jeudi 29 avril 2004

Listening to pictures "So, the next time your other half finds a dog-eared copy of Playboy under the bed, forget the old 'I only buy it for the interviews' and try the all-new 'Actually, I bought it to support cancer research'. A guaranteed winner." 'Buy pornography, fight psoriasis,' suggests 'The Register'. A better idea (which also saves me translating a recent article in 'Science et Vie') has been 'Wired': 'Tiny Computer Could Fight Cancer'. zzz "The Bush Administration understands the importance of responding to the global explosion in anti-Americanism. Left unchecked, these irrational sentiments, harbored by billions of mentally inferior foreigners the world over, could contribute to an international consumer climate in which American corporations and products stand at a competitive disadvantage." Where would we be without 'The White House' (indirectly via the Cruel Site of the Day)? In the Red pink corner, 'John Kerry Has No Recollection Of Throwing Medals Like A Girl' (Broken Newz). (Footnote to self: Be nice, even to Americans. You do, after all, have a date tomorrow with the loveliest one you've met this year... Anyway, they can't help it.) zzz 'iPodding the Met' -- yet another great idea from "God's country". Actually, this time I'm not being a sarcastic smart-arse. "The song ‘Listen Up’ by Oasis goes great with Dutch landscapes, but I was an idiot a month ago and wouldn’t have guessed. A recent class on French wines told me as much. The instructor, a large man with a long nose, stood behind a lectern massaging his waddle and explained to us, his students for the next three hours, that we were there because we wanted to know how to pair wine with food. Not true, I thought. I was there because I had a gift certificate to his school soon to expire, and ‘Wines of France’ sounded more appealing than ‘Couples Are Garlic Lovers,’ which I already knew, or ‘How To Do Things,’ which seemed kind of vague." Rosecrans Baldwin spent a birthday afternoon pairing music with paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wrote it up for 'New York, New York' ('The Morning News'). What Rosecrans tried at random inspires me to visit the Musée d'Orsay (English front door) with a fresh ear to the canvas. zzz It may not be just round the corner, but I reckon today's 'Bleat' gets it right. "In the future, I think, newspapers will become almost entirely devoted to local news and happy fluff, like me," says the blogrolled James Lileks. "I depend on my paper for local news, because I don’t watch TV news." I probably read a newspaper about twice a year. But that's more than I read Playboy... 11:58:44 PM  link   your views? [] 'Effendi': justice in the balance Blogrolled SF writer Charlie Stross -- who's rightly proud to have been shortlisted for a Hugo (The Herald) and must today merit a blog award for the shortest entry (after "suffering for your art") -- has beaten me to my noun. "Get them, read them, think about current politics in the middle east, feel your head explode. NB: contains raw, undiluted anger. May cause burns to mucous membranes. Not to be taken internally." Anger. A step ahead of me (eyes to the right at his place for the "Dead Trees"), Charlie's given us a brief review of 'Felaheen', the "capstone" to Jon Courtenay Grimwood's 'Arabesk' trilogy. 'Effendi' (Pocket Books, paperback 2003) is also an angry book, but the anger's neither raw nor undiluted. The crime thriller builds up a mighty head of steam, but subtly holds both the emotion and the reader in check until the climax in court. Back in El Iskandyria, the astute Ashraf al-Mansur has become chief of detectives, his first case a multiple murder mystery. Since Raf is a glutton for trouble, the man he's investigating is Zara's dad, his would-be father-in-law, Hamzah Quintrimala. Since 'Pashazade: The First Arabesk' did much of the scene-setting (as did I in my review of it here last September), Grimwood is more sparing with his fine brushstrokes for the city itself and even stronger on character, to equally potent effect and with as many twists, turns and tributaries as the Nile. "'Safety off,' said the gun. Stood beside Sergeant Ka, Zac said nothing. He'd spoken little enough when he was alive and now he was dead he talked even less . . . Ka thought that strange, because Zac's sister Ruth had also said little from the time she'd been captured to the moment she died. But now she talked so much that Ka couldn't concentrate on watching the growling trucks that rolled across the scrub towards him. 'Distance?' 'Half a click and closing . . .' Status and range. That was all the plastic H&K/cw could manage. It was an incredibly stupid weapon and the boy with the bone cross, feather amulet and boots several times too big didn't know why the manufacturer had bothered." This is not Isk. This is Sudan. 'Effendi: The Second Arabesk' is no more sci-fi or conventional crime thriller than 'Pashazade' was. And Grimwood's alternative today's world is no fantasy heaven and hell. Hence the anger: a tightly controlled rage laser-sighted in sparse but very telling prose, with wit, lightning humour and compassion, at some of the headline horror targets of our own First and Third Worlds. Like, just for instance, the use of child soldiers and the manipulation of "terrorism" in the affairs of state. In fewer than 400 pages, Grimwood takes a scalpel to some of the worst aspects of a modern Africa instantly recognisable to anybody genuinely familiar with the continent. That he can balance this against one or two of Africa's best features, write sexily about sex and make you smile in the process is considerably to his credit. 8:56:25 PM  link   your views? [] 'God Bless America': Patriotism Unltd. One term for them used to be "camp followers", but some of those did it for cash or their keep. There's no question of money for these women, who probably don't even "close their eyes and think of England the US of A": "(Kelly) McDonough energetically describes exactly what Operation Take One for the Country does, 'First, a military operation would not be a military operation unless we used an acronym, in this case, Op T.O.F.T.C., or as we say "To-FutK". Essentially we organize, discreetly, single girls to frequent bars and restaurants near military bases and, well, Take One for the Country, with members of the military, especially those about to go overseas. (...) 'The men go off into harms way gratified, and because the organization is covert, they get the boost in ego thinking that they scored on their own attributes, they ship out relaxed and confident, with a distinct impression of a grateful nation behind them.'" John Truman wrote up 'TOFTC'©. Kelly is as fond as John of striking punctuation and, like Mark Twain, doesn't give a damn for a woman who can only spell a word one way, telling us of hopes of making "The Howard Stern Show. THAT would be huge!" Kelly's warning: "Be DISCRETE! (...) To the group in Galveston Texas (Yes, I got word the NEXT day), you CANNOT, and I mean CANNOT go to a bar and get loaded and start chanting 'TAKE ONE FOR THE COUNTRY' like a zillion times. That's bad. I love you Texan gals and love your spirit but that's not what we are trying to accomplish and it's not safe." Via, with thanks, Soulhuntre's 'Core/Dump'. 5:28:00 PM  link   your views? []

mercredi 28 avril 2004

Streams of altered consciousness Fed up with my gripes? So am I. Especially when small miracles happen. Terje Rypdal. The Roof. And expecially Lady E. It's a very long time since I discovered the music Terje Rypdal makes with his friends -- I was still living in England -- that I feel I've known him almost forever, beginning with an LP from Manfred Eicher's early and legendary stable at ECM. Then a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London where the guitarist Rypdal, drummer Jon Christensen and trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg were the main men modestly to take the stage, with a few electronic tweaking machines, and work and weave a magic which blew every mind under that roof, including those of the genteel elderly couples who frequented the QEH and hadn't the slightest idea what to expect. It must have been 'Waves', with Sveinung Hovensjo on the electric basses ('77/'78, re-released in 1992). I particularly remember Christensen's genius with a drumkit and Mikkelborg doing things I'd not imagined possible with a trumpet and a fluegelhorn. When they'd done, there was a very long silence before an explosion of applause the like of which I've rarely heard before or since. Was it modern jazz, was it brilliantly scored very "contemporary music", was it an eclectic fusion of wonders? It didn't matter. Like a lot of sounds Eicher was recording then, it evaded etiquettes... I don't recall any encores or even requests for them; we were all too stunned, I think, perhaps sated with pleasure, simply grateful for a glimpse of heaven during what then felt like an aural revolution, or revelation, which had you at once wanting to keep your eyes closed for the colour and the transport of delight and wrench them open to watch how it was done. Rypdal's more recent achievements include ' Skywards' (1997), where the "simple" ballad 'It's Not Over Until the Fat Lady Sings!' and the 'Out of this World (Sinfonietta)' were so beautiful I played them several times over, and the live 'Lux Aeterna' (2000, released in 2002) which a guy in Scotland describes on Amazon as "a near religious experience". I'm digesting it slowly. 'The Turning Point' in my life this week is not quite of the kind Fritzjof Capra explained in his controversial 1983 introduction to theoretical physics and some almost mystical concepts. It's closer to what he appears to have achieved in 'The Hidden Connections' published last year (that's what we need: "a science for sustainable living"). I could scarcely credit it until they turned up in flesh and blood on Monday, after a guiding 'phone call or three on my part to get them to the right damned building: the guys who arrived to repair the leaking roof. This was but three years after I first informed the apartment manager of the rain coming into my bedroom. The two fellows gasped with admiration at the crack that has now extended from a corner of the living room to halfway across the ceiling. Later the one called Stephane informed me that the damage to the roof was far more extensive (and expensive to deal with) than the last of three surveyors who had all been called in for estimates told me about a year ago. This wasn't surprising. There are times I'm more grateful than ever to be a humble tenant who doesn't have to help pay for the repair. Much later, something even better happened. Lady E., the woman who made a first appearance here the day after April 1 (I may be superstitious, but that doesn't make me completely stupid and reckless), yawned her way back into my life. Ever since, every electro-chemical alarm bell in my cranium has been ringing and all the lights are flashing Code Orange. How much more dare I disclose? In the last encounter at close quarters, the time to exchange words was brief. And she looked as tired as somebody who had just had an arduous day or completed a long journey, but her sense of humour was intact. She lives at close quarters, far too close for her own safety with a waxing crescent moon in the sky and my senses and sensibility so dangerously aroused. She has a firmly set jaw and a mouth somewhere between full-lipped and that ever so slight downturn at the edges that speaks of untold experience lived and learned ... with a sudden smile that interrupts heartbeats. She's slender, graceful, elegant. Her eyes ... well, you know me and what an exceptional woman's eyes can do to my system. And she's one of those very rare people with whom I feel instantly, inexplicably at ease... She informs me that I am "clearly missing some naked men". Well, I think I've explained already that I found during my first go at being a teenager that I honestly don't miss naked men after a period of British public school indecision. But if it's here she's talking about, wasn't governor Arnie good enough for her? If she tells me who she wants, I'll do my best to oblige. I know exactly what Sylvie would say, so I'm not going to tell her about Lady E. Sylvie would say that "nothing in life is coincidence, Nicholas, and you met Lady E. during your previous existence as an Untouchable when she was of the Brahmin caste. She didn't even look at the sweepers then. Not before you. But —" "Stop it, Sylvie," I'd interrupt. "We've already agreed that all these lives happen simultaneously and time simply doesn't exist —" "Precisely," she would answer. "Yet another case of unfinished business. Don't say I didn't warn you." Well, all that's far too complicated for me tonight. It's April. It's spring. It's Paris. And I think I liked 'Disintegration' more than the Sex Pistols. My own munitions firmly tucked away, I'll put a word in for Vivienne Westwood (Flash site ... or not). It's all something to do with style. Real style... The remaking and reshaping of things. N'est-ce pas, Lady E.? 10:47:29 PM  link   your views? [] New sounds on the quiet (OS X) If you're interested and haven't spotted it, Apple have just slipped out updates to iTunes (version 4.5), iPod software and QuickTime (v. 6.5.1). They're not on offer via the Software Update pane; I stumbled across these releases when doing what had been intended to be a quick update check via VersionTracker. iTunes is in the news at Smart Playlists (via the MacDev Center). Particularly interesting features: "WAM - Convert WMA to AAC" and the new "Apple Lossless Codec", claiming to offer CD quality sound at "half the size". Be warned: the updated version of QuickTime is a long job to install and fixing permissions once you've done it is not just recommended, but imperative. By the time I'd gone down that road, I thought it best to run the gamut of maintenance routines. Three hours worth! At 'TS', Kelly's as quick off the mark as ever. MacCentral has it too. 10:11:45 PM  link   your views? [] Factory file: health on a thin red line First the bad news. Some very nice things have happened to me of late, but before that it's time to tell Factory hands remote from HQ a few things I've learned. A third party, outsider's perspective does no harm here. It came from a recent visitor to the place who was kind enough to tell me that I was "fun" but the ambience was "glum". So it is, with no signs of improvement since that "facts on the line" announcement from Big Boss to workers in the engine room I briefed you about on April 9. What I didn't say then, pending confirmation, was that the question I put to the BB concerned "a wicked rumour doing the rounds" that come the summer, many of us who have holidays to take will not, this year, be replaced by temporary hires on the Desks and services concerned. The wicked rumour turns out to be true. I learned this because, after getting through the past three or four weeks and keeping any sense of humour and perspective mainly on a surfeit of coffee, half-smoked cigarettes and a more than occasional Valium tab, it was time for some decisions. The "verdict" in yesterday's meeting with the gut specialist who's operated on me, Dr de P -- the first such lengthy analysis of the Condition I've had with him since my return to work about six months ago -- confirmed my feelings and led to more serious talking at AFP. Where my own health goes, after an initial shock at the badness of the test results, the outlook is as good as the past month has sometimes been hellish. The relapse has been only too real, but the huge difference between today and this time last year is that I know why. The bowel expert also supplied me with the means to prevent that daily abdominal ballooning which had come to remind me of a Monty Python sketch about a Zeppelin. Somehow I got through the afternoon in the Factory by the simple expedient of avoiding lunch (part of what has turned into a 48-hour purge to end very shortly). Then around 9:45 last night, Dr G, the psychosomatic shrink who did me so much good, 'phoned to tell me that I won't have to wait until May 7 to pursue the next steps with her, since she has a slot for me in a couple of days. I was as grateful as I was once again amazed at the length of her working days. I've turned down the offer of another arrêt de travail (sick note) because it's become a matter of principle that any time off needed now must be the holiday the Factory owes me and not another rest at the expense of France's social security system. It's also a matter of the health of the Factory itself. Whether or not I've become a union back-bencher, I remain a determined member of the resistance to staff cuts and non-replacement of absent journalists imposed on us all by a Board of Governors consisting partly of national media barons who at one and the same time hold the purse strings and are among our key clients. Along with the government, these people both decide how much investment AFP gets and how much they're prepared to pay for our "products", which is obviously the least they can get away with. It's scarcely surprising that visitors sometimes find the climate of the place gloomy. The better news is that there are many others in mid-level management and some at the top who acknowledge that the non-replacement policy is insanity. The same goes for the indecent treatment of some of the locally hired staff scattered all over the world. Despite the short-sighted, selfish and greedy policies of paymasters who could wreak as much havoc at the Factory as they have elsewhere, alongside the technical revolution currently shaping the media of the 21st century, I'm still optimistic that enough good journalists, technicians and administrators remain determined to fight for high standards as well as tolerable working conditions. I well remember an interregnum, a few years back, widely reported in the French press, when AFP didn't even have a senior management for some weeks, such was the turmoil at the top. But the Factory survived. It survived because responsible journalists and fine technicians kept the place going until a new team was appointed at the top. There are others, senior staff, who tell me that the current financial crisis is the worst ever. "Plus ça change,...": the pessimists have been telling me the same thing for two decades! My "medical team" suggests that if I worried less, managed not to empathise so much with people getting the rawest end of the deal and shed all guilt regarding my own absences, some symptoms of the Condition would disappear almost overnight. I'm obviously not sufficiently stupid to ignore such excellent advice. Coming sessions with Dr G will focus on "stress management" after all the groundwork described here since the turn of the year. I've begun to learn lessons from how others at the Factory handle their own stress; the main one is that reconciling high professional standards with an ability to stay "detached" comes in many ways for many people, but it's the detachment that matters most. Once I've blogged this, I'll make the very most of the next three or four days and not even think about the job until I'm back on Sunday. May will be manageable. And yesterday, I got a promise of some proper holiday time in June which has boosted both my courage and my morale! In the next log entry, drafted on Monday night but postponed for lack of sleep, it's high time for a bit more fun. 1:28:37 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 25 avril 2004

Disjointed thanks from a retarded ado And there were parliamentary and local government elections in Equatorial Guinea too, forgotten in the last entry. So mine was a very busy day from mid-morning on. I swiftly lost count of how many thousand words I wrote or edited, but it scarcely matters since they all appear to have vanished into a black hole. Neither the two African polls of the day nor the makings of more trouble in Ivory Coast have made any of even the main specialist news sites, though there might be a "pick up" or two by the morning. Just let nobody tell me, as they frequently do, that Africa is "under-reported". Factories like AFP churn stuff out and even try to make it interesting, but it's not for us to decide whether the newspaper, broadcast and website editors between us and the "general public" use the stories... As to this place, I'll ask again, though I'm grateful for the e-mails: please don't hesitate to put your comments in the box provided, even though the free software used can be a little laggardly -- some of them are too witty and funny to go unshared and I even enjoy the hostile ones. I'm genuinely sorry if one or two people find the occasional pictures of naked or semi-nude women offensive -- that's not the intent, and I can even be as tediously PC as required when it's really necessary. Nor is the idea, as Tom F. suspected, to boost my Feedster "score": I've not been there for a very long time and am simply intrigued tonight to find that the site and the idea have come a long way since the last visit. There may be some truth in Jean-Pierre H.'s remark a week ago that they're a "regrettable intrusion of the adolescence you've finally recovered" and his reference to "ripening backwards and slipping through the weave in our nets" ("ta façon de mûrir à reculons et à travers les mailles de nos filets"). At work, I suspect that Sarah got part of the joke, while Emma just gave a bemused shrug. Then said, "I thought your site was a discussion forum." Which it is, partly. Julie almost hit the nail on the head with a clever e-mail about the Condition, the Wildcat's comment that it isn't exactly sexy, a condensed and bawdy bardic twist of her own -- 'A Midsummer Day's Cream,' which I'd like to publish if she'll let me -- and a splendid link: "I hate that moment on Sunday mornings when you wake up at some guy's house and realize you have to stumble home in the same miniskirt and makeup that looked so sexy the night before, but just looks scary in the cruel light of dawn. And everyone on the subway knows you've got a raging hangover and your underwear is stuffed in your purse. God, let me get married soon, because if I have another one of these mornings, I'm going to slit my wrists" - "posted by Tara @ 2:00 AM" on 'Supermodel Personals'. Where the Condition's concerned, thanks for your concern, everybody. Yes, the past four weeks have seen some rough days, it does worry me (slightly), it wasn't nice for Marianne to have me sick most of the week she was here ... and one recent development is an embarrassing nuisance and even less sexy. The Kid and Catherine, her mum, have just dropped by to find me in my pyjamas and collect the cat. As an unfortunate witness, Catherine had a helpful suggestion to get rid of what I'm not going to describe in detail: "They need to do to you what they do to sheep with the same problem." Anyway, blow all that ... I see the gut specialist, Dr de P., at midday on Tuesday, a long-awaited rendezvous to assess the outcome of all the latest tests. You may never have thought to read me say "Bless the Wildcat" again, but I certainly do tonight, after she ended a 'phone call with some constructive ideas on ways further perhaps rapidly to get rid of the Condition I hadn't imagined. The fact that tomorrow I stand a good chance of seeing once more one of the loveliest women I've recently met has nothing to do with it... I've mislaid the e-mail address of "the One and True Visible Governor General of Australia", who paid me the honour of a trackback when I was ranting about different kinds of Americans and giving the lie to the old line about "over-sexed, over-paid and over here". However, Lord Sedgwick of Strathmore does us all another good turn with a link to 'The Eejit', who has a most entertaining site (via 'There Ain't No Sanity Clause'. 11:58:40 PM  link   your views? [] Dreamy day Giles Turnbull says that though he's a compulsive singer, he's a "complete musical ignoramus". But he's among the latest to be brave enough to expose himself to public ridicule. "Using GarageBand (Apple's tips) will not make you a musician," Giles warned after playing with it. "The best a non-musician can expect is to be able to create pleasant little doodles that may or may not entertain friends." His own doodles are at the end of 'Garage Band for the Musical Newbie' (MacDev Center). In Towns of Roman Britain, he or the software seem to have taken a leaf out of the minimalist book. The article is an incitement to fun. Though I've written about GB several times, I've yet to play with it and my music, film and software budget for the month has been spent. But in June, might we get iTunes music in Europe at last? MacRumors thinks so. Like Ataegina in her poetic offering (Fr.; b'rolled), I've mainly had a couple of days of pleasant little nothings myself. I even managed to forget that the promise awaits of a surfeit of Factory copy about Africa Malaria Day (MSF) and the run-off round in yet another almost incomprehensible vote in the Comoro islands. One of the nastiest legacies of French colonialism is the wretched habit of spoiling Sundays with elections journalists have to report! Even if it's a mainly Muslim country, so little happens in the Comoros apart from coups, coup bids and elections that they could pick a kinder day of the week. Were it not for that, I'd be at the Entrepôt, where a good band was earlier rehearsing behind white sheets on the stage. The cinema and club round the corner has the round tables and comfortable red leather armchairs too. Everything, in short, but the girl... I saw her, though, as I enjoyed my coffee after lunch on a corner café terrace in the sun, the straw-blonde woman of my daydreams, making her leisurely way down Losserand Street, hand in hand with another, equally pretty one, and I can only rejoice that the short hair and slightly boyish looks I adore seem to be back in fashion again this year. Sigh! I'll have to settle again for wishful, rather than magical, thinking (via Hot Links). Perhaps, like Kathryn Petro, who declares herself cheered by the "small joys of life," I'd do better to meditate on the "substance of matter" (A Mindful Life) and write a haiku than be tantalised by lightly clad shapes, but tonight I really could do with some livelier company than my ex-spouse's singularly sleepy cat. Joe the anaesthetist, meanwhile, has been delving deeper than I'd care to into the "mystery of Alisha Klass". Far too much ... makeup for me, while I also think it's a pity that models tend to wear such absurd and almost uncertainly uncomfortable shoes. But as to his reflection on the vanishing act performed by many porn stars, I'd have thought he'd know, as a medical man, that the answer to that one is not always a happy end. "Your mascara is peeling", "My wife fell overboard about ten miles back," "That's got to be silicon" and "You're very pretty for a foreigner" are among the pearls to be found in 'The Zompist Phrasebook' (via MetaFilter). People who speak a little French, German or Spanish will particularly appreciate the appalling traps scattered among the accurate translations. One person actually confronted with linguistic ineptitude is the Belle de Jour, who had "forgotten how much I want to live somewhere sunny" before she hailed us "from a foreign location". I never forget that, but liked her April 15 assessment of 'Escape hatches'. She's wrong about Africa, but then a lot of people are... The onetime world leader who has what some saw as a map of the place on his forehead, Gorbi, hasn't disappeared. Now president of Green Cross International, Mikhail wants "global glasnost". I take an imaginary hat off to Heli for the political link of my day. More wishful thinking maybe, but heaven knows we need some. "The real sad part about it all is that with all the horrible things in the world and that are happening here and abroad, that all these rights groups and (face it) powerful media organizations who can wield massive influence would only rally together united for a cause for the right to say 'fuck'," comments one person on what 'morons.org' sees as a sign of intelligence. The 'Irish Bastard' is right, of course. But it's a small miracle to see journalists manage to unite about anything. 12:08:09 AM  link   your views? []

samedi 24 avril 2004

Home truths about stress If the man who made an idiotic contribution to a debate on public ethics and private statements on a radio news programme this morning had his way, it wouldn't be in Saint Anne's loony bin that I might yet end up visiting Tony one day (short of being put in the room next door); he might be behind bars for one of his recent e-mail briefs. "This govt never learns," my friend announced to whet my appetite despite the obviousness of the introduction. "It fails to see logical inconsistency in declaring that as a lay institution the educational system is qualified to interfere with what girl pupils wear on their heads on religious grounds - rather like the Rugby Union opposing a change in soccer offside rules. Now it expels an imam (BBC) who has only advocated the beating of women; everybody knows this is a) a human right; b) often necessary; c) healthy exercise." More seriously (one of the Splendid Six ¼ has a near zero irony threshold), when it when it comes to bothersome interferers, my ears pricked up during a late bath this morning when a chap named Vincent told John Peel on 'Home Truths' (repeated on Monday or available over the Net): "My digestive system stopped working." A married man and father of three, evidently no wimp, Vincent developed this variant on the Condition because he worked in a small team where the boss was a bully who made his whole life intolerable. Some other symptoms he described were similar to those that contributed to the breakdown of my own intestinal machinery and also put Vincent off work for several months. He was less lucky than me, however; he explained how he went "mad" to such a degree that he had to separate for spells from his wife to give both of them a rest and he upset the kids, becoming short-tempered and depressed for the first time in his life. After encounters with shrinks, also a first for him, the diagnosis was "post traumatic stress disorder" (Sanctuary) no less. Vincent lost his job and said he still had no idea how to deal with men like that boss. Company superiors had offered no support and he described the catch: either knuckle under and the bullying gets worse or stand up to it and ... the bullying gets worse. I've brought the Kid up to understand that as a rule bullies are cowards, but there are exceptions. Vincent, who was obviously up against one of them, had a happy ending to relate. He landed a new and equally interesting job and won an unfair dismissal case against his former employer. His persecutor ended up doing some kind of business training course after -- if I heard right with my head under water -- being sacked. But it took an industrial tribunal to have the company acknowledge that the boss was a bastard. This got me to thinking about people I know have been bullied at AFP, where management is not always as enlightened as it might be and has lost its own share of court cases in my many years there. Today, I've got no complaints, since almost everybody was supportive when I got the Condition. But in the light of Vincent's tale, however, I also reflected on whether I had ever been bullied myself during my career at the Factory and the short answer was "Yes. Several times." When blogging earlier this week about sexual harassment, I declared that my outlook is to give such people two fingers. To be honest -- and despite long being a beneficiary of some legal protection provided in France for elected or appointed union officials -- this healthy attitude remains a recent development on my part, which might not have come without psychotherapy, western and oriental. Vincent still suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, he said, though it's now quite manageable. An odd thing is that while the therapists gave me a similar diagnosis, I only recognised it as such, with that particular label, on hearing his story. I tend to forget that it's past stress that hits me, rather than present pressures. He had recommendations with which I completely concur for those who begin to suspect they've got the same problem. First, you have to learn to see even the best of jobs as no more than a source of income; that's the bottom line and it's much harder to practice than to preach. Secondly, search the Internet. As Vincent said, it's a vast resource, once you've learned to sift through the nonsense. Today, I find that the 'Mental Health Sanctuary' even has a (small) list of blogs. I'm inclined to offer my services, for what it's worth. Which category, though?! To what Vincent said, I'd add a couple of things. The Obstinate One ½ (first and most stubborn of my visitors) will have realised that when I get a bad dose of the blues, I may hide, but even at the worst of times I know life will improve because it invariably has. Sometimes when you're down, you find it very hard to believe this, but it's a conviction I find more useful than most. Somebody sent me a multipage Christmas card about counting your blessings. I managed a polite reply, but that kind of syrup doesn't go with my digestion. The capacity of many people who never get depressed to misunderstand totally those who do astonishes me even today, especially since some of them publish the most dangerous rubbish on the Net. Nine times out of 10, telling someone who is seriously down to "snap out of it" or "pull yourself together" is not only pointless, since there's every chance they're trying hard enough already, but also increases their stress and guilt levels. Though he didn't say so, it was evident that Vincent learned that the hard way too. What he did do, however, was to refer to himself as "he", when talking about his spell of madness, which was a very healthy thing to do. It doesn't take a split personality to look at oneself in the third person. Once I began writing about my symptoms last year as "the Condition" and turned it into an object, it became increasingly easy to make both fun and light of it. Too much so for the liking of some, but that was their problem, not mine. A third suggestion is so obvious it shouldn't need saying, but since I've lived and worked with people who seem incapable of doing it, I shall: don't use ethically charged put-down labels! It's so easy to tell somebody "You're an idiot" or "You're useless" that I do the first of those frequently. But what I should say is, "You're behaving like an idiot at the moment." Several close and otherwise very bright and perceptive friends spring to mind when I think of people who've been so handicapped by such labels in the past that they still find it difficult to see themselves without the barbs stuck to their back. Maybe I rebel against labels today myself because when I was a kid I had a back like a dart board. That's enough. It's far too glorious a day to go on about depression and stress. In any case, as a woman said in a shaggy dog story at the end of 'Home Truths', you never know when your number might be up. It was a good sad story, about a Jack Russell terrier, a lamppost and some faulty electrical wiring. 5:25:33 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 22 avril 2004

Fine food for the senses From the bedtime reading: "Under the biggest cypress tree was an ornate bench. Between the cast-iron bench and a nearby oak stood a rain-streaked statue slightly taller than Raf. The statue showed a rudimentary metal tree with a naked girl falling headlong between its stark branches. 'Pike sverer mellom grenene,' said the General. '1907. Gustav Vigeland. You know what it represents?' Eyes wide, mouth open, small fists clenched. Raf could take a reasonable guess. But the General got there first, answering his own question as if he'd been the one asked. 'Whatever you want it to represent . . . So the next question,' said the General, 'is who decides exactly what we represent . . . ?' He didn't wait for the answer to that either." I don't know what the quote means. Yet. Vigeland was just a name I thought I'd heard before. But the brief passage -- lifted from an important exchange in Jon Courtenay Grimwood's unsleeping El Iskandryia, setting of the second part of his Arabesk trilogy, intrigued me sufficiently to wake up the computer. "The combination of human beings and trees in two meter high sculptures is one of Vigeland's most original concepts. The tree groups represent a romantic expression of Man's relationship to nature. The also form the setting for life's evolving stages, stretching from childhood and adolescence through adulthood to old age and death." Well, perhaps not when one of the statues, or a similar Vigeland work, ends up in a garden in the alternative modern Alexandria of 'Effendi' (see book list). The Vigeland Sculpture Park page and its links kept me up long past midnight. You might enjoy a visit too. It's not clear who takes the credit for this admirable work, though mail should apparently be addressed to one "ckau" at earthlink. zzz I'm asked whether I've stopped writing music entries. Of course not. But during the bout of the blues that preceded the recent return of the Condition, I wasn't in the mood for exploring. I fell back on old standard favourites, ranging from the Joshua Redman Quartet, for instance "live at the Village Vanguard" on the marvellous double album 'Spirit of the Moment', to the pre-celebrity Norah Jones of 'New York City' -- "a radio-friendly blend of country and pop, with just a tinge of jazz" from the Peter Malick group. Both relatively easy listening, far more demanding of the musicians than of the audience. Some 'Early Classics' from Pentangle changed the gears and also helped to snap me out of it. I'm now back mining the exploratory vein and the voices of women. More on that some other time. 11:03:24 AM  link   your views? []

mercredi 21 avril 2004

Getting up my nose isn't sexual harassment The first time I left the Factory tonight, late and in a rush, I had to go back for my copy of 'Les Inrockuptibles', fresh in this morning's post and scarcely started. The second time I ran down the steps on to the Métro platform, I realised I'd forgotten my shoulder-bag. And that was after a day there without the pills I'm supposed to take for the Condition, prepared as usual this morning and duly left at home. In a day of absent-mindedness and bereft of the little chemical regulators that usually sort out my insides well enough, I did remember to visit several different loos in the building, rather than again running the visual gauntlet of the multi-media department whose denizens obviously find it entertaining when I go to the same one every hour or so. I was followed. And directly propositioned. While people tell me that I look a lot younger than I am -- to which I reply that rather like Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, I keep the portrait under wraps in the attic -- I've not been assiduously pursued by a man since 1970s evenings in the BBC Club across the road from Broadcasting House, which was then a favourite evening drinking hole of youthful actors. Several of them were gay and a few have gone on from the repertory theatre and fine radio plays of the time to become famous, including a handful who abandoned perfidious Albion for Hollywood. I've long disliked the man who put certain ideas to me this afternoon, not because he's gay but because he seems to haunt a couple of the AFP "men's rooms" himself. Even when I'm free of the Condition, which is most of the time now, he's in there so often when I need to go that I find it a little sordid, though he probably has the most frequently washed hands in the building. This has been going on for years. He knows I don't share his sexual preferences because I've had to drop what I took to be very clear hints in the past, but this hasn't stopped him giving me the eye and trying again today. The odd thing is that he's among the people in the place whom I greet every day without knowing their names and with no desire to find out, but if he hasn't now learned to take "No thanks" for an answer ... well, I certainly wouldn't publish his identity here since I strongly object in all but the rarest circumstances to "naming and shaming", but my response will embarrass him. This minor annoyance is by no stretch of the imagination real "sexual harassment", much documented on the Web, but not always very well and still a surprisingly misunderstood concept, both in relationships and in law. I've dealt with three instances of the real thing in my time as an union official at the Factory, none of needed to go all the way to court. However, it might be if the man were in a position of power over me. As it stands, I accept the authority of absolutely nobody at AFP, irrespective of their rank, unless I respect them as individuals. This outlook doesn't render me invulnerable, of course, but I've found that it makes for better relations with most people, whatever their position. While I could do without that man's bizarre notion of flattery, it happened to come on the day I got a letter from the Paris branch of the National Union of Journalists. I took it to be a demand for money or notice of a meeting, but instead it was loaded with the kind of praise for my work during my 20 years of active union service that I'd frame and put on the wall if I believed it all or were an idiot. It was despatched by order of the last branch meeting I failed to attend, it would seem. Well, it was nice of them and I suppose I must learn to accept compliments without looking for a curtain to hide behind. One last effort, then. The best and most succinct summary of what sexual harassment really is that I've read at Menstuff. Normally, self-help books and Internet sites (apart from my own, which helps me a lot) turn me off almost as much as the bloke in the lavatory, but this one did get a four-star award from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and claims to have been hit 1,945,242 times last month. That's 1,945,240 times more than anybody hit on me. 10:55:52 PM  link   your views? [] Mêle-toi de ce qui te regarde! You've seen nothing here so far about the US presidential election for two main reasons. First, it's the subject preoccupying a blogosphere already dominated by our trans-Atlantic cousins. There's no shortage of news, views and lies elsewhere. I try to think different. Secondly, I prefer not to think about it too much. The very notion that those people over there could yet give George W. Bush another four years sends shivers down my spine and depresses me. I say "over there" because it strikes me that there is an almost unfathomable gulf, not just an ocean, between what I read almost every day on some American blogs and in the country's media on the one hand and, on the other, what I hear from virtually all the expatriate US nationals I live and work with. Rainer, however, has kindly mailed me this morning a little something which means making an exception to the rule. "Alain de Chalvron, the Washington bureau chief for France 2, the French equivalent of the BBC, hasn’t had an easy time since he came to America, last fall. He has had to endure a predictable barrage of remarks regarding freedom fries, Old Europe, and the 'Axis of Weasel,' along with a reticent White House which has made it hard for foreign journalists to get briefings. So when John Kerry became the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination de Chalvron and other French journalists in Washington were understandably excited." Thing is, Kerry can chew gum, walk and make jokes in French all at once. "Everything changed, though, when, in recent months, Republicans started intimating that Kerry was too Continental. Conservatives complained about his touting of endorsements from foreign leaders, and Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans told reporters that Kerry “looks French'," Joshua Kurlantzick writes further into a piece for 'The New Yorker'. "...Suddenly, Kerry appeared to develop linguistic amnesia. 'During a press conference, I asked Kerry a question, on Iraq,' de Chalvron recalled. 'He didn’t answer. In front of the American journalists, he didn’t want to take a question that was not in English.'" That, along with the rest of Kurlantzick's article, is one of the other reasons I prefer not to comment on the election. If the anecdote is any reflection on the insularity of their continent, then the least I could quite unrealistically ask of American leaders is to leave the rest of the world well alone. Almost four years of Dubya have been disastrous enough. 11:19:41 AM  link   your views? []

mardi 20 avril 2004

For a sweet from a stranger Would you swap your computer password for a bar of chocolate? If you're not quite that insane, then join fewer than 30 percent of people questioned by street poll at a London tube station. In a second survey, the multinational RSA Security discovered that "79% of people unwittingly gave away information that could be used to steal their identity when questioned." The report's at BBC Tech. Thanks to Dana (Note-It Posts). I was inclined to pass the morsel on to 'morons.org', but they've made a meal of it already. 9:07:13 PM  link   your views? [] Backdating the creativity boom In job calls to friends working in Africa, I often waste a moment or two of Factory 'phone time by asking about the weather, especially during the long months it's horrible in Paris. I like being able to shut my eyes for an instant to imagine the T-shirt and shorts days the Apprentice Dragon was hoping -- in vain, I fear -- to find this week in Italy. Lara Pawson has headed up from Abidjan on Ivory Coast's Atlantic shore into Mali, which lies next door to Niger, the place Dubya's regime showed a sudden interest in when it came to supposed WMDs and uranium. Her first impressions have that agreeable freshness you sometimes find in reports before journalists settle in and cease to tell us about the environment: "The other great bonus that Mali has over her southern neighbour, is the light breeze which blows over your body, leaving your skin tingling. But the breeze comes at a price. With the wind comes red dust - billions and billions of particles of red earth coat the entire city. You could clean your home 100 times, and you would never wipe away all the red dust. The dust is felt on your hands, in your hair, and in your throat - my voice has dropped an octave, I am sure, since arriving in Bamako." Lara wrote 'Sipping Saddam's tea' for the Beeb. It's autumn now far to the south of Lara, where the 'Cape Argus' has spun the discovery in a South African coastal cave of ancient shell beads, "accurately dated to 75 000 years ago," into the eye-catching claim that 'Africa Was 30 000 Years Ahead of the Times' (allAfrica picked up the story): "...the 'new' beads' presence is incontrovertible evidence that humans displaying fully modern behaviour - such as abstract thought, aesthetic appreciation and the ability to communicate through mutually understood symbols - evolved in Africa at least 30 000 years earlier than anywhere else in the world." Credit for the find and the picture go to Professor Christopher Henshilwood (his bio on the site of the Cape Field School) and his research team. Here's why the name rang a bell: in January 2002, the media was full of his discovery of engraved ochre stones in the same place, Blombos Cave (BBC Science). This was regarded as inconclusive by some, but knocked a dent in the widespread view that "modern" patterns of human behaviour first emerged about 45,000-40,000 years back. "Genetic and fossil evidence indicate anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa around 120,000 years ago. Whether modern behavior evolved gradually in tandem with anatomical modernity, or emerged suddenly around 45,000 years ago, has long been a bone of contention among anthropologists and archaeologists. A great divide exists in the archaeological record," explains a report on the beads in 'National Geographic'. "Waves of modern humans began leaving Africa to colonize the rest of the world around 45,000 years ago. There is extensive evidence that 'modern behavior' existed in Europe around 40,000 years ago: cave paintings, jewelry, more elaborate burial rituals, and more specialized tools. 'A creative explosion took place sometime around 40,000 years ago that is strongly expressed in the archaeological record over a very large geographical area,' said John Bower, an archaeologist-paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Davis. 'The question is whether something happened to affect the architecture of the brain.'" There's a further write-up at EurekAlert!; you have to pay to read the academic article in 'Science Magazine. Seventy thousand years? So that's how long it may have taken us to get from the origins of "modern behaviour" to the stage where medical researchers and biologists are saying we're at the point when the next phase of human evolution will depend far less on the workings of nature than on how we decide to change (I mentioned this in February: 'Spilt milk and split genes'). I can't help wondering whether African weather -- that other thing we have begun beginning seriously to affect in the name of "progress" -- played a part in making that continent an auspicious place for the earliest manifestation of communication and adornment. 12:52:53 PM  link   your views? [] Delayed in transmission In honour of Tony's experiences and to the shame of a Parisian hospital where the medical care is fine but the administration awful, what happened yesterday might be called "doing a St. Anne's". That's when you turn up for an appointment to find it's changed and "please come back in three hours' time". When you oblige, you find yourself being unexpectedly anaesthetised and having biopsy devices rammed deep into you to grab samples. What an afternoon! I'm glad the surgeon knew what was going on because I didn't, until the last minute, but it seemed best to go through with it. The Faithful Five ¾ can do without more pictures of my insides, since there aren't any yet, but one set of tests led to another and two and a half medical rendezvous in a day. If anybody needs any leukocytes (Wikipedia), I've got lots to spare, along with other extras, including an infection in the small intestine. So tomorrow's a day of rest -- and guilt. The newsdesk at the Factory is already stretched thin in this holiday season. I return to work tomorrow, come what may. After a week with the Kid where nothing went as planned since we were both sick for much of it, Sunday saw a welcome remission in the Condition. I remembered to take a 'phone pic (hence the low quality) of the famous Menu Marianne à la façon de Sam before devouring the Sunday special. The secret of spinach which may not look appetising lies in the north African extras. The spices were mild by request: none of those tiny chillies that can take the roof off the top of your mouth, though you'd not guess it to look at them. The Kid, who gave her name to this dish, has a nice term for food which hides its secrets, such as veggies containing garlic cut too fine to see or the mango sorbet that Sam gave her the other day, which she found delicious until: "Aarggh, it's got bits in it!" She calls it "la bouffe vicieuse". Try running that through your desktop translator: Lycos and BabelFish offer "puffs out vicious", Free Translation gives "the incorrect food" and InterTran suggests "her grub dirty-minded". My efforts to get her out of the house when I could were in vain, even when the sun came out. Marianne would let me nowhere near what she was up to on her Mac. She said all the chat and the rest was absolutely vital since she'd be deprived of Internet access for a whole week once in Brittany, where she and her mother were getting heavily rained on when I got news tonight. I filled in my own time between my hours with the Kid keeping appointments arising from the Condition almost completing belated correspondence, pruning my unruly porn collection and acquiring books promised to the Wildcat from Amazon. It wasn't too hard to get to the local tailor occasionally to review successive stages in the mending to my oldest and favourite jacket. From the moment samples of leather were compared and choices made, the man warned me it would be ferociously expensive. I didn't want to know how much until it was almost done. "Three hundred euros?!" Sam gasped when I told him. "I wouldn't pay more than half that for a repair job." However, the work included improvements such as deeper pockets in stronger fabric than before. Comparing prices on the Web, I found I could otherwise only hope to stay warm enough in winter to avoid hibernation was to buy something similar second-hand at eBay. My jacket has the merit of being ... well, mine! The tailor did such a fine job that it should be good for another decade and longer. The equipment on my Mac, once the OS was upgraded to Panther 10.3.3 (Ars Technica -- though impressed, the Kid declares herself quite happy with Jaguar for now), refused to play DVDs. In its wisdom, Apple has rendered iDVD compatible for now only with built-in DVD players, and my latest upgrade appears to have "broken" Trans Lucy, which annoys me because I paid for it. I can probably find out what's wrong if I delve, but instead I explored previously unsuspected options in the free VideoLAN Client, testing it on recent DVD purchases. VLC works well and gives me a fuzzy glow inside because it's "home-made", or used to be when a bunch of clever students at the Ecole Centrale Paris began devising the open source VideoLAN multi-platform software. It's "now a worldwide project with developers from 20 countries." Though the interface is user-friendly, it helps to be just a bit of a geek if you want to get the most out of VLC, and probably a wizard to understand its most advanced features. The Russian imperial family in a flurry of disarray at the opera is a screenshot I snapped while testing VLC on 'The Barber of Siberia', which gets a lousy review from the British Film Institute, can't be found at Amazon UK, and radically divides people at the IMDb. Regardless of the nay-sayers, I still include this film in my top 10 movies, have already seen it at the cinema several times and liked it better each one. I couldn't care less if Nikita Mikhalkov's epic love story is considered flawed by cliché and unhistorical; it is also wildly romantic and glorious to watch. Being as romantic and frustrated in idealism as I'm increasingly cynical when I write about the antics of politicians explains, in part the "psycho-" side of the Condition, though the latest relapse is for purely "-somatic" reasons. It can be sorted out quickly enough and last week gave me all the excuses I needed, if any, to sit in the waiting room chez bloghero Yang and his fellow doctors flirting with the Apprentice Dragon. This highly enjoyable activity has the added bonus of making (most) of the women present laugh while some of the other men look disturbed. Ariane, who bears a passing resemblance to somebody livening up this entry, should have become a fully trained Dragon by now, but puts her academic studies in psychology to better use. "You'll come back and wish me a good holiday on Friday, won't you?" she asked last Wednesday. "Where are you going?" "Italy. I'm half-Italian, you know." I didn't, but that made sense. "Just think of it, with luck I'll be back with a tan. And soon, it'll be time to wear skirts again. Won't that be wonderful?" Yes. Well. I hope she's got the weather she wanted. Recalling her legs from last summer, shown to the uppermost limits of the most liberal definition of decency, is enough to set my heart racing. If her conversation wasn't so entertaining, I'd remind her that it's supposedly her job to nurse the patients, not leave some of us impatiently nursing uncomfortably growing impulses we must keep in our trousers. Tony says he's "fortunately too old now" for such difficulties. According to the Wildcat, even if that's true, it would be a case of only just over the hump. The night she laughed even louder than Dr F did at my alarm at being dangerously attracted to some women much younger than me, she added that I should instead consider myself lucky and informed me that I could possibly even expect such fortune to be reciprocated until I'm "about 72"! That was such an educational chat that I'm ready to pay for the occasional long-distance 'phone call again, while also determined to deal rapidly with the resurgence of the Condition, since she also pointed out that "there's nothing very sexy about that!" Nevetheless, most of her notions were such heavenly harmony to my ears that I stopped bemoaning wasted years. For good measure, I said that since people sometimes told me that I've got "so much to give", I planned to settle for nothing but the best, which made the Wildcat hiss and spit. However, I claimed that there was nothing dismissive or unusually arrogant in this and suggested she adopted a similar policy when it came to men. That seemed to inspire her. 12:18:34 AM  link   your views? []

jeudi 15 avril 2004

Birdseed and wormjuice For two days, the Kid didn't set foot outside the flat and she wouldn't have done so today had I not told her that if she wanted the 'Underworld' DVD, she'd have to go and get it herself. After all, while Sam's forecast regrettably proved more accurate than those on the Net, where one site takes the risk of predicting a temperature the tolerable side of 18°C through the coming weekend, the sun made a welcome reappearance today and I couldn't let Marianne remain glued round the clock to her Mac. However, she was persuaded to do the task I was finding it hard to muster the energy for: cleaning all the windows. Which brings me to the pigeons. Remember that bright idea I had, short of shooting them, to stop them snaffling all the grub provided by a neighbour opposite before the other birds got a look-in? The sky-rats expect it now. Two of them wait for me to get up, sitting on a roof opposite and then swooping within striking distance of my hands when I open the window and leave their breakfast on the sill. That's when their relations arrive and the squabbling begins. Marianne finds highly entertaining the way the fattest pigeon -- who's also the most cowardly when it comes to people, hence probably his survival to such a size -- tries to chase away one of the younger ones. Those two both lose out because while they're having their daily scrap, their less belligerent kin eat most of the crumbs and nuts. In the past week, the other birds, particularly the sparrows, have begun to realise what I'm doing for the pigeons. So that windowsill has turned into a mini-aviary, a place where half the garden's winged residents have decided it's safe to perch and shit whenever they like, whether or not it's sprinkled with left-overs from "Paris's N° 1 baguette award 2004" bakery. On Saturday, they're in for a surprise. Marianne leaves tomorrow night to spend the rest of her school hols with her mother, in Brittany once more, and in exchange for the Kid, I get the Cat. This will be doubly risky, since Kytie has been stupid enough to leap off windowsills before and end up in trouble, though never from four floors up. Unfortunately, however, my increasing attentiveness to such wildlife as survives in the big garden out back has been in part due to a reluctance to venture very far out myself. Yesterday, I saw bloghero Yang, but neither he nor I could be sure what has led to the return of the three most disagreeable symptoms of the Condition: serious and sustained fatigue, frequent bouts of nausea, and the third one that I was joking about last year but now find far more annoying. We're not convinced that a blood test I had this morning will be much help, but tomorrow night I'll know whether the white cell count has skyrocketed again and any other anomalies have reappeared. A few days back, Rainer mailed me with a reminder of the 'Diet of Worms' (New Scientist), which isn't strictly for the birds. Somebody had already left me news of this delicious concoction when the Factory's science people picked up the story two weeks back. AFP's version (via Lycos) specified that "it will be sold under the name of 'TSO' (for Trichuris Suis Ova), presumably because 'Drinkable Pig Whipworms' may not be a smart branding strategy." With thanks to friends at the Factory, Rainer in Brazil and my brother Jon in Scotland who sent me an Irritable Bowel Syndrome booklet which does add more than I learned last year, I'll take up pig whipworms with the specialist I'm due to see on the 27th. Having worked out what the recent stress factors involved are, it's a quick fix I'm after this time. 10:38:39 PM  link   your views? [] 'Chasm City' & 'Redemption Ark': heavenly hells The span of Alastair Reynold's universe, where what's become of our species, other intelligences and terrifying machines interact just a few centuries hence against a backdrop of conflict spanning billions of years, is staggering. It's scarcely surprising to find that the Welsh writer (his site) last month gave up his other job in post-doctoral science at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. In the past four years, Alastair has published as many vast adventures, gradually unveiling different elements in what is proving to be an immensely engrossing struggle for the very survival of intelligent life in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and perhaps beyond. The first part of this opus, 'Revelation Space' (showered with praise here in January) was a complex blockbuster in its own right, but that "undercurrent of menace and increasing danger" I mentioned at the time was but a prelude to the greater revelations and time-games to come. In the wake of 'Chasm City', a monumental novel which is neverthless but what we journalists would call a "sidebar" to the hard news story of a not-so-distant future, the only thing to do was to plunge straight on into 'Redemption Ark', where Reynolds reveals rather more of his hand concerning the nature of the cataclysmic disaster that awaits the part of the universe we call "home". For Amazon UK (the book link), David Langford has succinctly summarised some of the author's preoccupations: "Chasm City's complications include spectacular space-elevator sabotage, faulty antimatter drives, hidden aliens, mystery drugs, exotic bio-modification, tailored disease, high-tech weaponry, a new and deadlier form of bungee-jumping, and that traditional SF symptom of decadence: organised hunts with human prey. Violent death is never far off, but our protagonist [a well-trained warrior named Tanner Mirabel] has deeper worries in that his own motives and memories, even his identity, don't seem to add up quite as they should..." This was the book that earned Alastair the British Science Fiction Award and was hailed at the time in a perceptive review by John Clute at SciFi.com: "Tanner--who tells the whole of Chasm City in a tough-guy first-person lingo taken from the kind of noir private-eye novel usually set in mid-20th century California--is a man desperately in need of help. Following his linguistic model, Tanner is rude, resentful, bullying, haunted and very, very thick. He is run from pillar to post by every other character in the book. He guesses nothing as fast as his slowest readers will have. He insults and betrays everyone who wants to help him." Right enough. As Tanner slowly finds out who he is in a once glorious hi-tech city poised on the edge of the gaseous gulf from which it takes its name, Reynolds works the art of character development with skill, not only for his anti-hero but those who haunt his mind. This is especially true of one Sky Haussmann, the criminal coloniser of a planet that bears his name, and when a practising doctor, Frazer Anderson, tells us (again at Amazon) that "the portrayal of Sky's slide into psychosis is one of the best I have read", who am I to argue? Yet the tale set in Chasm City, ravaged and reshaped by the Melding Plague, "not quite a biological virus, not quite a software virus, but a strange and shifting chimera of the two," left me disappointed after I was done with it — before heading into 'Redemption Ark', which altered my perception and appreciation of the strengths of this "interlude" in more than 600 densely packed pages! A writer who started out rich in insight into the complex workings of our human consciousness — the way sometimes incomprehensible, deeply irrational impulses can drive our actions, the fascinating interaction between our emotions and our memories that is currently a broadening field for researchers into both theoretical psychology and hard-wired neurology — in 'Chasm City' Reynolds more directly tackles a host of moral issues he'd only begun to explore alongside the solid grasp of such "hard sciences" as physics, astronomy and chemistry used to such brilliant effect in 'Revelation Space'. With 'Redemption Ark', Alastair further draws the psychology and ethical questions inherent our behavour together with those hard sciences in a way which demands one heck of a lot of brainwork from his reader. Rarely have I read a novel which is so challenging, where the author forces you to stretch your intellect and dig so deep into your own resources to reap the immense rewards delivered in return. At times, I could really have done with some of the accelerated thinking techniques bestowed on key characters among Alastair's Conjoiners, the hive-minded people who gave space-faring humanity the starship drives some of our other descendants have adopted for their own craft, but with precious little comprehension of what makes the engine work! Reynolds the scientist seems as at ease with relativity, quantum physics and probability theory as Reynolds the magician, who conjures up not just one but several decisively alien cultures and states of consciousness in such convincing fashion that he's right up there with the grand mistresses and masters of Otherness. Meanwhile, we discover that those "hell-class" Doomsday weapons of such importance to the rivals in 'Revelation Space' are endowed with minds of their own. And here, we encounter anew some of the characters, human or alarmingly mutated by the Plague, not to mention the remarkable pigs we first meet in 'Chasm City'. If you want a foretaste — with spoilers, be warned if you're new to Reynolds — of what happens in 'Redemption Ark,' that Amazon link given above is full of it. I'm not into spoilers, having written enough in my previous Reynolds review about wayfarers, lighthugging spaceships, obliterated alien cultures, Shrouders and Pattern Jugglers. What Alastair does with these and other elements, plus a whole cast of well-written new characters, in 'Redemption Ark' should not be revealed in advance, not if you'd rather be launched half-blind into the "turbulent, wildly entertaining ride" fellow novelist M. John Harrison commends on the cover and in his write-up for 'The Guardian'. Harrison makes this third book sound like a space-opera romp with science which makes sense at the cost of character. While I had no problem with the people and their hard-edged exchanges, I'll freely admit that my own rate of consumption was sometimes closer to a crawl, with about-turns to reread some of the tougher, more mind-stretching passages thrown in. Several times, Alastair's riveting writing had me reeling into sleep, simply unable to absorb any more ideas, though I had to go on until my attention turned itself off and I woke up to find the book on the floor on one side of the bed — and my glasses worryingly absent from where they should be on the shelf but fortunately found unbroken in the morning. On the behavioural codes of conduct already hinted at, this is the part of the opera where Reynolds — with only occasional digressions into anything recognisable under the label of "religion" — gets deep into consideration of a notion which has perplexed scientists and philosophers alike since first we started to think: free will. As its title suggests, 'Redemption Ark' is at one level a profound book about morality, salvation and choice. How do we behave, indeed how should we behave as people, when confronted with increasingly overwhelming evidence that the future is already a known disaster zone and there's damn all we can do about it? What price, then, on intelligence and endeavour? I'm impatient to get my hands on 'Absolution Gap' and learn how Alastair builds on this theme, among many others, but I'll wait for the paperback — which won't take very long now. None of the few notices I've read make mention of Nevil Clavain, "Butcher of Tharsis", double defector, and pivotal to the tale of the ark and the fate of the planet Resurgam as a man confronted with some of the book's most difficult choices. All I know for sure is that there's more of Nostalgia for Infinity, the starship Reynolds first subjected to an intriguing transformation in 'Revelation Space'. Where she — or is it he? — flies, I'm bound to follow. Harrison is one of the reviewers to put Reynolds on the same stretch of bookshelf as Philip K. Dick, not I think, solely on account of its "frenzied imaginative space", but also the dark threads that run through this work. A more unlikely parallel nagged at me when something in this writing hurled me back many years to that odd, convoluted academic C.S. Lewis. I don't mean those 'Narnia' chronicles I remember with far more fixed feelings than the simple pleasure they gave me when my mother read them to her kids, but the author of that singular set, 'Out of the Silent Planet', 'Perelandra' and 'That Hideous Strength' (worthwhile Wikipedia entry). It's not that Reynolds is into Christian allegory, far from it, despite the Biblical references in his titles — if it's myth he draws on at all, then it's a strain running even deeper than the archetypes bound into that monotheistic creed. Gothic, cyber-Gothic, steam-punk, a host of etiquettes have already been pinned on the fellow... "I can't really analyse these things," Alastair admits in an interview with Duncan Lawie for 'The Zone'. "Redemption Ark was a title I'd had kicking around in my files for a long time before I attached it to that novel. That sounds odd, but I think a fair few writers do this - they often have titles that they know they need to use. I guess they're fairly useful for the imagery. I'm not interested in the standard clean-cut space opera characters that are un-redeemably good or bad. I do like the idea, as a story mechanism, of characters that have done something atrocious or terrible in the past and are trying to atone for it." Plenty of core characters in these three books are like that, and we meet the messianic and the saviour types too. From among the varied and vivid descriptions of places fantastic, here's a teaser on one where somebody "sensed herself become plural. From out of the sea fog, from a direction she could neither describe nor point to, came a feeling of something receding into vast, chill distance, like a white corridor reaching to the bleak edge of eternity. The hairs on the back of [her] neck pricked. She knew there was something profoundly wrong about what she was doing. The premonitory sense of evil was quite tangible." Astrophysicist, philosopher, weaver of nightmares, delver into dreamscape, maybe the label I'm groping for to slap on Alastair when he's not watching is "theologian", in a universe where God is cold stone dead. At this stage in the evolution of our odd little species when scientific research and philosophical ideas which can seem refreshingly new and very old ceaselessly cross paths, along with conventional religious notions undergoing a radical overhaul, a writer of the calibre of Alastair Reynolds offers us very much more than exciting entertainment. 6:57:41 PM  link   your views? []

mercredi 14 avril 2004

Trying to understand Algeria's tragedy... ...is a very difficult task. It helps to be able to read French, because much of the really interesting stuff is in French and the history and economic "interests" of the two countries are almost inextricably linked, as much today as ever when Paris considered the place to be an overseas département (adminstrative region) of mainland France. The screenshot has been scaled down too much clearly to read the difference between what Google News came up with and what the latest version of DEVONagent (1.2.2b for OS X only) churned with as results for the same four words: "Algeria generals power vote". Google gave me about 40 pertinent pages. DevonAGENT, however, provided with a broader set of search engines, inspected 1,495 pages and produced 219 results, of which more than half shed light on what I wanted. But that's an aside. At the Canteen the other day, I asked one of my Berber friends how he thought the military in Algeria cooked the books in last week's general election (official results in French). In a book to be published this month, 'Françalgerie: crimes et mensonges d'Etats' (Algeria-Watch, Fr), two journalists, Lounis Aggoun and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, explore how Algeria's generals have always held the reins of power, and still do, with French complicity. 'FrancAlgeria: crimes and lies of states' looks as set to stir up trouble as Habib Saoudia, an Algerian former 'special forces' military officer, did in 2001 with 'La Sale Guerre' (The Dirty War). One of the best known of the men who really run Algeria is General Khaled Nezzar, Retd. (sic), who laughed and blustered his way through an interview last July, reported in 'Algeria's Ashes' (Australian Financial Review). I knew about the game the country's rulers play with ballot boxes, summed up thus by my friend, who paraphrased an Algerian comedian: "Before we had one party, one candidate and one ballot box. Now we've got a multiparty system, seven candidates and seven ballot boxes." An exaggeration, of course. A single stuffed ballot box is enough to replace the one people cast their votes in between the closure of the polls and the count. I was discussing this practice this afternoon with friends from Morocco, who gave me their eyewitness accounts of similar practices under the late King Hassan II. "It's better now," one of them said. But not in Algeria it isn't. You scarcely have to scratch the surface of the Internet to get a good idea of how things are really done in a country summed up thus by Rivoire and Aggoun in today's issue of 'Les Inrockuptibles': "So the personal economic interests of the Algerian generals would explain a good part of the 'dirty war'... L.A. - The problem is that there's nothing left but corruption; the product on to which corruption is normally grafted has itself disappeared from the economic circuit. J.B.-R. - For a developing country, companies have to be created. In Algeria, they content themselves with imports so that the people in power can systematically cream off commissions, which they put into Swiss bank accounts in foreign currency. As soon as a factory was set up, it blew up, and they said it was the fault of the GIA [Armed Islamic Group (CFR Terrorism)]. Today, Algerians import 85 percent of what they eat, but the country was once a real breadbasket." Talking to the Wildcat about such things last night, she said I should blog them, since they're apparently not as widely known as I thought. But here's the trick that took my breath away. One of my sources at the Canteen told me about the army, state television and the Codes. "[Ali] Benflis," he said of the former prime minister who was Bouteflika's main challenger at last week's polls, "is a chain smoker. He even smokes when he's making speeches. Everybody knows that. But when you see him on television, you never see him light up and you never see him put it out. What you do see is the puff of smoke coming out of his mouth when he exhales. The message: 'I'm poisoning myself, would you like me to poison you too?' "There's better, like the army officer who doesn't smoke. Also well known. He might go on television. He gets interviewed. And guess what? In one hand, he's got a cigarette. In the other, he's got a lighter. That's the message, not what he says. The message is: 'If you do this, we'll set the house on fire.' "They have a system, all these people. They use the television to give each other messages. It's all in the gestures, the hand signals: don't worry about what I say, watch what I do.' Among many pieces offering good background to the daily bad dream is Hamou Amirouche's 'Algeria's Islamist Revolution: The People Versus Democracy?', a 1998 strategy paper. After most of the online part of the day spent checking this out, and not liking what I found at all, one of Gary Brecher's stories for 'the eXile', a Moscow-based paper, came almost as light relief. Gary might contend that the Koran is "absolutely in favor of violence against everybody who's not already a Muslim", along with a few other odd things, but his perspective on Algeria in 'The Psychos Will Inherit the Earth' (War Nerd) is entertaining, thoughtful and, worse, closer to the "truth of it all" than makes for comfortable reading. So what does Winona Ryder have to do with anything? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that's the point. She cheers me up. 10:39:59 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 13 avril 2004

Bon appetit! - the mystery of 'bad' British food Sam's prediction of more gloomy weather to come and old Baudier sliding into his corner in a grumpy mood were the only clouds over yesterday's lunch at the Canteen, an unexpectedly festive affair. The place had been so empty on Sunday — and Sam was off duty — that I'd anticipated another ordinary meal and taken a pile of overdue reading along. Instead, I found everybody there, virtually the full complement of "regulars" for the first time this year. It was as if, by telepathy, we'd decided to congregate and celebrate the end of another dismal Parisian winter. I joined the three Netwizards, who were spurning the house wine and sent François home to fetch a second bottle of his own, while even the Literary Lion perked up considerably when a lass who'd been finishing off her meal alone slipped across the room to join him for a prolonged chat over coffee. Could she be the Mystery Woman I'd heard about from Baudier himself during his moments of deliberate indiscretion? If so, she was even younger than rumour had it. Nobody dared ask... The Kid deigned to tear herself away from her laptop and friends and join us as soon as I 'phoned her to tell her about the latest experiment Sam had conjured up without asking what I wanted for dessert. "Mmm, looks delicious!" I said. "Home made?" "Of course. Not by me, though; by Das." There's real seasonal promise in the air when the Canteen's Sri Lankan chef starts experimenting in his own right again. His surprise mixed chocolate cake, chocolate chip ice cream, bananas, lashings of cream and a rich sauce into a beautifully presented gâteau which Sam said will be "good next time". When Marianne arrived, the perfectionist was well into a complicated explanation of what Das should have done with the bananas before the Kid kindly diverted him to the other side of the restaurant to play dominoes. By that time, Sam had locked the door, Das and his wife were keen to go wherever they go for their afternoon siesta, and I wanted more pudding, irrespective of Sam's distinction between excellence and perfection. Two handsome young couples showed up in rapid succession and peered longingly through the window, but spent so much time perusing the menu boards on the pavement that their hesitation was their undoing. It's at such moments that Sam normally says, "Sorry, but you can come back at six o'clock," but he was engrossed in thrashing the Kid at their game and it became my job to make the coffees and to turn the tourists away. "That's just brilliant," commented Jacques the Neighbour. "Stray Americans stumble across a pizzeria run by Berbers in a quiet corner of the French capital and get told 'Sorry, it's closed now!' by a Brit." And somebody suggested that we should have let the ladies in and told their fellers to pursue their search elsewhere... Jean-Paul was regaling me with a novel explanation of why English cooking has acquired such a bad reputation. I'd always attributed this to overboiled veggies, overcooked meat, the legacy of wartime food rationing and a difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic attitudes to their meals. There's also the way that the English are far too polite when they are served bad food in restaurants, swallowing back their complaints with the nosh. This is a behavioural pattern I swiftly shed on this side of the Channel, but the rare times I expressed dissatisfaction used to cause considerable embarrassment to visiting family until most of them realised that sending things back to the kitchen if really awful was an idea worth exporting. J.-P. claimed however, on the strength of a TV documentary he's just seen, that the rot set in right back in the 18th century, when a royal decree in England proclaimed that everybody, rich and poor alike, should get enough to eat. This, the film-maker contended, led to a "dumbing down" of culinary standards. J.-P. couldn't remember which monarch was held responsible, but asserted that even the aristocracy then made a point of "eating badly to show solidarity with the poor". The notion is intriguing, but a fellow at Princeton University, Paul Krugman, guesses instead that: "the country's early industrialization and urbanization was the culprit. Millions of people moved rapidly off the land and away from access to traditional ingredients. Worse, they did so at a time when the technology of urban food supply was still primitive: Victorian London already had well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse-drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes, were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!), preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn't need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips)." Krugman expands on his thesis on a web page he has dubbed "mushy": 'Supply, Demand and English Food.' The 'Guide to Food and Drink' (London Tourist) does its best to warn people off most British grub if not the capital: "English social life revolves around alcohol to a degree we've not seen anywhere east of Poland. It's difficult if you take alcohol in moderation. The average Brit likes to get drunk, and then roar up and down the street in an aggressive manner, before vomiting and going for a curry. This is not new and was the chief complaint of 18th century visitors like de Sassure - his descriptions of London life ring true even today (...) Recently Cornish Pasty stalls have been set up in stations and other late night haunts - and offer a much better than average quick food option: they're targeted at people with the munchies and you can smell them several hundreds of yards off (this is a ploy in the same way supermarkets pump baking bread smells into their air con units). Generally, the English like their meat blackened and their vegetables boiled until they resemble lab specimens - so be sure to specify your preference." Martin Phillips further tips the kitchen scales with his Black Pudding Page (Health Warning) and a link to a splendid excerpt from 'Troubled Times' (Zetatalk Food). Click on their 'Bugs' icon (borrowed here for illustrative purposes) and you can learn how to cook maggots. If that's not helpful enough, here's Zetatalk's sensible advice regarding grasshoppers: "One thing to keep in mind in hunting any animal you are going to eat is to never expend more energy in capturing it than it is going to give back to you upon consumption." Apart from whole recipe books, of which 'Seven Centuries of English Cooking' — by a Frenchwoman — looks the most promising for a historical perspective, trying quite a range of search terms has brought me precious little on the Net in favour of British food. As somebody who first learned how to be a good cook from a mother who's always been adventurous in the kitchen, I find it hard to believe that nobody of note has written anything 'In Defence of English Cooking' since George Orwell had a brief go at it. In 1945. What Mum taught me, before the French made further improvements by introducing me to the meaning of "rare", was gleaned mostly from her own mother and from Mrs "First catch your hare" Beeton. The latter's principles of household management (OUP) were considered so indispensable that a copy was infiltrated into France as a wedding present for Marianne's mum and me, which became part of my "share" after our divorce. Apparently unlike most people, for several years I used it frequently. In those days, the kitchen was my domain, even when it came to dinner parties. "Those famous lines about eggs and hares were never written by Beeton, but represent the persistent misinterpretation to which the book has been subject," the Oxford World's Classics Magazine tells us. "Although it contains a smattering of extravagant recipes, if anything it errs on the side of frugality, with many pages devoted to plain family dinners and the use of left-overs." Now that, Jean-Paul — and one day, when I have a kitchen again, I'll show you the proof in the pudding — is exactly right. Much of the inventiveness he finds so strangely lacking in perfidious Albion's cuisine, arguing that this absence runs against the grain of British culture, was manifest in my own childhood in the use of left-overs. This is a notion worth exploring in the blogosphere, from Mary Beth in Pensacola 'Switched at Birth' (take a look in her kitchen) to a 'Sassy Lawyer' at the House on a Hill in the Philippines. Though very out of practice nowadays, I must already have mentioned my long-held view that cooking well is like making music: once you've learned a few sets of notation and harmony, the rest is about variations on themes. A Hungarian goulash, for example, is part of the same culinary family as boeuf bourguignon ('About' French cuisine). I don't know whether "a couple of geeks in Seattle", Gay Gilmore and Troy Hakala, are Netwizards. But their site, Recipezaar, is an international introduction to what cooking has in common with technology and science: many of the most interesting "discoveries" are the outcome of happy accidents. 11:27:33 AM  link   your views? []

dimanche 11 avril 2004

Untimely tidings from the blogroll The latest turn in "the war against intelligence" in France is that we have a new minister of culture and communication with a 0/10 record in cultural achievement and a 10/10 criminal score for money-laundering (BBC), along with one of his predecessors. As Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres says on his website: "Politics is a tough life. But service to the State is as exalting as it's hard." He should know. For French resident readers, nevertheless, the free of spirit remain hopeful about yet another petition. Today, in "démolition totale", davduf draws our attention to Iris and its efforts to prevent a tiresome bunch of politicians from enacting legislation which would require internet service providers to be the censors of online content. After all, privatising the judicial system could make the business of running a nation so much cheaper... The ISPs, unsurprisingly, are against it. Unlike members of the government, they don't seem to think that the prospect of spending up to a year in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros (source: Reporters without Borders) would be terribly good for their careers and their reputations. But as we're reminded at 'To the Barricades', it doesn't do, especially for politicians, to admit occasionally that they make mistakes (via Open Source politics). zzz "We must be blunt about the current system's threats to free speech, intellectual freedom, and the free flow of information. We must be careful not to be trapped into nihilistic rhetoric about the 'end of copyright.' Copyright need not end if we can rehabilitate and re–humanize it. Our culture and democracy depend on it." Here it's censorship at issue right now, but across the pond, Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of communication studies at New York University, has taken a close look at 'The state of copyright activism' (via J.D. Lasica's New Media Musings'). zzz "Given the bizarre mind-melding between the government and media and the Soviet-style propagandizing that's been taking place, one has to wonder: Is there is any significance in the fact that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and David Brooks are all beating the same tom-tom?" 'Will the 2004 Election Be Called Off?' asks Maureen Farrell (Buzzflash). Now there's a thought. While the "Madrid + bombs = 'Terror' 1 - 'Democracy' 0" hypothesis is insulting nonsense, Farrell's intriguing essay takes a rather different line, attracting Heli's attention (Heaven and Hell). If you think these are turbulent times for we Terrans, consider the stars. That's what astronomers in Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden have been up to for 1,000 nights spread over 15 years — but a tiny instant in the life of our stellar neighbours. "For the first time, the changing dynamics of the Milky Way since its birth can now be studied in detail and with a stellar sample sufficiently large to allow a sound analysis. The astronomers find that our home galaxy has led a much more turbulent and chaotic life than previously assumed," says the European Southern Observatory. "Supernova explosions, galaxy collisions, and infall of huge gas clouds have made the Milky Way a very lively place indeed!" Those who understand such things may be interested in the full 'Geneva-Copenhagen survey of the Solar neighbourhood' (PDF file direct download, 2.5 MB), but the rest of us are offered a glimpse of the findings in a little movie at 'Astronomy & Astrophysics' (via Grafyte (April 9). zzz "A big part of the problem is W.'s apparent lack of intellectual curiosity. It appears, for example, that he doesn't read very much. (...) Last year Pizza Hut, as part of a program to encourage children to read, asked all the governors to list their first favorite books. Bush put The Very Hungry Caterpillar at the very top of his list. And it's a very good book. I read it to my kids when they were little. The thing is, The Very Hungry Caterpillar was not published until 1969, a year after W. had graduated from Yale." Al Franken, in October 2000, reminded us that even for we earthlings are concerned, some things evolve very slowly indeed (via 'Brain Not Found', Fr). Back to nature, then? Close to home, Jean-Michel reckons the abandoned "little crown" down the road to the south of Montparnasse, could have become "the wildest part of Paris" (at MONTPARSUD). 9:44:56 PM  link   your views? [] Agony, ketchup and artificial additives Wherein Tony becomes the first guest columnist on taliesin's log. All but the title, illustrations and links in this entry are the work of my fine friend Mr Brock: Despite the fuss, Mel Gibson's 'Passion of the Christ' was just another Spaghetti Spectacular with perhaps a higher budget for tomato ketchup than other Biblepics. Always slow and at times boring, it spared no cliché from flashback through to slow-motion shots and the Heavenly Choir. I found the acting crass and the dialogue hardly rivetting, since my Aramaic is not as good as it might be and I didn't realise the Latin was Latin until I grasped that, most of the bit players being Italian, they were pronouncing it the way they read it. My interest, in so far as I had any, was in the lighting, the casting and fidelity to the script. It began with the Agony in the Garden, which meant lots of flickering torchlight and references to Rembrandt (Artchive), while the faces of the taunting crowd were Breugel (Artcyclopedia): the mise en scène was never memorable. The Christ character, a wooden bloke called Jim Something [James Caviezel; IMDb], was probably chosen because he looked like the face on the Turin Shroud, a change from the usual pre-Raphaelite Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild but a little off-putting because he had one eye half-closed for most of the action. Maybe the many non-Scriptural bits (e.g. Judas being driven to suicide by jeering urchins or Pilate's wife giving some towels to the BVM) were drawn from gospels not admitted to the canon, maybe they came from later legends, or maybe Gibson thought they improved the story line; for me they were just brakes on it and made me wonder why, since it put bits in, it left out bits that are scriptural and would be missed. I couldn't help comparing it with other versions to its disadvantage. The Pasolini 'Matthew's Gospel' (1964, IMDb, played straight, with little dialogue and only occasional Bach and the Missa Luba) had much more impact. Dorothy Sayers' 'The Man Born to be King' (serialised [in 1941] on Children's Hour; Christian History Institute) probably went direct to my psyche; it was sensational in its time because it had an actor playing Christ rather than the reported speech of the Bach passions. He was Robert Speaght (Salvation Army), chosen because he was a practising Christian and had a beautiful speaking voice, which made such a deep impression on me that I was shocked when I heard it again as a grown-up. This was in the Garrick pub, just off Cambridge Circus, that I'd entered with a colleague on the 'Evening News': a man wearing a Homburg hat with a beer in one hand and a sausage in the other waved at us and said: "Hallo Felix, come and have a drink." He should have said "Peace be with you." Which brings me to my chief objection to the Gibson opus. There is an Evangelical hymn: "It is a thing most wonderful Almost too wonderful to be That God's own son should come from Heav'n And die to save a child like me." For the sceptical, it is too wonderful — God? His Son? Sacrifice? Too much to swallow at once. But to G.K. Chesterton, "It's too good to be true but it is true." If you are a sceptic, you'd hardly want to make the film; if you're not, you might not share GKC's love of paradox but you're bound to be on his side: the story line is quite simply the central point in human history. So why make another run-of-mill movie, even if your distributors can release it in Holy Week? What of things that seemed to me secondary to the scenario? Like the gratuitous cruelty: two floggings, one with the birch, one with chains. In the Roman Catholic Stations of the Cross, Christ falls three times; I lost count of how often this happened in the movie — backwards, sideways, on the face, shot from different angles, including upside down. Cheap and nasty, but probably hardly shocking to punters used to villains ending up carbonised after a car chase. Nor did I buy the anti-Semitic complaint. It's true that the Sanhedrin ('Judaism 101') are presented as pompous assholes wearing embroidered dressing gowns with tea cosies on their heads, but the Romans, all ugly as well as brutal, come off worst. Nothing is made of the historically significant Gospel line: "His blood be on us and on our children" ('beliefnet')*. If it was said, I missed it — easily done in the linguistic circumstances. I found myself speculating about penitential practices, like young Filipinos getting themselves crucificed, me fasting and abstaining on Good Friday and people going to see films like this. Why do we do it? __________ *Tony missed nothing. In 'Mel Gibson and Matthew 27:25' (the linked article), David Klinghoffer writes: "This cut has been hailed as a victory for Jews who worry about the impact of the film. Is it really something to celebrate?" Paintings: Breugel, The Procession to Calvary, 1564 Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross, 1634 Hermitage, St. Petersburg 3:58:20 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 9 avril 2004

A good time to avoid me This has been a gruesome week, hence no posts since I'm usually averse to writing anything here when daily life robs me temporarily of my sense of humour. But maybe I should at least say where I've been. The front-page horrors in Iraq are, of course, the main dire developments preoccupying the politically minded in the blogosphere, but in another part of the Arab world, my colleague Gina has for the past few days been covering another event which will come as a disappointment -- if scarcely a surprise -- to some of my friends at the Canteen. The more cynical international observers are scratching their heads tonight, wondering exactly where in the process Algeria's official electoral results managed to give the incumbent President Abdelaziz Bouteflika a "landslide" victory of quite such magnitude. As the man's main challenger in yesterday's vote, Ali Benflis, put it, Kim Il Sung "couldn't have done better". Meanwhile, Rwanda and France are trading serious accusations in the wake of Wednesday's commemorations of the genocide 10 years ago. The most concise description of the small, crowded African country's President Paul Kagame I've heard from a journalist friend who has interviewed him is "creepy". This is just the word that sums up my own feelings about Kagame after covering the whole of his career since from before the massacres, but I'd scarcely say he's seriously sick in the head. That's a term best reserved for some of the people who comment on stories from the Factory relayed by Yahoo. The week's Award for Vile Minds goes to the bunch who contributed to a thread called 'One million n!ggers in 100 days???' There are moments when even hardened hacks read stuff like that and wonder quite why we journalists bother... My mood that day wasn't improved when the Factory's great leader, Bertrand Eveno, dropped into the engine room when most of us were at our busiest across the editorial floor wrapping the world's cheery tidings into the stories required for most of the European press deadlines. Apologising for the interruption, the chief executive took the micro to give us a few tidings of his own about the "state of the nation", so to speak, in the light of the day's board of governor's meeting for AFP. To tell you what he said would be a breach of my employment contract, so it will suffice to report for the benefit of Factory hands abroad that it was met with the sound of stones sitting at the bottom of a very deep pond. As Eveno took his leave, I was sufficiently irked by life in general and my assessment of the wellbeing of the media in particular, not just at AFP, to break the silence by accosting him with a question. This was not a matter of bravery, but of fatigue combined with the eternal naïvety for which I'm known and loved. The man wrapped an avuncular arm around my shoulder and sought to reassure me and thus, I guess, everyone else within earshot that my concerns were not only shared but had remedies. Having heard more or less similar things from so many successive managements down the years that I've lost count, I suppose I should conclude -- and eventually did -- that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." Anyway, I'm no longer a trade union activist. In the meantime, "what goes down must come up" has been the phrase applicable to every meal I've eaten since Tuesday night, but with the very important difference from last year that I know why the Condition has come back. There's even a remedy for this apart from fasting, which I can begin implementing as of tomorrow, after one more day in the Factory. I shouldn't complain because last night the Wildcat woke me up with a distress call and a tale of woe far worse than this one, and I think we managed to cheer each other back to sleep. Now the good news, because of course there is some. I've received a handful of delightful e-mails in the past couple of days, most of which I'll answer next week, when the Kid will be around and we both plan to do absolutely nothing but relaxing and agreeable things. And Tony has not only sent me a blog-worthy review of 'The Passion' as seen by Gibson, but spiced it with anecdote to be shared with the Faithful Five ¾ as soon as normal blogging resumes. That will be very soon now. 9:42:05 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 6 avril 2004

Under wraps On the hard sci-fi front, scarcely mentioned of late, I'm now glad to have postponed writing a review of Alastair Reynold's 'Chasm City' until I've completed 'Revelation Ark' (I'm about halfway through it now -- slow digestion). Had I done otherwise, I could well have written that I found 'Chasm City' a bit of a letdown in the wake of 'Revelation Space' (Jan 13 entry), which was such a magnificent debut that my "disappointment" was purely relative. However, as I get into the third book, it casts a new light on the second. Authors sometimes work in most mysterious ways, Reynolds proving to be a prime example of a creative talent whose work is best taken as a whole... During those relaxing days I enjoyed "off" -- marred only by the fatigue brought on with the return of elements of the Condition (but nothing like as bad as it was last year, and I'll have more Factory-free days to recuperate next week) -- some of the heap of "meaning tos" I finally got done included an overhaul of the Mac and a little behind-the-scenes work on this website. I spent several fruitful hours at places I consider well worth promoting on my home page -- MacMusic, the Safari shelf and, particularly, Erik Benson's 'All Consuming,' the book site that's turning out to have several useful "extras" built in I didn't notice on first deciding it was an excellent idea and signing up to it -- just a day or so too late to be able to help test the new "recommendations engine". I'd never even been quite far down that welcome page to notice a couple of RSS newsfeeds which are proving useful now that 'NetNewsWire' has become as indispensable on a daily basis as any of the "conventional" browsers I use. Erik's place also leads inquisitive minds to odd tales. Like an explanation of some mosaics I'd spotted without realising that my home city is discreetly being "space invaded". Thanks to Kevan, who provides illustrations at 'As Above - Internet Bindweed.' At least somebody knows what's going on... 11:14:12 PM  link   your views? [] Gito Baloi: a tribute Well, goddamit! "Reading in" on African news before going into work, I'm particularly saddened by the killing in Jo'burg of Gito Baloi (BBC), one of South Africa's finest musicians. "He spent his earliest years exploring sounds with the aid of discarded paraffin tins, reeds and anything he could lay his hands on. His first public performances, playing on a borrowed bass guitar, helped to support his family in a war-torn Mozambique." And went on win fame, as that biography at 'Sheer Sound' recounts, across the border in South Africa in the late 1980s, his work first reaching my ears a decade later. His superb solo album, 'Herbs and Roots,' was one of the then just released musical marvels I brought back with me after my working stint in Johannesburg. He can't be as well known as he deserves to be, since when I put the CD on my iPod last year, I believe it was among those where I was the first to ship the album details up to the Gracenote CDDB (online music data base). Baloi was just 39 when he was murdered on Sunday. It's a big loss. Gito Baloi leaves a musical legacy which I strongly recommend to adventurous ears. Update: listening again to Baloi's music on my way to and from the Factory for a day which included reports of several other tributes to one of the kindest and nicest people on South Africa's musical scene, it left me in a bitter-sweet mood. Bitter over the pointless stupidity of such brutal violence for a wallet. Sweetened by being reminded that if there's one thing Baloi's gifts achieved supremely well, it was to make other people happy. And that's a legacy no petty criminal can steal. 10:41:30 AM  link   your views? []

lundi 5 avril 2004

Let this be a lesson to nobody... ...and let it never be said that anything is too awful for this place. "The pop tart (sic) left little to the imagination with her raunchy display (...) Britney, 22, writhed in just a pink bra, knickers and suspenders as a male dancer put his head between her legs. The soft-porn show left the audience gasping. Britney arrived on stage by sliding down a fireman’s pole — then straddled a near-naked hunk on a bed, simulating sex as he groped her breasts." Mercifully -- despite prolific use of the usual two-syllable words from a bygone age ("hottest", "saucy", "frolic", "steamy", "shocking") -- Britney and the UK's biggest-selling newspaper in fact left the ghastly worst out in what I'd taken for an April Fool, entitled 'A star is porn'. But no. You could see even more of the gruesome stuff by clicking on the picture, while the Spears site confirms the phenomenon (pop-ups galore!)... Moving hastily on, my attention was drawn in that appalling direction via something else almost in the "friends of friends" category. At the weekend, Adam Curry -- who is quite indirectly to blame for the above -- made a generous contribution to the Lawrence "Free Culture" Lessig "let's-all-have-a-go" notion (AKMA) doing the rounds and reminded me of the Gutenberg Project. If you've got a newsreader, in his "collaborative audio books" entry, Adam's given us an RSS feed offering MP3 readings of Lessig's book. Nice thinking! The latest curiosity to come down the pipes via one of my peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing clients has been a copy of that Paris Hilton (bedroom) Video we got by the garbage truckload. (I was, anyway; half the hemisphere offered me dozens of them, as I suppose happened to anybody whose main e-mail addy has become inextricably intertwined with the spam servers of the Florida mafia and some of the Net's better quality porn sites...). As I hope Tony will confirm to me once he's satisfied his own curiosity about Gibson's gore-fest, "If you've not seen it, you really haven't missed anything!" The Gutenberg Project actively encourages an altogether more sophisticated use of P2P as one means "to put the world's great literature on the hard drives and in the CD collection of as many people as possible at little or no cost". And it's legal. "There are three portions of the Project Gutenberg Library, basically (to) be described as: Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc. Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc. References; such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc." I'm grateful to Adam for his reminder of this remarkable enterprise, since it's been one of my e-book "meaning to" items since I joined the O'Reilly Safari library last year, but hadn't realised that Project Gutenberg (Welcome page) has been up and running for more than three decades already. It's a combination of their link-up with 'ibiblio', the spread of broadband Net technology and the P2P explosion of recent years which now renders what they're doing of immense interest. They now have Music in Progress. That I unerringly manage to weave such stuff as the seedy Spears fantasy show into the same entry as a sublime String Quartet No. 13 (Beethoven "eText") which passeth all understanding will not, I'm afraid, surprise the Faithful Five ¾. But it's an exercise in dissuasion! Those adventurous friends I seem to have acquired will recall that things tend to happen to me and this blog at around this time of the year. Last May, even the delicious Sandy -- that fast-living lovely who was among my first fancies and quite obviously edible from the very tips of her toes every millimetre of the way on up -- was "co-habiting" here with Wagner and soon enough, the first buds for the Wildcat! And all you all know where that got me. Deep into nights of succulent sweet nothings, poetic digressions, romantic insanity, emergency negotiations with The Bank, and dramatic disaster to which I've granted the Wildcat, bless her sweet heart, exclusive book and film rights -- on condition she never does that again... The temporary disappearance of the flowers led to a kind offer from a blogger with boobies ... and a tormented note from Athens in Georgia, which received a dissuasive answer. It has to be coincidence that Georgia is next door to South Carolina, a source not of torment but the origin of today's lunch date. Those I am trying to dissuade -- from taking me as a good example of anything imaginable -- by rambling and digressing, cluttering up newsreaders and failing to provide hot news from the blogosphere -- are The Students. There's somebody I've been planning to strangle -- but I'm not yet that far down my long "meaning to" list -- for more than a week now, since the fellow told me that he has recommended 'taliesin's log' (this experiment) to a whole classroom full of bright and perhaps not so bright young things as a Model of a Well-Written Journalist's Weblog. If I didn't like the man immensely, he would be dead by now! This piece of information -- imparted I don't doubt with the kindest of intentions -- was almost enough to complete the edification of the biggest writer's block I have endured for years, compounded only by last week's excursion back into semiology (Philosophistry) and deconstruction. The Faithful Five ¾ were in grievous danger of becoming a Steady Six ¼, with all the risks that entailed of having to write properly, be PC, remember my manners, dress decently, and not even mention sex! And then. The deep southern cavalry rode into Purgatory, wearing hip-hugging jeans to her best advantage, complaining correctly about the "frigid" weather and ravenous for ... a humble croque monsieur. Thus making of me a monsieur prêt à croquer. "Didn't you get my e-mail?" she'd asked, when I called to make sure my last hope of a dangerously attractive encounter before returning to the Factory wasn't to be dashed. On the contrary. For now, let's call her Lady E. Intuition, gut-instinct and blind faith tell me that you, the Faithful Five ¾, may be reading more about Lady E in coming months. At close range, the woman is even prettier than recalled during a first ... irreverent encounter. She has the taste to live the sensible side of the river, has kept an accent as pleasing as her smile, and has those eyes. You know, the kind I tend to fall into ... that make me want to sleep with the enemy (Americans wise enough to elbow out more lebensraum and make a nuisance of themselves "behind enemy lines") ... that, yes well... Good heavens, the woman didn't even give me any of that "just good friends" nonsense, though she issued the usual warning signs -- talk of "long-distance lust relationships", the "boyfriend" (I'd expect no less), and, of course, "complications", etc. In short, the usual entertaing recipe for disaster. Shit. The 'Drama Queen' down under got it all so right on Saturday that I can't say I wasn't alerted. Lady E. had scarcely begun digesting her food and tea before she was telling me that what she really wanted to do was go to bed. Double merde! I thought. She's worse than I am! How admirably direct. I didn't even get the slap I might have expected when I agreed that this could be a splendid idea. But no... She had a living to earn and I absurdly thought it safer to run for the bus. Can you wait for the next instalment? I can. Sweet dreams, Lady E. As to what your shamanistic totem beast is, give us a chance, lass! I can't manage that much on the strength of a meal only too swiftly curtailed by what passes for Reality. 11:37:57 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 4 avril 2004

(almost) any friend of yours... "Unlimited freedom of thought and action is not a good stimulator of happiness. It's usually the opposite. Why else would organised religion be such a hit?" Peter Butler asks. Butler, aka 'mrgrimm', was responding to a 'Spoilt for Choice' post at MetaFilter about a widely remarked book by Barry Schwartz, 'The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less' (HarperCollins, Jan 2004). The appeal of organised religion for many people evidently isn't merely a matter of the regulations and constraints it imposes, but if one of Mel Gibson's intentions was to focus seasonal attention on at least one of these faiths, he's succeeded in that. I lured Tony out to the Canteen with the promise of Sunday specials from the kitchen -- Sam certainly lived up to his word! -- and my friend finished by telling me that he's still keen to judge that film for himself. Now that it's finally here, Gibson's 'Passion' has aroused as much controversy in the French press (Allociné media link) as it did in the blogosphere. I'm less inclined to see it than ever, since people whose judgement I value have convinced me that I'd be wasting a couple of hours on a tasteless study in savagery. But I value Tony's opinions too and will let you know what he makes of it as a practicing Christian. In the meantime, for Tony and anybody else who may be interested, Joel Sax has posted a highly readable essay on 'Christ and the Cross', in which he takes a look at the story as myth seen from different perspectives. It's the latest article in a series Joel has been writing on 'Martyrdom' since late February, as part of an increasingly multi-faith study of 'Myths and Mysticism' he has embarked on in the beautifully presented 'Pax Nortona' blog. For days I've blogged less than planned. The return of the Condition knocked me out. Then the time spent studying Derrida induced a kind of writer's block while I reassessed certain deep-rooted notions I acquired when first introduced to his kind of work -- along with that of Roland Barthes -- in the 1980s. This is so difficult to explain that I won't even try. The thread to this entry lies in an "Inspect" folder I keep on my virtual desktop, full of items set aside for later perusal in depth. Going through this in-tray, I find it consists mostly of the work of "friends of friends" -- good links I've spotted in my daily look at what my blogrolled buddies are talking about and the circles they move in. Some of this stuff I've kept simply because it looked amusing, given a cursory glance before rushing off to work. For instance, I liked 'Ssstudentses': "Tricksy studentses. Hates them, precious, yesss, we hates them. Studentses, grubbing for gradeses, grubbing and ssscraping and ssneaking, and their heads sso empty -- ssssso empty, gollum, gollum. No brains. No scrumptiously crunchable brainses, no precious, jusst air and dussst. Dussst!" (more of thisss chez Ellen Fremedon). The cartoon is part of a funny, quirky 'Treadmill' set by Demian, which pretty much summed up one bunch of my own sentiments in March. Dem's site -- Guild of Ghostwriters' -- is but one of many I might have pinched something from since stumbling on the Artist Blogs Webring. Surprise, surprise: while I think I got to those people via 'ars|blog', our friends Nat and Augustine are among them. I simply can't remember who to credit for most of the above, since I'm usually far too rushed in the morning to take notes while checking the newsreader. Some items have been sitting in the "Inspect" folder since January. One such is 'Quantum Muse,' a site where I occasionally drop in for "the best fantasy and science fiction literature and art we can obtain without spending most of our beer money". In short, I despair of ever being anything but a disorganised mess, despite a week spent sorting out as many things as I could! But there's a bit of an insight into what's stuffed into one of my Mac's too many drawers. Even thinking about the time it would take me to file it all properly gives me the same kind of slightly sick feeling I get from a surfeit of information... That too -- the "constantly changing landscape" of news aggregation -- has been charted in an original and inter-active way: the 'Newsmap' put together by Marcos Weskamp. You may already know of this extraordinary work using Google news sources, since now I've got around to mentioning it, many others have done so already. No matter, because if you haven't yet pressed the "launch" button and marvelled at what you can do with the map and a few clicks, you really should. At one fell swoop, it graphically charts some of what's best and worst in the news media, where I find the sense of priorities increasingly disturbing. Marcos Weskamp's related projects page is an absorbing conundrum in its own right (slow to load, but worth the wait). "My bandwidth usage is up in the stratosphere over my allowed quota -- I'm not really sure how I'm going to pay for all that -- and my log files are reaching 60MB (to give you an idea, that's just a textfile that usually was around 400k)," he wrote in his blog on Friday. That's what comes of being inventive. 8:50:57 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 3 avril 2004

Almost too much brain food In the end I went to see the film about Jacques Derrida on my own, to find that I was one of only two men in a surprisingly sizeable audience... I had such a limp that I was grumpy until lunchtime and disinclined to seek out company, though realising I'd been very lucky not to have broken any bones during yesterday's flying lesson. 'Derrida' (2002) only appears to be available for home viewing from Amazon US and not in Europe for the moment, but I liked it very much. Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick turned long months of filming the French thinker into a coherent and entertaining hour and a half's work, marred only by occasional lapses into sycophancy. Regrettably, you're likely to get the most out of the film only if you're fluent in English and French, since it's quite a mish-mash of the two, with both interviews and seminars switching from one to the other. At 'Film Comment,' Rachel Rosen remarks how the movie "cunningly incorporates the through-the-looking-glass elements of Derrida's thought, turning the seams of the filmmaking process inside out," which is true, but means that if you're stuck with the subtitles, though they're excellent, they probably get in the way of the enjoyment. Ever self-conscious with the film crew, Derrida points out the obvious: the movie is thus rendered "unnatural". However, he has considerable humanity and something essential that doesn't come across in the interview I mentioned yesterday: a sense of humour and fun. That came as a great relief, because if you make the kind of effort I have over the past four days to get some kind of grasp of the man's thinking, you find your own thought processes being turned inside out too. 8:33:57 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 2 avril 2004

Falling for ... ouch! When somebody I've been wanting to see before I go back to work said my last day off would suit her fine, she pleased me so much that I very nearly passed out. Well, that's almost how it was... While the physicists assure us that it is possible, and conceivably quite probable, to be in two places at once, I haven't mastered the knack of it. To have lunch on Monday with a delectable demoiselle would mean missing the last of a string of medical checks. After rushing to bloghero Yang's place to change the time of that rendezvous, I failed to spot a ventilator grate which some oaf had removed from a wall and left on the pavement. When my toe struck it, I flew headlong so fast I didn't even have time to stick my hands out before I was almost as flat on my face as the metal grill. I couldn't have hit the concrete harder if I'd tried, but my right knee seems to have taken almost all the blow, which was extremely painful and much amused a couple of teenage boys on the other side of the road. Being nearer the flat than the surgery, I limped home to rub some arnica ointment into the bruise as fast as I could, forgetting that you're not meant to use the stuff on broken wounds. That was when it really hurt. I managed to get to the bed in time to flop on to it before I fainted with the pain, but the nausea lasted for more than an hour... By half past eight, I was able to bend the leg again properly and complete the previous entry, but that's it. No more "chores". To each day this week, I've allotted a sizeable task: spring cleaning, long-postponed shopping and appointments financial as well as medical, more of my overdue correspondence and even buying a few clothes. Yesterday I spent little time online and missed out on any tomfoolery, apart from the mess Google made (Reuters/Yahoo). When I asked Francis if he'd noticed anything especially good in the papers he sells, he showed me a handful of "poissons d'Avril"; they were uniformly mediocre. The one that took me into was the musical report on 'Today' which seamlessly brought Brian Eno and Eddie Grundy together in plans for a "new and updated Archers theme tune" (Real audio clip, direct link, 7'00"). 10:31:07 PM  link   your views? [] Deconstruction sites On Monday, I was roundly defeated at the Canteen in a lunchtime debate with Jacques the Neighbour, the fellow who lives directly above my favourite eating hole. Jacques is well to the right of centre in politics, so when we broach the subject, it's usually a case of "irresistible force meets immovable object". He had me against the ropes defending my decision to sign that petition opposing the war against intelligence I've written about here, objecting to the text primarily for economic and business reasons where I'm ill qualified to fight back. But while he delivered some skilful blows on this front, I managed to hold my own when it came to cultural and scientific issues. I might have managed better had I then read an outstanding interview in 'Les Inrockuptibles' with the philosopher Jacques Derrida ("Deconstruction on the Net"), who had also signed the magazine's petition. That link comes from 'The Hydra,' an appropriately named network about eight influential thinkers. The Derrida article is 11 pages long, but not too conceptually difficult though it's pretty dense. Having digested most of it, the one film I'm determined to see before I go back to the Factory is 'Derrida' (French official site) -- which happens to be showing at L'Entrepôt right around the corner. At 'Derrida - the Movie', it's introduced thus: "What if you could watch Socrates, on film, rehearsing his Socratic dialogues? What if there was footage of Descartes, Thoreau, or Shakespeare as themselves at work and in their daily life? Might we now look at these figures differently, with perhaps a deeper understanding of their work and lives? Filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman asked themselves these questions, and decided to team up and document one of the most visionary and influential thinkers of the 20th century, a man who single-handedly altered the way many of us look at history, language, art, and, ultimately, ourselves: the brilliant and iconoclastic French philosopher Jacques Derrida." The first painting illustrating this entry is Amateur Philosophers, by the latest guest on 'Desert Island Discs'. When I last called my mother, she said she didn't mind turning the radio down because she was listening to this and disliked both the guest and his choice of music. I certainly wouldn't choose a Francis Bacon painting as my one island luxury, even if the 1973 Triptych of a lover's suicide would make a "good windbreak". That apart, I heard nothing exceptionable in this morning's repeat of the programme with castaway Jack Vettriano and his eight discs. When his host Sue Lawley suggested that "to like Vettriano is to lack artistic judgement", he was as uncharitable about certain art critics as Jacques was about some "intellectuals". When the best-selling painter got a royal award, 'The Observer' ran a story about Vettriano and the "snobbish elite": "In a rare interview, Vettriano said: 'The art world is not a lot to do with art; it's to do with money and power and position. Annually the national galleries are given a budget of taxpayers' money and they should spend it on behalf of the people of Great Britain, but I feel they don't. 'If they've decided you fit what they like, you'll be in; if they've made up their minds otherwise, you never will be. I appear to be in the latter category. If they were truly buying for the people of Great Britain then they would buy my work, that is as clear as day. But they don't. 'I have days when I couldn't care less, and other days when I wonder why the gulf exists. There's a snob association: when something's too popular it's regarded as a bit trashy. But I would rather my paintings sold to ordinary people, rather than being stacked in a store house at the National Gallery'." There, Jacques would agree. We compared notes again today over coffee, but he was keener to get away for a weekend in his country cottage than he was to come along with me to get an eyeful of Derrida. No matter. I'm hoping for altogether sexier company -- with or without make-up. Vettriano expressed a fascination for the application of female extras, but the women I find most attractive look every bit as good without them. But I agreed with the painter of Only the Deepest Red when he said there's something sensuous about simply watching a woman putting on lipstick. Whether I'll write up the movie, which I plan to see tomorrow, I don't know. My interest is stimulated not only by the interview, but by the way in which the film seems to be either loved or loathed at both 'Rotten Tomatoes' and the 'IMDb'. That's not an unfitting tribute to a man who has had a lot to say about living with contradictions. 8:47:21 PM  link   your views? []