Future Jazz

Posted 12:24 PM by Douglas
Hello. My name is Douglas Arellanes. Welcome to my blog.

I'm an American who lives in Prague, Czech Republic and have been there for ten years. I'm a club DJ, used to be an Internet guru (started a portal, worked for a telecom and ran its portal, owned an NGO doing software research and development and media activism for open source software. I'm the father of Josefina (21 months) and husband of Anicka (pronounced AN-eech-ka). I speak Czech, and thanks to copious viewing of Telemundo, my Spanish is coming back.

I don't know what easy classification to use anymore. So hopefully I'll get to one so that people will know how to buttonhole me.

This blog will cover my interests, which is an easy way to say it'll be all over the board. Music - mostly future jazz (check out
Compost Records, tech stuff, media, culture jamming, and what have you.

OK. So I'm back in California after about a year away. I've just gotten here a few days ago from Prague, which is where I live. Getting back into the swing of things has been easier than I thought. When I was preparing for this trip, I was expecting big culture shock, especially after 9/11. It hasn't really been that way at all, and aside from all the flags around things seem to be the same as they ever were, for better and worse.

Seeing as everybody has their own 9/11 story, here's mine. I was in Copenhagen on a business trip when I got word of the attacks via an SMS from Kip Bauersfeld saying "turn on CNN now." As I was in meetings all day, I couldn't. But his SMS messages kept getting more and more gruesome. My boss was an American expat living in Denmark, and his mood also turned more and more somber as the details filtered in. He had sisters in the trouble spots: one at the Pentagon (she was OK), one is a DC-area firefighter and one lives in lower Manhattan.

Being an expat has its good and bad sides, and one of these is your utter reliance on communications links to keep you close. In our case, phone connections to the US that day were spotty, which led to more anxiety on our side. By the time we got to my hotel room (closest place to the office with CNN), the case of Budvar I brought him was left untouched. He left with a big cloud over his head.

I eventually walked around in a daze, trying to find a place to eat. I went to the most expensive one I could find (knowing prices in Copenhagen, that's saying something), bought a bottle of their most expensive wine, and drank it alone. Paid with the company card (thanks, TeleDanmark!) and on the way out happened on a spontaneous gathering on the square in front of Tivoli, where people handed me an American flag.

Being the wary expat I am, I safely tucked it away in my coat pocket.