nonTROPPO.org

Yesterday I took part in one of the largest anti-war demonstrations in Britains history. Organiser estimates of up to 450,000 people turned up [1], an amazing number for a country that never has taken the right to assemble in large numbers to criticise the government very seriously. The atmosphere was simply magic. It was so rejuvenating to see the nearly half a million demonstrators from many different organisations so unified in working towards resisting this impending futile war.
We sadly missed many speakers, but arrived when Scott Ritter (though I never heard him introduced) was attacking Blair for publishing that rather pathetic dossier of ‘evidence’ (reminded me of the other equally weak dossier against Osama Bin Laden). Scott said there was nothing new in it, and that it was merely ‘propaganda’. He also attacked various groups in the demonstration who were criticising the United States, saying that the American people were ‘noble’, but that it was who they are ruled by that was to blame. I agree with this only to a certain extent, because one should assume at least some responsibility for the attitudes and deeds of your Goverment. If you just say ‘the people are great’, when it was those people who in some way enabled that Government to enter office, then who is to blame? Fine, you can say that the Government (e.g. Bush & Co.) did not actually win the elction, but enough Americans voted to get him close enough to the finish line so that he could cheat his way into first
position. Just like many Britons, many Americans don’t understand the feelings of the majority world, and blaming the Government and media for everything denies us any responsibility. Right or wrong, I know it is very complicated to assign culpability in these situations, but saying NO citizen in a democratic state is ever responsible for the deeds of it’s Government seems as fallacious as extremists saying all tax-payers are equally responsible for the crimes of their Government.
[1] Police estimated 150,000 - in this case the police were WAY off the mark…

As I’ve discussed with my friend Katharina, sometime the space between objects, and focussing on ‘what is not there’ rather than what is, can greatly aid in an appreciation of ones surroundings. Katharina suggests that it also makes one more ‘creative’. From that perspective then, the recent analysis of a 500 year old Zen garden in Japan (see image above) should come as little surprise. The researchers used a medial axis analysis to determine the structural placement of the rocks from the point where one views the garden, and found that lines of symmetry, medially placed between the stones naturally converged to the viewing zone. Randomly placing the stones did not yield such a symmetry pattern. The pattern resembled a tree reaching out from viewing spot (the red point in the second image), and it is suggested that the mind picks up on such ‘structure’ in the space between the stones. This may be one reason why the garden has such a calming aesthetic. I am somewhat skeptical as to how far one can stretch this type of analysis to the experiential level of Zen mediatation. But nevertheless it is an elegant analysis of the structure in the space that goes someway to explaining its impact on us. This suggests that subconsciously we may focus on the space between objects in this type of environment, which gives up the experiential boost outlined above…

On the first day that we arrived in Italy to visit my Dad, because we flew in to Pisa airport, we stopped in Pisa for a morning espresso and a little walk (you remember how good coffee can be when you arrive to Italy….). After our espresso and wonderful freshly made pastries, we sauntered to see the leaning tower after it had been ‘cured’ of its perpetual collapse. Parked next to a back street tourist stall, where one is able to buy leaning tower pepper mills and postcards of Galileo nude, was this car completely filled with cats. There must have been around 12 cats lounging inside and outside the said vehicle. This cat on the roof was blissfully unaware of all the tourist commotion around him. The owner of the car, who also owned the stall, obviously didn’t mind the fact he was driving round in what was basically a giant fur ball…
Camera: Lomo LC-A Film: Cheap Jessops Slide Film Cross-processed

Well, it is a strange thing when you feel sad for the death of someone you don’t know, and I’ve scathingly attacked others before for the mass-mourning phenomena surrounding such utterly unworthy subjects as the Queen Mother, but the old violinist of the band Taraf de Haïdouks, Nicolae Neacsu has died at the age of 78. I’d met him 3 times (so I knew him a little bit at least!), and although he speaks no English, everyone always fell in love with him. I remember him most because after concerts, he would wander around trying to steal cigarettes off everyone!!! He was somewhat more reserved than the other members of Taraf, maybe he was just
older. I don’t think he spoke too much French either, which is what many of
Taraf know, so he always communicated using universal sign language.
When I first saw Taraf they were playing with the Kronos Quartet, and I remember Nicolae walking onto the stage and starting singing into the Royal Festival Hall without a microphone!. He tried to fill the huge space with lung power!!!
He was most well know for his unusual method of violin playing, where he ties a string to one of the violin strings which hangs down, and then plays by scratching this string with his finger nail while playing. The result is a melodic creaking!!! It was really wonderful when the Kronos quartet came on stage later and he and they all played using this method; truly magical. His song using this technique about the fall of Ceaucescu always gives me chicken skin!!!
The next time I saw them was at Ronnie Scotts (a famous London Jazz club), and it was there where I started to truly understand the music. No one was dancing at all, and only me and a small hard-core group at the back were doing what one should with this
music - go wild… A pretentious jazz club is definately NOT the place to play wild gypsy music. I spent quite some time trying to communicate with Nicolae, and in the end we gave each other a hug, it was the only way I could communicate my love of this music, and the personalities of the musicians. Taraf have no pretentions, they often busk on the street before concerts (not for money, but for love of music), and they just want people to enjoy their music. They almost always continue playing in the bar or on the street after their concerts.
I remember one concert in Hammersmith, it finished at 10pm, and they then continued in the bar until 1am!!! We then had to leave, and as we were driving home, we stopped at a pedestrian crossing only to see a group of about 30 people dancing wildly acoss the road, Taraf in the middle and wandering down a sleepy suburban street. They are crazy! And Taraf will miss the unique personality of their veteran fiddler.
So, Nicolae - may you fiddle on wherever you’ve gone, and tonight i’ll get drunk on vodka, and dance till I collapse. It is the way I think that I could best honour you…

Found an obituary of Nicolae in the Guardian. For some more pictures of him, see here.

An issue which always makes my blood boil quickly is that surrounding asylum seekers. It infuriates me when I see inflammatory articles in newspapers that suggest that England is being overrun by illegal
immigrants and asylum seekers (particularly by papers such as the Daily Mail, see here for a nice comparison article on press atitudes to immigration). Such articles hugely inflate the importance of the issue, and leads to ignorant intolerance and hatred among people. This has been confirmed by new evidence showing violent attacks on refugees in England has reached an all time high.
Of course tax evasion by the rich “(see example here)”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,682292,00.html rarely gets such tabloid treatment (do you really see the Daily Mail screaming headline after headline about unfair tax breaks???, or do Tax evaders ever get their head kicked in by brain-dead thugs???). However, by my estimation, general tax evasion by the super-rich would pay for 30’000 refugees to stay in England. I’m sorry, but even if 10% of the refugees are ‘truly’ escaping life-threatening persecution (and I hate playing such silly numbers games with human lives…), then that is money
well spent. How can I accept our Governments spending such vast amounts on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for example when it then treats Afghan and Iraqi refugees with such contempt (refugees partially through previous and current foreign policies). It is easy to play the moral high ground when comparing oneself to the Taliban, but much harder to carry through on your promises to support those affected by such regimes. And the media frenzy over immigrants seriously compounds an already difficult situation. I won’t discuss the fact that many local industries depend critically on black-labour, allowing western companies to be more competitive at home (not that I agree with it). This aspect of immigration is very rarely discussed, only exacerbating peoples ignorance in assuming immigrants only take from a country.

Walking around London a few days ago, I saw many Evening Standard (the London local newspaper) posters for their headline story “Saddam Close to A-Bomb”, and later overhearing people talking on the bus confirmed to me that this story has had a clear effect on reassuring people that war is a ‘good thing’. So, when I read an op-ed article by the bulletin of atomic scientists I was really disappointed. Now, I know (I do know) I should realise how easy it is to use propaganda to sway public opinion, but this personal experience gave me the inside-view of how directly it affects individual people’s views. It makes me truly disappointed, especially as I don’t suppose the alternate views expressed by these scientists will get to have anywhere near the same impact as the original scaremongering…

Mirrors have always fascinated me. Both straight and curved mirrors - they present a world to us at once familiar, and yet also highly irregular. When I was young I would spend hours walking around my house with a mirror / inverting prism combination so that I was literally walking on the ceiling. We form an internal model of our familiar environments, and so these kinds of manipulations of our perceptual world have an immediate and striking effect on us. The latest use of a mirror is the GOOGLE mirror. A mirror in internet terms is a backup copy of a web site, and google allows an interface into it’s main database to be mirrored. This allows access to google even if, for example, a governement blocked the main google site
(which China does). This site however also reverses the text of the page, and you therefore need a real mirror to view the web site! It’s very bizarre to surf via mirror - but I suppose if content blocking was enabled, the double-mirror could bypass it because all the text is reversed. What if random unicode characters that appeared similar were also used? I’ve been homeless (!) for the last week and a half, which is why I haven’t updated… The joys of London…