This is about as good as it gets – Keith Jarrett (pn), Charlie Haden (b) and Paul Motian (d) live in Hamburg in 1972. It’s an object lesson in how musicians should interact: an economy of ideas with no raised voices. Texture in tranquility.
In this time of crisis it’s possibly useful to rethink our concepts of economy and the role that business plays in our society. I recently moved to a new apartment in a different part of Montpellier, but something was bugging me about my old place. I’ve been trying to work out how all the shops in my old neighbourhood survived.
Within 150 metres of my front door there were:
If you drew a Venn Diagram of all the overlapping products, and graphed the potential demand from local consumers, one might conclude that none of these businesses could be profitable. Yet somehow they all open daily and serve customers, and apparently all make a living profit.
A little further thought provided the clues to how this ecosystem works. First of all, the dwellings in the neighbourhood were large apartment complexes. By my conservative calculation, 25,000 people (the population of Taupo) live within a 300m radius of the shopping centre. So in fact, local demand for groceries and basic services is significant and sustained.
Secondly – and more importantly – none of the businesses is any bigger than any other, and none of them is trying to expand, so competitive pressure is fairly low. So long as each business can achieve a turnover sufficient to feed a household, and nobody rocks the boat, everyone is happy.
On an MBA course, (a degree designed to train managers for a globalising industrial economy), the teaching tends to emphasise the “logic” of achieving growth and shareholder value in an environment where intense competition for customers is an unquestioned reality.
By contrast, my old Montpellier neighbourhood illustrates a concept of a fairly equitable ecosystem, where everyone’s activities are bound by social convention to achieve mutual benefit: rather different to the sort of capitalism we’ve come to expect in Western economies.
A few weeks ago our MBA class was lucky to have a flying visit from Dr Leo-Paul Dana (who coincidentally teaches in NZ at the University of Canterbury). His doctoral research among the Inuit of northern Canada revealed startlingly original attitudes towards entreprenership.
The rate of entrepreneurship in Inuit communities is very high, but not because Inuit want to grow profitable businesses or to become wealthy. For many Inuit, (according to Dr Dana), being an independent businessperson simply means that you can organise your own time around communal activities such as whaling and house construction. To work for a salary ties you to shifts and you cannot participate fully as a member of your community.
This is not an argument against capitalism or market forces. But it seems pertinent to re-examine how individuals use capitalist practices to serve themselves, society and the planet. The current crisis is partly the result of a loss of focus: we have been encouraged to see unfettered capital growth and consumption as an end in itself, rather than a tool to help us live together.
Now I’m off to buy a baguette at the boulangerie on the corner.
(All photos were taken in Burgundy in 2007, not in Montpellier in 2009)
Here’s a little Web 2.0 story. Over the past few years blogging has become an increasingly integral part of the media, for better or for worse, and one of the side-effects of this is that content produced by “normal” people (like me, I suppose) is more likely to be picked up and used by major media outlets.
ReadWriteWeb is a tech blog run out of New Zealand, rated by Technorati as one of the top 20 blogs in the world. They published a piece yesterday about Mark Zuckerberg’s pre-Harvard inspiration for Facebook. Prior to Harvard, Zuckerberg was a student at Phillip’s Exeter Academy, and the photo they chose to illustrate the piece was a photo I took last year during my short trip to New Hampshire:
Phillips Exeter Academy in the snow – March 29th, 2008
I found out about the photo’s use via Paul Spence at Genius Net, who tweeted the news overnight. (See, I told you it was a Web 2.0 story)
For extra coolness, ReadWriteWeb content is syndicated to the New York Times site, so although the New York Times version of the story doesn’t contain the photo, I still get a credit at the bottom of the article. Does this make me a citizen journalist or something ?
Photos taken today on a walk in the garrigue near Pignan.
On the forest path
Wild thyme
Languedoc sky
Sun, leaves
Poised for flight
Today is V-E Day. Place de la Comédie in Montpellier was cleared for a few hours of its café tables and lounging youths while the military paraded in commemoration of France’s “victory”.
Faced by ranks of braided motorcycle gendarmes, tricolor bunting and martial music, it might be easy to forget that the 8th of May 1945 was as much the end of a complex and painful period in French history as it ever was a triumph. The story of Occupied France is fascinating, raising many questions about personal morality, politics and memory.
After the war, with de Gaulle as president, the myth of a nation of stubborn résistants and a handful of cowardly collaborateurs emerged. This convenient simplification of history was perhaps necessary to underpin the rebuilding of a traumatised society and economy.
In the turbulence of 1968, a revisionism of the myth started to emerge. Max Ophüls’ film Le Chagrin et la Pitié was the first to explore the reality of French experience under Axis domination. Released 40 years ago this year, it’s still one of the best documentaries ever made, mixing perspectives of ordinary French and Germans with the recollections of political figures such as Anthony Eden and Pierre Mendès-France.
Later fiction films started to explore the dramatic possibilities of a morally grey period in the nation’s life: Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien and Au revoir les enfants, alongside Truffaut’s Le dernier métro address very directly themes of antisemitism, collaboration and loyalty.
Scene from Le Chagrin et la Pitié
Novelists quickly recognised that in reality, many French citizens were, at best, ambivalent about the defeat in 1940 and Pétain’s armistice. Irène Némirovsky‘s Suite Française is full of characters simply trying to retain their humanity as the tide of history swirls around them. In this maelström, Némirovsky depicts courage, cowardice and indifference as all valid reactions to circumstance. Given that Némirovsky never lived long enough to view the occupation with hindsight, her perspective is remarkably poignant.
Robert Sabatier‘s perennial hero Olivier Châteauneuf faces World War 2 as a stubborn but confused teenager in Olivier 1940: his experience of war is one of survival and frustration, punctuated by occasional adventures. There is little heroism in Olivier’s war: he only accidentally joins the maquis right at the end of the novel. In La Douleur, Marguerite Duras evokes how a woman’s humanist concern for the chaos that engulfed Europe is submerged by personal grief and uncertainty about the return of her husband from deportation.
The reconsideration of France’s wartime story is explored on TV next month with the first 6 episodes of Philippe Triboit’s Un Village Français broadcast on France 3. This ongoing series promises to recount the life of a community in Vichy France throughout the entire war period. The promotional material focuses on the moral dilemmas faced by the characters, and I’m hoping it’s going to be as provocative as the books and films that have preceded it.
Keep cool till after school…
I have no idea how to dress myself. For example, I just bought a couple of t-shirts from New Zealand. An impulse purchase, but I can sort of justify it. On Thursday last week we finished classes for the MBA course, so it seemed to be a good moment to give myself a little reward for getting this far (“celebrate milestones and success” they said on our leadership course). And I needed a few new clothes for a hot summer in the south of France. Oh, and Tash told me to.
I got an Olly Ohlson After School design, and a Longest Drink in Town tee. They now sit proudly alongside my favourite 1974 Commonwealth Games logo shirt from Little Brother (4 years old and still going strong!). I’m also waiting on a smiley cloud-muffin shirt from JohnnyDurham19 in the UK.
But I’m not sure that my NZ t-shirts translate very well here in France. This summer, while I think my shirt is making a semi-ironic reference to a brand of milkshake from Auckland, the Montpellierians on the tram will think I’m just a sunburnt Englishman with a cartoon giraffe on his chest. But vive la différence and all that…
Note pour mes chers lecteurs français: Ceci est une parodie. Il s’agit d’ironie anglo-saxonne. Au moins, à moitié.
Let me start with a gross generalisation: the French love to talk. If they can have an argument, they love it even more. Therefore, one kind of television programme is particularly popular in France: it’s what they call un talk-show.
Un talk-show is nothing like Oprah or Parkinson. Un talk-show is a sacred arena of French public life. It allows millions of French people to watch other French people talking to each other for hours and hours. If there’s an argument, it’s even better.
To be a talk-show guest in France, you must be a well-paid bourgeois academic, journalist, entertainer, author or politician. In fact, if you don’t manage to hold down at least two of these jobs at the same time, you will never be a talk-show guest, never own a Rolex, and you will have failed in your life.
The biggest triumph for un talk-show is to have a philosopher as a guest, because philosophers love to talk even more than average French people. Philosophers hold doctorates in talking. Thus philosophers are bigger than rock stars in France (although this is also because French rock stars are rubbish). In fact in France, philosophers even marry rock stars.
There are at least 650 different talk-shows on French television each week, each of them with a studio audience. It is rumoured that the 35 hour week was introduced to allow French workers to participate as audience members in more talk-shows. This rumour has not been denied by the French government.
The current apotheosis of le talk-show is On n’est pas couché, which is broadcast at a time which in any other country would mean ratings death: Saturday nights, from 11pm to 2am. I am not making this bit up. This show is three hours long. But it involves people talking. Hence it is very, very popular.
Hosted by Laurent Ruquier (whose main job on the show is to not wear a tie), On n’est pas couché is difficult to explain to foreigners. It involves a series of conversations with a panel of well-paid bourgeois entertainers, authors and politicians. Normally most of these people are part-time academics and journalists as well.
At least one of the guests will be subject to a chronique satirique, a very particular form of French humour, where a comedian plays a similar role to the medieaval fou du roi. It’s a bit like a celebrity roast, but without Dean Martin. For this section, Jonathan Lambert dresses up as a figure from the guest’s past (a old classmate or a drinking buddy). What follows is generally incomprehensible, and may involve smelly cheese:
But the real stars of On n’est pas couché are the Les 2 Erics – Eric Naulleau and Eric Zemmour. They have two important jobs. Firstly, to not wear ties. Secondly, they are the two polémistes. The job of a polémiste in France is almost as important as that of a philosopher, because their job is to create arguments.
Eric Naulleau hides behind a cuddly khaki shirt (without tie) and an air of left-wing journalistic social democracy. If he were British, he’d read the Guardian. But instead he’s French, has a sideline gig translating Bulgarian literature, and gets paid lots of money to criticise the latest work of guests on On n’est pas couché.
By contrast, Eric Zemmour is so right-wing he makes Rush Limbaugh look like a pussy. Zemmour is a self-confessed Bonapartiste (ie. he thinks the main problem with the modern world is that Napoleon isn’t ruling France at the moment), and he tells every guest that their book/film/philosophy/sporting achievement is contributing to the moral decline of the Republic. This invariably causes arguments, which, as noted earlier, is a good thing.
I am becoming convinced that On n’est pas couché is the Rosetta Stone to French culture. So if you find me staying home on Saturday nights furiously searching French wikipedia while watching Eric Zemmour tell Jean-Pierre Chevènement (once again) that he is the origin of the moral decline of the Republic, it’s because I’m trying to work out what the heck is going on.
Jonathan Lambert, Laurent Ruquier, Eric Zemmour, Eric Naulleau
Well, it’s New Zealand Music Month again. A good excuse to dig up this old classic from 1984: Poi E by the Patea Maori Club.
It’s probably the first pop song I remember: kids in the school playground would run around singing and shouting “Taku poi porotiti, taku poi e!“. We didn’t know what the lyrics meant, but it sure made a change from playing Ewoks and Stormtroopers.
Poi E sounds like no other pop song before or since. Everything about the song and the video is awesome – fusing poi dance with breakdance, mixing kapa haka with MPC beats, and providing a 16mm picture into New Zealand at a transitional time in its history. Magic.
Possibly due to having too much free time and no other life, spoken word podcasts have become a little bit of an addiction, providing an easily digestible form of non-fiction and current affairs that doesn’t involve picking up a book.
None of the podcasts I subscribe to generally deal with music, although occasionally music does crop up, including Radio Open Source‘s tribute to Dave McKenna – recordings of, and interviews with, one of the finest solo jazz pianists of the past half century. Here’s a taste:
Dave McKenna: Blues (excerpt from Radio Open Source)
Listening to Lord Melvyn Bragg somewhere over northern Europe in 2006
A favourite format of mine is the long-form conversation, where two people talk for an hour or more, with minimal editing. In fact, the less production I hear, the more I enjoy the podcast. Over a couple of years, a regular listening schedule has developed that has effectively created a personalised on-demand radio station on my iPod. The lineup looks a bit like this:
I should probably make more of an effort to keep up with things back home in New Zealand – for instance maybe subscribing to Chris Laidlaw’s Sunday morning show on Radio NZ National? I’ll just have to find time to fit it into the schedule…
George Kenney (Image: Chad Evans Wyatt)
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