Construction Maison

There’s been a lot happening this month.  I don’t have any great plans of action as to the way forward, but I have some knowledge of the background, in terms of how we got here, that seem worth sharing.  Basically I just need to process, and thought I’d do that out loud.  So here are a few reflections on the events of August, 2017, that may be intimately related to one another. Note:  any links that appear below will take you to songs on the subject, mostly written in the past few weeks… *     *     * The Spanish Civil War has been discussed in the media more in the past few weeks than I can remember in my lifetime.  The media has said more nice things about anarchists in the past few weeks than ever in my lifetime as well, and I’m pretty sure they have covered protests more lately than at any time since 1970 or so. At the beginning of the month I wrote a song, “Rojava,” after getting encrypted messages from the front lines of the war against Islamic State in Syria, sent by an anarchi...

Regeni was undeterred. Proficient in five languages, he was insatiably curious and exuded a low-intensity charm that attracted a wide circle of friends. From 12 to 14, he served as youth mayor of his hometown, Fiumicello. He prided himself on his ability to navigate different cultures, and he relished Cairo ’s unruly street life : the smoky cafes, the endless hustle, the candy- colored party boats that plied the Nile at night. He registered as a visiting scholar at American University in Cairo and found a room in Dokki, a traffic-choked neighborhood between the Pyramids and the Nile, where he shared an apartment with two young professionals : Juliane Schoki, who taught German, and Mohamed El Sayad , a lawyer at one of Cairo’s oldest law firms . Dokki was an unfashionable address, but it was just two subway stops from downtown Cairo with its maze of cheap hotels, dive bars and crumbling apartment blocks encircling Tahrir Square . Regeni soon befriended writers and artists and practi...

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — The Latest on the Spain attacks (all times local): 5:15 a.m. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has asked people to pray for a young Australian boy who is missing after a vehicle attack on a popular Barcelona promenade that killed 13 people. Turnbull said Saturday that the boy's mother was badly injured and is in a hospital following Friday's attack at the Las Ramblas promenade . Turnbull says the boy's family is searching for him. He did not release the boy's name. Turnbull says: "All of us as parents know the anguish his father is going through, and his whole family is going through, as they rush to seek to find him in Barcelona." Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says four Australians were injured in the attack. ___ 2:35 a.m. Police in Catalonia say they have searched two buses in their hunt for violent extremists believed responsible for a pair of deadly attacks in the northwestern region of Spain. Police say o...