I'm lucky to have a few readers who kufiyaspot for me. Thanks to Wayne (of the invaluable wayne&wax) who alerted me to this one--from Jamaica, with Wacky French Prince and Ding Dong introducing new dance moves, Nuh Linga and Ho mi look. You can't miss the kufiyas on a couple of the dancers. The kufiya presence can't simply be read as Jamaicans slavishly borrowing from US hipsters, although US rappers might be a source. But it's just as, and maybe even more, likely that thirdworldist solidarity with the Palestinians could be a motivation. Read wayne's post on this, and other dance move videos. He notes that this one bears a marked resemblance to voguing.
This makes me nostalgic for the good old days of the b-boys in South Bronx in the seventies. (Not that I was there, by any means.) And it calls to mind the heavy Caribbean influence on the foundational hip-hop scene. The three most important early hip-hop DJs all had a Caribbean foundation. DJ Kool Herc, who essentially invented sratching, immigrated to the US from Jamaica in 1967. (And Herc hung around with the Five Percenters.) Afrika Bambaata's parents were from the West Indies, and Grandmaster Flash's parents were from Barbados.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
koffee-yehs! take that, dunkin' donuts!
I love it. I only recently heard about this campaign, which involves photos from all over the country of people drinking (their last cup of) dunkin' donuts coffee in a kufiya, in protest over the Rachael Ray debacle. (Thanks, Nadia.) Check the blog out for more photos like this one, which is from New Orleans. The big easy!
See, kufiyas still have their uses. Take that, hipsters.
And here's the campaign video:
Sunday, September 28, 2008
More kufiya hipster fashion, that Verena Von Pfetten loves to hate
My friend Theresa told me about this recent (Sept. 26) Huffington Post column by Verena Von Pfetten, entitled "7 Hipster Fashions We Love to Hate." It's fall, she says, and time to say goodbye to old trends and embrace the new ones. But--the hipsters need extra encouragement in this regard because, she says,
...no one group of people have ever so succumbed, so embraced, so clutched on to trends for dear life with cold, pale, smoke-yellowed fingers as that so-called creative counter-culture: The Hipster.
"From what I can tell," Von Pfetten continues,
the hipster depends, nay, thrives on irony, but the problem is that in doing so, they've a) diluted and deserted any formal definition that irony may or may not have once had and b) they've only served to create a fashion version of The Blob in which once they adopt a "trend" -- usually historical and always ironically, of course -- it feeds on itself, and it grows and grows until frat guys are wearing it and the cast of "The Hills" are designing it, and then someday Rachel Ray will star in a Dunkin Donuts commercial while wrapped in it. Or maybe it's the other way around.
Interesting, isn't it, that it's the hipster kufiya that's the iconic villain of this piece, the viral hipster fashion accessory? And that it's dead when frat boys and Rachael wear it--the archetypes of un-coolness?
And then there's Von Pfetten's point c):
...though they initially drench themselves in these sartorial affectations in a (soon-to-be proven misguided) attempt to show how very unconcerned they are with what exactly it is they wear and though it would seem that their entire image hinged upon the sheer disinterest they have in other people's opinions and the exquisitely cultivated and the desperately disdainful, "What, this? I picked it up off the floor and pulled this out of the garbage and stole this from my myopic maternal grandmother!," the very act itself is contradictory. In attempting to embrace something so patently unflattering so as to prove how patently unimportant such flattery is, they are -- in fact -- acknowledging their concern, and therefore, their endorsement.
And then:
To put it simply: these trends, these [seven] accoutrements, these god-awful outfits are fugly. And yet, they are everywhere. And somehow they just never seem to go away.
And then there's the slideshow, with a slide of Rachael Ray in kufiya, and the comment: If Rachel [Rachael] Ray is wearing something in a Dunkin' Donuts commercial, it's most definitely no longer cool. It's done. It's dead. Get over it. And a slide of Kirsten Dunst in brown-and-black "global chic scarf," with the comment: And while I'm a personal fan of Kirsten Dunst, this wasn't cool then, and it sure as heck isn't now.
Will Von Pfetten help kill this trend off? Will it revert back to the politicos?
I don't know. Fayetteville, Arkansas is certainly no bellwether of fashion. But now that the weather has cooled off, you do see the odd kufiya around. I have at least three students who wear them, who are both rather fashionable, and pro-Palestinian.
The saga continues...
...no one group of people have ever so succumbed, so embraced, so clutched on to trends for dear life with cold, pale, smoke-yellowed fingers as that so-called creative counter-culture: The Hipster.
"From what I can tell," Von Pfetten continues,
the hipster depends, nay, thrives on irony, but the problem is that in doing so, they've a) diluted and deserted any formal definition that irony may or may not have once had and b) they've only served to create a fashion version of The Blob in which once they adopt a "trend" -- usually historical and always ironically, of course -- it feeds on itself, and it grows and grows until frat guys are wearing it and the cast of "The Hills" are designing it, and then someday Rachel Ray will star in a Dunkin Donuts commercial while wrapped in it. Or maybe it's the other way around.
Interesting, isn't it, that it's the hipster kufiya that's the iconic villain of this piece, the viral hipster fashion accessory? And that it's dead when frat boys and Rachael wear it--the archetypes of un-coolness?
And then there's Von Pfetten's point c):
...though they initially drench themselves in these sartorial affectations in a (soon-to-be proven misguided) attempt to show how very unconcerned they are with what exactly it is they wear and though it would seem that their entire image hinged upon the sheer disinterest they have in other people's opinions and the exquisitely cultivated and the desperately disdainful, "What, this? I picked it up off the floor and pulled this out of the garbage and stole this from my myopic maternal grandmother!," the very act itself is contradictory. In attempting to embrace something so patently unflattering so as to prove how patently unimportant such flattery is, they are -- in fact -- acknowledging their concern, and therefore, their endorsement.
And then:
To put it simply: these trends, these [seven] accoutrements, these god-awful outfits are fugly. And yet, they are everywhere. And somehow they just never seem to go away.
And then there's the slideshow, with a slide of Rachael Ray in kufiya, and the comment: If Rachel [Rachael] Ray is wearing something in a Dunkin' Donuts commercial, it's most definitely no longer cool. It's done. It's dead. Get over it. And a slide of Kirsten Dunst in brown-and-black "global chic scarf," with the comment: And while I'm a personal fan of Kirsten Dunst, this wasn't cool then, and it sure as heck isn't now.
Will Von Pfetten help kill this trend off? Will it revert back to the politicos?
I don't know. Fayetteville, Arkansas is certainly no bellwether of fashion. But now that the weather has cooled off, you do see the odd kufiya around. I have at least three students who wear them, who are both rather fashionable, and pro-Palestinian.
The saga continues...
Thursday, September 25, 2008
back on the kufiyaspotting tip: "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization"
Yes, clearly I've not been blogging much lately. I have to attribute it to what seem like the very high demands of teaching this semester. But I've been collecting kufiya info, and it's time to start reporting. So here is the first of several posts which I hope to spit out over the next couple days.
One of my undergraduate students turned me on to this article yesterday,"Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization," by Douglas Haddow, from the latest issue (79) of Adbusters.
Here's the last paragraph of the article, which sums up the thesis and conveys the mood of the piece:
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
The article contains a couple of kufiya (keffiyeh) references--kufiyas, according to Haddow, are one of the key distinguishing signifiers of today's hipsters, as well as being symptomatic of the emptiness and meaninglessness that typifies the hipster subculture.
Here's how Haddow describes hipsters:
Take a stroll down the street in any major North American or European city and you’ll be sure to see a speckle of fashion-conscious twentysomethings hanging about and sporting a number of predictable stylistic trademarks: skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh – initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians, the keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory.
The kufiya: the quintessential sign of the vacant character of contemporary youth culture!
The kufiya comes up again, at the end of Haddow's article, in his description of a bunch of urban hipsters making their way home at dawn, after the after-parties:
The half-built condos tower above us like foreboding monoliths of our yuppie futures. I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet – oblivious to our own impending demise.
Hmmm...you'd look like revolutionaries whay exactly? Because of the kufiya and the rocks? Like this kind of revolutionary? (A young Palestinian confronting the army of occupation.) Who would hipsters be throwing rocks at? Who would be driving the tank? Or would you just be throwing rocks at your "yuppie futures"? Maybe it would be better to forget imagining that one could look like a revolutionary, and join demonstrations against the $700 billion dollar bail-out or send money to the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
I'm not sure that the kufiya hipster signifies the end of Western civ either. Hipsters or bohos or whatever you want to call them were wearing kufiyas for style reasons back in the early to mid-eighties. And hip youth culture as now being about "consuming cool rather that creating it" (Haddow)--this isn't particularly new either. It's all well and good to critique hipsters wearing uniforms, not knowing the provenance or politics of their kufiya gear, and fooling themselves about the subversiveness of their style and attitude. But it's not the end of the world.
(Excellent hipster kufiya photos are to be viewed at Hipster Intifada.)
One of my undergraduate students turned me on to this article yesterday,"Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization," by Douglas Haddow, from the latest issue (79) of Adbusters.
Here's the last paragraph of the article, which sums up the thesis and conveys the mood of the piece:
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
The article contains a couple of kufiya (keffiyeh) references--kufiyas, according to Haddow, are one of the key distinguishing signifiers of today's hipsters, as well as being symptomatic of the emptiness and meaninglessness that typifies the hipster subculture.
Here's how Haddow describes hipsters:
Take a stroll down the street in any major North American or European city and you’ll be sure to see a speckle of fashion-conscious twentysomethings hanging about and sporting a number of predictable stylistic trademarks: skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh – initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians, the keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory.
The kufiya: the quintessential sign of the vacant character of contemporary youth culture!
The kufiya comes up again, at the end of Haddow's article, in his description of a bunch of urban hipsters making their way home at dawn, after the after-parties:
The half-built condos tower above us like foreboding monoliths of our yuppie futures. I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet – oblivious to our own impending demise.
Hmmm...you'd look like revolutionaries whay exactly? Because of the kufiya and the rocks? Like this kind of revolutionary? (A young Palestinian confronting the army of occupation.) Who would hipsters be throwing rocks at? Who would be driving the tank? Or would you just be throwing rocks at your "yuppie futures"? Maybe it would be better to forget imagining that one could look like a revolutionary, and join demonstrations against the $700 billion dollar bail-out or send money to the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.I'm not sure that the kufiya hipster signifies the end of Western civ either. Hipsters or bohos or whatever you want to call them were wearing kufiyas for style reasons back in the early to mid-eighties. And hip youth culture as now being about "consuming cool rather that creating it" (Haddow)--this isn't particularly new either. It's all well and good to critique hipsters wearing uniforms, not knowing the provenance or politics of their kufiya gear, and fooling themselves about the subversiveness of their style and attitude. But it's not the end of the world.
(Excellent hipster kufiya photos are to be viewed at Hipster Intifada.)
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Peaches and Tone-Loc: "Wild Thing"
Peaches has remixed Tone Loc's "Wild Thing," and performs on the new version. I just heard about it. It's the twentieth anniversary of the release of the original. Makes me feel old.
Nonetheless, it's made me smile, and I've been listening over and over. See whether it does the same for you:
And then there's the video for Peaches' song, "Get It." Hilarious!
Keep up with Peaches at her website, peachesrocks.com.
Nonetheless, it's made me smile, and I've been listening over and over. See whether it does the same for you:
And then there's the video for Peaches' song, "Get It." Hilarious!
Keep up with Peaches at her website, peachesrocks.com.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Andalousies Atlantiques Festival in Essaouira, Morocco, Oct. 30-Nov. 1: Tribute to Judaeo-Arab singers Sami El Maghribi and Lili Boniche
I just received this announcement. I encourage anyone who reads this blog to both circulate this information and to try their best to go. I attended last year's festival, and it was splendid, both as a musical event, and as a tribute to the critical importance of Jews to modern Arab musical culture. Among last year's featured performers were the great Moroccan Jewish singer Haim Louk and the Algerian-Jewish pianist and vocalist Maurice El Medioni. Medioni will be there again this year, with the El Gusto Orchestra, a chaabi ensemble led by Abdel Hadi Halo. And other huge stars, the Judaeo-Arab singers Luc Perez and Luc Cherki, and Jil Jilala! I've posted a few photos from last year's event, which can be accessed here.
Haim Louk with Thami Harrak and his ensemble (photo: T. Swedenburg)
Dear All,
We would like to invite you to this year's Andalousies Atlantiques Festival, celebrating the prodigious musical heritage of al-Andalus. This year's event will take place in Essaouira from October 30 to November 1, 2008 and will pay tribute to two giants of Judeo-Arabic music who passed away earlier this year - the Moroccan Sami El Maghribi and the Algerian Lili Boniche. Among the groups performing are El Gusto, a 50-person ensemble that reunites veteran chaabi musicians who performed together in the casbah of Algiers in the 1950s - including Maurice El Medioni, Ahmed Bernaoui, Rene Perez, and Luc Cherki under the leadership of Abdelhadi Halo; Maxime Karouchi, a young Moroccan-born vocalist who performs Andalusian nuba, and Sami El Maghribi's melhoun and chaabi repertoire; Mohamed Briouel and the Orchestre Andalous de Fes - Briouel directs the Music Conservatory of Fez, and won the Prix du Maroc for his book Moroccan Andalusian Music: Nouba Gharibat Al Husayn; and the group Jil Jilala, who fuse the rhythms of Issawa and Gnawa with melhoun, and whose songs of protest of the 1970s and 1980s have become classics.
During the morning, panels will bring together researchers, journalists and musicians to discuss the music legacy of al-Andalus. Films, documentaries and exhibits will be shown during the afternoon - concerts begin at 6:00pm.
Here is a link to a newsreport on last year's Andalousies Atlantiques festival:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KvqSyWXHOs
Please join us!
For any questions about the festival, please contact Professor Ted Swedenburg at the University of Arkensas: tsweden@uark.edu (http://swedenburg.blogspot.com/)
Comité des Festivals d'Essaouira
Haim Louk with Thami Harrak and his ensemble (photo: T. Swedenburg)Dear All,
We would like to invite you to this year's Andalousies Atlantiques Festival, celebrating the prodigious musical heritage of al-Andalus. This year's event will take place in Essaouira from October 30 to November 1, 2008 and will pay tribute to two giants of Judeo-Arabic music who passed away earlier this year - the Moroccan Sami El Maghribi and the Algerian Lili Boniche. Among the groups performing are El Gusto, a 50-person ensemble that reunites veteran chaabi musicians who performed together in the casbah of Algiers in the 1950s - including Maurice El Medioni, Ahmed Bernaoui, Rene Perez, and Luc Cherki under the leadership of Abdelhadi Halo; Maxime Karouchi, a young Moroccan-born vocalist who performs Andalusian nuba, and Sami El Maghribi's melhoun and chaabi repertoire; Mohamed Briouel and the Orchestre Andalous de Fes - Briouel directs the Music Conservatory of Fez, and won the Prix du Maroc for his book Moroccan Andalusian Music: Nouba Gharibat Al Husayn; and the group Jil Jilala, who fuse the rhythms of Issawa and Gnawa with melhoun, and whose songs of protest of the 1970s and 1980s have become classics.
During the morning, panels will bring together researchers, journalists and musicians to discuss the music legacy of al-Andalus. Films, documentaries and exhibits will be shown during the afternoon - concerts begin at 6:00pm.
Here is a link to a newsreport on last year's Andalousies Atlantiques festival:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KvqSyWXHOs
Please join us!
For any questions about the festival, please contact Professor Ted Swedenburg at the University of Arkensas: tsweden@uark.edu (http://swedenburg.blogspot.com/)
Comité des Festivals d'Essaouira
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Jeff Halper on the Gaza Boat Trip
I just received this in the mail from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. Their Director, Jeff Halper, participated in the recent, successful effort of the Free Gaza Movement to break the Israeli siege of Gaza, sending two boats in with supplies and a team of dedicated volunteers. Jeff was trained as an anthropologist, and participated in a panel at the American Anthropological Association meetings last fall, for which I served as a discussant. Please read Halper's very important observations on the trip, and on Israel and its relations with Gaza.
I've also been receiving communications from Fun'Da'Mental's Aki Nawaz, who also participated in the mission, and I'll be posting those soon.
End of an Odyssey
Jeff Halper
September 1
Now, a few days after my release from jail in the wake of my trip to Gaza, I'm posting a few notes to sum things up.
First, the mission of the Free Gaza Movement to break the Israeli siege proved a success beyond all expectations. Our reaching
When we finally arrived in Gaza after a day and a half sail, the welcome we received from 40,000 joyous Gazans was overwhelming and moving. People sought me out in particular, eager it seemed to speak Hebrew with an Israeli after years of closure. The message I received by people of all factions during my three days there was the same: How do we ("we" in the sense of all of us living in their country, not just Palestinians or Israelis) get out of this mess? Where are WE going? The discourse was not even political: what is the solution; one-state, two-state, etc etc. It was just common sense and straightforward, based on the assumption that we will all continue living in the same country and this stupid conflict, with its walls and siege and violence, is bad for everybody. Don't Israelis see that? people would ask me.
(The answer, unfortunately, is "no." To be honest, we Israeli Jews are the problem. The Palestinian years ago accepted our existence in the country as a people and are willing to accept ANY solution -- two states, one state, no state, whatever. It is us who want exclusivity over the "Land of Israel" who cannot conceive of a single country, who cannot accept the national presence of Palestinians (we talk about "Arabs" in our country), and who have eliminated by our settlements even the possibility of the two-state solution in which we take 80% of the land. So it's sad, truly sad, that our "enemies" want peace and co-existence (and tell me that in HEBREW) and we don't. Yeah, we Israeli Jews want "peace," but in the meantime what we have -- almost no attacks, a feeling of security, a "disappeared" Palestinian people, a booming economy, tourism and ever-improving international status -- seems just fine. If "peace" means giving up settlements, land and control, why do it? What's wrong with the status quo? If it's not broken, don't fix it.)
When in
When I was in
Though the operation was a complete success, the siege will only be genuinely broken if we keep up the movement in and out of Gaza. The boats are scheduled to return in 2-4 weeks and I am now working on getting a boat-load of Israelis.
My only frustration with what was undoubtedly a successful operation was with the fact that Israelis just don't get it - and don't want to get it. The implications of our being the strong party and the fact that the Palestinians are the ones truly seeking peace are too threatening to their hegemony and self-perceived innocence. What I encountered in perhaps a dozen interviews - and what I read about myself and our trip written by "journalists" who never even attempted to speak to me or the others - was a collective image of Gaza, the Palestinians and our interminable conflict which could only be described as fantasy. Rather than enquire about my experiences, motives or views, my interviewers, especially on the mainstream radio, spent their time forcing upon me their slogans and uniformed prejudices, as if giving me a space to explain myself deal a death blow to their tightly-held conceptions.
Ben Dror Yemini of the popular Ma'ariv newspaper called us a "satanic cult." Another suggested that a prominent contributor to the Free Gaza Movement was a Palestinian-American who had been questioned by the FBI, as if that had to do with anything (the innuendo being we were supported, perhaps even manipulated or worse, by "terrorists"). Others were more explicit: Wasn't it true that we were giving Hamas a PR victory? Why was I siding with Palestinian fishermen-gun smugglers against my own country which sought only to protect its citizens? Some simply yelled at me, like an interviewer on Arutz 99. And when all else failed, my interlocutors could always fall back on good old cynicism: Peace is impossible. Jews and Arabs are different species. You can't trust "them." Or bald assertions: They just want to destroy us. Then there's the paternalism: Well, I guess it's good to have a few idealists like you around...
Nowhere in the many interviews was there a genuine curiosity about what I was doing or what life was like in Gaza. No one interested in a different perspective, especially if it challenged their cherished slogans. No one going beyond the old, tired slogans. Plenty of reference, though, to terrorism, Qassam missiles and Palestinian snubbing our valiant efforts to make peace; none whatsoever to occupation, house demolitions, siege, land expropriation or settlement expansion, not to mention the killing, imprisoning and impoverishment of their civilian population. As if we had nothing to do with the conflict, as if we were just living our normal, innocent lives and bad people decided to throw Qassam rockets. Above all, no sense of our responsibility, or any willingness to accept responsibility for the ongoing violence and conflict. Instead just a thoughtless, automatic appeal to an image of Gaza and "Arabs" (we don't generally use the term "Palestinians") that is diametrically opposed to what I've seen and experienced, a slavish repeating of mindless (and wrong) slogans which serve only to eliminate any possibility of truly grasping the situation. In short, a fantasy Gaza as perceived from within a bubble carefully constructed so as to deflect any uncomfortable reality.
The greatest insight this trip has given me is understanding why Israelis don't "get it:" a media comprised by people who should know better but who possess little critical ability and feel more comfortable inside a box created by self-serving politicians than in trying to do something far more creative: understanding what in the hell is going on here.
Still, I formulated clearly my messages to my fellow Israelis, and that constitutes the main content of my interviews and talks:
(1) Despite what our political leaders say, there is a political solution to the conflict and there are partners for peace. If anything, we of the peace movement must not allow the powers-that-be to mystify the conflict, to present it as a "clash of civilizations." The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is political and as such it has a political solution;
(2) The Palestinians are not our enemies. In fact, I urge my fellow Israeli Jews to disassociate from the dead-end politics of our failed political leaders by declaring, in concert with Israeli and Palestinian peace-makers: We refuse to be enemies. And
(3) As the infinitely stronger party in the conflict and the only Occupying Power, we Israelis must accept responsibility for our failed and oppressive policies. Only we can end the conflict.
Let me end by expressing my appreciation to the organizers of this initiative - Paul Larudee and Greta Berlin from the US, Hilary Smith and Bella from the UK, Vaggelis Pissias, a Greek member of the team who provided crucial material and political input, and Jamal al-Khoudri, an independent member of the PLC from Gaza and head of the Popular Committee Against the Siege and others - plus the wonderful group of participants on the boats and the great communication team that stayed ashore. Special appreciation goes to ICAHD's own Angela Godfrey-Goldstein who played a crucial role in
Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at: jeff@icahd.org.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Against Sixties Nostalgia: "Easy Rider"
Asked for his own impressions of these films and the period they capture, Mr. [Andrew] Lampert, 31, hesitated, then said: “I recently watched ‘Easy Rider’ and felt embarrassed for an entire generation. I would hope that life in the ’60s was much more like ‘Chafed Elbows.’ ”
From an article in today's New York Times Arts & Leisure section, about the 60s independent films of Robert Downey--which I had not heard of, nor have I seen. Since they've now been restored, I'll hopefully have a chance.
I was pleased to see the jab at Easy Rider. I've wanted to write something about some of the problems I see with iconic films of the sixties, which were much admired at the time, and which I must admit, I too liked a lot when they first came out. (Thanks to AMC, I've had the opportunity to see many of them again, for the first time since the sixties.) Easy Rider celebrates male hippy pot-smoking freeliving renegade motorcycle riders, turning them into martyrs at the hands of Southerners. That is, long-haired virtue is produced at the expense of a stereotype of redneck evil. (There is also an implicit identification made between the victimhood of the white hippies and that of African Americans, who suffered at the hands of crackers during the civil rights struggles.) I remember coming out the of theater after watchin g Easy Rider in summer 1969, feeling shocked and outraged. I didn't ride a motorcycle, but I did have the long hair. So I certainly identified with the Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson characters. It worked with me.
Such infantile and ill-informed sorts of representations (echoed in many other cultural artifacts of the time, like Neil Young's "Southern Man" and the film Deliverance) have had pernicious political effects, and are a part of the complicated story of how the South has gone very Republican. I've lived in Texas and Arkansas for a total of over twenty years, and I still have friends from the coasts, and urban centers in the Midwest, who can't understand how anyone could possibly live in the South or how anything good could possibly come out of (t)here. They are still apprehending the South through the lens of Deliverance and Easy Rider, it seems.
Other films I've been meaning to write brief notes about are MASH and its homophobia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and its sexism. I was completely blind to these issues when I originally saw these films. And I considered myself a political radical. I guess I'm trying to make sense of my own memories of the sixties.
So I vote for a revival of "Chafed Elbows." And "Flaming Creatures"!
More in future, I hope...
From an article in today's New York Times Arts & Leisure section, about the 60s independent films of Robert Downey--which I had not heard of, nor have I seen. Since they've now been restored, I'll hopefully have a chance.
I was pleased to see the jab at Easy Rider. I've wanted to write something about some of the problems I see with iconic films of the sixties, which were much admired at the time, and which I must admit, I too liked a lot when they first came out. (Thanks to AMC, I've had the opportunity to see many of them again, for the first time since the sixties.) Easy Rider celebrates male hippy pot-smoking freeliving renegade motorcycle riders, turning them into martyrs at the hands of Southerners. That is, long-haired virtue is produced at the expense of a stereotype of redneck evil. (There is also an implicit identification made between the victimhood of the white hippies and that of African Americans, who suffered at the hands of crackers during the civil rights struggles.) I remember coming out the of theater after watchin g Easy Rider in summer 1969, feeling shocked and outraged. I didn't ride a motorcycle, but I did have the long hair. So I certainly identified with the Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson characters. It worked with me.Such infantile and ill-informed sorts of representations (echoed in many other cultural artifacts of the time, like Neil Young's "Southern Man" and the film Deliverance) have had pernicious political effects, and are a part of the complicated story of how the South has gone very Republican. I've lived in Texas and Arkansas for a total of over twenty years, and I still have friends from the coasts, and urban centers in the Midwest, who can't understand how anyone could possibly live in the South or how anything good could possibly come out of (t)here. They are still apprehending the South through the lens of Deliverance and Easy Rider, it seems.
Other films I've been meaning to write brief notes about are MASH and its homophobia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and its sexism. I was completely blind to these issues when I originally saw these films. And I considered myself a political radical. I guess I'm trying to make sense of my own memories of the sixties.
So I vote for a revival of "Chafed Elbows." And "Flaming Creatures"!
More in future, I hope...
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Another report on the last Palestinian kufiya producer--plus hair gel
An AFP report on the Palestinian kufiya, with an overview of its recent uses in the West, the controversies, and the story of the last remaining Palestinian producer, Yasser al-Hirbawi, who faces severe competition face from Chinese producers. I like the fact that French reporters find it worthwhile to actually go to Hebron and talk to real live Palestinians. The report covers much the same ground as one that appeared in Le Monde this February.
But I do like this statement:
Even here [Hebron] most Palestinians, including the politically active, have cast off the traditional keffiyeh in favour of a more modern look.
"The young guys prefer to wear hair gel," Abu Rumilah, another merchant says.
It's been probably three or more decades, in fact, since anyone other than older men, especially those in traditional or rural garb, routinely wore kufiyas on their heads in the West Bank. But it has been very common for those wearing "modern" clothing to wear kufiyas as scarves, in much the same way as hipsters and politicos do in the West.
Abu Rumilah's statement has more to do with the fact that some in the older generation are quite critical of the younger generation for their modern and trendy hairstyles. It's true that many young men in the West Bank are quite concerned with keeping their hair looking smart, and with global clothing styles. This doesn't keep them from covering their necks with kufiyas in cooler weather, however.
(I found this via The Angry Arab.)
But I do like this statement:
Even here [Hebron] most Palestinians, including the politically active, have cast off the traditional keffiyeh in favour of a more modern look.
"The young guys prefer to wear hair gel," Abu Rumilah, another merchant says.
It's been probably three or more decades, in fact, since anyone other than older men, especially those in traditional or rural garb, routinely wore kufiyas on their heads in the West Bank. But it has been very common for those wearing "modern" clothing to wear kufiyas as scarves, in much the same way as hipsters and politicos do in the West.
Abu Rumilah's statement has more to do with the fact that some in the older generation are quite critical of the younger generation for their modern and trendy hairstyles. It's true that many young men in the West Bank are quite concerned with keeping their hair looking smart, and with global clothing styles. This doesn't keep them from covering their necks with kufiyas in cooler weather, however.
(I found this via The Angry Arab.)
Friday, August 29, 2008
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid/Knockin' on Heaven's Door
I just finished watching Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid--part of the continuing obsession with Bob Dylan, inspired in part by the film I'm Not There. It helps to see the former in order to help make some sense of the Richard Gere-Billy/Garrett scenes in I'm Not There. But the film is of course supremely worth watching in its own right. I had seen the original, when it appeared in 1973, and I remember being underwhelmed. Now I know why--MGM butchered it. For some time the director's cut has been available, and I'm so glad I got to see it. I think it really tops what I used to regard as Peckinpah's masterpiece, The Wild Bunch. It's much more lyrical, understated, and moving.I was particularly moved by the scene where Sheriff Colin Bear (played by Slim Pickens) is shot, knows he is dying, and goes to sit by the pond, to die, as the son goes down. His wife, played by Katy Jurado, sits near him, crying. No words are spoken, but Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" comes on, for the first time in the film. Watch it, I can't imagine that this scene won't just slay you.
Mrs. Bear/Katy Jurado, by the way, plays the only "strong "woman in this film. Which I seem to remember is typical Peckinpah, and typical sixties. Women in the film are mostly just there for men to sleep with (either whores or girlfriends) or cook food, and--probably most important--to show their breasts for the presumed male viewer. Rita Coolidge never says anything in the last scene, but she does show her tits. Mrs. Bear is middle aged and probably not worthy of objectification. So she goes with Pat Garrett (James Coburn) and her husband to hunt down some of Billy's pals, and she shoots them down, just like a man would, with her shotgun. (After shooting, she pulls new shells out of her cleavage--which we don't see.)
And wasn't Katy Jurado just great in High Noon?
I had an earlier "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" moment" when I saw I'm Not There. During the credits, a version of the song by Antony and the Johnsons comes on. I had never heard it, and was instantly hooked. One of the best Dylan covers I've ever heard. Since then, I bought the terrific soundtrack for I'm not there, with Dylan covers by the likes of Sonic Youth, Cat Power, Yo La Tengo. But the Antony and the Johnsons track is still the best. I'm obsessed. Check it out:
Sunday, August 24, 2008
More Darwish
Here's a great source for more on the recently departed Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, from Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, published in London.
And I was pleased to receive my copy of the latest New Yorker (August 25) and to find that they had published this poem by Mahmoud Darwish.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
That (Sudanese) Target Ad
You've all seen it, that Target "dorm dance" ad, with what must be one of the best dance tracks and vocals ever in a mainstream advertisement. And you think, yes, every cool song, and especially now, the coolest world fusion tune, must, immediately and invevitably, be turned into a marketing tool.
(And if you are some nostalgist who imagines this never happened in the sixties, check out The Rolling Stones shilling for Rice Krispies, below.)
The song is "Calabria," by DJ Enur from Denmark, and features vocals by Natasja Saad, a Danish dancehall/reggae vocalist whose father, it turns out, is from Sudan. I can't claim there is anything remotely "Sudanese" about her singing, which is pure dancehall.
But she seems to be trying to look vaguely Sudanese in this photo, no?
On the other hand, here's Natasja in a more typical "dancehall" look.
Natasja was not just a star in Denmark, but also "the first non-Jamaican reggae/dancehall artist ever to win the Jamaican 'Irie FM Big Break Contest,'" according to wikipedia.
Here's the "official" video, in which Natasja appears. Pretty typical dancehall fare, I guess: one guy in a suit, ogling all the beautiful semi-dressed female bodies.
Natasja was killed in a car wreck in Jamaica in June 2007. "Calabria" was already a global hit by that time; in January 2008, it hit Number One on Billboard's Hot Dance Airplay.
And for those of you who are a little slow on the uptake when it comes to Jamaican patois (as I certainly am), here are the lyrics you hear on the Target ad:
Easy now no need fi go down (2x)
Rock that run that this where we from
Whoop Whoop, when you run come around,
Cu(z) I know you're the talk of the town, yeah
Best shown overall, shiny and tall,
One touch make a gal climb whoever you are,
Brass hat, hatter than fireball
Whoop Whoop!
You not small you no lickle at all
(And if you are some nostalgist who imagines this never happened in the sixties, check out The Rolling Stones shilling for Rice Krispies, below.)
The song is "Calabria," by DJ Enur from Denmark, and features vocals by Natasja Saad, a Danish dancehall/reggae vocalist whose father, it turns out, is from Sudan. I can't claim there is anything remotely "Sudanese" about her singing, which is pure dancehall.
But she seems to be trying to look vaguely Sudanese in this photo, no?
On the other hand, here's Natasja in a more typical "dancehall" look.
Natasja was not just a star in Denmark, but also "the first non-Jamaican reggae/dancehall artist ever to win the Jamaican 'Irie FM Big Break Contest,'" according to wikipedia.Here's the "official" video, in which Natasja appears. Pretty typical dancehall fare, I guess: one guy in a suit, ogling all the beautiful semi-dressed female bodies.
Natasja was killed in a car wreck in Jamaica in June 2007. "Calabria" was already a global hit by that time; in January 2008, it hit Number One on Billboard's Hot Dance Airplay.
And for those of you who are a little slow on the uptake when it comes to Jamaican patois (as I certainly am), here are the lyrics you hear on the Target ad:
Easy now no need fi go down (2x)
Rock that run that this where we from
Whoop Whoop, when you run come around,
Cu(z) I know you're the talk of the town, yeah
Best shown overall, shiny and tall,
One touch make a gal climb whoever you are,
Brass hat, hatter than fireball
Whoop Whoop!
You not small you no lickle at all
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
more on Palestinian Olympians
Courtesy Kibbush. Below is an excerpt, but read the entire post (articles from China Daily and Ma'an News Agency.)
The [Palestinian] team spent 30 days at a sports camp in China where they received training from Chinese coaches. While the coaches say that the Palestinian team is talented, they lamented a lack of sports facilities and training opportunities in Palestine.
Hamza Abdu trains in a 25-meter pool, half the length of an Olympic pool.
`There aren’t any Olympic-size swimming pools in Palestine and the ones that are available here are just summer swimming pools and small ones, and Palestinian swimmers are training in these inadequate pools. In addition, their trainers aren’t of a high enough standard,` said Palestinian sports exert Omar Al-Jafari, who works for Ma`an News Agency in Bethlehem.
`Regarding the runners I can say that unfortunately there aren’t any full-size tracks for them to run into in all of Palestine, and runners just train in any place that they find suitable to run, sometimes in streets crowded with cars,` added Al-Jafari.
Ghadir Al-Ghrouf, the sprinter from Jericho, trains on a dirt track. Nader Al-Masri, the Gazan who plans to compete in the 5km running event, trains by jogging halfway down the 40km Gaza Strip.
The [Palestinian] team spent 30 days at a sports camp in China where they received training from Chinese coaches. While the coaches say that the Palestinian team is talented, they lamented a lack of sports facilities and training opportunities in Palestine.
Hamza Abdu trains in a 25-meter pool, half the length of an Olympic pool.
`There aren’t any Olympic-size swimming pools in Palestine and the ones that are available here are just summer swimming pools and small ones, and Palestinian swimmers are training in these inadequate pools. In addition, their trainers aren’t of a high enough standard,` said Palestinian sports exert Omar Al-Jafari, who works for Ma`an News Agency in Bethlehem.
`Regarding the runners I can say that unfortunately there aren’t any full-size tracks for them to run into in all of Palestine, and runners just train in any place that they find suitable to run, sometimes in streets crowded with cars,` added Al-Jafari.
Ghadir Al-Ghrouf, the sprinter from Jericho, trains on a dirt track. Nader Al-Masri, the Gazan who plans to compete in the 5km running event, trains by jogging halfway down the 40km Gaza Strip.
Monday, August 18, 2008
My favorite Christian Bale/Heath Ledger flick
It's not Dark Knight (which I liked a lot) but Todd Hayne's Bob Dylan biopic, I'm Not There, which I have finally, just now, seen.
I thought the film was stunningly beautiful all the way through, as well as "difficult," but in a productive as opposed to an off-putting way. It helps a lot to prepare for seeing the film, as I did, by viewing Pennebaker's 1967 cinema verité masterpiece Don't Look Back and Scorsese's 2005 PBS documentary Bob Dylan: No Direction Home. And if you really want to be obsessive, read, as I did, David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina (2002).
Cate Blanchett, of course, is utterly fabulous as the mythical Dylan ("Jude Quinn") on tour in '65-'66. The photo above, which I shot, is from Haynes' hilarious fictional rendering of the Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and its effect on the folk crowd. What I don't like about the depiction is that it erases the African-American dimension of this era-changing act. Dylan's backing band at Newport 1965 was composed mostly of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which included African-Americans Sam Lay on drums and Jerome Arnold on bass. How cool would it have been if the film showed Dylan and a band that included two black Americans firing machine guns at the folk crowd! (The photo below shows Jerome Arnold on bass; Sam Lay is mostly obscured.)
The first time I saw the film, I preferred the Christian Bale role to the Heath Ledger role. Bale plays "Jack Rollins," who is both the political folky Bob Dylan of the Village days, as well as the born-again Christian Bob Dylan. Heath Ledger is Robbie Clark, who plays Jack Rollins in a biopic. I came to appreciate his role much better when I watched the film again, this time with Todd Haynes' very smart and informative commentary. Then I "got" that much of the Robbie Clark footage is shot in the style of Godard's sixties films. And that it attempts to pay tribute to Godard's mixing of love/romance and politics in those films. The Robbie Clark scenes are very effectively punctuated by t.v. news footage of the Vietnam war. Finally Todd Haynes refunctions both Godard and Dylan in that he uses Claire (Robbie's wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) as an active female agent--in contrast with the ways in which men were typically the agents in Godard's films and Dylan's lyrics. As Haynes comments, this was entirely typical of the sixties counterculture and revolutionaries--males who wanted to remake the world but go home to a cooked meal and sex on demand.
Haynes' commentary, I repeat, is invaluable. I didn't know, for instance, that the Coco Rivington character (who Jude Quinn insults cruelly) is based on Edie Sedgwick, with whom Dylan reportedly had a significant fling. And I didn't catch the references to Fellini's 8 1/2 in the Jude Quinn "castle" sequence. I did make the connection of the Richard Gere/Billy the Kidd sequence in Riddle to Bob Dylan's Woodstock and "Basement Tapes" era. (Mainly because the Basement Tapes song, "Going to Acapulco," is playing.) It helps in this regard to have read Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1998), as Haynes notes in his commentary.
With regard to the Richard Gere sequence, Steven Shaviro, in his very incisive review of the film, mentions Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which he considers "the most beautiful Western ever made." I did catch this reference, but I saw this film, ages ago, when it first came out (1973), and I didn't have the same impression as Shaviro at the time. It's now in my netflix queue, and hopefully I'll appreciate it more the second time around. (There's much more to the Shaviro review, check it out.)
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Palestinian rap: interview with Jackie Salloum
From the Daily Star's inimitable Jim Quilty (a Razorback alum), this piece on Palestinian hip-hop:
Chronicling the story of Greater Palestine's rappers
Jackie Salloum discusses 'Slingshot Hip Hop,' pop culture and art
Beirut: [Yet another] blackout has descended upon Bourj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp this night. It makes your efforts to find the Palestinian Arab Center that much more atmospheric and inspires vague hopes that perhaps you won't miss the first minutes of Jackie Salloum's "Slingshot Hip hop" after all.
You find the hall's exterior bathed in generator-driven light. The interior is dim but for the concert footage projected on a screen and reflected back upon the white plastic chair-mounted eyeballs fixed before it.
Salloum's first feature-length film, "Slingshot" chronicles the rise of the Palestinian hip-hop scene - starting in '48 Palestine (sometimes called "Israel") and the other occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
Salloum's central protagonists are DAM - who had a region-wide hit with their tune "Mean Irhabi" ("Who's a Terrorist") - especially the group's Tamer Nafar, from Al-Lid near Tel Aviv. Other profiled artists include the Gaza Strip's PR (Palestinian Rapperz), West Bank girl-MC duo Arapeyat (aka Safa and Nahwa), Abeer Zinati ("the first lady of Palestinian R&B," and Mahmoud Shalabi, veteran of the Palestinian hip-hop group MWR.
Considerable buzz accrued to "Slingshot" since early 2008, when the Sundance film festival nominated it for its grand jury prize.
The Palestinian-American multi-media artist screened her film in Bedawi and Shatilla camps as well as Bourj al-Barajneh. This tour came just after a series of screenings around Palestine, and Salloum was still radiating a high from the experience.
"Until we screened in Palestine, it didn't feel like we were finished yet," she said. "Over 4000 people came out to Nablus to see the show. I couldn't get the Gaza rappers out for the screening and I couldn't get into Gaza myself ... The shows in Ramallah and Jenin were awesome."
"Slingshot" took some time to ferment and, like so many independent films, it has an eccentric production history.
"By chance," she says, "I was in Gaza [in 2003] for the first hip-hop show there ever ... We just decided to make a movie."
"I didn't know anything about filmmaking and there were lots of production problems ... I didn't even bother reading the manual before I picked up the camera. We were working on graphics and the sound right up to Sundance."
"I have a great support group," she continues, "but basically I paid for the film on my credit cards." Though she's long since maxed-out her cards, Salloum is less interested in discussing her spectacular indebtedness than the artists at the center of the work.
"The project was a huge collaboration," she smiles, "even in the production. I left cameras with DAM and Abeer and PR. I wanted the film to speak with their voices as much as possible.
"They did start getting impatient after a couple of years. It was hard to convince them that taking a bit of extra time would make it that much better.
"But they were very loyal to me. Plenty of other filmmakers approached them in those years, but they told them, 'No. Jackie will make the first movie.' They even turned down Al-Jazeera. That's a big sacrifice."
Western audiences will be interested in the film's portrayal of how Palestinian rappers have found echoes of their own lives in some American hip-hop, but the form occupies an ambivalent space in occupied Palestine.
"DAM began as an Israeli act," Salloum says, and they appeared on Israeli TV. The most popular [Jewish] Israeli rapper is an ultra right-wing Zionist [named Subliminal--TS]. [Israeli filmmaker Anat Halachmi made a 2003 film] about him and [DAM's front man] Tamer, called "Channels of Rage."
"What really changed DAM's music was the second Intifada. That's when they released 'Meen Irhabi.' The Intifada made the Zionist rapper worse. He sings 'Death to Arabs.' You never hear Palestinian rappers singing 'Death to Jews.' [Incorrect! see comments--TS.]
"I have so much respect for their integrity. Coca Cola is a big player in Israel and they approached DAM about doing an ad for them. They offered them a lot of money but the guys told them no. You hear about that and you realize these guys really have principals, even though they're broke.
"The hip-hop is different in different parts of Palestine. In Gaza, it's harder to have shows because it's more religious, even though all the rappers believe in god. Yet it took off there more than anywhere else."
Salloum blinks in recollection. "You ask someone 'Do you like hip-hop?' and they'll say 'What's hip-hop?' If you say 'Meen Irhabi,' they'll say 'Oh I love "Meen Irhabi!"'"
"Slingshot Hip Hop" marked Salloum's second appearance at Sundance. Her first experience with America's most-loved independent film festival came in 2005, when her nine-minute short "Planet of the Arabs" caught the festival's attention.
“Reel Bad Arabs,” Jack Shaheen's 2001 study of Hollywood's cliched representations of Arabs and Muslims, inspired the short, which draws upon clips from some of the movies Shaheen discusses. A bravura work of editing, "Planet" emulates the cutting and splicing techniques used to produce feature film trailers to make a work that's funny (if you know this stuff already) and thought-provoking (if you don't).
"Editing," Salloum recalls, "taking images and placing them next to each other and setting them to music, that all comes pretty naturally to me. When I heard Sundance wanted to screen it and I had no idea what it meant.”
Salloum's filmmaking insouciance may stem from her coming to film from multimedia art. She graduated with a masters degree in fine arts from New York University in 2003.
Her work occupies the interstices between pop culture and political activism and she's proven adept in a number of media - politically inflected collages, gumball machines and flashcards as well as video.
"People have told me that 'Slingshot' is the first 'Palestine film' they've seen that doesn't make them depressed," she says. "... That's why pop culture works so well.
"When I first started, ... I didn't want to start with the Middle East because it was too close to me. My first collages worked with Latin American pop art themes. Some people hated it. 'Art's not supposed to be didactic,'" she rolls her eyes. "'We're all on the left here, so you're just preaching to the choir.'"
Salloum has an agenda but she isn't naive - being interested in how her artistic intentions are received, regardless how they're refracted through the public's consciousness.
Her gumball machines, for instance, offer art consumers plastic capsules with objects and written profiles inside. In one version, "Each comes with a magnet, sticker, or ring of your favorite revolutionary." In another, "Each capsule comes with a Palestinian refugee: Collect all 5 million!"
"A woman walked into an exhibition that had one of my gumball machines," Salloum recalls. "She put in a quarter and one of my rings dropped out. She came back with a roll of quarters and kept feeding them in one after the other.
"I asked her, 'What are you doing?' I was a little irritated, I guess, because a lot of time and energy goes into each one of those items. She told me 'I just liked to collect rings.'
"Hip-hop is like that," she smiles again.
"I don't think my work is going to change the world, that people will want to overthrow Israel after seeing my film. But if I'm going to work, it has to be meaningful. With 'Slingshot,' I also want to help the artists.
"One of the problems Palestinians face is how they're represented in the media. That means we have to make different media. Media is our strongest weapon, I think."
Having spent the better part of five years working on a feature-length documentary, Salloum says she has no plans for her next long film.
Rather, she's thinking about the possibilities of Arabic-language music videos.
"Right now," she says, "I don't want to make anything longer than three minutes."
Jackie Salloum's "Slingshot Hip Hop" will next screen in Beirut at one of the city's October film festivals. For more information see www.jSalloum.org
Chronicling the story of Greater Palestine's rappers
Jackie Salloum discusses 'Slingshot Hip Hop,' pop culture and art
Beirut: [Yet another] blackout has descended upon Bourj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp this night. It makes your efforts to find the Palestinian Arab Center that much more atmospheric and inspires vague hopes that perhaps you won't miss the first minutes of Jackie Salloum's "Slingshot Hip hop" after all.
You find the hall's exterior bathed in generator-driven light. The interior is dim but for the concert footage projected on a screen and reflected back upon the white plastic chair-mounted eyeballs fixed before it.
Salloum's first feature-length film, "Slingshot" chronicles the rise of the Palestinian hip-hop scene - starting in '48 Palestine (sometimes called "Israel") and the other occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
Salloum's central protagonists are DAM - who had a region-wide hit with their tune "Mean Irhabi" ("Who's a Terrorist") - especially the group's Tamer Nafar, from Al-Lid near Tel Aviv. Other profiled artists include the Gaza Strip's PR (Palestinian Rapperz), West Bank girl-MC duo Arapeyat (aka Safa and Nahwa), Abeer Zinati ("the first lady of Palestinian R&B," and Mahmoud Shalabi, veteran of the Palestinian hip-hop group MWR.
Considerable buzz accrued to "Slingshot" since early 2008, when the Sundance film festival nominated it for its grand jury prize.
The Palestinian-American multi-media artist screened her film in Bedawi and Shatilla camps as well as Bourj al-Barajneh. This tour came just after a series of screenings around Palestine, and Salloum was still radiating a high from the experience.
"Until we screened in Palestine, it didn't feel like we were finished yet," she said. "Over 4000 people came out to Nablus to see the show. I couldn't get the Gaza rappers out for the screening and I couldn't get into Gaza myself ... The shows in Ramallah and Jenin were awesome."
"Slingshot" took some time to ferment and, like so many independent films, it has an eccentric production history.
"By chance," she says, "I was in Gaza [in 2003] for the first hip-hop show there ever ... We just decided to make a movie."
"I didn't know anything about filmmaking and there were lots of production problems ... I didn't even bother reading the manual before I picked up the camera. We were working on graphics and the sound right up to Sundance."
"I have a great support group," she continues, "but basically I paid for the film on my credit cards." Though she's long since maxed-out her cards, Salloum is less interested in discussing her spectacular indebtedness than the artists at the center of the work.
"The project was a huge collaboration," she smiles, "even in the production. I left cameras with DAM and Abeer and PR. I wanted the film to speak with their voices as much as possible.
"They did start getting impatient after a couple of years. It was hard to convince them that taking a bit of extra time would make it that much better.
"But they were very loyal to me. Plenty of other filmmakers approached them in those years, but they told them, 'No. Jackie will make the first movie.' They even turned down Al-Jazeera. That's a big sacrifice."
Western audiences will be interested in the film's portrayal of how Palestinian rappers have found echoes of their own lives in some American hip-hop, but the form occupies an ambivalent space in occupied Palestine.
"DAM began as an Israeli act," Salloum says, and they appeared on Israeli TV. The most popular [Jewish] Israeli rapper is an ultra right-wing Zionist [named Subliminal--TS]. [Israeli filmmaker Anat Halachmi made a 2003 film] about him and [DAM's front man] Tamer, called "Channels of Rage."
"What really changed DAM's music was the second Intifada. That's when they released 'Meen Irhabi.' The Intifada made the Zionist rapper worse. He sings 'Death to Arabs.' You never hear Palestinian rappers singing 'Death to Jews.' [Incorrect! see comments--TS.]
"I have so much respect for their integrity. Coca Cola is a big player in Israel and they approached DAM about doing an ad for them. They offered them a lot of money but the guys told them no. You hear about that and you realize these guys really have principals, even though they're broke.
"The hip-hop is different in different parts of Palestine. In Gaza, it's harder to have shows because it's more religious, even though all the rappers believe in god. Yet it took off there more than anywhere else."
Salloum blinks in recollection. "You ask someone 'Do you like hip-hop?' and they'll say 'What's hip-hop?' If you say 'Meen Irhabi,' they'll say 'Oh I love "Meen Irhabi!"'"
"Slingshot Hip Hop" marked Salloum's second appearance at Sundance. Her first experience with America's most-loved independent film festival came in 2005, when her nine-minute short "Planet of the Arabs" caught the festival's attention.
“Reel Bad Arabs,” Jack Shaheen's 2001 study of Hollywood's cliched representations of Arabs and Muslims, inspired the short, which draws upon clips from some of the movies Shaheen discusses. A bravura work of editing, "Planet" emulates the cutting and splicing techniques used to produce feature film trailers to make a work that's funny (if you know this stuff already) and thought-provoking (if you don't).
"Editing," Salloum recalls, "taking images and placing them next to each other and setting them to music, that all comes pretty naturally to me. When I heard Sundance wanted to screen it and I had no idea what it meant.”
Salloum's filmmaking insouciance may stem from her coming to film from multimedia art. She graduated with a masters degree in fine arts from New York University in 2003.
Her work occupies the interstices between pop culture and political activism and she's proven adept in a number of media - politically inflected collages, gumball machines and flashcards as well as video.
"People have told me that 'Slingshot' is the first 'Palestine film' they've seen that doesn't make them depressed," she says. "... That's why pop culture works so well.
"When I first started, ... I didn't want to start with the Middle East because it was too close to me. My first collages worked with Latin American pop art themes. Some people hated it. 'Art's not supposed to be didactic,'" she rolls her eyes. "'We're all on the left here, so you're just preaching to the choir.'"
Salloum has an agenda but she isn't naive - being interested in how her artistic intentions are received, regardless how they're refracted through the public's consciousness.
Her gumball machines, for instance, offer art consumers plastic capsules with objects and written profiles inside. In one version, "Each comes with a magnet, sticker, or ring of your favorite revolutionary." In another, "Each capsule comes with a Palestinian refugee: Collect all 5 million!"
"A woman walked into an exhibition that had one of my gumball machines," Salloum recalls. "She put in a quarter and one of my rings dropped out. She came back with a roll of quarters and kept feeding them in one after the other.
"I asked her, 'What are you doing?' I was a little irritated, I guess, because a lot of time and energy goes into each one of those items. She told me 'I just liked to collect rings.'
"Hip-hop is like that," she smiles again.
"I don't think my work is going to change the world, that people will want to overthrow Israel after seeing my film. But if I'm going to work, it has to be meaningful. With 'Slingshot,' I also want to help the artists.
"One of the problems Palestinians face is how they're represented in the media. That means we have to make different media. Media is our strongest weapon, I think."
Having spent the better part of five years working on a feature-length documentary, Salloum says she has no plans for her next long film.
Rather, she's thinking about the possibilities of Arabic-language music videos.
"Right now," she says, "I don't want to make anything longer than three minutes."
Jackie Salloum's "Slingshot Hip Hop" will next screen in Beirut at one of the city's October film festivals. For more information see www.jSalloum.org
Friday, August 15, 2008
I live in US's Pakistan...
according to this map....
If you check the ranks, you will note that Arkansas is not at the bottom...due no doubt to the fact that Walmart, Tysons and JB Hunt are headquartered in the state. Given that Arkansas is usually #49 or #50 in most other important economic and social indicators, it shows that not very much trickles down from our esteemed "local" businesses.
If you check the ranks, you will note that Arkansas is not at the bottom...due no doubt to the fact that Walmart, Tysons and JB Hunt are headquartered in the state. Given that Arkansas is usually #49 or #50 in most other important economic and social indicators, it shows that not very much trickles down from our esteemed "local" businesses.
Akshay Kumar and Snoop Dogg kufiya turban footnote
Rachel, who alerted me to the "Singh is Kinng" video, has now put up her own post on the vid on The Elephants Child. Props to her alert kufiyaspotting abilities. The post is also very worth checking out for the video of a kiswahili version of Lebanese pop star Nancy Ajram's "Yay." And check out the video of the original, featuring the seemingly timeless theme of cross-class eroticism, the middle class girl entranced by the hunk in the wifebeater....
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
what else? a couple more kufiyaspottings (plus turbans)
People keep sending me this stuff. So here goes...
#1. The Akshay Kumar and Snoop Dogg video, "Singh Is Kinng." Kumar can be spotted sporting the kufiya, draped around his neck like a scarf, several times throughout the video. (Thanks, Rachel.)
Why in the world is a Bollywood movie star wearing a kufiya?--particularly when he is also wearing a turban, since he's playing the part of Lakhan Singh, a Sikh, which he plays in the film, Singh is Kinng. Is it because Singh is the king of the gangstas in Australia? Is it just international style? Or, since he's on screen with Snoop Dogg, is Kumar trying to look more hip-hop? Who knows?
"Singh Is Kinng" is a bhangra song, composed by the UK bhangra band RDB, but it's not terribly clever. Such hip-hop/bhangra collaborations seem to be getting more and more common, and there are lots of better ones. Jay-Z's collabo with Punjabi MC on "Beware" seems to have started the trend. Go here for more hip-hop/bhangra downloads.
#2. I found this video on the page of the band, Rainbow Arabia. It's one of their "influences," and it's a video that goes along with the performance of "Palmitos Park" by El Guincho. The kufiya shows up right away, as kind of table cloth, with colored feathers on it. The kufiya and the feathers show up several times, each time looking more psychedelic. It's a very "conceptual" video, by Will Bryant. Who knows why the kufiya is there. El Guincho is a Spanish musician whose music has been described as "space-age exotica."
As for Rainbow Arabia, it is a kind of exoticizing experimental band. Their press packet describes them as combining Middle Eastern flavors with American experimental dance music, according to a review of their first release by Pitchfork. (Thanks to Dave for turning me on to them.)
And catch this, the Pitchfork review actually says that the band has a "keffiyeh-fied aesthetic"!
I've not heard Basta, the EP in question. (It doesn't seem to be available for download on any sites I know.) But if you check out the band's webpage, you can listen to three of their songs. Only one of them, "Tiny Tiny Man," has a hint of "Middle Eastern" influence--the sound of the derbouka.
Not really sure how "keffiyeh-fied" their aesthetic is. It's definitely exotica. I'll let you know if/when I find out.
(Oh, and be sure to check out the 4th video of their "influences"--the completely amazing Syrian singer, Omar Souleyman.)
#1. The Akshay Kumar and Snoop Dogg video, "Singh Is Kinng." Kumar can be spotted sporting the kufiya, draped around his neck like a scarf, several times throughout the video. (Thanks, Rachel.)
Why in the world is a Bollywood movie star wearing a kufiya?--particularly when he is also wearing a turban, since he's playing the part of Lakhan Singh, a Sikh, which he plays in the film, Singh is Kinng. Is it because Singh is the king of the gangstas in Australia? Is it just international style? Or, since he's on screen with Snoop Dogg, is Kumar trying to look more hip-hop? Who knows?
"Singh Is Kinng" is a bhangra song, composed by the UK bhangra band RDB, but it's not terribly clever. Such hip-hop/bhangra collaborations seem to be getting more and more common, and there are lots of better ones. Jay-Z's collabo with Punjabi MC on "Beware" seems to have started the trend. Go here for more hip-hop/bhangra downloads.
#2. I found this video on the page of the band, Rainbow Arabia. It's one of their "influences," and it's a video that goes along with the performance of "Palmitos Park" by El Guincho. The kufiya shows up right away, as kind of table cloth, with colored feathers on it. The kufiya and the feathers show up several times, each time looking more psychedelic. It's a very "conceptual" video, by Will Bryant. Who knows why the kufiya is there. El Guincho is a Spanish musician whose music has been described as "space-age exotica."
As for Rainbow Arabia, it is a kind of exoticizing experimental band. Their press packet describes them as combining Middle Eastern flavors with American experimental dance music, according to a review of their first release by Pitchfork. (Thanks to Dave for turning me on to them.)
And catch this, the Pitchfork review actually says that the band has a "keffiyeh-fied aesthetic"!
I've not heard Basta, the EP in question. (It doesn't seem to be available for download on any sites I know.) But if you check out the band's webpage, you can listen to three of their songs. Only one of them, "Tiny Tiny Man," has a hint of "Middle Eastern" influence--the sound of the derbouka.Not really sure how "keffiyeh-fied" their aesthetic is. It's definitely exotica. I'll let you know if/when I find out.
(Oh, and be sure to check out the 4th video of their "influences"--the completely amazing Syrian singer, Omar Souleyman.)
Hiking Palestine
Raja Shehadeh's new book, Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape, was recently published in the US. I bought it, but haven't yet read it (toooo much summer school teaching). But I'm amazed to see how much good publicity it is getting, and I'm glad. I found Shehadeh's previous books to be very incisive. I used to go on some hikes with Raja (and others) when I lived near him, in Ramallah, in summer and fall of 1985. And I saw him again, recently, when I was in the West Bank. (But we didn't get to take a hike.)
Check out this wonderful slide show, from today's New York Times, with photos taken by members of Shehadeh's walking group; this video which features Shehadeh talking about his walks; and the article about Shehadeh and his book, from the Books section.
The land of Palestine is beautiful but endangered, by checkpoints, settlements, the apartheid wall, tunnels, and bypass roads/highways, built by the Israeli occupiers. Hiking the land, as the original Zionist settlers knew, is a way of taking control. Will Palestinian walks become mass activities? One can hope.
Postscript on Mahmoud Darwish: His death was covered by the US media, at least by the Times, which published this quite decent obit. (Somehow I missed it on Sunday--see previous post.)
Sunday, August 10, 2008
RIP Mahmoud Darwish
The great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish passed away yesterday, in Houston, Texas, of all places. Read about him here and here. (Will the US media cover this story at all?!)The fact that this man never received a Nobel Prize is a cultural crime. (Arab artists can only receive Nobels if they have come out publicly and uncritically for "peace" with Israel. If they are in any way critical of Israeli policies, no chance.)
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