3 Ramos

I first heard Ramo Ramo in the early 1980s on an album by the Balkan Rhythm Jazz Band, a young, hip, happening and very American ensemble out of Chicago. I've been hunting for years for even a YouTube recording of the version I first heard, with no success  (here's a live performance from 1982 minus singers), but the search has been rewarding in any case because of the song itself.  Mirjana Lausevic,  in the introduction to her examination of Americans' affinity for Balkan music, Balkan Fascination: Creating an Alternative Music Culture in America (Oxford Univerisity Press, 2015), conveys a Yugoslavian perspective on what makes the song so special:

However, the biggest surprise of the evening was yet to come: "Ramo, Ramo, druže moj" ... It was the end of 1992 in New York, and within these walls covered with Balkan carpets and tapestries several hundred Americans were packed tightly, holding hands, dancing a circle dance while singing in Serbo-Croatian "Ramo, Ramo, druže moj."  I had a flashback to a time when I was little, spending the summer with my family on the Adriatic coast, in a syndicated (government-subsidized) vacation resort. We were dining outdoors on a concrete porch shaded by a grape vine. "Ramo, Ramo, druže moj" was the hit of the summer, played during every meal on the stereo, and then live during dinner.  I was six or seven at the time, and it was the first time I remember being deeply affected by a song.  I was very intrigued by the story behind the song, trying to understand who Ramo was and why the singer with the crying voice was so sad.  Much later I learned that the song had its origin in a Hindi film that was very popular in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s, which explains why it sounded so unusual to me.  Numerous local musicians and restaurant bands had their versions of the song, but how did "Ramo, Ramo..." make it to the States?  Why would Americans in New York more than twenty years later be singing, of all songs, "Ramo, Ramo, druže moj" in Serbo-Croatian? What kinds of images came in their minds when they heard the song?  Did they understand why the singer was so sad?

Here, an infinite number of Americans dance a čoček to the song played live by an uncredited band:

The history of the Serbian version of the song is traced more fully in Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora, by Carol Silverman  (Oxford University Press, 2011):

In the 1970s, Macedonian and Serbian Romani musicians embraced Indian-inspired melodies and songs, reflecting the growing diaspora consciousness of Roma.  In Macedonia there was a veritable craze for Indian culture; parents gave their children Indian names such as Rajiv and Indira, and one famous singer [Esma Redžepova] made pilgrimages to India... Movies from India were widely viewed by Roma (who could understand them because Hindi, like Romani, is related to Sanskrit), and movie tunes were turned into čočeks. ...  Muharem Serbezovski's Serbian song "Ramo Ramo" a tune inspired by an Indian film became a hit in the 1970s. Many versions were released in Yugoslavia. A Romani version appeared in Serbia/Kosovo in the 1970s as "Celo Dive Mangasa" (All Day We Beg)

The version that started it all in Yugoslavia in 1974:

Slobodan Ilić Boban has a more traditionally Serbian version but this one gives a flavor of what the Hindi inspiration might have sounded like:

http://lyricstranslate.com/en/ramo-druze-moj-ramo-my-friend.html#ixzz58QQKGl7c

Ramo, druže moj
Kad sam sreo druga svog
prijatelja jedinog
najsrecniji bese dan
jer ne bejah vise sam

Pesma nas je tesila
ljubav nam se smesila
ali vihor sudbine
od mene ga odvede

Ref.
Aj Ramo
Ramo, Ramo druze moj
Ramo, Ramo druze moj
da li cujes jecaj moj

U tami sad zivim sam
ko ugasen suncev plam
jer ti si otisao
bolji zivot nasao

Ali ipak nadam se
i zovem te vrati se
vrati mi se Ramo ti
sudbine smo iste mi

http://lyricstranslate.com/en/ramo-druze-moj-ramo-my-friend.html#ixzz58QQSTlF6

Ramo, my friend

When I met my friend

my only friend

it was the happiest day

because I wasn't alone anymore

A song consoled us

love laughed at us

but the destiny's whirlwind

took him away from me

Ref.

Aj Ramo

Ramo, Ramo my friend

Ramo, Ramo my friend

do you hear my sob

Now I live alone in the dark

like an extinguished flame of the sun

because you went away

and found a better life

But still I hope

and I'm asking you to return

return to me Ramo

we share the same destiny

~~~~~~~~~~

I don't know what to say about one writer's certainty that the lyrics are the first example in popular culture of relaxed Yugoslavian attitudes toward open homosexuality. It's certainly plausible.  In my experience the world is full of men who seem to think that sex is for women and love is for men.  But given the many references to "my friend" it does seem intended to be sung in any case in a spirit of deeply felt camaraderie.  This is true when performed by the many men who've tackled it and no less by the women.

Finally, as representative of the song's popularity outside of the Balkans, particularly in Turkey, an  instrumental version on buzuki by German born Orhan Osman:

Happy?

Do you ever see smiling, engaged youngish folks and think, what are they smiling about?  Was I ever like that?  Happy about nothing?  Not staring into the abyss?  Maybe I was.  Lightness of spirit, enthusiasm, jolliness, gameness, all seem sort of alien to me now.  But I think I was like that once.  Maybe twice.  It’s surprising to me that anyone can be in these times, but maybe it comes with youth.  If you’re thin and good looking and things are going ok… ok, be happy I guess.

It’s not just young people although they’re the ones the chasm feels the achiest about.  Happy people my age or older just look simple.  (Not really—although there’s an older couple – probably in their 70s I’d guess-- I frequently pass on my walk to the metro.  They’re just out on a morning constitutional I’ve gathered over the years.  They’re always smiling and holding hands as they walk – if not actually physically then at least sort of metaphysically in an unspoken clasp of digits.  As we approach, they both lock onto my eyeballs and give a nod and a silent but jovial “hi!”   I’ve grown to hate them.  (Not really—but I do think poorly of them in spite of myself.  I sometimes imagine that they are so unconsciously suffocated by each other that they involuntarily try to suck other humans into their toxic orbit in hopes of rescue.))

Public Storage

In News of the Weird this week, the New York Times on Tuesday announced the hiring of Quinn Norton as an editorial writer on the topic of technology (she would have written largely unsigned editorials in the paper's voice with perhaps an occasional op-ed)  and within hours announced her termination.

The reason for the rapid-fire about-face (is it a record of some kind?) had a familiar flavor: immediate outcry from the public over revealed 'homophobic', 'ableist' and 'racist' tweets as well as a habit of publicly referring to "weev" of the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer site among other unsavory types as a friend, and the surfacing of ambiguous themes in her journalism, exemplified by an article in which she referred to actual Nazi John Rabe as her "patron saint of moral complexity."

You are the jury.  Do you have enough information to convict?  I warn you the story as presented is luridly provocative.  Answers to the flood of questions raised immediately by it do not come rapidly on cursory skimmings.

The Times' track record hasn't been stellar of late, so reading Salon's account of the story, it was not difficult  to view the latest as of a piece with recent Trump mirroring and normalizing moves by the paper.  Moreover, where was the Times' reporting on Norton before she was hired?  How could they have missed what 5 minutes of surfing by the volunteer army of internet police had readily discovered?  But on further delving, the story would not be so easily tamed.

Norton's friendship with weev, by all accounts an avowed and unrepentant racist from the bowels of the internet, had its origin in her reporting and advocacy on his behalf in the context of his legal battles against AT&T and the Federal government for a bit of personally motivated hacktivism on weev's part to expose the corporation's cavalier treatment of its customers' personal information.  weev lost the government's criminal case against him and did prison time for it.

As for the Nazi, John Rabe, a Siemanns executive and Nazi Party leader in China in the 1930's before his reassignment to Germany for the duration of WWII,  Norton's piece was an examination of the significance of Rabe's role during the Sino-Japanese war in sheltering countless poor Nanjing residents with no means of escape by themselves from the brutal treatment of Japanese troops as the city was captured.  Rabe and a committee of prominent Westerners took advantage of Germany's alliance with Japan to negotiate recognition of a safety zone into which Nanjing residents who couldn't leave the besieged city otherwise could flee.  By his actions an estimated 200,000 were saved.  Moral complexity indeed.

In Norton's words:

Sometimes the world refuses to be simple enough to understand. 

For those among us who seem to thrive on killing ambiguity and nuance wherever we find it it could be easy to miss the point Norton makes at the end of her Rabe article, one which without a great deal of stretching could be applied to our own times:

For me there is only this in the story of John Rabe: there are no clear bad guys or good guys in humanity. There is just an uncomfortable pause, where you can let history crowd in on you. The best you can do is be quiet in the face of the terrible contradictions, and try to figure out what the next right thing is.

It's easy to miss but essential to note that the force of Norton's point depends entirely upon an appropriate horror at the object of Nazism.  Nazi redemption is not Norton's only concern.  In the same vein, I recommend her November piece on the responsibility of white people to remain engaged with racists-- to not abandon responsibility for the topic and leave it up to non-whites who may not have the luxury of a choice of whether to fight. 

If you're wondering what Nazis and white guilt have to do with technology, the binding factor is Norton's explorations of identity and privacy in the public domain of the internet where the context of one's self-expressions are frequently lost-- often purposefully if the comment taken out of context best suits an opponent's agenda.

The effort to contextualize Norton's words is well rewarded.  A TEDx talk she gave in 2010 on 'Privacy, Ephemerality and Self' took a couple of listens for me to appreciate, but the topic resonates with what transpired this week.

In the course of the talk, Norton reveals that some years ago, in a fit of pique, she deleted herself-- her posts, her accounts, access to her blogs-- from the internet in an effort to at least for a while reclaim some of the privacy she had yielded to a life chronicled online; an action she confesses she has never regretted.  The Quinn Norton we see today was therefore something of an un-invention and re-invention which was as she called it in the talk, 'doing the best equivalent I could to moving away and starting again.'

On Tuesday, in a series of tweets posted as news spread of her turnabout in fortune that day, Norton the technology thinker offered perspective on what had happened, referring specifically to criticism of discovered tweets of hers revealing familiarity with members of 4chan and Anonymous:

One more thing, about me, and anons, and so on. One of the tweets coming up was a conversation I specifically talked about in an article about context collapse: https://medium.com/message/context-collapse-architecture-and-plows-d23a0d2f7697 … And context collapse is what happened here tonight.

From the article linked to in the above:

We all know what context is in our lives. The same thing we do with our friends can be horrifying to think about doing with our bosses or families. This isn’t because we’re all massive hypocrites, it’s because context matters in culture. One of the major problems with online space is that the wrong people see us hanging out with our friends, and suddenly decontextualize our actions. This makes them wholly different and often unintended actions.  ... What I can’t control is if one party sees me talking to another and gets the wrong idea about what I mean and what kind of person I am. When trolls bounce around Twitter they play a baiting game. At its best, it’s a conversational art that exposes contradictions. At its worst, it’s stupid bullying. Most trolling lives somewhere in between, full of cues and references that make no sense to people who aren’t part of the conversation. Sometimes even the trolls forget this.

In the article, Norton, who like many Twitter users keeps lively, no-holds-barred conversations going in multiple contexts has given a prescient explanation of how some of her tweets, rough and tumble communication directed narrowly to ears fully equipped to handle them, could be quite conceivably interpreted out of context as slurs.  Are we careful with what we think we can glean from the fragments of others that we come across out there on the web?  It's a big responsibility but do we have the capacity to live up to it?

The internet is us.  It is not all of who we are, but everything that the internet knows about us is what we ourselves have put there. Are we happy with how we're perceived?  Are we perceived as we intend?  There's a glee in hanging people by their own words on the internet.  It's a mistake to think of this contact parlor game as justice.

It's sobering to think about the editorials we don't get to read because of how this episode played out.  Norton's thoughts from the center of the storm make me wonder what we've lost by silencing her voice on so prominent a national stage on topics that could still use her deep thought and interpretation:

You were powerful today. You changed at least one person's life, and if I'm honest, my family's too. It feels good to be powerful. But this power doesn't go away. It doesn't evaporate when you use it without thinking, or at the wrong person.

Regardless of how you feel about the incident and the writer at the heart of it, Norton's words of warning as she concludes her thoughts on the matter bear serious attention:

What I need is for you to see yourself as powerful, as people who can change the world. And I want you to think about how [you] wield that power.

Choose the targets of your power wisely. History is watching you.

ГШ (Glintshake): Мой новый стиль (My New Style)

Damn!  From a November 2017 show at Kex Hostel in Reykjavik, courtesy of KEXP Radio, Seattle:

Мой новый стиль высок —
Не делать ничего,
Показывать не туда,
Бить молотом в танцпол.

Несистемный внешний вид,
Децентрализованный дэнс,
Запредельный выход в свет,
Нелинейный уход в лес.

Все, что правда для меня, для тебя неправда
Все, что правда для тебя, для меня неправда

Самоконтроль — не для меня.
Дикие вопли, скрежет стекла.
Стелется дым на сотни миль,
Черное знамя, мой новый стиль.

Мой стиль — кнут, бич.
Вокруг света на кочерге.
Посланник в магазин.
Танец голубя на столе.

Дом латекса и кнута.
Живем так, чтоб трещали швы,
Наружу чтобы всё,
Дискотека всея руси.

Все, что правда для меня, для тебя неправда
Все, что правда для тебя, для меня неправда

В диких полях, в пене морей,
В желтых саваннах тянется день,
Кружатся в такт пена и пыль,
Страшная тайна — мой новый стиль.

~~~~~~~~~~

(Translation adapted from Google Translate and enough knowledge of Russian to be dangerous. As always corrections are welcome.)

My new style is high --

Don't try to say it's not there

Beat a hammer on the dance floor

Unsystematic appearance

Decentralized dance

Beyond the exit,

Nonlinear egress to the forest

All that for me is true is not true for you

All that is true for you for me is not true

Self-control is not for me.

Wild yelling, gnashing of glass.

Smoke for hundreds of miles,

Black banner, my new style.

My style is a crop, a whip.

Around the world in a mob.

The messenger to the store.

The pigeon-dance on the table.

House of latex and whip.

We live so that seams are cracked,

Outside of it all,

all of Russia is a discotheque.

All that for me is true is not true for you

All that is true for you for me is not true

In the wild fields, in the foam of the seas,

In the yellow savannah, the day stretches,

Foam and dust whirl around in time,

A terrible secret is my new style.

~~~~~~~~~~

Extra shook: Quarter to Five (from the same life-changing show):