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la vie viennoise

What a nice surprise. The president of the United States can read again. An end to my pet goat (what Bush was reading aloud to school children as the 9/11 Reichstag fire took place). George Bush Jr. was proud that he had managed to read Albert Camus' The Stranger on summer holiday. Most people with even a little bit of intellectual get and go have read Camus by the time they are through high school.

ex-President George Bush reading My Pet Goat on 9/11: Heck of a job, Brownie!

Columnists can go back to recommending books (above grade six level) for the president of the United States and hope that he could read them. The issue is not whether President Obama could read or understand the book but if he would have time. Why the right wing semi-intellectuals ever admired Bush Jr. is beyond me.

Perhaps, the whole man of action meme. They feel like they are the nasty geeks backing the stupid school bully. As long as Goliath is in their corner, they can just do whatever awful thing they like to the rest of their classmates. Well it turns out this colossus has feet of clay and the stones will be falling on their collective shifty heads for a good decade or two - or perhaps until the last syllable of recorded time. The worst presidency in the history of the United States will not be forgotten soon and its crimes will only grow with time. We still haven't forgotten the psychopathic Nero.

I would hate to think that to be a man of action, one has to be an imbecile - or at best a crafty, slacking bully.

Maybe talk is cheap, but thought is not.

Presdient Barrack Obama reading The Post American World

Why are we so on fire on the left? For the first time in several decades, leadership in the US seems to be following Plato's model. Perhaps President Obama is not so reluctantly being dragged out of his philosopher's cave, but at least he started as a thinker, a teacher (law professor) and a helper of men (community organizer).

Rather amazingly the New York Times, David Brooks manages to argue from both sides of his mouth.

He is against the bailout of the big three auto companies, but he is for the bailout of the banks:

Democrats from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi want to grant immortality to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. They have decided to follow an earlier $25 billion loan with a $50 billion bailout, which would inevitably be followed by more billions later, because if these companies are not permitted to go bankrupt now, they never will be.

This is a different sort of endeavor than the $750 billion bailout of Wall Street. That money was used to save the financial system itself. It was used to save the capital markets on which the process of creative destruction depends.

This just doesn't make any sense.

Bailouts for whom? Capitalist hypocrisy stumbles Continues »

Jörg Haider was the first person I met in Austria outside of my girlfriend's family.

Anna was dancing at the opening of the Carinthian Summer Musical Festival in July 2003. I had been in Austria for about two days before the festival. We'd had time to go swimming once and then it was off to the lake and Anna's performance there.

We were both thinking about the dance - the choreography was in order, but we were still concerned about her costume and Anna's hair. Anna had to get her head shaved for the asylum scenes in Lapinthrope just a week before. Wigs, scarves, hats were all proposed to make hide her shaved head. In the end the bare head prevailed (it's a lot easier to dance modern without something precarious glued to your head). With a woman as beautiful as Anna that summer and a dancer as talented as Anna, the audience is unlikely to pay too much attention to the length of her hair. And so it was.

The dance went very well.

On the way there, I heard Haider would be there, in his role of Landeshauptmann to open the festival.

Of course, I'd heard of Jörg Haider before. Even in Canada we got news of the Austrian politician who was supposed to be a new Hitler, threatening the rise of a fourth Reich.

Based on what I'd read in the press, I expected to find a brute - either foaming at the mouth and shrieking like Hitler or a portly sadist like Goering.

Instead, an elegantly attired fortyish and athletic man in an immaculately tailored Italian suit rose and spoke for over half an hour. If Haider had notes, he didn't need or use them much. It was the first time I'd heard a long speech in German, outside of the vituperative extracts from Hitler's rallies.

jorg haider speaks

Haider's voice was resonant and clear, the structure of his sentences as well tailored as his suit. Little acquainted with the German language at that time, I was only able to follow the phonetic balance of Haider's rhetoric.

The audience was as rapt as I'd ever seen at the speech of a politician. From Haider's end there appeared to be little grandstanding - none of the whipping up of the crowd that so cheapens many politician's public speaking. Just an engaging speech.

Like most young Carinthian women living in Vienna, Anna had an obligatory loathing of Haider. Later I learned why from Astrid. If you didn't profess anti-Haider sentiment, you would instantly be blackballed back in Vienna. You would be ghettoized as an undesirable Carinthian.

Fortunately I don't have to live in Texas and get emails like this young woman:

It seems like every day I am inundated with email forwards, usually from church members, extolling the virtues of our nation's leaders and the current war.

Dead Iraqi Civilians

The hypocrisy of it is not lost on her:

What really gets under my skin is that these emails are, nine times out of ten, from the holier-than-thou types who go to church six times a week and spend all of their spare time there as well. The type that won't let their kids watch the Disney channel because it's too violent. The type that scold adults for saying "shoot" or "darn" because it's just a substitute for a "bad" word....They're the ones that are always sending me these emails about how wonderful it is to bomb cities full of women and children because of a lie. They're the ones talking about how wonderful the leaders telling us those lies are. And they're the ones that are blindly supporting a candidate who openly advocates more of both.

Hopefully more Americans and more Christians are awaking to the catastrophic consequences for an entire people. It is incredible that this blatant land grab - frankly akin to the Third Reich's bloody occupation of Poland - is taking place every day as we speak.

My post about Palestinians and Indians remains as valid today as it was then. One can now make the parallel to Iraqis and Indians, with Americans as themselves, a century later.

It's a good thing that there is finally hope that the American military will be back in safe hands next year. But there's a ways to go before Barrack Obama is elected.

• The implosion of the music business beginning strangely with F.D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Peter Drucker's management analyss. The article concludes with case studies of Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and Peter Gabriel discussing in a serious way what might replace it.

  Despite any claims about deceased actors who snoozed through their Alzheimer's dementia in the White House, the Soviet Union failed because their economy tanked. They went bankrupt in a foolish glut of military spending trying to convince the U.S. that it was a equal or superior military force. Now the U.S. faces a similar situation, in a world without cold war arms racing, the U.S. outspends all the nations of the world combined on it's military. This is completely unnecessary, a loss of treasure that could be used for the good of all, and directs the nation into needless conflicts that are not "defensive"in nature. Ironically the same mindset that bankrupted the U.S.S.R. is now bankrupting the U.S.A.

• album cover art through a case study of the Hipgnosis set who created many Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and 10CC covers. The desmise of the LP has lost us an art form.

  
  Hipgnosis Album Art

• a review of current and past war propaganda. "Terror" verus "Shock and Awe".

  Here's an excerpt:

  When the colonists opposed the British, and dumped tea, it was called a "party". Sounds like fun. They, who combine to fight back, we call the "axis of evil". But when we are lucky enough to pull together 3 or 4 countries that still agree with us, we call them "an alliance of the willing."...
  
  It is war. People are killed in order to allow one group of rich men to prevail over another less rich group. We don't fight for honor, though the men who fight have the best intentions because they don't know any better. They follow the bouncing ball and sing the song, ooh rah, and people die while my finances, peace of mind and safety quickly fade.

  

Secret Service and Barrack Obama and The New Deal Continues »

While working on some WordPress plugins, I found some unbelievable news about abuse of copyright over on YouTube. From the world's biggest pirate, YouTube has become an unbearable censor of personal expression and free communication.

Chris Pederson's private videos of motor racing were taken down - and he got some nasty legal notifications.

However, in the last year I have had three videos removed by YouTube for copyright infringement under the DMCA.

Videos

The three videos are all of outdoor sporting events filmed as a spectator: two of motor racing at Brands Hatch in England and one of the Red Bull Air Race over San Francisco. I have uploaded the three videos to Vimeo for reference, although I do not know how long they will last before being asked to be removed.

It's hard to believe, but it looks like the corporate mass are getting ready to take the internet to slaughter. Finally person to people communication is possible and it will be shut down.

As individuals, we'll have to fight back - putting videos up on our own servers - but it's difficult as ISP's are pretty much obliged to take anything down on first notice.

With my girlfriend the other night we had a long talk about a woman's life in modern society. We ended up concluding that modern women have an even worse deal than their grandmothers.

Pre-feminism, a woman would have to bear and raise the children, take care of the house.

Post-feminism, what has changed?

A woman has to bear and raise the children, take care of the house and go to work and have a career.

What was a tough line has become a damn near impossible challenge (note plummeting motherhood rates among well-educated women).

In my email box from ZDnet came an essay from original feminist Paula Rothenberg entitled "Snatched from the Jaws of Victory: Feminism Then and Now". Rothenberg notes:

Once upon a time the personal really was political. Today, it is simply personal. Capitalist patriarchy has once again showed its extraordinary ability to take radical movements and demands that challenge the system, and re-package them in ways that actually reinforce that system and preserve the existing distribution of power and privilege in society. How convenient for capitalist patriarchy that young women today think that dressing like every man's sex fantasy is a sign of their liberation and that the women's movement was all about getting the right to choose and had nothing to do with making hard decisions about what values and what social vision should be reflected in our choices.

I remember well the sexual revolution of the 1960s. It seemed, briefly, to hold out the hope that women might finally control their bodies, control their own sexuality. But it soon became clear that the new sexual freedom simply meant more opportunity for men, not a new kind of experience for women.

No kidding, ladies.

It used to be that a man had to be somewhat responsible in his relations with women, or he'd be branded a cad and disbarred from polite society. What's going on now in the world is a simple sexual free for all.

You can go through as many girlfriends as you like. Women fling themselves at you all the time. You accept or you don't.

My girlfriends are complaining these days about putting two or three of the best years of their lives into a guy before he loses interest or just drifts off. And no one judges a man for it. "Oh it just didn't work out," pardons the chorus. Multiply by several boyfriends and bingo, a woman is thirty.

No children, no husband in sight. And nothing but some Club Med vacations and pretty Corisica photos to show for it.

Feminism has been very, very good to men.

I almost qualified men with the adjectives potent and attractive but that is a subject for another essay.

virginia tech shooting

Another shooting tragedy in an American educational institution. What is wrong with Americans? Can they not see that loose access to firearms kills? It seems Americans will never learn. G.W. Bush's first official reaction was to defend free access to handguns:

The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed.

Tell your concerns to the madman with a gun in his hand, Mr. Bush. While the bodies are still warm, right wing web pundit Glenn Reynolds opines that even less restrictive gun laws would have saved lives in Virginia.

These things do seem to take place in locations where it’s not legal for people with carry permits to carry guns, though, and I believe that’s the case where the Virginia Tech campus is concerned. I certainly wish that someone had been in a position to shoot this guy at the outset…

Another American takes Glenn Reynolds hypothesis to its logical conclusion. The consequences are frightening:

Not that I want to dive into the politics of this right away, either, but GR’s point is idiotic - there are SO many reasons you wouldn’t want the students to be carrying guns. If the law-abiding student failed to take down the attacker, the attacker would now have an additional firearm - and no real need to reload. Furthermore, picture an entire campus loaded with armed students. Once the first shots go off, you would potentially have dozens of students waving guns in the hall. They’d be just as likely to open fire on each other than on the actual murderer, not to mention all the additional people who could die in the crossfire. Also, the police would have a horrible, horrible time trying to separate friend from foe. This oversimplified “if everyone had guns, this wouldn’t have happened” attitude is terribly wrong.

Basically the more guns on hand, the worse a blood bath would be.

Firearms result in deaths from domestic violence (in this case as well) and facilitate murderous rampages by crazed people.

It's all well and good to say people should not ever be crazed. But it happens. One cannot outlaw human nature.

When there are no guns handy, your crazed person has limited access to weapons of immediate destruction. He or she can only grab an automobile and ram into somebody else (a few dead at worse). He or she might come after people with a knife or an axe. Neither of those variants will result in anything like the death toll of a crazed person with a firearm.

virginia tech candlelight vigil - photo: spector

The NRA argument that the right to bear arms protects the population of the United States from military dictatorship was preposterous from the beginning and has since been proven wrong.

In any case, the military dictatorship has much bigger guns now. They have tanks, APC, grenade launchers, sonic blasters and war planes. What do they care about a few disgruntled citizens with pistols. It just gives the government an excuse to shoot dissenters dead rather than have to imprison and try them in an open court of law.

According to the philosophy behind the original right to bear arms, Americans should be encouraging people to own their own tanks and warplanes, to protect themselves from tyranny. Anything less defeats the purpose of the right.

The politically correct thing to say here would be to express grief for the fallen. Still, it's difficult when their elected leaders continue to support the policies. Something like feeling empathy for the chronic drunk driver whose ran over his own child while intoxicated at the wheel. Stop drinking and driving!

The American "liberation" of Iraq has resulted in daily death counts from Baghdad as high as those of this particular tragedy.

I don't and won't buy into the xenophobic and diabolical belief that American or British or Israeli lives are somehow more sacrosanct than those of other peoples, whether Iraqi, Palestinian or African.

So given the daily death toll in Iraq, I can't count this day as any more tragic than another, apart from Americans unrelenting stupidity about gun control

Anybody who knows me well, knows that my favorites women in the world are Hungarian. Hungairan women are passionate and intelligent. Education in Hungary is first rate. It doesn't hurt that Hungarian cuisine is the best food in Europe east of France and north of Italy.

Beautiful Hungarian Women at the Budapest Parade
September 2006 - Photo: Alec Kinnear

It turns out that Hungarian women are not getting the professional opportunities they deserve:

According to an annual study published by the Central Statistics Office (KSH) and the ministry of social affairs and labor entitled "Women and Men in Hungary" ("Nők és férfiak Magyarországon"), while 54% of people participating in higher education are women, only 8% of university teachers are female. Men are also more successful at the workplace, as they still fill most leading positions. In addition, although women are better educated and speak more languages than their male counterparts, they find it more difficult to climb the career ladder, and only 35% of managers are women.

The percentage of women working part-time is much less in Hungary (4.6%) than the European average (25.9%) because of the lack of opportunities for part-time and remote employment.

In comparison to Slovakia and Bratislava where we have 0% unemployment (well probably 1% which is effectively 0%), the situation in Hungary looks promising. Oodles of energetic and intelligent people looking for challenging work. Hungarians have more get up and go than Slovaks (to put it mildly) so the chances of finding people who can really grow in an expanding company are much greater.

Hungarians have 1500 years of history and their capital is 700 years old. Budapest has been one of the top 10 cities in Europe for much of the last four hundred years.

While Hungarian politics are a mess, an underemployed and well-educated eager workforce of beautiful women in a fabulous city looks awfully good.

View of Buda from Iron Bridge

Delicious Hungarian Nouvelle Cuisine-

It turns out that Joni Mitchell is back at work on an amazing antiwar production - The Fiddle and the Drum - of all things a ballet.

She is still highly motivated by politics:

“Humbly I hope we can make a difference with this ballet,” she told him, speaking of her outrage about the foreign and environmental policies of the United States. “It’s a red alert about the situation the world is in now. We’re wasting our time on this fairy tale war, when the real war is with God’s creation. Nobody’s fighting for God’s creation.”

Hopefully her message will get through. The polar ice caps are melting and we are bombing cities in Iraq and gearing up to begin a nuclear war with Iran. Sometimes one wonders if that dolt Bush isn't really the antichrist, send to bring an end to this earth.

Mitchell suggests a wonderful metaphor - modern civilisation as we know it is on a runaway train.

My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species. I can’t cry about it. In a way I’m inoculated. I’ve suffered this pain for so long. We were expelled from Eden. What keeps us out of Eden?

Well, I’m being more specific now. The West has packed the whole world on a runaway train. We are on the road to extincting ourselves as a species. That’s what I meant when I said that we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

So what is the ballet like?

With 9 songs and 27 dancers, the result is equal parts Busby Berkeley spectacle, political jeremiad and rock opera, a collection of songs that form an essay on war and incipient environmental apocalypse. Young, athletic bodies are sent off to kill and die. The earth is electronically set for destruction. Dire biblical prophecies and the grave warnings of Indian chiefs ring true.

The Fiddle and the Drum - Joni Mitchell, Alberta Ballet

“We’re going to open the curtain” Mr. Grand-Maître explained, “and people who are expecting a ballet will get something more like a rock concert.”

After yesterday's Tanzhommage an Queen, it appears we are no longer in the era of the rock opera but are entering the era of the rock ballet.

Is The Fiddle and the Drum any good as a ballet? The run was short and sweet February 8-10 and February 16-17.

Curiously, William Forsythe has also recently created a political ballet, Three Atmospheric Studies which has even been likened with Picasso's famous antiwar painting Guernica.

The New York Times dance critic questions whether choreographers should venture into political waters.

Mr. Forsythe is hardly the only modern choreographer to have put politics center stage. “The Green Table,” Kurt Jooss’s antiwar masterpiece, was created in 1932 as Hitler was rising to power and is in the repertories of both American Ballet Theater and the Joffrey Ballet. Last year Paul Taylor paid homage to Jooss’s work with “Banquet of Vultures,” with Death again a central figure, but this time he wore a suit and tie and was a stand-in, Mr. Taylor has said, for President Bush....

“There are exceptions,” said Joseph V. Melillo, the longtime executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a leading showcase for progressive art. “But the majority of contemporary choreographers in the U.S. today do not think about their place as citizen-artists in response to the political atmosphere. That’s not to say they don’t talk about the war when they’re having a cup of coffee at Dean & Deluca, but they’re not doing that in their art. There’s a disconnect.”

What is striking about Mr. Forsythe, Mr. Melillo said, is that “an artist of his stature would so wholeheartedly and without reservation craft a work of art that is political in content and structure.”

Why are choreographers going political? First, the media are very heavily censored. Second, political leadership is so far in opposition to the will of a large part of the populations.

I've seen this phenomenon before, where theatre plays a huge role in politics. It was at the end of the Soviet Union. People were still hesitant to offer a straight critique of the regime. But via theatre the artists staged works into which an astute audience could read contemporary political allegory or analogy. Theatre na Taganke was famous for this kind of indirect political commentary.

In a totalitarian society, media is the first sacrifice. It is much harder to keep reign on the indirect speech of the world of theatre.

Totalitarianism seems to have a salutary effect on art, forcing it to ask harder questions about society. The late Soviet theatre was known for its quality and depth. Whether dance will successfully handle its new role as political critic is an open question. To my mind, dance is more about the personal and the internal than the societal. Dance longs to tell individual tales of love and loss. Yet Yuri Grigorovich was able to make a few majestic political ballets, notably Ivan the Terrible and Spartacus. Grigorovich's angle was to approach the general through the personal. Through Spartacus's and Ivan's own stories he touched wider issues.

Forsythe sees his work like a rising barometer:

"The fact that we are doing this changes fuck all," Forsythe concludes. "But if it contributes to the general feeling, if it is another drop in the stream of dissent that flows far to the places of power, then it is worth it, even if it is a little trickle. It's better to say something than to say nothing at all.

(The quote above comes from a very good historical précis of the relationship between dance and politics by John O'Mahony published in England's The Guardian.)

Three Atmospheric Studies - William Forsythe (photo Dieter Hartwig)

For the moment, thank you Mssrs. Bush and Cheney for making dance relevant again. It's a pity that it required over 100,000 casualties. No matter. While a single death is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.