I showed up to my first Dare to Repair Cafe with a notepad and a shopping tote full of holey sweaters.

The pad I needed to take notes on the event — a roving ministry, of sorts, for broken household items.

The sweaters, on the other hand, I took as mea culpas: I had said I’d bring a faulty Bluetooth speaker in the hopes a volunteer could make it play again. But my husband had already tossed the speaker in the trash. We were, in other words, part of the problem.  

“You won’t do that again,” said Don Winkelman, 71, a long-time volunteer for Dare to Repair. “We have people come in one time, with a lamp or something, and then we see them again and again.” 

Don Winkelman is a longtime volunteer for The Tool Library’s repair cafes. Courtesy of The Tool Library

Dare to Repair exists to reprogram wasteful consumers like my husband and me. Since 2017, the roving monthly cafe has traversed Buffalo, New York, and its environs, helping attendees repair broken electronics, household goods and small appliances. 

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans throw away nearly 40 million tons of such items each year. Repair cafes — of which there are now more than 3,000 across the world — offer an economical and environmentally friendly solution: Fix your broken stuff, instead. 

In Buffalo, repair cafes represent part of a larger regional movement around sustainability, communal resource-sharing and mutual aid. The monthly events are organized by the city’s Tool Library, a fast-growing, 13-year-old nonprofit group that lends tools and other equipment to individuals, small businesses and community organizations. 

The Tool Library has amassed a collection of almost 5,000 items, from hand tools to a cotton candy maker. Courtesy of The Tool Library

To date, the Tool Library has diverted 7,779 pounds of waste from landfills via its repair cafes and amassed a communal tool collection of nearly 5,000 items. It also serves as a model, a resource and a centralized hub for a range of other community sharing projects, from little free libraries to public gardens. 

“We’re part of a broader economic transition away from a system that really hasn’t been serving most people, locally or around the world,” said Darren Cotton, The Tool Library’s founder and executive director. “We’re shifting toward models that are more sustainable, more regenerative and that rely more on people helping one another, as opposed to a market delivering services.” 

The birth of Buffalo’s Tool Library

Cotton, 35, first dreamt up plans for The Tool Library while studying urban planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The university is an economic and cultural engine for the region, but its decision to open a suburban campus in the 1960s siphoned both people and resources away from University Heights, the city neighborhood surrounding its original campus. 

By the late 2000s, entire blocks of University Heights had been gobbled up by absentee landlords who leased their neglected properties back to low-income renters and students. Residents wanted to fix up their homes and address wider neighborhood problems, such as street trash and low tree coverage. But they frequently lacked access to basic tools, or the knowledge required to use them. 

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“It was a convergence of all these different problems,” Cotton said. “I realized, ‘Wow — a library is such a great platform for addressing all of them.’” 

The Tool Library launched in a tiny storefront in 2011 with roughly 40 tools and $15,000 in federal community development funding. Cotton and his all-volunteer staff developed a membership model, where residents could pay a low annual fee for unlimited tool rentals, as well as a system for tracking their growing inventory of hand tools, power tools and lawn and garden equipment.

The Tool Library processes more than 14,000 loans a year. Credit: Caitlin Dewey

In 2022, Cotton took on a full-time role and hired Lissa Rhodes, a poet and trained carpenter, as the Tool Library’s first operations manager. One year later, The Tool Library relocated to the ground floor of an old neighborhood bank on Buffalo’s Main Street, expanding its footprint from 1,500 square feet to more than 2,500. 

Today, the organization boasts nearly 1,500 members and processes more than 14,000 loans a year. Its wide east- and south-facing windows overlook a bright lending room, where tools are shelved in neat blocks of Ryobi green and DeWalt yellow: drills, jigsaws, sanders, drivers, lawnmowers and leaf blowers, hydraulic jacks, router tables. An entire wall is hung with coils of extension cords and hoses, while several shelves gather the library’s growing collection of household miscellanea: a sewing machine, a projector screen, a bocce ball set, a cotton candy maker. 

“A tool is anything you need to get a job done, whatever that job is,” said Rhodes. “Is it a presentation? Then your tools are a projector screen and a projector.” 

Repair Cafes

That community-minded, DIY ethos has gradually prodded The Tool Library into other initiatives, including tree-plantings, park clean-ups and — of course — repair cafes. In 2017, a director with Buffalo’s recycling department approached The Tool Library about collaborating on a series of repair events.

Since then, and despite a hiatus during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Repair Cafe has salvaged more than 500 items. Volunteers will happily tinker with lamps, furniture, small appliances, bikes, broken windows and damaged clothes, though they don’t currently accept computers, tablets or phones. 

The March repair cafe was held in the basement of a public library in the village of Akron. Courtesy of The Tool Library

For the March iteration, a team of volunteers set up shop in the basement of a public library in Akron, a small village 20 miles northeast of Buffalo. The room hummed with quiet chatter and the intermittent vrooms of faulty vacuums. Volunteer fixers puttered around a coffee station and traded stories in between work on lamps, clocks, Kitchenaid mixers and old CD players.

The atmosphere is both studious and social; over time, fixers often become friends. They also teach attendees the skills needed to make their own repairs: “What I love is that you not only get your fixes for free, but you get a lesson as well,” said Antoinette McClain, a Tool Library board member who helps organize the events. 

Many of those fixes are quite simple — which makes the impulse to junk these items look all the more wasteful. Both of the broken vacuums at the March cafe simply needed a good cleaning, for instance. Jennifer and Rebecca Outten, who brought the vacuums, said they would have spent $400 or more to replace each one. 

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“We love the Buy Nothing groups,” said Jennifer, referring to a movement of popular Facebook pages that encourage people to reuse household items instead of buying new. “But this, the repair cafe, I had never heard of.” 

I also left the Akron library with a newfound appreciation for repair: To fix the holes in two cashmere sweaters, volunteers Don Winkleman and Tom Guerra coached me through the process of ironing on a fabric patch.

Volunteer Tom Guerra (seated) at the March repair cafe. Courtesy of The Tool Library

Of course, I am but one of the millions of consumers needlessly tossing and replacing my stuff — and the repair movement faces a long, uphill battle against the wider culture of throwaway consumerism. In Buffalo, The Tool Library also faces the sorts of financial constraints common to many small community nonprofits. The organization will soon have the option, for instance, to acquire the building it moved into last year — but the cost to acquire and renovate the structure tops $1 million. 

The Tool Library plans to launch a capital campaign in April, Cotton said, and is currently a finalist for a major regional foundation grant. With that funding, he added, The Tool Library could build out new community space, seed mini-libraries across the region and further champion communal resource-sharing as a model for social and environmental innovation. 

“It’s one thing to be cool and novel and niche,” Cotton said. “But the question for us is: How do we make sharing and repairing ubiquitous?”

The post Got Broken Stuff? The Tool Library Has a Fix appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

On April 8, the moon will pass directly between the Earth and the sun, shrouding parts of the world in darkness, and creating a tempting void we’re told not to look at directly. It’s a relatively rare but well understood phenomenon, full of portents; the sun and the moon aligning just so—a haloed, shadowy abyss that is astonishing to behold, but harmful to observe without the right protection.

Source

Those who admonish Palestinian Resistance, armed or otherwise, have little understanding of the psychological ramifications of resistance, such as a sense of collective empowerment, honor and hope.

But resistance is not just a rifle or a rocket launcher. The latter are but one manifestation of resistance, and if not backed by strong popular support, they hardly have much impact.

Indeed, all forms of sustainable resistance have to be rooted in culture, which helps it generate new meanings over time.

In the case of the Palestinian struggle, the concept of resistance is multifaceted and strongly embedded in the collective psyche of generations of Palestinians, which allows it to surpass the ideological and political confines of factions and political groups.

Though the symbols of this resistance – for example, the keffiyeh, the flag, the map and the key – are part of this generation of meanings, they are mere signifiers of ideas, beliefs and values that are truly profound.

No matter how hard Israel has tried to discredit, ban or recounter these symbols, it has failed and will continue to fail.

In the early 2000s, for example, Israeli fashion designers created what were supposed to be Israeli kuffiyehs. From a distance, the Israeli scarves looked similar to the Palestinian traditional scarves, except that they were mostly blue. At a closer look, one would be able to decipher that the Israeli replica of the Palestinian national symbol is often a clever manipulation of the Star of David.

This could easily be classified under the banner of cultural appropriation. In actuality, it is far more complex.

Palestinians did not invent the keffiyeh, or hatta, one of the most common neck or even head scarves throughout the Middle East. But they did take ownership of it, giving it deeper meanings—dissent, revolution, unity.

The keffiyeh’s prominence was partly compelled by Israel’s own actions and restrictions.

After occupying the remainder of historic Palestine, namely East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel immediately banned the Palestinian flag. That ban was part of a much larger restrictive campaign aimed at preventing Palestinians from expressing their political aspirations, even if symbolic.

What the Israeli military administration could not prevent was the use of the keffiyeh, which was a staple in every Palestinian home. Subsequently, the keffiyeh quickly became the new symbol of Palestinian nationhood and resistance, at times even replacing the now-banned flag.

The history of the keffiyeh goes back many years before the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine by Zionist militias in 1947-48.

In fact, if one examines any revolt in Palestine’s modern history, from the 1936-39 Palestinian strike and rebellion to Palestinian resistance during the Nakba to the Fedayeen movement in the early 1950s, all the way to the present, the keffiyeh has featured prominently as arguably the most important Palestinian symbol.

Yet, the real rise of the keffiyeh as the symbol of global solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinians did not become a truly international phenomenon until the First Intifada in 1987. It was then that the world watched in awe an empowered generation only armed with rocks facing the well-equipped Israeli army.

Palestinian protesters wearing keffiyehs hurl rocks at occupying Israeli soldiers in Nablus, Jan. 16, 1988. Max Nash | AP

Two Types of Symbols

It is worth noting that when we talk about the ‘symbolism’ of Palestinian cultural symbols and counter-Israeli cultural symbols, we refer to two types of symbols: one laden with intangible, although quintessential representations—for example, the watermelon—and another with tangible and consequential representations—for example, the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque is a symbol of Palestinian spirituality, history, and nationalism, and it is also an actual physical structure located in an occupied Palestinian city, Al-Quds, East Jerusalem. For many years, Israel has perceived the Mosque with alarm, countering the Palestinian claim by alleging that, beneath Al-Aqsa, there lie the ruins of the Jewish Temple, whose resurrection is critical for Jewish spirituality and purification.

Therefore, Al-Aqsa cannot be considered a mere symbol, serving the role of a political representation. On the contrary, it has grown in terms of imports to carry a much more profound meaning in the Palestinian struggle. It would not be an exaggeration to argue that the survival of Al-Aqsa is now directly linked to the very survival of the Palestinian people as a nation.

According to renowned Swiss linguist Fernand de Saussure, every sign or symbol is composed of a ‘signifier’, meaning the form that the sign takes, and the ‘signified’, the concept that it represents.

For example, although a map is commonly defined as the geographic representation of an area or a territory merely showing physical features and certain characteristics of the place, it can take on a different ‘signified’ when the territory or land in question is an occupied one, as Palestine is. Therefore, the physical representation of Palestine’s borders became, with time, a powerful symbol, reflecting the injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people throughout history.

The same process was applied to the keys belonging to those very refugees, the victims of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The only difference is that while the villages existed and then ceased to exist, the key existed as a physical object before and after the Nakba. The house and the door are, perhaps, gone, but there is a physical key that still, symbolically, unlocks the dichotomy of the past, with the hope of, one day, restoring the door and the house as well.

In view of this, the segment of land stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea ceased to be just sand, water, grass, and stones and became a representation of something else entirely.

It must be denoted that the slogan ‘From the River to the Sea’ neither references actual topography nor politics. It is based on the understanding that a disruptive historical event has wrought a great deal of injustice, pain and hurt to historic Palestine. Confronting this injustice cannot be segmented, and it must take place through a wholesome process that would allow the land but, more importantly, the native inhabitants of that land to restore their dignity, rights and freedom.

Watermelons and Red Triangles

Some symbols, although employed even before the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, became far more popular after October 7. The watermelon, for example, has been used repeatedly throughout Palestine’s modern history, specifically when Israel banned the ownership or display of the Palestinian flag. The fruit itself, aside from being a symbol of the richness of the land of Palestine, also features the same colors as the flag: black, red, white, and green.

Another related symbol is the red triangle. A small red triangle began appearing as a functional tool in videos produced by the Al-Qassam Brigades, merely to point at a specific Israeli military target before it was struck by a Yassin 105 an RPJ shell or any other.

With time, however, the red triangle began acquiring a new meaning, regardless of whether it was intended by the designers of the Qassam videos.

Some connected the red triangle as a symbol to the Palestinian flag, particularly to the red triangle on the left, situated over the white color, between black and green. In truth, the origins of the small red triangle do not matter. Like other Palestinian symbols, it, too, has the generative power to accumulate new meanings over time.

Culture and Counter-culture

Like the ‘Israeli keffiyeh,’ Israel has tried to counter Palestinian culture. They did so mostly by devising laws to prohibit Palestinians from communicating or embracing their cultural symbols.

Another tactic that Israel used was claiming Palestinian symbols as if their own. This is quite common in clothes, food and music. When Israel hosted the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant in 2021, contestants were taken to the Arab Bedouin city of Rahat. Being obviously unaware that Bedouin culture, with its embroidered clothes, food, music and numerous cultural manifestations, is a uniquely Palestinian Arab culture, beauty pageants took to social media to express their excitement about being part of “a day in the life of a Bedouin,” with the hashtag #visit_israel.

Such episodes may highlight the degree of deception on the part of Israel but also expose, to a large extent, Israel’s feeling of cultural inferiority. A quick examination of Israeli symbols, whether it is the flag with the star of David, the Lion of Judah or national war songs, such as Harbu Darbu, seem to be largely extracted from biblical references and religious heroics that have existed even prior to the existence of Israel itself.

And, while Palestinian symbols reflect the desire of Palestinians to return to the land of their ancestors and to reclaim the rights and justice that they have been long denied, Israeli symbols seem to lay claims – ancient, religious, unverifiable merely. If this reflects anything, it tells us that, despite nearly a century of Zionist colonialism and 75 years of official existence as a state, Israel has failed to connect to the land of Palestine, to the cultures of the Middle East, let alone carve for itself a place in the yet to be written history of the region, a history that will surely be written by the native inhabitants of that land, the Palestinian people.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress

Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out’. His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

The post On Keffiyeh and Watermelon – Revealing the Meaning of Palestinian Symbols appeared first on MintPress News.

Published in Nikkei Asia on 15/3/2024

I’m sitting in the front row, almost close enough to touch Jimmy Page’s sky blue jacket. Page, leader of the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin, is in the midst of a lengthy number called “Dazed and Confused,” which requires him to run a violin bow across the strings of his electric guitar, thereby producing a series of mournful and disturbing sounds.

At least, the figure on stage looks, sounds and moves like Jimmy Page, but of course Led Zeppelin disbanded in 1980. The charismatic riff-meister is now 80 years old and living a quiet life in a haunted house in London with his girlfriend, a flame-haired 34-year-old poet he met a decade ago.

The rail-thin man with the ringlets hanging over his face in the Tokyo live music venue is Akio Sakurai, also known as Jimmy Sakurai or just “Mr. Jimmy.”  A former kimono salesman from snowy Niigata Prefecture, he has dedicated more than 30 years of his life to reproducing with astonishing authenticity what he calls “the sound magic of Jimmy Page.” Thus tonight, he is wearing the same  kind of satin bell-bottoms that Page wore in 1968 and 1969, using the same guitars and picks and, naturally, striking the same rock god poses.

This particular performance is modelled on the band’s early and, some would say most creative, period. Typical of Sakurai’s scholarly approach is the opening song, “Train Kept A-rollin’,” a staple of Page’s previous band, The Yardbirds, who can be seen playing it in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film “Blowup.”

More to the point, it was the first number that Led Zeppelin played when the four musicians came together for their very first rehearsal. Like several other songs Sakurai performed for us, the band never recorded it. His faithful renditions are the result of close study of super-rare bootlegs.

Tribute bands abound in Japan, with credible imitators doing Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones and many more. One of the most celebrated is The Parrots who have been performing the music of The Beatles from their home ground at the Abbey Road club in Roppongi for decades. They have played in front of such notables as former U.S. ambassador Caroline Kennedy, President Marcos of the Philippines and Paul McCartney himself.

Their leader, the late lamented Mamoru “Chappy” Yoshii who died in 2017, was a professional John Lennon for thirty eight years, just two years less than John Lennon was John Lennon.  He fulfilled his role with remarkable verisimilitude, including traces of a Liverpool accent despite having little proficiency in English. Now a new and much younger adept has taken over.

Even amongst such experienced and skilled performers, Sakurai stands out for the intensity of his approach. Every detail must be right, from the creases in a shirt similar to one Page wore at a particular concert, to the vintage amplifiers he uses. Just as the great director Akira Kurosawa would place antique objects in cupboards on his sets, even though they could not be seen, so Sakurai uses authentic equipment to transport himself into a different reality.

Jimmy S in contemplative mood

On his You Tube channel, he describes his lifework in terms of Japan’s three-step process of learning called Shu-Ha-Ri, best known overseas for its application to aikido and other martial arts. In fact, many traditional Japanese practices use the concept which has its roots in Zen Buddhism and goes back to Zeami, the 14th century master of Noh theatre.

“Shu” means protect: you protect the teaching by learning it by heart. “Ha” means break: you break through to a deeper understanding of the underlying philosophy.  “Ri” means separation: you transcend the form and everything becomes spontaneous and effortless.

To translate it into Sakurai’s context, “Shu”: you copy Jimmy Page’s guitar work over and over again. “Ha”: you come to understand the deep foundations of Jimmy Page’s sound. “Ri”: you actually become Jimmy Page.

Sakurai gained a huge boost in 2012 when the real Jimmy Page visited Tokyo and dropped into the club where his number one fan was performing. From the footage of the event, it is clear that he loved the show, congratulating Sakurai on the “incredible work” he had put in. Inspired by the experience and encouraged by his wife, Sakurai decided to move to California.

Jimmy Page & Jimmy Sakurai meet in 2012

His story has been told in “Mr. Jimmy”, a recent indie documentary directed by Peter Michael Dowd, himself a dyed-in-the-wool Led Zeppelin fan who sweated blood to get the film made. It is fair to say that Sakurai’s American adventure has had its ups and downs, from a gig in a pizza joint to a manager who compared him to an act at Disneyland.

He joined Led Zepagain, an American tribute band, only to find that that their fans like getting drunk and hollering and only want to hear the famous numbers. Refusing to be a mere “jukebox”, Sakurai’s response is withering: “to play this music in a lazy, lackluster way would be inexcusable.”

Finally, however, he gets as close as you can to the real thing, joining Led Zeppelin Revival – a band helmed by Jason Bonham, the son of Led Zeppelin’s long-deceased original drummer. At the end of last year, they played a sold-out gig in a Roppongi theatre.

In other hands, the film could have ended up as a campy “weird Japan” affair. Instead, it is not really about Led Zeppelin at all or even music. What matters is the purity of Sakurai’s quest and his refusal to compromise.

Sakurai wields a double-necked guitar, as made famous by Page

Jimmy Page is his “ikigai”, his reason for living. Everyone should have an “ikigai”. It makes you a stronger, fuller person. You do not have to be an artist. You could be a schoolteacher, a monk, a sushi chef or a mountaineer. You do not need to be Japanese either — although one of the talking heads in the film describes Sakurai’s level of lifelong commitment as “typically Japanese,” and there is definitely something to that.

Some years ago, film critic and Japanologist Donald Richie drew a wry parallel between Japan’s Beatles tribute bands and gagaku, 8th century Chinese court music which persists in Japan a millennium after disappearing from China. Likewise, Richie predicted, in the far future Japan will have “something called The Beatles. It’ll be four people with guitars, and nobody will know exactly what it is, but it will be the only place in the world that will have it.”

Led Zeppelin in Japan, 1971

What was a throwaway witticism becomes more salient as the rock era, which lasted some 60 years, visibly comes to an end. One by one, the practitioners are leaving for the great gig in the sky, and the possible variations on what is a highly limited format are largely exhausted. After another 60 years, the music will probably sound as remote as the popular songs of 1900 seemed to the rock generation.

Yet, as Richie intimated, if anyone wants a taste of what it was like, Japan will surely be the place to go. In all probability, Japan’s Beatles bands will still be there, playing live on a regular basis. And who knows — perhaps a third generation Mr. Jimmy, wearing the correct jacket and trousers, will be blasting out “Heartbreaker,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Black Dog.”