Back to, But Not Into, The Swing of Things

Got back to Kabul today. But feel completely out of the loop. The quick trip to Dubai was good, cause I really didn't do anything noteworthy at all: went to restaurants, smoked shisha, read, watched movies, sat by the pool, etc... Though, I think it just made the dislocation worse. Kept up with work there, but in coming back I feel completely out of the loop. And it was basically 48 hours that I wasn't here for.

But I did get to decompress, and sleep, and laize about. So the energy level should be back up for a bit, and will hopefully last me through to the end of August.

Work is largely the same. Though my affection for it had, or has changed. In the least my attitude towards it has changed. I'm giving it the 'it's not you, it's me' line these days. Maybe me and work can get back to the way we were before now that I've had this little break.

(Car) Bombs Bursting In Air

Happy 4th everyone.

I thought I was gonna miss out on the fireworks. It's been a running tradition for nearly 10 years for a group of us high school friends to have a BBQ/Picnic, and then go watch the fireworks from the Mall. I obviously am missing that this year. Hello to all of you, wish I was there.

But fear not, I got to at least hear some explosions. Seems like the Taliban felt like commemorating the 4th as well. Though their explosives don't have that neat multi-color star effect. Maybe we'll at least get the ISAF to launch some tracers tonight or something.

A Wisdom of Sorts or of Sorting

It could just as likely be tinnitus too. Because this next band has, as one of my former housemates used to say, "that annoying indie tinny sound." Upon saying such, and after yelling at me to turn the shit off, he would usually follow on with an explitive and command them to: 1) get decent recording equipment, or 2) learn to tune their insturments properly, or 3) stop letting tone-deaf singers join the band--and on the especially prideful occasion, I'd get him to say all three.

So this is for you Brown Bear: The Cold War Kids.

I've been sitting on them for a while. At first I dug them a lot. Then they seemed like good recyclers of many of the current crop of indie-stars (especially the NYC New Wave/Garage Rock/Blues-Soul crews). But now I'm settled to liking them a lot again. Once again, a provisio on the singing voice. So you got there sound.

If I were you, I'd start here, with "Hospital Beds", and then move on to here, with "The Soloist in the Living Room." Their website has two other downloads. Otherwise, they seem inaccessable from remote locations.

**But I found some more Cold War Kids songs. Here they are. A thank you to So Much Silence for posting the songs from a KEXP set.

Addressing Complaints

And there have surely been a few. OK like three. Since there are four readers. But at least 2 have been that I don't post enough pictures. This is because I haven't taken a picture here since our last excursion out of the city. I never was a picture person.

But today, Slate's Magnum Photo feature is running a series of photos of Stokeley Carmicheal (aka Kwame Toure). Today is his birthday. They're great photos.

My favorites being the opening photo, the seventh photo, and this photo tops the list.

Enjoy.

“As long as it’s talking with you, talk of the weather will do.”

The afternoons have been filled with what’s best described as a flat warm wind. Oddly, I don’t find it refreshing, as I do for most breezes. I still find a certain type of placidity brought by the wind, though the breeze isn’t calming by any means, and I don’t want to say that it brings a sense of apathy.

So every afternoon an odd dislocation sets in, and when not so removed, maybe one day I’ll find better words to describe it. But as for now, as a subsequent line in the BTS song “The Weather” advises, “Nobody's hoping for better days/ No one knows what to do./ You're okay in your secret place,/ No one bothering you,” I’ll leave it alone.

Work, as stated many times before, chugs along. It’s providing the continuity and pace that is necessary to allow me to cocoon myself to what’s going on down south. Occasionally, something that floats across the wires (or gets emailed to me from the security staff) affects my work. Largely, I can float along, in my office/bedroom enjoying the afternoon’s dislocation.

Also, as I’ve stated many times before, we’ve continued to wind down the project. So we’ve consolidated houses and offices. I’m taking over the wrap-up of another project as one of our expats heads home. That may involve some scurrying across town, so I may not be able to cocoon myself so much in my secret place. I’m definitely going to be bothered by more people too.

To buffer that (and I’m getting a little “escape envy” as coworkers [even the Chief is taking some, well deserved, time off] are coming or going), I’m trying to get out of town for a few days in a week or two. Go to Dubai just to leave here for a while. Not much of an exchange as it will be intolerably hot there with hot winds. But it will be not here, and that should be good for a few days.

So, in the end, I’m going to say it’s the weather that I blame for me not posting links to some articles and news on Afghanistan. Also, there seems to be a lot more news that is readily available to everyone. There were two recent articles on slate.com by Fred Kaplan. He dicusses the opium conundrum and NATO's Afghan strategy. There was also this good article by Ahmed Rashid, a book review that has a great “introduction” before getting to the review. Cut the man some slack on the self-serving aspect of writing an article that is 3/4s background and exposition, and 1/4 review, because it’s really good background and exposition.

Parts of Rashid’s article, which is largely on current issues and the climate here reminded me of a recent find, Peter Lamborn Wilson’s “travelogue”/article. Wilson, otherwise known as Hakim Bey for those familiar with Bey and all that entails, visited Afghanistan many times in the 60s and 70s and returned in 2003. This piece covers all that. Something struck when contrasting what was evoked in the above Rashid article with this Wilson quote:

The fact that the Taliban succeeded in taking over Afghanistan has always seemed to me a certain sign that the Afghanistan I knew was completely smashed to hell by the Russians and civil war. I never heard any Afghan, however pious, praise "fundamentalism" or mullah-inspired bigotry. No one had ever heard of this perversion of Islam, which then existed only in Saudi Arabia. Afghan Islam was very orthopractic, but also very pro-sufi; essentially, it was old-fashioned mainstream Islam. The idea of banning kite-flying would probably have caused hoots of incredulous laughter. It must have taken 20 years of vicious neo-imperialist ideological cultural murder and oppression to make Talibanism look like the least of all available evils.

In the last post, I noted that the discontinuity of this place was a tired cliché, especially as this place is and these people are constantly on the move. There may be even too much continuity and history here. In following my own advice, I'll search for something else. So maybe through “dislocation”—physically, temporally, cognitively, every which “-ly,” can this place be better understood. In the least, dislocation is helping me understand my current state here.

Late Again And Blaming Kabubble

It really is that odd 30 extra minutes added in this timezone. That's the reason, a discontinuity...that maybe explains too much, or rather is such a ripe metaphor, it's cliche. Anyway...

Another 'new to me artist', that apparently blew the charts up in Europe and in G.B. late last summer, Mattafix. So I was in the US then. Whatever...minor point.

I just saw the video of "Big City Life" on the South African sat channel we get. And the thing is, there is so much wrong: the video was at times quite trite (the homeless man vignette, though the pregnant woman thing and the accountant/skateborder i just don't get), the lyrics are painfully simplistic (i.e. not unlike The Streets or Audio Bully, but there is nothing really personal nor just "fuck all" as they say, about the lyrics. This particular song is just generic and universal.), the carribiean/dancehall emcee is a bit forced, the male singing is downright bad with its atonal falsetto, and it totally cops the feel (I think the cymbals and bass line in the beginning) of Primitive Radio Gods "Phone Booth" song (had to google that, as I was chatting w/ a friend and neither of us could remember that info, but I remembered vague and odd snippets). And it's so mid-90s trip-hop, with a few 2-step beats thrown in.

But I love the song.

I can't stop listening to it. I've even grown to like the signing voice, terrible as it is.

I love this song.

Dowload/Listen to some of their stuff here.

Not Quite Quiet or Quite Not Quiet?

The reason I still think it’s fairly quiet here, I’ll chalk it up to the distance and mountain passes between Kabul and Kandahar. Despite my few recent post titles proclaiming the quiet, and the music I've been listening to, the editors at Salon.com seems to think there is an "unquiet" here, or at least in the east. They even put it on Wednesday's front page. As for the news accounts, even the daily ones I receive from our security folks, I should be counting them in the same log, but I’ll still insist upon my claims of quiet. Here is the fairly pessimistic, but well written, article in Salon.com. Though to me, with my biases fully acknowledged, the tone seemed a bit sensationalist. Don’t ask me to justify that, else I’ll have to think about it more. And if you haven’t noticed, either by the dearth of posts, or the nature of the posts recently, I haven’t been thinking much about the situation here. Futher, if the sensationalism gets more public care/awareness of the situation here, I'll thank the press.

A lot has been going on, work wise, and the continuing extension and scale-back makes for a weird work environment. Luckily, of late my job has largely been operational. There are daily tasks to be done, things to be monitored, keep things running and such. So, though tedious at times, it keeps me moving. But in general, project wise, we’re in a glide pattern. And as we step into another three months, it’s somewhat frustrating. It’s especially frustrating because it seems like the whole of the donor/aid world is entering that pattern. Though I may be just imposing my sentiments, it nonetheless seems that the riots and the preceding and continuing escalation of military action and violence has a lot of groups and people in a "wait and see" attitude.

The problem--that is probably the last thing that is needed here. What is sorely needed is not only a redoubling of military/security measures, especially from the ANA (not just foreign troops), but also a redoubling of actual efforts and plans from aid groups (as the article linked above notes). Of course, the Afghan compact, and plans are all fine and dandy, with actual shovels to the ground being much better. Yet, the reality, as it seems to me, is that it will be a while before more can be done, physically. So it’ll at least be some good paperwork that needs to be done in the mean time.

Tangentially, yesterday, after getting our daily headline/news update via email, I was about to immediately post it. The humor of it struck me, and then it just got kinda disappointing. The irony of the first two headlines being concurrently true now gone, and the reality sinking in, my (essentially trivializing) motivation to share the headlines slipped away, thankfully. Now, I’ll still post the headlines, as I think they better capture the current moment here:

Afghan President Denies Forming Militias
June 11, 2006 -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai today denied media reports that he is forming militia forces in southern Afghanistan to fight the...

Afghan president: Tribal fighters will help battle Taliban
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday his government will give weapons to local tribesmen so they can help fight the biggest increase in Taliban violence in...

Karzai says between rock and hard place on reforms
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Sunday his government was trying to follow a moderate path in the face of competing pressures from the international community and his nation...

So as many are commenting now, and a few started sounding the warnings signals before, the situation is slipping further into factionalism. Motivations are becoming individual again, and though they may have been so all the while, actions towards such are now more transparent.

So mine is a sense of apathetic frustration towards the politics and such going on here. Thus the lack of news, well, rather sharing of news and posting and such. I still keep up with the news. I’m just not excited by or vested in much of what I read, news wise. I still have a job to get done, and will try to and hopefully give my best effort on that. I still see more than enough to inspire hope—the markets are still busy, construction still goes on, many folks aren’t at the point of running scared yet, and there is a recently launched CF/ISAF offensive in the south. So, maybe it’s that I just don’t care to hope much right now. We’ll leave hope for when the fighting slows down again.

In Desperation...

...I'll fall back to a music post. Again via Salon.com's Audiofile (so yeah, this page has nearly become a proxy for that site...at least becoming one of my primary sources), I've been introduced to a new to me artist, Carl Hancock Rux.

His new album, on Thirsty Ear (which, with the few recent Blue Series releases I've really liked (El-P's jazz album and DJ Spooky's release), may be put the "must buy" label list), is really strong. A neo-soul/blues/jazz/hip-hop album, along the lines w/ the two other name drops above. Some of the piano work does strike some similarities w/ Matthew Shipp's efforts on El-P's album.

And then there is the singing. The voice isn't spectacular, but rather a really solid baritone. Rux's lyrics (especially, which makes sense given his apparent literary talents) and delivery make the album, and really fill in and carry the sparse compositions. Think Chocolate Genius, with less experimentation and more gospel influences and generally uplifting, rather then wretchedly miserable, sentiments and tone.

Here's the free song "Lies", and a "video/add/interview" off of the Thirsty Ear site. The album, "Good Bread Alley" is on iTunes as well.

Quiet As Curfew Should Be

Today, thankfully, went with apparently no major incidents. At least I heard nothing, and heard of nothing.

The city, all of it, has been under curfew. And even during the day it seems a bit more subdued. But I haven't left the house. We are allowed to move around, essential travel only though.

Of my national coworkers that I've talked to, they seem apologetic and angry--at the riots and rioters and the US military for the accident, all of which is understandable. And with the lack of incidents and the anger towards the destruction of parts of the city, **we wont see any repeats in the immediate future.

**Hopefully, I meant to say.

Quiet As It Shouldn’t Be

Today it didn’t sound like a 3rd world city. I could hear the birds singing and leaves rustling with the wind. This at 2pm here, when all one normally hears are bleating car horns, street chatter and the busy sounds of poverty’s overcrowding.

It was oddly serene. Odd because the serenity was continually broken by the sounds of passing rioters chanting, and exchanges of gun fire and whatever else was on hand and would explode. There would be the stillness of a shallow breeze. All the sudden broken by a few gun-shot claps and the swelling noice of a crowd passing. An exchange of gunfire echoing off the hills and buildings. And then quiet. Quiet like you never hear in the center of Kabul.

It’s been even quieter for the past few hours or so; a few sporadic gun shots at most, not full on exchanges. The cars are returning to the streets, a few at least, and not the military/police vehicles or ambulances-rather a few honking taxis and speeding motorcycles. I can hear my neighbors’ children’s voices again, venturing a few steps into their courtyards now.

I’ve heard a few reports that a couple expat guest-houses were ransacked and looted. The fire I saw this afternoon from our rooftop, which may have been one of those houses, is no longer raging though.

I imagine it will be quite a few days more of protests here and there—hopefully without gunfire. And Juma and the funeral processions will be the real test of whether the powder keg is still volatile.

I imagine it will be even longer before the anti-American/West/Karzai sentiments that exploded today will calm down. That is only if things don’t get worse here in Kabul and in the south.

In the least, I hope the evening will be serene, and not oddly so.