No, the "Huguito" is not a new model of Yugoslavian car...

Last night the Vietnamese news broadcast was on in the open-air dining pavilion while I was replenishing myself. I couldn't understand a thing the fetching, silk-clad anchorwoman was saying until I heard the words "Venezuela" and "Colombia" come out of her mouth. Oh, no, I thought. The only reason those two distant nations could possibly make the Vietnamese news is if they have finally gone to war. Relations between these two neighbors are not the warmest, and minor spats seem routinely to threaten to develop into a full-blown slap-fest.

This morning I googled, and found it may not be so grave after all. I certainly hope this was in the news in the United States, because it has to be my favorite story of the week. Colombia is a major exporter of tele-novelas, those over-the-top latino soap-opera epics of deceit, romance, and riches. Venezuela and Cuba even run them on their television networks, despite certain political differences (in fairness to the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez, most networks in that country are privately owned, often by opposition elites).

The current diplomatic debacle was launched because a current Colombian soap offering features a secretary (a lower-class citizen) named Venezuela, and a dog (a dog!) named Huguito, the diminutive for Hugo. The Chavez government has complained bitterly, and from what I can understand the novela in question has been removed from the Caracas airwaves. I hope the situation is now stable, but wars have been started for less.

La Onda Verde

Few people in the United States seem to be as charged up about the Antanas Mockus presidential campaign as I am, although there was a Simon Romero story in the New York Times a few days ago. By and large I suspect that the major media here is going to stand on the sidelines scratching their heads until he is elected later this month, and then react in confusion and dismay. Mockus will again be described as "the formerly eccentric mayor of Bogotá," since once you are the president of a country, or even become a major candidate, you are apparently no longer eligible to be "eccentric," unless perhaps your country is in Africa. Mockus will be compared to Chavez and Evo Morales by journalists unable to conceive of a Latin American politics that defies the left versus right duality.

Few, in short, will get the story right. The story I hope people will write is about a green tidal wave of emboldened and motivated youth abandoning their generation's justifiably cynical view of electoral politics to rally their friends and families around a candidate offering change and vision, via a viral new media campaign beyond the understanding or control of the existing structures of power. If that sounds to you anything like the way Obama got into the White House, it isn't a coincidence; the reason I'm comfortable going out on a limb and predicting a Mockus victory is that, just as in that campaign, in Colombia the young graphic designers, facebookers, filmmakers, muralists and deejays have already chosen.

I believe none of the propaganda on this page to be the official creation of the Mockus campaign, although "Evolución" might be, but, like Shepherd Fairey's iconic high-contrast Obama poster (the only relevant and powerful work that artist has ever come up with, in my opinion, but at least he got one big one right), it doesn't matter, as it's all part of an unstoppable message that is spreading faster than bird flu in migration season.

"Old Green Sea Turtles with Antanas Mockus"

"Antanas Simpson"

"Join the Mockus Evolution"

I don't need pollsters to tell me whether Mockus is looking good; you want an unrefutable, unscientific sampling? Searching the "fan" pages (now apparently the "like" pages) for "Antanas Mockus" on facebook reveals 361 results, led by Mockus' official page, which is liked by 597,887 people. Juan Manuel Santos' page, on which the only viable rival candidate looks like an airbrushed Botox victim, is liked by a mere 135,669. Far more telling, however, is the nature of the subsequent unofficial facebook pages. The next four of the top five Santos groups are all actually anti-Santos pages, including "No to the politics of war, I'm NOT voting for Juan Manuel Santos" (with 38,642 likers), "Those of us who do not want Santos for president, WE ARE MORE!" (22,995), "We will not let Santos rise on the basis of FALSE polling" (9,143), and "This inert lump of coal can get more fans than Santos" (10,830). In contrast, I could find only one anti-Mockus page among the first fifty pages devoted to that candidate, on the second page of search results, with a mere 3,328 subscribers. The many, many pro-Mockus pages include "Creatives for Mockus," "People who want their parents to vote for Mockus," "I'm voting for Mockus, ask me why," and "Colombians living in Sweden for Antanas Mockus." See you on May 30th.

With a name like that, what's not to like?

Regular readers know that only on the very rarest of occasions does antarcticiana stoop to play the game of political endorsement. But sometimes a candidate is so impressive that we have to get down off the fence of dissatisfaction and exhaustion to shout "Antanas Mockus for president!" You want environmentalism? Mockus is a visionary urban planner and bicycle path specialist. You want transparency? Mockus laid his medical records on the table and explained that despite a diagnosis of Parkinson's he has twelve good years left to lead. You want style, pizazz, and razamatazz? Mockus looks like a cross between Slavoj Zizek, an Amish farmer, and Fidel Castro. You want a man to lead Colombia away from 40 years of conflict and blood? Vote Antanas Mockus!



Warning, cheesy music! We are still waiting for the power cumbia Mockus remix.

With apologies to Stan Brakhage

Moth Armageddon at el Dorado, on the Cuchillo de San Lorenzo in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. An impressive quantity of insects were stirred into a suicidal frenzy by the dim glow of one lonely porch-light in the jungle. Here, the morning after, they cling, in death or exhaustion, to the windows of the comedor.

Adios, albacore...

Walking along a sandy trail through dry tropical forest, toward the frothy blue Caribbean, Laura and I met coming down the path one of the staff of our rustic lodging in Tayrona National Park, the Finca Don Pedro. There we had pitched our tent between two coconut trees in an immaculately manicured jungle clearing. Our friend, one of the guys responsible for collecting dried coconut husks and weedwhacking the constant onslaught of tropical growth into a serviceable lawn, had just returned from the beach. Laden with fish, he had been at the shore at just the right time to purchase the pick of the morning's catch. He was carrying a string of bright-eyed snapper, some jack, and a long, silvery, eel-like tangle he declared was "mas sabroso que el dorado" (even better than mahi-mahi). The fish that caught my eye, however, was a diminutive tuna, fifteen inches of steely wet sheetmetal, sleek and stiff and glistening. He called it an albacora.

It was our last morning in the park. We said goodbye, heading along the coast to make the long trek up to Pueblito, the ruins of a pre-Columbian indigenous village hidden away in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. This massive, isolated clump of the Andes tumbles down into the Caribbean here. The vast boulders scattered along the coast, the craggy, sandy terrain, and the last remnants of towering coastal forest are what make Tayrona such a spectacular place.

All day long I thought about that fish. Laura is amazed at my unfailing ability to manufacture stress and anxiety out of even the most blissful of situations, and later that afternoon, as we sat on the pearly-white sand and dabbled our toes in the azure water, things were no different. "I should have offered to buy that fish right then and there," I whined. "I should have put a deposit on it." Laura pointed out that nobody else was staying at Finca Don Pedro except for three Argentine hippies we suspected of being vegetarian. "I don't know," I said. "I'm worried. I'm going to be really bummed if he already unloaded it. What if we arrive back in camp and someone else is feasting on it?"

At dusk, we hurried along the trail through the forest, swatting mosquitoes. Once back at Don Pedro's I wasted no time, poking my head in the doorway of the outdoor kitchen, an array of propane burners and a makeshift sink set up in a thatched lean-to. "I want to inquire about a fish we saw this morning," I said. "Do you still have it?"

The owner of the fish was summoned, and I was led in the gloom to a battered styrofoam cooler, tucked between the stalks of two banana plants growing out behind the open-sided hut where the workers sleep in a row of hammocks. There was the tuna, illuminated in the glow of my headlamp, packed tightly in ice. After a quick and most reasonable negotiation, it was ours.

"Do you mind cleaning it for me?"




Cooking methods are not subtle in the jungle. After a few slash marks down the side of the fish, in it goes to the vat of bubbling oil. A few minutes later, voila!



Sabroso!
Conversation was limited, as we were too busy gorging.

Adding to the collection... UPDATED

El Gran Fidel (2008) Dairo Barriosnuevo, detail

When embarked on obscure passions and pursuits it is always a joy to discover a fellow obsessive. One of the high points of a recent trip to Colombia to investigate the enormous mobile sound systems of the Caribbean coast was the discovery that this vibrant scene, in which deejays battle for the affections of the crowd from behind towering stacks of speakers, has a portraitist to immortalize their efforts on canvas. Dairo Barriosnuevo is a self-described music freak, but he is not a deejay; he is a visual artist who draws and paints his interpretations of the world and culture of the picó, as these sound systems are known. For some fifteen years the picó, their personalities, traditions, presentation, and history, have been his subject matter.

The picoteros are known and prized for their selection of music and for their brute auditory power, but they are also typically decorated with a vibrant popular iconography that evolves over time. When performing or competing, the picó display technicolor banners painted on thin scrims and hung before the speaker boxes. These are essentially self-promotional in character, images that hover somewhere between logo and mythology. Barriosnuevo does not (at least so far) decorate the picó himself. Instead, his paintings about them, while emerging from the same arte popular idiom, simultaneously celebrate and comment on the culture. Barriosnuevo sees the perennial competition between the picoteros as a kind of mock battle between titanic cartoon characters, comic-book superheroes, or manga warriors. He calls the picó "machines of war," whose weapons are sound and music.

Perhaps best known for what I might describe as his portraits of various beloved sound systems, a kind of fetishizing and even anthropomorphizing of the equipment itself, Barriosnuevo recently completed a new series he calls Heráldicas Picoteras. In these "heraldic" paintings, the sound system itself is no longer the subject matter. Instead the works interpret the icons of the various picó. They are therefore versions of the same sorts of paintings which the proprietors commission from a handful of specialist popular artists and have painted on their speaker grilles. "El Coreano," for example, has long been identified with a tank, charging into battle; the sound system was named in the 1960s in honor of the owner's nephew, wounded in action in the Korean war as part of the Colombian battalion that fought there, the only South American representatives of that particular US-led coalition. In Barriosnuevo's version the tank threatens to crush a frog, representing the hapless multitude of other, croaking picó, beneath its treads. His image of "El Conde," the count, depicts a seated, top-hatted patriarch, with all the imagined trappings of the refined, land-owning elite; in a tuxedo, he is seated on a gold-brocade armchair, with monocle, cane, and cravat, on a ballustraded patio, with the ancient city walls of Cartagena visible across the bay in the background.

"The Korean," "The Count," "The Guajiro" (which in Colombia has a completely different meaning than it would in Cuba, referring to the remote north-eastern province of Guajira, with its heavy indigenous population of Wayú Indians), and "The Supersonic," are just a few of the legendary sound systems Barriosnuevo has interpreted. Other sound systems are named for cultural or political heros: "El Gran Che," the great Che, is one now-defunct picó. Still in action today on the patios and terraces of Barranquilla is "El Gran Fidel." When I saw Barriosnuevo's painting of the same name I entered immediately into negotiations with the artist, and a few days later, arriving at customs at JFK Airport in Queens, I was able to have the following nerve-wracking exchange as I handed in my customs declaration form:

Dept. of Homeland Security: "Colombia, huh? What's inside that tube?"
Me: "Hmmmn. Uh.... It's, it's a painting."
DOHS: "Really? Of what?"
Me: "Well, to be perfectly honest, occifer, it's a picture of Fidel Castro, deejaying!"

El Gran Fidel, restretchered courtesy of Atlas Industries, in situ back at the Red Hook ranch.


UPDATE:
Fabian Altahona, of the excellent Africolombia blog, read this post and was kind enough to send along a snap of El Gran Fidel ready for action, to illustrate what it is, exactly, that Dairo Barriosnuevo is illustrating. It is in no small part thanks to Fabian's blog that I owe my renewed interest in the subject of the picoteros and the phenomenon of African popular music as played throughout the Colombian Caribbean litoral.

Photo courtesy Fabian Altahona Romero

There's a reason they call it cloud forest...

Just back from the Cuchillo de San Lorenzo ("the knife of St. Lawrence") in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a place I have wanted to visit for a very long time. This particular Sierra Nevada contains Colombia's tallest mountains, despite all the competition from the twin spines of the Andes that carve across most of this country further to the south. But this comparatively small cluster of mountains emerged in isolation, like an island, away from the principal Andean chains, and the therefore has an extraordinarily high rate of endemism in its flora and fauna. To see these unique birds and plants, however, one must climb high up into the mountains, something that has until recently been rather unsafe.



For much of the 1970s, before American growers perfected the cultivation of their crop on their home turf, the Sierra was largely given over to marijuana production; it was the source of the famous Colombian Gold, packed down the mountainsides and loaded into clandestine ships in the jungly coves Magdalena's north coast. In the 80s and 90s the guerilla and then the paramilitaries controlled the zone, then just one of many badlands totally out of governmental control. When I last visited the region, in 1993, I was strongly advised not to go up into the mountains. I took that advice, and so the ornithological riches dwelling in the high altitude cloud forests remained, for me, imaginary. But this time, when we asked around in the placid port city of Santa Marta, the situation was said to be completely calm. And it was, blissfully so. After the thick heat of the coast the mountain air was crisp, oxygenated by steep hillsides of dense forest festooned with epiphytes. Nothing disturbed the tranquility but strange birds darting amongst the gnarled trunks. There were toucans and toucanets, the passive and deliberate Golden breasted fruiteater, and the Santa Marta brush finch, which Laura quickly nicknamed "cheeks," for the dusky patches it has on the sides of its black head. The most dangerous things we could find were the columns of leaf-cutter ants carting their shards of greenery back to their vast nests.



Not all the specialties made an appearance, so we'll just have to take that as an excuse to go back...

The rubber trees shall inherit the earth

One of the things I like best about the tropics is the sense that nature has a chance in the face of mankind's constant assault. The brute power of photosynthesis near the equator gives one the suspicion that our species' eventual and inevitable passing into extinction will be noted here only by a massive spurt of vines, trees, rot and recycling, until in a few short centuries not a cinder block or slab of asphalt will remain to await the discovery of interplanetary archaeologists.


The hotel where I am staying in Cartagena is a riot of buildings and overlapping roofs with multiple patios, all under constant threat from two gigantic rubber trees in the central courtyard. They are the largest I have ever seen, and manage to cast a deep shade across much of the sprawl of hastily conceived additions. They shed prodigious amounts of leaf litter and beefy twigs.


Yesterday, one of the workers here climbed delicately up onto the tile roof to clear it of debris. The leaves of these trees are thick and rubbery like the sap that is tapped from their trunks. They have substance and heft that prevents them from falling far from the tree. Overwhelmed by the piles of litter, my friend on the roof was using a common kitchen broom. It was a Sisyphean task in reverse, pushing the leaves, twigs and sticks off the roof into the patio, only to await the next breath of sea breeze to replace them with another shower of organic material.


The hefty beams placed to prevent the mighty branches from sagging down and crushing the roofs are as matchsticks, engulfed in a spaghetti of the dangling tendrils from what is rather like a gigantic mangrove tree. These strand-like branches become, upon reaching down to the ground, the roots the tree uses to spread itself. The eagerness and ability of these shady giants to envelop the hotel in their embrace is endearing and unstoppable.

A couple of minor offshoots...

By the way, while our species is still thriving, I highly recommend the Bellavista hotel to those travelers tolerant of cracked, upthrust patio tile and a genuinely welcoming atmosphere.

42,000 watts of amplification in the Plaza de Toros, Cartagena de Indias

El Rey de Rocha, Cartagena's largest and most fanatically followed sound system, awaits the arrival of its thirsty crowd in the bullring last Sunday afternoon. Humberto Castillo Rivera, the organization's administrative director, calls El Rey "la religion de un pueblo."

I just wanted to make a simple phone call...

Some things really should be a state monopoly. Here in Cartagena, Colombia, there are three major cellular telephone operators, Comcel, Tigo, and Movistar. Not unlike Sprint, AT and T, T-mobile and the rest of the New York carriers vying to be the one to drop your call today, except that part of the corporate strategy here for grabbing market share is to penalize anyone who isn't your subscriber every time they call someone who is. In other words, since I'm on Comcel, I can call anyone else with a Comcel SIM card at a quite reasonable rates. If I call someone on Tigo, or Movistar, however, I get whacked. The first digits of the telephone number indicate the carrier; numbers beginning 310 and 311 belong to Comcel, for instance.

An entire business has sprung up to cope with this absurdity; on almost every block is a small-time entrepreneur who has gathered enough capital together to buy at least one phone and SIM on each network. The simplest of these businesses consists of a woman sitting somewhere in the shade in a plastic armchair, with a little disco waist pouch on her lap overflowing with the cheapest Nokias. The more splendid have a cart of some kind, or a card table protected from the brutal Caribbean sun by a small awning. Customers, even those who may own their own phone, cluster around these impromptu booths when they need to call someone outside of their own network, or simply because they have depleted their pay-as-you go funds and don't wish to make the lump-sum investment to recharge their accounts.

"Wait, let me get this straight: it costs much more to call some numbers than others?"
"Claro," of course, she said, as if I was a small child who understood nothing.
"How strange," I said, but instead it was me that she thought strange. It had never occurred to her, I think, that it would ever be any other way.

To avoid any funny business, like an unannounced call to Australia, the proprietor dials for you. As soon as someone picks up at the other end, you are handed the phone, and you begin to explain why you are not calling from your own telephone number. The less spry proprietors attach their telephones to their chair with lengths of string. The most deluxe operations have chains, an unintended metaphor for your relationship with your "service provider."

Reading: My Colombian War by Silvana Paternostro

“…even if Colombia is a failed state that scares me to the point of blindness, that angers me to the point of blindness, that hurts me to the point of blindness, it is where I come from.”

Colombia remains for most people just another banana republic, source of cocaine and druglords. That the country has more recently become the easiest place in the world to be kidnapped is just one more of the factoids that keep the country far down at the bottom of most lists of fantasy vacation spots.

Little considered is that the kidnapping, and to a large extent the drugs, are really just footnotes to Latin America’s longest running conflict, a blurry and muddled war that has seen decades of intermittent slaughter and positively Darfurian waves of “internally displaced persons,” or IDPs, as the UN refers to those refugees who haven’t managed to make it outside their country’s borders.

Pitting the “conservatives” against the “liberals,” this war, which has been simmering literally longer than anyone alive can remember, has its roots in the post-independence opening up of the country, when an enterprising few became overnight land barons, clearing, or seizing massive tracts of land that became the foundation for the sorts of multi-generational fortunes that are the stuff of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s epics.

This is Silvana Paternostro’s Colombia, from which she became a different kind of refugee, she tells us, when sent as a more or less oblivious teenager to the United States for the prestigious North American liberal arts education marking a right of passage for the children of the world’s elites.

The experience turned her into a liberal, or maybe even worse, and soon, working as a journalist and living in New York, she finds herself sympathizing with Sandinistas and at ease with the EZLN. She draws the line at fraternizing with the FARC, Colombia’s largest left-wing insurgent army, only through a state of almost willful denial until, with a commission from the New York Times Magazine in hand, she at last confronts her tortured relationship with her country of birth and returns to Colombia.



Generically, her people are conservatives, bloodstained landgrabbers, a latifundia family so famous that the guerilla has vowed not to stop until they have kidnapped every last one of the Montblancs. But individually, Paternostro rediscovers, they are beloved, churchgoing grandmothers, great-uncles and cousins, kind, funny, quirky upright citizens living in Barranquilla, people with whom she shared rights of passage who she now finds vacillating between denial and horror at the outrages being perpetrated upon Colombian civil society. Stuck in Barranquilla, getting up late and scandalizing her grandmother with her New York night-owl lifestyle, she is unable even to visit the family farm of her childhood memories. It is unsafe to go anywhere near it, and the family have left its operation in the hands of acceptably proletarian managers.

Visiting that farm becomes the cornerstone, both of the article Paternostro hopes to write for the New York Times Magazine, an article she does eventually write, and of the book. The final visit itself is brief, not much more than a luncheon, really, and secured by the army, but the dramatic conceit of the outing succeeds in holding our attention because of Paternostro’s ability to make us care—about Colombia, yes, but also about her feelings.

The Colombia which emerges is a vast, jungled land only nominally ruled by Bogotá's oblivious and absurdly centralized political elite. This transplanted European city barricaded away somewhere up in the Andes comes across as an entirely different country from the hot, fertile lowlands, where century-old land disputes are contested with the latest military hardware by freelance armies. Both the FARC and its allied acronyms on the "left," and the paramilitary errand-boys of the "right," fund their bloody self-fulfilling military prophecies by taxing, enforcing, securing or otherwise participating in the narcotics business. It is the ancient liberal versus conservative conflict, now fueled by drug money, with the hapless rural population caught in the crossfire.

At the end of her journey, back in New York, Paternostro seems to have found, at least, her own personal emotional closure. She takes down the map on which she had traced the many massacres and battlefields and packs away the photo album of childhood memories, treating the failed state of Colombia like a failed relationship. There are memories good and bad, and one hopes to have learned something, but ultimately, it may be time to move on.

Cumbia de Obama

One night, almost exactly seventeen years ago, if I calculate correctly, I was deejaying at a global freakout of a one-nighter Mark Kamins had going for a while, where he fused Turkish belly-dancing tunes with Amazonian riverboat songs and house beats and who knows what else. In came my late friend Fran Duffy, with this gangly British dude I hadn't met before, Jason Mayall. Duffy and Mayall were fresh off the plane from Cartagena, Colombia, and the Caribbean Music Festival, organized by my buddy Paco. For all I know, he was with them, but I'm fairly certain we hadn't even met yet. Duffy had been filming the festival, and Jason had been buying records, crate-digging in a warren of dusty roll-front shops in the chaos of Cartagena's sprawling outdoor market. Duffy was calling him "the cumbia kid." I was like, "WTF is cumbia?" And Duffy goes, "Nixon, dude, you gotta let him get on the set so you can hear these beats." (They used to call me Nixon, back in the day.)

So Mayall dives into his paper bag of crusty treasures and starts pulling out singles and weird one-off pressings on unheard-of Colombian record labels, slapping them on the turntables and wiping them free of the last gritty sand of the Caribbean's southernmost shores, with my Discwasher. He starts playing shiznit I never heard before: gaitas, named for the bizarre, almost Persian-snake-charmer-sounding cactus-wood flute they feature, and porros, almost maniacally uptempo tunes awash in the sound of a massive metal grater, like the güira of Dominican merengue. The basic rhythm, the cumbia, I recognized from a catchy Nescafé commercial that ran for months in movie theaters when I lived in Paris in the mid-Eighties, but Mayall had countless backwoods versions of this beat, crunchy, raw tunes that, when you heard them, conjured up an image of a bunch of musicians ill-at-ease in the studio, gathered together from working out in the fields somewhere to come stand in front of a microphone, probably barefoot. Thus began my love affair with the cumbia.

The author, filling in for Steve Blush at the legendary Lite Lounge at Carmelita's, circa 1988. Forensic analysis reveals that I'm rocking an original 12" of "Good Times," by Chic. (Not a cumbia). If you look very closely (click image to enlarge) you'll note that I am wearing a 'dookie rope chain,' albeit a teensy one. Photographer unknown, possibly Alison Mayer, aka Ali177, or AK718.

In the intervening generation, (yes, I'm old enough now that I can actually speak in all seriousness of an 'intervening generation') the cumbia, always a music of the lower classes, the impoverished and the marginalized, has spread far afield from its Colombian roots. The infectious rhythm first seems to have taken Mexico by storm, where it became fundamental to the booming Mexi-sound-system music known as Sonidero, easily heard by anyone taking a stroll down Fifth Avenue (in Sunset Park, Brooklyn), where it booms out of cars and shops alike. Peru developed its own tradition.

Only recently, however, has cumbia crossed over from the Sunset Park world of its humble but faithful immigrant clientele into the realm of hipsterdom. I'm going out a limb here, since I scarcely go out to nightclubs any more, but at least to judge by the corner of the world-wide-web sandbox I've found myself playing in lately, cumbia has suddenly become the hottest thing on the international club scene. Deejays from San Franciso are bringing back Argentine dub-plates to rock dancefloors in the Bay Area, and the hottest one-nighter in the world right now is a weekly electro-cumbia jam in Buenos Aires, Zizek, named after the uber-hip Slovenian cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek, who happens to be married to an Argentine supermodel-turned-philosopher. (It doesn't seem to be there today, but a recent google search for Zizek yielded a sponsored link to Cabinet Magazine.) At Zizek, the one-nighter, cumbias are slowed down, remixed, mashed up with hit rap records, tortured with dub effects, fused with reggaeton, and otherwise integrated into the deejay repertory.

This being the internet, however, you don't have to imagine what this music sounds like from my tortured descriptions. A brilliant example of the mash-up genre is "El Bombon en el Club," featuring Mr. Fiddy Cent himself being given the maximum cumbia treatment. Listen online, or download. If that doesn't give you enough to go on, download one-time Mark Kamins girlfriend and Danceteria coatcheck girl Madonna singing about music bringing together the rebels and the bourgeoisie over accordion rhythms laid down by the supreme maestro, godfather of the cumbia, the late Andres Landero, from San Jacinto pueblo in Colombia's coastal littoral, here. (Links Dead.) I've met them both, but you'd be more likely to find Landero sitting next to you at my fantasy dinner party. The bottom line in this post-post-modern, post-global music is that any sort of source material is fair game for remixation into a nova-Cumbia. Even footage of Barack Obama:

First spotted at Negrophonic, to whom I say "big up!," this is one of the most spectacular pieces of political propaganda to have yet emerged from the presidential race. Put on your dancing shoes and get out your Spanish-English dictionary.

UPDATE: If you are reading this before 10PM on March 17th, 2008, get on over to SOB's on Varick St. in New York City, where Zizek, the globetrotting party, not the Slovenian philosopher, is putting on their mobile show for one night only.