Die Murmeltierjahre im Land des Frühschoppens

Study on curvilinear abstraction

2012-01-30T08:29:00.002+01:00

Vanishing storefronts

2011-11-11T09:07:00.000+01:00

I've always been fascinated by storefronts. Because a storefront can be a window to the past. A storefront is what links the seller and the buyer, it is one of the interfaces between the people and thus, one of the factors that makes a society. That's why observing storefronts you can learn a lot about the people that use them.

This is a butcher's shop in Barcelona. This picture looks very familiar to me, every little bit of it transports me home, brings memories of my childhood to my mind. In this series I am going to show storefronts in Salzburg and Hallein, and how the times are changing for them.

Walking around the city, if you try to avoid the tourist paths you may still find quite authentic stores where time stood still around the sixties...

...stores where actual people still buy their stuff. Stores that, without a doubt, are still making a significant contribution to their local communities. But, for how long?

Because the pressure that real estate and tourism exert on traditional stores is so huge that they are hardly able to survive. All too often, the only recognizable thing is the old store sign which is sometimes still visible. Times are changing, and where once there were plenty of stores where you could find everything you could possibly need, today you can only get the exact same souvenirs and touristy stuff that you can also get everywhere. They all look the same, they all have really little to do with the city but, still, it is what people want, what money wants.

Survivors. There still are some survivors, even at the heart of Salzburg's Old Town. But it is very sad to observe the trend. Every time a traditional store closes to leave room for yet another souvenir shop, which looks exactly like all the others and sells exactly the same stuff as the others, the soul of the city dies a little. People who actually live here observe the signs that announce the closing with impotence and begin to guess which of their favorite places is going to vanish next.

You cannot stop progress. This is the conclusion. But. still, you are allowed to be sad about the direction in which progress goes. Especially in these times, where everything happens so fast that you don't really have the chance to stop to take a breath.

But what you can do is take your camera and make a photograph, and keep not only a vanishing memory but an actual image of how it was back then.

Through the leaves

2011-09-09T08:48:00.000+02:00

Read in 2010

2011-05-01T12:34:00.002+02:00


Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World	Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York

Eric W. Sanderson's Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City	Philip Roth's Indignation

Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes	Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works

Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals	Eduard Punset's Viatge al poder de la ment

Gerd Gigerenzer's Gut Feelings	Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct

Bastian Sick's Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod, Folge 4	Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint

Almost spring again

2011-04-15T08:30:00.000+02:00

Abstract Reflection on Stream

2011-03-27T09:43:00.001+02:00

A crane flies to Japan

2011-03-20T13:18:00.001+01:00

This origami crane is ready to fly to Japan, to join a huge flock that's already on its way, to try and bring hope and comfort to all those who are suffering the consequences of the earthquake that struck the island on March 11th. The whole week I've had these people very present in my thoughts.

It is especially moving for us hobby photographers, because most of the stuff we use for our passion (cameras, lenses, films, ...) has been produced, designed, conceived or dreamed of in Japan. I wish for the best as my crane flaps her wings and takes off...

A new beginning

2011-03-07T20:12:00.000+01:00

I guess you noticed that I have been quite inactive in Die Murmeltierjahre im Land des Frühschoppens for a while now.

The thing is that I have been quite busy lately. As I already told here, I reverted to using film with vintage cameras recently, and ~~obsessive~~ passionate about my hobbies as I am, I discovered myself thinking a lot about film types, computing exposure, medium format, do-it-yourself film scanning, colour negatives transformation, and yet another vintage camera.

I have been using my flickr photostream to share my progress in my film adventures, but flickr is not really the right kind of platform for that matter. I realised I was having a lot to tell these days, but it was almost exclusively about photography. Since I did not want to transform Die Murmeltierjahre im Land des Frühschoppens in a photography blog, I did not post at all.

That's why I decided to start a new blog, a blog about photography. I am very happy to invite you to come over to my playground, a (photo) challenge a day ....

What will happen with Die Murmeltierjahre im Land des Frühschoppens? Don't worry, it won't be that easy to get rid of me and my paranoia ;) I plan to continue posting here, and I hope I can canalise better what I have to say depending on the topic. If I have something to say about photography, it will go to a (photo) challenge a day .... Everything else is going to be posted here, to Die Murmeltierjahre im Land des Frühschoppens. Random pictures will continue being posted here as well.

I'd be glad if you would come along with me. Thanks for being there! :)

Bonsuccés

2011-02-10T18:34:00.000+01:00

BWV 788

2011-01-10T18:17:00.000+01:00

Photographic Treasures

2010-11-29T19:57:00.004+01:00

“Digital macht alles kaputt!”

The old lady complained from the other side of the counter, with the mixture of sadness and anger of the one who knows the enemy is so big that the only reasonable thing to do is to step out and wait for the end.

The place, Foto Bahnhof, close to the train station, is one of the last photography stores in Salzburg. After she told me that they did not have what I was looking for any more, I asked her if she knew about other photo stores in the city where I could find it. She shook her head and started listing stores that do not exist any longer. The last one she mentioned, Foto Mayrhofer, close the the Schranne, closed just a couple of months ago, after its owner went into retirement. It struck me that I was in front of one of the last members of an almost extinguished species. Her clear blue eyes darkened for a moment, as she realised that I had understood the bitter consequence of the syllogism she did not fully state.

The advent of digital photography, that reached the general public in the 90s, meant the last push to the democratisation of photography. During the 20th century, photography evolved to come closer and closer to the point & shoot ideal, fine-tuning automatic processes in such a way that the only actions left to the user were framing and shooting.

The advantages of a digital camera can be summed up in three: immediacy, low cost and storing and compression. Immediacy on review, because the picture appears on a more or less big screen, with more or less colours, instants after shooting. Low cost of operation because shutter opening and closing has a total cost that tends very quickly to zero. Compression because, thanks to clever algorithms, the optical data captured by the sensor needs a tiny fraction of the total storage capacity of the device, which results in a great autonomy of operation.

Technological innovation has countless positive aspects, but its ruthless logic leaves old and sometimes venerable technologies on the side as road kill, because they make no sense any more or, simply, because they are not profitable. For example the CD consigned tapes to oblivion, even though there is already an expiration data for the CD itself, whose symphony's last chords can already be heard under the direction of newer digital formats like MP3 and OGG. Digital photography sensors pushed film cameras to the background, making them museum display items or, sadly, mere pieces of junk that one does not know what to do with.

But not all technologies are equal and when a technology, as it happens with photography, is used as a support for artistic expression, I think that it is healthy to renounce to the multiple automatisms and advantages from time to time, because creativity and inventiveness usually work better when the first difficulties to overcome are technical limitations. I think that artistic creativity needs new challenges permanently, in order not to fall into routine and boredom.

I have worked you through this long introduction just to talk about the new territory that I am beginning to explore, pretty blindfolded at first, but with great hope and motivation. One of the photographic treasures that we brought from New York last year was Marona's new toy camera, a Diana Mini, from Lomography, that uses 35mm film. All pictures that I included in this post until now have been taken with the Diana Mini.

The second photographic treasure, this time brought from Barcelona, is an old camera that we borrowed from Marona's mum, a Kodak Retinette 1A that, after its serial number, was made between 1963 and 1966 and that we let repair and adjust. In spite of the almost 50 years passed, the camera works with a smoothness that a lot of present-day cameras can only wish for.

The Retinette makes you really think: from distance to your subject, which you need to guess and adjust without any confirmation chance, to exposure, for which you have to make use of rules of thumb or the photographic eye that began evolving as we decided to measure exposure manually with our digital cameras as well. I still have not exposed my first film with the Retinette, but I try not to miss any chance...

(this lovely picture of me was taken by Marona!)

It is nothing more than another step on my going back to the origin, back to the basics, that I already talked about in a photographic context. I love this feeling of going back to the origin, because I feel like I am doing real photography. Is it maybe vanity? Is it just that I want to stand out from the crowd? I don't know... But I guess the reason I went to Foto Bahnhof, to ask for advice about used twin-lens reflex cameras, gives a hint that what I really like is when people look at me as if I were crazy, as I take out old cameras (with no screen on the back!) from their leather cases and I start taking pictures with them.

Christmas Season

2010-11-26T23:28:00.000+01:00

North America has an unwritten rule: Christmas season does not officially start until the day after Thanksgiving, called Black Friday. Europe does not have such a clear starting shot, sometimes you already can smell Christmas even as early as late September.

We were in New York City the day after Thanksgiving last year. Having not really got over the jet-lag yet, we woke up really early and started wandering around the city at a time were really few people were in the streets, what sometimes was kind of spooky.

We went into Kossar's Bialys on Grand Street, in the Lower East Side. There, sipping coffee and eating an excellent bagel in the kind of environment that could not be farther from the magenta armchairs of a well-known coffee franchise but that, honestly, is exactly what makes New York interesting, exciting and worth living in, we watched the city wake up to the sound of the first Christmas song.

Shyness

2010-11-14T20:49:00.003+01:00

Autumn gets closer to its zenith, days are getting shorter and shorter and Nature, as well as people, starts getting ready for the upcoming winter.

The trees, that have been showing us their most amazing colours lately, are stripped bare of all their leaves, silently and calmly.

Some, though, are a little shy.

Fern-Weh

2010-11-13T12:01:00.001+01:00

Abstract 220°

2010-10-24T11:58:00.000+02:00

BWV 1010

2010-10-09T11:58:00.000+02:00

Photo Walk

2010-10-03T11:24:00.000+02:00

I went for a photo walk by myself yesterday.

I listened to my favourite accordion street player under the cathedral arches...

I spied on relaxing spots, all pretty with decorative pumpkins...

I saw myself in the future in an unexpected flash-forward...

I discovered the calm of the autumn leaves in spite of the menacing barbed wire...

But most of all, I started having fun with our new toy...

Musical rides

2010-09-26T21:10:00.003+02:00

This week I did something that I had never done before: I was able to ride my bicycle to and from the office for 5 days in a row, Monday to Friday. Not only do we seldom enjoy such a fine weather for such a long time, it is also very rare for me to get over my weaker self and not to fall victim to any of the numerous excuses at my disposal. I am really proud, I must say.

My ride to the office runs along the Salzach river. For most of the trip I use the bike path, which is a reconverted tow-path, used hundreds of years ago by horses and oxen for towing upstream the boats that, after reaching the salt-mines in Hallein, would be loaded with salt and driven downstream again, to give Salzburg its name (“salt castle”) and to make its prince archbishops awfully rich.

The ride is some 17km long (one-way) and I spend a little less than an hour on it —I am not at all fast! The first two days, especially Tuesday, were quite hard because I got headwind and I was still tired after a hike on Sunday. I got a little obsessed with the cycle computer as well, trying not to do too bad for the statistics. But from Wednesday on, I tried to ignore the computer and simply enjoy the ride.

I realized that there is a kind of physical “in-the-zone” feeling, a delicate and wonderful equilibrium between the force you exert on the pedals and the resistance from wind, road and gravity (slope). That means, there is always a minimum amount of force you have to use in order to maintain a certain pace. The trick is to use just this minimum force, but not more. If you try to keep the pace uninterrupted, by switching gears accordingly, you may be able to run and run with minimal effort and without even realizing the distance.

The funny part is that this kind of being “in-the-zone” happens in your mind as well. At least, once I've achieved this equilibrium of forces, my mind seems to become hypnotized by the rhythmic movement and I stop thinking about riding at all and my awareness wanders to other places.

And in this state, invariably, music comes to my mind. I guess it's because the pedalling pace is kind of a metronome that you cannot miss. It's not that I think: Let's sing “Mary had a little lamb”! Songs and melodies simply pop up in my mind. They come and go, without warning, at times switching from one to the other in colourfully wild arrangements that I would certainly not be able to make myself.

This is a selection of some of the melodies that came into my mind during this week's bicycle rides. Interestingly enough, Johann Sebastian Bach seems to have got a stronghold in my brain:

Prelude from Cello Suite No. 1, BWV 1007, by J. S. Bach

Variation 1 a 1 Clav., Goldberg Variations BWV 988, by J. S. Bach

Sinfonia No. 2, BWV 788, by J. S. Bach (listen here)

Gabriel's Oboe, “The Mission” original soundtrack, by E. Morricone

~~Another composition for two violins by J. S. Bach (I think!) which I can sing but I still haven't found out what it is~~ 2nd movement (Largo) from the Concerto for 2 Violins, Strings and Continuo in D Minor, BWV 1043, by J. S. Bach (listen here)

But, without a doubt, this week's winner has been the Prelude from J. S. Bach's Lute Suite No. 4, BWV 1006. Enjoy!

Circumzenithal arc?

2010-09-20T19:03:00.004+02:00

The (part of a) circumzenithal arc (I think!) that accompanied my bicycle ride on the way back home along the right bank of the Salzach, from Rehhof to Urstein. Too bad that I did not have a camera!

(UPDATED on Sunday, 26th September 2010)
Tuesday and Wednesday I got no luck, but on Thursday, 23rd September 2010, the arc was again there and this time I had a camera with me! :) There are two rainbows at each side of the Sun, separated some 20-30°. Here you can see some pictures of the phenomenon:

Does anyone know what it is? I don't really think it is a circumzenithal arc... Might them be sun dogs?

BWV 847

2010-09-19T12:29:00.001+02:00

Ferragosto

2010-08-15T13:00:00.001+02:00

Bus 40

2010-07-27T11:24:00.006+02:00

(Sunday, 25th July 2010, around 9:30pm) The sleepy little boy, whose eyes were slowly closing, his head resting on the lap of an elder sister, in front of the tired smile of their mother, on the bus number 40, near Parc de la Ciutadella, in Barcelona.

(this is a new section, "photos I didn't shoot", in which I will be presenting some photographs that I saw but, for one reason or another, did not take; inspiration for this idea comes from www.unphotographable.com)

Mediterranean breeze

2010-07-17T14:18:00.001+02:00

Manhattanhenge

2010-07-13T01:45:00.003+02:00

Summer solstice sunrise over Stonehenge
(photograph Andrew Dunn, 21 June 2005)

Twice a year the rays of the setting sun align perfectly with the east-west direction of the main street grid in Manhattan. This beautiful phenomenon was aptly called Manhattanhenge, in reference to the alignment of the sun on summer solstice over Stonehenge, by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Today the second 2010 Manhattanhenge is due to happen. You can check out some photographs on flickr.

Maybe someday I'll be able to post my own...

Nature's Chinese Lanterns

2010-07-04T12:29:00.001+02:00

Pennsylvania

2010-06-27T18:48:00.001+02:00

In November last year we were walking along West 34th Street in Manhattan, minutes after making our second contribution to the reconstruction of Solomon's Temple. It was on Thanksgiving Day and streets and avenues were still closed to traffic because of the Macy's Day Parade. The view was certainly unusual: pedestrians reclaiming the space that belongs exclusively to motorists all year round.

On arriving to 7th Avenue I looked downtown and saw four US flags back-lit by the sun and, not thinking it twice, I decided to shoot the first picture with the new 50mm lens (new for the third time, by the way...). I like this picture because the relatively dark background lets the flags stand out. A similar effect can be seen in the forest, when the sun creates the illusion that tree leaves possess their own light.

As you can see, those four flags belong to the Hotel Pennsylvania. Months after taking the picture I learned that, without knowing it, I took a picture of one of the many anonymous monuments populating New York City.

The Hotel Pennsylvania main dining room, the Café Rouge, witnessed numerous performances of the most famous big bands of the 40s and 50s, like the Dorsey Brothers, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

Hotel Pennsylvania also claims to have the phone number in longest continuous use in New York: +1 (212) 736-5000. Dialling from the City it would be just 736-5000, and using the usual North American letter code from rotary dial phones, 7 corresponds to P and 3 to E, so it would be PE-6-5000, for PEnnsylvania-6-5000. Which was exactly where Finegan, Grey and Sigman took their inspiration from for the famous song popularized by the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller.

I recently read that the Hotel Pennsylvania is threatened by demolition: its current owners, real estate company Vornado, want to replace the 22-story hotel with a 67-story office tower. It is clear that in Midtown Manhattan even monuments are not safe from the real estate voracity...

Longing for water

2010-06-11T22:26:00.002+02:00

Time-lapse tomato plants.

Chianti

2010-05-15T12:38:00.001+02:00

Der Garten an der Salzach

2010-05-09T18:48:00.008+02:00

If you walk by the bus stop on Ferdinand-Hanusch-Platz you might see them, sitting on the four metal seats that are their exclusive territory. Or you may see them go into the supermarket opposite the bus stop, to spend the few coins that they got God knows where. Their purchase is usually just cans of beer, the first one of which they are going to open before crossing the first of the two pedestrian crossings they need to cross to make it to the bus stop.

There they are, sometimes quiet and melancholic, at times vociferous and loud, but always silent witnesses of the other side, society's dark side, that let us remember every day about what could happen to anyone of us, in one of those ugly turns that life can take. A fate that is becoming more and more common and from which we tend to look away or, even worse, blame them for their misfortune; them who are the most fragile link of a society for whose smooth running we all are responsible.

Herr G is one of them. His hours pass slowly between the bus stop and the twenty something meters and two traffic lights to the supermarket, making use of his right to one of the four metal seats and observing the passers-by and people who look nervously at their watches as they wait for their bus to come. In the morning you can see him on the other side of the river, pushing an old and rusty shopping cart where he piles all his belongings up. Carefully, quietly, as the city slowly awakes, Herr G parks his shopping cart in a bend of the cycle path below the bridge. If the weather is nice, he sits on one of the benches nearby that, in the end, is the closest thing to a home that he has.

Because Herr G knows that every home needs a garden, and that's why he has taken two small green patches in front of his benches to plant some flowers, to lay out stones geometrically, to align pine cones, to give shelter to a couple of garden gnomes and even to have a colourful windmill. Herr G sits down on his bench, looks at his toy windmill and smiles in the inside before standing up again and going spend the morning at the bus stop on Ferdinand-Hanusch-Platz.

At noon, Herr G will sit down again on his bench and will let the sun warm up his tired joints, staying alert at those two teenagers that are riding their bicycles too close to his garden, ready to scare them away if necessary. Later, Herr G will close his eyes again and will take a nap.

Read in 2009

2010-04-23T21:18:00.005+02:00


Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat	Albert Sánchez Piñol's Tretze Tristos Tràngols

Wladimir Kaminer's Ich bin kein Berliner	Gregory Maguire's Wicked

Joachim Bauer's Das kooperative Gen	Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene

J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye	Richard Dawkins's The Extended Phenotype

Alexander Emmerich's Geschichte der USA	Horst Dippel's Geschichte der USA

Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten	Javier Cercas's Anatomía de un instante

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men	Merten Worthmann's Gebrauchsanweisung für Barcelona

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food	Jakob Hein's Gebrauchsanweisung für Berlin

Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale

Yüzüklerin Efendisi

2010-04-10T17:16:00.003+02:00

Context information is everything.

A New Yorker is someone who longs for New York (*)

2010-03-29T11:33:00.001+02:00

^(*) from Jeremiah's Vanishing New York

Hat

2010-03-27T16:12:00.000+01:00

It's funny how something so simple as a hat can change not only your image but your gestures as well...

We had a very windy evening yesterday and, as I was walking home, I discovered myself holding my hat with my right hand as I was crossing the river, fearing the wind would blow it away. And it struck me that I was just mimicking the very same gesture that thousands of men must have inconsciously made throughout the centuries before me.

^(*)

All of a sudden, I felt as if I were part of a picture at the turn of the 20th century.

^(*) To be honest, I'm not quite sure if my hat is a fedora or a trilby. What do you think?

The Time Machine

2010-02-28T12:04:00.002+01:00

Sometimes you don't really need a time machine to travel back in time, you don't need to risk uneasy encounters with flesh-eating morlocks or being inadvertently trapped inside a mountain.

All you need to do is go for a walk on the river side.

The Day the Music Died

2010-02-03T08:05:00.011+01:00

On February 3rd, 1959, 51 years ago, a small plane crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa. On that day, a solitary cornfield was the only witness to the deaths of three rock and roll legends: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. Later on, others would even call them the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.

As Holly, Valens and the Big Bopper "took the last train for the coast", an American period was coming to an end, a time of great hope in the future, distinguished by a feeling that everything was possible and within reach, a period of innocent (and maybe even childish) optimism, a period that started with the Allied victory on World War II that would be soon wiped out by the first serious lashes of the Cold War.

Every time that I listen to the music of that period, or I watch American Graffiti, I feel something very close to nostalgia for those times.

Buddy Holly - Everyday

Ritchie Valens - Donna

The Big Bopper - Chantilly Lace

Is it possible to miss something that you never knew?

Groundhog Day

2010-02-02T09:00:00.002+01:00

Today is Groundhog Day.

As an interested party, we from this blog celebrate this beautiful tradition, imported to North America from Central Europe, where it does not exist any more, and we are curious about what do Phil and the others predict for this year: are we going to have an early spring or do we still have to go through six more weeks of winter?

Goldberg, Tureck & Gould

2010-01-22T16:34:00.000+01:00

I don't use to listen to music at work, but on the first days of 2010 I have been writing a paper and I needed to isolate myself from my colleagues' conversations. At first I started with jazz music but some days ago Mar told me that she took a CD with J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations from the public library. "Bach, what a great idea!", I thought, because I hold that no music is apter to foster concentration than Baroque counterpoint. After an internet search for the Goldberg Variations I came across Glenn Gould...

The Goldberg Variations (BWV 988)^(*) for keyboard were first published on 1741 and are named after virtuoso organist and harpsichordist Johannes Gottlieb Goldberg, who probably was its first performer as well. The work consists of an aria, 30 variations and a reprise of the initial aria. Here you can listen to the delicate subtlety of the aria and a little further to the polyphonic brilliance of the first variation.

Goldberg Variations - Aria

The performer on these two recordings is Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who is one of the most celebrated pianists of the twentieth century and one of the greatest interpreters of J. S. Bach's keyboard works. Gould was a quite special character. He was born, lived and died in Toronto (1932 - 1982). His playing was quite remarkable in many senses. He used to play the piano from a very low position, so that he pulled down the keys instead of striking them from above. His eyes were just a few inches above the keyboard and throughout his life he would use a special chair, which his father constructed for him. Gould used to move his arms and his body a lot, swaying his torso almost always in a clockwise motion. He usually hummed while playing, having been taught "to sing everything he played" by his mother, and his recording engineers were more or less successful at removing his voice on the studio. In fact, we can clearly hear his humming on most of his recordings.

Gould shied away from physical contact with other people and always wore a coat, a scarf and mittens, independently of the weather, place and season. Before starting playing he would submerge his hands and arms in very hot water for 20 minutes. He gave few concerts, because he disliked the concert hall, considering it kind of a competitive sports arena. Gould always favoured the sense of control and intimacy of the recording studio.

Goldberg Variations - Variatio 1.

Gould developed an impressive speed and technique, which allowed him to do without conventional techniques such as the sostenuto pedal and to precisely articulate the complexly interweaving polyphony of Bach's works. Gould could play at unimaginable speeds and still maintain the separateness and clarity of each note. Even though his repertoire included all the great composers, Gould never tried to hide his aversion for Romantic composers such as Liszt or Chopin, and he even found an intolerable theatrical superficiality on the latest works of Mozart.

Glenn Gould was an exceptional classical piano performer ^(**). The only influence from a contemporary musician that he publicly acknowledged was that of pianist Rosalyn Tureck (Chicago 1914 - New York 2003). Rosalyn Tureck is, in many senses, the Queen of J. S. Bach's keyboard music. In fact, she is considered by some critics as unjustly eclipsed precisely by Glenn Gould. Interestingly, the version of the Goldberg Variations that Mar took from the public library was Tureck's, in fact the seventh and last recording of this work that she performed in 1998. It is said that after Tureck finished a Bach performance in a concert hall, the public would rest there in silence, unable to move or to clap hands, mesmerized, knowing that something extraordinary had just happened on stage. (This short documentary about Tureck's influence on American classical guitarist Sharon Isbin shows what I mean, around minute 7:30, but it is worth seeing the whole thing)

Listening to Rosalyn Tureck's and Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations I decided to try to play the piano again, or at least to play it more often, but I guess it's going to be hard to accomplish, because I am at that horrible level where everything I can play is quite boring and the things I would like to play are still way out of my league. A self-teaching person must have a strong willpower, and mine is not the same as it was when I was 15 years old and I started to play the guitar. Moreover, my inability to read music, especially from an F-clef, is not really helping. Anyway, here is my version of New Year's resolutions.

I enjoyed knowing about these two pianists, above all because both had a strong attachment to Baroque music, especially J. S. Bach's. There is something in the polyphonic texture of that epoch with which I associate a kind of return to the origins, renouncing to superficial ornamentations that became fashion in subsequent times. There is something about Baroque counterpoint that attracts me a lot, few musical styles reach so deep into my soul as Bach's. And I think it is just its simplicity, such as the one we find in a bicycle or in a prime lens.

I feel a great tenderness looking at Glenn Gould playing, especially on his latest recordings. Looking at him there, tiny, sitting, like he did all his life, on his chair, worn out by more than 40 years of use, almost hiding behind the piano, delicate, vulnerable. And then, after reaching out for some notes in the air that only he was able to see, he starts playing and extracts the most beautiful sounds out of his piano. Even his humming is pleasant and not at all annoying: sometimes it seems classical music is something wonderful that is on a big big pedestal and that has to be revered, but to me Gould's humming makes a strong point that that is not really this way, and brings us closer to the music others used to stress differences so that everyone can enjoy it.

You can see here the Goldberg Variations in Glenn Gould's recording of 1981. This was the only work of his repertoire that he recorded twice, the first in 1955.

^(*) BWV 988 refers to the number on the catalogue of J. S. Bach's works. Now that I can speak German I am finally able to remember what BWV stands for: "Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis", that is, "directory of Bach's works".

^(**) One of Glenn Gould's performances of J. S. Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C Major Number 1 (BWV 870) from Book Two of "The Well-Tempered Clavier" was chosen for inclusion on the Golden Record on board Voyager 1, which is now approaching interstellar space and is the farthest man-made object from Earth.

Christmas Day

2009-12-25T13:49:00.001+01:00

New York Impressions

2009-12-15T21:14:00.005+01:00

3rd Ave

J Train on Williamsburg Bridge

Hotel Pennsylvania

Reclaim the streets

Chrysler

Joy

Rock Atlas

Domino sugar

Tim Burton

16th St and 3rd Ave

2009-12-06T13:36:00.002+01:00

Sorry for the inactivity, we got a very important appointment... ;)

Christmas Tree

2009-12-03T02:55:00.002+01:00

Brenda Lee - Rockin' around the christmas tree

Macy's Day Parade

2009-11-26T15:00:00.000+01:00

Green Day - Macy's Day Parade

Textures

2009-11-16T18:10:00.000+01:00

Chess Autumn (*)

2009-11-08T23:32:00.002+01:00

By 1959 New Yorker saxophonist Sonny Rollins, frustrated with what he perceived as his own musical limitations, took what would become the first and most famous of his musical sabbaticals, in order to improve his technique.

During this period Rollins, a resident from Manhattan's Lower East Side, would go to the nearby Williamsburg Bridge, in order to spare a young pregnant neighbour of his the sound of his practice routine.

His comeback album, published three years later, was named "The Bridge". The mythical sight of a lonely saxophone player on a bridge, playing by himself, his dark silhouette over the Moon, is Rollins's.

Sonny Rollins - Without a song, from the album "The Bridge"

Tonight we've been lucky enough to listen to Sonny Rollins live. He has been welcomed by standing ovations even before saying a single word. At 79, the elderly man standing on stage, looking frail and walking with a stoop, has just needed to take his tenor saxophone in his gigantic hands and got two notes from it to make clear that we were in front of a true jazz legend. An experience that will be surely hard to forget.

^(*) At least, that's what I understood on my first Autumn living in Salzburg. Someone told me about this great "Chess Herbst" festival, which should be worth attending to. At first I imagined people playing chess all over town. It took me some minutes to realise I was being confronted with the native pronunciation for the word jazz. German speakers tend to close a too much (they don't know about the schwa and the very subtle nuances of neutral vowels) and do not seem to be able to distinguish between the sounds /dʒ/ (as in job or jazz) and /tʃ/ (as in chop or chess).

Fickle ray

2009-10-30T19:23:00.000+01:00

The Water-Method Man

2009-10-11T17:02:00.006+02:00

This post should have been called water's virtuous circle, but then I remembered the first book I tried to read in German, more than five years ago, which I must admit I was not able to finish.

I somehow managed to read two chapters of John Irving's "Die wilde Geschichte vom Wassertrinker" ^(*), but when you are spending more time looking up words on a dictionary than reading the book, at some point you'll just let go. Probably now, having already higher walls (Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, Erwin Schrödinger, ...) behind me, I will give it another try, because I like John Irving and also because the book is not mine! Even though my friend K might have long forgotten that I borrowed it, it is still a nice excuse to meet him... :)

What I actually wanted to talk about is the unexpected chain of valuable consequences that the simple fact of drinking water regularly can start. Vicious circles are unfortunately well known, but we should not forget that virtuous circles do exist as well. They are kind of a reinforced loop of events that, once set off, produce all kinds of beneficial effects.

Let us start with the recommendation to drink at least 2 litres of water a day. If I want to follow this piece of advice on a normal working day at the office, let's say I want to drink 2 liters without counting standard meals, if I spend 8 hours at the office then I have to drink 0.25l per hour, if I did the math correctly. It means I have to try and drink a glass water every half hour.

Let's see the chain of positive effects that starts as we drink that glass of water:

(i) we are drinking (more than) 2 litres of water a day, with all the health good effects that it brings forth

(ii) we have to leave the chair and stand up every time we have to go to the kitchen to refill the glass. Our muscles are activated and our eyes are granted a rest from staring at the computer screen (if your work consists mainly of sitting in front of a computer monitor, it is good to try to focus on a distant point every now and then)

(iii) one of the most noticeable effects of drinking half a liter water an hour is that the frequency of your WC-needs is going to raise remarkably. With that we boost the function of our kidneys and bladder.

(iv) frequent visits to the WC mean -as in (ii)- the same beneficial effects for our muscles and eyes as when going to the kitchen

(v) after the WC business we, of course, wash hands, with which we get a very important prevention factor against cold and flu. Which, in present times, is not uninteresting.

(vi) to finish, in a kind of job as mine, where you often need to "go up a little" to look at the problems from above, where you need regularly a happy idea at the right time in order to make everything simple (or, at least, manageable), introducing some physical activity (going to refill a glass, being in the WC) is really useful to unconsciously reorganise your thoughts and then get back to your computer knowing what's the next step.

Fred Trumper, the hero on Die wilde Geschichte vom Wassertrinker, had to drink lots of water because of an abnormally narrow uro-genital tract.

In my case, it is just about sparking this wonderful virtuous circle that only needs a glass of water to start.

^(*) lit. "the wild story of the water drinker"

Trajín (*)

2009-09-20T10:04:00.001+02:00

^(*) (spanish) hustle and bustle

Mannahatta

2009-09-12T17:27:00.005+02:00

On 11th September 1609, British explorer Henry Hudson, under patronage of the Dutch East India Company, set off the Atlantic coast of North America on board of the Halve Maen (half moon) to explore a promising estuary, thinking it might lead to the much desired Northwest Passage to India. Crossing The Narrows, he soon reached the southern tip of an island that was called to become the center of the world. It was called Mannahatta, "land of many hills", by the Lenape people who lived there.

Now, 400 years later, we have the opportunity to see this island through the eyes of Henry Hudson. The Mannahatta Project makes it possible.

Begegnungen (*)

2009-09-08T19:36:00.004+02:00

What happens when you are the first one to arrive to the office in the morning?

Well, you might disturb someone... :)

^(*) Encounters

Letting time go by...

2009-09-01T19:45:00.001+02:00

The end of summer is near.

The sun that used to enter relentlessly through my office window each afternoon, hides behind the fir trees on top of the mountain faster and faster. A sun that, incidentally, I prefer to face with an open window that, at least, lets some breeze go through, than to follow one of these unfathomable Austrian schools of thought that advocate for closing windows in order to keep the air inside cool. In my opinion, a more than debatable idea that, at most, would be valid in combination with a blind or something opaque for that matter. But this is an invention that still has not made it to my office, unfortunately.

The end of the summer, as I was saying, is near. Summer is the season whose ending I am most excited about. First of all, because summer ending marks the beginning of autumn and this one is truly my favourite season. Secondly, there are many minus points that go away with the summer: it stops being too hot, garbage stops stinking, you are able to sleep at night and people, you know, stop smelling (so) bad... And last, but not least, summer sun is way too intense and its rays fall way too vertical, just to shed light over a uniformly dull green colour that does not allow many fun with photography.

Because, I have to admit it, even if it means being despised by my neighbours, I don't like summer. In fact, summer is the last in my list of favourite seasons: first comes autumn, in quite challenged second and third places winter and spring, and way way back, summer.

Anyway, a good thing about summer are those lazy Sunday afternoons, with nothing more to do than taking a sandwich and your bike, ride half an hour to Hellbrunn, lay down on the grass and let time go by, reading a book, sleeping, eating your sandwich, playing around with nice puppies that come over and, in sum, enjoying today's favourite word: Müßiggang, meaning idleness, otiosity.

Let this Müßiggang ride along with us on our way back home...

Am I late?

2009-08-15T11:56:00.007+02:00

You know I have a thing about dandelions. I find these plants fascinating in many senses, although this does not really seem to be a popular opinion among lawn-owners.

One of the fascinating facts about dandelions is the way they reproduce. Many dandelion species do it by apomixis, which means they do not reproduce sexually, which means there are no two individual "parents" that produce offspring, but a single individual that produces exact genetic copies of itself.

This kind of reproduction, based on an exact duplication of genetic material, is not very different from the cellular division that happens in our bodies all the time, say when our hair or nails grow or when new red blood cells are created in our bone marrow. In a sense, dandelions or other species that reproduce asexually, challenge our conception of what an organism is.

In his book The Extended Phenotype Richard Dawkins makes a mind-blowing point about dandelions and organisms (emphasis is mine):

"Janzen (1977) faces up to the same difficulty, suggesting that a clone of dandelions should be regarded as one 'evolutionary individual' [...], equivalent to a single tree although spread out along the ground rather than raised up in the air on a trunk, and although divided up into separate physical 'plants' [...]. According to this view, there may be as few as four individual dandelions competing with each other for the territory of the whole of North America. [...]"
Dawkins, R.: The Extended Phenotype, Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, p.254

It is mid-August now and the peak of dandelion flowering season is long gone. Long gone? If you pay attention, you still might see some late-comers, those poor lazy ones that are always too late.

And if you come down close enough, you almost can hear them asking themselves: What is going on here??? Where is everybody???

U

2009-08-09T20:29:00.005+02:00

An image, alone, is nothing. Light reflected on different objects, on different materials, that absorb different parts of the rainbow each.

But when this same light crosses our pupils to be projected, upside down, on our retina, there begins the journey of interpretation, the search for meaning. And this is a journey that happens independently in our heads and hence it is something absolutely personal and subjective.

On the long way between the photosensitive cells deep down in our eyes and the formation of a picture, of a memory, of a remembrance in our mind, nerve impulses must travel at lightning speed across thousands of milions of neural connections that are arranged the way they are because this is precisely what makes us how we are, what makes us who we are, and not somebody else.

The image, those thousands of electrical signals that travel across our neurons, takes form in our minds through a process whose complexity we only begin to grasp. This image, or the model of it that exists in our neurons, is checked against hundreds of thousands of other shapes, colours, textures, that we have been linking throughout our lives to feelings, emotions, remembrances, ... meanings. And even though these meanings have a lot to do with our culture, they still are something unique and personal for each individual.

An illuminated blue cube on top of a pole with a white U letter would mean, on every German-speaking country, something as trivial as a subway station (in German, U-Bahn, abbreviation for Untergrundbahn, lit. "underground railway"). In my present situation, on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the city that welcomed me as I was 17 years old, the picture of such a cube has a very different meaning. This U indicates here an ambulance entrance to the hospital where I am writing this post from.

Today this U means for me the battle that I have just witnessed. A battle fought against those evil cells that, at random, out of pure egoism, decide to turn immortal.

Luckily, a battle that has been won.

Badewetter (*)

2009-07-29T15:41:00.002+02:00

Our neighbours, Paca and Gertrud, taking a refreshing bath against the high temperatures.

Don't they look happy? ;)

^(*) lit. "bath weather", meaning something like beach weather, is what the local weatherpersons say when temperatures over 25°C are forecast.

Summer in B&W

2009-07-12T22:08:00.001+02:00

The journey

2009-07-11T10:36:00.001+02:00

^(*)

^(*) Ismaël Lô - Tajabone

Great Plains

2009-06-15T20:32:00.002+02:00

I have seen a world of ice covering the land, whose incomparable beauty on the reflections of the delta Sun would have brought tears to the eyes of any mortal.

I have seen the ice melting, leaving space for a vast primeval ocean in whose womb everything began.

I have seen the thunderous clash of continents, I have seen land masses emerging, I have seen green organisms conquering them.

I have seen the rising of mighty rocky mountains to the West.

I have seen a very bright explosion to the Southeast that brought cold, famine and death.

I have seen a shallow sea leave place to a sea of grass, its vast ranges pastured by gigantic bison herds, further than the eye can see, reaching beyond the limits of my extensive dominions.

I have seen Red People living in balance with the Nature, feeding on bison but revering them at the same time.

I have seen the Great Stream to the East.

I have seen the first White People come from the South, moved by their greed in search of the descendants of the seven bishops of Mérida, in search of the mythical cities of Cíbola and Quivira. I have seen them fail.

I have seen the second wave of White People come from the East, at first on poorly constructed wagons, later riding smoky iron steeds, restless marching on shiny paths.

I have seen White People hunting millions of bison to sell their skins and bones and leave everything else to rot away. I have seen the bison being driven to near extinction by pure greed.

I have seen White People forcing Red People to move away, into the West or into reservations.

I have seen millions of settlements under the Homestead Act, I have seen the land divided in great numbers of 500 acre farms, poor White People trying to make a living out of them.

I have seen technological achievements cause deep open wounds to the land. I have seen ploughs that had the power to wipe out the soil, the same soil that kept moisture even in dry periods.

I have seen people mistakenly thinking that the climate of the region had changed, that rain really followed the plough. I have seen the land being converted into a massive granary for the contenders of a distant world-scale war. I have seen mechanization. I have seen the land being squeezed to the last of its riches.

I have seen the return of drought. I have seen the uppermost layers of the land literally being blown away in my arms. I traveled on dust storms, I brought the soil thousands of miles away, I deposited much of it on the bottom of the ocean. I created black blizzards on half a continent.

I have seen millions of people having to leave their homes buried under the dust. I have seen them load all their possessions in poor trucks and set out for the West, where oranges grow and honey flows... at least that is what they thought. I have seen misery, hunger and starvation.

I have seen thousands of ghost towns.

I have seen strange circles sucking water much faster than it can possibly be recovered.

I have seen slender white towers growing on the land. I am going to gracefully give them a little amount of my endless energy.

(all images taken from Wikimedia Commons)

At sunrise

2009-06-07T14:35:00.000+02:00

Missing you...

2009-05-30T22:50:00.003+02:00

Since I went away I have been missing you. Strange, isn't it? Before meeting you I expected I would like you a lot, but I could not advance that I would be attracted to you so bad that I would want for you from the distance.

Lately the wish that has been there all these months is changing to a biting yearning to which I do not seem to find a remedy.

Damn you, dumb American TV series!

Peace of Mind

2009-05-22T12:52:00.001+02:00

1993 - 2009

2009-05-09T09:48:00.004+02:00

Never again will you wait until everybody has sit down to eat to ask going out.

Never again will you fall asleep in an impossible position.

Never again will you follow the one who's sweeping the floor in order to check if it is done properly.

Never again will you raise your head and close your eyes when I scratch you under your chin.

Never again will you chase my feet when I'm wearing slippers.

Never again will you run in circles around the flat in your daily five minutes of madness, from the living room to the balcony, to the bedroom, to the corridor, to the living room, ...

Never again will you call from the door for the one who's just gone out to take out the rubbish.

Never again will you have that ironic look in your golden eyes, as if you already knew everything.

Never again will you ask someone to turn the tap on for you to drink water.

Never again will you gently lick our finger tips with your scratchy tongue.

Never again will you miaow us to complain when we come back home after having left you alone for one or two days.

Never again will you rub your head on my knees as I duck to say hello, recognising me every time I come back home and marking me as your property once again.

Never again will you threateningly hiss guests who try to stroke you on your back.

Never again will you hide your paws under your body if it's cold.

Never again will you foretell my mother's intention nor will you ever run again to hide under the bed before she gets you into the bathtub.

Never again will you get yourself into paper bags nor will you ever again be afraid of plastic ones.

Never again will you quietly ask us for food as we eat, gently touching our arms with your paw.

Never again will you go out to scout the stair landing, the most mysterious part of your indoors world.

Never again will you keep us in suspense as you walk on the railing of the balcony.

Never again will you fall down to the courtyard from a third floor and get only a scratch on your snout.

Never again will you leave the thinnest grey hairs on our clothes.

Never again will you set up a big fight every time we take you to the vet.

Never again will you fall asleep on our coats just minutes before we have to leave.

Never again will you make us worry about your ageing ailments and the bad health of your kidneys.

Never again will I marvel at the softness of your fur as I stroke you nor will you ever again show your acknowledgement by purring.

I know that the next time that I'm home, in Tarragona, my heart will hope to find you behind any door, but I will never see you again.

Now sleep, sleep forever, sweet Grisona. Go back to the soil and keep shining in our memories.

Elder revisited

2009-05-04T19:44:00.000+02:00

You'll probably remember my story about a parasitic elder growing on top of a maple tree.

Well, now the "maple" has finally grown its own leaves and I discovered that it is not a maple tree at all! It has pinnate leaves, instead of the well known maple tree leaves. Its trunk does not quit look like the other maple trees either and the branches have thorns.

Those leaves remembered me of some acacia that grew in my birthplace as I was a child. I liked the oval form of its leaflets very much. After some internet research, I came across what I think is the real identity of my mystery host tree: it is no acacia, but a black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), also known as false acacia, because it bears a striking similarity to them.

Now I'm not so sure that the elder slowed down the false acacia in growing leaves. Maybe it's just that maple trees are much faster than false acacias. But I discovered some (not parasitised!) false acacias quite close. They have all their leaves, too, but I don't know when did they grew them.

I'm going to have to continue my field research next year!

Dandelion

2009-04-27T20:30:00.005+02:00

They see Unkraut (bad weeds)...

... I see the peerless beauty of evolutionary success.

Read in 2007/2008

2009-04-23T12:00:00.005+02:00


Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth	Morton Rhue's The Wave

Hans Michael Koetzle's Photo Icons	Anthony Beevor's Stalingrado

John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy	Cormac McCarthy's La carretera

Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa's Tuareg	Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies

Carlos Ruiz Zafón's El juego del ángel	Nueva York de cerca

Gerald Brenan's Al sur de Granada	Sara Paretsky's Total Recall

Strange Nature

2009-04-20T20:01:00.004+02:00

Sometimes Nature surprises us with scenarios seemingly taken from a horror film, for instance this tree, which is taking revenge on those who hammered a traffic sign into it, slowly but without a rest...

I happen to meet another such scenario, not as horrific but still quite surprising, in my way by the river from the office to the bus stop. At the side there are some maple trees. Last year I realised that one of them has an elder on top of it, don't really know how. I was able to spot it because elderflowers are quite easy to recognise, because of the looks and the smell. "Strange", I thought, "how did this fellow manage to grow up there?"

These last weeks I am observing the maple with an elder, and I've seen something interesting. All other maple trees at the pathway already have lots of leaves, green and well formed. But the one with the elder on top has just started putting out little shoots, while the elder not only has all of its leaves fully formed, but also has sprouted the first elderflowers.

The maple with an elder (left) and a "normal" one (right). The latter has already lots of leaves, but on the former the only one with leaves on it is the elder!

That means, then, that the elder is, undoubtedly, a parasite of the maple tree. You'll never be too old to stop getting surprised...

Apples

2009-04-11T10:45:00.001+02:00

There's something interesting about fruit and vegetables and especially about the words we use for them. If you are asked to name a fruit really quickly, it would be not at all surprising if you think of an apple. Apples are like the quintessential fruits. Not only because they possess most of the features that we associate with fruit (round, coloured, it has a stem, ...), there is something about the word itself as well.

Many other fruits are named after apples, in many (European) languages. We've got the pineapple, the pomegranate (pomme being French for apple) or Granatapfel in German, there is Apfelsine in German for orange (probably because oranges come from China), we've got the Italian pomodoro (for tomato), which I would say means "golden apple". And do not forget one of my favourites: the French pomme de terre (potato), which means literally "ground apple" and has a nice direct translation in the Austrian local word Erdapfel. How did all these very different fruits and vegetables end up having such close words?

My theory is as follows. Centuries ago, as traders and explorers wandered around the world, they tried to bring something that would impress people back in Europe. Precious silk, unknown animals, rare spices and, of course, exotic fruit and vegetables. Now the problem with unknown stuff is that you have to come up with a name for it. What are your references when you have to name a new thing? Those things that you know and are familiar with. What is most familiar when you have find a name for a new fruit? Of course, the quintessential fruit: apples.

I would even say, people would use the word apple as a generic word for fruit, because at the very beginning, before traders and explorers started bringing strange stuff, there were mostly only apples. There might have been no actual distinction between fruit and apple, and the fact that we still use apples today to name that many other fruit and vegetables can be proof of that.

Can you think of other fruit whose name comes from apple?

Conservationism

2009-04-04T13:22:00.003+02:00

Lately I have found myself thinking and reading about life on our planet, about its first babbles, its current state and its future.

My awareness for conservationism has been shaped by readings and curiosity about the environment since my teenager years. But I think the true roots of this awareness, my realising the role we humans play about Nature, lay way back in the past, in my childhood, with two songs written by Joan Manuel Serrat, a Spanish Catalan singer that is part of the subconscious psyche of almost all members of my generation, thanks to our parents and the miracle of gramophone and compact cassette.

Pare
digueu-me què
li han fet al riu
que ja no canta.
Rellisca com un barb
mort sota un pam
d'escuma blanca.

Pare
que el riu ja no és el riu.
Pare
abans que torni l'estiu
amagui tot el què és viu.

Pare
digueu-me què
li han fet al bosc
que no hi ha arbres.
A l'hivern
no tindrem foc,
ni a l'estiu lloc
on aturar-nos.

Pare
que el bosc ja no és el bosc.
Pare
abans de que es faci fosc
tanquem la vida al rebost.

Sense llenya i sense peixos,
pare,
ens caldrà cremar la barca,
llaurar el blat entre les runes,
pare,
i tancar amb tres panys la casa,
Ai, dèieu vostè...

Pare
si no hi ha pins
no es fan pinyons
ni cucs ni ocells.
Pare
si no hi ha flors
no es fan abelles,
cera ni mel.

Pare
que el camp ja no és el camp.
Pare
del cel avui ens plou sang.
El vent ho canta plorant.

Pare
ja són aquí!
Monstres de carn
amb cucs de ferro.
Pare
no, no tingueu por,
digueu que no,
que jo us espero.

Pare
que estan matant la terra.
Pare
deixeu de plorar
que ens han declarat
la guerra.

Father,
please tell me what
have they done to the river
that it doesn't sing anymore?
It runs like a barbel
dead under a handspan
of white lather.

Father,
the river is not the river anymore.
Father,
before Summer comes again
hide all that's alive.

Father,
please tell me what
have they done to the woods
that there are no trees?
In winter
we won't have fire,
and in summer no place
for us to rest.

Father,
the woods are not the woods anymore.
Father,
before it gets dark
let us store life in the larder.

Without firewood and without fish,
father,
we'll have to burn the boat,
grow wheat among the rubble,
father,
and use three locks for the house,
Oh, would you have said...

Father,
if there's no pine trees
there'll be no nuts
no worms, no birds.
Father,
if there's no flower
there'll be no bees,
no wax and no honey.

Father,
the fields are not the fields anymore.
Father,
it rains blood from the sky today.
The wind sings about it crying.

Father,
they are here!
Flesh monsters
with their iron worms.
Father,
no, don't be afraid,
and say no,
I'm waiting for you.

Father,
they're killing the earth.
Father,
please stop crying
because they've declared
war on us.

This sond, as I was saying, resides so deeply in my subconscious, so stuck in my soul, that big tears run down my cheeks every time I listen to it. The same happens with the next song, Plany al mar (Lament to the sea).

Bressol de vida,
camins de somnis,
pont de cultures,
ai!, qui ho diria,
que ha estat el mar?

Mireu-lo fet una claveguera,
mireu-lo anar i venir
sense parar.

Sembla mentida
que en el seu ventre
es fés la vida.
Ai!, qui ho diria
sense rubor?

Mireu-lo fet una claveguera
ferit de mort.

De la manera
que el desvalissen
i l'enverinen,
ai!, qui ho diria
que ens dóna el pa?

Mireu-lo fet una claveguera,
mireu-lo anar i venir
sense parar.

On són els savis
i els poderosos
que s'anomenen
ai!, qui ho diria,
conservadors?

Mireu-lo fet una claveguera
ferit de mort.

Quanta abundància,
quanta bellesa,
quanta energia,
ai!, qui ho diria?,
feta malbé.
Per ignorància,
per imprudència,
per incosciència
i per mala llet.

Jo que volia
que m'enterressin
entre la platja,
ai!, qui ho diria?,
i el firmament.

I serem nosaltres,
ai!, qui ho diria?
els qui t'enterrem.

Cradle of life,
paths of dreams,
bridge of cultures.
Who would have thought it?
That has been the sea.

Look at it looking like a sewer.
Look at it coming and going
without stop.

It's hard to believe
that in its womb
life was created.
Who could now say that
without a blush?

Look at it looking like a sewer,
fatally wounded.

Looking at the way
that it is stripped bare
and poisoned,
who could believe
it gives us our bread?

Look at it looking like a sewer.
Look at it coming and going
without stop.

Where are the wise
and the mighty ones
that they call themselves,
who would have thought,
conservatives?

Look at it looking like a sewer,
fatally wounded.

So much abundance,
so much beauty
so much energy,
who would have thought?,
totally ruined.
Out of ignorance,
out of imprudence,
out of irresponsibility
and out of meanness.

I wanted
to be buried
between the beach,
who would have though?,
and the firmament.

And it will be us,
who would have thought?,
the ones who'll have to bury you.

Hoping for new life

2009-03-29T18:59:00.009+02:00

I already told you about my struggle on growing Mediterranean tree species in Austria. Well, our orange trees are doing pretty well, but I am starting to loose my faith on the survival of the pine tree. I think it might have frozen as we were in Spain last Christmas.

I'm afraid the day will come when I'll have to accept the evidence and throw my little pine away. Knowing that I will be very sad about it, I decided to make up to myself for it by letting new life sprout before the day comes. Just in case.

It all started in the Paleoproterozoic, around 3000 million years ago, as the ice cap of the Makganyene glaciation (which might have covered the whole planet) retreated and left space for a vast ancestral ocean.

Two types of living organisms survived under the ice and rapidly populated this ocean. Archaea, which used several sources of energy such as sulphur or ammonia and produced methane as waste product, and a new kind of bacteria, the Cyanobacteria, able to obtain their energy through photosynthesis, a process that converts sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO₂) into energy, releasing oxygen (O₂) as a waste product.

These cyanobacteria were so successful at reproducing and colonising the ocean that they actually changed the composition of the atmosphere and were going to shape the world for the next 3000 million years. Before cyanobacteria existed, there was not much oxygen in the atmosphere. Free oxygen in large amounts was in fact poisonous to most of the living creatures at the time, especially to archaea. Most life on Earth vanished in what is known as the Oxygen Catastrophe^(*).

But serious stress factors like this great oxidizing event are notably the source of big evolutionary pushes: a whole new kind of bacterial organisms evolved, aerobic bacteria, which used oxygen (now available in huge amounts) as a source of energy, producing carbon dioxide as a waste product. And that's not all. By an outstanding touch of genius, some Archaea, facing a serious problem in this new and poisonous oxygen-rich environment, incorporated cyanobacteria or proteobacteria (a kind of aerobic bacteria) through the cellular membrane into their cellular bodies and used part of the energy produced by them to keep themselves alive. This brilliant trick, known as endosymbiosis, would be the origin of the eukaryotic cells, which contain several membrane-bound structures, each one specialising in a different function.

Those Archaea that associated with aerobic bacteria (which needed oxygen) were the basis for the fauna, to which we humans ^(**) belong as well. From Archaea that associated with cyanobacteria (which produced oxygen through photosynthesis) would originate the flora, that is, multi-celled living creatures able to obtain energy from sunlight through photosynthesis.

^(***)

I've been thinking about this long story, this long evolutive path, as I was sowing orange and lemon seeds to give plant life another chance. Now wake up!, you little seeds. Wake up from your long sleep, let sunshine and water put you in alert and consummate once again the miracle of life for me!

^(*) This Oxygen Catastrophe in the Paleoproterozoic raised the atmospherical oxygen concentration to 4%. To reach the current level of 21% a colonisation of the land masses by plants and woods would be needed.

^(**) Not all Archaea disappeared in the Paleoproterozoic. In fact, a great number of them are alive and well, living in the most incredible places. Big colonies of Methanobrevibacter smithii, for instance, live in the human gut and help us with digestion.

^(***) Taronger is the Catalan word for "orange tree".

Blogger of the month! :)

2009-03-17T19:22:00.001+01:00

Die Murmeltierjahre im Land des Frühschoppens has been chosen Blog of the Month for March 2009 by Expat blog, the expatriate community.

You can read the interview here. Thanks Olivier, Julien and Benjamin! :)

Rose and Blue

2009-03-16T19:55:00.001+01:00

Little Things (ii)

2009-03-07T12:47:00.003+01:00

(continued from Little Things (i))

Very little and insignificant things have indeed the ability to change our lives. But there is still another quite little thing that, in fact, keeps us alive.

Everyone knows H₂O as the chemical formula of water. A chemical formula is a convenient way to count how many atoms of each element are present in a given chemical compound. H₂O means that a single water molecule is composed by two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Now oxygen has two free bonds (valence 2) and hydrogen has one free bond (valence 1). An oxygen atom with its two bonds taken each by a hydrogen atom forms a water molecule.

We can imagine each one of the atoms as a tiny ball, and a chemical bond as an even tinier stick that keeps two of the balls together. Now the oxygen atom is a slightly bigger ball in the middle with two sticks to the sides, each one connected to a hydrogen atom. These two bonds at the sides of the oxygen atom are not perfectly aligned, which would mean a 180° angle, but instead they form a slightly obtuse angle (exactly at 104.45°). Apparently an insignificant fact. But only apparently.

Oxygen has a higher electronegativity (3.44) than hydrogen (2.20), meaning that an oxygen atom attracts electrons much stronger than a hydrogen atom does.

The 104.45° angle between the two oxygen bonds means that one side of the water molecule (the oxygen's side) attracts electrons stronger than the other side (hydrogen atoms' side). We say water molecule has a dipolar nature. A water molecule is, in a way, like a tiny magnet, which has a positive and a negative pole.

(Image taken from Wikimedia Commons)

What happens is that the oxygen side (the negative pole) attracts all electrons in the vicinity, including those electrons in the hydrogen atoms of neighbouring water molecules. That means water molecules are bonded together through its dipolar nature. This kind of bonding is called a hydrogen bond, and it is weaker than a normal (covalent) bond, like the one that keeps a single molecule together. Still, hydrogen bonding among water molecules is responsible for the fact that water is liquid at room temperature, because more heat energy is required to break the hydrogen bonds between molecules.

Now take a moment to think about it. If oxygen had its two free bonds at a 180° angle, there would be no positive and negative side in the water molecule, because the two hydrogen atoms would cancel out the higher electron affinity of oxygen. The boiling point would be much much lower than 100°C. In fact, without hydrogen bonding, water would be a gas at room temperature.

Now imagine all oxygen atoms aligned its bonds at once. That means almost all liquid water on our planet would simply evaporate. Life as we know it would simply cease to exist. At once...

Thank goodness there is that 104.45° angle!

The cow and the rainbow

2009-02-21T08:47:00.000+01:00

It snows

2009-02-20T21:18:00.002+01:00

I love it when it snows.

Because your usual pathways are disguised in white and you have to follow the footprints of others before you to walk along them.

Because if you look at your coat close enough, you might see perfectly formed snow crystals, whose beauty will for sure captivate you.

Because the quietness is almost supernatural. I can hardly imagine of anything more relaxing than looking at the snow falling through a window.

Because I cannot resist passing my hand over the freshly fallen snow.

I really love it when it snows.

Little Things (i)

2009-02-12T18:47:00.006+01:00

A week ago, our computer started showing signs of sickness: blue screens of death, random behaviour, etc. After trying recovering her the whole week, reinstall the operating system, seeing that it would not help, despairing a little bit, giving it another try, and again and again, we realised it was a defect on one of the RAM modules. We replaced it by a new one and here we are again, after a week without computer.

After all the pain, I was thinking about what a strange thing it is how something so small (certainly not bigger than a thumb's nail!) may have such a big impact in our daily life (because, who are we kidding?, we are nothing without a computer and internet).

I have always felt fascinated by things that, even apparently small and meaningless, have the potential of changing our lives, even forever, or directing the evolution of our society to unexpected places.

In the autumn of 1872, some horses in Ontario, Canada, started showing signs of illness: they could not stand up, violently coughed and had no strength to pull any kind of load. It was the beginning of the 1872 American outbreak of equine influenza, which would spread quickly across the whole East half of North America. Same year's Great Boston Fire was so devastating because all fire department horses were sick and could not move.

This epizootic was one of the major causes of the so-called Panic of 1873, which in turn marked the beginning of the Long Depression, that would last until 1879. The influenza affecting virtually every single horse, economy ground to a halt in a way difficult to imagine: railways came to a halt because no coal could be delivered to locomotives. Men were forced to pull wagons by hand, tramways stopped and basic supplies could not be delivered to the cities.

Some years before, in 1863, one of the ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean brought an unexpected stowaway on its trip back to Europe. So started the spread of Phylloxera throughout the Old World, destroying all Vitis vinifera vineyards after them. In 1877 the plague crossed the Pyrenees and reached for the first time Catalan grapevine crops.

Catalan grape growers had the so-called rabassa morta contracts, by which a farmer had the right to the ground as long as the vines were alive. The European grapevines lasting for about 70 years, a farmer could work on the same field for life. In order to fight the plague, the breeding of Vitis vinifera with resistant native American species was needed, because the latter are naturally Phylloxera resistant. These new species, though, were much more short-lived, around 20 years, what left many young vine growers without fields to work on. Landowners would extend the agreements quite arbitrarily.

Catalan rabassaires suffered a great dissatisfaction and, organised in unions like Unió de Rabassaires, were one of the many factors contributing to the electoral triumph of the Spanish Popular Front (Frente Popular) in 1936. Unfortunately, we all know what came afterwards...

Even though we may see the equine influenza virus or Phylloxera as the villains in these stories, as the ones directly causing that much suffering, I think that the cause of human tragedies lies often in humans themselves, in archaic social structures, in our greed and meanness.

(to be continued...)

Kaffeehaus

2009-02-12T00:28:00.003+01:00

"Wie andere in den Park oder in den Wald, lief ich immer ins Kaffeehaus, um mich abzulenken und zu beruhigen, mein ganzes Leben." ^(*)

(Thomas Bernhard, 1984)

^(*) As others to the park or to the woods, I always went to the coffehouse to distract and to calm myself, my whole life.

No trespassing

2009-02-07T07:28:00.001+01:00

Close encounters

2009-01-31T18:39:00.016+01:00

Last summer, as we were in the US North East Coast, we booked for a whale watching tour departing from Portland, Maine. I was very excited about it, because I've read that you are probably never going to forget the first time you meet a whale. You cannot take your eyes off of them, of their blowing breaths, of their majestic flukes as they dive.

Meeting wild animals is always an experience to which we react with an inexplicable joy. This last December I read a very interesting article by Stefan Nink on the Lufthansa Magazin (12/08) that talked precisely about this joy, about what happens when encountering a wild animal in the nature. Nink writes: "[...] Encounters like these hold us spellbound and are fixed forever in our minds. Perhaps because they help us recognize what keeps the world going. Because, for the space of a moment, we have glimpsed something of ourselves."

He goes on to identify the cause of such reaction: "Psychologists can explain why encountering animals in nature affects us so profoundly. Humans, they say, are burdened with a permanent, subconscious regret at having cut ourselves off from nature as we evolved. That's why we experience such joy when we unexpectedly meet an animal face to face. They also say that part of our consciousness recognizes an ancient relative."

I have been lucky enough to have met a number of wild animals. Living so close to the nature, it is relatively easy, but not a bit less intense. There is something about watching animals in the nature that produces in us the same magical attraction that fire does.

Nink finishes his article beautifully: "Sometimes animals seem to have something that humans no longer possess, seem to know something nobody else does, except perhaps the wind. Sometimes we sense something of their power and superiority. Like when we look into the eyes of a lion or a tiger, or when, while hiking in South America, the sky momentarily darkens as the shadow of a condor passes overhead. This type of encounter is like a mystery revealed, and it will often make you feel as if the finger of creation had gently tapped you on the shoulder. An encounter like this may make you think about just how we humans treat the world, and if it wouldn't be a better place without us."

So, back in Portland, Maine, we were all set for the whale watching tour. But unfortunately, some twenty minutes after leaving the port, the captain decided we had to turn around and get back to port.

There was way too much fog to see anything...

Treasure

2009-01-18T18:03:00.000+01:00

A particularity of the German language is that many words are self-describing: they use Kühlschrank for fridge (lit. "cool cupboard", with the same translation on the Austrian version Eiskasten), or Ladegerät for charger (lit. "device to charge").

And sometimes, this self-describingness takes a lyrical level that I love. Today's word is one example: Wortschatz, meaning lexicon, vocabulary, literally translates to treasure of words.

And which better treasure could we think of than words?

Coincidence

2009-01-08T20:32:00.001+01:00

Some say that coincidence does not exist. But how do you explain getting a 33€ bill exactly on the day that you turn 33?

Anyhow, the highlight of the day was my new Eierpicker, in order to never have a broken boiled egg again. Isn't it cute? ;)

Schiachperchten

2008-12-12T20:36:00.001+01:00

Diagnosis

2008-12-07T06:45:00.000+01:00

- Say "thirty three"
- Thirty three
- Really? You look younger...

Swing up!

2008-11-25T07:35:00.002+01:00

Through wars of worlds / invaded by Mars

2008-11-16T14:20:00.002+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, October the 30th, was the 70th anniversary of the famous radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" adapted from H.G. Wells's novel.

This broadcast not only meant fame for a young Orson Welles, but there were also reports of thousands of frightened citizens blocking telephone lines by calling police stations and news agencies, really believing that the Martians just started an actual invasion of the Earth after having landed at Grover's Mill, New Jersey. Reports talked about mass panic as well, people fleeing their homes and driving miles away to seek shelter. Even though the general atmosphere of tension and anxiety that preceded World War II might have had something to do with these reactions, careful research points out that the reports were intentionally exaggerated by the press, in a time where many newspapers where concerned that radio, a new medium, would make them defunct.

This story is often taken as a proof of North-Americans' gullibility and ingenuousness. Not seldom you can see a self-satisfaction smile along the account of this anecdote, kind of: "Americans, you know...". You may see the same kind of smile on an European when reading "Employees must wash hands before returning to work" in US food court toilets, or when filling up the I-94W immigration form where, after questions like "Do you belong to a terrorist organization?", we are warned that answering YES to any of them might result in denial of our US visa. Sly smiles that come because we think we can see an idiotic society everywhere, to whom what is to be done must be always said, as if people were little children.

One of the things that make you feel bad when you live abroad, when you have to live your life in a different society, is the lack of cultural references, those millions of little details, winks, processes, conventions, that a native knows without being aware of it but that may suppose a big problem for you. Quite often you have the feeling that you are not getting it all right, that there is something that everyone knows but that you ignore, something that turns your mountains into sand corns for the native.

I already wrote about frames and its fragility, and about how they adapt to a new environment without us noticing it. But I am aware that you will never be able to erase this uncomfortable there-is-something-I-am-missing feeling, no matter how many years you live in another country. I think that the lack of the new country's cultural references is one of the toughest problems an immigrant has to face. That's why every help in this direction is more than welcome and having someone telling you how things work, what are you supposed to do, assuming no previous knowledge, no common frame, is a blessing.

The US, and North America in general, are a land of immigrants: there is almost no one there not having an ancestor born outside the US. Maybe that is the reason why every rule has to be stated in a very very clear way. The reason why everything has to be expressed without any margin to wrong interpretation. Maybe the need to harmonize several very different reference frames, and not an idiotic population, is what makes them appear little children to whom everything has to be explained. In a land of immigrants where everyone has its unique bias, its cultural nuances, an accurate setting of the rules of the game with no possible misunderstanding, is a must.

This summer I was, in a short period of time, in New York City and in Paris. And interestingly enough, in New York I never had the feeling of not knowing how to do something, where to wait for my luggage, where to wait for my turn in the lane or what was to be found at its end. A interesting feeling of comfort, as if the path to adaptation into that society had been thoroughly packed down long ago. Some days later, as I arrived in Paris, again in the Old Europe, not only did I need a while to understand where was my luggage, I surprised myself quite often thinking "Merde!, I am missing something again".

Martinigansl

2008-11-11T11:11:00.001+01:00

Favonius at work

2008-11-06T20:48:00.000+01:00

Yesterday morning, as I went out home at 6:45AM, with a scarf around my neck, I was welcomed by an incredibly warm November morning. Even though the Sun had not still risen, we might have had 18ºC! How was that possible? Is it because now, with Obama, it won't be cold in November anymore? ;)

No. It is the Alpenföhn, a unique wind effect that happens near the Alps. When an air mass has to rise to spring over a mountain range, water condenses and falls as rain on the windward side. Past the maximum elevation, the dry air "falls down" the slopes and raises temperatures by as much as 30ºC on the leeward valley.

(Picture taken from Wikimedia Commons)

The name Föhn comes from the Roman God Favonius, who personified the west wind. Later on, it went through Rhaeto-Romance favuogn and fuogn until it reached modern German as Föhn. Interestingly enough, a hair dryer is called Fön, without "h". I read that the name was registered as trademark by AEG on the 20s.

The Föhn is often associated with migraines and psychoses. A study by the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich claims that suicide and accidents increase by 10 percent during föhn winds in Central Europe. In fact, there is a Föhnkrankheit (Föhn sickness), which might be the perfect excuse to justify low performance on the job, excessive appetite or, simply, general apathy.

Other föhn wind examples around the world include the Chinook in the Rocky Mountains, North America, the Halny in the Carpathian Mountains, Eastern Europe, fogony and cierzo in the Pyrenees and viento del sur (southern wind) in Cantabria, northern Spain.

And I think I'm going to let it go for today, because, you know, there is Föhn today...

Flag

2008-11-03T20:49:00.001+01:00

Days are getting shorter...

2008-10-24T18:30:00.002+02:00

... November is almost here and I already rode my bike to the office for the last time this year ...

... the Sun strides through its journey in the sky lower and lower, long shadows and wonderful sunset light all day long ...

... and Cold and Darkness prepare themselves to rule over the Northern hemisphere for the next months. Strange organic sculptures wander around the city at night ...

Prime Sickness

2008-10-06T21:42:00.000+02:00

I've got a confession to make: I am sick.

It all started almost three years ago, as we got our dSLR. The dandiest feature of such a device is the interchangeability of lenses. At first I was quite happy with the kit lens, but after a year a mid-range telephoto zoom lens followed, in order to get a closer look to things.

During our stay in New York City, I could not help but pay a visit to B&H, kind of the mother ship for all photographers, either hobby or professional. In addition to a little camera gear, basically lens hoods (because size does matter! :D) some filters and memory cards, I got myself a 50mm prime lens, which ultimately confirmed my sickness: I am crazy about photo lenses and camera gear.

There are a couple of great things about standard prime lenses. First of all, they have far better optical properties than a zoom lens. The reason for that is very simple: the designer of a zoom lens is forced to meet a number of trade offs to deliver an acceptable quality in all its focal range. A prime lens, having a single focal length, can be optimized to get the best possible image quality for that particular focal length.

In addition, the optical system of a prime lens is plain simple and elegant, and yet works perfectly. This is something that I've always been fascinated about, like the functioning of a bicycle: so simple that everything can be understood at a glance and yet unsurpassed when it comes to energy efficiency. Due to this simple lens system, prime lenses are very fast (that means, they let lots of light go through), which is great for night photography, but also great to achieve hair-thin depths of field.

But to me, the greatest thing about a prime lens is that it has no zoom. Don't get me wrong, I find zooms are great and for some purposes totally irreplaceable, but I think zooms make us lazy as well. Why bother getting closer to our subject if we can get something similar just by turning the zoom ring? Being bonded to a fixed focal length, on the other hand, means that our photographic creativity is pushed forward because we have to move forward or backwards to get a nice picture composition, to apply the rule of thirds or whatever.

At first it felt strange, and my fingers often tried to turn the zoom ring when using the 50mm lens. But I quickly got used to it, and learned to use it and love it! Because it feels good, it feels like I'm doing real photography out there, it's a little like returning to the origins, back in time, when there was no digital, no reflex mirror, no memory cards, no USBs, no chance to look immediately at your pictures, no histograms, no program modes, no autofocus, no GIMP.

A prime lens is just the right lens for this time of year, when diminishing chlorophyll amounts make place for wonderful brown, yellow, orange and red pigments that have been waiting patiently all summer long to make their triumphant entrance.

Farewell Ms Chlorophyll! Welcome Mr Carotene and Ms Xanthophyll!

Unpronounceable

2008-10-04T17:38:00.003+02:00

When Austria entered the European Union in 1995, a request was made to recognise Austrian as an own language, independent from German. The EU experts replied that, except for a number of own words, most of them related to food, there were not enough differences between Austrian and German language to consider them independent.

One of these own words is today's favourite word. Zwetschken are a subspecies of plums (Prunus domestica domestica), ~~bitter~~ a bit acid in taste, which are in season right now. The German word for plums, in general, is Pflaume, but they are called Zwetschken in Austria.

And what is so funny about this word? If we count the number of vowels and consonants, we obtain proud 8:2 for the consonants. A nightmare for a Romanic language native speaker.

Many years ago, walking around Vienna on a cold October with a co-worker, we realised that the cold numbed our tongues and lips, making it really difficult for us to speak normally, as if we were coming from the dentist and anesthesia was still doing its thing. And right there we devised a theory: languages spoken on colder climates have to tend to be more guttural, because a guttural sound is easier to pronounce in a cold environment. On the other hand, languages from more benign climates can afford a richer articulation and pronunciation.

Is our theory right? I don't know, but I know for sure that some words will keep being a challenge for a long long time...

Rache des Papstes

2008-09-28T10:45:00.001+02:00

The reflection of the Sun, capricious, appears in the form of a cross on the steel dome of Berlin's Fernsehturm. Considering this building was the crown's jewel for the GDR socialist government, whose principles were profoundly atheist, it is easy to imagine how inopportune this effect was. The legendary Berliner humour quickly referred to the reflection as „Rache des Papstes“ (the Pope's revenge).

It is said that the dreadful Stasi questioned the tower's architect to be sure this was not something he planned and carefully designed on purpose. I read one of the Government officers ended the long discussions about the topic with the words „Das ist kein Kreuz, sondern ein Plus für den Sozialismus!“ ("That's not a cross, but a plus for Socialism!")

The elegant silhouette of the Fernsehturm, with or without cross, is a view that always make me smile, because it means I am in Berlin, one of the cities where I can picture myself living.

The American Way

2008-09-25T20:19:00.003+02:00

When travelling to the United States, Lufthansa offers some practical advice on how to complete the I-94W immigration form. Among other tips, it is recommended for European visitors to write numbers the American way, and not the European way, so that no misunderstanding can happen with immigration officers.

In spite of a lot of striking similarities, especially if you compare North-Eastern America with Central Europe, there is still an awful lot that's done differently on each side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The one thing that appeared most evident to me is that North Americans talk. A lot. It does not really matter if they know you or not. They are eager and willing to talk to table neighbours in a bar, spontaneously offer help if you just seem to be a little lost, ask you about your country or, simply, listen to your story. Someone told me that if you ask an average North American for the time, you have already made a new friend. And it seems to be true. Not only in lovely small towns at the heart of a National Park, but also in big cities (so big, in fact, that some might consider them capital of the western world).

This US people feature might be somewhat surprising to us residents of the Old World, where everyone tends to mind her or his own business and don't care about the others'. Confronted with the true masters of small talk, we felt a little strange at first. But we quickly recognised the advantages of giving conversation to people. Because thanks to perfect strangers that were willing to talk to us, we have been to places that we would never have discovered otherwise.

I think the greatness of this attitude is that it ends up in win-win situations quite often, in which both parties get something useful. And even nothing more but a friendly conversation with no obvious chance for anyone, it is still a nice experience. Either way, such an approach to social relations lets North Americans being open to new opportunities, to unexpected chances, practising actively the so-called "networking". Its principle is to establish contacts between people you know, who might be interested in knowing each other, whatever the reason. That way, the tremendous power of exponential growth is put to work for us.

A week before travelling to the States, I was waiting to get my international driving license at the ÖAMTC (the Austrian Automobile Association) in Salzburg. An old lady in front of me was asking for road information for her vacation, and I heard she asked about destinations on the coast between Barcelona and Tarragona. I smiled and waited for my turn. As I later got my license and went out, I saw she was still there at the parking lot, and I thought on approaching her and tell her that Tarragona is my birthplace and offer her some more advice. But, you know, I'm a little shy and do not feel really comfortable starting conversations with strangers, so I just unlocked my bike and rode away.

And I almost immediately regret not having talked to her, because nothing bad could have happened, she would have get first-hand information about the region from a native and, who knows?, probably I would have got something from her, even just the satisfaction of helping someone would have been fine. But no.

Maybe next time?

3x

2008-09-21T21:58:00.001+02:00

Underwater

2008-09-07T17:26:00.000+02:00

There is a small country in Micronesia that I feel especially bond to. The island nation of Palau consists of 8 major and some 250 minor islands, has less than 20000 inhabitants and its highest point is less than 250 meters.

(picture: lonely planet images)

It is not difficult to imagine how do Palauans (and most of the islanders in the world) feel about ice melting on the Poles and the accelerating sea level rise associated. Many countries, like Palau, are going to see their coastlines dramatically affected. Other nations will simply cease to exist.

That's why Palau and some other small islands are willing to present a resolution calling on the UN Security Council to address climate change as a pressing threat to international peace and security. Avaaz, an international NGO, started raising signatures to help support these small islands. I believe the first step to solve a problem, maybe the most important one, is to realize that we have a problem.

(picture: woody1778a)

Many years ago my father received a post offer to buy a special edition of all stamps of the Republic of Palau, which was being offered to people bearing this name around the world. He did not take the offer at the time, although he lamented not having done so afterwards.

I always thought maybe some day I would receive such an offer, too. I really hope that it is not too late for Palau and for all threatened small islands around the world.

Traffic Lights

2008-08-23T18:25:00.001+02:00

It's funny how everyone has myths and fetishes. For many it is woman's shoes, others prefer Broadway musicals and some loose their minds for music boxes or cheesy souvenirs in transparent balls where thousand glittering little stars simulate snow...

In my case, I'm crazy about taking pictures of traffic lights.

What is wrong with me?

Gotham impressions

2008-08-16T18:19:00.000+02:00

It is said that as in New York it is 3 in the afternoon in Europe it is 9 PM of ten years before.

In spite of its relatively short history as a city (the Dutch founded New Amsterdam on Manhattan's southernmost tip in 1624), you get the feeling you find yourself right in the middle of a place where big things happened and continue to happen. As if the History, to compensate for a late start, raced by at vertiginous speeds.

That's maybe the reason why New Yorkers live fast: people talk fast, people eat fast, cabs drive fast, pedestrians walk fast, people laugh fast and, I guess, they dream fast. Or maybe it is the other way around, and it is precisely them who accelerate the Big Clock's pace with their uncorrectable crossing in red and their never ending horn symphonies.

New York City has a soul, even though the multiple and surprisingly contradictory identities she possesses, turning one into the other as you walk few steps, even as you cross to the other side of the street. This is nothing new, though. Visitors to the seventeenth century Dutch settlement marveled that eighteen separate languages were spoken on its streets at a time when its total population was below one thousand. But New York City has a young and strong soul. You just need to stand in the middle of the street, in the middle of the roar, to feel its powerful beat below your feet.

New York City conveys a strange feeling of familiarity in all her faces, in all her images. No matter where you look at, a known icon will impress your retina, the frame of that one movie, a picture that maybe never existed, but which was long ago digested by the collective subconscious after decades of audiovisual exports.

As you walk out the door, you face the most difficult decision of the day: should we turn to the left (to the south, downtown) or to the right (to the north, uptown)? But in fact it's the same, because this city is great in all directions.

It is said that comic editors gave instructions to new illustrators and writers to help them with the locations for their stories. Metropolis, Superman's city, is Manhattan's Midtown on a sunny day at noon. Gotham, Batman's city, is Downtown Manhattan on a rainy night. And Harlem is Harlem, of course. We could walk around Metropolis to exhaustion. But unfortunately we did not get the chance to see Gotham. The only time it rained we were in Harlem.

The City (with a capital C)

2008-08-03T17:06:00.002+02:00

We've just come back from the City with a capital C, the city that all the other cities wish they were.

In his Historias de Nueva York (New York Stories), Enric González tells that, in order to survive in The Big Apple, you need to have good luck.

As we arrived to the apartment we had this last week, the owner, Chris (who, incidentally, could perfectly appear in a Paul Auster novel) wished us Good luck!

And it was in that same moment that I knew, although I did not dare saying it loud, that everything would be perfect, and that we were going to miss that city as soon as we take the train to the airport. And so it has been.

I have not been able to sleep for 28 hours now. Clearly, sleeping in planes is not my thing. I hope tomorrow I am some more of a person and tell something more. Until then, good luck!

Backlight

2008-08-02T19:15:00.000+02:00

No wine

2008-07-30T11:46:00.000+02:00

Bow

2008-07-27T09:30:00.000+02:00

Evening

2008-07-23T11:41:00.001+02:00

City of Blinding Lights

2008-07-21T12:08:00.000+02:00

The more you see the less you know
The less you find out as you go
I knew much more then than I do now

Neon heart dayglo eyes
A city lit by fireflies
They’re advertising in the skies
For people like us

And I miss you when you’re not around
I’m getting ready to leave the ground….

Ooh ooh ooh
Ooh ooh ooh

Oh you look so beautiful tonight
In the city of blinding lights

Don’t look before you laugh
Look ugly in a photograph
Flash bulbs purple irises
The camera can’t see

I’ve seen you walk unafraid
I’ve seen you in the clothes you made
Can you see the beauty inside of me?
What happened to the beauty I had inside of me?

And I miss you when you’re not around
I’m getting ready to leave the ground

Ooh ooh ooh
Ooh ooh ooh

Oh you look so beautiful tonight
In the city of blinding lights

Time… time
Won’t leave me as I am
But time won’t take the boy out of this man

Oh you look so beautiful tonight
Oh you look so beautiful tonight
Oh you look so beautiful tonight
In the city of blinding lights

The more you know the less you feel
Some pray for others steal
Blessings are not just for the ones who kneel… luckily