Bought a new lamp today after having spotted it yesterday night on the way back from the theatre. it is a cheap (ok, actually they charged me €20 for it, so it is not cheap) plastic lamp that emits a cold, ugly blue neon light and makes a cracking sound once in a while. tres plastic baroque! and while it was not really misplaced in the cheap late night grocery/liqour store window i got it from, i actually have no clue where to keep it in the apartment.

The lamp contains two rotating films inside its clear plastic encasing. the inner one depicts the pre 9/11 skyline of the southern tip of Manhattan, NYC complete with the statue of liberty and the twin towers. The faster moving outer film has images of hot-air balloons, sailboats, helicopters, para-gliders and a passenger jet on a transparent background. when lit, this creates the impression of the crafts on the outer film moving in front of the skyline in the back.

As the two films move with different speeds the relative position between the individual crafts and buildings changes all the time. every two minutes or so the lamp displays an eerie little re-enactment of 9/11 as the passenger jet seems to crash into the top section of the south tower of the world trade tower:

More pictures in this flickr set.

update: a Google search for the supplier reveals that it is produced by Zhejiang Ninghai Shengfa Electrical Appliance Co. Ltd. As they have the lamp listed in their new products section one can more or less assume that the lamp was designed post 9-11 and that the macabre connotation was somehow lost on its makers, who chose to market it by the name of ‘Seabed Lamp’

Up until now i have been pretty sure that things around me are going down. I mean since i am 15 or so, thing’s around me close down: it may be no secret that i was totally in favor of my school closing down, but for the rest it is usually bad: municipal swimming pools close, train lines disappear, bank branch offices get replaced by card-eating machines and cultural institutions get forced to shut down by budget cuts (and then i am not even talking about good ole’ fordist factories here).

So when a new theater opens around the corner from your house that is actually quite an unbelievable development. But that is what just happened around the corner from our house. A group of actors, directors and other theater people have turned an unused backyard hall on pappel allee into the ballhaus ost (beware: beautiful but stupid flash site!!) .

On top of the fact that it probably takes a lot of guts to start a theater without subsidy and all the other positive signals being given by this bold act as they have been discussed in the feulleiton of almost every German newspaper in the last two weeks it is also a nice thing to suddenly have a theater around the corner: it means you can just go out of the door to see if there are tickets left for the night’s performance if you are sitting at home being bored or depressed or both. And that is exactly what i did tonight and i ended up seeing the premiere of ‘Don’t cry for me Adolf Hitler’ (by Uwe Moritz Eichler):

I would have never expected that i would actually enjoy a performance that for a good deal consist of songs performed in german but in the end i did: the piece is situated in a end of second world war german army field hospital (think mas*h) which is run by double playing nurses trying to protect their drug addict, signal relaying, love-sick patients from an imbecile army inspector and Adolf Hitler himself while musing about love and happiness. Sounds extremely cheesy but actually it is quite insightful an entertaining (big props to the sparse contributions by the trumpet player (Steffen Schult)).

If you are in Berlin and you understand German you can see further performances on 24, 25 feb and 5,8,10,17,22 and 23 march at Ballhaus Ost, Pappelallee 15.

Yesterday i saw john & jane, a film about call center workers in new bombay by Ashim Ahluwalia, which is running as part of the berlin film festival. The film is an impressive, beautifully shot (but sometimes slow) portrait of six persons working in a call center (‘4th dimension’) which provides a range of services to callers from the US.

Of the six call agents only one, Glen, is unhappy with his job. in fact he seems to hate it. Glen was present for the Q&A session after the screening and i made a crappy phone recording of him explaining how he got finally got fired from the call-center ‘because he was stoned’ (click here for the 1.1mb mp3 file).

It is almost four years ago that i finally finished my thesis (‘The freedom of movement of workers in the context of the Eastern enlargement of the European Union’ – download the pdf here) and concluded my studies in comparative political science at the University of Amsterdam. After finishing the thesis and getting my diploma a quickly turned my attention to other projects and never really looked back at what i had written. however given the fact that in my thesis i set out to draw up…

… a clear picture of what can be expected in terms of intra-EU migration when the European Union of 15 is enlarged towards the East and Southeast. The aim of this paper is not to make a prediction about the exact amounts of migrants that are to be expected in a given constellation of events, but to give a theoretically funded assessment of the possible impacts of a change in political structure on migration from the Eastern European Candidate Countries (EECC) to the European Union of 15 (EU15) as it exists today….

… it would have been natural to look back on a couple of occasions to see if my ‘theoretically funded (sic!) assessment’ (which of course is bloated language for ‘my interpretation of the current situation beefed up with as many graphs, pie-charts and quotes as i can come up with’) did indeed turn out to be true. until today i have never really done this for whatever reasons.

Now today the European Commission published a report on the effects of workers mobility between the 10 new member states and the EU15 since the Eastern Enlargement on the 1st of may 2004 (FAQs here). The accession treaty required the Commission to come up with such a report in order to give the member states which opted to impose restrictions on the freedom of movement of workers from the EU10 (that is all old member except britain, sweden & ireland) an empirical basis for the reassessment of their position after 2 years (due on 30 april). now i have not had time to read the full report but if one can believe the media it pretty much confirms the concluding predictions of my thesis:

according to various news reports published today, the report that claims that ‘There was no evidence of a surge in either numbers of workers or welfare expenditure following enlargement, compared to the previous two years. New Member State (EU10) nationals represented less than 1% of the working age population in all countries except Austria (1,4% in 2005) and Ireland (3,8% in 2005)’ (EU comission) it further notes ‘… that East European workers sought out employment and did not abuse social security payments when they moved to Western countries’. (IHT) and that ‘…the barriers put in place when the EU had 12 members did not stop workers moving into these countries. But many workers had disappeared into the underground economy’ (idem.)

Anyway it is nice to know that I have not completely missed the mark while spending so much time on writing my thesis. I will try to re-read my paper and compare it to the report over the weekend and if there are more interesting findings I will report them back here…

Seems like everybody and her mother have bluetooth enabled phones nowadays. In the last few weeks i have had repeated pairing requests from unidentified mobile phones while working on my laptop in the Train. For the uninitiated, a pairing request is a precondition for establishing a connection between two bluetooth devices: The contacted party has to agree to ‘pair’ her device with the requesting device in order to transmit files, interchange data or use it as an input or output device.

Apart from this technical aspect the fact that a window titled ‘pairing request’ pops-up out of nothing on your computer screen also has a romantic connotation to it (though nothing is more annoying than not to find out who send you that request. This can distract you for the rest of a journey). Now all feelings of romance are immediately lost as soon as you see that the pairing request is coming from someone called ‘nokia6820’ or ‘K750i’ or even worse ‘RAZR’ or ‘ROKR’. how lame is that?

If you insist to harass others on the train with your mobile phone it is your first obligation to invest a little bit of time and imagination and give your phone a proper sleazy name. As an example i have renamed my phone from ‘K750i’ to ‘Luigi'.

It seems that the Dutch are not the only ones to prepare themselves for the Soccer World Cup. In Berlin advertisements of the German red cross have started to appear on billboards in various s-bahn stations. The advertisements show a young red-cross paramedic (with a 70es haircut, a reference to ’74?) that bandages the knee of a fully dressed out Dutch football supporter:

The caption on the picture reads, ‘in action for everybody’, which at least to me sounds like ‘ we really help everybody, even those who are scum’… guess the Dutch won’t really appreciate this. And what ever happened to the red-cross? i always thought they where for peace, love and harmony.

I blogged about the helipads in São Paulo back in october of last year. Seems like i am not the only person fascinated by the phenomenon of intra-city civilian helicopter traffic: The transmediale06 media arts festival in Berlin features a short video by french artist Richard Nicolas about the helipads of São Paulo:

The sky of Sao Paulo is always swarming with helicopters: 350 daily departures and landings – or one flight every four minutes. The city ranks first in helicopter air traffic and its air fleet – with 500 counted passenger planes – internationally ranks third after Tokyo and New York. The Brazilian bureau for civil air traffic confirms 220 helipads. The video-performance shows a bird’s eye view from the hustle of São Paulo and its huge choice of helipads.

The video is absolutely beautiful. if you are in berlin go check it out! It can be seen in the transmediale Lounge on the big projection screen (there are two other videos on that are projected alternating on the same screen, so you might have to wait for a while for it to appear). It even features a birds eye view of my favorite helipad.

Seems like everybody and his mother needs an iPod nowadays. First it is american senators who need the shiny device in order to understand that copying is not all that bad as the MPAA and RIAA tell them. Next thing you know it is the starving masses in our former colonies that demand the accessory of choice among the spoiled inhabitants of the former colonial powers. At least that is the message of stencil graffiti’s (by mantis) that have recently appeared in the UK:

Now as it is already known that people do horrible things to get their iPods, so maybe this is another incentive to try a little bit harder in keeping the have-nots out. We really don’t want them to mug iPods from senators thereby sending us to another dark age reigned by chaos, DRM and poverty – or something like this. (via gizmodo)

One of the the most notable achievements of the Dutch in recent history has been the introduction of targeting aids in the men’s rooms in public toilets. The whole thing seems to originate from Amsterdams schiphol airport (having such a fine airport makes living in Amsterdam much more bearable than it would be otherwise). It seems that having a fly depicted in the bowl of a pissoir significantly reduces the amount of misdirected urine in such places (which is a good thing).

Another remarkable trait of dutch society is how closely Heineken has managed to associate itself with a) queens day and b) the national soccer selection without actually sponsoring neither of them. They have done this by launching high profile give-away actions in the run-up to queens day and important games of the national soccer team.

Now it looks like that the marketing geniuses at Heineken have started to gear-up for this years soccer world cup. Tonight i have come across a soccer-themed orange urinoir mat (the plastic inlay that is supposed to keep cigarette butts out of the water pipe) in a Heineken equipped Thai restaurant on Zeedijk in Amsterdam:

Seems like I have again underestimated the inventiveness (utter stupidity?) of the human mind. Hope i will make it through this summer without developing a serious drug addiction…

Even though i cant really read Spanish (let alone speak it), i spend a fair amount of time in book stores in Buenos Aires which ultimaetely paid off as i found a very intreaguing book titled ‘San La Muerte – Una Voz Extraña‘ (also available via Amazon UK.

The book which combines numerous photographs with 6 essays (in Spanish and English) explores the rituals and practices of the worshippers of the ‘folk-saint’ San La Muerte (‘Saint Death’). The cult of San La Muerte originates from northeastern Argentina (the Corrientes & Chaco provinces which are among the poorest regions of the country) and the bordering regions of Paraguay, but has spread to other regions such as the poorer working class suburbs of Buenos Aires and other cities.

San La Muerte is worshipped through little statuettes carved out of wood, bone or lead: a skeleton sitting or standing, often bearing a scythe. Throughout the year he is worshipped in virtual secrecy, but on August 15 “messes” are being said before the altars of household shrines. Some devotees even chose to insert images of San La Muerte – chiseled on a bullet or a human phalanx – under their skin, a practice that is increasingly replaced by having images of the ‘Santito’ tattooed on one’s body for protection.

For some, San La Muerte offers an absolutely personal and non-transferable protection that will only be accessible to another when – after one’s own death – he or she is in the possession of the sculpture. Others – which doctors and payés – invoke the saint’s power on behalf of customers and patients , all the while concealing the image from sight. To some others, he is a household saint concealed in some corner of the house, bestowing his protection upon all family members with no distinction whatsoever.

He receives offerings in exchange for favors related to the main problems that plague human existence. The saint helps to restore love, health and fortune, protects worshipper from witchcraft, heals people upon whom somebody has cast the evil eye, he also grants good luck in gambling […] and may bring death upon th enemies off his devotees.

He is said to be the fairest of saints. according to some he is a fair saint because he allows for the recovery of stolen objects and punishes the misappropriators. Others refer to the justice inherent in death since it takes all humans without disctinction: rich and poor, powerful and powerless.

San La muerte sticks to a moral code that must be obeyed. In the cult of San La Muerte, even people who break the law and resort to violence have numerous obligation towards the saint, which they must honor in exchange for his protection. The cult is is based on punishment and submission; to be granted a grace the saint must even be threatened. The saint can be threatened with hunger or banishment to an uninhabited place until the favor is granted. When graces are granted, the siant must be rewarded and fed but never fully, so that he may soon be willing to grant another grace.

While one requests favors from the Gauchito (Gaucho Gil – or other saints for that matter) one must demand them from San La Muerte. [excerpted from the various essays in the book]

What i find particularly fascinating are the various requirements that seem to determine the powers of the individual representations of San La Muerte. The Saint is especially popular among criminals and the most powerful saints are made by prison inmates. While most figures are either carved from wood or human bone there are a couple of materials that have special powers. When it comes to wood the most intense, strongest images are carved from dead people’s coffins of from crucifixes of people who died recently, not more than seven years back.

Among devotees, fired bullets, those that wounded and, more specifically, killed a Christian man are regarded as the most powerful materials to be used for carving a saint figure.

Whatever the material according to orthodox requirements the completed saints must be consecrated by a catholic priest for seven times (this is mostly archived by hiding the figures in or under another object which is presented for consecration). if the saint is carved out of the bone of a christian man It only has to be consecrated 5 times as it ‘has already been consecrated twice’.