A little background to "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen".
Salon.com Books Destination: West Texas
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
31.7.06
28.7.06
BUFORD at the MONO
Lunch with the FT: Top of the food chain
By Graham Bowley
Bill Buford, editor, author and newly trained cook, sits in Casa Mono, a restaurant in downtown Manhattan, looking pleased with himself. And rightly so.
He has a new job writing on The New Yorker, the acme of serious US magazine journalism, and his just-out book, Heat, about his adventures as a trainee chef, is right now, on this sweaty summer afternoon, hovering in the top 20 of The New York Times bestseller list.
“It is pretty hard to complain,” he says, nodding, as he settles at our tiny two-person wooden table beside one of Casa Mono’s bright windows. “If you want to be a writer, to be the author of a book on the bestseller list and be working with The New Yorker, that sounds about right.”
This is as close as Buford gets to boasting. He seems an unobtrusive, dressed-down sort of man - an observer who fits in the background rather than a player like the big-name authors he has spent years editing or the ego-crazed chefs he writes about in Heat, even though as fiction editor of The New Yorker for eight years he was one of the most influential literary players on the globe. True to this relaxed ethos, today he wears frayed, well-worn jeans, brown shoes (that to my eyes look like clogs), a white-and-green-striped shirt, and grey stubble. He sets his mouth in a pursed “here I am, who’d have thought it, nothing I could do about it” sort of expression, one that he adopts a lot throughout our lunch.
Buford has chosen Casa Mono for our meal because it features in the pages of Heat. Another reason, he admits, is that his apartment is just around the corner. In his book he tells how he leaves his editing job at The New Yorker to reinvent himself as a cook, descending into the hellish kitchen at Babbo, one of New York’s best-known Italian restaurants, which is run by US celebrity chef and extrovert Mario Batali. Now that his book is finished, he is back at The New Yorker writing a monthly feature on food.
One of the conceits of Heat is that truly good cooking requires an understanding of the soulful connections between land, animals and the communities they nurture. This lore has mostly been forgotten, the connections cut, in modern mass-market America. To rediscover it, you must return to food’s ethnic roots abroad. Buford, as Batali did before him, travels to Italy to learn the secrets of the culinary trade.
Today, our cuisine is Spanish. Casa Mono, another restaurant part-owned by Batali, with just 13 tables, is run by Andy Nusser, the once much put-upon head chef Buford met at Babbo, who draws his inspiration from the street restaurants of Barcelona. Nusser is present today, a hyperactive, eager-to-please man who buzzes around us and sends over unbidden our first dish: lamb’s tongue salad with summer truffles. “Andy is 45 or 46, and he had been cooking for almost 20 years before finally he got his own place,” Buford says to me, drawing comparisons between great writers and the great chefs he has known. “I think about the similarities all the time. It takes a long time to become a writer. It involves a very, very long time in the wilderness in the business of learning your chops.”
Bill Buford loves his food. He leans over our dishes, studying, commenting, pointing, licking his fingers. He looks at home in front of a plate, almost beatific. It is intimidating to eat with such an obvious foodie. “This is the lamb’s tongue, right?” I say hopefully. “No, that’s the truffle,” says Buford, pushing away a spear of asparagus. “The lamb’s tongue I think will be underneath here. It is mounted in architectural fashion.”
When the waitress hands us the menus, Buford glances at me and orders for both of us. For him, rabbit with spring peas. For me, pumpkin and salt-cod croquetas with orange alioli. “This is going to kick ass,” he says.
Buford was born in Louisiana and grew up in California. His family owns land in Florida, he tells me, where he goes to hunt wild boar. After studying at Berkeley, he did a second degree in English at Cambridge, where he started to edit Granta. During the next decade and a half he transformed the failing university literary magazine into a national institution. The success, he says, tucking into his rabbit with gusto, was down to being in the right place at the right time.
“It captured a narrative renaissance in Britain,” he says. “At the beginning of the 80s, there was Angus Wilson and Margaret Drabble. By the end of the 80s, it was Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson. What happened in Britain in the 1980s was quite radical.” I ask him what was the high point of his time at Granta. “Publishing Rushdie,” he says.
The restaurant is beginning to fill up. Nusser has sent over two glasses of cava. As Buford explains to me what I am eating, he reaches over and scoops a large gob of my orange alioli on the end of his finger.
Whereas at Granta - at least early on - Buford had to cajole people to write for his cash-strapped magazine, he had plenty of willing contributors at the glamorous and wealthy New Yorker, where he was lured in 1995 by the then editor, Tina Brown. Yet for all the magazine’s wealth, he says, he was not always blessed with as rich a generation of talent to draw upon for his pages as he had been in Britain. “By the end of the year, if you published 50 stories and you had five great stories, you had a good year,” he says. “Sometimes we had one great story.” The first truly good piece of fiction came in his second year, he says, and was Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. “We had to persuade her to let us publish it. She had been turned down by The New Yorker so many times she was ready for it to be rejected.”
He has sent copies of Heat, he says, to some of his old contacts. “I sent it to Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx and Stephen King. Don said his wife, Barbara, grabbed it and read it, and he was going to read it next. Annie said she loved it. Stephen King was too busy promoting himself. He sent regrets via his agent.”
Buford stopped editing after he told David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, that somebody should write a profile of Batali, whom he had met at a dinner party he threw at his home for the writer Jay McInerney. Remnick knew that Buford wanted to be writing instead of editing and said he should be the one to do it. Buford agreed on the condition that he could actually work in Batali’s kitchen for research. “I did not want to write a profile about some fat chef guy if I could not also in some way make it about myself,” says Buford.
He wrote the profile and then left the magazine as the article grew into a book and he realised he wanted to learn much more about the art of the food. It became a personal journey, funded by the book advance and the sale of his house in Cambridge, and involved a stint making pasta near Bologna and an apprenticeship to a Dante-spouting butcher in Chianti. His wife, Jessica, quit her magazine editing job and trailed after him around Europe. She gave birth to twins, Frederick and George, just as he was finishing Heat.
Our next serving arrives: guinea hen with plum mustard for Buford; pork loin with bitter Seville oranges for me. As we both tuck in, I ask him if he can explain the current fascination with food. It is a question that nagged me while I was reading Heat. It seemed absurd that anyone could be obsessed with such questions as finding the perfect polenta or discovering the historical moment when egg was first used in pasta.
Buford acknowledges the wobbly carapace of deeper meaning that is sometimes constructed around cooking. “Food does have a kind of charisma,” he says. “It is seen as an expression of national culture. It is a way of talking to the dead. It is an expression of family and family inheritance. In Italy they are obsessed with how food is an expression of exactly where you are. It is so many different things at once and at the same time it is none of these things. It is finally also just dinner. You eat it, and it is gone. It is not art, and it is not culture, and it is not identity, and it is not your mother.”
But he also gives good reasons for the rising interest in cooking in the US, where, he says, people are “unbelievably ignorant” about what they eat - it is a sort of catch-up with the rest of the world - and why there should be more interest. “There is almost just an ethical responsibility to know your food,” he says. “I am glad that I know what good meat is and what bad meat is and know that it was raised well.”
Another important reason for taking food seriously, he says, is what we are doing right now - interacting socially over a good meal, coming together as friends. Me, friends with Bill Buford?
Buford declines dessert, but orders a watermelon sorbet for me. Nusser, waving from the counter, also dispatches a chocolate tart.
I ask Buford what he is going to do next. Surely follow the success of Heat with a novel of his own. But he insists that he won’t, not yet. “My wife thinks I will end up writing fiction,” he says.
He considered setting up a restaurant with Batali, or even starting a Manhattan outpost of the Chianti butchery. But he decided he was a writer, not a cook, and, for the time being, a writer of fact. His next book on food will stay with the international angle. It will be about French cuisine. He also plans a memoir about his father, who was a physicist, and the California aerospace industry
I pay the bill - $96. “They are being generous,” says Buford, peering over at it. I have enjoyed our lunch and want it to continue, but he has to leave. The spell of conviviality created by our shared meal lasts for a few steps then, out in the sunshine, fades. As we shake hands, Buford once again gives me that “nothing I could do about it” smile, and I watch him walk away up Park Avenue. It was, I realise, just lunch after all.
Casa Mono, New York
1 x pumpkin and salt-cod croquetas
1 x rabbit with spring peas
1 x pork loin with Seville oranges
1 x guinea hen with plum mustard
1 x watermelon sorbet
1 x chocolate torta
2 x glass of Cava
2 x glass of rose
1 x bottle of mineral water
2 x double espresso
Total: $96.45
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
By Graham Bowley
Bill Buford, editor, author and newly trained cook, sits in Casa Mono, a restaurant in downtown Manhattan, looking pleased with himself. And rightly so.
He has a new job writing on The New Yorker, the acme of serious US magazine journalism, and his just-out book, Heat, about his adventures as a trainee chef, is right now, on this sweaty summer afternoon, hovering in the top 20 of The New York Times bestseller list.
“It is pretty hard to complain,” he says, nodding, as he settles at our tiny two-person wooden table beside one of Casa Mono’s bright windows. “If you want to be a writer, to be the author of a book on the bestseller list and be working with The New Yorker, that sounds about right.”
This is as close as Buford gets to boasting. He seems an unobtrusive, dressed-down sort of man - an observer who fits in the background rather than a player like the big-name authors he has spent years editing or the ego-crazed chefs he writes about in Heat, even though as fiction editor of The New Yorker for eight years he was one of the most influential literary players on the globe. True to this relaxed ethos, today he wears frayed, well-worn jeans, brown shoes (that to my eyes look like clogs), a white-and-green-striped shirt, and grey stubble. He sets his mouth in a pursed “here I am, who’d have thought it, nothing I could do about it” sort of expression, one that he adopts a lot throughout our lunch.
Buford has chosen Casa Mono for our meal because it features in the pages of Heat. Another reason, he admits, is that his apartment is just around the corner. In his book he tells how he leaves his editing job at The New Yorker to reinvent himself as a cook, descending into the hellish kitchen at Babbo, one of New York’s best-known Italian restaurants, which is run by US celebrity chef and extrovert Mario Batali. Now that his book is finished, he is back at The New Yorker writing a monthly feature on food.
One of the conceits of Heat is that truly good cooking requires an understanding of the soulful connections between land, animals and the communities they nurture. This lore has mostly been forgotten, the connections cut, in modern mass-market America. To rediscover it, you must return to food’s ethnic roots abroad. Buford, as Batali did before him, travels to Italy to learn the secrets of the culinary trade.
Today, our cuisine is Spanish. Casa Mono, another restaurant part-owned by Batali, with just 13 tables, is run by Andy Nusser, the once much put-upon head chef Buford met at Babbo, who draws his inspiration from the street restaurants of Barcelona. Nusser is present today, a hyperactive, eager-to-please man who buzzes around us and sends over unbidden our first dish: lamb’s tongue salad with summer truffles. “Andy is 45 or 46, and he had been cooking for almost 20 years before finally he got his own place,” Buford says to me, drawing comparisons between great writers and the great chefs he has known. “I think about the similarities all the time. It takes a long time to become a writer. It involves a very, very long time in the wilderness in the business of learning your chops.”
Bill Buford loves his food. He leans over our dishes, studying, commenting, pointing, licking his fingers. He looks at home in front of a plate, almost beatific. It is intimidating to eat with such an obvious foodie. “This is the lamb’s tongue, right?” I say hopefully. “No, that’s the truffle,” says Buford, pushing away a spear of asparagus. “The lamb’s tongue I think will be underneath here. It is mounted in architectural fashion.”
When the waitress hands us the menus, Buford glances at me and orders for both of us. For him, rabbit with spring peas. For me, pumpkin and salt-cod croquetas with orange alioli. “This is going to kick ass,” he says.
Buford was born in Louisiana and grew up in California. His family owns land in Florida, he tells me, where he goes to hunt wild boar. After studying at Berkeley, he did a second degree in English at Cambridge, where he started to edit Granta. During the next decade and a half he transformed the failing university literary magazine into a national institution. The success, he says, tucking into his rabbit with gusto, was down to being in the right place at the right time.
“It captured a narrative renaissance in Britain,” he says. “At the beginning of the 80s, there was Angus Wilson and Margaret Drabble. By the end of the 80s, it was Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson. What happened in Britain in the 1980s was quite radical.” I ask him what was the high point of his time at Granta. “Publishing Rushdie,” he says.
The restaurant is beginning to fill up. Nusser has sent over two glasses of cava. As Buford explains to me what I am eating, he reaches over and scoops a large gob of my orange alioli on the end of his finger.
Whereas at Granta - at least early on - Buford had to cajole people to write for his cash-strapped magazine, he had plenty of willing contributors at the glamorous and wealthy New Yorker, where he was lured in 1995 by the then editor, Tina Brown. Yet for all the magazine’s wealth, he says, he was not always blessed with as rich a generation of talent to draw upon for his pages as he had been in Britain. “By the end of the year, if you published 50 stories and you had five great stories, you had a good year,” he says. “Sometimes we had one great story.” The first truly good piece of fiction came in his second year, he says, and was Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. “We had to persuade her to let us publish it. She had been turned down by The New Yorker so many times she was ready for it to be rejected.”
He has sent copies of Heat, he says, to some of his old contacts. “I sent it to Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx and Stephen King. Don said his wife, Barbara, grabbed it and read it, and he was going to read it next. Annie said she loved it. Stephen King was too busy promoting himself. He sent regrets via his agent.”
Buford stopped editing after he told David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, that somebody should write a profile of Batali, whom he had met at a dinner party he threw at his home for the writer Jay McInerney. Remnick knew that Buford wanted to be writing instead of editing and said he should be the one to do it. Buford agreed on the condition that he could actually work in Batali’s kitchen for research. “I did not want to write a profile about some fat chef guy if I could not also in some way make it about myself,” says Buford.
He wrote the profile and then left the magazine as the article grew into a book and he realised he wanted to learn much more about the art of the food. It became a personal journey, funded by the book advance and the sale of his house in Cambridge, and involved a stint making pasta near Bologna and an apprenticeship to a Dante-spouting butcher in Chianti. His wife, Jessica, quit her magazine editing job and trailed after him around Europe. She gave birth to twins, Frederick and George, just as he was finishing Heat.
Our next serving arrives: guinea hen with plum mustard for Buford; pork loin with bitter Seville oranges for me. As we both tuck in, I ask him if he can explain the current fascination with food. It is a question that nagged me while I was reading Heat. It seemed absurd that anyone could be obsessed with such questions as finding the perfect polenta or discovering the historical moment when egg was first used in pasta.
Buford acknowledges the wobbly carapace of deeper meaning that is sometimes constructed around cooking. “Food does have a kind of charisma,” he says. “It is seen as an expression of national culture. It is a way of talking to the dead. It is an expression of family and family inheritance. In Italy they are obsessed with how food is an expression of exactly where you are. It is so many different things at once and at the same time it is none of these things. It is finally also just dinner. You eat it, and it is gone. It is not art, and it is not culture, and it is not identity, and it is not your mother.”
But he also gives good reasons for the rising interest in cooking in the US, where, he says, people are “unbelievably ignorant” about what they eat - it is a sort of catch-up with the rest of the world - and why there should be more interest. “There is almost just an ethical responsibility to know your food,” he says. “I am glad that I know what good meat is and what bad meat is and know that it was raised well.”
Another important reason for taking food seriously, he says, is what we are doing right now - interacting socially over a good meal, coming together as friends. Me, friends with Bill Buford?
Buford declines dessert, but orders a watermelon sorbet for me. Nusser, waving from the counter, also dispatches a chocolate tart.
I ask Buford what he is going to do next. Surely follow the success of Heat with a novel of his own. But he insists that he won’t, not yet. “My wife thinks I will end up writing fiction,” he says.
He considered setting up a restaurant with Batali, or even starting a Manhattan outpost of the Chianti butchery. But he decided he was a writer, not a cook, and, for the time being, a writer of fact. His next book on food will stay with the international angle. It will be about French cuisine. He also plans a memoir about his father, who was a physicist, and the California aerospace industry
I pay the bill - $96. “They are being generous,” says Buford, peering over at it. I have enjoyed our lunch and want it to continue, but he has to leave. The spell of conviviality created by our shared meal lasts for a few steps then, out in the sunshine, fades. As we shake hands, Buford once again gives me that “nothing I could do about it” smile, and I watch him walk away up Park Avenue. It was, I realise, just lunch after all.
Casa Mono, New York
1 x pumpkin and salt-cod croquetas
1 x rabbit with spring peas
1 x pork loin with Seville oranges
1 x guinea hen with plum mustard
1 x watermelon sorbet
1 x chocolate torta
2 x glass of Cava
2 x glass of rose
1 x bottle of mineral water
2 x double espresso
Total: $96.45
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Fears of a slowdown
While the West cools down, especially America --- China is overheating. Worrisome? You Bet.
Fears of a slowdown Economist.com
Fears of a slowdown Economist.com
What do the wine professionals drink for fun?
Here is some good advice.....from those who ought to know.
FT.com / Arts & weekend / Food & drink - What do the wine professionals drink for fun?
FT.com / Arts & weekend / Food & drink - What do the wine professionals drink for fun?
GERALD MANLEY HOPKINS
Garrison Keillor reminds us that....
It's the birthday of British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, (books by this author) born in Stratford, England (1844). His parents were Anglicans, and they were horrified when Hopkins informed them that he was converting to Catholicism. So he went into a kind of exile, joined the Jesuits, and traveled to rural Wales to be ordained as a priest. Those months in Wales would be one of the happiest periods of his life. He especially loved the beautiful rural landscape. It was while he was there, in 1877, preparing for his ordination, that he wrote most of the poems for which he is remembered today, poems like "God's Grandeur" (1877), "Pied Beauty" (1877), and "The Starlight Night" (1877). He wrote in his diary at the time, "This world is ... a book [God] has written ... a poem of beauty."
But after his ordination, the Jesuits sent him to teach the poor children of industrial cities in Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. Hopkins had looked forward to a life of hard work and sacrifice, but he had no idea how much he would hate living in these polluted, ugly cities. In a letter in 1878 he wrote, "Life here is as dank as ditch-water. ... My muse turned utterly sullen in the Sheffield smoke-ridden air."
He wrote less and less, and finally, at the age of forty-four, he died from typhoid, which he'd caught from the polluted water in Dublin. His poetry might never have been remembered, since he published very little of it, except that he had kept up a lifelong correspondence with a friend from college, the poet Robert Bridges. Hopkins had sent Bridges many of his poems, and after Hopkins's death, Bridges began to publish Hopkins's poetry. In 1918, Bridges edited the first Collected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It wasn't until 1930, when a second edition of Hopkins's poems was published, that people began to recognize that he was one of the greatest poets of his generation.
It's the birthday of British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, (books by this author) born in Stratford, England (1844). His parents were Anglicans, and they were horrified when Hopkins informed them that he was converting to Catholicism. So he went into a kind of exile, joined the Jesuits, and traveled to rural Wales to be ordained as a priest. Those months in Wales would be one of the happiest periods of his life. He especially loved the beautiful rural landscape. It was while he was there, in 1877, preparing for his ordination, that he wrote most of the poems for which he is remembered today, poems like "God's Grandeur" (1877), "Pied Beauty" (1877), and "The Starlight Night" (1877). He wrote in his diary at the time, "This world is ... a book [God] has written ... a poem of beauty."
But after his ordination, the Jesuits sent him to teach the poor children of industrial cities in Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. Hopkins had looked forward to a life of hard work and sacrifice, but he had no idea how much he would hate living in these polluted, ugly cities. In a letter in 1878 he wrote, "Life here is as dank as ditch-water. ... My muse turned utterly sullen in the Sheffield smoke-ridden air."
He wrote less and less, and finally, at the age of forty-four, he died from typhoid, which he'd caught from the polluted water in Dublin. His poetry might never have been remembered, since he published very little of it, except that he had kept up a lifelong correspondence with a friend from college, the poet Robert Bridges. Hopkins had sent Bridges many of his poems, and after Hopkins's death, Bridges began to publish Hopkins's poetry. In 1918, Bridges edited the first Collected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It wasn't until 1930, when a second edition of Hopkins's poems was published, that people began to recognize that he was one of the greatest poets of his generation.
27.7.06
Jeapordy / Cycling
Could it be that Floyd Landis is really Ken Jennings? No, Ken wouldn't take the juice. Pity that they can't cycle without a pharmacy along for the ride.
CONVERSATION
Stephen Miller’s book Conversation: A history of a declining art contains one of the best descriptions of conversation I have ever read. He describes the conversations he sat in on in the mid-1960s between Jorge Luis Borges and two friends in Buenos Aires as being like “a chamber orchestra playing an improvised concerto”. He contrasts this way of talking with another kind which he listened to at the Café de Flore in Paris; the participants were Roland Barthes and friends. He claims that these, despite their brilliance, were not conversations but “intersecting monologues” (a phrase coined by Rebecca West). Unlike the talk in Buenos Aires, “here nothing mingled and became one”. Manguel concurs with Miller that the art of conversation is being lost. He claims that we have forgotten “how to weave our ideas into a common strand”. I disagree. As a sociolinguist, I have been recording the talk of single-sex friendship groups for over twenty years, and I have found evidence of both types of talk, the “improvised concerto” type and the “intersecting monologues” type.
YOUTUBE
First it was the Zidane head business, then it was Bush massaging Angela...........what a boost for YouTube. Check out this article from the New York Observer. http://observer.com/20060731/20060731_Tom_Scocca_pageone_offtherec.asp
26.7.06
At the heart of the Lebanon crisis lie the lethal mistakes of George Bush
It was meant to be over by now. This time last week Israeli military planners were demanding another 72 hours to finish the job: that's all they needed, they promised, to clear southern Lebanon of Hizbullah. Yet the enemy has proved stubborn. Despite two weeks of bombardment, Hizbullah's formidable arsenal remains in place. Yesterday they fired yet more rockets - 60 of them - deep into Israel, reaching the city of Haifa and killing a teenage girl in the Arab village of Maghar.
This persistence is causing the first rumblings of Israeli disquiet. Why are the Katyushas "still coming, and killing?" asks one Israeli columnist. Are the Israel Defence Forces losing their edge, asks another, wondering if "instead of an army that is small but smart, we are catching glimpses of an army that is big, rich and dumb". The top brass deny they have been surprised by Hizbullah's strength. They expected nothing less, they say - not least because Iran has been supplying the movement with more than $100m worth of arms. Which would explain the serious hardware, including long-range missiles, at Hizbullah's disposal.
So far none of this has eroded the astonishingly high level of Israeli public support for the war. I spoke yesterday to a "refusenik", an Israeli soldier whose principles compelled him to spend a month in jail rather than serve in the West Bank or Gaza. Even he was clear: "We had no choice but to hit back." This is not about defending occupied territory, because Israel is not an genuine occupier in Lebanon. This is, he says, about defending the country from a proxy army of a state, Iran, that is committed to Israel's destruction.
Little has punctured Israelis' sense of self-belief. They see few of the TV pictures we see, showing Lebanese children, bloodstained and weeping; they have victims of their own to concentrate on. As for the rest of the world's condemnation, it doesn't cut much ice. Why should Israelis listen to Vladimir Putin when he tells them their response has been "disproportionate"? Was Russia's pounding of Grozny proportionate? As for complaints from Britain and Europe about the 390 civilians killed in Lebanon, those are a reminder of the more than 3,000 civilians killed in the 2001 onslaught against Afghanistan: how was that proportionate exactly? Kim Howells was right to be appalled by what he saw in Beirut. But he surely would have been just as shocked had he visited the Iraqi city of Falluja after the Americans had turned it to rubble.
Besides, not much of this criticism, including that from Howells, has got through at all. The message projected by most of the Israeli media is that the bit of the world that matters - the US - is behind them. The government certainly echoes that line, and it will have been emboldened by Condoleezza Rice's show of understanding yesterday.
Indeed, for prime minister Ehud Olmert the backing of the US is central to everything this war is about. The Tel Aviv University analyst Dr Gary Sussman calls it a "war for the legitimacy of unilateralism". This approach, first pursued by Ariel Sharon and now Olmert's defining project, tells Israelis that it is OK to pull out from occupied territory - whether southern Lebanon in 2000 or Gaza in 2005 - because after withdrawal there will be a clear, recognised border, behind which Israel can defend itself more vigorously than ever. That is why, once Hizbullah had captured those two Israeli soldiers, Olmert had to hit back. If he had not, he would have vindicated the critics who brand unilateral withdrawal a glorified retreat, jeopardising Israel's security. He had to prove that pulling out did not mean running away, that Israel could still defend itself. What's more, because it had moved back to the internationally recognised border, Israel would now enjoy international legitimacy. Washington has obligingly played its role, supplying the support that confirms Olmert's logic.
This message is not aimed solely at the Israeli people. It is also meant to restore the country's "deterrence", telling Hizbullah and the rest of the region that they cannot cross Israel's borders, or seize its personnel, with impunity (no matter how Israel itself behaves). Israel is especially keen to disprove the "cobweb theory", put about by Hizbullah: pull at one Israeli thread, such as its 18-year presence in Lebanon until 2000, and the rest will unravel. The current operation is designed to say that Israel does not do unravelling.
There is a last audience for this war. Olmert wants the Palestinians to see that if Israel withdraws from further territory, as he intends, it will not be a soft touch. On the contrary, as the world has seen, if Israel is so much as scratched it will hit back very hard. The prime minister wants this point seared into the minds of Hamas and Fatah so that they remember it come the day Israel withdraws from parts of the West Bank.
From his own point of view, Olmert had little alternative. If he had accepted the soldiers' kidnapping, and sought their return through diplomacy, most Israeli analysts are agreed that he would have been finished. He would have confirmed his own weakness, a civilian with no military record, and he would have proved the anti-unilateralists right. His own plan, to withdraw from more occupied territory, would be in shreds. As things stand, he should now have the credibility to move forward.
That's as close as we get to a crumb of comfort to be found in the rubble of this last fortnight. Yet it need not have been this way. Had one of the key players in the drama behaved differently, this entire mess could have been avoided.
I'm thinking of the United States. It's fashionable to blame the US for all the world's ills, but in this case the sins, both of omission and commission, of the Bush administration genuinely belong at the heart of the trouble.
Diplomacy has had a difficult task from the start, in part because the US is not seen as an honest broker, but as too closely aligned with Israel. Washington has long been pro-Israel, but under President Clinton and the first President Bush there was an effort to be seen as a plausible mediator. Not under George W. Far from keeping lines of communication open with Hizbullah's two key patrons - Syria and Iran - they have been cast into outer darkness, branded as spokes, or satellites, of the axis of evil. As a result there has been no mechanism to restrain Hizbullah. Now, when the US needs Syria's help, it may be too late. Damascus will extract a high price, no doubt demanding the right to re-enter, in some form, Lebanon. The White House can't grant that - not when it considers Syria's ejection from Lebanon in 2005 one of its few foreign-policy successes.
But the record of failure goes deeper than that. It began in the president's first week, when Bush decided he would not repeat what he perceived as his predecessor's mistake by allowing his presidency to be mired in the fruitless search for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Even though Clinton had got tantalisingly close, Bush decided to drop it. While Henry Kissinger once racked up 24,230 miles in just 34 days of shuttle diplomacy, Bush's envoys have been sparing in their visits to the region.
The result is that the core conflict has been allowed to fester. Had it been solved, or even if there had been a serious effort to solve it, the current crisis would have been unimaginable. Instead, Bush's animating idea has been that the peoples of the Middle East can be bombed into democracy and terrorised into moderation. It has proved one of the great lethal mistakes of his abominable presidency - and the peoples of Israel and Lebanon are paying the price.
Guardian Unlimited Comment is free At the heart of the Lebanon crisis lie the lethal mistakes of George Bush
This persistence is causing the first rumblings of Israeli disquiet. Why are the Katyushas "still coming, and killing?" asks one Israeli columnist. Are the Israel Defence Forces losing their edge, asks another, wondering if "instead of an army that is small but smart, we are catching glimpses of an army that is big, rich and dumb". The top brass deny they have been surprised by Hizbullah's strength. They expected nothing less, they say - not least because Iran has been supplying the movement with more than $100m worth of arms. Which would explain the serious hardware, including long-range missiles, at Hizbullah's disposal.
So far none of this has eroded the astonishingly high level of Israeli public support for the war. I spoke yesterday to a "refusenik", an Israeli soldier whose principles compelled him to spend a month in jail rather than serve in the West Bank or Gaza. Even he was clear: "We had no choice but to hit back." This is not about defending occupied territory, because Israel is not an genuine occupier in Lebanon. This is, he says, about defending the country from a proxy army of a state, Iran, that is committed to Israel's destruction.
Little has punctured Israelis' sense of self-belief. They see few of the TV pictures we see, showing Lebanese children, bloodstained and weeping; they have victims of their own to concentrate on. As for the rest of the world's condemnation, it doesn't cut much ice. Why should Israelis listen to Vladimir Putin when he tells them their response has been "disproportionate"? Was Russia's pounding of Grozny proportionate? As for complaints from Britain and Europe about the 390 civilians killed in Lebanon, those are a reminder of the more than 3,000 civilians killed in the 2001 onslaught against Afghanistan: how was that proportionate exactly? Kim Howells was right to be appalled by what he saw in Beirut. But he surely would have been just as shocked had he visited the Iraqi city of Falluja after the Americans had turned it to rubble.
Besides, not much of this criticism, including that from Howells, has got through at all. The message projected by most of the Israeli media is that the bit of the world that matters - the US - is behind them. The government certainly echoes that line, and it will have been emboldened by Condoleezza Rice's show of understanding yesterday.
Indeed, for prime minister Ehud Olmert the backing of the US is central to everything this war is about. The Tel Aviv University analyst Dr Gary Sussman calls it a "war for the legitimacy of unilateralism". This approach, first pursued by Ariel Sharon and now Olmert's defining project, tells Israelis that it is OK to pull out from occupied territory - whether southern Lebanon in 2000 or Gaza in 2005 - because after withdrawal there will be a clear, recognised border, behind which Israel can defend itself more vigorously than ever. That is why, once Hizbullah had captured those two Israeli soldiers, Olmert had to hit back. If he had not, he would have vindicated the critics who brand unilateral withdrawal a glorified retreat, jeopardising Israel's security. He had to prove that pulling out did not mean running away, that Israel could still defend itself. What's more, because it had moved back to the internationally recognised border, Israel would now enjoy international legitimacy. Washington has obligingly played its role, supplying the support that confirms Olmert's logic.
This message is not aimed solely at the Israeli people. It is also meant to restore the country's "deterrence", telling Hizbullah and the rest of the region that they cannot cross Israel's borders, or seize its personnel, with impunity (no matter how Israel itself behaves). Israel is especially keen to disprove the "cobweb theory", put about by Hizbullah: pull at one Israeli thread, such as its 18-year presence in Lebanon until 2000, and the rest will unravel. The current operation is designed to say that Israel does not do unravelling.
There is a last audience for this war. Olmert wants the Palestinians to see that if Israel withdraws from further territory, as he intends, it will not be a soft touch. On the contrary, as the world has seen, if Israel is so much as scratched it will hit back very hard. The prime minister wants this point seared into the minds of Hamas and Fatah so that they remember it come the day Israel withdraws from parts of the West Bank.
From his own point of view, Olmert had little alternative. If he had accepted the soldiers' kidnapping, and sought their return through diplomacy, most Israeli analysts are agreed that he would have been finished. He would have confirmed his own weakness, a civilian with no military record, and he would have proved the anti-unilateralists right. His own plan, to withdraw from more occupied territory, would be in shreds. As things stand, he should now have the credibility to move forward.
That's as close as we get to a crumb of comfort to be found in the rubble of this last fortnight. Yet it need not have been this way. Had one of the key players in the drama behaved differently, this entire mess could have been avoided.
I'm thinking of the United States. It's fashionable to blame the US for all the world's ills, but in this case the sins, both of omission and commission, of the Bush administration genuinely belong at the heart of the trouble.
Diplomacy has had a difficult task from the start, in part because the US is not seen as an honest broker, but as too closely aligned with Israel. Washington has long been pro-Israel, but under President Clinton and the first President Bush there was an effort to be seen as a plausible mediator. Not under George W. Far from keeping lines of communication open with Hizbullah's two key patrons - Syria and Iran - they have been cast into outer darkness, branded as spokes, or satellites, of the axis of evil. As a result there has been no mechanism to restrain Hizbullah. Now, when the US needs Syria's help, it may be too late. Damascus will extract a high price, no doubt demanding the right to re-enter, in some form, Lebanon. The White House can't grant that - not when it considers Syria's ejection from Lebanon in 2005 one of its few foreign-policy successes.
But the record of failure goes deeper than that. It began in the president's first week, when Bush decided he would not repeat what he perceived as his predecessor's mistake by allowing his presidency to be mired in the fruitless search for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Even though Clinton had got tantalisingly close, Bush decided to drop it. While Henry Kissinger once racked up 24,230 miles in just 34 days of shuttle diplomacy, Bush's envoys have been sparing in their visits to the region.
The result is that the core conflict has been allowed to fester. Had it been solved, or even if there had been a serious effort to solve it, the current crisis would have been unimaginable. Instead, Bush's animating idea has been that the peoples of the Middle East can be bombed into democracy and terrorised into moderation. It has proved one of the great lethal mistakes of his abominable presidency - and the peoples of Israel and Lebanon are paying the price.
Guardian Unlimited Comment is free At the heart of the Lebanon crisis lie the lethal mistakes of George Bush
IRAN
Ignore Iran at Our Peril
Guardian Unlimited Special reports Iran warns the west: ignore us at your peril
Guardian Unlimited Special reports Iran warns the west: ignore us at your peril
25.7.06
The Third Man (1949)
I saw THE THIRD MAN last evening. I had forgotten what an absolutely superb film this is. Grahame Greene on the script. Carrol Reed directing. Orson Welles;.........and the Anton Karas zither music is haunting. See it again. The woman credited only as Valli only died last month.
The Third Man (1949)
The Third Man (1949)
24.7.06
Woody Allen
So where do you think Woody Allen donated his papers? He's 70, after all, and the Grim Reaper is peering through the window. Maybe Brooklyn College -- he was born in the borough. What about NYU?
Try Princeton. Yikes. Princeton is so not Woody Allen. So not neurotic-Zabar's-Alvie Singer-Jewish-Upper West Side. So teeming with preppie eating clubs and Aryan lacrosse players.
Woody Allen discusses his films - The Boston Globe
Try Princeton. Yikes. Princeton is so not Woody Allen. So not neurotic-Zabar's-Alvie Singer-Jewish-Upper West Side. So teeming with preppie eating clubs and Aryan lacrosse players.
Woody Allen discusses his films - The Boston Globe
21.7.06
ARE YOU HAPPY?
Talk of happiness studies, or the “new science of happiness”, is everywhere at the moment. The BBC has just aired a six-part series on it. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, wants to focus “not just on GDP but on GWB - general well-being”. Harvard University’s most popular class is now a course in happiness, or “positive psychology”. Cambridge University and Wellington College boarding school offer similar instruction.
The flurry of recent books on the subject is a symptom of the happiness phenomenon. But these writers are also fuelling the debate, as they bring previously obscure academic research on happiness - by economists, philosophers, psychologists and geneticists - to more mainstream attention.
So what can an academic usefully add to such a familiar, yet elusive topic as happiness? Happiness is common territory for philosophers who, going back to Plato and Aristotle, have broadly believed that contentment depended on leading a virtuous and ultimately satisfying “good life”. And we understand - even if we don’t always agree with - the great religious figures of history who said happiness was the reward for a life well lived. But is there really such a thing as an objective state of happiness that can be scientifically measured and observed? There is, according to today’s happiness thinkers.
Psychologists say the simple act of asking people how they feel over time will give a surprisingly accurate assessment of their contentment. Those reported levels of happiness may be further verified, they say, by measuring brain activity with electronic scans (happy people have more activity on the left front of the brain; unhappy ones have more on the right). Happiness-school economists then say these findings should help us to shape public policy, by focusing more on the “general well-being” of which Cameron now speaks
FT.com / Arts & Weekend - No laughing matter
The flurry of recent books on the subject is a symptom of the happiness phenomenon. But these writers are also fuelling the debate, as they bring previously obscure academic research on happiness - by economists, philosophers, psychologists and geneticists - to more mainstream attention.
So what can an academic usefully add to such a familiar, yet elusive topic as happiness? Happiness is common territory for philosophers who, going back to Plato and Aristotle, have broadly believed that contentment depended on leading a virtuous and ultimately satisfying “good life”. And we understand - even if we don’t always agree with - the great religious figures of history who said happiness was the reward for a life well lived. But is there really such a thing as an objective state of happiness that can be scientifically measured and observed? There is, according to today’s happiness thinkers.
Psychologists say the simple act of asking people how they feel over time will give a surprisingly accurate assessment of their contentment. Those reported levels of happiness may be further verified, they say, by measuring brain activity with electronic scans (happy people have more activity on the left front of the brain; unhappy ones have more on the right). Happiness-school economists then say these findings should help us to shape public policy, by focusing more on the “general well-being” of which Cameron now speaks
FT.com / Arts & Weekend - No laughing matter
ISLAMISTS ARE WINNING
Even the lesser irrationalities on the subject of Israel disturb. It is smaller in area than Sardinia or Wales, with only half the population of Mexico City, but its potency, like that of the allegedly world-conquering Jews themselves, is inflated to an inordinate degree. Conversely, the notion that Israel is presently engaged in ‘a fight for its very existence’ is an equally irrational assertion. With its formidable military arsenal, and armed forces which can easily outgun its local foes, it is not, or not yet, in such danger. But similarly irrational is Israel’s vow to ‘destroy Hezbollah’. The right arm of the advancing power of Iran, the so-called ‘Party of God’, cannot now be ‘destroyed’.
The Spectator.co.uk
The Spectator.co.uk
The Persian game
On the sidelines of a recent security conference in Oman, a former high-ranking Iranian official turned to a Saudi colleague and said: "You are overestimating our influence in Iraq. We are not as powerful as you think." A few moments later, the Iranian smiled and added, "But don't underestimate our influence, either."
Such calculated ambiguity has become a familiar feature of Iranian foreign policy, particularly regarding its role in Iraq, its nuclear stance and, of course, its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Sometimes the ambiguity approaches something resembling sophisticated statecraft; at other times it looks amateurish, like "bazaar diplomacy."
Amid the ongoing Hezbollah-Israel war, the ambiguity has been on full display: Iran, on the one hand, denies accusations that it is playing a role in the conflict, while secretly pledging financial and military support for Hezbollah and publicly declaring the Jewish state unsafe from Hezbollah rockets.
The Persian game Salon
Such calculated ambiguity has become a familiar feature of Iranian foreign policy, particularly regarding its role in Iraq, its nuclear stance and, of course, its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Sometimes the ambiguity approaches something resembling sophisticated statecraft; at other times it looks amateurish, like "bazaar diplomacy."
Amid the ongoing Hezbollah-Israel war, the ambiguity has been on full display: Iran, on the one hand, denies accusations that it is playing a role in the conflict, while secretly pledging financial and military support for Hezbollah and publicly declaring the Jewish state unsafe from Hezbollah rockets.
The Persian game Salon
20.7.06
THE OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP
Here is a roadmap to victory. We are given a hole by hole description of how to win the Open which commences today. Guardian Unlimited Sport Special reports Royal Liverpool: hole-by-hole
19.7.06
BLOCKBUSTERS
This is the summer of the blockbuster, as all recent summers have been, and it feels pointless to lament the fact. It doesn't matter how many writers tell you that the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel is convoluted, hammy, offensive and an hour too long; or that Superman Returns is simplistic, hammy, inoffensive and an hour too long. Whatever critics say, enough people will ignore them to ensure that those films still hit their inflated targets.
Indeed, the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, which most critics agree is as flabby as the big squid it showcases, is at the top of the chart of US box office receipts for a film's opening weekend. Scrolling down the list of these record-breaking openings is weirdly telling about the cinematic culture we live in. If you thought that the last part of the Lord of the Rings was a very successful film, well, it was, and it was a much-loved Oscar-winner that will last - but in its first weekend it didn't make as much as the universally excoriated The Da Vinci Code.
That massive opening success is all a film needs to get the status of a blockbuster, and it is extraordinary to see films that nobody took to their hearts attaining that status. As the critic Tom Shone wrote a couple of years ago in his examination of the blockbuster: "It is perfectly possible for a studio to buy our curiosity for the space of a single weekend, which is all the time the studio needs to make back its money. It doesn't matter whether we like what we see or not, only that we sit there, liking it or disliking it in sufficient numbers."
That is exactly what is happening now. The crowd I sat among for Pirates of the Caribbean and Superman Returns seemed to be as unmoved as I was - there were no laughs, gasps or tears - but even so, there was certainly a crowd.
If this makes you feel just a tad depressed about the culture around you, cheer up: hope is on the horizon. It may feel as you walk past the multiplex and into the chain bookshop where Katie Price's bestseller is stacked up, and then home to pick up the television schedules dominated by reality shows, that we live in an age when there is little room for anything but the blockbuster, the bestseller, the audience-chaser, the top celebrity. But if you listen to some of the voices out there, it turns out that this isn't what is going on at all.
The opposite is true, at least according to a writer called Chris Anderson who has come out with a buzzy new book which tells us that we are not living in the culture of the blockbuster and the bestseller. In fact, we are living in the culture of the niche and the eccentric, or, as he puts it, the long tail. The long tail, as he explains in his book of the same name, is what you see on the sales graphs for retailers like Amazon or iTunes, where a few hits and bestsellers may sell an awful lot, but most sales are of books and music that sell hardly anything - just bobbing along selling twenties, tens, twos and ones, rather than thousands. For online retailers, who can afford the kind of enormous catalogue that a real-space shop can't dream of, this long tail of small sales adds up to significantly more than the short head of big sales.
There is something immediately convincing about Anderson's explanation of the way our culture is going. Because the great pleasure of new technology is that it did not turn us all into the drones of science-fiction fantasy, consuming nothing but mass media en masse. The way people decided to use the internet - both buyers and sellers - encourages tiny interests to flourish again. I'm sure you've had experience of that yourself: I know I have. The joy of getting some out-of-print thriller from Amazon or buying some hard-to-find Garbo film from eBay - there's space for anyone to indulge an old-fashioned quirk on the internet, plus the space for teenagers to download their Japanese anime or play video games with each other.
It's great to hear Anderson's blast of optimism about all this human-scale activity and what it means for the future. No wonder commentators have fallen on his work, drawn to this hopeful picture of a culture that is as individualistic as ever in the face of apparent conformism. But what you are left with, if you're convinced by this picture of a culture that is all top curve or long tail, is a nagging question about what is happening to what has been called the middle torso. A culture divided between the massive hit and the tiny niche may feel comfortable for retailers and producers of a certain sort, but not so good for others. Many writers do not just want to reach a tiny online community and yet will never follow the formulas that please a massive audience; many film-makers don't want to go it alone with a digital camera and sell to the teenagers on MySpace, but also don't want millions of dollars of computer-generated imagery and a first week opening on thousands of screens.
At the moment, there is space to work in this middle ground. There are, say, the distributors who support independent film-makers with a small theatrical release, and independent publishers who take on new writers and help bring them out of the niche without expecting them to be bestsellers. But just as the small independent bookshop is being squeezed both by supermarkets and online retailers, so we may find that if our culture becomes so dominated by the blockbuster on one hand and the long tail on the other, something precious is going to get squeezed out of the middle.
Indeed, the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, which most critics agree is as flabby as the big squid it showcases, is at the top of the chart of US box office receipts for a film's opening weekend. Scrolling down the list of these record-breaking openings is weirdly telling about the cinematic culture we live in. If you thought that the last part of the Lord of the Rings was a very successful film, well, it was, and it was a much-loved Oscar-winner that will last - but in its first weekend it didn't make as much as the universally excoriated The Da Vinci Code.
That massive opening success is all a film needs to get the status of a blockbuster, and it is extraordinary to see films that nobody took to their hearts attaining that status. As the critic Tom Shone wrote a couple of years ago in his examination of the blockbuster: "It is perfectly possible for a studio to buy our curiosity for the space of a single weekend, which is all the time the studio needs to make back its money. It doesn't matter whether we like what we see or not, only that we sit there, liking it or disliking it in sufficient numbers."
That is exactly what is happening now. The crowd I sat among for Pirates of the Caribbean and Superman Returns seemed to be as unmoved as I was - there were no laughs, gasps or tears - but even so, there was certainly a crowd.
If this makes you feel just a tad depressed about the culture around you, cheer up: hope is on the horizon. It may feel as you walk past the multiplex and into the chain bookshop where Katie Price's bestseller is stacked up, and then home to pick up the television schedules dominated by reality shows, that we live in an age when there is little room for anything but the blockbuster, the bestseller, the audience-chaser, the top celebrity. But if you listen to some of the voices out there, it turns out that this isn't what is going on at all.
The opposite is true, at least according to a writer called Chris Anderson who has come out with a buzzy new book which tells us that we are not living in the culture of the blockbuster and the bestseller. In fact, we are living in the culture of the niche and the eccentric, or, as he puts it, the long tail. The long tail, as he explains in his book of the same name, is what you see on the sales graphs for retailers like Amazon or iTunes, where a few hits and bestsellers may sell an awful lot, but most sales are of books and music that sell hardly anything - just bobbing along selling twenties, tens, twos and ones, rather than thousands. For online retailers, who can afford the kind of enormous catalogue that a real-space shop can't dream of, this long tail of small sales adds up to significantly more than the short head of big sales.
There is something immediately convincing about Anderson's explanation of the way our culture is going. Because the great pleasure of new technology is that it did not turn us all into the drones of science-fiction fantasy, consuming nothing but mass media en masse. The way people decided to use the internet - both buyers and sellers - encourages tiny interests to flourish again. I'm sure you've had experience of that yourself: I know I have. The joy of getting some out-of-print thriller from Amazon or buying some hard-to-find Garbo film from eBay - there's space for anyone to indulge an old-fashioned quirk on the internet, plus the space for teenagers to download their Japanese anime or play video games with each other.
It's great to hear Anderson's blast of optimism about all this human-scale activity and what it means for the future. No wonder commentators have fallen on his work, drawn to this hopeful picture of a culture that is as individualistic as ever in the face of apparent conformism. But what you are left with, if you're convinced by this picture of a culture that is all top curve or long tail, is a nagging question about what is happening to what has been called the middle torso. A culture divided between the massive hit and the tiny niche may feel comfortable for retailers and producers of a certain sort, but not so good for others. Many writers do not just want to reach a tiny online community and yet will never follow the formulas that please a massive audience; many film-makers don't want to go it alone with a digital camera and sell to the teenagers on MySpace, but also don't want millions of dollars of computer-generated imagery and a first week opening on thousands of screens.
At the moment, there is space to work in this middle ground. There are, say, the distributors who support independent film-makers with a small theatrical release, and independent publishers who take on new writers and help bring them out of the niche without expecting them to be bestsellers. But just as the small independent bookshop is being squeezed both by supermarkets and online retailers, so we may find that if our culture becomes so dominated by the blockbuster on one hand and the long tail on the other, something precious is going to get squeezed out of the middle.
Pyschiatry by Prescription
This article raises some most interesting questions about the nature of mental illness. With so many (especially children) taking psychotropic drugs to acheive 'normalacy' -- is it illness or.....Pyschiatry by Prescription
18.7.06
NO BOOKS ON THE AIRWAVES
Did you catch CBS' Tuesday Night Book Club?
Of course you didn't. No one did. It was killed so fast, viewers hardly had time to realize that the housewives in this Arizona book club rarely ever mentioned books.
Which was the point, of course. Book talk wouldn't interest viewers, not the way adultery does. Which sums up television's treatment of books in general.
OK, bringing up TV and literature in this way inevitably leads to the Big Shrug: It's an American commercial medium, what do you expect? Lectures on Ezra Pound? Another complaint about TV's limited cultural grasp is not going to keep Les Moonves up nights.
But with that argument, we surrender the field to the Rupert Murdochs. We accept that the noisy junk we've got is all there is. All there will ever be.
Consider: At a conference in May, New York columnist Kurt Andersen noted that his Public Radio International program, Studio 360 was the only arts-feature program of its kind in the States when it started 10 years ago. Yet most European countries, Mr. Andersen noted, boast half a dozen such shows. Each.
So why do European airwaves have a richer literary-cultural discussion going on than ours? For one thing, there's a recognition that some aspects of human life are too important to be left to the discretion of a few media oligarchs. That recognition often leads to some form of public support.
In America, when people advocate gutting government support of PBS and NPR, which Congress tried again this year despite President Bush's mild opposition, they often cite cable TV and talk radio as the marketplace's answers to any audience needs.
That's hardly the case when one considers what laughably passes for books-and-arts coverage on cable or talk radio.
I've detected no such programming on commercial radio, except when another culture-war distraction flares up. And there's precious little on cable. Once the Bravo channel was bought by NBC, and A&E turned to such shows as Dog the Bounty Hunter, they gave up their educated, upscale audience to chase the same wide demographic.
Yet in his new book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson posits that such a mass audience is dying. Outfits such as eBay and Amazon.com make money not from a few big sellers but from millions of little ones. And these niches ("the long tail") are the market's real future.
Well, tell that to advertisers. They still want to nab the mass audience, the dim, young, mass audience. Book readers, meanwhile, skew older. And although older folk often have more cash than 18-year-olds, they're less likely to blow it on energy drinks or $300 jeans. So readers are ignored by most ad folk.
As long as the mass media in America, including newspapers, think like this and as long as advertisers foot the bill, book culture will be slighted. To a degree, this is so even in the nonprofit sector, which has increasingly sunk into commercialism: Ten years after it was launched, Studio 360 is still the only show like it in the States.
With books sidelined by the electronic media, I find I'm of two minds. On the one hand, TV has ruined whatever it's touched: pro sports, political campaigns, swimsuit competitions. And publishers already shamelessly push pretty, camera-ready authors. Maybe continued TV neglect of books wouldn't be so bad. We could go on reading and enjoying them – quietly.
On the other hand, if it doesn't appear on TV (and sorry, Webheads, broadband Internet is becoming just TV 2.0), if it doesn't appear on TV, it doesn't exist in America.
So what are we going to do?
GuideLive.com Arts/Entertainment News and Events Dallas-Fort Worth The Dallas Morning News Entertainment Columnist Jerome Weeks
Of course you didn't. No one did. It was killed so fast, viewers hardly had time to realize that the housewives in this Arizona book club rarely ever mentioned books.
Which was the point, of course. Book talk wouldn't interest viewers, not the way adultery does. Which sums up television's treatment of books in general.
OK, bringing up TV and literature in this way inevitably leads to the Big Shrug: It's an American commercial medium, what do you expect? Lectures on Ezra Pound? Another complaint about TV's limited cultural grasp is not going to keep Les Moonves up nights.
But with that argument, we surrender the field to the Rupert Murdochs. We accept that the noisy junk we've got is all there is. All there will ever be.
Consider: At a conference in May, New York columnist Kurt Andersen noted that his Public Radio International program, Studio 360 was the only arts-feature program of its kind in the States when it started 10 years ago. Yet most European countries, Mr. Andersen noted, boast half a dozen such shows. Each.
So why do European airwaves have a richer literary-cultural discussion going on than ours? For one thing, there's a recognition that some aspects of human life are too important to be left to the discretion of a few media oligarchs. That recognition often leads to some form of public support.
In America, when people advocate gutting government support of PBS and NPR, which Congress tried again this year despite President Bush's mild opposition, they often cite cable TV and talk radio as the marketplace's answers to any audience needs.
That's hardly the case when one considers what laughably passes for books-and-arts coverage on cable or talk radio.
I've detected no such programming on commercial radio, except when another culture-war distraction flares up. And there's precious little on cable. Once the Bravo channel was bought by NBC, and A&E turned to such shows as Dog the Bounty Hunter, they gave up their educated, upscale audience to chase the same wide demographic.
Yet in his new book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson posits that such a mass audience is dying. Outfits such as eBay and Amazon.com make money not from a few big sellers but from millions of little ones. And these niches ("the long tail") are the market's real future.
Well, tell that to advertisers. They still want to nab the mass audience, the dim, young, mass audience. Book readers, meanwhile, skew older. And although older folk often have more cash than 18-year-olds, they're less likely to blow it on energy drinks or $300 jeans. So readers are ignored by most ad folk.
As long as the mass media in America, including newspapers, think like this and as long as advertisers foot the bill, book culture will be slighted. To a degree, this is so even in the nonprofit sector, which has increasingly sunk into commercialism: Ten years after it was launched, Studio 360 is still the only show like it in the States.
With books sidelined by the electronic media, I find I'm of two minds. On the one hand, TV has ruined whatever it's touched: pro sports, political campaigns, swimsuit competitions. And publishers already shamelessly push pretty, camera-ready authors. Maybe continued TV neglect of books wouldn't be so bad. We could go on reading and enjoying them – quietly.
On the other hand, if it doesn't appear on TV (and sorry, Webheads, broadband Internet is becoming just TV 2.0), if it doesn't appear on TV, it doesn't exist in America.
So what are we going to do?
GuideLive.com Arts/Entertainment News and Events Dallas-Fort Worth The Dallas Morning News Entertainment Columnist Jerome Weeks
RADIO GOOD TASTE
Here's a radio station that is worthwhile. Back to the Forties.
calendarlive.com: Finally, a show with standards
calendarlive.com: Finally, a show with standards
N.Y. Times to reduce page size
We knew it was going to happen. But still, admitting a five per cent reduction in the newspace? Rather a committment to the electronic edition and a niche place for the paper/paper.
N.Y. Times to reduce page size, cut jobs - Yahoo! News
N.Y. Times to reduce page size, cut jobs - Yahoo! News
MORE STOPPARD/ROCK & ROLL
Hail, hail, rock ’n’ roll / Deliver me from the days of old,” Chuck Berry sang in the late fifties. From the outset, the rollicking beat of rock music was seen as transformative. The sound cast an irresistible spell over the imaginations of the young, for whom it was a call to action, to rebellion, and to ecstasy, not necessarily in that order. In a time of cultural turmoil and high anxiety, corrupting the world with pleasure was rock and roll’s messianic mission. But even the philosophes of fun couldn’t have predicted just how wild a ride the music would engineer on the world’s stage. Tom Stoppard, in his latest intellectual piñata, “Rock ’n’ Roll” (transferring from London’s Royal Court to the Duke of York’s on July 22nd), which is set in Cambridge and Prague between 1968 and 1990, contrives to look at music from the perspectives of both the West and the East.
Stoppard, who was born Tomá? Straüssler, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, arrived in England, via Singapore and India, in 1946, a nine-year-old refugee from the Nazis. “I put on Englishness like a coat,” he told the Independent recently. “It fitted me and it suited me.” Now a knight of the realm, and revered as one of his generation’s most important playwrights, Stoppard has been amply rewarded by the culture he adopted. Although he has written more than twenty plays and numerous scripts for film and television, “Rock ’n’ Roll” is only his second attempt to imagine himself back in the Czech landscape. The first was “Professional Foul,” an excellent 1977 TV play, which dealt with a soccer-loving professor of ethics whose moral horizons are widened by the false arrest of a former student. In “Rock ’n’ Roll,” those widening horizons belong to Jan (the outstanding Rufus Sewell), a twenty-nine-year-old Czech Marxist scholar who in 1968 leaves the doctoral program at Cambridge “to save socialism” at home by supporting the liberal agenda of the Communist leader Alexander Dub?ek.
In the eyes of his rebarbative British tutor Max Morrow (the fiery Brian Cox), who calls himself “the last white rhino,” Jan is a “bed-wetter.” Max is a hard-line Communist who thinks that Czechoslovakia’s “going it alone is going against the alliance.” He has no truck with Dub?ek, “a reform Communist,” as Jan calls him—“Like a nun who gives blow jobs is a reform nun,” Max sneers. Max is a true believer in the U.S.S.R. “If it wasn’t for eleven million Soviet military dead, your little country’d be a German province now—and you wouldn’t be bellyaching about your socialist right to piss everywhere except the toilet, you’d be smoke up the chimney,” he says. Max believes that the mind is “a biological machine” and that “the struggle was for socialism under organized labour and that was that. It wasn’t a revolution of the head.”
Max’s faith is in collective social justice; Jan, as his love of rock music indicates, is ravished by the notion of individual freedom. Max won’t have any of it: not the nineteen-sixties (“I was embarrassed by the sixties,” he says in 1990. “It was like opening the wrong door in a highly specialized brothel”) or the newfangled Euro-Communism (“Why call it Communism? . . . If I said to you, ‘I’m a Euro-vegetarian, so I’m allowed lamb chops,’ would you . . . laugh in my face?”). “Altering the psyche has no effect on the social structure,” Max argues. Stoppard surrounds the materialist old bull with a number of intellectual picadors who prod and exhaust him with their romantic idealism. Max’s cancer-ridden wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), a classics professor who reminds her students that Eros means “uncontrollable, uncageable,” uses her body to refute his reason. “They’ve cut, cauterised, and zapped away my breasts, my ovaries, my womb, half my bowel, and a nutmeg out of my brain, and I am undiminished,” she tells him. “I am exactly who I’ve always been. I am not my body.” Lenka (Nicole Ansari), one of Eleanor’s students, who takes up with Max after he is widowed, tells him, “To you consciousness is subversive—because your thing is the collective mind. But politics is over. You’re looking for revolution in the wrong place.”
Rock and roll legislates by joy, not by reason, which is why Stoppard opens his play with an image of Pan—a tousled youth playing the flute to a stoned teen-age hippie girl—and why the Czech state banned rock as “socially negative music.” The focus of state censorship fell, in particular, on the Plastic People of the Universe, a Czech band of anarchist artists who were driven underground and whose trial made a sensational shambles of the Communist regime. “The Plastics don’t care at all,” Jan says, explaining the band’s subversive appeal to a dissident friend. “They’re unbribable. They’re coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics. They’re pagans.” (When “Rock ’n’ Roll” is made into a movie—Mick Jagger is reportedly interested in acquiring the rights—the Plastics will likely be at the center of the story. Onstage, like so much else in the play, their plight is narrated but not dramatized.) Eventually, rock music and its musicians were the catalyst for Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution. At the finale of the play, Jan is on his feet in the Prague stadium where the Communists formerly held their rallies, cheering the Rolling Stones. By then, a lot of blood has flowed under the bridge; Jan has lived through loyalty pledges, purges, unemployment, imprisonment as a “parasite,” and rehabilitation as a bakery worker. As the Stones bring the curtain down—“Hey, hey, you got me rocking now / Hey, hey, there ain’t no stopping me”—Jan’s amazement at his hard-won liberty is something that the smug Western audience also feels. This is a considerable theatrical achievement.
The problem with “Rock ’n’ Roll,” however, is that dramaturgically speaking it doesn’t rock. Stoppard at his best—in “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” and “Arcadia”—is capable of inspired imaginative flights, thrilling grooves of verbal and scenic surprise. But that swift, irrepressible interplay of form and feeling is not in evidence here. The play, which is sluggishly directed by Trevor Nunn, can’t quite find its beat. Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, John Lennon, the Beach Boys, and Guns N’ Roses, among others, provide pertinent segues between scenes, but they serve only to underline the sedateness of the action onstage. We don’t really care about Max’s family or about Jan, because the focus never lingers long enough for us to know them; we understand the plot points of their lives and their psychologies, but these function more like factors in an intellectual equation than as emotional experience. Toward the end of the play, for instance, Jan returns to England for Max’s seventieth birthday and to make peace with the past. When he leaves, he says a wistful goodbye to Max’s daughter, Esme (also played by Cusack), the hippie girl we saw in the first scene, who has gone from a commune to motherhood and then to aimless middle age. This is the first time the two have met as adults. Jan exits, and minutes later reënters:
JAN: I came to ask, will you come with me? ESME: Yes. JAN: To Prague. ESME: Of course. Yes. Of course. JAN: Will you come now? ESME: Yes. All right. I’ll have to get my passport. . . . It’s upstairs.
The flatness of the exposition makes notional the drama of two resigned, disappointed souls finding each other; they become mere stick figures, their depth sacrificed to design. Real rock and roll goes straight to the heart; the play, however, is an appeal to the head.
“Rock ’n’ Roll” is bookended by two haunting images of collapse: that of Syd Barrett, one of the founders of Pink Floyd, who suffered a mental breakdown in the late sixties, and who features in the play as a reclusive offstage figure living (as the real Barrett did until his death earlier this month) in Cambridge; and that of the Iron Curtain. Both collapses—one internal, one external; one negative, one positive—embody rock music’s youthful call for rebirth. Just how well this protean spirit was woven into the fabric of the new Czech order is shown in one piquant entry on the time line that Stoppard includes with the published text of the play. “1990. January,” it reads. “The Czech government appoints Frank Zappa, the American rock musician, as Czechoslovakia’s representative of trade, culture and tourism; later rescinded as ‘over-enthusiastic.’ ”
...from John Lahr at NEW YORKER
Stoppard, who was born Tomá? Straüssler, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, arrived in England, via Singapore and India, in 1946, a nine-year-old refugee from the Nazis. “I put on Englishness like a coat,” he told the Independent recently. “It fitted me and it suited me.” Now a knight of the realm, and revered as one of his generation’s most important playwrights, Stoppard has been amply rewarded by the culture he adopted. Although he has written more than twenty plays and numerous scripts for film and television, “Rock ’n’ Roll” is only his second attempt to imagine himself back in the Czech landscape. The first was “Professional Foul,” an excellent 1977 TV play, which dealt with a soccer-loving professor of ethics whose moral horizons are widened by the false arrest of a former student. In “Rock ’n’ Roll,” those widening horizons belong to Jan (the outstanding Rufus Sewell), a twenty-nine-year-old Czech Marxist scholar who in 1968 leaves the doctoral program at Cambridge “to save socialism” at home by supporting the liberal agenda of the Communist leader Alexander Dub?ek.
In the eyes of his rebarbative British tutor Max Morrow (the fiery Brian Cox), who calls himself “the last white rhino,” Jan is a “bed-wetter.” Max is a hard-line Communist who thinks that Czechoslovakia’s “going it alone is going against the alliance.” He has no truck with Dub?ek, “a reform Communist,” as Jan calls him—“Like a nun who gives blow jobs is a reform nun,” Max sneers. Max is a true believer in the U.S.S.R. “If it wasn’t for eleven million Soviet military dead, your little country’d be a German province now—and you wouldn’t be bellyaching about your socialist right to piss everywhere except the toilet, you’d be smoke up the chimney,” he says. Max believes that the mind is “a biological machine” and that “the struggle was for socialism under organized labour and that was that. It wasn’t a revolution of the head.”
Max’s faith is in collective social justice; Jan, as his love of rock music indicates, is ravished by the notion of individual freedom. Max won’t have any of it: not the nineteen-sixties (“I was embarrassed by the sixties,” he says in 1990. “It was like opening the wrong door in a highly specialized brothel”) or the newfangled Euro-Communism (“Why call it Communism? . . . If I said to you, ‘I’m a Euro-vegetarian, so I’m allowed lamb chops,’ would you . . . laugh in my face?”). “Altering the psyche has no effect on the social structure,” Max argues. Stoppard surrounds the materialist old bull with a number of intellectual picadors who prod and exhaust him with their romantic idealism. Max’s cancer-ridden wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), a classics professor who reminds her students that Eros means “uncontrollable, uncageable,” uses her body to refute his reason. “They’ve cut, cauterised, and zapped away my breasts, my ovaries, my womb, half my bowel, and a nutmeg out of my brain, and I am undiminished,” she tells him. “I am exactly who I’ve always been. I am not my body.” Lenka (Nicole Ansari), one of Eleanor’s students, who takes up with Max after he is widowed, tells him, “To you consciousness is subversive—because your thing is the collective mind. But politics is over. You’re looking for revolution in the wrong place.”
Rock and roll legislates by joy, not by reason, which is why Stoppard opens his play with an image of Pan—a tousled youth playing the flute to a stoned teen-age hippie girl—and why the Czech state banned rock as “socially negative music.” The focus of state censorship fell, in particular, on the Plastic People of the Universe, a Czech band of anarchist artists who were driven underground and whose trial made a sensational shambles of the Communist regime. “The Plastics don’t care at all,” Jan says, explaining the band’s subversive appeal to a dissident friend. “They’re unbribable. They’re coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics. They’re pagans.” (When “Rock ’n’ Roll” is made into a movie—Mick Jagger is reportedly interested in acquiring the rights—the Plastics will likely be at the center of the story. Onstage, like so much else in the play, their plight is narrated but not dramatized.) Eventually, rock music and its musicians were the catalyst for Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution. At the finale of the play, Jan is on his feet in the Prague stadium where the Communists formerly held their rallies, cheering the Rolling Stones. By then, a lot of blood has flowed under the bridge; Jan has lived through loyalty pledges, purges, unemployment, imprisonment as a “parasite,” and rehabilitation as a bakery worker. As the Stones bring the curtain down—“Hey, hey, you got me rocking now / Hey, hey, there ain’t no stopping me”—Jan’s amazement at his hard-won liberty is something that the smug Western audience also feels. This is a considerable theatrical achievement.
The problem with “Rock ’n’ Roll,” however, is that dramaturgically speaking it doesn’t rock. Stoppard at his best—in “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” and “Arcadia”—is capable of inspired imaginative flights, thrilling grooves of verbal and scenic surprise. But that swift, irrepressible interplay of form and feeling is not in evidence here. The play, which is sluggishly directed by Trevor Nunn, can’t quite find its beat. Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, John Lennon, the Beach Boys, and Guns N’ Roses, among others, provide pertinent segues between scenes, but they serve only to underline the sedateness of the action onstage. We don’t really care about Max’s family or about Jan, because the focus never lingers long enough for us to know them; we understand the plot points of their lives and their psychologies, but these function more like factors in an intellectual equation than as emotional experience. Toward the end of the play, for instance, Jan returns to England for Max’s seventieth birthday and to make peace with the past. When he leaves, he says a wistful goodbye to Max’s daughter, Esme (also played by Cusack), the hippie girl we saw in the first scene, who has gone from a commune to motherhood and then to aimless middle age. This is the first time the two have met as adults. Jan exits, and minutes later reënters:
JAN: I came to ask, will you come with me? ESME: Yes. JAN: To Prague. ESME: Of course. Yes. Of course. JAN: Will you come now? ESME: Yes. All right. I’ll have to get my passport. . . . It’s upstairs.
The flatness of the exposition makes notional the drama of two resigned, disappointed souls finding each other; they become mere stick figures, their depth sacrificed to design. Real rock and roll goes straight to the heart; the play, however, is an appeal to the head.
“Rock ’n’ Roll” is bookended by two haunting images of collapse: that of Syd Barrett, one of the founders of Pink Floyd, who suffered a mental breakdown in the late sixties, and who features in the play as a reclusive offstage figure living (as the real Barrett did until his death earlier this month) in Cambridge; and that of the Iron Curtain. Both collapses—one internal, one external; one negative, one positive—embody rock music’s youthful call for rebirth. Just how well this protean spirit was woven into the fabric of the new Czech order is shown in one piquant entry on the time line that Stoppard includes with the published text of the play. “1990. January,” it reads. “The Czech government appoints Frank Zappa, the American rock musician, as Czechoslovakia’s representative of trade, culture and tourism; later rescinded as ‘over-enthusiastic.’ ”
...from John Lahr at NEW YORKER
17.7.06
Calif. man makes bad writing judges cringe - Boston.com
Calif. man makes bad writing judges cringe - Boston.com: "Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean,' Guigli wrote."
Israel's Costs and Rewards
Middle East Crisis:
Israel's Costs and Rewards
A spiral of violence has stymied peace in the Middle East for decades. Now, as bombs are being dropped on Beirut, rockets fired at Haifa and tanks sent into Gaza, Israel and Muslim extremists have brought the region to the brink of all out war. And the Israelis are beingconfronted by the wreckage of their own security policies.
And it was all so predictable.
How can it end?
Unless the United Nations stands and delivers, it will fail just as it has done so miserably in Bosnia and Darfur.
Middle East Crisis: Israel's Costs and Rewards - SPIEGEL ONLINE News
Israel's Costs and Rewards
A spiral of violence has stymied peace in the Middle East for decades. Now, as bombs are being dropped on Beirut, rockets fired at Haifa and tanks sent into Gaza, Israel and Muslim extremists have brought the region to the brink of all out war. And the Israelis are beingconfronted by the wreckage of their own security policies.
And it was all so predictable.
How can it end?
Unless the United Nations stands and delivers, it will fail just as it has done so miserably in Bosnia and Darfur.
Middle East Crisis: Israel's Costs and Rewards - SPIEGEL ONLINE News
14.7.06
Dumb America? You cannot be serious
FT.com
More than four decades ago, historian Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer prize for his seminal study of anti-intellectualism in American life. Troubled by a political culture in which Adlai Stevenson was successfully taunted as an "egghead" in the 1952 presidential race by Richard Nixon, Hofstadter looked into America's history and discovered "our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity".
As early as 1642, the Puritan John Cotton warned: "the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan you bee." Two centuries later, reflecting on the politics of the Indiana frontier, Baynard R Hall observed: "We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one . . . since smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled."
In the era of an unintellectual and famously inarticulate US president, Hofstadter's thesis has fresh resonance, particularly outside the US. For a world threatened by the unilateralist inclinations of the globe's sole superpower, it can be comforting to imagine that all that might is wielded by vulgar rubes who, for all their omnipotence, must subsist on a wretched diet of fast food and faster pop culture.
But any European snobs travelling to America this summer, please beware. For alongside its tradition of anti-intellectualism, Americaalso boasts a long-standing streak of earnestness. De Tocqueville called it "gravity" and observed that, in contrast to the "tumultuous and boisterous gaiety" of leisurely pursuits in aristocratic societies, the democratic Americans "prefer those more serious and silent amusements which are like business".
Based on my own highly unrepresentative and personal experience of the past few months, I can report that America's serious side is alive, well and at a dinner party near me. In London, dinner party guests can expect good wine, variable food and tumultuous and boisterous banter about mortgages, schools and, if they are lucky, as the evening wears on, increasingly lewd gossip.
But in New York dinner parties aren't just like business - they are business. A good hostess distributes biographies of her guests in advance - and a reading list. That is because at the best tables in town, the evening is about serious discussion of serious issues.
At the Park Avenue home of a publishing executive, when the three small tables of guests finished their main course the hostess introduced everyone present with the fluency of a talk-show anchor and then kicked off a 45-minute group discussion of Africa, based on a Council on Foreign Relations report and focusing mainly on Darfur and economic development. At the Upper East Side townhouse of a hedge fund pioneer, we started talking with the first course. The subjects were US global competitiveness, public schools and lower-income savings rates, and only students - sorry, guests! - who had read three policy papers were likely to keep up with the debate. Russian democracy was the theme at the Central Park pad of a legendary financier and philanthropist; Chinese economic development at a lawyer's place near the East River. My favourite was the evening devoted to brainstorming ways of raising the - collectively agreed to be lamentably lower than Europe's - level of public discourse in America.
The evenings end promptly - it is generally quite easy to be home by 10:30 - and while wine is served, only the foreign hacks seem to drink much. It is all done in a spirit I think de Tocqueville would recognise. "I thought that the English constituted the most serious nation on the face of the earth," he observed. "But I have since seen the Americans and have changed my mind."
It may sound grim, but to my mind, what makes this modern-day, American gravity rather charming is that, perhaps thanks to a consciousness of the rival anti-intellectual national current, it is utterly unpretentious. These are conversations where statistics trump sound-bites; facts are prized over flair. One evening, a European investment banker, speaking beautifully with a slight accent, began to illustrate a point with a quote from Thomas Jefferson. Sensing his faux pas in mid-flow, he hastened to explain that he wasn't trying to parade his own learning, just that he happened to be reading a Jefferson biography at the moment.
Park Avenue is admittedly quite a long way from Main Street, but the high seriousness of the east coast establishment does have a few echoes in the popular culture at the moment. The country's arch-egghead, Al Gore, is enjoying a rare moment of popular acclaim, making the cover of Vanity Fair and packing cinemas with his drippingly earnest environmental documentary. And many of nation's favourite celebrities - from George Clooney to Angelina Jolie - are going to great lengths to work on, and associate themselves with, serious issues.
This is the face of America which so enchants some of Europe's own nerdish Americanophiles, such as UK chancellor Gordon Brown. But Americans themselves don't generally see their own society as being particularly cerebral or serious. More than two centuries after the American Revolution, genuflection before the altar of European culture is still routine, as in a recent book review in the Mother Jones magazine which praised the British authors for their "dry wit, which seems the birthright of every Oxford graduate".
The rising economies of India and China, with their perceived iron work ethics and scientific prowess, provoke an even more profound sense of inferiority. The governor of a mid-western state with whom I shared a Washington panel a few weeks ago spoke with some awe of the mathematical and linguistic gifts of teenagers he had recently met at a Chinese middle school. Over dinner in a New York club, a private wealth manager unfavourably contrasted his own, indolent children with the young girl who gave him a tour of Beijing for free on a recent Saturday afternoon, as a way to practise her English.
Geekishness, it seems, has been an important part of America's greatness for some time. That may be why Asia's emerging nerds feel like such a threat. But, at least on the evidence of the country's dining rooms, the eggheads are not yet vanquished.
More than four decades ago, historian Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer prize for his seminal study of anti-intellectualism in American life. Troubled by a political culture in which Adlai Stevenson was successfully taunted as an "egghead" in the 1952 presidential race by Richard Nixon, Hofstadter looked into America's history and discovered "our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity".
As early as 1642, the Puritan John Cotton warned: "the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan you bee." Two centuries later, reflecting on the politics of the Indiana frontier, Baynard R Hall observed: "We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one . . . since smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled."
In the era of an unintellectual and famously inarticulate US president, Hofstadter's thesis has fresh resonance, particularly outside the US. For a world threatened by the unilateralist inclinations of the globe's sole superpower, it can be comforting to imagine that all that might is wielded by vulgar rubes who, for all their omnipotence, must subsist on a wretched diet of fast food and faster pop culture.
But any European snobs travelling to America this summer, please beware. For alongside its tradition of anti-intellectualism, Americaalso boasts a long-standing streak of earnestness. De Tocqueville called it "gravity" and observed that, in contrast to the "tumultuous and boisterous gaiety" of leisurely pursuits in aristocratic societies, the democratic Americans "prefer those more serious and silent amusements which are like business".
Based on my own highly unrepresentative and personal experience of the past few months, I can report that America's serious side is alive, well and at a dinner party near me. In London, dinner party guests can expect good wine, variable food and tumultuous and boisterous banter about mortgages, schools and, if they are lucky, as the evening wears on, increasingly lewd gossip.
But in New York dinner parties aren't just like business - they are business. A good hostess distributes biographies of her guests in advance - and a reading list. That is because at the best tables in town, the evening is about serious discussion of serious issues.
At the Park Avenue home of a publishing executive, when the three small tables of guests finished their main course the hostess introduced everyone present with the fluency of a talk-show anchor and then kicked off a 45-minute group discussion of Africa, based on a Council on Foreign Relations report and focusing mainly on Darfur and economic development. At the Upper East Side townhouse of a hedge fund pioneer, we started talking with the first course. The subjects were US global competitiveness, public schools and lower-income savings rates, and only students - sorry, guests! - who had read three policy papers were likely to keep up with the debate. Russian democracy was the theme at the Central Park pad of a legendary financier and philanthropist; Chinese economic development at a lawyer's place near the East River. My favourite was the evening devoted to brainstorming ways of raising the - collectively agreed to be lamentably lower than Europe's - level of public discourse in America.
The evenings end promptly - it is generally quite easy to be home by 10:30 - and while wine is served, only the foreign hacks seem to drink much. It is all done in a spirit I think de Tocqueville would recognise. "I thought that the English constituted the most serious nation on the face of the earth," he observed. "But I have since seen the Americans and have changed my mind."
It may sound grim, but to my mind, what makes this modern-day, American gravity rather charming is that, perhaps thanks to a consciousness of the rival anti-intellectual national current, it is utterly unpretentious. These are conversations where statistics trump sound-bites; facts are prized over flair. One evening, a European investment banker, speaking beautifully with a slight accent, began to illustrate a point with a quote from Thomas Jefferson. Sensing his faux pas in mid-flow, he hastened to explain that he wasn't trying to parade his own learning, just that he happened to be reading a Jefferson biography at the moment.
Park Avenue is admittedly quite a long way from Main Street, but the high seriousness of the east coast establishment does have a few echoes in the popular culture at the moment. The country's arch-egghead, Al Gore, is enjoying a rare moment of popular acclaim, making the cover of Vanity Fair and packing cinemas with his drippingly earnest environmental documentary. And many of nation's favourite celebrities - from George Clooney to Angelina Jolie - are going to great lengths to work on, and associate themselves with, serious issues.
This is the face of America which so enchants some of Europe's own nerdish Americanophiles, such as UK chancellor Gordon Brown. But Americans themselves don't generally see their own society as being particularly cerebral or serious. More than two centuries after the American Revolution, genuflection before the altar of European culture is still routine, as in a recent book review in the Mother Jones magazine which praised the British authors for their "dry wit, which seems the birthright of every Oxford graduate".
The rising economies of India and China, with their perceived iron work ethics and scientific prowess, provoke an even more profound sense of inferiority. The governor of a mid-western state with whom I shared a Washington panel a few weeks ago spoke with some awe of the mathematical and linguistic gifts of teenagers he had recently met at a Chinese middle school. Over dinner in a New York club, a private wealth manager unfavourably contrasted his own, indolent children with the young girl who gave him a tour of Beijing for free on a recent Saturday afternoon, as a way to practise her English.
Geekishness, it seems, has been an important part of America's greatness for some time. That may be why Asia's emerging nerds feel like such a threat. But, at least on the evidence of the country's dining rooms, the eggheads are not yet vanquished.
New Klimt in Town
A lot of lipstick, Mr. Lauder -- a lot of lipstick...
GUSTAV KLIMT’S 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, acquired last month by the billionaire collector Ronald S. Lauder, reportedly for $135 million, is now aptly installed like a trophy head above the mantelpiece in Mr. Lauder’s Neue Galerie for German and Austrian art, on the Upper East Side. Jon Stewart was joking on “The Daily Show” the other night about what that little green patch in the corner of the picture must be worth. You can’t buy publicity like that.
Well, maybe Mr. Lauder could. The portrait cost him the equivalent of the combined gross domestic products of Kiribati and São Tomé and Principe.
It’s a large, hallucinatory square of spectacular gold filigree. Adele looks almost as if she has inserted her head into one of those carnival cutouts, her thin face partly cast in shadow, obscured by the glare. Her lips are parted, eyelids heavy, cheeks pink. The eyes are two big, brown almonds. The overstuffed headrest of her chair makes a halo of beetle-wing delicacy. Monogrammed, her gown undulates with gently raised letters.
And that green patch Mr. Stewart likes so much is a glimpse of emerald floor, thrusting the picture into depth. The coup de grâce is a spider web of hands, a classic Klimt touch of decadence, clasped so that one wrist bends at a rakish right angle.
She’s half queen, half Vegas showgirl. The perfect New Yorker.
Welcome to town, Adele.
She temporarily hangs with four other Klimts owned by the Bloch-Bauer heirs, from whom the portrait was bought. They’re bridesmaids in lime-green dresses, supporting players in a passing Klimt show from the family’s collection. After they depart on Sept. 18, Adele will stick around, the new marquee attraction for Mr. Lauder’s luxe museum, which now, thanks to her, will surely jump high up on the list of New York’s must-see sites — a mixed blessing for those who have known it as a sleeper.
It would be churlish of art lovers in the city not to thank Mr. Lauder for the portrait that for decades was a Viennese civic symbol. Its passage, there to here, is quite a saga. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Jewish industrialist, commissioned Klimt to paint his wife, twice. Klimt obliged, so the story goes, by making her his mistress. Public-spirited, she willed her art to Austria. Then she died of meningitis, at 43, in 1925.
Ferdinand had to flee the Nazis 13 years later. They seized the family’s paintings; the family castle in Bohemia went to Reinhard Heydrich, the murderer of Wannsee; the family home in Vienna went to the Austrian national railway, which shipped Jews to the camps; and the diamond choker that Adele is wearing in the portrait went to Hermann Goering for his wife. Hitler apparently balked at acquiring the family porcelain. Too expensive, he said.
And then, for more than 60 years, the Austrian government refused to return the paintings to the family, although Ferdinand had redone Adele’s will. Led by his niece, Maria Altmann, now 90 and living in Los Angeles, the Bloch-Bauer heirs finally won a court battle in January.
In a nod to the city where she settled (her lawyer, by the way, is the grandson of another exile in Hollywood, Arnold Schoenberg), Mrs. Altmann lent the pictures to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April. Meanwhile, Mr. Lauder was negotiating the purchase of Adele, and arranging for this show to stop here.
It includes the second Adele, painted in 1912. No longer gold and Byzantine with Egyptian flourishes, instead flowery, sketchier and brightly colored, like a Japanese print, she wears a halo made out of the brim of a huge black hat. Her dress is high-collared, not off the shoulder, her body face-forward and erect, a slender, sinuous Coke bottle shape, more chaste than carnal. This older Adele gazes at some spot just over our heads — she’s still regal but less Vegas. More Aubrey Beardsley via Edith Wharton.
The other Bloch-Bauer pictures are landscapes; the earliest one, from 1903, of a birch forest, is exquisite: an archetypal Klimt mix of uncanny naturalism and geometric abstraction. Its forest floor makes a mosaic of Pointillist dots, broken up by irregular vertical stripes of perfectly real trees receding into idyllic space. For Klimt, bodies were erotic, nervous subjects, ripe for pornography; landscapes were Edenic.
The Bloch-Bauers also acquired a picture he painted of an apple tree and an unfinished jigsaw-puzzle view of houses on the shore of the Attersee, where he spent summer vacations. Neither is great. But like the two Adele portraits, they raise the question whether, had he not died at 55, in 1918, Klimt would have ended up a pure abstractionist like Mondrian.
The four pictures are on the market, Mrs. Altmann has said. She and her relatives are cashing in, which is their right. They offered the Austrian government a chance to buy the whole collection for about the money that Mr. Lauder reportedly spent on Adele.
The Austrians balked. Too expensive, they said.
When the Metropolitan spent $5.5 million on Velazquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja in 1970, it was a scandal; now it seems cheap for one of the great paintings in the country. The sums that places like the Museum of Modern Art squander on mediocre buildings, which become obsolete the moment they open, are scandalous.
The art market operates according to its own logic, which may have nothing to do with the quality of the art. Value is not price — whether the issue is a Klimt, or a ballplayer, or a chief executive paid millions of dollars, who runs his company into the ground.
But Oscar Wilde had it right about cynics, price and value. It’s only natural to play the skeptic when the art world is a circus of profligacy, drunk with cash, and when dimwitted speculators make headlines, wasting fortunes on bad art. Who knows what the most money paid in private for a painting really is: maybe $135 million. For that amount, assuming it is what Mr. Lauder paid, his portrait of Adele, a hedonistic masterpiece, will be talked about in terms of how many lives might have been saved or how many lifted from poverty for this sum.
It’s inevitable. But ludicrous. The Met spent more than $45 million two years ago for a tiny Duccio “Madonna and Child” whose modesty seems its most endearing virtue. The tipping point between endearing and hedonistic is evidently somewhere around $100 million.
As for the border separating public interest from private enterprise, it has never been fixed. The Neue Galerie is Christie’s annex now, exhibiting paintings for sale ($15 general admission, no children under 12 allowed), whose display is also a public service.
Someday Adele will be seen for just what she is: beautiful, a gift to the city. And $135 million may even come to look like a bargain.
GUSTAV KLIMT’S 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, acquired last month by the billionaire collector Ronald S. Lauder, reportedly for $135 million, is now aptly installed like a trophy head above the mantelpiece in Mr. Lauder’s Neue Galerie for German and Austrian art, on the Upper East Side. Jon Stewart was joking on “The Daily Show” the other night about what that little green patch in the corner of the picture must be worth. You can’t buy publicity like that.
Well, maybe Mr. Lauder could. The portrait cost him the equivalent of the combined gross domestic products of Kiribati and São Tomé and Principe.
It’s a large, hallucinatory square of spectacular gold filigree. Adele looks almost as if she has inserted her head into one of those carnival cutouts, her thin face partly cast in shadow, obscured by the glare. Her lips are parted, eyelids heavy, cheeks pink. The eyes are two big, brown almonds. The overstuffed headrest of her chair makes a halo of beetle-wing delicacy. Monogrammed, her gown undulates with gently raised letters.
And that green patch Mr. Stewart likes so much is a glimpse of emerald floor, thrusting the picture into depth. The coup de grâce is a spider web of hands, a classic Klimt touch of decadence, clasped so that one wrist bends at a rakish right angle.
She’s half queen, half Vegas showgirl. The perfect New Yorker.
Welcome to town, Adele.
She temporarily hangs with four other Klimts owned by the Bloch-Bauer heirs, from whom the portrait was bought. They’re bridesmaids in lime-green dresses, supporting players in a passing Klimt show from the family’s collection. After they depart on Sept. 18, Adele will stick around, the new marquee attraction for Mr. Lauder’s luxe museum, which now, thanks to her, will surely jump high up on the list of New York’s must-see sites — a mixed blessing for those who have known it as a sleeper.
It would be churlish of art lovers in the city not to thank Mr. Lauder for the portrait that for decades was a Viennese civic symbol. Its passage, there to here, is quite a saga. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Jewish industrialist, commissioned Klimt to paint his wife, twice. Klimt obliged, so the story goes, by making her his mistress. Public-spirited, she willed her art to Austria. Then she died of meningitis, at 43, in 1925.
Ferdinand had to flee the Nazis 13 years later. They seized the family’s paintings; the family castle in Bohemia went to Reinhard Heydrich, the murderer of Wannsee; the family home in Vienna went to the Austrian national railway, which shipped Jews to the camps; and the diamond choker that Adele is wearing in the portrait went to Hermann Goering for his wife. Hitler apparently balked at acquiring the family porcelain. Too expensive, he said.
And then, for more than 60 years, the Austrian government refused to return the paintings to the family, although Ferdinand had redone Adele’s will. Led by his niece, Maria Altmann, now 90 and living in Los Angeles, the Bloch-Bauer heirs finally won a court battle in January.
In a nod to the city where she settled (her lawyer, by the way, is the grandson of another exile in Hollywood, Arnold Schoenberg), Mrs. Altmann lent the pictures to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April. Meanwhile, Mr. Lauder was negotiating the purchase of Adele, and arranging for this show to stop here.
It includes the second Adele, painted in 1912. No longer gold and Byzantine with Egyptian flourishes, instead flowery, sketchier and brightly colored, like a Japanese print, she wears a halo made out of the brim of a huge black hat. Her dress is high-collared, not off the shoulder, her body face-forward and erect, a slender, sinuous Coke bottle shape, more chaste than carnal. This older Adele gazes at some spot just over our heads — she’s still regal but less Vegas. More Aubrey Beardsley via Edith Wharton.
The other Bloch-Bauer pictures are landscapes; the earliest one, from 1903, of a birch forest, is exquisite: an archetypal Klimt mix of uncanny naturalism and geometric abstraction. Its forest floor makes a mosaic of Pointillist dots, broken up by irregular vertical stripes of perfectly real trees receding into idyllic space. For Klimt, bodies were erotic, nervous subjects, ripe for pornography; landscapes were Edenic.
The Bloch-Bauers also acquired a picture he painted of an apple tree and an unfinished jigsaw-puzzle view of houses on the shore of the Attersee, where he spent summer vacations. Neither is great. But like the two Adele portraits, they raise the question whether, had he not died at 55, in 1918, Klimt would have ended up a pure abstractionist like Mondrian.
The four pictures are on the market, Mrs. Altmann has said. She and her relatives are cashing in, which is their right. They offered the Austrian government a chance to buy the whole collection for about the money that Mr. Lauder reportedly spent on Adele.
The Austrians balked. Too expensive, they said.
When the Metropolitan spent $5.5 million on Velazquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja in 1970, it was a scandal; now it seems cheap for one of the great paintings in the country. The sums that places like the Museum of Modern Art squander on mediocre buildings, which become obsolete the moment they open, are scandalous.
The art market operates according to its own logic, which may have nothing to do with the quality of the art. Value is not price — whether the issue is a Klimt, or a ballplayer, or a chief executive paid millions of dollars, who runs his company into the ground.
But Oscar Wilde had it right about cynics, price and value. It’s only natural to play the skeptic when the art world is a circus of profligacy, drunk with cash, and when dimwitted speculators make headlines, wasting fortunes on bad art. Who knows what the most money paid in private for a painting really is: maybe $135 million. For that amount, assuming it is what Mr. Lauder paid, his portrait of Adele, a hedonistic masterpiece, will be talked about in terms of how many lives might have been saved or how many lifted from poverty for this sum.
It’s inevitable. But ludicrous. The Met spent more than $45 million two years ago for a tiny Duccio “Madonna and Child” whose modesty seems its most endearing virtue. The tipping point between endearing and hedonistic is evidently somewhere around $100 million.
As for the border separating public interest from private enterprise, it has never been fixed. The Neue Galerie is Christie’s annex now, exhibiting paintings for sale ($15 general admission, no children under 12 allowed), whose display is also a public service.
Someday Adele will be seen for just what she is: beautiful, a gift to the city. And $135 million may even come to look like a bargain.
Quincy Jones
Mr. Jones, Take a bow.
http://arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/07/13/bmquincy13.xml
Here is a true musician's musician. Just take a look at his C.V. for an impressive and truly incredible history in contemporary music. Right up there with Allen Toussaint.
13.7.06
CHIRAC
Bad news on Le Quatorze.
The man who deserves a red card.
AS JACQUES CHIRAC opens the Elysée Palace on July 14th, for his annual garden party, it is surely clear that this Bastille Day will be his last as president. Although the 73-year-old veteran has said he will decide whether to run again for next spring's presidential election only early in 2007, it now looks all but impossible. His government is paralysed, his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, is unloved, and the French have had enough.
A sense of fin de règne was confirmed last weekend on the football pitch. Zinédine Zidane, the captain of the French team, was sent off during the World Cup final, which Italy won on a penalty shoot-out. It was a painfully fitting metaphor for the country's general malaise. The victorious multi-ethnic French champions of 1998 appeared, in those heady days of economic growth and new dynamism, to embody a fresh national spirit. This time, hopes of recapturing that glory were vested in Mr Zidane, the working-class son of Algerian immigrants. De Gaulle-like, he came out of retirement to lead the team. In the end, provoked by an insult, he got a red card for head-butting an Italian player, leaving the field in disgrace and the French without their promised saviour.
A similar yearning for somebody to rescue France from its melancholy hangs in the political air. After 11 years in the presidency, Mr Chirac has come to embody the country's political inability to renew itself. In politics for 41 years, he is the only serving politician who has belonged to governments under every fifth-republic president since de Gaulle. His popularity has collapsed. According to TNS Sofrès, a pollster, Mr Chirac is now the most unpopular French president since its polling began in 1978. Libération put it well this week: “For a month, France has been dreaming with Zidane. This morning, it wakes up to Chirac.”
It is a measure of their despondency that the French have begun to write the president's political obituary. Franz-Olivier Giesbert's trenchant account of Mr Chirac's past 20 years, “La Tragédie du Président”, has been a bestseller for months. The author is merciless: “By cowardice as much as by blindness, he persists in pursuing policies which, for over 20 years, have been leading the country to ruin.” A satirical documentary, “Dans la Peau de Jacques Chirac”, is showing in cinemas. Le Monde recently called on the president to resign.
Certainly, the record of the past decade has been meagre. Mr Chirac was elected in 1995 on promises to cut taxes, to curb unemployment and to “mend the social fracture”. Yet, under his watch, France has slipped out of the world's top five economies. Its public debt has swollen from 55% of GDP to 66%; unemployment has never dropped below 8%. At the start of Mr Chirac's reign in 1995, France was paralysed by strikes against reforms, and governed by an imperious, unloved prime minister, Alain Juppé. Now, towards its end, France has seen 1m-3m people on the streets in a student-led protest against labour-market reforms, and is governed by the imperious, unloved Mr de Villepin. A president who promoted the construction of a strong Europe, to counter-balance America in a multi-polar world, failed to persuade his own people to vote for its new constitution in last year's referendum.
The disappointment is bitter. Some had hoped that the man who, as prime minister in the 1980s, launched privatisation and abolished the wealth tax, would rediscover his liberalising zeal. “The French machine no longer works,” he declared in his 1995 election campaign. Yet, after a bold but failed attempt that year, Mr Chirac gave up on anything more ambitious than little réformettes, such as those of pensions and health. Income-tax cuts have fallen far short of his pledges. These days, indeed, Mr Chirac blends leftish anti-liberalism with an ardent defence of France's traditional “social model” against those, including his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who argue that after 20 years of stagnation it might need reinventing.
As for mending the social fracture, Mr Chirac did his best this week to lean once more on the multiracial French football team as a lesson in integration. “France”, he told the players, whom he hosted for lunch, “is stronger when it is brought together in its diversity.” Mr Chirac has, commendably, made a point of trying to stamp out racism and anti-Semitism on his watch. He was the first president to accept the official responsibility of the French state for the deportation of Jews from Vichy France during the occupation. This week, he honoured the 100th anniversary of the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer wrongly condemned for treason. And he has long supported Turkey's entry into the European Union, against the wishes of voters as well as most of his party.
Yet the riots that swept through France's banlieues last autumn punctured any lingering illusions that the multi-ethnic country was truly at ease with itself—or that integration on the football field could be easily replicated off it. This is a country, after all, where the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the presidential run-off in 2002. The National Front leader remains a threat. During the World Cup, he declared that “France does not totally recognise itself” in its mostly-black team. Yet voter support has proved steady. If both Mr Chirac and Mr Sarkozy stood for the right in the first round next year, said a Paris-Match poll last week, Mr Chirac would score just 8%—and Mr Le Pen 12%.
The man who deserves a red card.
AS JACQUES CHIRAC opens the Elysée Palace on July 14th, for his annual garden party, it is surely clear that this Bastille Day will be his last as president. Although the 73-year-old veteran has said he will decide whether to run again for next spring's presidential election only early in 2007, it now looks all but impossible. His government is paralysed, his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, is unloved, and the French have had enough.
A sense of fin de règne was confirmed last weekend on the football pitch. Zinédine Zidane, the captain of the French team, was sent off during the World Cup final, which Italy won on a penalty shoot-out. It was a painfully fitting metaphor for the country's general malaise. The victorious multi-ethnic French champions of 1998 appeared, in those heady days of economic growth and new dynamism, to embody a fresh national spirit. This time, hopes of recapturing that glory were vested in Mr Zidane, the working-class son of Algerian immigrants. De Gaulle-like, he came out of retirement to lead the team. In the end, provoked by an insult, he got a red card for head-butting an Italian player, leaving the field in disgrace and the French without their promised saviour.
A similar yearning for somebody to rescue France from its melancholy hangs in the political air. After 11 years in the presidency, Mr Chirac has come to embody the country's political inability to renew itself. In politics for 41 years, he is the only serving politician who has belonged to governments under every fifth-republic president since de Gaulle. His popularity has collapsed. According to TNS Sofrès, a pollster, Mr Chirac is now the most unpopular French president since its polling began in 1978. Libération put it well this week: “For a month, France has been dreaming with Zidane. This morning, it wakes up to Chirac.”
It is a measure of their despondency that the French have begun to write the president's political obituary. Franz-Olivier Giesbert's trenchant account of Mr Chirac's past 20 years, “La Tragédie du Président”, has been a bestseller for months. The author is merciless: “By cowardice as much as by blindness, he persists in pursuing policies which, for over 20 years, have been leading the country to ruin.” A satirical documentary, “Dans la Peau de Jacques Chirac”, is showing in cinemas. Le Monde recently called on the president to resign.
Certainly, the record of the past decade has been meagre. Mr Chirac was elected in 1995 on promises to cut taxes, to curb unemployment and to “mend the social fracture”. Yet, under his watch, France has slipped out of the world's top five economies. Its public debt has swollen from 55% of GDP to 66%; unemployment has never dropped below 8%. At the start of Mr Chirac's reign in 1995, France was paralysed by strikes against reforms, and governed by an imperious, unloved prime minister, Alain Juppé. Now, towards its end, France has seen 1m-3m people on the streets in a student-led protest against labour-market reforms, and is governed by the imperious, unloved Mr de Villepin. A president who promoted the construction of a strong Europe, to counter-balance America in a multi-polar world, failed to persuade his own people to vote for its new constitution in last year's referendum.
The disappointment is bitter. Some had hoped that the man who, as prime minister in the 1980s, launched privatisation and abolished the wealth tax, would rediscover his liberalising zeal. “The French machine no longer works,” he declared in his 1995 election campaign. Yet, after a bold but failed attempt that year, Mr Chirac gave up on anything more ambitious than little réformettes, such as those of pensions and health. Income-tax cuts have fallen far short of his pledges. These days, indeed, Mr Chirac blends leftish anti-liberalism with an ardent defence of France's traditional “social model” against those, including his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who argue that after 20 years of stagnation it might need reinventing.
As for mending the social fracture, Mr Chirac did his best this week to lean once more on the multiracial French football team as a lesson in integration. “France”, he told the players, whom he hosted for lunch, “is stronger when it is brought together in its diversity.” Mr Chirac has, commendably, made a point of trying to stamp out racism and anti-Semitism on his watch. He was the first president to accept the official responsibility of the French state for the deportation of Jews from Vichy France during the occupation. This week, he honoured the 100th anniversary of the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer wrongly condemned for treason. And he has long supported Turkey's entry into the European Union, against the wishes of voters as well as most of his party.
Yet the riots that swept through France's banlieues last autumn punctured any lingering illusions that the multi-ethnic country was truly at ease with itself—or that integration on the football field could be easily replicated off it. This is a country, after all, where the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the presidential run-off in 2002. The National Front leader remains a threat. During the World Cup, he declared that “France does not totally recognise itself” in its mostly-black team. Yet voter support has proved steady. If both Mr Chirac and Mr Sarkozy stood for the right in the first round next year, said a Paris-Match poll last week, Mr Chirac would score just 8%—and Mr Le Pen 12%.
GEORGE SOROS on BILL GATES
The Spectator.co.uk
‘Bill Gates is just a figurehead. I am actively engaged’
In the bookcase in George Soros’s South Kensington drawing-room, neatly lined up beside works on Kant, Adam Smith and Karl Popper, are multiple copies of Open Society, written by one of today’s aspiring philosophers: Soros himself. The literary line-up is testament to the Hungarian–American billionaire’s search for something that money can’t buy — acceptance at the same table as these great thinkers. But his cash has paid for a place on the same shelf, at least in his own home. And last week Soros was in London to talk about his latest book, The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror (Weidenfeld).
Despite giving away $5 billion of his personal fortune to propagate his beliefs, Soros will always be remembered for the $1 billion he made from the crisis in which sterling was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. He became known as ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’ and the tag has overshadowed everything he has done since. ‘I’m very happy to have had that billion dollars,’ he says, ‘and it hasn’t done Europe or Britain any damage. I’m actually very pleased with that particular incident.’
The financier turned philanthropist, now 75, began his career as a door-to-door salesman in Wales, progressed to the financial markets, and with his legendary Quantum Fund amassed a fortune for himself and his investors: a £1,000 stake in it 30 years ago would now be worth about £4 million. He is no longer actively involved with the fund, which is run by his two sons. But he is trying to change the course of history again — as a promoter of ideas. He has given up making money to concentrate on funding a network of foundations promoting democracy and open societies around the world. In the past his foundations encouraged democracy in Eastern bloc countries, but he will announce plans in the next few weeks to launch an Open Society Foundation in Western Europe — because he thinks the EU is failing.
He also has some fixed views on how philanthropy should be conducted. He thinks Microsoft’s Bill Gates is just a figurehead at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. ‘I am actively engaged in setting up my network of foundations,’ says Soros. ‘It is not comparable to Gates, who has engaged professionals to run his foundation. He’s a figurehead advocating the policies, which is different to what I do. While I do have great respect for the Gates Foundation — we work very closely together on some issues — I think I am more actively engaged in the management of my foundation. That’s what sets me apart. I manage the foundation with the same intensity as I used to manage my hedge fund.’
He is speaking on a glorious summer’s day from his house on one of London’s most exclusive squares. As you might expect from the world’s 71st richest man, it comes complete with a butler — who shows me through a hallway strewn with children’s trainers and tennis rackets, to a reception room with French windows opening on to communal gardens. The room is filled with an eclectic mix of objects, from tasteful period furniture to a modern aircraft-style reclining chair. Photographs of a grandchild wearing a bearskin hat sit next to a large plastic model of a pound coin — a souvenir, perhaps, of Soros’s part in freeing sterling from the ERM, just as his ‘open society’ work helped free the Czechs and Poles from the shackles of communism.
Soros spreads out on a sofa. I ask why he is not sitting in his airline recliner: he looks quizzical, scans the room and says, ‘I didn’t know I had it.’ With $7 billion in the bank, Soros is probably allowed to lose track of the odd asset, but when it comes to spending cash on his own foundations he does not miss a beat.
‘In a way it’s much harder to spend it in a socially responsible way than to earn it,’ he says, sweeping back his hair, which has turned more silver since we last met five years ago. ‘When you’re making money you have simple criteria, which is the bottom line. When you want to be socially responsible you affect different people in different ways, which is much harder to measure.’
His new book follows on from his attempt to pry George Bush out of the White House at the last election. It offers his views on the fatal flaws of the Bush administration, how it has lost direction in providing a beacon for good governance around the world. After 9/11, he says, ‘Bush exploited fear in American people. The Bush administration reinforced the threat posed by terrorists and declared war on terror, making it the centre piece of his policy — it is really exploitational.’
Is he worried that such trenchant anti-Bush views might get him sent to Guantanamo? ‘No,’ he says. ‘Actually my concern is that we don’t learn enough from this. I’m really very concerned about Europe’s role. The practical message for Europeans is that the world really needs a strong European Union with a mission which is different to America’s priorities.’
In part this is why Soros is about to announce an initiative to fund foundations to promote democracy in Western Europe. ‘The construction of the European Union has now missed a step,’ he says, sliding down the sofa until he is almost horizontal. ‘The political will moving the process forward has run out of steam. It is too unwieldy for the size of its membership, it is opaque and bureaucratic, and the democratic influence is too indirect, so that people feel alienated. For many years my foundation network has been active in the accession countries, and I believe that the time is right to extend our activities into the rest of the European Union.’ His first Western European foundation is likely to be set up in London or Paris.
Soros is himself a quintessential new European. The son of a Hungarian Jewish lawyer, he grew up in Budapest during the second world war and found fighting for survival exhilarating. ‘You can be either paralysed or stimulated,’ he says. He studied at the London School of Economics under Popper, whose work on the principles of open societies profoundly influenced him. After various menial jobs he went to the City to make his fortune and achieve that rare status of an investor whose words move markets. He still likes making predictions. ‘There is an impending global correction,’ he warns. ‘It will be prompted by higher interest rates. We are in a bear market ...but then I may be wrong.’
Another current Soros hobby-horse is the flotation of Rosneft: he accuses prospective investors in the Russian energy group, which made its debut on the stock market this week, of folly. ‘It will be a very risky investment,’ says Soros, tugging at an overgrown eyebrow. ‘Investors are buying into a company over which they have no control. Russia wants to use energy as a ruse for reasserting its dominance over Europe. The London Stock Exchange ought to be more discriminating in its listing of foreign companies.’
As Soros rights himself ready to get to his feet, I ask whether his legacy will be tainted by failing to overturn an insider dealing charge that was recently upheld by a French court. His response seems less motivated by vanity than by pragmatism; the charge, he says, is giving the Bush camp ammunition against his Open Society Foundations. ‘My enemies keep referring to me as a “convicted insider trader”.’ For this reason he is taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights. His words have moved markets for 20 years; now he wants them to move governments, and he doesn’t want his past to get in the way
‘Bill Gates is just a figurehead. I am actively engaged’
In the bookcase in George Soros’s South Kensington drawing-room, neatly lined up beside works on Kant, Adam Smith and Karl Popper, are multiple copies of Open Society, written by one of today’s aspiring philosophers: Soros himself. The literary line-up is testament to the Hungarian–American billionaire’s search for something that money can’t buy — acceptance at the same table as these great thinkers. But his cash has paid for a place on the same shelf, at least in his own home. And last week Soros was in London to talk about his latest book, The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror (Weidenfeld).
Despite giving away $5 billion of his personal fortune to propagate his beliefs, Soros will always be remembered for the $1 billion he made from the crisis in which sterling was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. He became known as ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’ and the tag has overshadowed everything he has done since. ‘I’m very happy to have had that billion dollars,’ he says, ‘and it hasn’t done Europe or Britain any damage. I’m actually very pleased with that particular incident.’
The financier turned philanthropist, now 75, began his career as a door-to-door salesman in Wales, progressed to the financial markets, and with his legendary Quantum Fund amassed a fortune for himself and his investors: a £1,000 stake in it 30 years ago would now be worth about £4 million. He is no longer actively involved with the fund, which is run by his two sons. But he is trying to change the course of history again — as a promoter of ideas. He has given up making money to concentrate on funding a network of foundations promoting democracy and open societies around the world. In the past his foundations encouraged democracy in Eastern bloc countries, but he will announce plans in the next few weeks to launch an Open Society Foundation in Western Europe — because he thinks the EU is failing.
He also has some fixed views on how philanthropy should be conducted. He thinks Microsoft’s Bill Gates is just a figurehead at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. ‘I am actively engaged in setting up my network of foundations,’ says Soros. ‘It is not comparable to Gates, who has engaged professionals to run his foundation. He’s a figurehead advocating the policies, which is different to what I do. While I do have great respect for the Gates Foundation — we work very closely together on some issues — I think I am more actively engaged in the management of my foundation. That’s what sets me apart. I manage the foundation with the same intensity as I used to manage my hedge fund.’
He is speaking on a glorious summer’s day from his house on one of London’s most exclusive squares. As you might expect from the world’s 71st richest man, it comes complete with a butler — who shows me through a hallway strewn with children’s trainers and tennis rackets, to a reception room with French windows opening on to communal gardens. The room is filled with an eclectic mix of objects, from tasteful period furniture to a modern aircraft-style reclining chair. Photographs of a grandchild wearing a bearskin hat sit next to a large plastic model of a pound coin — a souvenir, perhaps, of Soros’s part in freeing sterling from the ERM, just as his ‘open society’ work helped free the Czechs and Poles from the shackles of communism.
Soros spreads out on a sofa. I ask why he is not sitting in his airline recliner: he looks quizzical, scans the room and says, ‘I didn’t know I had it.’ With $7 billion in the bank, Soros is probably allowed to lose track of the odd asset, but when it comes to spending cash on his own foundations he does not miss a beat.
‘In a way it’s much harder to spend it in a socially responsible way than to earn it,’ he says, sweeping back his hair, which has turned more silver since we last met five years ago. ‘When you’re making money you have simple criteria, which is the bottom line. When you want to be socially responsible you affect different people in different ways, which is much harder to measure.’
His new book follows on from his attempt to pry George Bush out of the White House at the last election. It offers his views on the fatal flaws of the Bush administration, how it has lost direction in providing a beacon for good governance around the world. After 9/11, he says, ‘Bush exploited fear in American people. The Bush administration reinforced the threat posed by terrorists and declared war on terror, making it the centre piece of his policy — it is really exploitational.’
Is he worried that such trenchant anti-Bush views might get him sent to Guantanamo? ‘No,’ he says. ‘Actually my concern is that we don’t learn enough from this. I’m really very concerned about Europe’s role. The practical message for Europeans is that the world really needs a strong European Union with a mission which is different to America’s priorities.’
In part this is why Soros is about to announce an initiative to fund foundations to promote democracy in Western Europe. ‘The construction of the European Union has now missed a step,’ he says, sliding down the sofa until he is almost horizontal. ‘The political will moving the process forward has run out of steam. It is too unwieldy for the size of its membership, it is opaque and bureaucratic, and the democratic influence is too indirect, so that people feel alienated. For many years my foundation network has been active in the accession countries, and I believe that the time is right to extend our activities into the rest of the European Union.’ His first Western European foundation is likely to be set up in London or Paris.
Soros is himself a quintessential new European. The son of a Hungarian Jewish lawyer, he grew up in Budapest during the second world war and found fighting for survival exhilarating. ‘You can be either paralysed or stimulated,’ he says. He studied at the London School of Economics under Popper, whose work on the principles of open societies profoundly influenced him. After various menial jobs he went to the City to make his fortune and achieve that rare status of an investor whose words move markets. He still likes making predictions. ‘There is an impending global correction,’ he warns. ‘It will be prompted by higher interest rates. We are in a bear market ...but then I may be wrong.’
Another current Soros hobby-horse is the flotation of Rosneft: he accuses prospective investors in the Russian energy group, which made its debut on the stock market this week, of folly. ‘It will be a very risky investment,’ says Soros, tugging at an overgrown eyebrow. ‘Investors are buying into a company over which they have no control. Russia wants to use energy as a ruse for reasserting its dominance over Europe. The London Stock Exchange ought to be more discriminating in its listing of foreign companies.’
As Soros rights himself ready to get to his feet, I ask whether his legacy will be tainted by failing to overturn an insider dealing charge that was recently upheld by a French court. His response seems less motivated by vanity than by pragmatism; the charge, he says, is giving the Bush camp ammunition against his Open Society Foundations. ‘My enemies keep referring to me as a “convicted insider trader”.’ For this reason he is taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights. His words have moved markets for 20 years; now he wants them to move governments, and he doesn’t want his past to get in the way
STOPPARD/NUNN
Now this is going to be worth seeing.
Rock 'n' Roll
A New Play By Tom Stoppard
Directed by Trevor Nunn
TOM STOPPARD’s newest play, ROCK‘N’ROLL, spans the years from 1968 - 1990 from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock'n'roll band comes to symbolise resistance to the Communist regime - and of Cambridge, where the verities of love and death are shaping the lives of three generations in the family of a Marxist philosopher.
Rock 'n' Roll
A New Play By Tom Stoppard
Directed by Trevor Nunn
TOM STOPPARD’s newest play, ROCK‘N’ROLL, spans the years from 1968 - 1990 from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock'n'roll band comes to symbolise resistance to the Communist regime - and of Cambridge, where the verities of love and death are shaping the lives of three generations in the family of a Marxist philosopher.
MARCHONS! MARCHONS!
As we look to L'Institùte Français sur la Pont Neuf, it can be said that it has not been the best of years in the Hexagône. Immigrant unrest capped by Zizou's blunder. Nonetheless, La Fête Nationale always gives us pause to reflect on a world without the French. C'est incroyable. VIVE LA FRANCE!
BLUMENTHAL ON BUSH
Salon.com Swaggering to nowhere
President Bush was against diplomacy before he was for it. But with the collapse of U.S. foreign policy across the board, he has discarded talk of preemptive strikes and reluctantly claimed to have become a born-again realist. "And it's, kind of -- you know, it's kind of painful in a way for some to watch, because it takes a while to get people on the same page," he said at his July 7 press conference, adding, in an astonished tone, "Not everybody thinks the exact same way we think. Different words mean different things to different people."
Just two years ago, he appeared before the Republican Convention boasting of his "swagger, which in Texas is called walking." But in the face of the consequences of his failures, he has not adopted a new doctrine so much as swaggered into a corner. The cowboy's White House has become Fort Apache.
His policy is paralyzed toward North Korea, reduced to kowtowing to China in the forlorn hope it would implore the hermit kingdom to forswear developing nuclear weapons and firing test missiles. The Chinese, however, have declared they will veto any U.S.-initiated sanctions in the United Nations Security Council.
When Bush was president-elect, Bill Clinton's national security team informed him that a treaty with North Korea was essentially wrapped up. Incoming Secretary of State Colin Powell was enthusiastic. As president, Bush not only cut off diplomacy but also humiliated Powell and then South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung for seeking to continue the process associated with Clinton. In Bush's vacuum -- a series of empty threats -- North Korea predictably reacted with outrageous violations intended to capture U.S. attention. The U.S. negotiator, Charles "Jack" Pritchard, was constantly subverted by then Undersecretary of State John Bolton (Vice President Cheney's State Department mole). Quitting in 2003, Pritchard said, "I asked myself, 'What am I doing in government?'"
Bush sent a new negotiator to the six-party talks in 2004 but prohibited him from meaningful negotiation. Like clockwork, the North Koreans responded with extreme gestures, and Bush has answered that he will not speak to them directly. "By not talking with North Korea," Pritchard wrote last month in the Washington Post, "we are failing to address missiles, human rights, illegal activities, conventional forces, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and anything else that matters to the American people. Isn't it about time we actually tried to solve the problem rather than let it fester until we blow it up?"
On Israel's reoccupation of Gaza in response to Hamas' terrorism, Bush has regressed to embracing no policy, just as he did when he first entered office. In the light of Bush's failure to give Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas any tangible gains to show his electorate, Hamas' victory was foretold. Now the withdrawal of the United States from any peace process is yielding a predictable downward spiral of mutual recrimination in the region.
Similarly, less than a month after the celebrated Camp David sleepover of senior administration officials, ostensibly to bring new clarity to Iraq policy, Bush has returned to mouthing inane platitudes about "victory." The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, touted as a turning point, has proved to have had little impact. (Intelligence estimates put foreign fighters at between 4 and 10 percent of the insurgency.) Bush promises a military "defeat" of the enemy while ignoring his generals' admonition that a political solution is critical as Iraq descends into sectarian civil war.
What the president doesn't know and when he didn't know it remain pertinent. In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Bush met with three prominent Iraqi dissidents, who, in discussing scenarios of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, "talked about Sunnis and Shiites. It became apparent to them that the president was unfamiliar with these terms." Peter Galbraith, the former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and involved in Iraqi diplomacy as a Senate aide for decades, carefully sources this anecdote in his new book, "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End," in order to illustrate the "culture of arrogance" that imagined Iraq "was a blank slate on which the United States could impose its vision of a pluralistic democratic society."
But as the North Korea debacle shows, Bush's ruinous approach began before the Iraq invasion, indeed before Sept. 11. His latest policies, or pantomimes of policies, recall Gertrude Stein's description of Oakland, Calif.: "The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there is no there there."
President Bush was against diplomacy before he was for it. But with the collapse of U.S. foreign policy across the board, he has discarded talk of preemptive strikes and reluctantly claimed to have become a born-again realist. "And it's, kind of -- you know, it's kind of painful in a way for some to watch, because it takes a while to get people on the same page," he said at his July 7 press conference, adding, in an astonished tone, "Not everybody thinks the exact same way we think. Different words mean different things to different people."
Just two years ago, he appeared before the Republican Convention boasting of his "swagger, which in Texas is called walking." But in the face of the consequences of his failures, he has not adopted a new doctrine so much as swaggered into a corner. The cowboy's White House has become Fort Apache.
His policy is paralyzed toward North Korea, reduced to kowtowing to China in the forlorn hope it would implore the hermit kingdom to forswear developing nuclear weapons and firing test missiles. The Chinese, however, have declared they will veto any U.S.-initiated sanctions in the United Nations Security Council.
When Bush was president-elect, Bill Clinton's national security team informed him that a treaty with North Korea was essentially wrapped up. Incoming Secretary of State Colin Powell was enthusiastic. As president, Bush not only cut off diplomacy but also humiliated Powell and then South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung for seeking to continue the process associated with Clinton. In Bush's vacuum -- a series of empty threats -- North Korea predictably reacted with outrageous violations intended to capture U.S. attention. The U.S. negotiator, Charles "Jack" Pritchard, was constantly subverted by then Undersecretary of State John Bolton (Vice President Cheney's State Department mole). Quitting in 2003, Pritchard said, "I asked myself, 'What am I doing in government?'"
Bush sent a new negotiator to the six-party talks in 2004 but prohibited him from meaningful negotiation. Like clockwork, the North Koreans responded with extreme gestures, and Bush has answered that he will not speak to them directly. "By not talking with North Korea," Pritchard wrote last month in the Washington Post, "we are failing to address missiles, human rights, illegal activities, conventional forces, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and anything else that matters to the American people. Isn't it about time we actually tried to solve the problem rather than let it fester until we blow it up?"
On Israel's reoccupation of Gaza in response to Hamas' terrorism, Bush has regressed to embracing no policy, just as he did when he first entered office. In the light of Bush's failure to give Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas any tangible gains to show his electorate, Hamas' victory was foretold. Now the withdrawal of the United States from any peace process is yielding a predictable downward spiral of mutual recrimination in the region.
Similarly, less than a month after the celebrated Camp David sleepover of senior administration officials, ostensibly to bring new clarity to Iraq policy, Bush has returned to mouthing inane platitudes about "victory." The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, touted as a turning point, has proved to have had little impact. (Intelligence estimates put foreign fighters at between 4 and 10 percent of the insurgency.) Bush promises a military "defeat" of the enemy while ignoring his generals' admonition that a political solution is critical as Iraq descends into sectarian civil war.
What the president doesn't know and when he didn't know it remain pertinent. In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Bush met with three prominent Iraqi dissidents, who, in discussing scenarios of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, "talked about Sunnis and Shiites. It became apparent to them that the president was unfamiliar with these terms." Peter Galbraith, the former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and involved in Iraqi diplomacy as a Senate aide for decades, carefully sources this anecdote in his new book, "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End," in order to illustrate the "culture of arrogance" that imagined Iraq "was a blank slate on which the United States could impose its vision of a pluralistic democratic society."
But as the North Korea debacle shows, Bush's ruinous approach began before the Iraq invasion, indeed before Sept. 11. His latest policies, or pantomimes of policies, recall Gertrude Stein's description of Oakland, Calif.: "The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there is no there there."
12.7.06
Mr. KEILLOR (ON SUMMER)
The confrontational columnist Salon.com
Jul. 12, 2006 A summer night in paradise, supper in the backyard, and the neighbors' elderly cat who is on his last legs wanders over, smelling the salmon on our grill, walking as if his feet hurt. He's got the old-cat blues. He wakes up in the morning and everything tastes like turpentine; he feels like going down to the railroad line and letting the 4:19 pacify his troubled mind. My wife serves him a piece of salmon and he eats slowly, savoring the fish oil. He is 15 years old and this likely will be his last summer, and a fine one it is.
In Minnesota we look forward to these warm summer nights. That's what keeps us marching forward from February to June, the thought of eating supper outdoors in our shorts and bare feet. If this were Maui, where paradise is written into the contract, we would dread the thought of bliss interrupted, but here on the frozen tundra we accept July and August as our allotted ration of bliss. It's fabulous. We can't get over how wonderful it is. And then it's over.
It gives you a twinge to see an old cat on a paradise night who is about to croak. But I used up most of my anguish over mortality by the time I was 25. I was a poet, like everybody else, and wrote extensively about death and despair back then and pretty much wore out the subject. We poets went to parties where people chain-smoked and got bombed and listened to Janis Joplin screeching from the hi-fi speakers loud enough to cause cardiac arrest. Nobody imagined that Janis might someday come to Jesus and take up a life of regular exercise and good nutrition. She was determined to crash and burn. We, as it turned out, were not, but we were full of morbid gloom, a luxury of youth, trying to imagine death, the cessation of being, the emptiness of the world without us, the sliver of moon in the sky, the cry of the hoot owl, the railroad tracks stretching away to the west, et cetera.
Now my thoughts about death are mundane ones. I hope that when the cat croaks, he does it out in the open, or at least in the bushes, and doesn't try to crawl up under a porch where someone will have to reach in and extract him. People die in crevices in New York, brilliant loners who go to the city to find their niche only to get hooked on happy dust and wind up in a tiny apartment crammed with junk, and one dark day the neighbors detect an evil smell and call the cops and it's him, the tall gloomy man with the glasses, dead as a doornail. Keep in touch, tall gloomy men. Don't go in the cave. Leave that cocaine alone. Get outdoors more. Take long walks.
I've arrived at that delicate point in life where it gives me a twinge when the lady inside my computer says, "You are now disconnected." Or when the flight attendant refers to our "final destination" and says, "We will be on the ground shortly." Is that a nice way to talk? It suggests lying prostrate as uniformed personnel tear open your shirt and put the paddles on your chest. I don't want to be on the ground, I want to walk up the jetway and climb into a taxi and go to the hotel. Saunter into the bar, order a glass of gin neat with a twist of barbed wire, light up a stogie, look for the biggest guys in the room, walk over, blow smoke in their faces and say, "Which one of you fairies thinks he can take a 63-year-old newspaper columnist?"
"Oh," you say, "is that what you meant when you talked about living life boldly and lighting a candle in the darkness and daring to make a difference in your commencement speech at St. Raymond's lo these many years ago, when the president finally had to stand up and tap you on the shoulder and suggest that you wind it up?" Yes, of course, and just for that, you little twerp, I'm going to stop right now and not say what I was going to say about daring to be selfish and to enjoy your life without feeling obligated to share your hard-earned wisdom with your needy friends. Not another word from me. You figure it out for yourself.
Jul. 12, 2006 A summer night in paradise, supper in the backyard, and the neighbors' elderly cat who is on his last legs wanders over, smelling the salmon on our grill, walking as if his feet hurt. He's got the old-cat blues. He wakes up in the morning and everything tastes like turpentine; he feels like going down to the railroad line and letting the 4:19 pacify his troubled mind. My wife serves him a piece of salmon and he eats slowly, savoring the fish oil. He is 15 years old and this likely will be his last summer, and a fine one it is.
In Minnesota we look forward to these warm summer nights. That's what keeps us marching forward from February to June, the thought of eating supper outdoors in our shorts and bare feet. If this were Maui, where paradise is written into the contract, we would dread the thought of bliss interrupted, but here on the frozen tundra we accept July and August as our allotted ration of bliss. It's fabulous. We can't get over how wonderful it is. And then it's over.
It gives you a twinge to see an old cat on a paradise night who is about to croak. But I used up most of my anguish over mortality by the time I was 25. I was a poet, like everybody else, and wrote extensively about death and despair back then and pretty much wore out the subject. We poets went to parties where people chain-smoked and got bombed and listened to Janis Joplin screeching from the hi-fi speakers loud enough to cause cardiac arrest. Nobody imagined that Janis might someday come to Jesus and take up a life of regular exercise and good nutrition. She was determined to crash and burn. We, as it turned out, were not, but we were full of morbid gloom, a luxury of youth, trying to imagine death, the cessation of being, the emptiness of the world without us, the sliver of moon in the sky, the cry of the hoot owl, the railroad tracks stretching away to the west, et cetera.
Now my thoughts about death are mundane ones. I hope that when the cat croaks, he does it out in the open, or at least in the bushes, and doesn't try to crawl up under a porch where someone will have to reach in and extract him. People die in crevices in New York, brilliant loners who go to the city to find their niche only to get hooked on happy dust and wind up in a tiny apartment crammed with junk, and one dark day the neighbors detect an evil smell and call the cops and it's him, the tall gloomy man with the glasses, dead as a doornail. Keep in touch, tall gloomy men. Don't go in the cave. Leave that cocaine alone. Get outdoors more. Take long walks.
I've arrived at that delicate point in life where it gives me a twinge when the lady inside my computer says, "You are now disconnected." Or when the flight attendant refers to our "final destination" and says, "We will be on the ground shortly." Is that a nice way to talk? It suggests lying prostrate as uniformed personnel tear open your shirt and put the paddles on your chest. I don't want to be on the ground, I want to walk up the jetway and climb into a taxi and go to the hotel. Saunter into the bar, order a glass of gin neat with a twist of barbed wire, light up a stogie, look for the biggest guys in the room, walk over, blow smoke in their faces and say, "Which one of you fairies thinks he can take a 63-year-old newspaper columnist?"
"Oh," you say, "is that what you meant when you talked about living life boldly and lighting a candle in the darkness and daring to make a difference in your commencement speech at St. Raymond's lo these many years ago, when the president finally had to stand up and tap you on the shoulder and suggest that you wind it up?" Yes, of course, and just for that, you little twerp, I'm going to stop right now and not say what I was going to say about daring to be selfish and to enjoy your life without feeling obligated to share your hard-earned wisdom with your needy friends. Not another word from me. You figure it out for yourself.
ALLEN & COMPANY (OR ASPEN)
I must register a complaint with the USPS. I have never received my invitations to Aspen from Mr. Isaacson this year, which really puts a serious crimp in my usual Summer plans to mingle with his compatriots and guests at the Aspen Institute..
Therefore, but only as a back-up, I am applying to Allen & Company to attend their Sun Valley affair. It, perhaps is a bit down market of Aspen, given the commercial bent of the Allen "A" list, but nonetheless -- things may be learned -- so I am available.
Following, courtesy of the DEALBOOK.
The high-level schmoozing and, if tradition holds, deal-making officially began late Tuesday as a caravan of mogul-bearing sport utility vehicles rolled through Sun Valley, Idaho. The occasion, as many DealBook readers will know, is the annual conference held by investment bank Allen & Company which brings together a constellation of top media executives and other financial and corporate power brokers.
DealBook is here on the ground to observe the dynamics of this rarified crowd and report on what — or who — they are talking about.
The A-List began arriving Tuesday night for a pre-conference barbecue. Among those we spotted: Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett (who is giving a speech on Saturday), Ebay chief executive Meg Whitman (who, in contrast to the parade of luxury vehicles before her, pulled up in the passenger seat of a rented Ford Taurus, driven by her husband), Disney chief Bob Iger and his predecessor, Michael Eisner.
On Friday, Mr. Eisner will be reprising his role of talk-show host — his latest gig on CNBC — to moderate a media panel. A regular attendee at the conference, Mr. Eisner seems a bit more relaxed now that he is no longer a Fortune 500 chief: He had time to walk the grounds Tuesday and carry back his own groceries after picking up some snacks Tuesday afternoon.
On the agenda for Wednesday morning is a talk called “The 10 Commandments for Business Failure” by Don Keough, the former chairman of Coca-Cola. And Ms. Whitman is scheduled to speak about Ebay. (Will she give some insight into her company’s new relationship with Yahoo? The speculation is that the Internet companies’ recent rapprochement is a try-it-before-you-buy-it deal.)
In the afternoon, the moguls are off to whitewater rafting — or to some private deal-making meetings, for those who don’t want to get soaked. At least, not in the literal sense.
Therefore, but only as a back-up, I am applying to Allen & Company to attend their Sun Valley affair. It, perhaps is a bit down market of Aspen, given the commercial bent of the Allen "A" list, but nonetheless -- things may be learned -- so I am available.
Following, courtesy of the DEALBOOK.
The high-level schmoozing and, if tradition holds, deal-making officially began late Tuesday as a caravan of mogul-bearing sport utility vehicles rolled through Sun Valley, Idaho. The occasion, as many DealBook readers will know, is the annual conference held by investment bank Allen & Company which brings together a constellation of top media executives and other financial and corporate power brokers.
DealBook is here on the ground to observe the dynamics of this rarified crowd and report on what — or who — they are talking about.
The A-List began arriving Tuesday night for a pre-conference barbecue. Among those we spotted: Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett (who is giving a speech on Saturday), Ebay chief executive Meg Whitman (who, in contrast to the parade of luxury vehicles before her, pulled up in the passenger seat of a rented Ford Taurus, driven by her husband), Disney chief Bob Iger and his predecessor, Michael Eisner.
On Friday, Mr. Eisner will be reprising his role of talk-show host — his latest gig on CNBC — to moderate a media panel. A regular attendee at the conference, Mr. Eisner seems a bit more relaxed now that he is no longer a Fortune 500 chief: He had time to walk the grounds Tuesday and carry back his own groceries after picking up some snacks Tuesday afternoon.
On the agenda for Wednesday morning is a talk called “The 10 Commandments for Business Failure” by Don Keough, the former chairman of Coca-Cola. And Ms. Whitman is scheduled to speak about Ebay. (Will she give some insight into her company’s new relationship with Yahoo? The speculation is that the Internet companies’ recent rapprochement is a try-it-before-you-buy-it deal.)
In the afternoon, the moguls are off to whitewater rafting — or to some private deal-making meetings, for those who don’t want to get soaked. At least, not in the literal sense.
11.7.06
OH! THOSE CAREFREE GERMANS!
From Humorless to Carefree in 30 Days
By David Crossland in Berlin
England fans supporting the German team? Berlin policemen stroking puppies? Smiling shop assistants? Germany's image has changed over the last four weeks of the World Cup, which will be remembered more for the summer carnival atmosphere and great organization than the football -- apart from David Beckham's vomiting and Zinedine Zidane's headbutt.
You know something seismic has happened when England fans who came to Germany with inflatable Spitfires singing " 10 German Bombers" suddenly start supporting the German national team.
German fans ecstatic as their team, "World Champions of our hearts" comes third.British Prime Minister Tony Blair pointed out this unprecedented phenomenon in an opinion piece for Sunday's Bild am Sonntag newspaper, and declared: "The old clichés have been replaced by a new, positive and more fair image of Germany."
The 2006 World Cup host appears to have pulled off a coup no one had thought possible before the tournament began: a fundamental rebranding of Germany, a shift in the world's view of the nation from dour and humorless to fun- loving and friendly.
The perfect summer weather had a lot to do with it, as did the surprisingly strong performance by Jürgen Klinsmann's team. Those two factors acted like a strong dose of Prozac for a nation diagnosed in 2004 by its own president as entering "collective depression."
Suddenly the unthinkable started happening: policemen started stroking puppies and ignoring minor traffic violations, and sales assistants started smiling and being helpful.
Feelings of patriotism stifled for decades by the Holocaust came to the fore as Germans started attaching not just one but two and sometimes four national flags to their cars, painted neat little flags onto their faces and cleavages and donned wigs and bras in the national colors of black, red and gold.
They started singing the national anthem with passion in the stadiums and in the " Fan Fests" or public viewing areas, a successful World Cup innovation which gave the millions of people who couldn't get match tickets a collective experience of watching football.
"Partyotism"
It turned into a gigantic three-colored fancy dress party, a summer version of the Rhineland's spring carnival which gained momentum with each of the team's victories.
German media called it "partyotism" and indeed there was nothing threatening or exclusive about it. Men and women of all ages caught the bug, and there was none of the raucous, tribal passion of England's fervent fans.
The atmosphere engulfed the over 1 million visitors from abroad. In Cologne, on the steps leading up to the cathedral, Brazilian fans hopped and danced with Mexicans. Next to them were England supporters trying to chat up Swedish blondes, or engaging in mostly good-humored chanting competitions with Germans.
A hip patriot covered in body paint."Thirty one days of the World Cup have changed Germany and the Germans more than politicians have managed in years with their laws and decrees," wrote Germany's best-selling Bild newspaper on Monday.
"And the whole world suddenly has a thoroughly positive picture of us. Because the signals we sent can no longer be misunderstood. Germany is a happy country. Germany is a peaceful country. Germany is modern, innovative and creative."
It was a view echoed abroad. "Never mind the final, Germans are the real World Cup winners," wrote Britain's Times newspaper.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, in Berlin for Sunday's final, told German television: "I have to say that from everything I saw and heard, it was one of the best World Cups ever. The friendly spirit really caught on here."
Some cliches still apply
But let's face it, did anybody seriously expect this World Cup not to be a success? How could it fail given Germany's capacity for organization, its punctual trains, dense autobahn network, modern stadiums, great beer and spotless hotels? If the party atmosphere wiped away some of the negative cliches, the tournament did reinforce some of the positive ones, too.
Everything was planned down to the smallest detail. Last Saturday night on the Kurfürstendamm, western Berlin's main boulevard, as thousands of fans celebrated Germany's victory over Portugal, rubbish disposal men stood around patiently waiting to polish the streets once everyone had gone home.
When one exuberant fan lit a flare in the street, firemen who had been lurking in the shadows jogged onto the scene, put it out, tut-tutted mildly and walked away. Police had trained for months how to handle disorderly fans. They adopted a non-intrusive, tolerant approach and their cooperation with foreign police worked.
When the crowds on Berlin's Fan Fest behind the Brandenburg Gate started getting too big, authorities rapidly arranged for the public viewing area to be increased and more giant screens were deployed within days.
It seems the only people who had any concerns ahead of the World Cup were the hosts themselves. In fact, capital-A "Angst" dominated the run-up to the tournament. Not just the normal jitters any organizer would have, but deep, ponderous Angst, the German kind.
It started in January, when a consumer watchdog declared that several of the 12 World Cup stadiums, newly built or painstakingly refurbished, were unsafe for fans due to an absence of proper escape routes.
Then reports of attacks on foreigners mounted in March, April and May, not because more were being perpetrated but because the media were picking up on them, stoking a debate about " No Go Areas" for visitors in parts of Berlin and eastern Germany. Meanwhile newspaper coverage of violence by immigrant schoolchildren in schools added to concern that Germany was unable to properly integrate its many immigrants of Turkish descent.
What happened? The Turks, whose own team hadn't qualified for the tournament, adopted the German side, and startled many here by waving German flags. After each victory, many of the honking, flag-draped cars racing round Berlin were driven by cheering Turks.
There was concern in Germany and abroad about a surge in forced prostitution as new brothels opened to cope with the influx of fans. In the end, demand fell far short of expectations, with fans apparently too busy partying and meeting Fräuleins at the Fan Fests to think about paying for sex.
Then police and politicians were worried that neo- Nazis might stage demonstrations to get some of the global attention focused on Germany. Or that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fervent Holocaust denier, might present Germany with a major diplomatic headache by coming to watch Iran play.
Neither happened. The Nazis appeared to be too busy watching football or worried about counter-demonstrations. And the Iranian team didn't do well enough to warrant a presidential visit.
"World Champions of our Hearts"
Finally, the team. Many hadn't expected it to get beyond the first round. But fans across the country declared it "World Champions of our Hearts" after it got as far as the semi-final with a lively, attacking brand of football.
They even dispatched Argentina on the way in a penalty shootout -- there's another cliche that survived the tournament.
Nothing went wrong, except for the football itself. Few of the matches were memorable, the goal average was below par, and the teams were too cautious.
No fresh young talent burst onto the stage, there were no David vs. Goliath upsets and the only fairy tale of the tournament -- French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane's return to sparkling form to lead his team to the final -- came to a disastrous ending when he was sent off in the final for headbutting an Italian player.
That, along with England star David Beckham vomiting on the pitch, is likely to be the most striking image of a World Cup that from a sporting point of view fell short of previous tournaments. Still, Germany can't be blamed for the quality of play.
Even Chancellor Angela Merkel, not known for charisma or outbursts of emotion, was swept up in the football frenzy, cheering, punching the air during matches and hugging coach Klinsmann and the World Cup's chief organiser, Franz Beckenbauer.
"Germany's image abroad has definitely changed incredibly. I liked this inner, happy self-confidence a lot," she told RTL television.
Merkel said she hoped the last four weeks had given the country the confidence and drive to tackle its problems -- mass unemployment and runaway welfare costs.
"...We're a great country, we can do it, and we're admired by others," she said.
By David Crossland in Berlin
England fans supporting the German team? Berlin policemen stroking puppies? Smiling shop assistants? Germany's image has changed over the last four weeks of the World Cup, which will be remembered more for the summer carnival atmosphere and great organization than the football -- apart from David Beckham's vomiting and Zinedine Zidane's headbutt.
You know something seismic has happened when England fans who came to Germany with inflatable Spitfires singing " 10 German Bombers" suddenly start supporting the German national team.
German fans ecstatic as their team, "World Champions of our hearts" comes third.British Prime Minister Tony Blair pointed out this unprecedented phenomenon in an opinion piece for Sunday's Bild am Sonntag newspaper, and declared: "The old clichés have been replaced by a new, positive and more fair image of Germany."
The 2006 World Cup host appears to have pulled off a coup no one had thought possible before the tournament began: a fundamental rebranding of Germany, a shift in the world's view of the nation from dour and humorless to fun- loving and friendly.
The perfect summer weather had a lot to do with it, as did the surprisingly strong performance by Jürgen Klinsmann's team. Those two factors acted like a strong dose of Prozac for a nation diagnosed in 2004 by its own president as entering "collective depression."
Suddenly the unthinkable started happening: policemen started stroking puppies and ignoring minor traffic violations, and sales assistants started smiling and being helpful.
Feelings of patriotism stifled for decades by the Holocaust came to the fore as Germans started attaching not just one but two and sometimes four national flags to their cars, painted neat little flags onto their faces and cleavages and donned wigs and bras in the national colors of black, red and gold.
They started singing the national anthem with passion in the stadiums and in the " Fan Fests" or public viewing areas, a successful World Cup innovation which gave the millions of people who couldn't get match tickets a collective experience of watching football.
"Partyotism"
It turned into a gigantic three-colored fancy dress party, a summer version of the Rhineland's spring carnival which gained momentum with each of the team's victories.
German media called it "partyotism" and indeed there was nothing threatening or exclusive about it. Men and women of all ages caught the bug, and there was none of the raucous, tribal passion of England's fervent fans.
The atmosphere engulfed the over 1 million visitors from abroad. In Cologne, on the steps leading up to the cathedral, Brazilian fans hopped and danced with Mexicans. Next to them were England supporters trying to chat up Swedish blondes, or engaging in mostly good-humored chanting competitions with Germans.
A hip patriot covered in body paint."Thirty one days of the World Cup have changed Germany and the Germans more than politicians have managed in years with their laws and decrees," wrote Germany's best-selling Bild newspaper on Monday.
"And the whole world suddenly has a thoroughly positive picture of us. Because the signals we sent can no longer be misunderstood. Germany is a happy country. Germany is a peaceful country. Germany is modern, innovative and creative."
It was a view echoed abroad. "Never mind the final, Germans are the real World Cup winners," wrote Britain's Times newspaper.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, in Berlin for Sunday's final, told German television: "I have to say that from everything I saw and heard, it was one of the best World Cups ever. The friendly spirit really caught on here."
Some cliches still apply
But let's face it, did anybody seriously expect this World Cup not to be a success? How could it fail given Germany's capacity for organization, its punctual trains, dense autobahn network, modern stadiums, great beer and spotless hotels? If the party atmosphere wiped away some of the negative cliches, the tournament did reinforce some of the positive ones, too.
Everything was planned down to the smallest detail. Last Saturday night on the Kurfürstendamm, western Berlin's main boulevard, as thousands of fans celebrated Germany's victory over Portugal, rubbish disposal men stood around patiently waiting to polish the streets once everyone had gone home.
When one exuberant fan lit a flare in the street, firemen who had been lurking in the shadows jogged onto the scene, put it out, tut-tutted mildly and walked away. Police had trained for months how to handle disorderly fans. They adopted a non-intrusive, tolerant approach and their cooperation with foreign police worked.
When the crowds on Berlin's Fan Fest behind the Brandenburg Gate started getting too big, authorities rapidly arranged for the public viewing area to be increased and more giant screens were deployed within days.
It seems the only people who had any concerns ahead of the World Cup were the hosts themselves. In fact, capital-A "Angst" dominated the run-up to the tournament. Not just the normal jitters any organizer would have, but deep, ponderous Angst, the German kind.
It started in January, when a consumer watchdog declared that several of the 12 World Cup stadiums, newly built or painstakingly refurbished, were unsafe for fans due to an absence of proper escape routes.
Then reports of attacks on foreigners mounted in March, April and May, not because more were being perpetrated but because the media were picking up on them, stoking a debate about " No Go Areas" for visitors in parts of Berlin and eastern Germany. Meanwhile newspaper coverage of violence by immigrant schoolchildren in schools added to concern that Germany was unable to properly integrate its many immigrants of Turkish descent.
What happened? The Turks, whose own team hadn't qualified for the tournament, adopted the German side, and startled many here by waving German flags. After each victory, many of the honking, flag-draped cars racing round Berlin were driven by cheering Turks.
There was concern in Germany and abroad about a surge in forced prostitution as new brothels opened to cope with the influx of fans. In the end, demand fell far short of expectations, with fans apparently too busy partying and meeting Fräuleins at the Fan Fests to think about paying for sex.
Then police and politicians were worried that neo- Nazis might stage demonstrations to get some of the global attention focused on Germany. Or that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fervent Holocaust denier, might present Germany with a major diplomatic headache by coming to watch Iran play.
Neither happened. The Nazis appeared to be too busy watching football or worried about counter-demonstrations. And the Iranian team didn't do well enough to warrant a presidential visit.
"World Champions of our Hearts"
Finally, the team. Many hadn't expected it to get beyond the first round. But fans across the country declared it "World Champions of our Hearts" after it got as far as the semi-final with a lively, attacking brand of football.
They even dispatched Argentina on the way in a penalty shootout -- there's another cliche that survived the tournament.
Nothing went wrong, except for the football itself. Few of the matches were memorable, the goal average was below par, and the teams were too cautious.
No fresh young talent burst onto the stage, there were no David vs. Goliath upsets and the only fairy tale of the tournament -- French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane's return to sparkling form to lead his team to the final -- came to a disastrous ending when he was sent off in the final for headbutting an Italian player.
That, along with England star David Beckham vomiting on the pitch, is likely to be the most striking image of a World Cup that from a sporting point of view fell short of previous tournaments. Still, Germany can't be blamed for the quality of play.
Even Chancellor Angela Merkel, not known for charisma or outbursts of emotion, was swept up in the football frenzy, cheering, punching the air during matches and hugging coach Klinsmann and the World Cup's chief organiser, Franz Beckenbauer.
"Germany's image abroad has definitely changed incredibly. I liked this inner, happy self-confidence a lot," she told RTL television.
Merkel said she hoped the last four weeks had given the country the confidence and drive to tackle its problems -- mass unemployment and runaway welfare costs.
"...We're a great country, we can do it, and we're admired by others," she said.
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