Efrim menuck biography of barack obama
Our great cities are characterized by “horrifying inequality.” Ordinary people are “constantly at risk of being wiped out by [an] innumerable profusion of cars, which carry in total comfort men worth infinitely less than those they splash and threaten to destroy.” Thousands are “forced to breathe the poisoned air” of our neighborhoods. We avoid speaking of the “horrible disproportion of fortunes” and especially of “the secret causes that produce it.” Our morals are “harsh and arrogant behind our polite and carefree façades”: financiers, of course, are “harsh and crude at the same time,” but the other rich people who run the country “only possess one of these faults: either they’ll politely let you die of hunger, or they’ll rudely render you some aid.” Meanwhile, the “indigence of the poor” is such that it is impossible “to leave it behind while preserving your integrity.”
Such was Paris as Louis-Sébastien Mercier saw it in , a place whose miseries led him to dream, for the first time in European literary history, of a utopian commonwealth set in a concrete future time: L’An . His recipes for the future are in some ways dismayingly conservative: even as he imagines the demise of established Catholicism, the feats his future society cherishes above all are “giving birth to a child, sowing a field, and building a house.”But nearly halfway between Mercier and the year of his utopia, we face many problems that are not so different from his—save that, unlike us, Mercier had every reason to be confident that the human race would make it to For us to do so, we have to confront the future of capitalism, as he did not. But just as Mercier’s moralizing analysis is hopelessly inadequate to deal with the capitalism of our day, two recent books show that our own accepted wisdom on the subject might not go as far as we think.
The competition between alternatives in which misery is ended forever, made bearable, or overwhelms us completely is the impetus behind Peter Frase’s
If you’ve only ever listened to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s recorded output, you’ve probably never heard “Hope Drone.” The song has no fixed form; instead, it is an evolving being, seemingly fated to live solely in the domain of live performance. You can find ample evidence of the track’s changing character online; fan-recorded bootlegs trace its many manifestations as the band’s opening number since , when the Montreal-based collective reunited after a seven-year hiatus. Through those 15 years, with five recorded albums and countless live performances, “Hope Drone” has been, at once, the most consistent and ever-changing facet of the collective’s repertoire.
The word HOPE faded into view as a low bass hum emerged over the loudspeaker, announcing the imminent arrival of the band on stage at Chicago’s Salt Shed on the night of Nov. 8. Over the next dozen minutes, that one word flickered in and out on a piece of looping celluloid as the band began to shape the droning sound into something specific, imbuing the open concept with meaning. If hope is a discipline, as longtime abolitionist Mariame Kaba has taught us, then “Hope Drone” is a persistent exercise in renewing faith in a better world—the Sisyphean act of inching the boulder upward, only to watch it fall into an abyss of violence that seems to expand each day.
The band’s eighth album, No Title as of 13 February 28, Dead, asks us not to look away. While the band has never been subtle about their left-wing politics (see: “Transphobes eat shit and die alone,” taped to an onstage amp), the lack of overt messages on the songs themselves can sometimes push these conversations from view. If it feels like political actions taken elsewhere have done nothing to slow the horrors unfolding within Gaza, Godspeed reminds us that our attention still cannot waver. Just four months into the genocide, the band would mark the nearly 30, dead, a number that keeps growing. Even in these abstracted terms, whole lives and wor
ARCADE FIRE
"I'm living in an age that calls darkness light"
Contents:
Personal introduction
Personal introduction
In my book, Arcade Fire are not only the single greatest rock giant act of the s — it is not at all excluded that they might be the very last rock giant act, period. If this is exaggeration, count me happy; if it is not, do not count me sorry, because there is no better candidate than the pompous, over-the-top, sincere-yet-sarcastic tragism of Arcade Fire to draw the final canonical curtain over the rock age of music.
As is often the case with me, I was quite late to the party: heard Funeral for the first time around , was not overtly impressed for the first couple of listens, «got it» eventually, wrote a fairly positive, but not gushing, first review, and went on to other tasks. It was not really until the world at large caught the Arcade Fire virus after the release of The Suburbs that it gradually dawned on me how near-perfect Funeral was, and how these guys&#; music is the precise embodiment of all the high hopes and cynical disillusionments of the early 21st century at the same time. This is not the most common feeling in the world — there are still plenty of people out there wondering what all the fuss is, including people with generally immaculate taste, and it is unlikely that for those people my words will make any difference. But here goes nothing.
Genre-wise, what Arcade Fire essentially did was take the stylistics of «post-rock» (in the vein of their own Canadian predecessors and mentors God Speed You! Black Emperor) and re-integrate it back into a traditional rock setting — creating powerful, bombastic, multi-layered and simultaneously minimalistic soundscapes that had time limits, lyrics, verses, and choruses. In doing so, they were obviously not alone: this was quite a popular movement in the mids that spawned not a few decent bands (remember British Sea Po
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Catherine Grand (–) was a French courtesan and noblewoman. Born in India as the daughter of a French East India Company officer, she married George Grand, an officer of the English East India Company. After her marriage, she had a scandalous liaison with Bengal councillor Philip Francis in Calcutta. Her husband sent her to Paris, where she became a popular courtesan, having relationships with several powerful men, and was known as Madame Grand. She became the mistress and later the wife of French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the first prime minister of France. This oil-on-canvas portrait of Grand was painted by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. It was exhibited at the Salon of the Royal Academy in Paris the same year, as one of at least ten portraits submitted by Le Brun, and was favourably received. The painting is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Painting credit: Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun