Empty streets at night

Sometimes I cannot sleep, so I get up and drive around town. I like the cold air getting into the car through the small opening of the windows. It is always cold in this place, even in Summer. On these occasions I seldom encounter anyone in the streets. Well, there is this homeless drunken man shouting his frustrations out in Main and 3rd, and some teenagers around the drugstore at Creek Road, bored and up to no good. I always listen to Tom Waits on my nocturnal trips, his broken voice matching well the dark and windy streets of my town at night. I have not failed to notice how the slow tempo of his ‘Soldier´s things’ goes in perfect sync with the blinking traffic lights of Main Square. I sometimes stop the car there and listen to the song while letting my sight wander around the place. Then I sip once or twice at my coffee, start the engine, and come back home.

Photo: ‘Insomnia in a small town’, Duncan, BC, 2007 © Len Langevin

Lontano da dove?

Lately, my family and some friends have been asking me on a regular basis: Why do you have to go so far away? There wasn´t any closer place to move to? I am often tempted to answer the same way that character did in the Jewish story giving its title to Lontano da dove, the amazing account by Claudio Magris of the Jewish cultural legacy after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[1] Facing all sorts of difficulties in the country he is living in, a Jewish man plans to move away, and visits a rabbi to get his blessings before the trip. When the rabbi learns where the man wants to travel to, he asks: ‘Why so far?’. ‘Far from where?’‘, replies the man, touching on the errant condition of the Jewish people.

Sometimes, we take for granted we know where our home is, and even where it is natural to feel ourselves at home, and perhaps this is true for most people. However, some of us are not so sure our place ought to be close to where your ancestors lived and died, where your mother tongue is spoken, where most of your family lives, where you were born. Some of us are voluntary expatriates, still looking for the landscape, faces, sounds and atmospheres that may help us to recognize a spot as our own. In particular, we do not care about the nationalities or ethnic origin of the people surrounding us, working with us, or where the food, the films, the music we consume comes from. We are promiscuous, culturally promiscuous. We see as a positive thing to be constantly borrowing items from different cultures -as much as possible- to contruct our own. We are post-national in our minds. We abhor cultural endogamy. Actually, we value the availability and interaction of all this diversity in the same place. Therefore, paramount to us is to be surrounded by heterogeneity, and to be able to thrive there where a given ethnicity, culture, religion, skin colour or family name do not imply any advantages or disadvantages from the outset, where opportunities are there if you are determined enough, where every possible path in life is not already set, where choosing your own way does not raise eyebrows in disapproval.

Lontano? I will be closer to myself.

[1] Claudio Magris, Lontano da dove. Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-oriental, Torino, 1971.

Photo: Shadows and reflections, 2007 © Eric Flexyourhead

Puppet minorities

‘If we collaborate with the army, the terrorists try to kill us. If we collaborate with the terrorists, he will kill us’. Thus speaks to a foreign journalist the inhabitant of a Kurdish village in South-Eastern Turkey.[1] The terrorists are the PKK, the guerrilla of the Turkish kurds, while he is the officer of the Turkish military police who shadows the journalist everywhere he goes in the area.

We tend to think of minorities in certain regions torn by war, poverty and terror as inevitably repressed in every possible realm by the government of the country they are settled in, and perhaps by the majoritarian social group as well. While this is generally the case, especially if the minority belongs to a different ethnic group than the majority, or possesses a distinct culture, language or religion, or supported the wrong side in a recent armed conflict involving the country, we risk overlooking another important fact which also prevents peace and social tolerance from being accomplished. Quite often, minorities are manipulated by the leaders of neighbouring Nation-States in which the ethno-cultural group of the minority in question constitutes the social majority and/or enjoys significant political or military power. In other words, some governments and armed groups tend to manipulate minorities settled in nearby countries when both belong to the same ethno-cultural family, and they do so out of sheer geopolitical interests. Thus, sometimes minorities are not only victims of their oppressors, but also of their unwillingness to integration and adaptation to the new circumstances, a reluctance which reaches tragic proportions when the prospects for democratization are real.

While this phenomenon has been somehow present in many armed conflicts throughout history -let us remember, for instance, Italy´s manipulation of Italian communities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire territories, and the role these Irredenta claims played during World War I-, it is perhaps in the contemporary world where it has shown the real measure of its disruptive capabilities.

In the aforementioned example of the Kurdish communities of Eastern Turkey, both the PKK guerrillas and some Iraqi Kurdish leaders have influenced the Turkish kurds into not making compatible their belonging to the Turkish State with their maintaining their Kurdish cultural ties. In the India-administered part of Kashmir -Jammu and Kashmir-, Pakistan-sponsored groups have been pressuring muslim population not to comply with Indian legislation nor obeying Indian authorities. Obviously, Turkish and local Indian repression -particularly in the former case-, respectively, has not made things easy for those minorities.

Examples abound, but perhaps two of the most salient in global affairs are those of Kosovo´s serbs and Palestinian refugees. The Serb residents of Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, are just pawns in the regional game the government of Serbia is playing against the international community not to acknowledge the former Serb province´s independence. While they affirm to be defending the interest of that community, it is obvious they detached themselves from it a long time ago.[2] The life of that Kosovan minority would improve substantially if it accepted the new institutions, though the EU and the UN will have to be vigilant and force the Kosovan government to live up to its democratic constitution.

In the same manner, during more than half a century, Palestinian refugees have been equally manipulated by Arab leaders, who, claiming to be backing up their quest for returning to the Palestinian lands they left -forced by the Israeli army or voluntarily-, kept them in refugee camps and prevented them from integrating in their host countries, where many of them -or their descendants-, after 50 or 60 years, still do not have a full citizenship status, and are among the poorest inhabitants in their respective host countries.[3] They have also been pawns in a greater game, the one being played in the Middle Eastern power politics.

As in every conflict, often attributions of pure good and evil are difficult to make. Reality is much more complex than what defenders of different sides want us to believe.

References:

[1] Michael Ignatieff, Blood and belonging. Journeys into the new nationalism, London, Vintage, 1994.

[2] Michael Ignatieff, Empire lite, London, Vintage, 2003.

[3] Joan B. Culla, Israel, el somni I la tragèdia. Del sionisme al conflicte de Palestina, Barcelona, Edicions La campana, 2005.

Photo: Erbil refugee camp, Iraqi Kurdistan, 2007 © Emmanuel Smague

Unaffected crackdown

Are Chinese authorities worried because the eyes of the world are on them now Olympics are approaching? Do they recently initiated conversations with the Tibetan leaders in exile really acknowledging the status quo in the region must change? Apparently, the answer to both questions is ‘No’. Though they claim to have realeased hundreds of prisoners in the last weeks, actually they keep more than one thousand Tibetan protesters in prison. According to Amnesty International, many of those detainees are kept in dire conditions, without enough food and frequently beaten, and some of them have been judged and ’sentenced after questionable trials”. Meanwhile, Chinese journalists continue working amidst the extreme censorship stablished around their job when the riots began, and foreign ones are simply blocked from entering Tibet.

Isn´t it high time we ceased to reward the Chinese dictatorship with international events -such as the Olympics- for free? Shouldn´t the international community be exerting a stronger pressure on the Chinese government on behalf of human rights and the rule of law?

Read Amnesty´s report here.

Photo: Police, Lhasa, Tibet, 2007 © culturalvisions

Electronic oceans

After a few months away from it, I return to the electro atmosphere with a mix specially conceived for the dancefloor. For a variety of reasons, it´s been a while since I haven´t descended to the underground spaces where you plunge into the dark and hedonistic flows of electronic music. As aquatic animals developed millions of years ago the ability to get the oxygen they need while submerged, I have also learned to breathe and survive under the sounds, visions and emotions dancefloors are made of. I´ve been in dry land for too long. Now it´s time to get back into the electro waters.

Tracklist:

01 Steve Bug · Loverboy (Guido Schneider mix)
02 Booka Shade · The spectralist
03 Satoshi Tomiie ft Uta Dare · Scandal in New York (Audiofly mix)
04 Johannes Heil · All for one
05 Tony Thomas · Growth
06 Tiefschwarz · On up (Kiki & Silversurfer mix)
07 Rex the Dog · Prototype (MANDY mix)
08 Miss Kittin & Royksopp · Poor Leno, poor Madame Hollywood (Felix Da Housecat mix)
09 Pascal FEOS · Sunset
10 Gui Boratto · Like you (SuperMayer mix)
11 The Flying Doctors · We make contact (Oliver Lieb mix)
12 Silent Breed · Sync in (Butch mix)

Download
[55:50, 127Mb]

Photo: Breakwater, 2004 © El Ray

It all started here

Paradise Garage, The Soho, the 70´s & 80´s in the streets of NYC, the great Larry Levan, Grace Jones, Ru Paul, Xtravaganza, transvestites, dancing all night long, until the last client leaves the place, the last days of disco, The Loft, Chicago, Frankie Knuckles, Detroit house, underground clubs, François Kevorkian, Vinyl, Curtys Mayfield, Masters at Work, latin beats from The Bronx, for the love of music, Walter Gibbons, David Mancuso, Body and Soul, The Warehouse, Soho Club, Marshall Jefferson, Danny Krivit, Junior Vasquez, Danny Tenaglia, Linda Clifford, 84 King Street, Salsoul, Instant Funk, crowded dancefloors, sweety patrons, make-up, glamour, the clubbing culture taking off…

Those were the days. These were the places where house music was born. These were the men and women who made it possible. Thank you all, wherever you are…

Tracklist:

01 Linda Clifford · Changin’
02 Stacey Kidd · Music for you
03 Carl Bean · I was born this way (Gomi´s vocal mix)
04 Unique ft Angie Brown · Reach
05 Deep Sensation · There´s a soul heaven (Cleptomaniacs soul mix)
06 Jamie Lewis ft Michelle Weeks · Be thankful
07 Circuit Boy ft Alan T · Door (Danny Tenaglia mix)
08 Kings of Tomorrow ft Julie McKnight · Finally (Danny Tenaglia mix)

Download
[59:16, 68Mb]

Photo: Disco Ball Lady © Katharine Leah