Frank Sinatra on ecstasy

Here you have a Viennese 53 year-old Las Vegas-style crooner who, after living in South-Africa and Australia, and performing on stage in American clubs during the seventies, gets a stable and well paid job as singer and entertainer at the Marriott Hotel in Vienna, but, however, fascinated with the electronic sounds of much younger artists, gets in touch with the Austrian dance music arena at the end of the nineties and decides to take the most radical turn in his career. In his own words: “I decided there and then to resign from all other jobs and to completely dedicate myself to this new project for a period of two years”. “I reflected that, if I’d find myself in the street after those two years, I’d have to go back to my old jobs. But I wanted to try out this new direction under all circumstances – I simply had to”. Of course, his “project” did not end after those two years, as he is increasingly sought after by club and dance events promoters all over the world.

Louie Austen, now in his 60’s, looks like an impossible mix of the New York author Tom Wolfe and the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo and, with his silky and deep jazzy voice and gentleman manners, is indeed an improbable personage in the current world clubbing scene. However, unlike other rock stars or even jazz singers who have been lured into recording electronic versions of their own hits before him, this electro-crooner gets truly involved in the whole proccess of composing, recording and producing his work, or co-producing it with the likes of Sr. Coconut or Christopher Just, and then performing it live in clubs with his band Tha Family, whose synth-and-moog sounds match his warm voice like hand in glove.

Austen has now around twenty records, EP’s and singles out in the market, which cover all sorts of styles from classical jazz to electro-beats and house. Besides, in songs like “Glamour love”, “If only” or “Coconut girl”, to name but a few, one can straightforwardly discern the elegant sense of humour and the bon vivant manners of this world class singer and composer.

Waiter, another Dry Martini to go with these beats, please…

Louie Austen official site

Photo: Louie Austen © Monkeymusic

The catwalk

The perfect bodies were scattered all over the beach. Belonging to all sorts of known and unknown races, the light reflected by the white sand enhanced the soft tones of their beautifully tanned skins and their slim and muscled figures. Some of them were relaxedly chatting under the palm trees; others lingered alone or in small groups near the shore, their eyes carelessly wandering among bodies as perfect as theirs. Occassional laughs bursted in many different languages. A cloudless sky. A gentle breeze. Time passed placidly. The sun was about to sink in the dark turquoise waters after having presented the beauty Gods with another perfect beach day, whose afternoon was now vanishing. At that very moment, the most perfect among the perfect figures in the beach started walking towards the end of the catwalk. Emboding the very notion of innate grace, she raised the admiration of all the lesser Gods congregated near the wooden path, who followed her with their eyes. Then, just a split second before the horizon swallowed the last rays of sunlight, she dived into the water, which avidly guzzled both gorgeous gifts, bowing at the Heaven´s largesse.

Obscurity arrived all of a sudden. Time froze. The music began to fill the air. They got ready for another endless night of party, love and emotional travelling.

Tracklist:

01 Prosumer & Murat Tepeli · Noone else (vinyl version)
02 Q-Burns Abstract Message ft Lisa Shaw · Shame (Summer mix)
03 Brian Aneurysm · Inertia (Maetrik mix)
04 Daniel Kyo · Hypnotized (Atnarko bump mix)
05 Jay-J ft Latrice Barnett · Keep on rising (Copyright mix)
06 Chuck Love · Yellow truth (Atnarko mix)
07 Dawn Tallman · Lift up your hands (Bop till you drop mix)
08 Pablo J · All I wanna do (Atnarko mix)
09 Sandra Lima · Higher (Jay-J shifted dub)
10 Michelle Weeks · Joyful noise (Luis & Raffa main vocal)

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Photo: A real dream, 2007 © Milena T

Love and novelty

What do we fall in love with? Personality? A face? A body? Can we isolate these parts of us from each other? And what is it that we consider self? ‘I cannot recognize the person I fell in love with. She changed so much’. Does this make any sense? May our personalities change so much that we become ‘other’ person? And what if we remain the same person but physically change so much others do not recognize us? Are we the same individual or not?

How does the process of growing tired of someone work? We constantly get tired of objects and covet new ones. Are individuals like objects? But, isn´t it that we may fall in love with each other because we are not objects? If we are not objects, how can we get tired of seeing the same face every morning, by our side, when we wake up? Where do we set up the tipping point, by which the feeling of happiness aroused by the presence of the loved one turns into fatigue? And, beyond this point, are we really able to go back in time, towards the moment it all started? ‘I love you more each day’. Can this really go on forever? Isn´t the contrary more likely, though?

What would we be willing to do to make our loved one to keep those feelings alive, as if in the very beginning? Up to which point could we change so he / she experienced it as a fresh start, a whole new story but with the same characters? Could we be willing to change phisically? Is this too much? Actually, we see this around us on a daily basis, and for the same reasons (many people voluntarily undergo painful physical transformations in an attempt to retain his / her love).

Why couldn´t desire for the same body stay with us forever? ‘I´ll love you forever’, we say. Why not ‘I´ll desire you forever’?

Find these captivating and disturbing questions in the astounding South Korean movie Shi-Gan (Time), directed by Kim Ki-Duk in 2006.

Photo: Hyeon-a Seong in Shi-Gan © Flixter.com

Neoliberalism, or the making of an empty concept

Coming from Europe, I thought here in North America political language would be used more straightforwardly and efficiently. How naive I was…

Here, as in Europe, and particularly in Canada, you hear the word neoliberal at all times. Neoliberal fiscal adjustments, neoliberal aligment with the current Bush administration, neoliberal foreign policy, neoliberal bastards…

Actually, what does neoliberalism mean? Let´s see… What is ‘neo’ or ‘new’ in classical liberalism? Nothing, since classic liberals stand up for the very same individual freedom, rule of law, limited government principles -thought constantly adapting them to the new circumstances- of Hayek and Berlin. If any, new liberals would be those belonging to the British tradition of social-liberalism starting with Thomas Hill Green in the ninetieth-century, or perhaps earlier with the late works of John Stuart Mill. However, I do not think the people using the expression neoliberalism refer to this kind of modern liberalism accepting a greater role for the State in social and economic affairs.

Quite the contrary, neoliberalism points to everything we dislike in political or moral terms; it singles out our enemies, those who are not leftist, progressive enough - and there is no limit in this, obviously, so nearly everyone is potentially a neoliberal, depending on the extremism of the one making the claim. It reminds me of the way American conservatives used to employ the word ‘communist’ in the McCarthy years, or far-rightists in Europe until not so long ago: communism equals dangerous evil. Period. ‘We’ (those conservatives in power) will say who is a communist. Period. (Actually, the current Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been using the word communist as a synonym of everyone and everything he considers ‘wrong’ in his country until this year, apparently with good political results for him. Italy is such a weird political case…)

On a more careful consideration of the matter, neoliberalism is one of the emptiest political concepts man has ever invented, since there is no agreed, clear definition of what is to be a neoliberal.

Neoliberal is just an insult, and indeed a very useful one, since no one wants to be labeled that. However, as a scientific concept and as a description of a state of affairs, it is completely meaningless.

Photo: Shell, 2006 © Darny

Destruction / redefinition

If there is nowadays a country on earth capable of totally redesigning itself, it is China. Its current process of physical ruination and swift recreation is not a simple one, since it seems to embody Schumpeter´s old principle of creative destruction, albeit particularly in the urban lanscape in the Chinese case.

“Dans New York, c’est bien quand on est jeune, mais c’est trop prévisible. Votre avenir est écrit. Tandis qu’en Chine, le développement urbain est tellement chaotique que rien n’est prévisible. Tout est possible”.

Zhang Ke*

“J’ai essayé de répondre à la question : quel est le message de l’architecture et de l’art contemporain chinois? C’est une énorme question qui se pose à nous. La plupart des gens ont encore en eux la culture traditionnelle chinoise, mais tout a changé. Il faut trouver le moyen de réunir ces deux cultures, Chine et modernité”.

Wang Hui*

[*] Young Chinese architects, in Le Monde, August 5, 2008.

Photo: ‘Misty’, Pudong District, Shanghai, 2006 © Matteroffact