Left and right

Drunk weekend before, new headphones today London in 3 weeks, Nepal for May Still no idea where this is heading but luckily, cool people almost everyday

New flat on the weekend Mexican, Greek and me maybe a shave and a haircut doubtful, but let’s see

No matter how old I become, I’m always surprised when spring comes, as if it’s not certain.

Oh, BTW, this is actually important

For everyone who has a GMail account (or some other Google service, but for the majority of you this will be GMail.

Please visit www.google.com/history and enter your password. Also, best to do it now, don’t procrastinate.

What you should see is a list of every single search you’ve done for a good couple of years, tied directly to you email account, hence also your full name. Probably best to delete this entire thing, as well as to kindly request G to stop tracking you in the future. Note the request here, as Google is and will always be an advertising company, and as much as I like Don Draper, I would never trust him with my wife.

You could also consider using the unfortunately named DuckDuckGo for all your searches. It’s not open source yet, but it claims to be the most protective about your privacy of all the search engines.

Also don’t forget your ISP is probably required by the police to log all your internet traffic of the past x months, but there’s nothing much you can do about that than use something like Tor.

What’s really interesting is that the technology to have completely secure email and browsing is already free and ubiquitous, but nobody really uses it.

BTW FYI

I’m fine. I’m rushed, and slightly hunted, but I’m fine. There are many things I want to write about, but all of them will be half-hearted unless I put the time and effort in. Considering that I’m simultaneously being kicked out of my flat, being indignant about the Western/Israeli effort at staging a war against Iran, as well as planning a heroic escapist caper, please forgive me this post-it. As well as some other stuff emerging that I’m not supposed to talk about.

One thing never seems to fucking change, I’m still trying to do too many things at the same time, failing to bring any to a satisfactory conclusion. Ironically, this post is pretty representative about my life, by being exactly that. But I wouldn’t leave you with only excuses. Still your humble servant.

PS Belgium next week

Some strange things

in old Cockburn street

BTW

I have my camera again. The same dirty, scratched one.

The good ones go first

Today, the only thing that matters is that Etta James is no more

And thanks to modern times, my links to her music broke. Ping me and I’ll burn you a CD.

2011: A retrospective

There’s a lot of things I can say about 2011, but, in all honesty, there’s very little I want to leave to posterity. There was one thing I did want to write about, but to my later amazement I discovered I was dead wrong. For about 15 minutes, I truly believe I didn’t fall in love at all last year.

What was actually going on, is that  I was loathe to admit that the only time I feel in love last year was with a woman that I’ve never met with person, that I only know from listening obsessively to the same couple of music records I found on some dusty corner of my hard drive. Yes, dear readers, I’ve fell victim to the common teenage crush, and I wish I was kidding.

Her name is Yasmin Levy. Ethnically, she’s Ladino, Jewish of Spanish roots. Her music is both this heritage (of which her father is an eminent scholar and performer), as well as Flamenco and Middle Eastern influence. The music can be haunting, exhilarating, bone-chilling or passionate, and often all of these at the same time. But you can figure this this out for yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPOpcAp_qnU

From the mouth of this wonderful creature:

I am proud to combine the two cultures of Ladino and flamenco, while mixing in Middle Eastern influences. I am embarking on a 500 years old musical journey, taking Ladino to Andalusia and mixing it with flamenco, the style that still bears the musical memories of the old Moorish and Jewish-Spanish world with the sound of the Arab world. In a way it is a ‘musical reconciliation’ of history.

PS Does any one know a Ladino restaurant in Scotland, or another place they congregate?

Edinburgh, pt 2 (the sun)

Winter equinox is coming up. Edinbr’a will have an amazing 6 hours and 57 minutes of sun. I like being able to start work later, I get to see the sun in the morning even if it’s on my back. I try to sneak out for lunch late, so I can catch it again when it’s low. Today I spend the whole day outside, and realized the major problem isn’t that it’s so short, but that it almost never reaches you in the street, unless you’re lucky enough to walk a street in the right direction. The comical result is that most of the streets and building are quite dark, while the sky is quite dramatic as sunrise almost immediately turns into sunset. I spend a lot of time looking up. This is not really a bad thing, as the city gets more interesting from the 1st floor up.

When I get out of my house in the morning, I can see Arthur’s Seat (dormant volcano) in nice lighting. Then it’s a short way North to North Bridge, which never fails to slow my cadence. I still think it’s an amazing sight, and as soon as my camera arrives here I’ll show you why. Suffice to say that you can see about half the landmarks, including my personal favorite Edinburgh’s Shame (aka Scotland’s Disgrace, or the National Monument of Scotland), for which I share an affection normally reserved for my late brain-damaged cat.

Today marked my fifth week living here. I’m not sure why, but I still don’t have any well developed opinion on this city, or on how I feel living here. Basically, I need to relearn 9 to 5, learn a new field, make a new circle of peeps, and, something which I underestimated initially, get used to new cultural sensibilities. I think a mistake I made was thinking it would be quite similar to when I moved to Berlin. While it’s not harder, it’s different, and when I moved to Berlin I didn’t realize it was permanent, so in a way I took it less seriously. Next time I move somewhere new I will probably make an effort to arrive with some obligation free weeks, just to explore and get a grip.Right now, it’s pretty hard to tell you where I stand and how I see it, as I still figure out stuff every day about this city and myself,

The advantage of the whole darkness though, is that I have discovered the Scottish alternative to Berlin’s freeshops. It’s called a charity shop, and I can find tons of great books for about 3 pounds each. I’ve been a’hoardin, but I can already tell you right now that William Dalrymple seems to only write great books, and if you’ve had any passing interest in traveling or history, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. From the “Holy Mountain”, about Christians in Turkey/Levant. Incidentally, he’s Scottish.

Edinburgh, pt 1 (the letter)

I’m moving to Edinburgh. And, in trademark style, I manage to put off the actual packing until it’s too late to make any better effort than the one needed for a half asses job, and I’m left with making one pass over my meager possessions, chucking everything that seems semi-useful into a well-designated corner. Frantic as I am,  I resist the common temptation of perusing all the optimistically bought books, still unread from the day they claimed their place in the bookshelf. Resist the call of the small cardboard box with a small, eclectic collection of pictures, correspondence, flyers and other various paper based flotsam. But, stuffed between the collected works of Salvador Dali and a thumbed copy of a Kundera, I do find a curious object that’s able to waylay my attention. More than curious, it’s probably the most enigmatic object known to mankind. The unopened envelop.

Nothing on it’s exterior betrays it’s content, writer or recipient, but it’s form and color tells me it’s one I wrote. This also means that it’s written to a woman, as I can’t remember the last time I wrote a hand-written letter to a man. From which you can probably deduce a lot about the letter’s content and intent. But I digress. One of the fundamental properties of unopened letters is that they, such as everything else, follow the second law of thermodynamics, and tend not to stay unopened for long. I rip open the letter, eager to place it in space and time.

One glance at the heading is enough to bring back the context of this letter.  I deliberately choose to use the word “context” here, to underline the importance of the frame of mind of the writer at that time, as well as all other aspects that are not covered by the strict contents of this missive. I know this letter quite well, as the particular one I’m holding is the result of a couple of drafts, as well as a lot of careful penning on the subway, trying to space short, well timed burst of writing between the violent jostling of the old fashioned carriages. It takes only a couple of second before I’m dipped into a nostalgic reverie.

To make things more concrete, let’s say this letter is written at a time T1 (Time one). It’s written from a person A (being, obviously, me), to a person B (being whose identity is ironically only obvious to B). Let’s also start to make an early distinction between people at different times. This makes this a letter written by A1 (me, at time one) to B. Note that the lack of time for B, as the person it’s written to is a hypothetical person, a person whose characteristics I have extrapolated from earlier events, as well as a healthy dose of wishful thinking on my part. Or A’s part, as you prefer.

Moving on. With the semantics hopefully cleared up, it’s relatively easy to explain to you the contents of this letter. One of the most important elements is an ephemeral reference to another time T0, when A0 and B0 shared a couple of hours of conversation, as well as a couple of beers and illicit cigarettes. But the term “a couple of hours of conversation” is woefully inadequate to describe what in actuality transpired in those hours, and a good approximation would be that in those short hours A0 and B0 had a shared understanding, a fundamental sameness that render any imperfection in communication innocuous and imperceptible. An optimist might say that that moment was special enough to remove any reference to time, and just demarcate the event as A + B, an ideal and perfect meeting of two souls, released from the shackles of being within the context of a particular space and time. A pessimist  would find it hard to be a pessimist at all, given the circumstances.

So, now we know that the letter, written by A1 to a (hopefully receptive) B1 refers to this event T0. This letter is also constructed on the presupposition that both A and B have an innate ability to have a similar event in the future, as well as B1 being receptive to the idea of giving it a whirl.

What happened to the letter after it was sealed, I can only guess. I can safely assume the letter was finished at some ungodly hour at which no postage can be procured, and given the fact that A has a tendency to procrastinate, there’s no reason to assume A1+a bit wouldn’t. And perhaps this A a bit later that T1 (let’s call him A2, for clarity) didn’t start to doubt A1’s assessment of the B1 receiving the letter (very distinct from the B1 mentioned before, which is the person A1 imagines the letter will be read by). A2 is not sure A1 knows who B1 really is, as he’s not sure himself, and as he’s A1 senior, he’s supposed to know better. A2 decides to play it safe and doesn’t post the letter.

Now, what I really find mind-boggling, is that fact that I managed to find this letter in exactly the right moment to permanently fuse and confuse the event A + B with my move to Scotland, even though they’re not even tangentially related. And, somewhere in the future, say T4, A4 will think back on A3 finding a letter written by A1 to a hypothetical B1 about an earlier event of A + B, and all of this stuff will come back to him a matter of seconds, perhaps as he’s carefully looking for his unabridged Nabokov, somewhere between the collected works of Salvador Dali and a thumbed copy of a Kundera.

NB. A and B did, in fact meet again, and the entire event of A + B was never mentioned or referred to. The whole affair even  had a slightly awkward and embarrassing overtone. Both Ax and Bx seemed to have an unspoken agreement that something as time,- and placeless as A + B can only happen in a very particular time and place, which are only known a posteriori. So just make sure you enjoy it when it comes along, as it seems these A + B events are extremely rare (on the order of a couple per lifetime), and it would be a shame to either force or deny them.

Oversight

Sometimes, I manage to overlook some very vital things. For example, I consider myself an amateur listener of soul music, but the very embodiment of that genre managed to fly completely over my head. Sam Cooke, in this instance with the extremely poignant “A change is gonna come”.

I was born by the river in a little tent Oh and just like the river I been a runnin’ ever since It’s been a long, a long time coming but I know A change gon’ come oh yes it will It’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die Cuz I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky It’s been a long, a long time coming but I know A change gon’ come oh yes it willI go to the movie, and I go downtown Somebody keep tellin me “don’t hang around” It’s been a long, a long time coming, but i know A change gon’ come oh yes it willThen I go to my brother And I say “brother, help me please” But he winds up knocking me Back down on my knees There been times that I thought I wouldn’t last for long Now think I’m able to carry on It’s been a long, along time coming but I know A change gon’ come, oh yes it will