First we had the the professional corporate climate-change deniers snorting at the idea that global warming might have played a role in this week’s devastating tornadoes in the South. Now we have religious-right climate-change deniers claiming that they know what did cause those tornadoes: in fact, the storms were a product of God’s wrath and an expression of his judgment. This time it’s Dr. Calvin Beisner, voicing his views on the radio show of the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, via RightWingWatch: BEISNER: What this tells me, Bryan, is that we need to recognize that natural disasters like this are like distant early-warning signals. There is judgment to come. We are all sinners. None of us, none of us is righteous enough to say, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t deserve it if that happened to me.’ I’m sure folks in Alabama and Georgia will be pleased to hear that God singled them out for judgment — especially ahead of such godless places as Hollywood — just to prove that it can happen to good people too. And why are we getting God’s wrath? you ask. Well, Pat Robertson has the answer — it’s because we’ve become a modern-day “Sodom and Gomorrah”: Robertson: And I believe that the anointing of the Lord has been here to fulfill the desire of those early settlers, to take the gospel from America throughout the world, and that’s what we’ve been here to do. But let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t take a great scholar to tell you the United States has lost its moorings. When you think that courts have denied children the right to pray in schools, that there’s a vendetta against religious belief, that now homosexuality has been made a constitutional right, that abortion has been made a constitutional right, the courts and judges have trampled on the early origins of our nation, they have distorted the meaning of the First Amendment. It’s all been done, and we’ve let it happen. But I was reading today about a place called Sodom and Gomorrah, and a man named Abraham stood before God, and he says, “God, there’re righteous people in that city, would you kill them along with the wicked, must not the judge of all the earth do right?” And God finally promised, “If I can find ten righteous in that city, I will spare it,” just ten. Well the time came he could only find six, so they destroyed Sodom and Gomorra. But there’re many righteous here in America, and we need to band together and pray that God Almighty will spare this great land and reestablish in our hearts the vision of the pioneers. Well, considering that the storms struck hardest in states represented by some of the most hardcore global-warming denialists , maybe they’re onto something with this whole “God’s retribution” bit. Though not for the reasons they presume.
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The seven ages of man are a thing of the past. We’re never too old to find a new lover, start a business or even have a baby. Now, we’re ready for anything – except death. Welcome to the world of amortality. Plus, are you already an amortal? Take our test and find out My father was well beyond the danger point of a dive when a weight slipped from his jacket and spiralled downwards into the gloom. We had arrived at the quayside to discover our Red Sea pleasure boat laden with US soldiers on leave from peacekeeping duties in the Gulf. The platoon’s NCO proved to be a seasoned diver. His charges were novices. A 19-year-old private from Arkansas, paired with my father, then 70, for the safety check and first dive of the day, failed to secure the weights that are essential in controlling a diver’s surfacing speed. The mishap illustrated one of many rules that the sea subverts: on dry land a healthy teenager will invariably outperform a septuagenarian in any physical exercise. Underneath the waves, age is as fluid as water. Confronted with a problem, the soldier lost control of his buoyancy, flailing like a fish in a net, while the older man, an emeritus professor of theatre history, calmly recalibrated their dive plan, communicating the change in the limited vocabulary of scuba sign language. Only once we were back on board was the natural order restored, as the senior grouched about the teen, who stretched out in the heat, blithely unaware of the animus he had attracted. But the natural order is itself in flux. My father still dives in his 80s, still lectures, researches, writes books. People are living longer, sometimes much longer. Across the developed world the average lifetime has lengthened by 30 years since the beginning of the 20th century. The fastest-growing segment of the world population is the very old, with the number of centenarians up from a few thousand in 1950 to 340,000 in 2010 and projected to reach nearly 6 million by 2050. You might have thought we’d use all that extra time to squeeze in a few additional stages of life – from the seven ages of man observed by Shakespeare, when life expectancy at birth was below 40, to maybe 10, 12, 15 stages now that a man born in Stratford-upon-Avon looks forward to an average span of 76.9 years. Here’s the crazy, counterintuitive thing: the ages of man are actually eliding. Youth used to be our last hurrah before the onset of maturity and dotage, each milestone benchmarked against culturally determined expectations. Those expectations are now swirling and re-forming like glassfish in a current. What that means is that the premises on which our governments legislate are outdated. Our economies are based on data that no longer applies. There is a profound disconnect between how we imagine life and how it actually unfolds. The meanings of age have become elusive; visual clues untrustworthy. Children dress like louche adults. Their parents slouch around in hoodies and trainers. Rising phalanxes of Dorian Grays rely on exercise, diet and cosmetic procedures to remain transcendentally youthful. Glowing teens and twentysomethings are propelled by some of those same procedures into a semblance of premature ageing, their sculpted, frozen faces timeless rather than fresh. Female celebrities don’t grow old; they vanish. And there’s another reason our perceptions of age have come adrift: the disappearance of death in the developed world. If we’re lucky we may be in the middle of our lives before we see death up close and then it’s usually medicalised. Polite societies don’t dwell on death; we’re expected to dab our eyes and get on with the business of living. In the absence of legitimised outlets, our orphan emotions attach to public bereavements, depositing flowers at the gates of Kensington Palace and composing Facebook tributes for total strangers. But there’s also a growing trend to believe we can control death. Assisted suicide is becoming just another lifestyle choice, at least in the abstract. Moreover, science has already added decades to our lives and must surely be on the verge of adding many more. Barely a day goes by without a media report of a breakthrough that seems to promise another lifestyle choice: to defer death altogether. Things change. Amortals don’t, not at the core. These are the swelling ranks of people – and I am one – who live agelessly, doing and consuming many of the same things from teens into old age. For us, the concept of age-appropriate behaviour has little meaning. We don’t structure our lives around the inevitability of decline and death because we prefer to ignore it. Perpetual motion is a hallmark of the condition; we are prone to overwork, to adventuring. Nothing banishes those pesky intimations of mortality more effectively than illicit sex or emotional drama or some high-octane combination of the two. Unwitting revolutionaries, we assume all options remain open, from youth into old age, and may be startled if we get round to having children at all to find ourselves reliant on fertility treatments or adoption agencies or surrogates to help us to do so (as a result having fewer kids than non-amortals, but sometimes in batches of two or more). We never consider ourselves too young to pair up, break up, launch businesses, take on the world or too old for fresh commitments, old habits, the latest technologies or new diversions. David Battiscombe is a 59-year-old English bass-player-turned-property lawyer: “If somebody said tomorrow I had to stop practising law and do something else it wouldn’t faze me in the least. And I think whenever I stop doing this I would expect to do something else, probably something completely different. It’s the old Woody Allen dead shark thing, you can’t stay still. That’s just the kiss of death. A shark, if it stops moving, dies.” Battiscombe took up running in 2009 and last month completed the London marathon, a few months shy of his 60th birthday. Other amortals might mark that milestone with a different kind of marathon, a celebratory bender that leaves them mewling and puking like infants. The world is used to the spectacle of baby boomers, who never imagined they would one day wake up to find themselves in danger of being marginalised by the youth-oriented culture they helped to create, challenging shibboleths about age. Yet amortal impulses are by no means confined to boomers. Amortality has reached a tipping point and is spreading through all the generations. For a dystopian vision of the ageless world we now inhabit you have only to watch hypersexualised teens competing with hypersexualised sexagenarians on any of the talent shows that have become Saturday night TV staples. The svengali behind many of the shows is Simon Cowell, who is on the evidence of his own utterances one kind of amortal archetype. “All the things I used to like as a kid I still like,” he told Piers Morgan in an intimate chat in front of 6 million viewers. “Genuinely, my tastes haven’t changed at all.” The evergreen Cowell – Botox, he once said, is a routine, “like cleaning my teeth” – has more than a touch of the Peter Pan about him. He has fathered no children. His plans to marry, after his first-time engagement aged 50, show no signs of reaching a speedy fruition. Death is unconscionable to him. “I can’t go to funerals and stuff like that. I find it very difficult to deal with that kind of reality. I shut myself off totally because it affects me so badly,” he confided in the same interview. “The big surprise for me is that age is just a number. It’s a number without meaning,” mused Hugh Hefner. Aged 85, he’s preparing to marry a woman 60 years his junior. Amortals such as Cowell and Hefner may appear marooned in Neverland but they are only part of the story. The actor Richard Wilson became the personification of grumpy old age as Victor Meldrew in the sitcom One Foot in the Grave . In real life he’s as ageless as Mick Jagger or Meryl Streep. “I find myself looking at people and thinking, ‘Oh, look at that poor old man,’ and I realise that they’re probably younger than me,” says Wilson, 74. “Because my image of myself is not of an old man, I get quite shocked when people call me an old man.” When he was first offered the part of Meldrew, he turned it down, he tells me. “I didn’t see myself playing older people yet.” “[When] I’m 70, and I pick up the phone and I’m talking to some young spark of 30 who’s at the top of his game, will he pay any attention to me?” asks Bob Geldof, rhetorically. “No, but if I was still, say, having hit TV shows or hit records or still politically active in the proper sense, still arguing and being listened to, then they probably would. So age disappears in direct proportion to the vitality of your ideas.” Retirement isn’t a proposition that appeals to amortals unless life after work promises to be busier and better than the life before. And the impulse to keep working isn’t such a bad thing, given the changing profile of the world’s population. In Europe, the 60-pluses are projected to make up 37% of the population by the middle of this century. In some countries, two-fifths of citizens will be in their seventh decade or beyond. One of those countries will be Greece. Among the austerity measures its government proposed as it struggled to manage the country’s debt crisis was to raise the retirement age – from 53 to 67. Angry Greeks immediately flooded the streets to protest an outrage that threatened their right to be paid to do nothing for an average of 27 years. (Despite having the highest smoking rate in the world, the average Greek life span hovers around 80 years.) Amortals are more inclined to celebrate the lifting of compulsory retirement ages and to deplore the ageism that seriously disadvantages older job seekers. Here’s someone who reluctantly left her job at the Royal Court Theatre only when her employers discovered she was beyond pensionable age, and went on to establish a freelance public relations consultancy: “The other day I was washing my hair in the shower and they were blabbing on the Today programme about the problems with being able to afford to take care of the old. And I was half-listening, and I suddenly thought, I’m an elderly person – I’m 77 – and this is about me, but I don’t feel any connection to it at all. And it isn’t a money thing because financially I’m the least secure I’ve ever been in my adult life. It’s really that I don’t feel like an elderly person. I used to worry quite a lot about what people would think when I turned up to do jobs, because you know, the expectation, but I’ve completely got over that. I just think well, I am who I am and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Nobody has ever said: ‘Gosh, do you think you’re up to this?’ Never, never, never.” The speaker is my mother. She is amortal, like my father (her ex-husband; both parents are long remarried to younger partners) and many in our wider family. It’s no coincidence that quite a few relatives work in entertainment. It’s an industry that commodifies the desire for distraction, and it’s rammed with people whose greatest talent is to distract themselves. But genes don’t make us amortal; our socialisation does that, and the elements of that socialisation have changed dramatically as the culture of deference died, and traditional forms of authority ceded dominance to a makeshift cast of celebrities and scientists and a globalised, digitised range of cultural influences. Family, too, has lost traction as a vehicle for cultural transmission. As generational differences erode, relationships between adults and children change, often becoming closer. But if there is a weakness to amortal parenting, it is that amortal parents may be better friends to their kids than they are parents. In the vanguard of the amortally driven transformation of family life, you’ll find celebrities endorsing these changes through their own adventures in family-building. “I feel just as hungry today as the day I left home,” remarked Madonna. Her appetite for adding to her family extended beyond her 50th birthday. Elton John unburdened to OK! magazine about his decision to start a family with his partner David Furnish. “David said: ‘Well what about surrogacy?’ I said: ‘You know what? Why not?’ I’m 62 at this point, but I feel 40.” Celebrities are the most effective sales force of our age, popularising ideas and behaviours. They’re committed to the institution of marriage, for example. It’s the institution of being married that’s palled. And they increasingly use their celebrity power to shift products, too. Avatars of extended youth are often hired as the public faces of the multibillion-pound, multi-faceted global industry that is devoted to combating ageing and death or exploiting our passionate desire to do so. When we see famous actresses apparently defying age thanks to patented nostrums and programmes and potions, we react like envious customers watching Meg Ryan’s phoney orgasm: “I’ll have what she’s having.” The problem is that not even scientists can agree on the causes of ageing or the possibilities of an antidote. A majority of mainstream scientists are pessimistic about the possibilities for unabated life extension. The world’s verifiably longest-lived person, Jeanne Calment, died at 122 in 1997, and that may be close to the edge of the possible human span. But there have been flurries of excitement around discoveries that seem to hold out the promise of slowing ageing. Last November, Nature magazine published a study showing that mice with suppressed production of an enzyme called telomerase aged swiftly but could be rejuvenated if the telomerase supply was restored. And there is a chorus of dissenting voices promising that if we work out ways to live long enough, we’ll be able to live for ever. Ray Kurzweil, for example, puts his faith in nanotechnology, the development of machines tinier than atoms that could be deployed in the human body to repair the ravages of time. Kurzweil’s impressive record as an inventor (he developed the first flatbed scanners, optical character-recognition software, print-to-speech and speech-recognition technologies, as well as making fine keyboards found in many music studios), together with his unnerving habit of issuing outlandish predictions that later prove true, mean only the foolhardy would dismiss his forecasts out of hand. He has signed up to have his head cryonically frozen after death, envisaging resuscitation in a more technologically advanced future, but he’s not “super-enthusiastic” about refrigeration; it is, he says, a back-up plan. He is perched on a sofa in his office in Wellesley, near Boston, surrounded by awards, posters for two films centred on his transhumanist ideas, photos with people even more successful than he. “I have enough trouble pursuing my interests while I’m alive and kicking,” he says. “It’s hard to imagine doing that when you’re frozen, but proponents of it say it’s better than the alternative. Really, my plan is to avoid dying, I think that’s the best approach.” For Kurzweil – 62 at the time of the interview last year, “biologically more like 41″ – that effort involves a Spartan diet, exercise and handfuls of vitamins and around 150 supplements daily. Many amortals can’t be bothered to put the work into staying vibrant, trusting instead to boffins like Kurzweil to deliver us from the clutches of our own biology. Unfortunately there’s no firm evidence that they will do so, even in our longer lifetimes. Amortals may be assailed by depression or left unprepared when the gap between our ageless sense of self and the reality of ageing yawns. I would urge my family and friends to drink elixirs or open their veins to restorative swarms of nanobots if I thought that would grant them even a few additional years. Instead I cling to the hope that by eating well and taking exercise, engaging and being engaged, they will at the very least challenge Jeanne Calment’s record for longevity. Stretching the health span to match the life span is a goal to which any healthy human can aspire, assuming he or she has access to the fundamentals of life and the modern health and sanitation systems that have already extended our lives. The blind watchmaker has saddled some of us with defects likely to thwart that ambition; accidents will happen; we inhabit a fractious planet in which violence is distributed as blindly as genes. Those eventualities are largely unpredictable and unavoidable, but the rest is down to us. And amortality promises benefits as well as perils. Amortals will not step aside for younger talent, but our compulsion to keep working may provide at least partial relief from the economic strains of a greying population. Moreover, research has shown that attitude does play a significant role in determining how we age. How you feel often becomes who you are. Boredom and its ugly sisters – detachment, isolation, rigidity – can drain life of joy, as surely as sickness and poverty. When I asked my father about the regimen that keeps him fit enough for diving, he quoted an American folk song: “Oh, it’s beefsteak when I’m hungry/Rye whiskey when I’m dry/If a tree don’t fall on me/I’ll live till I die.” In fact, like many amortals, he doesn’t easily or entirely accept his mortality. His impulse to outrun death is one of the reasons he’s ageing pretty well. Catherine Mayer’s Amortality: The Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly is published on 12 May by Vermilion, priced £12.99 Are you amortal? Answer the following 10 questions and find out Tick the answer that most closely matches your immediate response. 1. The difference between the age you are and the age you feel is: a) More than 10 years b) Up to 10 years c) I feel the age I am d) No idea. Age is an irrelevance 2. Describe your typical Sunday: a) I often have to catch up on work but I also find time for friends b) I usually have a lazy day and watch TV c) Church, household chores and family pursuits d) Hard to say, but as busy as the rest of the week 3. The late thirties and forties are the best ages to have babies: a) I agree, and I/my friends have done just that/are planning to do that b) I’m not sure that’s true. It’s probably better to have kids when you have more energy c) I disagree. It’s unfair on the kids who have older parents d) I haven’t got round to thinking about babies 4. Your friend’s new lover is 25 years younger than your friend. You: a) Don’t think the age difference matters. They’re soul mates b) Understand the attraction but the age gap means the relationship is unlikely to last c) Think “there’s no fool like an old fool” d) Hadn’t noticed 5. You are permanently stressed and worried. You turn to: a) Therapy. I start by fixing myself b) Retail therapy. It always makes me feel better c) Prayer. It always makes me feel better d) Stress? The only thing that makes me stressed is having nothing to do 6. Your ideal holiday would be: a) Action-packed. An adventure b) A mixture of relaxation and sight-seeing c) I like to spend quiet time at home d) I prefer work trips. They’re a better way to get under the skin of a country 7. Your fitness routine involves: a) Guilt. I belong to a gym but I rarely go b) I exercise/play a sport but I’m not as fit as I used to be c) At school/college I played a vigorous sport d) I don’t really need to exercise because I am always running to the next appointment 8. When you think about retirement you: a) Shudder. I never want to stop working b) Wonder if I’ll ever be able to afford to retire c) I am looking forward to my golden years d) I haven’t really thought that far ahead yet 9. The following statement best describes your attitude towards getting old: a) I don’t intend to get old the way people used to. b) It comes to us all, I suppose… c) I look forward to the dignity and wisdom of age d) I haven’t really thought that far ahead yet 10. Every life ends in death. Discuss: a) Maybe, but science is on the point of finding ways to make us live longer b) That’s true but I’d really rather not think about it c) And death is the beginning of eternal life d) I haven’t really thought that far ahead yet ANSWERS Mostly As Bona fide amortal: You have strong amortal inclinations and are already living agelessly, at least in some respects. Mostly Bs On the way to amortality: You have latent amortal tendencies that may well develop in future. Mostly Cs Mortal soul: You have significant immunity to amortality and are unimpressed by many of its manifestations. Mostly Ds Amortal to the max: You’re so detached from external concepts of age that you probably don’t even realise how agelessly you live. Health & wellbeing Ageing Biology Nanotechnology guardian.co.uk
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When the 64th Cannes film festival opens on 11 May, no one will get closer to the stars than Gilles Traverso – a photographer for the local papers, whose family have had unique access to the world’s greatest actors for 70 years From the first, the Cannes film festival was a media event. The films in competition had to be seen indoors, in a sacrosanct darkness from which photographers were excluded. By way of compensation, festivities in the open air gave the paparazzi a diversion. Convoys of horse-drawn carriages or open-topped cars crawled through town displaying the stars, with flower petals fluttering from on high. Photo ops cannily accentuated national stereotypes: Yves Montand stationed himself on a bench poring over Le Monde , Glenn Ford more energetically bounced on a trampoline or rode in a go-cart, and Ugo Tognazzi gave a cooking demonstration in the surf, ladling spaghetti out of a vat. The stars were offered to the cameras, and encouraged to titillate fans by shedding their clothes. At the same time, they were lifted out of reach, unreachable objects of fantasy. The festival had two opposing imperatives: exposure on the one hand, mystification on the other. Visiting Cannes, you immediately understand the contradiction, summed up by the odd proximity of a beach and a so-called palace. On the level sand everyone is equal, reduced to tanned flesh. But the red-carpeted staircase outside the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès establishes a hierarchy, as the stars wave from its heights to their lowly admirers. Last weekend those stairs were inaccessible, behind barricades. Tourists who had been lolling on the beach paused to take photographs in front of the barrier, like candidates queuing for The X Factor auditions. In a society where everyone longs to star in his or her personal biopic, it counts as a sacred spot, the equivalent to being photographed outside the Vatican. Around the corner is a walk of fame like the one on Hollywood Boulevard, with palm prints of New Wave directors and sacred monsters such as Gérard Depardieu underfoot. This being France, the path is littered with cigarette butts, a reminder that stars are consumer items, to be used and discarded. Waiting for me beside the stairs was Gilles Traverso, whose grandfather founded a photographic firm in Cannes in 1919. Three generations of Traversos – Italian immigrants who crossed the border in the late 19th century – have documented the festival, with its officious ceremonies and its unofficial orgies, its parades and its parties. The founder, Auguste Traverso, was there at the railway station when Louis Lumière, the inventor of the film camera, arrived in September 1939 at the start of the first festival. Two days later the proceedings were abruptly curtailed when the war began. When the festival resumed in 1946, Auguste’s son Henri took over, and now the business is in the hands of Henri’s son Gilles, a jobbing photojournalist fuelled by Gitanes, who spent last Sunday racing on his motorbike between a fête du miel (honey fair) staged by beekeepers in the nearby town of Grasse and a traffic accident at La Bocca, with a stop in town to show me the family’s archive. I wondered whether the traffic accident shouldn’t take priority. “No fatalities,” he shrugged, with true gallic nonchalance; the totalled car that a newspaper in Nice wanted him to photograph wasn’t going anywhere. As we fought our way through the tourists immortalising one another on their mobile phones, Gilles scoffed at the scrum of non-professionals. “It was different in my father’s time. Elizabeth Taylor used to walk on her own, and was happy to be photographed with American visitors. Before she became the princess, Grace Kelly posed in the port, then invited my father to take an aperitif with her. In 1955 he asked Brigitte Bardot to run on the beach so he could show how her body was in motion; you can see in the photograph that a few others followed, but they kept their distance.” By 1967, when Henri photographed Bardot encircled by gendarmes and bombarded by flashes, the star herself had literally been eclipsed by those who were gazing at her through their incendiary lenses: you can identify her only by fixing on a cascade of blond hair at the point where the sight lines of all those competing cameras converge. “Recently I was photographing Milla Jovovich in one of the hotels over there,” said Gilles. “I wanted to make a shot on the beach, but we couldn’t cross the road. The moment people recognised her, it was madness. They have no respect, they want to touch; so finally we ran for cover. And even with the professionals, it is exhausting: they overdo it because digital photography is so easy – you take a thousand pictures and hope one will be OK. I began with a Rolleiflex camera, and after I clicked 12 times I had to change the film. That made me economise, and plan what I was doing.” Encouraged by the annual canonisation of a director at Cannes, the cinema tries hard to remember that it’s supposed to be an art form. But Hollywood has turned it into an industry, catering to a mass market that gobbles up snaps of stars and gossip about them. Traverso, however, is proud to be a pre-industrial craftsman, the master of a specialised trade, and would rather be an artisan than a self-glorifying artist. He works on his own, mainly for local papers, and instead of a studio has a tiny office in a back street where he keeps his negatives in yellowing envelopes with hand-inked labels, fastened with rubber bands and stored in wooden boxes. ” Tout fait à la main ,” he told me. ” Très artisanal . I continue a history.” The Traversos resemble the modest French dynasties that produce wine or cheese, conserving regional quirks and resisting standardisation. They have never thought of themselves as anything but journalists, capturing mementos of a day at a time. All the same, the passage of time has turned them into historians – of Cannes, the cinema, and the symbiotic connection between the art form and what was once a Provençal fishing village. Auguste Traverso started out as a radiographer, and after returning from the trenches in 1918 he put his knowledge of X-rays to use by setting up a photography studio; the art began as an adjunct to chemistry, which is why we used to take our rolls of film to a chemist’s to be developed. “My grandfather collected corpses from the battlefield during the war,” said Gilles. “It was terrible for him, he never spoke of it. He had seen too much, and afterwards what he wanted was to photograph glamour – women in furs who rode in limousines, the launching of steamships, gala soirees at the casino.” Auguste’s first studio was in the Embassy hotel, one of the establishments with Anglo-Saxon names – Carlton, Majestic, Gray d’Albion – that line the Croisette like an armada of meringues, monuments to a period when Cannes was a winter destination for Edwardian grandees. The beach back then still belonged to the fishermen, who reel in their nets in Auguste’s photographs; the visiting milords and their matrons would have blushed at the thought of venturing out into the sun. In the 1950s, Cannes began to market itself as a summer resort, with the festival as its preliminary rite of spring. Now the beach became a form of theatre, a stage for the scantily clad wannabes who hoped to attract the eye of a producer or patron. Further inland, young women like the one at the party for La Dolce Vita hurled themselves into swimming pools with an ecstatic shriek. As well as awarding prizes for excellence to directors, the festival rewarded physical flagrancy: each year, additional expanses of flesh were placed on public view. In 1967, a model whipped off the evening dress that was still compulsory and displayed the first miniskirt to grace the resort. In 1971, Yoko Ono wriggled into leatherette hot pants, and in 1974 Sylvie Matton, promoting a film called La Bonzesse , in which she played a happy hooker who becomes a blissed-out Buddhist nun, appeared with one bared breast and a shaved head. In 1977, Arnold Schwarzenegger broke a further taboo by exhibiting the pumped-up male physique, with an entourage of women chastely costumed as Victorian bridesmaids gripping his thighs: a man has redefined himself as meat, ready to be eaten. The pagan carnival at the water’s edge grew ever sleazier. I asked Traverso what had happened to the beauty contests of the 1950s, which were never more than excuses for getting young women to undress. “Le porno,” he succinctly replied. Cannes acclaims auteurs during the festival, but the town has its own output of sordid X-rated flicks with no aesthetic pretensions. Hence the need to uphold standards, to keep the ladder to the sky standing upright. The stars used to deplane ceremonially at Nice airport, pausing to be photographed at the top of the steps that led down to the tarmac; now they vanish into a closed-off bridge and disappear into the terminal. Once in Cannes, they took refuge in elevated retreats. Anthony Perkins or Claudia Cardinale perched on the balconies of their hotels for Henri Traverso, and in 1976 Roman Polanski and Isabelle Adjani clambered onto a rooftop high above the stunted palm trees, with Polanski – as usual, perversely infantile – using the rails as a jungle gym. The gradient of the stairs leading up to the Palais could always be relied on to impart a sense of occasion and choreograph a stately ascent. In 1954 Jean Cocteau greeted Gina Lollobrigida at the base of the steps leading up to the Palais and kissed his way up her bare arm, his eyes on her jewel-encrusted bosom: even a homosexual dandy had to perform an act of obeisance to the cinema’s current love goddess. Initially, an honour guard of policemen – in pith helmets, with white gloves up to their elbows – stood to attention on either side of the stairs. Soon the gendarmes were shouldered aside by the tuxedoed photographers, arranged in an unruly gauntlet of popping bulbs. Jeanne Moreau, arriving to promote Louis Malle’s thriller Lift to the Scaffold in 1958, looked up with trepidation as if she were mounting the gallows to her own execution: “I climbed the steps and stumbled on a few,” she recalled. Later, the pandemonium provoked by Bardot – who said that she remembered to smile while being “jolted, squashed, manhandled and suffocated” by the photographers – meant that the walk upstairs was replaced by a surge, as relentless as a tidal wave. “We climbed the steps as best we could,” Henri remembered, “our feet not even touching the ground.” He obtained his image of the mauled Bardot by default, holding his camera upside down above his head and hoping for the best. “For people like Bardot,” said Gilles, “the promotion was also a performance. My father once went to St Tropez to photograph her wedding to Roger Vadim,” Gilles told me. “But he got the date wrong and arrived the day after. Vadim wasn’t there, and Bardot told him he could photograph her instead. He said he needed both of them, so she gave him a drink and let him wait until Vadim returned. Merveilleuse! For me, Jane Fonda did the same when she returned to the festival after many years of absence. I shot her arrival, but I wasn’t pleased. I asked her if we could repeat it, and she staged it all over again, just as spontaneous as before. But then she was almost French: she, too, married Vadim!” Gilles depends for his livelihood on that primal scene on the stairs. “It starts when they get down from the car,” he said, “and when they go inside for the screening it is already over. The best of them know what we need, they make a little show. They stop, they pose, they smile, they wave.” Gilles had some extra luck in 2002 with the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. Nimbly Astairean, despite his lack of a top hat and cane, Kaurismäki used the steps to twist and tap through a victory dance after winning the Grand Prix for The Man Without a Past . The new Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, which opened in 1983, discourages such exuberant showing-off: it is a grim, windowless bunker, the symbol of an era in the cinema’s history when those who manage public relations keep the public far away. The stars, too, prefer to remain invisible, protected by private security squads and the tinted glass of their cars. “Some of them,” said Gilles, with an exasperated snort that suffused the air with the odour of Gitanes, “behave as if they were punished when they come to Cannes! Monica Bellucci is beautiful, but she will not move or respond. The stylists get her ready, then she just stands there. There is no relationship with the camera.” The Traverso archive documents the cinema’s history and touchingly preserves the youth of its performers. Henri photographed an almost cherubic Robert De Niro promoting Taxi Driver in 1976; on his desk, Gilles has his own – more recent-coloured – portrait of the actor, now grey-haired and as jowly as a mastiff. De Niro returns this year as president of the jury, so there will be more photographs. But the future of the family firm seems doubtful. Gilles has only one child, a daughter called Alice, now 14. He is not sure whether she will want to inherit the business, or
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Mohsin Hamid spent his childhood moving between California and his native Lahore. His response was to develop a fascination with maps and with imaginary islands he could populate with the best of both places In December 1980, at the age of nine, I moved back to Pakistan for the first time. We touched down at Lahore, in those less security-conscious days when it was still a place where families strolled to the tarmac to greet deplaning passengers. Ronald Reagan had just beaten Jimmy Carter in the election for president of the United States, the Soviet Union was about to mark the first anniversary of its invasion of Afghanistan, racoon-eyed General Zia-ul-Haq was ensconced in Islamabad as Pakistan’s dictator, and I’d lost my Urdu. It’s a funny thing to lose your first language. I was an early talker, chirping along in full sentences and paragraphs well before I turned two, and I have a scar to prove it. In the summer of 1973, ZA Bhutto was campaigning to become prime minister of Pakistan, and I picked up the habit of climbing on to the dining table and holding forth in the manner of the speeches I’d heard him make on PTV: “When I become prime minister…” One day someone tried to get hold of me and lower me to the ground. I made a run for it, dashed into thin air, fell, split open my head and wound up with blood in my eye and stitches across my brow. (ZA Bhutto’s fate would, sadly, be similar.) The following year I left Lahore, winging via Hong Kong and over the Pacific to San Francisco with my parents. In California we moved into one of many identical graduate student townhouses on the Stanford University campus. Bands of kids ran around and chased butterflies and dashed through the tish-tish-tishing rotating water sprinklers, all barefoot, unsupervised. I slipped out to join them. My mother heard crying and went to investigate. She saw me in tears at the door next to ours, gazing up at a perplexed neighbour, surrounded by jeering children. My mother took my hand and led me back home. “Is he retarded?” one of my new playmates asked her. “No,” she answered. “Then why can’t he talk properly?” “He can. He just doesn’t know English.” After that I didn’t speak for a month. My parents worried, but they decided I probably just needed time to adjust. So they let me sit in front of our TV, do my drawings and build precariously tall towers with my wooden blocks. And when I next spoke, much to their surprise, it was in English, in complete sentences, and with an American accent. Over the next six years I didn’t speak a word of Urdu. I made friends, went for sleepovers, brought home tadpoles and frogs in jam jars, ran like the wind, played soccer, crashed out on unused beds at grad student parties; camped in tents in national parks, asked what that funny smell was at a spliff-heavy open-air Bob Marley concert, swam in the frigid Pacific, dressed in moccasins and beaded vests, and wrote my first stories – intergalactic space operas inspired by a slew of sci-fi movies and TV shows of the time: Star Wars , Star Trek , Battlestar Galactica , Buck Rogers , Space Ghost , Star Blazers , Battle of the Planets . Meanwhile, my dad did his PhD, my mum worked at the accounting department of an early Silicon Valley electronics firm, my little sister was born, and our battered second-hand Datsun clocked up tens of thousands of miles. I’d been so fluent in Urdu, and such a talker, that my parents never realised just how completely I’d forgotten the language until we arrived back in Pakistan. I was thrown into a strange new (old) world of extended families, aunts and uncles, two dozen cousins, cricket, odd-tasting bread, odder-still-tasting milk, only one television channel – and even that only on for part of the day – and an almost complete absence of familiar consumer brands. Here in Lahore there were no Frosted Flakes, Twinkies, Nestlé Quik, Trapper Keepers, Nerf balls, Bactine and No More Tears shampoo. On my first day in Pakistan, I asked a cousin, “Are these people slaves?” “No,” he explained. “They’re servants.” I kept wanting to write to my friends in California but never managed to. What would I even say? Months passed and then it seemed too late. One night I looked up at the stars and thought these were the same stars people over there looked up at, and I cried. It was the only time. Pretty melodramatic stuff. But it passed. Or maybe it didn’t, but it did subside. Besides, I made new friends, learnt new sports, biked around town, found a place that sold model aeroplane kits, another that sold aquariums and tropical fish, and understood – after the first few bruises – that my cousins were actually like brothers and sisters, a classroom-sized clan always ready to chat and play and come unquestioningly to my defence against the outside world. I liked my new existence, but I’d liked my old one too, and I imagined places where the two could come together. I was a map buff, and for my tenth birthday my parents bought me an exquisite atlas. Pencil in hand, I would create new countries: non-existent Pacific islands with snow-topped volcanoes and tightly packed contour lines, the French department of Alpes-Maritimes as an independent republic (I admired its shape), the Kathiawar peninsula separated from the mainland by a deep canal, a confederacy of midsized city- states scattered across a variety of continents. I would write the almanac entries for these places, their histories and natural resources and climates and militaries and flora and fauna. And, importantly, their demographics: always mixed, with no clear majority, and significant immigrant groups of Lahori and San Franciscan descent. This was the creative writing initially inspired by my return to Pakistan. (There was also some poetry, modelled on verses in Tolkien and in Bulfinch’s Mythology . “Do you know what a virgin actually is?” my dad asked me upon reading it. “Like a maiden?” I ventured.) Most of my family and classmates in Lahore spoke English, so I didn’t need to fall silent this time. I just started picking up Urdu on the go. Eventually I could tell a joke and sing a song in it, flirt and fight, read a story and take an exam. I could speak without a foreign accent. But my first language would be a second language for me from then on. English fractured for me too, coming in distinct Californian and Pakistani varieties. (Later, in adulthood, Mid-Atlantic and British English would be added to my mix.) Sometimes, as a nine-year-old twice transported, the words I heard moved me in unexpected ways, like impressions of half-forgotten sunny afternoons, less than memories and therefore impossible to share. I wonder now if that is partly why I write, to try. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. His debut novel, Moth Smoke , is now out in Penguin paperback, priced £7.99 Mohsin Hamid guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Mohsin Hamid spent his childhood moving between California and his native Lahore. His response was to develop a fascination with maps and with imaginary islands he could populate with the best of both places In December 1980, at the age of nine, I moved back to Pakistan for the first time. We touched down at Lahore, in those less security-conscious days when it was still a place where families strolled to the tarmac to greet deplaning passengers. Ronald Reagan had just beaten Jimmy Carter in the election for president of the United States, the Soviet Union was about to mark the first anniversary of its invasion of Afghanistan, racoon-eyed General Zia-ul-Haq was ensconced in Islamabad as Pakistan’s dictator, and I’d lost my Urdu. It’s a funny thing to lose your first language. I was an early talker, chirping along in full sentences and paragraphs well before I turned two, and I have a scar to prove it. In the summer of 1973, ZA Bhutto was campaigning to become prime minister of Pakistan, and I picked up the habit of climbing on to the dining table and holding forth in the manner of the speeches I’d heard him make on PTV: “When I become prime minister…” One day someone tried to get hold of me and lower me to the ground. I made a run for it, dashed into thin air, fell, split open my head and wound up with blood in my eye and stitches across my brow. (ZA Bhutto’s fate would, sadly, be similar.) The following year I left Lahore, winging via Hong Kong and over the Pacific to San Francisco with my parents. In California we moved into one of many identical graduate student townhouses on the Stanford University campus. Bands of kids ran around and chased butterflies and dashed through the tish-tish-tishing rotating water sprinklers, all barefoot, unsupervised. I slipped out to join them. My mother heard crying and went to investigate. She saw me in tears at the door next to ours, gazing up at a perplexed neighbour, surrounded by jeering children. My mother took my hand and led me back home. “Is he retarded?” one of my new playmates asked her. “No,” she answered. “Then why can’t he talk properly?” “He can. He just doesn’t know English.” After that I didn’t speak for a month. My parents worried, but they decided I probably just needed time to adjust. So they let me sit in front of our TV, do my drawings and build precariously tall towers with my wooden blocks. And when I next spoke, much to their surprise, it was in English, in complete sentences, and with an American accent. Over the next six years I didn’t speak a word of Urdu. I made friends, went for sleepovers, brought home tadpoles and frogs in jam jars, ran like the wind, played soccer, crashed out on unused beds at grad student parties; camped in tents in national parks, asked what that funny smell was at a spliff-heavy open-air Bob Marley concert, swam in the frigid Pacific, dressed in moccasins and beaded vests, and wrote my first stories – intergalactic space operas inspired by a slew of sci-fi movies and TV shows of the time: Star Wars , Star Trek , Battlestar Galactica , Buck Rogers , Space Ghost , Star Blazers , Battle of the Planets . Meanwhile, my dad did his PhD, my mum worked at the accounting department of an early Silicon Valley electronics firm, my little sister was born, and our battered second-hand Datsun clocked up tens of thousands of miles. I’d been so fluent in Urdu, and such a talker, that my parents never realised just how completely I’d forgotten the language until we arrived back in Pakistan. I was thrown into a strange new (old) world of extended families, aunts and uncles, two dozen cousins, cricket, odd-tasting bread, odder-still-tasting milk, only one television channel – and even that only on for part of the day – and an almost complete absence of familiar consumer brands. Here in Lahore there were no Frosted Flakes, Twinkies, Nestlé Quik, Trapper Keepers, Nerf balls, Bactine and No More Tears shampoo. On my first day in Pakistan, I asked a cousin, “Are these people slaves?” “No,” he explained. “They’re servants.” I kept wanting to write to my friends in California but never managed to. What would I even say? Months passed and then it seemed too late. One night I looked up at the stars and thought these were the same stars people over there looked up at, and I cried. It was the only time. Pretty melodramatic stuff. But it passed. Or maybe it didn’t, but it did subside. Besides, I made new friends, learnt new sports, biked around town, found a place that sold model aeroplane kits, another that sold aquariums and tropical fish, and understood – after the first few bruises – that my cousins were actually like brothers and sisters, a classroom-sized clan always ready to chat and play and come unquestioningly to my defence against the outside world. I liked my new existence, but I’d liked my old one too, and I imagined places where the two could come together. I was a map buff, and for my tenth birthday my parents bought me an exquisite atlas. Pencil in hand, I would create new countries: non-existent Pacific islands with snow-topped volcanoes and tightly packed contour lines, the French department of Alpes-Maritimes as an independent republic (I admired its shape), the Kathiawar peninsula separated from the mainland by a deep canal, a confederacy of midsized city- states scattered across a variety of continents. I would write the almanac entries for these places, their histories and natural resources and climates and militaries and flora and fauna. And, importantly, their demographics: always mixed, with no clear majority, and significant immigrant groups of Lahori and San Franciscan descent. This was the creative writing initially inspired by my return to Pakistan. (There was also some poetry, modelled on verses in Tolkien and in Bulfinch’s Mythology . “Do you know what a virgin actually is?” my dad asked me upon reading it. “Like a maiden?” I ventured.) Most of my family and classmates in Lahore spoke English, so I didn’t need to fall silent this time. I just started picking up Urdu on the go. Eventually I could tell a joke and sing a song in it, flirt and fight, read a story and take an exam. I could speak without a foreign accent. But my first language would be a second language for me from then on. English fractured for me too, coming in distinct Californian and Pakistani varieties. (Later, in adulthood, Mid-Atlantic and British English would be added to my mix.) Sometimes, as a nine-year-old twice transported, the words I heard moved me in unexpected ways, like impressions of half-forgotten sunny afternoons, less than memories and therefore impossible to share. I wonder now if that is partly why I write, to try. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. His debut novel, Moth Smoke , is now out in Penguin paperback, priced £7.99 Mohsin Hamid guardian.co.uk
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Out on tour again aged 69, with a bestselling album under his belt, singer-songwriter Paul Simon has reached a new generation of fans with his songs of love and life At a recent Los Angeles concert given by Paul Simon, the singer’s drummer and percussionist, Jamey Haddad, looked out from the stage at the cheering crowd and noticed something unusual. It was the startling age range of the throng packed into the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood that caught his eye. “You know, if you first came across Paul when he was 20 years old and you were 30, then you are around 80 years old now. There were people like that there in the crowd. There were grandkids who had bought tickets for their grandparents and brought them along. It was beautiful,” Haddad told the Observer . That sums up the remarkable and enduring appeal of Simon, who, at 69, is on tour across America. He has just released one his most acclaimed albums in a career that dates back to before the summer of love in 1967 and has now cemented him as one of the most successful figures in modern music history. His sets have included a smattering of old favourites from the 1960s, such as The Sound of Silence, songs from his long solo career, and riffs on other artists’ classics, including a version of Here Comes the Sun, and numbers from his new album, So Beautiful or So What . That album has just given Simon his highest chart position for 20 years and seems to be winning him yet another generation of fans. “I am getting mail and texts from young people all the time. Paul’s really reaching out to young people on this tour,” Haddad said. This summer that reach will stretch all the way to Britain, when Simon plays nine shows in the UK and Ireland, including Glastonbury and the iTunes festival in London. Those appearances mark a remarkable survival in an industry known more for flameouts than multidecade legacies. Simon’s breakthrough was in 1965 when The Sound of Silence became a huge hit with his best known collaborator, Art Garfunkel. Simon was only 23. Of course, he is not alone in his longevity. The Rolling Stones are still packing stadiums. But, unlike so many other figures from the 1960s and 1970s, Simon and his music are still relevant. “You can count on the fingers of one hand the sort of artists who have had the sustained successful career he has,” said John Schaefer, host of the Soundcheck music show on New York radio station WNYC. Looking at the reaction to his new album, it appears impossible to conclude that Simon’s best days are behind him. The Los Angeles Times music critic Margaret Wappler said the album “climbs some of the most resplendent summits of Simon’s career”. The Associated Press’s Sandy Cohen said Simon remained “an undisputed master of his craft”. Meanwhile, Nate Chinen of the New York Times praised the album’s grand themes of love, life and death, mingled with religious imagery and conjecture. “He’s not preaching on this album. He’s finding solace, fleeting and fragmentary, and every springy guitar lick is its own benediction,” Chinen wrote. No wonder the album quickly sold 68,000 copies and went to number four on the Billboard album chart. But it is not just chart success that is keeping Simon on top of his game. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Simon has started to have a major influence on some of the hottest bands now on the scene . In recent years his songs have been covered by indie darlings Vampire Weekend and American rockers Spoon and Bright Eyes, as well as London electronic band Hot Chip. Conor Oberst, singer-songwriter of Bright Eyes, recently told New York magazine that Simon was a major influence. “I grew up with my folks listening to him. But as I got into songwriting, I realised how profound what he does actually is. His work over the years is a treasure trove of ideas.” Haddad believes he has an answer to why Simon continues to have an impact. “I think it is a lot of patience. He was successful early and then just followed his heart and took the time to develop. He knows he has always got a story to tell.” Over the years the stories have shifted and changed with the times. Together with Garfunkel – whom he met when they were both 11 – he has put out dozens of songs, including Bridge Over Troubled Water and Mrs Robinson, that are still known today. They seemed to capture a late-1960s, early-1970s folk vibe that symbolised the era. Then in the 1980s he underwent a profound shift with the album Graceland . A massive bestseller worldwide in 1986, it broke stunning new ground by incorporating music from South African artists, in particular Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Since then more albums have followed as have attempts to tap the rich veins of other cultures’ music across the world. That is evident in So Beautiful or So What , where African music continues to influence in the shape of Cameroonian guitarist Vincent Nguini. But it is also mixed in with Indian drumming and harmonies from American bluegrass. Simon is always innovating, too. On one song on his new album he samples an audiotape he made while on safari in Africa and includes the noise of a migrating wildebeest on the track. But those who admire Simon for his thoughtful lyrics, humour and intricate musical content would be mistaken were they to see him as anything but a steely, hard-working professional. Those who work with him praise his discipline and ability to lead his band on stage. In a recent interview with Esquire magazine, Simon cracked an old Woody Allen joke that summed up the attitude of a man who has worked at his craft all his life. “It’s like Woody Allen said: I appreciate living on in the hearts of my fans, but I would rather live on in my apartment.” Simon and Garfunkel Pop and rock Paul Harris guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Out on tour again aged 69, with a bestselling album under his belt, singer-songwriter Paul Simon has reached a new generation of fans with his songs of love and life At a recent Los Angeles concert given by Paul Simon, the singer’s drummer and percussionist, Jamey Haddad, looked out from the stage at the cheering crowd and noticed something unusual. It was the startling age range of the throng packed into the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood that caught his eye. “You know, if you first came across Paul when he was 20 years old and you were 30, then you are around 80 years old now. There were people like that there in the crowd. There were grandkids who had bought tickets for their grandparents and brought them along. It was beautiful,” Haddad told the Observer . That sums up the remarkable and enduring appeal of Simon, who, at 69, is on tour across America. He has just released one his most acclaimed albums in a career that dates back to before the summer of love in 1967 and has now cemented him as one of the most successful figures in modern music history. His sets have included a smattering of old favourites from the 1960s, such as The Sound of Silence, songs from his long solo career, and riffs on other artists’ classics, including a version of Here Comes the Sun, and numbers from his new album, So Beautiful or So What . That album has just given Simon his highest chart position for 20 years and seems to be winning him yet another generation of fans. “I am getting mail and texts from young people all the time. Paul’s really reaching out to young people on this tour,” Haddad said. This summer that reach will stretch all the way to Britain, when Simon plays nine shows in the UK and Ireland, including Glastonbury and the iTunes festival in London. Those appearances mark a remarkable survival in an industry known more for flameouts than multidecade legacies. Simon’s breakthrough was in 1965 when The Sound of Silence became a huge hit with his best known collaborator, Art Garfunkel. Simon was only 23. Of course, he is not alone in his longevity. The Rolling Stones are still packing stadiums. But, unlike so many other figures from the 1960s and 1970s, Simon and his music are still relevant. “You can count on the fingers of one hand the sort of artists who have had the sustained successful career he has,” said John Schaefer, host of the Soundcheck music show on New York radio station WNYC. Looking at the reaction to his new album, it appears impossible to conclude that Simon’s best days are behind him. The Los Angeles Times music critic Margaret Wappler said the album “climbs some of the most resplendent summits of Simon’s career”. The Associated Press’s Sandy Cohen said Simon remained “an undisputed master of his craft”. Meanwhile, Nate Chinen of the New York Times praised the album’s grand themes of love, life and death, mingled with religious imagery and conjecture. “He’s not preaching on this album. He’s finding solace, fleeting and fragmentary, and every springy guitar lick is its own benediction,” Chinen wrote. No wonder the album quickly sold 68,000 copies and went to number four on the Billboard album chart. But it is not just chart success that is keeping Simon on top of his game. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Simon has started to have a major influence on some of the hottest bands now on the scene . In recent years his songs have been covered by indie darlings Vampire Weekend and American rockers Spoon and Bright Eyes, as well as London electronic band Hot Chip. Conor Oberst, singer-songwriter of Bright Eyes, recently told New York magazine that Simon was a major influence. “I grew up with my folks listening to him. But as I got into songwriting, I realised how profound what he does actually is. His work over the years is a treasure trove of ideas.” Haddad believes he has an answer to why Simon continues to have an impact. “I think it is a lot of patience. He was successful early and then just followed his heart and took the time to develop. He knows he has always got a story to tell.” Over the years the stories have shifted and changed with the times. Together with Garfunkel – whom he met when they were both 11 – he has put out dozens of songs, including Bridge Over Troubled Water and Mrs Robinson, that are still known today. They seemed to capture a late-1960s, early-1970s folk vibe that symbolised the era. Then in the 1980s he underwent a profound shift with the album Graceland . A massive bestseller worldwide in 1986, it broke stunning new ground by incorporating music from South African artists, in particular Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Since then more albums have followed as have attempts to tap the rich veins of other cultures’ music across the world. That is evident in So Beautiful or So What , where African music continues to influence in the shape of Cameroonian guitarist Vincent Nguini. But it is also mixed in with Indian drumming and harmonies from American bluegrass. Simon is always innovating, too. On one song on his new album he samples an audiotape he made while on safari in Africa and includes the noise of a migrating wildebeest on the track. But those who admire Simon for his thoughtful lyrics, humour and intricate musical content would be mistaken were they to see him as anything but a steely, hard-working professional. Those who work with him praise his discipline and ability to lead his band on stage. In a recent interview with Esquire magazine, Simon cracked an old Woody Allen joke that summed up the attitude of a man who has worked at his craft all his life. “It’s like Woody Allen said: I appreciate living on in the hearts of my fans, but I would rather live on in my apartment.” Simon and Garfunkel Pop and rock Paul Harris guardian.co.uk
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They have always had a dusty image – and never more so than now – but libraries are at the heart of our communities. With the axe about to fall, Bella Bathurst reveals just what we’re about to lose You can tell a lot about people from the kind of books they steal. Every year, the public library service brings out a
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Saif al-Arab and three of Muammar Gaddafi’s grandsons killed, according to reports – but the Libyan leader was unharmed A Nato air strike in Tripoli has killed the youngest son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, a Libyan government spokesman has said. Saif al-Arab Gaddafi was killed along with three of Muammar Gaddafi’s grandsons, according to reports. The Libyan leader was in the building at the time of the strike, but was unharmed. Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said: “This was a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country.” “The attack resulted in the martyrdom of brother Saif al-Arab Gaddafi and three of the leader’s grandchildren,” he said. “The leader with his wife was there in the house with other friends and relatives. The leader himself is in good health – he wasn’t harmed.” More details soon … Libya Muammar Gaddafi Middle East guardian.co.uk
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With incendiary comments on Iraq, Libya and Obama’s birth, the property tycoon has livened up the Republicans’ search for a 2012 candidate The bright lights of the Las Vegas strip were an apt setting for the Donald Trump carnival roadshow to end up in last week. Amid the garish neon of the gigantic Treasure Island Casino, the business mogul-turned-reality TV star-turned-potential Republican presidential candidate made his latest stop. Speaking at an event called The Reagan Revolution: From Ronald to Donald, Trump made his pitch to an audience of Nevada Republican bigwigs and curious onlookers in one of the key early-voting states in the nomination process. In the casino’s ballroom, which featured an ice statue of himself, Trump gave a virtuoso performance that was full of braggadocio and littered with expletives. “Our leaders are stupid, they are stupid people,” he said, before referring to the Chinese government as “motherfuckers” against whom he’d raise trade tariffs. Despite such a performance – and perhaps because of it – there is no doubt that Trump has injected a remarkable shot of adrenaline into the stilted Republican search for a nominee to take on Barack Obama next year. One perhaps should have expected no less from the flamboyant figure who is a household name in America not for his politics, but his TV show The Apprentice and his catchphrase, “You’re fired!” But, as Trump’s “will he, won’t he” campaign rolls on, the Republican party may be waking up to the fact that they have bitten off more than they can chew. Trump’s decision to make “birtherism” his first big issue and fan the conspiracy theories about Obama’s citizenship last week led to one of the more spectacular political bunfights of recent memory. Trump’s claims to have sent investigators to Hawaii who had uncovered evidence to support him were dismissed in stunning fashion by the Oval office. As Trump touched down last Wednesday in New Hampshire – another key early-voting state – the White House revealed the president’s long-form birth certificate, which birthers had said did not exist. So, instead of being treated as an emerging Republican champion with a tough pro-America agenda on China and business, Trump became a national media joke. Obama referred to him as a “carnival barker”. A thundering New York Times editorial called the Trump-inspired situation “… a profoundly low and debasing moment”. Fareed Zakaria, a CNN host, called Trump’s birtherism “coded racism”. CBS news anchor Bob Schieffer reacted to his questioning the standard of Obama’s college credentials, saying: “That’s just code for saying he got into law school because he’s black. This is an ugly strain of racism.” Such a media kicking would have sent any other potential candidate running for the hills. But not The Donald. He seemed overjoyed at the slew of headlines. “Today, I am very proud of myself,” he told the press in New Hampshire, before hinting that he will continue to explore the idea of a run. Next month he will attend a Tea Party rally in South Carolina, his growing collection of another early-voting state. His travels are certainly starting to look like a genuine campaign. His poll numbers among Republicans certainly put him among the leaders, with a Rasmussen survey showing him on top with 19%. “Trump obviously has a slice of the vote. The question is: how big a slice is it?” said Steve Mitchell, chairman of Republican-leaning political consulting firm Mitchell Research. That prospect has most Democrats sharing Trump’s delight at all the attention. Many had assumed he was in it just for the fame or to boost his TV show. But, increasingly, it seems he is serious – and even events like last week cannot deflect him from his path. Conversely, senior Republicans are nervous. Asked last week on CNN about his plans, Trump said he would make an announcement before June. “I think a lot of people will be happy,” he said. His impact has been so potentially divisive that many suspect those happy people would be his Democratic opponents, not supporters of the party he hopes to lead. Whatever his decision, and no matter how well he does in any nomination race, ,Trump himself cannot really lose. With the bouffant hairdo that is more instantly recognisable than any policy position, the billionaire has long been a master of the fame game and immune to setback. Despite scandals about his private life and business bankruptcies, he has always emerged from the headlines with his ego fully intact. As he traipsed around New Hampshire in a black limo complete with a security detail, he was swarmed by fans who asked for his autograph and endured only a few heckles on the street. He participated in the usual footwork of New Hampshire campaigning by pressing the flesh in a diner in Portsmouth and then later in Newick’s Lobster House in the village of Dover. But looking like a campaign does not mean that one can pull one off. Even a showman like Trump must know that if he does run he will face press scrutiny of his lavish lifestyle and sprawling business dealings. He already faces demands to release his tax returns, and the Huffington Post last week ran a story about suspected organised crime ties to some ex-business associates. His personal life will put off social conservatives who are a key segment of the Republican base: Trump is on his third marriage and not especially devout. His ostentatious lifestyle is out of step with a national mood still smarting from the “Great Recession”. “He has enormous problems with Republican voters,” Mitchell said. There are inconvenient truths like the fact that he has donated more campaign money to Democrats than Republicans, including Obama right-hand man Rahm Emanuel and Senate leader Harry Reid. Or that Trump has not bothered to vote in many elections in the past 20 years. Then there is his “foot-in-mouth” syndrome. Last week, he claimed a CNN poll showed him neck-and-neck with Obama. He repeated the claim in an interview on CNN itself. When CNN correctly denied it had ever conducted such a survey, Trump insisted he was right and it was wrong. Trump’s gift for reducing events down to simplistic and populist soundbites has few limits. On Libya, Trump bluntly said the US should just take the country’s oil, rather than assist rebels fighting Muammar Gaddafi. “We don’t know who the rebels are, we hear they come from Iran, we hear they’re influenced by Iran or al-Qaida, and, frankly I would go in, I would take the oil — and stop this baby stuff,” he told Fox News. It is a sentiment he has gone on to repeat several other times. Yet all this is just the tip of the iceberg, with far more likely to come. That has many top Republican strategists terrified. “When Donald Trump not only dominates the airwaves but also the Republican polls then you know that they are a party in trouble,” said Professor Bruce Gronbeck, a political expert at the University of Iowa. It is a general rule of US presidential politics that the middle ground “independents” hold the key to national victory. Yet Trump, by so aggressively advocating birtherism, has seen his support there dry up. In New Hampshire only 23% of independents have a positive view of him; in South Carolina it is 28% and Iowa 29%. Trump’s brand is becoming toxic to moderates and many Republicans fear the poison will start to infect their party, even if he does not win the nomination. Perhaps even if he does not run at all. Yet Trump is striking a chord in part of the American psyche. Away from the clamour over birtherism, there are other elements of his message that resonate. His strident talk against China, which he has accused of “raping” the US economy, is powerful stuff in a country struggling with the mass outsourcing of its manufacturing industry and high unemployment. Trump can say these things so bluntly because he is an outsider to politics: something that also appeals to many disenchanted Americans. He is filling a huge void in a Republican party that has struggled to build on its victory in last year’s mid-term elections. Instead of finding a united voice, the party appears deeply split between its Tea Party anti-government wing, still powerful social conservatives and a sliver of moderates. “Unifying a group like that looks next to impossible,” said Professor Shaun Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California at Riverside. No wonder then that the field of Republican candidates alongside Trump has failed to inspire. It contains semi-famous names such as Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, who have run and failed before. It includes congresswoman Michele Bachmann, from the far right and former senator Rick Santorum. There is Newt Gingrich, who has not held office since the mid-1990s and whose private life is even more colourful than Trump’s. There are virtual unknowns such as former Utah governor Jon Huntsman and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty. The few well-known names – Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee – are still on the fence, with Palin looking likely to stay out. The field is so barren that in the first TV debate of the contest, planned for this week, only four potential candidates have agreed to turn up. “Republicans are run ragged at the moment trying to find anyone. It’s like the Keystone Cops driving around in a clown car,” said Bowler. No wonder Trump was still smiling. He has swaggered into a void in the Republican field and the top party bigwigs have only themselves to blame. Donald Trump US elections 2012 Republicans US politics United States Paul Harris guardian.co.uk
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