Oὐ γὰρ ἔδωκεν ἡμῖν ὁ θεὸς πνεῦμα δειλίας, ἀλλὰ δυνάμεως καὶ ἀγάπης καὶ σωφρονισμοῦ.

I watched two 2008-crisis related documentaries yesterday. I started with The Flaw and finished with Hank. Did I learn or hear much I haven't heard before? Not really, if one thinks of the specifics we all heard and read in the blogosphere and the Press then, with only a few noticeable exceptions. It's about those I'm posting this.

One** was the moment when Alan Greenspan, the Almighty Warlord of Capitalism of the 90ies, admitted that he became "distressed to find out about a flaw in the model of how the free markets were actually structured", that he personally didn't realise during the 40+ years he's been active in the Finance universe, and that he eventually admitted before a US Congress committee that "we were not all that smart", only falling short of actually admitting that "we were basically plain stupid and arrogant, and have allowed Armageddon to happen!"

My 'favorite' Yale Professor of Finance, Nobel Laureate, Robert Schiller*, said he had found that the 'housing industry' prices corrected for inflation had not fundamentally changed from before WW2 up until the year 2000, from which point they started heading up... up... up... towards the stratosphere (a.k.a. the housing bubble).

I liked a clear distinction someone made** between 'assets' and 'goods'. Assets are thingies one uses for investment in order to generate financial income, and Goods are thingies that people typically use and/or consume to get thru another day. People should not mix the two and employ 'goods' as 'assets'. This was an explicit criticism to all those responsible for packaging sub-prime mortgages, slicing them in tranches of increasing risk and selling them to investors in the form of non-transparent investment strategies a.k.a. CDOs. It seems CDOs used to return lots more profit than traditional investment alternatives. That's why investors loved them and they became so popular. Until the financial tsunami drowned everyone by surprise with CDOs in their portfolios.

Another point that was made** was something we often heard; that despite the crisis the world's richest keep increasing their wealth. Money disappears from the pockets of the middle class and the poor into the pockets of the top richest 1% of the population, especially the 0.1%, and even more in the 0.01%. We are talking tens of billions of dollars here to hundreds of billions, mind you. The commentator said that money obviously shifts from millions of households who lose purchasing power, and, in the process, hurt severely the economy, into the pockets of those who have no use for it whatsoever (other than boosting their ego and showing off in the Forbes list of the World's Billionaires). Luck has it that this morning a similar article popped up in Ta Nea's online edition discussing Portugal's riches and how during just one of the Nation's worst crisis years they added more than 12 Billion € into their personal fortunes. Mind you, many of these Midas's are 75+. Do they ever retire them greedy bastards? This kind of money won't buy them love anymore... that's for sure.

Hank*** was a sort of biography of Henri Paulson, Ex-Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO, who served as Treasury Secretary during George W. Bush's final years (2006-2009). His name was indadvertedly connected to the events at the eye of the storm of the September 2008 Financial outburst, Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, Bear Sterns takeover, AIG bailout, TARP, and the further bailout of the seven largest US Banks. It was good to hear it from the horse's mouth, although what he or anyone involved had said and done during Doomsday of that dreadful weekend while trying to sell Lehman to Barclays and failing, were already shown on TV and written about a million times.

One little detail was striking to me though. It was actually about Paulson's wife Wendy, who emerged from this documentary as a very strong and straightforward personality, and about what she responded, when, after the collapse of the Barclay's deal, Hank in desperation stepped out of his meeting to call her, admittedly overwhelmed by fear. When he mentioned to her that he had suddenly felt very afraid, she cited a line from Apostle Paul's 2nd letter to Timothy, 1:7... "For God hath not given us the spirit of Fear but of Power and of Love and of a Sound Mind****" (KJV). That phrase alone shook him up and gave him the courage to go back and wrap-up business, with Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner on his side.

A final remarkable point that we also know and heard a lot about was Paulson's reaction to the interviewer's question about banks, who, despite failing miserably, used bailout money to pay hefty bonuses to their executives; indeed the banks, not just investment banks but also the likes of Citi and BoA, shared a huge part of responsibility in the notorious 2008 financial clusterf@ck. The least one could consider acceptable was bonus payments to the top in a business as usual fashion. No wonder 'Occupy Wall Street' became a world movement in the years that followed. Hank (you don't mind me calling him Hank, everybody else does) smiled bitterly and actually jumped saying 'not that one again' and further reacted emotionally and he correctly showed his obvious sadness even talking about it. He had forgotten the fundamental dogma of Wall Street at that moment, though. Of which he has been part for decades before then. That 'Greed is Good'...

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* I actually watched a number of his 2011 "Financial Markets" lectures on iTunes-U before 'The Flaw' yesterday, and, my goodness, Mr. Nobel Laureate is such a bore in terms of lecturing techniques. Someone should really talk to him. Teachers should stare towards their students for most of the time, not trying to 'uncover' hidden messages from God by staring at the blackboard instead...
** The Flaw
*** Hank
**** οὐ γὰρ ἔδωκεν ἡμῖν ὁ θεὸς πνεῦμα δειλίας, ἀλλὰ δυνάμεως καὶ ἀγάπης καὶ σωφρονισμοῦ.

Autumn Light

In the kingdom of Belgium, where during most of the year a drizzle rain turns our landscapes into a sad, colourless, dull mixture of all shades of grey, the autumn light in a rainless afternoon becomes a pleasant surprise. As the sun plays hide 'n seek with the scattered cloud, the last yellow leaves that are still hanging in there become the subject of an interesting interplay of light and shadow, like one can only recreate in a studio with strobes, filters and strict light control with shaders, reflectors and other purpose made strobe accessories. I like to seek spots in my garden, where nature does the same with unpredictable effects. My lens, especially my 135mm, vacillates from leave to leave seeking the ultimate shadow/light interplay with leaves becoming members of an orchestra that play a different symphony, one without sound but with lights and darks. Nature, in the cusp of autumn and winter becomes in days like today a photographer's paradise, especially if you adore warm colours as much as I do, yellows, reds, rusty orange and vanishing greens.

First Autumn Colours

First Autumn Colours 2013

Three things I deeply cherish almost more than anything. Light, colours, and the games they interplay inside our perceptive brains, almost touching our soul. I make a serious habit of capturing that visual miracle inside my various cameras, be it either professional and expensive or more of the cheap stuff, like point-'n-shoots and iPhones/iPads. Of all light, especially in autumn, and in days that we are blessed with sun-rays escaping the Belgian cloud and causing the warm colours of decaying tree leaves to really pop, I feel so fortunate. Equipped with my Canon gear I usually go for a walk not far from my house, by the river Schelde, only a few hundred yards away, and shoot the beauty surrounding me. I must have photographed the same subjects a thousand times, for 25 years now. Nevertheless, there's always a different glimpse of the nature around me ready to amaze me again, as the trees and green are rarely the same. Everything changes in time, and so do the autumn vistas. There's always new ways to enjoy it and photograph new scenes unseen before, like when I came across a peculiar colony of mushrooms today in a formation that I could only think of just one attribute to call what I saw: Abundance. 
Yellow, green, magenta, orange, and deep reds, combined with scarce spots of clear blue sky escaping the scattered white/gray clouds have created for me one of the brightest symphonies of autumn colours I could have ever dreamed of. I feel blessed... indeed!

Feel free to experience my enthusiasm by clicking the links above and see the entire set in Flickr, called First Autumn Colours.

Τι Λωζάνη, τι Κοζάνη; (What's the difference between Lausanne (Switzerland) and Kozani (Greece)? - old Greek pop song)

In the 60's in Greece there has been a hit pop song with the title 'What's the difference between Lausanne and Kozani'. I guess the lyrics author picked Lausanne for it's rhyming with Kozani when pronounced in Greek. I searched the lyrics on the net and reading them I realised that the comparison between the cities is about them both located in 'mountainous' areas 'suffering' snowfalls in the winter (so, what's the difference?). The lyrics are furthermore about a soldier serving the military (still compulsory in Greece) and moaning about his lonely and sexless life... I thought about it first time I visited Lausanne, back in 1986. A thought flashed then, like 'dream on, baby' as an imaginary answer to the songwriter, reckoning he'd never seen Lausanne before writing his lyrics. Or he might have done and the whole thing was simply a catch phrase for laughs. In any case, the song stuck and became an instant hit. However, the issue of city comparison between North and South still remains. Do indeed cities in South Europe look different than cities in the Central and Northern Europe and why?

Coming from Alexandroupolis, myself, a Greek city that grew to 75 thousand inhabitants from 15 when I used to live there, and having become utterly frustrated when I visited it after being absent for a very long time, I have a 'weak' spot when it comes to how cities are built, organised and maintained to make life pleasing and comfortable for their inhabitants. It's not sufficient to simply claim that 'the south is chaotic, dirty and disorganised', (which indeed it mostly is, not just in the streets but also inside public administration buildings, schools and universities) and that 'the north is clean, organised and disciplined under the law' (which it often is, incidentally). There is also no imaginary line separating the troubled south from the disciplined north, and it's not like crossing the line will bring you from 'heaven' to 'hell' kind of thing... It is definitely a matter of culture of the individuals living in those cities and managing them daily; it's about tradition, vision, individuals's dignity, and applicable laws. But it is also about certain quite simple policies that various nations with the proper long term vision seem to apply, whereas others (mostly in the South of Europe) don't have a clue. And their impact could be humongous. A small perturbation with immense repercussions. Like chaos theory itself...

To illustrate my argument I have included two pictures here of two cities of similar size in two representative countries of our dearest EU. One is Rethymnon, Crete, in Greece, and the second is Aalter, East Flanders, Belgium. I shot both pictures myself, a few weeks apart. Click on them for larger view and tell the difference by inspecting the two. I will only mention one policy that would make a hell of a difference to Rethymnon and would bring it much closer to order, out of its current chaos. In other words: Cables!

No cables for communications, power and TV/Internet distribution can be seen in the open in Aalter, and just like Aalter, in the town where I live and so many other Flemish towns, cities and villages. Only houses, streets and street lanterns. I am not even talking about the Rethymnon old balconies and parts of buildings that seem to be falling apart. There, they will tell you that there's is a crisis and no money for maintenance and cleanup of the towns is available. Sorry to say, I'm not buying that. As it appears, despite what they say, there's still a lot of money left in Greece, like for top branded fashion and clothing (much more conspicuous than anything I ever saw in Belgium) and driving cars. With 600 thousand inhabitants in Crete, I reckon they must have at least 300 thousand cars and pickup trucks. There's cars everywhere you turn. Appalling! I am not even talking about their larger cities. I almost went ballistic when I arrived at Anogia, a large village not far from Rethymnon, where it was almost impossible to drive around because of the hundreds of cars parked both sides of the street in ways that would render Parisian drivers into the obedient angels of car parking. Apparently, even in Crete there are initiatives for burying the cables, as I heard about Acharnes (I think), a village near Knossos, where there's an EU funded programme for doing with cables what has been the policy in Belgium for more than twenty years now.

In conclusion, Τι Λωζάνη, τι Κοζανη; I betsa, a hell of a difference between the two! For a long time still, deep into the distant future... Unless hell freezes up.

For kicks, I photoshopped out the cables and did some minor repairs and painting and that's how it comes out...At least, it looks safer now...

iTunes Festival

It is the 7th edition of the Festival this year, and as always, it lasts the entire month of September. Since last year I have been watching its individual shows meticulously and with great pleasure. Needless to say, I'm watching it via all my Apple devices and computers, but its best appearance of all happens on my AppleTV connected to a Samsung HDTV. The show takes place in the London Roundhouse that has been converted for the purpose to an outstanding venue to accommodate the many acts (or gigs, to use the youth's jargon). Apparently this year about 20 million people requested free tickets to attend the live shows, which is more or less normal with the stars appearing this time, as are the likes of Lady Gaga (who kicked off the Festival this year) and Elton John. I watched the latter's show twice and I'm gonna have to watch it again and again before they take it off the air (or cable, to be more accurate). A genuine virtuose, still performing like time didn't pass by. Incredible pianist and singer. And with plenty of energy, he spent 1 hour and 42 minutes on stage! Gaga's gig was also performance-wise exceptional, if you like that sort of music it is. I have been amazed by the discipline and professionalism of the artists, and their humility too, regardless their stardom status. I love such pro's. Respect!

Last year I enjoyed for the first time on a show my favorite band Mumford and Son and watched for the first time as well the wünderkind Ed Sheeran, in an one-man orchestra performance. The most romantic voice and music money can buy. But also, Elbow and Emeli Sandé. We had seen all of them during the opening and closing Olympics ceremony by the time the Festival started in September 2012. The Olympics shows had catapulted many of them internationally and established them in the ranks of the best of Britain.

So far this year I have been impressed by a 22 year old kid, Tom Odell, whose voice reminds me the lead singer of Mumford and Sons, but his style is largely impacted by Elton John and Bowie too. Extremely romantic voice and lyrics. The kid plays the piano and does his best to sound like Elton John, but he'll have to spend a few extra performance hours to come any close to the great Artist (with a capital A).

The iTunes Festival is something for all ages. The production and its TV coverage are simply impeccable and one can watch the shows via an iPad app, AppleTV and iTunes on a Mac/PC. No excuses for missing any gigs. If not 'live', at least one has the opportunity to watch the shows after the fact, multiple times to his/her heart's desire. Even deep into the following month of October... and buy the records linked to many of the gigs.