Knowing When to Stop

I have discovered a new integral quality a good musician, and an artist for that matter, needs to have -- knowing when to stop! I just came back from a jazz performance at the hip London Dalston borough, at a hip London jazz club, as part of the hip London Jazz Festival. Well, dare a I say it, this perversion of a music was one "hip" to many for old humble me. The words "fucking weird" spring to mind. Immediately. Admittedly less rough methaphors were at the forefront at mine, and my friend Othman's who came with me, mind during the performance. Call it inspiration. "A swan just died in Hyde Park," Othman pointed observantly. " It feels like watching Becket's Waiting for Godot in Swedish, I replied. I suppose reading existentialist literature to the soundtracks of a duck being gang raped would be an appropriate midgroung between our sentiments for the musical event.

I tried to look for the thorn in my own eye, I really did. I thought that my genuine amusement might be similar to how the Spanish Infanta might have felt if, after just having been painted by Velazquez, she had seen a late Picasso or Dali. Artist with established reputation today, I reasoned, would have startled the masses back in the day, much in the same way I was started when the pianist started to pluck the strings of her grand piano with a drumming stick. Except the void between my painful craving for melody at this performance and the musicians resolute decision to not give me four notes in a row that made sense was on the scale of the Paleolithic era and the year 3000. And I wouldn't go as far as calling myself a musical caveman.

In case you are wondering what "knowing when to stop" means, this is when:

Daily Awesomes: August

13.08.2010
Jogging in the rain and finding yourself the only person on the road.
14.08.2010
"When are you coming home, I'm cooking dinner?" phone calls.
15.08.2010
Watching a rerun of a favorite show and realizing you've actually never seen that episode.
16.08.2010
Making it to the food market just as stands are closing and everything is half off, "just for you."
17.08.2010
Thinking how smart your coffee date is as you sip from the cup
18.08.2010
Finding out you are actually not out of chocolate.
19.08.2010
Oldie, but goodie: Illegal afternoon naps.

New Rubric: Daily Awesomes!

It's just past midnight on a Friday night. I've alerted all sources -- I'm staying in and working on my dissertation. It's a lie. Clearly. Instead, I just found the 1000 Awesome Things Project (check out blog roll) and I am shamelessly stealing and modifying the idea. I will write one feel good thing I did today, and will try to keep the effort going tomorrow. Feel free to join in at any time.

Writer's Block

Summer. City. Cloudy English beaches. Roadtrips'n'laughs. The ultimate 20 questions word: TASSLE. Barbecues. World Cup. Sad Brazilians. Rediscovering favorite people over Janelle Monae. Middle eastern news that make your hands shake. Go Dutch! Michiel de Ruyter. Navy barracks and bad pop music. IDEAs. Debates. On a point of information, sir, do you mind the sweatshop where your sneakers are made? A Greece-Bulgaria-Romania new energy deal. Hummus and marshal arts. I saw the Starry Night, you saw the frame... New job. Old schoolwork. The FSA has reputation problems, do you? Мерси, че се отбихте.

Where the Electoral Trump Cards Go?

Britain's allegedly most unpredictable and close election in ages didn't actually yield that revolutionary of a result. While the Lib Dems do hold the key to a likely ruling coalition, Clegg's stellar performance in the TV debates and evident affinity for the campaign trail did not work the miracles they were expected to work according to the last polls before the election. Cameron's call for change did not part the sea either. With less than 50 seats ahead of Labour as of the moment, seems that the Broken Britain he depicted did not come running for a Torry repair work after all. It seems that the one man who managed to pull an ace of his sleeve was the one least expected to do so. Camera-unfriendly, charisma-deprived, gaffe-making Brown still has got some game. Now, heading a party who took the country to five overseas conflicts and is leaving it with a budget deficit the size of Mouth Olympus, Greek pun intended, you would wonder why.
Couple of reasons spring to mind. Firstly, Brits, the progressive, debate loving nation they are, are really not that at edge with the Establishment. That is, while traditional bi-polar politics split the country with dividing lines, faith in the present political class prevails. This is exactly what a Lib Dem party would generally fear. Lib Dems don't usually have sizable core lobbies. They don't appeal to extreme constituencies, like the very rich or the very poor, they require people to think. Their rhetoric has less room for populism. People are rarely born in Lib Dem families, they usually chose to vote so when they have the educational background to make political choices. So the only air that a Lib Dem party can get under its wings is one, a charismatic leader and two, dissatisfaction with the current political elite.
Arguably, Nick Clegg gave the UK Lib Dems the first. His dominance in the first TV debate is admitted by Fleet street, left, right and center. But the second ingredient of the recipe appears to be in shortage. If you compare what is happening in the UK now to when the Lib Dems, lead by the former monarch, won a landslide victory in Bulgaria in 2004, you would see where I'm coming from. Now, their's was a lesson into how you come from behind the scenes, capture a nation's thirst for change by decent rhetoric (albeit populist) and manipulate it to the complete fulfillment of your political agenda.
On a more pragmatic note, I also wonder how does a third party win seats in a country who's media has such strong bi-polar political affiliations (except, of course, one notable independent Independent). You think Italian media is biased? You should have seen the Sun yesterday. It had an Obamanized image of Cameron and a slogan "Britain's Only Hope." The FT today attributed Clegg's dazzling rise to the TV debates. Imagine what he could have done if he has some media backing as well.
And lastly, and I do mean lastly in terms of impact on campaign politics, come the good old party manifestos and whether or not the parties who are winning and losing did actually have a good plan to lead the UK out of recession. With the one camp propelling the nanny state and the other wanting schools to run themselves, there was so much room left for a mid ground policies. What was on offer, however, didn't add up on all counts, and some last minute voters might have caught up on their reading and figured it out.

The Power of None

I find one of the most unfortunate paradoxes of student lifestyle to be that, while the very design of our endeavour mandates us to engage our minds in the heights of academic debate, thinking thoughts with various degree of real life applicability, that same occupational design forces us to fight the most mundane of battles. In other words, intellectual rigor is not yet purchasing power, and I for one have found my rights as a consumer violated on a number of occasions chiefly because my pattern of consumption, saving, spending, or rent-paying evidently does not tickle the relevant service providers sufficiently for them to care about the quality of their product. The particular disturbance I find myself entrapped by, and the bizzare fuel for my attention deficit vis-a-vis academia, is that my landlord has undertaken a, as of the moment, two month long repair work of my terrace, rending it inaccessible, failing to complete the work on time or provide adequate compensation for the inconvenience caused. What could I possibly leverage in this dispute? My Financial Regulation essay? My knowledge of market based regulation? My ability to express my utter aggravation with a number of synonyms and metaphors? None of these would work, that is certain. My intuitive decision to assess whether the UK housing market has a built in safety net helpful in my situation led me to the advice to contact a solicitor. A banal advice which, again, brings my monetary predicament to the forefront, not to mention my distaste for wasting time at the moment. Oh dear.

I won !!!

I freakin' won the Bernard Levin award. I am just going to use this platform to brag, since it's pretty much only darling Aleks Giga who reads my blog, I think ... I will be going an internship at the Daily Mail this summer and fingers crossed find a way to stay in jounralism. So here's the entire winning essay. The award presented said it was "un-put-downable"!

Failing LSE

7AM. Vivaldi’s Spring. Lights. And all that jazz. Toothbrush, coffee cup, run for the 243. Monday traffic, newspaper. Oh, look, it’s my Financial Regulation professor in Letters to the Editor again, and the topic for next class on the front page. Who needs a course pack anyway? Aldwych, The Royal Court of Justice. BUS STOPPING. Dash to class. Good morning, Buenos Días, Привет. I can never remember how many times they kiss hello in Chile. 22 classmates, 18 countries, 10 accents, 100 opinions. We are an argumentative bunch. Last Friday we came up with 12 reasons why new policy of the old chairman of the Federal Reserve might be wrong. In the break between two lectures we disagreed on Beckett as well. Professionals go to conferences abroad to discuss change with leading academics and other bright minds. I go to school.
Have you listened to a Rachmaninov concert for piano and orchestra? It usually starts off with a theme played by the string instruments, which later repeats, while the sounds of a grand piano pierce the violin-lead harmony to disturb the unison and leave a mark. Existing in the LSE reality makes me want to be a Rachmaninov piano. The student body would be my string ensemble. I marvel at the thought, energy, and enthusiasm accumulated on Houghton Street. Yet every day, I get reminded, I am not the only piano around. The Union, the street, the classroom, the pub are buzzing with the allegro appassionato solos of young people decisively taking over platforms and championing the causes they hold dear. In discussions on state intervention and entrepreneurship, on racism and freedom of speech, the public-private border is stormed. Private conversations can be as enlightening as public events, making it incredibly difficult to choose between spending Tuesday evening sparring intellectually among the Debate Society or discussing climate change with a Lord. Ultimately, the discourses enrich us more than the conclusions. In the dissonance of melodies, we strive to emerge harmonious, failing gloriously and walking away with more questions than answers. It’s a failure worth every penny.
One of my favorite things about the LSE is that it trivializes exceptionality. Take for example the book I bought this week from the bookshop on campus. It is arguably one of the most up-to-date and well argued books on its subject at the moment. It was Tuesday afternoon, and equipped with my new purchase, a cup of fair-trade mint tea, and a spare hour I sat in the Fourth Floor Café, only to be handed a colorful schedule for this year’s Economics and Finance Society conference. Imagine the pleasant astonishment when among the familiar names of LSE academic champions, I spotted the very author of the book I was holding. Before I knew it, I found myself front row seated, bright light lit, questions scribbling, and talking to a friend who had just interviewed the star panelist for the school newspaper. A nonchalant waltz to the forefronts on knowledge.
I went home that evening and stayed up late finishing the book, going over the issues the writer had raised in her speech, and trying to come up with conclusions of my own. As student tradition requires, my nocturnal musings completely disarmed the frantic sounds of my wake up alarm, forcing me to fast forward my mourning routine and speed off to class. Yawning recollections from last night’s reading collided with the sounds and smells of London in the morning; my affection for living in a dazzling metropolis mildly diluted by the pressing need to make my way through the cultural smorgasbord and get to class on time. Valuing punctuality is generally a good idea. Valuing punctuality was particularly beneficial that day, as the guest lecturer was not only an accomplished professional, but a change maker discussed in that very book bought, by that very writer I met earlier in the week. This lecture was an exceptional opportunity; it was also just another day at the LSE.
7AM. Vivaldi’s Spring. Lights. It is Friday already. As the pages of the calendar turn, I wonder will I ever be surrounded by a group of individuals this diverse, intriguing, witty and challenging, as I have been throughout the year. The chatter of Houghton Street campaigning shakes me off of my introverted retrospect. A line for tickets in front of the Student Union desk. Whose prime minister will be visiting the School next week? E-mail. Will I join few friends for a concert at the Royal Festival Hall next Monday? Of course I will, Rachmaninov is in the program. Glance over the seminar topics for the next lectures. More questions with no clear answers, another discussion to be had in class and continued over mint tea, another chance to learn what I need to learn more about.
LSE’s “motto rerum cognoscere causas” or “to know the causes of things” is a quote from Virgil's Georgics. Virgil's affinity for Epicureanism and the belief that the highest pleasure is achieved through knowledge and friendship suits us well, even if epicurean value of modesty and moderation does not completely fit a student body whose protests kidnapped the British headlines in the 1960s.
Midnight will strike shortly. A question I have been putting off all week lingers on my mind – how to encapsulate LSE’s vigor, where to apply the drive and curiosity the School fosters when the academic year is over? The concern is legitimate, but I am not too worried. Bernard Levin himself was never able to choose between Vietnam and Wagner. After all, to know that the best question is the one with no easy answer or a single answer at all, to be able to fail at being one-dimensional and narrow-minded is what our LSE degrees are really about.

"Image of Three Bulgarias"

I'm back home on holiday from school, reading a recently published book of a Bulgarian journalist and graduate of my high school, whom I've always admired. The man was already in his eighties when I first learned who he was. I recall a tall, well-groomed, evidently intelligent elderly man giving interviews against a background of the purple-and-golden American College of Sofia diploma. The same one graces my grandma's living room right now. The idea that the erudite journalist and I shared a common educational background has always tickled my self-confidence.

Reading his book, I realized however that ACS in his time, in the 1930's, before the school was closed during the Bulgaria's communist era, had much more influence on its pupils than it did when I attended it, or than it does now. He speaks of single-sex residence halls, strict curfews, and punctual punishments, we knew nothing of in our frivolous days of high school. Anyhow, ACS and the contacts you make there have a way of sticking with you for life. It has been true for the author of the book; it has so far been true for me. This is not really the motivation behind my blog post.

The writer's surprising short-sightedness on some issues is. Born and raised in the perfect centre of Sofia, educated in law, with a career in news reporting, who managed to never join the Communist Party, and stay, from what I am reading, critical of his time and his politicians, he shares some astonishingly flat views on the Balkans. Perhaps I have lost my taste for nationalism, more precisely I have never had one, but his account of Macedonians as a nation towards which Bulgaria should take a strict lack of tolerance policy, and Serbs as the arrogant man of the Balkans who is now left in Europe's back yard, bothers me.

The reasons are few. It does bug me when Macedonian press denies the presence of Bulgarian minority on their territory, of course it does. But leading a foreign policy based on threats, mimicking the IR farce Greece has been promoting for years now -- that's petty and counterproductive. If Macedonians see themselves as different ethnic group, let them. Their entry into NATO or the EU is not a matter of what the official name of their country is. It's a matter of ethic stability and economic indicators. Simples.

Then there is the story of meeting this Serbian Associated Press reporter in the 1970s the writer shares. He was full of himself, he concludes, because he spoke to him in impeccable British accent, refusing to speak in Serbian. Well I speak English with my Serbian friends. It IS easier. And it is in English that I've found out their views on Balkan politics, their sometimes inexplicable to me national pride, other questions on which we disagree, and quite a few things we share and which have made us very close. What I really don't enjoy is this incentive for comparison of nationalistic egos that the Balkans so successfully foster. So I am more critical of my country than you might be of yours. This doesn't make our institutions more democratic, our political leaders better versed, or our judicial systems more transparent. And we're not fooling anyone, except, perhaps, each other.

Coming to the end of this book makes me wonder, was the destiny of a critical intellectual living his most active years in communist Bulgaria bound to come down to believing that everything around you is idiotic, including the transition years and all international conflicts. Quite possibly living with the schizophrenic five-year plans of the Red Party leaders, a truly twisted take on economics as I learned by a bear-of-a-Russian professor of economics in Haverford College, Pennsylvania, really makes one an irrevocable skeptic, adamantly believing that human stupidity and herd like behavior is the root of all evils.

Walk Down Article Lane

I just wanted to jot down a list of the article's I've written for L'Europeo, so I have it somewhere, and so I can keep myself thinking of the one that's due shortly. Here we go.
1. Children of Issue -- "He had impeccable taste" on Ronald Lauder, son of Estee Lauder
2. Jazz Issue -- "The Illiterate Nobleman of Jazz" on Django Reinhardt and "The Jazz Baroness" on Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter
3. Media Issue -- "When the Informer is Enemy of the State" on Mortechai Vanunu and the Israeli atom bomb
4. Spies issue -- "To Spy on Kofi" on Katharine Gun, Clare Short, and Tony Blair
5. Underground issue -- "The Boxcar Society" on Boxcar Betha and the Hobo lifestyle in the US
6.World War II issue -- "The Blind Eyes of the Third Reich" on Leni Riefenstahl and the 1934 propaganda film Triumph des Willens (that one never got published)
7. Telecoms issue -- "At the Beginning There was Ericsson" on Lars Marcus Ericsson and every fifth mobile phone out there

Bernard Levin Competition Entry

So Bernard Levin gradaute LSE and went off the become a pretty influential and pretty controversial journalist. He also had a serious Wagner crush. This is the beginning of an essay I wrote for the LSE Student Union award in his name. It's a bit over the top, I know.

7AM. Vivaldi’s Spring. Lights. And all that jazz. Toothbrush, coffee cup, run for the 243. Monday traffic, newspaper. Oh, look, it’s my Financial Regulation professor in the Letters to the Editor again, and the topic for next class is on the front page. Who needs a course pack anyway? Aldwych, The Royal Court of Justice. BUS STOPPING. Dash to class. Good morning, Buenos Días, Привет. I can never remember how many times they kiss hello in Chile. 22 classmates, 18 countries, 10 accents, 100 opinions. We are an argumentative bunch. Last Friday we came up with 12 reasons why new policy of the old chairman of the Federal Reserve might be wrong. In the break between two lectures we disagreed on Beckett as well. Professionals go to conferences abroad to discuss change with leading academics and other bright minds. I go to school.

Mocondo

My favorite café on Hoxton square went bust. Now, I didn’t feel it when my last company lost a client or when the pound took a beating. But I’ve been officially hit by the crisis, even if the UK just came out of recession in this past quarter.
Mocondo was the first place I went to in Shoreditch. A friend of mine took me there, a true pioneer of East London and its hidden secrets. The first time I went there with her I order a chocolate cake to share. I did not. Share. The second time she took me to the flower market on Curtain Road after an espresso. She bought dry flowers because her room was not getting enough light. I resolved to go back and buy an orange tree. I never did. Last time I spoke to my friend she was back in the US taking care of her family. Mocodo closing down reminded me that I should have written to her sooner.
Mocodo closing down upsets me. Everything that I want and I can’t get lately upsets me. It also reminds me of the loony Marques village where everyone got insomnia for a week. Or was it a month. I could really do with a bit of insomnia these days, but, alas, my sleep is sound as a baby’s. Also sound as this guy on Grey’s Anatomy who had brain tumor. But that’s thinking is just a function of me and my roommate’s obsession with doctors’ TV shows. They are just so miserable, they make my life look like a breeze. I could take the Mcodo simile further by talking about magic realism and how academic and the constant vortex of job applications I am stuck in lately make me feel like living in a made-up place, but I won’t, because nobody likes a whiner.
In any case, I’m in another café now. It’s not as good, but it will do. The barrister is pretty. And this is not me having a soft spot for men behind bars (as in horizontal bars, not vertical). This situational appeal only works for men during the night. It’s 3pm and she’s a well, she. So my opinion is objective. Anyway, she has the “I wish I were in Mocondo gaze too.”

A list of words I'd like to use

Scintillate
noun
1. To throw off sparks; flash.
2. To sparkle or shine.
3. To be animated and brilliant: dinner conversation that scintillated.
verb
To give off (sparks or flashes).

Mamihlapinatapai (Ma-MI-luh-PEE-na-TAH-pie)
in Yaghan, spoken in Tierra del Fuego, South America.
noun
A meaningful look between two people, expressing mutual unstated feelings

Effigy
a representation of a person (especially in the form of sculpture); "the coin bears an effigy of Lincoln"

Haiti

I just finished watching the Help for Haiti Now concert and I'm finding it hard to go to sleep, even though it's probably a good idea. There's few reasons why. Last week alone I talked to probably few hundreds university alumni asking them for donations. I made couple of hundred pounds of the school and the organization I work for raised in the amount of thousands. This money would have been better spent on antibiotics and food. I know that the biggest problem in relieving disasters like this one is not the money, but its distribution. I still cannot feel right about going to work this Wednesday and asking people to donate. Part of the reason is that I myself am using several thousands of the school's money on my scholarship. For a degree I am not sure I want, towards a career I am almost certain I will not enjoy and that has little value added towards the economy in general, albeit the fees it attracts, and for an education I put suboptimal amount of time into. I had a friend from Haiti couple of years ago. We never spoke after that summer. I hope his family is well.

Training Contract Applications

aka the bane of my recent existence. Two curious observations in relation. Firstly, all graduate brochures are identical. The last sponsored article about a law firm I read actually listed great training, international offices, and approachable partners as their main perks. Ok then, my perks should be intellectual aptitude, global mind, and team player. Written just like that. Distinctive enough for HR? I should think not. What hypocrites.

Secondly, the stomach sickness I get from talking about myself in these applications has pushed me to blogging as a tool of procrastination. Not my most creative move.

Work in progress

I have two projects to finish these days, and they are as different as my plans for the future. I am writing a magazine article for Boxcar Bertha, the famous Hobo heroine, and inspiration for one of Scorsese's early movies. It is going to be part of series of articles on the Underground Culture. It's kinda cool, giving that the apartment I live in now is a stone throw away from where Orwell used to live in while pretending to be a Hobo in London, the "background research" if you will for his Down and Out in Paris and London. The area has improved, needless to say. So have rents. Anyway, the other thing I'm writing, or I should have written 2 days ago if I was not too busy perendinating, another great word I learned today, is an essay on insider trading. Quite a sexy topic when it comes to economic justifications, quite dull when it comes to enforcement and regulation, which is what I have to write about. Ugh.

Fool's Gold

I found a great new word today. Borborygmos. It's the Greek for stomach rumble. The word is far better than its semantics I think. It was my great, useless, unpronounceable word for entire 30 minutes. Until I googled it. Then I realized that other people already have such blog sections, additional to thousands unpleasant images associated with it.