[BRIEF NOTE] Making Enemies

Reading a recent post at Hurry Up Harry, I came across David Aaronovitch's (linked) article for The Guardian, "All Muslims are not the same". Two critical paragraphs from that article are quoted below:

Yesterday I watched the Van Gogh film on the internet. And the first thing that I thought was that it would never have been shown on British television as it was on Dutch TV. It begins and ends with the intoning of prayers to Allah. In between, the camera passes over the woman's eyes (the rest of her face is covered) and thinly veiled naked body, her voice telling us how she has been the victim of domestic violence, of rape by a relative, and how she dislikes having to cover her entire face. When her face is uncovered, it is bloody and bruised.

What the film suggests is that, somehow, domestic violence and rape are linked to specifically Muslim ways of seeing the world and the relationship between men and women. Given the fact that the film is made by a non-Muslim (indeed, by a noted critic of Islam), the effect is disturbing. What is the film-maker's intention? Who is the film aimed at?

Aaronovitch asks serious and important questions here, and certainly Van Gogh can be charitably described as abrasive. This Salon article goes into more detail about the man, while Submission can be viewed online, at iFilm. But then, as I previously noted, Van Gogh's co-creator Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the person who wrote the script for Submission, who in fact provided Van Gogh with the idea for the script in the first place. And no, contra the implicitly racist and misogynistic arguments of Rohan Jayasekera of (covered by me here and 2), she wrote that script of her own volition, drawing from her own personal experiences to that reflects her stated positions as a Dutch politician (namely, hostility to the internal trends that could lead to the isolation of the Netherlands' Muslim community by reactionaries, and to the deterioration of the statuses of women and children within the Dutch Muslim community). Hirsi Ali is the person responsible for the film, as even Van Gogh's murderer recognized; the letter pinned by the knife on van Gogh's body (available here, 1, 2, 3) was addressed to Hirsi Ali. She knew exactly what she did.

Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali Muslim? She is; at least, enough of a Muslim to be labelled an apostate and made the subject of numerous death threats, like her Belgian counterpart the Senator Mimount Bousakla, currently also in hiding following death threats. She has a relationship to the Islamic religion of her birth, and to the various communities defined by that religion; it is an adversarial relationship, frequently shading towards hostility in relationship to certain figures and associated cultural practices. The relationship exists, though. The sort of relationship enjoyed by Hirsi Ali sounded rather familiar, actually, reminiscent of someone's relationship with something, but I couldn't identify the who or the what until today.

"if you want to stop Aids shoot the queers..." says the governor of texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that the governor was only joking and besides they didn't think it would hurt his chances for re-election anyways and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and i'm carrying this rage like a blood filled egg and there's a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and i'm waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blowdarts in 'infected blood' and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government healthcare officials or those thinly disguised walking swastika's that wear religious garments over their murderous intentions or those rabid strangers parading against Aids clinics in the nightly news

- from Untitled (Hujar Dead), 1988-89, black-and-white photograph, acrylic, text and collage on masonite; text taken from Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz is most famous for providing the cover of U2's 1991 single "One", along with inspiring an associated music video. Before he died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 39, though, Wojnarowicz had achieved a prominent position in New York City's East Village art scene, and lasting influence as a casual Google proves: a 1989 essay by Guattari, a page with quotes and a selected bibliography at ACT-UP New York, exhibition of some of his visual art at Queer Arts, a 1991 interview, a brief review of a recent exhibition.

As the above quote makes clear, even without a perusal of his body of work, Wojnarowicz had a relationship with American culture that often become violently hostile, and that was strongly adversarial by default. He disliked the reality of an American culture that was excessively consumeristic, excessively homophobic, excessively complacent: "Scientists have discovered that if the head of a moth is cut off it can still continue to lay its eggs; somehow I don't think civilization is all that different; we are fossilized before we can even make further gestures; society is almost dead and yet it continues reproducing its madness as if there were a real future at the end of its collective gestures. Until the rude shock becomes magnified enough to wake us from this sleep we will continue to have more tiresome dreams."

Back in April, I noted in my post "Religion(s) of Peace, Religion(s) of Hate" that there is no such thing as an ideological system that exists entirely detached from messy reality, and that honest protagonists of any ideological system must recognize this reality, and this reality's consequence that the ideological system is responsible for bad acts committed in its name as well as the good. Islam encompasses Margaret Hassan and her killers; Marxism counts in its rank literary theorists and gulag guards; free-market capitalists should acknowledge New Zealand's experiences before claiming universal success.

I'd go further, and suggest that any ideological system has to be seen, by objective observers, as including its fiercest critics as well as its strongest supporters. Hirsi Ali has a relationship with Islam that is recognized by Muslims; Wojnarowicz (had in life, has even now) a relationship to American culture. Excluding the one or the other from those communities on the grounds of their hostilities is a senseless act, something that isn't a defensible act for anyone who claims objectivity and is borderline even for a given community's protagonist.

One more preliminary, uncontestable, conclusion, though: No enemy is so fierce as the former comrade-in-arms who was forced out into the cold.

EDIT (12:36 PM) : Minor errors including date changed.

[BRIEF NOTE] Mashups and Popular Culture: Future Creativities Realized

Of late, whenever I've been at the Grey Region I've been listening to mashups. I last wrote about mashups (briefly put, innovative mixes which fuse two or more songs into one) in June, in my mashup-style review of Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory and Barnes' The Merchants of Souls. At first, I listened to them simply because these songs were readily available in mp3 format and could be played with a minimum of fuss. More recently, I think I've become a significant fan.

There's some places you should visit if you're interested in this genre. Mashmix is a good site to start, while DJ Matt Hite's site has good links to a wide variety of sites, while McSleazy and Bumtschak host a variety of interesting remixes and mashups. A few songs have caught my fancy. There's "What Have I Done to Deserve Another Slow Boot?" (mp3 format), combining the Pet Shop Boys' 1987 hit with Dusty Springfield "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" with Kylie Minogue's recent "Slow." DJ Zebra's "Come Together" is an interesting fusion of the Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" and the Beatles' "Come Together." The Thin Gold chain mashup "Sweet Insomnia", which mixes Faithless' "Insomnia" with the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" has been a long-time favourite of mine. A more recent favourite of mine is DJ Matt Hite's "Model Goes Missing", which weaves together Everything But the Girl's "Missing" with Hite's remix of Kraftwerk's "The Model" to make a passionately and sparsely melancholy song.

My favourite mashup, I have to admit, is Bumtschak's "The Boy Will Make Me Crazy" (mp3 format), a mashup of Felix's 1992 song "It Will Make Me Crazy" with Brandy and Monica's 1998 summer hit "The Boy Is Mine." I remember driving down a North Shore road with my coworkers that summer, fresh from the summer-end outing hosted by my Tourism manager at her North Shore residence in Rustico, the lush green of farmers' fields to either side and the blue sea hemmed in my red cliffs behind us, listening to "The Boy Is Mine" over Magic 93. At the song's end, one of my coworkers concluded that the song was pure cheese. Which it was, and which this mashup is. It isn't a mildly exotic cheese like Gouda, either, but rather something that comes sprayed out of a can. And it is so good.

In last Saturday's The Globe and Mail, there was an interesting article ("Who are they to say that Britney's trash?") examining the question of what exactly was durable in popular culture. The author, Carl Wilson, argued that there was a bias in North American culture towards denigrating the popular musics enjoyed by "girl people, or black people, or gay people," and a tendency to cling to more traditional He cited the failure of the house, trance, jungle, and other related popular musics assigned the genre of "electronica" to successfully cross the Atlantic, arguably because of the late-1970s backlash against disco music (itself closely identified at the time with unpopular gays), as a data point in his thesis' favour. It's in the margins, Wilson suggests, in the authentic margins of ignored and denigrated identity groups, that truly innovative creative projects are produced.

Here, I have to admit that after their second album Radiohead's music has struck me as meandering, obscure to the point of incomprehensibility, and horribly self-indulgent. Good vintage 1980s stuff or more recent electronica of various kinds has consistently struck me as more innovative, exciting, and enjoyable. What is it about Radiohead, anyway?

Wilson concludes his article by talking about the career of the late American musician Arthur Russell, who before his 1992 death from AIDS managed to produce an extensive discography. Almost a member of the Talking Heads, Russell's solo work reflected his location in a time and place (late 1970s New York City) where borrowing across genres (of music, of art, of literature) was possible, as Andy Battaglia describes in his 2004 Slate article "Disco Fever".

Russell's era marked a time when pop music and art music and dance music had not yet been divided. This was the freewheeling downtown New York where disco was in bed with everything that moved: from the roly-poly pop of Talking Heads to the fitful dance-rock of James Chance and the Contortions to the rhythm-bandit exploits of unsung acts who worked up to the point where rock recoiled from the notion of "dance music" and disco splintered into house, electro, techno, and so on.

The samples of Russell's work available via Battaglia's article interest me, although they don't strike me as being immediately compelling. Russell's sound, though, has a playful syncretism that's decidedly futuristic; or rather, was futuristic in the 1980s. Mashups have realized, in a different fashion, Russell's musical imagination. From one data point to another, a trend can be traced connecting the two. (Ending where, mashups regularly in the top ten? Perhaps the mashup review as an established convention of literary commentary?)

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tried to write his 1995 Millennium from the perspective of the galactic museum-keepers, blessed with a vantage point far in the future so as to enjoy the advantages of the longue durée in determining trends in human civilization over entire centuries. To my mind, Fernandez-Armesto succeeded interestingly. You don't need Fernandez-Armesto's vast sweep for studies of contemporary popular culture, but it's a good idea to possess some fragment of his superlative trend-tracking ability.

[BRIEF NOTE] Ukraine's Underestimated Strength

Yesterday, Nick Barlow quoted from Green Mars, the final novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy of Martian colonization and settlement.

She could have kissed him. Instead she nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and went to the doorway to the living room. Jackie was still in the midst of her exhortation, and it gave Maya the greatest of pleasure to interrupt her: "The demonstration's off."

"What do you mean?" Jackie said, startled and annoyed. "Why?"

"Because we're having a revolution instead."

That seems to be what the Ukrainians are doing, after more than a decade of economic decline and dubiously authoritarian politics. (Nick Barlow has another relevant quote, this one from V for Vendetta). The ultimate outcome of the situation is uncertain, though the fact that the Ukrainian Supreme Court has blocked Yanukovych's inauguration can be taken as a hopeful sign. A variety of blogs are covering the Ukrainian situation in detail, including the Head Heeb (1, 2), Far Outliers (1, 2), and most prominently, A Fistful of Euros (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Dragan Antulov has also made an interesting post on Ukraine's future, examining its status as a frontier zone and as an internally divided land.

Ukraine, as it is pronounced in Croatian, sounds very much like "Krajina", which is the word for "Frontier". Whatever happens with this elections, this is the fate that awaits that country – Ukrainians are either be Russian buffer zone towards NATO and West or NATO/EU buffer zone against Russia. It is understandable why so many in EU want Yuschenko to win this contest – idealists want new, big and nuclear-armed addition to future European superpower, while realists see Ukraine as some kind of European Mexico – source of cheap labour and cannon fodder which happens not to be tainted with Islamic fundamentalism. US administration, on the other hand, tries to use Ukraine in order to improve its standing with Europeans and world leftists by standing on the side of liberal democracy. Both USA and EU also want to re-establish some its great power prestige at the expense of weakened Russia.

Another thing seems very likely. Whoever won this elections had rather slim margin and whoever wins post-election stand-off would have to deal with the country bitterly divided on sectarian and ethnic lines. Unlike Serbia, Georgia and East European countries in 1989, there won't be any magical "velvet" or "rose" revolution to instantly transform authoritarian regime into liberal democracy. If some kind of meaningful compromise isn't reached very soon, all kinds of unpleasant scenarios, ranging from military dictatorship, civil war and Yugoslavia-style break-up, are likely.

And indeed, the BBC Online article "Ukraine: a divided country" (via pompe) makes it clear that Victor Yushchenko's orange dominates the north and west of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych's blue the south and east. This distinction maps fairly well onto Ukraine's ethnolinguistic divide; the areas of the north and west, with populations largely Ukrainian in ethnicity and language save for certain minorities (Magyar, Polish) in the far west, voted for Yushchenko, while the more ethnically complex and linguistically Russophone areas of the south voted for Yanukovych. The recent Reuters article "Fears of Ukraine Split After Disputed Election" goes into more detail of this sort.

This analysis is flawed, though. The Reuters article I reference above claims that the "west is home to Ukraine's large eastern-rite Catholic minority, having been ruled by Poland and Austria-Hungary at different times[, and] feels distinctly part of central Europe." As this map makes clear, though, only a comparatively small portion of Ukraine was ruled directly by Austria-Hungary. Kyyiv--also known as Kiev--left Polish rule in 1648; the Ukrainian lands east of Kyyiv fell to Russia at a still earlier date. Certainly, the legacy of Austro-Hungarian rule and Polish influence played; I argued in my recent post on Belarus and Russia that the lack of comparable influence may have doomed the Belarusians towards a strongly Russophile and Russophone identity. Austria-Hungary, however, certainly cannot explain why Kyyiv and Chernihiv are strongholds of modern Ukrainian nationalism and Yushchenko supporters.

As for ethnic tensions, Taraz Kuzio's 2000 note "The Myth of Russophone Unity in Ukraine" makes the very important point that speakers of the Russian language in Ukraine do not constitute a unified body, but in fact (as in Kyyiv) often prefer Ukrainianization measures. Graham Smith's July 1997 "Rethinking Russia's post-Soviet diaspora" goes into further detail about the fragmented nature of the Donetsk Basin's Russophone community. Further, Ukrainian and Russian ethnic identities are not nearly so distinct as (say) Serb and Croat identities, or even Baltic and Russian identities; many Ukrainians are Russophone, there is a high rate of intermarriage across ethnicities, and there are low and readily permeable ethnic frontiers. Paul S. Pirie's 1996 "National identity and politics in Southern and Eastern Ukraine" and Stephen Rapawy's 1997 "Ethnic Reindentification in Ukraine" presage the findings from the 2003 census, which recorded sharp shifts upward in the proportion of self-identified ethnic Ukrainians and speakers of Ukrainian even as the total population contracted by more than 6%. Ukraine's ethnic frontiers are porous; Ukrainians themselves are a highly mobile people. Ethnic and even linguistic identity in Ukraine is fluid, and this fluidity definitely plays to the advantage of the Ukrainian nation-building project. How else to explain the popularity of Ukrainianization measures in Kyyiv, a city mostly Russophone by language (if mostly ethnic Ukrainian by population)?

I'm skeptical, in short, that Ukraine is at real risk of splitting apart along ethnolinguistic-cum-political lines. And yet, I can't help but remember Andrew Wilson's The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, which suggested that the most likely and the most stable course for Ukraine would be a broadly centrist position, relying on slow Ukrainianization and a Ukrainian balancing act between the European Union and Russia. Going to one extreme (a strongly Ukrainianizing regime intent on immediate European integration) or another (a strongly Russophile regime intent on Eurasian integration) could, Wilson suggested, disturb the equilibrium. Mass secessions wouldn't be the result so much as growing alienation, the formation of more coherent ethnic groups with stricter frontiers. This would be a problem for Ukraine, needless to say.

And yet, as destabilizing as the events of November and December 2004 could be for the long-term future of Ukraine, there is no way I can do anything but wish the protesters in Kyyiv and L'viv and dozens of other cities around Ukraine, Europe, and the world the best of luck. Ukrainians deserve to live under a democratic polity in a liberal society just as much as Poles, or Russians, or Canada. Long live free Ukraine!