Jazz in the Air | Chapter 11 @Cafe de Paris

(photos by Lina Ejeilat)

Reflections on Chapter 11′s latest Jazz gig
I was privileged to have attended Chapter 11’s latest Jazz gig at Café de Paris with the company of all the good friends.
I have been receiving Yacoub’s invitations for quite a while but I was deterred by life’s off-beats from retreating into its grooves. But the recorded sounds of Jazz that I listen to daily strive to break from monotonous repetition, from continuing to be what it once has been.

Jazz calls for a narrator, an interpreter as it is a novel built in sound; so I headed to Café de Paris last Friday to capture the sound, built into stories by five wonderful musicians.
The first notes struggled to depart from the passive aura of the city, crowdedness and dissimulated noise. They picked up the sounds, played chords and then jumped into modes, built up a melody and suddenly it’s Stan Getz’ Girl from Ipanema! The music pulled the people slowly into its domain, harmony was sensed in the air ruptured with few missed notes every now and then.
The music was soothing, yet doubtful – each had expectations, musicians and audience. Even alcohol had to anticipate the buzzing mood!
The break after first session was a gap for tidying up, it was as if everyone recaptured the moment, revised what has been played and re accumulated their senses and the rest was something else!

My friend asked them to play Cantaloupe Island, a Jazz standard by Herbie Hancock- and there it was breaking from and building back into melody, and at each time it broke to free-formed solos it picked layers of energy, passion and collective vibes lifting it at every verse to a complex state of musical ecstasy!

All I could say is that there was Jazz in the air!
Thanks to Chapter 11 for taking us there- Yacoub, Aram, Shadi, David and Tareq; all the energy, groove and good vibes sent your way!

Join Chapter 11′s Facebook group here
Catch them every Tuesday at Canvas and every Friday at Cafe de Paris!
Join the group for all information, gigs and reservation details!

Neo-Bullshitters!*

..having been fed “aggressively” for the past few decades; Bourgeois culture and its production and remolding of bourgeois morality somehow lately managed to fuse its self with hippies only to prove there is nothing more sickening than smelly, barefoot, weed-smoking lower-bourgeois hippies other than the neatly-dressed upper-bourgeois bullshitters whose new hobbies, next to shopping, are saving the world and feeding the Africans!

Apparently the most selling merchandise next to weapons, arms, politics, pornography and coke is conscious!

That which is packaged in all sorts of themes; the environmentalist package, the vegetarian, the freedom-of-expression package, the caring-for-the-homeless, the president-on-Oprah package, the world-free-of-smoking, the rescue-the-whales and the leave-Britney-alone package!

Go and light a cigarette for all its worth because to build your stupid Hybrid a fucking god-scale factory is built in east-asia with abused workers whose annual income don’t match to your “Save-the-World” bumper sticker – and when that worker rests to light a cigarette you won’t let him so he won’t harm your health!

* this is not intended to ‘enlighten’ anyone in anyway, deliver any idea nor ‘stimulate’ anyone to think! But it is only a public deceleration of refusal!

___

“Bourgeois democracy is democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, exuberant promises and the high-sounding slogans of freedom and equality. But, in fact, it screens the non-freedom and inferiority of women, the non-freedom and inferiority of the toilers and exploited.“

Operation Swiss 2.0: Public Design Activity @Rainbow St

[Communication]
We’ve lately realized many of Interruptions activities create mass-confusion.
This surely is not intentional even though it’s enjoyable- but confusion is naturally the side-effect of putting together designers taking on topics from design culture, cities, people, things, building, society and politics and then do projects and label them Bananas, Power, Catatonia or the Swiss Operation!
All of which are exercised within ‘underground’ circles at a network structured merely as an Illuminati order-!

Our communication methods grew complex and our solid on-paper documentation is nowhere to be found for those who are eager to put their hands on it as a thousand and five hundred copies of Banana Edition were distributed personally without a copy at a store or bookshop!

Possibilities of building organized methods of communication seem distant! So for now we’re aiming at intensifying activities so that Interruptions can grow familiarity which enables people to become both recipients and creative mediums of spreading an interruptionist culture. (pretty optimistic!)

[Operation Swiss 2.0]
The Swiss Operation is a design exercise Interruptions team was commissioned for by owners of Swiss Café and Patisserie- Located at the gates of Rainbow street, Swiss is recognized by many Ammanis since it first opened in 1966 for serving the most delicious cheesecakes!

Operation Swiss 2.0

(find more pictures of Swiss sessions here.
Photo album will be updated weekly.)

[Swiss 2.0: Aims]
The exercise aims at maximizing Swiss’ potentials in-and-beyond the 4-table space, reintroduce brand, engage with Rainbow Street’s development and contribute values to local café culture.

Throughout the exercise we’ll be testing Design’s ability to assist small businesses, experiment with methods to encourage suggested hybrid behavior and promote the concept of public and interactive design activity.

[Public Design Activity]
An Interruptionist design team made up of architects and product designers carries out the exercise that’s divided to phases stretching between weekly sessions held at Swiss. A documentation process follows each of the sessions and a weekly report will be posted on Interruptions blog and the operation’s workspace on Interruptions’ network. Visitors of Swiss, as well as friends, viewers and readers can all interact throughout the design process, attend design sessions, join workspace and send comments or feedback. A public presentation will be held at Swiss once design is finalized.

Visitors and customers of Swiss are already interacting by adding to the notes we’ve posted on the walls.

Dr. Ziyad Haddad of Design faculty at the Yarmouk University joined one of our sessions and many guests will be invited later on at late design phases.

(We’re looking forward to receiving your comments and feedback to our weekly reports.)

“Love Died” on a Wall in Amman!

Written by Khaled Sedki for WAW Al Balad
To be released in WAW’s Issue/8.

And wall said: Khaled, love died!

A wall once told me, as I walked by it, that love died; “Khaled, mat al-hob!”
It knew my name, so I guess it was addressing me personally.
Walls usually tell us a lot of stuff; to vote for the wrong people, to buy things we don’t need or to rent apartments. Some walls gossip about who loves who ‘forever’, what sports-club the kids of the neighborhood are fans of, or simply threatens anyone who attempts to ‘piss’ next to them.
But this wall specifically wanted to let me know that “love is dead”, as if it was a sequel to Nietzsche’s old announcement, yet the latter at least bothered to offer an explanation!
I looked around the wall, even the other side of the wall and all the walls of the neighborhood to find any further details on how, when or why love has died. Whether it was murdered, or simply died of cancer or perhaps aids! But that’s all there is! None of the kids around the area have seen the dying love, or heard about its tragic death, but they all believe it is dead, and none of them seemed to be bothered by that ‘fact’.

Walls talk to us; with our words- I prefer graffiti-sprayed walls to neat bourgeoisie-guarding fences.
Words on the walls are like riddles, solving them is decoding a culture through its own spontaneous, irrational and collective means of expression and reproduction of its self, its values and its symbols.
So try reading walls, writing or even commenting on them! True you can’t post links, videos or pictures on city walls like you do on Facebook walls, but these walls are not virtual, they’re not limited to ‘friends’ and at least they don’t feature Google ads!

Walls are urban canvases that bare our traces, whether carved, designed or built; they are a way of urban communication found by cave-men and lost for the polished image of sexy tourism.
Words spoken on a wall are there to stay, even if painted over; they remain in a wall’s memory, layers of brick, concrete, words and paint. Hammurabi’s codes, anarchist propaganda, Pharaoh’s history and Greek wisdom were all written on walls, and if love truly died, then you first read it on a wall in Amman.