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Americans vs Balkan Brass: An Interview with Alex Krebs
Alex Krebs (on saxophone) with Krebsic Orkestar at Dante’s, Portland, Oregon, 6/9/2012 Alex Krebs is the founder of Krebsic Orkestar, a Portland, Oregon-based Balkan brass band, where he plays the...
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Music from the Heart: An Interview with Maria Noel
Maria Noel (center) singing with Krebsic Orkestar at Dante's, Portland, Oregon, 6/9/2012Maria Noel is a singer with two of Portland’s Balkan bands: Krebsic Orkestar and Kafana Klub. As I explore what...
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Made of Fragments
We slip between definitions with such acrobatic ease that straight narrative becomes impossible. I cannot conceive of my story as one of simple progress, or simple woe. Any confidently thrusting story...
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Do What’s Necessary, Seek to Make Choices
The bus ride last Saturday night to the Kultur Shock concert enlightened me on the difference between actions that you do out of necessity and those that you do by choice. Sticking with the bus...
View ArticleThe Lag Between Two Cultures
An accent is a tell-tale scar left by the unfinished struggle to acquire a new language. But it is much more. It is an author’s way of compromising with a world that is not his world and for which he...
View ArticleA Bipolar Personal World
[O]ne certain outcome of exile is the creation of a bipolar personal world. Spatially, the world becomes riven into two parts, divided by an uncrossable barrier. Temporally, the past is all of a sudden...
View ArticleAn Excess of Memory
[A]s a psychological choice, the exilic position may become not only too arduous but too easy. Perhaps the chief risk of privileging the exilic narrative is a psychic split—living in a story in which...
View ArticleAll Homesickness Is Fiction
[T]hese days we are wont to say not so much that all fiction is homesickness as that all homesickness is fiction—that home never was what it was cracked up to be, the haven of safety and affection we...
View ArticleFruits of Meaning
To be sure, in our human condition, it takes long, strenuous work to find the wished-for terrains of safety or significance or love. And it may often be easier to live in exile with a fantasy of...
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Feeling Through Sound: An Interview with Willo Sertain
Willo Sertain is the founder and accordionist of Macaulay Balkan, the latest addition to Portland’s Balkan music scene, which had been, according to one active member, in need of new blood. Having seen...
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