Hey City Zen!

Well, almost unplugged... Wi-Fi is evil...

Não tenho nada a dizer que o MacGuffin ou o Complexo Divino não tenham já dito. Lembro-me do medo que ele despertava em 75. Depois passou a ser um símbolo daquilo que Portugal poderia ter sido -- Safa!

Found him! As soon as I arrived in Lisbon and turned on the car radio, para a Rádio Oxigénio, claro, the bare-bones simplicity of Carl Craig rekindled my jet lagged neurotransmitters with his remix of "The Boys Doin' It" by Hugh Masekela -- featured in Verve Remixed 3 (listen to the exclusive verve remixed 3 snippets mix at download.com). What more could I have asked for? Family, beach, and Carl Craig on the radio. Ah, sim, uma meia de leite...

I am always closer to the America I love in Lisbon. I am a firm believer in the non-metricity of knowledge networks, but this is certainly true of cultural ones. Detroit is much closer to Lisbon than Bloomington. There is a semi-metric wormhole connecting the global urban landscape -- the city zen wormhole.

Então bom dia Lisboa!

We interrupt this program to hop to the other side of the Atlantic...
O Programa segue dentro de dias a partir de Lisboa...

I am already in a Euro state of mind, so I leave you with some eurotrash grooves...

From Helsinki

Luomo - Tessio (Moonbotica Remix)

From Stockholm:

Stockholm Mix Sessions 2 - by Jesper Dahlback (Full Album Stream)

Koop - Summer Fun (mp3)

From London:

Groove Armada - M 2 Many (mp3)

From Switzerland:

Minus 8 - At the Beach (mp3)

"Doris: But without God, the universe is meaningless. Life is meaningless. We're meaningless. (Deadly pause) I have a sudden and overpowering urge to get laid." From Woody Allen's God (A Play)

As I prepare to jump the pond in a few days, here are some sounds from the Midwest for the weekend.

Some tracks from Ann Arbor's Midwest Product:

• Duckpond (mp3)


• A Genuine Display (Telefon Tel Aviv Remix) (wma)

And other Midwest stuff:

• Mathew Dear - But For You, also from Ann Arbor (mp3)


• Enon - Shave (mp3) -- From Ohio

Spring in Bloomington has been very, very nice -- I see where the city gets its name from.

Writing the previous post reminded me of the song which inspired the title of this blog, and indeed why I started this blog to begin with. Mostly because I need to vent against the fear zeitgeist I allude to in the previous post. The politics of fear aims directly against people who feel at ease in and have a passion for a global culture -- the urban citizens. Sure we want a more compassionate globalization, but we don't want to throw away the baby with the bath water. If the solution to the problems of globalization is to cage us in our old-fashioned nation-states, then, well, I said it below, our generation lost. And, man, do we hate to loose -- we hate it with a passion!

So here is the song, by ABC, of course, from their most forgotten album, Beauty Stab:

I could not agree more with today's Friedman:

"where birds don't fly, people don't mix, ideas don't get sparked, friendships don't get forged, stereotypes don't get broken, and freedom doesn't ring." Full Article.

American DNA for me is not simply a metaphor. My wife and I mixed our bi-continental DNA to produce children who are both European and American. They are something neither of us could be alone. Our little birds were meant to fly effortlessly not only across the big pond, but across the globe. Left to their own devices, they do. They thrive in their cultural and genetic mixture.

If, as Friedman points out, 9/11 leads to a progressive caging of our cultures due to a reactionary fear of the late XX century movement towards cultural, racial and global openness, then the terrorists will have won. Those who like to erect walls around themselves, Stalinists and Zionists alike, will have won. Indeed, this reactionary zeitgeist of fear is not only made in America. I suspect the French "Non" is based on the same fear of increasing openness to race, custom, lifestyles and open borders -- and the French certainly do not hold a patent on that "non" around Europe.

The World, not just America, needs to get rid of the politics of fear. We need a little bit more Popper, a little bit more Picasso, a little bit more love. Not just trite peace-and-love-and-stick-our-heads-in-the-mudhole sort of thing, but passionate openness. Live Aid, back in 1985, more than the money that it was able to gather for its cause, generated a global feeling of openness, of good old American "can do " spirit at a global scale. It was a defining moment for my generation: we wanted openness with a passion, not as outsiders to the system (e.g. a la Woodstock generation) but as movers and shakers. The 90's, when this generation hit the job market, showed the full force of our global openness ethos.

If I can stretch this point a little further, I would say that the current zeitgeist of fear is a direct reaction against the Live Aid generation. That is why I take it all so personally. Nothing could be more against our nature than the new border and university controls that Friedman well describes, or the politics of nationalism creeping up at every corner. Well, we need to counter-react. Make the World feel a little bit better about coming together. Could the second coming of Live Aid help? I know I'll be grooving -- with passionate openness! Let the walls come tumbling down!