Anna Karina

And now on to Godard's early 60s muse and her work with Gainsbourg. I'm not sure what I consider to be his best form: the late 50s early 60s jazz chanson. The excursions into soundtrack jazz and latin. The string of hits with Jane Birkin. Or maybe, just maybe, the string of hits with pop moppets like BB, Gall, and Karina, which continued well into the 80s with albums from the likes of Isobel Adjani. Here is some Karina anyway.

Surprised by how wrong you can be...

At least I am surprised by how wrong I can be. Never figured France for winning the match last night. In fact if truth be told I never figured France for getting out of the group. I thought the sides that drag you down to their level (the Switzerlands and Koreas and Irelands of this world)would triumph. But instead they played their first good game in fully six years and were good for their victory. I don't think they'll meet two worse full backs in the tournament though. Spain made a mistake. Or several - playing the high offside line with Zidane to supply through balls and Henry to run was stupid. Not playing with wingers was merely ill-advised for two reasons. Firstly if you progress you want to be comfortable with playing a team selection that can beat the selecao, with nothing down either flank you play into Brazil's strength (plus you play the high line like Ghana did and you will get hammered) and secondly their full backs were so weak you needed something to take the French wings minds off attack. They didn't and Sagnol and Ribery took them apart. Sagnol looked like a worthy heir to Lizarazu - which he has never looked before. This was Ribery's only effective match in the tournament and he was marvellous. Hell, even the deeply average Malouda looked good. Too many of the same players turned out for Spain. Xabi, Xabi Alonso, Cesc Fabregas, and on the bench Iniesta and Senna. Okay, there is no team in the world that wouldn't like to have some passing midfielders, but just because you have five of the best doesn't mean you have to play them all: see England and the Lampard/Gerrard axis of feeble. They needed a ballwinner in there and didn't have one. Raul wasn't needed - that is until he was taken off when the new formation would have suited him and you'd have had him there rather than Luis Garcia.

* I meant to say - why didn't they play a decent full back like Asier del Horno? Is it because he is black or something?

Vive la revolution... or at least we'll have a strike

Just came back from over a week in France, in Toulouse and Carcassonne. Had a great time, bought a load of records, went to a match with my da for his seventieth birthday and it was great, came home later than expected. I love France, and in general, I love the French people. Though the civil service there seem to get their only thrill in their stunted, joyless, impotent lives by being arseholes. Off work they're probably fine.

I was sitting in Carcassone castle enjoying the sun and reading 'House of Leaves' by Mark Danielewski (extraordinary book - David Foster Wallace's 'infinite jest' is the major reference that comes to mind. But without the smug annoying self satisfied onanistic backslapping on its own cleverness and with terrifying voids of horror and emotional damage)and I met some nice Americans while I was having a glass of wine. They insisted on buying me a glass - no other nationality would have in that circumstance, Americans are actually, genuinely much nicer than Europeans. One thing that struck me as odd was that they were genuinely annoyed by French people going on strike. I was kind of 'why do you care? I mean it doesn't hurt your economy...' Which is kind of my attitude to incomprehensible things that you can't change and don't really effect you. I often find it funny when people in Europe get heated about US domestic issues. It's not like you can vote. Anyway I was saying that they had a revolution so that they could do this and if they were the same as everyone else why would people come to France? We were sitting, as I said, in a beautiful huge castellated medieval city. If it was in Ireland every tourist image of the country would have it. But the more I thought about that issue the more the revolution came into my head. Revolution often fills my head. When I was in school I remember writing a parody of Hopkins called 'that nature is a Hegelian dialectic and of the comfort of the revolution'... Anyway. I think the reporting of the current French strikes and protests against the law to 'liberalise' the youth employment market misses the point. The protestors are the children of petit bourgeois, functionnaires. The French revolution was a petit bourgeois revolution. It was unnecessary in England as merchants ran the country rather than aristocrats. The US revolution, by contrast, was a revolution of aristocrats and oligarchs avoiding paying tax to the English. As a result France is run by and for the petit bourgeois: the US is run by and for the ultra-rich who don't pay tax. Where does that leave us? I've said before that we took the Canadian option when we were run by our local version of the US revolutionaries: rich landgrabbing Anglos that didn't want to pay tax to England. And then we had a revolution. Or did we?