East

Tomorrow is the opening of my East exhibition in Warsaw. In Romania at the moment, flying to Poland later today.

Hugh Fraser

Was just telling a friend the story of my original mom’s-side ancestor, Hugh Fraser. In 1707 Paisley Scotland, at age 7, sent home from school for acting up, sent back to school by his angry mom, kidnapped on the way and shipped off to America as an indentured servant on a tobacco plantation. Ended up marrying the owner’s daughter and running the place.

The Mods are Back

Yes, that’s me to the right of the center guy raising his arms. August 1983. DC’s early 80s mod-revival scene certainly didn’t rival punk’s scope and depth, but we represented. Too bad the headline (MODS ARE BACK) is cropped out of this scan.

Notice the Risky Business movie review teaser at the top, talk about dating yourself. 

Jimmy Page

What ever happened to guitar solos? Not that I’m really a big rock fan anymore, but strange when you think such a staple of 60s-80s music could basically become passé and disappear.

Listening to the guitar solo in Stairway to Heaven at the moment (Led Zep getting me through a day of organizing my office). I’ve always thought it’s one of the greatest of all time, not because it’s perfect but because it’s got such a raw, yearning humanism to it. Like you’re not even sure Page is going to make it through, but he does. Almost brings a tear to your eye. Even the standard speed-riff flourish at the end is charmingly scrappy and uplifting compared to, say, the effortless acrobatics of Free Bird (if we’re sticking to the period).

The planet is not at risk. We are.

“

We can’t go on endlessly fooling ourselves that nothing is wrong and that we can go on cheerfully pursuing our consumer lifestyles, ignoring the climate threats and postponing a solution.

- Vaclav Havel

”

— The planet is not at risk. We are - International Herald Tribune

The Serbs

I made a few visits to Serbia in 2001 and 2002, as a kind of followup to the week I spent in postwar Kosovo in 1999.

Unfortunately, it’s not so hard to believe that the Kosovo question is still unresolved. The UN’s ideal of a multi-ethnic Kosovo will be nearly impossible to achieve anytime soon. Around 200,000 ethnic Serbs were forced to flee their Kosovo homes after the war, fearing revenge attacks for Milosevic’s mass explusion of ethnic Albanians. Albanian extremists have no intention of letting their former Serb neighbors come back. When I was last there, only something like 150 Kosovo Serbs had managed to return to reclaim their homes and lives. And they required permanent protection by KFOR troops, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have lasted a week.

One of the most complex aspects of an incredibly complex postwar stew has been the collective Serb process of coming to terms with all that happened during the Balkan war years. Or, more precisely, not coming to terms with it. Many Serbs are still aggrieved, possessed by a certain mythology, and are in staunch denial. Theirs is the particular anger of those who feel not only wronged, but misunderstood. Former Kosovo Serbs feel particularly hopeless, with little chance to either return home or be fully accepted in Serbia proper. It’s a cruel irony, but I’ve always thought of them as Milosevic’s final victims.

Co-Incidents

This has nothing to do with anything (…OR DOES IT???…). Today I got a flat tire on my bicycle AND on my car, within about an hour of each other. Ok, a coincidence, but what are the odds? I always wonder if such things mean something. Something we’ll never decipher of course. Also, I’ve noticed that once you start to take note of coincidences, they start to come more often and in more intriguing ways.

For example, once I was walking (in Minsk, as it happens) to meet a friend. It was hot, I was feeling really tired. I saw my friend pull up in his car and for whatever reason I suddenly decided I was going to tell him I was “knackered”, a word I hadn’t used before or since. I got into the car and before I could say a word he said, “ah, I’m knackered”, a word he hadn’t used before either…

And one of the best ones I can think of - my daughter Sofia Dalanda refused to be fully delivered until just seconds after 12 midnight, making her born on the birthday of her namesake, my wife’s sister Dalanda. Just to be clear, we didn’t decide on the name after this coincidence, we had already planned it.

How to Calculate Musical Sellouts →

I have to say, I’ve been crying about this for a few years now. Just about every musician/group that could once claim true rebel status now not only licenses their music for car commercials etc, but covets the privilege of doing so. We’re talking The Clash, Iggy Pop, even The Jam for chrissakes. I recall Pete Townshend wrote on his blog not long ago about how he dearly hoped to land an HP ad.

And no one seems to care. We’re all used to Aerosmith’s recent habit of shilling for the highest corporate bidder, but I remember way back when they were rebel artists, cool, not sellouts. Watching them onstage with Justin Timberlake (or was it Britney) at a Super Bowl halftime a few years ago launched me into a tirade that they didn’t even seem aware of the irony, they were absolutely earnest. All I got from people in the room was polite indulgence.

Petworth News →

I live in Petworth, a turn-of-the-century rowhouse neighborhood in what might be called a ‘transitioning’ area of Washington DC. Petworth was developed in the early 1900s as a streetcar suburb, and was mostly working to middle-class white (Jewish/Italian/Irish) for its first few decades. Mass migration of southern blacks in the 1950s, combined with the racial tensions and 'white flight’ of the period, made Petworth mostly black (same class, different race) by the 60s.

Many of those residents are still here. People keep their yards nice, go to church on Sunday, wave and say hello to you on the street. There is some drug dealing, mostly under the radar, a hangover from the rough 1980s and early 90s. You also see cases of increasingly elderly homeowners under the boot of live-in grandkids who are up to no good.

But much is changing, like watching grass grow. It began in earnest in the late 1990s as, all across DC, homebuyers suddenly couldn’t afford to live in neighborhoods that they once were afraid to walk in. During my formative running-around years, 16th Street NW was a clear demarcation line. Then gentrification rolled over it like a wave. My wife and I barely planted our flag in time, almost priced out of our own city. We’re living in a kind of social experiment - for the first time in its existence, the neighborhood is becoming successfully mixed.

I was just interviewed by the editor of a local newsletter about the Petworth News blog I publish - how it impacts the evolution of the neighborhood, the role of online media in community-building, etc.

Click the title of this post for a PDF of the newsletter, the article starts on the first page.