Coatpocalypse

This weekend was slightly ridiculous.

On Saturday, I tried to go see a Brazilian drumming/Ethopian funk band/stationary marching band concert, except the plan failed horribly when we arrived and I realized I did not have my id. Although it was 18 and up, they wouldn't let us in, and since I can't pull the "O, but I'm a dumb gringa" flirtation trick anymore, we ended up having to go back to Tufts.

Then, yesterday, afternoon, I got a rather frantic phone call from BUILD, the sustainable development group I went to Guatemala with (OOOO- I should blog about us eventually!!!!) asking if I would be willing to help out with a coat check that we had just found out we needed to do for a Gala to celebrate the 25th anniversity of the EPIIC program, which is run by the umbrella organization that also funds BUILD. Funny story, but we had actually run a horrible coat check last year during Tufts' Winter Bash event, which was literally the worst night of my life since it involved literally 100s of drunk girls rushing at us, trying to find misplaced "black pea coats" and "black northfaces." ANYWAY, 30 minutes or so later, homework and fear of coat checking be damned, I was dressed in an eccentric cocktail dress and headed downtown. 4 of us arrived at the hotel where the event was being held right at 6, which just so happened to be the same exact time as the guests were arriving. On finally finding the racks for the coats, we were informed that THERE WERE NO HANGERS AND TAGS. Apparently, these are customary items to bring with you when you run a coat check. Hotels do not even own hangers, we were told. An interesting development....Without tags, we had to resort to ripping pieces of looseleaf. It was pretty bad, especially once a line built up and we had to make up a system as we went along, and then spent 3 hours fixing the non-functional system.

While it was not the best evening ever, I realized something really unexpected. When the wealthy IGL donor types/important dignitaries had to come in to find their coats because we couldn't, if they knocked a coat off the rack, they would just leave it on the ground. Or they would just throw their paper slips on the ground or the counter or wherever. I realized: I don't ever want to be "too important" to pick up a fallen coat. And maybe I shouldn't have been picking up papers off the ground, but I don't ever want to be the kind of person who thinks its perfectly fine to make extra work for a janitor likely working for minimum wage.

I want to live with unobtrusive dignity. And if its at the expense of getting ahead, I think I'm ok with that.

Get your ire on!

This week was a pretty good reminder that there is no shortage of injustice and short-sited thinking and greed in the world.

On Tuesday, I squeezed in a lecture by controversial academic Lawrence Lessig on the subject of institutional corruption. Using a variety of examples from US politics, he proposed the very simple yet profound idea of institutional trust as a cyclical problem. If there is a perception, regardless of its validity, that politicians or institutions are biased, or outright corrupt, democratic participation in that institution will drastically drop off because its assumed that nothing can be done to fix the problem, which only makes it easier to get away with questionable behaviors.

So then, the day after, I went to see Gaslands, a documentary about the relatively new process of natural gas extraction through hydralic fracturing or "fracking," that has gotten a ton of press lately with its Oscar nod and backlash from gas companies who challenge its message. With dark humor and a homemade aesthetic, filmmaker Josh Fox tells personal and institutional histories of what appears to be yet another faustian bargain for "cheap" energy. Harking back to Lessig's message: even if he had fabricated the entire thing, as many gas companies have the audacity to claim, the fact that we live in a world where it's completely plausible for serious exceptions to the Clean Water Act to have been made for special interests, where water could be polluted with impunity and where budget cuts could have obliterated environmental accountability says more than whatever did actually transpire behind the closed doors.
Plug: Watch the movie.


Finally, this weekend, was the annual EPIIC conference, a big conference bringing in speakers and students from all over the world to address one theme. This year's was "Our Nuclear Age," pretty much the biggest example of humans being short sited that I can think of.
I made it to 2 panels:
-The first was on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty System, addressing whether or not the system was actually functioning and addressing areas of contention that have been exploited by states with intentions to nuclearize.
-One really interesting statistic I happened to remember from the panel: every year, the US makes about as many nuclear weapons as Pakistan and India have made in the last 20. Funding $$$ for NPR and education anyone? (Naively oversimplified, I know.) But, as is quite evident, how can we expect other states and actors to not want weapons when we continue to send a signal that they are desirable?

-The second, "Re-Thinking Iran" provided fewer truly innovative solutions than might have been expected given the pre-fix, but still had some really interesting perspectives on what Iran's capabilities truly are and will be, the role that a divided political elite within the country has on nuclear policy, the effectiveness (or not) of sanctions, regional power politics and the role of the 6/12 elections and spreading protest in the middle east. What I had really wanted to hear was someone say, ok, well since it seems pretty obvious that they are going to get weapons eventually, what do we do when they do?

So, as usual, lots of things to think about. And fight for/against.

Weekly Round Up: Quotables

"It's all about balance"
-Random hipstery guy at Market Basket, after overhearing me and my housemate debate whether more salt or more sugar was desirable in our tomato sauce.

"I always sleep so soundly when I'm in Sierra Leone"
-My advisor, in a quick chat we had about readjustment to life in the US and the stress that our constant multi-tasking here creates.

"Sepamos Combatir/Por Nuestro Honor/Nuestra libertad"/“Let us know how to fight for our honor and our liberty”
-Mural, Villa Victoria, a housing project in Boston's South End that is an example of community organization in the face of urban gentrification projects. Visited with some friends before going on a random and improvised culinary tour which included Peruvian, Ethiopian and Chinese food.

"They eat the flesh of their enemies, not because it is good, but because it is established custom"
-Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed around the world with Magellan, from a primary source document describing his travels and the peoples he met. Most of whom are described as either crazy or naked or both.

"To date, states have been far more effective in the destruction of housing than its construction"
-Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, a scathing look at the city in the modern era

Hip- hop 2

It just blows my mind how much cool music is out there that i have absolutely no knowledge of. Here's an interesting cast of South American hip- hop characters I've been introduced to just in the last few days:

Anita Tijoux- 1977
A female Chilean rapper! Her french stage name comes from the fact that she was raised in France due to her parent's political exile.


ChocQuibTown- De Donde Vengo Yo
Afro-Colombian hip-hip


Bomba Estero- Fuego
Also Colombian


Juana Fé- La maquinita
Not actually hip- hop at all, it's alternative cumbia from Chile aka Chilombiana. But I finally figured out who this song was by!

February 9: Intervention/Translation

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of "intervention" lately, since I feel as if I've just come to look at in a critical context for the first time. In international relations and economies and social work, it's so common place to jump right in "to create change" that we almost never question if it's the right thing to do, blinded as we are by the overarching goal.

I'm currently working on homework for my translation course and I realized there are really cool parallels between translation and socially focused intervention. Basically, you are motivated by a good goal: translating a work into another language so that more people can enjoy it or understand.

BUT, your job is frustrated by levels of cultural meaning that you cannot interpret. Your act may have significance beyond itself, for example, reinforcing the global primacy of English. Mainly however, in the process, you need to be sure that you say no more or less than the text itself does or what the author suggested. Doing no harm is the very basic first step.

I'm taking a really cool course through Tufts' Experimental College on Crisis Mapping, a very new method of humanitarian intervention. Today, we talked with a Tufts alum who is working with internally displaced persons from the earthquake in Haiti, in large part making use of technology to have input from affected individuals on their survival needs. She talked literally in terms of translation, mainly of taking human need and turning it into humanitarian response.

So, today's big question: how can we learn to enter into each other's lives and texts without doing harm?

February 5th: Somerville Adventures:

"No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another prhase."
-Translation Studies, Susan Bassnett McGuire

So after a productive stint of research memo writing (sans internet, obvioooo) at the o-so hipsterlicious Bloc 11 Café in Union Square (there were also a lot of small children there too which was rather an odd mixture), I went on a quick grocery run to explore the local food store offerings. I stopped into a Brazilian Paderia (bakery) for some delicious and reasonably price coconut /sweet bread. YUMMM. There's also an Italian store and several stores with Indian products and several with Hispanic food products: basically, it's an awesome cultural hodgepodge.

I stopped in Market Basket as well, the dirt cheap grocery store with the amusingly economic sounding name, which never ceases to inspire me with its astounding multiculturalism. I was only buying eggs and ended up having to wait in line for nearly half an hour since pretty everyone who lives in Somerville and their mother (literally) were trying to buy things before the storm. I heard Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Haitian Creole, Nepali or some other language from the Indian subcontinent, Chinese and possibly Korean and Russian. Mothers and children, pregnant women, the elderly, college students, the working poor, Cambridgey hippies, immigrants representing every single legal category and nationality , middle class moms, White, Black, Latino, Asian American, Muslims, mixed race, etc. etc. etc.
And I realized how absolutely singular* this particular moment was: each of us was interpreting the same space and sensory inputs was and translating what we saw in the world around us into our own language, maybe even languages, our own biases, our own very very varied life experiences. All of us waiting in line together, no one with any more power to change the situation than anyone else despite our complete differences in opportunity and wealth and happiness and socially constructed labels. And where else could this possibly occur but America: a conjunction of people who have so little and yet so much in common, all sharing the same corner of this earth, making the best of what we are given, striving for better lives for ourselves and/or potential offspring. HELL YEAH.

*Probably pretty singular. In my class on globalization, however, we've been talking about how incredibly diverse trading communities in the Indian Ocean in the 1300s-1500s or so were. But I'm going to guess not quite this diverse.

Hip- hop

For some weird reason, listening to rap helps me focus when I'm doing work, maybe because it has a steady beat? At any rate, I am burning up in the Tisch library right now (which is probably only 75 degrees but feels positively balmy compared to the outdoors and my 58 degree house) rocking out to Chilean rap group Tiro de Gracias. I never really got around to writing about this while I was in Chile, but it is fascinating to me how "street culture" of the US has been exported and reworked, in both its positive and negative manifestations. Think graffiti covered walls, and "flaite" fashion, a degrading Chilean word that basically is the equivalent of looking "ghetto". Baggy shirts, flat brim caps and all. In the same way that rap is pretty much the only music that voices the problems of the inner city in the US, rap in Chile provides a similar voice to urban poverty, although there's also a stronger tradition of socially conscious folk music.

Anyway, Tiro de Gracias. They kind of sound like a really white (although not quite Beasty Boysesque) Chilean permutation of 90s rap.
Joven de la Pobla (roughly translating to Kid from the Hood. If you look in the background of this video, the landscape is pretty similar to what it looked like where I worked in Maipú. The tall buildings are the Chilean equivalent of housing projects)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_lxa7nam90

Melaza
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPwgkGch5cE&playnext=1&list=PL03DF7E075B4642E7