is a literary/cultural journal published by the SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY English Department. Current issue: WALLS. Upcoming issue: DV8. Issue in production: ABOUT SEEING: Addressing the Visual Arts.
On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, BBC Mundolooks at barriers, which are still standing -- or have gone up since -- around the world.
From Northern Ireland to South Korea to Cyprus -- walls once embedded take on a life of their own -- dividing countries, social economic classes, and in some cases, family members.
Since the beginning of the year, Rio de Janeiro has been building walls around its favelas -- shanty towns on the hills around the city -- which will eventually be surrounded by concrete with a total length of 8.6 miles.
At the end of the 20th Century, Spain began constructing barriers in Ceuta and Melilla, to prevent illegal immigration from Africa. The people of Ceuta and Melilla have paid the price of living in a fortified city.
Designed as a temporary measure to keep fighting Protestant and Catholic communities apart, many "peace walls" are stills standing. The most recent wall was built as last year at a primary school north of Belfast.
The border between Mexico and the United States is 1,988 miles long. The US government has built a metal wall along a third of it, at an estimated cost so far of $2.5 billion to prevent the arrival of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
Checkpoint 303 composes activist breakbeats and middle-eastern electronica to promote peace, human rights and justice in the middle-east.
Their music is available for free download at http://www.checkpoint303.com or Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/checkpoint303.
Here's a piece the band recently wrote for Common Ground News Service (CGNews) available at: www.commongroundnews.org
Tear down the wall and dance! 06 March 2008
EAST JERUSALEM and LYON, FRANCE — We had nearly finished getting our gear off the stage when someone from the audience came up to congratulate us on our show. After telling us how much he enjoyed the music and video projection, he added, with a slightly troubled look on his face: “…but I have a problem. Isn’t it somehow wrong to dance to music that deals with the Palestinian cause?” He explained that while he found himself dancing to some of the more up-beat songs, he could not help asking himself whether it was okay to dance to the message our music embodies.
We were pleased to hear about his ‘dilemma’. This is precisely what our band, Checkpoint 303, is all about. Instead of telling the audience what to think about the issue of Palestine, which would be a ridiculously naïve attitude, we try to trigger a reflective process in our listeners.
This same question is put to us every now and again. Obviously there’s no universal answer. Every individual has to discover what they consider to be right, that’s the point; it’s ultimately all about the process of figuring it out. But for those who feel guilty grooving to the sound of a serious humanitarian issue, we have one consolation: silly I-love-you-baby lyrics need not be the unique criterion for danceable music.
This said, Checkpoint 303 is not a dance music band. The songs we consider successful are ones that involve the listener in the artistic process, songs in which the listener participates in creating the statement, as opposed to passively consuming a message. This can only be achieved by avoiding music with a ready-to-go, prêt-à-porter, take-away message.
How can this be achieved from a practical point of view? By contrast to other forms of musical activism, we do not rely on lyrics to convey our message. Checkpoint 303’s music is primarily based on field we record throughout the Middle East, and Palestine in particular—covering a large spectrum of predominantly urban sounds: people talking in the old city of Jerusalem, a traffic jam in Ramallah, excerpts of a local Bethlehem radio station, the sound of an identity control at an Israeli checkpoint, the chanting of a demonstration in the west bank, etc. We then transform the audio material into loops, onto which we add electronic beats, riffs and melodies played on oud (oriental lute), keyboard or guitar.
When our ‘sound catchers’, SC Yosh or Cheikh Julio, are on the street with their recording gear, they are not looking for a specific sound to convey a pre-defined impression or statement. The essence of our music is to capture, fragment, and reconstruct the soundtrack of daily life in the occupied Palestinian territories. Yet we don’t restrict our music to only portraying the suffering and hardship of life under occupation. The media is doing a fantastically wrong and biased job of exclusively depicting the negative aspects of life in this tormented region of the world. By contrast, our music includes rhythms of “normal” life, the supposedly insignificant things that never make headlines, but help make possible the very idea of “hope” in Palestine.
Many Palestinian families heroically try, against all odds, to get along with their lives, educate their children, and dream of a better future—one worth living for. There are positive stories to report from Palestine. Our attempt to make music based on objective field recordings in the Middle East is in itself a challenging intellectual exercise. But, at the end of the day, that is precisely what yields the necessary degree of realism and humanity that is the backbone of our music. Our aim, then, is to blend the aesthetics of electronic music composition with the social, economical, and humanitarian dimensions of reality in Palestine in a way that actively involves the listener in shaping the message. But does this make our work political? Although it may be perceived as such, our creative intentions are not political per se. They are driven by fundamental humanitarian values. It seems to us that the universality of human rights should in theory be both the common ground and the starting point to achieve peace. Additionally, when it comes to the question of whether our art is politically correct or not, the answer is simple: we do not care as long as it is humanly correct. We are artists, not politicians; this allows us the luxury of being able to tell the truth from a humanitarian point of view with no fear of electoral consequences!
Electronic music and audiovisual experimentation are the tools Checkpoint 303 uses to react to both the virtual and physical walls the occupation has created. These walls are also being hacked by the flourishing Palestinian hip-hop and trip-hop scene (e.g. DAM, Ramallah Underground, G-Town, Arapeyat, etc.) but also international artists such as the British graffiti artist Banksy or the American indie songwriter and political activist David Rovics to name but a few.
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This article is part of a special series on Art and Conflict, which surveys the work of art in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and examines the political dimensions of art in general.
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
Checkpoint 303 collaborates with film-makers, musicians, and visual artists from around the globe. Its free tunes from occupied territories are an act of resistance and a celebration of hope.
Checkpoint 303 was invited by Massive Attack to be a support band for three shows in the UK in 2007 and in France in 2008. We are also very much into performing in alternative venues and spaces where the aesthetics and meaning of sound/noise and its link to social activism can be reconsidered and explored...
Over the last two years, the band has performed electronic and live sets in several countries (USA, Australia, Canada, France, Palestine, Tunisia, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Japan, etc.) spreading the word for peace and human rights through a blend of twisted electronica, downtempo, break-beats, oriental riffs and field recordings...
This documentary examines the turbulent life in California of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), author of One-Dimensional Man, Reason and Revolution and Eros and Civilization, among other books, professor of philosophy at the University of California San Diego, and a visionary and influential force for the student movement worldwide during the Sixties and Seventies. Blending archival footage, interviews, re- created scenes and voice-over narration, the video profiles not only the life of Marcuse but also the history of student protest and social activism. The video features interviews with Marcuse's student Angela Davis, former UCSD Chancellor William McGill, colleagues Fredric Jameson and Reinhard Lettau, and rare footage of Marcuse and former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Directed by Paul Alexander Juutilainen.
The hardcore punk movement in the 80s reached one of its cultural high points when Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics were on TV. It was a grand scandal, and so popular they were back on TV for sweeps week. With her spreading shaving cream all over her chest, being angry and rebellious, with mohawks to rival the best in Trafalgar Square, with her blowing up a car on stage--TV couldn't resist and neither could I. From my post-adolescent-male-point-of-view it was a theatre of pain and suffering, with boobs! What's not to like? At least that's how it was back in the day. These days I appreciate the best of punk for its raw accomplishments in tweeking the hegemony from within its own capitalist system, infecting even as it's held to the margins of the radio dial and cultural landscape.
There's one aspect of punk (such as hardcore punk music like the Plasmatics, FEAR, Germs, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys) that is as alive for me now as it was when I was first discovering it in the late seventies and into the eighties, and that is the humor, the ironic deadpan hilarity of this work. In this clip we can hear the band opening with a count "One, Two, Fuck You." It's not the kind of humor you'll read in the New Yorker, but it's funny anyway. I like to think about how Kafka's K would react, sitting in the audience at a Plasmatics show, feigning disgust and disinterest but mesmerized by the sexualized rebellion against the system. Either he would forget himself and dance upon his chair, get some shaving cream on his hands, or he would cower in guilty shame for having liked it. Either way, he would not leave the theatre. He certainly would not be as comfortable as that badass Tom Snyder, who had lots of great punks on his show.
The Houston, Texas musician Jandek has self-released one or more albums of discordant howling freak folk songs every year since 1978 without granting any interviews to the public.
It wasn't until 2004 that he performed live, unannounced at an obscure folk festival in Scotland. Attendant music geek jaws hit the floor as the recognition slowly set in that the gaunt nearly albino man in black playing on stage matched the likeness of the figure that would sometimes appear on Jandek album covers. The organizers of the festival never claimed to have had any dealings with anyone called Jandek, only "a representative of Corwood Industries" the record label whose sole artist is Jandek and is presumably run single handedly by the individual behind the music.
Below, Susan Sontag has some intelligent things to say on the subject:
"Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village school-teacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess. Accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he regards his previous achievements in poetry, philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance. But the choice of permanent silence doesn't negate their work. On the contrary, it imparts retroactively an added power and authority to what was broken off—disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity, a certificate of unchallengeable seriousness. That seriousness consists in not regarding art (or philosophy practiced as an art form: Wittgenstein) as something whose seriousness lasts forever, an 'end,' a permanent vehicle for spiritual ambition. The truly serious attitude is one that regards art as a 'means' to something that can perhaps be achieved only by abandoning art; judged more impatiently, art is a false way or (the word of the Dada artist Jacques Vaché) a stupidity. Though no longer a confession, art is more than ever a deliverance, an exercise in asceticism. Through it, the artist becomes purified—of himself and, eventually, of his art. The artist (if not art itself) is still engaged in a progress toward 'the good.' But whereas formerly the artist's good was mastery of and fulfillment in his art, now the highest good for the artist is to reach the point where those goals of excellence become insignificant to him, emotionally and ethically, and he is more satisfied by being silent than by finding a voice in art. Silence in this sense, as termination, proposes a mood of ultimacy antithetical to the mood informing the self-conscious artist's traditional serious use of silence (beautifully described by Valéry and Rilke): as a zone of meditation, preparation for spiritual ripening, an ordeal that ends in gaining the right to speak. So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the 'new' and/or the 'esoteric.' Silence is the artist's ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work." — Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, The Aesthetics of Silence
Documentary filmmakers Molly Bingham and Steve Connors mine a seam on the NYT video Op-Ed webpage (here via UTube); watch closely people--this is how it's done.
