Author: Mick Hartley

A doctor, summoned once to examine him, asked him if he ever drank.

“Sometimes,” Parker replied, “I have sherry before dinner.”

A fine appreciation of Charlie Parker, 50 years after his death (via ArtsJournal).

The influence of Charlie Parker has been so all-pervading that it’s hard to imagine music without it; his influence has reached places where it would scarcely be suspected. Michael Jackson, the altoist Charles McPherson once pointed out to me, is affected “whether he knows it or not” – because his arranger, Quincy Jones, is a Parker follower. Like some trace element in the atmosphere, Parker’s sound is almost everywhere and, for the same reason, virtually invisible.

ws about the negotiations has a shelf-life of no more than a few hours.

Omar at Iraq the Model is reporting that talks between the United Iraqi Coalition and the Kurdish Alliance have collapsed.

For some better news, check out his earlier post about Iraqi traders boycotting Syrian goods.

The students at Starkville High School have compiled a list of Mississippi musicians (via Metafilter). From the legends, like Robert Johnson, Elvis or W.C.Handy, to the well-known, like BB King, Tammy Wynette or Lester Young, to the obscure, like, um, Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Ayan Hirsi Ali had to go into hiding after renouncing her faith on television. […]

Mr Hussein told The Times: “It’s been absolutely appalling. This is England — where I was born and raised. You would never imagine Christians would suffer in such a way.”

The police have not charged anyone, but told him to leave the area. “We feel completely isolated, utterly helpless. I have been utterly failed by the authorities. If it was white racists attacking an Asian guy, there would be an absolute outcry,” he said. […]

With other converts, Yasmin has helped to set up a series of support groups across England, who have adopted a method of operating normally associated with dissidents in dictatorships, not democracies. They not only have to meet in secret, but cannot advertise their services, and have to vet those that approach them for infiltrators.

“There are so many who convert from Islam to Christianity. We have 70 people on our list who we support, and the list is growing. We don’t want others to suffer like we have,” she said.

Although some are beaten “black and blue” for their faith, others suffer even more. The family of an 18-year-old girl whom Yasmin was helping found that she had been hiding a Bible in her room, and visiting church secretly. “I tried to do as much as possible to help her, but they took her to Pakistan ‘on holiday’. Three weeks later, she was drowned — they said that she went out in the middle of the night and slipped in the river, but she just wouldn ’t have done that,” said Yasmin.

ert Mugabe is busy turning Zimbabwe into a terror state, with starvation used as a political weapon. There’s the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Togo. There’s slavery still in Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Chad. The AIDS crisis is ongoing. And then there’s the tragedy of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, which could easily be the subject of an equivalent article, on why we’ve paid so little attention in the West to the massive loss of life and brutalisation of a whole country: a country that a couple of decades ago looked so hopeful after the Idi Amin nightmare.

Of all these, Darfur and Zimbabwe probably generate the most news stories, for the excellent reason that we can see what the problem is, and what a solution might look like. In Darfur, we know that the Sudanese government is directly implicated, and that the international community needs to get tough with them. In Zimbabwe, we can see Mugabe’s descent into tyranny. But the Congo? What might an answer look like there? Who could even begin to provide a coherent account of what’s been going on? Let’s see….after the Rwandan genocide, the UN set up camps over the Congolese border, which were swiftly taken over by the Hutus responsible for the genocide, so the new Rwandan government sent troops in after them, then Zimbabwe and Uganda and Angola sent in troops, and then….well, it all degenerated into civil war, and that’s about when I lost the plot, and I suspect I’m not alone. I think there’s a Kabila father and son in there somewhere. As for a solution, all you can do is suggest weakly that this must be a matter for the UN, but since UN troops have been busy making a name for themselves by raping the locals, well, the situation is lacking somewhat in moral clarity.

Macintyre concludes:

The tangled civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (which officially ended in 2003, but still rages on in the east) has killed ten times as many people as last December’s tsunami. Relief agencies describe this as the worst humanitarian tragedy since the Holocaust itself. Ten million people have been displaced from their homes, and more than three million are beyond the reach of aid groups. Yet there are few letters of outrage in the papers; the novelists and pamphleteers have barely lifted a pen; you could count the number of angry bishops on the fingers of one, mutilated hand.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is too often deployed as a cliché for black savagery on the dark continent, when it is truly an indictment of the black hearts of the white men who came to enslave and steal, and were utterly corrupted by their own greed. The heart of darkness belongs to Mr Kurtz, dying surrounded by the severed heads of Africans.

It took a concerted campaign of moral indignation to shine a light into that darkness, and Leopold’s legacy continues to ensure misery in the most dramatically failed state in Africa. The tragedy of the Congo lies not just in the terrible events taking place there, but also in our own acceptance of the horror, the horror with a shudder, and a shrug.

I don’t know….must everything be turned into a navel-gazing session about our own moral shortcomings?

It is impossible to separate the art of Joseph Beuys from his teaching…. This symposium explores how teaching was as much a medium of Beuys’s art as drawing or sculpture.” Coming up in April there’s a discussion on Joseph Beuys and Christianity – “Beuys’s concern with transcending materialism found expression in an eclectic and personal religious iconography, drawing on pantheism, Norse, and Celtic myths and other spiritual sources. The links to Christianity are especially strong.” Then there are a series of Social Sculpture Research Seminars – “Shelley Sacks, interdisciplinary artist and Director of the Social Sculpture Research Unit [at Oxford Brookes University], worked with Joseph Beuys for many years. She is joined by a number of German and UK practitioners in these unique research seminars. By enabling a closer understanding of Beuys’s work and contemporary social sculpture projects, participants will have the opportunity to consider a range of expanded art practices committed to facilitating a democratic and ecologically sustainable world.” [“Social Sculpture” is a piece of Beuysian jargon: “He formulated a theory of ‘social sculpture’, exploring ways in which the creative impulse that shaped a work of art could also influence the world in which we live.”]

If Beuys has, as claimed, shifted the emphasis “from what an artist makes to his personality, activities and opinions” then we have a recipe for precisely this: the cult of the artist. I always though it was a tired commonplace about the art gallery replacing the church in our secular age, but perhaps there’s more to it than I’d realised.

es to preserve peace and justice. But this lofty ideal, enshrined in the UN Charter, is at serious variance with the facts of the UN’s history.

After the Korean War, the UN stood by and did nothing for four decades as some of the worst crimes against humanity were committed across and within borders. It did nothing when the Soviet Union imposed its will by force on Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. It did nothing to stop Pol Pot’s genocidal wars in South East Asia or the Indonesian cremation of East Timor. Just as Mao Zedong was busy executing anyone who expressed the slightest reservation about the wisdom of the Cultural Revolution, he was rewarded by being given a seat on the Security Council.

At the very moments when these hideous events were falling like blows on the face of freedom, the main obsession of the UN was with condemning Israel’s attempts to ensure its own survival in the face of Arab determination to wipe it out. Though it apparently could not be persuaded that totalitarian dictatorship was incompatible with its founding principles, the UN General Assembly did find the time to condemn Zionism as racism.

Of course, its defenders say, that was in the Cold War, when the world was regrettably divided into hostile camps, and the UN Security Council was checkmated by the veto from doing anything of substance.

Since then things have changed. Look at the first Gulf War. Didn’t that show how international co-operation through the UN can confer legitimacy on the use of force in the defence of law and justice? Well, perhaps. Some of us would argue that it was the need to keep that unwieldy coalition from collapsing that the war was not prosecuted to its proper conclusion — the removal of Saddam Hussein.

But even if this was a fine moment, it was also clearly the high-water mark of post-Cold War UN action. The UN quickly fell back into its familiar torpor. It failed in the Balkans. It did nothing to stop genocide in Africa. And Iraq — well we know about Iraq. The truth is, if we had waited for the UN’s say-so to promote the cause of freedom in the past 50 years, we’d still be waiting.

Freedom is on the march around the world. What the UN needs now is to get in front of that glorious procession, rather than lag behind it. John Bolton may be the man for the task.

His diplomacy has earned him some serious opprobrium. North Korea once described him as “human scum”. Which, if you stop to think about that country and its contribution to human history, is one heck of a compliment.

ericans.

What about some gene therapy then, if one mutation provides protection? The article merely notes that Professor Duncan, one of the authors, “is not hopeful that the genetic mutation, can be reproduced artificially to create protection”.

ence on the subject.

The picture that emerges is stark: any global map of terrorism would show that a majority of Muslim countries are victims of terror. Modern terrorism has caused the death of more Muslims than members of any other faith.

“It is unfair that images of this place are always included in any television report about terrorism,” says Habib, a 40-year old shoe merchant from Karachi, pointing his finger at the Grand Mosque.

This triggers a commotion in which many voices call for a distinction between “normal Muslims, people like us” and those who have adopted terrorism as an ideology in the name of Islam.

d. Oh what show of strength that was.

This is the essence of my disgust: our leaders can’t tell the difference between mediocrity and strength.

Still, even a mediocre inquisitor has sufficient power to detain and torture. This is the essence of my fear. And my terror. My would-be torturer will be a mediocre figure, working for a mediocre President, in a mediocre country, going through mediocre crises, that could have been averted through the application of a mediocre amount of wisdom (they had none), still the torture will be no less painful.

The sign posted next to my apartment block says: “We are all with you…”

to the bitter end, of course. For what other end could the likes of him offer for the likes of us?

And this suggests that the easy optimism of last week already seems misplaced:

Lebanon came almost full circle yesterday when Omar Karami, the pro-Syrian prime minister forced from office last week by massive opposition protests, was virtually assured reinstatement after a majority in parliament backed him to form the next government.

An unofficial count gave Mr Karami more than half the votes in the 128-member legislature, and a formal announcement by President Emile Lahoud was expected by today.

The turnaround came a day after several hundred thousand people took to the streets of Beirut following a call by Hezbollah to show support for Syria in the face of demands from the international community that Damascus pull its troops out of Lebanon.