What About Paris? ™

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June 30, 2023

Prisoner of Rock 'n' Roll: Help, I'm a Rock.

How was your week, Campers?

Posted by JD Hull at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2023

World-Famous Way-Mindful 12 Rules of Client Service.

The 12 Rules, that's who. Sometimes all you need is what one favorite poet called a New Mind. These now classic if eternally annoying 12 Rules will get you there, friend:

1. Represent only clients you like.
2. The client is the main event.
3. Make sure everyone in your firm knows the client is the main event.
4. Deliver legal work that changes the way clients think about lawyers.
5. Over-communicate: bombard, copy and confirm.
6. When you work, you are marketing.
7. Know the client.
8. Think like the client--help control costs.
9. Be there for clients--24/7.
10. Be accurate, thorough and timely--but not perfect.
11. Treat each co-worker like he or she is your best client.
12. Have fun.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2023

The Church Militant and Church Triumphant (1365)

Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze, The Church Militant and Church Triumphant, fresco, Santa Maria Novella, Florence (1365)

Posted by JD Hull at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)

My go-fund me account in the sixties in Ohio before I could drive.

Starting around 1965, and until 1971 or so, I painted Indian Hill mailboxes, washed cars and taught tennis. For two years I mowed three acres of grass on Miami Road when we lived in front of the stone water tower but I did that one for free. I worked at Keebler’s cookie factory in summer of 1971. After that, almost overnight, I became a famous lawyer.

Posted by JD Hull at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2023

The Fighting Temeraire, 1838

The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1839, by Joseph Mallord William Turner.

The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London

Posted by JD Hull at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)

Henry Miller: The Classics

A man with his belly full of the classics is an enemy of the human race.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2023

Gonzoid Specimen # 1 from Duke Chanticleer 1975

Duke Chronicle piece 10/23/74
Duke Chanticleer piece August 1975
Original WAC/P? blog post 10/22/16

People don't want to accept that about themselves, that they're part of the general rot, and they react to that angrily, which is a very pure reaction, and it's good that it happened in a sense. For even the most politicized people here at Duke, they share a common dream, and that dream has to do with finding an interesting profession, a stable job that will allow them to rise on the ladder, a marriage that's stable and sustains them for a long time, a sheltered kind of environment where they're protected against not only misfortune, but surprise. There's that certainty of waking up and knowing that that day's not going to be different from the day before — it's all part of that myth. And here comes this nut on stage with his Wild Turkey swinging from his hips telling them not only is that image crap, filled with rot and corruption, but it ain't gonna happen. No matter how much you invest and how many chips you put on the table and how many graduate schools you attend and how many teachers you suck up to and how many unintelligible theses you write, it ain't gonna happen. Because somewhere at the center of this society something is broken, and it's not gonna be repaired by dreaming a myth or believing in a myth. When someone presents that kind of truth it's so incomprehensible it's really tough to deal with.

— From November, 1974, interview with

Bernard Lefkowitz, journalist and visiting Duke professor.

Reporter, ri por ter, n. One who reports; a
member of a newspaper staff whose duty it is
to give an account of the proceedings of
public meetings and entertainments, collects
information respecting interesting or
important events, and the like.

— Webster, not a Duke professor or a journalist.

gonzoid specimen number 1

Page Auditorium. October 22, about nine-thirty. This will be hard.

Leaving with the chaos vibes I kick a paper airplane that somehow got long-armed to the back rows and wonder how this will be done. Cannot find Dean Griffith but talk briefly to badly shaken Denise Creech in Flowers Lounge. Leave the poor girl alone. Deliberately shirk my responsibility to COVER (the whole) STORY and go with Jane to the CI
where people jokingly console me about having to resurrect some front page fire from the ashes of this whiskeyed journalist's "speech." I make notes. My head has been spinning all evening long from this darvon Pickens gave me for the eye infection and it makes the two beers go twice as far, so am roughly in Hunter's shape when I get around
to mounting two flights of stairs, open a closed door that says "Editor" on it. I am not up to this.

"Where have you been anyway?" David asks. The bad stare is justified, of course. I have been fucking around in the Cambridge Inn instead of transforming myself into the relentless amphetemined lemming that all good reporters are. He is used to this kind of flaming imcompetence on the Chronicle, only not so carefully planned and executed. Steve
is staring blankly at the floor, thinking, hopefully, and some Union heavies are assembled for their official backstage report to the press. Tried to find Dean Griffith, I explain, talked to Denise there a little — uh, hi Denise — but mainly went to the CI. Didn't want to go into it, really, that dinner at the pits, my eye, the coffee to kill the darvon, the speech bummer and now these beers were making me ill. My eye throbbed and I wanted to go to bed.

Steve finally lifts his head. "Look, it's manageable, it's manageable. Dan does the speech story, David, you do the Union side of it. We'll run two stories."

It is 10:30. Leave with my notebook for the managing editor's cubby hole to start typing, pause briefly to notice perhaps for the hundredth time that magic-markered gem scribbled over the drinking fountain: 'The only dope worth shooting is Nixon." At least four years old, it is — even if half-serious — a vestige of the political pretensions the Chronicle once had or pretended to have. Maybe they have never been more than nice, introverted suburban kids exchanging polo shirts and Bass Weejuns for workshirts and sandals (but with tweed in the closet), their cocktail party civility for a little rhetoric, but they could be very serious people. It was not just the political tone then, wrought through tough editorials on everything from the war, sexism and racism to scum in the garden pond, but the corresponding energies. At three in the morning in 1971 I once watched in horror as the managing editor penned a steamy half-edit essentially accusing UNC football coach Bill Dooley of murdering that player who dropped dead while running around the track. Something which could never happen now, the country, Duke students and so the Chronicle having "mellowed out." Everybody but Thompson: "No one has beaten him as bad as he deserves, and no one really comprehends how evil he is. The horror of it all is that he reflects the rot in all of us."

I grab a fat stack of eight-and-a-half by eleven yellow copy paper out of a drawer. Up at third floor Flowers the stuff is everywhere, strewn on the floor, tacked up on walls and slipped into typewriter carriages for memos between staff people. The first time I used it was early in 1971 for an article on the new West campus tennis courts. The piece is short, not very good and (to let me know this) crammed under the Spectrum section on page two. The assistant managing editor that night was very nice about it, maybe too kind, since the short messy, poorly worded blurb
would have sent most newspaper vets screaming down the stairs, doubled up in hysterics, and into the CI for sanctuary. But he printed the damn thing anyway.... Along with the yellow, the mad urgency of the NYT wire machine though not cacaphonous chugga-chugga which, being both frantic and seductive, is the perfect metaphor for
newspaper work. It never stops, and the mind tends to look back into it as you think and type. Jane, from whom night editing has robbed a night's sleep, suggests some lines. "Beer cans and an occasional joint passed
among the rows of Page as Thompson..."

Around 11 :00 Harriet from the Tar Heel calls and asks what's happening "officially" between Thompson, his agency and the Union. Tell her to talk to David or Rick or John Miller or anyone but me. I am much more obsessed with capturing on this yellow paper what happened at something I actually saw but cannot comprehend. Anne mercifully
shows up with beer and wine, John Miller stops in. Rick caiis. Spending the day with Thompson has taken its awful toll, shoving him to the brink of a minor nervous breakdown. Terrible, terrible, he moans, the Doctor started right in by ripping the headrest of the passenger seat of his Volvo, kept stopping for beers and jabbering about his need for "medicine." Could I lash together a story on this? Am I even going to attempt if? he asks.

Yes.

Close to midnight there is another disturbance. A Chronicle hangout type comes in to put the mock moves on Jane, half-asleep over a typewriter. I politely tell this asshole to go away and shut the door; some screechy Bitch is croaking for my story so she can go home. Remember that guy from freshman year, when we were both new reporters and he was a YAFer with short hair, a big car and a rich father? A long-locked "radical" now, he is still tainted with that garrish piece of Detroit iron and, like many of these paper people, tends to choose his women, like the Bitch, and good buddies from Chroniclites. This practice inevitably turns up in love affairs, friendships, cliques, love triangles, frail egos and much fear and loathing on the Chronicle. Newspapers tend to breed incestuous offspring. Many new children die off quickly, the rest left to carry on comraderies and plot the editorships, ineptly pimping freshman reporters for their edit council vote in the Spring. Very arm-pitsy, so there are many good reasons not to attend edit council meetings or go on the retreats. God, drinking a lot of wine in the woods with a bunch of Chronicle people has always seemed about as exciting as playing poker with a bunch of nuns. "It's just another place at Duke for boys
and girls to meet other boys and girls," an ex-Chronicle heavy once told me. If they weren't so damn close socially —but professionally instead, he added, the Chronicle could be a really great collegepaper. Maybe so, but at this hour, who cares?

My notes are hard to read, eye hurts. Where is Thompson now? Never occurred to me to hunt him down for a statement. Is that Thompson aficianado Morris getting an interview, like he said he would, feeding the Doctor Wild Turkey and stuffing a microphone in his face? It's late, and the repetition of images has no mercy on the deadened mind. The Thompson movie keeps attacking, reeling away those jerky movements and gritty speed-laced squawks
of a whiskey man fished out of a hotel bathtub, hauled over to Page, and thrown like meat to the wired gargoyles, restless and knowing that anyone this tanked up, this crazy, is easy prey, naked lunch. Those stupid Union people, they're responsible for this — a very bad set-up, ambush, really. Suggested column for Friday's paper:

"Poetic justice and Hunter Thompson would both insist the person whose idea it was to cast the journalist in a podium/stage/lecture setting in Page Wednesday night be flogged into unconsciousness, carted out to Hillsboro in a wagon and stretched in two by sinewy field beasts, then ground into fine pinkish powder for snorting purposes..."

Finished at 1:00. I like the story. David's been in for thirty minutes and Annie N. begins to type mine, dutifully checking my messy copy for errors and suggesting changes. Cod, forgot about finishing up the edit pages but, great, Larry has cropped the Rockefeller picture for the Lewis column, Ralph, the paste-up man, will do the rest. Do
not worry, these are very competent people up here tonight. Relax.

1:30. The story is ready. After changing the pasteup a bit and correcting a few typos we have a four-column two-deck headline space to fill — tastefully. This takes two hours of rummaging through tired brains. Steve, evidently, still has great deal of energy. He is over there insisting that night editor Zipp's suggestion of "Thompson, Crowd Run Amuck" does not cut the mustard, is not journalistically or aesthetically pleasing. This starts people making up weird headlines, laughing over them. People are giddy. Around 3:00 the right head emerges: "Thompson, Audience Clash in Page Chaos." Am amazed by Steve's meticulous quest when no one really cares any longer.

3:00. Walking around, drinking coffee, doing nothing really. I watch Steve and Zipp do national news heads and jump pages. Ralph has gone home, Zipp is about to — he has a test in six hours. My body is numb but the head still a grey circus of the Page Chaos as I stare at the too-familiar-now words and pictures people will see tomorrow, while I am
still asleep. Paper goes to Mebane and I to Buchanan Avenue, exhausted. But there is no falling off so I read fifty or sixty pages of Steve's On the Campaign Trail (all the while the demon wire machine keeps beating through me) until the sun comes up and there is battered, reluctant sleep.

Thompson, audience clash in Page chaos

By Dan Hull

"Is there any coherence in this thing? I feel like I'm in a hicking slaughterhouse in Chicago early in the morning."

In a pathetic attempt to slide something coherent through his staccato mumble, Gonzo journalist Dr. Hunter S. Thompson was met last night at Page Auditorium with a bevy of jeers, curses, and a request by the Duke University Union to leave the stage.

According to Union spokespersons, it was expected that the slightly inebriated Thompson would drive away the audience if his talk turned out particularly monotonous.

Frustrated by the dialogue between the disjointed speaker and the belligerent audience, some did leave while others, many of whom were as well-oiled as Thompson, remained until the journalist was escorted off the stage.

Beer and joints

Beer cans and an occasional joint passed among the rows of the auditorium as Thompson, forty minutes late an looking more like a lanky tourist than a radical journalist, poked across the stage to the podium.

Slouching there, Thompson began: "I have no speech, nothing to say. I feel like a piece of meat," referring to his marketing by his lecture agency.

Having tossed aside the index cards on which were written questions from the audience, Thompson received few serious oral questions from the audience.

"What I'd really like to be in is an argimient," he said.

When a baby cried Thompson miunbled, "That's the most coherent fucking thing I've heard all night."

In most cases, serious questions and Thompson's responses to them were inaudible or incoherent.

Visibly put off by the belligerent Duke audience whom he repeatedly referred to as "beer hippies," Thompson was most relaxed and clear when talking about Richard Nixon.

"Nobody's beaten him as bad as he deserves," Thompson emphasized. "And nobody really comprehends how evil he is. The real horror of it all is that he reflects the rot in all of us."

"Hell, we elected him. The bastard won by the greatest majority since George Washington."

Thompson then urged the audience to "go out and vote."

Maintaining that the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago "kicked off an era," Thompson recalled somewhat disjointedly that before going there he took along his motorcycle helmet left over from his Hell's Angels days. (In the
sixties he rode with the Angels in order to research a book on the group).

"After I got there, I found out why I had brought it with me," he said.

During the forty minute encounter [he was asked to leave at about 9:30), Thompson commented briefly on other subjects.

The 1976 Democratic Presidential candidate: "Mondale."

Terry Sanford's possibly candidacy: "I hope not."

Gary Hart, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Colorado "He'll win, but he's a sell-out."

England: "A coal mine in the Atlantic. Next to a potato farm."

When asked a serious but largely inaudible question concerning the rise of consumer politics, Thompson yanked the shotgun-style microphone around the podium attempting to focus it in the direction of the questioner, a good 25 yards away.

"Violence is always sort of a self-satisfying thing," he added.

It was at this point, reportedly, that the Union people began to seriously considered pulling Thompson from the stage. Asked by someone whether the Rockefeller family was encouraging
"canabalism in South America," an incredulous Thompson tossed up the remainder of his Wild Turkey onto the velvet curtain behind him, and scattered the rest of his unused index cards.

Amidst jeering and confusion. Union program advisor Linda Simmons escorted Thompson off stage. Afterwards Thompson talked for an hour with about 100 students in the garden behind Page Auditorium.

Post mortems on Thompson's abbreviated Duke debut varied.

One rather inebriated disciple was overheard saying, "I thought it was great, anyway. Just great."

But another student remarked, "I'm totally embarrassed — ^for everyone."

A third student commented, "This was fantastic — guerrilla theater, theater of the
absurd — all in one night. Good times at Duke."

Reality is a crutch for those too weak to face up to drugs.

Duke Chronicle piece 10/22/74
Duke Chanticleer piece August 1975
WAC/P? blog piece 10/22/16

Posted by JD Hull at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2023

Suffolk Boy Makes Good

On this day in 1631, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, British lawyer John Winthrop became first Governor of Massachusetts. Winthrop was born near the village of Groton, in Suffolk, England, in 1587. He was one of the leading figures in the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony, the second major settlement in New England following Plymouth Colony. Winthrop's writings and talks about the fledging Puritan colony as a new "city upon a hill" were influential in the religious and political life of Massachusetts Bay and neighboring colonies as New England expanded.

Winthrop, in painting done circa 1630, by unknown artist

Posted by JD Hull at 08:24 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2023

“Cisgender”

Am happy that people like J.K. Rowling are attacking the term “cisgender.” Frankly, “cisgender” was coined and popularized by folks who want in part for basically healthy humans to feel as bad about themselves as they do. It’s a derogatory term. It even sounds awful. Don’t use it, or respond to it, please. Let’s not turn the world over to angry dinks, uber-oddballs and prom rejects. Not yet, anyway. Let them seek revenge some other way.

Posted by JD Hull at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

My Midsummer Tribe.

My tribe this solstice. The Anglo-Irish have spread drunkenness, bullshit, sloth, verbal audacity, bellicosity and evil genius everywhere for over 1000 years. And then there’s our dark side.

Posted by JD Hull at 03:35 PM | Comments (0)

O’Hara nails January 6, 2021.

Posted by JD Hull at 08:36 AM | Comments (0)

June 21, 2023

Get a grip.

Scores of my family—some officers but most not—fought on both sides of the American civil war. Based on what I’ve learned, the vast majority fought based on region. I honor all of them. Every one of them. It’s time to welcome back and honor them all.

Posted by JD Hull at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2023

What about Marco?

"Law Biz: What About Clients? Dan Hull is no pussy. If lawyers laid eggs and hatched their young, Randazza would have been in Hull’s nest. Highly educated and a spirited advocate for his clients, he sees, and has long seen, that the legal marketplace for attorneys old and new is driven by value and versatility..."

Posted by JD Hull at 07:46 AM | Comments (0)

June 19, 2023

Elvoy Raines (1951-1999)

I still miss my friend and old drinking pal Elvoy Raines, writer, lawyer-lobbyist, outlaw. We were very much alike. He was on Oprah once. He testified before Congress a lot. He checked into Harvard for a year in his 40s like it was a rehab. Anyway, with Elvoy, they broke the mold. I remember every conversation. He called me the "craziest white man in America." I called him Dr. Raines. He once said at Nathan’s or Clyde’s late on a Tuesday night: "It's been good for our careers and credit ratings that bars in Georgetown close down during the week by 2 or 3 am, don't you think?”

Posted by JD Hull at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2023

Merrick Garland

Merrick Garland is a very fine lawyer, fine jurist, fine human and yet a very poor excuse for a human male. He should never have been America’s top lawyer. Culturally, for America and the West, he’s been a disaster and a deeply unsettling embarrassment to both man and God. He’s more polarizing than Trump and twice as dangerous. He sees Evil that does not exist and sees it Everywhere. Not unlike our establishment media, AG Garland is one of America’s major true believer villains and much of the blame for any coming second American civil war will be logically laid at his feet. If he ever woke up to the truth about himself, he’d jump off a building. Anyway, how can I put this?

Posted by JD Hull at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2023

“I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come.”

Sainte Genevieve (422-512) saved Parisians from the Huns, the legend goes, in 451. People had started to flee Paris in anticipation of the invasion led by Attila--but stopped when she told them she had a vision that the Huns would not enter Paris. “Get down on your knees and pray! I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come.“ She became the city's patron saint. In 1928, a grateful Paris erected a statue to her on the Pont de la Tournelle (now about 400 years old). Genevieve is facing east, the direction from which the Huns approached. She is also said to have converted Clovis, king of the pagan Franks, to Christianity. If you walk from the Right Bank to the Left Bank near the Ile Saint Louis, you walk right under her, with Notre Dame on your right.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2023

The other Rule 11: Treat each co-worker like your best client.

Clients want to be part of that. Watching and enjoying the "well-oiled" team is an image which sticks in the client mind, memory and senses. They will want more.

The 12 Rules of Client Service. The rules themselves have stayed the same. However, we keep adding to our expansions, takes, riffs and explanations on them (which follow each of the 12 rules themselves), and will continue to do so. The second to last rule is Rule 11: Treat each co-worker like he or she is your best client. What's this Rule 11 all about?

Three things mainly, and much of this is personal and a confession.

First, in our workplaces, we need great people and we need to treat them with respect--not just buttering up. No, they are never as important as clients. But we do need to give employees prompt feedback--the good and the bad. Above all, we want them to grow and be happy.

Two smiling women during my associate days. Neither ever worked for me.

Second, I have a short fuse. I am focused on what I am doing, and I am not always perfectly nice. To bad guys. To good guys. To people I admire, respect, like and love. And since 1981, I have had approximately 25 secretaries. Half of the 20 who didn't work out thought I was crazy, and the other half, well, I learned the hard way. Big Sally, one of my first assistants in the ASAE building on 15th and Eye Streets, once threw a Washington, D.C. yellow pages book at me that crashed into the wall a foot from my head, destroying several plants, another lawyer's dictaphone and worst of all cracking the frame on my "Hunter Thompson for Sheriff" wall poster which I hung on the wall outside my office. Both of us were to blame--but repairing the relationship took months. It should have never happened. Big Sally was not my first choice as an assistant, a partner hired her and assigned her to me, and I was a 32-year-old lawyer under enormous pressures to advance a large client's agenda and prove myself and my firm in the DC court systems--but she had her own distractions in life. And I needed her. Whatever I said to her in those 3 angry seconds about my dissatisfaction with her work or work ethic cost me a lot. More recently, I had a huge "disconnect" problem with just about every "Generation Y hire"--a thoughtful and talented part of the US workforce with strong and quite sane ideas about the place of work in their lives--who walked through our doors. But I am getting there. I am making progress.

Third, "Rule 11" is a client rule, too. Clients love to form partnerships with law, accounting, consulting firms and service providers of all manner with genuinely functional workplaces. They love work communities where the professionals are demanding but love what they do and solve problems together as a team of happy, focused people who stretch--but respect--one another. It's fun for them to watch, and fun to watch them watch you. Clients want to be part of that. Watching the "well-oiled" team is an image which sticks in the client mind. We have a GC with a transactional and mergers and acquisition background who has a history of popping in us for trials in two cities. He once spent the better part of a month camped out with us in Pennsylvania. He likes to be around us. If we have a trial going on, and he has time, he might head for it. If he heads for a courtroom, he may stay only for an hour. But he thinks it's damn fun to be around us. His eyes light up during strategy sessions when we can include him. And you even sense he wants to pop up from his seat and take on a few witnesses himself... If a client can experience your people working together in that kind of focused but loose harmony, it's contagious.

A client will want more of it. It's that last string in the major chord of a truly joyous place to work and grow.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:45 AM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2023

Sparta: Money, Guns and Mothers.

War is the last of all things to go according to schedule.

-- Thucydides (460 BC - 395 BC) in The History of the Peloponnesian War.

Spartan Woman Giving a Shield to Her Son, 1805, Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier. In the lore and legend of Sparta, when a son left home for the armed forces, his mother said: "Fight well and fairly. Return with your shield or on it."

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 10, 2023

Speaker's Corner: Happy. Monday,

Posted by JD Hull at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2023

Kurt Vonnegut, '40 is Prisoner in Germany, Shortridge High School Daily Echo, Indianapolis, March 29, 1945

Posted by JD Hull at 04:03 AM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2023

16th Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, Easy Red Sector

79 Years Ago. 16th Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, Easy Red Sector, Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. © Robert Capa.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

A New Mind. Anyone?

Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the necessity
will not matriculate: unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness.

William Carlos Williams in Paterson, Book 2 ("Sunday in the Park")

Posted by JD Hull at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2023

Guernica: "Did you paint this?"

Here's a WWII story I first heard in 1992 in Paris from a struggling young Irish painter named Richard hustling his drinks and living by his wit, humor, charm and talent on a few choice blocks of the Right Bank. I never found out what happened to Richard. But ever since I've thought about this simple and apparently fairly well-known Picasso story, and more and more since 2005.

In the Fall of that year, Julie McGuire and I were together in Madrid. We made time to see Guernica, very likely Pablo Picasso's most famous painting, and some other great modern Spanish works, at the Museo Reina Sofia in central Madrid. Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 after both German and Italian bombers shelled Guernica, in Spain's Basque Country, on April 26 of that year, during the Spanish Civil War. The bombing by Germany and Italy happened at the request of Spanish Nationalist forces. The painting is an outcry, protest and lament of the self-assured, polite, smooth and famously composed Picasso.

The smallest details of the story seem to change. But historians and journalists seem to agree on the following:

In 1942, during the 1940-1944 German occupation of Paris, German officers often visited Picasso's Paris studio at a time when some of his paintings were being burned as decadent. On one visit, an aggressive Gestapo officer found a simple postcard with an image of Guernica in the studio. The officer confronted the painter, and held before Picasso's face the postcard with its breathtaking indictments of war, national pride, meaningless death, pointless suffering, waste, government hypocrisy, inflamed leadership and self-destruction.

"Did you do this?", the officer asked.

“No, sir. You did."

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925 – June 6, 1968)

RFK or “Bobby.” Far and away he was the most interesting and storied Kennedy. A phenom and a rock star at the end. Died 55 years ago today. June 6, 1968, a few weeks after MLK, Jr. was killed. I was 15, and an ambitious high school sophomore in Cincinnati after my family’s last back-then obligatory corporate America move. When Robert Kennedy died, I was already into policy and politics. And I’d already heard stories about him most people never heard. My dad, a P&G executive, was not bowled over by famous rich people. But he had crossed swords with Kennedy in the late 1950s when we were living in Detroit. And I got some stories out of him. John Kennedy was still in Congress then. And younger brother Robert was an abrasive and spectacularly unpleasant young Hill investigator obsessed with trucks and companies that used them. In fact, that was who Bobby Kennedy was for most people his whole life. That’s how they knew him: tough guy, mean boy and fixer. But over the next decade lightning rod Bobby changed--and to even those close to him that change was fundamental. He came into his own late in life by somehow softening. From rich bratty bully scrapper and runt of the Kennedy litter to high priest of American youth culture. Tons has been written about him—and about how those changes might have come about. Please read some of the literature on this guy. This Kennedy was a character out a great novel. But real. Authentic. With a happy ending. He grew. Existential hero, some said. Anyway, Kennedy was shot on June 5. He died early on June 6. His campaign manager—the super-charged Frank Mankiewicz —got on TV and announced Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s death in just a few sentences which you should see and hear if you can get a clip of it. Go find the YouTube version of Frank Mankiewicz’s announcement. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere. It’s amazing.

Posted by JD Hull at 08:51 PM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2023

City of the Dead: Père Lachaise, 20th arrondissement

Laid out like a modern grid-form metropolis, Père Lachaise has the feel of a town--truly, a city of the dead--with tidy paved and cobbled "streets," complete with cast-iron signposts.

--Alistair Horne, in Seven Ages of Paris (Alfred A. Knopf 2002)

Père Lachaise Cemetery, 20th arrondissement.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

2121 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 03, 2023

Ile St Louis: Ernest, the French aren't like you and me.

They have more class.

--With apologies to the F. Scott-Ernest exchange.

Like their natural enemy, the English, Parisians are wonderful--but neither nation's citizens are openly "friendly". When the English and French encounter Yanks abroad, they just can't get why Americans are so outgoing, or why they would even want to be. Most Americans are openly curious and warm everywhere they go.

Both the English and the French, however, would rather choke to death than ask a question about something they don't know, and they bristle at at the overly-familiar tone they associate with American tourists and businessmen. True, the reserved English are getting better at customer service. But a Parisian retail-level employee is still likely to treat basic customer service as horribly degrading to his or her person-hood: "I know it's my job, I know you aren't like the other Americans, but you are still bothering me, sir."

Despite my own predominately English roots--I've got smaller bits of German, Welsh, Irish and French, and dabs of any of the four can make you hopelessly eccentric and irritating in completely different ways--the French are my still favorite. They are flirtatious and serious, volatile and sturdy, civilized and feral, logical and irrational. But they do teach their children of all social classes that education and being steeped in the best of Western culture is not something like, as Brit author Julian Barnes once suggested in Something to Declare, an optional feature to a car. Art is a necessity, not a luxury. The French are

designed by God to seem as provokingly dissimilar from the British as possible. Catholic, Cartesian, Mediterranean; Machiavellian in politics, Jesuitical in argument, Casanovan in sex; relaxed about pleasure, and treating the arts as central to life, rather than some add-on, like a set of alloy wheels.

So the humanities, ideas and old verities from great men and women now gone are essential for living and enjoying life as a Whole Person. Art isn't just for the rich, the elite or the intellectual. Moreover, the French are not runners and cowards--don't make the mistake of buying into the notion that they shrink from adversity. Throughout most of their history, they've been calculating, competitive, courageous and war-like. They are intelligently patriotic. And they'll beat you with argument, and arms, if they have to. But their real gods are Reason and Art. My sense is that, in the next few decades, the French will manage to save us all from ourselves, as they can be counted on to remind humans of what's important--and who we all really are. Watch them.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

World-Famous, Witty, Way Fun and Elegant Rules of Client Service

Our world-famous 12 Rules of Client Service. Revel in their wisdom. Ignore them at your peril. Make your family memorize them. Teach them to the help. Your mistress. Argue about them. Improve them. And see the movie.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2023

"I just play straight, natural blue..."

An' my type of blue, I play it with a bottleneck. I first got this style from a beef bone, you understan'. Rib what come out of a streak. My uncle when I was a small boy in the country, he ground this bone down, and filed it with a file and put it on his lil' finger, but I play it on my ring finger, you understand....and this here bottleneck sound better n' the bone because you get more clear sound out of it....

--Fred McDowell, 1969. I do not play no rock 'n' roll

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)