The Ferryman

Smiling at the Shadows

The river is everywhere at once...


"I have learned from the river that everything comes back."

Vasudeva's face was filled with a bright smile.

"Yes, Siddhartha," he spoke. "It is this what you mean, isn't it: that the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future?"

With thanks to Whiskey River and ray, and a warm "Welcome home" to George.

Hermann Hesse | Siddhartha Chapter 9

Paradise Lost?

US Threat to Africa Grows

Liberia and São Tomé paint the forward path


Hunting Bambi in Monrovia, Liberia

“We import fifty per cent of our oil. Supplier number one is Canada, two is Saudi Arabia, three is Venezuela, four is Mexico, and five is Nigeria. Folks have finally figured out that we don’t need to rely on the Middle East for oil. African oil is less sticky than the stuff you get in the Middle East, and much of it is in deep water far offshore, so the natives don’t notice it being taken, whereas in the Middle East it’s pumped out of the ground under the noses of Wahhabi fundamentalists. Then you have São Tomé, which is basically the only stable democracy in West Africa. It’s perfect.”

US State Department official

Preoccupied with secrecy and media, we lose sight of that which lies immediately before us. Jon Lee Anderson, writing in The New Yorker, describes the horror of Liberia, a globally sanctioned, ongoing genocide. In The Devil They Know, he chronicles the life and times of President Charles Taylor and those living in "the United States’ bastard colony in Africa."

On my last night in Liberia, I was visited in the restaurant of my hotel by Samuel Kofi Woods and a social worker who provides therapy to Liberia’s ex-combatants. The social worker told me about a young man who confessed that it had been his “job” to slit open the bellies of pregnant women at a roadside checkpoint. He and his comrades would take bets on what sex the fetus was. In recurrent hallucinations, the man sees the faces of his victims walking toward him, and he shouts out at them, “It wasn’t only me!” This particular case, the social worker acknowledged, is hopeless, as is that of another man—a victim—he is treating. The man’s entire family of eight were slaughtered in front of him; one of his children was picked up in the air and literally hacked in two before his eyes. The man had been left alive “so that his suffering would be greater.” And it was; the man was drinking and drugging himself to death. The social worker himself had to undergo counselling, he confessed, after he witnessed killers tear the heart out of a living man, then boil and eat it. It happened in broad daylight in Monrovia, just two years ago, at a gas station near the Eternal Love Winning Africa road junction.

Our New Best Friend

From the savagery of Liberia, where Kurtz's vision leaps from every shadow, Anderson takes us back a year, to São Tomé and an equally compelling piece, Our New Best Friend. The United States' interests in African oil are no secret but, should any remain, Anderson bares them. He writes of a country which, although its government is in turmoil following a coup last week, plays Paradise to Monrovia's Hell. Offering an F. Scott Fitzgerald glimpse into an African way of life and a political naivety soon to be obliterated by United States and African oil barons, Anderson writes of a party at the presidential palace.

One evening, Fradique held a dinner to celebrate the anniversary of São Tomé’s independence. Tables for about two hundred people were set in the front garden of the Presidential palace, an elegant pink-and-white mansion that once housed the colonial governors. It was lit up dramatically and looked like a big cake. Around noon the next day, in Independence Plaza, opposite the corniche, where a grandstand had been erected, a group of women were dancing, animated by free beer and Carnival-style music coming from speakers. Several men and boys had climbed into a breadfruit tree to get a better view. Amiable-looking soldiers wearing red berets and holding Kalashnikovs stood at attention when a security convoy drove up, followed by a cavalcade of cars led by two Mercedeses. One, which had a red license plate with the letters “PR,” for “President of the Republic,” was carrying Fradique and Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a tall thin man in a dark suit. Omar Bongo, the dictator of Gabon, was in the other Mercedes. Bongo is a tiny, natty man, very black, and he wore what looked like custom-made shoes with platform heels. His wife is a rather queenly woman, much younger than him and a head taller. She was wearing a great deal of gold jewelry, a gold-and-purple print dress, and gold-rimmed Gucci sunglasses. She ascended the grandstand and took her place next to her petite husband. Bongo has been in power since 1967, and has long enjoyed a close relationship with French oil companies. Obiang has held office since 1979, when he overthrew his uncle and had him executed. In the last few years, Exxon Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, and a host of smaller U.S. companies have secured lucrative deals with Obiang for a share of Equatorial Guinea’s estimated billion and a half barrels of offshore oil. Both Bongo and Obiang are exceedingly corrupt and exceedingly wealthy.

Attentive security men from the three countries stood on the grandstand, and there were more of them near the official cars parked at either end of the plaza, suspiciously eying passing theatre groups and undulating women in batik sarongs. A soldier on the roof of a building at one corner of the plaza surveyed the scene with binoculars. Two Arabs in suits—Obiang’s Moroccan security guards—stood at the back of the grandstand. Inebriated dancers and mimes swayed to the sounds of drums and flutes. A group of men were dressed up as women, some in headdresses and clothing decorated with mirrors and bits of gold. Several children jumped between sticks that men held on the ground and slammed together. Two men briefly and exuberantly simulated copulation in front of the grandstand—Mme. Bongo averted her gaze—and pranced off again.

Bongo and Obiang frowned stolidly at the spectacle, staring straight ahead through their dark sunglasses. Fradique, who was wearing a gray suit with a quaint bow tie, smiled and nodded, apparently delighted with the chaos. President Obasanjo of Nigeria was supposed to have been at the ceremony, but he didn’t arrive in time. His jet flew into São Tomé that evening, and he went off to meet privately with Fradique.

'The Americans want to build a naval base here.' ... 'Fuck 'em. Remember Mogadishu.'

Bongo, Obiang and Obasanjo are global players and hard men to boot. They are the future in a region soon to be dominated by the US. These realities come hard on the heels of George W. Bush's push to establish a global Pax Americana, and we must take them into account if we are to be human. Peace is the last thing on Bush's mind, the ousting of France as an oil-rich regional power the first. Is Fradique's ousting within days of the US president's departure from Africa coincidental? Coincidence plays no part in politics. Read Monica Moorehead's short article, Why Bush Wants Troops in Liberia and give Khaled Hanafi Ali's piece, The New U.S. Strategy in Africa, a through going over. You'll be hearing plenty about the Chad—Cameroon pipeline before long.

As noted in a post below, "...Liberia is just another bloody country - albeit a country that the US will use as one of its many launch pads for armed intervention and military takeovers in Africa. The Economic Community of West African States' [ECOWAS] decision to inject 1,300 Nigerian troops into the conflict as the first step towards deepening regional involvement is not good news. Close to 1,000 people have died in fighting around the capital, Monrovia, during this past week. Nigerian involvement bodes well for the Americans, whose newspapers appear to have missed the São Tomé coup. US and Nigerian oil interests are in synch as it were, and peace [read regional dominance] will be imposed with a zeal that should show up Charles Taylor's warlords for the kindergarten teachers they are."

Visons of hell. Despite Fradique de Menezes' return to power this week, he is monitored by a junta supporting the plundering of the country's oil reserves. Coup leader Fernando Pereira says the military will have the major say in determining the future of the country's huge oil reserves of some 4 billion barrels of crude. Iraq is the prelude to something far worse, the continuance of a US foreign policy dedicated to Shrinking the Gap, leaving the poor of the world to eat dirt and live out their lives in pain, pus, blood and abject misery. There's bound to be blowback though. Africa is not the Middle East. Should the US' proxies be unable to deliver, all one can say is, "Remember Mogadishu".

"I think Africa is a continent that is going to be of very, very significant interest in the 21st century."

General James Jones Jr. United States European Command

Father Christopher Returns to Earth...

...rapes Dr. Phil on Oprah Show, and...

...touts latest New Age tract during short gig at Frankie Boy's


Father Christopher eyes out Mark Pilgrim's cheap signage

"You are seriously fucked up, Frank. You know that? I feel as if I'm attempting the absurd right now. Donald Barthelme. Jesus."

Father Christopher

Indeed. In the end, it all boils down to Jesus. Until you come to know Him, you cannot know yourself. Oprah.com [Live Your Best Life], in association with the legendary Frank Paynter of Sandhill Trek, bring you the best of our very own Father Christopher, the gracious and gentle man who does so much for our children. According to Father Christopher, he will shortly screw Dr. Phil into the ground ["My God, is that legal? He's really bolting him to the floor."] before taking over as Oprah's resident New Age Narcissist.

Touting the latest in his New Mysticism series, No Love Lost by Christopher Locke, Father Christopher [RageBoy is missing, feared dead or trapped in the Jesus Bunker], gives us the first installment of an extended interview. Covering much of interest to faggots, wankers, academics, EGR Irregulars and other blogging trailer trash, he lights the path to personal freedom in new and strange ways, brutalizing philosophers, fucking chickens, shooting Frank and engaging in lewd and indecent acts with immoral and decadent women.

Experience Chris Locke at Sandhill Trek NOW you little shits and, remember, Live Your Best Life.

An Oprah.com production. In association with Sandhill Trek. Signage courtesy Brother Mark Pilgrim [with thanks]. Oprah, Angel Network, Get With The Program, Harpo, Make The Connection, Oprah's Book Club, and Remembering Your Spirit are registered trademarks of Harpo, Inc. Spa Girls, and Use Your Life, are trademarks of Harpo Inc. All rights reserved. Etcetera...

Rage On You Crazy Diamond

Through steel walls
Your voice blastin' on
True rebel my brother Mumia
I reflect upon
You be tha spark
That set all tha prairie fires on
Make tha masses a mastodon path
To trample tha fascists on
At fifteen exposed Philly's finest killing machine
With boots and mad guns
They tried to pacify you young
Cause and effect
Smell tha smoke and tha breeze
My panther my brother
We are at war until you're free

You'll never silence tha voice of tha voiceless

You see tha powerful got nervous
Cause he refused to be their servant
'Cause he spit truth
That shook heads
And burned like black churches
Prose and verses
A million poor in hearses
Watch tha decision of Dred Scott
As it reserves
So long as tha rope
Is tight around Mumia's neck
Let there be no rich white life
We bound to respect
Cause and effect
Can't ya smell tha smoke in tha breeze
My panther my brother we are at war until you're free

You'll never silence tha voice of tha voiceless

And Orwell's hell a terror era coming through
But this little brother's watching you too

Rage Against The Machine | Voice of the Voiceless

Oh, What a Lovely War

Global Takeover Still on Track

Bush and Blair end good week with blood on their hands


'Look! No stains.'

Tony Blair returns home to face the storm over the apparent suicide of his Iraqi-intelligence mole, Dr. David Kelly, armed with limp American reassurances that none of the Britons being held on Guantanamo Bay will be murdered. They will, however, continue to remain guests of the Bush regime for as long as the US leader deems fit. Will the Guantanamo death chamber soon to see the implementation of the feared [and illegal] revolving-door execution policy touted by US officials?

David Kelly? While his wife, Janice, calls defence secretary Geoff Hoon to task and to account for his death, Kelly remains mince meat ground out by the political media machine governing Western policy. Who really gives a shit about his death? He was just another bloody civil servant.

And Liberia is just another bloody country - albeit a country that the US will use as one of its many launch pads for armed intervention and military takeovers in Africa. The Economic Community of West African States' [ECOWAS] decision to inject 1,300 Nigerian troops into the conflict as the first step towards deepening regional involvement is not good news. Close to 1,000 people have died in fighting around the capital, Monrovia, during this past week. Nigerian involvement bodes well for the Americans, whose newspapers appear to have missed the São Tomé coup. US and Nigerian oil interests are in synch as it were, and peace [read regional dominance] will be imposed with a zeal that should show up Charles Taylor's warlords for the kindergarten teachers they are.


Spring 2004: Not exactly a withdrawal...

Coming hard on the heels of Uday and Qusay Hussein's obliteration, aiding George Bush's escape from further questioning of US motives in invading Iraq and escalating US deaths in that country, the Boston Globe rejoices in the news that US forces will be reduced by up to 10,000 before spring 2004, reducing the total to 137,000. The limited, much-publicised and long-overdue troop withdrawals would constitute a first, insignificant reduction of occupation forces in a year. Most soldiers leaving will be replaced by foreign troops who will make up the standing force of 137,000 in place [thereby confirming an extended US occupation of Iraq].

Send home the spare parts and send in the fighting men. So much for the 'short stay', 'quick handover', denial of an 'occupation', and Iraqis dancing in streets strewn with gardenias.

This should help Bush no end. He has launched a media counter-offensive, promising to release pictures of Saddam's dead sons [why not prop their heads on sticks?] and claiming, "In the 83 days since I announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, we have made progress, steady progress in restoring hope in a nation beaten down by decades of tyranny." Or, as the Sun puts it: "The White House has been looking for an opportunity to try to shake off questions about the rationale for war and the halting start of reconstruction efforts. The deaths of Odai and Qusai Hussein have provided just such an opening in what had been weeks of bleak news."

Paul Wolfowitz was in a magnanimous and expansive mood. "Yesterday's events help enormously." Trust George and his pals to take the gap like fevered little rats. In the face of media 'promises' of Saddam's imminent capture or gory death, nobody's going to be a party pooper and whine about the two soldiers killed yesterday, the three killed today, the... yeah.

Instead of asking the hard questions, the Boston Globe quotes Army Major General Stanley McChrystal, vice director for operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "'Is the force stressed? Yes, the force is stressing hard to meet its challenges,'' says the general. ''Is it overstressed? Can it not meet its challenges? We don't have any indication of that at this point.''

General John M. Keane, the US Army's acting chief of staff, says roughly 369,000 of its approximately 480,000 soldiers are deployed in 120 countries around the world. ''The commitment to Iraq is obviously of concern to us in terms of the size and the scale of that commitment,'' Keane says. ''We know we can handle it. If we had to continue at that level, it would challenge us quite a bit.''

Facing opposition to requests to increase the size of the US army from none other than known dove, peacenik and all-round pussycat, Donald Rumsfeld, Keane says the Army is studying whether it can fulfil politically motivated military obligations at the current force level. With Africa about to feature strongly in the US' Military Conquest of Everywhere and Australia taking the soft option of landing troops at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, the article spells one thing:

D-R-A-F-T

But I guess you knew that all along, eh?

"I am not a god..."

Seeing the Real Winer at Last...

...while Marking the Pilgrim's Progress


'I'm not a god.'

"On my weblog no one can change what I wrote. ... Weblogs are unique in that only a weblog gives you a publication where your ideas can stand alone without interference. It gives the public writer a kind of relaxation not available in other forms. That might mean that in some sense the "quality" of the writing is different, but I would not say lower, assuming the purpose of writing is to inform, not to impress."

Dave Winer | What makes a weblog a weblog?

The Cardinal Oligarch is set to crash and burn like a foam-fucked space shuttle. No-one's wishing his demise or volunteering to take on the job of being his judge, jury and willing executioner. Luckily, the self-styled inventor of blogging is doing the job himself.

Winer has steered his business into the iceberg of self-aggrandizement and reinvented himself as a New England college professor, flogging blogging to rich people who cannot read. It comes as no surprise that he treats, and probably views, the bloodied trail of transgressions left on the road to Harvard as proud markers along a dark highway leading to an ivory tower befitting the lord, master and creator of this corner of the cyberverse.

Dave has a long history of clashing with high-flying personalities in the blogging and tech communities. He does not like competition. A pocket Bill Gates with a chip or a different type on his shoulder, Winer can be viciously vindictive. His ugly side has never bugged or phased me. We all have one. Besides, to me, Dave Winer is nobody. His over-inflated ego and singular lack of talent for anything but opinionated self-interest rendered him uninteresting long before he set about actively destroying himself.

Winer appears incapable of seeing in himself a self-crowned emperor in dire need of raiment. He is too proud to subject himself to such humiliating scrutiny. Yes, it's probably tough when you think you're at the top. Those occupying such precariously unstable heights generally feel they have more important things to do than wallow in a poor man's notion of 'accountability'.

Leaders, whether paperclip despots or natural-born visionaries, are subject to the vicissitudes of their constituencies and the whims of fate. Dave probably knows this and probably realises his run is coming to an end. The fate that befalls all gods, self-proclaimed or disclaimed, is headed his way. He will be turfed, unlamented, into history's unforgiving dustbin.

Trouble is, the longer it takes, the more likely we are to find people becoming disillusioned with weblogging. The backhanded viciousness of people like Winer spoil my blogging, make me decidedly leery of so-called 'communities', and generate entries like this one. Until I get it off my chest though, Winer's recent prognostications and attacks on other bloggers will continue to retard my propensity to shoot from the heart and the hip.

Such is the nature of personal blogging.


’I think Sam did something very eloquent.’

"On the other hand, they are writing about their own experience. And if there's editing it hasn't interfered with the style of the writing. The personalities of the writers come through. That is the essential element of weblog writing, and almost all the other elements can be missing, and the rules can be violated, imho, as long as the voice of a person comes through, it's a weblog."

Dave Winer | What makes a weblog a weblog?

In the run up to Shelley Powers writing Editing Others Comments at the beginning of June, she appended comments to a post on Sam Ruby's site. Sam took them to be offensive, and edited them by subjecting text to strikethroughs. Shelley took offence at Sam's action, blogged the issue and watched her comment box become a sewer filled to flooding.

Of the editing of Shelley's comments, Winer had this to say:

"I think Sam did something very eloquent. Your words are still there for everyone to see, and so is your shame for trying to drag the discussion into the mud. ... You should thank Sam for crossing out your ad hominems because I never would have responded until he did. Your method serves to shut people up, because if I get embroiled with you, people blame me for your nasty words. A strategy that used to work until Sam innovated. I can see why you're upset, you had a trick that kept me from speaking. Now the trick doesn't work anymore, you're going to actually have to say something intelligent and respectful, or else YOU become the issue, not the person you're flaming."

Winer, accorded much respect on this blog and elsewhere, commenting on the editing of Shelley's words or distortion of her voice, finds such editing eloquent, sees it as a tool for upsetting people or inflicting shame, and is all for using it. His later language suggests power play, the scent of victory, and carries a demand for respect. It ends with the triumphal pronouncement "...Now the trick doesn't work anymore, you're going to actually have to say something intelligent and respectful, or else YOU become the issue..."

When you lack the humour to appreciate or value a title born of the Harvard site, i.e. "crimson oligarch" [I'd use 'cardinal' myself, but there you go], you've travelled a long way from your roots as a blogger and are very much an arrogant businessman using a tertiary institution as a storefront of convenience. Your public persona's travelled a long way from being able to profess your weblog to be the unedited voice of a person.

Shelley subsequently ran a story on July 17, On Identity and Edits. It revisits Mark Pilgrim's aborted Winer Watcher, a monitor of Dave's proclivity for saying vile things of people, having them snapped up by the news aggregators and, shortly thereafter, pulling them or editing them to innocuous innocence. The practice is so well known, it's called Doing a Dave. Pilgrim's venture, which monitored Winer's edits in a manner similar to the 'eloquent' method employed by Sam Ruby, caused a hell of a stir, much debate, and generated umbrage from Winer. However, as Shelley points out, the issue is not Winer or Pilgrim.

"A far more critical issue is that of weblog writers pulling material or substantially editing it after publication, and the writers so-called 'contract of accountability' with their readership."

The nut of it is that Pilgrim and Shelley, in their own ways, tried to hold Winer accountable for his heinously duplicitous practices. They were slammed for doing so. Shelley, on the principle of accountability, Pilgrim for reasons that seem clear to me because he's as guilty of manipulating others' text as Winer.

Who is Pilgrim? Apparently a Winer-wannabe, he's a blogger who edits the comments posted to his blog, marring others' opinions with flaming red strikethroughs. If ever you need an example of someone needing to exercise [and be seen to be exercising] unfettered personal power, check out Pilgrim's site. If Dave Winer is a pocket Bill Gates, Mark Pilgrim is a pocket Dave Winer.


’Yeah, well, there's people starving in Africa, too.’

On Value Judgments, we have Shelley body-checking Pilgrim [not named] for censoring comments made by her on his blog entry Dive into accountability. Pilgrim answers the criticism:

"You *know* my moderation policy, and yet you come around and post completely irrelevant flames that you *know* will get moderated. And then you complain when... [drum roll please]... they get moderated! Boy, who couldn't see that coming?"

Pilgrim then sets out the editorial policy of many bloggers.

"Yeah, well, there's people starving in Africa, too. What are you doing sitting around here weblogging? How selfish! How hypocritical! ... Er, whatever. ... And if you can't figure out the difference between [a] writing something on your own site, and [b] writing something on someone else's site—to see why different rules apply, well, I don't know how else to explain it to you. The ability of other people to put content on my site is a privilege, not a right—a privilege subject to rules that I have the sole right to determine and which I have clearly and publicly stated. Don't like it? You're free not to comment."

Ugly stuff, eh? Noone holds sole rights to hypocrisy. So much for community. So much for accountability. So much for Winer and Pilgrim.

Shelley's comment hardly warranted 'flame' status. Pilgrim should quote her in full. She is, as ever, confrontational, her statements demanding answers. Instead of answering her, Pilgrim wields his red pen as readily and willingly as a practiced little commissar. Mindless automation appears to be not in the software of our small Napoleons, but in their minds and make-ups. Shelley has good reason to criticise Pilgrim and hold him accountable for his censorship. Pilgrim defends the indefensible as does Winer and George W. Bush, his president, by [ab]using it.

The point needs to be stressed. Editing the work of others on our blogs is censorship. It is insulting. It is defacement. It shows an unhealthy disrespect for others' views [and probably one's self]. Ultimately, censorship is the death of voice.

However, in Dave Winer and Mark Pilgrim's cases, I suspect the voices to die will be theirs. Accountability comes in many forms, often without the trappings of legislated rules and regulations. It tends to be about 'swings and roundabouts' or 'What goes around, comes around'. That said, Winer and Pilgrim give blogging a bad name and a bad taste. Those unable to see that these ethically malnourished deviants diminish the medium are plain dumb.

Do I want to see Dave Winer go down? No. I do not want to see the self-styled blogfather enter terminal self-destruct mode. A person with a mind larger than he is presently able to control, he has contributed greatly to that which we have today. Like it or not, the past always forms an essential part of the whole. Dave Winer cannot, therefore, be a bad guy. But I do not know him.

How can I? Dave uses blogging to project that which he wishes us to see better than most of us are able to. I don't find Dave Winer at www.scripting.com, a one-man, two-line link farm. Nor do I find him at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, the origin of material at odds with what I so often read. I find scraps of Dave Winer, the person and blogger [who supports censorship], fulminating in the comments boxes of other people.

Bearing his comments in mind, I would not want anyone to alter a word he says. It is through his unguarded words that I come to know him best.

"I'm not a god, or the final arbiter of goodness."

Dave Winer

And Now My Love...

Do Penniless French Girls...

...choose to become princesses?


'Life's simple.' 'Yeah. Jus' you 'n me, Babe.'

I live in another world where life and death are memorized, | Where the earth is strung with lovers' pearls and all I see are dark eyes.

Bob Dylan | Dark Eyes

If one looks back, life tends to make more sense than it does as it is lived, i.e. forward. Even so, Claude Lelouch's And Now My Love (Toute une Vie) sprang to mind when thinking of the past week.

Lelouch's films made an enormous impression on me. This one carried especial significance. Lelouch, if I remember him correctly, had a soft focus and an exquisite, deft touch. His direction was romantic, but real.

I remember little of the movie. I do recall it starred Marthe Keller and told the story, over generations, of a man and woman destined to meet and fall in love at its end. The film tracked their love from its genesis.

By the time they met, their lives were complete.

Perhaps it was Lelouch's spontaneous method, story-telling ability or direction that struck a chord in me. Perhaps it was Keller. She was a beautiful woman. But I don't think it was any of these things.

My understanding of something inside of me, a sense of time, beauty or destiny came to consciousness while watching the film, making it a memorable experience given special emphasis by an appreciation of some unknown.

It was a similar sense of destiny that later governed my love for my wife, after our meeting a few years' later. I knew, despite every obstacle thrown before us, that we were meant to be together. That was all there was to it. And that's how it is. No matter how crazy it seems...

I kind of dig it...


'My God, haven't I enough to deal with. Why can't he just be normal?'

But I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise, | Whom nature's beast fears as they come and all I see are dark eyes.

But there's a kicker here. I realised, looking for a picture from And Now My Love [Toute une Vie], that Marthe Keller had taken the lead in a television series my father and I used to watch.

Translated into Afrikaans as Die Meisie van Avignon, Frédérique Hébrard and Louis Velle's La Demoiselle d'Avignon epitomised the peculiarly French talent of tying fantasy to romance with comedic flair while tearing heart strings in the process.

The series was made several years before Toute une Vie. But, in retrospect, it had a quality very similar to that which was so evident in the film.

The story of a beautiful, penniless French girl and the diplomat who falls in love with her before finding out she's a princess in some fairytale Nordic kingdom had me hooked as easily as a junkie to a needle.

Which, I guess, was just the way it was meant to be.

I tend to see things that way...


'There! Can't you see it?' 'What, my Princess?'

But I feel nothing for their game where beauty goes unrecognized, | All I feel is heat and flame and all I see are dark eyes.

The Dylan song? It's a long and possibly contentious story these days. Offering a brilliant performance by Marcello Mastroianni, Dark Eyes is a 1987 movie that tells the 19th Century story of an architect who marries for money.

According to the blurb, he soon becomes "...a good-for-nothing and expends his wife's fortune. Running away, he meets a beautiful Russian girl [married] at a spa and falls in love for the first time."

Marthe Keller played his mistress.

[And Dylan wrote the song in 1985.]

Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies, | A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.

Bob Dylan | Dark Eyes

37.2° le matin

"Can't Help Falling In Love with You"

Of Demons, Memories and Moments of Common Sense


37.2° le matin...

Well, we drove that car all night into San Anton' | And we slept near the Alamo, your skin was so tender and soft. | Way down in Mexico you went out to find a doctor and you never came back. | I would have gone on after you but I didn't feel like letting my head get blown off.

Bob Dylan | Brownesville Girl

I really dug that movie. Not the one in the post below; this one... 37.2° le matin. I never did read Philippe Dijian's book, but the movie held my morbid fascination. It was our life, the legacy years, the shreds of "Jus' you 'n me, Babe."

Yeah, it was all so black and white then. We could overcome everything and anything and, besides, being otherwise was a jol. Our lives and everything else were cool. And Beatrice Dalle was something else to watch.

It [the movie] was a kind of warning, I guess, but I didn't give it the attention it deserved. They'd pegged you as a BPD way back then, at the outset, during your three-month incarceration at 19 or 20, but I didn't listen.

The Good Professor who pronounced the diagnosis all those years ago, and from whom we've heard nothing despite numerous incarcerations at her institution of higher medicine, phoned our doctor a couple of weeks ago to find out why my wife had missed an out-patient appointment.

My wife's doctor is the new urban drug lord, a Bible-toting purveyor of palliatives able to calm or cure anything and everything, and the respectable face of the international pharmaceutical industry.

In the suburbs, the doctor is God. He saw the priest off twenty years ago.

My wife's doctor thinks she's possessed by demons.

I kid you not. Demons. I must have expressed some reservations when she told me because she hauled me off to his consulting rooms the next time she visited.

As far as the doctor is concerned, my wife is incurable. He has seen her through three kids, countless illnesses [the kids], and her 'problems'. Although he 'cured' her alcoholism for a while, her mood's no less susceptible to vicious, unpredictable swings. She is, therefore, in his professional estimation, medically incurable.

And, because he is God, it was only reasonable for him to expect us to concur with his omniscient diagnosis. He diagnosed demons.

Big, black, wild, dread-locked, ganja-smoking demons swathed in great white shrouds of smoke with Caribbean voodoo monsters as pets. Well, not really, but I thought he'd been smoking something pretty weird to come up with a diagnosis like that. Or maybe he'd been spiking up on the cancer medicine. I don't know.


...and smoking by 10:00

Well, we're drivin' this car and the sun is comin' up over the Rockies, | Now I know she ain't you but she's here and she's got that dark rhythm in her soul. | But I'm too over the edge and I ain't in the mood anymore to remember the times when I was your only man | And she don't want to remind me. She knows this car would go out of control.

Bob Dylan | Brownesville Girl

He asked us if we would like to meet with a few 'people' from his church, but my wife is a sceptic and I'm a Catholic. Her thyroid has also packed up. So, being sceptical, Catholic and unreasonable [hypothyroidism], we declined his invitation. My wife was left to fight her demons alone.

I don't have much respect for the medical profession. They're on drugs.

At least I thought they were until the Good Professor had my wife's doctor phone me to tell her [my wife] she had missed her appointment. I assumed my wife knew as much. She might be possessed by demons but she is not dumb.

It was then that I remembered the Good Professor's diagnosis made when my wife was still a teenager. A personality disorder. Personality disorders were pretty weird and exotic things back then. We did not pay much attention to them. The shrinks didn't seem to know what to do with them either, so who was I to question their lack of follow up?

Besides, I had myself to deal with.

Speaking to the doctor on the phone, twenty-something years' experience in the psychiatric business came flooding back to my blog-rotted psyche. Hell, I even remembered sub-editing a psychiatric textbook about eight years ago. Neuroses, personality disorders and psychoses; the whole bang shoot rocketed to the front of my occipital lobe.

I thought I'd left that horrible stuff behind me, but it seems I had not.

My recollection of the DSM-III led me to RageBoy's site and on to the magical manual for diagnosing all things pertaining to those of us who refuse to bow to the god of the everyday, the DSM-IV.

I'd no idea just how far my wife had, without any medical practitioner raising an eyebrow in twenty-odd years, slid down the slope followed by those possessed of a Borderline Personality Disorder. Reading the official literature, I realised things had come to a pretty pass.


...oh, yeah, BPD rocks

There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice. | I don't remember who I was or where I was bound. | All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun and he was shot in the back. | Seems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down.

Bob Dylan | Brownesville Girl

Now, I'm reading all this shit that explains the past few years and it's heavy, a death warrant served on us in retrospect, served up in instalments. The Courtship Dance Of The Borderline, indeed. Look, BPD ain't all that bad but, when you get down to brass tacks, it's not a sustainable lifestyle. Somebody's gotta give and I'm suffering PTSD big-time.

Why is it that everything seems to fall apart or break at once?

Yeah, you, I'm not kidding. I'm fucked, stuffed, knackered and in need of clinicians myself. There's nothing I can do to get you out of there because, as long as you drink and cut and destroy, you'll never get out of jail, get past 'go' or get a life. These links point to a couple of articles, some professional, others not. Here's a pretty one-sided, colourless description of the household terrorist.

It's accurate, if badly written.

I guess I wish the situation didn't seem so fucking hopeless at the moment. Perhaps it's because I'm tired. I've always dealt with this stuff in the past. I am, after all a professional and a blogger to boot. Nothing phases me. I don't go down. It's a big downer to feel myself losing my grip this way. I must be getting old or something...

What is it that attracts people like me to people like you? Is it your seeming helplessness, vulnerability, edge, impulsive nature, danger, sexuality, or what? I'm a quiet guy. I want a settled life. No booze. You're a demon on booze. It's too much to handle. Yeah, I guess I could watch Betty Blue again, though. She really was something.

Y'know, 37° is 'normal'. 37.2° is a woman's average temperature when pregnant.

37.2° in the morning. What a fucking title. And in French too. Heh... But, jeez... yep, what a bloody price...

Way too much. Yeah. Shit… let’s just see how it goes.

My wife has shown inordinate interest in these articles ripped off the Web in 20 minutes. She shows all the signs of those who realise they are not weird freaks destined to live out a silent hell on their own. Yeah, the questions are the same. "But why did nobody ever tell me about this? Why didn't they do something? Anything?"

Unlike my wife's doctor, I do not have the answers to these skull crackers, but it looks as though the Good Professor's call came in the nick of time. They have this therapy called Dialectical Behaviour Therapy… I’ll check it out with my spiritual adviser, Father Christopher.

The last thing we can afford is to indulge yet another New Age fad subsidising a second-rate, photo-shopped TV personality living high on the hog in a place like Aspen.

Demons? Fuck. Tell me another...

Brownsville girl with your Brownsville curls, teeth like pearls shining like the moon above | Brownsville girl, show me all around the world, Brownsville girl, you're my honey love.

Bob Dylan | Brownesville Girl

Girl, Interrupted

The Mad, the Bad and the Sad

Where do bad girls go when they cry?


'...they don't go to heaven where the angels fly.'

I can see through your walls and I know you're hurting, | Sorrow covers you up like a cape. | Only yesterday I know that you've been flirting | With disaster that you managed to escape.

Bob Dylan | When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky

I watched Girl, Interrupted on our local pay channel over the weekend. I enjoyed it, despite its obvious Hollywood origin. Set in a mental health facility beyond the means of all but the impossibly rich, the script gives mental illness sensitive treatment.

The success of such films depends largely on the interplay of two key figures [in this instance, Susanna and Lisa], both contributing to an appreciation of a single person. In Girl, Interrupted, Winona Ryder plays Susanna, a teenager or twenty-something endowed with too much sensitivity. Locked into a contemplation of inner suburbia's middle-class inanities, she develops a morbid fascination with death rather than real problems and, after wishing oblivion on herself, is consigned to the dustbin of the mad, the bad, and the sad. She's a wishy-washy character, a journal-keeping, drip-dry product of the soak-and-rinse set from which she comes. Ostensibly suffering Borderline Personality Disorder [BPD], she meets Lisa [Angelina Jolie], who suffers nothing and delivers much.

The story is based on Susanna Kaysem's book of the same name, a recollection of her experience of BPD. Unless people like Ryder's Susanna [a mild character at her most exciting] are locked up in the States, I can only assume Kaysem generously attributes most her lousy BPD traits to Lisa, topping them up with a touch of sociopathy to give Lisa an irredeemable edge.

Lisa's an enchanting character and, as Susanna gets her confused little life together learning, with the help of well-scripted advice from Vanessa Redgrave, to make the tough choices most of us screw up on, Lisa provides most of the BPD bad-action scenes. She is the borderline I [and I assume many others] know or live with. In a memorable sentence at the close [before the usual thickly ladled serving of syrup], Kaysem comments on how BPDs tend to amplify aspects of their lives and exclude others. Some lose themselves in the warren of their self-created universes, never finding their way back.

I liked her use of the word, "amplify". We are all, to a degree, fucked up but some, unfortunately, are more fucked up than most. It's sad to see beautiful people fighting monsters that exist only for them.


'...they go to the lake of fire and fry...'

Recently, after speaking to my spiritual adviser, Father Christopher, I concluded I suffered every malady listed in the DSM-IV. Being well versed in such matters, he just laughed. "You've just got a thing for Lisas, boy. But, yes, I agree, none of us has to look far to find a true-blue BPD."

Indeed. I relate easily to borderlines, but decided a long while ago I am merely neurotic. I still get to take the tablets. Apparently, BPDs manifest:

• frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5.
  
• a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
  
• identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
  
• impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging [e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating]. Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5.
  
• recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior
  
• affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood [e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days].
  
• chronic feelings of emptiness
  
• inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger [e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights]
  
• transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms

That's BPD according to the DSM-IV. Apparently, exhibiting five of nine of these characteristics is a pretty strong indicator of BPD behaviour. Shit, in my neighbourhood, that's normal. However, being neurotic [and Catholic to boot], I am exempt from these arbitrary dictates of character and am allowed twisted behaviour of a deviant nature.

You, of course, are not. If you're missing any one of these criteria, visit Don Williams's blog immediately. Yeah? You see? He has two. And they're infrequently updated? I'll tell you why. He uses them to spam Google and improve his rankings. Shrinks do not only read minds. They do search engines too.

Ah well, fuck Don. He's a con. Trust me instead.

Leaning on personal experience, I doubt Lisa ever made it back to the outside world with a clean bill of health and a manuscript. But Lisa is, by comparison to many, a pussycat. Her behaviour is mild, friendly and, to put it bluntly, alluring. I would take good care of a sweet girl like that.

I can't provide for you no easy answers, | Who are you that I should have to lie? | You'll know all about it, love, | It'll fit you like a glove | When the night comes falling from the sky.

Bob Dylan | When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky

Bonfire of the Sanities

Of Distant Ships and Dream Twisters

'Only a matter of time 'til night comes steppin' in'


'Bird fly high by the light of the moon'

Freedom just around the corner for you | But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?

Bob Dylan | Jokerman

I have seen people limping soul-sick and wounded through lives of empty despair. I have felt the desolation of no alternative, choice or hope. I have known the death of dreaming and I have been skewered by betrayal.

I have seen my love letters burning on a bonfire lit in the kitchen sink, and I have seen my wedding pictures ripped, shredded and torn, left to mix it with the peelings and scrapings of dinner at the bottom of a dirt-bin.

I have looked into failure's eyes, and have had to bow beneath the weight of to its unwavering gaze.

"Hell is other people."

"I know, J-P, that's the pity of it."

Mondays. Bring 'em on.

Shedding off one more layer of skin, | Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within.

Bob Dylan | Jokerman

No Beating About the Bush

South African Visit of Dubious Worth

Where Clinton shone, "Hello, Mister" fails to impress


Not the warm heart of Africa...

[US] President Bush received a cool reception today in the capital of Africa's largest economic power, as opinion leaders across the continent complained about his policies on Iraq, AIDS and the International Criminal Court.

Bush has come with many goodies for this long struggling region: the promise of billions of new dollars for development, disease fighting and counter-terrorism efforts, and the prestige conferred by his making only the third sub-Saharan Africa tour by a U.S. president. But Africans have responded with anti-Bush demonstrations, diplomatic snubs and critical media coverage.


When all is said and done...

Here in South Africa, the country's revered former president Nelson Mandela, who sharply criticized Bush on Iraq and once said he "cannot think properly," arranged to be out of the country for the three nights Bush is here.

The country's dominant political party, the African National Congress, led a 2,000-person march to the U.S. Embassy here today in protest of Bush's visit. Hundreds more marched in Cape Town. The current president, Thabo Mbeki, left the country today after a half day with Bush to attend the 52-nation African Union meeting in Mozambique with the rest of Africa's leaders. more...

Visiting the U.S. ambassador's home for a dinner with African and American business leaders, the President and his wife were greeted in the foyer by a stairway full of African female singers. After shaking the hand of the lead singer, the president escalated through a range of embarrassing expressions as the women moved and swayed in the full arc of their womanhood. The performance ended with the singers pulling their shirts to two points at the breast. more...

Note

The song chosen for the visiting American superstar translates loosely as "Hello, Mister. You're a tit." A hit in South Africa, the video shows the women dressed in traditional garb, i.e. sans shirts. It was, however, felt that President Bush might lose control when confronted by a bevy of naked and nubile lovelies. Shirts were therefore worn for the presidential performance. "The president of the USA will understand," said one singer. "He is, after all, a professional and quite adept at covering things up himself."

Thoughts from the Most Powerful Mind in the World

Q: "Do you still believe they were trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa?"

A: "Right now?"

Q: "No, were they? The statement you made..."

A: "One thing is for certain, he's not trying to buy anything right now."

"Hello, Mister", interviewed in South Africa, quoted by MotherJones.

Murphy's Law...

...yields Unexpected Dividend

Increasing post-combat deaths signal hope for peace


Disinterested US marines based at um-Qasr on the Gulf Coast, told of their possible withdrawal from a war that did not take place, in the face of a threat that was not there, against an enemy they did not catch, in search of weapons that never were and for a reason that could not have been, exhibit emotions impossible to describe

I saw it advertised one day, | Bear Mountain picnic was comin' my way. | "Come along 'n' take a trip, | We'll bring you up there on a ship. | Bring the wife and kids | Bring the whole family." | Yippee! | Well, I run right down 'n' bought a ticket | To this Bear Mountain Picnic. | But little did I realize | I was in for a picnic surprise. | Had nothin' to do with mountains. | I didn't even come close to a bear.

Bob Dylan | Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues

Despite Saddam Hussein's release of his latest audio-cassette album, Bring 'Em On, the Irish Independent reports US occupation forces in Iraq to be enjoying a good fortune previously considered reserved for those inhabiting the Emerald Isle.

Since US President George W Bush declared major combat operations had ended on May 1, 29 US troops have been killed by hostile fire and 44 others have died in accidents and other non-hostile circumstances, a total of 73.

The total number of Americans who have died in Iraq since the conflict began March 20 stands at 212, including the death on Monday in Balad. That number includes 69 deaths in accidents and other non-hostile circumstances. About two-thirds of the non-hostile deaths have come since May 1. more...

The Pentagon today welcomed the increase in post-combat non-hostile deaths since May 1, predicting an equal, possibly greater increase in post-combat hostile deaths.

"Should the percentage of post-combat non-hostile deaths continue to rise, we see no reason why there should not be a concomitant rise in the number of post-combat hostile deaths," said a Department of Defense spokesman. "The Iraqi people appear to be applying themselves assiduously to the task of inflicting as many deaths as possible."

Although only 29 hostile deaths have been inflicted since combat was declared over on May 1 [or 20 percent], the number and frequency of attacks on US troops is escalating rapidly. The number of troops killed by Iraqi forces during the invasion [114] has dropped to 80 percent of the total [143] killed before and after May 1. The Toronto Star, in a wide-ranging article covering The Moustache's Comeback Tour, President Bush's untruth dependence, and evaporating US domestic support for global warfare, reports post-combat hostile attacks...

...have taken 30 lives since George W. Bush declared an end to combat May 1, and eight more soldiers were wounded in attacks yesterday. Assaults have become more brazen and widespread and are carried out with heavier firepower.


Rumsfeld and Franks explain the maths

Briefing reporters at the Pentagon earlier today, General Tommy Franks, former head of US Central Command said, "Working on the assumption that this post-combat trend will continue, as it must, the percentage of those killed during the invasion will fall. The scope of President Bush's global campaign against everything and everyone indicates that it will eventually fall to a point where, by rounding off the figures, it will be true to say the pre-May 1 invasion phase saw no American casualties at all."

Refusing to speculate on the implications of these startling revelations, General Franks agreed such a percentage decline in combat-phase hostile deaths was encouraging. "It is conceivable that, should the Iraqis kill a sufficient number of our troops during the post-combat phase, the percentages would lead us to conclude that, in fact, Gulf War II did not take place."

"President Bush would then be in a position to withdraw all troops from the region," he said.

Now, I don't care just what you do, | If you wanta have a picnic, that's up t' you. | But don't tell me about it, I don't wanta hear it, | 'Cause, see, I just lost all m' picnic spirit. | Stay in m' kitchen, have m' own picnic... | In the bathroom. | Now, it don't seem to me quite so funny | What some people are gonna do f'r money. | There's a bran' new gimmick every day | Just t' take somebody's money away. | I think we oughta take some o' these people | And put 'em on a boat, send 'em up to Bear Mountain... | For a picnic.

Bob Dylan | Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues

"Who Needs Gorée...

...when We Have Guantanamo Bay?"

Bush snubs offer of ready-made prison at start of "Hello, Mister" World Tour

"If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings."

Nelson Mandela [presently out of town]


"Hello, Mister" remembers the good ol' days

US President George W. Bush takes a look out to sea from the departure portal, or 'Door of No Return', of The Slave House, built in 1776 on Gorée Island, two miles from the Senegalese capital of Dakar. Ruled in succession by the Portuguese, Dutch, English and French, Gorée was a slave-trade depot between the 16th and 19th centuries and the last glimpse of home for many of 20 million enslaved Africans. President Bush scoffed at Senegal President Abdoulaye Wadeas's suggestion that the United States might wish to make use of Gorée for the African leg of the US president's "Hello, Mister" World Tour. "You must be out of your fucking head. Why should we need Gorée now that we have Guantanamo Bay?" asked an incredulous Bush.

Mail & Guardian Bush jets into Pretoria tonight

The Great Deceiver...

...embarks on...

...the African leg of his "Hello, Mister" Tour

"I absolutely agree with the president of the United States: Bring 'Em On."

General Tommy Franks [US Central Command - Retired]


The African leg of the "Hello, Mister" Tour

Since coming into office in 2001 this man has: stymied cheap drug production; made conditional aid an article of faith; strangled Africa's agricultural sector; conned his country and its allies into going to war; castrated the UN and other multilateral bodies; resisted international attempts to make the Earth a healthier and environmentally sustainable planet; reversed the global trend towards civil liberties; and created fertile soil for the very terror against which he purports to be waging a war. In just 30 months, George W Bush has made the world a dangerous, a very dangerous place.

Mail & Guardian Cover spread [July 4-10, 2003]

I've been wondering about the young American soldier who, on Sunday, stood in line at a cafeteria outside the Engineering Department on the Baghdad University campus, awaiting his turn to buy a cooldrink.

How long was the queue? Who were the people ahead of him as he waited patiently to buy a bottle of Coke or some other beverage?

I assume the queue comprised Iraqi students and a few US troops. Perhaps the two soldiers on duty with him were standing in the same line. He might have watched those in front of him, studied the backs of their heads, wondered where they came from, noted physical peculiarities or habits, watched a young girl and wondered...

...wondered where she came from and where she was going to.

Bored and hot under a 40-degree sun, he might have felt the weight of his rifle, the spread of his vaguely cooling sweat, the shade afforded him by his comfortable canvas hat, the relative ease of movement he enjoyed not having to wear a flak jacket, or he may have felt the discomfort of his feet, burning in his combat boots. His thoughts may have wandered to his base, home, family, or to small tasks with which he was busy, the campus meeting he was assigned to guard, or insignificant happenings about him.

Perhaps he knew some of the students, and chatted to them.

His immediate thought though, that which must have been uppermost in his young mind, was undoubtedly the exquisite, cooling flow of a thirst-quenching drink working its liquid magic as it slid, cold and easy, down his parched throat.

Having bought his cooldrink, he escaped to the shade of a stairway next to the Engineering Department to drink it.


Fans trickle into the stadium for...

"Hello, Mister."

He might have heard the voice just behind his ear, the quiet voice of a great and lethal intent.

But he probably didn't hear the gunshot that killed him or feel the small-calibre bullet that ripped into his neck and turned his throat and the base of his brain to mush.

He probably found himself transported instantly to another space in his mind, a quiet, still space from which he could view events as they happened to and around him.

He may not have known that the bullet that severed his spinal cord was to take him from this world into the next. He may have wondered, almost disinterestedly, as he fell in a bloody heap, what the hell was going on.

With his cooldrink, those about him, and any thoughts he might have had of the family, friends and colleagues who made up his world slipping from his fast-fading consciousness, he may have realised that his throat which, an instant before, had anticipated cooling drafts of refreshing cordial, was drowning in a hot flood of his own blood.

He might have wondered, "Why?" Alternatively, he could have thought, as he gasped for air with a futility he may even have found vaguely amusing: "So this is what it's like."

Perhaps he was spared the sight of hundreds of panicked students rushing into the cafeteria for shelter as colleagues rushed to help him to death and darkness. Perhaps, with the area sealed by tanks and humvees, he did not hear the cries of "Allahu akbar" emanating from those who watched the ambulance into which he was lifted leave the campus for the nearby military hospital.

All too quickly, the voice, the whispered harbinger of a violent death, was gone. So was the young soldier.


...the Great African "Hello, Mister" Tour

"Hello, Mister", the spirit of enmity that saw the young man as the epitome of evil, had moved on. The spirit of "Hello, Mister" is a dark spirit. "Hello, Mister" flows through all of us. Like a river, "Hello, Mister" is here, there, nowhere and everywhere.

But mostly, it is here.

Until the spirit of "Hello, Mister" is driven from the world, young soldiers will not slake their thirsts on cooldrinks and dreams of peace. They will instead drink and choke on the warm, slightly strange taste of their own blood.

United States President George W. Bush knows this. The thought does not worry him. Other, more pressing matters demand his attention. He is attending to such matters now. These matters have brought him to Africa, where he will share with us the next leg of his compassionate-conservative "Hello, Mister" tour.

"Hello, Mister."

Welcome to Africa. Now fuck off.

Born in the USA

The Boss...

...still Pissing on the Flag


Thanks to Ryan Irelan

Headline: Shootings ... Mark Escalation of Resistance
"...a soldier was shot in the neck and killed yesterday as he queued to buy a soft drink at Baghdad University. An Iraqi man came up to him and said 'Hello mister', drew a pistol from his pocket and fired." more...

Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

Born in the USA
I was born in the USA
I was born in the USA
Born in the USA

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

[Chorus]

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "Son if it was up to me"
Went down to see my VA man
He said "Son, don't you understand"

I had a brother at Khe Sahn, fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go

[Chorus]

Bruce Springsteen | Born in the USA

Headline: Troop morale in Iraq hits 'rock bottom'
US troops facing extended deployments amid the danger, heat, and uncertainty of an Iraq occupation are suffering from low morale that has in some cases hit "rock bottom." ... In one Army unit, an officer described the mentality of troops. "They vent to anyone who will listen. They write letters, they cry, they yell. Many of them walk around looking visibly tired and depressed.... We feel like pawns in a game that we have no voice [in]." more...

"There are some who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush said. Extending his right hand for emphasis, he added: "My answer is: Bring 'em on."

George W. Bush [US President]

Fuck Off, George W. Bush

South Africa Does Not Want You Here

Butcher of Baghdad scouts military bases on African soil



Airforce One hits the tarmac at Waterkloof airbase next Tuesday, the first pulpit on United States President George Bush's evangelical five-stop African junket — his second trip to the continent, his first to South Africa. Bush will also visit Senegal, Nigeria, Botswana and Uganda. ... Strategically, Nigeria and Senegal are vital for future US oil supplies; South Africa's support is crucial because she's a regional power and an influential developing world country, while both Uganda and Botswana are paeons to the US free market agenda. ...

Accompanied by his Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Bush will be hard-pressed to show his good works in South Africa. ... He comes to a country where one of the world's greatest statesmen, Nelson Mandela, called him "a man who cannot think properly" and where the country took a firm and vociferous stand against him on the war on Iraq. And once he gets his voice heard above the roar and the din, his spin-doctors will have their work cut out overcoming the distrust and scepticism that Africans — and South Africans in particular — have developed towards his administration. To many on the continent and in the pro-Africa lobby in the West, Bush is the Great Deceiver: adept at repackaging old promises and dazzling his critics with new pledges to be delivered on future dates.

Besides South Africa, protests are also planned in Dakar, and the union movement in Nigeria will link its crippling strike against the oil sector to Bush's visit. Bush's strategic agenda is two-fold: political and economic interest. Politically, this is a visit to shore up support for his "war on terror". ... Against massive public opposition, both South Africa and Kenya are putting the finishing touches to domestic anti-terror laws. ... The decision by the US this week to tie military aid to 19 African countries, including South Africa, to support for its plans to dilute the influence of the International Criminal Court is likely to harden attitudes. This short-sighted decision could have implications for the US's ramped-up military activities in Africa. ... Troop deployment is often congruent with oil exploration — the US sees West Africa as a vital future supplier of oil.

Bush's increasingly unilateralist foreign policy agenda is alienating the "world's only superpower" across the globe, and here. His is an unwilling empire and, as next week's protests and meetings are likely to show, as they do in Iraq's nascent guerrilla war, national sovereignty and multilateralism are vital in a globalised era. The US decision to downgrade its representation to the World Conference against Racism in 2001; its walkout from negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court; its hardline and uncooperative stance at the World Summit; and, finally, the war on Iraq have cooled relations, at points to near icy, between it and South Africa. ...

While Bush will stress the absolutes of US compassion, research shows that in each area he will highlight, economic support is in fact very limited and always places US business and national interests first. ... [T]he US has also hamstrung efforts at the World Trade Organisation to make it easier for developing countries to import or manufacture cheap generic drugs; and this week it appointed a big pharmaceutical industry businessman, Randy Tobias, former CEO of Eli-lilly to head the Bush Aids programme. Aids activists fear this will sound the death knell for efforts to manufacture and distribute cheaper non-patent Aids drugs — essential in the global battle. ...

The third leg of its "compassionate conservatism" is the African Growth and Opportunity Act [Agoa], which allows preferential market access to 38 African countries. ... Because benefits are only granted to countries that completely open their markets, local producers can lose out. In Lesotho, where clothing exports grew to $130-million from a zero-base, almost seven in 10 new enterprises are Taiwanese owned with suspect labour practices and poor working conditions, a troubling norm, according to trade unions who conducted a two-year study into Agoa. ...

South Africa is readying to roll out the red carpet for Bush ... But as Airforce One takes off next Friday, Bush is likely to go home with another message: the age of empire is over and Africa has her own priests. more...

Bush's No-Mercy Mission

Like the world's oldest profession, the Republican administration of United States President George W Bush has interests, rather than principles. It would be a mistake to take Bush's "compassionate agenda" seriously. His whistle-stop tour of five African countries, including South Africa, must be seen for what it is — hard-eyed self-service posing as a mercy mission. African leaders should approach it in the same self-interested spirit. Bush's primary concerns, as they were before the invasion of Iraq, are domestic security, the advancement of corporate America and the securing of strategic assets, mainly oil. more...

Bush Plans Bases to Gird Africa

As George Bush prepares to leave for a whistle-stop tour of Africa, it has been revealed that he has ordered the US military to plan for a massive expansion of its presence on the continent. more...

Ah, what the hell. I told you so.

Conservative Compassion in Action

American Barbarism in the Home of Civilisation

U.S. soldier swaps child's morphine for father's gold watch



Departure was delayed by a sandstorm, and the family - the four children in the back - set off shortly after noon in Kassim's new car. A few minutes later they reached the American checkpoint at the northern gate to the city. [Significantly, the suicide bomb which killed four US soldiers at a road block and was credited with inflaming American behaviour at check points, occurred a full four days later on 29 March at Najaf. This was the incident described by the Washington Post as, 'The first such attack of the war.']

'I could see two tanks,' recalls Kassim. 'They were sand-coloured, with markings on them. I was afraid and stopped my car 60m away. Less than a minute passed. They did not open anything, I saw no one. It was silent.' [The American tanks kept their hatches down. The Marines inside would have been looking through their green-tinted rectangular window, at a civilian car carrying a couple and four children.] 'I was frozen with fear,' continues Kassim. 'I could see their guns moving down. Then there was a terrible noise, and my car was buried in shooting.'

Kassim's voice begins to crack. 'I saw my eldest daughter, Mawra, die. She was nine; I saw it with my eyes: she took the first shot, opened her eyes, and closed them again.' Gufran, his second daughter, was also killed immediately. 'But my son Mohammed, he was six and in the first year of primary school, he was still breathing. And my Zainab, she is five, was also still alive, although she had been shot in the head.'

Two Americans approached the car. 'They were called Chris and Joe. They took out my two dead children, then tried to give my son oxygen, but it was no use. He died there, at that moment. I asked for a helicopter to take us to hospital. They refused, but Joe gave us some morphine in exchange for my gold watch. They tied my bad leg to the other, then took us to their base.'

There, the Americans had established a field hospital, where they bandaged up the surviving child, father and mother. For two nights, the remains of the family slept in a bed. It appears that the story is reaching an end. 'Wait!' insists Kassim, his tears preparing themselves for what is to come, as if his trials could get any worse. 'Don't ask me questions. I will tell you what happened.'

On the third night, that of 27 March, 'there were some Americans wounded that night, in the fighting. Maybe they needed the beds. So they told us we had to go outside. I heard the order - "put them out" - and they carried us like dogs, out into the cold, without shelter, or a blanket. It was the days of the sandstorms and freezing at night. And I heard Zainab crying: "Papa, Papa, I am cold, I am cold." Then she went silent. Completely silent.'

Kassim breaks off in anguish. His wife continues the story of the night. 'What could we do? She kept saying she was cold. My arms were broken, I could not lift or hold her. If they had given us even a blanket, we might have put it over her. We had to sit there, and listen to her die.'

'We'd had trouble having children,' Kassim re-enters the conversation. 'We'd been trying for six years without success and given up hope. But then God blessed us, and everything went right. Four little flowers - and now four little flowers cut down. What for? For oil and a strategic place for America? Do they know God, these people? Why did they put my Zainab out into the cold? I tell you Mister, she died of cold, she died of cold.' more...

Confess or Die, US Tells Jailed Britons

Two Britons facing US military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay will be given a choice: plead guilty and accept a 20-year prison sentence, or be executed if found guilty. more...

America to Build Super Weapons

The Pentagon is planning a new generation of weapons, including huge hypersonic drones and bombs dropped from space, that will allow the US to strike its enemies at lightning speed from its own territory. more...

Girl at the Window

One Way Mirrors and...

...the mysteries we seldom see



She's got everything she needs, | She's an artist, she don't look back. | She can take the dark out of the nighttime | And paint the daytime black.

Bob Dylan | She Belongs to Me

I seldom think of photographers as bloggers. Times change. Frank, in pointing to Aicha Hockx's above photograph, led me to Niek Hockx's blog which, in turn, led me to the lair of the diabolical and ghastly PorridgeBoy. Indeed. PorridgeBoy is trying to get at me through Niek and Aicha. He will not succeed and they can be assured of my protection. But never mind that. Much as I relish the thought of girding my loins, calling on my armies, saying farewell to my family and heading [again] into battle with the diabolical Scot, this entry looks at another of Aicha's photographs. This task is a tad more difficult than it was yesterday as, having some idea of the photographer's origins, my interpretation of her work can only be subjective. Frank, however, asked what I thought and I'll stick to his brief.

This photograph carries the same themes or metaphors as that interpreted below. I will, however, say two things that might send shivers up Frank's spine, i.e. 'simulacra' and 'simulacrum'. There is nothing real here but the meaning one derives from light and shadow. And that is everything. Religious myth again dominates. The girl's position before the crucifix formed by the windowpane suggests the women at the Cross on Calvary. Windows... go figure. Bergman used them to great effect in his movies, but I've never explored their meaning beyond the obvious, our view of the world and ourselves. The girl's attitude, hand on hip, leaning into the crucifix and the light, the latter being outside, carries a certain denial or defiance of that which is before her.

All the action takes place in the seemingly empty room.

The room's darkness reminds me of my tendency to ignore an explanation of dark or cold as an absence of light or heat. To me, they are presences, tangible and real. And so it is with the Shadow that cleaves to the girl's back, silhouetting her entire being. It is behind her, in her subconscious, that we find reflections of the Cross that are more clear and, perhaps, true than that which she faces. The sun thrown to the floor by a window not shown in the photograph makes it immediately a replica of the cross represented by that in front of her. It is clean, true, geometric. However, it is not the cross the girl sees in her soul. I find the truth of the picture in the crucifix of light shining from the wall, perhaps a cross more easily or readily accepted or acceptable. Joined to the window, part of its simple geometry is marred or perfected by shadow from the girl's elbow, lending it an immediately recognisable pubic triangle or feminine quality.

This triangle is mirrored outside, in the world, in the apex of the roof that rises from the foot of the cross. The other, more sterile version of the crucifix, lies on the floor, to the girl's right-hand side. Interestingly, although I cannot see what she is wearing, the girl's right arm seems to hang, covered, by her side, as though lame. Her bare back and active arm point to the crucifix on the wall [where most crucifixes are found]. From the 'external' reality of the window, two versions of the crucifixion are evident in the subconscious, one sterile or male, the other fertile and female. The latter is not 'perfect', broken by a power plug [suggestive in itself] and the light meeting the floor. It does however, leave a glow on the floor, suggesting warmth. It is this female cross that rises towards the light, in line with the girl's outward gaze. It is in these harmonious angles that an acceptance of whatever it is she sees, is reached.

I don't know. Anything can be read into anything. A cross is a cross and a window is a window. Geometric patterns make nice pictures. Shadows create light. Aicha Hockx seems to work with light, radiant or otherwise. Bringing my old friend Bob into the picture, so to speak, "She can take the dark out of the nighttime, and paint the daytime black."

I'd disagree with Dylan on one thing though. I reckon the person who put this photograph together looks at everything from many angles.

She's nobody's child, | The Law can't touch her at all.

Bob Dylan | She Belongs to Me


"I have seen the end of the world..."

Thinking of a series of dreams | Where the time and the tempo fly | And there's no exit in any direction | 'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes

Bob Dylan | Series of Dreams

Having visited Niek's site, I'd be surprised to learn he's not contributed to the Sports Illustrated Calendar edition. We're talking veritable high-power commercial photography here. It does not, however, lean towards the contemplative in the same sense as it might if we were to dispense with our sheer delight in the female figure. On that score, I cannot, with any certainty, say my interpretations of Aicha's photographs bear any relation to her intent. However, as a great photographer once said, "Photographs are conversations." Fuck, I think it was a photographer... perhaps it was one of those hippy-dippy marketing gimcracks from the cluetrain school. I don't know but, whoever said it, hit the nail on the head. Between the creation and the interpretation, falls the shadow.

Besides walking into PorridgeBoy [Gary, where the hell are you? Aren't we due another war?], I find Niek speaking of Rennes-le-Chateau and pointing to several intriguing sites perpetuating the story of the Sinclair family, the Priory of Sion, the hidden mysteries of the Carolingian Empire, the Knights Templar [last reportedly seen at Bannockburn kicking English ass], the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. In my interview with Frank last year, I wondered at the in-the-world truth of the life of the Holy Family, speculating on Christ's flight through Egypt, across North Africa, his landing from an IRA sympathiser's boat off the coast of Ireland and his later retirement in the south of France. Or something to that effect. I was enormously pleased, during the 80s, to read Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln's The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, their book on freemasonry, and the follow up to the original, The Messianic Legacy. These books profited from scepticism both of their claims and their healthy questioning of events in Palestine some 2,000 years ago. For me, they were books in which I realised my quite happy knack of being able to live with worldly and spiritual truths, no matter how disparate or contradictory they might at first appear.

Synchronicity does not, however, stop there. Niek points too, to the site of the lissome young lovely I had to save from the clutches of the depraved ray sweatman, namely Gretchen Pirillo, model of the world's greatest pair of shoes. Gretchen featured in my mind today as I continue my story of The End of the World. I have not completed it, but will do so shortly. Today, I was busy with geology, noting with enormous pleasure Mark Woods' posting yesterday of a John Isaac photograph of an Arizona slot canyon, The Corkscrew. I've been delving into the geology of that neck of the woods and, having scoured Monument Valley, headed for Canyon De Chelly, where I came across a remarkable picture by Phillip Greenspun, a Hockx linkee.


The Restaurant at the Beginning of the World [enlarge]

Wasn't making any great connection | Wasn't falling for any intricate scheme | Nothing that would pass inspection | Just thinking of a series of dreams

Bob Dylan | Series of Dreams

But enough of the geological crap. A couple of excerpts from Bring on the Apocalypse, which will probably never see the light of day.

My main base of operations for the foreseeable future will, however, be the Jesus Bunker, for which a map giving directions is located somewhere in the PageCount archives I link to from this page. For reasons that will be revealed to you in what is called 'good' time [why should such time be considered 'good' when other times are generally thought of as being 'bad'?], Gary Turner and I are hunkered down in the Jesus Bunker with Chris Locke and RageBoy, everybody's favourite gay couple, who just happen to be married [which is pretty weird since, if you know this blog, Father Christopher is in line to take over from Pope JPII].

Marek is on guard at the door and Gretchen is cooking our supper. She's a good girl. I have taken over the Jesus Bunker and have renamed it Out2Lunch [as I usually am] or am otherwise not always all there. You take your pick and lie in it, as my spiritual adviser is wont to say. Frank is not here. He did not make it. We were on our way to the bunker from Denver International when we were ambushed by a rag-tag horde of people comprising academics in a state of high dudgeon. Which is why we are hunkered down in the Jesus Bunker. We cannot decide whether to call these people 'insurgents', 'freedom fighters', 'guerillas', 'terrorists', 'rebels' or something else having similar connotations and an equal sense of tempered objectivity. They crucified Frank, so he'll be a few days late. I have mailed Rumsfeld for advice.

By now it should be obvious to you why I have no time to worry about the petty shit with which you trouble your little brain. I have the wedding report to finish. As mentioned elsewhere, Father Christopher and RageBoy were married on June 21, the day of the northern summer solstice. It was the winter solstice down here, but I suppose that doesn't mean a thing to pea brains who think only of that which directly affects them. I was there to record the event but Norlin vomited on my camcorder and I have to reconstruct the whole damned thing from memory. Never mind, I will finish the job. It was a beautiful and moving ceremony, with Father Christopher and RageBoy taking their vows from the DSM-IV.

[...]

Since then, in awe of 225 million years of history rising above me, I've been mugging up on what to do when Apocalypse II strikes. Some people reckon it will be Apocalypse VI. I don't often go to the movies, so wouldn't really know. It doesn't matter. The loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago leaves me strangely unmoved. Perhaps I am a heartless bastard after all. As far as I'm concerned, though, these things all pan out the same way. Our Creator wields a broad brush. But have no fear, I will lead you safely through all things. Don't believe me? Well, fuck you. You're for the fire and flame, my friend. Check out Phillip Greenspun's work above. He offers irrefutable proof of life after death. Suck on that, Bubba. In fact, blow the bloody thing up. Click on it and study the plastering job on the canyon walls. Yeah. Apocalypse. The Hand of God. It's all about us. But have no fear. We will survive it. Trust me.

Gretchen's serving supper. I have to call Marek in...

Who said blogging's no fun?

Wasn't looking for any special assistance | Not going to any great extremes | I'd already gone the distance | Just thinking of a series of dreams

Bob Dylan | Series of Dreams