Two items that caught my eye watching the local news in Dallas over the Thanksgiving weekend: 12 protestors were arrested outside the Bush family's ranch in Crawford. A new bye-law prevents anyone from protesting within seven miles of the property. Some Texas cities asked residents frying Turkey to keep hold of the cooking oil. The authorities planned to collect the oil and recycle it into biodiesel.(A nice surprise, particularly as gasoline here is below $2 per gallon once again).
'Do you eat reggae?', or thoughts on Culture present
Just back from a great evening of roots reggae at the VK club. Culture, of 'Two Sevens Clash' fame, was in town (and what timing: "It's only a housing scheme that divides," they sang back in '77. Tell it to the kids of Clichy-sous-Bois!) Frontman Joseph Hill's rich voice is still in great shape. He also has a pithy way with words, introducing one track by saying, "Reggae is rebel music, but make no mistake, reggae is a rebel with a cause." And in Culture's hands indeed it is. But it's still party music too and the crowd didn't stop moving for the two hours the band was on stage. As Telford Nelson, Albert Walker and the rest of the musicians prepared to strike up the classic 'I'm not ashamed,' Hill explained that in Jamaica, treating houseguests well is very important. "And I'm not feeding you like swine. Do you eat reggae?... Come and dine on reggae music." So we did, even asking for a second helping, which Culture duly served up with aplomb. The Chartist William Cobbett once wrote, "I defy you to agitate any fellow with a full stomach." Culture is that rare band, one able to satisfy physical hungers (for rhythm, timbre, melody) without losing its convictions or the power of its message: Long may they continue.
Inshallah, 2006 will see Roger Corman pass two milestones: his 80th birthday (a date he shares with yours truly), and his 365th film as a producer. The latter is currently slated to be 'Deathrace 3000', which, if anything like its 1975 prequel, the notorious 'Death Race 2000', will be well worth seeing. In fact, to acknowledge the man's achievements I propose declaring 2006 The Year of Roger Corman, to be celebrated by watching one of his productions every day from January 1st to December 31st. It would certainly knock those 'Star Wars' and '24' marathon viewing sessions into a cocked hat.
One of the most interesting evenings out I've had in a while was a guided tour last week of La Monnaie, Brussel's famous opera house, as part of my Dutch course. As well as a visit to the theatre itself with its beautiful Josepeh Poelaert interiors, the tour also encompassed a trip to the nearby seven-storey building where the opera company rehearses, makes and stores its costumes and builds its sets. For someone used to the mend and make do nature of amateur theatre, the sheer scale of the operation is quite something to behold. For instance, La Monnaie has 12 full-time employees making women's costumes and three full-time shoemakers. It also has a fabulous (one-tenth scale) working model of the opera house at Bayreuth in Germany. Sadly, seeing one of the La Monnaie's productions is rather more difficult than seeing its buildings: some 80% of all tickets go to season-ticket holders and the remainder are, as you can imagine in a world-class opera house that holds less than 1,200 people, highly sought after.
I had been preparing a post about how great it was to see dominoes world record attempts back on the TV (a fond memory of watching 'Record Breakers' as a child). But, the shooting of a sparrow that knocked over some 23,000 of the 4 million-plus dominoes being set up by Dutch TV production company, Endemol for an (ultimately succesful) record-breaking attempt last Friday, kind of put a dampener on that. The sparrow is an endangered species in the Netherlands and Endemol, best known for creating Big Brother, may now face a legal investigation into the shooting. It was dedication that you need, sang Roy Castle, not an air rifle (!)
The International Rugby Board's decision to award the 2011 World Cup to New Zealand rather than Japan is another example of the short-sightedness that has held back the development of the game as a major global sport. Having recently attended Belgium's 26-20 World Cup qualifying victory over Croatia and seen the enthusiasm of the home supporters at the final whistle (most of the crowd of around 1,500 invaded the pitch to mob their heroes), it is clear that there is a growing appetite for rugby union outside its traditional powerbase - England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, France, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Argentina and Italy. The Japanese World Cup bid was a great opportunity to acknowledge that the game is played in other countries too, but, like Geordan Murphy for Ireland against Australia yesterday, the IRB somehow contrived to waste a glorious chance.
This photo shows the exterior of Santiago nightclub, Blondie (the awning with the 'B' logo that is remarkably similar to Henry van de Velde's design for the Belgian Railways). The Britney Spears and N'Sync special I attended there last month was quite an eye opener. I have never seen a club as busy on a Sunday night: there must have been 1,500 people inside. Getting in was quite a hassle. The club opened about 45 minutes late and the security checks seemed to take forever, meaning that the place filled up slowly. The slightly decrepit building housed two dance floors: one with room for about 100 people where the DJ was spinning 80s synth pop (New Order, Soft Cell, etc) and a much larger main hall for 1,000 to 1,500 people, complete with video screens. Here, the evening started with the Britney Spears Special, which bizarrely was a replay of a live concert taped off French cable channel, MCM. Later, once the floor was full, the DJs brought the crowd to a frenzy with a succession of N'Sync videos (including the one where they are N'Sync dolls come to life in a toy shop). Chilean taste in music is a little quirky to say the least. The aren't many places where you can walk into the metro and see Queen's 'Fat Bottomed Girls' on a video screen. You can in Santiago. Equally, it is one of the few cities where you can still buy a badge celebrating 1980s hardcore punks Minor Threat with little difficulty. Friends from Brazil and Colombia who accompanied me on the trip were surprised that they never heard Chilean music in any of the restaurants we visited, only music from other parts of Latin America. In Colombia and Brazil, local music is heard all the time, they explained.
Whatever your views on Wikipedia as a piece of scholarship (and it certainly has plenty of flaws in that regard), by attempting to be a truly global online resource it has given a fillip to minority language activists the world over. After all, which traditional publisher would even consider an encyclopaedia in Cornish? A glance at the list of Wikipedias (Wikipedium?) reveals that there is at least one article posted in 198 different languages. And there are some interesting trends in the data: more articles in Dutch than in Spanish or Chinese; close to 30,000 articles in Esperanto, making it the 16th most common language on the site (ahead of Hebrew, Ukrainian and Korean); more articles in a language as obscure as Walloon, than in one as widely spoken as Persian. Partly these trends are a result of demographics - many Belgians (where Walloon is dying out) are online, few Iranians. But more important, at least in some cases, is the activist effect. After all, there are many more Korean speakers on the web than Esperanto speakers, but Esperantists are proseletysers for their tongue, they have to push its benefits as a global lingua franca (see previous post). Similarly, the few remaining speakers of a dying language such as Walloon will try their utmost to keep the embers alive. Other European minority tongues - Welsh, Limburgs, Neapolitan - are also comparatively highly-placed in the ranking, further evidence of the activist effect.
The first Esperanto television channel for a global audience was launched last week out of Sao Paulo, Brazil by businessman Flavio Rebelo. The Internet-based Internacia Televido will carry a range of programming, including news, documentaries, interviews, music and film coverage, travel guides and pieces on 'exotic cultures', says a press release from the Flemish Esperanto Society (VEB). The release quotes Rebelo as saying that, after years of stagnation, Esperanto is spreading quickly again through the auspices of thousands and thousands of young netizens who are learning the language online.
More copycat violence in Brussels: 100 youths involved in disturbances in the city centre this evening. The longer the uprising in France continues, the more likely that there will be further outbreaks of this kind of behaviour in its francophone neighbour.
My first reaction on hearing Arctic Monkeys was not, as some generous critics have called them, 'The Northern Libertines'. It was, 'at last the neo-wave has its Jilted John!' 'I bet that you look good on the dancefloor' is a piece of fluff, Splodgenessabounds for Chris Moyles listeners. A famous wag once said that humour should be like a knife, you should feel the point as well as see it. With the Sex Pistols, the Smiths or Pulp, the laughs were all the more pleasurable because the barbed words were like a knife to the ribs of well-deserved targets. But with the new generation of bands influenced by the the punk, post-punk and new wave era? Either the pointless laughs of an Arctic Monkeys, or the humourless angst of a Bloc Party (who, for all the anthemic quality of a song such as 'Banquet' left me a little cold at the Halles de Schaarbeek the other night). As my friend Victor S said to me at Moeder Lambic recently, there is so much trouble in the world, so much material for sharp, hip bands, why are the new UK rave (Arctic Monkeys) a group whose message is essentially no different from that of Britney Spears? Why indeed?
Having spent a night at The Grand Hyatt Hotel, Amman in January, it is all too easy to imagine the carnage of last night. But, as John Tulloch eloquently proves in today's Guardian, even when terrorism is this close to home we do not need to lose our principles out of fear. Of course security is important, but why avoid physical harm by having a triple-locked door and armed guards when you can create the conditions to safely leave your door unlocked? One reason why I can leave my door unlocked and do not feel afraid walking the streets of Brussels, even in the poorer quarters is that, for all the racism and unemployment that effect the lives of kids of Turkish or African descent, it is a much better integrated city than those of France, for instance. Although there have been a small number of arson attacks this week, imitating the genuine and deep-rooted rage of the French rioters, Brussels is a city where the different classes, races and religions often do rub shoulders. Not that you would believe that reading the latest crock from the Vlaams Belang, which is using a couple of cars been burned out by some restless teenagers as a reason to call for the stripping of Belgian nationality from anyone involved in such violence who was not born in the country. Apart from the fact that the fascists are pouring petrol on the flames once again, it is ironic that the head of an organisation that supports the secession of Flanders from the Belgian state should be such a champion of the Belgian national identity (!)
Even more than 'Lost', the show I can't bear to miss at the moment has to be 'Arrested Development'. AD reminds me a little of 'Soap' filtered through a sieve of'Seinfeld'. And like both those shows, it is a twisted laugh-riot. For some reason, BBC 2's schedulers have consigned the programme to the 11pm on a Sunday night graveyard zone (previously occupied by the excellent and underrated 'Trevor's World of Sport'). Let's hope they see sense and move it to the kind of timeslot it deserves.
I'm sure the European Central Bank will be pleased to learn that the five euro note is washing-machine-proof. That must be what makes it such a strong currency today!
Tom Wolfe's latest novel 'I am Charlotte Simmons' has received mixed reviews for its portrayal of life at the fictionalized US university, Dupont. For the Guardian's Jerome de Groot, the novel is, "Arrogant, prurient, self-regarding, verbose and ultimately a little shallow." At the other end of the scale, the Mail on Sunday called it, "A blistering indictment of contemporary standards." Both positions have some credibility. In the plus column, the author captures the flavour of campus life at one of America's top colleges pretty well - at least according to friends who went to Ivy League schools. The 'sexiling', the one-upmanship and the shallowness are all real and pretty faithfully represented. He also skillfully integrates into the narrative some of the class and race issues that are often brushed under the carpet in the US, as well as ruthlessly exposing the hypocrysies of its college sports system. However, by having a national champion basketball team and Nobel Prize winning lecturers at the same school, Wolfe has created a strange amalgam of Ivy League and state university. The idea seems to have been to make Dupont the 'ideal' US college, but the separation of the elite schools from the schools that pursue sporting excellence is an important distinction in the US and to elide these class differences is to miss the point a little. Like Dupont University, the main characters too are essentially archetypes - brilliant but innocent outsider (Charlotte Simmons), frat boy (Hoyt Thorpe), nerd (Adam Gellin), jock (Jo Jo Johanssen), left-wing professor (Jerome Quat). Wolfe has drawn flak from de Groot and other critics for this one-dimensional characterization. For my part, the principals are detailed enough to be believable in the context of the story, which, as a synthesis of the bildungsroman form with the comedy of social manners, is, in any case, more concerned with plot development than character development. The focus on plot and Wolfe's keen social anthropological eye means that the novel rarely drops in tempo, making turning the page no real effort. Although the various strands of the narrative come together nicely, the ending did feel a little glib, particularly after the sharpness of much of what had come earlier. Final verdict: Flawed, but still worth reading.
If, as some commentators suggest, the new NBA dress code is intended to make the sport 'less black' by banning hip-hop attire and enforcing a 'smart casual' look, it could actually have the opposite effect. As students of Cultural Studies will remember from reading books such as Dick Hebdige's 'Subculture: The meaning of style', Angel McRobbie's 'Zoot suits and second hand dresses' and Stuart Hall's 'Resitance through rituals', throughout the post-war period youth subcultures have taken great pleasure in turning society's stylistic norms on its head. Think of the Teddy Boys in 1950s England, with their mockery of the fashions of the Edwardian dandy. Or the Mexicans and their Zoot Suits in 1940s America. Or the Mods and Casuals, with their smarter-than-thou approach to clothing, dressing like everyone else only more so. A similar look could arise in the US, with ghetto kids sporting chinos and Aquascutum blazers in a similar perversion of white, middle class dress codes as that employed by working class and unemployed UK kids (Chavs if you will) when they adopted 'golf club' brands such as Pringle and Burberry as marques of distinction.
One of the highlights of my recent trip to Chile was dinner inside the Giratorio, Santiago's very own revolving restaurant. There's something very satisfying about watching a city go idly by as you tuck into your nosh. Back in the 90s I had something of a penchant for revolving restaurants, visiting two in Bratislava in one week. I reckon this is some kind of nostalgic impulse driven by the Kitten Kong episode of The Goodies, with its memorable scene involving London's Post Office Tower. There is something very modernist about the whole revolving restaurant thing: a 60s/70s International Style fad that has just about survived into the 21st century. You can imagine Augusto Pinochet, fresh from one of his shopping trips to London, asking Santiago's city planners to come up with something that could replicate the GPO Tower dining experience. Bizarrely, my main course at the Giratorio was like a Chilean riff on fish'n'chips: battered conger eel and a fried egg and chips. Not bad actually. And the wine was, as you'd expect in Chile, excellent. Unlike with some revolving restos I have visited, the Giratorio building itself does not move, instead the restaurant is on a kind of giant turntable inside a rectangular steel and glass structure. With mountains on all sides, the 90 minute 'journey' around Santiago is a picturesque and contemplative experience. Can the Muzak though please guys! As far as I know, no-one has set a movie inside a revolving restaurant, but it would make a great backdrop to the passage of time in one location. You can imagine a film about Chile from the 1970s to the present day, with every scene taking place at a table in the Giratorio...The passing of the seasons, the journey from hope to despair and back again. So many possibilities...
"Some major US media outlets (e.g. NY Times) have picked up on the existence of an Internet radio station for cats and dogs, DogCatRadio. The broadcasters say their aim is to soothe the nerves of pets while their owners are out. I thought I would road test it with our two cats: Easter (17) and her son, Beltane (10). Easter slept through the whole experience, while Beltane seemed decidedly unimpressed (although, as my fiancee pointed out, he has always been more of a visual cat). For my part, I thought the music was dreadful MOR pop and soft rock dreck, not at all cool for cats. Maybe it's a dog thing?
