Chile Rising, Rafael Sotomayor

This month, Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines released a special on Chile’s student protests that rocked the country for much of the past year and continues into 2012. With a largely privatized education system described as “capitalism’s ideal laboratory,” the cost of education is high and the state of public schools and universities in Chile are dismal. The faces of the students filmed were so bright, beautiful and young. They were demanding free, quality education to the rhythms of Chilean singer Anita Tijoux’s Shock, the song-turned-anthem of the movement, whose chorus went,

La hora sonó, la hora sonó
No permitiremos más, más
tu doctrina del Shock¹

…

Rafael Sotomayor, a young Chilean man, had moved to Frankfurt am Main some years ago. We had met him as a street musician on the Römerberg, the central square in Frankfurt when the apples were ripe on trees and the sun still reflected upon the city’s skyscrapers.

It is common in Europe’s metropolises to walk past accordionists who churn out La Vie en rose, whether you are in Paris, Munich or Istanbul, or violinists who will interpret The Godfather on a tram in Warsaw or the underground in London. And it is the same in Frankfurt, the banking capital of the continent.

But Rafael Sotomayor was neither playing a famous melody nor any common instrument with his slender figures. In fact, we had not even spotted him by the fountain of Justice when the strange and rich undulating timbre halted my nightwatcher in his tracks. It seemed to warp time and space around us, drawing us into manifold resonances, successions of low rapid notes that caressed the ear, now as a soft reed brush, now as the tap of a fingertip. The air was already cooling, but a little party gravitated rapt around the seated young man tapping and waving his hands over what looked like upturned metal woks or alien saucers. A Japanese businessman, a couple from South America, a group of Indian tourists, we all stood still before the spectacle. The weekend bustle of the crowded square seemed to fade as the young man wrought his melodies.

The audience clapped heartily at the end of the performance, and the South American couple came eagerly to him, interrogating him about his strange UFOs, fingering his CDs. They were happy to speak a common tongue and listened intently as he explained how the instruments were a 21st century invention by two Swiss makers. They were called “hang,” from the Bernese word for hand, which was the only medium used to coax sound from the instruments— all handmade to this day by the same two individuals, whose artisanal production was dwarfed by growing demand. I can only liken the sound to the Indonesian gamelan, since the ensemble is composed of percussions, but it is a pale comparison.

Purses and wallets opened and CDs changed hands as Rafael Sotomayor bowed graciously and packed his instruments. The sun had set and the wind was rising.

The affable young musician told the crowd he would be playing in the city’s Königshalle (Emperor’s Hall) where kings and emperors used to be crowned, as well as at theatre and concert venues in and around the country. He also played in a band, The Art of Fusion, composed of musicians from Poland, Bolivia, Jamaica, Spain, India, as well other intermittent artists of diverse origins.

The crowd dispersed eventually, some still under the music’s spell.

It is time we should look him up again. “Chile Rising.” It seems to describe Rafael Sotomayor.


¹ The bell has tolled, the bell has tolled
We won’t allow it any more
Your doctrine of Shock

The song makes a direct reference to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, the name she gives to the free market economic policies of the “Chicago Boys” who had influenced Chile’s development under the dictatorship of Pinochet.

Listen:

Shock, Anita Tijoux
Skies over Germany solo piece, Rafael Sotomayor
Inner Voice, The Art of Fusion-Rafael Sotomayor

Scenes from Budapest, Párizsi Nagy Áruház

«Protests before Párizsi Nagy Áruház, Andrássy út 39», 2012
Signs: “There will be a Hungarian Republic”, “Enough!”, “Solidarity”, “Democracy”, “Orbán, get out!”

Nothing betrayed the commotion outside the Alexandra bookstore of the Párizsi Nagy Áruház to its visitors but the assistants who had halted their rounds and stood motionless by the upper-floor windows. Arms crossed, their faces illuminated by the dancing lights on the trees of Andrássy Avenue, they reflected the shadows of thousands passing beneath their gaze. And as the music and chants grew more distinct, one could not, even in the opulent interiors of Budapest's own “Parisian Department Store”, one simply could not escape the sense that something was in the air.

Monday evening of January 2, wave upon wave of protesters rolled down the elegant thoroughfare towards the State Opera, where the prime minister and his coterie were holding a gala in honor of the country's new constitution, passed by his party’s two-thirds majority in Parliament. The numbers of the opposition did not cease to grow into the night, and already by half past seven had congested quite a number of side streets, including the “Broadway” of Pest, Nagymező utca, as well as Liszt Ferenc tér.

The state television channel would later air footage of nearly-empty streets along with isolated skirmishes between young ruffians and the largely peaceful congregation, the former clad in black leather, and who had pushed themselves into the crowds to stir trouble and make Nazi salutes. But as I had seen it from above and later down in the streets, the procession was by and large solemn and grave, distancing themselves from the troublemakers with “Nazis haza!” (Nazis go home!).

What is a constitution that restrains the powers of the constitutional court, the speakers asked, that muzzles the free press, the judicial branch, the independence of the central bank? What is to be done with a prime minister who strips the country of the word “Republic” from its official name, invokes St Stephen and God to bless the Hungarians? Do “Heroes, Kings and Saints,” the exhibit Viktor Orbán opened at the Hungarian National gallery on the same day, impassion him more than the economic fears of Hungarian citizens today?

«Lotz-terem», 2012

In the Lotz-terem, the neo-Renaissance jewel of the Párizsi Nagy Áruház, where I was sitting at the start of the mobilization, a piano tinkled As Time Goes By. The artist of the hall’s vaulted ceiling, Károly Lotz, must have been dreaming of the Sistine Chapel when he painted the gilded frescoes in 1884. Between the arcades, in place of Michelangelo’s prophets and sibyls, he had depicted men and women hammering, measuring, drawing, cutting, building— in a fit of national glorification in crimson lake and cobalt blue. Sipping hot chocolate in such a place, one could feel the effervescence of those years of monarchy and empire.

The neo-Renaissance palace on Andrássy út 39 that was refashioned into a department store of Secessionist expression owed its conception to the wealth gleaned from such an empire, the very same that had erected the State Opera, its ceiling also signed by Lotz. On that evening, the audience of the prime minister’s gala and the visitors of the Lotz-terem Bookcafé were gazing up at the same inherent tension— burgeoning nationalism rendered in the cosmopolitan aesthetic of an imperial multiethnic constellation.

The Párizsi Nagy Áruház and its Lotz-terem did not offer the circumstances to contemplate such paintings after the Second World War, when it was converted for some years to a book storage warehouse, no doubt at the time the finest of its kind in the world.

Scenes from Budapest, Moszkva tér

“In the old days, this square used to be called Moszkva tér”

The voice of the metro had announced the stop, “Széll Kálman tér,” just as the train pulled into the station. Nothing had changed, apart from its new and freshly pasted name. The people still arrived on Soviet trains, steel blue compartments with leather cushions from 1970, the year of Line 2's inauguration. They mounted the tunnel escalators, still interminably long and windy, at the end of which the ticket inspectors guarding the entrance still nodded a deferential “jó egeszséget” (good health) to the elderly.

From the metro doors streamed forth the passengers, among whom emerged a little boy, polar bear clutched in one hand, his grandmother's mitten in the other.

“In the old days, this square used to be called Moszkva tér.”

The boy made this remark with extreme gravity, although he was no older than three, and his grandmother, like the grannies who had overheard him, was moved to a soft chuckle.

His words hung in the air like an air of Khachaturian...

The old name plates were crossed out in red before vanishing from one day to the next. But they cannot erase the past so easily. At the bar just above the metro entrance, there was still “Moszkva tér bisztro” printed on a London underground bull's eye; across the tram lines to the market, a “Moszkva tér ticket booth.”

Or can they?

Morning breaks over the bridges, streets and squares of Budapest as Ivan Sings. Köztársaság tér (Republic Square) has become II. János Pál Pápa tér (John Paul II Square); Lágymányosi híd (bridge) has been renamed Rákóczi híd. What was known as Roosevelt tér on the Danube is now Széchenyi István tér. The nameless square by Margit bridge is baptized Elvis Presley tér. And soon Szabadság tér (Freedom Square) will cease to be, as will the poetic Pablo Neruda utca and Lukács György utca in Óbuda.

And it was so that the reigning party committed what those they condemned had done before: uproot by force, remold the memory of the people.

L'Homme révolté

«L'homme révolté», 2010

«La lutte de l'homme contre le pouvoir est la lutte de la mémoire contre l'oubli.»

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivion.

— Milan Kundera, (Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli, p.14, Folio nº1831 / The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

I remember one day, in a library in Bohemia, putting down Camus’ book and staring into the distance. The image that formed before me was that of Spartacus bound and struggling to free himself from his chains. A year later, in another country, I sketched a model who coincided with this image in my mind.

In support of the current struggle of the Egyptians and the Syrians, of all those past and present who have struggled for freedom.

And... in memory of Václav Havel, a man greater than his small country, face of the Velvet Revolution, who passed away yesterday at 75 in Prague. A man who strived “to live always in truth,” in his words, and whose legacy will be misunderstood, rejected, hijacked, by the powerful he deplored in his writings, in East and West alike...


Slavoj Žižek reviews Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts by John Keane
Read Pepe Escobar's Latin America's message to the Arab world

Six degrees of separation

«Castles on the Rhine», 2011

What does Burg Katz, a castle overlooking the Rhine, have to do with WikiLeaks? When its looming shadow materialized on the opposite shore before dawn, the passengers of the train thought: nothing. Nothing at all, except when one falls into the rabbit hole of links. The hourglass sand falls, the fern’s shadow crawls. And two names that would never have coincided in real life are on the web interconnected.

Like the legendary Rhine castle of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) where the hero Siegfried meets his doom, Burg Katz was also set in flames, and must have been a formidable sight, a firebrand and its blazing reflection in the twilight. Its destroyer, Napoleon, was riding on a tide of victories in 1806, whose crest was Austerlitz. He bombarded what previous centuries of war between France and the German princes had hitherto spared. That was how the former abode of the Counts of Katzenelnbogen (the first cultivators of Germany's quintessential wine, the Riesling), became ruins until nearly a century later when it was rebuilt as the Burg Neukatzenelnbogen (the New Cat’s Elbow Castle). Decidedly a syllable too long, everyone hence called it Burg Katz, or Cat’s Castle.

But back to the rabbit hole. Burg Katz is the setting of one of comic book character Yoko Tsuno’s adventures, L’Orgue du Diable (The Devil’s Organ). The character is unusual in that she is the product of a Belgian writer’s imagination, who was inspired by a Parisian cabaret dancer and actress, Yoko Tani.

The Asian counterpart of Josephine Baker, Tani first drew the attention of international audiences for her role on the silver screen as a Vietnamese nightclub hostess in the American adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

Set in French Indochina, Greene’s novel foreshadows future American involvement and war in Vietnam. The eponymous American is the bright and idealistic but woefully ignorant Alden Pyle, who has had no real experience in Southeast Asia.

It has been observed that his character may have been based, at least in part, on US military counter-insurgency expert Edward Lansdale, who was stationed in Vietnam 1953-1957.

Lansdale happened to be the direct supervisor of Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers, during the latter’s two years of service in Vietnam. On June 17, 2010, Mr Ellsberg appeared on Democracy Now! in front of Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales to defend the alleged actions of Pfc. Bradley Manning, arrested and thrown into solitary confinement for leaking, among other documents, a classified video of a US military helicopter gunning down unarmed Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists, to (the final link) WikiLeaks.

So there you have it:

Burg Katz – Yoko Tsuno – Yoko Tani – The Quiet American – Edward Lansdale – Daniel Ellsberg – WikiLeaks

Six degrees of separation¹

Burg Katz also happens to overlook the Lorelei rock (see previous post). Curiouser and curiouser, further north of the Rhine is its rival, Burg Maus (Mouse Castle), built in the 14th century to secure the Elector of Trier’s borders against the Counts of Katzenelnbogen.

¹Thanks to Wikipedia

of herb and forest spirals...

Walking around town one summer day, my friend and I stumbled upon a curious mound of rubble in the courtyard of a primary school. Upon closer inspection, I perceived that the pile was dirt contained by natural stones arranged in a spiral from which weeds had sprouted and flourished. My friend, a native, enlightened my notion by explaining that it was a Kräuterspirale, an herb spiral, that children had built as a school project. One finds these spirals in gardens, private and public, and they are quite popular here.

Its larger cousin, the Waldspirale (Forest Spiral), designed by (grownup) Austrian architect Hundertwasser (A hundred waters), right in Darmstadt's backyard!

The idea is that one can grow a variety of herbs from different climates in a relatively small space by placing them at different levels in the spiral. A whole herb community can thus be cultivated.

I later discovered that it was an Australian, Bill Mollison, who had come up with the idea, as part of his “permaculture design”. Some years ago, the word “permaculture” had so captivated my imagination that I was ready to set off for farms in Wales and Japan to study it (the word permaculture comes from permanent, or sustainable cultivation of the earth). In particular, I had read about a Japanese farmer by the name of Masanobu Fukuoka who had published a book in the seventies called One Straw Revolution. It was essentially a manual of techniques Mr Fukuoka had distilled from thirty years of “natural” farming— that is, farming that rejected industrial techniques of heavy machinery or the use of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. It was, in short, the antithesis of the so-called “green revolutions” that promoted modern industrial agricultural techniques in developing countries such as India in the 1960s.

At the dawn of its independence, an India suffering from famine turned to the United States for food aid. In 1960, 92% of the aid that the US provided to India was alimentary in nature. It was then that the Green Revolution was launched, supported by the American Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and India was able to considerably increase its cereal production (from 70 million tons in 1954 to 220 million today). However, the price India paid was heavy: dried-up canals and underground waterbeds, soil salinization, soaring personal debt of farmers (more than 100,000 among them committed suicide in less than a decade), an alarming rise in cancer rates in the countryside. And that without mentioning the grave repercussions at the political and social level. Many considered the Green Revolution as a major factor that led to the secessionist revolt in Punjab in the 1980s, a movement during which Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh guards in 1984, following the assault by the Indian army of the Golden Temple, a Sikh sacred site, where the insurgents had taken refuge.¹

Back to Fukuoka… one of his most cherished projects was combatting desertification through “plant irrigation,” that is, by spreading the most water-hardy plants throughout the desert first, and then using their network of roots to accumulate and hold ground water. He envisioned forests eventually engulfing the desert, although not in his lifetime.

An herb spiral is similarly concerned with water irrigation in its distribution of plants at different levels. Below are instructions on how to build an herb spiral, taken from a gardening book found in a café in Heidelberg.

Plants in an herb spiral

The upper level of the herb spiral is ideal for Mediterranean plants such as oregano, lavender, winter savory, sage, rosemary and thyme. The middle level is good for culinary herbs from the continent, such as marjoram, hyssop, basil, chives, parsley and burnet. And finally, on the lowest level of the spiral are moisture-loving plants, such as peppermint, lemon balm and watercress.

Constructing the spiral

The spiral is made out of natural stones, like a dry wall. Draw out the spiral at the location desired with a spade or stick. For the first stones, dig a foundation about 10 cm deep. From this foundation, the next levels will be built. The maximum height of the spiral should be around 50-60 cm, with the sides sloping gradually until the edges.
The space between the stones should preferably be filled with rubble. This chalky and permeable material is ideal for herbs. The rubble should then be covered with about a 10cm thick layer of earth. A good mixture would be two parts garden soil and 1 part sand.
Fill the outermost sections of the spiral with good garden soil. At the end of the spiral, one can create a small pond that collects water. Just make a hollow and line with film or simply install a plastic tub inside.


⁽¹⁾ Mira Kamdar, “L’Inde résiste à la séduction de l’agroalimentaire américain,” Le Monde diplomatique, March 2010.

Je me révolte, donc nous sommes

Occupy Frankfurt

«Printemps arabe - Asmaa Mahfouz», 2011 (aquatint study)

Mai 68

In keeping with the two-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street Movements (as of Nov 17), here is food for thought from Al Jazeera's Pepe Escobar: The West's Tragedy of Capital