Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projec

Escape from Kuregem

Entry 1628

A slight miracle happened last week in Belgium.

Two important Flemish progressive parties, social democrats and ecologists, suddenly asked for a zero tolerance treatment in the hot quarters of Brussels.

When a few weeks before Christmas some (anonymous) policemen had complained in the press that they didn't dare to patrol anymore in certain Brussels streets this had been vehemently contradicted by the chief of police as utter humbug. Two incidents triggered this sudden change of opinion. A school in the Kuregem (Anderlecht) quarter closed and moved its classes to a safer part of town because its pupils were incessantly violently attacked and robbed by young thugs and the same weekend a police officer received three bullets in the leg from a Kalashnikov.

Until now these kind of occurrences had never been taken serious, last year had different incidents where police patrols had been ambushed by youngsters mostly because the law had tried to arrest a faithful fellow of the band. In one, rather ridiculous and shameful situation on the 7th of September 2009, the police could only get away by returning the Kalashnikov they had just seized from the gang. Later that day the Brussels police found a Kalashnikov, a riot-gun, a revolver and eight Molotov cocktails left after a shooting.

Only a few years ago the progressive parties called a sociologist racist because she had published a study comparing Brussels crime statistics with the nationality and religious backgrounds of these youngsters. Of course only a minority of Muslim immigrants are criminals but Brussels criminals are, almost without exception, part of the so-called lost maghreb generation. Instead of thinking of a solution for the problem the Belgian government tried to cover up the statistics by automatically giving all immigrant offspring the Belgian nationality. The result is that the immigrant criminality statistics lowered spectacularly but of course, not crime by itself.

The politically correct establishment tried to explain this as an anti-racist measure but a decade later theoretical crime researchers and sociologists complain that they have no longer the information they need to trigger the right stratum of the population.

To aggravate the matter the Brussels police is openly racist as was testified again this week by a Moroccan man who was arrested by mistake in the aftermath of the current events (the police simply entered the wrong house, doesn't police school teach anymore how to read housenumbers?). The cops kicked in doors although they simply could have opened them, smashed in windows just for the fun of it, emptied cupboards on the floor out of sheer sadism and sneered that it would be simpler to fire bullets through the heads of all Moroccans. The police officer (as a matter of fact the coordinator of the raid and thus the main responsible for the action) who uttered these threats was apparently unaware of the fact that the arrested man spoke fluently Dutch. Extreme right parties should finally understand that not only immigrants need to be instructed how to deal with other cultures.

But it also needs to be said that over 30 years of street work, educational projects and anti-discriminatory measures didn’t have the desired effect on the lost generation (the Kuregem quarter alone has got 4 neighbourhood committees where autochthons and immigrants can sort things out on a friendly basis). The editor in chief of the official Flemish television, not an illiterate racist redneck if you ask me, once told how the Brussels police was instructed not to verbalize cars if the owner was called Mohamed but only if it they found out the owner had a distinct French or Flemish surname. Those measures didn’t help, on the contrary, as these well-meant positive discriminatory measures only gave a minority the feeling that they could get away with anything. What started as a bunch of youngsters stealing handbags from old ladies has now evolved into gangs who empty their Kalashnikovs when they see a blue uniform.

But finally change is gonna come or so we thought. This is Belgium where a politician can't have a pee in his garden without creating a communotary crisis between Flemings and Walloons. Francophone politicians openly wondered what the fuzz this was all about and claim now that Flemings are planning a coup against Brussels (geographically speaking Brussels is a Francophone enclave encircled by Flemish territory). The mayor of Brussels centre called the shooting incident a fait divers and his 18 other colleagues more or less shared the same opinion. Brussels must be the only capital in the world that has nineteen (19!) different city managers, 19 city councils and 9 independent police zones.

But as is often the case also the Flemish politicians spoke without thinking first. Police and judges aren't opposed to the zero tolerance treatment but have already warned that this is not possible, at least not in the immediate future.

Whenever the police catch a Brussels thief he is inevitably set free a couple of hours later as the courts have an eight months delay to catch up. Youth delinquent centres are overbooked, so are the prisons and convicted suspects with sentences less than three years are free to go for lack of space in prisons.

The politicians shouting for an immediate solution have not realised that putting speed trials into place will ask for at least 10 new judges. Apart from creating an extra budget for this the legal procedure to appoint a Belgian judge usually takes over nine months. So new judges simply can’t be appointed before the end of this year. Such is the law and the politicians shouting now for immediate action have voted it that way.

Then there is the shortage of blueshirts in Brussels. To create an efficient police force in Brussels 750 extra forces are needed, but nobody is eager to take the job. No wonder if even the mayor, who is also head of police, calls being shot at by a Kalashnikov a fait divers. And weeding the extremist and racist roots within the police will be a hell of a job as well and is as important as getting the young thugs of the street.

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Slow Train Coming

Entry 1624

The Belgian railways have this magnificent computer management system that fully automatically delays all trains with 20 minutes or more whenever weather conditions change.

Although most Belgians knew it was going to freeze a couple of weeks ago the over-subsidized operators of the NMBS, drinking pink champagne with scarcely clad nymphets in corporate bubble baths, weren't aware of this fact and thus the train schedules suddenly looked like overcooked macaroni.

On television a communication officer explained that the train schedules were disturbed by, and I quote, the extreme weather conditions.

I understand it had snowed a lot and that it was minus five. Celsius that is, not Fahrenheit. But the press buff apparently wasn't aware of the fact that, in Belgium as in most other European countries, there is an annual recurrent phenomenon called winter.

Over four decades ago I learned a little French poem about winter, it was in first grade and I must only have been 7 or 8. I still can (partially) recite it now.

L’hiver est là
Et nos pas
S'effondrent la gelée (?)
Un beau matin
On n’entend rien
Car la neige est tombée

(Winter has come.
Our steps trace the ground.
On this beautiful morning,
you don’t hear a sound,
because snow has fallen down)

In those last 40 years something very important must have happened to our school education system that young university graduates who are willing to speak for our national railways do not have a notion anymore of what could eventually happen in winter. Do they not play White Christmas anymore on the radio? I would call minus 20 degrees damn cold, but is minus 5 extreme? People go swimming in the Northsea at minus 5.

It is a well-known secret that trustworthiness isn’t really demanded from NMBS public relations people. Belgium has always been an ambassador of surrealism and these spin doctors, paid with taxpayer’s money, need to excel in that artful quality as well.

A couple of years ago, and I dare betting my left testicle on it that this is the truth and nothing but the truth, the Parliament wanted to know why the Belgian trains had this uncanny tendency of always arriving too late.

This was, so said an NMBS fantasist on television, due to the fact that people were getting in and out of the vehicles when these halted in the stations, implying that if trains would drive around the country without any passengers on board they would at least drive on time. Obviously that made sense and the answer was very much appreciated by our politicians and the Belgian press.

It has to be said that most spokesmen (or women) of the NMBS only make it to the television screen once and that after their maiden speech they are never heard of again. It was rumored that this one was last seen in a straightjacket, just before he was ceremonially drowned in one of the corporate Jacuzzis.

This week on Tuesday, the commuter train I daily take was announced with a delay of 20 but arrived only after 50 minutes. The reason?

The temperature had risen above zero, in other words: it had stopped freezing. Just like an autistic can't bear a sudden change of environment so can’t our Belgian railway company.

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Z for Zeitoun

Entry 1618

It was freezing cold this morning and exactly this week clothing manufacturer H&M decided to adorn the railway stations with some lingerie publicity that made me even shudder harder when I passed the semi-naked fleshy skeletons that pretended to have a good time. In the name of science I had a good look at them and decided that two models glued together would make a normal looking woman with the necessary accessories to put some lingerie around (and then, as I am – but – a man, take it back off).

Although there is an anti-skinny movement going on for a couple of decades now the haute-couture and fashion world doesn't seem to be interested and carries on promoting an anorexic lifestyle. When Photoshop Disasters published a promotional picture of a model whose picture had been so maltreated that her hips actually were smaller than her head Ralph Lauren immediately attacked the blog for copyright infringement and its internet provider removed the post without even asking if Ralph Lauren had made a valid point or not (it wasn’t but the image still hasn’t reappeared nearly 3 months later). The new censorship dictators no longer carry the title prince, king or emperor they are now called CEO and lawyers throwing crap from sad green mountains have become their licensed fools.

Later on Photoshop Disasters published a second Ralph Lauren publicity, but this time the company didn’t respond anymore as their previous reaction had backfired, mainly because other blogs, especially Boing Boing, newspapers and television stations had jumped in to the rescue thus creating a so-called Streisand effect. If you have a couple of hours to spend just do a Google search and enjoy. It is also rather dubious that Ralph Lauren never found it necessary to apologize to Photoshop Disasters, nor Boing Boing, but prefers to send silly press statements to the world about how misunderstood they are.

Thank god, dog or blog we have democracy and freedom of speech. So we think, I was a big believer of the nivellement par le bas theory in my progressive twenties (suddenly the name Habermas flashes through the mist in my brain) but when the first fat rolls started to grow on my body that had a reverse proportional effect on my ideological beliefs as well. Now that I have turned 50 I’m back full of anger and angst and the future looks as gloomy as when I was 18.

I used to ironically quip how (Bush ruled) United States of America slid more and more towards the direction of that big fat, but nevertheless undernourished, ancient enemy of theirs the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It isn’t irony anymore.

Both countries basically had a rigid one party system with an infallible but often slightly demented leader at the top. Both countries used a ‘common enemy’ to enhance nationalistic feelings, anyone opposing or even debating that issue was considered unpatriotic and measures where then taken to remove the unpatriotic elements from society. In the USSR you disappeared in a mental institute or a Gulag archipelago, in the USA – being a capitalistic driven society – it was mostly enough to sack the person from his/her job, although there are enough examples of American citizens that have been imprisoned for ‘unpatriotic’ behavior. I recently came across Dave Eggers’s non-fiction book Zeitoun and it enraged me at a point that I had to take physical distance from the novel from time to time.

The book meticulously describes how Abdulrahman Zeitoun, an American citizen, stays behind after the hurricane Katrina disaster, peddling with his canoe through the inundated streets and helping citizens who didn’t or couldn’t flee the city and who were eagerly waiting for official help organizations that would never arrive, as if the USA was one of those third-world countries who can’t look after their people after a tragedy.

As a devout Muslim Abdulrahman finds it his task to help wherever he can, but one day he gets arrested, in true Mad Max style by self-appointed police officers, and deported to a nearby prison camp.

Zeitoun is put in an iron cage (!) that ASPCA would find unsatisfactory for animal transport and is accused of terrorist activities. How on Earth an Al Qaeda terrorist would plot satanic plans, peddling in a canoe, by helping old ladies from the roofs of their inundated houses, remains a mystery, but from then on the story, although it is not a story - but hallucinatory fact, gets Kafkaesque proportions. Zeitoun literally disappears from Earth, is refused a lawyer, his family is not informed of his imprisonment and they are led to believe he has drowned trying to protect his property. If this had happened in the USSR we’d call it Stalinist and rightly so.

Zeitoun, falsely accused, repeatedly insulted, (verbally) abused, emotionally and physically tortured, was not the only citizen doing Katrina time says Dave Eggers, and all-in-all Abdulrahman was still quite lucky:

There were hundreds of people that did months in jail, and I'm sure there are dozens of cases of prisoners who did over a year in various jails and prisons around Louisiana, where no one even knew where they were. It's unprecedented in American history, (…) I think there was a dark age, right in the middle there, from 2003 to 2006 especially, when anything seemed possible and nothing was surprising. (Taken from: Salon)

Zeitoun’s unnecessary persecution didn’t turn him onto a Muslim terrorist; quite the contrary. He seems to see the whole episode as a weird test and has forgiven his persecutors. He tries to persuade himself and his entourage that the whole process has strengthened him as a religious individual and as an American citizen who, as everybody else, watches Pride and Prejudice with his family. While a droopy dog-eyed George Bush was firing one-liners to television cameras around the world Abdulrahman Zeitoun saved over two-hundred New Orleans citizens trapped by the water. The American government rewarded him by putting him in a dog cage and by refusing him the most elementary human rights, including medicial treatment for his wounds.

I wonder if the chairman of the next Republican Party convention will have the courage to openly repudiate George Bush and his politics. If Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had the guts why not Michael Stephen Steele?

I urgently need a drink. Now.

(Profits of the Zeitoun book by Dave Eggers go to the Zeitoun Foundation.)

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Perception

Entry 1616

Last week a Belgian governmental institution published some HIV statistics. In 2008 1078 new cases of HIV have been diagnosed (other sources say 1079). It has been established that, concerning unprotected heterosexual encounters; there is an almost infinite small chance of getting HIV in Belgium, 1 in about twenty thousand. Strange enough the government and its affiliated partners refuse to confirm that we may all screw now like horny rabbits, in their minds protection and safe sex are still the standard when sexual encounters are involved. We are also informed that whenever we think there is something wrong with our reproductive systems we should go to hospital to have our tubes examined. Now here is a strange advice and I’ll tell you why…

Some statistics are harder to find than others but in 2006 it was made public that – yearly - 2500 to 3000 people die in a Belgian hospital bed of hospital-disease, an unhealthy collection of bacteria, viruses and fungal infections that have become resistant against antibiotics. The numbers are somewhat vague and not as well defined as with the HIV infections for the simple reason that hospitals don’t like to brag around that they have killed another patient thanks to their lack of hygiene. It was believed (in 2006) that this number would increase by 8% a year, so the annual hospital-bacteria-death-toll for this year could be anything between 3150 to 3750. I haven’t found any triumphalist hurrah-messages that these numbers went spectacularly down although apparently simple hand-hygiene from doctors and nurses in between patient-care, in other words: washing your hands, could lower hospital-disease with 40%.

Although over one hundred thousand patients a year get MRSA (and other resistant infections) in Belgian hospitals there aren’t dozens of subsidized organisations around to promote its prevention, as for HIV. In Belgium this results in 445000 extra hospitalisation days and as these extra days are paid for by the Belgian health insurance (and unfortunately the patient) we have the uncanny effect that the hospitals get more money out of a patient by being less effective.

The risk of catching a deathly disease in hospital is about 100 times larger than contracting HIV by screwing around. For every AIDS-related-death in Belgium, and my statistics are getting rather cynical now, 50 persons will die in a hospital-bed of a disease they didn’t come to hospital for.

I find it very strange that, at the entrance of every hospital, there isn’t a very big sign, in unfriendly letters, reading:

WARNING
ENTERING THIS HOSPITAL
MAY BE LETHAL

This post is meant to be satirical, although I fear that the numbers are correct. But statistics will prove anything, so said the scientist who drowned when he tried to cross a river with an average depth of 30 cm.

AIDS is a very serious life-threatening situation, especially in less-developed countries, and it is of course better to avoid it. While Belgian heterosexuals are rather safe, even when practicing unsafe sex, statistics for gay encounters are very worrying. The chance for a male homosexual to get an HIV infection is 1 in 20, thousand times larger than for heterosexuals. This is not something to act funny about, but - warning: here comes satire again - at the other hand I’m still wondering why some organisations find it discriminatory if one says this is a buggers disease?

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Bad Moon Rising

Entry 1610

This blog has been made with Thingamablog that recently resurfaced with a new beta version after nearly two years silence.

Since September Thingamablog, TAMB for short, has issued four beta versions in the 1.5 series and hopefully we will see a RC (release candidate) soon, but as there are still some bugs to sort out, it can still take a little while.

The strong point about TAMB is that it creates static webpages that behave like a dynamic blog. Although all hosting companies offer php and MySQL enabled servers nowadays you usually have to pay (extra) to have database access, at least in my country.

From the big web providers in Belgium, Belgacom offers a free blogging solution (on their Skynet portal) but not on the webspace they’re giving away with each subscription. The other major host Telenet experimented with a blogging portal in 2005 but decided to stop as there are (too) many free blogging solutions out there.

In a recent interview on Uhusnest, Bob Tandlinger, the developer of TAMB, shares some of his viewpoints about TAMB and I happen to share most of these as well. Here are some excerpts, but of course you are all invited to check the complete interview.

Uhu: Some people might say that TamB is a bit "old school", without online database handling like in wordpress or serendipity.

Bob: I would agree completely :) But I'd also say that being “old school” isn't always a bad thing. I think we sometimes forget just how much easier and straightforward things were back in the day. Wordpress, for instance, has a ton of plug-ins for just about anything imaginable, which is great. However, with all this flexibility comes quite a few headaches as well. (…) Now, I'm not saying all this endless customization is inherently a bad thing. But the fact is that the vast majority of people simply do not care and do not want bothered with it. If someone just wants to set up a blog to make a few posts every month, is all that -really- necessary?

Other quotes from Bob Tandlinger in the same interview:

# I think this is the niche that Thingamablog fills. An easy to use blogging platform that you are in complete control over.
# It's fairly easy to use and has a small learning curve. If you can use an email client, you can use Thingamablog.
# It works anywhere regardless of what is supported on the server side. If you can FTP to it, Thingamablog will most likely work with it.
# It's easy to experiment with and make blogs look how you want. No need to learn a new programming language just to edit a template. The template syntax is straight forward easy to understand.
# You can maintain multiple blogs on multiple different servers from a single program.

# Your blog data lives on your computer, not on some server in the cloud. (This is either a good thing or not depending on your point of view.)

Call it old fashioned but I like to keep my data by myself and if something goes wrong, I’ll be to blame. If you buy a new PC nowadays you see more and more that the computer companies give away some free backup or storage room on their servers. I think this is a bit uncanny and I smell a certain inconsistency realising that the same people who write Amnesty International letters will have their letters hosted on a Chinese or Korean server.

Not that American servers are more trustworthy, in the aftermath of nine eleven some measures were taken that catapulted freedom of speech back to the same level as, let’s say, the German Democratic Republic. Ok, the previous sentence is a bit exaggerated but there are some conservative forces at work that would like to see it happen. Little by little, little mice are nibbling at our freedom, a bite (byte?) at the time, and even Barack Obama is not able to put a halt on it, i.e. his recent decision that freedom of speech will exclude blasphemous expressions.

The European Union decided in 2006 (and they had been trying since 2002, BTW) that all telecommunication providers will be obliged to keep the records of phone and internet traffic for a period from 6 to 24 months (Belgium will probably implement this law next year and has decided to use the longest data retention period).

One of the common clichés to make these kind of laws accepted by the general public is the notion that innocent people have got nothing to hide, implying that people who do object against privacy intrusion implicitly have and are – by definition – guilty of state unfriendly and even hostile behaviour.

This platitude has been neatly analysed by Daniel J. Solove in his essay 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy. It is a very good and interesting read but you don’t need to wait for the conclusion on page 28 to realise that it is a false premise.

By accepting the nothing to hide argument ”you are saying that it’s OK for the government to infringe on the rights of potentially millions of your fellow Americans, possibly ruining their lives in the process. (…) It basically equates to “I don’t care what happens, so long as it doesn’t happen to me.” (BJ Horn, as quoted in the essay.)

And so this entry that started as a celebration for the blogging software Thingamablog turned into a rant after all.

Thingamablog’s tagline goes like this …because everyone has got something to say… This little prick would like to add: …while you still can…

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If you download Thingamablog be sure to take the right version. At the Sourceforge download page you can only find TAMB 1.06 (official) and TAMB 1.1.6 (beta), but these date from 2007. The download link to the 1.5 series can be found here and it actually points to beta 4.

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Yellow

Entry 1609

It has been the most wonderful week. After I had read a favourable review of Douglas Coupland’s Generation A in the newspaper I bought me the book and I am in the middle of reading that one now. The story is put in a future not so very far from now where bees have disappeared altogether and the weather is constantly playing tricks on the population, like suburban smog.

When 5 persons around the world get stung they are immediately abducted by special services into a research centre that reminds the reader of the white room where David Bowman encountered himself. The quintet is repeatedly injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected (borrowed from Alice's Restaurant © Arlo Guthrie).

When apparently nothing common between them is found they are put back into the world where they have troubles coping with their instant Youtube superstar status. They all meet for the first time, because their stay at the research centre was in splendid isolation, on a distant island where the last beehive was ever found and that is now a UNESCO world heritage site.

The island has turned in a Mad Max environment with murders being committed on a daily base. The five get the assignment to tell stories to each other, like the people in the Decameron, because that might be a way to find out why the bees exactly choose them…

This week the new Orb album also landed on my desk. It is called Baghdad Batteries and was a pleasant surprise. It isn’t a masterpiece but I found it pretty cool that they have returned to their ambient roots. It is pleasantly soothing.

If anybody ever reads this shit it might be good to know that a couple of months ago I had some eye injections that made me exactly feel as if someone was sticking a needle through my eye. This week I had some tests to see if these injections had really worked or if they had just been a weird Dr. Caligari experiment.

First I was summoned by one of the most ravishing women I have ever seen, she made me read cards that went like DEFPOTEC but all I could think of was that she could defpotec me all night long. A while later, still in a happy mood, I was reading Generation A by the way, I went to the picture man who was going to take pictures.

I had to roll up my sleeve and I was injected with a yellow contrast fluid. The nurse warned me that I might look yellow; well not look yellow, but that everything I would look at would appear yellowish.

Wow! All of a sudden I was feeling like Neil, the hippie, on a sunny day, humming Daydream Believer, although in my case, and I kid you not, a rather popular Coldplay tune was ringing through my head.

Once home I had to take a leak, and my urine was fluorescently yellow as if I had eaten a six-pack of Stabilo Boss marker-pens. If they could make this thing in orange and pink it would be a great hit on summer festivals around the world, I thought. Let’s all do a rainbow pee.

And today I also purchased me – what is officially titled –

DOUGLAS ADAMS’S
HITCHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
PART SIX OF THREE
AND ANOTHER THING

The book is written by Eoin Colfer, with a name like that you become either a science fiction writer or an Irish folk dancer, I guess, but Eoin didn’t take the easy way out. But the book will have to wait until I finish Generation A.

I’m yellowy pissed anyway that for the first time in history a hitchhiker book actually appears on the day that it was promised to appear. At least they could’ve said on the twelfth of October that it had all been a joke and that - to celebrate and honour Mr. Douglas Adams - the book would appear in another timeframe.

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Thingamablog 1.5

Entry 1605

Those that peek behind the green door of this blog may have noticed that it has been conceived with blogging software called Thingamablog. I have consecrated a few posts to the program before but these all date from quite a while ago.

The reason is simple, the last update from the application dates of December the 2nd, 2007 and since then nothing happened. I am not in the business of upgrading for the sake of upgrading like all these other programmers, if anyone can explain me the difference between - for instance - Adobe Reader 5 and 10, please do, and I don’t mean the fact that the workload and the physical volume of the software has doubled in size. I always sardonically laugh when people at work tell me that we urgently need Office 2007 because the 2000 version is too old. These are the same people who ask me on a weekly base: Can you refresh my memory how to multiply two cells in Excel? I always have got the same answer ready for them: same formula as in Excel 95 (and Excel for DOS, if one still remembers)!

But Thingamablog version 1.1B6 was still a work in progress with a few dozen of fans (and thousands of users). The forum was active and demands were made, not always silly ones, to add features that the bigger blogging communities (and software) already offered.

Updates were quirky to say the least: V1.05 dated from November 2005, December 2006 saw V1.06 and a year later, November 2007 V1.1B5. But the yearly upgrades clockwork system failed in 2008. When also the forum disappeared everybody thought that Thingamablog was dead.

Until now. My machine that goes ping when important messages arrive did ping. The message read:

Thingamablog 1.5: A Call For Testers and Translators!

Thingamablog is back from the dead with a new release (version 1.5) right around the corner. The forums will be back soon as well. Everything is moving to a new, more flexible, web host at thingamablog.com which should provide for some interesting stuff in the future.

New features in (the beta version of) TAMB are the use of keywords, descriptions, 'extra fields' and labels on each post and intimi will be glad to see that new tags have been added. Here is a quick rundown of the new tags (they need to be included on the page templates in order to be published):

<$EntryExtra1$>
<$EntryExtra2$>
<$EntryKeywords$>
<$EntryDescription$>
<$AuthorName$>
<$AuthorURL$>
<$AuthorEmail$>
<$AuthorDetails$>
<Entries category="">
<Entries id="">
<Entries label="sticky">

The question is if TAMB will be able to regain some confidence. Lots of (possible) users have switched over to Wordpress or other blogging solutions, but I’ll think I’ll stay faithful to my old love for a while.

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The Purloined Ladder

Entry 1582

Six prisoners escaped from a Belgian prison by putting a ladder against the wall and jumping down, obviously at the other side where one of their mothers, Ma Baker, was waiting in a getaway car. Four could be arrested almost immediately; two are still on the loose…

Is it normal, so wanted to know a journalist, that a ladder high enough to climb over the wall is lying there out in the open? This was a pertinent question because it had already been established that nobody had visited the escaped convicts carrying a four hundred centimeters long cake under the arm. Well, answered the prison spokesman who was visibly annoyed. He clearly was aware of the fact that he was running for the imbecile of the week award, technically the ladder did not belong to the prison but to a subcontractor who was doing some repairs inside the prison.

The press officer then overzealously added that any fule kno that ladders and construction sites go together as dry bread and water, police and thieves or computer helpdesks and sheer sadism. The journalist, who for once was not a total nitwit, was not impressed and slightly rephrased his previous question.

Is it normal, he asked, for construction sites located inside prison walls to have unattended ladders lying around for about three weeks? Foreign readers who are not accustomed to our rich Belgian culture need to know that in the beginning of July the annual summer holidays for the building sector kick in. Moving a ladder on a construction site during the holiday period would create chaos all over the country, a possible revolution and almost certainly a general strike… (but only in August, after these holidays, of course.)

The press officer looked indecisive and his eyes made clear that he wished to be in Torremolinos with those construction workers on leave, drinking beer and burping very loud. We will have to investigate on a national level how we can ameliorate the safety in our prisons, was the neutral answer, but besides that I would like to add that the prisoners deliberately ignored the forbid sign and illegally entered the construction site when they stole the ladder.

As I put before: imbecile of the week and this time he was not even hiding it.

These inmates were in the nick for rape, torture, attempt at murder and violent theft and thus it is a bit silly to think that a sign saying

FORBIDDEN TO ENTER
THE CONSTRUCTION SITE

will keep them from doing so, see also the cat and the milk, the kid and the cookies or Felix Atagong and ArianeB…

Thieves will steal, that is what they do for a living, so assuming that a NO ENTRY sign will stop them from doing what is written in big friendly letters on top of their résumé is a bit naïve, even for a prison spokesman.

It is no wonder that Belgium has been invaded so many times since our Neanderthal days: Belgae and Gauls suffered attacks from Germanic tribes, from Julius Caesar, Germanic tribes again, Vikings, French, Spanish, Austrians and even the Dutch, and when our little country was finally independent, basically because Luxembourg refused to take its turn, those Germanic tribes tried again, twice, just to honor their rich tradition of conquering other people and states…

If there is one point that glues this country together, normally so divided in feudal feuds between Wallonia and Flanders, it is that we are all so damn mediocre. That is our only common point.

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Babylon By Bus

Entry 1580

I don’t read a lot of books anymore like I used to. An iPod in the ear and a game driven smartphone has replaced the pile of printed letters that some people refer to as a book.

On top of that my right eye, the good one, is slowly dying on me. At the local hospital they stuck a needle through the lens and injected some oily substance. For a minute or so it made me the centre of a highly personal Mike Leonard’s light workshop but that is all the fun there was as for the next couple of days my eye hurt as if it had been hit by Muhammad Ali. And don’t you believe the crap either that sticking a needle in one’s eye is completely painless.

I now have the choice to do absolutely nothing and to literally watch my right eye slowly fadeout or to go regularly to the butcher, spend thousands of Euros for injections and get blind anyway, although much slower and beaucoup more painful. I’ve always been the optimist, anyone can see that. And also I am a bit more receptive now for the saying that wanking makes you go blind.

But enough about my personal besognes, on my weekly hunt at the local record- and bookshop I was intrigued by a paperback written by Imogen Edwards-Jones, its title was Pop Babylon and the blurb went like this: sniffing out the secrets of the world of pop. Now I am a sucker for rock books but I had never read a novel about pop stars before. Mostly that is because rock’n roll non-fiction is so incredibly weird that no fiction can compete with that.

Take a story about a boy and a girl who are deeply in love. They marry. One day they have a drunken fight on their yacht and she throws her wedding ring in the water. A while later, the guy, high on dope, dives in the water to get the ring and his marriage back, but he doesn’t surface anymore… Would you read such crap? I wouldn’t. But this is what happened (more or less) to Dennis Wilson though…

Once there was a time when one bloke met another bloke on the train, carrying some blues records under the arm, and, with the help of some other unemployed friends a successful rock band was born, although rock was often the last thing on their mind. "I hope they don’t think we’re a rock’n roll outfit", said Mick Jagger when he announced the very first Marquee outing of his little rhytm and blues band in Jazz News. If you would like to know, it was on Thursday, July 12, 1962 and the lineup was: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis, Dick Taylor, Ian ‘Stu’ Stewart and Mike Avery.  

Boy meets boy, it’s the story of many Sixties groups and even the proto-Floyd used to have blues afternoon sessions at Syd Barrett’s place in Cambridge (his mother furnished the lemonade and cookies).

Nowadays it’s different in the music industry. If a manager wants to make a quick buck, he doesn’t wait anymore for a band to knock on his door, but he creates the band himself. It's much easier that way and the victims are ready to sign whatever that is presented to them (see also X-Faxtor and Pop Idol).

This is what the protagonist of the book does (if he has got a name I have already forgotten it) to keep on leading the good life he has had up till now. The popular indie band he manages gives him the sack – once famous all other managing bureaus and record companies are drooling over them - and the other artists he owns all fail to get their songs in the charts.

A friend from the music industry advises him to invest in a boys band. Boys bands are big business and give less hassle than girls bands who are ‘twice the trouble and half the cash’. A while later Band Of Five is born. The band consist of two good-looking boys who can sing and 3 ‘passengers’ whose only task it is to dance a bit and to mime in front of disconnected microphones (although they are not aware of that). We are learned that there is safety in numbers for a boysband and that the perfect number is five. 'Because if one member leaves you’re still on the safe side.'

To turn the downtown thugs into popstars The One Agency hires different specialists who teach the lads to dance and sing, writers are needed to pen some songs, an engineer is hired to record the demos, others will (re)mix the album and finally a promotor has to organise a tour. There will be a first small tour in and around schools (and some gay night clubs) to make the brand name known and then a full UK tour to cash in on their first number one hit.

And here is where Imogen Edwards-Jones and her anonymous co-author(s) kick in. Whenever the band or their managers meet a personality from the music industry that person will first spit a few pages with real saucy anecdotes from the music business before the story goes on. A lot of these anecdotes sound familiar like the alternative way in which Stevie Nicks used to snort cocaine. Others were new to me; I didn’t know that Axl Rose used to have a roadie to blow-dry his testicles (luckily, this was done backstage). And although Mötley Crüe is mentioned once it is not for Nikki Sixx’s egg burrito pastime. Perhaps that anecdote was a bit too unsavoury for the Babylon series.

Sex and drugs are omnipresent in the novel, and it absolutely shows that the industry, nor the agents, really care for their product. Powdering my nose has an entirely different meaning in music business and during an after-gig party some band members can be seen walking around with their ‘nostrils frosted white like a margarita glass’. When the manager does a feeble attempt to stop this self-destructing behaviour he gets the reply to ‘leave us kids alone’. That one Band Of Five member is legally underage is apparently no problem either; to make the boys look more manly there is a stack of socks to pop down the front of their trousers to give them ‘great big cocks’. The endless gigging, partying, snorting and shagging demand their toll as well, at a certain moment they all have to line up, pants down, to get a pinprick that’ll keep them going for the show.

Music business is swimming with sharks, says one agent to the other, the thing about it is that it's controlled by a bunch of middle-aged men who enjoy a lunch and a bottle of wine and have the flocking instinct of lemmings. It all turns around percentages and at the end ten pence worth of disc is selling for £10, which is a mark-up of ten thousand percent. In 1972 not all were aware of that. Clare Torry, who did the vocals on Pink Floyd’s Great Gig In the Sky, a track on (The) Dark Side Of The Moon that apparently sold over 35 million copies, received 30£ for her input (and rumours go this was a double fee as the recording took place on a Sunday). Even Alan Parsons, who engineered the album, worked for a flat fee and was still angry about that years later in a Dutch Playboy interview. (It took over 30 years for Torry, EMI and Pink Floyd to come to a settlement. In 2005 they all agreed and the song is now co-credited to her.)

Just when Band Of Five is starting to go strong the band breaks up due to the Yoko effect; the partner of the lead singer finds that one fifth of the band’s income is not enough and reveals to the 3 passengers that they are just cute faces without any (singing) talent. The breakup takes place at about the worst moment, although the band has existed for about a year they haven’t seen a single penny yet. Royalties will only roll in after the record company has made the financial balance and if there is any money left the managers will have to deduct their investments first, plus of course a 20% management fee. The future of the boys, if there is a future at all, will lie in occasional television appearances such as Dancing On Ice where ex-celebrities can cash in on previous successes.

Boy bands are over decides The One Agency, the future is female singer-songwriters from now on… and perhaps it is time to have Pop Babylon 2, the sequel then…

But is the novel well written? Well..., it is written and sometimes not even too bad. Edwards-Jones can punch nice one-liners around but doesn’t do it enough in my opinion. The story is a bit bleak and the several encounters between the band and the record people have only been inserted as a vehicle for the many anecdotes, but that is what the Babylon series is all about. The revealing secrets behind the music industry are not that shocking (not if you have been reading Q and Mojo for the past 20 years) and overall the novel has the impact of a fart in a wind tunnel (to quote one of the better ones). Or are you shocked to find out that Madonna wants 50% of the writing credits of a song before she agrees to put it on an album? I am not.

Easy to read. Easy to forget. Just like boy bands basically. And if you would try to start one yourself you don't even have to read the complete book, just consult The golden rules of Pop Babylon where most of the secrets are out in the open...

P.S. Mike Avery (see above) was a pseudonym for Brian Jones that didn't stick for long.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Boobytraps 

Foreign Affairs

Entry 1578

I seldom write about politics here. Because...
a) the visitors of this website have a tendency to be mostly interested in pixel-combinations that appear to the mind as sparsely clad virtual girls; and, of slightly more importance to me…
b) criticism on the Belgian political system immediately results in the accusation that you belong to the opposite camp (whatever that is) and…
c) criticism on the Belgian political system only feeds anti-politics, so they say…

What you need to know about Belgium in one sentence (well, two actually...)

Belgium is a democratic federal monarchy with two populations, speaking different languages, and whose regional parliaments have diametrical points of view. The federal government supersedes the communities, but as important issues demand a majority in all regions and as small communotary problems have been blown-up to symbolic levels, nothing moves anymore and important Belgian federal political decisions have come to a standstill.

Just one painful example: a personal quarrel between a Flemish and a Walloon minister halted all progress in the political refugees dossier for over a year and a half. In July Fedasil (the Belgian asylum seekers agency) closed its offices in protest against this situation and the Red Cross had to set up an emergency tent camp to accommodate new asylum seekers and give them humanitarian help. All this happened because a Flemish (Annemie Turtelboom) and a Walloon (Marie Arena) minister were not on speaking terms anymore which is strange because both bitches look like bloody asylum seekers themselves if you ask me.

Crisis? What Crisis?

Lucky for the federal government, which was balancing between catatonia and stupor, the international monetary crisis arrived and thus they could sweep the regional differences aside and try to save our Belgian pants (especially those with pockets full with money). The Belgian government didn’t do very badly; they sold a few banks to our neighbouring countries, a minister (who is now a European commissioner) sold his Fortis shares just before the bank collapsed and the prime minister had to step aside because he had intimidated the judges who were investigating, on behalf of the share-holders, the legality of the nationalisation of those banks. Belgian political business as usual.

But things are slightly getting better; we just had some regional elections and this means that the community issues are back on the agenda. It is estimated that every living soul in Flanders donates 2000 Euro (2833 $) a year to Wallonia, so the slogan from the extreme-right-wing waiting for the worms Vlaams Belang that an average Flemish family (blond haired mama, blue eyed daddy, heterosexual son and virgin daughter) is giving a small car to a Walloon family every year is not that far-fetched. Things will not get better; on the contrary, the Flemish government promises a budget break-even in 2012, Wallonia and Brussels will not be able to adjust their budget before 2019 (give or take a year).

The last few days it was a touch and go of political big shots who left the federal government (or parliament) for a day, were sworn in at the regional parliament and then immediately returned to the federal level, their place taken by a reserve player who would never have been elected on his (or her) own account. It's shady politicians that feed anti-politics, not those criticizing...

Belgian Follies

But, and this is not a political farce by Molière, the biggest political swindle is the return to national politics of Michel Daerden, whose intoxicated appearances on YouTube made him a Wallonia superstar and a Flemish castaway. The regional Walloon parties vehemently refused to have Daerden in the regional government, for obvious reasons, so they lured him in a box by holding a bottle Black & White on a stick and shipped him to the national level where he was welcomed with open arms (one member of the opposition quipped that the bartender in the parliament will be glad to see him back). But there isn’t only foolishness at the francophone part of the country.

The chairman of the Flemish parliament, Jan Peumans, is an active republican and refuses, as such, to shake hands with the king of Belgium. Whenever the Belgian monarchy invites the most important political representative of Flanders, and that happens a couple of times a year, he will refuse and send a replacement instead.

Part of me finds this attitude rather foolish, but another parts finds it rather cool. Some days ago a royal spin-doctor invited a busload of journalists to the Paradisio animal parc that was visited incognito by the crown prince, his wife and his children. The children were having a great time and reported their enthusiasm to their parents in fluent French. After 180 years the royal family still doesn’t talk the language of the majority in Belgium and as such I agree that the prince is perhaps the official crown prince, but that he will never be our crown prince.

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Other political musings on this blog:
20090110 2-0-0-9
20080621 EUlogy
20080324 Just like Belgium
20071110 Belgium: WTF?