“Manti Te’o did lose his grandmother this past fall. Annette Santiago died on Sept. 11, 2012, at the age of 72, according to Social Security Administration records in Nexis. But there is no SSA record there of the death of Lennay Marie Kekua, that day or any other. Her passing, recounted so many times in the national media, produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper. Nor is there any report of a severe auto accident involving a Lennay Kekua. Background checks turn up nothing. The Stanford registrar’s office has no record that a Lennay Kekua ever enrolled. There is no record of her birth in the news. Outside of a few Twitter and Instagram accounts, there’s no online evidence that Lennay Kekua ever existed. The photographs identified as Kekua—in online tributes and on TV news reports—are pictures from the social-media accounts of a 22-year-old California woman who is not named Lennay Kekua. She is not a Stanford graduate; she has not been in a severe car accident; and she does not have leukemia. And she has never met Manti Te’o.”
“Why is it that if Mozart sneezes it is “music” (and I am quite sure the great genius even sneezed melodiously) but the most sophisticated Indian music ragas are the subject of “ethnomusicology”?”
“When I agreed to write a column for VICE, I was granted this space, and I am responsible for what happens in this space. Today, I’m going to use this space to rub your racist and bigoted shit in your own faces.”
“This is The War. This is what we can actually share with people like Dan and Maya… and we have much more in common with them than with The Canaries (see the film for that reference.) The War is far, far away, on a screen. It gives you a headache and is over for at least a little while when you turn off the machines. It is terrible and distant. And most of us have never been made uncomfortable by it for a nanosecond. Until Bigelow.”
““At 10 p.m., I hadn’t heard from him,” said Ms. Silver, 30, who wore her favorite skinny black jeans. Finally, at 10:30, he sent a text message. “Hey, I’m at Pub & Kitchen, want to meet up for a drink or whatever?” he wrote, before adding, “I’m here with a bunch of friends from college.””
“A communication device is configured to switch from a normal mode of operation to an inconspicuous mode of operation in which a reduced set of information is presented on a home screen of a display of the device in comparison to a set of information presented on the home screen in the normal mode of operation. In addition, other display properties such as contrast and brightness may be adjusted to make them less conspicuous. The home screen in the inconspicuous mode of operation is less obtrusive or conspicuous to individuals than in the normal mode of operation. The device may enter the inconspicuous mode upon user request or by detecting at least one environmental condition using a sensor available to the mobile communication device. The environmental condition may be anything that the device can detect or sense in its surrounding environment such as ambient light or sound. The device may return to the normal mode of operation by user request or when the environmental condition is no longer present.”
“CORAL GABLES, FL—Noting that he had already purchased the song for his wind-up Victrola seven decades ago, extremely hip 90-year-old Emmet McInerny insisted Monday that he had every right to download a recording of Glenn Miller’s “In The Mood” for free using a BitTorrent client. “Hell, the Miller estate’s gotten enough money out of me,” the tech-savvy nonagenarian stated as the download bar for the 1939 big-band staple passed 70 percent. “And I sure as hell don’t feel like lining the pockets of the bigwigs at RCA. I know it’s not their fault I lost my old 78 of the song when I moved houses back in 1965, but fuck it.” Since he was online anyway, McInerny then proceeded to torrent “Mairzy Doats” by the Merry Macs.”
Drawn by the radio and tv ads of the twentieth century, which had reached them as faltering wisps and cobwebs of communication (yet still full of a mysterious, alien vitality), the New Men had invaded Earth in the middle 2100s. They were bipedal, humanoid–if you stretched a point–and uniformly tall and white-skinned, each with a shock of flaming red hair. They were indistinguishable from some kinds of Irish junkies. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. They had a kind of pliable, etiolated feel about their limbs. To start with they had great optimism and energy. Everything about Earth amazed them. They took over and, in an amiable, paternalisitic way, misunderstood and mis-managed everything. It appeared to be an attempt to understand the human race in terms of a 1982 Coke ad. They produced food no one could eat, outlawed politics in favour of the kind of burocracy you find in the subsidised arts, and buried enormous machinery in the subcrust which eventually killed millions. After that, they seemed to fade away in embarrassment, taking to drugs, pop music and the twink-tank which was then an exciting if less than reliable new entertainment technology. Thereafter, they spread with mankind, like a kind of wrenched commentary on all that expansion and free trade. You often found them at the lower levels of organised crime. Their project was to fit in, but they were fatally retrospective. They were always saying: “I really like this cornflakes thing you have, man. You know ?” [From Light, 2002.]
Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis is a great fan of that alternate reality holiday classic It's a Wonderful Life, and he's never made a secret of the fact that the Biff-ruled Hill Valley of Back to the Future Part II is an homage to the neon-filled Pottersville George Bailey travels through. This video, made by YouTube user skeejay, shows just how close Marty McFly and George Bailey really are. More »
The Paradox of the Wage Slave Metaphorical Web. I have quibbles with some details of the history (for instance, the regimentation of workers started much earlier, with the large scale factories in the 1800s, and schools, not wars, were the means of getting the public used to regimentation) but this is still a good read.
Antidote du jour (Dr. Kevin). And before you say this looks Photoshopped, I’ve seen pix of cats I know personally in the same pose (and their human can barely take pictures, much the less doctor them):
…And we’re back! Our favorite show, American Horror Story: Asylum went on hiatus over the holidays, leaving us twiddling our thumbs on Wednesday nights without Evan Peters on our screens. We had so many unanswered questions about Briarcliff, Bloodyface and Grace’s baby. Rest assured, our beloved horror show returned last night and progressed the plot line in multiple ways. Sister Jude undergoes electroshock therapy after being diagnosed with manic depression, Grace has Kit Walker’s baby, the Monsignor Timothy O’Hara kills Sister Mary Eunice and Dr. Arden commits suicide to reunite with Sister Mary. Some critics have referred to Ryan Murphy’s AHS as the evil twin of his other show, Glee, and we never felt that way more than after watching last night’s episode. From the dance number to the virginity-losing, Briarcliff was less like an asylum and more like the halls of McKinley High. Here are our favorite Glee-like moments from “The Name Game.”
1.The Name Game – This comparison is by far the most obvious. In the middle of the episode, Lana Winters asks Sister Jude if she knows her own name after receiving electroshock therapy. Without answering Winters, a delirious Sister Jude trudges to the new jukebox in the asylum and selects Shirley Ellis’ classic to play, “The Name Game.” When she plays the song, Sister Jude immediately transforms into a glamorous early ’60s songstress and the bleak patients of Briarcliff get their groove on. Where is Kurt to bust out a showstopper when we need him? While we know this is a dream state and American Horror Story has its absurd moments, we couldn’t help but imagine Ryan Murphy in the writer’s room suddenly deciding to insert a dance number into the episode. Even for AHS, this felt out of place.
2. Freak Like Me – Glee partly became popular because we could relate to these social outcast students who let their freak flag fly proudly in the school’s glee club. Rachel Berry nurtured her inner theater geek, Kurt took pride in his sexuality, and Amber wasn’t afraid to be outspoken. Murphy’s same message reverberates throughout this ep. At the beginning of the episode, Dr. Arden inspects Grace’s body in order to understand her mysterious pregnancy. As Grace’s new guardian, the amazing Pepper emerges from the dark and threatens Arden to leave Grace and her baby alone. Instead of the name game, she plays the blame game with Dr. Arden, citing, “That’s how it works with us freaks. We get blamed for everything.” But if Dr. Arden lays one hand on Grace, he will be the only one responsible for her death. Just like Glee, the “freaks” seem to be gaining power.
3. Like a Virgin – Remember the Madonna tribute in season one of Glee? Rachel, Jesse, Finn, Santana, Emma, and Mr. Schuester sang the early Madge hit. “The Name Game” had a much more twisted “first time.” This time, it’s between a priest and the devil, as Sister Mary forces herself onto the Monsignor … not your typical sex scene. As she straddles the priest, she says, “It’s okay. We’re like Adam and Eve. Two innocent children just learning each other’s bodies for the first time.” Are we still at Briarcliff? Or are we really witnessing two high schoolers doing the dirty? By the end of the episode, we were waiting for Sue Sylvester to douse Kit with a slushie.
I'm currently at work writing a chapter on rai for my book (provisional title: RadioInterzone; who knows when it'll be done). One of the questions I've been trying to work out is the history of “pop-rai.”
A number of accounts claim that it was the song by Oran artist Chaba Fadela, “Ana ma h'lali ennoum” (I don't enjoy sleep anymore), recorded in 1979, that launched the pop-rai era, with its chorus, “Beer is Arab, but whiskey is European.” Bouziane Daoudi and Nidam Abdi (“Records: Music from a melting pot - Rai, the sound of Algeria,” The Guardian, October 5, 1989) interpret the chorus thus: “I have no problem getting drunk on beer because whiskey is too expensive.” (Yes, beer is produced in Algeria, and in Oran, by the Brasserie Algerienne Oranaise.)
Others have suggested that the term pop-rai dates back to 1974 or 1975, and that it emerges with the release of recordings by Messaoud Bellemou and his various collaborators. I agree that in order to understand how modern rai developed after Algeria's independence, it makes sense to trace the developments further back than 1979. Unfortunately, this period (rai in the nineteen seventies) has not been well documented, neither in the literature nor in the musical archive. The Sublime Frequencies compilation of 1970s rai music, 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground, released in 2008, marked an important and very welcome attempt to document what liner-notes author Hicham Chadly regards as an unjustly ignored period in rai. But it's just one compilation.
Fortunately, and thanks in large part to the fact that so many Algerians are putting on the web previously very "rare" recordings, mostly on Youtube, there is enough material now to piece together a somewhat more complete as well as much more complicated story than the one told previously.
Boys take over: Belkacem Bouteldja
Let's start with what happened to the cheikhat (singular, cheikha) tradition, one of the key sources of contemporary rai, which emerged in Western Algeria. The cheikhat of the Oran region gained a national reputation during the 1950s (several of them were recorded by French labels during this period), and some of them, like Cheikha Rimitti participate in the short-lived cultural efflorescence that marked the first years of Algerian independence (won in 1962). But as the revolutionary regime consolidated itself, and particularly after President Houari Boumedienne came to power in 1965, women were banned from singing in Algeria's cabarets and restaurants. Meanwhile, the government made gambling and the sale of alcoholic beverages in Muslim public places illegal, regulations which were in conflict with the popular drinking culture surrounding rai and particularly the music of the cheikhat. The government also imposed curbs on popular religious practices, such as the wa‘dāt, the saints festivals that typically included song and dance, and where cheikhat typically performed. The wa‘da was an annual festival held at the end of the agricultural season, honoring the patron saint of the region. (It was at one of these festivals that Rimitti reportedly received her nickname, which is alcohol-associated.)
In the wake of the marginalization of the cheikhat, it was young men from the greater Oran area who kept the musical tradition publicly visible and who took up the repertoire. They also performed the bedoui repertoire of the likes of Cheikh Hamada, Cheikh El-Madani and Cheikh El-Khaldi, another of the musical streams that formed the basis of what we now call "rai." It is perhaps the case that such younger artists began to displace the bedoui cheikhs from their position of popularity as well. Belkacem Bouteldja One of the first to record and perform the cheikhat repertoire in the post-independence era was Belkacem Bouteldja, a young man from the El Hamri quarter of Oran. In December 1965, at age thirteen, Belkacem recorded his first 45" single, “Gatlek Zizia,” a song originally made famous by Cheikha El Ouachma (“the tattooed”) El Temouchentia (d. 2009), who recorded it for the French label Pathé in 1957.
Cheikha El Ouachma was from Aïn Témouchent, a town 72 kilometers southwest of Oran, and she recorded a number of tracks for various French labels in the fifties and sixties. As of 1965, she divided her time between Marseille and Aïn Témouchent. When rai gained national renown in Algeria in the 1980s and achieved international renown in subsequent decades, Cheikha El Ouachma never gained the sort of recognition won by other great cheikhas, like Cheikha Rimitti. Mohamed Kali for his part calls Cheikha El Ouachma the "mamie du rai," rai's grandmother. And Kali tells us that according to Blaoui Houari, the great singer in the wahrani style (sometimes known more precisely as wahrani ‘asri, "contemporary" wahrani), it was El Ouachma who succeeded in making the transition from "baladi" or country style cheikha music to what eventually came to be known as rai. Or to use other terms, she was responsible for the movement from rai trab (rai of the land, another name for the music of the cheikhat) to rai moderne. (Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to hear, at least for me to hear, the musical evidence for Houari's claim.)
Bouziane Daoudi (Le rai [2000]) translates into French a line from her song "Gatlek Zizia"as follows: "Zizia te dit ce soir on couchera chez moi" (Zizia [diminutive for Zohra] tells you, tonight we'll sleep at my place). Daoudi also mentions two other songs by Cheikha El Ouachma, “Smahni ya el commandar” (Excuse me O commandant) and "Sid elhakem" (His honor the judge), both of which he says evoke the everyday experiences of ordinary people living under military repression during wartime. (If they are critical of the colonial regime, I wonder whether these songs might in fact have been recorded post-independence.)
Have a listen to Cheikha El Ouachma's 1957 version of “Gatlek Zizia” here, and then check out Bouteldja's 1965 recording, here. Bouteldja's version is very much in the same style as Cheikha Ouachma's, his vocals backed only by the gasba (reed flute) and guellal (hand-held frame drum). Such was the characteristic accompaniment of both the cheikha and bedoui musical genres. The chief difference between the two recordings that I can hear is that Bouteldja's voice sounds like that of an adolescent, and indeed, he was only thirteen when he made the recording. The song's release seems to have marked the taking over of the of musical tradition and repertoire of the now-marginalized cheikhat by an emerging generation of young male singers.
Bouteldja claimed, in an interview given in 2009, that the song in fact marked his supersession of both the cheikhat and the bedoui cheikhs. "Avec le titre Gatlek Zizia, j’avais mis fin au règne de Rimitti Allah yarhamha, cheikha Habiba, cheikha El Wachma, Hakoum, Kaifouh de Témouchent... J’avais déstabilisé le marché du disque de l’époque" (K. Smaïl, "Je vis dans la précarité sans retraite ni ressources", El Watan, January 6, 2009). (With "Gatlek Zizia" I put an end to the reign of Rimitti--God rest her soul-- Cheikha Habiba, Cheikha El Wachma [Ouachma], Hakoum, Kaifouh of Témouchent...I'd destabilized the music market of the time.) (Cheikha Habiba was from Sidi el-Abbès, and was popular in the Oran area during the sixties. Hakoum is presumably Cheikh Hakoum, who you can listen to here. Go here for a fragmentary bit of info on Cheikh Kaifouh.)
According to French scholar Marie Virolle (La chanson raï, 1995), Belkacem Bouteldja recorded under the name Kacimo, and he had a small "orchestre" called Étoile, formed in 1964, whose members included Missoum Bensmir and Belarbi, and in which he played the melodica. (Bouziane Daoudi(Le rai) says of Mohamed Belarbi: "de son côté, fait ses débuts en 1952 à Oran dans l’orchestre de Jacques Vidal. Il jouera de la batterie dans différents groupes à partir de 1956 tout en intégrant les rythmes afro-cubains dans ses compositions." Missoum Bensmir was the son of a celebrated bedoui poet, Cheikh Hashmi Bensmir. Here's a nice track from Bensmir, with lots of photos on the Youtube vid. I have no idea when it was recorded.)
Missoum Bensmir Missoum Bensmir and unidentified musicians source: here Belkacem composed over 60 songs over the next ten years, and made records in Casablanca, Algiers, and Paris. Belkacem was also known by the nickname "El Joselito" or "Little Joe," because of his androgynous sounding voice. He shared the nickname with a Spanish adolescent singer and actor (born, José Jiménez Fernández) who was well known in Algeria at the time due to his film and television appearances. Despite the recent (1962) departure of Oran's very substantial Spanish colon population, Spanish culture remained important in the city remained, and Oran continued to host foreign variety shows, especially from Spain, until the beginning of the 1970s (Daoudi and Miliani 1996). (One also wonders whether the "Little Joe" moniker might have had something to do with Little Joe Cartwright, played by Michael Landon, a character on the US t.v. show "Bonanza," which broadcast from 1959-1973 and was very popular abroad. I saw it when I lived in Lebanon, but I have no idea whether it was broadcast in Algeria.)
I've been unable to locate any recordings of Kacimo with his orchestre. But here's another interesting recording by Belkacem Bouteldja from 1967 or 1968, which deals with issues of migration to France, called "Hedi Fransa" (This is France). One of Belkacem's best-known as well as most infamous songs from this period is the 1965 recording "Serbili Baoui" ("Serve me my BAO" -- the Orani-made beer produced by the Brasserie Algerienne d'Oran.) The picture below, from a recording of the song, shows Bouteldja pouring a fruit drink, not a beer. Belkacem recorded "Hedi Fransa" in the rural, cheikha style. "Serbili Baoui" is more or less cheikha style, but I believe that violins are also playing along with the gasba(s).
All the recorded material of Bouteldja's from this period that I am able to locate on youtube is done in "traditional" style. "Milouda fine kounti" is a song originally done by Cheikh El-Younsi Berkani. There is also "Ya Binti." Sometimes violins added, as on "Serbili baoui" and "Ya Rayi," a cheikha song. Unfortunately, I cannot locate any of Bouteldja's work with Etoile, which must have had a quite different and more modern sound. It seems that his recorded "hits" were all done in the "traditional" vein.
It appears that Bouteldja's career had fallen off somewhat by the early seventies, but was then revived when he began collaborating with Messaoud Bellemou.
Messaoud Bellemou and "pop-rai" Messaoud Bellemou Pop-rai emerged, some claim, when Bouteldja and other young vocalists and musicians devoted to "Orani folklore" began to work with the legendary figure Messaoud Bellemou during the 1970s. Messaoud Bellemou (b. 1947), like Cheikha El Ouachma, was from the town of Aïn Témouchent, 72 kilometers southwest of Oran. While a student at the municipal school, Bellemou was encouraged, according to an article found on wikipedia, to learn the trumpet from a teacher named Henri Coutan, a French colon. Frank Tenaille, in his book Le Raï: De la bâtardise a la reconnaissance internationale (2002), claims that Bellemou's trumpet teacher was a Spanish colon from Oran. Given that Bellemou was from Aïn Témouchent and not Oran, and that the wikipedia article names the teacher, Tenaille is almost certainly in error.
Kali tells us that when Bellemou started on trumpet, he played Western tunes, and in particular, the Spanish passacaglia. But he earned his living as a house painter. In the mid-sixities the Amar circus passed through Aïn Témouchent and recruited Bellemou to play trumpet in its orchestra. He toured with the circus for six months, working with seasoned musicians. After he returned home, Bellemou began to practice techniques for playing quarter tones on the trumpet -- necessary if one wanted to play Algerian music. It was also necessary if one wanted to perform the local, "folkloric" music of the cheikhat and the bedoui cheikhs, as the gasba, the reed flute, is central to the texture of both the bedoui and cheikha genres. So Bellemou attempted to recreate the sound of the gasba with his trumpet playing, but he also flavored his music with some Spanish paso doble and flamenco. (It's important to recall how strong the Spanish influence was in colonial Oran, and Oran province more generally. Orani residents of Spanish origin outnumbered those of French origin by two to one in 1886; by 1941, the ratio of Spaniards to French was three to one.) The ethnomusicologist Lechlech Boumediène, cited by Kali, states that Bellemou also seasoned his modernized rai with other traditional genres like gnawa and hawzi.
Kali claims that what Bellemou did was a revolutionary development, and that he managed to produce quater tones by using his breath to modulate notes as one would do when playing a bugle. (Kali also tells us that the Lebanese trumpet player Nassim Maalouf was instrumental in designing a trumpet that could play Arabic modes, with a fourth valve half the length of the second--but this occurred some years after Bellemou made his breakthrough.)
Bellemou's trumpet playing gave the local music what Kali calls a "jubilant charge." He began to play at wedding processions and was a big hit. (Playing at weddings was and is still an important source of income for musicians throughout the Arab world.) As a result of Bellemou's influence, the trumpet gradually began to replace the use of the double-reed ghaïta or mizmar which heretofore had typically been employed on such occasions, in Western Algeria. By 1968, at age 22, Bellemou started his own ensemble and was able to leave his painting job and to make his living from music.
Bellemou's music got no radio airplay, and cassette recording had not yet come into existence. So at first he chiefly made a name for himself by accompanying the local soccer team when it competed in other town. He used to play every sort of music, local, paso doble and film soundtracks. Bellemou's regional reputation grew more and more.
(According to wikipedia, Bellemou also used to accompany local singers (of both the cheikha and bedoui variety), including Cheikha Ouachma, Cheikha Bekhta and Cheikh Brahim, when they performed at weddings in the countryside around Aïn Témouchent. Unfortunately I've as yet found no recordings of Bellemou backing any cheikh or cheikha on trumpet, so I can't verify that this is in fact true.)
Bellemou recruited other young musicians from the area who were interested in the local "folkloric" traditions and, and reportedly started to make recordings (at first on vinyl) in this style in 1973 (source: wikipedia). The wikipedia piece says Bellemou's first recording was a track called "Sidi H'bibi," featuring (according to the bog Kaloulou) Hamani Hadjoum on vocals. For her part Marie Virolle (La chanson raï, 1995: 54)dates the emergence of the new, modern sounding "pop-rai" to Messaoud Bellemou's recordings with Belkacem Bouteldja, beginning in 1974. (Wikipedia says the two started working together in 1975.) Kouider Metaïr ("Oran, berceau du rai," in Kouider Metaïr, ed., Oran la mémoire, 2004) meanwhile dates the emergence of pop-rai to a specific recording by Bellemou and Bouteldja, “Zarga ou masrara” (Brown and radiant), released in 1975. K. Smaïl ("Les initiales: B. B. du raï," El Watan, December 15, 2009) also claims that Bouteldja sang on "Zerga ou mesrara.”
For his part, Kali states that Bellemou gained national recognition due to the release of two 1975 recording, one with Cheikh Hamani (i.e., Hamani Hadjoum Tmouchenti) on vocals, called "Ya hbabi ana bassit," and another track (unnamed) with Boutedlja.
Based on the successes Bellemou achieved due to one or all of these recordings, he went on national tour, a tour that was noteworthy for the fact that he charged admission (and people paid to see him), at a time when typically concerts were put on by local state authorities and entry was free.
Fortunately for the researcher interested in this history, it is now possible to locate, via Youtube, many of the recordings that are essential to it. (But not, alas, "Ya hbabi ana bassit" or "Sidi H'bibi"). It appears that the Bellemou recording called “Zarga ou Masrara” in fact features the Aïn Témouchent singer, Hamani Hadjoum Tmouchenti, rather than Bouteldja. Tmouchenti was one of those local musicians recruited by Bellemou as he developed a new sound for Orani "folkloric" music in the early seventies.
Bellemou and Belkacem Bouteldja meanwhile recorded a song that sounds virtually the same as "Zarga ou Masrara," under a different title: “Andi Mesrara” (I have a radiant girl). (I eventually found this source, which correctly names the Belkacem hit though without attributing it to Bellemou as well.)
Please listen to both the Hamani Tmouchenti version ("Zarga ou Masrara"):
And now to the Bouteldja version, "Andi Mesrara" (note that the Bouteldja video below opens with a more contemporary concert clip, and the song in question doesn't start til 2:00).
What is remarkable about these recordings is how Bellemou and his ensemble have modernized the patented cheikhat (and bedoui) sounds, especially when you compare them to Belkacem Bouteldja's 1965 “Qatlek Zizia.”
Jacket of "Zarga ou Masrara" (45"); Bellemou in jacket and tie The percussion on both resembles what one hears on the cheikha recordings, but it is also considerably punched up by the playing of a tbal, a drum that is much larger and louder than the guellal, played by pounding it with a curved stick. Here's a photo one from a collection of postcards from colonial Oran. It's played here by an Algerian Gnawa, but the instrument is widely used by various Sufi cults in Morocco and Algeria, such the Aissawa, as well as by the Gnawa in Morocco.
Now here is Cheikha Rimitti, playing a guellal, whose diameter is much smaller than that of a derbouka. On these foundational pop-rai recordings you can also hear the sound of kerakeb (sing., karkaba), the distinctive metal castanets played by the Gnawa (or Bilali, as they're known in Algeria). A female chorus repeats the male vocals and also contributes ululation, adding to the fuller sound that characterizes the two "Mesrara" recordings, by comparison to typical recordings from the cheikhat and bedoui tradition. But what I find most remarkable is that on these two recordings, the essential place of the gasba is taken by both trumpet and saxophone. It's Messaoud Bellemou himself here on sax, and his brother Mouafaq (nicknamed Mimi) is on trumpet. Both the Hamani and Bouteldja versions maintain the feel of the cheikha roots, but overall it's a bigger sound, a deeper, groovier rhythm, and with a more "modern" touch provided by the sax and trumpet. Now check out another Bellemou and Bouteldja number, “Inta Âkli,” from 1976, which has roughly the same sound as “Andi Mesrara,” except that Messaoud plays trumpet instead of sax, and it also features an organist, whose playing is quite subdued.
The person responsible for putting this video up on youtube, "maghrebreunion" (who as of this date has posted 352 videos--mostly rai--and to whom I am eternally grateful) also provides a photo of the members of Bellemou's troupe from the mid-seventies. They are identified, from left to right, as Kerbiche on kerakeb, Messaoud Bellemou on trumpet, Mimi Mouafak Bellemou on trumpet (I don't know why he is identified here as "Boumediane"), Hocine (holding a soft drink), the group's accordion player and organist, and Hamdane on tbal.
Please also listen to Bellemou's “Mani M'heni,” featuring Hamani Tmouchenti on vocals.
The rhythms on this track are quite amazing, and somehow the percussionist(s) manage to produce what sound like drum rolls.
l to r: Mouafak Boumediane ("Mimi ") and Messaoud Bellemou, trumpets, Hamdan on tbal And if you really liked the Bellemou and Hamani Tmouchenti recordings, here's another: "Ana bhar aliya."
Listen too to another of Cheikha El Ouachma's recordings, “Hak Kachak Hak” (I'm not sure when this 45" was released). You will notice that Cheikha El Ouachma uses the Gnawa rhythms of the kerakeb here. It would seem possible therefore that when Messaoud Bellemou used kerakeb on "Zarga ou Masrara" and "Andi Mesrara" he may not have been innovating but rather following in the cheikha tradition, at least as practiced in the Aïn Témouchent region. (Recall that it is reported that Bellemou used to accompany Cheikha El Ouachma).
The idea for incorporating the tbal and the kerakeb might also have been due to the influence of the Moroccan neo-folk ensemble Nass El Ghiwane (and other similar groups, such as Jil Jilala and Lem Chaheb).
Nass El Ghiwane, huge superstars in Morocco, were notable for incorporating various regional and local Moroccan traditional musics and putting them together to create a new synthesis; they used both the tbal and (on occasion) karakeb. The Ghiwanian influence was enormous in Algeria at this time, and according to Bouziane Daoudi and Hadj Milani (L'aventure du rai, 1996), there were over 3000 Ghiwanian groups in Algeria in the early seventies. The young Khaled Hadj Brahim, later known as Cheb Khaled, started a group in the style of Nass El Ghiwane at age 11, in 1971, called Les Cinqs Étoiles (who, it seems, left no recordings). (The sound of Khaled's group, however, must have been somewhat different than Nass El Ghiwane, as Kalakoulou notes, since its instruments were accordion, bongos and violin.) Moroccan neo-folk quickly went out of fashion, however, after Morocco's occupation of the Spanish Sahara and the ensuing hostilities with Algeria in 1975. The influence of Moroccan neo-folk on Bellemou and company may have been that it provided a warrant for using instruments linked to separate folk traditions and putting them together to produce something new. It may have influenced Bellemou and company to use the tbal and kerakeb specifically. Or it may have been a more general influence, one which encouraged young people to take their local "folkloric" traditions seriously. Recall that we are discussing musical activity in Western Algeria, quite close to the Moroccan border. (The operative word here is "may," because I really have no idea.)
But what about the incorporation of saxophone and the trumpet? (I am unaware of any other recordings, besides those Bellemou did with Hamani Tmouchenti as well as "Andi Mesrara" with Belkacem Bouteldja, on which he played the saxophone.) Young Algerians were, of course, listening to music by the likes of James Brown in Algeria in the 1970s. Bouteldja tells us, in a 2009 interview with K. Smaïl, that as a young man he was listening to James Brown and Otis Redding, in addition to various Algerian and French musicians. But could cassettes by Egyptian Nubian musicians like Ali Hassan Kuban, Bahr Abu Ghreisha, Hassan Jazouli, or Hussein Bashir also have been making their way to Algeria at the time? Egyptian Nubian music of this period was noted for its use of brass and saxophone, and sometimes when I listen to Bellemou recordings from the seventies, I think I hear similarities.
Frank Tenaille (2002) claims that Bouteldja played accordion on some recordings, and that he used it to replace the sound of the zamr, a kind of double-reed clarinet favored in the bedoui music of Western Algeria rather than the gasba. I think Tenaille may be wrong again, both about Bouteldja playing accordion, and about the zamr, i.e. the ghaïta or mizmar, which was employed in wedding processions (as noted above) and not in bedoui music per se. Benteldja, however, says that he played derbouka in Bellemou's group. Here's a recording of the Bellemou ensemble with Bouteldja on vocals which features the accordion. Perhaps Bouteldja is playing it -- but I've seen no other claims other than Tenaille's that Bouteldja played one. More likely it's Hocine of Bellemou's group (see above). The song is "Bakhta," which was originally written and recorded by Cheikh Abdelkader El Khaldi, and it is an excerpt from a long poem that El Khaldi wrote about his lover. (Here's El Khaldi's "Goul L'Bakhat Goul," which I think is a song from a different segment of the poem.) "Bakhta" was also recorded, previous to the Bellemou/Bouteldja version, by wahrani singers Blaoui Houari, Ahmed Wahby and Ahmed Saber, and later by Khaled, on his N'ssi N'ssi album (1993). A wikipedia article summarizes a description Khaled gave of the song in an interview in 1997. (Wahrani is another of the sources feeding into the development of modern rai.)
Sometime in the mid-seventies, Bouteldja was arrested, according to the testimony of Boutaiba Sghir in the very interesting 2003 documentary, Mémoire du Raï -- you can watch the segment here. I've not been able to find details on the arrest, only some vague references to Belkacem Bouteldja as a kind of "enfant terrible." Here's what he looked like in that period (from the cover of the 45" for the songs "Ndag Ndag" and Ya Rayi," recorded with Bellemou: you can listen to the latter here.)
As far as I'm aware, Kacimo did not play guitar, but I suppose that a photo of him posing with one, along with his hairstyle and his pullover sweater, would have helped to create an impression of the music as "modern."
(To confuse things even further: here's a live recording of Bellemou and Bouteldja, from the first rai festival in Oran, in 1985. They play "Ha Raï, Ha Raï," "Zarga Ou Masrara" [originally recorded, as we've seen, with Hamani on vocals] and then Bellemou does an instrumental. It's from an album, Le rai dans tous ses états, released on the French label Maison des Cultures du Monde in 1986, which also features tracks from Cheikha Remitti, Raïna Raï, and "Chab" Khaled.)
Boutaiba Sghir
Another young singer who Messaoud Bellemou recruited to work with him was Boutaiba Sghir (born Hafif Mohammed), from Chabate, a village located 7 kilometers from Aïn Témouchent. Bellemou in fact started working with this local vocalist even before he began performing with the Oran singer Belkacem Boutaldja. And although it may have been the Bellemou/Bouteldja collaborations (and particularly "Andi Mesrara") that put pop-rai on the map (at least in the Oran region), Boutaiba Sghir was equally crucial to the development of that "new" sound, especially given that Bouteldja disappeared from the scene for a time due to his jailing. The Sublime Frequencies compilation of 1970s rai music, 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground(2008) features three very fine tracks from Bellemou and Boutaiba Sghir. (For some reason, Bouteldja is absent from the album.)
Let's examine now some of the sounds produced by the Bellemou-Boutaiba collaborations. This recording by Bellemou and Boutaiba, "Dayha Oulabes" (featured on 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground), has an instrumental opening, with two trumpets and accordion, that reminds me a lot of Egyptian Nubian music produced by the likes of Ali Hassan Kuban.
On the Bellemou-Boutaiba recording "Manemchiche," dating from 1977-78, you can hear further development of the Bellemou ensemble sound, and in particular, the presence of bongos (or maybe derbouka), which give the song a distinctive rhythmic feel.
Another great Bellemou-Boutaiba outing (also on 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground) is "Malgré Tout." (Note the Frenchtitle; French is routinely incorporated into the local Oranais dialect). You can hear an electric guitar clearly on the song's opening, and the rhythm here is dominated by bongos. (The chorus goes, "malgré tout mazal n'brik," or, "despite everything, I still love you.") The drum rolls are similar to those on the Bellemou and Hamani Tmouchenti track “Mani M'heni,” discussed above. (I guess, but it's only a guess, that it's Hamam Ahmad Zergui on guitar -- see below.)
Here's another excellent track from Boutaiba, I assume with the backing of Bellemou's ensemble, "Ki Kounti." It's notable in particular, from my view, for the strong guitar instrumental opening, and it's a real scorcher, with the percussion, vocals, trumpet, accordion and organ playing together to create a musical tempest. The person who posted it, "maghrebunion," says that it dates from the seventies and that it is off the album Ouine n'guiyel ana oughzali. Sublime Frequencies, or some other company with an interest in such material, needs to issue another compilation of seventies rai. If anyone does so, this track definitely belongs on it.
Chaba Fadela, who as we noted above has been cited by many as the originator of "pop-rai," used to sing back-up on occasion for Boutaiba in the mid to late seventies, before she started recording under her own name. Here she accompanies Boutaiba on "Ya Khali", from 1978 or 1979. The notes to the video state that it is Gana El Maghnaoui on trumpet, who was another important figure in the development of rai in the 70s. (I have thus far been able to find little hard information about him, but you can find lots of his music on youtube.) It is worthwhile comparing "Ya Khali" to Fadela's famous "Ana ma h'lali ennoum" track of 1979. After listening to both, it seems clear to me that Fadela's song, said by some to mark the emergence of "pop-rai," is more of a piece with "Ya Khali," recorded with Boutaiba, than marking any kind of radical break with what came before it.
Please check out "Ana ma h'lali ennoum" by Fadela (via Youtube). Helpfully (and once again, I am deeply grateful to the Algerians who have posted all these vintage recordings), it also features the jacket of the cassette, which looks like this:
Note that the cassette jacket attributes the track is attributed to Fadela and Bellemou. In Arabic, meanwhile, it says Fadela al-Wahraniya, or "Fadela the Orani." The person who posted the track on Youtube writes in his/her notes that she was called Fadela al-Wahraniya at the time in order to distinguish her from the well-known Algerian singer of hawzi, Fadhéla Dziria (1917-1970). The spoken introduction to the song introduces her as "Chaba Fadela al-Wahraniya." The recording then also seems to be one of the earliest uses of the cheb or chaba as a name for rai stars. (Here is another version of the song, from 1985 or 1986.)
The quality of the recording as reproduced on the Youtube vid is not very high. But you can hear electric guitar and accordion playing on the song's introduction. Although the cassette is attributed to Bellemou and Fadela, there is no trumpet playing. Perhaps it's Bellemou's "ensemble" who accompanies her. The accordion here substitutes for the gasba. We also hear (although it is not very strong) the electric guitar playing rhythm throughout. The song is also remarkable in that male voices (I don't know whose) respond to Fadela on the chorus. Compared to Bellemou's other recordings from the mid-1970s (at least the ones that are available), the major innovation of "Ana ma h'lali ennoum" song is that it features a female rather than a male lead voice. In that sense, it represents a partial return to prominence of female vocalists, the cheikhat, within the rai tradition. This return of women as featured vocalist in the "rai" tradition also happens to coincide with the cultural liberalization that occurred in Algeria after President Boumedienne (d. 1978) was replaced by Chadhli Bendjedid, who served as Algeria's President from February 1979-January 1992. (Chaba Zahouania, the other big female star of early pop-rai, reportedly started recording in 1981. Here's "Hey Delali" from Zahouania, recorded in 1981 with Groupe El Azhar.)
Benfissa, Groupe El Azhar, Frères Zergui, and others
Younes Benfissa Bellemou also recorded with another vocalist named Younes Benfissa during the seventies, and according to wikipedia, before he even began working with Bouteldja. The article suggests that Benfissa too, like Hamani Tmouchenti and Boutaiba Sghir, was from Aïn Témouchent or its environs. I have been unable to learn more about Benfissa, but he did make a number of excellent recordings with Bellemou during this period when "pop-rai" was developing. Here's one, entitled "Li Maandouche L'Auto" (He who doesn't own a car), which you can find on the album, 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground. And here's another wonderful track from Benfissa, "Derou shour," which features him on both vocals and 'ud. The 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground also features tracks from Groupe El Azhar and Cheb Zergui. I cannot find much information about these artists, but based on their available recordings, they certainly are worthy of more discussion and research. According to Hicham Chadly, on the album's liner notes, Groupe El Azhar used to accompany Cheb Mami in the 1980's, before Mami moved to France in 1985. But they also made a number of recordings in the seventies, and were very active on the scene. If you hunt around on Youtube, you can find tracks that Boutaiba recorded with Groupe El Azhar. Here's one, from 1975-76, which I think (based on the fact that maghrebunion reproduced the cover for it -- above) is called "Nar Guedate." Magrebunion also offers up this photo (below) of Boutaiba with the Groupe El Azhar, and he identifies the group's members as: trumpet, Saïd Tmouchenti (not shown); accordion, Bellebna (known as Hammani, RIP); guitar, Kouider; derbouka, Houcine Nahal; tar, Bellahouel. The violin and 'ud players are not identified. I've been unable to determine where Groupe El Azhar were from. But maybe if they had a trumpet player named Saïd Tmouchenti, they were also from Aïn Témouchent? There is also this track, "Ha Galbi Allah I'Ouatik B'Sbor", featuring Boutaiba and Groupe El Azhar. The Youtube vid features another photo of the group, I guess, but perhaps with some different personnel? It's hard to tell. Note that below we see someone on banjo and two violinists. The photo is not clear enough for me to tell what the gentleman standing in back is playing; perhaps it's a trumpet. Note that in both these recordings the ensemble playing doesn't really match the ensembles that are depicted. In particular, the trumpet is a central feature of both outings but the trumpet player only shows up (perhaps) in the photo below. Groupe El Azhar deserve a much larger place in the history of the early development of "pop-rai," perhaps as much as Bellemou and his collaborators do. Their recordings with the Frères Zergui in particular are especially interesting, most notably the wah-wah guitar playing of Hamam Ahmad Zergui. Check out this truly amazing track (title unidentified), featuring "Cheb" Zergui on vocals and guitar. Groupe El Azhar recorded with a number of other artists besides the Frères Zergui and Boutaiba who were involved in the development of the pop rai scene. Via youtube, one can now find recordings they did with: Gana El Maghnaoui (mentioned above, 1978) Cheb Khaled (1978) Hocine Chabatti (Cheb Hocine) (1977) Chaba Zahouania, "Hey Dellali," 1981 But... Cheb Khaled Based on all the research I've done, I was ready to proclaim Bellemou and his collaborators as the founders of modern pop-rai (possibly with the addition of Groupe El Azhar). And to give pride of place to the city of Aïn Témouchent over Oran, which has been conventionally cited as the originator of rai. But then I heard this song, from Cheb Khaled. The title is either "Mahna Sigliya" or possibly "Hala la (Mahna Sigliya Maamda Ala Zega .....)." Two sources claim that it is from Khaled's first album, an EP really, released in 1974, when he was only 14, and named after its title track, "Trig Lycée" (The way to the high school), which you can listen to here. (Sorry, this is the best photo I could find of the "Trig Lycée" EP.) "Mahna Sigliya" is immediately remarkable for its guitar work, which kicks in strong right from the beginning, is shadowed by a sax (at much lower volume than the guitar) and then is joined by an accordeon (perhaps played by Khaled). It has a quick paced beat (bongos and tambourine?), quite a bit quicker than traditional bedoui or cheikha rai. The accordion, sax and guitar play basically variations on the same riff over and over in between Khaled's vocals, but the interplay between them is quite intriguing, as the volume varies and the guitar and sax really go at it. It's really a wonderful track, fully as unusual (compared to what came before) and as compelling as Bellemou's "Mesrara" cuts. The much better known "Trig Lycée" is less wild, but it's the same ensemble (such recordings usually took place in one session), but without any guitar. (Khaled recorded a new version of "Trig Lycée," now called "Trigue Lycee," on his 1999 album Kenza.) I've been unable to determine who played with Khaled on this recording, but it is possible that he played accordion himself. (Unlike in the case of Bouteldja, there is not a shadow of a doubt that Khaled played accordion.) It could be Bellemou and his group. It could be Groupe El Azhar. Or perhaps there were some other musicians active in Oran (where the "Trig Lycée" album was almost certainly recorded) who were working in the same vein as Bellemou. (The Audotopia music blog says it was the Le Cinq Étoiles, but they don't really sound here like a folk band in the Ghiwanian vein.) Kalaloulou meanwhile says that "Sidi H'bibi," Bellemou's first recording, with Hamani on vocals, sounds remarkably like Khaled's "Trig Lycée": "La similitude est frappante: le phrasé, le rythme...seule la voix fait l'écart" (The similarity is striking: the phrasing, the rhythm...only the voice makes the difference). Given that "Sidi H'bibi" was recorded in 1973, the year before "Trig Lycée," Kalaloulou concludes that "Hamani Hadjoum passe pour être le premier chanteur de Raï moderne." That is, Hamani, not Khaled, not Kacimo, not Fadela, was the first "pop-rai" singer. What a pity that I can't find the "Sidi H'bibi" recording, or any photo of Hamani! You can find a truly amazing and invaluable treasure trove of early Khaled recordings here, including Trig Lycée, courtesy ƮᏲҾ дևծιστøρία. 20 albums! And if you are interested in Khaled's earliest material, check out the compilation, Ala Rayi: The Early Years, for some more tracks that sound like they came out of the same milieu as "Trig Lycée" and the "Masrara" material. It's also found at the Audiotopia link noted above. And a note on the term "rai"
Boutaiba Sghir, interviewed in the film, Mémoire du Raï, says that both he and Bouteldja combined what he calls "gasba music" (the film translates "gasba" in French as "ancien") and the "modern" in their work. His use of the term "gasba music" rather than "rai" is quite interesting; Boutaiba means here the music of the cheikhat and the bedoui music of the cheikhs, and his formulation underscores how important the gasba was to this music.
Some scholars call the music of the cheikhs bedoui citidanisée, or "citified bedoui," by which they mean bedoui (literally, "Bedouin") music done by urban cheikhs who sang and composed in a rural tradition.
A youtube video of the Bellemou-Bouteldja recording of Cheikh El Khaldi's "Bakhta" calls this genre, Orani "makhazni." Bouteldja uses the term wahrani-makhazni well, in an interview he gave in 2009. This article about Cheikh Abdelkader Bouras, who was associated with Cheikh El Khaldi, says that makhazni gave "new life" to the bedoui genre, and that it was based on a change of rhythm that permitted easy transition from one qasida, or poem, to another.
The ethnomusicologist Boumèdiene Lechlech, in a very detailed account of the bedoui genre, states that bédoui wahrani includes three main forms: guebli, performed without percussion, just the gasba, mekhzni, with guellal and gasba, and bsaïli, performed with only percussion, what he calls a kind of primitive rap. The term mekhzni, he writes, comes from the tribal cavalry, charged by the ruling elite (the makhzen) with collecting tribute and maintaining order. Its meaning then is upbeat music.
Bedoui ensemble (screen save from Mémoire du Raï) According to Virolle (La chanson raï), it was not until the 1970s that a genre known as "rai" came into being. The music performed by the cheikhat, she states, was known prior to that time as "elklām elhezal" -- which she translates as "parole leger" in French, or "light, amusing speech." (This in contrast to elklām eljed, which apparently is more characteristic of the melhoun verse sung by bedoui artists.) The name raitrab, country rai, commonly given these days to the music sung by the cheikhat, as distinguished from rai moderne as well as from bedoui, is perhaps then a more modern invention.
A cheikha and her accompanists (screen save from Mémoire du Raï)
One imagines that recordings like Bouteldja's "Ya Ray," dating from the 1960's, played a role in giving rise to the name of the music, as it became known in the seventies. Note that this Bouteldja track features a violin in addition to the gasba and guellal; note too that the jacket of the recording advertises it as "Chante folklorique oranais" (Orani folkloric singing).
It seems that the term "rai" really came into existence with the rise of pop-rai in the seventies.
Mohamed Kali, writing in the Algerian daily El Watan ("Querelle des clochettes," July 9, 2011) also states that the term "rai" wasn't used to describe a musical genre until well after independence. (He gives no date for its first use.) It is used, he says, to designate a style of singing in which singer-songwriters refer constantly to their "reason-unreason" in their refrains, which is how he translates "rai." It is the "unreason" aspect of their songs, he claims, that made rai music subversive.
More on the place of origins: Oran, Sidi Bel Abbès, Aïn Témouchent
In the past few years controversy has arisen over the place of origin of rai, especially as rai has become a kind of national folkloric institution and the occasion for festivals and tourism (thus far, mostly local). The main rivalry is between Oran and the city located 70 kilometers to the south, Sidi Bel Abbès. Kali says that it is partly true that Sidi Bel-Abbès has a claim on rai, because the music's practitioners were able to find a kind of refuge there after independence, especially after the strictures placed on female performance by the Boumedienne regime. (It's not clear from his account, however, exactly why Sidi Bel-Abbès was so protective of rai.) Some claim that it's Raïna Raï, who were originally from Sidi Bel Abbès, that gave rise to pop-rai when they established their group in Paris in 1980.
Kali puts the origins of rai back much further, to the inter-war period. It was the Aïn Témouchent region, he claims, that was the true origin. The city sits at the center of the most intensely colonized and fertile region of colonial Algeria. During the summer harvest season, it attracted thousands of seasonal workers, known as "chouala," from all over Algeria, as well as from the Sahara and from Morocco. Women made up a large portion of the labor, as they were favored by the colons who considered them more easily controlled and manipulated than men. Rai, in its origins, was music sung by migrant female laborer, says Kali. (Recall that the wa‘dât, the saints' festivals held on the occasion of the end of the harvest season, were important performance venues for both the cheikhat and the bedoui cheikhs.)
I intend in future to look more deeply into the issue of migrant labor in the inter-war period, and specifically in the Aïn Témouchent region. At minimum, this account helps make sense of the importance of Témouchenti artists like Cheikha El Wachma, Messaoud Bellemou, Boutaiba Sghir and others in the development of modern rai. It's unfortunate that they have not received the recognition they so greatly deserve for their role in inventing this incredibly important genre of music.
There is a dish they don’t tell you about in Hansik 101. It is not listed on tourism websites and Korean cookbooks. Whenever an expat stumbles upon it, they are compelled to blog, Instagram and tweet...
Screenshot from Franchesca Ramsey’s video “How Slut Shaming Becomes Victim Blaming.”
Late last week, Franchesca Ramsey shared her immensely intimate and painful story regarding sexual assault as part of a critique of a video by comedian Jenna Marbles. The video and a transcript are under the cut, but be advised that it carries a heavy TRIGGER WARNING due to the subject matter.
Franchesca Ramsey: I had intended on making a hilarious video with wigs and green screens and costumes and characters. I changed my mind and instead decided to make a response video to Jenna Marbles’ “Things I Don’t Understand About Women: Sluts Edition.”
Clip of Jenna Marbles: The first thing I don’t understand about sluts is a one-night stand. A true one-night stand: when you meet someone, you’re out somewhere, and then you go home somewhere just to have sex with them. This concept is like [makes "mind-blowing" motion] to me. Maybe I’m at his house and, you know, he’s got big plans of chopping me up in little pieces and keeping me in his freezer for awhile. Maybe he’s got, like, 10 roommates in the other room that are all just waiting to close in and gang-bang you for the night. Help the sluts of the world make less bad slutty decisions.
FR: Two really amazing YouTubers have already done responses that I completely co-sign and think that they did a great job of explaining slut-shaming and why it is bad and how it lead to a really slippery slope, so make sure to check out videos by Laci Green and Hayley G. Hoover. I will link them in the video description box.
Laci did a really great job–and so did Hayley–of just kind of adding a disclaimer that this is not an attack on Jenna Marbles. This is really about a larger problem, and she’s just kind of opened the door to the conversation. I’ve decided to chime in here because I actually have personal experience with this. Awesome! Of all the things I never thought I’d be sharing on the internet, this is definitely one of them.
When I was 18, just past my 18th birthday, I was date-raped. That is how I lost my virginity. That’s my beautiful story about how I was deflowered.
For my 18th birthday, one of the girls that I worked with took me to a concert. She bought me concert tickets, and we went with her boyfriend and his roommate. Somewhere through the course of drinking all day and not really eating very much and kind of feeling pressured to drink because I was not really a drinker, when it was time to leave the concert, I was, like, beyond inebriated. Like, stumbling and slurring my words and having a hard time–and so clearly, I could not drive home. And, in retrospect, I don’t know if there was something in my drink because I’ve never, ever gotten like that post-the situation. I blacked out–like, donezo. Like, no recollection, was not conscious.
It wasn’t until the morning that I even realized that I had sex and I was like, “Wait a second, what, what happened? This doesn’t feel right.” And I asked my girlfriend and she was like, “Yeah, you totally had sex with him, you were like, so bad.”
I remember feeling mortified. Just thinking “Oh my God, why did this happen to me?” I mean, just all of those horrible thoughts going through my head, blaming myself. I told her, I begged her, “Please don’t say anything about this at work.” She told my co-workers. She told my manager, and they said horrible things about me. They called me a slut, and I was the running joke. I was the running joke at work. And because of that, I didn’t say anything.
I’m making this video because there are women that speak out about experiences that have happened to them, about their rape experiences. And time and again, everyone tells them, “Well, it was your fault. You shouldn’t have done this, you shouldn’t have done that.” No. Can we stop telling girls that they “shouldn’t get raped” and instead tell men to stop fucking raping women and to stop taking advantage of women?
And, you mean, you see it all the time. Most recently, there was a young woman who was 11 years old, I think it was in Texas. She was gang-raped by 20 guys. Eleven years old. The New York Timeswrites a story about it, and for some reason, the story continues to focus on how much makeup this young woman wore, how late she stayed out, and how “grown-up” and “sexily” she dressed. She was 11 and 20 guys raped her, and somehow it’s her fault.
You can be the “perfect person” and still get raped, and it would not be your fault. The same way you could make “tons of bad decisions” and engage in risky behavior on a daily basis, and if someone rapes you, it is the rapist’s fault, not yours.
I wish someone had said that to me. I wish I’d had someone that told me that it wasn’t my fault, that I should speak up.
(My camera stopped in the middle. It was like, “You’ve said enough!”)
It’s just scary to think how many women and girls have been in this same position and haven’t said something, or have been discouraged from saying something, because they in some way, shape, or form felt like it was their fault. Across the board, the only constant–because there are so many different scenarios where someone could be a victim of abuse; not just women, men, as well–the only constant is that person that makes the bad decision to hurt someone else.
I do think that it’s really great that Jenna touched on the idea of looking out for one another. If you see a woman that is in a potentially dangerous situation at a bar or what have you, there’s no reason that you can’t step and try to help her out. But, what I would add to that is, it shouldn’t just be a woman’s responsibility to look out for other women; there’s no reason that a guy can’t step in at a bar and say, “Hey dude, this girl is wasted, I don’t think she wants to go home with you. Let’s put her in a cab.”
One of the comments that was left on my Facebook page that I really liked was made by a young woman by the name of Regina, and she said something along the lines of, “It’s important to help victims, but it’s also important to prevent victims from happening.” And I really liked that because it’s not probably a good idea for anyone to blackout drunk, and I say that as someone speaking from experience.
I hope that I’ve added another perspective to this conversation in just kind of explaining why it’s important that we move away from slut-shaming and that we also promote being smart and being responsible to everyone, not just with a focus on women. There are people of all spectrums and walks of life that are affected by sexual assault and abuse, and the best way to prevent it and to make sure that those who are responsible are held accountable is to stop blaming our victims and to continue being smart and finding ways to protect ourselves and protect each other. I’ll see you guys later.
For a tropical island, Clipperton doesn’t have very much going for it. The tiny, ring-shaped atoll lying 1,000 kilometres off the southwest coast of Mexico is covered in hard, pointy coral and a prodigious number of nasty little crabs. The wet season from May to October brings incessant and torrential rain, and for the rest [...]
On the train to work today I had the opportunity to read Aaron Swartz’s My Life Offline and danah boyd’s I want my cyborg back-to-back. The dichotomy between these two pieces, both from respected internet thinkers, is great. They aren’t necessarily contradictory, but they definitely show the range of emotions people have about being connected.
This past week the Economist published a piece entitled Primates On Facebook that described some research done by the Facebook Data Team. Since there have been a number of questions throughout the monkeysphere, we thought we would take the opportunity to describe our approach, the data, and our analysis.
We were asked a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks? This is a particularly difficult question to answer, so as a first attempt we looked into the types of relationships people do maintain, and the relative size of these groups. The image above presents a high-level overview of our findings: while the average Facebook user communicates with a small subset of their entire friend network, they maintain relationships with a group two times the size of this core. This not only affects each user, but also has systemic effects that may explain why things spread so quickly on Facebook.
Before discussing the data, let us first set the context.
People you know
Many people are asking questions about the number of friends they have on Facebook. Do I have enough? Do I have too many? What may be tripping people up here is the language: while the people you’re connected to on Facebook are called your “friends,†they’re more likely people you have met at some point in your life. Social network researchers have been trying to measure this number for decades, and come across a number of clever techniques.
If you’ve read the Tipping Point, you may remember a study Gladwell described where people were asked to identify whether or not they knew people with names from a long list culled from a phone book. Based on the probability of knowing someone with a given name and the number of people with this name that a person knows, we can estimate the number of people a given subject has met. Killworth, et al. found using this technique and others that the number of people a person will know in their lifetime ranges somewhere between 300 and 3000 ((Killworth, P., Johnsen, E., Russell, H. B., Shelley, G. A., and McCarty, C. Estimating the size of personal networks. Social Networks 12 (1990), 289–312.)).
On Facebook, the average number of friends that a person has is currently 120 ((Facebook Statistics)). Given that Facebook has only been around for 5 years, that not everyone uses it, and that the not every acquaintance has found each other, this number seems reasonable for an average user.
Communication network
As a subset of the people you know, there are some individuals with whom you communicate on an ongoing basis. The number of individuals that represent a person’s core support network has been found to be much, much smaller than their entire network. Peter Marsden found the number of people with whom individuals “can discuss important matters” numbers only 3 for Americans ((Marsden, P. Core discussion networks of americans. American Sociological Review 52, 1 (1987), 122–131.)). In a subsequent survey, researchers found that this number has dropped slightly over the past 10 years ((Mcpherson, Miller, Smith-Lovin, Lynn, Brashears, and Matthew, E. Social isolation in america: Changes in core discussion networks over two decades. American Sociological Review 71, 3 (June 2006), 353–375.)), causing some alarm in the press, but without sufficient explanation ((While this work is well cited, there is support that the methodology underestimates the core network, e.g. Bearman, P., and Parigi, P. Cloning Headless Frogs and Other Important Matters: Conversation Topics and Network Structure. Social Forces 83 (2004), 535.)).
How many people an individual communicates with probably exists somewhere between their total network size and their support network. Some research by Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan Watts observing all email communication at a university shows that the number of ongoing contacts hovers somewhere between 10 and 20 over a 30 day period ((Kossinets, G., and Watts, D. J. Empirical analysis of an evolving social network. Science 311, 5757 (January 2006), 88–90.)).
Maintained Relationships
Facebook and other social media allow for a type of communication that is somewhat less taxing than direct communication. Technologies like News Feed and RSS readers allow people to consume content from their friends and stay in touch with the content that is being shared. This consumption is still a form of relationship management as it feeds back into other forms of communication in the future. For instance, a high school friend uploads a photo of her new puppy and this photo appears in your News Feed. You click on the photo, browse through a host of other photos and discover that she has also gotten engaged, which may lead you to reach out to her.
This type of communication is the core of the Facebook experience, and given the question posed by the Economist, we wondered what effect this sort of relationship maintenance had on the breadth of people’s networks.
Measuring Networks on Facebook
To try and answer questions about network size on Facebook, we looked at the communications of a random sample of users over the course of 30 days. We defined networks in 4 different ways:
All Friends: the largest representation of a person’s network is the set of all people they have verified as friends.
Reciprocal Communication: as a measure of a sort of core network, we counted the number of people with whom a person had had reciprocal communications, or an active exchange of information between two parties.
One-way Communication: the total set of people with whom a person has communicated.
Maintained Relationships: to measure engagement, we took the set of people for whom a user had clicked on a News Feed story or visited their profile more than twice.
For each users we calculated the size of their reciprocal network, one-way network and network of maintained relationships, and plotted this as a function of the number of friends a user has. As Andreas mentions in his blog post about the article, the visualization (shown below) did not make it into the article, but presents a pretty clear picture of the relationship between these types of communication.
In the diagram, the red line shows the number of reciprocal relationships, the green line shows the one-way relationships, and the blue line shows the passive relationships as a function of your network size. This graph shows the same data as the first graph, only combined for both genders. What it shows is that, as a function of the people a Facebook user actively communicate with, you are passively engaging with between 2 and 2.5 times more people in their network. I’m sure many people have had this feeling, but these data make this effect more transparent.
Systemic Effects
What effect does a 2x increase in connectivity mean for a network? The easiest way to observe this is to look at one person’s personal network. The image below shows the personal network for one of my coworkers. The first diagram shows his entire network, namely all of his friends, and all of the relationships between his friends. It is clear that the cluster on the top is the highly connected set of Facebook coworkers, and the cluster on the right is another group of friends.
The cell on the bottom right shows only those relationships that have reciprocal communication. Many of the individuals in his network are completely disconnected or out of touch with each other. Moving to the bottom left cell, we see the slightly more connected network containing one-way communication. This includes every person who wrote a comment, sent a message or wrote a wall post to one of my coworker’s other friends. The cell on the top-right shows the passive network, including all those people who were keeping up with their friends. While some of his friends are still disconnected, a very large percentage are now reachable through some set of observations.
The stark contrast between reciprocal and passive networks shows the effect of technologies such as News Feed. If these people were required to talk on the phone to each other, we might see something like the reciprocal network, where everyone is connected to a small number of individuals. Moving to an environment where everyone is passively engaged with each other, some event, such as a new baby or engagement can propagate very quickly through this highly connected network.
While these data are not a controlled experiment, and do not directly relate to the theories described above, they do show a directional trend in the way people manage relationships on a social network today. We hope to continue this line of research with the eventual hope of making relationships that much easier to manage.
Designed by Richard Neutra, completed in 1962 and originally constructed to house a tableau of Pickett's Charge, the Cyclorama building at Gettysburg will be demolished by the National Parks Service. The modernist structure has had a 15-year battle on whether to keep or raze it. The decision from the NPS is to return the site to its 1863 state, a key portion of the Union battle line and important to the public understanding of what happened at Gettysburg.
I just installed a Nest in my living room. Let's see how it goes.
When temperatures drop and I find myself indoors more often, it's easy to use a lot of energy at home. This ideabook is a collection of products that can help lower energy usage and lower bills this season. Jennifer from I Art U
[Image: Lebbeus Woods, from San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City (1995)].
I thought I'd upload the course description for a studio I'll be teaching this spring—starting next week, in fact—at Columbia University's GSAPP on the architectural implications of seismic energy and the possibility of a San Andreas Fault National Park in California. The images in this post are just pages from the syllabus.
The overall idea is to look at architecture's capacity for giving form to—or, in terms of the course description, its capacity to "make legible"—seismic energy as experienced along the San Andreas Fault. As the syllabus explains, we'll achieve this, first, through the design and modeling of a series of architectural "devices"—not scientific instruments, but interpretive tools—that can interact with, spatially mediate, and/or augment the fault line, making the tectonic forces of the earth visible, audible, or otherwise sensible for a visiting public. From pendulums to prepared pianos, seismographs to shake tables, this invention and exploration of new mechanisms for the fault will fill the course's opening three weeks.
The larger and more important impetus of the studio, however, is to look at the San Andreas Fault as a possible site for a future National Park, including all that this might entail, from questions of seismic risk and what it means to invite visitors into a place of terrestrial instability to the impossibility of preserving a landscape on the move. What might a San Andreas Fault National Park look like, we will ask, how could such a park best be managed, what architecture and infrastructure—from a visitors' center to hiking way stations—would be appropriate for such a dynamic site, and, in the end, what does it mean to enshrine seismic movement as part of the historical narrative of the United States, suggesting that a fault line can be worthy of National Park status?
I'm also excited to say that we'll be working in collaboration with Marc Weidenbaum's Disquiet Junto, an online music collective who will be developing projects over the course of the spring that explore the sonic properties of the San Andreas Fault—a kind of soundtrack for the San Andreas. The results of these experiments will be uploaded to Soundcloud.
[Images: Lebbeus Woods, from San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City (1995) and an aerial view of the San Andreas Fault, looking south across the Carrizo Plain at approximately +35° 6' 49.81", -119° 38' 40.98"].
Course: Columbia University GSAPP Advanced Studio IV, Spring 2013 Title: San Andreas: Architecture for the Fault Instructor: Geoff Manaugh
The San Andreas Fault is a roughly 800-mile tectonic feature cutting diagonally across the state of California, from the coastal spit of Cape Mendocino, 200 miles north of San Francisco, to the desert shores of the Salton Sea near the U.S./Mexico border. Described by geologists as a “transform fault,” the San Andreas marks a stark and exposed division between the North American and Pacific Plates. It is a landscape on the move—“one of the least stable parts of the Earth,” in the words of paleontologist Richard Fortey, writing in his excellent book Earth: An Intimate History, and "one of several faults that make up a complex of potential catastrophes."
Seismologists estimate that, in just one million years’ time, the two opposing sides of the fault will have slid past one another to the extent of physically sealing closed the entrance to San Francisco Bay; at the other end of the state, Los Angeles will have been dragged more than 15 miles north of its present position. But then another million years will pass—and another, and another—violently and unrecognizably distorting Californian geography, with the San Andreas as a permanent, sliding scar.
In some places today, the fault is a picturesque landscape of rolling hills and ridges; in others, it is a broad valley, marked by quiet streams, ponds, and reservoirs; in yet others, it is not visible at all, hidden beneath the rocks and vegetation. In a sense, the San Andreas is not singular and it has no clear identity of its own, taking on the character of what it passes through whilst influencing the ways in which that land is used. The fault cuts through heavily urbanized areas—splitting the San Francisco peninsula in two—as well as through the suburbs. It cleaves through mountains and farms, ranches and rail yards. As the National Park Service reminds us, “Although the very mention of the San Andreas Fault instills concerns about great earthquakes, perhaps less thought is given to the glorious and scenic landscapes the fault has been responsible for creating.”
[Images: (left) A “fault trench” cut along the San Andreas for studying underground seismic strain; photo by Ricardo DeAratanha for the Los Angeles Times. (right) A property fence “offset” nearly eight feet by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; a similar fence is now part of an “Earthquake Trail” interpretive loop “that provides visitors with information on the unique geological forces that shape Point Reyes and Northern California.” “Interpretive displays dot the trail,” according to the blog Weekend Sherpa, “describing the dynamic geology of the area. The highlight is a wooden fence split and moved 20 feet by the great quake of 1906.” Photo courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey].
This is not a class about seismic engineering, however, nor is it a rigorous look at how architects might stabilize buildings in an earthquake zone. Rather, it is a class about making the seismic energies of the San Andreas Fault legible through architecture. That is, making otherwise imperceptible planetary forces—the tectonic actions of the Earth itself—physically and spatially sensible. Our goal is to make the seismic energy of the fault experientially present in the lives of the public, framing and interpreting its extraordinary geology by means of a new National Park: a San Andreas Fault National Park.
For generations, the fault has inspired equal parts scientific fascination and pop-cultural fear, seen—rightly or not—as the inevitable source of the “Big One,” an impending super-earthquake that will devastate California, flattening San Francisco and felling bridges, houses, and roads throughout greater Los Angeles.
From the 1985 James Bond film, A View to a Kill, in which the San Andreas Fault is weaponized by an eccentric billionaire, to the so-called Parkfield Experiment, “a comprehensive, long-term earthquake research project on the San Andreas fault” run by the U.S. Geological Survey to “capture” an earthquake, the fault pops up in—and has influence on—extremely diverse contexts: literary, poetic, scientific, photographic, and, as we will explore in this studio, architectural.
Indeed, the fault—and the earthquake it promises to unleash—is even psychologically present for the state’s residents in ways that are only vaguely understood. As critic David L. Ulin suggests in his book The Myth of Solid Ground, on the promises and impossibilities of earthquake prediction, the constant threat of potentially fatal seismic activity has become “part of the subterranean mythos of people’s lives” in California, inspiring a near-religious or mystical obsession with “finding order in disorder, of taking the random pandemonium of an earthquake and reconfiguring it to make unexpected sense.”
For this class, each student must make a different kind of unexpected (spatial) sense of the San Andreas Fault by proposing a San Andreas Fault National Park: a speculative complex of land forms, visitors’ centers, exhibition spaces, hiking paths, local transportation infrastructure, and more, critically rethinking what a National Park—both a preserved landscape, no matter how mobile or dynamic it might be, and its related architecture, from campsites to trail signage—is able to achieve.
Important questions here relate back to seismic safety and the limits of the National Park experience. While, as we will see, there is a jigsaw puzzle of literally hundreds of minor faults straining beneath the cities, towns, suburbs, ranches, vineyards, farms, and parks of coastal California—and much of the state’s water infrastructure, in fact, crosses the San Andreas Fault—there are entirely real concerns about inviting visitors into a site of inevitable and possibly massive seismic disturbance.
For instance, what does it mean to frame a dangerously unstable landscape as a place of aesthetic reflection, natural refuge, or outdoor recreation, and what are the risks in doing so? Alternatively, might we discover a whole new type of National Park in our designs, one that is neither reflective nor a refuge—perhaps something more like a San Andreas Fault National Laboratory, a managed landscape of sustained scientific research, not personal recreation? Further, how can a park such as this most clearly and effectively live up to the promise of being National, thus demonstrating that seismic activity has played an influential role in the shared national history of the United States?
Meanwhile, each student’s San Andreas Fault National Park proposal must include a Seismic Interpretive Center: an educational facility within which seismic activity will be studied, demonstrated, explained, or even architecturally performed and replicated. The resulting Seismic Interpretive Center will take as one of its central challenges how to communicate the science, risk, history, and future of seismic activity to both the visiting public and to resident scientists or park rangers.
Finally, the San Andreas Fault National Park must, of course, be located on the fault itself, at a site (or sites) carefully chosen by each student; however, the Seismic Interpretive Center could remain physically distant from the fault, although still within park boundaries, thus reflecting its role as a mediator between visitors and the landscape they are on the verge of entering.
[Images: (left) John Braund, Cartographer for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, March 1939, demonstrates a “new process expected to revolutionize map making… showing all the details of topography in a form true to nature.” His machine chisels topographic details using “a specially-designed electric hammer.” What new mapping devices might be possible for the San Andreas Fault, for a landscape unpredictably on the move? (right top) From Piano Tuning by J. Cree Fischer (1907). (right bottom) Bernard Tschumi, Parc de la Villette, Paris (1989). Can—or how do—we extract a site-logic from the San Andreas Fault itself?].
The first design challenge of the semester, due Monday, February 18, will be a set of architectural instruments for the San Andreas Fault. These “instruments” should be thought of as architectural devices for registering, displaying, amplifying, dampening, resonating in tune with, or otherwise studying seismic energy in the San Andreas Fault zone.
These devices should serve as seismic translators, we might say, or terrestrial interfaces: instructional devices that inhabit the metaphorically rich space between human beings and the volatile surface of the planet they stand on. Importantly, though, students should not expect these mechanisms to function as realistic scientific tools; rather, this initial project should be approached as the design of experimental architectural objects for communicating and/or making sensible the seismic complexities of an unstable landscape, interpreting an Earth always on the verge of violent transformation.
Students should begin working through a series of drawings and desktop models, developing ideas for the devices, follies, and instruments in question; one of these devices or instruments should then be chosen for physical modeling in detail, including accurate functioning of parts. This model should then be photographed for presentation at the midterm review, though the resulting photographs can be embellished and labeled as display boards. Each student must also write a short explanatory text for the instrument (no longer than 150 words).
Finally, all of this material should be saved for later documentation in a black & white pamphlet to be made available at the GSAPP End-of-Year Show.
For precedents and inspiration, we will look at, among other things, the work of Shin Egashira and David Greene, whose 1997 booklet Alternative Guide to the Isle of Portland will serve as a kind of project sourcebook; the U.S. Geological Survey’s Parkfield Experiment, in particular the Parkfield Interventional EQ Fieldwork (PIEQF) by artist D.V. Rogers; the “prepared” or “adapted” instruments and other musical inventions of avant-garde composers such as John Cage and Harry Partch; Bernard Tschumi’s fragmented half-buildings and other grid-based follies for the Parc de la Villette in Paris (recast, in our context, as an organizational collision between designed objects and the illogic of the fault they augment); and the speculative machines catalogued by architect C.J. Lim in his book Devices: A Manual of Architectural + Spatial Machines.
[Images: From Shin Egashira & David Greene, Alternative Guide to the Isle of Portland (1997)].
As Lim points out, devices share “a long and complex history with architecture.” He adds that “the machines of Vitruvius and Leonardo da Vinci,” among others, can be seen as functional compressions of architectural space, connecting large-scale building design to the precise engineering of intricate machinery. Lim’s highly imaginative examples range from Victorian-era phantasmagoria and early perspectival drawing instruments to navigation tools, wearable toolkits, and even sensors for detecting lost rivers in underground London.
[Images: From Shin Egashira & David Greene, Alternative Guide to the Isle of Portland (1997)].
One question for us here will also be in reference to scale: how large does a “device” have to be before it becomes a “building”—or a landscape, or a city—and how can architects work effectively across these extremes of space (from a portable gadget to an inhabitable building to a landscape park to a continent) and extremes of time (from the real-time motion of a mechanism to the imperceptible million-year grind of plate tectonics)?
[Images: D.V. Rogers, Parkfield Interventional EQ Fieldwork (PIEQF), 2008. According to Rogers, PIEQF was “a geologically interactive, seismic machine earthwork temporarily installed in the remote township of Parkfield, Central California, USA. During ninety-one days of intervention, between the 18th [of] August and 16th [of] November 2008, the installation reflected 4000-4500 Californian seismic events. PIEQF interfaced with the US Geological Survey seismic monitoring network and was triggered by near real-time reported earthquake waves from magnitude (M) 0.1 and above… Surrounding the earthquake shake table and buried within the excavation at north, south, east, and west co-ordinate points, an array of vertical motion sensors were installed. These sensors (Geophones) were excited when walked over or jumped upon, causing the shake table to become mechanically active. Visitors to PIEQF engaged interactively with the installation becoming seismic events themselves when interacting with these sensors.”].
Our own devices will be performative, interactive, interpretive, and instrumental. They will amplify, distribute, reproduce, offset, counterbalance, prolong, delay, hasten, measure, survey, direct, deform, induce, or spectacularize even the most imperceptible seismic events.
[Images: Daniel Libeskind, Writing Machine (1980s). As Lebbeus Woods has written, describing Libeskind’s work: “Elaborately constructed and enigmatic in purpose, Libeskind’s machines are striking and sumptuous manifestations of ideas that were, at the time he made them, of obsessive interest to academics, critics, and avant-gardists in architecture and out. Principal among these was the idea that architecture must be read, that is, understood, in the same way as a written text.” In terms of our studio, what would a machine be that could “read,” “write,” or “translate” the San Andreas Fault?].
Again, these “instruments” should not be approached as realistic scientific tools, but rather as poetic, spatial augmentations of the San Andreas Fault. Students are being asked to use the problem-solving techniques of architectural design to imagine hypothetical devices at a variety of scales that will translate this unique site—a fault line between tectonic plates and an elastic zone of origin for millions of years of future terrain deformation—into a new kind of spatial and intellectual experience for those who encounter it.
[Images: Harry Partch, various stringed, percussive, and resonating instruments (1940s/1950s)].
Upon completing these devices, the second, most important, and largest project of the semester, due Wednesday, April 17, will be the San Andreas Fault National Park proposal and its associated Seismic Interpretive Center.
The Seismic Interpretive Center should be an educational facility, equivalent to 30,000 square feet. Here, seismic activity will be studied, demonstrated, interpreted, and otherwise explained to the visiting public and to a seasonal crew of scientist-researchers who use the facility in their work. It might be useful to think of the Seismic Interpretive Center as a direct outgrowth of the instruments developed in the previous project, either by housing or emulating those devices. In other words, the Center could passively display seismic instruments for public use but simultaneously operate as an active, building-scale mechanism for engaging with or tectonically explaining the San Andreas Fault.
In practical terms, the proposed Center should be a fully developed three-dimensional building or landscape project, no matter how speculative or straight-forward its underlying premise might be, whether it is simply a museum of the fault or something more provocative, such as a partially underground public test-facility for generating artificial earthquakes. In all cases—circulation, materials, program, site—students must demonstrate thorough knowledge of their own project in the form of, but not limited to, the appropriate use of plans, sections, elevations, axonometrics, physical models, and 3D diagrams.
[Images: (left) Harry Partch, two instruments, 1940s/1950s. (right) Doug Aitken’s “Sonic Pavilion” (2009), courtesy of the Doug Aitken Workshop].
To help develop ideas for the Seismic Interpretive Center, we will look at such precedents as artist Doug Aitken’s “Sonic Pavilion” in Brazil, where, in the words of The New York Times, Aitken “buried microphones sensitive to vibrations caused by the rotation of the planet,” or the artist’s own house in Venice, California, where, again quoting The New York Times, “geological microphones… amplify not just the groan of tectonic plate movements but also the roar of the tides and the rumble of street traffic. Guests can listen in on this subterranean world without putting an ear to the ground. Speakers installed throughout the house bring its metronomic clicks and extended drones to them whenever Aitken turns up the volume.”
More abstractly, students could perhaps think of the Center as a variation on “Solomon’s House,” a proto-scientific research facility featured in Sir Francis Bacon’s 17th-century utopian sci-fi novel The New Atlantis. In Solomon’s House, natural philosophers operate vast, artificial landscapes and complex machines—rivaling anything we read about in Dubai or China today—to examine the world in fantastic detail. Bacon offers a lengthy inventory of the devices available for use: “We have… great and spacious houses where we imitate and demonstrate meteors… We have also sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation… We have also engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions… We have also a mathematical house, where are represented all instruments, as well of geometry as astronomy, exquisitely made…”
The larger San Andreas Fault National Park proposal within which this Interpretive Center will sit must include all aspects of an existing park in the National Park Service network of managed sites; however, students must push the National Park typology in new directions, taking seriously the prospect of preserving and framing a landscape that moves.
[Images: (left top) AllesWirdGut Architektur, a Roman quarry in St. Margarethen, Austria, converted into public venue, park, and auditorium, 2006-2008. In a private email, responding to the image seen on the left, landscape blogger Alexander Trevi from Pruned suggested that perhaps it would be more interesting for us to think of the San Andreas Fault not in terms of a detached viewer—like the so-called Rückenfiguren (or figures seen from behind) in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich—but, as Trevi suggested, more like dancer Fred Astaire, physically and whimsically engaging in a choreographed state of delight with the Earth’s shifting topography. (left bottom) “Ice Age Deposits of Wisconsin” (1964) and a photo, taken from Flickr, of an Ice Age National Scenic Trail marker (2007). (right top) National Tourist Route Geiranger-Trollstigen, Norway. Architect: Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter. Photo: Per Kollstad. (right bottom, left to right, top to bottom, within grid) National Tourist Route Rondane. Architect: Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk. Photo: Vegar Moen. National Tourist Route Geiranger-Trollstigen, Norway. Architect: Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter. Photo: Jarle Wæhler. National Tourist Route Aurlandsfjellet. Architect: Todd Saunders / Saunders-Wilhelmsen. Photo: Vegar Moen. National Tourist Route Ryfylke. Architect: Haga Grov / Helge Schjelderup. Photo: Per Kollstad. Courtesy of National Tourist Routes in Norway].
This means students must propose a working combination of such features as trails, lodging, visitors’ centers, educational programming, parking/camping, and other facilities that differentiate National Parks from their less developed counterparts, National Monuments, but with the addition of new types of structures and innovative landscape management techniques that might reveal future opportunities for the U.S. National Park system.
Here, we will look at a variety of precedents, including current plans for a “Manhattan Project National Park” (a National Park that will preserve three geographically diverse sites key to the development of nuclear weapons during World War II); a proposal by photographer Richard Misrach for a “Bravo 20 National Park” (a former U.S. Navy bombing range that would be preserved as a recreational landscape); the High Line here in New York City; an entirely underwater National Park Service “Maritime Heritage Trail” in Biscayne Bay, Florida; the extraordinary, multi-sensory “Taichung Gateway Park” proposal by landscape architects Catherine Mosbach and Philippe Rahm; the “Ice Age National Scenic Trail” in Wisconsin; and, of course, a handful of already existing state parks and recreation areas in California—such as the Los Trancos Open Space Preserve and the 206,000-acre Carrizo Plain National Monument—that feature hiking trails and other recreational facilities that cross the San Andreas Fault.
The “Ice Age National Scenic Trail” is what we might call a planetary interpretive trail: “More than 12,000 years ago,” we read, “an immense flow of glacial ice sculpted a landscape of remarkable beauty across Wisconsin. As the colossal glacier retreated, it left behind a variety of unique landscape features… The Ice Age National Scenic Trail is a thousand-mile footpath—entirely within Wisconsin—that highlights these Ice Age landscape features while providing access to some of the state’s most beautiful natural areas.”
However, no less useful in this context are the “National Tourist Routes” that now criss-cross the geologically rich landscapes of Norway. In essence, these are new scenic routes for automobiles constructed through extraordinary natural landscapes, including coastal fjords and precipitous mountain valleys; however, these routes have also been peppered with signature architectural interventions, including lookout towers, roadside picnic areas, trail infrastructure, geological overlooks, and more.
But how do we define—let alone locate—a park on the scale of a fault line? Landscape architect James Corner suggests that the virtue of a “large park”—which he defines as a park “greater than 500 acres”—is that it “allows for dramatic exposure to the elements, to weather, geology, open horizons, and thick vegetation, all revealed to the ambulant body in alternating sequences of prospect and refuge—distinctive places for overview and survey woven with more intimate spots of retreat and isolation.” He calls such parks “huge experiential reserves”—in terms of the San Andreas, we might say a kind of seismic commons.
Further, thinking about—let alone designing—architecture on this scale requires close attention to what landscape theorist Julia Czerniak calls legibility. “The concept of legibility,” she writes in her edited collection Large Parks, “extends from park design to the design process. In other words, to be realized, parks have to be legible to the people who pay for and use them.” After all, she adds, “in addition to questions of a park’s legibility that stem from recognizing its limits—‘where is the park?’—large park schemes with unconventional configurations provoke other uncertainties—‘how does it look?’ and ‘what can it do?’”
[Images: (left) One of only a few sites where the San Andreas Fault is designated with road signs; photographs by Geoff Manaugh. (right) Satellite view of the San Andreas Fault, rotated 90º (north is to the right)].
Complicating matters even more, we will also examine how National Park infrastructure—from interpretive trails to hotels and viewing platforms—function as immersive projects of landscape representation, even above, and possibly rather than, places of embodied physical experience. In other words, as Richard Grusin reminds us in his book Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks, “just as Yellowstone and Yosemite were created as national parks in accordance with late-nineteenth-century assumptions about landscape and representation, so a national park today (whether scenic or historic) must be created according to present-day assumptions about media, culture, and technology.” Indeed, he adds, “national parks have functioned from their inception as technologies for reproducing nature according to the scientific, cultural, and aesthetic practices of a particular historical moment—the period roughly between the Civil War and the end of the First World War.” How, then, would a 21st-century San Andreas Fault National park both represent and preserve the landscape in question?
To help us sort through these many complex questions, and to ease our transition from thinking and designing at the scale of a device or building to the scale of an entire landscape, we will be joined for one class by GSAPP’s Kate Orff, a landscape architect and co-editor of Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park. Her experience with Gateway will be invaluable for all of us in conceptualizing what a San Andreas Fault National Park might be.
Finally, students must spend the last week of the semester, leading up to our final day of class on Wednesday, April 24, revisiting and refining all of their work produced over the term and, in the process, collecting all of their relevant project documentation. This project documentation will then be collected and published as a small black & white pamphlet, forming a kind of speculative architectural guide to the San Andreas Fault.
In addition to any boards and models necessary for explaining the resulting proposals, this black & white pamphlet will be produced in small quantities for guest critics and other attendees of our final review. It will also be made available to attendees of the GSAPP Year-End Show. Specific requirements—including number of images and length of accompanying descriptive texts—will be discussed during the semester.
One of the main inspirations for this course is architect Lebbeus Woods, who passed away during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. In order both to honor Woods’s extraordinary influence but also to demonstrate the breadth of ideas and themes available to us as we explore the architectural implications of seismic energy, this syllabus will end with a few examples of Woods’s work that will serve as points of reference throughout the term.
[Images: (left top and bottom) Lebbeus Woods, from Underground Berlin (1988). From deep inside the Earth, Woods writes, “come seismic forces that move the inverted towers and bridges in equally subtle vibrations.” (right) Lebbeus Woods, two seismically “completed” houses from his San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City (1995)].
In his 1989 book OneFiveFour, Woods describes a city all but defined by the seismic events surging through the Earth below it. It is a city ornamented on nearly every surface by “oscilloscopes, refractors, seismometers, interferometers, and other, as yet unknown instruments, measuring light, movement, force, change.”
In this city of instruments—this city as instrument—“tools for extending perceptivity to all scales of nature are built spontaneously, playfully, experimentally, continuously modified in home laboratories, in laboratories that are homes,” exploring the moving surface of an Earth in flux.
Woods imagines even the towers and bridges acting in geomechanical synchrony, riding out the shocks and resonance from the volatile geology below: “Like musical instruments, they vibrate and shift in diverse frequencies, in resonance with the Earth and also with one another… Indeed, each object—chair, table, cloth, examining apparatus, structure—is an instrument; each material thing connects the inhabitants with events in the world around him and within himself.”
In a closely related project—an unproduced film treatment called Underground Berlin, also documented in the book OneFiveFour—Woods describes the discovery of a fictional network of government seismic labs operating beneath the surface of Berlin, a distributed facility known as the Underground Research Station.
Woods explains as part of this scenario that, deep inside the Station, “many scientists and technicians are working on a project for the government to analyze and harness the tremendous, limitless geological forces active in the earth… a world of seismic wind and electromagnetic flux.” They are pursuing nothing less than “a mastery”—that is, a sustained weaponization—of these “primordial earth forces.”
The film’s protagonist thus descends into the city by way of tunnels and seemingly upside-down buildings—“inverted geomechanical towers,” in his words—inside of which dangerous seismic experiments are already underway.
Elsewhere, describing the origin of his so-called San Francisco Project, partially inspired by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Northern California, Woods asked: “What is an architecture that accepts earthquakes, resonating with their matrix of seismic waves—an architecture that needs earthquakes, and is constructed, transformed, or completed by their effects—an architecture that uses earthquakes, converting to a human purpose the energies they release, or the topographical transformations they bring about—an architecture that causes earthquakes, triggering microquakes in order that ‘the big one’ is defused—an architecture that inhabits earthquakes, existing in their space and time?”
[Image: A map in four sections (see below three images) shows the San Andreas Fault stretching from northern to southern California. The San Andreas “is just one of several faults that make up a complex of potential catastrophes,” paleontologist Richard Fortey writes in Earth: An Intimate History. It is “the flagship of a fleet of faults that run close to the western edge of North America... In places, maps of the interweaving faults look more like a braided mesh than the single, deep cut of our imagination.” Here, we see the San Andreas come to an end in Northern California at the so-called Mendocino Triple Junction. Maps courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, from The San Andreas Fault System, U.S.G.S. Professional Paper 1515 (PDF); see original paper for higher resolution].
Our work this Spring will be paralleled by a series of musical experiments led by Bay Area sound artist Marc Weidenbaum’s Disquiet Junto, an online music collective. The Disquiet Junto will be developing projects that explore the sonic properties of the San Andreas Fault and uploading the results of these seismic-acoustic experiments to Soundcloud. Students will be required to leave comments on these audio tracks as part of regular homework over the course of the Spring term.
The Disquiet Junto, a satellite operation of disquiet.com, “uses formal restraint as a springboard for creativity. In 2012, the year it launched, the Disquiet Junto produced over 1,600 tracks by over 270 musicians from around the world. Disquiet.com has operated at the intersection of sound, art, and technology since 1996.”
[Image: (left) A Rückenfigur looks at a highway cut through the San Andreas Fault in Palmdale, southern California; photograph by Nicola Twilley. (right) Aerial rendering of the San Andreas Fault, courtesy of NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (2000). If an earthquake presents us with a turbulent condition similar to waves in the ocean or a storm at sea, is the ship a more appropriate structural metaphor than the building—even if it’s an ocean that only exists for sixty seconds? What does orientation mean for the minute-long intensity of an earthquake—the becoming-ocean of land—and how do we learn to navigate a planet that acts like the sea?].
“The contrast to the balminess in usually frigid Vermont and normally warm places in the American Southwest was striking. While it was 47 degrees in Burlington as dawn broke Monday, it was 25 in Las Vegas and 31 in Phoenix. The culprit, as almost always, was the jet stream, that high level river of air that steers weather systems. It generally flows east to west, with occasional bumps and curves northward that give some places mild spells, and dips elsewhere, giving other spots cold spells. In this case, an extremely large and deep dip in the jet stream brought a surge of Canadian air much further south than usual to the western United States, causing the record chill. When the jet stream dips to an extreme level like it did in the West over the weekend, there’s often a corresponding huge northward bulge further to the east. That’s what happened over the weekend, and that’s why Vermont had that snow-eating thaw. The jet stream is shifting around a bit now, and that dip is trying to set up over eastern North America. That means we’ll turn colder. The first blast of Arctic air will come through Thursday and Friday. It won’t be extreme for Vermont, but a lot of places will go below zero. After a relatively warm break Saturday, it’s back in the ice box next week. In recent years, outbreaks of super cold air, when it gets into the teens and 20s below zero in Vermont, have only lasted a day or two. However, there are signs that next week, such cold could go on for several days as the deep dip in the jet stream gets stuck over us. We’ll have to wait and see how cold and how long lasting the chill will become, but chances are, we might have the longest and most intense frigid blast we’ve had in years. That’ll teach you for getting used to last weekend’s warmth.”
All these public space hobbit designs look the same.
Located in the heart of Jerusalem, next to Israel’s government assembly building, the second prize winning proposal in the Jerusalem Museum of Nature & Science competition creates a vibrant flexible building that integrates seamlessly into the landscape and urban setting. Designed by MYS Architects, their design approach was sustainability driven from the get go. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The project includes a new combined home for the Jerusalem science museum and the City’s nature museum. The site is also located next to the National Museum which is the country’s most important art and history museum, and the new National Library site. The site presented great challenges. The site, albeit being in an area of high public interest, is disconnected from the city urban fabric. A “rift” exists between three different urban strips caused by topography, lack of cross paths and absence of “city-life” fostering streetscapes.
The site, though located in the city center, is a part of an “urban nature sequence” – A series of green open areas made of natural and man-made gardens, which form habitat for hundreds of species of plants and animals. The urban goal of the project was to act as a connector between the Hebrew University to the west, the government buildings to the east and the museums boulevard to the north and south. A building whose mission is to pass the knowledge of nature and science will better convey it’s message if it is an integral part of the existing ecosystem.
Morphology
The concept for the building draws inspiration from nature. The Earth’s crust and landscape is shaped by natural geological forces such as plate tectonics, erosion and weathering. Likewise, the building’s shape will take its form as a result of the buildings inner forces (i.e. the brief requirements and circulation demands) and outer urban forces. (i.e. topography, natural settings, and built environment context) The resulting geometry forms continuous spaces for exhibitions inside, and new public places on the outside – Places that are the museum interface with the city and neighboring streets.
By folding the museums main façade inward, a public entrance piazza is created as a place for formal and informal gatherings. A new pedestrian pathway that connects the two almost parallel streets running alongside the site is formed by lifting the building mass above the piazza level, creating a much needed east-west passage which improves accessibility between city blocks. And finally, the public rooftop garden which is an extension of the nearby tree grove, creates yet another public linkage running north-south, between the grove park and existing Science Museum building. All are intended to reweave the site together, and attract people in, on or thru the museum.
The brief spaces allocation was made with simple logic: Keep science functions near the existing Science museum, have the Nature wing connect to nature and the preserved grove, while placing all public functions in the center, between the two wings. The main lobby hall is located on the raised floor, above the public passage and piazza. Visitors entering the building ascend via a staircase to the entrance hall and from there they can start their journey to the two museum wings – science and nature. The two wings are designed with different approaches to the relations between the exhibition halls and circulation elements.
The science wing circulation elements are designed to face outward and organized on the circumference of the building, allowing movement to be visible from the piazza. The exhibition halls, that require a more introverted neutral space are located in the inner part of the floor, and form “white box” spaces, that allow better control over lighting, ventilation and mechanical installations requirements.
The nature wing has exhibition halls facing outward with strong connection to nature while circulation is centralized around an elongated atrium. The atrium, which is formed by rifts in the floor plates create a wadi-like space that allow for easy orientation, let natural light penetrate deep into the display spaces and help induce natural ventilation. Lining one side of the atrium is a spectacular life-like web display wall, dubbed “The Living-Wall”.
The Living Wall is a 3 dimensional mesh that creates a “hyper-display” wall, which transcends all galleries themes and binds them together, while giving the visitors a visual “backbone” and a common ground to start or end each gallery “tour”. This exuberant surface can hold displays, video art, interactive surfaces and paths of exploration. The visitors are enticed to walk in front of it, through it, and interact with it. It is the focal point (or surface) of the museum.
The planetarium is located at the southern corner of the building, creating strong visual presence, inside and out. The sphere, despite being quite a large mass, is the designed to “touch” the ground lightly, and supported by the bridges going in and out of the planetarium hall. At night, video art projections would create an illusion of orbital movement and levitation. The conference center containing an auditorium and classrooms is located on the lower level, under the entrance piazza, allowing direct access from it. This allows conference center events to take place regardless of museum activities or opening hours.
Building facades
The building has two distinct facades that react to their orientation and context: The “Nature Side” – The north east facing façade, which edges the grove park, is designed as transparent low profile facade that is almost hidden in the midst of trees. It is shaped to create a semi-enclosed open space where the building nestles the garden from one side while the grove slope and trees on the other. Here the museum in only a backdrop to the natural elements of fauna and flora.
The “Urban Side” – The south-west façade, facing the Museums Boulevard and main entrance piazza has a more predominant appearance. A stone louvered façade defines the museum boulevard edge, lining the street and folding inward to create the entrance piazza. The stone clad façade, which is a typical Jerusalem feature that uses limestone cladding, (and has long been a mandatory city regulation in Jerusalem), has a common language with adjacent museum and government buildings. The museum façade utilizes stone as exterior finish not in the common use as a vertical surface, that is impermeable and covers the façade, but rather as a horizontal, louver-like surface. This creates a translucent stone veil that allows natural light to permeate into the galleries while preventing solar gain. Variations in louvers density can further enhance lighting effects in the galleries, while creating a raster like image of stone cliffs from a far.
The living roof
The museum’s green roof is designed as a ground plane that was “peeled up” from the grove and put on top of the building. In that way, visitors walking in the park would find themselves on top of the museum without realizing where the park ended and the museum began. This is one of the features that blur boundaries between museum and nature, private and public, man-made and natural. The museums roof is divided into two bands. One is an open public linear garden, which is both recreational and educational. As people walk on it, even if not intended to enter the museum, take part and can explore parts of the museum’s extroverted themes. It is the public interface of the museum and a place for play and rest.
The other roof band is essentially the outdoor annex of the museum. The living roof gardens act as an outdoor exhibition area and testing grounds for plants growing, solar experiments and bird watching activities. The museum educational center is located on the top floor next to the roof so it could also serve as an external educational center, further increasing its connection to the community. The green roof ecological contribution is immense. It absorbs the heat of the summer sun while creating an isolation buffer in the winter. It also collects rainwater which is then transferred to the garden pond and ecological pool where greywater is cleansed as well. The green roof, alongside the museum gardens, restores and enriches existing ecosystem, creating more than 13,000 square meters of habitat.
The museum’s design, through its dynamic shape and context sensitive facades, exuberant inner spaces and generous public places is truly sustainable in all fields. While providing exhibition spaces for exploration and education, it aims not just to coexist with its surroundings, but to enrich and improve it as well.
Architects: MYS Architects
Location: Jerusalem, Israel
Project Leaders: Eran Ziv, Meidan Gany
Competition Team: Rachel Feller, Shemtov Tzrouya, Gabi Singer-Vitale, Leonardo Harf, Igor Shevchenko, Adi Aharon
Area: 17,500 sqm
My friend Christine danced in Streb's troupe in the first decade of the third millenium after the birth of Jesus Christ. My favorite act is the running jump into a baby pool filled with water.
“Last week in my Historiography seminar I taught Hayden White’s classic 1966 The Burden of History. This is the third time I’ve taught him (last two times were in 2000 and 2004) and each time, certain aspects of his argument seem fresh, others seem dated. What’s wonderful is that those labels change each time. Here he is writing about “methodological and stylistic cosmopolitanism” in history-writing (131): Such a conception of historical inquiry and representation would open up the possibility of using contemporary scientific and artistic insights in history without leading to radical relativism and the assimilation of history to propaganda, or to that fatal monism which has always heretofore resulted from attempts to wed history and science. It would permit the plunder of psychoanalysis, cybernetics, game theory, and the rest without forcing the historian to treat the metaphors thus confiscated from them as inherent in the data under analysis, as he is forced to do when he works under the demand for an impossibly comprehensive objectivity. And it would permit historians to conceive of the possibility of using impressionistic, expressionistic, surrealistic, and (perhaps) even actionist modes of representation for dramatizing the significance of data which they have uncovered but which, all too frequently, they are prohibited from seriously contemplating as evidence. If historians of our generation were willing to participate actively in the general intellectual and artistic life of our time, the worth of history would not have to be defended in the timid and ambivalent ways that it is now done. The methodological ambiguity of history offers opportunities for creative comment on past and present that no other discipline enjoys. If historians were to seize the opportunities thus offered, they might in time convince their colleagues in other fields of intellectual and expressive endeavor of the falsity of Nietzsche’s claim that history is “a costly and superfluous luxury of the under- standing.” What struck me about the quote then, as now (as I embark on the very narrative readings for this week), is that while we can say that historians got much more adventurous with types of source material, and much more connected with modern social science, mainstream historiography has not–at least not in the work read by this media historian–taken up White’s call for new modes of representation. Most histories I read are still written in a narrative form, granted with adventure and variety, but I would not say we get a lot of impressionistic, expressionistic, surrealistic, and (perhaps) even actionist modes of representation. Sure, there are singular exceptions within history, like Carolyn Steedman, and outside it, like Michel Foucault or Friedrich Kittler. Writers influenced by poststructuralism took a more ironic stance with respect to their sources. But now, as then, the default mode, the accessible mode of history writing is the narrative mode. Then again, it’s hard not to read this passage against the explosion of work in the digital humanities. The difference is that that history may or may not turn out to be “written” in the same sense that the histories criticized by White were written.”
Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis is a great fan of that alternate reality holiday classic It's a Wonderful Life, and he's never made a secret of the fact that the Biff-ruled Hill Valley of Back to the Future Part II is an homage to the neon-filled Pottersville George Bailey travels through. This video, made by YouTube user skeejay, shows just how close Marty McFly and George Bailey really are. More » 
Belkacem Bouteldja 
Missoum Bensmir 
Missoum Bensmir and unidentified musicians source: here 
Messaoud Bellemou Pop-rai emerged, some claim, when Bouteldja and other young vocalists and musicians devoted to "Orani folklore" began to work with the legendary figure Messaoud Bellemou during the 1970s. Messaoud Bellemou (b. 1947), like Cheikha El Ouachma, was from the town of Aïn Témouchent, 72 kilometers southwest of Oran. While a student at the municipal school, Bellemou was encouraged, according to an article found on wikipedia, to learn the trumpet from a teacher named Henri Coutan, a French colon. Frank Tenaille, in his book Le Raï: De la bâtardise a la reconnaissance internationale (2002), claims that Bellemou's trumpet teacher was a Spanish colon from Oran. Given that Bellemou was from Aïn Témouchent and not Oran, and that the wikipedia article names the teacher, Tenaille is almost certainly in error.
Jacket of "Zarga ou Masrara" (45"); Bellemou in jacket and tie 
l to r: Mouafak Boumediane ("Mimi ") and Messaoud Bellemou, trumpets, Hamdan on tbal 
Younes Benfissa 
Cheb Khaled 
Bedoui ensemble (screen save from Mémoire du Raï) 
A cheikha and her accompanists (screen save from Mémoire du Raï)
Missoum Bensmir and unidentified musicians source: here 
Messaoud Bellemou Pop-rai emerged, some claim, when Bouteldja and other young vocalists and musicians devoted to "Orani folklore" began to work with the legendary figure Messaoud Bellemou during the 1970s. Messaoud Bellemou (b. 1947), like Cheikha El Ouachma, was from the town of Aïn Témouchent, 72 kilometers southwest of Oran. While a student at the municipal school, Bellemou was encouraged, according to an article found on wikipedia, to learn the trumpet from a teacher named Henri Coutan, a French colon. Frank Tenaille, in his book Le Raï: De la bâtardise a la reconnaissance internationale (2002), claims that Bellemou's trumpet teacher was a Spanish colon from Oran. Given that Bellemou was from Aïn Témouchent and not Oran, and that the wikipedia article names the teacher, Tenaille is almost certainly in error.
Jacket of "Zarga ou Masrara" (45"); Bellemou in jacket and tie 
l to r: Mouafak Boumediane ("Mimi ") and Messaoud Bellemou, trumpets, Hamdan on tbal 
Younes Benfissa 
Cheb Khaled 
Bedoui ensemble (screen save from Mémoire du Raï) 
A cheikha and her accompanists (screen save from Mémoire du Raï)
Designed by Richard Neutra, completed in 1962 and originally constructed to house a tableau of Pickett's Charge, the Cyclorama building at Gettysburg will be demolished by the National Parks Service. The modernist structure has had a 15-year battle on whether to keep or raze it. The decision from the NPS is to return the site to its 1863 state, a key portion of the Union battle line and important to the public understanding of what happened at Gettysburg.
[Image: Lebbeus Woods, from San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City (1995)].
[Images: Lebbeus Woods, from San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City (1995) and an aerial view of the San Andreas Fault, looking south across the Carrizo Plain at approximately +35° 6' 49.81", -119° 38' 40.98"].
[Images: (left) A “fault trench” cut along the San Andreas for studying underground seismic strain; photo by Ricardo DeAratanha for the Los Angeles Times. (right) A property fence “offset” nearly eight feet by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; a similar fence is now part of an “Earthquake Trail” interpretive loop “that provides visitors with information on the unique geological forces that shape Point Reyes and Northern California.” “Interpretive displays dot the trail,” according to the blog Weekend Sherpa, “describing the dynamic geology of the area. The highlight is a wooden fence split and moved 20 feet by the great quake of 1906.” Photo courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey].
[Images: (left) John Braund, Cartographer for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, March 1939, demonstrates a “new process expected to revolutionize map making… showing all the details of topography in a form true to nature.” His machine chisels topographic details using “a specially-designed electric hammer.” What new mapping devices might be possible for the San Andreas Fault, for a landscape unpredictably on the move? (right top) From Piano Tuning by J. Cree Fischer (1907). (right bottom) Bernard Tschumi, Parc de la Villette, Paris (1989). Can—or how do—we extract a site-logic from the San Andreas Fault itself?].
[Images: From Shin Egashira & David Greene, Alternative Guide to the Isle of Portland (1997)].
[Images: From Shin Egashira & David Greene, Alternative Guide to the Isle of Portland (1997)].
[Images: D.V. Rogers, Parkfield Interventional EQ Fieldwork (PIEQF), 2008. According to Rogers, PIEQF was “a geologically interactive, seismic machine earthwork temporarily installed in the remote township of Parkfield, Central California, USA. During ninety-one days of intervention, between the 18th [of] August and 16th [of] November 2008, the installation reflected 4000-4500 Californian seismic events. PIEQF interfaced with the US Geological Survey seismic monitoring network and was triggered by near real-time reported earthquake waves from magnitude (M) 0.1 and above… Surrounding the earthquake shake table and buried within the excavation at north, south, east, and west co-ordinate points, an array of vertical motion sensors were installed. These sensors (Geophones) were excited when walked over or jumped upon, causing the shake table to become mechanically active. Visitors to PIEQF engaged interactively with the installation becoming seismic events themselves when interacting with these sensors.”].
[Images: Daniel Libeskind, Writing Machine (1980s). As Lebbeus Woods has written, describing Libeskind’s work: “Elaborately constructed and enigmatic in purpose, Libeskind’s machines are striking and sumptuous manifestations of ideas that were, at the time he made them, of obsessive interest to academics, critics, and avant-gardists in architecture and out. Principal among these was the idea that architecture must be read, that is, understood, in the same way as a written text.” In terms of our studio, what would a machine be that could “read,” “write,” or “translate” the San Andreas Fault?]. 
[Images: Harry Partch, various stringed, percussive, and resonating instruments (1940s/1950s)].
[Images: (left) Harry Partch, two instruments, 1940s/1950s. (right) Doug Aitken’s “Sonic Pavilion” (2009), courtesy of the Doug Aitken Workshop].
[Images: (left top) AllesWirdGut Architektur, a Roman quarry in St. Margarethen, Austria, converted into public venue, park, and auditorium, 2006-2008. In a private email, responding to the image seen on the left, landscape blogger Alexander Trevi from Pruned suggested that perhaps it would be more interesting for us to think of the San Andreas Fault not in terms of a detached viewer—like the so-called Rückenfiguren (or figures seen from behind) in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich—but, as Trevi suggested, more like dancer Fred Astaire, physically and whimsically engaging in a choreographed state of delight with the Earth’s shifting topography. (left bottom) “Ice Age Deposits of Wisconsin” (1964) and a photo, taken from Flickr, of an Ice Age National Scenic Trail marker (2007). (right top) National Tourist Route Geiranger-Trollstigen, Norway. Architect: Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter. Photo: Per Kollstad. (right bottom, left to right, top to bottom, within grid) National Tourist Route Rondane. Architect: Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk. Photo: Vegar Moen. National Tourist Route Geiranger-Trollstigen, Norway. Architect: Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter. Photo: Jarle Wæhler. National Tourist Route Aurlandsfjellet. Architect: Todd Saunders / Saunders-Wilhelmsen. Photo: Vegar Moen. National Tourist Route Ryfylke. Architect: Haga Grov / Helge Schjelderup. Photo: Per Kollstad. Courtesy of National Tourist Routes in Norway].
[Images: (left) One of only a few sites where the San Andreas Fault is designated with road signs; photographs by Geoff Manaugh. (right) Satellite view of the San Andreas Fault, rotated 90º (north is to the right)].
[Images: (left top and bottom) Lebbeus Woods, from Underground Berlin (1988). From deep inside the Earth, Woods writes, “come seismic forces that move the inverted towers and bridges in equally subtle vibrations.” (right) Lebbeus Woods, two seismically “completed” houses from his San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City (1995)].
[Image: A map in four sections (see below three images) shows the San Andreas Fault stretching from northern to southern California. The San Andreas “is just one of several faults that make up a complex of potential catastrophes,” paleontologist Richard Fortey writes in Earth: An Intimate History. It is “the flagship of a fleet of faults that run close to the western edge of North America... In places, maps of the interweaving faults look more like a braided mesh than the single, deep cut of our imagination.” Here, we see the San Andreas come to an end in Northern California at the so-called Mendocino Triple Junction. Maps courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, from The San Andreas Fault System, U.S.G.S. Professional Paper 1515 (PDF); see original paper for higher resolution].
[Image: Map courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, from The San Andreas Fault System, U.S.G.S. Professional Paper 1515 (PDF)].
[Image: Map courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, from The San Andreas Fault System, U.S.G.S. Professional Paper 1515 (PDF)].
[Image: Map courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, from The San Andreas Fault System, U.S.G.S. Professional Paper 1515 (PDF)].
[Image: (left) A Rückenfigur looks at a highway cut through the San Andreas Fault in Palmdale, southern California; photograph by Nicola Twilley. (right) Aerial rendering of the San Andreas Fault, courtesy of NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (2000). If an earthquake presents us with a turbulent condition similar to waves in the ocean or a storm at sea, is the ship a more appropriate structural metaphor than the building—even if it’s an ocean that only exists for sixty seconds? What does orientation mean for the minute-long intensity of an earthquake—the becoming-ocean of land—and how do we learn to navigate a planet that acts like the sea?].
