by Frances & Frohman

“…WHY IS IT that the only way a young musician can get across to the general public these days is as wallpaper for some other product? Why is it that we can’t hear new music on the radio, or see new music performed on television? In other words, why isn’t music on its own, given its own space in the still-powerful mass media? Isn’t music good enough? Or, could it be that it’s just not profitable enough? And if the latter is the case, shouldn’t we ask why the mass media system–and our planet’s airwaves, which belong to all of us–are structured in such a way that our right to meaningful, rich, sensuous, full-of-life art is increasingly denied? …” Read the full piece here.

While the Senate acts politically with its hearings of Gonzales et al and impeachment is “off the table” those plucky Argentineans have developed a tactic of public justice known as the Escrache.

What do you do when the people who kidnapped, tortured and killed your parents or relatives go free? When the doctors who attended your pregnant mother while in a concentration camp escape unpunished? The answer that many members of HIJOS, an organization of the children of the disappeared, extra-judicially executed and exiled in the Southern Cone countries, have come up with are escraches. An escrache involves setting up a demostration in front of the house or place of employment of a known torturer or killer, alerting the public as to his identity and his crimes. In a recent week, Argentinean doctor Raul Sanchez Ruiz was the object of an escrache. Sanchez Ruiz worked in the ESMA (Naval Mechanics School), the largest concentration camp in Argentina, where he made sure the disappeared did not die during the torture sessions, so that they could continue being tortured. He also attended the pregnant women who gave birth at the concentration camp, and is suspected of knowing the whereabouts of their children – most of whom were given to families and friends of the military to adopt as their own. The escrache included a play about a doctor who helped a military man adopt the child of a disappeared woman, and ended with red paint being thrown at the walls of the doctor’s house.

Like the sex offender registry, these events aim to make the neighbors of the Escrache target very aware of what kind of creep they live next to. The goal here is to make it hard for the meatball to move around without people calling him out for the scumbag he is. These Escraches involves targeted flyerring, noisemaking, graffiti painting, and mass rallies by the douche-bags own home. It’s a public justice thing.

A video (among many online escrache videos) advertising the public shaming of this Argentinian, Alfredo Bisardo, who looks like Karl Rove!! Twins missing at birth? Perhaps. They both seem to share a gene for complicity in genocide. The video shares the fleck of dirts home phone and address.

Thanks Jennifer Flores Sternad.

London Review of Books | Vol. 29 No. 14 dated 19 July 2007
David Runciman

Before he discovered literature in a friend’s apartment in New York, Bob Dylan’s connection to the world beyond the narrow one into which he was born came almost exclusively from the radio. The radio is usually on somewhere in the background of his memoirs, and it’s always broadening his horizons, letting him know what American music could sound like, in all its unexpected variety. Now he has his own radio show – he started broadcasting in the US last year – and it should be no surprise that it is deeply nostalgic for the music of his own youth. What’s more surprising is that the show doesn’t sound at all dated. This is one of the wholly unexpected blessings of Dylan’s later years: it turns out that he is a wonderful disc jockey. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could be better.

What makes Dylan such a magnificent radio presence is his obvious love of the medium coupled with his refusal to be bound by its conventions. His voice, for example, is almost a cliché in radio terms – its gravelly, nasal drawl is perfectly suited to the business of introducing records – but his delivery is very strange. Sometimes he mumbles, more often he over-enunciates, speaking a touch too slowly, regularly sounding as though he is reading a script. The result is weirdly rhythmical and somehow comforting. The format of the show is one of its many delights: it’s called Theme Time Radio Hour, and each week Dylan plays a series of records around a particular theme – marriage one week, divorce the next. Many of his selections are obscure to anyone under the age of 60, his taste tending towards the 1940s and 1950s over the 1980s and 1990s. But he is not wilfully obscure, nor is he a musical snob. For the divorce show, he played Tammy Wynette’s ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’ For the show about fathers, he played the Temptations’ ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’. For the show on coffee, he played Blur’s ‘Coffee and TV’ (but not his own ‘One More Cup of Coffee’). The pleasure of listening to pop music on the radio is always finely balanced between the wish to hear something different, and the hope that the next song will be a familiar one. Almost all radio stations tilt the scales heavily in favour of the familiar for fear of scaring people off. Theme Time Radio Hour doesn’t pander to anyone, and as a result it gets the game pretty much right.

Dylan also seems to understand the balance between the intimacy that is the essence of good radio and the more functional role of the DJ, which is to play the records. He often introduces or back-announces a record by simply reading out the first or last verse of the lyric in his incantatory style, making the words sound like poetry. But he also gives his listeners occasional glimpses into his own world. For the show about flowers, he talked about picking out his favourites at his local garden centre. For the show about cars he remembered the ones he’d coveted as a child. It’s never easy to know how seriously to take all this stuff, given his predilection for faking his own biography, but that is part of the pleasure (as it is with his memoirs). You often get the sense that he treats the whole thing as a big joke, and that, too, is part of the show’s easy charm. Occasionally, he reads out a communication from a lucky listener. In the show on the theme ‘rich man, poor man’, he told us about an email he’d received from, as he put it, ‘someone named Alan Dershowitz, who describes himself as a feisty civil libertarian from Harvard Law School’ (it’s hard to convey on the page the exquisite irony with which he spoke these words). Alan had an eager-beaver question about one of the records he’d been playing, and Bob was only too happy to help, though he warned Alan that he might be coming back to him ‘for some free lee-gal ad-vice-ah’. Who is the joke on here? Who cares? Sit back and enjoy the ride.

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