macdermott's war song (project)

Jingo Karaoke
Multimedia Performance
We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do ...
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too!

It was 1878 when in the United States Edison patented the phonograph that later was developed into gramophone and was the most common device for playing recorded sound until the 1980s.
In the same year across the ocean the music-hall singer G. H. Macdermott (aka "the Great Macdermott") introduced in London Pavilion his song By Jingo (means By God in Old English).
This is one of the very first examples of modern propaganda since Macdermott was commissioned to change the public opinion in Britain with a popular song in the middle of the political crisis between the British Empire and Russia, after the war with Turkey in the Balkans and Caucasus.
The crisis ended with a diplomatic triumph of Britain's Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and after the song a politician from the opposition Laborist Party invented the term jingoism that now is used for describing "extreme chauvinism or nationalism marked especially by a belligerent foreign policy".
It is amazing how political life changed forever since audiovisual mass media and propaganda charged pop culture were invented and eventually became an intrinsic part of the public life. In 2008 exactly one hundred and thirty years after, we can celebrate an anniversary of audiovisual industry and jingoism, with Russia becoming again the world's Evil, with the US presidential campaign in which a remote war that can be seen as a perfect example of jingoism was described as "God's Plan" and the Blue Ray (probably the last hard copy media) becoming world standard.
To remind for all these events media artist Petko Dourmana invited in his Chain Reaction Pavilion everybody who wanted to sing Macdermott's war song By Jingo with a karaoke set that uses a New Edison-Style Cup Phonograph.
In the plastic cups used as recording media visitors got free beer after singing.
By Jingo Karaoke performance was presented from September 11-14th, 2008 at Macedonia Square in Skopje, Macedonia as part of Upgrade International

jayce salloum at canadian cultural centre, paris

Glasgow International Let's Get Lyrical Event

Glasgow International Let's Get Lyrical Event from GI Festival on Vimeo.

Tom Leonard on Language and social status

Hito Steyerl on Minorities

'Minorities are not primarily defined by their small number, but by their incompatibility with pre-existing categories of identity' from the Empty Center translated by John Southard

'The City' Constantine P. Cavafy (1910), translations

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,

find another city better than this one.

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong

and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,

I see the black ruins of my life, here,

where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.

This city will always pursue you. You will walk

the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,

will turn gray in these same houses.

You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:

there is no ship for you, there is no road.

As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

You tell yourself: I'll be gone
To some other land, some other sea,
To a city lovelier far than this
Could ever have been or hoped to be -
Where every step now tightens the noose:
A heart in a body buried and out of use:
How long, how long must I be here
Confined among these dreary purlieus
Of the common mind? Wherever now I look
Black ruins of my life rise into view.
So many years have I been here
Spending and squandering, and nothing gained.
There's no new land, my friend, no
New sea; for the city will follow you,
In the same streets you'll wander endlessly,
The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age,
In the same house go white at last -
The city is a cage.
No other places, always this
Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists
To take you from yourself.
Ah! don't you see
Just as you've ruined your life in this
One plot of ground you've ruined its worth
Everywhere now - over the whole earth?

Translated by Lawrence Durrell (in the novel Justine)

TEDxRamallah: Munir Fasheh-Occupation of Knowledge

The worst conquest is that of knowledge. It led to conquering diversity and pluralism in living by a modern superstition: the belief in a single universal path for knowing, learning, and progressing. Transforming ahaali (no synonym in English; the closest is 'people-in-community') into citizens has been instrumental in the conquest and disastrous to human communities. Whereas the basic relationship in the case of citizens is to a state and institutions, it is in the case of ahaali to one another, to a place, culture, and collective memory. Knowledge, learning, and religion of ahaali have been gradually replaced by institutional ones. Examples from Palestine and what happened in Cairo...