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The Iranian indie band talk about life as outlaws in their homeland, as documented in their new film No One Knows About Persian Cats

At first glance, Take It Easy Hospital look like any other aspiring indie duo. Dressed in impeccable Shoreditch chic – plaid shirt and skinny jeans for him, cute vintage dress, black tights and brogues for her – their teenage epiphanies came on copied cassettes of Nirvana and Pink Floyd, while these days they're more into Sigur Rós and Foals.

Their ambition for next year, once they find a drummer, is to get on to the bill at Glastonbury or Reading. The difference is that Take It Easy Hospital originally formed in Iran, where rock music is banned. When the local music industry is non-existent, gigs and recording studios are regularly raided by police and even MySpace is monitored, simply finding someone who shares your love of guitars and plaintive vocals is fraught with difficulties.

Ash Koshanejad and Negar Shaghaghi, the twin songwriters of Take It Easy Hospital, are the stars of a new Iranian film by garlanded Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi, called No One Knows About Persian Cats (so named because pet cats, like rock musicians, are outlawed in Iran). The film is a fictionalised account of the duo's attempts to recruit a rhythm section in order to play a local underground gig and ultimately escape to the rock-friendly west. As the two indie innocents are taken under the wing of music-loving wide-boy Nader (Hamed Behdad), the film becomes a Linklater-esque romp through Tehran's clandestine rock underground. All the bands and musicians featured are real, but whether hairy blues rockers, jazz singers, class-war rappers or indie kids, they exhibit a love for making music that overrides the fear of being arrested the moment they switch on their amps. "If you were discovered playing rock music, you'd get arrested, you'd have to pay a fine," reveals Ash, matter-of-factly. "Sometimes you'd go to prison."

The film gleans affectionate humour from the various bands' ingenuity when it comes to hiding their rehearsal spaces from the authorities in diligently-soundproofed underground caverns, shacks constructed on the roofs of tower blocks or, in one case, in a working cattle barn (much to the cows' displeasure).

By coincidence, there is a British film out this month which also documents the struggle of a couple of indie dreamers to form a band – except 1234 is based in London, so the only obstacles are their own musical inadequacy and weedy sexual tension between bandmates. Persian Cats makes 1234 look rather pathetic.

In Iran musicians are forced to behave like fugitives, even though the charges invoked against them are vague (Ahmadinejad imposed a ban on "western and decadent music" soon after becoming president in 2005). "It's a not a written law," complains Negar. "There isn't this red line. You never know when you're crossing it. [The authorities] don't even really know what they're opposing. They don't see that music brings energy and good nature to society."

In 2007, Ash's former band Font staged an open-air gig in a private garden in a suburb of Tehran. Armed police arrived en masse to shut it down, arresting everyone in the audience, and slinging the band in prison for 21 days. "They didn't have any law that said what they should do with us, so they called us satanists. They said we were against the moral law and disgracing the face of society." Ash chuckles wryly at the memory. "It was an odd experience, sleeping next to a serial killer for three weeks. But it made me believe even more in what I was doing."

Font and Take It Easy Hospital are rarities: most Iranian wannabe rockers never even get further then their bedrooms, due to the subtle pressure exerted within families. "Under this regime, you don't have any opportunity to make a living from being a musician, so families prevent their children from learning music in the first place," Ash explains. "Families are a small example of big government. They don't trust the young generation."

When Ash and Negar were kids, the only opportunity they had to hear western rock music was when somebody from their community travelled abroad and brought back CDs. "They'd be copied on to a tape over and over again," says Negar. "We used to write the track names in class when the teacher wasn't looking and take it home with such excitement to listen to it." Even so, whatever they got depended on the tastes of the traveller; often hoping for something similar to Nirvana, they'd end up having to make do with ABBA.

The advent of the internet changed everything for Iranian teenagers, who were suddenly able to participate in global youth culture, employing their technological nous to stay one step ahead of government censors. The fact that the bands in No One Knows About Persian Cats wear Strokes T-shirts and pass around copies of the NME shouldn't seem that strange. But what is the attraction to Ash and Negar of the kind of fey indie music that even within its countries of origin is often considered a bit insular?

"Well, we are indie!" declares Ash. "We had to do it ourselves in bedrooms because if you step out into the streets, you cannot even tell anyone you've just written a song. We would make our own imaginariums in our rooms."

If they'd grown up in England, Take It Easy Hospital's wan, organ-driven indie-pop, topped with earnest observations about the "human jungle", might stand accused of being a little bit twee. But once you learn how hard Ash and Negar have had to fight just to get their songs heard, they take on a whole new complexion. And despite their ugly experiences in Iran, they are determined not to make rebel rock. "Me, I don't care about politics," says Negar. "The value of art is a lot more than politics. Politics is something that passes, but art stays for years."

Ash picks up the thread: "Politics is a tool to solve a situation at one moment. We believe that art is pure and always depending on human nature, so we've always kept ourselves far from politics. Our music is not dangerous, but the current regime in Iran feels that it has to keep people away from honest expression because if they face up to the reality they will soon find out what they are missing."

Ash and Negar agreed to star in Persian Cats not to make a political point, but to try to show the older generation, including their parents, that music is a force for good. But while Ash has received some positive feedback from older Iranians – "I've heard that they walk away after seeing this film to remember what they had before the revolution" – Negar is despondent that most of them haven't been able to overcome their prejudices. "I guess that when people decide to close their eyes to something, you can't force them to see the truth."

In the light of last year's post-election protests, the police crackdown on young people involved in music and the arts has intensified. When Take It Easy Hospital's old drummer went back to Iran several weeks after the election, he was arrested and beaten. Last January, the film's co-writer, Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, was arrested in Tehran and handed an eight-year jail sentence on trumped up charges of being a US spy (she was eventually freed following a global outcry).

Reluctantly, Ash and Negar decided it was unsafe to return to Iran and have successfully applied for asylum in the UK, where they've been living since coming over to play at Manchester's In The City festival in 2008. In the film, the duo never make it to London, so in this case, truth is happier than fiction. However, Negar is at pains to point out that they never viewed England as the promised land, despite our rather more relaxed laws regarding the public airing of Farfisa-driven jangle pop.

"Some people say we've run away," says Negar. "But there is no running away. Moving from one country to another doesn't necessarily solve all the problems that are on your mind." Proof that indie introspection truly is an international language.

No One Knows About Persian Cats is out Fri; it previews at Brixton Ritzy, SW2, Tue

• World cinema

Musicians, DJs and authors to reveal their favourite hangouts

Have your say on the Travel blog

HiFi is the best rock'n'roll bar in NYC.The room is covered with empty album sleeves and the juke box is hands-down the best in the city – I believe there are about 3,000 albums on it, so you can't complain about them not having your song. There is a fantastically affordable happy hour and a great local crowd. Like the rest of the East Village, it can get a bit much on weekend nights, but most of the time it's my favourite bar in town.
· 169 Avenue A, +1 212 420 8392.
Craig Finn, lead singer of the Hold Steady

The entrance to the Pegu is an unassuming doorway on the south side of West Houston Street. It's only when you are up the stairs that the glory of this place hits you. It is like going back to the great clubs of the 20s, when the staff were pretty and jazz and cocktails ruled. On a recent visit, two amazing Django Reinhardt-style guitarists were swinging through 30s classics. Cocktails are taken seriously here – the art of proper, classy drinking is almost a motto. At the weekend it can get pretty busy as it is becoming the "in" place.
· 77 West Houston Street, +1 212 473 7348.
James Pearson, artistic director, Ronnie Scott's, London

It was a balmy night in September when I visited Po' Monkey's juke joint. It's a ramshackle hut powered by a single cable in the tiny town of Merigold, deep in the Mississippi delta. A poster on the door warned: "Bring your liquor inside but not your beer." The walls were cluttered with posters and age-old postcards, while toy monkeys swung from the rafters. It was low lit – smoky but inviting, with beer and whiskey flowing freely. Terry "Harmonica" Bean took to the tiny stage, elbow to elbow with the crowd, and delivered a mind-blowing, foot-stamping performance that will stay with me forever. Delicately soulful cries came from his ageing gruff voice, while stupendous bluegrass melodies oozed effortlessly from his antique steel guitar. This was raw blues at its authentic and spine-shivering best.
· +1 662 514 7488, 15km from Cleveland.
Dan Hipgrave, co-founder of Original Music Company (originalmusictravel.com), which launched this month and specialises in music-themed holidays

The Spirit Store in Dundalk, County Louth, is on the edge of town beside a small harbour. There's a small, friendly bar downstairs which opens around 4pm, but it is the live music upstairs that is the main draw. You would be hard-pressed to find anywhere as welcoming to an artist and more genuinely music-driven in its programming of events. That's why I keep going back there to play, and why many other artists who have outgrown the 120- or so capacity venue keep returning. So many venues and promoters are about the money but Derek Turner, who books the music, is driven by something much more.
· +353 42 9352697.
Duke Special, musician. His DVD box set, The Stage, A Book & the Silver Screen is out now

Not exactly a venue, not exactly a bar, entrance to Trishas/The Hideout/that door on Greek St (as it is variously known), is obtained by boldly knocking on what appears to be the entrance to a flat above a shop, striding through a starkly lit corridor and down a flight of stairs, before mumbling an explanation to the owner as to why you don't appear to be in possession of a membership card – having accidentally put it through the washing machine normally does the trick. Inside, you'll find a cupboard-sized, candle-lit cavern which can be hired out for private music showcases. But stumble in unannounced after hours on a weekend and you might also find a doo wop or jazz band sandwiched into the corner between the usual crowd of transvestites, metropolitan hipsters and veteran Italian locals.
57 Greek Street, Soho, London.
Krissi Murison, editor, NME

I first played at this blink-and-you'll-miss-it shed in the tiny village of Brawby back in 1998. It only held 64 people and we scraped our legs on the front row's knees. It has since moved to Hovingham village hall, though it retains its name. The man behind The Shed, Simon Thackray, has presented events from the Fish and Chip Van Tour with a trombonist, to mixed media knitting installations – saxophonist Lol Coxhill playing free jazz in a skip to coach trips for folks in knitted Elvis wigs touring sites of Elvisian interest in Ryedale. My own band, Hank Wangford and the Lost Cowboys, started a tradition of Christmas gigs at The Shed, where we play morose songs and have a riotously miserable time. The Shed was the inspiration for my village hall tour around Britain, which I am currently writing up as a book. And, after 235 villages, The Shed is still the loony best.
· 01653 668494.
Hank Wangford, writer and musician. His CD, Whistling in the Dark, is out now

For me, the greatest gig of 2009 was at A38, a huge old ship that used to lug coal up and down the Danube. The lower deck is now a state-of-the-art live music venue, but bits of engine room equipment are still there. Even though the boat is held down in dry dock by 100 tonnes of concrete, the bottles still jingle on the shelves of the bar when the parties get wild. The booking policy is great – they've had cutting-edge electronic artists such as Ikonika, Dorian Concept and Foreign Beggars play recently. And nothing compares with the signature dish of the restaurant on the upper deck: rooster stew, complete with the crest and testicles of the bird.
· +36 1 464 39 40.
Mary Anne Hobbs, Radio 1 DJ. Her show is broadcast on Thursdays 2-4am

Wild At Heart is a whisky-soaked, no-nonsense rock'n'roll joint in Berlin's old anarchist district, Kreuzberg: a seven-nights-a-week venue painted blood red, crammed with Elvis memorabilia, Hawaiian gods and a lifetime's supply of hard liquor. For 15 years it has presented bands from all over the world – mostly punk, rockabilly, psychobilly, 60s garage and surf. I spent a memorable evening there talking to TV Smith from the Adverts and another with Wreckless Eric, both of whom started out with punk label Stiff Records in 1977, and I've played there with my band, the Flaming Stars. The music's loud, but the welcome is friendly, and the club also runs the Tiki Heart cafe and clothes shop next door, where you can eat, drink and kit yourself out in a spectacular variety of rock'n'roll clobber.
· Wienerstrasse 20, +49 30 610 747 01.
Max Décharné, singer in the Flaming Stars and author of A Rocket in My Pocket: The Hipster's Guide to Rockabilly, to be published by Serpent's Tail in June

Mesa de Frades in Alfama, the oldest district of Lisbon, is the sort of place you dream of hearing fado, the traditional soulful Portuguese music. A tiny converted chapel with tiled walls, it is full of locals and quality performers booked by owner Pedro Castro, a great guitar player. You can come for the music, which starts late – around 11pm – or book a table and come for an excellent dinner beforehand. A couple of years ago I sat here watching Carminho, the amazing young fado singer who is now the talk of Lisbon. When the music starts, the doors are shut to enclose the tiny performing space. It's what fado in Lisbon should be, but so rarely is.
· Rua dos Remedios 139A, +351 91 702 9436, mesadefrades.com. Booking is essential.
Simon Broughton, editor of Songlines magazine (songlines.co.uk/musictravel)

In the heart of Turin, off Piazza Statuto, you'll find the best of all worlds: from Wednesday to Saturday Il Folk Club plays host to Italian and international jazz, folk and world musicians. How this Italian institution – legendary in Turin for over 20 years – has remained generally unknown to travellers and music junkies outside Italy is a mystery. Alongside its regular programme, Il Folk Club is also the launching point for Radio Londra, a monthly mini-festival which fuses British musicians such as Jim Mullen, Kit Downes, Brandon Allen and Quentin Collins Quartet, with local stars such as Mario Pozza, Enzo Zirilli and Dado Moroni. The bar is simple – one central room with space for about 150 people, exposed brick walls, and a stage – so the focus is always on the incredible music.
Via Ettore Perrone 3, Turin.
Sam Sollai, buyer and events coordinator, Ray's Jazz at Foyles

This little neighbourhood bar used to have a green door with panes that rattled when you opened it, but it has now been replaced with something more solid, partly to keep the sound in. It's run by Mar and Nacho, both dyed-in-the-wool culés (Barcelona supporters), and nights there are long and loud. You can hear Sam Lardner, an American resident who plays his own fusion of flamenco and bossa nova, or wonderful classical and flamenco guitarists like Daniel Figueras and Pedro Javier Hermosilla, or the Covers Project, with frontman Philip Stanton. The eating and drinking are delicious too – Galician-style octopus, traditional meatballs, pimientos de padron (small green peppers), and wine for not much more than a euro a glass. A great night out in the Alta Zona.
· C/ Ivorra 24, Sarria, Barcelona, +93 203 4988.
Rupert Thomson, author living in Barcelona. His latest book, This Party's Got to Stop, will be published on 8 April

Salta, in north-west Argentina, is well-known for its folk music heritage. This has given rise to the creation of pena, which roughly translates as a place where musicians and music lovers come together. Seven nights a week you can experience this at La Casona. The venue's five colonial rooms are filled to the brim with musicians, professional and amateur, folk, jazz and others, locals who come down from the Andes bearing pan pipes and drums, and some foreign visitors, all coming together to jam the local tunes. As a musician, I found great comfort in the fact that this kind of place exists in the world. And of course, many people come simply for the music.
· La Casona del Molino, Caseros.
Lizzie Ball, violinist and singer. She will be performing – and launching her album – with Machaca at La Linea Festival in the Purcell Room on London's South Bank on 27 April

The first time I asked a taxi driver to take me to Havana's Salón Rosado de la Tropical back in 1989 he said it was a place for Cubans, not foreign tourists – and certainly not lone women – and I'd better watch out as it could be rough. He'd obviously never been inside this mecca of Cuban dance music, where all the top bands play regularly, testing their latest material in front of the sexiest dancers on the island. In Cuba, most music venues are geared to tourists and too expensive for ordinary Cubans, who are often not allowed in anyway. Not so the Salón Rosado. This is the closest you can get to hanging out with a Cuban clientele. Dedicated to the memory of Beny Moré, Cuba's touchstone band leader of the 1950s, it started out life a Spanish cultural centre at the beginning of the 20th century. These days there's a balcony reserved for tourists overlooking the dance floor where, if you're lucky, you may rub shoulders with the musicians as they gather for the gig. Although today reggaeton and hip-hop dominate street tastes, Salon Rosado continues to offer a window on to the latest music scene and is a dancer's dream.
· Avenida 41 esq. 46, Nicanor del Campo, Marianao, +53 7 203 5322.
Jan Fairley has been travelling to Cuba since 1978 and is writing a book on women and music in Cuba

Leading Japanese venue Liquid Room has been going for about 15 years and hosts weekly bands and DJs from Japan and around the world. The website may say it closes at 12, but the last time I played there, as The Orb, they didn't let us out till 6am. There's a beautiful cafe upstairs and the friendly enthusiasm of Tokyo clubbers has to be experienced to be believed. The last time I played there I took a bag of Space Dust (the sweet!) which made me very popular.
· Higashi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, +81 3 5464 0800, liquidroom.net.
Alex Paterson, co-founder of The Orb and HFB, his new project. HFB's first three EPs are available from 12 April on Malicious Damage Records

Lagos is not your classic tourist destination; it's a prohibitively expensive city of 14 million people and a crime record to frighten even the toughest traveller. But Nigeria's notorious capital does have one musical landmark worth going the extra mile for: the New Africa Shrine. It's named after the legendary club run by the late musical activist Fela Kuti, which was razed by soldiers. Fela's daughter Yeni and her musician brother Femi have built up a nightclub that can hold thousands and has live music throughout the week. It's not for the faint-hearted, but the Shrine is probably the safest place in Lagos: it has its own police force. You'll get a warm welcome, and hear some of the best live music in the region.
· Pepple Street, Ikeja.
Rose Skelton, music and travel journalist specialising in West Africa

• Bars and clubs
• United States
• New York
• Ireland
• World music
• Budapest
• Hungary
• Berlin
• Germany
• Lisbon
• Portugal
• Yorkshire
• Argentina
• Havana
• Cuba

A new torrent has been uploaded to U2Torrents.com.

Torrent: 5759
Title: 2001-10-10 * Joyce Center * University of Notre Dame * South Bend, IN * JEMS archive masters DVD
Size: 7.66 GB
Category: Elevation
Uploaded by: JEMSHQ

Description
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
U2
Joyce Center
University of Notre Dame
South Bend, IN
October 10, 2001
JEMS masters

Video Source: live satellite feed > satellite receiver > forgotten professional format video tape (likely Betacam) > Digital 8 tapes
Audio Source: live satellite feed > satellite receiver > Casio DAR-100 DAT

Master Digital 8 tapes and DAT tape > Vegas edit, sync and author > Dual Layer DVD-R > VIDEO_TS

Data Size: 7.66 GB

Video Info:
Authored with menu
NTSC
MPEG-2
720 × 480 (4:3)
29.97 fps
8.00 Mbps

Audio Info:
PCM stereo, 48 kHz, 1.54 Mbps

01 Beautiful Day
02 Until the End of the World > Two Tribes
03 New Year's Day
04 When Will I See You Again
05 Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of
06 What's Going On
07 New York
08 Pride (In the Name of Love)
09 Sunday Bloody Sunday
10 Kite
11 Angel of Harlem
12 Staring at the Sun
13 Bad > Molly Malone
14 Psalm 116 > Where the Streets Have No Name
15 I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
16 With Or Without You > Shine Like Stars
17 Elevation > Creep
18 Mysterious Ways > Sexual Healing
19 One
20 Peace on Earth (tiny glitch on both audio and video masters)
21 Walk On

So…some of you know that JEMS recorded the 2001 Notre Dame webcast direct from the satellite feed. I posted that audio a couple years ago and the response seemed to be positive in that it was considered the best version yet to circulate (oddly, a webcast-sourced version was posted to U2T a few months ago that some preferred even as the capture, by its very nature, should be inferior. Not throwing stones, I just don't understand how a direct capture from a satellite receiver could be inferior to a webcast downstream of the same source given the state of broadband in 2001).

While we were not able to capture live video ourselves, live video was recorded from the satellite though not of the multi-camera feed. From what I was told, this was because the feeds were coming through in PAL as that was the video system U2 employed on the road, but the so-called Bono-cam was NTSC and that feed was recorded. Now I honestly don't recall to what tape format the Booncam was captured (it was most likely Betacam), but well after the fact, JEMS was able to borrow and dub those pro tapes to what was the best format we could put our hands onto on short notice, Digital 8.

This DVD is the first time those Digital 8 tapes (three of them) have been transferred and circulated. Our good friend KS did the authoring and the syncing to the DAT audio source. He has done great work in the past and this one is no exception. He felt the quality was strong enough to author as a dual-layer DVD which will annoy some of you but at this point dual-layer burners are pretty common. This will be the only version.

Now, the real question is, is this better than what's circulating? I know at least one other satellite capture was made of the Bono-cam and it has always been my presumption that it was the source for all the copies in circulation. I have compared ours to the screen grabs at Achtung Bootlegs and it does appear to be an upgrade. The colors aren't as washed out (look at the green of Bono's guitar). The picture edges are more defined (read the word "Security" on the jackets near b-stage), and the audio should be an improvement. I have attached screen grabs of the menus and a few other frames to help guide you.

Sorry about the upload speed. This is going to take awhile and it will probably be turned off a few times over the weekend.

Butterking for JEMS

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can use the URL below to download the torrent (you may have to login).

http://u2torrents.com/torrents-details.php?id=5759&hit=1

Take care!

Live U2
_________________________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer: Please do not reply to this email account it is NOT monitored.
Please visit the U2torrents.com Help section at http://www.u2torrents.com/help/ for helpful information or to Ask a Question.

The will to learn brings confidence, and the ability to view society through truthful eyes

The socialist paradise in which I'm now sitting is a place where people from all walks of life, young and old, firm and somewhat less firm, have – through a combination of apprenticeship and self-examination – come to learn together about the world, without having to pay for the privilege.

It's a public library, of course: a place which you visit voluntarily in order to learn more things than you were taught at school. I call it "the place where dreams can come true". It's where the project of learning continues, at your own pace and of your own volition, and where you are understood to be an equal participant in the making and changing of your mind. No possibility is closed off to you.

Good fortune favours the well-primed, and the habit of seeing yourself as someone who doesn't do that sort of thing, or have that kind of luck, can be hard to get out of. But oh, to be a child in Newham now! The east London borough has just announced a policy of giving every pupil in its primary schools free music lessons for a minimum of two years, and the loan of an instrument of their choice. You can almost hear its mayor, Sir Robin Wales, rubbing his hands together at the thought of spending £1.25m a year making Every Child a Musician, as the scheme is known.

Knowing that my nan, who left school at 11, could play a bit of piano, whereas I barely know one end of the instrument from the other, proves that no skill is transmitted by osmosis. It has to be passed on deliberately, which is why progress can never be taken for granted, and why the invidious nature of cultural dispossession must be kept in mind.

It's hard to convey the sheer desultoriness of our music teaching at my secondary school. For a start, we were given one half-hour lesson a week, of which 25 minutes were spent trying to wind up the plainly contemptuous teacher. When she couldn't be bothered, she looked out of the window and let us get on with pressing the demo button on our Casio keyboards: playing at playing and learning nothing in the process because the person we needed to guide us didn't think it was worth her while.

This is shown more powerfully in 36 Children, Herbert Kohl's account of teaching in a Harlem elementary school in the late 1960s. He shows the children that they have brains when every other teacher has told them they're brainless. He invites them round to his apartment and puts on jazz music while they rifle through his books and artefacts. They quickly become fascinated by Greek myths and work together to produce a literary magazine full of allegory, truth and creativity.

Middle-class children are subjected to "accelerated learning" virtually from birth. The nascent person of power is treated as a sponge who can take it all in, because they're assumed to have the potential for discrimination and specialism later in life. Start with piano, violin, trumpet, ballet and chess club and you can always drop one when, as expected, you start to show exceptional talent in one or more of them. This enrichment of the domestic environment – turning home life into an extension of schooling – is taken as a given by teachers at largely middle-class schools, which stretch their children to the extent that excelling becomes the norm.

Note that accelerated learning programmes – or "wraparound schools" which start early and finish late, the better to fit more of these "middle-class" activities into the daily life of working-class children – are intended to do the opposite: to make school an extension of the home. However, the value of making educational activities something you do outside of school, as well as inside, is surely that you stop associating learning exclusively with schooling.

Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman, writes convincingly of the role that learning to read and play music has in building confidence. Mastery is a transferable skill – once you've mastered, or at least gained a working knowledge of, one thing, there's nothing stopping you from trying another. When my husband takes his Grade 8 exam in classical guitar next month he'll be 35, but that won't stop him picking up another instrument to learn straight afterwards (I know what he's like). Playing music gives him another kind of voice, and affords him a sort of enviable mental polyphony.

You can keep people down with this kind of power: the power to deprive, to impoverish, to make ignorant. But you can't keep them down for ever. At some point it will warp and blast out some other way, in bitterness, in fighting, in baying for blood, the consequences of having just enough knowledge to know you're ignorant. Learning is what enables us to look at ourselves and our society through more detached, more truthful, eyes. Who would deny anyone that?

• Arts in schools
• Teaching
• Schools
• Social exclusion
• Communities
• Equality
• Libraries

Red, yellow, pink, black with a hint of blue. Red, yellow, pink. Black with a hint of blue. It was a dress, slightly shimmery. The girl wearing it talked to me about a magic guitar.

Montreal, October 2008. The POP Montréal festival throughout the city and its venues. Every night packed with concerts, drinking, and running from venue to venue, city map in hand. On the marquee tonight: The Persuasions, a mythical American acapella group from the 60s. The Ukrainian Federation packed, Richie du Fire losing control in the middle of the crowd, the group who got off the stage and passed around the mics, low rhythmic voices and high melodic voices, the concert which finished with an amazing song by one of the organisers of the festival. One of the most amazing concerts of our lives and the apotheosis of POP Montreal that year.

But. Victor had insisted that we not miss the concert at 11:30 at Casa Del Popolo. It was the Luyas, his favourite new band, a band buzzed about by most of the people I met. Casa was only a few blocks away, but it was already too late. From the middle of the crowd, Victor signalled ‘It's Jessie!'. The girl had a red, yellow, and pink dress on. And she talked to me about a magic guitar. And she talked tirelessly.

Reykjavik, November 2008. Jessie had told me she'd be in town for the Airwaves festival. Not with the Luyas, but with Miracle Fortress, her buddy Graham's band. I found myself in Iceland on the trail of a docu-fiction project, Sun (Set & Rise) which, bit by bit, was breaking us down with each subsequent day. We spent a lot of our time drinking, catching shows, drinking even more, making the most of our nights to forget the drudgery of our days. At a Yelle concert on our last night, during a stage diving session, in a room packed with young Icelanders shouting the lyrics at the top of their voices, a surreal moment: I broke my back, lost all my stuff, thanks to Jessie, who crushed me into the ground before disappearing into the cold without even singing me a single note.

Perpignan, August 2009. The magic guitar Jessie had talked about was in fact the work of Yuri Landmann, guitar-maker extraordinaire, the only person that my friend Gaspar and I had decided to invite to Pedro Soler's festival Guitares au Palais. Through his instruments, we'd encountered the Malian Sidi Touré, the Dutch group The Moi Non Plus, who are the force behind Subbacultcha in Amsterdam, the vagabond Noel Akchoté, who improvises with astonishing ease. And Jessie Stein, who – discreetly this time – brought the sensation of a faraway night through her accent and her soft voice. I only saw her briefly; my head, too, was somewhere far away.

Montreal, October 2009. It had been one year since I'd discovered the Luyas and Jessie Stein. One year of replaying the melodies in my head, dreaming about this girl and her distinctive voice. One night, as we biked together, I told her, “Every time I hear you sing I get the impression that I am across the ocean, even if I am close to you.” It is this sense of nostalgia for an unknown country evoked through her music which makes me crazy for her.

POP Montreal invited me to organise another screening, but this year I was also invited to film a series of selected local acts for Arte Live Web. This series was to include the Luyas, of course, whom I had long wanted to film. We had hoped that I would be able to join them in the previous winter's snow, but fall proved to be more welcoming.

Réal : Vincent Moon

Tourné à Montreal

Réal : Vincent Moon

Tourné à Montreal

The Luyas is Jessie, Stefan (the percussionist/drummer from Bell Orchestre), Pietro (formerly of Arcade Fire, as well as Bell Orchestre and Torngat), and Mathieu, the group's newest member. Jessie proposed that we film on the sidewalks of the Jacques-Cartier bridge and on the island in the middle of the St. Lawrence. Crossing Montreal by bike felt easy, light and airy. I had thought that Jessie would be more stressed for this little film, considering how many times it had been delayed, but to the contrary she brought a constant humour and a capacity for off-the-cuff improvisation. A joy to follow from in front of and behind a camera.

Réal : Vincent Moon

Tourné à Montreal

Réal : Vincent Moon

Tourné à Montreal

Film to meet, record to remember. That afternoon remains the apotheosis of numerous voyages, the perpetual quest for sound, of many different experiences. To see these images again brings back an entire week of musical encounters, like the confluence of emotions in a single final explosion.

Réal : Vincent Moon

Tourné à Montreal

Réal : Vincent Moon

Tourné à Montreal

The last song of this film, shot in and around a playground, is probably the sequence which most represents these final months of my travels – entirely improvised, from the beginning to the end, a moment of pure musical magic the likes of which I had never filmed before. And the last phrase, hilarious and which will stick with me for a while: "It looks like dirt, but it's death."

New York, February 2010. The night deepens, Jessie has had too much to drink and she talks nonstop. Under the table, she takes my hand and I remember when I fell in love with a girl who talked about a magic guitar, who played music while looking straight into your eyes, and who sang like a child far across the sea. Sometimes simple encounters change lives.

Translated by Tara Dominguez

The fact that many people love games isn’t really that new. Retailers and even our own governments have used our love of games to sell us products and hook us on lotteries and whatever else they can think of to boost revenue. But the rise of online games such as World of Warcraft and the social and “casual” games popularized by Zynga and other companies on Facebook, such as Mafia Wars and Happy Aquarium, has arguably made gaming a far bigger part of our culture than it has ever been — not to mention location-based apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla, which have explicit game-like features built in. Online payment giant PayPal said that Zynga was its second-largest merchant last year, and PayPal does business with some of the largest companies in the world. And get ready for even more games: Flurry Analytics says that its research shows almost half of the apps that are being developed for the upcoming Apple iPad are games.

What is the impact of all that gaming on our society? One academic, Lee Sheldon of Indiana University, says the generation that has grown up with ubiquitous online gaming is bringing that culture with it into the educational system, and ultimately into the workforce. “As the gamer generation moves into the mainstream workforce, they are willing and eager to apply the culture and learning-techniques they bring with them from games,” Sheldon, an assistant professor at the university’s department of telecommunications, told ITNews. He said older managers will have to “figure out how to educate themselves to the gamer culture, and how to speak to it most effectively.”

Sheldon is already experimenting with that: over the last year, he started grading two of his classes (both involved with game design) using a system based on “experience points” or XP, similar to the way gamers in World of Warcraft and other massively-multiplayer games award points for various tasks. Students started the year at level one, with zero XP and then gained points — and higher grades — by completing “quests” and “crafting,” which corresponded to giving presentations and doing exams and quizzes. Students also formed “guilds” similar to the gaming groups that rule WoW and other multiplayer games, and Sheldon says that his students seemed far more engaged than they had been before.

A similar phenomenon was the topic of a panel at the recent SXSW conference in Austin, where Christopher Poole, the founder of the controversial discussion forum known as 4chan, and Web historian Jason Scott discussed the site and its culture — which in some cases consists of offensive material, but also involves public advocacy through offshoots such as the Anonymous group. According to a description from Austin360, Scott compared the behavior at 4chan to a game, but one in which the objective was to come up with something more shocking and/or hilarious than your competitors.

Scott noted that another site behaves in almost the exact same way: Wikipedia. And he’s got a point — the “crowdsourced” encyclopedia relies in many cases on unknown and unpaid editors and writers to produce and structure and verify its content, people who to some extent compete for the recognition of their peers on the site, and in some cases wind up “levelling up” to become senior editors and members of the internal Wikipedia “cabal” of site managers. Although Wikipedia doesn’t explicitly award experience points, the concept is the same, and it motivates people in similar ways.

The moderation of comments at Slashdot is based on a very similar system: users are able to gain “karma points” through positive actions such as posting sensible comments, voting on other comments and flagging abusive comments. When they get enough points, they are selected by the site’s algorithm to be official moderators, and can then “spend” the points they have removing comments. In such a system, it doesn’t ultimately matter whether someone is anonymous or not, because there is an incentive for them to follow the rules and behave properly (although there are always users who don’t care about the rewards and try to “troll” or disrupt any site).

The bottom line is that good games take advantage of people’s innate desire to compete with each other, but balance that with their need to receive rewards, including the approval of their peers — rewards that in some cases can be used to modify their behavior in certain ways. Those are principles that don’t just apply to games. Jesse Schell, a former creative director at Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, had a great presentation at the DICE 2010 conference last month in which he talked about the rise of social gaming and what we can learn from it, which is embedded below.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Stock Xchange and Flickr user chanchan222

I love this panoramic series of photos of Matthew Good's workshop. He describes the contents:

I can't believe he didn't mention the X-Files poster!

(Note: Click on the image for a larger version of the panorama.)

The culture clash between social games and core gamers was on full display at GDC. I have been called a traitor to the cause of core gamers, even. At the awards show, when a Zynga rep claimed the social games award for Farmville and did a little bit of recruiting from the stage, he was not only booed, but someone shouted out, “But you don’t make games!” This is a common sentiment out there in the usual gamer haunts.

I have many many thoughts on all this — and I have been posting some of them in various places when discussions arise.

Yes, Farmville is a game. It just requires fairly little skill compared to games for “advanced” gamers. But by any reasonable definition of game, it fits perfectly.

You have to make choices (they are strategic choices rather than real-time, but so what? Games have a long tradition of slower play). The choices require knowledge and skill (the skill is what gets derisively called “spreadsheet gaming” by the cognoscenti, but that’s a brush that EVE Online and other MMOs have been tarred with too). You have to prepare for the challenge. You can screw up. You get rewarded for doing well, etc.

It may seem elementary to those who can juggle complicated business sims, but think of it as the training wheels version for novices to that genre, and you won’t be far off. I think people who didn’t play games in the early days forget that the level of complexity they enjoy today is a phenomenon of the last ten years, a symptom of typical genre development. Social games are more advanced than most of the games made from 1970 to 1988.

Yes, social games truly are social. They just work on somewhat different modes than real-time synchronous games do. Instead of rewarding real-time teamwork the way that group combat in an MMO, playing on a soccer team, or being a member of a chorus line does, they reward asynchronous behaviors.

Most specifically, there is a lot of exactly the sort of weak-tie social design that was intrinsic to Star Wars Galaxies and Asheron’s Call: stuff around gifts, networks of mutual benefit, etc. More, they are exploring some of these things in a deeper way than MMOs do (because MMOs fall back on the synchronous crutch). Which is more indicative of social ties, a user who logs in once a week for a raid, or a user who logs in every day to send every friend a gift? The answer is not straightforward, if you dig into social networking data.

Yes, it is arguably even an MMO. The core activity is single-player, but the features around gifting, fertilizing, helping build structures collaboratively, etc, are all massively multiplayer techniques. Oh, they are not yet truly virtual worlds, though some of them do feature real-time chat, and more will over time, because in many many cases it is a value-add of a feature.

Long ago, I posed the question of whether American Idol was an MMO. And in that post, I said

It’s surprising, in a way, how little collective action matters in most MMOs. Here’s a medium that allows it better than any other game type, and yet we still see fairly little collective action — and when we do, it’s raids — arguably, exactly the wrong sort of collective action to really play to the strengths of what virtual spaces can do, precisely because what MMOs offer is spaces with thousands in them, not spaces with a few dozen.

Well, here we are. Collective action is starting to matter in the social games, and it’s going to matter more, not less precisely because it is an assumed core premise of the genre.

No, social games are not what we think of as a virtual world. But as I said the other day, that definition is evolving.

Yes, social games make money. Do some Googling, people! And no, it’s not all from scams.Yes, there are shady practices. But not all games use them, and if they do, it is less every day as the market gets cleaned up. And even when they do, they are not the bulk of the money.

Social games are not just a fad. There have been a lot of comparisons to things like motion control, 3d imaging, and so on. But back in 2008 there were Gamasutra articles about whether retro-looking gaming was a fad; before 3d graphics got good enough, there were questions about whether it was a fad… the key thing to look at here is whether there are underlying technical and social factors that are pushing development in a particular direction.

In the case of retro looks (which are now a firmly established aesthetic), the answer lay in the somewhat complicated fact that a younger gamer sees all previous aesthetics side-by-side and does not judge their quality based on technology, the way that older gamers do. A push towards innovation and artistic intent in game design called forth the ghost of the 8-bit era, and the pixelated look became an identity badge. Tech helped this along — the rise of Flash as a common game development platform resulted in a “Flash aesthetic” driven by the display limitations that today we see in console games such as PixelJunk Eden and Patapon.

In the case of 3d, the march of technology simply made it work over time, and it evolved from gimmick to tool. This may yet happen with 3d displays as well, or motion control.

In the case of social games, you have to look at the overall context too. As I have been saying for quite some time, all games are becoming connected experiences. And it turns out that social networks are becoming the glue. They are sweeping away all the “gamer-only” networks that so many companies started.

The value in these networks lies in the connectivity to friends, the easy distribution of content across the social graph, the web accessibility, and so on. These are things that we now take for granted. The genie is not going to go back into the bottle.

Now, is the investment level going to change? Absolutely. The white-hot heat around the segment will definitely subside as everyone gets used to the fact that the market is here to stay.

No, social games won’t turn into core games. This is one of the misconceptions that AAA developers often have as they try to establish themselves in the market. It is absolutely true that social games are going to grow more sophisticated over time. But they will do so by growing further along the direction they have already been going.

If you look at the AAA game world today, you can trace just about everything in it to the early core gamer market. Video games got going with sports, dragons, robots, guns, jumping & climbing, and cars. Those were the first big ideas. And here we are now, decades in, and they are still the big ideas. Many other ideas have come along since, but somehow they have always been quirky, “outside the mainstream” — like, say, when Rollercoaster Tycoon, or Guitar Hero, or The Sims came along. The only way something like “playing house” can possibly be “outside the mainstream” is if there’s a subculture in charge.

Well, social games are here and they managed to get themselves established largely without reference to those tropes. As a result, they have a different set of starting premises. Many of the things that were “quirky” are “normal” and vice versa. Central design tropes  include cooperation rather than competition; asynchronous rather than synchronous play; social dynamics; and a very different set of core cultural references. There’s more.

What will happen over time is that this new audience will grow in sophistication. They already take for granted all of the elements of a farming game, for example. You can think of the farming game as equivalent to any other genre, and replete with design tropes that are exactly equivalent to conventions like WASD, hit points, skill point allocation, rocket jumping, and tank-nuker-healer, if you like.

All that is going to happen is a recapitulation of design history, only with a new of new assumptions embedded in the games:

• a far broader set of cultural references.
• a new and different set of core artistic choices driven by different rendering technology
• a fresh and exciting set of design paradigms built around asynchronous sociability and large-scale weak-tie “guild” structures — hoo, is there a design essay lurking in the difference between a guild and a neighbor ring...!
• a whole new set of business models and practices

What this boils down to is that social games will grow along those axes, and not magically turn into what core gamers today consider to be core games. It’s a mistake to think that the game development industry is going to manage to magically make this audience fall in love with sports, dragons, robots, guns, jumping & climbing, and cars.

But there’s hope for core gamers nonetheless: These games are the new home of “worldy” games, in some ways. And they are bringing neglected genres back to life.

Social games are going to push boundaries in design areas that are currently neglected. A renaissance in simulation and strategy games is likely, and I don’t think it is an accident that so many prominent AAA strategy game developers are in social games now.

If what you have craved is greater user agency and impact on a persistent world, a greater sense of community and economic interdependence — those are features that are intrinsic to this new market. As an example, I would point out that there was a core MMO game that many of the readers of this blog loved that had a farming game where you had to check in every few days to collect your stuff and decide what to try to harvest next. And it’s wasn’t Farmville. It was Star Wars Galaxies. In many ways, the features that were seen as oddest or least “gamer-like” in the worldy MMOs are going to be among core features in the social games: housebuilding, shopkeeping, farming, dancing, dress-up, even hairdressing. Right now, these are one-to-a-game. But one possible direction of development is that they not be.

I have thoughts on what all this means for the core games we know and love, but I’ll leave those for another day.