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Michael Jackson Catches the Soul Train

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0300

It’s a bad day to be an American celebrity and one of those ‘Where were you when?’ days. First it was reported that Charlie’s Angel, Farrah Fawcett died this morning – not unexpected as she was suffering from cancer but then came shocking news that Michael Jackson had died of cardiac arrest. The King of Pop is dead.

He was one of the most talented artists of our lifetime and the most eccentric celebrities in the world. As an American living overseas it’s a day to commiserate with other Americans because perhaps only a ‘Yankee’ as we are called here, has an abundance of poignant moments throughout their lives that have been touched by the music of Michael Jackson -– boogying to the Jackson Five when they played reruns on Soul Train, tuning into Z-93 to hear ‘Don’t Stop until You Get Enough’ with Casey Kasem on Saturday afternoon, trying to learn the moonwalk on the sidewalk with your friends after school and of course gathering around the TV when the groundbreaking video for Thriller came out.

Since the height of his career, M.J. had increasingly grown to become more of a curiosity for his eccentric -- and sometimes creepy -- behavior, but for Americans he was truly a part of our lives and despite what seemed like an unfortunate destiny that served up plenty of fuel for the tabloid fires, he was an out-of-this world composer, singer and dancer. The King of Pop is dead.

M.J. and Argentina

Interestingly, Michael Jackson, while very well known here, never reached the same pinnacle of fame in Argentina as in Japan or Europe.

Argentina is a ‘roc n rol’ and cumbia country as far as the youth are concerned. There’s not the same level of appreciation for black American music as elsewhere in the world (although Jackson was considered a mega ‘crossover artist’ we can’t forget that he did get his start in Motown after Diana Ross discovered The Jackson 5). The youth movement in Argentina has -- amazingly -- not even been co-opted by hip-hop, unlike so much of the rest of the world. The absence of soul is tangible. While many young Argentines love Nirvana, Sonic Youth, the Ramones and The Rolling Stones you hardly hear a peep about Bebop, Motown, Old Skool Ska, Blues or Soul. Only the most enthusiastic music connoisseurs here are familiar with artists such as Outkast, Taj Mahal, Nina Simone or a Tribe Called Quest.

The last time Jackson gave a concert here was indeed way back in 1993, when he played three shows at the River Plate stadium. (A friend who attended says it was spectacular). He also, perhaps misguidedly, met with then-President Carlos Menem. Nonetheless he was still revered here, as all over the world–- upon the news of his death fans gathered around Buenos Aires’s Obelisco with candles.

I’ve been saying for years that Michael Jackson was on the shortlist for ‘celebrities most likely to die young’ but it was still a painful shock to hear the news. I immediately figured that he had died due to use of medication. As far as I understand, body dysmorphic disorder is not in itself fatal. It was also pretty obvious in the disastrous documentary, Living with Michael Jackson that he was on something that seriously impairs good judgement. It would indeed be very unusual for him to suddenly die at age 50 of natural causes considering the apparent longevity in his family and his relatively good physical (if, perhaps, not mental) health.

Spectacularly talented and ultimately tragic, Michael Jackson has hitched the Soul Train to the sky.

Columbine 10 Years On: Why does the U.S. (still) have an Epidemic of School Shootings?

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0300

When the Columbine School shooting happened ten years ago I was living in nearby Denver and working as a freelance journalist, although not on the ‘blood and guts’ beat. As events unfolded, the media converged on Colorado to an extent I had never seen replicated firsthand. The biggest impression I have thinking back, on the 10th anniversary of the event, was just how intensely bizarre it all was – not just the massacre itself but the way it magnified the ludicrousness of the majority of today’s corporate media.

The obvious question going through everyone’s head was: “What could bring kids to do that?’

I didn’t know much about Columbine except that a good friend had attended the school. (Along with some of the guys of the band Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Irreverent South Park founder, Matt Stone is also an alum.) Even though he attended many years before the school shooting I had heard tales of bullying at the school -- my friend had began to study martial arts in order to defend himself from the ‘jocks’ who taunted him with racial epithets. I had the passing impression long before Columbine occurred that it was a place where kids who weren’t of the ‘cookie cutter’ mold might have a torturous high school experience.

The suburb of Denver known as Littleton is really ‘any town USA’ and that was what made this crime so shocking for some. The houses there tend to look the same, the uniforms of residents tend to follow those of the department stores, in short – conformity is king.

Those who are not familiar with the phenomenon may not realize that in the U.S. suburbs it is possible to cultivate a very comfortable isolation, while enjoying the just another-house-on-the-block façade. Many residents are transplants living far from extended family. Residents can thus get in their car, pass the day in their cubicle, grab fast food at the drive-through on their way home and go on to watch TV for the rest of the night -- with very minimal human contact, even with one’s own family. In a large high school such as Columbine a kid can just go through the motions without much direct contact with teachers. It seems surreal to those of us who live in cities or in apartment buildings, but in the suburbs, people can – and often do -- live next door to each other without knowing each other’s names for years. The McMansions that dot the landscape allow an autonomy in which your neighbors could be beating the kids every night, have an in-house methamphetamine lab, be organizing illegal dog fighting or -- as in this case -- producing pipe bombs without anyone ever knowing, for years on end.

Who to blame?

As everyone asked “Why?” People began to search for the root of the problem, and came to conclusions that broadcasters distilled down to tidy sound bytes. At the time I was struck by the triteness of the overall response.

Christian groups heavily co-opted the event in what many found to be a rather distasteful “See -- we said you needed Jesus” kind of way. It was so extreme that it caused repulsion among those who already had an inner resistance to the suburban conformity and surely some parents who were asking “Why?” to God themselves.

Many were eager to blame the music of Marilyn Manson, which was extremely popular at the time. He responded in the Michael Moore film, Bowling for Columbine. The influence of the ‘trench coat mafia,’ a group of kids who listened to ‘Goth’ music were blamed -highlighting the ‘blame the weird kids’ mentality that may have contributed to the event in the first place. It later came out that the murderers weren’t actually part of the group. Violent video games, I think ‘Doom’ was the one mentioned at the time, were noted as a possible influence. Gun control folks pointed the finger at the easy accessibility of guns in the United States, overlooking the fact that indeed more U.S. family’s had guns in their homes in the decades before the school shooting epidemic started in the 1980’s. Others took it as an opportunity to push the ‘tough on crime’ agenda, even though the U.S. has the highest rates of incarceration in the world and throwing the book at criminals, particularly juveniles, has statistically proven unfavorable. (The Killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had actually been charged with a robbery offense, but had passed through their diversion programs with flying colors.) Others brought into question the parents of Klebold and Harris, who were considered by all later, more balanced account, typical parents.

What’s behind the U.S. Killing Sprees?

Despite all the finger pointing, speculation and pontification school shootings in the U.S. have only increased since that time. According to this database on crime stats, out of 57 school shootings since 1996, 44 were in the United States. (The only one in Latin America was in Argentina in 2004, and that shooting which left three dead was an absolute shock for Argentina, which otherwise does not have any continued history of school shootings. At that time Columbine was mentioned in the Argentine press, while people here grasped to understand the causes of such an event. )

The fact that school shootings have only increased in the tens years since Columbine again brings up the same poignant question as before: Why?

The Irish in Argentina

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:05:07 -0300

The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels."
--Ernesto Guevara Lynch, speaking of his son, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

Everyone knows the iconic image of Argentina’s Che Guevara, but few know that he was of Irish decent, along with many other famous Argentines.

Argentina has South America’s largest Irish community and the world’s fifth largest among the Irish Diaspora, with an estimated 500,000 Irish descendants throughout the country. Due to poor record keeping during the immigration wave, the exact number of Irish in Argentina is unknown.

Argentina courted Irish immigrants because of their reputations as hard-workers with experience in agriculture and cattle herding. The Irish wanted to escape famine and religious persecution and Argentina was a Catholic country with plenty of land. Of course wherever there are Irish there are bound to be priests and nuns, and they founded some of Buenos Aires most established schools including Collegio Fahy, San Brendan and Santa Brígida. The Southern Cross, a Buenos Aires-based newspaper originally published in English, Spanish and Gaelic and founded in 1875, is still being published today.

The Dresden Affair

One of the saddest moments in Irish-Argentine history was the 1889 ‘Dresden Affair’ Some 2000 poor Irish, mostly from the counties of Dublin and Cork, were shipped in terrible conditions to Argentina – many didn’t make the 19-day voyage. Once they arrived, the country was ill-equipped to handle the remaining passengers. At first they were housed in stables in the Retiro neighborhood. Children who had been separated from -- or lost -- their parents were left to fend for themselves and pretty girls were forced into prostitution in the red-light district of Constitución. Around 800 remaining were send to Bahia Blanca to set up the Irish Colony of Napostá, but it is one of the few areas of the country not favorable to agriculture and after such a terrible journey and rough start in Argentina, within a year those who could went back to Ireland or emigrated to other countries.

The Dresden Affair effectively ended Irish immigration to Argentina. In 1889, Archbishop of Cashel, T.W. Croke wrote in a Dublin newspaper:
“I most solemnly conjure my poorer countrymen, as they value their happiness hereafter, never to set foot on the Argentine Republic however tempted to do so they may be by offers of a passage or an assurance of comfortable homes."

Lasting Influence

Nevertheless Irish immigration has had a lasting effect on Argentine culture. The ‘Latins of Northern Europe’ share with Argentines traits of passionate self-expression, sometimes hot tempers and love of spirits, music and gatherings.

Other famous Irish Argentines include: national war hero, Admiral William ‘Guillermo’ Brown who has 1200 streets named after him; General, Edelmiro Julián Farrell, who preceded Juan Peron as president of the country; prolific writer and musician, Maria Elena Walsh; the founder of investigative journalism in Argentina, Rodolfo Walsh, who unfortunately ‘disappeared’ under the military dictatorship; Valeria Lynch a popular singer in the 1980’s and Norma Nolan, the 1962 winner of the Miss Universe pageant.

Right-brained? More Reason to Learn a Language

Fri, 6 Mar 2009 09:58:54 -0200

If you are predominantly right-brained, learning a language as an adult can be kind of like trying to solve a physics problem before you know how to count. Languages are filled with fussy details that right-brainers may find frustrating, but what at first seems like a disadvantage, can become an advantage for right-brained people who persevere in their language study.

From the start, right-brained folks have one big advantage that those left-brained folks don’t: those hesitant, logical thoughts of, ‘Jeez, I’m going to sound like an idiot when I try to say this.’ A right-brained dominant person, if they’re not too shy, will just throw it out there with a smile, kind of intuitively fake it to get the conversation started. Sure right-brainers -- who tend to be considered eccentric anyway -- might get some strange looks but we don’t have to reminded that no one is going to punch us in the face for speaking poorly. Once your native conversation partner generously takes their cue from your smile they may take you into deeper conversation waters than you can handle. A right-brained person knows how to float though – they just go with it -- if they don’t have the precise vocabulary that they need, they can often find creative ways to make their point without stopping the flow of conversation. This can lead to some misunderstandings but it bodes well for actually learning how to speak a language instead of just accumulating a bunch of book-knowledge.

Once at the intermediate level, right-brained people tend to remember whole phrases and sayings, which comes in handy, but if they need to break it down word-by-word and figure out why something is said in a certain way, they get confused.

The key to understanding a right-brained approach to learning is we simply want to absorb it, assimilate it, like a child first learning how to speak. This would be great if we retained the capacity to learn like we did when we were two-years old but adults who are monolingual have lost some of those neural pathways so active when you’re a child. So the absorption of a language for a right-brained person has to be balanced with some attention to the semantics and syntax of your new language.

Since phonology is a strength for right-brained people, they learn to parrot pretty well, and with time can develop a better accent than left-brained folks who technically speak better after pouring over grammar books for years. Right-brainers also pick up slang more readily, and although this may not necessarily be a good thing, it’s sometimes useful. The left-brained are more ‘by the book’ so it can take them longer to figure out how to talk to a local. Right-minded folks find out how far eye contact and few ‘uh huhs’ in the local language can take them pretty fast.

In translation work, I would propose that right-brained people are actually at an advantage. This is because you usually can’t translate something word for word -- you have to take the whole phrase in context and find a way to make it sound the most natural in the language into which it is being translated. Since right-brained people think holistically, this jump in logic comes easier to them.

As this brief article from Bowdoin College indicates, the topic of how the left-brain and right brain function in language is probably more complex than the cognitive psychologists’ standard theory that language resides solely in the left hemisphere of the brain. Despite being a person so right-brained it feels like a disability at times, I did learn a second language as an adult. It has turned out to be a rather fulfilling task, not only because it’s fun once you’re able to converse, but also because I believe being monolingual just doesn’t cut it anymore in the workforce or in the pursuit to become a world citizen. Learning a second language can help you exercise your left-mind, which sets the standard for modern society, and in turn sharpen your skills with technical tasks. And because life is experienced emotionally for a right-brained person, your experiences in your new language will be readily embedded into your subconscious -- hey, not everyone can say they have bilingual dreams.

The Left-brained and Right-brained Learn Language Differently

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:44:53 -0200

Are you left-brained or right-brained? Do you depend on your left brain, which deals with logic, language and details or the right which handles abstract thought, intuition and creativity?

Although they would probably be scoffed at by scientists, a couple of simple tests online can give you the clue. Here is a short quiz that gives you a good general idea of what hemisphere of your brain you use most. The Herald Sun of Australia offers this cool visual test, an animated drawing, which they say can give you an idea of what side of your brain rules the roost.

Since traditional education is designed to accentuate left-brain skills, by the time they graduate high school, most adults tend to use their left brain more.
I was tested to be extremely right-brained from a young age. I took the first test above and scored 90% right-brained. Being right brained is seen as an extreme disadvantage, not only in traditional education but in learning a second language. I have learned this first-hand, but like a typical right-brained person who dreams about what could be, the challenge and possibility to communicate with so many more people in the world just made me want to do it more.

If you’re severely right-brained and you want to learn a second language, you might have some frustrating moments, but not all hope is lost. In the next entry I’m going to discuss some observations about the differences of how the right-brained and left-brained learn a second language.