Unfamiliar Sights

Holidays afford a routine return to familiar territory that is the perfect opportunity to change perspective. Countless times I have zoomed up I-95 -- the interstate highway, the ultimate American non-place [link via this excellent repository] -- and into Baltimore. I mark my entrance by that smoke stack, this solitary remnant of heavy industry on life support that is as much a cultural symbol of the city, a tourism board's welcome sign, as it the machinery of a factory.

Swooping over the Middle River and either branching off into downtown or continuing under the harbor, this elevated stretch of interchanges and off-ramps dazzles the eye. The water, the shipyard, the Key Bridge, the neighborhoods fanning out from downtown, and the city's modest skyline all compete for attention. It is a microcosm of the northeastern city, serving up a feast for hungry urban eyes.

But with the encroachment of non-places like I-95 that funnel in suburbanites, dumping them at the city's faux-historical economic engine, the Inner Harbor, comes the shadow of the highway trusses looming over forgotten neighborhoods. What haven't I seen in all those years of traveling into Baltimore by car?

I've given up on private car ownership, and when coming from outside the city now feel reluctant to bring a new private automobile into it. Call it moral congestion pricing. So on Friday, I parked at the edge of D.C. and took the Metro, taking advantage of late night weekend service. On Saturday, I took that game plan to Baltimore, hoping to take transit in a state notoriously hostile to it.

My M.O. was the Baltimore light rail, which snakes from BWI Airport and southern inner ring suburbs through downtown, heading north to its terminus at ex-shopping mall/current "town centre" Hunt Valley. I swore allegiance to the MBTA for four years, am doggedly loyal to SEPTA, and even keep subway porn on my coffee table, yet never have I taken Baltimore's tentative steps toward effective public transportation.

As the train crept north, I was particulary interested in seeing the vast hive of concrete and waterways around the Middle River from surface level. The trip did not disappoint, as I discovered two neighborhoods hidden in the shadow of I-95 and I-295. The first, Westport, is in fact cleaved by the latter highway. It is a tiny, down on its heels enclave of rowhouses, now poised for massive redevelopment by the light rail stop. A developer plans a giant high-rise complex with hotel rooms, office space, condos, and retail, which strikes me as a contrast of urban luxury and poverty of Mumbai proportions. While I certainly favor transit-oriented development, as this surely will force heavier usage of the light rail at its doorstep, I'm left with grave concerns about how such a development will interact with the existing neighborhood. Job training? Or the equally likely gated entrances, private security, and surveillance cameras? If there even is a neighborhood left, given the money that starts being put on the table to feed the "insatiable demand for homes on or near the water."


Eerie overtones of the Johns Hopkins hospital in East Baltimore, which looms like a citadel over the struggling neighborhoods at its feet. Town-[hospital] gown tensions run constantly.

Next stop: Cherry Hill. In another overlooked corner by those of us whose itineraries are circumscribed by highway routes, I found the nation's first planned community for African-Americans, designed to house WWII veterans. Sadly, it experienced rapid post-war disinvestment and decay, with the veterans' homes becoming public housing. But just across the water from Westport, the planners have come back as more waterfront property becomes enticing. An active neighborhood group ("A great neighborhood -- getting even better!) catalogues the ongoing development of the Cherry Hill master plan, which remains contentious in the community.

Later that night, I was listening to the Audio Infusion on WEAA. The DJ announced a caller from Cherry Hill and I smiled in recognition. The next morning, on the road in the I-95 morass, I craned my neck to catch a newly familiar sight, the stately Baltimore Rowing Club on the Middle River, with Cherry Hill fanning out behind it. New routes lead to new discoveries.

Tic-Tac-TObama

Polls close in 15 minutes here in battleground-cum-blue Pennsylvania. No snags over at the local fire station serving as my polling place, just some tired neighbors who were running the show all day. I did read about some supposed Black Panther voter intimidation over in North Philly that was debunked. That said, I was walking to the polling station an hour ago as night had already settled in to see if there were lines (and donate my leftover Halloween candy). Some men on their porch asked me if I had voted as I walked by. I told them yes. They asked me for whom. Come to think of it, I should have told them it was none of their business -- the secret ballot is a right -- but of course the "I voted Obama" sticker, "Barack Obama" in Hebrew button, and Phillies/Obama t-shirt gave it away. Still, what if I had said McCain, or even stuck with my tightlipped response? A white guy in a black neighborhood -- where normally I feel safe -- maybe there is an intimidation factor in neighborhoods and towns that tilt extremely to one side or the other? I gave them some Raisinets and everything was cool.

Scattershot --

• "The McCain campaign has said they have to win Pennsylvania." -- Anderson Cooper, CNN (T-minus 4 minutes to polls closing)
• Twittering your way to Grant Park might prove entertaining. After tonight, Chicago will be the second city no more.
• Cabide DJ knows who he would vote for, just check that sleeve.
  

Non-Alignment Pact

Buried in the international section of the Inqy I saw a small story on Rwanda and their decision to stop teaching French in favor of English in the nation's schools (syndicated from the WaPo, of course, in this era of shrinking newsrooms). The article is mostly blase, operating on the assumption of French's diminishing role in the world. In particular, it prints a horrendous quote by Theoneste Mutsindashyaka, Rwanda's state minister for education: "When you look at the French-speaking countries - it's really just France, and a small part of Belgium and a small part of Switzerland."

Tell that to the Organisation internationale de la francophonie (Fr only, natch) and its claim of 200 million French speakers on five continents. I guess the minister never took a look at this map. Across the pond, The Guardian dug a little deeper, pulling a better quote from Vincent Karenga, the Trade and Industry Minister: "French is spoken only in France, some parts of west Africa, parts of Canada and Switzerland." Still off-base -- he didn't even mention Belgium, the very reason French is spoken in Rwanda -- but at least he got West Africa, a massive stronghold of French and the very reason French will remain a major language over the coming decades.

Of course, the article appropriately links the decision to lingering anger at the French for their role in the Rwandan genocide and a wider post-colonial push away from European powers, especially former colonizer francophone Belgium. But as an assiduous observer of French as a language of resistance in the Americas, from Louisiana to the Caribbean to Québec, I'm sorry to hear it couldn't occupy a more positive role in Rwanda. Its role in Africa is more as a common thread across countries filled with hundreds of local languages. That, in part, has rendered Dakar such a hub for African hip-hop -- a swirl of languages with French usually running through.

I wonder how politics will trickle down to affect culture vis-à-vis Rwandan hip-hop. The excellent Africanhiphop.com points to an excited local scene with the usual hybrid of languages (Swahili, the local Kinyarwanda, French, and English). Several profiles point to French-language schools that rappers attdended as children. But as that shifts in the coming generation, it's only logical that French will fall by the wayside, and by extension the tour dates to France and Canada will be replaced by the UK and the U.S.

Electoral Maps

It's an off-year election season in Brazil, too, where my man Cabide DJ actually ran for vereador (selectman or alderman) of his town, São Gonçalo, just over the Guanabara Bay from Rio proper. Unfortunately, he didn't make it past the primary, but I don't think we need to worry about him quitting his day (night?) job: being O No. 1 Sampler do Brasil. See him live at the Milky Way in just a couple hours.

That said, a friend recently sent me an interesting campaign tool released by Fernando Gabeira, PV (Green Party) candidate for mayor of Rio. He's most famous for having helped kidnap the American ambassador in 1968 to protest the military dictatorship, which resulted in his exile (the event was later made into an Oscar-winning movie, "Four Days in September"). Gabeira has since given up armed revolution for politics, however, although his cultural revolution continued on Rio's beaches. After a distinguished career as a deputy, hopefully his strident leftist voice will now put him in charge of the city.

Like any mayoral candidate, he wants to address the overwhelming issue of the criminal factions that run the drug trade. How anyone is going to stem that tide is beyond me, but if calling a spade a spade is a start, then he's on his way:


Exibir mapa ampliado


This is a map of all the favelas in Rio, color coded by the ruling faction (one of the three gangs, or independent vigilantes called milícias. There are symbols for recent flare ups as well. Laying it out like that is a very stark -- and very powerful -- method of recognizing the scope of the problem. I wish him luck on Sunday.

p.s. On a lighter note, there are several Barack Obamas running in Brazilian local elections this weekend.

Voting-a-Go-Go

Any astute observer on the highways has probably seen D.C.'s provocative license plate, harkening back to Revolutionary-era complaints. It's true -- residents of the District pay federal income taxes, but their lone congressional representative cannot vote on legislation. It's long been a thorny issue, with the most recent best effort shot down just over a year ago.

The latest effort by the main advocacy group for District voting rights, DC Vote, definitely caught my ears. They enlisted a local gospel/R&B singer, Joe L. Da Vessel, to cut a go-go track on the topic.

Joe L. Da Vessel - Demand the Vote

Go-go is, of course, D.C. music to the core, but on a matter like voting rights, the precise boundaries of the city matter. Da Vessel, for example, gives an address on his website of Fort Washington, Maryland -- just across the line in Prince George's County (frequently touted as the most affluent black-majority county in the country). If that's where he lives, then he's got a voice (assuming he votes).

P.G. County is home to plenty of folks with roots in the District, dating back to a black middle-class exodus in the '60s and '70s. Wale, who I profiled from Rock the Bells, grew up in the District and moved out to Largo, MD as a teenager. Go-go's got a stronghold out there too, as an old online list of go-go clubs or the Take Me Out to the Go-Go message board can attest to. Addresses in NE and SE D.C. may still dominate, but there are plenty of Oxon Hill, Capitol Heights, Fort Washington, and Marlow Heights addresses too. The District's city line is definitely permeable, but I suspect go-go is going to move more in the county direction, as inner-ring suburbs become increasingly popular to residents squeezed out of cities by higher prices (or the dreaded 'G' word). The Anacostia River, a psycho-geographical barrier between affluent, cosmopolitan D.C. and everything else (aka black & poor) is even being crossed with some condo development in the historic Anacostia neighborhood. I glanced at some insipid condo newspaper full of marketing doublespeak on the Metro the other day and a real estate agent projected Anacostia is the next big market. This was unthinkable 5 or 10 years ago and, as it goes with the up-valuing of a low-income neighborhood, not something anyone can rightfully decry if they don't live there, but still something to watch -- change takes many forms, not always the ideal ones.

Back to the county, there is another dividing line in the Capital Beltway. As residents chime in on a City-Data thread about P.G. County, the inner-ring is aptly cordonned off the Beltway, the major highway enforcing its own kind of ghettoization. Meanwhile, go-go fans are getting squeezed on both sides as officials see club closures the solution to violence at go-gos in both P.G. County and the District. In an even further afield case, the suburban sprawl that has pushed black residents out of P.G. and into neighboring Charles County has seen police harassment bordering on racial profiling at a go-go night. Just as far from the District both geographically and culturally, I heard that Saturday night's show at Merriweather, where I saw Rock the Bells last weekend and where go-go pioneer and legend Chuck Brown was the undercard, went without incident.

All urban/suburban music, culture, race, and nightlife politics that are far more complicated than the fairly straightforward call for voting rights (it's a shame that Congress can't see how simple it is). On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that DC Vote shot a music video for the song. I'll scout it on VoteTube when it arrives.

"Now I know this is delicate / But I can go to war and all I can get is a shadow delegate?"

Whose Jerusalem? Microglot & Polytical

Everyday life in Israel is micropolitical in a way that is unfathomable to me and must be extremely wearing for those who live there -- doubly so for residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Unsurprisingly, the Palestinian Territories were not on our itinerary, but flipping through a guide book I had the realization that, in fact, the Territories are not such a terra incognita. There's even a counter-Birthright to take you there. I try to avoid the polemics as best as I can, but crossing the green line will be an imperative for me whenever I can next make my way there.

It's embarrassing to admit that I had let news coverage so completely define my perception of the place. Ramallah to me was inextricably linked with Yassir Arafat's compound and that image had no place for say, these guys (many great links & mpfrees to be had), or the supposedly many hip bars with contemporary Arabic music. Arafat's compound, meanwhile, is a few miles outside of town. I should've known better: I'm originally from the D.C. area and I hate the assumption that everything "inside the Beltway" is the federal government (and not say, hip-hop/go-go fusion like my recent favorite W.A.L.E.).

In truth, I did visit the West Bank, to be precise the Jewish settlement of Gush Etzion. The whole place put me on edge, beginning with the History Channel-esque documentary in their "Gush Etzion Museum" of the history of Jewish settlement there and the battle that took place in 1948. At the end, the screen recedes and behind it lies the underground bunker where the last defenders of the kibbutz there were killed. The very fact that they need a master narrative to justify their presence made me inherently suspicious of the settlement's legitimacy, despite claims that it's not of the same ilk as more radical, most definitely illegal, settlements.

As if to underscore this difference, the largely American-born residents of Gush Etzion prefer to think of themselves as a suburb of Jerusalem, carving out a sense of normalcy precisely by painting it as suburbia, a disturbing slice of the Inland Empire in Israel. West Bank, CA.


12 minute drive to downtown Jerusalem aside, what kind of suburb is it if you have to pass through a checkpoint and along the infamous Wall? (How much is security fence and how much is wall I won't bother getting into here; on the Jerusalem-Gush Etzion byway [bypassing the Palestinian city of Bethlehem], it's a concrete wall, an attractive wall, but a wall all the same.)


Checkpoint at dusk from the bulletproof window of an armored bus.

Upon return to Jerusalem, lights across the city proudly proclaim the 40th anniversary of (re)unification.


Out of sight, out of mind?

Not exactly -- the division between (Jewish) West Jerusalem and (Arab) East Jerusalem along the fault line of the Old City has no pronounced borders or checkpoints, but it's the subtler linguistic distinctions that make me question the proclamation of unity. Polyglot Israel has three official languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Official signage is very good about including all three.


In ultra-Orthodox West Jerusalem neighborhoods, Arabic is nowhere to be found (no photos out of respect for the community -- they did have large signs in every possible tourist's language asking visitors to dress modestly, not come in groups, and not take photos). Even just a few hundred yards into East Jerusalem, meanwhile, Hebrew script becomes noticeably scarcer. Especially on the buses: On the whole, West Jerusalem (Hebrew/Jewish) buses don't go to East Jerusalem, nor do East Jerusalem (Arabic/Muslim) buses go to West Jerusalem. Disappointing as it is, it's also endemic of the systematic discrimination against East Jerusalem neighborhoods in terms of municipal services. Yet 40 years of being one city has yielded substantial integration, whether friendly or not, and if a two-state solution means dividing East and West, it will require microsurgery indeed.


Even the incredible sensory overload of going to the market was, at times, fraught with reminders of ongoing tension.



How many articles have I read about olive trees destroyed, olive groves cut off by barriers, the bitter taste off the branch, sour in the mouth but so easy to swallow?



The police were watching all the entrances, a reminder of the very real terror of the Second Intafadah, when buying ingredients for Shabbat dinner (I took these photos in the Friday afternoon pre-Sabbath rush) was done at one's own peril. I suspect Arab residents, by choice or by dint of racial profiling, keep to their own market, but that doesn't mean they can't slip through under cover.


A stall selling all manner of religious, secular, Hebrew, Arab, Israeli, Egyptian, Lebanese, Moroccan, &more CDs was, to me, a triumph of the hot & polyglot multicultural stew that, at its best, the Middle East can be -- and that I believe Israel, as a democratic state, warts and all, fosters better than other nation-states (not that particular cities can't, at the local level, foster them -- Beirut, Cairo, Ramallah, Marrakesh).

The heavy strings in vintage Arab popular music accompany the lilting voice of a great chanteuse, like Egypt's Faiza Ahmed, extremely well. It was a joy to turn the dial on my trusty FM radio while in Jerusalem and come across the rich textures, the fantastic tonal interplay between voice and instrument.

Faiza Ahmed - Set El Habayeb (Al Oum)

All the more reason to learn Arabic and Hebrew for that matter.


Sunset over Har Herzl (Mount Herzl), home to the Israeli national military cemetery -- tombs of presidents, prime ministers, generals, famous Zionists (including Herzl himself), dead soldiers, innocent bystanders. Below this picture, I had just finished hearing the leader of our trip recount the death by suicide bombing of his fiancée in front of the memorial wall to victims of terror on which her name is inscribed.

There is no one side here.

Kids With Guns

Update: I accidentally posted Cidinha e Doca's proibidão version of "Rap das Armas", even though they credit Junior and Leonardo as the authors. Thanks to DJ Zezinho for correcting me.


Before I got an Internet connection installed here in the house, I went up the street to a LAN House, as they're called, to take care of my digital business. I brought my laptop, so all I needed was to hook up a cat-5. Lucky, too, because all of the terminals with a full rig were constantly occupied. I'm not sure I ever saw a free computer in that place.

Most of the customers were kids, under the age of 16, if I had to guess, and they were almost always playing first-person shooters. It's a genre of computer game to which I can profess considerable familiarity, having passed more hours than I'd like to admit blowing my friends to pieces. I was always firmly against the argument that violent games inculcate violence – if you're maladjusted enough to let a game cause violent mood swings, perhaps you've got deeper problems than what you're playing on your PC. And in the case of Grand Theft Auto, everyone's favorite target, I think critics focus on the possibilities permitted by the game mechanics but miss the brilliant social satire, especially evident in the in-game radio. Not that it didn't hit too close to home in some places (note that it was also banned in Brazil, not that it's stopped some of the video game parlors I've seen in Rocinha, who might appreciate the tragicomic aptness of this parody).

On the whole though, such games are simply difficult to take seriously when you have a BFG9000 at your disposal. In the case of my suburban friends and I, such games were the closest we ever came to any weapons, whether they be the absurdity of Doom or the realism of Counter-Strike.

In the case of Rocinha, it's more or less the opposite. The public presence of guns has been a part of every young resident's life since birth, and likely they saw them in person before they ever held one virtually in a game. Certainly, the same goes for those in the asfalto, as the police pack plenty of firepower as well. But the concept of "police" still comes with a kind of separation from the average citizen (on-duty, off-duty). Not that my corner bandidos aren't uniquely different from Seu Jose and his family upstairs – they most certainly are – but it's a kind of 24/7 role. They don't seem to become "civilians" the way a police officer might at the end of the day. Indeed, that's part of how Amigos de Amigos (or ADA, the criminal faction that rules Rocinha) maintains its control, by remaining visible in the community and, as Paul Sneed has explained, firing magazines upon magazines into the air . . . in celebration, in mourning, in reminding you they're still on top.

So it happens, then, that I'm checking my e-mail in the LAN House with young kids on my left and right ripping through virtual decaying urban landscapes, blasting each other with assault rifles, only to have one of the traficantes working the nearby boca-de-fumo ("mouth of smoke", where drugs are sold, and hence the reason I always have bandidos on my block) walk in to watch the Mexico x Argentina match of the Copa América while idly holding an assault rifle. The leap from virtual to real was only a few feet away from every gamer in there.

Are Rocinha kids who play violent video and computer games more likely to join up with the ADA when they grow older? Sounds like a sociological study for another time, another place, another person. But suffice to say: life imitating art imitating life in a very disconcerting way.

Maybe I'm just the still-sensitive gringo who's not used to seeing high-caliber weapons on a daily basis. It's been a fact of life here for decades at least, cf the lyrics of Junior e Leonardo's "Rap das Armas". The closest I could find to the original is the cover by Monobloco, which only changes a few words; and even if you don't know Portuguese, there's some universal shorthand in there, M-16 anyone? Famous in its time, the track that was completely misinterpreted by the media: Junior e Leonardo were tagged as apologists for the criminal factions because they sang the phrase "paz, justiça, e liberdade (peace, justice, and liberty)", the supposed slogan of the Comando Vermelho, when they themselves had no clue that was the case (anecdote recounted in Paul's thesis). It was really just a rap about their quotidian lives . . . which happens to include an extensive catalogue of weaponry.

With an old school Volt Mix beat along with "Planet Rock" and "Push It" samples, it's a veritable classic of funk antigo. The live music video is also extremely dated, but in the best possible way. I've heard they live in Rocinha and someone at I2I knows them, so I may have to pay a visit.

Junior e Leonardo - Rap das Armas

Freshly Spannered

I've got some Rio reflections of the more journalistic variety up over at Spannered. They've written about and hosted music by such fine folks as Maga Bo, DJ Ripley, and DJ C.

Now check out: Gold-Plated Guns, Silver Linings, and Bronzing in Peace, some on-the-scene reporting that expands on my first impressions stateside of the 2007 Pan-American Games.

I'll admit though, I was excited to see Latin America's finest in the baseball competitions. Unfortunately, tickets were all sold out because the games are held in a small 5,000 seat stadium. I am locked in for the men's football gold medal game at Maracanã, however. If the Copa America was any indiction, Viva o Brasil!

Jogos Pan-Americanos

Update: The NYT travel guide to the Games adds, "For the Pan American Games, Rio overcame concerns about security by promising to hold about two-thirds of the events in a sparsely-populated area, far from the city's most perilous neighborhoods." That's the Barra bait-and-switch I discussed below. However, don't think for a second that Barra itself isn't ringed by favelas as soon as you get to the hills, which aren't terribly far away from it -- where do you think the fancy hotels and condos get their service staff?
___

The NYT reported last week on concerns that Rio may not be ready ($$ for article) for the Jogos Pan-Americanos (em îngles: Pan-American Games) in July. It reminds me of Athens when I visited in 2003. A year before the big show, there was much hand-wringing among Greeks that crucial buildings -- the olympic stadium itself included -- wouldn't be finished in time. Somehow, a frantic last minute push and they got their act together for the '04 Olympics.

I imagine a similar culture is at work in Rio. Neither city is known for its efficiency (part of the charm, natch). Although the ambition is definitely there: "Sports and government officials attribute some of the busted budgets and delays, which have pushed the cost of the Games past $1.5 billion, to a decision taken to upgrade arenas and stadiums to North American and European levels."

Beyond mere first-world jealousy, the objective is clear: "Brazil hopes to host the World Cup of soccer in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016, so any failure at the Pan-American Games could be a fatal blow to those aspirations." Of course, it isn't the first time the World Cup has been in Rio -- world-famous Maracanã (which bears a striking resemblance to my hometown favorite, RFK Stadium) was built in time for the 1950 cup, only to play host to the equally world-famous Maracanaço. But as global sporting events become such elaborate productions, even Rio's Temple of Soccer may not be good enough.

That shift is plainly evident in the planning for the Pan-American Games. Check out the venue map:


The locus of the Games will be in the Barra da Tijuca neighborhood, a wannabe-American wonderland of condos, gated communities, and shopping malls that I've written about before. Granted, it has the open space necessary for new construction, but it also marks a significant break with historical -- even traditional tourist -- Rio. While Maracanã and Sugar Loaf are both marked off as zones for venues (far right of the map), the historical center and touristic Zona Sul (Ipanema, Copacabana) are definitely not Jogos HQ.

Unfortunately, growth in this area is going to mean more infrastructure accessible only by car, more suburbanization of Rio, and less access for the denser neighborhoods in the city. Of course, the hills behind Barra are ringed by favelas -- no surprise there -- and I wonder if, as both Mike Davis (of Planet of Slums fame) and Robert Neuwirth (of Squattercity) have argued, major sporting events will become a pretext for slum clearance. God forbid you have favelas in the background of TV shots. I shutter to think what would happen if the World Cup or Olympics came to town.

The Games were supposed to lead to some infrastructure development, like an extension of the metro line underground through Copa to Ipanema, but even that's been shelved. Part of a thick recent history of pie-in-the-sky plans for Rio, a city that has global aspirations but seems unable to make that leap (perhaps for the best; leave the cosmopolitan shtick to São Paulo).

For example, there was talk of a Guggenheim extension a few years back: see press release, criticism, and reality. Google sleuthing this endeavor did cause me to come across something of a modest proposal: VidiGug. That is to say, a Guggenheim museum perched atop the favela of Vidigal, which overlooks Ipanema and Leblon beaches. Obviously facetious, but with a sincere goal of integration (even if favela gentrification would be the biggest concern). The author, Ricky Seabra, is full of ambitious plans for the city, including a serious, comprehensive extension of the metro system. Not likely to happen, but one can dream . . .

In any case, what effect the Games do have on Rio's cityscape I'll be sure to report back. They begin just over a week after I arrive in early July, with a distinct promise to pick up the blogging for plenty of carioca snapshots.

stateside Drama

just got back in the US of A (with plenty of backblogged paris bits to get to, unsurprisingly) and they're ARRESTING DJs now. no wonder customs started asking questions about my bag full of records ("you acquire all those abroad?" contraband techno, what can I say).

arm yourselves, citizens:

• video log (vlog, vblog?) commentary: RIAA needs to STOP SNITCHING
  
• wayne&wax;, who alerted me to the story
  
• all-purpose repository: Free The DJs

likewise, Chloe just informed me of some bizarre Philly mix drama: Ian St Laurent gave the "South Philly Scum" treatment to the leaked LCD Sounsdsystem track "North American Scum."

but ISL received threats to his family?!:


Drama? Scum? these headlines write themselves. maybe it's time to revoke my James Murphy disco defense [FYI: DFA is backed by EMI now].

93 Hardcore, East Side: clichy-s/s-bois

Like Magellan, I didn't quite succeed in my attempt at circumnavigation. Fortunately, unlike him, I came out alive. Although we both shared some transportation issues. Granted I got a late start, and granted it was Sunday, but intra-banlieue transportation in Île-de-France is painfully slow, which is easily its own strike against the state's urbanism: in Paris proper, one is never more than 1/2 kilometer from a métro station. The density obviously justifies the extensiveness of the métro network, but it just about dead stops outside of the city limits, with only a few lines reaching into the suburbs. And in contrast, the buses and tramways are much slower and much less frequent. But that's out of kilter in a metropolitan region where the city proper is more than four times smaller in population than its environs.

There is the RER, or commuter rail, which plays its own questionable role in the relationship between Paris and the banlieue -- Les Halles, where four of the five lines converge, resembles an immigration checkpoint as much as a subway stop, as police and RATP security are always out in force, checking for tickets and then checking your papers if you look North African . . . they were practically corralling non-whites on New Year's Eve when the métro ran all night.

But I made it out eventually, arriving at Clichy-sous-Bois, infamous flashpoint of last years "évenements" (commemorated in the graffiti at the top). It's a bleak place for sure, big concrete tower after big concrete tower.


This is one of the nicer looking ones, as I ran out of camera battery before I got to the peeling paint, dilapidated exteriors, barren yards. But no matter the outside aesthetics -- or interior, for that matter, I can recall reading a few articles that point out they're just normal looking apartments inside -- it's mostly a matter of location.
I saw what an ordeal it is just to get to/from Paris, where the bulk of any potential job opportunities would be (most of the cités were built to house factory workers during the post-war industrial boom, which now post-post-war is post-industrial with no more factories). And of course, as this sign indicates, by car is probably the best way to go -- not always the most affordable means of transit.

As the other direction points to, of course, there's a town nearby. Each of the communes (municipalities, essentially) of the banlieue that are now known for their cités began simply as small villages on the outskirts of Paris. While I didn't make it to Clichy-sous-Bois's centre ville, I passed through adjacent Livry-Gargan.


It was Sunday market day, a scene that could have been lifted from any side street in Paris. To that extent, I think the Banlieue 13 vision is unfairly dystopian. There are more than just housing projects surrounding the city. Saint-Denis, for example, is home to the stunning Basilique de Saint-Denis, royal necropolis since the 12th century (a more worthwhile visit than Notre Dame). The towns proper sometimes live in tension with the cités that started cropping up 50 years ago, but there's enough pride in them that they'll retain their identity.

Vis-à-vis the cités, I wrote in my somewhat hasty (and uninformed) banlieue commentary about the lack of pride or ownership in the communities. It's still a largely valid point -- litter everywhere, for example, and hardly a Rio-style residents' association in sight. They just seem to suffer from neglect, plain and simple.


Kids making a soccer field out of whatever flat patch of dirt they can find, burned out wreckage of exactly what I don't know. A lot of loitering, lingering, killing time. A few folks fixing cars, some teens pumping some bass out of a stereo in a parking lot. Someone blew by on a 4x4, getting his thrills however he could. Pure anomie.

Like the Soviet housing blocs I visited in Berlin (as always, blog post TBA), there's nothing you can do about housing projects once they're already there. It's a not a configuration conducive to mixed-use -- the best East Berlin's Marzahn neighborhood could muster was a shopping mall (the commercial counterpart of a housing project, I guess), the best Clichy-sous-Bois could offer was a McDonald's and a few scattered municipal services (elementary & middle school, firehouse).


The département (Seine-Saint-Denis, postal code 93), for its part, tries to build up some sense of civic engagement with its own reformulation of the Republic's "liberté, égalité, fraternité." Most noticeably, it addresses the New Year's well-wishes to "citizen." Immigrants' children, born in France, are French citizens, just like Jacques who can traves his ancestors back to Charlemagne. It's been an enormous sticking point, however. While their parents fleeing poverty or political upheaval abroad were content to have a home and a job, their children are frustrated by location, unemployment, and systematic discrimination, all of which make it easy to forget -- or at least not believe in -- the values of citizenship.

Ultimately, it's an intractable problem. Such buildings are good housing, in a utilitarian sense, and I understand economics don't permit the demolition and reconstruction of . . . what, exactly? How do you artificially create a home, or a sense of home? I'm still firmly convinced that, whatever the housing pressure, without a sense of ownership (not necessarily a legal sense, as favelas prove) there won't be any civic pride. 24 Rue de Banque's squatters or the camp-in along the Canal St Martin take better care of their spaces than they would if they were installed on the 20th floor of a dilapidated cité. And ennui-inducing as they are, as my professor Alain Bertho has told me, no one is happy when a cité is razed.

Instead, there's a gritty pride inspite of itself, like the braggadocio of banlieue bloggers (fr & a fee, sorry, but tags like "93, département le plus hardcore!" as an indication). Or, for that matter, rapping.

Mac Tyer - 93 Tu Peux Pa Test

You can't test 93, the title goes. But the refrain closes, "j'oublierai jamais la banlieue qu'on brûlé" (I'll never forget the banlieue that one burned). Ambiguous in its phrasing: the 3rd person impersonal 'on' (like the English 'one did this or that') is common enough in French, so is Mac Tyer using it out of habit, or purposefully distancing himself from the events? (He could have used "nous", 'we'.) Treading the line between approval of the flames and simple acknowledgment. Will he never forget because of their effect on him, his home, his family? Their effect on the media attention to the problems of the banlieue? Because he participated?

Production-wise, it sounds like it's lifted straight from American commercial hip-hop . . . same old story. I got it off the Rap 2 Bandit Part 10 mix tape, which opens with "remixes" of Rick Ross and Chamillionaire -- basically the original with long instrumental gaps during which French rappers jump in.

The style is called "hardcore" in French. Perhaps taking its name from Ideal J's 1995 "Hardcore", banned on French radio for its explicit lyrics ("Hardcore, as if I'd thrown a bomb at Disneyland", for example).

Ideal J - Hardcore

While Rap 2 Bandit seems to buy into bling & bitches American rap hook line and sinker, some of the other mix tapes I snagged have some very intense political consciousness, like L'Emeute ("The Riot", a term used to described Nov '05).

All acquired at the Marché aux Puces (flea market) of Saint-Ouen, quite a francophone melting pot. But that'll have to wait for a West Side post.

Remix Politix

On the left: DJ Technics, an originator in the bmore club game. On the right: Sany DJ, an originator in the Rio funk game. A similar enough stature in their respective genres, and a remarkably similar recent trend: taking the music places it hasn't been before.

A little over a month ago, Technics alerted the Hollerboard to some golden new remixes -- still available for d/l on his site -- to much acclaim. Mostly recent hip-hop: quick fixes on Beyonce (w/ and w/out Jay-Z), the new Ciara single, Rick Ross gets tweaked another go around, dusts off an old 2Pac track. But one sticks out like a sore thumb.

Radiohead - Everything In Its Right Place (DJ Technics Remix)

It's gotten mostly rave reviews, cropping up in mixes all over the place, and Technics himself affirms that it's among his favorites of his recent tracks. But at first glance, it seems like something you'd expect from a dude who spends too much time on music blogs, knows his way around a copy of Reason, and likes the irony of applying an aesthetic from black Baltimore to white indie kid music.

Technics explains in the thread, "i'm trying to breath new air into the style of track making....ya know messin wit shit that folks wouldnt even touch." And in the initial post writes, "I BEEN BUSY TAKING MY SHIP BACK."

The sound definitely is something new -- it's much sparser and more minimal, even a little slower (it's Radiohead after all) than the club music I'm used to hearing -- as is the source material. I certainly can't fault the originator for originating, but it still strikes me as a noteworthy phenomenon. To overtake the upstarts, whose West Baltimore roots don't go quite as deep (and for whom the grab bag of other sounds comes more easily), you've gotta branch out.

Then again, the roots of it have been in the works for awhile, as the Baltimore City Paper reported earlier this year. As far back as 2003, club DJs were invited to play parties in NYC and Hollertronix helped blow it up via live gigs and white labels. So slowly the local crews got a clue. Scottie B: "I didn’t have any idea. We knew they were into it in Philly, in the black crowds, but we didn’t know anything about any white crowds anywhere."

And with a new audience you've gotta appeal to them, right?

Sany DJ rolled through Europe last month. Not the first Rio DJ to do that, but one of the few certainly. I saw him at Favela Chic (a questionable name, but a critical mass of Brazilians work there [including the owner] and they bring in some legit Brasileiros to play from time to time. then again, would I feel comfortable opening a bar called Ghetto Chic abroad?), where he dropped the Madonna "Hung Up" remix I commented on over the summer and posted more recently.

While funk has been celebrated for its blender-like aesthetic, from my experience it's less wide-ranging than we think. A lot of folks were hyped up on hearing The Smiths or The Clash with Portuguese rapping overtop, or the more general formulation "punk rock + new wave samples + little kids screaming + miami bass + outsider music industry = most exciting thing going on right now". Call it the unintended Radiohead remix.

But I've listened to a ton of funk this year, and the punk/new wave sound is definitely in the minority. From what I can tell, it had its hey-day in the late '90s, the era of the Bondes ('crews', roughly, like Bonde do Vinho, who did the "Rock the Casbah" cover). In the present day, however, DJs and MCs are a lot more cognizant of who they're imitating and what they're sampling. "Hip-Hop Radio Traxx" was one of the most popular pirated CDs available in Rio, carrying the most recent commercial rap. Nobody was interested in if I knew who The Strokes were, they were more keen on my knowledge of 50 Cent (or "Cinquenta Centavos"). Indie rock had its place -- A Maldita ["The Damned"] at Casa de Matriz was very much au courant -- but in an environment far removed (culturally) from the baile funk.

So did Sany remix Madonna with an eye toward the world beyond Rio? Probably. But is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. I've highlighted before his new, more avant-garde style, which he can't play at traditional bailes becuase the crowd's not ready for it yet.

I can't speak as knowledgably about Technics & Bmore, even if I do have the Maryland connection that the City Paper vaunts (but don't give me & Roxy -- Columbia, Howard County raised -- too much cred: Naymond and Mike, city kids in The Wire, argue this season whether the KKK exists in HoCo). Sonically, at least, compare the recent cuts to /rupture's archieved piece from '96 and you'll hear the difference. The newer stuff is, I think, more cerebral, especially the killer choice of the 2Pac vox-cum-manifesto. Maybe the new audience is liberating for some creative ideas that were thus far suppressed. Ditto for Sany. The ass gets tired of shaking and the head wants to enjoy it some more. Of course the music's going to evolve -- none of these sounds are or ever were static -- but the question is with an influence from where and toward what?

Am I hinting at a certain disapproval of these styles being plucked out of their "natural habitat" (or "local scene", for a less objectifying terminology), a process that I myself am implicated in (like I said, don't give us suburbanites too much cred -- Bmore club was news to me too)? Maybe just some caution.

"The only people that are concerned about outsiders are the real outsiders," Aaron LaCrate comments in the City Paper piece.

In club, perhaps it's less of a concern. It's not too hard to get a Bmore DJ or MC up to NYC for a show and have him or her return to Charm City with some extra scratch. The long-time players are playing out, selling records, getting press, and obviously don't mind sharing the trade secrets: Fork out for Technics' Club Tools and let's hear your remix. But Mr Catra, the biggest MC in Rio, doesn't think he can get a visa to play in the U.S., so we end up with a Bonde do Role tour instead.

I've avoided the 'a' word -- authenticity -- thus far, but man those kids just don't have it. The sound simply doesn't come natural to art school students from middle-class Curitiba, nowhere near Rio. It's self-aware enough to appeal to Americans and European -- and hey, they're Brazilian, that's enough caché for an unaware audience up North -- but doubtful any bailes in the carioca hills. To bring it full circle: It's the equivalent of me starting a Baltmore club crew.

Yet Sany loves Mariana's vocals and isn't he the best judge? Muito complicado, muito.

Get Domestic

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
--Emma Goldman

Off the French political beat for a hot minute -- not that I tend to stay on it for too long, of course. We're two days out from the first Tuesday in November. In (dis)honor of that occasion, here are some words&sounds; to get you through it.

• DJ C drops the perfect Election Day 2006 soundtrack on the Riddim Method, continuing his venerable 'B' Series DJ Mixes. I shot him a DVD full of funk mp3s -- maybe 'Brasil' is somewhere in the works.
• No beef if you don't want to vote, of course, given the way representative democracy works in a country of 300 million people. Here's some ammo to bolster your defiance: Brian Doherty of Reason Magazine pre-2004 on being a principled non-voter; more libertarian intransigence from LewRockwell.com.

It's bizarre to be sitting in Paris, contemplating absentee ballot choices for a suburban county in Maryland. I've lost pretty much all attachment to such mediocre local politics. I credit a few candidates for spending the postage to actually cull my name from the absentee rolls and send pamphlets transatlantic. Not that it helped -- it's far from thrilling to watch county executive candidates duke it out over who can best maintain Howard County's suburban landscape. Or who's got a more compelling vision for "downtown Columbia" (marked most prominently by a shopping mall). Bleak prospects in a town that's gone from '60s social experiment to management by a company that specializes in shopping malls. . . . I need to get registered somewhere else. Here's hoping I'll have a more exciting U.S. address come November 2008.

For now, I'm absolutely torn on this race. For all those Howard County orphans' rights experts, any suggestions?

anniversary, for worse.

Update: I spoke a bit to soon about no violence around the one-year anniversary of last year's "riots". As reported here (among many other news outlets), some youths set fire to a bus in Marseille, seriously injuring a female student who remains in the hospital with burns over 60% of her body. I've loosely followed the story in the papers, where it's gotten considerable attention from Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who fanned the flames last year when he publicly decried the banlieue youth as "racailles", a verlan word that inverts the French derogatory term caillera (loosely translated as "rabble", but more complex -- see the links). The Guardian offers excellent etymological analysis of the term, while Urban Dictionary throws it a heavy dose of irreverence (I promose to watch out for alligator logos next time I'm in Châtelet-Les-Halles late at night).

But back to Sarko. He's a conservative (by French standards) in Chirac's government who's positioning himself for a run at the presidency next spring. The left reviles him as much as they despise Bush -- when a pair of women from Gambia joined a political conversation I was having with a friend at a restaurant the other night, we came up with the following comparison: Bush started a war abroad, while Sarko started one at home.

I'm sure he legitimately cares about the Marseille attack, but his finger wagging smacks of self-righteous indignation and political posturing: The prevailing theory of the pundits is that lawℴ will be the big issue come election time. I don't want to trivialize what happened -- it's obviously an awful event, and for once there's something personal & human about it, a name, not just flames everywhere you turn (à la the pics I posted of last year). But it has to be seen as something of a positive sign that at least the nervous fears of "anniversary" attacks didn't turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

anniversary, for better or worse

There's been a buzz around Paris w/r/t October 27, 2006: one year on from the death of two youths in Clichy-sous-bois, a poor neighborhood outside of Paris, who ran into an electrical grid while most likely fleeing police. The event sparked "riots" across the cités (large housing projects) of the banlieue (suburbs), from Clichy-sous-bois to the rest of Paris's suburbs to every major city in France (to even, as I just learned, Guadeloupe). They were vastly mischaracterized in the American press -- I recall, for example, a New York Times' editorial entitled "Paris is Burning", when the point was precisely that Paris was completely calm while the periphery had erupted into a conflagration. Or perhaps it was just a question of emphasis. Setting cars on fire was the typical MO, but it was only buried deep in an article that I would find a sentence along the lines of "riots in the French suburbs subsided last night as the number of car burnings dropped to average levels." Those average levels, meanwhile, were something like several hundred cars a night! Sure, the sharp spike was something to take notice of, but the basic act of protest wasn't anything new.

So I'm not surprised to read, as in this BBC piece, "The conditions that led to the 2005 unrest are still in place." That seems to be the main conclusion drawn by the outpouring of banlieue commentary. Le Monde, the country's leading newspaper, has certainly wanted their fill: an 8-page supplement on Thursday and the cover of their political magazine.




















The two features make for an instructive contrast. On the left, "Banlieues un an après" (Banlieues one year after), and on the right, "Trente ans d'histoire et de révoltes" (Thirty years of history and revolts). The former is stuck in a naïve mindset, one that I imagine was shocked such events could happen in the first place and certainly hasn't learned much since, even though, for example, a popular movie like La Haine came out over ten years ago! Why talk of one year after when it's really a question of, as the latter seems to better understand, thirty years before?

Or longer, for that matter. Between 1945 and 1971, approximately 6.5 million units of housing were built in France. At an average occupancy of 4 persons per unit, that's 26 million people. In 1971, the population of France was roughly 50 million people. Astounding rates of post-war growth and construction? Sounds like a baby boom to me, not a big deal. Except that of those 6.5 million units of housing, 2 million were HLM (habitation à loyer modéré -- rent-controlled housing, aka cités) and 3 million were publicly financed in some manner. Given that those 3 million aren't necessarily all cités of some kind, you can calculate that roughly 15-35% of the French lived in such projects. And that was in 1971. Wikipedia picks up the slack and brings it to the present day: There are now approx. 4 million HLM housing units, home to roughly 14 million people, or one-quarter of France's population.

What makes cité life provoke such hostile reactions? Certainly there are obvious economic and cultural reasons: high unemployment, endemic job discrimination (a plan to institute anonymous résumés -- so employers can't immediately toss their Mohammets into the rejection pile because they're looking to hire Jacques -- recently got scrapped in the National Assembly), and the resentment of outsider status. Huge problems for which I'm hardly equipped to provide solutions.

A more manageable question, however, might center around where and how the violence was carried out. It struck me that, as far as I could tell from media coverage, those perpetrating the unrest mostly were doing so in their own neighborhoods. Paris proper was untouched for a reason, in that sense -- the geography of the banlieues keeps them a substantial train ride away. Granted, I have seen some bidonvilles tucked into corners along the Seine, but I have to imagine anyone squatting on central Parisian real estate wants to lay low (bidonville can refer to anything from a "tent city" to a "shanty town" -- in this case I'm referring to more of the former, the rows of tents you can find on some of the left bank quais).

So there's a geographical segregation, coupled with a built environment that, on the whole, isn't very appealing: large, concrete apartment blocks. Lots of them. Moreover, and maybe even more importantly, they've been provided by the government. Crucially, this means there's no sense of ownership. Of course, no one was ready to go torch their homes, but to burn cars, police stations, even schools and community centers -- to add a lot of charred wreckage to an already bleak landscape -- probably wasn't accompanied by a lot of tears. An environment like that just doesn't engender a lot of attachment.

Naturally, I can't help but think about favelas in Rio by comparison -- where it's the exact opposite. Of course social unrest has occurred in the city for decades. The '90s in particular were considered something of a nadir, as I've been reading in Cidade Partida ("Divided City"). Of particular note in light of the banlieue are the clashes between funkeiros that occurred on the beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana (around '93, I believe). When tension reached a head, they didn't destroy their own communities -- precisely because their communities are their own. I can't imagine anyone setting a car in their own favela on fire. The sense of pride and resilience is simply too strong. Destruction caused by warring gangs is of course another story, but I've never heard of a gang tearing down a favela -- that's the kind of thing the government is more likely to propose.

In Rio the poor build themselves homes they are proud of in spite of the government so they don't always have to live peripherally. / In Paris the government builds homes for the poor they have no attachment to and forces them to live peripherally.

So when Rio's huddled masses want to be heard, how do they do it? Throw a baile funk. Let that bass trickle down the hillsides -- and yes, you can be in a neighborhood of the asfalta and hear the soundsystem up on the morro. And outside Paris, they let flames cascade upward, hoping those lucky enough to be inside the Boulevard Périphérique look up & notice.

all just ways of rendering the invisible visible, some more destructive than others.
____

Easy to get grandiose & general, which can be dangerous & dishonest. To refocus:

1. banlieue, like favela, is a vastly overwrought term at this point, and can hardly be spoken of in monolithic terms
2. the cités are also there to stay -- it's a fait accompli: there's no chance the government is going to rip them all down and somehow integrate millions of people into already-dense Paris
3. so what's going on besides focusing on violence (of which, fortunately, there doesn't seem to have been any to "mark" the anniversary)? besides the same kind of sensationalization you deplored in opinions of favelas?

Well, Le Monde Diplomatique, the magazine cover on the right side that I never got back to, already seems to be pointing in that direction. The inside flap ad sets the tone dramatically. "Banlieues: A positive energy!", "Creative Banlieues", "The Culture of the Cités." The "Banlieue One Year After" insert deserves some credit too, even if I don't like the presentation. In a particularly carioca moment, there's an article on the resident of a cité in Marseille who proudly shows off a commanding view of the city, port, and ocean that only his home turf offers.

I'm wondering too, with all the downtime unemployment offers, if there's a music scene of some kind stirring about on the outskirts of town & more importantly how I can find it. Le Monde was fascinated a week ago (en français, sorry) with one way the bored youth pass their time: blogging. The subtitle (translated) reads, "The cités of the banlieue play out rivalries with one another on the Net via hundreds of blogs. They're violent, territorial, provocative. Choice excerpts -- with their spelling." [the posts are full of slang, esp. verlan, where the syllables of a word are reversed. merits its own analysis some other time.]

The author of this piece clearly doesn't have a healthy sense of exaggeration. Someone's profile reads, "Welcome to Mureaux. Number of residents: around 30,000. Crime rate: 97%. Chance of visiting & leaving alive: Almost nil. From the moment you pass the sign, the game begins." Maybe Mureaux really is that rough, but I detect a pretty obvious tough guy façade there. It fits in line with what the article quotes at the beginning, that the blogs argue over which neighborhood is the scariest, "the hottest," "the ghettoest." Again I can't help but compare: the youth of the favela will instead take pride in having the best baile around.

I would link to some of the blogs -- and indeed have been meaning to try and contact the authors -- but as I just discovered, their host shut them all down for "not following the terms of the website." Somehow not surprising.

So where does that leave me? I didn't come to Paris to visit cités in the same way that favelas were an integral part of my plans in Rio. But I'm absolutely of the mindset that all parts of a city deserve attention -- peripheries as much as centers. It's remarkable how effective out of sight/out of mind is: I couldn't help but be reminded of favelas every day in Rio, while it's taken this artificial anniversary to get me thinking more seriously about the banlieue.

And yet, three days a week I'm heading to St-Denis (a municipality that, technically, is in the banlieue) for my classes at Université-Paris-VIII, the most radical of the post-'68 campuses (psychoanalysis program founded by Lacan, philosophy dept founded by Foucault . . . you get the idea). The kind of place that even has an academic program on connaissance (familiarity or knowledge) de la banelieue. Soon enough, I suppose: I'm taking a class on the problems cities face in the era of globalization, and the professor promised to give me a list of architecturally- or archetypically-significant sites around the région parisienne w/r/t all this suburban fury.
___

Quick parting shot, from a random AP article reporting on last fall:

"The emergency decree invoked a 50-year-old security law that dates to France's colonial war in Algeria that empowers officials to put troublemakers under house arrest, ban or limit the movement of people and vehicles, confiscate weapons and close public spaces where gangs gather."

Those colonial entanglements never do go away, do they?