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A request to my Austin readers: Anyone want to give me a couch to sleep on during SXSW in a couple of weeks? (Specifically, we’re talking the nights of Friday, March 10 through Monday, March 13.)
I’d appreciate it greatly; my desire to pay for a hotel is vanishingly small. I promise (a) not to be a bother — you’ll barely notice I’m there, (b) not to drag some raucous PHP/MySQL coding party into your living room, and (c) access to the greatest kickball game of all time, if desired, and (d) to buy you the lunch or dinner of your choice.
My email’s jbenton at toast dot net.

How to write about Africa, from Granta. As someone who has written a handful of stories from Africa, I can tell you it’s awful hard to open your eyes and step past the stereotypes. And I don’t mean racial stereotypes — I mean writerly stereotypes.
“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.
“Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.
“Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.”
The African middle class gets horribly undercovered, and stories do tend to rob Africans of their individual agency. In Western stories, things always happen to Africans; Africans rarely do much worth mentioning. (It’s at least somewhat symbolic that the sine qua non of modern African heroes is Nelson Mandela, a man most famous in the West for sitting stoicly in prison for 27 years.) This happens with even the most well-meaning reporters; hell, it probably happens more with the most well-meaning reporters. My funeral story from Zambia probably falls in that category.
What’s strange is that these stereotypes don’t go back as far as you might imagine. The “beaten-down, pathetic” stereotype (better or worse than the old “savage” stereotype?) only became dominant in the ’70s or so, by my reading — after Biafra, after Idi Amin, and gaining speed with the Ethiopian famines and AIDS in the ’80s. Which is why it’s so bracing to read stuff from Africa in the early ’60s, with the sense of optimism that came with decolonialization and men like Nkrumah and Kenyatta and Nyerere and Kaunda. Africa didn’t seem helpless.
Getting past those stereotypes is, to me, what that “Cultivating Loneliness” essay I linked to a while back was all about: Having the courage to write what you see, not what the 20 people before you have seen.

Holy MP3! If you’ve got an iPod you’re looking to fill, this BitTorrent file will download 2.5 gigabytes of legit MP3s, from a healthy portion of the 1,400 bands playing at SXSW next month. It’s 713 songs in total, all legal.
I downloaded this last year, and I feel I should warn you: A really substantial chunk of these songs are crap. But there are also plenty of jewels to be picked, however surgically, from the stercus.
Addendum: Here’s another torrent with 229 more MP3s. Presumably from the bands who didn’t have their act sufficiently together to get their MP3s in on time.

For dedicated Apple fanboys like myself, there’s little better than a Macworld keynote — the once-a-year event when Steve Jobs climbs on stage and unveils the latest Apple goodies. But even we can appreciate this compilation of screwups from past keynotes. The OpenGL bit by Phil Schiller — he’s the guy who looks like the third-base coach at AAA Shreveport — is particularly choice.

An interview with Whit Stillman. It’s a shame he’s disappeared from the scene; he’s produced nothing since The Last Days of Disco, which started my (not particularly long-lasting) obsession with Kate Beckinsale.
Strangely, reading that interview gives me two contradictory feelings: “Whit Stillman seems like a pretty cool, reasonable guy” and “Whit Stillman is probably secretly crazy — you can just tell.”

While I’m focused on French ’60s pop: A full page of France Gall videos. Some great songs there, plus several supremely creepy Serge Gainsbourg appearances. More contemporary francophiles may recognize “Laisse Tomber Les Filles” from the cover version by April March.

Along the lines of my post on ’60s French girl acts: Cresoxipropanediol en Capsules, a 1966 song by actress Ginette Garcin.
Lyrics here, and in franglais. And no, I have no idea what cresoxipropanediol is, but I imagine it’s something a la the Stones’ Mother’s Little Helper.
I found this through Volume 10 of the “Girls in the Garage” series (previously written about here). The compiler of that all-French volume was DJ Mimi la Twisteuse, who used to host a French-pop radio show in Quebec. The show has passed on, sadly, but she hosts a monthly dance party in Toronto called Zoi Zoi.
More info on that and more cool ’60s French pop over here. And a bonus three-hour DJ set by Mimi over here. One highlight: About 1:48 in, Jean-Pierre Ferland, the Quebecois John Lennon, singing his classic “God Is An American.”

More trouble for foreign desks at regional newspapers. The Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, and Newsday — all proud newspapers with strong legacies of foreign correspondence — are all cutting back.
The Globe just shut down its Baghdad bureau, which was until recently staffed by a fellow Yale Herald alum. Newsday looks ready to shut down Johannesburg and Beijing, maybe ready to get out of Iraq, and recently closed its Mexico operation. The Sun, with probably the proudest history of them all, has already closed Beijing and London and may be thinking more.
(And, of course, my own employer has shut down its Bangkok, Havana, and Panama bureaus in the past few years.)
It’s a damn shame, but it’s becoming apparent that the foreign news game is going to be played by an ever smaller number of news organizations. In the newspaper world, you’ve got the NYT, the Post, the WSJ, and the L.A. Times who all have significant networks of foreign bureaus. And that’s about it. Everyone in that second tier — the Tribune, the DMN, the other papers mentioned above — are getting out of the business. (Knight Ridder has been something of an exception, although that could change at any moment.)
I mean, how can it be a good thing journalistically to have two fewer American bureaus in Beijing? Precisely at the historical moment when China is becoming America’s chief rival in a dozen ways?

A warning to the heterosexual men in the audience: You are about to view the cutest girl in human history.*
France Gall, live on the Eurovision Song Contest, 1965.
Eurovision is a strange bird, a 50-year-old televised competition in which European nations come up with their best song and singer and compete against one another. It’s like “American Idol,” but if it were Italy versus Norway instead of Justin Guarini versus Kelly Clarkson. (I first heard of it via a Monty Python sketch in my youth.)
Anyway, France Gall was a 17-year-old French singer who somehow ended up representing Luxembourg. Her song was “Poupee de cire, poupée de son,” which isn’t as dirty as it sounds, despite the fact it was written by notorious French lecher and ugly dude Serge Gainsbourg. (Serge would later write a hit titled “Les Sucettes” for Gall, which she sang innocently until she realized all its talk of “lollipops” was, in truth, about fellatio.)
Man, in that video, she is cute. Is it the occasional bite of the lower lip? Is it the slight self-consciousness? Is it the joyfully dorky headbop at the end of every verse? Is it the fact that she really can’t sing at all? Or is it just the driving, ’60s orch-pop music behind her? (That instrumental break is pretty great — terrific rolling drums.)
Some other fine France Gall images from the interwebs: with strange wooden Viking doll; the brunette; greatest hits; nice scarf.
And, just because any mention of Serge Gainsbourg requires repeating this story: When Serge told Whitney Houston on live television he wanted to fuck her.
* By “cutest girl in human history,” of course, I mean “with the exception of all women I’ve ever dated or will ever date.” Hi, past and future honeys! You’re all much cuter than silly old Frenchie!
Bonus: Video of Serge Gainsbourg singing “Le Poinconneur des Lilas,” probably circa late 1957. Not sure I get the chicken-pox motif, but a good reminder of why French pop from that era was so great. Also, a good reminder that Serge Gainsbourg was the ugliest dude to ever schtupp hotties like Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin.

Best juggler evah.
There was a time, in the late ’60s, when the Beatles were considering adding a juggler to their act — in particular, one who could accompany the pop-symphonic second side of Abbey Road. The idea was to find a replacement for Paul, who’d been killed tragically in a car accident.
Sadly, it never worked out (damn you, Yoko!), but here is video proof of how it might have looked.