TLS on Weather

by Nicholas Hiley

a review of TURBULENCE by Giles Foden
A novel of the atmosphere
351pp. Faber. ¿16.99.978 0 571205226

Giles Foden's new novel focuses on the weather forecasting for D-Day, June 6, 1944. It was an intriguing historical moment, for the Allies assembled three two-man teams of forecasters, from the Met Office, the Admiralty and the United States military, to establish what Foden describes as "a safe weather forecast that would allow thousands of men to land by sea and air on a stretch of the French coast on a single day at the optimum time". Foden argues that "weather forecasters are heroes, so difficult is the task they face". He has chosen as his narrator Henry Meadows, a British meteorologist looking back at D-Day thirty-six years later. A research scientist with a Cambridge doctorate in fluid dynamics, Meadows had volunteered for the wartime Met Office from a post in the Cavendish Laboratory. He is writing his account in 1980, as he travels from the Antarctic to the Arabian desert on a ship made of ice, the realization of an abortive Second World War operation named "Project Habakkuk".

In Turbulence, General Eisenhower asks the meteorologists to find him "a good spell ... during the next month or so". In reality, meteorology was never the prime factor in deciding the date of D-Day. As early as November 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt had told Stalin that France would be invaded in May 1944. That was postponed to June as the scale of the operation grew, and the approximate day was known well in advance. The landings had to take place at low water around dawn, during a full moon, and that meant June 5, 6, or 7.
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Foden conjures up a race against time, in which "one man's prediction could change the face of the world". But in fact, the three teams of meteorologists were not asked to find good weather for D-Day, only to veto those days they believed would be bad, working just forty-eight hours ahead. On June 3, they vetoed the first date, with a two-to-one split between the teams, and were proved right. The following day they decided, initially by a two-to-one split, that they could not veto June 6, and the invasion went ahead in conditions that were only just tolerable.

Having the meteorologists as heroes makes a good story, but it creates a significant problem. Meadows is the standard fictional scientist: a figure of towering intellect, who is nevertheless well below the average reader in ordinary social skills. He admits to being inarticulate and "emotionally withdrawn", and is acknowledged to be an awkward, "childlike", "inward, unreflexive creature". The problem for the author is that this obsessive and introverted narrator has to act as a guide through the complex emotional landscape of a novel.

In fact, there is little about Meadows's narration to suggest that he is a scientist, "reducing things to their underlying values". He thinks not in equations but in images, associations and dreams - "the mind's strong poetry". He is captivated by patterns of memory "streaming from the stern as the queen of the night passes in her ghostly cloud-ship", and his lyrical evocations of an African childhood - "the rows of tobacco where they hung, lion-tawney, in the curing sheds" - are clearly Foden's own. When Meadows has to be shown doing real science, we get little more than the Hollywood standby of a quick shot of an equation followed by a sequence of dissolves. "I solved calculation after calculation", Meadows recalls breezily of the final hours before D-Day: "My hand moving quickly under the desk lamp, covering the blank sheets ...".

This absence of a scientific sensibility need not have mattered, for Foden's intention was clearly to unite the book with an overriding meteorological metaphor. In a reversal of the pathetic fallacy, he presents human emotions as a sort of weather: "a world of disintegration and endless renewal", where all that seems fixed and intelligible from one standpoint "becomes disordered and unpredictable viewed from another". We are like particles of air, moved by huge systems too vast to comprehend, and, like the D-Day planners, we peer into an uncertain future, desperate to locate order in a world where "disorder is always waiting to pounce".

Foden repeatedly invokes this metaphor, in an effort to make it work. It never does, but it still has a lasting impact because, perhaps unconsciously, Foden reduces all the characters in the novel to discrete particles. As Meadows treads his path towards D-Day, it becomes clear that Turbulence is less about prediction than about the impossibility of predicting, or indeed of imagining any lasting relationships between things or people. All the friendships here are false or undermined by jealousy, all the relationships are bleak and impermanent, and when Meadows clutches at "a dream of comfort", it results only in pain, damage and violent death.

Turbulence has indeed a barren heart. It was brave of Foden to construct a novel around the figure of an isolated and lonely scientist, telling his story on "an ice ship heading for the desert", but that bleakness has permeated the entire work. The image of Meadows labouring on Project Habakkuk, to construct a cold "Frankenstein's monster of a ship", could stand for the whole book.

Poem du jour

Song For an Unborn Brother
by C.J. Driver

The one who should have been the first,
My mother lost at thirteen weeks.
My parents saved his name for me
And one there sleeps, and one here wakes.

I wonder what he might have been
since what I am would not exist.
What little gap there seems to be
Between my body and the dust.

So when I'm dead (as dead as him)
Will I then seem as never born?
A shadow lost when lights went out?
A matchhead struck which didn't burn?

Abundance thrives despite our loss:
The glass reflects, the glass refracts -
My brother's flesh and my own self
Still suppositions more than facts.

TLS on Stalin's Terror

Forgotten atrocities of 1937

The West has never known the full scale, and the bitter ironies, of Stalinist crimes against humanity
by Jane Yager


In the part of the world that the Cold War defined as the West, only the roughest outline of the Soviet atrocities of the 1930s has entered the popular imagination: Stalin, a great terror, a great purge. As the German historian Karl Schlögel notes in Terror und Traum, a world that committed to memory the names Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz stumbled over Vorkuta, Kolyma and Magadan. Primo Levi was read; Varlam Shalamov wasn’t. And so Stalin’s victims died a second death, this time in memory.
Overshadowed not only by the Nazi Holocaust but also by the size of the Soviet death toll in the Second World War, the Stalinist atrocities were walled away on the other side of a divided Europe: the post-Mauerfall opening of Soviet archives filled in details for academics but not so much for the broader public. No book could be more equal to the task of restoring Stalin’s victims to Western memory than Schlögel’s Terror und Traum: it is an extraordinary work of scholarship, prose and remembrance.
Terror und Traum encircles the reader with a panoramic view of the city of Moscow in and around the year 1937. The book is a montage of three dozen short chapters, their settings strikingly disparate: building lots and Red Riviera cruise ships, mass graves and store display windows. Pairing the terror of the Stalinist USSR with its dreams, Schlögel reveals a Moscow of 1937 that, however horrific, is anything but drab or grey: life is “heterogeneous, chaotic, anarchic and obstinate” in this city of dizzying acceleration.
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Schlögel began his career writing about Moscow. A quarter of a century ago, he walked through Moscow armed with a 1920s city plan and Walter Benjamin’s Moskauer Tagebuch. The resultant book, Moskau lesen (“Reading Moscow”, 1984), showed the topographically minded approach to history that has become characteristic of Schlögel’s work. His subsequent essay “Die Mitte liegt ostwärts” (“The centre lies eastward”, 1986) pitched him into the Mitteleuropa debate then raging among European poets and thinkers such as George Konrad and Milan Kundera. The works that followed explored the cities of East-Central Europe – St Petersburg as a laboratory of the modern, the Berlin of Russian émigrés – as well as such overlooked “non-places” as a used car market in provincial Lithuania. In the recent theoretical work Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit (“Reading Time Through Space”, 2003), Schlögel advocated a “spatial turn”, a way of writing history with an awareness of place. Terror und Traum treats the space of the city quite differently from Moskau lesen. In 1937, Moscow was no place for a strolling flâneur. Borrowing a term from Mikhail Bakhtin, Schlögel sets forth the Moscow of 1937 as a chronotope, a specific and inextricable bundle of time and space whose defining features are despotic arbitrariness, suddenness, shock, attack out of nowhere, disappearance and the blurring of the line between reality and phantasm. The reader does not walk through 1937 Moscow but rather stands in a paralysing 360 degree view, as if looking out from the eye of a storm.
The book’s sources are rich and varied, showing both deep archival research and careful attention to the surfaces of newspapers and magazines. One of these sources is Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel of the Moscow of the 1930s, The Master and Margarita, which Schlögel anoints as a “navigation instrument” to deliver the reader into the maelstrom of his book. The first chapter of Terror und Traum joins Bulgakov’s character Margarita on her supernatural flight above Moscow. Soaring alongside Margarita, the reader views the city from above in its topographic entirety. Bulgakov’s fictional Moscow, where reality melds with the fantastical, looks a lot like Schlögel’s historical Moscow: denunciation as everyday life, vanishing characters, sudden and unexpected death.
Leaving The Master and Margarita behind, the reader is plunged into a city that was in many senses one big construction site. In central Moscow, the steel foundations of the grandiose, never-to-be-completed Palace of Soviets rose from a massive pit where six years earlier the tsars’ Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had been dynamited to rubble. This site was the most dramatic of the uncountable works in progress in a city that was being torn down and built anew, expanded and modernized at an impossible pace. As Moscow was forced overnight into a modern metropolis, 2 million displaced peasants streamed into the city within a single decade, a rural migration of historically unprecedented speed and size. Linguistically and ethnically diverse, arriving from all corners of the Soviet Union, they found a housing shortage so severe that many slept under factory work benches, in metro tunnels or in dirt burrows.
As the city lurched towards modernity, its denizens dreamt of utopia – a dream that was every bit as central to Schlögel’s Moscow of 1937 as the Terror. The athletic Soviet youth, “born or raised after the Revolution, already a child of the new order”, best embodied it: “The social mobility set off by the Russian Revolution had loosed an inexhaustible reservoir of talent and ability . . . . Stalinism is youth plus Soviet might, authoritarian power plus the beauty of the athletic body”. The “forever forward-striving” Soviet youth came into its own in 1937, a generation rising up to fill the spaces left empty by those executed and imprisoned in the purges. Although extraordinary, the expectations of Muscovites in that year were not delusional – they had, after all, seen the realization of such recently unimaginable miracles as electric lighting, running water and indoor heating.
Calling his book a “narrative of simultaneity”, Schlögel draws out harrowing ironies and concurrences. The public celebration of the opening of the Moscow–Volga Canal coincided with the execution of the overseers of its construction. A popular book praising the USSR’s affinities with the United States appeared at a time when individuals could be shot for real or imagined personal connections to America. While the Soviet secret police drew up their execution lists of the imagined internal enemy, a real external enemy was making its own “to-kill” lists for Moscow – and many of the same names appear on both the Soviet and the Nazi lists. About Red Square, Schlögel writes: “Everything converges: a ticker-tape parade and a plebiscite on killing, the atmosphere of a folk festival and the thirst for revenge, a rollicking carnival and orgies of hate. Red Square as the true arena of the year 1937: at once fairground and gallows”.
The terror that rises through the book culminates on the city’s periphery in the field of Butovo, a site where the secret police regularly conducted mass killings throughout 1937 and 1938. A secret police order of July 30, 1937, set forward execution and arrest quotas to be filled in each region of the Soviet Union: the authorities in Western Siberia, for example, had four months to find 5,000 “Category 1” Trotskyite terrorists to execute and 12,000 somewhat less menacing “Category 2” terrorists to imprison for eight to ten years. In Butovo, as throughout the book, Schlögel handles the voices of the dead with unhurried grace: lengthy quotations from eyewitnesses mingle with gruesome secret police charts and instructions.
A voice given surprisingly little exposure in Terror und Traum is that of Stalin. The reader encounters him primarily through the eyes of a foreign visitor, Lion Feuchtwanger, a Jewish German anti-fascist who, as a bestselling novelist, was granted a three-hour private reception with Stalin on the eve of the second show trial. Terror und Traum is about Stalinism, but – in contrast to much of what has been written about this context – it is not concerned with Stalin himself. He is granted no priority above the book’s hundreds of other subjects.
Schlögel also explores how Moscow came to reach a point of rupture in European civilization, a “bacchanal of self-destruction”, an “excess within excess”. Without trying to explain what happened, he offers a concrete motive for the massacres of 1937. It is no coincidence, he argues, that the Politburo order for the executions that were to be carried out in places like Butovo came on the same day that rules and regulations for free elections were issued. Elimination of anyone who could pose a threat to Stalin’s power necessarily preceded the vote. “The fiction of ‘free, general, secret elections’ and the ‘cleansing’ of society were two sides of the same process, the manufacturing of the ‘unity of the Soviet people’.” Though there are motives in this Moscow, there is no overarching theory.
In Terror und Traum, the author dedicates his abilities as a writer and scholar not to a thesis but to a task. In his acceptance speech for the Sigmund Freud Prize in 2004, Schlögel spoke of the historian’s task of bringing the living and the dead to Augenhöhe – eye level – with one another. The illiterate farmers who signed with an X the confession to a capital crime made up of words they couldn’t read, the doomed geologists and polar explorers who made the USSR rich by mapping its natural resources only to find themselves bound for the firing squad. With a magician’s aplomb, Schlögel retrieves from oblivion these together with countless other faces, bringing them not only to equal footing with the reader, but also palpably close.

Karl Schlögel
TERROR UND TRAUM
Moskau 1937
816pp. Hanser. 29.90 euros.
978 3 446 23081 1

Jane Yager is a freelance writer and translator living in Berlin.

Photo du Jour

Sophie Marceau + Monica Belucci

TLS on Leninist Auden

Comrade Auden

Unpublished verses by W. H. Auden that show him learning his trade – as a documentary film-maker

by David Collard

For some six months in 1935–6, W. H. Auden was employed by the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit on a modest salary of £3 a week, even less than he had made in his previous job as a schoolmaster. (His friend and collaborator Christopher Isherwood, by contrast, would soon be earning £200 a month working for Alexander Korda at Shepperton Studios.) For this whole period Auden would be intensively and productively engaged – as scriptwriter, assistant director, lecturer, writer and, on one occasion, in front of the camera, dressed as a department store Father Christmas. Harry Watt, the co-director of Night Mail, the most celebrated product of Auden’s time in the film industry, recalled him at work (in his memoir Don’t Look at the Camera):
Auden sat down to write his verse . . . . He got a bare table at the end of a dark, smelly corridor. We were now bursting at the seams, and the last corner available was in what was inevitably called “the back passage”. It ran parallel with the theatre, where films were constantly being shown. At one end, a bunch of messenger boys played darts, wrestled, and brewed tea.
At the other end, Auden, serene and uncomplaining, turned out some of the finest verse he has ever written. As it was a commentary, it had, of course, to fit the picture, so he would bring sections to us as he wrote them. When it did not fit, we just said so, and it was crumpled up and thrown into the waste-paper basket! Some beautiful lines and stanzas went into oblivion in this casual, ruthless way. Auden just shrugged, and wrote more.
In addition to the low wages, which his documentary colleagues saw as proof of their uncompromising, high-minded, non-commercial integrity, the Unit offered Auden a congenial, predominantly male working environment and an atmosphere of shoestring budgets, cheap digs, creative exuberance and missionary zeal.
In October 1935, soon after Auden had joined the Unit, a man named Ivor Montagu was organizing a Sunday afternoon screening at the New Gallery Cinema in Regent Street. Montagu (1904–84) is an original and likeable figure. Born into a wealthy banking family, he overcame his advantages and in 1925 was co-founder of the Film Society, which mounted one-off screenings of mostly foreign films, early silents, avant-garde shorts and the latest productions of the emerging documentary film movement, and lasted until 1939. Predictably, the contemporary press mocked its intellectual pretensions and even Montagu’s mother referred to “Ivor’s Sunday afternoons of gloom”, but it was an immediate success and a forerunner of today's British Film Institute. These 1930s screenings were challenging, unpredictable and wide-ranging.
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One programme consisted entirely of films made by women, including Germaine Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman, memorably rejected by the British censors as being “so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If it has a meaning it is doubtless objectionable”. Montagu was also politically active – initially as a member of the Labour Party (Holborn Branch), later joining the Communist Party, learning Russian and befriending Sergei Eisenstein during the great director’s American period. He was the first ever film critic for the Observer, and worked with Michael Balcon as associate producer on such Hitchcock classics as The 39 Steps, The Secret Agent and Sabotage (the last-named being a particular favourite of Auden’s). Auden was a paid-up member of the Society, and a regular at the New Gallery.
The supporting programme at the forthcoming October screening would include a dazzling abstract work by Len Lye, Edgar Anstey’s influential Housing Problems, and the premiere of the experimental Coal Face, the first collaboration between Auden and the promising young composer Benjamin Britten. The main feature, though, was to be the world premiere of a Russian propaganda film commissioned by Joseph Stalin to mark the tenth anniversary of Lenin’s death. The director was Denis Kaufman (1896–1954), better known by his adopted name Dziga Vertov (“Spinning Top”). His new film was called Three Songs of Lenin and was structured around peasant folk songs eulogizing the dead Soviet leader and promoting Stalin as his political heir. Montagu was busy arranging subtitles and intertitles, and soon realized that the songs deserved a more poetic treatment in English. He needed advice, and urgently. What about that chap working for the Post Office?
In December last year I was working through the Ivor Montagu papers, which entered the BFI’s Special Collections archive in 1985. My main interest was in the first screening of Coal Face, but the next item in the pile was a stiff white envelope that contained a typed note: “The following titles are ‘verse’ titles to be held up for a few days while wording is checked in consultation with Auden”, dozens of scruffy typescript sheets in an unfamiliar format, and three manuscript pages in Auden’s best handwriting, blue ink on cheap unwatermarked paper, held together by a paper clip, a 1930s original by the look of it. The Montagu collection is one of the most frequently consulted in the BFI’s archive, but until now no one seemed to have recognized the importance of this material. Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor, confirmed that these poems had never been published and that this was a significant find.
The papers fell into four separate categories: (a) an eleven-page typescript, being a literal translation by Montagu of the three songs and prose commentary; (b) three pages of handwritten verses by Auden, with pencil corrections by Montagu; (c) a second typescript (thirteen pages long, but incomplete) incorporating Auden’s renderings into instructions for the title-makers; and (d) another copy in an unknown hand of the three songs, with some minor variations from (b) and (c). The typescripts are evocative working documents, covered in scribbled numbers, calculations and erasures, and were clearly passed from Auden to Montagu and then to the title-makers and back again. They show that Auden was already capable of working within the severe technical constraints imposed by the documentary medium, composing verses timed to accompany a rapid, headlong montage sequence, collaborating with others in what amounts to a trial run for Night Mail, with its relentless mechanized rhythms. By comparing the literal translation with the final version it is also possible to see how Auden’s genius engaged with the unpromising source material.
The intertitled print of the film has not survived, and so for over seventy years the only known record of Auden’s contribution was a rather terse programme note: “The Society thanks Mr W. H. Auden for kindly advising on the English rendering of many passages in the songs”. This manages to be both condescending and inaccurate, given that Auden clearly did far more than offer a few tips. Consider for example the literal translation of the first lines of Song One as it appears in typescript (a), complete with erratic punctuation and grammar, describing the political awakening of a veiled peasant woman:

My face was in a dark prison
blind was my life
without light or learning
I was slave though unchained
but into this dark came
a light-ray
The ray of the truth of Lenin.

Auden’s versions of Songs One and Two are reproduced in full opposite, along with the version of Song Three as it appears in typescript (c). Immediately striking is how very English these verses appear; they could almost have sprung from the pages of Hymns Ancient and Modern. There are direct links, as Mendelson has pointed out, to the vibrant choruses in The Dog Beneath the Skin, Auden’s theatre collaboration with Isherwood, also of 1935.
Although the three-page Auden manuscript appears complete it does not include a rendering of the Third Song. It may be that the original prose version was judged adequate, or that tight deadlines would not allow for completion. It is possible that Montagu and Auden disagreed over the content before the Third Song was worked up into verse. This would not be unlikely, given Auden’s lack of serious political commitment, his chronic playfulness, and Montagu’s own ideological zeal. There is an intriguing example of what appears to be Montagu’s revisionism in a line in Song Two. Auden’s neat handwritten version runs:
We loved him as we loved our steppes; no more than that.
A pencilled comma (not in Auden’s hand and presumably therefore Montagu’s) alters the line to read:
We loved him as we loved our steppes; no, more than that.
Presumably Auden intended the meaning indicated by the inserted comma, but it is at least possible that he didn’t. Auden’s whole manuscript is very lightly punctuated, and he was in any case notoriously slipshod in such matters, but it is worth noting how drastically that comma changes the meaning of the line from one of level-headed peasant good sense (i.e., we loved our leader and our land in equal measure) to an overblown rhetorical sentiment which doesn’t ring true (ie, the thought suddenly occurs to us that we loved our leader even more than we love our land). Auden’s punctuation was consistently erratic, however, and the Stalinist implications of a single comma should not be taken too seriously.
Following its New Gallery showing, Three Songs of Lenin was screened in New York the following month at what was incorrectly claimed to be the world premiere, on November 6. This was one day ahead of the first public screening in Russia, an ominous sign that the production had not met with official approval. The American programme notes include extracts from alternative translations of the three songs (“A veil of darkness. Then slowly – light”) and there are breathless eulogies from such figures as Will Rogers, André Malraux and H. G. Wells (“One of the greatest and most beautiful films I have ever seen”). Since then the film has all but disappeared from view, eclipsed by the political horrors of the Stalin era and critical indifference. Dziga Vertov’s reputation has changed over the years. Man With a Movie Camera (1929) was universally acclaimed, is still in circulation and remains his best-known achievement, but by the mid-1930s he had fallen out of favour with the Stalin regime and his career had ground to a halt by the time of his death in 1954. He has since been described as a practitioner of totalitarian cinema, and as an apologist for the Stalin era. Though complete nonsense, this is the sort of thing that rapidly becomes an established critical orthodoxy.
Auden’s verses apart, there are admittedly prose sections in Three Songs of Lenin which will provoke a modern audience to uneasy laughter. What are we to make, for instance, of the following titles from Song Three, which awaited Auden’s approval, and which appear partly in strident upper case? “THE GREAT PUPIL OF THE GREAT LENIN, STALIN, HAS LED US INTO BATTLE. / Into battle with our age-long backwardness.”
Does that second title contain a deliberate, undermining ambiguity? Is “backwardness” the thing against which the speaker is battling? Or is it the quality that defines followers of “the great pupil”? And what of the double-edged cry repeated five times towards the end of the film: “If Lenin could see our country now!”? Much of the film’s English commentary seems to a modern audience a balance between plain seriousness and a more troubling, equivocal tone. The show trials and purges of the Stalin era were still in the future, of course, but other poets, such as Osip Mandelstam in his “Stalin Epigram” (1933), were already ferocious in their denunciation of Lenin’s successor in the wake of enforced collectivization and the famine which followed, killing millions.
Soon we shall have the chance to judge for ourselves, thanks to the enthusiastic efforts of Nathalie Morris, the Special Collections curator at the BFI, and her colleagues. Highlights from the original programme, including a rare print of Three Songs for Lenin, will be given a special screening at the BFI Southbank (formerly National Film Theatre) in London at 6.15 on June 8. Auden’s verses will be read by the actor Simon Callow and for the first time in almost seventy-five years Uncle Wiz and the Spinning Top will be reunited.


W. H. Auden’s versions of the anonymous songs are copyright by the Estate of W. H. Auden and printed by permission.

Song One

My face in a dark prison lay
And blind by life remained
No learning mine nor light of day,
A slave although unchained
Till through my darkness shone a ray
And Lenin’s truth I gained

We never looked upon his face
We never heard his voice
Yet closer than a father he
Much closer to us was

No father for his children did
What LENIN did for us

From darkness thick he made a light
From deserts gardens green
And out of death the life he brought
Through him the [weak] poor have seen.
A million sand grains make a mound
A million corn a sack
A million of the weakest straws
Break the strong camel’s back.

With all he had he took our part
He gave his brain, his blood, his heart.



Song Two

We loved him as we loved our steppes; no [,] more than that.
If he would but return, we would give away our tents and steppes [,]
If he would but return, we would give away our lives.

Never will we forget him; our grandchildren’s grandchildren shall remember
He founded our party of steel; he built it from year to year
Taught it and tempered it; in the stubborn and ceaseless struggle it was tempered
He was tireless in work; his eyes were full of irony and sparking with wisdom
Now he smiles kindly, [deleted “now”] his burning speech is inspiring the masses

He was simple and straight in his manner; the Russians called him just Ilytch
He lived in a hut; in a hut beyond the marshes

Song Three

(Montagu typescript)

in Moscow
in the big
stone city
in a square there
stands a tent
and in it lies
LENIN
and if ever you should
be in sorrow
then go you to this
tent and look
on LENIN
an your grief will pass
away from you, like water (x2)
and your sorrow float away,
like leaves upon the brook
our life is become
sturdy and joyful –
true is our Lenin
path



David Collard works for an educational charity and is researching "Auden on Film", a study of the poet’s engagement in cinema in the 1930s and 60s.

Travel: Helsinki

Listening to: Justin Nozuka

If there ever will be a musical Kevin Bacon game, Justin is a perfect bridge to that family. He is a son of Kevin Bacon's wife (Kyra Sedgwick)'s sister.

Amazing talent!

TLS On How Mossad helped Hamas

on Mossad

A botched assassination attempt by seven Israeli agents and the rise to power of Khalid Mishal

by Duncan Campbell-Smith

In March 1997, disappointed over the latest reversals in the peace process in the Middle East, King Hussein of Jordan wrote a letter to Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister of ten months’ standing, that must figure as one of the saddest documents in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Having openly endorsed Netanyahu in the Israeli general election of May 1996 – a disastrous miscalculation – Hussein felt a deep sense of betrayal. Netanyahu had wasted no opportunity in the ensuing months to disparage the peace process begun in Oslo in 1993, and to assert a combative line on new settlements in the Occupied Territories.
The King saw his vision of an eventual peace for the region turning to “a distant elusive mirage”. The letter is quoted at some length in Avi Shlaim’s authoritative biography, Lion of Jordan (2007). “I could remain aloof”, wrote Hussein, “if the very lives of all Arabs and Israelis and their future were not fast sliding towards an abyss of bloodshed and disaster, brought about by fear and despair.” And so it proved. In Kill Khalid, Paul McGeough, an Australian journalist with long experience as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, chronicles the bloodshed and disaster that followed. Things have fallen apart just as Hussein predicted – and went on lamenting, until his death in February 1999 – and it is the members of Hamas, full of passionate intensity, who have been the chief beneficiaries of the fear and despair. McGeough’s narrative, constructed from the scribbled notes of years on the road, as well as dozens of privileged interviews and a careful gleaning of the media record, recounts the story of the Islamist party. In the process, it draws on the wider history of the triangular relationship between the Palestinians, the Jordanians and the Israelis over the past half-century to explain the dramatic rise to power of Hamas. If McGeough treats the suicide-bomb strategists of the movement with an impartial eye that some readers may find unsettling, he has nonetheless produced a compelling and wholly credible account of a political phenomenon that most outside observers misjudged for years – and with which US policy-makers must contend, as hopes rise for an Obama peace initiative.
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The undisputed leader of Hamas today, barricaded with his family inside a fortified office complex on the outskirts of Damascus, is Khalid Mishal. The racy title of McGeough’s book sums up his central thesis, that Mishal came to power largely as the result of a botched assassination attempt by seven Mossad agents in September 1997.
Eschewing the more familiar air-to-ground missile, car bomb or silent bullet in the night, Israel’s secret service opted for a poison that would supposedly result in death a day or so later, while leaving no clues for the autopsy. Stepping out of his car on the way to the office one morning, Mishal encountered a couple of men posing as tourists. One caught his attention by noisily pulling open a soda can; the other leapt up and squirted a deadly toxin into his ear. At this point, however, Mossad’s plan went awry. A bodyguard chased and caught the two assailants, who were handed over to the police. Mishal himself was taken to hospital in time to halt, and eventually reverse, the usually fatal after-effects. And four Mossad accomplices were run to ground in the local Israeli embassy.
Unfortunately for all concerned, except Mishal, this was the embassy in Amman. The intended victim was a Jordanian citizen, living openly in the capital with the tacit approval of the government. Worse than a crime, the assassination attempt was a blunder with calamitous consequences. It had been ordered not only in total contravention of the existing understandings between Jordan and Israel, but also days after Hussein – in a last desperate bid for a breakthrough – had sent a plan to the Israeli Prime Minister for a thirty-year truce that he hoped might conceivably win support from all Palestinian factions, including Hamas.
The attack was therefore seen as the crudest possible rebuff. Hussein and his government reacted accordingly, while Arabs in the street rejoiced at the sight of Mossad operatives caught behaving like Keystone Cops. Only after the intervention of President Clinton and secret midnight visits to Amman by Netanyahu and several senior colleagues, including Ariel Sharon, was the crisis eventually brought to an end.
For Netanyahu himself, the episode was hugely damaging. He had authorized the assassination personally, in defiance not only of that private letter from Hussein six months earlier but also of wiser councils within his own government. (Thus did Hussein discover, in Professor Shlaim’s words, that Netanyahu “was devious, dishonest and completely unreliable” – a judgement McGeough amply endorses at several points.) The ensuing breach with Hussein undermined Netanyahu’s credibility with his colleagues and the wider public, and contributed directly to his defeat and temporary withdrawal from politics less than two years later.
McGeough devotes a quarter of his book to an account of this episode – literally a blow-by-blow account when it comes to the fight scene with the “tourists”. But he takes a hundred pages to set the background first, tracing Mishal’s life from his birth on the West Bank in 1956 to his family’s flight after the Six Day War in 1967 and his teenage years as an exile in 1970s Kuwait. Here, as a college student and budding physics teacher, a devout young Mishal (“a nerd before the term was invented”) committed himself to the Muslim Brotherhood. He gathered around him in the early 1980s a coterie of political activists, who rejected as hopelessly corrupt and ineffective the secular version of Palestinian resistance led by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the PLO. While Arafat’s forces were cornered by Sharon’s army in Beirut and expelled to Tunis, Mishal and his fellow exiles embraced a new vision. It would rely on Islamic piety and endless networking across the Palestinian diaspora to inspire, and bankroll, a different kind of resistance. The Kuwaiti exiles saw themselves as part of the international jihad, then just starting to pitch the mujahideen against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. As yet non-committal over the use of violence, they set out to build support at the grass roots. Covert support came from US and Israeli sources, keen to back Islamic do-gooders as a softer and more acceptable face of dissent than the PLO.
Mishal directed much of his fund-raising activities on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, led by the wheelchair-bound cleric, Sheikh Yassin. When the first Intifada revolt broke out in the Occupied Territories at the end of 1987, Yassin proclaimed the formation of Hamas, to promote an uncompromising guerrilla war against Israel. Months later, Arafat decided to renounce violence and to recognize Israel.
Mishal had no difficulty choosing between these two alternatives, and committed the Kuwaiti Brotherhood to Hamas. (It might have been instructive to hear a little more about how the American and Israeli security forces executed a less than perfect U-turn at this point – and, indeed, about Hamas’s decision to embrace suicide missions as its distinctive contribution to the Palestinians’ armed struggle. Neither issue, perhaps, gets quite the attention from McGeough that it deserves.) Then, in 1990, Arafat supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Having resettled his family in Amman, where they were taking a break, Mishal hurriedly returned to Kuwait to pack up his Hamas treasury files before Saddam’s marauding soldiers could find them. He managed to escape, though not before an Iraqi checkpoint toyed with arresting him. Failing to recognize his importance, they sent him on his way – shades of Lenin on his bicycle, perhaps, challenged by a policeman in St Petersburg at the dawn of the Revolution. But it is the young Stalin that comes to mind as we follow Mishal’s career through the 1990s. McGeough recounts many conversations with leading Jordanian journalists about the Hamas leadership. One told him Mishal “was the least interesting of them . . . [he was] just an assignment guy, chosen for his mediocrity . . .”. No doubt many others shared the same view. He was a colourless bagman, on the losing side.
The mid-1990s were lean years for Hamas: widespread popular support for the Oslo accords and a savage clamp-down on the movement’s activities by Arafat in the Occupied Territories brought it “to the brink of organizational and military paralysis”. But Mishal quietly went on accumulating party jobs in Jordan, controlling the money and joining a three-man committee that watched over Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigade. Jordanian intelligence worried over his extremist views. (“The word ‘Israel’ does not exist in his ideological dictionary” was apparently the top man’s angry assessment.) As of 1997, meanwhile, he was still very little known beyond his own clandestine world. Even his parents, it seems, had no idea that he worked for Hamas. At the height of the crisis over the assassination attempt, we hear of the US ambassador in Amman turning to a CIA man and asking “Who the hell is Khalid Mishal?”.
Netanyahu’s spectacular own goal, suggests McGeough, changed everything. Fully recovered from his ordeal, Mishal found himself a household name across the Arab world – and was fired now with a sense of his own destiny. Suddenly he was unmistakably the coming man. As well as running the Hamas finances, he had been temporarily in charge of its political bureau for a couple of years. Alarmed at his rise, the Jordanians tried to have him replaced. Mishal swept aside their machinations – though in November 1999, he found himself being forcibly deported in a private jet to Qatar, a pit-stop on the road to Damascus.
More fundamentally, the fall-out from the Amman episode rallied support for Hamas on the streets. As part of the deal struck with King Hussein and President Clinton to limit the damage to Israeli–Jordanian relations, Netanyahu was coerced into releasing scores of prisoners locked up in the struggle to suppress the Intifada. One of them was Sheikh Yassin, who had been behind bars for eight years and now returned to Gaza like a conquering hero. Hamas and its hard-line affiliates had coordinated dozens of suicide bombings in Israel during Yassin’s imprisonment: it was largely the revulsion against them that had brought Netanyahu to power. It was a condition of the Sheikh’s release that they should stop, but Yassin soon reneged on this. The bombings went on, constantly adding to the polarization of attitudes in the Middle East in response to the Second Intifada that began in 2000, the Bush presidency’s war on terror after the attacks of September 11 and the debacle for US policy in Iraq. Hamas exploited the terror weapon ruthlessly over these years, eventually managing to sideline Arafat and anyone else ready to accept Israel’s existence as the starting point for a political solution. In response, Mossad put its 1997 escapade behind it. Yassin and most of his senior associates in Gaza were assassinated one by one. If the attempt on Mishal’s life had caused embarrassment in 1997, the Middle East was a very different place seven years later. McGeough records an Israeli Cabinet minister publicly promising in 2004 to do away with The Man Who Wouldn’t Die in 1997: “The minute we have the operational opportunity, we’ll do it”.
Mishal has remained at the head of Hamas ever since. While unambiguously its supreme leader, he heads a movement built on a “deep-rooted system of shura, or consensus consultation” and has remained a shadowy figure. Like the IRA in Northern Ireland, Hamas insists on a division between its political and military arms. But in case this subtlety should be lost on a prospective assassin, Mishal rarely emerges in public. He is inclined, for example, to address rallies via a mobile phone held to a microphone on the stage. Probably this anonymity has contributed to the serious underestimation of Hamas in recent years. All were wrong-footed by its victory in the Palestinian elections of January 2006. And having defeated the moderates of Fatah at the ballot box, it routed them with the bullet in the vicious civil war of June 2007 that left it in control of Gaza.
McGeough plots a path through all this skilfully and with no little stamina: the events since 1997 fill the second half of the book. In the well-honed style of the Sunday magazine feature, he resorts wherever possible to fly-on-the-wall (or perhaps that should be eye-in-the-sky) accounts. This can pall at times, and inattentive readers may occasionally fancy they’ve wandered into the world of Mickey Spillane: characters tend to blow into town, tool around in fast cars and cut each other some slack. But it is a style that for the most part matches the bizarre story McGeough is telling – not least when it takes him into the US, on the trail of Hamas’s fund-raising activities. It also allows him to write with feeling about the regional background he knows well: the squalor in most of Gaza, for example, or the demolition of Palestinian orchards to make way for neon-lit Israeli settlements – “slices of America and Europe, dormitory suburbs that looked utterly out of place in the sunbaked Middle East”. And as a journalist himself, he has a sharp eye for the way in which both sides in the conflict have played the media.
Kill Khalid is more than just a thriller with endnotes. The author’s accumulated contacts over the years have given him rare access to most of the individuals at the centre of the Hamas story (though none, rather conspicuously, from Iran). Eventually, with just twenty pages or so to go, we get to meet the mysterious Mr Mishal himself. He agreed to be interviewed several times in his Damascus safe house in the autumn of 2007, and McGeough sets the scene in graphic detail. Beneath a portrait of Sheikh Yassin, Mishal lounges in an armchair, polishing grapes one at a time with a tissue. McGeough reports “a personal charm that belied the caricature and his cutthroat reputation” – but his views of the world are predictably more chilling than charming. He stands by the use of suicide missions and rocket attacks on Israel, seeing negative publicity outside the region as a price worth paying for their impact on Israel’s sense of security. No lack of conviction here: he simply waves aside any notion of terror as a dehumanizing force. “Mishal would not accept that the numbing violence that Palestinians and Israelis inflicted on each other had a brutalising effect on all who were trapped in the conflict.” It surprised him, he tells McGeough, that Hamas’s decision to enter the electoral process in 2006 did not attract more plaudits from the West. As for how he might react if ever confronted, like Arafat before him, with a choice between ostracism and genuine engagement in talks with Israel, Mishal is studiously vague.
As first and foremost an investigative reporter, McGeough goes in for very little speculation of his own. He is happy, however, to quote anonymous senior figures in Jerusalem and Washington acknowledging Mishal’s central importance to any future peace process. Knowing how quickly events can move in the region, he closes with a few nods to the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, as of October 2008, this future did not include Israel’s devastating attack on Gaza, launched in December. Where this has left Mishal and the Hamas government in Gaza, no one really knows. Nor is it clear, yet, how far the new US administration is ready to soften its line on any Hamas involvement in a coalition government with Fatah: the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has only confirmed that a more flexible stance is being considered. No doubt briefings on this have been high on the agenda at the White House shortly, as part of President Obama’s preparations to host his first meeting, on May 18, with Israel’s newly elected prime minister – the politically born-again Binyamin Netanyahu.


Paul McGeough
KILL KHALID The failed Mossad assassination of Khalid Mishal and the rise of Hamas
477pp. Quartet. £25.
978 0 7043 7157 6
US: New Press. $26.95
978 1 59558 325 3

Listening to: Chiara Civello

Шутка du jour

В городок приехал богатый турист.
Оставив в залог 100$ хозяину гостиницы, он поднялся посмотреть комнаты
отеля. Хозяин гостиницы, не медля ни минуты, берёт купюру и бежит с ней
к мяснику отдать долг.
Мясник, с купюрой в руках, бежит к фермеру и отдаёт ему долг за
говядину. Фермер отдает долг владельцу автомастерской.
Владелец мастерской направляется в местный магазин и отдаёт долг за
продукты.
Хозяин магазина бегом к местной девочке по сопровождению, которая из-за
кризиса "обслуживала" его в долг... Девочка сразу бежит к хозяину
гостиницы и отдаёт ему долг за комнаты, которые она снимала для
клиентов.
В этот момент обратно спускается турист и говорит, что не нашёл
подходящей комнаты, забирает залог и уезжает.
Никто ничего не получил, но весь городок теперь живёт без долгов и с
оптимизмом смотрит в будущее...

Tadjik Talent

London!

Шутки du jour

ДАРАГАЙА РИДАКЦЫЙЯ!
(Из писем в газету в раздел "Советы Сексолога")

Отказать Олегу я хотела, но не смогла, потому что уже давно лежала в его
кровати, притом голая.

Я просто устала от этих отношений, да и постель для меня не главное.
Можно в конце концов и стоя.

Глядя на Борю, я чувствую, как там, внутри, начинает шевелиться
яйцеклетка.

За время учебы в институте я освоила все виды секса. И вот институт
позади, скоро буду работать по специальности.

Я отдавалась ему всю ночь, но до секса так и не дошло.

После бурной ночи с Гошей, когда он ушел, в моей душе образовалась такая
пустота, что я целую кастрюльку супа съела.

Потом Игорь объявил "ночь свободной любви". Все разбились на парочки и
разошлись по комнатам, а я осталась одна на раскладушке. Что же это за
свобода такая?

Она распахнула халат, а там - все без ничего.

Я с детства мечтала стать женщиной, а когда решилась, было уже поздно.

Я долго разглядывала все его татуировки, исправляя грамматические
ошибки.

Мне было так грустно и тоскливо, что Митя сразу же стал меня утешать как
мог. А мог он только два раза.

Поклонников Маши я постепенно начал бить. Уделал одного, потом второго,
а третий меня озадачил. Вытирая кровь, он сказал: "Всех не перебьешь."

После интимных отношений с мужем своей подруги я стала совсем по-другому
смотреть на нее. Как она может изменять такому чуткому и обаятельному
человеку?

То, почему у нее такие умелые руки, я понял, узнав, что она почти десять
лет работала дояркой.

И когда Борька стал любить меня сзади, я не удержалась и стукнулась
головой о батарею. Только тогда у меня мелькнула мысль: презерватив-то
забыли!

Когда я нашел в ее вещах искусственный член, первое, что подумал:
"Хорошо, хоть не настоящий..."

Мой персональный вибратор быстро сломался, хотя я согласно инструкции
эксплуатировала его не более 14 часов в день.

В постели Нина набросилась на меня с таким жаром, что я подумал: "Если
останусь жив, жене больше изменять не буду.."

Даша так орет, что соседи начинают звонить и интересоваться, когда,
наконец, наступит оргазм.

У меня не муж, а какой-то сексуальный маньяк. И все мои подруги тоже так
считают.

TLS: on Fresh Food

Is it fresh?
The competing myths about fresh food that have helped to mould the contents of the Western fridge

a review of Susanne Freidberg FRESH
A perishable history
383pp. Harvard University Press.
£20.95 (US $27.95).
978 0 694 03291 0


"Is it fresh?” From motorway service stations to the wet fish markets of Hong Kong, the refrain rings out, as nervous customers pore over produce that doesn’t look quite right. This simple question – more often a plea for reassurance – covers a noxious stew of anxieties. It is unanswerable, suggests Susanne Freidberg, because notions of “fresh” have no fixed moorings. Freshness has meant different things to different people at different times. Her book sets out to trace the commercial ventures which have sought to define this shifting quality and, in doing so, moulded the contents of the Western fridge. Freidberg examines beef, eggs, fruit, milk, vegetables and fish, and refrigeration itself. Each commodity gets a chapter, in a set of variations on the theme of how industrial production, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, has changed the relationship between food producers, consumers and workers.

Future social historians will note the extraordinary centrality of food to national discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Celebrity chefs and lifestyle experts attempt to reform bad habits. Doctors debate the health benefits and risks of modish diets, from raw greens to bone marrow. Class warriors deplore as snobbish dismissals of cheap battery-farm chickens. And the gulping majority grow obstinately fat on salty, sugary, pre-packaged slop, swelling the coffers of the multinationals and delivering fiscal nightmares to those who must foot the bill. But, despite this glut of media coverage, the provenance of most food is little known or understood. Whether at Tesco or farmers’ markets, consumers must take vendors’ avowals of freshness on trust. Few question exactly what knowledge a sell-by date imparts. Societies rely instead on myths, as Freidberg’s double-edged subtitle implies. The numinous meaning of freshness, as with all cults, is apprehended only vaguely by its followers.
Ancient cultures used preservative methods, such as salting and pickling, in order to extend the durability of produce for domestic use. Refrigeration delivered a paradigm shift by removing the site of production from the sight of consumers. The idea of freshness emerged to fill the conceptual ellipsis that resulted. Adam had no need to question the physical integrity of the apple Eve offered him, whatever its moral risks. Self-sufficient agrarians did not define freshness, because they watched their chickens lay and slaughtered their own cows. But fridges, from the outset, posed difficult, potentially lethal questions of age and origin. Extemporized eggs, suspended in cold storage, hatched a new language to answer modern needs.
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The first golden age of globalization that John Maynard Keynes looked back on and mourned in 1919 flourished particularly through the food economy. It also powered America towards global supremacy. Chicago grew rich on cows, California on oranges, Alaska on fish. As Keynes wrote, it seemed that a man could “adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages”. This was never more true than when applied to beef; “the spirit of capitalism made flesh”, according to the journalist and author Upton Sinclair. In 1889, William Vestey, an Englishman, discovered the export of frozen partridge, during a sightseeing tour of Argentina. By 1921, Vestey’s meatpacking business was one of the wealthiest enterprises in England, with 2,300 butcher shops, a shipping line and packing enterprises in every continent.
Sketches of eccentric entrepreneurs enliven Freidberg’s sometimes dryly factual narrative. Charles Tellier, France’s “père du froid”, made it his mission to bring refrigerated beef to France from America. He died penniless and reviled by his countrymen, many of whom have maintained their fervent opposition to imported meat. In recent times, the anti-globalization movement, led by figures such as the French Communist farmer José Bové, has drawn on that disquiet. These two Frenchmen of different eras serve as useful symbols of the reactionary and modernizing impulses that have divided societies since the onset of industrialization. Bové animated older national dissatisfactions in describing the target of his crusade as “malbouffe” – not only junk food, but also the “confused unease that such food provoked”.
Men like Tellier suffered no such epistemological queasiness. They saw global food production chains as the rational answer to scarcity, motivated by a self-assumed philanthropic duty to connect the earth’s resources. The nascent advertising industry sold housewives a compelling vision of “nature made simple”, in which refrigeration and vacuum packing provided liberation from dirt and toil. But fears of technological advance persisted, particularly among the religious. Fridges meant left-overs and left-overs meant loose morals, said the Puritans. The small-farm lobby replied to the industrialists’ trumpeting of wants over needs by declaring the “moral superiority of meals prepared fresh”, as well as the health benefits. Freshness demanded the preservation of immemorial relationships between people, land and animals.
Such romanticism proved incompatible with the demands of urbanization and, later, war. Farms were exiled from Manhattan because New Yorkers wanted to banish the cow slurries that fouled their city. Then two world wars demanded massive economies of scale in which vast out-of-town factories delivered sustenance for the troops. By the time of the Second World War, the “hysterics”, as one paper put it, had conclusively lost the argument: “crafty Hitler, cunning Hirohito, crazy Benito – let them be an everlasting reminder that we need eggs, eggs and more eggs”, ran the mastheads. Even when one war was over, perpetual mass production would be required to guard against the threat of future conflicts and, of course, to sustain the new economy.
Freidberg tells these stories straight, seldom offering her own perspective on whether this era drove progress or sowed the seeds of social and environmental degradation. She flits between areas and times. The nineteenth-century markets at Les Halles swiftly give way to those in modern Seattle and Hong Kong. In order to link these peregrinations, she requires a unifying narrative, which implies a single historical trajectory, a “cold chain” from the first meatpacker to the modern supermarket. But Freidberg is unclear on whether the industrial societies and markets which emerged were inevitable products of technological advance, or if other visions might have triumphed. In a book so concerned with different accounts of the “good life” and the benefits or otherwise of modernity, these are unfortunate omissions.
Social histories often draw their interest from the villains of the piece against which their polemics are directed. Freidberg quotes frequently from Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel of 1906, The Jungle, which excoriated the working conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. She does not, however, share explicitly the clear political agenda characterizing his work, or that of more recent writers such as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, 2001). She relies instead on stricter reportage.
In some cases, the facts need little authorial elucidation. The sections of the book that deal with consumer and labour relations demonstrate plainly that the mass production of each of her chosen commodities involved often violent recalibrations of society. The American public blamed the massive food price inflation of 1910–11 on speculators using refrigeration to reduce supply and drive up prices. The cold storage of eggs encouraged gambling and the development of informal futures markets. Refrigeration made risky economics from risky foods. Freidberg admits that “questions of freshness and fairness were rarely far apart”, but she does not take sides. Considering the meticulousness of her research, it is curious that she provides no opinion as to whether speculators were to blame for the food crises of those years.
No matter the advances in technology, farming, particularly of fruit and vegetables, continued to require large reserves of “unskilled”, generally back-breaking, labour. In early twentieth-century America, farm labourers were referred to as stoops, because of their posture. Mechanized fish cleaners became known as “iron chinks”, after the nationality of the workers they replaced. In 1936, reporting on striking Filipinos in the farmyards of Salinas, California, John Steinbeck declared that “there was tension in the valley and fear for the future”. Until the Depression, the perishability of crops had allowed organized labour a certain power over employers. But, in Freidberg’s narrative, the “Battle of Salinas” proved a watershed. Local militias combined with antiCommunist army reserves to overcome the strikers violently. While the industry complained of negative publicity – not least through Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath – their victory demonstrated that more labour could always be found.
Freidberg notes that this triumph of consumers’ desire for freshness over workers’ rights occurred just at the time when “organized labour enjoyed greater popular legitimacy and legal protections than ever before”. This is perhaps her most political observation. Then, as now, the material effects resulting from greater public awareness of human rights, or even their formulation in international law, are questionable. As at Salinas, the news cycle focuses briefly on one heart-wrenching inequity, before swiftly moving on. In its wake, companies envelop their activities within promises of corporate social responsibility and greater self-regulation. But the consequences of this attention are as nothing compared to international consumer demand for “permanent global summertime” in which all fruits and vegetables are made available all of the time. The universal impulse to fetishize the (increasingly) rare and the beautiful leads back unerringly to inequity and despoliation.
Freidberg comes closest to anger when describing the social outcomes of contemporary global food markets for countries such as Burkina Faso. As with many postcolonial outposts, it functions effectively as an export processing zone for its former masters, in this case supplying haricots verts to France (the trade in which was the subject of Freidberg’s previous book, French Beans and French Scares, 2004). International merchants target rural areas at some distance from the capital Ouagadougou, so that the small producers have no alternative market to turn to if a dispute over pay or conditions arises. The remoteness means many crops perish en route (the Sahel lacks refrigerators and roads), but, in the harsh logic of global supply chains, fragility increases profit.
In 1931, a US trade paper suggested that without refrigeration “our present daily existence would become unworkable. Cities with thousands of inhabitants would fade away. We would probably turn into beasts in our frantic struggles to reach the source of supply”. Freidberg observes in her epilogue that, during the book’s composition, the word “locavore” emerged, providing a loose banner for a range of food movements which oppose supermarkets, free trade and carbon intensive industries.
This new scramble for ethical nourishment has not yet turned beastly. In fact, as the market responds to this fast-growing demographic, more sustainable definitions of freshness which hark back to pre-industrial times have emerged. Susanne Freidberg clearly approves, but, as is typical in her enlightening but frustrating account, the big questions remain unanswered. Do middle-class, pastoral idylls of food production provide a business model by which to feed the world’s poor? Should governments intervene to push unwilling electorates towards more ethical food choices? How can global supply chains be regulated towards a more equitable distribution of profit? Finally, in a book based on debates over naturalness, the absence of any discussion of genetic modification is startling. Fresh frames a wealth of provocative debates, but it lacks a sense of conviction.





Jon Garvie is a freelance writer living in London. He is currently completing a research project at the University of London on globalization.

New Yorker on Neuroscience

One morning in January, a tall, gray-haired man whom I will call Arthur Jamieson arrived 31 the Mandler Hall psychology building, at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla. Jamieson is seventy years old and lives in the Midwest. He is a physician and an amateur rellist, and has been married for forty-seven years. He also suffers from a rare and bewildering condition called apotemnophilia, the compulsion to have a perfectly healthy limb amputated - in his case, the right leg, at mid-thigh. He had come to La Jolla not to be cured of his desire (like most people with the syndrome, he believed that relief would come only with the removal of the limb) but to gain insight into its cause. To that end, he had scheduled a meeting with Dr. Vilanayur S. Ramachandran, an Indian-born behavioral neurologist who is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at U.C.S.D., and has a reputation among his peers for being able to solve some of the most mystifying riddles of neuroscience.

Click the images below to read the article

Cartoon du jour

Just Seen: Юрьев день

Interview with Serebrennikov

Photo du jour

This photo has been taken in Hong Kong during the SARS epidemics. It can happen here too :)

Food and Fashion de Luxe

Click on the image to see it full-size

Listening to: Rosa Passos

1993

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Festa is one of Rosa Passos most beloved albums. That could be easily understood because seven out of the 12 songs in the album are written by Rosa Passos herself along with her long-time collaborator Fernando de Oliveira (co-writing six of those songs) and one other with Aldir Blanc. The remaining five songs come from Edu Lobo, Djavan, Vadico and Noel Rosa, Aldyr Blanc and Moacyr Luz and Tom Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes.

How can one resist the soft guitar chords in the introduction of "Dunas"? The song paints the end of summer in Salvador, Bahia. The beauty of the scenery is matched with the smooth melody that flows like calm waters. Pink orchids, yellow flowers, bugs and birds populate the city. The entire city is blooming with colors and scents, and all is captured in the beautiful verses in the song. Gilson Peranzzetta's keyboard accompaniment in this track is memorable. Following this great opener, Edu Lobo's classic "Candeias" features Idriss Boudrioua's alto sax solo and Itamar Assiere's piano accompaniment. It is yet another song describing the beautiful Bahian landscape, the bright moon and white sails as if in a religious procession. Lula Galvão has a great acoustic guitar solo in this track. For "Salada Tropical," the bouncy arrangement is highlighted with Pirulito's tamborins with great percussion. The lyrics are poetry in music in essence. Besides talking about poetry directly, the song also mentions Guinga and Aldir Blanc, and in the last verse the unabashed mention to João Gilberto. Love songs with an evocative accordion solo ("Juras"), a mambo that turns into a swinging samba ("Festa") and the effusive and playful mixture of French and Portuguese ("Paris: De Santos Dumont aos Travestis") are just some of the memorable songs presented in this excellent album.
ALBUM PERSONNEL

Producer: Paulinho Albuquerque

Erivelton Silva: drums
Gilson Peranzzetta: keyboards
Idriss Boudrioua: alto sax
Itamar Assiere: piano
Jorge Helder: bass
Lula Galvão: acoustic guitar, arrangements
Marcio Montarroyos: trumpet
Ovidio Brito: percussion
Paulo Guimarães: flutes
Pirulito: percussion
Rosa Passos: acoustic guitar, arrangements
Sizão Machado: acoustic bass



Tracklist
All tracks by Fernando de Oliveira and Rosa Passos except where noted.

1.Dunas
2.Candeias (Edu Lobo)
3.Salada Tropical
4.Juras
5.Festa
6.Causa Perdida (Aldir Blanc - Rosa Passos)
7.De Flor em Flor (Djavan)
8.Chuva de Verão
9.Feitiço da Vila (Vadico - Noel Rosa)
10.Paris de Santos Dummont aos Travestis (Aldir Blanc - Moacyr Luz)
11.Outono
12.Amor em Paz (Tom Jobim - Vinícius de Moraes) [Incidental music: Summer of 42 (Michel LeGrand)]


1996

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Pano Pra Manga is another of Rosa Passos' albums with a high content of original compositions with her collaborator Fernando de Oliveira. Rosa Passos' name is in 10 of the 13 tracks. Besides Fernando de Oliveira, she pairs up with the great poet Paulo César Pinheiro as well as other stellar songwriters, such as Sérgio Natureza, Ivan Lins and Vitor Martins. In addition to original compositions, the album also features classics by Chico Buarque -- and he sings in duet with Rosa in "Com Açúcar, Com Afeto" -- Tom Jobim and Ary Barroso and Luiz Peixoto.

"Verão" is one of those beautiful landscapes that anyone familiar with Passos and Oliveira's compositions should recognize. The song is, in a nutshell, a scene on a beach with surfboards, seagulls and green waters. Contrasting with this serene and light-hearted image, the song ends with more serious verses stating that it rains a lot in the singer's heart. Lula Galvão's guitar solo and Marco Brito's piano accompaniment are beautiful. As for "Samba com Pressa," as the name implies, it is a fast samba with elaborate lyrics making use of alliteration with the sound of the letter S. That literary style plays very well with the fast tempo of the song. Simply put, it's gorgeous. Also just as beautiful is the duet with Chico Buarque in "Com Açúcar, Com Afeto." Though Rosa Passos has not recorded a lot of material from the Buarque extensive repertoire, whenever she does it, she performs Buarque's music exceptionally well. In this case, the combination of her voice with Buarque's soft tones is dreamy. The title track is yet another remarkable tune. Not only is the samba beat contagious, the lyrics by Paulo César Pinheiro are outstanding. He uses the word "pano" (cloth, literally) in several different connotations. Quite the touch of a master poet! Another interesting lyrics featured is the one for "Gesto." The song uses general ideas associated with a woman's gestation period with the genesis of a new song. Also heartwarming is the dedication in "Abajur Lilás" to Brazil's great singer Dalva de Oliveira. Rosa Passos is joined here by Ivan Lins.

Pano Pra Manga is full of pleasant surprises from beginning to end. From the repertoire to the special guests, the album is never short in beauty.

ALBUM PERSONNEL

Producer: Paulinho Albuquerque

Andréa Ernest Dias: flutes
Armando Marçal: percussion
Carlos Malta: flutes
Eduardo Pereira: viola
Erivelton Silva: drums
Glauco Fernandes: violin
Iura Ranevsky: cello
Jorge Helder: bass
Leandro Braga: string arrangements
Leo Ortiz: violin
Lula Galvão: acoustic guitar, arrangements
Marcio Montarroyos: trumpet
Marco Brito: piano
Nema Antunes: electric bass
Pedro Amorim: bandolim
Rosa Passos: acoustic guitar, arrangements
Sergio Galvão: saxes


Tracklist

All tracks by Fernando de Oliveira and Rosa Passos except where noted.

1.Verão
2.Samba com Pressa
3.Com Açúcar, com Afeto (Chico Buarque) - w/ Chico Buarque
4.Amorosa
5.Pano pra Manga (Paulo César Pinheiro - Rosa Passos)
6.Gesto (Sérgio Natureza - Rosa Passos)
7.Abajur Lilás (Fernando de Oliveira - Ivan Lins - Rosa Passos) - w/ Ivan Lins
8.Chovendo na Roseira (Tom Jobim)
9.É Luxo Só (Ary Barroso - Luiz Peixoto)
10.Espelhos
11.Barcos
12.Samba Sem Você
13.Minuano (Vitor Martins - Rosa Passos)

1997

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Letra & Música - Ary Barroso is the third release from Lumiar Discos entirely dedicated to one composer. Previous albums covered the works of Antônio Carlos Jobim (with Leny Andrade & Cristovão Bastos) and Chico Buarque (with João Nogueira & Marinho Boffa). The idea behind the series is very simple: focus on one composer's music and lyrics only, no collaborations. Since Ary Barroso is better known for the gorgeous melodies he wrote, this album is even more special because here you also have a chance to enjoy Ary Barroso, the lyricist. What selections and performances we find in Letra & Música - Ary Barroso.

Ary Barroso is probably best known for his exultation sambas singing the beauties of Brazil. In that vein, we have the classics "No Tabuleiro da Baiana," "Rio de Janeiro (Isto É o Meu Brasil)," "Isto Aqui o Que É," "Na Baixa do Sapateiro" and the most famous of all, "Aquarela do Brasil." In addition to that, Ary Barroso was also a fantastic songwriter when he wrote about people and emotions. When he sang about women, you could truly feel the weight in his words. In "Morena Boca de Ouro," for example, you can experience the fire that woman brings when she dances and passes by. Rosa Passos' voice adds a certain vitality to the lyrics with her soft tone and enunciation. It is all very sensual. Another nice moment in this release is the smooth duet of Rosa Passos and Emílio Santiago. Their voices do match very well and make the exchange in "No Tabuleiro da Baiana" more effective than other artists' attempts. A difficult thing in any production that covers such a well known composer is the choice of the repertoire. In the case of Ary Barroso, his works are so widely known in Brazil that sometimes consumers end up getting the same song selection from album to album. It is probably because it is safe to record what the people know well. I am glad that Rosa Passos stretched those boundaries and gave us a gem such as "Ocultei." Not only are the lyrics beautiful, but the arrangement is superior. Stamato's piano solo is gorgeous. Another memorable piano solo is in the classic "Pra Machucar Meu Coração," except that in this track Brito is responsible for the beauty in the piano accompaniment. Even though Lula Galvão is prominently featured in all tracks, it is nice to see that other musicians get their share of the glory in this album. Take, for example, Carlos Malta's flute pirouettes in "Faceira." Very nice indeed.

ALBUM PERSONNEL

Producer: Almir Chediak

Armando Marçal: percussion
Carlos Malta: flutes
Erivelton Silva: drums
Hamleto Stamato: piano
Idriss Boudrioua: alto sax
Jorge Helder: bass
Lula Galvão: acoustic guitar, arrangements
Marco Brito: piano
Rosa Passos: acoustic guitar, arrangements
Sérgio Galvão: soprano sax
Zé Nogueira: soprano sax


Tracklist

All tracks by Ary Barroso.

1.Morena Boca de Ouro
2.Folha Morta
3.No Tabuleiro da Baiana - w/ Emílio Santiago
4.Inquietação
5.Foi Ela
6.Rio de Janeiro (Isto É o Meu Brasil)
7.Isto Aqui o Que É
8.Ocultei
9.Pra Machucar Meu Coração
10.Faceira
11.Camisa Amarela
12.Na Baixa do Sapateiro
13.Aquarela do Brasil


1999

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After three years since her last album with original songs (Pano Pra Manga), Rosa Passos released Morada do Samba with a good repertoire . Eight tracks here give listeners Rosa Passos' fine songwriting skills. The remainder of the album contain music by Walmir Palma (one of Rosa's collaborators), Djavan, Dorival Caymmi and Paulinho da Viola. As a preview of a forthcoming album with Dorival Caymmi's music (Rosa Passos Canta Caymmi), Rosa selected two classics by the most famous Bahia composer: "Lá Vem a Baiana" and "Saudade da Bahia."

Opening this release, a bouncy and brassy arrangement of Djavan's "Beiral" gets things going in a lively way. Idriss Boudrioua's alto sax, Sérgio Galvão's tenor sax and Nelson Oliveira's trumpet spicy up Lula Galvão's arrangement. Taking things down a notch to a lovely slow samba, we then hear "Esmeraldas," the first of Rosa's original songs in the album co-written with her long-time collaborator Fernando de Oliveira. The same team still gives us three other songs here. "Esmeraldas" makes reference to that moment one falls in love upon "stumbling onto those green eyes." It is a fall from which one never recovers. The second Rosa/Fernando song, "Pequena Música Noturna" reminisces about a rainy night when two people fell in passionate love. Picking up on the rain theme and paying tribute to Tom Jobim, Rosa and Fernando dedicate "Roseira" to Tom. The music and lyrics are clearly echoing Tom Jobim's own "Chovendo na Roseira." It is a beautiful and touching tribute in which Gilson Peranzzetta's piano and Ricardo Pontes flute solos take us all waltzing. The last of Rosa/Fernando's collaboration in the album, "Alma de Blues," is another love song. Even though the lyrics claim that "the theme as always -- our love -- is getting old fashioned," it is really not true. How can we tire of hearing Rosa singing beautiful verses such as those? Another partnership featured here is the one between Rosa Passos and Walmir Palma: "Primavera" and "Morada do Samba." The bolero "Primavera" is my favorite. It adds another season to Rosa's repertoire (she already has "Outono" and "Verão" in previous albums) and blooms both musically and lyrically. The words paint images of flowers, butterflies and birds as well as Monet and Stravinsky. Spring, the lyrics say, is an exuberant woman, and Peranzzetta's arrangement and accordion accompaniment fit this song like a silk glove. A third partnership presented here is Rosa Passos with Sergio Natureza: "Marco" and "Nada Igual." Now, really saving the best for last, Rosa Passos presents us with one of Paulinho da Viola's most beautiful songs, "Retiro." As the last verses go, "you know my soul and whenever you feel like it, you come by to see me." Morada do Samba is a good way to get to know Rosa Passos' soul. You will likely come back for more after you hear this album.

ALBUM PERSONNEL

Producers: Almir Chediak & Rosa Passos

Celso de Almeida: drums
Dom Chacal: percussion
Eduardo Neves: tenor sax
Erivelton Silva: drums
Fábio Torres: piano
Gilson Peranzzetta: piano, accordion, arrangements
Idriss Boudrioua: alto sax
Jaguara: percussion
Jorge Helder: bass
Lula Galvão: acoustic guitar, arrangements
Marcos Vicente: percussion
Nema Antunes: bass
Nelson Oliveira: trumpet
Ricardo Pontes: flutes
Roberto Marques: trombone
Rosa Passos: acoustic guitar, arrangements
Sérgio Galvão: tenor sax


Tracklist

1.Beiral (Djavan)
2.Esmeraldas (Fernando de Oliveira - Rosa Passos)
3.Pequena Música Noturna (Fernando de Oliveira - Rosa Passos)
4.Roseira (Fernando de Oliveira - Rosa Passos) - Incidental music: Chovendo na Roseira (Tom Jobim)
5.Primavera (Walmir Palma - Rosa Passos)
6.Morada do Samba (Walmir Palma - Rosa Passos)
7.Alma de Blues (Fernando de Oliveira - Rosa Passos)
8.Marco (Sergio Natureza - Rosa Passos)
9.Lá Vem a Baiana (Dorival Caymmi)
10.Nada Igual (Sergio Natureza - Rosa Passos)
11.Calmaria (Walmir Palma)
12.Saudade da Bahia (Dorival Caymmi)
13.Retiro (Paulinho da Viola)



2001

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A combination of new and old material, Me and My Heart is a heartwarming release featuring only Rosa Passos (voice and acoustic guitar) and Paulo Paulelli (bass and mouth percussion). Recorded in only 4 days, the album sounds like a private performance with Rosa in your own living room. The album was first released in the international market and a year later in Brazil with the title Eu e Meu Coração.

This album contains a few songs previously released by Rosa Passos in some of her other albums, but with different arrangements. Instead of orchestral settings, we hear just voice, acoustic guitar and bass. Collectors and Rosa Passos fervent fans of course love the opportunity to hear her singing her standard repertoire, especially when that includes original songs such as "Juras," "Dunas" and "Minuano." Out of the batch of tunes not previously heard in Rosa's voice, "Água Doce" is the first in Me and My Heart. Paulelli's bass solos in this track are very rich and envelope Rosa's voice very gently and beautifully. The Pinto/Zilda classic "Aos Pés da Cruz" is very melancholic as is the case of the title track, "Eu e Meu Coração." Clearly one has the feeling that Rosa is almost whispering sweet nothings in our ears. Though she has not recorded Chico Buarque very often, it is a joy to hear Rosa's rendition for "Desencontro." At times, Rosa's voice is so tender that it sounds like she is singing a lullaby to get a child to sleep ("Se o Tempo Entendesse"). One of my all-time favorite Rosa Passos songs is "Dunas." Contrary to the original arrangement in Festa, here we hear a slower version of that song. The beauty of that song is everlasting. Before closing the album with Jobim's "Águas de Março," Rosa presents us with a moving rendition of Donato/Lysias' "Mentiras." As for "Águas de Março," Paulelli's mouth percussion is awesome, and Rosa does a remarkable job in her performance, too. Her voice and guitar accompaniment are outstanding in creating a nice duet between artist and instrument enhancing Jobim's voluminous lyrics.

ALBUM PERSONNEL

Producer: Edwin Pitre-Vásquez

Paulo Paulelli: bass, mouth percussion
Rosa Passos: acoustic guitar



Tracklist

1.Só Danço Samba (Antônio Carlos Jobim - Vinícius de Moraes)
2.Água Doce (Ivan Lins - Vítor Martins)
3.Aos Pés da Cruz (Marino Pinto - Zé da Zilda)
4.Juras (Rosa Passos - Fernando de Oliveira)
5.Eu e Meu Coração (Inaldo Vilarinho - Antônio Botelho)
6.O Que É Que a Baiana Tem? (Dorival Caymmi)
7.Desencontro (Chico Buarque)
8.Se o Tempo Entendesse (Marino Pinto - Mário Rossi)
9.Dunas (Rosa Passos - Fernando de Oliveira)
10.Dois de Fevereiro (Dorival Caymmi)
11.Surpresas (João Donato - Caetano Veloso)
12.Minuano (Rosa Passos - Vítor Martins)
13.Mentiras (João Donato - Ênio Lysias)
14.Águas de Março (Antônio Carlos Jobim)


2003



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Review from Musica Brasileira

I can still recall the first time I heard Rosa Passos. The song "Verão," from her release Pano Pra Manga (1996), made an indelible mark in my mind. "Verão" has kept its place as one of my favorite Rosa Passos and Fernando de Oliveira's tunes. Since that time, Rosa Passos albums have been a constant addition to my collection. Besides her releases in Brazil, she has also recorded with Kenny Rankin (Here in My Heart, 1997) and more recently with Yo-Yo Ma (Obrigado, Brazil).
Passos latest release is a collaboration with bassist Ron Carter. The album, entitled Entre Amigos, is a collection of eleven Brazilian classics in Passos' inimitable voice and style. Produced by Cliff Korman and David Chesky, Entre Amigos also features Lula Galvão (guitar), Paulo Braga (percussion) and Billy Drewes (tenor sax and clarinet). This Passos/Carter combination sounds like a match made in heaven. Her intimate voice coupled with Carter's rich bass creates a beautiful combination to please die-hard Passos fan and, most certainly, the new fans she'll gain with this album.
The opening track "Bahia com H" might take you back to João Gilberto's 1981 Brasil album - Passos does not hide her passion for him - but Passos arrangement picks up the tempo just a tad faster to catapult Entre Amigos to new heights right from the start. Carter's bass accompaniment envelopes Passos voice and seems to play along with such ease that the listener will likely feel drawn to the charms of these two remarkable performers. And the magic in the first track is not short-lived. Over and over, these two artists spare no surprises. Carter's solo in "Insensatez," for example, is just as moving as Passos' soft spoken voice. Not detracting for the overall atmosphere of the album and at the same time adding a new dimension to it, Drewes' sax and clarinet solos are gorgeous. In "Desafinado," his solos are sometimes mirrored in Passos' voice. She sings some lines in staccato fashion, imitating Drewes precise notes. He also shines in "Eu Sei que Vou Te Amar" with an unusual and mesmerizing introduction.
The friendship shared in Entre Amigos is clearly shown in each track. The album is charming and endearing with each musician's participation carefully balanced. Passos is one of the few singers I know who is capable of recording a well-known song such as "Garota de Ipanema" and make you want to hear it again. Entre Amigos will have that effect on you, too.


Tracklist

1. Bahia com H (Dennis Brian)
2. Insensatez (Antonio Carlos Jobim - Vinícius de Moraes)
3. Desafinado (Antonio Carlos Jobim - Newton Ferreira de Mendonça)
4. Sorriu para Mim (Garoto - Luís Cláudio)
5. A Primeira Vez (Bide - Marçal)
6. Garota de Ipanema (Antonio Carlos Jobim - Vinícius de Moraes)
7. Por Causa de Você (Antonio Carlos Jobim - Dolores Duran)
8. Caminhos Cruzados (Antonio Carlos Jobim - Newton Ferreira de Mendonça)
9. Feitio de Oração (Noel Rosa)
10. Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar (Antonio Carlos Jobim - Vinícius de Moraes)
11. O Grande Amor (Antonio Carlos Jobim - Vinícius de Moraes)

2004



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Review from Musica Brasileira

An unabashed tribute to her idol João Gilberto, Amorosa is Rosa Passos's latest work. Still hot on the trails of her successfully acclaimed 2003 collaboration with Ron Carter (Entre Amigos), Passos selected gems from the João Gilberto repertoire and added a special tribute with an original song dedicated to him, "Essa É Pr'o João." As the song title says, this is to João.
Making music professionally since the 1960s, Passos (born in Salvador, Bahia, 1952) never tried to hide her affection and admiration for João Gilberto, the name synonymous with Bossa Nova in Brazil and the world. In 1978 she released her first album, Recriação, with original compositions co-written with long-time collaborator Fernando de Oliveira. From there on, her career catapulted to stardom with the release of several successful albums, such as Curare (1991), Festa (1993), Pano pra Manga (1996) as well as other works entirely dedicated to the works of Ary Barroso, Dorival Caymmi and Antônio Carlos Jobim. More recently, she worked with Ron Carter and Yo-Yo Ma reaching larger audiences outside of Brazil. Her impeccable taste to record the best in the Brazilian songbook is clearly evident in all albums she has released to date.
Produced by Jorge Calandrelli, Amorosa features Helio Alves on piano, Paulo Paulelli on bass (Nilson Matta in "Chega de Saudade"), Paulo Braga on drums, Cyro Baptista on percussion and, of course Rosa Passos on vocals and acoustic guitar. Passos also arranged all tracks except for "Que Reste-t-il de nos Amours" and "Chega de Saudade," which were arranged by Calandrelli. Special guests featured in this album are Rodrigo Ursaia on tenor sax, Paquito D'Rivera on clarinet and Henri Salvador with vocals in "Que Reste-t-il de nos Amours." The bonus track "Chega de Saudade" was taken from Yo-Yo Ma's Obrigado Brazil (Sony Classical SK 89935, 2003).
Four out of the twelve tracks here were recorded by João Gilberto in his classic 1977 album Amoroso: "Wave," "Bésame Mucho," "Retrato em Branco e Preto" and "'S Wonderful." (Gilberto's Amoroso is available in a 2-in-1 combo along with Brasil on Warner 9 45165-2.) Though strings are used in some of Passos's renditions for the same songs, she did not attempt to repeat Claus Ogerman's majestic arrangements. Instead, she opted for new arrangements, and they are just as beautiful. The other tracks were also recorded by Gilberto in several of his albums, with the exception of Passos and Medeiros's original "Essa É Pr'o João," her personal dedication to Gilberto. The song is a loving tribute full of images of João Gilberto, his music and Bossa Nova (see lyrics below).
To write about Passos renditions for all the songs in this album is an herculean task. She opens her heart in each track and sings from within her soul. The accompaniment is also superb note after note. Passos's phrasing is unequalled. Sometimes she puts so much feeling in one syllable that the listener is not capable of holding back a sigh of amazement. Case in point: her rendition of "Retrato em Branco e Preto." In the last verses of Buarque's touching lyrics, Passos carries the pain of all lovers in a single word: "coração" (heart). Her enunciation for that word is powerful. The same goes for several other lines in the song, such as "lembranças do passado" (remembrances of the past) and more.
Of course, in many instances of the album, Passos is playful and pure happiness. "Pra Que Discutir com Madame," "O Pato" and "Eu Sambo Mesmo" reflect the energy emanating in her grand small voice. The same goes for the non-Brazilian material presented here. "Bésame Mucho," in all its quietness, is passionately ardent until the last breath. As for "'S Wonderful," Alves's mellifluous piano accompaniment with subtle soaring strings is all but heavenly. Finally, the magnificent duet with Henri Salvador in "Que Rest-t-il de nos Amours" reaches a high not even attained by Gilberto's own recording. Ronaldo Bastos's Portuguese lyrics blend so beautifully with the original French words that you are likely to forget when one language is being sung instead of the other. Never has French and Portuguese sounded so beautifully together since Chico Buarque's "Joana Francesa."
Amorosa is proof that less is a whole lot more. Voice and lyrics take center stage. Instrumentation and arrangements highlight the beauty of the music. Everything else is superfluous.

Essa É Pr'o João (Rosa Passos - Arnoldo Medeiros)

This is for João (Rosa Passos - Arnoldo Medeiros)

Ouvindo atentamente na vitrola Seu jeito encantado de cantar Eu tento resistir aos seus acordes Mas só consigo me apaixonar e confessar De tudo que meu coração precisa Fundamental é mesmo um violão O som inesquecível da batida Em um samba harmonizado por João Por João E nesse nunca chega de saudade A sua inconfundível divisão É toda infinita poesia Que faz da melodia uma ilusão João Gilberto, amigo, eu só queria Lhe agradecer pela lição Desses seus acordes dissonantes Desse seu cantar com perfeição E até o apagar da velha chama Eu quero sempre ouvir o mesmo som Só privilegiados tem ouvidos Mas muito poucos deles tem seu dom Seu dom, que bom

Listening carefully on the turntable His enchanting way of singing I tried to resists his chords But I can only fall in love and confess Everything my heart needs An acoustic guitar is really fundamental The unforgettable sound of the beat In a samba harmonized by João By João And in this no more blues His incomparable phrasing Is all infinite poetry And it turns the melody into an illusion João Gilberto, friend, I just wanted To thank you for the lesson Of your dissonant chords Of your perfect singing And until the final flicker I only want to hear the same sound always Only the privileged have ears But just a few have your gift Your gift, how nice

Tracklist

1. Você Vai Ver (Antônio Carlos Jobim)
2. Wave (Antônio Carlos Jobim)
3. Bésame Mucho (Consuelo Velasquez)
4. Pra que Discutir com Madame (Janet de Almeida - Haroldo Barbosa)
5. Lobo Bobo (Carlos Lyra - Ronaldo Bôscoli)
6. O Pato (Jayme Silva - Neuza Teixeira)
7. Retrato em Branco e Preto (Antônio Carlos Jobim - Chico Buarque)
8. Eu Sambo Mesmo (Janet de Almeida)
9. Essa É Pr’o João (Rosa Passos - Arnoldo Medeiros)
10. Que Reste-t-il de nos Amours (Charles Trenet - Portuguese lyrics by Ronaldo Bastos) - w/ Henri Salvador
11. 'S Wonderful (George Gershwin - Ira Gershwin)
12. Chega de Saudade (Antônio Carlos Jobim) - w/ Yo-Yo Ma

2005



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No information :(


Tracklist

1. Abajur Lilás
2. Festa
3. Chuva de Verão
4. Juras
5. Causa Perdida
6. Minuano
7. Pano Pra Manga
8. Espelhos
9. Samba Sem Você
10. Verão
11. Amorosa
12. Dunas
13. Outono
14. Barcos
15. Gesto
16. Salada Tropical

2006

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Review from Musica Brasileira

Whereas many performers shy away from opening an album without any instrumentation, Rosa Passos pulls all the stops singing Garoto's "Duas Contas" a cappella as the very first track in Rosa. Garoto's lyrics take center stage. With a repertoire that includes classic songs by Tom Jobim, João Donato, Augusto Mesquita and Chico Buarque, Rosa also features six new original Rosa Passos songs with several of her long-time collaborators, including two tracks co-written with my favorite of her partners, Fernando de Oliveira.
"Sutilezas" is the first original we hear. With lyrics by Sérgio Natureza, the song is about calm waters, birds, nature and celestial echoes. The search for subtle tones is evidenced by images of intimate whispers and ritual silence. The song not only makes reference to Tom Jobim, but also to Rosa's idol, João Gilberto. She sings about searching for the simple and pure. In Rosa's inimitable style, she delivers precisely what is simple and pure in this album.
Among the several classics she performs, one unusual song stands out. The famous Jovem Guarda hit "Sentado à Beira do Caminho" gets an endearing Bossa Nova beat. Originally composed as a ballad by Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Carlos, this track has received performances by world-renowned stars, including the most recent rendition by Andrea Bocelli in Amore. Rosa's version here reflects the solitude in the lyrics and makes a life's journey a very slow process. Another classic with a distinct Rosa style is Augusto Mesquita and Jaime Florence's "Molambo." With a soft bolero arrangement, Rosa re-defines this torch song.
"Desilusión" and "Fusión" feature Rosa singing in Spanish. In "Desilusión," a Rosa Passos melody with lyrics by Spanish composer Santiago Auserón, the words sing of the old disillusionment of love. As for "Fusión," the song requires no special introduction other than the fact that it is penned by Uruguayan songwriter Jorge Drexler, the notable Academy Award winning composer of "Al Otro Lado del Rio," from The Motorcycle Diaries.
Of the two collaborations between Rosa and Fernando, "Demasiado Blue" and "Detalhe," my favorite is the latter. Fernando de Oliveira is a master in evoking scenes vividly with his choice of words and succession of images. "Detalhe" is full of that: months, sun, sea, smells, etc.

Tracklist

1. Duas Contas (Garoto)
2. Eu Não Existo Sem Você(Antônio Carlos Jobim - Vinícius de Moraes)
3. Sutilezas (Rosa Passos - Sérgio Natureza)
4. Até Quem Sabe (João Donato - Lysias Enio)
5. Olhos Nos Olhos (Chico Buarque)
6. Sentado à Beira do Caminho (Roberto Carlos - Erasmo Carlos)
7. Molambo (Augusto Mesquita - Jaime Florence)
8. Jardim (Keren Ann - Benjamin Biolay; Portuguese version by Michelino Silvano & Bia Krieger)
9. Demasiado Blue (Rosa Passos - Fernando de Oliveira)
10. Desilusión (Rosa Passos - Santiago Auserón)    
lyrics     En tus ojos vi un hetizo passar     Entre sombra y luz no podia durar     Utópico era confira en la quimera de aquél guión     Todo el argumento se llamanva al fin desilusión     Demasiadas penas sobran las esenas entro los dos     Guarda-te las frases de consuelo y de tan solo adios     Una vieja estória de sedilusion y nada más     Entre sombra y luz no podia durar

11. Edredon de Seda (Rosa Passos - Arnoldo Medeiros)
12. Não Sei o Que Acontece (Alexandre Leão)
13. Detalhe (Rosa Passos - Fernando de Oliveira)
14. Fusión (Jorge Drexler)
15. Inverno (Rosa Passos - Walmire Palma)

2008



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Review from Musica Brasileira

Romance has been a constant in the recent albums released by Rosa Passos. Her 2001 Me and My Heart, 2003 Entre Amigos and 2006 Rosa all bear some resemblance to this latest CD. In addition to being very romantic in its repertoire and delivery, Romance also shines with its jazz approach to Brazilian compositions.

Romance picks up several musical threads previously explored by Rosa. You will find here additional songs by Dorival Caymmi (Rosa Passos Canta Caymmi), Antônio Carlos Jobim (Rosa Passos Canta Antônio Carlos Jobim - 40 Anos de Bossa Nova) and Djavan (Azul). The other songs performed in Romance include selections from Ivan Lins, Marcos Valle, Suely Costa, João Donato, Chico Buarque and others. Out of those, three selections from the Elis Regina repertoire receive the Rosa Passos treatment in memorable arrangements: "Atrás da Porta," "Tatuagem" and "Altos e Baixos." This is a double gift not only because of Elis, but also because Rosa has -- unfortunately -- not recorded many Chico Buarque and Suely Costa music. That absence is beautifully rectified here.

Rosa produced the album and handed the arrangements to the capable hands of Paulo Paulelli, Lula Galvão and Fábio Torres. Rosa has worked with all three in the past several times. Lula Galvão was a central figure in Rosa's 1997 Letra & Música: Ary Barroso, for example. In addition to contributing to Rosa's albums, Paulo Paulelli and Fábio Torres often work together, as they did in their 2005 Corrente. Most of the music in Romance falls in the traditional jazz school of piano (Fábio Torres), bass (Paulo Paulelli) and drums (Celso de Almeida). To add multiple layers to the instrumentation, other notable musicians are featured in the album: Lula Galvão (acoustic guitar), Daniel D'Alcântara (flugelhorn), Vinícius Dorin (saxes) and Nahor Gomes (flugelhorn and trumpet).

Though Rosa's competence is undeniable, it is impressive to experience her artistry once again with composers such as Chico Buarque. In "Atrás da Porta," Lula Galvão has a stunning guitar solo, and Vinícius Dorin's flute and sax solos in "Tatuagem" make the track unforgettable. All of that works like perfect bookends to Rosa's flawless performances

Tracklist

1. Doce Presença (Ivan Lins - Vitor Martins)
2. Nem Eu (Dorival Caymmi)
3. Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar (Antonio Carlos Jobim - Vinícius de Moraes)
4. Álibi (Djavan)
5. Preciso Aprender a Ser Só (Marcos Valle - Paulo Sérgio Valle)
6. Atrás da Porta (Francis Hime - Chico Buarque)
7. Tatuagem (Chico Buarque - Ruy Guerra)
8. Por Causa de Você (Antonio Carlos Jobim - Dolores Duran)
9. Altos e Baixos (Suely Costa - Aldir Blanc)
10. Cadê Você (João Donato - Chico Buarque)
11. Neste Mesmo Lugar (Armando Cavalcanti - Klécius Caldas)
12. Nossos Momentos (Luís Reis - Haroldo Barbosa)