Come antipasto, comincia dai "132 frammenti sulla creatività". Questi sono i primi:

Rompere le regole

"Non esiste grande genio senza una dose di follia."
Aristotele (filosofo)

"Vedo la mente di un bambino di cinque anni come un vulcano con due sfoghi: distruzione e creatività."
Sylvia Ashton-Warner (educatrice)

"La passione per la distruzione è anche una passione creativa."
Michail Aleksandrovic Bakunin (pensatore e rivoluzionario)

"Le regole sono ciò che gli artisti rompono; ciò che è memorabile non è mai nato da una formula."
Bill Bernbach (pubblicitario)

"Adoro gli esperimenti folli. Li faccio in continuazione."
Charles Darwin (naturalista)

"Dai diamanti non nasce niente/dal letame nascono i fiori."
Fabrizio De Andrè (poeta)

"La creatività è l'arte di sommare due e due ottenendo cinque."
Arthur Koestler (saggista)

"Un'idea che non trova posto a sedere è capace di fare la rivoluzione."
Leo Longanesi (scrittore)

"Ogni creazione è, all'origine, la lotta di una forma in potenza contro una forma imitata."
André Malraux (scrittore)

"Bisogna avere in sé il caos per partorire una stella che danzi."
Friedrich Nietzsche (filosofo)

... continua sul sito.

In his book written with Desmond Leslie, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), Adamski claims that beautiful, benevolent beings invited him aboard their spaceship.

Adamski says the ship's pilot was telepathically connected to the propulsion system. By controlling thought waves interfaced with advanced technology, the aliens allegedly tapped into elemental harmonic rhythms of the universe.

This, according to Adamski, enabled their penetration and actual travel through space-time. Adamski's diagram of the circular transportation system is likened to the Hopi medicine wheel.

Adamski also says, however, that the minds of human beings are currently far too chaotic and undisciplined to meaningfully (and safely) harness such a technology, a sentiment which recalls Arthur Koestler's notion that, by virtue of its apparently random evolution from primitive to complex, the human brain is intrinsically conflicted.

Critics of Adamski are many. Most feel that his accounts fall into the category of hoax, as the following aptly illustrates.

One aspect of the UFO story does seem to be deeply involved in hoax. This is the so-called contactee cult. Many people now located over much of the world claim to have had direct contact with the flying-saucer people. (Adamski and Leslie, 1958; UFO International).
Perhaps the contactee is informed by mental telepathy that he should report promptly to a certain lonely spot in the desert. Upon obeying, he is met by a flying saucer whose occupants are, as a rule, beautifully humanoid and who frequently take him into their confidence by allowing him to photograph themselves and their craft, inviting him in for a look at the control panels, and perhaps taking him for a quick spin, sometimes to Mars or Venus but best of all to the mysterious planet on the other side of the sun, unobservable from mother earth.
Everything about these stories seems to cry hoax. The proof is typically a series of photographs (which could easily be fraudulent) and copious quantities of pseudoscience. Someone who had really contacted visitors from another world should surely be able to do better than that. Why should visitors from another world bother with such obscure representatives of the human race, anyway? Their message is always that man must cease his wars or be destroyed, but why should such an important message be given to someone who is bound to be considered a liar when he delivers it?

Frank B. Salisbury, "The Scientist and the UFO" in BioScience, Vol. 17, No. 1, (Jan., 1967: 15-24, p. 19).

» Alien Possession Theory (APT)

Image Source:

• "UFO Incident" by Flidais Earie at http://www.flickr.com/photos/flidais/431988892 Creative Commons License

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http://www.elpais.com/articulo/reportajes/Mataban/todo/veian/elpepusocdmg/20080504elpdmgrep_1/Tes

George Grosz

Cuenta la historia que había una vez un verdugo llamado Wang Lun, que vivía en el reino del segundo emperador de la dinastía Ming. Era famoso por su habilidad y rapidez al decapitar a sus víctimas, pero toda su vida había tenido una secreta aspiración jamás realizada todavía: cortar tan rápidamente el cuello de una persona que la cabeza quedara sobre el cuello, posada sobre él. Practicó y practicó y finalmente, en su año sesenta y seis, realizó su ambición.

Era un atareado día de ejecuciones y él despachaba cada hombre con graciosa velocidad; las cabezas rodaban en el polvo. Llegó el duodécimo hombre, empezó a subir el patíbulo y Wang Lun, con un golpe de su espada, lo decapitó con tal celeridad que la víctima continuó subiendo. Cuando llegó arriba, se dirigió airadamente al verdugo:

Por qué prolongas mi agonía? -le preguntó-. ¡Habías sido tan misericordiosamente rápido con los otros!

Fue el gran momento de Wang Lun; había coronado el trabajo de toda su vida. En su rostro apareció una serena sonrisa; se volvió hacia su víctima y le dijo:

-Tenga la bondad de inclinar la cabeza, por favor.

A. Koestler

]]> http://14deabril.wordpress.com/?p=320 Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:04:16 +0000 Júcaro http://14deabril.wordpress.com/?p=320 Mientras que la llamada izquierda necesita aferrarse a principios para la reconstrucción de su proyecto democrático, uno tiene la impresión, seguramente errónea, que la derecha política adolece de esa inquietud. Ellos parecen conformarse con la encomienda al dios mercado mientras se ejercitan en el golpe bajo y efectista; no tienen esa necesidad de buscar nuevas lecturas y cuando se lanzan a ello se quedan en FAES.

Existe una cierta izquierda que se quedó en la nostalgia del marxismo pero ya sabemos que no se dan las circunstancias. En ella abundan las adoratrices de iconos imposibles y absurdos que viven agarrados al pasado y desorientados en el presente. Ya no se puede seguir aferrado a la esperanza del compromiso de los trabajadores para emprender una auténtica transformación.

Nada más conservador, por irreal e ilusorio, que seguir confiando en una clase trabajadora que ya no existe tal y como fue concebida allá por el siglo XIX y buena parte del XX, cuando las fábricas eran un abuso constante y los trabajadores auténticos esclavos de sus necesidades y de las ambiciones del empresario. Hoy nosotros, humanizadas las condiciones de trabajo, nos entregamos al placer de la propiedad y al juego de la emulación: coche potente, adosado en las afueras o cerca de la playa, electrodomésticos y cachivaches de última generación así como un largo etcétera, hace que sigamos esclavizados por las necesidades que nos crea un sistema insaciable.

No podemos negar que nos hemos convertido en consumistas compulsivos en busca de la felicidad. Hemos puesto de moda una cierta adoración esquizoide al dinero para poder representar un hipotético triunfo personal y social que sabemos falsos, pero que nos sirve para el autoengaño y para la práctica de un exhibicionismo intrascendente y soez a costa de cargar, si es preciso, con el yugo de la hipoteca vitalicia.

Algo así, pero con mayor lucidez, escribió Koestler: "La adoración al proletariado parece a simple vista un fenómeno marxista; pero en realidad es una variedad de los cultos románticos del pastor, del campesino, del noble salvaje, que ya conoció el pasado"

Las clases sociales tradicionales ya no se corresponden con la realidad actual; el movimiento obrero se reduce a protestas puntuales ante situaciones muy concretas y específicas, Delphi por ejemplo. El inconformismo social, dormita a la espera de mejores días; ya no quedan revolucionarios, puede que algunos pocos rebeldes y perseguidores de sueños imposibles, poco más. Tampoco quedan intelectuales capaces de dar respuesta de elaborar ideología y, si quedan, ¿dónde están?

Aquí, nosotros los trabajadores, formamos parte de esa mayoría resignada y sometida a la presión de la propaganda para comprar más, para tener más, sin comprender que aquí siempre pagamos los trabajadores. El ejemplo de la crisis hipotecaria es palmario. Una serie de bancos entran en crisis y mientras a ellos se les inyecta dinero, al trabajador se le proporciona desempleo y pérdida del poder adquisitivo.

Por lo demás, seguimos, como siempre, en manos de esa minoría que controla el mando económico, político e informativo aunque en este terreno puede que la revolución llegue vía Internet.

Escrito tras la lectura del post de Jovekovic.

Israel has the same right to exist as the United States. Boatloads of people from Europe came to both and took the land away from the folk already living there. The right of conquest. It's a conditional historical right, not an absolute moral one. Americans may say Manhattan was paid for with beads and mirrors and the Israelis protest, truthfully for the most part, that they paid good shekels or pounds sterling for their land. But there's one huge difference. The Europeans who morphed over time into Americans began their ethnic cleansing of a continent 400 years ago and had the job pretty much done by 1880. European Jews, on the other hand, only settled Palestine in the lifetime of people who write blogs.

The pieces on history's chessboard cannot be made to go back to the start of the match. If resetting the pawns and bishops became a geopolitical strategy, Constantinople would have to be given back to the Greeks, the Muslims of Cairo would have to go back to the Arabian desert and the Normans get out of England. The Garden of Eden would become a little over-crowded. Everyone has to accept the verdicts of history. The Cherokees who were betrayed and ended up on a bit of unwanted land called a reservation can do no more than purse their lips and shrug their shoulders. But they don't have to like it, or say that it was just. And neither do the Palestinians in their reservation called Gaza.

There is nothing Hamas can do about Israel. All the talk of driving the Jews into the sea doesn't get anyone anywhere. Hamas should talk, and has indeed offered to do so more than once, but Israel will not sit down with them until they concede the point they want to debate. That is the logical fallacy of petitio principii or circular reasoning or begging the question. Palestinians are required to say, whether they agree with the statement or not, that they were dispossessed of the land of their forefathers by a process that was fair and legal. Until they utter those words, they don't get to say anything or sit anywhere. Israel certainly has a right to demand that they give up violence. Indeed, Hamas has undertaken to declare an indefinite moratorium on violence, as the PLO did before them. But Israel has no moral authority to force them to say, before they even approach the table, "we have no right to bemoan our fate."

If rational rules of discourse prevailed, the Palestinians would be able to acknowledge the fact of the land-grab while holding in reserve their opinions of the correctness of it. But they are not allowed to say: Let's agree to disagree on Israel's right to exist and talk about where we go from here, providing we promise to stop throwing bombs. The only answer they get to that proposition is: Sit in the filthy squalor of your refugee camps, with our fingers on the spigots of your water pipes and our thumbs on the breakers of your electricity lines, until you learn to say Israel has an unconditional right to this land. You can offer to stop bombing, rocketing and shooting all you like, but you can't negotiate unless you say 600,000 Europeans arriving to settle on the land your father and grandfather used to farm was fair.

Rearranging history's chessboard indeed sounds silly, but it does happen. England went into Ireland in the twelfth century and left in the 20th. After World War II, Japanese settlers got out of Korea and Manchuria, Germans got out of Upper Silesia and East Prussia, United States administrators left the Philippines, while out of Africa came the French, Belgians and British. After 1991 Russia had to abandon about half the population of the old Soviet Union. But that's not going to happen in Palestine. No amount of hoping and dreaming is going to make European Jews go back where they came from. The Palestinians must accept that. But having them make the best of a bad deal is not enough for the Knesset in west Jerusalem. They want the Palestinians to shout from the rooftops that Israel has an unconditional right to exist.

Until 1918, during the lifetime of the fathers of some bloggers, Palestine was made up of satrapies of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish census-takers were pretty good at checking off and tallying. In 1880, they counted 24,000 Jews in the whole land, including the part Israel calls Judea and Samaria and the rest of the world calls the West Bank. More than half of them lived in the Safed region around the Sea of Galilee, embracing the city of Tiberias. The (extended) Jewish families of Jerusalem then, Wailing Wail or not, could be counted on your fingers. The Turks allowed another 60,000 Jews in before World War I, most of them escaping persecution by Christian Slavs. After their defeat in 1918, the Turks were made to turn over the entire Arab Levant to Britain and France.

There were more, many more, Jews in Baghdad and the cities of Morocco and Yemen than there were in the "Holy Land." Indeed, in 1880, the year American Jews consider the takeoff point for mass Ashkenazi immigration, there were ten times more Jews in the United States than there were in Turkish Palestine. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, the Jews were also in Berlin and Warsaw. And there's the crux of the matter. "Crux" means cross, specifically the Christian one.

It's not politically correct any more to say the Germans murdered six million Jews. It was the Nazis who did it. But deep in the heart of every thinking European Christian there is guilt. If the outcome of the First World War had been different, if a humiliated France had been weighed down by crippling reparations to pay Germany while Alsace-Lorraine was annexed and re-militarization forbidden, if all hope had been squeezed out of the nation by hyperinflation and all self-respect by the Depression's breadlines, some French monster might have come up with a Final Solution of his own. There's not an honest Frenchman who would deny it.

In those days Jews were banned from the best New York clubs and ritzy neighborhoods. A Jew had little more hope of being elected to the Senate from Connecticut than a "negro" in Illinois. All over the white Christian world it was the same. In the 1920s, if you want the best example of Jewish integration, you must turn to Germany, where they were professors, artists, doctors, entertainers, captains of industry, politicians, and above all the spouses of Christians. There were more "mixed marriages" in Germany than anywhere else. In 1922, one year before Hitler's Munich beer-hall putsch, the foreign minister of Germany was Jewish. He was assassinated by a gang of malcontents including (the one who owned the car from which the shots were fired) a man with a Jewish wife.

So one of the main pillars on which the justification for filling Palestine up with the survivors of Hitler's death camps and leaving the Palestinians with 22% of the country was collective white Christian guilt. It was felt that the Jews were owed a homeland, a paltry recompense for the unimaginable horrors visited upon them. No country with the power to stop Jews from occupying the land was going to try very hard for very long.

There was a lot to feel guilty about. In 1940 Congress turned down a proposal to open Alaska to Jewish refugees. In 1941 it refused to relax a quota and allow 20,000 German Jewish children into the United States. In 1943 the State Department rejected a plan by neutral Sweden to jointly rescue 20,000 Jewish children. That same year the Archbishop of Canterbury begged Winston Churchill to drop the quota limits (71,000 were allowed into Britain). Churchill refused. New Zealand declined absolutely to allow in a single Jew, when even Japan let in 2,000. Atheist Russia admitted a quarter million.

The British, who ruled Palestine under a Mandate from the League of Nations, began allowing 1,500 Jewish settlers into Palestine every month from October 1946. Most came from camps in Cyprus, where the British interned those caught trying to sneak in. There was to be a limit of 100,000, agreed on by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, with six members appointed by President Truman and six by Prime Minister Atlee. Then the brand-new United Nations took over, drew up a partition plan and terminated the mandate. A war broke out that the Jews (you can't yet call them Israelis) won. They discarded the UN border plan and set up their nation (actually, they declared a state one day before the termination of the mandate, but the U.N. didn't admit Israel until May 11, 1949.)

Of course the origins of the Jewish state are much more complex than that. The San Remo Conference of 1920, which set up the French and British mandates, acknowledged a Jewish National Home in the British part (today's Israel, Jordan, West Bank and Gaza), first set out in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November, 1917. Zionists (the term has an almost pejorative feel to it today but was proudly used then) spent a lot of money buying a lot of land at inflated prices, chiefly from Arabs, but also from Turks and Europeans.

Conflict between Arabs and the steadily swelling Jewish settlers was continuous from 1918 to 1948. In 1937 the Earl of Peel headed a commission that proposed dividing the land west of the Jordan River into a small Jewish state, a large Arab one and a British zone that included Jerusalem. The Arabs rejected it out of hand though the Jews, with arms twisted, accepted. The following year another commission, under Sir John Woodhead, came up with another variation. In 1940, Britain banned Jewish purchases of land in designated Arab areas. The Jewish Agency, a sort of quasi-government that had replaced the Zionist Organization, came up with one partition plan in 1938 and a much more ambitious one in 1946. Even these envisaged an international zone for Jerusalem.

Then, on 29 November, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state to come into being from the day the British mandate ended May 15, 1948, with an economic union between the two. There was to be an international zone around Jerusalem, and there were to be 25 Jewish settlements in the Arab state and the isolated Arab town of Jaffa beside Tel Aviv was to be surrounded by the Jewish state. Strife got steadily worse as the day approached. In the closing hours of the mandate, Arabs attacked from Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. They thought they would repeat Turkey's 1923 feat of driving the Greeks out of Anatolia. But in six months the self-proclaimed new state conquered most of the populated area of today's Israel and were finally victorious by January 1949, setting the borders until 1967.

No Arab or anti-Israeli Muslim with an ounce of compassion will deny that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in history, but they will also say that Jewish suffering does not justify taking 78% of Arab land in Palestine (and that was before the West Bank settlements). Most of the world's borders have been delineated at some time by war or conquest. The number of Palestinians who left what became Israel in 1948 is disputed. The U.N. estimated there were 809,100 there in 1947 and two years later the Israeli census (which no reasonable person disputes) counted 160,000 still resident, meaning 650,000 had left. The Israelis say they left of their own accord and the Arabs say they were kicked out. Most lived in wretched refugee camps where their descendants remain today. Neighboring states made little attempt to integrate them. Israeli not only feels no responsibility but appears not even mildly interested.

Massive transfers of population were a feature of the late 1940s. About 12 million Germans were driven east. Vast numbers of Poles were moved out of Byelorussia (as Belarus was then known) to take their place. Virtually all the Hindus were driven out of Pakistan and many Muslims chose to make the dangerous journey the other way from India. Japanese were ordered back to the home islands. So in that context at that time, Palestine was not so different. After the 1948 war, the Sephardic Jews who had lived for centuries in Morocco, Yemen and all over the rest of the Arab world came under pressure to leave. How many were actually driven out and how many were beseeched by the new state to come and populate the land is questioned, but about 586,000 arrived. Israel then proceeded to vacuum up Jews all over the world, including about 60,000 from India, eliminating a vibrant ancient culture in Bombay. Even from Britain came 14,000.

Then, after 1990, any person in the former Soviet Union with the vaguest connection to Judaism was freely admitted with virtually no questions asked. All Israel wanted was to swell the numbers of non-Arabs. And to fit them in, Israel began a vast building program in parts of the West Bank it had promised President Carter it would vacate. So Israel has no incentive to talk to the Palestinians, ever.

In fact, every time there seems to be a break that looks like it may lead to negotiations, Israel will conduct a "targeted killing" of a Palestinian leader, no doubt one selected because he genuinely has blood on his hands. But the result is always to nip in the bud all talk of progress. These assassinations are so timely that any Israeli claim to coincidence is ludicrous. Israel does not want to talk because if it does, the only agenda on the table is Security Council Resolution 242, drafted in 1967 by British diplomat Hugh Foot (Lord Caradon, 1907-1990) and adopted unanimously that year. It requires Israel to withdraw all military personnel from territories occupied in the 1967 war. Plainly, come what may, that is not going to happen.

Another pillar on which the legitimacy of Israel is claimed is a religious one. Conservative Jews and evangelical American Christians believe that God gave the Holy Land to Moses. This may be a powerful article of faith but is no argument at all in logic or history. Believing some legends from a couple of millennia ago take us back to that original absurd premise of preordained borders. It has all the logic of telling the Spanish to give Mexico back to the Aztecs. Besides, there is no proof that Ashkenazi (European) Jews originated in some diaspora from Judea. We know there were Jews in Rome in the first century, but where were they in the Dark Ages and early medieval times? They suddenly appear out of nowhere around the same time the Scandinavians and Slavs were converting to Christianity.

Arthur Koestler, the Jewish-Hungarian-British historian and scholar (and ardent Zionist) published a book in 1976 called The Thirteenth Tribe. He posited the eminently sensible suggestion that the Jews of Europe got to be there the same way the Christians did -- and later some Muslims. They converted. Koestler suggests they were a Caucasian group who, after conversion, were slowly driven northwest until they eventually appear in western history by late medieval times as the Ashkenazi Jews. Conversion in those pre-literacy days was a decision by a king for the entire tribe. Of course Koestler's theory is not popular in Israel. But one thing in its favor is the mirror. Sephardic Jews look more like Arabs. Ashkenazi Jews look like the Lithuanian Benjamin Mileikowsky (a.k.a. Netanyahu).

The general perception is that the Arab-Israel conflict is insoluble. But it isn't. All it needs is a totally new perspective. That is not likely to come from the Palestinians. It could come from the Israelis if only they were willing to do an absolute rethink of their values. Dick Cheney is there this week saying the usual optimistic things about break-throughs. But a small shift in position won't do. First they could drop the Old Testament's eye for an eye and adopt the New Testament's turn the other cheek. (Yes, only 9% of Israelis are Christian.) They could say, send your puny little home-made rockets over the border and we will not hit back. You kill about one of us a year, and we kill (not on purpose, of course) several children and innocent bystanders every time we punish you for the rocket. Sooner or later, especially if there is movement on the real issue, pressure will mount in Gaza to make the rocket firers desist.

Next, some far-sighted Israeli statesman has got to convince the whole nation to say something like this:

Sixty years ago you were living here. Then we had a war and now you are living in those disgusting camps. When we won we brought half a million European survivors of Christian horrors to live in places where you used to be. Then we gathered up every Jew in the world we could persuade and got them to move in too. That included half a million who were living in Muslim countries for centuries before the Prophet swept out of the desert with a new message called Islam. This million soon became three. Then the Soviet Union fell apart and we imported a million more. Now there are 4.8 million of us in the land where there were once about a million of you. There are about one and a half million Arabs here, too, descendants of the ones who didn't run away, or, if you insist, weren't chased out. Of that 1.5 million, 83% are Muslims and the others evenly divided between Christians and Druze.

Now, those Arabs who live among us are not integrated very well into our society. But they enjoy all the rights and privileges of other citizens. They chiefly live in their own towns, villages or suburbs, speak Arabic (which we have made an official language), attend their own schools if they want, observe their own customs, go to their mosques and churches. They are free to print their own newspapers, join labor unions, get jobs that suit their qualifications and elect members to parliament. By law no one can injure their rights. Wouldn't you like that too? Well, you are not going to have it in our country. You can't come back to the places your fathers and grandfathers lived in. For one thing there are nearly five million Jews here now and for another, like it or not, our outlooks on life and religion are too different. We are not about to be swamped by you, and surely you wouldn't want to be swamped by us.

So here's what we'll do. We'll build you high-rise cities like Hong Kong and Singapore in Gaza and the West Bank. Nice apartments with good plumbing and elevators, with gardens and fountains in the forecourt. We'll build you schools and hospitals and shopping malls and power stations and waterworks and industrial estates where you can get jobs if you don't have much of an education and office towers to work in if you do. We can afford it. We may have to tighten our belts a bit, but it will be worth it if you agree to let historical bygones be bygones. We can start with the $2 billion the United States gives us every year. Our GDP is $233 billion, so we can afford to add quite a lot more. For about $20 billion, with another $20 billion for infrastructure, we can, with your cheap labor, rehouse the lot of you. We can manage that over 20 years. We'll start with the refugee camps in places like Jenin in the West Bank and Khan Yunis in Gaza and bit by bit we'll empty out the camps in Lebanon or wherever you are living in those hopeless, deplorable conditions.

Implicit in this, of course, is that you behave. But we won't ram that down your throats. We are not asking you to like us. We're not asking you to have anything to do with us if you don't want to. No matter how unfair you think the outcome of our settlement and conquest was, you can't reset those pieces on history's chess board. We couldn't either, even if we wanted to. It may sound all pie in the sky to you, but look at Hong Kong. Back when we had our first real war, they had an electric fence and shunned the people on the other side. In the years after 1949 Hong Kong was a collection of shanties no better than the ones you are living in now. But look at how prosperous they have become. You can, too, after a while, starting with some immediate improvements like jobs in the construction industry. You can aspire to the good life for your kids. If it works out we may have an intertwined economy and become civilized neighbors.

Simplifiquemos:

Primero: Les Luthiers o el humor por excelencia. Largo recorrido, el absurdo, la música y la originalidad a la hora de crear instrumentos musicales de objetos inauditos. Nos quedamos con este último detalle: la flexibilidad de ver nuevos usos en objetos habituales. Más mágico es crear música.

Segundo: El anucio del Honda Accord creado a través del movimiento de cada una de sus piezas, de forma secuencial. Increíble anuncio que muestra, una vez más, que la el TODO es mucho más que la SUMA DE LAS PARTES.

Tercero: Si tomamos lo más especial de los dos anteriores, los instrumentos originales de Les Luthiers (ésta vez no será su humor) y las diferentes piezas del vehículo tal como se muestra en el anuncio de Honda,  lo integramos, le damos forma, estilo, clase...y ya tenemos el nuevo anuncio de Ford: el Ford Focus.

CONCLUSIÓN: la combinatoria, la bisociación de Koestler, una vez más, es garantía de ideas originales. Obviamente, para llegar al resultado final se necesita mucha elaboración y más ideas. Pero el concepto, ¡ay el concepto!.

Espectacular.

Vamos a verlos:

LES LUTHIERS

HONDA ACCORD "THE POWER OF DREAMS"

RESULTADO: FORD FOCUS: EL INSTRUMENTO PERFECTO.

El desempleo de masas en Alemania estuvo estrechamente vinculado al auge electoral de los grupos antisistema a principios de los años treinta. Por esa razón, no ha de extrañarnos que buena parte de la estrategia política de estos girase en torno al citado problema social. Así nos narra Díez Espinosa este fenómeno: “El cambio político requiere conquistar el voto de los desempleados (2 millones en 1929, 3 millones en 1930, 4,5 millones en 1931, 6 millones en marzo de 1932), de sus familiares y, en general, de cuantos ciudadanos se sienten amenazados por el desempleo. Las formaciones antisistema son conscientes del potencial revolucionario de la crisis económica y orientan a tal fin la estrategia”.

No obstante, como bien indica el autor en esta y otras de sus obras –El laberinto alemán y Sociedad y cultura en la República de Weimar. El fracaso de una ilusión– la crisis no fue la única causa del derrumbamiento republicano. Coincide con Sebastián Haffner al afirmar que el constructo político de Weimar nació incapaz de arraigar en la conciencia de los alemanes: era una república sin republicanos. Esto explica porque el modelo democrático-liberal cayó en Alemania mientras se mantuvo en otras naciones –Estado Unidos y Gran Bretaña- con problemas de desempleo similares o mayores. En esos lugares el sistema político había echado raíces; se planteaban cambios en los gobiernos, pero nunca de modelo estatal.

Díez Espinosa comienza su estudio sobre el desempleo de masas y los grupos antisistema en Alemania citando algunos estudios de carácter sociológico, histórico y económico: Los parados de Marienthal (Paul Lazarsfield, Marie Jahoda y Hans Zeisel Bread and Work. The experience of unemployment (Matt Perry), La Gran Depresión (Jean Heffer), Sociedad y cultura en la República de Weimar. El fracaso de una ilusión (José Ramón Díez Espinosa), Wirtschaftliche Depresion und Politischer Radikalismus (H. Bennecke), Unemployment and Solidarity: the German Experience 1929-33 (Dick Geary), Los fascismos (Thierry Buron y Pascal Gauchon ), y Empleo y desempleo. Un análisis socio-psicológico (Marie Jahoda). Después de estos estudios, el autor se sirve de las obras literarias para continuar con su exposición: La peste parda, de Daniel Guérin; Una juventud alemana, de Golo Mann; Berlin Alexanderplatz, de Alfred Döblin; Mr. Norris cambia de tren, de Christopher Isherwood; Un sí menor y un NO mayor, Georg Grosz; La escritura invisible, de Arthur Koestler; ¿Y ahora qué?, de Hans Fallada; Von drei Millionen drei, de Leonhard Frank; La muchacha de seda artificial, de Irmgard Keun; Fabian, Historia de un moralista, de Erich Kästner.

A lo largo del espacio dedicado a Alemania encontramos también referencias al cine –Kuhle Wampe, de Slatan Dudow- y a la música –Horst Wessel Lied por la parte nacionalsocialista, y Das Solidaritätslied por el bando comunista-. Además, en las páginas 231 y 232 encontramos, respectivamente, un cuadro dedicado a los resultados electorales del KPD entre 1928 y 1933 (cuadro 24), y otro de idéntica temática sobre el NSDAP.

Bibliografía:

[1] El desempleo de masas en la Gran Depresión. Palabras, imágenes y sonidos; José Ramón Díez Espinosa - Valladolid - Universidad - 2006.

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Saber reírse de uno mismo, tomarnos la vida un poco menos en serio de vez en cuando, asombrarnos del mecanismo de la risa (Arthur Koestler: en "The act of creation" reflexiona sobre el mecanismo común de la risa: ¡ja!, el asombro estético ¡ah! y el "ajá" del descubridor), todas esas son vías para, como siempre, ver este mundo con otros ojos y encontrar rendijas por las que seguir creando.

Y pensando en maestros del humor contemporáneo, televisivo, hoy hubiera cumplido 84 años,  Benny Hill, el simpático gordito inglés con el que muchos descubrimos el corrosivo humor británico y de paso, pues sí,  la catedral de Saint Paul en Londres y sin saber que era eso.

Y sí, le encantaba la picardía "viejoverdera".

Pues a reírse un poco, que mueve el diafragma y oxigena el cerebro...

Por Benito Montañica

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Then there's the magazines.  I love magazines.  I am a total periodical consumer.

The funny thing is how all this parallel reading sometimes comes together.  I have a pair of books in one room (okay, the bathroom) that on the surface couldn't seem more opposite: Lord of the Fries by Tim Wynne-Jones and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland by Phillip K. Dick.  I take turns reading chapters from them. I find they compliment each other in strange ways.

One is a collection of short stories, the other is a novel, separated by 30 years (although this is the first time the Dick book has been in print).  One has adults trying to navigate the harsher realities of middle-age angst, the other has teens navigating their teenage angst. Urban California versus suburban Canada.  Modern, natural narrative against mannered literary stylist.

The two books work together the same way that ingredients do in cooking, it's almost alchemical.  You can make a tomato sauce for pasta with a little honey to cut the acid, or you can grate in some lemon zest instead and brighten the flavor.  The Dick book has a gravity to it, the weight of the characters like the spare tire they carry with them in their later years; the Wynne-Jones kids are all the light rambunctiousness of youth.  Both feature the antics of adults navigating their way through life, different but no less than the teens who are still trying to find their place in the world.  Same world, different times, same struggles, different perspectives.

Parallel worlds, in my bathroom.

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Exhibition: Insider Art
ICA, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH
12 July - 9 September (daily 12pm-7.30pm)

I’ve been struggling with the Insider Art exhibition at the ICA because it’s hard to know how to frame it. The two hundred works in the show were selected from around 3,000 entries sent by open submission to the Koestler Trust this year by detainees in prisons, psychiatric hospitals and other secure units in Britain. It’s Koestler’s annual exhibition but this year there’s a twist: they’re showing it at the ICA, they’ve invited big Art names to select for and curate the show, and they’ve given it a big Art title.

It looks like the exhibition is trying to function in three separate ways at once. It’s a showcase for the dedicated work of sometimes technically and conceptually accomplished detainees for whom making artwork is a rare opportunity for creative self-expression. It’s evidence of the work of the Koestler Trust, an organisation that aims to demonstrate the positive value for prisoners of achieving something positive and being recognized for it. And it expresses the perspective of the established artists and curators who designed the exhibition. But I don’t think the three players quite see eye to eye, and there are one or two uneasy compromises lingering.

Greyson Perry was on the selection panel and he briefly mentioned a concern that this year’s system encouraged seeing the artworks as found objects and the curators as artists. He swiftly moved on with an unresolved ‘I hope not’, but he raises a good point about the effect of doubly recontextualising the work, not only taking it out of its original institutions but putting it into the aggressively Contemporary Art context of the ICA.

In straightforward terms of publicity, kudos and visitor numbers the move is billed as a big step up for the Trust. But for now at least, whether or not the Koestler Awards are “making it into the mainstream” as Iain Aitch announces in his Guardian Online review, it certainly isn’t the case for the artists themselves. In almost every review I’ve read there’s been a strong feeling of ‘them and us’, with ‘us’ being either the general law-abiding public or the all-seeing, all-knowing art crowd, and ‘them’ always remaining the criminals: the baddies with soft hearts. Perhaps it’s impossible not to read histories into the work since the background of the artists is so definitively emphasized - after all the show’s only theme is that all the participants are detainees, and each has their institution listed on the wall alongside their name. The provocative title of the show with its implicit reference to outsider art encourages this feeling too, and all in all it’s tempting to see the whole hang as a tabloid excursion into pop criminal psychology.

The reference to outsider art in the title also introduces some of the more theoretical concerns of the exhibition, by making the assumption that outsider art is what we’re looking at here. How do we define outsider artists, and how might we mark their crossover into mainstream art, if that's something that can ever happen? What are the implications of imposing the term on an artist - or, more startlingly, on two hundred almost completely unrelated artists? Calling it all outsider art is a big assumption to make with no questions asked and it feels uncomfortable and even patronising as Greyson Perry suggested. I’d be interested to know how the work would fare without the label. The Whitechapel’s 2006 exhibition Inner Worlds Outside brought up the same question, showing works by outsider and established artists together and trying to minimize any distinction between them. The result was quieter and more respectful of the artwork than Insider Art. There's no denying that much of the work in the current show is engaging, skillful, challenging and enjoyable, and would look quite at home in a degree show or contemporary art gallery. But it feels like this is missing the point, and that there's something productive the work would be able to offer if only it were positioned within the context of contemporary art in such a way that it's able to speak for itself, as itself, and without being dazzled by the fact of what it is.

I can’t help feeling that the formal treatment of the show makes it difficult to consider the works other than as placeholders in a curatorial exercise, and that in this respect any work taken from contained institutions and placed in the ICA would have had the same effect. The artists will individually and independently continue to benefit from their participation in the show and the process of art-making itself, but in terms of ‘mainstream’ contemporary art, it remains a show more for the curators than the artists.

Tamarin Norwood

Some books are sometimes so full of good quotations and good references that I end up discovering several other books worth reading. This happened to me recently with Brave Companions by David McCullough. And now it's happening again with Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter . One person quoted in Caplan's book is Arthur Koestler which lead me to check out his contribution to The God That Failed, a book of testimonials from some prominent ex-communists in the fifties. It also got me to talk about it with my father who lived through that period. Of course my dad knew all about Koestler and the other people who contributed to the book. He also recommended Koestler's book Darkness at Noon , which is now on my reading list. It turns out that Koestler had proposed the word "holonic", which adds another candidate for the Language of the Future post: "holonic order".

The conversation with my dad turned to all the people who traveled to the USSR in those years and then he mentioned an early French traveler named Custine who in the early 1800's had traveled to Russia and had made some eerily accurate predictions about the future of that nation. Around the same time, Alexis de Tocqueville was traveling around the USA and was making eerily accurate predictions about they way "democracies choose bad policies". What was it about nineteenth century French aristocrats that made them so smart? My dad is like that, he has read an enormous quantity of books in his life (can't read anymore now due to blindness), and somehow talking about Koestler must have unearthed from his memory the Marquis de Custine and his book Letters from Russia, all stuff that I had never heard him talk about before. Anyways, now I have yet another book on my reading list. But here is the curious thing: while reading the Wikipedia page linked above for de Custine what do I find in the Notes and References? A link to Bryan Caplan's great Museum of Communism! Coincidence?