"Yemen: The 9-year-old war-zone school teacher"

 The most moving 90 seconds of TV I've seen in a long time.

"In the city of Taiz, Yemen, hundreds of children arrive for lessons each day in the ruins of a school near to front-line fighting between the government and Houthi rebels.

Ahmed, a nine-year-old boy who has been blind since birth, steps in to take classes when the teachers can't make it.

One in every five Yemeni schools is out of use, according to Unicef. But at this one, teachers decided to open it despite the damage, so that education could continue."

Produced by Orla Guerin, Goktay Koraltan, Claire Read, Ahmed Baider and Suad al-Salahi.

"The time has come to #FightTheDebt"

"A tsunami of debt has crashed over the world, and billions of people are drowning.

This week, the G20 will meet to decide the direction of the global economic recovery — and we are demanding debt justice.

The G20 governments are the major creditors to the world. But instead of sending emergency support to the world's poor countries, they have helped big banks and vulture funds to collect money that is desperately needed for public health.

We need to break this system of exploitation — and replace it with a system centred on debt justice and the delivery of green and just transitions everywhere.

This struggle is not new. For decades, peoples and nations have fought debt as an instrument of neocolonial extraction.

Today, we take forward that legacy in a global campaign to #FightTheDebt, using this historic opportunity to advance the cause of debt justice."

Download the Briefing & Read Our Demands

"Eva's eye" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

 

[Photo: Eva Parey, from Expulsiones Anunciadas]

Even if you just look at the titles of just a few of her solo exhibitions before you focus on the poignancy of her photography, you can get an idea of the scope of Eva Parey’s work: ‘Expulsions Foretold,’ ‘Chernobil Beach,’ ‘Princesses for sale,’ ‘Forced Nomads,’ ‘Gypsy lives,’ ‘The daughters of Durga.’  

From last summer until now, the Covid-19 pandemic was also the subject of an especially harrowing set of photos she took of life in Barcelona’s streets and treatment rooms. It has also meant that several of Eva’s recent exhibitions have had to move online.

I would say it’s near impossible to do justice to the best photography by attempting to use words to describe or comment on it. What I can express is how I’m taken in by her images because of the pure humanity that shines through them and how sensitively she frames her subjects. 

The nucleus of her whole catalogue is people and the living environment but more particularly, people from minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.

These include children in Barcelona’s eviction-ravaged Meridiana, ethnic Kalash animists, slum-dwelling women in Mumbai, the victims of new segregation along the Slovak wall and Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona (including her photos of men at prayer in a mosque).

Much of Eva’s work can be viewed on her website (EvaParey.com). One project  she talks about there that has been widely displayed in galleries across Catalonia is titled ‘East Winds.’

According to her it’s “a portrait of the Romani Diaspora [concentrating on a family headed by Ioana,] a matriarch whose 15 children are dispersed across Europe, between Romania, France, Germany and Spain.”

In the section of pictures called ‘Under a Hot Tin Roof’ she says that “After living for a while in Barcelona, Ioana decided to return to Romania, taking care of her grandchildren.”

In Eva’s opinion her children “aspire to be like their elders who are their role models, putting them in the same position as their predecessors once they become adults: at the mercy of political decisions, socio-economic ups and downs and socially at the back of the queue. Emigration is the only way out.”

Her skills are not restricted to fixed images though. Recently, Eva’s first documentary film became available through Filmin. Called ‘Arrels fondes’ (Deep roots) and jointly directed by Pep Martínez, it’s an hour length co-production with IB3 Television in Catalan with English or Castellano subtitles.

As a “journey through the branches of memory on the island of Formentera from the Franco regime to its opening to tourism, locals on the island of Formentera narrate how they survived the famine in the mid-1950s.

Through autumn to summer, the island's transformation is shown, “from tranquillity to tourist saturation with globalization causing the inevitable loss of certain ancestral customs, despite the retired peasants remaining rooted in land and sea; a deep bond that few young people inherit.”

Eva appears to not be content with her substantial creative output since 2006, sharing her knowledge by teaching photography at the Tecnocampus University of Mataró and photojournalism at the UPF in Barcelona. Her professional history also includes participation in collective and group shows such as ‘Photojournalists: looking at violence against women in the world,’ which was held in Barcelona’s Institut Català de la Dona in 2019.

George Orwell wrote that “ As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.” I’d argue that the progressive left could certainly do with a lot less factional tribalists and a lot more people like Eva Parey.

She’s someone who quietly gets on with using their empathy and talents to reveal the human damage that the capitalist machine is doing every day to countless millions across our groaning planet.​

(This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Feb. 2020.)

From Eva Parey's webpage...

EXPULSIONS FORETOLD

In the summer of 2010 the French government ordered the mass expulsion of thousands of Roma during August and September after the riots in Saint-Aignan that were triggered by the death of a Roma at the hands of the police.

 

Some of Ioana’s children were living in camps on the outskirts of Lille in France. The police arrived with an expulsion order for everyone to leave within 24 hours. When the time was up they led them to the Belgian border or deported them by plane on the understanding that they would not return to French soil. Many left voluntarily in order to be able to return.

 

This happens every year to Roma people from Eastern Europe. The French government continues expelling Gypsies, nowadays offering no form of financial help.

"ESTATAMBESTAT/ESTATCONTRAESTAT" -- EXHIBITIONS AND SHOETANK PERFORMANCE 2020, Xavier G Solis"

 

"Xavier G-Solís held two exhibitions entitled ESTATAMBESTAT/ESTATCONTRAESTAT:

. 1 October - 8 November 2020, at Sala dels Trinitaris in Vilafranca del Penedès . 5 November - 5 December 2020, at Galeria Contrast in Barcelona

[The artist's words:] These exhibitions were initially due to open in March 2020, but were postponed when the state of emergency was declared. And so, the first global pandemic makes up a large part of both exhibitions. The video presents the performance SHOETANK and the two exhibitions that talk about the social situation in Catalonia after the sentencing of the elected Catalan politicians who organised the referendum for independence on October 1, 2017. The world has changed, but the repression of individual and collective freedom of expression in Spain continues to take place with total impunity."

"Pandemic as Polemic" ' -- Online seminar from the University of Barcelona

 "The Covid-19 pandemic has been a great challenge for everybody, individually and socially, and has raised many questions about lifestyle, environment, social and economic inequality, health policies, science and especially governance and politics. 

Covid-19, its development, impact and effects form the basis of most current debates in our media and politics, and the illness has therefore become a rich interface of conflict that exacerbates contemporary inequalities and creates new ones. Yet, polemic can also be the source of renovation and construction, and as such, Covid-19 needs and deserves to be discussed from a multidisciplinary, global perspective. 

The Barcelona November 2021 seminar Australian and Transnational Studies Centre│Fac. of Philology│U of Barcelona│Gran Via, 585│08007 Barcelona, Spain 

Pandemic as Polemic aims to provide such a floor for open-minded discussion. 

We invite scholars to submit proposals for panels, posters and papers on the topic, from whatever point of view or discipline. • Submissions should include an abstract of 200-300 words in the language of the paper (choose one of the nine languages listed below) as well as in English, together with a brief biography in English. All should be sent to the scientific committee no later than 15 May. • Acceptation of proposals will be informed by 15 June. 

The seminar will be held ON LINE on Thursday 4th and Friday 5th November, and is free of charge, but registration is needed at the e-mail address ceatubenrolment@gmail.com. 

The CEAT will send the information and links for the Seminar to the registered participants. English, Catalan and Spanish will be the languages of the Seminar, but participants can submit ad give their communications in German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Galician and Basque as well. No translation will be provided. 

For further information and submission of proposals contact us at ceatsubmissions@gmail.com Scientific committee: Dr. Isabel Alonso Breto, Dr. Montserrat Camps-Gaset, Dr. Maria Grau-Perejoan, and Dr. Martin Renes. "

Deaf woman chosen as Podemos spokesperson in Valencia's parliament

[Photo: Europa Press]

In an historical first, Spanish progressive-left party Podemos has chosen Pilar Lima, who is hearing-impaired, as their parliamentary spokesperson in the Valencian parliament. She will communicate in sign-language.

 Source: Business Over Tapas. (A superb news summary service.)

Covid, Brando and Moore what's more

   

[Colour-blind Covid warning]

Imagine...6 months from now the Covid-19 virus is able to breed in the air. 

   We are all scrabbling suddenly on the internet to buy "virus- safe" filters for the windows and air conditioners in our houses after another full lockdown/confinement/quarantine/international panic. 

   Imagine...There's the above possibility (or "potential", the word I keep hearing everywhere on mainstream media and the Twittersphere.) 

Somehow in my mind this is connected with a brilliant documentary I watched yesterday ("Listen to Me Marlon") on that most authentic of humans, Brando. He was one of the first males to use the power of suggestion in body and face language and movement, all coming from his harvesting and harnessing of childhood memory of his mother and a solitary upbringing in the open air and nature. 

He realised the primacy and goodness of Tahitians, indigenous first nation Americans, and was one of the few celebrities who put his body on the line in the early proto-BlackLivesMatter public protests in the late 1960s. 

He was with Martin Luther King around the time he was assassinated and years later still felt moved enough that he could still recall the sound of that brave soul's voice. Brando seemed to work and live his life as an expression of pure authenticity. 

One of the few writers who is doing the same today is Suzanne Moore. She just reeks of it: the unabashed openness of being herself. In a highly unfashionable act, she wrote recently about the importance of Freud, remembering him as he understood the babyish primacy of memory, childhood, want and nakedness.

Spanish youths' surprising outlooks

 

[Photo: EFE]

‘Young Spaniards believe that they will live better than their parents, but in another country.

Those aged 15 to 29 are critical of the value of friendship, committed to social causes and sceptical of their political representatives’.

The survey includes a useful graphic. From La Vanguardia but found at Business Over Tapas.

"A village with their own dialect and far from everything"

 

"From Fascinating Spain comes ‘San Martín de Trevejo, the village in Extremadura where Asturian (sic) is spoken’.

It begins ‘This is possibly the most isolated town in Spain, located in the Sierra de Gata and bordering Salamanca and Portugal. This geographical isolation may explain why it has an old town far from all the stereotypes of Extremadura.

It also conserves its own dialect, A Fala, which has been declared an Asset of Cultural Interest…""

(Found using the excellent weekly news service Business Over Tapas.)

"Captured" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

[A surveillance camera in Barcelona. MANEL LLADÓ.]

 “I’m the only foreigner in the Catalan government,” Italian, Francesca Bria used to sometimes say when introducing herself to a public audience. 

In the two years leading up to the pandemic, her team’s work on “digital sovereignty” for people living in the Catalan capital might prove to be as important as others' efforts on political sovereignty.

A Financial Times article gave her the cringe-inducing title “Barcelona’s Robin Hood of Data” but Bria’s official job name was CTO (Chief Technology Officer) for the city. 

Along with Amsterdam, under Bria's’ charge, Barcelona was one of the two big cities that ran a pilot program titled DECODE that aimed to “provide tools that put individuals in control of whether they keep their personal data private or share it for the public good.” It was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme.

Invited to take up this position by Mayor Ada Colau, the legal framework her team produced might just have helped prevent the mistakes of other European cities and countries where the rights of citizens are fast being snatched by corporations operating hand in hand with governments and their agencies.

Recent government attempts to authorise drone surveillance by police in France were only barely defeated by public pressure. 

Their use for the so-called public good in the fight against terrorism and to ensure national security came out of the usual conservative arguments that don’t admit that new technology can violate basic human rights. 

With conservatives, the ends always justify the means, except when it hurts the most financially well off in society.

Echoing the history of especially the last 4 years in Catalonia, independent consultant and curator Marta Arniani Marta Arniani (who has worked in the same EU circles as Francesca Bria) said to me, "There have been cases of police beatings and if it’s a case of an individual citizen’s voice against the police, we know where power lies. That’s why it’s very important to [be able] to film the police. This is valid for France, for Catalonia, for Europe. It’s a matter of making these systems accountable. People who work in civil rights, lawyers for example, should be able to access which algorithms and surveillance tools are utilised, for instance through public registries. As emerged in my research for Digital Future Society on the gender dimension of digital welfare , the digitalisation of public services is mostly subcontracted to private companies: there is little know-how and social impact evaluation inside the public bodies, and no oversight from independent observers. Digitalisation should be an occasion to review the bias encoded in our public systems through centuries, so that they can be more inclusive; instead, the dominant solutionist approach is leading to automating inequalities. That's the title of a very good book, by the way!"

I very much share experts like Marta's concerns. Police and private drones are already flying with minimal legal restrictions in Barcelona but late last year the Spanish government approved the use of flying air taxis in Barcelona (and Santiago de Compostela; curiously both places being major foreign tourist destinations.)

My first question with this and every proposed legal or technological change is, ”Does it benefit the average person in any way? If not, then who does it benefit and who does it disadvantage?” Expensive helicopter rides only benefit those who can afford them and cause noise and visual pollution for everyone else.

The same basic question needs to be asked about new technology, including “biometric” facial recognition cameras. In my opinion, the answer is similar: the richest 1% (or 5%) of the population are those who gain from it. As usual.

[A version of this article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2021.]

"Richest 1% have almost a quarter of UK wealth..."

[Photo: Jeff Gilbert/Alamy]

'Official figures have missed £800bn of private assets, says thinktank, amid calls for wealth tax to fund Covid recovery'

Almost a quarter of all household wealth in the UK is held by the richest 1% of the population, according to alarming new research that reveals a historic underestimation of inequality in the country.

The study found that the top 1% had almost £800bn more wealth than suggested by official statistics, meaning that inequality has been far higher than previously thought. Researchers said the extra billions was a conservative estimate and could well be more.'

Read more from source at The Guardian's Observer here.

Two looks back on 2020 that are really worth reading...

​[Pic: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images]

1. THE SEVEN SECRETS OF 2020 BY YANIS VAROUFAKIS 

2. THE YEAR OF THE IMPENETRABLE DEATH GRAPH BY SUZANNE MOORE 

 Happy new year, readers!

"In a small world" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

Barcelona isn’t well-known for flamenco but Kayoko Nakata, thinks it should be. 

As a Japanese flamenco dancer with a Catalan husband and two year-old son, she lives near the city’s Sant Pau hospital. When she can, she goes back to her place of origin in the rural Iwate region where she’s a lifetime cultural ambassador.


Kayoko told me, “At the Barcelona Ciutat Flamenco Festival at the end of October, my work, “Hermandad” was selected from a lot of applications and I was able to perform at the Auditori Sant Marti. “That was just before the last three concerts in the festival were cancelled due to Covid restrictions.”


“Flamenco is a small world,” said. “Here and in Seville where I studied it, the attitude is very often that [Romani] Gypsies do this and Japanese people could never dance flamenco. Tourists don’t want to see Japanese or Chinese or Africans dancing flamenco. It's a closed world too. I struggled a lot and eventually doors opened for me and I danced in “tablaos” (or daily organised performances on stage) a lot.”


“The title of my latest show means bonding but also brotherhood. In that way, it describes what I’ve done with two types of music. I fuse flamenco with traditional musical elements from Japan. 

For example, in the song that opens the show I dance dressed in a “kimono” (traditional and formal Japanese garment) and I use hand movements from the ancient “Nihon buyo”  dance from my region. 

There are people in Barcelona who really like being surprised by that mixture. I’m someone who wants to create music and movement without borders. I don’t feel Japanese or Catalan or Spanish. I’m a human, a person.” Summing up herself on her website, she uses the phrase “I DON'T KNOW WHERE I COME FROM OR WHERE I'M GOING.”


I asked Kayoko about the meaning to her of “duende,” that core spirit of the art that is said to take over flamenco dancers when they are in full flight. She compared it to the Japanese idea of “mu:'' nothingness or being without, "unasking." She said in that state, thought was absent, like when she meditates.


Other things are also absent in her life, however. Currently because of the theatres being closed and face to face sessions prohibited, Kayoko teaches flamenco online from her apartment, though she’s only doing a small number of classes. Her students are both in Japan and those living in Barcelona, where she believes the  flamenco scene is based on many thousands of residents who have an Andalusian family background.


Like so many other teachers though, she’s had to try to adapt this year. As have the people around her. “I think the neighbours in my building are angry at me because of all my stamping on the floor but luckily none of them have said anything,'' she laughs. “I want to restart classes in my studio because that’s more enjoyable.”


As a foreigner or “gaijin” as they are called there, I was lucky enough to live in Japan for three years. Similar to Kayoko Nakata, I also had a partner and young child with me. Also like her, I discovered something of a small world.


I learned that the world was not as big as I’d thought because Japanese people basically wanted many of the same things as me. This, despite the fact that they have a hugely different culture and history from where I’d grown up in Australia.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2020.]

"A posthumous story collection by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2020)"

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, La Ciudad de Vapor. Todos los cuentos [The city of steam: all the stories], 2020, 224 pages.

Publisher’s summary: (from Literary Rambles blog)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón conceived this work as a recognition of his readers who had followed him along the saga begun with The Shadow of the Wind.

«I can conjure the faces of the kids of the Ribera neighborhood with whom I sometimes played or fought in the street, but none which I would like to rescue from the land of indifference. None but that of Blanca.»

A boy decides to become a writer when he finds out that his inventions give him a few moments more with a rich girl who has stolen his heart. An architect flees from Constantinople with the plans of an unassailable library. A strange knight challenges Cervantes to write a book as has never existed before. And Gaudí, navegating to a mysterious meeting in New York, delights in light and steam, the matter cities should be made of.

The echo of the great characters and motives of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books novels resonates in theses stories by Carlos Ruiz Zafón –gathered together for the first time, and some of them unpublished so far– turning on the magic of the narrator who made us dream like nobody else.

One of the most popular posts on this blog is on a book by Ruiz Zafón: Labyrinth of Spirits (2016).

The Guardian offers an obituary (June 2020), in case you are unfamiliar with this author."

SOURCE: Planeta (publisher)

And the next most popular language used in each country is...

 

   Please comment below and let me know what you think, if you're surprised etc...

Source here: https://mymodernmet.com/second-languages-of-the-world-infographic/?fbclid=IwAR3FvSva_D6ojo7vqmEF8BOnmFgIWNtVdJtWGEHzU0u8q4kmuu4pP6syRSQ

"Gets to the Heart of the Real Spain" -- Another ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reader-review of "Slow Travels..."

 

I'm extremely thankful for these lovely words of praise from Lesley Postle about my latest non-fiction book...

"As someone who used to live in Spain and has been away for far too long, for me, Brett's book was a moving nostalgia trip through a country I love.

He brought it all back to life for me in a way that could only be done by someone who knows and understands the place really well. I adored the way he describes the minutiae of Spanish life, the food, the music, and the way things often don't quite work as they should over there, like having a tourist office which is impossible to find.

For me, the mix of travel writing with short commentaries on politics, history, religion and culture works well. There isn't too much of any one topic, so it never gets boring. I just wish it had been even longer. It was really interesting to read about some of the lesser-known towns which I do not know, but which I'd now love to visit.

I could really relate to Brett's personal story, having lived in a similar area and experienced a lot of the same things. It made me quite homesick and even more determined to get back there some day.

Original reader review titled "Gets to the Heart of the Real Spain" at Amazon here.

"House closed" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

"Precarious:" a word that accurately describes so many jobs under modern hyper-capitalism.

In Catalonia over the last few months this word has become a sword that is hovering over the lives of thousands of people. 

For around 300 employees at the International House chain of European language schools, “precarious” has come to be much worse than a mere word .

In their Barcelona branch (which operated for 40 years) at least 120 teachers and support staff have lost their positions. 

This is in addition to closure of IH’s other workplaces in Tarragona, Sabadell, Badalona, Terrassa and Mataró. Zaragoza and Palma de Mallorca are also shutting up shop.

Speaking to union representative Duncan Hawthorne, who has worked for IH Barcelona for the last 23 years, he told me he’d expected to stay with them for the rest of his working life. His opinion is that it was a great school but badly run over the years, particularly due to power struggles at the top of the company.

“There’s a lot of anger towards the management and that’s who the staff are trying to hold responsible for the end of the business," he said. "Covid 19 wasn't a major cause of us closing. It was just the last straw."

Duncan believes that employees feel abandoned by the owners of the company and their recent protests outside their former office on Trafalgar Street in Barcelona are evidence of that. He explained that one of the worst problems for employees is that they are currently in a kind of financial limbo, neither being paid by IH nor able to claim unemployment benefits (which for  hundreds of thousands of others, are currently taking up to 3 months to be paid by the Spanish government.)

Duncan also told me that the company is in the hands of a legal administrator but is not yet technically bankrupt. 

Another teacher said on social media, "Many of us have worked for IH over the last 5 decades. Staff left without pay or contracts 5 days before the new school year. Staff continued to finish classes yesterday because they care about their students."

Apart from this, it needs to be acknowledged that IH has stated online:

“The closure of schools is due to a sustained deterioration in recent years of International House's main lines of business, resulting from fundamental changes in the world of language teaching. This downward trajectory worsened, without a doubt, with the crisis caused by COVID-19.”

As someone who has also worked in and for a number of different language “academy” schools for many years, to me, this disaster represents just one of many that are striking this sector. 

This is due to the so-called free-market economy failing to provide secure jobs. The (supposedly temporary) closure of Merit School in Barcelona in July is just one other example.

As long as there are native English speakers in Barcelona and elsewhere in Europe giving one-to-one “classes” for a glass of wine or online for under 10 euros an hour -- both common enough -- there will be continuing exploitation of professional, qualified and experienced teachers. 

We are witnessing an ‘Uber-isation’ of teaching and learning in the private sector.

In reality, across our continent there is no law; there is only power. Or at least the power to enforce it. The “convenio” standard that legally exists has been widely abused for years and the pandemic has meant a genuine drop in pay rates. I’ve seen this for myself in trying to find teaching work since August.

So, what do we have in the industry? We have closed houses and open slather.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2020.]

A free read of "Slow Travels in Unsung Spain"

If you like armchair travel you can now read any part of the book for free at Scribd!

Click here.

"a compelling and eclectic narrative full of the unexpected" -- Nick Inman, Rough Guides

[5 min. video:] The good news and the bad news from Trump's defeat

Balanced and clear-headed comments from Yanis Varoufakis, co-founder of DiEM25, a pan-European, progressive movement that aims to democratise the EU before it disintegrates.

 

 

Controversial art exhibition opens in Barcelona, Nov. 5

 

[12 de febrer de 2019. Xavier G-Solís]

 ESTATAMBESTAT/ESTATCONTRAESTAT

              by Xavier G-Solis

From November 5 to December 5, 2020,at the  Contrast Gallery: C / Consell de Cent, 281, 08011, Barcelona.

The Contrast Gallery will remain open during the following hours during the month of November:

Tuesday to Saturday from 12 to 6 p.m.

They guarantee all safety  measures and the capacity is reduced to 33%: 6 people.

Openings cannot be held these days.

Next Thursday, November 5, from 12pm to 6pm the artist will be in the gallery for anyone to meet.