BostonBios - Memorial Day

A lot of things have been said and written about memory and I hold myself capable of reciting quite a lot of them. Perhaps because I am a sucker for history or just because I am growing old, memory and memories are becoming increasingly important for my small universe. And just maybe it should be this way, it should be that people try to remember or at least not forget -which is not always exactly the same-.

Yesterday people in the US celebrated Memorial Day, a day dedicated to the fallen of all wars, which for this young nation may just have been too many already. Maybe this makes the necessity of a Memorial Day even bigger but then again why don't European nations have one as well?

Regardless of what might be said (or written) by others (and myself) about the Americans and their lack of historical thinking, there are some things that they cherish and value more than other people. It may be also true that to a foreigner, especially a European who has read about the near-destruction of his continent as a consequence of non-negotiated nationalisms, the over-abundance of USA flags all over the place and the constant talk about a strong, willing nation (in addition blessed by God) may look a bit repelling. But we are living "interesting times" and this forces us to try to think a bit more like the others instead of judging them on our own grounds, or to cut a long story short...sometimes it's better to try finding excuses than always looking for the blame.

And I 'll be honest. I liked Memorial Day. I liked the fact that the fallen get to be remembered once a year, even if it is a bank holiday. Wars may sometimes be just or -most of the times- unjust, worthy or -almost always- unworthy. But the life of a young man is always worthy and his death is always unjust.

Yesterday we strolled up and down Boston's North End, visited cemeteries full of flags and memorial grounds full of flowers. The day before we came across this pair of boots next to a small flag in Backbay Fens. Friends or relatives of soldiers that died in battle tend to leave their boots next to a flag as a sort of dedication. For me it stands as both a memorial of the fallen and a protest against the stupidity of war.

I just hope Memorial Day serves for the same purpose.

BostonBios - life at the porch

I spent my first days in Boston, looking at the rain outside the window, worrying that the clothes I have brought with me would not suffice for the cold and that I won't see all the things I want to see because of the bad weather.

But the weather proved me wrong and since yesterday it has been so warm I can only compare it with Barcelona at its most humid. And apart from the fact that it gets a bit hard to work without air-condition, I am really enjoying it. Summer is here at last.

Over the last days I have been questioning my work and my ability to carry it out. I am having more than the usual doubts about what I am doing and the usual about how well I am doing it
. A lot of parallel projects, none of which is working out exactly perfectly plus a paper review that puts my kindness in conflict with my scientific good practice.

My salvation has been the company of my good friend Kostas, some californian wine and his porch, at which we spent some nice, long hours last evening, talking about things that really matter. I am just hoping my visit in Boston has more of this and less of the work-related frustration.

let's go with the first series of Boston-Tracks...

sound-track (top 5 in my mp3 player)
1. Stone Roses - I am the resurrection (back to my basics after a nice party at a bar in Allston)
2. Arctic Monkeys - Leave before the lights come on (we caught them live in Avalon Club near Fenway Park and really enjoyed it)
3. Bob Dylan - I will be free (among a lot of other songs of his while getting in really US musical mood)
4. Van Morisson - Linden Arden stole the highlights
5. The Bathers - Kelvingrove baby (old but good, especially out on the porch)

word-track (books I have read or am still reading...)
1. William Faulkner - As I lay dying. the more you read the classics the more you realize there are few things that remain to be written. As the Greek philosopher Kornilios Kastoriades once said "nobody is going to go farther than Aeschylos or Kafka". And after this first reading of Faulkner I would agree. The book builds up slowly but reaches moments of greatness when you least expect it. Faulkner's ability to put universal truths in the mouths of the most simple people resembles that of Shakespeare.
2. William Faulkner - The sound and the Fury. Just started this one, it looks even better than as I lay dying. The language is a bit difficult but once you get the hang of it it works out fine.

film-track (films I saw lately)
1. Borat. My firend Kostas made me watch it when I first came here. Really enjoyed it, it was funny although it does not escape some cliches about "deep" USA, which are scary enough exactly because they are so cliches.

waiting-for-track
1. Visiting the Boston Museum of Fine Arts tomorrow
2. that work gets on some right track and results make sense at last

Everything for dummies

Yesterday on the train from New York to Boston, I noticed a weird poster at one of the intermediate station's platform. It advertised the "For dummies" series of books. To those unaware of the aforementioned "encyclopedia of the ignorants" a simple Amazon search will suffice to enlighten them on the topic.

The US should actually be considered as the inventor of "easy-everything", meaning this kind of culture under which everything should have a light, easy, user-friendly version and whose products and outcomes range from fast-food to google-scholar. But I admit that a book entitled "Sex for dummies" was something of a surprise even for a suspicious observer like myself. And what about "The Islam for dummies"? This is yet another demonstration of wrong hierarchy of priorities. I mean if you know all you want to know about sex (and would not dare ask) what would you need knowing about Islam or the war in Iraq?

Seriously now, "everything for dummies" comes as an additional proof of americans not taking themselves seriously. Admiting they are "dummies" by buying such a book (or in order not to be too judgy a book with such a title) is one thing. Not moving on to a next level by trying to learn something more, buying another book, with less punchlines and more bibliography, or even buying a newspaper twice a week instead of "Cosmo" and "Men's health" would have saved them the trouble to have to keep up with the latest about history, politics or maybe even sexual trends (although I guess Cosmopolitan might be up to date on this last one). The issue here, goes far beyond book reading or being informed. It has to do with the commercial establishment of "chewing gum for the eyes" culture, with books that make you look smart overnight, music that makes you feel trendy for a fortnight and films whose impact on your stomach is just a little bit stronger than the one you got from the pop-corn-pepsi giant combo you had at the multiplex.

We get used to having everything easy, we don't read because we look everything up in the internet, we don't think because TV star-analysts do it for us, we don't care because there is nothing to care about. It's just like Steinbeck's Lennie, the retarded hero from "Of mice and men" who imagined he would "live off the fat o' the land", only that we are convinced we are actually doing it, and this makes us -oh yes- real dummies. And as long as we don't do something about it, we might as well as start looking for a book called "Switching back to being clever... for dummies".

New York Bios...God bless America...

This is a strange land to say the least. At least this is what it looks like in the eyes of a European, that in addition deeply appreciates everything that is European. Yesterday I found myself at the closing dinner of a US-dominated science meeting in Cold Spring Harbor and have to say that I found the overload of what I have always considered fundamentally "american" quite overwhelming.

What do I find "american"? The tendency of excess in everything, the complete absence of measure and the overconsumption in all levels, starting from the amounts of food we were fed by the meeting organizers to the absurdity of keeping the temperature of the auditorium at 14 degrees in early May. The avidity to make money out of everything, to demystify everything and to mock your own living legends, which was manifest yesterday, first in having James Watson giving a small talk about his own genome (!!! comments about this in an upcoming post) and then putting on sale at the Institute's gift shop (its existence alone stands out as obvious "americanism") an advertising poster for Apple computers, picturing James Watson and signed by himself at the rediculous price of $2000!!!

The closing dinner, found me lost in such thoughts and seeking refuge in the company of my "fellow" catalans, my witty boss (shifted towards the wittier with a little bit of wine) and an old colleague from France, named France. After the dinner, we had the honour and the privilege to testify that geeky scientists, are not necessarily geeky all day long, and even if they like to talk about work all the time, they still can have their own special moments. So I witnessed a great part of the meeting participants having a bowl at the concert of "Ethidium Spill" (a group constituted by meeting attendees in itself), which involved crazy dancing, a lot of drinks and even the transient formation of some couples right there at the aftermath of four days of talks, posters and pretending-to-care-about-genomes.

What stroke me though was neither the brief and spontaneous transition of top-notch scientists to party animals (which was expected) nor the proneness of them scientists to get drank at the end of the conference (which was even more anticipated). It was the all-american repertoire of the band, to which I paid special attention not because it was really worth it but merely out of my supposed inherent interest in music, and the frenetic response of the audience to tunes I had always considered as the epitomy of US "college-surf-drive-in-burger" culture. I had only suddenly realized I was in the US.

Moreover, little by little, just by observing the people's reactions, their cheer and enthusiasm, their defiance of any constraint for "comme-il-faut" behaviour, in the end their convenience in not taking themselves at all seriously, I ended up in admiring them. They had spent an entire five days in trying to prove (with very moderate results) that they are in the process of changing the world, they enjoyed each and every moment adulating each other, being flattered by one another and then there they were acting like as they were back in college, naively thinking they still remain the high school kids they once have been, reminiscing their youth to the sounds of what they consider the greatest songs ever, arrogantly believing they live in the greatest country of them all.

And then it occurred to me equally suddenly as clearly. That this is this country's ultimate power. The lack of any constraint, the absence of proper behaviour, the obvious, self-evident right to go on your way, with no obligation to look behind since there is nothing back there for you to look up to. In fact, I think that what we Europeans consider to be the Americans's greatest defect, namely their lack of history and intellectual pillars to stand on, is at the same time their greatest advantage. America has no Socrates or Feidias, Virgilius or Cicero, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Flaubert, Beethoven or Dostoyevski, no Pericles, Leonidas, Julius Cesar, Charlemagne. They share no history that goes back to thousands of years and therefore they feel no shadow being cast upon them by the giants of a glorious past. Americans have every right to invent themselves and in fact they keep doing it with great ease and efficiency. They have actually re-invented USA more than once and I think that Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin, Elias Cazan, John Steinbeck, Richard Feynman, John Coltrane, Woody Allen, Martin Scorcese and Curt Cobain would agree with me.

Constantly re-inventing one's identity is, naturally, quite easy if your sense of historicity is exhausted in overpricing Nobel Prize laureate' s autographs, but then again this is probably part of the system that allows our fellow Americans, not to ever get attached to the past and keep moving forward with no sense of continuum whatsoever. The lack of origins should never preclude the trajectory and although the destination might not be the desirable one, it is the journey that matters.

Long Island Bios

Here I am then, after months of thinking about it, weeks of worrying about it and, a few days of getting stressed about it and 20 straight hours actually doing it I arrived in Cold Spring harbor Long Island, NY, US of A!

The truth is that you don't need that much of fuss even if a business trip is to last the month and a half mine is going to but my usual anxiety, combined with a working load and a growing nostalgia which has become dual, making me miss Greece and Barcelona at the same time, all reached a combined peak two days before I rode the plane and it all became a bit depressing.

Luckily, this soon turned into yet another demonstration that home is where your hat is...or to put it less prosaically wherever you lay down to sleep. Especially if you are a Greek bearing something from Ulysses' genes. You just pack clothes, books and music, your best memories from the place you are leaving, your greatest expectations for the place you are going, then invite your friends for a nice dinner and some wine and the next morning you take off.

Cold Spring Harbor Bios is better than I expected, long walks by the sea under the thin shadow of the oaks and the slightly thicker one giants of science, who overlook you from their portraits in the auditorium, dining rooms and meeting halls. I have to admit that I am enjoying meeting people that are supposed to be great scientists of today, but my well-established tendency to like everything classic and taciturn against anything new make me doubt a lot about where science is going today, few new ideas with a lot of technology, too much searching for stuff, without much imagination about what to look for...

But maybe it's just me, in fact who am I to judge these people. In fact they are the ones entitled to talk about work. All I really want to do here in the US, is reading Faulkner's "As I lay dying", which I find much more exciting than nucleosomes, listen to jazz that sounds much more appealing than talks about SNPs (narcoleptic crisis ahead) and hang around with friends I have not seen for a while, while having drinks on the lawn...

Maybe it's just me, but Cold Spring Harbor Bios is much more fun the way it is not supposed to be.

Election day

Jokes over. Today, unless some great surprise happens, Nicolas Sarkozy will get elected president of France and a new era will begin...

OK, we said jokes over. No new era, just a follow-up of the current one, which is already bad enough. Nicolas "the great" (according to the Economist) or Nicolas "the fearsome" (according to common sense) will bring few new things to French and European policy, apart from a stronger and more honest-with-no-soft-words-rhetorics. I guess he just means to carry on, what has been going on for the last 15 years, which is right-wing politics prevail against socialists which are actually conservative, company-subsidized fakes.

I think it was Freud who once said that people need two things to be happy: Good sex and choices. Although sometimes I doubt about the second one, I totally agree when it comes to politics. We need choices. And the fact that we do not have them pisses me off.

And looking at the cartoon above just makes me depressed.

You 'll never walk alone

Could not have been otherwise!

The Reds of Merseyside, a club originally founded and run by Liverpool workers whose greatest players have always been proud local lads, Liverpool FC which is -as they say- not a club with funs, but funs with a club, against million-pounds-Chelsea, a team from a rich side of London, whose billioner president and arrogant coach have aspired to transform into a European top club, met in Anfield Road's legendary ground on May 1st.

The outcome was not a surprise and Liverpool FC will not walk alone in what will be the attempt for the 6th Champions Winners' Cup on May 23th in my home town, Athens.

Almost one year ago I was posting that I don't like mixing politics with football and here I am going down the slippery road to connecting footballing victories with working-class triumphs. The sad truth is that, historical connotations aside, it is nothing like it. True that Liverpool is much poorer a club compared to Chelsea and even truer that going down the steps under "This is Anfield" and into the pitch with the echo of "You 'll never walk alone" sang by the Kop-choir can influence every game's outcome, but apart from that, no worker will get anything out of a Liverpool win apart from a temporary consolation from his real problems.

Nevertheless, last night's semifinal comes as another proof of history still counting in football, and shirts being "heavier" than money. And that maybe poor people with a cause, like "poor" clubs with a history may still have a chance in winning the Champions League.

As for the real world and politics...posts are coming up.

1 de mayo...

My grandmother used to say that "in May it only rains in cursed places". Waking up on a first of May, -which has always been considered the official beginning of spring and would steer country-side walks and pic-nics even to city dwellers like my family- in the pouring rain was really something new and given Barcelona's weather, quite disappointing.

So be it! I am not "catching" May this year. Instead I am sitting on my couch, looking at the rain outside the window, the wind bending the palm-trees, as disappointed as me, or even more for not being able to dazzle the tourists, who have flown from all over Europe only to find Barcelona at its grayest. The Old Port looks emptier than ever, no outdoor tapas, or claras, umbrellas instead of sunglasses and anoraks instead of shorts (although some visitors still believe you can fight reality with hope and go around in sandals).

And as the Spanish would say "1 de mayo mis cojones!"

Nonetheless, 1st of May is not only about flower-picking and pic-nics. It's labour day for the Europeans at least although the legendary strike took place in Chicago. I felt a bit bad about not doing anything to participate but as it often happens, the mountain came to Mohamed. So around noon, I heard trumpets blowing and drums rolling in front of my place, all this under heavy rain. I opened the window to see a hundred people with their flags and their umbrellas strolling down Passeig de Colom, singing "A las barricadas" a worker's hymn from the 30's often sang during the Spanish civil war.

the lyrics go something like this:

Black storms are shaking the air and dark clouds shade are view
but even if suffering and death awaits us, our duty calls us against the enemy
the gift mostly precious is our Liberty, we have to defend with faith and bravery
High flies the flag of revolution that will bring people to emancipation
On your feet worker people, towards the battlefield, reaction must be defeated
To the barricades, to the barricades, for the triumph of our revolution!

I stood there on the balcony for some five minutes, under the rain as the least I could do for these people, who after so many years and with the rest of the world having grown (or better say having decayed) to be thinking of them as funny romantics, or even stupid and back-ward, they still keep singing about barricades in times when barricades are becoming more and more invisible. The worst thing of all though, was that right across the street, in front of the building of the Capitania General, two police cars full of cops were "discretely" following the demonstration, as of they were monitoring the movements of possible common muggers and thieves, or -God forbid- terrorists...

To the spirit of these people, who keep keeping the cops under terror, who are frowned upon by their own townsmen as retrogressive rebels with out-dated causes, to these few but dedicated successors of the Haymarket Square martyrs, is this post dedicated.