For Pedants and Freedom Fighters Alike

Snagging this off Jadaliyya. A lot of people were interested in the other kinetic typography link i posted, this one acutely relevant to what's happening NOW in Syria. After everything i've seen in Palestine, watched from afar in Lebanon, really wondering what Hezbollah is going to do. Come down on the side of the madness shown at the end of this clip... or point their rockets eastward and tell Assad to BACK OFF?



Day later addendum: perspectives on Syrian intifada from the Lebanese left.

Where's my weekly dose of soma?

Yesterday i was woken by a phone call - way too early for a Sunday morning, might add - one of my students, screaming into my ear, 'We won! We won!' What the f*ck?? 'Eurovision! Azerbaijan won!!!' i'm thinking to myself, 'ask me now if i care,' yet ever the polite foreign guest, i did my best to feign interest - even enthusiasm - understanding immediately why the city's noise level was totally off the charts (yes, pun intended) last night, cringing at the realization that the coming week is going to meet all my criteria for cultural hell.

i do love thinking about ministers arguing over dismantling Schengen while the rest of Europe and its wannabe masses are fussing over dance costumes. Something of a Huxleyian brilliance in that, no? Out and about in the afternoon, i noticed that the urban wildlife was also frantically running around like - well, like rats, which is what they were. A second poignant vision, almost too much metaphor for someone who didn't get enough sleep.

Anticipating that Eurovision will be THE number one topic in all my classes this week, i dutifully checked out the Guardian UK's contest blog and then immediately wished i hadn't.

Our hosts for the evening are Anka, who is wearing a red dress like a 70s shagpile rug and a over-tight ponytail; Judith, who is wearing Bacofoil and doing the French bits, and a man called Stefan who is the actual Swedish Chef off the Muppets. He is talking about TV vankings. I hope these are rankings.

Ah, there's nothing like a bit of set-piece intro comedy, is there? Lena can't perform last year's winning song, Satellite, because she is also competing this evening, so Stefan and Anke are performing a rockabilly version.

Imagine how bad that could possibly be, and then multiply it by about 7 MILLION.

They have no been joined by 43 Lena lookalikes waving the flags of Europe. And now the actual Lena, doing the final chorus. And a full swing band. And many, many, fireworks.

My head hurts.

i stopped there cuz my head hurt, too. This is just NOT something i'm ever going to care about. Over on facebook, i'm inundated with Nakhba news and Israel's IDF shooting at people on all their borders. You want bright lights and meaningful crooning? Here's my eurovision antidote.

Time for a musical interlude

Rhythms East-West

Some random Mickey Hart interview i heard eons ago came to mind while watching this lively montage. Mickey talks about breath as the source of all rhythm, evolving palaeontologically into The Beat as we commonly think of it, or maybe just take for granted dancing around till sunrise in an ecstasy-propagated workout. It punches out the frequency of our hearts, our brain waives :-), REM flutter and just about everything else indicative of life. Even in dormancy there is a pulse, however faint.

The soundtrack for Akachi's short film is provided by the Brasilian-based ensemble, Barbatuques, who are also dedicated to exploring this rhythm-body-sound relationship. STOMP without all the toys. Their own website has some nice visual interpretations of their musical journey, definitely worth having a look at if you're in a free-thinking, relaxed mood and need something non-specified to focus on (that is not an oxymoron, contrary to how it reads). In all likelihood, Too Far West Is East was probably made with other objectives in mind, but it's a beautiful rendition of how rhythmically we humans behave, across vastly different cultural parameters and regardless of the material objects which partly define or direct our movements.

Too far west is east from Takayuki Akachi on Vimeo.

A rare surfendental trip this evening, towed to sea by youtube's ebbing current. There's just too much stuff out there now, at least 10 remixes of every original piece, interviews about the mixes, it's sometimes impossible to even find the original. Question of the day: Is there a contradiction between not being able to cope with so many choices and being an anti-statist?

In the maze of threads surrounding Busta Rhymes' track Arab Money - if you dare the video then don't leave without checking out the comments - came across this clip from Red Leb Studios in Beirut. If you like, here's something a bit more rockin'.

Kharmic histrionics, or, Tom Waits railed against zionism and i missed it?!

More conscientious of late about reaching further out into the blogosphere, i'm thinking the best way to maintain a daily rhythm (and readership) might be to write long, snappy titles and then key out a couple of unassuming sentences or add an image, just so there's an actual post to go with them. More people do this than i would have guessed and it generally works. For example: X, Y or Z. Still, i'm a ridiculously wordy person so long titles are easier to generate than concise to the point of mute postings. Once i had the idea that the best strategy for writing a book would be to generate about 20 chapter titles and then fill in the spaces between them. If you try it and land a publishing deal, please let me know.

The other night i was talking with RM in the great state of Wisconsin and mentioned that i'd been up to the castle earlier that day to see a retrospective exhibit of 20th century Hungarian artist Lajos Vajda. My august attempt to impress her with alliterative nonsense on constructivism was interrupted by her chiding me for mentioning a jaunt to the castle as if it were a perfectly normal, everyday kind of thing. In Wisconsin, they have dairy farms handed down over generations from people who fled Europe to get away from the perversions of royalty, and even in SF, where RM and i both used to live, there are mansions in the city, forts on the cliffs, and nouveau estates over the bridge in Marin - but castles? Not a one. Back in our day, that would've required first a massive handover of cash to Ticketron and then a long drive down the coast to San Simeon; the Hearst Xanadu is a notable paean to excessive wealth, but it's also not the same thing as having a castle in the center of town, its lights reflected at night in the glassy veneer of some european river well-known for inspiring concertos and revolutions. Leave it to a mid-westerner to remind me that one woman's neighborhood castle is another's 'let them eat cake' holiday tour fantasy.

Having been thus jostled, i brought the camera with me to A38 the other night, one of my fave clubs in BP as they seem to have about the best program manager in town. As you can see from the photo, the other trés cool thing about A38 is that it's a boat, anchored on the Buda bank of the Danube not far from the National Theatre, which is visible in the background (behind it the audaciously neon Budapest Palace of the Arts). So not only do i live in a city with a castle, but where people go to concerts on boats - all year round. Sure as hell can't find that in Wisconsin! I don't think you could even find it in Prague. Yet, living here on and off for several years now, the party boat scene has sort of melted into the blur of tattered kiosk posters and palinka binges. Thanks to RM for reminding me not to take the frills of Magyarland for granted, and to N who told me Braindogs were playing and made sure i didn't miss them.

The show happened to be on the night of the only major snowstorm we've had in the city this winter. i'm not a winter person anymore and spend november-march in 3 pairs of socks, in sync with the upper layering of shirts, scarfs and sometimes gloves. i truly believe that if i have to suffer through several months of subzero temps, then it's only fair nature coughs out one of its most magical meteorological perks so that i may at least reap aesthetic pleasure from an otherwise horrid season. Walking in the middle of a down-covered street at night listening to the arythmic thud of snowflakes landing and the airy whoosh as feet displace powder is a virtual reality experience without the gadgets. i know decorative urban lighting is a total waste of electricity, but this particular church on Raday utca looks great at night, snowfall effect creating the impression of an (almost 2-dimensional) Time Burton movie set.

Being a night of cold cold ground, the soundtrack was a perfect fit. Braindogs are a one-show-a-year band who jam so tightly you'd think they'd been touring together for almost as long as the Grateful Dead (ok, Franz Ferdinand). Bluesmen Ian Siegal and Ripoff Rashkolnikov are complemented by a large mix of hungarian musicians who were obviously all born to crank out the indiosyncratic tunes of one of music's most gifted minstrals.

True confession: i actually lost track of Tom Waits in 2005, when i moved to Palestine and went a bit bonkers over George Wassouf and Souad Massi. So i was extremely surprised to hear 'Road to Peace', which is on Waits' 2006 Orphans: Brawlers album. Talk about hitting the nail on its head:

The fundamentalist killing on both sides is standing in the path of peace
But tell me why are we arming the Israeli army with guns and tanks and bullets?

Full lyrics here. The song tells the story of kids who turn their bodies into bombs and makes an a propos reference to Kissinger's real politik... it was bold of them to do this, given the significant number of young israelis filling out the club scene here (generally) and mostly not to hear commentaries on the problem of Israel and America against the world. Even more kudos to Tom Waits for penning these lyrics, and although ironically i've been looking for Souad's last album, that's going to have to wait until after i've caught up with Mr. Waits. My friend M and i used to lament how working full-time in the Palestinian hinterland made it difficult to participate in the kind of on-going direct action resistance that we're genetically programmed to do. So too, it's ironic that with all the anti-occupation music being passed around there, this one fell through the cracks. i'm close to half a century old, i really shouldn't have a problem multi-tasking this sort of thing. Give me Ska-P, give me Waits! Once upon a time, i realized that good things would happen if i just made a point of showing up... another instance of prescient slackerism. Guess it took a few cm's of snow to yank my head out of the counter-kharmic sand.

Just checked into myspace and see that my ultra-talented whiskey drinking buddies, Flogging Molly, have just released their first video from last year's album Float. A very well-conceived meditation on the interstices of our personal-planetary journey.

Mama Africa passes into eternity

"What I have seen here, I will tell the world in words and in songs." Mariam Makeba

Where Biloxi Meets Barack

Our fathers asserted that great principle--the right of the people to choose the government for themselves--that government rested upon the consent of the governed. In every form of expression it uttered the same idea, community independence, and the dependence of the government upon the community over which it existed. It was an American principle, the great spirit which animated our country then, and it were well if more inspired us now.

Jefferson Davis, Boston 1858

Introducing these two videos with the words of Jefferson Davis may seem counter-intuitive, but hear me out. In an earlier life, an anarchist comrade told me that the most basic right we have is the right to secede. Davis, as President of the Confederate States of America, fully embraced that principle, though he's generally credited with doing so for all the wrong reasons. The fact that creation of the CSA immediately lead to a long, bloody war, and that the Confederacy was lead by slave-owning elites whose slave-holding friends footed the bill for their rebellion, has and will forever color the "wrongness/rightness" of secession itself. In Oregon and California 80 years later, four counties banded together to create the State of Jefferson; curiously, researching this subject we find that the movement is again afoot. "We have nothing in common with you people down south. Nothing," said Randy Bashaw, manager of the Jefferson State Forest Products lumber mill in the Trinity County [CA] hamlet of Hayfork. "The sooner we're done with all you people, the better." Interesting, but i digress.

On my grande finale american road trip, i drove down to the Gulf of Mexico and stopped to visit Jefferson Davis' post-bellum home in Biloxi, Mississippi. The artifacts room there has a number of his early writings on display, many from the 1830s-40s when he was waxing Jeffersonian-like about liberty, democracy, and the rule of law as foundation for all civilized men. i confessed to having been impressed; in that era, people wrote about these things with an eloquence and passion which few today are able to match. When finally the southern states decided there wasn't any point in continuing the slavery debate, Davis wrote just as eloquently for that cause. Make no mistake about it, slaves were property and for him there was no disconnect between government for and by the people, and his right to maintain his personal possessions free of all threat and harassment. We should likewise remember that 90% of the southern whites did not own slaves, but as with many northerners, the very idea that africans and (by then) afro-americans were human beings equal to themselves and deserving all the same rights was, quite simply, a travesty in the eyes of all things right and christian. The elimination of slavery was not synonymous with equality in the minds of many, many people. Sadly, there are some among us who still lag far behind the program, and i'm not sure i'd challenge President Obama if he decided they needed to be separated from the general population to spend some time in re-education camps. Or, let them secede. i'm sure Bono and friends wouldn't hesitate to update their anti-apartheid boycott tracks.

Checking out responses to Diddy's election vlogs, i'm really struck by how deeply they (the responders) are moved by Obama's campaign - his very presence. It's easy to say the election isn't about race, but that's only looking at one ridiculous angle: will white people vote for a black man? (Ridiculous because anyone who bases their vote on race or ethnicity is just politically immature, period.) Obama's pending victory is a major milestone in the amazing continuum of afro-americans' role in shaping the ever-evolving (devolving? let us hope not for much longer) US. This rant of Diddy's is a brilliant testimony to that history and what one should have learned from it. Ironically, this doesn't necessarily fall so far from what Jefferson Davis said 150 years ago: government rests on the consent of the governed. Caring and responsibility are implicit in that, but so too is empowerment. As Nelson Mandela famously wrote, only free men can negotiate. The spirit of President Davis is probably still pondering that concept, while the freedom train marches on and hopefully the best man wins.

More disillusionment. (Sorry, it's not the best way to start the week, i realize that.) The music festival scene in the UK is being consumed by a Beverly Hills company whose board members are also running Clear Channel. Deep-pocketed W associates, one of the more offensive pro censorship, corporate media godzillas. That the founder of Glastonbury "doesn't have a problem with the Bush thing" is the height of cynicism, given the politics of so many of the performers there and probably most of the people who attend. i guess all the fuss about whether Jay Z belonged on the Glasto stage was an easy way to steer clear of this issue... as long as everyone had a good time, who cares where the profit is going????

Musical Interlude from Malawi

Some hip hop from the Real Elements

Rock & Roll junkies alert! The museum at 'the place where it all went down' has finally opened. Another must see on my Return to American Fantasy tour.

Infinitely unqualified to write music reviews, but someone's just given me REM's new album and i gotta put in a plug, encourage anyone who thinks the band had become passée to listen to Accelerate. They are rocking with that combination of righteous anger and raucous irreverence that was so tempered down in Empire of the Sun (which i also like, but it's ballet music in comparison to the new release). Exceptional lyrics... is that Mr. Richard Perle Michael's singing about?

More on LSD. It's inventor, Albert Hoffman, has just died at the impressive age of 102. He made a substantial contribution to the history of consciousness, providing a way to mass produce something that turned out to be extremely beneficial for a lot of people to be taking in sync at a particular point in history. The rapidly increasing living standard in countries where the use of LSD exploded made all sorts things possible that probably would have been missed were it not for Mr. Natural.... or they just wouldn't have happened (i mean, what's an acid test without the acid?)

i can't say how many times i've used this drug - 'many' would definitely cover it - i had a chemistry teacher who believed it was helpful for students in visualizing electron orbits and molecular structures... it certainly does pique (peak?) one's visual abilities. i think the main achievement of the psychedelic movement was that a lot of dots were connected over space and time, maybe just in time, since these connections laid the foundations for so much of the environmental work that's managed to keep us one step ahead of total crash and burn. Nowadays, it seems like LSD is one of many designer drugs, no longer carrying much weight as an extreme experience. The cultural-consciousness element has become blaisé. "It's work here is done?" No, that can't be right. There's always got to be room for more space.

Grateful Dead Archives

Tegnap este, a Morcheeba koncertbe mentem és nagyon, nagyon jól volt!! After the show, a friend celebrating his 19^th birthday sent me this text message: hope you too had something like orgasm there! No kidding. Ross Godfrey’s guitar playing is right up there with the best of the lyrical guitarists of our age and their new French vocalist was excellent, a perfect fit for Morcheeba's swooning, bluesy tunage. The ticket cost more than i paid to see the Rolling Stones last summer, but no complaints. It’s probably about as close as i’ll come on this continent to a traditional Bay Area musical experience, which is to say that i came out in a different – much improved - state of consciousness than i had going in. “What more is there?” asks the closeted rock & roll junkie, the languishing deadhead, the misplaced citizen leaning towards misanthropy.

What more? Indeed, there are always the archives…. tangible proof that the power of good music never stops. Last week, the Grateful Dead announced they are gifting their archives to my alma mater, the University of California, Santa Cruz. i’ve always been proud to be a UCSC grad, but perhaps never moreso than now, when they’re about to become Dead Central. i’ll be damned. A pedestal of my own counter-culture foundations is being enshrined for research posterity, it’s an exciting thing to have happen. For those of similar persuasion, or who otherwise might be curious about why i’m going all gaga over the folder files maintained by what’s still called a 1960s rock band, it appears that the press conference (which i watched live on iclips) will go up on the Dead’s website soon – check here for it. The press conference was actually hilarious, with questions like “How will my girlfriend find her ticket order envelopes?” and “Bobby, will you be archiving a pair of your cut-off shorts?” For more info about the archive, check here at UCSC’s Special Collections,

The librarians said they’re already getting requests for loaning the material, so even though the band themselves have stopped touring, their wild collection of art and sundry will continue to travel North America. Hopefully beyond, as well. It’s fun to think of people lining up outside Moscow’s Pushkin Museum for an exhibit called The Grateful Dead: LSD and American Anarchist Experience. Just think of the changes in consciousness that could bring about – mind-boggling possibilities. Or maybe it’s too late for the “dead phenomenon” to have that kind of impact, since it’s one of those “you just had to be there” kind of things? Yet i’ve got this friend here, a Brit, always quizzing me about shows and personages, etc. lamenting the fact that he missed it all… but on a deeper level, he’s totally got it, even though he never experienced a live show. The magic is in the mystery unfolding, i guess. For those of us who drove from Santa Cruz all over California to share in that particular bit of magic, this recent news leaves us with nothing else to do but smile, smile, smile.

One of the strange things about logging into the net from here is that the majority of ads on many sites are strictly in Hungarian - except when they're in Spanish; skype usually opens up in Romanian; google does this random thing where i sometimes get a French search engine, sometimes German, most often Hungarian; and youtube once offered me the most viewed videos in Japan - go figure. Nothing like an eclectic experience to start one's day, eh? (for those who appreciate Canadian question tags). In those moments - and they do occur - when i feel nostalgic for some homegrown american culture and deadnet doesn't want to load, i have to look elsewhere, though sometimes net offerings just cough things up somewhat randomly.... or a friend will offer advice. Here's a truly astonishing clip by Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir covering Sweet Home Alabama.

Congratulations Zimbabwe

The news from Africa this morning is apparently good news. Robert Mugabe's Zanu PF has been heavily defeated in the election and the new president will likely be Morgan Tsvangirai, of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). In several countries, mock elections were staged outside Zimbabwean embassies, since one of the government's edicts was that people in the diaspora were not allowed to cast votes. The MDC and other opposition parties worked hard for a victory over dictator Mugabe, under repressive conditions and a climate of both state and opposition violence for months leading up to the elections. Tsvangirai himself was beat up by the police last fall, which predictably just served to inflate his determination. There's a short interview with him on the Guardian site, worth taking a look at just to get an idea of who he is (at least compared to Mugabe, who certainly does not have files on human rights violations scattered around his office).

After what happened in Kenya earlier this year, and given conditions in Zimbabwe itself, the concern about the country collapsing into post-electoral violence is substantial, especially if Mugabe declares himself the winner. The guy's campaign slogan was Get Behind the Fist, which succinctly characterizes his own political evolution over the past 30 years. i remember when the Zanu-Zapu coalition put Mugabe in power in 1980, in the first elections following independence from Britain, and the future of the country looked pretty good then. When i was there in 1989, Zimbabwe was full of refugees from apartheid South Africa, and i spoke with groups of them in Harare and elsewhere who all asserted they wanted their future to be free, as the Zimbabweans' was. The forests on the border with Mozambique were in flames, and SWAPO was still fighting to the east. Yeah, at that time, Zimbabwe was relatively safe and peaceful. Yet, like so many of the post-independence rulers in sub-saharan Africa, Mugabe became increasingly invested in his own omnipotency, driving the country's economy and political system into the ground. So today, there are Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa in a kind of reverse twist of history.

Well, let's hope for the best following this elections and that Tsvangirai will succeed in bringing some tranquility by initiating programs and projects that reverse the country's tragic decline. Zimbabwe is a stunningly beautiful country, the people are gracious and warm, and the music is outstanding. Leaving off here with a video clip from one of my favorite Zimbabwean musicians, Leonard Dembo. who sadly died of AIDS earlier this decade. i had the opportunity to see him play with Jonah Moyo at a football field outside some little town near the Great Zimbabwe ruins, and it was a spirited night, to say the least. Zimbabweans drink a sorghum beer that can have the color of a strawberry shake - it's cheap and gets you drunk pretty fast, though not to the point of forgetting how to dance :-) At that time, back in the days of cassettes, both Dembo and Moyo had only recorded in small local studios and tapes were everywhere for about ZW$1-2 each. As Ziggy Marley says, "If you don't have good music, you don't stand a chance." So here's to the future of Zimbabwe, where the music won't let you stand still - hopefully better days ahead.

Thom Yorke of Radiohead has a piece in today's Guardian about changing habits in the interest of slowing down climate change/reducing greenhouse gases. As i often notice in the British blogosphere (much more than in its American counterpart), readers' comments prove to be equally if not more insightful than the article being commented on. And of course, you can't put anything out there anymore that doesn't get scrutinized for contradictions (a good thing). Yorke structures his commentary around how to dodge the wicked witch's "I'm melting... melting" gloom and doom mindset. The fact that so many people can wax knowledgeable on this issue is perhaps the most uplifting aspect of it all.