Concrete Achievements

Category: Twitter

  • Links from the week of 2 May 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • C’est fini pour le PS alors.

    C’est fini pour le PS alors. Ces arguments sont exactement les mêmes que les Britanniques en Irlande du nord, Orban ou Kaczynski. Céder le respect des lois pour quelques conscriptions. Vraiment, c’est honteux. twitter.com/PierreLepel/st…

    « Désobéir la loi internationale dans un rayon spécifique et limité » – ces sont les mots du ministère Britannique en essayant d’éviter les conséquences du TCA en Irlande. Et que dirait un MAÉ socialiste en réponse? « Ah ouais c’est pas mal comme idée ça »?

    J’en ai marre avec les politicos français qui prétendent que l’Europe est un grand méchant ogre que la France ne peut jamais influencer. Qu’ils aillent voter pour Le Pen et son Frexit!

  • Links from the week of 25 April 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Not often that I walk out of an opera at the interval but tonight’s @Operadurhin…

    Not often that I walk out of an opera at the interval but tonight’s @Operadurhin production of Così Fan Tutte is a bloody mess both literally and figuratively.

    I’m sure there is a good opera to be written about war parting lovers for decades, sorrow, mutilation and longing but Così isn’t it.

    The heart of the problem is the producer broke the timeline, so different scenes happen in different decades around the First World War. Meaning, the war is not a ruse of Alfonso’s, it is a real war. And the men don’t disguise themselves as Albanians and come back that morning

    They disguise themselves as mutilated soldiers and come back … four years later. And then the next scene is … ten years later. It just rips the heart out of the structure, I cannot imagine anyone who had even read the libretto would think this was a good idea.

    It also means that the poisoning scene is a chance meeting on stage in a cabaret. I have no idea how they’ll handle the third and fourth acts but of course I’m not going to find out.

    Così is a comedy, but it’s perfectly possible to play it dark, and Alfonso in particular you can do a lot with. But you can’t play it as Saving Private Ryan. And you can’t have a Così where Alfonso plans nothing, and stuff just happens.

    They mutilated the libretto a fair bit to get it to fit what they were trying to do (and also mistranslated parts of it on the surtitles) but you can’t get away from the text saying that the plot is happening to six characters in one day. It’s not a sprawling epic.

    I was up in the slips of the second gallery so I could at least lean back and listen to the music, but every time I looked down at the stage something totally out of sequence was happening.

    It’s a shame as I really enjoyed their Elisir d’Amore a few seasons back, and I do love a good innovative production (like the Da Ponte Trilogy at @LaMonnaieDeMunt pre-Covid). But this was a massive, massive miss.

    (Tagging fellow Così fan @mrchrisaddison as a warning)

    What the Fiordiligi? Glad I headed back for a beer.

    That’s … not the point of it.

  • Checking out the new online consultation on constitutional reform in Belgium.

    Checking out the new online consultation on constitutional reform in Belgium. It’s very pretty – but the questions are essay questions with 50k character limits. I mean, I care about the constitutional arrangements but it would be a leap of faith in terms of time commitment.

    I mean… even with super smart AI and sentiment analysis, I don’t know that you would get anything out of questions like this if 1,000 people replied. And less if 10,000 did.

    And in terms of those people who are not happy with Belgium’s constitutional arrangements, of whom there are many, are any but the most parti-pris going to take the time to write 5-7000 word answers?

    The whole thing is here: demain-toekomst-zukunft.be

  • Watching @De7deDag opening its Sunday morning politics and culture show with a half-hour…

    Watching @De7deDag opening its Sunday morning politics and culture show with a half-hour section on Arno (RIP) and thinking about cultural connections and cultural islands. He was from Oostende but sang mostly in French and was strongly anti-nationalist.

    Culture in Belgium is interesting. Divided across languages, but francophone culture is a tiny part of la Francophonie while Flemish culture a much bigger part of Dutch-speaking culture. Where it becomes unique is where those pieces cross over, and Arno was a great example.

    Example: a good piece in @destandaard this morning about how he mixed up languages in his songs (not just recording different versions in NL and FR) standaard.be/cnt/dmf2022042…

    And one of his best known songs was “Putain, putain”, with the chorus “Nous sommes quand-même tous des Européens” (here performing it with @Stromae in Feb at @ABconcerts) youtu.be/THXzF60V-6U?t=…

    @karinelalieux called him a “great Belgian” and there’s something about his life and music that speaks to Belgium at its best – a mixing of cultures, a certain hedonism, a particular attitude – and stands against small-mindedness.

    The Grand-Place played his music over the speakers yesterday as well twitter.com/PhilippeClose/… RIP.

  • Links from the week of 18 April 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • 45% would be disturbing new high for the French far-right but …

    45% would be disturbing new high for the French far-right but …
    (and this is not criticism of Mij, who is v level-headed on it)
    1. Not all those votes are far right votes. Some are anti-system votes, some are anti-Macron votes. twitter.com/Mij_Europe/sta…

    2. Vote rot = inevitably more anti-Macron votes when he is defending his record after five years.
    3. Zemmour did Le Pen a favour by staking out even farther right positions
    4. Le Pen is a figure that people are more familiar with now and cost of living crisis is good for her

    5. Electoral system is handling Dutchification v badly. 2-round means representative of the universal 25% anti-system voting bloc will always get to run off against a fragmented mainstream.
    6. Le Pen vote will be the 2022 high point for RN. Assemblée elections will not go well.

    None of this is to say we shouldn’t be worried, but this is not “one more heave” and then the far right win. The non-extreme parties have five years to reconfigure themselves into a winning format for the post-Macron era. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t but they can.

  • Links from the week of 11 April 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Links from the week of 4 April 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.