This appeared on the Guardian Music Blog on 9 December 2009:

Remembering Jacno: France’s First Punk

The new wave icon, who died last month, founded the Parisian punk scene and pioneered French electropop

“Denis Denis, oh with your eyes so blue/Denis Denis, I’ve got a crush on you.” So sang Debbie Harry on Blondie’s first European hit in 1978. At the time, there were persistent rumours that the Denis in question was none other than Denis Quilliard — better known as Jacno — who died from cancer at the age of 52 last month. After embodying the post-punk years in France, Jacno (his soubriquet, which he acquired as a chain-smoking teenager, was a tribute to the graphic designer who created the iconic Gauloises cigarettes logo) had himself achieved cult status.

Despite being at the heart of the original Parisian punk scene, Jacno hated the herd mentality associated with such movements. One of his more recent songs is called “Je viens d’ailleurs” — “I Come from Elsewhere” — and in his book of interviews, he repeatedly refers to himself as a “martian” (which is quite fitting given his resemblance to Bowie circa The Man Who Fell to Earth).

Jacno met the beautiful Uruguayan Elli Medeiros (now Mme Brian de Palma) during a student demonstration in 1973. They became an item and formed the Stinky Toys (a reference to both Dinky Toys and New York Dolls). Following their first chaotic gig in 1976, the band acquired a reputation for debauched drunkenness that eventually alienated EMI who were about to sign them.

At Malcolm McLaren’s behest, they played the 100 Club punk festival following which Elli appeared on the cover of Melody Maker. Their eponymous first album sold — as Jacno used to point out — as many copies as the Velvet Underground’s debut. And like the Velvets, their small fanbase included such luminaries as Andy Warhol. When he arrived at Orly airport in the summer of 1977 — having been invited to attend the inauguration of the Pompidou Centre — the Pope of Pop was sporting a conspicuous Jacno badge. Over the following days, Warhol would court the young musician assiduously (albeit unsuccessfully), famously painting his portrait on a restaurant tablecloth using a borrowed make-up kit.

On their second album, the Toys abandoned their original riff-heavy sound and explored colder, quirkier climes. The band disbanded after an Altamont-style gig during which a fan was killed by rampaging Hells Angels. It was time to move on.

In 1980 Jacno became the poster boy for the Jeunes Gens Modernes (“Modern Young Things”), a label coined by a local magazine to describe the resolutely elitist post-punk scene based around Le Rose Bonbon nightclub. He provided the soundtrack to Olivier Assayas’s first short movie, including an instrumental entitled “Rectangle“, which no record company would release at first, although it ended up being a massive hit throughout Europe. The film also included a bittersweet track sung by Elli that marked the birth of the Elli & Jacno duo which would go on to sell millions of records until the couple split up in 1984.

Jacno also produced albums by some of France’s greatest stars like Jacques Higelin or Etienne Daho, but he will go down in history as a pioneer of electropop who anticipated the late 1990s French Touch. By playing schmaltzy 1960s “yéyé” tunes on Kraftwerk-style synthesisers, Jacno provided a perfect retro-futurist soundtrack to the melancholy innocence of adolescence. Paris will never be quite the same without him.

Avec sa fiancée Elli Medeiros, ils avaient fondé le premier groupe punk français : Les Stinky Toys. C’est à eux que Malcolm McLaren, le manager des Sex Pistols, avait piqué l’idée des épingles à nourrice comme accessoire de mode. Jacno (du nom du dessinateur du sigle des cigarettes Gauloises) était né Denis Quillard dans une famille désargentée de la noblesse bretonne, il est mort vendredi dernier (6 novembre) à Paris, à l’âge de 52 ans. Dandy emblématique, il était l’un des chefs de file des “jeunes gens modernes” de la fin des années 70 qui inspirent tant les créateurs d’aujourd’hui et, incidemment, les séries de mode de GQ . On se souvient de sa silhouette nonchalante, un verre de bordeaux dans une main et une Gauloise dans l’autre, y compris sur les plateaux télés. Auteur du tube Rectangle, il fût le producteur d’Étienne Daho, Daniel Darc, Jacques Higelin ou Lio et de la B.O. des Nuits de la pleine lune du cinéaste Éric Rohmer.
J.B.
Plus d’infos sur menstyle.fr

The overall decrease in smokers poses a challenge to packaging manufacturers which supply tobacco companies, as opportunities for growth dwindle and competition for remaining customers grows fierce. Some bright spots for the tobacco packaging industry are left: Eastern Europe, Russia and China. These regions, due to a lack of regulation or public sentiment against smoking, have seen an increase in tobacco use.

Imperial Tobacco Special Packs

Although some 10-20% more expensive flip-top packs continue to penetrate the market in these areas as they are thought to be of a better quality compared to the cheap-looking soft packs. However, as anti-smoking regulations continue to spread across the world, such opportunities for the tobacco industry are expected to vaporize, and packaging manufacturers will be forced to diversify applications into which they supply, in order to secure future growth.

A recent study in the UK examined consumer perceptions of cigarette packs, including perceptions of ‘plain packaging’; in which colour and other design elements were removed, whilst retaining the brand name. The participants were asked to compare pairs of cigarette packs on five measures: taste, tar delivery, health risk, attractiveness and either ease of quitting (adult smokers) or brand they would choose if trying smoking (youth). Results: Adults and youth were significantly more likely to rate packs with the terms ‘smooth’, ‘silver’ and ‘gold’ as lower tar, lower health risk and either easier to quit smoking (adults) or their choice of pack if trying smoking (youth).

The colour of packs was also associated with perceptions of risk and brand appeal: compared with Marlboro packs with a red logo, Marlboro packs with a gold logo were rated as lower health risk by 53% and easier to quit by 31% of adult smokers. Plain packs significantly reduced false beliefs about health risk and ease of quitting, and were rated as significantly less attractive and appealing to youth for trying smoking. (You can view pictorial pack warnings from around the world at this website)

Even with the bill recently passed, requiring bold health warnings on both sides of a pack of cigarettes in England, a move countries like Brazil, Australia, Thailand and Singapore pioneered, discussions are going-on to do something more radical, and even more distressing to the industry: introducing all-white packages, to kill the mystique in brands, like Marlboro, Camel and others empowered by their distinctive look.

At the recent UK National Smoking Cessation Conference, Dr David Hammond of the University of Waterloo in Canada made it clear that every country in the world should be much more active in using the cigarette pack as a means of encouraging smokers to quit. The companies themselves clearly won’t do it voluntarily, so according to him, governments need to take control of the packs via legislation and require much more effective warnings and quitting information be included on cigarette packs.

'social responsible' packaging of the Ukrainian designer Reynolds

Of course the tobacco industry is not happy with these developments, as layout, colouring and design of the packaging are the only possibilities left to promote the brand. Prohibited from advertising their products via the mainstream or other media, and limited by all the horrible warnings and pictures illustrating the devastating consequences of smoking, cigarette companies and their designers have no other choice then to take to the most fantastic printing technologies to show the ‘beauty’ of the product.

Irrelevant whether you smoke or not, or whether you want to ban tobacco products completely and despise tobacco companies, you have to admit that the 6 here described cigarette packages are school-examples of creativity, beautifully executed by the respective converters with the input of the latest in printing technology.

Benson & Hedges Super Slims

All six packages received a 2009 PLGA Global International Print Quality Award, so I include the judges’ comments and note that all six are converted by Alcan Packaging. Alcan Packaging (Rio Tinto Group) is a world leader in value-added specialty packaging ranking No. 1 in flexible food, pharmaceutical, beauty and tobacco packaging.

Alcan Packaging, Montreal, Canada converted the cigarette pack for the Benson & Hedges Super Slims. The pack is printed on a Bobst press in 10 colours on SBS board using Flint Inks. This package has 4 colour process, 4 spot colours, matt and gloss varnish plus hot foil stamping. The judges commented that this was a nice looking sample with foiling and a good use of differential lacquering. The reversed out and normal type is very clear and clean.

Gauloises Tobacco Overwrap

The next is from Alcan Packaging’s plant in Westin, Ontario, Canada for the Gauloises Tobacco Overwrap. The wrap is printed on paper on a Cerutti press in 4 process colours with registered lacquer and reverse side registered hot-melt using Sun Chemical Inks. This is a promotional wrap consisting of three designs made from four-colour process inks in which the balance of print had to meet health warning colour and customer graphics. Overall, according to the judges, a well-produced label with good halftones and clean, crisp type. The health warnings while gruesome are well produced.

Marlboro Fresh

The third cigarette pack is from Alcan Packaging, Montreal, Canada again. This time for Marlboro Fresh. To print this package on SBS board Alcan used 8 stations using Flint ink on a Bobst press. These packs incorporate pearlescent ink, two different polychromatic metallic inks, matt and gloss lacquer. The combination of matt and gloss lacquers with the polychromatic inks and the vignettes background give a sophisticated and modern look, which is emphasized by the embossing elements.

Hologram Carton for Lambert & Butler

Alcan Packaging in Bristol, England, did the next good printing job: a Hologram Carton for Lambert & Butler. This is a special pack as the range of holographic cartons were designed to celebrate Lambert & Butler’s position of 10 years as the UK’s biggest FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) brand.
The pack made from SBS board laminated with an in-register film holographic is printed on a Bobst press in 8 colours plus varnish. The use of holograms contributes to enormous shelf appeal. Small screens of colour were used on each pack to distinguish brand variants. The hologram was designed to fit existing brand graphics.
Special printing techniques were required including accurate tension control on the printing press and the use of sophisticated print register equipment to enable up to 6 colours to be successfully printed in register with the hologram.
It is the first time that rotogravure printing technology and in-line embossing and cutting and creasing has been used in conjunction with a registered holographic laminate for the tobacco market.

It is a bright looking carton with excellent halftones, clear and clean type and good solids, while the revolutionary holographic pack design sets a new standard for tobacco product packaging.

Camel # 9 Menthol

From Alcan Packaging, Atlanta, USA comes the Camel # 9 Menthol. A nice contrast between the black, green and red images printed on SBS board in 4 colours and varnish using Sun Chemical inks on a Bobst press. The judges commented: “Not too much to go wrong with this carton”. The solids are good in all colours and the black type clear and legible. The crocodile embossing effect is truly unique and makes this job.

Camel # 9 Menthol Tactile Effect

And Alcan Packaging, Atlanta, had a second winner with the Camel # 9 Menthol Tactile Effect.
Printed on SBS board in 6 colours, using Sun Chemical inks on a Bobst press, the package is unique in that the Tactile Effect was created by using micro particle ink and special engraving by SGS. The magenta background contrasts nicely with the deep black and the silver/gold 9. The reversed out type is clear and very legible and the Tactile Effect quite good.

'social responsible' packaging of the Ukrainian designer Reynolds

So, what is best? Plain white cartons with horrendous graphics popping off the packs or high-technology printed beautiful cartons, which without doubt will soften the impact of the same horrendous graphics.
**
related posts:
The Super Blooper of this Year
Gauloises Blondes in a Tin with a Zipper

90926

Ooh. Collagey.

Actually, the front cover. This post is brought to you by: Gauloises, Beacon’s Closet, handmade stencils and cast-offs from the music library.

You are not smoking anymore? That is a pity really, as you will miss a beautiful packaging from one of the most famous iconic cigarettes in the world.
Gauloises is a typical French cigarette brand. The name means “Gallic”, and the emblem is the helmet of a Gallic warrior.
But what to do with this icon facing declining sales?
Following a recent trend in contemporary design of metal cans, speciality can manufacturer Virojanglor developed a zipped tin for the brand Gauloises Blondes.
Surpassing the limits and going one step further Virojanglor started to mix other materials with metal. Although steel is the … read the full article.

MAYBE BECAUSE IT’S SUMMER, or I’m living near the water, or there’s something about the light here on the East End, but lately I find myself drawn to all things Provençal. The South of France is one of my favorite parts of the world, and I haven’t been there in far too long. So I try to replicate the experience in small ways, such as:

• Eating salad Niçoise almost every day, with fennel and Niçoise olives, naturally, and Alziari olive oil (a $20 splurge at Citarella but I was so happy to see it there – it took me instantly back to the famous store in Nice, where they fill people’s empty bottlees with fresh-pressed oil out of huge kegs)
• A little jar of Herbs de Provence, also from Citarella
• Lavender soap, lavender dishwashing liquid, lavender toilet bowl cleaner, etc.
• Intentions of putting  a yellow printed table cloth on my round picnic table and spending three hours dining under the trees sometime
• Sunflowers in a vase at all times
• My Bodum French press coffee-maker (the best system I’ve ever found- no more Mr. Coffee for me)
• Van Gogh print of Flowering Gardens at Arles on the kitchen wall

What else do I need? A bottle of pastis? I have no plans to start smoking Gauloises (I did briefly in college) or re-read Peter Mayle any time soon.

A few days after the opening of The Zoo, Jean rang me up.

“Hey, man, want to party?”

It was well past eleven and I was already half a bottle of wine away from hitting the sack.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll come by your place and pick you up, then.”

“Pick me up?”

There weren’t many gaijin in town who had their own cars. The few who did usually drove rusting jalopies that had been fobbed off by friends who didn’t want to shell out for the shaken, the extortionately priced vehicle inspection. It came as quite a surprise then when Jean pulled up in front of the Family Mart in a brand new Mercedes wagon.

“Hop in,” he said. I did and off we went, aggressively powering down narrow streets like a bat out of Hell.

“Where’s the party,” I asked.

“I am the party,” Jean replied. “But, first, I have to stop in at my warehouse. If you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

Jean’s warehouse was located in industrial area of the city, only a few blocks from the Customs house. Narrow corridors separated rows and rows of metal shelves stuffed from floor to ceiling with the same merchandise I had seen at The Zoo. Two tattooed and pierced employees busied themselves under the sickly glow of fluorescent lights unloading boxes that had just come in from Holland and Thailand. Dozens of plastic bongs, silver accessories packed in bubble wrap, knit caps, shoulder bags made from hemp, canvas shoes, wool scarves, skeleton figures, and pillow-case sized bags filled with dried psilocybin mushrooms. I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy shop.

“Give me a sec, will you?”

“Sure, take your time.”

Jean sat down at a desk placed a call to Switzerland. The guy was amazing. One moment he was ordering his staff around in Japanese, the next he was on the phone speaking German having funds moved from his Swiss bank account to one of his suppliers in Thailand. I had a couple of years of university German under my belt, enough to order bier and würst at a kneipe in Heidelburg, but this Jean, he blew me away.

When he was finished I asked him if it were smart to be doing what he was doing so close to Customs.

“Oh, the cops are watching me every step of the way,” he said. “Make no mistake about it.”

As soon as he was finished we took off for Bayside Place, a woebegone shopping mall the city had built ten years earlier at the port connecting Fukuoka City by hydrofoil to the islands in the Genkai Sea and beyond to South Korea. Jean had a small boutique there as well, one of ten that he operated all over the northern part of Kyushu. He needed to check on something at the shop, so I tagged along.

It was much smaller than the Zoo and lacked its subversive edge. It was also dead quiet like most of the shops in the mall.

“There’s no future in retail,” Jean told me as we entered the shop. “From now on I’m going to focus on wholesale.”

I picked up a pair of cheap canvass slip-ons selling for 3,900 yen and made a face.

“Those canvas shoes you were just snickering over . . . “

“Snicker?”

“I saw you. They’re as ugly as shoes get, yes, but I sold over fifteen thousand pairs of those canvas shoes last year. Imagine that: Fifteen thousand Japanese kids wearing my shoes. All I need is three or four hit items a year like those ugly shoes and . . . “

15,000 times 3,900 yen . . . Christ, that almost 60 million yen or about $500,000.

It was a staggering amount of money for someone who was busting his balls ten hours a day and making less than a fifth of what Jean earned with those ugly shoes. I had long suspected that I was in the wrong business; now, I was certain of it.

“And, how much do you buy them for?” I asked.

“It’s not as simple as that,” he replied. “C’mon, this place is depressing me.”

We left Bayside Place and walked to the end of the deserted pier where lovers were meant to gaze upon the romantic skyline of the city before heading off to one of the nearby love hotels to screw each other’s brains out. Only, there wasn’t much of a view to speak of. Across the harbor were general cargo sheds, silos, and a tugboat. Beyond that was the stadium for the City-run boat races and the city’s elevated expressway. An uninspiring skyline of fifteen-story high buildings and neon billboards could just barely be seen in the distance.

Jean asked me if I smoked.

I pulled a pack of Gauloises out of my jacket breast pocket.

“Ooh, Gauloises blue. I haven’t had one of these in years.”

He took a cigarette from the box and put it between his lips. Digging into the hip pocket of his cargo pants for what I thought was going to be a lighter, he took out a small Ziploc bag with a black ball of clay in it.

“Smell this,” he said.

I did. It was hashish.

“I hope you appreciate this. It’s from your Beqaa Valley.”

He passed the hashish over a flame to soften it, then tore off a small amount and returned the rest to the Ziploc bag.

“Consider it a gift,” he said, handing me the bag.

I couldn’t believe my luck. “Thanks!”

“Hold this a sec,” he said, giving me the small amount he’d torn off.

He then pulled the filter off the cigarette, tossed into the water, and started to remove the tobacco from it. Gesturing for the hashish, I placed it in his palm and rubbed his hands together in a circular motion, blending the tobacco with hashish. From another pocket, he took out some Zigzag papers and rolled up a spliff. It had taken Jean less than a minute.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had smoked. Lighting up and taking that first toke, I let out an embarrassing rail of coughs.

“Man, you want to cops to find us,” Jean said looking around nervously.

“No . . . ” Cough-cough-cough. “It’s just that . . . ” Cough-cough. “It’s been . . .” Cough-cough-cough. “It’s been fucking ages.” Cough.

I passed the spliff back to Jean and then the rush hit me.

“Woa . . . ” I had to lean against the breakwater to keep from swooning.

With the spliff held between his index and ring fingers, Jean took a long hit from his cupped hand, then, without exhaling, made the following observation: “An Arab and a Jew sharing a spliff. Imagine that!”

“Never call someone from Lebanon an Arab,” I said taking the spliff back. “They’ll consider it as an insult.” Cough-cough-cough. “I understand what you’re getting at, though. What the world needs is more pot, and fewer bombs.” Cough-cough.

Cover, The Importance of Music to Girls

Last week, I was bestowed with a treasure. My friend Curran made me a two-volume mix CD, one of my favorite things to give and receive. I especially love Internal/External’s “Stepping Up to the Mic,” Yoko Ono and Cat Power’s “Revelations,” and Takaka Minekawa’s “Fantastic Cat,” which he selected specifically for my cat, Kozy. And he also reminded me that I should have been listening to Crass this whole time.

His mix came with a 20-page set of liner notes with lyrics, observations, and personal meanings for each song. Curran is a very thorough, thoughtful person who values homemade things and resistive, non-normative modes of expression. I had a dream that he wrote a 30-page essay on Shonen Knife for this blog’s “Records That Made Me a Feminist” section and have no doubt that he might. You should read it.

The week before that, I was bestowed with another treasure. My neighbor-friend Rosa-María left a clipping from Entertainment Weekly in my door, with the blurb for Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Importance of Music to Girls circled. So I picked up a copy (actually, Kristen got me a copy from the UT Library, as I hadn’t replaced my UT student ID yet). I had never heard of the author before and know very little about who she is as an author or what she means to her native England (I guess she’s a writer and teaches writing classes at the university level; thanks, Wikipedia). I wasn’t even sure what era this book was going to cover (luckily for me, she comes of age during the 1970s, a very interesting time for England and to me). Just as you do with a mix CD, you take your friend’s recommendations on faith and dive in.

Let me share with you now one of the best quotes I’ve ever read on the power of making mixes for people. Greenlaw’s words:

The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself. Selection, order, the lettering you used for the track list, how much technical detail you went into, whether or not you added artwork and no tracklist at all, these choices were as codified as a Victorian bouquet.

Yes, exactly. This quote has new resonance for me after making mix CDs for 50 GRCA campers. I hope they take the blank, one-color paper sleeves and make something completely their own out of them.

Now, the task of writing a review for the book poses a challenge. Its use-value is a little hard to determine. It’s a memoir. So, if you know about Greenlaw and care about her artfully written recollections of coming of age, then this is a good book. But if you don’t know Greenlaw, or have much invested in the place and time in which she comes of age, you might feel like you’re grasping for straws.

But I appreciated Greenlaw’s willingness to recollect events, political movements, personal activities, rituals, and practices as means of identification. She erects collages clipped and ripped and taped and pasted from magazines that constantly shift and mutate her bedroom’s landscape. She laquers her flipped hair and eyelids and straps on platform shoes to go to discos with girlfriends. She recounts the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and the Sex Pistols antics from the safe distance of her neighborhood and television. She starts listening to “hippie” records (ex: Santana, Genesis) because of a boy, who later accidentally leaves a crate of records for her on the tube when they meet up again as adults (with her partner and child in tow). She goes to concerts with friends. She visits a friend in the hospital after a suicide attempt. She makes and unmakes girl friendships. She renounces punk for new wave because she thinks the subgenre mirrors her affinity for Russian literature and Gauloises. She loves reading and writing, but hates school. She roadtrips to Ohio because she loves Devo. She thinks about Thatcherism and the National Front alongside the Pop Group’s second album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, though didn’t put them together at the time (which, seriously, a book that reminds me to throw that record on is a good book by my definition). She cuts her girlfriend’s hair at a party. She constantly dyes and cuts and grows out and re-dyes her own hair.

In short, she constantly changes and renegotiates who she is, configuring herself always in a state of becoming, even after she’s transitioned out of her teenage years.

Putting all of this into a broader context, she’s very easily the type of girl British cultural theorists like Angela McRobbie were later devoting books and articles to, helping to build girls studies programs in the process. McRobbie’s girls tended to be bookish, middle-class in an increasingly impoverished country, rebellious but well-behaved, mercurial and fidgety and looking for their place in music culture and their piece of the street. But this girl, Lavinia, wasn’t theoretical. She was real, and, as an adult, created a document as filled with history and reference and memory and meaning as any good homemade mix. Her book is worth a look and a listen.

Hong Kong authorities have required the promoters of a new movie about Coco Chanel to airbrush out her cigarette, and the result is above and to the right.

The idiotic libertarian/anarchist position would be that Hong Kong “city fathers” are being a bunch of old fuddy-duddies in requiring Coco Chanel’s cigarette to be removed from posters in our MTR (subway), as if “censorship” had a single meaning.

However, with some reluctance, I think they acted right.

I started smoking at the age of 16 for two reasons. The first is that it was “cool”, and expressed Bohemian resistance to muscular Christianity of all sorts. The second, background reason was that it couldn’t, in the final analysis, be all that dangerous, because I was surrounded, in 1965, of images of glamorous normal people lighting up.

The second reason seems naive. However, the normal commercial law (that products sold in a free market must be “fit for use”, not causing death and illness when used as directed and as expected) expresses a subconscious feeling which is “naive” only in being unexamined. People in market societies in fact need to have some assurance that the Coca Cola drinks they buy at McDonald’s won’t contain a dead mouse at the bottom.

The macho “alternative” view is a cynical caveat emptor, which sniggers at the naive expectation, but whose cynicism manufactures the phenomenon it pretends to oppose in a Foucauldian manner.

The software industry, with its overtly macho demographic, was able to infect commercial software vending with caveat emptor by means of those famous disclaimers which we never read but always approve when we install software. The result? Because software creation companies aren’t under “fit for use” discipline, actual software coding in commercial software companies is always under enormous amounts of unrealistic deadline pressure…while offline, “open source” creation is nothing more than the theft of intellectual production and its subsequent transformation into intellectual “property” by traders who deal in virtual time-slices of slaves: the slaves being the creators of the “free as in free speech” software.

The effect of macho fantasies about caveat emptor on software is of course worthy of a separate blog post. But the tobacco industry was able, in the 1890s and attendant on the birth of the US Food and Drug administration, to gain a very lucrative exemption from regulation in the same thug fashion as the software industry.

As a result, and owing to hatred of working people (whose drug of choice is, properly speaking, not tobacco but its active and addictive element, nicotine, and who use this drug to survive boring industrial and office work), the delivery system for self-administration of nicotine is a murder weapon: globules of “tar” (concentrated soluble carbon, and various other poisons including plutonium) carry the nicotine into the blood stream, and then accumulate carcinogenetically.

This mass murder of working people was aided and abetted by advertising which showed glamorous actresses smoking.

My late Mom grew up poor in New York City of the 1930s and 1940s and was surrounded by imagery of glamorous, wealthy and upper class actresses smoking in movies and promoting tobacco in advertisements. As a direct result she died young for an American woman, at the age of 72. I was not thereafter able to talk with her about my kids. I wasn’t able to share with her my publishing a book or my son’s top SATs. Today, I am unable to speak with her on the uncaring, to me, behavior of my kids.

I started smoking in 1965 and soon graduated to a pack of Gauloises a day as a philosophy major, in love with the romance of Picasso and Sartre. But owing to the expense of Gauloises, I switched after graduation to Camel unfiltered cigarettes.

When I was in Paris in 2004, I found myself buying a pack of Gauloises owing to nostalgie de la boue, and smoking one. I became violently ill. Today, the packet is obscured by bold-faced warnings, and these warnings kept me from buying Gauloises in the tabac even as images on Hong Kong packets of the consequences of smoking prevent me from backsliding.

In the idiot, macho, libertarian, anarchist narrative, my manhood is in question: in the idiot, macho, libertarian, anarchist narrative, I’m supposed to fantasize that I’m a monad or a god uninfluenced by society. But (Kant again) true freedom comes from the acknowledgement of true limits.

Unfiltered cigarettes were more Authentic than the “lite” cigarettes of the scared bourgeois “clutching their spectre of repose”, and unfiltered cigarettes went better with the dark beer I discovered in London in 1972. I also figured that I smoked fewer, and indeed, this is confirmed both by studies and my experience when I switched to filtered Parliaments and Kools in 1976.

I switched to a pipe in the later 1970s. Today, pipe smoking marks one as a complete loser, dork and potential pedophile, but back then it had a certain academic glamor. It forced me to be more conscious of my smoking as I had to clean the pipes carefully, and fill them properly. I became a pipe gourmand and with some limited fondness remember some of the beautiful, sturdy briars I owned in the 1970, and Balkan Sobranie tobacco.

But following my divorce, and when I started running marathons, the idea of smoking seemed to become completely inauthentic. I was also amazed to discover that a really hard run (San Francisco to Sausalito) not only removed all desire to smoke but gave me the feelings of wholeness that I was seeking in smoke.

However, life went on and became more difficult. I increasingly backslid, and by the late 1980s I was nipping out about once a week for a smoke at the loading dock at the Princeton information center on Prospect avenue. I was joined at times by John “A Beautiful Mind” Nash who like many recovering mental patients smoked rather heavily, and he’d occasionally ask me questions about the mainframe and the Internet.

But I was in crisis, because I’d started smoking to concentrate on dreary or exacting tasks including programming, and could no longer smoke at my desk.

In the Nineties, as my readdiction increased, Nicorette gum was introduced and it has saved my life despite its expense, since I could self-dose while working hard. Today I am gradually (and after many more years than I’m am supposed to) reducing the use of the gum and am looking forward to freedom from nicotine.

But, as Shakespeare’s James Tyrell cries after murdering the Princes in the Tower at the behest of the old monster,

“But oh the devil”

When I was without money during the writing of my book, I used Copenhagen spit tobacco.

“The horror!” – Heart of Darkness

This is known to cause fatal mouth cancer and trashed my teeth, but it was affordable and “helped” me to endure near homelessness. When I became fully employed again, I returned to Nicorette, which is increasingly available in “generic” and house brands.

In Paris this month, I could use the more civilised Nicorette pastille and reduced the dosage significantly.

I am very absent-minded concerning most trivial tasks and demands of everyday life, but I note that I never “forget” to smoke, and I never “forgot”, or even mislaid, my nicotine paraphernelia, from Gauloise and matches, to tobacco and pipe, to Nicorette flat.

But when the dose is reduced I start to forget to self-administer. I read recently of a high-tech brain operation which claimed to “cure” nicotine addiction, but with the usual gross medical brutality of such cures; it is the destruction of brain tissue so the smoker “forgets to smoke”.

I think as a layperson that it is possible that nicotine, unlike other drugs, may be a completely “self-reflexive” drug. Other drugs have a twofold effect. They provide social and personal gratification (the camaraderie of the bar, the gemutlichkeit of the opium den) as well as physical gratification followed by physical dependence (the morning after the night before, the shakes for the peecee pipee).

If nicotine is purely self-reflexive it may create a strong memory “you must smoke, or administer Nicorette”, and this memory will disappear once I reduce the dosage to a minimum.

And speckl’d vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

- John Milton, ODE on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity

Whereas nicotine may simply redefine, through dopamine rewiring, what it feels to be normal as opposed to what it feels to be out of it and weird by being present in the system. The state of nicotine “normality” not pleasant in particular, just temporarily, and falsely, reconciled with objective social conditions that are unendurable, such that its presence becomes demanded even in objective conditions that are easier.

You can take that as read. “Objective social conditions that are unendurable”: children who travel to SE Asia without even apologizing for not stopping in Hong Kong. Thirty years of 16 hours a day writing compilers that solved business problems, and making strangers rich thereby, but ending up nearly homeless in Asia because the kids grew up in a town I wanted to grow up in. The things I’ve done wrong, too.

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.

- TS Eliot

But once the nicotine exits the system as it exited mine in the early 1980s, the mind/body may just forget its original sin.

But: what if the very phrase “original sin” expresses a guilt and responsibility that was God’s in the original story? He created Adam and Eve knowing that they would fall, and in the “Gnostic heresy” this means that beyond “God”, a flawed creator, there is a meta- or supra- God, or Goddess who will wipe away the years we hide when we say “smoke gets in your eyes”, by saying, “you did not sin: you shall now Forget you smoked and return to the Garden, you who have so long, so long, sought Me”.

“Heavy matters! Heavy matters! Now bless thyself: thou hast been with things dying: I have been with things being born.”

-Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale

Heaven would be somehow forgetting the pain we have caused and that we have endured. Or, as I felt when free of nicotine and smoke in the early Eighties, a remembering like a painting by Poussin, who so distanced himself from life in order to love the world: to recreate the light that surrounded Adam and Eve, or that was sought by Blind Orion.

However, in terms of policy, nicotine has a known effect in reconciling people to stressful lives as they are, en masse and with so very few exceptions, shoveled by armored bulldozers into the pile of bodies contemplated by Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”, who cannot see Zion. Nicotine should be permanently delinked from tobacco and available in pastille form world-wide as it is in France. It has been made available historically only in lethal forms because of hatred of the working class and Puritan hatred of pleasure.

The Soul seeks pleasure first – and then,
Relief from Pain – and then -
Those little Anodynes -
That deaden suffering -

The problem. When free of nicotine, I demanded more out of life. In the early Eighties, I wanted Hotel California all the time.

Why do you ask for so much? Why not ask for more? – Leonard Cohen

It’s different now. I still “want”. But I had a strange experience ten years ago.

I was getting ready for a run along the old Illinois and Michigan canal near Joliet, Illinois. I found that some folks had had a beer party that included nappy changing, and the muddy, beautiful flat next to the fast-flowing Illinois that parallels the canal was littered with beer cans and shitty diapers.

Cheerfully I cleaned up the mud flat to restore it, without resentment of the party hearties. I felt like the “hands reaching down”. This is the (rare) feeling you get when you yourself change a nappy, as I got when taking care of the kids…and as I get in some way in my wonderful, wonderful job, where I am actually paid to teach all sorts of marvels to cute-as-a-button Oriental rug rats and adolescents.

The element of pure eleemosynary Duty as found in Kant is a necessary part even of a teaching “job”: the employment contract cancels the eleemosynary if you’re pushing bonds at Hong Kong and Shanghai bank, producing toxic exchange value exclusively. But the kids in a classroom represent a Mystery, “that which skepticism does not easily question”, in Lord Russell’s words. A pure need, and a pure Future that I shall not see being their blind Moses.

In 1965, my parents and the “guidance counselor” at St Viator were bullyragging me to act in long-term self-interest and strive to be “college material”. My parents did so I fear for partly selfish reasons, if my ambivalence when my own kids were born is any guide: you think, in fact, whoa, this kid is a twenty year jail sentence in which I shall have to work for corporations.

I’d read Shakespeare in the Seventh grade, I’d already been arrested for civil rights, I wanted … who the hell knew, some sort of god damned aufhebung or something like that.

Starting smoking falsely reconciled me to “concentrating” on narrow and diminished goals such as learning IBM 1401 assembler programming so as to be either employable, or being able to work in the rear with the gear at Tanh Son Nut air-base as opposed to humping through the combat zone.

It made me sick, and less hungry, and with the diminished need of the sick: of ghosts. My parents found need a threat, and I was anxious to please.

But then, in the dark months of 1981, I went out for a run…around the block, and then around two blocks, and so on. This was a vision of a pillar of fire.

…and the light showed in the darkness, and the darkness understood it not…

I haven’t stopped running, or working out with swimming and indoor aerobics and the Dance, since 1981 for more than a week or so at a time, very rarely.

Idolatry, in my fat pal Adorno (and blessed be He, a latter-day prophet), is trusting to a graven image of Resurrection in time. But somehow, running-and-working-out never betrayed me. It has been like the little angel guy on Elmer Fudd’s right shoulder as opposed to smoking, the little devil on the left.

Well, there it is, as the Emperor says in Amadeus. This is why I think it’s a good idea to airbrush out cigarettes. Thanks for reading this message.

Sorry for the confusion – this is a wordle graphic using all the words in this post.

Let the fun and games begin anew. Before the cock croweth thrice we’ll be back in the country where Jeff and I “found” ourselves. Forgive this pseudo-psychoanalytical term but it does fit well in today’s scheme of things.

Strictly speaking we first found ourselves in the traditional sense when Jeff and I met and galaxies collided in New York’s Greenwich Village in pre-Beatles 1962. But there’s a big difference between found without quotation marks and “found.”

We’d known each other for about a year – and hadn’t spent a night apart – when we had the crazy notion to get the cheapest flight possible and go to Paris.

In those days Paris meant something. French movies were the rage, Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Brigitte Bardot were all French and America was starting to discover “The Art of French Cooking” on TV from the irrepressible Julia Childs – bless her heart – who ended every show with her trademark “bon appétit.”

Neither of us had been out of the USA before, neither spoke a word of any non-English language and up to and including the day we flew off we had great trepidation about something that these days is considered as easy as taking the bus. In 1963, it wasn’t, I assure you.

I have no recollections whatsoever of our first day in Paris. Overwhelmed doesn’t do justice to the feeling I experienced. My first clear memory is of the next morning when we awoke in bed in a tiny hotel where a taxi driver had brought us – according to Jeff – when asked at the airport to take us to the smallest, cheapest and most romantic hotel in Paris.

There was that undefinable aroma. Undefinable because no-one’s yet managed to convey in print how a romantic Paris hotel room smells. But I’ll try.

The overriding fragrance was of history. This room – and bed – had lived. Oh, how I wish both could have spoken. There was fresh baked bread in the vicinity and the scent of French cigarettes which – as smokers – both Jeff and I switched-to and continued using for far too long until we came to our senses.

That morning as Jeff threw back the curtains I saw for the first time we’d slept in a 4-Poster bed with a fine net screen on all sides. Using a jazz expression of the time, “How cool!” And yes, you’ve guessed it, this is the exact moment when we “found” ourselves.

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They killed my mouse
They destroyed my palace
They smashed my infantry
They slaughtered my knights
They annihilated the imperial guard
They tortured my hero
They attacked and destroyed my ally

May the sky fall on your heads, bloody Gladix, son of Gauloises.

[it has been a terrible day on Travian.de server4]

Reeking of le rive gauche, soft pack chic, a very persuasive shade of blue, the only difficulty was they were repulsive and made you feel a bit sick.

Westmalle triple, Gauloises y la penumbra del Café Le Cirio.

De vuelta de Bruselas.

Tengo mucho sueño y más frío,

esta piel que se ha trenzado

en un abrazo oscuro

con el frío [1]

y la sensación de que en Bélgica la realidad se vive a media luz;

todo es aplazable y menudo, irrisorio y vacuo, ridículo, quedo y sabroso como los mejillones; allá todo es pronunciado con boca menuda y letra pequeña (como quien se llena la boca de moluscos y trata de hablar),

pero eso sí: con labios de un carmín dorado y casi pétreo, como de infortunado ayudante de cámara que anhela su precioso destino, siempre por concluir, siempre hipotético. En Bélgica.

Provisorio parece su carácter, provisorias sus formas.

Todo sucede por lo bajini y el hecho de que sus habitantes no miren al cielo (a ese cielo brumoso) sino al vetusto empedrado, implica que las chicas son extraordinariamente feas e inanes

-nadie quiere mirarlas-

y que la ciudad discurre sin música

-nadie se atreve a tocar esa música escondida- ,

o, mejor dicho, la ciudad se mueve con la música de un movimiento maquinal. Como de espectro que persevera en su actitud fantasmagórica.

Una música empalagosa como lluvia de chocolate con leche es la música de Bruselas.

O mejor dicho, su runrún.

Porque no, no hay música sino runrún en sus tranvías, cuya coquetería es de vieja olvidadiza y desmañada, ni es histórico su metro sino sórdido, casi ruso. Así sus trenes, con sus vetustos revisores. Y los innecesarios autobuses larguísimos y dobles,

sucios de un polvo grueso que ha olvidado su tarea de moverse e ir de aquí para allá. El polvo pegado a los vehículos

(la poesía del polvo y la herrumbre en esos autobuses).

Y sus palacios, sostenidos por ridículos fútiles andamios y hasta el terrorífico vacío del parque donde el lamento del Arco del Cincuentenario se sujeta con cables de acero. Y sus cuervos negros, y sus palomas panzurrosas y ese decorado de preludio de una gran catástrofe postromántica que nunca sucede.

Naturaleza muerta. Bruselas.

Así el mínimo esplendor en la cúpula del Palacio Real y, sin embargo, abandonarse a la vista que domina la ciudad desde allí y sólo ver el lustre negruzco de algunas chimeneas y tres o cuatro horrendas grúas amarillas, en atildado descanso.

Y de nuevo la dejadez del polvo que permea todos los cristales, inclemente el polvo y la negrura de sus antaño verdosas estatuas, y los coches y las calles y la parsimonia de sus camareros y tenderos y los cientos de lugares sagrados donde testaferros de la fé aguardan en despreocupación de siglos y horas y casullas y minutos y los largos tediosos segundos que aguardan y aguardan…

No lo sé. No sé, qué aguardan, si la paz o la revancha.

O el reconcimiento de alguna gloria menor.

No sé si aguardan que ese dolor incierto que se sufre en Bruselas se extinga. O que aparezca un estímulo nuevo, perdido: la pasión; por ejemplo. Una pasión que en Bruselas no se huele por ninguna de sus calles, porque además sus calles huelen a Londres.

Y, ah, qué decir de ese campo de fútbol de extraradio que es el Parlamento Europeo. Ah, la vieja europa…, piensa uno. La pobre vieja Europa… agoniza en ese infierno frío de cristales opacos.

No hay en Bruselas amabilidad ni diligencia sino parsimonia y cansancio. Ya digo, a uno le embarga el sueño igual que al ver ese cuadro de Jacques-Louis David, La Mort de Marat,

emblema de su Museo de Arte Antiguo:

La Mort de Marat

Y lo que a mi parecer es el símbolo de Bélgica: la cigala. No los moluscos, según se ha venido obstinando uno de sus artistas más relevantes,  Marcel Broodthaers y que utiliza para satirizar las costumbre belgas.

Como aquí:

Marcel Broodthaers. "Casserole et moules fermées" (1964)

El símbolo de Bélgica debería ser la cigala.

Naturaleza muerta según se representa en obras como las de Jan Davidsz de Heem “Nature Morte au Homard” (1667) o ese otro cuadro atribuido a David Rijckaert II y también titulado “Nature Morte au Homard” y firmado con el pseudónimo de Osias Beert.

Vida callada, queda y moribunda.

Así Bélgica, así sus cigalas (hasta el plano de su metro representa subrepticiamente una cigala).

Conformidad y satisfacción. Opacidad pues y desidia.

Dice Mauricio Wiesenthal que no existiría el arte europeo sin la melancolia [2].

Puede.

Pero lo que advierte uno a las claras en Bruselas es que la melancolía ha mudado a fastidio,

fastidio de la Gran Place al sentir la llamada todavía cercana de la luna

y la impotencia de no saber cómo echársele al cuello:

Lo que yo he visto en Bruselas

es el regocijo de la cigala por saberse yendo por los suelos de una realidad queda y estanca

y he visto sufrir a esa cigala su propio martirio por saberse poseedora de unas majestuosas pinzas que sólo le sirven ya para llamar la atención sobre sí mismas, aunque sin concretrarse el propósito.

Es Bruselas como esa vieja actriz de pasadas glorias que sale el domingo

(y para ella ya todos los días son tardes lánguidas de domigo)

y que se pone sus joyas más queridas para salir a caminar despacio el domingo y lo hace sin rumbo, y que al abandonarse a los sillones de un café modernista  -y esto lo hace con mucha calma-,

ya llegada la noche,

cuida mucho de que se vean bien sus joyas más queridas, pero sin tocarlas, ajustándolas cuidadosamente al cuello, atreviéndose a hacer esto sólo con las yemas,

no vaya a ser que se le revele la sospecha de que son perlas falsas las que le regaló hace tanto tiempo aquel marido huraño y que ella con tanto cariño y nostalgia pasea por la vieja lánguida Bruselas.

Melancolía hay en Bruselas, pues, sí, es cierto, al decir de Wiesenthal, pero no estoy seguro de si ésta la traía yo ya de casa… y todo lo demás que acabo de dejar escrito.

Que Bélgica me perdone.

[1] Julio Trujillo. “Plegaria contra el frío”.

[2] Mauricio Wiesenthal “El esnobismo de las golondrinas”. Edhasa. Barcelona. 2007. [pág. 58]

>>>>>Postscriptum (y descargo):

Una razón insoslayable para visitar Bruselas,

el cuadro de Francis Bacon que tienen en el Museo de Arte Moderno

(pues éste no viaja al Prado):

Francis Bacon. Le pape aux hiboux.

am doua pachete de tigari din care fumez pana cand imi sar plamanii si fierea si rinichii si ochii de nervi si de sedat sentimental ce sunt. Gauloises si Lucky Strike. Alternativ. dar una ramane sufletul meu facut bucati, macinat, intors pe dos, blond-maroniu sedat ca un fetus cu doua capatani in formol, vodca, acid ceanhidric sau in ce rahat mai tin in ziua de azi fetusii.

ascult xploding plastix si ma fac ca citesc, dar sufar, sufar cu adevarat.

On se souvient encore de ces images de familles américaines ruinées, assises hébétées autour de cartons de déménagement devant la porte d’entrée de ce qui fut leur maison, têtes dans les mains pleurant sur un rêve brisé. C’était l’été 2007. Éphémère rêve américain qu’elles crûrent caresser, elles n’étaient que les premières victimes d’un système prônant le surendettement comme un art de vivre.

En France, le réflexe fut immédiat, nous avions l’Atlantique comme rempart, protégés par nos spécificités gauloises de bon sens, de saine gestion, de régulation maîtrisée. Un an plus tard, la réalité est toute autre et l’imbrication française dans le cynique système financier mondial apparaît désormais au grand jour avec les ravages que l’on sait.

Même l’écureuil (les caisses d’épargne), d’habitude si prudent, n’a pas échappé aux sirènes de l’argent virtuel facile. Résultat : 695 millions d’euros brûlés par des apprentis traders. Et que dire du Crédit Foncier de France, dont les prêts n’ont rien à envier aux subprimes américains, dont on découvre, sans que personne ne s’en alerte, les milliers de victimes françaises ?

On est bien loin des propos du président Sarkozy dans ce discours éclatant de Toulon, le 25 septembre dernier, superbe et cynique (sachant qu’il était jusqu’ici le chantre de ses amis les plus proches, les plus brillants banquiers et assureurs français) où il déclarait ” L’autorégulation pour régler tous les problèmes, c’est fini. Le laissez-faire, c’est fini. Le marché qui a toujours raison, c’est fini”. Dans une diatribe convaincue il surenchérissait : “Les banques françaises paraissent en mesure de surmonter les difficultés actuelles, mais si elles devaient êtres mises en difficulté par la spéculation, je n’accepterais pas qu’un seul déposant perde un seul euro parce qu’un établissement financier se révèlerait dans l’incapacité de faire face à ses engagements. C’est un engagement solennel que je prends ce soir : quoi qu’il arrive, l’Etat garantira la sécurité et la continuité du système bancaire et financier français.” Les déposants certes, mais les emprunteurs abusés ? Car là est le hic… Du pur subprime en somme… La source, la cause et, désormais, la conséquence….

Souvent les hommes d’Etat se révèlent à l’aune des pires crises. Gageons que ce soit le cas pour le nôtre. Au fond, ce serait heureux. Pourtant, Paul Krugman, auteur de nombreuses critiques sur l’administration Bush dans les colonnes du New York Times, introduisait très tôt dans la crise, dès l’automne 2007, le caractère mondial de la crise des subprimes…

Ne pas perdre la confiance, coûte que coûte
La chute des deux géants hypothécaires Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac marque le début d’une lente descente aux enfers qui emportera avec elle, la prestigieuse institution financière Lehman Brothers. Les investisseurs s’affolent, les index boursiers voient leurs courbes balayer le plancher. L’administration américaine, si prompte à brandir l’étendard de l’ultra libéralisme, nationalise pourtant de grands vaisseaux amiral de la finance et de l’assurance devenues en quelques semaines de véritables radeaux. L’opinion américaine, groggy, a du mal à digérer un tel retournement de situation. Il faudra deux tentatives et faire preuve de beaucoup de pédagogie pour voir le Plan Paulson (700 Md de dollars), secrétaire d’Etat au trésor américain, finalement adopté par des parlementaires pragmatiques. La menace de voir l’économie mondiale s’effondrer se révèle toujours d’actualité.

Dans l’hexagone, la facture pour le sauvetage du système financier atteint déjà les 10,5 Md d’euros (compris dans les 360 Md € européens), de quoi donner le vertige sans pour autant annoncer le retour au calme. Entre de courtes périodes d’accalmie, le système financier est toujours à la recherche de l’une de ses composantes essentielles : la confiance. Ce sentiment tient maintenant le monde entre ses mains. Le remède n’est donc pas tant dans le déploiement de liasses de billets mais dans un traitement de choc de la méfiance qui s’installe entre tous les acteurs économiques.

Désormais, les banques ont peur des banques. Et nul ne sait combien de titres dépréciés sont contenus non plus dans leurs coffres, mais dans les disques durs de leurs ordinateurs. Toutes bluffent, prétendent, affirment, rassurent, manipulent en tentant de sauver ce qui n’a désormais plus de prix : la solidité, feinte ou objective, de leurs résultats. Si, pendant les dernières semaines, elles ne savaient pas elles-mêmes à quel niveau se portait leurs achats virtuels de titres pourris, noyés dans des investissements sains, elles peuvent l’estimer plus précisément maintenant. Reste la guerre de communication pour sauver la confiance, coûte que coûte, non sans en appeler à l’intervention des Etats, remis au centre du pouvoir.

Les subprimes à la française font des milliers de victimes
Bien loin des discours lénifiants, la France a, bien entendu, participé de la finance facile et de l’immobilier lucratif. Elle a, elle aussi, lancé sur le marché des crédules emprunteurs, des produits financiers comparables aux subprimes. L’exemple, peu repris encore par la presse, du Crédit Foncier de France est à ce propos tout à fait éloquent.

Les prêts du CCF (filiale de la Caisse d’épargne) étaient, en effet, prétendument, sécurisés avec un taux d’intérêt capé, c’est-à-dire plafonné en cas de variation de l’indice de référence. Or, avec la brusque remontée des taux, plusieurs dizaines de milliers de souscripteurs (estimés par le CCF lui-même à 150 000) ont vu leurs mensualités s’envoler brutalement et la durée de leur crédit s‘étendre aux calendes grecques.

Ce spécialiste du crédit à taux variable (700 000 clients) s’est engagé, par contrat, à accorder des prêts à taux plafonné à un niveau n’excédant pas 1,3% à 1,5% par rapport au taux initial. Mais les clients ont découvert, lors de la révision trimestrielle de leur prêt, que l’augmentation de leur taux était bien supérieur à ce que leur contrat stipulait initialement (de 3,5 % à parfois 6.5%).

François Blancard, le directeur général du Crédit Foncier déclarait le 18 janvier dernier à l’Afp, suite à l’intervention de l’Union française des consommateurs (UFC- Que choisir), principal soutien aux clients affolés, que son établissement était prêt à faire un geste. Il leur proposait de plafonner leur taux de 5,75 % ou 6,25 % selon les cas.

Le philanthrope directeur général n’a pas pour autant convaincu l’UFC, loin s’en faut : “ce qu’annonce le Crédit Foncier ne règle pas le problème”, juge-t-elle, arguant que l’organisme a vendu à plusieurs de ses clients un crédit plafonné alors qu’il ne l’était pas. Près de 1500 souscripteurs se sont fait d’ores et déjà connaître. “Mais ce n’est que la partie émergée de l’iceberg”, prévient Alain Bazot, le président de l’UFC.

Hier, la nomination expresse de Nicolas Merindol, fraîchement viré de la direction générale des Caisses d’épargne, à la tête du CCF en remplacement de François Blancard, n’inspire pas vraiment confiance… Elle révolte même. Surtout Annick D., cliente marseillaise écœurée : « Après avoir fait mes calculs, j’ai payé 40 000 euros de remboursement de mon prêt pour rien. Cet argent à été foutu en l’air par une banque d’escrocs. Et ce n’est que le début, puisque la durée de mon crédit a été allongée de 25 à 28 ans ! »

Combien de personnes ont-elles été victimes de ce type de produits financiers ? A ce jour, les néfastes retombées du marasme économique ne sont guère chiffrables. Mais le spectre de la récession laisse entrevoir des matins qui déchantent. Nos dirigeants ont, semble-t-il, pris conscience de la moralisation nécessaire du système macro-économique. Leur intervention devrait certainement s’intensifier dans les prochains mois car d’effet domino en effet boule de neige, des pans entiers de notre économie menacent aujourd’hui de sombrer entraînant avec eux les victimes, bien humaines, elles, d’un libéralisme vorace.

Ich hatte mir gestern Abend zur Spätschicht meine letzten drei Zigaretten dabei – mit dem Vorsatz, dies seien die letzten drei meines Lebens. Dummerweise wurde ich bei Ankunft auf Arbeit von meiner Supervisorin mit den Worten “Da ist eine Stange Fluppen für dich hinterlegt.”. Auweia… Mein Kollege Jan hatte mir netterweise aus seinem Heimaturlaub (nahe der polnischen Grenze) die vor x Wochen bestellte Stange Ziggis aus Polen mitgebracht. Wie hieß notgedrungen das Motto des gestrigen Tages?

AUFSCHOBEN IST NICHT AUFGEHOBEN!

… und neben mir qualmt gerade eine polnische Gauloises…

Danke, Jan! <– ernstgemeint.

Sucht

…hmm…

“…io ci credo in quel che voglio e forse voglio farmi male..ma non mi riconosco in quello che conviene…”

By Philippe Philoppe

FRENCH food chief Hercule Haw-Hee-Haw has this week slated agricultural products from everywhere in the world except France.

At a meeting of EU food bosses in Luxembourg, Haw-Hee-Haw highlighted his particular resistance to American products.

He said: “The Americans can keep their ‘orrible food. They are all fat and they know nothing about poetry.”

Lighting the first of many filterless Gauloises, Haw-Hee-Haw told journalists of his love of painting – but his failed attempts to recapture the Impressionist style had left him frustrated, he confessed. He admitted that last night he flew into such a rage he slashed several of his paintings with a knife he had previously been using to cut goat’s cheese.

Haw-Hee-Haw’s confession today sparked speculation in the European media that his criticism of non-French food had in fact been caused by a creative block, rather than an informed assessment of pan-European cuisine.

‘Ce n’est pas chouette,” commented one French reporter on the allegations, adding that Haw-Hee-Haw had been courageous enough to try a range of non-French foods, including beef jerky (US), pickled onions (UK), and Marmite (UK).

Other journalists contented themselves with throwing buns at each other, drinking excessively, and having incestuous office relationships.

By Philippe Philoppe

FRENCH food chief Hercule Haw-Hee-Haw has this week slated agricultural products from everywhere in the world except France.

At a meeting of EU food bosses in Luxembourg, Haw-Hee-Haw highlighted his particular resistance to American products.

He said: “The Americans can keep their ‘orrible food. They are all fat and they know nothing about poetry.”

Lighting the first of many filterless Gauloises, Haw-Hee-Haw told journalists of his love of painting – but his failed attempts to recapture the Impressionist style had left him frustrated, he confessed. He admitted that last night he flew into such a rage he slashed several of his paintings with a knife he had previously been using to cut goat’s cheese.

Haw-Hee-Haw’s confession today sparked speculation in the European media that his criticism of non-French food had in fact been caused by a creative block, rather than an informed assessment of pan-European cuisine.

‘Ce n’est pas chouette,” commented one French reporter on the allegations, adding that Haw-Hee-Haw had been courageous enough to try a range of non-French foods, including beef jerky (US), pickled onions (UK), and Marmite (UK).

Other journalists contented themselves with throwing buns at each other, drinking excessively, and having incestuous office relationships.