Soundtrack Saturday
2 hours ago
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
The geography lesson of Gay Girl in Damascus
The tale of the lesbian blogger in Damascus who turned out this weekend to be a married American chap studying at Edinburgh University will surely be told many times over. Here is a news story lightly wrapped around a bundle of talking points: what spurs someone to create and maintain a false identity ("Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, emblem of street-protesting Syrian womanhood!"); the nature of personal attachment in the era of Web 2.0, and how the internet has democratised that old-fashioned pursuit, the media hoax. How appropriate that Tom MacMaster should claim to be doing a postgraduate degree, because his is the stunt that will launch a thousand research fellowships.
Listening to MacMaster's interviews yesterday, one other issue nagged away at me: what the hoax tells us about the importance of geography.
To the blogger, his distance from the Arab Spring was merely incidental. "The reality is that I have been in contact with a lot of people inside Syria and I have been following things very closely," he airily told Radio Scotland. The fact that he knew the studentville of Edinburgh's Newington far better than the Middle East was beside the point.
And sure enough, the Gay Girl in Damascus blog features very little local detail. True, there's the odd reference to Friday prayers, the Druze, a lover called Zina and all manner of other variables that can swiftly be cut and pasted from Wikipedia. But of the scenery that surrounds Amina, of the journeys that she would have to make to get to her marches and her dates . . . there is next to nothing. The message to western readers is clear: this woman thinks like you, blogs like you and appears to have sex like you. She is foreign only in name.
This is the big lie that underpins all the little fibs dreamed up by MacMaster. It can be summed up thus: in the age of mass technology and almost unprecedented international trade we are becoming more alike – and our local environments are of diminishing significance. Geography mattered in 1914 and 1939 and all the way up to 1989; but now we live in a global village.
This has been the promise of this wave of globalisation, and smarter people than MacMaster have made a lot of cash from it. Thomas L Friedman and Frances Cairncross produced bestsellers titled The World Is Flat and The Death of Distance. In the early 90s, the economist Richard O'Brien pretty much made his career proclaiming "the end of geography".
One way of reading the financial bubble is as a story of people who believed the same thing as MacMaster: that geography was just an inconvenience to be worked around. So you had Northern Rock, a former building society in Newcastle that wanted to be a major bank on high streets and used global financial markets to speed the process up. In Iceland, you had a small clique of businessmen, pumped up on testosterone and cheap credit, who went out and bought up swaths of foreign businesses. Then came the crash and the return of those old local constraints.
It's the British Treasury that had to bail out Northern Rock; it's the government Reykjavik which has to haggle over the cash its banks owe foreign savers. Shoppers who once enjoyed only the benefits of globalisation, in the form of cut-price tellies made in China, can now feel its downside as the property slump in Nevada makes it harder to get a mortgage in Newbury.
Even during the bubble, how interconnected your world was always depended on who you were. Sure, it may have been easier than ever for financiers to fly from London to New York – not so for would-be asylum-seekers hoping to get from Sangatte, say, to Kent.
It's the limits of the globalisation story that have helped drive some academics back to geography and to what is now called "the spatial turn". Anything that comes out of academia labelled "the 'something' turn" generally involves creasing your forehead over some hardback quoting Foucault, but one excellent new history book makes the case for taking local differences more seriously.
In Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century, Leif Jerram sets out the case for considering the importance of where events happened, rather than only the when and why.
Investigating history's "crime scenes", the Manchester academic upends some of the most cherished popular notions of how big changes come about. He traces the immediate origins of the British Labour party, for instance, to a factory in Bradford making velvet.
In 1890, just before Christmas, the owner of Manningham Mills imposed a 35% pay cut on workers. The largely female workforce wanted to go on strike, but were resisted by the men leading the local trade unions.
So the women organised themselves, and went door-to-door in Bradford and Leeds raising a war chest of £11,000. Barred from the usual meeting houses, they gathered in open-air ice rinks. It was the limitations placed on the women's free speech, and their harassment, that turned a tussle over wages to a much broader movement. The result, three years later, was the creation of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford.
Whether it's anti-Mubarak protestors gathering in Tahrir Square, or British university students clustering in commons rooms, the scene and the setting cannot be divorced from each other, and some specifics cannot be wished away. That's the lesson Tom MacMaster is learning the hard way this week.
Aditya Chakrabortty @'The Guardian'
Listening to MacMaster's interviews yesterday, one other issue nagged away at me: what the hoax tells us about the importance of geography.
To the blogger, his distance from the Arab Spring was merely incidental. "The reality is that I have been in contact with a lot of people inside Syria and I have been following things very closely," he airily told Radio Scotland. The fact that he knew the studentville of Edinburgh's Newington far better than the Middle East was beside the point.
And sure enough, the Gay Girl in Damascus blog features very little local detail. True, there's the odd reference to Friday prayers, the Druze, a lover called Zina and all manner of other variables that can swiftly be cut and pasted from Wikipedia. But of the scenery that surrounds Amina, of the journeys that she would have to make to get to her marches and her dates . . . there is next to nothing. The message to western readers is clear: this woman thinks like you, blogs like you and appears to have sex like you. She is foreign only in name.
This is the big lie that underpins all the little fibs dreamed up by MacMaster. It can be summed up thus: in the age of mass technology and almost unprecedented international trade we are becoming more alike – and our local environments are of diminishing significance. Geography mattered in 1914 and 1939 and all the way up to 1989; but now we live in a global village.
This has been the promise of this wave of globalisation, and smarter people than MacMaster have made a lot of cash from it. Thomas L Friedman and Frances Cairncross produced bestsellers titled The World Is Flat and The Death of Distance. In the early 90s, the economist Richard O'Brien pretty much made his career proclaiming "the end of geography".
One way of reading the financial bubble is as a story of people who believed the same thing as MacMaster: that geography was just an inconvenience to be worked around. So you had Northern Rock, a former building society in Newcastle that wanted to be a major bank on high streets and used global financial markets to speed the process up. In Iceland, you had a small clique of businessmen, pumped up on testosterone and cheap credit, who went out and bought up swaths of foreign businesses. Then came the crash and the return of those old local constraints.
It's the British Treasury that had to bail out Northern Rock; it's the government Reykjavik which has to haggle over the cash its banks owe foreign savers. Shoppers who once enjoyed only the benefits of globalisation, in the form of cut-price tellies made in China, can now feel its downside as the property slump in Nevada makes it harder to get a mortgage in Newbury.
Even during the bubble, how interconnected your world was always depended on who you were. Sure, it may have been easier than ever for financiers to fly from London to New York – not so for would-be asylum-seekers hoping to get from Sangatte, say, to Kent.
It's the limits of the globalisation story that have helped drive some academics back to geography and to what is now called "the spatial turn". Anything that comes out of academia labelled "the 'something' turn" generally involves creasing your forehead over some hardback quoting Foucault, but one excellent new history book makes the case for taking local differences more seriously.
In Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century, Leif Jerram sets out the case for considering the importance of where events happened, rather than only the when and why.
Investigating history's "crime scenes", the Manchester academic upends some of the most cherished popular notions of how big changes come about. He traces the immediate origins of the British Labour party, for instance, to a factory in Bradford making velvet.
In 1890, just before Christmas, the owner of Manningham Mills imposed a 35% pay cut on workers. The largely female workforce wanted to go on strike, but were resisted by the men leading the local trade unions.
So the women organised themselves, and went door-to-door in Bradford and Leeds raising a war chest of £11,000. Barred from the usual meeting houses, they gathered in open-air ice rinks. It was the limitations placed on the women's free speech, and their harassment, that turned a tussle over wages to a much broader movement. The result, three years later, was the creation of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford.
Whether it's anti-Mubarak protestors gathering in Tahrir Square, or British university students clustering in commons rooms, the scene and the setting cannot be divorced from each other, and some specifics cannot be wished away. That's the lesson Tom MacMaster is learning the hard way this week.
Aditya Chakrabortty @'The Guardian'
‘Paula Brooks,’ editor of ‘Lez Get Real,’ also a man
Paula Brooks from LezGetReal is a Man – Straight Man Fraud in the Lesbian World
Burial - In McDonald's
"we just did this for a laugh and to test out the camera so don't get too worked up! :)
my love for burial is limitless and did not intend to disrespect his work."
(MoogDnB, the director)
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Tyranny in NYC
Wasteful
The vast majority of arrests in New York City are for low-level offenses, such as misdemeanors like possessing a small amount of marijuana or violations like selling umbrellas or flowers on the street without a license. By any criteria, almost none of these activities could be considered dangerous or predatory. At worst, most city residents would view them as public nuisances.
Police officers and other criminal justice personnel -- judges, court officers, district attorneys, public defenders and correction officers -- spend hours every day, if not their whole workday, processing these cases. And these law enforcement officials are preoccupied with these seemingly insignificant cases day after day, week after week, month after month and so on.
According to the Drug Policy Alliance, just one category of arrests -- for possessing, not selling, small amounts of marijuana -- costs New York City $75 million per year.
Ineffective
The aggressive arrest-driven policing applied in New York City aimed at minor offenses has effectively caught up hundreds of thousands, perhaps actually millions, of individuals in the criminal justice net in recent years. Last year, for example, the city’s police made over 370,000 arrests. Most of these arrests occurred in New York’s low-income communities of color -- for example, although the majority of people who use marijuana are white, 86 percent of the individuals arrested for marijuana possession last year were black or Latino...
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Robert Gangi @'AlterNet'
A Conversation With Saudi Women's Rights Campaigner Wajeha al-Huwaider
Wajeha al-Huwaider is perhaps the best-known Saudi campaigner for women’s rights, human rights and democracy. She has protested energetically against the kingdom’s lack of formal laws (the Koran is it) and basic freedoms and in particular against the guardianship system, under which every female, from birth to death, needs the permission of a male relative to make decisions in all important areas of life—education, travel, marriage, employment, finances, even surgery. In 2008 a video of her driving a car, which is forbidden for women in Saudi Arabia, created a sensation when it was posted on YouTube. Al-Huwaider is a strong supporter of the June 17 Movement, which calls on Saudi women to start driving on that date, and made the celebrated YouTube video of its co-founder, Manal al-Sherif, jailed for nine days in May for driving. While this interview was in preparation, she was briefly detained by the police when she tried to visit Nathalie Morin, a French-Canadian woman held captive with her children by her Saudi husband.
Why the driving protests? And why now?
The issue of women drivers has remained unresolved since the driving protests of 1990. Just before the launching of the June 17 campaign, a group of well-known women and men signed a letter to the Shura, or Consultative Assembly, asking to reopen the discussion. It was rejected. That was the spark for the current protest of Manal and the other women. The issue never goes away...
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Katha Pollitt @'The Nation'
Monday, 13 June 2011
Grime's 100 Club Moment
It's somehow appropriate for its DIY ethics that the seminal moment in the history of modern British urban music is a four-part YouTube clip. Ripped from a home-made, long out-of-print DVD called Conflict, one cameraman films a tiny box-room full of young grime MCs, performing on pirate station Deja 92.3 FM, high up on a rooftop in Stratford – only yards from what is now the Olympic site.
Filmed on a summer evening in 2003, over 40 minutes, 15 or so members of legendary crews Roll Deep, East Connection and Nasty Crew squeeze into the makeshift studio – an all-star cast akin to getting the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Buzzcocks on the same bill. This was, in fact, grime's 100 Club moment – and thanks to the internet, we can all pretend we were there. As Roll Deep's DJ Karnage builds momentum with the instrumentals, the microphone is passed from MC to MC, from legends Wiley and D Double E to a 16-year-old Tinchy Stryder, to forgotten early heroes Demon and Sharky Major. The video is notorious for its dramatic climax, when a 17-year-old Dizzee Rascal nearly comes to blows with an MC who was then as hotly tipped as he was, Crazy Titch. The whole cast is a litany of possibility, of foiled and realised ambition; the future of British pop music at the crossroads. Eight years later, Dizzee is a global superstar with four No 1 singles to his name; Crazy Titch is serving a life sentence for murder.
Seen from this distance, the poignancy lands with the clinical punch of a Wiley snare: Dizzee Rascal now wants nothing to do with the music that first made him famous – he won the Mercury prize for Boy in Da Corner only months after this video was recorded. In 2011, Dizzee is collaborating with Shirley Bassey and Shakira; shadow-boxing backstage at Hyde Park with Prince Harry, while Titch resides at his grandmother's pleasure.
The videos, with a million or so YouTube views, findable by Googling Roll Deep Conflict, are a window on to an extraordinary era in British musical history. In one 10-second bit of hosting, Wiley accounts for the now-vanished trinity that created grime, and gave the British pop zeitgeist its platform: radio, raves and riddims. "This is Deja 92.3 FM … hold tight the raving massive, don't forget Eskimo dance ... hold tight Danny Weed, hold tight Target". This was a time when pirate radio was a hub for a whole (teenage) community – the geographical horizons as narrow as the musical ones were broad: "That's where I'm from, Bow E3," Wiley sprays into the mic. "I'm like the 38 bus, because I never turn up."
It also tells a story about grime at its musical peak: a stage before, or perhaps exactly when, the ego of MCs began to take over. Prior to that, anyone with a mic in their hand was first of all answerable to the beat, to the producer-DJ auteur, and pirate radio was all about "rolling out" the instrumentals – building a steady, if restless momentum. The MC was a performer, but also a host: a master of ceremonies, but also, in the parasitic sense, possessed by those extraordinary early grime beats and their macabre, avant-garde minimalism. As Wiley spits, "I'm futuristic, quantum leaping/there's no defeating/E3 tiger – see me creep on the riddim like a spider/kill them with a 16-liner". You wouldn't know it to hear 2011's shiny electro collaborations with the likes of Calvin Harris, but grime "spitting" is supposed to be twice the speed of hip-hop rapping: typically, you had just 16 bars to show your skills, before passing the mic to the next MC – a rule that made grime the most thrilling, ADD-friendly onslaught of a genre. Andy Warhol should count himself lucky he got 15 entire minutes to make an impact.
As the energy mounts, Crazy Titch is bopping with cartoonish energy, face screwed up at the sheer meanness of the track playing underneath, his blitzkrieg of bars including the lyric "Draw for me, you'll be on the 10 O'Clock News" seconds before the fight with Dizzee breaks out. When the scuffle starts, it could almost be a scene from EastEnders – apt, given the location. The music cuts out abruptly, and amid the clamour of raised voices and bravado we hear "step outside!", "leave it, man" – you can almost hear Pat Butcher telling them "he's not worth it!". Wiley is immediately in between the two callow young MCs – the godfather of grime, the paternal statesman who cares more for the scene than his own career. They are pulled apart, and everyone spills out on to the rooftop, silhouetted against the east London gloaming, as friends attempt to calm them down.
Three years later, Titch was sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the murder of 21-year-old Richard Holmes, a senseless crime supposedly connected to a disrespectful grime lyric. In that Deja FM set, Crazy Titch is captivating, going 100 miles per hour, arms pumping, grinning ear to ear – it's not a stretch to suppose that the gleeful, relentless energy he displays on the mic came from the same place as his manic, unhinged tendencies.
"Forget all this, man, forget all this," one MC is heard saying after the fight breaks out, attempting to defuse the tension. He meant they should forget the beef – and soon enough, they did. But a great deal else was forgotten with it.
Dan Hancox @'The Guardian'
...worst headline of the year award winner btw!
Talking to Machines
We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.
ASC Presents Deep Space Mix 20
01 – Ø – Unien Holvit
02 – Gas – Untitled 3 (Pop)
03 – Alva Noto – Interim (For Dieter Rams)
04 – Dadavistic Orchestra – Strung Valve Checkout
05 – Mr Smith – Deterioration
06 – Loscil – Névé
07 – Kangding Ray – Apnée
08 – ASC – Lunar Industries
09 – Ø – Koituva
10 – Biosphere – Les Fleurs Du Mal
11 – Deaf Center – Lamp Mien
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Bodytonic Podcast - Ghosting Season
Ghosting Season is Gavin Miller and Thomas Ragsdale.
It was born in 2011 out of the foundations of worriedaboutsatan, the band they have toured and recorded as for over half a decade. They play London this Friday with Demdike Stare at the Lexington.
Ghosting Season Website
Tracklist
1 - Kraftwerk - Elektro Kardiogramm
2 - Byetone - Plastic Star (Session) (Ghosting Season edit)
Kraftwerk - Elektro Kardiogramm (parts)
Nine Inch Nails - Closer (Ghosting Season edit)
3 - How To Destroy Angels - BBB (Ghosting Season edit)
Byetone - Plastic Star (Session) (parts)
4 - Pantha Du Prince - Behind the Stars
How To Destroy Angels - BBB (parts)
5 - Fairmont - Flight of the Albatross
6 - Ben Klock - Ok
Fairmont - Flight of the Albatross (parts)
Function - Disaffected (parts)
Jonas Kopp - Michigan Lake (Ghosting Season edit)
7 - Modeselektor - B.M.I
Joby Talbot - A Yellow Disc Rising From the Sea (Ghosting Season edit)
Nine Inch Nails - Closer (parts)
Function - Disaffected (parts)
Kraftwerk - Elektro Kardiogramm (parts)
8 - Ghosting Season - Dead Man's Switch (Ghosting Season edit)
9 - Apparat - Arcadia (Telefon Tel Aviv remix) (Ghosting Season edit)
10 - Telefon Tel Aviv - The Birds (Ghosting Season edit)
Jonas Kopp - Michigan Lake (Ghosting Season edit)
Apparat - Arcadia (Telefon Tel Aviv remix) (parts)
11 - Ludovico Einaudi - The Planets
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Writing The War On Drugs
What if American law enforcement agents arrested more than six hundred drug dealing suspects in more than twenty cities across the country in just two days and nobody noticed?
On February 24, that’s exactly what happened as raids targeted drug gangs in cities all over the United States. In two days, 676 people were arrested and authorities confiscated $12 million, 282 weapons, ninety-four vehicles, and large packages of drugs.
It was one of the largest operations against drug cartels operating in the United States in recent years. These gangs were allegedly part of the vast structure that moves millions of dollars worth of drugs out of Mexico and into American neighborhoods in hundreds of cities. But did anyone notice?
As the arrests and seizures were reported by the DEA, FBI, and local law enforcement agencies, the front pages in the cities where the operation unfolded were concerned mostly with the latest developments in Libya, thousands of miles away. The arrests made in their cities, of people selling drugs to their residents, did not seem to have the same news value. For papers like the Los Angeles Times, The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, The Dallas Morning News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Detroit Free Press, or the Newark Star-Ledger, news of the arrests did not make their front pages, even though these cities were part of the operation.
The New York Times ran a small teaser on the front page (their main story is here, as did the Houston Chronicle, where the raid resulted in a shootout and a local cop was wounded. Only a handful of papers, like the San Antonio Express-News,The San Diego Union-Tribune, El Paso Times, and in cities along the Rio Grande Valley gave the story some space on their front pages.
Watching from across the border, this was shocking. Raids against drug cartels and coverage of criminal activities surrounding the drug trade frequently jump to the front pages of Mexican newspapers. We experience the war on drugs every day through the violence employed by the cartels trying to control territories across the country. It has left almost 40,000 people dead in its wake.
But in Mexico, whenever raids or arrests don’t make the front page, the reason is frequently not lack of interest, but an abundance of caution. In the past four years, drug cartels have killed more than ten journalists, kidnapped dozens more, and carried out scores of attacks against newspaper offices or TV stations with gunfire and grenades. The objective: burying coverage of their activities.
I know this because I am a newspaper editor in Mexico, and in the past few years I have learned to take into account more than the news value of a crime story. But as far as I know, no threat exists against the US media—and so, the fact that such a significant raid against local drug gangs didn’t make the front pages of the local newspapers looked kind of strange...
On February 24, that’s exactly what happened as raids targeted drug gangs in cities all over the United States. In two days, 676 people were arrested and authorities confiscated $12 million, 282 weapons, ninety-four vehicles, and large packages of drugs.
It was one of the largest operations against drug cartels operating in the United States in recent years. These gangs were allegedly part of the vast structure that moves millions of dollars worth of drugs out of Mexico and into American neighborhoods in hundreds of cities. But did anyone notice?
As the arrests and seizures were reported by the DEA, FBI, and local law enforcement agencies, the front pages in the cities where the operation unfolded were concerned mostly with the latest developments in Libya, thousands of miles away. The arrests made in their cities, of people selling drugs to their residents, did not seem to have the same news value. For papers like the Los Angeles Times, The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, The Dallas Morning News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Detroit Free Press, or the Newark Star-Ledger, news of the arrests did not make their front pages, even though these cities were part of the operation.
The New York Times ran a small teaser on the front page (their main story is here, as did the Houston Chronicle, where the raid resulted in a shootout and a local cop was wounded. Only a handful of papers, like the San Antonio Express-News,The San Diego Union-Tribune, El Paso Times, and in cities along the Rio Grande Valley gave the story some space on their front pages.
Watching from across the border, this was shocking. Raids against drug cartels and coverage of criminal activities surrounding the drug trade frequently jump to the front pages of Mexican newspapers. We experience the war on drugs every day through the violence employed by the cartels trying to control territories across the country. It has left almost 40,000 people dead in its wake.
But in Mexico, whenever raids or arrests don’t make the front page, the reason is frequently not lack of interest, but an abundance of caution. In the past four years, drug cartels have killed more than ten journalists, kidnapped dozens more, and carried out scores of attacks against newspaper offices or TV stations with gunfire and grenades. The objective: burying coverage of their activities.
I know this because I am a newspaper editor in Mexico, and in the past few years I have learned to take into account more than the news value of a crime story. But as far as I know, no threat exists against the US media—and so, the fact that such a significant raid against local drug gangs didn’t make the front pages of the local newspapers looked kind of strange...
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Javier Garza Ramos @'CJR'
F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.
The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.
The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing...
The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.
The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing...
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ioerror Jacob Appelbaum
It appears that the old COINTELPRO tactics are happening in America to people who associate with me. In the dead of night. Free country, eh?
It appears that the old COINTELPRO tactics are happening in America to people who associate with me. In the dead of night. Free country, eh?
'Gay Girl In Damascus' Turns Out To Be An American Man
On June 6, it all came to a screeching halt when Amina's cousin declared on the blog that Amina had met the fate of many bloggers in authoritarian regimes: Assad's police had taken her into custody. Whether she was alive or dead, no one knew.
As soon as "Free Amina" groups popped up on Facebook and the State Department began looking for her, the story began to seem a lot like fiction. No one had ever talked to Amina. The Guardian published a profile of her June 7 that included a picture they soon found out wasn't Amina but of a Londoner called Jelena Lecic. The biographical details in her blog posts did not check out. Amina Arraf couldn't be found in any public records in Georgia or Virginia and the names of her father and mother also turned up nothing.
Today, the Gay Girl In Damascus blog ended the mystery, posting an apology that revealed Amina was in fact the work of Tom MacMaster, an American from Georgia whose university records show is in a medieval studies graduate program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
On the blog, he wrote:
I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.The revelation came hours after NPR approached Britta Froelicher, his wife, with some evidence that connected her with Gay Girl In Damascus. Other news organizations appeared to be zeroing in on the couple, too. Over the past week, we've been talking to people who kept in contact with "Amina." Some of them had been in contact with this online persona for as long as five years.
We obtained hundreds of e-mails from a Yahoo! group called thecrescentland that was administered by the online persona. The group has since been removed. One of the people on that list, however, provided us with a mailing address the online persona had given them. The website The Electronic Infatada connected the address with the owner Tom MacMaster.
Sandra Bagaria provided us pictures that Amina had sent her during their six-month friendship in which they exchanged some 500 emails. We found that nine of them matched pictures uploaded by Froelicher in 2008 to a public album that has since been made private.
We matched up the pictures of a trip to Syria visually, then compared the data embedded in the pictures and found all of them contained the same time stamp and all of the pictures contained the same focal length, aperture and exposure time.
The only difference we found in the photo data was that the pictures posted to Picasa were edited using the photo editing program iPhoto, whereas the pictures sent to our source were the originals from the digital camera.
Many the details in the emails also corresponded with MacMaster's life. In his emails to the Yahoo! group for example, Amina shared detailed observations of Edinburgh and a great deal of knowledge of the Atlanta area. In other emails Amina wrote about getting a post graduate degree at the University of Edinburgh.
Another clue came from Paula Brooks, the executive editor of a lesbian news site called LezGetReal. Amina began blogging on her site before she started her own blog. Brooks told us she confronted Amina at first, because the IP address that came up when she accessed the LezGetReal site traced back to Edinburgh, not Syria, where Amina said she was.
Amina told her through email that she used a proxy. Brooks accepted that explanation until this story started breaking. Late last week, she checked her server logs and found that the IP address was from Edinburgh all 135 times Amina logged in. That is highly unusual if one uses a proxy.
Froelicher told us by email that the she and her husband were on vacation. She pointed us to the statement on the blog, which they published a few minutes after emailing NPR.
"We are on vacation in Turkey," she wrote, "and just really want to have a nice time and not deal with all this craziness at the moment."
In interviews with Washington Post, before the announcement was put on the blog, MacMaster denied any involvement with the blog:
"Look, if I was the genius who had pulled this off, I would say, 'Yeah,' and write a book," said MacMaster, reached in Istanbul, where he is vacationing with his wife, a graduate student working on a PhD in international relations.On the blog, MacMaster said he created Amina to illuminate the story of the Middle East for a western audience. In a lot of ways, the accessibility of the blog was likely the reason it got so much attention. Since February, it has been filled with posts that are dramatic and compelling and full of action. Amina had love interests and a father with failing health. She was a gay woman living in a country where being gay is illegal. She was a girl with close ties to the Assad regime but with heartfelt sympathy for the aspirations of an oppressed people. She spoke against Assad and his iron fist with literary flair and with an unflinching and courageous tongue.
"I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in this year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience," wrote MacMaster on the blog.
"This experience," he continues, "has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism."
Eyder Peralta and Andy Carvin @'npr'
Gil Scott-Heron Tribute Mix by Gilles Peterson
01. Gil Scott Heron — Offering (Midnight Band - The First Minute Of A New Day, 1974) Flying Dutchman
02. Gil Scott-Heron — Essex (From South Africa To South Carolina, 1975) Arista
03. Gil Scott-Heron — Fell Together (From South Africa To South Carolina, 1975) Arista
04. Gil Scott Heron & Brian Jackson — The Bottle (Winter In America, 1974) TVT
05. Gil Scott Heron & Jamie XX — I'll Take Care Of You (We’re New Here, 2011) XL
06. Gil Scott-Heron — Alien (1980, 1980) Arista
07. Gil Scott-Heron — Whitey On The Moon (Small Talk At 125th And Lenox, 1970) Flying Dutchman
08. Gil Scott-Heron — Did You Hear What they Said (Free Will, 1972) Flying Dutchman
09. Gil Scott Heron & Brian Jackson — We Almost Lost Detroit (Bridges, 1977) Arista
10. Gil Scott-Heron — Angel Dust (Secrets, 1978) Arista
11. Gil Scott-Heron — No Knock (Free Will, 1972) Flying Dutchman
12. Gil Scott-Heron — The Revolution WIll Not Be Televised (The Revolution WIll Not Be Televised, 1974) Flying Dutchman
13. Gil Scott Heron & Brian Jackson — It's Your World (It’s Your World, 1976) Arista
14. Gil Scott-Heron — Fast Lane (Moving Target, 1982) Arista
15. Gil Scott-Heron — B Movie (Reflections, 1981) Arista
16. Gil Scott-Heron — Lady Day & John Coltrane (Pieces Of A Man, 1971) Flying Dutchman
17. Gil Scott Heron & Brian Jackson — It's Your World (It’s Your World, 1976) Arista
18. Gil Scott-Heron Gil Scott-Heron — Fast Lane (Moving Target, 1982) Arista
19. Gil Scott-Heron — Lady Day & John Coltrane (Pieces Of A Man, 1971) Flying Man
20. Gil Scott-Heron — Everyday (Small Talk At 125th And Lenox, 1970) Flying Dutchman
21. Gil Scott-Heron — Grandma's Hands (Reflections, 1981) Arista
22. Gil Scott-Heron — Winter In America (Winter In America, 1974) TVT
23. Gil Scott-Heron — Spirits (Spirits, 1994) TVT
24. Gil Scott-Heron — Is That Jazz (I’m New Here, 2010) XL
25. Gil Scott-Heron — Rivers Of My Fathers (Winter In America, 1974) TVT
26. Gil Scott Heron & Brian Jackson — Home Is Where The Hatred Is (I’m New Here, 2010) XL
27. Gil Scott-Heron — Johannesburg (1975) Arista
28. Gil Scott-Heron — Peace With You Brother (Winter In America,1974) TVT
(Thanx Stan!)
Apology to readers
I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone -- I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.
I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.
This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.
However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.Best,
Tom MacMaster,
Istanbul, Turkey
July 12, 2011
@'A Gay Girl In Damascus'
From Damascus with Love: Blogging in a Totalitarian State
Sunday, 12 June 2011
♪♫ Mark Stewart and The Maffia - Liberty City (Live @ Link Bologna)
With the world's greatest live mixer Adrian Sherwood at the controls!
Bonus:
Tack>>Head Live after the jumpInside the murky world of Pete Doherty
Pete Doherty with his friend and fellow addict Pete Wolfe. Photograph: Andrew Kendall (www.andrewkendall.com)
In 2008, Jake Fior received a phone call from a woman he didn't know. "Her voice was a sort of husky velvet," says Fior. "She said her name was Robin Whitehead and she wanted to speak to me as she was making a film about Pete Doherty. I said, 'Oh dear, that's bad luck.' She laughed, and it started from there."
Fior hadn't been joking. The musician and bookseller, now 47, had known the Libertines' singer since 2001. Fior had rewritten and produced Doherty's first top 10 hit, "For Lovers", but by 2005 he'd "had enough of all this chaos in my life", as Doherty's drug-fuelled lifestyle took its toll on everybody around him. Fior returned in 2008, to try to record a solo album with Doherty, before walking away for good.
Whitehead never got that chance. On Sunday 24 January 2010, she died from a suspected drug overdose in the Hackney flat where she had been filming Doherty and his friend, another musician, Pete Wolfe, whom Fior had previously managed. Last month, Doherty was sentenced to six months in prison for possession of class A drugs, and Wolfe 12 months, for possession and supply of class A drugs, a conviction secured by damning evidence filmed by Whitehead on the weekend of her death. It is Doherty's third prison sentence since 2003, and follows multiple fines, court appearances, spells in rehab and broken promises to clean up his act. "The media are calling this a tragedy," says Fior, speaking before the pair received their sentence. "But for a brilliant, beautiful, vibrant 27-year-old girl to have gone into that flat and not come out, it is not a tragedy, it's an obscenity."
Whitehead and Fior had a relationship for nearly a year, but at the time of her death they were just friends. "She was as bright as a button and hilariously funny," he says. "She was really unusual – very, very talented. I couldn't quite work out how Doherty had managed to get her involved [in the film], she seemed too sophisticated… but I think she was first approached when Doherty was still with Kate Moss and she hadn't envisaged that he'd make the film so difficult for her to complete."
The Friday before her death, Fior had dropped Whitehead outside the flat in east London. "I rang her up the next day," he says. "They had reduced her to tears over this film. I was going to go over there, but it would have resulted in a serious confrontation, and Robin didn't want that. But of course, I should have gone all the same."
Film-maker Robin Whitehead. Photograph: Family Handout/PA
Whitehead was the daughter of film-maker Peter Whitehead and his former wife Dido Goldsmith, a cousin of Jemima Khan and Zac Goldsmith. "Had they known that she was related to the Goldsmiths, I think it would have made a big difference with them," says Fior. "Despite his public persona, Pete [Doherty] isn't immune to being impressed by that sort of thing. They are just bullies really, and like most bullies they are cowardly enough to know who they can and can't pick on."Fior should know. His first contact with Peter Wolfe came in 2001. "Everybody said I shouldn't go near Wolfe, but Carole – my girlfriend at the time – was living in the same flat, so avoiding him proved difficult. She asked if I could help Wolfe with his music career."
Wolfe, a "failed plumber from Maidstone", was born Peter Randall. He had already made several unsuccessful attempts to become a singer but Fior was sufficiently impressed by Wolfe's writing skills to offer to help. "Even then it was clear that he was a drug addict and quite dishevelled," says Fior. "I told him that if he got himself sorted out I'd try and do something. At the time I thought it was a win-win because he'd never sort himself out and I'd look good for offering. Unfortunately, he went to America and got off drugs for a bit. I wish he hadn't bothered."
Fior put together a band, eventually renamed Wolfman and the Side-Effects. A buzz began to build, partly thanks to their biggest fan. "Even at the height [of our fame], we didn't have much of a fanbase," says Fior. "We had hit records, but only about 100 people at our gigs – but the number one fan was Pete Doherty. I knew Doherty well, I had employed him to hand out wine at private views when I was running a gallery – he did a good job. He is capable of being quite charming."
At the time, Doherty was a singer with indie group the Libertines, the band he had formed with Carl Barât in 1997. Doherty was also hooked on heroin and crack, and partly because of this shared addiction, Doherty and Wolfe were virtually inseparable. Doherty regularly used lines written by Wolfe in his songs and borrowed aspects of his personality. "With his kitchen-sink romanticism, Doherty assumes the existential position of the outsider," say Fior. "But in reality he is an extrovert. Wolfe is the outsider, and for good reason." Wolfe was also getting back into drugs. "We played a show at the Sundance film festival in the US. Afterwards, the bass player told me Wolfe had smuggled some heroin over, up his bum. From then, it just became a case of trying to manage his dependency and make a joke out of it. I approached Special Brew for sponsorship but they declined. Maybe they were worried about the image of their beer?"...
Continue reading
Peter Watts @'The Guardian'
JPBarlow John Perry Barlow
Britain's military budget is 7.7% of America's. They don't care about security, I guess...
Britain's military budget is 7.7% of America's. They don't care about security, I guess...
Jacque Fresco - Future By Design (2006)
Future by Design shares the life and far-reaching vision of Jacque Fresco, considered by many to be a modern day Da Vinci. Peer to Einstein and Buckminster Fuller, Jacque is a self-taught futurist who describes himself most often as a "generalist" or multi-disciplinarian -- a student of many inter-related fields. He is a prolific inventor, having spent his entire life (he is now 90 years old) conceiving of and devising inventions on various scales which entail the use of innovative technology. As a futurist, Jacque is not only a conceptualist and a theoretician, but he is also an engineer and a designer.
A film by William Gazecki
A film by William Gazecki
U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors
...and then Americans can hopefully use the technique to bypass their govt's attempt at censoring their internet!
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