Ivan's Blog

Strange coincidence… a few days ago I was complaining about the fact that Picasa Web Album did not give non-US audience the possibility to buy extra storage space if needed. I have just received a mail from Picasa Support (I also complained to them by email) that they have just this possibility is also open now for everybody. So I have to rectify my remark, and I am happy to do so…

I will have to look at my photos on Picasa Web again now. This facility has some nice features, it may very well be a nice alternative to my current, mostly manual way of generating albums on the Web. I do not know yet.

I have been using Picasa for a while to organize my photos on my machine, run a local slideshow, etc. It is a good software for that. I generate my photo albums with the HTML export facility of Picasa which also has a simple template system that lets you adapt the output.

I have recently updated my templates to include some javascript to navigate among the pictures with arrow keys; while I was at it, I also made the output proper and valid XHTML. I have put the template files to this site, in the somebody wants to use them: just download the zip file, deflate it in the web\templates directory of your Picasa installation, and that is it. Picasa will pick up the template automatically from this directory.

Not all my albums use the cleaned up version yet, but you can look at, say, my photos of Amsterdam as an example (I have commented out the copyright statement and the extra calligraphy image from the distribution, you might want to adapt it to your taste…).

By the way, I have also tried out the Picasa Web Album, to see if I could directly use that instead of generating (and uploading) the XHTML myself. I do not think I will use this, though… Although the album feature looks quite nice (see mine, for example), it has a relatively limited amount of space available and one has to pay a yearly fee for some extra space. That, by itself, would be acceptable, but… payment is accepted from US bank account and credit card only! Isn’t that ridiculous? What a parochialism…

Having spend some vacations lately in Beijing, I also took photos, of course. I have finally worked through all of them and have put a selection of those on the Web (mixed with older photos that I took on previous occasions).

Actually, I also play with the Picasa Web Album site, and I have the same album on my site there. I quite like the Picasa program that I have been using to organize my photos for a while. Actually, I also quite like the Picasa Web Album, and I would love to use that site to store my photos but… there is a limitation on the amount of space that one can use for free and to buy a larger space one has to be in the US. No kidding: if you are not in the US (more exactly, if you do not have a US credit card, I guess), then you cannot buy a larger disc space. This parochialism is really offending.

I had the pleasure, yesterday evening, to see the movie “Girl With a Pearl Earring” (courtesy of the Belgian TV…). The movie itself is, well, a fiction; I think I actually preferred the original novel by T. Chevalier. What captivated was not really the story but the beautiful work done by the cameraman. Some of the shots were really like the paintings of J.&Vermeer in terms of light, colour, etc.

And the movie reminded me again how absolutely beautiful the original painting of Vermeer is. I remember being so captivated by it at my last visit in the Hague at the Mauritiushuis that I sat down on a couch facing the painting and I just stayed there for a very very long time, completely absorbed by the view. It certainly is, at least for me, one of the highlights of classical Flamish/Dutch painting, and of European painting in general. It was good to see such a movie and remind me again…

I always considered the BBC World News as the best TV News around, and believed in the aura of impartiality that it tries to convey about itself. Until now, that is…

There were some major raws and street fights in my home country, Hungary, at the beginning of this week; these raws actually followed a series of protestations, turmoils, etc, that have been going on for several weeks now. This week’s events were exasperated by the commemoration of the uprising of October 1956. I do not want to go into a detailed (albeit personal) analysis of all these events, it would take too long; suffices it say that, in my view, what happened is the failure of the whole political establishment of the past 15 years (roughly since the regime changes).

However: what the BBC showed in its reports, in the tone of its “Hard Talk” programme, etc, is an incredibly one-sided view of the events, almost fully dictated by the hypocritical attitude of the current opposition parties and personalities. This in spite of the fact that the responsibilities of those in the raws and street fights are also enormous. We have not heard at all about a number of appalling and, frankly, frightening events around the so-called “opposition groups” on the streets of the past few weeks: making a list of all Jewish members of the current government, carrying around a red-white striped flag (the so-called “Árpád stripes”) associated to the worst fascist movements of pre-war Hungary, or that one of the slogans they shouted was “throw the prime minister into the (river) Danube”. The current opposition tries to wipe these under the carpet, which is part of their policies to regain power. It is all understandable though despicable. But why did the so-called objective BBC News did the same?

Oh well… one illusion less, I guess 

My son made me discover a Turkish jazz pianist called Fazil Say. I must admit I never heard of him before, but I listened to two of his jazz variations: variations on Mozart’s “alla turca” and a set of Paganini variations. I am usually not fond of jazz transcriptions of classical piano pieces, but these two are really good. Worth listening to them!

The interesting thing is that he is as much a classical as a jazz player. On another entry I found on YouTube he plays Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s wonderful Chacone (originally composed for solo violin). Although I do not like Busoni’s transcription at all (I really prefer the original), it is worth noting when a pianist can play both jazz and classical. It is not frequent (Keith Jarrett comes to my mind who also published CD-s with sonatas of Händel, and also recorded the Well Temperated Clavier).

I had a few hours free in Berlin, so I went to see the new Holocaust Memorial which was finished about a year ago. (The official name is “Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe”.) I have already heard about it, I saw pictures on TV, and I know it is a quite controversial work of art. And, I must admit, when I saw it on TV I could not really appreciate it either.

The memorial consists of a large number (2711, to be exact) gray concrete stelae, placed on a regular grid. There is also a paved pathway between the blocks that people can go to. As the photos below show, the stelae are of different height and their top have different slopes as well. The higher blocks are in the centre of the grid, forming a little “hill”, the ones on the sides are fairly small (about 30-40 cm height).

So far so good, and one could ask what the big deal is. (I was wondering myself, too.) That trick is that, of course, the visitor is pretty much drawn to go and follow the paths between the blocks. And that is where the surprise comes. Indeed, what one cannot see from the side of the memorial is that not only are the blocks of different height, but the paths are not flat either. They usually go down toward the centre, though in a somewhat irregular fashion. What this means is that, when going “in” the grid, one is surrounded by fairly high stelae (some of the are more than 4 meters) very quickly on a path that is smaller than a meter. And the surprising effect comes from the fact that this happens much more quickly than one would expect just looking at the stelae from the side. I can tell you: it is a fairly discomforting feeling. Cut from the sunlight, surrounded by those dark gray blocks on a dark gray pavement… It can get to you. It did for me.

And then, I got it. This is a Holocaust memorial, not only a play with blocks. Remember what happened? First, only very small steps were done (you know, jews had take a special section of the tramway, they may have been banned from some governmental jobs, these sort of things). And people thought: that is not so bad, one can survive that, things will get better. (It was just like those small blocks on the side of the memorial: nothing really exciting.) And then things went downhill. Fast. Very fast, just like getting submerged by those big blocks in the middle of the memorial. We all know what happened next. Maybe this is my imagination, and this is not what the artist wanted; but I do not care. It worked for me… And it was a fascinating, though slightly discomforting experience.

(Maybe I was influenced by the anti-semitic and other, nationalistic noises that reappear on the streets of my home town just about these days. Do not be fooled by the small gray blocks that you can simply sit on; it can be scary very very quickly…)

It is a bit unfortunate that this did not attract more attention. A unique history textbook has just been published. It is a textbook on European history after 1945, which will be followed by others on European history in general. The interesting point is that this textbook was prepared jointly by German and French experts, is published in both languages, and will be part of the official curriculum both for French and for German students preparing what one call « le baccalauréat » and the others call “die Abitur”.

People outside Europe, or younger generations, may not realize the huge symbolic importance of this. The history of Europe has been dominated by the controversy of the French and the Germans, which had largely contributed to both World Wars. It was an unfortunate symbol for the madness of national feelings. It disturbed family lives in the most cruel ways. My family, for example, comes from an area called « la Lorraine », East of France today, which was the subject of wars between Germany and France several times over the centuries. Consequence: two of my grand-uncles found themselves enrolled in opposing armies in the first World War and sent to the same front, just because a crazy frontier happened to be somewhere between two villages. How cruel can that be?

It is one of the greatest achievements of the past decades that this is now in the past. Germany and France will never go to war against one another again. People way too often forget that putting such nationalistic feelings behind us and replacing it with some sort of union is probably one of the biggest achievements of the very existence of the European Union, and this by itself makes it worth having this Union and be wholeheartedly in favour of it. I am not talking of the Franco-German relations only, there are others (to take an example that I visited a few months ago, Süd-Tirol in Italy, or a number of similar conflicts in Central Europe). Looking at my “other half” of my family line, I would love to see a joint history book for Hungary and Romania coming up, for example…