American Robotnik: Where does your passion for Balkan music come from?

Willo Sertain: I grew up in the Appalachians. My mother taught me to love old places because, she’d say, every building has a story. The same goes for music.

Since I was a girl I’ve liked listening to a lot of styles and genres from all over the world. I used to be obsessed with African music, then Indian ragas, anything that sounded real.

Exposure to cultures other than your own makes you realize there’s more out there than the pop you see on TV. I think I was searching for anything that would bring out a sense of what it is to be alive, to feel my blood boil.

American Robotnik: How did Macaulay Balkan get its start?

Willo Sertain: After I moved from North Carolina to the West Coast in the early aughts, for nine years I played with the Portland-based touring band Underscore Orkestra. I learned to play a lot of Eastern European music with them.

Somewhere along the way I heard some Bulgarian and Gypsy and Serbian brass music on a compilation CD, and I remember wondering what I was hearing. It was so different, so inspiring. I listened to the disc obsessively, and I became not only passionate about the music, I wished I could play like that.

Kafana Klub and Krebsic Orkestar introduced me to live Balkan music. (Both Maria Noel and Alex Krebs are an inspiration to me.) But that’s just one night a month and I wanted more, so I started the band. It’s my love project. I get to feel purely through sound.

Lucas Warford (homemade bass instruments), Grace Young (viola), Danielle Evans (percussions), a rotating horn player, and I have been practicing since last February, and you saw our first show in April.

American Robotnik: What’s in store for Macaulay Balkan?

Willo Sertain: Compared to my main band, Three for Silver, which tours a lot, Macaulay Balkan isn’t an ambitious project. I just want us to play the music, contribute to the local Balkan music community, and share a culture that’s not part of the mainstream with other people.

Unlike with Three for Silver, we don’t write original songs. Macaulay Balkan plays our interpretation of songs from the Balkans. We want to honor the original songwriters.

At the same time, the more I learn the more I see how much more there is to learn. We aren’t purists and we don’t always play correctly. We learn from recordings. We just want to play the music the way we feel it, to get the feeling across.

I also want to work on the music, hone in on it, because it’s an expression of what’s going on in my head.

I feel we’re in this together. That feeling is contained in the music. It’s about connecting with people. On Balkan Dance Nights, people from different social groups come together, relating to and over music. I want the band to be a part of that kind of world culture, which celebrates and shares our differences.

There is some nostalgia, too, the kind I experienced looking at old buildings with my mom.

Photo courtesy of Willo Sertain/Three for Silver.

The post Feeling Through Sound: An Interview with Willo Sertain appeared first on American Robotnik.

Change, of course, is a natural facet of life; I had not expected the place to remain the same. I also knew that change appears to be much more prominent after an absence than when you are in the middle of it. Yet what I thought of as reverse culture shock was filling the pages of the city’s weekly newspapers and dominating conversations. The transformation that came as a jolt to me was shaking the city to the core, and it continues to do so.

The New Portland: It’s a Problem

The complaint goes something like this: Over the past decade the city has received a tremendous amount of publicity, from the (not-so-funny) IFC show Portlandia to the (all-too-serious) New York Times. Front and center have been Portland’s many quality-of-life virtues, from the creative vibe to the craft beer and restaurant scene, from low-cost of living to walk- and bikeability, from the many green splendors to the general rad-ness. The generation of Americans seeking a place to begin settling down paid attention and flocked here.

The Portland metropolitan area’s urban growth boundary limits sprawl, which results in new development having to go up, rather than out. After the Great Recession, developers launched a condo-building craze to house the new population. But, even as condos ratchet up the city’s density, the supply can’t keep up with the accelerating influx. The resulting housing shortage is pushing rental and home prices up, pushing African Americans out of traditionally black neighborhoods and artists of all ilks out of their cheap rooms, eastward where housing is cheaper, toward the derided 82nd Avenue.

Some call it gentrification: the city’s growing up, they say, maturing from punk-rock rags and tight jeans to khakis and the aforementioned polo shirts. Perhaps the hipster is going the way of the dad. Others blame greedy developers capitalizing on the trend.

Fellow Yankee, Go Home

What we can all agree on is our shared dislike of the newcomers. A divide has emerged between established transplants, roughly those who arrived before the Recession, and the new, post-Recession arrivals (I omit Portlanders born here because they seem so rare nowadays and because they’ve been through this before).

After I moved here in 2004 I heard complaints about immigrant Californians driving up home prices. In other words, young professionals have been coming here for a while now. We just may have reached a tipping point.

But now I am one of the complainers. At a networking gathering the other day, I helped a spirit of camaraderie develop around the table when us, established nonprofit professionals commiserated about the new Portland. Ever since my return last year, at my favorite places I’ve frequently caught myself thinking, “Who are these people?”

Taking Responsibility, Taking Portland Back

Few older transplants blame themselves. Had we collectively not created a city that others find attractive, we’d have nothing to talk about. Each and every person who moves here alters the place. I did when I moved here and so has everyone else who has made this great city home.

The same goes for immigration to the U.S. Some like to complain about America that’s disappearing before their eyes as the new arrivals change its fabric. But we are all immigrants. Complaining about the changing Portland and new transplants, of whom I am one, is no different than complaining about new America and immigrants, of whom I am one, too.

And so, I have decided to quit complaining. I will no longer berate the change I helped bring about. Instead of glaring at that new boxy building, I will relish biking under the trees lining the street and through the invisible clouds of flower fragrances, even as I fail to avoid the scantily-clad hordes of bicyclists converging on the Naked Bike Ride. Instead of giving a stink eye to ‘those people,’ I will quaff that new microbrew like it was my last one. And I will remind myself that The Standard and its cheap booze is still only two blocks away. Besides, they now have a Thursday all-night Happy Hour for patrons with an Oregon drivers license.

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Nostalgia is not merely a matter of regret for lost times; it is also a pining for lost places, for places we have once been in yet can no longer reenter. —Edward Casey in Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World

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Every migrant knows in his heart of hearts that it is impossible to return. Even if he is physically able to return, he does not truly return, because he himself has been so deeply changed by his emigration. It is equally impossible to return to that historical state in which every village was the center of the world. The one hope of recreating a center now is to make it the entire earth. —John Berger in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

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Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but also, undoing the very meaning of the world and–at its most extreme–abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd. [T]o emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments. —John Berger in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

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Being the first day after the weekend, my week has always started on Monday. There’s a reason for Saturday and Sunday being called the weekend; as the week’s final day, Sunday is reserved for rest before another work week. In my Slovak mind, the sequence of Monday-Friday of work followed by Saturday-Sunday of rest manifests the proverb, “First work, then fun.” This is the order of time, of life itself.

For over ten years now, a week starting on a Sunday has been throwing everything into confusion. In the monthly-view calendar I know every week occupies a single line: first come work days, then the weekend. The two form neat blocks: work days a squarish one to the left, weekend days a tall rectangle running down the side. The view reinforces the work-fun sequence, and its tidiness appeals to my sense of order.

In contrast, the American calendar shows the work week flanked by Sunday on the left and Saturday on the right. Weekends are thus broken up into separate lines and opposite ends of the page. (On digital devices I can set the week to begin on Monday but Sunday is default.) This forces me to spend way more time deciphering the calendar than it should. Weekends should be less work, not more.

In this persistent culture shock, I am caught in the battle between rationality and religion. Whereas the ISO 8601 international standard says the first day of the week is Monday, the Christian and Judaic (as well as Islamic) traditions begin the week on Sunday. The Sunday-first calendar manifests the religious roots of American culture. Like the U.S. customary units, it also perpetuates the Americans’ self-proclaimed exceptionalism.

I’m with the Boomtown Rats in that I don’t like Mondays. But when it comes to the calendar, Monday remains my champion starter.

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The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. —Rebecca Solnit, “The Blue of Distance II,” in: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The post People Thrown Into Other Cultures appeared first on American Robotnik.

• “Conservatives Are Driving Americans Away from Religion” by Claude S. Fischer, Boston Review, October 15, 2014 — Self-explanatory.
• “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture” by A.O. Scott, The New York Times Magazine, September 11, 2014 — “[I]n doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups.”
• “9 Reasons We Should Abolish Tipping, Once And For All” by Hunter Stuart, Huffington Post, October 17, 2014 — A follow-up to my two-part post on tipping.
• “Think There’s a Lot of Immigration to the US? Think Again” by Nathan Siegel, OZY — The U.S. has, proportionately, fewer immigrants than many developed countries.
• “Best Immigration Policy Is More Immigration” by Noah Smith, Bloomberg View, November 10, 2014 – “[I]t would seem to be a good idea for us to tilt our immigration policy toward more skills-based immigration.”

From the Bookshelf

• Madelaine Hron, Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature and Culture, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009 — Is it an obligation to suffer in order to become an American? — BUY NOW
• Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, New York: Penguin Books, 2005 — Reflections on the life of wandering. — BUY NOW

The post Through Other Lenses: American Robotnik Readings for November 2014 appeared first on American Robotnik.

A case could be made that they would have been better off melting into the landscape as no doubt many now forgotten did, adopting native tongues, stories, places to love, ceasing to be exiles by ceasing to remember the country they were exiled from so that they could wholly embrace the country they were in. Only by losing that past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it. —Rebecca Solnit, “Daisy Chains,” in: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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The American notion of the nation derives from the French civic nationalism, based on territory and language: if you were born or live in France or to French parents, and speak French, you are French. By contrast, in the German, ethnic concept of the nation, you must be born German (to German parents) to be German. There paths to citizenship but even if you become a citizen of Germany you may never become German (the same kinship-based approach applies in my native Slovakia and all the other countries east of Germany).

Where Do You Come From, Bi-National?

A while ago two commentators of an (American) football game had a hard time pronouncing the name of the town in the Ukraine where Igor Olshansky of the San Diego Chargers was born. They tossed around various versions until one of them gave up and said, “It doesn’t matter, he’s American now.”

During one of Team USA’s 2014 World Cup games that I watched at an old college friend’s house, her 8-year old son asked me, “Why are you rooting for America?” Concentrating on the game I absent-mindedly blurted out, “Because that’s where I’m from.” An animated discussion ensued. My friend got upset that I, who like her come from Slovakia, would renounce my roots to such a degree as to say something like that. “You are from Slovakia!” she said. “You’re right” I argued, “I am from Slovakia. But I’m also from the United States now.” I failed to get my point across, perhaps because I didn’t understand it completely myself. I do now.

Stranger in the Homeland

The immigrant always leaves something behind in the country where he was born that can only be found and retrieved there.

Sometimes my friends or family here in the U.S. say, with shock in their voices, “What? You’ve never seen the show XYZ?” I usually respond by saying, “What, you’ve never seen The 30 Cases of Major Zeman? Nu pogodi? Linda? Never heard the hits of Elán or Peter Nagy or even Boney M?” These are pop culture artifacts fellow Slovaks can relate to.

At the same time, when I visit Slovakia, I always see new, unfamiliar celebrities in magazines, spot new TV shows or politicians, hear new bands—and feel like I’ve missed out and will never catch back up. Some of my family call me The American: I live here, I dress like one, and in the first few days of visiting I speak Slovak with the American accent.

The immigrant ceases to be complete in the country he was born, between the borders of his origin. I am no longer 100 percent Slovak—I’ve become a foreigner in my own country.

The Asymptotic American, Always a Foreigner

Yet, American passport or not, deep down it’s impossible to become an American completely. It is impossible for me to ever digest the entirety of pop-cultural fodder my wife’s or friends’ identities are built on, to know all the products and shows and musical acts that formed their consciousness, to completely relate on the pop cultural level (or any other level that defines Americanness, for that matter).

You can become an American in name but, like an asymptote which never touches the axis toward which it forever curves, you can never become American all the way. Even after more than 10 years of full immersion, I learn something new, a new pop-culture reference, a new word or turn of phrase, a new historical factoid. I still get overwhelmed in the supermarket or department store, I still ask for nuances in the meaning of certain words, I still question the unspoken in the natives’ behavior, forever hoping to catch up.

I will never be complete in my new nation—I may be an American but I will always remain a foreigner.

Living in the Crack Between Two Cultures

The immigrant here lives split between two countries, two nations, two cultures: that of his origin and America. He teeters in the crack between them, with one foot in each and his soul in neither. And as the two nations and their cultures evolve, they shift like ice floes and the feet get wobbly.

Not only does the ground beneath the immigrant’s feet shift constantly, he cannot recognize his face in the mirror. I look at myself in America and I am Slovak; I look at myself outside the U.S. and I am American or I am Slovak, depending on where I am or how I feel; I look at myself in Slovakia and I am American. Yes, I can select between these identities, I can choose to say who I am or where I’m from. But in the choosing between the two selves the identity that’s left behind for the moment doesn’t go away: it lingers around the edges, shifted off-center like images with misaligned colors.

Present Impossible

I am no longer Slovak and never will be Slovak again—I live in the past. I am not quite yet American and never bill be American—I live in the future. This in-betweenness, the impossibility of the present, is the immigrant’s permanent condition.

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