Tuesday 1 March 2011
HA! (Thanx Paul!)
A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting
at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it.
The CEO takes 11 cookies, turns to the tea partier and says,
'Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.'
at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it.
The CEO takes 11 cookies, turns to the tea partier and says,
'Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.'
W.A.R. Women Art Revolution with Lynn Hershman Leeson (2011-02-12)
Interview and discussion with artist and filmmaker, Lynn Hershman Leeson & Film producer Alexandra Chowaniec about feminist art practice and the film "Women Art Revolution." On the Mic: Diana McCarty & Barbara Muerdter.
"Through intimate interviews, art, and rarely seen archival film and video footage, !Women Art Revolution reveals how the Feminist Art Movement fused free speech and politics into an art that radically transformed the art and culture of our times."
Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. in 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American artist and filmmaker. She was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She is Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Hershman studied at the University of California Berkeley in the late 60's.
Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds.
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http://www.womenartrevolution.com
http://lynnhershman.com/livingblog/
http://www.lynnhershman.com/
Left Behind? American Youth and the Global Fight for Democracy
One has no choice but to do all in one's power to change that fate and at no matter what risk - eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. For the sake of one's children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion. - James Baldwin(1)
The people have awakened. If change had happened through elites, there wouldn't have been real change. Now people understand their rights and know how to demand them. They realized their own power. -Ahmed Mahir, leader of the Egyptian Youth April 6th Movement
Within the last few months, we have seen an outpouring of student protests from all over the globe. Fifty thousand students took to the streets in London to protest tuition hikes, while "thousands of young people in Puerto Rico and Ireland are marching against cuts to student funding and fee increases."(2) Students in France and Greece are demonstrating with their bodies, confronting the police and registering their outrage over the imposition of severe austerity measures. In Spain and Italy, youth are challenging unemployment rates that have soared to 40 and 30 percent respectively. In Tunisia and Egypt, students have been at the forefront of uprisings that eventually led to the overthrow of authoritarian societies, which for too long forced young people to linger in a liminal space in which there were no jobs, no hope for the future and far too few freedoms. This general sense of frustration among young people is widespread in Europe and the Middle East. For instance, students marching in Rome "shouted, 'We don't want to pay for the crisis,' referring to the financial crisis that has turned ... labor market[s] from bad to worse. 'Where do I see my future? Certainly not in this country,' said protester, Morgana Proietti, expressing a common sentiment."(3)
Counterpublic spheres and modes of resistance that we once did not think young people could mount have erupted in a rush of emotional and political expressions and scattered demonstrations. Mass demonstrations have been organized through the emergent screen cultures of a generation well versed in new technologically assisted forms of social networking and political exchange. Governments complicit with a lethal combination of massive inequality, joblessness and ongoing cutbacks in social services are now the object of righteous youthful aggression in which buildings are occupied, pitched battles are waged in the streets and banners are dropped from national symbols like the Leaning Tower of Pisa and once impregnable governmental institutions. Shared sufferings, pent up repressions, ideological longings and emotional attachments have flared up in a massive collective demand by young people to be part of a future in which justice, democratic values and politics once again matter. Forging collective spaces of resistance, young people are expressing their long simmering anger and indignation against harsh injustices, growing inequalities and insufferable injuries in both totalitarian and allegedly democratic countries. The fear of political transgression that kept individual actors in check has given way to a politics in which dissent is amplified, multiplied and seized upon with vigor and moral courage that has seldom found such thunderous expression among young people since the late 1970s. Democracy is no longer being defended. It is being reinvented as a kind of shared existence that makes the political possible.(4)
Moral outrage infused by a complex of affective connections, social despair and a deeply held sense of shared possibilities has created a spontaneous tsunami of collective protests, strikes, rallies and demonstrations that have toppled governments, prompted shameless retaliatory outbursts of state terrorism and further fueled the possibilities for a global sense of resistance among repressed youth everywhere...
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Henry A. Giroux @'Truth-out'
Fear and Loathing in Coal Seam Gas Debate
Simmering tensions between landholders, mining companies and the State Government have reignited after ABC Television’s Four Corners program showed shocking images of coal seam gas (CSG) mining.
The heat of the CSG debate has barely cooled within the pages of this newspaper in the past three years, but the intense rage gripping southern Queensland landholders has now reached fever pitch, escalating within 24 hours of the current affairs program going to air on Monday.
Among the harrowing scenes striking fear into rural and regional landholders across the state were:
The heat of the CSG debate has barely cooled within the pages of this newspaper in the past three years, but the intense rage gripping southern Queensland landholders has now reached fever pitch, escalating within 24 hours of the current affairs program going to air on Monday.
Among the harrowing scenes striking fear into rural and regional landholders across the state were:
Faulty gas wells polluting bores and pumping potentially lethal toxins into underground aquifers.
Worrying assessments by environmental scientists that damage to the Great Artesian Basin will not be repaired for another 1000 years.
Heavy-handed tactics by mining companies to access private land.
The inability of Mines Minister Stephen Robertson to answer direct questions. So far, developments dominating the fallout include:
Landholders aligned to the Coal4 Breakfast group are mobilising in their hundreds to protest at a Community Cabinet meeting in Toowoomba on March 13 in what could be the district’s biggest rally yet against CSG mining.
Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA) chief executive Belinda Robinson goes on the attack, calling anti-CSG campaigners a “noisy and misleading minority” and claiming Australia’s CSG industry is the most carefully scrutinised and heavily regulated in the country.
AgForce president Brent Finlay slams Premier Anna Bligh for her recent Cabinet reshuffle that has seen government responsibility for the issue withdrawn from the seasoned Stephen Robertson and transferred to two new ministers who must now be briefed on the run.
Australian Lot Feeders Association president Jim Cudmore reveals that feedlots have experienced significant reductions in groundwater levels since the CSG industry began operating in their areas, while others have bores leaking gas due to CSG development despite Queensland Government guarantees that such bores would be fixed.
Basin Sustainability Alliance chairman Ian Hayllor fears a raft of environmental impact statements provided to the State Government may have been shelved, saying their repeated warnings verified by independent analysis have not been paid due attention by the government or the mining companies at the centre of the storm.
The overwhelming condemnation of CSG mining operations and the State Government’s role in drafting legislation that has allowed a handful of energy companies to ride roughshod over prime agricultural land is now in the mainstream public spotlight.
It has also left the Government scrambling to defend its environmental and economic credentials – both taking a hammering – as it walks a tightrope to appease anxious landholders, agitated miners and a fragile alliance with shadowy green groups.
But there’s also trouble looming for the Opposition, with veteran hard-man Jeff Seeney reaffirming his position that CSG and liquid natural gas mining can coexist with farming, isolating him further colleagues and the LNP’s rural con-stituency that Labor will be key to exploit in the state election countdown...
Worrying assessments by environmental scientists that damage to the Great Artesian Basin will not be repaired for another 1000 years.
Heavy-handed tactics by mining companies to access private land.
The inability of Mines Minister Stephen Robertson to answer direct questions. So far, developments dominating the fallout include:
Landholders aligned to the Coal4 Breakfast group are mobilising in their hundreds to protest at a Community Cabinet meeting in Toowoomba on March 13 in what could be the district’s biggest rally yet against CSG mining.
Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA) chief executive Belinda Robinson goes on the attack, calling anti-CSG campaigners a “noisy and misleading minority” and claiming Australia’s CSG industry is the most carefully scrutinised and heavily regulated in the country.
AgForce president Brent Finlay slams Premier Anna Bligh for her recent Cabinet reshuffle that has seen government responsibility for the issue withdrawn from the seasoned Stephen Robertson and transferred to two new ministers who must now be briefed on the run.
Australian Lot Feeders Association president Jim Cudmore reveals that feedlots have experienced significant reductions in groundwater levels since the CSG industry began operating in their areas, while others have bores leaking gas due to CSG development despite Queensland Government guarantees that such bores would be fixed.
Basin Sustainability Alliance chairman Ian Hayllor fears a raft of environmental impact statements provided to the State Government may have been shelved, saying their repeated warnings verified by independent analysis have not been paid due attention by the government or the mining companies at the centre of the storm.
The overwhelming condemnation of CSG mining operations and the State Government’s role in drafting legislation that has allowed a handful of energy companies to ride roughshod over prime agricultural land is now in the mainstream public spotlight.
It has also left the Government scrambling to defend its environmental and economic credentials – both taking a hammering – as it walks a tightrope to appease anxious landholders, agitated miners and a fragile alliance with shadowy green groups.
But there’s also trouble looming for the Opposition, with veteran hard-man Jeff Seeney reaffirming his position that CSG and liquid natural gas mining can coexist with farming, isolating him further colleagues and the LNP’s rural con-stituency that Labor will be key to exploit in the state election countdown...
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Debbi Orr @'Western Downs Alliance'
One Shot Not : Lloyd Cole
No Blue Skies
Writers Retreat
Like A Broken Record
Lloyd Cole celebrated his 50th birthday on January 31, 2011
iankatz1000 Guardian and NYT ombudsmen reach opposite conclusions on ethics of publishing Raymond Davis's CIA link http://j.mp/gjcgLG http://j.mp/gDNCyA
Monday 28 February 2011
Israel Bombs Gaza Again
Israeli artillery Monday bombarded the Gaza International Airport in Rafah, south of Gaza, according to witnesses.
Ambulances headed to the scene after reports of injuries, they said.
Israeli armored vehicles also carried out incursions Monday east of Rafah. The vehicles bombed a Palestinian house and destroyed parts of it. There are no immediate reports of injuries.
Israeli forces bombed al-Zaytoun neighborhood in eastern Gaza Sunday night, killing one Palestinian and injuring several others.
The Israeli army had killed one Palestinian Wednesday and injured 10 others
Israeli aircrafts also launched strikes east of Jabalya, north of Gaza, and agricultural land east of Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, with no injuries reported.
Israeli bombing of Gaza came as retaliation after a missile struck the southern Israeli city of Beersheba for the first time in two years, which came in response to several violent incidents in Gaza including an Israeli killing of an Islamic Jihad fighter in northern Gaza earlier last week.
Beersheba is the largest city in the Naqab desert of southern Israel, often referred to as the ‘capital of the Naqab,’ and is the seventh largest city in Israel with a population of 194,800.
@'PNIA'
Ambulances headed to the scene after reports of injuries, they said.
Israeli armored vehicles also carried out incursions Monday east of Rafah. The vehicles bombed a Palestinian house and destroyed parts of it. There are no immediate reports of injuries.
Israeli forces bombed al-Zaytoun neighborhood in eastern Gaza Sunday night, killing one Palestinian and injuring several others.
The Israeli army had killed one Palestinian Wednesday and injured 10 others
Israeli aircrafts also launched strikes east of Jabalya, north of Gaza, and agricultural land east of Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, with no injuries reported.
Israeli bombing of Gaza came as retaliation after a missile struck the southern Israeli city of Beersheba for the first time in two years, which came in response to several violent incidents in Gaza including an Israeli killing of an Islamic Jihad fighter in northern Gaza earlier last week.
Beersheba is the largest city in the Naqab desert of southern Israel, often referred to as the ‘capital of the Naqab,’ and is the seventh largest city in Israel with a population of 194,800.
@'PNIA'
HSBC profits double to almost £12bn
HSBC revealed that its highest paid banker took home more than £8.4m last year as it reported that profits more than doubled to $19bn (£11.8bn) in 2010.
The UK's largest bank said 280 of its most senior employees had shared in bonuses of $374m. Some 186 of these were in the UK and their share of the bonuses was $172m. This means key bankers in the UK get paid an average of $920,000 verses $1.3m group-wide, although this is partly because the UK numbers include lower-paid staff involved in monitoring the bank's risks.
Stuart Gulliver, who took over as chief executive at the start of the year, is to take his £5.2m bonus in shares. His total pay was £6.1m, down on the £10m he received a year ago when he was the highest paid employee of the bank.
While the chief executive's office is Hong Kong, Gulliver joked that he lives on Cathay Pacific and British Airways, spending a third of his time in the UK, a third in Hong Kong and a third in the air.
For 2010, the highest paid banker – who is not named – received between £8.4m and £8.5m; one took £6.8m and three received between £6.3m and £6.4m.
HSBC provides more information about pay than other financial institutions because it is listed in Hong Kong, which demands disclosure of the five highest paid staff. In banking, the biggest earners are often outside the boardroom.
Under Project Merlin, the deal between major banks and the UK government, the disclosure is different and only requires the pay of the five highest paid executives outside the boardroom – rather than all bankers and traders – to be disclosed. Under this measure the highest paid executive received £4.2m.
The information about the bonus pool for senior staff is being provided to comply with a new Financial Services Authority rule which requires so-called "code staff" – those deemed to be high paid and taking big risks – to have their pay published in aggregate.
Gulliver replaced Michael Geoghegan as chief executive after a very public boardroom reshuffle. For 2010 Geoghegan received £5.8m after his £2m salary and benefits were topped by a £3.8m bonus. He is also to receive £1m for 2011 and a pension contribution of £401,250 under the terms of his contract. While he stepped down at the end of December, he will receive £200,000 in consultancy fees to 1 April which he will donate to charity.
The bank cut its long-term return on equity target to 12-15% from a previous 15-19% target, blaming the costs caused by regulations which demand banks hold more capital and extra liquid instruments that can be sold quickly in a crisis. The shares fell 4% to 682p as the market digested numbers which, Gulliver admitted, showed income was flat, costs were up and that profits have been bolstered by the $12.4bn fall in impairments to $14bn – the lowest level since 2006.
"We've targeted 12 to 15% through the cycle for return on equity, principally taking into consideration what we view as a somewhat unstable and uneven economic recovery over the coming years as well as much higher capital requirements," said new finance director Iain Mackay.
Commenting on the profits, which were below the $20bn estimated by analysts, Gulliver said: "Underlying financial performance continued to improve in 2010 and shareholders continued to benefit from HSBC's universal banking model. All regions and customer groups were profitable, as personal financial services and North America returned to profit. Commercial banking made an increased contribution to underlying earnings and global banking and markets also remained strongly profitable, albeit behind 2009's record performance, reflecting a well-balanced and diversified business."
HSBC's new chairman Douglas Flint – who was the finance director until he replaced Stephen Green in December – said the group will "not forget" the financial crisis and support from governments around the world, adding the group entered 2011 "with humility". Green's departure to join the government as trade minister caused the bank to reorganise its top team last year.
But Flint hit out against George Osborne's permanent levy on bank balance sheets, saying that if the chancellor removed the levy – which will cost HSBC around $600m – the bank would increase its payouts to shareholders. The final dividend was announced at 12 cents, up from 10 cents at the same point last year.
Flint was also concerned about the new rules that force banks to hold more liquid instruments such as government bonds. "It will be a near impossibility for the industry to expand business lending at the same time as increasing the amount of deposits deployed in government bonds while, for many banks but not HSBC, reducing dependency on central bank liquidity support arrangements," Flint said. It is to be hoped that the observation period, which starts this year and precedes the formal introduction of the new requirements, will inform a recalibration of these minimum liquidity standards.
For 2009 the bank reported a 24% fall in pretax profit to $7bn (£4.63bn), which included a total bill for salaries and bonuses of $18.5bn, down 11%.
Jill Treanor @'The Guardian'
Thousands of Screws Make a 3D Portrait
Meet Andrew Myers, one of the most patient modern-day sculptors around. This Laguna Beach, California-based artist goes through a multi-step process to create incredible works of art you almost have to see (or touch) to believe. He starts with a base, plywood panel, and then places pages of a phone book on top. (Cool fact: He'll use pages from his subjects' local area.) He then draws out a face and pre-drills 8,000 to 10,000 holes, by hand. As he drills in the screws, Myers doesn't rely on any computer software to guide him, he figures it out as he goes along. "For me, I consider this a traditional sculpture and all my screws are at different depths," he says.One of the most challenging parts is getting rid of the flat drawing underneath because he then has to paint over each of the screw heads, individually, so that in the end, the sculpture looks like an actual portrait.
'Whoonga' threat to South African HIV patients
Smokers use it to lace joints, believing the anti-retroviral Stocrin increases the hallucinogenic effects of marijuana - though there is no scientific proof of this.
The threat to HIV patients in this poor community of KwaZulu-Natal province is very real.
"On the one hand, we are battling to stay alive," says 49-year-old Phumzile Sibiya, who has been taking ARV drugs for six months. "Now we have to worry about thugs who will want to rob us for a chance to live because that's what they are stealing from us when they take our pills."
Ms Sibiya and other HIV patients now visit the clinic in a group to ensure their safety.
"I just don't feel safe at all when I come to collect my pills. You never know where they could be waiting for you. This is very painful," she says as she shuffles along a long queue at Ithembalabantu Clinic, south of Durban...
From fear to fury: how the Arab world found its voice
Tunisian rap singer Hamada Ben Amor, or El Général, performs at an opposition rally in Tunis. Photograph: Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images
It was early morning on Friday 11 February and the streets of central Cairo were throbbing with adrenaline and fear. Long-haired American professor Mark LeVine and Shung, founder of the Egyptian extreme metal band Beyond East, were caught in the flow of a million Egyptians who seethed towards Tahrir Square, past tanks, burnt-out buildings and soldiers with taut faces, through the rubble and detritus of two weeks of revolution.Mubarak's surprise announcement that he was holding on to his rotten throne had sent a collective groan of frustration through the nation. The crowd feared that the time had come for desperate measures. Marvelling at the mood of coiled rage all around, LeVine and Shung looked at each other, wavelengths firmly locked, and said: "This is really metal!"
Before the revolution, Egypt's metal heads lived in fear of arrest. Bullet belts, Iron Maiden T-shirts, horn gestures and headbanging were closet pastimes for foolhardy freaks. Bands such as Bliss, Wyvern, Hate Suffocation, Scarab, Brutus and Massive Scar Era rocked their fans like the priests of a persecuted sect who lived in constant wariness of the ghastly Mukhabarat, Mubarak's secret police.
Since 1997, when newspapers had "exposed" the metal scene as a sordid sewer of satanism and western decadence, metal was never a faith for the faint-hearted. "Here in Egypt, everything is satanic if it's unknown," muses Slacker, drummer with Beyond East and veteran of Egypt's metal wars.
"The consequences of speaking out could be pretty dire," explains LeVine, author of the recently published Heavy Metal Islam, a startling look at metal heads, hip-hop kids and other musical marginals throughout the Arab world. "And for what? What would it get you?" Jail? Sodomy? The lash? Any musician contemplating open revolt against one of the Arab world, old-school, authoritarian dictators faced some stark choices. Zip up or die, in career terms at least.
"We were like in a cocoon," explains Skander Besbes, aka Skndr, a luminary of Tunisia's electro and dance scene, "Closed in on ourselves, ignoring the regime and the authorities. You're angry, but you move on, because you don't know what to do. I decided to compromise because I wanted to be involved in the music scene in Tunisia."
Skndr organised parties and raves with his friends under the moniker Hextradecimal at a bar/restaurant called Boeuf sur le Toit in the town of Soukra. It was a mecca for Tunisia's rave scene, regularly hosting dubstep, electro and rave nights. There, Tunisian party people rubbed shoulders with musicians, artists and hacktivists, such as the newly anointed king of the Tunisian protest bloggers, Slim Amamou, aka Slim404, who has been made minister of youth and sport in the post-revolutionary government. Mutual rants about the regime were firewalled from government eavesdroppers by the venue's pumping sound system. "They were rare occasions when people could meet without feeling oppressed by the police or without the usual social barriers," Skndr says.
However, electro music was a relatively safe option because it was instrumental. Metal and rock were partially protected by English lyrics which the police didn't understand. But if you sang in Arabic, you either cloistered yourself away in anodyne "high art" music or embraced the banal glitz of the local pop production line, prostituting yourself to conglomerates such as Rotana, the huge, Gulf-owned media and entertainment concern that more or less controls the music industry in the Middle East.
Alternatively, you could choose to cup your hands around a flickering flame of integrity and fight a lonely battle out in the cold. Some popular Tunisian singers such as Ba'adia Bouhrizi had the guts to speak out. She denounced the brutal suppression of Tunisia's first anti-corruption protests in the town of Redeyef in 2008, before eventually fleeing Tunisia for the UK, where she was spotted singing alone in front of the Tunisian consulate during the recent revolution. Others, such as Emel Mathlouthi and Bendir Man, also deserve honourable mentions.
But it took a rapper to galvanise Tunisia's youth, whose frustration had been fuelled by years of government corruption, nepotism, ineptitude and general state-imposed joylessness. Until a few months ago, Hamada Ben Amor, aka El Général, was just a 21-year-old wannabe MC in a Stussy hoodie, leather jacket and baseball cap. He lived with his parents and elder brother in a modest flat in a drab seaside town south of Tunis called Sfax, where his mother runs a bookshop and his father works in the local hospital. El Général didn't even register on the radar of Tunisian rap's premier league which was dominated by artists such as Balti, Lak3y, Armada Bizera or Psyco M. It was a community riven by the usual jealous spats and dwarfed by the more prolific rap scenes of Morocco and France.
El Général had been quietly honing his very own brand of politically combustible rhyming since 2008 with tracks such as "Malesh" (Why?) or "Sidi Rais" (Mr President). Maybe it was the influence of the books his mother brought home from the shop. Maybe it was his beloved Tupac Shakur. Whatever the reason, El Général was game for confronting le pouvoir, aka the corrupt regime of dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. "Before the revolution, it was forbidden to do gigs," he tells me over the phone from Sfax. "We just played our music over the internet, on Facebook, because there was no other way. The media never talked to me and I didn't have a label."
On 7 November, El Général uploaded a piece of raw fury called "Rais Le Bled" (President, Your Country) on to Facebook. "My president, your country is dead/ People eat garbage/ Look at what is happening/ Misery everywhere/ Nowhere to sleep/ I'm speaking for the people who suffer/ Ground under feet." Within hours, the song had lit up the bleak and fearful horizon like an incendiary bomb. Before being banned, it was picked up by local TV station Tunivision and al-Jazeera. El Général's MySpace was closed down, his mobile cut off. But it was too late. The shock waves were felt across the country and then throughout the Arab world. That was the power of protesting in Arabic, albeit a locally spiced dialect of Arabic. El Général's bold invective broke frontiers and went viral from Casablanca to Cairo and beyond.
A few weeks later, El Général recorded another stick of political dynamite called "Tounes Bladna" (Tunisia Our Country), just as the revolution was gathering momentum. The authorities had had enough. On 6 January, at 5am, 30 cops and state security goons turned up at El Général's family flat in Sfax to arrest him, "on the orders of President Ben Ali himself". When his brother asked why, they answered: "He knows." He was taken to the dreaded interior ministry building in Tunis, where he was handcuffed to a chair and interrogated for three days. "They kept asking me which political party I worked for," he remembers. "'Don't you know it's forbidden to sing songs like that?' they said. But I just answered, 'Why? I'm only telling the truth.' I was in there for three days, but it felt like three years."
Eventually, thanks to a storm of public protest, El Général was released and returned to Sfax in triumph. Even the cops were now treating him as a celebrity. "People were proud of me," he says cheerfully. "I took a risk, with life, with my family. But I was never scared, because I was talking about reality."
El Général's rap broke the spell of fear and showed his peers that it was possible to rebel and survive. Rap's power is its simplicity. "People can just record songs in their living room," says the Narcicyst, an Iraqi-born rapper living in Toronto, who got together with other MCs from the Arabic rap diaspora, such as Omar Offendum, and released a tribute track called "#Jan25 Egypt", which has become a huge viral hit. "It's something that can be easily done in the middle of a revolution."
Egyptian hip-hop group Arabian Knightz.
Karim Adel Eissa, aka A-Rush from Cairo rappers Arabian Knightz, stayed up late into the night of Thursday 27 January recording new lyrics for the tune "Rebel", which he was determined to release on Facebook and MediaFire. "Egypt is rising up against the birds of darkness," spat the lyrics. "It was a direct call for revolution," Karim says. "Before, we'd only used metaphors to talk about the corrupt system. But once people were out on the streets, we were just like, 'Screw it.' If we're going down, we're going down."He and his crew just about managed to upload the new version of the song before Karim was called away to help with the vigilante security detail who were down in the streets keeping his neighbourhood free of looters and government thugs.
After the uprising of 25 January, Cairo's Tahrir Square resounded to the traditional Egyptian frame drum or daf, which pounded out trance-like beats over which the crowd laid slogans full of poetic power and joyful hilarity. As the Egyptian people rediscovered what it felt like to be a nation, united and indivisible, they reverted to the raw power of their most basic musical instincts to celebrate their mass release from fear – traditional drumming and chanting and patriotic songs from the glory days of yore when Egypt trounced the forces of imperialism in 1956 or took Israel by surprise in 1973.
During the revolutions of 1919 and 1952, or the mass student protests of 1968, poets used to monopolise the power that rappers now share. The chain-smoking, cussing, national poet hero Ahmed Fouad Negm ("Uncle Ahmed") was reinstated by the Tahrir Square protesters as Egypt's bard of protest par excellence. A man of unbelievable courage, Negm has spent 18 of his 81 years in Egyptian prisons. The word "fearless" doesn't begin to do him justice. In 2006, he was being interviewed by the New York Times when a donkey brayed loudly outside his ramshackle flat in one of Cairo's poorer neighbourhoods. "Ah, Mubarak speaks," he quipped to the astonished journalist.
Student musician Ramy Essam by his tent on Cairo's Tahrir Square.
"The Donkey and the Foal", Negm's poisoned paean to Mubarak and his son, Gamal, was set to music by Ramy Essam, a young engineering student who became the Billy Bragg of Tahrir Square. He sang the song to ecstatic crowds with the ancient Negm beside him, still standing tall. Essam went to Tahrir Square early in the uprising with his guitar and cobbled together a song called "Leave" from all the inventive slogans that were flying around the square. It became the hit of the uprising, going viral on YouTube and the Huffington Post, before being picked up by CNN and then TV networks around the globe. Essam lived in Tahrir Square's tent village for the entire revolution, composing songs, and playing almost every hour on one of the many stages that had sprouted there.
In that temporary utopia, Egypt rediscovered its love of freedom, honesty, joy and simplicity. The revolution stripped away layers of blubber from the fatuous, irrelevant body of Egyptian pop to expose a new, punk-like directness and integrity in artists such as Essam, Mohamed Mounir or Amir Eid from the rock band Cairokee, who gathered together other luminaries from the Cairo rock scene to record the rousing, hymn-like anthem to the revolution "Sout Al Horeya" (The Voice of Freedom). The people were tired of bullshit, whether it was political, social, religious or cultural.
When the slippery pop star Tamer Hosny was sent into the square to try and persuade the protesters to go home, he was almost lynched, later issuing a blubbing apology on national TV. Million-selling pop idol Amr Diab fled the country with his family in a private jet bound for the UK at the start of the uprising. He'll find it hard to look his country in the face again.
Zakaria Ibrahim, founder of the traditional street music ensemble El Tanbura, from Port Said, remembers the student protests of the late 60s and early 70s. "I was very happy to see a second revolution in my life," he tells me in his gentle, wistful voice. Despite the head wounds received by his son, Hassan, when government goon squads invaded Tahrir Square on horses and camels halfway through the revolution, Zakaria went down to Tahrir with El Tanbura – and several other bands affiliated to the folk centre that Zakaria has founded in Cairo – to play regularly.
"People were completely excited to hear something new that they were never used to hearing before on state media," he says proudly. "Under Mubarak, Egyptians had become selfish and aggressive," he continues. "But in Tahrir, you suddenly saw the other side of people, the kindness, the forgiveness and many things like that."
All in all, as Noor Ayman Nour, son of a famous dissident Egyptian politician and founder of Egyptian metal band Bliss, told me: "This was a very artistic revolution." Political freedom and cultural freedom danced hand in hand. To be young, to be alive was bliss, but to rediscover the thrill of banging your head to the sound of a raw, pummelling guitar, or spitting lyrics to the mic, or strumming out the truth in simple chords, without fear or compromise… that was very heaven.
This article is dedicated to the memory of artist and musician Ahmed Bassiouni, who died in Cairo on 28 January 2011 from injuries sustained fighting the police and government militias
Andy Morgan @'The Guardian'
The Julian Assange Conspiracy - Networks, power and activism
Listen Now - 2011-02-26 |Download Audio - 26022011
The object of Wikileaks is to dismantle the conspiracies that, according to its founder, rule the world. But what is a conspiracy and are you part of one? According to Assange, it's possible to be a member of conspiracy without even knowing that you are. This week, we look at Julian Assange's political philosophy and his view of the world as a network of conspiracies.
@'ABC
@'ABC
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