Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Pathetic high school and total absence of adults
JAY ASHER – 13 REASONS WHY ► – 2007-2017
This novel deals with a female teenage suicidee (age 17 in
junior class in high school). The subject is serious and deserves great
attention. It is mostly centered on the recorded cassettes of the suicidee explaining
her reasons since she arrived in this high school as a “freshman,” a word that
has to be updated either to freshman and fresh-woman, or to fresh-person. “Freshman”
is purely sexist for girls or young women. This is also true at college level.
There are seven cassettes, hence fourteen sides and they are
received by mail and listened to through the sole ears of a certain Clay
Jensen, same age, same junior level same high school. This listener is talkative
and he constantly adds his own commentaries. The recorded story is in italics
and the commentaries are in straight font, but apparently the same font, which
makes the reading a little bit difficult. The second privileged young man in
the story is a certain Tony whose family name I have not found (maybe my negligence).
He is a friend of Clay Jensen and he provided the suicidee, Hannah Baker, with
the cassette recorder (a Walkman) she used to record her story which is her
real story told by herself in practically thirteen sides and the last but one
side is in fact the incognito recording of her session with her guidance
counselor and English teacher, Mr. Parker. Each side centers on one particular
character who in a way or another (except one) did something nasty to her. Note
Tony’s Walkman will be borrowed without true approval by Clay. Tony will not
resent it, far from it because he knows what it is for. Hannah recorded a
second set of cassettes (though technically it could not be done with ONE Walkman)
and she entrusted that second set to Tony in case the first set that was
supposed to circulate from one person concerned to the next got lost or destroyed.
Tony has been entrusted on the tapes themselves with the mission of making them
public if they did not reach the end of the list of twelve people concerned by
Hannah’s death.
The author is also a man, so that Hannah’s story is seen
through the ears and eyes of two young men and told through the pen of an older
man. In the story, apart from Mr. Parker who has an important role to play, all
adults are marginalized or plainly absent. Hannah’s parents are inexistent?
Clay’s mother is anxious to believe her son’s lies to dedramatize a situation
that is tricky since he listens to the fourteen cassette sides in one evening
and night and thus sleeps in some kind of a park at the end. In the same way
Tony’s father is reduced to a mechanic taking care once in the book of his son’s
car and yet has nothing to say. This absence of adults is totally surprising
since a high school is full of adults most of them highly trained to deal with
older teenagers. And all of them have parents and all parties take place in
private houses, but without any parents present or close. The teachers,
guidance counselor, librarians and other personnel should have been able to see
the tall tale signs of a coming suicide in a girl that demonstrates very clear
Asperger symptoms. The most obvious is the strong desire to be empathetically
received by others and at the same time the extremely strong attitude that makes
her resent such contacts if they do not satisfy her own expectations, and then
her locking herself into isolation, loneliness, cultivated reclusion in
inwardness.
This being said we cannot psychoanalyze Hannah because she
is not a true person and psychoanalyzing the author is from my point of view
useless and uninteresting. I will concentrate on the story and there is a lot
to say about it.
Thirteen characters are announced and twelve are actually
targeted in the six tapes. Let me give you the list in proper order.
0- Tony
whose name evades me and who is the cassette recorder and reader lender and the
depository of the second set of cassettes. Remember he is a friend of Clay
Jensen.
1- First cassette, first side: Justin Foley, the author in fresh-person class of the
questionnaire and vote in the class about who is hottest and Hannah comes at
the top. She resents it.
2- First cassette, second side: Alex Standall who gropes at her backside and grabs her
wrist. She of course resents this forced physical contact.
3- Second cassette, first side: Jessica Davis. Ms. Antilly a guidance counselor tries to
bring together two new people in the high school and the area. So she organizes
the meeting of Alex Standall and Jessica Davis. Hannah find herself connected
to them in some diner called Monet’s and they start since the three of them are
from outside the area a relation with a motto and a gesture: hand on hand they
cry “Olly-olly-oxen-free.” But it will be short lived because of the
questionnaire about the hottest girl that preferred Hannah Baker to Jessica
Davis (the latter resents being second), and the subsequent groping of Alex.
Jessica becomes very hostile rapidly.
4- Second cassette, second side: Tyler Down, the photographer for the yearbook but also a
peeping tom who tries to get pictures of Hannah in her room in the evening; She
hears the clicks and tells another girl, Courtney Crimson who is interested in
the exhibitionism of the situation and to trap the boy they give themselves in
a show in Hannah’s room, and they catch him. Hannah does not reveal the name of
the girl but Clay finds a picture in some open golden book at Monet’s showing
Hannah and Courtney in a friendly pose.
5- Third cassette, first side: Courtney Crimsen who, one night, to go to a party, asks
Hannah to drive her over making her a guest of the party at the same time. As
soon as they are arrived, Courtney goes her own way and drops Hannah who is
very fast dissatisfied with the party where she cannot integrate in the kind of
activities proposed (drinking, smooching, or even some deeper physical
contact). She decides to leave to the great outrage of Courtney who does not
have a ride home. In his commentaries Clay reveals that in eighth grade his
crush was on Skye Miller but he had not exploited it. At the same time, hence
in the course of listening to the cassettes, he visits Tyler’s house and finds
there Marcus Cooley telling that several people have already come there and
used stones to break Tyler’s window.
6- Third cassette, second side: Marcus Cooley who in “My Dollar Valentines,” a fund raising action
of cheerleaders gets Hannah Baker as his first “choice.” He calls her and she
accepts an ice-cream date at Rosie’s another diner. She goes and she waits a
long time when Marcus finally arrives, obviously counting on her not coming and
yet checking beyond any decent time lapse if she had come after all, and she
had.
7- Fourth cassette, first side: Zach Dempsey, a student in the Peer Communication class
where special personal bags are open to all messages from the members of the class,
anonymous or not. Hannah is in the class too and she finds out Zach is stealing
her messages, isolating her from any peer communication.
8- Fourth cassette, second side: Ryan Shaver who is the editor of the “Lost N Found Gazette.”
She has contact with him as a poet and they exchange their poetry. He likes one
poem particularly and he, without her agreement, publishes the poem
anonymously. In fact, the poem then is used in English classes, including
Hannah’s with Mr. Porter. She resents the lack of trust the publishing of the
poem reveals but she refuses to recognize the poem is hers.
9- Fifth cassette, first side: Clay Jensen who, Hannah says, does not belong here because
he is all good. He works with her at the local cinema but the relation is not
personal, only professional though friendly which does not mean much. One night
he goes to a party (which is rare for him because in all his classes they are
tested on Monday) and Hannah decides to go too to meet him. The meeting becomes
friendly and could develop into something more intimate. But she stops it and
asks him to leave, which he does.
10- Fifth cassette, second side: this is the side that is
not in the count of twelve. Still in the room where she had become nearly
intimate with Clay, Hannah sees Justin Foley coming with Jessica Davis that is
totally out, drunk and unconscious; Justin puts her in the bed and then Bryce
Walker arrives, speaks with Justin and then rapes Jessica Walker after checking
she was irresponsive. But the episode is centered on Hannah Baker because she could have stopped it if she had
revealed her presence, hidden as she is in some cupboard. She did not. This
episode is illogical since later on Clay will not send the tapes to Bryce
Walker but to Jenny Kurtz that appears in the next episode.
11- Sixth cassette, first side: Jenny Kurtz is the cheerleader who took Hannah’s “My Dollar
Valentine’s” form, gave her the results and witnessed the call from Marcus
Cooley. At the end of the previous party Hannah accepts a ride from Jenny Kurtz
who runs into and over a stop sign. Hannah gets off then and witnesses two cars
ramming into each other at that crossroads because the stop sign is down. One
of the drivers is a senior from the school delivering pizzas. He is killed on the
spot. She runs to a gas station to call the police but it is too late, the
police are already on the way. She believes Jenny has called but she finds out later
that it is Clay who called because he also witnessed the accident. Jenny’s
bumper was hastily replaced and the first accident destroying the stop sign was
hushed up.
12- Sixth cassette, second side: Bryce Walker is the “hero” of this episode. Hannah looks
after a house for the night next to a loud party further on in the street. When
all the guests have left she decides to walk along and comes to the house where
she finds Courtney and Bryce in a hot bath in the garden; They invite her and
she accepts out of the worst possible motivation. She totally yields to Bryce’s
rape just to motivate herself more to commit suicide. The decision is
practically taken then. It is clear that she is still a virgin and sacrifices
her virginity as a prelude to the sacrifice of her life.
13- Seventh cassette, first side: Mr. Porter, her guidance counselor and English teacher. She
asks for an appointment and gets one. She comes with her Walkman on in her backpack
and she records the whole interview. Mr. Porter in insensitive, in fact non-empathetic.
He is a pure bureaucrat who has learned his lesson more or less. He does not
sense he is rejecting her into her clearly stated intention to commit suicide. He
will not call the parents or contact anyone. He abandons her to her fate with
three choices he enumerates: to press charges; to confront the rapist; or to
move on.
14- Seventh cassette, second side: No character at all. Just
“Thank you.”
The conclusion is Clay’s who recognizes he could have done
more to establish a personal relation with Hannah but was never able to. In the
school corridors on the day after his listening to the tapes, late for his
class, he meets with Skye Miller that goes by and he runs after her and
establishes some kind of contact probably to make up for his failure with
Hannah. If things were that simple, the world would be beautiful.
What can we say?
First high school life is absolutely dematerialized in this
book since only the teenagers are captured with one exception, and maybe a half,
among the adult personnel. It cannot cope with personal growing pains both
preventively and curatively. The relations from Hannah’s point of view are
nothing but bullying in any way possible including from the evanescent
teachers. Parents are absent in society, even in the various institutions where
the kids go, diners, and cinema. I cannot believe the only two workers in the cinema
are Clay and Hannah. There must be a proprietor or manager or ticket checker
somewhere for security and smooth work. These teenagers are totally abandoned
to themselves.
Suicide then becomes the only true solution or rather
way-out or escape since these teenagers have no contact with adults even confrontational.
There is one mention of Hannah being grounded and yet she goes to the party
where she meets Clay by escaping her room through the window. The only adult
who has some density is vain, bureaucratic and frankly not very well trained in
the psychological domain since he does not recognize in his class the clear Asperger
syndrome Hannah demonstrates and he is totally unmoved into any exceptional understanding
or action by Hannah telling him she is going to commit suicide.
What is left then?
A narrow palette of the hundred shades of suicide teenagers,
and anyone who comes to this conclusion that life is no longer worth living,
encounter. Hannah says page 254 “I wish I would die.” And she develops with
three “could”. What is surprising is that the text does not get to the next
stage of “should” because someone who is to commit suicide has to come to the
conviction they should, they must, they ought to do it. This is not reached
with Hannah. Her last words to Clay on the day before dying are “I’m sorry!” She
will use the same words when confronted to her being raped by Bryce. The phrase
has at least two meanings and these two meanings are not exploited. They are a
potential but totally uncultivated, hence wild. And this should have led the
author to another meaning of suicide very present in the tapes left behind: “I’m
sorry I have to do this but you will be sorry in your turn, you the twelve when
you listen to the tapes, and you the twelve if the second set of tapes is made
public.” There is in any attempt to commit suicide the idea that the survivors
will be sorry and that you, the suicidee, will know about it, see it, witness
it, and you, the suicidee, make sure there will be repayment after your death.
That leads us to the idea that the rape she accepts is a sacrificial ritual on Hannah4s
side spoiling her and thus justifying both her suicide and the repayment she
will bring with her tapes, though from the description she gives of that rape
it is more sex without any consensual agreement but with no resistance at all
to any forced action from Bryce since there is no forced action from Bryce: she
undresses herself and puts herself in the hot bath.
The book is thus amazingly provocative but psychologically and
even existentially rather superficial, though it reads tremendously well. Note
in this high school world in modern times the sexual orientation of these young
men and women is not only a pregnant question but a capital question, as
supreme as the Supreme Court’s decision on it. This question is totally absent
from the book, both in Hannah and in the young men and women around her, though
many occasions were ripe to lead to such questions that were problematic like
hell in older eras and are still quite enigmatic to many.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Captain SKA - Liar Liar GE2017
Liar, you say? You are too nice with her. She is a cynical demagogue
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
God gets lost in GMOs
KATA MLEK – ONE GOD – BOOK 1: THE
WILL TO POWER – 2016
Welcome to the apocalypse of this world, I mean Europe only,
even if dragging Africa in its wake, but definitely no USA or Americas, no
Great Britain, no Russia and no Asia. But do not believe they are absent. In fact,
they are in the unmentioned background. We are dealing with GMOs, the too
famous Genetically Modified Organisms, both animal and vegetal, mainly
developed by the USA and adopted in the Americas and Asia.
But in fact we have here what I would consider as a dystopia,
that is to say nothing close to any utopia, except if Animal Farm is considered a utopia. And it is true it could be for
people who cannot see the light of the stars without thinking of the sharp points
of such stars and wasting their mental time wondering how many points these
stars may have. Then we fall into what is oratory, the art or practice of formal speaking in public, or the eloquent
or rhetorical language of some politicians in any beer fest, cattle fair or
roller coasting funfair, and in the background what it is in the Roman Catholic
Church, i.e. a religious society of secular priests founded in Rome in 1564 to
provide plain preaching and popular services, established in various countries,
and by metonymic extension that plain preaching itself against GMOs, and thus
we get to some Grossly Magnified Oration about some “ecologically incorrect
political science fiction,” if such a definition of this book is not
excessive.
In Europe where
GMOs, in the standard understanding of the acronym, are banned, a group of researchers,
businessmen, entrepreneurs and other political and economic social climbers
have decided to change the situation in order to make a lot of money. So they
take over an anti-GMO respectable genetic business and turn it into a war
machine against anything that could be “natural” or at least what is supposed
to be natural.
First they
invent the new plants by crisscrossing various species. Then they do the same
with some pests they are going to use as destroying armadas against standard
agriculture, then they start playing with these new plants on their private
land somewhere inconspicuous in Europe and they start the “industrial”
exploitation of these new plants in Africa where it solves the problem of
hunger. To clean up the European plate they systematically spread the new pests
over agricultural exploitations and farms to create starvation and famine. Then
politicians are easy preys since they have to feed the people and even most
crops from across the Atlantic where GMOs are the norm become both too
expensive and the only alternative, apart from the GMOs devised by this band of
European criminal entrepreneurs under the sole monopolistic name of Genesis.
The possible
competitors in Europe are ready for becoming the victims of moralistic and
ethical snipers since on the side the main man in this line of clean business
is accompanying his ethical chemistry and his campaign for ecological agriculture
in self-sufficient farms with a vast network of prostitution and his own
practice of carnal love for very young girls. This man is also able to drag
into his sensual perversion one of the highest ranking religious person just
under the Pope. This man, Will Smart, and his friendly priest, Yan Varga, are
both Hungarian and absolutely off limits. But be sure justice, both civilian
and religious, will catch up on them, though they will manage to escape more or
less.
But that will
give the whole of Africa and the whole of Europe to the sole Genesis. Isn’t
that a shame and tremendous entrepreneurial success? Yes, it is indeed.
I regret though
the fuzziness on what GMO covers. If it is only crossing one plant with another,
that is not very recent. Maize, also called Indian corn, is a typical plant
devised long before the Christian Era by the simple crossing and selecting of
species since the wild plant in Mexico and around that can reproduce itself by
shedding its grains on the ground has been turned into a plant that cannot
reproduce itself naturally without the helping hands of humans because the ear
of maize is wrapped up in a hermetic husk and sealed by the corn silk at the
tip of it. The grains are also very firmly attached to the corn cob itself. Gregor
Mendel is the final tip of this iceberg of species selection and crossing. GMOs
today go far beyond what our ancestors invented even before the last Ice Age
somewhere around 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, at least. We can be against
integrating in a plant weed killers, pest killers and disease treatments that
will still be present in the final plant, thus feeding to people these chemical
elements without knowing what the consequences on the health of consumers could
be, except that it cannot be innocuous. The line between crossing various species
of one plant to improve its performance or to produce some hybrids that have
qualities that the original plants would not have is a very standard method in
agriculture and has been for a long time. Most European vineyards are planted
with traditional varieties hybridized onto American varieties that are the base
to the hybrid and provide this hybrid with some qualities only the American
native varieties possess, like resistance to phylloxera.
I also find the
attack against the Catholic Church that sees the godlike saving intervention of
Genesis to cope with famine as some competition against the concept of God, the
business stock of the Catholic Church, though not only, slightly easy and in
contradiction with the end when the Pope apparently remains nicely neutral, and
anyway totally unrealistic about the depth and ideological pregnancy and power
of religion in our modern godless world. This world might be godless but the
main dimension of religion does not need God to exist, which explains why
Buddhism can thrive though it does not state the existence of any creator or
god.
But this book
is an interesting trip in some fears of the 21st century vastly
amplified by populism here and there that wants to be effective by getting rid
of all norms and ethical rules in the name of “back to national basics,” “America
first” or “Britain first.”
Dr. Jacques
COULARDEAU
Sunday, May 28, 2017
What are the causes of proliferation and terrorism, please?
COUNTDOWN TO ZERO – 2010
This documentary is based and constructed around one quote
by John Fitzgerald Kennedy in his address before
the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 25, 1961:
“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate
the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child
lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads,
capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by
madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”
The logic of the film is simple.
We have’ more than twenty thousand nuclear devices in the world in the hands of
a very small number of countries and thus in the hands of machines that control
them, military personnel that manages the machine and political personnel that controls
the military personnel that controls the machines that control the nuclear devices.
All along that command line individuals can make the wrong evaluation of a
situation, take the wrong decision on the basis of that wrong evaluation and
within 20 to 30 minutes it will have happened: one city or more will have been
destroyed, and within a few more minutes, retaliation will come. And once it is
started it cannot be stopped. There is no comeback, no turn-back, nor
step-back.
In that command line we just need an accident caused by some
mechanical failure, or some miscalculation brought up by the misinterpretation
of some data provided by the machines, or some madness, or let’s say some mental
derangement of one actor in that chain of command. The film provides several
instances of close to the brink situations that occurred over the years.
Evaluation of the damage in the case of one nuclear weapon on one big city in
the world is just over-dramatic and seems to only play on fear in the audience.
If the public is only motivated by fear, then there is no hope.
Hope can only come if the public, the vast wide general
public is convinced we have to get rid of nuclear weapons not because they are
afraid but because of positive reasons like the fact humanity means life, means
creative development, means continued progress, and nuclear weapons, both
possession and use, are none of these, not life, not creative development, not
continued progress. We could also develop some positive ethical arguments going
the same way, provided we clearly see the difference between nuclear energy and
nuclear weapons. Just like nuclear power can be used in nuclear submarines or
in nuclear ships it may have one day to be used in space travel, and not
fission but fusion. Not using nuclear energy for weapons is definitely nothing
but an ethical decision and the mark of ethical human control of humanity. It
is not because the internal combustion engine was used in tanks that we are
supposed to ban the internal combustion engine, all cars and many other
applications. It is not because some planes are military bombers that we are supposed
to ban air travel.
That’s the first shortcoming of this film: nuclear energy is
not clearly differentiated from nuclear weapons and yet only the French images
project the confusion by stating “NON AU NUCLÉAIRE” [No Nuclear] meaning the
rejection of both nuclear energy and weapons, though in fact in the mind of the
French people who put forward this motto (the Greens), it is nuclear energy
they have in mind. The images from all other countries and the interviews
always target nuclear weapons. But it would be clear to say that nuclear energy
is another can of worms and these worms might be earth worms, very useful worms
for agriculture, gardening and hence surviving hunger.
The second shortcoming is the very ambiguous message about
terrorism and about proliferation. The film insists with images and long
sequences on the Islamic danger of Pakistan who has nuclear weapons – supposedly
thanks to the Chinese, though we do not know where the Chinese got the
technology, from the Soviets maybe? – and who sells the blue print as much as
the technology to anyone who wants to pay. The Pakistani bomb is called the
Islamic Nuclear Bomb and it is at once connected to Al Qaeda and Iran, and
allusions to more Muslim countries in the Middle East or the Arab world are
added. Nothing is said about the proliferation of nuclear weapons to India, the
Hindu Bomb, etc., and where it could have come from – the Soviets I guess? And
still along that line there are a few elements about North Korea, still under
the rule of Kim the Second, not yet Kim the Third. This presentation is
absolutely biased and debatable. And what about France, Great Britain and
Israel?
Terrorism is a problem but we have other forms of terrorism
than Islamic terrorism, even today. Terrorism has causes and to only speak of containing
and controlling it is a waste of time since it will bring no solution to the
real causes. And by the way how did the apartheid South Africa manage to get
nuclear fuel to be able to build nuclear weapons at a time when a total embargo
was imposed onto this country for anything military? And the film is a little
bit short on the fact that there are an unevaluated and definitely uncontrolled
amount of Highly Enriched Uranium and Plutonium running loose on the planet’s
black market, enough to produce thousands of nuclear weapons of various categories
from a dirty bomb to a real nuclear weapon. And this black market can only
exist because of the diamond and other gems black market, because of the
uncontrolled speculative financial market and the vast international financial
laundering machine through and via the various fiscal paradises and tax havens.
Altogether this film is essential because of the data it
contains but it is not enough because of what I have just said and the main
shortcoming is that it does not at all tackle the causes of such paranoid
attitudes at the level of the various states that control nuclear weapons, or
want to, and of the development of terrorism in this world of ours. As long as
we will not be able to integrate in the global community the Muslim world,
which is not the Arab world, which is a lot more than just the Arab world and
even the Middle East which is mainly not Arab, or even Semitic, but Turkic or
Indo European or Indo-Aryan. We are today manipulated by life, by social media
and by various political social climbers who want to make us be afraid of
something, anything in order to feed their commerce, be it economic, political
or social, with paranoia and to lead us to some adventurous violent attitude
against some presumed dangers who are in many ways considered as having no
causes, as coming out of nothing, as being the pure creation of some religious
vision of a god from the past. That’s so limited, I mean mentally limited.
To be seen, widened and discussed as much as possible.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Saturday, May 27, 2017
Don't get trumped by it: this film is full of hope against bullies
GEORGE ROMERO – STEPHEN KING –
CREEPSHOW – 1982
The film hasn’t changed one iota since 1982 and what’s more
it does not seem to have aged too much. Special effects maybe, but that’s about
all. The stories are absolutely funny more than frightening. They might have
been gross and frightening in 1982 but today we are used to that kind of make-believe
cinema.
Every single story or moment is pleasure and nothing but
pleasure.
The Prologue and epilogue are so nice about the abusive
father and the voodoo son, Stephen King’s own son by the way. Let’s think his
father wasn’t that kind of a father. But you may be surprised if you really
analyzed the “rapport” between a father and a son. Abusiveness is at times in
excess gentleness.
"Father's Day” is the hilarious vengeance of an old and
decrepit father killed by his own daughter: the vengeance comes from the grave,
from beyond the grave. Never ever neglect celebrating father’s day even for a
father who does not deserve it.
"The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" with Stephen
King in the main and only human role is even more than funny with his meteor that
brings some kind of invasive green algae, fungus or whatever from outer space. Nothing
to do with Superman, nor Aliens actually. The only solution is to evade the
invasion by committing suicide I guess, slightly like a terrorist blows himself
up in order to kill as many miscreants as possible to clean up the world of its
perversion. The world is clean for the terrorist for sure after his own
sacrifice.
"Something to Tide You Over" is even more than
hilarious because of another case of vengeance from beyond the grave and in
this case the grave is the sea itself. I am not sure Stephen King intended this
story to be hilarious but it is true that since Michael Jackson living dead
creeping out of their graves and chasing you have become very entertaining.
"The Crate" is nothing but justice or some just
vengeance or some just balancing of grievances in a married couple. Don’t let
children watch that one: they could get some good idea of how to take care of
an invasive mother who does not know what a bathroom or toilet door is when her
son is using these facilities, or who does not know why she is not supposed to
look under her son’s bed. That’s when the monster in the closet is really
useful, and should be cultivated, for such sons: let it come out and take care
of the mother. It is all the same when the son has become a husband and the
mother has become a wife since all husbands choose their wives to correspond to
what their mothers were. How can you be so pessimistic? But that is no
pessimism: it is pure truth and reality.
"They're Creeping Up on You" is the final touch
about some rich man who is obnoxious with everyone and at the same time is
obsessed with cleanliness and his germless and bugless environment. That is a
killing obsession and the bugs will always have the last word and bring justice
to the poor. You can imagine what I may dream about the fate of Trump who
should be trumped by bugs and mulched by germs.
And the epilogue gives us hope: all nasty people will sooner
or later be trumped and mulched into oblivion and inexistence
1- beyond
making friends with nasty Sunni dictators or autocrats;
2- beyond
making fun of the Pope by being a grinning giant puppet next to the serious
look of this grave charismatic religious leader;
3- beyond
pushing some Prime Minister out of his right way to be in the front of the
family picture;
4- beyond
chastising 23 out of 28 of his allies and trying to bully them into paying for
his own bills to make America great again;
5- beyond
his gripping handshake that a French President turned into a gripping-back
handshake that he could not escape anymore;
6- beyond
his leaking confidential details of a criminal investigation in a terrorist
attack in Manchester;
7- beyond
his attempt to sink any climate agreement, including the one in Paris, for his
egotistic promises to completely failed professions overdue in their coming to
their own end;
8- beyond
his sending 23 million people out of insurance coverage;
9- beyond
his cutting federal funds for Medicaid by 50% and food stamps by 25% just to be
able to cut the taxes of the wealthiest in proportion.
And NINE is of course the apocalypse, the dragon, the beast
and we are all the pregnant woman escaping this Babylon RED(RUM) Witch Doctor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYgOlqinH7A
or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ttGgIQpAUc)
of a President.
Yes There is hope beyond the worst possible horror story in
real life and that’s what makes Romero’s film and Stephen King’s stories so
beautifully good, funny and true to life down to our deepest guts.
When These masters of literature and the cinema die we will
have to reinvent them under a new skin. It is true Stephen King leaves two sons
beyond himself, though they do not have the same level of creativity as the
father. But Romero is more complicated as for descent.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Friday, May 26, 2017
Puerto Rican in New York, Uprooted and rebellious
HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF – THE AVIGATOR – 2017
Porto Rican
and yet New Yorker. She lives in the City and no other city than the City. And
that urban music, those urban lyrics have the power of suffering, death at
every corner, surviving as a daily activity, solitude as both a life style and a curse that leads to a death
pyre but is yet the fuel of survival. Add to this the feeling that a colonized
person from a colonized people uprooted out of everything to survive in a
foreign environment that is no choice but a real curse then the experiential
existence you may have is going to be more situational than enthusing. But you
have to be ready for the world except if you prefer dying.
And in that
uprooted life there are few things and people that can keep you alive. The
bottle of course and you are always at the bottom of it, and a sugar daddy that
can provide with some solace but even these daddies are not eternal and then
from the bottom to the well there is a well tramped path that can only not be
trodden if somewhere you believe you may have a life to save. Your life?
Indeed, and yet that’s nothing but salvaging. The world is a salvage yard for
old models of human beings discarded like old rags.
And that rag
is the rag of a rag doll, of a rag girl that has gone and yet comes back,
unchanged and nevertheless totally locked up in that nothing that’s gonna
change that girl, and yet that simple rag accepts to be picked by some man and
she accepts to be the love object, the love rag of that man who has no other
identity than “you” but who is that “you”?
And to
think of tomorrow and what will or may happen is like living in a dream, like
locking oneself in a dream while real life is nothing but perdition,
abandonment and suffering. But why do people need some solace from a dream of
tomorrow, always tomorrow? Because life is always a trip along some road and
you have to follow that road the navigator points out to you. What a shame we
cannot go wherever we want, but just where the navigator tells you to go.
And if you
get out of the hands of that navigator you can walk in the street and everyone
around you will be the navigators of your life and they will of course tell
lies because navigators are liars, people are liars, and you can only let
yourself be taken over up and down and through by fake prayers on your knees as
if the world would change because you pray for it to.
And she can
only live the haunting curse of being a woman in a world she pretends was made
by men, which is at least unfair and vastly untrue. Railroads, records,
phonograph needles, and what else, who cares, never mind. And even those who do
nothing and produce nothing, politicians and cops, are the real masters of this
world and they all are men by definition, I guess especially when they are women.
There is nothing more manly than a woman who wants to be a man. And she has
only fighting as the end of this beginning that will lead to more ends and more
ends, till the end of that end.
In the old
neighborhoods of New York City fourteen floors are many though little to do
with skyscrapers. And yet she sees these fourteen floors as if they were the
fourteen steps to heaven in the sky. And strangely enough these fourteen floors
are some kind of bridge to her father, but a father that is nothing but a ghost
in the background. Sky, lie and cry all rhyme nicely. You can be up in the sky
lying on some cloud and yet all that is nothing but lying and crying. True life
is in the distance speaking Spanish and playing rhythmic percussions.
And imagine
her at night in this room on the fourteenth floor listening to the street. She
is like in a bubble up in the air with some kind of noise from the bottom. And
she has finally decided to settle in that bubble. And bubble it is in the sky
and then settling is fine but it is evanescent, it cannot last, she wonders how
long she will settle. In America, this country of settlers, you cannot stay
more than a short time in every settled place because you are a settler that
has to go on and settle somewhere else any time settling is getting slightly too
long.
To want, to
wish, to desire to be something, anything, provided it is something, is just
nothing at all and leads nowhere because you have lost your humanity in that
constant searching and looking for something. And she is there waiting for that
door to open, that road to lead somewhere, her feet to take her along to
something she could come to. To what some preaching from Puerto Rico. And there
is nothing left but some howling in the desert of this aimless world, Pa’lante
Please, Pa’lante again and again. But what is it? In Latin American and especially Puerto
Rican slang, it's a contraction of "para adelante" or
"forward."
But what is that call to move forward, forward
to what? But she is preaching to all those who hide, prideless in their
survival to stand up and move forward, but forward to where, to what, since she
does not know where to go.
And that’s the end of this improbable
journey to an improbable goal with an improbable navigator that does not even
know where the road leads. There is in that music some kind of sad aimlessness.
And that’s its charm because today to feel emotion and empathy you have to be
lost, uprooted, out of sorts. And off we go with the navigator in some Spanish
and yet so repetitive between the navigator and “oh, my girl!” and nothing but
the final voodoo rhythmic trance percussions that can maybe take us to the sky
on the seventh heaven of totally inward vision and contemplation.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Laissez-vous mener par les cordes sensibles
ORCHESTRE A CORDES DE LEMPDES – PATRICK BRUN – IMPROMPTU – 2011
La région
Auvergne a une histoire d’amour pour les orchestres de cordes. Cela ne peut
être qu’un héritage de la vielle à roue si ancienne dans nos montagnes. Et
pourtant nous avons aussi les vents avec la cabrette et l’accordéon de Giscard.
Mais rien n’y fait, restons dans les cordes.
Les cordes quand
elle se liguent en brigades ou en légions ont une variété suffisante pour créer
un véritable univers parfois cosmique, parfois virulent, parfois sentimental ou
romantique dont on aime les sanglots longs le soir à la brune dans les bois, et
dieu sait si nous en avons des bois dans cette région. Les cordes sont un
ensemble si flexible, malléable et dynamique qu’il peut être un tout en soi,
même quand elles se mettent en formation réduite. On remarquera cependant que
la formation ici contient quelques invités ce qui ajoute un hautbois, un
clavecin, une harpe, vibraphones et timbales, quand nécessaire.
Ce disque a un
autre avantage que les cordes rendent fascinant, c’est de pouvoir jouer toutes
les périodes, tous les styles, y compris la musique moderne qui a intégré la polyrythmie
africaine grâce aux esclaves du trafic transatlantique qui n’était pas un
commerce mais une contrebande illicite et vicieuse même si officielle et si
elle a fait la richesse de Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen et quelques autres villes
portuaires. Du moins c’est un potentiel rarement utilisé car les orchestres de
cordes ne sont pas la norme dans la musique nord-américaine et dans la musique
dite pop, rock, gospel, jazz, soul ou R&B, hip hop et rap. De cordes
ils ne connaissent souvent que la guitare et encore électrifiée.
Et c’est un peu
ce que je regrette ici car le CD ne donne pas beaucoup de cette musique du 20ème
siècle pop ou non, alors que je les ai entendus en concert à Olmet récemment et
là ils ont osé donner des pièces de compositeurs argentins et américains qui ont
cette richesse de polyrythmie si typique de notre monde musical actuel.
Il faudrait maintenant
parler de la musique, n’est-il point ?
La direction est
ample et majestueuse mais peut-être un peu trop bien ordonnée et tempérée. Il y
a dans le film the « The Peacemaker » avec Clooney and Kidman, une
brève leçon de piano quelque part en Bosnie et le professeur de piano montre à
son élève comment on peut varier l’émotion exprimée en simplement jouant sur le
rythme, la force ou la douceur des notes, donc le toucher et même l’accompagnement
de la main gauche ou des arpèges de la main droite qui peuvent ralentir,
accélérer ou simplement amplifier le rythme. Peut-être que les pièces choisies
ne s’y prêtent pas assez. Pourtant dieu sait si la « Danse de l’Ours »
de Claude-Henry Joubert s’y prêterait car l’ours n’est pas un automate mais un
animal très sensible et variable, parfois imprévisible. Il y a dans l’ours
aussi une dimension si romantique, sentimentale, fascinante. Vous êtes-vous
donc jamais trouvé nez à nez avec un de ces petits ours noirs dans une réserve
californienne où vous auriez campé pour la nuit ? Le petit- ours brun vous
regardera et nonchalamment se retournera et partira dans le sous-bois
nonchalamment sur ses deux pieds, j’entends debout sur ses pattes arrières.
Surtout ne lui donnez rien à manger : il est sauvage et n’est donc pas
dépendant de la nourriture humaine.
Les autres scènes
roumaines s’y prêtent aussi bien et il y a une tentative mais les lancinantes
notes isolées de « Dans l’Église de Braila » me semblent trop
homogènes et donnent une vision plutôt froide et menaçante de ce qui pourrait
être inquiétant et fascinant.
Le travail
musical des musiciens est précis, juste, bien lu et bien sûr conforme à la
partition, peut-être un peu trop. Laissez donc la « Fête à Bucarest »
s’envoler dans la joie et la poussière du soleil.
On aimerait peut-être
que cette formation stabilise sa composition – difficile quand on a les élèves
d’une école de musique – et se lance dans une œuvre plus ample qui pourrait
enrichir la palette de l’émotion, de l’empathie des violons et autres cordes
qui peuvent scander la pire terreur autant que la plus triste et même sardonique
histoire d’amour loupée, perdue, enfuie, comme la « Méditation de Thaïs »
de Massenet. On aimerait en entendre plus de cette musique, mais ne suis-je pas
illusionné par la participation de Hiroe Namba comme soliste de cette pièce, la
violoniste invitée. La musique semble même se perdre totalement dans les limbes
de je ne sais quelle inconscience avant de retomber sur terre dans la plus pure
contemplation intérieure quasiment ombilicale.
Les deux mouvements
du concerto de Telemann tiennent leur charme et leur puissance au fait que les
solistes sont un alto et un violoncelle. L’alto est un instrument souvent
négligé dans la gamme des cordes alors qu’il a la virilité puissante de son ton
un peu sombre comme l’adolescent qu’est le violon quand il passe la dernière
mue de l’âge adulte vers vingt ans, celle de la perte de sa virginité d’argent
et je dois dire que François Schmitt en fait un vrai prodige de cet alto
soutenu en arrière par les violons plus réguliers. Le violoncelle lui est un
instrument si féminin qu’il en est érotiquement chantant, disons même
probablement sexuellement attirant pour beaucoup et Bénédicte Piat en fait un
vrai plaisir diabolique comme dans les Sorcières d’Eastwick. Il ne manque
vraiment que la grande basse de Jack Nicholson pour que le Sabbat commence.
Je suis moins
convaincu par le « Chant des Oiseaux » de Pablo Casals. Pièce de
circonstance plus que d’émotion. Pièce pratiquement de conservatoire, peut-être
naturel et plein d’oiseaux.
L’ « Impromptu »
de Jean Sibelius est enfin capable de sous-tendre une rythmique superficielle
par une rythmique profonde même si elles sont presque concomitantes, la
souterraine peut-être à peine syncopée mais puissante et inquiétante ; Ne
croyez pas ce que vos yeux vous disent. La réalité est souvent bien autre. Et
on peut alors se lancer dans une musique de surface plus dynamique qui efface l’inquiétant
de la profondeur. Qu’il est doux d’en rester à la surface des choses ! Au moins
on ne peut pas se noyer dans une onde trop profonde. Ophélie est sauvée. Et
Hamlet est allé mourir seul plus loin dans la profondeur d’une tombe, ce qui alanguit
la fin du morceau qui retrouve un peu de l’abattement du début mais sans la
rythmique profonde et sombre de la mort qui nous tient et tire par les pieds
comme on se permet parfois de tirer le diable par la queue ou par les cornes.
Dr. Jacques
COULARDEAU
