Do You Love Me?

This video posted on Hawgblawg by the always engaging Arkansasawian Ted Swedenburg deserves wider airing:

Is this the best video clip of Arabic music ever?

"Do You Love Me?", from the Bendaly Family عائلة بندلي
Kuwait, 1978.

EMERGENCES AND EMERGENCIES: NEW SOUTH ASIAN FILM-MAKING FROM BRITAIN

If you are in New York City this weekend (20/4/7-22/4/7) you can go see this 'must see' collection of films. If you are not able to attend, the texts are worth reading - collected below. Excellent.

Emergences & Emergencies
New British Asian Films
Curated by Sukhdev Sandhu


From the companion catalogue:
1. Sukhdev Sandhu on "India Calling" (Sonali Fernando, 2002)
2. Michael Vazquez on "Otolith" (The Otolith Group, 2003)
3. Naeem Mohaiemen on "Bradford Riots" (Neil Biswas, 2006)
4. Jon Caramanica on "Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music" (V.Bald, 2001)
5. Vijay Prashad on "The Road To Guantanamo" (Winterbottom 2006)
6. James Brooke-Smith on "England Expects" (Tony Smith 2004)
7. Karen Shimakawa on "Skin Deep" (Yousaf Ali Khan: 2001)
8. Kamila Shamsie on "A Love Supreme" (Nilesh Patel, 2001)
9. Mohsin Hamid on "My Son The Fanatic" (Udayan Prasad, 1997)
10. Bharat Tandon on "The Warrior" (Asif Kapadia, 2001):
11. Gautam Malkani on "Young, Angry and Muslim" (Julian Hendy, 2005)

Thanks to Naeem Mohaiemen for the collection of texts - visit Shobakorg.
.

one evening on a Melbourne side street there was a bloody foreigner... (though this is a bit of an in-joke ... for an in-group of one)

The Queen's duck

When someone mentions the English Queen, I'm afraid I always think 'unaccountable and irredeemably wicked shareholder of major corporations of the likes of Riotinto' (though that is spurious rumour of course). Well this week, while Riotinto reels under the PartiZans activist intervention at its annual shareholders meeting, and while the Queen's grandson Billy dumps his consort (already I forget her name - [Capital Kate I think]), I found this on the Community Radio 3CR radio compere Suzanna's news round-up. The wooden and pale imitator of celluloid glam Helen Mirror is still doing her bit for commodity sales. This time ducks (made in China I expect - which is fine - [sing the song]):

"Rubber Duckie shares Royal bath
The Queen is reported to share her bath with a yellow rubber duck that wears a crown
According to The Sun, the toy was spotted by a decorator as he refurbished Her Majesty's Buckingham Palace living quarters
The newspaper also says a spokesman for the Queen would not comment on the duck
The paper reports the unnamed decorator saying: "I was repainting the Queen's bathroom walls in the same colour she's had for the last 50 years when I glanced down at the bath. "I nearly fell off my step-ladder when I saw the yellow rubber duck with an inflatable crown on its head
"I suppose she was given it by her grandchildren as a joke." It was revealed recently the Queen has a mobile phone and a Big Mouth Billy Bass novelty singing fish
Now sales are soaring"

At least that has the merit of being a little funny, whereas unaccountable Royals and their filthy riches, even as they do duty as faded tourist attractions and tabloid fodder in the low season, are not always so amusing.

Australians of course voted her to stay in power (it was rigged - the only other choice was a Howard appointee - ie, Georgie B2's appointee...) but here in England she is in power by habit and by default. Still in power.

Fear & Loathing In Teheran - by Sarah Gillespie

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Fear & Loathing In Teheran - by Sarah Gillespie

‘The blood drained from her face and Faye whispered, 'there's going to be a rape involved in this' Operator Maintainer Arthur Batchelor Daily Mirror 9th April 2007

Faye Turney, the ‘she-man’ Seaman captured in Shatt al-Arab last month, claims her captivity in Teheran was marred by fear of rape, torture and a lifetime of incarceration. Despite having been released unharmed, a bizarre scene is emerging from the dark recesses of Turney’s imagination in which the saintly mother of little Molly (3) was subjected to floundering indefinitely in a dingy jail wearing nothing but pair of knickers and a floral headscarf. According to Faye’s ‘worst fears’ her ‘evil captors’ spied on her through her cell door slat, cracked jokes about her imminent martyrdom and most bizarrely of all, felt compelled to fit her out with her very own hand-crafted, bespoke coffin. Here is our first hint that we are dealing with the humiliation fantasies of a serious narcissist; while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard indeed have affiliations with the Moral Police responsible for public executions, I doubt very much that they throw a made-to-measure coffin service into the deal.

Nothing here adds up. But it doesn’t have to because the press have finally dispensed with the pursuit of truth altogether. Faye Turney’s fears are being treated by the media as if they were facts. Do a Google search on ‘Faye Turney rape’ and over 80,000 results appear. Remarkable really, given the woman has not been raped at all and is even claiming that she was not. Such is the ravenous appetite in Britain for titillating tales of defenceless damsels and wicked Arabs, the Sun-reading British electorate doesn’t care anymore if the narrative is absolute fantasy or not, so long as the victim is a westerner and the aggressor is a Muslim.

Thus, it doesn’t matter that Turney & Co were well-fed, clothed, even supplied with Marlborough Lights and Presidential ‘goodie bags’. It doesn’t matter that none of the 15 were exposed to torture, sexual abuse or humiliation. It doesn’t matter either that the worst trauma they endured was having their I Pods confiscated and forced to wear outfits that looked a bit ‘last year’. Arthur Batchelor, one of the Seaman, who we can assume has received at least some Military training for coping with stress during captivity, said: ‘Those suits were an insult. Not only did mine not fit, but it was cheap and tacky and the Hugo Boss shirt was a fake.’ What? So this is the ‘mental torment’ he insists on peddling for cash? The message is clear, the Seamen were treated well. Another message is also clear; the news-consuming public refuses to internalise this. Fay's abuse was in her disturbed mind and what is even more disturbing is the fact that our minds are deviant enough to consume her sickening fantasies. Without delving too deeply into the collective perversion of an entire nation, it is crucial to note that the British, who built their pseudo-egalitarian, post-industrial, mega-economy on the backs of two centuries of colonized labour, just love to feel like they are the victim. Check out the streets of Soho if you need proof.

What is more alarming, is that British media are quick to mobilise this penchant for humiliation in order to spoon feed us fictional narratives that reinforce the binary underpinning Anglo-American-Israeli foreign policy: Muslim=terrorist/Westerner=liberator. Since Turney traded in her phantasmic trauma for a substantial wad of Rupert Murdoch’s cash we are inundated with stories about her not being raped. Without the popular fear of Islam bestowing a veneer of feasibility into this narrative, Turney’s confessional would be exposed for the absurd non-event that it is. Try to imagine an equivalent news flash without the anti-Muslim agenda: ‘Man Thought He Was Being Followed Home by Rabid Gunmen, But Then He Realized It Was His Mum & He Was Just Being Paranoid.’ Or ‘Footsie Share Index Plummets to Record Lows Thought City Worker When He Accidentally Leant on His Apple Mac Keyboard Earlier Today.'

The rape, the torture, the execution didn’t happen but still it is reported over and over again simply on the proviso that it was temporarily imagined to be true in the mind of one woman. Truth is elusive, murky territory, impossible to fix or locate, impervious to the tyranny of technological mapping devices that offer objective comprehendible absolutes. Truth is relative, deceptive, it is in process, it never arrives at its destination and yet, we all insist on chasing it into oblivion. What has happened in the case of Faye Turney is that we seem to have given up the quest altogether, we have willingly surrendered to the absolutist reassurance of fear, at the expense of truth. Not only are we cut adrift from facts, we are not even pretending to look for them anymore, we are heading for a terrain were facts no longer matter.

On 9th April 2007 Blair, a man who, among his many sins, incarcerates Muslims for months on end without charge, dubbed Iran a ‘cruel and callous’ nation. So complicit are we in the demonisation of an entire civilization, we knowingly consume this fantasy of cruelty rather than consider the real possibility of humanity. We are invited to believe that Turney, the giant Viking of the Gulf Sea, is the ultimate victim, while Ahmadinejad, who hopes, albeit naively, one day to defend his country from foreign invaders, is the ultimate evil. The tragedy is we are no longer concerned as to whether this is true or not.
# posted by thecutter @ 17:12

Nabeel on Panto

This generous synopsis of my Auckland talk from Nabeel (who has a show on BASE FM - where you might have heard a rant last weekend!):

"PANTOMIME TERROR

And I've been working like a dawg. Time for an Easter break. I can tell I'm physically and mentally tired when I start to use the word 'interesting' too much in a lecture every time I'm trying to introduce a 'significant' point. Found myself doing that today when talking about 'A Hard Day's Night' in the Popular Music on Screen course. I even attempted some defensive drolery about it with the students (about 90 of the 130+ roll), apologizing for using the word too much and then telling them that it was OK in a lecture but not in their essays.

That was today but yesterday I finished powerpointing the Beatletastic images with a few Warhols, then went to a talk by John Hutnyk who does anthropology and cultural studies at Goldsmiths College at the University of Londinium. John was one of the editors of Dis-orienting Rhythms (1997), a book about the new Asian dance music in the UK which I read religiously just after I finished my PhD in 1996 and was thinking about ways in which to rewrite it into a book. DR marked out a space to share knowledge and debate the British Asian peeps pop culture. That's when 'TranslAsia' was as hep as the Nu Asian Kool or the Asian Underground. Well, there's always a place for a nifty title. I agreed with many of the authors in Dis-orienting Rhythms though I disliked the way some of its politics seemed to ignore issues of musical pleasure and gender and suggested that the only 'worthwhile' British Asian music was the stuff that was clearly anti-colonial, anti-racist and on the barricades. It didn't have many light touches.

I had heard John speak about Asian Dub Foundation and Fun-da-mental in a Calcutta (now Kolkata) 1998 conference about globalization and music and I've read a fair bit of his other work. His talk yesterday was called Pantomime Terror and took place in ALR5 in the Architecture Building which is one of the worst designed buildings on our fair campus. John is working toward a way of narrating the 'war of terror' and the paranoia in Londinium using the detritus of popular culture and the different inflections of radical chic. Walter Benjamin, Michael Taussig and James Clifford in Adorno dub stylee. Fundamental are in panto mode when they dress up with their keffiyahs and pose for photographs, though they are trying to do something different to Madonna when she dons Che's beret for a record cover. John suggested a difference but didn't elaborate how we judge that difference. Is it just a matter of political utility that distinguishes this type of semiotic play/warfare and its value from this or that po-mo articulation? We must choose certain truths and rights, as Johnny Osbourne would sing: "Render your arms and not your garments. The Truth is there for who have eyes to see". I'd like to believe it but cannot pray to this claim five times a day. It's true but not true.

John's powerpoint presentation included images of the July 7 bus after the top of it was blown off, a posed Fun-Da-Mental pic from The Guardian July 2006 that seemed to juggle all the signifiers of the London transport terror like backpacks, the St George's Cross, rightwing soccer clichés, and the ubiquitous double-decker bus. He screened a rollicking Fun-da-mental video for their Cookbook DIY song about making dirty bombs in an Islamist bedsit and bigger bombs in US military installations. Cher appeared in Che's beret, Kylie in her Che T-shirt. John's working on a related project about trinkets and lefty memorabilia like Chairman Maos and the mass reproduction of Che. Motorcycle diarists of the world unite.

John returned to the Arabian Nights and imagined Sheherezad telling her stories night after night because they might save her from torture at Gitmo. This clicked with my own feelings about the absurdities of the current political moment and a hunch that fabulist forms of expression such as surrealism, situationism, science fiction and reworks of populist modes might have some mileage for telling stories that a million documentaries, news and current affairs segments cannot. We are after all living in the age of John Stewart 's show, which is proud of its status as the best fake news. I think we can give magic realism a bit of a rest though. But you can't deny the power of exotica to get people fired up.

All the playlists are my way of working through the craziness of what it means to be 'Terrormade' using muzik. To my distant ears Sarf London dubstep captures paranoid Londonistan better than any other music. Donning a rabbit's head or becoming a comic book terrorist with a pirate eyepatch is a way to talk back to the nonsense. Hollow po-mo irony maybe but if you don't snigger at it you're gonna go crazy like Gnarls Barkley, probably. Nothing that new about these fictions and rhetorical tactics. Maybe it's just that combination of a sense of failure with my academese and the need to use a different voice. The 'Guantanamo, Here We Come' essay on the Smiths' album Strangeways Here We Come was a start for me. Still waiting to hear back on the first draft which still needs a lot of work but has some good bits. At this early stage of a critical-autobiographical Islamopoppy project, it was reassuring to find someone looking for other ways to represent. Ended up enjoying more than a few drinks, vittals and rapping with John and Tara and other post-seminarians at the Mezze Bar. Cheers John.
# posted by nabeel @ 9:09 PM "

Hong Kong

I spent a day in Hong Kong on the way back from New Zealand and the best thing about the day was the statue of Bruce Lee on the harbour front Kowloon side.

Why be interested? Well, check out Viajay Prashad's book Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting. And Ko Banerjea's chapter in the book Travel Worlds (available here).

And recall (sing even) the immortal tune:

KUNG FU FIGHTING - Carl Douglas - 1974 (Also recorded by The Drifters).

Everybody was kung-fu fighting
Those cats were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they fought with expert timing

They were funky China men from funky Chinatown
They were chopping them up and they were chopping them down
It's an ancient Chineese art and everybody knew their part
From a feint into a slip, and kicking from the hip

Everybody was kung-fu fighting
Those cats were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they fought with expert timing

There was funky Billy Chin and little Sammy Chung
He said here comes the big boss, lets get it on
We took a bow and made a stand, started swinging with the hand
The sudden motion made me skip now we're into a brand knew trip

Everybody was kung-fu fighting
Those cats were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they did it with expert timing

(repeat)..make sure you have expert timing
Kung-fu fighting, had to be fast as lightning

Transpontine

For a while I have been reading this blog - its well worth the what's on and the curios:

A Transpontine Top Ten

A big weekend is planned in Deptford and New Cross on May 5th and 6th, with loads of live music happening in local pubs and other venues (including one very exciting international act, fingers crossed). Keep an eye on Rocklands for emerging details. Anyway for the programme I've come up with a Transpontine Top Ten of songs/artists linked to the area. In no particular order, here it is:

1. The Only Living Boy in New Cross (1992): Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine had a top five hit with this tale of ‘greboes, crusties and goths’
2. New Craas Massakkah – Linton Kwesi Johnson (1984): dub poet’s take on the 1981 New X Fire.
3. Up the Junction – Squeeze (1979): South London kitchensink drama from band who started out on Deptford Fun City records
4. Mad Dot – The Band of Holy Joy (1986): ‘when I walk up the New Cross Road when I’m starved and I haven’t been fed’.
5. Nancy Boy – Placebo (1996): former Drakefell residents who met in a pub in Deptford.
6. Action Time and Vision – Alternative TV (1978): Deptford and ATV’s Mark Perry started Sniffin’ Glue, the original punk fanzine.
7. Gravity’s Rainbow – Klaxons (2006) :first single on Angular records when they were just a little band in New Cross. The song title references Thomas Pynchon’s novel, which features a rocket explosion in Greenwich Park.
8. Cloudbusting – Kate Bush (1985): Kate started her career living in Brockley and playing gigs at the Royal Albert in New Cross Road and the Rose of Lee (now Dirty South)
9. Judy Teen – Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel (1974): glam rocker grew up in New Cross.
10. Death Cab for Cutie – Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (1967): Bonzos met at Goldsmiths in New X, performed this song in The Beatles ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ film and gave a name to current US emo rockers.

Fairly arbitrary I know, the list could be a lot longer. What would your suggestions be?

Posted by Transpontine at 5:00 PM

[I've added the image - from the compilation album of a couple of years back - used to be able to buy it downstairs in the NX MoonBow Cafe]

New Left Curve Published.

The new Left Curve is out, with Publicity Section, lots of good stuff, including a piece by Roh Wright.

More details when I am back at my desk.

****** If you live in the Bay Area [USA], please join us for the

New Issue Release Event for Left Curve no. 31:

Wednesday, April 18, 7 p.m.

City Lights Bookstore

461 Columbus Ave., San Francisco

With readings/presentations by:

- Dolores de Leon - Susan Galleymore - Jack Hirschman -
- Henrik Lebuhn - Arturo Mantecón - Cameron McHenry -
- Doug Minkler - Csaba Polony - Marilyn Ringer-