#and was constructed in 1995. A symbol of wealth and life

[lexifleurs-versace]

The former East

As Igor Zabel writes in his book Contemporary Art Theory " the eastern artist  has , in his effort to produce modern art, remained a kind of incompletely realized  western artist, and thus a second class artist" or sometimes a slightly different situation where  the eastern artist is seen as a "representative of a different and exotic culture". The Eastern artist, in  their attempt to please the idealized West, has become either an incompletely developed Westerner or  has turned their "easterness" in an exotic fiasco. In the post-Cold War period, the Eastern artist is no  longer expected to be a universal artist, the eastern artist is expected to be a Polish, a Bulgarian, a  Russian but never "just" an artist.  

The Bulgarian contemporary artist rarely admits to have been influenced by bulgarian art and even disregards the bulgarian art. This attitude is self colonial because they are denying the importance of the cultural context that they have grown up in and are striving for these universal forms of art which in their essence are Western ideas of art. Everything on the periphery of the Western idea is seen as “the Other” and the Bulgarian artist does not want to be that Other.

In this text I am going to explore parts of that vernacular pop culture which the Bulgarian intellectual elite are trying to escape from, to be unassociated with and are trying to eliminate its presence in their identity. DRIFTING EAST    CHALGA

 Chalga is the Bulgarian version of the Balkan folk music known as Turbo-folk in Serbia, Laiko in  Greece, Manele in Romania or Tallava in Albania. Etymologically the word “chalga” means popular  entertainment music, once played in Bulgarian towns during the Bulgarian Revival under Ottoman rule  by ethnically mixed instrumental bands, the so-called “chalgii”.  The popular culture of chalga appeared during the "transition" period which rattled Bulgaria and  other post-Soviet countries. While in ex-Yugoslavia this transition period was experienced through wars, Bulgaria's war was an economic  one. A survey done by sociologist K. Kolev shows that during the transition period “65% of all people  have not bought shoes or clothes in the past two years. 54% have not traveled between settlements.  20% have not bought even soap” . Amidst this national crisis I was born in an intellectuaé Bulgarian family strongly oppossed to chalga culture invested  in "protecting high culture". According to Open Society foundation, around the time of my birth the situation in Bulgaria was that “76% of the people have lost their social status, both objectively and subjectively, which leads to social degradation… The people’s vault of values is emptied of meaning as well as is their psychological capacity of correctly responding and dealing with problems and the elite do  not need the population, which has fallen into a state of complete exclusion and inertia." . During  this turmoil chalga music is gaining traction as the "hero" of the time, an art medium  which makes the Bulgarians forget the massive political issues going on. Shops are empty, protests for  democracy are ongoing, organized crime is steadily entering politics and people are brutalized. There is an  ongoing danger in Bulgaria, especially in the 90s, in these wretched conditions and the brutalization of  people, and the relationship between “life” and “art” gives only chalga as a result. Chalga is rejected by the intellectual communities, and "high" and "counterculture", but if reflection of reality in itself is a "high" culture, then isn't chalga a paradoxical high culture in itself?        

 Throughout this period chalga was more attuned to the cultural, political, and societal woes of everyday Bulgarians than anything produced by the self-proclaimed intellectual tastemakers of the times.  Reoccuring topics in Chalga music :

Mercedes or BMW

The presence of the importance of economical status as represented by such brands as Mercedes and BMW has been an omnipresent feature of the venucalare Bulgarian, and to some  extent Balkan, culture since the 90s.After the end of the socialist era people were finally able to buy  easily "western" brands. Owning "western" objects belonging to the world of capitalism before '89 was seen  as an extreme luxury , objects to which only a priviliged few had access to and the free market shift  made the ownership of such objects socially acceptable  The western brands are the symbol of privilege   and an expression of a high class status. Chalga singers dedicated songs to car brands, and if they didn't  explicitly name them after a brand, they implied visually their social status by featuring Mercedes and  BMW in their music videos. Thus creating a visual hegemony and an aspiration for economic stability and wealth which is what these ‘luxury’ brands represent for the masses during the transition period. In contemporary pop culture in Bulgaria one can say that the definition of success  is owning a Mercedes. Usually owning a Mercedes means that the owner is someone who lives abroad - in Western Europe - and is therefore rich (  the local stereotype is that all Western Europeans are rich). It is  very common that most of the people who live up to the Bulgarian dream of owning a Mercedes are  working for less than the minimum wage in countries such as the UK, Germany or Switzerland , working  over hours and living in horrible conditions. They save money during their stay in Europe in order to  buy the shiniest and newest Mercedes or BMW so that when they come back home they can show all  their neighbours how powerful and rich they are. In its essence the Mercedes is a symbol not only of a  mindset developed during the 90s but can also be seen as a symbol of the social position of the  Eastern European diaspora in Western Europe.  

In the video clip of Nelina - Bial Mercedes / Нелина - Бял Мерцедес / ENG: White Mercedes  we see the narrator, the singer Nelina, dancing in the typical lo fi, green screen 90s aesthetics setting montage and shaky low production camera footage. " A white mercedes is following me around in life  and is constantly walking next to me, a white mercedes has taken my attention but love is not sold for  money, I have foreign currency that I can sell but I do not sell my love for money , my mom sent me to  the change bureau so that I can buy one green dollar but in the change bereau they are out of dollars ...  " . The White Mercedes in this song stands for the man whose social status ranks him to have anything he  desires. The Mercedes owner waves a one dollar bill at Nelina only to assert his dominance. As  viewers we are confronted with different images depicting the comfort of this symbol in its making (as  seen in Image 1) and we are put in front of this difficult choice that Nelina is facing. She has to make a  choice - submit to the dream of the "west" , of having money , of being Western and putting aside her  "easterness" but by doing so affirming even more her position as an Eastern European woman in the  context of male - female relationship , or rejecting the idea of having money, as post-socialist philosophy  . In this song we can see not only the inner battle of a woman struggling whether to marry a man for  money, but we see the more complex relationship of former East and former West ideologies. The  "West" represents the bourgeouis, who 50 years prior to this song were murdered or robbed in all  post-Soviet countries, through the symbol of Mercedes and rejecting the symbol of Mercedes

represents the traditional socialist thinking which is "higher" and "devoted to the nation". But in  Image 2. we see Nelina merging with the Mercedes and this can only mean that no matter what choice  she makes it is evident that the symbol of Mercedes is an inevitable part of her identity.  

In Rositsa Peycheva - Dai mi Tate Malko Parichki / Росица Пейчева - Дай ми тате малко  парички / ENG: Daddy, give me some money 1995, Image 4. , we can see a merge between Balkan  culture with the newly arrived Western culture. The five musicians playing traditional to the chalgii  music instruments are fading into a highway traversed by a BMW. But in this context the musicians are  not the ones seeking dominance through owning luxurious items. The musicians themselves are part of  this property. The highest goal for the Balkan gasterbaiter (slang word for bulgarians who work as  construction workers in Europe) is to be able to come back to their home country with an expensive car  and throw a massive party in their home village. But this parties are not what a party looks like in  Western Europe. These parties consist of inviting at least everyone in the village, decorating the village  and inviting the most expensive orchestra, usually a Roma orchestra. The musicians play only if the  audiences sticks money on their foreheads. If the money stops, the music stops. It is very common for  Balkan party- goers to spend between 50euros and 4000 euros per song. Therefore Image 2. is a  representation of the highest form of being the most successful, specifically gasterbaiter, Eastern  European.

In Image 5: Simpatiagi - Za milioni niama zakoni /Симпатяги - За милиони няма закони / ENG  : For people who have millions there are no rules 1998 we see two thugs asserting their power by  standing next to their Mercedes. Here the role of the Mercedes is a little bit different. While it still  represents dominance, it is a different branch of the Mercedes dream. This dream is designated for the  most daring - the ones who are ready to take the once in a lifetime oppurtunity of becoming a criminal.  While it is a job that hides some risks, the thugs of the 90s (as we see in the watermark of Image 5) ruled  the country and potentially are in charge up to this day. The biggest barrier to becoming a Mercedes  owning thug was the risk of getting shot or getting arrested in the case for those who were not so high  in the hierarchal structure. The image represents essential trademarks of the Bulgarian thugs - golden  chains, dark sunglasses and black clothes. And ofcourse, what is a thug without a Mercedes?  

In Image 6: Tzvetelina - Sto mercedesa /Цветелина - Сто мерцедеса / ENG: One hundred Mercedes cars, 1997 we see a young beautiful woman surrounded by a rain of Mercedes. The rain of  Mercedes could be seen as a substitute of the cliché rain of money. After all , anyone can have money,  but not everyone has enough to buy a Mercedes. Interestingly enough, the lyrics of the song are  exploring a love story and the value of the love is represented through the amount of Mercedes cars the  lady owns. " 100 Mercedes, I will drive them for 100 years and a 100 men will want to marry me". In this  song the Mercedes is no longer just a symbol of money. The Mercedes represents everything - it is the  lover, it is the lenght of a life, it is the social position. WOMEN FOR MALE PLEASURE 

In chalga music , the female singer or actress is depicted as a sexy woman whose only  concern in life is how to please the men around her. The man is strong and is either a thug or tries to be  one. The narrative demonstrates the power play position of the rich Balkan man and the quiet beautiful  woman. She is entertaining, forgiving and sensitive. He is strong, powerful and wears gold. He has as  many women as possible. The more women he has around him, the richer he appears to be.

In its essence it is a social game whose winner is the richest. This might be regarded as PTSD  from the deprivation of capitalism before '89. After '89 the people who were robbed of the experience  of "being unequal" could finally show that they are better than their peers. And what other way to prove  your superiority but with demonstrating your wealth to acquire high status. In reality, most people in  the 90s were poor but that made chalga even more attractive. It represented a sort of a dream world, a  so to say collective consciousness. This person, who listens to chalga, is not a chalga celebrity such as  Milko Kalaydzhiev or Kamelia , who are projections of his or her dreams. This person articulates through  the language of chalga imagery but they remain his or hers best self. Chalga dictates the norms and rules  of the pop culture.  

The socialist parliaments in Eastern Europe included a higher number of women than those in Western Europe before ‘89. Prior to the regime change, the average percentage of women in those parliaments was 26% compared to only 12.5% in the European Union member states. After the first free elections the level of women’s representation in parliament decreased. In Bulgaria it fell down from 21% to 8.5%.

As the iron curtain fell, mysoginist came front hiding behind the idea of free speech. We can see the root of this issue in “socialist feminism” – the woman was portrayed both as a laborer and a mother thus retaining her “women” duties in her private life, while being equal on paper to her male colleagues. Even though there was a significant number of women in politics, they had almost no power and were shadowing the male leaders in their sphere. And as the transition period of the ‘90s arrived, Western feminist ideologies were seen either as a colonial power trying to impose foreign beliefs or a type of bourgeouis feminism. Thus chalga reacted as a counterculture agent trying to establish a national identity which didn’t respond to external pressure whether that be from the West or the East.

Whether chalga is one of the roots of sexism in Bulgaria or is a reflection of the already existing sexism in the country is not clear. But in contemporary culture chalga listeners preach beliefs of gender inequality. Even though men are as objectified as women in these videos, the objectification remains in the respective gender boxes. The woman must be attractive, have big breasts, wear as little clothing as possible, be submissive even if she is portrayed as strong and independent. She is suffering for she can not live without the male character. The man must be strong, he must display his financial status through cars and gold, he is in power even when he is weak or dependent. He is suffering for the female character but usually forgets about her because he can have any girl he desires. It is a sort of power play between emotional and financial dominance.

IMMIGRATION / EUROPE

The most traumatic topic for Bulgarians today is emmigration. From a population of roughly  9million in 1989 to roughly 7 million in 2019, Bulgaria faces one of the biggest population declines that  are not caused by a war. Most Bulgarians aspire to live abroad as they know that this is the only way to  self-realisation. The immigration process has become even easier after 2007 (the year Bulgaria became  part of the European Union) as visas were no longer required to live in the EU. Chalga music, as the  trustworthy mirror it has proven to be, has taken this topic at heart and has a wide range of music  clips tackling this issue.  

In Kali - Shengen / Кали - Шенген, 2000 , we see a fictive Shengen border which is guarded by  two border police men . They are playful but at the same time are strict and do not allow the Bulgarians  to enter Shengen. Even though the song was created for parties, it has a strong political message. " Will I  manage to get in Shengen? Can I be a European member?" is part of the refrain. Alongside the video ,  the Shengen song represents one of the biggest political questions at the time. The Eastern European  who is wondering whether they are good enough for the Europeans, whether they are savage or civilised, and their worth is measured by their status in the EU. Some of the characters in the video are represented by "european looking" Bulgarians, whilst others dressed in the traditional Bulgarian clothes represent what needs to be eliminated from Bulgarian culture in order to be seen as worthy. The  characters trying to pass the border are performing different tricks for the border police and their

entry is based on the entertainment value of their performance. The Eastern European is seen as  the one who is invited only if they play by the rules and marginalized if she/he demonstrated  their culture too much. The invitation is conditional.  

In Lia - Mitnichariu/ Лия - Митничарю / ENG: Borderpolice, 2001 we see a beautiful young lady  stuck at a border point. She is begging the policemen to enter their country whilst offering them  different types of bribes. She drives an expensive car, which means that she has been working abroad  and now wants to go back home. The border police do not allow people with expensive cars to pass  the border without taking a bribe, even today. The lyrics of the song " give him 200 deutsche marks, he  is human after all and he needs money to buy cigarettes" are giving a sort of innocence to the act of  corruption. Lia is normalizing the corruption culture but she is also giving a voice to the Bulgarians who  live abroad and experience this border police reality. Rather than describing a fictional situation, Lia is  addressing an actual issue . She is not trying to take a political stance i.e. fight corruption, but rather  is trying to deal with immediate corrupted regulations .The Bulgarian doesn't want to be involved in changing the country, they know it is not possible. The Bulgarian wants to get rid of the  bureaucratic situation as fast as possible and knows the cost of it. The individual wants to give the  money required and go home to see their family as fast as possible because they have only a few days  off from work in the West. In a few days they will have to drive another 1000 km to go back to  Western Europe and continue working. The border police is just one of the many obstacles on the  journey. The Bulgarian knows that if he refuses to pay the bribe there will be greater consequences,  even if he has not done anything illegal. Mitnichariu is a song which I listen to every time I am faced  with Balkan border police, it gives assurance that I am not the only one experiencing this injustice and it  gives me hope that these thug policemen are eventually going to let me through the border.

The border is a mythical location. It is a place where anything it can happen. For the  border police it is a sort of cash machine. Refering to my own experience during the summer of 2020 I  was asked for my car insurance at the border between Montenegro and Croatia. I gave them my international insurance which explicitly covers Montenegro. The borderpolice said it is not possible to pass through unless I buy their insurance and claimed that mine was invalid. After arguing for twenty minutes, one of the border police gave me 3 choice : buy their insurance, get arrested or go back to Croatia. When I bought their insurance at the price of 15 euros and hurried to enter Montenegro, I saw  that document they gave me said One Week Insurance for Belarus. An elaborate scheme for taking  bribes through a company in another country. Technically, this insurance was worthless, unless I went to  Belarus in the upcoming days. This is just one of the many examples of the cash machine which Balkan  borders can be. In the video clip of Lia we can see an exploration of this topic through her personal  experience, which even though personal can be relatable for any Eastern Europeans who has had to  pass through the Balkans by car.  

Even though there are other visual culture references in chalga music , I have decided to focus in this text on the holy trinity of the chalga person - cars, women and Europe. heteronormativity

To end this visual analysis of chalga we must have in mind that the music in its essence is Orientalist but it is not the Saidian concept of Orientalism. Bulgaria does not have the colonial history which Europe has with Oriental culture but was rather under Ottoman rule for 500 years up until the late 19th century which makes orientalism a big part of the Balkan identity. The orientalism of chalga helps the listener to break free from the cultural elite formed during Soviet times and it can been seen as a tool to decolonize the national identity from Western culture. Rather than mocking “Eastern” values which are seen as uncivilized or backward in the eyes of Western Europe, the sultans and sheiks are transformed in a treasure vault mocking the Western ideals. They have been transformed in mafia businessmen, luxury capitalist gods, and the target of irony , even if not conscious, are the dreams connected to the Western life. 

__________________

Bibliography:

Igor Zabel - Contemporary Art Theory

Rosemary Statelova - The Seven Sins of Chalga

Boris Groys- The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond

Boryana Rossa - The Tree of Bulgarian artists

Vesa Kurkela - Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse 

Rory Archer - Assessing Turbofolk Controversies: Popular Music between the Nation and the Balkans.

 Reference links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv18ZnLFQBc - Bial Mercedes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5dJVFoXzL4  - 100 Mercedesa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvjzB3zQDRg - Dai mi tate malko parichki

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVMTaIIFQgQ - Za milioni niama zakoni

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZtN1Fu_G6I - Mitnichariu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzVGVjtAIs - Shengen

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Sun Myung Moon’s One-World Theocracy

by Robert Parry

... A silent testimony to Moon’s clout is the fact that his vast spending of billions of dollars in secretive Asian money to influence U.S. politics – spanning nearly a quarter century – has gone virtually unmentioned amid the current controversy over Asian donations to U.S. politicians.

With unintended irony, Moon’s Washington Times repeatedly has featured stories about secret Asian money going to Democrats. “More than a million dollars of this foreign money is believed to have been contributed to the Democrats, putting the election up for auction,” charged Times’ editor Wesley Pruden in a typical column. [Oct. 18, 1996]

The blind spot on Moon is especially curious since there have been U.S. government allegations dating back to the 1970s that Moon’s organization fronted for the South Korean CIA and funnelled money to Washington for right-wing Japanese industrialists. For the past 15 years, The Washington Times has been the most obvious conduit for this foreign money. The newspaper and its sister publications – Insight and The World & I – have cost Moon an estimated $1 billion in losses. Yet, Moon has never accounted for the sources of his money.

Moon’s jingle of deep-pocket cash also has caused conservatives to turn a deaf ear toward Moon’s recent anti-American diatribes. With growing virulence, Moon has denounced the United States and its democratic principles, often referring to America as “Satanic.” But these statements have gone virtually unreported, even though the texts of his sermons are carried on the Internet and their timing has coincided with Bush’s warm endorsements of Moon.

“America has become the kingdom of individualism, and its people are individualists,” Moon preached in Tarrytown, N.Y., on March 5, 1995. “You must realize that America has become the kingdom of Satan.”

In similar remarks to followers on Aug. 4, 1996, Moon vowed that the church’s eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by the liquidation of American individualism. “Americans who continue to maintain their privacy and extreme individualism are foolish people,” Moon declared. “The world will reject Americans who continue to be so foolish. Once you have this great power of love, which is big enough to swallow entire America, there may be some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested.”

During the same sermon, Moon decried assertive American women. “American women have the tendency to consider that women are in the subject position,” he said. “However, woman’s shape is like that of a receptacle. The concave shape is a receiving shape. Whereas, the convex shape symbolizes giving. ... Since man contains the seed of life, he should plant it in the deepest place.

“Does woman contain the seed of life? [“No.”] Absolutely not. Then if you desire to receive the seed of life, you have to become an absolute object. In order to qualify as an absolute object, you need to demonstrate absolute faith, love and obedience to your subject. Absolute obedience means that you have to negate yourself 100 percent.”

Evil Hamburgers

These pronouncements contrast with Moon’s lavish praise of the United States disseminated for public consumption during his early forays to Washington. On Sept. 18, 1976, at a flag-draped rally at the Washington Monument, Moon declared that “the United States of America, transcending race and nationality, is already a model of the unified world.” He called America “the chosen nation of God” and added that “I not only respect America, but truly love this nation.”

Yet, even as Moon has soured on America, his recruiters continue to use that flag-draped scene of the Washington Monument to lure new followers. The patriotic image struck powerfully with John Stacey when the college freshman watched a video of that speech while undergoing Unification Church recruitment in 1992.

“American flags were everywhere,” recalled Stacey, a thin young man from central New Jersey. “The first video they showed me was Reverend Moon praising America and praising Christianity.” In 1992, Stacey considered himself a patriotic American and a faithful Christian. He soon joined the Unification Church.

Stacey became a Pacific Northwest leader in Moon’s Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles [CARP]. “They liked to hang me up because I’m young and I’m American,” Stacey told me. “It’s a good image for the church. They try to create the all-American look, where I think they’re usurping American values, that they’re anti-American.”

At a 1995 leadership conference at a church compound in Anchorage, Alaska, Stacey met face-to-face with Moon who was sitting on a throne-like chair while a group of American followers, many middle-aged converts from the 1970s, sat at his feet like children.

“Reverend Moon looked at me straight in the eye and said, ‘America is Satanic. America is so Satanic that even hamburgers should be considered evil, because they come from America’,” recalled Stacey. “Hamburgers! My father was a butcher, so that bothered me. ... I started feeling that I was betraying my country.”

Moon’s criticism of Jesus also unsettled Stacey. “In the church, it’s very anti-Jesus,” Stacey said. “Jesus failed miserably. He died a lonely death. Reverend Moon is the hero that comes and saves pathetic Jesus. Reverend Moon is better than God. ... That’s why I left the Moonies. Because it started to feel like idolatry. He’s promoting idolatry.”

One-World Theocracy

Despite growing disaffection among many longtime followers and other problems, Moon’s empire still prospers financially, backed by vast sources of mysterious wealth. “It’s a multi-billion-dollar international conglomerate,” noted Steve Hassan, a former church leader who has written a book about religious cults, entitled Combatting Cult Mind Control. At his Internet site, Hassan has a 31-page list of organizations connected to the Unification Church, many secretively.

“Here’s a man [Moon] who says he wants to take over the world, where all religions will be abolished except Unificationism, all languages will be abolished except Korean, all governments will be abolished except his one-world theocracy,” Hassan said in an interview. “Yet he’s wined and dined very powerful people and convinced them that he’s benign.”

Hassan argued that perhaps the greatest danger of the Unification Church is that it will outlive Moon, since the organization has grown so immense and powerful that other leaders will step forward to lead it. “There are groups out there that want to use this organization,” Hassan said.

A couple of years ago, Moon shifted his personal base of operation to a luxurious estate in Uruguay. The church has been investing tens of millions of dollars in that nation since the early 1980s when Moon was close to the military government. In a sermon on Jan. 2, 1996, Moon was unusually blunt about how he expected the church’s wealth to buy influence among the powerful in South America, just as it did in Washington.

“Father has been practicing the philosophy of fishing here,” Moon said, through an interpreter who spoke of Moon in the third person. “He [Moon] gave the bait to Uruguay and then the bigger fish of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay kept their mouths open, waiting for a bigger bait silently. The bigger the fish, the bigger the mouth. Therefore, Father is able to hook them more easily.”

As part of his business strategy, Moon explained that he would dot the continent with small airstrips and construct bases for submarines which could evade Coast Guard patrols. His airfield project would allow tourists to visit “hidden, untouched, small places” throughout South America, he said.

“Therefore, they need small airplanes and small landing strips in the remote countryside. ... In the near future, we will have many small airports throughout the world.” Moon wanted the submarines because “there are so many restrictions due to national boundaries worldwide. If you have a submarine, you don’t have to be bound in that way.”

(As strange as Moon’s submarine project might sound, a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Japan, dated Feb. 18, 1994, cited press reports that a Moon-connected Japanese company, Toen Shoji, had bought 40 Russian submarines. The subs were supposedly bound for North Korea where they were to be dismantled and melted down as scrap.)

Moon also recognized the importance of media in protecting his curious operations, which sound like an invitation to drug traffickers. He boasted to his followers that with his vast array of political and media assets, he will dominate the new Information Age. “That is why Father has been combining and organizing scholars from all over the world, and also newspaper organizations – in order to make propaganda,” Moon said. Central to that success in South America is Tiempos del Mundo.

http://consortiumnews.com/archive/moon1.html

______________________________________

How Sun Myung Moon’s organization helped to establish Bolivia as South America’s first narco-state.

In order to rule the world, Sun Myung Moon had to start with Korea.

Sun Myung Moon’s desire to take over the League for his own financial and political ends

Fraser Committee Report on Moon org.:  “these violations were related to the overall goals of gaining temporal power.���

My experience within the hierarchy of the Moon cult during its years of expansion in Russia and in the CIS

Press Release on the FFWPU by the Department of Communication, Nizhny Novgorod province, Russia

Sun Myung Moon was eager to infiltrate the European Parliament

Group Founded by Sun Myung Moon Preaches Sexual Abstinence in China

Robert Parry’s investigations into Sun Myung Moon

[thinkaboutnetwork-blog]

10+ Of The World's Most Incredible Fountains

10+ Of The World’s Most Incredible Fountains

Many of you have probably heard of the Trevi Fountain in Rome, and you’ve probably seen the famous Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas, either in person or while watching the movie Ocean’s 11.

While there’s no doubt that these are both spectacular sights to behold however, they only represent a small percentage of the incredible fountains that you can currently find around the world. From Stockholm…

[trashybutsophisticated]

Perla

In 1995, a British Columbia justice wrote that, "putting material in the garbage signifies that the material is no longer something of value or importance to the person disposing of it. When trash is abandoned, there is no longer a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect to it. [1]

Furthermore, whereas the life cycle of large scale constructions is growing longer, the life cycle of our houses and the articles we use in daily activities is gradually growing shorter [2], sacrificed when they are no longer of use. [3] As the day's routine proceeds the pile of paper mounts higher: the trash baskets are filled and emptied and filled again. [4] It subordinates life to organized destruction, and it must therefore regiment, limit, and constrict every exhibition of real life and culture. [5]

In a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images, the search for identity, collective or individual, ascribed or constructed, becomes the fundamental source of social meaning. [6] Time is compressed and ultimately denied in culture, as a primitive replica of the fast turnover in production, consumption, ideology, and politics on which our society is based. [7]

Schiller defends his decision to write on problems of aesthetics at a time of political crisis, insisting that the only way to achieve true freedom is through beauty. [8] beauty, in the romantic mind, meant a certain utilitarian order and purposefulness: the new planners set their minds in another direction and sought to preserve and if necessary to introduce the rough, the unexpected, the decayed, the disorganized, the dilapidated.

The destruction of reality, of the material, is necessary if form is to emerge as a meaningful symbol, as an autonomous human creation. [9] This is not to say that the exercise of freedom is completely indifferent to spatial distribution, but it can only function when there is a certain convergence; in the case of divergence or distortion it immediately becomes the opposite of that which had been intended. [10]

As Arendt has written: The man made world of things, the human artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever changing movement of their lives and actions, only insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of objects produced for use. [11] Thanks to that privilege which does not last but which one enjoys during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being a spectator, so to speak, of one's own absence, there was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat and traveling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. [12] "as an act of moral redemption.” [13]

For example, sophisticated techniques of chemical analysis are used to simultaneously study and preserve ancient wall paintings; fragile objects, such as baskets; and unstable objects, such as metals that are subject to rapid oxidation and decay once they are removed from their buried environments. [14] And to this the greatest attention is necessary, [15] as an effort toward more sustainable practices. [16] The meaning of things can never be permanently fixed. [17]

[1] Zimring__Encyclopedia_of_Consumption_and_Waste

[2] Ockmann__Architecture_Culture_1943-1968

[3] Eco__The_Name_of_the_Rose

[4] Mumford__The_Culture_of_Cities

[5] Mumford__The_Culture_of_Cities

[6] Zimring__Encyclopedia_of_Consumption_and_Waste

[7] Castells__The_Rise_of_the_Network_Society

[8] Harrison_Wood_Gaiger__Art_in_Theory_1648-1815

[9] Semper__Style_in_the_Technical_and_Tectonic_Arts_or_Practical_\

Aesthetics

[10] Hays__Architecture_Theory_since_1968

[11] Hays__Architecture_Theory_since_1968

[12] Zizek__Less_Than_Nothing

[13] Zimring__Encyclopedia_of_Consumption_and_Waste

[14] Zimring__Encyclopedia_of_Consumption_and_Waste

[15] Holt__Literary_Sources_of_Art_History

[16] Zimring__Encyclopedia_of_Consumption_and_Waste

[17] Mallgrave__Modern_Architectural_Theory

[katebushwick]

Vietnam provides a compelling site to investigate these complex processes of rise and decline. Largely unaffected by the 2008 global economic slowdown, Vietnam’s economy grew nearly 8 percent each year between the point when it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO, hereafter) in 2006 and the time of this research. This growth attracted foreign direct investment. By 2010, annual FDI was nearly three times the amount brought into the country in 2006. Figure 1 shows two forms of capital: overseas remittances (money sent from foreign workers in the Vietnamese diaspora) and disbursed FDI (investment capital that has been registered and accounted through state banks). The General Statistics Offi ce of Vietnam reported that FDI skyrocketed from U.S.$4 billion in 2006 to $11 billion in 2010.14 By 2010, FDI disbursed capital was nearly four times as much as the foreign capital brought into the country in 2005 prior to WTO membership. Figure 2 adds a third dimension to the fl ow of foreign capital: committed FDI. The difference between disbursed capital and committed capital is the difference between actualized money and promised money. For example, on a land development project with a projected investment of U.S.$50 million, a foreign investor might disburse $20 million in the fi rst phase of construction and commit to bringing in anther $30 million in later phases of construction.

Importantly, looking strictly at committed or promised capital, there was a major spike, to U.S.$71 billion, in 2008, which occurred at the height of the global fi nancial crisis. Regardless of whether the committed capital actually made its way through state banks, the spike in 2008 hints at a rapid increase in the brokering of deals.15 This is indicative of the highly speculative markets and the volatility emerging in the Vietnamese economy, as well as the rapid increase in the number of deals being brokered during that time. But if the United States and Europe experienced a fi nancial crisis in 2008, where was all this capital coming from? Before 2006, the United States was one of the largest foreign investors in Vietnam. Between 1995 and 2005, Australia, Canada, and the United States were the largest providers of FDI in Vietnam. However, by 2009, Western nations played a much smaller role in Vietnam’s market economy as countries within the Asia-Pacifi c region began to take over. And by 2010, the six leading contributors were Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong (fi gure 3).16 Capital from these sources overtook both Western investments and overseas remittances, giving an Asian face to wealth in Vietnam for the fi rst time.17 The shifting sources of capital led to a rapid altering of the social and urban landscape as bulldozers tore down old colonial buildings, like the one in fi gure 4, to make room for new high-rises, as depicted in fi gure 5. During the fi fteen months that I conducted research in HCMC, between 2009 and 2010, a new high-rise steel tower appeared each month; for this reason, foreigners and locals alike dubbed Vietnam the new “international goldmine.” Investors engaged in major land speculation as they 

sought out development projects that were expected to yield rapid, high returns on their investments. By 2010, the manufacturing, real estate, construction, and hotel development and tourism sectors dominated Vietnam’s economy, rapidly replacing the previous, agriculture-based economy that had dominated through the mid-1980s. These changes marked the beginning of a transition toward an industry- and servicebased economy.18 This economic shift created a new opportunity for Vietnam to reposition itself and decide how to imagine its pathway toward modern nationhood with respect to Asia and the West. How do shifting global capital confi gurations destabilize the terms in which diverse men and women negotiate their perceptions of the rise of East and Southeast Asia and the simultaneous waning of the dominance of the West? The multiple niche markets in Vietnam’s global sex industry offer insight into some of the larger macroeconomic shifts that reframe our understanding of the coproduction of gender and global capital. Foreign direct investments are not disembodied fl ows of global economic capital. People broker capital deals. In an ethnography of Wall Street, Karen Ho engages with the works of Karl Polanyi, who reminds us that “economic practices take place in a complicated web of social relationships, which change in degree and form over time.”19 Ho argues that when we assume that fi nancial capital is abstract, separated, or decontextualized from concrete lived realities, we run the risk of allowing elite players in the global economy to defi ne and decipher our economic lives.20 In Vietnam, FDI is embodied in entrepreneurial relations that are largely male dominated and heavily infl uenced by existing practices established in China, Japan, and South Korea, where men rely heavily on the sex industry to facilitate informal social relations of trust as foreign investors embed themselves in the local economy.21 Vietnam’s transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy beginning in 1986 created a domestic superelite that was connected to powerful political fi gures. However, in a country like Vietnam, where the majority of investors do not have faith in legal contracts enforced by the Vietnamese state, or when they seek to bypass many of the bureaucratic hoops to obtain land and permits through informal social networks, the sex industry plays a vital role in establishing social contracts for state entrepreneurs with political capital to strike deals with private entrepreneurs and foreign investors.22 In order to attract investments from foreign companies and negotiate contracts in the region, men rely on the labor of hostess-workers to ease the tensions between factions, facilitate personal relations of trust, and broker business deals.23 As political scientist Thu Huong Nguyen-Vo writes, “During marketization, the state, which includes the Communist Party and government, endowed a class of men with certain state-owned capital and freed them to make entrepreneurial choices in an economy that now included private entrepreneurs and foreign capital. Entrepreneurial men used sex buying to establish personal ties facilitating their access to the means of production and exchange in an economy that was moving from central command to one that depended on” the brokering of relations between state offi cials, foreign investors, and private entrepreneurs 

For local Vietnamese and other Asian businessmen, hostess bars are masculine spaces of leisure and consumption, where they can engage in deal-making practices crucial for organizing business ventures. Inside the bars, hostess-workers act as informal brokers of social capital, setting the stage for local elite men to dramatize Vietnam’s potential as a lucrative place for foreign investment. In a highly speculative market driven by emotional calculations of risk and potential rewards, businessmen must establish informal relations of social trust to secure investment in speculative real estate markets and urban renewal landdevelopment projects. Hostess bars in Vietnam’s sex industry have enabled local Vietnamese clients to secure business deals in an informal, nonbureaucratic, and culturally Asian setting, where they can build personal ties to mitigate fi nancial risks through private and off-the-record knowledge of the economy.25 As a result, a new high-end niche market of sex workers has emerged in tandem with the new Vietnamese political and economic superelite. These sex workers are valued not only for their beauty but also for their ability to deploy vocabularies of consumption that ease tensions between men in an elaborate symbolic dance tailored to the requirements of individual capital deals. A look at local Vietnamese elites and their Asian business partners brokering capital deals tells only one part of the story: that of Asian ascendancy. By strategically looking at multiple segments of the sex industry, this book also examines how overseas Vietnamese men and Westerners simultaneously negotiate perceptions of Asia’s rise and Western decline while recuperating their failed masculinity and marriages through personal relationships with local sex workers.

This book brings sociological theories of globalization, markets, and gender into conversation to create a framework for analyzing segmented markets in the context of Vietnam’s economic rise. Building on Zelizer’s idea that markets and social life are inextricably intertwined, Rene Almeling argues that we should examine variation in how markets are confi gured.26 I examine multiple niche markets of Vietnam’s segmented sex industry to better explain how male clients and female sex workers negotiate their perceptions of Vietnam’s repositioning in the global economy. Dealing in Desire advances research on global sex work, research that has tended to focus overwhelmingly on female sex workers and

either overlooks the experiences of their male counterparts or focuses primarily on Western men.27 Interestingly, while most research assumes that wealthy Western men brokering capital deals command the highend sexual markets, in this Asian-centered economy the local elites and other Asian businessmen command the highest-paid niche markets. I illustrate how the men in these different niche markets participate in different projects that involve divergent understandings of Vietnam’s place and future in the global economy. For businessmen tied to Asian fi nancial capital, the sex industry allows men to broker deals by projecting confi dence in the Vietnamese market. For Western men and overseas Viet Kieus, who are largely excluded from the segment of the sex industry linked to business transactions and FDI fl ows—since the vast majority of FDI into Vietnam comes primarily from Asia—the sex industry serves a different purpose, allowing men to displace their status anxieties onto women’s bodies. The three other niche markets infl ate the diminishing egos of Viet Kieus, Western businessmen, and Western budget travelers as sex workers help attract overseas remittance money into the local economy. Taken together, the niche markets that cater to local Vietnamese businessmen, Viet Kieus, Western businessmen, and Western budget travelers highlight how the commodifi cation of sexual labor can have multiple and varied effects as male clients and female sex workers negotiate their changing status—either by embracing the shifts in global capital fl ows that bolstered Asia’s ascendancy or by reproducing old regimes of global power that hinge on Western dominance. Local elite Vietnamese men and their Asian business partners fall on one end of the spectrum, in a niche market where relations of intimacy are tied to the trappings of East and Southeast Asian foreign direct investments. At the other end, intimate relations are tied to the trappings of paternalistic charitable giving from Western nations. By comparing multiple markets and weaving distinct relational confi gurations into one transnational story, this research questions several assumptions found in existing theories of global sex work. 

Dealing in Desire looks at clients and sex workers in multiple markets to show that the worlds of high fi nance and benevolent giving are never divorced from the personal and intimate gendered spheres of the informal economy. I examine interactions among men, and between men and women, as they make emotionally calculated risks to fulfi ll individual desires that are intimately tied to their aspirations for the nation during a time of rapid economic expansion coupled with a great deal of economic volatility. This book brings together three key theoretical insights crucial for understanding desire. First, we must situate desires as they converge and diverge across local, national, regional, and global social spaces.28 I highlight new forms of desire linked to the broader political economy. The trappings of capitalist success and failure emerge in a context where global economic market insecurities lead to the rise of new translocal and transnational fl ows of money embedded in different race, class, and gender relations. Second, I augment current works on postcolonial and global theories of intersectionality by stressing the material and cultural relations of desire. More specifi cally, I examine how men’s performances of masculinity and women’s embodied and performed femininities hinge on their structural locations within categories of race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality.29 As Anne McClintock points out, these categories “are not distinct realms of experiences, existing in splendid isolation from each other; [rather], they come into existence in and through relations to each other.”30 Third, by comparing multiple niche markets, I show how men’s performances of masculinity and women’s corresponding performances of femininity are mobilized hierarchically in their desire to affi rm Western superiority in the markets that cater to Western men and to contest Western dominance in the markets that cater to non-Western men. Through these interactions in everyday life, men and women actively work to construct competing hierarchies of race and nation in the global imaginary. A relational approach allows us to see how racialized, nation-based, and classed relations are mobilized through different intersecting relations. Men and women draw upon different consumption and production strategies in distinct spaces of leisure and entertainment in their desires to reimagine the developing world’s place in relation to the West. In other words, this book theorizes desire relationally as it moves from the macro level of the national political economy, to the meso level of the moral economies that structure different niche markets of the sex industry, to the micro level of individual hopes, dreams, and desires for upward mobility that connect particular men and women in intimate relations. In using this scalar approach to trace new economies 

of desire in Vietnam, I build on the work of Julie Chu by situating individual desires for mobility in a particular cultural-historical moment where desire meets potentiality.31 In doing so, I focus on the productive frictions that shape men’s and women’s desires as they refl ect the polarized tension between imaginaries of Vietnam as a nation on the move and as a former colony untouched by globalization.32 Therefore, while changes in the global economy structure relations of intimacy between clients and sex workers, intimacy also serves as a vital form of currency that shapes economic and political relations.

By connecting the three levels of analysis, I show how competing masculinities are expressed, negotiated, and reproduced through the enactment of male desires that double as status within the broader political economy and in relation with women. At the micro level, this book pays close attention to what Doreen Massey calls “differentiated mobility”—the uneven and unequal positioning of different groups in relation to different fl ows of capital and movements of people33—to examine men’s and women’s hopes and aspirations to reimagine hierarchies of race, nation, and class differently in each niche market. Men’s desire for dominance over other men is enacted through the consumption of distinct types of sex workers in different spaces. For male clients, sex workers are products to be consumed in ways that enable them to enact distinction.34 Chapter 3 brings together two key theoretical insights crucial for understanding multiple hierarchies of masculinities. First, I discuss how performances of masculinity depend on men’s positions within global markets. That is, multiple masculinities intersect across local, national, regional, and global social spaces.35 Second, I highlight new forms of privilege linked to the trappings of capitalist success and failure in a context where global economic market insecurities have led to the rise of new fi nancescapes in Asia. In the niche markets of HCMC that cater to Western men, masculinities are indeed mobilized to privilege an international hegemonic masculinity that affi rms Western superiority.36 However, I take this analysis one step further by illuminating a simultaneous process wherein local Vietnamese elites and Viet Kieus articulate their desire to imagine a new global order that no longer privileges a white, First World masculinity. These men construct competing notions of an international hegemonic masculinity that contests Western superiority in the Asia-Pacifi c region 

using personal wealth and Vietnam’s access to Asian FDI as an indicator of national dominance. In other words, two simultaneous processes are at work in HCMC’s niche markets—a recuperation of Western power and a contestation of that very power by those with aspirations for Asian ascendancy. Masculine distinction in the bars depends heavily on the labor of female sex workers. As I illustrate throughout the book, workers perform femininity to enhance men’s performances of particular masculinities.37 I introduce the term competing technologies of embodiment with greater theoretical and empirical depth in chapter 6 to explain how sex workers construct desirable bodies in different ways to cater to male clients’ competing aspirations. In order to entice clients, sex workers who cater to wealthy local Vietnamese men and other Asian businessmen construct themselves as distinctly pan-Asian modern subjects, while workers who cater to Viet Kieus construct themselves as nostalgic cosmopolitan subjects, and women who cater to Western men construct themselves as Third World subjects dependent on Western support, to satisfy their clients’ racialized desires. These differing embodiments and performances of femininity have symbolized Vietnam’s changing economy as it has pushed to emerge as a rising dragon in a new era that embraces capitalism and an open market economy. Through these performances, sex workers effectively work together with clients to contest and actively reshape global race-, nation-, and class-based hierarchies. By detailing the complexities of HCMC’s global sex industry, I examine how desire shaped by technologies of embodiment shape and reshape various relations of intimacy, client self-conceptions, and workers’ patterns of embodiment, including their performances of femininity. These masculinities and productive femininities that hinge on male desire are precarious precisely because of the rapid economic transformations occurring in the broader political economy. Consequently, I show that racialized desires, social status, business success, and hope for upward mobility are both realized and shattered in the bars of Ho Chi Minh City.

It is diffi cult to write a book on the global sex industry without addressing the issue of sex traffi cking. A burgeoning literature examines the plight of women as victims of human traffi cking or as forced participants in the global sex industry owing to dire economic conditions. 

When I began my research in 2006, I also wanted, as a feminist researcher and scholar, to study “traffi cked women,” or “victims” of the sex trade. However, I found that few of the women in my study were forced, duped, or coerced into the sex trade. As far as I could tell, none of the workers I spoke with had been pressured by pimps or bar owners to have sex for money against their will. In fact, as I describe in more detail in chapter 5, the madams (locally referred to as mommies) in my study follow a strict moral code that prohibits them from taking a cut of their workers’ earnings from paid sex. Mommies earned their money through a combination of business profi ts from the bars, alcohol sales, and tips from the clients. As a result, workers’ autonomy and consent in the labor process were crucial to sustaining business across all four of the niche markets in this study. While several scholars critically examine the issue of forced labor and human traffi cking, I examine the broader structural conditions that shape the range of choices available to women as they enter the sex industry.38 This book departs from the premise that all women in the sex industry are victims forced into the trade, or that they experience severe forms of labor exploitation, and instead follows the work of Denise Brennan, Rhacel Parreñas, and others by looking at women who choose to enter into sex work as a strategy to advance their economic and social positions in the local economy.39 Many scholars of gender have shown that Third World women are frequently misrepresented as victims rather than as agents with motivations and desires that guide their actions.40 Taking this work a step further, I illustrate how sex workers in HCMC act as astute entrepreneurs within existing structures of patriarchy. For the women I studied who catered to wealthy local and other Asian businessmen, the sex industry allowed them to escape rural life and move into some of the most lavish spaces in Vietnam. These women earned more than white-collar professionals with master’s degrees who worked in local businesses. Workers who catered to Viet Kieu men and Western men were women who either originated from HCMC or had migrated to HCMC several years earlier. They had all worked in the service economy and in factories, earning less than a hundred U.S. dollars a month with no possibility of upward mobility. Sex work provided these women with opportunities to advance economically and to escape exploitative working conditions. Critically, these women were not victims of trafficking. They were free agents who could quit working at any time. But while women were able to capitalize on Vietnam’s rapid