Winter in America

I met Gil Scott-Heron at S.O.B.’s, where he played one of his gigs with Brian Jackson. They performed their legendary songs, as if time hadn't past. Prison and addiction had left obvious traces on his face, but his energy was still there. It wasn't just the music though. His old lyrics sounded scarily fresh and up-to-date. I asked him, what he thought about the fact that most of his words from decades ago seem to be still valid (or valid again). Being above mundane journalist questions, he just shrugged his shoulders in agreement and kept on eating his take-out dinner of burger and fries.

But you don’t even have to replace that many names and numbers in his song about the "B-Movie" Reagan administration. Are we just living the groundhog years? The conservative desire to turn back the clock to sometime in the 19th century sure's still the same. That's why even Johnny „Guitar“ Watson’s lamentations about political corruption and middle class decline sound rather current.
Right on! This was the pessimist spin on the new year. Positive one coming up....

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Watch Gil Scott-Heron perform"The Bottle"

2005

in POP:
- Art (Friedlander, German Pop Art, The Disco-style lighting of Brooklyn Borough Hall)
- Books (Benjamin Kunkel, Jay McInerney, Tony Judt)
- Concerts (Neil Diamond, Doves, Lady Sovereign)
- Food (360, Fred, Taku)
- Movies (Match Point, Murderball, Syriana)

and POLITICS:
- Northeastern US (Nine states voluntarily adapting the Kyoto Protocol)
- Pennsylvania (Putting a lid on the Intelligent Design farce)
- Roger Toussaint (Bringing back the working class hero)
- Les Banlieues (Rocking the boat)
- South America (Electing governments which actually represent the interests of their citizens)

in POP:
- Records (I don’t think I kept a single album that came out in 2005. Ok, a few - D'Nell, Doves, Jamiroquai)
- Geriatric Sex (Jagger's gyrating, Madonna’s cameltoe, the depictions of teenage lust in recent works by the elderly like Larry Clark, John Irving and Tom Wolfe)
- Apple (Reducing everything to content and content to palmsize crap)

and POLITICS:
- The US (Guantanamo, Katrina, NSA)
- Germany (Gerhard Schröder pimping German pacifism to his mass-murdering autocrat buddy Putin)
- China (Two massive ecological desasters in six weeks? )

Forces of Victory

When Mayor Bloomberg was still just a billionaire, one of his famous quotes was: "Always pick a fight with someone smaller than you.” So it’s even more deserved that he got cornered by a feisty immigrant from Trinidad. Union leader Roger Toussaint started his fighting stance early. Born one of nine children raised by a single mother in the slums of Trinidad, he was politically active by the age of 11. He was expelled and arrested for writing political slogans like “Free Education Means Free Books” on the walls of his high school. He also joined the movement against the neo-colonialist Brits who were still running the oil-rich island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. When he came to New York he started as a shipbuilder in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. After the Yards closed he worked for the MTA first as a cleaner, then as a track worker, while getting himself through Brooklyn College. In 1998 the MTA fired him for doing union work on company time, but he sued and got his job back. There are a lot of people who don’t like him, because he has expressed to not only fight for his rank and file, but also against the nationwide trend to roll back benefits. Other unions supposedly have watched the transit strike closely.

This is the man that Bloomberg more or less called a criminal and a thug. Although others have already compared him to legendary Irish Civil War hero and immigrant New York labor leader Michael Quill. So it was a good news week, having a new force in the lackluster American labor struggles. Contrary to what the media reported, most New Yorkers were rather supportive of the strike, knowing full well that this was about more than MTA pension plans.

The other good news was of course the US district court verdict in the Dover case, in which federal judge Jones called so called Intelligent Design, what it is – a poorly masked effort by creationists to force fundamentalist belief into the science curricula of public schools. Always a bit puzzling, that science still has to fight a fight that was kind of settled, when a Vatican cardinal admitted to Galileo Galilei that the bible can only tell you how to get to heaven, not how heaven works. That was in the summer of 1615.As the Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson said on his "Forces Of Victory" album – this is the age of reality.
In closing here are two more quotes by our dear Mayor Bloomberg. This one goes out to the ladies: "If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they'd go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale's." This one perfectly illustrates, where he’s coming from, when he calls unionists criminals: "I make it a rule never to go to Queens -- and since that eliminates both airports I don't travel a great deal." (for Non-New Yorkers – Queens is this city’s blue collar and immigrant borrough).

We Live In Brooklyn, Baby

New York braces itself for a subway strike, which would severely cripple the city. As usual it’s hard to decide between being annoyed about the disruptions of daily routines and old-fashioned liberal glee, that the brave workers of the Manhattan Transit Authority stick it to the man, who in this case is our arrogant billionaire mayor who’s shilling out triple digit million dollar favors to his cronies,while reducing social services and squeezing city employees.

It makes sense then that tomorrow New York might be turned into a Third World megalopolis with the citywide fleet of cabs and liveries being allowed to function like bush taxis, picking up as many passenegers as possible and driving them to their destinations one after the other. That of course has already been the praxis in Brooklyn and Queens for years, with mini-buses servicing all those immigrant communities, where public transportation is sparse.

So we might be stuck in Brooklyn. Tomorrow night we were supposed to go to a fight in the Bronx, which won’t happen in the case of a transit strike. Although this would be the almost exact reverse route the mighty Warriors took in the movie by the same name that’s having a major renaissance with the video game that just came out and Tony Scott shooting a remake. So here's to our glorious borough and vanishing point of the Warrior’s New York odyssey with Roy Ayers' hymn and three Brooklyn bands from around that time (I actually saw Mandrill playing Fort Greene Park a few years back, still razor sharp...).

À bout de souffle

It’s always fun to get tapped for a list of favorites, since it’s a good way to indulge in a bit of vanity and make yourself sparkle with the help of a few well-chosen cultural coordinates. Hey – most blogs are basically random lists of current faves. Listing your 30 all-time favorite films for a European underground magazine for cinéastes is a challenge of course. You don't want to be too pretentious, can't be too pedestrian. Somehow I ended up listing mostly American films from the 70s and the last five years. Plus a few 60s French films.

"Tirez sur le pianiste" (“Shoot the Piano Player“) was on my list. The signature tune is one of those melodies you'll never ever get out of your head again. Same goes for French jazz piano player Martial Solal’s soundtrack to Godard’s „À bout de souffle“ (Breahtless"). Which is probably the ultimate slacker film - somehow 60s Nouvelle Vague managed to way outcool Hollywood cool on it's own turf. Belmondo using his legendary thumb swipe across the lips to put some sensuality into his Humphrey Bogart idolization. Bogart and Seberg hanging out in her appartment talking forever about seemingly nothing, foreshadowing Tarantino dialogues by 30 years.

One of the best French films ever couldn't make the list though. Mainly because it’s barely ten minutes long. It’s Claude Lelouch’s "Cétait un rendez-vous“, which he shot in one single take one early morning in the summer of '76. There are a lot of legends and myths about the film. Supposedly Lelouch had one roll of film left over from his shoot of "Si c'était à refaire" ("Second Chance“), which he used for a bet. He said he could make the roughly six and a half miles from Boulevard Periphérique to Montmartre in under ten minutes.So he strapped a camera on his new Ferrari 275 GTB and hit the gas with a admirable disregard for red lights and personal safety. At some strategic intersection he had look-outs posted with walkie-talkies, but mostly he just went for it. He made it in 7:57, just in time for the climactic Montmarte bells ringing in 6:00 AM. After the first screening Lelouch was supposedly arrested, although some sources say that he just got a ticket, that was later revoked by the mayor of Paris himself. There is some debate now, if it was really a Ferrari or a Le Mans Matra 67, an Alpine A110 or even a motorcycle with overdubbed Ferrari sounds.

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Watch - „Cétait un rendez-vous“

Nightclubbing

I recently watched the documentary "Maestro", which tells the story of the legendary New York nightclub Paradise Garage that opened in SoHo in 1976. The Garage was the place where Larry Levan (pictured below) was laying the fundations of DJ Culture, anticipating House, Techno and the vast jungle of genres created by turntablists around the world. According to the film it was him who created the first continuous breakbeats by mixing two copies of the same record. There isn't much footage from the Garage and it’s predecessors like Gallery, Sanctuary or David Mancuso’s Loft, but it's enough to take you back. Paradise Garage was still open when I came to New York for the very first time. Danceteria, Limelight and Area might have been familiar territory coming from Europe, but nothing prepared me for the borderline mass hysteria on the dancefloor of Paradise Garage.

Fellow Paradise Garage veteran Frankie Knuckles created this type of dancefloor ecstasy later at the '86 Tempo party in Munich and at the Music Factory on the Westside. This would be the moment to start complaining about the current state of New York nightlife, with the Daytona Beach style Meatpacking District and all those bland clubs like Lotus, Marquee and Bungalow 8 filled with „Apprentice“ types shilling out $ 300.- for bottle service to impress their anemic dates. On the other hand this seems to be nothing new. Not according to Ms. Gladys Knight, who described the feverish ambitions of New York nightlifers already a quarter century ago in her version of the Ashford & Simpson instrumental "Bourgie Bourgie" (which used to be one of Levan's staple songs at the Garage). I also might be a bit too distracted to find out where the real places are. Although - David Mancuso supposedly throws Loft parties again. That of course would be more than worth the effort.

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Trailer - Maestro

Listen to David Mancuso spinning on Shibuya FM podcasts

An audio fansite for the Paradise Garage

Slippin' Into Darkness

When I interviewed Anthony Swofford (the ex-Marine whose biography was made into the movie"'Jarhead") he talked about this strange nostalgia for the Vietnam War most Desert Storm grunts shared: „In a way the Vietnam War is very romanticized, there’s a somber quality to how it’s considered, because of the many deaths, and, the feeling that it was some kind of a worthless war. But it was a rock ‘n’ roll war, and there were villes outside of every encampment with whores and whiskey, and you were smoking dope, there was heroin, and it was crazy. It was a different kind of lifestyle.“

Contrary to Desert Storm: „Our war was very clean. We were in Saudi Arabia, we couldn’t get alcohol, couldn’t get women—it was almost as though we were being punished for all of the fun that the guys had in Vietnam. Not that the war was fun, but the extra-battlefield stuff, the whores, the drinking, the music. There was no music that came out of the Gulf War. We were listening to Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.“

Things changed. The troops in Iraq might still suffer from a lack of loose women and mind-altering substances, but contrary to their '91 predecessors they sure have their own Pop culture. Troop encampments are way more comfortable then they were in Vietnam now and a lot of grunts have filled their barracks with digital toys of every kind and nature. The flood of blogs and digital photos coming out of Iraq has put a very different spin on the way we view the war. This time it’s not the eyes of the reporters, but of the fighting troops themselves that form our perspective. And they do have their own music now. A frontline solider named Big Neal (pictured) has started the first Baghdad based rap group called 4th25 (as in fourth quarter). They have an album out accompanied by a video clip they assembled from a wide array of taped and shot footage. Some of the original footage plus personal frontline photos can be found on their website gallery, which makes the images from Abu Ghraib look tame.

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A clip of Vietnam GIs having a blast.

Trailer - Jarhead

4th25 video in - wmv ... flash ... realplayer

4th25 - Homepage

Sunny (December)

Went down to Tribeca to one of those screening parties for Robert Greenwald's "Wal-Mart - the high cost of low price". His way of distributing documentaries via house party screenings was pretty ingenious. During last years elections he did "Uncovered" and "Outfoxed" and since he could use the mobilizing muscle of the MoveOn.org mailing lists there were up to 3.000 screening parties a week. It wasn't quite that happening this time around. The point could made that he needs an active nationwide grassroots movement to piggyback, because cinematically and technically his films are rather substandard. They're 90 minutes of mostly talking heads and superimposed statistics, the sound is not mixed right, the light balances are off. But Robert Greenwald definitely makes up his lack in filmmaking skills with outrage. His storytelling and technical ineptitudes are strange though, because he did direct some mainstream Hollywood films, the musical "Xanadu" with Olivia Newton-John being the best known. I guess that wasn't a storytelling masterpiece either, but at least they were on rollerskates.

Anyway - even though it's not exactly a pleasure to sit through his preachy films, Greenwald manges to show a complete picture of how destructive a force Wal-Mart has become. There is no end - from destroying the communities with the ferocity of neutron bomb (a quote from one of the townspeople driven out of business by a Wal-Mart), to the below-poverty-line-wages to their import quotas making them a de facto bridgehead of the Chinese industry in the US, to dismal health, environmental and cultural politics. They seem to know - about the same time Greenwald's film had it's brief run in the theaters, Wal-Mart launched it's own documentary, that was equally propagandist. Just without the educational value and with all the corporate spin.

Also - another version of this blog's title song.

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Trailer - "Wal-Mart - The High Cost Of Low Price"

Trailer - "Outfoxed"

Trailer - "Uncovered"

Trailer - "Xanadu"

Debating Pop pt. 2

I tried to figure out the appeal of the widely celebrated Antony & the Johnsons, who sounds as contrived to me, as Tom Waits, Dave Matthews and anybody who ever played in the Velvet Underground. If you really dig for similarities you might end up with Meat Loaf for the art house set (referring to his operatic pathos, not his size). Still there’s some deeply embedded pop cultural feedback loop that makes it work. It’s not just his Billie Holiday timbre. Nina Simone came to mind, but her main force was raw anger, while Antony is more larmoyant. Although sometimes he does manage to muster some of this sorrow that comes from heartbreak way beyond disappointed love.

Which brought me back to Esther Phillips whose timbre might be the true crosslink between Lady Day and Antony. Her catalogue is dominated by this heart wrenching pessimism. She even managed to take the outrage over the failing civil rights movement in Gil Scott-Heron’s "Home Is Where The Hatred Is" to new levels of pain. Of course she could also be very diva, as she proves with her interpretation of Odyssey’s disco classic „Native New Yorker“. But I guess that comes with the territory.

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Watch Anthony & the Johnsons

Floodwater Running Through My Veins

The New Orleans legends and contenders for "most sampled band ever" The Meters played New York last night. There was some announcement how New Yorkers truly understand, what the people in New Orleans are going through, because somehow Katrina was like 911, which didn’t really make sense, but didn’t matter either, because they jumped right into one of their legendary grooves. Not that they ignored the anger and frustration of their hometown. Art Neville inserted some new lyrics into their old songs, it was hard to understand, but there was definitely something about CNN and rising tides and „Fire on the Bayou“ featured the new line „There is floodwater running through my veins“.

It’s easy to forget that The Meters are not just New Orleans legends and raw material for beats by everybody from the Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest to Ice Cube and Public Enemy. For quite a while they were the blueprint for everything Rock music wanted to be. After all it was New Orleans that was the ultimate destination of Dennis Hopper’s and Peter Fonda’s quest for the American soul in „Easy Rider“. You can hear Meters inspired songs on countless albums by people like the Allman Brothers, The Band and especially Little Feat. Robert Palmer didn't even try himself and hired The Meters to play on his '74 album. The following year Paul McCartney cut a Mardi Gras track with the Meters that closes „Venus & Mars“. When they played at a party he gave on the Queen Mary, the Stones were there and immediately hired them as their support act for their next tour. But only the Feat’s Lowell George was invited to play on a track of an actual Meters album.

Last night they proved to be still true to form. Only the venue was a downer. They call it the Nokia Theater and this strange fear permeates these large rooms with those towering logs of all these sponsors. Goons man all the strategic points of the subterranean complex, there are color coded lines, wristbands and the drinks are rationed - one per wristband only, if you want to get your company one too, you have to give up your place in the actual theater and bring them. It's as if they are afraid of the very culture they're hosting here. Well, just to satisfy my prepubescent problems with authority I just ended my longstanding brand loyalty and exchanged my Nokia for a nifty looking Samsung fliphone.

Arnold in Rio

This is the film Governor Schwarzenegger didn't want you to see - Carnival in Rio, which he shot in 1983 on the heels of his success as Conan the Barbarian for the Playboy Channel. But the Internet's memory is merciless and somebody generously keeps on donating bandwidth so we can watch a carefully edited clip of highlights from this cinematic gem. See Arnold dance, see Arnold grope, see Arnold make his Portuguese teacher simulate oral sex on condiments! Arnold's best line comes during his musings on the erotic supremacy of Brazilian mulata women while observing some scantily clad Samba dancers at Club Oba Oba: „You know something, after watching the mulatas shake it, I can absolutely understand why Brazil is totally devoted to my favorite body part: the ass."

During the recall election campaign the publisher American Media (home of the National Inquirer, Weekly World News and Muscle & Fitness) supposedly tried to suppress the video and even paid somebody $ 2,000.- for a copy. Originally American Media had pursued Schwarzenegger's sex life with a string of scandalous stories, but Schwarzenegger made them an offer they couldn't refuse. For a mere million Dollars he would have come on board as a consultant to the publisher and thus give their fitness publications his bodybuilding legend stamp of approval. Consequently AMI's publications backed him all the way, only to have him back out of the deal after all.

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Watch Arnold in Rio

Cruise

I’m not a particular fan of the South Park series, but their recent episode with the Church of Scientology and Tom Cruise coming to town was a riot. When South Park’s Stan gets tested on the Church’s E-meter, he registers as an instant "Operational Tetan 9", which is the highest stage of enlightenment you can reach in their belief system. Stan is considered the reincarnation of L. Ron Hubbard. Subsequently Cruise comes to South Park to talk to the ‚prophet’ and asks Stan what he thinks of his work. The boy replies "You're O.K. I mean you're not Leonardo DiCaprio or Napoleon Dynamite or anything." Cruise is devastated, whines: "I'm a failure in the eyes of the Prophet!" and subsequently locks himself into Stan's bedroom closet. Everybody comes together in Stan’s bedroom and begs: „Come out of the Closet, Tom.“
Later John Travolta, Nicole Kidman and R. Kelly try to help, with Travolta and Kelly getting locked up in the closet as well. Noticeably absent was the character of Chef in this episode, whose voice of course is provided by Isaac Hayes, himself a staunch follower of Scientology. No news yet, how Scientology and Cruise reacted, but if you missed the show, you can see it on the ScienTomogy website, which also features hilarious clips of Tom Cruise promoting Scientology and vilifiying psychology on various TV shows this summer.

Weekend in Kentucky

Went down to Louisville, Kentucky for the weekend to attend the opening festivities of the Muhammad Ali Center, which is somewhat like a presidential library for the Champ. Funny town. They’re proud of having a view of the nation’s second largest clock above the Colgate plant across the river in Indiana and of having the world’s largest chandelier on one of them five casino boats on the Ohio River. The windowless bar of the local Hyatt with its pool tables and Formica paneling had all the charm of a state sponsored Romanian youth club. The bartenders swapped stories about the last funeral directors’ convention, while they served me snifters of so-called „sipping Bourbon“, which is the local effort to compete with expensive single malts, although it still tastes like kerosene. I guess the flight on that tiny Delta jet had already been a strong hint that I was leaving cosmopolitan America behind, with that faint odor of manure wafting through the cabin courtesy of a non-working bathroom door and seats encrusted with old chewing gums and the remnants of countless crackers (no pun intended).

Ali's museum wasn’t quite finished yet, but I really liked the place. It sits on a prime spot by the river overlooking the 2nd Street bridge, from which Ali supposedly threw his Olympic gold medal in 1960, because some segregated diner on Main Street had refused him service, even though he had entered with the medal around his neck.
The museum features plenty of footage with Ali clobbering opponents and getting talk-show hosts off-kilter with blunt statements about race and politics. There are some nice virtual reality installations, like a heavy bag attached to some mechanism that simulates the punch of a heavy-weight, and a ring where you can spar with a projected image of Ali's daughter Laila. To continue Ali's humanitarian work, it will also serve as a center for conflict resolution on a rather ambitious scale. They already sponsored a round of informal Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Ali had never seen the finished place, so yesterday he toured the exhibition halls with the help of his wife Lonnie and his buddies Kris Kristofferson and Howard Bingham. He seemed quite overwhelmed, seeing a whole modern museum dedicated to his life, but it’s hard to tell what he thinks these days. He still does his friendly shadowboxing moves, but can’t talk much right now. On top of the Parkinson increasingly getting a hold on his motor skills he's had neck surgery a couple of weeks ago and his gate looks like he’s wading through knee-deep cotton candy. But his charisma is still intact, getting grown men to feel like teenage girls meeting their crooner idol. In one of the Center’s showreels Billy Crystal puts it best: „...and in this quiet now he is almost louder than when he was ranting and raving.“

The Singaporization of New York

Last night the Country Music Association Awards were held in New York. Now why would you wanna do something like that? There must go a lot of careful planning into forcing a whole bunch of people who hate New York to come here, where nobody wants them in the first place. The same kind of planning that went into holding the Republican National Convention in Manhattan. It all fits rather well into Bloomberg's ongoing Singaporization of New York that brought us the Time Warner Mall, Christo's merchandising bonanza The Gates, plus a law and order policy that seems to be steeped in Chinese traditions rather than Western society. Make no mistake, he goes way beyond Giuliani. I never had so many friends my age spending a night in jail for some minor offense that used to get you a scolding when you were a kid. And I’m way past the age where you are prone to run into trouble with the law.

Now I do enjoy Country music (somehow Country has always been a big thing in Germany, Johnny Cash even recorded a German album with local twanger Gunter Gabriel). New Year’s eve 2003 we danced to the Jimmy Nations Combo at Lillie’s in Red Hook until about five in the morning. Brooklyn of all places is actually the one part of New York City where you can hear some of the most outstanding Country Music. Hank’s Saloon on Atlantic Avenue is a great Honkytonk and those aren’t out-of-towners playin’ there. The website Brooklyn Country lists over 40 local performers and groups like the Gowanus Corral and the Cobble Hillbillies.

But the CMAs sure weren’t about down home bohemian Americana. The show was hosted by patriot faves Brooks & Dunn, some of the award winning artists and honorees were ultra-redstaters like Toby Keith, Alabama and the hosts themselves. Ain’t no room for the Steve Earles and Willie Nelsons on this roster, no Siree. Don’t they have the rest of the country to hang out in? Well, at least they made the premiere of „Walk The Line“ part of the festivities, which I’m rather curious to see, because Johnny Cash had been an icon of mine long before Rick Rubin stripped him down to his bare voice and guitar.

Debating Pop

Debating Pop is a great way to hone your rhetorical skills. When you’re a teenager. After a certain age there’s something pitiful about this debate, but it seems that nobody gets more serious about it, like middle-aged Europeans. Being one of those I recently found myself at Milano’s Bar on Houston defending Neil Diamond against the very adament arguments of a novel-writing PEN Club member who’s ten years my senior and kept on praising the Smashing Pumpkins. What a sad sight we must’ve been, but it did rekindle the thrill of debating for the sake of debating. It also illustrated a fundamental generational difference - the earnest pathos of Rock against the frivolous nonchalance of Pop.

A good topic to continue an intergenerational discourse might be the current glorification of Kate Bush by the European Pop intelligentsia. I dutifully listened to her celebrated comeback album and found myself rather worried. Does any self-respecting disciple of Pop dare to even own this? Let's grant the target group of Waldorf-school-students, crystal healers and Hobbit-fanclubs it's own music, but isn't this a sign of the long-dreaded comeback of Progrock? Is Lester Bangs rotating in his grave right now? And where is Nick Hornby, when we need him?

Burn Baby Burn

It’s day 11 of the French riots and there is no end in sight. Quite the contrary. Rioting supposedly spread to 300 towns. Today a 61-year old man who had been beaten into a coma by one of the rioters was the first confirmed death. Last night the first cars went up in flames in the German cities of Berlin and Bremen. The politicians are at a loss. No wonder. '68 won’t work as a political reference. 1992 is more like it – the year of the Los Angeles riots, because it isn't a riot with a political aim. It’s not even fueled by some jihadist fervor, which would be as irrational as the current rage, but at least fit into some known political coordinates. It's true that being muslim has isolated many of the rioters from mainstream society, it's also true that islamic fundamentalists used that very frustration to recruit, but right now it’s pure nihilism sweeping throught the street of Europe.

The stories are quite similar. The LA riots might have been triggered by the acquittal of the four cops who had beaten up Rodney King. The true anger that had simmered in the city for months had been the killing of Latasha Harlin though, a black teenager who had been shot by a Korean grocer, who was only sentenced to a fine of $ 500.-.

In the US riots have been started by violence against minority youth again and again. In Paris the riots were triggered by the death of 15 year old Banou Traorés and 17 year old Ziad Benna in the banlieue of Chlichy-sous-bois. The two teenagers had been electrocuted in a transformer station, supposedly after they had been chased by police.
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If you speak French, there are quite a few websites that give you some insight from the streets:

Friends of Banou and Ziad started a condolence website that has hundreds of heated comments.

There is some debate on the rap-blog 9.3 Ghetto Star.

Other sites with lots of commentaries from the street are Chlichy Sous Bombesand les K1-FRY.The blog Violances Urbaines was closed by Skyblog, because of inciting commentaries.
There is some reporting from the streets on Indymedia Paris.
Three bloggers were arrested and charged with inciting riots on blogs they ran on the website of the radio station Skyrock

Paris Is Burning

Listen to their music - you don’t have to speak French to get the gist. Today on the ninth day the riots in the banlieues of Paris made page one of the New York Times above the fold. Like most English language reports the Times used the rather misleading translation of the word banlieue as suburb. Those are no suburbs. Those are massive Soviet style housing projects that the government erected for the mostly immigrant poor on the outskirts of town, so mainstream society woudn’t have to deal with what the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday called ‘scum’ and ‘troublemakers'.

In France the riots are seen as the worst civil unrest since 1968. The comparison doesn't quite work though. German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung called it a bit more poignantly an ‘intifada at the city gates’. Back in '68 it was the youth of a new middle class demanding their fair share of society in the form of education reform. Right now the rioters are the new members of European society who were never meant to be or stay there in the first place venting their frustration with the purest form of nihilism - burning down their own neighborhoods.

The riots didn’t come as a surprise though. In France the tensions of the banlieues are already so deeply embedded in the country’s fabric that they already rose to the very top of pop culture. Last year Luc Besson of 'Femme Nikita'-'Fifth Element'-'Transporter' fame produced the film 'Banlieue 13', which tells the story of gangs in a future, when the French government has erected walls between the ghetto projects and the communities of the affluent and rich. Being a Besson movie it's as authentic as if Joel Silver had produced a three-digit action movie about the L.A. riots, which is why the film is more ‚Escape From New York’ than ‚Boyz ‘n the Hood’. Still the soundtrack features some of the preeminent Hip Hop artists that came ouf of the banlieues and the song titles speak for themselves.

The so far best film about life in the banlieues came out ten years ago. Mathieu Kassovitz's ‚La Haine’ (The Hate) told the story of a skinhead, an Arab street kid and an African boxer trying to pursue some form of happiness in the projects near Paris, when a riot breaks out. It's not easy to track down the film, but the trailer gives a good glimpse of the atmosphere that lead to the events of last week.
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Film Trailer - Banlieue 13

Film Trailer - La Haine