Carsten Holler slides

I finally made it to the Tate Modern slides I mentioned earlier.
I didnt find it challenging, but I enjoyed chatting with people in the queue, sharing the excitement and slight fear and I couldnt help but smile for 10 minutes once I had gone down for the 4th floor.
Really good fun.

Holbein in England - Tate Britain - review

Hans Holbein the Younger (he is the Younger cause his father, Hans Holbein the elder, ran a successful workshop in Germany) came to England in 1526 with the recommendations of Erasmus, and made it big here, becoming a few years later Henry VIII's official court painter.

This exhibition offers great evidence of Holbein's "ability to depict likeness, texture, light and stillness" so well you feel like you could touch the cloth or the skin he has painted.

Everything you see amazes you: the eyebrows in his drawings are so precise, literally hair by hair; the parting of the lips, executed in one fine line; the fur, the silk, the embroideries, the pearls... Everything looks so real.

However, one notices no artistic evolution in his work. Holbein's style remains the same from his arrival in the UK until his death. His trademark is "perfect likeness to reality". In a time where there was no photography, where portraits were a treasure, a sign of success, when portraits were also the only way for the Henry VIII to heck out a potential wife, Holbein's talent and skills were very much in need, so why change the style?

Therefore, my view is that Holbein will amaze you with his talent, but not surprise you. In a sense, once you have seen an Holbein, do you need to see any other? Still, I recommend you see at least one!

El Roto

In the middle east, we wear the burka to be invisible, and in the west we wear it to be seen.

El Roto publishes daily for the newspaper El Pais.

Pieter Hugo

This picture by Pieter Hugo won the World Press prize for best photojournalism picture. The colors are amazing, it really goes with the surrealism of seeing a hyena on lead.

More winners can be seen on the Liberation website.

David Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery

Went to see David Hockney's Portraits exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery yesterday and enjoyed it very much.

I knew Hockney for his big colurful paintings, whether portraits or landscapes. I wasnt aware he was also a master of simple drawings and photography.

Sketching to him is an extension of seeing, and he seems to be sketching constantly. He is obsessed with the idea of seeing and representing. I didnt know he had such a fascination for Picasso either, and with the history of art in general. I really want to read his book: Secret Knowledge, Rediscovering the Techniques of the Old Masters.

Amazon says: This book is the fruit of his practical and historical investigation into how artists from the 15th century onward produced such vividly realistic drawings and paintings. Hockney's conclusions are simple but devastating. He argues that, "from the early 15th century many Western artists used optics--by which I mean mirrors and lenses (or a combination of the two)--to create living projections". The results are extraordinary. Secret Knowledge carefully explains how Masaccio, Van Eyck, Holbein, Caravaggio, Vermeer and Ingres all used optical aids, as it carefully takes apart the paintings and recreates the instruments and techniques used by artists from as early as the 1430s.

Interesting no?

Gael Garcia Bernal at the NFT

Mexican actor, director and cutie Gael Garcia Bernal was at the National Film Theatre for a talk on Monday. I couldn't afford to go but that's alright, cause the Guardian has a transcript of the whole interview.

I recommend you read it all. He turns out to be a very politically engaged actor who is really giving all he has to make films with meanings and to improve his country's (Mexico) situation. Among other things, he has created his own production company and is launching a travelling documentary festival in Mexico, Ambulante.

Here are a few bits that interested me:

"It is truly impossible to take politics out of any story made in Latin America or Mexico. The place demands that you involve its history. It would be very disappointing not to use that wider scope. I think Y Tu Mamá También is a truly involved political film that will be more important in 10 years' time because it is a document of something that was happening in Mexico right after the fall of the PRI, the party that was in power for 72 years. So it is inevitable to be political and I must say it is irresponsible not to acknowledge it. It augments the fiction and it is there to be grabbed and used, without the politics having to be spoon-fed to the audience."

"[The Motorcycle Diaries] was a film where, if I'd been a bit detached from it, it would have been a useless experience. You had to give yourself and transform yourself as the two guys on that journey transformed themselves"

" I think that by working together is where Latin American cinema can find its place. I think we should work as a bloc: we share the same language - the case of Brazil is different, but we share the same circumstances and we might as well work together. You go to a film festival and you find one stand called Asian cinema - in Asia, they speak so many languages and the cultures are so very different, and there're more people and it's more diverse there. And then you go to the Mexican stand, the Argentinian stand, the Cuban stand, the Colombian stand and you're lost. We should work as a bloc"

"Almodóvar is one of those people who can give himself that luxury, he can start shooting any time he wants, he can hire any actor he wants. He's a great director. He's very specific - he tells you how many steps to take from here to there. If he says it's nine steps, you have to make it in nine. So that creates a tension, but it also creates a world"

"You asked about the nostalgic feeling in my work - well, that's the nature of it. There is this vision of Latin America as a place of pure celebration, but actually I see it as a cage of melancholy, but melancholy flies a lot and looks like a happy bird. Octavio Paz put it so well, it's a labyrinth of solitude."

"You might have an idea of what you're doing, but when you're on stage, you get lost. And that moment of losing yourself, of not knowing what the hell you're doing and thinking that you're going deep into a whirlwind and hoping that someone will catch you at the end, that is called a performance. That's when a director catches you, and that's when the audience acknowledges your leap of faith into something that's so incredibly unknown"

"I want to say one more thing before you leave, just one little thing. Whoever of you wants to be an actor, or film director, or writer or film producer or whatever. Honestly, I used to be sitting back there. I know this sounds like the biggest cliche ever, but it really is possible to tell a story and just go out and do it. Doesn't matter if only two people see it, doesn't matter if you get up on the stage and one of the lights goes out. It is important to tell a story and be faithful to yourself, be consistent. Just do what you like. So hopefully many people will go from here and do a film one day, even if it's in 10 years' time. I am very, very glad to be here and I'm getting very sentimental, but it's so important to me to be here. Thank you so much."

We answer to the name of Liberals

A letter, signed by 44 American professors, in the magazine American Prospect, denouncing the failures of the Bush Administration. In there, a very good definition of what being a liberal (ie from the left) and what binds us together in a democracy.

"We reaffirm the great principle of liberalism: that every citizen is entitled by right to the elementary means to a good life. We believe passionately that societies should afford their citizens equal treatment under the law -- regardless of accidents of birth, race, sex, property, religion, ethnic identification, or sexual disposition. We want to redirect debate to the central questions of concern to ordinary Americans -- their rights to housing, affordable health care, equal opportunity for employment, and fair wages, as well as physical security and a sustainable environment for ourselves and future generations"

"Reason is indispensable to democratic self-government. This self-evident truth was a fundamental commitment of our Founding Fathers, who believed it was entirely compatible with every American's First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. When debating policy in the public square, our government should base its laws on grounds that can be accepted by people regardless of their religious beliefs. Public commitment to reason and evidence is the bedrock of a pluralist democracy"

Read the whole letter here and in French here

Orhan Pamuk Nobel Prize

The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Litterature today.

It is fantastic that he receive such a prize, as he was taken to court in his home country, Turkey, for denouncing the 1915 genocide of Amernians and Kurds led by the Turkish.

It is also great that he receives such a prize today, just as the French Assemblee Nationale voted a law prosecuting anyone denying the Armenian genocide.

Go truth!

Carsten Holler slides - cant wait to go!

The artist Carsten Holler has installed huge slides in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. The longest drops from the 5th floor, and that is 27 m high!

Apparently, the feeling is amazing!

What is the link with art?

Well, it certainly has something to do with architecture and psychology, according to Holler.

"For some reason that I don't understand slides have not been taken up," he said. In his view, they provide a safe, fast and efficient means of transportation through and between buildings. The experience of descent also "gives you a moment of relief," he said. "It gives you the possibility to let some of those things go that you carry around as an adult. By letting yourself go you somehow get to the bottom of things."

The slides are on for 6 months, so people, come and visit! Until then, have a look here

Cloudspotting

London, September 06

Elie Medeiros - Toi mon toit

This is one of the first songs I loved as a child. I was only 5!
Love the rythm and the lyrics are quite cute ("the butterflies... in the air! and the ants... on the ground!"). Those lyrics are also a bit naughty ("Take a little fish, put it between my legs...") but I just thought that was weird. All I wanted was the fish-dress worn by the singer, Elie Medeiros. And the sparkly one at the end, even better!! :-)

Entrance of a bordel

Michael took this picture of the entrance of a strip club, peep show place, on Great Windmill Street. London, 03/10/06

Mobile phones and sardines in Kerala

A really exciting piece in Liberation today, written by a professor from the Massachussets Insitute of Technology, about the digital divide between developed and developing countries.

Should developing countries try to reduce the technology gap or focus on getting the essentials (water, health...) right first? Both sides have good arguments, and here, Esther Duflo tells a story showing the unexpected advantages of introducing mobile phones on the Kerala coastline (South India).

Mobile phones have helped sardines fishermen increase their profits by 8%, at the same time as reducing the price of sardines by 4% and avoiding wastage all together. Now how is that possible?

Fishermen go to sea, along the coast (max 25km), early in the morning, and by 8am are back on beaches to sell their catch. Those beaches are quite far apart, so they were unable to move from one beach to another if there was too much competition on one beach. The same for fish buyers: if there was not enough fish to buy, they sometimes went home empty handed.

Now, with mobile phones, fishermen can decide before coming ashore who they are selling the sardines to, or what price they will sell them to. All the fishermen have access to all the buyers, and vice versa. Results: reduced volatily of prices, no wastage, better prices and better profits for all.

Good no?

a good movie!

Watched Shopgirl, starring Claire Danes and Steve Martin, and thought it was really good. I cant work out if it was sparse or too sophitiscated. Let's say it is elegant. I cant work out if the story is believable or not, but let's say I related to it.

It had some great long travelling shots, beautiful lighting, good lines and characters I cared about. And Claire Danes is superb in that movie. Her performance is the only thing critics agreed upon. For the rest, it's very mixed. Only 62% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes...

Some people found unbelievable that such a girl would fall for Steve Martin (born 1945!) but his character is a rich man, a bit shy at the beginning, quite a gentleman. What would people say if that man was a dwarf or a fatty? I say why not?

Another boy is after Mirabelle, the geeky Jeremy. After a not very good first fling, he leaves on tour with a rock band and comes back changed. It is sad that the scenarist (Steve Martin himself) decided to make him change through self-help books, when the reason he changed is simple: he just did what he wanted to do, and through that became more confident and had more to give.

People point to plot-holes and things being a bit too "engineered", but, man, women's favourite romantic comedy tells about a whore who falls for her client, how engineered is that!

Anyway, this is my movie recommendation for this week.

Cats on Drury Lane

Drury Lane, London, September 06
Special pic for Vanini!

Silvio Rodriguez at the Barbican - review

Silvio Rodriguez was at the Barbican yesterday evening, for a very special concert.

Silvio Rodriguez is "the Beatles and Dylan rolled into one" for Spanish speaking people said the Guardian a few days earlier. And indeed the expectation among the crowd was as high as if a concert with such a line up ever happened. Since his music career started, 45 years ago, Silvio had only been to London once before. So imagine the queue awaiting return tickets in the Barbican Hall.

I will be quick on the supporting band, Ska Cubano, who did their best to warm up the crowd, but putting them before Silvio Rodriguez would be like putting the Pussycat Dolls before Joan Baez. We're expecting a man with a few guitars, a flute, nice melodies and exceptional lyrics, so not really in the mood for some dancing. But they did quite well, until members of the 80s band Madness joined them onstage. Then, Ska became what I really think it is: boring.

Anyway, after the entracte, Silvio came on. Already we were on our feet to welcome him (So much for having to win people over!)

I thought about how tough it must be to be Silvio Rodriguez. He has 5-10 tunes that are known almost by heart in Latin America. Everyone probably remembers where they were the first time they heard Ojala. A boyfriend had just dumped me, and there came this haunting guitar and these lines over a tape player: "Let's hope something will happen that erases you suddenly, a bliding light, a snow storm, Let's hope at least death will take me so that I dont see you that much, so that I dont always see you". I cried like an idiot in front of everyone.

Anyway, it must be hard for him because people want to hear those songs, he has to play them. New ones? OK, why not, but you have to play Ojala he?? Which is why we knew there would be several encores because he hadnt played Ojala or others. And, when a guy comes twice in London in 45 years, we want to suck the blood out of him, he'd better play all the songs he can!!

So it was a good evening. I realised there were many songs I didnt know, but I enjoyed the warmness of people around me, people clapping to specific lines in songs, people doing a proper encore clapping (ie not random, but "O-TRA, O-TRA, O-TRA" English people cant do that, believe it or not), and of course Silvio's songs. He is a good writer, and though he has little efforts to make to be liked, he is a good performer as well.

To finish, here is a poem by Luis Rogelio Nogueras he read to people during his performance (he seems to read it at every concert)

"HALT!"

Recorro el camino que recorrieron 4.000.000 de espectros.
Bajo mis botas, en la mustia, helada tarde de otoño, cruje dolorosamente la grava.
Es Auschwitz, la fábrica de horror que la locura humana erigió a la gloria de la muerte.
Es Auschwitz, estigma en el rostro sufrido de nuestra época.
Y ante los edificios desiertos, ante las cercas electrificadas, ante los galpones que guardan toneladas de cabellera humana.
Ante la herrumbrosa puerta del horno donde fueron incinerados padres de otros hijos, amigos de amigos desconocidos, esposas, hermanos, niños que, en el último instante, envejecieron millones de años.
Pienso en ustedes, judíos de Jerusalem y Jericó, pienso en ustedes, hombres de la tierra de Sión, que estupefactos, desnudos, ateridos cantaron la hatikvah en las cámaras de gas.
Pienso en ustedes y en vuestro largo y doloroso camino desde las colinas de Judea hasta los campos de concentración del III Reich.

Pienso en ustedes y no acierto a comprender cómo olvidaron tan pronto el vaho del infierno.




My translation (The ... sign means I didnt know how to translate. Apologies)


I follow the way taken by 4 millions spectres (...)
It is Auschwitz, the horror factory that human madness built to the glory of death
It is Auschwitz, a mark on the face of our times
And, in front of the deserted buidlings, the electric fences (...)
In front of the rusty oven door where were incinerated fathers of other sons, friends of unkown friends, wives, brothers, children who, in the last moment, aged millions of years.

I think about you, Jews of Jerusalem and Jerico, I think about you, men of the land of Sion who, (...) sang the hatkivah in the gas chambers.
I think about you and your long and painful way from the hills of Galile to the concentration camps of the III Reich.

I think about you and cannot manage to understand how you forgot so quickly the vapor of hell.

Ted Honderich on Terrorism

I watched with interest the Channel 5 programme Don't get me started, where a well-known figure talks about an issue they feel strongly about. This week, it was the philosopher Ted Honderich (Profesor Ted Honderich for the intimates), who talked about the war on terror bla bla bla.

His point was that we had to address the causes of terror, not just terror itself, and the cause is rooted in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Who would have thought? Thanks for that, Ted, we had figured that out before.

As a reminder, Israel was created in 1948 by the Western powers, in some sort of compensation to the Jewish people, victim of the Holocaust, on a land called Palestine. ie a land where people already lived, but we didnt really think about that. So we can imagine the anger of the Palestinian people, having their land taken away, and realising that their fellow Muslims were powerless to regain that land for them. Today, Palestinians still suffer from Israeli domination (checkpoints, the wall etc...) and that can be said to fuel extremism and terrorism among Muslims (the same way Nazi brutal occupation of France fueled the ranks of the Resistance during WWII)

Anyway, 2 interesting points in the programme:

• One, Honderich presented his principle of Humanity: the principle by which one takes rational actions to prevent people from leading bad lives (ie from being deprived of length of lives, well being, freedom, respect, goods of relationships and satisfactions of culture). (A principle that can be liked to Amartya Sen's view of development as freedom)

• Two, based on that principle, Honderich said the Palestinians had a moral right to terrorism, since they were being almost ethincally cleansed and had no other means. I am not exactly sure how that goes with the principle of Humanity.

Ha, how I like programmes with interesting and challenging messages nicely presented and argumented, where the trail of thoughts is easily identifiable and things make sense. Well done. Tap on the back Ben, for feeling clever tonight.

Mecano!

Ana Torroja, lead singer of the major Spanish band of the 80s, Mecano, did a tour of 42 dates around Spain this summer to celebrate the 25th birthday of the band (no longer together) and to promote her album, Me cuesta tanto olvidarte, which includes 13 new versions of Mecano classics.

Apparently, the tour was quite a success. The last date, yesterday in Madrid, got a good review in El Pais this morning.

Dalai Lama, Hijo de la Luna, El 7 de septiembre, Mujer contra mujer... Mecano made it big in France as well, thanks to well translated lyrics and what a voice has la Torroja! I remember learning Un ano mas in my Spanish class when I was 13, and everyone asked the teacher to copy the song on a tape for us.

Tonight we are celebrating my sister's 35th birthday and 10th wedding anniversary. I am pretty sure Dalai Lama will be played at some point!!

For your own tranquility, remain scared!

El Roto draws daily for the Spanish newspaper El Pais

Rosalia de Castro

Feeling a bit shit today.
Woke up at 5.30am with a sore throat (angine), and am paying the consequences of my stupid Monday idea: going to the gym in the morning and going to my flamenco class in the evening. My legs are dead. It was fun at the time though!

I have been obsessed by this poem, written by gallegan writer Rosalia de Castro in the 19th century. It is read in the movie El espiritu de la colmena.

Ya ni rencor ni desprecio
ya ni temor de mudanza
tan sólo sed…, una sed
de un no sé qué que me mata
Rios de vida, ¿do vais?
Aire! que el aire me falta
¿Qué ves en el fondo oscuro?
¿Qué ves que tiemblas y callas?
¡No veo! Miro cual mira
un ciego al sol cara a cara
Yo voy a caer en donde
nunca el que cae se levanta