#dronelife: "Drone Bomb Me" by ANOHNI

 
A remarkable video of a gorgeous and terrifically brave song by ANOHNI, formerly known as Antony, best known as lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons. I can't embed it but you can watch it here. Directed by Nabil Elderkin--who has directed a lot of great videos, including the stunning "Two Weeks" by FKA twigs--and starring supermodel Naomi Campbell.

The vid is visually stunning, the singing sooooo beautiful, but the lyrics, damn!

Love, drone bomb me
Blow me from the mountains
And into the sea
Blow me from the side of the mountain
Blow my head off
Explode my crystal guts
Lay my purple on the grass

I have a glint in my eye
I think I want to die
I want to die
I want to be the apple of your eye

So drone bomb me
(Drone bomb me)
Blow me from the mountains
And into the sea
Blow me from the side of the mountain
Blow my head off
Explode my crystal guts
Lay my purple on the grass
(Lay my purple on the grass)

Let me be the first
I'm not so innocent
Let me be the one
The one that you choose from above
After all
I'm partly to blame

Has there been a more stunning pop culture response to the drone program than this? I don't think so.

Lest we forget, the cruel stats of the US drone program, from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

Pakistan, since 2004:
Total strikes: 423
Obama strikes: 372
Total killed: 2,497-3,999
Civilians killed: 423-965
Children killed: 172-207
Injured: 1,161-1,744

Yemen, since 2002:
Confirmed drone strikes: 113-133
Total killed: 514-747
Civilians killed: 65-101
Children killed: 8-9
Injured: 94-223

Possible extra drone strikes: 81-97
Total killed: 337-489
Civilians killed: 26-61
Children killed: 6-9
Injured: 78-105

Other covert operations: 15-72
Total killed: 156-365
Civilians killed: 68-99
Children killed: 26-28
Injured: 15-102

Afghanistan, from 2015:
Total strikes: 293-295
Total killed: 1,321-1,800
Civilians killed: 61-62
Children killed: 4-18
Injured: 160-165

dances with drones: MIA and Eleven Play (Japan)

Two more examples of drones in pop culture:

MIA has just released a new, self-directed video, of her song "Double Bubble Trouble" from the album Matangi. It's another one of MIA's patented full-of-radical-gestures and a wild stew of images. The main issues she seems to raise are "violence" -- and the danger that this might proliferate as guns are made with 3D printers -- and drones -- which in the vid seem to be both agents of surveillance and targeted killings. (There is a quick shot of a poster on a wall that says: "Drone Survival Guide.") The drones that circle above the dancers at the end of the video are in the shape of peace signs. And MIA warns us that "1984 is Now." Go watch it, see what you think, MIA puts these things out there to raise controversy and discussion, as far as I can tell.

And then there's this beautiful and much more easily read drone dance from the Japanese troupe Eleven Play (courtesy Dangerous Minds). And I think Dangerous Minds says it all: [the troupe] manages to utilize drone technology for art and beauty, while simultaneously depicting all of its potential insidiousness. At first the dancers interact cautiously and experimentally with the drones, then the machines become more active and more threatening. With no control over the increasingly volatile technology, the women flee the stage in fear. In the end, the only ones left dancing are the drones themselves. 

And the Palestinians in Gaza who live with Israeli drones constantly in the air call them: zanana. 

Meaning variously, "a wife’s relentless nagging", or "to nag with drone-like talk."

Drone Wars Just Beginning: Matt Bors

Great text and visuals on the drone wars. Gotta see and read this.

An excerpt:

drone life cont'd: Jon Langford's 'Drone Operator'

 Thanks to Mike W, who informed of this. Jon Langford of The Mekons and the Waco Brothers and lots of other bands, and formerly of Leeds and now very settled in Chicago, has put out a song called "Drone Operator." He seems to have been performing it since at least 2012, but has recently put it out (by Jon Langford and Skull Orchard) as a single, and on youtube, with a very fine video by Hassan Amejal. 

Amejal also sings a bit in Arabic (haven't had the time to decode it, and maybe I won't be able to. Somebody help.)

If you know anything about Langford's politics you'd know that the song would be critical of the drone war machinery. And it is. Here are some of the lyrics:

I’m not really a soldier
I’m more likely to die
By car wreck or cancer than the eye in the sky
That follows them home, right into their window
And they never know
They never know

and...

It didn't look like a wedding
It wasn't my call
When it all was over
We went to a bar
Drank beer and watched basketball

 It's a sinister, and at the same time, banal evil.

"Drone Operator" is on the album Here Be Monsters, which is about to drop, as they say, on April 1, which is only a few hours away. Enjoy.
 

drone life: new year's wish

One of my New Year's wishes for 2014 is that the USA end its bloody program of targeted assassination.

The invaluable blog Dangerous Minds (which mostly posts about pop culture) yesterday posted a piece entitled "The Truth about Obama's Indiscriminate and Bloody Drone War." It featured excerpts from Greg Palast's Vice article (July), "Drone Rangers," and a more recent article (December 29) from The Guardian by Heather Linebaugh, who served in the US Air Force from 2009 until March 2012, working in intelligence as an imagery analyst and geo-spatial analyst for the Iraq and the Afghanistan drone program.

I found these excerpts from Linebaugh's piece to be most illuminating. I wish everyone in the USA could be made aware of this.

What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle... 

The UAVs in the Middle East are used as a weapon, not as protection, and as long as our public remains ignorant to this, this serious threat to the sanctity of human life – at home and abroad – will continue.

drone life Gaza: zenana

By Jonathan Cook, via Richard Falk, on the "unfolding tragedy of Gaza."

Drones are increasingly being used for surveillance and extra-judicial execution in parts of the Middle East, especially by the US, but in nowhere more than Gaza has the drone become a permanent fixture of life. More than 1.7 million Palestinians, confined by Israel to a small territory in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, are subject to near continual surveillance and intermittent death raining down from the sky.

There is little hope of escaping the zenana – an Arabic word referring to a wife’s relentless nagging that Gazans have adopted to describe the drone’s oppressive noise and their feelings about it. According to statistics compiled by human rights groups in Gaza, civilians are the chief casualties of what Israel refers to as “surgical” strikes from drones.

 An unmanned aerial vehicle (Photo: Israel Aerospace Industries)

An earlier post on Israeli drones over Gaza and surfing as a way to avoid them stated that "zanana" translated as mosquito.

Ha'aretz wrote in 2010 that Gazans "have begun using the slang word zanana to also refer to those Gazans who report to the Hamas authorities what people say and do, with whom they meet, who visits them, and whose brother has gone to Ramallah."

The Washington Post in 2011 wrote this: "Roughly translated, zenana means buzz. But in neighboring Egypt, a source of Gaza custom and culture, the term is slang used to describe a relentlessly nagging wife."

I guess it could be all those things. And deadly. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

drone life 5: Chicago alderman proposes using drones for students' safe passage to school

Yes, seriously, Chicago Alderman George Cardenas proposed this.

And the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International chimed in, saying that 'drones can be a boon to law enforcement agencies by keeping officers out of dangerous situations, helping with search and rescue missions, responding to natural disasters and saving on the bottom line. The group claims drones can operate for as little as $25 to $75 per hour, which is far less than the $400-per-hour cost of using a manned helicopter.' And -- “The technology could certainly be used to help keep children safe. Importantly, however, it is up to local leaders to determine whether this is an appropriate use in their community," according to AUVSI spokeswoman Melanie Hinton.

One wonders whether Mayor Rahm Emmanuel might not be in favor, since all the school closings that his administration mean that many school children who going to new schools will have to cross gang boundaries and to be "in the line of fire."

drone life 4: Seymour Hersh

"Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren't we [journalists] doing more? How does he justify it? What's the intelligence? Why don't we find out how good or bad this policy is? Why do newspapers constantly cite the two or three groups that monitor drone killings. Why don't we do our own work?"

Seymour Hersh, to The Guardian, September 27, 2013.

drone life 2: NYPD drones

In December 2012 the NYPD arrested the artist Essam Attia for posting 100 posters around the city suggesting that New York's finest were using drones to control crime. In particular, given the image, it intimates a targeting of the undocumented. (The image of the fleeing family is lifted from a warning sign developed by the California Department of Transportation to warn drivers, on I-5 north of San Diego, that illegal immigrants might be crossing.)

The posters also are riffing on a current iPod add seen around town:

Just a month after Attia was arrested, CBS News reported that the NYPD might be considering using drones in its crimefighting efforts.

A year earlier, anti-war activists in the city, led by a US army vet who had worked with drones during two tours in Iraq, were posting signs saying: “Attention, authorized drone strike zone.”

Stay tuned...

drone life

Adam Harvey's fashion solution to targeted killings: 

"the collection includes hoodies, hijabs, and burqas made with metallized fibers that reflect heat, thus evading the thermal imaging technology used by drones. The garments were created in collaboration with fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield and highlight Harvey's own anti-authoritarian leanings and qualms about the unbridled use of drones."

drone life: swarms of insect sized MAVs by 2030

Please read Charlie Booker writing in The Guardian on February 24 on the US Air Force plans to develop bird- and insect-sized micro-drones with flapping wings, known as micro air vehicle or MAV. They can operate in swarms and their purpose is, among other things, to kill. The bird MAVs are planned to go operational in 2015, the insect MAVs by 2030. Be sure to read and then watch the chilling video, from 2009. Our tax dollars at work.

Sunny Ali and the Kid - MUSLIM RAGE #drones

they're runnin but there's
drones up ahead
drones in your bed
drones in your home
drone give me head
drone give me dome
preacher preacher
leave them kids alone


More on Sunny Ali and the Kid here.

Time's Joe Klein on why we kill 'their' 4 year olds with drones

Joe Klein really said this. On MSNBC's Morning Joe on October 23. From a recent piece by Vijay Prashad:

'On Oct. 23, Time’s Joe Klein was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Host Joe Scarborough spoke passionately against the use of drones, saying “it seems so antiseptic and yet you have 4-year-old girls being blown to bits because we have a policy that now says, ‘You know what? Instead of trying to go in and take the risk and get the terrorists out of hiding in a Karachi suburb, we’re just going to blow up everyone around them.’”

Klein, a defender of the Obama record, answered emotionlessly, “The bottom line in the end is — whose 4-year-old gets killed? What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.” (emphasis added)'

Meanwhile, 178 children have died in US drone strikes on the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands.

drones of war: kill a man with a dronestick in your hand

John Caramanica reviewed Fatima Al Qadiri's new release Desert Strike today in the New York Times. Given the subject matter and its stylistic connections to grime, I of course immediately purchased it. I'm not entirely convinced that it does all that Caramanica claims it does. It's good but I don't find it so "morose, ominous, moving" as JC. I don't hear "Ghost Raid" quite as "nihilistic" as he does. The "hints of grime" on "Hydra" are too weak for me. It's true that "Oil Well" is "littered with the sounds of weapons being cocked and emptied" but given that the EP is meant, according to JC, to be "a conversation piece about war," I want it to be "grimier." I want it to convey much more of the horror and the blood and guts. Especially after Gaza.

Louis Pattison also reviewed Al Qadiri's EP for The Guardian last Friday. There we learn that Al Qadiri was raised in Kuwait, that she used to play a Megadrive game called "Desert Strike: Return To The Gulf" when she was 10, in 1992, just two year after the Iraqi invasion. She now lives in Brooklyn. (Of course!).

I think Pattison overplays the "horrors" evoked by Al Qadiri's music as much as Caramanica does. But Pattison did alert me to a much more interesting piece of music that reflects much more vividly on the interconnections between war, video games, and drones: Montreal producer d'Eon's "Kill a Man with a Dronestick in Your Hand."

I find the video and the song to be quite riveting. It's electronic, it opens with some great, electronically altered oud playing (perhaps played by d'Eon), then shifts to a slow dance beat. The sing-songy lyrics are a bit hard for me to catch because the voice is slightly modified through electronics. But it's a very simple and clever rhyme scheme where all the lines rhyme with Man and Hand. Thus: Taliban, Pakistan, etc. Two lines I can catch are "Kill a man far away in Pakistan" and "There's no blood on your hand."

The video mixes images of what appears to be the men and women who sit in rooms in the US and guide the drones to their targets; video footage of "real" drone strikes from above and on-the-ground; video games that simulate drone war; a woman in a very short skirt dancing; scenes of the Taliban flogging a prisoner, and so on. Sometimes it's not clear whether you're watching video games or "real" war scenes.

You can watch the vid below. You can buy the song (well worth it) from iTunes and, no doubt, other venues. d'Eon records on the Hippos in Tanks label. "Kill a Man with a Dronestick in Your Hand is from his album Palinopsia. (In 2011 d'Eon recorded a split 12" with the fabulous Grimes, called Darkbloom. For the record, Grimes has been kufiyaspotted.)

d'Eon "Kill a Man With a Joystick In Your Hand" from OLDE ENGLISH SPELLING BEE on Vimeo.

poetry of US war on terror 2.0

“light footprint”
combo clandestine Special Operations raids
drone strikes
continuous surveillance
cyberwarfare
locally trained proxy forces hunt capture kill manage perceived threats to American interests
on global scale

see Steve Niva," The “Matrix” Comes to Libya," the Merip blog, November 2.