The Espresso Mode Improvisation

Sometimes a word or a picture triggers a memory deeply entrenched in your brain. The vimeo HD video “ESPRESSO” has the evocative power of recreating flavors and mindsets  when drinking an espresso.

Here are a few pictures and drawings improvised  from ‘nowhere’..

Before drinking I look ….Click on the picture to see the video.

Colors and smells.. Click on the picture to enlarge.

She don’t like espresso it’s a bad romance… Click on the picture to hear and see Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”.

After effect  espresso.. Click on the picture to enlarge.

Gold brown powder is beautiful..  Click on the picture to enlarge.

Fearful espresso.. Click on the picture to enlarge.

The quantum espresso men..

To finish,

To my great dismay, after finishing the pictures ‘decorated’ with the word “Expresso”, I found that the word  ‘Espresso‘ is perhaps more adequate. But being to lazy to rework the pictures , I found to my great relief that, I quote:

…”Many Latin based countries, such as France, Spain, and Portugal, use the Expresso form. In the United States and Canada, both espresso and expresso are used.  Italy uses the term espresso, substituting most x letters in Latin root words with s; x is not considered part of the standard Italian alphabet.”…see here.

So, coming myself  from Europe, I have the strong feeling that I may stick, unpunished, to the word Expresso.

Mother’s Imprint on the Environment

“THE ENVIRONMENT AS A WITNESS.”- W. ZUREK.

I remember having read a book by SF author Greg Egan named “Quarantine” where incredible things occur: …

“This mod allows the user to stop being an observer in the sense of quantum mechanics and consequently to “smear”, i.e. to exist in a superposition of different states at the same time and to pick eigenstates of personal preference from the range of possible states, when the personal wave function is collapsed.”….see here.,

This seems a little bit perplexing if meanwhile not feasible, but is actually a good start to no lesser perplexing matters like the following story..

…I always asked myself what is there beyond the things I am witnessing in my everyday life? Or perhaps… am I being witnessed by some dark force, you know those monsters looking at you from the nowhere darkness, for whom I am their everyday life..

Apparently there are such little monsters, they are named photons not looming from the darkness but creating light. They are the true members of the  ‘quantum mechanics’ theory and they look and monitor  me from my birth until my last  breath.

Now what has  this  Film Noir preamble to do with my future exhibition at the Kibbutz Gallery in Tel Aviv?

Well it has. By some metaphorical magic, if  my drawings and prints  are to have a meaning about the emerging  of my mother Gitel into my everyday life and about their emerging before your eyes as visitors in the gallery, then the exhibition “Mother as an Imprint on the Environment” has to point to the underpinning weirdness named decoherence, telling us how such an appearance is made possible with the help of those  little monsters.

To put us in the mood of what these little photon monsters do, I quote from the article  “Decoherence is our ticket out of the quantum world”  published in 1999, see here,  giving the big picture of this emerging in a nutshell :

…” ‘We live in a sea of photons, for example, and interact with some small fraction of them. So the environment is in some sense in a constant process of monitoring objects,’ Zurek said… …’Decoherence provides a menu of allowed states; it’s a selection process that disallows flagrantly quantum states of macroscopic objects,’ Zurek said.”…

W. Zurek one of the most  prominent theoretical physicist is trying to elucidate the weirdness of the  transition from the quantum world to our everyday classical world. He  propose a very captivating view,  where the little quantum monsters  as the mysterious agents of  quantum physics cause our apparent  perception of reality, and  in particular, how and why I perceive my mother Gitel after her ‘transition from the quantum-to-classical world’…a very weird phrase for describing her motherly earthiness..,  for more see here

So if I take his words for granted then my mother, as a macroscopic person (state), cannot be in a quantum state of many possibilities and indeed, without to much surprise, I see her definitely classically as photos and prints in one place and not in a paranoid simultaneous two place position.

….. From here on, with the help of an amnesiac state of mind and  with some extrapolation I imagined and imaged a metaphorical  quantum-to-classical voyage with the benevolent help of the underpinning  decoherence story,  depicting the  transition of my quantum mother to her earthly classical mother form.

And  further on,  the whole thing lives in about 45  drawings and prints on paper made with inkjet printer, pencils, colors and other accessories..  look at the following pictures as a sample:

To view the full images, please qlick on the pictures,

Mother in a flagrant superposition of  two of her possible states,,, reduced to classical pencils paper ocher…prints states.

…. my young mother beyond my everyday life depicted in a sea of  little photon monsters, presumably in one of her possible quantum states  and being monitored by the yellow head until instantly she decohere into a classical definitive state…… reduced to Rives print paper, inkjet colors, monitor pixels as representing the little photon monsters…

…. And finally mother emerge in my classical everyday classical life….Photos, 110 year old, from my mother in Zdunska Wola in Poland. Sepia color, staged in the light of a real gallery in Tel Aviv.

‘Bon Voyage’…

Improvising an Art-Book as a Graphic Novel

To view the full image, please click on the picture

Improvising an art-book as a graphic novel is perhaps a crazy idea, but after viewing the video on Keith Jarret where he talks about  “The Art of Improvisation” ” and remembering what he says:  …” improvisation is to begin a musical piece from scratch with no antecedents to be based on”…(loosely quoted from the video clip), I took the same idea to comics drawing.

My no-antecedent and from scratch comics drawing only source was the Russian movie ” Night Watch” by director Timur Bekmambetov. I remember vaguely what the film was about. Perhaps the  theme, a mystical battle between the forces of evil and the forces of good in his modern Russian version was the trigger to chose “Night Watch”.

Well  I hadn’t the slightest idea from where to begin. So I began to screen the movie on my computer and each time I was impressed by a passage I stopped the screening and draw the scene, drawing finally  a sequence of 250 pictures pictures guided randomly by my visual feelings .

With my first drawing   I was confronted with the question in what style to draw? Looking  at the art of well know artist I admired their fine artwork. Magnificent examples are the drawings by Dave Gibbons for Alan Moore’s graphic novel “Watchmen“:

To view the full image, please click on the picture

But I am not a graphic arts artist so my skills to make  something like Dave Gibbons’s drawings for “Watchmen”,  where very doubtful. It was  obvious to me that my drawings should be closer to my personal instincts: disliking ‘beautiful drawings but also appreciate them, and finding the right touch to merge   beauty and ‘bad’ drawing.

Finally, this ‘graphic novel’ was not intended to act as a graphic novel but more as an experimental art book, where what I draw was done on the fly without much correcting.

Here is a sequence from chapter 2 . To view the full images, please click one each  pictures.

For those interested in technicalities. Perhaps a bizarre choice, but I draw directly into a hardcover book by Nobel winner physicist Richard Feynman called “Feynman Lectures on Gravitation”. My drawing tools where black markers with different point size. The markers bleed through each page. Taking tipp-ex as a substitute for white acrylic  I painted  on the unwanted black  marks.  After restoring the white color and letting some black or gray spots on each page,  the original book text on gravitation shimmering through the tippex fluid serve as a canvas to draw each new picture.

Tel Aviv, A Lonely Magical Musical Moment

In the evening. Tel Aviv and the Yarkon ‘river’. An anonymous lonely pretty good saxophonist playing jazz with playback… and a bystander armed with a digital camera to catch the magic of the moment,,,

Best viewed in full screen mode.

Does the Palestinian West Bank boycott the Israeli Occupied Territories?

Does the West Bank boycott the occupied territories?

The above phrase ‘looks’ like the ‘Drawing Hands’  from Escher: the West Bank hand  drawing his involvement with Israel and vice versa.. Israel’s hand drawing her involvement with the occupied territories..

Drawing hands, Echer

(Drawing Hands, Escher).

With this picture in my mind, I read  one of the last announcement to boycott Israel, I quote …” The  Spanish Housing Ministry has disqualified Ariel University Center from the international Solar Decathlon contest, on the grounds that the university is “located in occupied territories.”see here.

Well yes the Ariel University Center is located in the West Bank in the occupied territories. But does all those ‘beautiful people’ in Spain ask themselves, if their preaching to boycott Israel  has any real repercussion in the West Bank (..the occupied territories)?

Surprisingly perhaps, here is an answer by:

…”The governor of Bethlehem, Salah Tamari [said,]“Israelis are paranoid because of their past, while Palestinians are paranoid because of their present,” Mr. Tamari said. “But we are doomed to live together or blessed to live together, depending on your point of view. It is true that the economy is improving slightly. But beyond that, I’m afraid very little is getting easier.“ see here.

Or in more optimist words by the  Bethlehem’s mayor Victor Batarseh:

It has been the best year since 1999,” …. “Our hotels are full, whereas three years ago there
“ was almost nobody. Unemployment is below 20 percent. But we are still under occupation.”,see here.

This shows the gap between unscrupulous cowardly armchair professional boycotts of Israel,  and what happens in everyday life in the West Bank. If we want to understand the difficulties of those who are “doomed to live together or blessed to live together,…” as said by the governor of Bethlehem, Salah Tamari, then ‘doomed’ can be transformed into something closer to ‘blessed’.

The boycotters, mainly from Europe and Scandinavia, have  no idea of what’s really going on in the West Bank. Reading boring economic reports from Palestinian and Israeli statistical sources is only a nuisance to their obsession  to denounce Israel as the bad guy.

Here is a example of such a boring nuisance. The “Report of the Government of Israel to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee New York, September 22, 2009″ ,see here, ,  shows valuable information about the  actual… (blessed)… relation between  the West Bank and Israel. The information about the West Bank economy comes in part from the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics:

…”This relative economic growth and an improved quality of life are demonstrated by a flourishing of economic, cultural and social activities, including the opening of a shopping mall and a cinema complex in Nablus, the project to build the city of Rawabi, and increased activity of cafes and restaurants throughout the West Bank. According to official Palestinian sources,1 since 2008, foreign investment in the West Bank has increased by 600%, as a result of economic conferences held in Bethlehem and Nablus and the improved security situation on the ground. A sharp increase in cement consumption reaching, during the first half of 2009 alone, a figure exceeding by 18%, amounts consumed in all of 2008, reflects the high volume of construction activity on the ground.

.

During the first quarter of 2009, the Palestinian GDP increased by 5.6% compared to the parallel quarter in 2008 (despite early estimates by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, predicting that the annual GDP would shrink by 3.1%). According to IMF estimates, economic growth in 2009 is expected to reach 7%. However, if the trend of growth recorded in the first quarter of 2009 continues, annual economic growth for 2009 could even surpass these relatively optimistic IMF forecasts. This increase continues despite the global economic crisis. Most economic sectors contributed to this acceleration in economic activity.”….

So to return to the question: does the West Bank boycott the ‘Occupied Territories’, I quote from the article “Green Shoots in Palestine II” published by the NYT and written by Thomas L. Friedman :

…”..many Israelis were no doubt surprised to read this quote in the Maariv daily from Omar Hashim, deputy chairman of the Chamber of Commerce of Nablus, the commercial center of the West Bank: “Traders here are satisfied,” said Hashim. “Their sales are rising. They feel that life is returning to normal. There is a strong sense of optimism.”…

…“You can feel the movement,” said Olfat Hammad, the associate director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, who lives in Nablus and works in Ramallah. “It is not a burden anymore to move around to Ramallah for business meetings and social meetings.” Nablus recently opened its first multiplex, “Cinema City,” as well as a multistory furniture mart designed to cater to Israelis. Ramallah’s real estate prices have skyrocketed.

“I have had a 70 percent increase in sales,” Maariv quoted a Nablus shoe store owner as saying. “People are coming from the villages nearby, and from other cities in the West Bank and from Israel.”…see here .

And how do the Palestinian West Bank residents cope with the their own difficulties? From the site “Ramallah Syndrome” here is a excerpt from a discussion:

…”- Alessandro
Maybe a point is the definition of resistance. We always refer to the first intifada as a model, the only model, which can be a problem. Lisa’s articles and also Nasser’s article say there is a different form of resistance today. Then you didn’t go to the cinema because you were resisting, now it’s different. It’s not only negative. We are also a part of that, we are also having a life. It would be stupid to have the same model as the first intifada for the sake of it. But it has to be said that the opposite is also stupid, when you are building your career on Palestine, on the tragedy of Palestine, and having a normal life. And honestly, everyone here even though they are under occupation, is enjoying his or her life to some level, so you can also resist and have a normal life. The Lebanese have always managed to balance resisting and also trying to enjoy life. I don’t think it’s completely wrong.”… see here,

(extracts from conversations N. 1/Oct. 2008 and N. 2/Dec. 2008)

So the discussion and the doubts arising from  economic prosperity without resistance is the lesser of evil for many, but  for the belligerent Palestinian leaders it is an anathema, I quote (“Beware ‘economic peace” by Sever Plocker in Ynet) :

…”The economic normalization threatens the revolutionary and radical elements within Palestinian society, and they swore not to allow this normalization to take root. It’s perceived by them as indirect reconciliation with the occupation. A national liberation movement, and certainly a national-religious one, withers away when the masses go out to shop rather than to demonstrate.

The reinforcement of a Palestinian middle class, which may fall in love with a routine life, reject the ongoing struggle, and enjoy its proximity to the large Israeli market is anathema in the view of the militant leadership, and not only there. The tensions between economic and personal progress and a diplomatic and national dead-end tear Palestinian society apart.”… see here.

Another observer, Daniel Schueftan in his article “The Palestinians did it again”  put a direct emphasis,, on ..I quote:

…”The Palestinians are proving yet again that even the responsible elements among them cannot act in a constructive manner in order to build society and promote stability, welfare, and an agreement with Israel. They cannot do it because, as it turned out again, at the moment of truth we see the irresponsible, violent, and demagogical radicals who incite and fan the flames gain the upper hand.”…

…”Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is attempting, for the first time, to utilize the generous foreign aid for constructive aims and build a functioning society. President Abbas and his people realized (belatedly) the gravity of the terror curse and Hamas’ existential threat. Under their political patronage, the United States trained Palestinian security forces (the so-called “Dayton forces”) who are doing well in the fight against terrorism and its infrastructure.”…

…”However, this is where the self-destruction mechanism that has been thwarting the Palestinian people since it was formed almost 90 years ago came into action: An irresponsible and belligerent minority turns to violence, radical elements promise a zealous public immediate satisfaction via “victimization demagoguery,” and this immediately prompts the responsible elements to assume a defensive posture and be neutralized in the political arena.”….see here.

These are only a few glimpses 0n what really happens in the West Bank between The Israelis and the Palestinians despite all the security frictions all the animosities and mistrust. This is also a pointer of what can be done with hard work from both sides.

Will this convince the ‘enlightened’ Spanish and other European  boycotters? My bet is no for the simple reason that they are only belligerent destructive boycotters who regard perhaps with suspicion Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s attempt to build  a new Palestinian economy. So as the old adage says ..”While dogs bark, the caravan passes.”

Hope and Emotions Accompany the Video Statement of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit

The bare facts.

The  “proof-of-life” video statement by Gilad Shalit.  The price for the video information: twenty terrorist women swapped for Gilad. The hope: his return home to his family in Israel as soon as possible .

Here is the full text of the video statement of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured and held hostage by the Hamas since June 2006.

…”Hi, I am Gilad Shalit, son of Aviva and Noam Shalit, brother of Hadas and Yoel, from Mitzpe Hilla, ID number 300097029. Today is Monday 14 September 2009.

As you can see, I’m holding in my hand today’s Palestine newspaper, 14th September 2009, which is published in Gaza.

I’m reading the newspaper in order to find information about myself, and I hope to find information about my release and return home soon.

I have been waiting and yearning a long time for the day I will be released.

I hope the current government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu will not waste this opportunity to finalise the deal and that as a result I will finally be able to realise my dream and be released.

I want to send my regards to my family, to tell them that I love them and miss them a lot, and yearn for the day that I will see them.

Father, Yoel and Hadas, do you remember the day when you arrived at my base in Ramat Ha-Golan, on the 31st December 2005, which, if I’m not mistaken, is called Revia Bet? We did a tour around the base. You took a picture of me on top of the Merkava tank, and on top of one of the old tanks at the entrance to the base.

Afterwards, we drove to a restaurant in one of the Druze villages, and on the way we took a picture on the side of the road with the snow-covered Mount Hermon.

I want to tell you that I am well in terms of my health. The mujahideen of the Izzeddine al-Qassam Brigades are treating me fine.

Thank you very much and see you again.”… source

i

The Goldstone Encounter with the Hamas Terrorism and Israel’s Defence War

Justice Richard Goldstone.

A few days ago Sky News reported a couple of news mentioning the name Goldstone. The first was about an outbreak of the e-coli disease in the Goldstone pet farm ( Surrey, UK),  and the second was the Goldstone commission report about the Cast Lead war between Israel and the Hamas. . I was almost temped to say:  perhaps another sort of disease, breed in the Universal Human Rights laboratories specifically targeting Israel.

Well, no, the report is not a disease. Ex judge Richard Goldstone is an honorable men. His credentials as a Zionist and Israel lover are beyond doubts. He is a first rate jurist with overwhelming experience in war crimes jurisdiction.

So this Zionist Israel lover is the men accusing Israel of war crimes, putting her in the same league as the Nazi criminals in the Nirenberg Trials. He is not drawing a demarcation lines between the premeditated Wannsee plan of exterminating the Jews and in fact exterminating 6 million of them, and between Israel’s self defence war, causing 1300 war casualties mostly Hamas men.

Let me  remind to myself: the Cast Lead war was  only the final result of a 7 year shelling  of more than 8000 qassam rockets  targeting  half a million of civilians living in south Israel by the Hamas ,

So where is the catch? what is going wrong?

Well to say it frankly. Nothing is going wrong, there is no catch at all. Ex judge Goldstone report is viewing and judging the today terrorist warfare  trough the codex of WW2 war crimes .

He has taken a snapshot named the “Cast Lead” war, a war whose causes are fossilized deep into the report as not fitting directly in the overall  schema of what he sees as war crimes . Israel’s attempt to stop the rocket launching on his southern civilian population is, in his view, well fitting in his scheme of war crimes:

…”Israel is currently fighting under, and being judged by, the laws of World War II, which are suitable for conventional wars between two or more armies in open fields, where it is easier to define proportionality.

But what do you do when terrorists hide under homes, or when they don’t wear uniforms? What do you do when the enemy high command runs its operations from under a hospital located in a crowded neighborhood, as Hamas did during Cast Lead, using the basement of Shifa Hospital as a command and control center? It is clear that the existing laws of war are incompatible with the current and evolving nature of war”…, see here.

This is a situation of incompatibilities where hypothetical soldiers will be forced to ask in the middle of battle who is a civilian and who is a terrorist and meanwhile be killed and perhaps loosing a self defense war..

Ex judge Goldstone’s report does not provide much help to solve such incompatibilities or ‘minor’ problems. But on the other hand his report is a panacea for the terrorist who can now rely on his WW2 codex jurisdiction to continue without fear, from within any civilian population, be it in Afghanistan, Iraq or any other country or European capital, and perpetuate any crimes, and if civilians may be killed in the attempt of the local forces to stop them, the blame of war crimes will fall on the defenders.

What conclusions, if any, can be drawn from the encounter of ex judge Goldstone, Hamas terrorism and Israel defending her citizens. In the short run all are shouting in one great cacophony. Right wing speakers blame the world for his hypocrisy. See Obama in Afghanistan, Putin in Tchetchenia… etc. Leftists and fringe speakers accuse Israel for all the vicissitudes of the world, see the  boycotters from the UK, Toronto …etc.

But in the long run, and in our days the long run is relatively short, each of the belligerent parties will readjust himself to the new Goldstone conditions or fight them , fine tuning his intelligence capacities and improving his high-tech weaponry. The smarter will do the hack better. But if the Jihadist mentality  against Israel will prevail, then de facto, nothing will radically change for both sides. Israel and the Hamas will continue their clashes.

This is the world today, a ‘Rashomon‘ movie, telling a 21 century story staged in the high-tech third millennium under the auspice of the Goldstone report as a metaphor.

Jane Fonda, Danny Glover and Friends in Toronto

To tell the truth …The Toronto film festival and his tail of anti Israeli participants  is not the subject of the following lines.

Actors Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, musician David Byrne and filmmaker Ken Loach may think what they want about the Israeli and Tel Aviv participation when boycotting the  festival f called “City to City” — which honors Tel Aviv ’s 100th anniversary by spotlighting 10 Israeli films.

The  real subject is: how those famous actors when expressing their own opinions and not reciting the words of a  professional film script are a direct copy of the common talkbacker ’shouting out’ his gut feelings without much reverence. .

And what are the Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, musician David Byrne and filmmaker Ken Loach arguments in favor of the boycotting:

Thy…”…accused the Toronto International Film Festival of “complicity with the Israeli propaganda machine” over its spotlight this year on Tel Aviv. “…

And more:

…”The program “ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories” after a “mass exiling of the Palestinian population” in 1948, according to the letter. “…see here.

Jane Fonda

Now the irony of this slapstick comedy is that in the Google era when information is available on any subject, it is a bit silly to argue about the “Israeli apartheid”  without looking into your own backyard, something actors Jane Fonda and Danny Glover forgot to do.

Well, I will do it for them.

Their own backyard is the  film industry located in  Hollywood, LA California  USA.

So who where the historical inhabitants of the land where the today big Hollywood film industry is making his milliards of dollar to the benefit, among others, of Jane Fonda and Danny Glover. Well you surely guess the answer, the bad guys the Indians the Apaches  ( not the software or the helicopter)  the Sioux etc, they where the native Americans and their today descendants lives in LA.

Here is an expert from a report “The Status of American Indian Children in Los Angeles November 2003″:

…”Although American Indian and Alaskan Natives were the first Americans, they are often among the most forgotten in the region’s social priorities. AIAN children face persistent economic and educational hardships. Serving this community presents unique challenges, in part because the geographic dispersion of AIANs makes it difficult to serve this community using centralized facilities. The relatively small overall size of the AIAN population hinders the reach of their political voice. Despite these barriers, as a society we have an obligation to work with AIANs to formulate better and more approrpiate public policies. Understanding and respecting the diverse cultures and experiences of AIANs must be an integral part of programs to address and alleviate the challenges facing indigeneous populations in the Los Angeles region.”… See here for the whole report

Moreover, there is a site named “Native American Netroots“. The site’s statement is:

…”...a forum for the discussion of political, social and economic issues affecting the indigenous peoples of the United States, including their lack of political representation, economic deprivation, health care issues, and the on-going struggle for preservation of identity and cultural history.”…

One of the site’s  pages is dedicated to “American Indians, Hollywood, and Stereotypes” . I am not sure, but it seems that the illiteracy and ignorance of Jane Fonda and Danny Glover of their own American history is very well illustrated by the following excerp:

…”Only when we saw them building roads through our land, wagons at first, and then the railroad, when we watched them building forts, killing off all the game, committing buffalo genocide, and we saw them ripping up our Black Hills for gold, our sacred Paha Sapa, the home of the wakinyan, the thunderbirds, only then did we realize what they wanted was our land. Then we began to fight. For our earth. For our children. That started what the whites call the Great Indian Wars of the West. I call it the Great Indian Holocaust.”…see here

Now if actors Fonda and Glover are in an amnesic state about their own native American history, is there any hint they would do a better job with modern Israeli history? ..So in the light of the above story, why do they not first of all boycott themselves…and then the festival … and after that all the others.

Danny Glover