JOE WALSH, RONSTADT, MEEZERS AND MORE - #19

MEMORABLE CONCERTS - PART 1

I first saw Linda Ronstadt in concert in about 1973 in a little venue in Atlanta called the Great Southeast Music Emporium. I have since seen on various websites that the capacity of the venue was about 540 people. It seemed smaller, a converted shopping center movie house that sold beer by the bucket. Literally. Little metal buckets. Search the name and read about the place. By the time that Cathey and I went to concerts there, some of the acts that they were booking went on to the big time. One such was Linda Ronstadt.

Imagine seeing Linda up close and personal in such a small venue, blue jeans and bare feet and with a band that would become the Eagles backing her. Imagine that it's the early show and she's just hit town and she's kinda tired so it's mostly ballads. That voice just a few feet away. Singing love and loss right at you. And imagine, when the show is over, that management comes out and says that, since the second show wasn't sold out, you could stay if you wanted. Yes, there was a time that Linda couldn't sell 1,000 tickets over two shows. And we were there.

I'll talk about other shows at that venue in subsequent posts. But right now I want to talk about pre-Eagles Joe Walsh and another venue worth mentioning.

St. John Terrell's Lambertville Music Circus was a one-off when it opened, a bowl in the Greek style serving up theater-in-the-round under a circus tent. Novel idea. Fifteen minutes from my house. The history of the Music Circus is littered with famous names of the 50s and 60s. The list of jazz artists who performed there reads like a Hall of Fame lineup - Basie and Brubeck, Ellington and Fountain. I saw Rita Moreno in West Side Story there. And I saw my first true guitar hero there - Joe Walsh.

It's difficult to describe a concert like the one that I attended at the Music Circus 60 years ago. Saying that the  James Gang was a power trio doesn't do the term justice. Maybe the James Gang actually defines the term. (Picture of Power Trio in the OED = The James Gang) Joe started the show alone, offstage, making sounds that I had never heard come from a guitar live before. The show hit me right between the eyes. It became my music then. It's my music now. I just can't help it.

    

MEEZERS

There's something about Siamese cats. I can't explain it. If you're not a cat person, you won't get it. Even if you are a cat person, the allure of Meezers may not get to you in the same way that it gets to those of us who have been captivated by the breed. Siamese...Meezers...are talkative to a fault. They are bossy and demanding. They are too curious for their own good, smart enough to open any cupboard door and find the tasty treat or chicken bone hidden therein. But at the same time, Meezers are beautiful to look at, regal in bearing, and loyal to their chosen human. One of the great mysteries of life...

MACRON IS MY PRESIDENT

We moved to France permanently in 2014. We have returned to the USofA on the average of once every five years. Our rural, quiet French village of Quarante sits in the middle of a relatively active tourist region but is not significantly picturesque or sufficiently close to a popular tourist destination to be on anyone's radar. The road to Quarante leads to Quarante and nowhere else.

It's true that Quarante is on one of the routes of the Santiago de Compostelle, the long road purportedly followed by Saint John as he brought Christianity to Iberia from Rome. And occasionally, pilgrims carrying a heavy backpack with an identifying seashell attached to the back will find their way to our village bar for a rest and a drink of water or something more bracing as they follow that ancient route. But they are few and far between. No, this is France Profund, Deep France as Cathey likes to say, a generation behind the rest of the country, the rest of the world.

And so we watch the goings on in the USofA with a certain amount of detachment. We are concerned for the future as it might affect family and friends, as it might affect the rest of the world. But deep down inside, if we are being honest, we've left the USofA behind. Thoughts and prayers...

Macron is my President.

MACRON, 1/6, PIZZA, AND OTHER BITS AND PIECES: #9

 

MACRON IS PISSED OFF. SO AM I.

I don't care if it was political calculation, a slip of the tongue, or simply an uncharacteristic burst of honest feelings from a politician. But I am not pissed off that Macron is pissing off the people who piss me off by not getting vaccinated. As the controversy over Macron's statement concerning the last 10% of the French who are holding out against the jab plays out, anti-vaxxers are being interviewed by the media. And what those interviews bring to light, admittedly as anecdotal evidence, is that the anti-vaxxers have no problem purchasing fake vaccine passes or borrowing the passes of friends and family in order to go to restaurants and cinemas while unvaccinated. In other words, they have no problem breaking the law and endangering other people's lives, demonstrating that they are not merely criminals. They are sociopaths. 

Yes, such rants are becoming more and more common. Given that anti-vaxxers are such a small minority - in numbers if not in volume - that calling them names might not seem as edgy as it would have a year ago. But a year ago, I was calling them names too.

AT LAST. PIZZA

Friday night is Pizza Night. 

Isabella's Pizza outside of Bath made a fine pie just the way that we liked it back when we lived in Pennsylvania, USofA.  Isabella never appeared in person but her old man always welcomed me with a handshake and a grin. And on a warm summer evening, he would hand me a cold beer if I had to wait a few minutes for my pie to come out of the oven. For decades, Cathey could rest easy and enjoy someone else's cooking that one night a week. 

In France, it's been different. 

Every little town in France has a pizza joint. Some have full menus. Some just pizza. Sometimes. the pizzas are little more than crackers-with-toppings with thin, almost wafer crusts. Some of those cracker pizzas are better than others. I like the guy who parks his truck in the square on Wednesday nights better than I like pizza from the town's storefront shop that's only open on weekends, but the difference isn't that dramatic.

Crackers with toppings...

Recently, fate intervened. A new friend, and a foodie too, said that he heard that a pizza restaurant in a market town up the road made a good pie. So we went to the Sunday morning market in Saint-Chinian, lingered over a cup of coffee while we waited for Pizza Di Rosa to open, and the three of us ordered three different 8" pies. Wonderful. A fine cross between the full-crust American pie and the French crackers, with a thin but slightly bready crust, flexible enough to fold, but not so thick that the toppings were overwhelmed. 

Now, for a decent bagel...

 1/6: A DAY THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY

When Liz Cheney said that 1/6 will be remembered by Americans in the same way that 9/11 and December 7th are, she was immediately castigated by the Trumpists in her party. So many people died when the planes flew into the World Trade Center, so many people died when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, that there can be no comparison, they said.

Well, Liz wasn't talking about deaths. No, Liz was talking about unexpected attacks on the soil of our USofA and its institutions. Liz was talking about events so previously unthinkable that they shook our concept of what is acceptable and normal. And she was right. A 21st Century insurrection to overturn an election that to this day still stands as free and fair, despite every attempt to brand it as stolen, will almost certainly be remembered for a long time to come. Let's hope that it's remembered in the proper context - a failed attempt to subvert democracy fueled by an ignorant, arrogant, and defeated President.

YOUTUBE: THERE'S A VIDEO FOR THAT

Putting together IKEA furniture? Wondering how to change a setting on an iPhone Xr? Carving a turkey or a rib roast? There are videos for that. There's a video for everything. No more mysteries. No professional secrets. 

Put malt powder in the water when you boil your homemade bagels. Intel or AMD? Add cinnamon to lamb shanks to sweeten them a bit. What's the easiest way to make pallets out of your furniture? (Wait a minute. Reverse that.) There are videos for that. 

 Clearly, it is more likely than not that we live in a simulation. We are engulfed in a digital world so interconnected and complex that almost certainly, the next step is to live in a virtual world of our own choosing, a virtual world in which such nuisances as COVID do not exist.

How's that for taking a sharp right turn that you didn't see 

RANDOM THOUGHTS

Thousands of anti-vaxxers took to the streets in Austria to protest mandates. Millions stayed home, fully vaxxed. Guess which group earned the headlines.

Djokovic rightly expected to be able to compete in Australia. Money and power. What else do you need to be allowed to do whatever you want to do? Just ask Trump. And by the way, Trump will never go to jail. Why not? Money and power.

For the past week, lows at night have hovered between 28F and 39F with frost turning the vineyards white in the morning. In eastern Pennsylvania, such temperatures in mid January might be considered a blessing, especially if the daytime temps rose fo 50F as ours have been. I guess that my blood is thinning after eight years living within spitting distance of the Mediterranean. 

FRENCH YELLOW VESTS, BREXIT, AND THE COLOR OF CONCRETE: 12-2018

A friend worried that she'd been dropped from my blog's feed because she hadn't read anything from me for a couple of months. Shame on me. Yes, there have been problems and there's been work to be done. But I have an opinion for every minute of every day and I type reasonably well. So what am I waiting for?

THE COLOR OF CONCRETE: We live in the oldest part of our village, maybe 50 meters from the site of the original Roman villa, in a house that has probably been inhabited in some configuration or another for 1,000 years. We're packed in tightly with our neighbors. Our front door opens onto a pedestrian walkway that we can just barely fit our car into if we approach it from a certain angle. But the walkway is barely wider than the car, it's illegal to park there for longer than it takes to offload our stuff, and there's no way out except to back and fill and return the way we came.

The pieton, as we call it, used to be paved with bricks. This past summer, the town decided to replace water lines. They pulled up the bricks, covered everything with dust and dirt and mud, replaced the lines, and then poured concrete instead of replacing the bricks. It's a shame. A concrete sidewalk is easier to keep clean, yes. A boon for the young ladies who work for the town sweeping and cleaning our streets and sidewalks daily. But a concrete sidewalk simply has none of the rustic charm of a brick-paved walkway.

Last week, a work crew began digging up one half of the new walkway. Why? Well, after they poured the second half of the walkway this summer, it rained just enough to slightly change the color of the concrete. So the two halves of the walkway didn't match. That meant redoing one half and matching it to the other.

This tells you two things about the French. They don't have the good sense not to pour concrete in the rain. And color coordination is more important than money.

BREXIT: The world is getting smaller. The idea that a small island with a mid-sized economy can compete globally with the European Union, the USofA, China, Russia, India, South Korea, and even Japan is absurd. (Yes, the UK has the world's fifth largest economy. But that's today with free access to its largest trading partner, the EU. After Brexit?) The idea that a better deal than the one that Theresa May brokered but could not possibly get through Parliament can be renegotiated with the EU is absurd. Brexiteer Tories calling for a vote of no confidence when they had no chance of winning, thereby accomplishing nothing except their egotistically greedy goal of weakening the leader of their own party and assuring her departure sooner rather than later, is absurd. The fact that the best that Labor can do in terms of an alternative to PM May is Jeremy Corbin is absurd.

This tells you two things about the English. The English system of higher education has created a coterie of elite, self-serving, unpatriotic twerps who care more for the way that the seams on their trousers fall when they sit at their desks, counting their money, than they do for the health and welfare of their home country. And that the English are just as susceptible to covert Russian disruptive influence as was the USofA during our last Presidential election.

YELLOW VESTS: I asked an American friend living in Paris if the lawlessness was as widespread as it appeared in the media. Yes, she said. So I don't go near the Champs-Elysées. Well, the Champs-Elysées isn't all of Paris and Paris isn't all of France. Yes, there are goons of the extreme right and extreme left who have taken advantage of the situation, mostly in urban settings where they can remain anonymous. Remember, we're probably talking about maybe a couple of hundred bad apples in a movement that put hundreds of thousands of people on the streets.

The rural French are the backbone of the movement and they have a right to be upset. The government has pushed the use of diesel cars and trucks for years. The thinking was that diesels last longer than gasoline-powered motors and are more cost-effective to operate over the long term. Thus, diesel fuel has been subsidized. As a result, every French grape grower owns a little white diesel-powered van (usually inhabited by a little white dog) and all of their families own diesel-powered cars. Suddenly, though, the French government has changed course. The environment takes precedence. What had been encouraged was now about to be discouraged and heavily taxed. Why? To reduce France's carbon footprint. (And France, with its heavy reliance on nuclear energy, already has one of the smallest carbon footprints of any industrialized country.)

So we are stopped just about daily at a local traffic circle here in the rural south. The GJs (Gilets Jaunes = Yellow Vests) hand out flyers detailing the cost of government, the pay and fringe benefits of government ministers as compared to the income of local farmers. They explain that Macron is taking food from their mouths. I tell them that I'm an American. "Vous avez Macron. Nous avons Trump." They laugh. And then they raise the barriers and we are on our way in less than five minutes.

Those are the folks that are the true face of the GJs, not the bomb-throwers.

But my American friends, at least those who support the anti-immigration rhetoric of Trump and his ilk, will tell you that FRANCE IS BURNING! REVOLUTION! THEY ARE CHANTING 'WE WANT TRUMP' IN THE STREETS!

This tells you two things about Americans. The first is that those who claim that the media are peddling fake news are the first to believe the media if the reporting fits their agenda. And they forget the Boston Tea Party, when Americans rebelled against a far away and seemingly disinterested government that put a tax on a staple by destroying private property. Every American has heard that story in school. But most Americans have the long-term memory of a fruit fly and a capacity similar to that same fruit fly to think critically.

AN AMERICAN EXPAT'S TAKE ON WORLD POLITICS: PART 1 - FRANCE

I enjoy politics. I enjoy reading about politics, talking about politics, writing about politics. And I've been a politician. I was a member of my town council in Pennsylvania for a couple of decades, chairman for a good bit of that time, and I sat on the two-county regional planning commission that covered the Lehigh Valley of eastern Pennsylvania including the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton, twice serving as chairman.

This last year or two have been like heroin for a political junkie like me. As an American expat living in the south of France among politically aware expats from around the world, Brexit, Trump, and Macron have been front and center to read about, to talk about, and now to write about. What better time to look back and look forward than at the beginning of a new year?

I don't pretend that these will be detailed analyses. Pick nits if you will. In fact, I invite discussion. Even dissent. My insights are free of charge and worth every penny.

Let's get to it. And let's start in France. Why France? Because of the three countries that I will be discussing, France is the one country that seems to have gotten it right. Who'd have thunk it?

The French hold a series of elections, regional government, Presidential, and National Assembly in that order. Each of the elections may be two-tiered. That is, if the candidate for a particular office does not receive 50%+1 of the vote, a runoff between the two top votegetters is held. Campaigning is strictly controlled. For instance, all campaigning must cease on the Friday before the Sunday voting and the publication of polling in the French press is forbidden on election day.

The regional elections way back in December of 2015 were truly extraordinary from this American's point of view. Why? Because the center-left Socialists and the center-right Republicans cooperated to prevent the anti-European, anti-immigration, far-right National Front from controlling a single one of France's 13 regions. How did they cooperate? The Socialists withdrew candidates with no chance to win in favor of their Republican rival.

OK. Stop. Take a deep breath. And think about that for a minute, you sophisticated American political operatives out there. In places where they had no hope of winning, Socialist candidates not only withdrew their names from consideration. They urged their followers to vote for the conservative Republicans in order to prevent a win by a surging, populist fringe. And it worked. Although the National Front took the most votes overall in the first round of the regional elections, they failed to end up with political control of a single one of the thirteen French regions.

But wait. It gets better.

Having received a record number of votes in the regionals, and with failed/corrupt/uninspiring candidates for President  representing the major political parties, National Front leader Marine Le Pen's followers were charged up. There was a real chance that an anti-immigration, authoritarian, populist/nationalist might be elected President in 2017. (Sound familiar?) Enter Emmanuel Macron. An investment banker who joined the center-left Socialist government in early 2012, Macron worked his way into a Cabinet-level role and managed to institute several business-friendly reforms. But in 2016, he saw his chance, left the Socialist party, and formed En Marche!, the brand new political party that was to be the platform for his election as the youngest French President ever.

As is the case with any political party that is the child of a single politician, En Marche! defies easy categorization. Although supported by prominent centrists and even greens, Macron also committed to various workplace reforms that would eventually send the unions into the streets to protest. In shorthand, I'd say that Macron and therefore En Marche! are generally socially liberal and fiscally conservative. (Understand that by American standards, socially liberal in France is very liberal but fiscally conservative is far to the left of anything true American fiscal conservatives would recognize. My guess is that this sort of political philosophy is shared by a majority of Americans. They just don't have a political party that consistently espouses it.)

Macron proved a cagey politician, became the darling of the media, and eventually led the field in the first phase. He crushed National Front's Le Pen in the runoff. The turnout for the runoff was historically low at about 75%, probably because it was understood that Le Pen had no chance. By the time that the elections for the National Assembly rolled around, the wave was complete. En Marche! won a clear majority of seats in the French legislature without having to form any coalitions.

There are two lessons that I take away from the French elections as an American political observer.

The first is that the French understood in ways that Americans can't seem to wrap their heads around that love of country can and should have primacy over political loyalty, even over political philosophy. 60% of voters in the American 2016 Presidential election voted for a candidate other than Trump. That's a practically unprecedented rejection. Given a turnout below 60%, Trump received the vote of less than 25% of eligible voters. Yet Trump won. Why? Because Americans failed to understand the dangers of a Trump Presidency, underestimated the chances of a Trump victory, and so either stayed at home or voted for a candidate that had no chance of winning. Americans have no basis for pride in their electoral system given that result.

The second takeaway is that the Republican and the Democrat establishments had better keep their eyes open. The Tea Party movement has pulled the Republican Party far to the right. Progressives are similarly convinced that Democrats should move further left. Take heed. A new centrist party in France, less than two years old, swept into power on an irresistible wave fueled by contempt for a corrupt and unresponsive establishment and a desire for a centrist government. If it's true that the majority of Americans are centrist, the two major American political parties are moving in a way that invites a third party to fill the vacuum.

It couldn't happen in America, though. Right?

En Marche!

ELECTION STUPIDITY CROSSES THE ATLANTIC

I tried for something light. Satire or sarcasm. I just couldn't. First the Americans. Then the French. Same song, second verse.

Trump was normalized by a media fascinated by personality. He wasn't dangerous. Oh, no. He wasn't a threat to orderly governance. Oh, no. He was at worse a fool, concerned with image and ratings. An almost lovable fool. But dangerous? Oh, no. Anyway, he'll never get elected

Clinton was not a valid alternative, they said. A tool of Wall Street. An opportunist. The candidate of the establishment. Just as bad as Trump. Forget her early work with migrants, knocking on doors for McGovern, her voter registration drives, her work for women's rights both at home and abroad. You just can't trust her. I read it on Facebook.

A pox on both their houses.

Americans are just beginning to see the result of their naivete. Let's look at two horrible examples.

America first? That's what Trump said. Then MOAB in Afghanistan, troops on the ground in Syria and Somalia. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. When has an Anglo-European intervention in the Middle East ever led to the desired result? Hundreds of years of history tell us that the answer to that question is NEVER. But somehow, this time will be different?

We are told that Trump's tax cuts will be paid for through economic growth. I repeat, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Not since Kennedy's time has a tax cut served as a significant stimulant. Of course, in those days the top individual rate was 91% and the top corporate rate 52%. There was room to provide stimulus. But both the Reagan and the GWB tax cuts resulted in huge deficits and eventually recession. Really, we need to try riding that old horse again?

You'd think that the example was there for all to see. But nooooooo......

Le Pen is smart, charismatic, good looking. Not her father. She isn't dangerous. Oh, no. She isn't a threat to orderly governance. Oh, no. She is at worse simply a socially conservative rabble rouser with Daddy issues trying to get attention. But dangerous? Oh, no. Anyway, she'll never get elected.

And who the heck is this Macron kid? A banker? Married to his teacher? Never held elective office? He is just not a valid alternative. A tool of the Rothchilds. An opportunist. The candidate of the establishment.

A pox on both their houses.

Insanity is doing the same thing...