Batallas de Dependencia (link to full size image) illustration created for Our business is none of your art

Esta era un escuela internacional y como todos los estudiantes veníamos de diferentes países, la pregunta de cajón al conocer a alguien es un inmediato Di dove sei?

Yo le contesté que de Colombia y lo que Andrea hizo fue entristecer su mirada por un segundo acto seguido de lo cual en un tono afligido pero firme, pidiendo una explicación, me contó como un amigo suyo había sido asesinado mientras vacacionaba en Colombia.

Me dijo que unos policías lo habían matado, al parecer para robarlo perqué, perqué?. Me mostraba Andrea con ojos agüados un articulo en Internet perqué, perqué perqué?

Yo no supe que decir. Nos quedamos callados.

Después de un corto Mi dispiace con palmadita en la espalda, volví a mi mesa a trabajar.

200 years ago, the people of the ‘Virreinato de La Nueva Granada’ rebelled against the Spanish king and set in motion the events that after a long process stretching over 100 years of failures, secession and disputes, would produce the terrible tragedy that later would be known as the Republic of Colombia and it’s comparably miserable sibling nations : The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Republic of Ecuador, the Republic of Panamá and Simon Bolivar’s favorite : the republic of Bolivia.

It would be 9 years later after the “Cry of Independence” of 1810 that the definitive battle, the “Battle of Boyaca”, where the Spanish were defeated took place. This battle is known in Colombia as the “Battle of Independence” and it’s celebrated the 7th of August as the “National Party” and it’s also the date on which every 4 years the ceremony in which the president takes possession is held.

It was a time in history when the South American colonies fought to be free from the control of Europeans. The Spanish were our adversaries, we fought our hardest to leave their control, they fought their best to keep us under their flag.

200 years later the roles have reversed.

Today we Colombians, in far greater numbers than those who fought to be independent, fight to be again dependent of the developed world and the European countries and be covered under their flag.

In contrast to out forefathers, we fight our personal Battles of Dependence. And we fight alone. It’s you against the world. We fight to leave, and for our right to stay alive. We are rats that escape the sinking ship. We are the horsemen of the apocalypse. Every man for himself.

Our adversaries are the same countries that 200 years ago fought to keep us, except that now they want to keep us. Out.

They fight us with road blocks and divisory walls between country borders, visa requirements, changing definitions of what a valid reason to stay is, and fees and waiting periods and separation from our families and apostilles and official translations and bank records, criminal records and actualized notarized copies of our birth certificates. Language exams, integration tests, blood tests and personal interviews.

We stand in line, we hold on the phone, we take verbal abuse but stay polite and positive, we take our picture and go where it’s required and stay there as long as needed to fetch what we are asked. Photocopies and certificates, stamps and seals and fingerprinting are second nature. Despite their best efforts, our numbers grow larger and we overwhelm them. We fly couch, we are there, and if you lift a rock n your city, out Colombians will pour and run away like cockroaches exposed to light.

The official numbers from 2005 (the last official census) very optimistically say that 10% of Colombians left the country, almost 3 and half million. A more recent study says the number is 6 million and closer to 15% percent of the total population. The NGOs say the number is actually 8 million.

In contrast, census from 1835 record the total Colombian population to number barely 1 million and 700 thousand.

The Colombians who fought to be independent are outnumbered by us who fight to be dependent and their will and resolution is our curse and our cross to burden. Their actions are our original sin.

The places I called home have had names like Monteria, Santigo de Chile, McClean,Treviso, Bogotá, London… and in about a month, we will be leaving the city of Buenos Aires where we have lived for the last 3 years: its name added to the list.

Sentimentalism is not high in the priority list and I actually believe a change of cultures is fundamental every so many years as to avoid stagnation and to keep an open mind:  it keeps on your toes, protects you from getting too comfortable and buying way too many things you don’t need, you learn about a different way to see life and you even learn a new language in some cases.

Even tho I came and went in this Buenos Aires city, I have to say that of all the cities I have lived in, this is the one where I have felt the most welcome and at ease.

Welcome because this is one of the few places where as a Colombian you are not singled out as a threat or an undesirable. People actually like Colombians here (Bolivians take the heat here…) and the immigration laws are for once skewed in our favor. Other foreigners get away with never having to register or pay taxes as long as they come in and out of the country (by river, from BsAs, 1 hour to the neighbor Uruguay) once every 3 months

At ease, well , being “at ease” seems to me it the very core of the Argentine lifestyle and even tho that can also get on your nerves when absolutely nothing technical actually works, and Porteños don’t actually keep their word or appointments, there will be plenty of things I will miss about Buenos Aires.

The slow pace of life is one of them: Here and in contrast with other mayor urban centers of the world, it is quite possible to have a social life where you take the time to relax and spend time with people. Venues are more than plentiful (I still haven’t seen even half of BsAs saddly), of good quality and open everyday until very late. Life is kind of cheap (but not as cheap as it used to see this example as one of many of the rampant inflation going on right now) and working and making money are not the top priorities.

Another thing I like is that there are more expats everywhere ( i don’t mean tourists) : Argentines are super friendly and open but making real friendships with them is hard because in their very traditional lifestyle they made all the friends they needed back in high school. To top it off a lot of them flee BsAs on the weekends to be with their families having “asados” (BBQ) in the suburbs.

Fortunately there are thousands of other foreigners around coming and going like waves of locust. Zones like Palermo and Recoleta are crawling with us non-Argentines and there is always someone new in town to meet and get to know and someone else who is leaving. Other expats are my favorite kind of people by far and they fall into 2 kinds:

You have your white people (Americans, English, Australians etc…), most of them have taken a semi-dangerous chance (usually for 6 months to 1 year) and they quit their jobs or work remotely or take a year to come and study Spanish or work for very little money. They move to a strange place with a strange language and weird costumes and when asked they will probably tell you they were bored with their life back home.

Then you have your non-white people, and they usually come to study and/or to find a job in a particular type of industry that flourishes in the region, mainly advertising, photography or cooking. Many of my Colombian friends have come here in these conditions. They work the waitressing/cooking helper jobs. They like it a lot here but most end up leaving because most of them can’t find better work.

Expats/Inmigrants are always open to hang out, to go out, to meet strangers, a lot of times they have a new place or activity in town that you didn’t know about, and they are generally open to at least consider new things.

The world would be a completely different place is everyone the world were required to spend at least 1 year as a foreigner (I don’t mean as a tourist).

For white people It’s my understanding that despite having all the advantages of a ‘white person passport’ very few actually use them. For the other type of foreigner, the rest of us, it’s the destination countries that do everything possible to keep us out.

In Colombia there a saying that applies “My god gives bread to toothless men“.

So we are leaving Buenos Aires and everything must go. The boxes are being packed, the unnecessaries given or thrown away. I have to return in a few months while the Dutch process my application to live there, but when i come back it will be for short while.

All in all it’s been fun and if everything else fails, we always have Buenos Aires to come back to.

This month’s issue of Cartel Urbano Magazine features an article on Bazuco. Paula Ricciulli conducted a very interesting e-mail interview that, unfortunately, didn’t make it to the article in its entirety, but that can be read in English here and in Spanish here.

The article can be found here.

The article itself, as it often happens and probably due to the limited space available for the piece covers very little of what it’s said in the actual interview.

Last week, I visited the Dutch Embassy in Buenos Aires. I need to get a tourist visa to go to the Netherlands: my wife and I are planning to move there this year but first I’m going as a tourist to study the language a bit more while some of the things that we need to start the process get ready.

Going to embassies to ask for visas has been a recurrent stress situation for me. This time however, I would hear something new that surprised me and depressed me.

We were being interviewed by the staff, going trough the long list of documents I have to present to be allowed to visit the Netherlands, when the woman there started talking to my wife in Dutch. My Dutch is not completely fluid at the moment, but from my broken understanding and my wife’s reaction, I could tell something was off.

It seemed to be that, even though all of our papers appear to be in order (and they are), the fact that we were married was actually going to play against our chances of getting the visa.

What?!

So now, it’s bad if you don’t have a valid reason to go to the Netherlands and it’s bad if you do.

The woman there told us that there have been too many partners of Dutch citizens that frustrated with all the hoops they are made to jump by the Dutch Migration Services that sometimes they get a tourist visa to enter the Netherlands and then stay illegally.

As the spouse of a Dutch citizen, (and because I was born in Colombia) I fit the profile for someone who would attempt to illegally stay in Holland. But that the “good news” is that at least we don’t have children, because THOSE PEOPLE are the most desperate.

So right now, there are fathers and mothers forcefully separated from the sons and daughters, husbands separated from their wives, because one of the spouses comes from one of the countries in the Dutch Migration Services’ “black list” of unwelcome nationalities (every country except EU countries, USA and a few other rich countries) that must pass the lengthy “integration” procedure and there are families pushed so far, so desperate, that they rather come in illegally to be together and if my logic serves me right : that their families in the Netherlands are hiding them from the authorities(?). Households where the whole family has to hide one of the parents from the authorities : wives hiding their husbands, children hiding their parents, people living outside the law and if anyone thinks that this is starting to sound “Anna Frank-esk” I wouldn’t blame them. It even takes place in the same city, it’s just a different ethnic minority being singled out.

The procedure to legally migrate to the Netherlands, for someone from their “black list” (even if their are married and even if they have Dutch children) is to put it lightly unfair and has been criticized as a violation of human rights by the Human Rights Watch organization: Do the Dutch Migration Services still wonder why people with children would be desperate?

And now, negating even tourist visas to the spouses of Dutch citizens… it gets you thinking: how far will they go to keep their migration quotas low? if they keep going doing this path, what is the next step? Total closure of the borders? house to house checks? banning marriage with people from the countries in the black list?  arrests for Dutch citizens hiding immigrants? Will the Netherlands and Europe live in a future with the likes of the one predicted by P.D. James’s “Children of Men” with TV commercials constantly urging people to report all illegal immigrants and reminding them that hiding, sheltering or hiring an illegal immigrant is a crime.

A eso del 2003, tocaba yo en un par de bandas de skate punk (neo punk) en Bogotá. Una se llamaba Los Jackson (ya extinta) y la otra Independiente 81 (quienes todavia continuan). En ese año, ambas bandas nos juntamos, “hicimos vaca”, que para los que no son fluidos en español Colombiano significa que cada miembro de las bandas hizo un aporte monetario y juntando entre todos logramos pagar por el costo final, en este caso, el costo de grabar nuestro propio disco. Esta modalidad en el mundo músical se llama un “split”.

Nos fuimos un fin de semana largo a la ciudad de Bucaramanga, donde existía un estudio de grabación recomendado a nosotros por los miembros de otra banda de skate punk, que se llamaba (o se llama?) Alto Asalto y grabamos el susodicho split, mientras disfrutabamos un escape del horrendo clima de nuestra ciudad de residencia de ese entonces (Bogotá, capital del odio) y consumiamos los exquisitos manjares locales como por ejemplo la hamburguesa con huevos de codorniz y las arepas de maíz.

Al final de la aventura teniamos pues grabado un disco de 5 canciones para cada banda para un total de 10. Yo mismo cree el arte de la caja, que era de cartón, de estilo “bolsillo” y tambien el librillo adjunto. El disco se llamó “Contiene Dinamita”, sugerencia de los chicos de Independiente 81, si no recuerdo mal.

Una disquera de las muchas que hubieron y hay por ahi afiliadas al “rock” criollo (Colombiano), llamada “Eje records” se dio a la tarea de tomar el split y ayudar con la producción, aunque a la fecha no me acuerdo cual fue la ayuda exactamente. Se que pusierón el disco en uno de los mostradores de “Antifona” (una tienda de discos muy popular del momento) y eso era super wow pero no me acuerdo si ellos pagaron por algo del prensaje del disco. Nosotros estabamos felices eso si, porque Eje Records habia sacado discos de una banda muy vieja que admiramos mucho que se llamaba Danny Dodge.

Los años pasaron. Yo tuve que abandonar ambas bandas al ganar mi beca con Fabrica. Los Jackson, ya heridos de muerte por la perdida de nuestro guitarrista Plinio y una cierta inconsistencia de nuestro vocalista Juaned, finalmente quedaron desbandados. Independiente 81 consiguió otro bajista, Mario que regresaba a la banda, (y quien luego abandonaria nuevamente para ir a ser el vocalista de un desastre de marketing llamado: Uno Mas) y siguieron con lo suyo incorporando tambien a nuestro baterista Carlos a su alineación. Por mi parte, desde que vendi mi bajo para ayudar a financiar mi viaje a Italia, no volví a tocar un instrumento.

Saltamos al 2010 y por ahi me dio por googlear “Contiene Dinamita” porque ya de andar por años por ahi perdi mi copia y buscaba piratear mi propio CD. Finalmente lo encontre por ahi para bajar gratis y tambien lo encontre disque para vender por canción en lastFM y tambien en la página de la ya nombrada disquera Eje. Que cosa tan absurda.

Encontre tambien un review, escrito por un señor Owai y en el momento pensé que era un “chino”, que es como le decimos en Bogotá a los jóvenes pre-adolescentes. Pensé eso porque : y a quien diablos más se le ocurriría hacer un review de semejantes bandas?

El review es fulminante y preciso. Por mucho que duela admitirlo, al tocar skate punk, jugabamos en un esquema que ya estaba predefinido y en el caso de Los Jackson y a pesar de nuestros mejores intentos no teniamos la inteligencia músical suficiente para salirnos del modelo. El review, esta aqui.

Pero a pesar de lo fastidioso del tono de muchos de las canciones del disco, me gusta saber que de las 2 bandas aunque sea una “salio adelante”, que fue I81, con un estilo mas propio y mas definido que se refino en los discos posteriores. Digo que salieron adelante, no como exito comercial, ni insinuo que tuvieran una gran fanaticada, porque eso seria decirnos mentiras. Me refiero a un progreso personal de los artistas integrantes. “Los mariquitas del neo” se volvieron mas y mas “mariquitas”, mas poperos: tanto que en mi opinión se salieron del neo … menos mal … me recuerdan mas a lo que entiendo se llama “post-punk”. Y que bien que les queda ser honestos consigo mismos, eso es algo caracteristico de los 2 integrantes principales que son y siempre serán Lucas y Daniel que son unos aristas,unos maestros, unos performers innatos, cosa que se continua observando con los proyectos musicales y literarios de cada uno, juntos y por aparte.(vease por ejemplo: Lucas Armando, Danilo el Romantico, Los Famosos, Los Danis, El Embustero)

Los Jackson no contaron con tanta suerte. Unos casados, otros que no tocan mas como yo, otros completamente transformados en papás y señores “de bien” como el resto de los de su generación que no tocaron neo. Los unicos que siguieron tocando fueron Manuel y Carlos, hasta donde yo se. Carlos se fue para I81 y Manuel, supe después, toco hasta con otra de estas fastidiosas fabricaciones : Naty Botero (sale en el video de “Dinosaurio” tocando guitarra y bailando con Naty) aunque luego fue despedido de la banda. Cosas del marketing.

De los Jackson puedo decir que aunque las canciones como tales no envejecieron bien, por ponerlo de manera elegante (porque la mayoría suenan bastante mal), todavia gusto mucho de ciertas partesitas aqui y alla. Por ejemplo, en esta grabación no quisimos doblar las guitarras para los solos, o mejor dicho, si las doblamos pero no se metio la segunda guitarra ritmica en el fondo, ya que no teniamos desde que perdimos a Plinio (Y como nos desconcerto y dolio esta perdida). Ahi algo en esa cosa que suena “aspera” que hicimos diferente : Otra “bandita de neo” de epoca trataría de meterle 5 guitarras ritmicas de fondo con tal de mantener la harmonia y el decoro. Creo que Manuel se desempeña muy bien en todos los solos que le corresponden. Siempre fue un astro de la guitarra, no solo en lo técnico sino en el “feeling” (llamemole asi), algo que los demas otros “virtuosos del neo” guitarristas de otras bandas nunca tuvieron.

Otra cosa que me gusta todavia, es ese humor que aunque no tiene nada que ver con las desavenencias sociales del punk original y que es totalmente auto-referencial (como “soy un imbecil”, “pense que estar en una banda me traería nenas” y “Paul Pfeiffer Es Marilyn Manson”) y fue una especia de presagio de lo que se seguiria en las vidas personales de los integrantes y de esta forma tambien de toda esta movida de “chinos neos” y de la selección Colombia y porque no : del “país” en general. Hacía un chiste de nosotros mismos, de nuestra pauperrima banda, de nuestro patetico intento a la fama. En el disco como tal, y me refiero en la parte impresa, la ilustración (como me duele no tener estos archivos fuente) trata sobre el poco valor del trabajo realizado de los diseñadores gráficos, los músicos (“Mi dios le pague”), el afan de hacerse “famoso”, la final falta de proposito de nuestra música y temas de retro-inspección que yo no vi en otras bandas de neo.

He escuchado decir que en Colombia nadie se rie más, que el humor ya no existe, que desde que mataron a Jaime Garzon está prohibido hacer la parodia, como que hay muchos temas sobre los cuales uno “no se debe burlar” so pena de violencia fisica o muerte, como si en Colombia fueramos Musulmanes defendiendo a Mohamed de los chistes… por eso yo creo que el humor y en especial el humor negro de autocritica es justo y necesario ahora mas que nunca. Pero de pronto estoy cesgado, que se yo…

Lo que si veo una y otra vez es que con todo el amor que le tengo a Juaned, no se preparo bien cuando grabamos esto y en el resultado siempre se noto, siempre lo supimos. La voz de Los Jackson brillo por su mala calidad en esta grabación. No solo es la mala calidad que tienen todas las voces del neo, sino tambien el desafinado no intencional producto del afán. Hubo intentos de re-grabar estas voces, pero todos sumaron absolutamente nada, como es la costumbre local… Es que, ya para que?

De lo que mas me arrepiento es de no haber tenido una copia del master de la grabación instrumental. Cuando lo oigo, miro para atras y recuerdo como se sentia tener ese bajo que rentamos (no se que marca ya… era buenisimo y costaba miles y miles de dolares) que era una nave total y el sonido de los mesa boogies.

I recently collaborated with BZC Media corporation with some illustrations for their new book Our business is none of your art.

You can see a preview of the book at : http://www.blurb.com/books/1279083