The Smiths
"Versailles"
Parc Des Expositions, Paris
1 December 1984
NTSC
63 Mins

Silvers > Mac The Ripper > HD > You

I really don't know much about this video but it doesn't appear to be up here so I thought people may be interested. I picked up the DVD on Bleeker Street in New York City. It has a soundboard audio source and was apparently a TV broadcast. The songs are tracked and there is a menu. The intro to Handsome Devil is cut. I'm including the original artwork. There are video edits that remind me of the 80's in all it's cheesy glory. If you're a Smiths fan you'll want it. If you're a Moz fan, hey, he sticks his tongue out and exposes a nipple or two. Enjoy.

Setlist

William, It Was Really Nothing
What She Said
Nowhere Fast
Reel Around The Fountain
Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now
How Soon Is Now?
Still Ill
Rusholme Ruffians
This Charming Man
Barbarism Begins At Home
I Want The One I Can't Have
Hand In Glove
What Difference Does It Make?
/Handsome Devil
Miserable Lie

I found the following info on a fan site:

1 December 1984
Parc Des Expositions, Paris, France

To put an end to a very busy year, the Smiths returned to Paris for a one-off concert. This is often credited as having taken place in the Parisian suburb of Versailles, but the venue was actually a hall at the Parc Des Expositions, near the Porte de Versailles in the south of Paris. The setlist was similar to the ones from the recent Irish dates, minus "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want" and "Jeane". All five then-unreleased songs that would appear two months later on "Meat Is Murder" as well as recent single tracks "William, It Was Really Nothing", "How Soon Is Now?" and "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" were performed.

The concert went down well, but perhaps because the Smiths were not as known in France as in the UK, the audience took some time to warm up to the band. After the opener "William, It Was Really Nothing", Morrissey greeted the crowd "Thank you we are the Smiths and we come from England... what?". He wasn't as talkative in France as he was in England or Ireland, probably because of the language barrier. At the end of "Nowhere Fast" he lied on the floor to illustrate the song's final line "I'd lie down and die". The next song on the programme was then introduced "Thank you, this is a song called 'Reel Around The Fountain'."

After "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", Morrissey thanked the audience and introduced the next song: "Thank you... thank you, you're very kind, thank you... This is a song called 'How Soon Is Now'." Near the end of "Still Ill" he fell on the floor and writhed. The following song was then introduced "This is a new song which you don't know, it's called 'Rusholme Ruffians'." It segued into "This Charming Man" the way it always did since its live inception in September. This was to be the last of the few times this medley was performed.

During the bass solo at the end of "Barbarism Begins At Home" Johnny, who had nothing to do, pretended to yawn and started dancing along while Morrissey was 'oscillating wildly' near him, arm flying everywhere. Near the end of a very spirited "Hand In Glove", Morrissey removed his shirt gradually, swung it around for a short while then threw it in the crowd. He said "Goodbye... thank you... we love you..." and the Smiths left stage. They were soon called back and Morrissey thanked the audience "Thank you France, we didn't expect this, thank you". The first encore consisted of a playful "What Difference Does It Make?" with added "Ba-bada-bada" and "Handsome Devil". The band was then asked to do a second encore, and they went for "Miserable Lie" after thanking the French again for their welcome: "What could we say? Thank you..."

This concert was recorded and broadcast on television. The image quality is good, but this was filmed from one main angle and very few variations. There is also a lot of annoying video effects that can't really be blamed on the fact that it was the 1980s. It is only one of two visual documents for the Smiths in 1984 so despite all this, still very interesting to watch on bootleg video or DVD.

I’m not talking about whether or not it’s Sarah Palin.  I’m talking about the direction it (and the Republican party) will take in the wake of the Bush administration and the recent election results.  From a recent article by Philip Klein from The American Spectator titled “The Future of the Right” (link):

About two-dozen conservative leaders met today at the Stanley, Virginia home of Media Research Center President Brent Bozell in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains to discuss conservatism's future in the wake of Tuesday's election results.

TAS Publisher Al Regnery and editor in chief R. Emmett Tyrrell were on hand, along with leaders from policy groups and grassroots organizations representing each pillar of the conservative coalition, from Christian conservatives to libertarians, and everybody in between.

"As the afternoon went on, it didn't take long for attendees to become resolute in their resistance to moderates and to the opinion that the conservative movement will become the opposition to Obama," Tyrrell said.

One attendee said, "We're no longer going to support Republicans who want to 'improve' a bad bill. We're going to oppose all bad bills."

and then

Looking back at the campaign, they felt that John McCain wasn't really a conservative, and that Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber were the two best things that happened because of the way they connected with people.

In an article in the LA Times titled “The GOP looking glass”, Jonah Goldberg frames the soul searching this way (link):

In one corner, there are a large number of bright, mostly younger, self-styled reformers with a diverse -- and often contradictory -- set of proposals to win back middle-class voters and restore the GOP's status as "the party of ideas" (as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it).

In another corner are self-proclaimed traditional conservatives and Reaganites, led most notably by Rush Limbaugh, who believe that the party desperately needs to get back to the basics: limited government, low taxes and strong defense.

What is fascinating is that both camps seem implicitly to agree that the real challenge lurks in how to account for the Bush years. For the young Turks and their older allies -- my National Review colleagues Ramesh Ponnuru, Yuval Levin and David Frum, the Atlantic's Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, New York Times columnist David Brooks et al -- the problem is that Bush botched the GOP's shot at real reform. For the Limbaugh crowd, the issue seems to be that we've already tried this reform stuff -- from both Bush and McCain -- and look where it's gotten us.

and then:

The irony is that both camps agree on a lot more than they disagree. The reformers are committed to market principles and reducing the size and role of government, and so are the back-to-basics crowd. The problem is that an elephant named George in the room is blocking each side from seeing what the other is all about. But hopefully not for much longer.

It seems to me that the realities of electoral demographics will be critical for charting electoral success for conservatives in the coming decades.  In another LA Times article titled “Democrats set sights on Texas” (link), Peter Wallsten writes:

As they review the results of Tuesday's election victories and begin looking toward future campaigns, some Democrats have settled on a rallying cry: Texas is next.

It sounds improbable for the Republican bastion that produced President Bush and served as an early laboratory for Karl Rove's hard-nosed tactics. But Texas is one of several reliably red states that are now in Democrats' sights as party strategists begin to analyze a victorious 2008 campaign that they believe showed the contours of a new movement that could grow and prove long-lasting.

A multiethnic bloc of Latinos, blacks, young people and suburban whites helped to broaden the party's reach Tuesday well beyond its traditional base in the Northeast and the West Coast -- carrying Barack Obama into the White House and expanding the party's majorities in Congress.

That new formula was evident in state exit polls and county-level election results showing that Democrats scored gains from a voting base that is growing progressively less white than the population that helped forge Republican advantages in past elections. In state after state, from GOP strongholds like North Carolina, Indiana and Colorado, minorities made up a larger share of the vote than in the past, and in each case they helped turn states from red to blue.

and then

Latinos made up a greater share of the electorate than in the past in every Southwestern state, according to exit polls compiled by CNN. And in each Southwestern state, as well as Florida, the Democrat pulled a bigger percentage of the Latino vote -- a turnaround from 2004, when President Bush cut deeply into Democrats' hold on Latinos and won that bloc in Florida, where many Cuban Americans remain loyal to the GOP.

Projections from the US Census Bureau (link) indicate that by 2042 non-Hispanic whites will no longer represent a majority of the US population. 

Here is a summary of the projections comparing 2008 to 2050:

If those projections turn out to be anywhere close to reality, it’s obvious that the Republican party’s prospects will continue to decline over the next few decades if it is fairly or unfairly  stereotyped as as “anti-immigrant” or the party of white people.  Those aren’t fair descriptions of the Republican party or conservative political movement as a whole, but those tendencies are there and could be exacerbated depending on the direction conservatives take in response to their recent defeats.  The nearly uniform whiteness seen among the party leaders and the crowds at the party convention illustrate the danger that it could be perceived as not a party for all of us.  This is one of the reasons that it is important that people like Bobby Jindal and Michael Steele become significant faces of the party.  Regardless, it seems that issues of changing demographics have to be given weight as the conservatives chart their course forward.