Sandlander

Weekend video 4

2012-01-22T12:45:00.001+01:00

Text below re-blogged from here.

"Monocle 24 a post-Internet effort. In the animation above, Monocle shows the listener next to a home stereo, at a club, in the car listening to Monocle 24. The implicit assumption is that these devices are Internet-enabled. But the message is that Internet media is not a style of media. The Internet is invisible to the experience.

Monocle makes no Internet concessions. No tweetable headlines, no compressed audio. Even as it undeniably exploits the Internet. After all, its radio station is Internet only.

Traditional media types like to champion Monocle as a victory against the Internet. But they're missing the point. Monocle is post-Internet. Monocle is an example of how purposeful creative work is bigger than its medium."

Monocle 24 is what I listen to when BBC Radio 4 has programming which fails to interest me.

Weekend video 3

2012-01-21T17:54:00.002+01:00

According to Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isacsson, the Apple founder spent the last years of his life looking at how the company could shake up the textbook market. Apple unveiled the textbooks on Thursday at an event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

"These are beautiful books. Interactive, gorgeous, fun, engaging," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of world-wide marketing.

The company also released iBook Author, which will allow people to create their own interactive textbooks.

The Guardian cited above. And I left thinking how amazing this can be beyond education... for a new generation of transmedia story-tellers.

From Frogsmoke

2012-01-21T10:23:00.001+01:00

A thief in Paris planned to steal some paintings from the Louvre. After careful planning, he got past security, stole the paintings and made it safely to his van. However, he was captured only two blocks away when his van ran out of gas.

Asked how he could mastermind such a crime and make such an obvious error, he replied.

“Monsieur, that is the reason I stole the paintings.

I had no Monet to buy Degas to make the Van Gogh.”

(And you thought I didn’t have De Gaulle to tell you this one!)

Well, I figured I have nothing Toulouse.

Weekend video 2

2012-01-21T09:48:00.002+01:00

Weekend video 1

2012-01-21T09:46:00.000+01:00

For some reason I'm into architecture at the moment. And my fondness for trains is well known to readers of this blog.

And there is also the fact that the video is a quite brilliant of real footage and CGI material.

Good news!

2012-01-20T21:10:00.001+01:00

"Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill 'until there is wider agreement on a solution.' ... and ... “'In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the Protect IP Act,' said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in a statement Friday morning."

For the time being sanity prevails!

We can draw a breath of relief... and chill out for a few minutes with the track embedded below...

A kind of justice?

2012-01-20T15:02:00.003+01:00

This is a facade which can be spotted on no fewer than seven thousand streets in Germany, where the Schlecker chain of drugstores has a seventy-six percent market share of this retail segment. The concern is also present in many other countries of Europe.

The thirty thousand employees of Schlecker have never been in any way to be envied. The company's treatment of staff has been for long been seen as an example of cold-blooded exploitation and in many other areas the firm's practices have been highly controversial.

I know many people who avoid shopping at Schlecker whenever possible, people who like me have not felt themselves to be boycotting the stores but simply preferring to shop where the smell of indignity and repression is less pungent.

This morning Schlecker applied for insolvency protection. The chain's employees are even less to be envied now.

Paradomicile

2012-01-19T17:40:00.001+01:00

Paradomicile, a set on Flickr.

Architecture matters

2012-01-19T17:37:00.001+01:00

I admire and enjoy brash, bold architecture. The work of the Catalan architect, Bofill, was much criticized when the complex in Marne-la-Vallée was first completed.

But I preferred it to the construction shown below... also built as almost a complete circle of poured concrete with a circumference of a kilometre. This is Héliopolis, part of the naturist resort at Cap d'Agde.

I spent many summer vacations there, only occasionally haunted by the architectural reminder of Betham's 'Panopticon'...

But at Cap d'Agde it was not all brutalist concrete. I have assembled some other shots I made on Flickr and posted them under the headline 'Paradomicile'.

Oh dear!

2012-01-19T14:49:00.000+01:00

You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!

Paul Simon

After more than 100 years in business, the photographic company which defined how we take and process pictures in the 20th century has filed for bankruptcy. The Guardian has a wonderful gallery here.

Analogue film made by the old photochemical process is fast becoming a thing of the past. It's been announced that a trio of leading film camera manufacturers... Arri, Panavision and Aaton have made their last.

Net freedom matters

2012-01-18T09:13:00.003+01:00

Ever upward?

2012-01-13T09:00:00.003+01:00

From The Guardian yesterday... an interesting thought for a Friday the 13th.

"China could be the next country to go bust, if its headlong rush to build ever-taller skyscrapers is a guide to its future economic health. According to a study by Barclays Capital, the mania for skyscrapers over the last 140 years is a sure indicator of an imminent crash.

It points out that the construction boom that threw up New York's Chrysler and Empire State buildings preceded the New York crash of 1929 and Great Depression. More recently, Dubai built a forest of skyscraping offices, hotels and apartment buildings, including the world's tallest, the Burj Khalifa, before it got into terrible financial difficulties. In 2010 Dubai had to be bailed out by its neighbour, Abu Dhabi, to avoid going bankrupt."

High speed?

2012-01-10T14:04:00.001+01:00

Whilst France celebrates 30 years of its admirable TGV high speed rail services, Britain
struggled to complete barely 70 miles of high speed rail track after 13 years of indecision,
whilst the Government has wasted years without building more UK high speed rail lines,
despite a growing need and consensus of support.

The Guardian reports today...

"The government has given the green light to a new £32.7bn high-speed rail network and announced new stretches of tunnelling to placate opponents of the scheme. The decision ends months of speculation. The first phase of the network, between London and Birmingham, due to come into operation in 2026, will cut journey times by more than 30 minutes."

The first HST2 train will run fifteen years from today! Did the French build their wonderful network by taking so long to get each new stretch of track from blueprint to reality?

The final approval for the very first TGV line was given on the 23rd of March 1976 and work started in the December of that year. On the 22nd of September 1981 the line was officially opened, President Francois Mitterand travelled from Paris to Lyon at speeds of up to 260 kilometres an hour.

Weekend video 2

2012-01-09T10:07:00.000+01:00

I missed this clever adaptation of the German traditional New Year's Eve entertainment 'Dinner For One'.

Weekend video +

2012-01-07T10:30:00.003+01:00

Twiggy is currently a guest on the BBC Radio 4 program 'Saturday Live' and I reckon her album is going to be one of my very next purchases.

And on the Guardian website I am served up with another potent blast from my sixties past, noting that David Bowie has now reached pensionable age.

Ah well, Tempus f***it!

A tipping point?

2012-01-06T18:16:00.001+01:00

Ten years after Steve Jobs promised to reinvent the music industry with the iPod, digital downloads have overtaken physical sales of singles and albums for the first time in the US. Digital downloads accounted for a record 50.3% of all music sales in the United States last year, according to an annual report by Nielsen and Billboard, contributing to a rise in total album sales for the first time since 2004.

Cross-platform

2012-01-05T15:20:00.000+01:00

I was cross-platform at a time… fifty-year ago… when the term platform was used mostly to refer to where the trains stopped. Or that elevated section at the end of the school Assembly Hall.

It was thus. And it was in Dallas, Texas. I had two part-time jobs while attending university. One was at a local cinema which opened only in the evening hours on weekdays and screened only ‘art movies’ mostly made in Europe. Shows were always timed to start at six, eight and ten. Although barely out of my teens I was designated ‘acting manager’ after the previous incumbent made off with the box-office takings.

My other earnings came from a local radio station which boldly featured two hours of classical music each evening from eight to ten. My British accent qualified me to present this program on the air and each afternoon I selected the music and wrote and pre-recorded the introductions.

It was relatively clear to me that there could well be an overlap of the cinema audience and the listeners favouring the classics. It was a simple step to introduce a barter arrangement whereby the radio station was advertised on the cinema screen and the current movie showing got a mention in the music show.

The next step was to pipe into the cinema the opening minute of the day’s radio program, trailering the wonderful music the listeners would be hearing. And the counterpart was a broadcast audio trailer for the next week’s movie.

To me that all sounds like a precocious cross-platform promotion exploit for which there was no precedent that I knew of in 1961. At the time, I must admit, I was enamoured as much with the sound of my own voice as with the young girls who sold the popcorn and candy at the cinema’s concessions counter.

Fast-forwarding to the seventies and to Paris where I was employed as the manager of a well-known photographer. But the business model was by no means limited to the soliciting of assignments from editorial and advertising clients. The photographer’s work reached those who bought lavish collectable coffee-table books in unprecedented numbers in several different countries. The photos were sold as limited edition prints at prestigious exhibitions in many big cities around the world. They were also made available as very affordable postcards and during that decade the poster versions were on the bedroom walls of many youngsters, most of them young girls who identified with the models portrayed. The signature ‘look’ of the photographer’s work translated well to the moving image and the sound-track albums of several movies were very popular. I doubt whether a cross-platform policy had ever before worked so well for a photographer.

Moving a bit closer to the end of the last century I found myself in Germany working as producer of serial drama on television, the genre commonly derided as ‘soap opera’. Although in those days there were no devices to compete with the conventional television set as a receiver of the ‘product’ in its primary form it was nevertheless possible to give access to the story-world in alternative media. There were spin-off novelizations and above all hit records by artistes and ensembles whose origins and first showcases were within the fiction of the ongoing storyline. This was, perhaps, cross-platform ‘light’.

And now… I write. I am the solitary author in his garret turning out the occasional novel (Golden Dawn is promoted shamelessly top-left on this page) destined to be almost completely ignored even by fans of the ‘civilized thriller’ genre.

I am wondering if the book I wrote is failing to be discovered because of a transmediality deficit. It exists only as a Kindle edition with ostensibly nothing to set it apart from hundreds of self-published manuscripts languishing on Amazon’s platform.

The ne’er-do-well husband of the heroine of Golden Dawn is a passionate videographer. Why are his clips not on YouTube? (Although Vimeo hosting would probably be better suited since some of the content would certainly be seen as ‘adult’ in spite of redeeming aesthetic values. And my long experience has never given me cause to doubt the adage that ‘sex sells’!).

The heroine’s enigmatic companion is a talented artist. Why not a cycle of twenty-six drawings, one per chapter at least? Exhibitions could be organized in suitable cities. Buyers of a drawing would get the e-book as well and a live event is always a good promotional exercise.

Maybe this year I should step out of my lonely garret and go cross-platform once again. Of course I myself have no talent for drawing or painting. Nor do I have the wherewithal to pay those who would appear before my video camera. And when ‘on location’ means the Languedoc-Roussillon then further costs are implied.

Ay, there’s the rub!

Weekend video 3

2012-01-01T16:19:00.002+01:00

Maybe my New Year's resolution is not to be beastly any longer about Céline Dion! Her contribution on this version of one of my favourite Carole King songs is really good and my regular readers know full well that I am a sucker for voices singing in harmony.

Weekend video 2

2012-01-01T16:05:00.000+01:00

Weekend video 1

2012-01-01T16:03:00.000+01:00

2011 / 26:1 / 99:1

2011-12-31T12:22:00.001+01:00

This year David Cameron, the head of the British coalition government, managed to marginalize his country, putting it in a minority of one which could be easily outvoted by the other twenty-six members of the European Union. That was the ‘26:1’ story of the year.

2011 saw the protests of the Occupy movement spread far beyond Wall Street, giving currency to the ‘99:1’ slogan. The activists brandished an eclectic range of signs reflected disparate niche interests and concerns but had one thing in common; they had little hope that the elected politicians would remedy the inequities they identified.

“It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellow men.” So said George MacDonald, a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister who died in 1905.

Over a century later his words still ring true and his conclusion is even more alarming today. It is perhaps the case that his ‘best men’ are not only absent from the political arena but also far from numerous in the boardrooms of global financial institutions. The current dire state of the world economy seems to confirm this suspicion.

It can be predicted that the world of banking will change for the better. Reforms will be imposed, once again the alert minds of experienced and enlightened human beings will do more than algorithms to deliver the results shareholders will demand.

But citizens, the 99 percent, are not shareholders with votes that make a difference. Those who have in the past seen their vote in parliamentary elections as having positive economic or societal outcomes are increasingly uneasy. More and more they feel that if their candidate has what it takes to be elected he is almost certainly not the best man to make any contribution to effective governance.

The best any would-be parliamentarian can offer his constituents is a pithy slogan speaking of vision, of hope, of change. At the same time he will scrupulously avoid defining change in any terms which are bold, or radical, or disruptive. For were he to do so he would be seen as rash by the vast majority who equate ‘daring’ with dangerous, ‘radical’ with suspect and who view ‘disruptive’ as a harbinger of their own future and personal discomfort.

Thus it is that candidates often win elections by being above all reassuring and then when they find themselves elected recognize in the mirror their own mediocrity, inability to lead, to innovate, to inspire confidence. They are nowhere in the world’s mature parliamentary democracies the best men or women. Some are indeed deplorably lacking in character. Americans seeking to be their party’s candidate spend millions on campaigns maligning the opponents in their own parties. A German rises to accept a cabinet position, feeling… one must assume… that his non-authorship of his doctoral dissertation will be viewed as a trivial transgression. British parliamentarians gleefully claim expenses for items of the most egregious personal vanity.

It is telling that few young people express any ambition to enter conventional politics although there is no lack of altruistic engagement in non-governmental activism. Not that there are no representatives of a younger generation in the established political parties, some indeed with their ideals intact. But they, too, will one day need to win elections if they are to make progress in their careers. They will learn the vocabulary of reassurance and the tortured syntax of making promises which on closer examination are patently empty. Beliefs and principles they may once have had will fade as fast as elected positions are obtained, with the remuneration they provide, the status they imply, the opportunity to imagine if only briefly that they are indeed the best ones entitled to determine the future of their country and the fate of the governed.

The parliamentarians are not alone to be blamed. Over the decades the ranks of non-elected bureaucrats manning the vast apparatus of modern government has grown rapidly. When in 2010 the Greek economy was recognized as being terminally afflicted the German media were quick to point out that one-fifth of that country’s workforce are employed as civil servants. Indignation ensued with nobody in any hurry to point out that in the Federal Republic the comparable figure is one-sixth and thus insignificantly lower. However in this particular area the quantitative measure is possibly less important than the qualitative. Where those in the pay of the state are perceived as being positive agents promoting society’s well-being, the size of the cohort is of secondary importance. This could be the case in Sweden where the public sector is responsible for one-third of the labour market.

But in many countries it can surely be presumed that civil service staffing remains high because no elected government has demonstrated the courage to reduce the manpower to a level commensurate with the benefit the bureaucracy actually delivers for the good of the citizenry. And it can be assumed that a search for the ‘best men’ will not result in many discoveries in the corridors of power behind the parliamentary chambers.

There is no doubt that the democratically constituted parliaments of the latter half of the twentieth century were often a force for the good. There emerged leaders who could be called statesmen, individuals who saw clearly the imperatives after the defeat of the Nazi tyranny and who paved the way for the eclipse of the Soviet system.

The free world was well served by these men and women. But the governmental structures within which they worked have changed irrevocably as has the world we live in. Globalization, digitalization and even virtualization have created an environment which is as alien as it is unstable. It is a world which is not ‘product’ but ‘process’, in constant but discontinuous evolution.

Is the framework of parliamentary democracy… now in the twenty-first century singularly lacking in the ‘best men’… equal to the contemporary tasks of governance? There is the distinct fear that it is not. And on the supra-national level almost certainly not, however well-intentioned the motives underlying the United Nations or the European Union. The ‘best men’ are not to be found there either, or if there be a few they are unable to accede to leadership roles or find it prudent to keep quiet.

It might be suggested that the more globalization is understood and accepted as non-reversible, the more relevant ‘localization’ could become. It could be the era of socio-political networks brought to life at grass-roots level, not created by national governments suddenly moved by the principles of subsidiarity. Springing from the shared concerns and aspirations of communities such networks could be based on geographical proximity.
On this last day of 2011 there was a report on Radio 4 devoted to a social entrepreneurship project under the title ‘Your Square Mile’. The aim is to motivate citizens to take charge not only of their neighbourhoods but of their destinies. The website summarizes the aims.

“… the UK rioting brought chaos and devastation to the streets of our major cities over three nights in August. But amidst all that was some of the most uplifting news footage we’ve seen in a long while. Those armies of people taking to their streets with brooms, mops and buckets, to clean up after the rampaging hordes and reclaim their neighbourhoods, gave us hope that we haven’t all become selfish, money-grabbing hermits.”

However the ‘neighbourhood’ could also be virtual, in the form of ‘tribes’ united by common beliefs and principles. There may, to be sure, be a lot in untidiness; the London riots were not without tribal character, albeit of a negative kind.

If espoused by enough of the 99 percent, ‘tribal communitarianism’ could coexist with the 1 percent. Indeed the 1 percent… the bankers, brokers, tycoons and even the legislators and their bureaucrats… could perhaps simply be ignored as the 99 percent discover and experiment with alternatives to the status quo in a multiplicity of ‘bite-sized’ revolutions. Any wholesale overthrow of the establishment in an excess of anti-capitalist zeal would be a very old-fashioned way of bringing about change in the age of instant communication and social networking.

Communitarianism is summarized in a Wikipedia entry as a position which “cannot be classified as being wholly left or right, and many theorists claim to represent a sort of radical centre”.

If localism were to emerge as one template for the future of peoples living in countries now ill-served by outdated and bloated parliamentary systems, it might turn out that the ‘best men’ could identify with a radically centrist position and will be prepared to stand tall on a local level, even if they be writer, poet or man of faith as was George MacDonald. And, of course, if they be woman.

Same procedure as last year

2011-12-31T11:13:00.001+01:00

According to Wiki...

"The 18 minute single take black-and-white 1963 TV recording featuring British comedians Freddie Frinton and May Warden has become an integral component of the New Year's Eve schedule of several German television stations, Danish, and Swedish national television, a December 23 staple on Norwegian national television, and a cult television classic in Finland, Estonia, Faroe Islands and Austria; on New Year's Eve 2003 alone, the sketch was broadcast 19 times (on various channels). As of 2005, the sketch has been repeated more than 230 times. It is famous in other countries as well... including German-speaking Switzerland and South Africa."

Amazingly enough... as a feature on Radio 4 this morning discovered... the Brits tend to find it not at all funny. I saw it for the first time forty years ago and it is simply part of the Silvester ritual.

Arise, Sir Jonathan!

2011-12-31T09:15:00.000+01:00

Jonathan Ive has been honoured with a knighthood. It is heartening that a designer should be seen as as deserving of recognition as a golf champion or a former cricket umpire. I wonder when we shall see Apple's products bearing the Royal Warrant?

Mid-week video

2011-12-29T08:26:00.001+01:00

This is a film I must see.

2011-12-25T16:31:00.001+01:00

[Xmas] Weekend video

2011-12-25T16:29:00.001+01:00

2011-12-24T08:43:00.001+01:00

Christmas Eve... and the feeling that the past twelve months have gone by with amazing rapidity. The menu above was served at Le Beaujolais in Abu Dhabi a year ago. And, yes, it was a joy to be in the Sandlands for three months, escaping the German winter. And yet it was a sobering visit to the Emirates, a reminder that the time I invested... almost the entire first decade of the new century... in the UAE had no really positive outcome. I cannot look back with pride on any significant professional achievement. There were just a series of false starts.

I was, perhaps, too timid in my initiatives, too 'politically correct'. The visual on the left makes me smirk. Imagine linking Santa and cigarettes today!

In future, I promise to be all else than 'politically correct'!

The People's Post

2011-12-23T15:34:00.002+01:00

As many of you know, my weekday schedule demands that I leave the comfort of my flat in Schwabing in order to head through wintry Munich to my client's offices. There I upload the day's stories into their system and build the updated web pages.

I must admit that since the weather has entered the 'brass monkeys' zone I have more and more often in the past couple of weeks done the upload and page-build remotely, even if the screen of my laptop is too small to deal with a tool-set which really calls for a 26 inch display.

But I digress, as usual.

When I do brave the elements it involves turning off Radio 4 at three o'clock. For the past weeks this has meant shutting down at the end of each episode of a wonderful documentary series, The People's Post. This series has not only given a comprehensive history of the Royal Mail but also fascinating insights into the development of Britain's postal service over the centuries and highlighting aspects of its political, technical and cultural significance many of which were new to me.

Any of us who choose to call ourselves 'communicators' will certainly not regret using the BBC iPlayer to listen to the podcasts now available of the most recent episodes of The People's Post.

2011-12-22T09:47:00.003+01:00

2011-12-22T07:43:00.003+01:00

2011-12-21T08:17:00.001+01:00

2011-12-20T07:55:00.003+01:00

Words of wisdom

2011-12-19T13:44:00.003+01:00

"As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age: first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death." (Cicero)

"When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him carefully and with respect... but do not believe him. Never put your trust into anything but your own intellect. Your elder, no matter whether he has gray hair or has lost his hair, no matter whether he is a Nobel laureate... may be wrong. The world progresses, year by year, century by century, as the members of the younger generation find out what was wrong among the things that their elders said. So you must always be skeptical ... always think for yourself." (Linus Pauling)

"I am not a cheese!" (MacThomson)

2011-12-19T08:30:00.001+01:00

2011-12-18T09:54:00.003+01:00

Weekend video 2

2011-12-17T15:39:00.001+01:00

The director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet who also made the movie Amélie, was as much in love with the Orient Express as with Audrey Tautou, I suspect.

Le camion qui fume

2011-12-17T10:45:00.002+01:00

More about the brilliant venture here...

"Le Camion Qui Fume is Paris' first food truck and the brainchild of California native and Ferrandi-trained chef, Kristin Frederick. In a city where burgers of all forms and quality have become ubiquitous, it was going to take something special to make Kristin's burgers buzz-worthy in Paris. Once she landed the permits and the truck, all that remained was a way to inform hungry urbanites of the truck's daily location."

Weekend video 1

2011-12-17T10:19:00.000+01:00

I love her angst when she speaks of using Arial rather than Helvetica!

2011-12-17T08:45:00.003+01:00

2011-12-16T15:00:00.000+01:00

I very much like the latest from Banksy. It is said to be a comment on the paedophile scandals in the Church, an expression of protest.

Gradually I am becoming tired of assertions that the Occupy protestors do not articulate any new strategy of their own. Protesters are not, in my view, obliged so to do. In parliamentary democracies we accept the spectacle of professional politicians with their snouts deep in a well-filled trough. But our expectation is that their deliberations will lead to laws which are for the great good of as many as possible of those they represent. When these expectations are not fulfilled there are two options. One is 'revolution'... the trough will be seized... the other is 'protest'... the loud cry of those who find the situation intolerable and articulate a demand for change.

But making those changes remains the job of the politicians.

2011-12-16T08:06:00.003+01:00

Creatives wearing blinders?

2011-12-15T17:49:00.000+01:00

Another tip from the wonderful Roba Al Assi...

This is a hilarious yet absolutely brilliant look at the cliches of Hollywood, compiled by Christophe Courtois. Movie posters are separated according to genre, and it’s when they’re put together that you realize how depressingly brain dead mass culture is.

I am sure Monsieur Courtois could make a similar assemblage from the covers of paper-backs, a sector in which the cliché density is just as appalling.

Person of the year

2011-12-15T17:44:00.000+01:00

The story of the world's protesters, and the modern media they've used and inspired, is not remotely over. But their story is growing in part because old-fashioned media companies like Time are paying serious attention – and discovering that, like it or not, they are participants themselves in the global issues they choose to cover.

Dan Gillmor in The Guardian

2011-12-15T06:58:00.001+01:00

Waking from dreams

2011-12-14T17:19:00.005+01:00

The arabianbusiness.com story confirms that I stopped dreaming at just about the right time.

"The value of construction projects scrapped or on hold in the UAE soared to $958bn in the 12 months to October, signalling the Gulf state’s battered project market is still some way from recovery. The UAE's property boom ended in 2008, with home prices in the Dubai emirate plunging by about 60 percent, forcing many developers to abandon projects. More than half of the projects in Gulf country were scrapped or cancelled as project finance dried up.

Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Authority said in May up to 500 property projects were facing the axe and around 90,000 units were ‘under review’.

More recently, a slowdown in Abu Dhabi’s construction market has alarmed the industry, which fears a reduction in spending in the oil-rich emirate could crimp any fledgling recovery in Dubai. The UAE capital has pushed back the delivery of major projects including its planned Louvre and Guggenheim museums, in a sign it may be feeling the pinch of its $500bn ‘2030’ plan."

Ho, ho, ho!

2011-12-14T13:57:00.000+01:00

There are few things perceived as so 'typically German' (in a positive way) as the Christmas Market. I have heard that they are even springing up across the United Kingdom, complete with stands selling Glühwein.

And so we might assume that here in Munich the 95 Christkindlmärkte in and around the city are places where traditional German handicrafts... nut-crackers made in the Erzgebirge mountains... hand-blown glass baubles for the tree... cherubs crafted in wax... toys and decorations of all kinds... can be found in abundance. Pshaw! Humbug! Investigative reporters from Bavarian Television have discovered that a good number of vendors offer to the 1.6 million visitors merchandise 'made in Germany' which is in reality sourced from low-cost suppliers in Asia.

The result, of course, is that a 20 Euro nut-cracking hussar made in China sells far better than one costing 60 Euros but made by families of craftsmen who have been carving these figures for generations.

All a bit sad, I think.

2011-12-14T08:57:00.002+01:00

Progress?

2011-12-13T14:52:00.002+01:00

The Capital List is a new website devoted to the night life in Abu Dahbi. How things change. Ten years ago the after-dark scene in the nation's capital could be summarized on the back of a postage stamp! I suppose that for the twenty-somethings this could be a useful information resource. I rather liked the fact that Abu Dhabi was relatively quiet, but then that has to be a question of age...

2011-12-12T18:11:00.004+01:00

No, really?

2011-12-12T17:44:00.001+01:00

This calls for an explanation. I am absolutely certain that I have never been photographed at the wheel of a motor vehicle of any kind.

My exploits on the tractors maintained by the school farm in Maine in the late fifties went undocumented and although I have a vague memory of driving a 1950 Ford a couple of times (on the campus, of course, not on public roads) that also was not recorded for posterity.

There was a visit to California in 1984 when the driving was in a rented Mazda with my wife in charge. One afternoon in the delightful calm of San Luis Obispo I did... for some reason... feel curious about being in charge of an automobile. My curiosity was satisfied after three blocks and a single right turn.

And so the photo posted is unique and in several ways very misleading.

That is a BMW 6-Series Cabriolet with a hefty six-figure price tag. It costs about what I would pay for a studio flat if I had that kind of cash available. And I did not move the car a single inch.

Simple story, really. In a BMW training film I played the role of a doddery elderly gentleman thinking of buying one of these magnificent machines but left alone to come to terms with all the new-fangled controls and knobs and switches and dials... I tried for a Monsieur Hulot habitus with a Mister Bean edge! It seemed to be what the director wanted...

Except for the fact that most of the scenes were shot in an ice-cold basement garage... it was only between takes that I could warm up in my down-filled leather greatcoat... it was all good fun.

Weekend video 2

2011-12-10T12:36:00.001+01:00

Weekend video 1

2011-12-10T12:35:00.001+01:00

Chilly prospects

2011-12-10T08:47:00.001+01:00

Early yesterday The Times caught up with the story online as shown in the screen cap above.

This is how The Guardian put it this morning...

"EU leaders promptly agreed to bypass Britain and establish a new accord on the Euro among themselves by March. The EU appeared poised to line up 26-1 against Cameron in support of the Franco-German blueprint, leaving Britain utterly isolated."

I see outside that there is a flurry of snow on the roofs opposite. But this is not what makes me shiver.

David Cameron claims that his decision was based on his commitment to 'safeguarding the City of London'. This, above all, is what depresses me hugely. Had he been determined to protect a significant and traditional British industry... the builders of ships, the makers of steel, engineering innovators... I might even have applauded Cameron's stand.

But what he seeks to 'safeguard' is the financial service industry, a sector which has boomed in the past two decades. Speculators who often have little connection with either British society or culture... chancers from all over the globe who find London the ideal environment for their greedy and self-serving gambling... a wunch of bankers shamelessly giving credence to the claims of the Occupy protesters that it truly is a matter of 99:1 when taking that disgusting annual bonus.

Not only do I shiver, I cringe.

2011-12-09T09:36:00.001+01:00

From the Publishing Perspectives blog (here) the following...

"Growing Demand for Transmedia Stories: The huge growth of all types of intelligent devices, such as tablets, smartphones, net books, etc., is changing many people’s means of access to culture, information and entertainment. These new intelligent devices appear to be made for increased consumption of transmedia stories. The more people who use these devices to consume digital content, the greater the demand for transmedia stories will become. In other words, a higher number of 'gadgets' will likely equate to a higher demand for transmedia content."

I do believe it is time to review and possibly revitalize the project I attempted to launch in 2006, which could probably have a better chance nowadays.

I weep

2011-12-08T10:05:00.001+01:00

Via Roba Al Assi's always perceptive blog I learn to my alarm of this...

"H&M admitted to the fact that the models they use to display their clothes on their website are, em, computer generated. Yup. You heard that correctly. The models that H&M uses to display clothes on their website consist of computer generated bodies. Because even horribly thin human models who starve themselves to death to look 'good on the catwalk' are not perfect enough. Because even Photoshop doesn’t cut it anymore."

Now my eye... and surely that of many men... is always caught when the H&M billboards announce the imminent arrival of spring with imagery of bodacious promise.

Spring will never now be the same, in the knowledge that that we are possibly being seduced by mere pixels.

Mid-week video

2011-12-07T17:00:00.001+01:00

Could not resist posting this as soon as I found it! Full screen is a must...

Abu Dhabi versus Munich

2011-12-07T10:17:00.001+01:00

2011-12-06T12:44:00.001+01:00

2011-12-04T14:42:00.001+01:00

I am having a bit of a problem with history. Not even ancient history, just that of my own seven decades.

Forty years ago I was a regular house-guest in a lovely flat overlooking Zurich. When the weather was summery the television set would be wheeled out onto the very large balcony. One evening I was amazed that a sporting fixture... I think it must have been basketball... was being broadcast live from what was then the Soviet Union, from the land of Stakhanovite women of dubious femininity, where the suits worn by the politicians seemed to be fabricated from cardboard...

The twists and turns of history struck me again today when reading of the evacuation of 45 thousand residents of the German city of Koblenz in order to deal with the discovery made at low water on the Rhine of a 1.8 ton bomb dropped by the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.

And the day before yesterday while watching the rather unfathomable sport of biathlon on the television monitors at my usual café I was slightly discombobulated by the fact that the sponsor of the broadcasting from Ruhpolding (not an hour distant from Munich and understandably on manufactured snow) was Russian State Railways.

And the prestige trains of that operator... the Sapsan ('Peregrine Falcon') expresses shown above... are based on the German IC3 series trains... although widened by 33 centimetres for the Russian broad-gauge tracks... designed and built by Siemens.

History, schmistory!

Weekend video 2

2011-12-03T14:39:00.001+01:00

Yeah, I know!

Weekend video 1

2011-12-03T11:45:00.001+01:00

Mabrouk!

2011-12-02T13:16:00.001+01:00

Forty years young! I wonder what the United Arab Emirates will be like when these two reach their fortieth birthdays? What will the next decades of 'Arab Springs' have for consequences?

Not a new idea

2011-12-02T08:24:00.001+01:00

As schoolboys we speculated about something like this, in an era when the very, very latest refinement on the railways was a corridor connection between the steam locomotive and the rest of the train!

Ken Russell

2011-11-29T13:38:00.001+01:00

I must admit that Ken Russell was not a film director whose oeuvre meant a lot to me. But then I was not a fan of Fellini either, very much preferring Antonioni.

But The Boyfriend was a movie I well remember! Partly this was due to the fact that Twiggy starred in this quirky film, in her first acting role. And Russel was the person who gave her that chance. However I was the first person to think... back in 1965... that maybe the very, very young model could possibly sing...

I can't grow peaches on a cherry tree.

I have Twiggy's very first recording somewhere, cut on an acetate... must try to find it.

More recollection of my early years in Paris, days of a trio of friends comprising an Englishman, a Scotsman and a Hungarian. If I remember correctly, the Scotsman saw The Boyfriend only once. But the Englishman and the Hungarian probably saw the film over a dozen times. One is entitled to ask what they had been smoking!

Weekend video 2

2011-11-27T16:35:00.001+01:00

Find something really energetic to listen to very loud in iTunes... enlarge the video to full screen... and hold on real tight!

Weekend video 1

2011-11-27T16:31:00.001+01:00

Munich notes

2011-11-25T14:31:00.001+01:00

I am constantly reminded that so much of the picture which urban Munich presents is the result of the initiatives which were taken to prepare for the Olympic Games of 1972.

The fountain installation shown above, with jets of water four metres high, was designed by the sculptor Heiner Schumann. Over the years, however, the pumping system was increasingly degraded by the build-up of mineral deposits in the complex system of pipes. Finally the fountain delivered only embarrassingly feeble seventy centimetre jets and it was finally turned off pending renovation.

This is a place where I spend about ten minutes every day when I change from tram to bus on the way to visit my client. For the past six months it has been an ugly building site, but yesterday the fencing was removed and once again it looks as its designer conceived it forty years ago. The refurbishment, using advanced pumping technology and new materials for the plumbing has cost around 700,000 Euros.

When the spring of next year comes I look forward to a wonderful show from the fountains.

Regarding perception...

2011-11-23T14:32:00.001+01:00

When coming up with birthday greetings for my ex I landed on the idea of the Vuitton logo. But I also recalled how easily perceptions can be skewed. The story goes like this...

Back in 1965 I had a business relationship with the head of the Playboy organization in the United Kingdom, Victor Lownes III. He was a wonderfully colourful figure... “What is a playboy? It is usually someone who is getting more sex than you are,” he famously maintained... and he was rather rich. And so it surprised me not at all when I noticed that he owned a wonderful set of luxurious luggage. I saw the 'LV' design as Victor's monogram.

Enlightenment came later in the year. I saw the movie The Great Race and saw to my astonishment that the character played by Tony Curtis was carrying in his car a set of Victor's luggage! Okay, that's how I discovered Louis Vuitton, with a corrected perception of a reality which had escaped me.

While I am in self-mocking mode there is another anecdote from the beginning of the eighties. At the time in Paris many of my colleagues in the media scene were of Lebanese origin. My memory is of a drive from Paris down to the Mediterranean... my wife (not 'ex' then) at the wheel... when I was a passenger happy to have the leisure to gaze upon the passing landscape and observe the other traffic on the Routes Nationales.

I expressed, suddenly, that there seemed to be a great number of cars on the road with 'L' decals.

"Funny how many Lebanese there are on the roads..."

Skewed perception! Wife corpsing at the wheel and gently suggesting that the drivers might in fact be coming from Luxembourg.

Scotland again...

2011-11-22T10:00:00.001+01:00

This is a screen cap from a twenty-minute video about Scottish whisky, in which this pretty lass with a lovely accent introduces the viewers to one of the largest whisky collections ever assembled.

This she is explaining to a group of Bavarians, who have headed for Scotland with a few barrels of a premium beer brewed at Aying, just outside Munich. And the experiment the visitors have in mind is to make the beer barrels available for the final maturing of selected whiskies by a pair of distillers. The resulting usquebaugh varieties will be available for sampling at a gastronomy fair in Munich next February.

So far, so good.

The reason I post this is a phone call I received last week, from a sound engineer I must have worked with only once and about two years ago. Not only did he need a voicer to narrate the English version of the video, but he wondered whether I could deliver the text with a Scottish accent.

It so happened that the day I worked with him was one when I was wearing the kilt! Having four kilts means that each gets worn once a month, making for a regular weekly appearance of my bare knees to compete with the wearers of Bavarian Lederhosen.

Hitherto I have always seen this as just an indulgence in a mild form of eccentricity.

But this time the result was a nice little fee for translation and voiceover work... a highly satisfactory outcome!

I wonder...

2011-11-21T13:43:00.001+01:00

Should I perhaps consider a change of profession? What fun it is to use Google StreetView to research for my writing. I can see the paces my characters pass when they hurry through the streets of Edinburgh on their way to the next cliff-hanger!

Side effects

2011-11-20T11:23:00.001+01:00

On the one hand, I have never, ever in the course of quite a long life held a driver's license. On the other hand, for over six years now my professional life has revolved around media devoted to all things automotive.

I fear this specialization is colouring my approach to life in general. I certainly perk up whenever I see parked on a Munich street a wonderful veteran or classic car model with the terminal 'H' (for historic) suffixed on the license plate...

My ex-wife is currently in a Munich clinic recovering well from a hip replacement operation. The visual posted above was my idea for a motivational teeshirt... German license plate, of course, since she is German. WIth the white-and-blue Bavarian crest since she was born here in Munich... convenient that cars registered in the city all start with 'M' which happens also, by fortunate coincidence, to stand for her first name, with 'S' and 'T' completing the set of her initials. 1956... the year of her birth, of course.

The German text reads "Spare parts? Understandably!".

The teeshirt got a broad grin and we can be confident that very soon MST will be zooming around with renewed, impeccably maintained, vigour!

Weekend video

2011-11-19T09:40:00.001+01:00

Alles Müller, oder was?

The Guardian comments thus...

"Why mention that your advertisement is about yoghurt, it reasons, when you could just cobble together a mishmash of vaguely nostalgic cultural touch-points and pray that the viewer will be too busy cooing in dumb recognition to realise how catastrophically witless it all is?"

Weekend video 2

2011-11-13T11:26:00.001+01:00

Given that Jess Lewis is only sixteen years old I think it is safe to predict that she has a wonderful future!

Weekend video

2011-11-13T09:29:00.001+01:00

I am insanely jealous of this guy! As long-time readers will recall I am living in strictly limited space and sleep on a fold-down 'Murphy' bed. But the video proves that even in 450 square feet (just over 40 square metres) there can be elegant solutions and an inviting atmosphere.

Okay, my own space is about half of that of the New York teacher and as for the $70,000 he invested... well, lucky him, I guess!

A year ago

2011-11-12T15:17:00.001+01:00

For the Formula One weekend last year in Abu Dhabi there were blue skies and on the other side of the city from the Yas Island circuit I followed the action on large public viewing screens erected on the Corniche, opposite my client's office.

In Munich today we have blue skies, too, but the temperature is about thirty degrees lower and rapidly approaching brass monkeys discomfort.

Eheu! fugaces labuntur anni.

11.11.11.11.11.11

2011-11-11T08:08:00.001+01:00

If you take the six pairs of elevens as a binary number, the more familiar decimal equivalent would be 1,023.

Make that the year MXXIII... the year during which currency was first printed on paper by the Chinese.

Just a thought...

"In Germany the Karneval season (also known as the fifth season!) officially gets under way at 11.11 am on the 11th day of the 11th month. I suspect that this year there will be an extra kölsch or two drunken to celebrate, as if the Karnevalisten need the excuse."

Motorvision TV in the United Arab Emirates

2011-11-09T12:46:00.000+01:00

Where the Volkswagen Golf driven by the local police can be a powerful GTI model it can be assumed that automobiles are of considerable importance in the nation's culture...

And when the rules of the road can be enforced by officers at the wheel of a Chevy Camaro, where the police garage is full of exotic vehicles of all kinds, then we must be in the United Arab Emirates.

It was in the Emirates that I learned about all the things that could be done to turn a Porsche Cayenne into an off-roader fit for dune-bashing by a moneyed Sheikh.

It was where friends and colleagues introduced me to the exotic exemplars of the automotive elite such as, for example, the cars crafted by Spyker.

And all this was part of an education... an initiation... which which means that my current responsibility for translating into English the stories posted daily on the German-language Motorvision website is a task I undertake with pleasure and with the utmost respect for the young team of journalists who write the articles.

Although motorvision.com has been available in English for almost a year, yesterday saw the German media group make a big step forward, beyond the borders of its German home. On the Orbit Showtime network in the United Arab Emirates viewers will be able to see the English-language channel Motorvision TV. They will see programming made in the country where the automobile was invented and where cars are an enduring object of passion. As of tomorrow... felicitously timed to coincide with the opening of the 2011 Dubai Motor Show and as the excitement mounts at the start of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix... Motorvision TV will reach a new audience in a nation where the fascination for all things automotive is just as intense as it is here in Germany.

Mabrouk!

My life is average

2011-11-07T12:30:00.000+01:00

...but not 'my' photo! I found it by chance on Wikipedia. The number 27 tram brings me back late afternoon from my daily visit to my client, where I upload the day's translations into the CMS and build the updated web pages. And the tram stops right in front of Café Schwabing where one or two beers are the ritual before I walk the couple of blocks to my flat where the evening's reading awaits...

For quite a long time I subscribed to the feed My Life Is Average (MLIA) and today I recalled so many posts during the autumn before last in which 'crispy leaves' were mentioned. Here the trees started to shed their foliage about a couple of weeks ago and since then it hasn't rained. As a result the leaves are still dry and wonderfully crispy and kicking through big piles of them makes even an aged Sandlander feel a bit like a kid again.

Reading matters

2011-11-06T14:16:00.002+01:00

An Amazon reader review...

"...oh, what a thriller. It's a thousand pages with the dynamic energy of a bullet train or a wild mustang, screaming along with an almost unbearable intensity and narrative zest. I found myself nipping a hundred pages at a time, like trying to gag down a glass of Bacardi 151, because it moves with explosive speed and a madcap intensity that never really lets up. It's not a traditional Stephenson novel, but only a writer of his caliber could have crafted a thriller this long, complex, and energetic. And you get the sense that he just had a ridiculous amount of fun writing it. It's worth every moment of the read, and it's terrific fun watching the thriller genre get worked over by a writer of a caliber rarely seen in the straight-to-paperback set."

For me Reamde was this year's truly memorable reading experience, on a par with my serial immersion in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy last August. And, as was the case with those three volumes, the reading filled two weekends and the intervening week. For a budget-conscious reader this was huge value for money as well as a joyous reading experience.

Another loss...

2011-11-06T08:38:00.001+01:00

Seventy-five

2011-11-02T10:26:00.002+01:00

Since for many years there was only the single BBC television channel there was no need for any kind of graphic ident until 1953. The 'bat-wing' logo above was introduced in anticipation of the competition from the new commercial channels.

It was in that year, 1953, in Edinburgh that I first saw a television broadcast... the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. On our street three houses had the tell-tale 'H'-shaped aerial on the roof, although it was rumoured that in one case there was no actual television receiver in that home. Such a costly device did not find its way into our household in Scotland. And my television-watching years only really started after our family's migration in 1955 to the United States.

* * * * *

The Daily Express's Hickey column has marked 75 years since the first BBC broadcast in its own inimitable way. The diary column notes that the last BBC program to air before the outbreak of world war two was a Mickey Mouse cartoon on 1 September 1939. "And the first one after broadcasts returned on 7 June 1946? The same Mickey Mouse cartoon. BBC repeats have been a talking point ever since."

Reading matters

2011-10-28T13:03:00.001+02:00

Thank you, Amazon, you know me well! But the suggestion arrived less than twenty-four hours after I had bought this most promising tome (1,114 pages) from the English-language Munich bookstore, Hugendubel. This is the outlet which will close for good in about six months. And although I have more or less decided that when that day comes I shall migrate to e-books and read them on the Kindle Fire, buying Reamde reminded me of the fact that some books impress by their heft, their feel, their suitability as objects to delight the eye. The paper used to print Neal Stephenson's novel is unusual, the pages are cut with the ragged edges which makes French books so special and it has an unwieldy bulk in my lap as I read it.

And yet cyber.thriller author Stephenson himself would certainly approve of his work being accessed by an e-reader device.

Ah, the irony!

Weekend video 2

2011-10-23T16:32:00.003+02:00

Another pretty lady, and from even further back in time. But this time I have no doubt where most of the material was shot. Apart from the footage shot on one of London's bridges, the location was South Kensington, in the vicinity of the Tube station.

This was where I lived in 1965. This was the station I used almost daily. This was exactly how my neighbourhood looked when I was twenty-five. And all of this was an additional reason for my putting Repulsion very high on my list of all-time favourite movies.

Weekend Video 1

2011-10-22T11:26:00.004+02:00

I was a fan-boy then, back in 1973, and nothing in the interim has served to change my affection and respect for her!

Wonder which beach that is? My guess is that it must be one at Pampelonne, not to far from Eddie Barclay's villa.

Breaking...

2011-10-20T14:11:00.004+02:00

Getting the message?

2011-10-18T13:51:00.000+02:00

Police in Abu Dhabi and Dubai said the number of reported traffic accidents plunged during Research In Motion’s recent three-day BlackBerry outage. According to The National, accidents fell 20% in Dubai and 40% in Abu Dhabi. Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim from the Dubai Police department said his force saw the largest decrease among young drivers and men. “The accidents that occur from the use of these devices range between minor and moderate ones, but at times they are deadly,” Tamim explained. “Absolutely nothing has happened in the past week in terms of killings on the road and we’re really glad about that,” Brigadier General Al Harethi, from Abu Dhabi’s police department said. “People are slowly starting to realize the dangers of using their phone while driving. The roads became much safer when BlackBerry stopped working.” According to The National, there is typically a fatal accident in Abu Dhabi every two days and an accident every three minutes in Dubai.

Happy Birthday!

2011-10-18T07:36:00.003+02:00

Troubling times

2011-10-16T10:31:00.001+02:00

from MediaShift

"Since Adbusters called for a protest on Wall Street in September, a leader-less group calling itself Occupy Wall Street has been camping out in Zucotti Park in downtown New York. The group has been calling itself the 99% of people in America who have no power compared to the top 1%, and their protests have spread beyond New York to more than 100 more' occupied' towns and cities around the country. And today, those protests have spread to 82 countries around the globe, according to organizers. While the mainstream media initially didn't pay much attention to the movement (or only when there were disturbances or arrests), now there's even an Occupied Wall Street Journal newspaper with coverage of the events."

It's turning out be an interesting year, is it not? Today the protests are the headline story on the BBC World Service newscasts. '99:1' is a brilliant, evocative and easily comprehensible meme.

I worry that it will prove difficult for the vast majority, the ninety-nine percent, to agree on any single practical and coherent agenda for change. Will it not remain so very much easier for the one percent... experienced in the ways of steering the evolution of our society and economy... to circle they wagons and defend the status quo.

Yes, some of the protesters' signs are touchingly apposite... And the police brutality they are potentially facing on Wall Street and elsewhere is certainly swelling the ranks of those who suddenly recognize themselves as part of the angry and frustrated majority.

In Germany we must surely have a feeling of déja vu. The ideals of those who sympathized with the Red Army Faction, the Baader Meinhof Complex, were in the initial stages of their activism... before blood was shed... not so very different from those of the protesters now four decades later.

Later, of course, lives were lost.

Weekend Video 1

2011-10-15T09:30:00.001+02:00

The pretext for posting this clip is the news that new 35mm prints of Jean-Luc Godard's amazing movie have been struck, replicating the image quality the film had when it was first released in 1967, doing justice once again to the cinematography of the brilliant Raoul Coutard.

I cannot claim that I understood the film when I first saw it. I doubt if I fully understand all of it today. But it is one of the movies which convinced me that cinema would be my passion and, whenever possible, that audio-visual storytelling would be the arena in which I would seek to be active.

Back in 2007 I posted the long take which meanders through the barnyard... Unfortunately the YouTube account has in the meantime been closed. If I manage to find an alternative source I shall update this post.

Reading matters

2011-10-14T14:49:00.002+02:00

This video reminds me how many years have passed since I was a regular visitor to the Frankfurt Book Fair... exactly thirty years, to be precise. The book fair was always a tiring grind for exhibitors and I well recall long treks across the vast complex of the fair grounds... often through rain and even, when October played dirty tricks, through sleet... in order to visit different sections of the show.

I'm just finishing the quite droll book by former Member of Parliament, Giles Brandreth. I picked it up after hearing the author announcing on a BBC Radio 4 show that he is about to play the role of Lady Bracknell in a musical version of The Importance Of Being Earnest. I think that performance might be even more diverting than his books.

I'm not sure how I feel about Wilde being cast by Brandreth as a detective, albeit with Arthur Conan Doyle as his side-kick. For me he remains the genius who wrote the play in which I had huge fun as an actor back in the day. My 'Algernon Moncrieff'... well, I tried hard!

Huh?

2011-10-09T19:38:00.002+02:00

I spotted this on the Guardian website a couple of minutes ago... No, this is not the typical 'technical' usually encountered on the embattled coast roads of Libya. The caption explains that the vehicle was seized from some ancien regime big-wig. Fine... first thought is that a Cadillac Escalade must count as quite a catch in terms of the 'spoils or war'.

Wait though... look closer. This looks very much like a golf cart with Caddy styling. Presumably it was hi-jacked in the parking lot of the Tripoli Golf Club.

I'm not sure quite what conclusion to draw from this!

Reading matters

2011-10-08T16:42:00.001+02:00

A new Ian Rankin is always welcome. And as usual it was a great read. A.N.Wilson has this to say of the book...

"After the wonderfully gloomy Rebus novels, we now have Ian Rankin's second great sleuth: DI Malcolm Fox, who investigates bent coppers. Here, he's in Fife checking out a possible police cover-up when he unearths an extraordinary story of terrorism in the Kirkcaldy of the 1980s. This is vintage Rankin, a five-star crime novel by an author at the height of his powers. After reading it, you'll never look at the SNP in the same light again."

And so the story and its political setting was of particular interest to me given that my own work in progress hints at significant mischief which could follow a Scottish declaration of independence.

It is quite a long time since I have posted under this headline, not since the end of July. There are now over two dozen paperbacks on the floor under my coffee table... read, but not mentioned in the blog. Up to now when I have posted about some of my reads I have moved the books in question out into my wee hallway where they get stacked up against the wall. There they await an ultimate disposal which will most likely be transport to the local Oxfam shop since nobody here in Munich trades in second-hand English-language thrillers.

I suppose I have not blogged about those books on the floor because none did more than fill two or three evenings. Pulling out a first pile from under the table I note that twelve are the work of reliable journeymen (and women) who have... well, done their job, I guess. I am unsure how much I enjoy my Scandinavians, Camilla Lackberg (The Hidden Child) and Jo Nesbo (The Redbreast)... I find the tricky Swedish and Norwegian place names tend to make the reading tiresome on occasion. J.A.Jance has been around a long time but her Fatal Error, published this year, was my introduction to her work. Noteworthy is that I read it in a single sitting. But that was because I started it sitting outdoors on one of our Indian summer afternoons and continued when I got home.

Belinda Bauer is an up-and-coming writer, winning the Gold Dagger for the Best Crime Novel of 2010 with her first novel. I greatly enjoyed the atmospherics and the original characters in her second book, Dark Side.

Ann Cleeves' Silent Voices is also a 2011 release. Her Vera Stanhope is a wonderfully tormented Detective Inspector, in the words of an Amazon reviewer "a wholly original character. Vera is an unattractive, overweight, uncouth middle-aged woman who is also one of the most intelligent, cunning and ruthless police detectives you're bound to come across. Who could resist that combination? She cheerfully manages to anger most people she comes in contact with - suspects and colleagues alike." Great fun!

So on to the final volumes to be moved to the hall... Nine I feel no need to cite.

Another Philip Kerr again riffs on the Third Reich to good effect in Hitler's Peace, Henning Mankell with Inspector Wallander's final case (The Troubled Man) contributes further to my indecision about Scandinavian noir.

Raphael Cardetti lives in Paris, where he is a professor of Italian (specialising in the Renaissance) at the University. Death in the Latin Quarter is his first novel to be published in English. Clearly with such a title I was bound to buy the book and I had no regrets whatsoever.

[Now the dust-bunnies under my coffee table have nothing to read![

One final mention... Panic by Jeff Abbott. On his own website the writer has this to say...

"I am thrilled to announce that my first young adult novel will be published in the United Kingdom on July 7, 2011. For my first book for teens, I have taken one of my most popular novels, Panic, and transformed its hero, Evan Casher, into a sixteen-year old boy. Evan is a student who discovers that everything in his life... his parents, his girlfriend, his worst enemy... is a lie. I had a fantastic time re-imagining the world of Panic... a book rewritten from the ground up with new villains, new dangers, and new challenges. Now Evan Casher is a desperate but brave teenager fighting to avenge his mother, save his father, and discover the truth about his life."

Huh? 'Young adult'... 'for teens'... Now I stopped counting as a teenager in 1960! And of course I only consult the web after finishing a book and so had no idea that this was a re-worked narrative. It was one I enjoyed hugely, unlike many Amazon reviews who were distinctly unimpressed.

And in spite of my half-century of distance from Abbott's target readership. How bizarre!

.

One more thing

2011-10-07T09:19:00.001+02:00

On my way back from my daily visit to my client I passed the Apple Store close to Marienplatz, the very centre of the city of Munich. The man-sized iPad replicas were dark. There were little bunches of flowers... and some apples... placed against the windows on which a good number of Post-Its had been stuck.

It was late afternoon and time for me to head to my café for a couple of beers. For the first time in a couple of weeks there were clouds in the sky. Our glorious Indian summer was ending.

How fitting, I thought.

At Café Schwabing the numerous big television screens were showing the feed from NTV, a German rolling-news channel. At 18:30 they broadcast a hastily assembled 'special' devoted to the passing of Steve Jobs. I watched it and found it moving, even if in the café there tends to be no audio unless Bayern München are playing.

The 'ah-ha' moment for me came when the news special ended. There were commercials... trailers... promo clips... and then the graphic opener for the scheduled top-of-the-hour newscast. And then it struck me... all of these motion graphics elements, these video artifacts... spring from a design culture which owes so very much to the tools Steve Jobs gave us. While the Apple machines never had a huge share of the overall computer market they were and are the equipment of choice within what is rather smugly called the 'creative community'.

By the time the commercial embedded above came out in 1997, voiced in this version by Steve himself, I had been 'thinking different' for almost a whole decade, since the day when a colleague upgraded to the newly launched Mac Plus and bequeathed to me his Mac 512k.

In 1988 the game Shufflepuck Café was released. And that year, too, my daughter was born. It was not long before a little baby was pestering me to play against the shy dweeb Skip Feeney in order to hear him say in a tinny voice "good shot!" after winning a point.

In ten days she will celebrate her twenty-third birthday. I am happy to report that she shows every sign of taking to heart Steve Jobs' admonition...

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

2011-10-06T08:51:00.000+02:00

Jalopnik says...

Steve Jobs is dead. The Apple chairman and former CEO who made personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and digital animation mass-market products passed away today. We're going to miss him. Deeply, and personally.

Steven P. Jobs passed away on October 5th, 2011 after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. He was just 56 years old. We mourn his passing, and wish his family the very best.

He was the reason many of us got into this industry, or even care about technology at all. He made the computer personal, and the smartphone fun. Bill Gates may have put a computer on every office desk, but it was Steve Jobs who put one in every dorm room and bedroom and living room. And then, years later, he repeated the trick, putting one in every bag and every pocket, thanks to the iPad and iPhone. If you use a computer or smartphone today, it is either one he created, or an imitation of his genius.

He changed the way movies are made, the way music is sold, the way stories are told, the very way we interact with the world around us. He helped us work, and gave us new ways to play. He was a myth made man.

Prior to Steve Jobs, computers were alien to most of us. They were accessible to few people without an engineering degree. Not merely because of their complex operating procedures, but also because they were so cold and so inhuman. Jobs understood that they could be something more than that. That while computers would never be people, he could endow them with humanity. He could transform them into machines that not only anyone could use, but that everyday people would enjoy using thanks to the art of great design. He made them something that would be part of our lives. And he did that again and again.

His life story is familiar, but it deserves repeating. He was given up for adoption by his unmarried parents. He grew up in California, and was very much a product of that place and time. He took drugs. He got into phone hacking. Both were precursers to what would always be his interest: changing the status quo.

In 1976 he started Apple in a garage. Together with Steve Wozniak, he shipped the first true fully-built personal computer, the Apple I. He drove development of the Mac, understanding that it was the future of computers. The great thing that we would all see. He brought in a grown up to run the company. And that grown up forced him out of the company that he built and into the wilderness.

While he was gone, he started NeXT computer. The NeXT operating system would form the underpinnings of Apple's OS X, and iOS.

He also started the best movie studio of the past 30 years. Pixar's films were innovative, to be sure. It pushed the boundaries of CGI to such an extent that even today its early films still look great. But technology is only a tool. As with everything else he understood that great technology alone is not enough. It must be human to have an impact. Pixar movies tell stories. They make grown men cry. That was the impact of Steve Jobs.

After his return to Apple, the company began shipping iconic product after iconic product. Products that defined a decade. The iMac, OS X, the iPod, iTunes (which was very good, before it was very bad), the iPhone, the iPad. All of these were deeply human products. They reflected his understanding of how technology was used not only in the workplace, but in the home. In his keynotes, product demos typically showed not executives, but families.

He made Apple into the most valuable company in the world.

He never met his biological father.

He accomplished so many things, in so many fields that it's tempting to compare Jobs to someone from the past. A Thomas Edison or a Ben Franklin or even a Leonardo Da Vinci. We tend to do that because it helps us understand. But it does him a disservice. He was unique.

His own person. Our own person.

He was our emblematic genius. In 100 years, when historians talk about the emergence of the age of intelligent machines, it is Steve Jobs they will hold up as the great exemplar of our era.

Our world will be less interesting, less exciting, and less meaningful without him. Goodbye, Mr. Jobs. We will miss you so very much.

From Roba Al Assi

Oktoberfest ends

2011-10-03T11:21:00.003+02:00

As I posted previously, the Oktoberfest started this year with a couple of days of chilly and wet weather. But then things changed. We have now been astonished by fourteen consecutive days with cloudless blue skies and daily high temperatures approaching the mid-twenties, an indescribably lovely Indian summer. It is set to end on Friday and Saturday with next weekend's highs just single digit!

Weekend Video 1

2011-10-03T11:10:00.001+02:00

They call him "l'enfant terrible de la cançó catalana." And Albert Pla-Àlvarez collaborates from time to time with Judit Farrés, actor and musician... and in the clip posted a slightly unusual performance artist.

The show reminds me of stuff we experimented with in London at venues like the Arts Lab and, in particular, at the Round House when The Living Theatre visited at the end of the sixties.

Oddly enough this came to my attention while researching Puerto Escocés, where once at a place called Caledonia Bay there was an attempt at the close of the seventeenth-century to establish a Scottish colony on the isthmus of Panama. It failed badly.

I should point out that the manuscript which is my 'work in progress' hints at a seriously dystopian outcome for a Scotland striving for independence.

And... again oddly enough... one of the 'good guys' in my narrative is as casually exhibitionist as Judit Farrés in the video.

Research... given the sometimes surprising links Google is inclined to make... can be serendipitous in the extreme.

3 October 2011

2011-10-03T10:10:00.004+02:00

Google's logo adaptations to commemorate significant individuals and important dates are really very eclectic. I find it pleasing that today it is the German Unification Day holiday which is reflected in the design displayed above.

Creme 21 Youngtimer Rally

2011-09-29T13:27:00.003+02:00

Translation of stories for an automotive-themed website is... occasionally... more than just the way paying my rent.

When I saw the headline... also used for this post... I was immediately struck by how baffling this would be for visitors to the English language site. And also what fun language can be and how cultural references which are immediately meaningful in a particular country can make no sense at all in another.

In this case the German text reported on a gathering of fans whose affection is for cars which are not quite old enough to qualify officially as classics...

Anyway, I felt inspired to add the introduction which follows...

Preface

There are times when a post on these pages calls for a measure of ‘cultural orientation’. Few English speakers will immediately comprehend the headline of this story, except that it must concern a rally event. And presumably ‘Creme 21’ is some kind of sponsor? Sorry, no.

What about ‘youngtimer’, then? Disambiguation demands that we first consider the term ‘old-timer’ (yes, hyphenated) which Wikis suggests connotes “a veteran, an elderly person”. Such an old-timer is this writer, whose task and pleasure it is to translate the texts written by much younger colleagues at motorvision.de which is the German language website.

But for reasons which escape me the word ‘oldtimer’ (un-hyphenated) has been adopted by the Germans and Dutch to refer to what we would call in English ‘classic cars’, the elderly and honourable veterans of the road. Thus with the ‘oldtimer’ accepted and widely understood was a small leap to invent the term ‘youngtimer’ (which of course does not exist in English) to cars which are not quite old enough to be automotive antiques but have the merits to be seen as ‘future classics’ as the years pass, memorable models from the seventies and eighties.

Now you begin to get the picture of what a youngtimer rally is all about.

Now… what about that sponsor? Well, not really a sponsor, since the brand of body care products, at the time a competitor with Nivea, ceased production in 1986. But ‘Creme 21’ is unforgotten.

The attitude around Creme 21 and in the seventies was very exceptional: a combination of light-heartedness combined with a special understanding of fashion and lifestyle! We remember the tie-dyed tee-shirts, the long hair, the bell-bottom pants, psychedelic rugs, disco balls….but also the wild, apple-green Porsche 911 Targa or the distinctive and indestructible Mercedes 8 as well as the Citroën CX with its dashboard that looked as if it came straight from a science fiction movie.

21 was the age of official adulthood. Creme 21 was one of the first advertisers to use imagery featuring semi-nudity which today would be deemed Not Safe For Work. And so it is that the organizers of the rally meet for owners and fans of ‘future classic’ cars saw Creme 21 as the perfect expression of a nostalgia for a long gone era and the automobiles which were then so new and wonderful.

On another occasion I would love to explore how it came to pass that the Germans... having adopted the real English word 'Pullover' for the garment in question... continued to invent the pseudo-English word 'Pullunder' for a sleeveless jumper.

Beer and football

2011-09-26T12:38:00.000+02:00

Although the first two days of the Oktoberfest were cool and rainy, for the past week... and for the rest of the current week the story is of blue skies and temperatures reaching the mid-twenties. How fortunate dear daughter was to take her long weekend when she did, coming back from Maastricht to do her duty as a half-Bavarian young lady in the form of two seven-hour stints at the Theresienwiese.

Tomorrow, however, promises to be interesting. In the evening there is the Champion's League fixture which will pit Bayern München against Manchester City. Three thousand fans of the Yorkshire club are expected to descend on our town and it can be anticipated that many of them will have fuelled their football enthusiasm with quantities of the special Oktoberfest beer... alcohol volume 6.3%... before staggering off the the Allianz Arena.

The Munich police could have a problem on their hands, as they did back in 2001 when English hools laid waste to a downtown shopping street.

My problem is slightly different... do I cheer on the local team owned by Munich moguls or the visitors, munificently financed by Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan? I think I must hope for a draw!

Update

Keefieboy's comment obliges me to apologize to any Lancastrians. I never was very clear about the 'white rose' and 'red rose' business... But ee bah gum, what a rubbish match it was!

Eggs-propriation

2011-09-24T15:54:00.001+02:00

How to blow an egg:

1. Gently swirl the point of your scalpel into the end of the egg, pushing as you go slightly, until it pierces.
2. Repeat at other end but continue to widen the hole at the other end by swirling the scalpel around so it chips away at the sides. Make it large enough to just insert the skewer.
3. Insert the skewer and jiggle it around a little to break up the yolk.
4. Place your mouth over one end, the other end over a bowl and gently blow into the egg. It might take a few puffs before it starts to come out, but once it gets going it will all come out with a few blows. If the yolk appears stuck, shake the egg and try the skewer again.
5. Now hold a finger over the bottom hole and place the top one under running water so the egg catches a little water. Shake it around a little and blow out again.
6. Leave to dry.
The result is an empty egg. It still looks like an egg, essentially unbroken. But the content has been blown out of it.

Taking for a change a slightly serious look at the broken/unbroken theme... and reeling from the awareness that so many governments in countries usually termed advanced seem at the moment incapable of dealing with with grim economic realities... I wonder if the problem might be that governments have become 'hollowed out', with just an empty shell remaining.

Globalisation is a widely discussed phenomenon in politics and international relations today. It is a wide and far-reaching subject, having many different effects on different types of states. The state itself is a widely contested notion in modern day international relations, the very existence and power of the state under wide scrutiny in the globalising world of today. There has been a claim by contemporary economists and writers such as Susan Strange that globalisation has reduced state sovereignty and power in decision making, leading to the 'hollowing out' of the state and the pooling of state authority in multinational organisations, transnational corporations and entities rising to global internet dominance. Her view is that states have lost their command over outcomes and their authority has diminished.

The reduction of political power; for example, of a member state on joining a supranational body, such as the European Union; of a local authority by national government; or of a state by global organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.

Our Western democracies... empty shells? How fragile! Almost egg-splosive!