Blackwater Out of Potrero

Victory!

For many months the community of Potrero has protested the ambitions of Blackwater, the company that serves as one of the major American contractors in Iraq, to build an 842-acre facility in Potrero, California. Today, the community was surprised to learn that Blackwater decided to dump the project.

Brian Bonfiglio, Vice President of Blackwater West, wrote to them. I saw the letter coming as a pdf from a mass SDCPJ e-mail. I don't know how to link pdfs to this site but this article misquotes Bonfiglio's statement by a tad: “Although our project would have brought a great benefit to San Diego County -- providing local, state, and federal law enforcement with access to low-cost superior training facilities while bringing much-needed jobs to the area -- the proposed site plan simply does not meet our business objectives at this time.”

“It's great news for the community of Potrero,” said Carl Meyer, the Potrero planning committee's new chairman, according to the San Diego Union Tribune. “I think Potrero will start to rejoice tonight. We'll have a party.”

Oui? Moi aussi! Nous faisons une fête chez moi samedi!

Opus Vs. Laibach - "Live is Life" & "Life is Life"

Take a gander at these two videos - here and here - based on the same Opus song "Live is Life." See if you notice any differences.

Also... Ein, zwei, drei, vier!

Musical Hero Mahmoud Ahmed Grooves to High Heaven

Anybody who has explored the epic Ethiopiques series would probably recognize the name Mahmoud Ahmed and the man's intriguing, seductive croon. Ahmed is one of the many legendary artists to have emerged from Ethiopia's nightclub scene of the '60s and '70s. He started out as a shoe-shine boy, then took a job as a handyman at the Arizona Club in Addis Ababa, and eventually he became the singer for the Imperial Body Guard Band. Over the proceeding decades, he would go on to sing for groups like the Roha Band, the Idan Raichel Project, the Venus Band, the Walais Band and the Ibex Band.

I just watched a short interview with this beloved Ethiopian band leader. Gotta love the guy's cool confidence: "This is the modern music, which is traditional music as composed by me and other composers and writers. So we arranged it and we played by that," he says. "Maybe if somebody wants me to play traditional music, it's my pleasure to play...I do everything."

The Ahmed hits I know are spooky and transcendent, in a groovy, R&B kind of way. Why, the interviewer asks, is his music so dark? "Not so dark," Ahmed says, smiling. "Bright. Everything is bright."

Here are some great videos: un festival-concert au Québec, un concert Parisian au Café de la Danse (où il chante ma chanson préférée), et une vidéo de musique. Also, tell me, is this the Ethiopian equivalent to a U.S.O. show?

Estonia's Sing-Song Rebellion

I just saw "The Singing Revolution," a documenty chock full of historical insight by Maureen and Jim Trusty. The Singing Revolution emerged in Estonia in 1987, during Soviet rule. After Gorbachev introduced Glasnost and Prerestroika, Estonians held mass gatherings of thousands upon thousands of people, where they sang paeans to their land and patriotic anthems - some of which resembled arena-rock balladry. Fifty years after the U.S.S.R. staked claim on Estonia by signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Baltic peoples formed a singing human chain that stretched 600 km from Estonia, through Lativa, and into Lithuania.

Three words: Best. Revolution. Ever.

Neil Gordon, Next Year's Dean of Lang, Faces "A Whole Set of Problems"

Over the past two decades, Neil Gordon has had four concurrent careers: journalist, novelist, family man and scholar.

Through the 1980s and 90s, Gordon held various positions at The New York Review of Books, got his PhD in French Literature at Yale, finished his first novel, Sacrifice of Isaac, contributed to prominent publications and raised a daughter. By 2007, two novels and a son later, he was working at another novel and serving as both the Literary Editor of Boston Review and the Chair of Lang's Writing program.

"He is able to do three or four or five things simultaneously," said Jennifer Howard, a friend of Gordon's who worked alongside him at The New York Review. "He does all of them extremely well."

In the years ahead, current and former colleagues say, such proficient multi-tasking will prove to be quite an asset. This summer, Gordon, a bespectacled, pensive but voluble man of 50, who has been at Lang for six years, will become Dean of Eugene Lang College.

As Dean, he will find himself at the center of a massive effort, championed by New School Provost Ben Lee, to untangle the university's bureaucratic red tape, build a larger and more profitable undergraduate program and develop a university-wide undergraduate curriculum. All the while, plans will be in motion to replace the university's current hub, 65 5th Ave., with a state-of-the-art, 18-story "flagship" building.

In an interview in his office two weeks ago, Gordon acknowledged that Lang will have to solve "a whole set of problems" in the coming years—for instance, the massive scarcity of classroom and office space that will hit the university once 65 5th Ave. becomes a construction site. But he said that his solutions, at the moment, are "only speculative."

"My de facto position is that, 'It can be done,'" he said. "My job is to form the intellectual communities of faculty and staff, who are going to be able to imagine and execute solutions to the very, very specific problems posed."

"I don't want to be coy," he added, "but I don't want to circumvent the consensual processes with my colleagues."

In a "mission statement" Gordon wrote prior to his appointment last month, he outlined his priorities for the college. Among other things, he wrote, he intends to create a stronger working relationship with The New School for Social Research and other divisions, institutionalize a "robust" structure of shared governance for faculty and administrators and think "entrepreneurially" about Lang's place in the "American educational marketplace."

Another chief concern among students, faculty and administration, he said, is Lang's lack of diversity.

"We need more curriculum and programming that will raise our awareness, as a community, of the difficulties of being a minority Lang, and the necessity for us to come to a more open way of discussing these difficulties," he said. "We need a curriculum that is more open to a greater range of the city, in terms of culture and ethnicity. And we need to find ways of recruiting, attracting and retaining more students and faculty of color."

Over the years, the administration has worked hard to allay this problem. For his part, Gordon has worked with writing professor Margo Jefferson to build a course on ethnicity, called "Reading Race."

"It's a start," Jefferson said. The importance of diversity, she added, "is something that [Gordon] really feels as well as believes."

Next Fall, Writing will begin to merge with Lang's Literature Department to form a program called Literary Studies. Gordon said that he does not know who will replace him as chair, but he offered that it will have to be "someone really good."

In Gordon's four years as Chair of Writing, faculty members said, he has formalized the department's structure and helped create concrete standards for Lang's fiction, poetry, nonfiction and journalism tracks. He has also hired several high-profile writers, including Jefferson and Lorraine Adams, both Pulitzer Prize winning journalists.

Some students complain that Gordon always answers his cellular phone during class time. But all ten of the Lang faculty members interviewed for this article said that they are pleased with Gordon's leadership and the direction of the department.

"You feel like you're collaborating on a larger project that really matters," Jefferson said.

"He's not a self-promoting chair," said Robin Mookerjee, Director of First-Year Writing. "He's always had a big picture perspective."

Gordon was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. His parents, Harley and Sheila Gordon, Jewish émigrés from Lithuania, were active in the anti-apartheid movement. They moved to the suburbs of Massapequa, Long Island after Gordon turned 3, because many South African activists faced persecution and even assassination.

In 1969, the Gordons moved to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The Vietnam War and the threat of the draft served as the "stark and dramatic" backdrop to his high school years. But compared to "soul-deadening suburban life," he said, New York City was an "incredible, vibrant and fascinating place."

In Greenwich Village, on almost any night of the week, Gordon could run into Allen Ginsberg at the 8th Street Bookstore. He would often hang out with a man named Silverbell, who lived in a truck on 8th St. that was outfitted with an upright piano.

The bohemian life only had one drawback, he said: "You just got mugged all the time."

This article appears in next Tuesday's issue of The New School Free Press. Photo courtesy the New School.

Learn the Jumpstyle

Not too long ago I encountered a peculiar video depicting a relatively new style of dancing. That heavy, repetitive beat you hear is an offshoot of my all-time favorite hardcore techno sub-genre, gabber.

I've yet to familiarize myself with the jumpstyle canon. But from what I've seen and heard so far, this sub-sub-genre rules about as much as gabber itself. So if you're growing weary of the waltz, the charleston, the freak, the headbang, the square dance, the jig, the polka, the skank, the tango, the salsa, the electric slide, ballet, interpretive, tap, belly, ballroom, swing, contra, English or Scottish country, Nordic polska, kolo or, God forbid, Bhangra, Giddha and Bollywood, then expand your horizons and learn the steps of jumpstyle.

Photo courtesy Dan Dickinson's blog, where there is plenty more about the jumpstyle phenomenon.

How Do You Stop a School Shooter? With Your Concealed Weapon, Of Course

About half an hour ago, I experienced one of the most shocking moments of my life: I learned about the organization Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, which has a Facebook membership of 11,000.

Why am I so shocked? Why do I find that this group's existence is so unbelievably unbelievable? Because this organization is convinced that, to prevent school shootings, America needs to legalize concealed weapons on campus.

This is a clear solution that, apparently, goes by a simple logic. "The only way to stop a person with a gun is another person with a gun," Michael Flitcraft, a sophomore at the University of Cincinnati, told USA Today.

But to anybody with half a brain in their head, there is a very blatant problem with this concept: It would legalize the behavior of Stephen Kazmierczak, who walked onto Northern Illinois University campus yesterday with a shotgun stuffed in a guitar case and guns hidden behind his jacket, in order to prevent the behavior of Stephen Kazmierczak, who proceeded to enter a lecture hall and open fire on the class, killing five students.

Surely I'm not the first to point out the extremely obvious twist of logic here. But apparently, some people actually think that this is not a ridiculously stupid idea, and in fact that it is a smart one. Bills to legalize concealed weapons on campus are currently under debate in 12 states, including Washington, Michigan and Kentucky.

Democratic Rep. Robert Damron, who sponsored the Kentucky bill, says that gun-toters should have the same rights at the university as in anywhere else in Kentucky, where they are allowed to keep guns in their cars. Fair enough. But riddle me this, Damron: how will a handgun locked in a car prevent a shooting that takes place inside a lecture hall?

It seems, judging by the general fear people have of someone who is weilding a gun, that this law would cause more harm than good. By the time a student would make it out to the car to get their handgun, after all, it's likely that the police would already have been notified of the emergency, if not already on the scene. So the moment that this maverick student-hero waltzes over to the scene of the crime, pistol in hand, he or she will either get arrested or gunned down.

It should be obvious enough why that would happen. But just in case an S.C.C.C. member happens across this blog entry, I'll explain: Because this person is holding a fucking gun.