Global Voices
The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance
Announcing my new edited collection: The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance
This lively textual symposium offers a rich harvest of formative research on the culture of global psytrance (psychedelic trance). As the first book to address the diverse transnationalism of this contemporary electronic dance music phenomenon, the collection hosts interdisciplinary research attending to psytrance as a product of intersecting local and global trajectories. With coverage of scenes in Goa, the UK, Israel, Japan, Italy, the US, Portugal, The Czech Republic and Australia, the collection features a dozen chapters from scholars researching psytrance in worldwide locations, employing various methods, within multiple disciplines. With chapters offering significant contributions to our understanding of globalization and music cultures, scene demise and transformation, ephemeral and cosmopolitan assemblages, counterculture and paradox, psychedelicization and genre, virtual tribes and the Internet, the carnivalesque and the aesthetics of nonsense, festivals and the logics of sacrifice, and other topics, Psytrance will strike interest across anthropology, sociology and studies in popular music, culture, media, history and religion.
Contents
Psytrance: An Introduction. Graham St John
I Goa Trance
1. Goa is a State of Mind: On the Ephemerality of Psychedelic Social Emplacements. Luther Elliott
2. The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes: The Case of Psytrance in Goa. Anthony D’Andrea
3. The Ghost of Goa Trance: A Retrospective. Arun Saldanha
II Global Psytrance
4. Infinite Noise Spirals: Psytrance as Cosmopolitan Emotion. Hillegonda Rietveld
5. Psychedelic Trance Music Making in the UK: Rhizomatic Craftsmanship and the Global Market Place. Charles de Ledesma
6. Re-evaluating Musical Genre in UK Psytrance. Robin Lindop
7. (En)Countering the Beat: Paradox in Israeli Psytrance. Joshua I. Schmidt
III Liminal Culture
8. DemenCZe: Psychedelic Madhouse in the Czech Republic. Botond Vitos
9. Dionysus Returns: Tuscan Trancers and Euripides’ The Bacchae. Chiara Baldini
10. Weaving the Underground Web: Neotribalism and Psytrance on Tribe.net. Jenny Ryan
11. Narratives in Noise: Reflexivity, Migration and Liminality in the Australian Psytrance Scene. Alex Lambert
12. Liminal Culture and Global Movement: The Transitional World of Psytrance. Graham St John
Reviews“Psytrance is an intriguing transnational phenomenon for anyone interested in popular music, subcultures, and alternative spiritualities and lifestyles. Although still relatively unexplored, it is an increasingly significant area of study in Sociology, Cultural Studies, Popular Music Studies and Religious Studies. A dynamic feature of a multi-faceted, global, psychedelic occulture, psytrance presents the scholar with a fascinating, if bewildering array of musicological, cultural, and spiritual confluences. Edited by Graham St John, the foremost EDMC theorist, this stimulating collection of essays by some of the key researchers in the field provides a genuinely insightful and engaging contribution to the study of psytrance, which students, tutors, and researchers will be turning to for many years to come. I warmly and enthusiastically welcome it.” --Christopher Partridge, Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, UK
“The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance is a rich collection, full of pieces that combine the results of detailed fieldwork with up-to-date theorizing. I particularly like the way this volume goes beyond the longstanding preoccupation of popular music scholars with subcultural expression, and into a whole set of other, interdisciplinary issues. This book is very much about music, but it also tackles such phenomena as the global “festivalization” of culture, emerging forms of music-based religiosity, transformations in the nature of cultural labour, and shifts in the social meaning of travel. Psytrance comes across here as much more than just one more interesting musical niche. Interweaving technologies and bodies, the archaic and the contemporary, the local and the cosmopolitan, psytrance condenses within itself many of the key cultural dynamics of our time. The articles gathered here delve into those dynamics with skill and commitment, and the result is a book that should interest any scholar of present-day cultural expression.” --Will Straw, Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Canada
“Graham St John has assembled a thought-provoking and rewarding collection of essays that explores the rarely considered musical and cultural practices that make up psytrance. Dedicated to its local variants and its global tendrils, this collection frames psytrance through scenes, subcultures, neo-tribes, political economies, cultural politics, and aesthetics, as well as movement and mobility, giving us an engaging contribution to the nascent study of electronic dance music cultures.” -- Geoff Stahl, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa - New Zealand
Purchasing the bookNote this book is only available at present in hardback. While it is expensive, if there are enough sales over the next year, it will become eligible for Routledge's Paperback Direct program (ie. will be a much cheaper paperback). So, if you can get your library to aquire it or your professors to buy it, please do so. Or, if you are unusually wealthy, go ahead and grant yourself this indulgence.
Buy it from Routledge
But it from Book Depository = cheaper: free delivery.
Buy it from Amazon.com
Categories: Global Voices, Undergrowth Featured Blogs
MardiGrass
Last Sunday, I climbed down out of the hills.
I bore witness to the annual Hemp Parade, part of MardiGrass, Nimbin, Australia.
The protestival had its inception on May 1 1993, inaugurated by the Nimbin HEMP Embassy in response to years of repression met daily by users of cannabis. As a weekend-long schedule of public events, which emerged as a legitimate platform of protest and celebration in response to an incident in March 1993 when eggs and toilet paper rained down on the police station, MardiGrass enables the inhabitants of Nimbin and the surrounding region to make a peaceful spectacle of themselves, and their cause.
Eighteen years later, the event is a unique festival by world standards, attracting thousands from around the region and indeed around the world.
By the time I lurched into town with friends Kathleen and Kenneth I'd missed the infamous 4:20 mass "enlightenment" and Kombi Konvoy which rolled through town on Saturday.
Officially known as the Rally and Parade for Cannabis Law Reform, the Sunday parade ends with a rally down at Peace Park near the site of the 1973 Aquarius Festival that had transformed the town into Australia's alternative capital. Down at the park, speeches would be made and prizes awarded for the winners of the Hemp Olympix.
But before that, there was the parade of the outraged and the outrageous. Here's a few shots:
The event will be held, so say its organisers, "until the war is over".
Categories: Global Voices, Undergrowth Featured Blogs
Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures
I am very pleased to announce the publication of my new book:
Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures
(Graham St John, Equinox, 2009)
A cultural history of global electronic dance music countercultures, Technomad explores the pleasurable and activist trajectories of post-rave culture.
“Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures is the most wide-ranging and detailed of all the books on rave. More than the study of a musical movement or genre, Technomad offers an alternate history of cultural politics since the 1960s, from hippies and Acid Tests through the sound systems and ‘vibe-tribes’ of the 1990s and beyond. Like Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, Technomad makes unexpected but entirely convincing connections between people, movements and events. Like Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, St John’s book introduces us to unknown heroes, committed geniuses and genuine revolutionaries. Beautifully written, with a genuinely international perspective on electronic dance music culture, Technomad is one of the best books on music I’ve read in some time.”
Professor Will Straw, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University
Book description:
The book documents an emerging network of techno-tribes, exploring their pleasure principles and cultural politics. Attending to sound system culture, electro-humanitarianism, secret sonic societies, teknivals and other gatherings, intentional parties, revitalisation movements and counter-colonial interventions, Technomad investigates how the dance party has been harnessed for transgressive and progressive ends – for manifold freedoms. Seeking freedom from moral prohibitions and standards, pleasure in rebellion, refuge from sexual and gender prejudice, exile from oppression, rupturing aesthetic boundaries, re-enchanting the world, reclaiming space, fighting for “the right to party,” and responding to a host of critical concerns, electronic dance music cultures are multivalent sites of resistance.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic, netographic and documentary research, Technomad details the post-rave trajectory through various local sites and global scenes, with each chapter attending to unique developments in the techno counterculture: e.g. Spiral Tribe, teknivals, psytrance, Burning Man, Reclaim the Streets, Earthdream. The book offers an original, nuanced theory of resistance to assist understanding of these developments. This cultural history of hitherto uncharted territory will be of interest to students of cultural, performance, music, media, and new social movement studies, along with enthusiasts of dance culture and popular politics.
Contents
1. Introduction: The Rave-olution?
2. Sound System Exodus: Tekno-Anarchy in the UK and Beyond
3. Secret Sonic Societies and Other Renegades of Sound
4. New Tribal Gathering: Vibe-Tribes and Mega-Raves
5. The Technoccult, Psytrance and the Millennium
6. Rebel Sounds and Dance Activism: Rave and the Carnival of Protest
7. Outback Vibes: Dancing Up Country
8. Hardcore, You Know the Score
Available from Equinox
and amazon.com
More reviews
“Technomad offers important insights into the meeting points between countercultural discourses and post-rave techno cultures. Optimistic regarding the progressive potential of outdoor techno-trance gatherings, this well-documented study traces the complex genealogy of a global nomadic ‘technoccult’, with emphasis on Europe, North-America and Australia. Not to be missed by anyone interested in the study of rave cultures, countercultures and festivals.”
Dr Hillegonda Rietveld, Reader in Cultural Studies, London South Bank University
“A critical utopianism is articulated and celebrated with a textual energy too rare in today’s cultural studies. Graham St John is wide-eyed in order to look more closely. I recommend his shining and grubby doofscape to all interested in the radical possibilities and limitations of contemporary culture.”
Professor George McKay, University of Salford
Categories: Global Voices, Undergrowth Featured Blogs
The Journeybook launches in SF on Aug 8 2009
Come celebrate the San Francisco launch of the Journeybook, the world's best psychedelic anthology. A private warehouse party @ 1286 Folsom St. San Francisco CA 94103 on Sat Aug 8th from 730pm – late (afterparty at nearby venue). Featuring book launch and author readings by Rak Razam and Tim Parish and a Psychedelic Salon panel discussion by leading experts, including Rick Doblin from MAPS, live electronic music, art gallery space and more.
To reserve your place now for this private event, Paypal US $15 for entry, or US $35 for entry plus a signed copy of the book (which you can pick up on the night) to: paypal@undergrowth.org by clicking here.
A portion of the door proceeds go towards MAPS research on medical psychedelics.
Price: $15.00
http://www.thejourneybook.com/events
Categories: Global Voices, Undergrowth Featured Blogs
Monday Too Far Away: Rainbow Serpent Fest 09
Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum
You have to travel a long way up river to find him.
So far above the headwaters there’s barely a trickle. Under the withering south-eastern Australian sun in January, under the direct pressure of quality sound, in that primal real estate between the speaker stacks on Monday afternoon, on the Market Floor, Rainbow Serpent Festival. It doesn’t get much better than this. And somewhere, amid all that optimising, under all that tweaking of sophisticated hardware, in a vibrant undergrowth of bronzed bodies and baked wet ware, the Colonel is getting his freak on. This is not the bird-frying Colonel of take-out restaurant fame. He’s not your rank and file denizen of the trance floor. Somewhere in this theatre of the absurd, this paddock of pizzazz, this cavalcade of crank, the highest, rankest and most de-commissioned officer in the PLA (the Psychedelic League of Australasia), Colonel Kurtz, is at large.
It’s Australia Day weekend 2009, and I’m attending the nation’s psychedelic carnival: in all likelihood the funkiest dance festival on the planet. They’d made expeditions from across the country, and around the world, for the 12th annual Rainbow. I’d driven down from Brisbane, some 2,000 kilometres north. Via Coonabarabran near the Warrumbungle Ranges, through Dubbo and Deniliquin, I rode astride the long Barren Highway, over a landscape scorched by an unprecedented heatwave. Near Parkes I made passage through Bogan Gate and somewhere near West Wyalong drove into a freak storm, lifting as quickly as it set in.
The following day, Murray River ghost gums guided me home around Echuca way as my 75 series Land Cruiser crossed into Victoria, making for the town of Beaufort, west of Ballarat, the locale of the Mother of all Doofs.
Photo: Web Grrl: ozdoof.com
Arrived near midnight, two days before the event’s official kick-off. 500 people were already on site, so it took some effort the following morning to locate Krusty. An altered statesman and luminary of the scene, he’d found some shade and began making camp – good thing, as by 10:30 AM the heat was making my blood crawl. Beginning with a shrine Krusty set against a tree, over the next day or two, the camp became a loose network of vans and tarps, peopled by a largely Melbourne based techno-cognoscenti. Adjacent, a non-intrusive independent sound system spilled warm tunes and mashups over my daily iced fruit loops.
Over the next couple of days the festival expanded like an inflatable tropical aquarium. More than 11,000 people eventually poured on site, a flourish of vibrance, colour and sound replenishing a punished land. With five stages hosting sounds and performances from straight-up progressive psychedelic trance to dub reggae, along with a Lifestyle Village (large workshops zone), Transformational Area (natural therapy) and Kid’s Zone, Rainbow Serpent has gained respect in the global alternative dance calendar.
Mirror ball fetishes sway from the trees of countless campsites like devotions to the Age of Disco-very. Tribal ensigns, entheogenic art and black light beacons are raised on and above this temporary sonicity whose inhabitants are infected by a wicked and knowing laughter. All around the site, curious sculptures, funny lights and cool interactive installations have appeared, perhaps none more impressive than a pyramidal structure called the LightScraper (check the video here) built by ENESS in a paddock.
LightScraper by ENESS
While the festal ambiance is fed by popular cultural imports (a small tribe of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles among them), local origins and mythologies are respected too (the story of the Rainbow Serpent chief among them). With traditional owner Uncle Ted Lovett leading the opening ceremony with his customary Welcome to Country, there was no doubting where I was. And as indigenous music, art and culture (Dugong cooking workshops, performance) danced in strange synchronicity with non-indigenous Australiana, illuminated by the flames of Robin Mutoid's fire organ, we were living an animate mythology.
Photo: Ben Dixon
Photo: Dallas Casey
Last sighted in these parts a year ago, Kurtz was inside the animation. The man who was “banned” from ConFest, the alternative lifestyle festival started by Jim Cairns back in 1976, which, by the 1990s, evolved into Australia’s premiere alternative gathering.
I’d first attended ConFest for New Year’s 1993/94, becoming so captivated that I returned 13 times, leaving finally in 1999 having completed a PhD thesis in anthropology on ConFest (part conference and part festival) and its organizing body, the Down to Earth Co-operative Society (DTE). In those early years of my attendance the event alternated between bends on the Murray River near Moama (at New Years ) and Tocumwal (at Easter).
Mutoid Waste Co Beetle Mantice at ConFest’s Teknow Village doof, New Year 1996/97
This was pre-invasion, according to the stalwarts of authenticity defending their beachhead from raving interlopers and the possibility of the newspaper headline "Five young teenagers dead at 'Go to Heaven in 1997 Spiritual Festival'". The pre-emptive headline expressed the fears and the fantasies of Les Spencer who distributed a document around DTE in 1996 instructing Confesters on the neo-sonic demonics of techno music. It all started with the arch-nemesis of old farts, none other than DJ Krusty, who in Easter 1995 teamed up with the Ci-Cada sound system detonating Goa Trance down town ConFest to the chagrin of inhabitants unsettled by the Vooor Vooor Vooor Vooor propagating across the billabong and upending their asanas. The following year, Krusty attempted to shift the doof to the DTE Winter Solstice Gathering. But his efforts to obtain approval (and funding) were hampered by DTE, which, under the ministrations of defender of "the ConFest spirit" David Cruise, ruled that the event's postered image of psilocybin compromised ConFest's reputation as a "family" event.
The doof that never was
For those seeking a place for the doof outside the ConFest city-limits, the negation was disingenuous. The oldies appeared to be behaving more like over-sized children than wise elders. It was Krusty vs Crusty. And the cultural war would begin with earnest. By Easter 1997, the Doof at the Murray river site near Moama, a collaboration of Krusty's TeKnow village and the Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Company's Labyrinth, took place on the most elevated part of the site, where all were subjugated by the beats. When, with horn honking, director-turned-vigilante, Laurie Campbell, drove onto the dance floor intending to tow away the generator, the theatre was in full swing. But when someone reached in, snatched his car keys and chucked them into the Murray River, the doofers declared that they weren’t going quietly.
When, in the next act, Laurie returned holding a hatchet with which he intended to stab the beast (the generator) in the belly, he was gang-tackled, brought to ground, and dispossessed of his prop (by none other than Robin Mutoid - who then lobbed it in the river). But while Laurie was prevented from hacking into the 3-phase generator cable (and likely electrocuting himself), under Cruise control, with the support of Spencer and an anarcho-gerontocracy, DTE would oversee the axing of the doof menace, despite efforts by the likes of Joe Stojsic, another of my Rainbow campmates, to augment a compromise in a techno-acoustic "village" he called "Hybrid". With more than an echo of Nancy Reagan, as the signature file of one detractor had it: “Just Say No to Techno”. In this climate, voting blocks of those identified as ConFest Negator Tribalists (or CNTs) slashed funding to techno digital arts, psychedelic culture and forest activism. Amid the boundary maintenance was Kurtz, who once held a series of unobtrusive Psychedelic Spirituality workshops at ConFest, becoming the subsequent target of a bizarre hate campaign. Public enemy numero uno.
With his photo pinned at the entrance over successive ConFests, the gossip moved faster than a fire front on Back Saturday, and even more toxic. Amid dark fantasies of village water supplies spiked with acid, sexual abuse, and innocents abducted by techno-terrorists, a scapegoat for all the imagined dangers bedeviling their retirement village, Kurtz was bound, packed with the community’s nightmares, and driven off into the Never Never. A flaccid Cruise was seen parading at subsequent ConFests in a body painted flight suit under a banner which could have read "Mission Accomplished".
But what’s this? Surviving the Department of Justice (who had appointed an administrator to DTE in 2001), here they were, Cruisy and Les - out here in Never Never Land. The two most responsible for "saving ConFest" by carefully manufacturing, and leading crusades against, its enemies, stepping into the land of nod, nod, nod, nod. Over ten years later, I guess they came to see where everyone went. I meet Dave and Les in the workshop area late Sunday. The former sitting quietly nursing a video camera and carrying the kind of weariness I imagine one acquires scanning the horizon for spooks. Wearing earplugs, with no music amplified within the proverbial Coooeeeeeeee, Les delivers a 20 minute monologue on his recently completed PhD on what he calls the Laceweb. What are they seeing here, I wonder. And what are they hearing?
Col Kurtz and the Gesticulations
Photo: Sensesmaybenumbed
A Kingswood ute reverses slowly towards the Market floor. In its tray, couches hold raucous team-mates barracking for spirit. And their view? It's nothing short of sensational. Early afternoon and six thousand people are being dumped by long swells of funk. My woggle fully toggled, I bob across the sparkling sea on this longest of Mondays. That outfit from Cairns sharing their fleshy membrane with this crew from Doncaster East. Those bogans from Ballarat merging with these travelers from Israel, and those two recurring cute girls from Japan ... they are eternal. I make mid-floor interception with a cluster of marijuana plants offering the most organic decor in memory.
Familiar faces emerge from the deep. Rusty, I haven't seen for years, his scout uniform bristling with activist and esoteric insignia. Nano, a real life Drop Bear hunting action figure, lounges on his game, finding patterns in the chaos. A Norwegian goddess whose name I knew not but whose smile I knew well shouts stories of some other event on another continent. The illustrious gonzoloid Rak Razam, who with artivist-at-large, Tim Parish, had launched The Journeybook, a collection of entheogen-inspired narratives and imagery, on site. Holding an umbrella against the sun, under crown and in familiar tie-died uniform, the resplendent King Richard holds court in this federation of fedoras. And abandoning his command on the heights above the Market Floor, the Colonel himself now draws up among us, raising his side arms with uncanny precision, grinning under bass pressure, gesticulating in tongues.
And as I gaze to the right of stage ... there they are. A short squat figure and a taller man with grey beard. It's Cruisy and Leso, standing back beyond the stage, thin lipped at the spectacle. I imagine that they are staring directly at me. They are staring at me. At us! I wave, gesturing that they join me, join us, in this rare place under the sun.
Vooooooor Voooor Vooooooor Voooor.......
But like zoo patrons populating the safety margins beyond the primate enclosure, flâneur inspecting the contents of a terrarium, they are standing outside the vibe. They weren't intending to dive into these exotic waters off the Cape of Good Vibes. They were having none of it. Perhaps this is a case, as George Carlin once observed, that "those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music". Perhaps they're archonic inspectors searching for the WMDs they're certain are here. Sappers acquiring co-ordinates for a fire-strike? I don’t know, but the grooveless armada vanish into the haze as we warm to the synaesthetic currents in which we're immersed. And as I come about to an electronic funk quaking with tremors, turns and bombastic vocal samples, I know this isn't ConFest anymore. And, incidentally, it also isn't a European psytrance festival where intrepid adventurers are tasked to scale the summit of the progression. Under the relentless southern sun, amid techno-ferals and raving mates heir to a thousand backyard BBQs and a million corroborees, we are mounting a progression all of our own.
Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum
Photo: Beautiful Wwworld
Canadian puppet master Mathew Jonson is now conjuring a tech-tonic storm, the platform built throughout the morning by the likes of Reality Pixie, Sun Control Species, and Sensient, the salviated aural animatronics of the former (Darren Smith) benchmarked by his driving Schnickschnick which caused a sensation if for nothing more than the carefully crafted samples evoking psychedelic bogans of the third kind descending among, and getting up, us. Saddled up, and divining the spirit amid a groove intoxication that was growing phatter by the hour, the man of stainless steel, the Swedish Chef, held his Nangerator - the Whipped Meme Dispenser - aloft. Repurposed widely as a means of inhaling the compressed contents of nitrous oxide bulbs (or nangs), the gourmet whipped cream machine is a tool for assisting the gnosis, accessing the mysteries, downloading the shit.
Out here, the Nangerator is in high demand, for the mysteries are nigh and the Pope of Nitrous is calling in the reserves. On this Aussie Day weekend, in the strange wake of the NO2 assaying of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William James, and Ken Kesey, the dance floor might be a football field, the footie a nang drop-punted through the posts ... and the Rainbow dream team captain? Why, it's Kurtz.
The Kernel of Truth
To speak of progression is to speak of mystery - that which compels action, which motivates the sacrifice of energy in the pursuit of spirit. Gathering strength, we're at a significant site of the mysteries provoking and channeling spirit in all of its forms. And I say "we" since it is inside the optimised vibe where a multitude of individuals holding unique life stories, and pathways into this day, onto this space, may transcend their uniqueness by the most historically evolved means – that is, by dancing with others in a space-time which is remote, temporary and vertical. Such logistics enable a simultaneity of singularity and theatricality, evident in the rites of the Dionysian Mystery cults of Ancient Greece, and in the corroborees performed for scores of millennia in these lands by the Wathurwurrung and Djarwarrung. Since at least the 1960s and 1970s, alternative festivals have offered a means by which this logic (edge + brief + high = wow) has been adopted, resurrected, and, more recently, remixed.
Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum
And so you once had ConFest, an event whose cooperative framework, whose grassroots anarchist principles, enabled its social organicism and its "spirit". ConFest's spiritual ethos reveals a desire to remain free from possessive materialism, at the same time enabling experimentation with a multitude of alternative discourse and practice within its borders. This was a serious alternative cultural investment since 1976, and in the early to mid 1990s ConFest was a hot-house of ideas: permissive, exciting, diverse. But with nepotism, bigotry and CNTs characterising and populating Down to Earth, its event grew insular and, to the frustration of many, pointless.
Commentators have held that DTE's cooperative ethos made for a more open, virtuous and authentic event. But early in the new millennium, ConFest had transformed into a remarkably closed phenomenon, many of its innovators and activists ran out of town by possessive sheriffs. The Colonel was only one of these outlaws, although perhaps the most spectacular. With an early incarnation at the Tocumwal ConFest at Easter 1996 - where Krusty dubbed the doof village "Rainbow Dreaming" - The Rainbow Serpent Festival is a commercial enterprise. But it has evolved into an alternative carnival unparalleled in Australia, save perhaps for the Exodus festival. Its roots in electronic music, specifically psychedelic trance, colours its trajectory, as does its capacity to accommodate outlaws, the outraged, and the outrageous. Rainbow Serpent is much more than an electronic music festival. For one thing, music styles are diversifying. More widely, a commitment to support a local alternative arts scene, and host sustainable practices and indigenous culture within its precincts reveals a growing vision. More importantly, Rainbow Serpent, and a variety of smaller local event-crews, are vehicles for the evolution of a hybridized doof arts scene that, from its inception, has been sensitive to ecology and indigeneity, ceremony and celebration. And with support given for the augmentaton of its Opening and Closing Ceremonies, ConFest never had such an indigenous spirit.
Opening Ceremony Parade. Photo: Alicia Flanders
Closing Ceremony
The End of the Rainbow
Writing on West African possession cults, anthropologist Steven Friedson comments that in Africa "who you are often has as much to do with how you dance.” The statement offers some insight for Rainbows, but it may not be how you dance by comparison to others but that you dance with others. Here “possession” seems more intersubjective despite the fact that there are no universally identifiable deities or spirits of "possession". This is the terrain of the vibe, and it seems fair to say that, however you may struggle to describe it, the vibe cannot be experienced at home alone. At the thick end of the Rainbow, vibrating in its refracted hues, an optimised state of being together with others enables our encounter with the Other, including our other selves. These transpersonal states may provoke revelations about the universe and questions about our place in it, or they may confirm a spectrum of visions.
Yes, we were seeking answers and finding questions in this open classroom under the Southern Cross. And if there was a clear affirmation resonating as the orange disk slid beneath the western horizon, as traditional owners closed the festival under didj, drums and burning eucalyptus, in response to the Hendrixian question remixed in Sphongle's debut release Are You Shpongled?, it was as if we were declaring …. “yes, we are”.
And yes we are. The words I heard escape from the lips of the good Colonel as he was being shredded by electronic machetes.
"the colours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the colours"
Tim and Rak strapped in on the launch pad of The Journeybook .... This is Houston, come in 13.....
Photo: Dallas Casey
Thanks to Sally, Paris and Jay and their Five Star couches, the photographers for their eye, Callum and Robin Mutoid for their valued feedback, Krusty for inspiration, Kurtz for his Being, and the many-coloured people of the Rainbow.
You have to travel a long way up river to find him.
So far above the headwaters there’s barely a trickle. Under the withering south-eastern Australian sun in January, under the direct pressure of quality sound, in that primal real estate between the speaker stacks on Monday afternoon, on the Market Floor, Rainbow Serpent Festival. It doesn’t get much better than this. And somewhere, amid all that optimising, under all that tweaking of sophisticated hardware, in a vibrant undergrowth of bronzed bodies and baked wet ware, the Colonel is getting his freak on. This is not the bird-frying Colonel of take-out restaurant fame. He’s not your rank and file denizen of the trance floor. Somewhere in this theatre of the absurd, this paddock of pizzazz, this cavalcade of crank, the highest, rankest and most de-commissioned officer in the PLA (the Psychedelic League of Australasia), Colonel Kurtz, is at large.
It’s Australia Day weekend 2009, and I’m attending the nation’s psychedelic carnival: in all likelihood the funkiest dance festival on the planet. They’d made expeditions from across the country, and around the world, for the 12th annual Rainbow. I’d driven down from Brisbane, some 2,000 kilometres north. Via Coonabarabran near the Warrumbungle Ranges, through Dubbo and Deniliquin, I rode astride the long Barren Highway, over a landscape scorched by an unprecedented heatwave. Near Parkes I made passage through Bogan Gate and somewhere near West Wyalong drove into a freak storm, lifting as quickly as it set in.
The following day, Murray River ghost gums guided me home around Echuca way as my 75 series Land Cruiser crossed into Victoria, making for the town of Beaufort, west of Ballarat, the locale of the Mother of all Doofs.
Photo: Web Grrl: ozdoof.com
Arrived near midnight, two days before the event’s official kick-off. 500 people were already on site, so it took some effort the following morning to locate Krusty. An altered statesman and luminary of the scene, he’d found some shade and began making camp – good thing, as by 10:30 AM the heat was making my blood crawl. Beginning with a shrine Krusty set against a tree, over the next day or two, the camp became a loose network of vans and tarps, peopled by a largely Melbourne based techno-cognoscenti. Adjacent, a non-intrusive independent sound system spilled warm tunes and mashups over my daily iced fruit loops.
Over the next couple of days the festival expanded like an inflatable tropical aquarium. More than 11,000 people eventually poured on site, a flourish of vibrance, colour and sound replenishing a punished land. With five stages hosting sounds and performances from straight-up progressive psychedelic trance to dub reggae, along with a Lifestyle Village (large workshops zone), Transformational Area (natural therapy) and Kid’s Zone, Rainbow Serpent has gained respect in the global alternative dance calendar.
Mirror ball fetishes sway from the trees of countless campsites like devotions to the Age of Disco-very. Tribal ensigns, entheogenic art and black light beacons are raised on and above this temporary sonicity whose inhabitants are infected by a wicked and knowing laughter. All around the site, curious sculptures, funny lights and cool interactive installations have appeared, perhaps none more impressive than a pyramidal structure called the LightScraper (check the video here) built by ENESS in a paddock.
LightScraper by ENESS
While the festal ambiance is fed by popular cultural imports (a small tribe of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles among them), local origins and mythologies are respected too (the story of the Rainbow Serpent chief among them). With traditional owner Uncle Ted Lovett leading the opening ceremony with his customary Welcome to Country, there was no doubting where I was. And as indigenous music, art and culture (Dugong cooking workshops, performance) danced in strange synchronicity with non-indigenous Australiana, illuminated by the flames of Robin Mutoid's fire organ, we were living an animate mythology.
Photo: Ben Dixon
Photo: Dallas Casey
Last sighted in these parts a year ago, Kurtz was inside the animation. The man who was “banned” from ConFest, the alternative lifestyle festival started by Jim Cairns back in 1976, which, by the 1990s, evolved into Australia’s premiere alternative gathering.
I’d first attended ConFest for New Year’s 1993/94, becoming so captivated that I returned 13 times, leaving finally in 1999 having completed a PhD thesis in anthropology on ConFest (part conference and part festival) and its organizing body, the Down to Earth Co-operative Society (DTE). In those early years of my attendance the event alternated between bends on the Murray River near Moama (at New Years ) and Tocumwal (at Easter).
Mutoid Waste Co Beetle Mantice at ConFest’s Teknow Village doof, New Year 1996/97
This was pre-invasion, according to the stalwarts of authenticity defending their beachhead from raving interlopers and the possibility of the newspaper headline "Five young teenagers dead at 'Go to Heaven in 1997 Spiritual Festival'". The pre-emptive headline expressed the fears and the fantasies of Les Spencer who distributed a document around DTE in 1996 instructing Confesters on the neo-sonic demonics of techno music. It all started with the arch-nemesis of old farts, none other than DJ Krusty, who in Easter 1995 teamed up with the Ci-Cada sound system detonating Goa Trance down town ConFest to the chagrin of inhabitants unsettled by the Vooor Vooor Vooor Vooor propagating across the billabong and upending their asanas. The following year, Krusty attempted to shift the doof to the DTE Winter Solstice Gathering. But his efforts to obtain approval (and funding) were hampered by DTE, which, under the ministrations of defender of "the ConFest spirit" David Cruise, ruled that the event's postered image of psilocybin compromised ConFest's reputation as a "family" event.
The doof that never was
For those seeking a place for the doof outside the ConFest city-limits, the negation was disingenuous. The oldies appeared to be behaving more like over-sized children than wise elders. It was Krusty vs Crusty. And the cultural war would begin with earnest. By Easter 1997, the Doof at the Murray river site near Moama, a collaboration of Krusty's TeKnow village and the Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Company's Labyrinth, took place on the most elevated part of the site, where all were subjugated by the beats. When, with horn honking, director-turned-vigilante, Laurie Campbell, drove onto the dance floor intending to tow away the generator, the theatre was in full swing. But when someone reached in, snatched his car keys and chucked them into the Murray River, the doofers declared that they weren’t going quietly.
When, in the next act, Laurie returned holding a hatchet with which he intended to stab the beast (the generator) in the belly, he was gang-tackled, brought to ground, and dispossessed of his prop (by none other than Robin Mutoid - who then lobbed it in the river). But while Laurie was prevented from hacking into the 3-phase generator cable (and likely electrocuting himself), under Cruise control, with the support of Spencer and an anarcho-gerontocracy, DTE would oversee the axing of the doof menace, despite efforts by the likes of Joe Stojsic, another of my Rainbow campmates, to augment a compromise in a techno-acoustic "village" he called "Hybrid". With more than an echo of Nancy Reagan, as the signature file of one detractor had it: “Just Say No to Techno”. In this climate, voting blocks of those identified as ConFest Negator Tribalists (or CNTs) slashed funding to techno digital arts, psychedelic culture and forest activism. Amid the boundary maintenance was Kurtz, who once held a series of unobtrusive Psychedelic Spirituality workshops at ConFest, becoming the subsequent target of a bizarre hate campaign. Public enemy numero uno.
With his photo pinned at the entrance over successive ConFests, the gossip moved faster than a fire front on Back Saturday, and even more toxic. Amid dark fantasies of village water supplies spiked with acid, sexual abuse, and innocents abducted by techno-terrorists, a scapegoat for all the imagined dangers bedeviling their retirement village, Kurtz was bound, packed with the community’s nightmares, and driven off into the Never Never. A flaccid Cruise was seen parading at subsequent ConFests in a body painted flight suit under a banner which could have read "Mission Accomplished".
But what’s this? Surviving the Department of Justice (who had appointed an administrator to DTE in 2001), here they were, Cruisy and Les - out here in Never Never Land. The two most responsible for "saving ConFest" by carefully manufacturing, and leading crusades against, its enemies, stepping into the land of nod, nod, nod, nod. Over ten years later, I guess they came to see where everyone went. I meet Dave and Les in the workshop area late Sunday. The former sitting quietly nursing a video camera and carrying the kind of weariness I imagine one acquires scanning the horizon for spooks. Wearing earplugs, with no music amplified within the proverbial Coooeeeeeeee, Les delivers a 20 minute monologue on his recently completed PhD on what he calls the Laceweb. What are they seeing here, I wonder. And what are they hearing?
Col Kurtz and the Gesticulations
Photo: Sensesmaybenumbed
A Kingswood ute reverses slowly towards the Market floor. In its tray, couches hold raucous team-mates barracking for spirit. And their view? It's nothing short of sensational. Early afternoon and six thousand people are being dumped by long swells of funk. My woggle fully toggled, I bob across the sparkling sea on this longest of Mondays. That outfit from Cairns sharing their fleshy membrane with this crew from Doncaster East. Those bogans from Ballarat merging with these travelers from Israel, and those two recurring cute girls from Japan ... they are eternal. I make mid-floor interception with a cluster of marijuana plants offering the most organic decor in memory.
Familiar faces emerge from the deep. Rusty, I haven't seen for years, his scout uniform bristling with activist and esoteric insignia. Nano, a real life Drop Bear hunting action figure, lounges on his game, finding patterns in the chaos. A Norwegian goddess whose name I knew not but whose smile I knew well shouts stories of some other event on another continent. The illustrious gonzoloid Rak Razam, who with artivist-at-large, Tim Parish, had launched The Journeybook, a collection of entheogen-inspired narratives and imagery, on site. Holding an umbrella against the sun, under crown and in familiar tie-died uniform, the resplendent King Richard holds court in this federation of fedoras. And abandoning his command on the heights above the Market Floor, the Colonel himself now draws up among us, raising his side arms with uncanny precision, grinning under bass pressure, gesticulating in tongues.
And as I gaze to the right of stage ... there they are. A short squat figure and a taller man with grey beard. It's Cruisy and Leso, standing back beyond the stage, thin lipped at the spectacle. I imagine that they are staring directly at me. They are staring at me. At us! I wave, gesturing that they join me, join us, in this rare place under the sun.
Vooooooor Voooor Vooooooor Voooor.......
But like zoo patrons populating the safety margins beyond the primate enclosure, flâneur inspecting the contents of a terrarium, they are standing outside the vibe. They weren't intending to dive into these exotic waters off the Cape of Good Vibes. They were having none of it. Perhaps this is a case, as George Carlin once observed, that "those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music". Perhaps they're archonic inspectors searching for the WMDs they're certain are here. Sappers acquiring co-ordinates for a fire-strike? I don’t know, but the grooveless armada vanish into the haze as we warm to the synaesthetic currents in which we're immersed. And as I come about to an electronic funk quaking with tremors, turns and bombastic vocal samples, I know this isn't ConFest anymore. And, incidentally, it also isn't a European psytrance festival where intrepid adventurers are tasked to scale the summit of the progression. Under the relentless southern sun, amid techno-ferals and raving mates heir to a thousand backyard BBQs and a million corroborees, we are mounting a progression all of our own.
Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum
Photo: Beautiful Wwworld
Canadian puppet master Mathew Jonson is now conjuring a tech-tonic storm, the platform built throughout the morning by the likes of Reality Pixie, Sun Control Species, and Sensient, the salviated aural animatronics of the former (Darren Smith) benchmarked by his driving Schnickschnick which caused a sensation if for nothing more than the carefully crafted samples evoking psychedelic bogans of the third kind descending among, and getting up, us. Saddled up, and divining the spirit amid a groove intoxication that was growing phatter by the hour, the man of stainless steel, the Swedish Chef, held his Nangerator - the Whipped Meme Dispenser - aloft. Repurposed widely as a means of inhaling the compressed contents of nitrous oxide bulbs (or nangs), the gourmet whipped cream machine is a tool for assisting the gnosis, accessing the mysteries, downloading the shit.
Out here, the Nangerator is in high demand, for the mysteries are nigh and the Pope of Nitrous is calling in the reserves. On this Aussie Day weekend, in the strange wake of the NO2 assaying of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William James, and Ken Kesey, the dance floor might be a football field, the footie a nang drop-punted through the posts ... and the Rainbow dream team captain? Why, it's Kurtz.
The Kernel of Truth
To speak of progression is to speak of mystery - that which compels action, which motivates the sacrifice of energy in the pursuit of spirit. Gathering strength, we're at a significant site of the mysteries provoking and channeling spirit in all of its forms. And I say "we" since it is inside the optimised vibe where a multitude of individuals holding unique life stories, and pathways into this day, onto this space, may transcend their uniqueness by the most historically evolved means – that is, by dancing with others in a space-time which is remote, temporary and vertical. Such logistics enable a simultaneity of singularity and theatricality, evident in the rites of the Dionysian Mystery cults of Ancient Greece, and in the corroborees performed for scores of millennia in these lands by the Wathurwurrung and Djarwarrung. Since at least the 1960s and 1970s, alternative festivals have offered a means by which this logic (edge + brief + high = wow) has been adopted, resurrected, and, more recently, remixed.
Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum
And so you once had ConFest, an event whose cooperative framework, whose grassroots anarchist principles, enabled its social organicism and its "spirit". ConFest's spiritual ethos reveals a desire to remain free from possessive materialism, at the same time enabling experimentation with a multitude of alternative discourse and practice within its borders. This was a serious alternative cultural investment since 1976, and in the early to mid 1990s ConFest was a hot-house of ideas: permissive, exciting, diverse. But with nepotism, bigotry and CNTs characterising and populating Down to Earth, its event grew insular and, to the frustration of many, pointless.
Commentators have held that DTE's cooperative ethos made for a more open, virtuous and authentic event. But early in the new millennium, ConFest had transformed into a remarkably closed phenomenon, many of its innovators and activists ran out of town by possessive sheriffs. The Colonel was only one of these outlaws, although perhaps the most spectacular. With an early incarnation at the Tocumwal ConFest at Easter 1996 - where Krusty dubbed the doof village "Rainbow Dreaming" - The Rainbow Serpent Festival is a commercial enterprise. But it has evolved into an alternative carnival unparalleled in Australia, save perhaps for the Exodus festival. Its roots in electronic music, specifically psychedelic trance, colours its trajectory, as does its capacity to accommodate outlaws, the outraged, and the outrageous. Rainbow Serpent is much more than an electronic music festival. For one thing, music styles are diversifying. More widely, a commitment to support a local alternative arts scene, and host sustainable practices and indigenous culture within its precincts reveals a growing vision. More importantly, Rainbow Serpent, and a variety of smaller local event-crews, are vehicles for the evolution of a hybridized doof arts scene that, from its inception, has been sensitive to ecology and indigeneity, ceremony and celebration. And with support given for the augmentaton of its Opening and Closing Ceremonies, ConFest never had such an indigenous spirit.
Opening Ceremony Parade. Photo: Alicia Flanders
Closing Ceremony
The End of the Rainbow
Writing on West African possession cults, anthropologist Steven Friedson comments that in Africa "who you are often has as much to do with how you dance.” The statement offers some insight for Rainbows, but it may not be how you dance by comparison to others but that you dance with others. Here “possession” seems more intersubjective despite the fact that there are no universally identifiable deities or spirits of "possession". This is the terrain of the vibe, and it seems fair to say that, however you may struggle to describe it, the vibe cannot be experienced at home alone. At the thick end of the Rainbow, vibrating in its refracted hues, an optimised state of being together with others enables our encounter with the Other, including our other selves. These transpersonal states may provoke revelations about the universe and questions about our place in it, or they may confirm a spectrum of visions.
Yes, we were seeking answers and finding questions in this open classroom under the Southern Cross. And if there was a clear affirmation resonating as the orange disk slid beneath the western horizon, as traditional owners closed the festival under didj, drums and burning eucalyptus, in response to the Hendrixian question remixed in Sphongle's debut release Are You Shpongled?, it was as if we were declaring …. “yes, we are”.
And yes we are. The words I heard escape from the lips of the good Colonel as he was being shredded by electronic machetes.
"the colours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the colours"
Tim and Rak strapped in on the launch pad of The Journeybook .... This is Houston, come in 13.....
Photo: Dallas Casey
Thanks to Sally, Paris and Jay and their Five Star couches, the photographers for their eye, Callum and Robin Mutoid for their valued feedback, Krusty for inspiration, Kurtz for his Being, and the many-coloured people of the Rainbow.
Categories: Global Voices, Undergrowth Featured Blogs
India: A Critically Ill Marxist Leader Trends On Twitter
At 11.30am on Wednesday 6th January 2010, a medical bulletin from a private hospital in Salt Lake, Kolkata announced that Mr. Jyoti Basu, a 95 year old Marxist leader and former Chief Minister of West Bengal, who had been hospitalized on January 1st, following a bout of pneumonia had been put on the ventilator and was critically ill.
Mr. Jyoti Basu, a patriarch of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had served as the Chief Minister of West Bengal from 1977 to 2000, making him India's longest-serving Chief Minister as of 2009.
Soon, the word spread like wildfire and in the absence of a follow-up official statement/ medical bulletin regarding his condition, speculations began (both in the real and virtual world) as to whether Jyoti Basu was alive or had passed away. The arrival of a host of political leaders and other dignitaries, one after the other, at AMRI – the hospital where Mr. Basu was being treated, further fuelled the speculation regarding his death.
“Has he passed away?” A friend from Bangladesh asked me in the afternoon on Facebook Chat. “I don’t think so, have not yet heard anything to that effect”, I replied. “The news doing the rounds is that he has passed away but the government is not announcing it yet”, said another friend, an avid netizen.
As the day wore on, the crowd grew outside the hospital, more dignitaries visited and speculation gathered momentum. It also offered us an interesting opportunity to watch social media in action.
‘Breaking News’ of Mr. Basu’s ‘death’ was published on various websites, some of which, for example, SamayLive.com (an online news service from the Corporate House Sahara India Parivar) and kalponik.us claimed that they got the news from ‘inside sources. The ‘news’ was also discussed widely on blogger forums, social networking sites such as Facebook and of course, on Twitter.
By afternoon, Jyoti Basu was a hot search topic on Google, a lot of it being initiated from Kolkata. With all the buzz generated, he soon became one of the trending topics on Twitter, surely a first for someone from West Bengal.
lihkin - Jyoti Basu is dead and its all on Twitter. RIP Jyoti Basu.
paldibyojyoti with the number of tweets claiming Jyoti Basu dead, God himself would have been confused about Mr. Basu's fate!
anoopan (Anoop Narayanan) – http://twitpic.com/x0xsk - Google suggests Jyoti basu is dead
twikewl (Sunny Sodd) > @atulchawla: Jyoti Basu was born b4 computers, he was against computers, and now he's a trending topic on Twitter. Funny how life works.
By around 2pm, ‘RIP’ messages were pouring in. Tweets were coming not only from ordinary citizens but from celebrity Tweeters associated with MSM. Shobhaa De, a well-known columnist and novelist tweeted:
DeShobhaa - Jyoti Babu's death is worth mourning. I remember our last meeting at the Bengal Club vividly. Intellectual giant and idealist. Rare today. RIP
The page on Jyoti Basu in the Wikipedia was also modified to accommodate the unconfirmed news of his demise.
Finally at around 3.30pm, the veteran leader’s long serving personal assistant Joy Krishna Ghosh issued a statement that the patriarch was very much alive, though critical. Biman Bose, the West Bengal Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) reaffirmed this message. Mr. Bose also stated that he was aware that rumours of Jyoti Basu's demise were being fuelled by ‘certain websites’ and that he had himself read some of them. He urged the people at large not to give credence to such rumours.
Gradually the message began seeping through all the buzz that Mr. Basu was still alive and responding to treatment. Those following the story online saw something interesting happening on the Web.
The pages on the websites that had initially cited ‘inside sources’ and announced the passing away of Jyoti Basu were curiously unreachable or blank. Wikipedia took quick action, removed all incorrect references and semi-protected the page on Jyoti Basu to prevent unauthorised editing.
On Twitter too, a section of Tweeters were already cautioning others not to re-tweet unconfirmed news without checking out official confirmation. There were tweets and re-tweets of news quoting the official statement and medical bulletin. @Shobhaa De drew quite a bit of flack for jumping the gun.
ChinTweet (Chinmay Tadwalkar) - @DeShobhaa What are you upto,ma'am? Jyoti Basu is critical but still ALIVE! Keep your “RIP” messages with yourself.
Unni1945 (P.N. Unni) - Shobha De's hurry makes good laughing. let Jyoti Basu recover soon
cosmichappiness - @DeShobhaa Jyoti Basu is not dead yet. Hold on to ur obits and check the news
By the next day, more dignitaries, including the Prime Minister had visited Mr. Basu in the hospital. His condition remained unchanged. Some of the Netizens who had keenly observed the frenzied discussions of the day before, were quick to express a critical view of the role played by social media in the entire episode.
Pradeep at Sands of Change wrote on his blog:
Democratization of mass media mechanism may have its good side, but definitely not without pitfalls. A good example of the latter was the way the rumour about Jyoti Basu’s death spread on twitter this afternoon. Like email forwards and sms forwards, this too got mindlessly retweeted. The extent of traffic could be gauged from the fact that Jyoti Basu was a trending topic on twitter for a while… Interestingly, now it was the non-journalists who jumped the gun with “breaking news”, and it was they who got it all wrong! I hope they have become wiser now, and will pardon, when next time round journalists slip.
Kanupriya at Mixed Expressions wrote:
We always speak of media irresponsibility and sensationalism but in this case aren't citizens responsible for this rumor? Yes, Mr. Basu is critical and is hospitalized too but the news of his death is not confirmed by any official sources yet. In fact as per the latest update from most of the official sources, he is still alive. .. Well, now I'm curiously waiting for any update from news sites to know if it is actually a rumor or twitter was the first platform to break this news…Till then the curious case of Mr. Basu continues…
Others urged social media users to be more responsible.
For example, Anirban Saha wrote on his blog:
It’s a plea, to all who uses social media (facebook, twitter, orkut…and the list is endless) to be responsible… we need to be more responsible, as citizens as netizens.. the social media is a powerful tool to educate. It is equally powerful to spread rumours.
According to Shivalika Raj:
Social media is a plat form where people can share ideas, news or information from around the world but that information need to be authentic and not just any useless piece of rumor. The problem with the social media is that we cannot find the authenticity of the person involved and he/she can write anything and that news is spread in two minutes like a wave of water. I reckon that its our duty to make sure that the information we are sharing with our networks is acceptable enough. Assorting such news is quite hectic and sometimes time wasting but spreading a untruthful piece of news is quite dire for the society.
On Twitter too, tweeples were sounding words of caution. For example,
SachinKalbag - Journalists on Twitter will have to learn to remain true to journalism fundamentals. Twitter is a medium not a free-for-all. @surekhapillai
anirbanmisra -Jyoti Basu is alive, it was a rumor, appolise (sic) for being a part of spreading the rumorSachinKalbag – To those who perpetuated Jyoti Basu is dead myth, please be more responsible. Else Twitter will be under govt scanner.
SachinKalbag – To those who perpetuated Jyoti Basu is dead myth, please be more responsible. Else Twitter will be under govt scanner.
When asked to comment on the viral spread of unconfirmed news positioned as citizen journalism and the resulting criticism of social media as a vehicle of such rumors, popular Indian blogger Dina Mehta said that today the term ‘citizen journalist' was being used loosely, leading to unnecessary controversies. According to her, “citizen journalists are typically folks who are talking to their communities” so not everything that is crowdsourced, or found on Social Media should be labeled citizen generated news/citizen journalism.
As of this hour, Mr. Jyoti Basu continues to be critically ill and is battling for his life. The rumor mills have died down as of now. In the final analysis, the moral of this incident (and others similar to this one, for example the one pertaining to Steve Jobs that appeared on CNN's iReport site in 2008) is perhaps that whether we are recognized/ professional journalists or simply ordinary citizens, it is each of our responsibility to ensure that we do not oil the rumor mills online or off it.
Categories: Global Voices
Azerbaijan: Year of the child?
Emotions on Air, Mind Mute visits an orphanage in Azerbaijan and compares the officially stated aim of making 2009 the Year of Children with the reality faced by those seemingly forgotten and destined to remain in residential care.
Categories: Global Voices
Iran: Chinese cyberactivists support Iranians
Since the recent mass demonstration in Iran against the Islamic Regime during the commemoration of Ashura, dozens of Chinese “netizens” have joined the #iranelection Twitter community. They have added their own new hashtag, #CN4Iran, and even built a new site to support the struggle of the Iranian people, titled CN4Iran.org. Global Voices interviewed one of the cyber activists behind this initiative.
When and where was your site created and what are its main objectives?
Our site was created in Dec 28, 2009, hosted by Dreamhost.com (US). Our objective is to support the Iranian people for liberty and democracy, learn from them and spread the experiences to Chinese people.
Please explain us who is involved in this project, and do you have any organizational support?
The creator is CaoTaMaDe (nickname), we also have some webmasters and volunteers. You can see more details on Cn4Iran. Until now, we have NO organizational support.
Have you been in touch with Iranian cyber activists? What are your sources and who is your target?
We followed some Iranian people [on Twitter]. Sometimes we send message such as: How are you? Thank you. The major source is the Twitter users we followed, such as @@persian2english, @oxfordgirl, @oli2be, @tehranweekly. We also collect news from foreign media, for example, CNN.com. Our target is the Chinese cyber citizen, firstly the Chinese users on twitter.com, and then other Chinese Internet users who read our information. Also, we infrequently have some worldwide readers, and we tell them the reaction in China (by translating some Chinese news into English).
Do you see any similarity between Chinese and Iranian censorship? What about cyber activism?
We know that many web sites have been blocked by Iran Regime, which is similar to China. I guess they also have a censor system for keyword filtering, like the Great Firewall (GFW) in China. Such situation is quite common in countries like Iran and China.
About the cyber activism, I think it's viable. However, the governmental censor becomes more and more severe. We hope people from different fileds can have his/her own voice, even if it is noisy voice, but is must be heard. We also hope more people can make contribution, the collaboration in China or ever in the whole world can make the target to be achieved as quick as possible. Twitter.com can easily connect us together, this is a great choice and beginning.
How have been feedback so far?
We received some responses, like helping us to re-design the picture for supporting Iranian people, and helping us to translate English to Chinese. More feedback is the RT on twitter.com.
Categories: Global Voices
Brazil: Net-citizens have fun shooting corrupt politicians
After finding himself the target of a Federal Police investigation as the leader of the latest corruption network to scandalize Brazil, José Arruda, Governor of the Federal District, can now be shot by net citizens in an online video game. Launched by the Movimento Brasília Limpa [Clean Up Brasília Movement, pt], the game features Arruda and panettone (once simply a popular Christmas cake, but now a symbol of the fight against corruption in the country) flying through the air. Paola Lima [pt] explains how to play:
O passatempo é simples - e feito em cima do que se tornou o símbolo da crise, o panetone. O jogador tem de destruir os quitutes natalinos que aparecem na tela, assim como os bonequinhos do governador José Roberto Arruda. Ao fim do jogo, a mensagem: “Você ajudou a limpar Brasília”.
The game is simple and is based on what has come to be the symbol of the crisis, panettone. The player has to destroy the Christmas delicacies that appear on the screen, along with images of Governor José Roberto Arruda. At the end of the game the message “You have helped to clean up Brasília” is displayed.Movimento Brasília Limpa
Arruda's panetone. Hit the corrupted politician to clean up Brasília.Panetone is 1 point, Arruda is 5 points. We support the Clean Up Brasília Movement.The inspiration for the game was the events of November 2009, when the Federal Police accused Arruda of being in charge of a syndicate based on bribery and passive and active corruption that allegedly distributed a monthly sum of R$ 600,000 (approximately US$ 340,000) to its allies. His misdeeds were caught on camera and spread around the country via YouTube. Arruda denied all charges and claimed that the money had been donated to buy panettone for the poor.
Needless to say, this excuse only added to the scandal and has given rise to a number of jokes; even children have been poking fun and calling for Arruda’s removal from government. Many songs, animations and video clips have appeared on YouTube, all using the ready-made public footage to retell the story, seasoned with a lot of mockery. It seems that Brazilians are using humor and the Internet to make sure that the public – famous for their short memory when it comes to politics – does not forget about this case.
http://www.radioretweet.com.br/blog/
In this series of clips (in Portuguese) the actors recreate scenes based on the images of the Governor and his allies tucking money into their underwear, socks and jackets, substituting panettone for the money.MC Paulada has created two funk songs (both in Portuguese) to celebrate the “Pandora's Box” scandal.
MC Paulada/You Tube
In the “Arruda Out! Pandora's Box Funk” (above), the video clip begins with a voice saying, “OK, let’s count the profits. Oh no, the Federal Police! We’re fucked, what can we do? Tuck the money into your underwear, no, your socks… no, your underwear! It doesn't matter, let's go, let's go!!!”MC Paulada/You Tube
In “Arruda and the funk of the stashed money”, MC Paulada inserts a voice saying: “Where is our money? It’s all stashed in our socks, suits, underwear and bags.”The “Pandora's Box” police investigation will be resumed after the Christmas and New Year’s Eve recession, when the Supreme Court and the Federal Chamber will set up a Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPI) to analyze the case. If the institutions do not choose a more effective method of investigation, slow bureaucratic procedures will make the chances of an impeachment scarce, and Arruda could end his term before the next election, due in October 2010.
GameMania
“Arruda's Panettone” is not the first online game featuring Brazilian politicians accused of various misdeeds. The President of the Senate, José Sarney, accused of nepotism back in July, has also been a target. The aim of the following game is to shoot Sarney's head with a cannonball while he is surrounded by other legislators. It is a lot of fun, and you can work your way up through different levels. The game was created by the website Parece Piada. Click below to play:
The tradition goes back to the 1990s, when former Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello, who was impeached in 1992, was the target. According to Futepoca [pt], Collor's was the first game of its kind:
O primeiro escândalo de corrupção a ganhar as telas de vídeogames e computadores foi o que envolvia o então presidente Fernando Collor de Mello. Com o nome “Roxo”, o objetivo do passatempo era acertar a figura de um caricato mandatário – com faixa presidencial a tira-colo – com um martelo. Ao garantir o sucesso da empreitada, o pequeno Collor no joguinho, seu membro ganhava a cor roxa e surgia um balãozinho com o dizer: “Ui!”. Tudo em alusão à declaração do próprio alvo da piada, ainda em campanha eleitoral, de que ele teria “aquilo roxo”.
The first corruption scandal to be enjoyed on gaming and computer screens featured former President Fernando Collor de Mello. The goal of the game, called “Purple,” was to use a hammer to hit the ludicrous figure of the politician wearing the presidential sash. If successful, Collor's penis became purple and a little speech balloon appeared saying “U!”. The game alluded to a remark made during an electoral campaign by the butt of the joke himself, saying that his “thing [was] purple” [meaning that he was a brave, courageous, fearless, “real” man].http://desciclo.pedia.ws/wiki
Categories: Global Voices
Mauritania: Woman MP Calls General Aziz a Hypocrite!
Mauritanian blogger Nasser comments on MP Nomma Bint Mogaya's explosive speech in the last days of 2009 in parliament denouncing General Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz and calling him a hypocrite. He also features her speech in a video translated into English.
Categories: Global Voices
Egypt: Galloway is a persona non grata
Zeinobia writes about the new official news that British MP George Galloway has been declared persona non grata in Egypt - on the background of the Free Gaza March last week. He has been deported from the country and blacklisted in the official and some of the unofficial media too.
Categories: Global Voices
Egypt: In our house.. H1N1
Egyptian blogger, Ahmed Shokeir, writes [Ar] his experience with his younger child's infection with H1N1 (swine flu), and how the family worked on combating it.
Categories: Global Voices
Algeria: First day for a book on Amazon
Maamar Ameur writes [Ar] his experience with his colouring book for children “A.B.Coloring” 's first day on Amazon, and his blogger friends enthusiasm to help him promote the book through different social media websites.
Categories: Global Voices
Saudi Arabia: First “sighted” blogger
Saudi blogger, Maged, writes a blog post [Ar] about his friend Ali Al Omary, the first blind Saudi Blogger whom -Maged thinks- is not just a blogger but a real philosopher. Ali is also working on a new book about music in Arabic poetry.
Categories: Global Voices
Morocco: Ladies Honored
Moroccan bloggers joined the Kolena Laila (We Are All Laila) campaign, an independent online initiative inviting bloggers across the Arab region to express themselves freely and raise awareness on the concerns of women in their respective societies, for the first time. The campaign which originally started as an exclusively Egyptian initiative back in 2006 is now covering blogospheres from across North Africa and the Middle East.
Laila is the protagonist of the novel “الباب المفتوح” (The Open Door) by Latifa Az'zayate, and symbolizes women who try to build an independent personality in their communities.
Bouthaina, writing in Arabic on My Sweet Home tells the story [Ar] of a woman to whom modern life seems to have brought little benefit. She writes:
تصل إلى البيت أخيرا و قد استنفذت قواها الباقية من مشقة العمل و رحلة المواصلات التي لا تنتهي.. تنصرف السيدة المربية على عجلة من أمرها هي الأخرى ـ يبدو أنه قدرها الحتمي في هذه الدنيا .. عجلة أزلية.. لا تدري إلى متى فهي تكاد تنكسر..ـ تبتدئ بعدها مرحلة جديدة من مراحل عملها اليومي.. فالطفل يكون بانتظارها كي تقوم معه بنزهة.. أو تلاعبه أو تطعمه..عدا مراقبتها له و لشقاواته.. و التي قد تختلط فيها الضحكات بالبكاء و الصراخ الذي لا نهاية له…. تعود أنت يا حبيبي من عملك متأخرا.. بعد أن تكون طاقتي القليلة قد انعدمت أو تكادتندهش دائما إذا لم أتجاوب معك بما يكفي. و كيف لي بالتجاوب و أنا أخاف أن أبلغ يوما لا أستطيع فيه حتى التجاوب مع نفسي؟ She finally reaches home, having exhausted her remaining forces at work and by then commuting in an endless daily trip back home. The nanny leaves. She's in a hurry too. Being in a hurry appears to be her destined fate in this world. An eternal cycle with no end in sight. She's almost broken. Now begins a new phase in her daily work. Her child is waiting for her to give him a ride, or to play with him or feed him. Let alone that she needs to constantly look after him and watch him, which usually includes an endless succession of laughter, tears and yelling. Her lover comes back from work late, after she has lost almost all her energy. He's always surprised that she doesn't respond enough to him. She wonders: How on earth can I respond when I'm afraid one day I won't be able to respond to myself?
I'm Citizen Like You!
A. C. Osama writing in Ana Wa al-Hayat [Ar] attacks what he sees as widespread sexual harassment against women in his society. He writes:
التحرش الجنسي جريمة.. جريمة يعاقب عليها القانون، ليس لدينا طبعا. بل في دول الشمال. هنا الأمر يختلف، و إن كان هناك بعض الوعي الذي بدأ في الانتشار، إلا أن المجرم الوحيد الذي يشار إليه بالأصابع إن حصل فعل التحرش، ليس سوى المرأة. على الأرجح أنتم تعرفون كيف يحصل ذلك، و إن حدث و أظهرت تضايقك من تصرف “السي السيد” فلن تجد جاوبا أكثر من “إنهن فتنة، يستدرجوننا.. أنظر إلى لباسها! عليهن اللعنة”.
صحيح أن هناك تيار، يريد إرجاعنا، دون وعي منا، إلى زمن كانت فيه المرأة يرى إليها كوسيلة إشباع لرغبات و نزوات الرجل. و هذا ما قد حصل فعلا، فبعد تطور نسبي عرفته مجتمعات بعض الدول العربية في النصف الثاني من القرن الماضي على مستوى التفكير و رؤية الأمور، ها هي الأشياء ترجع إلى أصلها. كل ما يبدو لنا من المرأة هو الجسد. و أول شيء نفكر فيه عند رأيتنا لها هو السرير!!
. الأمر مقرف لدرجة لا تتصور. رأفة بنفسي و بكم طبعا، سأختم الآن. لكن كنوع من التنفيس عن الذات اسمحوا لي بالقول: لعن الله الرجال!!
There is indeed a current now that tries to push us, most of us unaware of it, to a time when women were seen as a means to satisfy the wishes and whims of men. This is what has actually happened: after a relative development in the ways we see things in some Arab countries, especially during the second half of the twentieth century, now we're back to square one. The only thing we seem to notice in a woman is her body.
This is unbelievably disgusting. Out of compassion for myself and for you I will conclude by a kind of cathartic call. So let me say: God damn men!!
The issue of sexual harassment was also tackled by writer and blogger Mohamed Mouâd EL GORDE (Medmouad) who calls for more respect and courtesy toward women. He writes:
I owe to my mother who, after the prematured death of dad, sacrified herself to raise us & to have all we need & my maternal aunts who didn't marry just to take care of us & later of grandma. Education & ethics in which I believe came from them & thanking them won't be enough whatever I do. Those silly men should think twice.
I won't allow myself to harass [any woman]. Understand as you want, I try to be as gentelman as possible.
So, men, please: have a respect for women.
Another blogger, Issam, although supportive of Kolena Laila initiative, is skeptical [Ar] about the impact such initiatives can have. He writes:
دعونا الآن نفكر في الفئة التي ستقرأ هذا الكلام.. إنها غالبا فئة مثقفة مطلعة على المدونات والأنترنت.. هذه الفئة تفهم تماما أبعاد القضية وليست على الإطلاق هي الفئة التي تحتاج إلى تنوير في الموضوع. وحتى إن وجد من هو على هذا القدر من الثقافة ورأيه يخالف ما نتكلم عنه هنا، فإن أول رد فعل سيقوم به حينما يجد موضوعا عن المرأة وحقوقها هو أن يغلق الصفحة دون أن يخسر على الموضوع سوى كلمة واحدة: “هراء!”أظن أن الصراخ المثقف، والندوات المثقفة، كعادة الثقافة دوما، أشياء تدور في حلقة مفرغة مثقفة بدورها. إن من يهين امرأته أو يضربها أو يتحرش بها لن تجده على الأرجح يتصفح هذه التدوينات أو يحضر الندوات أو يشارك في المهرجانات. Let us now think about who will actually read these words: it is often an educated class familiar with blogs and the Internet. This class fully understands the proportions of the problems facing women, and is not at all a category that one needs to enlighten on the subject. Even if one can find educated readers with an opinion contrary to what we are talking about here, I imagine the first reaction such reader might have when coming across this story about women and their rights, would be to close the page uttering this one word: “Nonsense!”
I think that cultural screaming, cultural seminars, and cultural things in general tend to revolve in a vicious circle. The one who insults his wife or beats or harasses her probably will not be browsing these pages or attending seminars or participating in meetings.
Hind Idrissi, writing on Hindapress [Ar], yearns for a time when, she says, men and women used to respect each other more. She writes:
إن ما تربينا عليه ووجدنا أجدادنا واباءنا وأمهاتنا عليه هو الاحترام المتبادل وليس اللكم المتبادل, إن من المعروف على المرأة العربية المسلمة عامة والمغربية خاصة هو احترام الزوج بل أن المرأة كانت تقبل يد زوجها احتراما له وهذا كان منتشرا في أجيال سابقة ومازال إلى يومنا هذا في بعض العائلات القليلة جدا ربما البعض سيقول هذه إهانة للمرأة لكن عندما يكون هناك المودة والاحترام المتبادل وعندما نرى البعد المعنوي لهذا التصرف لا يكون كذلك وبالمقابل يكون الزوج هو السند والأمان لها وفعلا في زمن مضى كان الرجل أكثر احتراما لزوجته والعكس صحيح . We were brought up to live the life we found our forefathers and our fathers and mothers living: a life of mutual respect, not punching each other. What was well known about Arab and Muslim women in general and Moroccan women in particular, is their respect for their husbands, and that the woman used to kiss her husband's hand, out of respect for him, and this was prevalent in previous generations and still exits to this day in some few conservative families. Maybe some will say this is an insult to women, but when there is love and mutual respect, and when we consider the moral dimension of this act, it no longer looks insulting. On the other hand the husband supports his wife and provides her with security. Actually, men used to be more respectful of their wives. Today it seems to be the opposite.Blogger Heebou goes on denouncing a certain mindset [Ar] that he sees prevalent against all Lailas or independent-minded women. He writes:
ما ننسى أنها حملتنا ,أنجبتنا ,أرضعتنا وربتنا فقط لنرفع صوتنا في وجهها كنا صغارا وحتى صرنا كبارا نجدها بقربنا أيام المرض نشفى فنعذبها حتى نسقطها أرضا ولا ننسى تشطيبها من الوجود فقط لأنها ليلى. We tend to forget that she [the woman] brought us up, nursed and educated us, only for us to raise our voice in her face. We grow older, we fall sick but she stays on our side. As soon as we recover we start tormenting her until we bring her to the ground and finish her up, for the only reason that she is Laila.Blogger Marrokia [Ar] who wears the Islamic veil or Hijab, defends her choice of a conservative lifestyle. She writes:
هكذا أريد أن أعيش لأني اتخذت ما هو صائب: حجابي تاجي وجسمي ملكي وعقلي حريتي. بكل بساطة هذا قراري This is the way I want to live and this is the right choice for me: my Hijab is the crown, my body the kingdom and my mind is my freedom. This is simply my own decision.Finally Naoufel explains [Ar] why in his view some assumptions need to be challenged. He writes:
.. فقط سأحتفظ بمقولة أن الاسلام كرم المرأة.. ثم أضيف: هل كرمها المسلمون أيضا؟ ان كنت ستهز رأسك ايجابا.. فتعال أكرمك أنا أيضا.. أمنحك حيضا و نفاسا و جنينا يعيش في بطنك لتسعة شهور و أسجنك في البيت ما حييت و اذا تسامحت معك و حدث ان خرجت فالبس النقاب، ثم في الأخير أمنحك نصف ما أخذه أخوك من الارث.. ها قد كرمتكالديمقراطية هي الحل
[…] Let us keep the assertion that Islam honored women. Let's ask: Do Muslims honor her too? Now if you shake your head in approval I suggest you experience such an honor. I offer you the menstrual cycle, the postpartum and a fetus in your womb for nine months. I'll imprison you at home all your life and if I'm compassionate enough will let you walk outside but only if you wear the Niqab (a full veil covering the face), and then as a last gesture will offer you half of your brother's inheritance. How is that for an honor?Democracy is the solution.
Kolena Laila celebrated its fourth anniversary, and whilst some have been questioning the point behind such initiatives, the organizers claim that it has already reached its main goal: opening up spaces of debate throughout the Arab world. The campaign was held from December 24 to 31.
Categories: Global Voices
Bolivia: Ex-Beauty Queen Named Candidate for Governor of Beni
For many, the news that Bolivian President Evo Morales would name ex-Miss Bolivia Jessica Jordan, 25, as the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party candidate for governor of the Department of Bení seemed like a late Day of the Innocents (Bolivia's version of April Fools Day) joke. However, when the announcement became official in a live televised press conference, the reaction became immediate on Twitter, as well as the reaction to those reactions. After the dust settled, bloggers also began to provide their thoughts about the matter.
Photo of Jessica Jordan by Hugo Miranda and used with permission.
Initial opinions on Twitter were ones of disbelief that a former beauty queen would be nominated to participate in the elections in such a high-ranking position. Diego Arrázola (@darrazola) wrote:
ni pa concejal JESSICA JORDAN puej pa GOBERNADORA! q esta pasando? siguen en la jodita de los inocentes?
Not even for council member JESSICA JORDAN, but for GOVERNOR! What is happening? Is it still Day of the Innocents?Mariela Castrillo (@ardilla_ilusa) wrote:
Lo de Jessica Jordan es hilarante….no hay más gente en Beni? no hay más jóvenes con sueños? q pena…
It is hilarious about Jessica Jordan….there aren't more people in Beni? No more young people with dreams? What a shame..There were similar messages of disbelief, and many referred to the fact that Jordan was the former Miss Bolivia. However, others thought that it was not fair for people to react in this manner. Patricia (@arquitecta) counters:
que les pasa? ven normal que un feo acceda al poder, pero cuando una bella candidatea, se rayan… machistas!
What is the matter with you all? You think it is normal when someone ugly takes power, but when the candidate is beautiful, you complain…it is machismo!Jaime Durán of the blog Economía Política, Desde el Lado Gracioso [es] criticizes those that have already written off the candidate:
Están también los que olvidandose de sus posiciones de género han dicho muy sueltos de cuerpo que la niña será muy bella, pero que es poco probable que la cabeza le sirva para algo más que peinarse. Viendo la calidad de gobernadores que hasta ahora ha tenido el Beni, dudo mucho que se pueda criticar a la bella Jessica Jordan, por este tema. Por mi parte, estoy seguro que dictará cátedra en los temas en los que se ocupe, pues siempre he creido que belleza e inteligencia no son para nada incompatibles.
Then there are those who forget their own positions regarding gender equality, who say that surely the girl is beautiful, but it is unlikely that her head is useful for something other than fixing her hair. Seeing the quality of governors that Beni has had so far, I doubt that one can criticize the beautiful Jessica Jordan for that matter. I am sure that she will show aptitude on the matters that she will deal with, I've always thought that beauty and intelligence are not incompatible at all.One of the major questions that this nomination raises is “What's in it for MAS?” Beni is a department in the Bolivian Orient that has traditionally been under the control of the opposition. Placing a nationally-known figure, who has not been a party member or active in politics is seemingly attracting the attention of the entire country and could turn the tide in that part of the country. Hugo Miranda of Angel Caido [es] adds his thoughts:
Y bueno esto merece un comentario, quizas resulte obvio que el MAS esta usando a figuras publicas de los departamentos donde aun no domina para tratar de ganar las Gobernaduras y Municipios, de esta forma tener el control total de todo Bolivia.
Quizas para algunos Jessica este siendo utilizada para estos fines del todopoderoso Evo Morales.
Pero queda la duda, y creo que Jessica se merece eso por que ella quiere mucho a Bolivia.
This is worth commenting, maybe it is obvious that the MAS is using public figures in the Departments where it does not dominate, in order to win the Governorships and Mayorships, in this way to have total control over all of Bolivia.
Maybe for some, Jessica is being used for those ends by the all-powerful Evo Morales.
The doubt remains, and I think that Jessica deserves all this because she loves Bolivia very much.
The strategy seems to be working as some bloggers who have been apolitical, or even in opposition to the MAS party are starting to support Jordan. However, some are making it clear that their support is going to the candidate, and not the political party. Even those people who are not eligible to vote in the Department are expressing their desire to help the candidate. It still remains to be seen whether the strategy will work in the elections scheduled for April 4, 2010.
Miranda, who has not been a supporter of the MAS party, writes that the one candidate that he will support is Jordan to the extent that he will include free campaign advertising on his sites. Durán concludes:
Creo que la elección del Beni será la más interesante de todas las que presenciaremos en abril del 2010. Asimismo, desde esta palestra anuncio que estoy dispuesto a trasladarme a la bella tierra oriental para colaborar en tareas de campaña
I think that the election in Beni will be the most interesting of all of the April elections. In addition, from this platform (his blog) I announce that I am willing to travel to the beautiful lands of (Beni) to help out in the campaign.Categories: Global Voices
China: New Ticketing System For Train Riders
As “Chunyun”—the travel season before, during, and after the Chinese New Year—approaches, two of China’s largest rail lines are adopting a “real-name” ticketing system.
Guangzhou Station in Yuexiu District, Guangzhou is a major hub for travel in Southern China. Photo by Don Weinland
Information Times reported Friday that passengers traveling on trains serviced by Guangzhou Railway Group or Chengdu Railway Bureau will be required to produce a valid identification card upon purchasing a ticket. Names and ID numbers will be printed on tickets and must be produced with a corresponding ID card at train stations to gain entrance.
Along with this change in ticketing practice, Information Times reports that passengers will be allowed three tickets per purchase but must produce three separate ID cards: one ticket per ID.
A variety of factors have brought about the introduction of the system. The difficulty of securing a ticket has become a hardship for many Chinese working away from home. “Yellow Cows”, or scalpers, purchase large quantities of tickets in advance to sell at inflated prices. The new measures may also increase safety aboard trains.
Appeals for a new system have been visible since last Chinese New Year’s holiday. An article published January 2009 at Sina.com sought a solution to the problem that has been popularly dubbed “a ticket is hard get.”
春运当前，有关火车票实名制的呼声再次高涨。民意一方呼声急切，以为非实名制而不能解“一票难求”之困局。而处于铁道部一方，则断然表示“成本太高”，言下之意，难于实行。铁道部门的这种“傲慢”，加之其垄断地位、春运种种苦难现象，混合在一起，一再地刺激民意昂扬。
Faced with the New Year’s travel season, appeals for a real-name train ticketing system rise once again. The appeals of the people are urgent, thinking that the “a ticket is hard to get” situation cannot be solved without a real-name system. But [the rail lines] have resolutely expressed that the “expenses are too high,” or in other words, it would be difficult to carry out. The arrogance of the rail department along with their monopoly status, the variety of hardships during the holiday travel season, mix together and once again agitate an upbeat popular opinion.
According to Baidu Encyclopedia, the real-name ticketing system will restore a sense of fairness to rail transportation during a season that is already fraught with difficulty.
目前民众尤其是外出务工人员，在出行乘坐火车这种公益性的大众交通工具时，常常遭遇不公平：虽然长时间排队，却很难买到自己急需的火车票；而一些票贩子却能通过各种手段，获取他们并不急需的火车票。于是，在这种现实面前，公民乘坐火车变成了一种没有权利和尊严的选择：要么你去求人找关系买票；要么你多花钱到票贩子那里买票。
At present when the people, especially those working away from home, take a form of mass transportation such as a train, they often met with unfairness: although they have lined up for a long period of time, it’s still difficult to buy the ticket they urgently need. Yet scalpers have a variety of means of acquiring tickets they don’t need urgently in the least. Faced with these facts, the taking of trains by citizens has become a choice void of rights and dignity. Either you beg someone with good connections to buy you a ticket or you give your money to the scalper.
The Chinese New Year’s travel season, known as “Chunyun” in Chinese, is the world’s largest periodical circulation of people. According to Xinhua News, This year’s travel season will see over 2.1 billion trips made between places of work, hometown, and back again, an increase of 9.5 percent from last year.
Not all agree with the adoption of the real-name ticketing system. Baidu Encyclopedia has listed some common complaints regarding the introduction of the system:
春运期间，铁路与民航的最大区别是客流量大。一旦推行实名制后，将会增加售票的信息录入时间和验票的信息核对时间，降低工作效率，影响人流疏散，加剧人群滞留，容易形成挤压伤人事件隐患。所以，实名制在现实中不具有可操作性。
During the holiday travel season the biggest difference between rail and air transportation is the large volume of train passengers. As soon as the real-name system is in place ticket registration and ticket checking time will be increased, work effectiveness [for rail employees] will be decreased, influencing the dispersing of the flow of people, adding to build up of crowds, and creating the conditions for trampling incidents. Therefore the reality of a real-name system is not workable.
这仅仅是增加了黄牛的麻烦，并不能从根本上解决问题，真正的黄牛，肯定不会是去排队买票的，既然是从内部拿票，所以你买黄牛票的时候只需带上你的个人信息，如此而已。
This only increases the difficulty of the scalper’s business but by no means fundamentally solves the problem. Real scalpers certainly don’t line up to buy tickets. Because they buy tickets [from a connection] within the ticket office, you will only have to provide your personal information when buying a scalped ticket. It’s as simple as that.
The Chinese New Year’s travel season is generally defined as a period of forty days before, during, and after Chinese New Year’s, or Chunjie in Chinese. According to Baidu Encyclopedia, this year’s travel season begins Jan. 30 and ends Mar. 10. Chinese New Year’s, a lunar calendar holiday, lands on Feb. 14 this year and lasts fifteen days.
Information regarding the “real-name” system was first leaked online on Dec. 10 from a Chinese blog. The changes were later confirmed by a railway insider in an Information Times article.
Categories: Global Voices
Russia: Photos of Yawning Girl Stir Interest on RuNet
Russian bloggers humorously discuss photos of a little girl [RUS] who for the second year in a row stands and yawns in front of the Russian president during the Christmas service at the Church of the Christ the Saviour in Moscow.
Categories: Global Voices
Uzbekistan: Calculations of the parliamentary elections
As expected by different experts parliamentary elections in Uzbekistan were recognized valid. Chairman of the Central Election Commission Mirza-Ulugbek Abdusalomov released that information later the same day (December 27), and added that 15,108,950 voters or 87.8% of all registered voters participated in the elections and, according to the article 44 of the Law on Elections to Oliy Majlis they were legal and undisputable.
neweurasia wrote about different surveys and one in particular by loyal to the Uzbek government Uzniform information agency.
Online survey, conducted during end of October and first decade of November asked respondents if they “…know that December 27 [2009] elections to the Legislative Chamber of Oliy Majlis and region, district and city Kengashes of people’s deputies will be held?”.
Out of 159 survey participants 82 (51.6%) answered “NO”; 12 (7.5%) referred to the difficulties with responding to that question; and, only 65 (40.9%) answered “YES”.
No generalization from my side but… If we consider that this was just a survey asking if they knew about then upcoming parliamentary elections that didn’t mean that they expressed their will to participate in actual elections.
Such opinion comes after checking out results of other survey by the same information agency which asked people to evaluate “…evaluate current activities of the Legislative Chamber of Oliy Majlis?”. Out of 171 respondents more than a half (89, or 52%) answered “NEGATIVE”; 15 (8.8%) participants answered “More negative than positive”; “Positive” and “More positive than negative” options got 41 respondent’s approval which sums up to 24% of all answers.
Ferghana.ru’s article titled “Parliamentary Elections Held in Uzbekistan” emerged many different opinions by those who read it.
максим (maksim) says [ru] that his “grandma was forced to participate in the elections because she was said that in case of not participating her pension for January would be available only after New Year.” Nobody wants to be without money on a New Year night, to meet and “celebrate” it with a poor holiday dinner. Thus, old lady had to go and “contribute” to that theater performance.
Che Lovek (basically, means a Human being), another active participant of the discussion, got mad because went to the elections to vote against everybody but couldn’t find such option. His fellow Dionis responded by: “Since we didn’t have “against everybody” option I filled in boxes of all candidates.” This means his bulletin didn’t meet requirements of the counting machine and had been exluded from calculation as invalid.
Whatever happens in the minds of citizens of Uzbekistan, international observers recognized elections as “democratic and open”. Very often serious politics doesn’t care about real state of affairs and analyzes events through the prism of national interests.
Photo courtesy Uza.uz: President Karimov participating in the election on December 27.
Cross-posted from neweurasia.net.
Categories: Global Voices
Russia: Blogger Reveals Microchip Plant Construction Delay
Habrahabr user pechkin1007 published [RUS] photos showing a construction delay at the “Angstrem-M” microchip plant near Moscow. The plant administration received a €815 million government loan [RUS] in 2008 and committed to starting the construction in Autumn 2009.
Categories: Global Voices
