Urban Urgency Wrapped in Gossamer Strains

A coworker recently turned Pawn onto You Are Listening To…, a website which mashes up ambient music and police scanners.  Focusing on five cities, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Montreal, the site features a simple photograph of the city you chose, along with the aural pastiche appropriate to those climes.  Check it out, a shockingly soothing audio backdrop for the workplace.

You are listening to Los Angeles

As an interesting experiment,just go looking for some sounds you think might go well together.  I just loaded up the “Ambient” tag at Sound Cloud in one browser window, and the Kennedy Space Center live audio feed in another.

Making Use Of Local Artisans


Interesting review in the Shepherd Express most recent issue.  Jeff Beutner reviews INdustri Café, which besides its twee spelling indulges in a surfeit of locally produced ingredients.  In this early paragraph Beutner describes some of the local favorites for the cannibals amongst us:

The menu at INdustri Café is interesting and thoughtful. In a nod to Milwaukee, there is a liverwurst sandwich and an appetizer of kabobs made with kielbasa and white cheddar cheese. The liverwurst and sausage are made from local artisans.
INdustri Café Highlights Local Ingredients

Pawn was fortunate enough to have visited INdustri on their opening night, along with buddy T, and thoroughly enjoyed the free appetizers.  One wonders how many artisans perished for that snack.

An American Ex-Pat’s Thoughts on Egypt

Pawn recently reached out to friend and ex-patriot T, now living in Mozambique, for her opinion on the current events in Egypt.  T is an international teacher, and has taught in Los Angeles and Thailand, before living and teaching in Cairo for some time.  This was her response:

Great to hear from you.  Yes, J and I are glued to the news everyday.  I think it is absolutely necessary for the people to fight against Mubarak.  He has been a tyrant and a merciless dictator for too long.  It is a shame that some people will get hurt, but I agree with the revolt and think that Hosni should resign.

I think it is amazing that social networking can possibly be the unifying factor for many people throughout Africa.  Here in Mozambique when we had the riots last fall, people were being organized by text messages, until the government cut off all cell phone service.  That was the only way to squelch it.

Many Africans in countries with corrupt governments have needed a way to organize and join together to fight and be heard, now facebook, text messages, have reached the common man, the economies have been increaing and the technology has become available to the masses.  Just last month there were protests in Tanzania for the first time in twenty years and it was all organized through texts.

Again I don’t want to see people get hurt and looting and destroying property is horrible but If you mistreat people for long periods of time, you can’t help but expect them to fight back violently.  I just hope that the international community puts enough pressure on Mubarak so that he will actually step down.  I’m worried about  my Egyptian friends of course, and concerned for their safety, but I know they are ready for the regime to be toppled.

New Mediator for Egyptian Crisis

This just in:

Controversial graffiti artist and Mobarak’s friend Banksy to act as mediator.”The embattled president of Egypt has confirmed through a Facebook entry and through the state-run Nile TV that he is willing to open his door to negotiations with the leaders of the rival parties under two conditions.

“First is for the immediate halt of the street protests in the city of Cairo and Alexandria and second is for President Mubarak’s friend and a popular graffiti artists, Banksy”… to mediate between the parties.

Egypt’s Mubarak Opens Door to Negotiations, Requests Banksy | Newsflavor

Syndey Police Photos

Eugenia Falleni, alias Harry Crawford, special photograph number 234

Eugenia Falleni, alias Harry Crawford, special photograph number 234

My favorite photo blog site, Heading East, today featured some photos from the collection of the Sydney Police Department.  It seems the Home Office has an archive site which is open to browsing, download, etc.  Raul Gutierrez of Heading East writes:

I finally dug through the original archive myself at the The Historic Houses Trust site today. It’s well worth the visit. The site allows download of full resolution versions of the images and provides context. Many of the descriptions are like that famous 6 word Hemingway short, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

“Child unknown, found wandering at large.”

“Eugenia Falleni, alias Harry Crawford, special photograph number 234”

“Nudist colony surveillance.”

“Film in stolen camera.”

The image above is my favorite, so far, from Raul’s list:
Eugenia Falleni, alias Harry Crawford, special           photograph number 234, Central Police Station Sydney, 1920.

Description: Special Photograph no. 234. When ‘Harry Leon Crawford’, hotel cleaner of Stanmore was arrested and charged with wife murder he was revealed to be in fact Eugeni Falleni, a woman and mother, who had been passing as a man since 1899. In 1914, as ‘Harry Crawford’, Falleni had married the widow Annie Birkett. Three years later, shortly after she announced to a relative that she had found out ‘something amazing about Harry’, Birkett disappeared. Crawford told neighbours that she had run off with a plumber. In 1919 Birkett’s young son, who had remained in Crawford’s custody, told an aunt of attempts made on his life by his drunken stepfather. The aunt contacted police. A charred body which had been found in Lane Cove in 1917 was belatedly identified as Birkett’s. ‘Crawford’s’ astonished second wife, when finally convinced of Falleni’s true gender remarked, “I always wondered why he was so painfully shy …”
The photograph shown here shows Falleni in male clothing, probably on the day of her arrest. The negative was found in a paper sleeve inscribed ‘Falleni Man/Woman’. It is also possible that Falleni was made to dress in a man’s suit for the photograph.

Appropriated Fables

Tonton Macoute c1976 by Gèrard Bruny

Here’s an interesting thing Pawn heard on the BBC last night on an episode of The Strand, the arts and culture show of the World Service.  The first story was about a new anthology of Haitian fiction called Haiti Noir.  The interview, with the editor, was quite interesting.  The episode is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00cgkp8
The segment in question is the first one.

One thing I found interesting was the editor, Edwidge Danticat’s, explanation of the title.  In Creole, “noir” in addition to meaning “black” as in traditional French, also means native, familiar, one of us, as opposed to “blanc” which is taken to mean a foreigner.  But it also, in fiction, has the meaning with which we associate it.

But the other thing which really got my attention was her explanation about historical appropriation of traditional stories, such as the Tonton Macoute, by the state.  In traditional Haitian Creole lore, the Tonton Macoute (Uncle Gunnysack) is a form of boogeyman, who walks the streets after dark and kidnaps children who stay out too late.  After disbanding the Hatian army and police forces, upon gaining power, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier organized his own, ruthless, security force.  The citizens quickly named it the Tonton Macoute due to their habit of disappearing those who ran afoul of the regime.

Anyway, this whole idea just struck such a chord with me, the idea of a frightening instrument of the state getting named after a fairy tale character.  This immediately made me think, what does Janjaweed mean? To me the Janjaweed militia, known for their effortlessly ruthless attacks on innocents in Sudan represent the very worst of thugish behavior.  To what, I wondered, does that name owe its legacy?  I looked it up, and it means, literally, “ghostly riders,” fro Jin “spirit” jawad “horse.”  Or, more popularly, “Genie on a horse.”  Again, a perhaps childish visage, a genie, who rents the fabric of a displaced community.

Perhaps most striking to me is that the implication of the fairy tale is that a well behaved child need not worry, it is only if you stray that the Tonton Macoute, the Janjaweed will swoop in, throw you in his gunnysack or across his horse, and spirit you away to someplace far away from your family and your comfort and your warm bed.  You bad, bad child!

So, that is what I was left to ponder as I tried to return to my own warm, comfortable slumber.

This morning I went to the book seller and bought the book.

Contrast and Compare

The Times has an article on their news blog, The Lede about Private First Class Bradley Manning, he who took a  Wikileak on the Department of State.  At the end of the post is included his current reading list.  I thought you might want to read up:

“Decision Points,” by George W. Bush
“The Critique of Practical Reason” and “The Critique of Pure Reason,” by Immanuel Kant
“Propaganda,” by Edward Bernays
“The Selfish Gene,” by Richard Dawkins
“A People’s History of the United States,” by Howard Zinn
“The Art of War,” by Sun Tzu
“The Good Soldiers,” by David Finkel
“On War,” by Carl von Clausewitz.

In “The Good Soldiers,” Mr. Finkel, a Washington Post reporter who was embedded with an Army unit in Iraq in 2007, described in detail the killing of two Reuters employees by fire from American helicopters. The same episode was shown in graphic video shot from the helicopters posted on YouTube in April by WikiLeaks.

Not for the faint of heart

Politico tells us that Former UN Ambassador John Bolton is mulling a Presidential run.  Here’s his rational:

“As I survey the situation, I think the Republican field is wide open,” Bolton told POLITICO. “I don’t think the party’s anywhere close to a decision. And stranger things have happened.”

John Bolton eyes 2012 presidential run – Molly Ball – POLITICO.com

Now that’s a stirring fund raising platform, “Stranger things have happened!”

Bolton, who has the reputation of being the most bellicose member of an over testoseroned, über-bellicose Bush foreign policy team, Politico claims, “whose reputation, at least on the right, is as a speaker of unfiltered truth to power.”  On the right, perhaps, but everywhere else he’s known more as as a speaker of power to truth.  Part of that whole Might-Make-Right American Exceptionalism thing.

Want to lose a little sleep?  How about a Palin/Bolton team for 2012?  She can see Russia from her porch, and he has a nuke aimed at it.

Sleep tight…

The Madoff/Kohn Doppleganger

Bernie Madoff (left) and Sonja Kohn (right)

Bernie Madoff (left) and Sonja Kohn (right)

Irving L. Picard, the trustee seeking redress for victims of the Madoff financial collapse has just filed suit seeking over $19 billion from Sonja Kohn, an Austrian banker he accuses of conspiring with Madoff in the whole house of cards.  Looking at their photos, Pawn posits that this is an understatement.  I believe they are, in fact, either fraternal twins or clones!

“In Sonja Kohn, Madoff found a criminal soul mate, whose greed and dishonest inventiveness equaled his own,” the trustee, Irving L. Picard, said.  Soul mate indeed!  Have they ever been seen in the same place at once?

“In Sonja Kohn, Madoff found a criminal soul mate, whose greed and dishonest inventiveness equaled his own,” the trustee, Irving L. Picard, said.

Literary Ambassadors

This from the Times today makes one proud of our Foreign Service.  An excerpt:

Cables about Kazakhstan’s high-living leaders are written in a satirical tone worthy of Borat, the fictional (and wild) Kazakh played in the movie by Sacha Baron Cohen.

One described Kazakhstan’s defense minister turning up drunk for a meeting with an American official, “slouching back in his chair and slurring all kinds of Russian participles.” He explained that he had just been at a cadet graduation reception, “toasting Kazakhstan’s newly-commissioned officers.”

The memo concluded: “Who was toasted more — the defense minister or the cadets — is a matter of pure speculation.”

From WikiLemons, Clinton Tries to Make Lemonade | The New York Times

Pawn compliments Secretary Of State Clinton on her so far masterful handling of the whole leak situation.

Far less palatable is the performance of Sen. Joseph “Useful Idiot” Lieberman, whose harassment of Internet and other businesses has led to the eviction of WikiLeaks from Amazon’s servers, PayPal’s payment processing, and a host of other services.  These firms seem suddenly to have decided that reporting from purloined documents is now against their terms of service, although they gladly provide the same services for their media partners, such as the Times, the Washington Post, and others, whose content they host, payment they process, or electronic editions are provided on their Kindles.

Shame of these big businesses of the Internet for revealing how unfree it really is.

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