Of Montreal @ Botanique

Eclectic, theatrical and fun. Of Montreal convinced the few hundreds of people squeezed in the Botanique Rotonda for their sold-out show in Brussels last night. The concert was both a good sample of the musical talents of the band from Athens, Georgia, and a personal show by Kevin Barnes, or rather his outrageous alter-ego Georgie Fruit. The songs performed were mainly from their last two albums, which privilege funky rythms, retro-disco effects, influences from glam-rock, Talking Heads and 80s electropop,..and a touch of Rocky Horror. This latest element was overemphasized by the four performing artists staging little gags and scenes wearing animal costumes, skull masks or superhero outfits as the band played--shame the Rotonda stage was probably limiting their possibilities. Barnes/Fruit predictably stole the show with his pretended-gay attitudes (the guy is allegedly straight as an arrow), little dances, costumes and strip teases. Overall, an incredible stage animal. Personal highlights of a brilliant setlist: the opener She's a Rejecter, A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger, from "Hissin Fauna" and Gallery Piece from the latest "Skeletal Lamping". But really everything showed how far the band has grown up from their thin psych-pop Elephant Six beginnings. (And just for the nostalgic old guys like me, Of Montreal saluted with impeccable covers of two punk classics: the Ramones' Judy is a Punk and the Buzzcocks' Ever Fallen in Love?)

Of Lonesome Deaths And Human Arrogance

He was the villain in a Bob Dylan song. He was a rich Maryland tobacco farmer who in his youth caused the death of a poor middle-aged black barmaid. He was condemned for that to a mere six-months in jail by a sympathetic judge. He stirred young Dylan’s anger and led him to write the song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” in 1964.

Last week, William Devereux Zantzinger died, aged 69.

The song has become a classic of American folk and a standard in Dylan’s repertoire. Most critics and biographers agree that it represents a peak of the singer’s “protest song period”, those initial years in Dylan’s career when he purportedly became the “voice of his generation” singing about political and social injustice and the need for the times to change. Afterwards, his music and career went elsewhere. And farther. But “Hattie Carroll” remained in Dylan’s canon, and versions of it can be found in live recordings of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Indeed, it could be argued that the song was not necessarily a protest song, because its words carry a universal message about the human nature. The arrogance that can naturally derive from power and wealth. (read the song’s lyrics at http://www.bobdylan.com/ )

Some writers, analyzing the song’s quasi-journalistic content, stressed the inaccuracy of some facts or their actual falseness. As reported by Ian Frazier in an excellent article for Mother Jones, then reprinted by The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/feb/25/bobdylan : “Zantzinger's actual arrest and trial were more complicated than the song lets on. Police arrested him at the ball for disorderly conduct - he was wildly drunk - and for assaults on hotel employees not including Hattie Carroll, about whom they apparently knew nothing at the time. When Carroll died at Mercy Hospital the following morning, Zantzinger was also charged with homicide. The medical examiner reported that Carroll had hardened arteries, an enlarged heart, and high blood pressure; that the cane left no mark on her; and that she died of a brain hemorrhage brought on by stress caused by Zantzinger's verbal abuse, coupled with the assault. After the report, a tribunal of Maryland circuit court judges reduced the homicide charge to manslaughter. Zantzinger was found guilty of that, and of assault - but not of murder.”

Frazier’s article is well documented and moving: well worth reading. He actually gives justice to the fact that, despite the inaccuracies, Dylan’s song “took a one-column, under-the-rug story and played it as big as it deserved to be”.

Others are more critical. Clinton Heylin, in his book "Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited" (2001), countered that the song "verges on the libelous" because of "its tenuous grasp of the facts of the case" One criticism was that Mr. Zantzinger's "high office relations," as Dylan called them, were overstated: his father had only been a one-term state legislator. The song did not mention that Carroll was black, although listeners could make that assumption. Dylan also did not refer to the reduced charge of manslaughter, only the six-month sentence. And Hattie Carroll had in fact 11 children, not 10, as the song says. And Zantzinger was spelled by Dylan without the “t”, Zanzinger. And so on, and so forth…

Wait a minute. Someone’s missing the point here.

Is it significant to dissect the lyrics and verify the correctness of every fact in a song? Is it really important whether Zantzinger’s cane was a direct or indirect cause of Hattie Carroll’s death? Of course not.

What counts is Dylan’s vivid, exemplary description of human arrogance. The conceit, self-importance and vanity of the rich and powerful of the world. That sense of superiority, that carelessness they often exude and apply in their relations with the less privileged members of the society. Who hasn’t witnessed such behavior in every day’s life? Who cannot relate to and feel anger at the powerful man who “Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders and swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling”. Simply because he knows that “In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking”?

This is why the song is immortal and will last longer than other so-called protest songs. Dylan captures universally understood concepts: the overlooked injustice, the helplessness of the weak, the extreme human intolerance.

(Photo courtesy of AP)

Is Afghanistan the next Iraq?

A need to re-think Obama’s campaign promises

Important voices in the US media have begun to warn President-elect Obama about the risks of an escalation, or “surge”, in Afghanistan. War is not the answer, we read. There is no such thing as a military solution in Afghanistan, others say. The US military is stressed from years of war in Iraq and elsewhere, writes Bob Herbert in the New York Times, budgets and equipment are strained: “sending thousands of additional men and women (some to die, some to be terribly wounded) on a fool’s errand in the rural, mountainous guerrilla paradise of Afghanistan would be madness”. Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, on a Newsweek’s special edition urges the newly elected US president to focus on much more modest political objectives there, namely ensuring that terrorists can’t use the country as a safe haven for launching attacks around the world.

Is it the sign of a newfound realism in Washington? Or is it just common sense coming from well-informed analysts and pundits? It could be both. But what is interesting from a European perspective is that something which in our capitals has been discussed for months (and criticized by the US government) is now openly debated in American mainstream media.

Of course, the economic crisis drives some of this new thinking. Why, people ask, spending more money to send more troops for an escalation in Afghanistan, when the US is facing a profound economic crisis? Why countless billions of taxpayer dollars should be used to support the utterly corrupt government of Hamid Karzai? In fact, power in Afghanistan is not exercised from Kabul. Real power rests with tribal leaders and warlords.

The basis of our strategy in Afghanistan, argues Bacevich, “should therefore become decentralization and outsourcing, offering cash and other emoluments to local leaders who will collaborate in excluding terrorists from their territory”. This should be supported by an active monitoring of the situation by intelligence agencies and, when necessary, military strikes to crush Taliban or other radical insurgency.

Such a strategy would not necessarily require more troops. Just a better use of the resources that the allies have already deployed there. Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason, two counterinsurgency experts writing in The Atlantic last October, observed that fighting insurgents from provincial capitals in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan as NATO is doing was “disastrous”. “The Taliban”, they write, “are well aware that the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the rural Pashtun district and village, and that Afghan army and coalition are seldom there”. On the other hand, tribal leaders are not predisposed to support the Taliban, as their intolerant form of Islam goes against Afghan traditional values.

To implement a successful form of decentralization, the coalition would need to reconfigure its operations and abandon the concept of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) which are too thin on the ground. Much more effective would be to create small development and security teams posted in every district in the south and east of the country. Johnson and Mason estimate that 20,000 personnel (one-third of the 60,000 foreign personnel now present in Afghanistan) would be enough to man about 200 district-based teams. Each of these would include “roughly 60 to 70 NATO security personnel, 30 to 40 support staff to manage logistics and supervise local development efforts”. Air support would be crucial to provide security of such relatively small units.

But the reasons for re-thinking Obama’s campaign promises to send more troops to Afghanistan are also strategic. As Bacevich points out, “the chief effect of military operations there so far has been not to defeat the radical Islamists but to push them across the Pakistani border. As a result, efforts to stabilize Afghanistan are contributing to the destabilization of Pakistan, with potentially devastating implications”.

That the situation in Pakistan is becoming more dangerous than in Afghanistan has been stressed also by Pakistani analyst and writer Ahmed Rashid in a recent article for Foreign Affairs. In particular, he indicated that the Pakistani government needs more international support to face its problems with Islamist radicals in the semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas near the Afghan border. At the same time, the Pakistani military is reluctant to move against insurgents.

No multilateral framework exists to deal with the complex and entwined problems of the region, Rashid points out. NATO has no clear Pakistan policy, despite the fact that its troops in Afghanistan are suffering losses from Pakistan-based insurgents. The UN Security Council “has hardly discussed Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan ”.

The incoming US administration promise of renewed political efforts in the region should be elevated to a high-level diplomatic initiative to build a genuine international consensus on the achievement of Afghan stability by addressing the sources of Pakistan’s instability, as suggested by Rashid. This should include a settlement of the Kashmir dispute, which would allow the Pakistani military to concentrate its efforts on the border with Afghanistan.

“A first step”, Rashid suggested, “could be the establishment of a contact group on the region authorized by the UN Security Council” including the five permanent members, NATO and moderate Muslim countries, and promoting dialogue among all regional actors. Such dialogue would have to be complemented by “a multilayer international development aid package”, aimed particularly at the border regions.

Over the past weekend, vice-President elect Joe Biden has traveled to both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and met with both government officials and coalition troops. No official statements have been published indicating what the new administration’s policy in Afghanistan and in the region will be. Let’s hope Mr Biden has been well briefed and that additional thinking will be made by Obama’s foreign policy team before January 20.

After the earthquake...

The good life as an international civil servant...That was then.
Before December 18.
Before the earthquake.
So here I am: new year, new page, but not new life...not yet. It's just time to start again, or better to look for a new start. And this new blog seems like a good idea to put my thoughts together, to comment about things that are happening in the areas I know a little bit of: international affairs, politics... but also about things I like: music, cinema, books. I think the blog will take shape while working on it. We'll see.