Sin Señal

Forget Me Not

A few years ago I started reading Iris Murdoch’s the Sea the Sea, and put it down 40 minutes later cause it was boring as all hell. From what I remembered the protagonist was some old woman who was dying and lived in a lighthouse. Or maybe I’m getting it mixed up with another book by another woman writer who I haven’t read all the way through. Anyway, this week I picked up The Sandcastle, which does what indie bands do, which is choose a title for a record based on one conciet that occurs about a third of the way through. The more I think about it the more I hate it when people do that. It smacks of deliberatley trying to find a title and meaning for your product, which is ok in itself, but then when they sort of deliberatley obscure it seems smug somehow.

There’s a band from the UK called Gentle Friendly who I liked when I saw them supporting Ponytail (who I didn’t like) and listening to their tape (which I cant even remeber the title of) I like more and more, despite them having the worst band name since the Artic Monkeys. Actually Gentle friendly is better than The Artic Monkeys but only just.

There’s nothing particularly secretive about what GF do. It’s a casio, a loopstation, a couple of mics, a delay and a distortion pedal,and live, a drum kit. And it sounds like that. It’s lo-fi that takes the end result seriously but not the process. I wish more bands went about composing the same way.

The sandcastle great for the first third, but I’m still waiting for some great psycho-social revelation about 1950’s england. So far, all we’ve had is adultery and cricket.

Hyperbole

Ohhhh shit Kingdom just reclaimed the word ‘banger’.

Mindreader is the dance track that is always secretly in yr head when you go to all those trendy DJ nights to see someone like Aeroplane and make all the wrong drinks choices, and don’t really dance and neglect to take it any further than a shy look at the only girl in the place you half fancied.
It’s 1991 ibza and 1996 Mampi Swift and 2001 Ciara and 2007 Crystal Castles, and it’s huge like a blue whale or the sky, or GDP of Luxembourg..

What the fuck is going on at Acephale? After putting the sound of a guilty coked up
wank over yr flatmates girlfriend on tape with SALEM, and changing one o clock in the morning forever with CFCF they go and hand the rest of the summer to you on a fucking plate. Or rather on one of 500 limited edition vinyls that you can only get at like 4 recod shops in the whole world. I’ve never met these guys but I imagine it’s like shaking hands with a Van de Graf Generator.

No you can't hear it.

The View From Here

On a thursday night 2 maybe 3 weeks ago i DJ'd at a friends party in a karaoke bar in a car park. I also lost my phone within 5 minutes of walking in which has left me excomunicado for the last bit. (I'm not greatly bothered by this, but i should probably look into sorting it out soon). The idea behind the party was to have a few different dj's playing four or five tracks in in rotation. The only problem was they'd booked about 10 people to play and hadn't really thought it through or cleared it properly with the people who's night it originally was. Whatever. So although i only played 3 tracks (Russ Chime's Afterburner, More Fire's Oi and DJ mania's Sobrevivente do Rave) i did get a chance to listen to everybody else play theirs. What surprised me is that it was almost exclusively italo and electro. There isn't even a club that plays italo in Madrid, and all of these kids from supposedly different scenes had exactly the same fucking records. It was a bit weird, but i guess you had to be there.
Even more surprisingly for me was that the musical highlight of the evening was hearing Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love. I felt like i was 14 and Jason from Freeboy had just put on Dweeb's cover of Beat Me, at the Mad Sheep Club. (yes that's what cambridge's indie disco was called). I'd totally forgotten what an amazing track it is.
Anyway, possibly because of the astrological phenomena surrounding 2012 facilitating synchronicity as a sign of the human race's impending evolution, but more likely because she's got good taste and works in a record label, my friend Ana has just released a track that sounds more than a little like Genius. It's called San Valentin and is as poppy as a whole sachet of Fizz Wizz washed down with orange fanta, but i can't stop listening to it.

www.myspace.com/holasoylindamirada

ROMAN HOLIDAY

(i'm posting this here because i don't think it can go on viceland with the esperanza aguirre libel, and i cant be bothered to work it much more)

My buddy Jared from the terribly titled, but fairly excellent house music blog FuckYouOnFriday posted the new Doves track Kingdom Of Rust with a satellite picture of Spain. Yeah I know, doves, whatever, but the second bit is spot on, and here’s why.
Let’s put aside the rampant favouritism, internal dealing, and the lack of distinction between public and private money for certain members of certain political parties and focus on yet another bent public service, the police force.

Last week 2 secret policemen called me an asshole and threatened to arrest me for harbouring ilegal immigrants. I found out later that they’d been staking out my building for 4 hours while my 2 fully legal romanian cleaning ladies did what I pay them to do, washing my cummy sheets, sweeping up fag ash off the floor, putting books back on the shelves and emptying ashtrays. Yeah, I know. I’m a pig.
The only time I had any idea of what was going on was when a fairly good looking 20 something dude with skinny jeans, a leather jacket and a beard knocked on my door, told me he was police and asked me if I lived alone. Which I do. 3 hours later I get called up on the intercom by his partner (bad cop) calling me a fucking retard for not telling them that the girls were inside.

I was a bit baffled by this, until today El Pais ran a story about how police forces are being given quotas of arrests they have to make. It’s part of a frankly racist crackdown on illegal immigrants. I’m not so naive as to suggest that there isn’t a link between immigrants and crime. If you have no papers and no money, it’s pretty obvious that in order to stay alive you’re going to have to do something shady. Whether this is out and out begging, fencing stolen goods, pushing top manta DVDs or drug dealing.

But it’s only when you realise how this policing is being done that you realise that the long arm of the law is actually a twisted tentacle made up of equal parts prejudice and boredom, reaching into our communities and fucking up lives without apology or restraints.
Acording to the article, a leaked internal memo describes how police are set targets on how many illegals they have to arrest each week in neighbourhoods based on the rate of “Problem delinquancy”, explicitily linking crime to immigration. The way this works is that an area with a high rate of delinquancy is set a higher quota than another. Vallecas for example was charged with 35 arrests in one week, with the memo further stating that if those arrests could not be made within the area, that police were authorised to venture into neighouring constituencies apparently at their whim.

What the fuck? What the fuck is going on, when not only anyone with dark skin can be explicitly linked to a rise in the crime rate, but can also be stopped and arrested because they look like illegals. How the fuck can you ‘look illegal’? does Esperanza Aguirre look illegal? Yeah, she actually sort of does. Bad example.

Not to mention the public funds spent on sending a team of undercover cops to stake out a building for 4 fucking hours because they ‘saw two girls who looked like gypsies’ go inside.

Yeah it’s a kingdom of rust alright. Totally fucking corrupt.

COMBINADO CON BEBIDA

the only reason i'd ever want to dj would be to play tracks like the one on my myspace profile. www.myspace.com/keredis
I met Samy and Kaiser a year and a bit ago in a squat called el patio de las maravillas here in Madrid. Back then it was the only place anything interesting happened in the city. It had just opened, and was an example of a space being used brilliantly, without any of the pernicious political bullshit that inevitably accompanies Okupas in Spain. Sure, there were kids with dreads, and a few of those wierd genie trousers, but for the most part it was perfect.
This is a list of the cool stuff that went on in the first month or so.

Open air concerts by Au, Bestia Ferdia, Maher Shalal Haz Baz and Grabba Grabba tape amoung others that i didn't go to
This wierd canopy thing made out of pulleys that covered the courtyard when it rained.
A bike rack out the front.
A weekly workshop on how to build midi controllers out of random toys.
Open air projections of actually quite interesting documentaries.
And local kids like Samy and Kaiser mixing with wannabe hipsters like me.

This is what went wrong.
Within 2 months, the concerts stopped, and the bar filled up with hippies.
Bicicritica moved from it's workshop in Vallecas, into the building, filling it with heaps of old bikes and general shit (i have no problem with critical mass - it's just gone a bit hippy recently)
The actually quite interesting wall painting and art installations like the canopy thing got replaced by shitty anarchist graffiti, CNT logos, and the dumbest fucking bullshit cartoons featuring asterix and Obelix, fighting the roman empire.

I have no problem with people being political. I even think that some political views are better than others. For instance, socialism is better than fascism. But i find it hard to accept an ideology that turns you into a 12 year old radicalised fuckwit without any aesthetic sensibility whatsoever.

Rejecting and criticising the art market and whatever for being disgustingly capitalist is great. I'm with you. Right on etc. But that doesn't mean you should reject pretty things just cause they dont carry a clear political message. Do you scowl at sunsets because they're not red enough? do you deliberately make yourself vomit on the flower beds in the park?

are you such a fucking arsehole that you turn what was an important open cultural space for people from lots of different backgrounds in the centre of madrid into another scowly hippy ghetto of righteousness?

obviously you are.

Fino

It's just gone 10 oclock in the morning. I've been up since 7. Last night i was drinking tequila with this girl called Kelly and my friend Lisa who was sitting in a hammock in Kellys flat. We went out and brought back a pizza. We listened to the Clash, Calexico and Silvio Rodriguez, none of which are bands i especially like.
Lisa and Kelly live in Caracas, which is the capital of Venezuela which is at the top of continental south america and is in the news every now and again because of its ebullient president and the inappropriate things he says to international leaders.
C is a city of about 5 million people, which by Latin American standards is pretty insignificant. It doesn´t have any pretty colonial architecture due to earthquakes, 1950's city centre remodelling under the perez jimenez dictatorship, and what remains is streaked with exhaust fumes, bulletholes and city grime on account of it being in the centre which is now a slum.
When you go abroad you always feel safer than you do at home. It has alot to do i think with not hearing the stories that make you paranoid. It's like the first time you got mugged you didn't walk down that street again. At home your phone is filled with text messages about how pete got stabbed the other night in the park and you can turn it into gossip if you like, but it still makes you think twice.
I think this is the problem with Caracas. Rumours. For starters, the TV is filled with surgically perfect presenters, dripping jewllery, tans and smiles, talking about killings, politics and how generally fucked the country is. I am sure that the country for those people is fucked. But nowhere near as fucked, cut, sobbing and ripped up as it is for the people who have to deal with the majority of the crime. The vastly disproportionate poor.
I have next to no interest in talking about how the poor are a direct result of the widespread cultural racism and exploitation at the hands of the upper class and middle class elite. From what i understand the argument runs that the number of poor has risen under the present government. But so has migration to the urban centres and immigration from surrounding latin american countries. Which is probably a sign of a relatively strong economy.
the next argument talks about living conditions. Slums are dangerous cramped and living conditions are terrible. Right. And call me a postmodern liberal tourist, but the question seems to be about aesthetics. Slum housing is self constructed, but the same capitalist rules apply to it as any kind of housing. THe more money you have, the bigger and better that house will be. With the government turning a blind eye to the robbing of electricity, and taking direct action to provide water, the slums seem a cheaper alternative to providing housing for the urban poor. It's worth asking how much the visual impression these developments have upon the 1950's upper class generation has in terms of generating fear is down to their aesthetic departure from the ideals set forth under perez jimenez.
What does exist is crime. Caracas has one of the highest proportional murder rates in the world, and yet the violence is mainly focused within poor urban areas.
What i'm getting at here is how the fear of crime contributes to the perpetuation of crime. The response of the relatively well off classes is to retreat into gated communities, shopping centers and TV, leaving the centre to the slums and negating any possible dialogue between the classes. I'm not saying senora rosales should walk into the centre dressed in prada, but the point is that people always take precautions about their environment and it's a great feature of people that they adapt to the environments they find themselves in. And this goes across the social and economic spectrum. It seems to me that the isolationist hysterical approach of the U/M class contributes to the problem, and expresses a collective fear which has guilt and hypocrisy at it's root, and continuing inhumanity as it's result.

This is a discourse that i feel is shared by the people i met and liked in Caracas. Photographers, Fixers, Students and Cinematographers who took it upon themselves to confront and experience disparity first hand, placing it under the banner of experience and seeing it as necessary. It's worth saying though that Kelly still carries mace when she goes out after dark.