Art

I have recently seen two excellent exhibitions. the first one is Andreas Gursky's impressive, oversized photograps at London's White Cube.

This german artist takes pictures (I guess) with a large-format camera capable of producing incredibly large positives ( a series of Formula 1 pit-stop photos were 4 by 2 meters) with great level of detail. Looking him up on Wikipedia I just learnt he hold the record for the most expensive photograph ever sold: $3.3m for his 99 cents II.


The second one is Chuck Close's amazing retrospective at Madrid's Reina Sofía. I had already seen some of his works at MoMA, but somehow it failed to impress me then (or perhaps I was too impressed by everything else in there).

He also produces extremely detailed, large-format paintings. In this case he only paints portraits, his method involving taking a photo, dividing it into a grid and then copying each cell into a large canvas.While the technical side is amazing, the most interesting part is how he manages to capture the subjects's personality as few photographers - let alone painters - can do.

changes

I can't sleep. When that happens, I either eat compulsively or decide to change things. Tonight I decided I had enough of my old blog design. For one, I want bigger pictures, since I'm more articulate with my Canon than with the keyboard. I'm now playing with the new Blogger templates, I read ( guess where?) about a way of posting larger images, for which I needed to abandon my old template and switch to onne of the new designs. Let see how it goes (maybe I'll fall asleep before finishing...)

The photo is mine, but the idea was Samu's... Cheers, mate.

iPods everywhere

Female member of Mursi tribe in Southern Ethiopia.

Apple announced last week that 100 million iPods have been sold worldwide. Nothing compared to the number of AK-47s, I guess.

Kurt Vonnegut, R.I.P.

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up! "
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.

From Cat's Cradle (1963)

Kurt Vonnegut died last night

La Latina

Stuck on Amber

The Boo Radleys have always been one of my weaknesses. Formed in Wallasey, England in 1988, with singer/guitarist Sice, guitarist/songwriter Martin Carr, bassist Timothy Brown and now Placebo drummer Steve Hewitt. The band split in 1999. They had their 15 minutes of fame with Wake up Boo!, from their 1995 Wake Up album, but had recorded some excellent work that earned them credit with Indie/Britpop/shoegazing lovers. The songs in that album will always remind me of the great spring of '95 in Liverpool. Stuck on Amber is one of the pop gems it contained (you can download it here)
Even if it isn't hit material like Wake up Boo! or Find the Answer Within, it is amazingly beautiful and catches the spirit of the band.

Home alone

I don't normally spend the evening alone, but yesterday Virginia had a dinner out, so I prepared myself for a good five hours on my own. First I did some manly stuff --- plumbing. My toilet's tank loses an almost invisible line of water, and since I'm in this very annoying, eco-taliban mode, I decided i had to stop it. After a couple of hours, three trips to my local hardware store, my toilet was pretty much in the same state as before starting to repair it., but the bathroom floor and walls were much dirtier though.
Then I did the dishes, folded the laundry and made myself dinner a sandwich with a glass of Rioja Gran Reserva 1994 and half a kilo of strawberries with low fat cream....the contradictions of the single man. Finally I sat back to enjoy the kind of film I can never watch when my girlfriend is there (no, not porn). This time I chose Battle Royale, with Takeshi Kitano. Gimme some more blood, baby!

The PS3 is out now in Spain

Pardillos...maybe. The ones that queued up in London got a free HDTV and a taxi ride home. Only that cost Sony UK about 250,000 quid, but the PR effect sure is great. And, if you like realistic games and movies, you're basically getting the best console money can buy and a really, really cheap blu-ray player (standalone ones cost at least 1,000 EUR). So, who is the pardillo now?

Ellen Feiss

I pity you, poor PC users, who haven't heard about Ellen Feiss, internet star and sex goddess on drugs, thanks to an Apple Switch commercial. Apparently she's now starring on a French movie called Bed & Breakfast.


PS: I meant to embed the video onto the post, but I forgot how to do it. Pablo, helpp!!!

De Aifoun

Well, it's finally here: the most expected and talked-about gadget in recent history, and definitely something I'd like to have.

On the plus side: A gorgeous 3.5” screen, Mac OS, with its widgets, stability and good looks. Being just a little bigger than an ordinary iPod, and a mere 15g heavier than your average telephone, you can make calls, access the Internet, watch videos and music, and even (I guess more apps will be eventually disclosed) enjoy a “Mac PDA”. Convergence in your hands, man!

On the downside: No 3G is the obvious one. Being cool will set you back 599 USD, which seems like a bit too much to me. Plus, it will only be available this side of the pond in Q4. By then these already-average specs will be long outdated…

The iPhone will become mainstream (just like the iPod) in three obvious stages:

Step One: Unemployed hipsters with trust funds and Mac afficionados drop the requisite 600$ to be the first to ride the iPhone wave, and more importantly, have another platform in which to exercise their pretension.

Step Two: Six months later, the price drops down into the "Somewhat-reasonable-but-not-really," and all the upper-middle class tech guys and rich white kids buy them.

Step Three: One year later, the price drops down into the Motorola RAZR range, and everyone and their grandma suddenly has an iPhone. Mac Fanatics everywhere rejoice in the growing ubiquity of their cult/favorite brand. Hipsters everywhere rebel in anger, many are quoted as saying, "The iPhone is like, so fucking 2007."

In any case, this may become the ultimate Metrosexual device:

Cuba

Queridos amigos, la rubita y yo nos vamos a Cuba. Ahí os quedáis en la fría Europa.
¿Asistiremos a un funeral de estado por el Padre de la Revolución? Yo me pienso tomar un mojito a su salud en cuanto ponga mis pies en La Habana.

Feliz puente pre-navideño a todos

A Wii manual

This is the hilarious japanese version of the Nintendo Wii games console safety manual. (well, the comments of the people at Gizmodo surely help...)

Thanks to blogs like Gizmodo or Boing Boing, it created quite a lot of buzz, and soon someone came up with the missing pages from the manual...

on my iPod today

Peter,Bjorn and John, "Young Folks"

I can't take this sone off my head since I saw their excellen gig in Madrid last Tuesday. Their excellent third album is called Writer's Block, and you can watch the video here.
The lady you hear is Victoria Bergsman, formerly the lovely voice from The Concretes.

Smoking etiquette

Japan Tobacco has created an etiquette manual for smokers. Some of them are straightforward and quite obvious, like "don't blow your smokke into people's faces", but some others are deliciously funny, like the one above, or weird, like this one:
(Seriously, do you look behind when "passing gas"?)
Apparently, it is quite common for smokers in Japan to carry a portable ashtray with you (obviously, you don't throw away cigarrette butts into the street). Will these manners ever arrive to Europe, let alone to Spain? Mmmmm..No.

The whole set is here

Freedom, Democracy, Reconstruction

As Bechtel Goes

As Bechtel Goes, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:

Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission — to rebuild power, water and sewage plants — wasn’t accomplished: Baghdad received less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq’s population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel, having received $2.3 billion of taxpayers’ money and having lost the lives of 52 employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.

As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort. Whatever our leaders may say about their determination to stay the course, I mean, complete the mission, when it comes to rebuilding Iraq they’ve already cut and run. The $21 billion allocated for reconstruction ... has been spent, much of it on security rather than its intended purpose, and there’s no more money in the pipeline.

The failure of reconstruction in Iraq raises three questions. First, how much did that failure contribute to the overall failure of the war? Second, how was it that America, the great can-do nation, in this case couldn’t and didn’t? Finally, if we’ve given up on rebuilding Iraq, what are our troops dying for?

There’s no definitive way to answer the first question. You can make a good case that the invasion of Iraq was doomed no matter what... But the lack of electricity and clean water did a lot to dissipate any initial good will... And Iraqis are well aware that the billions squandered by American contractors included a lot of Iraqi oil revenue...

Consider the symbolism of Iraq’s new police academy, ... “the most essential civil security project in the country.” It was built at a cost of $75 million by Parsons Corporation.... But the academy was so badly built that feces and urine leak from the ceilings in the student barracks.

Think about it. We want the Iraqis to stand up so we can stand down. But if they do stand up, we’ll dump excrement on their heads.

As for how this could have happened, that’s easy: major contractors believed, correctly, that their political connections insulated them from accountability. Halliburton and other companies ... were ... so closely identified with President Bush and, especially, Vice President Cheney that firing or even disciplining them would have been seen as an admission of personal failure on the part of top elected officials.

As a result, the administration and its allies in Congress fought accountability all the way. Administration officials have made repeated backdoor efforts to close the office of Mr. Bowen, whose job is to oversee the use of reconstruction money. ... And now, ... Congress has passed a bill whose provisions include the complete elimination of his agency next October. ...

But that’s all in the past. What about the future?

Back in June, ... Mr. Bush said something I agree with. “You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered,” he declared. “You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people.” But what those measures actually show is the absence of progress. By any material measure, Iraqis are worse off than they were under Saddam.

And we’re not planning to do anything about it: the U.S.-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is basically over. ...[T]he United States has accepted defeat on reconstruction.

Yet Americans are still fighting and dying in Iraq. For what?

CAP

A Christian analysis of popular movies. Hilarious

Fundación Canal, Madrid

All I've Ever Wanted in a Gadget

Immigration in the U.S.

Reason Online publishes a four-page cartoon (these are the best two) about immigration in the U.S. by cartoonist Peter Bagge. It makes interesting reading, and should be made compulsory for every politician.

CBGB closing for good

Iconic punk institution CBGB in New York City is closing for good on Halloween. The Bowery club is shutting its doors after a lengthy rent dispute. Iggy Pop, Television, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, and nearly every other first generation punk band graced the stage there at one time or another during its thirty-three years in existence. From the New York Daily News.

Not all of that history, however, is being left behind. Owner Hilly Kristal said he's negotiating to open up a CBGB in Las Vegas, as early as March...

Wherever the next CBGB ends up, Kristal said he's planning to take everything he can with him: the stage, the bar, the floorboards and assorted memorabilia. The scraps, he said, may be auctioned on eBay.

"We're going to take the urinals," Kristal said. "Joey [Ramone] went to the bathroom there.

"We can charge admission," he said, laughing.

The whole story, here.