I have had my first direct encounter with homeland security. I paid back too much money all at once on my credit card. They suspended it. Without telling me why. Simply called “suspicious activity.” I was informed that it is suspicious to pay too much. Any activity out of your regular habits is deemed suspicious. WTF. Really. I had to prove that I was actually paying off my bills. I was punished for taking care of my credit. It seemed too perfect.

I looked around found out I am not alone in this . Apparently, it is now illegal to go against your own grain.
It became clearer
1. The Patriot act does not make me feel safer
2. The internet is not free. Here, from information aesthetics, is a very detailed 1.1 mb .pdf map of the internet.
3. Google is scary, despite their recent gestures of resistance towards federal spying on search queries (done to prevent exposure of their extremely lucrative search algorithm). Just look here at the censorship they deploy on google searches for human rights for google china

All this paranoia makes me conservative.
Maybe it’s true, that a nice face to face conversation can never be replaced…. even if Habermas is an old stodge…

I have been asked by a number of friends over the past couple of days to discuss the conditions of the military occupation of 9 favelas in Rio de Janeiro. In my life, I have lived 5 years in Rio, and dedicated a tremendous number of energies into trying to untangle its weave to look at its fabric. I have not succeeded, and frequently, when addressed with questions as to “why?”, I can only respond with a feeble attempt at “how”.

How can Rio allow such radical stratifaction, both class and race, be so evident and yet do little to resolve or address it? How can Rio celebrate a 2.5 million reais (US$750,000) Rolling Stones Concert on the beach and allow and encourage the federal military to occupy its favelas again (yes, the military has had a presence in Rio’s streets a number of times in the past years)? How can a supposed left Lula, seen here with Tony Blair, support such action? How can anyone live in such an amazing state of contradiction and celebrate it with carnival?

The answers I usually attempt are fairly simple, and hardly complete:
Rio is Raw. It is not a total core and periphery model of a city, as in Europe or many US cities (and São Paulo). The socio-geography puts its slums right next to, and quite literally on top of, some of the most expensive real estate in the world. It is not Tokyo. It is not New York. It is Rio. And it is exposed.
But if you began to expose each of these cities to itself, you would find, on a different scale, many of the exact contradictions that are lived every day in Rio. It isn’t to excuse Rio, but it is to situate it as unique in its raw exposure of the contradictions of global capital flows and corruption that dominate our current time.

Rio is an exceptionally corrupt city. Rio is an exceptionally beautiful city. Rio is a divided city (Zona Norte, the workingclass and poor region, and Zona Sul, the wealthy). It is the heart of Brazil, the country of the “future”. It is the heart of messianism and the heart of utopianism (more so than Brasilia, which tried and always already failed). Rio believes in the future, and in itself. It is the greatest city I know, and the worst. But it is fundamentally not neutral. There is almost no middle ground in Rio. You have, or you don’t. You can, or you can’t. You are, or you are not. But, some day, if you believe, or try hard enough, you always could, you always might be. It is a city of faith in itself.

When the military, or the police, occupy the favelas, it is because Rio, like many cities in Brazil, is a city of civil societies. The federal government is fairly weak compared to the local rulling forces, both militarily and socially. Everyday life in Rio is regulated by neighbohoods and implicit cultural rules coming from a mutual (mis)understanding of social norms. Common sense, in the Gramscian sense, rules, and common sense is much more flexible than federal law.

When the government steps in, it is to impress, to leave an impression, and should come as no surprise that when Lula, wishing to appease Tony Blair and the international community, stands by his decision to exhibit control and force over his people, he is doing so to imply conditions of rule that do not, and cannot, control the people of Rio. Just as Tony Blair cannot control his own people with a terrorist Police force that killed Brazilian Jean Charles Menezes in the subway, Lula will not control Rio, nor its favelas. But he may have succeeded in leaving an impression, which was, most likely, his original desire (do you think that he actually cared that a few weapons were stolen from a barracks?).

Aside from my vague comments, I can suggest one film and two directors to that I find understand the conditions that reproduce the violence and corruption that form the fundaments of Rio (and many cities– like Washington D.C.–around the world).

Historias de Uma Guerra Particular, by Katia Lund and Joao Moreira Salles, 1999. This film comes bundled with Cidade de Deus (City of Gods), a film based upon a much more amazing book of the same title by Paulo Lins. Joao Salles is an incredible director and the foundational force behind VideoFilmes in Rio, a committed, though sometimes pedantic, production house dedicated largely to PBS and HBO style documentaries. Both he and Katia came very close to serious jail time for this film for their involvement with Marcinho VP, a druglord and self-proclaimed revolutionary.

The other documentary source I can recommend are films by Eduardo Coutinho. Titles such as Edificio Master, Santo Forte and Babilonia 2000 are key for any discussion of the social conditions of Brazil, as well as the 2/3 world in general.

I can recommend any music by seu jorge, bezerra da silva, Racionais MC’s, Xis, and many others, but I will talk music later…

I have some remorse and sadness when I see Lula’s military ‘invasion’ of the favelas. I feel just as much hope, though, as that finally the international press has begun to pay attention.

The inherent contradictions that encapsulate much of our everyday activities are apparent in Brazil, on the surface, raw in Rio. It seems to me that the more we address those contradictions so visible in Brazil, the more we will be forced to begin to address those that surround us everyday, wherever we are.

“What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new.”-Jacques Attali, Noise

Yes, we have all heard it all before. Sometimes.

Here are some resources I use for hearing and listening:

last.fm–just a great way to listen to music in a community
freesound project–post and listen to everything from fx to beats. hi-res and well documented.
odeo–Record! Listen! Share! why not?
broadcast electronics–make your life a broadcasting radio station
audacity–yes, you probably already have this, but be sure to download its export as mp3 library as well as its vst plugin library. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s free!
the hype machine–music blog aggregator. just music, but a lot of it.
free sound effects library–ok, 9/10 you get what you pay for, but for the desperate, this can cover your ass for a temp. edit.
opsound–just a great fking resource for tagged music. Just got back from the Palais du Tokio, and they love these guys. I thought it was lame at first, but then i poked around, and there are some gems.

ok, more soon…and feel free to comment (ahem) if u think this is garbage or interesting.

I just got back from doing live video an amazing show at Sonic Acts. Here’s some photos from flickr.Streaming will be up soon.

I was going to write about it, but my brief trip outside the US has reminded me again of what a tenuous position we we are occupying in the United States. I feel a certain urgency to write about the gap and my shaky zone of operations.

In the 90’s, there were claims that the first Iraq War Never Took Place.
The debates surrounding these claims (Norris vs. Baudrillard, for example) are fruitful for our current situation.

It may be said that the category of war, that is, antagonistic relations between military entities, real war, did not, in a certain sense, take place in the aerial massacres of the first gulf war of 1991. It was a ’surgical’ strike, intended to disable Iraq, and massacre citizens and the vastly weaker Iraq military. That this death was a simulation, is not, of course, true. But for those who related to the massacre of more that 100,000 Iraqis in this first war by way of CNN, it may be said to be, in addition to a massacre, an enormous, expensive media spectacle.

Critically, the act of war, the return of enemy fire, the death by military force between warring entities, was extremely limited. According to wikipedia figures, 147 battle-related and 325 non-battle-related deaths were reported by the American Military regarding its own forces. Of course, this does not state that there was not suffering, trauma, death and mass murder in the gulf at this time. The debate simply threw into question our very category of war in general.

Now, I would claim, we are at war. This is not an Iraqi conflict. The congress has declared the right of the President to seize control of the country and enter into war with Iraq. And many soldiers are dying.

An excellent visualization of the official “Coalition” deaths in the current Iraq war is available here.

If we could make claims for the nature of the first Gulf War as a simulated experience fuled by blind faith in the media apparatus, we could potentially call into question the very nature of the category of this war.

But not now. Now, we are at war. But a new kind of War.
In the United States, this war could be said to be with ourselves, our own status as a nation-state.

We have, within the Bush administration of rule, systematically eliminated most of the rights of our own citizens, as well as formalized our position as a police state locally, nationally and internationally. And we are proud of this police action. Now we spy on peace groups. We have declared a war on that which opposes war. This contradiction, open and exposed, has debilitated the defense of the Left. It is to say, “Yes, we are breaking the laws we created. So what? What are you going to do? We are at war!”

We are in a new kind of War. We have exposed ourselves to ourselves. It is Raw. We are at raw.

It is a volitile time. We are exposed. We are at Raw/War. Can those who wish to speak truth to power take advantage of this exposure, before it is too late?