Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, Occupy Los Angeles began on October 1st with a massive rally in the downtown of the city. Yet after more than two months demonstrating on the lawns of City Hall, Occupy LA was raided by police and shut down last week.
Sitting in a wheel chair outside City Hall during a recent Occupy Los Angeles rally, 78-year-old Anastasia Stewart pumped her handmade sign in the air. She said, “We’ve become ‘of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations,’ instead of ‘of the people, for the people, by the people.’”
A new film trails a Cuban exile in New York who could not remain in Cuba, but who can barely survive in the swashbuckling consumerism of the United States.
Approaching the U-Haul Store on Hollywood Boulevard is like entering a bustling market. A gaggle of workers swarm you, politely placing business cards into your hand, offering their services.
Diallo Ibrahima traveled to France from his homeland of Mali with dreams of a decent life. Nine years later, he’s still waiting. “I came here to find a better life,” he said at Place de Bastille, in central Paris, where he and hundreds others had camped out for nearly a month. “And I still haven’t found it.”
You hear them in Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Berlin: Punk bands, "world musicians" and cabarets filch Roma, or Gypsy, Jewish and Balkan melodies, and casually weave them into other musical traditions. In these metropolises, Eastern European folk music roosts on the margins, threading together broader Balkan, Jewish and Roma themes to survive. Yet on the edge of this musical map beats Budapest, a folk boomtown with thriving Magyar, Roma and the seedlings of the neo-klezmer scene. In a town where established folk communities are the norm, do they ever cross-pollinate?Photo by Daniel Spitzberg
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019