Why are things, sometimes, so difficult!

Why is it so difficult to transfer music with iTunes from my Macbook Air to my mobile phone?  And that is a real question.  I have downloaded the programs that are supposed to help and all I have got is increasingly frustrated as the music stubbornly stays on the Mac and will not seamlessly transfer itself to my phone.

At which point, I know, some of you are going to ask, “Why are you trying to transfer music anyway?  Haven’t you heard of things like Spotify?”  Well, I have.  But I feel that there is something deeply unsatisfying about instant access to infinite music without some sort of effort.

This explains my love/hate relationship with the Internet.  There is nothing more satisfying that having an informational itch that can be satisfied by a few key clicks. 

I always forget the word for the technique of putting opposites together like “hot ice” in Romeo and Juliet, but I know that I can find it out by going on to Google.  Which I just did.  I first searched with “technical term for hot ice” and found a whole series of scientific, chemical references which, if I had not been writing this, I might have been tempted to delve into and spent god knows how much time getting further and further away from the original investigation! 

However, I added “Romeo and Juliet” to the search terms and got to a whole range of references.  Glancing through them I soon found the word “oxymoron” and didn’t even have to click on anything further to find it!

I had the whip of writing this to keep me on task, but the number of times that I have started off looking for something like, “When was Cervantes first translated into English?” and found myself, half an hour later looking at the latest finds from the ancient Antikythera wreck, and looking at the amazing “Mechanism” that was found that might well be the oldest computer in the . . .   You see what I mean! 

Fascinating stuff, but not what I was looking for.  [Though, if you haven’t heard of the wreck, you really should read about it.  The quality of stuff that has come from this sunken ship already is amazing, and the finds that might come to the surface next year promise wonders!  You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_wreck  Well worth reading.]

But to be realistic, you don't always diverge from your appointed task and find yourself reading about something as culturally uplifting as an old Greek wreck!  No, most of the time you discover that, for the last twenty minutes you have been going through a horror show of pictures that show "25 child stars who have not aged well" or "50 famous people you did not realize have died this year" or something similar and generally unedifying - but compulsive!

So, the excitement of the chase for knowledge has been made much easier.  The laborious use of the index in various encyclopedias and the frustrating page turning has gone.  But I seem to recall that my page searching days were just as frustrating, as my eye would inevitably fall on a tempting title and be drawn into seductive byways having nothing to do with the original search.

But the speed with which you can get through the ‘little’ things; correct the lapses of memory; check an irritating, questionable reference – for these the Internet is wonderful.  When I think of the amount of time that I have spent during my life in long, exhausting searches that could easily have been completed in a few seconds had I been able to move forward into the future and use the Internet I could weep!

But you can often only get so far putting your trust in the Internet.   

I have found that using the Internet in traditional specific research, certainly in the arts, encourages you by gains in the early stages.  You get the sense that you are making real progress and then something, sometimes something that you consider to be a minor obstacle, becomes immovable and whatever you do, the Internet does not seem to have the answers and you have to return to more traditional methods to get where you want to go.

As someone who is now outside the traditional university system, I do miss access to a decent University library and the library services that it provides.  Sometimes a thoughtful librarian can save you days of work!  

In my case, a couple of years ago, I was looking for an article in an Arts magazine published in the 1970s.  The Open University, with which I was then studying, had electronic copies of the magazine but not including the 1970s.  The ‘Night Librarian’ of the OU – a service of international librarians accessed via the OU website – found copies of the magazine for me in Milan and somewhere in Germany, but not in Barcelona. 

I sulked.   

I knew that I could go to the British Library, but that was a flight away from where I was.   

I sulked.   

It was only when I enquired about a book in the art gallery shop on Montjuic and the shop assistant casually asked if I had tried the library on the first floor that things became to happen for me.   

The library, whose existence I had not guessed at, was a positive treasure trove.  My magazine was there, and was photocopied for me; other books that I had hoped to read but had given up finding were there; suddenly, everything seemed possible!

Perhaps the mistake is mine.  I am in a foreign country and I have not exhausted the availability of institutions that might be of help to me.  But, sometimes you just have to admit that you have failed.

One piece of work that I was doing concerned the artists Álvaro Guevara and David Hockney. 

I was comparing Hockney’s A Bigger Splash with swimming paintings by Guevara.  I had seen one of Guevara’s paintings in an art book I owned, and I was able to find a colour reproduction on line from an auction catalogue, but I did not know where the original was. 

After much searching on line, I did see what I thought was the painting in a lifestyle magazine and I was eventually able to contact the owner who very kindly allowed me access to the paintings that he owned and I was able to complete my work. You can see the finished essay here:

http://independent.academia.edu/StephenRees

But one painting by Guevara (with a tempting title that paralled Hockney’s) I was never able to find.  I knew that it existed and had been exhibited, but beyond that, nothing.  I wrote, I telephoned, I searched, but I could find out nothing about the present whereabouts of the painting.  A dead end.  

Or a nagging lack that might, one day, prompt me to revisit what I didn't find the last time I tried!  

Something for the future!

As is getting to terms with Spotify if I persist in being unable to get music from one machine to another!

A crumb of happiness!

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It shows how low the bar for ‘political satisfaction’ is set that the fact that a homophobic, racist, unconstitutionally acting, twice fired judge, bigoted, accused paedophile Roy Moore fails to make it to the American Senate as representative for Alabama.  By just over 1% of the popular vote.

As Alabama is a deepest red Republican state, a Democrat successfully elected is a triumph, no matter how small the margin of victory.  It has been estimated that over 70% of the white vote went to the Republican, no matter how vile a candidate was standing to represent them!  And they call themselves God-fearing Christians!

Well, amid the unrelentingly awful progress of Brexit in the hands of a group of Conservatives who, at cabinet level have yet to even discuss what sort of Brexit they are actually working towards, a little ray of reason in the form of the wrong person NOT being elected to office is something to relish.

 

As is the fact that the failed Republican candidate was enthusiastically supported by pussy-groper-in-chief, good old kiss-of-death-to-reason 45, POTUS.  In an astonishingly polite and reasonable twitter 45 actually congratulated the new Democrat Senator!  Could it have been written by 45 himself, or is there someone in his office with a shred of decency who managed to get in first? 

45 has, of course, started to twitter a ‘justification’ (sic) saying that he knew that the Republican would lose which is why he supported his opponent in the Primaries and . . . hold on, I am not going to repeat the mendacious Jesuitical (not that 45 could ever rise to the height of sophisticated casuistry that the Storm Troopers of Roman Catholicism reach) rubbish that spills from his mouth and dribbles from his small handed typing fingers.  He lost.  He backed a loser.  Who lost.  Like him.  Tarred with the same brush of failure.  Sad.

This loss of a crucial vote in the Senate should make the passing of the shameless tax grab by corporations, big business and greedy donors more difficult to pass.  Does anyone truly believe that the new tax cutting laws are going to be revenue neutral, or that they are going to create an economic miracle, just like the similar plans in Kansas didn’t?  One waits and hopes.

But, above all, congratulations to the voters of Alabama for doing the right thing and rejecting a clearly obnoxious bigot from high office - and that is something that I did not expect to write in my lifetime!

Is it just me, or is the triumph of May in the Brexit negotiations anything more than mere words?  Try as I might I can see nothing concrete about any of the three elements of Payment, NI Border, EU Citizens in Britain and we poor British buggers in EU countries.  Yes, vast sums of magic money, billions of pounds have been metaphorically waved in the air (presumably to the sound and rhythm of Boris’s whistling); the Invisible Border has been made concrete (so to speak) but the implications for the rest of Britain, following NI’s lead would suggest that we have no Brexit at all; the gambling chips of EU lives are still being thrown towards the baize table as the wheel revolves.   

It’s an unreal combination of the Emperor’s New Clothes and ghoti.

For those not aware of ‘ghoti’ I should explain that it spells the word ‘fish’.  And here’s how:

Take the ‘gh’ from enough

Take the ‘o’ from women

Take the ‘ti’ from nation

Put them all together and you have all the sounds to make the word ‘fish’

But it doesn’t end there, ‘ghoti’ also has no sound at all!  And here’s how:

Take the ‘gh’ from night

Take the ‘o’ from people

Take the ‘t’ from ballet

Take the ‘i’ from business

Put them all together and you have . . . nothing.

And that, if you still remember what I was talking about, is like what has been ‘agreed’ about Brexit and what the British government (I use the term very loosely) have stated/promised/negotiated/said/suggested/mentioned/insinuated - or any other word you might think of to explain exactly what they have done, because for me, I feel that we are dealing with the second pronunciation of ‘ghoti’ and that we have a wordy nothingness to get on with.

The trouble is, of course, that ‘wordy nothingnesses’ while they might keep the perennially warring EU factions of the Conservative Party momentarily apart, they do nothing for life as it is lived in the real world where real people have real needs.

Living in Spain as I do, what does this ‘triumph’ of negotiation say about my entitlement to healthcare in my adopted country?  What does it say about my ability to travel on the continent on which I live?  My right or not to stay in Spain?  My rights as a Brexit blighted citizen in a re-defined country relationship?

You try finding concrete reality in the vacuous mouthings of dithering, incompetence from the British government, added to the astonishingly lazy arrogance of Davies as he ‘negotiates’ by the seat of his pants with no apparent need for projections of what his airy pronouncements might mean.  Because the Spanish government is going to ask all the hard ‘W’ questions like: What?  When?  Why?  Which?  Who? and so on.  To these our government has no answers, mainly because they have not had the wit to think of the questions themselves.

So, what about the Spanish government?

After the stealing sequestering of art works from Catalonia and sending them to Aragón in defiance of the natural course of law yesterday, the powers that be have today declared that the number of political prisoners jailed at the moment is woefully inadequate and there are plans to incarcerate 40 more of the officials who participate in the dangerously democratic referendum held on the 1^st of October of this year.  You remember, that was the referendum when the world saw pictures and film of members of the Civil Guard and National Police smashing their way into polling stations and into the people who were in them.

Our President is in exile in Belgium and, while the craven Spanish Government has withdrawn the international arrest warrant for him, because it was likely to have been thrown out of court and humiliated the government by its rejection, it has retained the Spanish arrest warrants.  So, if our President were to step foot on Spanish soil he would be immediately arrested.  For the time being our President continues to canvass and participate in the Catalan election via video from Belgium. 

Our President speaks a number of languages including French and English and so he is more than able to communicate with the International Press.  The Spanish President speaks one language, and his command of Spanish has been, um, a little individualist at times.  He has also rejected questions in press conferences which have not been in Spanish.  It is almost sad to watch Rajoy at international gatherings as he attempts to show that he is chums with people who look mildly irritated and embarrassed when he approaches.

We are now only eight days away from an election that could define the course of Spanish history for generations, and indeed the course of European history.  The election in Catalonia involves us all.  What happens to Catalonia will be seen as an indication of the strength of democracy not only inside Spain, but also within the EU and the wider world.

You are involved in what happens on the 21^st.  Keep watching!  Your future is at stake!

Art, Politics, Religion.

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Art, Politics, Religion.

What a potent mixture those three words in the title conjure up!

Imagine, if you will, a group of nuns in Aragón living in a ruinous Convent in the 1980s.  They decide to move to another Convent in Catalonia and they further decide to sell various religious artworks that they owned to the Generalitat of Catalonia.  Contacts are signed, the move is made and the religious art works find their way to a museum in Lleida.  All is well.  The nuns are settled in their new home and the museum has gained a substantial number of interesting artworks to put on display.

But no!  All is not well.  Aragón has decided that the nuns wrongly sold off part of their regional artistic heritage and they demand the return of the works.

http://www.rtve.es/noticias/20171211/44-obras-sijena-retornan-lleida-aragon/1645140.shtml

What country, you may well ask yourself, does not have one case (or in the British Museum’s case thousands) of someone somewhere asking for the return of something cultural that was bought/sold in what approximated for good faith when the transaction was done?  The most glaring example in the BMs case is probably that of The Elgin Marbles.

 http://www.britishmuseum.org/visiting/galleries/ancient_greece_and_rome/room_18_greece_parthenon.aspx

In recent decades Greece has become increasingly strident in its demand that the Marbles be returned.  Not to the monument itself, where if the marbles had been left in place they would be today, shapeless pieces of marble destroyed by the acidic smog and rain from the pollution of the city, but rather be placed in another museum at the foot of the Acropolis.  This museum has already been built and awaits the return of the lost treasures.

And all I have to say is that Greece will get those Marbles over my dead body! 

That almost happened (my death I mean) when, as a backpacking Greek island-hopper back in the day, in a roughish bar in an insalubrious part of Athens I maintained (drunkenly, loudly, but articulately) that the Elgin Marbles were works that I had grown up with, they were part of my heritage and I valued them as an essential part of what it meant to be British and that we would never, ever let them go!  As one Greek later confided to me in the bar, “The only reason we didn’t kill you was because you were obviously so passionate about them!”

In the same way, the Assyrian bas-reliefs of The Lion Hunt, and especially the poignant depiction of a dying lioness.

 

These are objects that I always visit first when I go to the BM.

 http://etc.ancient.eu/photos/assyrian-lion-hunting-british-museum/

Another part of MY history and MY culture, no matter where the artwork was originally made.  I would be very loath to give those back - even if it might be difficult to work out exactly who to give them back to, history being what it is and places and people changing so much over time!

But the ‘decent’ person inside the voracious art-lover persona knows exactly what the issues are and, while questions of ownership are difficult they are not impossible and the ‘right thing to do’ trumps smaller questions.

That being said, I still wouldn’t give them back!

So, what I am saying is that I do understand the passions that can be aroused by ownership and siting of works of art.  Which brings us back to what, this morning, was packed into a van in Catalonia and taken, through a police cordon and angry crowds, to Aragon.

There has been an acrimonious court case about the ‘ownership’ of these religious works of art and the latest twist was a judge saying that they should be ‘returned’ to Aragon.  In normal times, that judgement would be the prelude to further rounds of legal argument and a procession through various courts until, possibly it found its way to the highest court in Spain.

But that didn’t happen.

Given the present situation in Catalonia, things are a little different.

After the threat of the Catalan government’s proclamation of independence, the minority right-wing Conservative (PP) national government in Spain declared article 155 of the Constitution and took away the elected government from Catalonia imposing their own rule from Madrid, arrested members of the government and issued an international arrest warrant for the President who is now in exile in Belgium.

PP managed to gain 9% of the popular vote in Catalonia in the last elections.  9%!  And now that party runs the country!  And they are showing exactly what their ‘running’ of the country means.

Iñigo Méndez de Vigo is the minority, right-wing, Conservative national Spanish government’s Minister of Culture and he has now intervened in the dispute.  As an Article 155 Minister imposed on a country that did not vote for him, he has ordered the treasures to be returned from Lleida to Aragón.  But not just to Aragón, but to the small town of Villanneva de Sigena - population 512.  From the museum in Lleida - population 140,000.  It just so happens that the party of government of the small town is PAR, a party closely associated with PP!  Well, there’s a surprise!  Funny how things work out when you are looking for a spiteful opportunity to denude Catalonia of its art!

Iñigo Méndez de Vigo has used the imposition of Article 155 to short circuit the legal procedures and give himself the power to take autocratic decisions against Catalonia.

Many people will not care much about old religious art, but the crowds of protesters outside the museum in Lleida did, just at the staff of the museum did when they came out of the building  en mass and applauded the support of the protesters.  This is not the end of the protest, even though the van carrying the disputed treasures has left for Aragón, and it should be a wake up call to those who think that they can trust any of the so-called ‘Constitutional’ parties in the forthcoming election to behave with anything approaching understanding following the events of the past months.

The taking of these art works is a clear indication of how the minority right-wing Conservative (PP) government is going to work.  It will use the power of Article 155 to manipulate and damage Catalonia in a way that it would never have been able to do if its measly 9% popular support was its mandate.

If it is prepared to do this with artworks, then imagine what is it likely to do with the actual structure of government and the finance of institutions in Catalonia!  PP is not to be trusted.  It is clearly the most corrupt party in Western Europe, with hundreds of its members in courts accused of or condemned for criminal activity.  And these are the people ‘governing’ Catalonia; preparing for the election on the 21^st and, most disturbingly, counting the votes.

Now, more than ever, Catalonia needs the eyes of the world, and especially those of the EU, to scrutinize the arrangements for, the supervision of, and the results from the local election in Catalonia on the 21^st of December.

All the Catalans ask for is fairness and honesty.  A big ‘ask’ from PP.

Watch what happens in Catalonia.  Ask questions.  Demand answers.  Support Democracy and Liberty!

New Life!

Praise be!  Behold, my telephone hath been restored unto me!

The language used for that last sentence fits the sense of renewed faith that comes with being plugged into whatever electronic systems I have been missing over the Days of Isolation through which I have had to live.  And please do not say that the 38 euro thing that I bought to ‘tide me over’ did anything so much.  To be fair I am astonished by just how much such a cheap phone was able to accomplish, but it wasn’t my faithful old Yotaphone.

It was given back to me this morning; some sort of chip having been replaced and it is now in full working order.  Except . . . .

Except, while the phone works, some things are missing.  Like all the apps that I added and the photos stored (I assumed) somewhere or other on the sim or in the cloud, somewhere, anywhere.

It’s a bit like beginning to walk again.  You progress step by step.  You have your basic phone and a lot of space on the main page where lots of little icons used to lurk.  Some of the replacements were easy to decide on: Reverso (my translation app); The Guardian (once a Guardian reader always a Guardian reader); Radio 4 (to question the need for this one argues that you wouldn’t understand the answer and that you were a poltroon); WhatsApp (people send things and they expect me to read them, and I do try, honestly!).  Other apps will be found when I need them, or to put it in the way that Toni described it, “You’ll get them when you find they aren’t there!”  Which is almost philosophical and probably counts for a lot of the time spent on computers as we try and find what isn’t there.

In the bad old days (I now understand that means anything over 5 years ago), no, the really bad old days when there was no internet, no wi-fi and virtually not on-board memory, you really did have to search for things that you thought that you had done, but you had made a tiny mistake in the file name or file type or where you put it and it was well and truly gone.  Like the books in the British Library that I was told had a shelf number as their identifying place in the system, which meant that if a book was replaced incorrectly then there was a real chance that it would never be found again, except by pure chance!  Sometimes it felt with early computers that, whatever we were told about the cold logic of our machines, they were actually motivated by a malevolent maliciousness that works ceaselessly against us.

So with my revived phone.  It felt as if things had been intentionally hidden.  For example the photographs I had taken.  On the photo app on the phone there were no ‘taken’ photographs, all the photos had gone.  Somewhere.  And, sure enough, over the next few hours, I found a photo, and then a whole slew of photos emerge from the electronic mists and retake their places.  They are there, but I don’t seem to be able to access them from the camera.  That too will change, I’m sure.

And, a I’ve been typing, I have realized that there is another app that I can’t do without, that of Kindle.  This is the app that uses the second face of my phone, so that I can read easily in black and white, and in the sunshine too.  And even as I type it is syncing my information and all my books are now only a touch away!

Everyone should go through the trauma of ‘losing’ their phone, if only for the delight and satisfaction in ‘restoring’ a life!

Life without the phone

 

I am determined to be happy.  And why not?  There is much to be happy about.  Today has been cold, but bright and fine.  The sea has looked particularly uninviting in a positively attractive and sparkling way and lunch was good.  But as I sit here and type I know that lurking in my left hand jeans’ pocket is a new mobile phone.

Normally those last three words would be a cause of guilty jubilation for me as yet another gadget asks to be plugged into a power source.  But not this time.

My ‘reserve’ Yotaphone 2 (I am still the only person I know who has even heard of this make) has given up the ghost and I have had to take it to be assessed and repaired.  I know that I am not the only person with a Yotaphone 2 in Castelldefels because some guy (it was from a male changing room locked locker) stole it from me, but I have yet to see anyone else with one, or should I say with what used to be mine!  My ‘reserve’ Yotaphone 2 is my third (the second went into the pool and was never the same again) and I keep on buying them because they are the only phones to have two faces: the normal screen you get with every phone and a second back screen which acts like a Kindle screen so that you can read in sunlight.

There are rumours and even ‘reviews’ of a fabled Yotaphone 3, but unless you live in China or possibly Russia such a thing remains the stuff of legend.  Even the Yotaphone 2 is now ‘discontinued’ in the bargain on-line bucket store from which I bought the last one.  I was left without a phone.

Now the last thing that I use my phone for is to phone.  Indeed the first time I had a call on the thing I had no idea how to answer it and had to wait for it to stop ringing, see who phoned me and then phone them back.  Obviously I learned how to answer the thing, but it still remained a niche activity for me.

I use my phone to read.  I read The Guardian every day and do the quick Guardian crossword first thing with my cup of morning tea.  This ‘quick’ crossword has taken me as little as 4-and-a-bit minutes to do (my very best time) and as long as utter-shame-for-an-ex-English-teacher sort of time, but it has become a sort of ritual and I quite like worrying my way to some odd words and then questioning the definition that was given as a clue to justify my tardiness.

I also read books on the phone.  I have got used to the screen size and it doesn’t worry me - as long as the reading matter is engrossing.  I find that I prefer reading non-fiction on the phone rather than literature because I think that the pace to take in factual information is slower than the rush of narrative.

My Spanish/English go-to dictionary is on my phone.  I use the Reverso phone app which is quick, informative and free.  I use the camera on the phone, but not half as much as I want to.  I enjoy photography, but rarely take the time to improve my skills.  And then there is the Internet and all the niggling little pieces of information that one used to ignore because one couldn’t be bothered to go to the dusty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or in the case of my family The Children’s Britannica or the big Chambers Encyclopaedia.  Now, in seconds information and answers are available with little effort.  Although, of course the fact that the Web gives us so much so quickly is an absolute delight, there is little sense of achievement.  There is no selection of what might be the right volume, no turning pages, no reference to indices, no remembering an almost forgotten volume in which there might be a reference, no combing contents, no . . . OK, let’s face it, much of the process of ‘looking something up’ was boring, frustrating and very often futile, because even when you got the information and read about it at length in an encyclopaedia, that information was usually way out of date.  Now, there is a different level of frustration.

Take my trying to find a new old Yotaphone 2.  I have (electronically) bounced around the world going from site to site, following up references and suggestions, sticking and pasting leads into search engines in the hope that I can get to where I want to go.  And, just like the books, I go from page to page, flitting from lead to lead.  I find myself distracted: three clicks and I am engrossed in something which has nothing to do with what I started out my search for.  I wrench myself back and go on a roller coaster of emotion as what I am searching for seems tantalizingly near and then electronically crumbles away into the same old dead ends.

And this was taken away from me with the death of my phone.  After a day (even with the liberal application of laptop) I was having withdrawal symptoms.  My absent phone was a like a phantom limb.  I couldn’t stand it.

So now I am the ‘proud’ owner of a Qubo.

This is a phone that can be hidden in the palm of my hand.  It has a screen the size of a large stamp and looks like something that I would not have bought all those years ago when mobile phones looked like that.  I showed it to the family as they had come for lunch and to see the Fayre that had taken over the centre of Castelldefels and they burst into horrified laughter and then expressed concern about my atavistic taste!

But I am impressed by what this 38-euro phone can actually do.  It has internet (though I don’t know how to get on it), a camera, a torch, plays music (none there), holds my contacts, oh and makes telephone calls.  I am not going to be reading books on the thing, but that is not why I bought it, and I don’t think that its internal memory is exactly large enough to take more than a pamphlet.  I have taken three photos and they seem to be somewhere inside the machine.  I am not sure how many more images can be stored, but I am hoping that my repaired phone will be returned to me so that I won’t have to find out.

Shop!  Please phone my landline and tell me that my link to the world has been restored!