Alice O'Keefe Wishes Manu Chau Was Not Quite so...
Lost in a century
Alice O'Keeffe
Published 27 September 2007
In contrast, La Radiolina sounds urgent and hectoring, laden with rock guitars, wailing sirens and lyrics that border dangerously on the facile: "In Baghdad/it's no democracy/just because it's a US country/In Fallujah too much calamity/This world go crazy, it's a fatality." In its lighter moments ("Me Llaman Calle" and "Otro Mundo"), La Radiolina recalls the best of Manu Chao, but too often it feels like being trapped next to a member of the Socialist Workers Party at closing time in the student bar.The feeling is not entirely dispelled by an hour in conversation with Chao; he has a tendency to make apocalyptic pronouncements, such as: "If we stay like this: chaos. End of civilisation. I mean what I'm saying. It's a matter of time" and "Capitalism is barbarity, it's the law of the jungle in money". Maybe so, but I find myself wondering what happened to the sensitive, poetic person I heard on his early albums.
Why couldn't they have got someone to interview him who was actually sympathetic to his ideas? I can't understand why the writer feels we would particularly care to have her status quo viewpoint inserted here. Would she find it so very implausible to think that it might be his political 'sensitivity' that makes his records so popular in the first place? Evidently so. Well, hopefully Mr Chao won't be too concerned about her strictures on how to be the nice, well-behaved sort of rock star that she would prefer to listen to. What piffle.
Flub away, Miss South Carolina
Well, it would be entirely unfair to gang up on the poor girl. But this Today Show sycophancy is just retarded. Basically, by saying 'atta girl, Miss South Carolina - it was just an attack of the jitters and you blanked, could have happened to anyone', they are completely ignoring some obvious facts. For starters, she didn't blank. Rather, the girl was actually trying to achieve something incredibly difficult. And no, I am not referring to the task of winning a teen beauty pageant.
As *everyone* knows, a good ol' southern gal would never stoop so low as to criticize her country in a beauty pageant! That there might be social problems in the star spangled home land is taboo! As such, the question was clearly out of order. Bless our heroine, however, rather than fall into the sneaky trap set by the questioner, she decided to try to redirect it. Unable to risk taking the question about poverty here in the USA seriously, she answers by referring to South Africa to 'the Iraq' and ... well, almost anything but what she feels she really must not say.
In a sense, the Today Show was doing much more than shoring up the poor girl's ego. They were actually engaged in a much more sinister activity. That is, they were performing according to a certain sort of text which demands unequivocally that the actual question which provoked the girl's mistake be banished from all thought. Naturally, the interviewers seem to suggest, anyone would crack under *that* sort of pressure. Of course they would, and there is the rub! Nobody would wish to blame such a nice and presentable young lady for trying her best to perform a script that it has taken the American media decades to perfect. So flub away, Miss South Carolina. At least they won't call you anti-American.
A final note: did you see how the revised answer was so careful? No suggestion that anyone in the USA had no access to a map, or suffered from shite education. This is a shame because, in fact, the 'statistics' tell us that over 10% of Americans cannot read or write at all, 20% of the nation has basic literacy issues, and 13% of all American 17-years-olds are functionally illiterate.
See:
http://www.ahalenia.com/id/id11/illiterati.html
http://www.efmoody.com/miscellaneous/illiteracy.html
"One of the great things about books is sometime there are some fantastic pictures." - George W. Bush
Borders, language, and the future of European integration: insights from the 19th century Habsburg Empire
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/362
Max-Stephan Schulze
Nikolaus Wolf
7 July 2007
The key hypothesis concerns the importance of ethno-linguistic networks for trade. If ethno-linguistic networks were an important factor, then the intensification of networks among members of the same ethno-linguistic group, and the simultaneous decline of transportation costs, should have produced a border effect inside the Empire. That is, all else equal, two cities with little or no ethno-linguistic differences will tend to trade more with each other than cities with larger differences.
Cyberspace Author William Gibson Touting Latest Novel in Second Life
William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his novel Neuromancer. So it's fitting that Gibson's latest book, Spook Country, will be promoted in cyberspace -- in Second Life, to be exact.