Postcards from Babylon

A ROUGH GUIDE TO LIBERATION Christian de Sousa

I listen to him; suddenly, for a moment, the human chasm appears.

A flash – and all is told, given silently, to hold.

We plunder tequila and go deep into discussion of the beyond.

What is God? he asks. Where did we go wrong? I ask.

And the tendrils of our many answers weave into the Mediterranean night.

By 3am we are in Adam’s kitchen, drinking local red and listening to early Bowie on a tinny tape recorder. Surging with emotion, he leans forward across the table and looks me in the eye.

“You are not a journalist,” he says.

“You are looking for the soul.”

Medicine [LONDON]

Finsbury Park, the raised station platform empty after closing. My mate sparks a flame, inhales a lungful of nocturnal oxygen and brings the slender blunt to life. Pausing during a night of urban exploring, we stand under the sodium lights and contemplate the vista of Zone 2 North London.

Shipped in undercover from distant, warmer lands, the ganja smoke infuses us with earthy sweetness and disseminates its pungent aroma into the night. Like a panacea, it softens the abrasive edges of the city and expands the moment into a next-level reality.

The herb that Mexicans call marijuana is a catalyst for our waking dreaming, giving art and music extra, wilder dimensions. It guides us through the multiplying pathways of our minds and reveals new perspectives on reality and our position within it.

But the plant of knowledge is an unpredictable ally. It can twist a conversation into lyricism and theatre but will just as easily kill it dead. It can awaken and elevate full-body sensation, but can also turn us into disembodied drones. It can show us how to harvest the golden fruits of our consciousness, but in the wrong mood it will rouse the looming shadows and afflict us with a ceaseless paranoia.

As a siren wails in the distance, we receive the medicine

and continue on our way.

Night Drive through Babylon [DETROIT]

Dawn from the sixty-second floor. Gazing out over the twinkling cityscape, rivers of electronic melody coursing through my mind. Bass pulses under layers of digital percussion and a synth-line soars into a minor key.

Motor City. The manufacturing heart of America’s twentieth-century economic triumph and one the original templates for the Western consumer economy. The engine room of the American Dream: birthplace of the automobile, the mass-production assembly line and the three-minute Motown slice of musical soul.

And birthplace also, in the late 1980s, of a sonic revolution. Techno: the music of the future, the soundtrack animating a thousand dancefloors around the world. Rhythmic commentary for the millennial era; abstract and repetitive machine music that brims with raw energy and passion, transporting listeners, willingly or not, into altered states of consciousness.

Cue Paul and me, two musical pilgrims disguised as journalists, come to plug into the groundsource of the sound. We’re armed with a commission from a UK music magazine to cover the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, DEMF, and recap the origins of the techno story. We hit the blaggers’ jackpot with a well-worded email to the Detroit City Chamber of Tourism, who are laying out five-star hospitality for us. We’re riding the media train first class, getting VIP guided tours of the city and a hotel room in the upper reaches of the landmark General Motors towers, complete with ice machine and the most panoramic view I’ve ever seen, never mind woken up to.

By this time my investigations of subculture in London have entered a new phase. I’ve managed to plug into the music media and have been doing portrait shoots for magazines. I’m finally earning cash, and I’m also travelling, getting free records and meeting some of the main characters in the various electronic scenes. The dynamic energy of all this has tempered my bleak obsession with the state of the world, and I’ve started photographing in colour. Life seems to be looking up.

Meanwhile, the immersion in electronic music and graffiti further afield has confirmed my sense that music-makers and artists in other places are doing the same thing as the London crews: taking the intensity and challenge of the contemporary urban experience and using it as the raw material for artistic expression and transformation. With this in mind, we arrive in Detroit keen to explore the relationship between the city’s legendary dystopian landscape and the music that was born here. It feels like Detroit offers a key to understanding how human beings can respond creatively to adverse circumstance. So, with some time to spare before the festival begins, we start walking.

Heading first towards the newer architecture by the riverside, we find an eighties sci-fi vibe that interprets the corporate HQ as futuristic space station. It’s all tubes and pods and gantries and Star Trek service towers. We half expect something to suddenly levitate and shoot off to a different galaxy.

As we reach the core of downtown, we spot the derelict skyscrapers we’ve heard about. Dating from the now long-gone boom times of the Detroit motor industry, they have names like Cadillac Tower, and from a distance they seem to retain all the majesty and kudos of their Art Deco and Modernist origins.

But closer investigation reveals that they are abandoned, with lobbies full of junk and broken windows punctuating the grids of glass and concrete.

We spend two days exploring the bizarre ghost town that is metropolitan Detroit, walking, taking it all in and discussing the genealogy of techno and its musical descendants. We have little contact with anyone apart from street people, the staff in empty diners and a pair of donut-eating cops.

When the festival begins we head down to the open site under the towering Renaissance Center, where a number of stages are dotted around the plaza, pumping out digital music. The festival is free and there’s a broad mix of punters, from hordes of travelling techno youth to picnicking local families and a sizeable contingent of old homeless guys getting down to some seriously funky moves.

Techno, and particularly Detroit techno, inspires fervent loyalty.

We see a guy with a large and still unfinished tattoo on his back depicting Richie Hawtin’s Plastikman logo, an icon of Detroit’s second wave in the early nineties. It takes me back – the first techno record I ever owned was a Plastikman twelve-inch.

Let’s rewind for a minute. The history of Detroit is a classic tale of spiralling boom-and-bust economics; it is in many ways a microcosm of the evolution of global capitalism. It was in Detroit in the early twentieth century that Henry Ford and his Model T assembly line spearheaded the manufacturing revolution that kick-started the era of mass-produced goods for consumer markets.

The mechanisation and sequential processes of the assembly line allowed speedier production, lowering costs and making cars accessible to a far broader segment of the population – including, for the first time, the workers manning the machines making them. Detroit’s factories produced millions of cars, but the mechanised assembly-line model was also used for making everything from aeroplanes and tractors to computers, kitchen appliances and plastic toys, opening up vast swathes of economic potential.

During the Second World War the city’s entire manufacturing capacity was converted to the production of planes, tanks and other military vehicles, keeping Detroit’s economy booming and generating technical advances that would translate into great leaps forward in post-war car design and manufacture. Then in the ‘golden age’ of the fifties and sixties, the car really asserted its dominance of American culture, with the construction of freeways and the rapid growth of suburbs outside the downtown centres.

This was not entirely a spontaneous evolution; the motor industry lobbied for the development and was also involved in financing it.

The automobile became the ultimate symbol of freedom, offering individual choice, comfort, power, status and sex appeal. Promoted with increasingly sophisticated marketing, the car became a test case for using the rhetorical promise of freedom to create product desirability. Stoked by this manufactured desire, the liberation offered by cars generated huge sales, and repeated them by regularly releasing improved and more desirable models.

All this was gold for Motor City, supporting waves of exponential growth in prosperity and population. The big automobile corporations built impressive architectural edifices to house their offices and display their success. Their management elites developed a taste for the high life. Workers flooded into Detroit, many from the poor and segregated Deep South, finding relatively well-paid jobs in factories which significantly raised their material standard of living.

But then came the crashes. The first was in the thirties, when the depression brought plummeting sales and production, which in turn led to unemployment, social unrest and racial tension. But Motor City rode out the storm and survived. It happened again with the oil shocks of the seventies.

Worldwide economic stagnation, combined with competition from more fuel-efficient European and Asian cars, seriously disabled the mighty Detroit car industry. The result was a major economic slump and the return of rising unemployment. In the middle of all this, in 1943 and 1967, the city exploded into devastating race riots, catalysing further tension and social dislocation.

By the mid-eighties, Detroit was a metropolis in major decline. The city and the motor industry at the heart of both its economy and its identity were reeling from a decade of downturn, strife and the illusory trickle-down rhetoric of Reaganomics. Wealth distribution was massively uneven. Unemployment, drug addiction and violent crime were all high, and the wholesale degeneration had catalysed mass white flight and commercial relocation to the suburbs.

Downtown Detroit was gradually abandoned, leaving countless empty buildings to decay and become squatted shelters for the homeless and the crackheads. What was once the fourth-largest city in the United States effectively became a post-industrial wasteland.

The Road to Hell [BAGHDAD - JERUSALEM]

By the time I’ve completed this triangular review of my personal history and the global narrative it’s a few years into the new millennium. The world is reverberating from 9/11, its transformation of the political landscape and the subsequent waves of military mobilisation and repressive legislation.

It is against this backdrop that the farcical search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq culminates in a seemingly inevitable and stage-managed invasion.

It seems obvious to anyone reading between the lines that the rhetoric about removing an evil dictator, eliminating terrorist threats and rolling out democracy to the entire planet is a wholesale cover.

It’s really all about asserting Anglo-American control over Iraq’s vast oil reserves – along with Afghanistan’s strategic position in resource-rich Eurasia. History has been inverted, with the living descendants of the ancient Babylonians now copping it from the contemporary evil empire.

Saddened and angry at the flagrant injustice of it all, I nevertheless find myself gripped by a morbid fascination with the tension and excitement of the unfolding drama. I watch the annihilation of Baghdad by state-of-the-art American weaponry, the bloodless TV footage worthy of a glossy arms trade PR video. I absorb the massively lopsided statistics

on Iraqi versus Allied deaths and then discover shaky, chaotic internet video footage showing dust, mayhem and corpses. I read about the irreversible looting and destruction of the Baghdad library and the archaeological sites of ancient Babylon, both unique records of the origins of civilisation. And I feel a lurking sense of impending apocalypse, aware of the grim irony that even as it rains destruction upon a country full of innocent people, the twenty-first century West is denying and obliterating its own origins.

From the safe distance of my comfortable life in London, I try to think of a way to do something, to engage with the situation beyond passive consumption of the media spectacle and a kind of neutered outrage. One day, a friend in the peace movement introduces me to an Iraqi man called Sammi. Over Arabic coffee on the Edgware Road he tells me he is collecting funds and medical equipment to make an independent ambulance mission to his home town, the northern oil city of Kirkuk. Exiled during the rule of Saddam Hussein, he has been living and working as a taxi driver in Bristol for the last decade. Now, with the help of a London-based NGO called Peace Direct, he plans to go home and set up some sort of post-war citizens’ support centre. He has a large truck and intends to fill it with essential supplies,

then travel by road through mainland Europe, Turkey, Syria and into Kurdish Iraq. He is looking for someone to help with the driving.

I come away from meeting Sammi with a profound sense of respect and an elastic stomach.

At last, someone taking the plunge and actually trying and make a positive contribution to the situation.

The opportunity is clear: join this crazy one-man humanitarian caravan and align my actions with my beliefs. It’s also an opportunity to finally take on the mantle of being a proper photojournalist – to journey to the frontline, expose the fallacies of the war project and tell a story of hope for humanity. If all this wasn’t enough, it is a ticket to photograph the original Babylon.

The trouble is that by this time the Iraqi ‘peace’ is lurching into a predictable and spiralling bloodbath of insurgency, ethnic strife and sectarian massacre. The violence is worse than it ever was during the official war, and the various militias have taken to kidnapping and executing both foreigners and the Iraqis who deal with them. The highway from the border to Kirkuk has become one of the most dangerous roads in the world.

A friend asks me pointedly what it is I think I can achieve by going to Iraq and risking my

own violent death. I reply that we bear collective responsibility for the suffering and I want to do something to alleviate it and show the reality behind it. But his words hit home. Gradually, a suffocating fear takes root. I have several dreams about being shot and I start worrying about my family. Slowly but surely my self-preservation instinct erodes my desire to lend a hand to the Iraqis, visit the original Babylon and bring home a document from the edge. Reluctantly, I succumb once again to the safety blanket of Western privilege and tell Sammi that I’m not coming with him.

Then a magazine commissions me for a feature on clubbing in Israel. It’s only a couple of hundred miles across the desert from Iraq, but the club scene there is more or less identical to others I have photographed across Europe.

And so my first experience of the Middle East is a road trip along the so-called ‘apartheid highway’.

The road from Ben Gurion airport to Jerusalem runs through Palestinian territory in the West Bank but is securely fenced off from the Palestinian lands that surround it, and strictly reserved for vehicles with yellow Israeli licence plates. The taxi driver’s radio is tuned into a station playing eighties pop. As we speed past a bullet-proof watchtower, Chris Rea’s ‘The Road to Hell’ starts playing.

The Temporary Autonomous Zone

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