It’s beautiful in New York, and the world if full of things to argue about. Here are three important issues I’ll have to get back to you on.

While the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I have been trying to maintain my sanity with light reading, and sunny days on the back patio. This largely precludes the production of good (or even mediocre) writing. Further political catastrophes and World Cup drama could completely rule it out.

Despite that, there are several things which should appear here soon, plus a reading recommendation.  Advice for further reading and different perspectives is always very welcome.

First, I’m working on a close reading of the latest US / West African drug arrests, this time focused on Liberia. Not to sound too paranoid, but these things never seem to hang together well when examined closely, and I’ve come to believe over the last few years that there is a commonality of interests between several right wing think tanks, a clutch of journalists and “terrorism experts”, UN Anti-Drug authorities, foreign governments, military, and local governments which play up the need for military and legal spectacle at the expense of actual work on development or ending corruption. While there is likely some real criminality going on in this case, I’m prepared to argue that this Liberian sting of aspiring West African drug runners serves more to allow these interests to further very specific political agendas.

Next, there are updates on the Nigerien political transition, with a new electoral law that has generated some controversy, while we wait for several party political and constitutional shoes to drop in Niamey (party leadership, coalitions, charges against Tandja supporters, not to mention and entirely new Constitution of the Seventh Republic that has to be written and voted on by the end of the year).

Most important to me, I’ve finally thoroughly read Dutch historian Baz Lecocq‘s 2002 dissertation, “That Desert is Our Country’: Tuareg rebellions and Competing Nationalisms in Contemporary Mali (1946-1996).“  As it is available online, I had read later chapters when I’d seen it cited some time ago.  But having stormed through from the start, I must say that it is the best thing written on the Malian Tuareg in English (easily) and arguably better than anything in French (to be fair, I’m thinking only of articles I’ve read by Georg Klute, the Bernuses, Claudot-Hawad, and Bourgeot.  I haven’t read Pierre Boilley’s “Touaregs Kel Adagh”, let alone Georg Klute’s ”Die Rebellionen der Tuareg in Mali und Niger”, which I’ve only ever seen in German). With very few changes it could be produced as a very valuable book.

Lecocq’s basic premise – which he candidly admits was not the one he began with – is that French colonialism and the process of independence heightened a pre-existing “racial” prejudice between northern and southern communities in what is today Mali, even when outsiders might be unable to easily distinguish between these groups. Independence, as well as French and upper class Tuareg resistance to the form this independence, only deepened these divisions, reinforcing mistrust on all sides, keeping these communities at daggers drawn. This has played out through profound reordering in the structures and meanings of the notoriously complex and shifting Tuareg social/political order on one side. On the other, the brutality and hamfistedness of southern politicians and military has often exacerbated conflict, frustrating Malian society.  Nine of ten Malian live in the south, and these communities, having paid dearly to create the imperfect economic development and political liberties they now enjoy, have little sympathy with Tuareg demands.

If you’re anglophone and interested in French colonialism in the Sahara, Mali’s first decades of independence, the current “Tuareg problem”, or even the more general history of cultural conflict along the interface of the Sahel, there’s tremendous value in this work.  Admittedly, Lecocq really focuses on the history of “free” clans of Tuareg in (what is now) Kidal Region’s Adagh des Ifoughas, who make up only a portion of the population of even this limited area.  But their politics and culture are central to the 1963, 1990, and 2006/7 rebellions, and all north south relations in Mali.  Without understanding this, I’ve always found the causes of fighting there hard to understand, even in relation to the Nigerien Tuareg rebellions, which seem much more enmeshed in Niger’s politics and culture.

• Current preferred time waster: tommymiles on Twitter

How sad is it that I’m this excited about a book of history – polisci essays? How additionally sad is it that I’m trembling in terror over my girlfriend’s reaction that I just spent $40 on a whim?

Regardless, I’m very excited about finding a copy of “Army and Politics in Niger” (“Armee et politique au Niger”, actually) which was just published in 2008 by Codesria, but is already distributed in Europe and North America. Finding careful writing about contemporary Niger is difficult, and I’m usually sent off to local papers, Jeune Afrique, or the reference section to indulge my habit. I’d been looking for Kimba Idrissa’s “Niger: Etat et démocratie” for some time (with little luck), so imagine my joy at discovering this edited volume.

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The Training Shoe

The Face magazine, Vol 2 no.26, in November 1990

by Peter Hooton.

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This year marked the tenth anniversary of THE FACE, but whereas parties have been thrown to commemorate this occasion, nobody has bothered to hold a ‘do’ for the tenth anniversary of the training shoe. It could be a unique occasion (possibly hilarious) and a fitting bash to celebrate a decade that has seen trainer wear break out on a massive scale. Training shoe espionage is now big business, and sportswear conventions where new designs are revealed have stricter security and secrecy than any Tory Party Conference: it seems that bootleggers know their stuff and can rip off a design before you can tie your laces!

I’m sure Adi Dassler and his brother Rudolf didn’t know what they were starting when they began making sports shoes in Germany in the Twenties. After the war, the brothers had a row and split (good soap opera plot, this) and Adi formed Adidas and their kid formed Puma. The companies have been arch rivals ever since and it’s only fitting now that the two main rivals in the so-called ‘old school trainers’ wars are Adidas and Puma.

Much has been written about training shoes over the last couple of years, as the style magazines and the newspapers have tried to come to terms with the massive increase in the popularity of the trainer. Empires have been built and fortunes acquired during the Eighties, and most ‘lazy’ journalists have looked to the States to explain the phenomenon. Unfortunately, most of what has been written has been complete nonsense, so far from the truth that it’s not even funny. If the truth be known, the obsession with training shoes for the youth of this country began in the late Seventies and not in the late Eighties, as some would have us believe. It came from the football terraces and the council estates of the big cities, and who gives a George Best who started it – it happened and that’s a fact.

In the post-punk revolution of ’78/79, Adidas Samba ruled the terraces of Anfield and Goodison, quickly followed by Stan Smith’s, before Puma struck back with its Argentina (blue leather, white stripe) and the much sought after Puma Menotti (red leather, white stripe). Trainer wars were well underway, and European away matches were the perfect opportunity to acquire those obscure training shoes available in Germany, but not in Liverpool. Most of the training shoe addicts would never dream of getting a pair you could buy in the city centre in Liverpool. This was real fashion, and the competition was intense. A revolution was going on that had absolutely nothing to do with the streets of Brooklyn or the Bronx. In all the years that The End magazine was printed in Liverpool, we never received a single letter about ‘trainers’ in America, but we did get hundreds about the training shoes the different football crews were wearing. A football crew’s reputation could be severely damaged by giving it toes (getting chased) at Fulham Broadway, Finsbury Park or the Euston Road, but more serious damage could be done if a fatty was seen wearing a bad pair of trainers by the opposing teams’ fashion spotters.

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My Pathetic Homepage was first created in mid 1995 so I could hotlink Glasgow Celtic photos, post scans of people shooting nautical flares at one another, tell people what to think about politics, convince them to buy my fanzine, and get dates. The first two succeeded wonderfully, the third got dull real quick, and the last two never came off at all. Ah the dreams of the springtime of my life!

Between then and now there have been several iterations of this thing. Most have been shortlived (the boredom thing). Most have been green in color. Most have featured a picture of Peter Hooton‘s rare original 1970s Stan Smith all green colorway I ripped out of a copy of The Face sometime in the mid 1980s.

One thing has remained the same: a self-important, if jokey, response to “company name” on my pirated copy of Photoshop 3: The Tomathon.

Slouching into steady employment,

Tommy