This blog isn’t dead, it’s just moved…

to my own domain at www.brokenatlas.com

in the process of moving the site has received a fine buff and polish. it even has hood ornaments. and pictures. and sound (with more to come). no cash prizes for advance ordering my book yet, but check back.

Saturday Night in Conception Bay South, NL

While in Sin Jawn’s I learned that friend Dave Bidini would be playing at his buddy Haddon’s house in nearby CBS. It was a grand, friendly and properly rowdy night. Dave, of the now defunct Rheostatics, has evidently been playing solo shows armed with only an acoustic guitar, but when I mentioned I didn’t know this he added, “Only in the Maritimes.” Which seems appropriate once you hear his new stuff.

Here are a trio of tracks by Dave that I recorded. The first featuring his lovely wife Janet Morasutti on backing vocals. The second song, “Horses”, should be familiar to Rheos fans. (Buddy, by the way is Haddon’s sweet one-eyed dog.)

drivin-on-and-two-more.mp3

Also in the house was Neil Conway, once of Nova Scotia, now St. John’s. Neil got behind the microphone despite a froggy throat. The second song is a Ron Hynes classic.

lesbian-boxer-and-more.mp3

Island Cultures

The South Pacific nation of Vanuatu (220,000 people dispersed over a vast archipelago) has long been an incubator for some of the more curious manifestations of human culture. Most famously, in the aftermath of World War II Vanuatu became a hotbed of cargo cults, one of which still worships noted xenophobe Price Philip. Less known is that the islands are among the most linguistically diverse in the world, with more than 110 indigenous languages still actively spoken (each one used by at least 2,000 people).

In more recent Vanuatu news, a bank on Pentecost Island is now accepting pig tusks as currency. There are many instances of non-paper & coin currencies throughout history, but it’s probably one of the few cases today of a resource being easily bankable and convertible. And it’s being done in the hopes of tackling poverty; the logic being that using traditional goods as currency will mitigate some of the discontinuities and damages wrought by modern global capitalism, while preserving the integrity and coherence of local cultures.

Cod was once currency in Newfoundland, where I find myself now. I’m here for a week doing research and working on a couple magazine articles. St. John’s appears to have changed only a little since I was last here three years ago. A few more swanky boutiques on Water St. and more Norwegian-flagged oil exploration vessels in the harbour. I ran into a drunk Pole last night who says he captains one of the ships. He extended me an inebriated invitation to tour the ship today.

Something I missed last time was Gibbet Hill, one of the promontories overlooking St. John’s on the way up to Signal Hill. A gibbet is a gallows or scaffold from which executed criminals were gruesomely left to hang as a warning to others. Often the unfortunate sod being made an example of was also tarred and encased in an iron contraption.

The gibbet hasn’t been used in Newfoundland for about 150 years. Reading the local papers, however, I can say the same effect is more or less achieved rhetorically. I’ve never seen letters and opinion pages in Canada so full of personal attacks, albeit rather ingenious and well-phrased ones.

In other news of note in Newfoundland, The Independent, a politely nativist weekly broadsheet, features a centre-page spread that considers the candidates for the province’s greatest orator of all time, including Joey Smallwood and Peter Cashin, Smallwood’s opponent in the debate over dominion with Canada. But the paper leads rather tellingly with news of a job action brewing on the Alberta oil patch and its impact on the Newfoundlanders working there. Another front page item indicates that the number of missing persons in the province is on track to reach a record high this year. Maybe they’re in Alberta.

Thanks to Tyler Stiem for the Vanuatu news.

Western Swinging

In honour of July 4, here’s a swell piece of Americana to enjoy. These are the Quebe Sisters of Fort Worth, Texas.

City Living

Demographers have been avidly waiting for this moment—when a majority of the human species had finally traded in its farm implements for pocket protectors, its grubby overalls for fine slacks. According to the United Nations, May 23, 2007, marked the day when the earth’s population became predominantly urban. (This is really a “polite statistical fiction” as one writer described it, based on U.N. estimates of the rate of rural to urban migration worldwide.)

Most of the developing world’s rural poor, however, are merely trading one kind of poverty for another, joining the ranks of those scratching out a living on the city’s margins. Finding shelter in the peri-urban shantytowns and labouring in its informal economies. This mass migration to the cities is dramatically transforming the planet, but it is hardly talked about enough. It’s become an old story. Rio’s favelas are now a tourist attraction.

The community that has taken root around the Guatemala City municipal dump (picture above) is but one example of this global phenomenon. For over sixty years, Central America’s largest, most toxic landfill site, has drawn a steady influx of poor, displaced families that depend on the dump’s derelict bounty for their livelihood. It’s estimated that around 2,000 families work as pickers, most of them residing in the warren of jury-rigged shanty homes across the road from the dump’s entrance. Many of them were driven here during the civil war, fleeing warfare in the highlands.

The best place to acquire a broad mise-en-scène of the dump is from the city’s oldest cemetery. Driving past grand old colonial-style tombs and the ostentatious Mayan-cum-Egyptian temple that serves as the mausoleum for the founder of the country’s largest brewery, there’s rarely-visited corner of the cemetery inhabited by swarms of turkey vultures. From here the resting places of the city’s rich are only a small ravine away from the Brueghelian madness of the landfill.

Dump trucks, shadowed by expectant gangs of pickers, pull into clearings and eject their stash. The piles are swarmed over. The guajeros, keenly aware of the economic hierarchy of trash, generally know when which trucks arrive from what part of the city. Metals are highly prized (from aluminum cans to the scrap from appliances), but almost everything can have a value, from cardboard and bottles to nylon and plastic. Pickers typically earn between $2-$6 a day.

Tractors pile the leftover leftovers into terraces of dirt and multi-coloured refuse. Smouldering fires stinking of burning plastic, randomly arranged, send dark smoke signals into the bleached noon-day sky.

Until recently many of the children worked in this swamp of detritus alongside their parents. I spoke to a bright, fourteen-year-old girl named Olivia who used to pick alongside her mother (mom still works at the dump everyday); she now attends school and is enrolled in an inspiring support program called Camino Seguro.

“Before, when they let kids inside, I had to go with my mom to help. You have to be really careful where you step and I knew that as a child maybe you were risking your life there… My mom still collects plastic, nylon, aluminum, cardboard. I’m not embarrassed to say that because she works very hard and even though she doesn’t have a degree or a regular job, she’s struggling to help us.

Nothing bad has ever happened to us but our neighbour died once because a truck collapsed into the ground (the land is highly unstable) and took her with it. She was buried. They couldn’t even find her. My mom was at the dump at the time, near there, and I heard there was an accident so I was really scared. Everybody was talking about it in the neighborhood. The police wouldn’t let me go in to find my mother so I jumped the fence to go and see if she was okay. The police saw me and took me out again. But nothing had happened to my mother.”

I later spoke with a Dutch social worker who is involved with Camino Seguro and counsels many of the neighborhood’s children.

“The problems our kids cope with, they have a lot problems with anger management, they see a lot of violence in their neighborhood, they see a lot of violence between men and women. So they copy that. Besides there’s no time or skills to talk about emotions, empathy. People are surviving, they go every single day to that garbage dump and they fight to have a good piece of garbage, that’s the reality in that neighborhood. No, you’re not going to sit down and grieve about the husband who left you or the child who died, so it just goes on and on.”

The explosion in the world’s shadow cities is no great secret. Economists, politicians and NGOs have been examining a variety of measures for decades, but each shantytown appears to work according to its own internal logic. It has been proposed that these urban poor be given title to their land, thus providing them with collateral for loans—this is what Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto means when he talks of “liberating dead capital.” But as I’m finding in my research shantytowns are now so well-established in many cities they require a raft of uniquely local solutions. Titling may work in Lima, but that doesn’t mean it will in Istanbul or Mumbai.

And neither is it the magic bullet its proponents often suggest.

Look here for a great photo essay on the Guate City dump by American photographer Misty Keasler.

Why I can’t merengue, but maybe robots can

Back in Canada, going through my Guatemala research, and wondering why I must wait an entire week between the resolution of the Stanley Cup’s Conference Finals and its celebrated final round (featuring my predicted match-up, Ottawa v. Anaheim). Meaning there’s no game this Saturday.

One wonders at the connection between this desperate eagerness to watch playoff hockey on its most favourable evening of the week and the utter hopelessness of my attempt to dance merengue, when prompted, in Guatemala.

Finally, some Guate stuff will be posted here over the next couple days. The above picture is of a boot shop in Zona 1, Guatemala City–a ‘hood bizarrely chock-a-block with shoe stores, their dominance challenged only by equally conspicuous fast-food emporiums and appliance/electronics marts. Elsewhere:

Collision Detector Clive Thompson draws our attention to the subject of Soldier-Robot Love and a piece in the Washington Post. Philip K. Dick hallucinated this article thirty years ago.

I’ve mentioned Istanbul-based, ARKMedia magnate Adnan Khan previously. He writes frequently on Afghanistan and Iraq for Macleans and The Walrus, but his blog contains some of the most original and insightful commentary on the region’s strife you’ll find. In a recent posting he dissected the dramatic rise of opium production in Afghanistan, beginning with a trio of facts to arrest your distracted mind:

1. In 2006, opium production in Afghanistan rose 61% over 2005
2. Profits from drug trafficking is now equivalent to one-third of the nation’s GDP
3. Over 90% of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan

Adnan is also an excellent photographer, as demonstrated in his bells-and-whistles slide show Child Mechanics (Techical Dept.: allow it a few moments to load). He also plays the ney (an end-blown flute that, dating back 5,000 years, is among the oldest musical instruments still in use) in the accompanying soundtrack. Must be the Turkish coffee.

From the slide show I love the comment from one 12-year-old mechanic: “You want a (Toyota) Corolla, I can get you one in a week.”

God, garbage and precious metal : A month in Guatemala

Greetings from Guatemala City, where I am currently finishing up close to a month´s worth of research for the book. The city itself is worth some investigation despite the dire warnings of the guidebooks and the almost complete absence of any foreign tourists. The largest, most cosmopolitan city in Central America, it´s sprawling, chaotic, often filthy but burning with energy and not without a few charms. Like my favourite deep-fried taco stall on Avenida 6 in Zona 1. Or the porky Argentinian man with the hot pot of paella in the front door to his grill house near my hotel… and the strange, freqeunt spectacle of clowns interacting with sooty traffic.

Briefly, there are three stories that drew me to Guatemala and provide the kind of case studies/personal stories that I hope are at the heart of broken atlas. I spent about a week in the town of El Estor, on Lake Izabal, a long day’s two-bus journey northeast of the capital. Just outside of El Estor, Vancouver-based Skye Resources is at work reopening an old Inco nickel mine that had been mothballed back in the ’80s. With the fast-rising demand in China for stainless steel (of which nickel is a key ingredient) driving nickel prices to near record highs, Skye, a junior mining company, acquired the property from Inco a couple years ago.

Last fall, one week before the company was to release its feasibility study to investors, five pockets of land within Skye’s territory were occupied by Q’eqchi Mayan families. This type of land invasion by indigenous communities is not unique to El Estor; it’s estimated there are about 300 playing themselves out across Guatemala right now. This is a country where crime and corruption is endemic, and many of the presidential candidates make security their first priority; and yet, unequivocally, land issues have always been the most fundamental and defining.

The Q’eqchi question Skye’s ownership, going back to the circumstances under which Inco first acquired it in the 1960s from the country’s then military dictatorship. They question the scope of Skye’s claim. And, further, they claim they were not consulted about Skye’s proposed use of the land as is required by international law.

This past January police and army marched in and evicted the five communities; two have since returned. The story of the eviction made some waves on the internet thanks to a nine-minute video by Montrealer Stephen Schnoor. (With over 35,000 hits and counting this is a nifty sub-story about 21st century activism in the net-age.) For now there’s an uneasy peace in the hills outside El Estor as the company quietly undertakes backdoor negotiations with the remaining communities. Something it originally claimed it would not do while anyone remained on their land.

By my own unofficial estimate, I’d say support for the mine in the town and surrounding area is split pretty evenly. The opposition to it is itself divided between the Q’eqchi, the environmentalists, and some local businessman who are not so much against it as concerned that the benefits of the mine reach the people. Each one has a different priority and they are in some cases, if not antogonistic, downright dismissive of one another.

That’s the intro. It’s the collision of global and local forces here that interests me, with a hefty dose of small town politics and characters to boot. It’s an evolving story, so I may end up returning to see how it plays out. It’s complex, multi-hued, and it slams past with present… providing a perfect mini-drama within the broader scope of the book.

Plus I kinda fell in love with El Estor, despite the bone melting heat (high 30s, humid, all the freaking time). I’ve checked out a few of the familiar-to-travellers spots in Guatemala: Antigua, Livingston (way over-rated!), Flores/Tikal. But the two places I’ve dug the most and spent the longest? El Estor and Guate City. Many will say this is mad.

Okay, that was a lengthier than promised explanation. So now I will be brief. In Guate City I followed up the two other tangents. First, the dramatic rise in evangelical Christianity around the world, along with the surge in Islam, is proving wrong one of the first lessons I was taught in Sociology of Religion 101 almost 20 years ago: that modernity and religion are incompatible. It has become clear, that with the exception of western Europe, the opposite has become the case. And Guatemala is a great place to study the phenomenon as it is now the least Catholic country in Central and South America. Some studies estimate that somewhere between 30-40% of Guatemalans identify themselves as evangelical or pentacostal. More tellingly, a large number of the country’s Catholics describe themselves as “charasmatics,” which is basically pentacostal with mass, and actual participation numbers (eg. church-going) are way higher among the protestants.

There are many aspects to the story. How and why pentacostalism took root here. Its surprising diversity. And how it has interacted with the political sphere. When I travel to Ghana and Nigeria later in the year I hope to investigate the explosion of evangelical churches there, as well.

And last, the growing urban poor of our third world metropolitan centres. I spent some time learning about a program called Camino Seguro (Safe Passage) which helps the children of families who work as pickers or recyclers at the municipal dump. Many of the children themselves used to work at the dump, picking out shards of scrap metal, tin, plastic, whatever, for resale to middle-men, until a fire blazed through the dump a couple years ago and new regulations ensured children wouldn’t be allowed in. Not surprisingly a large shanty town sits facing the dump, home to the people who depend upon for it for their livelihood.

I’ll try to develop these storylines a little further in the coming days… with photos.

The Next Culture War

My article on the affect copyright issues are having on documentary filmmakers—stifling creativity and discussion of critical issues in the process—is in the current issue of Maisonneuve (“Copyfight”).

For more material on the subject, check out the work of Brett Gaylor at opensourcecinema.org, one of the filmmakers I interviewed for the article. His latest project, The Basement Tapes, addresses copyright and remix culture issues in the music sphere (watch the trailer). While Gaylor focuses on mash-up artists and music downloading, he ties it into the larger movement in favour of open source culture (interviewing the likes of Lawrence Lessig).

Gaylor told me he was partly inspired to make Basement Tapes by the Hurricane Katrina home videos that people posted on YouTube in the storm’s aftermath. The vids typically combined “stolen” tv footage and self-shot stuff with pop music tracks. For that reason they’re technically all illegal. But they provided an important, independent document of what happened in New Orleans.

Gaylor says he was also inspired by the Philadelphia-based mash-up artist Girl Talk, whose stuff is as my Québec friends might say, “superfantastic!” Here’s a wee sample…

*
Forget the red state/blue state, conservative/liberal, religious/secular culture wars we’ve heard so much about for the past twenty years. While that conflagration isn’t going to disappear anytime soon—it will warp into new directions, however—the battle royale over ownership and access to our collective culture is only going to get louder and nastier. Copyright as it exists now is incompatible with many cultural and technological developments. Consider the advances in file compression, sharing and manipulation and the popularity of collage/pastiche as an art form for social critique and parody. When photo-archive magnate Mark Getty (of Getty Images) says “intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century”, one sees the unintended prophecy contained therein: that we will fight over intellectual property just like we have historically fought over oil.

In recent years there have been many examples of the rearguard action that corporations are fighting: the concentration of ownership of archives and stock houses; the willingness to sue teenagers and grandmothers over a handful of illegal downloads; the disappearance of more materials from the public domain; and the ludicrous clearance fees demanded of independent creators. They can all be interpreted as expressions of a dying business model.

Two last notes. 1) If you missed last month’s Vanity Fair there was an excellent article on Pirate Bay (“Pirates of the Multiplex”), the Swedish file-sharing site that’s teaching Hollywood a lesson in 21st century economics and human nature. 2) And did you know that last year the Boy Scouts began offering activity badges for respecting copyright?

Four corners

It’s been almost a month since I dismounted from the snowmobile and my hands are still numb. The persistent vibration from gripping the handlebars have given me arthritis. One must get back into the swing of things, however, and so here are four interesting postings elsewhere of note.

CHAD—Photographer and fellow traveller Don Weber, now based in Moscow/Kyiv, has posted some photos from his recent trip to eastern Chad documenting the spillover genocide from Sudan.

GUANTANAMO—With the issue of Canadian citizens being “detained” abroad back in the news, here’s an interesting study that Clive Thompson brings to your attention—a psychiatrist at King’s College London argues that there’s little difference between the effect of psychological and physical torture.

GREENLAND—Filmmaker Andrew Gregg is currently shooting a series of docs on maverick explorers and researchers around the world, and posting dispatches along the way. His blog is a hoot and full of facts fun, exotic and sobering. Here he comments on life in the north and the necessity of hunting.

UKRAINE—Having spent a month in Ukraine last year I confess to a tender spot for the country whose people claim to be among the unhappiest in the world (in a poll published last year, Ukrainians ranked 173 out of 178 countries on a happiness index, considerably more glum than the folks in Sierra Leone and Bangladesh). On a light note then, ignoring the current constitutional crisis, I will point you to the controversy surrounding Ukraine’s entry in the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest, Verka Serdyuchka. Who happens to be a drag queen. Not only are Ukrainian nationalists embarrassed, but the Russians are pissed. Seems they’re taking the song’s chorus as an insult—it sounds like she’s singing “Russia Goodbye”, which coming from a Ukrainian in the post-Orange Revolution era, has certain political implications. But Serdyuchka insists it’s all a misunderstanding. A mondegreen if you will, like “Hold me closer, Tony Danza” (Tiny Dancer). She’s actually singing “Lasha tumbai”. Which means “churned butter” in Mongolian.

The song entry… dance along if you must…

& this is just what you’re typical Ukrainian dinner party is like…

Snowed in

Successfully completed one leg of the journey to Blanc Sablon, where temperatures were suspiciously mild–around -1 to -5 C in the daytime. Enjoyed mostly clear blue skies all the way, and no breakdowns or accidents as I learn to make nice with my “snow machine” over 440km of varying trail conditions. As the big storm that hit southern Ontario headed up here we decided to leave Blanc Sablon a day earlier so we wouldn’t be stuck. That was over breakfast with some locals who argued whether we’d the forecast would be accurate or not. It may look like there’s plenty of snow and ice here, but the folks in Blanc Sablon talk like they’ve yet to receive a good pail of the white stuff yet. As Tony Dumas, motel owner/school bus driver/future mayoral candidate said: “The government done forget about us, so too has the weather.”

Weather is the big topic all over the coast and everyone has a story about the climate has changed over the past 10 years. I’ve collected more than fifty different such stories, with varying degrees of believability. But one thing is indisputable: the snow trail that connects the Basse Cote Nord is open for a shorter period ever year. In fact we had already begun our little expedition upon it while technically it was still closed. Whereas it used to be open by December, this year it opened Feb 9.

Was a good call to leave Blanc Sablon when we did, but we’ve been snowbound in Vieux Fort nonetheless. Today we hit the skidoos again and begin the return journey, hitting some of the towns we skipped coming up. Having only intermittent access to internet, and high speed is pretty much non-existent. Will file more back in Havre Saint Pierre.

To leave on a note of bad humour, I will share a joke a sealer told me last night (there are a lot of ‘em here, waiting for the government to announce the quotas for next month’s hunt).

A seal walks into a bar. The bartender asks “What’ll you have to drink?” The seal says, “Anything but a Canadian Club on ice.”

Ugh.