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dimanche 29 février 2004
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Noting my tastes, my friend Stuart recently returned from England and thrust his copy of 'We' into my hand to fill one of the holes in my reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's short novel, written in the immediate aftermath of Russia's Bolshevik revolution, is the grandfather of all 20th-century science fiction dystopias and remains immensely readable almost 83 years after he penned it.
"A dystopia is any society considered to be undesirable, for any of a number of reasons. The term was coined as a converse to a Utopia, and is most usually used to refer to a fictional (often near-future) society where current social trends are taken to nightmarish extremes," the superb Wikipedia informs us.
The ordinary narrator of 'We' is D-503, a contented Number in the perfect OneState, whose citizens live and work their mathematically ordered 26th-century existences under the benevolent rule of the 'Benefactor', watched over by the Guardians.
Nobody has or needs names in OneState, a monumental and proud social collective living in glass and steel buildings protected from the chaos of an inhuman, natural world which lies beyond the Green Wall, constructed in the aftermath of a devastating 200 Years War.
D-503, like Zamyatin himself, is a mathematician and engineer, the builder of "the glass, the electric, the fire-breathing INTEGRAL," a spaceship due for imminent lift-off "to place the beneficial yoke of reason round the necks of the unknown beings who inhabit other planets -- still living, it may be, in the primitive state known as freedom."
This tightly written tale -- not much more than 200 pages long in Clarence Brown's 1993 translation published in Penguin Twentieth Century Classics -- is hard to read with a fresh eye when you come to it after digesting the dystopian novels and films it directly inspired or has influenced, from George Orwell's '1984' to Kurt Wimmer's 'Equilibrium' (2002; IMDb, reviewed last July).
While 'We' retains all its relevance when it comes to humanity's pursuit of happiness and as a satirical critique of planning for a perfect society, it is also, as Brown points out in an admirable and witty introduction, very much a work of its time.
"I suddenly recalled," D-503 notes in his 'Record Two', "a picture in the museum: one of the avenues they had back then, after twenty centuries -- a stunningly garish, mixed-up crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colours, birds . . . And they say it was really like that. It could have been like that. It all struck me as so unlikely, so idiotic, that I couldn't help it, I burst out laughing.
And suddenly there was an echo, laughter, from the right. I turned. Before my eyes were teeth -- white, uncommonly white, sharp teeth -- and a woman's face that I didn't know.
'I'm sorry,' she said, 'but the way you were looking at everything, it was inspired, as if you were some god out of myth on the seventh day of creation. I think you believe you created me, too -- you and nobody else. I'm very flattered.'
All this with a straight face."
D-503 gets confused from this very first encounter with I-330. D-503 is destined to become totally infatuated with I-330. D-503 is soon even going to need sick notes so he can see I-330 outside his allocated Personal Hours and her part in his Table of Sex Days.
His own brief notes for unknown readers are already becoming sick, disjointed.
And I-330 is dangerous, she teases D-503's previously dormant imagination, erupts into his dreams. I-330 is a rebel. Worse, she is not alone and she has designs on D-503 and the INTEGRAL.
While Zamyatin's Numbers are thinly developed as characters, serving mainly as vehicles for ideas, I-330 is a striking creation from a Russian naval engineer who served in Britain for two years during World War I. He must have assimilated notions of the women's liberation movement taking off in England's rigid post-Victorian society before returning to a homeland where he was supportive of the Marxist revolution.
I-330 is a courageous, free-thinking, sexually adventurous leader and breaker of barriers. She is viscerally opposed to the workings of the Benefactor, in whom it is much easier to see Lenin and notions of perfectibility through scientific socialism than the Big Brother of '1984'.
Orwell, and Aldous Huxley in 'Brave New World', were respectively writing just after (1948) and before (1931) the terrifying manifestations of a new totalitarianism and a global confrontation of ideologies in the last century's total war.
From this perspective, I found 'We' far less of a political novel than those it has inspired. Unlike some of those offspring, OneState is not evidently derived from any one nation of Zamyatin's day, but the parallels with the regulated lives many of us live in the big cities of today's "developed world" become more pertinent with each passing decade as nature is driven out of the metropolis.
Zamyatin wrote the book as no enemy of the Soviet State, though it was swiftly perceived that way and went unpublished in any faithful rendition of his original text in Russia itself until 1988, 57 years after Stalin allowed him in exile in Paris, disabused by the absence of creative outlets and the conformity of Soviet thought.
'We' is instead an entertaining, sometimes funny and seminal work of science fiction, where the core of social satire lies in a simple arithmetical challenge I-330 puts to D-503 as the tale nears its climax.
Zamyatin's biographers tell us he much admired another of the first great "sci-fi writers", H.G. Wells, whose influence is evident, and the naïf D-503 also has a little in common with Voltaire's wide-eyed Candide until he finds himself increasingly distanced from a society founded on a scientific ideal.
In our 21st-century societies, scientific thinking has to many minds dethroned traditional religious notions. Developments in medicine and nanotechnology have given a new twist to the concept of human perfectibility as a taming of the genetic "freedom" exercised in the evolution of the species to its current point.
I found 'We' a particularly stimulating read in the immediate wake of some catching up on current thinking in genetics and biology, most especially the conclusion that any further evolution of Homo sapiens -- if we avoid rendering our world uninhabitable first -- will be determined primarily by our technologies, medical science and socio-cultural achievements.
Beyond the Marxist model Zamyatin adopted, beyond the manic consumer capitalism of our day, the concepts of utopia and dystopia have assumed a new relevance, drawing on developments scarcely conceivable until they began happening in the latter half of the 20th century.
According to the cover of the British edition, one of my blogheroines, the wide-ranging writer Ursula K. Le Guin (her site), described 'We' as "the best single work of science fiction yet written". Ever wary of superlatives, I'd simply rate it among the best SF books I've yet read. If this were to be an essay of the order of Patrick Parrinder's 'Imagining the Future: Zamyatin and Wells' (Science Fiction Studies, 1973), I would digress into a similar piece contrasting 'We' with the book I lent Stuart in exchange, Le Guin's own 'The Dispossessed' (1974).
In that profoundly influential novel of ideas, much richer in character, the physicist hero Shevek declares:
"Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go and unbuild walls."
With that, he could be Zamyatin speaking.
Brown, in explaining the chequered history of 'We', its various renditions, and the need for his new translation, says that Zamyatin regarded the book -- which some might describe as a mere "novella" alongside the hefty, often multi-volume tomes of contemporary science fiction -- as his most light-hearted and most serious work.
It's a light and swift read, that's for sure. But it delivers a subtle and serious message of the kind you could be thinking about for months.
7:05:51 PM link 
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samedi 28 février 2004
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Though this log didn't take part in Grey Tuesday, the blogosphere's "defiance of the music industry's copyright control" (Wired) this week had my wholehearted support.
There's no doubt that small record stores and many people who work in the music business are seeing the raw end of ongoing mega-deals and the slow slaughter of the single by technology.
"There's never been a better time to be in the music industry? Try telling that to the thousands of music workers who have been laid off over the past couple of years. Universal slashed its workforce by 11% last year. Tower Records filed for bankruptcy in the US two weeks ago."
"But," the same 'Second Sight' (Guardian) story by Sean Dodson reports, "with album sales rising and the phenomenal growth of ringtones and legal downloads, plus record-breaking years for merchandising and publishing rights, it seems the death of the music industry has been greatly exaggerated (...)
"It also looks as if digital downloads are the saviour of the industry rather than their destroyer."
I spotted that at Casper's 'Chromatic Musings': the blog of a broad-minded bass player who doesn't worry any more than I do that "talking about music is like dancing about architecture". (Alan Scott had a lively time trying to track down who said that first.)
10:30:32 PM link
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Matroshka, "a mock-human of natural bone, simulated organs and synthetic skin, was installed on the outside of the [International Space] Station's Russian Zvezda module during a spacewalk today by Expedition 8 crewmembers Michael Foale and Alexander Kaleri. Today's spacewalk [was] the first time the ISS will be left unattended during an EVA.
Rigged with numerous radiation detectors both inside and out, the dummy will spend a year on the space station's surface before being returned to Earth," Tariq Malik writes for 'Space.com'.
That comes via "the open-the-pod-bay-doors-hal dept." at Slashdot.
What with tests like this, the priority restored to the Mars mission and the latest dismal reports on climate change, you might sense a distinct "Stop the world, I want to get off" chill in the air.
Is there anything we need to be told?
9:01:01 PM link
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I gave up reading newspapers years ago. Monthly magazines, books and the Web are more than enough to keep me informed.
On that basis, the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) strikes me as an excellent initiative.
It's a pleasingly international offshoot of Rotten Tomatoes, which has long been an indispensable meta-resource for movie reviews. Both get a great deal on to one well-edited page.
The OFCS has stringent membership conditions to ensure that you don't waste your time reading badly written, ill-informed opinions of the kind a simple Google search inevitably turns up.
"Writers who wish to apply must maintain an annual online publication quota of at least 50 professional-level reviews, no less than 400 words per review, in order to be eligible for consideration," for starters (About the OFCS).
If you're a film buff, this is a site to bookmark, along with those tomatoes and the invaluable Internet Movie Database.
"Though their readership is growing, online film critics remain at the bottom of the movie-publicity food chain -- far below daily newspaper critics, magazine writers and broadcast reporters. They are the last to be invited for preview screenings, are seldom quoted in movie ads and remain largely off the radar for Hollywood studios."
But in today's article at Wired, Jason Silverman goes on to explain that 'The Invasion of the Web Film Critics' has begun to change all that.
8:36:03 PM link
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The screenshot isn't great, but it gives you an idea of how the Kid's blog comes out if you search for belcatja at Kartoo (.com).
This French invention, both fun and practical,
"provides a graphical look at meta search results, eschewing the traditional list format to instead map your matches via colorful balls and visual word links. It's definitely not for a mass audience and drew only 3 percent of the winner vote. Most will probably be confused by it, but a few may love the interface. We felt it deserved an honorable mention this year."
That's what Search Engine Watch thought of it in their awards for 2002, though I don't see why they reckon it could confuse most people.
It makes for a great change from Google and you can count me among those who love its interface and the way it works, using Flash technology.
I discovered it via 'A vos Mac!' (Fr).
The founders, Laurent and Nicolas Baleydier (Kartoo.net), work out of Clermont-Ferrand. Their invention is, so far, especially friendly to Microsoft, Linux and Unix; there's no indication that you'll be able to grab the full works, including a Kartoo toolbar, for Mac.
Never mind.
Without Kartoo, I'd not have found some commendable thoughts from web designer D. Keith Robinson:
"Lately I’ve been posting about the bad things I see every day on the Web. I do this to help raise awareness and hopefully effect positive changes. The Web is perhaps the greatest invention (if you could call it that) during my lifetime. It has so much potential and brings boundless opportunity to make the world a better place in so many ways, but it’s got problems. Big ones. Problems that need to be addressed.
Many people don’t respect the Web’s potential." (Read more on 'The Web and the Good Things' at Asterisk).
Keith's ideas about the use and abuse of the Web came to my attention via InfoDesign, which merits immediate addition to my blogroll and looks like a place of guaranteed interest to anybody with a site of their own.
1:13:56 PM link
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vendredi 27 février 2004
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Now I see why so few blogs I know are bothering with politics outside the United States.
An awful lot of people are scribbling about that film.
The one I don't currently plan to see.
There's talk of another one:
"We here at the Museum Of Stupidity are hard at work on our pitch for Sodom and Gomorrah. No context. No explanation as to why this is happening. Just an hour of raw, graphic, demented sex in the streets, followed by God's bloody wrath, as the city collapses around them, crushing them, impaling them, causing their eyeballs to explode from their heads, and more arterial spray than the last five Takashi Miike movies." (Museum of Stupidity)
10:18:51 PM link
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My head was under the shower nozzle when Clare Short again turned her flame-thrower on her "boss" about bugging Kofi Annan, so I misheard the gist until I got to the Factory, where we learned this afternoon how "Blair resists calls to come clean on UN spying allegations" (AFP/Yahoo).
Am I surprised? Of course not. Were you?
There was a pretty good piece today on 'How Britain and the US listen to the rest of the world' (The Guardian).
The only serious remark I have to make about this "revelation" is that I'm struck by how fast this kind of story comes to light in today's democracies, such as they are, compared with just two or three years ago. At this rate, investigative journalists, already an endangered species, may face total extinction.
The blogosphere was unusually silent, as far as I can see, apart from the dependable Scott Ort:
"Spy Tapes of Annan Show No Evidence of 'United' Nations
(2004-02-26) -- Secretly-taped conversations involving U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan reveal no evidence of the so-called 'united' nations that Mr. Annan 'hyped' in the run up to the Iraq war, according to a former British cabinet secretary who has read the transcripts" (more at Scrappleface).
And this:
"Blair: Bugging UN 'essential' for safety of Britain
(...) Mr Blair went on to say that some members of the UN were 'dangerous', as had been shown by Iraq. 'These people invade sovereign countries – start wars, which cost thousands of lives and devastate nations – at their whim,' he said. 'They are very dangerous, and we have to know what they are doing.' When asked to confirm if he meant the United States, he declined to comment on 'specific cases' (...)" (from Deadbrain).
9:43:36 PM link
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jeudi 26 février 2004
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"The last index of your web site (...) completed two seconds ago. It took four minutes to crawl 285 pages and index 285 pages containing 637,804 words for a total of 13,457,492 bytes. 32,459 word endings, 0 synonyms, 21,185 sound-alike words, and 15 excluded words were included in the index."
So, the Atomz machinery told me this morning after I logged in and updated this place's search engine, 'taliesin's log' now runs to 285 pages and 637,804 words, with astonishingly few "dead links" (just a small handful).
The first word written here was "Solaris".
Why do I bore the Faithful 5 ¾ with such facts and statistics?
Because, two days late -- which is just what I did with my poor Mum last week, after leaving myself a reminder of the wrong date -- I've remembered a birthday.
This experiment began, with a very different format, on February 24, 2003, has since been through three radical overhauls of the layout and has seen its subject matter take many unplanned directions.
Heartfelt thanks to everybody who has helped me along with ideas and insults, protests and plaudits, contributions and corrections, blog art and brickbats. There have been so many of you, on every continent except Antarctica.
I shan't be taking a crate of champagne into the Factory. Not after what Sam did to my head at the Canteen, when instead of the drop or three just for taste I expect with my occasional Coupe Pernety, he almost drowned yesterday's variant on this delicious dessert in vodka.
Except in cough mixture, virtually no alcohol has passed my lips since August 1997, so the effect of Sam's stunt was swift and a shock to my system.
But there'll be fine chocolate on the house for all comers if I make it quickly to Monoprix before diving into the Métro.
11:02:26 AM link
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mercredi 25 février 2004
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"Aaron, understandably reticent to be in the same room while I used the world's most luxurious masturbatory device, returned to take a few posed shots. 'Um . . . what's it feel like?' he said, using his camera primarily to avoid making eye contact. I gave Karen a few hard pumps to illustrate. 'Y'know what?' he said, taking shots as he backed toward the door. 'You can tell me later.'"
This is truly appalling, outrageously expensive and ... well, I was going to say "exclusively adult".
Except that 'I Did It for Science: Sex Doll', has a creepy fascination decidedly not for the children (via Cruel Site of the Day) and stretches even my definition of adult behaviour.
It's rare that I lose the nerve to beg, borrow or steal pictures.
7:58:55 PM link
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"The highly anticipated version 2.0 of the GIMP, due out next month, will run under Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, and preview versions are now available for all three platforms."
GraphicConverter usually does it for me.
But the GIMP is free, open source and on my machine.
NewsForge previews what's in the pipeline.
7:31:58 PM link
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It's good to see the weekend Pentagon weather report from the 'Observer' doing the rounds of the media and the blogosphere.
The story of potential catastrophe by climate change gave the usually tedious France Soir the wherewithal for a front-page splash yesterday, with a double-spread inside. 'Tomorrow ... the Apocalypse' read the headline.
"Quand ce ne sont pas les terroristes, c'est la météo qui s'y met" ("When it's not terrorists, it's the weather that sets about it"), comments Padawan at 'Brain Not Found' (Fr), briefly giving the gist of the story.
Padawan also links, however, to a different account of the report at the 'Oakland Tribune'. While Ian Hoffman goes straight to source to debunk the "dire look at a hypothetical hothouse world" in that paper, he concludes:
"At the same time, it might be a mistake to think the Bush administration will embrace predictions of climate change from the Pentagon more than it has from the EPA, the United Nations, the National Academy of Sciences and the world's major scientific societies."
Some took a similar line with the second global disaster warning of the week, since "many astronomers did not agree that waking up President Bush would have been wise", the Beeb notes in a tale about a "potential asteroid strike last month" ('Earth almost put on impact alert' at BBC science).
At this rate, 2004 is looking set to become the year when even mega-budget Hollywood productions outflank the headlines.
This, on reflection, is scarcely surprising, since every four years, US politics is more than ever about theatre than policy, which is something the rest of us have to endure.
When it comes to scientific policy, though, I've been digging around to find out where the expert apologists for not bothering to wake up the White House hang out.
The Marshall Institute seems like a good place to start.
Or an alarmingly disconcerting one, depending on your viewpoint.
The Pentagon report by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall dates back to October 2003 and began with the following caveat:
"The purpose of this report is to imagine the unthinkable – to push the boundaries of current research on climate change so we may better understand the potential implications on United States national security.
We have interviewed leading climate change scientists, conducted additional research, and reviewed several iterations of the scenario with these experts. The scientists support this project, but caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways. First, they suggest the occurrences we outline would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than globally. Second, they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller.
We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately."
For those with the curiosity, time and patience to assess the whole thing for themselves, Greenpeace (another write-up) has put it online.
The 22-page .pdf document can be downloaded here (916 KB). Thanks, Gina, for the link to the link.
6:43:27 PM link
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"Ma boulangerie a gagné le titre de la meilleure baguette de Paris 2004, et c'est vrai elle est délicieuse ce matin..."
 If Jean-Michel is going to do his 09h09 pictures just three or four doors down the street, he'll have to put up with my pinching one.
I'll now be keeping my eyes open for this guy and his sneaky camera on the rare occasions I'm out of my pyjamas and out of doors by nine-oh-nine in the morning.
But most of J-M's daily snaps at that hour are of him, with a brief comment also translated into English.
I'll be dropping by our bakery after lunch for the daily special I last night asked the lasses to set aside for me. Like the owners of an increasing number of eateries in the quartier Sam now gets "the best baguettes in Paris" from this recent arrival on Losserand Street for his clients at the Canteen.
I found J-M, who probably knows me on sight too, during further forays into this country's blogosphere, which led last night to several of the promised additions to the blogroll for the French-speaking readers who get bored with me.
A noteworthy feature of some of the French places I visit is an emphasis on visuals rather than text, along with some excellent blog design.
People into photography may also still have Buzznet to discover. This place offers photobloggers and admirers entry into a wide range of communities, including a Paris one.
1:01:43 PM link
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mardi 24 février 2004
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"How are you?" we politely say to each other, and heaven help those who give a long and straight answer.
The truth is not always what we want to hear.
But so many people have now asked me, with unfeigned interest, what happened to the Wildcat that I maybe I really should tell.
The Wildcat herself has been among those curious to know what's been going on during all the "intensive sessions" with Dr F., the psychotherapist expert in psychosomatic medicine.
Suddenly I find myself shy on both fronts!
The Faithful 5 ¾ will have already have read that the Wildcat has prowled back into my life, but you'll also have noticed an absence of flowers since the turn of the year.
After all, it was "just friends" the woman proved really to want in the end, and that's how it became. I shall, however, make no such arrangements with the next thief of my heart -- that's for sure.
So we've had some long chats, but instead of 'phoning me every night as she did for months -- and having me call her back -- the Wildcat's taken to writing, not to me, but really writing: brave and creative work which she finds hard going, but which I strongly encourage, since she's good at it.
She's read long extracts to me, taken my "constructive criticism" with resilience, and mailed me none of it yet. Partly, perhaps, because she still doesn't quite trust me not to publish it. She might have a point.
Something I learned on settling this side of the Channel, fuelled by a typically "British" blend of Mediterranean, Celtic and Saxon but apparently predominantly Norman -- or Viking -- blood (that's as much as my tribe has been able to trace of its origins), was that one old French "meaning" of my paternal name meant somebody who's deceitful.
Dr F., however, left little room for evasion or self-deception in our journey to the core of the Condition that took up so much blogspace last year.
It's difficult to write what happened during our frequent 45-minute encounters. The digging has led to the dissection and inspection of many unexpected parts, the better to put them all together again in an equally surprising way.
Why the past tense?
Well, we reckon something is over, finished.
We've agreed to another meeting in a few weeks, but the last left me in a very different place from the one I'd expected when we started.
This is where the psychology might be of some interest to others.
Cutting short the long tale already told -- and simplifying a little at the expense of the purely physical causes of the Condition -- we worked on the hypothesis that my guts fell apart roughly nine months as a bodily manifestation of a disintegrated mind on the edge of the breakdown I never had.
The explored causes were manifold, but included severe stress, massive information overload, the repression of whole and essential facets of my personality since adolescence, and a capacity for empathy with other people which was both a useful quality and a serious setback.
"Your barriers," the Wildcat once said, "aren't in the same place as mine."
Once Dr F. had got the preliminaries out of the way, she began talking about barriers and how it was conceivable that I didn't have enough of them.
So we started out from the notion that I was only too well socially integrated, rather than cut off from other people, but needed to develop "affective", or emotional, defence mechanisms in place of the "gut reaction" to events, colleagues and friends, and to ideas and demands I refuse to accept -- or swallow.
There was no end to analogies between food, tastes, congestion, digestion, expulsion and our mental processes.
The task of analysing all this was often funny as well as hard work.
During our most recent session, it came to me that where I'd thought we were going to work on sorting out new barriers and limits, we'd instead taken a host of them down.
I hope I'm being clear, because writing rationally about the often unconscious and non-intellectual things that came to light seems semi-contradictory.
Sex, for instance, is nothing like words about sex.
Music is a language quite different from writing abut music.
And so on.
When I said that I felt as if I had, in a process of integrating bits and pieces of my identity (whatever that is), found I had barriers, but completely natural ones, and had no desire to make any artificial ones, Dr F. simply smiled and told me she didn't think we needed to see each other again any time soon.
She didn't say "You're cured" or anything absurd like that.
She's far too bright to suggest that I've got anywhere but the end of one phase and the beginning of another in a lifelong process.
But the rest, right now, is I believe up to me.
That's it, really. That's how I am and where I'm at now.
Since that last meeting with the psychotherapist, which I've "digested" as slowly as ever but thoroughly, I've noticed three things. I've become more curious about other people and their "workings" than ever. For the first time in years, I've just lived through a new moon time of the month without going into a downer or temporarily losing my sense of humour.
And women seem to have started looking at me -- and teasing me sometimes -- in ways I've never been accustomed to (or at least noticed) before.
That last is, of course, a particularly interesting development...
I even know exactly what it feels like to be "mentally undressed" by somebody else. And, as a frequent practioner of that art, I'm relieved to find that it doesn't always feel so bad. On the contrary! No empathy required.
8:56:32 PM link
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lundi 23 février 2004
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"Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer [its story], warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world."
Says who?
Says the Pentagon, says The Observer (via a discussion in a forum at Ars Technica).
Don't you love 'em?
There's more from the Factory (via Yahoo AFP).
This isn't far from 'The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare' (Fortune).
Oh well.
Between now and that November election I can't wait for, at least we get 'The Day after Tomorrow'.
12:06:56 AM link
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dimanche 22 février 2004
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The Kid has done me a very good turn.
The latest issue of 'Trax' (via Info-Presse (Fr.; no site of its own) disturbingly points out that the only too venerable 'Rolling Stone' got buried under a thick carpet of moss with its list of the '500 Greatest Albums Ever Made' (Rhino Records).
There's not one record in the US magazine's top 20 which won't be at least 13 years old in 2004! Reading on, I see that much of the rest of the list is no better.
So what happened? Did good music suddenly stop? Or did the "array of musicians, critics, and influential industry figures" polled by Rolling Stone simply exclude anybody under the age of, say, 25?
I'm surprised to find that of all 500 albums listed, I still own precisely three, with five near-misses by the same artists and about a dozen others long since sold or given away.
Yet I've bought hundreds of "non-classical" records in my time.
It's nice to learn how marginal you are!
 The Kid, along with friend François, a few other amateur or pro musicians (and magazines like 'Trax', 'musiques WORLD destinations...' and 'les Inrocks') have been unwittingly filling in much of a decade-long gap in my musical "culture", an ongoing process often pursued online on the strength of leads they've given me.
So I've discovered that much more of what the Kid listens to is very good music, by my own eclectic standards, than I reckoned a few months' back when my inconsiderate ears were filtering it all down to a diet of tediously repetitive heavy metal without really listening. Mea culpa.
With luck, this is a favour I'll be able to return, opening the Kid's ears to a few of the things that are going down today outside her orbit.
She claims, for instance, that she doesn't like contemporary jazz or a lot of world music, only to say that she really likes some of the stuff I'm listening to ... so long as I don't warn her what it "is" by sticking a genre label up front.
It's precisely such labels, trends, and above all the pseudo-cultured "sacredness" of the classical concert hall that Christopher Small opposed so strongly, along with a Marxist-influenced critique of three or four centuries of "Western classical music", comparing it with Oriental and African music-making, when I interviewed him about 'Music, Society, Education' in 1977.
The people at Amazon UK dug out a copy to replace the one I long ago had (though it took them a month longer than the "1 to 2 weeks" mentioned on their site). Since it's not on my immediate list for re-reading, I've lent it to a musician friend, who reassures me that Small's then seminal ideas haven't dated a jot.
I've already said (on December 16) that I have hopes of meeting the man again and finding out what he's thinking today. It's one of many good reasons to go to Barcelona.
Maybe he rejoices to hear the proliferation of easily available musics since he wrote that book and the way modern technology, computer programmes and the total overhaul under way in the record industry are making creativity that much easier.
This is not to say that I like everything going on nowadays. Far from it. In the past couple of weeks, I've been using the iPod to sample dozens of tracks that have made various people's "best of" lists in the past year.
Then I trashed what I found unoriginal and boring, to make space for more, and am down to a shortlist of around 30.
But don't be surprised in weeks and months to come to find a greying old wolf like me cheerfully writing about music probably more familiar to the ears of our offspring than most of us in our 40s and upwards.
Any notion that the music we liked in our youth was so much better than today's has long since been banished from my brain.
A baker's half-dozen from that (growing) shortlist might include:
10:05:34 PM link
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It's impossible, much as I'd like to oblige.
Since summer I've tried to make time for long reviews of each book and film that's seized my imagination (and one or two which didn't, though much praised elsewhere), but doing this any more will become a full-time job.
So I'll return to much briefer write-ups on occasion. If reviewing becomes a chore for me, it'll certainly be a bore for you!
The first "casualty" is 'Zodiac' (Arrow paperback, 2001) -- since I've been reading Neal Stephenson's work backwards.
The alarming tale of Sangamon Taylor, an environmental warrior who takes on an industrial giant polluting Boston harbour, is again too broad in its scope simply to be labelled SF.
With his customary verve, fast-paced action and considerable wit -- very few books make me laugh out loud as this could -- Stephenson works lessons in biology, chemistry and the art of navigating a high-powered Zodiac in pitch darkness, storms and the blinding glare of floodlights into a first-rate ecological thriller.
The cast includes some dangerous nutters and likeable eccentrics as well as the FBI, one or two friends Taylor is pretty lucky to have, and plenty of people out to silence him permanently, including young Satanist angel-dust heads.
This was the first Stephenson novel I've read where he managed to write a perfectly satisfactory end as well as a beginning and a middle.
He finishes his opening acknowledgements with thanks to a woman who "read the manuscript and told me that the main character was an asshole -- confirming that I was on the right track."
If Stephenson's anywhere close to the mark with his speculative look at what nasty industrialists could do to the seas with the things they dump in them -- and I'm sure he is -- then the world direly needs clever assholes like Sangamon Taylor.
Reading 'Zodiac' coincided, usefully, with my completion on my online Safari bookshelf of all I wanted from 'Nanotechnology: a Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea' (Prentice Hall PTR, 2002) by Mark and Daniel Ratner.
This book kept the promise of its title perfectly, notably providing a highly readable and clear non-scientist's guide to the science underlying nano before getting down to a grand tour of the technology in action and potential, in domains ranging from medicine to electronics.
I didn't read it all -- that's partly the point of the Safari bookshelf, plus the ability to download particularly interesting chapters as .pdf files to keep for future reference -- but would strongly recommend it.
At Amazon, this book alone would cost me the equivalent of my monthly subscription to the bookshelf, where I can have up to 10 titles on the go under the option I've selected.
Studying on-screen can be tough on the eyes, but I'm learning to pace myself. The O'Reilly way of doing it is astonishing value for money.
8:16:46 PM link
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samedi 21 février 2004
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"Dent du Midi (what a beautiful name!) is an application that allows you to convert MIDI files into GarageBand loops or tracks. Enjoy,"
Heli recommends (at 'Heaven and Hell').
While I've not yet tried GarageBand, touted by Apple (iLife) as "the easiest way to create, perform and record your own music whether you’re an accomplished player or just wish you were a rock star," everybody else with a Mac, a log and an ear to music has been raving about it.
All that has stopped me getting my own hands on GarageBand was the lack of the required DVD player and time, and the first obstacle has been overcome.
Scarcely was it released last month before "NeutrixX" was reproaching others in a MacMusic forum entry:
"I don't think you guys really understand how big of a deal GarageBand is (and I mean to paid musicians whom already own pro audio software). I produce downtempo electro-acoustic psychedelic (bassy breaks stuff) tracks for a local label with [expensive programmes] Reason, Ableton Live and Logic, but none are as sweet (or should I say organic?) looking as GarageBand for recording and editing tracks (Reason actually looks quite good for a synth/sampler/effects rack: yet visually lacks when one is editing within the track mode).
Why should I even mention to you how good looking GarageBand is? Why you say? Simple. If it excites me to work with a good looking piece of software - which I admit - it does very much (appealing to my eye - with incredible ease of use and superior workflow), it will inevitably inspire my work. And if it inspires my work, in any sort of creative way, I would gladly pay far more than the small price of $49 for it!"
That's telling 'em.
Apart from MacMusic, where there are now GarageBand reports and discussions aplenty for pros and amateurs alike, Apple's evidently astounding offering has got a host of newer sites going.
GarageBand, which is out "to redefine how music is discovered and promoted", is not one of them, but likes the technology:
"'We have tremendous respect for Apple's vision and leadership in the digital music space,' said Ali Partovi, CEO of GarageBand.com [Jan 7 press release]. 'We've always shared their goal of empowering musicians, and today we're excited to share with them our name. Now, any musician can create music on Apple's state-of-the-art GarageBand software and promote their recordings on GarageBand.com's award-winning web services.'"
Getting inside Apple's new device, Andy Dietrich provided the magnificently comprehensive review at Ars Technica I've learned to appreciate from that site.
MacBand is, among other things, an online way of sharing music made with GarageBand, where songs and loops are made available under a non-commercial, share-alike Creative Commons licence.
MacJams, another user community, offers plenty of listening -- with, say, iTunes or QuickTime -- and seeks contributions, as well as being generous with tutorials, such as yesterday's 'Using Native Instruments' software synths with Apple GarageBand' (MacJams).
Jean Burgess's blog points to other such sites. In his entry on 'GarageBand: Usability vs. Hackability' at 'creativity/machine', this Australian cultural studies and new media student and non-Mac owner triggered one of those comments:
"GarageBand will be the litmus test for the long proclaimed creative superiority of the Apple client base: Will drag and drop music made by the musically unskilled with a Mac be any different than drag and drop music made by the musically unskilled with a PC?"
That came from Kaden, who lives at 'eccentric genius' (skippable Flash intro).
10:10:22 PM link
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Africa was busy enough for an otherwise quiet Saturday to give me no fewer than six good stories to signal to the Factory's clients on the 1600 GMT news advisory (these are kind of "best of" and big story round-ups news agencies put out every few hours as daylight works its way through the world's time zones).
For those who persist in telling me I should write another novel as well, pay heed to the 'Nobbly' view at 'Words with Wings':
"You'll be pleased to know that yesterday I came up with an excellent first sentence for my novel. This is very pleasing, and it has only taken eighteen months."
"Yes," said Barry, when I regaled colleagues with that little gem. "And then some copy editor got his hands on it."
"Some copy editor ruined one of my best intros," he added. "I had to write a piece about the farm outside the Vatican. I started it: 'Yes, there is a papal bull.' But this fellow told me that might offend Catholics.
'How would you know?' I asked him. 'You're a Jew.'"
Some stories I have to set on one side for BJ. Nothing inspires him more than the kind of news that today leaked out of one of Africa's most squalid tropical dictatorships, the rarely reported and suddenly oil-rich former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea. This hot spot has since 1979 been in the hands of a thug named Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his squabbling family. Obiang Nguema overthrew and then executed his uncle to get his clutches on the place.
All is now less well than ever.
Few papers tomorrow will probably bother to report that it's emerged that dozens of people, including senior army officers, have been on trial behind closed doors since Tuesday.
BJ, like most journalists, writes especially well when he can get his teeth into copy which fires his imagination, like that story which arrived at the Factory in French. The latest episode of this sorry tale is not on the Net yet, but the last one is, at of all places, a site called 'SpaceWar - Your Portal to Military Space'.
What BJ did, as published there, with 'Mysterious army movements in Equatorial Guinea' is a lesson in how committed journalists can write a story which tells all in its revolting detail while remaining "objective".
Anybody with half a brain will find it hard to read, in context, "The general was reported to have twice attempted to commit suicide recently. Now in Spain for medical treatment, Ndong Ona reportedly drove his automobile into the sea after 'strong words' with the president's eldest son," without thinking along the lines the French use for life's ironies in conversation: "He was suicided."
Another delightful little tale from the same part of the world showed us why journalists are still paid to edit things computers can't. An online translation programme could, after all, have done a pretty lousy job of the story from the Atlantic archipelago of Sao Tome & Principe in the Gulf of Guinea.
Washington has just kindly granted the government of these volcanic chunks of rock -- which mainly exported some cocoa and good music until they too were recently found to be sitting on top of lots of oil -- 800,000 dollars to finance airport expansion and a feasibility study into building a deep-water port.
The US Trade and Development Agency explained that the aim was to promote "trade and travel".
Nowhere did the USTDA press release, the US ambassador to the place or even the Reuters version of the story bother to mention a point which has long been doing the diplomatic rounds in the region, particularly in Nigeria, after the Bush administration tried to buy west Africa's oil giant out of OPEC.
Increasingly interested in African oil since "9/11", Washington has long been suspected of having a scheme to turn a chunk of Sao Tome & Principe into a most conveniently located military base.
Now that indeed would be good for "trade and travel"!
Nobody needs a novel from me when the "real world" is so entertaining?
You'll have to make to do with this place.
8:05:10 PM link
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vendredi 20 février 2004
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Well, I don't know.
I've had to chastise a Desk chief at the Factory. What with other absences for having babies or spraining ankles in the Alps, when the man let Claire off to write a book and Anne-Laure disappear for her first spell in an office almost on the Equator, he's turned the Desk afrique into an all-male enclave at times. And the same dreadful thing has happened on the Desk anglais even, on occasion.
This should not be! Such a hormonal imbalance is very bad for the news.
Worse, it reminds me of being at a single-sex school and mistakes you can nearly waste too much life recovering from after an upbringing like that.
I reflected during this afternoon's few spare moments on this accumulation of imbalanced vibes and other things I would outlaw immediately were I the boss of AFP. Until I remembered that I'd loathe such a job, wouldn't want any more "authority" and in any case have only one daughter, not four, which seems to have become a characteristic of the Factory's recent great leaders.
What got me thinking of single-sex education and my relief that the Kid is not going through it was a recent link -- from I forget where -- to a South African "social commentary" on the matter.
In a piece on running workshops for 17-18 year olds in Cape Town, Tashi Tagg found last year that:
"there is a marked difference between [young adults] who come from single sex schools and those who don't. The single sex school kids are always affected by the once-off presence of the opposite sex. There's an underlying awareness. Also a sense of embarassment/shyness/self-consciousness etc.
Self-consciousness most. Interestingly enough this is one of the main feelings I pick up with each and every group. Obviously some kids are really 'out there' -- very relaxed and comfortable with who they are -- but, I'd say 70% of those I've met aren't. In fact loads of them have Insecurity of Note - so much so they are literally forced to physically cling to each other. I shit you not" ('School Gossip', TashiTagg).
The academic quality of my own school was excellent and I thank my parents for that, but from the late 70s, after I'd finished, single-sex education became a "no-no" in Britain for all but a dwindling elite, while in France it's a very marginal and mainly Roman Catholic church-related trend.
At 'About', experienced teacher Robert Kennedy, who unlike me but like a good number of my workmates, favours private schools (on About's education pages), briefly notes a feminist trend in the United States in the 1990s towards single-sex education, which he says was "recanted" in 1999 by the American Association of University Women.
I'd thought that now we're in the 21st century, single-sex education had become something of an anomaly worldwide, certainly a great rarity, but further inspection leads to me to some reported evidence in favour of it -- drawing on recent studies in England, Australia and Jamaica -- gathered by the US National Association for Single Sex Public Education.
If the statistics and summaries the NASSPE has published are correct, those who think like me are in for a surprise or two. At the very least, they are intriguing.
These people argue that "the best evidence now suggests that coeducational settings actually reinforce gender stereotypes, whereas single-sex classrooms break down gender stereotypes. Girls in single-sex educational settings are more likely to take classes in math, science, and information technology. Boys in single-sex schools are more likely to pursue interests in art, music, drama, and foreign languages. Both girls and boys have more freedom to explore their own interests and abilities in single-gender classrooms" (the emphasis is theirs).
Hmmmm.
8:55:05 PM link
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Days when nothing happens are rare enough to be worthy of note, I thought early last night -- while I had an Internet connection.
OK, Swaziland declared a national disaster (BBC/AFP), but that's been regrettably predictable. Otherwise, my regular stint scouring the Web turned up zilch, even on all the "alternative" news sites (a few of which are in the blogroll).
One or two more like this and journalists might start reporting good news.
The workaholics -- there are always so many of them that it surprises me: hacks who hate having no events to report -- might start even writing those "features I've always wanted to do, but never had time."
Things change this morning: the "conservatives are poised to rout the reformists" in Iran's election (Yahoo AFP). "Politics sucks!"
My connection went down twice yesterday.
"There's no breakdown in your sector," my ISP's hotline people informed me after the first stopped my searching.
"Well, I'm reporting one."
"It's your computer. Unplug the modem--"
"I've played all those games, twice. It's your service!"
After seven minutes of ding-dong for which I was being charged 34 cents a minute, they made me hold again, "to fix up a rendez-vous with a technician."
I hung up on the hotline then, dug out my "secret numbers" for the big bosses at Noos.
"As ever," I informed one, "your hotline people are blissfully ignorant of a technical fault in my sector, blaming it on me. They want to send a techie. And every time they do that, the techie confirms the breakdown."
As ever, the big boss was polite, said he'd check it out and get back to me. At their expense, not mine.
Twenty minutes later, he 'phoned back to confirm the breakdown and told me what the technicians were doing, asked me what was happening at my end.
Now that was an answer, so when the connection went down again for the rest of the evening, I wasn't bothered.
When this happened several times late last year, Noos gave me a 70 euro (89 dollar) rebate. That was nice. Until I got my 'phone bill: calls to Noos had totalled 72 euros!
They have made efforts. I commended them on sometimes now sending SMS warnings to my mobile phone informing me of technical work in advance.
But if they do not swiftly establish a system where the technicians tell the hotline people what's going on, I'm not only going to publish those "secret numbers" for the ISP's HQ here, but send them to Noos's consumer watchdog organisation, Luccas.
They have been warned.
In science, there was a story:
"President Bush's administration has been accused of suppressing and distorting scientific findings that run counter to its own political beliefs.
The charge comes from an American body, the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement with more than 60 supporters.
The signatories, who include 12 Nobel Prize winners, say scientific integrity must be restored to policy-making."
That BBC Science article will have picked up the story on something most of us suspected but should be glad to see exposed from Wired ('Bush Distorts Science').
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views."
That's a quote from Doctor Who. I'm happy to see it at the top of another take on this damnable deception at Morons in the News.
10:59:55 AM link
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jeudi 19 février 2004
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A recent letter fails to explain why Béa has been travelling so much.
But there's a hint.
At last: "I have furniture in my rooms!"
It arrived in Nairobi weeks after Béatrice did. If you have to camp, you sometimes might as well be outdoors as in. So she was.
This is her latest selection of pictures.
 She found the old fellow, who is blind, at the end of January on Chad's border with Sudan, a region two and a half days' drive from the Chadian capital Ndjamena and full of scattered groups of refugees.
One of Africa's several "forgotten wars" has been taking place for the past year on the other side of the frontier, where Khartoum's military and allied local Arab militias are fighting rebels and bombing people.
The embattled area, where a small UN humanitarian team has just arrived (AFP), is called Darfur and has long been the "wild west" of the biggest country in Africa.
Béa had a word for the nurses and doctors of Medécins sans Frontières (MSF in English): "E-POU-STOU-FLANTS" ("A-ma-zing").
Those people, she says, are working miracles with very little among refugees who have absolutely nothing.
The Comoro Islands are right over the far side of Kenya, out in the Indian Ocean, where my Factory friend found they looked lovely from the air but had little of much interest to show on the ground.
Apart from the dubious privilege of holding a world record for the number of successful or foiled coup bids in a little more than a quarter-century of independence -- it was another round of "unrest" that led her there -- Béa found only the capital Moroni worthy of note.
Here's the mosque by the sea.
Women wouldn't normally dream of setting foot in the shady main square whence Béa took that picture, but she was allowed to, being foreign.
A little tidbit. The Comoros apparently have the distinction of being one of the few Muslim nations where women are allowed to own property. The men don't have houses.
Instead, they have to choose which of their wives they plan to spend the night with.
 As for the last picture, my friend says it was taken close to home, where now she sets foot from time to time.
The way she tells it, you'd think this was her back garden.
I liked the date stamp.
There are worse ways to spend Christmas Eve.
6:49:07 PM link
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mercredi 18 février 2004
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For a book called 'Permanence' (paperback, April 2003), it's all change in Karl Schroeder's first venture into space opera, crammed with very bright ideas, races against time and another go at one of science fiction's big questions: if we're not alone, how come space isn't teeming with civilisations?
Most of them got wiped out.
Scientist Laurent Herat has spent much of his life studying the ruins of alien cultures, with his assistant Michael Besquith, who also happens to be an undercover Neo-Shinto monk.
Humanity has populated vast tracts of what's out there, but the only surviving alien species encountered are totally uninterested in contact, let alone cooperation.
Rue Cassels, daring her valiant getaway from an abusive brother and an appalling aunt on a backward mining station, strikes lucky with a major discovery on her way to the nearest planet around the dwarf star that is all she has known for a sun. She stakes a salvage claim to an abandoned, silent "cycler", one of the vast and slow vessels that link the "halo" worlds.
Schroeder's threads begin to draw together, the military is swiftly involved, and Rue and an unexpected benefactor in her family circle are caught in a battle to gain and keep control of her starship and a struggle between the Cycler Compact and the Rights Economy of the "lit" worlds, who have faster-than-light travel.
The Rights Economy has driven religion underground, including the non-theistic kind, and masters nanotechnology, one of the key ideas in Schroeder's equally rich and dense debut novel, 'Ventus' (reviewed last June). In 'Permanence', however, nano is largely about labelling, price, payment and enforcement.
The Cycler Compact, by contrast, relies on trade in goods, ideas and information.
At the cost of a more Manichean development of his characters -- pretty clear-cut heros and villains -- than in the first book, Karl develops a deft political subtext as fitting for our own times as it is for his far future. Mostly he keeps it under the surface.
A different kind of writing needs deciphering on Jentry's Envy, the name Rue takes from her brother for the ship that could propel her into the elite ranks of the Cycler Captains.
The scientists come into their own with this challenge, not just the experts in xenobiology and linguistics, but a bunch of brains, set to be roped, sometimes kicking and rebelling, into Schroeder's imaginative variations on the tug of war between fascinating theory and fearsome technological application.
Jentry's Envy is alien.
It will take Rue's quick wits and tough guts, Herat's experience and Mike's grasp of alien psychology -- which has plunged him deep into a kind of "dark night of the soul" as a result of his efforts to capture the "kami" (or recorded essences) of otherness -- to unravel the cycler's secrets.
It could also take something even harder to obtain: alien help. In a vast void of indifference.
For all that's spelled out in too much black and white, Schroeder's characters are mostly convincing and real people, including the kind of resourceful, clever, sometimes funny and brave people you'd like to be able to count on as friends in times of crisis.
Herat's a great one for explaining things; perhaps there's an excess of explanation and exploration of the wildest ideas to please readers who don't like the arias overly digressive in their space operas.
Some of the ensemble "set pieces" are fantastic writing: a celebratory party in a monastery which turns into a high-stakes power game, the final and furious showdown...
The many changes of scenery are generally smooth and sometimes surprising, the big cast includes murderers, rebels, adventurers, the monastic community that upholds the Cycler Compact's concepts of "permanence", marines and even not-so-little green men.
There are hidden treasures, high tech and underhand behaviour, cunning twists on some more recent astronomical discoveries -- including brown dwarfs -- and a new look at the old idea of doomsday weaponry. Oh, and there's a love story.
'Permanence' is a very different novel from 'Ventus', and that, for all its minor flaws, is one of its strongest merits.
Not one to let go of good ideas, the Canadian writer also likes to develop them at his own place, as shown in his pursuit of "inscape" (Works of Karl Schroeder). With luck, he'll find time for a new novel.
11:41:52 PM link
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As Westerns go, apart from two or three classics which are "ancient" already, I enjoy what's offbeat, original and shot with a really attentive eye to the wild, so 'Blueberry' was just my kind of film.
Where the "cinéma fantastique" goes, Jan Kounen's movie went a long way, far more interesting than many, but sometimes much too dependent on the special effects to get near the heart of shamanism and journeys of initiation.
The big French film to start the year brings a generally excellent international cast to a tale borrowed from a comic strip hero, with Vincent Kassel in his strongest starring role to date as the small town marshal from Louisiana who has to confront a savage killer at the same time as his own past, his fears and a mind scar left by the violent death of a prostitute.
The sense of new frontiers on the edge of what passes for "civilisation", both physical and spiritual, pervades the whole film, which has a good number of strong scenes in town (Palamito, with entertaining nods in the direction of Western clichés, the tense saloon, a noisy defenestration, booze and shootouts), and among the Indians and in the desert and the sacred mountains where the climax of Blueberry's journeys takes place.
Before making 'Blueberry', which strays a long way from the character created by Jean "Moebius" Giraud, Kounen spent months with the Tarahumara people in Mexico and pursued his interest in shamanism into the Amazonian forest.
The movie was shot in Spain, Mexico and France: the 'Blueberry' site (Fr. and Eng.) tells something of the locations, while nature itself plays an important role in the story.
Somebody who saw 'Blueberry' a few days ago told me it had "a touch of intelligent spaghetti Western meets Lara Croft" and I kind of see what she meant, though it mines a much deeper vein than both.
Kounen's 'Dobermann' (1997; IMDb) was a violent like-it-or-loathe-it first venture beyond stylish shorts and videoclips. I didn't enjoy it myself, but saw signs of a talent with the potential of a Luc Besson or a Matthieu Kossevitz. Here, the director asks a great more of his cast and it pays off.
Kassel, thin-faced, tired and clever, is perfect for the title part and carries much of the film on his back, along with New Zealand-born Temuera Morrison as his Indian friend Rumi, who becomes a shaman. In secondary roles, I enjoyed Michael Madsen as the brutal Wallace Blount -- who doesn't kill, as he puts it, Indians and other "animals" -- and Eddie Izzard as the Prussian geologist and adventurer Prosit. As the girl, Juliette Lewis gives more than I've seen before.
After coming out of it this afternoon, I read a good interview in 'L'Ecran Fantastique' (construction site for now; Fr.) where Kassel explained how deeply he got into the role and the difficulties of some of the location shooting. And it shows.
For me, the climax of the film, much written about and illustrated in the French cinema magazines, was a relatively successful failure, diverting to watch but as incapable as any other attempt I've seen of bringing inner voyage or acid trip to the screen. Minor "confession": in younger days, I experimented, as people then called it, with LSD, magic mushrooms and the like, but have read far too much of the hard psychology and neurobiology of all that since to be contented with anybody's attempts to convey hallucinogenic experience on celluloid.
You might enjoy the way Kounen tries it if you're into South American Indian art and snakes ... or you might yawn through it.
It's hard to imagine how 'Blueberry', released in France on February 11, will go down in the United States. It deserves to do well, but it's not very much like anything else I've seen to date. 7/10 in my book.
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lundi 16 février 2004
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"private\genx\shell\inc\prsht.w:
/ / we are such morons. Wiz97 underwent a redesign between IE4 and IE5"
"private\ntos\w32\ntuser\client\nt6\user.h:
* The magnitude of this hack compares favorably with that of the national debt."
At one of the sites where you could get lost for days, Selznak takes "a quick, superficial look at the style and content of the leaked Windows 2000 source."
And we are reassured: "I quote from the comments but not the code, so this should be safe for developers to read" ('We are Morons': Kuro5hin).
It also contains amusing insights for non-developers, late developers and the under-developed, i.e.: the rest of us.
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In a quiet moment today, I found a little fable quite remarkably good.
"Summary: A little boy throws stones into a pond and discovers a principle that may explain how the whole universe comes to exist."
I'm a mathematical blockhead.
But the way Chris Wenham tells the story of Pi and Phi and other mysteries at Disenchanted, I was entertained while being informed, and isn't that the secret of something?
Party trick included (via OxDECAFBAD).
10:12:49 PM link
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 A gifted artist can't and shouldn't be kept down. It's about time fellow Factory hands all over the world got a taste of 'Feff', a spare-time cartoonist and caricaturist who's been brightening up the walls of starship control during the latest routine winter of mild to average discontent.
I'm not in the same unions as Feff is nor do I share all his views, but that's no big deal now that AFP journos have no fewer than half a dozen labour bodies all saying they look after their interests.
One comment on big finance bodies, the fearful French media barons on AFP's board, golden handshakes and parachutes, and the current man in the hot seat simply made me laugh (the main caption reads, "This going to last much longer?"). Thanks, Feff, for permission to blog it.
Posted as one of the "old sods" of the place? I just loved that this afternoon! No sooner had I disclosed my age to the veterans of the Desk afrique than I was teasingly told that I've made it: about good enough for the scrap heap now. "Make way, make way for the young!"
Maybe one day, before then, I'll publish my own AFP "salvation scheme". People seem to have been busy producing them virtually since the day the agency was given its current statute during France's troubled years after World War II. And still we're there.
My own plan, like a few other people's, might glance across the water to the BBC's fairly similar charter. But it's not as if the Beeb is having a great time of it now either...
Youth was in evidence on the editorial floor today. Children and even babies, I mean. We're just into those splendid two weeks of each year when half of Paris disappears to go up and break legs and sprain ankles in the Alps, including lots of teachers and child-minders.
It's still too early for the tourists, these school holidays usually mean that the worst of winter is at last now behind us, and tempers improve in the Métro in proportion to the blessed elbow-room granted those of us sensible enough to stay behind and enjoy it rather than go to fight for a place on the ski-lifts.
"Zen," that's the watchword! One I might have muttered to the Wildcat, who has, yes, over the past three days restored her end of diplomatic relations after the Christmas break.
Even in Africa, Laurent is thinking about Zen. In a missive tonight, the feller in Abidjan tells me he's spotted trace elements of Zen and meditation in this blog. He recommends me, and therefore presumably you, to make the acquaintance of a Japanese writer I'd not heard of before, Eiji Yoshikawa.
Since he writes of a trilogy he's reread with great pleasure, I don't think Laurent can mean 'Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era' (trans. Charles Terry, Kodansha Europe, 1995), but if those aren't rave reviews I've linked to, I don't know what is. To be explored...
The man in the Ivory Coast also sent me in the direction of Un Zen Occidental, describing it as a "very comprehensive" Western website on Zen. That it most certainly is -- not just for French speakers, because there are some good further leads to follow on the "links" ("liens") page -- while my correspondent rightly highlights a pleasing "distanced humour" evident particularly on the meditation page.
Thanks, buddy.
9:40:58 PM link
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dimanche 15 février 2004
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Great cartoon on a "revolutionary new Bluetooth feature" (via Heli, who is otherwise in more serious mood, passing on a 'Sorrows of Empire' review at 'Heaven and Hell').
"A revolution would be required to bring the Pentagon back under democratic control," 'Blowback' writer Chalmers Johnson apparently warns in his latest book (Amazon US).
That's not what I want to think about now. The politics are more far subtle in the next book due for comment here, Karl Schroeder's 'Permanence' (Amazon UK; St Martin's Press, paperbook 2003). I thought 'Ventus' was excellent (and so did the Kid), but Karl was full of more surprises in this latest one. Too good for a hasty write-up tonight.
zzz
The Kid's off through the Chunnel again tomorrow, with her friend and co-blogger Sév (belcatja2). It's quite a big deal trip, since they'll be crossing London and heading up to to York to see Marianne's English grandparents for a few days mostly on their own, but everybody's looking forward to it.
And one of the first things the Kid wants to do, now she's got her own papers as well as passport, is get another hole pierced in her ear...
Piercing any other parts of her anatomy while she's over there is strictly banned, though she enjoyed making threats.
Tony's also going to England, the brave man. Heaven help him, I think he'll be on the same Eurostar as the Kid and friend.
zzz
I see Rainer's into Orkutlery (Solipsism Gradient) -- having taken good note of its off-putting terms of service. I've thanked the feller who invited me to Orkut, but cried off. Had it been the other side of the Equator...
Sometimes it's hard to make time enough for my flesh-and-blood friends, let alone the "virtual ones", though it's fun when the latter occasionally turn into the former as well.
There was yet more about Orkut and the like in a very long post at
Apophenia: 'Revenge of the User':
"...these networks don't look real. It's too socially awkward. They're not built to give us a way to express the subtleties of how we know people, the power differentials, the contexts, the strengths.
Furthermore, they expose more about us to different groups of people than we would ever do in real life (...)
It doesn't get us any closer to having a social network that means something."
Extracts like that don't do justice to a thoughtful article which sums up a lot about the "new social architecture" (via Many 2 Many) and is far from a purely negative survey.
"At this writing, I'm informed that I'm 'connected to 35862 people through 23 friends.' Nearly all of those I know personally or professionally. It's very interesting to follow the network links," Rainer says.
Maybe I've become too much of a lone wolf, but while I find that sort of statement intriguing, it's also ... well, not exactly disturbing, but it reminds me of wild geese.
Now that technology has far outpaced our ability to process information, to each their own networks, I guess. In line with developments on the site itself, I've changed my blogroll link to Cyberjournalist, where I drop in more and more often. There, I've finally expressed a readiness to join.
Another thing about the "social software" bugs me.
Generally, it links "us" to "people like us".
The 'Globe of Blogs' currently lists 10,765 weblogs, which include neither mine nor even a tenth of those out there. Of that relatively small handful, how many are in Africa?
Just 48 ('globe of blogs').
Knowing it's inevitably like that doesn't make me any more comfortable with the figures.
11:16:23 PM link
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samedi 14 février 2004
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Coates is coming down from O'Reilly's Emerging Technology 2004
"...everyone's heads are full and we've all got a little bit of a hangover", Tom says ('plasticbag').
It wasn't an all-American affair, then, though you could be forgiven for suspecting so in the wake of most ETech posts in the blogosphere.
James Duncan Davison found that "by the time it was all over, everyone’s brains were not only leaking out from their ears but had been splattered all over the walls. It was that good" ('x180').
Sounds a bit like 'Kill Bill' for geeks.
Blasted or otherwise, JDD's post links to a series of others and to sites that tell us what all the fuss was about. The pickings are rich enough to keep the rest of us quiet for a while.
8:40:12 PM link
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Medical advances, nanotechnology and a process of natural selection of successful "memes" -- or culture and idea genes, if you like -- are all more or less imminently destined to play a role in the further evolution of Homo sapiens that Nature herself has very long since abandoned in all but the most minor of respects.
Such, in its simplified essence, is the import of a very comprehensive dossier I've finally finished reading in last month's 'Science et vie'.
For science and arts writer and blogger David Pescovitz (Pesco bio), nanotechnology has become a "media virus" or meme in its own right, popping up everywhere:
"Depending on what someone outside of the small tech industry (or perhaps even within it) has read, heard, or watched, nano means everything from carbon nanotubes to stain-free pants, robots in our bloodstream to the Library of Congress in a sugar cube. Nano could save the world, destroy it or maybe even make some people rich. There’s a lot of conceptual DNA in those four letters, hence nano’s virulence.
The way in which the nano meme spreads through our media gives us subtle insights into what we as a culture feel about the technology."
David's published an insightful article, full of links, on a technology with the "ways and memes for a viral assault on pop culture" (Small Times: News about MEMS, Nanotechnology and Microsystems; via an exercise in self-promotion at Boing Boing).
Then, of course, there's news on the South Korean scientists who cloned 30 human embryos, but now want a baby clone ban (BBC science). I couldn't help but react to this revelation about what's going to happen whether we like it or not without a thought for 'Spares', the fine novel by Michael Marshal Smith I reviewed last March 27.
The research published yesterday in 'Science' "demonstrates that the moralists who are running the US government's efforts to stop cloning are, and always have been, doomed to failure. Trying to stop scientific progress by political means is like trying to bail water with a fork."
Tom Negrino (Backup Brain), said it all in a familiar sentence.
'Science won't wait' opined the Washington Times, though some in South Korea itself would rather turn the clock back in the "ethics debate" (Korea Herald).
With "Pope John Paul's bioethics adviser calling (human embryo cloning) a repeat of what the Nazis tried to do in World War II concentration camps" ('The Age', Sydney), the Vatican once again shows itself to be not only wrong-headed but irrelevant.
Why read science fiction as well as science fact? Of many reasons that spring to mind, one is to try and stay ahead of the life game rather than trying to shove genes back into bottles.
Next step, "closing in on (the) ageing gene" (BBC science again).
Rather than fretting about it all, we'd be better off talking and listening to our kids about the world they're going to grow up in.
5:37:54 PM link
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A radio news story about a Luton 15-year-old who's taking her school to court for banning her from wearing the long "jilbab" dress worn by some Muslims -- also told at the children's BBC ('Girl fights for religious rights') -- reminds me that I'm often asked what a "Franglish" thinks of Chirac's "headscarf ban".
It took more thought than I expected, but I'm strongly against it.
Outside France, this legislation to keep religion right out of the secular education system has already been widely criticised, as Tom Heneghan reports (Al-Jazeerah):
"The overwhelming 494-36 vote for the anti-veil law on its first reading by the National Assembly on Tuesday showed legislators saw the ban as a way to uphold those traditions and defend France's secular system.
It did not look that way to many Arab and European commentators reacting to the law, which will bar emblems of faith such as headscarves, Jewish skullcaps or large Christian crosses from public classrooms from September."
Foreigners who see the French move as an aberration and an incomprehensible repression of personal freedom could find it hard to grasp the strength of popular feeling that lies behind last week's remarkably one-sided vote in favour of the ban.
Several of my French friends find my opposition to the dress code as difficult to understand as outsiders do what they see as an attack on human rights.
The many reasons for this include the historical fact that the French Revolution -- and "liberty, equality, fraternity" and all that -- was as much about breaking the grip of the Roman Catholic church on the country as overthrowing the monarchy that went hand in hand with the religious establishment.
For more than a century, France has been a profoundly secular country, politically speaking, and many of its people have a gut opposition to organised religion as a social force.
The Islamic faith of the millions of north and other Africans who live and work here is respected and upheld in law and often in practice, but deep-rooted prejudice also exists and is part of the cause of the relative strength of France's outrageous extreme right.
Political relations have never been easy between France and Algeria since the mainly Muslim country won independence in 1962 after a savage war, and you see echoes of this in French daily life, where many immigrants still feel different and excluded -- though this situation has changed considerably, for the better, in the 24 years I've lived here.
As a colonial power, France took a very different approach from Britain. Over a long period before independence came to the country's colonies, some -- including Algeria -- were considered an extension abroad of the French state, sending their own members of parliament to sit in the mainland national assembly.
The idea, among those who had "progressive" notions, was social and political integration. The colonised were expected to understand and appreciate the benefits of France's culture and revolutionary heritage and become a part of it.
That, on the whole, they didn't and wanted to rule themselves caused genuine bewilderment among some French intellectuals, writers, teachers and philosophers.
Four decades on, French supporters of the Chirac ban can't see it as a crackdown on civil liberties and human rights, but regard it, on the contrary, as a normal step, a part of the building of a more tolerant society, in that it protects women and girls in particular from what are seen as the deeply intolerant, socially constricting regulations of fundamentalist Islam.
Thus, what goes for Muslims who want to live here must also go for Jews, Christians and now the French Sikhs, who got forgotten in the haste to get this law on the statute books and pose the most thorny problem with their opposition to haircuts and the requirement to wear turbans.
The outcome is a mess! Writing in 'The Guardian' on February 5, with some insight into mutual incomprehension and memories of the bomb blasts that have wreaked disaster in Paris several times since I moved here, Tim Garton Ash took a perfectly plausible look at what could just happen in the next five or six years:
"At last, we have the inquiry we need: a full, independent inquiry into the Paris bombing of 2009. As we all know, in that appalling attack, a large area between the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the River Seine was devastated by a small nuclear bomb, detonated by suicide bombers linked to the Algerian-based Islamic Armed Group (GIA). Some 100,000 people were killed or wounded. The supremely cultured heart of one of the most beautiful cities in the world was reduced to smouldering ruins. None of us will ever forget the photograph of Rodin's statue of Balzac, looming as if in tortured grief above the half-dismembered but recognisable corpses of a young couple on the Boulevard Raspail."
This little exercise in future history ('Who was to blame?', Guardian Unlimited) is worth digesting as a thoughtful projection of the state of today's paranoid world into what could happen.
I'm opposed to the ban not because of fear that it could sow the seeds of further hatred or because I share an alarmist view of its possible outcome. I can even see some excellent reasons for imposing it, which Garton Ash mentions. I'm deeply hostile to extremism of all kinds and very wary of any organised religion which imposes its "laws" on believers in a misguided and often downright wrong interpretation of the basic tenets of the faith at issue.
However, Jacques Chirac and Britain's Tony Blair, though often supposedly far apart on the political spectrum, both frequently make the same very serious mistake, and I see little difference between the headscarf ban here and the Labour government's anti-foxhunting drive the other side of the Channel. Both are symptoms of the increasing incursion by politicians into areas of public life which are absolutely none of their business.
Both are manifestations of the 'Big Brother' mentality that genuinely thinks it knows best, that governments have the right to determine social behaviour where they would do far better to leave well alone. The long-term impact of such measures, both a matter of immediate political expediency, has not been considered and thought out.
I have other French friends who share my opposition to the "headscarf ban" because they see it as unwarranted interference in social and ethical issues that should be no part of the political domain but instead debated and resolved by the parties directly concerned. The ban will do nothing to make the lives of French teachers any easier, and it is bound to backfire as a supposed attempt to promote secular values and increase social integration.
My sympathy for the 15-year-old in Luton is limited, nevertheless. In her case, from what I heard this morning, the school has already made sensible concessions regarding an intelligent compromise on dress code. This kid is not exercising her "rights", she is asserting her "individuality" to a degree which is simply impractical and ultimately anti-social. There are undoubtedly plenty of other ways in which she can "be herself" without waging war on false premises, that other great mistake of our times whose outcome will profoundly affect us all for far, far longer than the passing political leaders of the day are willing to envisage.
It's not because very large numbers of people insist on behaving like sheep that control-freak governments have the slightest right -- let alone duty -- to treat them as such by legislating for social changes which are far beyond their grasp, competence and real ability to affect.
Such governments are generally long since gone and merely a part of the historical record by the time humanity is reaping the cruel harvest of the dangerous seeds they have sown.
1:08:20 PM link
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jeudi 12 février 2004
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An impudent, imprudent member of the Faithful 5 ¾ inquires "how your Wildcat saga ended - if indeed it ended at all."
Patience!
All, for now, is silence.
And meanwhile, Dr F pursues her probing, a few more rusty locks broken each time as we travel down the most unexpected paths.
As for "those limpid dark eyes", they too, for now, are many, many kilometres distant, summoned the other side of the Equator.
I don't doubt I shall write of them again also, some day.
I am busier now reading other people's blogs, ever exploring, while many in the city are wondering, like me, whether it just might be safe to think about coming out of hibernation soon.
There are so many pairs of eyes, my friend, of a sudden at this odd, expectant time of year. All engaging, all enticing, all a risk.
Saint Valentine has his fun on Saturday, it's all over the newspapers. And we are expected to choose?
Sometimes I prefer messages in bottles, cast out on the tide, with no certainty as to where they might beach.
This week's mailbag also included a note that I sometimes appear to have a more "direct line to (someone's) psyche than does my own conscious mind", which certainly isn't planned, and an invitation to Orkut. Replies will go on reply day.
I thank both writers meantime. I thought Orkut was a river in Siberia, but that's Irkut.
Orkut "attempts to collect a ton of data about you. The kind of demographic data that marketing folks drool over" (Jeremy Zawodny), has aroused the contempt of Apophenia (Zephoria - who's "making connections where none previously existed") and brought sudden thoughts of insecurity to Life With Alacrity.
It was on January 22 that the news came that "Google tip-toed into the hot market of online social networks with the quiet launch of Orkut.com" (CNet News).
"Being your friend is hard work," Aaron Kottke soon moaned.
Tom Coates yesterday thought Flickr "much much better than Orkut" (plasticbag).
I'm like Buzz and he, "like a lot of other people, (...) recently found myself simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by the brave new world of 'social software'." (Sci-Fi Hi-Fi).
Xeni Jardin picked up on a Register story and wondered are the "Orkut TOS a déjà vu of controversial, discarded Microsoft TOS?" (Boing Boing).
I reserve judgement, pending thought.
11:49:42 PM link
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...and then there are the days to write off.
The worst was hitting the button on one story and getting back with my lunch tray for a merited knuckle-rapping because it's true that "You don't put such crap on to the wires!"
I'd supposedly subbed it, but my mind was elsewhere, like that of the usually good writer, and we let the Factory's clients have garbage. It's not that I was especially "tired", as suspected.
I'm haunted.
 For four days, I've woken up early out of recurring dreams, involving a most gifted friend of my youth and long hot summers living in tents, with almost no money, on meat pasties, strong cheap "scrumpy" (Gunning) and roll-your-own cigarettes. The beer was so much better, but the cider cost next to nothing.
Every year, we rented the same farmer's field at the top of a hill, long before a south Devon town became a yuppie yachting resort where it seems the visitors locally known as "grockels" now outnumber the townspeople 10 to one at the wrong time of year.
My friend still lives there.
The Kid, who made several long train journeys there with me when she was younger, will just love me for this nostalgia trip back to one of her first lessons in playing with sounds.
That friend, Harry, is one of those few some of us are lucky enough to have when you can pick up the 'phone after years of silence and pick up the conversation where you left off as if it was yesterday.
Time for another unpolished extract:
The Estuary
straddles ley-lines, dragon-paths,
with its channels obeying the moon.
The estuary’s changes reach into corners
among hills once taken for women’s breasts
when my part in this world was designed.
In those years, friends made love under canvas
& divided towns had no wailing walls;
we pitched our tents for timeless days. But now, as
Gaia has traversed infinity & rolls
on through ages, her moonstruck nights
crossing spaces beyond comprehension,
I know that watching shooting stars above
our heads, on our backs in the field - "There’s one !"
"Missed it." "Too late." - was a game not of youths
but of lovers. We deserved Gaia then
& only growing up brought the untruths
& thus little trust in redemption.
The boys became men; the girls, women.
I pay great attention to a man
who stayed on there. When his saxophone
comes out at night, my daughter will applaud
far too loudly, to get herself thrown out
of pubs with me. But she has understood,
at six, what estuaries are about.
That one was empty once & lost for words
I felt my blood run cold, when every boat
lay beached, abandoned, & even the birds
seemed perturbed. "Listen, friend, when will they float ?"
"Spring tides," he said. "When they come in.
I have not often seen the sea so low."
Later - late - he picked up a clarinet
& the notes flew high to swim back below
my belt. My testicles caught light again.
"I can’t finish this," he groaned & laid down
his instrument. That first mate is a player
of music as well as a teacher. "Nice one,"
I told him. "Push no further." The window
& the town beneath, an ugly church tower,
claimed "Gaia abides." In that place, gain all
or go, tides proclaim. We are forever,
despite the church tower, its formidable
grey. Leave it out ! A postcard does its part
sometimes. If chosen well, it’s capable
of saying an estuary seizes the heart.
 This weekend I must 'phone. Perhaps that way, I'll find out what it means, the message that's been surging up in my night mind nearly all week now. I won't post a picture of the view from that music room window, perched high in the town overlooking the estuary.
The very thought of encouraging even more "grockels" to swarm to one of the most magical parts of the world is too appalling.
As for the second picture, I couldn't resist.
Even if the punishment during her brief visit this weekend is more very heavy metal indeed.
9:37:41 PM link
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mercredi 11 février 2004
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Apologies to those, notably in low Net bandwidth countries, for whom this blog has been loading slowly sometimes. I've tweaked features of the home page a little to speed it up again.
Many people who've recently updated Apple's Safari browser to version 1.2 (v125) via the Mac software update panel have also complained about an annoying speed drop on a host of sites. Some have noted in Mac reports that this happens to them particularly when the images are expected to load.
Being among those affected, I found a fix that works. Re-download the stand-alone version direct from Apple ('Get Safari', 7.9 MB). Trash your current Safari application and the com.apple.Safari.plist preferences file in your home library, but for safety's sake don't empty the trash until you've installed the new package. And don't trash the separate Safari file in the library, which contains your bookmarks, etc.
The new one will work much faster. I've no idea why in this instance, but it often seems to be the case that various Mac OS X stand-alone installers from Apple eliminate little problems with updates offered via the panel.
For serious Mac-heads, "some excellent discoveries of some minor regressions from 1.1 to 1.2" have just been listed by developer Dave Hyatt ('Surfin' Safari').
Finally, for those of us who like the radically changed Omniweb 5, I've found it prone to the occasional freeze, but it is still in beta, and hasn't yet had a more accessible explanation of some of its hidden features than last week's one by Michael Brewer at the MacDevCenter.
If you, like me and John Siracusa, are not among the "people (who) have trouble getting excited about web browsers," he gives you the full works on the Omni event at Ars Technica. There are pages and pages of it, which explain among other things why Omni products are worth paying for.
P.S. I like OW 5's tabs drawer, cause of much argument, and not just because it's different from what we've come to expect. But to explain why would require being more of a geek than I fancy tonight.
9:40:56 PM link
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Not a Mac rag around, in any language I've seen, seems able to avoid making its current cover picture and story Apple's new range of mini iPods, even if some have very little to say.
So while you know I'm very happy with the non-mini one I've acquired, I'll jump on the bandwagon and link to one of the first extended comparative reviews I've seen, written by Walter Mossberg for today's Wall Street Journal: 'Smaller iPod to Hit Stores Next Week'.
The voice of my day has been Susheela Raman.
I immediately -- and readily -- give her new CD 'Love Trap' a star more than the 3/5 offered by the sole person so far to write it up at Amazon UK, and it's about the only album on my music player which I've filed as "world" music without a finer classification.
This is because the music ranges from devotional songs of the Carnatic repertoire ('Indian Heritage' at Saigan) to a Joan Armatrading standard, the musicians include the Greek Manos Achalinotopoulos, Andalusian pianist David Dorantes and Fela Kuti's former drummer Tony Allen, and Susheela also found inspiration in Ethiopia.
You can't get much more world than that, but I want to listen to it all again before any attempt at a review, especially since only two songs are in a language I understand.
Meanwhile, I like it!
9:35:34 PM link
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mardi 10 février 2004
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The start of this year's pursuit of "voices of women" for the iPod has already blessed me with some remarkable finds, unknowns in my world whose CDs have been in sales and bought by whim.
A new one raised me right out of tired blues as I made my way home from the Factory, where little of today's African news was cheery. Searching for the right word for Julie Zenatti's voice, I found it in somebody else's brief notes on 'Fragile' (2000; Amazon Fr.): crystalline.
 Rap & hip-hop are rarely my thing, but might be added to my tastes if there's more like the amusing duo Passi does with Julie on 'Le Couloir de la Vie'. Other songs are melancholy, uplifting or both.
The girl can sometimes surprise with the power of that voice and there are two or three fine orchestral arrangements performed by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra. (More and more these days, in the music industry and film alike, I see producers employing fine musicians from the other side of what used to be the Iron Curtain, presumably because they come cheaper than west European performers.)
My only disappointment about a varied album without a dud song was that only one, 'Si Je M'en Sors', was by Julie herself, but she was still but a much younger woman than sometimes she sounds when she made 'Fragile', and turned 23 this month (bio at TV5, Fr).
Both voice and name passed me by because I didn't see 'Notre Dame de Paris' (official site), the musical that several of my friends were raving about four years ago. Julie Zenatti is already a talent with a lot of promise.
Swept out of commuter hell by this first record (and with ears wide open for her later one, 'Dans les yeux d'un autre'), I again twice experienced that little oddity about travelling with a headful of music. Eye contact.
The Paris underground is no different from others: eye contact between strangers is generally fleeting, often furtive, usually swiftly averted.
But not when you've got earphones in. It frequently happens then that you see an interesting or attractive face, or both, a gaze is met but this time it's held, each party quite leisurely about it, not shy or embarrassed or feeling intrusive or intruded on. And smiles are more easily exchanged between strangers.
I'm sure other people, long used to Walkmans, have noticed this long before I did. It could be that music, like fine weather, relaxes people, makes them feel less vulnerable and uptight. But it also happens when only one of the gazers is "tuned in" ... or out. What's the psychology behind it?
I spotted no fewer than three iPods today in one crowded Métro carriage. They must be selling fast. I've not yet tried the "Let's swap music" game that some people already play, simply plugging your earphones into somebody else's listening and vice versa for a while, but I've seen it happen. With mixed results...
10:32:27 PM link
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lundi 9 février 2004
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"Worried, we called Kurt Vonnegut. What did he know?! He said he would tell us when he had more complete information. The next morning we received another fax, a transcript of a conversation he had, he said, with the out-of-print science fiction writer Kilgore Trout."
To be found at State of the Asylum (In These Times)
Thanks to Norm at One Good Move.
zzz
"I think it would be best for everyone if we request that the Grammy awards never, ever do a 'tribute' to any legendary bands again," sanely and briefly argues Tom Johnson (Unproductivity).
zzz
"All of these things -- prefering a lover's lie to the truth, putting your shoes on the conveyer belt, banning a book -- are really the same. Ultimately, each of these things serves to protect an illusion.
As human beings, we continually re-invent the world around us. To some extent, this is necessary; our perception of the world is limited by our senses and by our past experience. Filtering is a necessary way to make sense of the world.
But the person who bans The Prince, the person who prefers a lover's lie, and the person who puts his shoes on the converer belt are all engaged in something more. They are actively seeking to protect and preserve an illusion -- a deliberately constructed, carefully maintained falsehood."
Machiavelli inspired Tacit on "illusion" and 'The Nature of Things'.
zzz
"'I'm bored. Let's shave my pussy!'
No. 3 of 25 attributes of 'The Perfect Woman'." For once, Joe and his book can keep the dubious picture. And take the flak...
zzz
TDavid has caught up with some of the latest on the Music Biz vs. Filesharing.
And found a list of legal online music stores (Make you Go Hmm).
zzz
"Students for an Orwellian Society (SOS) is a nationwide student group. Although SOS has always been a nationwide student group, there is evidence to suggest that it first appeared at Columbia University. The mission of SOS is to promote the vision of a society based upon the principles of Ingsoc, first articulated by George Orwell in his prophetic novel, 1984."
Students for Orwell (thanks. Via 0xDECAFBAD)
zzz
Ouch!
"The old canard that women handle pain better than men is false, but women do have to work harder to inflict pain," Sydney the Medpundit reports. And this I can believe.
10:31:50 PM link
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What's most useful about Cory Doctorow's piece on 'Virus writers profiled' (Boing Boing) is that it will still be there when I imagine the 10-page investigation by Clive Thompson into 'The Virus Underground' (NYT) has disappeared into an expensive, paying archive.
Thompson's article, while still easily available, taught me a thing or two.
"The virus community attracts a lot of smart but alienated young men, libertarian types who are often flummoxed by the social nuances of life."
That much is well-known, and for "young men" you can sometimes read 16-year-olds who describe even younger crackers as "kids". A little more rare is a portrait or two of those out to wreak some strange notion of vengeance.
7:59:05 PM link
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Australian journalists have compiled an excellent online dossier on climate change.
'How Global Warming May Cause the Next Ice Age' (Melbourne Indymedia) links items you only too rarely see united on one page.
One of the links I find particularly interesting is a "hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to change the Earth's climate" -- very long, but easily navigated at a page on the 'Discovery of Global Warming' (AIP - American Institute of Physics).
6:58:27 PM link
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Updated on seeing Lawrence Lessig's "pills as political prisoners" article, linked at end.
Thabo Mbeki should be deeply ashamed of himself, looking set for re-election as South Africa's president now that he has set a date: April 14 (AFP - Yahoo).
The man might be justified in bragging a little about the achievements of the African National Congress (ANC) since democracy finally won out in that country almost 10 years ago.
But, as he does on developments in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe's regime yet again found an excuse to pull the plug on the independent Daily News (AP - Yahoo) last week, Mbeki finds every bad reason in the world to avoid doing anything much about the country's murderous AIDS epidemic.
"He claims: "I don't know anyone who has died of Aids." So why does it continue to dominate the problems facing the South African people?
This is still a surreal and confusing place.
One minute you are in a vast modern shopping centre, with marble floors, a glass roof, a multiplex cinema, numerous cafés and restaurants, and smart cars parked outside.
Five minutes drive away there is a shanty town of shacks and houses constructed with mud and bamboo canes, with public water taps, public pit latrines and no electricity."
For the BBC's From Our Own Correspondent, Hugh Sykes has written a quietly devastating account of the scale of the problem. Those initial points are among the first things that strike a visitor, but the rest of his story is one of quite unnecessary tragedy.
I love South Africa, mostly had a great time working there, found the country fascinating and too many of its people too ready to denigrate themselves on the strength of the past rather than taking pride in what had been achieved since 1994.
On HIV/AIDS, though, the Sykes story posted at the weekend resembles one I could have written myself, virtually word for word, two years ago!
That is a scandal.
I was naïf about it at the time. During the few short months I was in South Africa, I'd felt that little signs of progress on the AIDS front I'd witnessed or been told were happening even as I was there meant that the epidemic couldn't possibly be as hidden or quite as bad in two or three years.
Even the big pharmaceuticals had expressed a genuine readiness to help at an affordable price. And very slowly, the government seemed to be giving ground over a series of "yes, buts..."
Some of these were comprehensible to an outsider.
I spent little time in KwaZulu-Natal, the most impoverished of provinces, but just enough to understand why the health ministry at national level had reservations about attaining the level of even basic infrastructure necessary to bring relief to hundreds of thousands of people and follow up in the health care -- even if the drugs were made available for free or next to nothing.
Numerous doctors, however, were speaking out in favour of treatment they were not officially allowed to provide. Some were already providing it.
Nelson Mandela was saying as much as he dared without showing open disloyalty or opposition to the programmes of an ANC he had played such a paramount part in bringing to power.
But the fact that, even today, the man who took his place at the helm of the state is still in denial about something as evident as the AIDS crisis in South Africa, a country in a position to do something about it more than most, is appalling.
Let's hope that this is a side of the story that will be told properly and often enough during the election campaign finally to make a difference.
Tucked away in February's 'Wired' is an article by Lawrence Lessig, who also thinks politicians should sometimes be shamed.
As Lessig observes in 'Stop Making Pills Political Prisoners' (Wired), it's easy to blame pharmaceutical firms over patents and costs instead of those who should really carry than can.
The man argues that "with price discrimination, it would make economic sense to charge Africans practically nothing for drugs sold in Africa, as long as the same product could be sold in the US for lots more. So why isn't there more lifesaving price discrimination for drugs?"
And briefly sets out the cons and pros of a "brilliantly humane idea".
6:38:46 PM link
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Foolhardy friends are claiming to sense spring in the air, but I doubt that some fine days we've been having really means winter's done all it's worst this early.
I rely for signs of true seasonal change from a magical nearby street, which goes almost unnoticed. It suffices to turn into the rue des Thermopyles to find yourself in part of a village within a village, with well-kept pretty houses and artist lofts luxuriant with greenery and flowers when the time comes. It must cost a fortune to be able to afford to live there, but the place is for the rest of us a quiet delight of the district, one of Paris's many little "secrets".
There's no sign of any early buds there, but it's good to be able to open the windows wide again. Today has been ideal for cleaning up corners you can scarcely see properly most of the time between November and April.
Until last week, I hadn't thought of an aerosol as much other than a banal spraycan. But since we've dealt with the guts and are pursuing work on the head, the time came to do something about clogged sinuses that have been part of my life almost forever, especially in winter.
The ultrasonic aerosol I fetched from the chemist after consulting an ear, nose and throat man proves to be a hefty electrically powered device on loan for a week, along with a complicated mixture of medicines to put in receptacles and a series of tubes, one of which can be fitted with prongs to shove right up my nose for 20 or more minutes a day while it vibrates a very fine spray deep into my skull.
Apparently, some consider such machines as "alternative medicine" (breathing page), but this is simply an alternative to the British-made nasal spray I've been addicted to for years, but have managed to do completely without for three days, fine weather or damp.
Even the habitual morning headaches have begun to ease.
I've no idea what a few more days' treatment may achieve, but this is impressive. It's a mystery why it's new to me and why previous doctors invariably said I'll need surgery one day. The man I saw laughed off this notion and told me that the only people in the world who don't have at least slightly "bent sinuses" are aboriginal Australians.
Mine happen to be just a little more deviated than most, but are not uncommon and a nuisance to everybody with the same little problem.
A Yugoslav firm has since 1998 been marketing an ultrasonic nebulizer (Prizma) which looks far less unwieldy than the device the French state has lent me. I shall show this to the specialist next time I see him and ask what he thinks of it.
So far so good with the internal spring cleaning, which I can only commend as an option to others who spend too much time all stuffed up. It'll be more than a month before I've finished the treatment that follows the aerosol, but if it works as planned; it's good news.
4:17:14 PM link
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dimanche 8 février 2004
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Chris Allbritton, the journalist who independently went 'Back to Iraq' (b'rolled), will be flattered to learn that his daily writings on war and its aftermath got a paragraph to itself in the latest issue of Mac and Co, the latest French monthly Mac-rag, which hit the newsstands with such a dismal, boring first issue that I thought it doomed from the start.
However, the magazine got a hefty kick up the backside by issue three and is now readable and sometimes original. In writing up the blog phenomenon -- and quite wrongly asserting that all weblogs have become much of a muchness -- it does the service of reminding me that I don't blogroll enough French "jouebs" for those of the Faithful 5 ¾ who do me the honour of reading me in their second language.
I shall put this right in coming months.
To start with a couple of pioneers this side of the water, David Dufresne manages to be a telly news editor and still keep a "carnet de bord farouchement indépendant d'un mutant perdu dans un monde en ruines". For a "fiercely independent ... stray mutant in a ruined world," David remains remarkably concerned this weekend about plumbing and justice (davduf), though sex and the other arts and skills are far more interesting than French politics.
Mac and Co sent me into the hitherto unknown world of 'Le blog du menteur'. It would seem Pierre Lazuly been's busy broadcasting lies since 1998, which does make him an early bird over here.
He doesn't bother to blog very often, but he can be very entertaining.
11:56:33 PM link
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The French critics were right.
'Qui a tué Bambi?' (IMDb; 'Who Killed Bambi?') is a clever, dark first film directed by Gilles Marchand -- who co-wrote it and also scripted the fine 'Harry, un ami qui vous veut de bien' (2000) -- but it would be much better for a few judicious cuts.
Sophie Quinton (pictured in last entry) plays Isabelle, a trainee nurse who makes some very disquieting finds in what some foreign viewers took for a super-modern hospital, which is really a now routine establishment by France's high standards.
Isabelle is both attracted by and scared of Dr Philipp (Laurent Lucas), who seems to spend most of his life on the premises and is professionally attentive when she does her first near fainting fit on running into him in a lift.
When she pulls a similar stunt while, again for the first time, doing duty in the operating theatre, Isabelle's life takes a turn for the worse. Sooner or later, she's going to be on the surgeon's slab herself.
And by then, we know that Dr Philipp is a killer.
That's not the spoiler it might seem, because the drama of this movie lies in Isabelle's discoveries and the young trainee's rapport with the doctor who haunts the hospital at night as well as what we might take for her dreams.
Her boyfriend, competently played by Yasmine Belmadi, is your average kind, nice young man who offers little reassurance, while the splendid Catherine Jacob, as Isabelle's cheerily competent cousin, is also an experienced nurse who becomes understandably peeved at the girl's sinister notions. Until it's too late.
'Bambi' is showing at L'Entrepôt (Fr., the revived cultural centre round the corner whose bright rebirth I wrote up on May 24), which at this stage five months into the film's big-screen career might trick people who know Paris into thinking it's another French art movie.
Marchand does play at that game with his finely shot mixture of reality and fancy and a soundtrack which is minimalist enough to be effective, but without being a great film, it deserves a broad public.
So does Sophie Quinton. She's indeed the pretty head-turner people have been writing about but also a most gifted actress cast in a difficult role, which she plays with a rare and convincing understatement. The only problem is that she's asked to do so for rather too long. In being over-ambitious with his first feature, Marchand serves up a film that loses its tension and sags for a spell in its second half as he labours his points and his cast.
I give this a 6/10 and recommend it when you're in a mood to be slightly disturbed, not for a fun evening in or out, nor to anybody with a phobia about syringes or injections.
'Bambi' also reminded me of a particularly good variant on that game of those question and answer sessions where the only responses allowed are oui or non. But to say any more of that would be a spoiler, since it forms one of the cleverer psychological twists. As for the film's title, the only answer to that one is "Go and see it".
At L'Entrepôt, they need to do something about one of the toilets! Trying to find the handbasin and the towel-roll in the dark afterwards, the man I almost collided with said, "The film was sombre enough! Now the damned toilet as well..."
10:49:57 PM link
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If 'Qui a Tué Bambi?' is as good as the critics almost unanimously say it is, then I might review it myself later.
 Apart from some mostly excellent write-ups, the psycho-thriller that came out last year seems to have stirred a sizeable part of France's male population all because of a hitherto unnoticed young actress called Sophie Quinton.
Among countless things I've now read of her qualities, for those who read French one of the saddest was where a fellow called Antonin went online in an Allociné forum. When it comes to the "brush-off" in the punchline, I've hardly savoured better myself!
Ah, such gallantry! Talk about downright lust hidden in a bouquet of praise... All to no avail!
Am I cruel, of a sudden?
It's all Natalie's fault. I don't know that it will boost her sales, but a certain book of hers is now, I find, part of the talk of the quartier. Where Sam spoiled me rotten, yet again, with a splendid Sunday lunch at the Canteen, accompanied by far too much talk of sex.
During a dull moment in the Factory yesterday, I was catching up on my blogroll. When it comes to talking about sex, this activity led me to another chat which is one of the reasons I could get into trouble at work.
You are warned, forthwith, that this allegedly true "transcript of a private America Online chat session" is definitely open-minded adult reading: the strangest tastes came up at 'Purple Prank'.
Before you click on that link, take note that even Venomous Kate hesitated about posting it last week and said "I know I'm Going To Regret This" (Electric Venom).
But it is quite revoltingly funny.
(Photo credit: Haut et Court films)
6:06:38 PM link
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(Also posted to Blogcritics, belatedly. But I don't blame Stel Pavlou for the cold, etc. that stopped me writing for a while.)
If you want a novel of near-future politico-scientific speculation, ablaze with mind-stretching ideas and taut with the tension of total disaster in the making, then Stel Pavlou's 'Decipher' (2001, Simon & Schuster; Pocket Books, 2002) is it.
The action begins in appalling weather aboard the 'Red Osprey', an energy giant's exploration vessel in the Ross Sea off Antarctica, where a tough team from Rola Corp. and some queasier scientists are after oil reserves.
Yes, this kind of research is illegal and wicked. We know all about the last great wilderness, the provisions and bans of the Antarctic Treaty. The earth's vast southern icecap is a place where you can't shit without tanking the stuff up and taking it home for disposal. And nobody owns it. But as Pavlou points out in a brief preface starting in 1960, the Treaty
"guaranteed that even if mankind had any desire to rid itself of the Seven Deadly Sins, Greed had been assured of a place in our hearts by virtue of time. By writing it down on a piece of paper and parading it as law and belief, Greed could be resurrected at a moment's notice.
That was the beauty of the written word."
However, it's not oil they strike with Rola Corp.'s depth node sunk from 'Red Osprey'. It's some weird rock, Carbon 60, and it's got incomprehensible writing on it.
Roll on Dr Richard Scott, linguist extraordinaire, expert in the origins of language, bane of the Bible Belt because he explodes the very foundations of the Christian faith with his knowledge of comparative religion and mythologies.
Scott is a kind of Joseph Campbell ('Thou Art That') and Mircea Eliade ('The Sacred and the Profane', 1968) rolled into one and doing his thing in 2012.
With the United States on the verge of an energy resources war with China, the reliable old sun suddenly behaving so dangerously strangely that humanity's own recent and considerable contribution to global warming is among the least of our worries, and more bizarre discoveries being made in places as distant as the Amazon and Egypt, Scott's needed to take on something new.
Along with Jon Hackett, nuclear physicist, Sarah Kelsey, leading geologist, engineer Ralph Matheson and a few others who who have to join an uneasy alliance of scientists, the military and Rola Corp. to find that they have about a week to save the world.
Pavlou is good. His first novel rivets the attention for nearly 800 pages, draws richly on two of the oldest and most widespread myths known to humanity -- the Flood and notions of Atlantis -- and abounds with wit and ideas.
But even when I finished it, I still wasn't sure whether my imagination had just absorbed a large chunk of encyclopaedia or a blockbuster film script to which the likes of James Cameron, Ridley Scott or even the grown-up Steven Spielberg might do justice, given a lot of money and some staggering but discreet special effects.
The man does write movies. The year 'Decipher' came out, so did 'The 51st State', which the Liverpool University graduate both wrote and co-produced, to mixed crits. And it shows in the book, where the visual imagery is big-screen stuff, right up to its climax beneath the ice, but the characters are mostly not filled out: brilliant, funny, and sometimes devious and dangerous, but stereotypes nevertheless.
This didn't bother me, since I was hooked. What did, however, was the number of times Pavlou puts his people in the most appalling situations and they respond in the most unlikely of ways. By chattering, relentlessly. Experience has taught me that when you're being shot at, for example, you don't chunter on as if you're in some cosy scientific conference. I don't know how I'd react if I encountered something as monstrous as a Golem, but I doubt that I'd resort to verbal pyrotechnics.
Stel does seem vaguely aware of this flaw! At one point, a character does a nice parody of Scott, who is by far the worst offender.
The trouble is that while this Britannica meets Hollywood approach pads the book out and can beggar belief while interfering with the action, what the characters have to say is often interesting. John Howard takes Pavlou to task for this in a nice exercise in comparative review: 'On Writing and Decipher' (Walden East). I agree with Howard that he sometimes crams too much in "as if Pavlou wasn’t sure that he’d ever be able to write another novel", but John misses the point in calling the four-page bibliography at the end a "tad pretentious".
Had he looked more closely, he would have noticed that the works listed include:
Matheson, Ralph K., Ecological Controls in Oil Production, USC Press, San Francisco, 2009
and
Scott, Richard, Tales of the Deluge: A Global Report on Cultural Self-Replicating Genesis Myths, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2008.
Stel's sense of humour invariably steps in each time he goes right over the top. This redeems the dull bits. And I'll read his next book.
________
Note to self: the "sense of humour ... redeems the dull bits". Might they say as much of me...
Note to others: the man has a small Stel Pavlou website. Where I wish he'd included an e-mail contact address.
1:04:06 PM link
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vendredi 6 février 2004
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I don't know whether current Net congestion is all the fault of the W32.MyDoom worm A or B (Sophos), but one of my virus detectors eradicated nine infected attachments from today's e-mail alone.
While few viruses are any threat to Macs, I keep my anti-virus software up to date rather than risk contaminating my friends using Windows.
The oddest development is that despite my computer firewall and having no file-sharing functions switched on, some guy called Baptiste, whom I otherwise know nothing about, appears to have access to my music library and has given me access to his.
I've no strong objection, but I haven't got hours to search tech sites and bulletin boards to find out how the hell he's doing it. This isn't the first time that I've discovered somebody busy "hacking" my Mac, not that he's doing any harm.
Maybe I need to get hold of the latest 'Take Control' e-book (PDF format) released yesterday by TidBITS, 'File Sharing in Panther', or ask one of my network savvy friends what's going on.
zzz
Had enough of reading about the wonders of Apple's iTunes Music Store without being able to buy anything there yet? Then take a look at the small, Paris-based and truly international Nupha Musicstore, which works with independent record labels.
Nupha's
"the 2nd Mac compatible Music Store in the US after Apple, and the 1st 'for the rest of us' (i.e. the rest of the World ;-). Let's hope that this will motivate the majors to help Apple launch the iTMS in Europe ASAP..." (brief article on MacBidouille, or hardmac.com, in English).
The full interview with Nupha's creator, Marca Tatem, is on MacBidouille's French site.
I've joined Nupha, of course, though I haven't bought anything there yet, and installed the Daemon for Mac OS X (a convenient menu-bar way of getting into their store, where the prices are certainly right).
Even if I choose just one of the 10,000 CDs Marca says are available in AAC (Apple) or WMA (Windows) format per month, I'll happily encourage anybody inventive enough to set up operations intended to be complementary to the iTunes store.
Nupha went offline after receiving so many "hits" a second following recent publicity that they had to get a new server and more bandwidth, but business appears to be back to usual tonight. At 128 Kpbs for AAC music files and 192Kpbs for WMA, the sound quality is not quite up to the highest CD standards, but it's fine for the average punter.
10:06:47 PM link
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Dr F. took me on a long time-trip.
Or was it the other way round?
Exhausting, yes, but enlightening.
In illuminating the unexpected, the woman is gifted, her sense of navigation as sure-footed as an Amazigh trader (Art & Life in Africa, U. of Iowa) in the eastern Sahara. One of the oases where I led her will be the starting point of our next exploration.
The subtitle of this log is still there for good reason. An ... experiment I posted last month led to one baffled e-mail and two to teach me something (but really, you're invited to comment here, no holds barred).
Here's another.
If still you're confused, let's recall that, Wednesday, I tumbled headlong into the big black pupils of a lucid gaze. Not deep enough yet to see stars; but a wellspring of pleasurably troubled nights, with dreams defying the passage of the decades.
Hence, for those eyes, a suite of three more fragments from the six 'Watches':
The desert was all.
The knight messenger flashed his sword
across the Gulf,
where the prophet stood, still.
Blood drained into shifting sand.
The sand remained.
(Gaia complained.)
The shining sword was the wrath of God
incarnate, the word of fighters and bombers
& missiles that missed.
The prophet said :
Those missiles became voices,
the voices of children. Sustained cries asked "Why" ?
Because, replied the sand in the wind,
unstained by their blood,
because you were there.
Bombs are made to drop from the sky
& you were made perfect here to die.
Of your wounds, I shall make a lasting grave.
It shall not move,
but I am tasked to sift it all away.
(& Gaia bowed like a slave.)
The Old Man
bequeathed laughter ;
proclaimed himself fallen from the 56th floor
to the 17th.
There is mercy above the clouds,
but not beneath.
Where does it come from, a cancer ?
The crab holds & eats away.
Sometimes the answer
resides in the question,
sometimes not ;
the interrogation persists
always.
He gives substance to so many days
& unless I help to save
it, his wisdom will waste in the grave.
The coming after
resides where the laughter begins
on her face. On Gaia’s face.
The solitude of wolves
proves to me that out of space,
half lost, you came.
Formed by night on the swell of a thunderous tide
you flew to me on the wind off the hills.
We warmed & shared a cup or two
& the shivering ceased with a lingering smile
& the hope in the storm’s embrace.
Starfire seeping from your hollow bones,
I nearly had you then,
gnawing on your succulent admission
but you dissolved and made me a mist
chill as the threat of no return.
& with the dawn, the loss was there again.
Song of Death, Dance of Hell
"Your style," Death whispered,
"is doomed to die."
"We do but try," I told him back. "The enemy
will take the flak."
It was under a tree
that the Buddha made his flames.
My Fire Sermon is free
of anybody else’s games.
"It says ?" "Love."
"What do you know about love ?"
"Nothing, my friend,
not a thing. But we live by & for it."
"You’re insane," Death informed me.
"And you think you’re God ?" I warned him.
Distant the frontiers
where first I pitched my posts.
My brain will not circumscribe them.
"And your Fire Sermon ?" Death insisted.
"Nothing," I said,
"not unless I speak of love."
"How so ?" screeched all my ghosts.
Hell is mere burning, a possession by fire.
But when Gaia is turning,
she’s alive. A live wire,
the best of all our play.
Death, you are dead !
I say
‘Hallo to Gaia’,
some of us are bound to love you.
______
Notes (& picture credit):
'The desert' - 1995 (from the 'FIRST WATCH');
No sea this, but the Shatt al-Jarid (or Chott el-Djerid - more on 'Lovely world'), a sometimes treacherous salt desert in west central Tunisia: I took the photo during a crossing with the Kid in 1996;
'The Old Man' - 1993/1976 rev. 1995 (from the 'SECOND WATCH');
'Desert Lion' picture - from Deborah Hill's 'Online Creative';
'Song' - 1995 (from the 'SECOND WATCH');
while 'Incident de Voyageur' (included in the 'Metropolitan mishap' entry of Jan 19) was a "bleeding chunk" (1994) extracted from the 'FOURTH WATCH'.
4:58:16 PM link
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She had a tough week: two days of exams as a dry run for her Brevet, which Marianne will take, turned 15, at the end of the school year and is a major time for decisions already in the making.
Though I ask questions and monitor the homework the Kid brings with her at weekends, some of the workings of French education have bewildered me. Not least because the classes are numbered backwards from the system I grew up with, but some of the crucial orientation choices come at slightly different ages.
From what's left of my English perspective, French kids are asked to make some key career decisions a little too early in life, while the weight of the textbooks, paperwork, exercise books in plastic folders, photocopies, pens, pencils, rulers, etc. most are expected to lug around on their backs every schoolday is a scandal.
While I've only been to two or three parent-teacher meetings, those I've attended remain alien to what I'd expect from my own upbringing, too reverent and regulated.
Rather than an exchange of views, the parents get told, "This is how it's going to be and you don't have much say in the matter" - an opinion shared by some of my British and American friends with children in "ordinary" French schools.
Still, what the Kid usually doesn't want to talk about and what I should have asked her mother but often didn't, I've learned from such friends and a host of resources on the Web.
There are clear explanations in English at sites like 'Moving to France Made Easy', which reminds me of a disgruntled prediction my friend Jacques made recently at the Canteen:
"You'll see, if things go on the way they are, in less than 20 years' time southern France will be one big retirement home for foreigners!"
Given the English colonisation in the past couple of decades of whole tracts of the Dordogne, I see what he means!
However, whatever reservations I have about the rites, rotes and rigours of this country's educational system, I can't argue with the fact that like the French national health service, it often produces admirable results.
I got out of an appointment a little too late to head off to join Marianne and her mum for a first "orientation meeting", but I've kept my fingers crossed for the Kid under examination for a couple of days.
It turns out that I shan't be seeing her this weekend as I'd expected, but I've still got potentially glad tidings for her.
It's not just me and her chums who keep up with her doings on the 'Belcatja' (Fr.) blog she shares with a friend.
So does François, a buddy of mine who's been very busy of late making a music album he was kind enough to let me hear as a work in progress. The feller's scouting for lyrics.
And he told me he's been very taken with some of the things he's read of late on Belcatja.
Now that's worth a special mention.
Does it count as orientation?
4:39:05 PM link
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jeudi 5 février 2004
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Dawn Olsen's outpouring of bile at Shania Twain and Faith Hill smells extremely wicked and lends far too much credit to a brace of unremarkable singers as spawn of a diabolical imagination:
"two of the most grating, vile, useless, worthless purely fabricated piles of shit stuffed into a Barbie Doll, dressed-up-like-whores, tools of the devil I have ever seen."
Nevertheless, Dawn's reflections on 'What Your Taste In Music Says About You' (BC) feature some of the funniest insights into musical likes and dislikes I've read in a long while.
Worse, that, she claims, is merely Part 1.
12:06:02 AM link
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mercredi 4 février 2004
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Hmm.
Kathryn Petro and I have at least two common features.
She writes about psychology and therapies 'Of Necessity' (A Mindful Life), but from an expert's perspective.
And she's had the luck to make Augustine's acquaintance, even using one of the gifted cartoon's thoughts about thoughts as a parallel to the "feelings chart that therapists use to help children and adults identify and express feelings".
I've just come across Kathryn oddly not via Blaugustine, but by way of the All Consuming trackbook.
Sometimes the blogosphere seems almost as close-knit a universe as the world can occasionally prove small.
11:36:27 PM link
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Ha! I've caught myself perpetrating three or four genuinely good jokes and even one or two bits of sheer silliness.
Among the latter, I couldn't help but see a grouchy stupidity in somebody's moan on the Factory canteen's comments sheet for the day:
"My piece of quiche was too small!" they'd scrawled.
So I pinched a pen and wrote underneath:
"My piece of quiche was too big."
Hours later, as I paused between stories for a quick smoke on the landing, one of the loveliest women on the editorial floor, also blessed with a richly melodious laugh, stopped for a brief chat as she left.
With her bright dark eyes just a breath's distance from mine and such a pretty mouth divulging some intriguing news, it was very hard to restrain myself from simply kissing her full on the lips there and then.
That could have got me into terrible trouble, but Oh la la! Could it just be, I dared wonder, that the worst of the winter is suddenly behind us, this part of the world no longer fully turned on its dark side?
Despite the congested sore head, city drabness and unexpected course of antibiotics to finish on Friday, I felt better than I have for weeks.
Then I realised.
"I feel a full moon coming on," I remarked to MK, back on the news desk.
"That's interesting," she said. "How do you know?"
But I always know.
Michelle put it down to some kind of "magnetic influence". Yes, something like that. Well, I discovered, it's on Friday-Saturday night.
But maybe I'd already known and forgotten.
There was also a good landing chat with Patxi, the big Basque, about vices, of which he kindly offered to teach me a few more, and how the Brits are good at crosswords but the French so much better at wordplay, including puns ('Dictionnaire International des Termes Littéraires'; Fr. but also some articles in English).
Wordplay is one of my favourite things about the French language.
There's plenty of that in the work of Lynda Lemay, the star singer from Québec who made me miss a Métro change tonight as I was listening to 'Les Lettres Rouges' for the first time, becoming an instant if belated fan.
Lynda's remarkable voice, considerable wit, the clever humour in some of her songs and intimacy with life's passions in the more serious ones brought back a few emotions I've rarely felt since my family days...
Lynda Lemay (RFI, decent bio in English), Mali's Moussa Traoré, Berlin's Ellen Allien, Argentina's Emma Milan and the late Eva Cassidy of Maryland, who died cruelly young, like the London-born Sandy Denny (whom I saw live several memorable times in my teens) -- these are just a few of the women who have made almost every kind of music, all on my adored iPod.
That astounding invention can scarcely take any more.
I've copied more than 200 CDs from my collection on to the music player that has in just weeks become a vital part of my life, to such a degree that I can totally identify with the considerable distress the Kid felt when some utter asshole a few days ago stole the Walkman I bought her for Christmas.
I thank my stars I also insured it, and all I'm waiting for is a copy of her police report, due in the post.
I'm far from convinced that I'm the womaniser a friend recently told me I am. Even if I were, my recent experiences have confirmed that I've extremely rarely been a "successful" one!
But of one thing the Faithful 5 ¾ can be certain.
In the coming year, should you keep dropping by, you'll be reading many more entries on a vast subject close to my heart: the voices of women.
And tomorrow comes my latest rendez-vous with Dr F, the expert in psychosomatic matters. It promises to be an interesting encounter.
We've not yet had a session so close to the full moon.
Now, if only I could get those magnetically kissable lips right out of my mind. What could they not cure?
10:41:19 PM link
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mardi 3 février 2004
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The Factory has a budget.
Though no longer a union official on "active service", I'm posting a quickie for AFP staff members in far-flung parts of the world who haven't had time of late to keep an eye on the internal notes and service wires, especially DIR.
Our current great leader, Bertrand Eveno, came down to the editorial floor at the start of the evening after a Board of Governors' meeting to take the microphone with a brief account of proceedings as he saw them. Obviously, the terms of our employment contracts don't allow me to blog details of the numerous figures Eveno provided and the spin he put on them.
Let's just say there wasn't exactly a stirring round of applause for the French media barons and government afterwards.
But if you want to know where the chairman and managing director, and the trade unions, think we're headed, I'd recommend paying a little more attention than usual to those internal wires over the next three or four days.
Unions also have, don't forget, their sites on AFP's intranet. And this being France, there seem to be even more of them to choose from, after the fuss that surrounded last year's union elections and what happened while I was away last year, when the CGT (Fr. main site) branches in the Factory, er ... blew up. That's the only term I can think after one batch of them dubbed the others "Stalinist" and various other happy labels from the past.
The SNJ (main Fr. site, but David -- Sharp Words -- is also busier than ever), is still largely in one piece and remains by far the biggest journalists' union in France, active as ever in the Factory.
Finally, if you want French press reports of what's going on, don't forget that the media or economy pages of Libé, Le Figaro, Le Monde and sometimes L'Humanité tend to have something to say when such rites of passage occur in the Factory's career.
9:42:59 PM link
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Some very nice e-mails of all kinds have been coming my way in the past couple of days (a few of them related to my work here and at Blogcritics).
I will take up the various points raised, that's a promise, but for the moment the priorities must be rather a packed week on the medical front, the more swiftly to be better and snarl at everybody again, and the workload in the Factory, where I'm not the only one who's sick at the moment.
This is lurgy time.
10:53:33 AM link
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lundi 2 février 2004
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And I don't mean the Mydoom worm (BBC tech). Tonight I got rid of the latest 18 versions of that to land in my e-mail.
I mean one of those bugs doing the rounds right now that had given me a heavy cold by Friday morning and turned into such fever and a brain-numbing headache by yesterday that I thought it was 'flu, the real thing.
Bloghero Yang tells me that there isn't any 'flu in France right now. So I went on to an ear, nose and throat specialist, who I will be seeing again on Friday once my sinuses are sufficiently disinfected for him to be able to see what the real trouble is, after a few days on antibiotics.
In the meantime, until I can breathe and sleep properly again, there aren't going to be any blog entries and the various reviews and other items I'd had in mind are all in the "to do" file.
I took advantage of the gaps between doctor's appointments today to clean up the Mac and check things were up to date.
Hence this holding piece is the first entry posted with the new Omniweb 5.0 beta 1 browser, released today, which I've already decided is a very nice piece of work.
11:01:44 PM link
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fountains and fortunes
voices of women
(ecstatic naiades, erotic firebirds, eccentric angels,
electric dryades ...)
the orchard:
a blog behind the log
(popping those green pills sometimes gives me strange fruit)
backlog
musical months
march 2007
[feb 2007]
jan 2007
[dec 2006]
nov 2006
oct 2006
[sept 2006]
aug 2006
july 2006
june 2006
may 2006
april 2006
march 2006
feb 2006
jan 2006
dec 2005
nov 2005
oct 2005
sept 2005
aug 2005
july 2005
june 2005
may 2005
------------
previous lives
april 2005
march 2005
feb 2005
jan 2005
dec 2004
nov 2004
oct 2004
sept 2004
aug 2004
july 2004
june 2004
may 2004
april 2004
march 2004
feb 2004
jan 2004
dec 2003
nov 2003
oct 2003
sept 2003
aug 2003
july 2003
june 2003
may 2003
april 2003
march 2003
feb 2003
good ideas
artistic licence;
contributing friends (pix, other work)
retain their rights.
a fine way of seeing it
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