What has been painted as a battle between the virtuous, hardworking
north and the lazy, feckless south should instead be depicted as a
banking crisis. This is the crucial point made in a new paper published
by Manchester's centre for research on socio-cultural change. Called Deep Stall,
it compares the eurozone collapse with a plane crash and finds one big
difference: whereas everyone in the aviation industry – from passengers
to planemakers to airlines – has a vested interest in keeping planes up
in the air, the banks have no such commitment to keeping the rest of the
financial system afloat as long as they get paid out.
The
implication is clear: rather than devote efforts to ruining the lives of
southern Europeans, a far more effective way to deal with the
continent's crisis would be to restructure the banks, then rein them in
for good.
Can you imagine a television special featuredebuting in 1965 and being broadcasted every Christmas ever since? This is the case of A Charlie Brown Christmas, which was written by Charles M. Schultz, based on his landmark comic strip Peanuts, and directed by Bill Melendez, a key animator responsible for the film and television adaptation of the Peanuts universe.
Unsurprisingly, and ever so pleasantly, Charlie Brown doesn't really fit in the commercialised version of the holiday season. He tries to overcome his depression, and find out what Christmas is all about, accompanied by Vince Guaraldi's jazz soundtrack; in other words, this is pure Peanuts brilliance. Here's a small tribute to Charlie Brown, the most wonderful underdog of all time– and Merry Christmas everyone!
I can hardly think of anyone in the indie/alternative genre who can match the originality and expressiveness of Chan Marshall, the musician who is known as Cat Power; more importantly, her eclectic style, combiningthe punk aesthetic with the sensibility offolk and the quality of soul, in effect transcends music genres. In other words, it has been nothing short of a fascinating journey, from the intimate rough-edged riffs ofRockets, from her first album Dear Sir back in 1995, to the incredibly moving version of Bob Dylan's I Believe In You, from her 2008 album Jukebox.
And neither does Chan Marshallfail to impress on her most recent album Sun, which she produced herself, as well as plays almost all instruments on it. This time, multiple layers of her trademark vocals meet with the prominent use of synthesizers, in what perhaps is the most optimistic body of work she has ever released.Sun is a brighter albeit not a lighter effort, with tracks such as the upbeat Ruin, and the epic Nothin' But Time, setting the terms of reference. This is an album that breaks new ground, as much as it is vintage Cat Power; and maybe nothing demonstrates that better than the beautifully haunting first single Cherokee.
Photograph by Milos Bicansky/Getty Images ilpost.it
By
this point, there should be no debate: Austerity has been a failure,
shrinking economies and making it ever harder for indebted countries
to repay their debts.
[T]he economics of austerity have played out exactly according to script — the Keynesian script, that is, not the austerian script. Again and again, “responsible” technocrats induce their nations to accept the bitter austerity medicine; again and again, they fail to deliver results.
[...]
It really is like medieval medicine, where you bled patients to treat their ailments, and when the bleeding made them sicker, you bled them even more.
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a groundbreaking opera written by Bertolt Brechtand composed by Kurt Weill. It tells the story of a city based on the relentless pursuit of profit, and relying upon consumption; sex, food, drinking, and gambling, are its cornerstones. Anything can be turned into a commodity, and everything is allowed as long as one is prepared to pay for it. And in terms of Mahagonny's distorted and ruthless sense of justice, one can get away with shooting someone, but they are sentenced to death for having no money.
Mahagonny thus is an allegory of capitalism, and at the same time a satire of opera conventions. Bertolt Brecht opened up a new space for the critique of contemporary themes in the context of a traditional genre, while Kurt Weillsubverted opera's musical formalism by incorporating jazz influences and elements of popular music. Furthermore, their work brought the harsh realities of capitalism, including the cruelty with which people treat each other, to the forefront; and in doing so, one might say that they brought opera down to earth.
Not just any earth though; Mahagonny was created in the context of the Weimar Republic, and was met with hostility by the Nazis, who bannedit in 1933. "In a way," argues Tim Smith in the Public Broadcasting Service website, "what Brecht and Weill did was to hold up a
mirror, allowing those with open eyes to see the world around them." The opera premiered on 9 March 1930 in Leipzig; a retrospective by thePublic Broadcasting Serviceincludesthe following quote by the actor and singer Lotte Lenya, who was in the audience:
I have been told that the square around the opera house was filled with Nazi Brown Shirts, carrying placards protesting the 'Mahagonny' performance. ... The performance [was] well under way, before I was startled out of my absorption by the electric tension around us, something strange and ugly. As the opera swept toward its close, the demonstrations started, whistles and boos; by the time the last scene was reached, fist fights had broken out in the aisles, the theatre was a screaming mass of people; soon the riot had spread to the stage, panicky spectators were trying to claw their way out, and only the arrival of a large police force, finally, cleared the theatre.
Mahagonny is a timeless piece of art witha long performance history, including anew productionby the Catalan group La Fura dels Baus. Their imaginative and rough-edged interpretation may actually be read as a reflection upon the current economic crisis; it wasdirected by Alex Ollé and Carlus Padrissa, two founding members ofLa Fura dels Baus, and it premiered in Teatro Real in Madrid in 2010.
The above video includes an excerpt in which theCanadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman singswhat probably is Mahagonny's most popular piece: the Alabama Song. It has been covered by numerous artists, and most notably by David Bowie, who happens to be a Brecht aficionado; in 1982, for example, he played the lead role in a BBC television production of Baal, which you can see in its entirety here, while recordings of the songs from the play were released as the acclaimed EPof the same name.
David Bowie's version of the Alabama Songwas released as a single in 1980; he had already included itin his 1978 tour, and played it again on stage in 1990. The following video is from his concert in Berlinduring the 2002 Heathen tour. The city is no stranger to Bowie; hehad settled down in Berlin during the late 1970s, and it is there that he recorded what may be seen as his best work, the trilogyconsisting of the albumsLow, "Heroes", and Lodger.And it is this period of his life that he refers to while introducing the Alabama Song; "[w]hen I was living in Berlin," he tells the audience, "I used to sing this song every morning."
Oh show me the way to the next whisky bar
Oh don't ask why, oh don't ask why
For we must find the next whisky bar
Or if we don't find the next whisky bar
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die
Oh moon of Alabama, it's time to say goodbye
We've lost our good old mama
And must have whisky or you know why
Oh moon of Alabama, it's time to say goodbye
We've lost our good old mama
And must have whisky or you know why
Oh show us the way to the next little dollar
Oh don't ask why, oh don't ask why
For we must find the next little dollar
Or if we don't find the next little dollar
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die
Oh moon of Alabama, it's time to say goodbye
We've lost our good old mama
And must have dollar or you know why
Oh show us the way to the next little girl
Oh don't ask why, oh don't ask why
For we must find the next little girl
Or if we don't find the next little girl
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die
Oh moon of Alabama, it's time to say goodbye
We've lost our good old mama
And must have little girl or you know why
Oh moon of Alabama, it's time to say 'auf wiedersehen'
We've lost our good old mama
And must have little girl or you know why
You know why
You know why
"we never meant our music to come with a pre-programmed emotional response. we don’t want to tell anyone how to feel and what to take from it. with the films, we have literally no idea what the directors are going to come back with. none of them know what the others are doing, so hopefully it could be interesting."
Sigur Rós is the best reason I can think of for one to listen to post-rock music; and they have furthermore put forward a quite fascinating idea. As the above quote from their website suggests, the band invited filmmakers and video directors to visualise music from their latest album Valtari, and gave them full artistic freedom in order to do so. The outcome of the Valtari Mystery Film Experiment has been nothing short of amazing, and the following video is my favourite; it is written and directed by Christian Larson, the choreography is by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and the dancers are James O'Hara and Nicola Leahey. Moreover, a Valtari Film Experiment program, consisting of sixteen short films, will be screened this weekend all over the world; a detailed list of venues and screening times is availablehere.
How
can we ask of people that they accept meekly the ferocious cuts in
living standards that the austerity measures imply? Do we want them to
just agree that the massive creative potential of so many young people
should be just eliminated, their talents trapped in a life of long-term
unemployment? All that just so that the banks can be repaid, the rich
made richer? All that, just to maintain a capitalist system that has
long since passed its sell-by date, that now offers the world nothing
but destruction.
[...]
And
yet, rage [...] can so easily become a nationalist, even fascist rage; a
rage that does nothing to make the world better. It is important, then,
to be clear that our rage is not a rage against the Germans, not even a
rage against Angela Merkel or David Cameron or Nicolas Sarkozy. These
politicians are just arrogant and pitiful symbols of the real object of
our rage – the rule of money, the subjection of all life to the logic of
profit.
What has been happening in Europe – and indeed the US in a more muted
and dispersed form – is nothing short of a complete rewriting of the
implicit social contracts that have existed since the end of the second
world war. In these contracts, renewed legitimacy was bestowed on the
capitalist system, once totally discredited following the great
depression. In return it provided a welfare state that guarantees
minimum provision for all those burdens that most citizens have to
contend with throughout their lives – childcare, education, health,
unemployment, disability and old age.
Of course there is nothing
sacrosanct about any of the details of these social contracts. Indeed,
the contracts have been modified on the margins all the time. However,
the rewriting in many European countries is an unprecedented one. It is
not simply that the scope and the speed of the cuts are unusually large.
It is more that the rewriting is being done through the back door.
Instead
of it being explicitly cast as a rewriting of the social contract,
changing people's entitlements and changing the way the society
establishes its legitimacy, the dismembering of the welfare state is
presented as a technocratic exercise of "balancing the books". Democracy
is neutered in the process and the protests against the cuts are
dismissed. The description of the externally imposed Greek and Italian
governments as "technocratic" is the ultimate proof of the attempt to
make the radical rewriting of the social contract more acceptable by
pretending that it isn't really a political change.
The danger is
not only that these austerity measures are killing the European
economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European
democracies – not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so
many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also
indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through
this backdoor rewriting of the social contract. Especially if they are
going to have to go through long tunnels of economic difficulties in
coming years, and in the context of global shifts in economic power
balance and of severe environmental challenges, European countries can
ill afford to have the legitimacy of their political systems damaged in
this way.
