Month: June 2019

By Posted on Posted in The World We Live in Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The edge of democracy

Just a few days after my post asking “where’s the revolution”, the documentary “The Edge of Democracy” premiered on Netflix. It’s a visual version of what I tried to say on that post. Except here you get to see, and specially listen to the actors involved.  Director Petra Costa already starts the film claiming her left-leaning views, yet, she did try to give room for all sides to speak. She is slightly younger than me, so our views coincide most of the time. I just didn’t have a family that needed to go into exile or involved in big businesses or politics. The film already made it into the NYT’s “Best Films of 2019 so far…” list

I wanted to see the first half before going to the gym, but after I started, I just couldn’t stop. And , mind you, I’m a person who followed all of that. Nothing in the documentary is new to me. But it could be very close to home for those of you in Poland, Italy, Hungary, Hong Kong, Turkey, Germany, UK, and yes, you, USA. I recommend this documentary to anyone living on planet Earth right now. The English title sums it all (I think it’s even better than the original in Portuguese). You can check more info on the trailer below and here.

It’s worth mentioning the brief, yet poignant speech by former congressman Jean Wyllys. He was elected for a 3rd mandate last year, but he resigned due to life threats (speacially for being openly homosexual) and now lives in exile in Berlin. He was replaced by fellow party member, David Miranda, also gay, who is also receiving barbaric life threats to him and his family. He’s married to none other than Glen Greenwald. In fact, you may remember David was detained at London Heathrow under vague accusations using the Terrorist Act 2000 at the height of the Snowden leak scandal. He later sued the British government and won.

Going back to Glen Greenwald for a second, too bad the film was finished in January. Just earlier this month, Glen and his team from The Intercept unveiled evidence of what everyone always suspected (and the documentary also leaves it almost clear): even the Judiciary and the Federal Prosecutors acted with a political agenda. The ones who were supposed to act without any ulterior motivations, but the law (let alone political ones), apparently, didn’t do so. You can read all the leaks in English here.

if you still have 20 minutes left to spare, I can only finish this post with a recent episode of “Last Week Tonight” about impeaching Trump. If you watch the documentary first, John Oliver’s show presents a creepily similar situation going on in the USA about halfway through the episode. The comparison with Watergate is undeniable, yet part of the press focus more on how the compromising messages were obtained rather than their republic shaking consequences. Anyway, I leave it all here for your appreciation.

By Posted on Posted in Depeche Mode Tagged with , , , , ,

‘Twas about time I came back to the backbone of this site: Depeche Mode. As part of the series of rereleases of their 12″ singles, they just put the boxes for “Black Celebration” and “Music For The Masses” out late last month. I was traveling, so I had to wait two weeks to finally get to savour them.

Let us get the elephant out of the room first. The mystery surrounding the singles taken from their first compilation: “Shake the Disease” and “It’s Called a Heart”. Specially the first one is a fan favorite. No one really knows why the band skipped them or where, when or even if they will be released. We were all being led to believe these rereleases would follow their remaster series from 2006/2007 where they were added as bonus tracks on the “Black Celebration” DVD. The band knows their fan base. I don’t believe for a second they don’t plan on releasing them at some point. But the label is also keeping it a secret. Even the David Bowie rereleases get some kind of statement when there’s a glitch in the matrix. So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Starting with “Black Celebration”, this is the album that was the turning point for the band. From poppy melodies to “depressed mode”. You just can’t listen to “Stripped” and not imagine the reaction from the studio crew when they first played the final cut of the song. In fact, you can have that experience yourself if you happen to be in Berlin and book a tour of the legendary Hansa Studios. Depending on the availability of the mixing desk room, he can play this song through their speakers.

As a nice touch, they made one extra 12″ that didn’t exist – at least not in the UK – out of their first cassette single, a limited edition of “A Question of Lust”, the second single with Martin Gore on lead vocals. The booklet that came with the original single now became the inner sleeve. It was issued on vinyl in Germany in the 80′ (there’s even a colored edition that can be worth 3 digits), so maybe this 12″ is worth the entire box alone.

And the box finishes with the two 12″ singles for “A Question of Time”, which was originally released already by the end of the tour. You can read a very thorough story about it on David McElroy’s blog (aptly called “Almost Predictable. Almost). Highly recommended!

Less than one year later they were releasing the first single from their following album. Except the album was still far from being finished. “Strangelove” was a huge hit on the other side of the Atlantic. Back then the Brazilian charts used to follow whatever made an impact on the American charts. Depeche Mode had made a small dent in Brazil with “Just Can’t Get Enough”, but slowly fell under the furniture of their local label. It all changed because of “Strangelove”. The local division of Warner Music took over, reissued their entire back catalog and the song was an instant hit. I was 5 years old at the time and I still remember it playing on the radio. For many fans, this is their favorite DM song, or at least the one that got them into the fandom. But the band was not so fond of the 7″ version and remixed the song for the album, based on the Blind Mix of the song. I’m a fan of several remixes of this song: the Maxi Mix, the Blind Mix and the Pain Mix. The latter even made  its way into a soap opera soundtrack. The ultimate achievement an international artist could have at the time in Brazil. They’re all in this box. The instrumental B-sides “Pimpf” (or its alternate version “Fmnip”) and “Agent Orange” are very experimental. I quite love both. My mother did not. She said “Pimpf” caused her nausea and agony and I was not allowed to play it loud whenever she was nearby. It still is a challenging song to anyone’s ears. DM fans, however, loved it. The band used it at the intro for their shows of the “Music For The Masses tour”. It even has its own video. Would you dare watch it all the way through?

However, I don’t remember the following singles getting the same attention in Brazil. I do know the label tried to push them to the radios. They issued promos and everything. Because of a catchy cigarette ad on television that had a bluesy version of “Route 66” at the time, and because the label realized that DM also had their own cover version of the song, they put it as a bonus track on their reissue of “The Singles 81-85”, which in fact was just called “The Singles”, without the 81-85 part since DM’s cover version was officially released in 1988. You’ll find plenty remixes of “Route 66” in this box set. My favorite is the onde done by The Beatmasters. It’s 100% americana, just like the song itself.

Let me just skip to the final odd single: “Little 15”. Even the catalog number for this is different from the rest. Just “12Little15”, instead of the usual “Bong” numbers. There was a rumor this single was “only released in France” which is not true. It had a UK release, along several other European ones. It was the band that was not so keen in releasing it as a single, but went along with it. I agree it has null commercial potential, but a video was made and the most beautiful B-side of a 12″ is hidden here: Stjarna, which means “star” in Icelandic (and has cognates in other north germanic languages, such as Stjärna in Swedish). It is followed by another very odd song with also zero commercial appeal to the average DM fandom: Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Sonata Nº 14 In C#M “Moonlight Sonata”“. Rumor has it the band secretly recorded Alan just practicing this on the piano without telling him. As a way of excusing themselves, the song is rightfully credited on the liner notes like this: “performed by Alan Wilder”. Still, it’s the experimentation that is the secret of their success. That’s whyI love this single, both A and B sides.

You can order these and the previous 12″ box sets here. This is a limited run. You won’t find them on retail stores a couple of years from now.

By Posted on Posted in Life in General Tagged with ,

It’s no news that the entire world is undergoing some sort of crisis of democracy. It’s as if principles we adopted way back and have been polishing and upgrading ever since the Age of Enlightenment are being thrown out of the window at the speed of a piece of fake news being shared on social media. Some fundamental rights that we deemed absolutely unbreakable were now being bent. You could quote the “eternal vigilance” line. And I won’t dispute the world today faces challenges that were not there some 2 or 3 centuries ago. And in some sort of twisted seesaw of politics, people are being polarized against each other. But the rise of the “alt-right” (just a rebranding of what had been happening here in Germany circa 1920’s and 1930’s) is worrisome. The book “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt is the base of what I’m talking about here. If you haven’t read it (or don’t have time to), just watch this review. It’s somewhat based on American democracy, but it draws examples from everywhere and several periods in history. If democracy in the US is in danger, imagine countries with still young democratic periods like Brazil, Poland, Hungary…

I could make an ever-growing list of jabs and uppercuts democracy suffered in just a couple of years. But I’ll just name drop Brexit and Trump before moving to the current Brazilian president. You can all say all three were democratically chosen.  But all three had shady events surrounding them. Brexit, for exemple, in my opinion, is something you shouldn’t even put up for vote. It’s like having a referendum on bringing back slavery, ending marriage equality or human rights altogether. You just don’t. We’re not supposed to be going backwards. Yet we are.

Now, my home country is being governed by a dude who sold himself as an outsider, despite having been a congressman for nearly 30 years. He openly praises the military dictatorship the country freed itself from in 1985. Ironically, he had to retire form the army before he could suffer some severe punishment for insubordination. The reason? He was an active voice for a raise in the armed forces’ salaries and threatened to bomb away water reservoirs that serve Rio de Janeiro if his demands were not met (yes, you read that right, just plain terrorism). Between being punished in a first trial and appealing form this decision, he retired and back then it got swept under the rug as he first got elected as a city counselor in 1988. He defines himself as the voice of the right wing in Brazil and won, basically, because he antagonized against the left-wing Workers’ Party (who also has its big share of skeletons in the closet). But he is, in a way, a union leader for the military. Much like his biggest opponent, former presidente Luís Inácio Lula da Silva rose to power for being a union leader and founder of the Workers’ Party.

But that was 30 years ago. Fast forward to the beginning of this decade and he went from just local nut that Rio de Janeiro sent to the Congress every 4 years to some sort of troll which we fed and now we have to deal with. In 2013, there was a certain turmoil in Brazil as people started to realize the World Cup and the Olympics were NOT gonna leave “the legacy” politicians spoke so proudly of in their speeches. It started as protests against a raise in the bus fares in major cities, but it soon escalated to protests “against-all-of-what’s-going-on”. Without any centralized command, the Brazilian alt-right also surfed on these protests. The Workers’ Party government (now under president Dilma Rousseff) was caught short with its pants down and did too little, too late. She got reelected a year later in an election that never really ended. She won, but the Congress was no longer on her side. Along with a massive corruption scandal involving her party (but not her and not just her party), they came up with some technicality that didn’t even exist and ousted her in 2016 with hopes to also halt the investigation where it was. Too many politicians had been waking up with the police on their doors with arrest warrants. Her vice president, Michel Temer, took over, however, his political capital turned into ashes as he was also caught in a secret recording negotiating shush money to members of his party that were already in jail. He gave up any positive agenda in exchange of not being ousted himself. Pointless. He is also in jail right now, by the way, since he’s no longer president. So the country was drifting ashore these 4 years between the last election and this one. The price drop in commodities was not managed by anyone. The country starts to dwindle further down into economical crisis along with the political one. We have to blame someone. And we have to find a hero who will come and save us. Who will know how to take up these roles? Who is gonna walk in their shoes?

So this was the recipe: blame it all on the previous government. Demonize them. And sell yourself as the remedy for that. Adopt the most populist speech you can. Can you talk about economy, pension reform, tax reform, or human rights without sounding like the ignorant you are? No? No problem! A convenient stab on your bowels during the ONLY day in your campaign that you were not wearing a bullet proof vest will guarantee you won’t have to open your dirty mouth during the campaign or attend any debater have to speak to journalists. Add some fake news in a context where social media played a major role for the first time (yes, they were there before, but this time people didn’t bother with conventional media – their messiah was talking to them from the hospital bed directly to their phones on their hands). Communication only goes in one way. You don’t listen. They have to listen to you. And that’s how we got where we are.

This post is already too long, so I’m giving you a break for now. But we’ll resume on this topic sometime soon, you patriotic junkies.