Judging FalastinVision 2025

While EuroVision was getting the headlines, FalastinVision was where you could find the most relevant music.

The rise in the  daily death count in Gaza, along with the imminence of the mass starvation event, is such that even BBC and NPR is reporting on it a little.  Over 100 people have been killed by Israel's random bombing of locations up and down the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours -- largely tents, and buildings which have already been bombed previously.  Within them, children, Israel's primary victims.  (All Hamas children, of course.)

A friend who has been donating all the money she could afford, since the war began, totaling $18,000 so far, reported to me that if a bag of flour can be found on the besieged Strip today, it will cost you $700.  She said her contacts in Gaza are now saying good-bye.

During World War 2 there were parts of Switzerland that were accidentally bombed by Allied planes because they mis-read the map, and thought they were bombing Germany.  Mostly Switzerland made it through the war intact.  Swiss banks make a lot of money from other countries' wars, along with Swiss arms manufacturers, but Switzerland itself has been at peace for over 200 years.  In the city of Basel you'll find fully intact neighborhoods where all the houses were built in the 13th century.

On May 17th, there in Basel, Switzerland, the most-watched television event of a typical year on planet Earth, the EuroVision Song Contest, took place.  This was headline news everywhere, of course.

What didn't make the international headlines so much was the use of tear gas and rubber bullets by the Swiss police in their efforts to control the protesters outside, outraged once again at the inclusion of the fascist state of Israel in the contest -- particularly at a time, some would add, that Russia is excluded, for the Russian government's war crimes, which plainly pale in any comparison with those which Israel is carrying out by the hour.

Well over a hundred million people apparently took in the EuroVision performances and watched the drama unfold, as for much of the evening, reportedly, Israel was looking like the likely winner, until the last contestant, representing Austria, pulled ahead in the voting at the last minute.

While that gala was taking place, a far smaller and more low-tech "genocide-free" song contest was happening.

It was the second annual FalastinVision, organized by folks in Sweden.  Sweden has often been the winner of EuroVision, and was the host country for the event last year, when once again there were protests against Israel's participation. 

I was paying attention to every minute of FalastinVision, until my vision was blurring and my ears were very tired of having headphones on them.  Nonetheless, it was a wonderful event, despite the length of it.

This was an event organized by people who, as with all of the participants, believe that there's an essential place for culture in social movements and in the creation of bonds of solidarity.  I might have been spending most of Saturday glued to my laptop screen, sitting in the dark with headphones on, ignoring my children anyway, but what especially motivated me to be part of the whole marathon was having been asked to be one of four judges for the contest.

I have rarely paid much attention to EuroVision, but I've watched bits of it over the years.  I would have probably benefitted from a greater familiarity with EuroVision proceedings, because I believe FalastinVision is loosely based on it in various ways, such as the procedures for voting on songs.  There's a certain method for the jury members, who rate their favorite seven selections, and then a much simpler one for the general viewing public, who can also vote, for their single favorite song.

The event began with hosts in Sweden talking about the dire situation now in Gaza, and the efforts of the flotilla which has long been attempting to sail there -- sabotaged in one way or another at every turn, most recently involving a drone bombing of an aid ship in international waters near Malta that destroyed its engine.

What went on next was a brief introduction to each of the jury members, the various watch parties, and, mostly, the contestants.

The hosts interviewed most of them before playing their song in pre-recorded form.  Swedes were well-represented, but there were also artists from Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, Iran, Chile, Australia, Ireland, and probably somewhere else.

FalastinVision was hosted on Streamyard, a platform I use a lot.  Tens of thousands of Zionist bots had been trying to hamper operations on other platforms, but Streamyard streamed just fine.

As the stream began, Streamyard invited people like me to stream the proceedings on our own social media.  I streamed the event on my YouTube channel and on X.  Very quickly, the stream was taken down from YouTube, supposedly for copyright violations.  On X, it kept streaming and it's still up.

What we all got to hear next were songs -- often involving well-produced music videos -- recorded by artists who are beseeching everyone to confront this genocide, see what's happening, be moved by it, and moved to action.  In many different languages, in various genres, what we heard was one well-constructed anthem of resistance after another.

In my own life, I became familiar with various forms of music in the course of friendships and relationships with people from various parts of the world.  This was how I first grew to love the Nueva Trova tradition of Latin America, and Arab music as well, with an emphasis on music of anti-colonial resistance from Palestine and Lebanon.

As for Swedish hiphop, until now it's not something I've delved into much -- I've heard a lot of it in various situations, usually at gigs where I was also playing, but never tried to get a lot of the lyrics translated.  As a jury member, I was of course reading along in the English lyric translations we all had for each song, and it was an experience I'm far better off for having had.

I'm a new fan of Anton Berner, Frida, and LOREM, Swedish artists who have all made brilliant contributions to the struggle with their music.

I was particularly moved by both the beautiful music, vocal harmonies, and storytelling of Portuguese singer/songwriter, Annie G. Silva, with her song, "Vento."

If I had been just a member of the public, I would have found this much easier, and just voted for the Portuguese entrant.  Otherwise, trying to assign different scores to the various songs, most of which were brilliant, seemed like an impossible task.  Even picking the best seven out of the 16 songs was very difficult.

In terms of the process, it was interesting to note that the handful of songs that would definitely not have made it into my top 7 were in the top 7 of other judges.  As a native English speaker, I think I was hyper-critical of the songwriters who chose to write in English, when it was clearly not their first language.  Most of them employed enough over-used phrases or painfully bad rhymes that these things killed the songs for me.  But not for the Swedish judges, who were apparently not at all bothered by bad English rhymes.

The preference for Swedish-language hiphop among the Swedish jury members seemed fairly evident, not surprisingly.  They were some of my favorites as well, even in translation.

Plans for featuring the activities and performers at different watch parties had to be adjusted when the Basel watch party was unable to go to the location of the party because they were busy being kettled by police at the EuroVision protests.

By the end of the votes coming in, while brilliant Swedish hiphop artist Anton Berner was in the lead at first, once the public's votes were counted, Iranians for Palestine were the winners.  They weren't in my top 7, but their song was a  powerful entry, too, and the video accompanying it was especially moving.  Due to a bad internet connection in Iran, the winning band couldn't be interviewed live.

While I'm still not a big fan of contests, this one was a brilliant idea.  It represents an alternative to EuroVision, in principle, rather than just a protest against it.

And it is certainly one of the highest-quality and most international gatherings of like-minded artists I've ever been part of, albeit mostly an online one.  Whatever happens in what seems like the endless struggle for survival of the Palestinian people, FalastinVision should continue, and grow.

FalastinVision represents a beacon of hope for the power of culture -- something which is often dismissed by significant elements of contemporary western resistance networks and organizations, and it is dismissed at our collective peril.  Bring on the music -- the beating heart of the resistance.

Genocide and the Deafening Silence

A few thoughts for the silent majority.

There are only 193 countries in the world, and I like to have some idea of what's going on in all of them.  It inevitably surprises the cab drivers that I know the name of the capital city of the country they're from.  I memorized them all when I was 12.  It doesn't take much to impress most any African, Arab, or eastern European cab driver.

There are terrible things going on in many different parts of the world, and I try to keep tabs on a whole lot of it.  There has been a huge upswing in wars, civil wars, and famines in lots of different countries, most of which are related to some combination of climate change, the sanctions on Russia that have quintupled so many commodity prices globally, and huge structural problems like so many governments that are basically collapsing under the weight of their national debt.

There's only one country, which isn't officially a country, part of which consists of a walled ghetto which is being systematically starved and bombed for the past 19 months, and which was being regularly bombed and deprived of necessities for decades before 2023 -- only one.  That country, or that occupied place, is called Palestine.

I have woken up every morning for the past 19 months wondering how many children were bombed or starved to death since I went to sleep.  Al-Jazeera provides this information for me, as best as they can.  They only know for sure who died whose bodies were found, rather than all the unknown possibly hundreds of thousands who are buried beneath rubble that no human can possibly move without the right equipment, none of which is available.

When the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001, I bought five different t-shirts that had a huge, sinister-looking image of GW Bush with bold yellow words that said INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST.  It seemed like the only reasonable thing to do, when your country's military was regularly bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan, torturing prisoners, and committing massacres of civilians in Iraq.

I kept very busy back then singing at antiwar protests and other events.  Mostly small ones, occasionally big.  It was easy to be ensconced in that community most anywhere I went, which was mostly in North America and Europe.  But it was also too easy to get an idea of how the general public felt about these wars, and this president, and the guy wearing that t-shirt, or some combination thereof, anyway.  Overwhelmingly, it was silence.  People look away and pretend not to notice, or they notice and they maintain a stern expression of some kind.  Maybe 1 in 100 passersby would smile or say something indicating their opposition to the so-called "War on Terror."  Less often, people would be hostile.

I've been writing about the Palestinian struggle now for 25 years, but my level of engagement increased a lot since October, 2023.  Sometime around then I acquired a number of Palestine flag t-shirts, and I've been wearing one most days since then.

People involved with protesting or otherwise organizing to try to stop the war machine have of course wanted to show how many people in the US and other countries are opposed to Israel's war on Gaza, and depending on which poll you look at, there seem to be a lot of them. 

But going to the protests in the US and other countries, while they are sometimes big, they're almost never nearly as big as the numbers being put out by organizers, which are often the same ones used by the media these days, bizarrely.  (The media didn't used to do that.)

And walking down the street in Portland, or in a random airport, or in London, it is overwhelmingly stony silence that greets me everywhere I go.  Now and then a woman in a hijab or an Arab family at an airport will smile at me.  Embarrassingly, they often thank me.  But otherwise it's as it was with the Bush t-shirt I used to wear -- no reaction.

I feel like I'm living in a different dimension from the vast majority of my fellow humans, at least in the countries I frequent.  There's a walled ghetto being bombed and starved every day for the past 19 months, with hundreds of thousands actually killed, many more hundreds of thousands wounded, and two million people now on the brink of starvation.  And it's all being livestreamed, minute by minute, on Al-Jazeera and any number of other places online, by Palestinians who are taking great risks just to get to a wifi hotspot where they can send out the photos and videos and other reports documenting their own annihilation.

Random people, like the checkout person at Trader Joe's, ask how I'm doing, ask what I'm up to this weekend, reflect on some recent local event, and they never say anything about my t-shirt.  There's a genocide happening, have you heard the news?  I want to ask, but I don't.

I write songs about the ongoing Palestinian apocalypse, and a hardcore group of fans tell me how good the latest song is with great enthusiasm, and they thank me for doing this work.  It's usually the same people, I recognize most of the handles on YouTube and Substack and wherever else.  

But in terms of the broader public, once again, it's silence.  By the time one song I put out last week got a thousand views on X, it had been reposted 15 times.  That's 1.5% of people who watched the video felt moved to share it.

At the same time, it's clear there is concern and interest -- for example, with the onset of the genocide, my audience on Spotify increased by 50%.  People who are looking for artists who have written a lot about the Palestinian struggle found me.  But that doesn't mean hardly any of them are bold enough to repost a song on X or Facebook.

Are they concerned their boss will see the post, and they'll get fired?  Or that they'll alienate some of their friends or relatives by taking a public position on this ongoing genocide?  Or if they are artists, that they'll never play at another folk festival in the US again?  Or they'll lose their record contract?

These are all typical consequences to speaking up about Palestine in a serious way, so that other people actually notice.  Quite likely to happen, from my experience, and by my observation of what happens to other people, too.

We hear about and perhaps celebrate the ones who speak out regardless, and suffer serious consequences for it.  We hear much less about the many more who stay quiet, keep their  heads down, don't get involved with saying what they think of controversial, divisive issues.

An artist might deign to make a "ceasefire now" statement, and their career survives, more or less intact.  Dare to denounce Israel's genocide against the Palestinians and you've crossed a line that will likely have consequences, and so most artists never do it.  An artist might write a generic peace song, but not a song criticizing the genocidal intentions or deeds of the self-proclaimed Jewish State.  And they won't share any of the songs I've written about this subject either.

Those few people with large followings who do ever share my songs on this subject are people who are already defined by the issue -- journalists like Sam Husseini or Sarah Wilkinson.  People who have been brutalized by police, and otherwise already faced serious consequences for daring to speak out.  The other people with big accounts I've shared songs with who haven't shared them with you are too numerous to name.

If this were a predominantly Muslim nation bombing and starving millions of people living in a walled-off ghetto who were Jewish, you can be sure there would have been all sorts of international intervention by now.  But not if the situation is the reverse.

Just in the past couple of weeks, coverage on BBC has changed.  It's become just a little more like Al-Jazeera.  They're now telling us each day how many hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by the Jewish army of Israel, though of course they don't call it that, and they always make sure to uncritically mouth the nonsense being put out by Israel's slick PR machine claiming that every one of those bombings were targeting Hamas, despite the high death toll of children in all of them, despite the obvious fact that they're targeting hospital staff and patients half the time.

I guess BBC management doesn't want to go down in history as doing what most of the American media is still doing, even now, and mostly ignoring the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, or the daily, violent pogroms in the Occupied West Bank, or the frequent Israeli bombings of targets in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen.  Let's just talk about tariffs, that plane in Qatar, and the new Pope.

Over these 19 months in my travels I have so often been in social situations where I see old friends and comrades who are as obsessively attentive to every development in Gaza as I am.  This is never surprising.

What is always surprising is the number of people I see who seem to be living on a different planet from me.  So many people horrified by all the things Trump is doing, who seem to have forgotten that this genocide is still ongoing, and that it's a bipartisan one -- and has been for the past 80 years or so.

I go to England and I hear about the rise of Reform UK, and how pathetic the Labor Party continues to be when it comes to running the government in such a way that things like the health service functions like it used to do, or in such a way that housing is affordable.  For so many, as long as the lesser evil party is managing to hold onto power, the genocide they are sponsoring along with the Tories seems to be somewhere far back in the order of their priorities.

I go to Scandinavia and find a greater degree of involvement with the issue overall, but still plenty of people who are clearly much more concerned about the rise of antisemitism in Europe, or the growth of a local rightwing party, than about the genocide of the Palestinians which all of their mainstream political parties actively support by trading with and helping to arm the fascist state of Israel.

As I've said a lot, along with lots of other people, at some point in the future, perhaps not even the distant future, countries will be building museums to remember the genocided Palestinians.  People, pundits, national leaders will broadly proclaim how they failed to stop this genocide, how they didn't realize it was really happening or whatever other utter nonsense they might come up with.  They'll say they just couldn't imagine a Jewish State could possibly do such a thing, despite it being livestreamed on the internet hour by fatal hour.

It's just as ridiculous as realizing after the fact that maybe killing millions of civilians in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia over years of constant bombing was a bad idea.

Back then, there was a much bigger and more sustained resistance movement in the US, which faced all the same obstacles as people have faced during this one.  But it still was never a movement that became the kind of mass movement that history has seen before, leading to things like general strikes.  There were no general strikes against these wars, except for student strikes.  Almost every day, the ports stayed open and the weapons kept being shipped, then as now.

I have watched this genocidal war being conducted on the people of Gaza for the past 19 months, and now, along with so many others who are living in the same reality as me, I wait with absolute, abject horror for the far greater numbers of death through starvation to begin in earnest, as so many people in the Gaza Strip have barely eaten in months.

While I appreciate the efforts of the activist few -- mostly Jews and Muslims who feel too  personally tied up with the situation to ignore it -- the silence of most people throughout the western world, at least among the countries that I frequent, particularly across the US, is deafening.

I will never be the same.  And in the future if I ever hear anyone talking about "never again" in relation to the Nazi holocaust who is not in the same breath talking about the genocide of the Palestinians by an army of Jews, I don't know what I'll do.

Travelogue 5.2025: Visiting Countries on Top of the Target List

A few thoughts from my recent travels in Canada and Denmark.

Since Trump's latest inauguration and Shitshow 2025 commenced, countries I've visited have included several of those most often mentioned by #47 as targets for trade wars and even potential military action.  In March Kamala and I visited Mexico, and then California, along with England and Scotland in early April.  (I wrote travelogues about those visits as well.)

After a little time back home with my family I then spent several days traveling on my own and doing gigs around British Columbia in Canada, and then six days in the Jutland region of Denmark doing the same sort of thing, with a little tour that was a last-minute addition to spring plans.

So, with the constant backdrop of incessant news stories about Trump's latest schemes, threats, and deportations, and the constant backdrop of the silence of the western leaders along with the outrageous distortions of the mainstream western media's coverage as Israel commits genocide against everyone in Gaza, withholding all water, food, medicine, electricity, etc. for over two months now, I set off for BC.

Canada and the US naturally have such parallel histories in so many ways.

My first stop was Centralia, where in the town center you can now find, along with the statue of the Legionnaire, a plaque remembering those IWW members railroaded into prison or lynched under a bridge for daring to defend their union hall when it was under attack by Legionnaires, during the times of the Palmer Raids in 1919. 

On my way north I passed through the cities where once lived Rachel Corrie, and Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, both of whom were killed by the Israeli military in the course of their efforts to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.

When I arrived at the land border in Blaine, Washington, there was no line at all.  For the first time in my life that I can remember, I drove right up to the border, waited for the one car ahead of me to get through, and then it was my turn.

The agent looked at my extensive list of bannings and other problems at the border over the course of my adult life, asked me a few questions about that, and then let me in.

The nonexistence of any line at the Canadian border was a continuation of the experience I've had with international travel so far in 2025 -- hardly anyone is leaving the US, or coming to the US.  Whereas one could normally expect to stand in line for at least an hour at immigration, often much more than that, at airport after airport -- in Los Angeles, at Heathrow, at SeaTac, in Amsterdam -- I walked right up to the agent.

Part of the fun in touring, at least if you're well-suited for that sort of thing, is all the travel involved with getting from gig to gig.

Stopping at cafes along the way, walking around on the ferries, talk of tariffs was a very regular thing.  Buying a cup of coffee was one transaction that provoked a conversation I overheard between a customer and the barista, who seemed also to be the cafe owner.  Although coffee isn't a big crop in most of the US, the coffee this guy was importing from Indonesia went through California on the way, and would thus be subject to these big new taxes.  He was looking into alternatives.

Among the wonderful folks from around Vancouver Island who traveled to the historic town of Cumberland to hang out and catch my show there was one Kevin Neish, who, along with Rachel and Aysenur and many others on both sides of this border and around the world, has dedicated a large part of his life to solidarity with Palestine, and was very nearly killed for it when Israeli soldiers boarded the aid ship he was on in 2010, killing nine of his comrades.

The event in Cumberland, as elsewhere, was a fundraiser going towards medical aid for Gaza.  As I told stories and sang songs about the ongoing genocide there, and the resistance to it, in the audience were more than one person who had risked their lives on one or more occasions in efforts to break the deadly siege of Gaza that has been in place for the past twenty years, Kevin very much among them.

Cumberland and Centralia especially share history in common, both being towns where prominent organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World -- or in Canada, the One Big Union -- were martyred.  In Centralia, Wesley Everest, tortured, disfigured, and lynched.  In Cumberland, prominent union organizer Ginger Goodwin was shot and killed while hiding in the woods, trying to avoid being sent off to fight in a war -- World War 1 -- which the IWW denounced as a war for the bosses, where the workers of the world all lose.

Together with several other wonderful folks, I visited Ginger Goodwin's grave once again, for the first time in many years, as well as the old Japanese and Chinese cemeteries, or what little remains of them.

On both sides of the border there were waves of Asian Exclusion acts passed, along with waves of deportations, and eventually internment, and laws following release from internment that forbade the formerly imprisoned from moving back to the west coast.  After the initial wave of exclusion acts and deportations, the ad hoc neighborhoods known as Japantown and Chinatown in Cumberland were mostly abandoned.  After Pearl Harbor the Japanese cemetery was largely destroyed by vandals.  Later, Japantown and Chinatown were bulldozed by the authorities, who, I'm told, didn't want the places to become havens for hippie squatters.

On my way to visit the cemeteries, with a friend from Victoria in the car, one of her fellow Canadians, presumably, passed us on his motorcycle and made sure to flip us off three times.  Three times, presumably, to make sure we didn't miss the gesture.

The motorcyclist apparently hadn't passed us because he had been aiming to go faster, because after passing us, he resumed going the speed limit, as we had been doing, which was a very low speed limit.  Given that I was going the speed limit, driving a nondescript car with no bumper stickers, there was no question at all that our offense was that we were driving a car with Oregon license plates.

Having had many more disturbing experiences in the United States driving a car with license plates from another, apparently unpopular, state, such as what has often happened to me vis-a-vis road rage incidents while driving a rental car with Florida plates, the Canadian nationalists have a long way to go to muster up a similar degree of hostility.  But certainly this was the first time I've ever had a negative experience in Canada as a result of being from the US.

Of course the outrage at Trump's threats and other statements is perfectly understandable, if not the assumption on the part of this motorcyclist that some random guy from Oregon supports the dude.  My song about the time the US and Canada did go to war, a war which the US lost, was well-received at all three gigs -- though in a typically polite, reserved, Canadian kind of way.

On my way to Denman Island I stopped to visit two labor-and-music activists I first met on my first visit to Cumberland a long time ago.  Brian and Steve recorded an interview with me for their community radio show.  Along the way I learned that one of them was on the committee that was working on future editions of the IWW's Little Red Songbook.  I learned with great pleasure that the efforts of my detractors to have my music removed from the songbook failed, and "Minimum Wage Strike" will remain in the next edition.

I was also interviewed on Denman Island, by a Danish man for his community radio show.  He remembered first hearing me play in Denmark around 25 years ago.  He hadn't kept up with my career until he saw that I was playing on his little hippie island-within-an-island, where they call Vancouver Island "the mainland."  I also met a Swede and a Norwegian during my brief stay on that island.

Most people I talked to in both Canada and Denmark on these visits said they would avoid going to the US under the current situation.  Most everyone had heard the stories of other Canadians and Europeans getting detained in miserable conditions for weeks on end, and most of the folks I tend to know have records of concern, whether arrest records, or records of their involvement with far left organizations of one kind or another.  Many people in both countries asked me if I was worried about being arrested in the US, and offered to help in some way if I needed to flee.

In the city of Vancouver I did another wonderful gig with the brilliant local band, the Gram Partisans, and the Solidarity Notes choir.  The choir opened with their rendition of one of my songs about Gaza ("If A Song," they call it).

Folks involved with that gig were some of the same folks who organized a concert at the Peace Park that separates the US from Canada, around twenty years ago, during a time when I was banned from entering Canada for a year.  So they organized a concert in one of the very few locations where folks from both the US and Canada can gather, where none of them have to go through immigration first.

On the way back into the US, the pattern of no wait at the borders didn't quite hold.  It was one of the shortest waits I've ever experienced at that border crossing, but I was sitting in the traffic for a half hour or so.  The majority of the cars had Washington plates, with most of the rest having BC plates.  There were no cars I recall seeing from further afield, and I was looking, for reporting purposes.

On the way to Denmark, the big breaking news was that because of Trump's bullying tactics, tariffs, etc., the less Trumpian of the two main capitalist parties in Canada, the Liberals, won the election by a landslide.  A few days later it was Australia's turn, with a big victory for the Australian Labor Party.  Now that everyone's getting tariffed around the world, suddenly the nationalists modeling themselves after Trump are completely toxic.

On the news, the Canadians interviewed most often use the word "betrayal" to describe the new, hostile attitude of the Trump administration towards their country.  My guess is the Canadians who feel most especially betrayed are the formerly Trump-aligned members of the rightwing of the political elite.

I was heading to Denmark because only a couple months earlier I got an email from one of the folks who book gigs at the legendary punk rock social center in Aalborg, 1000Fryd, about playing there on May 1st.

Since I first started touring in Denmark around 24 years ago, playing at 1000Fryd on May 1st was an annual thing.

The biggest cities in Denmark are Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, and Aalborg.

I'm not sure what happened to Odense, but the other three of Denmark's biggest cities have long been the homes of my biggest fans as well as much of the country's population.  It's in these three cities where I'm apt to get the biggest and most enthusiastic audiences.  It's from these audiences that I learn which songs from my most recent album have hit home the most, and I often discover this based on how loudly people are singing along to those songs.

1000Fryd is the only venue I ever remember playing in in Aalborg.  Aalborg is the fourth biggest city in this small country, much smaller than Aarhus.  In Aarhus there are a whole variety of great venues, backed by various wonderful organizations, and this is also true of Copenhagen.  Aalborg has one venue that I've ever run across, and it's a great one, but there's only that one.

So of course it shut down in 2020 for the pandemic lockdown era, but unlike the rest of the country, 1000Fryd didn't open back up for events after the lockdowns were over, because of problems in the neighborhood with noise complaints.  Over the course of years, involving much fundraising and other forms of struggle, the collective was able to soundproof the walls and satisfy the needs of the folks next door who for some reason decided it was a good idea to move in right next to an infamous punk rock club.

Over the years since 2020 of coming to Denmark and never getting invited to Aalborg, in my more paranoid moments I started wondering whether the anarcho-puritan crowd from Portland or Freiburg had gotten to the folks in Aalborg, and convinced them that I was really a fascist in disguise.  So when I got the invitation from the booking committee, and it involved a plane ticket, I extended my spring touring to include a very short visit to the country that my friend and musical collaborator Gregg Weiss recently and accurately referred to as "David's happy place."

Only when I was in Amsterdam, looking into the connecting flight to Aalborg and such details, did I realize that I had booked the rental car for the wrong day.

Having done this before, I knew that this would mean it, and the price I had gotten for it, would no longer be available, and I confirmed that to be sure.  This then meant paying three times as much for the rental car as I had planned, throwing a major wrench into this already not-particularly-profitable visit to Denmark, but that's how the cookie crumbles when you're stuck with my brain.

I was mostly staying in Silkeborg while in the Jutland region of Denmark, where everything was happening on this little visit.  My host was my old friend Kirsten Gammelgaard, a not-very-retired pedagog with a long history of working with marginalized people of all sorts, and supporting the party known as the Red-Green Coalition, the Unity List, Enhedslisten.

Of the four events I sang at, two were Enhedslisten events, starting with the first one.

On the morning of May 1st, Kirsten and I were both singing at the local chapter's May 1st event, in the backyard of former member of the Danish parliament, Christian Juhl.  It was a fine gathering of several dozen folks involving lots of red flags, Palestine flags, conversation, beer, soup, with speeches and musical sets interspersed. 

I can't claim to have understood all the speeches at either of the Enhedslisten events I sang at, but even so, it's clear that the question of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and what to do in response to this ongoing genocide, is a hotly-contested subject.  Which side of the debate Christian Juhl falls on was immediately evident, but in conversation with other prominent Enhedslisten members during this visit it was clear that Christian's passion for trying to make an effective stand with the Palestinians is not universal in the party.

Singing in Silkeborg and then driving up to Aalborg to play there all on the same day was a very familiar exercise, though in past years I have made as many as five appearances at different events in different parts of Denmark and sometimes also Sweden, all on May 1st.  Just two events on the day was a relatively sleepy May 1st, really.

Meeting folks at 1000Fryd when I got there I heard about the May 1st march folks had attempted to participate in earlier that day.  The red and black contingent showed up in the park where the May 1st rally was taking place, with the expectation that they'd march with everyone else.  But when the main organizers saw all their Palestine flags, they forbade them from marching with them, apparently claiming that Palestine isn't a labor issue.

The opening act that evening was a young musician at that precarious age of 27, who had clearly been profoundly influenced by the brilliance of Kimya Dawson.  When I guessed that Kimya had been an influence she said she considered her music to be "Juno Soundtrack-core."  (If you don't know what that means because you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it!) 

There were a whole bunch of people there who hadn't heard me in at least six years, and the show at 1000Fryd was definitely one of the most memorable ones I've ever done there.  Folks started carrying tables and chairs out of the room before I went on, and it soon became evident why they did that, because the room was packed with folks who were standing, and thus taking up less space. 

In Aarhus, the show was presented by Pino and associates involved with organizing on the streets.  As in many other countries these days, in Denmark there's a spiffy newspaper that you'll see being sold on the sidewalks by people who might be staying in a shelter nearby.  But whereas in places like the US groups like these might have an office in a church basement somewhere, in Denmark there's state support, at least to some extent, for nonprofits to have offices and other physical spaces, and even budgets for putting on events.

The interest in this crowd in the welfare of the Palestinians was unmistakable, well framed by the playlist they featured through their sound system before I sang, which was entirely hiphop in solidarity with Palestine.

Among the assembled crowd there were two of my fellow Americans who are in the process of extricating themselves from the clutches of Uncle Sam, having done the necessary ancestry research required to obtain a couple of European passports.

In Skanderborg the local Enhedslisten conference that I, of course, had missed and wouldn't have understood, had evidently been fractious.  I learned this only from participants who thanked me after my set for helping heal the wounds, or something along those lines.

Factionalized or not, perhaps one of the explanations for the growth of this party in Denmark over the past few decades is that they often feature live music at their conferences, I can say from lots of first-hand experience.  Whether or not Enhedslisten might benefit from the Trump Effect that has helped upset elections in Canada and Australia is yet unknown.  What I can say for sure is in the one speech I heard at the Enhedslisten conference in Skanderborg, Trump's name came up at least once per minute.

On my last night in Denmark I stayed at 1000Fryd, in their guest quarters for touring musicians.  I had a 6:30 am flight out of Aalborg to take me back to Portland, and I figured it was best to be close to the airport.  I hadn't factored in the cost of parking downtown overnight, which is about as costly as paying for a hotel room in some parts of the world.

When I got to the parking garage at 4 am, which I had made sure was open 24 hours, the gates were closed.  There was a door for pedestrians to walk through, though.

I momentarily panicked, but then thought maybe if I drove up to the gates, they'd open because the car was there.  That didn't work.

Starting to panic again, I thought about a bunch of different bad options, such as abandoning the car in the parking garage and taking a taxi to the airport in order to make the flight, or staying with the car and missing my return flight and having to buy another plane ticket.

As these different bad-dream scenarios flashed through my head, of course I thought of the famine unfolding in Gaza, and my concerns suddenly seemed profoundly petty.  I'm locked in a parking garage, while friends of mine were just bombed by a drone as they were about to attempt to sail from Malta to Gaza.

I called the phone number associated with the parking garage on Google Maps.  Miraculously, a sleepy-sounding Danish man answered.  After a couple minutes he found which parking garage I was in, and remotely opened one of the gates, so I could get out.

The only thing making me get on that plane to Portland was missing my children.  Otherwise I'd probably have skipped it altogether, and stayed in Denmark.  Or Canada.