It is “The Who” who sing it on the album The Who Sell Out (1967):

Welcome to my life, tattoo
I’m a man now, thanks to you
I expect I’ll regret you
But the skin graft man won’t get you
You’ll be there when I die
Tattoo

(And they sing it so sweetly, too: just savor the descending harmony at the end of this chorus. If you don’t already know it, you can get some of the melodious flavor of the song from Amazon with Windows Media Player and with Real Player, although unfortunately these extracts don’t include that stretch of harmony of which I speak.)

Ah, but it doesn’t have to be the “skin graft man” anymore – these days tattoos can be erased by a procedure involving a laser. As it happens, and as the lead to a recent article in Berlin’s Tagesspiegel reports (Bleibende Schönheit, or “Beauty That Sticks Around”), “Many British want to be rid of their tattoos.”

(Just before we go “under the fold,” let me add that The Who Sell Out was quite a remarkable concept album, one of the first of that genre, with station-jingles and faux commercials interspersed between the individual songs. The schtick was to make the entire album sound like a pop music program from one of the “pirate” radio stations, broadcasting those days from ships out in adjoining international waters, outside (or so they thought) of UK regulatory jurisdiction. Consistent with all this, the front and back of the LP/CD cover features the boys of the band individually posing for mock product advertisements: Heinz Baked Beans, Odorono (some type of deodorant; probably fictitious), etc. Later on, in the late 1980s, the band would embark on “reunion tours” actually explicitly sponsored by companies such as Budweiser. But then they had also sung “I hope I die before I get old” back in 1965 – and three of the four original band members made it into the 21st century thirty-five years later. One’s attitudes often tend to change as one grows older, I’m given to understand.) (more…)

The threat is worse than I thought: it’s not just some English-writer-for-hire who has made an appearance writing articles in Germany’s foremost commentary newspaper – or rather “German-writer-in-English-for-hire” – but Dr. Theo Sommer himself, a well-known name in the German commentariat and Die Zeit’s “Editor-at-large.” His first contribution, Never waste a crisis. This is the right time for a New Atlantic Covenant, is quite decent. Again, that’s not a translation of the article’s title: that is the article’s title and the thing is written in English. Pretty good English, too, if not as sassy as that of his colleague, Constanze Stelzenmüller, and even if it contains a couple howlers. (Namely “And: It is going through” at the end of the second paragraph and – *ouch* – “[t]he world has changed two [sic] much for that” later on. But blame not the good Dr., but rather his editors.)

But his article is credited at the bottom to “The Atlantic Times, Vol. 1, Nr. 2, November 2004,” so apparently Dr. Sommer didn’t write it exclusively for Die Zeit. Maybe Frau Stelzenmüller will remain largely on her own in her beachhead of English in the German press. By the way, this on-line article discusses “The Atlantic Times,” a new English-language monthly newspaper (“produced in Berlin, printed in Washington and distributed to 20,000 decision makers in the United States”) designed to make Americans more aware of the German point-of-view on things. No indication as to whether it is already on-line or is going to be available that way. (I’ve made an inquiry: stay tuned.)

Update: Here’s the Atlantic Times website. And it’s a free monthly publication for subscribers in the United States. Just go to the website to register for your subscription.

Ole Bang Nielsen of Denmark’s Berlingske Tidende provides a lot of useful background to the electoral dramatics currently going on in the Ukraine today (Europe’s Forgotten Land). Basically, the EU has dropped the ball – or has it? (more…)

The new European Commission started work today – finally. They were supposed to start work on November 1, but got held up by one Rocco Buttiglioni, the Italian Commission candidate who was supposed to get the Justice and Home Affairs portfolio. In nomination hearings before a European Parliament committee, Buttiglione was not shy in setting forth his personal value-system in which homosexuals are sinners and women encouraged to stay home and care for the children. Those sorts of sentiments just won’t do for the EU of the 21st century, to the extent that if the Parliament had no other choice but to reject the entire new Commission proposed by Commission President Jose Manual Barroso in order to keep Buttiglione from taking his place within it – and, the way the EU’s rules now stand, it didn’t – then fine, they were willing to reject the entire new Commission. Barroso pulled back from this brink and managed to get rid of Buttiglioni and find another Italian much more to everyone’s liking.

The new token Italian – but Italians, don’t get offended: every one of the 25 member-states gets a “token” of its own on the Commission – turned out to be a very safe choice, namely Franco Frattini, or the Italian government official who is supposed to be most congenial to foreigners, that is, the foreign minister. (more…)

One thing you can say about Czech president Václav Klaus, he’s never loath to let people know his opinions. Perhaps that’s good for a head-of-state, you might say – we don’t want any slippery focus-group-pandering politician in that top office, even if it’s mostly ceremonial! – but there’s a better case to be made that, in fact, it’s not so good. Consider this: heads-of-state generally carry the title “president,” but only in that major subset of the world’s countries which call themselves (in one form or the other) “republics,” having at some point in their histories discarded the king/queen/prince/duke representative of the hereditary, unelected system of rule that emerged in most places out of the mists of history. But a lot of other countries have still kept their king/queen/prince/duke around; so they’re not republics, although by now the sovereign generally has only a fraction of the political power he/she once wielded. (more…)

The dark blight of terror has now spread its shadow a bit further ’round the world, I’m sorry to report. This from the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny (Terrorist Attack Allegedly Threatens Slovakia): The government spokesman for the Slovak Republic, Vladimir Simko, recently announced on Slovak TV that Slovakia is the possible target of a future terrorist attack. It seems that the Slovak secret intelligence service (SIS) has caught wind of something; as Simko’s announcement put it, “During radio broadcasts in lands in the Near and Middle East there has appeared speculation according to which Slovakia was designated as a possible target for a terrorist attack.” Naturally, though, there was nothing picked up about an actual imminent strike; I daresay the entire conduct of the Slovak government would have been rather different if there had been. (more…)

I recently surfed over to my favorite German commentary newspaper, Die Zeit – and what did I see? An article entitled The Disaggregation Temptation – and that’s not a translation from German, that was the article’s title, which appeared (and still appears, if you’re quick) on the Die Zeit homepage together with a blurb in English. (Look for the American flag.) And the author’s by-line that follows is even “By Constanze Stelzenmüller for ZEIT.de” (my emphasis).

In short, Die Zeit is going English on us! It’s just a start for now – that’s certainly the only article in English to be found on that homepage. But if this catches on, who will love the EuroSavant anymore? Plus there’s all the Sturm and Drang that was involved in my learning this language in the first place: wasted once German on-line newspapers start coming out in the Queen’s English and then, as the other Schuh drops, all of Schiller, Goethe, and Kleist follow. (Or has it already been translated? All of it?)

On the brink of panicking, well before any settling-down to actually read Frau Stelzenmüller’s article, I tried to gauge the size of the threat. (more…)

Yes, EuroSavant has been gone for a while. And what a time for such an absence! Just when the assassination of controversial Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh on the American Election Day touched off a wave of violence and counter-violence against places of religious worship here in the Netherlands, suddenly throwing into question in the eyes of the rest of the world this country’s reputation for tolerance. Have we been swept up too much over here in violent street-pogroms against local Muslims to find time to get to our computers to do a little blogging?

Nothing of the sort, of course; the absence has had more to do with unexpected delays in fully implementing a cable-to-ADSL Internet connection transition, which left me access-less for a while in the meantime. And just to make things perfectly clear: that “street-pogroms” phrase above was nothing more than exaggeration for effect. (Could we call it “blogger’s license”?) There’s been actually nothing more here than occasional night-time vandalism attacks on mosques and Muslim schools and churches. Nothing at all like mobs or a “pogrom,” although those incidents are certainly bad enough, of course, and do raise concerns about where this country is going with relations between various immigrant communities and native Netherlanders. At least rest assured that both the prime minister and the Queen herself are on the problem, paying visits to the right places and speaking calming and reasonable words.

Rather than try to follow the day-to-day incidents, I think mention of another happening, reflecting on the political background, is in order. (more…)

It’s day two of the great George W. Bush re-election wake (since his victory only became definitive on Wednesday the 3rd – day Zero); time to search for some sort of intelligent word about what it all might mean from the German press, perhaps from the highly-respected Die Zeit. There we find, as lead article, what is basically a Teutonic riff on the “two nations” theme out of the election results, in Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff’s article The United Half-Nations. Maybe you’ve already drunk up all the English-language commentary on the 2004 presidential election that you have been able to find, and so are sick of hearing about this thesis and watching it quickly approach the status of a cliché. But if you can still stand it, the German perspective on it here is somewhat intriguing. (more…)

The result is finally in – Bush wins – and most of the rest of the world is rather less than pleased. You would rather expect that, but can get filled in on the details here in the Washington Post. In that article there is a brief reference to a commentary from Le Monde; reason enough to go take a look at the full piece itself, in the original French (Electoral Archaism). It turns out that that Le Monde commentary is perhaps not the most definitive word to turn to from France’s newspaper of record, since at the time it was put on-line the presidential election’s final result was not yet known – it begins “Despite an advantage held by George W. Bush, the result of the American elections remains uncertain.” (more…)