What Does Maradona Mean for Argentina?
By DANIEL ALTMAN
TAGS: ARGENTINA, MARADONA
The enduring affection in Argentina for Diego Maradona dates back to the 1986 World Cup triumph. (Getty Images)
Maradona was in Beijing last summer to support the Argentina Olympic soccer team, who went on to win the gold medal for the second straight time. (Getty Images)
Lobby for something long enough, and you just might get it. For years, Diego Maradona said what an honor it would be to coach Argentina’s national team, going so far as to present the position as the logical capstone to his career in soccer. Few Argentines thought the opportunity would arrive so soon.
Though a genius on the pitch – he still shows off his skills in a made-for-television five-a-side league that pits famous veterans of South American national squads against each other – Maradona has little experience as a coach. In his only stint with a major team, he led Racing Club to a record of two wins, three losses and six draws before abandoning the post.
Yet even more worrying to some Argentines is Maradona’s roller-coaster lifestyle, punctuated by frequent medical problems and political pronouncements. If he is indeed confirmed as coach of the national team, in Argentina the decision will seem both controversial and inevitable. Here is what some participants in my weekly pick-up game in Buenos Aires had to say about his potential selection:
“I love Diego, and without having experienced Diego I wouldn’t love the national team as much. But, come on man…”
“Why lie? I knew he wasn’t prepared, that out of 23 matches as a coach he won three, that anyone else would have been better, except Simeone… I don’t care about the result, I believe that the greatest creator of magic should have an opportunity.”
“If you want to give him an opportunity, start him with the under-17s and then move him up.”
“He did a noble and honest job when he was a player. His work as coach will come from the gut, not from the head, and maybe that will be good for the team.”
“Well now, what is the transitive property that means a good player has to be a good coach?”
“Yes, we Argentines have a great confusion with past ‘glory’ (Perón! Perón!).”
“Actually I’d rather see Maradona as president than as coach.”
“Enough beatifying Maradona. My mother is the person I love the most in the world, but that’s no reason to make her coach of the national team or president of the republic.”
“If it goes badly for Maradona, we will have entered – as a society – a dilemma which, if not insoluble, will at least be an intolerable stigma for a long time. How can you hate the one you love?”
“I have officially lost all hope that someday Argentina will be a better country than Uganda. If people who drank milk every day before they were one year old think this way, we’re really in for it.”
“I just bought the Trinidad and Tobago jersey! Come on, Trinidad, we’re going to the World Cup!”
The discussion then broke down into an argument about whether soccer was the most forceful embodiment of all society’s awfulness, or whether it was a game in which 22 people kicked a ball around.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Piano Music Flourishes in Nicaragua
International Piano Contest Kicks Off Monday
By Elizabeth Goodwin
Tico Times Staff | editorial@ticotimes.net
They'll Be the Judges: Fany Solter, top, and Baruch Meir, bottom, are among the premier international pianists on the judges' panel of the María Clara Cullell International Piano Competition.
Photos courtesy of María Clara Vargas
About 50 young pianists from all over Latin America will arrive in San José this week to compete in the fifth annual María Clara Cullell International Piano Competition. The musicians will face a prestigious group of judges as they compete in one of two levels in two rounds.
The intermediate-level competition, for pianists 14 to 20 years old, begins Oct. 20, while the superior level, for pianists up to 27, holds its first round the following day. The finals for each round are set for Oct. 22 and 23. On Oct. 25 at 7 p.m., the winners will hold a concert at the National Auditorium in San José's Children's Museum.
All participants must play some pieces by Costa Rican composers, including “Forest Echoes” by Juan de Dios Páez (1878-1937), and “Tlanéhuatl” by Alejandro Cardona.
The competition's judges consist of premier international musicians with an interest in the next generation of pianists, including Maria Asteriadou of Greece, Brazilian-born Fany Solter, Israeli Baruch Meir and Brian Ganz of the United States.
The competition is named after María Clara Cullell, a Costa Rican pianist who has worked to spread her music and knowledge of music throughout the world. An association in her name, together with the University of Costa Rica and the National University's schools of music, funds the competition.
–Elizabeth Goodwin
By Elizabeth Goodwin
Tico Times Staff | editorial@ticotimes.net
They'll Be the Judges: Fany Solter, top, and Baruch Meir, bottom, are among the premier international pianists on the judges' panel of the María Clara Cullell International Piano Competition.
Photos courtesy of María Clara Vargas
About 50 young pianists from all over Latin America will arrive in San José this week to compete in the fifth annual María Clara Cullell International Piano Competition. The musicians will face a prestigious group of judges as they compete in one of two levels in two rounds.
The intermediate-level competition, for pianists 14 to 20 years old, begins Oct. 20, while the superior level, for pianists up to 27, holds its first round the following day. The finals for each round are set for Oct. 22 and 23. On Oct. 25 at 7 p.m., the winners will hold a concert at the National Auditorium in San José's Children's Museum.
All participants must play some pieces by Costa Rican composers, including “Forest Echoes” by Juan de Dios Páez (1878-1937), and “Tlanéhuatl” by Alejandro Cardona.
The competition's judges consist of premier international musicians with an interest in the next generation of pianists, including Maria Asteriadou of Greece, Brazilian-born Fany Solter, Israeli Baruch Meir and Brian Ganz of the United States.
The competition is named after María Clara Cullell, a Costa Rican pianist who has worked to spread her music and knowledge of music throughout the world. An association in her name, together with the University of Costa Rica and the National University's schools of music, funds the competition.
–Elizabeth Goodwin
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Belfast Regains Its Voice
(New York Times)
By JOSHUA HAMMER
Published: October 19, 2008
THE Friday night session was just getting started on the second floor of Maddens, a dimly lighted pub in the Cathedral Quarter of Belfast. Six musicians — a young woman fiddle player; a pony-tailed, grizzled uilleann piper; a pair of guitarists; a tin-whistler; and a bodhran, or Irish tambourine, player — sat in a circle jamming, gazing at one another, seemingly oblivious to the crowd. The music had an improvisational feel to it — sprightly and hypnotic, the vigorous melody of the fiddles skittering above the sweet, mellow tones of the bagpipes.
Midway through the set, I heard an unfamiliar language being spoken and turned to face a bearded, stringy-haired young man clad in baggy sweatshirt and jeans sitting beside me at the bar. He introduced himself as Caomhin (pronounced KEE-vin) Mac Giolla Caehain, a fiddler and devotee of Gaelic, which, like Irish folk music, has been enjoying a revival in Belfast the last few years.
Many of the people in the room, Caomhin (the name means gentle offspring) told me, were regulars — traditionalists who showed up at Maddens on Friday nights to pay homage to both the ancient language and Ireland’s rich musical heritage. “This is the real thing,” Mr. Mac Giolla Caehain said of the music.
Some 10 years after the Northern Ireland peace agreement, Belfast is in the midst of a transformation. A wave of investment — mostly from other parts of Britain — has turned this once war-torn, economically depressed city into one of Europe’s liveliest towns.
Hotels, clubs and restaurants seem to be springing up in every neighborhood; a new riverside promenade winds past acres of commercial and residential development to a giant entertainment complex in the making, the Titanic Quarter, named for the doomed luxury liner built in Belfast’s now-moribund shipyards in 1911. But perhaps nowhere is the peace dividend more pronounced than in the revival of the city’s music scene. Back in the 1960s, before the outbreak of the Troubles, Belfast was one of Europe’s most musical cities. Van Morrison, born in East Belfast, got his start playing folk tunes at a sailor’s hostel called the Maritime Hotel. (From there he landed a recording contract with Decca Records in London, and a career was born.) The city has also nurtured performers like Derek Bell and Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains and Henry McCullough, who started a folk band called Sweeney’s Men in the 1960s, later joined Joe Cocker’s band and then became the lead guitarist for Paul McCartney’s Wings.
“When I grew up in the ’60s there were 80 clubs in and around Belfast where bands could go and play. And that went down to one,” said Terri Hooley, a Belfast impresario who brought the Clash to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles in 1977. (After fighting broke out between fired-up fans of the Clash and the police and British soldiers — a riot that became known as the Battle of Bedford Street — the promoters canceled the concert at Ulster Hall two hours before it was scheduled to begin.)
Now, however, there are at least 40 clubs around the city, including a dozen where Irish musicians go back to their roots — playing the traditional folk tunes that have formed the backdrop of Irish life for centuries. “You can hear ‘trad’ every night of the week these days,” Mr. Hooley told me.
Debate abounds about how far back the origins of traditional Irish music go; some of the songs played in the pubs of Belfast, I was told, date back more than 1,000 years, passed down from generation to generation. And it was only in the last couple of centuries that the music was written down and collected. Bands or small ensembles have probably been a part of Irish music since the early 19th century, when instruments like the fiddle and the uilleann pipes were pulled out for Irish dancing — reels, hornpipes and jigs — at weddings and saints’ days. These days perhaps the greatest display of Irish traditional music in the world takes place at the annual Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann festival, which begins with a series of competitions at the village and county level, and attracts as many as 20,000 participants.
I recently spent five nights in Belfast, venturing out every evening to sample the flowering trad scene. I started my tour on a Monday night, the slowest of the week, at a bar called Fibber Magee, around the corner from Belfast’s City Hall. It was a touristy place where a duet called Finnegans Wake played familiar Irish tunes to a crowd almost exclusively made up of Americans, Canadians and Britons.
But it didn’t take long before I found my way to more authentic hangouts — pubs frequented by, among others, former paramilitary fighters from both sides of the sectarian divide. Nearly all of these establishments can be found in the Cathedral Quarter, a slum only five years ago but now the epicenter of Belfast’s cultural and architectural renaissance. In most of them, the musicians gather once or twice a week for sessions — relaxed, informal gatherings at which the music is played as much for the benefit of the artists as for that of the audience.
On Tuesday night, a fairly quiet one in Belfast, I left my hotel and wandered past a boisterous group spilling out the door of the Spaniard, one of Cathedral’s oldest taverns. Then I turned down a narrow street lined with darkened office buildings and came upon a small, unobtrusive pub called the John Hewitt.
Opened nine years ago by the nonprofit Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre, whose managers hoped to bridge the city’s sectarian divide, the John Hewitt (named for a Belfast poet) stands blocks from a no man’s land once ruled by paramilitary gangs. The neighborhood is still dicey: across the street stands a burned-out office block.
When I arrived at the Hewitt, a trad quartet — fiddler, guitarist, drummer and uilleann piper — had just started its evening session. I met John McSherry, one of Northern Ireland’s best known players of the uilleann pipe — the Irish national bagpipe — who tours with a band called At First Light.
“There’s been a lot more vibrancy to the Belfast scene nowadays, and it just keeps getting livelier,” Mr. McSherry told me during a cigarette break in the street. He sat in a chair on the stage, wedged the uilleann pipe bellows beneath his right elbow, manipulating it to keep air flowing into the pipe bag. With his fingers dancing lightly over a series of holes on the stemlike chanter, he produced a haunting, vibratory sound with high-pitched, reedy notes skipping over a low monotone.
The Hewitt occasionally sponsors contemporary art exhibitions in tandem with the weekly sessions, and on this Tuesday evening the walls were covered with stark surrealistic paintings — prisoners squeezed into concrete cells, courtyards overlooked by watchtowers. The works were done by Raymond Watson, a former Irish Republican Army man who served eight years at Maze Prison outside Belfast. As it happened, Mr. Watson was at the pub that night. As the session players kicked off into a lively reel, he invited me to sit down at a round table packed with Hewitt regulars: poets and politicians, Protestant and Catholic ex-fighters, artists and ex-Communists, aging hippies and a few business types.
By JOSHUA HAMMER
Published: October 19, 2008
THE Friday night session was just getting started on the second floor of Maddens, a dimly lighted pub in the Cathedral Quarter of Belfast. Six musicians — a young woman fiddle player; a pony-tailed, grizzled uilleann piper; a pair of guitarists; a tin-whistler; and a bodhran, or Irish tambourine, player — sat in a circle jamming, gazing at one another, seemingly oblivious to the crowd. The music had an improvisational feel to it — sprightly and hypnotic, the vigorous melody of the fiddles skittering above the sweet, mellow tones of the bagpipes.
Midway through the set, I heard an unfamiliar language being spoken and turned to face a bearded, stringy-haired young man clad in baggy sweatshirt and jeans sitting beside me at the bar. He introduced himself as Caomhin (pronounced KEE-vin) Mac Giolla Caehain, a fiddler and devotee of Gaelic, which, like Irish folk music, has been enjoying a revival in Belfast the last few years.
Many of the people in the room, Caomhin (the name means gentle offspring) told me, were regulars — traditionalists who showed up at Maddens on Friday nights to pay homage to both the ancient language and Ireland’s rich musical heritage. “This is the real thing,” Mr. Mac Giolla Caehain said of the music.
Some 10 years after the Northern Ireland peace agreement, Belfast is in the midst of a transformation. A wave of investment — mostly from other parts of Britain — has turned this once war-torn, economically depressed city into one of Europe’s liveliest towns.
Hotels, clubs and restaurants seem to be springing up in every neighborhood; a new riverside promenade winds past acres of commercial and residential development to a giant entertainment complex in the making, the Titanic Quarter, named for the doomed luxury liner built in Belfast’s now-moribund shipyards in 1911. But perhaps nowhere is the peace dividend more pronounced than in the revival of the city’s music scene. Back in the 1960s, before the outbreak of the Troubles, Belfast was one of Europe’s most musical cities. Van Morrison, born in East Belfast, got his start playing folk tunes at a sailor’s hostel called the Maritime Hotel. (From there he landed a recording contract with Decca Records in London, and a career was born.) The city has also nurtured performers like Derek Bell and Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains and Henry McCullough, who started a folk band called Sweeney’s Men in the 1960s, later joined Joe Cocker’s band and then became the lead guitarist for Paul McCartney’s Wings.
“When I grew up in the ’60s there were 80 clubs in and around Belfast where bands could go and play. And that went down to one,” said Terri Hooley, a Belfast impresario who brought the Clash to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles in 1977. (After fighting broke out between fired-up fans of the Clash and the police and British soldiers — a riot that became known as the Battle of Bedford Street — the promoters canceled the concert at Ulster Hall two hours before it was scheduled to begin.)
Now, however, there are at least 40 clubs around the city, including a dozen where Irish musicians go back to their roots — playing the traditional folk tunes that have formed the backdrop of Irish life for centuries. “You can hear ‘trad’ every night of the week these days,” Mr. Hooley told me.
Debate abounds about how far back the origins of traditional Irish music go; some of the songs played in the pubs of Belfast, I was told, date back more than 1,000 years, passed down from generation to generation. And it was only in the last couple of centuries that the music was written down and collected. Bands or small ensembles have probably been a part of Irish music since the early 19th century, when instruments like the fiddle and the uilleann pipes were pulled out for Irish dancing — reels, hornpipes and jigs — at weddings and saints’ days. These days perhaps the greatest display of Irish traditional music in the world takes place at the annual Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann festival, which begins with a series of competitions at the village and county level, and attracts as many as 20,000 participants.
I recently spent five nights in Belfast, venturing out every evening to sample the flowering trad scene. I started my tour on a Monday night, the slowest of the week, at a bar called Fibber Magee, around the corner from Belfast’s City Hall. It was a touristy place where a duet called Finnegans Wake played familiar Irish tunes to a crowd almost exclusively made up of Americans, Canadians and Britons.
But it didn’t take long before I found my way to more authentic hangouts — pubs frequented by, among others, former paramilitary fighters from both sides of the sectarian divide. Nearly all of these establishments can be found in the Cathedral Quarter, a slum only five years ago but now the epicenter of Belfast’s cultural and architectural renaissance. In most of them, the musicians gather once or twice a week for sessions — relaxed, informal gatherings at which the music is played as much for the benefit of the artists as for that of the audience.
On Tuesday night, a fairly quiet one in Belfast, I left my hotel and wandered past a boisterous group spilling out the door of the Spaniard, one of Cathedral’s oldest taverns. Then I turned down a narrow street lined with darkened office buildings and came upon a small, unobtrusive pub called the John Hewitt.
Opened nine years ago by the nonprofit Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre, whose managers hoped to bridge the city’s sectarian divide, the John Hewitt (named for a Belfast poet) stands blocks from a no man’s land once ruled by paramilitary gangs. The neighborhood is still dicey: across the street stands a burned-out office block.
When I arrived at the Hewitt, a trad quartet — fiddler, guitarist, drummer and uilleann piper — had just started its evening session. I met John McSherry, one of Northern Ireland’s best known players of the uilleann pipe — the Irish national bagpipe — who tours with a band called At First Light.
“There’s been a lot more vibrancy to the Belfast scene nowadays, and it just keeps getting livelier,” Mr. McSherry told me during a cigarette break in the street. He sat in a chair on the stage, wedged the uilleann pipe bellows beneath his right elbow, manipulating it to keep air flowing into the pipe bag. With his fingers dancing lightly over a series of holes on the stemlike chanter, he produced a haunting, vibratory sound with high-pitched, reedy notes skipping over a low monotone.
The Hewitt occasionally sponsors contemporary art exhibitions in tandem with the weekly sessions, and on this Tuesday evening the walls were covered with stark surrealistic paintings — prisoners squeezed into concrete cells, courtyards overlooked by watchtowers. The works were done by Raymond Watson, a former Irish Republican Army man who served eight years at Maze Prison outside Belfast. As it happened, Mr. Watson was at the pub that night. As the session players kicked off into a lively reel, he invited me to sit down at a round table packed with Hewitt regulars: poets and politicians, Protestant and Catholic ex-fighters, artists and ex-Communists, aging hippies and a few business types.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Austria's Banks
Austrian government guarantees safety for all bank savings (10/9/08)
Chanecellor Gusenbauer promised in the course of international financial crises the unlimited safety for savings at Austrian banks. The new law is retroacting valid since 1st October.
If it’s necessary the government holds out a nationalized responsibility for banks as well. Banks which have surplus liquidity should dispose their financial means in a clearing station of the Austrian control bank to help other banks, says financial minister Wilhelm Molterer.
Austrian banks are not in danger, is the conventional wisdom. All those new decisions are just arrangements to guarantee cover and protection. The government has also banned short selling from Austrias stock exchange market.
Faymann and Gusenbauer are trying to calm down Austrias population. “Everything is in control. Our banks are solid. Austria is in a very good situation. Nobody in Austria has to fear about his bank savings”, they say.
Chanecellor Gusenbauer promised in the course of international financial crises the unlimited safety for savings at Austrian banks. The new law is retroacting valid since 1st October.
If it’s necessary the government holds out a nationalized responsibility for banks as well. Banks which have surplus liquidity should dispose their financial means in a clearing station of the Austrian control bank to help other banks, says financial minister Wilhelm Molterer.
Austrian banks are not in danger, is the conventional wisdom. All those new decisions are just arrangements to guarantee cover and protection. The government has also banned short selling from Austrias stock exchange market.
Faymann and Gusenbauer are trying to calm down Austrias population. “Everything is in control. Our banks are solid. Austria is in a very good situation. Nobody in Austria has to fear about his bank savings”, they say.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Russia's Position in the World
Article
Putin to Ukraine: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you
Front page / World / Former USSR
03.10.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru
Pages: 12
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko conducted negotiations with her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on October 2. Tymoshenko arrived in Moscow to discuss the question with the price on natural gas, which Ukraine buys from Russia.
Putin to Ukraine: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you
Experts say that Tymoshenko may take an advantage over her political rivals in Ukraine in the event the problem is solved positively for Kiev.
Tymoshenko’s trip to Moscow was quite an adventure. Her flight on board the presidential jetliner was canceled shortly before the departure. It was said that President Yushchenko supposedly needed to use the plane too for a flight to Lvov. As a result, Tymoshenko had to board a charter plane. Spokespeople for the Ukrainian prime minister in Kiev said that the incident with the plane had been plotted by Yushchenko’s camp.
Putin reminded Tymoshenko during their meeting in the Moscow region that Ukraine was making arms shipments to Georgia.
“It is a great pity that Ukraine considered it possible to deliver arms to the conflict zone,” Interfax quoted Putin as saying. “There could not be a bigger crime committed to the people of Ukraine and Russia than making arms shipments to the conflict zone,” he added after the talks.
“It was impossible to imagine several years ago that Russians and Ukrainians will be fighting each other,” Putin said. The prime minister emphasized that the shipments per se were not that significant since it was a commercial matter. “But there were military systems and people used to kill soldiers – Russian people, which is an alarming signal for us,” Putin stated.
“Has it been done for the sake of the Ukrainian nation? What are the interests of the Ukrainian people there? This is a political intrigue, an irresponsible and harmful crime, the crime, when the Russian and the Ukrainian nations clash,” Putin said.
Yulia Tymoshenko was not so emphatic in her remarks. She stated that all the accusations need to be proved first. “I do not think that the facts will be confirmed,” she said.
Vladimir Putin pointed out that the unstable political situation in Ukraine may eventually question the effectiveness of the signed agreements between Moscow and Kiev. “But I hope that they won’t be revised,” he added.
“Unfortunately, our meeting is taking place under very complicated conditions. It is connected with the uncertainty in the decisions linked with the political situation in Ukraine. One question arises in connection with the agreements that we are discussing today – what is going to happen with them tomorrow?” Putin told Tymoshenko.
Tymoshenko stated that Ukraine considers Russia as an absolute strategic partner.
Putin to Ukraine: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you
Front page / World / Former USSR
03.10.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru
Pages: 12
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko conducted negotiations with her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on October 2. Tymoshenko arrived in Moscow to discuss the question with the price on natural gas, which Ukraine buys from Russia.
Putin to Ukraine: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you
Experts say that Tymoshenko may take an advantage over her political rivals in Ukraine in the event the problem is solved positively for Kiev.
Tymoshenko’s trip to Moscow was quite an adventure. Her flight on board the presidential jetliner was canceled shortly before the departure. It was said that President Yushchenko supposedly needed to use the plane too for a flight to Lvov. As a result, Tymoshenko had to board a charter plane. Spokespeople for the Ukrainian prime minister in Kiev said that the incident with the plane had been plotted by Yushchenko’s camp.
Putin reminded Tymoshenko during their meeting in the Moscow region that Ukraine was making arms shipments to Georgia.
“It is a great pity that Ukraine considered it possible to deliver arms to the conflict zone,” Interfax quoted Putin as saying. “There could not be a bigger crime committed to the people of Ukraine and Russia than making arms shipments to the conflict zone,” he added after the talks.
“It was impossible to imagine several years ago that Russians and Ukrainians will be fighting each other,” Putin said. The prime minister emphasized that the shipments per se were not that significant since it was a commercial matter. “But there were military systems and people used to kill soldiers – Russian people, which is an alarming signal for us,” Putin stated.
“Has it been done for the sake of the Ukrainian nation? What are the interests of the Ukrainian people there? This is a political intrigue, an irresponsible and harmful crime, the crime, when the Russian and the Ukrainian nations clash,” Putin said.
Yulia Tymoshenko was not so emphatic in her remarks. She stated that all the accusations need to be proved first. “I do not think that the facts will be confirmed,” she said.
Vladimir Putin pointed out that the unstable political situation in Ukraine may eventually question the effectiveness of the signed agreements between Moscow and Kiev. “But I hope that they won’t be revised,” he added.
“Unfortunately, our meeting is taking place under very complicated conditions. It is connected with the uncertainty in the decisions linked with the political situation in Ukraine. One question arises in connection with the agreements that we are discussing today – what is going to happen with them tomorrow?” Putin told Tymoshenko.
Tymoshenko stated that Ukraine considers Russia as an absolute strategic partner.
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