Bombs Falling /Nowhere To Go/Sound Collage

Bombs Falling/Nowhere To Go
A Gaza Bombing Sound Collage

Bombs Falling/Nowhere To Go is set in Gaza but it could be anywhere – I take a neutral political position on Israel/Palestine and honour all civilian victims of war.

Music by David Archer – (unauthorized) text by Jawad Harb

Bombs Falling/Nowhere To Go/Sound Collage (4:01)

David Archer with text by Jawad Harb – January 2009 mp3

Download mp3  (right click – save as)

 

On January 14/ 09  I read an article entitled The Bombs Came Today – There Is Nowhere to Go  written by Jawad Harb who lives with his family in Rafah, Gaza and was there during the bombing.  As any parent -  any feeling person – would be, I was horrified at this harshest of realities and stunned by the powerful writing of a parent in an anguish of fear and concern over their children’s safety.

I had to react to what was happening but I was not certain how to go about it. Not wanting to let that stop me, I began to work with the vague idea of a sound collage involving my usual sounds plus some found sound effects from around the web.

Once I had a few loops and sound ideas going, it occurred to me that the actual words of  Jawad Harb  himself would express what I was searching for far better than I ever could. After realizing that my first choice of having Harb read them himself over the phone was not likely to happen – I tried reading and chanting the words myself.  Bad idea. My voice had no place in this sound.  A few days earlier, I had stumbled on a browser based news reader that actually reads HTML text aloud with a Microsoft Sam style computer voice.  I thought I had my solution but the voice sounded all wrong. I surfed around the net for a while and tried several other text readers of various types until I finally pieced together a workable version using a female Asian/Indian sounding voice and managed to record it.

It’s weird but sometimes, given the power of the words as written, the computer voice actually seems to carry human feeling and on at least one occasion it sounds as if the speakers voice is breaking with emotion.

Most of the other sound effects came from The Freesound Project, except the explosions, which are actually from a recording of the bombing of Baghdad.

Although the Gaza bombings and the experience of Jawad Harb and his family are the source and catalyst for this project, I hope it can serve as a memorial to all innocent war victims anywhere, anytime and a reminder to the aggressors that the real victims of war are always, always children.

Here is the original text. 

GAZA (January 13, 2009, 6:15 p.m) – The leaflets came yesterday, telling us our neighbourhood would be attacked. The whole population of the area is terrified. We have nowhere to go. My neighbour checked at the UNRWA shelter but it was full. Overflowing. There is nowhere to go. We waited to be bombed. My children have seen the dead bodies of children on television. They cry, they are crying now, they are terrified. When will this end? There was screaming. It is dark and cold but most of us are still outside. My family is outside next to the house. We are terrified to go inside.

The bombs came today. It was terrifying. We have nowhere to run. There was an air strike every five minutes. Thick black smoke 100m-150m away from us. People were scared, ran outside of their houses and gathered together in the street. 300-350 people in the street. The street was the safest place. If our house is bombed, we’ll get trapped and die like the people we saw on television.

It is quiet for 20 minutes now but we don’t know if it will start again. What if it is just a short break? We can’t take the risk. My children are shivering. It is getting so cold. Some neighbours went back inside, but they are staying on the first floor, next to the door so they can run outside. We don’t know what will come next. This is the closest it has come to our house. The neighbourhood next to ours was bombed. What do we do? We don’t know. We have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go.

 

 

Update:

Bombs Falling/Nowhere To Go became international in nature in a rapid and ineveitable way as it was being assembled and could not exist at all were it not for that fact.

The words – and to be honest, the entire emotional content -  are from Gaza.

 But I truly believe that same emotional content could be from anywhere. 

The voice – though computer generated with an Indo/Asian accent –  is meant to be anyone and indeed becomes the voice of a Universal Motherhood as well as fear, love and acceptance, anger and courage. That fear, love, acceptance, anger and courage all belong to Jawad Harb, his family and neighbours and all those who have lived and died these same ways.

 The first sound – the bass drum –  is the impossible violence of what can be –  but will not be altered from it’s white hot, black heart of despair and anger and hatred and destruction.

The guitar is the onlooker, alternately relentless and hesitant, charging forward and pulling back,  but determined, for once, to stand witness to the truth.

 The child’s cry is from a train station in North America and by its very sound represents something we all know in our hearts.

The air raid sirens are from Israel and are the voices of warning coming from all those who have experienced the history of terrible violence and oppression.

 There is an unknown Turkish man reading poetry way back in the mix toward the end. He represents the voices of people that no longer have names and will never be heard.

Then the awful, terrible sound of explosions – lifted from a YouTube  copy of CNN’s live coverage of the bombing of Baghdad - like  murderous, demonic laughter ripping darkness into your soul, stealing fire from heath and heart and blazing hatred and anger, hatred and anger, hatred and anger across the sky and the flesh and the bones of innocent children. Deafening, hideous, sickening thunder and lightning  torn from humanity’s darkest recesses, dripping bloody, putrid venom and poison onto everything that means anything to anyone.

The bottom end of the piano is the rock of the earth, the heat of technology and science, mankind through our collective history, evolution and religion, and the hope and hopelessness of time moving on. The high end of the piano represents the tears of the witnesses, the sorrow, the sadness, the pain of knowing, the guilt and remorse and the anger at helplessness in the face of such an storm, such an onslaught.

And it’s when I go back and listen, when it’s late and I’m alone and my ability to resist is at it’s lowest, and the acceptance and the understanding of why the wolf must tear at the throat of the deer stares back at me from the mirror,  I ask myself  ”how can such things as this come to be?” And I fear that as I say those words out loud, someone else will say to me “How dare you presume to create such a thing, you who know nothing of this.”

Inauguration From a Balloon at 500 Ft.

 

If you’re like me, when you saw the Obama Inauguration, you immediately thought: I’d like to see a video of this scene from a balloon about five hundred feet up.

Well, we here at Loon Theory can help you out with that. (CNN does the satellite image, Loon Theory does the balloon.)

 I think it’s really cool that someone thought this was a good idea.

Digital Design + Imaging Service,  who also do some pretty amazing photography and the 4d pictures with Microsoft Photosynth, are kind enough to provide access to the balloon shots.

The balloon link above goes to the original Inauguration video and this link goes to the balloon video menu.

Update

It seems the primary purpose of the balloon cameras was to assist in crowd estimates and to provide otherwise unattainable angles for the 4d images CNN used to asemble “The Moment”, a multi source, digitally stitched together set of images using Photosynth.

From an article on cnet by Elinor Mills :

Crowd counting is an art,” said Curt Westergard, president of Digital Design and Imaging Service, which took photos of the event with 360-degree spherical panoramic cameras attached to balloons bobbing 500 feet above and a few blocks away from the White House. Fiber-optic cables tethered the balloons to a special launch trailer, which transmitted live shots to CNN.

“We’re trying to contribute some of the oblique-angle photos of the scene that might see things under trees that satellite photos might miss (or) people standing in alcoves,” he said.

The cameras took the shots between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. EST, when they were forced to shut down due to air space regulations. The balloons, which measure about 12.5 feet in diameter, only rose to 500 feet instead of 800 feet because of issues with President Bush’s helicopter, according to Westergard.

Photosynth requires registration and a download which I did not do so  check it out at your own risk.

I have not yet found out how “Main Concept” enters the picture.

Update

OK, so Main Concept , with the same logo as on the video, create audio and video codecs.

O.K. U.S.A.

O.K. U.S.A.

Please America, No More Homicidal Lunatics

A quick note before the inauguration.

We would appreciate it if you folks take a little more care with choosing your leaders from now on. Now that you know what a reasonably intelligent, competent, decent human being looks and sounds like, perhaps you could use this as a template for future leadership candidates.

Your last President has behaved wrecklessly and callously. He was also chosen wrecklessly and callously.

History and the entire world are expecting America to grow up and stop acting like the worlds troubled teen-ager in the midst of a childish, unbelievably self centered adolescent tantrum.

Good Luck.

The Nightmare is Finally Over

Krugman and the Zombie Banks

I enjoy reading Paul Krugman’s writing. I appreciate a  Nobel Prize winner who is able to communicate vital, complex ideas in a straight forward, understandable way.

In his recent column “Wall Street Voodoo”  Krugman seems worried that influential people are leaning toward a Frankenstein’s Monster of bank crisis solutions that will sink further tax payer billions into what he calls Zombie Banks; banks that are essentially already collapsed yet through bailout money and the expectations of further bailouts are able to continue – likely for strictly their own purposes – to pose as fully functioning entities.

But recent news reports suggest that many influential people, including Federal Reserve officials, bank regulators, and, possibly, members of the incoming Obama administration, have become devotees of a new kind of voodoo: the belief that by performing elaborate financial rituals we can keep dead banks walking.

Krugman is suggesting a temporary nationalization of the troubled banks but fears that irrational ideological opposition to nationalization and a disinclination to recognize unpleasant realities will lead the big thinkers to engage in The New Voodoo Economics.

Why go through these contortions? The answer seems to be that Washington remains deathly afraid of the N-word — nationalization. The truth is that Gothamgroup and its sister institutions are already wards of the state, utterly dependent on taxpayer support; but nobody wants to recognize that fact and implement the obvious solution: an explicit, though temporary, government takeover. Hence the popularity of the new voodoo, which claims, as I said, that elaborate financial rituals can reanimate dead banks.

Knowing they are safely ensconced within the concrete towers of  the worlds biggest Welfare Scam and that the American Taxpayer is there to cushion the fall.

Amazing.

Besides his regular NYT column, Paul Krugman also writes a very interesting blog called The Conscience of a Liberal.

So Called Sphere of Consensus

 
Fascinating article by Jay Rosen on the role the press plays in determining a universal narrative and how the Internet works as an opposing force to the atomization of the audience and the regimented dictates of the acceptable sphere of discourse.

Rosen uses the diagram above, from the 1986 book  “The Uncensored War” by press scholar Daniel C. Hallin to illustrate his views.

 ”Deciding what does and does not legitimately belong within the national debate is—no way around it—a political act. And yet a pervasive belief within the press is that journalists do not engage in such action, for to do so would be against their principles”

“That journalists affirm and enforce the sphere of consensus, consign ideas and actors to the sphere of deviance, and decide when the shift is made from one to another— none of this is in their official job description. You won’t find it taught in J-school, either. It’s an intrinsic part of what they do, but not a natural part of how they think or talk about their job. Which means they often do it badly. Their “sphere placement” decisions can be arbitrary, automatic, inflected with fear, or excessively narrow-minded. Worse than that, these decisions are often invisible to the people making them, and so we cannot argue with those people. It’s like trying to complain to your kid’s teacher about the values the child is learning in school when the teacher insists that the school does not teach values”

Seems to me that the press do not arrive at a unified conclusions in an entirely autonomous or “arbitrary” way. Of course that sort of concensus of randomness is always in play, but there is likely much more  that we usually cannot see. Rosen takes us to the edge but I’m not sure he leads us to the next question: Who is shaping the views of the view shapers?

“Political journalists failed properly to examine George W. Bush’s case for war in Iraq, they were making a category mistake. They treated Bush’s plan as part of the sphere of consensus. But even when Congress supports it, a case for war can never be removed from legitimate debate. That’s just a bad idea. Mentally placing the war’s opponents in the sphere of deviance was another category error. “

In the Iraq case, the bleeding edge of unanimity was provided, enforced and re-enforced by the Bush/Cheney gang. The unnatural subservience and preparedness by the public to accept a world view seen through a neo con lens was already in full force and has been since at least 1980. So the evil actors from above, combined with a spaced out, pre inoculated and, yes, I’m going to say it, somewhat brain dead brain washed public set the stage for the perfect calamitous storm.

So the real issue of the Mainstream Media and ourselves is: How did we allow those who traffic in Propaganda – and those who pay them – to dominate us so completely and how can we put a genie back in a bottle?

“This gap between what journalists actually do as they arrange the scene of politics, and the portion they can explain or defend publicly—the difference between making news and making sense—is responsible for a lot of the anger and bad feeling projected at the political press by various constituencies that notice these moves and question them.”

The anger and bad feeling projected at the political press is itself – finally – becoming mainstream. The distrust is palpable and has begun to leech past the American Idol facade through the late night comedies and the wreckage of the evening news into the living rooms and conversations of a North American population who had, without realizing it, begun to give up hope.

I think Rosen’s article is important and I find Hallin’s model helpful as we consider how we must be vigilent in watching both the watchers and their paymasters.

 

 

At Night, I Dream of Morning Coffee

I have few rituals in my life, but the morning coffee ritual is almost sacred. I don’t drink all that much – between two and, at the most, five cups a day, always early in the day. Coffee in the second half of a day will keep me up at night.

The most memorable cup of coffee I’ve ever had was in Toronto’s Sutten Place Hotel lounge. (believe me, not my usual style hang out) It was a Sunday morning. The coffee was served in a translucent china cup to the the sound of a live classical pianist. The server was a beautiful young blond woman wearing one of those real looking tuxedo tops (bow tie, tails) with black shorts. (Long, long legs)

She appeared both exotic and classy to me that day.

The coffee was excellent.

What an awesome picture.

Cheers.

Pan in the Midnight Snow

Peter Pan Statue, Glenn Gould Park, Toronto, Jan/09

Morning Mosaic

Leah at Mr. Greenjeans, Eaton Centre, Toronto, Canada, Jan./09
(Click on image for full size)
 

The Image Mosaic Generator creates a mosaic using thousands of random Flickr pics.

Sullenberger for Aviation Safety Czar

 

 Perhaps President Obama would consider  C. B. Sullenberger as some sort of Special Aviation Safety Czar.

You read it at Loon Theory first.

Bombs Falling/Nowhere To Go

 Update January 24/2009

The sound collage inspired by this incredible  article is now finished and available for listening and downloading:

Falling Bombs/Nowhere To Go/Sound Collage

Jawad Harb writes fron Gaza. (From CARE via Andrew Sullivan)
 

GAZA (January 13, 2009, 6:15 p.m) – The leaflets came yesterday, telling us our neighbourhood would be attacked. The whole population of the area is terrified. We have nowhere to go. My neighbour checked at the UNRWA shelter but it was full. Overflowing. There is nowhere to go. We waited to be bombed.My children have seen the dead bodies of children on television. They cry, they are crying now, they are terrified. When will this end? There was screaming. It is dark and cold but most of us are still outside. My family is outside next to the house. We are terrified to go inside.  

The bombs came today. It was terrifying. We have nowhere to run. There was an air strike every five minutes. Thick black smoke 100m-150m away from us. People were scared, ran outside of their houses and gathered together in the street. 300-350 people in the street. The street was the safest place. If our house is bombed, we’ll get trapped and die like the people we saw on television.

It is quiet for 20 minutes now but we don’t know if it will start again. What if it is just a short break? We can’t take the risk. My children are shivering. It is getting so cold. Some neighbours went back inside, but they are staying on the first floor, next to the door so they can run outside. We don’t know what will come next. This is the closest it has come to our house. The neighbourhood next to ours was bombed. What do we do? We don’t know. We have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go.

 
Today, I am not thinking about who is bombing or why. Today I am thinking of the innocent people – especially the children - who are underneath those bombs.

They are the same people who are always underneath the bombs.

In every war.

In every conflict.

Everyday.

Update January 22/09

There is a Ceasefire in the works.

Check back with Loon Theory to hear a music/sound collage using
the above text read by a computer voice and various instruments and sound files.

Sociopathic Killer in Chief

 

The legacy is hundreds of thousands dead and millions of lives destroyed.