Friday, November 28, 2003
This is good enough to copy it entirely:
In a few hours I'm meeting a man to talk about a job. The interview will take place in a massive building in midtown Manhattan. I'll wear a blazer, but no tie, and go through security, where my bag will be explored by a tired-looking guard, and I'll receive a nametag. If I get the job, I'll spend a few weeks helping a team of people design a software application. The application will in turn help men and women manage mutual funds worth one or two billion dollars a shot.
My work will be in Manhattan, but it might as well be in another country, where money is no longer the stuff used to buy a sandwich or pay your health insurance, but rather, a fluid, strange, almost magical element, with a language all its own. Whenever I work in finance, I realize that the dollar in my wallet, this green rectangle of paper that I might use to buy a newspaper, lives a life far more complex than I can describe. And I get a little jealous of it.
As a member of the middle class I buy things. But the rich do things with their money. I've watched wealthy men and women turn a million dollars into respect, a partnership, a new business. They convert their funds into opportunities and relationships, translate cash into power, amplify their ideas into businesses, summer cottages, and tax shelters.
I've tried to understand how they work. After all, these are the people that run the world, or at least they act like the do. I've tried to fathom the stock market, the derivatives, the mergers, all the voodoo of accounting, but in the end, I realized, it's simply people in conversation, communicating in a stream of checks and balance sheets, shaking hands and making cell phone calls.
I tried once to imagine the path that a dollar takes when it leaves my wallet, when I buy a can of soup. It goes to the cashier, and then to the bank, and then it turns into a bit of light, traveling through the world's networks, spreading out through loans and the larger money supply, dented by interest rates, skimmed and re-skimmed in fractional percentages, hopping continents at light speed.
I've tried to learn the language of money, to fake the speech of the financiers, but I've had to accept that money is simply not a medium in which I can work. I am not a native speaker, and my middle-class accent betrays my ignorance. When I hear “a hundred million dollars,” I think of a hundred million loaves of bread, a hundred million cans of soup on sale. I can't help it. Whereas my clients, who hire me and thus pay for my apartment and my cans of soup, are the ones who can think in money-as-light, money as signal, and know how to listen for opportunity, endlessly seeking their percentage, their commission, their reward for being a native speaker.
(Source here)
In a few hours I'm meeting a man to talk about a job. The interview will take place in a massive building in midtown Manhattan. I'll wear a blazer, but no tie, and go through security, where my bag will be explored by a tired-looking guard, and I'll receive a nametag. If I get the job, I'll spend a few weeks helping a team of people design a software application. The application will in turn help men and women manage mutual funds worth one or two billion dollars a shot.
My work will be in Manhattan, but it might as well be in another country, where money is no longer the stuff used to buy a sandwich or pay your health insurance, but rather, a fluid, strange, almost magical element, with a language all its own. Whenever I work in finance, I realize that the dollar in my wallet, this green rectangle of paper that I might use to buy a newspaper, lives a life far more complex than I can describe. And I get a little jealous of it.
As a member of the middle class I buy things. But the rich do things with their money. I've watched wealthy men and women turn a million dollars into respect, a partnership, a new business. They convert their funds into opportunities and relationships, translate cash into power, amplify their ideas into businesses, summer cottages, and tax shelters.
I've tried to understand how they work. After all, these are the people that run the world, or at least they act like the do. I've tried to fathom the stock market, the derivatives, the mergers, all the voodoo of accounting, but in the end, I realized, it's simply people in conversation, communicating in a stream of checks and balance sheets, shaking hands and making cell phone calls.
I tried once to imagine the path that a dollar takes when it leaves my wallet, when I buy a can of soup. It goes to the cashier, and then to the bank, and then it turns into a bit of light, traveling through the world's networks, spreading out through loans and the larger money supply, dented by interest rates, skimmed and re-skimmed in fractional percentages, hopping continents at light speed.
I've tried to learn the language of money, to fake the speech of the financiers, but I've had to accept that money is simply not a medium in which I can work. I am not a native speaker, and my middle-class accent betrays my ignorance. When I hear “a hundred million dollars,” I think of a hundred million loaves of bread, a hundred million cans of soup on sale. I can't help it. Whereas my clients, who hire me and thus pay for my apartment and my cans of soup, are the ones who can think in money-as-light, money as signal, and know how to listen for opportunity, endlessly seeking their percentage, their commission, their reward for being a native speaker.
(Source here)
Yamaha has a new software that can actually sing. After a moment of disbelief (every average computer user has heard a voice synthetizer, and knows how inhuman they are), I heard the demos. Simply incredible, stunning, realistic to the slightest detail. You could even make someone be moved by a music sung by your cold computer...
Thursday, November 27, 2003
Some words more about celebrity leaders with strong political convictions. I wrote a couple of days ago about Bono and Thom Yorke, two rock stars against the establishment, to use a silly expression. I said that those were somehow the two ends of the same model line, and that it's not easy to stand in such position, because they're stinking rich after all. In the Guardian chat, someone said to Yorke "No one wants to hear some stupid rich rock star complain about the evils of capitalism", and Yorke answered "Please don't come to our shows. Please don't buy our records." Some other guy corrected "I want to hear a smart rich rock star complain about the evils of capitalism", but the problem is still there, and can be expressed like this: Radiohead is a big seller, how on Earth dare they to complain about capitalism? Then I remembered about a case that was a big fuss in its time: the Canadian collective called "Godspeed you black emperor!", in a famous interview for a Dutch magazine, said the words that were the conversation piece of the moment:
Radiohead is nothing but a bunch of hypocrites and liars. They are crazy enough to think that everything they say is taken seriously, despite the fact that they belong to a multinational.
The reaction was huge. So huge that Efrim, the leader of the group who denies being the leader, had to publish an open letter. The letter as a whole is very interesting, and very aware of this problem:
anyone wants to punch holes in our politics, go ahead; you wanna say that we don't properly address the paradox of a "political" band making money off of compulsive shoppers or victims of fetish capitalism- guess what, YOU'RE RIGHT! we haven't properly addressed that paradox at all, and we know it (...)
the fact remains, radiohead are owned, part and parcel, by a gigantic multinational corporation, and their critique of global corporatism is tainted by that one harsh reality...
I know it's easier to be a critic when you're a relatively small band like G.Y.B.E., but the bottom of truth remains. You can't mix politics and music, you can't speak against money when you use limousines to move from one place to another. But you also can't be in the other end critizising, because everyone will express the same reaction:
that politics get in the way of music, that any band with any sort of political awareness, however fuzzy, is either completely naive and clueless or completely full of shit...
So that's the trap of capistalism: if you speak against it, either you are in the resentful corner (as I've been told once: "you speak against the United States because you live in a third world country and you're envy of our comfort"), or you have no right to speak because you used the system to reach the place you're speaking from. The sad thing is this example: two people against the same problem, fighting each other to see who has more rights to speak.
Radiohead is nothing but a bunch of hypocrites and liars. They are crazy enough to think that everything they say is taken seriously, despite the fact that they belong to a multinational.
The reaction was huge. So huge that Efrim, the leader of the group who denies being the leader, had to publish an open letter. The letter as a whole is very interesting, and very aware of this problem:
anyone wants to punch holes in our politics, go ahead; you wanna say that we don't properly address the paradox of a "political" band making money off of compulsive shoppers or victims of fetish capitalism- guess what, YOU'RE RIGHT! we haven't properly addressed that paradox at all, and we know it (...)
the fact remains, radiohead are owned, part and parcel, by a gigantic multinational corporation, and their critique of global corporatism is tainted by that one harsh reality...
I know it's easier to be a critic when you're a relatively small band like G.Y.B.E., but the bottom of truth remains. You can't mix politics and music, you can't speak against money when you use limousines to move from one place to another. But you also can't be in the other end critizising, because everyone will express the same reaction:
that politics get in the way of music, that any band with any sort of political awareness, however fuzzy, is either completely naive and clueless or completely full of shit...
So that's the trap of capistalism: if you speak against it, either you are in the resentful corner (as I've been told once: "you speak against the United States because you live in a third world country and you're envy of our comfort"), or you have no right to speak because you used the system to reach the place you're speaking from. The sad thing is this example: two people against the same problem, fighting each other to see who has more rights to speak.
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
When I met the Slavic portion of the world that belongs to the Balkan countries, I couldn't avoid to like it. Music and culture, all brought to me for the first time through Bregovic and Kusturica, respectively, poured into my life. It was, naturally, by the times of the Sarajevo days, and Buenos Aires was boiling with Balkan war movies like "Perfect circle", "Miss Sarajevo", "Ulysses' gaze", "Before the rain", and a long et cetera. I first heard Goran Bregovic in one of those films, Kusturica's "Underground", and fell in love with his music. So naturally I ran to buy the soundtrack, and my first impression was "this guy has too much music inside him, coming out whether he wants it or not". Besides the cultural difference that makes any "ethnic" music ("world music", people would say these days) very attractive for a lot of people including me, I was paralyzed by his baroque orchestration, and by his inner musicality. For the first item, I once tried to record a guitar version of one of his songs (check the music section), and realized how complex were his arrangements, far more than what you can perceive at "first audition". For the fuzzy second item, I thought that songs like "Mesecina" or "Kalashnikov" were extraordinary, very musical, and I always wondered which part was folklore backgorund and which was his own authorship. So I went on buying his records. Soon I couldn't help but notice his particular reuse of ideas, to put it mildly. On the one hand, no song was ever at the level of those I liked from Underground. On the other, I often found the same song played in two or more records (notoriously in the album with Kayah), with different arrangements or sung in another language, but finally the same song across different albums. That same song was never "Mesecina" or "Kalashnikov", the ones that made him famous. Later, I began to dig on his mate's band, Kusturica's "Non Smoking Band". When Bregovic and Kusturica decided not to work together anymore, Kusturica took a gipsy-punk band of his youth and made them record songs for his new movies. When I went to see them live, I couldn't fail to recognize some songs that were slightly disguised versions of those in questions: Mesecina, Kalashnikov. I bought the Non Smoking Band record, and in the booklet there was no mention to the fact that such songs were Bregovic's. Mistery grew up. I saw Bregovic in concert in Buenos Aires, playing reluctantly those songs, those that all the people were asking for, naturally. Finally I saw the light, or part of it: I found the famous Claude Cahn article about how Bregovic stole and cheated Bajramovic. We can read there that Kalashnikov and Masecina are not Bregovic's:
(...) the "folk songs" which Bregovic plunders are, in many cases, not actually folk songs, if one takes a folk song to be something of anonymous authorship, sung by the people since time immemorial. Some of them are stolen from the world of contemporary Romani pop. Take, for example, "Mesecina", the third song on the Underground soundtrack. The original melody is a ditty called "Djeli Mara", full of piano flourishes, a puccini violin line and somewhat pedantic tempo changes. The electric drum machine keeping the rhythm assures its irrelevance for the mass market. In the Bregovic rendition, "Mesecina" is re-folkified by being performed by a brass band, but Bregovic has a keen ear for the slick sound of the market, and so overlays "Mesecina" with multiple extra layers of horns. With the benefit of recording techniques not generally available to small town brass bands, Bregovic's Mesecina sounds like a herd of stampeding elephants. This lifts the piece out of folk obscurity and into European vogue.
When Cahn discovers this (he's some kind of lawyer for the rights of the Romani people), he goes to visit the original author of that Djeli Mara, a guy called Saban Bajramovic. He finds that Bajramovic doesn't want to be "defended", nor sue Bregovic at all. Cahn bitterly concludes that Bajramovic (he pictures him in a house full of poverty and children) was fooled by Bregovic (pictured as a rich in Paris, living a totally non-Yugoslavian life selling the distorted culture of his country).
When I could finally hear Bajramovic's "Mesecina", I realized that the essential song was there, what was important and attractive was there, but in a shape that nobody would have bought it. In Cahn's own words:
(...) many non-Roma -- especially non-Romani Yugoslavs -- cannot stomach listening to him [Bajramovic]. In the first place, he sings ballads in a language they can't understand. More importantly, his whole atmosphere is drenched in Gypsiness, and anti-Romani sentiment is presently at high tide in Central and Eastern Europe. With his gold tooth and his Muslim name, he is the epitome of Romani strangeness all over the former Yugoslavia -- a kind of too-familiar false Turkish exoticism. Hence the role for a cultural translator. A talented composer like Bregovic can take Bajramovic's genius for pop melody and render it suitable for non-Romani audiences.
Naturally, he can't keep from adding
And make a lot of money in process.
But he was right: Bajramovic's "Djeli Mara" is only palatable once you heard Bregovic's Mesecina (curious how a song can shed some new light over a previous song, like two steps in a ladder). So one may think that Bregovic is rich, stepping over the heads of Kusturica -now not as famous as in times of Bregovic, and without him- and Bajramovic -a local star fooled-, and that's it, but this is more complex. Saban Bajramovic sings in both last albums of Kusturica and Bregovic, and even toured Europe with the latter. So the relationship between Bajramovic and Bregovic is at least healthy. To Cahn, the relationship with Kusturica is purely a commercial deal:
(...) Saban is just a not-very-prominent component of the Kusturica tapestry -- a well-woven vision of Romani life seen from the outside, in two colorful dimensions.
He extends this critic to Kusturica's movies as well, of course:
Definitely. Kusturica's medium is wild, funny, endearing, stupid, clever, scheming, violent, venal, lazy, eccentric, innocent, depraved, passionate Gypsies and everything gadje (non-Roma) love to believe about them. Kusturica's brilliance is to dive headfirst into stereotypes and exploit them to their fullest in the service of propelling a story forward.
So coming back to the beginning, it turns out that all of what struck me about the Balkan world at first was perfectly fake. Fake is Kusturica's view on Yugoslavia, fake is Bregovic's music, just an overproduced Hollywood score. Some saw the two Bregovic concerts in Buenos Aires as identical, separated by two years: the acting of a professional performer to entertain foolish people who believe in the magic of world music, this time with a denigrative shade over that expression. Is there anything more to add? Oh, yes, we were thousands, dancing and singing at his concert, right.
(...) the "folk songs" which Bregovic plunders are, in many cases, not actually folk songs, if one takes a folk song to be something of anonymous authorship, sung by the people since time immemorial. Some of them are stolen from the world of contemporary Romani pop. Take, for example, "Mesecina", the third song on the Underground soundtrack. The original melody is a ditty called "Djeli Mara", full of piano flourishes, a puccini violin line and somewhat pedantic tempo changes. The electric drum machine keeping the rhythm assures its irrelevance for the mass market. In the Bregovic rendition, "Mesecina" is re-folkified by being performed by a brass band, but Bregovic has a keen ear for the slick sound of the market, and so overlays "Mesecina" with multiple extra layers of horns. With the benefit of recording techniques not generally available to small town brass bands, Bregovic's Mesecina sounds like a herd of stampeding elephants. This lifts the piece out of folk obscurity and into European vogue.
When Cahn discovers this (he's some kind of lawyer for the rights of the Romani people), he goes to visit the original author of that Djeli Mara, a guy called Saban Bajramovic. He finds that Bajramovic doesn't want to be "defended", nor sue Bregovic at all. Cahn bitterly concludes that Bajramovic (he pictures him in a house full of poverty and children) was fooled by Bregovic (pictured as a rich in Paris, living a totally non-Yugoslavian life selling the distorted culture of his country).
When I could finally hear Bajramovic's "Mesecina", I realized that the essential song was there, what was important and attractive was there, but in a shape that nobody would have bought it. In Cahn's own words:
(...) many non-Roma -- especially non-Romani Yugoslavs -- cannot stomach listening to him [Bajramovic]. In the first place, he sings ballads in a language they can't understand. More importantly, his whole atmosphere is drenched in Gypsiness, and anti-Romani sentiment is presently at high tide in Central and Eastern Europe. With his gold tooth and his Muslim name, he is the epitome of Romani strangeness all over the former Yugoslavia -- a kind of too-familiar false Turkish exoticism. Hence the role for a cultural translator. A talented composer like Bregovic can take Bajramovic's genius for pop melody and render it suitable for non-Romani audiences.
Naturally, he can't keep from adding
And make a lot of money in process.
But he was right: Bajramovic's "Djeli Mara" is only palatable once you heard Bregovic's Mesecina (curious how a song can shed some new light over a previous song, like two steps in a ladder). So one may think that Bregovic is rich, stepping over the heads of Kusturica -now not as famous as in times of Bregovic, and without him- and Bajramovic -a local star fooled-, and that's it, but this is more complex. Saban Bajramovic sings in both last albums of Kusturica and Bregovic, and even toured Europe with the latter. So the relationship between Bajramovic and Bregovic is at least healthy. To Cahn, the relationship with Kusturica is purely a commercial deal:
(...) Saban is just a not-very-prominent component of the Kusturica tapestry -- a well-woven vision of Romani life seen from the outside, in two colorful dimensions.
He extends this critic to Kusturica's movies as well, of course:
Definitely. Kusturica's medium is wild, funny, endearing, stupid, clever, scheming, violent, venal, lazy, eccentric, innocent, depraved, passionate Gypsies and everything gadje (non-Roma) love to believe about them. Kusturica's brilliance is to dive headfirst into stereotypes and exploit them to their fullest in the service of propelling a story forward.
So coming back to the beginning, it turns out that all of what struck me about the Balkan world at first was perfectly fake. Fake is Kusturica's view on Yugoslavia, fake is Bregovic's music, just an overproduced Hollywood score. Some saw the two Bregovic concerts in Buenos Aires as identical, separated by two years: the acting of a professional performer to entertain foolish people who believe in the magic of world music, this time with a denigrative shade over that expression. Is there anything more to add? Oh, yes, we were thousands, dancing and singing at his concert, right.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
The FTAA (Free Trade Area of Americas) is the topic in Argentina these days. People voting in the public squares (mostly against it), politicians and businessmen speaking in TV (mostly for it). After Cancún, the United States has a different position when talking with Brazil and Argentina. "We're closer to North America than to Europe", expressed someone from the Argentinean government yesterday. Time's passing fast, and the deadline is closing in. If it happens, this will be a huge change for us. If it doesn't happen, I wonder what the relationship will be between the United States and its backyard...
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