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nova0000scotia · 4 years

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Intimate Partner Violence and Abuse - It can be stopped Download the PDF version What is intimate partner violence and abuse? Intimate partner violence and abuse is an abuse of power that includes a wide range of threats and acts: •Physical violence that may involve a threat with a fist or object; being pushed or shoved in a way that could result in injury; being slapped, hit or beaten; being hit or attacked with an object. There may be no obvious physical injuries, or there may be bruises, cuts, broken bones, internal injuries, disfigurement, disablement and even death. •Sexual assault may be part of a physical attack. Sexual acts within a relationship must take place with consent. There is no "right" to sexual relations. •Emotional abuse that can include threats and intimidation, demeaning and degrading verbal and/or body language, control and isolation, subordination and humiliation. Victims may suffer serious loss of self-esteem and experience feelings of shame, anxiety, hopelessness, depression and terror. Intimate partner violence and abuse Violence and/or abuse by an intimate partner is not a crime of passion and it is not a private matter. Intimate partner violence and abuse can be committed by a spouse, ex-spouse, a current or former common-law partner, a current or former girlfriend or boyfriend or a person in a dating relationship. The victim may think that she or he somehow provoked the abuse but the abuser is responsible for his or her own behaviour. An abusive relationship is often a confusing mix of love, fear, dependency, intimidation, guilt and hope. There is a shared life involving family, finances and a home. Victims of violence and abuse usually return to the relationship many times before leaving it. To harm, or threaten to harm, another person is against the law under the Criminal Code of Canada regardless of the relationship between the two parties. An effective legal response to intimate partner violence and abuse requires coordination by all parts of the criminal justice system. The Criminal Code and the Canada Evidence Act provide protection for victims as well as sanctions for offenders. Prosecution policies and guidelines ensure that charges proceed in court, however, the police are usually the first step in the legal process and the major point of contact in intimate partner assault cases. When called to an incident of intimate partner violence and abuse, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are responsible for restoring order, protecting victims, investigating and gathering evidence. This may involve arresting or taking into custody the perpetrator of the violence or abuse. If the investigation finds reasonable and probable grounds that a crime has been committed, appropriate criminal charges can be laid. 　 Relationship abuse is tragically common. It is also very complex. How can you bring her flowers one day and hit her the next? Why does she stay? How can she leave? What happens when that safe place called home becomes a prison or war zone? What about the children? How does society step into these private, personal spaces and help make a difference? Let’s find the answers — because spousal and partner abuse can be stopped. Even if criminal charges are not laid, an individual can apply for a peace bond or restraining order to prohibit their partner from threatening or harassing them further. 　 The roots of intimate partner violence and abuse Intimate partner violence and abuse is rooted in a power imbalance between individuals, within families and in society. Basically, when one person is controlled and/or considered less worthy than another one -- because they are a vulnerable person or part of a vulnerable population -- there is the potential for abuse. What makes intimate partner violence and abuse occur in one relationship and not another? According to the National Clearinghouse on Family Violence, we know that partners in violent and abusive relationships have often experienced family violence themselves as children. There are also known factors that increase the risk of partner abuse, especially the risk of serious abuse: •Men who have witnessed violence by their fathers toward their mothers inflict more severe and repeated violence in their own relationships than men whose fathers were not violent. •Alcohol is a prominent but not a causal factor in relationship abuse. In just over half of all violent incidents, the violent partner was drinking. •Women are at greater risk of severe violence •The risk of being killed by a spouse or partner is eight times higher for women in common-law relationships than in registered marriages. 　 Top of page Who experiences relationship abuse? Intimate partner violence and abuse is pervasive: no one is immune. It affects people of all ages, rich and poor, rural and urban, from every cultural and educational background. The majority of abusers are men and the majority of victims are women. Serious abuse is most often committed by men against women and children. However, men are also victims of intimate partner violence and abuse. The rate is significantly lower than among women and the severity of abuse, especially homicide, often less. We are just beginning to learn more about the abuse of adult men. There are other groups, such as same sex intimate partners, for which the violence and abuse needs more recognition and remedies. Since these groups may already be stigmatized in society, it can be difficult for either partner to reach out for appropriate help and support. Disabled and dependent persons are also particularly vulnerable in abusive situations. Aboriginal women and men experience higher rates of spousal violence than the general population. New Canadians should know that landed immigrants will not be deported if they leave a partner because of abuse, even if that partner is their sponsor. (Immigrants without legal status should get legal advice.) Children are often victims of intimate partner abuse. Estimates are that in 30 to 40% of reported cases where the partner is abused, so are the children. However, there is a growing understanding that simply witnessing intimate partner violence in their home can affect children the same way as abuse directed at them. (Ask for the RCMP’s booklet Where Does It Hurt? The Effects of Family Violence on Children.) What every person involved in an abusive relationship should know is that the RCMP will investigate all incidents of violence and abuse, regardless of sex, ethnicity, background or lifestyle. Do you have a safety plan? Safety plans help you reduce or eliminate the risks that you and your children face by an abuser. Creating a safety plan will help you and your children get away from potential risks safely. Safety planning should include: •letting someone you trust know about the abuse even if you do not report it to the police; •creating a code word with friends or family that lets them know to call for help when leaving is not an option; •having one safe location to keep your identification, important documents (passport, Social Insurance Number), bank cards, credit cards, keys and cell phone that you can grab quickly in an emergency; •having a physical plan to get out of your house in an emergency and a place to go, including the nearest shelter if necessary, once you have left the abusive situation; and •practicing your safety plan with your children to keep them safe as well. If you have left the abuser and the situation is still volatile, make sure that the school, day care, and police have a copy of all court orders, including restraining orders, custody and access orders, as well as a picture of the abusive partner. Getting help The facts show that partner assault has declined in recent years. That is proof that relationship abuse can be stopped; it can be prevented. Changing attitudes, services for victims, treatment programs for violent men, stronger laws and pro-arrest policies are all making a difference. The first step for anyone in, or close to, an abusive relationship is to get help. Help for the Abused In an emergency, call the police. Seek medical attention (injuries may be internal as well as external). In a crisis, call a women’s shelter, crisis line, or counseling agency. Talk to your family doctor or community health center. Tell someone you trust, such as a friend or relative. Believe in yourself. You are not to blame. Help for the Abuser If you abuse your partner, get help now. In most cases, abusive behaviour is learned as a child. It is also often accompanied by low self-esteem, frustration and guilt. You can change. You can take responsibility for your actions and seek counseling. The best way to start is through a family doctor or social service agency. Abusive behaviour often goes hand in hand with alcohol or drug abuse and you may need to address these problems as well. 　 Top of Page Help for the Witness If you believe someone you know is being abused, do not turn a blind eye. Call the police in an emergency; do not attempt to intervene at risk to yourself. Listen to the affected person, whether abused or abuser. They may be asking for help. Offer support and refrain from judgment. Ask how you can be of help. Do not take over. Help the person explore their options. Tell him/her it is dangerous to do nothing about the abuse. Community involvement and responsibility All forms of violence and abuse are serious criminal matters with a huge impact on society. As the National Clearinghouse on Family Violence states, "Health costs for injuries and chronic health problems caused by abuse amount to about a billion dollars every year. We also pay a social cost in the form of children too traumatized to learn or develop normally, adult victims unable to function to their full potential, and diminished quality of family and community life". Intimate partner violence and abuse flourishes in an environment where the misuse of power against the vulnerable or less powerful is tolerated. That environment may be behind closed doors or in the larger community. That is why we all need to work to prevent violence and to build a society where abuse of power is not tolerated. By seeing intimate partner violence and abuse for what it is -- a crime -- we can all take responsibility and work together as a community to stop the violence. Help is available Contacts and Resources •crisis line •abuse counseling •women’s groups •immigrant and ethno-cultural groups •Aboriginal groups •women’s shelters •women’s resource centres •community health centres •family doctor •police •RCMP victim services •legal aid For more information and resources on family and relationship violence, please view our other brochures: •Dating Violence - Say NO! •Effects of Family Violence on Children - Where does it Hurt? •Criminal Harassment – Stalking: It’s not love These brochures can also be ordered at a cost from St. Joseph Corporation. For ordering information, contact them at their toll free number: 1-888-562-5561. http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cp-pc/spouse-epouse-abu-eng.htm

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jodiwalker · 7 years

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Don’t Let the Door Hit Ya: A Pre-Hometowns Assessment

I know I've missed a lot here. The last time I checked in with The Bachelorette, Rachel was dating the entire "Hoodies" section of the Urban Outfitters in Times Square, and now her boyfriends couldn’t even make up an intramural basketball team without recruiting someone off of the elliptical machines. I know it doesn’t make any sense to come back in with commentary on what is notoriously the most boring episode of any Bachelorette season—the one right before Hometowns where Rachel cuts every guy she knew she was going to cut from the very moment she met them but kept around because they gave good hugs and always had gum—instead of any single other upcoming episode.

Ahead of us we'll be meeting the families who inspired these bros to seek love and/or protein gummies Instagram sponsorships on television; dropping in on date specifically designed for sex at Chris B. Harrison's invitation; and Rachel wearing a truly bomb ass silver dress in which she will be proposed to shortly before making the much more important decision of either going back to being an attorney and retaining the public's respect and adoration, or becoming the next host of Do You Want to Build a Tiny House Filled With Poltergeists: Weekend Edition? in which case we will turn on her in the swiftest of fashions, despite all the good she's done for our dear, awful, corrupt ABC franchise of choice.

With all that tantalizing drama waiting ahead of us, perhaps I should also briefly glance back at the carnage in the rearview mirror. I nervously avoided the Lee/Kenny drama for weeks, and now that I've watched, it simply must be said…

You guys. The Bachelor isn't racist! We've all been so wrong all along! The Bachelor's contestants may be racist, and the world around it may be racist, but The Bachelor isn't racist. No, no, no. It's just Lee. Lee is the problem! Lee is racist and since The Bachelor chose him and put him on the show, and were aware that his blatant, dangerous, toxic racism was, indeed, racism, they're totally in on it. It's meta!

Not buying it? Okay, watch this—name all the times Lee was racist on this season of The Bachelorette: That time he kept telling Eric he "loved him to death" while demeaning him every chance he got; that time he called Kenny aggressive for (initially) fussing at him calmly about interrupting him with Rachel twice; that time he kept calling Kenny aggressive while openly explaining to the cameras that his main hobby is riling people up and then smiling at them or saying sociopathic shit like "Jesus loves you" or "I'll pray for you"; telling Rachel that he was scared of Kenny; lying to Rachel about Kenny throwing him out of a van or whatever while actively sporting Cameron Diaz's jizz-hair from Something About Mary.

Okay, now name all the times The Bachelor WASN'T racist: that time it picked Rachel, a black woman, as The Bachelorette after 30 seasons of not doing that!

But for real, screw The Bachelorette for giving Lee a platform and putting Kenny in that situation which was, by the way, a storyline they pilfered directly from Unreal season 2—not even the good season! And let it be known that any goodness that comes from this season is a direct result of Rachel and any badness seeps from the pores of this franchise which was one step away from having Lee wear a Confederate flag swimsuit and be all, Whaaaa I'm just proud of my heritage?!

But Rachel, whose only human flaw seems to be that she has absolutely no self-control when it comes to large, statement rings—even when wearing winter gloves!—has somehow managed to live up to our absurdly high expectations. Heading into Hometowns, she has four dudes and what I imagine is a world of emotional trauma that is utterly not worth it lying ahead of her. Let's briefly assess their odds before they take us into their childhood homes and adult male psyches.

Matt (Who?) is only worth noting because of the sobs that overtook Rachel when she told Matt (Who?) she had to send him home. Every season the Bacheor(ette) sends home some man or woman that I while professing them their rock, their best friend, their damn Jiminy Cricket that I have literally never heard of before in my life. [Ed. note: The Bachelorette—the one place in the world the friend zone DOES exist, men. Because this woman IS contractually obligated to date you!] For JoJo, I seem to recall it was Vinny the Barber, who went on to a prosperous life in Paradise where he acquired a much more reasonable hairline. I can only hope the exact same for Matt.

I would wager that Dean is as cute (and tear-inducing) as the kid in the kid in Lion, while simultaneously making me want to put my face on his face as much as the grown-up kid in Lion: my boyfriend Dev Patel. Dean looks like the 26-year-old actor they'd cast to play the high school sophomore having an affair with his AP English teacher on The CW. Indeed, we've got a real Hot Archie on our hands here, and he is going to get his precious, fragile, surprisingly woke heart shattered into a million pieces by our resident Veronica-meets-Josie.

Rachel knows Dean is too young for her. Rachel knows she's not going to marry Dean—how else do you explain his first date being a blimp ride and his second date being…going to Catholic mass? But I think Rachel would be quite pleased to make a man out of Dean in the Fantasy Suite, and also, probably just wants to see if she can make him grow up a little in their time together. Yes, it will be awfully traumatic for him when she breaks up with him very soon after meeting the family that he's so self-conscious about. But one day, he'll look back fondly on Ms. Lindsay and all that she taught him about Fahrenheit 451 and the importance of clitoral stimulation.

Eric's weird. Aside from the initial challenges he faced with Lee and Lee's general dickish-ness, I was pretty bored by him. That probably comes from the fact that he's always seems like he's falling asleep in his interviews and his fashion sense rests somewhere between Season 1 Michael Scott and Blake Shelton on The Voice. But when he's with Rachel, all the sudden he appears to be quite a fun person. Eric has never been in love or brought a girlfriend home, so this all seems very, very real for him—and he will probably be very, very scarred when it all ends.

Peter is highly handsome and seems highly normal; he apparently has access to a unending supply of nice sport coats, and he is really easing into the salt-and-pepper thing nicely. If Rachel chose Peter and married him, I think they would be very happy together and have a lot of beautiful, athletic, well-dressed children who would one day compete on The Bachelor(ette) and talk about how their parents have been married for 35 years. So it's too bad…

Rachel's going to pick Byan because Rachel is absolutely in love with Bryan. I mean, maybe it's not too bad? Maybe Bryan is fine. But this relationship just feels so Andi-and-Josh circa 2014…and we all know how that ended up circa 2016. It could just be that Bryan resembles a cross between Aaron Murray's brother and Aaron Rodgers' brother, but something about Bryan's constant charm and dedication to telling Rachel exactly what she needs to hear feels a little off. Perhaps Bryan is exactly what Rachel needs…or perhaps he has a half-brother named Aaron somewhere and this will all be yet another strike against the good name of chiropractors.

See you in Hometowns—hope everyone was telling the truth about being sure their parents would be cool with them bringing home a black woman even though they've never done it before and that is actual dialog pulled from the year's most acclaimed and terrifying movie about race!

#the bachelorette #the bachelorette recap #rachel lindsay

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easterndaze · 7 years

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Budapest’s New Underground

Although the international reputation of the country, whose PM hailed illiberal democracy as his preferred NWO, is not the best (to say the least), there's a parallel culture that largely operates independently of state-run infrastructure, creating several microcosms with their own audiences and worldviews, implicitly turning against misogyny, discrimination, narrow-mindedness, and reflecting the techno-dystopian times we are living in at the moment. "...The goal of our underground is to create a second culture, a culture completely independent from all official communication media and the conventional hierarchy of value judgements put out by the establishment", wrote Ivan Jirous, a member of The Plastic People of the Universe, in 1975. For the purposes of this article, we will focus only on Budapest. Hungary, in general, is very centrist, even more so than its neighbouring countries. Most of the cultural happenings take place in the capital. "It is worth mentioning that to me the 'underground' seems to be an arty, intellectual, middle-class, mostly Budapest-centred, or at least city-centred thing", explains popular music scholar Emília Barna. "For instance, there is so much rap music made in the outskirts or the provinces, extremely poor areas of Hungary, scenes that thrive in these localities as well as on the internet – music that I would certainly call political because these artists directly address issues of poverty, social deprivation, criminality (gangster and prison life) etc. – yet as far as I know this music is never referred to as part of 'the underground'".

UH Fest

"A strong stage performance and powerful art are always political acts", says Krisztián Puskár, one of the organisers behind UH Fest. The experimental music staple was established at the dawn of the new millennium, taking inspiration from the now-defunct Austrian phonoTAKTIK festival. Since 2000, UH Fest (also known as Ultrahang) has staged approximately 500 performances. From noise techno, through avant-garde improv, to an hour of drone, UH Fest aims to challenge its audience's expectations and break the boundaries between various genres and generations. Thus, over the course of the week of the festival, the likes of Romanian spectralist Iancu Dumitrescu rub shoulders with Low Jack, KTL, Sote and Richard Dawson. Unlike many other similar urban festivals in Europe, UH Fest is not institutionalised, and is largely run on a volunteer basis. "To this day, we are just ordinary citizens without an institution behind us. We have a foundation, which is a legal entity, but not in terms of an office or infrastructure. It was a grassroots initiative, a family venture in the beginning, because my sister and brother-in-law were also involved", says András Nun, the organiser of the festival and one of the most pivotal figures of the Budapest underground music scene. Aside from its main event, which usually happens in late September/early October, the festival has also organised so-called "Demo" events for up-and-coming local talent, which acted as a springboard for several successful musicians such as The Death of Rave artist and Mark Fell collaborator Gábor Lázár, Opal Tapes and Lobster Theremin producer S Olbricht (whose own Farbwechsel imprint we'll discuss later), and the improv duo 12z.

OMOH

OMOH is a new addition to Budapest's queer scene, shunning the music played at mainstream gay events and embracing a more abrasive type of techno and underground house. The name itself comes from Russian police special forces and can be interpreted "as a sort of middle finger to all homophobic legislators of the world", explain the organisers, whose identity remains a mystery. "No organisers, no line-ups" is their egalitarian motto. The monthly (or so) OMOH party takes place at the top of a decaying shopping centre built in 1926, the home of the infamous Corvin Club & Bar. This sprawling venue is wedged between the 7th district, renowned for its tourist-filled ruin bars, and the up-and-coming, working-class 8th district. "Lively, chaotic, and most definitely an architectural, urban and social war zone – not postcard material. Which fits our mindset perfectly." The right-wing parties who came to prominence across Central Europe – most prominently in Poland and Hungary – championed heteronormative, Christian, conservative, nationalist values, the resonance of which can be felt in places like OMOH: "Even if club owners and managers have no problem with the LGBTQI crowd, the organisers still have to deal with the suspicion of the staff and the regulars – to put it mildly. And our audience, quite frankly, is a division of brave little foot-soldiers claiming their share of an environment which is by no means a so-called safe space."

Auróra

About 10 minutes' walk from Blaha Lujza Square, deeper into the dimly lit streets of the 8th district, the increasingly gentrified inner-city "ghetto" which is also one of the most ethnically diverse and lively areas of Budapest, lies Auróra. Located in the street of the same name, Auróra is based in an inauspicious building – you will have to ring the bell in order to get in. This family house with a cosy garden has become an oasis of alternative culture and thinking in its purest sense. Aside from its music programming – which largely centres around the weekend – the space also provides offices to several NGOs such as Budapest Pride, Roma Press Center and DrugReporter, maintained by a platform called the Auróra HUB, which is funded from Auróra's profit. The genealogy of the space can be traced back to Sirály, a former squat located on one of the busiest commercial veins of the city, at Király St 50, which was shut down in 2013. Several activist groups and a few political parties emerged from the vaults of Sirály – one of which was the collective behind Auróra (another established Gólya, a venue also located in the 8th district). Auróra's music programming is diverse, and encompasses over 40 gigs per month, ranging from free jazz, techno and punk to experimental electronics – all of this without any official state support. "The political situation doesn't let us cooperate with culture-politics at all", say Auróra's Fanni T��th, Áron Lukács and Zsuzsi Mekler. "You can see self-censorship, fear and unpredictability across cultural institutes all over Hungary. We think the only possible way to keep this platform of NGOs and the lively discussion about issues in our country alive is to run a social centre like this, totally independently."

RNR666

RNR666, or Rock'n'Roll 666, is a music community established in 2005 by three friends from rural eastern Hungary: Csühes Pali, Lavor and Szabo, whose backgrounds include music, art and fanzine publishing. Initially begun as online radio, the RNR666 RADIO SHOW, the group widened its activities to include concert organisation, online publishing and record releasing. Their collective spirit is marked by a fiercely DIY attitude and punk-inspired ethos. They began in the era of Myspace, which connected them to the global underground and the low-budget, so-called "food-flat-and-beer bands". 10 years later, not much has changed in terms of the frugality and DIY aspect of this scene. "Lots of the venues here don't care about the fact that you want to do small, but subculturally very important events, they are just interested in profit", says Lavor as we sit in Kék Ló, an improv venue/bar in the 8th district. These days, they might do one gig per month, largely due to the lack of resources, inviting mostly foreign bands – they have to finance everything from their own pockets. This is how they released their first 7-inch, a psychedelic garage rock split between Piresian Beach, the moniker of Budapest-based singer-songwriter Zsófia Németh – who is also a member of the collective – and JC Satán. Although event promotion has shifted to Facebook, they still make posters and spread the word IRL: "I still party six days a week, so I get to talk to people that way."

Farbwechsel

Farbwechsel is a truly glocal label based on friendship and personal connections, sourcing its roster almost exclusively from local talent and organically spreading the "Budapest sound" abroad. This happened largely thanks to acclaimed producers like Route 8, S Olbricht – who established the label with Bálint Zalkai aka Alpár in 2012 – Norwell and Imre Kiss, all of whom released their debut albums on Farbwechsel. You'll often find musicians associated with the imprint jamming in each other's bedrooms, sometimes perusing vintage hardware instruments borrowed from Zoltán Balla, an avid collector and member of Farbwechsel-signed project Wedding Acid Group. Even though several artists from the label's roster have gradually begun to release music on foreign labels such as Opal Tapes and Lobster Theremin, they remain faithful and committed to the imprint that brought them recognition, and they also organise regular events in Budapest. Their sonic aesthetic has been described mostly as lo-fi house, but that doesn't do them justice. There's a sense of ghostly melancholia and longing, perhaps an aural appropriation of their home city, a place constantly hovering somewhere between the past and the present. This is most prominent in Mikolai's work, which centres around the dancefloor and transgresses it at the same time. The label roster has become stable over the last five years, with names such as Saint Leidal The 2nd, Aiwa, S Olbricht, Norwell, SILF and Alpár.

Küss Mich

Küss Mich… and follow me to a gritty basement, where we'll dance to abandon and the music will elevate us beyond our physical selves, bodies sublimating in communal spirit. Küss Mich is a romantic event – romantic in its truest, least-saccharine sense. Founded in 2008 as an irregular DJ club event at the iconic drinking den/underground basement Vittula off Blaha Lujza Square, Küss Mich is a legendary night in the context of Budapest nightlife – a place that hailed eclecticism before it was in fashion and steered clear of the corrosive irony inherent in postmodern hipsterdom. Their sonic cocktail contains a blend of DIY-synthwave, punk, Italo disco, acid and industrial – in a concert or DJ format. "The motivation was to entertain ourselves. One of us had an industrial-dark-synth-punk background, the other came from techno and acid-oriented electronic dance music. We were both tired of the narrow-mindedness of these scenes", says Krisztián Puskár who also DJs under the moniker Splatter, one of the founders of Küss Mich alongside Gábor György alias Gördön. Adopting their outsider status and subverting expectations of the then-segregated music milieu, rediscovering past gems and presenting them alongside current sounds and bands, enabled them to navigate the muddy waters of contemporary music, aided by a devoted audience. "To choose a German name was pretty strange, fun and uncool back then. Now it's totally the opposite of that. German party and brand names will vanish or become out-of-vogue, but great people will still be there to do things on their own. And us too. If there is no money in it, there must be another motivation, right?"

JazzaJ

JazzaJ is a compound word combining "jazz" and "zaj" (which means "noise" in Hungarian). The event, which aims to bridge the free jazz and noise/experimental scenes, based on improvisation, was founded in 2011. "We wanted the noise musician to meet the free jazz musician. The underground rocker to meet the folk musician. The baroque player and the avant-garde music-philosopher to meet the electronic music geek", says Ernő Zoltán Rubik, one of the organisers of the event. Over the last five years it has grown into a communal gathering of discerning listeners, who welcome anything that JazzaJ offers them. "Listening is a creative act", adds Rubik. The main task that musicians who play at JazzaJ are given is to leave their comfort zones. "We believe in no style". Recently, JazzaJ began to invite musicians to be curators – each month a musician puts together the line-up, which sometimes creates rather interesting and surprising juxtapositions. This way, they've staged "hardcore-like nights" courtesy of Balázs Pándi, video operas with Miro Tóth, baroque and noise improvisation with Albert Márkos, and 12 saxophonists running around the room via Gergő Kovács. The JazzaJ community is sourced from the sprawling local scene, but remains tightly connected not only to neighbouring countries, but also the European and international scenes. "Our way of promoting improvisation as an act of freedom and tolerance, listening and presence, is already political without naming it so. There were times when we felt that for some people, this was a weekly refuge, a hideout from everyday cruelty and ignorant aggression taking place on social and political fields, or the streets." (photo: Attila Nagy)

T+U

T+U stands for Technologie und das Unheimliche, or the uncanny, the strangely familiar – that which repulses and attracts you at the same time. Established in 2014 as a publishing project and cross-disciplinary movement by Mark Fridvalszki, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and Márió Z. Nemes, T+U is located somewhere between Berlin, Budapest and Leipzig. Their leitmotif is an exploration of the confrontation between the age-old dichotomy: the human condition – its various manifestations and cultures – and technology, through theme-based issues and events. Music plays an important role in their modus operandi. They have a regular radio show on legendary Tilos Rádio and create guest mixes, employing a specific sonic aesthetic that chimes with their ideology: dark, technoid, dystopian. Some of T+U's members have left Hungary for personal and political reasons. "Within the recent years, mostly due to the socially and morally harmful cultural politics of the current political establishment, there is less and less air for progressive art and subversive thoughts", says Zsolt Miklósvölgyi via email. "This catastrophic hedge-hop mainly caused by the anti-intellectualist, reactionary attitude of the ruling right-wing populist party and its substandard cultural myrmidons, obviously forces many of us into 'exile'. But within our techno-capitalist era, the image of 'living in exile' no longer means that you exchange one geo-cultural location for another, but you are in constant transition. You are not only characterised by the place you are from, but rather by the way you are rewriting these already-existing cognitive landscapes and cartographies."

Drrpnc

If you are a musician or into underground rock and extreme metal in Budapest, you will probably have passed through Keleti Blokk and the adjoining Dürer Club at some point. The sprawling complex neighbours the green oasis of the city park, whose integrity is threatened by a huge makeover that, for the foreseeable future, may replace much of the greenery with shiny concrete. Drrpnc is a secret cellar somewhere in the underbelly of the aforementioned space. A cross between a rehearsal room and a gig space, Drrpnc has become one of the city's most prominent havens for the punk/hardcore and extreme underground metal. Needless to say, the modus operandi of their activities is strictly DIY. "We have always had some challenges, such as leakage, electrical damage, etc., but the Hungarian scene is a community, so we can solve all of our problems through our common strength", says Adam Mjöl. The future remains uncertain. "This building, where we are now, will be probably demolished, so we have to start looking for a new place."

Davoria & Külvárosi Techno

The seeds of Davoria were sown around the year 2000. The collective began organising sound-system parties in the summer, as part of the then-thriving freetekno scene and its annual summer teknival gatherings. Ever since their beginnings they have always been part of both worlds – throwing events at regular clubs as well as the outdoor, illegal parties. These days, Davoria's monthly events take place at Müszi (situated in the 8th district at the aforementioned Corvin shopping mall), a space for alternative culture that also includes the offices of the civil watchdog Atlatszo.hu, as well as Auróra. The sonic identity of the event remains faithful to their beginnings: hardcore techno, noise and experimental electronics. "We call our parties tekno, because we feel that this term is open enough to represent different kinds of genres, from tekno to experimental music", explains Davoria organiser Péter Márton, who also produces uncompromising techno (or tekno) and noise under the respective monikers Telesport and Prell. Davoria also host a stage at the now-legendary underground techno event Külvárosi Techno (Suburban Techno), which takes place several times a year in the industrial premises of the large studio space and now-defunct venue R33. Ideologically, their stance hasn't changed over the last fifteen years. "We try to show that even in a commercial world, you are capable of doing productive, good things while keeping your freedom."

Originally published in Glissando magazine #30

Lucia Udvardyova

#Davoria #Budapest #OMOH #RNR666 #Jazzaj #T+U #Farbwechsel #S Olbricht #Aurora #Uh Fest #Kuss Mich

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