where does the money go? (when the markets go low)

A general feeling of optimism in today's news, as the Stock Markets are going up again after the so-called "black" last Monday. And after the panic that got into me the day before yesterday, I am starting to feel calmer once more. The stocks are going up, what a relief!

I have been around only for the last thirty years, conscious of news over the last 20 or something and I still never had bothered enough about what people call "the economy" and how this may be related to the stock markets, or simply, the "markets". Even so, I find it somehow frustrating that we should actually care about what happens in the stock exchange department. I mean, why should I care? Over the last decade I have seen the Greek Stock Market (to give a rather mediocre but interesting example) to grow three times as big within 10 months (that was back in 2000) and then shrink back to the levels of before within the following year. I can assure you that my life did not change a single tiny bit and during those two years, when -supposedly- the "economy" grew to an "unprecedented high" only to reach a peak and crumble down to "depression", I kept earning the same, living with my parents, trying to avoid taking a cab back home, going to the movies every now and then. And yes, the prices of almost everything were the same throughout this period.

So, what is this deal with the "markets"? Why should I be glad if the stocks are up and get depressed when they go down? What's in it for me?

During last Monday, I am told, the European stock markets lost more than 300 billion Euros, an amount that equals the annual gross domestic product of Greece. Where did this money go? Where does the money go, when the stocks go low? More interestingly, I can remember a day or two, when judging from the gains all over the world, the Stock Markets MUST have gained the annual GDP of Greece. Where did THAT money go? Well, you should take my word if I tell you I did not see a penny of it.

I said before, I am no expert. I am a simple chemist, having read my share of Herakleitos and Lavoisier plus a little bit of Marx, perhaps a bit too much of Kondratiev, and thus having inherent difficulties in dealing with commodities that simply appear out of nothing or disappear into nothing. I am probably too ignorant when it comes to how "economy" works or perhaps even stupid when it comes to how it really works. And I may be a bit naive in asking if the losers of Monday can be the winners of today, since we are most ardently ascertained that the stocks ARE going UP as we speak. I guess -and this is as far as my poor economy-related argumentation can reach- that they are probably not the same. That the ones who suffered "Black Monday" were simply outranked by the ones celebrating "White Wednesday", that it is all just a game between players, having nothing to do with normal people lives, and that in any case...

I STILL DON'T CARE!

anniversary*

Pensar em ti é coisa delicada.
É um diluír de tinta espessa e farta
e o passá-la em finíssima aguada
com um pincel de marta.

Um pesar grãos de nada em mínima balança
um armar de arames cauteloso e atento,
um proteger a chama contra o vento,
pentear cabelinhos de criança.

Um desembaraçar de linhas de costura,
um correr sobre lã que ninguém saiba e oiça,
um planar de gaivota como um lábio a sorrir,

Penso em ti com tamanha ternura
como se fosses vidro ou película de louça
que apenas como o pensar te pudesses partir.

Antonio Gedeao (Romulo de Carvallo)
"A um ti que eu inventei"

*this is BarcaBios 100th post. Thanks to Filipe for providing such wonderful words for it

Missing

Saturday is my holy day. No matter what happens, I refuse to work unless I do it out of joy -something which lately has been quite common, mostly because of the absence of deadlines-. And as any holy day, my Saturday mornings follow a ritual, whose customary character can only be disturbed by extreme weather conditions or over-consumption of alcohol on Friday night.

So, any given Saturday after having breakfast, I start my morning walk rambleando (a term I initially thought to have invented myself until Juan Goytisolo wrote the best piece about it in today's Babelia). Ramblear simply means taking a stroll down -or in my case up- the Rambla, a walk which as Goytisolo may confirm is probably as unique as the Rambla itself. Of course, some may argue that it is quite impossible to conduct a proper rambleo during a sunny Saturday morning, or in fact any Saturday morning, given the flocks of tourists, children, crazy bikers, skaters, madmen and other members of Barcelona's stable I am probably forgetting. They are right to some extent, but my Saturday's rambleo is usually too short to be perturbed by them. At the hight of Escudellers I always turn right towards Plaza George Orwell, (or as it is better known Plaza Tripi). There in the quietness of one of the Gothic Quarter's inner patios I can apply myself to my favourite leisure activity. Looking for old books.

You see in the middle of the Tripi, there were always stalls of booksellers, with a great variety of old books, good books, first editions, in many different languages. Most of all there is good company, as the booksellers themselves are real booklovers. The lady in the photo is one of them. I have spoken with her more than once. She's very polite and generous and kind, always by the side of her stall to recommend a good read, in between two whiffs of her pipe. I do not know her name, but I 've talked with her about many books, her country, Uruguay, and my favourite Uruguayans, Eduardo Galeano and Juan Carlos Onetti, my country and her favourites Sophokles and Euripides. We have also talked about her exile, how she ended up in Barcelona, how much she likes it here even if she misses home. I felt I have grown to know her a bit, even if many times I may just pass by her saying "Hola", when I see her busy or when I don't feel like talking too much (she can be a bit too much of a talker even for a chatterer like myself).

But that all was until last weekend. Since then, the old lady with the pipe has vanished. She disappeared alongside her stall with first editions of Marques. As did the rest of the booksellers of Tripi and their stalls and their Saramagos, Onettis, Fuentes, Camus and Faulkners. They are simply not there anymore.

Which means, my Saturday literary ritual will remain suspended until further notice.

stand up for you rights!

Yesterday I was writing about football, victories and defeats and how all these take their special place in the minds of fans, shape a collective memory, which is to be shared among people, strengthening bonds between them and eventually making their lives more interesting. I forgot to mention the obvious, that is that all of the above apply to sane people only.

I count myself among the sane ones. I 'll bear the grief for yesterday's defeat, share it with my father and friends, long for an opportunity to regain the pride and wipe out the shame of this 4-0. It is now part of our club's history, which as the history of a nation includes both victories, disasters and triumphs. But, these are all having to do with one thing ONLY and that is football. Insane people, on the other hand, are totally missing this point. They feel a football game result, is a projection of their whole lives, which void of any meaning are in desperate need of a cause. And they find this cause in questioning life itself. They do it by killing each other.

Yesterday night, right after the game an Olympiakos' fan was stubbed in the heart by some people I don't even dare to describe as football fans. He died on the spot, simply because he was too unlucky in being at the wrong place in the wrong time, celebrating victory with a drink, with his team's scarf around his neck. He did the most natural thing to do, and if my team had won and I was not living in Barcelona, I could have been in his place.

The question is what WE do about all this. How long can this keep going? It's high time people take action to stop this disgrace. Above all we, football fans, should stand up for our right to enjoy freely the game we love without having to apologise all the time about the brutal insanity, with which some maniac idiots have chosen to surround it. Unless, fans, sports journalists and footballers, everyone that has a say about this game go down the streets to declare that we shall tolerate this no more, we don't deserve anything better than this!

Atonement...

...will have to wait 7 more years....

Atonement

March 21st, 2001 was a Wednesday. Having not found tickets for the game and given there was some kind of TV broadcasting ban, I had no option than to stay at home and listen to it on the radio. My father sat at the other side of the table, smoking unstoppably. Ten minutes after kick-off we were down 0-2 and the hope of securing a soothing victory against Olympiakos was already gone. By that time we had been beaten by them in every possible way. Within a period of five years, we had lost to them four league titles, more than a handful of derbies, including a humiliating Cup Final in which they played with one man down for most of the game. But an astonishing 1-4 defeat in our home ground, with no excuse about a terrifying atmosphere or biased refereeing could only mean one thing. We had reached the bottom.

It's been almost seven years since then. Things between us (Panathinaikos) and them (Olympiakos) have not changed considerably. They still win the league, we still do better in Europe. Over these seven years we have had victories over them, won back a Cup Final in 2004, got the double that same year and have not lost to them in our last 4 encounters. But, in spite of all that, the stain of that distant 1-4 remains.

They say that football is about winning, just like any other sport, that winning is all a matter of consistency and that the best is the one who wins trophies at the end of the season instead of achieving solitary victories in the middle of it. But for a helpless romantic like myself, -even more, one with a painfully good memory-, there are some victories or defeats that somehow are more important than a series of trophies. They mark a before and an after, they set a time-mark in the history of clubs and consequently in the lives of the funs. They become part of a legend, where game results become historical events, wins are now called "triumphs" and losses qualify as "disasters", in the strict footballistic sense. They don't happen very often, therefore the shame can last for years.

Fortunately it's the strict footballistic sense that allows to avenge the shame and regain the pride. There are opportunities in the form of re-matches. Tonight's game is one such. A one-off Cup quarter-final at their ground, with our lads in high moral and the strong belief we can do it. It's no easy task, given that a 0-1 victory will not mean revenge. Most of today's players were not there with me on that Wednesday, some of them were not even aware that tere is a team called Panathinaikos. It's not their job to carry the memory of that game for seven years. They may be unaware of the fact that they have a chance for atonement, a chance to make up for that disgraceful 1-4, seven years ago. And it may be better like this.

All they have to do is play good football tonight. And let me long for the atonement of their predecessors.

today

"...que no hay tórtolas, que no existe Lucília, que no existe el Residencial de la Praça da Alegría, que no existe el chulo negro, que no existe la Pide, que no hubo comunistas, que no existió mi pasado (...) que tampoco existe usted, amigo escritor, y que nos encontramos ambos, óigame, no en el Campo de Santana, que jamás existió, con sus pavos reales, sus mendigos y sus locos, sino suspendidos en una especie de limbo, conversando sobre nada, rodeados de tejados y árboles y gente sin substancia, en una Lisboa imaginaria que baja hacia el río a lo largo de una confusa precipitación de callejones inventados..."

Antonio Lobo Antunes
El orden antural de las cosas

People live here

The cloudy weather we have been experiencing in Barcelona over these last days, combined with some post-holiday, new year's melancholy had sent me in a really grey place by yesterday morning. I woke up sleepy and tired, got dressed while swearing in all languages I can pronounce, mumbled "good morning " to my flatmates and went out the door, hating my job, the moist sticking on the tiles of Plaza de la Merce, this humid winter and the complete universe. As I rushed down Carrer de la Merce, hoping to make it on time for the seminar I passed by this place, a small strip of the street sheltered beneath an arch, where usually I see a couple of homeless people sleeping.

Yesterday they weren't there. But there remained signs of their existence in the form of a smoked wall. Signs that someone had built a fire to get through a chilly night. I thought that in my native Greek tongue, the fireplace is actually used to mean "home" and then I thought that the place I was looking at, the remains of a fireplace I was taking a photo of, IS the actual home of some people. I remembered the sign I had once seen in the nice, nearby neighborhood of el Born, "Aqui viu gent", meaning "People live here" and imagined it pasted over this smoked wall.

And then I gave myself a moment to think about this unknown neighbours of mine, who spent each night a few meters away from my front door, covered up in anoraks, blankets and sleeping-bags, trying to keep warm by building fires in the middle of the street. I thought about them, being rudely awaken by the cops much earlier than when I lazily decide to get out of bed. I imagined them telling stories to each other to forget their agony in the face of one more rainy night, or even worse, having told all the stories so many times and having got so drunk that there are no more stories to tell.

I thought about all these things going on right next to my doorstep and decided that it probably was the wrong day for me to bitch about the weather, or the seminar or everything. Or perhaps it was a perfect day to bitch about all that but I was the wrong guy to do it.

where the streets have a name

Saturday afternoon found me strolling down the streets of Barceloneta seeking refuge from the wind that looked as if it was destined to strip away the beach of all its sand. It is funny how places close to the sea exposed to strong winds tend to have a similar architecture, with small narrow streets, where one can still find some peace even though a few meters away the palm trees are bending and the waves are roaring. Like many of the Greek islands, Barceloneta is also built in a grid of very narrow streets, packed next to each other, providing shed from the tramontana, while allowing the sea breeze to blow through and cool things off during the hot summer days.

As I walked down from the Plaza de Barceloneta towards the sea I came across this street sign on the corner of Carrer de Sant Miguel and Escuder. An old building stood there, its walls grey and dirty, no tiles or fancy colours, just a patine of what looked to me like the sepia toner of old photos. There, next to the sign reading the name of the street, someone had used black paint and old-style calligraphy to write a name: "Miguel Pedrola". From that point of view, it looked as if this street had two names, two Miguels, one who was a saint and another one about whom I knew nothing. Who was Miguel Pedrola?


As I normally take pride in earning my living as a researcher, I felt it was time for me to prove it. I took a shortcut to the office and started digging into google-land. A first search gave me some hints. Miguel Pedrola's name was listed in some old marxist archives as leader of the POUM youth during the Civil War. Further search in the Civil War archives revealed that the young Pedrola fell in the front of Aragon sometime early 1937. This would mean he had no chance to see his comrades being stigmatized as trotskyist-antirevolutionaries during the incidents of May 1937 in Barcelona. Staying away from this tragically ironic conflict he fought his good fight and fell for what he believed. Therefore, even though not a Saint he might have deserved a street with his name.

Some more of library-digging at home today shed more light into the story of this street with two names. According to the City Hall's registry this street is listed with two names although the official street sign reads only the first, more divine one. The story behind this is that people from the neighborhood of Barceloneta, where Pedrola came from, wanted the name changed but some dispute with the municipal authorities at some distant time prevented that. The street is shown in all maps and guides as Carrer de Sant Miguel and the name of Pedrola is slowly drifting towards oblivion.

The person who painted the sign on the wall, might have never met Pedrola himself. He might have been the son of one of his comrades, a distant cousin who grew up listening stories about him, or the girl Pedrola never married, or her daughter, or a neighbour with whom they would play football on Sundays. In any case it was someone who remembered, someone who would like us to remember also.

So, next time you pass by Carrer Sant Miguel, take a short moment to take a look at the corner dedicated to Miguel Pedrola, a youngster who, being no Saint, died for democracy some sixty years ago, somewhere close to Teruel.

a day like today

Over the past two years I have grown so used of flying back and forth between Barcelona and Athens that I can practically set my flight sleeping schedule according to the cruising altitude, knowing exactly when to bring my sit to the "upright" position before even being told. Today in particular I was quite reluctant in doing so, mostly because it was sometime around 5 in the morning when we started our descent to "El Prat" Airport.

In any case, this late -or early depending on one's point of view- flight was actually better than what I expected. The weather I encountered upon my arrival, on the other hand, was not. I picked up from where I left, almost two weeks ago when it was cloudy and windy. Only now it was very cloudy and very windy. As I tried to give myself as many tasks as possible to avoid going to bed at 11 am, I found myself riding a bike up on the Rambla only to remember that a day like today, four years ago I was walking down the same street for the first time in my life. Back then in 2004, Barcelona was just a -promising- holiday destination, I was a tourist and in the company of Kostas enchanted by this beautiful city. Today, I have been in this place for almost two years, enough not to consider myself as a "guiri" anymore. Nevertheless, the joy of walking down the Rambla remains unspoiled by any habitual interference, like having to go to the supermarket or carry 10 kilos of groceries back home, while "bicing" (yes, I still do that) through the tourist-infested streets of the Gotico.

It looks like, 4 years after that first acquaintance with the city of Gaudi, the magic is still here.

today

Avant d' etre aveugle, Oedipe n' a fait toute sa vie que jouer a colin-maillard avec la Sort.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Feux