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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)
May 31, 2023
Born Outlaws: Americans.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)
May 29, 2023
Memorial Day
For Yanks, Memorial Day is about resolute if terrified men and women, innocents all, who died, often alone, horribly and in confusion, in American military engagements.
June 6, 1944. U.S. army officer watching Norman coast as his landing craft approaches Omaha Beach.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
May 28, 2023
I remember…
Posted by JD Hull at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)