Author: Mick Hartley

making comparisons about our lovemaking technique, I might get jealous,” Mr. Crumb added.

Their daughter, Sophie, is not so sure about the arrangement. She called the idea of her mother’s having a second husband “gross.”

Nonetheless, the strong-jawed Mr. Coudurès, 61, has become a part of the support system that frees Mr. Crumb to focus on work. The Frenchman, who has a thick mane of black hair, does handyman chores. His daughter Agathe McCamy, 35, helps Ms. Crumb color her comics.

“I am a Situationist,” Mr. Coudurès explained in French after sharing a dinner with the Crumbs next to a gently crackling fireplace in his kitchen. He was referring to a European avant-garde philosophy born in 1957 and championed by Guy Debord. “I am an adventurer of the present.”

Ah yes – a Situationist. All about finding pleasant situations for yourself.

Then of course there’s Ms. Crumb herself:

They began drawing comics together in 1974. Many readers of their occasional reportage-style comics in The New Yorker, where they have written about the Cannes Film Festival and New York Fashion Week, do not realize that Ms. Crumb draws herself in the panels and writes her own dialogue.

If these many readers didn’t realise that Ms. Crumb contributed, they must have been blind. Her contributions display – how to put this? – an almost complete lack of talent. Not that it matters:

A graphic memoir, “Need More Love,” including Ms. Crumb’s comic books, paintings and musings, is scheduled to arrive in stores next month. An exhibition of her drawings and other works is scheduled for the Adam Baumgold Gallery in Manhattan, Feb. 15 through March 17. On Feb. 14, Mr. Crumb is scheduled to interview Ms. Crumb at the New York Public Library. (Mr. Coudurès also plans to be present.)

Crumb’s life is eventually going to make a great read – though any biography will of course have to start with Terry Zwigoff’s wonderful film. Hmm – I wonder if Robert’s got anyone lined up yet. That village sounds like a great place to live:

Three times a week Ms. Crumb leads an American-style Pilates-yoga-dance class in her village’s Napoleonic-era barracks. Regulars include Estelle Kohler, a legendary actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company; and a French marionette maker, married to a man who publishes a newsletter about flying kites.

The village seems to be thriving with such free spirits. An Israeli, Khaïm Seligman, set up shop making wooden flutes. Melinda Trucks, the wife of Butch Trucks, the Allman Brothers Band drummer, has taken Ms. Crumb’s exercise class. The Truckses have bought a nearby estate.

A longtime friend of the Crumbs, Peter Poplaski, moved to the village in the ’90s, collaborated with Mr. Crumb on a 2005 collection, “The R. Crumb Handbook,” and continues to work on a pet project he describes as “the quintessential Zorro book of the 21st century.” Mr. Poplaski, a Wisconsin native, dresses as Zorro for festivals to entertain the village children.

On the other hand, maybe not.

[More on Crumb here]

nment was thinking of “bowing to pressure from conservative Catholics.”

He added: “This Labour Party has an excellent record on equality. We’ve got ride of most of the discriminatory laws against lesbians and gay people.

“I think that this is an issue of equality. It’s exactly the same as saying you can’t have a child for adoption because you’re black or because you’re a woman or because you’re disabled,” he also said.

But is it the same? That’s the whole issue. Catholics would argue that it isn’t: that the fact of prospective parents being gay and of the same sex is highly relevant to the bringing-up of a child. Gay parenting doesn’t offend me personally, but I can certainly understand a moral position that does find it offensive, in a way that I couldn’t excuse, for instance, a ban on dealing with black couples, or mixed-race couples.

e/0,,2092-2557632.html”>interviewed:

A lot of the hate comes from some members of her own family: 26 years after she ran away they still cross the street to avoid her. Her only real contact is her nephew Sunny. “He’s hip, he’s modern, but he still says, ‘If I get married I wouldn’t want my wife to speak to you’.”

She shakes her head in disbelief. “But then if you look at the recent BBC poll for the Asian network they asked 15 to 24-year-olds if they could justify an honour killing, and more than 50% said they could.”

Fighting back has become a life’s work and Sanghera, now 41, has turned from counsellor to campaigner. “Awful things happen all the time: 30% of those taken abroad for forced weddings are underage and I see girls who are taken to India and raped to conceive a child to make their marriage work. I worked with a girl recently who suffered horrific abuse with her new family and kept running home to her parents. The third time she ran home her own father stabbed her three times. In the end we had to relocate her and change her identity because the fear is always that they will seek them out.”

Her list of horror stories goes on and on. “If you came to Derby I could introduce to more than 50 women today who have run away, and they’re the lucky ones. But when people read stories about honour killings they think the suffering is isolated and rare because the cases seem so dramatic, but it’s not true. It is widespread.” And though honour killings grab the headlines, she points out that “the suicide rate for young Asian women is three times the national average”.

On Friday the House of Lords will debate a private member’s bill sponsored by Lord Lester, the Liberal Democrat human rights champion, that would offer victims of forced marriage the right to seek civil remedies. Sanghera wants more.

“I don’t think the government is getting tough enough on forced marriage. At the Labour party conference they promised they would be revisiting the issue, but there was nothing in the Queen’s speech, and even yesterday when I was at the House of Lords for a meeting of Asian peers there were people in the audience saying, ‘Do we really need this?’” “We’re in denial about this even being an issue,” says Sanghera. “But we have to start seeing this as a UK problem. This PC culture we have created here is a nightmare. Forced marriage isn’t an issue of cultural understanding. It’s about people abusing other people. So why not face facts? We know forced marriage happens across a number of communities, but the figures tell us they are predominantly south Asian, so let’s not get all PC about things. It doesn’t help.”

She finds the race row ignited by Celebrity Big Brother typical in missing the point yet again. “There are so many bigger concerns. I don’t understand why we can’t have a properly important and honest discussion about race in this country.”

The problem, of course, is that the community most blighted by the issue is the one most resistant to tackling it. “Change has to come from the leaders of the Asian community. I know I’ll still be fighting it when I die.”

On the murdered Armenian newspaper editor:

Hrant Dink’s view was that Turkey needs to come to terms with its history, and accept that enormous wrongs were committed in the past.

But he also had Turkish friends and supporters.

In one interview he said the difference between him and Armenians abroad was that he was living with the Turks of today, while they were still living with the Turks of 1915.

In fact there are tens of thousands of Armenians in modern Istanbul – they have their own churches, their own schools.

As long as they do not raise the past too publicly, as Hrant Dink did, they are left to get on with life.

It is in eastern Anatolia, in eastern Turkey, that the Armenians and their culture have all but disappeared.

Where there were more than a million Armenians 100 years ago, there are only a few scattered families left.

Silence has brought a degree of protection to Turkey’s remaining Armenian communities.

But Hrant Dink refused to be silent.

It brought him into constant conflict with the law. And in some eyes it made him a traitor.

In a newspaper column written just this week, Dink said he had received many death threats by e-mail, his computer was full of them, and that he was scared.

Tragically, he was right to be so.

Political leaders in Turkey have been quick to condemn the murder.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called it an attack on national unity.

All too late for Hrant Dink, who said he had received no protection from the authorities despite his complaints.

Earlier posts of mine on the Armenian Genocide here and here.

ad been half bombed back into the Stone Age already. And I’m sorry that should be on the conscience of anyone who supported the war, which I did not. But though I don’t try and evade the responsibility for what the other side eventually did, not just in Cambodia, but also in Vietnam, but there was never any chance of keeping Vietnam partitioned, and it shouldn’t have been tried. Now furthermore, no American interest was really involved there. We were told we were fighting against the Chinese takeover, whereas the best insurance against Maoism in Indochina is always Vietnam. That’s been proved many times since then. So none of this applies in the case of Iraq, where we went to overthrow a hideous dictatorship that was a local aggressor, a sponsor of international terrorism, had used weapons of mass destruction inside and outside its own borders, was hated by its people, and was in thoroughgoing breach of all important United Nations resolutions. None of this, by the way, was the case with the government of Vietnam. Where furthermore, let’s not be shy about it, we do have a crucial interest, first in keeping the Gulf open, and its oil available, not just for us, but for everybody else, getting it pumped again, particularly important to pump Iraqi oil, because we need to undercut the monopolies of Saudi Arabia and Iran in the area. That’s a vital interest. Second, I don’t think that a single Democrat who doesn’t agree that we are in fact in some kind of war, however defined, with Islamic extremism, and not just in the Middle East either, but in Indonesia, and on the streets of European capitol cities, and that it is completely out of the question to concede a country of the importance of Iraq to these people. We cannot allow them to take over, first for humanitarian reasons, the country would be destroyed, and the people would be put to the sword, and second, because, well, for the advertised reasons. It’s just too strategically and economically important a country to let that happen.

HH: Now that part I understand.

CH: We’ve entered Iraq far too late, Saddam Hussein could have, should have been taken out in 1991, shouldn’t even probably have been allowed to stay there that long, Jimmy Carter should never have been allowed to endorse his invasion of Iran, we’re paying for the price of two generations worth of mistakes that for once, we’re there for a good reason.

onalists who viewed him as a traitor, correspondents say.

More here:

NTV television said Dink was shot three times in the head and neck. Muharrem Gozutok, a restaurant owner near the newspaper, said the assailant looked about 20, wore jeans and a cap and shouted “I shot the non-Muslim” as he left the scene.

al consensus among geologists is that the Colorado River basin has developed in the past 40 million years and that the Grand Canyon itself is probably less than five to six million years old. The result of all this erosion is one of the most complete geologic columns on the planet.”

The Lea, at Springfield Park:

Here’s the classic original Subterranean Homesick Blues video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWkUbNzlcxA&w=425&h=350]

and here’s Weird Al Yankovic:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nej4xJe4Tdg&w=425&h=350]

Well I think it’s funny.

(Via the comments thread to this Metafilter post, which, by contrast, isn’t funny.)

Norm quotes Francis Wheen in the Evening Standard:

Tate Britain unveiled Mark Wallinger’s latest exhibition yesterday – “an ambitious new work… typically uncompromising in scale and intention”. It turned out to be an agitprop assault on Tony Blair and the Iraq war.

Last night the Channel 4 offshoot More4 screened Alistair Beaton’s drama, The Trial of Tony Blair, billed as a “biting feature-length satire”. It was a denunciation of the PM as a war criminal.

Ambitious and biting? As ambitious as a Tube journey from Chancery Lane to Holborn; as biting as a gummy old dachshund snoring by the hearth…

They [these ‘crude fusillades’] are the conventional wisdom of our time, repeated by everyone from the Socialist Worker to the Daily Mail…

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question…

Yes indeed. One journal in particular which has consistently added its voice to this conformist wisdom, which Wheen unaccountably omits, is Private Eye, the, um, satirical organ. Francis Wheen, I believe, writes for Private Eye.

Shome mistake, surely?