Dutch winter

we have been blessed with spells of sunny days and beautiful shiny black ice.........2009 found the Dutch at their best!

guillotines and nouvelle cuisine

there is a good place in Lyon where one can have terrific food without having to pay astronomical prices: http://www.institutpaulbocuse.com/ which is the cookery school of the celebrated French chef Paul Bocuse

Almudena asked the maitre d' why chefs had to wear tall hats, to what he replied that it was simply a question of hierarchy and protocol,

which brings me nicely to her next question (yes, she's six) 'why didn't you want to have another queen after Marie Antoinette?' although such a question only provoked giggles among French people.............. I suppose the adult answer to that should be 'because the French tired of paying for the overspending of the privileged and the country was buried into debt'...............hang on a minute, does it ring a bell or two?.............maybe we should be shipping guillotines to Mr. Bush and Mr. Brown all the way from France!

the state of things in russia

On the day when everybody was busy watching the opening ceremony of the Olympic games, Russia invaded Georgia.

I have visited St. Petersburg recently, and was astonished by the Kafkian bureaucracy that still reigns in Russia and the absolute power that authorities have over the population. But what it really surprised me was that people seem to agree with how Putin is conducting the country, even though nobody really looked happy.

Vladimir, our taxi driver, said not without a hint of melancholy: 'Russian people need a firm hand, they are not ready for freedom'

egosurfers

According to The Independent, 'Nerdic' is the fastest-growing language in Europe,
avoiding arguments on the fine line that divides language and dialects, Jerome Taylor claims that more than 100 new words were added to the Nerdic vocabulary in the past 12 months, more than three times the number the Oxford English Dictionary added to the English language.

Here is a sample of words created by the technology industry:
Android= phones featuring Google's Android software
Mash-up= when two elements from different websites are combined
Wimax= powerful wireless internet which can cover whole cities
Egosurfers= those people who spend all day looking themselves up on internet

Too fast to follow? Can't catch up with the speed of things?
Worry not! Most words (specially those used to describe older technology) have already disappeared!

the division between the haves and have nots

I have recently visited Doris Salcedo's 'Shibboleth' (known among visitors as 'the crack') at the Tate Modern. 'A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group. ‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. In breaking open the floor of the museum, Salcedo is exposing a fracture in modernity itself.' says the text on the wall of the Turbine Hall.

The Crack represents the division between the haves and have nots, between oppressed and oppressor and, if you like me choose to look at it from above, between those who 'get' it and those who 'don't'.

The Prime minister said recently inflation must be kept down - and called for wage restraint among public sector workers. In today's England nurses, teachers and social workers will soon join those whose houses have been repossessed in their fall onto the wrong side of the crack.

new old masters

Some artists feel it necessary to leave their homeland in order to find themselves. The Spanish painter Miquel Barcelo is one of those artists.
Miquel Barcelo can be considered part of the post-Franco artistic movement in Spain that was able to develop after the election of the socialists in 1982. These artists did not have in common any particular style neither were they aware of being part of a movement. They made works that ranged from lush figurative paintings (Guillermo Perez Villalta, Miquel Barcelo) to austere constructivist sculptures (Susana Solano, Cristina Iglesias).
Placing these Spanish artists in the international context is crucial to the understanding of their uniqueness and strength. Given the present status quo in which cleverness is rated higher than creativity, artistic prospect in the Western world falls short of hope resulting in a replacement of aesthetic values for monetary ones. In the contemporary artistic world the term ‘postart’, coined by Alan Kaprow, seems ironically appropriate.
It is in this background that Spanish art that gestated in the 1980s hit a peak in the 1990s with unprecedented international impact. Democracy alone did not bring about the Spanish art boom. Institutions and private foundations like La Caixa and Caja Madrid and state funding together with the creation of Madrid art fair ‘Arco’ in 1982 helped to make it possible for artists to thrive. It was precisely in the midst of this national and international effervescence, just when Barcelo was experiencing his first artistic success, that he decided to go to Africa ‘in search of uncertainty’ .
Barcelo made his first trip to Africa in 1988. He crossed the Sahara and settled on the banks of the Niger River, at Gao, in the republic of Mali. He then met the Malian sculptor Amahigueré Dolo, whose work is imbued by the Dogon culture and mythology. They soon became work mates and friends. Barceló decided to extend his stay in Africa for another six months to explore Mali and the neighbouring areas of Senegal and Burkina Faso. From the very start in Africa, he drew fundamental knowledge for making new pigments, despite the difficulties caused by the extreme heat, dust, sandstorms, and termites. During his stay in Africa he kept a journal, which has been recently edited and published under the title ‘Cuadernos de Africa’.

There are no certainties when a work by Barcelo needs to be catalogued by curators. His approach to material is both economic and primeval. In a recent interview about his retablo in the Chapel of Sant Pere in Palma , he explains his choice to work with clay ‘because it is a very elemental and previous-to-art material’. Such a choice of material in a digital era is nothing but a powerful statement in itself. What makes Barcelo’s works interesting for the viewer constitutes a nightmare for conservators. Pieces of organic matter, bones, sand and whatever happens to participate in the moment of creation are welcome by the artist. We read in his ‘Cuadernos de Africa’ that sand blown by the wind covers his African canvas and that he even once dipped a sketchbook in a termite hole only to work around the marks that the insects had left on it afterwards.
Africa offers Barcelo what the academic life did not. He powerfully describes it when he says in his ‘Cuadernos de Africa’: ‘The Dogon country is like a gigantic Buddhist garden where everything makes sense, although at the same time and in many different ways’.

Although Barcelo benefits from Africa’s culture, his quest for the essence of things does not leave the Dogon people untouched. As he writes in his ‘Cuadernos de Africa’, he periodically lives in the Dogon region, becoming part of village life and interacting with them. So, what do the Dogon people receive in this exchange? They receive Barcelo himself. This is clearly exemplified in his journal entry in ‘Cuadernos de Africa’: ‘As it’s Christmas Eve, I told the Dogons about the life of Christ; then, the lives of Caravaggio, Frankenstein and Billy the Kid. I mixed them all a bit. It made a great impression on them (Mali, 24th December, 1994).’

Barcelo finds in Africa a new order of things. And he documents this ‘A woman is worth five cows, a cow is worth ten goats, a goat costs 125 francs.’
We could cynically consider Barcelo as a sort of enfant terrible, just another little Rimbaud playing anthropologists. But it is only when we place Barcelo in the contemporary art world scenario that we can begin to appreciate his escapes to Africa, his choice of materials and his painting techniques.
In a world in which art is considered to have reached a dead end, and where the trend of thought goes from ‘emptiness’ to ‘stagnant narrow ideological interests’, contemporary Spanish artists have something to say. It is in this context that a painter such as Barcelo should be analysed and valued. A painter who in spite of living in a digital era knows how to engage in a raw emotional dialogue with the media he uses in his work, be it paint or vegetables, sand or clay.

Barcelo has recently completed the Cathedral retablo in Mallorca, his native island. Some art critics marked this event as a culmination of a circular journey that ends at the point of departure. Perhaps it would be better to consider this work as just another step in the artist’s search for the roots of things. Or as he puts it in his African book: ‘pintamos porque la vida no basta’ (We paint because life just isn’t enough).

reason for hope

One of the world's most admired women - acclaimed scientist and conservationist, Dr Jane Goodall - Dame of the British Empire (DBE), Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace -visited Anglia Ruskin University for a lecture on 'Reason for Hope'.

She is one of those rare people who provoke reverence wherever she goes. She is frail but tremendously strong at the same time. I told her that one of my daughters wanted to study biology and asked whether she could dedicate the book to her. She wrote:

'For B,

Follow your dreams'

She once said: "Every individual matters, human and non-human alike. Only if we understand can we care. Only if we care will we understand."

She is a very beautiful woman.

pheasant hunting season

I had the most frightening experience yesterday

I was driving through the beautiful gardens of Madingley when a silly pheasant popped out from nowhere into my path. the poor thing was clearly more interested in showing off his feathers than his own safety for it didn't react until the last second. All of my emergency stop procedures converged into my left brain (the right one was busy listening to music) as I braked suddenly.

Driving speed: 20 mph.

I am pleased to inform that the narcissist pheasant is safe and well.

At least until the hunting season.

informatics and informatitians

chariots of fire

Sam Dobin, who is reading economics at Trinity, has beaten the record for the now traditional ‘Chariots of Fire’ 367 metres race. Today the 19 year-old student completed the course in 42.77 seconds, 0.83 seconds faster than Lord Burghley, who first set the record in 1927. To succeed, competitors must run round Trinity College's Great Court in the 43.6 seconds it takes for the college's clock to strike 12.
Looking in the Cambridge University website to make the link, I found instead a more interesting and deeply moving report: the Recorded video message from Professor Stephen Hawking to mark the opening of the Stephen Hawking Building for Gonville and Caius College.
Whether you have been graced by legs faster than the wind or by a mathematical mind, the lesson is clear, one must do more than merely taking a waiting attitude!


Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

Cristina Iglesias 'Pavilion'

Cristina Iglesias
Pavilion suspended in a room 1
2005
Tate Modern

This is a big format piece consisting of twenty-six rectangular panels suspended from the ceiling, twenty arranged vertically and six horizontally. Traces of literature, letters which may or may not form any word, can be found in the weaving that makes the structure of each panel. The arrangement in the space of these panels forms a pavilion where an ‘entrance’ and ‘exit’ invite the viewers to enter it. This otherwise static piece welcomes movement as the viewer walks through it.
Each panel is made of flat woven straps of copper wire, welded together in vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, which make its structure. These lines limit an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ depending on which side the viewer is looking from. The viewer can see through the geometric mesh that the lines form, the effect of which may be evocative of Islamic female reclusion, Catholic confessionary or Venetian blinds, bringing the inside out and vice versa and questioning how much shelter does a shelter need in order to be a shelter.
Shapes echo each other all throughout the piece, giving it the idea of units of construction.
The predominant colour in this piece is a tertiary mix of grey, copper and
brown which looks uniform from a distance. As one approaches it, a slight shininess becomes apparent, whereas the welding shows as a burnt grey. The basketry of the wire straps that this work is made of gives it a texture that disappears completely when one analyses the shadows that this pavilion casts. There are several spotlights on the ceiling shining down through the structure of the pavilion which flood the room’s floor and walls multiplying and echoing the lines and shapes of the panels. The twenty panels that make the front, side and back walls of the pavilion are all suspended 30 centimetres above the floor. This space provokes in the viewer the impression that the whole piece is levitating, allowing the shadows on the floor to be experienced by the viewer as a welcoming carpet.
A room, a house, a church, or as in this case, a pavilion, is constructed by people for people. Whether they are present or not is immaterial as human presence is implicit by the mere fact that the house or pavilion is there.
Cristina Iglesias has created this pavilion with reminiscence of intimacy, protection, sacred space. She has materialised in this work the proto-home that every human being has a longing for. The way Cristina braids the metal transforms something heavy and cold into something warm and inviting. Cristina speaks the spiritual language of sanctuaries fluently, which appeals to the mystical needs of the viewer rather than his need for a shelter. The call for the western alphabet as a code with which to engage in dialogue with the viewer radically contrasts with the eastern exotic atmosphere of the piece.

Cristina has succeeded in creating a three dimensional object that, with an artistic and intellectual pirouette, goes beyond sculpture and architecture.

compassion

a week after political unrest in Burma which resulted in arrests by the thousand and death by the hundred, one must wonder what kind of dark forces have made people in power feel threatened by barefoot monks with no more weapons than their saffron tunics and their hard earned moral authority

this flame expresses my deepest thoughts:
may compassion and love prevail

warriors

Thousands of people are expected to see the Terracotta Army at the British Museum from 13 September until 6 April.
I had the privilege to see China’s First Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi’s legacy two years ago when I visited Xian. And I am delighted that many people will take the chance to see it now that it is coming to London.
Given the heavy carbon footprint that flights inflict upon the environment, travelling exhibitions may well be the solution for the future.

Power and the instrument to legitimise it: soldiers (2200 years later)

Digital 'Smiley Face' Turns 25 :-)

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message, says Daniel Lovering for the BBC. Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language — to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice, he said.
"What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said. In some ways, he added, they also give people "the ability not to think as hard about the words they're using."


:-)

my dog and the metric system

they think he's guilty, he thinks they see the pint before they see the beer!

The European Commission has tired of waiting for the UK to give up imperial measurements, and now says it can use some of them. In that light, English people can continue to confuse visitors with the pound, the ounce and the mile for as long as they want. Although some experts claim that the metric system was originally invented in England before being adopted by the French, English people have barricaded behind the imperial measurements, absurdly making it a question of national pride.

Some people say that that’s exactly why we love the English, because they are different.

I am not so sure I enjoyed their inclination towards peculiarity when we tried to board the ferry that was going to take us from Spain back to England this summer though. We were travelling with our dog Tim, which had to be treated against worms and ticks before what we understood was 48 hours. Having visited the vet in Santander the morning before embarking, we innocently queued on the pier until they singled us out. The dog’s Dutch passport was incomplete, and the worm treatment had to be given after 48 hours before embarking but before 24 hours before embarking. Confused? So were we. Any alternatives? Yes, you can either wait in Santander for the next ferry which will depart in a week’s time or drive 1000 kilometres to France and take the next one tomorrow, by then the treatment will be in the right time window.

Sorry, how many miles to France did you say?

autumn

Calendar of the Soul

September 09, 2007 - September 15, 2007

There dims in damp autumnal air

The senses' luring magic;

The light's revealing radiance

Is dulled by hazy veils of mist.

In distances around me I can see

The autumn's winter sleep;

The summer's life has yielded

Itself into my keeping.

English translation by Ruth and Hans Pusch

mensenzoo

Last Sunday I saw one of the best examples of the famous Dutch tolerance in action at the cultural festival and day-without-cars in Utrecht. I am talking of Mensenzoo (people zoo) installed in the post office square, one of the hot spots in the city. Consists basically of a group of stalls in which a ‘specimen’ of the human race is ‘exhibited’ (farmers, homeless, homos, children, immigrants, and almost all the groups in the human family were represented). You could talk to the people in the stalls, ask them questions and, as in any other zoo, take photos of you and your favourite creature.
The idea behind it is to promote a society which does full justice to each individual irrespective of religion, age, social status or sexual preference.
And the way to achieve that? By improving communication and respect for each other’s differences in a funny, provocative way!
















Meet one another, exchange views and learn from one another.

first webcam

The first image ever broadcasted by a webcam was a black and white live picture of the Trojan room coffee pot in the computer science department at Cambridge University in 1991.
Fellow academics working in other parts of the building could check the state of the coffee pot and thus avoid pointless trips to the coffee room.

See below an image of how Cambridge students spend their time nowadays!

lost in translation

Chinese love

I read in the International Herald Tribune that the Chinese government now requires top executives at security firms to pass written and oral exams in Mandarin, the national tongue.

According to Qing Zhang, a professor of linguistics at the University of Texas, Chinese is one of the toughest languages to learn. First, the meaning of each sound depends on tone. Worse, students must memorize thousands of picture-like characters instead of the 26 letters that make up English words.

Since the test began in 2005 fewer than 10 foreigners have passed.

The simplest Chinese word is the character for 'one' which is a single horizontal line; the most complex requires 56 strokes.

This is my first attempt at (Chinese) love: