[spectre] who are we?

Sun, 9 Sep 2001 16:31:03 +0200

C'est un message de format MIME en plusieurs parties.

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 Dear Spectres
 An attempt to haul out threads of the ars experience related to deep europe
and media art and culture ; needless to say but in these hypersensitive
times these things apparently have to be said, what follows is a perfectly
subjective view of things.

Honor, your Ars post shows up one of the (many) insidious features of the
festival, this « side-lining » of more strongly ideologically positioned
work, as opposed to the electrolobby’s dominance of the Brucknerhaus with
its hip hop cultural near-void (though generalisations are dangerous as
always because some of the work was interesting in the way it adopted
obsolescent low-end platforms and standards as the starting point for new
games aesthetics – see Simon Carless). Overall though, the setup induced
similar feelings to early Sigkids days at Siggraph : the institutional(ised)
need to tap into and be in best position to appropriate « next generation
culture ». Check out today those you’ll be marketing tomorrow. Negroponte
came up with memorable bullshit along these lines at an EU (information
society) forum in Brussels a few years ago, when he described to a packed
house his strategy to parachute hundreds of pc’s to a bunch of little Asian
villages to give kids a chance to tune in to the (his) world. A Brazilian
woman who angrily asked him whether he’d bothered to check out literacy
figures amongst his future targets was razzed by the predominantly male,
Negroponte-worshipping audience who pointed out that if you want EU
information society to look serious, you obviously need the blessing of the
Negropontes and Gates of the world. No thoughts about the need to develop a
specific European view of infocommunications and their development - chronic
thinking for most Brussels commissioners. Brussels sprouts recolonisation in
new digital packets. But of course one expects this bland, idle non-thinking
in certain EU environments, as at Siggraph and now, unfortunately, in
heavily institutionalised festivals like Ars with its 22 years of venerable
history.

With all due respect to Gerfried, and to some provocative pieces of work
show-cased here and there (Andreas has mentioned them), I found the
symposium a particularly bad non-event (didn’t catch Thursday, any
improvements ?). Not because of the hot air places like this invariably
abound in (am used to that), but because of the sickeningly consensual,
unquestioning blanket approach to this thing polemically entitled «
Take-over ». Which amounted to a bunch of individual speakers getting up and
doing their things in total autonomy – a few of them certainly well worth
listening to (Natalie Jeremijenko as Andreas has said, Rafael Lozano who was
a spectre as much as he could be under the circumstances, also Stuart Bunt
and the Australian guys with the SymbioticA research group, Nora Barry with
her Streaming Cinema experience and ethics, others…) – but without the sense
of wanting to open up a real discussion – something we know about through
the list, n’est-ce pas? A few token local presences didn’t help matters – an
embarrassing dance performance and a presentation by « the Austrian Neal
Stephenson » who blithely managed to misquote Roy-Bladerunner’s final « time
to die » line. Ouch. But overall there seemed to be an adamant blanket
refusal to grapple with the question of art that the symposium was meant to
be about, where it’s happening today and how it’s defined, how it demarcates
itself from other social spaces/ activities (« oh that’s not my problem, I
leave that to the theorists/ historians, the difference between artists and
designers is that designers get paid before the job and artists
afterwards », etc – these are a few of the (un-)forgettable answers given by
various speakers when pushed…). There was much very problematic and
potentially debatable stuff that just wafted straight through the stuffy
brucknerhaus air, in one ear and out the other.

So we ended up with the usual sitcom mush whereby everybody and nobody is an
artist in an indiscriminate realm which blends design of all kinds (games,
interfaces, systems architectures, design of history and theory, etc), and
does away with questions like how to voluntarily put the spoke in the wheel,
shake up status quo thinking, how to complexify current problems as opposed
to demystify them and smooth a neurotic population into lullaby acceptance
of the world today - i.e. how to admit the idiosyncratic and disturbing and
weird hermeneutics that skew standardised views and visions of the world
through that indefinable practice known as art. How’s that for a load of hot
air rhetoric, sorry. In short, the same problem regularly encountered
amongst (other) institutional funders/ policy-makers cropped up :
infocommunications technologies as an anaesthetic rather than aesthetically
loaded medium, which engage so-called participatory interactive citizenship
via pushbutton (or sophisticated MIT haptics) interfaces as an alibi for
identifying with one’s social environment, as catharsis for the excluded,
etc etc etc. No grit in the tangible bits, damn it. Like lots of spectres, I
’ve been battling with these attitudes for years to fight for
differentiation between certain design practices geared towards making the
world more palatable, and practices I qualify as artistic geared towards
catalysing questions and precipitating head-on experiences that emphasise
what in our taken-for-granted world remains horrifyingly unacceptable.

It seems to me that the deep europe preoccupations of spectre should push us
to contest this insane emulation of transatlantic « culture » that is
currently driving much of euroland into a rut, fast. We can wake up to and
use the vague feelings of awkwardness expressed by a few policy-makers aware
of the fact that europe is not just a historical and cultural playground for
tourists wanting disney with « appellation contrôlée » flavours. That
official eurodom is widening fast and inexorably and that less spinelessly
mimetic forms of cultural activism and creative initiatives, are indeed more
likely to emerge from the other side of the rhine or the danube or whatever
river you want to name… Isn’t this one of the things that spectre is about ?

OK, enough riffing I've hopefully not outstripped the netiquette text
volume, back to another burning question : Andreas, Inke, is there a
majordomo-type mechanism that enables one to check out the list population
and see who’s subscribed ?  The fact that we’ve gone practically overnight
to 90 people – especially since there are apparently many active old friends
coming in – means nothing if we don’t know who they are. It would be good to
know to whom we’re talking, to avoid the being «
assailed-by-voices-shrieking-in-the-desert » syndrome. One of our explicit
goals is to respect the priorities this list has defined for itself  – as
opposed to a number of other excellent lists which have a slightly different
focus. Pushing the send button to simultaneously hose several lists with a
post, however brilliant, doesn’t strike me as being a sign of addressing the
specificity of spectre. This isn’t a sweeping generalisation – such action
is obviously justified in certain cases (e.g. information about the current
situation in Macedonia), but in others seems questionable : if we’re just
part of the « bouquet » of hip lists that are to be sprayed with solipsist
texts, with no real attempt to discuss issues we’ve defined as starting
points for spectre, why bother ? Of course I’m including myself amongst the
people whose posts may appear self-indulgent or off-the-point to others,
because this is always possible in a relatively anonymous crowd (even when
you’re with a bunch of friends). Not wanting to turn the clock back, nor to
go round in circles (something the clock is allowed to do), but am quite
happy to pick up certain topics with individuals met over the years thanks
to this community, in order to take them further in the context of
one-to-one or few-to-few exchange. Some complex issues we’ve identified as
important for the list could perhaps have been openly discussed with the
couple of dozen spectre subscribers of a fortnight ago, in an atmosphere of
mutual confidence (that means neither total consensus/ agreement, nor
backroom secrecy), but I suspect that these same issues might take us
straight into a brick wall as a quasi-anonymous group of a hundred people,
many of them apparently a bit sulky and embittered and determined to let us
know about it. I’m not into esoteric cliques but there’s a simple thing
called group dynamics, which makes certain kinds of exchange viable in
intimate situations, others viable in more public situations. After all, not
everything that interests each of us has to be spot-lit for everybody. We
have enough panopticons to deal with in everyday life. I do actually
regularly have conversations and correspondence with individuals (shucks !),
and in many cases these are more productive for me than soapboxes. I’m not
against noise, it’s part of life, and what sounds like noise for some is
music for others (personally enjoy Satie’s silence AND some very loud
opposites). But the question for me, since like many people my time and
energy are not unlimited, is how and with whom to pick up on the issues we’
ve identified as priority for spectre. This is NOT an aggressive message.
But I'm not going to bore the list with any more input - don't have time to
howl at the moon - without knowing who the hell is out there and what real
interests are, because I'm really wondering whether the "raison d'être" of
spectre as it's been defined is graspable. Maybe we're now in a time slot
that's too completely different to that of our earlier exchanges, and I'm
barking up the wrong tree/ howling at the wrong moon. Like the Marley song,
"you're running and you're running and you're running away...". Didn't help
him much unfortunately.

Andreas I’m very sad about the Podewil cherry trees. Talking about songs, do
you know the French song, « Le temps des cerises » (the season of the
cherries) ? It was written after the Paris commune by Jean-Baptiste Clément,
and more or less accepted as a love song as long as the final verse wasn’t
sung, because the falling cherries referred to symbolised the communards
gunned down by Thiers when he came back in from Versailles with his troops
and tested Paris’s glorious new canon-width format boulevards – blood red
cherries (tombant sous la feuille en gouttes de sang). The « Bloody Week »
of May 1871 – cherry blossom time for the northern hemisphere. Here’s the
last verse with a hack translation :

J’aimerai toujours le temps des cerises : / C’est de ce temps-là que je
garde au cœur

Une plaie ouverte, / Et dame Fortune, en m’étant offerte,

Ne saurait jamais calmer ma douleur. / J’aimerai toujours le temps des
cerises

Et le souvenir que je garde au cœur.

I will always love the season of the cherries / It is from that season that
I harbour an open wound in my heart,

And Lady Luck, were she to offer herself to me,

Would be unable to assuage my pain. / I will always love the season of the
cherries

And the memory that I keep in my heart.

That was the verse that sort of exposed the metaphor and couldn’t be sung
for a very long time. It was also a very hot song in May 68 and has remained
a strong element in France’s contestation repertory since. Perhaps if you
have a good speaker system at Podewil it’s worth trying to track down a
version and playing it to drown out the chain saws ? A hateful sound. But
the song is good.

courage, take care

sjn

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<DIV>&nbsp;<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
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Spectres<?xml:namespace prefix =3D o ns =3D=20
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">&nbsp;<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">An=20
attempt to haul out threads of the ars experience related to deep europe =
and=20
media art and culture&nbsp;; needless to say but in these hypersensitive =
times=20
these things apparently have to be said, what follows is a perfectly =
subjective=20
view of things. <o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">Honor,=20
your Ars post shows up one of the (many) insidious features of the =
festival,=20
this =AB&nbsp;side-lining&nbsp;=BB of more strongly ideologically =
positioned work,=20
as opposed to the electrolobby&#8217;s dominance of the Brucknerhaus =
with its hip hop=20
cultural near-void (though generalisations are dangerous as always =
because some=20
of the work was interesting in the way it adopted obsolescent low-end =
platforms=20
and standards as the starting point for new games aesthetics &#8211; see =
Simon=20
Carless). Overall though, the setup induced similar feelings to early =
Sigkids=20
days at Siggraph&nbsp;: the institutional(ised) need to tap into and be =
in best=20
position to appropriate =AB&nbsp;next generation culture&nbsp;=BB. Check =
out today=20
those you&#8217;ll be marketing tomorrow. Negroponte came up with =
memorable bullshit=20
along these lines at an EU (information society) forum in Brussels a few =
years=20
ago, when he described to a packed house his strategy to parachute =
hundreds of=20
pc&#8217;s to a bunch of little Asian villages to give kids a chance to =
tune in to the=20
(his) world. A Brazilian woman who angrily asked him whether he&#8217;d =
bothered to=20
check out literacy figures amongst his future targets was razzed by the=20
predominantly male, Negroponte-worshipping audience who pointed out that =
if you=20
want EU information society to look serious, you obviously need the =
blessing of=20
the Negropontes and Gates of the world. No thoughts about the need to =
develop a=20
specific European view of infocommunications and their development - =
chronic=20
thinking for most Brussels commissioners. Brussels sprouts =
recolonisation in new=20
digital packets. But of course one expects this bland, idle non-thinking =
in=20
certain EU environments, as at Siggraph and now, unfortunately, in =
heavily=20
institutionalised festivals like Ars with its 22 years of venerable =
history.=20
<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'"><o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">With all=20
due respect to Gerfried, and to some provocative pieces of work =
show-cased here=20
and there (Andreas has mentioned them), I found the symposium a =
particularly bad=20
non-event (didn&#8217;t catch Thursday, any improvements&nbsp;?). Not =
because of the=20
hot air places like this invariably abound in (am used to that), but =
because of=20
the sickeningly consensual, unquestioning blanket approach to this thing =

polemically entitled =AB&nbsp;Take-over&nbsp;=BB. Which amounted to a =
bunch of=20
individual speakers getting up and doing their things in total autonomy =
&#8211; a few=20
of them certainly well worth listening to (Natalie Jeremijenko as =
Andreas has=20
said, Rafael Lozano who was a spectre as much as he could be under the=20
circumstances, also Stuart Bunt and the Australian guys with the =
SymbioticA=20
research group, Nora Barry with her Streaming Cinema experience and =
ethics,=20
others&#8230;) &#8211; but without the sense of wanting to open up a =
real discussion &#8211;=20
something we know about through the list, n&#8217;est-ce pas? A few =
token local=20
presences didn&#8217;t help matters &#8211; an embarrassing dance =
performance and a=20
presentation by =AB&nbsp;the Austrian Neal Stephenson&nbsp;=BB who =
blithely managed=20
to misquote Roy-Bladerunner&#8217;s final =AB&nbsp;time to die&nbsp;=BB =
line. Ouch. But=20
overall there seemed to be an adamant blanket refusal to grapple with =
the=20
question of art that the symposium was meant to be about, where =
it&#8217;s happening=20
today and how it&#8217;s defined, how it demarcates itself from other =
social spaces/=20
activities (=AB&nbsp;oh that&#8217;s not my problem, I leave that to the =
theorists/=20
historians, the difference between artists and designers is that =
designers get=20
paid before the job and artists afterwards&nbsp;=BB, etc &#8211; these =
are a few of the=20
(un-)forgettable answers given by various speakers when pushed&#8230;). =
There was much=20
very problematic and potentially debatable stuff that just wafted =
straight=20
through the stuffy brucknerhaus air, in one ear and out the other.=20
<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'"><o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">So we=20
ended up with the usual sitcom mush whereby everybody and nobody is an =
artist in=20
an indiscriminate realm which blends design of all kinds (games, =
interfaces,=20
systems architectures, design of history and theory, etc), and does away =
with=20
questions like how to voluntarily put the spoke in the wheel, shake up =
status=20
quo thinking, how to complexify current problems as opposed to demystify =
them=20
and smooth a neurotic population into lullaby acceptance of the world =
today -=20
i.e. how to admit the idiosyncratic and disturbing and weird =
hermeneutics that=20
skew standardised views and visions of the world through that =
indefinable=20
practice known as art. How&#8217;s that for a load of hot air rhetoric, =
sorry. In=20
short, the same problem regularly encountered amongst (other) =
institutional=20
funders/ policy-makers cropped up&nbsp;: infocommunications technologies =
as an=20
anaesthetic rather than aesthetically loaded medium, which engage =
so-called=20
participatory interactive citizenship via pushbutton (or sophisticated =
MIT=20
haptics) interfaces as an alibi for identifying with one&#8217;s social =
environment,=20
as catharsis for the excluded, etc etc etc. No grit in the tangible =
bits, damn=20
it. Like lots of spectres, I&#8217;ve been battling with these attitudes =
for years to=20
fight for differentiation between certain design practices geared =
towards making=20
the world more palatable, and practices I qualify as artistic geared =
towards=20
catalysing questions and precipitating head-on experiences that =
emphasise what=20
in our taken-for-granted world remains horrifyingly unacceptable.=20
<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">It seems=20
to me that the deep europe preoccupations of spectre should push us to =
contest=20
this insane emulation of transatlantic =AB&nbsp;culture&nbsp;=BB that is =
currently=20
driving much of euroland into a rut, fast. We can wake up to and use the =
vague=20
feelings of awkwardness expressed by a few policy-makers aware of the =
fact that=20
europe is not just a historical and cultural playground for tourists =
wanting=20
disney with =AB&nbsp;appellation contr=F4l=E9e&nbsp;=BB flavours. That =
official eurodom=20
is widening fast and inexorably and that less spinelessly mimetic forms =
of=20
cultural activism and creative initiatives, are indeed more likely to =
emerge=20
from the other side of the rhine or the danube or whatever river you =
want to=20
name&#8230; Isn&#8217;t this one of the things that spectre is =
about&nbsp;?=20
<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'"><o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">OK,=20
enough riffing&nbsp;I've hopefully not=20
outstripped&nbsp;the netiquette text volume, back to another =
burning=20
question&nbsp;: Andreas, Inke, is there a majordomo-type mechanism that =
enables=20
one to check out the list population and see who&#8217;s =
subscribed&nbsp;?<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-spacerun: yes">&nbsp; The fact that we&#8217;ve gone =
practically=20
overnight to 90 people &#8211; especially since there are apparently =
many active old=20
friends coming in &#8211; means nothing if we don&#8217;t know who they =
are. It would be=20
good to know to whom we&#8217;re talking, to avoid the being=20
=AB&nbsp;assailed-by-voices-shrieking-in-the-desert&nbsp;=BB syndrome. =
One of our=20
explicit goals is to respect the priorities this list has defined for=20
itself&nbsp; &#8211; as opposed =
to a number of=20
other excellent lists which have a slightly different focus. Pushing the =
send=20
button to simultaneously hose several lists with a post, however =
brilliant,=20
doesn&#8217;t strike me as being a sign of addressing the specificity of =
spectre. This=20
isn&#8217;t a sweeping generalisation &#8211; such action is obviously =
justified in certain=20
cases (e.g. information about the current situation in Macedonia), but =
in others=20
seems questionable&nbsp;: if we&#8217;re just part of the =
=AB&nbsp;bouquet&nbsp;=BB of hip=20
lists that are to be sprayed with solipsist texts, with no real attempt =
to=20
discuss issues we&#8217;ve defined as starting points for spectre, why =
bother&nbsp;?=20
Of course I&#8217;m including myself amongst the people whose posts may =
appear=20
self-indulgent or off-the-point to others, because this is always =
possible in a=20
relatively anonymous crowd (even when you&#8217;re with a bunch of =
friends). Not=20
wanting to turn the clock back, nor to go round in circles (something =
the clock=20
is allowed to do), but am quite happy to pick up certain topics with =
individuals=20
met over the years thanks to this community, in order to take them =
further in=20
the context of one-to-one or few-to-few exchange. Some complex issues =
we&#8217;ve=20
identified as important for the list could perhaps have been openly =
discussed=20
with the couple of dozen spectre subscribers of a fortnight ago, in an=20
atmosphere of mutual confidence (that means neither total consensus/ =
agreement,=20
nor backroom secrecy), but I suspect that these same issues might take =
us=20
straight into a brick wall as a quasi-anonymous group of a hundred =
people, many=20
of them apparently a bit sulky and embittered and determined =
to&nbsp;<SPAN=20
class=3D147182214-09092001>let us know about it. I&#8217;m not =
into esoteric=20
cliques but there&#8217;s a simple thing called group dynamics, which =
makes certain=20
kinds of exchange viable in intimate situations, others viable in more =
public=20
situations. After all, not everything that interests each of us has to =
be=20
spot-lit for everybody. We have enough panopticons to deal with in =
everyday=20
life. I do actually regularly have conversations and correspondence with =

individuals (shucks&nbsp;!), and in many cases these are more productive =
for me=20
than soapboxes. I&#8217;m not against noise, it&#8217;s part of life, =
and what sounds like=20
noise for some is music for others (personally enjoy Satie&#8217;s =
silence AND some=20
very loud opposites). But the question for me, since like many people my =
time=20
and energy are not unlimited, is how and with whom to&nbsp;<SPAN=20
class=3D147182214-09092001>pick up on the issues we&#8217;ve =
identified as=20
priority for spectre. This is NOT an aggressive message.&nbsp;<SPAN=20
class=3D147182214-09092001>But I'm not going to bore the list&nbsp;with =
any more=20
input&nbsp;- don't have time to howl at the moon - without knowing who =
the hell=20
is out there and what real interests are, because I'm really wondering =
whether=20
the "raison d'=EAtre" of spectre as it's been defined is graspable. =
Maybe we're=20
now in a time slot that's too completely different to that of our =
earlier=20
exchanges, and I'm barking up the wrong tree/ howling at the wrong moon. =
Like=20
the Marley song, "you're running and you're running and you're running =
away...".=20
Didn't help him much unfortunately.
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">Andreas=20
I&#8217;m very sad about&nbsp;the=20
Podewil&nbsp;cherry trees.&nbsp;Talking=20
about songs, do you know the French song, =AB&nbsp;Le temps des=20
cerises&nbsp;=BB (the season of the cherries)&nbsp;? It was written =
after the=20
Paris commune by Jean-Baptiste Cl=E9ment, and more or less accepted as a =
love song=20
as long as the final verse wasn&#8217;t sung, because the falling =
cherries referred to=20
symbolised the communards gunned down by Thiers when he came back in =
from=20
Versailles with his troops and tested Paris&#8217;s glorious new =
canon-width format=20
boulevards &#8211; blood red cherries (tombant sous la feuille en =
gouttes de sang).=20
The =AB&nbsp;Bloody Week&nbsp;=BB of May 1871 &#8211; cherry blossom =
time for the northern=20
hemisphere. Here&#8217;s the last verse with a hack=20
translation&nbsp;:<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'"><o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">J&#8217;aimerai=20
toujours le temps des cerises&nbsp;: /=20
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">C&#8217;est de=20
ce temps-l=E0 que je garde au c&#339;ur <o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">Une=20
plaie ouverte, / <SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">Et dame=20
Fortune, en m&#8217;=E9tant offerte,<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">Ne=20
saurait jamais calmer ma douleur. /=20
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">J&#8217;aimerai=20
toujours le temps des cerises<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">Et le=20
souvenir que je garde au c&#339;ur.<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">&nbsp;<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">I will=20
always love the season of the cherries =
/=20
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">It is=20
from that season that I harbour an open wound in my =
heart,<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">And Lady=20
Luck, were she to offer herself to me,=20

<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">Would be=20
unable to assuage my pain. / =
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">I will=20
always love the season of the cherries<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">And the=20
memory that I keep in my heart.<o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'"><o:p></o:p>
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">That was=20
the verse that sort of exposed the metaphor and couldn&#8217;t be sung =
for a very long=20
time. It was also a very hot song in May 68 and has remained a strong =
element in=20
France&#8217;s contestation repertory =
since.=20
Perhaps if you have a good speaker system at Podewil it&#8217;s worth =
trying to track=20
down a version and playing it to drown out the chain saws&nbsp;? A =
hateful=20
sound. But the song is =
good.
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'"><SPAN=20
class=3D147182214-09092001>&nbsp;
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'"><SPAN=20
class=3D147182214-09092001>courage, take=20
care
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'"><SPAN=20
class=3D147182214-09092001>&nbsp;
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'"><SPAN=20
class=3D147182214-09092001><SPAN=20
class=3D147182214-09092001>sjn&nbsp;
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">&nbsp;
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">&nbsp;
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'">&nbsp;
<SPAN=20
style=3D"mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier =
New'"><o:p></o:p>&nbsp;</DIV></BODY></HTML>

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