Strike Three - (you 're out...)

This has been the third great general strike since last May. Back then, it all seemed dismal already. Today, a mere 7 months and two more strikes later it looks as if there is no going back.

The most recent (but not the last) of a series of austerity bills hit the ministry desks last night with one more deputy of the ruling "socialists" exlcuding himself from the vote. It was the least he could do not to go down in history as one of those who once gave in to the demands of a foreign, not elected authority that asks for the lowest average income in the EU to be cut down by 10% to 40% and in some cases 60%. Which roughly translates to 10%-40% less spending, 10%-40% less holiday, 10%-40% less education, 10%-40% less health. And 10%-40% more profit for those who used to pay those "surpluss" wages of 700 Euros, the bankers, the CEOs and the company owners who will pay ~15% less taxes this year as a reward for having put up with such overwhelming earnings on behalf of the "lazy" workers of this country.

These workers, will now have to pay the price for having lived on the benefit of "development" for so long. Only this "development" meant a shift of the balance to the bottom. After all this "development" and "expansion" one out of five Greeks lives at the edge of poverty. After all this "growth" you have half a million Greeks unable to visit a doctor. And you see people fighting on the streets for who gets to be the first to look for food in the trash can.

But it was growth for some all right. It was growth for the shareholders who saw their taxes being cut down from 40% to 22% on average over the course of the last 20 years. It was development for the banks who could privatize profits and nationalize debts. It was expansion for those who will now buy this country's forests, coal mines, buses and trains for scrap.
In Europe like in the US the model prevails over the facts. As long as there is "growth" and "development" it's business as usual for those who have their appointed prime ministers cutting the deals. The rest can enjoy poverty.

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Update: All of the above, better said -in Greek- here

the last stand

Of late I have re-newed my devotion to Thanassis Papakonstantinoy mostly due to the interest epxressed by my good friend J. upon listening to a track of Thanassis, which I had casually posted on my facebook page. After giving J. a brief introduction and urging him to listen to "Vrahnos Profitis" (one of my most favourite Greek albums ever) I also found myself unconsciously pressing "repeat" over some of the tracks of the album.

This is how I got to remember "A. Manthos" (the album's fourth track and one with very particular lyrics) and how I came up with the story behind it. The song's lyrics have been adopted from a poem by Christos Bravos, referring to a real incident between Athanasios Manthos, a photographer of the town of Trikala and Thomas Gandaras, an infamous bandit of the region of Thessaly which took place in the 1920s. Gandaras had an extremely bad reputation among the great land-owners of the region for having an extensive record of kidnappings and killings, but as these were limited against the rich and the powerfull, the poor people were largely sympathizing with him. The legend had it that Gandaras became an outlaw in order to avenge the rape of his wife by a squire, thus he and his gang were more often thought of as "Robin-Hood"-like bandits instead of as fierce killers.

But authorities thought (as usually) otherwise and soon the head of Gandaras was put a price on. As the manhunt was closing down on him and his men, he realized that it was not meant for him to last long. Before his last stand, he wanted to strike a last pose. He decided to have his photo taken. One night, he
forgot all precautions and sneaked into the house of Manthos, by then a well-known photographer in the town of Trikala and the nearby villages. Manthos woke up in awe as the ruthless bandit stood before him but was relieved to find out that all the the outlaw wanted was his portraid done. Thus in the middle of the night, Manthos, who was used to photograph weddings and funerals, took a photo of the famous Thomas Gandaras in the living room of his house and in outmost secrecy. The story of this secret meeting is told in the aforementioned poem "A. Manthos" by Christos Bravos, has been made a song by Thanassis Papakonstantinoy and was recently the subject of a beautiful short film by Vassilis Kosmopoulos entitled "The Trikala photographer".

In the days that followed, Manthos met Gandaras in his secret hide-out where he took one more portrait of his (the one you may see here, taken from the blog of Konstantinos Davanelos) as well as a photo of the entire gang. Gandaras finally met his destiny as he was hunted down and killed by militia-men close to Deskati, Grevena on August 5th, 1923. He was decapitated and his head was exposed in the main square of Kalambaka the following day.

Wish you were here (E.T.)

That I am a devoted fan of Pink Floyd is no mystery to the readership of this blog (all three of you). I have repeatedly mentioned names and places related to the greatest band of them all in various past posts, including a (personal) obituary for the late Rick Wright. Having a particular strange tendency for both visual and audial connections it was then very easy for me to spot the missing link behind NASA's Astrobiology lab latest discovery.

According to this, the first living organism to be able to incorporate arsenic instead of phosphorus in its genetic material, was recently isolated in lake Mono in Southern California. The bacterion, whose name (GFAJ-1) comes as yet another proof that people in NASA may provide a whole new level to the definition of dullness, was the object of a greatly anticipated press conference which circulated media feeds and e-mail boxes all over the globe yesterday. People who were let down by the fact that the press release (initially making explicite mention to "the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life") turned out to be about an insignificant bug with an utterly boring name should think twice.

A long time before NASA turned to Lake Mono in desperate search for extra-terrestrial life, Pink Floyd had used its surroundings in a famous photo by Storm Thorgerson which appeared at the back cover of their "Wish you were here" album. This is the snapshot of a diver immersing in the alkaline, toxic but calm and ripless waters of Lake Mono. (And judging from the concentration of arsenic in these waters, I can only hope that the photo is the outcome of some artistic superposition of images.)

Whether the existence of extra terrestrial life was something that concerned Pink Floyd at the time, or whether it was the unwordly atmosphere of the environment that matched their nostalgic title of the album, I dare not speculate. However, the inconcistency with which the scientists announce a talk about alien life only to provide us with an example of what can only be terrestrial (even though underwater) can only make me think that in their quest for E.T, the guys in NASA maybe constantly thinking how they "wish he was here".