Let Your Mind Be Free

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. "Let your mind be free." Doo na na na na na! Doo na na na na na! "Let your mind be free." Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

About two hours ago I just bought Bad Boy Bill's "Bangin' The Box, Vol. 3," a collection of bouncy, sparkling, infectious Chicago house hits from the late-1990s. I've been looking for a good compilation of this stuff lately. While perusing the scanty electronica collection at Off the Record, my eyes made out the bright neon text of the packaging and the grandeur of the man on the cover of this curious assortment, which rounds out at a hefty 45 tracks. I'm not sure where Bad Boy Bill and the rest fit into the history of house in Chicago, where DJs gave birth to that repetitive electronic genre in the 1980s. I'm not even sure if all the artists listed here are just Bad Boy Bill's pseudonyms. But I am a sucker for compilations and this was printed on a Chicago label in 1998, so it must be at least kind of legit (no matter that I couldn't tell you what "legit" house is). After a moment of deliberation with myself, I brought the comp to the counter.

I read a sage bit of wisdom in Simon Reynolds' Generation Ecstasy the other day. The gist of the book's introduction is that, to the average ecstasy-addled party boy hoofing it on the dance floor, history is not a concern. That dancer's vision is a timeless affair in a world rocked by oscillating surges of rhapsody and interspersed with planes of unflappable ambiance. When I'm out hunting for new tracks, I may as well be like the beast. Forget "intelligent dance music." Now it's high time I give in to my guiltiest, most electrified of pleasures. For 74 minutes, at least...

Photo: Bad Boy Bill mans the turntables in 2000, by Jewels.

Clarifier: Pardon the faux pas, but I do mean to say "mix" when I refer to this compilation.

Empty Lots

Yesterday, my dad led me to Rancho Bernardo on the same route he took in October after the San Diego Fire Department invited him, his fiancee and her daughters back to the neighborhood. They had to evacuate for a couple days because a wildfire had started eating up the houses and hills just a few blocks away from their new house. Luckily, after the fire was contained, my dad's place turned out fully preserved - except for a few burn marks in the wicker chairs on the patio.

Many San Diegans think of Fall as a time when the dry winds of the Santa Ana desert head westward and create the kind of atmosphere where a simple brush fire can grow into a conflagration that crosses a highway and lays waste to millions of dollars worth of property. Naturally, the 60 mph winds of this season fueled the Witch Creek Fire, which consumed Rancho Bernardo. The wind battered the blaze here and there, sending red-hot embers floating through the air and placing them inside giant plastic garbage cans or on top of front yards' hedges. Their appetites thus whetted, the embers hatched fires themselves, whereupon those grew and grew until they could eat houses whole. And that they did.



Dad gestured to blackened pile of branches creeping alongside someone's preserved house. I looked far into the distance at the miles of blackened rolling hills. When we turned onto Duenda Street, he pointed out empty lot after empty lot. "There's one," he said. "There's one. There's one." The lots used to be houses. They had been cleansed of charred material possessions, dreams and aspirations wolfed down by fire. Now, for the most part, they were squares of flat dirt.

Rancho Bernardo, for all its lush shrubbery, is chiefly a land of concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads and tar highways. In part, all of this sprawl saved the neighborhood from total destruction. Today, winding streets with bright green shrubs and block-wide stretches of huge, million-dollar homes dominate. But they are interspersed with these signs of ruin.

Just around the corner from dad's house, we arrived at one of the first new houses, still under construction and right nearby a few empty lots. A moment after I snapped a picture of the new house, an older woman and her daughter walked up to us. The older woman had lost her house in the blaze. Her daughter, a middle-aged woman who wore sweatshirt that said "Brooklyn," which she had bought at an Old Navy in San Diego, did not lose her house.

The daughter said that this new house's owner was the brother of a trainer for San Diego's football team, the Chargers. Apparently, the family got a lot of help. "They want to get it up before Christmas," she said. The doors of the new house were open, and any curious bystanders were welcome to take a look. The mom and daughter had just taken a tour. Dad and I opted not to check it out - even though the new construction was, for all of Rancho Bernardo's seeming affluence, quite a rare sight.

Off!

As of 11 p.m. tomorrow, if both legs of my airborne adventure keep on track with the time-stamps of my online itinerary, I will be in San Diego. It's been a long haul, this semester. I've discovered a lot of new things about myself - for instance, that I have become a hopeless workaholic. Even now, free from the burden of any school responsibilities, I am making a mental index of all the shit I have to get together, all the ducks I've got to line up, and all the pages I've got to write before May 2008 comes around.

All the same, I've been doing hardcore research on YouTube. So far, I've managed to compile a list of selections that anyone could enjoy:

Michael Jackson's "Thriller" gets the Bollywood touch.

Van Hammersly's brand of edu-tainment.

"The Goofy Movie" from a David Lynch perspective.

Every video on YouTube that features Tom Waits.

Finally, my absolute fave: new developments in the world of gabber.

Now, off to happy hour. Then, to San Diego!

Provost's Vision for 2017: A New College and a Bureaucratic Overhaul

In front of a packed crowd of senior administrators, faculty and students in the Orozco Room on November 29, New School Provost Ben Lee proposed that by 2017, The New School, A University, should undergo a drastic change in curricula, financing and bureaucracy as The New School for Liberal Arts.

These plans have percolated over the past several years inside the Provost's Office. Last semester, Lee formally introduced the academic initiative in a paper titled "The New New School." His presentation was part of a series of town hall meetings this year that dealt with the university's future plans. The current ten-year academic plan is a product of Lee's meetings over the past year with university deans, 6 faculty-led committees, the Faculty Senate, students and a consultant company that led a study of students' use of space last year.

Throughout his presentation, Lee assured the crowd that the ten-year plan is tentative and open to input from the New School community. Lee, along with other administrators interviewed during the event, said that one chief goal is to ensure a high level of open-ended cooperation in the planning itself.

At this newly proposed university, Parsons will operate relatively independently but liberal and performing arts undergraduates will follow a prescribed interdisciplinary track. This will include an undergraduate program that begins with a year-long general studies curriculum with a "unique New School stamp," and then gives the option of attending either Lang, a bachelor's track for adults, a performing arts school like Jazz, or a university-wide, project-based curriculum tentatively dubbed the "Experimental College."

Currently, the university has one model for a program that would exist in the "Experimental College": Environmental Studies. The program, which should be viable by Fall 2009, will offer a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Sciences. Classes will focus on subjects like the ecosystem, sustainability, and spatial design, taking into account both theory and practice.

"These groups are not just saying, 'Oh, you've got the liberal arts tree-huggers and the design tree-huggers.' It's not that at all. You're bringing them together for the first couple years," said Joel Towers, Associate Provost for Environmental Studies. "Bachelor of Arts will take design courses, so that they understand that doctrine."

But the academic plan does not just focus on academics—essentially, it would overhaul the university's entire operational and spatial structure. The ten-year plan, Lee said, would revamp controversial budget rules that have dogged the university for years, build faculty and student governance, develop a system for tenure, and boost enrollment for undergraduate schools.

"The university currently relies on a small number of programs to fund its future growth, which is primarily in the form of new faculty and facilities. This is an inherently dangerous situation. Imagine what would happen if the past repeated itself, and Fashion should go out of fashion," Lee said, reading from a prepared statement. "We need to diversify this risk by having a larger base of creative programs and curricular innovations."

For years, each division's student population determined its budget. For every student a division had, it received that much more money. But the university also relied on a "Parsons-centric model," Lee said, where revenues from Parsons funded the university's graduate programs.

Several administrators have told the Free Press over the past year that this budget structure has led to serious inter-divisional tensions. For instance, Parsons officials resented losing money to fund grad schools, while graduate school officials resented that undergrads took graduate courses.

"It has been said from the standpoint of fiscal stability, the university developed backwards—ass-backwards," Lee said.

With the new model, the Provost's Office will manage the schools' budgets. That way, Lee said, the Provost can allocate budgets for cross-divisional initiatives, and deans will be able to focus on fewer bureaucratic hurdles.

In order to have a comprehensive liberal arts program, he said, the university's deans concluded that the total student population at Lang and "Experimental College" should be as high as 2,500 in ten years. That is nearly twice the size of Lang's current population of 1,290.

Lang administrators told the Free Press in October that they were worried what affect a population boost would have on the student experience and students' decisions to stay here past their freshmen years. For years, faculty and students have also protested Lang's rapid growth. Many have voiced concerns that Lang has not been able to sustain its growing population, since many faculty members have no offices and classroom and study space is scarce.

In his presentation, Lee acknowledged the "cynical responses" of Lang faculty and students, but said that Lang is "undersized."

"Growth in the right areas," he said, will ultimately improve the university, since it will bring in more revenues to fund academic initiatives and construction projects, including the university's project to tear down 65 5th Avenue and, over the next several years, construct an 18-story "signature building." In turn, the new building will provide the university with more space.

Currently, Lee said, officials are establishing Presidential and Vice Presidential positions that will focus on "strategic enrollment," and are hiring a consulting agency, Maguire Associates, to manage the population boom.

For all of the contentions surrounding the university's future plans, Lee's audience was polite, if not jovial. A veritable Who's Who of senior administrators, faculty and students filled the chairs, leaned against walls and sat on the floor, taking notes, listening attentively, munching on cookies, and sipping coffee. People exchanged snickers when Lee described Lang's current curricular structure as a "roll-your-own style."

After the talk and a question and answer session, Lang sophomore Alex Cline expressed some uneasiness about the plans. "It makes it easier for students to get what they want," he said. But he is afraid the university is, "shifting towards what programs make money. It might be getting away from what New School originally stood for."

Executive Vice President Jim Murtha said that students need not worry about a more centralized bureaucracy. "Centralization is always a bad word," he said. "I prefer to characterize it as building a university. Taking the disjointed parts and really drawing them together and making them more effective."

Amelia Granger contributed reporting. A version of this article ran in this week's issue of the New School Free Press. Photo: Ben Lee unveils the university's ten-year plan at the Orozco Room, by Hannah Rappleye.

East Jams With West at Breakneck Speed

Five guys from Palestine and one from Morocco took to the stage at the Jazz Performance Space at 55 West 13th Street in November. In short order, they jumped into an improvisation of Van Morrison's "Moondance."

The jam was a long, freewheeling jaunt, but this time it featured no lackadaisical riffs of an electric guitarist who is, presumably, very high. Rather, John-Robert Handal tapped his fingers energetically against a traditional Arab drum called a darbouka. Moroccan Tarik Hilal plucked a flamenco guitar. Joseph Duqmaq blew into a saxophone. Zafer Tawil drew a bow across a violin. Tarek Abbushi fingered the fretless, stringed buzuk. And, as if in a trance, Wissam Murad played a wild solo on an old brother to the lute, the oud.

The State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, working with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, put the ensemble together. Tawil and Abbushi are both based in New York, but the State Department brought Handal, Hilal, Duqmaq, Murad and vocalist Fatima Abdeldayem here from abroad. The musicians led a series of workshops about Middle Eastern music. "Moondance" was a treat at the end of a day trading percussion techniques, Arab musical traditions and jazz standards with the Jazz program's Middle Eastern Ensemble.

After the improvisation, the Middle Eastern Ensemble got on stage with Abdeldayem and the other visitors. An East-meets-West supergroup, armed with drums, more darbouka, violins, flutes, clarinet, more flamenco guitar and voice, suddenly formed.

Harel Shachal, a saxophone player from Israel who teaches at The New School and plays in a local, nine-piece "multicultural ensemble" called Anistar, led the ensemble. He conducted three ten-minute expressions of Middle Eastern songs arranged with Western instruments. He joined in on a Turkish clarinet with a G tuning, which plays quarter-tones.

These were exercises in worldly ambition. Performing Arabic melodies on Western instruments is no easy feat, Abbushi said after the show, since Arabic music does not use harmony and the timbre of many Western instruments tend to sound bizarre when they merge with traditional Arab instruments.

"It's possible, but it's difficult to bring in Western or modern sounds," he said.

The World Music Ensemble and the visiting musicians still put on a thrilling show. They first played "Lama Bada," written in the 18th century by Syrian composer Salim el-Misri. The supergroup launched into a whirling melody at breakneck speed. Adbeldayem sang one chorus in Arabic, then Mika Hary, a Jazz student from Israel, sang another in Hebrew.

The second piece, "Longa Nahawand," which Shachal described as a "dance number" from the Asia-minor part of Turkey, began with a percussive boom-chuck that grew in intensity. Then the group burst into a wild 16th note melody, led by flute, violin and the two vocalists. A few minutes into the song, the group took up a catchy dance beat with a salsa-esque syncopation. Then Handal started tapping his darbouka with greater intensity, this time accenting the beat with his palms to produce a juicy boom.

26 people sat in the audience, including a cameraman and a photographer—not even double the size of the group on stage.

Martin Mueller, Executive Director of The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, told the Free Press before the show that the school had not publicized the event as much as it could have, to avoid arousing the indignation of Israeli students.

Shachal also wanted to keep the night on the down-low, he said over the phone last week. The concert came at a time when Israelis and Palestinians are "at war," he said, and bringing up political tensions is often unavoidable.

"If I was living [in Israel], I wouldn't have this chance to play with them," he said. "Not even to meet them, ever."

The performance, Mueller and Shachal both said, was about the music. And music, they agreed, is a great way to overcome irreconcilable differences.

"Music is an amazing thing to connect," Shachal said. "If there were performances like that arranged for the cultural department in Israel or something, there would be peace."

This article ran in this week's issue of the New School Free Press. Photo: the visiting musicians embark on their Middle Eastern moondance, courtesy the New School.

Iraq Watch: Enabling Genocide

Even after the British drew up Iraq's borders after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Sunnis, Shias, Jews, Turks, Kurds and others drank chai tea, talked politics and hit up the bustling book markets of Baghdad, one of the most diverse cities in the Middle East. But over the past few years, Baghdad has been systematically cleansed of its diversity.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in Ghaziliya, a neighborhood that was once a flashpoint for Sunni-on-Shia violence. Now America has staved off the sectarian violence, in part by dividing up the neighborhood with twenty miles of concrete blast barriers.

"Everyone in our neighborhood is Sunni, even the birds flying above us are Sunni," resident Mohammed Azzawi told the LA Times in November. "Now that it is pure Sunni, it is better for us."

The U.S. is currently taking a "bottom-up" approach to stoking reconciliation. Part of that involves recruiting "Local Concerned Citizens," security forces aligned with Americans that will increase the peace in local neighborhoods. Already, roughly 60,000 Iraqis have joined the force.

There are plenty of people to kill in Iraq: a kaleidoscope of terrorists, death squads, mafia-style criminal networks and Islamic militias. But intelligence is the key to counterinsurgency, and that is something many Americans—from those on the front lines, to commanders at the Pentagon, to administrators in the White House—don't have. And it is becoming increasingly apparent that hunting, imprisoning and killing more bad guys will not resolve deep-seated tensions that have haunted Iraqis for 35 years under Saddam Hussein.

So the United States' alliance with Sunni sheiks, including those in Ghaziliya, looks like it will only enable a civil war.

"Now the Americans are with the Sunnis and against the Shiites," Azzawi said.

What should the occupier do? Pulling out entirely, by all accounts, would lead to genocidal civil war. Training new security forces without being entirely scrupulous would enable genocidal civil war. Leaving only a handful of advisors or Special Forces there, to train security forces or to hunt Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia for the next decade, would not only starve the military of resources to stave off genocidal civil war, but prolong our violent and unwelcome occupation of Iraq.

One thing is certain: sooner or later, we will leave Iraq to the Iraqis. In October, U.S. military leaders considered declaring victory on Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, since many of those militants have been forced from Baghdad. Starting in late November, the United States began withdrawing a first batch of 5,000 troops from Diyala Province, which will bring the American troop count down to 157,000. The Iraq Study Group, which produced a dire assessment of the occupation's progress in December 2006, recommended that we withdraw our troops by March 2008.

Whatever we do, it appears that genocide is Iraq's destiny. So why not leave now, and resign ourselves to the fact that our nation is, in large part, responsible for Iraq's fate?

At the moment, that is a question I do not care to answer. Even philosophically, I do not want to be complicit in my own country's hideous crimes. But I cannot help but feel that, being an American, I already am a war criminal.

A version of this article ran in this week's issue of the New School Free Press.

Behind the CIA's Black Site Wall, Reporters Discover Another Cockroach

The CIA denied Congress and the 9/11 Commission access to a video of Abu Zubaydah and another unnamed detainee's "enhanced" interrogation - which, for each of them, might have involved a round of water-boarding or time in a tiny wooden crate called the "dog box." Today, the New York Times reported that the CIA destroyed these videos in 2005.

After the Times alerted the CIA that they were running an article on the subject, Gen. Michael Hayden justified erasing this evidence by crying "national security." If the video-tapes had been leaked to the public, he said, CIA officers and their families would've been exposed to "retailiation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers."

Come on, Hayden, we all know what you really mean. The statement should be re-edited to say "retaliation from Congress, the Supreme Court and their sympathizers."

New School President Bob Kerrey, who served on the 9/11 Commission panel, wrote me a brief but dire assessment over email: "They (CIA) lied to Congress, the Court and the 9-11 Commission. They admit they lied after a journalist uncovered the fact that they had destroyed the evidence. Finally, because they used illegal interrogation techniques, they compromised the legal case against Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. No good news here."

But at the very least, he noted, there is something to be said for the Times coverage. "The story this AM is another terrific example of something that can only happen in (relatively) open democracies."

The "enhanced interrogation" debate is pretty unnerving, if you consider the fact that Ramzi Yousef, who executed the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, told two FBI agents everything they needed to know during a conversation on an airplane flight. I don't think our administration's desire to torture has anything to do with intelligence gathering. If you ask me, using the CIA to do the work of prisoner holding and interrogation (which case officers have never been trained to do in the past), is merely the outgrowth of post-9/11 hatred of Arabs/Muslims, who of course are seen as one and the same, and an insatiable hunger for revenge.

Now, about 80 out of 300 Guantanamo detainees are facing military tribunals at a portable tent city called Camp Justice in Guantanamo Bay. Presumably, this military commissions court is too embarrassing a sight to be located on American soil. None of the detainees have been charged with a crime, but the prosecution is able to deny them access to lawyers inside the courtroom and use hearsay as evidence against them. So in a hi-tech and institutionalized mass-lynching, it looks like most of these "terrorists" will go to jail forever. Or, some Americans hope, they will go to Hell. Finally, America will have its tasty revenge.

George W. Bush will step out of office in January 2009, returning to his Texas ranch and a steaming plate of Huevos Rancheros. He and his cronies will leave the rest of America to rebuild our decimated legal system. Deeply embarassing and tragic discoveries about what happened at Guantanamo and in the CIA's "black sites" will eventually abound, no doubt. And only then will the Bush Administration establish a legacy that will persevere through the ages. I am not one to miss a historic moment, so I will be at the Hague when it happens.