Censorship at Rock al Parque?

Venezuelan heavy metaler Paul Gillman, apparently booted from this year's Rock al Parque.

Paul Gillman is one of Venezuela's biggest rock stars of recent decades. But he is also an outspoken Chavista - a supporter of the leftist movement founded by the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And those politics appear to have gotten him kicked out of this year's Rock al Parque music festival.

That political movement has fallen into severe disrepute in recent years, particularly in Colombia, as Venezuela has become more authoritarian, government forces have violated protesters' rights, and the country's economy has tailspun.

But through it all, Gillman, 57, has remained loyal to the Bolivarian Revolution (a bit reminiscent of the True Believers who kept their faith in Stalin's Soviet Union long after its horrific human rights abuses had become common knowledge), calling himself '100% revolutionary.'

Brothers in revolution: Gillman with the late Hugo Chavez.

Concert organizar Idartes' announcement that Gillman would participate spurred protests on Twitter, led by Colombian businessman Julio Correal, one of the festival's founders. 'I'm not the owner of this festival, but if I can cry out against one of (Venezuelan Pres. Nicolas) Maduro's activists, I will always do it,' Correral tweeted.

Call Gillman ignorant, naive, stupid, or whatever - but he's part of a long tradition of artists, such as Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson, whose ideals blinded them to terrible realities. Seeger's and Robeson's musical talents don't get recalibrated because of their faith in the Soviet Union, so why should Gillman's Colombian fans be deprived of his music because he supports a rotten regime like Venezuela's?

Rock al Parque 2017.

The organizers of Rock al Parque, said to be the largest free concert in South America, allege that the festival has always been apolitical - which is a bit difficult to believe. According to the cultural magazine Arcadia, the Venezuelan group Caramelos de Cianuro, which performed at last year's Rock al Parque, is 'clearly aligned with the opposition' to the Venezuelan government. And even if Gillman were to start ranting in favor of la revolucion bonita during his performance, would it make any difference? Not many rock fans are likely to be either persuaded or offended, if they can even make out the words in Gillman's heavy metal lyrics.

Some justified booting Gillman for 'security' reasons. Could Gillman's performance really trigger violence? If that's the real concern, it would mean permitting a small, violent minority to decide what the rest of us can see and hear.

In a letter posted on the Internet, Gillman, who still plans to perform in Colombia at the end of May, called the decision to cancel his performance "unprecedented."

'In Rock al Parque's 23 years...there has never been a similar situation in which an artist with 40 years of experience has been removed for reasons completely removed from music,' he wrote.

He also told the El Tiempo newspaper that Rock al Parque "allowed itself to be carried away by one person's hate."

Paradoxically, as of May 13 Gillman was still listed among the festival's international invitees.

'Without a doubt, (Gillman) is one of the foundational figures of rock (in Venezuela) and across all out continent, and one of the most eagerly awaited in the festival's history.'

His fans will have to wait longer now.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Dancing for Delia

The Fundación Delia Zapata is one of the little-known jewels of La Candelaria. Named in honor of

Delia Zapata Olivella

Delia Zapata Olivella, who dedicated her life to researching and popularizing the music and dance of Afro-Colombian peoples of Colombia's coastal regions. Later in life, she traveled to Africa to find the roots of AfroColombian melodies.

The foundation, housed in a grand old building on the south side of Calle 10 between Carreras 2 and 3, offers dance classes and musical events.

Delia Zapata was born in 1926 in Cordoba and died exactly 14 years ago on May 24, 2001. Ironically, she was killed by a disease she contracted during a research trip in Africa.

Delia Zapata and friends.

The Delia Zapata Foundation on Calle 10.

Delia Zapata at rest.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

An Irish Troubador in La Candelaria

The last few days, we've passed this colorful fellow strumming his guitar and singing popular tunes in English. He is Fin, from Cork, Ireland, who's lived in Colombia for the past 20 years.

Fin didn't seem to want to elaborate on what brought him to Colombia or kept him here.

"I came and I stayed," he said, his Irish brogue still intact.

Fin seems to favor popular classics: the Beatles, country music...'everything's gonna be alright,' he sings, and then 'baby you can drive my car.' And then, 'rollin', rollin' down the river...I never saw the good side of a city until I saw the view from a riverboat queen.'

That doesn't exactly describe Bogotá, but could come from a Gabriel García Márquez novel.

Fin says he doesn't often play in the street for coins, but when he does, the Callejon del Embudo, off of the Plaza del Chorro, is a favorite spot. He's here now, because he recently returned to the city and hasn't gotten any pub gigs as yet.

"I'm waiting for my phone to ring," he says.

In any case, it's been a long afternoon of singing and strumming, and Fin's throat is dry. So, in the best Irish tradition, he's off to a pub for a wet one.

If you want to hire a real Irish voice, give Fin a call: 314-237-6109

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Calle 13: Street of Controversy

Ready for Plaza Bolívar? Calle 13 performing in Venezuela. (Photo: Wikipedia)

When Canal Capital contracted the Puerto Rican pop music group Calle 13 to play on Plaza Bolivar on May 14, they hoped only to get some positive publicity.

And they've gotten more publicity than they planned on - along with lots of controversy. Ten conservative city council members, vigilant to protect Bogotanos' morals, want the concert cancelled. They say that Calle 13's music promotes drug use, violence, sexual promiscuity and insults women.

Calle 13 member René Perez in 2009 in a shirt calling
Alvaro Uribe a paramilitary.

Interestingly, Marco Fidel Ramírez, leader of the council members denouncing the morals of Calle 13, which has won numerous awards for its music, was recently the object of scandal himself. Reporters looking at Ramírez's Twitter account discovered that he was following several pornographic feeds, including one offering nude photos of teenage girls. Ramírez, who is an evangelical minister, first said that he must have signed up for the feeds by accident, and then changed his story to saying that someone must have hacked his Twitter account.

This is not Calle 13's first controversy. In 2011, the government of the Dominican Republic banned nine of the group's songs for supposedly promoting violence and drug use.

On the other hand, Calle 13, which is politically very leftist, is also known for social and political commentary in its music. One wonders, in fact, whether some of the criticism of Calle 13 could be linked to an incident in 2009 in which band member René Perez appeared on TV wearing a t-shirt calling then-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe a 'paramilitary'.

Unrelated to Calle 13's lyrics and politics, one can also question whether paying for a pop concert is really the best way for a city-owned television station to promote itself and serve the public. And, while censorship is a bad solution, particularly in the age of the Internet, that doesn't mean that the city should be in the business of promoting music which teaches questionable lessons.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Cultural Incongruity

This band, composed of indigenous people from Peru, performs often on Bogotá's plazas, such as here in Las Nieves. They play traditional music from the Andes - so why do they dress like Plains Indians from North America?

They do it for a simple reason: "We get more tips this way," a bandmember once told me.

He explained that a friend had shipped them the costumes.

Sadly, even native North Americans exploit these stereotypical images. I once visited an American Indian reservation in the Carolinas. In the souvenir shops - often owned by outsiders - they sold things decorated with images of the Plains Indians.

This little girl was moving to the music. 

Andean music CDs. I didn't see any Sioux music here. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Justin Bieber Leaves His Mark on Bogotá

Bieber painting Bogotá?

Teen hearthroub Justin Bieber thrilled thousands of adolescent girls in El Campin last night - and then left a more controversial mark on the city.

On his way down Calle 26, Bieber stopped his caravan of armored SUVs, pulled out spray cans and painted graffitis onto the northern wall of an underpass near the Bogotá City Council building. While Bieber and several companions spray painted, the singer's four bodyguards and several police car escorts waited and watched.

Bieber may be no Banksy, but his artwork drew attention when a CityTV van appeared and started filming. A police officer and a bodyguard approached the TV crew and ordered them, in English, to stop filming - which they refused to do. Bieber and company continued painting anyway.

Painting on public walls without a permit is a minor crime here, so it struck many as strange that the police protected Bieber while he did it. The family of Diego Becerra, a graffiti artist who was discovered painting a north Bogotá wall in 2011 and chased down and shot dead by police found the contrast unfair.

Becerro's father, Gustavo Trejos, called for "more fairness" and for graffiti artists to be respected and permitted to make their art.

This afternoon, other grafiteros had washed off and
painted over Bieber's work.

"In this city there are continuous abuses," Trejos told El Tiempo. "They see (the grafiteros), they take them to the police station, they hit them and in extreme cases such as our son, they are assassinated."

A city official called Bieber's paintings "in bad taste and illegal," and said the city would have given him permission if he'd only requested it. But if Bieber returns to Bogotá, city officials said, he'll have to to public service work to pay for his crime.

But officials might not have approved of all of Bieber's images, which included a frog and what looks like a marijuana leaf.

A non-fan ridiculed Bieber on the wall. 

By this afternoon, other grafiteros - who are apparently not Bielebers - had already erased and painted over Bieber's work.

This wasn't Bieber's only controversy in Bogotá. El Espectador reported that he later stopped at a Chapinero nightclub and that seven apparent prostitutes were seen getting into one of his SUVs.

Almost unbielebable.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours, which offers graffiti tours. 

Reggaeton al Parque?

This group of young people marched down Ave. Septima today to raise awareness about one of the most pressing and transcendental issues facing Bogotá today: The city lacks a Reggaeton al Parque festival to go along with the existing Rock al Parque and Salsa al Parque festivals.

For tomorrow, big protest marches are planned by students, unions and other leftist organizations. Perhaps they'll march to a reggaeton beat, tho.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Poet of the Bronx: Death, Drugs and Music

Max Heinz and his guitar. 

From Nazi Germany, to Chile to Bogotá's Bronx, the saga of Max Heinz, 'A Poet of the Bronx,' has to make one question human nature - or celebrate it.

Max Heinz's mother fled Germany just before World War II "on the last boat out." She wasn't Jewish, but her father "knew that Germany was going to lose the war" and wanted to rescue his daughter. A man of influence and connections, Max Heinz's grandfather also knew of the Nazis' abuses against Jews and others committed in the notorious Dachau concentration camp. He was able to free a Jewish man from Dachau and help his family escape Germany - but on the condition that they adopted his daughter, Max Heinz's mother. "He put them on the boat, with my mother as their daughter." That's how Max Heinz obtained his Jewish surname Loeb, "although I'm not of Jewish blood."

The family landed in Buenaventura. Eventually, Max Heinz's mother met and married a Chilean man, who took her to his homeland, where Max Heinz was born. The Chilean's own father was from Birmingham, Alabama. His parents spoke to him in English and German, and "I learned Spanish from the drivers and gardeners," Max Heinz recalls. The family returned to Colombia, where Max Heinz's father worked as a translator.

By his home on the edge
of the San Bernardino neighborhood. 

A talented swimmer, Max Heinz participated in national and international competitions, winning many medals, he says. Later, he got into Tae Kwon Do. Being trilingual got him work in universities and language academies. But when his mother died about 20 years ago, Max Heinz's life fell apart. He had dabbled in drugs, he says, but then he lost control.

"I said 'What the fuck! and I went out to the street to drink."

Max Heinz, now 54, lived first in El Cartucho, the notorious neighborhood since bulldozed and replaced by Parque Tercer Milenium, then in El Bronx and now in the equally rough San Bernardino neighborhood just south of Tercer Milenio.

He's witnessed killings committed according to those neighborhoods' pitiless codes of justice. Back in El Cartucho, where he recalls 3, 4 or 5 murders took place every day, the bosses, known as caciques, would hand a man a gun and order him to kill someone.

"If he did it, he'd get twenty bazuco cigarretes, if not he'd get killed himself. He had to do it."

Waiting to sing on a bus on Carrera Decima.

Max Heinz says he was never ordered to kill - thanks to a great degree to his musical ability. Instead, he played his guitar.

In the Bronx, he describes how drug sellers' ruthlessness with debtors. "They'll make the guy sit down, and give him an hour to pay. He can't go anywhere. All he can do is hope that someone who passes by will give him the money. Otherwise, they kill him."

Max Heinz, who seems quite a humanist, accepts this way of doing business.

"The dealers have to do it. Otherwise, the users would all take advantage of them.

"There's a code of honor."

Recently, he witnessed another musician gun a man down in San Bernardino. The corpse was tossed near a road. Nobody said anything. "Everybody is death, dumb and blind," says Max Heinz. The killer "must have had his reason. People don't kill for no reason."

He defends and respects El Bronx, even insisting that prostitution doesn't go on either there or the old Cartucho (against all other accounts I've heard), and that "women, children and animals are respected.

A street in the San Bernardino neighborhood. 

"It's a real paradise," he says of El Bronx, causing me to stare at him. "You can get everything there cheap. I bought a cellphone with television for only 7,000 pesos," he boasts, pulling it out and insisting it wasn't stolen. "Nobody else would buy it. All they want to spend their money on is drugs."

He consumes a cocktail of drugs himself, legal and illegal. But, as he describes it, they serve him as stimulants, keep him awake and enable him to play music. Just a few bits here and there, mixed into something else, he describes. One drug helps him control his consumption of another. He's got his self-maintenance formulas down pat, he says.

That was especially true back when he lived in El Bronx, where "they blasted the music until 6 a.m., shut down for a bit, and then started again."

Teaching English in La Candelaria. 

Still, his almost frenzied grin and rachety movements and speech give away that he's under the influence of something - or needs something.

For the past few months he's taught English in a foundation for poor children in La Candelaria. He credits that experience with helping him reduce the consumption of the one drug which he says was hurting him - vodka.

"I've cut down from two bottles a day to a half a bottle."

Along the way, Max Heinz has been profiled in the now-defunct 'Colombian Post,' which called him 'A Minstrel of Bogotá' and a few years ago in Cromos magazine, which baptized him a 'Poet of the Bronx.' He carries the article proudly in his pocket. Max Heinz says he's lived with six women and fathered nine children.

With students of English. 

Max Heinz seems happy, or at least generally satisfied. He teaches languages, sometimes as a volunteer, with energy and enthusiasm. "Repetition is the key," he explains.

And he earns his bread and butter singing on public buses. He's written 118 songs, but says that evangelical churches have stolen some of them. On buses, only fast ballads will do - he's got only a few minutes for his show, and a bolero would put the passengers to sleep.

"I've got to get on and do my show in two minutes and thirty seconds. I don't beg. I don't talk shit.

"I prefer singing to the poor. They give you coins and shake your hand. The rich just reach out and drop the coins into your hand."

But singing to bus passengers isn't easy: "They're tired. They've had a bad day. And they didn't ask you to sing. You've got to sing well. Otherwise, you make better money just begging."

But Max Heinz declined to sing for me. His guitar strings needed changing, he said.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Los Chincheros de la Humildad

During our bike tours we often meet these boys in the Santa Fe neighborhood, where they sing an anti-violence rap song. Kevin, on the left, usually does the singing, while others contribute percussion noises. Sometimes, one of them appears, sometimes two, sometimes four. Their rap group is named "Los Chincheros de la Humildad," and they're planning on making a CD.

"Queremos paz. Nada de violencia!"

"We want peace. Nothing of violence!"

The song, which they wrote themselves, goes on to talk about violence and murder, homeless women and Colombia's armed conflict. See them perform here.

But only recently have I discovered what tough lives these boys have, and how conditions are stacked against them.

Both of these boys, Kevin and Arly, have grown up without their fathers. In fact, both of their fathers are now in prison, one for not paying child support. Kevin doesn't have a mother, either, because she was murdered several years ago in this same neighborhood. Now, he lives with his grandmother, who works as a housecleaner. However, recently she injured her leg when a motorcycle almost hit her and sped off. Now, she can't work.

I hope that in a few years these boys are still doing something constructive and creative. But, knowing how adverse their lives are, it's easy to see how they could fall into crime.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours