Hallaw...
Googling 'Konfused Kid', i eyeballed when i saw the NY Times piece, nobody told me about it, so i had an extra kick out of finding out myself, people started congratulating me, i read it and i bascially had my rocks off...then i read the other people's turf.
can't tell u i didn't feel a little out of place, what i wrote was basically a spontaneous piece in which i left out any political thoughts and conceptions aside -i especially liked NAJMA's piece - which juxtaposes natrual phenomena, people's tendency to intertwine that with political crap inside an emotional elections frame.
RIVERBEND did her usual. To me, RIVERBEND always represented a serious, respectable news channel (MBC, opposed to say, myself's CBM ; technically, these people beat me hands down, but come again - my viewpoint represented the non-political citizen catching up the proverbial late bus, i better leave the more politically-inclined stuff to the guys in the know. My whole point was to present the world with a no-holds-barred look upon youths in Iraq.
So it has been out in the open, can't be anything other than Official Ruin for this country, as the elections failed --- suppose it gets redone, Shia would get pissed off and here we are headed locked-on the pits of failure ; the abyss of denial ; the catacombs of civil war awaits and the Goru downstairs is the inexplicable Sectavarium. What better way to meet all that than wtih a non-bullshitting yellow smile that half-says 'i knew it all along'
As i inserted my finger into Barney's purple asshole, i recall precisely that - a Barneylike sense of undeniable shitstained joy.
As i am writing this, the purple ink has not yet dried, and as i look down upon it all i can look back is : 'Ignorance is a bliss'
Life was much more easier when i didn't give a feces who ruled the country, but our own government of Ira(n/q - pick one) started a series of practical jokes that crossed over the boundary to the point that it couldn't be anymore ignored, so i had to vote in the hope that something's gotta give.
Today the MURAAM people (the organizaiton consisting of 30-something coalitions that boycotted the elections results, practically everyone but the kurds and the winning triple-5) went out in the streets in demonstrations, i preferred to stay in a much more blissful dreamscape and woke up at 3 PM, i even missed Friday's Prayer (with sadness, i must say) and headed straight towards my ignorant acoustic, earning 'Fade To Black' gives me a splinter of blackened comfort in these Hakim-blessed days.
I miss Totalitarian TV-days a lot, in these days, the people stopped trying to do anything about their fate and kept laughing at themselves, Saddam was a demi-god and the simple rules that u had to follow in order to live in his divinity's holy kingdom was as clear as a pimple in fat lady's derriere. Shout in demonstrations, Deny and curse US in TV investigations, Na3am Na3am Na3am, Lil Qa'id Saddam Hussein. Sometimes when Iraqi TV showed us 3-hour meetings of God Saddam meeting the army officers and have us listen to each and every one give out the undying loyalty scripture sealed and signed, it was one big joke - sometimes it was unbearably funny seeing how such a large mass of people who took themselves so seriously can be reduced to smithering asskissers, i mean, the 'Afya' videoclip, when i first heard this (first day of war - i think) i burst out laughing! HOW COULD THE SINGER GET AWAY WITH THATTT?
You see, 'Afya' is a somewhat slang word that Saddam used in these 3-hour meetings, by default, 'Afya' is usually said by a compassionate elder to a promising child who's helped the old lady cross the street, when each of these hypocritical hypermoustached dudes would finish his worship, the God would interrupt whatever he was doing, usually smoking a big Castro cigar and murmur a cold 'Afya' to him, (legend has it that one Afya meant a million, two meant 2 millions and so forth...i wonder what good old Abu El Laithan would say wanted to give out a 1/2 mil) 'Afya but return 500' or probably a fart-like 'Af'
so anyway one day the radio comes alive with a tribal song named 'Afya' that as was as much sad as it was funny.
AHhhhh, sweet Black Humor, the last defense of the lazyboy who wouldn't give a shit.
Every cynic is actually a sensitive motherfucker who is afraid of his sentimentality and can't really bare to show it.
it seems everybody's who's running for elections these days is a secret heavy metal devotee, aside from the infamous Hakim headbanging incident widely circulated in mobile phones, there's 618's own crazydude :
Q/ Why does the cameraman keep shaking the camera violently in Adnan Dulaymi's speeches?
A/ To keep the picture in sync with Adnan's headbanging.
how about some more of these election jokes ?
A deaf & dumb was asked to whom he would vote for in the coming elections, he bent over three times.
(it is quite helpful to know that in Iraqi, a 5 is an asshole)
Yeah Whatever.....
On a more cheery note, I failed 1 lesson. We celebrated that by going to a kubbah restaurant and having our bellies full of one gaint kubba that could've been one of the Winged Bull's Balls.
My giving up faith in this country is re-vised these days, at least now i can say I TRIED.
i REALLY broke up with my ex-girl and have finally ended 18 months of torture, pain and invisbile love and affection.
Free again.
Now i can honestly feel what these men do when they kill ther wives. She was a pain in the ass, if i stopped worshipping her for a single second she's flip out her Bazooka mouth and shoves all sorts of I Hate You-s down my throat.
we broke up repetitiously, it reached a point that in the last week we broke up twice one day.
i don't know why i kept returning to her, she was my safety net in a manner of speaking but now i made a vow never ever.
but now i am free again - bring out the honies!
BACHELOR, 20, COLLEGE STUDENT. HANDSOME BUT DARK, PREFERS BRUNETTES. LONG LEGS A MUST, SHORT HAIR PREFERRED.
INTELLIGENT, SUAVE/VULGAR OK, SENSITIVE, UNDERSTANDING, RELIGIOUS IN A WAY.
SPANKING TENDENCY A PLUS.
Friday, December 23, 2005
Monday, December 12, 2005
Biography of the fictional band The ABBiS
HI THIS IS MY NEW POST NUMBER 2, please read post number 1 (Dusty Blogspot) BEFORE THIS.....
, all artwork is by Anarki13 (gracious thanks)
THE ABBIS
When it's all said and done, The Abbis were the first English-speaking Arab band to gain international recognition, paving the way for the likes of the first signs of what will be later called the Middle Eastern Heavy Metal (MDEHM - pronounced Medhem) in which Post-War Iraqi heavy metal played a great deal. By fusing the disparate genres of traditional Middle Eastern music and contemporary rock/metal sounds the band crafted an original style only hinted at previously, in the course of four years, they rose from semi-obscure alienated Iraqi kids into superstars of considerable status in the Arab world, only to fall too quickly as they are torn by intra-band frictions, widespread disdain in their Arab homeland and spanking scandals, their short legacy which is comprised of three official albums, is likely to be hugely influential for years to come.
Legend has it that roots of the band are traced back as early as 2005, where Abbas Khudur and Karrar Subhi were joking around on a college picnic, where they first wore their patented 'Wigs' schtick. The two would continue to jam together throughout their college years, however at these tough times of life in Iraq music was generally a spare time habit and a minor distraction from life's
ongoing necessities - the two went their separate ways after college but still maintained contact in one form or another.
By June 2008, in a convention held at Amman, Khudur stumbled by mistake upon his old jamming partner, Kurdish Mohanad Hadi who was playing for an amateur- solo guitarist bill at a Jordanian restaurant/casino at the time, an ambitious and gifted classically-focused guitarist, Khudur saw in him the courage and imagination which would fuel their co-written songs later. It was somewhat difficult for Khudur, an engineer and Mohanad, a doctor, to leave their carriers hanging by the noose whilst they pursued daydreams...but lord has mysterious ways, back in Iraq, they reunited with friends Alaa Samaka (bass) and Abdalla Anwar (drums) and started jamming intensely part-time after working hours in an abandoned garage in Karrada.
Slowly and uncertainly, the sluggish after-hours of practice began to pay due, as the band progressed into serious stuff, and wowing what little audience for rock songs with a rendition of Metallica's 'The Wait' as backup band for AccrasscidA, the country's leading (and only) heavy band. Convinced of having a winner on their hands, the band started looking for a singer.
after several unsatisfactory lineups, what could only be described as a miraculous stroke of fate that the band should inexplicably get a call from longtimenosee colleague Subhi, offering his services to the band, temporarily, as he has to relocate to London where he will work for an exporting company one year later. After hearing him sing, the band was mollified and awed, and he was taken in immediately.
In 2009, the band's first album 'Khosh Teez', was released to a virtually nonexistent market. it was a weird mixture of Khudur's eastern-influenced songwriting, Hadi's classical undertones and general heavy metal cliches that sparked some attention with a lockstep bedouin-rocker, 'What Is There and What Is Not There (Shako Mako)'. Luck played a great amount in this particular story, as the song was heard by Frank Ottuler, a representative of an upstarting recording company in Germany, home to some of metal's unheard of niches. the song was re-released to slightly better airplay, reaching #179 on the Mediterranen Metal Charts.
Following a mysterious, sulky video of 'Shakomako' and a lukewarm reception from worldwide audiences, US media capitulated on the band, writing stories which often strategically places them as models for a newborn democracy in Iraqi soil. The band's reaction was reclusion, working silently on their follow-up album, 'Haji Metal'.
Touring throughout Europe with the slime of the turbulent nu-metal scene relentlessly throughout the years, the hungry, raw energy of their exhaustion was directly plugged in the amps for this album. Seeing that the band yet has to dream of international recognition, the band scaled back their ambition to native middle eastern territory, depending on the US-media outlets to solidify their fragile star power. Signing up for EMI Arabia, and releasing the album 'Haji Metal', the band made history, as the first single from the new album 'Abo John' stormed the charts and sparked a revelation, followed by a slew of popular singles that even reached out toward Europe, being recognized not as novelty art famous because of its Iraqi nationality but for actual radio time : 'Palm Tree Date' dissected Boy/Girl dilemmas in Iraq, 'BiSK/BiSHK' a discussion of Sunni/Shi'ite politics in Iraq, and more importantly 'Mr. G' which discussed gender wars and chicken slaughter in Iraq.
The band's subject matter was new and original, its presentation to the world clever and ambiguous, depending equally on intelligent videos and magical Arabian influences, the band weaved a somewhat original heavy-oriental theme, the band's notoriety increased as bandmembers started giving
outspoken, outlandish comments on national television, to the recurring disdain from such icons as Ilham El Madfai, once on an interview, the band's guitarist Khudur said :
"We chose distorted guitars and the rock'n'roll, wholly American instruments to express our emotions not only because it has the most powerful devices to encapsulate cathartic bliss in not-necessarily vulgar terms in a way that traditional Arabic music simply, cannot, and not only because we believe that in order to infiltrate a system, one must play the fool then start to rot from within, but also because it's admittedly cool. We are very conscious of our image and what it proclaims in the wave of secularism - we are anti-America, but we are also anti-two-slut commercial whores like Haida Wahli'. he was the first performer to swear on a live interview.
Following a successful tour that lasted much of 2010, Subhi started complaining from Khudur's antics, calling him a dictator and a vengeful crusher of people's ideas - to which Khalid retorted by exposing Dohi's reluctance to continue in their mission and calling him a 'snooze'. Tensions between the band reached a point as the recording sessions for their legendary 2011 album 'People Of The Sand' a major leap forward in artistic vision, thematic control and treatment of subject matter - as their mix of influences weave its multi-part way through the album's 70 minutes, almost single-handedly responsible for the popularity of bands like AccrasscidA later in the West. 'Sad Sad Saddam', 'Melodrama' and the title track all proved huge cornerstones for all the Oriental Metal that followed afterwards. shortly afterwards the tour, Khudur and Subhi announced in a conference that there will be no more Abbis, stating with a smile that their 'mission is done.'
Khalid founded the Fire In The Wood association and released a couple of unpopular solo albums, he made money making documentaries and finally joining a TV station in Germany as part-time director, his works are collected in the anthology 'The Abbis : Fad Tifo Waghaf - Chix, Dix and Handbreak'
a religious duet with Sami Yusuf, though, proved to retain some of the band's credibility, as they performed a live version of 'Fils Take aWay!' as a short reunion in 2016.
Follow The Wayward, Subhi's solo album garnered little attention and after its premature death in 2015, the talented vocalist returned to his previous job as a computer engineer.
Hadi was the only ABBi who kept the flame, joining Ilham El Madfai's backup band and at last shot to reclusive stardom as 'Flamboyant Titty Wanker' in the classic 2018 film 'Sheikh Mahshi'.
Little more has been heard from them, but as the years progress, their influence can be heard on countless records that is likely to enliven their vision of laconic proportions for years more.
1. F.T.W. (Khaudur/Subhi/Anarki13) - 4:02
2. Hussein (Khudur/Subhi//Abd El Fatah) - 6:11
3. The Joys of Spanking Kaheel (Khudur) - 2:45
4. BiSK / BiSHK (Khudur/Hadi) - 3:36
5. Waghaf's Song (Khudur/Subhi/Anwar) - 4:58
6. American Haji (Anwar/Hadi) - 3:20
7. Independent Dependent (Khudur/Subhi/Fa'iq) - 4:20
8. My Deity (Khudur/Hadi) - 3:30
9. People Of The Sand (Subhi/Khalid) 6:23
10. Rami (Khudur/Subhi/Hadi/Samaka) - 5:30
11. Mr. G (Khudur/Hadi/Anwar) - 4:21
12. Bandpass (Subhi) - 3:00
13. Your Homemade Lovesongs (Khudur/Hadi) - 4:20
14. Alienation (Khuddur/Subhi/Hadi/Anwar) - 7:01
ABBAS KHUDUR
Rhythm guitarist and songwriter of the Iraqi Heavy Metal band The Abbis, Abbas Khudur was a misunderstood identity which impinged vital tones in Arabrock music.
Born in Baghdad, to a small family - he exhibited signs of a high knowledge aptitude early since he was just six - learning to read/write before going to primary school and learning all the world's capitals, he was also a scrawny, socially awkward and sensitive genius who couldn't really blend in with the kids all around. By the age of 15, he started listening to pop music like many of his peers, eventually switching to hip-hop and finally he discovered heavy metal. The discovery was enormous as he finally found methods to express 'all sorts of devils' in a way he always wanted. His alienation urged him to perform a number of crowd-pleasing antics, the first of which -
writing a dirty word in a class quiz - almost got him suspended. this pattern of non-conforming to authority continued in all his forthcoming life, by the age of 19 Khalid took guitar lessons and progressed through them, he also entered the legendary Nahrain University where The Abbis was first conceived. By then, Khudur has engineered his quiet observations on life into a loose theory for which he coined the term 'FTW', and by which it was interpreted by the public. The philosophical aspects of the FTW movements lies undercurrent in all Abbis albums, FTW can be explained as in general a collection of ideas that borrows as much as can be learned from the depression-soaked, cynical half-eye adolescence culture of the West and remarry it with a more spiritual, religion-based Eastern air, often presenting the latter as a solution to the former, ghosts of everyday dilemmas as inferiority, need to be wanted or especially sexual demons are widely present too. However, none of this is first apparent upon first inspection of the band's lyrical output, meaningfulness of the band's songs only happens when u put the words to the music, a classic Chris Cornell technique.
When The Abbis took off after releasing the classic 'Haji Metal', Khudur seized the moment to steal as much of the limelight as he can, appearing vigorously in several TV shows and interviews where he gave disconnected, unorthodox interviews, he was at times nice and intellectual, others sardonic and rude. Often poised as the menacing, unpredictable part of The Abbis as opposed to Hadi's friendly, emotional music and Dohi's equally bright overtures, Khalid also became an unlikely sex symbol due to his mysterious, intellectual darkness. As a string of Khudur-Hadi hits flooded the Arab charts in the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, one of which 'Mr. G' sparked a controversy upon its dissipation of the a touchy subject as gender wars in Arabian settings, although the song was anti-homosexuality, it wasn't too clear for some people, who were the same people who objected to 'Hussein' citing its disrespect for the holy figure, after which Khudur had to unravel that it was really about Saddam Hussein, with disappointment 'I wanted it to last just a little bit more'.
Khudur had several girlfriends, but in 2012 he married his long-term and first girlfriend Muna Kelo, only to get divorced two months later, he married M. Fish two years later, and had two kids from her.
after The Abbis's disband, Khudur announced that he would explore his unfed directorial talents and started shooting commercials for restaurants on the condition that he be a director of them. In July 2, 2014, a big scandal eschewed as lewd photos of the star violently spanking an unidentified person spread over the Internet. Khudur never denied his identity, saying 'I did something wrong and I am punished for it, it is the mashee2a of Allah. It is my fault, though, I knew I should never have walked near that Jooj'. - the line, 'Never should've walked near that Jooj', was actually a cryptic wording in one of The Abbis' most overanalyzed songs 'The Joys Of Span-King Al Kaheel'. Many people insist that Jooj is the name of an obscure tavern in Bataween. He was severly looked down upon in the Arab world from here on, forcing him to relocate to shooting small-time projects for German television.
The Abbis remained immensely popular, so much that the band reunited for a short interval with multi-selling Sami Yusuf and performing some of their less flamboyant repertoire in a conservative attitude. The change didn't convince some people though, as he was killed days later after an unexpected visit in his homeland.
, all artwork is by Anarki13 (gracious thanks)
THE ABBIS
When it's all said and done, The Abbis were the first English-speaking Arab band to gain international recognition, paving the way for the likes of the first signs of what will be later called the Middle Eastern Heavy Metal (MDEHM - pronounced Medhem) in which Post-War Iraqi heavy metal played a great deal. By fusing the disparate genres of traditional Middle Eastern music and contemporary rock/metal sounds the band crafted an original style only hinted at previously, in the course of four years, they rose from semi-obscure alienated Iraqi kids into superstars of considerable status in the Arab world, only to fall too quickly as they are torn by intra-band frictions, widespread disdain in their Arab homeland and spanking scandals, their short legacy which is comprised of three official albums, is likely to be hugely influential for years to come.
Legend has it that roots of the band are traced back as early as 2005, where Abbas Khudur and Karrar Subhi were joking around on a college picnic, where they first wore their patented 'Wigs' schtick. The two would continue to jam together throughout their college years, however at these tough times of life in Iraq music was generally a spare time habit and a minor distraction from life's
ongoing necessities - the two went their separate ways after college but still maintained contact in one form or another.
By June 2008, in a convention held at Amman, Khudur stumbled by mistake upon his old jamming partner, Kurdish Mohanad Hadi who was playing for an amateur- solo guitarist bill at a Jordanian restaurant/casino at the time, an ambitious and gifted classically-focused guitarist, Khudur saw in him the courage and imagination which would fuel their co-written songs later. It was somewhat difficult for Khudur, an engineer and Mohanad, a doctor, to leave their carriers hanging by the noose whilst they pursued daydreams...but lord has mysterious ways, back in Iraq, they reunited with friends Alaa Samaka (bass) and Abdalla Anwar (drums) and started jamming intensely part-time after working hours in an abandoned garage in Karrada.
Slowly and uncertainly, the sluggish after-hours of practice began to pay due, as the band progressed into serious stuff, and wowing what little audience for rock songs with a rendition of Metallica's 'The Wait' as backup band for AccrasscidA, the country's leading (and only) heavy band. Convinced of having a winner on their hands, the band started looking for a singer.
after several unsatisfactory lineups, what could only be described as a miraculous stroke of fate that the band should inexplicably get a call from longtimenosee colleague Subhi, offering his services to the band, temporarily, as he has to relocate to London where he will work for an exporting company one year later. After hearing him sing, the band was mollified and awed, and he was taken in immediately.
In 2009, the band's first album 'Khosh Teez', was released to a virtually nonexistent market. it was a weird mixture of Khudur's eastern-influenced songwriting, Hadi's classical undertones and general heavy metal cliches that sparked some attention with a lockstep bedouin-rocker, 'What Is There and What Is Not There (Shako Mako)'. Luck played a great amount in this particular story, as the song was heard by Frank Ottuler, a representative of an upstarting recording company in Germany, home to some of metal's unheard of niches. the song was re-released to slightly better airplay, reaching #179 on the Mediterranen Metal Charts.
Following a mysterious, sulky video of 'Shakomako' and a lukewarm reception from worldwide audiences, US media capitulated on the band, writing stories which often strategically places them as models for a newborn democracy in Iraqi soil. The band's reaction was reclusion, working silently on their follow-up album, 'Haji Metal'.
Touring throughout Europe with the slime of the turbulent nu-metal scene relentlessly throughout the years, the hungry, raw energy of their exhaustion was directly plugged in the amps for this album. Seeing that the band yet has to dream of international recognition, the band scaled back their ambition to native middle eastern territory, depending on the US-media outlets to solidify their fragile star power. Signing up for EMI Arabia, and releasing the album 'Haji Metal', the band made history, as the first single from the new album 'Abo John' stormed the charts and sparked a revelation, followed by a slew of popular singles that even reached out toward Europe, being recognized not as novelty art famous because of its Iraqi nationality but for actual radio time : 'Palm Tree Date' dissected Boy/Girl dilemmas in Iraq, 'BiSK/BiSHK' a discussion of Sunni/Shi'ite politics in Iraq, and more importantly 'Mr. G' which discussed gender wars and chicken slaughter in Iraq.
The band's subject matter was new and original, its presentation to the world clever and ambiguous, depending equally on intelligent videos and magical Arabian influences, the band weaved a somewhat original heavy-oriental theme, the band's notoriety increased as bandmembers started giving
outspoken, outlandish comments on national television, to the recurring disdain from such icons as Ilham El Madfai, once on an interview, the band's guitarist Khudur said :
"We chose distorted guitars and the rock'n'roll, wholly American instruments to express our emotions not only because it has the most powerful devices to encapsulate cathartic bliss in not-necessarily vulgar terms in a way that traditional Arabic music simply, cannot, and not only because we believe that in order to infiltrate a system, one must play the fool then start to rot from within, but also because it's admittedly cool. We are very conscious of our image and what it proclaims in the wave of secularism - we are anti-America, but we are also anti-two-slut commercial whores like Haida Wahli'. he was the first performer to swear on a live interview.
Following a successful tour that lasted much of 2010, Subhi started complaining from Khudur's antics, calling him a dictator and a vengeful crusher of people's ideas - to which Khalid retorted by exposing Dohi's reluctance to continue in their mission and calling him a 'snooze'. Tensions between the band reached a point as the recording sessions for their legendary 2011 album 'People Of The Sand' a major leap forward in artistic vision, thematic control and treatment of subject matter - as their mix of influences weave its multi-part way through the album's 70 minutes, almost single-handedly responsible for the popularity of bands like AccrasscidA later in the West. 'Sad Sad Saddam', 'Melodrama' and the title track all proved huge cornerstones for all the Oriental Metal that followed afterwards. shortly afterwards the tour, Khudur and Subhi announced in a conference that there will be no more Abbis, stating with a smile that their 'mission is done.'
Khalid founded the Fire In The Wood association and released a couple of unpopular solo albums, he made money making documentaries and finally joining a TV station in Germany as part-time director, his works are collected in the anthology 'The Abbis : Fad Tifo Waghaf - Chix, Dix and Handbreak'
a religious duet with Sami Yusuf, though, proved to retain some of the band's credibility, as they performed a live version of 'Fils Take aWay!' as a short reunion in 2016.
Follow The Wayward, Subhi's solo album garnered little attention and after its premature death in 2015, the talented vocalist returned to his previous job as a computer engineer.
Hadi was the only ABBi who kept the flame, joining Ilham El Madfai's backup band and at last shot to reclusive stardom as 'Flamboyant Titty Wanker' in the classic 2018 film 'Sheikh Mahshi'.
Little more has been heard from them, but as the years progress, their influence can be heard on countless records that is likely to enliven their vision of laconic proportions for years more.
1. F.T.W. (Khaudur/Subhi/Anarki13) - 4:02
2. Hussein (Khudur/Subhi//Abd El Fatah) - 6:11
3. The Joys of Spanking Kaheel (Khudur) - 2:45
4. BiSK / BiSHK (Khudur/Hadi) - 3:36
5. Waghaf's Song (Khudur/Subhi/Anwar) - 4:58
6. American Haji (Anwar/Hadi) - 3:20
7. Independent Dependent (Khudur/Subhi/Fa'iq) - 4:20
8. My Deity (Khudur/Hadi) - 3:30
9. People Of The Sand (Subhi/Khalid) 6:23
10. Rami (Khudur/Subhi/Hadi/Samaka) - 5:30
11. Mr. G (Khudur/Hadi/Anwar) - 4:21
12. Bandpass (Subhi) - 3:00
13. Your Homemade Lovesongs (Khudur/Hadi) - 4:20
14. Alienation (Khuddur/Subhi/Hadi/Anwar) - 7:01
ABBAS KHUDUR
Rhythm guitarist and songwriter of the Iraqi Heavy Metal band The Abbis, Abbas Khudur was a misunderstood identity which impinged vital tones in Arabrock music.
Born in Baghdad, to a small family - he exhibited signs of a high knowledge aptitude early since he was just six - learning to read/write before going to primary school and learning all the world's capitals, he was also a scrawny, socially awkward and sensitive genius who couldn't really blend in with the kids all around. By the age of 15, he started listening to pop music like many of his peers, eventually switching to hip-hop and finally he discovered heavy metal. The discovery was enormous as he finally found methods to express 'all sorts of devils' in a way he always wanted. His alienation urged him to perform a number of crowd-pleasing antics, the first of which -
writing a dirty word in a class quiz - almost got him suspended. this pattern of non-conforming to authority continued in all his forthcoming life, by the age of 19 Khalid took guitar lessons and progressed through them, he also entered the legendary Nahrain University where The Abbis was first conceived. By then, Khudur has engineered his quiet observations on life into a loose theory for which he coined the term 'FTW', and by which it was interpreted by the public. The philosophical aspects of the FTW movements lies undercurrent in all Abbis albums, FTW can be explained as in general a collection of ideas that borrows as much as can be learned from the depression-soaked, cynical half-eye adolescence culture of the West and remarry it with a more spiritual, religion-based Eastern air, often presenting the latter as a solution to the former, ghosts of everyday dilemmas as inferiority, need to be wanted or especially sexual demons are widely present too. However, none of this is first apparent upon first inspection of the band's lyrical output, meaningfulness of the band's songs only happens when u put the words to the music, a classic Chris Cornell technique.
When The Abbis took off after releasing the classic 'Haji Metal', Khudur seized the moment to steal as much of the limelight as he can, appearing vigorously in several TV shows and interviews where he gave disconnected, unorthodox interviews, he was at times nice and intellectual, others sardonic and rude. Often poised as the menacing, unpredictable part of The Abbis as opposed to Hadi's friendly, emotional music and Dohi's equally bright overtures, Khalid also became an unlikely sex symbol due to his mysterious, intellectual darkness. As a string of Khudur-Hadi hits flooded the Arab charts in the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, one of which 'Mr. G' sparked a controversy upon its dissipation of the a touchy subject as gender wars in Arabian settings, although the song was anti-homosexuality, it wasn't too clear for some people, who were the same people who objected to 'Hussein' citing its disrespect for the holy figure, after which Khudur had to unravel that it was really about Saddam Hussein, with disappointment 'I wanted it to last just a little bit more'.
Khudur had several girlfriends, but in 2012 he married his long-term and first girlfriend Muna Kelo, only to get divorced two months later, he married M. Fish two years later, and had two kids from her.
after The Abbis's disband, Khudur announced that he would explore his unfed directorial talents and started shooting commercials for restaurants on the condition that he be a director of them. In July 2, 2014, a big scandal eschewed as lewd photos of the star violently spanking an unidentified person spread over the Internet. Khudur never denied his identity, saying 'I did something wrong and I am punished for it, it is the mashee2a of Allah. It is my fault, though, I knew I should never have walked near that Jooj'. - the line, 'Never should've walked near that Jooj', was actually a cryptic wording in one of The Abbis' most overanalyzed songs 'The Joys Of Span-King Al Kaheel'. Many people insist that Jooj is the name of an obscure tavern in Bataween. He was severly looked down upon in the Arab world from here on, forcing him to relocate to shooting small-time projects for German television.
The Abbis remained immensely popular, so much that the band reunited for a short interval with multi-selling Sami Yusuf and performing some of their less flamboyant repertoire in a conservative attitude. The change didn't convince some people though, as he was killed days later after an unexpected visit in his homeland.
Dusty Blogspot
Hyuh...
so much has happened during my absence...apologies to my fans....stereotypical absence crap...exams..busy/lazy depending on who u r, anyways....to sum it up.
i'm back.
this absence was just what i needed to fuel up a declining creativity;
depsite my reluctance to comment anywhere nor indicate in any way that i am still around, which i was not, i kept a half-eye on the comings and goings of the blogosphere...with Emigre's burnout, the IraqBlogCount has been moderated by Hassan Average and Najma, i find this ratifiying in many ways, i really don't know that much about Emigre, but i feel that a guy with the ambition, desire and obsession of blogging as Hassan could be the only one fit for moderating such a blog, even better than the hailed Emigre, wasn't Hassan the guy who wrote the short-short history of Iraqi Bloggers start to finish? so there u have it. I find the site in good hands and i am sure it will be going for the better, my only gripes with it is that it is supposed to be neutral towards all bloggers but it treats some with more concern than one might like - for instance the 'Carnival Of The Relatives' thingies which only serve as advertising for people only related to a moderator by blood - these things are fine, but not as posts on the main page, post it on ur blog, whoever u are. Secondly, a refining of the blog list must be in order, too many blogs have been neglected for a long time, they should be arranged in terms of proposed popularity.
Good luck...
Some new blogs have popped up, Iraqi Rebel floored me, this guy looks so much like me, kudos to u, whoever u are....his last post is the jewel of cathratic tantrums....keep an eye on him...probably the best thing out there at the mo, i'm so tired of all the usual melodrama, Anarki13's going nowhere, Truth's getting old, we need something new people!mmmkkkkayyyyyyy....
What i've been so busy doing these days, is the following (arranged by date):
1. Department CD
2. Exams
3. Getting To Know Anarki13's 'Guitarbuddies'
DEPARTMENT CD
Last year, i collected all the pictures taken by our departement, every single photograph taken by a colleague during the year, added an MP3 for evey person based on his request, and did a simple-but-tasty slideshow showcasing every single person with his name/pic/preparatoryschool/what u like/what u hate questionnare etc etc...the concept was simple but original, and it was hailed at its time as a masterpiece of design and vision.This year, i decided to do a follow-up to the CD, being a true artist, i tried not to repeat myself - that which the green first graders gratitiuosly did for me - imitation is the highest form of flattery, remember, they copied my CD to the last detail, even such bad jokes as HANTOOSH : Socks & Software (theirs was Pizza & Software), a Macromedia FLASH intro and a hide & seek maze of subfolders that included hidden files...In February 2005, a massive strike flamed within my university, based on an unjust law legislated by the univeristy board to raise the minimum average requirement to enter M Sc. studies from 65% to 75%, the strike lasted almost a week and was covered by several media stations. My first idea was to do a fake news agency and cover the strike, as we did this, I rediscovered a long-lost dream of becoming a director, along with a handful of carefully picked ideas - some old, some came within working -, and we used a SONY handheld camera to finally achieve a complete 7 o'clock news episode, featuring a mock-up of a News Studio (Our dept. hall), and three news pieces, the aforementioned strike ; a bitchhouse raid and finally a review of the classroom ancedotes for the year presented in the Egyptian Sports Analyst (Salih Wahish) format, the concept slowly grew and almost swallowed us whole : We did an obligatory President-meets-veterans piece at the beginning, 7 Television commercials (which were later hailed as the most entertaining parts) for products ranging from VIAGRA to KENKO (Prominent Chinese scientific calculator in college) to even advertisesments for programs produced by our fake network - a hit-show (Al Jarboo3 Wal Mar2a) and a documentary, u name it....i had trouble finding a female reporter but eventually i landed the deal.Aside from this, I shot a FPS-game, a music video for a fake rock band 'THE ABBiS' amongst too many other things to mention, all in all, the project took six months to complete but thankfully I got the deserved recognition, I'm even thinking of showing it to some TV station, say what?here's some photos, as well as a biography of THE ABBiS themselves :
2. Exams
Fucked up one out of seven this time, damn the ROOT LOCUS to all eternity!
3. I will talk about this later.
Well, with elections less than four days ahead, i guess i have to talk about it, only this time, i don't feel it's a chore, unforunately it's been on my mind more than it has to be lately, shweet! this blogging stuff has turned me on to politics, u can only compare this recent taxi driver conversation with the one i posted on my very first entry :
Taking Highway Mohammed Al Qasim as a metaphor for life, A taxi driver is a strange human being, in a manner of speaking, he embodies the Average Iraqi's de-evolution in a transitional state prior to his total going nuts otherwise known as 'Kia Driver' and after the virtually nonexistent state of innocent order on the right lane 'Citizen'....thus, he represents the de facto core of the Iraqi Spirit in the Millennium, to quote the rolling-in-its-grave motto seen upon walls when the occupation was still 2003-2004 (La Sunniya, La Shiyia, Wahda Wahda Islamia (No Sunni, No Shia, A Unified Unified Muslim)
Wahda Wahda Taxi
Spitting on the wheel, the driver in his questionable pink-red t-shirt (shirt?) was typically in his late-thirties, unshaved and uncombed, the car was a scrap heap from the pre-occupation common-man 80s cars (Toyota Corona 1981, Passat 1983-1988, Datsun Firebird 1980 etc) but nowadays most taxis are either Opel Vectras 1995 or Kia Sephia 1993/4. He said to The Kid, as The Kid was heading from Jadriya (university) to Salhiya (my girl's house - surprise visit)
'We'll take the other road because this one is a makhabkhana (whorehouse)'
'As u please' Says The_Kid Himself in his sour passenger mode
Silence protrudes and engulfs the inhabitants of the car, over unconfident radio static, a guy assures us of his undying love (sorry, Asimov - Kid)
The Kid_Himself looks to the right as the car stands in a busy traffic, men descend from a van and start gluing some poster or other of an obscure three-digit coalition, on their T-shirts the logo is 'Watanioon' (Nationalists)
Out of character and driven by boredom, The Kid asks Pinkred Whorehouse: 'Who will elect these poor devils?'
'Them's got backed up by their tribes, surely' Pinkred comes into conversation lulled, as if wanting to pull but not trying to sound too eager
'Aha'
'They will collect some 250,000 votes in the hopes of getting a chair or two'.
'Ha'
SilenceThe Kid's mind floats to his girl, perhaps feeling secure by several pleasantries going in his mind, he asks
'So who are you going to elect?'
'Khamsmiya Khamsa W Khamseen (555 - Iran-influenced party currently ruling Iraq)' the words roll with a slow approval/appraisal, biting a soft chocolate that melts into your mouth.
'Oh, i think that elections this year will become much more stronger than last time'
'Yeah, these small lists won't get a chance or two compared to the big ones, 555, 618'
'731'
Pinkred is pissed 'Let him go to hell, that bastard son of a bastrad, who likes him? Son of a whore, we don't want him'
'On the contrary, several people i see are going to choose that bastard'
Pinkred hesitates... 'Bastard'
'U know why, some people do not want an Islam-directed government that inclines to this side or that, they want a govenement that's free of all that, and not only did Allawi destroy Najaf, he did that to Falluja as well'
'You said it, he just crushes, what use is he? The whole south will choose 555, others choose 618,he hurts everyone....and what is with this constant attacking of govenement and Jaffari' tone suggests undying loyalty
'These are election tricks, check out Chalabi's attacks on Allawi, I'm not saying that Allawi is a flower, he is a dog son of a dog, but he doesn't follow a certain sect, and that is needed, and who says that the governemnt is flawless....don't u ever see all these people getting killed??? What abotu Al Jadriya scandal??'
'Everybody who is killed is Shia'
'Everybody who is killed is Sunni, i live in Adhamiya and i see it everyday'
Pinkred is unsure of The Kid's side by now, he starts praising 618
'How much i like this guy Mohsin Abdilhameed (Islamic Party's head, part of 618) a man who is just and never differentiates, and that other guy El Izzi, he was killed just because he said that Sunni/Shia are equal, these are okay men, but not Harith Al Dari
''What's wrong with him?'
'What's this he says in Cairo about not attacking terrorists'
'There is terrorism and there is resistance'
'yeah, sure'
'and he wants to differentiate between the two'
Pinkred is silent, he doesn't know what to say, The Kid feels strangely out of place, he is winning in a political debate!!! Pinkred obviously is the following type. The conversation never inflates into a heads-on bullfight because neither side is either sure nor sectarain. As The Kid gets out of the car, Pinkred says : I hope i did not bother u, all we want is equality and justice wihout differentiation.'With a smile, The Kid says 'Of course, no you did not bother me, on the contrary. Here's your 4,000 ID'
TO ANARKI 13 & EVERYONE :
This is the first time I am going to vote, and I urge everyone to vote too from their hearts, sitting around there doing nothing and pretending it ain't gonna make a difference is no excuse, it makes a difference - you only need to witness the abysmal massacres that happened, if not for the better then please vote not to make matters worse! I will only vote because of all the sectarian blood shed, there has to be a balance of powers in order for this country to at least kick any massacre back into terrorism territory, not by the very same security forces.I will vote for all the people that has lost their lives not for anything, but because their only faults was that they were Sunni.and in doing so, i deeply reproach myself for making a decision based on Sectarian lines, sadly, this is the policy with which the USA runs Iraq.
Early on, when American soldiers were still treated as aliens from outer space surrounded by children, my cousin told me about his first encounter with the American Soldier, he said that the first question he asked us was who is Sunni/Shia and whether we have any problems with that?
These mighty, mighty sons of bitches....
Under these US-instigated sectarian obsessions carefully injected everywhere, the papers, the TV, the people -if any one of the sects (Sunni, Shia) rules the other, there certainly would be crimes and/or feelings of injustice, the obvious solution is Secularism, (Allawi, who obvioulsy will win under US babysitting) - then again, any Muslim must only accept Islam as his rule, by separating Mosque from State, the Muslim may find himself watching Iraqi Gay TV only because a large number of people feel the need to watch Iraqi Gay TV. that is unacceptable.Unfortunatley, if u vouch for a moderate Islamic rule, there ain't such a thing - and some smartass or other won't take your 'I am Muslim' negation and try to shoe-horn u into either Sunni/Shia...So i will drop off 731 (surefire winner, btw) and pick 618, for my Haji Amir. and quite frankly, i feel safe with that number.
i feel shit, too.
Yesterday Iraq won West Asia cup from Syria by Penalties, and the sky turned into a flameball, Sunni or Shia, BiSK or BiSHK, you love football....Ahmed Radi has joined the 618, it's interesting to see what happens from soccer junkies who don't happen to take that much interest in religion....although starpower concept in Iraq is almost nonexistent. (Radi, the only Iraqi ever who has scored in World Cup has once starred in a corny Brake Oil campaign( what's the fucking connection between Car Lubricants and an Athelte anyway, unless he drinks the damn thing!!!! quite frankly, if they made him drink the oil then, it would have sold a gadzillion, hee hee - humourless drones!) let's hope this ain't as corny as his stoned performance then.
So, my friend Anarki, to vote is to, quote the holy book :
{وادو الامانة الى اهلها}
most well-known Islamic fukahaa (such as Yousif Qardawi) say that it is obligatory for a muslim to go to these elections.Vote to reduce bloodshed, these parties ain't in it for the money, they boycotted it the first time.
not because you are sunni, but to create a balance.
and your touchtype post about me was great, except for several points :
1. 'He is quite fast, hell, even faster than me'....that is a severe understatement, i can kick ur ass quite soundly at this, please.
2. the 'i am proud' bit is a total disgrace as pointed out by Daniel, not only are you not that old, but with all due respect- i love u dude, but don't get high on your own supply - you and i are wildly different, and u r a most amazing person, nice, kind, hospitable, exteremely unique, but i really can't see u as a rebel - maybe on the inside but on the outside, u will always be the mild-mannered dork as u once said, it is not a fault to know one's own strengths.
No disrespect meant, ever.
ABOUT SADDAM
We don't need the trial, i meant, isn't the outcome already known homies? if u come to the crimes, not one of them can be jusitifed quite reasonably
Halabcha : Irani folks threw lotsa chemicals, Saddam warns Kurds he will do so too in order to kill the irani infiltrations, nobody gets out he throws white flour, still no reaction, is it anybody's fault when the chemicals hit the floor?
Dijayal : what the fuck do u expect from any Arab leader when somebody tries to kill him? Har Har....
Anyway Abo El Laithan will get what he deserves.....
Cheerios,
Here's some pics from my departement CD:
so much has happened during my absence...apologies to my fans....stereotypical absence crap...exams..busy/lazy depending on who u r, anyways....to sum it up.
i'm back.
this absence was just what i needed to fuel up a declining creativity;
depsite my reluctance to comment anywhere nor indicate in any way that i am still around, which i was not, i kept a half-eye on the comings and goings of the blogosphere...with Emigre's burnout, the IraqBlogCount has been moderated by Hassan Average and Najma, i find this ratifiying in many ways, i really don't know that much about Emigre, but i feel that a guy with the ambition, desire and obsession of blogging as Hassan could be the only one fit for moderating such a blog, even better than the hailed Emigre, wasn't Hassan the guy who wrote the short-short history of Iraqi Bloggers start to finish? so there u have it. I find the site in good hands and i am sure it will be going for the better, my only gripes with it is that it is supposed to be neutral towards all bloggers but it treats some with more concern than one might like - for instance the 'Carnival Of The Relatives' thingies which only serve as advertising for people only related to a moderator by blood - these things are fine, but not as posts on the main page, post it on ur blog, whoever u are. Secondly, a refining of the blog list must be in order, too many blogs have been neglected for a long time, they should be arranged in terms of proposed popularity.
Good luck...
Some new blogs have popped up, Iraqi Rebel floored me, this guy looks so much like me, kudos to u, whoever u are....his last post is the jewel of cathratic tantrums....keep an eye on him...probably the best thing out there at the mo, i'm so tired of all the usual melodrama, Anarki13's going nowhere, Truth's getting old, we need something new people!mmmkkkkayyyyyyy....
What i've been so busy doing these days, is the following (arranged by date):
1. Department CD
2. Exams
3. Getting To Know Anarki13's 'Guitarbuddies'
DEPARTMENT CD
Last year, i collected all the pictures taken by our departement, every single photograph taken by a colleague during the year, added an MP3 for evey person based on his request, and did a simple-but-tasty slideshow showcasing every single person with his name/pic/preparatoryschool/what u like/what u hate questionnare etc etc...the concept was simple but original, and it was hailed at its time as a masterpiece of design and vision.This year, i decided to do a follow-up to the CD, being a true artist, i tried not to repeat myself - that which the green first graders gratitiuosly did for me - imitation is the highest form of flattery, remember, they copied my CD to the last detail, even such bad jokes as HANTOOSH : Socks & Software (theirs was Pizza & Software), a Macromedia FLASH intro and a hide & seek maze of subfolders that included hidden files...In February 2005, a massive strike flamed within my university, based on an unjust law legislated by the univeristy board to raise the minimum average requirement to enter M Sc. studies from 65% to 75%, the strike lasted almost a week and was covered by several media stations. My first idea was to do a fake news agency and cover the strike, as we did this, I rediscovered a long-lost dream of becoming a director, along with a handful of carefully picked ideas - some old, some came within working -, and we used a SONY handheld camera to finally achieve a complete 7 o'clock news episode, featuring a mock-up of a News Studio (Our dept. hall), and three news pieces, the aforementioned strike ; a bitchhouse raid and finally a review of the classroom ancedotes for the year presented in the Egyptian Sports Analyst (Salih Wahish) format, the concept slowly grew and almost swallowed us whole : We did an obligatory President-meets-veterans piece at the beginning, 7 Television commercials (which were later hailed as the most entertaining parts) for products ranging from VIAGRA to KENKO (Prominent Chinese scientific calculator in college) to even advertisesments for programs produced by our fake network - a hit-show (Al Jarboo3 Wal Mar2a) and a documentary, u name it....i had trouble finding a female reporter but eventually i landed the deal.Aside from this, I shot a FPS-game, a music video for a fake rock band 'THE ABBiS' amongst too many other things to mention, all in all, the project took six months to complete but thankfully I got the deserved recognition, I'm even thinking of showing it to some TV station, say what?here's some photos, as well as a biography of THE ABBiS themselves :
2. Exams
Fucked up one out of seven this time, damn the ROOT LOCUS to all eternity!
3. I will talk about this later.
Well, with elections less than four days ahead, i guess i have to talk about it, only this time, i don't feel it's a chore, unforunately it's been on my mind more than it has to be lately, shweet! this blogging stuff has turned me on to politics, u can only compare this recent taxi driver conversation with the one i posted on my very first entry :
Taking Highway Mohammed Al Qasim as a metaphor for life, A taxi driver is a strange human being, in a manner of speaking, he embodies the Average Iraqi's de-evolution in a transitional state prior to his total going nuts otherwise known as 'Kia Driver' and after the virtually nonexistent state of innocent order on the right lane 'Citizen'....thus, he represents the de facto core of the Iraqi Spirit in the Millennium, to quote the rolling-in-its-grave motto seen upon walls when the occupation was still 2003-2004 (La Sunniya, La Shiyia, Wahda Wahda Islamia (No Sunni, No Shia, A Unified Unified Muslim)
Wahda Wahda Taxi
Spitting on the wheel, the driver in his questionable pink-red t-shirt (shirt?) was typically in his late-thirties, unshaved and uncombed, the car was a scrap heap from the pre-occupation common-man 80s cars (Toyota Corona 1981, Passat 1983-1988, Datsun Firebird 1980 etc) but nowadays most taxis are either Opel Vectras 1995 or Kia Sephia 1993/4. He said to The Kid, as The Kid was heading from Jadriya (university) to Salhiya (my girl's house - surprise visit)
'We'll take the other road because this one is a makhabkhana (whorehouse)'
'As u please' Says The_Kid Himself in his sour passenger mode
Silence protrudes and engulfs the inhabitants of the car, over unconfident radio static, a guy assures us of his undying love (sorry, Asimov - Kid)
The Kid_Himself looks to the right as the car stands in a busy traffic, men descend from a van and start gluing some poster or other of an obscure three-digit coalition, on their T-shirts the logo is 'Watanioon' (Nationalists)
Out of character and driven by boredom, The Kid asks Pinkred Whorehouse: 'Who will elect these poor devils?'
'Them's got backed up by their tribes, surely' Pinkred comes into conversation lulled, as if wanting to pull but not trying to sound too eager
'Aha'
'They will collect some 250,000 votes in the hopes of getting a chair or two'.
'Ha'
SilenceThe Kid's mind floats to his girl, perhaps feeling secure by several pleasantries going in his mind, he asks
'So who are you going to elect?'
'Khamsmiya Khamsa W Khamseen (555 - Iran-influenced party currently ruling Iraq)' the words roll with a slow approval/appraisal, biting a soft chocolate that melts into your mouth.
'Oh, i think that elections this year will become much more stronger than last time'
'Yeah, these small lists won't get a chance or two compared to the big ones, 555, 618'
'731'
Pinkred is pissed 'Let him go to hell, that bastard son of a bastrad, who likes him? Son of a whore, we don't want him'
'On the contrary, several people i see are going to choose that bastard'
Pinkred hesitates... 'Bastard'
'U know why, some people do not want an Islam-directed government that inclines to this side or that, they want a govenement that's free of all that, and not only did Allawi destroy Najaf, he did that to Falluja as well'
'You said it, he just crushes, what use is he? The whole south will choose 555, others choose 618,he hurts everyone....and what is with this constant attacking of govenement and Jaffari' tone suggests undying loyalty
'These are election tricks, check out Chalabi's attacks on Allawi, I'm not saying that Allawi is a flower, he is a dog son of a dog, but he doesn't follow a certain sect, and that is needed, and who says that the governemnt is flawless....don't u ever see all these people getting killed??? What abotu Al Jadriya scandal??'
'Everybody who is killed is Shia'
'Everybody who is killed is Sunni, i live in Adhamiya and i see it everyday'
Pinkred is unsure of The Kid's side by now, he starts praising 618
'How much i like this guy Mohsin Abdilhameed (Islamic Party's head, part of 618) a man who is just and never differentiates, and that other guy El Izzi, he was killed just because he said that Sunni/Shia are equal, these are okay men, but not Harith Al Dari
''What's wrong with him?'
'What's this he says in Cairo about not attacking terrorists'
'There is terrorism and there is resistance'
'yeah, sure'
'and he wants to differentiate between the two'
Pinkred is silent, he doesn't know what to say, The Kid feels strangely out of place, he is winning in a political debate!!! Pinkred obviously is the following type. The conversation never inflates into a heads-on bullfight because neither side is either sure nor sectarain. As The Kid gets out of the car, Pinkred says : I hope i did not bother u, all we want is equality and justice wihout differentiation.'With a smile, The Kid says 'Of course, no you did not bother me, on the contrary. Here's your 4,000 ID'
TO ANARKI 13 & EVERYONE :
This is the first time I am going to vote, and I urge everyone to vote too from their hearts, sitting around there doing nothing and pretending it ain't gonna make a difference is no excuse, it makes a difference - you only need to witness the abysmal massacres that happened, if not for the better then please vote not to make matters worse! I will only vote because of all the sectarian blood shed, there has to be a balance of powers in order for this country to at least kick any massacre back into terrorism territory, not by the very same security forces.I will vote for all the people that has lost their lives not for anything, but because their only faults was that they were Sunni.and in doing so, i deeply reproach myself for making a decision based on Sectarian lines, sadly, this is the policy with which the USA runs Iraq.
Early on, when American soldiers were still treated as aliens from outer space surrounded by children, my cousin told me about his first encounter with the American Soldier, he said that the first question he asked us was who is Sunni/Shia and whether we have any problems with that?
These mighty, mighty sons of bitches....
Under these US-instigated sectarian obsessions carefully injected everywhere, the papers, the TV, the people -if any one of the sects (Sunni, Shia) rules the other, there certainly would be crimes and/or feelings of injustice, the obvious solution is Secularism, (Allawi, who obvioulsy will win under US babysitting) - then again, any Muslim must only accept Islam as his rule, by separating Mosque from State, the Muslim may find himself watching Iraqi Gay TV only because a large number of people feel the need to watch Iraqi Gay TV. that is unacceptable.Unfortunatley, if u vouch for a moderate Islamic rule, there ain't such a thing - and some smartass or other won't take your 'I am Muslim' negation and try to shoe-horn u into either Sunni/Shia...So i will drop off 731 (surefire winner, btw) and pick 618, for my Haji Amir. and quite frankly, i feel safe with that number.
i feel shit, too.
Yesterday Iraq won West Asia cup from Syria by Penalties, and the sky turned into a flameball, Sunni or Shia, BiSK or BiSHK, you love football....Ahmed Radi has joined the 618, it's interesting to see what happens from soccer junkies who don't happen to take that much interest in religion....although starpower concept in Iraq is almost nonexistent. (Radi, the only Iraqi ever who has scored in World Cup has once starred in a corny Brake Oil campaign( what's the fucking connection between Car Lubricants and an Athelte anyway, unless he drinks the damn thing!!!! quite frankly, if they made him drink the oil then, it would have sold a gadzillion, hee hee - humourless drones!) let's hope this ain't as corny as his stoned performance then.
So, my friend Anarki, to vote is to, quote the holy book :
{وادو الامانة الى اهلها}
most well-known Islamic fukahaa (such as Yousif Qardawi) say that it is obligatory for a muslim to go to these elections.Vote to reduce bloodshed, these parties ain't in it for the money, they boycotted it the first time.
not because you are sunni, but to create a balance.
and your touchtype post about me was great, except for several points :
1. 'He is quite fast, hell, even faster than me'....that is a severe understatement, i can kick ur ass quite soundly at this, please.
2. the 'i am proud' bit is a total disgrace as pointed out by Daniel, not only are you not that old, but with all due respect- i love u dude, but don't get high on your own supply - you and i are wildly different, and u r a most amazing person, nice, kind, hospitable, exteremely unique, but i really can't see u as a rebel - maybe on the inside but on the outside, u will always be the mild-mannered dork as u once said, it is not a fault to know one's own strengths.
No disrespect meant, ever.
ABOUT SADDAM
We don't need the trial, i meant, isn't the outcome already known homies? if u come to the crimes, not one of them can be jusitifed quite reasonably
Halabcha : Irani folks threw lotsa chemicals, Saddam warns Kurds he will do so too in order to kill the irani infiltrations, nobody gets out he throws white flour, still no reaction, is it anybody's fault when the chemicals hit the floor?
Dijayal : what the fuck do u expect from any Arab leader when somebody tries to kill him? Har Har....
Anyway Abo El Laithan will get what he deserves.....
Cheerios,
Here's some pics from my departement CD:
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Alive
I am alive.
but busy....
and Anarki's cheap shots have nothing to do with this post....
nice post...
i just been busy with a project and have finished it this week (Department CD)
next post (soon) will be much more, promise.
and also, no net in home now, wire troubles, have to check upstairs,
so lazy
but busy....
and Anarki's cheap shots have nothing to do with this post....
nice post...
i just been busy with a project and have finished it this week (Department CD)
next post (soon) will be much more, promise.
and also, no net in home now, wire troubles, have to check upstairs,
so lazy
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Tag! You're It
mates, i never send offlines/chainmails or anything, plain lazy, be it a salo ala muhammed or the friend you always care about is A B C type...but since this tag's received by two friends i respect, Haneen & Hassan, i gotta comply, and i gotta do 14 since i've been double-tagged, you *@&#(@*&.... : )))) :))) i'll do 8.
I CAN :
1. speak english as good as i write it, i tried it, they thought i was from the BBC.
2. do the moonwalk
3. play guitar
4. speak Libyan (as evidenced in Amman, they thought so)
5. touchtype, my oldest trick in the book, they always eyepop when i do it.
6. accept anyone despite of his background (even, say, Jews, given that they do the same)
7. Conivnce all classmates to act in a slew of embarassing movies, incl. a parody of a first-person
shooter, a fake TV station on the streets, a rockband complete with fake wigs and an advertistement for a chinese calculator.
8. Attempt any bet given to me by guys, incl. Kissing guy u don't know and walking in college with ur hair in disarray (believe me, that caused a commotion.)
PLAN TO DO :
1. MUSICWISE: Buy electric guitar, write an eastern-influenced rock song, learn all arabic scales and some harmoy/melody stuff as well as try to understand Oud, get a kick at Violin & Paino. Play with a band and somehow play live somewhere. Learn sheet music, basically, kick ass musically.
2. Gain weight, i weight a lousy 62. i plan to be 70-75 which fits my height.
3. Stay in Iraq as long as possible before my parents forcefully drag me outta here, call me crazy but i like it here.
4. Develop an interest in political matters at least in terms of becoming an educated everyman, my hunger is already building and am currently reading two books : 'American Empire and the Raid of Iraq' by Muhammed H. Haykal (guy on Jazeera tv) and Huntington's Clash -again-
5. Deepen religious feelings and try as much as i can to suppress sexual impulses and the overwhelming desire to spank particular someones. Attain a more religious posture strictly based on moderate islam teachings, Amro Khalid-style. At least one day pray all five.
6. Learn to swim, i try all the time but my friends just go once or twice before quitting it. I planned to learn this summer by going to the river but i didn't....LAAAZY
7. Improve driving skills : I suck at driving, mainly because i didn't drive much and that little was last done six months ago before dad sold the car just when it fell into my lap. this is much needed right now, althu the treacherous gasoline prices, wicked traffic jams and populous carjacking suggests otherwise.
8. Relearn the capitals of all the world's countries like i did when i was 7 years old. Used to be an Atlas-freak who was so freakishly glad he discoverred a country called 'Andora'
CAN'T
1. sleep like a normal human being, either sleep all the time, never sleep (30+ hours a piece of cake) or sleep all morning and stay up all night, Batman-wise.
2. keep toilet seat down
3. talk more than 10 words per day to my grandparents for fear of inciting fight.
4. not negotiate a taxi driver into a humiliating fare. - to pay him more in the end, if i think he desrves it-
5. not sleep in Dr. DMA's lectures.
6. not laugh in Dr. DMA's lectures.
7. not get dismissed in Dr. DMA's lectures.
8. spend a day without computers.
I CAN :
1. speak english as good as i write it, i tried it, they thought i was from the BBC.
2. do the moonwalk
3. play guitar
4. speak Libyan (as evidenced in Amman, they thought so)
5. touchtype, my oldest trick in the book, they always eyepop when i do it.
6. accept anyone despite of his background (even, say, Jews, given that they do the same)
7. Conivnce all classmates to act in a slew of embarassing movies, incl. a parody of a first-person
shooter, a fake TV station on the streets, a rockband complete with fake wigs and an advertistement for a chinese calculator.
8. Attempt any bet given to me by guys, incl. Kissing guy u don't know and walking in college with ur hair in disarray (believe me, that caused a commotion.)
PLAN TO DO :
1. MUSICWISE: Buy electric guitar, write an eastern-influenced rock song, learn all arabic scales and some harmoy/melody stuff as well as try to understand Oud, get a kick at Violin & Paino. Play with a band and somehow play live somewhere. Learn sheet music, basically, kick ass musically.
2. Gain weight, i weight a lousy 62. i plan to be 70-75 which fits my height.
3. Stay in Iraq as long as possible before my parents forcefully drag me outta here, call me crazy but i like it here.
4. Develop an interest in political matters at least in terms of becoming an educated everyman, my hunger is already building and am currently reading two books : 'American Empire and the Raid of Iraq' by Muhammed H. Haykal (guy on Jazeera tv) and Huntington's Clash -again-
5. Deepen religious feelings and try as much as i can to suppress sexual impulses and the overwhelming desire to spank particular someones. Attain a more religious posture strictly based on moderate islam teachings, Amro Khalid-style. At least one day pray all five.
6. Learn to swim, i try all the time but my friends just go once or twice before quitting it. I planned to learn this summer by going to the river but i didn't....LAAAZY
7. Improve driving skills : I suck at driving, mainly because i didn't drive much and that little was last done six months ago before dad sold the car just when it fell into my lap. this is much needed right now, althu the treacherous gasoline prices, wicked traffic jams and populous carjacking suggests otherwise.
8. Relearn the capitals of all the world's countries like i did when i was 7 years old. Used to be an Atlas-freak who was so freakishly glad he discoverred a country called 'Andora'
CAN'T
1. sleep like a normal human being, either sleep all the time, never sleep (30+ hours a piece of cake) or sleep all morning and stay up all night, Batman-wise.
2. keep toilet seat down
3. talk more than 10 words per day to my grandparents for fear of inciting fight.
4. not negotiate a taxi driver into a humiliating fare. - to pay him more in the end, if i think he desrves it-
5. not sleep in Dr. DMA's lectures.
6. not laugh in Dr. DMA's lectures.
7. not get dismissed in Dr. DMA's lectures.
8. spend a day without computers.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Notmuch
' you and me, will all go dow in history
with a sad statue of liberty
and a generation that didn't agree'
- System Of A Down, Mesmerize
p.s. the verse has nothing to do with the subject here, but it's just so cool i had to put it, plus i am overdosing on System Of A Down at the mo.
i didn't read Quran after i returned home from last post, and haven't done so in the past 10-so days.
i regret this.
SONG : System Of A Down - Violent Pornography
Naturally, i treated nu metal and all that was related to it with disgust, it copied the more intellectual rock/metal's noise without the important riffs/melodies or songmanship, and it is basically a watered-down Frankenstein that's weaker than all the parts it was chawed off from, be it white or black music. Aside from Linkin Park (which has more to do with good teenpop than with good rock) i found little use for KoRn, Bizkit or SoaD, the latter was different, original and their eastern Armenian influences sometimes harped on my ambition to incorporate eastern/western music, they ruined their more digestible moments however with cartoonish blasts of thrash metal. All this changes with their latest release, 2005's Mesmerize simply put, mesmerized me....compared with Toxicity, the changes are not apparent, but they are both subtle and hugely effective - for starters, the songwriting has grown considerably, allowing the band's cartoonish foolishness to blend seamlessly with the more oriental exotica in a pattern that was lost in the band's earlier songs - in the past, i would say a SoaD's album has about 10% of good stuff, now it has 10% of okay stuff and 90% of cool. a new classic! they treat it with such intelligent, texture and accessibilty that bewilder the most stalwart of music construction : witness 'Violent Pornorgaphy' first a somber middle-eastern funeral, followed by a parody of a comic break, a SoaD thrash, and finally a triumphant Nickelback chorus, what's amazing is that all these styles, as disparate as they are, connect somewhat strangely. The album smokes and is a genuinely fresh air into a stale, depressing scene. i also listen to Dream Theater's original Images & Words, but while i have nothing against Petrucci & co's indulgent, repetitive songs that still contain a mighty riff/solo at times - they are nowhere as endlessly inventive as this band. can't wait for Hypnotize.
(so i didn't read quran r u happy now, u sicko pervert? - keep on writing about Sex In Iraq btw, people need to know how much of George Constanzas we all are, and kudos for Blackrose's sudden metaphorsis, to quote me : التلفزيون صار ملون)
F.Y.I. : the blog title Sex In Snow, was coined by myself after reading it on a passerby's t-shirt...
the allusion is that In Iraq, Sex is like Snow because it never happens unless by mistake...
a friend told me that i write better than Anarki13, this is so honorable it almost makes me kneel on my knees....thank u Pentra, and thank u 13, my goal is always to challenege myself to write btetter than u, in good spirit, of course.
my favorite Anarki13 quote :
'Like old spy vs spy cartoons but less entertaining'
- in reference to Sunni/Shi'ite melodramaticization by some sides
Back In Black....black being the color of light.
currently posting on UPS supply...
whilst i have a coupla ideas to post about, gonna delay 'em for now and write about trivailties as my brainwaves do not fit the climate right now.
Stuff's been flying about in Iraq recently (Ex-Prez gettin' it, referrendum klawat), i wanted to vote but couldn't, and even if i could my grandparetns had me sit down yesterday and told me very clearly that i wasn't about to go munching anyplace other than home on the reverred day, i could've been a teen spirit and ousted this but i didn't feel like it, one doesn't need to know the science of psychohistory to figure that it's pretty much predetermined that the referrendum will be passed, in any means necessary.
excerpt from Iraqi's Konfused Kollege Kid diary at 15 Ocobter 2005 :
3 pm Woke up, felt cranky, tv flicking...
4 pm pretence of studying
5:35 pm iftaar, lively noodle soup and some weird stuff...good
7 pm brief hangout with dudes
8 pm home
12 am guitar
4 am slept
i pretend not to care, but i've been gettin' too politikal 4 my own good these days, if i went , i guess i would've no-ed it, not due to my respective Ayatollah saying so, but because it smells too fishy, with Sunnis's sinusodial comments on the day before and Shi'ites insiting on it happening, legally or not. i once read an early copy of it, what i read i didn't like - one part insisted that Iraq is a free country with its Shi'ite Majority and sunni and kurds (why does it insist upon on shi'ite being a majority?) from that day, i distrusted it.
Federalism benefits lotsa people, but mostly USA. Shiites, who are largely under religious leadership would feel like it as it gives their leadership more control (althu i really can't see Shi'ite liking this more than Iraqi identification) and surely Kakas are all hupped up on the Kurdistaan dream.
Yippie yay! Went to 13's yesterday because i wanted him to draw me some artwork for the CD of the dept. (more on this later) and sucked his CD collection dry of discs, he told me about some guitarists who would be more than interested in me too, gonna check that for future reference.
Dry throat. I am past eating 15 minutes in order to write for ur dogs, so here's the deal, since this post will go down as one of my worsts....gonna hip it up by introducing my picture, i don't look that cute in real life, btw....
and oh, anybody wanna abduct me, please be an alien. (don't think anybody'd intereested, even for all the Jarrar hype, i KNOW it was about the beard and not the blog, -from 13, who knows jarrar personally, i even posted about that and I WAS RIGHT...NYA HA HA HAAAAAAA)
I called Avg Iraqi these days, nice fella, we talked for 30 minutes on the cell phone! generous dude (him not me, i miscalled him) at 2 am, i am waiting for a chance to visit him, probably this week.
Kid's classic albums of all time:
celebrating SoaD's Mesmerize, i am dishing out my eternal list of my most trasured albums, this was started ever since i started listening to music back when i was 15, and i vowed never to erase a name no matter what, so it may contain some embarrasing content :
arranged by relative impact upon me :
1. Metallica - S&M
2. Soundgarden - Superunknown
3. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP
4. Michael Jackson - Dangerous
5. Michael Jackson - HIStory
6. System Of A Down - Hypnotize
7. Metallica - LOAD
8. Metallica - ReLOAD
9. Metallica - Garage, INC.
10. Metallica - The Black Album
11. Guns N Roses - Appetite For Destruction
12. Metallica - Master Of Puppets
13. Iron Maiden - Brave New World
14. Metallica - Ride The Lightning
15. Metallica - ...And Justice For All
16. Nirvana - Unplugged In NY
17. Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory
18. *N SYNC - No Strings Attached
19. Aerosmith - Permanent Vacation
20. Backstreet Boys - Millennium
joke of the day : my ex-gf was a paranoid in every sense of the word, always awaiting for something to break us up...if she trips and falls, she would tell me it was a divine punishment and we would have to break up - only to call me back three days later...once i was byebyeing her in messenger when i tried to sound all romeo so i tried spanish : 'adios'
only to be replied with a somber 'what?'
Kid : What
Paranoid Chic :....don't talk with me again
Kid :(switches to arabi) hay shbeech, adios means bye in spanish
Paranoid Chic: u mean something else, Kid, why do u always have to be so dirty....?!?
it was only when i wrote the word in arabi when i knew what she meant.
good thing i broke up with her for real.
so to all of u,
ADIOS
The Ever Wisecracking Kiddo
with a sad statue of liberty
and a generation that didn't agree'
- System Of A Down, Mesmerize
p.s. the verse has nothing to do with the subject here, but it's just so cool i had to put it, plus i am overdosing on System Of A Down at the mo.
i didn't read Quran after i returned home from last post, and haven't done so in the past 10-so days.
i regret this.
SONG : System Of A Down - Violent Pornography
Naturally, i treated nu metal and all that was related to it with disgust, it copied the more intellectual rock/metal's noise without the important riffs/melodies or songmanship, and it is basically a watered-down Frankenstein that's weaker than all the parts it was chawed off from, be it white or black music. Aside from Linkin Park (which has more to do with good teenpop than with good rock) i found little use for KoRn, Bizkit or SoaD, the latter was different, original and their eastern Armenian influences sometimes harped on my ambition to incorporate eastern/western music, they ruined their more digestible moments however with cartoonish blasts of thrash metal. All this changes with their latest release, 2005's Mesmerize simply put, mesmerized me....compared with Toxicity, the changes are not apparent, but they are both subtle and hugely effective - for starters, the songwriting has grown considerably, allowing the band's cartoonish foolishness to blend seamlessly with the more oriental exotica in a pattern that was lost in the band's earlier songs - in the past, i would say a SoaD's album has about 10% of good stuff, now it has 10% of okay stuff and 90% of cool. a new classic! they treat it with such intelligent, texture and accessibilty that bewilder the most stalwart of music construction : witness 'Violent Pornorgaphy' first a somber middle-eastern funeral, followed by a parody of a comic break, a SoaD thrash, and finally a triumphant Nickelback chorus, what's amazing is that all these styles, as disparate as they are, connect somewhat strangely. The album smokes and is a genuinely fresh air into a stale, depressing scene. i also listen to Dream Theater's original Images & Words, but while i have nothing against Petrucci & co's indulgent, repetitive songs that still contain a mighty riff/solo at times - they are nowhere as endlessly inventive as this band. can't wait for Hypnotize.
(so i didn't read quran r u happy now, u sicko pervert? - keep on writing about Sex In Iraq btw, people need to know how much of George Constanzas we all are, and kudos for Blackrose's sudden metaphorsis, to quote me : التلفزيون صار ملون)
F.Y.I. : the blog title Sex In Snow, was coined by myself after reading it on a passerby's t-shirt...
the allusion is that In Iraq, Sex is like Snow because it never happens unless by mistake...
a friend told me that i write better than Anarki13, this is so honorable it almost makes me kneel on my knees....thank u Pentra, and thank u 13, my goal is always to challenege myself to write btetter than u, in good spirit, of course.
my favorite Anarki13 quote :
'Like old spy vs spy cartoons but less entertaining'
- in reference to Sunni/Shi'ite melodramaticization by some sides
Back In Black....black being the color of light.
currently posting on UPS supply...
whilst i have a coupla ideas to post about, gonna delay 'em for now and write about trivailties as my brainwaves do not fit the climate right now.
Stuff's been flying about in Iraq recently (Ex-Prez gettin' it, referrendum klawat), i wanted to vote but couldn't, and even if i could my grandparetns had me sit down yesterday and told me very clearly that i wasn't about to go munching anyplace other than home on the reverred day, i could've been a teen spirit and ousted this but i didn't feel like it, one doesn't need to know the science of psychohistory to figure that it's pretty much predetermined that the referrendum will be passed, in any means necessary.
excerpt from Iraqi's Konfused Kollege Kid diary at 15 Ocobter 2005 :
3 pm Woke up, felt cranky, tv flicking...
4 pm pretence of studying
5:35 pm iftaar, lively noodle soup and some weird stuff...good
7 pm brief hangout with dudes
8 pm home
12 am guitar
4 am slept
i pretend not to care, but i've been gettin' too politikal 4 my own good these days, if i went , i guess i would've no-ed it, not due to my respective Ayatollah saying so, but because it smells too fishy, with Sunnis's sinusodial comments on the day before and Shi'ites insiting on it happening, legally or not. i once read an early copy of it, what i read i didn't like - one part insisted that Iraq is a free country with its Shi'ite Majority and sunni and kurds (why does it insist upon on shi'ite being a majority?) from that day, i distrusted it.
Federalism benefits lotsa people, but mostly USA. Shiites, who are largely under religious leadership would feel like it as it gives their leadership more control (althu i really can't see Shi'ite liking this more than Iraqi identification) and surely Kakas are all hupped up on the Kurdistaan dream.
Yippie yay! Went to 13's yesterday because i wanted him to draw me some artwork for the CD of the dept. (more on this later) and sucked his CD collection dry of discs, he told me about some guitarists who would be more than interested in me too, gonna check that for future reference.
Dry throat. I am past eating 15 minutes in order to write for ur dogs, so here's the deal, since this post will go down as one of my worsts....gonna hip it up by introducing my picture, i don't look that cute in real life, btw....
and oh, anybody wanna abduct me, please be an alien. (don't think anybody'd intereested, even for all the Jarrar hype, i KNOW it was about the beard and not the blog, -from 13, who knows jarrar personally, i even posted about that and I WAS RIGHT...NYA HA HA HAAAAAAA)
I called Avg Iraqi these days, nice fella, we talked for 30 minutes on the cell phone! generous dude (him not me, i miscalled him) at 2 am, i am waiting for a chance to visit him, probably this week.
Kid's classic albums of all time:
celebrating SoaD's Mesmerize, i am dishing out my eternal list of my most trasured albums, this was started ever since i started listening to music back when i was 15, and i vowed never to erase a name no matter what, so it may contain some embarrasing content :
arranged by relative impact upon me :
1. Metallica - S&M
2. Soundgarden - Superunknown
3. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP
4. Michael Jackson - Dangerous
5. Michael Jackson - HIStory
6. System Of A Down - Hypnotize
7. Metallica - LOAD
8. Metallica - ReLOAD
9. Metallica - Garage, INC.
10. Metallica - The Black Album
11. Guns N Roses - Appetite For Destruction
12. Metallica - Master Of Puppets
13. Iron Maiden - Brave New World
14. Metallica - Ride The Lightning
15. Metallica - ...And Justice For All
16. Nirvana - Unplugged In NY
17. Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory
18. *N SYNC - No Strings Attached
19. Aerosmith - Permanent Vacation
20. Backstreet Boys - Millennium
joke of the day : my ex-gf was a paranoid in every sense of the word, always awaiting for something to break us up...if she trips and falls, she would tell me it was a divine punishment and we would have to break up - only to call me back three days later...once i was byebyeing her in messenger when i tried to sound all romeo so i tried spanish : 'adios'
only to be replied with a somber 'what?'
Kid : What
Paranoid Chic :....don't talk with me again
Kid :(switches to arabi) hay shbeech, adios means bye in spanish
Paranoid Chic: u mean something else, Kid, why do u always have to be so dirty....?!?
it was only when i wrote the word in arabi when i knew what she meant.
good thing i broke up with her for real.
so to all of u,
ADIOS
The Ever Wisecracking Kiddo
Saturday, October 08, 2005
Depression & Ramdan...
Okkkkkkaaaay...
First and foremost, Happy Ramadan, now i know this is my blog and my first rule when i started out is to throw out all the formalities and keep the bullshit at a minimum. But to me this is no bullshit, it is HOLY SHIT...it means to me, when i say it i say it will all my cardiac muscles, all one of them.
Happy Ramdan to all of u guys
I am just out of Mosque now, i prayed Eishaa ( Nighttime Prayer) and paid dues with the extended Taraweeh...
since i'm in a holy mood, gonna lay the goods down on this thing...
a muslim prayer's buliding blocks are Ruka3a (literally translated means KNEELS), a kneel can be subdivided as it involves going through a ritualistic motion but we won't go there for clarity's sake...there are five standard prayers a muslim's gotta do everyday, Dawn (2 Rukaa), Noon (4 Rukaa), Afternoon (4), Sunset (3) and Night (4)...the average prayer lasts for 5 to 10 minutes...
Now in Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, Muslims everywhere must not eat from Dawn tilll Sunset...which initaites the Breakfast mode. in addition, Night prayer is extended into an optional (but preferrable) prayer called Al Taraweeh...which is 20 Rukaa in total but u can pray as many as u want of those (in the last 10 days, Al Taraweeh is extended into Al Tasabeeh, an additional 10 Rukaa)
Phew! Judging by the look on ur face....a muslim's got nothing to do all day long but pray...right?
Anywaaay...way off course here, let me get back to my
People have been giving me the stick a lot recently about being blue.
It saddens (pun intended) me that u good folks think of me as this, because in reality i am not as sad as i sound.
I mean, for Allah's sake...13....i ain't that way in real life? n'est-ce pas/!? u pissed me off when u said that, so fuck u ...
(i don't really mean it, btw, u know me :) )))
(and happy ramadan to u too)
Okaay, my friends, i am not a bullshitter, so when i say i'm not all sniffy and weepy i really am not, i could've been so sometime earlier in my life. but now i ain't. it's just that i normally like irony, darkness, sarcasm and evil music by my nature, it's just the way i am, whilst i could relate to the stuff in my more temperamental days, matter of fact, the reason i sometimes feel a little cranky is that i'm a little ashamed at myself for having such an empty, happy, free-form life.
and now to prove it, i am gonna tell u about a happy hippy day i had last Thursday, me and my mates decided to have our Breakfast in a restaurant, so we didn't go back home and stayed all day long in college, we managed to sneak through the Internal *residence for students who come from outside Baghdad* cuz recently visitors have been prohibited from doing so...after taking a nap (and the customary pillow fight) we took a hike to Al Mansoor, now here comes the fun part.
i took my Handycam with me that day to college cuz we had some video projects to be included in our Departemnt CD (Post about this soon) and a handheld external MIC. The conclusion we reached was inevitable.
It was me shooting and my pal holding the mic, after rehearsals on my pals, we hit the streets, bumping into every guy we meet and pretending to be some dopey local TV channel...oh, the poor dudes, NOBODY even suspected us....it was a small friggin SONY HANDYCAM for God's sake...and the mic was half-broken, it had a cord that i put in my pocket...but let me tell u, as soon as u put the camera in their face they'll automatically follow the motions :
'What do u say to the iraqi people in the holy month of Rumdaan?'
The answer depends from shifty-eyed youths who cap u off with oneliners or in a most unfortunate case a haji who took us so seriously that he threw a whole disugsting mess of consitution, crisis and political analysis....i had to put my mouth on my face to distort the gigglies...
we then follow that with our own silly version of the Ramadan riddle :
'We have a riddle for u, what is the thing that u keep looking for? and when u find it, u throw it?'
Now surely we win here, i can safely present this to any TV Channel and tell em nobody will asnwer this becaues even if they know it, they won't be able to tell it for sake of diginity...
a guy was scratching his nose...my friend said : 'U R SO CLOSE U R SO CLOOOOSE TO THE ANSWER'
oh, the brutality!
i had so much fun that day, aside from accidentally eating a chili and having my mouth burn me for 10 minutes...then scrathcing my eye whilst some chili residue was on my hand and hvaing my eye AND mouth burn for the next 20 minutes...
i couldn't stop laughing that day...at everything, it was such a fun fun day... i just love being back where i belong....
Here's a good thing for all u paranoids to show that this whole Sunni/Shiite stuff is made up first and foremost by some few goddam sect-loving dudes who were embraced by US...thinking they do justice by dividing : we were seven friends waiting as the food came in our laps...three of us were shiite and four were sunni...Shhite eat 15 minutes after Sunnis do, so we agreed on eating in the exact middle, i ate 7 and a half minutes after i usually do.
and i was glad.
i went back home and played Fog El Nakhal all over again. I am Iraqi, and i am proud of that.
hey 13 where r u? i can't wait to play with somebody now that my usual jamming partner has gone (a Kurd, who hauled his ass to Dhouk now)...
oh and my good friend the Average Iraqi called me the other day, i will visit u one day soon, promise.
Constitution's due next sunday, i wanted to vote but i was too late, they had closed by 9/1 so i didn't register. My grandma won't, too.
i am so comfortable now, at peace with the world.....this is such a holy month, congratulatiosn to all of u.
i am in a net cafe right now, i will go back home and probably recite some Quran cuz i haven't done so in a long while...
Ahhhh.... C ya....
Kid
First and foremost, Happy Ramadan, now i know this is my blog and my first rule when i started out is to throw out all the formalities and keep the bullshit at a minimum. But to me this is no bullshit, it is HOLY SHIT...it means to me, when i say it i say it will all my cardiac muscles, all one of them.
Happy Ramdan to all of u guys
I am just out of Mosque now, i prayed Eishaa ( Nighttime Prayer) and paid dues with the extended Taraweeh...
since i'm in a holy mood, gonna lay the goods down on this thing...
a muslim prayer's buliding blocks are Ruka3a (literally translated means KNEELS), a kneel can be subdivided as it involves going through a ritualistic motion but we won't go there for clarity's sake...there are five standard prayers a muslim's gotta do everyday, Dawn (2 Rukaa), Noon (4 Rukaa), Afternoon (4), Sunset (3) and Night (4)...the average prayer lasts for 5 to 10 minutes...
Now in Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, Muslims everywhere must not eat from Dawn tilll Sunset...which initaites the Breakfast mode. in addition, Night prayer is extended into an optional (but preferrable) prayer called Al Taraweeh...which is 20 Rukaa in total but u can pray as many as u want of those (in the last 10 days, Al Taraweeh is extended into Al Tasabeeh, an additional 10 Rukaa)
Phew! Judging by the look on ur face....a muslim's got nothing to do all day long but pray...right?
Anywaaay...way off course here, let me get back to my
People have been giving me the stick a lot recently about being blue.
It saddens (pun intended) me that u good folks think of me as this, because in reality i am not as sad as i sound.
I mean, for Allah's sake...13....i ain't that way in real life? n'est-ce pas/!? u pissed me off when u said that, so fuck u ...
(i don't really mean it, btw, u know me :) )))
(and happy ramadan to u too)
Okaay, my friends, i am not a bullshitter, so when i say i'm not all sniffy and weepy i really am not, i could've been so sometime earlier in my life. but now i ain't. it's just that i normally like irony, darkness, sarcasm and evil music by my nature, it's just the way i am, whilst i could relate to the stuff in my more temperamental days, matter of fact, the reason i sometimes feel a little cranky is that i'm a little ashamed at myself for having such an empty, happy, free-form life.
and now to prove it, i am gonna tell u about a happy hippy day i had last Thursday, me and my mates decided to have our Breakfast in a restaurant, so we didn't go back home and stayed all day long in college, we managed to sneak through the Internal *residence for students who come from outside Baghdad* cuz recently visitors have been prohibited from doing so...after taking a nap (and the customary pillow fight) we took a hike to Al Mansoor, now here comes the fun part.
i took my Handycam with me that day to college cuz we had some video projects to be included in our Departemnt CD (Post about this soon) and a handheld external MIC. The conclusion we reached was inevitable.
It was me shooting and my pal holding the mic, after rehearsals on my pals, we hit the streets, bumping into every guy we meet and pretending to be some dopey local TV channel...oh, the poor dudes, NOBODY even suspected us....it was a small friggin SONY HANDYCAM for God's sake...and the mic was half-broken, it had a cord that i put in my pocket...but let me tell u, as soon as u put the camera in their face they'll automatically follow the motions :
'What do u say to the iraqi people in the holy month of Rumdaan?'
The answer depends from shifty-eyed youths who cap u off with oneliners or in a most unfortunate case a haji who took us so seriously that he threw a whole disugsting mess of consitution, crisis and political analysis....i had to put my mouth on my face to distort the gigglies...
we then follow that with our own silly version of the Ramadan riddle :
'We have a riddle for u, what is the thing that u keep looking for? and when u find it, u throw it?'
Now surely we win here, i can safely present this to any TV Channel and tell em nobody will asnwer this becaues even if they know it, they won't be able to tell it for sake of diginity...
a guy was scratching his nose...my friend said : 'U R SO CLOSE U R SO CLOOOOSE TO THE ANSWER'
oh, the brutality!
i had so much fun that day, aside from accidentally eating a chili and having my mouth burn me for 10 minutes...then scrathcing my eye whilst some chili residue was on my hand and hvaing my eye AND mouth burn for the next 20 minutes...
i couldn't stop laughing that day...at everything, it was such a fun fun day... i just love being back where i belong....
Here's a good thing for all u paranoids to show that this whole Sunni/Shiite stuff is made up first and foremost by some few goddam sect-loving dudes who were embraced by US...thinking they do justice by dividing : we were seven friends waiting as the food came in our laps...three of us were shiite and four were sunni...Shhite eat 15 minutes after Sunnis do, so we agreed on eating in the exact middle, i ate 7 and a half minutes after i usually do.
and i was glad.
i went back home and played Fog El Nakhal all over again. I am Iraqi, and i am proud of that.
hey 13 where r u? i can't wait to play with somebody now that my usual jamming partner has gone (a Kurd, who hauled his ass to Dhouk now)...
oh and my good friend the Average Iraqi called me the other day, i will visit u one day soon, promise.
Constitution's due next sunday, i wanted to vote but i was too late, they had closed by 9/1 so i didn't register. My grandma won't, too.
i am so comfortable now, at peace with the world.....this is such a holy month, congratulatiosn to all of u.
i am in a net cafe right now, i will go back home and probably recite some Quran cuz i haven't done so in a long while...
Ahhhh.... C ya....
Kid
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Truly Confused, with a 'C'
HUGE WARNING : This post is the amaglamation of three posts i have previously planned, one is the Mundane & Inevitable, Pt 2 post promised in my very first post, the other about the cultural identity between east/west, and the last about my own inability to withstand my ignorance amidst crushing uprise of crisis in Iraq, due to my non-Politics nature of the blog, i have sought to merge all three posts into one exorcism pot to get rid of them, resulting in a most unfortunate mess of ideas, u have been warned.
HUGE WARNING 2 : I am a twenty-years Iraqi guy trying to talk politics, therefore a huge amount of bullshit may occur at times. I apologize in advance.
"Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it
"I wanna destroy the passer by cos i wanna be anarchy"
- Sex Pistols
Anrachy can be fun, right? especially on the records...
My american cousin is 14 years old, he visited amman for two months and i was there for one month, a nice fella in his inside but completely ignorant, a severe disrespect for almsot everyone and esp. adults, at night he goes prowling the neighborhood screaming anarchy and ringing doorbells.
I watch him in silence. In seeing him, I understand what the Abu Ghareeb prison scandals are all about, they are mainly here to have some ignorant fun. Nice fellas, but they don't really care....think about it, about 99% of the good deeds u do or anybody else does ain't really about being good, but about FEELING good about yourself, all these 1st-world guys who feel ur pain aren't really. Nobody cares for u but urself, never ever forget that.
Would u care to see the homes destoryed, the families torn apart, the wail of twenty black-dressed women as they mourn an 'oops, sorry i shot ya' case as their helpless banshee fades out to nothingness and repeat that nefarious Sid Vicious laugh again?
I read Riverbend's Sepetember 11 entry, i couldn't help but feeling the dramatic fake overtones that capitulated some points to the advantage of appealing to a crowd, a card usually played by iraqis unconsciously due to the upbringing of Saddam's regime, which inforces the prose of horning and hooting, i esp. liked the way the RC fell out of somebody's hand....
Lemme tell ya what i was doing, i was watching some stupid thing on Iraqi National TV (probably Cartoons, considering it was about noon, and when it cut my first gut feeling was HEY WHAT THE F****...when i saw the planes hit the towers....i was 'huh?' it was a strange moment, in the sense that America's been hit! the unquenhcable giant! World War goes awry? Call America, You Win...Communism, Nazism, Faschism....the amazing power that u could depend on, has been hit! but i wasn't really shocked...i wasn't flustered, cuz ya know why? as a person, it didn't matter to me one bit. It ain't the center of the world to me.
and on some level, there was a happy voice chirping....
Sure, my condolesnces, they clearly are nice guys, but then again sorry folks, that's why i am here for, to tell u the truth and make u understand more about us. I only read Sci-Fi, and the biggest lie about Sci-Fi in my case isn't aliens or space travel or energy portals, but the unified earth.
There ain't no way in a million years that earth could be unified, unless it'd be wiped out by a singular race, Earth is the only stage required for mankind's theatre in a precondition set by God, or Nature if u please to call him that. Simply put, Human Racism is quite built-in everywhere, u cannot deny it, even in our holy books...ur identification with ur own race must be strong, cuz theese are the only people u can really count on...Unfortunately.
As Sam Huntington's Clash Of Civilizations points out quite vividly...i ain't talking about bloody masscre, it's about cultural ID.
To me, and surely to many other Arabs who won't admit it, Osama Bin Laden is much like the voice of Saruman, ur reasoning quite assures u that he is wrong, but his low, gentle voice lulls u into a dreamscape of the glories of our Arab Nation, a nation about greatness, justice, and truth. His peaceful speeches that belie the usual madman gloating of the exterme guys blanket the countless atrocities committed by his group, who i think of as enemies of Islam before being enemies of anybody else, cuz they run contrast to the tolerance that was always part of the religion (as opposed to, say, the violent killings done in Spain at the time of Elizabeth & Ferdinand against anybody who ain't christian)
MOVIE PLOT : In post-war Iraq, a forgotten laboraotary that has been kept notoriously in secret until now has been developing a time-machine, head engineer, Falah Hussein, is accidentally kidnapped by Abu Musaab El Zarqawi, no sooner than El Zarqawi learns about the machine than he decides to return back to the times of prophet to ask for guidance in the jihad against unbelievers, El Zarqawi, armed with an AK-47, was aiming after Mecca's libeartion but misses it and returns eight years earlier, when muslims were 40+ members huddled secretly in some house, before even reaching them, armed with an AK-47, he wipes out half Mecca's population in a Jihaad frenzy, thus causing a large population of present-day arabs to fade into nothingness, their parents being dead before their conception.
My point is to say that if one takes a message from the prophet, fighting is nothing but the last option, and battle must be openly and accepted upon, muslims were tortured by the dozen earlier on and the Prophet would do nothing but say : 'Patience, patience'. One must gather his own strengths first.
Arabs are frequently humiliated in movies and books, being shown as illiterate, dirty foul creations of nature, brianless apes shot down by Indiana Jones...a friend of mine sent me a link to Franz Kafka's stories, one of them 'Jackals & Arabs' offer several implicit (& explicit) insults to our race, especially striking is the simple equality between Jackals & Arabs, as if we are some sort of animals.
Arab Nation is a great place, dudes, even if me saying so at the current moment with a lot of disbelief, it ain't now, we've been too much run in the mud to see how great we are, but i tell ya, it's got lotsa cool stuff, it illuminated the Dark Ages of the West. In examining many productions, u find a determined negligence and/or insult of the arab role, for example, in the movie Genghis Khan, Arabs are always mentioned as Persians, and once when an arab envoy is sent, he is humiliated in the most enderaing fashion exclusively of all other races...(interestingly, the hero of that 60s Hollywood film is Omar Shariff, an egyptian).
It's Friday, i listen to the weekly speech given by the nearby mosque's Imam at noon, he concludes that Katrina is the hurricane Allah sent to punish nonbelievers, and upon raising his hands in the traditional pryer to god, the usual drone of 'Amen' that usually is no more than a sheepish static is rendered to an exciting uprise, admiteddly, we are moved to believe this.
If one believes the Koran, there were many bad guys who were terminated with hurricanes & wind (Aad, Thamood) and my Imam did a great demo of these, come to think of it...are America genuinely bad guys collectively??? God and Religion are frequently mocked about in the Western lifestyle and frankly even though i enjoy many of the American Way of Life's liberalism, i would never think of it as the utopian way of life for anybody, when Oprah asks Aishwarya Rai (sorry for misspells) what Indian women think of American Women, do they consider us bad cuz we have sex? Man, i almost blushed! Would u think of Shurooq Faiq, Uday's favorite TV whore asking that anytime soon?
هل تعتقد ان النساء الامريكيات ينيجن هواية؟ انصل على 7791212 للادلاء برأيك
I watch FRIENDS everyday, i have a hoot and enjoy it everyday, and i feel brutally ashamed everyday. it's probably one of the most dangerous products of the West cuz it promotes dangerous ideas in a fun, hip form that u'd love to do....sex has become more and more an easy subject for me along the guidelines of such daily discipline, think of what could that do to a collective youth? while in theory i am supposed to find that enthralling, psychologically it is not. It feels MORALLY wrong. Deep down inside, where u can't lie.
Bottomline, American Way of Life is a negative influence even amongst me, a guy who's supposedly American in all his ways of life.
These feelings of humilition, and longing for the true extent of our civilization are some of the factors that fuel arab desire for a better day, if u ask me, American should encourage Islamic study, not oppress it, thus fueling resistance even more.
MOVIE PLOT #2: A disgusted taxi cab driver is fed up with the way life is and his disconected mirror-talking self finally explodes in a catharsis of anger and frustration that threatens an entire city.
now substitute Travis Bickle for Islam Extremist, NY City for World. these terrorists main psyche gripe is not derived from simple American hatred, but also from a feeling of shame from themselves as well. If u could feel for Bickle, shouldn't u feel sorry for their disillusionment? Had America learned to feed these inferiority feelings, it would have been a great deal off.
I haven't posted in so long because aside from going to Amman to do some stuff with my parents i have been doing some serious thinking about the objectives of this blog.
Surfing thru the iraqi blogosphere at the time of creation of this blog i was genuinely bored, there were all ur ABCs, the typical politiblogs that are bound to appear, already targeted at foreigners and stock-full of the usual goddam heated exchanges of opinions and fights that already inundate the television, media and local sittings. it was horrible stuff and i actually thought that i would achieve something by talking about how life actually goes about in Iraq for a collegeman who really doesn't care about that crap as one might possibly be led to believe, we have a life going on!! Looking back, i haven't even achieved this --- largely due to the fact that as a person i am not quite normal enough to convey the typical iraqi twentysomething.
For a farily approximate male iraqi in his 20s deviant from the Political and Candycoated Hypocrisy types, check out my friend's Caesar Of Pentra, a not-getting-any, but still able to acknowledge Rumdan & Aimaa with the usual stereotypical dialogue imprinted by heart due to Iraqi's neccesity of learning copious lenghts of useless text in Saddam's time, i sat nearby him whilst he created his blog.
I read Truth About Iraqi's last post, it was strong and to the point, but he again played the dramatic card, although quite in place....We had our peace, life was in order, u knew what to do and do not and if u followed these hypocrisy well u could lay ur head at ur pillow at night at ease ; while America was watching Seinfeld, Iraqis were watching The Family Of Hajj Mitwali.
Now it is complete and heinous anrachy, u actually don't know what to fear cuz there are already so many of them. Death is quite in fashion these days, it is quite difficult now to talk about girls and guitars or whatever when it has blown up so out of proportion. It was different when i started this blog, it has become unbearable now.
Before i left Iraq, a person got whacked at the end of our street, he was sitting at a Police Capt's house with two other guys & capt when armed maskmen made swiss cheese out of them.
I was passing by the house when the corpse was mailed-in, the chorus of wailing women send shivers down my spine to this very day.
Next day, other end of street, taxi guy gets whacked by the taxi fare.
Eh... who's to blame?
Two days ago i seeped through my messenger list, there were two guys online, was a faroff acquanitnace, the other was an american soldier, i met him a few months ago in some chatroom or something.
i clicked on him and said hi, as i was doing so, a queer sensation built up inside of me, i have never experienced it before in regard to american soldiers.
it was hate. blind and angry
what have u done to our country?
It is so hard to be of mind when u are filled with hate, which if i may point out, is a sudden heating sensation that rushes through ur canals and seeps through ur heart so vividly, fearfully rendering ur thought inanimte as it pushes u to do something....
I urged to fight my hate down because it is the reason of errors, besides America has done so much for me as a culture, all i read is Western novels, i play rock'n'roll offsprings - a pure American invention - and sometimes i even think in English lanuage, i have never been proud of this. Our Arab culture has so many great hot stuff, it's a shame we always tend to think of it in the context of a tribal, degenerate spirit, it's got tons of cool, folks!
By mistake I played Fog El Nakhal on my acoustic guitar, i couldn't get it out of my head, it's amazing how such beautiful, beautiful music has been made by mindsets i have always considered muddy and stubborn. I was spellbound by surprise, mostly...
They got it all, irony, sex, u name it,
This is a joke from an old book of my grandpa:
a wiseguy told a lebsian once : 'O Sister, bananas are delicious'
to which she replied : 'true, but it inflates the belly.'
LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!
See? everything is down there, sharp wits could rework these fun bits into a modern whole not in ur usual 'enhancing the image of East in West' by importing Western franchises, what is needed is a revival that has a distnict stamp of the East but incorporating a new cool into it.
This can be even implemented in religion, such as the case of brilliant Amro Khalid, whose unorthodox teaching beliefs of not scaring ya off with a sword and frown, his brilliant understanding of the contextual arab youth and intelligent aversion to politics have served a great deal in his re-shaping of traditional religious sermons that absolutely nobody actually listens to (youthwise). This cynic has shed his tears twice over his lectures.
Kiddos, i guess i talked a lot of crap here but anyways it's my blog so there ya go...
U might've noticed that i got no standard point of reference, one moment i'm Mr.Religious wet-eyed the other i'm sex-obsessed freak....that is my exact defintion, 'Konfused' as all arab youths are, intermingling higher causes with the usual dabble, only now the gimmick has faded and the grim reality of the black world has dawned on an unsuspecting kid, hence the true C obliterates the fancy K in this post's title.
This is probably my most confusing post.
Sorry dudes, next time.
I hung out with 13 twice so far, i'm gonna call him up today for another hangout before i leave to Iraq tomorrow night, 13 returns with me but in a separate car cuz he's got his family, i am eager to meet all my friends again despite my pop's growing concerns over the situation in Iraq (and speaking of mass media confusion, my pop kept asking me about my friends, who's Sunni/Shiite, do u talk abotu stuff like that? CALM DOWN, it hasn't grown to that yet in Baghdad at least, don't know about other places but u don't have to know this to survive...)
LIFE IN IRAQ GOES ON....DON'T LISTEN TO THE FUCKING TEARMONGERS.
BUT I HAVE TO SAY THAT AS OF NOW THE TOILET IS CLOGGED.
Btw, i would love to meet some iraqi bloggers like 13 here did, on my wishlist mostly is Salam Pax, who i feel is an older, more political version of myself (i was particularly mesmerized by the fact that he is homo, HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? dude! i so wanna talk to ya - not that way though- , i told 13 about that and his eyebrows arched....it's quite cool, in Iraqi Gay who openly admits that is powerful, did he ever talk about that in details? it's probably the reason he don't believe in religion either...anyway i'll talk about that later)
Also i'd like to meet Baghdad's Mistress, who hasn't been writing for a long time, and my nice friend Haneen With Love (so nice to hear from ur comment, as soon as i saw it i wrote this) and last but not least the Neurotic Wife.
i think i'll see Average Iraqi soon too....
Peace....
and speaking of Amman, what the hell is gone wrong with the blashempous guys who design the pedes, (where i come from they're called shutt-afas, erm, don't know what u guys call it but it's basically a bowel made of porcelain or somesuch that shoots out water to rid ur esteemed other hole from so much crap), these guys are (*#&@ murderers, we have three bathrooms in our appartment in cozy Western Amman, in each i'd have to take a different sitting position [lowering rear, lowering rear with an acute -oooof- angle, u name it]....aside from that, i guess it was a refreshing change from the usual array of practical jokes back in Baghdad : electricity, water and ra-ta-tat)
A Nice Day...
The Kid Himself
HUGE WARNING 2 : I am a twenty-years Iraqi guy trying to talk politics, therefore a huge amount of bullshit may occur at times. I apologize in advance.
"Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it
"I wanna destroy the passer by cos i wanna be anarchy"
- Sex Pistols
Anrachy can be fun, right? especially on the records...
My american cousin is 14 years old, he visited amman for two months and i was there for one month, a nice fella in his inside but completely ignorant, a severe disrespect for almsot everyone and esp. adults, at night he goes prowling the neighborhood screaming anarchy and ringing doorbells.
I watch him in silence. In seeing him, I understand what the Abu Ghareeb prison scandals are all about, they are mainly here to have some ignorant fun. Nice fellas, but they don't really care....think about it, about 99% of the good deeds u do or anybody else does ain't really about being good, but about FEELING good about yourself, all these 1st-world guys who feel ur pain aren't really. Nobody cares for u but urself, never ever forget that.
Would u care to see the homes destoryed, the families torn apart, the wail of twenty black-dressed women as they mourn an 'oops, sorry i shot ya' case as their helpless banshee fades out to nothingness and repeat that nefarious Sid Vicious laugh again?
I read Riverbend's Sepetember 11 entry, i couldn't help but feeling the dramatic fake overtones that capitulated some points to the advantage of appealing to a crowd, a card usually played by iraqis unconsciously due to the upbringing of Saddam's regime, which inforces the prose of horning and hooting, i esp. liked the way the RC fell out of somebody's hand....
Lemme tell ya what i was doing, i was watching some stupid thing on Iraqi National TV (probably Cartoons, considering it was about noon, and when it cut my first gut feeling was HEY WHAT THE F****...when i saw the planes hit the towers....i was 'huh?' it was a strange moment, in the sense that America's been hit! the unquenhcable giant! World War goes awry? Call America, You Win...Communism, Nazism, Faschism....the amazing power that u could depend on, has been hit! but i wasn't really shocked...i wasn't flustered, cuz ya know why? as a person, it didn't matter to me one bit. It ain't the center of the world to me.
and on some level, there was a happy voice chirping....
Sure, my condolesnces, they clearly are nice guys, but then again sorry folks, that's why i am here for, to tell u the truth and make u understand more about us. I only read Sci-Fi, and the biggest lie about Sci-Fi in my case isn't aliens or space travel or energy portals, but the unified earth.
There ain't no way in a million years that earth could be unified, unless it'd be wiped out by a singular race, Earth is the only stage required for mankind's theatre in a precondition set by God, or Nature if u please to call him that. Simply put, Human Racism is quite built-in everywhere, u cannot deny it, even in our holy books...ur identification with ur own race must be strong, cuz theese are the only people u can really count on...Unfortunately.
As Sam Huntington's Clash Of Civilizations points out quite vividly...i ain't talking about bloody masscre, it's about cultural ID.
To me, and surely to many other Arabs who won't admit it, Osama Bin Laden is much like the voice of Saruman, ur reasoning quite assures u that he is wrong, but his low, gentle voice lulls u into a dreamscape of the glories of our Arab Nation, a nation about greatness, justice, and truth. His peaceful speeches that belie the usual madman gloating of the exterme guys blanket the countless atrocities committed by his group, who i think of as enemies of Islam before being enemies of anybody else, cuz they run contrast to the tolerance that was always part of the religion (as opposed to, say, the violent killings done in Spain at the time of Elizabeth & Ferdinand against anybody who ain't christian)
MOVIE PLOT : In post-war Iraq, a forgotten laboraotary that has been kept notoriously in secret until now has been developing a time-machine, head engineer, Falah Hussein, is accidentally kidnapped by Abu Musaab El Zarqawi, no sooner than El Zarqawi learns about the machine than he decides to return back to the times of prophet to ask for guidance in the jihad against unbelievers, El Zarqawi, armed with an AK-47, was aiming after Mecca's libeartion but misses it and returns eight years earlier, when muslims were 40+ members huddled secretly in some house, before even reaching them, armed with an AK-47, he wipes out half Mecca's population in a Jihaad frenzy, thus causing a large population of present-day arabs to fade into nothingness, their parents being dead before their conception.
My point is to say that if one takes a message from the prophet, fighting is nothing but the last option, and battle must be openly and accepted upon, muslims were tortured by the dozen earlier on and the Prophet would do nothing but say : 'Patience, patience'. One must gather his own strengths first.
Arabs are frequently humiliated in movies and books, being shown as illiterate, dirty foul creations of nature, brianless apes shot down by Indiana Jones...a friend of mine sent me a link to Franz Kafka's stories, one of them 'Jackals & Arabs' offer several implicit (& explicit) insults to our race, especially striking is the simple equality between Jackals & Arabs, as if we are some sort of animals.
Arab Nation is a great place, dudes, even if me saying so at the current moment with a lot of disbelief, it ain't now, we've been too much run in the mud to see how great we are, but i tell ya, it's got lotsa cool stuff, it illuminated the Dark Ages of the West. In examining many productions, u find a determined negligence and/or insult of the arab role, for example, in the movie Genghis Khan, Arabs are always mentioned as Persians, and once when an arab envoy is sent, he is humiliated in the most enderaing fashion exclusively of all other races...(interestingly, the hero of that 60s Hollywood film is Omar Shariff, an egyptian).
It's Friday, i listen to the weekly speech given by the nearby mosque's Imam at noon, he concludes that Katrina is the hurricane Allah sent to punish nonbelievers, and upon raising his hands in the traditional pryer to god, the usual drone of 'Amen' that usually is no more than a sheepish static is rendered to an exciting uprise, admiteddly, we are moved to believe this.
If one believes the Koran, there were many bad guys who were terminated with hurricanes & wind (Aad, Thamood) and my Imam did a great demo of these, come to think of it...are America genuinely bad guys collectively??? God and Religion are frequently mocked about in the Western lifestyle and frankly even though i enjoy many of the American Way of Life's liberalism, i would never think of it as the utopian way of life for anybody, when Oprah asks Aishwarya Rai (sorry for misspells) what Indian women think of American Women, do they consider us bad cuz we have sex? Man, i almost blushed! Would u think of Shurooq Faiq, Uday's favorite TV whore asking that anytime soon?
هل تعتقد ان النساء الامريكيات ينيجن هواية؟ انصل على 7791212 للادلاء برأيك
I watch FRIENDS everyday, i have a hoot and enjoy it everyday, and i feel brutally ashamed everyday. it's probably one of the most dangerous products of the West cuz it promotes dangerous ideas in a fun, hip form that u'd love to do....sex has become more and more an easy subject for me along the guidelines of such daily discipline, think of what could that do to a collective youth? while in theory i am supposed to find that enthralling, psychologically it is not. It feels MORALLY wrong. Deep down inside, where u can't lie.
Bottomline, American Way of Life is a negative influence even amongst me, a guy who's supposedly American in all his ways of life.
These feelings of humilition, and longing for the true extent of our civilization are some of the factors that fuel arab desire for a better day, if u ask me, American should encourage Islamic study, not oppress it, thus fueling resistance even more.
MOVIE PLOT #2: A disgusted taxi cab driver is fed up with the way life is and his disconected mirror-talking self finally explodes in a catharsis of anger and frustration that threatens an entire city.
now substitute Travis Bickle for Islam Extremist, NY City for World. these terrorists main psyche gripe is not derived from simple American hatred, but also from a feeling of shame from themselves as well. If u could feel for Bickle, shouldn't u feel sorry for their disillusionment? Had America learned to feed these inferiority feelings, it would have been a great deal off.
I haven't posted in so long because aside from going to Amman to do some stuff with my parents i have been doing some serious thinking about the objectives of this blog.
Surfing thru the iraqi blogosphere at the time of creation of this blog i was genuinely bored, there were all ur ABCs, the typical politiblogs that are bound to appear, already targeted at foreigners and stock-full of the usual goddam heated exchanges of opinions and fights that already inundate the television, media and local sittings. it was horrible stuff and i actually thought that i would achieve something by talking about how life actually goes about in Iraq for a collegeman who really doesn't care about that crap as one might possibly be led to believe, we have a life going on!! Looking back, i haven't even achieved this --- largely due to the fact that as a person i am not quite normal enough to convey the typical iraqi twentysomething.
For a farily approximate male iraqi in his 20s deviant from the Political and Candycoated Hypocrisy types, check out my friend's Caesar Of Pentra, a not-getting-any, but still able to acknowledge Rumdan & Aimaa with the usual stereotypical dialogue imprinted by heart due to Iraqi's neccesity of learning copious lenghts of useless text in Saddam's time, i sat nearby him whilst he created his blog.
I read Truth About Iraqi's last post, it was strong and to the point, but he again played the dramatic card, although quite in place....We had our peace, life was in order, u knew what to do and do not and if u followed these hypocrisy well u could lay ur head at ur pillow at night at ease ; while America was watching Seinfeld, Iraqis were watching The Family Of Hajj Mitwali.
Now it is complete and heinous anrachy, u actually don't know what to fear cuz there are already so many of them. Death is quite in fashion these days, it is quite difficult now to talk about girls and guitars or whatever when it has blown up so out of proportion. It was different when i started this blog, it has become unbearable now.
Before i left Iraq, a person got whacked at the end of our street, he was sitting at a Police Capt's house with two other guys & capt when armed maskmen made swiss cheese out of them.
I was passing by the house when the corpse was mailed-in, the chorus of wailing women send shivers down my spine to this very day.
Next day, other end of street, taxi guy gets whacked by the taxi fare.
Eh... who's to blame?
Two days ago i seeped through my messenger list, there were two guys online, was a faroff acquanitnace, the other was an american soldier, i met him a few months ago in some chatroom or something.
i clicked on him and said hi, as i was doing so, a queer sensation built up inside of me, i have never experienced it before in regard to american soldiers.
it was hate. blind and angry
what have u done to our country?
It is so hard to be of mind when u are filled with hate, which if i may point out, is a sudden heating sensation that rushes through ur canals and seeps through ur heart so vividly, fearfully rendering ur thought inanimte as it pushes u to do something....
I urged to fight my hate down because it is the reason of errors, besides America has done so much for me as a culture, all i read is Western novels, i play rock'n'roll offsprings - a pure American invention - and sometimes i even think in English lanuage, i have never been proud of this. Our Arab culture has so many great hot stuff, it's a shame we always tend to think of it in the context of a tribal, degenerate spirit, it's got tons of cool, folks!
By mistake I played Fog El Nakhal on my acoustic guitar, i couldn't get it out of my head, it's amazing how such beautiful, beautiful music has been made by mindsets i have always considered muddy and stubborn. I was spellbound by surprise, mostly...
They got it all, irony, sex, u name it,
This is a joke from an old book of my grandpa:
a wiseguy told a lebsian once : 'O Sister, bananas are delicious'
to which she replied : 'true, but it inflates the belly.'
LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!
See? everything is down there, sharp wits could rework these fun bits into a modern whole not in ur usual 'enhancing the image of East in West' by importing Western franchises, what is needed is a revival that has a distnict stamp of the East but incorporating a new cool into it.
This can be even implemented in religion, such as the case of brilliant Amro Khalid, whose unorthodox teaching beliefs of not scaring ya off with a sword and frown, his brilliant understanding of the contextual arab youth and intelligent aversion to politics have served a great deal in his re-shaping of traditional religious sermons that absolutely nobody actually listens to (youthwise). This cynic has shed his tears twice over his lectures.
Kiddos, i guess i talked a lot of crap here but anyways it's my blog so there ya go...
U might've noticed that i got no standard point of reference, one moment i'm Mr.Religious wet-eyed the other i'm sex-obsessed freak....that is my exact defintion, 'Konfused' as all arab youths are, intermingling higher causes with the usual dabble, only now the gimmick has faded and the grim reality of the black world has dawned on an unsuspecting kid, hence the true C obliterates the fancy K in this post's title.
This is probably my most confusing post.
Sorry dudes, next time.
I hung out with 13 twice so far, i'm gonna call him up today for another hangout before i leave to Iraq tomorrow night, 13 returns with me but in a separate car cuz he's got his family, i am eager to meet all my friends again despite my pop's growing concerns over the situation in Iraq (and speaking of mass media confusion, my pop kept asking me about my friends, who's Sunni/Shiite, do u talk abotu stuff like that? CALM DOWN, it hasn't grown to that yet in Baghdad at least, don't know about other places but u don't have to know this to survive...)
LIFE IN IRAQ GOES ON....DON'T LISTEN TO THE FUCKING TEARMONGERS.
BUT I HAVE TO SAY THAT AS OF NOW THE TOILET IS CLOGGED.
Btw, i would love to meet some iraqi bloggers like 13 here did, on my wishlist mostly is Salam Pax, who i feel is an older, more political version of myself (i was particularly mesmerized by the fact that he is homo, HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? dude! i so wanna talk to ya - not that way though- , i told 13 about that and his eyebrows arched....it's quite cool, in Iraqi Gay who openly admits that is powerful, did he ever talk about that in details? it's probably the reason he don't believe in religion either...anyway i'll talk about that later)
Also i'd like to meet Baghdad's Mistress, who hasn't been writing for a long time, and my nice friend Haneen With Love (so nice to hear from ur comment, as soon as i saw it i wrote this) and last but not least the Neurotic Wife.
i think i'll see Average Iraqi soon too....
Peace....
and speaking of Amman, what the hell is gone wrong with the blashempous guys who design the pedes, (where i come from they're called shutt-afas, erm, don't know what u guys call it but it's basically a bowel made of porcelain or somesuch that shoots out water to rid ur esteemed other hole from so much crap), these guys are (*#&@ murderers, we have three bathrooms in our appartment in cozy Western Amman, in each i'd have to take a different sitting position [lowering rear, lowering rear with an acute -oooof- angle, u name it]....aside from that, i guess it was a refreshing change from the usual array of practical jokes back in Baghdad : electricity, water and ra-ta-tat)
A Nice Day...
The Kid Himself
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Quickie Reaffirmation Post : Ottham Abd El Hafid
Hi folks...
I finished exams today!!!!
t.g! not particulalry easy questions (our teacher is Dr. Ali, or Dr. Spoonfeeding, the toughtest nut in the dept, we had a long-running relationship of tension, largely due to his sarcastic half-smile control freak personality that clashed with my class-clown antics....but i had labored over improving things and he was so okay with me today and even gave me a pat on the back as i was scribbling - i felt a shameful shred of love - students aren't supposed to like teachers no matter what, rule #1 - for him and lovable shred of shame at myself for having my ass taken outta class by him two times and a half....errr....
SONG : Guns 'N Roses - Perfect Crime
it took me a long while to like Axl Rose's romantic whine....but after six months of trying Novemebr Rain became a favorite and i ended up buying an MP3 collection, my favorite song off the Illusion 1 disc, which suffers from a healthy amount of fillers and pompous production which largely contradict the raw hunger that is supposed to be what Guns N Roses is all about...'Perfect Crime' is a serious exception...an out-of-control barrage of dirty Aerosmith/Stones riffs that play like a nervous trainwreck on crashing drums played at breakneck speed with varying time-signatures and punk-rock ethos, Axl Rose is brilliantly domineering, his nonstop vocal stealing the show as well as Slash's rollicking excellence....a powerful distillation of the greatest band assets, see also 'Think About You' from Destruction.
Yippieee! finally free, i celebrated today by sleeping naked [why the hell do eurpoean guys do that, anyway? our country is the most likely place to ever do that, btw :)] and here i wake up tired and feeling as battered and worn as a springy mattress on a seedy second-floor tenant somewhere in El Shi3la....
[cringe]
that's my funnybone breakin'....anyways, back to basics, aside from what's hot and what's not, i promise u some focused posts now that i have not much on my mind to do aside from playing guiatr and dreaming of chix and workin' on the Department CD (an ambitious project which i treat like my masterpiece) - more of that later....
I couldn't let this slip me by...as i was returning home today via our beloved Kia public-transit system i noticed the black death-rag [what is it with me & death rags, as if not they have become a common sight in Iraq nowadays] of one Otthoman Abdul-hafid, underneath it was written, who gave his life to save the lives of those in Al Aimma bridge. My face was flushed into a docile, life-realizing smile - to the horrible amazement at the dude sitting opposite me, who happened to look me in the eye then- it was the best death any1 could wish for, his ticket to heaven being asssured....
if u're not familiar with Otthman's tale, go here (Arabic)
and read 13's for the english - abridged - version. (btw 13, i left ya a comment at my Grendizer post, check it out please)
his story fills me with a nice, warm feeling...the sort that starts out at ur heart and proceds to fill u up ear to bottom, like an expanding amoeba...it makes me look around at the world around me, a world i usually regard with deep suspicion, unease, and dissatisfaction with understanding and pateince at the whole shibang of mess, i was at one time in my life highly connected with God, and i tell ya, there is no feeling more pure and divine than this. More of this later too...
i just wanted to acknowledge the boy and his family and may hop into this someday and let them be sure that his deed was not passed without notice, even in the heart of heartless 20-year-old horny cases like myself.
God Bless u, my friend...U R not forgotten.
Out & About...
Kid
I finished exams today!!!!
t.g! not particulalry easy questions (our teacher is Dr. Ali, or Dr. Spoonfeeding, the toughtest nut in the dept, we had a long-running relationship of tension, largely due to his sarcastic half-smile control freak personality that clashed with my class-clown antics....but i had labored over improving things and he was so okay with me today and even gave me a pat on the back as i was scribbling - i felt a shameful shred of love - students aren't supposed to like teachers no matter what, rule #1 - for him and lovable shred of shame at myself for having my ass taken outta class by him two times and a half....errr....
SONG : Guns 'N Roses - Perfect Crime
it took me a long while to like Axl Rose's romantic whine....but after six months of trying Novemebr Rain became a favorite and i ended up buying an MP3 collection, my favorite song off the Illusion 1 disc, which suffers from a healthy amount of fillers and pompous production which largely contradict the raw hunger that is supposed to be what Guns N Roses is all about...'Perfect Crime' is a serious exception...an out-of-control barrage of dirty Aerosmith/Stones riffs that play like a nervous trainwreck on crashing drums played at breakneck speed with varying time-signatures and punk-rock ethos, Axl Rose is brilliantly domineering, his nonstop vocal stealing the show as well as Slash's rollicking excellence....a powerful distillation of the greatest band assets, see also 'Think About You' from Destruction.
Yippieee! finally free, i celebrated today by sleeping naked [why the hell do eurpoean guys do that, anyway? our country is the most likely place to ever do that, btw :)] and here i wake up tired and feeling as battered and worn as a springy mattress on a seedy second-floor tenant somewhere in El Shi3la....
[cringe]
that's my funnybone breakin'....anyways, back to basics, aside from what's hot and what's not, i promise u some focused posts now that i have not much on my mind to do aside from playing guiatr and dreaming of chix and workin' on the Department CD (an ambitious project which i treat like my masterpiece) - more of that later....
I couldn't let this slip me by...as i was returning home today via our beloved Kia public-transit system i noticed the black death-rag [what is it with me & death rags, as if not they have become a common sight in Iraq nowadays] of one Otthoman Abdul-hafid, underneath it was written, who gave his life to save the lives of those in Al Aimma bridge. My face was flushed into a docile, life-realizing smile - to the horrible amazement at the dude sitting opposite me, who happened to look me in the eye then- it was the best death any1 could wish for, his ticket to heaven being asssured....
if u're not familiar with Otthman's tale, go here (Arabic)
and read 13's for the english - abridged - version. (btw 13, i left ya a comment at my Grendizer post, check it out please)
his story fills me with a nice, warm feeling...the sort that starts out at ur heart and proceds to fill u up ear to bottom, like an expanding amoeba...it makes me look around at the world around me, a world i usually regard with deep suspicion, unease, and dissatisfaction with understanding and pateince at the whole shibang of mess, i was at one time in my life highly connected with God, and i tell ya, there is no feeling more pure and divine than this. More of this later too...
i just wanted to acknowledge the boy and his family and may hop into this someday and let them be sure that his deed was not passed without notice, even in the heart of heartless 20-year-old horny cases like myself.
God Bless u, my friend...U R not forgotten.
Out & About...
Kid
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Sweet Childhood Reminscing (too lazy to spell)...
I just found this site and i'm almost in tears....
this, my friends, is the penultimate anime in Iraq, it is THE definitive cartoon for any iraqi kid (and strictly male, at that) of our generation, the sort of classic u'd sigh in relief upon seeing as the younger, less-understanding generation scoffs and laughs at u....this is a cultural stamp thing for crap's sake! a friend of mine has the entire 74-episodes on his HDD and he won't give me but five....damn him, i don't wanna seem like a kid but i never got to see the last twenty or so....i am filled with a ridiculous happiness right now, DOOOKFLEED....say what u say but hey that's me...i am a kid inside (hence the blog name)
i learned to play the main theme on my acoustic just now, amazingly it is played one the age-old arabic scale known as Hijaaz!!!!
my final is two days due, btw
Just go here
this is a good informative site, also check out goldoroakgo.com
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Eiffel 65 Song ....Drunken Ramble...
I never drank alcohol, it's against my religion.
but i guess this must be what it feels like...
Uhhhh....where to start...burrrp...
SONG : EAGLES - Life In The Fast Line
This is really driving me crazy, we all know the eagles for the one song i wouldn't bother to name 'Warm smells of colitas'....but lately this one can't get out of my head, it's a bluesy hard rock and roll tune of the kind i'm supposed to hate but i think my musical philosophies's going thru changes recently, this is probably due to Aerosmith....Don Henley's vocal is right-on, especially the call-and-response 'Uhhh' on the chorus, as for the lead work at the end....wham....the other Eagles song i play these days is the R&B 'I CAn't Tell You Why'...
i can't seem to remember when i wrote last here but it seems like a long time, well, i wouldn't want to let my fans (all two of them) disappointed so i guess i'll have to apologize in some way :
sorry.
phone line broke down again, i am currently posting from a net cafe...actually i couldn't post all last week because i wasn't home for most of it.
oh, well.
it just seems to me that my Zodiac Star sign bullshit or whatever has encountered a solid Cosmic Belt of The Constellation Disappointementa, the kind that cringes, one by the other they hit me and i just keep taking em cold-hearted, you know the kind, the sort that leaves u disconneceted and numb from the rest of the world, as if that was not my way of life already - i am now looking through the universe in blue.
da-boo-dee-da-boo-dai
this blog was supposed to be a general rant to help me forget the frantic pressure of living in this place and now i can see that no matter what u do u cannot ignore the politics...it is a fact and we cannot ignore it....even some of my good pals have already caved....when i first started this i thought i'd change the world with my anti-politics stance but few people have paid notice.
can't say that i care much currently....
i am not going to bother u with my negligible comments on the political situation these days, there are already a dozen of excellent politiblogs, u want that, go read them....Al Aimma bridge was probably one of the worst things that ever happened so far, Sunni? Shiite? some people say kids did it for fun...
we were bypassing Babil's hotel yesterday when i saw a black rag on the wall, these black rags in iraq are known for proclaming the death of a certain fella and where his funeral (fat'ha in arabic, in coincidence with the first sura of El Koran, the relation is that this chapter (sura) is the one read usually in funerals) ; funny thing, in Amman they use a small white A4 paper printed in Word, but i kinda like the rags more....anyway, this particular one wasn't a death notice, it said more or less this :
'The shoes of the martyrs of Al Aimma bridge is a CROWN on the head of Amro Mosa and his associates'
wtf? i asked around but nobody knew what this is for....it was kinda funny...
قنادر شهداء جسر الامة
hee-hee...
my contribution to the subject...
watched the stuff happening in New Orleans, it was weird seeing the Hawasim saga of looting and hooting in the US , it serves to remind us that after all we're all made of the same dust and bones under the hood...
my own personal dilemmas....it all started a day after Al Aimma stuff, i have this late-night ritual of falling asleep in front of TV, only lately the 'falling asleep' bit has changed to 'catching rats', i couldn't sleep till 6 so i decided to go wash up and go to college instead, some stuff broke out about exams and i thought i'd just check em and go back to my beautiful bed by 10, only as usual i hung out with my buddies and it was nothing but 2 when i finally took a Kia (sort of a transit system) home...guys called me and said they'd like to come over, i thought what the hell but not too long cuz i wanna get some sleep....they came over and it was all fun & games till 5...when they said they'd like to go to this Fat'ha of a guy in our college (his pop was popped two days ago, his mom died from an explosion a month ago and his uncle was shot six months ago as well - poor sod) i didn't know the guy well but it was a horrible tragedy and i felt obliged to be present...i asked my pal : 'how long is this going to take?'
'oh, an hour, no more'....
it was 5PM, i haven't slept for 25 hours now - i last woke up 4 PM yesterday!!!
i said what the hell...it turns out that our friend here has to take his mom & sis and then pickup his grandma and then deliver them all someplace before doing the actual thing, and amids traffic jams and picking up two more buddies we reached the place by 8 PM and stayed the last 10 minutes of the ordeal, i almost kissed the guy by mistake....
when we got back to the car i hadn't slept for like 28 hours and was starting to get the screeming mimis in my head when all of a sudden my friend's mom calls and say some stuff broke in our region and armed guys fill the streets, so we were shut off - AHHH GREAT! i called grandma who give me a violent reproach for even thinking of staying over at a friend's house like my friends would do (and did) - she's afraid we're gonna smoke and hire a hooker or something and ordered me to get my ass to my uncle's place...
when they told me we reached uncle's place it was 9 (29 hours) and just when i thougght i'd get some corner where i could be all by my lonesome i found my uncle's wife and cousin in the front yard, there was no electricity and they had locked themselves out....keys and phone with my uncle and he's nowhere to be found...we have to find him...she told me
Well smack my ass and call me Sa3di!
for a second i felt a little voice inside me that insisted to come up to my mouthpiece and tell that fat ridiculous woman to shut the hell up and stop being such a bitch and go cook us some dinner, it was a small selfish voice of somebody who felt the whole world was against him, but it was there, when i opened my mouth what came out instead was :
'No problem, we'll call him from my friend's house'
AAARGH....i felt like i'm in a comedy film where i am the guy who's getting picked on by some sort of cosmic joker...it would feel funny tomorrow i told myself...called uncle and turns out he's straneded on a highway, car won't start at 10 PM and my uncle has a history of heart-attacks, SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT.....where could u get a crane sometimes this late???
it was not until 10 when my uncle came after the car miraculously worked again (bad street-sold gasoline) and munched on a few meatballs and said goodnight to my relatives in a calm, collected way that diagonally opposed the bottled-up suffering inside....
30 hours of no sleep, a man could die if he didn't sleep for 72 hours, i woke up at 4 AM
....looking for rats....anyhow, i couldn't go back home again and the next two days were spent trying to sleep in the noon and mooning dracula in the nightime, i got back home three days later...
i got my midterm grades too, 17/30, unpromising...i have to work hard for my next Tuesday exam...
and last but not least my guitar teacher SAAD ZAI finally did it and fucked me real good, i felt gutted to the bone, the one thing i felt proud about that i could actually do some good at has been taken away from me, mainly playing guitar...he has been scolding me for the past 4 lectures but frankly i've never paid attention cuz they were mostly stupid 1-2-3-4 stuff.. i've been playin for 2 months on my own before i took him and has learned to play some stuff, mainly 20 chords and some songs Nirvana's The Man Who Sold The World - i recorded a version with vocals & drums & bass & a pseduo-electric guitar (acoustic with wah-wah effect) on Cakewalk, as well as Behind Blue Eyes, Karma Police and Hotel California...turns out my sitting position is wrong...i usually ignored him because he's this academic dictator, i saw hundreds of guitar players and they didn't all conform to this unique hand or body position....my disappointemnt came when i went yesterday to a friend's house and he told me the exact same things....shit...shit...shit....i have to relearn all eh old crap....
uhhhh...
girls? i have a new fantasy these days about a girl in our college, she is a muhajaba (wears headdress) and has been making eyecontact with me forever, when i lashed back at her with stares she withdrew and is now avoiding me whenever she sees me with a scared look but i see her looking at me when she thinks i'm not paying attention....nice eyes, but mostly leadership mother hen qualities and the biggest ass i've ever seen are her ass-ets, this may be just me, but all my major crushes are on girls who wear headresses, i am a pervert - the thought of having sex with a veiled girl is somehow, weirdly appealing....
i still talk with my online-met acquaintance girl from time to time
and no words from my ex-girlfriend for a 10 days, ta-da! a world record! we usually re-hooked every three days after every subsequent fight (the batting average for her was probably 14 fights a month, the other 14 being truces and my attempts to fix)...
i am drunk with words, and have no place to go with this ramble, it's a bad post but that's how it's meant to be....i'll write more when i have purpose....
adios
but i guess this must be what it feels like...
Uhhhh....where to start...burrrp...
SONG : EAGLES - Life In The Fast Line
This is really driving me crazy, we all know the eagles for the one song i wouldn't bother to name 'Warm smells of colitas'....but lately this one can't get out of my head, it's a bluesy hard rock and roll tune of the kind i'm supposed to hate but i think my musical philosophies's going thru changes recently, this is probably due to Aerosmith....Don Henley's vocal is right-on, especially the call-and-response 'Uhhh' on the chorus, as for the lead work at the end....wham....the other Eagles song i play these days is the R&B 'I CAn't Tell You Why'...
i can't seem to remember when i wrote last here but it seems like a long time, well, i wouldn't want to let my fans (all two of them) disappointed so i guess i'll have to apologize in some way :
sorry.
phone line broke down again, i am currently posting from a net cafe...actually i couldn't post all last week because i wasn't home for most of it.
oh, well.
it just seems to me that my Zodiac Star sign bullshit or whatever has encountered a solid Cosmic Belt of The Constellation Disappointementa, the kind that cringes, one by the other they hit me and i just keep taking em cold-hearted, you know the kind, the sort that leaves u disconneceted and numb from the rest of the world, as if that was not my way of life already - i am now looking through the universe in blue.
da-boo-dee-da-boo-dai
this blog was supposed to be a general rant to help me forget the frantic pressure of living in this place and now i can see that no matter what u do u cannot ignore the politics...it is a fact and we cannot ignore it....even some of my good pals have already caved....when i first started this i thought i'd change the world with my anti-politics stance but few people have paid notice.
can't say that i care much currently....
i am not going to bother u with my negligible comments on the political situation these days, there are already a dozen of excellent politiblogs, u want that, go read them....Al Aimma bridge was probably one of the worst things that ever happened so far, Sunni? Shiite? some people say kids did it for fun...
we were bypassing Babil's hotel yesterday when i saw a black rag on the wall, these black rags in iraq are known for proclaming the death of a certain fella and where his funeral (fat'ha in arabic, in coincidence with the first sura of El Koran, the relation is that this chapter (sura) is the one read usually in funerals) ; funny thing, in Amman they use a small white A4 paper printed in Word, but i kinda like the rags more....anyway, this particular one wasn't a death notice, it said more or less this :
'The shoes of the martyrs of Al Aimma bridge is a CROWN on the head of Amro Mosa and his associates'
wtf? i asked around but nobody knew what this is for....it was kinda funny...
قنادر شهداء جسر الامة
hee-hee...
my contribution to the subject...
watched the stuff happening in New Orleans, it was weird seeing the Hawasim saga of looting and hooting in the US , it serves to remind us that after all we're all made of the same dust and bones under the hood...
my own personal dilemmas....it all started a day after Al Aimma stuff, i have this late-night ritual of falling asleep in front of TV, only lately the 'falling asleep' bit has changed to 'catching rats', i couldn't sleep till 6 so i decided to go wash up and go to college instead, some stuff broke out about exams and i thought i'd just check em and go back to my beautiful bed by 10, only as usual i hung out with my buddies and it was nothing but 2 when i finally took a Kia (sort of a transit system) home...guys called me and said they'd like to come over, i thought what the hell but not too long cuz i wanna get some sleep....they came over and it was all fun & games till 5...when they said they'd like to go to this Fat'ha of a guy in our college (his pop was popped two days ago, his mom died from an explosion a month ago and his uncle was shot six months ago as well - poor sod) i didn't know the guy well but it was a horrible tragedy and i felt obliged to be present...i asked my pal : 'how long is this going to take?'
'oh, an hour, no more'....
it was 5PM, i haven't slept for 25 hours now - i last woke up 4 PM yesterday!!!
i said what the hell...it turns out that our friend here has to take his mom & sis and then pickup his grandma and then deliver them all someplace before doing the actual thing, and amids traffic jams and picking up two more buddies we reached the place by 8 PM and stayed the last 10 minutes of the ordeal, i almost kissed the guy by mistake....
when we got back to the car i hadn't slept for like 28 hours and was starting to get the screeming mimis in my head when all of a sudden my friend's mom calls and say some stuff broke in our region and armed guys fill the streets, so we were shut off - AHHH GREAT! i called grandma who give me a violent reproach for even thinking of staying over at a friend's house like my friends would do (and did) - she's afraid we're gonna smoke and hire a hooker or something and ordered me to get my ass to my uncle's place...
when they told me we reached uncle's place it was 9 (29 hours) and just when i thougght i'd get some corner where i could be all by my lonesome i found my uncle's wife and cousin in the front yard, there was no electricity and they had locked themselves out....keys and phone with my uncle and he's nowhere to be found...we have to find him...she told me
Well smack my ass and call me Sa3di!
for a second i felt a little voice inside me that insisted to come up to my mouthpiece and tell that fat ridiculous woman to shut the hell up and stop being such a bitch and go cook us some dinner, it was a small selfish voice of somebody who felt the whole world was against him, but it was there, when i opened my mouth what came out instead was :
'No problem, we'll call him from my friend's house'
AAARGH....i felt like i'm in a comedy film where i am the guy who's getting picked on by some sort of cosmic joker...it would feel funny tomorrow i told myself...called uncle and turns out he's straneded on a highway, car won't start at 10 PM and my uncle has a history of heart-attacks, SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT.....where could u get a crane sometimes this late???
it was not until 10 when my uncle came after the car miraculously worked again (bad street-sold gasoline) and munched on a few meatballs and said goodnight to my relatives in a calm, collected way that diagonally opposed the bottled-up suffering inside....
30 hours of no sleep, a man could die if he didn't sleep for 72 hours, i woke up at 4 AM
....looking for rats....anyhow, i couldn't go back home again and the next two days were spent trying to sleep in the noon and mooning dracula in the nightime, i got back home three days later...
i got my midterm grades too, 17/30, unpromising...i have to work hard for my next Tuesday exam...
and last but not least my guitar teacher SAAD ZAI finally did it and fucked me real good, i felt gutted to the bone, the one thing i felt proud about that i could actually do some good at has been taken away from me, mainly playing guitar...he has been scolding me for the past 4 lectures but frankly i've never paid attention cuz they were mostly stupid 1-2-3-4 stuff.. i've been playin for 2 months on my own before i took him and has learned to play some stuff, mainly 20 chords and some songs Nirvana's The Man Who Sold The World - i recorded a version with vocals & drums & bass & a pseduo-electric guitar (acoustic with wah-wah effect) on Cakewalk, as well as Behind Blue Eyes, Karma Police and Hotel California...turns out my sitting position is wrong...i usually ignored him because he's this academic dictator, i saw hundreds of guitar players and they didn't all conform to this unique hand or body position....my disappointemnt came when i went yesterday to a friend's house and he told me the exact same things....shit...shit...shit....i have to relearn all eh old crap....
uhhhh...
girls? i have a new fantasy these days about a girl in our college, she is a muhajaba (wears headdress) and has been making eyecontact with me forever, when i lashed back at her with stares she withdrew and is now avoiding me whenever she sees me with a scared look but i see her looking at me when she thinks i'm not paying attention....nice eyes, but mostly leadership mother hen qualities and the biggest ass i've ever seen are her ass-ets, this may be just me, but all my major crushes are on girls who wear headresses, i am a pervert - the thought of having sex with a veiled girl is somehow, weirdly appealing....
i still talk with my online-met acquaintance girl from time to time
and no words from my ex-girlfriend for a 10 days, ta-da! a world record! we usually re-hooked every three days after every subsequent fight (the batting average for her was probably 14 fights a month, the other 14 being truces and my attempts to fix)...
i am drunk with words, and have no place to go with this ramble, it's a bad post but that's how it's meant to be....i'll write more when i have purpose....
adios
Monday, August 29, 2005
Youth Of Iraq, Episode 2
Hey...
today was subtly pleasant, i was supposed to review for my finals but as usual i delayed it for yet anohter day, spent the noon in front of the TV/PC. Bored out quickly at 5 and went out with a few friends before finally hanging out with Bashaar Al Kaisi's bro back in my room, strumming California (we're picking up where u left us, u know who u r)...
so i am in a musical mood currently and decided to continue on my quest to explain what exactly has been going through my head for the past...six years...
*deep breath* hookay...
i have a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake, i didn't like it much when i first bought it but i found myself quoting from it over & over again.
BOOK: Stephen King - Everything's Eventual : 14 Dark Tales
Stephen King is way overrated, he writes in a great style, but it is so mercilessly repetitive that it eventually wears out its welcome, and the horror plot is usually rubbish - reading this short-story collection reminded me of an old Iraqi saying : 'Searching shit for melon seeds'....of the 14 tales, 2 were instant-classics 'All That You Love Will Be Carried Away' about a travelling insurance salesman whose only reason not to commit suicide is his pastime of collecting
bathroom graffiti, and the last 'Luckey Quarter' which ends things hopefully for a change, both stories are literary ones, not horror. the rest of the 12 vary from farily okay 'Autospy Room 4' about an alive man about to be accidentally
chopped up in the autopsy room told from his viewpoint, and 'The Road Virus Head North' was decent, but most end incomprehensibly and one is plain unreadable 'Eluria'. Never scary, but read it for the style. All That U Love is a must-read though.
All in all, uneven. (3/5)
in part 1, i left u at the door of my musical ambitions door after scouring what is called the Iraqi Metal Scene for lack of a better word. Today i am supposed to introduce u to whatever's been going on inside my own mind for the past years of musical meditation.
Music is kind of sacred to me, it hasn't always been that, i grew up in a mostly religion-adhering family, i learned early on that music does not sit well with religion side to side. However i hummed the occasional tune or two. Most iraqi teens
dig Arabic music, as they are supposed to do, however arabic pop these days is either a watered-down conversion of western aesthetics or all-out sex-driven heaving of overfed meat cows dancing their asses to the traditional one-two-three sound of dumbuk and nai. Many people listen to western music, but most have it figured out as either another Mr. Cool item or a mindless pastime, a devout hardcore minority is present nonetheless and these guys are knee-deep in either hip-hop or rock. I was first interested by music, like every other teen in his insecure, early days by the pop tunes of boybands...i ate, drank and slept Backstreet Boys when i was sixteen, fact : they called me AJ and for a good reason (those who know me will figure it out), we were freaks me & ma buddies, especially me, apparently i had just
discovered dirty words and we had this notebook (i found it a while eariler) in which we re-wrote all their songs to dirty versions, I was particularly fond of Larger Than Tonay's - (for those in-the-know, i was in Baghdad College) three
months later i was bored and turned to...who else? the King of Pop, who epitomized western music for all its best (& worst) in Iraq, i did six months of Michael, and i still listen to him every now & then, after half a year of making funny
shapes out of my shoes (i can moonwalk and do all his stuff pretty good, guys still come up and ask me to do it - i have his exact figure). music felt pretty stale for me, and that was when the Eminem mania was building up (early 2000), a friend introduced me to Marshall Mathers LP, prior to that, i figured Will Smith as all the rap that matters but that album blew my socks away...it is still one of my classic all-timers and Eminem is undeniably witty though repetitive at the moment, his style is so original, i was just getting to know Dre & Snoop & all that Pac/Biggie when my musical values were furiously shattered and after that time (March 2001), the world never looked the same again.
That was when i first heard No Leaf Clover.
No Leaf Clover is, by far, the closest composition that ever got to my all-time favorite song award, the foremost fusion of words and music I have ever heard in my whole short life. Never has a song offered such power, emotion, and atmosphere as this one. While lyrically the composition is vague and daunting, with such everyday indistinguishable words, the mirroring of their ideas into the music is what makes Clover totally mind-blowing, I never knew anything about music other than it's just a way of spending just a fun time. the actual analysis of this classic took me about six months, before that, I just listened, but I never expected the impression to be so awesome, I was too lowbrow to express my feelings anyway - eventually it changed my whole outlook on music as not just a tool for having fun, all the silly, kitschy pop music seemed absurd and meaningless, it frightened me that a band with such depth, detail and intelligence actually exists, and if only a tenth of music was as good! It taught me to carefully examine artistic works:books, photos, pictures, songs. Everything had whole new dimensions upon closer inspection. Consequently I found out that this line of thought has even influenced my usual real life relationships and social judgment of persons.
My entire world was upside down, those very bare-chested drug-addicted longhaired who i absolutely DETESTED became my philosphers and new world preachers. By unearthing Metallica - and heavy metal - i attained a new 'different' stamp from my social standpoint and also found a very powerful outlet to express my frustrations, i connected with the music that i have been looking for in years. Dark, intelligent and subliminal. When u first get into heavy metal, u think that anything that doesn't have distorted guitar in it is pop-crap or sellout songs, i tried the other metal offerings but i couldn't really find more of the music/lyric juxtapoisitionng that i was feasting upon.
it was only by chanc that i happened to watch a weird video by a band called Soundgarden (Black Hole Sun, naturally) and the respective album, Superunknown, brought radical new ideas hammering down to me, prior to this, grunge & alt.rock were classified in my brain as pop. but Superunkown taught me that the very same concepts i digged could be that much more scarier if they were injected INSIDE the classicist pop-song radio-ready 4-min outfit, a deep, bitter and dark irony that was always present in Chris Cornell's voice - the song THE DAY I TRIED TO LIVE is the absolute realiziation of a radiosong that says I LOVE U but really says FUCK U ALL TO ROTTEN HELL. It was the ultimate album for lost souls of Generation X, it was everything that Nirvana was supposed to be but really wasn't.
Which bring me to an important point.
Kurt Vonnegut once said : "People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowning something about the artist, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiousity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?
There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer's mind. Pictures are famous for their humanness, not for their pictureness.'
This is vital. In many cases, the image of a certain performer is so intertwined with his music that it is impossible to separate when u r listening to, case in point, Nirvana.When i didnt' know absolutely NOTHING about the adventures of Kurt Cobain, i just picked up a compilation done by a friend of Nirvana songs, it had 'Teen Spirit', 'About A Girl', 'Come As You Are' , 'All Aplogies', etcetra etcetra...i kept playing it over & over...trying to understand what's the big deal?!? This is life-changing music??? i mean sure it's not bad, but its' not immortal as, say, Metallica [to me]. i came by Metallica though S&M, a high-brow concept concert performed with a symphony backing them up, throughout the concert, James Hetfield didn't strike me as the kind of guy who would go and have ten bottles and shoot up and scream at the top of his voice. No, sir, i thought of him that time as a scary prince of darkness who would finish the set and have a quiet dinner with his wife and kids and read TIME magazine (u can imagine my shock upon seeing Live Shit! Binge & Purge...) anyhow, in a short while i got to know all about Generation X, the trials and tribulations of Cobain and how he was pushed into the throne and his all anti-star stance and suddenly all his music made sense to me...ghosts of wallowing in self-ironic depression and mockery of the mainstream as well all that was in-between suddenly became impinged, but it was not by the MUSIC, it was by the PERSONA. MTV Unplugged became a classic and i kept listening to him. But I know now that people like him because of his personality, because of what he stands for, not for his musical ideas - which is basically punk-rock in its simplest form, it is virtually hard to separate the two - his lyrics are admittedly meaningless, he glued them up from separate poems but people have him labelled as performer capable of 'intense emotional songwriting'...well, u get the point. The same can be said of bands like The White Stripes, System Of A Down and Radiohead.
The sort of music i am looking to be able to create one day is should be ambitious in scope, utilizing sounds and instruments for a greater cause, so far i have only hinted at what music sends shivers down my spine, in order to clarify things up, here's a song, i suggest u listen to it before trying to understand what is said here :
Radiohead - Karma Police
This is a mid-tempo song based on paino and an acoustic chord strum, with a melancholy, ellegiac tone in the verses, during which, singer Thom Yorke sings this :
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radioKarma Police, arrest this girl, her hitler hairdo, is making me feel ill and weak i've crashed her party
I don't know what the singer meant to say here, but i have my own personal interpretation, it may not stand true, but i like it and it is the result of my previous exploratino of musical landscapes. This song is about a person living his life guided by some sort of 'moral code' that he set for himself : Peer pressure, attempts to look cool, whatsoever...thus in the verses, he is assuming his supposedly cool alter-ego, a false state of mind he made in which he procalims his
'Karma Police' to arrest several people he finds inapporporate or uncool, the verses are disenfranchied, but this free-word associated is what adds to the mystery, this coolness is fake, and is exposed by Yorke's tone, very unhappy and out of touch...in the break, a cold voice intones :
This is what u get, This is what u get, This is what u get, when u mess with us...
Basically, a man crushed by his own confusion.
I like the unorthodox chorus so much, it has my favorite trick of initial restrain followed by an unexpected cathartic blast brighter chords resonate as Yorke repeats in a voice filled with stupid but true happiness, it is a minute of release from
all this complicated modern-world pressures melded all in one line, the lyrics is negative but is rendered by Yorke like a man on drugs, it is his only refuge, a minute of simply losing all that pretence and complication and return to a more
simple state of mind, be yourself :
For a minute there, I lost myself
For a minute there, I lost myself
For a minute there, I lost myself
For a minute there, I lost myself
by the end of the chorus, u already see the depression creeping up in the end of Yorke's wail, as if the minute is over and we're back to pretending more of not liking people we are not, bottling our true feelings inside : basically living in
Iraq.
OK Computer, a development of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon is about difficulites in living in the modern world, and this song is the amplification of that subject.
This is ambitious, complex music, it offers sublime depth into it, it is wrong to appraoch music with this kind of mathematical mentality usually, because sometimes free-form sponatenoity usually leads into great results, but all i am meaning to say is that i don't like rock music because it's full of blood and demons and chugga-chugga riffs, Bob Rock said it best : 'It's good to say kill kill fuck fuck, but it's better to say it for a reason.'
It's the reason that i'm betting my life on.
SOUNDGARDEN - HEAD DOWN
We see that smile, We see that smile, We see that smile on your face
We hear you cry, We hear you wail, We steal that smile from your face
We see you laugh, We see you dance, We take that away everyday
We see you cry, We turn your head, Then we'll slap your face
Bow down, Bow down, Live your life, Head down, Head down, Hide that smile
Head high, Head high, You've got to smileHead high, Head high, You've got to smile!
We see you try, We see you fail, Some things never change,
We hear you cry, We hear you wail, We steal that smile from your face
Bow down, Bow down, Live your life, Head down, Head down, Hide that smile
Head high, Head high, You've got to smileHead high, Head high, Head high like a song you like!
These lyrics are not much by themeselves lying on a piece of paper, but Cornell has the trick of combinig sound and words into somehting truly its own :
A strange number from the classic 1994 Superunknown written by bassist Ben Shepherd. The song starts unassumingly, with an unfocused acoustic and some shuffled drumming in the background; the acoustic surprisingly jumps headlong into a structured riff with percussion catching up with some busy lumbering. An electric guitar of the Black Sabbath detuned variety soon joins the fray, with an electric in front and an acoustic in back, the texture invoked is subtly queasy and hollow, from that texture comes out a hypnotically sympathetic Chris Cornell. Awash in cymbals, Cornell wears the tone of crooning, heartfelt sympathy, the kind of sympathy seen generously dealt from higher authority towards the lower, tortured spirits of peasants. Unlike real life -fortunately- all his sympathy is criminally and truthfully fake, starkly
disbelieved by the lyrical value of his affection, with such haunting sympathy, the assumed dictatorial governor concernedly addresses his cracked citizens of worship, telling them very dearly that he is the reason behind their suffering, so they should bow down and go home, live their lives, and, in true dictator fashion, the much-maligned hopes of victory is evoked passionately with the contrasting last lines 'Head high, Head high, you've got to smile', at which Cornell rises from his hypnosis into a higher, hopeful survival pitch. Having fulfilled that, the texture is disoriented again by the very first acoustic shuffle of the song, which transits the song into one of the most powerful riffs of the whole album, then again towards the electric/acoustic medley, before going back for some more discipline from his majesty.
You know what made me think of it this way, ever heard the Ba'ath's slogan: 'Head High, You're from Iraq?'
Well this was a bit confusing, but it's 4:49 AM so there ya have it
Out & About
today was subtly pleasant, i was supposed to review for my finals but as usual i delayed it for yet anohter day, spent the noon in front of the TV/PC. Bored out quickly at 5 and went out with a few friends before finally hanging out with Bashaar Al Kaisi's bro back in my room, strumming California (we're picking up where u left us, u know who u r)...
so i am in a musical mood currently and decided to continue on my quest to explain what exactly has been going through my head for the past...six years...
*deep breath* hookay...
i have a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake, i didn't like it much when i first bought it but i found myself quoting from it over & over again.
BOOK: Stephen King - Everything's Eventual : 14 Dark Tales
Stephen King is way overrated, he writes in a great style, but it is so mercilessly repetitive that it eventually wears out its welcome, and the horror plot is usually rubbish - reading this short-story collection reminded me of an old Iraqi saying : 'Searching shit for melon seeds'....of the 14 tales, 2 were instant-classics 'All That You Love Will Be Carried Away' about a travelling insurance salesman whose only reason not to commit suicide is his pastime of collecting
bathroom graffiti, and the last 'Luckey Quarter' which ends things hopefully for a change, both stories are literary ones, not horror. the rest of the 12 vary from farily okay 'Autospy Room 4' about an alive man about to be accidentally
chopped up in the autopsy room told from his viewpoint, and 'The Road Virus Head North' was decent, but most end incomprehensibly and one is plain unreadable 'Eluria'. Never scary, but read it for the style. All That U Love is a must-read though.
All in all, uneven. (3/5)
in part 1, i left u at the door of my musical ambitions door after scouring what is called the Iraqi Metal Scene for lack of a better word. Today i am supposed to introduce u to whatever's been going on inside my own mind for the past years of musical meditation.
Music is kind of sacred to me, it hasn't always been that, i grew up in a mostly religion-adhering family, i learned early on that music does not sit well with religion side to side. However i hummed the occasional tune or two. Most iraqi teens
dig Arabic music, as they are supposed to do, however arabic pop these days is either a watered-down conversion of western aesthetics or all-out sex-driven heaving of overfed meat cows dancing their asses to the traditional one-two-three sound of dumbuk and nai. Many people listen to western music, but most have it figured out as either another Mr. Cool item or a mindless pastime, a devout hardcore minority is present nonetheless and these guys are knee-deep in either hip-hop or rock. I was first interested by music, like every other teen in his insecure, early days by the pop tunes of boybands...i ate, drank and slept Backstreet Boys when i was sixteen, fact : they called me AJ and for a good reason (those who know me will figure it out), we were freaks me & ma buddies, especially me, apparently i had just
discovered dirty words and we had this notebook (i found it a while eariler) in which we re-wrote all their songs to dirty versions, I was particularly fond of Larger Than Tonay's - (for those in-the-know, i was in Baghdad College) three
months later i was bored and turned to...who else? the King of Pop, who epitomized western music for all its best (& worst) in Iraq, i did six months of Michael, and i still listen to him every now & then, after half a year of making funny
shapes out of my shoes (i can moonwalk and do all his stuff pretty good, guys still come up and ask me to do it - i have his exact figure). music felt pretty stale for me, and that was when the Eminem mania was building up (early 2000), a friend introduced me to Marshall Mathers LP, prior to that, i figured Will Smith as all the rap that matters but that album blew my socks away...it is still one of my classic all-timers and Eminem is undeniably witty though repetitive at the moment, his style is so original, i was just getting to know Dre & Snoop & all that Pac/Biggie when my musical values were furiously shattered and after that time (March 2001), the world never looked the same again.
That was when i first heard No Leaf Clover.
No Leaf Clover is, by far, the closest composition that ever got to my all-time favorite song award, the foremost fusion of words and music I have ever heard in my whole short life. Never has a song offered such power, emotion, and atmosphere as this one. While lyrically the composition is vague and daunting, with such everyday indistinguishable words, the mirroring of their ideas into the music is what makes Clover totally mind-blowing, I never knew anything about music other than it's just a way of spending just a fun time. the actual analysis of this classic took me about six months, before that, I just listened, but I never expected the impression to be so awesome, I was too lowbrow to express my feelings anyway - eventually it changed my whole outlook on music as not just a tool for having fun, all the silly, kitschy pop music seemed absurd and meaningless, it frightened me that a band with such depth, detail and intelligence actually exists, and if only a tenth of music was as good! It taught me to carefully examine artistic works:books, photos, pictures, songs. Everything had whole new dimensions upon closer inspection. Consequently I found out that this line of thought has even influenced my usual real life relationships and social judgment of persons.
My entire world was upside down, those very bare-chested drug-addicted longhaired who i absolutely DETESTED became my philosphers and new world preachers. By unearthing Metallica - and heavy metal - i attained a new 'different' stamp from my social standpoint and also found a very powerful outlet to express my frustrations, i connected with the music that i have been looking for in years. Dark, intelligent and subliminal. When u first get into heavy metal, u think that anything that doesn't have distorted guitar in it is pop-crap or sellout songs, i tried the other metal offerings but i couldn't really find more of the music/lyric juxtapoisitionng that i was feasting upon.
it was only by chanc that i happened to watch a weird video by a band called Soundgarden (Black Hole Sun, naturally) and the respective album, Superunknown, brought radical new ideas hammering down to me, prior to this, grunge & alt.rock were classified in my brain as pop. but Superunkown taught me that the very same concepts i digged could be that much more scarier if they were injected INSIDE the classicist pop-song radio-ready 4-min outfit, a deep, bitter and dark irony that was always present in Chris Cornell's voice - the song THE DAY I TRIED TO LIVE is the absolute realiziation of a radiosong that says I LOVE U but really says FUCK U ALL TO ROTTEN HELL. It was the ultimate album for lost souls of Generation X, it was everything that Nirvana was supposed to be but really wasn't.
Which bring me to an important point.
Kurt Vonnegut once said : "People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowning something about the artist, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiousity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?
There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer's mind. Pictures are famous for their humanness, not for their pictureness.'
This is vital. In many cases, the image of a certain performer is so intertwined with his music that it is impossible to separate when u r listening to, case in point, Nirvana.When i didnt' know absolutely NOTHING about the adventures of Kurt Cobain, i just picked up a compilation done by a friend of Nirvana songs, it had 'Teen Spirit', 'About A Girl', 'Come As You Are' , 'All Aplogies', etcetra etcetra...i kept playing it over & over...trying to understand what's the big deal?!? This is life-changing music??? i mean sure it's not bad, but its' not immortal as, say, Metallica [to me]. i came by Metallica though S&M, a high-brow concept concert performed with a symphony backing them up, throughout the concert, James Hetfield didn't strike me as the kind of guy who would go and have ten bottles and shoot up and scream at the top of his voice. No, sir, i thought of him that time as a scary prince of darkness who would finish the set and have a quiet dinner with his wife and kids and read TIME magazine (u can imagine my shock upon seeing Live Shit! Binge & Purge...) anyhow, in a short while i got to know all about Generation X, the trials and tribulations of Cobain and how he was pushed into the throne and his all anti-star stance and suddenly all his music made sense to me...ghosts of wallowing in self-ironic depression and mockery of the mainstream as well all that was in-between suddenly became impinged, but it was not by the MUSIC, it was by the PERSONA. MTV Unplugged became a classic and i kept listening to him. But I know now that people like him because of his personality, because of what he stands for, not for his musical ideas - which is basically punk-rock in its simplest form, it is virtually hard to separate the two - his lyrics are admittedly meaningless, he glued them up from separate poems but people have him labelled as performer capable of 'intense emotional songwriting'...well, u get the point. The same can be said of bands like The White Stripes, System Of A Down and Radiohead.
The sort of music i am looking to be able to create one day is should be ambitious in scope, utilizing sounds and instruments for a greater cause, so far i have only hinted at what music sends shivers down my spine, in order to clarify things up, here's a song, i suggest u listen to it before trying to understand what is said here :
Radiohead - Karma Police
This is a mid-tempo song based on paino and an acoustic chord strum, with a melancholy, ellegiac tone in the verses, during which, singer Thom Yorke sings this :
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radioKarma Police, arrest this girl, her hitler hairdo, is making me feel ill and weak i've crashed her party
I don't know what the singer meant to say here, but i have my own personal interpretation, it may not stand true, but i like it and it is the result of my previous exploratino of musical landscapes. This song is about a person living his life guided by some sort of 'moral code' that he set for himself : Peer pressure, attempts to look cool, whatsoever...thus in the verses, he is assuming his supposedly cool alter-ego, a false state of mind he made in which he procalims his
'Karma Police' to arrest several people he finds inapporporate or uncool, the verses are disenfranchied, but this free-word associated is what adds to the mystery, this coolness is fake, and is exposed by Yorke's tone, very unhappy and out of touch...in the break, a cold voice intones :
This is what u get, This is what u get, This is what u get, when u mess with us...
Basically, a man crushed by his own confusion.
I like the unorthodox chorus so much, it has my favorite trick of initial restrain followed by an unexpected cathartic blast brighter chords resonate as Yorke repeats in a voice filled with stupid but true happiness, it is a minute of release from
all this complicated modern-world pressures melded all in one line, the lyrics is negative but is rendered by Yorke like a man on drugs, it is his only refuge, a minute of simply losing all that pretence and complication and return to a more
simple state of mind, be yourself :
For a minute there, I lost myself
For a minute there, I lost myself
For a minute there, I lost myself
For a minute there, I lost myself
by the end of the chorus, u already see the depression creeping up in the end of Yorke's wail, as if the minute is over and we're back to pretending more of not liking people we are not, bottling our true feelings inside : basically living in
Iraq.
OK Computer, a development of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon is about difficulites in living in the modern world, and this song is the amplification of that subject.
This is ambitious, complex music, it offers sublime depth into it, it is wrong to appraoch music with this kind of mathematical mentality usually, because sometimes free-form sponatenoity usually leads into great results, but all i am meaning to say is that i don't like rock music because it's full of blood and demons and chugga-chugga riffs, Bob Rock said it best : 'It's good to say kill kill fuck fuck, but it's better to say it for a reason.'
It's the reason that i'm betting my life on.
SOUNDGARDEN - HEAD DOWN
We see that smile, We see that smile, We see that smile on your face
We hear you cry, We hear you wail, We steal that smile from your face
We see you laugh, We see you dance, We take that away everyday
We see you cry, We turn your head, Then we'll slap your face
Bow down, Bow down, Live your life, Head down, Head down, Hide that smile
Head high, Head high, You've got to smileHead high, Head high, You've got to smile!
We see you try, We see you fail, Some things never change,
We hear you cry, We hear you wail, We steal that smile from your face
Bow down, Bow down, Live your life, Head down, Head down, Hide that smile
Head high, Head high, You've got to smileHead high, Head high, Head high like a song you like!
These lyrics are not much by themeselves lying on a piece of paper, but Cornell has the trick of combinig sound and words into somehting truly its own :
A strange number from the classic 1994 Superunknown written by bassist Ben Shepherd. The song starts unassumingly, with an unfocused acoustic and some shuffled drumming in the background; the acoustic surprisingly jumps headlong into a structured riff with percussion catching up with some busy lumbering. An electric guitar of the Black Sabbath detuned variety soon joins the fray, with an electric in front and an acoustic in back, the texture invoked is subtly queasy and hollow, from that texture comes out a hypnotically sympathetic Chris Cornell. Awash in cymbals, Cornell wears the tone of crooning, heartfelt sympathy, the kind of sympathy seen generously dealt from higher authority towards the lower, tortured spirits of peasants. Unlike real life -fortunately- all his sympathy is criminally and truthfully fake, starkly
disbelieved by the lyrical value of his affection, with such haunting sympathy, the assumed dictatorial governor concernedly addresses his cracked citizens of worship, telling them very dearly that he is the reason behind their suffering, so they should bow down and go home, live their lives, and, in true dictator fashion, the much-maligned hopes of victory is evoked passionately with the contrasting last lines 'Head high, Head high, you've got to smile', at which Cornell rises from his hypnosis into a higher, hopeful survival pitch. Having fulfilled that, the texture is disoriented again by the very first acoustic shuffle of the song, which transits the song into one of the most powerful riffs of the whole album, then again towards the electric/acoustic medley, before going back for some more discipline from his majesty.
You know what made me think of it this way, ever heard the Ba'ath's slogan: 'Head High, You're from Iraq?'
Well this was a bit confusing, but it's 4:49 AM so there ya have it
Out & About
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