Passing through the saltwater swamps near the French-Spanish border the bullet train stalls on a slender land bridge between two frothing inland seas. The passengers look at each other uncomfortably as our carriage rattles in the storm. Surrounded by so much wind and water this futuristic armature of steel and glass feels suddenly frail. Pink flamingoes cower nearby, I want to invite them inside. Here is a video from the same area a few years ago, exploring the same area by bike in better weather.
When not staring out the window there is time to watch some films. Here is an unlikely plot: I get very famous, then leverage that fame to create an entirely fictional shadow Filastine. This puppet artist has a mission to create music that is empty, derivative, superficial. But surprise! the public loves this hollow alter-ego. The press fawn, he sells out concerts, and is hired to produce Madonna’s next record. Unrealistic? Only if you haven’t seen the Banksy film. It’s a hoax so enormous it would make P.T. Barnum blush.
In the Kebab shop last night the LCD was tuned to a french pop music video station. Pop music videos also look like mockumentaries, like comic imitation of themselves, or the background videos of karaoke. Do allegedly real stars now seem more false than a deliberately false artist? In any case Mr. Brainwash, or his backers, deserves all the cash he can rake in.
If you find yourself alone on a remote island, next to a beheaded statue of saint, standing between sheer cliffs and a raging bush fire, is it a sign? A spiritual metaphor? A Werner Herzog set?
Stranger yet is to board a metal cylinder a few hours later and shoot through the sky, crossing half of planet earth. The other 500 people in the airplane staring into their own personal entertainment systems, as content as babies with pacifier.
Halfway through the third hollywood movie we pass 3k meters over Somalia, where Islamists battle with qat-crazed warlords for a few hectares of dusty ruins.
This is where nearly every science fiction writer got it wrong, the future and the past exist concurrently.
Vacationers overfly unfolding genocides while watching the fictionalized violence of a film whose budget exceeds the GDP of the nations scrolling below them.
I used the gps on my mobile phone to navigate into the maw of a sleeping volcano to visit villages founded by runaways slaves, villages little changed in the last three centuries. There are still no roads or cables that connect them with the rest of the humanity. This green caldera is called Mafate, named for one of the founding chiefs who escaped the europeans. He was later killed by a bounty hunter, his legacy survives.
It’s paralyzing to think about all the simultaneous realities, the bushman and the salaryman, the campesino and the derivatives investor, you, me, and the everyone else on a crowded hunk of dirt and water hurtling through space.
While I was off feeling superior and sipping red wine in europe, firmly convinced that the American south was a cultural wasteland populated by bigots, they went and elected a black president and developed great taste in music. Believe it. In Nashville, Tennessee, I witnessed 4k peeps in a hypnotized rutting trance to good beats.
But we have to consider which part is the music and which part is the cult of personality around the DJ behind them, because Bassnectar, aka Lorin Ashton, has smartly hijacked the fanatical crowds of the jam-band scene. Girls swoon, guys yearn to bump fists with him, they all scream and yell as if he were the Beatles. The fans fly or drive from distant cities, some even follow his tour like a la Grateful Dead. Lucky me, I got the opening slot for about ten dates (deeps thanks for the invitation!).
It was an unlikely place to find myself, an artist deep usually in the margins of the anglo music business, dead center of an exploding American popular culture. It felt like I’d parachuted in from another civilization: a culture that may be older and wiser, but also hidebound and phlegmatic. This was more dynamic than not only Europe, but also the US coastal hipster mire. The Do’s and Don’ts of Vice magazine were not heeded there; fixie bikes and ironic mustaches haven’t taken hold. The fairer half of this mob looked like Daisy Duke at a rave. The menfolk mostly Joe college dudes, a sea of backwards ball-caps. At first I was terrified, they looked just like the chaps who beat the shit out of me during my few miserable teenage years in Oklahoma. But instead of fists in my face it was fists in the air. This was the irony- the world spins, places change, culture flourishes in unexpected places….
Places. The south is full of tiny livable oases, cute old clapboard or brick towns as old as dixie, locally-owned shops and people who smile. But each oasis is surrounded by a thick ring of hell, an evil moat of strip malls, tire shops, highway overpasses, and parking lots. These soul-destroying suburban landscapes seem built as if the city planners & architects were a committee of sentient cars, not human beings….
Human beings. They are largely classified as black or white down south. Seems like it’d be simpler than a place like Barcelona, which crams together Catalans, Pakistanis, Moroccans, Spaniards, South Americans, and white euro riffraff…. but it ain’t. There is a hangover of racial injustice to big to be written about in this blog. It extends into every visible detail of life, from the color composition of concert audiences (ouch!) to the razor-sharp division of labor. It is a situation so omnipresent that it’s difficult not to quickly become numb or complicit.
There were many unexpected pleasures on the trip, from Bluegrass music in the honky-tonks of Nashville to the second-line brass bands on the streets of of New Orleans, the beautiful urban trees and gardens, and the surprising amount of wild forests and swamps. The US is one of the few nations increasing it’s forest coverage every year, as the population shifts urban and rural land is abandonded, mother nature repo’s her property.
I’m digesting this big dose of americana while sitting on a balcony overlooking a ramshackle of sunset-tinted roofs spilling towards the sea, on St. Denis, Reunion Island. If you own own a map that is to scale, Reunion will figure as a dot, not a shape, in the ocean between Madagascar and Mauritius. Last night I performed in a festival here, the last stop of a two-month tour. Strangely enough it felt like a more typical Filastine gig.
Below are some fotos of things I did along the way. From the streets of Hamburg with a multi-channel pirate-radio bike enabled soundswarm, stops in Berlin, Holland, Burning Man, a string of left coast gigs and camping, the liquidation of my old life in the Seattle, the surprising southern tour w/ Bassnectar, a mad three day roadtrip into the new mexican desert, directly to the remotest part of the Indian Ocean. Time to decelerate.
At just this moment the azan (muslim call to prayer) is echoing across the valley. Allah o akbar. Not sure if god is great, but life certainly is.
Imagine a colony of fifty thousand earthlings stranded on a desert planet. The host planet is devoid of life, not even a fly or blade of grass. It is deadly hot by day; dust blizzards and mini-tornados erupt at random.
The isolation has given root to a new religion, the people revere a neon-lit wicker man atop a tower, a sort of pagan Ka’aba, around whom they’ve built their city in a perfect circular radius. Every possible permutation of hippie mashup spirituality thrives in syncretic mix with the Man worship, buddhist scientologists, sufi tarot shamans, even more esoteric sects.
In despair at never returning to the home planet the population has become sex-mad. People fuck in public, walk around naked, and erect giant lingams.
The only music recording that survived from earth was a CD compilation of techno classics, which they blast from any possible speaker. A new indigenous music has developed called “womp”, it’s followers dress burlesque and don’t comb their hair.
The desert planet has massive petroleum reserves, with nothing else to do, the residents have become expert in petro-art. Flamethrowers adorn every object. Objects are blown up for the sheer pleasure.
Vehicles have transformed into fantastical totemic animals, a bus becomes a dragon, a car becomes an insect, cruising slowly across the moonscape as riders jump on and off in a mass-transit roulette.
The castaways live as if each moment were the last moment of their life.
I’ve tried writing this piece about the Sound Swarm in Hamburg a half dozen times. It won’t come out. It was too tremendous a labor, should have written in installments.
Summary: the Sound Swarm is a rolling loudspeaker orkestra, a loose choreography of bicycles whose together form a distributed mobile sound system to be used for direct action interventions or just ripping a whole in the fabric of everyday life.
Aggregated into sub-swarms according to our tools: ants with megaphones hats, birds with home-made resonant 5-gallon bucket speaker systems, fish with a collection of 80′s boomboxes, and bees with megaphones mounted on tall crutches. Each of these groups was fed a distinct audio channel via four fm transmitters mounted on the queen bee, a type of chariot built from two tall bikes with a cockpit in the center for the sound controller. The queen is armed with so many batteries, cables, gadgets, and antennas that it looked more lunar landing craft than anything for use on this planet. One of the festival curators called it “something from the next century”. We can only hope she is right, that the art of the future will be made from junk, powered by human sweat, and defy the law.
Being in the cockpit had to qualify as one of my personal favorite “performance” experiences, as we rolled off curbs, over cobblestones, through grass, dodging police, sometimes cowering under a plastic sheet during brief rain showers, while controlling five-channels of sound spread across thirty moving speakers in a chaotic mass of hundreds of bicycles pouring through the dark streets of an unfamiliar city.
Like any worthwhile performance, the police department provides the last act with a siren-lights-as-disco-party crescendo. Have a look at this newspaper piece. Later there will be some video of the performance/action. Until then these stills of the preparation.
I give up on trying to describe this more, just want to say thanks to Kampnagel for being a festival willing to take risks, and to this iteration of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination for being a team solid enough to realize such an idea.
We all know Nike’s shit reputation, to the point that their swoosh has become something like a symbol for labor exploitation. Nike may be the most aggressive about wage-explotation, but the others follow closely.
I usually end up shod in adidas because their logo is the least offensive. Looks less like a brand than some harmless racing stripes, although mine are about to get improved with some duct tape.
Empire is not some kind of extraterrestrial entity, a worldwide conspiracy of governments, financial networks, technocrats, and multinational coroporations. Empire is everywhere things are working. Everywhere the status quo reigns.
We were born inside the catastrophe and with it we have drawn up a strange and peaceable relation of habitat.
In “traditional societies” isolation was the harshest sentence that could be passed on a member of the community. It is now the common condition.
But what is most striking… is not the arrogance of the empire but the weakness of the counter-attack.
The quotes above are from a book titled The Call, last week I played a benefit for it’s alleged authors. They are often called the “Tarnac Nine” after their home of Tarnac, a quaint village in France’s most remote & least populated region. Flowers line the hamlet’s empty cobblestone streets, in every way it seems the least likely place to start the coming insurrection. But that’s not what the French state thought when they sent 350 paramilitary police on a raid in November of 2008.
They are accused of writing a pair incendiary books (The Call, The Coming Insurrection), and some acts of sabotage. They state’s case is weak, and futher undermined by a sympathetic French public that has seen this raid for exactly what it was: a PR stunt by the Sarkozy regime. Le Monde even gave the defendants a full page editorial to write whatever they like. Imagine for a moment the New York times giving an op-ed page to some accused insurrectionary terrorists. There has been very little media on the Tarnac raid in the anglo press, although this below is a gem-
Maybe it has something to do with revenge?
Remember back when the world’s leaders couldn’t plot in peace, when any meeting of the powerful was marred by the racket of helicopters, exploding tear gas canisters and shouts of the multitude? The vengeance of the state toward this rebellion has arrived, nearly ten years after the high-water mark of our collective resistance. Revenge is a dish best served cold, but it’s more likely that the current global wave of repression is arriving tardy because of the torpid velocity of police investigations, compounded by a lack of evidence, or in many cases even a significant crime.
Maybe I’m too cynical or paranoid. It could be true that the French state is so naive & delusional they they honestly believe that these peeps were on the verge of fomenting a violent revolution.
In any case it’s important to support the accused. Although it’s even more important that others pick up the torch, figuratively and literally. ¡Venga jaleo!
Tunisia is a small nation with a ridiculous amount of tourism, but the impact is small because crackers are penned up in fantasy-island prison complexes called “Zone Touristique”. Big respect to the genius who dreamed up tourist apartheid, the walled compounds, the excursions only under the careful watch of wardens. The only flaw: the financial benefits only line the pockets of a few (see below).
Driving anywhere in rural Tunisia forces you to pass directly through the center of an uncountable number of miserable towns. They are notable only for their consistent lack…. here you will find neither parks nor plazas, there are no shade trees, no space for pedestrians or bikes, the buildings have no thermal mass for moderating the intense heat, and of course there are no solar panels in this sun-baked desert. Reminds me of the bleak prairie states where I grew up, swapping the green of grass for that of Islam.
Each town does have at least one supersize billboard featuring the crooked mug of Mr. Permapresident. Aside from self-aggrandizing propaganda, there is one other thing the state provides in spades: police. The medieval custom of city guards is still in vigor, your first clue of an approaching village is the pair of omnipotent cops, oddly trimmed in white patent-leather, conducting security stops.
Beyond the forgettable towns, deeper into the desert, the landscape swallows humanity’s dull folly. Stunning salt plains, decomposing mountains, views so wide and deep that you can see the curvature of the earth. Palm-shaded oases nourished from tricking creeks, stolen swims in hidden lakes and waterfalls. Homeless camels, sprinting rodents, many birds. You can sleep in a palm hut, in a mud cave, or in a faded colonial hotel, in any case you will likely be the only guest.
Another pleasure is Tunisia’s distance from the straightjacket of wahabism, the current pop sensation from the Saudi crucible. Magic still exists here, or at least low-income people who believe in magic, if the number of Zaouias scattered across the land are any indication. A Zaouia is a sufi mystical sites that mark the tomb of a marabout (saint). Active mysticism means that music, dance (and often trance) survive within their original social context, not as a packaged re-creation.
I don’t usually mention gigs, this will be an exception. Le Fest took place in the desanctified cathedral of Romano-Moorish design at the acropolium of Carthage…. AND it was a perfect audience. Love it when people cheer and whistle while I play, especially when it’s an informed public that can trainspot instruments & rhythms.
This was recently broadcast on various Catalunya tv stations. I avoided seeing it because interviews of self are always godawful embarrassing. This is a rare exception because the producers, Walkie Talkie Films, have crafted it so well.
Look at a map of the world, now put your finger on the place about which you know absolutely nothing, a place you imagine to be perfectly empty of any significance. You are probably pointing at central Siberia. At least in Mongolia you might imagine yurts and yaks, in the ‘stans you imagine men with beards fighting in the mud, or for instance the vast interiors of Canada you imagine moose, tar sands, or eskimos. I’m currently in the place least popular in the euro-american imagination. What is here?
Bigness. The scale of everything in Siberia confirms the theory that people, given nearly limitless space, will supersize everything. Restaurants are built to host at least a hundred souls, spoons are so large they barely fit in your mouth, roads wide, sidewalks sometimes even wider. Maybe humans build cultures in proportion to the sky- the more sky we see, the larger we fabricate an environment to rival it?
Sky. Tyumen airport has as many helicopters as airplanes. North of here, in the oil fields, it’s impossible to build or maintain landing strips. Ditto for roads. It is the very definition of isolation, all about bogs and forest, mostly birch mixed with thin coniferous trees. When not frozen solid it’s a paradise for insects: ticks that carry lime disease, fat mosquitos with dangling legs, furious ants and many varieties of spiders. I imagine there were once bear, but between sport and the chinese gall-bladder market, you don’t see any bear or other wild mammals. Sad to observe that, even here, humans have crowded out the rest of the species.
There are semi-abandoned wooden villages an hour from the city. “Semi” because while we explored a derelict grain factory an angry man chased us us off. The houses in these villages are made of logs, over their lifetimes (hundreds of years) the log houses have developed a slant following the direction of prevailing winds, looking a little bit like those model houses featured in the famous nuclear blast tests, frozen in that brief moment before they totally disintegrate.
Cold place/Cold war. I kept my mouth shut when the angry old man arrived. He lived his whole life struggling to meet wheat quotas for the motherland, sent his sons to fight in cold war battles against the proxy armies of the Yankee imperialists. Later his country “loses” to the west, embraces crony capitalism, and leaves him without any retirement or social security to live his old age like a feudal peasant. Then, adding insult to injury, some obnoxious american dj comes to this remote corner of the world to trespass in his grain silo.
May 9 in Russia is the big national holiday, ostensibly WWII victory day, nowadays a general excuse to be proud to be Russian. There is much goose-stepping of soldiers and waving of flags. Even Stalin get’s a comeback on this day. Despite his pact with Hitler, the gulags, and fast-tracking the USSR from revolutionary to authoritarian, people still fancy parading with his photo.
Gulags. The Long Walk is a worthwhile read, it rivals Shackleton’s tale as the ultimate “indomitable will of humanity” story. It concerns the escape of three prisoners from a Stalinist work camp as they walk across siberia, the gobi desert, and the himalayas to arrive in India.
Thinking about their travel makes me feel sheepish sitting here on the Trans-Siberian train, a mere 40 hour journey to Moscow in a comfy compartment, with two stern women guarding the wagon, tea service, and a power outlet. As a mild form of punishment I do have to share this compartment with a boyish professional boxer who insists on showing me pixelated fotos on his mobile phone of every girl he’s ever fucked, plus videos of them clubbing or hanging out on Thai beaches. You would think this could only last a few minutes, but in Siberia everything is so goddamn massive that the unwanted multimedia show has lasted most of the afternoon.
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