#iranelection

25Jun09

As a Persian-Canadian I’m compelled to write about the Iranian election and yet, while the urge is more intrinsic than from peer pressure, I’m apprehensive to investigate my thoughts on the matter because it deals with a part of my identity that has scarcely been provoked like this in the past.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arasmus/3629543561/

I’ve never been a nationalist, mostly because Iranian culture reeks of nationalist fervor and I simply cannot identify with the flagrant displays of jingoism. For this reason (among others), I am disconnected from Persian culture because I haven’t really found models of cultural expression that suit my personality and preferences. While I am fully aware that being confounded with such an identity crisis is the quintessential cliched phenomenon for immigrants/first gen kids, it is difficult for me to even comprehend that people have had the words to classify it as a phenomenon, because I certainly have trouble talking about it.

It’s important to understand that as “white” as I am, there is still a part of me that identifies with the country my parents left behind.

I worry about my family in Iran but rumination is useless when there is literally not a single thing that can be done. Truthfully, the feelings I have about the state of the country are harder to shake. It’s easy to have faith in cousins who can take care of themselves. I don’t exactly have — or ever had — faith in the emotionally and religiously fueled political systems of Iran.

I’m still trying to figure out my position within the context of Iran’s recent worldwide media attention. Immigrants have all had the lovely experience of correcting ignorant statements made about their culture — we’ve collected an entire life’s worth of them. When the discourse about one’s home country becomes suddenly more intense and concentrated in a short period of time, being suddenly thrown into the hot seat is unnerving. I am compelled to speak up about #iranelection but feel no more qualified on the issue than the average non-Iranian, and I get easily tongue-tied because I don’t want to bring in my jadedness into the conversation. Mix that in with the previously described cliched first-gen guilt, plus of course the worry for relatives, and then the emotional baggage that Iran’s harrying political environment carries and it all leads to… nausea.

Iranians are stereotypically emotional and this is no more evident than when you get them rabble-rousing about politics. The emotions are well-warranted. So many of us had to leave after 1979 or during the Iran-Iraq war. Many of us lost family and friends and never got the closure we needed for their deaths because of the inhumane actions of the government. It has become quite evident over the past 30 years that there is no hope for Iran.

I understood from a young age that the country’s theocratic grip was impossible to overcome. I say this in spite of the 80s baby boom, a generation that is constantly cited by Westerners as the promising future for democracy in Iran. Even though many of these well-educated Iranians are well aware of corruption and how their country compares to others, the role of religion has become so prominent in their daily lives that the idea of a secular government sounds like a sure sign towards Western decadence. The Iranians who do support secular government are either ex-pats or have been threatened into silence for so long that there is no hope of ever leading a grassroots secular movement. The only reason the current protests are successful is because they are spearheaded by moderate theocratic politicians who have the experience and power to successfully organize such a movement. I don’t think any possibility for a revolution in Iran at this time will lead to the utopian, secular democracy that so many of us desire.

My lack of hope for Iran’s future is part of this aversion of fostering a sense of Persian-ness. I know I will never go back. I acknowledge that my Persian-ness will only ever amount to so much of my personality, and yet of course there is that ever-present guilt thing, which I believe is a result of a sheer curiosity about my roots and being able to make sense of a language, culture, and non-Western perspective that makes up a part of my socialization.

I have no conclusion to this entry and I’ve been trying to write it for days so I will conclude it here by saying: sure, let there be a revolution, but don’t for one second believe that Iran will transform into a democracy.

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iN tHe LoOp

19Jun09
photo courtesy ming wu from flickr

tUne-YarDs @ Babylon -- photo courtesy ming wu from flickr

Last month I saw two different musicians make good use of loop pedals — sound gear commonplace at many shows, for sure, but when it’s a) capable of recording and playing multiple sounds; b) used to create a soundscape; and c) used by a solo performer, the loop pedal becomes much more interesting.

For one thing, it changes the dynamics of a performer’s stage presence. I’ve always been in favour of judging the quality of a show partially on the energy and antics of the performer and the way they engage the audience. Even with acts where the onus is on a multi-sensory, meditative experience, my curiosity always points in the direction of the stage — I must see how the musician lets their own music affect them physically and how they reflect that to the crowd. I’m particularly picky with instrumental/electronic musicians because too often their eyes become glazed over as they click their laptop mousepads and press grid buttons. Their boredom is a catalyst for my own.
For this reason I was a little anxious to see Animal Hospital live. Memory is one of my favourite albums of 2009 but it’s the kind of music best suited to headphones, or that is softly played in the background as one falls asleep. The idea of standing in Raw Sugar Cafe for 40 minutes straight watching some guy press buttons… I just knew I’d get fidgety after five seconds.

Well, I was wrong. Kevin Micka pretty much blew me away. Most of his performance boiled down to his use of the loop pedal — it was pivotal to creating his layered soundscapes, and what made him so mesmerizing was his intense concentration. Animal Hospital is an ever-changing sound pattern that requires many recorded loops, meaning that he was busy playing, recording, or fiddling with something the entire set, hands moving around constantly but never missing a beat.

The main reason why loop pedals fascinate me so is because it brings out every performer’s own idiosyncrasies which are influenced by and sync up with their music’s stylistic aspects — take for example, the yell-singing of the tribal, percussive, and gypsy-like tUne-YarDs, who was equally impressive to watch as Animal Hospital, but for completely different reasons. Like Micka, she uses the loop pedal to record each layer of a song, including vocals. Her music may not have the same rich textures of Animal Hospital, but where she lacks in compositional complexity she makes up for in raw energy, stage presence potency, and her use of eerie, looped vocal echos.

I’m gushing about loop pedals like it’s a new phenomenon, but it’s not — it’s done by musicians from a plethora of genres, though prior to this summer I’d never witnessed it by an artist I actually cared about. One genre of music I didn’t expect to be associated with the loop pedal is singer-songwriter (cases in point: KT Tunstall, Imogen Heap, Juana Molina). When I asked Danny Michel about his use of loop-pedalling for an XPress profile, he said he was moving away from it because he found the loop pedal inhibited him from communicating with the audience. This brings me to my last point. Musicians are unique in their performance antics — they must figure out their own way of connecting with the crowd and making their show interesting. Singer-songwriters like Michel entertain best through crowd spritzing, but I’d argue that this is kind of an expected performance style in his genre. Don’t get me wrong — I love watching funny musicians, but there’s little novelty there. It’s more difficult for instrument-clad musicians who don’t have a mic to share their observational humour, and so naturally, their best bet is to emote through their instrument or physical demonstration of rhythm (head-banging, playing their guitar behind their head, etc.). Again, there’s not much novelty in this. In fact, it’s cliched. Unless a musician does something completely new with an instrument, I’m not going to care.

A multi-track-loop-pedal-focused performance, on the other hand, is still a novelty, because few musicians do it. As such, we haven’t figured out all the ways in which songs can be recreated live through a multi-track loop pedal, and the ways in which musicians will exploit the pedal to add to their performance. This has became especially apparent to me after seeing Animal Hospital and tUne-YarDs, two loop-pedal-loving musicians who are as different as can be, music- and performance-wise.

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Getting back into the arts journo groove

04Jun09

It’s June and as I’ve said on Audio Visual and Apt613, there is a crapload of events happening this month. It’s crazy. It actually terrifies me. Tomorrow, for example, I’m going to four different things: 2 vernissages, a fake wedding party, and Troll 2.

Just some of the things happening this month: Doors Open Ottawa, Magnetic North, GAGA Weekend 2, Giant Hand cd release party, Nikki Payne at Yuk’s, Apt613 launch party, Westfest, an amazing month at the Mayfair, more…

gelato

The event I’m looking most forward to this month takes place not only on one night, or a weekend, but a full two weeks: The Ottawa Fringe Festival. I’ve been a Fringe fan since high school but I’ve never been privy to a media pass, even though I’ve been a guestlist fiend since starting the arts journalism thang. This is because we never ran June issues at the Fulc, and as such we never get to cover Fringe. I’m kind of going overboard this year: I’ll be (most likely) live-blogging for Apt613, having fringers on Audio Visual, and writing about it for the XPress. So exciting. There’s 57 productions and according to Jess if I actually wanted to attend them all, I would have to see 5 point something shows a day. Both Jess and Peter have challenged me to do it on AV this week but I… don’t know guys. That might be too much theatre, even for me. That might actually be more concentrated theatre than say, that 9-hour play at Luminato.

I’m really happy to be writing this post because I was pretty depressed/writers-blocky for a good month. No articles in the XPress, too depressed to open Google Reader. I’m feeling MUCHO BETTER NOW, THANK YOU FOR ASKING and if there’s any indication, it could be the three articles I have in the XPress this week: bam bam bam!

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twenty-one years ago

27Jan09

this is a short clip of me singing persian nursery rhymes to my grandmother on february 13, 1988. my grandmother passed away several years ago.

listen.

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