cheese it, the cops!

Warlord and Peacemaker

Spamiola- Reporting from Sana'a

yesterday at midnight Fares Mana'a was arrested out of his home in Sana'a, just a couple of days after the London summit. You might think, yeah so what, don't people get arrested there all the time? well, this guy is a real peice of work. He is a known illegal arms dealer, on top of a "blacklist" of warlords in Yemen, smuggling arms and selling them to whoever has the green. It only gets juicier; this man is the head of the mediating committee that was appointed by the President himself between the government and the Huthis. So, there is this guy, who makes money out of selling weapons, hanging out with these guys who want weapons and are willing to pay in gold for them, appointed by President right after he put him on a blacklist.

my first reaction? WTF!!!

it's amazing how trends sweep a college campus. this week, every single girl is wearing superskintight jeans and big boots. there are hundreds of them milling about, like maoist cultural revolutionaries in their matching olive-green fatigues.

Yemen: Week's Round-Up

It has been quite a week. So here's my commentary on some of the stuff that went down:

1- Three gov soldiers were killed and at first it was said that the Southern Movement did it, then it was confirmed that it was the Huthis, then finally- whoever decides who's who- said that it is Al-Qaeda for sure. I have no bloody idea who did it, and it seems like no one actually does.

2- Links have been "found" between the Huthis and Al-Qaeda. Someone told someone who told someone who then told someone, i guess, coz let's face it, how the hell can we really tell anymore; there are factions withinboth groups now, and things are so damn hard to figure out now more than ever. Some people seem to think that there aren't all these groups; just one that really runs the show. interesting..and totally possible.

3- I have been going from one independent local website to the next- not reading the news, but really surverying people's comments; and seriously, that is the scariest shit for me, more scary than the bearded dudes in caves. People really believe in Al-Qaeda's mission, they really believe that they are doing the work of God, and are blessing them and praying for their success. That was scary thing number one.. as for number two, every Yemeni seems to fuckin hate all the other Yemenis. I guess I had been brainwashed by government "unity" propaganda like all the others, and failed to see this divide. Needless to say, the notherners and southerners would very much like to slit each other's throats- but that is not it. There are more divisions: the Hadramout people hate everyone else- they want all their oil revenues back, the South has the religious factions and the leftist factions, all fighting among themselves and with each other; add to that all the northern tribes, who are fighting wars over a well of water now and thinking of the wars for power to follow. It is really crazy. If this country is to ever be stable it wud have to become 6-12 seperate countries or so.

4- All the shit going down in the south is still in the shadows. I check their websites and they claim thousands of mid-night arrests, and tens of deaths either due to air raids or during demonstrations.

5- The Huthi leader who was claimed dead by the government showed up in a nice video that shows he only has a scartch on his knee. Again with the zombies! Oh, and he offered a truce with the Saudis after withdrawing from their land, but said that it is actually Yemeni land that was stolen, so do not question the legitimacy of his offensive or anything, that wud just make him sad.

8- One of the Al-Qaeda leaders in the ME made statements urging the faithful to kill and maim all the "infidenls" and those who work for/with them. This thing was all over the internet and spammed to e-mails. I worry about how many people wold actually answer his call.

7- The US confirmed that they're funding, planning, and sharing intelligence in the latest operation against Al-Qaeda in Yemen. Tell us something we don't know already. What people want to know is whether it's going to change anything.

8- Last but not least, the London wonderfulness, which is basically a bunch of different ppl promising the government a fat sweaty pile of cash to fight the evil terrorists. Of course, there are rules and conditions, etc etc. like the ones from all the previous times of anti-terror funds. People are so upset that the president and his gang are almost getting rewarded for being short-sighted, theiving idiots for the past 34 years. This is where conspiracy theory number two comes: there is no Qaeda, there are no Huthis; there is only opposition and people undercover whose job is to make opposition against a corrupt and oppressive government come across to the world as terrorists, so the government can milk as much money out of the world as possible. What people want is proof: that there is a threat from Al-Qaeda in the country, and that this money will indeed be spent on fighting them, and that actual results can be seen; are all of these donors going to monitor where their money will go?

 9- I still hear bombarding almost every night, and checking the news the next morning, there is nothing about anything happening near the capital, so I am not really sure what's going on. Things are calm on the streets, people are not worried at all, and there is a HUUUUUGE "patriotism" campaign; if you ain't go a flag sticking out your car, you're a commie or a Huthi.

obama needs to attack. he needs to think big and ditch the clintonism. or think small and embrace the clinton within. he must speak and act boldly. etc etc. all i can say is i'm glad i'm not in a position where i need to thrash meaninglessly back and forth in response to the whims of the polls or the off-cycle elections or the opinion-makers. politics must be the very worst career ever invented, the least compatible with anything resembling human life. my advice? bo should pretend he's a singular - i mean a particular - human being and do what he thinks is best. maybe he should boycott the state of the union address.

really these people are all like: he needs to re-invent himself right now! i don't know. would you say that to your spouse, your friend, your parent, your child? can you expect that, really, of anyone? how can a human being meet demands like that without becoming nothing at all? at the bottom line of all these recommendations is the profound slop at the heart of our era: that making assertions is merely strategic, i.e. that there is no truth, and that we are the stories we tell, i.e. that there are no persons. y'all have fun! maybe there's a basketball game on.

woman's tear in picasso slashes value by $65 million. first of all, that's ridiculous, and we won't know until the met sells it, as well it should. and second, the whole way we treat art is completely insane, or merely stupid. look, you arbitrarily appoint picasso to the status of superhuman genius, and the infinite cash is an index of the bizarre ascension to godhead, which renders the man and his work incomprehensible and worse than useless. that painting is something a human being made, in a context, for the same basic reasons in the same basic ways that people make things. it's worth $8,000, or i guess 4, now. really i seriously propose that we get rid of the idiotic idea of genius, pricelessness (=extreme expensiveness), etc and just try to craft useful or beautiful or critical objects as best we can.

plus picasso has a bit of a sucking problem, as that particular painting well illustrates, and i say that people more often pretend to be blown away or even to like the stuff or to want to go see it than actually appreciate it. it's more about peer pressure and structures of (aesthetic) authority than any intrinsic merit.

the left disaffection with obama (watch ed schultz of rachel maddow these days) is an extremely good thing. cynicism and disaffection are the only thing keeping us free, and the cult of personality and incredible optimism about the the state (coercion) as a solution for all that ails us that swirled around the person of obama (chris matthews, "if you don't believe that government is the solution, you've got no business being a democrat") are the merest love of totalitarianism. give up. give the fuck up. and let's actually get on with living, day by day.

next time you hear geithner, or for that matter obama, throw down the "populist" anti-fatcat rhetoric, laugh in their faces. or when the thought occurs to you that the republican party represents corporate interests while the democratic party represents something else, return to that piece and read it again.

the argument below is not to the effect that we ought to decentralize; it's that we inevitably will, as every big immobile thing will explode. but since i also think we ought to decentralize, i'd worry about the argument. marx is a terrible case: thousands of pages devoted to the notion that my wishes are destiny. it doesn't matter whether you agree with me or not: my whim/pathology/theory is your fate!  meanwhile for whatever useless reason i'm still trying to persuade you about what ought to happen, though normative theories are non-scientific. well christianity too etc: it's a particular self-serving pathology. oops!

so here's a little train of thought. one way to understand 'islamism' or 'terror' as it works in the mental economy of our rulers is that it performs for now the function that communism performed for a few previous generations; it unites what we oppose into a monolith, or returns us into history understood as a clash of forces, an opposition, a dialectic. leave aside the bullshitty quality of this whole (hegelian) structure of thought for a moment.

now there is one big way that islamism is not like communism: communism took the form of mega-states, squaring off against our mega-states: huge militarized institutions, immobile as mountains. islamism consists of rag-tag tiny groups of weird fanatics, hiding in caves somewhere. now one might think that islamism on that ground is a poor opponent, inadequate to drive history: the conflict is too "asymmetrical" etc.

however, the conflict is not that asymmetrical after all. they can knock down our huge buildings. the soviet union could vaporize our capital in a few minutes. al-qaeda can do that too, if they can work up the nuke. we could have vaporized moscow in retaliation, but now - as is extremely plain every day - we don't know who or what to vaporize, exactly; the enemy is diffuse, elusive, mobile.

now one thing to ask yourself: who invented all these means by which bearded weirdos could smash the pentagon? who unleashed nuclear weapons on the world, e.g.? well, liberal democracy etc: or more widely the modern mega-state. but when the technology becomes mature, it becomes cheap and commonplace and easy. i just bought an iphone for $49.99. and if the united states government were to be vaporized by its own terrible inventions, that would be justice, true?

at any rate, here's the deal: the means of destruction invented and deployed by the mega-state end up making the mega-state impossible. there could be hundreds of tiny angry groups out there bent on destroying this or that; controlling nuclear technology or the anthrax organism etc is getting to be like record companies controlling intellectual property: over.

in a situation like that, the megalithic state is impossible. you can't build pentagons: they just sit there gigantically, begging to be blasted. you can't build skyscrapers, etc. the supersize that shows your endless power is the way you get transposed into the role of victim.

so perhaps the modern mega-state really is at the edge of its end. not because of globalized capitalism or the fact that we're all uniting to save the himalayan glaciers through international regulatory regimes, etc, but because with the diffusion of the capacity for destruction, nothing really big can survive: the dinosaurs were impressive, but their hugeness made them extremely vulnerable to extinction.

al qaeda etc are taking us down a road to necessary decentralization. you put all the power in one implacable, albeit unbelievably inefficient and ineffective institution, or man. right. then you're utterly vulnerable to a thousand strange pissed off freaks. you have to distribute power. you have to respond to the mobile, distributed, multiple threats of a thousand tiny groups with mobile, distributed, multiple institutions.

so that, more or less, is how we go from the hugeist welfare/military nation/state to something resembling anarchy. however, the process is going to be unbelievably difficult as we cannot even imagine or want this sort of decentralization: the concentration of extreme power over ourselves in the hands of huge institutions seems to us inevitable. we love it and want it and cannot imagine our world without it. and yet it is becoming impossible.

the twentieth century was the era of the infinite state, of an architecture as big as nature. the destruction of this architecture is a nightmare of pain and death, and of feeling lost. but that idea, those people, that approach, destroyed itself: it purposefully but inadvertently created its own destruction, as in a greek tragedy. its end is going to suck. but it itself sucked: the modern mega-state was a holocaust, now finally being re-visited upon itself.

i'm getting more and more insufferable, gloating about climate change retrenchment. and i'll tell you this: it's going to get more and more extreme. it's going to be an object lesson in science as horseshit. now first of all, think about the function, the actual social/political function, of constantly intoning that the science is indisputable and on your side, i.e. that your opponents are irrational idiots. and then think about the scope of self-delusion, arrogance, authoritarianism. think about the real function of "education" and enforced unanimity. oh yes, and the next hysterical orgy of definitive claptrap? roll your eyes.

sometimes the use of a song on an ad will remind you of who and why you hate. i hate elton john on innumerable grounds, thoroughly and in every respect. the shit is as musically and lyrically empty and deracinated, gutless, and pointless as, say, andrew lloyd weber. and i feel that when god condemns me to hell for eternity for my...shortcomings, He will pipe these recordings in to show me that i have not really understood the meaning of suffering. listening to elton john or andrew lloyd weber is the price we pay for being white, for having exploited and raped the world. you come out of a few centuries of that and you just aren't really anything anymore: your art is a fungus of some kind.

at any rate some ad or other currently gives us "i guess that's why they call it the blues." it's a typical elton melody, which is too boring to be really irritating, but bernie taupin, the master of meaninglessness, shoves the idiocy down your throat like force-feeding a hungerstriker. um, why do they call it the blues, as opposed to the pinks, or the new york jets? dunno. they call it the blues cause it's really sad. however, it's not. i'll teach elton john what they actually do cal the blues and why, if you give me an mp3 player and some duct tape: you'll be listening to son house or howlin wolf records until we cure you of the disease that is your art. perhaps elton's greatest moment, though, is "sad songs say so much." it's not itself a sad song, and it doesn't say anything at all; it merely asserts of itself that it is sad and that it says something, as though i ran out of stuff to write about and just wrote about how amazing this very piece of writing i'm now doing really is. this fucking sentence that you're fucking reading right now says so fucking much.

maybe i'm just in a leftist mood or something. but if money is speech according to the conservative court, then constitutional rights vary directly with income. now they do anyway, always one sort of argument for programs to redistribute wealth etc. but what i'm saying is that conservatives need to think about where explicitly endorsing this idea will take them. and then let's add the premise that corporations are persons - a kind of legal commonplace, but fearsomely radical if the idea is that corporations possess inherent rights in the declaration-of-independence sense, and hence if the first amendment and others apply to them.

alright start off with the idea that i and goldman sachs both have free speech. now throw in the premise that this right varies with, ranges over, or actually is money. then my right is shockingly negligible and circumscribed. we might say that goldman sachs has ten million times as much right to free speech as i have, approximately. in part, i admit, this is simply a statement of antecedent fact rather than some sort of normative program. but these things cannot all be true at once: a corporation is a man. all men are created equal, that is, they have certain inalienable rights. money is speech.

i would like to do an excursus, for one thing on individualism and the relation of corporatism to communism, but instead i will say: the decision makes the most basic ideas on which the american republic is founded entirely incoherent. it makes the basic american political vision inyourface absurd. that, one would think, should have given the court some pause.

the immediate conclusion is that the spirit of the founders requires a total insurrection against corporate capitalism. now however you may feel about that, i don't think that that can be the conclusion to which anthony kennedy desires to lead us. so i'd suggest the need to re-think the basic thrust.

here's a quote from the wonderful legal theorist patricia williams (from the alchemy of race and rights, 1991), on buckley v. valeo, a previous political speech case. now obviously the identification of money with speech - which is at the heart of today's supreme court decision - is liable to give some folks the heebeejeebees. williams does a good job of beginning to say why.

When the Supreme Court held not only that it is undesirable to constrain the expenditure of money in political elections, but that such expenditure is speech, what does that mean? The court seems to have gone one step beyond holding that money is related to access to expensve media; it seems to imply that if one could speak freely (without pecuniary cost, that is) but could not spend money, then one would still be 'censored.' But if expresion is commodified in this fashion, then can it not be bought and sold? Is money itself communicative and of what? Is the introduction of money as a concept of expression something like introducing usury into our love lives? Can speech usurious? Is money a form of language, in the way we think of speech as language? What does this imply for oaths, rituals, the swearing of attachments?

sorry for the slow blogging; i'm trying to index political aesthetics and gear up for the semester (teachin "politics and hip hop," "asian philosophy," and "political philosophy.") i do feel that somehow i will survive the republican victory in mass, though it might be hard to push through the dangling bodies of democrats hanging from the rafters. and i just want to say this, which i say on more or less every such occasion. the thing oscillates and there's plenty of time for the next oscillation before the mid-term election. a year ago the republican party was over: for some reason everyone mistakes the momentary spasmodic jerk for the permanent condition of humanity. prediction: obama will muddle through and muddle his way to re-election etc. in fact, i'm hoping for the shepard fairey "muddle through" poster. you'd think, wouldn't you, that no one would need to be chastened by reality yet again, but human beings are unteachable idiots, and we will kill everything in our pursuit of utopia.

Al-Qaeda and Zombies!

they're dead but they're alive, you kill them and they get right back up, you never know if they're really there or not and yet they want your brain. If these guys turn out to be an army of the living-dead, then maybe we should be stocking canned food and blocking our windows...

on another note, who the hell are ppl supposed to believe now?

happy malcolm x self-defense by any means necessary day. i have a dream where we all get what we fucking deserve.

the pat robertson stuff is of course wacky. but it's also kind of touching. it's one way through this process in which i think we are all engaged at some level: trying to make this kind of shit make sense. it's a challenge, putting it mildly, to any religion that makes the world the product of a benevolent god. one factor in the growing religious skepticism in 18th century europe was a similar disaster in lisbon. the main thrust of many explanations comes back to making the disasters in some sense the product of human agency or choice or evil or greed and so on. then we would be immune to catastrophe if we were good people or if we believed the right things.

now in my view reality is fundamentallly incomprehensible and morally arbitrary. but like anyone else i have a hell of a time facing up. and it strikes me that the robertson thing - which implicitly makes haitian catholicism/voodoo satanism, and supports colonialism, racism etc - is self-serving and ridiculous. but...it is poignant, human, and it exposes our basic dilemma.

Yemeni President + Wisdome =

peace talks with Al-Qaeda!! So guys how about you lay down your arms and we just all have a big ol' hug?

The president says this the first day, and then the next, gov resources say the number one Al-Qaeda leader has been killed in the southern governorate of Shabwa. I am not sure how a terrorist group is supposed to be "pacified" and integrated into the "peaceful" political system.Alot of people are relieved the guy is dead, but also worried about the payback Al-Qaeda might be preparing.

this google/china thing is interesting. china has rather the larger armed forces. but you would have to think google has a lot of leverage. it might be hard to run a country without google: more and more, i imagine it is. and not that anyone is going to throw this on the table, but what data on the chinese state and its officials etc is stored on some google server somewhere? if google succeeded in resisting the repressive measures, this would indicate that we are entering a world in which, precisely due to information technologies,  totalitarianism is becoming impossible. however, of course then you'd have to think about google itself as a potentially repressive world regime.

Angels and Demons- Yemen

Truth is, writing here has been an eye opener for me. I think most Yemenis do not really realize the gravity of the situation. For decades a whole population has been in denial (apart from the Southerners who sometimes go on a rally every now and then and get squished right away)- it could of course be credited to the fact that everyone is constantly high from chewing Qat, or because we have this saying: "a devil you know is better than an angel you don't know" which is what everyone uses when confronted with the autrocities of the regime. This multifaceted disaster has been cooking for quite some time.

On a more funny-or sad, depending on your mood- note, the German Prime minister arrived yesterday to deal with two issues: 1)the 6 germans kidnapped by one fo those groups who seem to enjoy kidnapping expats who pump millions of euros into the country in development aid, 2)the four germans who were training in an Al-Qaeda camp. Now, the Yemenis who join Al-Qaeda are usually poor and ignorant, so i am not sure what excuse other than stupidity do these guys have!

the way they trot out dyson and other black academics at racial moments on msnbc or cnn is condescending and ghettoizing. michael eric dyson should be commenting every day on every thing, instead of just being trotted out as a token black voice.

so if you don't already get this, spamiola is giving us updates from on the ground in yemen. and it actually helps; it's the only way i actually feel i have some sort of handle on the situation. obviously one worries - though not as profoundly as spamiola may worry - about whether all hell is about to break loose.

you might tell folks to link up, or draw this material to people's attention.

one thing that should be clear is that when you double military aid to yemen etc. you don't have a clear idea of whom you're attacking or why.

"If we don't act presumptively," warned U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman on Fox News, "Yemen will be tomorrow's war."

The U.S. has already been conducting covert strikes on Al Qaeda targets in Yemen and has pledged to double military assistance to the embattled government.

one thing our person in yemen is pointing out is that we're liable to be funding a general repression and the personal fortunes of the leadership: that we're liable to be very on the wrong side, and actually to occasion a full-on civil war that we will not clearly understand.

so i was watching michael eric dyson on msnbc. he was deconstructing harry reid's notion of "black dialect": you know, more like jesse jackson or colin powell? ludacris or paul robeson? but of course in another mood dyson knows very well what the content of the idea is and celebrates ebonics, english africanisms and african englishisms etc; the dialect of the novels of zora neale hurston or toni morrison, nikki giovanni, langston hughes, etc. henry louis gates, e.g. has gone far down the road of a chastened racial/linguistic nationalism. it's a difficult question, not a cut-and-dried mistake, to talk about black dialect.

all along i tried to tell you that barack obama is a negro. but would you listen to me? geez. the problem really is that harry reid and bill clinton and i grew up in a world in which race was salient. that moment is passed; manifesting any awareness of the content of race (like clinton: "he would have been bringing us coffee"; a satatement of fact, a description of how it was), is unacceptable. the awareness that there is a social construction called race is taboo. but as you can see it can be instantly re-constituted: race is salient. the whole system suddenly re-appears in ironical form. i say it's still potentially explosive: race will make a comeback as a concept. or in a long series of rearguard actions for centuries, like christianity or communism or nationalism. maybe it wins in the end, though; who knows? america is never really that far from a race riot; if you enact it, it is real.

Updates from Yemen

Well, if no one was sure whether the government is fighting on three fronts (in addition to war with the Huthis, and Al-Qaeda) today's events sure as heck got everyone's attention, and once again, we're in the headlines.

Today, the Peaceful Revolutionary Council called for civil disobedience in the Southern states, as a reaction to the closing of five southern opposition newspapers for their "inciting violence" and "jeoprodizing the unity of Yemen". The governors of the South though threatened whoever participates in this action a deduction in their monthly pay (about $50, which is 1/4 of most ppl's salaries). The "Southern Movement", called for all possible peaceful actions to demand seperation from the North, which many a souhern website calls a "military occupation". Things seem to be firing up in the South, a smart tactic from the southerners to seek international attention while the magnifying lense is still on the country. The demonstrations in the south ended in thousands of arrests and several deaths according to "The Southern Arabia" websites. Gov resources say there were hidden arms and explosives, but the Southern Movement leaders insist that these were planted to use as an exuse for the government's violence against peaceful demonstrators.

The real problem here is that there seems to be Al-Qaeda leaders in the South, who sometimes call for such demonstrations and such, these guys cause a hell lotta confusion, because the government uses them as a perfect excuse to just eliminate the southern seperation movements, while the leaders of these movements insist they have nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, do not support it, and sure do not get anything from it (there is a refernce to the obvious idelogical difference, as most of the south still roots for a Marxist state). But, one of the leaders of the Southern Movement who called for the strike today  "Al-Fadhli" is said to be an ex-Al-Qaeda leader, and one of the people involved in the northern military invasion of the South during the 1994 civil war. Oh, and he is also a relative of the President's by marriage, used to be in the parliament, and his dad was kicked out by the Marxist gov of the South back in the day. What kind of confusinmg crap is this!

Things in Abyan went back to normal in the early afternoon. But this is sure getting more messy by the day!

roots playlist

Roots List
There's no way to make a definitive compact roots reggae list. These are great, great cuts. I like it sounding pretty...vicious, as you can see by the Marley songs I favor.

The Paragons, "Riding High on a Windy Day"
Bob Marley and the Wailers, "Burning and Looting"
Groundation, "What Could Have Been"
Black Uhuru, "What is Life?"
Steel Pulse, "Worth His Weight in Gold (Rally Round)"
Bob Marley, "Crazy Baldheads"
Burning Spear, "Door Peeper (Original Single Mix)"
Devon Irons, "Vampire"
Burning Spear, "This Population"
Prince Alla, "Stone"
Burning Spear, "Steppin Out"
Abyssinians, "Satta Massa Ganna"
Hugh Mundell, "Run Revolution a Come"
Mikey Dread, "Roots and Culture"
Burning Spear, "Swell Headed"
Augustus "Gussie" Clarke, "Rocking Vibration"
Gregory Isaacs, "Night Nurse"
Glen Brown and Big Youth, "Opportunity Rock"
Bob Marley, "Natural Mystic"
Max Romeo, "Melt Away (12" Version)"
Augustus Pable, "Java"
Wailing Souls, "Jah Give Us Life"
Glen Brown and Friends, "I'm Your Puppet"
Groundation featuring Don Carlos, "Freedom Taking Over"
SOJA, "Freedom"
Heptones, "Cool Rasta"
Max Romeo, "Chase the Devil"

something like hip hop - which i'm gearing up to teach a course about this spring - has multiple origins, and the question of where or when it began is fraught or as they say in my biz "overdetermined." but here's a good candidate. this is the pioneering deejay dennis alcapone, interviewed by lloyd bradley in bass culture. he's talking about King Tubby's sound system, or, you know, outdoor music/dance parties

"It was in 1969, around the time when reggae was starting to hit big, and Tubby's dance was ram. There was a buzz of excitement - like expectation - because word had got round all week that Tubby's was going to do something special that night. Tubby's sound was so innovative you knew it as going to be spectacular. He had four dub plates he'd made from Treaure Island rocksteady tunes, and this is at a time when you never have the rhythm on the record itself - no dub or version yet, A- and B-sides were both straight vocal.

"But Tubby did it quietly. Him and U-Roy start the dance off as normal, and after a while he play "You Don't Care for Me at All" by the Techniques, then when he lift it up to start it back from the beginning again he'd switched it to the dub version, and after a couple of lines of the original all the crowd could hear was pure riddim, then U-Roy come in toasting, and they went nuts. He had four dub plates, and for the rest of the night it must have been just them he play."

so here are the key elements that begin here: the use of technology to appropriate and alter pre-existing recordings, and the use of that as a setting for a rap or toast that runs over the record. when kool herc or flash took this up in the bronx, the primary differnce was that while tubby made his dub plates - on the fly and improvisationally - he did it in a studio. herc and flash tore down and rebuilt the song using two turntables in real time at the dance. one of the many things they have in common, however, is the tremendous emphasis on the rhythm, as herc would play the bridge or rhythm break over and over, whereas tubby simply removed the distracting treble elements.

both also used references to previous work as motivation: the crowd would get excited when they heard material they already knew, so that there was an element of nostalgia: herc and flash were already kicking it old-school with p-funk or nile rogers tracks that they knew people would dance to; same with tubby and u-roy with treasure island (duke reid) rocksteady. it was the combination of the familiar riddim and the new setting that was so effective, and many tracks (like chic's "good times" or "wear you to the ball") were continuously re-interpreted for years on end.

in both cases, the realization had to dawn that this was not just something you might do at a party, but something you might record in its own right and sell as a record. kool herc didn't think that was right. but in both cases you soon had multiple generations of layered appropriated materials etc, an archeology of sound.

at least on the popular music front, this was the first full realization that the recorded song or sound was a work of art of its own kind, its own medium, and not merely a means for preserbving or reproducing an antecedent live performnce. the way we now think about popular music for better and worse is impossible without these conceptual moves.

from Sana'a

People right now are divided in two groups as far as speculation goes when it comes to the current situation in Yemen: some believe that this whole thing is being blown out of proportion, and that the Huthi problem is under control, Al-Qaeda is just a phase that will pass, and that the government is in full control of the situation; others are freaking out, taking their savings out of banks and into chests under their beds, stocking on canned foods, gas, medicines, etc, especially those who lived through the 1994 war. This weird devide between the paranoid overreactors and the indifferent overconfident is very unsettling; you don't quite know who to believe and what to do. So i might not be buying cans of beans yet, but i'll probably put that money under my mattress.

The tricky part is that the situation is not really that easy to decipher because there are multiple piles of shit all hitting the fan at the same time: The Huthis are absolutely relentless, although one of their prominent leaders was killed about a week ago; Al-Qaeda is elusive and no one really knows how to track them down, and you could NEVER tell what their support base is like; the leftists are reactionaries and not very efficient or pressing with their demands as a valid political entity, but citizens of many a southern governorate are able to cause problems with assasinations, kidnappings, vandalism, etc. without the need for a political agenda; there is also a "mini" tribal war in Abyan that no one really is talking about, and the whole area has been sealed so those guys would keep their bullets for eachother. Not many expected that all of these issues would arise at the same time, but alot of people have been fearfully waiting for things to get out of hand because of the government's lack of foresight and planning. When all you've been doing is stuffing your pockets for 30+ years, at some point you'll look up to see urself in a big hole.

If you just ask people on the street, most would tell you that this is what happens when the government is too corrupt to actually play the political game which would insure a certain loyalty from different factions, and we're talking thousands of tribal leaders here. With repression, these concerns are always well-hidden, only the socialists et all in diaspora are talking about it from time to time, but everyone knows they have no power anymore, so their talk wil always remain talk.

As for the recent Al-Qaeda developments, everyone has a different opinion about it. Some people see a connection between them and the Huthis, some think such an idea is ridiculous (Huthis being Shiite and Al-Qaeda being Wahabi), some people believe in the theory that Iran and Saudi are the "masters of puppets" in this whole thing, but then also some believe that the whoel Huthi crisis has been created and played by the government for specific financial gain. But one thing that most people would agree with is that the deployment even of ten US troops would open the mouth of hell, for it would be the perfect excuse for whoever has any western intolerance to unleash their weapons, literally. The big problem wud be the fact that even people who are now denouncing the attacks on foreign interested would not feel so oblidged to do so if there is a US militray deployment in the country. Unfortunate as it is, it's still a fact that the hate for America, if not just out of sheeply ideological following, is either because some people are genuinly pissed that the US supports financially a government that is a tyrannical dictatorship, or because they believe that the US has a hidden agenda and an interest in the region and just wants in (conspiracy theory #1: it started with the whole somali pirates thing, and then with a guy wanting to explode from his boxers who did not even have a history of extremism). Either way, Al-Qaeda support would soar, and war wud not even begin to describe such a situation.

Now, alot of people say that there is already a military existance in the South, but no one can really prove it (other than the guys from all over on the look out for those pirates). But what I can confirm is that a couple of days ago, in borad daylight, people on the street saw huge rockets flying over the Sana'a sky heading towards Al-Qaeda targets, some resources claim those were US rockets.

Excuse me if issues and ideas are colliding in this post, i am just jotting down whatever i remember from the past couple of days.

Reporting from...

So I am not sure whether the huge and sudden interest in the situation in Yemen should make me more worried or not about the shit my country has gotten itself into. Nevertheless, that's not going to stop me from bringing you my slightly subjective peices of news from Sana'a, the capital city, by sensing the vibe from the street and from the everlasting chain of people involved in hearsay which most of the time reflects real events better than news channels do. That being said, please do not take my "reports" as an official resource for information on the situation in Yemen, because sometimes nothing makes you more biased than living right in the middle of it all. I believe it's important to state that I do not have a loyalty to any of the political or religious parties/factions/groups in the country, except that I tend to be sympathetic towards the leftists sometimes. I will try to keep my personal opinions out of my posts here unless my rants are relevant to the subject.