another F1 video- Jean Pierre Beltoise '68

The original is here.

René Arnoux in 2008

I always liked René Arnoux. Arnoux raced in F1 from '78 till the end of the 1989 season, and while his stock had fallen considerably by the late 80s, it's easy for people today to forget how much he was regarded as a rising star around '79-'81. If I recall correctly he even held the record for most pole positions in one season at one time.

He left the Renault team when they were on top to go drive for Ferrari, presumably seduced by the legend. After two more seasons with Ferrari, the first good, the second somewhat less so, he was canned at the beginning of the third (1985) season after only one start-- and not allowed to drive for anybody else for the rest of the year because the Ferrari people wouldn't release him from his contract. Peering into the psyche of a famous person you've never met is probably silly, but it's difficult not to think that this may have soured him on the sport a bit and hurt his confidence.

After that he spent his last four seasons with Ligier, 1986-'89, and like Arnoux, Ligier didn't have the same form as in the early 80s, especially after their engine supplier (coincidentally, Renault) left F1 at the end of '86 and they had to make do with lesser equipment.

Scientology on trial in France- BBC

Happy birthday Bibendum

according to our wiki friends, Michelin commissioned artist Marius Rossillon to create Bibendum in 1898, so he turns 110 this year. Here are some older iterations. I've been told by some I resemble the Michelin man, but the less said about that the better, at least for this Wednesday evening.

Le Cru et le très cuit

photo: ucdb.br


today is Claude Lévi-Strauss's 99th birthday, as I mentioned last week. So, happy birthday.

meow.

I have finished my 1st movie. (No, this isn't it(above), but for some reason it came up as related content(?)* on youtube.) I uploaded it to Youtube, but I may fiddle with the editing some more. I sent the url off in an email to some persons I know who I hope might give me a sense of whether the edits are too fast or too slow.

(I have a very poor sense of this, as I tend to favor faster edits than what most people are accustomed to, at least for my generation. By contrast, young people these days, who knows-- they might think my edits are too slow.)

Anyway, I liked this video, even though I don't think it's really similar to mine. If you really want to see mine, it's here: "v. primitive".

*I have since replaced the "flying cats" video since I figured out that it just came up, not as related content, but as something they were promoting. So here's an interview with Claude Lévi Strauss(pt 1) Here's pt 2 and pt 3.

Incidentally, Lévi-Strauss will be 99 on Wednesday the 28th(!)(I guess I shouldn't refer to "young people these days" as I'm just a pup compared to him...)

Pike's Peak

putting the zooom in Hugo Zoom. The Pike's Peak hillclimb used to be held on the 4th of July, but now it's held later in the summer. I know it's unrealistic, but I'd like to imagine that if Peugeot sold cars like this to the general public they never would've left the US market.

9.24

I've been ill, and not so keen to post as a consequence. Last week I mentioned to HZ guest host Rob Payne that I meant to write about Peter Galbraith's recent piece in Tomdispatch, which has since appeared in Salon and the NY Review of Books as well. I will in a day or 2, tops. Incidentally Rob has been very productive this past week, and has a bucket of interesting posts up, including his discussion of the afore mentioned Galbraith essay.



In the meantime, here's the sublime Mélissa Theuriau, the French news anchor called la bombe cathodique (”the television bombshell”) by Paris Match.

I don't know how the news can be that bad when she's the one reading it. The only bad thing about looking at her is how it makes me feel like I'm Moe the bartender from The Simpsons. C'est la vie.

Naturally 7:concert-sauvage-dans-le-metro

Concert sauvage dans le métro !
Uploaded by lapapsprod

via American Samizdat:

Naturally 7 is an American hip-hop group based in NYC. Here, they are videographed* on the Paris Metro, 01 December 2006.

As Zippy might observe: meanwhile, somewhere in Beaumont,Texas a middle-aged Francophile is salivating with jealousy...

*I guess that's the right term. Non?

No, it is NOT Hammer time

Vast Left discusses MC Hammer's unfortunate "anti-war" song(via Avedon.):

If MC Hammer can help save our troops with his new video, "Bring Our Brothers Home," why should I quibble?

Well, because it's deeply dishonest.

Still, I agree with the chorus, which is actually pretty catchy:

Bring 'em home
Bring our brothers home
Too much dying
They've been gone too long
People crying
That this war is wrong
Right or wrong, it's time to come home

Also, the endless montage of war footage and flagged-draped caskets is quite moving. How could it not be?

Unfortunately, Hammer has been Hannitized for our mutually assured destruction.

I have to agree with "Vast Left." Hammer has bought in to the idea that domestic criticism of the war is "hating the troops." Another sample:

Man it must be hard
With all the things you're going through
Got the world on your shoulders
Everybody watching you
Keep us all safe
And out the same mouth we hate you.

and Hammer seems to be saying that the problem with the war was just that we stayed there too long:

You did what we needed
In our darkest hour
While our peoples was dyin'
In them burning twin towers
Never before have we seen it like this
The enemies we looking for
Was living in our midst
So we brought it to 'em
And we hit 'em where it hurts
Stuck they heads in the sand and knocked they dicks in the dirt
They know what it is, sir,
Job well done
Now pick up the phone and tell our boys
Come on home.

"Stuck they[sic] heads in the sand and knocked they[sic] dicks in the dirt, They know what it is, sir, Job well done?"

Apparently he's decided to be a racist to boot. Too bad. The title is "Bring Our Brothers Home," and you can look for it if you are determined; but like hell I'll embed the Youtube video here.

I wonder how many people will also decide, years down the road when(and if) the Iraq occupation is finally over, that it was the right thing to do, but we "just stayed over there too long." For all I know it may already be a common sentiment among the blood-n-guts crowd that keeps buying those damn bumper stickers. (If I displayed a bumper sticker that said "I support the troops, except the deranged and sadistic ones," I imagine I'd be compromising my safety, even though it strikes me as a pretty reasonable sentiment. What if I also specified "And I support extensive mental health treatment for the deranged ones?" No, I think it still would be unwise...)

Anyway: as I said the other day, our mass media operators seem pretty determined that people don't make connections and don't put the pieces together, and Hammer's view is tailor-made for giving a way for people to unreflectively square the sheer waste of the war with the aims of the once and future war machine. It's not that different, if you stop and think about it, from John Kerry's "message" in 2004 that the problem with the war was that it was prosecuted badly.

It wasn't always this way. Remember when Jon Voight and Jane Fonda won the lead acting Oscars for Coming Home? I'm not saying the Oscars are or ever were a meaningful measure of film art (clearly they're not, and if they ever manage to be it's only coincidentally so), but they are a measure of what the Hollywood elite holds up as valuable, and it's unimaginable that a film like Coming Home, were it made today, would receive that kind of conferred legitimacy. Today Hollywood courts Hillary Clinton and (to a lesser degree) Obama, with their "all options on the table" talk viz-a-viz Iran, and even in the last cycle they wouldn't touch Howard Dean when he still seemed viable in late 2003.

If you want another reason to see Hammer's view as small and mean, consider this, from another era:


(larger image here.) photo courtesy "Rom Tobbi"

(a total of about half a million soldiers died at Gallipoli in a few months' time, roughly half on each side, the British and French, and the Turkish. The custom of sending soldiers' bodies back to their home countries is a comparatively recent development. Incidentally the man who wrote the words fought there too.)

all electric, no bills

photo(andreadoria.com) of the Ile de France leaving New York Harbor, circa 1936.


When I was a kid I loved animals, and big motorized machines of every type, whether it was an airplane or Jackie Stewart's Tyrrell Formula One car or the big ocean liners of yesteryear. It never occurred to me that my holding these parallel interests might somehow be ironic.

I wanted, for example, to someday fly on the Concorde, which last flew in 2003, so I guess I missed my chance. The big ocean liners are mostly gone too, but like the Concorde they're strictly a niche consumer good for the wealthy. I wonder sometimes if the ghosts of Concorde and the old gran luxe ocean liners are a sort of D.E.W. line for a society that still believes that technology will rescue us from today without requiring us to do anything about our multiple bad habits.

Speaking of French things (and motorized machines, etc.), the 24 hrs of Le Mans is taking place this weekend, and there's a pretty good chance that a diesel-powered racer will win it outright. The rules have been finessed for this year to allow a diesel powered car to be competitive, and Audi and Peugeot decided to field diesel-powered entries to meet said rules.(The scuttlebutt, incidentally, is that because of the massive investments these two companies undertook to make competitive diesel racers, they're concerned that the rules stay the same for a few years so as to not render their cars obsolete in 2008. After all, only one company team can win Le Mans at a time.) I still love motorsports like I did when I was a kid, even if I can see the politics I wouldn't have understood when I was seven or eight.



photo: greatoceanliners.net

addendum: oh yeah-- Audi won.

Ségolène n' Buddy

AFP foto

Ségolène Royal, on the left, and Buddy Sarkozy were the two top vote-getters in the first round of the French presidential election, as you probably already know. Ok, ok, I think his name is Nicholas. But he looks like his name should be Buddy, if you ask me. You can tell how much they like each other, too.