Head Press

A poem for Londoners (Updated)

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:50:00 +0000

I love this city, its seething desperation
I love its scrabbling citizens, trying to improve themselves with mind maps and 8 steps to affluence
I love its steel benches inhabited by those with endless leisure time
I love the suicidal pedestrians and homicidal motorists
I love the cyclists, imbalanced by a great big chip on one or other shoulder
I love the centre of gravity that pulls all in search of work, of play, of love, of culture to its ailing heart
I love how it clings to a belief in the centrality of empire
I love how it wears the scars of war and architecture with pride.
I love the mad men and women who talk to the world around them
I love the ignorant
I love the snobs
I love the filth
The suburban nightmare of fear.
I love having my energy violently sucked from me.
I love the thugs at bus stops and the thugs driving buses
I love the casual hatred we have for each other
I love the stench of rotten rubbish on a hot summer's day
The incessant flies buzzing amongst the abandoned
I love the stretch limos cruising through abject poverty.
I love the unstable agreement that keeps us going.
I love not feeling for an hour on the tube
I love how we are all driven slowly to drink
I love the corporate sponsorship of every step we make.
I love the charity muggers who remind us to feel guilt.
I love that we're all a little racist.
I love that all races are equally disregarded by this city.
I love that the city will continue with gritted teeth through each terror of each day that is the endless drudgery of our unsympathetic existences.
I love how we engorge the grass amongst the concrete.
I love how tourists can't stand on the right
I love the festering kebabs and quotidian fist fights.
I love the easy credit, now gone.
I love that amber means speed up
I love the over-priced gold dust locally sourced tomatoes of divine origin
I love that you'll look that way and me this.
I love that we have when someone sits next to us on the bus
I love that on one hand I should have tattooed "Piss off" and on the other "Chill out"
I love this city.

Shifting Fantasy to Imagination

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:27:00 +0000

In a world where the promise of life is in depressing contrast with life as it is lived, fantasy reigns as unopposed master of our hopes.

The promise of a job that will make you happy, while paying the rent; the promise of a soul mate, who’ll also be a life partner; the promise of recognition for the things at which you excel; increasingly, the promise of fame, fleeting though we may all, deep down, know it to be. These are the promises that sustain our daily trudge through the day.

The casually handsome man, rubs his perfectly manicured hand across his freshly shaved chin. There is a confident glint in his eye, the cat that got the cream. His beautiful, well toned and sweetly smiling girlfriend kisses him lightly on the lips. The best a man can get.

Attractive, but not abnormally so, the youthful women laugh and pulsate in a spasm of solidarity. One woman stands and walks confidently towards us. The picture behind her blurs into the ether – she is all we see, as the wind blows the long auburn hair. Because you’re worth it.

Sex has always sold. So has success. And confidence. And belonging.

Eat this food and you’ll fall in love. Buy this car and you’ll feel the greatest liberation. Read this magazine and you’ll be part of a community. Buy this watch you and you’ll be successful. Consume this, you will feel better about yourself. It’s what the advertisers have always sold us. They do it very well. And often with a pleasant self-ironic twist.

While the promise of fame through reality television might be somewhat novel, a version of it has always existed – the myth of fame to be found in Hollywood, New York, London – and someone has always profited from it.

Fantasy requires forces beyond our control to align in a particular formation. Sexual fantasies, for example, require the willing participation of another person (or else the breaking of the law), and finding someone who shares ones fantasies, or rather desires the other side of those fantasies, while more greatly facilitated by the internet, is still in the realm of fancy. The fantasy of fame and fortune, while largely achievable with the requisite hard graft, still requires that big break. That great lost beast of a lucky break. While dreams come true for some, on occasion, the fantasy remains nothing more than that for most of us.

Though, the eventual non-fulfilment of fantasy is probably for the best. Fantasies, almost by definition, require the very basis of our existence to shift. They demand an alteration so fundamental to ever really enjoy. Which is why most fantasies, when fulfilled, leave one feeling empty, having lost a measure of hope. We are all too used to celebrities, that most unique species, falling apart before our eyes in self-hate fuelled destruction. The façade crumbles beneath the weight of attention, as there is rarely much to support it.

The hope of fantasy is a false one. It is a spectre, a fault in perception. A sculpture of sand, it is destroyed with little force.

Perhaps more than this, fantasy renders us passive – unable to break out of the stupefying cycle of dreams and dreaming, indulging in our delusions we are left motionless, unseeing of the world around us, unwilling to change anything of it.

There is, however, an alternative. Where fantasy provides a false destination, imagination provides the possibility for real achievement. Where fantasy brings us to an ultimately soulless and empty realisation of ourselves, imagination can fulfil our lives in meaningful and novel ways. Where fantasy leaves us passive, imagination spurs us to act.

It is in imagination that our hope finds structural integrity. To imagine our future is to have it within our grasp. It necessitates that we can understand the possibilities that future presents. Within our comprehension, such potentials are within our power to attain.

Imagination does not require a grandiose hope for the impossible. Rather it seeks to discover how to make the fantastical possible. It is the bridging of the gap between our fantasies and world we inhabit.

Imagination is not the compromise of fantasy, but rather the more solid articulation of hopes, dreams and improbabilities.

If we want to bring positive change to this world, our only weapon of consequence is the clarity and vivacity of our imagination.

Rational, logical building blocks have their place in the creation of a more equal, just or peaceful world, but only in the fulfilment of our imaginations. For if our image of progressively altered society is to be realised, it must exist in this world first. In order to enact a paradigm shift in societal progression towards, say, sustainability or peace, we must be able to imagine a world that prioritises other forms of achievement over the financial, that rewards communal progression rather than personal achievement.

But that world is not on another planet, or with a different six billion odd inhabitants, it is this world, and we must imagine from this stand point first. We must have a foot in our reality – or realities – if we are to envision new ones. But even with this, the primacy of fact becomes a difficult burden to undertake for any who look to a future which might possess new possibilities.

Imagination is the currency of those who work in the creative arts. But it does not belong to them exclusively. Each of us, wherever we are, or who ever we are, has, right now, the power to imagine a life, a world, a society that is a changed and a more perfect articulation of human possibility.

At the intersection between fact, reason and logic on one hand, and fantasy on the other, we find imagination. Surely, a world which values and indulges in imagination in the same manner it does fact, logic, reason and fantasy is already a world half changed, for the better.

- by Neil Keating

Assumptions, beliefs and the continuum between them

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:54:00 +0000

Assumptions underpin much of what we do on a daily basis. Extend this to discussion and debates of a more theoretical nature and assumptions are quite essential. Many economic theories, for example, must assume that humans behave rationally – one of the more contentious assumptions in that field of study, understandably. Making assumptions eases our progress through life – if you need to set the terms of engagement on every conversation you might embark on in any given day, you might find yourself never actually saying anything at all.

Assumption is the more common and acceptable younger cousin of belief. Assumptions, at least on some level, are understood by us all to be unfair simplifications (never quite the whole story) which make our lives just a little easier. They are also challengeable and, with a bit of resistance, can change. Beliefs are a little more intransient. They tend to run deeper than simple assumptions, they are more fundamental (a dangerous word these days) to one’s view of the world.

One day, some centuries ago, some English man had an apple fall on his head. He theorised and proposed the existence of what we call gravity. Gravity, for all the evidence to support it, remains nothing more than the best explanation we have for why apples fall to the Earth.

Before proceeding it feels important to recognise unequivocally that the theory of gravity is very compelling, indeed the evidence is overwhelming and largely without genuine challenge. On that basis one can believe in gravity without fear of being proved wrong. For that matter, one of the most heartening things about science is that it deals in evidence and not proof.

Some many centuries before that day of the falling apple, some people believed that the Sun was pulled across the sky by a horse, others believed that it was carried by a boat. These respective theories were, at the time, the best known solutions for the journey of the Sun across the sky. Arguably neither theory has ever been proved to be incorrect. Simply the weight of evidence has pushed us to believe that there are, in fact, better explanations out there.

In order to theorise about the world scientifically, you need to believe in certain things. Certain specific requirements could be considered assumptions – you need to assume that theory X is correct in order that theory Y might even be possible. Other things must, by necessity, be more accurately called articles of faith – you must simply believe that gravity exists as a force in this universe before you can consider further theories of physics.

If one was to ask someone of an even moderately religious nature if there is evidence for the existence of (a) God they would say “Of course, it is in every blossoming rose and every smiling baby” or words to that effect. And, of course, given their belief system, they would be right. There is such evidence. For some people the existence of a deity or series of deities remains the best possible solution for the world being the way it is.

One does not need to reject either science or religion to argue that at one point in our history that religion acted as science. When looking at the rising and falling tides, when experiencing the change of winter to spring, when witnessing birth and death and all that happens in between, when contemplating our dominance as a species above all others on this world – what better solutions could we have come up with? And different peoples came up with different solutions. And they all stood up to scrutiny given the logic they followed and given the evidence available.

Slowly but surely the balance of evidence started to slip away from the religions – actually it make more sense for the Earth to rotate around the Sun rather than the other way around; also, humans are more likely to have evolved from a lineage linked to the animal world over the course of several hundreds of thousands of years rather than being created over the course of a few days. In time the argument simply becomes impossible to make (even if the second named is still in contention). And it is still possible to be religious and believe the Earth is round.

That religions lost their position as the best explanation for how Earthly and celestial phenomena happen, did not remove their power or influence or importance. Where religion could no longer provide people with the explanations for how the world is, it started to focus more solely on the reasons why the world is.

Some may see the growing virulence of the debate between atheists and the religious establishment (the relativist and fundamentalist sectors of both camps being embroiled) as evidence of the nearing end of the entire structure of and, by implication, need for religion. Such a thought process negates the continuing power and impact religious faith has on people’s lives. Indeed, use of such logic exposes the blind self-confidence of the more extreme atheist sectors of the debate, very much a characteristic of the crumbling façade of irrational empires.

But thankfully, science isn’t irrational. It may sound contradictory, but my faith in science comes from knowing that if a better explanation for, say, gravity does come along that science (not that we talk about science as a single entity with a single consciousness) will accept it as the new best explanation.

Science lives and dies by the validity of its arguments. If science compromises itself, or the evidence it uses, it becomes worthless. It is for this reason that ‘serious’ scientists take such entertaining glee in ripping to shreds clinical trials, for example, that have been funded by drug companies and are not double blind and peer reviewed.

Religions, on the other hand, do have a vested interest in considering the evidence that supports its foundation and not that which attacks it. While the Pope can retain his infallibility in the eyes of many Catholics if he changes his mind on a policy – say the use of contraception – he would have a hard time of it if he changed a central tenet of Catholicism – the Immaculate Conception or that Jesus rose from the dead, for example. Such a change could topple the Catholic Church because the contradictions it would throw up would be too great for anyone to ignore. That is why it is impossible to imagine the Pope doing such a thing (it is, indeed, hard enough to imagine him changing the church’s position on contraception).

So, while science may deal in many articles of faith, these beliefs are somewhat more flexible – closer on some imaginary continuum between assumption and belief to the former. It is also fallible and uses fallibility as one of its strengths.

One imagines that religions will continue to reject their fallibility. But so be it. For many people, religion remains the best explanation for why the world is. Until something else comes along to tip the balance of evidence, it will remain so.

- by James Grogan

A Space for Thought, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:38:00 +0000

- by Dan Marsden

Will John Prescott re-shape eating disorders debate?

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:36:00 +0000

When I heard the news that John Prescott, the former deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has admitted in his memoirs to suffering from bulimia, I found myself unsurprised. Prescott’s weight has long been the subject of satire, but the more I discover about eating disorders the more convinced I am that serious obesity has less to do with the body than the mind. Why shouldn’t Prescott suffer from an eating disorder? He has all the classic characteristics; he’s an over-achiever, under a lot of pressure and has a serious weight problem. However not being young, thin and female he has challenged our simplistic view of what an eating disorder is and means.

Prescott admits that he doesn’t fulfil the eating disorder stereotype, saying “People normally associate it with young women - anorexic girls, models trying to keep their weight down, or women in stressful situations, like Princess Diana”. It is for this very reason that his revelation is so important. As Diana herself said fifteen years ago in her 1993 eating disorders speech, “many would like to believe that Eating Disorders are merely an expression of female vanity”. To understand eating disorders we must first accept that they aren’t ever just about fitting into a dress, or being like a picture in a magazine, even if some people find these to be triggers that unleash a deeper and more complex self-loathing.

Anorexia, the more famous sister of bulimia and binge eating, has had more press because it is, on a superficial level, easier to understand and, crucially, easier to identify. However, the portrayal of anorexia in the media has only gone further to skew the understanding of eating disorders and their causes. ‘Size zero’ is an unhelpful catchphrase, because it reduces our understanding of anorexia to the level of a fashion dilemma.

As Laurie Penny’s article for the brilliant feminist website The F-Word points out, “Anorexia is a complex psychological disorder, often stemming from deep, long-standing self-esteem issues and triggered by specific personal trauma. […] The ‘size zero’ myth reduces anorexia to a frivolous pique of silly little girls who aren’t clever or mature enough to take proper care of themselves”.

While I commend anything that highlights the prevalence of eating disorders in society, I can’t help but notice that the ‘skinny shock pictures!’ approach of magazines like Heat focus on rich, successful women and portray eating disorders as the reserve of glamorous, airhead females. Whilst spending time in the murky world of pro ana/mia (anorexia/bulimia) chartrooms last year, I learned that for a lot of people eating disorders go hand in hand with personality disorders and/or depression, or are a response to abuse. If you want evidence that eating disorders go beyond a simplistic desire to be thin, just look at an anorexic’s loss of perspective driving them to lose more and more weight, moving to a lower and lower target weight until they reach a point where, even if they desperately want to eat in order to stay alive, their problem has become so intense they are simply unable to consume food. That has nothing to do with fitting into a size eight frock.

Although women do make up the majority, around one in 10 of the UK's 60,000 people reported as suffering from eating disorders are men. The fetishization of women’s bodies is partly responsible for the female focused eating disorder debate, because women’s bodies are seen as up for grabs, sexually and in terms of comment and judgment. On some level the focus on anorexia has been connected with the associations made between glamour, death and violence against women. Could it be that the media culture that brought us the crime scene victims photo shoot on Americas Next Top Model is the same media culture that illustrates the eating disorders debate with pictures of gorgeous emaciated teenagers staring out from sunken eyes that seem to say ‘fuck me, I’m so sexy I’m almost dead’? We are yet to rid our culture of the destructive heroin chic, where ill, thin and dependant are all sexy. Maybe bulimia and over-eating would get greater press coverage if we had an equivalent gluttony glam…

Having found myself increasingly offended by the ‘who ate all the pies’ analysis of bulimia and binge eating, I hope I don’t have to throw my radio out of the window in rage when satirists get their hands on Prescott’s confession. One common mistake is the idea that serious eating disorders have some kind of a weight limit. Many sufferers of bulimia actually gain weight, but still prevails the dangerous myth that to have an eating disorder you must be thin. This perception needs to change if we are ever to help the people who wake up late for work, with swollen faces, burst blood vessels under their eyes, sore throats, chest pain and faster heart rates after a night of binging and vomiting, only to think they don’t have the right to seek help for their problem, because they aren’t underweight.

Many will have heard the joke, ‘I'm half a bulimic – I eat a lot but I don't throw up’ (recently causing controversy when it was bafflingly cracked by the Trade Minister Lord Jones in an after dinner speech), and the bizarre offhand comments people make about wishing they had bulimia so they could eat what ever they desired. John Prescott’s comments in The Times of London are therefore understandable, "I've never confessed it before. Out of shame, I suppose, or embarrassment”. The misconception that bulimia is in some way to do with greed must be dispelled. If someone eats to the point of physical pain, barely tasting the food they are consuming, they are not doing so for pleasure. If somebody engages in this kind of behavior for twenty years without them losing weight, it cannot be misconstrued some kind of stupid quest for attractiveness.

The truth is that very quickly one learns that binging and purging has no purpose; it will not change your body or the way you feel about it. Obviously every sufferer acts with different motivations, but the addictive nature of destructive behaviors makes the bulimic cycle hard to break free from. In a world still so ignorant about a condition that can consume peoples lives, I can only hope John Prescott’s brave decision to go public will finally make us realize that it will take much more than banning size zero models at The London Fashion Week to seriously address the silent eating disorders epidemic.

- by Anna Beecher

Confused Days

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:22:00 +0000

The association forms daily

Each yanked towards it, invisibly sewn

A public property no one appreciates

An unseen agreement, manifested

In the oblivious routine of our course

Tattooed by the steps we leave on the ground

It’s what we all have, yet none of us own

The conjoined existence we’ve perfected to slavery

Infinite circles congeal and congest

Impossibly wrapped in a meaningless vine

An all-encompassing stream of sourceless information

Nameless, as collective as the ocean

Ever conscious, never defined

At one single time, the sound of orderly confusion

Of chaos of no-one’s making

Yet everyone’s blame

The soundless decomposition

Of old information

The murderous kiss of time

The seamless script of ill communication

The miniscule classifications of spoken desperation

A collage of couples, singles

And knots too tight to classify

Or be viewed by anyone outside their constriction

In designated anonymity, the asphyxiation

The claustrophobic glee of a motionless stampede

Flattens your lungs

Chokes your eyes

And leaves you hanging, a carcass in twisted momentum

Like a fly, dead, on an endless wall

But which could never move when live

The human connection, constructing its own irrelevance

All customs and logic completely opaque

A food chain of no consumption

Only waste, of words and time

A chart that never stops moving

All the useless vibrations form a straight line

For all these lost years I have charted courses

Made alliances, brokered trade with the heavy tangibility of words

Made maps of paths that succumbed to non-existence

Read people whose language was never mine

My notes made no sense then, their non-meaning drained from them now

The information comes and goes, and plummets through a sieve

As you are left to fall, amongst it all, until the day you leave

- by Halligan Quin

Crusts of forgetting - Dental Floss and Walter Benjamin

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:04:00 +0000

I just found my dental floss. I lost it three months ago. Three months without dental floss is a little troublesome. I didn’t buy any more because I felt I knew I would find it. In fact I knew where it was, I just couldn’t remember.

I was just reading about Walter Benjamin’s death ‘by his own hand’ as it is favoured to say for figures of historical import. He chose the wrong day to try to leave France, he chose the wrong place to leave from, he chose the wrong place to receive his visa. I suppose if you start to pull it out further, he chose the wrong time to live, the wrong ideas to think and write about (rejected by dialectical Marxists and most certainly an enemy of the Nazis), the wrong religion, the wrong country. None were chosen, of course, but that doesn’t stop the feeling of historical injustice. If he had lived passed his own death, I think he would have enjoyed the confluence of events that led to it: the sheer chance of it all, tragi-comic in its own sad and individual way. His death, as I read it, led to others being granted the invaluable passage through Spain and out to freedom and a delayed death, presumably.

There are things that escape your consciousness for a while – the location of wayward dental floss, for example – and decide to reside somewhere in the depths, or at least underneath some sort of calcified crust of recollection, the surface of which is the portrait of the memories we hold with us every day. For some people, this upper crust of memory – essentially the reality we hold with us everywhere we go – if fractured and allows surprising things to seep through all the time. I’m not one of those people. My crust needs to be broken by a direct dart of perceptual signification – a smell, a sight, a sound, a word – which pierces the surface and allows an insight into something of the past; a glimpse at best, intuitive and esoteric.

And yet, like the Earth’s own thin crust, there are signs on the surface of the things underneath – mental mountain ranges, chasms, seas of tranquil stillness – which tell us that something lies beneath. Something that moves and shifts, adjusts all the time, never really comes to rest. I think it was something like this – some psycho-geographic feature – which told me my dental floss was under my desk, the very desk I was sitting at, reading about the death of dear Walter. Something in the stillness of the end of the paragraph, finalising the details of his sad and all too early demise I found a moment for insight – I didn’t have time to even think “Yes, I know!” before I dived below the desk to find the small circular plastic piece of everyday dental hygiene equipment.

It is too much, in this day, to speak of collective experiences, societal forgetting and cultural landscapes. Our experience of the world is a different one to everyone else’s. It must be – how else can we fail to understand each other in even the most simple of situations? Agreeing with someone else has become one of two things: a political choice, based upon some ulterior motivation; consent based in the lack of relevant information. An ever growing generation of individualists – not different from any previous incarnation of society in the degree of connection to others, but rather only in recognising the inherent alienation of each individual from any other – is learning that ‘alone’ is all one can ever be.

And yet. There is that unifying voice – the complete, comprehensive and seamless narrative of history, of culture, of society. This is the voice of unified media; the voice of parliamentary government; the voice of university historians – contexts in which a diversity of opinion is encouraged, but where all opinions must work off the one logic, the one agreed set of principles of order. The story of history, that found in history text books that read like novels, that which we hear about, that which we can understand – this is the story of the world we live in, the story we have agreed, the story which supports our sense of the normal.

Normal or average. The jury is out.

And this normal history, narrative which makes most sense to us, can at times behave like I do – forgetting things it knows, forgetting people it knows it knows, forgetting thoughts that didn’t quite fit. It creates a crust of forgetting, under which one finds the thinkers, the artists, the activists who are making the mountains form above them, but who are the unseen forces below. When we uncover them (some dead long ago, some more recently deceased, some blessedly still alive) we label them as ‘ahead of their time’, or worse ‘avant guard’ going some way to denying the very fact of their existence in a historical moment – because they don’t quite fit the narrative.

Walter Benjamin was one of these men.

He stayed submerged a relatively short time – within decades he was being posthumously published and remains today a bedrock of post-Marxist and Critical Theory. Indeed, it is from his writings on history that we recognise many of the equalising forces of dominant narratives in our culture, our history and our society. He encouraged us to be playful in our approach to history, rearranging the building blocks that make up the story of the world as we know it.

So, my dental floss is returned to its place with the other daily hygiene paraphernalia in my life, just as Walter was placed within the canon of discourse we take for granted now.

Perhaps in time we will learn to read the surface more accurately, to understand more of what is below. Seismic shifts, providing a view to the world below, are all too rare, and tend to come just as the bubbling material underneath has passed by, leaving only a trace of what we might have otherwise known in more complete intimacy. And as the world ticks on, the moment of clarity is soon replaced with a million others of cloudy uncertainty. If only we could catch some more as they flitter by, if only.

- by James Grogan

Reframing myths – stories of the city

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:02:00 +0000

Shrouded in the mists of memory, tinted in certain sepia tones of distance, told and re-told stories of glory days come, gone and here again. Certain people and places carry a baggage of mythology. In people it’s almost inevitable – a construction of enigmatic behaviour, a flair for exaggeration, battle tails recounted at dinner parties; everyone propagates their own myth, some are accepted and encouraged by others, some are rejected. We do it endlessly with celebrities, politicians, sports personalities, even journalists: Bill Clinton, the relaxed sax player with Southern charm and Northern politics; Tiger Woods, the steely-eyed genius of the golf course; Jeremy Paxman, hard-hitting, strikingly intelligent, witty.

It’s never entirely without truth, of course. But on some level it must be a careful construction. In some ways our everyday identities will always be constructed, playing roles as student, mother, taxi driver, whatever. More subtly, but perhaps more persuasively, we construct our identities as black, white, Asian, gay, straight, man, woman and all the subgenres of identification that one can find beyond those. As you continue to break down the classifications you come closer to that unique, undividable me. Each of these sub-divisors has their own set of mythologies, identifiers and implications. And on some, perhaps less public, level we propagate a myth all of our own – reliable, intelligent, charming, sociable. None of these are false, but it is never the whole story.

Inanimate objects are just as capable of developing mythologies (the hallowed turf, the sacred shroud, the lucky hat). Such objects can become the focus of worship, they possess a power far beyond their use as things and inevitably they have a history to them which people enjoy, which people find something of themselves in. Such mythologies really do relate to a sense of where we have come from – a father introducing a son to the pocket watch that has been passed through the generations, an atavistic link to a world he cannot inhabit. Such objects become powerful and permanent tokens of origin; they provide scope and definition to where we have come from; they initiate a legacy which one is party to, and to which one has to adhere. One may even go as far as to speculate that such objects (of a familial, cultural or religious nature) go a long way to ensuring social stability and cultural cohesion.

Some of the greatest mythologies surround cities. Hong Kong: bustling Eastern (this is, of course a mythology from Europe) metropolis of sky-scrapers and Old Colonial charm. Tokyo: city of endless money-making, epic movements of people, a spiritual centre. New York: exciting, pulsating place where art and culture are pressure boiled and where anything can happen. Dublin: quaint and pleasant city of slightly bleary eyed jolly Guinness drinkers, statues, history and music. London: city of ancient rituals and traditions with a thrilling mix of artistic and cultural activities, a people of steeled cohesion.

In this last named case, the myth is sadly lacking in reality. London, as a place to live in and as an experience for anyone who ventures forth on its famous thoroughfares, is a nightmare. Streets heaving with suicidal-looking pedestrians, crazed black cab drivers for whom zebra crossings are little more than an opportunity for some excitement, unfriendly and inept staff at overpriced and odd smelling eateries, corporate branding that has ensured every café, pub, restaurant and shop is a carbon copy of every other on every other dirty street. Screeching underground trains, filled with more dead-faced souls, trundle through century old tunnels, shifting millions of people from one place to the next every day. It is a city which exists to ensure the false economy of its over-inflated nature (not to mention its grossly over indulgent levels of consumption and waste) is propagated and supported in a continuous cycle.

The two greatest constituents of the London myth are that it is a place of solidarity and cultural engagement.

Many will have, as I did, witnessed the unforgettable scenes on July 7^th 2005. London, having been struck by a series of terrorist bombs, continued. People got to work as best they could. Then, with the transport systems grounded, they walked home. Walking from central London to the suburbs is quite a trek; but there they were, endless streams of regular Londoners walking quietly home, because that’s what they had to do. There was solidarity in that mass of people, there was a strength that you only find in a people that support each other. We were reminded of our (cultural, historical) memories of Blitz era London, bomb shelters and blackouts, the all clear and The White Cliffs of Dover. The pit of one’s stomach was tweaked by the scenes. “Yes”, one though, “this truly is one of the greatest cities of the world.” A city held together in solidarity – a rare and wonderful thing indeed.

The vision of a cultural London is more historically based. King’s Road, The Beatles, Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, David Hockney – The Swinging Sixties. A time of political and cultural revolution; hippies in Hampstead and Belsize Park; the golden age of The Royal Court Theatre; a new era of peace and harmony. The King’s Road is now one of the most fashionable shopping streets (no independent stores could even consider the rents in such a place); Abbey Road (or somewhere in the general area) has a Beatles museum; Belisize Park and Hampstead’s hippies have either moved on, or grown up, shaved and started working in media or finance. The cultural institutions of London today, many and valuable though they are, seem more concerned about the ever dwindling funding from the Arts Council and performance related targets, the very essence of life under New Labour. There is all but no space for experimental or fringe arts – the cost of even a small theatre space in London means that only the most crowd pleasing pile of drivel will break-even.

I am, I know, being unfair – July 7^th was an incredibly rare set of circumstances, which produced something truly unique, unpredictable and perhaps in line with human nature. That Londoners don’t display the same signs of communal solidarity on a daily basis is an inevitability of urban living, or so it would seem from here. The past always produces misty eyed memories, especially when those who lived through it are still around, though not living quite as exciting lives as they like to believe they once did.

But either way these things have found their way into the mythology of London as a place. They are inscribed on the fabric of the city, they are written into its historical narrative, they are as much part of London as Big Ben and the changing of the guard. But that’s just it – London, as we like to understand it, as we like to speak about it, is a set of signifiers with cultural or historical significance; it is a fantasy constructed through the telling and re-telling of those places, those times and (perhaps) an exaggeration of the significance of those self-same things.

But does it matter? Arguably the myth of London, like the myth of how your grand dad won the war, is harmless and unimportant. It’s just part of the way we identify our place in the world, a way to attach ourselves to something we can understand, be proud of even. It gives us context and a basis for definition and identity. These things are valuable – essential even.

But there are moments, in the most genuine of London experiences, when the myth and reality start to bare next to no relation. London can possess qualities of incredible intimacy (unspoiled days spent picnicking on Primrose Hill spring to mind) and immense fun. But even these do not tally with the agreed, collective mythology of the place. Perhaps the only way to survive is to create your own myth of the city – rediscovering memories down shady roads, catching a scent on the breeze, buzzing through streets of good times gone, and maybe to come again.

And here we come close to the nub of the point – the myth’s I outlined above will be disputed by many. We do all construct our own myths, found in the retelling of stories and the recounting of experiences related to place. The problem comes when myths are imposed from elsewhere. See above – you’ll find assertions about places, arbitrary associations between potentially random cultural signifiers. It is something you find in newspapers, documentaries, novels and the ever expanding broadcast news. These are the building blocks of society, and those who control the narratives of myth have a hand in the control of society.

Perhaps our only recourse is to insist on reframing the myths to our own purposes. Shifting the viewfinder to a new position, taking one section and making it our own.

These mythologies are only ever a product of our desire. Without people to pass them on, agree on them, adhere to the collective experience, they would vanish in an instant. Is it the ever more prevalent mass media that pushes such myths through into our subconscious with greater speed and effect? Or is it simply that we need the myths to get through more easily – the realities feeling just a little too boring, or empty, or uninspiring? Either way we sustain the mythology because it sustains us; we need to believe in it – what else is there?

- by Neil Keating

Relay

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:37:00 +0000

“What’s in the bag?”

I don’t have much choice,

“It’s a panda costume officer”

He isn’t fazed. Which is fair; velour panda legs are quite visible under my wishfully inconspicuous coat. I have no one to blame but myself it seems.

“I’ll need to do a search”

It’s only the panda head and paws in the bag. I’ve left everything else at my girlfriend’s house, apart from a £10 note and a phone number to call in case of emergency.

If I do end up at a station (which is now of primary interest to me) they could take my phone and document my contacts, which I consider a discourteous offence to the reputation of my friends (none of whom are in the least bit disreputable…). I would loathe implicating any into the records of police clerks due to my dissenting behaviour, standing here in Ladbroke Grove, headless but panda-bodied.

It snowed today. Lovely, puffy big flakes making a stand against the English calendar. London was for one day a little Siberia, and I its proud panda preparing for peaceful protest. That is, until we got utterly rumbled by a group of policemen who didn’t really need to be too observant to notice a group of people aimlessly loitering, two of which with very big black feet.

“When were you intending to put this on?” gesturing towards the panda head, now looking distinctly dejected.

I detail our plans with openness and calm. This is how we’ve been briefed. We even had role-play exercises;

‘Excuse me Sir, could you please vacate the premises or we may arrest you for Breach of the Peace and Obstruction of the Highway.’

‘Fuck off pig or I’ll cut yer inta’ cubes bitch! I’m the motherfuckin’ P.A.N.D.A.!’ was generally a tone we were recommended to avoid.

They group us into a side alley and await further advice. We exchange humoured glances of incontestable defeat. The Olympic Torch and its entourage process before us; legions of police on foot, bikes and cars, black vans with black windows, carnival floats with offerings from official sponsors (who will not be mentioned), dancing girls pretending it’s not freezing, crowds pretending they can see anything…

We hear word that the torch is actually in a bus as it’s too dangerous to be exposed. That shouldn’t seem so reasonable.

Another policeman takes our details, which does involve one panda having to de-robe to access his wallet. “Oooh Officer!” raises the faintest smile, and I conclude that we’re both just fulfilling a role.

After we’re deemed to be of no danger, we’re free. We follow the wake of the procession, taking photos with the displaced spectators, performers and other protesters. Somewhere ahead someone is carrying a flame to China, and with it angry people are rushing like moths.

But that urgency is absent in me, as I question my reasons and motives, personal and political. I’ve never done this before. I find myself looking at the eyes of a child staring at me through the holes in my panda head.

- by Dr. Fieldmouse.

Nailing my lungs to the post

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:44:00 +0000

Non-smoking crowd, please forgive me, but smokers are nicer people. Except for fashion world smokers – designer cigarette people are way out of our league. Smokers always gather somewhere, and whether they know each other or not, conversations will be had, cigarettes will be offered and lighters will be lent.

Airports. No one really likes them. Waiting rooms, 6 hour long stop-overs, all-the-same duty free shops, the mystery really isn’t there. So you sit in the waiting room, waiting for your flight. Stare as blank as a goldfish towards whatever screen is, or occasionally fall asleep on those more than uncomfortable chairs. It really is a life of an aquarium. Unless you happen to be a smoker. Oh your fingers and lungs tingle just at the thought of stopping over and being able to smoke. And as you make your way to the smoking lounge at the airport you ponder as to why airplanes can’t have a smoking area. Smoking lounges, I find, can vary immensely from airport. But whether they are cancer-closet-like or ample, chique and comfortable they all have one feature in common. The glass wall. And though some might interpret it as a nice act towards smokers, enabling them to not feel so excluded from the outside world, it actually serves a didactic purpose. Parents from all over the world can stroll along the lounge pointing at jolly smokers and saying: “Sophie, Candice… Do you see those people there? They’re all engaging in a very un-healthy habit. And one day they will be very sick. And might steal your place in a public hospital. These people have black lungs and yellow teeth and nails and bad breath.” But, obviously, what Sophie and Candice see differs largely from what her dad is telling them. What they see is an exciting world, much more exciting than the goldfish world they are stuck in. They see people interacting, laughing, and blowing smoke out like magic dragons. And except for the occasional suit and briefcase introvert everyone seems to be happy, entertained. They walk off, bemused at this alternate, smoky, almost mythical world and follow their parents in pursuing cheap whiskey and Lindt chocolate.

Other than having each other, smokers have also that precious little tobacco stick that can be of most use in many situations. Cigarettes have been told to prevent mosquito bites, provide little but crucial lighting to dark areas thus impeding smokers to walk aimlessly around, minimize stress levels and heal the sense of post-modern world loneliness. Absurd, you say? I beg to differ. Upon making plans with friends one can many times be left to wait alone for a good hour as said friends make themselves fashionably late. No cigarette, you’re left to stand there, looking sad and stupid and feeling abandoned, with nothing more to do than people watch. Cigarette in hand, your confidence is restored, your sense of loneliness and abandonment diminished. You are no longer someone just waiting, you are a person smoking. You are no longer passive, but active. You have a purpose in life, the world will not crumble down over you. You are in control. If Estragon had been holding a cigarette in hand during the first section of Act 1 in Waiting for Godot the play would’ve had a completely different impact. The power of cigarettes is clearly underestimated.

A cigarette can not only change the entire course of an earth-shattering play, it can also make people look smarter. The act of taking the little white stick to the lips, inhaling, holding it in, and then exhaling makes people gain a complexion of insightfulness. It’s as if life was revealed to them in a different way. And their sensorial, chromatic and chronologic perceptions are a whole different thing altogether. Smoking also has an impact of mystery on other people. It is an ambiguous endeavor, especially if accompanied by iconic clothing, such as leather jackets or scarves. It can at the same time make one look absorbed in life and nonchalant. Imagine if there was a Nicotine Addict Barbie. Life as we know it would no longer be.

But as all better-off minority communities, we must be fought and eradicated in the name of alienation, fragile and therefore more easily corrupted labour, selfish individuality, goldfish lifestyles, Sophiesms, Candiceisms and Malibu Barbiecisms. As every day goes by smokers are restricted to smaller and smaller areas, making population density in these places higher than in any corner of São Paulo. Our favorite characters on main-stream TVs, battling against cigarettes, buying nicotine gum and nicotine patches and being encouraged by their friends to quit. Most of the cigarettes that get airtime are found in the mouths of villains and women of dubious professions. No one to identify with, we are unworthy societal types. Not even the market, which is out after every different group, hype and clique – from midget anarcho-punks to blonde samurais – want us. And unlike other minority groups, no one will be by our side to raise our flags and offer a helping hand or a comforting word. We will not despair, however, fuelled by our daily intake of nicotine, sense of community and insightfulness and will ride off into the sunset, hat on a high-held head, cigarette in hand.

- by Mariana R.

Podcast: Dual Identities (Dafur Radio Project)

noreply@blogger.com (Yaz Al-Shaater) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:35:00 +0000

In "Dual Identities," the Darfur Radio Project explores the divides between Khartoum and Darfur, Sudan and Kenya, and expatriates and their homeland. First, a look at how economic growth in Khartoum compares to development in Darfur. Then, in the second installment of our series on Sudanese culture, we speak to two Sudanese musicians who find they're connected in unexpected ways.
And, who's who? This month, an introduction to the Sudanese Liberation Army, one of the key rebel groups in Darfur. Finally, we look at how the Sudanese expatriate community in the US is preparing for the 2009 Sudanese elections.
Click the title to download the podcast.

The Darfur Radio Project is a monthly radio broadcast that explores the historical, political, economic, and social contexts of the conflict in Darfur. Using personal stories as well as critical analysis, we aim both to introduce listeners to the complexities of the situation in Sudan and to give them the tools to effect change. We believe that education, good information, and analysis will play an important role in the search for sustainable, long-term peace in Sudan.

A list

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:45:00 +0000

Shuffle through the list of names

Faces, drifting away

Relegated long ago from current, now

Drifting in a sea of obscurity

And today the recent remembered,

Wait to join the queue of the forgotten

What memories you have

Locked, in the prison of the self

The mind’s stagnant focus

Capturing them as they were,

As you want them to be

Fractured statues of youth, now

Growing on some distant shore

Free from the eyes that time

Made fierce and cynical

Their absence, apparent

In the little days spent,

Observing the staccato punctuations of clocks

And wishing for reminders that they

Free from your desperate preservation

Have suffered too

Under the corset of age

But life’s vacancies fill

And now you have new faces,

New lists, short-term bonds

That strangle the past and wait

Complacently, to be strangled

Now we sit comfortable, as the present

Gnaws away passings, and faded photographs

Become less tattoos and more memorials,

Silhouettes of moments and spaces, past monuments

Fast becoming new routes to today’s

Arrogant characters and places

But, in vain, layers of triviality

Amassing like fossils, to be later buried

The present’s desperation, to be encapsulated

Perfectly formed, in the otherwise dusty

Museum of memories and mementos,

Embodies itself in friendship pacts

And photographs of fast passing eras

But behind smiles and daily reunion

All are marked with the unhealing scar

Of dormant obscurity, marked to be drowned

Waiting to join the queue of the forgotten

And become a face

In your most prestigious list

- by Halligan Quin

Written with Anger (at Oneself)

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:42:00 +0000

You have a duty,
to right wrongs.
You have words to say what may be.
To render just, what you view unjustified.
A quality in a character, a view or description.
But words move people, not mountains.

Meet two mouths willing to move.
Do not waste your words any more.
Who are you really trying to help?
You have a duty to build.
Otherwise don't speak of cracks.

Moan, and the world moans with you. How useful.

- by Dr. Fieldmouse

Crossroads

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 01:24:00 +0000

If you could capture the now

Freeze it in captivity

What dour changes would you find

Trapped in the barbs of history?

The earth is rumbling under force of new feet

The dirt is shifting to the east

The withered stalks bow to a new breeze

There's a grind we can feel in all our bones

A foreign tongue has a leash on the land

The Queen’s English has kind hands around our throats

Giving up on trying to make us change

Instead they gift us with new signs and new names

The outsiders come to measure our words

Tailor our sounds to suit their intentions

Preoccupied with the pleasantries of a quiet conversion

Yet with the determined dignity of an Empire’s will

Some have the awkward grace of respect

The Saxon desire imbued in their work

To breathe in the smoke of Ireland’s fire

But we must look them in the eye down the barrel of a gun

What will they find, dismantling our land

A place drowsy with its own beauty

Drenched in culture, soaked in silent sameness

Lame after years of dreaming its own existence

All the lessons we’ve taught ourselves

In the houses of wisdom buried in the dirt

All to be smothered by the wave of new words

A premature funeral march for the soon dead languages

Language we have, but never a voice

The constant medley of stagnant progress

Parnell, O’Connell, the mystical echoes of Wolfe Tone

We listen to all, thus now we are confusedly deaf

Some find the new voices suit their ears

And their tongues were made for the modern talk

Now they rise with the sun, and bow to The East

And have washed their mouths out with English soap

Others see futures as theirs to construct

Breaking the chains of Irish self

Demanding the proud progression of sea

Away from the rotting stalks and browning green

Yet Ireland’s change is departing its home

And stubborn roots refuse to be pulled

Either blinding ourselves as to not see their sense

Or furiously drawing blood from the foreign hand that feeds

So here we all stand, at crossroads divisive

The edge of The West, the middle of nowhere, the centre of the battle for the world

The Irish may depart on the roads they want to see

But, where then, will Ireland be?

by Halligan Quin

Between God, Pointy Hats and Ghosts – an analysis on magical realism

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 22:09:00 +0000

“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight.” – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Mislabeling is present in all realms of our present world, mostly due to commonly accepted paradigms that seem to permeate through time without the slightest discussion they deserve. Today’s dish? Magical realism. I read lots of what is considered world literature (which is a ridiculous label in the first place because isn’t everything world literature?) and I found that many Latin-American books, African books, and Indian books are labeled or “tagged” (I don’t really get this whole tagging business) under the “magical realism” genre on amazon.com or shelfari.com, not to mention in many classrooms around the European/American world. Words aren’t just bundles of letters that simplify our communication, they have much more power than people realize: they shape the way we see the world, and allow us to take control or attempt to take control of ideas. It’s as if giving something a name makes it somehow tangible, it is no longer something unknown, something to fear. Ultimately magical realism seems like it’s a prettier word for the term “pagan”. And by calling it so the western world could understand and cease to fear this reality. By calling it magical, the premise of it being really real is excluded. The ever-fearing Christians can once again sleep in peace, being assured that there are no such things as ghosts and spirits.

As if Christ resurrected is totally normal and realistic, but a ghost wandering through the house is somehow more farfetched and “magical”. Realism and reality are such perspective based ideas, especially when addressing abstract issues and ideas. But, as usual, one viewpoint must prevail. (A “one ring to rule them all” motif, so to speak). So any book reference to Noah’s Ark and the gazillion animals that magically fit into it, Mary being a virgin (who are we trying to kid?), and the sea splitting open is fine. But healing men, water spirits and foreshadowing isn’t. This is all so 1500s, ships, Jesuits and the whole shebang setting out to colonize and cathequise the natives. Must we still live under this eye-blinding, neck-stifling viewpoint? Is it really necessary? Any post-colonial country has issues with trying to regain its own identity. These places are places full of contradictions and mixes. Places where language is a muddle up somewhere in between the colonizing language and the native language, where religion is a mesh of “pagan” beliefs and Christianity. It isn’t magical realism, it is a very complex and intricate historical process. It seems as though the west has been condemned to Five Hundred Years of Solitude and has therefore been impeded to recognize and accept this whole world out there and its adjacent set of ideas.

To me, magical realism is something along the lines of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, it has nothing to do with tradition (though maybe with some unhealthy overgrown nerdy men cult) and everything to do with magic – wands, pointy hats and even flying brooms. Now, what is categorized under the Magical Realism definition is hardly “magical”, it’s maybe mythical (but isn’t everything?) and very much cultural. It is tradition being passed on through literature. It is characteristic postcolonial catholic-animistic-spiritual amalgam. It is the western world trying to make sense of something they fear and do not understand; trying to gain control over something that perceive as exotic and that offers no rigid structure. The so-called pagan world is much more fluid and organic, less certain but much more exciting. For future reference, perhaps, magical realism should be labeled and tagged and defined as anything written under the influence of magic mushrooms as. And also whatever Tom Cruise says when he goes off on a scientology rant.

by Mariana R.

Podcast: Four Corners (Dafur Radio Project)

noreply@blogger.com (Yaz Al-Shaater) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:33:00 +0000

In "Four Corners", the Darfur Radio Project explores the physical and mental geography of Sudan, both inside and outside of Darfur. First, a critical look at how Chinese investment is playing out in the Merowe Dam Project in northern Sudan. Then, in a new series on Sudanese culture, we speak to musicians both at home and abroad. And, an exploration of the conflict in the east of Sudan, which predates the violence in Darfur. Finally, we hear about how both large international NGOs and smaller grassroots organizations tackle the question of education in Darfur.
Click the title to download the podcast.

The Darfur Radio Project is a monthly radio broadcast that explores the historical, political, economic, and social contexts of the conflict in Darfur. Using personal stories as well as critical analysis, we aim both to introduce listeners to the complexities of the situation in Sudan and to give them the tools to effect change. We believe that education, good information, and analysis will play an important role in the search for sustainable, long-term peace in Sudan.

Gaitas and Volkgeist: Music, Identity and Nationalism in the 21st Century

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 22:19:00 +0000

Music has been often described as the most noise conveying the least information. Eduard Hanslick, summarizing the tenets of formalist criticism, has said that “music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks […] nothing but sound.” As I listen to the voice of Betsy Smith on the radio, I feel very much inclined to disagree. Music plays a critical role in human exchanges and in making us human. At the same time, I would also like to reflect on some of the contradictions that emerge in a complex world where post-national governance structures and the most virulent nationalism co-exist. How can a national musical expression help individuals and communities construct an imagined self in the 21^st century? What are the boundaries imposed and the promises delivered by the music of national artists in nations that are not states? What are its dangers?

If we understand music as a multilayered text that can be read and interpreted outside of its subjective, formal and sonic qualities, then we can’t fail to realize the power of music in shaping the symbolic dimension that permeates all facets of life, from the imaginative-emotional to the politico-social.

The work of several contemporary ethnomusicologists (including Joseph Lam and Martin Stokes) rests on the assumption that music is one of the battlegrounds in which identity is shaped. More than political projects, historical conditionings, and religious and ethnic associations, music plays a privileged part in the imagining of a “global self” because of its immediacy and because it contains, reifies and is informed by all of the above. By highlighting its discursive nature, in its practice and its products we learn that music is not an innocent and disembedded object meant solely for aesthetic pleasure, but that, in fact, it carries meaning and provides an aural venue for the intangible threads of identity to be woven. Music acts as an epistemological palimpsest of critical importance in a confused age where individuals and communities are searching for ways to re-imagine their souls, for a coherent articulation of their desires, subjectivities and yearnings that will infuse their political and historical projects, and their presence on this planet, with signification and meaning.

But homogeneity, or even coherence, is not to be expected. Go to the “World Music” shelves of a record store and you will find wonderfully hybridized compositions where the rhythms of a beatboxer mix with the pulsations of taiko and tabla, or a flamenco guitar sings with and Indonesian gamelan orchestra in the background. This trend of music making by borrowing and incorporating foreign elements and practices is characteristic of the larger process accelerated with the advent of globalization in the phase of late capitalism. We enter a historical phase where there is nothing, if there ever was, nationally or culturally authentic. Cultural practices are but an alloy of influences and currents from diverse sites.

Now, to the political implications of all this. If music is a battleground in which the self is built and negotiated, then it provides a rich, subversive and accessible platform for individuals to express their agency, and to compete and bargain vis-à-vis their international Other. For this reason I’m interested in looking at the role of music in the formation of nationalist identities. Borrowing Anthony Smith’s definition of the term, I’m referring to nationalism as “the doctrine that makes the nation the object of every political endeavor and national identity the measure of every human value.”

In the European context, the nationalist forces that punctuate domestic politics in many countries (including Spain and the UK) are crucial to understand the contradictions of a historical moment where the nation state is under serious attack and when internal national boundaries are being abolished. However, as we learn from a quick glance at the newspaper, borders and nations still matter. Last September, the Spanish press reported that more than four hundred people attending a nationalist demonstration in Catalonia burnt images of the Spanish king while singing Els Segadors, the Catalan anthem.

As Anthony Smith suggests,

“in many ways national symbols, customs and ceremonies are the most potent and durable aspects of nationalism. They embody its basic concepts, making them visible for every member, communicating the tenets of an abstract ideology in palpable, concrete terms that evoke instant emotional responses from all strata of community.”

It is in this sphere of the emotive-political that I seek to understand how music articulates a nationalist ideology by building an imagined contemporary nationalist self.

The sonic textures of the gaita

In order to explore this, I have chosen a musical soundscape that is very dear and familiar to me: Galician music, the music produced in the northwestern autonomous region of Spain.

Galicia has a distinct character and culture, different from the rest of regions that comprise Spain. Gallego, a romance language closely related to Portuguese, is the native language. Since 1978 it enjoys co-official status in Galicia together with castellano. From pre-Roman days, Galicia was occupied by Celtic tribes whereas the rest of people in the Peninsula were of Iberian origin. This Celtic past has survived trough the ages in its mythological and poetic form and, for some, it grants claims of a distinct ethnic identity. Whereas this ethnic claim is arguable, its culture presents many unique features. Galician music, for instance, stands out from the rest of music in the Iberian Peninsula. Its flagship instrument is the gaita, a version of the bagpipe. The gaita has become “the” symbol of Galician national identity. The Romantic poets of the nineteenth century that articulated the nationalist tenets of the Rexurdimento movement spoke of the beauty of this instrument and its connection to the land. Its potent melody always accompanies official acts and informal events alike.

The symbolic importance of the gaita has an indisputable political dimension. Last year, a group of musicians had the creative but unfortunate idea of performing in an official event a version of the Galician anthem in Flamenco style. The Galician Nationalist Party presented a resolution in the Galician parliament to avoid this from happening again. As Dr. Lam points out, “whenever the self is factually or psychologically threatened, the efforts to preserve and to adjust the treasured self promptly emerge.” Indeed, members of the nationalist party argued that it was their duty “to defend our culture, our music and our symbols.” (El Mundo, December 21, 2006).

Since Franco’s death in 1975, nationalism has become a major political force in Galicia and in other Spanish regions. The Galician Nationalist Block (BNG in Spanish) is the main nationalist political party in Galicia. Based on claims of the existence of a distinct national identity different from the rest of the country, the BNG strives for self-determination and eventual independence. Today, the BNG holds a modest number of seats in the Galician parliament but it is now governing in the region thanks to an alliance with the Socialist Party.

It is necessary to mention that several competing projects of Galician selfhood co-exist today in the region. For instance, a large number of Gallegos, although they have been born and live in Galicia, conceive their self as a uniquely Spanish one, believe in the territorial and political unity of the Spanish nation, and rarely use Gallego or limit it to the private sphere. Another equally important self is that of individuals who comfortably inhabit a dual or benevolently schizophrenic self, the result of a combination of both a Galician and Spanish identities that are not mutually exclusive. Finally, there is the nationalist self, which discourages a dual Galician/Spanish identity and favors an exclusively Galician one. This Galician self, however, is often imagined in a global context.

By analyzing the sonic texture of the gaita in the work of two Galician pipers, I endeavor to illustrate how music helps to simultaneously articulate and subvert a nationalist identity, while offering a creative way of imagining a Galician global self.

Electronic authenticity and musical cosmopolitanism

Mercedes Peón is in many ways the symbol of the renaissance of Galician folk music. A BBC world music award nominee, she has spent ten years visiting Galician villages, collecting and recording the oldest of Galician musical expressions from the rapidly disappearing oral tradition of the Galician people. Her ethnographic fieldwork has yielded more than two thousand hours of musical material which has crystallized in three CDs. In her work, the rough and primal vocal rhythms of the Galician heartlands can often be heard in conjunction with a hoe, whose blade she beats with a piece of cut flint to provide percussion. The gaita plays a central part in her music, but the sonic texture of this instrument is very different from its traditional sound. Peón places the gaita in the crossroads where tradition and modernity meet.

A sinuous, primeval sonic quality confers Peón’s work with a surprising, new-age-cum-medievalist flavor. I believe Peón has undertaken the romanticist project of “reconstructing the sounds of the nation in all its concrete specificity and with ‘archaeological’ verisimilitude.” (Smith). She goes back to the past and the oral tradition which are the genuine sources of the Volksgeist. Peón thus rescues the “authentic” national character of the land. However, as she herself has stated, her music is not “traditional [but] an evolutionary expression of the people, from generation to generation.” The way she incorporates synthesizers, pre-recorded sounds from nature, and other digital technology to create special sonic effects attests to this. By creating such a soundscape, Peón suggests “the nation’s antiquity and continuity, its noble heritage and the drama of its ancient glory and regeneration” (Smith) now accomplished through electronic technology and international global markets. The global Galician self holds the hand of the past while walking confidently into the future.

Despite their connection to the land, the modern Galician people are also global nomads. Over the last 150 years, at least 2.5 million Galicians (roughly the population of Galicia nowadays) have migrated in massive numbers to Latin America, to the point that nowadays Spaniards in the American continent are referred to as Gallegos.

This global presence is best captured in the music of Cristina Pato. This twenty-seven year old piper belongs to the Erasmus generation, that increasingly larger group of European students who thanks to the educational policies of the European Union have become more aware of the cultural diversity beyond their national borders. As Pato has stated, her musical project consists in “mixing the gaita with other musics. [She wants] to drink and eat from other cultures.” This thirst for hybridity led her to collaborate with the Silk Road Ensemble in New York last year. More importantly, it can be appreciated in the eclecticism of her last two works, in which she combines traditional musical codes from Galicia with Latin music, jazz and blues.

Adjusting the gaita to the musical codes of other traditions alters its sonic texture in surprising and inspiring ways. In conjunction with electric guitars and a piano, the gaita transcends its melancholic, lyric, and martial tonalities. It becomes explosively sensual and enticing. It achieves a cosmopolitan dimension that projects the desires of the global Galician self.

This transcultural process of music-making, however, is not totally devoid of a nationalist agenda. Pato states that her goal is “to bring the gaita to the same level with other instruments […] because I am a woman of the world, but first of all I am gallega.”

The hybridity of Pato’s music is not new. As some of the Galician immigrants returned from Latin America in the 1930s, they brought with them Cuban rumbas, Argentinean tangos and Mexican rancheras that were adapted and incorporated to the gaita’s repertoire. Ironically, the proponents of Galician nationalism in the pre-Franco years despised these “sins of the art… this profanation of the Galician gaita.” Both in Pato’s work and that of her predecessors, we see how the foreign is not disciplined, but is emphasized and made salient, either to embrace it or to despise it.

Re-thinking nationalist identities through music

The two examples I have used reveal the inherent contradictions enmeshed in the formation of a contemporary nationalist identity. On the one hand, musicians project a global Galician self, confident in different cultural codes and embracing global technologies and markets. At the same time, they participate in a nationalist project that rejects the idea of a world community in its moral unity. Nationalism, as Smith argues, “offers a narrow, conflict-laden legitimation for political community, which inevitably pits culture-communities against each other.” I am perfectly aware of the need to actively preserve and cherish traditions and cultures (and I acknowledge the crucial role that nationalism has played in that respect). However, I cannot condone the radicalism and insularity that is often used to defend such postures and which emphasizes our human differences over our commonalities. I understand that individuals and communities need to have an identity core that centers them and allows them to meaningfully interact with each other. However, when the creation of such identities rejects democratic ideals of equality, fraternity and non-violence I despair. Similarly, I also understand the need for people to fight political and military oppression (I am an outspoken supporter of the rights of the Palestinian, Tibetan and Saharaui people), but in the current European context of rights, freedoms and material wealth, radical nationalism is reactionary. Taking it to the extreme of groups like the Basque ETA, is totalitarian.

If music allows us to re-imagine ourselves and our relationships with the rest of the world, why not transcend parochial attachments and truly embrace a global identity? After all, as Benedict Anderson has said, communities and nations are constructed through acts of the imagination. In order to encompass a more accurate reflection of the global Galician self, it is necessary to create a global identity that is not bound to national imperatives. Shelly, appropriately wrote that artists “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Their duty, I believe, is to legislate ethically and responsibly.

sanzbritz@gmail.com

Bali must fix binding emission targets on a per-capita basis to include all countries fairly

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:27:00 +0000

One of the major justifications for the US not signing Kyoto is that the treaty does not contain any legally binding emission reduction targets for China and India, although these countries have become respectively the largest and fourth largest emitter of green house gases. India and China – in return – claim that any path of development that would not harm the climate is too expensive for them; the West has to pay for a historical responsibility that stems from its past emissions, which brought about anthropogenic climate change in the first place. In this way the blame is passed from one nation to the other, and in the meantime all three countries keep on increasing their gross emissions.

One of the factors that brought about this tragic ping-pong game is that throughout the negotiations in Kyoto the Annex 1 countries (the industrialised nations with the highest level of greenhouse gas emissions) were not willing to discuss per-capita emission rights. Kyoto left open the question of how much CO2-equivalent countries ultimately have to reduce in their emissions. With the end of the road of emissions reductions deliberately left in the dark, it was consequently not possible to fix how much low-emitting countries could still increase their emissions. When frequently criticising the Kyoto Protocol for its lack of binding emission targets for developing countries, Western politicians seem to ignore that their unwillingness to fix universal emission targets gave birth to this problem.

To address climate change meaningfully, emission restrictions undoubtedly have to be imposed on all countries, including non-Annex 1 countries like India and China. To achieve this, the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali needs to change its negotiation from one about emission reductions to a rights-based approach of maximum allowable emissions. Using ethical decision making systems such as John Rawls' “Original Position”, it follows that such a right for emissions would need to be defined per-capita. Any system that does not allocate per-capita rights of emissions would mean that there would be humans of different values. The world's climate being a common good, all humans have an equal share in it. This is especially relevant as the capacity to emit is a need to produce many types of goods. To allocate more rights to emit to one person compared to another would mean to judge that one person is given a higher capacity to own goods/use services which emit greenhouse gases. So if the international community allowed Country A higher emission rights per citizen compared to Country B, this would mean to establish in international law that Country A is given the right to a higher capacity for wealth than Country B. Of course countries are different in wealth but by fixing carbon allowances differently also the allowed capacities for wealth creation would be influenced. Such a discrimination would clearly be incompatible with the Original Position and also with the Categorial Imperative or Utilitarianism.

If, however, the conference in Bali decided for clear per-capita rights for emission, greenhouse gas emissions could be restricted for all countries. For current low-emitters this would be advantageous in that they would know where the boundaries lie and develop their industries accordingly to maximise the welfare they can get out of their total amount of emission allowances. And for high-emitters like the UK per-capita rights would give certainty as to what value emissions need to be decreased, thereby giving the chance for a more long-term planning both by politics and business. No matter how much a country emits now, under a per-capita rights based scheme all countries would have incentives to reduce their emissions. Furthermore per-capita emission rights would provide the basis for real international emissions trading. There would be legally binding emission targets also for China and India just like the USA demanded. And – satisfying China and India's common argument that sustainable development would be too costly for them – the cost of this change would be reduced through real participation in one international emissions trading market.

Concluding, through per-capita emission rights the major arguments for inaction of these three top emitters could be resolved and climate change be mitigated both efficiently as ethically if the conference next week in Bali makes the right steps.

- by Dirk Heine

Podcast: Dialogue & Discourse (Dafur Radio Project)

noreply@blogger.com (Yaz Al-Shaater) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:53:00 +0000

In this podcast, the Darfur Radio Project examines ways in which the world thinks about and responds to the conflict in Darfur. We hear about current discussion surrounding the role of climate change in Darfur. And, how do experts define the crisis--is it genocide? Then, we take a critical look at one possible solution--the divestment movement. Finally, who's who? This month, a profile of President Omar al-Bashir.
Click the title to download the podcast.

The Darfur Radio Project is a monthly radio broadcast that explores the historical, political, economic, and social contexts of the conflict in Darfur. Using personal stories as well as critical analysis, we aim both to introduce listeners to the complexities of the situation in Sudan and to give them the tools to effect change. We believe that education, good information, and analysis will play an important role in the search for sustainable, long-term peace in Sudan.

Aiming for Peace

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 12:20:00 +0000

That's it, you can do it. Just a little more now, pull a bit harder... BAM!

the green figure slams forcefully into the ground as the bullet rips through

the cold green steel plate... BAM!

another smashes into a paper figure that looks suspiciously like a Russian soldier from the 70's, and is for some bizarre reason referred to as Ivan or Boris most of the time. One down and closer to peace. BAM! another one down and closer still. At least we produce bullets faster than we make enemies (for now we do)

”He can't even use the radio, but he's a damn fine shoot! just what I want from a medic, keep up the good work soldier!” A flash of colour, perhaps even true colours, but it doesn't last for more than a second as the major then goes on;

”We need to be there, for the people who are suffering, that's our purpose, but please remember they are your enemies”. A conflict of interests if ever there was one. They are worth as much as any of you, but do remember, they are all scumbags who can't be trusted.

Go on do it, sign it, you can do it, it's just a splash of ink... Why would you care? SCREECH The pen of a student signing a petition against an oil-giant drilling for oil in Nigeria.

We made a difference, yes we did, that's what we tell ourselves when we sent 1005 copies of a black and white printed letters in swollen words to a company board, but did that make them think twice about what they were doing? No, they were probably thankful, because now they didn't have to use their own oil to warm their office, and never mind the expenses on toilet paper.

But at least there was a will. Or was it someone else's will? Did you even stop to think about what you signed?

-Nah! It was too long, I was in a rush, but I'm sure it was for something good, at least it said amnesty at the top.

A drop of colour, maybe red, but your blood was blue, was it not?

Yes, now you did your part for the world, what would it do without you and your support? All those profound personal letters will sway the hearts of the oil-giants! And if not... We could always torch it! I mean... It's by no means we who give them that power, by turning on the lamp, cramming out full effect from the heater, or making a tropical paradise into a walk-in freezer with 12 air-conditioners at the same time? Not to mention how utterly important it is to get everywhere! Sure we care, we just don't care enough to give up OUR comforts.

-I for one would never give up my comforts, a soul dark as tar, not from smoking though, at least not my own smoke.

But did we really want to help people, or did we want people we could help, things to care about? We thirsted for someone to say, oh my god, so righteous, so good. We longed to see the disabled kids every Thursday so that we would know that we were not one of them. As long as it was just playing in the park with them or feeding them it was ok, but if they needed to go to the toilet or threw a tantrum (or threw up for that matter) the old ladies taking care of them would come scurrying to comfort them, and we would pat our own backs and say;

- you did well, he didn't pee on himself (or you) before she came, you did well, you can't be expected to be able to calm him down, he's re... mentally handicapped for heavens sake!' and yes, you managed to look your best throughout the whole endeavor.

Sometimes I wonder what is best, having the will to change but being capable of nothing or having the strength to change, doing so but not really caring.

BAM!

"YOU'RE SHOOTING TOO SLOW!"

-Yes, how can we ever hope to preserve the peace if we can't kill them fast enough? and if shooting them creates the enemy, well then you better be fast on the trigger so that they don't grow faster than you shoot!

*reflection... is that really true? oh well, they told me to shoot didn't they? and that's what I like best. If this is helping I kinda like it, come out come out wherever you are!

-Have you thought this through?

- Yes!

-I mean Really thought this through?

-YES!

-So... what are you waiting for?

-oh, right...

BAM! one down, BAM! two... god, so many terrorists... and now they've taken to wearing skirts and carrying children too... but you won't fool me, I can see right through you! Oh, not that one... can't see through her... what to do? BAM! oh! now I can! I knew there was a way!

If they were civilians they would have told us, right?

At least you're not told to think in the military, you're actually told not to.

So who's to blame for the world of today with all its horrors? Who bears responsibility for the disastrous condition of the global society? Or is there actually something wrong at all?

When asked the vast majority of this world would like to see peace on earth, when asked they support equality, you would be deemed a mental case if you said anything else.

But can this world hold such things? Is it even possible? What would we care about, what would we work for if where it got us was the same place as we started? I think these problems are needed, both as a point of reference, so that we may know that we are better off than others, but also as a cause. We want to feel important and acknowledged. It's a human drive and it's what keeps us moving forward. It sure has been the reason for many struggles and horrible things, but without it we would be nothing. We need the problems of this world to feel alive and thus I believe that we are all part of these conflicts and that there is no final solution that will lead to an end of all inequality and injustice, it's just human.

by Joakim Pettersson

Post-Humanism II

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:40:00 +0000

It has been a month, and we have had ample time to consider what is, and what is not moral in our pursuit of posthumanism. Our definition of the posthuman must first agree (and I always enjoy quoting myself):

The Post-human is described as -in evolutionary terms- a being whose qualities exceed that of present man and, that said being can no longer be classified as such (human) for he/she/it has transcended the homo sapien. This all sounds like normal, proper evolution yes, but this Post-human being -by definition- must have at one time existed as a human but has since transcended this classification by application of mechanical and genetic components which have greatly advanced its abilities. Any human whom has been improved by nano-technology, genetic manipulation, life extension therapies, etc. but has not advanced beyond the universal definition of humanity (what ever that is) is dubbed a transhuman: that is someone in the transitional phase between the two classifications, owning elements of each.

We run into many dangers in the argument for, or against, Post-human, many of the arguments involving definitions, and sly maneuvers around the proper subject. Firstly, there is a danger even using the term Post-humanism, for this implies that this is some movement post dating humanist thought. We are not discussing humanism by any means, although the idea that humans are so important that they can supersede themselves does seem to be a thought strain engendered by humanist waffling. In fact, transhumanism is considered an outgrowth of secular humanism.

Transhumanists believe, as a generalization, that human improvement technologies should be widely accessible and available. Although these transhumanists believe that dangers lurk in the advancement of humans, they believe the pros outweigh the cons. So what are the Pros?

There are possibilities for the Trans-human and Post-human in increased longevity i.e. immortality (perhaps in someway unimagined), increased intellectual faculties, the ability to halt, stifle, or manipulate emotion, and an ability to cohabitate wider ranges of environmental platforms, indicative of an increased separation from normal biometric function. The main worry of this, which is voiced by many in the bioconservative camp, including writers and academics such as Leon Kass and Wesley Smith, is that the processes involved here could possibly be dehumanizing.

The word dehumanizing is misplaced. Post-human endeavors are dehumanizing, and that is the point, to move the current race beyond its faults and foibles. Perhaps a better way to express this fear is the concept that post humanism undermines our inherent human dignity – another humanist theorem – and that letting go of things that make us human under current definition might destroy what is valuable in being a human.

So it seems the argument is between Science and Philosophy, both in their own ways a sort of religion. So what we are really talking about here, and this is the crux of the matter, is whether or not it is ok, right, or even wise to play God with our own evolution. Should we, as a people, not just say God is dead, but also say God is dead but don’t be bummed, my buddy here has a few gizmos and a costume beard – couldn’t he just take over?

Now it isn’t as simple and rudimentary as that, not so cut and dry. The main focus here should be – and it is in many bioconservative papers – is that a appreciation of human nature, and our defenses against the dangers of being such at present is too general. We are a people with a well developed society, with fail safes in place for a great number of the population – far more than any other time in history – to live in peace with little distress. Yet – and this is important – we still fail to be happy, to take full advantage of these gifts and to improve upon the society we have gone so far to build. We have the opportunity provided us by invention to run away and cower, to turn our back on the redeeming qualities of human kindness and charity, and become enhanced mechanically, rather than spiritually. This is not just improvement of body and mind, this is a dumping of all previous human baggage and evolution – a fresh start. For some this may be appealing, and is in the case of the Transhumanist, but the Transhumanists run the danger of becoming worshipers of a Utopia unfounded i.e. because we have been enhanced by technology racism, disease, death, rape, plunders and war will cease to exist. That everything we have ever feared will be no more.

Since we are afraid of the dark then, should we turn on the light? Is it right in every situation, or are we being wasteful, using resources to much, burning up the planet, burning up ourselves? Is it too presumptuous to believe that because of a few man made and most likely fallible devices man will overcome all things which have plagued him since the beginning of his existence? This is the argument of the transhumanist! How amazing! How fantastical! I query as to whether the rise of the Posthuman may come peacefully. Will it truly come to pass without a smear against the so called peaceful dignity we will achieve with enlightenment? Would there not be violence in relation to those who choose the path of this so-called improvement, and those who do not? Would one side not defend their right to choice? Would they co-exist, or is the term posthuman in fact an ominous premonition of the fate of those who choose to conserve their individuality.

There is a quote from Leon Kass which goes:

the final technical conquest of his own nature would almost certainly leave mankind utterly enfeebled. This form of mastery would be identical with utter dehumanization. Read Huxley’s Brave New World, read C. S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man, read Nietzsche’s account of the last man, and then read the newspapers. Homogenization, mediocrity, pacification, drug-induced contentment, debasement of taste, souls without loves and longings – these are the inevitable results of making the essence of human nature the last project of technical mastery. In his moment of triumph, Promethean man will become a contented cow. (L. Kass 2002: Life, Liberty, and Defense of Dignity: The Challenge of Bioethics. P48)

This brings us to interesting territory. Is there not evidence in our current use of technology which proves the possibilities of the deterioration of human dignity? Perhaps the internet – not always a bad tool, nor such a terrible resource – is breaking down communities, wiring us up, making us more intelligent, making us intelligent to a fault, bringing us to a point where little joy can be got from life when not constantly turned on? Is this not a drug, pacifying rumbling souls? Is this not encroaching upon our carefully developed human pride with silent but deadly piano wire?

And violence does encroach daily upon us. How many men have we seen shot on a television, how many sex scenes have we seen and how many people have we ourselves blown to pieces in a video game. There is the old adage querying whether without movies we would know how to cry and perhaps it is true. Perhaps we already know little on feelings, and have begun the first tragic steps towards the Posthuman.

If viewed in such a manner it seems we are living in a new age, one of the Post-romantic, where human interaction is no longer involving the senses, feelings, and souls, but rather simple exchanges of information. Our synapses are turned on by flashing lights, we salivate when presented with conditioned material such as adverts and we express feelings under the same conditioned experiences. Our moods are aroused by imaginary quantifiers such as video games and technology, movies inform our behaviors and I’ll be so bold to say that art has become a commodity, so part of everyday life that instead of inspiring, it is dulling the senses (this is said in generality, for there are still artistic materials which challenge and inspire).

If this is so, with the little technology we currently have at our perusal, will we become homogenized? Will so many peoples personalities be put through a blender then shot into a giant computer for the sake of ‘human advancement’? For knowledge beyond our own? For life immortal? We do not know how to use the knowledge we have now. Will becoming posthuman flip and switch and make us fully cognitive of ourselves and the limitations we have? And if it does, will we be able to do anything about it?

No. The resounding answer is no, and we should focus now, in all days ahead, on what we are doing here; that is exploring the psyche of man, discovering new layers, making ourselves better without false layers of man made material, without quick fixes. There is a danger of destroying something truly grand in us because of our bravado, and our inability to see the right and true aspects of what the humanists lied down as a manifesto is dooming us to a lukewarm existence where the senses are extinct and we live as pulses along a wire.

Respond to this article at horatiotigre@googlemail.com

By Horatio Tigre

Your Milkshake Brought Me To This Yard

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:39:00 +0000

Last Tuesday I suffered a rare glimpse of lucidity through a misty gin-soaked haze whilst lying next to a man I thought was a terrier but who was actually an umlaut. This is wrong I thought, it’s all wrong, it shouldn’t be like this. This has been going on too long. “What are you referring to?”, came a voice from my iPhone, apparently Garth was listening to the whole thing, “Waking up next to an umlaut?”. “No, the British Legal System. It’s negligible. But…when did I get an iPhone? This isn’t my beautiful wife?” I say ‘glimpse’ because it was now that I fell back into my drunken nightmare (like a willow) and lost control of my conscious self-hood. There are photographs of I, complicit in crimes of passion somewhere outside Sao Paolo, but they are but a bagatelle.

Needless to disclose, the iPhone were actually a phone box and I have no wife. No need to display sympathy, I have no wife because I am repulsive. And a braggart.

Regardless, my reason for today putting fingertips to computer bits is thus. During my travels I have related to myself a utopian model for law giving-ness thus titled ‘The System of Gratitudinal Sin Balancing.’ Being no stranger to a sin-bin or two I know first hand the berry serious deficits of the currant bunishment system. In this isolated island of a world we live in that we have sometimes frequently left to beat up other people, and which we once did send lots of prison-ish bastardlies away from to Oz, we are barking up a tree so wrong its probably… not even a tree.

What is missing, my pie in the sky, is a sense of reward for tasks of kindnessness and generosity. Once upon a time we had religion to keep the unwashed in check, but now that God’s a metrosexual, and Tom Cruise is gay, there’s no one to rely on for salvationist treats and paradisiacal redemption. Who’s gunna give you a sticker for helping the old female across the street? Not even David Cameron! He’d sooner pat your sexyback for assaulting her so as to look street-ish, iz it - wurd. And what about the prison ships fulla nesbitts and penny snatchers and whoremongers? We can’t keep feeding ‘em our juicy money biscuits! Not with my tixes. (tax that!)

Ay no. Here’s a rub. I would be good if I got a reward! Like a dog. Like, I’m like a canis, not I’d like a canis. Bad for the fleas. So…there’s all these people who want to do good if only they could…for example they’d love to make shoes for disabled children but they’re too busy earning monetary to pay for Trident/NHS and there’s all these young dudes in prison…see where I’m going? You are quick as a flamingo. I proposing have Courts of Law pass judgement on how nice people are as well as evil, and designate candy-coloured convicts to their services accordingly! “Mr. Ginger, for saving Jane Seymour’s life I sentence James ‘Trotsky’ Kleinberg to do your washing for 3 years”. BANG BANG BANG! Imagine, all over the Isles, burglars doing the gardening, murderers getting the spuds in, drug-dealers feeding the cats, rapists putting up flat-packs, arsonists entertaining the kids and token Muslims stocking the fridge! The money we’d save on cheap labour. She loves a bit of it and that’s totally all right.

I hear you SCREAM and my ears bleed gin ‘n’ ketchup. Yes, you foresee the safety danger of the scenario thus yes? Give a burglar a trowel?! Rapists in IKEA? Totally un-Swedish! Give the nice man Mr. Ginger a gun and if the burglar gets frisky/Tyskie shoot the silly boy. But you knows the smarts? Nice man Ginger, now murderer, increase work force yes! Fail safe goodnight. It’s a system of revolutioniteless. its getting dark out here…..whence forth dizzzzzeeeeee fruitless campaign.for love. And mutuwal, banl , respect, one worldturnthelightoffiwannastayherefuckoff.fuckoffisnotfuneee

G’night. If yer dryv’n oome t’nigh dun f’git y’car.

by Ethical Andy

Podcast: Far From Home (Dafur Radio Project)

noreply@blogger.com (Yaz Al-Shaater) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 13:42:00 +0000

An in-depth look at the experiences of Sudanese refugees. We hear from an 18-year-old Darfuri man frustrated with the bureaucratic red tape facing asylum seekers in the UK. And, the story of a grown-up Lost Boy who left Southern Sudan twenty years ago and is still waiting to go home. Finally, we learn about the efforts of a Darfuri refugee in the US to bring peace to the home he hasn't seen in years.
Click the title to download the podcast.

The Darfur Radio Project is a monthly radio broadcast that explores the historical, political, economic, and social contexts of the conflict in Darfur. Using personal stories as well as critical analysis, we aim both to introduce listeners to the complexities of the situation in Sudan and to give them the tools to effect change. We believe that education, good information, and analysis will play an important role in the search for sustainable, long-term peace in Sudan.

Post-Humanism

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:32:00 +0000

We are at a unique precipice at the great divide which separates human past and human future. Great leading line there for a piece of copy, but hold on my dear hearts. We have been given the opportunity at this great height to look backward and to look forward upon history and future, at choices made and choices which can be made for improvement and refinement. Some of these choices, indeed, have to be made for the sake of existence. Some might not affect existence but will merely the future of all of our peoples –merely, being too weak a word, but somewhat appropriate. Our present time is unique in that we have been given the awareness to view situations confronting us with intelligence, hindsight and a fair bit of intellectual clarity. We also have comfort, comfort to look upon history and our situation without great expense to ourselves or our neighbors –although as a side note, and pardon my digression, but it is often our neighbor (never seen) which takes the blunt of our mindlessness.

For most of the peoples in the G8 who reside above the poverty line, this is the life that we lead. These aforementioned peoples are given an abundance of choice which can have detrimental and or positive affects on other peoples, places, or things. Human morality and responsibility is an important subject here. Although these subjects have always been a central divide for debate throughout the ages, we have different morals now, bred by an advanced and for the most part, consumerist populous. These issues must be addressed.

We know the affect of our normal, everyday consumption which –let me not forget to mention- is at an all time high. Further, we know that even our little decisions affect others, and that even our smallest decisions can be sources of pain somewhere far away. In fact, for the first time, some of our smallest decisions -the butter we use, the detergents we clean our clothes with, the vehicles we drive- can affect not only ourselves, but others on a global basis as well. What great pressure for us all!

These concepts must be dealt with for us to build a future worth living. It is possible it could get on top of us if we do not harness it. The danger lies in the great global guilt, and the great global pain, but these are subjects for another time.

So, morality is important. ‘Yes, we know’ you say. You hear enough about it, yes, our responsibilities, yes, our duties to the planet you say, on televisions, billboards, posters, radio, word of mouth, books and magazines, possibly even website articles (read on!). Yet, it is more important now as humans have begun the great trek towards unification; i.e. worrying about morality on a global scale, outside of the village and the household. It is the first step (and possibly one of the few) to the nigh impossible Utopian ideal. This is an exciting prospect indeed. You may argue that global recognition has been around since 1945 -yes, with the bomb, and war, and the effects of these- but many small decisions with big reactions are now in the hands of the normal man and not a government, nor a despot, nor even (gasp!) nature (the defeat of nature and the nature guilt, will be another subject we will delve into soon dear brothers and sisters).

So now, possibly, the weight of morality can be counterbalanced by this:

Change is possible with a single human act.

You can agree to disagree.

The purpose of this series of articles is to stoke debate on human morality and the choices we are given the privilege to make –that is as beings with the ability to make choice as well as the spirit (one guesses) to free ourselves from animal urges. We’ll explore, together, the troubles and pleasure (oh especially the pleasures) of living in this modern age. We are unique –this present day is ours, given to us by evolution and heredity. We can choose what to eat, what to drink, whether or not to hunt, to eat meat or only vegetable, to drink diet or regular (to use an American aphorism) etcetera. We are unique, and being such, we have a great deal of philosophy to dive through to get to the crux of that meaning of life (is the meaning of life tied to morality? See, the questions keep coming!).

Who is this writer you will ask -and if you do not ask, why would you trust? So you ask and I give the answers in the tradition of many a past philosopher –as I will be calling myself while writing these articles; not great mind you, just a philosopher. I should indeed introduce some of my personal effects, my mind artillery if you will. It is important so that you may explore my own moral weighting. Being a male is indeed the first thing you should know about your dear narrator. As such, I will be giving a male’s perspective –albeit the post post-modern male’s perspective, with all the baggage that entails. Second, I am American and refuse to hide it, not even with all the immense paranoia, prejudice, and ignorance that this may bring to the discussions henceforth –on both my part and my readers. In this I am not afraid. I hope my arguments will be intelligent as will my audience be equally so. Third, I come from a social class which teeters between the poverty line and complete ruin, but the social class which often has the spurts of great windfall which keep one happy in such a position. This is important because I will be touching on subjects that hinder all classes, and will profess my ignorance to those people who have more than a few dimes to spare. This may appear in subsequent articles as over eager generalization, or overzealous ignorance, I do not know. Fourth, I have never been too strong with my beliefs, nor too weak, and as such a person I have a handful of creeds of which I always return to, and these, I hope, will opinionate me and not indoctrinate me. If I receive an e-mail, or, preferably, by the Gods, a letter, I will take any arguments into account and if thoroughly swayed, will profess this change in writing. This is my binding contract to you. We must have trust.

So with an introduction of such length, where do we begin? It is my belief to rarely pull punches so we should start with something quite heavy yes?

Let us deal with a question of greatest debate and deliberation; that of our evolution and development, specifically focusing on the concept of the Post-Human.

Whether you believe in evolution or not should not come into the debate. We have scientific evidence that the human species evolved in a certain way, yes, but at one time we did believe the Earth was flat, say, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt –that is if you believe in all that creationism rubbish. We are all here with our own ideas. But if evolution in history is false, the possibilities of evolution in our present are a harsh reality. With technology, gene splicing, DNA manipulation, and the all too unsettling prospects of human cloning, we have begun a new phase of human evolution –one engendered by our own intelligence.

Post-human theory is amongst one of the more interesting of these evolutionary prospects. The Post-human is described as -in evolutionary terms- a being whose qualities exceed that of present man and that said being can no longer be classified as such (human) for he/she/it has transcended the homo sapien. This all sounds like normal, proper evolution yes, but this Post-human being -by definition- must have at one time existed as a human but has since transcended this classification by application of mechanical and genetic components which have greatly advanced its abilities. Any human whom has been improved by nano-technology, genetic manipulation, life extension therapies, etc. but has not advanced beyond the universal definition of humanity (what ever that is) is dubbed a transhuman: that is someone in the transitional phase between the two classifications, owning elements of each.

There is an important distinction here –that the being that is post-human was once human but made the decision to evolve and to throw away what made them human by our definitions. Evolution has never been a choice, but rather, something nature (or God, whatever your beliefs) has thrown at us like so much sticky goo. Whatever stuck was there to stay. It was not man’s choice. Now the choice is with us as to how grand we want to be, how much we see God in ourselves, how much we believe we can transcend nature and improve upon ourselves. The implications of these improvements are endless; super human speed, strength, cognition (by way of nano-chips implanted in the brain). We could be living Frankenstein’s, but perhaps without the monster moniker.

So what are the moral implications here? One questions whether humans at this stage have had enough time, and that the human should indeed transcend. Some may worry about the implication this may have on the environment, as these new techno beings would have little need for the planet’s atmosphere.

There is so much debate to be had! Would we loose our emotional abilities? Do we want to? Have we already begun to with the advent of so many technological diversions? Perhaps we have! But did not Nietzsche say ‘I teach you the overman. Man is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?’

Should man be overcome? Here is where I lay my gauntlet. No. Man has not taught himself enough to be overcome. What is man but a floating body of molecules and ideas, yes, grasping onto straws? Great emotional immaturity and, dare I say, indifference creeps wild throughout contemporary culture. We are a people increasingly depended on large scale diversions i.e. television, movies, etc. to bring emotional calm and clarity to emotions. There are too many theories abound on the idea that many a person lives emotions discovered in film, or express emotion through a song lyric because they can not engender it themselves. Should we be moving on the human race right once we’ve lost the idea of what it is to be human (if in fact we’ve ever known; cue next debate)?

Some of these things are happening now. We already have external devices which make us smarter (PDA’s with internet access), bionic parts which make the handicapped whole (such as arms with electronic leads) and yes, indeed they are helpful. I am not doubting or debating this. But evolution at the scale many leading Post-human thinkers are debating would require a great leap in human empathy and maturity, which doesn’t look likely to happen on the morrow.

Why do I go on about emotions when we talk about physical improvement and possible mental expansion? How would we handle such new powers without the emotional clarity to use them with respect and good intentions? Would we automatically gain the maturity to use them wisely with a mere 10 point boost in IQ? Would we really be able to trust ourselves with possible Godlike power when we have a fraction of that now and we can’t seem to hold it together? These are not rhetorical questions, but rather questions with one answer. No. No again and again.

This is where the experiment begins. The web is a marvelous tool and could potentially be a great forum for debate and critical argument. I believe the manifesto of Head Press is to challenge the reader to rethink and question their world and environment. This is what I’d like to do here in this space. I have included an e-mail address where you, dear brothers and sisters, may write to your dearest of narrators with questions, answers, critiques, etc. The desirable outcome of this being that you can present your thoughts on the issues, which I will critique, agree upon, and/or present out of interest as I see fit, in the style of an Oxford debate. We are looking to the Greek Dialogues as inspiration here; a greater understanding through criticism and the flagrant over use of English vernacular.

Sample questions you may want to ask yourselves:

What are the main arguments for or against the application of science to transcend the human definition? What are the social implications of such practices? Would the spirit of our current race continue in the upgraded human? Or would these qualities burn away? Would we gain autonomy as Post-Humans or would we become increasingly subjugated and watered down as a people, and if so, is that a particularly bad thing?

Feel free to answer these, or pose your own question which I will endeavor to answer as lucidly as possible. We will return to the subject of the Post-Human next issue.

I also hope that all of you will go out and do a bit of research yourself as this article is merely a beginning, and not an academic treatise. I will cover more information, and give names of some of the more prominent thinkers next issue.

Bring on the intellectual heat.

horatiotigre@googlemail.com

- by Horatio Tigre

Mu-sic: negative space in Japanese electroacoustics

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Keating) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:12:00 +0000

Nobuyuki Tsugata has a theory about Japanese animation. It concerns the main difference between American and Japanese animation styles. The American style, that style pioneered by Disney, relies on a process known as ‘continuous motion’. It’s fairly simple to understand, it’s actually all in the name: it is a style whereby there is constant movement on screen. In contrast the Japanese style veers away from this concept with the focus placed on very little movement and still frames where motion may occur only in one section. Obviously these styles vary enormously and hence they have produced very different canons of work. However despite the more pragmatic factors, such as cost and the amount of work involved, Tsugata believes there is a deeper reason behind the conservation of movement and the use of space in Japanese animation.

Tsugata believes that it is a reference to, and hence a contemporary use of, the Japanese notion of Mu. Mu is the idea of ‘negative space’; it is an ambiguous term which is hard to translate but you might describe it as “space where other things are not present”. This idea is derived from Chinese and Japanese Zen brush paintings, typically of landscapes, where some detail may be portrayed but the space above, below or around it is empty. Whereas this may be perceived as blank canvas it can also be interpreted as ‘negative space’. Space in which there may be air, wind, sound, smell, something visually unrepresentable but most importantly undefined. This ‘negative space’ therefore is just as crucial to the understanding of a work as anything that is illustrated. It adds texture, depth and extra sensory dimensions which are ambiguous enough to be filled by any interpretation.

So this then is the central concept of Mu. Naturally enough this idea of negative space, has cropped up in several different cultures in various ways over the centuries, however it is its use in modern Japanese electroacoustic composition that proves it is a fascinatingly malleable traditional technique. Although it may or may not be evident to composers such as Yuichiro Fujimoto, Akira Kosemura, Motohiro Nakashima and Daisuke Miyatani, to name a few, their explorations in electroacoustic sound incorporate a facet of enduring Japanese art: the use of negative space.

What then do we mean when we talk about negative space in terms of aural rather than visual representation? Well despite the confines of text let us attempt to create an impression through description. Let us take for example Yuichiro Fujimoto’s ‘Drawing of Stars’ from his 2005 release Kinoe. It begins with a single chord, on keyboard, which is repeated metronomically. It is a constant. Gradually it becomes lazily punctuated by a sweet melody drummed out on acoustic guitar. This motif is cut up, and spliced in, in different forms and segments, not building, rising or falling, just playfully existing. A few glittering harmonics shine among these sounds. While the keys continue to pulse, the guitar deteriorates into muted scratching noise, until once again the melody returns before trailing off with the small death of the synthesized chord.

This then is a piece of electroacoustic composition. It may sound odd on paper; it certainly isn’t any less strange when heard. However if played solely as described above it would probably be interesting, maybe challenging, but certainly not great. There is however an element to the piece which was not revealed, and that is Fujimoto’s use of negative space. Throughout the track there is an organic static, maybe the sound of a microphone left on in an empty room, maybe the recorded sound of wind, gushing water or rain outside a window. Towards the end of the track it veers closer to white noise, the sound of someone pottering around and a plastic rattle disrupt the slight hypnosis that was created. What does this pervasive empty sound signify? What does it symbolize? It certainly isn’t the blank perfect silence of the mastered studio album. It is the deliberate use of empty space, negative space, to highlight aurally indefinable aspects of the work; maybe a certain time, place or feeling. Most importantly though, it allows the listener to interpret all the other aural information they are presented with as they see fit. It injects an ambiguity into the track that emphasizes its musicality while simultaneously drawing attention to the empty canvas beyond.

Mu therefore has been identified in this music. It is used masterfully by Fujimoto on Kinoe and his peers make effective use of it in their own unique ways. Just like contemporary animation, contemporary composition therefore is just as inflected with traditional Japanese artistic concepts, and it would probably not be too much of a stretch to locate them in different mediums. Nonetheless in Japan there is being created a great wealth electroacoustic works that should not pass you by.

Some of the best:

Akira Kosemura – It’s On Everything

Daisuke Miyatani - Diario

Motohiro Nakashima – The Sandhill

Tenniscoats – Totemo Aimasho

Yuichiro Fujimoto – Kinoe

- Paul Bond