As seen from Just Above Sunset

Wednesday, 22 June 2005

Topic: World View

Our Man in Paris: Europe Votes for Swing

Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis, reports on the 2005 Fête de la Musique in Paris, mentioned previously here. Scroll down for the photos.
This, and even more photos from Don Smith of Left Bank Lens will appear in next Sunday's issue of Just Above Sunset, the parent site to this web log.

PARIS, Tuesday, 21 June - Give Parisians five days of summer weather with the last day of spring tapping out at 35 degrees (92 F) and then lay the Fête de la Musique on them after a relatively cool day with azure skies and 28 degrees (82 F), and you'll get what we got - grandmas and grandads, babies in strollers, pregnant ladies and their husbands in wide shorts, aunts and bald uncles, teenagers on rollers, pouring out of the Métro exit in hundreds, clogging all of Daguerre for the music and thousands bopping at Denfert's live concert stage, hey! Fête de la Musique - it's the first day of summer, shortest night of the year, and let's roll for party time in France again.

My guess is that half of the past twenty-three editions of this annual musical day have been rained out, or were greeted with towering indifference by skeptical Parisians. For my plan of the evening I even considered hiking down to Saint-Sulpice, to the fire station there. Luckily I remembered this is a party address for Bastille Day on 14 July, but my local place Denfert-Rochereau always has a bandstand on 21 June.

Out I go to Daguerre, around the corner. At first I don't hear anything except TV audio coming out of all the open windows. It probably is from the big stage set up in Louis' front yard out at Versailles, the show that France-2 TV was plugging at the end of the news. I am missing Zazie at the palace.

At Daguerre I hear accordions. Is it from the Bistro 48, the Penguins or mostly likely, from Paris Accordéon? Motto: 'since 1948.' There are eight people standing in the street listening to the accordion players inside the shop. Next, there is a musical pause happening at the café Naguère, but all its terraces are full. At this time it's normally been closed an hour.

Then I see a musician I know hauling down the street, not carrying his drum kit. As I'm catching up he loops back to the Zango and takes a quick peep inside at the band. Zango has set up a street-sales counter, mostly inside the café because the sidewalk is so narrow.

Daguerre hasn't been closed to traffic but between Gassendi and Boulard there are a lot of people walking in the street. The setting sun is blazing down it, perfectly lined up this one day a year. My musician takes off south on Boulard and I see the lady accordionist doing the standards in the Bouquet. Almost the entire audience is outside.

It sounds a bit like a crazy midway. The fast food place half a block away has a short-circuit stereo cranked to max, there's another band over by Vin des Rues, and the electric guitars in the café d'Enfer are… forceful.

Cars hesitate and sift through carefully along Boulard, while hundreds of sunset and music fans stroll in both directions. Several hundred are grouped around the restaurant, leaning over diners exiled to the sidewalk who are trying to fill up. Further along a Joe is running hip-hop off two turntables by the fancy cheese boutique, and there is a choral group singing in front of the bookshop.

Fruit and veg is closed, fish is finished, the other cheese is closed and there's another dual turntable Joe in the butcher's between the terraces of Caves Perez and the Café Daguerre, and there's all these folks in the air with sundown red faces, ignoring TV's show in Versailles.

On the Avenue Leclerc there are two cops at the intersection, not doing much. Cars are coming around the corner but are having a hard time turning into the wide avenue because teenagers have decided it's a pedestrian zone. There's nothing coming up from Alésia except more teenagers and red lights.

The other way, beyond the intersection, the place Denfert is full of trucks and barriers, hiding the lion statue. I can't get around by the Métro exit - there are too many coming out of it and jammed there in a narrow space because of the snack caravan, so I go back over by way of the RER station.

Riot cops are standing well back in groups of six. The space between them and the Ricard 'Live' stage is filling up, being fed from the five streets leading in. This year the stage has turned 90 degrees so that its back is to the west, facing a vaster area.

The other big French rock show is in the 13th arrondissement, up on the platform of the Bibliothèque Nationale, with a program called 'Playground, Extra, Extra.' In the 14th we've got French rock too, with Deportivo, trying to take over from Noir Désir. For crowd size, the 14th has the lion's share. And for once the sound isn't badly distorted, just loud.

I shouldn't say I'm too old to be standing around on cobbles after sundown with thousands of teenagers and the golden youth of Paris getting my ears battered, so I won't. Going around to the left I see the Lion of Belfort poking up in the midst of the crew trucks and buses, and the jam by the Métro exit hasn't diminished.

The cops are still not doing much to help bewildered drivers get where they want to go and there are even more teenagers all over the avenue, in front of their McDo shrine, and there's another gang of them in front of the Monoprix which has used the opportunity to peddle drinks and cookies. Streetlights haven't come on, the cafés have open doors and their terraces are full of blue smoke and smell of yellow pastis.

Guitars are still driving at the Enfer, still with a big audience in front. Further up Daguerre the mystery band at the Naguère seems to be having another pause, but the accordions are more visible at the shop, with a small audience in the near dark. Open doors at the Bistro 48 but the sign isn't illuminated. Ink sky in the dark over the cemetery, but I hear a live broadcast from a bandstand on Radio FIP. Later on TV, tennisman Yannick Noah on stage at Versailles, rocking at three in the morning. Louis would have had more sopranos.

Blame all of this on Jack Lang, France's onetime minister of culture. This year he was in London to help Les Anglais get in tune with the Continent, where several cities held their versions. Prague said its musicians were too poor to play for free.

According to the story there was a gang of Brazilian musicians rolling around in an antique RATP bus with an open rear platform, that there are five million amateur musicians in France and this was their day to play, that in the Senat's courtyard of honor there were 100 drummers with a samba school from north Rio, and that 'French rock' has been a joke since Johnny Hallyday.

Yeah, and Paddy Sherlock and his franco-anglo big band, Les Swing Lovers, was a hit at the Irish Cultural Centre in the 5th.

Europeans will always vote for swing if nothing else.

__

Photos:

At Daguerre I hear accordions. Is it from the Bistro 48, the Penguins or mostly likely, from Paris Accordéon? Motto: 'since 1948.'

... there's another band over by Vin des Rues, and the electric guitars in the café d'Enfer are? forceful.

...grandmas and grandads, babies in strollers, pregnant ladies and their husbands in wide shorts, aunts and bald uncles, teenagers on rollers, pouring out of the Métro exit in hundreds, clogging all of Daguerre for the music and thousands bopping at Denfert's live concert stage, hey!

On the Avenue Leclerc there are two cops at the intersection, not doing much. Cars are coming around the corner but are having a hard time turning into the wide avenue because teenagers have decided it's a pedestrian zone. There's nothing coming up from Alésia except more teenagers and red lights.

... there are even more teenagers all over the avenue, in front of their McDo shrine, and there's another gang of them in front of the Monoprix which has used the opportunity to peddle drinks and cookies. Streetlights haven't come on, the cafés have open doors and their terraces are full of blue smoke and smell of yellow pastis.

Posted by Alan at 18:25 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 22 June 2005 18:49 PDT home

Topic: Couldn't be so...

What's Up? Much is happening, and keeping on top of things is hard…

One: Ah, Texas!

In Houston, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay compared the "constant barrage" of bad news from Iraq to "all this reporting" in the local press about "violence, murders, robberies, deaths on the highways," adding that "if Houston, Texas, was held to the same standard as Iraq is held to, nobody'd go to Houston."

The Houston Chronicle item is here and this is too easy. Insert variations on Yogi Berra saying, "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

Does anyone go to Houston? If they go, why do they go?

Tom might be getting a call from the Houston Chamber of Commerce, but probably not.

Can Houston make Baghdad its sister city?

Two: The Freedom Fries Man

The man who made the congressional cafeteria rename those hot grease-coated, salted potato sticks "freedom fries" - Representative Walter B. Jones Jr., Republican from North Carolina – who last week introduced a bipartisan resolution calling for Bush to come up with a plan by the end of this year to withdraw the troops from Iraq, and for the withdrawal to start no later than October of 2006 – is profiled in AlterNet by Jan Frel here (June 22) and we find that it wasn't local political pressure that led to this change on Iraq, even if his constituents think his new stance makes him "look 'weak' on the military." Frel says it's simply that "Walter Jones can't lie about Iraq anymore."

One asks, why not? Does Jones hate America? Is he a traitor putting our troops in danger? Things ARE going fine, we HAVE enough troops on the ground, they ARE wonderfully equipped, that insurgency IS in its last throes, and so on and so forth.

Should Jones apologize like Dick Durbin did? (Fox News explains here.)

Or has Jones joined the Air America radio folks, saying the opposite about the war - citing facts and statistics and quoting people and all that sort of thing? See this from the June 20 broadcast of Westwood One's The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly (audio clip here):

O'REILLY: And when he [Durbin] went out there, his intent was to whip up the American public against the Bush detainee policy. That's what his intent was. His intent wasn't to undermine the war effort, because he never even thought about it. He never even thought about it. But by not thinking about it, he made an egregious mistake because you must know the difference between dissent from the Iraq war and the war on terror and undermining it. And any American that undermines that war, with our soldiers in the field, or undermines the war on terror, with 3,000 dead on 9-11, is a traitor.

Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you're a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they're undermining everything and they don't care, couldn't care less.

If you're in Los Angeles tune into 1150 AM and be a traitor too. Of course, as long as you know the precise line between dissent and "undermining" you'll be just fine. Bill will no doubt explain just where that line is at some point in the future. He knows. He's sure. Are you? Best be careful. Ask Bill.

Three: "Now" is no longer on the air, but Bill Moyers is, here and there.

June 21, Bill Moyers, who had that show on PBS that so irked the administration that they now want to change PBS to make it more balanced and not so left wing – that's what Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, wants – was on CNN's Lou Dobbs show. Whether or not PBS carries too many children's shows that advocate tolerance of others, or too many science shows that undermine Christianity by claiming there actually is geological evidence the earth is more than six thousand years old and that evolution isn't just a crackpot theory, Bill Moyers' "Now" really did tick them off. As Kenneth Tomlinson has said, Public Broadcasting should represent the views of the vast majority of Americans, who are, as shown in Bush's election mandate of 2004, firmly conservative and completely Christian.

As you can see from the transcript, not only is Moyers still being an elitist minority pain-in-the-ass, Dobbs is buying into this stuff, and what Dobbs says is even more amazing. Some excerpts:

MOYERS: … the American dream is flat on its back.

The inequality in this country is greater than it's been since 1929. The gap between -- when I went to Washington in 1960, the gap between the highest paid and the lowest paid was 20-fold. Now it's 75-fold. "The Wall Street Journal" reported two weeks ago that if you were a child born in poverty in Europe or Canada, you have a better chance at prosperity than a child born in America today. "New York Times," "Wall Street Journal" have also reported that the upward mobility of people at the bottom has stalled. And no Marxist rag, "The Economist," one of the best friends business and capitalism have, reported just the weekend before George W. Bush's second inauguration, that the inequality that is growing in this country means America's on the way to becoming a European style class-based society. I didn't make that up. That's not my term. That's "The Economist."

When hope and opportunity close down, democracy is in trouble. That's why I'm concerned.

DOBBS: … I find it mind-boggling the number of people who seem inured to an educational system that is failing, a public education system that is the bedrock to me of what has been the American dream, offering poor boys like Bill Moyers and Lou Dobbs and millions and millions of other folks an opportunity to move from the so-called working class into the middle class and beyond, that -- to lose that is -- to meet such indifference on the part of so many people is mind-boggling to me.

DOBBS: Warren Buffett was sitting here one night a few weeks ago. We were talking about class warfare, and he said, and I know we're not supposed to talk about class warfare in this country, but the fact is, that's what's going on politically. And he says, well, I don't know if it's class warfare or not, but I can tell you, my class is winning. … And he said it with great - with anguish, not with any sense of pride in it at all, rather concern and disappointment.

DOBBS: … there was a time you could turn to the Democratic Party and expect to see the working men and women of the country represented. You could pretty much expect Republicans to represent business interests. For the life of me, Bill, I can't discern the difference between the two parties. They both, it seems to me, owned lock, stock and barrel by corporate interests.

Okay, this is what you expect from Moyers, but from Lou Dobbs? Now Dobbs has no reason to fear Kenneth Tomlinson, as Lou works for Jonathan Klein. But when CNN starts bashing America, what are things coming to? And what would Bill O'Reilly say?

Four: Porn in High Places

The National Republican Congressional Committee has a dinner last week for the president. That got considerable coverage, like this item from CBS, because one guest, Mark Kulkis of Kick Ass Pictures out here in California, brought along his hard-core porn star Mary Carey, of porn film fame. Well, she ran for governor of California two years ago (see this in these pages from August, 2003) and she says she plans to run for lieutenant governor out here in 2006. What was she doing there? From CBS: "I've been a Republican now for, ummm, a couple of days."

That'll do. But note this:

Right-wing media not happy that Mary Carey wants to have sex with the Bush twins

Now that the presidential fund-raiser is over, hard-core porn star Mary Carey doesn't mind the public knowing about one of her secret desires – having sex with the twin daughters of the president.

Carey was the guest of her boss, pornographer Mark Kulkis of Kick A– Pictures, at the National Republican Congressional Committee's multimillion-dollar dinner with the president here last week.

She made no secret prior to the event of wanting to have sex with Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan and Alan Colmes - in addition to at least one player from every team in the NBA. But she asked blogger John Aravosis to hold back reporting her feelings about the Bush twins until after she cleared out of town.

"Oh my God, his daughters!" she said. "I'd love to party with his daughters. I'd love to meet them. I totally want to have sex with them. You can write it the day after I leave here."

Oh my! Some of us caught her interview with Keith Olbermann on "Countdown" on MSNBC late last week. (Video clip here - go to the bottom of the column for the link.)

She's having fun with the Republicans. She's toying with them and causing no end of trouble. I suspect she is, in fact, a smart and savvy left-wing subversive with a wonderful sense of humor. There's something Swift-like about all this. It seems an odd update of the tactic Swift used in "A Modest Proposal" long, long ago.

The White House and the National Republican Congressional Committee are all embarrassed and upset. I think that was her idea. Ha!

Five: A "What did you expect?" item from CURSOR.ORG

New topic summary: "The wages of fundamentalism" are said to include signs that "American science is losing its edge, and may even have peaked." Earlier: "the U.S. is no longer a friendly destination for foreign students."

What did you expect?

The cartoonist Kirk Anderson offers this cartoon that sums it up. I came across this at SLATE.COM and if I had more than a handful of readers I'd have to pay Artizans syndicate to post this image. They own the rights to the image. But under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, Limitations on exclusive rights (fair use), and since it is part of the commentary, this may be okay.

It almost has come to this:

Posted by Alan at 15:21 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 22 June 2005 15:23 PDT home

Tuesday, 21 June 2005

Topic: World View

The man who thought he was being chased by a lobster through the nightmare streets full of loud music...

Notes for Tuesday, June 21, 2005: the moon is just about full (actual full moon June 22), they've got that music thing going in Paris, and Jean-Paul-Sartre would be one hundred years old on this date, but he's dead.

This "Fete de la Musique" thing? No doubt Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis, and Our Man in Paris, will cover it in next Monday's issue of Metropole.

Here are the basics -

PARIS, France (UPI) -- France kicked off summer Tuesday with musical festivities now being replicated worldwide.

Musicians and wannabe musicians were out serenading audiences across the country, marking the 24th annual "Fete de la Musique."

Founded in the early 1980s in France, the "fete" - or celebration - is being replicated in some 100 cities scattered across five continents.

Some 5 million French are musicians, Le Figaro reports, although many are amateurs….

As noted last year about this time in these pages -

This is madness in Paris, where the longest day of the year gives everyone reasonable natural light until well after ten in the evening. (Paris in on the far western edge of its fifteen-degree time zone so the sun sets very, very late.) In 1997 up in Montmartre, strolling rue des Abbesses, you would have heard a lot of Brazilian bands, as I recall, and then, further east down the street, one could walk into an ancient stone church where one could sit and listen to some ancient looking nuns doing plainchant sorts of things. In June of 2000, on a long walk from rue Daguerre down rue des Rennes and ending up at the Buci market area (a long slog), the city seemed filled with over amplified seventh-rate amateur rock bands, crappy novelty New Orleans groups doing "Hold That Tiger" (Tenez ce tigre?) and such things – and a heavy mental band outside the hotel window that played (quite badly) until four in the morning. Awful stuff. I missed Patricia Kaas across the river on the right bank.

Hollywood has nothing like thing, or is like this all the time.

But all of this year's music will no doubt drown out whatever Sartre stuff is going on, and the BBC reports that officials at France's National Library are quite disappointed by the poor visitor figures for a current anniversary exhibition of his work. Ah well.

Mixed feelings?

"France hated him when he was alive and shuns him in death," French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy said.

But in his heyday, his radical ideas earned him a following that has been compared to that of a pop star.

There was a time when Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) could not move without being mobbed in the street.

His existentialist ideas made him an icon for a whole generation of intellectuals.

According to the British philosopher Julian Baggini, Sartre's "point is that freedom is something we're kind of afraid of, and we always want to deny we have, so we always try and make excuses for our behaviour, and say it's not our responsibility".

"And his real point was, no, we do have to choose. And not just about what we do, but what we believe, and the values we hold."

Yep, and Sartre supported the Soviet regime in the fifties and then the Maoists, then he defended the killing of those Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and he turned down the Nobel prize for literature – it was just too bourgeois, of course. So there have been a series of tributes and events, but he does have this reputation as an apologist for totalitarianism. It's not all just "holding forth in a smoky cafe on the Left Bank with his partner, the French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir."

Lately those Left Bank Cafes - the Flore and Les Deux Magots – are filled with American tourists who hate the smoke and want smoking banned throughout Paris, just as we have done here (we got rid of philosophy discussions early in the nineteenth century, of course). Adam Gopnik explains what two those places are now all about here in his book "Paris to the Moon." Those days are gone.

For a fine assessment of Sartre for us - we, the Americans - you might check out this:

Exit, Pursued by a Lobster
Jean-Paul Sartre: Brilliant philosopher, or totalitarian apologist?
Jim Holt - Posted Monday, Sept. 22, 2003, at 8:28 AM PT - SLATE.COM

Holt writes for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine and the title has to do with Sartre's experiments with mescaline, which left him with the recurrent fear that he was being pursued by a lobster. Who knows? Perhaps he was so pursued.

A bit of what Holt has to say -

As an intellectual superstar and monstre sacre, Sartre has no equal in the English-speaking world. Even in France you would have to go back to Voltaire to find a figure of comparable stature. At his funeral in 1980, a crowd of 50,000 people followed the cortege through the streets of Paris to the Montparnasse cemetery. This ugly little wall-eyed scribbler had done it all. He created existentialism, a philosophy that could be lived. His treatises and novels sold in the millions; his plays were boffo successes; his public lectures were mobbed. He founded Liberation, which was to become France's most powerful left-wing newspaper, and Les Temps Modernes, for years its premier intellectual journal.

By dint of sheer intellectual authority, Sartre could engage his bitter adversary Charles de Gaulle as an equal, even though de Gaulle was head of state. ("One does not imprison a Voltaire," the general said of him.) …

Yep, a big gun. And Hold suggests that if you combined aspects of Bertrand Russell, Arthur Miller, Noam Chomsky, Saul Bellow, Leonard Cohen, and Mick Jagger you might have a pretty good idea of how big a gun he was.

But how good was Sartre as a philosopher?

Some critics say that in creating existentialism he simply took the ideas of Heidegger and give them a Gallic gloss. Sartre's Being and Nothingness, they complain, is just Heidegger's Being and Time with some racy passages thrown in about the anus and Italian love-making. That is unfair. It is certainly true that Sartre, who grew up in a bilingual Alsatian household, owed a great debt to German thought. But the starting point for his philosophy, as he always insisted, was the Cartesian formula "I think, therefore I am." Consciousness, the core of our being, is an emptiness or "negativity" that must fill out its nature through arbitrary choices - that is the idea behind Sartre's celebrated aphorism "We are condemned to be free."

Despite the phenomenological complexities of his philosophy, Sartre managed to make it exciting. Anybody could become an existentialist, especially the young. The teutonic dread of Kierkegaard and angst of Heidegger gave way to Sartrean fun.

Ah, screw Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and let's have some Sartrean fun!

In the underground caves of St. Germain-des-Pres, jazz dancing was deemed the highest expression of existentialism. Never has a serious philosopher had such an impact on nightlife. Sartre even wrote a rather beautiful song for the great chanteuse Juliette Greco to sing at the Rose Rouge.

I guess you had to be there. And it is hard to determine what Sartre made of Juliette Greco's hot affair with Miles Davis.

As for the negative stuff? In the fifties align himself with the Communist Party – "this at a time when the crimes of Stalin were being documented and other intellectuals were abandoning the party."

He broke with Camus because the latter denounced totalitarianism. He was silent on the gulag ("It was not our duty to write about the Soviet labor camps"), and he excused the purges of Stalin and later Mao. When the defector Victor Kravchenko published I Chose Freedom, the first inside account of the horrors of Stalinism, Sartre wrote a play implying that Kravchenko was a creation of the CIA. Even when Sartre was on the right side, he could be morally tone-deaf. In opposing the war in Vietnam, he urged the Soviet Union to take on the Americans, even at the risk of nuclear war. And in championing Algerian independence, he wrote (in his preface to Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth) that for an African "to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time."

Yipes - read Holt for all the details.

But in the end Holt is kind. Sartre was the Last Intellectual.

True, France still has writers on philosophical questions who also march in demonstrations. (One of them, Luc Ferry, has even been made the nation's minister for education.) But there will never again be a combination of totalizing theoretician, literary colossus, and political engage like Sartre. Today's French intellectuals look like puny technocrats by comparison. Luckily, they proved to be on the winning side of history, so they can afford to be gracious to him, to say, along with de Gaulle, Sartre, c'est aussi la France.

So full moon, music in the streets, and it's Sartre's birthday. Here in Hollywood not much is happening.

__

Additional Notes:

Sartre ? excerpts from the AFP wire Tuesday, 21 June 2005 18:32:00 GMT -

[1] In fact, says historian Annie Cohen-Solal writing in Le Monde newspaper, the French have largely turned their backs on Sartre, while his philosophy goes from strength to strength in other parts of the world.

There is "a strange divide between the way Sartre is viewed in France and in the rest of the world," she wrote in Le Monde Monday.

[2] Sartre's legacy will also be dissected and debated in several major symposia this summer, including one in southwestern France's Salies-de-Bearn, from June 29 to July 1, and another in Cerisy-la-Salle, on the Channel, from July 20-30.

[3] The last traces of the Renault automobile factory in Boulogne-Billancourt, where an iconic photograph showed the pro-Marxist philosopher haranguing the workers, disappeared under the wreckers' ball a few weeks ago, and is rapidly being replaced by apartments and offices for the bourgeoisie.

[4] One of the foreign countries that did remember Sartre on the day of his birth was Austria, where the cultural channel of the ORF public radio has dedicated a series of broadcasts to the theme Sarte and freedom.

A major article in the weekly Profil magazine describes Sartre as "a great intellectual, humanist and activist."

It said his reputation has been dusted off, so that one now "rediscovers a pop-star of philosophy" who helps people find their authentic selves.

Ah, more of that "pop star" business.

And Tuesday night's music program?

AFP Wednesday, 22 June 2005 01:40:00 GMT -

[1] A bevy of popular French singers performed before more than 70,000 people, according to the police, in the grounds of the Versailles palace.

French Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres hailed the success of the four-hour concert, where performers included Bryan Adams, Yannick Noah and Shakira. A firework display lit up the skies over the chateau.

[2] This year's theme took the fete back to its beginning: amateurism. And even if there were fewer headline acts that in previous years, there were still plenty of marquee names on stage.

French actress Sandrine Kiberlain, who has just released an album, was one, along with electronics music wizard Emilie Simon and rock band Deportivo.

The French Senate celebrated in its private backyard -- otherwise known as the Jardin de Luxembourg -- with a display of Brazilian rhythms featuring 150 percussionists.

So the Brazilian music up on rue des Abbessess up in Montmartre in 1997 has gone upscale. The Jardin de Luxembourg no less. Cool.

Posted by Alan at 17:09 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 22 June 2005 08:02 PDT home

Monday, 20 June 2005

Topic: Selling the War

Last week's topics bleed into this week, so to speak…

Billmon over at Whiskey Bar is fond of digging up old quotes, like this one -

Acheson and the other wise men advised [President Johnson] to launch a public relations campaign. They felt that if he could impart to the public the progress they had learned of in the secret briefings, he would be able to slow down the erosion of support. The president's appointments secretary, who kept a record of the Wise Men's meeting, summed up the advice of McGeorge Bundy, currently president of the Ford Foundation and a member of the group: "Emphasize the 'light at the end of the tunnel' instead of battles, deaths and danger." - Neil Sheehan, A Bright and Shining Lie, 1989

Ah, those were the days.

Here we go again. As mentioned previously, on Thursday, June 16, late in the afternoon, Jennifer Loven of Associated Press sounds the alert - "Facing growing pressure to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush is launching a public relations campaign to try to calm anxieties about the war."

Is this a problem public relations can fix? Well, as the New York Times explains in a long article on Monday, June 20, Bush's Road Gets Rougher – "… barring some crisis that creates another rally-round-the-president effect, analysts said, Mr. Bush's best opportunity to drive the agenda may be past."

Some would disagree – and argue Bush is wildly popular (the polls ask the wrong questions of the wrong people) and the best president America has ever had – but nonetheless, this "public relations campaign to try to calm anxieties" began on June 20, with a press conference at the White House. As the Associated Press reports -

WASHINGTON - Under fire at home and abroad, President Bush on Monday defended his polices on Iraq and the war on terrorism, saying the Iraqi conflict will be won despite attempts by "cold-hearted killers" to derail the U.S.

"I think about Iraq every day. Every single day, because I understand we have troops in harm's way," the president said at a White House news conference. "We will complete the mission and the world will be better off for it."

With more than 1,700 U.S. troops dead in Iraq, voters in the U.S. have grown uneasy with Bush's policies, according to public polls. Some in Congress are pushing for a date certain when troops would begin withdrawing.

… Overseas, the U.S. image has been tarnished by allegations of prisoner abuse in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where suspected terrorists are being detained. Bush challenged critics, even invited journalists to the detention facilities.

"Look at all the facts. That's all I ask people to do," the president said at a news conference with European Union leaders. Bush noted that many of the suspects at Guantanamo are not traditional war prisoners.

No, they're not. Assume then, for the sake of argument, that those Geneva Conventions may not apply. Do any rules apply?

Bush is facing, as documented over at the Daily Kos with links to all the items, a group of Republicans who oppose torture -

Want to know what's interesting about that list of Republicans above? Colin Powell, Army general. Chuck Hagel, two purple hearts and a bronze star in Vietnam. Lindsey Graham, US National Guard Judge Advocacy Group. Arlen Specter, US Air Force. Of the conservative bloggers, the one that seems to get this is John Cole, also a veteran.

Kos himself, as left as he is, is also a veteran.

There are more and more Downing Street memos, more daily suicide bombings in Iraq as things seem to many to grow worse by the day, Senator Richard Durbin noted on the Senate floor that torturing prisoners was the sort of thing Nazis or Communists would do, and that the United States, trying to be on the side of doing what's right, should hold itself to a higher standard of conduct, and the man who made the congressional cafeteria rename those hot grease-coated, salted potato sticks "freedom fries" - Representative Walter B. Jones Jr., Republican from North Carolina - last week introduced a bipartisan resolution calling for Bush to come up with a plan by the end of this year to withdraw the troops from Iraq, and for the withdrawal to start no later than October of 2006. Yeah, right. Former Republican Senator John Danforth ? who Bush had as our UN ambassador for a time - denounced the whole new Republican evangelical party as being just about the opposite of what anyone would consider Christian (see this for the particulars) ? but that may be a theological dispute as Danforth is also an ordained Episcopalian minister, and the religious right suspects that's a fake religion anyway. And recruiting numbers are way down as it is getting harder and harder to staff our professional (voluntary) military. (How hard? Just Above Sunset on Monday had a logon from this server - usarec.army.mil - the headquarters of the United States Army Recruiting Command.)

Bob Patterson, known to readers of the weekly Just Above Sunset as either The Book Wrangler or The World's Laziest Journalist, or both, is having none of this "dissention in the ranks" business -

Due to the delicate nature of the questions about WMD and such, it may be necessary for some Republicans to say some things which don't conform to policy. This extraordinary dispensation will only apply until after the 2006 election. In the meantime, it's not what the Republicans say that matters; it will be what they do. If they vote as Bush decrees, well then they can say all these nasty things because Dubya knows that's what they have to do to get reelected.

Don't watch what the Republicans say; judge them by what they do.

On the noon radio news on CBS, they were talking about what Chuck Hagel said about losing the war in Iraq. Did he have his fingers crossed when he said it? You know: It's not a lie if you cross your fingers when you say it.

Plus, it helps put the Democrats off balance. It makes them see "the light at the end of the tunnel."

So it's a plot to make it seem as if a few folks disagree with Bush. Just to fake them out.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Do know that Bob has a real-money bet going with a few readers that Bush will be sworn in for a third term in 2008 ? either the twenty-second amendment will be repealed or elections cancelled due to some emergency, or something. He is certain.

But still the national conversation is hot. What Richard Durbin of Illinois said on Flag Day, Tuesday, June 14, on the floor of the senate (the PDF document is here and our first round-up on it here) is still being discussed. For example Hugh Hewiit and William Kristol over at the neoconservative Weekly Standard want his hide. And over at Powerline you can read the letter former Speaker, Newt Gingrich, sent to every sitting senator, calling for formal censure of Durbin.

By his statements equating American treatment of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay with the behavior of the evil regimes of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, Senator Richard Durbin has dishonored the United States and the entire U.S. Senate. Only by a vote to censure Senator Durbin for his conduct can the U.S. Senate restore its dignity and defend American honor.

Senator Durbin's comparison, sadly, is despicable.

U.S. Senators should be clear about the gravity of Senator Durbin's comparison. Nine million innocent human beings were murdered in Hitler's death camps, nearly three million perished in the gulags under Stalin, and more than one and a half million were slaughtered in the killing fields of Cambodia at the hand of Pol Pot. And while not a single terrorist has died in detention at Guantanamo, Senator Durbin sees fit to liken our American service men and women to the terrifying murderers of three evil despotic regimes.

Moreover, Senator Durbin equates the terrorist detainees at Guantanamo with the millions of innocent men, women, and children exterminated by the order of evil dictators. The fact that he did so as a high ranking member of the Senate on the Senate floor makes his comparison all the more shocking.

This moral equivalence isn't just utterly false; it endangers the lives of our young men and women in the military because it arms every radical Islamist with the official-record words of a Senate leader to justify their war of terror against civilized people everywhere.

Senator Durbin's statement of "regret" on Friday has only compounded the need for the Senate to act. In it, Senator Durbin said that "I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood. I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true feelings?" Incredibly, Senator Durbin is sticking to his original assertion that there is indeed, in his own words, an "historic parallel" between U.S. soldiers at Guantanamo Bay and the killers under Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. In other words, his only regret is that Americans don't understand his misreading of history and that he has caused us to misunderstand him. Offering no apology for the original slanderous statement itself, Senator Durbin has chosen instead to actually defend his comparisons. This defense makes his original speech all the more revolting.

It's one thing for one Senator to endanger young Americans and defame America; it would be the shame of the Senate if the other 99 senators did not stand up to defend America and to defend the reputation of our young men and women in uniform.

A Senate censure of Senator Durbin is justified and would reaffirm a standard for healthy, rational debate. By voting for or against the censure, the rest of the members of the U.S. Senate can go on record and make clear how they judge Senator Durbin's characterization of American soldiers. It will also send a clear message to terrorists who will use the words of a Senate leader against us that the Senate stands in support of America and our military and against those who seek to destroy the free people of the United States.

There is historic precedent for censuring Senators whose words bring dishonor and disrepute on the Senate and impair its dignity; Senator Durbin's words fit that precedent.

In this case, expressing outrage is not enough. It is time for the Senate to act. Senator Durbin must be censured now.

Well, we shall see what happens. John at Powerline adds this is a good way to see who loves America and who hates America. Count the votes.

? the American people deserve to know who, if anyone, agrees with Durbin's slander of our armed forces, so that when those Senators run for re-election, they can be defeated. Senators should not be able to hide behind a discreet "no comment," as Hillary Clinton has done. This is not a time for our elected officials to be neutral as between the terrorists and the armed forces of the United States.

For us - and for each and every thing we do or say - or against us - wanting to murder Americans and on the side of the terrorists and, in fact, aiding and abetting the enemies of the nation, as in "treason." Choose now. Be quick.

Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Sullivan, who calls himself conservative, offers this view -

I've now read and re-read Senator Dick Durbin's comments on interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. They are completely, perfectly respectable. The rank hysteria being perpetrated by some on the right is what is shameful. Hugh Hewitt should answer one single question: does he doubt the FBI interrogator who witnessed the appalling treatment of some detainees at Guantanamo? Here's the report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

Is Hewitt arguing that the interrogator was lying?

Does he believe that the kind of tactics used against this prisoner are worthy of the United States?

Does he believe that this happened without authorization?

If he were told this story and informed that it occurred in, say, Serbia under Milosevic, would he be surprised?

Hewitt should then answer the same question about the five detainees which the U.S. government itself has acknowledged were tortured to death by U.S. interrogators, and the scores of others who died in detention during or after "interrogation".

Does he deny that this happened?

Does he honestly believe that removing the legal restrictions on cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees by our current president had nothing to do with this?

Maybe he needs a little refresher on the extraordinary range and scale of the record of abuse that is still accumulating. I'm just amazed that some can view what has happened and their first instinct is to attack those who have criticized it, rather than those who have perpetrated it. It is this administration that has brought indelible shame on America, and it's people like Dick Durbin who prove that some can actually stand up against this stain on American honor and call it what it is. Good for him. Thank God for him.

Yeah, well Sullivan is gay so he doesn't count.

And as Chris Wallace of Fox News said on the June 17 Hugh Hewitt radio show - "I think they would have been very happy to be allowed to defecate on themselves." The idea is that's a whole lot better than what we could do, and often do. Like, who cares?

Yep, there is a discussion out there that is bringing things to a point.

Even the soldiers join in. As in this in Eric Alterman's column in MSNBC -

Name: Justin LeBlanc
Hometown: Seoul, Korea

That's it, I've had it. I'm tired of going on line and reading about all these people who attack Bush and his administration's policies for going to war with Iraq. I'm a soldier and I think that we did the right thing and still think we are. I challenge you (Dr. Alterman) and any other liberal who cares more about Europe's opinion than our own country's safety to reply to this email. Yes, we are in a war and people die. I'll certainly be heading over to fight in the sandbox soon enough when I complete my tour here in Korea. We took out one of the most hostile individuals of my generation. We took out a ruthless dictator who got his kicks off raping his neighbors and killing his own citizens. People want to characterize Gitmo as the "gulag" of our times; well, Hussein was the "Stalin" of our times. I really don't care whether we found weapons of mass destruction. Whether he had them or not is no concern of mine. What's of more concern to me is my family's safety years from now. What's of more concern to me is the shape of the Middle East decades from now. Iraq is a democracy and lets begin to celebrate that. I'm certain we'll be seeing sweeping changes, all for the better, in that region over the next 20 years that we previously thought we wouldn't see in our lifetime. I hope, when it is all said and done, you congratulate the President on taking measures he thought were necessary to keep our country and our planet safe. One day, a few decades from now, you and your "progressives" (if you can honestly call yourselves that) are going to have to own up to the fact that what the President did, however difficult, was good for Iraq, good for the Middle East, good for us, and good for the planet. Oh, answer me this Dr. Alterman, how many people did Saddam kill? Oh, that's right, you can't answer that - THEY'RE STILL COUNTING!

Replies? There are a whole bunch of them here -

Name: Mike Wright
Hometown: Nellis AFB, NV

Dr. Alterman,
In response to the e-mail you published from Mr. LeBlanc, I would like to offer the following response: Mr. LeBlanc, you may be a soldier in the U.S. military; I am glad that you are not a disgrace to my own branch of the service. My experiences since I have worn the uniform have led me to believe that we are the best and most professional military force in the world, however your apparent doctrine of the ends justifying the means is doing as much to challenge my beliefs as the idiots at Abu Ghraib. We are supposed to hold ourselves to the highest standards. We receive annual training in military standards, the Law of Armed Conflict amongst others, and at all times are supposed to live up to the core values of our profession. We are not supposed to use the moral character of our opponents as an excuse for behavior that falls outside of those standards. Your statement trivializing the comments on Guantanamo Bay simply because "Hussein was the 'Stalin' of our times" shows that you have paid little attention to the training and the core values of the U.S. Army. There is no honor in mistreating prisoners. There is no integrity in breaking the law, simply because you want information or rationalize it as applying the enemies' rules against them. There is no courage or selfless service displayed, no duty or loyalty to anything other than the egos of those doing wrong. Any respect that we might have had in the areas surrounding the prison has been severely, if not irreparably, damaged. The same flaw runs through the rest of your argument. If you truly believe that the ends justify the means, then you yourself are no better than Stalin or any other despot that figures he can do no wrong. I have served in Iraq. I know the good that we can and have done in the lives of the Iraqi population. I also know that any good that we do is enhanced or ruined by HOW we accomplish that good.

You might go read the whole exchange.

From others?

- "I am a veteran and I understand your dismay at the criticisms leveled at your Commander In Chief. However, please remember that your oath was not to a man but to an ideal established by our Forefathers and embodied in our Constitution. Lies and manipulation that result in thousands upon thousands of dead Americans and Iraqis is neither in keeping with your oath nor that of the office of the President."

- "First, thank you for your service to our country. Secondly, a fundamental problem with the war in Iraq is that it has not made the U.S. any safer (Osama's still at large, the country's nuclear facilities are still unprotected, DPRK, Iran, etc.). It has only drawn troops and resources away from places that actually do have (or will soon have) nuclear weapons and the capability to launch them against us or our allies. Further, it has diminished our moral authority to lead. We say, "X has nuclear weapons...no we mean it this time." They say, "Are you going to fall for *that* one from the Americans again?" We are not in a position to act effectively unilaterally again."

- "Hussein was a bad man and it's good that he cannot continue to harm people. He got what he deserved and I enjoyed seeing him get it. But, that doesn't mean we were right to trump up bogus charges to do it. If we wanted to go to war because he brutally tortured and killed his own citizens, we should have just said so up front. It may not matter to you that we did not find the stockpiles of weapons, but it drastically affects our ability to act in the world: instead of talking about the DPRK and its ability to launch the nuclear warheads it has onto Japan and the west coast, we are arguing about Iraq. Instead of focusing on Pakistan's AQ Khan and his 'helpfulness' or the stability of Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal, the President and company are busy trying to cover their asses and justify their actions."

- "Hi, Just read the letter from Justin LeBlanc, and I have to admit to being baffled. He doesn't care if there were WMDs or not. Well, if there weren't, in what way, exactly, did invading Iraq impact his family's future safety? Iraq was not a threat to the U.S., even our closest allies agree with that. On the other hand, we have assuredly made generational enemies of thousands of Iraqi citizens, and thousands more Muslims around the world, through our extra-legal torture activities in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. And the families of the tens of thousands of innocent civilian casualties in Iraq will certainly never be our friends, either. And the assertion that we're better than Stalin? Better than Saddam? Is that the best we as a country can aspire to be? Please."

What's all this conversation about? Lots of people, starting over the last few weeks, are suddenly all worked up. Well, Bob says it means nothing as Bush will be president for a third term, or more, and what folks say is just insignificant, and those of us who sense a widening rift here in America, and sense the president is losing traction (or whatever), are just stupid and unenlightened.

Ah, maybe so. But it's an interesting show.

Posted by Alan at 16:53 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Monday, 20 June 2005 17:15 PDT home

Sunday, 19 June 2005

Topic: Photos

Check it out!

In addition to spending two hours this morning at the eight annual Rodeo Drive Annual Concours - the amazing cars on display in the middle of Beverly Hills – late this afternoon I posted the new issue of Just Above Sunset, the weekly parent site to this daily web log. That would be Volume 3, Number 25 - for the week of June 19, 2005 - posted at 4:21 PM Pacific Time.

This may be the first travel and celebrity issue - Tom and Katie and Paris - and an exclusive letter for Tel Aviv, an intimate view of life there today. That, and three pages of photos from Paris this week. The local photography is full of celebrities too. Real ones. Here in Hollywood. And the quotes this week pertain to that.

But there are big doings in current events too - many people now are asking some basic questions about what we are doing, a famous dispute is settled, perhaps, the US Senate offers a rare and useless apology, and various people rethink what we should think about. That would include the wrap of the Michael Jackson business, and what we missed because of the attention we paid to it. Much of those are extended versions of what first appeared here.

And of course Bob Patterson is back with something on what the American Trucking Association can teach us, and with his book notes on the basics, and more. None of that appeared on the web log.

As for the automobiles on display on the swankiest shopping street in the world, well, I took 235 pictures and it will take some time to edit them into a photo album.

What was there?

- Nicolas Cage's 1954 Bentley Fastback
- The Hearst Family's 1960 Jaguar Mark 2 Fastback
- A 1959 Corvette formerly owned by televison's Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore
- Wayne Gretzky's 1989 Porsche Speedster Fastback
- Laurence Fishburne's Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle from the Biker Boyz Fastback (huh?)
- The 1932 Howard Hughes Duesenberg featured in the film The Aviator
- Jean Harlow's 1932 Packard Sport Phaeton

There was much more - old Ferraris from ages ago, Cords, rare one-of-a-kind Bentleys, two old gull-wing Mercedes, a Minerva, a Cadillac V16 monster from the thirties and so on and so forth.

Just to give you a flavor, some close-ups (in 1919 the Hispano-Suiza company decided to use a stork as its symbol, the emblem used by French ace Georges Guynemer, who flew an Hispano-Suiza-powered Spad VIII):

Jean Harlow's 1932 Packard

Quick access to pages in the new Just Above Sunset:

Current Events _________

Why Thursday?: After all this time it's now time to talk about the war?
Case Closed: Dead, Autopsy, Enough Said
Race: "Never apologize, son. It's a sign of weakness."
Dissent: Conversations About Odd News Items
Book Notes: Hedging Your Bets
News Notes: What to cover is the question?

News and Fame _________

Enough Already: Michael Jackson So Over
France Turns a Bit American: What's Up with That?
Other News: While Fox, CNN, MSNBC and the networks deal with Michael
Paris News: Cruise, Holmes, Dump Cruz and Klein, Climb Eiffel
Quotes regarding Michael Jackson in Santa Maria and Tom Cruise on the Eiffel Tower

Bob Patterson _________

WLJ Weekly: from the desk of the World's Laziest Journalist - Online Magazines Should Learn from the American Trucking Association: There's Strength in Numbers
Book Wrangler: Barmecide Banquets - and other imaginary items from Baghdad

Features _________

Our Man in Tel-Aviv: Israeli Contrasts

Guest Photography _________

Vrai Paris: More from Left Bank Lens
Etonnant par Paris: Unusual shots from Left Bank Lens (held over)
Our Man in Paris: Summer in the City

Local Photography _________

West Hollywood Parade: Where was Paris Hilton?
Somehow Unsettling: Odd LA

Posted by Alan at 20:05 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Sunday, 19 June 2005 20:24 PDT home

Newer | Latest | Older

«	June 2005					»

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30