Just for the sake of sake of clarity, I will define my definition of culture for this message as Individual Culture, or culture that identifies you from the rest. Unfortunatly it is actually very little comparitively and fading fast. I currently line in a city, and have toured to most cities as part of my work(Musical Theater Engineer, Touring shows pay well). I have also spent a fair amount of time touring europe on occasion, and have to agree, there was much more culture there than I had ever seen in America. I also have seen what little culture is in america that is individualistic is fading fast anbd being replaced by large corporations, chain restaurants snuffing out the local flavor of restaurant and the like. Also though America does tend to fight learning other languages(I wont speak for Britain). Just take how much effort is put into teaching a second language in school. Most countries teach at least two languages from the start, but in america how many people remember a fraction of what they had to learn to graduate 5 years later? We are at best forced to take 4 semesters of it here, but 24-32 semesters of english. the amount of difference is startling. Seablade

On Sat, 04 Mar 2006 19:39:35 -0500 Lee Revell <rlrevell(a)joe-job.com> wrote: Can't have tons of culture when the country is only 400 years old at most. There's no blame to be put: simply look at the facts. What can you expect as 'tons of culture' when your country is large as a continent, does not include other old countries (as Russia, China, etc...), that Native people (the only ones who lived there before) are rendered irrelevent, that your northern neighbour is mostly the same (apart from that little corner up there of 7 millions, you know, but even them, they're Americans, but with a slight cultural twist), and when all immigrants, despite their exotic names, adhere quite fast to the American way of life. So that's pretty much uniform. And this uniformity prevents people from facing 'tons of culture'. Can't really blame people for that. Now compare this to Europe. All these little sovereign 'countries', each having their own language (most of them). You cannot live in Europe on a daily basis for years without that feeling coming up. Be it in the news, the papers, that prompts you to think 'Hey, there are Italians down there close by and Parmalat has troubles and it implies Berlusconi. Hey, there are Finnish people up there close by (yes I know, takes 24 hour ship trip from Rosotck to get to Helsinki) and they're doing some good business with Nokia. etc...". So on so forth. Be it the music. Especially in the middle-to-small leagues, but also the big stars such as Zugaro whose posters fills up the streets ofa German city. When did you had the oppurtunity to last see the very good Swedish band Isildurs Bane ? Or The Flower Kings ? Well, you know, IB takes their rental truck and drive it down to Germany and then they can play a few gigs there. And the week after ? Two Finnish ladies singing Lapland songs. Lots of that per week, 52 weeks per year. Be it the films, rentals and in theatres. be it the car industry with cars from France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Czech republic (Skoda - I know, owned by VW), Sweden. So you see, there's no blame to be put on the dynamics where people are living. Put European people in America and after a generation or two they'll behave like... Americans ! ;-) As for the second point I mentioned, people having in general more interests in things, this is very flagrant with the percentage of Americans not caring what Bush has lead them to so far. Political chitchat in America often boils down to echoing something heard on TV. In Europe you at least get the feel that the individual has given some thought to the matter.

On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 08:22 -0500, lanas wrote: Thirty something percent? I don't watch TV and neither do most of my friends You seem to be comparing cultured Europeans to American hicks, but you can go to the south of France or the mountains of Switzerland and find people who are the European equivalent of dumb ass rednecks in the US. Lee

Yves Potin wrote: :)

On Mon, 06 Mar 2006 02:17:20 +0000 tim hall <tech(a)glastonburymusic.org.uk> wrote: You can find dumbasses everywhere. The hard fact that a vast majority of people in the whole world were against the invasion of Irak and a vast majority of Americans were for it does not mean that you can't find dumbasses in the vast majority of people in the world or that you can't find intelligent people in the country of Frank Zappa. Only extremist, short-sighted people would think otherwise. No comment on that one :-) Really. Yep, it's high time for a third major politcal party that's not funded by the same interest as the other two. Do it while people remember where the U.S.of A. are located on the map of the globe ;-) So, in good faith, let's listen to good American bands like Djam Karet, Boud Deun, and the Smoking Grannies. Can't say that there ain't good music in America !