Filastine Frequency

8 Hours in Beograd

At the top of the 90′s I wandered through Yugoslavia, just another dumb teenage kid with a backpack. A week later the country ceased to exist, the rest is history…. or at least historical fiction as presented by Emir Kusturica.

Today I came back to Belgrade. A few hours after arriving I was taken by a friend, Uros, to explore an abandoned factory on the edge of the city. It was as dramatic as you might imagine, crumbling brick and iron halls about a dozen stories tall, dangling remnants of the machines, fallen bird feathers, fine powder dust. A WWII-era motorcyle+sidecar in one hanger, an equally aged river patrol boat in another. The boat looked sadly marooned so far from water, and covered as it was in a centimeter of pigeon shit.

Nothing could have prepared me for what was yet to come. One wing of the factory had been granted to a theater director and culture icon named Ljubiša Ristić. We passed through a door that brought us out of the ruins and into his private palace.
Suddenly it was all marble floors, vaulted ceilings, walls painted with life-sized nude women in mughal style, a grand piano functioning as a stand for a collection of live cockatoo birds, fireplaces complete with roaring flames, classical arabic music piped throughout via a discreet soundsystem. We passed through three halls like this, each furnished and lit as if expecting a thousand guests, but there was not a soul to be found. We walked around in circles, feeling like intruders, until finally bumping into the master of the house. Fortunately he was (kind of) expecting us. We spent the next hour talking of the balkans as a chessboard of global geo-strategies, the origin of experimental theater in late 70′s europe, Spain’s paralysis in the baroque, and whatever else occurred to him.

We finished our night with another building visit, Bigz in 1928 would have been one of the most impressive deco-style industrial buildings in europe, later in the 90′s was a squat, now functioning as a semi-feral cultural space. A jazz bar full of professional smokers can be found on the top floor, a circus collective on the 6th. Every vertical surface is a riot of graffiti.

Tonight’s lesson: It’s time to buy a camera. Haven’t had one in six months. It saves me having to write so much.

Celebrity Makeover

Desert junk yards, Charging riot police, classic mercedes benz north african taxis, psuedo-feminist lyrics over marching band dancehall-dubstep riddims, abandoned highway overpasses, ruined cars as performance vehicles, insurrectionary graffiti. Since y’all must be tired of this aesthetic I’ve been flogging for years, I asked my close personal friend Beyonce for a celebrity makeover. She’s much improved the schtick by adding supermodels and subtracting politics. 68 million views can’t be wrong.

Tongue-Tied by Repression Trauma

There is a new documentary that tells the story of a subject I’m still too traumatized to write about. If you live on the US west coast you’ll have the opportunity to see it in cinemas this week.

Many good people are in federal prison for their sabotage of corporate property. They have been charged as terrorists and often have sentences longer than rapists and even murderers, despite the fact that they never harmed anyone.
If you don’t already own my first record, Burn It, a benefit version can be purchased here. ALL proceeds go to the defendants.

Dérive

The alarm clock sounds, the dreams struggle to accommodate the interruption, the subconscious working overtime to re-write the script to include some transit noises or alarm bells and fool myself into ignoring the digital bleat. It doesn’t work, I open my eyes.
Where am I? A living room. Why am I sleeping in my living room, is somebody in my bed? No, it’s not my living room. The windows are too big, and leafy trees rustle outside. The hated alarm is only used when absolutely necessary, it can only mean one thing: there is some transit to catch.
Quick, look out the window. It’s Berlin.
Clothes are already laid out and bags were never unpacked, wallet and train ticket already placed in pocket.
Walk out the door and make a decisive error. After five minutes I check the gps, oops, walked away from Ostbanhof, not towards it. The next eight minutes are spent sprinting at the fastest a man can run dragging 40kilograms of wheeled luggage. Lungs screaming for air, sweat pooling under armpits. I watch the train leaving the station and pause for a moment, hyperventilating.
In the Bahn office a stern german matron prints out an itinerary of interconnecting local trains, a hieroglyph instruction on how to get to my destination in Poland by six trains instead of one. There isn’t even time to buy tickets, must sprint for the first train and spend the next few hours dodging the ticket inspector. Each leg of the journey brings a new surprises. The first two stations in the German hinterland, standing alone in the middle of breezy fields next to a single set of rails. Later arriving in Poland. Oops, here they don’t use the euro, I don’t have tickets, food, or water and still got four trains and eight hours left. The trains don’t leave at the time indicated on the german timetable, nor on the tracks indicated on the Polish posted timetables. I wave my intended destination in the face of the one or two lonely Poles to be found in a series of ruined WWII-era brick stations with impronuncable names like Krzyz.

Am now barreling through the Polish countryside in an empty wagon finished entirely in late-50′s synthetic wood paneling, sitting on a hard plastic seat painted a lurid red. Mid-century dentists office meets McDonalds. This train left from the wrong track at the wrong time, but someone insisted I board. Anyways, it was the only train, and it feels better to be in motion.

Postcard from the Eye of a Hurricane

For the last week the uprising in Spain has reduced to a simmer. The movement, which is increasingly called either “15M” for it’s start date, or “los indignados” for it’s broad indignation, has now decentralized. Meetings now take place in each barrio; Barcelona’s central plaza is mostly abandoned by campers.

The state took advantage of the quiet spell to arrest the supposed leaders of the net activist/hacker collective Anonymous, who are closely associated with the movement. The police published this surreal foto of a Guy Fawkes mask, usually worn by Anonymous when doing public actions, as evidence against the accused.

an image so ridiculous that within minutes there were several remixes circulating, like the below.

Tomorrow things are going to get extremely caliente. We intend to block the Catalan parliament. If you live in Catalunya no te lo pierdas, 7:30am. The early bird gets the worm.

Many people will be wearing the Anonymous mask. Surrounding the parliament wearing these masks, made famous by the film V for Vendetta, has a certain irony. Are we trapped in a feedback loop between reality and fiction?

Summary of the Spanish Uprising

There is a real lack of awareness in the anglo world about what’s been happening here in Spain.  The Arab revolutions are more easily reduced to a simple and often flattering narrative 1) people vs. dictatorship 2) they want to have governments like ours.  The social revolution in Spain doesn’t condense to such an easy story. It’s about the decadence and malfunction of our modern democracies, about the influence of capital and finance over government that has left us impotent to shape our societies. Spain’s elections last sunday saw 33% abstention: a third of the electorate actively refusing to vote. That number doesn’t include the half a million people who went to polls only to  submit a blank protest ballot, a world record.

Beginning on May 15th Spaniards, inspired by Egypt’s Tahrir Square. occupied their plazas with camps. This is no just in Madrid and Barcelona,  here is a list of over one hundred plaza camps.  The numbers range from tens of  people  in little towns to tens of  thousands in the bigger cities.

The common goal here is deep political and economic change, call it democracy 2.0, post-capitalism, the possibilities are many. This is a movement with it’s head floating in utopia but it’s feet firmly on the ground. Vamos despacio porque vamos lejos = we go slowly because we are going far.  Here is a brief manifesto in english.

I’ve spent a lot of time these last two weeks in Plaza Catalunya, which is a large public space at the very heart of Barcelona. Think Trafalgar or Times Square. This plaza is now a parallel universe, a commerce-free micro-world. A potlatch culture of sharing, plus improvised architecture of tents and cables, make it feel like a politicized urban version Burning Man. You can find libraries, gardens!, health clinics and kitchens, 24-hour debates and an overdose of information.

The activities of the camp are carefully organized. Throughout the day there are commissions, meetings, and working groups. In the evening the numbers swell until about 9pm, when, for precisely one hour, everyone makes a hellacious racket, banging on pots and pans, shaking their keys, blowing horns and beating drums.

This is followed by a general assembly at 10pm, where the days commissions report their proposals or decisions. Mass votes are taken by consensus using hand gestures. Closing out the evening is an open-mic, where people have three minutes to speak their minds.

Yesterday, 27 May, at 7am,  riot police violently evicted the Barcelona camp, they hauled away thirty garbage trucks of stuff, nearly all of the camp’s infrastructure (tents, tarps, sound system, kitchen).

By afternoon the plaza was retaken by sheer numbers. Last night the people couldn’t  fit in the plaza, spilling into the bordering streets and effectively shutting down the heart of the city’s transportation. Their eviction plan backfired spectacularly.

Nobody knows where this is going, but it has already accomplished much- a giant collective shedding of apathy and cynicism, and a defiance of every stereotype about disorganized mediterraneans.

On a personal note, I have never been more confident in my decision to immigrate to spain than in the last few weeks.

The Wildfire Spreads

The current uprising in Spain takes direct inspiration from the revolts on the other side of the mediterranean. But here the starting point is not dictatorship but a liberal european democracy. Unlike Egypt or Tunisia, disappearances or torture are an aberration, and the press is free to write anything that will sell. The current elected government is led by the Socialists, it could be considered among the more progressive  in the world, sadly enough for what that says about other governments.

What this means is that we are witness to the emergence of demands for something completely new, a  utopian uprising, a search for a more direct version of democracy. This new movement’s strength and weakness is that it doesn’t have a symbol, a flag, or a name. It is one possible future that only exists in the collective imagination of the thousands that fill the plazas.

Refreshingly, unlike the UK uncut protests or French strikes, these plaza occupations (at least in Barcelona) are not plastered with explicit slogans about budget cuts, salaries, job contracts or student fees. The debate digs deeper, almost philosophical: why are we fucked? Who fucked us? How do we get unfucked? and, most fundamentally: what kind of a society to we want to live in?

It’s been argued that current model of democratic government is the end of history, that there is nowhere to go from here. It’s surprising that Spain, so freshly out of it’s own dictatorship that lasted until the 70′s, would be so quick to lose faith in the consensus of modern capitalism. Although spain’s people might disperse from the plazas come monday, this critique isn’t going to disappear. It will manifest in another way, in another place. History is not over, we can still make it.

foto: assembly last night, thursday May 19

It’s a Bad Hair Month for My Online Self

Apologies for this awful-looking wordpress theme and my broken website which doesn’t list any of the upcoming gigs. Filastine’s little corner of the internet is broken. Some friendly geeks are trying to duct tape it back together. Until things are right I’m not posting.

Mud on Their Hands

I’m in Indonesia now working on videos for two new songs. One of the tracks concerns the disequilibrium between humanity and (the rest of) nature. It takes place at hot spots of this friction, of which there is no better example than Lapindo mud disaster.

In 2006 a company drilling for gas and accidentally opened a monstrous geyser of boiling mud and gas. The mud spews forth at a rate of about a million cubic feet a day (about 12 olympic swimming pools), a few villages have already disappeared. On the edge of the disaster you can witness people ripping apart their homes, salvaging what they can in preparation for the mud’s inevitable expansion. Geologists expect the flow to continue for thirty more years. It’s stink of gas and is searing hot…. basically hell on earth, lacking only the finer details like pitchforks.

The site is provisionally contained by a levee. Former residents of the buried villages have the exclusive right to charge admission to the levee, offering motorbike rides on top of it. Deputized by a powerful oil company as tour guides of their own tragedy.

We hired some of these desperate men for the day. They motored us in single file caravan of five bikes, in gale wind of noxious fumes, looking for a place we could descend into the mud without either dying or attracting the attention of company goons. The company would never permit any activist, artist, or foreigner to film onsite (even worse a combination of all three) so we were ostensibly doing wedding photo shoot- we dressed the part and used only SLR-style cameras. The story got suspicious once we setup up a bunch of drums and loudspeakers and got knee deep in the muck, but it was already too difficult to stop us. At least we were entertaining our drivers, who’d probably never seen anyone intentionally enter the mud, least likely a foreigner in a three-piece suit and a local girl in a white dress.

Heading now to stay in the countryside in an traditional wooden house for a few quiet days to work on the music. It’s a long humid night train ride, but pleasant. The windows open. An an ancient lady in hijab shared her homemade snacks with us. People now sleep on the floor of the wagon. Some drunken men in the dining car forced me to sing karaoke with them, while the (male) ticket inspector did a sexy dance, yelling “no sleeping, yeah!!” The people here are phenomenal.

[video- shopping for supplies for the video. this humble boombox has a protagonist role]

Sweaty

I began the christian new year in a the humid interior of a warehouse rave on the outskirts of barcelona, controlling some gadgets that push decibels through bass bins. People were dancing.

Afterwards stopped at home long enough to rinse away the oily collective sweat of an the night party, I was soon on a plane towards Egypt for a rendezvous with friends.

It’s a different sweat in Cairo, a matte effect. Everything is covered in thick dust, some mix of airborne desert  and auto exhaust. Lay an object down for 24 hours and it will be become a greyish khaki color. Just as snow makes a city beautiful, this skin of dust dampens the loudness of colors and harmonizes the visual noise of the metropole. I’d love to talk more about Cairo, but it really fucking overwhelming. One of the fotos below is the entrance to my hotel, where tangles of improvised wiring & plumbing ornament a colonial staircase in complete abandon, whose centerpiece is some kind of collapsed elevator sculpture that is home to families of feral cats. A five minute walk from here: eateries of the super-rich, alleyway sheesha bars,  luxury hotels, a streets littered with burned out cars,  the remains of King Tut, the river Nile. It’s a place that summarizes nearly the whole of human history and our likely future: the normalization of survivalism as modus operandi in a landscape of ruin.

From Cairo I nearly missed the continuing flight to Kuala Lumpur, the sweat glands in overdrive as the taxi stewed in a traffic jam and me in the pheromones of my own panic.

Twelve hours later the transfer in KL featured an epic sprint to catch another nearly missed flight, this one in the dense mug of tropical Malaysia in wet season, still wearing the same clothes I’d put on  in european winter, however many days ago.

In Indonesia now, at night sleepless with jetlag listening to the din of a million insects and nearly as many motorbikes. Many diverse experiences to come in the next month, but they will all have one common denominator: sweat.