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Napoleon Bonaparte knew how much he owed to Italy. On a spring
day in 1796, the 26-year-old fledgling general trapped and
destroyed a greatly superior Austrian force at Montenotte in the
steep hills of the Appennini Savonese.
Years later, answering a question about his bloodline, the
Emperor said: “My nobility dates from Montenotte.”
And the revolutionary general’s victory and advance into
Lombardy and Piedmont also begin the story of modern Italy, an
excruciatingly long-running opera semiseria, made up of
unequal measures of romance, pathos and near-farce.
As Bonaparte’s citizen army won battle after battle, France’s
hot revolutionary breath excited the local intellectuals, fuelling
dreams of a united, independent Italy that could take its place as
a great power alongside Austria, France and England.
On paper, it was a reasonable proposition. The people of the
peninsula spoke related tongues, they were all nominally Roman
Catholics, they all hated the Austrians, and they all regarded the
Roman Empire and the artistic and cultural glories of the great
Italian cities as their patrimony. They certainly bore a closer
resemblance to a nation than the France the revolution had just
conjured into being.
But the obstacles to a unified Italy were massive. France might
consist largely of illiterate, mean-spirited and suspicious
peasants living and dying in complete ignorance of what was over
the next hill. But France had not endured 1300 years of invasion
and rule by greedy foreigners.
The indignities inflicted on Italy since the Western Roman
empire’s collapse had created a mosaic of jurisdictions that
prevented the development of anything like a common political
culture. It was in essence still a medieval landscape in which
loyalties seldom extended beyond town, city, family or group. Only
the church’s hand touched all of the nation-in-waiting.
But within 75 years the work of the intellectuals was done.
Thanks finally to the patriotic spirit of the Risorgimento inflamed
by Garibaldi (a figure Duggan finds to be a true hero and patriot),
Victor Immanuel emerged king of a united Italy.
In time, the resistance organised by the Bourbons, their client
class and the unhappy church faded. Rome was defended by the French
until 1870, when it became the capital. It would take until the end
of World War I for Italy to regain the few remaining bits of Italia
Irredenta - “Unredeemed Italy”.
Redeeming Italy, however, was never going to be enough. For
many, satisfying what Duggan believes is a human need “to owe
primary allegiance to a collective body of one kind or another” was
only the beginning: what the glories of the Risorgimento had set
tingling in the bone marrow was a yearning for military triumphs,
for conquests, for blood.
This obsession with glory and death would produce many
pointless, farcical and tragic events. These include the battle of
Adua in 1896, in which the Ethiopians inflicted upon an Italian
force the biggest defeat ever suffered by colonials in Africa, the
incomprehensible invasion of Libya in 1911 and the humiliating rout
at Caporetto in 1917. It also produced Italian fascism and
Mussolini and runs in an unbroken line to Silvio Berlusconi.
Much of Duggan’s history is devoted to tracing the origins and
progress of this Italian personality disorder. He has no shortage
of material to draw upon. It is hard to find a page without a
quotation from an Italian patriot lamenting the nation’s lack of
“moral unity”, exhorting Italians to die for their country or
weeping over some catastrophic failure caused by his countrymen’s
lack of courage and moral fibre.
The movement known as Futurism, embraced by the leading artists
of the day, provides a perfect example of the mindset of the
intellectuals. Its 1909 manifesto says: “We want to glorify war -
the only source of hygiene in the world - patriotism, nationalism,
the destructive act.”
This sort of bellicosity led to the Libyan idiocy, which, like
America’s Iraqi adventure it so closely resembles, was paid for
with the blood of poor boys. One of them wrote later: “Why should
so many people be killed to come and get some sand, four palms and
a few lemons? And the Moors hated us.”
But what chance did the views of the peasant cannon-fodder have
when a man Duggan describes as a sober-minded intellectual could
conclude: “. . . only when Italy has secured a virile victory of
its people over an enemy - no matter who . . . will it be able to
say it has avenged a millennium and a half of shameful history and
be able to face the future with confidence.”
We owe Duggan a debt for producing a remarkably fresh and
compelling work of history. He has earned absolution for starting
off his book with a sentence of 160 words and for his many attempts
to improve upon that Churchillian mark.
Peter Temple’s most recent book, The Broken Shore (Text),
won the UK Crime Writers’ Association best novel award last
year.

French writer-director Daniele Thompson’s Orchestra
Seats, which she co-wrote with her son, Christopher (who also
plays a role in the film) was France’s entry for the best
foreign-language film in the Academy Awards last year.
It’s a lightweight work, although it tackles some potentially
weighty subject matter; its principle tone is a kind of wistful
yearning. Its location is a Paris street in the theatre district
where several people cross paths at crucial moments in their lives
as they endure crises about art, love, ambition and
expectations.
A concert pianist desperately wants to change direction, to the
distress of his wife who has dedicated herself to furthering his
career. A popular soap star (the always disarming Valerie
Lemercier) longs to shed her image and play Simone de Beauvoir in a
new film to be made by a US director.
A self-made man puts his valuable art collection up for sale to
the chagrin of his resentful son, and an elderly theatre manager
prepares for her retirement. Flitting chirpily between them is a
young woman, Cecile de France from The Singer, looking for
a job and a place to stay. Rental only.

VIDEO: Trailer -
Superbad

This male bonding high-school comedy, co-written by Seth Rogen
(star of Knocked Up) has moments of surprising sweetness as well as
plenty of absurdity, gross-out moments and scenes of acute
embarrassment and humiliating discomfort. At its centre are two
longtime best friends, earnest Evan (Michael Cera of Arrested
Development) and burly, garrulous Seth (Jonah Hill), contemplating
a life apart as they are about to go to different colleges.
The clueless but determined pair go on a final mission together
to buy some alcohol for a party. They are hoping to make more than
just a good impression on a couple of girls they like but, in the
company of uber-nerd Fogell (scene-stealing newcomer Christopher
Mintz-Plasse) they get embroiled in escalating disasters that
involve anything from convenience store hold-ups to menstrual
bloodstains.
A running gag involves encounters with a pair of drunken cops
(one of them played by Rogen). An ebullient, well-honed expression
of good-natured bad taste - with a warm attitude towards its
central characters - Superbad moves at a smart pace and
wears its excesses well.

One of Peter Carey’s best early stories, American
Dreams, is a beautifully ironic comment upon America’s
powerful hold over the Australian imagination. To the characters
who populate the tiny unnamed town in which the story is set,
America appears both familiar and distant. Its chimerical glamour
enthrals them. It is a land of movie stars, giant televisions,
luxurious cars. It represents escape.
When the enigmatic Mr Gleason startles everybody by transforming
their mundane lives into art, crafting a perfect replica of the
town and its inhabitants, they are puzzled and discomforted at
being exposed in such a way.
The story ends with Americans coming to see the model, which has
been transformed into a tourist trap, and gawk at the locals, but
in a neat ironic reversal the tourists have trouble accepting that
the inhabitants are really the people being represented.
American Dreams becomes less a tale of mutual
incomprehension than of wilful blindness. The two cultures gaze at
each other but each prefers the representation to the unglamorous
reality.
Not the least significant aspect of Carey’s 10th novel, His
Illegal Self, is that it turns the small town perspective of
American Dreams on its head. Its two main characters, a
young woman named Anna Xenos, who goes by the nickname Dial, and a
six-year-old boy named Che Selkirk, are Americans. They spend much
of the novel stranded in a hippie commune near the towns of Namboor
and Yandina in southern Queensland.
The sense of defamiliarisation as Dial and Che adjust to the
strange landscape and its odd inhabitants is one of the novel’s
achievements.
Carey has, on occasion, explored questions of cultural
difference in a very colourful fashion - notably in the elaborate
allegory of Efica and Voorstand in The Unusual Life of Tristan
Smith, and in his amusing memoir Wrong about Japan.
But in His Illegal Self, which is written in an
unobtrusively Americanised idiom, the quiet sense of dislocation
provides impetus to the book’s deep emotional undertow.
The novel is set in the early ’70s against the backdrop of the
political radicalism of the time. Che is the son of two disaffected
children of the privileged classes, both of whom have joined the
militant fringe of the counter-culture. They have abandoned Che to
the care of his grandmother, a wealthy New York matron, who
describes herself as a “bohemian”, deplores her daughter’s
revolutionary zeal and insists upon calling her grandson Jay.
The opening chapters, in which Dial absconds with Che, taking
his hand and running away from his grandmother on a New York
street, are as taught as any thriller. The point of view switches
back and forth between Che and Dial, and the overlapping
perspectives are brilliantly handled, gradually revealing the
farcical nature of the plot and the bungling that compels the pair
to go underground.
Carey is not particularly interested (a la Philip Roth) in the
destructive passions that politics can unleash but the novel does
set out a pointed contrast between the countercultures of Australia
and the US. The American radicals, for whom the narrative displays
no sympathy whatsoever, are self-important and ruthless. They are
full of passionate intensity and are genuinely dangerous: they rob
banks and build bombs.
The Australian hippies, with whom Dial and Che eventually come
to reside after a series of on-the-road travails, are hapless
ferals in Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, which the omniscient
narrator (not a character) describes at one point as “a police
state run by men who never finished high school”. (Would it have
improved matters, one wonders, if they had finished high school?)
They are not apolitical but they are mumbo-jumbo spouters, bumbling
and ineffectual.
Dial and Che might have no knowledge of the country in which
they have sought refuge but there is more than a hint of mockery in
the way some of the Australian characters’ understanding of the US
is revealed to be little more than a jumble of preconceptions.
But if there is mockery in Carey’s portrayal of the hippie
commune, there is affection too. Trevor, a dodgy character who is
an illiterate but smart petty criminal, as well as a keen nudist,
is revealed to be a soft-hearted chap, who becomes an unlikely ally
for Dial and Che.
Even the unwelcoming Rebecca, a minor character who is initially
portrayed as the kind of laid-back fascist who doesn’t care what
you do as long as you obey the rules, is granted a degree of
empathy towards the end of the book.
This is reflective of the overall movement of the novel and is
ultimately more significant than its contextualising politics.
His Illegal Self is concerned with loss of innocence but
also with the painstaking creation of personal trust.
In the book’s gently paced second half the fragile and evolving
relationship between Dial and Che is deepened. Che’s conflicted
feelings about his estranged father are explored and the two exiles
slowly come to develop something like a sense of affinity for their
shambolic new home, whose landscape the novel affectionately
evokes.
His Illegal Self is a sad story but it has a warmth and
directness, an earthy poignancy, that one does not immediately
associate with Carey’s boisterously inventive fiction.
His recent novels have not been shy about acknowledging their
debt to classic literature. He has rewritten Charles Dickens in
Jack Maggs, William Faulkner in True History of the
Kelly Gang and Mary Shelley in My Life as a Fake. His
writing has also at times revelled in its virtuosity, most
obviously in the booming voice of Ned Kelly and the rambunctious
double-act of “Butcher” Bones and his perceptive idiot brother Hugh
in his previous (and very different) novel, Theft.
His Illegal Self is in its quiet way a technically
accomplished work but it does not flaunt its proficiency. A few
passing references to Huckleberry Finn, which highlight
the novel’s sympathy for Che’s child’s-eye view of the world and
the sense of freedom he discovers as he romps through the bush with
the commune’s hippie children, are as close as the book gets to a
canonical homage. It is none the worse for this unassuming
quality.
His Illegal Self might be a relatively straightforward
and understated tale by Carey’s usual standards but it is a fine
novel.

China shut down 44,000 Web sites and arrested 868 people for Internet pornography last year, state media said Wednesday.
China’s Public Security Ministry launched a crackdown on Internet pornography last year, saying it had “perverted China’s young minds.”
Nearly 2,000 people involved in Internet pornography activities also were penalized, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Separately, Xinhua said 33 people were arrested in connection with a Web site that allowed customers, mainly in Taiwan, to view live sex shows filmed at 12 separate locations in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai.
Xinhua said 23 of those arrested were performers who were ordered detained for 15 days, while the 10 others, including two Taiwanese, were managers. It did not say when the arrests took place, but said the heavily trafficked site had been among those targeted in the crackdown last year.
Cash, computers and film equipment were also seized, Xinhua said.
China forbids pornography and paid sex in virtually all forms, although prostitution is common and the government’s Internet police struggle to block pornographic Web sites based abroad.
China’s online population has soared to 210 million people and could surpass the United States this year to become the world’s biggest, the official China Internet Network Information Center said earlier this month.
The government will increasingly concentrate on Web sites that have audio or video, blogging or send information to cell phones, Xinhua said.
China recently said it wanted to exert more control over Internet videos and video-sharing Web sites.
The government regularly censors and restricts access to content it considers subversive or politically sensitive, and Chinese Web sites often hire their own censors to eliminate certain content.

It doesn’t seem that long ago when you’d
reach for the shelf and then exclaim, “Damn! They haven’t got that
far yet!” But with this volume, The Australian Dictionary of
Biography has extended itself almost to the present. It’s the
17th of the series launched in 1966, running now to 9 million words
as it records the lives of notable Australians.
And this time there’s a change. Previous volumes were compiled
on the basis of when people were most active (the floruit
principle); this one is the first of two drawing on people who died
during the period 1981-1990. Many of us then would be familiar with
some of the names, perhaps even knew one or two of the people
included.
One entry is about a friend who suffered an early death; I see,
too, that he was born a year after me. Somebody younger than
yourself is not what you expect to find in the ADB.
Volume 17 maintains the breadth of range that is the distinctive
feature of Australia’s biographical dictionary. In addition to
politicians, governors and the formidable military contingent,
there are trade unionists, Communists, members of the ratty right,
Aboriginal leaders and activists (though not so many multicultural
ones - perhaps there’ll be a wave of them in later volumes). There
are sportsmen, and poets, someone designated “hawker, whipmaker and
saddler”, businessmen, Australia’s first AIDS death, and a “lawn
bowler and bank manager”.
Some of the juxtapositions are choice, too: a Catholic charity
worker (made a dame) followed by an Aboriginal lawman and community
leader, or the eccentric academic “Ding” Dyason, followed by radio
personality Bob Dyer.
The notables get the attention they deserve. The two Liberal
premiers, Henry Bolte and Robert Askin, dominant in the ’60s in
Victoria and NSW respectively, receive judicious accounts.
Askin’s sets out the details of the life first, before his more
dubious activities are considered. Bolte, however, appears to have
been more consistent, if artless, so a stronger sense of the
personality emerges. Alexander Downer (father of the present
politician) is made more interesting than he appeared at the time;
Wilfred Burchett is treated with commendable sobriety. The poet
Vincent Buckley receives a warm appraisal from colleague Chris
Wallace-Crabbe.
The volume gives a wonderful cross-section of the period.
Expatriation became not the only way for specialist advancement;
artist Russell Drysdale and the medical scientist Macfarlane Burnet
spent almost their entire working lives here.
But we are reminded, too, that many went overseas on war
service; that is the drone sounding through many entries.
Usefully, we see how war service fitted into the pattern of
people’s lives, sometimes energising them on return.
Moreover, the volume moves beyond male exploits to the service
rendered by some of the hundreds of nurses in theatres of war. Much
of this was taken for granted but as the actress and filmmaker Elsa
Chauvel explained in 1934, a woman’s role was to charm men, to love
them and serve them.
We also glimpse the first concerted campaigns to save historic
buildings, and how wit could be used to clinch a political point. A
demonstration held during the Vietnam War singled out two offending
ministers with the slogan: “lynch Bury, bury Lynch”.
There are so many things one learns. That radio personality
Norman Banks, in later life a vigorous supporter of apartheid,
began as a keen Labor man; that Reg Ansett, who took over rival
airline ANA in 1957, had fought off a takeover bid from them nearly
20 years before; that Berkelouw, the Sydney antiquarian bookseller,
came from a line of booksellers in his native Holland; that the
composer of the themes for Dr Who and Maigret was
Ron Grainer, a Queenslander; and that there is a musical
scholarship in Western Australia for Aboriginal people, to
commemorate a black classical pianist and activist.
If space permitted, one could go on.
In a volume that serves up a generous slice of the human comedy,
there are also flashes of humour - from both subjects and
authors.
Senator Pat Kennelly, for instance, was a parliamentary Labor
leader despite his persistent stammer. This meant he would get
stuck on a syllable. An impediment, the Dictionary informs
us, “he occasionally used to vulgar comic effect, especially when
referring to the Country Party”.
But go see for yourself. This vast national resource is now
online, and (unlike its British counterpart) access is free. Google
ADB Online, and go from there.
– Jim Davidson is completing a biography of the historian
W. K. Hancock, and wrote the entry on him in the ADB.

Can the intellectual life of a society be encapsulated in
an annual digest that, read from end to end, conveys the debates
and discontents that somehow define the nation at a particular
time? The obvious answer, of course, is that human experience
permits no such tidy divisions: a title such as The Best Australian
Essays 2007 can only describe a disparate selection of works,
united simply by the accident of having been published in the same
year. And, in the introduction to her latest anthology of
disputatious and reflective prose for Black Inc., Drusilla Modjeska
certainly makes no more ambitious claim. At least, she does not do
so explicitly. But it is in the nature of an editor’s task that the
temptation to discern a wider unity of theme in one’s choices is
never entirely suppressed.
The year that has just passed, Modjeska assures us, was marked
by a quickening of public debate in Australia, which in turn
breathed new vigour into the essay form and especially into that
sub-genre of engagement, the review essay. And that quickening, she
declares, writing even before the federal election was announced,
was in considerable part a reflection of the growing awareness that
the Howard era in Australian politics was approaching its end. Thus
some of the essays that have made their way into this volume
anticipate the election result, and chart the changes in the
national mood that produced it. Most notable among these is Judith
Brett’s “The Turning Tide”, which first appeared in The Monthly in
March. Brett’s take on the election, in this and other essays, has
already been discussed on these pages in recent weeks; here it
suffices to say that “The Turning Tide’s” prophetic quality amply
justifies its inclusion in the anthology.
Also in this Best Essays is another contribution to The Monthly
that helped define the year in politics: Kevin Rudd’s “Faith in
Politics”, an exploration of the thoughts of his hero, the Lutheran
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is a piece as remarkable for the
reception it has had as for the quality of the argument itself,
elevated and erudite though that is.
Modjeska suggests that one of the noticeable changes in public
debate during the past 12 months has been the way that Australians
have taken to arguing about “God and the devil”. I would have
thought, to the contrary, that the rash of sometimes baffled,
sometimes sneering responses to Rudd’s essay has confirmed the
discomfort that many public intellectuals in this country continue
to feel in discussing religion in any way that is not merely
dismissive.
Rudd’s avowed aim in writing “Faith in Politics” was to reclaim
Christianity as an ethically transformative framework for
progressive politics, rather than the conservative bulwark that
some Australian politicians, aping the religious right in the US,
have sought to make it. Since the essay appeared references to it
have mostly taken the form of jibes about the Labor leader’s
sincerity, implying that subsequently we have seen him only in the
guise of political technocrat, which must be “the real” Rudd. But
if the essay has, in a sense, been stillborn, receiving an
embarrassed “ahem” from those to whom it was addressed, that surely
reveals at least as much about them and their cultural milieu as it
does about the new Prime Minister.
Rudd on Bonhoeffer is accompanied in Best Essays by “It’s too
easy to say that ‘God is Dead’ ” - a contribution to the Australian
Financial Review’s review pages by Guy Rundle. If this selection is
intended to bolster Modjeska’s contention that Australians have
sloughed off their traditional reserve in discussing religion, I am
still not convinced. Rundle is certainly not one of those who
simply dismiss arguments such as those made by Rudd, and he is too
well read in cultural history to be puzzled or affronted by the
resilience of faith in a secular age.
Yet even here there is an intellectual sleight of hand: Rundle’s
willingness to accept religion as a human phenomenon is not the
same as a willingness to engage it on its own terms. Faith - or
more precisely the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam - is still for him a problem to be
explained, and the broad lines of his explanation will be familiar
to anyone who has read Feuerbach and Durkheim. He offers what
purports to be a general history of Western religiosity, and it
will dazzle some; but others will wonder how deeply he is
acquainted with the complex theological traditions about which he
makes such confident, and sometimes glib, generalisations.
Of course, there is much, much more to be quarried in Best
Essays than the seams of religious argument uncovered by Rudd and
Rundle. I have chosen to write about them partly in response to
Modjeska’s inclination to see them as indicative of a national
trend, and partly because many of the other essays she includes -
Helen Garner on the filming of Rai Gaita’s Romulus, My Father, for
example, or Noel Pearson’s vision of self-supporting indigenous
communities - will already be familiar to many readers. (The Rudd
essay has been much cited, of course, but I wonder how many, even
among those who refer to it, have bothered to read it closely.)
Any anthology invites readers to cherry-pick favourites. The
essays I most enjoyed, and found most intellectually engaging, were
those that transcended specifically Australian concerns. Anne
Manne’s “Love me Tender?”, on the pornification of Western popular
culture, for example (another Monthly offering), and two others
that could be read as companion pieces to it, on the well-springs
of eroticism, from male and female perspectives: “The Heart of
Desire”, by John Armstrong, and “In Fealty to a Professor”, by Anne
Sedgley. Taken together, these three amount to a desolate
commentary on a world that is shredding its capacity for intimacy.
It was happening long before John Howard entered our lives, and it
may still be happening when Kevin Rudd leaves them. I wonder what
they’ll have to say about it in The Best Australian Essays
2008?
Ray Cassin is a senior staff writer.

Randall’s Island sits in the middle of New York’s East River, a
vast, characterless, landfill-augmented field, surrounded by
straits given the kind of alluring names that New York’s outer
boroughs seem to specialise in: to the east there’s Hell Gate and
to the north, Bronx Kill.
If it’s not quite as ghastly as the waters around it suggest,
Randall’s Island certainly doesn’t exude much in the way of charm,
even in the sunshine of an unseasonably hot autumn afternoon. It
is, concedes Richard Reed Parry, Arcade Fire’s affable red-headed
multi-instrumentalist, a far cry from the venues at which the band
are renowned for performing: the churches that seem to echo the
quasi-religious fervour in their music, the “aesthetically
inspiring” spaces in which Parry has said they play their best.
If you wanted an indication of the magnitude of Arcade Fire’s
rise since last year’s release of their second album, Neon
Bible, then Randall’s Island and the nonplussed punters would
do nicely.
A couple of years ago, Arcade Fire were a critically acclaimed
seven-piece, alt-rock act, albeit one noted for the intensity of
their live shows, their frenzied, evangelical cult following, their
penchant for dressing like 19th-century American farmers and the
fact that their two central members, Win Butler and Regine
Chassagne, were a married couple. They played the kind of venues
that critically acclaimed alt-rock acts perform in: when asked by
U2 to support them on a handful of Canadian stadium dates, the band
viewed the shows, Parry says, with the bemused detachment of people
who weren’t really supposed to be there, dumbfounded by what he
calls the “huge, ginormo machine of a production. It was,” he
recalls, “like, whoa.”
And yet, here they are, barely two years later, performing to
22,000 people - a crowd, Parry notes, that is “as big as one of
those U2 shows”. They are at the end of a vast American tour,
during which they were feted not by the kind of rock aristocrats
who have queued up to garland the band since the release of their
debut album, Funeral (David Bowie and David Byrne have
performed with them), but by a rather different kind of celebrity:
Scarlett Johansson, Drew Barrymore and James Spader turned up to
see them in Hollywood. So did Rod Stewart, an artist whose love for
apocalyptically inclined, anthemic baroque art-rock had previously
gone strangely unnoticed.
The audience thronging Randall’s Island, meanwhile, is
conspicuously light on the kind of whey-faced indie-kid blogger
whose early support earned Arcade Fire that most noughties of
labels, the internet phenomenon. Instead, there are baseball caps
and shorts and Gap casual wear in profusion: this is very much a
mainstream American rock crowd.
It is all evidence of success of a kind that should,
theoretically, cause headaches and hand-wringing in Arcade Fire’s
ranks. This is, after all, a band that zealously guards its
independence and rigorously shuns the celebrity that seems an
inescapable by-product of your second album reaching the Top 10
around the world.
“The song is independent of my face and what I look like,” says
Chassagne. “I know in pop music people are really used to, like,
relating it to the person who made it and what they eat and what
they do every day, but to me it’s just independent.”
And the band could not be accused of rapaciously pursuing global
domination: earlier this year, Butler was heard to label “bands who
think in terms of, ‘I’m going to be the biggest band in the world,
f— all those bands who’ve got no ambition’,” as “a total crock of
shit”. Then there’s the fact that Arcade Fire thrive,
according to Parry, on “playing small rooms where you can really
get in people’s faces and connect with them and wrestle with
them”.
But Butler says that there has been little hand-wringing about
Arcade Fire’s mainstream success: for one thing, he says, success
means it’s easier to refuse to do things you don’t want to do. Nor
is he particularly sorry to see the back of playing small venues:
indeed, he prefers playing Randall’s Island or the Hollywood Bowl
to the euphoric, wildly acclaimed performances they gave at
London’s St John’s Church and Porchester Hall early last year.
“This tour is the opposite of the sell-it-out hype thing. It’s
more about letting people who want to see us, see us. That feels
really good. A lot of these shows have been more intimate than the
warm-up shows we did in the churches because they were so
overwhelming and press-centred.”
Butler is famously no great fan of the media, claiming never to
read anything written about the band. This means that he has missed
the appearance of a blog called Arcade Fire Stole My Basketball, on
which an outraged fellow gym user baldly accused him of the theft
alluded to in the title, and Arcade Fire being called the greatest
band in the world by at least three different British
periodicals.
You get the impression that being interviewed seldom constitutes
the highlight of his day. He is scrupulously polite and thoughtful
in his answers but you would never confuse him with a font of
easygoing bonhomie. “I don’t like the process of having to promote
an album and talk about it,” he says, flatly, “and I learnt pretty
early on that the artist always seems like the asshole in the
situation, no matter what you do.”
He and Parry think Arcade Fire’s aversion to celebrity may have
something to do with their roots in Montreal. The city has arts
grants available to bands that instil a certain anti-commercial
sensibility in musicians: “They encourage people to think that
being an artist is a viable way of life, that doing something that
won’t necessarily make money is a worthwhile thing to do.”
Whatever the reason, Butler has gained the reputation of a
prickly and rather difficult customer. His understandable desire to
avoid what he calls “the hoops” of the music industry - “all the
things that have nothing to do with playing your instrument or
playing together that take up a lot more energy than actually
playing music and connecting with people” - has shown a tendency to
look more like petulance.
It was Butler who smashed a camera with his mandolin and stormed
off stage during Arcade Fire’s appearance on the British TV show
Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, apparently piqued because
the band had to sit in the green room with the other guests when he
wanted to visit a friend instead.
The ill-humoured appearance on Jonathan Ross was indicative of
what was, by all accounts, a difficult summer for Arcade Fire.
Despite the critical plaudits and commercial success, says Butler,
“there have definitely been points when we’ve been pretty down”.
During a gruelling round of festival appearances, Parry came to the
conclusion that Arcade Fire was “not a festival band”. This
contradicts their obsession with turning a show into a communal
experience in which the music invokes a transcendent singalong.
“People are like, throwing up and hitting the doors and things
like that,” Butler says of Glastonbury. “I get the appeal of
wanting to get high for the first time and wanting to run ’round
the fields, you know, but that’s not necessarily the most engaging
experience to me.” Parry nods: “We were just, like, ‘what in God’s
name is this? Why would I be here if I wasn’t playing?”‘
They have toured since this time last year, a schedule that
proved so punishing Butler and Parry alight on the singer
contracting an acute sinus infection in March as an unlikely
highlight: “Even though I was recovering from surgery, it was
great. We had a month with nothing to do.” They talk with a
wistfulness about the pleasure of being in the studio. At one
point, Butler offers a description of recording the track Haiti.
His account is so detailed it borders on fetishism. Butler says
they are “going to find a way” of breaking out of the
album-tour-album-tour treadmill. “That’s the next great challenge.
It’s not the best system for creativity, because that’s not the way
it works: be creative for two years, don’t be creative for two
years.”
That night, as they take the Randall’s Island stage, he
announces with barely concealed relish that this is the last time
Arcade Fire will play New York “for a couple of years”. The
audience hoot their derision. “Yeah,” says Butler, heavily. “Boo.
Hiss.”
Road-weary or not, they are magnificent on the stage. By the
encore, Butler’s brother, Will, is hanging perilously from the
lighting rig and Arcade Fire have succeeded in transforming
Randall’s Island into something magical: a sea of swaying hands, a
vast choir of voices singing along to Wake Up’s wordless
chorus. At the show’s conclusion, the band rushes into the crowd
where they perform a frantic cover of the Violent Femmes’ Kiss
Off, to the delight of fans within earshot and the horror of
security. It is, as Parry would say, like, whoa.
Backstage, I see Butler and Chassagne talking with fans, still
holding an acoustic guitar and an accordion respectively,
distractedly picking out a tune as they chat. Then they slip away
into the dressing room, still playing their instruments.

China shut down 44,000 Web sites and arrested 868 people for Internet pornography last year, state media said Wednesday.
China’s Public Security Ministry launched a crackdown on Internet pornography last year, saying it had “perverted China’s young minds.”
Nearly 2,000 people involved in Internet pornography activities also were penalized, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Separately, Xinhua said 33 people were arrested in connection with a Web site that allowed customers, mainly in Taiwan, to view live sex shows filmed at 12 separate locations in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai.
Xinhua said 23 of those arrested were performers who were ordered detained for 15 days, while the 10 others, including two Taiwanese, were managers. It did not say when the arrests took place, but said the heavily trafficked site had been among those targeted in the crackdown last year.
Cash, computers and film equipment were also seized, Xinhua said.
China forbids pornography and paid sex in virtually all forms, although prostitution is common and the government’s Internet police struggle to block pornographic Web sites based abroad.
China’s online population has soared to 210 million people and could surpass the United States this year to become the world’s biggest, the official China Internet Network Information Center said earlier this month.
The government will increasingly concentrate on Web sites that have audio or video, blogging or send information to cell phones, Xinhua said.
China recently said it wanted to exert more control over Internet videos and video-sharing Web sites.
The government regularly censors and restricts access to content it considers subversive or politically sensitive, and Chinese Web sites often hire their own censors to eliminate certain content.

Modern PC software is often a work in progress. Just as you’ve
mastered an application and found ways to work around its quirks,
an upgrade comes along fixing the problems. Developers frequently
add new features; introducing new quirks and new workarounds. And
just to complicate matters there are regular security updates and
patches.
Desktop PC applications evolve at breakneck speed but web
applications change at a faster rate. The main difference between
the two types is that you can easily choose not to update a PC
application you’ve fine-tuned to perfection; with web-based
software you are force marched to the updated version. Sometimes
this can be good.
Two of my favourite productivity applications went through
significant updates last year. The web-based Remember the Milk
(RTM, http://www.rememberthemilk.com)
implemented a long list of new features and went through a big
redesign while the desktop-based Evernote (www.evernote.com) made some useful
incremental changes and developed a portable version designed to
work with USB memory devices.
In simple terms RTM, which last featured in this column in
October 2006, is an online to-do list manager. Moving to-do lists
online means they can be integrated with maps, pictures, digital
calendars, personal information managers, mobile phones and just
about everything else that’s web-enabled.
The basic version of the Australian-developed application
remains free but there’s a $US25 ($28.35) Pro version that has
priority support and the ability to synch to Windows Mobile
devices. There are special versions of the application for iPhone
and iPod touch users and a version that integrates with Gmail.
RTM works online with Mac OS X gadgets, Google gadgets and Yahoo
Widgets.
As well as developing a portable edition, the Evernote note
capturing application has been upgraded so it can recognise text
inside digital images. This means you can photograph something with
your mobile phone camera, then store and index the information in
an Evernote database.