Thursday, July 27, 2017

 

Tout ce qu'on peut souhaiter savoir sur Michel Caubet



Michel Caubet ou l'écartèlement de la spiritualité

https://www.academia.edu/34056703/Michel_Caubet_ou_l%C3%A9cart%C3%A8lement_de_la_spiritualit%C3%A9

https://www.slideshare.net/JacquesCoulardeau/michel-caubet-ou-lcartlement-de-la-spiritualit


LE SPIRITUEL OU L’EXTENSION DE L’IMAGINAIRE

Dans le monde qui est le nôtre depuis l’an zéro où les eaux retrouvèrent le niveau normal d’après glaciation il faut savoir rendre – toujours – ce qui appartient à César à ce César lui-même, que ce soit une pièce de monnaie, une citation ou une fin brutale.
Et pour métisser l’Anglais qui dit « there is always a general who tries to outcaesar Caesar » et le Français qui prétend qu’il y a toujours quelqu’un qui « est plus royaliste que le roi » nous pourrions être spirituel et nous demander quel est ce césarien qui se veut plus radical que la dernière césarienne venue.
En ces temps de Brexit on ne pense plus à une seconde venue future qui pourrait nettoyer la planète mais bien plus à en revenir à un état de pureté et de grâce anciennes et délaissées – à jamais – dans la saleté et la crasse du passé qu’il me souvient. Le mythe des paradis perdus n’est peut-être pas très futé mais il est spirituellement rassurant pour les esprits qui n’ont pas d’empathie existentielle.
Il y a plus dans les mythes de la chute de Babylone et de la Tour de Babel que dans toutes les jérémiades des nostalgiques d’un temps béni qui n’a jamais existé ailleurs que dans leur esprit un tant soit peu racorni. Raison de plus quand le changement vital fait que le roi d’hier qui n’utilisait que son œil droit ou son œil gauche pour saisir la réalité expérientielle se trouve confronté à un prétendant qui sait lui se servir de ses deux yeux avec en plus des implants magnifiants.
Et pourtant ils ne nous font pas rire. Il faut une sérieuse dose de spiritualité de cirque pour voir les esbroufes d’un Trump ou d’une May comme des morceaux choisis de comédie et de farce, bien que ce soit d’effrayantes pitreries de hâbleurs tragiques qui avec leurs pantalonnades nous feront perdre nos culottes, petites ou grandes, avec bretelles, ceinturons ou jarretelles, qu’importe pourvu qu’on ait le string avec « garters » pour enfants gâtés.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

 

Flick the screens and enjoy the streaming



CINEMA AND TELEVISION
Published Research (March 2013 to today) & Reviews (February 2 to December 18, 2016)
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Published on Jan 1, 2017

Cinema and television have become obsessions in me over the years and today with the large flat screen we have, with a universal, all zone and all standard DVD reader we can access all the films that are available in the whole world on a digital medium.
 In the following pages, which are more a book than a paper, I have brought together all the full studies published at Amazon Kindle or on Academia.edu (these studies are extensive and I only give the presentation and the front page of them. Then I have collected all the reviews published on various sites, particularly various Amazon national branches over about the last eleven months.
Be sure I also have plenty of music, operas, books and other cultural artifacts in the field of research and reviews (I just finished a 13,000 word article on Benjamin Britten’s operas), plus creative writing (the lastest poetry volume is An Untellable Story, A Dramatic Confession, The Nineteen stations of Saraphic Love, Amazon Kindle, ASIN B00UP4CX88)  and at the same time I go on with my basic research on the phylogeny of language with Homo Sapiens over the last 250,000 years, plus the psychogenetics of language in our modern world from before birth to adult age.
For you to be able to find what is in this volume I have built a full table of contents with hyperlinks. Have a good navigation.

Olliergues, France, December 22, 2016

 Screening is inescapable, dixit Kevin Kelly, the Great KK!

They tell us there is no escape from all the screens that are going to invade our life and environment, and be sure, if there is some money to make out of this new slavery they will impose it onto us. We are their guinea pigs and mules and we will cultivate their cotton fields while they crack their whips on well-tempered airs and on our backs if need be.

Imagine the world in ten years when screens are everywhere:
From the screen(s) in our bedroom when we are woken up by the clocking in alarm;
To the screens in our bathroom to tell us to wash properly behind our ears;
To the screens in our kitchen mixing our cereals with milk, sour or not for breakfast;
To the screens in our cars or our buses or our subway trains to go to work;
To the screens at our workplace, everywhere including the toilets to entertain us with live music canned in a screen,
To the same as in the morning when going back home in our cars, in our buses, in our subway trains, in the streets too;
To the screens in our home for supper and for television in the evening and in the bathroom to make sure we brush our teeth on the proper rhythm;
To our bedroom till we go to sleep and yet still going on all night to make sure we learn our lesson properly.

Good morning at all hours in the day not to Big Brother but to Big Regressive and Repressive Womb with a screen all the time there like an umbilical cord that feeds us our submissive sauce, drug, morphine, etc.

What’s more all these screens can be eyes and they look at you, at your face, at your eyes and they know everything about you, even the type of porn you watch in secrecy and in privacy, and even the one you dream of in your mental closet, and they cabn satisfy on the screen in your glasses or on the screen on the microchips embedded in your brain anything you have wanted to see and had never dared ask Mum, Dad, your teachers, the local cops, your bosses, your priests, your friends and even your MPs.

That’s why it is high time we start becoming screen-literate and we learn how to analyze the messages, decipher the shackles they contain and liberate our brains and minds from the gladiator’s net they are throwing onto us to keep us prisoners in that dungeon of multimedia screened slavery.

I dedicate this long collection of views and reviews to those who maybe still want to dream of a world that the screens could not control, and particularly my friends Ivan, Serban, Michel, José, Maïté, Paula and a few others who may know what is coming. If we can’t avoid this inescapable, at least let us learn how to tame it, maybe control it. Catch the elephant by the Trump and look into its eyes and maybe we might be permitted to mesmerize it.


Dr. Jacques Coulardeau, Olliergues, February 14, 2017

 

Let yourself be caught by the dream-catcher


WILLIAM DRESDEN – DEAD RECKONING – 2016

A thrilling novella. We are after the Civil war with all the “freed” soldiers that turned their warlike skills into new professions, horse thieves or highwaymen, all of them drifters in gangs from one western place to the next. It is also the time when the war against the Indians started and they were relentlessly pushed away into desolate reservations, systematically. The Trail of Tears is in full swing and all kinds of stories are circulated based on some Indian myths and folk tales with monsters and magical powers to frighten the good American Christians and justify in their minds the genocide being performed on these “barbaric” Indians.

In that atmosphere William Dresden invents a character, Jesse who has the power to project fire when provoked and made angry. A gunslinger he is but also a fire-starter in the best Stephen King’s tradition. The beast is “The Limikkin. The Wendigo. The girl. Amélie.” And that beast takes possession of cannibals. Amélie was its last victim, the last cannibal in the story. And that girl has to be destroyed first as the girl and then as the beast. Complicated. And then buried and her heart extracted from her chest before has to be burnt separately. Definitely complicated like some vampire story.


There are some funny passages, particularly the poker game. Jesse has some supernatural eyesight – or is it brain-sight? – which enables him to feel what other people see or hear. So he is able to assess the hand of cards of his opponent and he knows he can beat him. Unluckily you do not defeat the king of the place in a Far West Wild West (fwwww:// or the Internet of the nineteenth century’s Indian killing and gold rushing pioneers) city in the middle of nowhere except if you can draw and shoot faster than him, and Jesse can of course.

He is connected to some Indians led by Sixkiller, a human six-shooter of some sort. He is the one who brings the Indian magic in the story, with extra-natural beasts, supportive or antagonistic but always ugly and frightening. He is working on the various gates corresponding to the various Indian directions in the Indian universe and he wants to prevent Jesse from entering the Eastern Gate, though we do not know exactly why, maybe meeting the famous Nyx, the supreme Indian Beast. To do that Sixkiller has to kill the gatekeeper Desmond. Sorry Jesse, no gatekeeper any more. Well, he’ll have to find another one.


Well written with the hybridizing of Clint Eastwood’s western films and Stephen King’s gunslinger’s magic and earlier horror books. Enjoy the horror western Indian hallucinatory feast. But do not take too much of the magic mushroom, even if it looks like simple ayahuasca. Avoid drinking that mixture that might bring you on the other side of the brick wall at the dead end of the street to hell.


Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

Monday, July 24, 2017

 

Clermont Ferrand, Bienvenue chez les Ploucs!


METTEZ-VOUS AU VERT DANS LA VIGNE
DE CHEVALARD À CADILLAC VIA MIMIZAN

LAURENT MATHOUX – SOUS PRESSION – RevoiR ÉDITIONS – 2017

Laurent Mathoux va en étonner plus d’un avec son dernier roman, « Sous Pression ». C’est l’histoire d’un jeune obsédé sexuel parisien qui finit par se marier avec un cep de vigne appelé Marinella (comme la chanson de Tino Rossi, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6wTxk39Wns), dites Marie c’est plus simple et moins guindé.


Quand je te tiens là, sur mon cœur
Pour moi c'est un tel bonheur
Qu'aucun mot ne peut l'exprimer
Tout mon être est transformé
Et je voudrais que ce moment
Qui me trouble éperdument
Se prolonge éternellement


Et c’est ainsi qu’il finira entre deux chiens Peugeot et Renault, un ado de 17 ans, presqu’un homme, Alex, fils de Marinella et d’un père exilé en export-import en Chine. Il va devoir apprendre à cultiver la vigne du vignoble de Marinella, et donc d’Alex. Mais Alex n’est pas bavard, alors ça ira à la lanterne ou à la chandelle, peu importe.


Et dire qu’il fut parisien, instituteur de maternelle obsédé sexuel en direction des mères de ses charmants élèves. Mais à trop tenter parfois on se casse une dent et c’est ce qui lui arrive avec le mari handicapé physique d’une de ces « mamans » dragueuses qui a mis son mari dans le fauteuil roulant d’un coup de pétard parti volontairement par accident. Il fuit donc de Paris à Clermont-Ferrand et Aubière et devient le bureaucrate gratte papier sur clavier d’ordinateur à l’Inspection académique du Puy de Dôme responsable de la gestion des brigadiers remplaçants.


Mais sa vie est compliquée et il devra laisser tout derrière. Son voisin, un certain Raoul Morhange qui n’en a qu’une qu’il fait échographier régulièrement pour éviter quelques remplacements, est un instituteur remplaçant plutôt barjot et tire au flanc, au flanc des volcans à Aubière. Difficile voisinage qui s’améliorera rapidement. Une certaine Jenny allemande prospère entre eux, qui est une manipulatrice du sexe qui ne cherche en définitive qu’à piéger un père sans qu’il le sache pour en tirer une pension alimentaire grâce aux conventions européennes. Qui réussira-t-elle à piéger dans son piège à bébés. Ce n’est pas simple. La route d’Aubière à Vichy en passant par l’Allemagne est des plus compliquée, mais simple à l’heure de l’ADN dont elle collectionne des échantillons chauds en diable de ses innombrables amants.


Il rencontre dès le première jour une gitane qui fait un BTS et vit en ville. Et il tombe à cul et chemise en une heure environ avec elle, notre Tristan – comme Tristan et Isolde comme il dit une fois qu’il ne connait qu’en allemand et attribue à Wagner alors que Wagner n’est qu’un des derniers venus sur ce bateau de l’Irlande à la Cornouaille en passant par la Bretagne et qui fut rédigé par écrit en français normand du 11ème siècle et existait plus profondément en Gallois, en Cornouaillais et probablement en Breton et en Irlandais bien avant dans la tradition orale, donc dans des langues celtes et donc avec des racines dans le celte gaulois pour sûr, racines à retrouver, mais personne ne connait la littérature orale gauloise écrasée et détruite par la conquête romaine. Dieu ait l’âme de Jules César, un JC entre autre au tournant d’un millénaire.


Et il est alors le gadjo de ladite Rosette et de sa famille, les Klaxon, dont il côtoie sans le savoir un des oncles historiques au café d’Aubière tous les matins vers six heures, un dénommé Jojo qu’il ne connut jamais sous son nom patronymique, jusqu’à sa mort : et c’est lui qui le découvre mort dans sa voiture un matin devant le café La Taupinière. Et le voilà transformé en taupe mortuaire.


Et c’est ainsi qu’il est mêlé à la résurrection de l’attraction familiale des Klaxons détenue par Jojo Klaxon et enlisée dans la broussaille depuis les années quatre-vingt ou deux frères se moururent l’un l’autre sur le mur de la mort de cette attraction. Inutile de dire que Raoul et Rosette (un choix imposé par l’éditeur RevoiR j’imagine) font un beau couple et quand on ajoute le couple Raoul et Tino – une autre allusion à Tino Rossi, décidément – sur les motos dans l’attraction de ce mur de la mort en lutte mortelle – ou presque – pour les beaux yeux et la rose de Rosette on a une merveilleuse trinité faite pour la classe moyenne plus ou moins cultivée qui a envie d’avoir des émotions fortes par intermédiaires plus courageux que simplement téméraires.


Mais le sujet central est l’Education nationale et son fonctionnement de triste machine à normaliser les têtes mises au carré bien plus par l’école de la république que par la télévision aux plus de cent chaines aujourd’hui alors que la vision scolaire reste le maître normalisé – en fonction du quartier où il officie – aux besoins, souhaits et normes de la classe sociale de chacun de ces quartiers. Le maître ne fait que transmettre des savoirs et des savoir-faire qui doivent être absolument en osmose avec la position sociale des familles, et peu de mixage social s’il vous plait, et surtout pas ethnique. Les écoles d’application pour la classe supérieure, sinon l’enseignement privée, catholique ou pas. Les classes pour voyageurs sur les terrains communaux de ces voyageurs pour les Gitans. Et le moyen de gamme – d’une gamme si avachie qu’on dirait à peine une taupinière dans une prairie à vaches – pour le restant des populations socialement déprimées ou ethniquement marginalisées sinon ghettoïsée.


La charge est lourde mais l’Education Nationale en a vu d’autres – comme l’église catholique – et les contestataires ou ceux qui veulent faire les choses autrement n’ont pour eux que la porte soit vers les échelons supérieurs de l’université s’ils supportent, ou bien les établissements industriels qui peuvent avoir un peu plus de liberté pédagogique, ou encore le privé encore, mais le privé qui ne joue pas le jeu de l’Education Nationale et de l’éducation privée sous contrat. C’est d’un sinistre ! Le pire des vices dans cette institution est la peur panique de la pédophilie et tout instituteur – notez pas institutrice – qui a des rapports trop proches, en confiance, de grand frère est suspecté d’avoir des tendances de mauvais aloi, alors qu’en fait dans cette profession c’est bien plus celui ou celle qui garde des distances bien fermes et claires qui révèle sa peur de surtout ne pas apparaître comme il ne faut pas – et Freud nous dit tout de suite que qui ne veut pas paraître est trop souvent inconsciemment ce qu’il ne veut pas paraître.


Mon dieu comme les choses deviennent compliquées ! Peut-être qu’il est plus simple d’enfourcher une moto et de monter au mur de la mort, ou bien d’aiguiser des sécateurs et de faire la vendange après avoir effeuillé la vigne un mois plus tôt pour que les raisins encore verts puissent mûrir, bien que tirer les cavaillons restent la chose la plus amusante de tout cycle de travail viticole. Il est vrai qu’il me manque en souvenir le cheval et la charrue qui déchausse le rang de vigne avant de tirer les cavaillons. Mathoux suit sa Marinella et parle de désherbage. Un peu court. Mais il est vrai qu’au temps des tracteurs parfois volants il est difficile de voir un cheval et une charrue au mitan des règes de vignes.


Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU



Saturday, July 22, 2017

 

Apocalypse Révélation Archétype de notre espoir


L’Apocalypse de Jésus Christ/Book of Revelation, Jean de Patmos, Jacques Coulardeau, Michel Caubet et al at Academia.edu & Slideshare.net (39)

Le creuset de l'imaginaire fantastique

https://www.academia.edu/23923009/Le_creuset_de_limaginaire_fantastique


Abstract:

On a souvent vilipendé l'Apocalypse de Saint Jean comme n'étant qu'un texte religieux plus ou moins enfermé dans sa propre foi que certains trouve superstitieuse. 

Cet "on" ne rime pas avec "bon" car il a tout faux. Ce texte est une vraie révélation du génie humain et de son imaginaire qui ne sait pas se satisfaire de l'ordinaire et cherche le fantastique, le magique même parfois.

Que ce texte soit attaché à et revendiqué par une religion ne saurait cacher que le fantastique qu'il contient est universel. On le retrouve dans toutes les cultures, dans toutes les religions. 

Les Contes des Mille et Une Nuits sont pleins de récits de ce type. Shahnameh, le livres des rois iraniens, contient des épisodes au moins aussi puissants. Et que dire des mythologies du monde entier. Que dire des religions des Incas, des Aztèques, des Mayas et des Indiens Américains ou Canadiens. 

Que dire même du célèbre poème de Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, dont je ne connais pas une seule traduction qui sache rendre le sombre espoir d'une mort certaine que l'on espère pouvoir dompter et amadouer, bref à laquelle on souhaite échapper. 

C'est ce qui fascine, mais il est de bon goût dans certains milieux de torser le nez et de se moquer car il est sûr que n'importe qui le veut peut tomber aussi bas que Charlie. Mais ils manquent l'essentiel car c'est cet essentiel, l'imaginaire humain, qui nous a permis d'émerger en Afrique et d'ensuite migrer dans le monde entier, tous sortis du même nid et rêvant d'une Jérusalem messianique aux couleurs aussi variables et changeantes qu'il y avait de migrations hors d'Afrique, puis dans les quatre coins du monde qui de toute évidence en compte bien plus de quatre.

Découvrez cette beauté et oubliez la ferblanterie des icones religieuses. Ne gardez que le combat héroïque entre l'homme et la Bête, entre la femme et le Dragon, entre le bien du rêve et le mal du cauchemar quand la réalité quotidienne tient plus du cauchemar que du rêve. 

Ce texte est le creuset dans lequel un cri dont certains charlie-simple-d'esprit se sont moqué trouve toute sa profondeur. House'llelujah! monte en écho de l'Hallelujah de Handel comme un chant d'amour qui a trouvé son père.

Research Interests:

Semitic languages, Middle East Studies, Renaissance Studies, Apocalypticism, Biblical Studies, Eschatology and Apocalypticism, Comparative Semitics, Bible, The Apocalypse of John, Biblical Exegesis, Jerusalem, Fantastic Literature, Beyond Good and Evil, Epiphany, Literatura Fantástica, Acts of the Apostles, Salvation, End of the world, and John the Apostle

Friday, July 21, 2017

 

Brexiteering in the Sahara


ETHAN ARKWRIGHT - SUB-SAHARA – 2016

What a book! The story is crazy and utopian but that’s beside the point I want to make. You will love that utopian battle for some extraterrestrial source of energy that has such an immense life span that we cannot even predict its end. Beautiful. And it comes from under the sand of the Sahara, like oil and natural gas, from a city that was still there in the 1950s built around a metal pyramid that contained this supreme source of energy praised, cherished and adored like a god by the people who accepted to die in the room where it was exposed due to some ultrafine invisible deadly poisonous sand or dust. The role of the Nazi is purely secondary and some kind of romantic fallback to the standard evil symbol.

But the book deals with geopolitical global considerations that are surprising in many ways.

A British private though connected to some state services group of adventurers financing some archaeological venture in the south of the Sahara, in Niger precisely, get informed that a hurricane has completely uncovered an ancient city with a metal pyramid in the middle and that they are proceeding to it and the obviously added containers around the midriff of this pyramid. The main archaeologist plays it double and informs a competing but absolutely violent and uncontrollable group to sell her discovery to the better bidder.


The British team then encounters various groups and have to defeat them in some twelve hours or so. First the Chinese attack even before the British team reaches its destination. They are fast and radical but they are defeated of course; Isn’t it natural? Good riddance. Apart from the fact it is not exactly what the Chinese are doing, military intervention and strikes to destroy any competitor, it is funny how nasty this quick episode is and there is no explanation of how they managed to be informed about the move of this private secret British team: there is always a fink or a fissure in all secure situation. Sad, as Trump would tweet.

Then they are confronted to the challenging violent brutal competitor, Titan. But the British team is so naïve that they do not even see that their intervention as Red Cross doctors is a loincloth on the aggressive intent of these Titan assassins. In the meantime they have to defeat a detached unit from the Nigerian army. Easy again, since the Nigerian army is both underequipped and not very brave.

The Titan team, which is only a vanguard, creates havoc but the British team is more creative and they of course manage to take over the whole situation and control the next stage. The only thing they get out of this is that Titan had been informed by one of the members of the initial archaeological team, and this understanding is going to be essential since they have to make sure the betrayal will not succeed and that the source of energy they will recuperate will remain in their own hands. It is in fact the leader of the initial archaeological team who is the double agent, hence the finkish traitor to the people who paid for her initial venture. She is a stoolie canary in other words.

Then they enter the pyramid and have to go through all kinds of traps to recuperate the source of energy that contains an element that is unknown and hence is extraterrestrial, if that is possible, but let’s suspend our disbelief. While the leader of the British team is liquidating the remnants of the initial Titan team, the team inside the pyramid is successful and manages to find their way out in tunnels, after they have been rejoined with their boss who can take over the last leg of the operation.


When they come out they find the Nigerian army, with the French Foreign Legion as their main supporters, in fact their real bosses, and behind a second Titan team that has come to recuperate the source of energy. These Titan people cause a stir that eliminates half the Nigerian army and the French Foreign Legion, as well as half of their own members.

Of course the British team who had managed to securely hide the source of energy in the underground escaping tunnels, fools everyone and distributes the fake source of energy in a certain number of lead containers whose content is verified to be highly radioactive, let’s be NBC for a minute, and the party poopers all go away with their prizes. Unluckily for them these lead containers contain a tracker and as soon as the various parties are gone drones take off from the top of the pyramid, or so, and destroy all the outgoing convoys, except one on the Titan side because they had two vehicles but only one lead container. So the British team picks the real source of energy from where it was hidden and they chase the Titan team, save the only survivor and use their plane to go back to Europe with the promise of paying the mercenaries and releasing them as soon as they arrive in their first stop in Libya, with no strings attached.

Mind you the Americans are only mentioned because they are the worst of them all since they will probably arrive on the site but when everything has been cleaned up and after the battle. The Americans are not ready to become great again, if they ever do.

Conclusion. The Chinese go fast and are first but they are defeated in two seconds. Then the locals, the Nigerians, are ineffective and not very courageous. Then an alternative competing hostile British team using mercenaries is really subtler than the central British private team and fools them at least two or three times but are defeated in the end and their boss is deep-fried in phosphorous. A hot burning hot ending for a man used to massive killings. Then the Nigerian army and their “allies” the French Foreign Legion are just ineffective and easy to fool both by Titan who is following just behind them and by the British team who is just setting a plate of goodies in front of the greedy Frenchies. Should I say it is a plate of French fries with frog legs? I guess I could. And the Americans are the final and totally ineffective dummies who come last for sure and only get the bones of the turkey that everyone else ate, stuffing, dressing and all side dishes, before the Americans were able to even approach the site. Thanksgiving is no longer what it used to be.

Thanks goodness! Only the British people are on top, provided they are on the side of the official state system, but governed by private enterprise imagination and creativity. In other words, only the British can dominate the world if they are deeply and resolutely Brexiteers. And Brexiteers they are, ending their adventure in some kind of all male gentry club on Pall Mall in London drinking some good spirit and smoking some Havana cigars. Maybe that aspect is a little bit excessive and nostalgic, nostalgic of the good old Empire time when there was only one other empire, the French colonial empire. It did not last very long from WW1 to WW2 and we know the catastrophic result of this rivalry. The British will always dream of the world as an eternal and repetitive Falklands campaign.


Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

 

US Justice naked and shameful


LAW AND ORDER (NEW YORK) – THE FOURTH-SEVENTH YEARS – 1993-1996

The interest in these rather old (more than twenty years old) seasons is in the obsolescence of so many things that do not exist anymore or the absence of what is common today. This is TV archaeology. Thus you have the big monstrous PCs, the old dial telephones, the old enormous cars, and no smart phones, no portable phones, no tablets, and even practically no bikes. The traffic is practically fluid and you can park your car anywhere easily. Security is light, the presence of cops and even thieves is light too. The police force is hardly racially integrated, definitely very little at investigating police level and same thing at justice, DA and court level. This vision of the world in New York in the early 1990s is amazing. Do you remember it? Or rather can you imagine it?

The second element is typical of US American-centered vision. Every episode starts with the sentence: “In a criminal justice system,“ wrongly quoted as "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important, groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories," by http://lawandorder.wikia.com/wiki/Law_%26_Order, because it is not true of any criminal justice system in the world and the use of “A criminal justice system” implies the universality of the remark. I checked I do not know how many dozens of episodes and it was always the same, the use of the American-centered indefinite article. What is shown in this series is purely American. In many other systems in the world investigation means looking into what the prosecution can use and what the defense can use. The defense research or investigation is not paid by the accused and done by his lawyer but most of it is done by the investigating team under the responsibility of a judge.


It is this very justice system of the USA that leads to the worst possible jury decisions that are irreversible because no one can be tried twice for the same offense, even if he has been condemned to a life sentence or even the death penalty. Any appeal has to be on facts that are erroneously processed in the trial itself or eventually, if a judge accepts it, on new elements. Mumia Abu Jamal, the longest-detained prisoner (he broke Nelson Mandela’s record) in the world, is going through a life sentence without parole, which is a pitiful decision of this justice system that reduced the sentence from death to life without parole and yet they refused a real second trial processing the new testimonies brought up by the defense. When, he was first tried his defense attorney was committed to him by the justice department (Miranda) and of course no real investigating was done for the defense because the criminal justice system in the US only investigate to prosecute. In other words, they only look for a culprit and as soon as they find one – or they are convinced they have found one – they are satisfied and go to court.

The series is very clear about that and many episodes show how tricky it is if the defense does not investigate on their own side. They even actually show cases in which the investigation is wrong, the jury finds the defendant guilty and the judge sends him to prison to serve a 25 to life sentence and yet right away afterwards new elements come up showing that the culprit is another man who was exonerated. They cannot reverse the jury decision. The judge cannot change it at all. They have to find a way to beat about the bush, negotiate the obstacle and use a detour to prove the other suspect guilty without bringing the first convicted one into the picture. Then and only then the first trial can be voided. The least we can say is that it is slightly distorted. Some might say corrugated.


That’s probably the best side of this series: it does not hide the fact that the American criminal justice system is deeply problematic. In spite of their Miranda warning that states what follows: “You have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to consult an attorney before speaking to the police and to have an attorney present during questioning now or in the future. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you before any questioning if you wish. If you decide to answer questions now without an attorney present, you will still have the right to stop answering at any time until you talk to an attorney. Knowing and understanding your rights as I have explained them to you, are you willing to answer my questions without an attorney present?“, in spite of that the prosecution will not target both guilt AND innocence but ONLY guilt. And over and over again the episodes show how bungled a case can get when the defense attorney is not diligent enough.

This series shows all judicial mistakes come from the basic police work at the root of everything else afterward. The police work is often based on a personal conviction or even belief more than facts. The advantage of the police shown here is that the lieutenant who follows the investigation performed by his or her (in this case her) detectives can challenge them and the facts they bring up and ask them to look in other directions, to check other sides of the situation. But even so, nothing is clear. The main issue – or one of the main issues – is the role of women and in this particularly series the lieutenant is a woman, what’s more ethnic, and the assistant district attorney Jack McCoy’s assistant, Claire Kincaid, is also a woman. They often bring in a new note, a softening note, at times an alternative approach. But that is not in any way based on truth and the search for truth but on the deep conviction the case of women, or relevant facts that only women can see have been ignored.


The next step in this series is the importance of deals reached by the public prosecutor with the defense before the court decision. Such deals are not dealing with justice nor even the truth but only with speeding up the procedure, save on court expenses and most of the time reduce the sentence by reducing the qualification of the crime. And when wrongly accused the duress is so hard in some situations that the innocent person accepts to plead guilty in exchange of a soft sentence, but yet it is fake justice.

I guess all people who want to understand how the criminal justice system works in the USA have to watch this old series that lasted twenty years, supposedly the longest ever because of this balanced vision of an unbalanced system.


Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU



Monday, July 17, 2017

 

Hallelujah!



Happy the one who can leave in due time
https://www.academia.edu/30541300/Happy_the_one_who_can_leave_in_due_time
Death makes life unforgettablehttp://www.slideshare.net/JacquesCoulardeau/death-makes-life-unforgettable

In 1974, I knew Pierre Boulez indirectly since I was reading the music treatises of Pierre Schaeffer and some other books on the subject of modern music, concrete music, noise if you want, but also plain music from classical to jazz, from negro spiritual to Black and Soul, from the Beatles to The Who and AC/DC or vice versa. I was ranting and raving on David Bowie the non-bipolar fluid gender hermaphrodite. I was already waxing sentimental and dazzled by the genius of Leonard Cohen, and yet I was trying to enter another world, the world of a distorted stressed psyche that has managed to survive a couple of traumas including the one of extreme eyesight impairment from birth to the age of six without any medical assistance. You know: “Don’t Pass Me by!” And I had enjoyed in all the twenty-nine years already behind me all that was sound, music, languages, talk, drama, radio, and so many other things to listen to and to hear even if seeing was not exactly the cup of tea in which I could rinse my “spectacles” or glasses if you prefer.

Here was my mind then (never ever published since 1974 and only read once to a small audience)

DAVIS, CALIFORNIA, 1974

And he looked right and he saw Lawrence
And he looked left and he saw Terence
And in front of him he saw Stephens
And there and here someone else
                               Someone more
A Face anonymous and placid
       Amorphous and tacit
A face with a nose and two eyes
       With a pose and two lies
One for him and one for the world
And the pose of the comfort
                               Of the mind
We had tried hard to break the lurid front-lights
                               To jump into the dark pit
                                           Of the tender-footed neophytes
The vertigo of a mosquito
       Attracted by the bite
       The fervid taste of blood
       And the pounding grind of the slap
That will forever stop the flight
Of the buzzing nuisance
To a sad inacceptance
                       
The clown was standing in front of his audience

And then all of a sudden
The bright imagination beam
Takes in its tight spot the face
Of what among others that is more
                               And yet nothing more
                   That is for an instant
                               And already no more
Of him he flippantly likes
       And he recreates in his mind
                   In his flesh
       Recreates with his quivering eyelids
                   Good morning but don’t touch me
                   I love you but don’t touch me
                   I want you but don’t touch me
                   I have you but don’t touch me
And phantasy phantasizes the phantasmic phantasms
       Of his desire
He plays his stringy show
On a stringent note of maybe I can
                               Maybe I could
                                           Maybe I might
                   Make him understand
       The turn of my covetousness
       The counterturn of my ravenousness
       The stand of my desirousness

The clown was standing in front of his audience
And got no answer not even a clap

He relapsed in his voyeurism
He traced the fine of an ankle
                   The line of a leg
                               The mine of a thigh
                                           That shivers at his breath
The lip brushes the softness of the hairs
The tongue waters the skin of his flesh
The fingers meet into the width of a palm
Cupping to retain the wine of the crotch
                   The milk of the breast
That mango juice he pines for
And lift it to his mouth
Furnishing his palate
       With the sultry caressing lime
       Green like the never ripe passion of his heart
Acid like the never-moored
            Overflying Dutchman
                        Of his dearth
Coating his throat with the reviving paste
       That springs high
                   That digs deep
                               That will never germinate
                               And yet will carry more fruit
                   Than the carob tree of yon savannah
                   Dead-like and lifeless
                   Like a bug dried in the moonshine
                               Silent
                               Dark
                               And fatefully immobile
There the cross of the long-legged roads
There were the east and the west meet
In the climax of their zenith
In the apex of their noon
The south emerges
                   Soothing and simmering
The flames in the eyes
The thirst in the mind
With a taste of roundness
With a flavor of boldness
A bouquet and a fragrance
Heady and exhilarating
Like the foreplay of the skin
                   Over the sharp edge of the blade
                               Of the brit milah of fervid tradition
Ready to penetrate
                   The soft sweet bread of the flesh

The clown was standing in front of his audience
And got no answer not even a clap
From the unreachable posse of indifferent masks

                               Coulardeau Jacques
                               Davis June 1974


– Pierre Boulez – David Bowie –
– Leonard Cohen –
Blissful Recollection of the Future

Music wind of the mind
Crawling creeping sliding
In out through
Ears eyes skin

Music tempo of the soul
Beating dancing swinging
Up down gone
Hands feet head

Music tempest of the heart
Loving hugging cuddling
Back forth
            All around
Chest breasts
Elbows and arms

Sitting in the dark gloom of the abbey church I listen to the opening of some symphony that reverberates under the vault and among the columns.
A butterfly flutters gracefully in the sunshine and perches itself on my knee in some green meadow behind the summer house of the vacation.
Snowflakes hover in the air and lightly cover the sidewalk of the still benighted street of my city just one week before Christmas in the cold morning air.
On the big square on a bench my street homeless friend wakes up every morning when I come and every morning I give him half my ten thirty snack.
And all the time some music resonates in my brain and tells me in a whisper between the notes, among the keys and codas, a message that I will remember.
Ever!
“Go your way and keep in your fists the acorn you saved last September, keep it for the forlorn forgotten forsaken squirrel of an alley urchin that has no shelter and that longs for love.”

An acorn
A walnut
An apple
A pear
Shared and split in half
Bestowed and received
With a hungry smile
With two eager lips
With many ravenous teeth
Flat sharp pure tonic C

The schoolboy offers in one hand
The sidewalk wanderer gathers with both hands
Raises his eyes and locks them
On the blue irises pierced with a dark question

Why?

A voice from on high then vibrates like a tuning fork

“I won’t pass you by, I promise!
“But don’t vanish and go, ever!”

Jacques COULARDEAU
Olliergues, February 9, 2017




Boulez-Bowie-Cohen @Academia.edu & SlideShare.net (74)

Happy the one who can leave in due time
https://www.academia.edu/30541300/Happy_the_one_who_can_leave_in_due_time

 

Death makes life unforgettable

http://www.slideshare.net/JacquesCoulardeau/death-makes-life-unforgettable

Abstract:

Three living stars have just died in the field of music. Three supernovas that were a galaxy of their own. Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and Pierre Boulez, the whole western world in a nutshell, Canada, Great Britain and France, and the last one directed and recorded Wagner as well as Frank Zappa. A whole world is leaving and we are left alone in the orphanage our world has become.

And yet they leave in, our hands, in our ears and in our eyes a whole world of illumination, hallucination, inspiration and exquisite frustration. We have to build tomorrow’s world with what they have just granted us as their heritage, as our inheritance. Let’s take care of it for ever and ever.

Dr. Jacques Coulardeau

Research Interests:

Music, Musicology, Popular Music, Death, Musicians, and Pop Singers

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