SHADOW BLOGGER

Class of '69 - October 2009

2009-10-31T12:01:00.000-07:00

The prospect of our 40th high school reunion – we were excited. We had decided, to hell with the busiest and most stressful part of our working year, just drop everything, get the airline ticket and just go.

Another old friend, the one without internet, the snail mail one, said, oh, you are so brave. I just don’t think I could face it. Where we felt anticipation, she felt mild curiosity. Our best friend here at home, eight years our junior, said, I can’t imagine wanting to see anyone I went to high school with. Maybe because I changed schools a lot. I don’t know…

We wondered, so why were we so game? To be honest, the excitement had first been worked up by that phenomenon known as Facebook. The faces had been coming up out of the mist, like the triangular pieces of wisdom offered by the Magic 8 ball – each one teasingly obscured by 40 years of life having been lived but left untold. We were starting to connect, remember – and even to repair.

With us, the desire had long been there, before Facebook. We had already been trawling the web in hopes of a reunion. We hadn’t really even twigged on the even forty-year date – we had just known it was time. And then nervously discovering that there had already been a ten years’ reunion, and then a twenty – and no one had dug us up to invite us, even though our mom still lived in the house we’d grown up in. But still we persisted, still we wanted, we had to be there.

On the very eve, there were some fleeting doubts. Our mom and sis helped fuss over what to wear – 87-year-old mom so effortlessly picking up the roles she’d played when we were 17 – (tuck in the blouse or wear it out?) all of us knowing that there wasn’t much to be done, things were as they were, and perhaps that game was even then starting to reveal its false machinations. The weekend was in fact, to put an end to all that - to show how none of that mattered anymore, and how none of it ever had.

The festive night, the inviting lights, The friend that approached, his characteristic laugh unmistakeable, simply extending his hands, looking at us, shaking his head, wordless: I’m here. So many people and places to visit in those rooms, and so many we did not even make it around to. A strange spell came over us making all the women beautiful and all the men deadly cute. We kid you not.

Later, in the car with our first love from junior high, and indeed our first date (he reminded us that his dad had driven), we heard him say he was so glad he came, he described it all as somewhat of a triumph, just that we’re still here, I mean, we obviously all knew enough to stop at red lights and such, but then, The twentieth would have been hard for me. I don’t think I could have done the twentieth. Why? There was just too much left to do. But now…

Is there now nothing left to do? Certainly not – we are not suggesting a slide towards death. We feel rather that we are just hitting some kind of stride. The night, the lights, the going out, all seemed a pocket of forever, as hopeful as any prom party or graduation dinner. Life goes on and life is, after all, so good. And that night, the best thing of all, was how a kind of peace had settled in. A feeling so unexpected, and overwhelming and strange – quite simply, we felt like we had made it home. We had made it home safe.

A votre santé

2009-08-17T13:55:00.001-07:00

We live in three countries, in a way. There’s the country in which we spent the first 40 years of life, then there’s the country we live in physically, and then there’s the country in which we listen to the radio. This radio station talks about politics a lot – the Prime Minister and some very colourful (sic) politics. (We’re not always attentive, having shook ourselves awake one day saying, it is no use being moved to vote for the leader of the Kingdom in Which One Listens to the Radio.)

Currently, the Kingdom in Which We Listen to the Radio is spending a lot of time tangled up with The Former Colonies right now, that country having cast aspersions on The National Health Service - and if we can believe the radio, the claims are not without merit.

Risking sounding like we are indulging in a kind of schadenfreude (a word that comes from neither of the languages we speak), we are comforted that we physically reside in another country altogether. Our health care est un miracle, carrement. But should it be such? It was not until we’d lived in L’hexagone for some time before we came to understand what it was to have problems, worries and challenges, yes, but that getting a doctor’s care or affording medicines or landing in the hospital is not one of them. What a massive relief.

And it set us to thinking about health care in the native land, and wondering who would not want this, who does not deserve this, remembering being a freelancer and being worried literally sick about this – and thinking but yes:. there are people in our country of birth who believe in their hearts that people who have not managed to snag a decent health plan from a decent job are losers. The American dream – the American responsibility – is to earn the daily bread and the hospital, too.

But now that we have lived in the country where – day by day - one does not live in fear of doctor’s bills - now that we have tasted this non-fear – and knowing that it is for everyone – and seeing just how it recedes into the landscape where it belongs – we feel ever so strongly that there are areas in which market must not rule. Yes, ok, it costs a bomb, and humans know how to abuse it – so we can’t continue like this forever, and it will be necessarily adjusted – but doucement, doucement. Our hearts are in the right place, and thank God we’ve got them covered.

Beverage Profiling

2009-07-29T05:40:00.000-07:00

The President stumbled just a little. We meant notre Président du coeur, the American one, not the one who got all bent out of shape jogging and who has been prescribed a vacation. (Someone who has to have a heart attack scare to convince themselves to lighten up and go on vacation can’t really be all that French. Slow down, Mr. Sarkozy, you’re President of vacation paradise – the French concentrate on “discovering” their own Texas-sized country every year as much as foreigners do – and it’s the kind of place that inspired Disneyland – except being the real thing.)

When his friend Henry Louis Gates locked himself out of his own house, a mishap that lead to him being handcuffed for disturbing the peace, Obama was asked to comment. His first reaction was memorable – he said, “well, if I tried to break into my house…” then he realized where he was – and he let out a nutty little laugh and said, “well (if I tried to sneak in) here I’d be shot!” Whatever he does from now on in, whether anything he does goes right or wrong, we will always love him just for that moment.

Afterwards he said the police had been “stupid,” and went on about it – and later realized he’d started a media furor – (something that is as easy to do as starting a brush fire in August in the California hills) – and had to go calling up the people involved. It is all ending with “a beer at the White House” with Mr. Gates and the police sergeant. It’s said that Barack will serve Budweiser. Fine. It’s not our favorite, but it’s American (think of the furor that could start up over Heineken or Kirin), and yes, we accept that people submit to long train rides or even planes paid for by the taxpayer just to drink a beer at the White House.

But here are the real questions. Who is this neighbor that called the police, who doesn’t know that one of the most prestigious authors and scholars in the country lives a couple of doors down - and doesn’t believe the man on the porch lives on her street whoever he is? And why automatically choose beer when Obama doesn’t particularly like it? Did he ask the cop if he wanted wine or juice?

Playing Out of Tune

2009-07-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

It’s the kind of random serendipity reminiscent of the great composers. Two stories currently announce themselves side by side on the website of the New Times. (It is not for nothing that www.nytimes.com is our homepage, our touchstone, therefore consulted more times a day that we would like to admit).

Obama Arrives in Moscow to Seek Arms Control Deal sits next to (this just in) a lengthy obit of Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary that (quote) “helped lead the US into the maelestrom of Vietnam and spent the rest of his life wrestling during the war’s moral consequences.”

McNamara was a brilliant technocrat recruited from the Ford Motor Company by JFK during the final tremulous shivers of the cold war. Nuclear power on their minds, and the idea of the USA losing a conflict unthinkable. He was in the room during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He served through the assassination to the Johnson administration, during which the war became his personal nightmare. Vietnam was called “McNamara’s War.” He did not object. “I am pleased to be identified with it,” he said, “and do whatever I can to win it.”

Later he confessed in a memoir that he had been “terribly, terribly wrong.” And in Errol Morris’s brilliant 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,” the former secretary talked about his experience doing statistical analysis during WWII:

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals…What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

And finally, “Nuclear weapons serve no military purposes whatsoever,” he wrote. “They are totally useless — except only to deter one’s opponent from using them.”

But by the end of his life, McNamara’s lament was considered “too late”, his tears for the dead “stale,” his confessions hollow, out of key.

Today, over in column one, Obama wants to disarm the major powers, and took a plane to Moscow to get started. There are some who find him wrong, wrong. He’ll never do it. What a risk to take! It might right alone in the rooms of state, in the silence of a man’s conscious, but in practice! How?

How does one know when one is singing in the wrong key? Can one hear when the most dissonant tone is in fact deep perfection?

Now, about hte photo. We conclude with this item posted on Facebook for American Independence Day (July 4th) by Sue Schardt, Executive Director of the Association of Independents in Radio. (Thanks, Sue) The photo is the composer Igor Stravinky, the composer of The Rite of Spring that caused a stir at its premiere. Yes, it's a mugshot:

Igor Stravinsky was reportedly arrested in Boston in 1940 for including a major 7th chord his arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner. Massachusetts law prohibited "tampering with national property," which apparently included the national anthem.

and the beat goes on

2009-06-28T03:42:00.000-07:00

It may be late Saturday afternoon at the Grande Ecole, but it’s a hive of activity, with the students busy serving snacks and being friendly. Two young guys in red student association tee shirts play a spirited game of ping pong with a pair of guys in snappy blazers, white shirts and ties. The hopeful applicants straight out of gruelling preparatory schools from around France dress to the nines for their interviews. Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean is blaring from the lounge.

The snacks, the funny graffiti and the ping pong suggest a devil-may-care situation, but in reality there is more to it. After all, we’ve taken part in the French entrance juries this year, conducting interviews, passing judgement as the French faculty representatives do, and we got a glimpse into the pressures on French prep school students. Quite frankly, they’re put through the wringer.

Another Jackson song, Beat It, comes to mind, along with a job we had in the 80’s helping to produce a daily children’s radio show. We had a top ten of songs that the children, aged 6 – 12, requested each week. For months they called in Beat It, Beat It, over and over, driven by the urgency of the beat, and the message in the words:

Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right

Just beat it beat it beat it.

Over the last two days, millions of people worldwide have been focusing on the demise of the manchild. It was a man who broke the color barrier into the White House, but it was a strange enchanted boy who first broke the color barrier on MTV. The boy is dead. Long live the boy. And he sure could dance.

Back in our office, we hit the New York Times front page online, which zips us through to You Tube – the best of Michael dancing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKBLxh3u0tM

5.7 million views and counting

And the video of Beat It? 25 million and counting.

Technology and Desire

2009-05-05T15:12:00.001-07:00

We finally spilled a glass of wine all over our computer keyboard. Ah! time to buy a new one. Why did we wait so long? The new one has such springy keys, so responsive to our touch, so smooth yet yielding like fine small squares of dense, toothsome chocolate.

We hover by the screen these days. Because our age old dream – that of a bus filled with all the people we’ve loved and lost throughout our long life heading straight for heaven – is back! Yes - 75 Friends and counting.

First - we stopped off at the technology store on our way home to join the friends. We became excited by the thousand flat screens, the sleaker computer speakers, the toys to flatter our own darling ipod, the little waffle iron that could. And – don’t tell now! - we sneaked so slyly into the Mac section, more than ready to cheat on our PC. And please tell us - how much will it really cost us to get an iphone, do you reckon? We’ll pay.

Technology will save us... technology will bury us...The medium is the…what? Never you mind.

Easy come, easy go

2009-04-26T05:03:00.000-07:00

Just when we thought things were going OK, there were taxes to pay. The salary amount certainly has been adjusted for the cost of living, and then some, but we know we enjoyed it more when we had to lay all our money out on the table, green, blue, pink and yellow.

The time we were sent to prison did not help matters. Once would have been hard, but three times in a row made us really feel like everything in life was against us. We’re not even clear as to what it was for. We had duly paid the luxury tax, although we had no luxuries at the time. Once released (we had a card), we managed to acquire some property – but that got traded away very quickly to Clément, who had mercilessly built hotels before anyone else was even out of the starting gate.

To be honest, those new hotels are plastic, not as nice as those we remember in the days of the top hat and cigar. They fall over more easily than the small wooden ones. Plus, the bank itself is plastic, too. The money ebbs and flows through a plastic card shoved into a machine, singing its little electronic melody as the cash is siphoned away. Easy come, easy go, we said. We also said, we are sure that money should not be represented by plastic. This is one thing that we have learned.

In the end, we managed to own the Place de la Concorde and the Eiffel Tower just for a turn or two. But then we landed on Clément’s hotel on Notre Dame. Hasn’t anyone explained to him that the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, and the Gare du Nord aren’t for sale? That you can’t build a hotel on Notre Dame? Paris will never be sold off piecemeal, like Boardwalk, Marvin Gardens or Park Place, right? Aren’t we right about that one thing?

The mirror with a memory*

2009-01-26T06:14:00.000-08:00

We think often of the proverbial grain of sand that slips into the oyster and creates the pearl – (simulated or otherwise) and that grain of sand is often an image. Here on the Shadowblog, it is (nearly always) an image we’ve captured ourselves. Thus the one you see taken while on vacation in the Jura region of France.

We hearby re-direct you to a not-to-be missed meditation by Erroll Morris and expert guests on images from the Bush presidency. Enjoy:

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall/?hp

*Olivier Wendell Holmes, describing the art of photography in its infancy.

WHAT IS THIS A SIGN OF?

2009-01-17T08:07:00.000-08:00

It started with the guitar strings, then moved on to the dish towels.

First, we broke a string on our new learner’s guitar. So on the way home, we took a long detour through the later afternoon fog to the town next door to stop off at the music store – a local institution - where the patient young musician had spent an encouraging hour helping us pick out the guitar.

Pulling up in front – the store was a shell of its former self. No more music store in that town.

And then the dish towels. Our Canadian friend, she with the clean, attractive kitchen, was having a birthday. She’s got great style, our friend, but she’s not fussy, and she doesn’t like a lot of money being spent for her gift. Not in these times. But she had made an unrelated, off-hand remark the other day, “I need some new dish towels.”

We knew just the place - a store in the shopping center next door to the office – a kitchen store – beautiful linens.

You guessed it – walking towards it, in the glow of holiday lights, that corner appeared unusually dark. Gone. Almost overnight, like thieves in the you-know-what.

Our mind darted off into a dream…of the large boutique on the edge of the Wazemmes outdoor market – a two-story galaxy of household French wonders – from heaps of plain white porcelain in every shape and size to six different kinds of corkscrews to forks for eating various delicacies to straws for sipping cocktails to rows upon rows of correct pots and pans to the sublimely fantastical upstairs, to the latest Gien dinnerware and Wedgewood teapots. A local institution for sure.

But a dream bien sûr…it was boarded up and gone more than a year ago.

We did find the towels. In one of those new boutiques that could have been in any city in the world, having popped up like a mushroom after the rain. The towels were flashy, and surprisingly cheap. As were the paper napkins, the wicker what-nots, and the pans with flash.

The best things in life are…

2009-01-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

You heard it, we heard it – the horrid roar of that huge bubble bursting – but now that it's done, listen! In the distance could that be the gentle and subtle sound of a tiny sigh…of…?

The dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound – have these lost their authority as definitive yardsticks of value? What is one to do?

Meanwhile - allow us to propose NEW units for measuring profit...en profiter. We present - inestimable countables.

Roast chestnuts.
Lights. En rose.
A rose.
A bulb forced in winter.
Swans on the wing.
The cork that popped.
The look he gave me.
The punchline that paid off.

The day after tomorrow,
(that certain number
of minutes longer
in daylight terms
than the day before).

And in the way of all contradictory truths – we’ve got a good feeling about this 2009.

Meet us on the bridge. At sunset.

The Engineer's Creed

2008-12-14T04:24:00.000-08:00

For two straight weeks in the New York times, Thomas Friedman http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10friedman.html has surveyed his flat world, seized on the American automotive industry, and pronounced it a dinosaur. Rather than bailing out the carmakers, he says, we have to “let nature take its course.”

It’s hard to dispute the truth of it, when you focus on the bottom line. We think such predictions are, in fact, no brainers – along with the dinosaur metaphor. After all, what has a both tiny head and a huge body that makes it eventually incapable of outrunning the competition? Bean counters take note.

We are a daughter of Detroit – dad was a career engineer for Chysler. We lost him in 1992 – therefore he's not around to see the sad state of affairs today. Retirement didn’t really suit him. He loved his job. He was a battery expert, and worked on the starter system. The teenaged us remembers once banging through the screen door one summer, after clumsily failing to start the car. Dad was sitting reading the paper. “That darn starter, “ we whined. Without missing a beat or putting down the paper, Dad shot back, completely serious, “We’re working on it.”

Today we’re a prof, and some of our students are young engineers. They are very competitive. They understand a lesson when it takes the form of a game, with a prize. And when they ask us for the prize, we always say, “it’s the engineer’s favorite prize, the thing that drives every engineer at his or her heart.” Money, they guess? Sex? Chocolate? “No, “ we say, “it’s the satisfaction of a job well done!” They grudgingly agree.

We have not doubt that Detroit is still filled with men and women who value their work above all else. And what of them. Are they the “Detroit” vilified in the papers? When nature takes it’s course, what of the human cost? The people clinging desparately to the tail, wishing the head would wake up?

Sooner or later, that’s most of us.

Fight for the right

2008-11-30T06:48:00.000-08:00

Some months back, we were shopping at Auchan with a friend here in France, talking about a zone in the center of the hypermarket set off to offer cheaper products – buy cookies and candies by the pound and off-brands of staples like coffee and sugar. Our friend said he wasn’t sure that it was a great sales strategy, because, as he put it, “the poor don’t like to reminded that they’re poor.” Au contraire, we answered - where we come from, everyone likes a bargain. In the US, you’ll see fur coats raking around in the No Frills Zone.

Chez nous, saving a buck is no shame, for those that got and those that ain’t got alike. But complication sets in when you consider also to what point those that ain’t got still count on getting a flat screen TV. In fact, we suspect that the right to bear flat screens was on the way to becoming Amendment 28 before the news turned gloomy enough to be noticed even by people who don’t use their flat screens to keep breast of the news.

Well, on Thursday, Panasonic slashed its annual profit forecast by 90% - blaming a “nasty economic cocktail” that included a rising yen, write-downs and of course – a drop in flat screen sales. Add that to the events of this year’s Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving when stores attempt to get themselves “back to black” by slashing prices and opening doors in the wee hours of the morning. This year a Walmart employee was trampled and killed when he opened up to a desperate crowd in Long Island, New York., and two people were killed in a gun battle outside a Toys R Us in Palm Desert, California. Watching the news reports of sales all over the country, you’ll see flat screen TV’s figuring prominently.

SECOND LIFE, AU SECOURS

2008-11-27T01:37:00.000-08:00

Last night we met with two heads of IT departments to talk about teaching a class of young engineers about managing projects. Nothing unusual in that, we’re glad to have the work. And it is a sign of optimism, to think that if the interesting work projects ever get scarce in this life, there’s a whole alternative reality just waiting around. That’s us, by the way, between the guy in Texas and the other guy, who's in France. After the meeting adjourned we went back to change our outfit. We made a skirt out of a picture the guy in Texas sent. Then we wandered aimlessly around and got stuck in some 16^th century scooner left lying around. We think we’re still there – so when we get to work, we’re going to have to ask the IT department for a teleportation pass. How embarrassing.

Is that who I think it is?

2008-11-19T12:40:00.000-08:00

We had a boyfriend in New York when we were 26 years old - that time in life when everything seems possible – or let’s take it even further: in enshrined moments nothing is IMpossible. That’s what we were lucky enough to believe in and experience in late 1970’s New York City.

We’re still here today to reassure you that this is true. One of the glorious joys of growing older (and there are many lest you doubt) is that you get to see how the story turns out.

The boyfriend wanted only one thing in life – to be a star. To be a MAJOR star, he used to say. OK, he meant in the movies. But when he finally got his wish, it was only television. And he went through a kind of hell first (as you do) to get there . But what makes life interesting is the detours- the one step forward, two steps, no, SIX steps back that are involved.

BTW, we’ve got our own story – A Movie of the Week if ever there was one. And soome nights, Dear Reader, we pop the old corn, put the feet up, and just dream away in perfect contentment.

WHOOOAH!

2008-11-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

Things seem to be getting serious. It’s not anything we can put our finger on. We’ve still got the job and the mortgage. But we find ourselves buying lottery tickets. In fact, together with a small group of friends, we’ve resolved that we will buy some tickets every week and that if anything comes thorough, we will share out the proceeds and…we’ll be saved somehow. We’re all of a certain age (let’s say post “Sex and City”), and we’re starting to get the notion that this might be the only way left to entice that ship to finally dock where it outta.

We don’t remember thinking along these lines before. (Given this new found interest, we vow to stay away from Texas Hold ‘Em and one-armed bandits). It’s true that we were once on a game show (the Pyramid, mid-70’s, Dick Clark and all. He told us a dirty joke.) We won 1100 dollars and set of steak knives from Airwick. And we still have the steak knives.

Tonight, at the Centre Commercial to do the weekly shopping, we got three of those sweepstakes tickets. We dutifully stood in line in front of the clanging booth with the other shoppers. Everyone seemed sheepish, trying to laugh alittle at the manical desperation of the supermarket. An upbeat bread line, a leering carnival. Men, women, children shuffling past, music swooping down, loss after loss, the voice saying, “jetez votre ticket.” My turn, I shrugged, shared a wry look with strangers. But then…whoop whoop whoop. Gagné. TWO EUROS!

I suddenly felt a cut above the rest. I’ll be back for more.

When we look outside our window

2008-11-11T02:46:00.000-08:00

While today is Veterans Day in the US, over here it’s Armistice Day. In the US the veterans of arguably recent memory receive their due, and thoughts of tragic sacrifice stand side-by-side with a complex and, we might say confused, mix of Country First and vague dreams of peace.

The focus in our part of Northern France is decidedly that of sacrifice – namely The War to End All Wars, the horrifying Great War of 1914-17. 1.4 million French soldiers alone lost (not to enumerate the dozens of nationalities that took part), shot and drowned in ditches overflowing with mud and blood and the senseless pride of the people that sent them there.

To put down roots in this region is to understand that one stands literally on the bodies of the lost, young and old – signs on every corner, cemeteries in every town and village. Around here, war is not an abstraction waged by evil-doers. It’s what happened right here among us. The cost is understood - and that understanding is passed down.

Across the street, the mayor our small village is laying the wreath. In Ypres tonight - and every night - they'll be blowing the last post at 8 pm.

The ears have it

2008-11-09T10:48:00.000-08:00

It's a work in progress, as the political cartoonists turn their pens to the new president. You've got give them that - they need some time to get it right. Tall and skinny? Check. Prominent chin? Not so sure. But the ears - should they really go for the ears? After all, they already used the ears on Bush. This is supposed to be about change.

But we say the ears were wasted on Bush. He didn't use them. Obama, on the other hand, deserves ears like satellite dishes. Because they're permanently tuned in - they won him the election.

Keeping our heads

2008-11-08T07:34:00.000-08:00

Our 2008 rentrée has been as frantic a carousel as any in recent memory, punctuated by bottomless coughing and pointless honking. However, you never know - the change towards a darker season can bring more than shorter days -it can also bring a change in a political landscape that is felt even by us ordinary working stiffs behind the wheel on the way home from work in the dark - as we swerve away from the bright lights of the shopping mall tonight in favor of a bracing walk in the last orange glow of the woods.

It's a quiet landscape of reflection - the shrill voices of nay nay nay are momentarily silenced. Rationality and soothing good sense have been rewarded.