This is pretty appropriate for the song itself, where less context is given than in music videos.

But that's why those are two different creations, which is where this reviewer (and really, a lot of critics in a lot of magazines that I do read) fails to draw a distinction. In line with Bun B's more (professed) sociological perspective in his new stuff, plus his stated intent of 'taking gangsta back' (read: redefining, hence the 'Now That Is' of the title), this video acts more as a peek into a part of the world PITCHFORK GUY IS NOT FAMILIAR WITH. Port Arthur, to be exact:

It's not Houston, because Hurricane Rita didn't do shit to most of Houston beyond kick up a lot of tree branches (except in the wards). It did level Port Arthur, where Bun B and Pimp C are from. The H-Town artist craved would be just as out of place there as Sean Kingston.

Speculating about a dude's involvement in a professional, creative project is gossip. It's not cool.

RAI LOvE

2008-03-29T22:16:00.008+01:00

I've been checking out lots of rai love (or rai sentimentale) lately, and it's been rewarding. My first encounter with it was completely accidental. I'd always seen this Fassiphone store on the street I used to loiter around when I first moved to Barcelona (carrer Joaquin Costa, in the Raval neighborhood), so I checked it out and to be frank I didn't even know where to start because, from outside, I could see that most of the writing was in Arabic, I couldn't quite put my finger on the way things were arranged in the store (I was so used to labels and muzak and people ignoring one another as opposed to stopping to listen to or watch the CD or DVD someone's checking out before they buy), and I really didn't even know what I was looking for (I just knew a couple of artists, from occasionally asking what was playing at different bars and whatnot), plus most of the album covers are just pictures of dudes that dress like folks that I consider douchebags both in Spain and here (superficial, judgmental, wrong, noted).

So, like a total n00b, I asked if they had any Rachid Taha or Cheb Mami. Two Moroccan dudes immediately started laughing, and when I got home I found out why. I'd only heard like, two or three Cheb Mami songs prior to that, and they were all veeeeerrry different than what was on this CD. Instead of minor-key melodies and long grooves, I heard these joyous but, yeah, saccharine love songs (with so many fake trumpets!). I didn't really like most of the songs on the CD in question, but I went on exploring rai and reggada anyway, frequently running into these songs, which I used to just skip, probably because my mood at the time.

Lately, though I've gotten really into these songs. Today I went to the store again, which changed owners. The new owner, Abdul, mentioned that he sang music similar to the stuff I was asking about. "Rai sentimental" he was calling it, in Spanish. I hung out for an hour or so as we chatted about all kinds of stuff, but mostly about Cheb Hasni (efficient primer here), the Algerian pop star viewed as responsible for rai love or rai sentimental, who was gunned down by fundamentalists in 1994, at a time when pop stars were viewed as untouchable because of the degree to which they were revered by both sides of a deep political divide. Some key excerpts from the linked bio, and a more moody shade of a tune:

"Several thousand people from across the Oran region turned out to join the funeral procession which accompanied Hasni's coffin to its final resting-place in the Aïn-el-Beida cemetery. Meanwhile, hundreds of young Raï fans took to the streets, angrily chanting slogans and calling for "a free and democratic Algeria." Khaled, the best-known Raï star on the international scene, admitted he was "completely traumatised" by the crime, which remained all the more inexplicable for him as Cheb Hasni had "never been mixed up in politics. He was just a kid from my neighbourhood. We grew up together and ended up singing together in Oran eight or nine years ago and in Paris just six months ago."

The lyrics to "Beraka" (The Shack) [not the song above] went beyond the bounds of the daring, Hasni singing about "making love in a dirty old shack. I had her ... because when you're drunk that's the sort of idea that runs through your head!" The song caused a veritable scandal – and proved an instant hit with Algerian teenagers! In fact, it went on to become the big summer hit of 1987, catapulting young Hasni to overnight fame. Needless to say, the arrogance and insolence of the song had critics up in arms. "After all, they had already found enough cause for concern in the "outrageous" Raï songs recorded by the likes of Khaled, Fadela, Saharaoui and Benchenet which dealt with taboo subjects such as divorcées, young widows and adultery). Islamic fundamentalists went so far as to force record store owners to turn down the volume when they played "Beraka", so that the outrageous lyrics would not be heard in the street."

His music, of course, lives on. Here's some video evidence of how close he still is to us:

Expect to hear a lot of this stuff, as La Mancha sets into Spring mode.

OBAMA AND THE EXPLANATION OF EVERYTHING: A Thick Description

2008-03-18T19:14:00.006+01:00

Obama
by krs601

Barack Obama goes into his historically-purposeful (time will tell if it is to be called 'historic') speech on race's role in the discussion surrounding the Democratic primaries with two American flags behind him. It's tempting to condemn this obvious symbolism as a simple nod to his "Two Americas" discurso, or more broadly as an appropriate backdrop to his deliberate, signifying, and profoundly effective doublespeak. Indeed, it is even appropriate to call out these Orwellian elements as they purtain to his (or any Presidential) character, speech, or process for what they seemingly are. However, I feel, think, and propose that it is another matter entirely to denounce these elements for reactionary or seemingly pragmatic and ultimately political reasons.

By embracing the tellingly one-word slogan of "CHANGE," Obama has willfully taken on the burden of a stated primary objective of a redefinition of American politics (I don't use the term "America" here thoughtlessly or lazily, as it frequently pops up in his statements explicitly and conceptually). So it is interesting and appropriate that he publically confronts the racial elephant in the room by bringing his complex and subjective concept of family (that most complex social institution, with its inherent monopoly on the definition of personal identity) into his bid for the representation of the state (that complex social institution, with its dwindling monopoly on the definition of public identity).

Other candidates, historically, have frequently and sleazily brought family into their campaigns. It is significant that Obama does this differently. He does this with all the other tricks politicians use to get votes (reductive sloganeering, appeals to unity, campaign financing, bipartisan alliances, etc) allbeit with healthy doses of nuance and subtlety, as well as a vagary that I admit allows both for me to interpret things as I've done here so far and for me to be completely wrong about this, for Obama to wind up just being another guy who was overwhelmed or swallowed by a contradictory and conflictive social system, or even just another political hack.

This is why I'm responding to all these different, excited or even tacit blogular endorsements of Obama in this way. A lot of folks, like myself, are turned on by what looks like a candidate who's "cutting through the bullshit." This is a mistake that happens in a lot of spheres of influence, not the least of which is the academic sphere. It's not hard to see why: when language is employed in an innovative, efficient, or productive way, it shines light on questions or worries that have been deeply integrated into the construction of personal and collective identities as well as the multiple conflicts between these. Doing this economically ("rationally") is always attractive.

However, the concept of "cutting through the bullshit" is kind of a dangerous one, especially when it is the underlying premise upon which a grand project of redefinition is going to take place, because it encodes a privileged relationship to The Truth upon which an assumption of objectivity can be built; "the bullshit," as the superfluous, the inefficient, or the False provides a highway for the role of utility to come back to the debate and re-establish the dominance it enjoyed during the last Paradigm (the dominance that, in my opinion produced the artificially thick line between the sociological paradigms of structuralism and symbolic interactionism, and the bimodal socioeconomic distribution that has resulted in the wake of the application of sociological models to the scientific management of policy and defines The Task at Hand so clearly perceived by the U.S. public during campaign season).

I think it's important, then, to distinguish between this idea of "cutting through the bullshit" and that trait that makes Obama's statements, proposals, and character so interesting and, yes, exciting for a presidential candidate. I'm talking about the concepts of honesty and openness, which I think are what smart folks are really getting turned on by when they drool over what's seen as his ability to cut through the crap. Answering questions honestly and openly has that effect of shining light on previously dark or hazy things, however it only serves to redirect the gaze, and it only shines on what it knows to turn towards.

I don't mean to sound patronizing to the folks (and bogs) who are excited and writing about Obama. In fact, I'm sure I'm not telling them anything they didn't think about or feel. This is just a skepticism (or nag, however you want to see it) that I think must be expressed in light of the many thoughtful considerations and endorsements of this person.

EDIT: Oops! John just wrote about the exact same thing, sort of. My bad!

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Elecciones 2008

2008-03-09T13:59:00.005+01:00

So, with all the hullabaloo over U.S. elections (coverage in Spain strongly supports what this map demonstrates, via Proud Papa &Wax's highly recommended link dumps), you'd almost forget that there's an important election going on in Spain too. In fact, it's the first national election since the undeniably Madrid bombing-influenced 2004 elections (here are my 21 year-old thoughts and defense against contemporaneous ethnocentric Texan War-on-Terror opinion articles on that in my old university's newspaper).

That year, el Partido Socialista Obrero Espanyol (PSOE) defeated the right-wing Partido Popular (PP) to the surprise of many, given PP's largely successful economic policies prior to their knowing deception of the Spanish population in the aftermath of the Atocha bombings. Since then, Zapatero has ridden a wave of *implied* approval that has, in my opinion, resulted in laziness at the level of legislative initiative. Dude legalized gay marriage, bought off votes with across the (documented) board 'subsidies', y punto. He has done nothing to tackle the plight of Spain's massive undocumented migrant worker population, the grey market incentives that contribute to said mass and their exploitation, or Spain's biggest problem: rampant real estate speculation, the result of a corrupt and exclusive public-private agreement that takes advantage of ALL of the worst aspects of representative, party-based democracy.

For all of the U.S.'s electoral bullshit and gerrymandering, I will say this: at least folks there are voting for an individual, and that there is a lot more freedom of movement and association at that level in terms of policy design than there is when you just vote for a party. This inherent restriction is most visible when you watch the televised debates that only took place during the last week of campaigning, and were only between those two parties, despite the fact that minority parties are currently active and quite relevant. If you think the negative campaigning and vague rhetoric that characterized a lot of the 73,246 U.S. Presidential debates' content is disheartening, you ain't seen nothing.

Party-based voting allows for a very pronounced and explicit role for identity politics. You're not voting for policy, you're voting based on what type of folks you associate yourself with. Check out this webspot (increasingly important and youth-targeted, these), wherein a Douchebag, or pijo, is represented more or less awesomely, as well as totally unfairly in a political sense. Also note that the symbol for PSOE is a woman, which is worth a very long and thoughtful post of its own. En castellano:

Now, my problem with this isn't that the pijo is hilarious. It's that a party can get away with making this its entire platform. Once one asks PSOE politicians what that party has actually done, you just get some mention of a superficially tolerant discurso (a pretty spanish word that basically means "rhetoric" but sounds like "discourse," and thus smart/elitist), but no talk of action.

That said, I'm not voting for PP because they're actually crazy and pander to fascists. Nor will I vote for a nationalist party because they're actually crazy and pander to fascists. I'm going to go ahead and take the easy way out and vote for Izquierda Unida (IU), because that's basically a coalition between the old Partido Comunista (different here than in most places where these exist) and the Greens, and they won't win so I won't feel responsible for anything. If PP wins, it's because PSOE lost, deservedly.

Hydrobronek/SPACE OCCUPATION

2008-03-02T13:12:00.009+01:00

Hi y'all. As you've probably noticed, I've been out of the blogging game for more'n a minute. I'm having a really tough time balancing academic, economic, and musical output lately. As a result, a malaise has sort of crept into my voice and choice of topics 'round these parts, since I can't really figure out what it is I wanna wax about.

Actually, fuggit, I'll just be direct: it's research proposal time and, while I've settled on a topic (under what sociodemographic conditions do migrants have children in host countries, specifically France and Spain), it's a pretty boring (and 'technical' or whatever the fuck euphemism I'm trying to find for 'quantitative') one to blog about.

I have been active musically though. My band Hydrobronek is taking shape, recording, playing out here and there. We're a sort of experimental guitar/sax/laptop improv project sort of comparable to DJ/Rupture's amazing stuff with Andy Moor. And, again, true to life, this group's history and evolution has been totally dijointed and chaotic. So, for example, while our lo-fi live demo (newer) is loose and weird, Bronek's and my earlier output is pretty different (more of a party vibe, still mostly off-the-cuff).

I also recorded a 40-minute dj mix that I'm pretty proud of. Dubstep, whatever Modeselektor is, hip hop, screw, (Spanish) women singing/rapping, jungle, dubbed out cumbia, and all kinds of other weird mashups and wobbly surprises abound:

SPACE OCCUPATION

Tracklist:

mrk 1 - i got too feat sizzla
skream - auto dub
modeselektor - let your love grow feat. paul st. hillaire
kode 9 + spaceape - victims
skream - dutch flowerz
modeselektor - hyper hyper feat otto von schirach
dj scud - stormtrooper (sampled)
kraddy - new world order (sampled)
skepta - in a corner
chingo bling - do the lasso feat mistah f.a.b. and fabo (of d4l)
juelz santana - santana's town (ghislain poirier remix)
nettle - more fire (com.a & dj shiro the goodman)
lil' wayne + gorilla zoe - get money
mala rodriguez - no van
deadbeat - port au prince
s.l.a.b. - feat jayton, boss, trae, w.g., lil' b, snoop dogg, guerilla black
mrk 1 - digital orient
matt shadetek - warm hearts turn cold
field recordings from
pedro laza y sus pelayeros - navidad negra
deadbeat - for palestine
ojos de brujo - rumba dubstyle (munyeca rumba dub style remix)
estrella morente - a pastora
filastine - crescent occupation
mala rodriguez - la cocinera
mrk 1 - grit
ciara - oh (ghislain poirier remix)
nettle - scorched earth (dj olive remix)
s.l.a.b. - in my slab feat. shyna, paul wall, trae, w.g., boss, lil' b

Faceless autovox

2007-11-26T03:33:00.000+01:00

There's no way for me to know whose songs these are, but here is some amazing, autovoxy amazigh pop from the Atlas mountains in Morocco. I don't mind that these songs are super long at all. What rich and complex pop! I don't even know where to start.

A million points if you have any track info.

??????????? - Track 3
??????????? - Track 10

If you think this stuff is really lame, I probably think you're kind of an asshole.

I WONDER HOW MANY ITALIANS OWN NAZI PARAPHERNALIA

2007-11-08T19:12:00.000+01:00

'Lyrical terrorist' convicted over hate records

A 23-year-old Heathrow airport worker who dubbed herself the "lyrical terrorist" today became the first woman to be convicted under the government's anti-terror legislation.
Samina Malik, who burst into tears on hearing the verdict, wrote poems entitled How To Behead and The Living Martyrs and stocked a "library" of documents useful to terrorists.
On the social networking site Hi5 she listed her interests as: "Helping the mujaheddin in any way which I can ... I am well known as lyrical terrorist."
The jury at the Old Bailey found Malik guilty by a majority of 10 to one of possessing records likely to be used for terrorism.
[...]

Jonathan Sharp, prosecuting, said she was an "unlikely" but "committed" Islamic extremist: "She had a library of material that she had collected for terrorist purposes. That collection would be extremely useful for someone planning terrorist activity."
But Malik, of Townsend Road, Southall, west London, told the jury: "I am not a terrorist." She claimed to have used the nickname "lyrical terrorist" because she thought it was "cool".

How is it morally justifiable to detain this woman based on the paraphernalia she owns? Could a moody livejournal entry provide the basis for a pre-emptive investigation into a person's behavior? What is a crime of passion, precisely? Why does it matter?

Samina Malik was prosecuted under Britain's Terrorism Act 2000. I know very little about the particulars of this legislation, though I do have first-hand experience with it. In short, for Britain, this is the Doctrine of Preemption.

About this time of year in 2005, I had a twelve hour layover between flights at Gatwick Airport in London. It was between 10 pm and 10 am and I had never been to London before. Since I didn't have money for a hotel and hadn't slept in awhile, I went to sleep on a bench in the airport. You know that itchy/tickly feeling you get when someone plays that annoying game where they don't touch you, but put their finger reeeeeeally close to your face, and keep repeating "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!"? That feeling woke me up.

When my eyes opened, I was staring down the barrel of a gun, with two more pointed at me. All three pertinent index fingers were playing the same annoying game with the triggers.

"Do you mind if we ask you some questions?" asked the policeman, who was decked out in body armour that looked like an expressionist version of Superman's torso.

The grounds for this intervention was, according to the Sussex Police Stop/Stop & Search Form is section 44 of Terrorism Act 2000, which is a Search Not Requiring Reasonable Suspicion (but requiring specific authority).

WHATEVER THAT MEANS

Sasha Frere-Jones shrapnel

2007-10-30T17:05:00.000+01:00

I've been enjoying the recent blogospats concerning Sasha Frere-Jones' New Yorker piece on the 'retreat into whiteness' he sees in indie-rockorwhatever. It's something I'd been talking about with friends for awhile and, while I don't so much applaud as I do recognize the fact that Frere-Jones is painting in broad strokes, I do have a very particular beef with a lot of what he says.

THERE IS A LOT MORE TO SO-CALLED BLACK MUSIC THAN BEATS OR FUNKINESS OR SEXINESS.

Geez...I mean, there's a really good chance I'm overlooking some of Frere-Jones' (or bloggers' or commenters') more subtle points or instances in which they address this issue. But, to make my point, I'm going to use two very mainstream bands whose importance is as daunting as it is non-negotiable in many rock spheres: Radiohead and The Clash.

Now, I'm a Radiohead fiend, so I'll start with them. It was by navigating these guys' tastes (as culled from interviews) that I got into a lot of the weirder music I got into: Faust, Penderecki, Prince Buster, DJ Shadow, Charles Mingus, etc. The atease hordes know quite well that they are also huge fans of dub, especially King Tubby and Lee Perry (Johnny Greenwood even stuck his name on a recent Trojan comp he selected). Now, while there aren't too many Radiohead songs that'll make you want to skank, what you will hear (in album tracks, b-sides, In Rainbows, which is also the best U2 album ever) is toying with echoes, reverb, beatboxing, scatting, etc. It just so happens that Radiohead are pretty darn unfunky, so these songs aren't gonna make you swivel your hips too much--does this mean that the music is not influenced by dub? There's also "Life in a Glasshouse", which draws pretty clearly from a lot of Mingus' work in the sixties.

I don't know much about the Clash besides the fact that Sandinista! was recorded after the band had spent a lot of time listening to dub, and that, although many songs on this album do indeed skank, many others don't, but still have a dub-infused sense of production. Also, finally, I'd like to point out that the last song on Nirvana's Unplugged was a Leadbelly song, and that it may very well be the most unfunky thing ever recorded.

I do kind of agree with what Sasha's saying in general, though. I just think I wouldn't paint it as whiteness in anything but casual conversation. As a fella who used to listen to a lot of indie rock (and likes Pavement and Spoon and Wilco), I think overall my beef with a lot of modern indie rock is rooted in the escapism and veiled self-satisfaction I see in so much of it: think of how much stuff out there is either twee as fuck or bratty, histrionic, and annoying (like the Arcade Fire). It's the sound of navel-gazing too long, finding your anus eventually, and wholeheartedly vanishing up it, in front of a crowd that wishes they could do the same, in front of the same crowd, and be just as loved for it. I could get into how this could only happen in a privileged sphere, but I need to go to work in a sec.

I'm curious as to what Sasha's take on Black Kids is. Also, I don't like the whole black people = sex vibe I got from his piece.

Un-space

2007-10-25T17:18:00.000+02:00

Strange maps is a fantastic blog that I recommend checking frequently. Thanks to this site, I now know about Babak Fakhamzadeh concept of statistics as 'unspace'. I've been toying around with this idea a lot recently, especially in arguments with my more quantitative(ist!) colleagues. He uses a powerful visual representation of 'un-Austria', but is also good at explaining the problem of statistics with words (something I'm not very good at):

“Statistics, representing a real-life environment are, by their very nature, an un-space, as they only exist on paper. For example, the statistic that 1% of Austrians are members of voluntary environmental organizations is nothing but a number and doesn’t say anything about each individual living in Austria, except in general terms, on an abstract level.”
“However, these numbers, these statistics, create a representation of a physical space, Austria, therefore pretending that statistics can actually be representative for a real life construct.”

In more personal news, I got into the PhD program at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. My thesis will be on another topic of analysis that's easily hidden by statistics and benefits greatly from considerations of space: migration. Specifically, the current plan is to examine the mental and physical health risks migrant workers are exposed to as a result of labor market conditions and structure, bad job-matches (eg, Senegalese city kids working agriculture and cutting their hands), and Spanish (and EU) immigration policy.

Blip

2007-10-17T13:15:00.000+02:00

Ready or Not, France Opens Museum on Immigration

Mr. Sarkozy guaranteed that the museum, a pet project of his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, would make headlines when he conspicuously did not show up for its inauguration.
Nor did many other people when I stopped by the other day. I am told that thousands showed up the first few days, but only a small crowd milled around on the museum’s first Saturday afternoon. There’s no charge for admission. There’s no fancy gift shop or cafe, either, and the place has the slightly ramshackle, melancholy air of a temporary installation. It shares an old building with an aquarium that occupies the basement. Most visitors, when I looked, headed downstairs.
Sparsely devised with charts, graphs, interactive gadgets and odds and ends of memorabilia meant to humanize what is a fairly dry, lifeless display, the museum is a well-meaning dud. Its obvious reluctance to dwell on touchy subjects like the occupation of Algeria is predictable, this being a government enterprise.
[...]

Curiously, the building in which the French have chosen to house the museum used to be part of the International Colonial Exposition of 1931. A sculptured frieze on the facade, an Art Deco-era marvel by Alfred Janniot, shows French colonial laborers toiling for the glory of the empire. Across the street, a memorial from 1934 honors Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who helped spread French rule in Africa. Standing tall in crisp tropical-weight military wools, Marchand leads a troupe of half-naked African servants.

[...]

To Mr. Sarkozy — the son of a Hungarian immigrant, as is often pointed out — the idea of atonement is political anathema. Lately his government has proposed the use of genetic testing to verify the bloodlines of would-be immigrants who want to join family members here. One of his own ministers called the idea “disgusting.”

Meanwhile, the police have been ordered to expel 25,000 immigrants “sans papiers,” without papers, before the year ends. Newspapers here have been publishing articles about immigrants like Chulan Liu, a 51-year-old divorced woman from North China, who died last month after leaping from her window when policemen knocked on her door; and Ivan Demsky, a 12-year-old son of Chechen asylum-seekers who slipped off a fourth-floor balcony in Amiens when he and his father tried to evade authorities. Opponents of the government have started forming what they’re calling the new Resistance.

Epoca de rebajas

2007-10-10T20:25:00.000+02:00

Free shit! I love it.

Lately, whenever I feel like listening to music on my own, I use Ableton to play with my playlist. Lately, I'm also all "Screw the World!"

Wayne's version of Calle 13's "Cumbia de los Aburridos" is ace.

Here's a fifteen minute morsel of stuff going at different speeds. It's about the Earth winning always, or at least that's what was on my mind. NO RESPECT FOR VOLUME.

Tracklist:

King Tubby & Soul Syndicate - King Tubby's Key
Chancha via circuito - Princesas remix
Deadbeat - For Palestine
Programme - Des singes deboulent de partout et tabassent tout ce qui passe
Filastine - Ja Helo
Sun Ra - Solar Drums
Sunburned Hand of the Man - The Jaybird

Pateras

2007-10-07T12:54:00.000+02:00

Rarely does a Spanish newsday pass without a blurb about the National Police Corps' latest catch. Pateras (rickety rafts) of between 50 and 150 people are routinely intercepted and brought to shore, where the ill are treated by the Red Cross before finally being sent back to their nations of origin (regardless of what that nation does with them upon their arrival). In some cases the state attempts to place people in a legal situation either within Spain or in another EU country, but the vast majority of these folks do not experience this. The number of people on board and a vague reference to the port of origin are all that are reported in the news, which abruptly segues into a Spanish human interest story on a region's peculiar culinary customs, the feats of a national sports icon, or a report on some bumbling Bush policy.

So why, in this context, does Spain's social democratic government, in cooperation with Portugal, propose an apparently radical revision of the European Union's immigration policy? Especially considering that, just five months ago, they were looking at this particularly ugly option, in which Moroccan mothers would be granted worker visas with a block on family unification for seasonal agricultural labor. The new policy supposedly seeks to establish an "ordered" relationship dedicated to integration, solidarity, and development. And, in the context of current U.S. or French immigration (and integration) policy, it certainly does seem like a huge step forward to "globalize" the Spanish labor market on such a large scale.

Except that this policy is mostly about two things: plugging up large holes in Southern Europe's porous borders and expanding the boundaries of the European Union. This latter point is clear since, under this new policy, hidden by the guise of development and educational initiatives, the EU expands its jurisdiction to include a field of Mali's or Senegal's that does not exist, namely the determination of who is allowed to leave the country and the conditions under which this can occur.

But the more interesting element of this, in my opinion, is the way in which this policy aims to plug the leaks in Europe's ethereal borders and, on a broader scale, what this reveals about the dangerous effects of a distracted and uninformed public on a strictly party-based democratic system. That about 90 percent of Spain's population growth in the last 7 years is due to immigration is no secret to the average native, though it is a fact that is widely ignored (the rest of Spain's population growth is largely a residual effect of population ageing plus returning emigrants). The country's welfare state, as I've mentioned before in this blog, is in serious danger because Spain's birth rate is far below a population replacement level (1.3 children per woman, in contrast to the situation in the U.S., where the birth rate is slightly above the population replacement level at 2.1, thus revealing popular right-wing excuses for the privatization of social security or the absence of a universal health care system to be total bullshit). As a result, Spain has found itself in a situation in which it must expand its tax base among people of working age (the exact demographic that struggles through unimaginable hardship to arrive here in the first place), but comply with EU immigration policy at the same time. To make matters worse, this occurs at a time in which the political parties of the larger, richer, and more autonomous regions routinely appeal to nationalism and the politics of identity to mobilize and steal from one another's electoral bases.

If we are so different, and our economic and political alliance, based on the marriage of two monarchs with the goal of expelling a common enemy, is of such an antiquated, strategic nature, what is the point of our state in the first place? This seems to be the question at the center of all discussions of nationalism in Spain. It is a discussion fed by the subsidization of cultural commodification through a tourism-centered economy. It is the result of a segmented labor market in which one group enjoys permanent job protection while another suffers extreme precariousness, yet both carry out the same tasks. It is ignored when everyday people engage in black market activities to attain a quality of life that resembles that of the people up north, and need a labor force that doesn't show up in the books. It is the sad game of high expectations and limited viability.

So expect to see Southern Europe continue to try and push for a more fluid, transnational labor market while still complying with the EU's demands for a thick southern border. And expect waves of large-scale regularization of citizenship status to continue, as they will mask years of exploitation with outrage-inducing amnesty. The politics of identity are meant to drive globalization in its current, fractured state, in which the desire for wealth is designated as the only characteristic shared by all people, who in turn are far too different to share anything.

2007-10-01T13:29:00.000+02:00

ASDÑLFNAEWOAIRGTAKWEMFJ W4EIOJRMF AWEAILOVETHESEIDUDDESS!!!!!1

How much will you pay for the new Radiohead album?

By now you will have heard today's flabbergasting news that Radiohead have a new album
coming out. IN JUST TEN DAYS. Blimey, Christmas does get earlier each year.

It's called In Rainbows, and Radiohead have decided not to bother signing with a record label, but release it themselves.

It's available to pre-order from the In Rainbows website now as a download or 'disc box' - a disc box being the new album on CD and vinyl, plus a second CD with more new songs, all stuffed inside a "hardback book". They don't say which book it is, but at £40 I'd hope for the new Naomi Klein.

NEVER FORGET

2007-09-13T09:27:00.000+02:00

In the spirit of the last post, specifically the comments section:

Do you know about the Jena Six?

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 : Six black students at Jena High School in Central Louisiana were arrested last December after a school fight in which a white student was beaten and suffered a concussion and multiple bruises. The six black students were charged with attempted murder and conspiracy. They face up to 100 years in prison without parole. The fight took place amid mounting racial tension after a black student sat under a tree in the schoolyard where only white students sat. The next day three nooses were hanging from the tree.

Sadly, this blurb (via) doesn't even scratch the surface. Here's the surface, scratched (via Facebook, of all places, but that's a whole other post):

Last September, at a high school in Jena, Louisiana, a black student asked if he could be allowed to sit underneath the big leafy tree in the school's hot courtyard. Previously, only white students were allowed to sit there. The next day, three nooses hung from the tree. All the black students were outraged and sat under the tree together. Soon, the local police and district attorney showed up. "I could end your lives with the stroke of a pen" said the district attorney to the mass of students.

In Jena, 85% of the population is white. The blacks were scared. Tensions continued to rise for the next few months. A black student was beaten up at a white party. Two black students were threatened with a sawed-off shotgun in a convenience store.

Finally, on December 4, 2006, the tensions rose to a boiling point. A fight broke out at school and a white boy was injured and taken to the hospital. He was released later that day and was smiling with his friends before the sun set. Six black students who participated in the fight were charged... with attempted murder. No one came even close to dying that day.

At one time, these six young boys and futures, hope, now they face up to 100 years in prison. One boy has already been tried, by an all-white jury. He was convicted of aggravated assault. In Louisiana, for aggravated assault to occur, a deadly weapon must have been used. In this case? The weapon was a pair of tennis shoes. The boy faces sentencing on July 31, he could serve up to 22 years in prison. The other five boys still face second-degree murder charges and 100 year sentences.

COMPARE AND FUCKING CONTRAST, EVEN IF IT'S DEPRESSING

2007-09-12T00:11:00.000+02:00

It's not 9/11 here anymore, but that's OK because in Catalunya it's like, Catalunya Day or something.

It is still 9/11, though, for the country whose inhabitants should be reading this:

Is The U.S. Responsible for a Million Iraqi Deaths?

Excerpts:

In October 2006 researchers from Johns Hopkins University published a peer-reviewed article in The Lancet, one of Europe's most important and respected medical journals, estimating that 650,000 Iraqis had been killed due to the U.S.-led invasion of their country, 601,000 violently. [1] The report was quickly marginalized in public debate in the United States.

[...]

The researchers' methods were not to blame. They used the method accepted around the world to measure demographics such as birth and death rates in the wake of natural and man-made disasters: a cluster survey...The treatment of the Lancet study and its findings has really been exceptional. In other war zones, results from cluster surveys have become the standard estimate of deaths. The cluster survey-based estimate that 200,000 have died in Darfur, for example, is consistently cited as established fact by both the U.S. media and the Bush administration.

[...]

The U.S. Army's Mental Health Advisory Team recently found that only 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of Marines thought "all non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect." Just 40 percent of Marines and 55 percent of soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for "injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant." [10] The Nation recently interviewed fifty Iraq combat veterans on the record, of whom "dozens … witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower." The veterans said these killings usually went unreported and unpunished, one suggesting that it would be impossible to investigate every incident where an Iraqi civilian was killed or wounded because they are so frequent.

[...]

An AP poll in February asked Americans how many Iraqis had died as a result of the war. The median response was just under 10,000. [12]

The best estimate indicates that more than a million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation. It is reasonable to suppose that if politicians and news media in the United States were forced to confront this reality, pressure for the end of the war would increase dramatically, and cavalier discussions of new military actions in Iran and Pakistan would be less likely.

Silent green

2007-09-01T22:34:00.000+02:00

I'm a sucker for free documentaries on the internet. Especially when I'm supposed to be doing something else (thesis is due Friday!!!).

Jon Pilger's The War on Democracy

Now, Mr. Pilger clearly covers Venezuela's still nascent Chavez era from a statist, leftist perspective with all the manipulative pizazz of that old-ass Crystal Pepsi commercial. But he never tries to appear objective and I respect that, now more than ever.

Anyway, check it out. And think about what the community organizer says near the beginning: before Chavez, maps of Venezuela colored the mountains surrounding Caracas green, literally erasing the "gravity-defying" barrios that actually cover them and any traces of green. Populism is weird, especially considering these demographics. I gotta get back to work...

Phillip Chbeeb

2007-08-17T00:29:00.000+02:00

I just got turned on to this, but Phillip Chbeeb is my little brother's friend and a fellow Strake Jesuit College Prep alum. He's of Lebanese descent, and I know absolutely nothing else about him except that he's AN UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME DANCER:

Marketable! Everything about that (mission statement, clothes, reaction, earnestness) was very Strake, especially his answer to the third judge's question. Respect the slo-mo replay. Weird fact: many of my brother's friends are extremely talented young adults!

Summer capsule

2007-08-10T23:33:00.000+02:00

Song of the summer for me, right here. An oldie, off of S.L.A.B. 4.5 Plex:

S.L.A.B. - In the Hood (feat. Trae, Redd, Boss, W.G., Lil' B, and Jay-Ton)

In the hood I'm in my car, air-conditioned tight, sealed, and buckled up listening to SLAB on my way to some other freeway or tollway or farm road. My car's an unkempt Jetta with Playmobil snap-on guts from Mexico that haven't been the same since that dog. . .

anyway,

I'm from Ellis Island, if that island were located in a swamp...(it is now, isn't it?) Meyerland's changed quite a bit since it was the Jewish River Oaks, Houston's Beverly Hills (except with fully-functioning plantations well into the 60s):

''All you have to do is go down to Southwest Houston, which is like our Ellis Island, and see who is standing at the bus stops," said Joe Rubio, vice president of Community Relations for Catholic Charities. ''You'll see people in native dress from all over the world."

Maybe our neighborhood's the multicultural scene outside your car window on your way to wherever, but the most significant demographic shift in Houston is less An American Tale and more The Book of Exodus.

The county's black population increased by 52,000 in a year, the largest numerical increase in the nation and one several officials linked to an influx of Katrina evacuees.

The Battle at Kruger

2007-08-09T04:25:00.000+02:00

Speaking of babies, and kings of jungles, and war and masses, and like, everythiiiiing...:

Sterile borders

2007-08-08T22:47:00.000+02:00

When you're trudging through the gobbledygook that is quantitative social scientific writing, it's easy to get the feeling that you're only really able to see six inches in front of you (see: the last six months here at LaMancha). Every once in awhile, though, you happen upon an article that has somehow managed to slice right through the bullshit by a) not adding to it with lazily improvised terminology, b) keeping their methods simple, thoughtful, and interdisciplinary, and c) focusing on demographical margins.

Caroline Bledsoe is an anthropologist from Northwestern University whose current project, "Transnational vital events: birth, law, and migration between Africa and Europe," asks how (and explores why) people distribute key life moments across international boundaries. In this article, with the help of demographer Rene Houle and geographer Papa Sow, she points to the effects of Spanish policy on the reproductive experiences of Gambian migrants. Particularly in the context of what marriage entails in Gambia, Spanish restrictions on family reunification (such as setting a bar for children over 18 or, shockingly, not granting Spanish citizenship to Gambians born in Spain), in tandem with (economic) institutions that favor flows of Sub-Saharan Africans to rural areas/economies, strongly distort reproductive practices:

Given both the precariousness of farm employment in Spain and the pressure to bring more people as conditions in Africa worsen, the more that Europe tries to seal out Africans, the more “African” their reproductive practices may become. We predict, then, that forces of exclusion will lead to more maneuvering, not less, around children and reproduction, by international, national, and family players.

The paper itself is far more interesting than just this little blurb. I recommend reading it (though it is long and sort of technical), as it describes how Gambian migrants coordinate their own social and economic networks through the grey areas of a Spanish policy that encourages large-scale trends which (I'm taking this further) are in turn interpreted (daily) by natives as a quietly hostile resistance to adaptation.

T his article points to what awaits migrants if and when barriers to social inclusion are removed:

On the one hand, immigrants’ social exclusion increases their difficulties of accessing financial services, as we shall discuss: unstable income and low saving make them unwanted customers for many financial institutions. This is due to perceived higher credit risks, higher operational costs, to lower profit margins for this customer segment.

On the other hand, the exclusion from financial services contributes to raising obstacles for immigrants’ social and economic integration: a mortgage for buying a home gives them the opportunity of owning real estate properties that can become useful collaterals for future business loans; a loan for financing a new business activity can help immigrants to earn a higher and stable income and thus provide them with more chances for economic and social integration; in many
enterprises it is quite normal to transfer wages on banks’ checking account, which per se requires that all workers have a bank account.

Facts x Importance = News

2007-08-07T17:41:00.000+02:00

From a bird's eye (or Commanding Heights/Keynes vs. Von Hayeck/states vs. free markets/macro) perspective, it seems it's The State's turn now (witness the heterophony of the avenging democrats/youtube debates). As usual, I won't explain my statements and just link up some stuff for y'all to mull over with that in mind:

Why the private equity bubble is bursting:

[Michael] Psaros is a managing partner of KPS Capital Partners, a firm that
specializes in buying and rebuilding troubled industrial companies. A contrarian
with a keen eye for market trends, he sold eight of his 11 companies as he
watched the private equity frenzy mount over the past 14 months. "The prices
were incredible," marvels Psaros. "The market is completely out of touch with
economic reality." Now he's poised to move back in. KPS just raised $1.2 billion
to buy companies that, Psaros reckons, LBO shops and lenders will jettison at
desperate, distressed prices. "It always turns on a dime," he says. "All of a
sudden you can feel the fear."

This must be true because it warranted CNN's first decently-done story in like, ten years.

And in the Philippines...

No squatters in 3 years, agency vows:

The attainment of a squatter-free metropolis in three years comes alongside the
removal of illegal structures and obstructions particularly shanties that not
only worsen flooding by clogging waterways but also endanger the lives of the
settlers to risks of drowning and outbreaks of diseases, according to Esquivel.
“While we are removing the urban poor from slum areas and preventing them
from returning, other government agencies must [tailor] their budget allocations
to be able to provide more low-cost housing units as relocation sites.”

Broad strokes v. pointillism

2007-08-01T00:52:00.000+02:00

The most well-known lines Antonio Machado ever wrote:

"Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en el mar"

That is, "Traveler there is no path/ but wakes in the sea." Data collection and analysis = mapping those wakes. By the time you're done, the boat's far out of sight and the first ripples that inspired your decision to study the wake are now waves. All you can do with those is calculate how close to the coast they'll crash and whether or not it'll matter.

On the other hand, art in any of its forms can convey the rumble of the motor, the water foaming about it, and the rippling shape of its impact in a single "snapshot" (to borrow quantitative social scientific jargon for a sec). I was reminded of this today when I saw Sanford Biggers and Takeshi Murata's work at the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, respectively. Biggers mixes mysticism and hip-hop into his audiovisual work, while Murata's psychedelic work incorporates you-tube style poor compression in exciting ways.

From one of Murata's Melts:

2007-07-27T05:16:00.000+02:00

That's where I'll be this weekend. Suraj K. bangs verrrry choice screw and rap into his sets. I will post a lot more on him once I can upload stuff from Scooby Doo Crew's awesome glowfest last weekend.

2007-07-24T06:26:00.000+02:00

Al Gore's cabinet.

Definitely not Kucinich though.

2007-07-24T05:51:00.001+02:00

I think an unprecented number of presidential candidates will be in the cabinet in 09.

Time Capsule

2007-07-16T21:16:00.000+02:00

Not a lot of social scientific content on here lately, and I guess this is because I'm starting to specialize for my thesis and centering on a topic (the effects of temporary contracts on fertility in Spain, comparing native and migrant household planning strategies) that may be a little boring to y'all(?) . Anyway, SpainEconomyWatch is one blog (among many) by Edward Hugh that's been low on recent activity, but is full of useful and interesting information on Spain's, em, peculiar economy. Of particular interest (to me) is his post on immigration as a solution to Spain's (and Europe's) low-fertility quagmire, in which he quotes Harvard economist David Bloom:

David Bloom, the Harvard economist, once did a calculation in which he combined the dependency ratios of Africa and Western Europe. He found that they fit together almost perfectly; that is, Africa has plenty of young people and not a lot of older people and Western Europe has plenty of old people and not a lot of young people, and if you combine the two you have an even distribution of old and young. “It makes you think that if there is more international migration, that could smooth things out,” Bloom said.

Cultural politics, censorship

2007-06-25T14:30:00.000+02:00

Censorship has many shades of wrong. I'm with John Denver and that dude from Twisted Sister on this one.

Cinemas protest at having to show Spanish films

Most of Spain's 4,000 cinemas were expected to close last night in protest at a planned law requiring them to offer at least one Spanish or European film in every four shown. The Federation of Spanish Cinemas strike was expected to close 90% of venues. The federation's leader, Rafael Alvero, told El País that the law would force cinemas to run films "of very little interest to the public". The culture ministry said the law is needed to protect Spain's film industry. The Cinema Law, now going through parliament, penalises local cinemas for a waning interest in Spanish film, Mr Alvero said.

My sex in the convent - by Nobel poet

The publication of Books of Love, which includes 25 previously unpublished poems, has provoked angry letters from the Holy Rosary order, the newspaper El País reported yesterday. The women Jiménez conquered or, at the very least, fantasised about appear to have included Sister Amalia Murillo, Sister Filomena and, most ardently of all, Sister Pilar Ruberte.
"They were young, like him," said Mr Exposito, who admitted that it was impossible to say where reality and fantasy met. "We cannot say exactly what their relationship was."
Jiménez, whose neurotic fear of sudden death meant he always needed to be near a doctor, stayed as a privileged guest at the nursing home. He had gone there after suddenly leaving a psychiatric hospital in France where he had been staying in the director's house and appeared to have embarked on a red-blooded affair with his wife - who also features in the poems.
Jiménez, who wrote more than 3,600 poems, sent the erotic poems to the printers in 1913 but withdrew them after his wife-to-be, Zenobia Camprubi, complained about a previous, much tamer, book of poetry.
"She said it might not set a good example to young people," said Mr Expósito. "He also had to take into account her mother, who was very conservative."

Distraction

2007-06-22T23:50:00.000+02:00

Spain's National Institute of Statistics is Spanishly organized. Sucks. This waiting game shit's getting old.

So why make YOU wait for some really good, bluesy screw (off of Playing the Game with No Rules).

Young Cash feat. Paul Wall - Disco Ball

Z-Ro, Lil' Keke, and Paul Wall - Still Leanin'

Y'all still got your shit in a wad over the lyrics? Read /jace's post.

Lifted

2007-06-19T13:18:00.000+02:00

Been on something of a hazy nostalgia kick lately, as this playlist that I recently put together will demonstrate (45 mins 43 Mb). Lots of open spaces for so many different types of papers to pile up.

So I'd not been able to listen to anything space-synthy at home or around town until today. This may be because I swallowed waaaaay too many hours of bad dubstep last week. There is such a huge gap between good dubstep tracks and bad ones. This is true for all genres, but it's really noticeable in dubstep, and even moreso in a social setting. You can't talk, you just kinda hunch to a beat. For awhile.

Anyway, back to the shuttle. Weezy's on it right now.

I tell him I didn't really like Da Drought 3 at first, but it's growing on me fast (especially the beats selected). I ask, not aloud this time, "Is it just me or does it occasionally feel like he's an even more impressive rapper when it sounds like he's not trying?"

Lil Wayne - Boom

And this next track is playing on my Cadiwagen Etherprancer's clean-ass system as I take a last look back at Earth on our way out, fixing my gaze on that last, tiny patch of green...

Lil Wayne feat. Currency - President

Flamenco tilt-a-whirl

2007-06-16T19:18:00.001+02:00

Lots of synth in Barcelona this week for SONAR, so let's hit up the organic section for a minute.

El Lebrijano - El Anillo

Maybe you've read about El Lebrijano before on Mudd Up! This song's off of Encuentros, which features a ton of songs with lyrics from fairy tales. Lots of people would hear this song and say something like, "Wow, cool! Arabian music and flamenco." I encourage these folks to purchase the album, because more than anything, it serves as a fantastic sampler of just a few of the very many colors offered by these two worlds. This track is pure, innocent joy--a wedding song about a quest(/lottery).

Then there's Enrique Morente. Apparently he recently did something with Sonic Youth and I've not heard it yet, which means that if anyone reading this has access to some sort of a recording or can point me in that direction, please hit me up. Here he is in a more traditional setting (bitchin' psychedelic studio set notwithstanding), singing a solea accompanied by Pepe Habichuela, of Granada's ff-aaabulous Habichuela dynasty.

Real Republican

2007-06-01T17:55:00.000+02:00

Remember the type of conservative John McCain was supposed to be?

Weird. Refreshing. The Republic of Texas folks probably dig this guy, too. I kind of like that he is a terrible public speaker.

Note: I'm not saying I support this guy, but from this side of the ocean and far, far away from home, I do find him more interesting than any other politician being talked about right now.

Grainy syrup, smooth nostalgia

2007-05-29T01:14:00.000+02:00

Damage Control recently did a tribute to Big Hawk that's a very necessary listen for fans of heavy and gritty psychedelic rap. Some vintage DJ Screw tracks on there, and I still can't get over the fidelity of the recordings. I wish I could describe the way I feel as I'm transported back in time to some of my first experiences with this style of rap, but as you can see I'm running a little short on words lately. Maybe just nod along and smile?

Damage Control Anniversary Show/Big Hawk Tribute (FM 90.1 KPFT Houston)

Sara Baras - El Albaicin

2007-05-25T03:01:00.000+02:00

Mance Lipscomb - The Night Time is the Right Time

2007-05-23T17:03:00.001+02:00

Keeping mum in Spain

2007-05-17T16:45:00.000+02:00

From the BBC:

A man in north-eastern Spain has made an unexpected discovery after buying a new home without seeing it first.
Inside he found the mummified body of the previous owner.
Jordi Giro bought the flat in the Costa Brava resort of Rosas at an auction after the previous owner defaulted on her payments.
[...]
It seems that Maria Luisa Zamora failed to keep up payments on her mortgage because she had in fact died in 2001.
[...]
Police believe the body has been preserved by the salty sea air.