And they say the US is polarized....
Since RCTV station went off the air Sunday night, protests against erosion of freedoms here in Venezuela have been on the rise. The police and various guards have been using tear gas and firing pellets at crowds of mainly University students, who have been chanting, banging pots and lighting garbage on fire in the streets. Cars honk in support as they drive by. Needless to say, I'm not running to see what the excitement is about when I hear about a gathering at a particular intersection. A local deli has been the scene of a small and quite peaceful protest here near where I'm working. Yesterday the cooks were leading the pot-banging from the roof of the building. Personally, its making my life dull as I have been just hanging out in the hotel at night. Getting the feeling these protests will grow in intensity before the situation gets better. Will be going back home on Saturday.

Tuesday: Marcha UCV por la Libertad de Expresion 29-05-07



Monday: Represión en Caracas


  posted by John : 12:41 PM

 
Celebration
The sounds coming in through my hotel room window here in Caracas right now are of jubilant shouting through a megaphone wielded by the spokesman of a group of banner waving demonstrators. Passing cars in all directions are honking a cheerful tune in support. But this is a protest, in opposition to the non-renewal of the operating license for one of the free-to-air TV stations here RCTV, who supported and some would say aided in the 2002 coup attempt. The station will go dark tomorrow at midnight, and the demonstrations will likely escalate through the rest of the weekend, both in support of RCTV and against them (that rally will be on the other side of the city). And I read that last night a cable TV news station, considered to be anti-Chavez and which may be the next target, was covered with pro government graffiti.

Meanwhile, ten out of the first eleven TV stations on the air right now are broadcasting one of Chavez's ardously long public talks about something or other.

  posted by John : 2:13 PM

 
Who Are You?


Last night we watched a DVD of The Who live at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival (the one where 600,000 people attended, they say). It was filmed by Murray Lerner, who also shot the Newport Folk Festivals that became the recent film Festival. He included a 30min follow-up interview with Pete Townshend from 1996. The Who are my #1 absolute all time favorite rock band ... ever! Its interesting to consider why that is the case. Pete followed an East Indian mystic, the source of the title of the song Baba O'Reilly ("teenage wasteland"). I was aware of his interest, but never pondered it much, just enjoyed their music. On the surface I was drawn to how each of them came at the music as if they were playing the lead instrument at all times, creating a driving rhythm from all sides. And Roger is a great singer. But I see now that what really got me was the spiritual message Pete wrote into the music. From Wiki page on Pete Townshend:

Tommy did more than revitalize The Who's career (which was moderately successful at this point but had plateaued), it also marked a renewal of Townshend's songwriting and his spiritual studies infused most of his work from Tommy forward. However, unlike other openly spiritual rock stars whose music became dogmatic once they discovered religion, Townshend generally soft-pedaled the religious nature of his work. This may have been because his newfound passion was not shared by his bandmates whose attitude was tolerant but who were unwilling to become the spokesmen for a particular religion. Few of the thousands of fans who packed stadiums across Europe and America to see The Who noticed the religious message in the songs; that "Bargain" and the middle section of "Behind Blue Eyes" from Who's Next and "Listening To You" from Tommy were all originally written as prayers, that "Drowned" from Quadrophenia and "Don't Let Go The Coat" from Face Dances were based on sayings by Meher Baba, that the "who are you, are you, are you" chorus from the song "Who Are You" was based on Sufi chants, or that "Let My Love Open The Door" was not a message from a lover but from God.

In the DVD interview Pete talks about how ending concerts with "Listening To You" was designed to be like a prayer that the audience participated in, uniting them in a shared pseudo-religious experience while bright lights from the stage shined down on the crowd.

Listening to you I get the music. Gazing at you I get the heat. Following you I climb the mountain. I get excitement at your feet! Right behind you I see the millions. On you I see the glory. From you I get opinions. From you I get the story. Listening to you I get the music. Gazing at you I get the heat. Following you I climb the mountain. I get excitement at your feet!

Its not just the lyric that is the prayer, the anthem-like quality of the music also contributes heavily to the group experience. These words don't mean anything in particular in terms of the story of Tommy, and it was never very important to me to analyze or understand them. I don't recall pondering who the "you" refers to in that song - yet it is accentuated on every line and we yell it out as we sing along. Another interesting topic I think ... how we can be satisfied with mumbling the words to songs for decades?

Now that I think about it, I think its the clever way the spiritual message was concealed in these songs, along with the driving music, that made their music compelling to me. Unlike more overt demi-gods of the time, like Led Zeppelin.

When I was twelve I lined up all night to get tickets to see the Who at the CNE. I was just a kid of course, and actually had mainly heard the music from their early greatest hits album Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy at the time. That summer night thousands were unified in their devotion to something ... and their anthems rang out from boom-boxes (to be accurate, these were ghetto-blasters then). Of course the line "we're all wasted!" was the rallying call, which seemed like the anthitesis of the Christian message. A few years after that tour, for which Kenney Jones played drums, The Who's decades long string of final concerts and reunions began. The first final concert was held in Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1982. Nearly impossible to get a ticket, we watched the simulcast on TV instead. After seeing a slew of huge outdoor concerts in the eighties, by the the early nineties I lost interest. Well, I do recall making exceptions to see Simon and Garfunkel, with Gordon Lightfoot opening, at the Skydome in '93, ... an anthem-laden pilgrimage to the spiritual well. Now I'm a greedy geezer and want to see/hear live music in a small room with, at most, a couple hundred others. The spirit comes through more directly with that intimacy.

  posted by John : 5:38 AM

 
My Old Man
May 16, 2006 my father passed away. Sharon and I left the next day to go to LA for her son Josh's wedding, then flew to Toronto the day after that. I made a copy all the pictures from my Dad's computer. He spent thousands of hours at his computer, scanning pictures and books, gathering the text of old stories and novels in the public-domain, reading the Danish news, writing email, and generally keeping his mind active. What was strange is that all the pictures are at a tiny resolution. But I know he scanned them higher because he printed lots of these out on paper, putting them up around their apartment. I would like to spend time scanning their old pictures to have a digitial collection of them. Here's a good one of him that I don't remember seeing before:



The thing I remember most strongly about my father is he embodied the do-it-yourself ethic. Like many dads who grew up on a farm during the depression and then lived without luxuries during WWII, you learned how to do a lot of stuff yourself. I can't remember him hiring someone to do any work for him - not fixing the car, or the roof of the house, or making a picture frame, or complex electronics - he did all of those himself. A fraction of that rubbed off on me, but for that past few years I've been trying to shake it. I'd rather have some help. Yesterday I spent a few hours spraying the entire yard for chiggers (nasty things - you'd spray them too). Then it rained heavily last night, so the effects of the spray will likely be lost and I'll have to do it again. That's okay, I'll think about my dad while I do the work.

I could say the same about my mom, as far as household work. In this picture they both get to sit back and receive for a change, at their 50th wedding anniversary:



  posted by John : 6:26 AM

 
Morrocoy
Spent this weekend hanging out on the beach at another national park, Morrocoy, which is about a four hour drive west from Caracas. The park is a cluster of mangrove "cayos", many adorned with picture perfect beaches and turquoise waters. I lifted this photo from the web:



  posted by John : 11:47 AM