Jernejblog

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2005-12-05T17:19:00.000-08:00

Just checking something...

Towards the clear

2005-12-02T21:21:00.000-08:00

I am getting back to real life. Tons of projects to catch up on, this is one of them. I apologize if the last two posts were a bit fuzzy, but i just wanted to more or less reflect my state of mind.

I haven't told you much about the outing to the UCLA live - no time. The Shakespeare Globe Theater company performance of Measure 4 Measure. What great social satyre... It amazes me how much more tragic Shakespeare's comedies are than most tragedies you see floating around. It's some sort of deep resignation about how screwed up and corrupt his environment is, so that the only thing left is to mock it. "I can just as well give ya a happy end if ya'll wan' one!"
If you ever get a chance go check out the Shakespeare Globe Theater Company. They are simply amazing. Live "band" with authentic instruments, the act starts with announcement, ends with a very carefully coreographed dance, and all in between is beyond my linguistic capabilities. It's great. I had some weird kind of preconception that I should get bored watching a play in an original setup - alas, was I soooo mistaken...

Anyway, Globe is great. But now, let me tell you about one other really funny thing. It's about "fairness in life" and that kind of stuff, and even more than that about deadlines. So I have this Mac, right, or better still, I had this Mac, an old Titanium model, a G4, first generation. About a year and a half ago, it started making me trouble. I correctly assessed (in truth, a friend told me) it was some deep sort of motherboard problem and said, well, I have this Apple Care insurance, they'll just have to replace the thing, right? But then I constantly needed my computer, and finally I realized a couple of months ago that probably the time of my warranty was running out so I better do something. I bought another computer to be able to put my old one into service, and finally today, I had also an accident - I tripped over the wire, and the computer fell off my table. Hmmm, the monitor broke completely, so I said well now I really have to take it to the store.
Ok, I phoned up the local mac store, and drove straight over there, told them the whole story, and they said, yeah no problem, except, hmmm, my warranty finished 2 weeks ago... So they told me I should try to get an extension from Apple Care, call them, etc., and maybe I could get one. Well, I called them, and sure enough, I didn't get one. I just trashed about $1000...
I am really, really stupid, and really really clumsy, right?

Sometimes, I guess, deadlines REALLY matter, it's not like with the homework (in my entire life I don't think I managed to turn in one single homework on time..). Anyway, the deadline also mattered for LSE and for Oxford, but you know what - after 140 applications out, I couldn't care less, and I also couldn't care less if the stupid Apple doesn't want to give me an extension. I have a nice life to live, and I will never stress (at least not about such insignificant things)!

Music is

2005-12-01T18:53:00.000-08:00

-when you wake up in the morning and want to jump and dance
-when you listen to Irakere and join them on stage, dancing, with no knowledge of salsa or what it even is...
-when you ride around on your bycicle in a frenzy with headphones missing turns, lights and signposts (just barely)
-liking to play a Bartok or Kodaly duet with a violinist you heard and you like a lot
-being in Jey's garage and jamming to the point of destroying your hands in blisters
-Jey playing on his drums
-humming along to Jey's playing on his drumset
-friendship (and friendship is music)
-playing Piazzola with Tim
-playing anything with Tim (or just thinking about it)
-Tim hammering that piano
-being in love (and playing a serenade to the girl)
-blogging while listening to Vivaldi at 120Db
-listening to Vivaldi at 140Db (louder than that is just noise, and later you can actually keep hearing it, happened to a friend of mine who went to a concert of a group -Gogol Bordelo- he really liked, and their sound was toooo loud, and he kept hearing background noise for days, went to the doctor, who said it was for life, wrote email to Gogol who told him that he should f*** off if he was such a wimp, consequently stopped liking the group, after which he also stopped hearing noise - Happy end :) - in any case, listening to Vivaldi at 141 Db can seriously affect your life...)
-being in love (and just thinking about serenades in Paris and other places)
-being in love (and being in love is music)
-hitchinking accross some continent
-the sound of parrots in our backyard
-silence (if it doesn't last for too long)
-what you can hear at the Disney Center (why I LOVE LA)
-getting seriously drunk with your best buddies and dancing with flowerpots to Bach's Brandenburg concerto No 3 (last movement is particularly appropriate if you include the small cadenza that is done so lovely by the English Concert under Trevor Pinnock)
-what Trevor Pinnock does for living
-walking into a cathedral in Edinburgh, and hearing a choir from Aberdeen sing Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" (ragtag, smelly, and dirty after biking accross the hills of Northern England for days in the company of best friend, and after having wanted to do precisely that for years, and being 19 year old, in love, having been in Spain, liking Flamenco, gypsies, and having all the trip still ahead of you...)
-turning Vivaldi to 141 Db regardless of the consequences
-What Beethoven kept hearing (and writing) after he was deaf (no guarantee you are going to write a bunch of symphonies after you grew deaf because of listening to Vivaldi at 150 Db, so don't count on that)
-playing for the crowd in a village church
-playing for that Mexican cleaning staff at Caltech at 5 am (some of them are sooo undereducated for their intellect, one of them knows the Economists yearbook on world economic data by heart and knows pretty damn well what those data mean...)
-my friend's passion
-watching the Shakespeare Globe Theatre perform Measure 4 Measure
-having sex to flamenco (having sex to Bach is SACRILEGIOUS and you should never do that)
-when you receive a cd in your mailbox from a friend (you would never expect to truly send you the cd with his favorite band)
-the reason we are all here (so we can make music)
-my passion.

(there is going to be more of this in the future, you bet...)

Limits of Myself

2005-12-01T18:28:00.000-08:00

When you wake up in the morning and you realize that you have been sleeping for 3hours/night for the last 2 months, and you are completely psyched and regardless of your bad character your friends are still there for you (read the second comment of one of my great friends on the previous post, most of the other comments are spam but that on IS NOT), and you realize you had written about 20emails/day without remembering a single one of them. Or you sleep in your office for those miserable three hours with crappy ventilation on an underinflated sleeping pad and with a too small blanket (you aren't cold because it is too warm with that nasty stale tint to it...) more often than you sleep at home. And you talk only in metaphors, and you are completely gone, exhausted, and you realize two months have passed like this, and someone asks you have you are and you say:"Great!" - but with that touch of crazyness that may well indicate you are well beyond the line. Plus when you think about it carefully you realize you really are having a blast. That's when I realize things aren't going they way they should. The next signal I get is that I am caught dancing naked in front of my mother in law who coldly remarks:"A drunk man". Hey, I AM SOBER! Yeah, sober, but impossible I was also sane...
Next, you walk up in a very aggressive fashion to the 6foot7 security guard who gave you parking ticket ticket the previous morning, with no fear, to discuss that ticket, with any means necessary (I am 5'7'', for the uninformed). Possibly sober - impossibly sane...
You find that you also have to pay a late registration with that ferocious zeal ("They ARE going to get it one day...") and you send emails to people in a random fashion, you listen to Vivaldi at 120Db at 3am in your office: in love - possible, sane - impossible...

Finally, you are caught filling 120 envelopes with junk and sending them to places far far away (to China, imagine, where there is birdflu and stuff) where nobody has ever heard of you, but they are willing to listen - weird, huh? (by the way, I had to borrow a cart to get them to the post office, weighed too much, and don't ask me how much I payed for the postage...)
And then you spend two hours saying things to a crowd of people who are willing to tear you appart, just for practice (after one of those sleeping-pad nights), and you try to bark back, all so inappropriately: masohism - possible, sanity - impossible..

And then I ask myself: what are the limits of myself?

Why I love LA

2005-11-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

We are just returning from a concert of the LA Phil and it was just amazing. Everything. From the Disney Hall, the young Russian conductor, the pianist, the program, the crowd, and of course the orchestra.
The program was aesthetic: Schnitke, Mozart piano concerto No. 20, and Prokofiev's fifth.
The performance by Lars Voigt (I think that was the pianists name) was great, and I realized that late Mozart is even much more interesting than Beethoven piano concertos. A lot more subtle, less pompous, more intricate, fragile. It is really chamber work, and it was performed as such. Last year I heard Lang Lang, the big hit pianist, playing with the LA Phil, and he just sucked. Some melodrammatic junk. But this one today, this was quite a proper pianist.
Schnitke was a demonstration of the aptitude and ability of the orchestra. A humorous piece, "Sommernachtstraum", neoclassical at moments, and then with the characteristic Schnitke-ish dissonant and seemingly chaotic modulations.
Very very good, and perfectly executed. They really showed off there.
Finally, Prokofiev's fifth symphony, which has never been my favorite, in particular for its 45 minutes that amount way over my attention span. So whenever I listened to it on a cd, I had a hard time not getting bored. Not today. It was brought closer to me, all its intricacies, jazzy rhythms, and humorous tunes, intertwined with the heavy themes commemorating the D-day (I was reminded today that it was written just after the allied assault on Hitler's Europe). When all these things are heard live, and performed by such an orchestra, the listener is compelled to listen. And then you just get it. Not an everyday piece, but well worth the effort.
At moments I thought about what the program director must have thought when he selected today's pieces: it must have been something like "Hmm, very satisfactory". At other moments I just watched the dance of the conductor and the invisible strings between him and the orchestra. I noticed the light changing through the side-window, the afternoon leaning late, then I noticed again the modern beauty of the interior design of the Disney Hall, then my wife remarked how the Hall was really democratic for even in our last row of the fifth balcony we could see and hear perfectly. Most of the time I simply enjoyed the music and let be carried to the far away lands, remembering among other things how my parents first started taking me to classical concerts as a kid.

That's when I pause and think.
How many cities in the world there are like this one? In the morning you can mountain bike in a national forest, on a beautiful warm fall sunny day, then you swing by your favorite ethnic restaurant for peanuts (actually today it was one of the oldest Californian wineries, right in downtown LA, check it out, very nice and eley place - Sanantonio Winery, google it or something), and finally you listen to one of the best orchestras in the world, in one of the fanciests and pretiest music halls that have ever been built, performing such great pieces, for ten bucks a piece... No, the day is still young, and I am going to a caffee to meet my Italian friend who puts mayonese on his pizza (he said it!!! - not me, read his comment, hihihihi), and get some work done. The people are non-pretentious, nice, and cozy on every single step of this journey. After all, it's just LA, ugly, smoggy, with traffic, wanna be movie stars, and grouse deserted industrial hangars... But with sooooo many things to cherish. I LOVE LA, and I have a lot more to say about that...

part 3

2005-11-05T23:15:00.002-08:00

Things here are deteriorating REALLY FAST. The bunch here is getting pretty rowdy.

The theme for a while has been the "volume" of our friend's girlfriend, and there have even been some imitations. My goodness, I really do know how to pick "bad company".
Now the conversation shifted to a general discussion of sexual lives of non-present, censorship time - good night...

Saturday nite live, part 2

2005-11-05T23:15:00.001-08:00

So now these guys here are making fun of me. This is my revenge (not that I don't deserve being made fun of) - but just to describe the assembly here: one is my good friend and co-author, an Italian, although that is not obvoius given what he puts on his Pizza (ask me in private, but you really don't want to know). Next, we have Danlaure, the double-headed dragon. Then, we also have "Lucia, the heavy hand", known for the strength of her drinks. Martin, the iron-guy, not known for his stealth, but rather his irony, and inappropriate remarks, just having made a few. The only proper and friendly person around is "Il dottore". The rest are, well, my friends - who'd expect them to be normal!

Oh, my wife is just telling the really good story about my coyote friend, I have to post that one. (The fluffy wanna-be-iron-man just tried another nasty remark on me but right now I really do not answer to provocations, so he failed miserably :))
Anyway I have two nice Altadena stories to tell, let's get some tension going here, right?

Saturday nite live

2005-11-05T23:15:00.000-08:00

OK. So, here we go. My friends are drinking wine, talking about gossip and soccer, more precisely about Maradona... And I, I am anti social, playing with my new wonderful gadget, yep, a very male thing. The good thing is that finally I am making new posts. I am behind the news, Hariet Miers long gone, Scooter handcuffed, Paris burning in riots, and me, well, hmm, absent.
I mean, c'mon, I am trying to get on the job market (btw: my wife just made a Jernej trick of telling a story she really didn't know very well), and it has really been overwhelming. But, dear webfreaks (that is my three good friends reading this + the spamming software) I am almost done, and I AM BACK!

Global

2005-11-05T15:56:00.000-08:00

hey! I am finally back. And there are news. For now just this: Today I officially went global. Feels good. More coming soon

Bets on Nobel - anyone?

2005-10-10T01:23:00.000-07:00

Well, given the "popularity" of my blog (two visitors, who happen to be very good friends) in the last ten days, I am pretty certain that nobody will take me up on this one. So well, let's make it just for the record, and also as another proof to Carmelo (see his comment on my last posting). For the uninformed: my wife just checked the webpage of the Nobel committee and there it says that the announcement will be made approximately 3 hours from now ("1pm in Sweden, at earliest").
The rumor has it that several famous Economists have (again) been spending much of their time this Fall writing acceptance speeches - Alas, should those be tossed again, all that marvelous oratory in vain. (I will tell no names, but this is kind of like "The Aristocrats" joke among the Economists, I heard at least one pretty nasty version of it; well, nobody expects Economists to be nice people, right?) In any case, I am quite sure that there must be more than a handful of those seriously important people out there, who aren't catching any sleep (an even more awful day tomorrow).

My bet should not be regarded as at all informed because I have little clue about what seriously important people consider seriously important. Even less do I know what the Swedish Royal Academy considers seriously grandiose. I can just tell you that Ariel Rubinstein got the bi-annual Nemmers prize for 2003-2004 (awarded by the Northwestern University and arguably harder to get than the Nobel simply because they only give one every two years; it is also said that it is "believed to be the largest monetary award in the United States designated specifically for academic excellence in economics and mathematics", whatever being believed means). So he definitely is my bet number 1, also because he should get it, sooner or later, so if I persistently put him up there, I will eventually make the right prediction, and then I can REALLY start publicizing my blog.
Oh, one more thing about Ariel Rubinstein: if you want to know more about him, check out the following link, and also his webpage, matched and surpassed in complexity only by Preston McAfee's. I am sure that some seriously important student on extremeely complex complexities must find a wealth of research ideas on complexity by just trying to browse through their webpages. Here are the links (check them out, and you won't be disappointed):
http://www.tau.ac.il/~rani/arsecog.pdf
http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il
http://www.mcafee.cc/ (by the way, right now it is 7 years and 71 days since Preston quit somking)

Ok, should I stay with only one bet, or should I hedge? Well, it's getting late, so I will just post this one and keep my fingers crossed. After all, betting on more people would just decrease my predictive power.

(More postings are coming soon, I promise - the problem is that I am really trying to get myself on the job market, which involves lots and lots of work, coordination, etc., so until November I may be somewhat irregular.)

What is the point

2005-10-03T22:56:00.000-07:00

I have not yet quite decided what direction I want my blog to take, so I can for now rant about whatever I want.

For example, about my yesterday's venture into Little Ethiopia, one of my favorite littles of LA. If you haven't been there yet, it is definitely worth a visit, it's right on Fairfax a few blocks east of the 10 freeway. There is one block full of REALLY GOOD restaurants (if you have never been to an Ethiopian you should totally check that out, you are supposed to feed your company with your friends, which can be quite entertaining), and the other nice thing is that there are always people hanging out on the street, in their suits after work, just chatting, having Ethipoian coffee, etc.
We usually go to one particular restaurant, but yesterday we went to another one, which instantly also made it high on my list. All these places have excellent food and very good and pleasant service...

Yesterday when we were getting there on Fairfax Ave, we noticed a crowd of people on the street, much larger than the usual, and when we approached we realized they were holding banners, slogans, and Ethiopan flags. Well, it turns out that Ethiopia had its first "democratic" elections in May, which turned out to be a big sham: when the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) realized that they were losing, they quickly cancelled any further vote count, and ordered the military to crackdown on the opposition protesters. Several dozens of civilians were killed and an unknown number imprisoned. In August the (EPRDF) finally announced the election results, and - surprise, surprise! - they remained in power. (There seems to be something inherently wrong with the parties that have "People's" in their name, or maybe they should just change the continuation into "People's demise" or something of the likes...)

Well, I was surprised to learn this and I attributed my ignorance to summer time, distraction, etc. (usually I am up to speed with world political economy events). But when I checked the archives of the New York Times I realized that the news about rigged Ethiopian elections never got much attention in the US press, and just slightly more on BBC. If only we were as good in helping Ethiopians attaining their democracy as Ethiopians are in making me feel at home in their little part of LA...

Vse je bilo tiho... (it was all very quiet...) - and then:

2005-10-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

Zdravo! Pa sem tu.Vklop v svet virtualnega nakladanja... Gotovo sem mu manjkal...

It was about time...
It was high time...
After all that time...
I AM HERE.
I only thought it fair to start my virtual existence in my mother tongue. I apologize to those who can't understand it. But hey, I figured that it's finally quite convenient to come from a country of 2m, right? - I'll be able to post all those codified messages in the future that only my countrymen will be able to understand fully. Ok, ok, I'll keep it down to a minimum.

Anyway, here I am, and I can tell you that I like to talk, so I will probably post quite a few things up here. All in due time.
For now just a big virtual HELLO!