Bill Murray's Blog, page 92
March 26, 2017
Achieving Greenland and Searching for Robert
First thing we have to do, we have to find Robert.
The men smoking outside the concrete block terminal are not Robert so I ask around inside. The man behind the check-in counter might as well be collecting Arctic tumbleweeds. No flights are pending; no one is checking in.
He does not know Robert.
Together we lean over his counter to look down to the harbor. One boat is speeding away and there don’t seem to be any others. He flips his palms up and shakes his head, “I think you just go down there and wait. That is your only chance.”
You can’t fly to Tasiilaq, the biggest town on the eastern side of Greenland, for lack of sufficient flat space for an airstrip. So we have flown to a gravel strip called Kulusuk Airport. To get to Tasiilaq we must traverse the mouth of the Ammassalik fjord. We booked that online and all we know is, get to Kulusuk and ask for Robert.
We insult the silence with our prissy roll aboard carry-on bags, scraping and skipping the damned things down the rough gravel. Show more respect and stand still, and the quiet closes up around you as a vehement, absolute thing.
A man from Cologne with a massive backpack walks ahead of us. He has arrived with no itinerary beyond walking for two weeks. His pack reaches up past his head, bulging with two weeks of freeze-dried food and powdered milk. Once he walked from Ilullisat to Sisimiut in western Greenland. Right now he plans to circumambulate Ammassalik Island. He puts great store in the advice of Robert, but none of us know how to find him.
Airport to harbor, perhaps a twenty-minute walk. No boats in sight. Either side of the gravel path, just rock and a little but not much tenacious flora. Our destination across the water is low and bare with mountains rising snow-capped, glaciers embedded toward the top. Clouds tease the ridges but do not suggest a threat of rain. In between individual icebergs, not a field, rise like several-story buildings.
It turns out that two tiny Danish-built fiberglass Poca speedboats, so low slung that the dock hides them both, bob in the sea beyond the dock. Two Greenlandic men stand down there on the shore below the dock, neither in so much as a jacket, enjoying the northern summer.
We ask, “Robert?” and the younger man, with no English, shakes his head no, “Christian.” We and the backpacker, who is expecting the same ride, are at a bit of a loss until we work out, through gestures and goodwill, that Christian is here on behalf of Robert. For us, that is good.
•••••
A tiny excerpt from my new book. Go grab it, it’s good stuff. And sign up for a free audiobook version of Common Sense and Whiskey by clicking the box on the right. Drawings every Friday.
March 25, 2017
It’s Show Time for French Elections
This will get you up to speed on the state of things one month before the French election: The center-right Républicains and center-left Parti Socialiste have dominated French politics since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958, and this year neither may advance to the final round. Among the Républicains, the two best known candidates went down in turn. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s comeback attempt was turned back early, then in the primaries’ second round, Alain Juppé was defeated by former Prime Minister François Fillon, who promptly became embroiled in a scandal that has brought his poll numbers down to 18%. He is currently polling in third place.
President François Hollande’s hapless governance has brought the center-left Socialistes’ prospects down with him, and the Socialistes have chosen to radically shake up their status quo. As on the center-right, the expected standard bearer, Manuel Valls, fell decisively in the primaries to a harder left candidate named Benoit Hamon, who proposes shortening the work week to 32 hours, and a tax on robots. He languishes in last place, most recently polling 14.1%.
The candidates most likely to finish one-two are Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Macron has positioned himself squarely in the center, having left the Socialistes to form a party called En Marche, meaning sort of “on the move,” or “let’s go!” While Macron, 39, is accused of a lack of policy heft, he is just about tied atop the polls with the leader of the Front Nationale, Marine Le Pen. Le Pen has worked hard on the “de-démonization” of the anti-EU, law and order party she inherited from her father, the holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen. The firebrand populist hopes to benefit from the rise of nationalism in the west, and from the “Trump effect.”
Here is one in a series of election ads (with English subtitles) that seeks to show Le Pen’s steely determination and patriotism:
The first round of the elections in Sunday, 23 April, with the top two candidates moving to a runoff two weeks later. Conventional wisdom suggests the rest of the political spectrum will close ranks against Le Pen, behind whoever emerges as her opponent in the second round, to be held Sunday, 7 May. More on that then.
Weekend Reading
[image error]
A fine harvest of articles for your weekend:
• The Faroe Islands by Porter Fox at Nowhere Mag
• The Disorient by Joshua Kucera at Roads and Kingdoms
• Goodbye, Eastern Europe! by Andrei Rogatchevski in the Los Angeles Review of Books
• The Capitalist Who Knew Capitalism Was Only a Third of What We Need by Tim Montgomerie at Capx.co
• What Caused the Russian Revolution? Look to the Powder Keg of Petrograd by David Reynolds at The New Statesman
• Here Be Dragons by Lois Parshley at VQR Online
March 24, 2017
Quotes:
On the collapse of print newspapers:
“All that’s happened is advertisers are leaving, classifieds first, inserts last. Business is business; the advertisers never had a stake in keeping the newsroom open in the first place. This disconnection between the business side and the news side was celebrated as a benefit, right up to the moment it became an industry-wide point of failure.”
-Clay Shirky on Medium.
Kissing v Marrying
[image error]Here’s the new book. Go grab it, it’s good stuff. And sign up for a free audiobook version of Common Sense and Whiskey by clicking the box on the right. Drawings every Friday.
March 23, 2017
More Vintage Moscow
The other day I shared a fascinating color photo essay at RFERL.com, from Moscow in the 1950s. It prompted me to seek out what photos I could find from my 1986 trip there. Here are three.
First, opposite the Kremlin, across Red Square, was the cavernous government-owned GUM department store (Глáвный универсáльный магазѝн), translated as “Main Universal Store:”
I stayed that trip at the massive Moscow Hotel (Гостиница Москва) just outside Red Square on Manezh Square. Here are the amenities on the desk in my room, circa summer 1986:
And here is the view from that room onto Red Square:
[image error] http://www.earthphotos.com/Countries/Russia/i-sHCjdqB/X3
For Research Purposes Only
[image error]
The clearly not good for you Canadian dish called poutine is French fries in gravy with cheese curds. This particular plate, from a pub in St. John’s, Newfoundland, was strictly in pursuit of research for Out in the Cold, my new book.
March 21, 2017
Flying Soft
[image error]Private Empire by Steve Coll is the book to read about our curious, NATO-avoiding new Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. It covers his time as the leader of Exxon Mobil. In The New Yorker, in the first thing I’ve seen from Coll on Tillerson in his new job, he suggests not taking journalists on Tillerson’s Asia trip may have been because he has gone a touch soft. As Exxon C.E.O.:
When Tillerson travelled, he rarely flew commercial. The corporation’s aviation-services division maintained a fleet of Gulfstream and Bombardier corporate jets at Dallas Love Field Airport, a short drive away. Whether Tillerson was flying to Washington, Abuja, Abu Dhabi, or Jakarta, he would typically be driven in a sedan to a waiting jet. He boarded with a meticulously outlined trip schedule and briefing books. He worked and slept aboard in private comfort, undisturbed by strangers, attended by corporate flight attendants.
