I have possible leads for apartments in the Sunset. Not quite the Tenderloin or Haight-Ashbury, but it's good enough. Expect Logan to call me a hippie (even though there is no such thing as a French hippie. May 68, anyone?). But the sea would be close by.
Just seen:
And yes, I was very surprised to hear about the appointment of Bernard Kouchner to the French ministry of foreign affairs. My childhood hero working in the government of my childhood annoyance (my childhood nightmare being the fascist - although in the States, you'd call him Republican, Jean-Marie Le Pen).
Kouchner was basically one of the reasons why I attended medical school after my baccalauréat (only to flunk out later on, much like Pierre Joris)(the other reason for my med school attendance being a teenage fascination for the Che Guevara and the Subcommandante Marcos. It was the 90s).
Kouchner was what the man of the left should look like. He founded Médecins sans frontières and went where doctors were most needed. And he did it with panache and flair that wouldn't be lost on an 8-year-old me. Call him a Romantic man of action, à la française, something we had not seen since André Malraux, who would go to Spain during the Civil War to organize the Republican Air Force (and shoot the footage of the movie L'espoir, which would also become a novel).
And Malraux too would later come to work for a conservative government. Twice. First in the interim government established after the Liberation as minister of communications, then as minister of culture in the first government of the Fifth Republic under (again) Charles De Gaulle. Yes, I also had a strange teenage fascination for Malraux. And Yukio Mishima. And Verlaine and Rimbaud (but who didn't). On the other hand, I still have admiration for him and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
I've read in the New York Times that he was in favor of the invasion of Iraq. His position was a bit more nuanced than that. He was both against the call for invasion proposed by George W. Bush and against the tacit support of Saddam Hussein (the position, more or less, of the French government and of the French left), which is why he can't really be seen as a neo-conservative.
"La solution du problème Saddam (...) ne peut procéder, en même temps que du maintien de la pression militaire, que de la prise de parole du peuple irakien telle que pourrait la favoriser la désignation d’un médiateur des Nations unies." ("The problem Saddam (...) can only be solved though both the use of military pressure and the assertion of the Iraqi people that could be facilitated by the appointment of a United Nations mediator").
But what is most surprising about Kouchner's appointment is the presence of a figure of the May 68 movement (granted, he did not take part in those demonstrations, as Cohn-Bendit did, as he was too busy with humanitarian work in the conflict in Biafra) in the government of someone who has accused this movement of the ills French society is now suffering.
Just seen:
Un long dimanche de fiançailles, by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Zatoichi, by Takeshi Kitano
And yes, I was very surprised to hear about the appointment of Bernard Kouchner to the French ministry of foreign affairs. My childhood hero working in the government of my childhood annoyance (my childhood nightmare being the fascist - although in the States, you'd call him Republican, Jean-Marie Le Pen).
Kouchner was basically one of the reasons why I attended medical school after my baccalauréat (only to flunk out later on, much like Pierre Joris)(the other reason for my med school attendance being a teenage fascination for the Che Guevara and the Subcommandante Marcos. It was the 90s).
Kouchner was what the man of the left should look like. He founded Médecins sans frontières and went where doctors were most needed. And he did it with panache and flair that wouldn't be lost on an 8-year-old me. Call him a Romantic man of action, à la française, something we had not seen since André Malraux, who would go to Spain during the Civil War to organize the Republican Air Force (and shoot the footage of the movie L'espoir, which would also become a novel).
And Malraux too would later come to work for a conservative government. Twice. First in the interim government established after the Liberation as minister of communications, then as minister of culture in the first government of the Fifth Republic under (again) Charles De Gaulle. Yes, I also had a strange teenage fascination for Malraux. And Yukio Mishima. And Verlaine and Rimbaud (but who didn't). On the other hand, I still have admiration for him and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
I've read in the New York Times that he was in favor of the invasion of Iraq. His position was a bit more nuanced than that. He was both against the call for invasion proposed by George W. Bush and against the tacit support of Saddam Hussein (the position, more or less, of the French government and of the French left), which is why he can't really be seen as a neo-conservative.
"La solution du problème Saddam (...) ne peut procéder, en même temps que du maintien de la pression militaire, que de la prise de parole du peuple irakien telle que pourrait la favoriser la désignation d’un médiateur des Nations unies." ("The problem Saddam (...) can only be solved though both the use of military pressure and the assertion of the Iraqi people that could be facilitated by the appointment of a United Nations mediator").
But what is most surprising about Kouchner's appointment is the presence of a figure of the May 68 movement (granted, he did not take part in those demonstrations, as Cohn-Bendit did, as he was too busy with humanitarian work in the conflict in Biafra) in the government of someone who has accused this movement of the ills French society is now suffering.
Comments
i don't know any of those ppl, sans the professors. i had a class with tony this last semester. well, someone in my writing group was talking about you - that is why your name sounded familiar. do you know chris stephens or james hayes?
you are moving to san fran? are you living in houston now?
best, signe.