New Job

After all these years, I finally have my own cubicle.

Vietnam

100 movies and 300 records to choose from in the plane, 37°C at 6:30 AM in Doha, a million motorbikes, heat, rain, people cookingeatingsleepingpeeingspitting on the streets, peaceful temples, beautiful rivers, the best food I've ever tasted, paradise beaches, crooked taxi drivers, 15 hours on a train, sunburnt, on a bike across the bridge in Hue, ancient palaces, atmospheric old Hanoi, amazing water puppets, 9 more hours on a train, breathtaking mountain landscape, the smell of rice paddies, children begging everywhere, refreshing cold beer, Halong Bay, 2 hours walking under the rain and knee-deep in mud, a relaxing massage at a five-star hotel, fighting with a taxi driver, fighting with the hotel staff, tired of bargaining for a bottle of water, rats at Hanoi airport, the best coffee in the world, crazy Cholon market, fresh beer at 9 cents a glass, incredibly beautiful girls...

On the pleasure of reading

I am more of a novel reader, but lately I have been reading two essays, one on reading and the other on music. What took me to these two books was more the authors than the subject. This is not to say that I don't enjoy music or books ( I couldn't live without either), but I wasn't searching for a particular essay. Hornby is a good writer, he will make you laugh and you'll love his books (and the films made of them), especially if you enjoy football and music his two passions. He'll never win a Nobel (and he's ok with that) but he's a honest author that knows how to entertain without writing books made to sell.
This takes me to the first one. It's called Comme un roman, by Daniel Pennac, author of Au Bonheur des Ogres, probably one of the books in French I have enjoyed the most. This one asks why we read, what can we do to get our children to read and what are the rules that every reader should abide to (answer: none). And then someone asks him whether there is such thing as a bad novel:

Pour être bref, taillons très large: disons qu'il existe ce que j'appelerai une "litterature industrielle" qui se contente de réproduire à l'infini les mêmes types de récits, débite du stéréotype à la chaîne, fait commerce des bons sentiments et des sensations fortes, saute tous les prétextes offerts par l'actualité pour pondre une fiction de circonstance, se livre à des "études de marché" pour fourguer, selon la "conjoncture" tel type de "produit" censé enflammer telle catégorie de lecteurs.
Voilá, à coup sûr, des mauvais romans.
Pourquoi? Parce qu'ils ne relèvent pas de la création mais de la réproduction des "formes" préétablies, parce qu'ils sont une entreprise de simplification (c'est-à-dire de mensonge), quand le roman est art de vérité (c'est-à-dire de complexité), parce qu'à flatter nos automatismes ils endorment notre curiosité, enfin et surtout parce que l'auteur ne s'y trouve pas, ni la réalité qu'il prétend nous décrire.

Tridimensional sound

Connect your headphones and close your eyes.

Bada Bing!

The Economist: American society through the eyes of Tony Soprano.

Saying goodbye to Tony Soprano

THE day of mourning is at hand. On June 10th, after eight years, 86 episodes and innumerable garrottings, gougings, beatings, decapitations and chain-assisted drownings, “The Sopranos” comes to an end, and with it arguably the best hour on American television.

Tabloid journalists are speculating about the final episode. Will Tony Soprano survive or splatter? Commentators are competing to heap praise on the series and its creator, David Chase. David Remnick uses his oracular position as editor of the New Yorker to pronounce it “the richest achievement in the history of television”. And others are grappling with the most pressing cultural questions of the day: what made the series so good? And what does it say about America?

There are lots of little things that made it so good. The sharp-eyed observation of dozens of different worlds, not just the mob-land of north-eastern New Jersey but also the smug little worlds of Columbia University, bohemian New York and psychiatrists' dinner parties. The extraordinary characters like “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri, with his weird wings of hair, who hover in the no-man's-land between cartoons and nightmares. The willingness to break with television conventions, not least the convention that everything has to be neatly tied up.

The most important reason, however, was the central conceit: that gangsters are human beings just like the rest of us. Mr Soprano is a mob boss who makes his living skimming city contracts, hijacking lorries full of booze and cigarettes, running illicit gambling. His office is in the backroom of a strip club, the Bada Bing; he enforces his business deals with beatings and murder. But Mr Soprano is also a regular McMansion-dwelling guy. His money never quite goes far enough. He worries about his children's upbringing. Above all, he has what Americans call “issues”. His mother was a monster, the black dog follows him wherever he goes and he sees a shrink.

It is hardly original for artists to try to blur the boundaries between the normal and the deviant. Hollywood has been in that game since at least the 1960s. But “The Sopranos” does it superlatively well. Mr Soprano's depression is rooted in family dynamics. True of many. But one of his earliest memories of those family dynamics is his father shooting a bullet through his mother's beehive hairdo.

The blurring of normal and abnormal is also the blurring of good and evil. Mr Chase makes no bones about the fact that his hero is evil. He carefully eschews the glamorising of gangster life characteristic of Quentin Tarantino and his ilk. Mr Soprano murders anybody who is a threat to him, including his nephew and his best friend, Sal “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero. He breaks bones with a stomach-turning crack. He commits adultery in a thoroughly animalistic manner, at one point with a one-legged Russian woman. Yet Mr Chase also portrays him as a devoted family man. “I'm a good guy, basically,” he tells his psychiatrist, not long after he has murdered a close relation. The result is complicated. Viewers hope for Mr Soprano's redemption. They also—let's be honest—take guilty pleasure in his freedom from middle-class hang-ups. In Tony Soprano Mr Chase reveals the banality of evil and its glamour.

Which leads on to the second question. “The Sopranos” says a lot of positive things about America—that it can pour out remarkably gripping and innovative drama and can elevate pop culture to the level of art. But it also says something worrying: that American culture is always likely to set people's teeth on edge, particularly in the world's more conservative corners; not just because it is so full of animal spirits, but also because it revels in overturning moral certitudes.

Love is hate

Foreign-policy commentators like to draw a distinction between soft power and hard power. The argument is that America has more to gain by spreading its ideas and values than through exercising its military muscles. They also often seek to make a clear distinction between pro- and anti-Americanism. But a little time with Tony, Big Pussy and Paulie Walnuts shows that things are a little bit more complicated.

Many people mistrust America not so much because they have not been wooed by its soft power but because they believe that they and their children are over-entangled in it. And many people are up in arms not simply because they are anti-American but because they are bipolar about America—simultaneously attracted and repulsed by what they see going on in the Bada Bing.

This is not to endorse Dinesh D'Souza, a writer who calls for an alliance between American conservatives and Islamists against Western liberalism. The cultural excesses of liberalism are a small price to pay for its benefits. And, besides, Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of al-Qaeda, fashioned his hatred of America while watching church dances in rural Colorado. Still, it is one thing for Western sophisticates, with a life-time's immersion in pop culture, to watch Mr Soprano at work; quite another for people in more traditional places.

American culture has always had a weakness for sex and violence. But since the 1960s it has gleefully eliminated conventional distinctions between good and bad, and since the 1990s it has been supercharged by the dramatic increase in the power of mass communications that are bringing America's cultural offerings to every corner of the world. The success of “The Sopranos”, both commercially and critically, can only serve to reinforce this trend. The tensions created by the growing global reach of shows like “The Sopranos” may prove far more difficult to manage in the long run than the tensions created by the passing neoconservative moment.

street view

This may be seem like a stupid post (and old news) to some of you, but I just discovered an interesting option in already-amazing Google Maps. It allows to see the address you're searching at just that, street view. the picture above is the part of the street where we stayed in NYC two years ago. Awesome, man.

Holidays

Dog leaving the European Union

We just spent a few days in Copenhagen, home to all things design, cleanliness and Scandinavian coolness. The picture was taken in hippie, squatter and communist Christiania.


As a bonus, we also went to Sweden. You just take a train (and that beautiful bridge), and half an hour later, you're in Malmö, at the other side of the Øresund strait. The city, although smaller than Copenhagen, has jewels like Calatrava's Turning Torso, which at 190m, is the country's tallest building.

Hairs moving in all directions

Rectone

How can you not love this? This is soooo much better than our Hemoal.

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...