Here I am in that bit of pre-perfromance time, the few hours between soundcheck and performance that I usually try, but fail, to take a siesta. This particular night is different. Since the stage isn’t set up for video my VJ computer is unemployed. A rare chance to poop out another blog.
Last weekend in Norway Filastine expanded and we were suddenly three, with Amelie (cello) and Nova (voice). We stayed an extra day after the performance in Stavanger with no plan for where to sleep, where to go, or how to get there, but with the singular purpose of experiencing a fjord.
A contract worker from Romania who just left his job at an off-shore oil rig was our angel. The morning following the concert he brought us on the stunning hike to pulpit rock, a 2000 foot precipice dropping to Lysefjord. See embarrassing foto.
Norway is quietly drilling itself into being Saudia Arabia on ice. In fact the trickle down from those riches funded our performance (government subsidies for festivals), it’s why we can be 3 in Norway, but tonight I am alone in Greece.
So, I’ve officially nowhere to go tomorrow and haven’t had a moment to research any plans for these free days before the flight to Russia.
A tiny village near the sea would be perfect. Maybe those still exist in Greece? With old people who press their own olive oil and goats grazing in the hills. Some coastal place with no euro-trash discos nor luxury hotel towers. I have faith it can be found.
Each nightfall brings a wave of deep mammalian terror. Total darkness, total solitude. We are programmed to fear this, just another link in the food chain. Scrawny naked ape so vulnerable sleeping on the ground, bigger animals with claws and teeth all about.
I find an an abandoned canoe on this glacial lake where no road arrives. How did it get here? A paddle made from chunks of wood pushes me towards the other shore. The sky turns black and the lake erupts into to milky green whitecaps. Maybe this janky canoe will leak or capsize in the storm. I’d die of hypothermia long before reaching the shore. A corpse would float to shore and be eaten by scavengers. I paddle furiously into the wind, feeling so tiny, and also so fucking happy.
After a few days my food runs out. And this place it better off without me anyway. It’s time to retrace steps back the road, fording rivers, wading through bogs.
Back at the highway there is a coyote with a panicked expression trying to cross the road. His eyes are golden, his fur dense and soft; he gets close to sniff and decides that I’m less a threat than the passing traffic. When the road is free of cars I clap and stomp to spook him across. We continue to stare at each for awhile. I feel profoundly apologetic for this highway and it’s cars, which, even in this most remote and protected place, circumscribe his territory and threaten his life.
I hope someday the coyotes, bears, and their allies encroach on human landscapes, that every trip to the corner store is an opportunity for attack by a mountain lion, that forests sprawl to swallow the cities.
The odd concrete ruins are called “the flats” and can be found between Gold Hill and Silver City, Nevada. Both these towns seems to have a population of less than ten.
The pioneer graveyard (and rusted car hulk) is in on the edge of Virginia City, which once rivaled San Francisco for being the biggest city in the western United States. Mark Twain started his writing career here. After pilfering everything possible from beneath the ground the people went elsewhere, leaving only their gravestones and toxic industrial landscapes. Coyotes and hawks are quick on the reconquista.
I had a lot of doubts about writing publicly about my visit to rural America, so didn’t publish this for the last two weeks. I traveled there to be at the side of my brother in a hospital ICU. Now that he’s recovering so I feel less awkward about publishing.
We never know when some unanticipated event will suddenly trump everything. All the stressful details of life that we find so obsessive yesterday are today just background noise.
Simultaneous to the national debate about health care I’ve been experiencing the very personal results of this nation’s sad health deficit. The state of my brother parallels the state of the nation. The sickness of a body and the sickness of the body politic.
My brother is partner of a small business, but also waits tables at a corporate chain restaurant for extra income and the health insurance plan. He has contracted a sickness too expensive for their insurance policy so avoided going to the hospital for treatment. He was finally brought to the hospital in an ambulance on the edge of death.
A flat screen TV decorates a wall in every room of this hospital. Since the real windows are sealed shut, this is a patient’s only view to the world, their only sensory input, their fresh air. What is on TV this week? A national debate over health care reform. It shows a president defending his modest plan against an army of skeptics. Town hall meetings are held across America where angry mobs shout down the politicians for all the wrong reasons. The look like the same angry mobs who blocked desegregation. It’s disgusting to see those with privilege battling to preserve it.
My days are spent in a room that looks strangely like my studio, the same collection of computer screens, blinking electronic boxes, and cables all converging at one central object. The difference is that the hub of all this activity isn’t my computer, but my brother on life-support.
It doesn’t help my depression that the little I’ve seen of this town is a carbon copy of every other Suburbia, USA. Burger King, Subway, and Starbucks have beachfront property right next to the 4-lane roads, set back behind more ample parking lots you have Petco, Home Depot, Safeway. Spelled out in identical plastic signs are an instantly forgettable cluster of check cashing spots, laundromats, and chinese take outs.
Despite the good weather everything everywhere is blasting air condition as if electricity, and fossil fuels that generate it, were god’s special gift to this generation of americans, to burn up without regard for it’s global impacts. Nobody walks, nobody bikes, people move themselves only in super-sized autos.
It may seems frivolous to get my panties in a twist about global resource consumption when someone’s life is in danger, but the lifestyle here is putting life itself in danger.
Imagine for a second that the arab nationalist movements of the 50′s & 60′s had given way to progressive governments instead of either US “client states” or fundamentalist theocracies. Forget wahabism, shia fascists, stalinist wingnuts like Saddam, and mafiosos like Mubarak, and most definitely forget the nouveau-riche feudal city-states of Dubai. Reserve the deepest part of your memory hole for the apartheid state of Israel and the eviction of the Palestinian people.
(forgot to post this because it’s so damn forgettable)
Buraka Som Sistema are exactly what i expected, and those expectations were high. They only disappointed when stooping to pandering stunts, at one point inviting a pre-selected group of talentless cute girls from the audience to flood the stage. These few moments aside it was phenomenally good. The big surprise for me this year was Gaslamp Killer, a deejay from LA that ups the stakes. Local resident and friend Cardopusher was great as always, and deserving of any good things that come his way. Omar Suleyman less interesting live than on his lofi cassettes, but still enchanting. Mulatu Astatke also excellent. A festival with even one good artist is unusual, so half a dozen is stellar programming.
The sideshow of Sonar is seeing the world’s party people bumbling around the Raval, unable to speak the language, getting lost, sunburned, pickpocketed, and treated rudely but still managing to have a great time. Party people are tough, able to go without sleep for days and have fun in the most punishing of circumstances.
Most depressing part of any festival in Spain is the mountains of garbage generated. The mediterranean nations were taking a siesta when the rest of europe went green. Would be so fucking easy to provide recycling containers, or, adapting to the local custom of throwing everything directly on the ground, have the cleanup crews sort this calf-deep carpet of debris, 90% of which is plastic cup, when they sweep it up.
The streets of Barcelona are always full of pakistani immigrants selling cans of beer, during a festival the business is very heavy. A friend says that it’s possible to see the economy of Pakistan jump up to 1% the day after a large public event in Barcelona (Sonar, Merce, football games) as the foreign wire transfers briefly boost the economy.
I did a number of interviews for tv, radio, and print. Have a peek around if you speak Italian, French, or Spanish. It’d be the death of my street cred to break my exile from the anglo-american hegemony.
While we getting frivolous, peeps in Iran were getting their head’s cracked. Those in power say the (fraudulent) results are simply god’s will. On the contrary I see the hand of god quite clearly hucking a molotov cocktail into the basij headquarters. Or the foot of god acting via this woman below
If you haven’t seen the film Manufactured Landscapes then please find a way. It’s a documentary on the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky. His photos, and this film about them, show many of the unseen processes of the extraction-manufacturing-shipping-waste cycle. It’s a work that smacks you out of frivolity and deep into a meditation on the state of things.
At one point the film follows him to the shipbreaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh. It reminded me to dig up by own photos of this same place, taken in late 1997, just found them in a shoebox, here they are.
Short explanation in case you never heard of this place: A number of scrap steel companies own pieces of these tidal oceanic mud-flats. The companies bid on obsolete or exhausted cargo ships. The ship are piloted with a skeleton crew to the bay of bengal. At the moment of the monthly high tide they drive ship at top speed towards the coast, going aground in the mud. As the tide recedes the scrap company dispatches an army of desparate men who rip the ship into pieces by hand, using nothing but oxy-acetylene torches and sledge-hammers. The pieces are carried by teams who chant to keep synchronized as they wade through the thigh-high mud and oil sludge.
In Stereofonic Streetscape Blowout from Dirty Bomb you can hear the sound from those two fotos of the tower being ripped from the top of the ship. There is only a short usable bit of recording because I lost my senses and yelled something like “holy fucking shit” over most of it.
After about an hour onsite I was expelled by some security thugs. They didn’t want people documenting the shipbreaking yards because it’s a notorious environmental and labor disaster. For me it also illustrates a larger theme- about how we make, transport, and discard things, about relative values and hidden costs, about the grand works of man and their undoings.
By way of introduction, Barceloneta is triangle-shaped barrio bordered on one side by the port of Barcelona and on the other by the sea, historic home to fisherman, dockworkers, and other working class families.
The fishing industry is gone, the port has undergone a Miami-style face lift, the beach is mobbed by tourists, but somehow the neighborhood has survived this far maintaining local character and traditions.
A few nights ago they celebrated la fiesta de los coros. People associate via local bars into bands of a few dozen for a weekend of revelry. In short, these gangs and their hired bands parade from their home bar to the other bars to show off, then go away to a hotel out of town for a few days of constant intoxication, then return and parade again. They parade for hours, fueled by some cocktail of drugs, traditionally accompanied by natty brass marching bands, but nowadays there are many backed by brazilian-style batucadas. The gangs terminate their parade around midnight at their home bar, with a bunch of firecrackers and small explosives blowing up overhead, or sometimes a flaming logo, or a street filled with foam or some other trick.
It’s a potlatch style festival, like mardi gras, carnival or even the d.i.y. parts of Burning Man. The participants try to throw the best party, have the best band, show off their costumes, and share some dangerous & impressive fireworks display. Like any good street party it’s chaotic, blurry, auto-organized, and with almost no presence of authority.
These people have somehow weathered a lot of bullshit city plans and gentrification, but the biggest challenge might be arriving just now. There is a new landmark in the neighborhood, the Hotel Vela, a glass skyscraper imitating the sail-shaped hotel in Dubai. It’s plopped right on the coast, 5 stars of ugliness sitting atop a new shopping mall. It’s hard to find someone happy about it. For instance today I got an email invitation to a public action meeting, some excerpts:
S’ha alçat en l’horitzó de la ciutat una torre d’assalt. L’Hotel Vela. L’Hotel Vela culmina l’estratègia del “model Barcelona”: la transformació despòtica d’un territori urbà sotmès a l’interès privat, l’extracció de benefici econòmic, i el control policial que aquestes activitats demanen, amb el recurs a un sentit comú neoliberal que no ignora el mesquí interès quotidià, i la brutal trajectòria.
L’Hotel Vela és un agent de l’extensió d’aquest desert.
(……..)
Alguns volem dinamitar l’Hotel Vela.
(……..)
T’hem afegit a la llista de distribució de la campanya Bomba a l’Hotel Vela…..
It basically says to the the hotel as a tower of assault, the final touch in the ongoing program of converting territory from commons to private for the sake of enriching certain peoples, and brings with it the policing necessary to secure these new private upscale spaces, etc… Later it follows: Some of us are going to dynamite this hotel. Then the bulk of the email which talks about the meeting plans.
And from the end of the message: you are on the mailing list to Bomb the Hotel Vela, if you wish to unsubscribe etc..
It’s one quick solution. Less messy would be to hire David Copperfield to make it simply disappear.
The below foto I took during construction, from the rocks below where I used to sit and practice darbouka. The grafitti has been replaced by a giant “W Hotel” advertisement, and the skeleton now tarted-up with glass. Now I go elsewhere to play my instrument, but am running out of places.
This building is personal for me in another way. The night of St. Joan 2007 I was explaining my pipe dream of a floating container-ship city to Mireia while sitting in the port. I looked up and realized that in fact we were sitting in the shadow of a cargo ship with the hand-painted name of “Freetown.” Later I found out it was abandoned by a bankrupt Indian shipping company. Soon after I brought out a friend with more arts/government connections to see the ship, but they had closed the entire zone, including public streets. We were turned around and told there’d be no access for a few years. By now Freetown is likely scuttled.
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