Andre Gorz Suicide

In case people missed it (from an email from Geert Lovink): French philosopher Andre Gorz commits suicide with wife 4 days ago.

TROYES, France (AFP) — French philosopher Andre Gorz, 84, co-founder of the Nouvel Observateur weekly, has committed suicide together with his wife Dorine, relatives told AFP on Monday.
 
Dorine, who was 83 and of British origin, had been ill for several years. The couple were found by a friend side by side in their home southeast of Paris surrounded by letters written to close friends and relatives.
 
Born Gerard Horst in Vienna in 1923, Gorz became a naturalised French citizen in 1954 and made his name writing about ecology and anti-capitalism. He co-founded the Nouvel Observateur in 1954.
 
Last year Gorz wrote of his wife: "You have just turned 82. You are still beautiful, gracious and desirable. We have been living together for 58 years and I love you more than ever."
 

Play: Never the Sinner

Please Join Us As

Woodshed Collective

Presents
The New York Return of

Never the Sinner
The Leopold and Loeb Story

By John Logan

Conceived by Woodshed Collective
Directed by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn
The Outer Citric Circle Award for
Outstanding Off-Broadway Play Returns to New York City July 13-28.

Never the Sinner
July 13 – 28

Flamboyan Theater, CSV Cultural Center (107 Suffolk St.)
Tuesday-Saturday @ 8pm.
Sundays: July 15 and 22 @ 3pm
Saturdays: July 21 and 28 @ 2pm

All Tickets $18
www.smarttix.com or call 212-868-4444

(Featuring Long Sunday contributor Stephen Squibb!)

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maybe ten years ago . . .

There's a lazy tendency to slander the past when something happens in the present. In today's New York Times David Carr writes that the firing of Don Imus for his racist remarks is a "sign of the times."

Mr. Imus is an old-school radio guy caught in a very modern media paradigm. When he started 30 years ago, if he made the same kind of remark, it would have floated off into the ether — the Federal Communications Commission, if it received complaints, might have taken notice, but few others.

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comfort torture

Yesterday, Tuesday April 10, I saw an article by Mr. Joseph Kahn at the New York Times on China's mistreatment of one of its intellectuals. If you read the Times, you've read the same article about a hundred times before. They love writing articles about evil foreign regimes while luxuriating in the pink bubble bath background assumption that "we" aren't anything like that. And thus Kahn was more than willing, when referring to China's treatment of its reformist intellectuals, to use a word that has become, recently, "contested": torture. Earlier this year, in January, I contacted another Times reporter, Mr. Scott Shane, who was unwilling to use the 'T' word in an unqualified way concerning our treatment of detainees at Guantanomo. The contrast between these two uses of the word 'torture' is what prompted me to contact both authors.

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rev tim haggard: music saturday

A song I listened to recently put me in mind of Reverend Tim Haggard's situation.

The song is by the band 'Garbage.'

The title of the song is "Sex is not the enemy"

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Hear the Kossacks Call

What's funniest about all of this "Path to 9/11" humbug:  the 9/11 Commission Report was itself politically white-washed crock of shit.    Sorry to spoil the party (and sign the petition, please*) but still someone had to say it.

*particularly if–like most LS lurkers–you are a centrist with any cred.

Update 9/10:  Oh wouldn't you know it, "The Path to 9/11" is linked directly to David Horowitz (where does that man get all his money?):

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Neocon Clusterfuck in Middle East (open thread)

"...in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel...it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war–not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself."

"....somthing frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime..."
-Doris Lessing

Post-oracular hypothesis:  that no thinking person would honestly dispute the distinction between a free-wheeling, cultural-political, descriptive or generic or even centuries-old genetic "desire" for (what will become of the concept of) "war," and someone ignorantly wishing it to happen, or for that matter, refusing the responsibility that comes with power, and for  having significantly, predictably, knowingly, and against the consensus wisdom merely prescient of the glaringly obvious, helped it to happen.  The very intensity and stakes of the current 'crisis' (what makes it new–though never purely original–this time) have everything to do with a certain pressure on 'democracy,' it seems to me.

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Disney trades announcer for ... rabbit?

Deal sends Al Michaels to NBC for lost cartoon character

LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- A 61-year-old sportscaster for a 79-year-old animated rabbit?

Such are the deals being made these days in Hollywood as new Walt Disney Co. (DIS : 26.68, -0.04, -0.1%) Chief Executive Robert Iger indicated that his company would be extending another olive branch within the entertainment community.  This time, Iger is trading "Monday Night Football" sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC Universal (GE :General Electric GE33.25, +0.33, +1.0%) for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a cartoon character that was the predecessor to Mickey Mouse.  It doesn't stop there, though, as Disney's ESPN gets the rights to broadcast Ryder Cup golf, extended Olympics highlights and various cross-promotion deals. 

Debating the future/a future d'Europe

There have been several lively discussions recently (see for example, somewhat shamelessly, here, here, here, here or here) regarding the immanent vote in France on whether or not to ratify the European constitution as currently structured.  Is a "yes" vote an immediately despicable but ultimately necessary gesture?  Intellectual figures far and wide seem to be calling for the “courage” and “strength” to vote “yes,” but significant enough doubts have been raised, among a remarkably diligent and conscientious public (ah, if only we had such a thing here!), as to make the likelihood of a majority “no” vote in France very strong.  The issue seems to be one of either compromising with a neoliberal “free” market wet dream for the sake of "progress" and meaningful competition with the U.S., versus taking an active stand for something better, more just, more wary of the disaster that is unchecked privatization, perhaps more democratic and yet to come (which is not to say, of course, inevitable).  Needless to say the corporate press, even in France, seems to be rolling over itself in a mad rush to grant space to luminaries, writers and philosophers of all stripes who fervently oppose the “no” vote, yet rarely if ever do these public intellectuals address the concerns of what appears to be the majority of French citizens.  Just what are Habermas, Grass, Kluge, and Baudrillard thinking? 

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