lundi 14 mars 2005

A reassuring racket Here's a heartfelt "thank you" to people who approved of my recent outbursts in defence of an "old school" of journalism (mainly in entries on February 24 and 26) that has nothing to do with neckties and nepotism. That week when the Factory became a silent Bedlam is history, mentioned again partly because like-minded hacks responded by regaling me with alarming stories of daily life in their own media institutions and primarily because fellow sufferers enjoyed BJ's diktats buried among the women a few days ago so much. Unless you want to be anonymous -- like the Reuters veteran whose unprintable mails are among the funniest anybody's sent me this year -- please use the comments box, especially if you have nice remarks to make about people I name. It can be slow, but it works; I'll pass on the rude feedback as fast as the rest and even sub that typo you only saw when it was too late. We heard today from my predecessor as Africa editor, James ("Jimmy Whiskers") Whiston, the last man at AFP to work on a typewriter until retirement, of the death of Geoffrey Minish, one of an almost legendary generation of English deskers like my agency "guru" Andreas Freund. Several of them quit shortly before I signed on in the mid-1980s after a strike famous in Factory circles but of little interest to most visitors here. Apart from an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema and a skill in writing about it that saw some of his articles published in Spanish in Cuba and in French in west Africa, Minish was more gifted than most at throwing away prodigious numbers of boring stories. The hard-drinking Canadian I remember for great one-liners could be equally savage with people, but was apparently a mentor to Eric, who's soon to move on from his job as the Factory's first non-French editor in chief ... perhaps unaware (unless he reads this) that many work-slaves have never understood a word of his Glaswegian French accent, getting the message only from the astonishing decibel count he puts into it when he's cross. At least one of those holes in my clothes began when I snagged an arm on a door-handle of a recently installed rack of lockers, supposedly for our personal use, which got the Frogs saying my end of the desk looks like a swimming-pool changing room and makes it difficult to squeeze out of it behind other other people. The real reason the damned things were put there, I suspect, is because Eric was such a first-rate Minish disciple somebody thought we needed a thick metal lining along the flimsy partition that used to be the only barrier separating my back and those of the few who risk sitting near it from his office and the sometimes phenomenal racket described in news editors' language as the regular "phone conference" among AFP's international hubs. A noisy outburst at the usually reverent end of the desk over a silly mistake in a story this afternoon had Abhik, who overheard it from Joburg, ask if I was "in a fish market". Such remarks mean a reassuring return to normality. Eric told us one bright spark once dared to ask Minish: "Why did you sub down my feature into three paragraphs?" "Because," came the blunt response, "I couldn't get it into two." There you go, Lauren, it's blogged. That's your reward for an article about the weekend's anti-malaria fund-raising concert, which deserves to be widely picked up by clients who like reading people who tell it as it is. Before sending it up to the satellites, I reassured Lauren that even if you work for a Factory, when it comes to stories about major music events and other aspects of what we're learning to call "lifestyle" as well as the arts, it's fine to bend the rules and express your opinions about the performances under a byline ... on condition you know what you're talking about, which she did. Since the story was already long, I left out a detail Lauren gave me in the lively report from Dakar I'd sought on the phone. Rwanda's Corneille (Africa Live again), making his first big African comeback since losing much of his family to the 1994 genocide, may have elicited the wildest shrieks from the teeny-boppers in the audience. But for all his music awards, mainly in Québec where he currently lives, Corneille (TQS bio; Fr.) outstayed his welcome among some of his fellow musicians. He hogged the stage for an hour and a half, Lauren tells me, cutting into the slot allocated to one of the many performers both of us have more time for. The deceptively demure Rokia Traoré thus got only 45 minutes. Lauren's excuse for working from home today wasn't the chance she got to talk to one of Mali's most remarkable women. And it was better than one I heard out of most journalists based in a bureau not too far from the slopes of Kilimanjaro, pictured in today's issue of The Guardian because its "trademark snowy cap, at 5,895 metres (1,934 ft), is now all but gone - 15 years before scientists predicted it would melt through global warming". Yes, BJ, I'd have excised the "trademark", a trendy adjective as useless as Lauren's story about the concert would have been if she'd given us yet another mere "shopping list" of names all too widespread in what people write about the arts. She's badly bruised but unbroken after catching my habit of falling over and trying it on the stairs. In the Nairobi bureau, however, I found only Otto and Bosire, the local journalists, struggling over one computer between them in the hallway. Since their foreign colleagues were filing stories just as busily, I don't imagine they'd taken their laptops for a night and a day on a bare mountain. But staying out of the office because of the foul stench of a paint job that was taking longer than planned is the best excuse for absence thrown my way since somebody drew my attention to the New York Times story about people getting into tangled messes with the dangling wires of their iPods. Bosire and Otto sounded happy enough: the painters, Otto explained, were "ladies". "It's the same in Moscow," said BJ. Painted women, music, the woes of wires, what more do you want for tonight? OK. The name's Angela McCluskey (Flash warning for clean offices: her site can come loud). The voice is sometimes unpolished, raw. Most people call the style soul-pop, but when some mention Billie Holliday in almost the same breath, they've got good ears. Angela's solo debut album (after The Wild Colonials, Tryptich) is 'The Things We Do'. As Ade in Lagos would note, "kindly disregard" some of the sourer critics at Amazon UK. The lyrics aren't great poetry, but neither are emotional adventures at the sharp end of a stick, which Angela picks up in a unique and engaging way which keeps you hanging on until the sun comes out again. This album, sparsely and originally orchestrated, was one of my last "safe" downloads from the iTMS before the thing Brigitte in the personnel department did for me was kind enough to placate people at my bank until next week. I'll try to persuade my "counsellor" that collecting the voices of dozens of women has become a task no less professional than a Nairobi paint job. There'll I leave all these noises before I start counting and risk a shopping list. With luck I'll find time next week to start hiding one somewhere on this log as cunningly as once I tried to hide a garden. There's a pair of initials on tomorrow's rota which tells me I'm in for a "hello stranger" encounter... Who knows? It might encourage me to leave off blogging for a while to return to the screenplay she inspired. I hope she's in a fishy mood. 11:55:32 PM  link   your views? [] Can't give it all up "Aïe, take this back, you idiot." The Kid thrust the fag into my hand as the seventh airport bus came into sight. "If she catches me with one of these..." Marianne dislikes cigarettes, but held mine as I adjusted my belt. She inspected me as the bus we hoped her mother would finally be on drew up to the stop: "And do up your coat. She'll see the hole in your jersey." "It's only a small one." Old habits die harder than even my clothes. Her mum and me haven't lived together for a dozen years, but the Kid probably recalls blunt remarks about my aged garments and enforced excursions to buy new ones better than I do. Her mother has stopped chastising me and long since renounced the dirty looks she gave me whenever I put on something too ancient. Tonight, she just grinned again and was too content to care, after enjoying a week in a small Moroccan coastal town so nice that its name's best kept a secret. Such holidays are decidedly her department this year, not mine. If today's welcome change in the weather is a precursor to an end of winter any time soon, I'll have to try to keep my word and give up smoking when the sunshine and warmth come back to town. Maybe the man who keeps a lid on a "bottomless pit" I mentioned last time speaks English and even dropped in here long enough to spot those ill-advised words. More likely some computer set off an alarm. Whatever. The weekend began with an early call from my "'counsellor" at the bank, telling me the boss wanted to see some more money on my account within days if not seconds. The "Or else..." rang bells from the early 1980s in France, when banking regulations were so tight recent imports like me weren't allowed ever to go into the red. When one of the employers I've had who was lousy at handing over salaries was late once too often, neither entreaties from me or a letter from him taking all the blame could bend the law: the Banque de France put me on a blacklist, took away my cheque book for a year and my French was so bad then it wouldn't have surprised me if I'd wound up behind bars. Perhaps I should be grateful to Scrivener, whose law (Fr.) about "protecting consumers of products and services" makes for fearful reading if the person you need you to be saved from is yourself. I'm a menace, particularly when I wonder how he'd feel if somebody set about his teeth with a pair of pliers. I presume Scrivener's a "he", since it hurts to much to look for a website which bothers to give me a French politician's first name. The Factory's unlikely to fuss about the interim measure required, but any notion I had of quitting town in a week's time when I get a bunch of days off has vanished. Next go the cigarettes. I hope nobody will find me becoming one of those abominable people who constantly tells you how foul the habit is just as soon as they've given up themselves. After DVDs and long after Mac mags, the very last thing I'll give up is music. Being able even to think of it as a "product" or "service" is almost beyond my power. Even a warning like yesterday's served only to slow me down with my online shopping baskets, though I'll still avoid any site's 1-Click minefield. The bloke at the bank said he was too busy on Saturdays for a swift chit-chat and next week he'd be sunning himself somewhere. Like journalists, my successive bank counsellors tend to work to last-minute deadlines. They give you the news, usually bad, as late as they can, put the blame on their machines, leap on your shortcomings and scarcely know what praise means. You're only as good as your last excuse for them to make money, but they don't have sub-editors, which means my bank statements are sometimes punctuated by substantial figures in the wrong column, which go unexplained apart from a curt reference to "handling fees". Enough. I've got plenty of praise for Amazon users who write thoughtful reviews and helpful lists of things I'd much rather explore than the world of low finance. A couple I've checked out before taking undue risks recently include Jason Cafer, who seems funny, and "poet and music lover" Juan Mobili, whose eclectic taste is a match for anyone's. These two have the knack of standing out in a crowd. Cafer claims a 'Best of 2004' selection was "the work of an 82-year-old woman", while Mobili became irresistible by calling one list 'Young, Brave and Intimate.' If I've bored you with overlong blog pieces, my apologies, which also go to the very small handful of people whose mail is still unanswered. Recent entries have often kept me occupied while hefty chunks of the Mac's processing power were diverted to pillaging the French iTMS -- it's more interesting now the people who fly that wing of Apple's music store have filled the place with enough music from the stratosphere of the charts to start chasing rarer birds -- and to shifting all the "old" CDs I like for company on to my belt. Now iTunes informs me the latter part of the job has been done so thoroughly it will keep me going for a fortnight without having to hear the same thing twice if I want to be a sleepless hermit, and I've picked up some tips on the way: - one of my "five favourite annoyances" (John Rizzo's are at the MacDev Center) has been iTunes's habit of automatically updating your iPod when you've set it this way but don't want that for once. The remedy's among the keyboard shortcuts in the Help menu: "Command-Option as you connect the iPod to your computer (hold the keys down until the iPod appears in the iTunes Source list)"; - if you want a new window or more in iTunes, the answer often lies in a quick double-click, for instance on the blue note to the very left of a playlist's name. That may be obvious but wasn't to me, thanks Kid; - should reminding yourself what you find in the music store should be on a "wish list", not in a basket where the temptation to click the "buy" button is strong, you can create a new playlist, call it 'Not Tonight, Darling!' and drag songs from the store into it; - if you need a cure for shopping mania, ask a police officer if you can borrow a set of handcuffs for a while, without the key. If you must stay indoors, relax at the Squip's Photo Gallery or meditate, with Iain Banks, on the madness of wanting to own too much and export ways of doing it. When Norm did, he made a good move in suggesting that "this is how science fiction has turned anti-American, and why there'll be no WMD in outer space". I was able to avoid the two latest offerings in a generally good DVD sci-fi series coming out fortnightly here since both films took exporting the current White House values for granted; - plot with your friends. If I prove unable to give up acquiring libraries to share with them, I'm got most of the team in place for a bank job now, gathered among those who need a few "handling fees" of their own. My sixth tip also came from the Kid, who said it before I could: "Listening to really good music is like going on holiday anyway." Well almost. Nat and alter ego have finished their Luxor travelogue (Blaugustine). The closest I'll get to Egypt for the foreseeable future is with Youssou N'Dour -- whose latest, it seems, goes down less well in Senegal than it does with me among those who don't like a change of tune. Someone I know seems to have been too busy so far to write any more about N'Dour. She's not alone: apart from "curtain-raisers", there's not much around on the Net as yet about the Roll Back Malaria concert in Dakar (BBC) this weekend. Even the Africa Live festival's blog (Fr.) packed in for the duration. Who wants to go away and write about it when you can listen to it? I can't wait for the DVD... Me? Jealous? I've given it up. 12:14:33 AM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.