Yassaui Mergalyev

You may recall that I was recently floored by a dancer with the Kyiv City Ballet Gala at Southampton Mayflower theatre, and that I couldn't locate his name or the extraordinary music he danced to.

Well, I received a lovely email from the artistic director who corrected a few errors I'd made (now updated) and shared with me the dancers name and the music that was driving me nuts trying to locate. When I looked down the concert program the first name I picked out was Yassaui Mergalyev because of the Asiatic name, and my brief experiences of former Soviet Union states, yet still I managed to get the music wrong or clicked on a different rendition of the classical piece called November by Max Richter. If you haven't heard it, I hope you find a few minutes to listen at some point.

Now then, as soon as I had Mr Mergalyev's name I did a search and saw a bunch of videos but two of them appealed to me because they were so grainy and posted well over a decade ago. The location, Kazakhstan I believe, might not be The Bolshoi but on that stage, you and I can view those minute and a half clips, from a (distant galaxy) or generation ago as if we are talent spotters trawling the planet for the new and the best, and it's among the most extraordinary footage you or I could have ever expected. You can see for yourself how exceptionally talented a dancer Yassui Mergalyev is.

Those unbelievable pirouettes that I've seen world class ballet dancers misstep when drawing to a halt, because everybody is vulnerable to dizziness, no amount of training takes it all away, a lot yes, but not all, yet Mr Mergaliev delivers easily the most unprecedented number of turns for a male dancer that I've yet witnessed. 

Finally in the first clip, the dances' denouement ends in a what looks like for a microsecond, a stumble or fall, but no. The music is surgically severed exactly on-point and we apprehend all of a sudden that it's a choreographed collapse and thus takes us somewhere I've not seen outside of Nureyev or any of the biggest names. It's a large claim but you can see for yourself.

It's a real treat even to the untrained eye.

First Draft. I'll clean up later as I must crack on.

How To Hide An Empire

Humorous memes aside, I learned more interesting info in and from this discussion than anything I can recall in a while. 

His moon landing thesis is hysterical. For every floorboard of Empire, he misses the croaking of it.

My Perestroika

There's an interesting confluence between Generation X and Perestroika people. Broadly speaking we have the same spectrum of values without having really met till after the fall of the USSR.

We don't like authority, we don't believe the State, we're sceptical of media and we prefer to live with values that transcend materialism even if it means we're often broke.

I felt uncomfortable watching My Perestroika. It's a close up look at people of my generation's lives. I was left with two sound bites from this film, that stuck in my mind like a Shuriken (Chinese throwing star or ninja star) from a Bruce Lee movie.

One woman spoke about the overpowering need, during the fall of communism, to run out into the streets and squares to be with like-minded people protesting at the insanity of those who claim to be in power.

I feel like that all the time. We're trashing the planet with a growth model that doesn't have a planet B.

One gentleman talked about how he couldn't understand the Russians who flipped from being Communist one day to Capitalist the next, just because their TV's told them so. No reflection, no awareness, just making money is all that matters now.

It's a bit like those who have talked about the war on terror and the need for security, but now fall silent as NATO funds Nazis in Ukraine and terrorists in Syria.

We've always been at war with East Asia haven't we?

CIA Covert Operations In Angola

The Angolan Civil War was a major civil conflict in the Southern African state of Angola, beginning in 1975 and continuing, with some interludes, until 2002. The war began immediately after Angola became independent from Portugal in November 1975. Prior to this, a decolonisation conflict had taken place in 1974--75, following the Angolan War of Independence. The Civil War was primarily a struggle for power between two former liberation movements, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). At the same time, it served as a surrogate battleground for the Cold War, due to heavy intervention by major opposing powers such as the Soviet Union and the United States.

Each organisation had different roots in the Angolan social fabric and mutually incompatible leaderships, despite their sharing the aim of ending colonial occupation. Although both the MPLA and UNITA had socialist leanings, for the purpose of mobilising international support they posed as "Marxist-Leninist" and "anti-communist", respectively. A third movement, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), having fought the MPLA alongside UNITA during the war for independence and the decolonization conflict, played almost no role in the Civil War. Additionally, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC), an association of separatist militant groups, fought for the independence of the province of Cabinda from Angola.

The 27-year war can be divided roughly into three periods of major fighting -- between 1975 and 1991, 1992 and 1994, and 1998 and 2002 -- broken up by fragile periods of peace. By the time the MPLA finally achieved victory in 2002, an estimated 500,000 people had been killed and over one million internally displaced. The war devastated Angola's infrastructure, and dealt severe damage to the nation's public administration, economic enterprises, and religious institutions.

The Angolan Civil War reached such dimensions due to the combination of Angola's violent internal dynamics and massive foreign intervention. Both the Soviet Union and the United States considered the conflict critical to the global balance of power and to the outcome of the Cold War, and they and their allies put significant effort into making it a proxy war between their two power blocs. The Angolan Civil War ultimately became one of the bloodiest, longest, and most prominent armed conflicts of the Cold War. Moreover, the Angolan conflict became entangled with the Second Congo War in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as with the Namibian War of Independence.

President of the United States Gerald Ford approved covert aid to UNITA and the FNLA through Operation IA Feature on July 18, 1975, despite strong opposition from officials in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Ford told William Colby, the Director of Central Intelligence, to establish the operation, providing an initial US$6 million. He granted an additional $8 million on July 27 and another $25 million in August.

Two days before the program's approval, Nathaniel Davis, the Assistant Secretary of State, told Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, that he believed maintaining the secrecy of IA Feature would be impossible. Davis correctly predicted the Soviet Union would respond by increasing involvement in the Angolan conflict, leading to more violence and negative publicity for the United States. When Ford approved the program, Davis resigned. John Stockwell, the CIA's station chief in Angola, echoed Davis' criticism saying the success required the expansion of the program, but its size already exceeded what could be hidden from the public eye. Davis' deputy, former U.S. ambassador to Chile Edward Mulcahy, also opposed direct involvement. Mulcahy presented three options for U.S. policy towards Angola on May 13, 1975. Mulcahy believed the Ford administration could use diplomacy to campaign against foreign aid to the communist MPLA, refuse to take sides in factional fighting, or increase support for the FNLA and UNITA. He warned however that supporting UNITA would not sit well with Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angolan_civil_war

Fritz Lang, Werner Von Braun & The Moon Landings

I think this is even more interesting than the first part of the documentary I posted earlier. There's less of a focus on the questionable moon landing photography and more on manipulation of populations through media and film entertainment. It starts off with questions of the Van Allen belts being to dangerous for man to travel through without being irradiated to death but does move on to the whole Soviet and United States manipulation and deceit of space travel. I had no idea of the Von Braun/Fritz Lang connection or that the Soviets too were faking so much stuff.

I'm genuinely confused in a good way trying to fit in both sides motives because intercontinental complicity seems to be a theme I pick up now and again, and I may have to explore much deeper. 

The lie is different at every level isn't it?

Socialising Media

UKYorkie

What's the point of it all?

I've been asked this time and again by a bunch of folk ranging from London planning honchos who don't have enough time to explore web 2.0 or friends who fired off a volley of concerned emails during a patch when I'd seemingly gone underground. I will however first off make a rough and ready psychographic division because not everybody is the same when I make this case.

A narrator or writer I came across (I'm struggling to remember where) asserted that there are roughly speaking two types of people plodding around the planet at present. Cold war survivors and the ones after, lets call them Post-Coldies. This has only a little to do with age as its a mindset that can easily be absorbed from say parents and different environments. Cold war people have been bombed by mainstream media (MSM) into believing that the world is divided into good and bad, and have trouble dealing with shades of grey or the texture and subtlety between. Go easy on them because its pretty close to a brain washing experience, but in principle a generation of Soviet 'evil empire' rhetoric, contrasted with Western neoliberal capitalist propaganda as saviour of the world leaves them with a sharply divided mindset that is wholly binary and extends to extraordinary statements like communism has failed and only capitalism works. Or "isn't it great the polar caps are melting, let's consume some more refrigerated ice cream".

Cold war survivors are a guarded bunch. MSM and their parents taught them to be that way. They manage their online identity with Stalinist control, feel uncomfortable with online pictures of themselves, default to using very spy-like online monikers, never use 'include message in reply' in their emails and compartmentalize their offline lives with a strict policy of not mixing say work friends, then family, and life friends. They also tend to tell default fibs if different groups happen to enquire about each other, but they are not being malicious.

I guess they're just trying to shore up their separate offline identities that they manage in this increasingly complex and connected world. This was necessary to hold the whole cold war mentality together. People who aren't paranoid or under fear of invasion make for lousy misguided patriots so it's in the interests of the State to make sure a climate of them and us prevails. It's not completely impossible to envisage the current attempt to exchange reds-under-the bed, with the now ubiquitous terrorists of today. But that's probably another post about propaganda's resemblance to heaps of contemporary advertising that I'm saving for later.

Anyway, the point of all this social(ist) media immersion is, in my view, to drive all that online activity offline. The most rewarding experience of virtual friendships is to meet those same people in real life. I started to be convinced of this through hooking up with big chunks of the London plannersphere. But take the argument even further, and the MMORPG or video gaming community is a good example. Its not hard to see that the apex of their digital community experiences are the championships and tournaments they hold in conventions centres from Seoul to South Dakota.

Another good potential example of this might be for Last.FM to create Last.FM bars. These would be bars where the community can have a say over the music, ranging from discovery mode, to play-me-the-classics-I-love. This used to be called a Juke Box but it was quite limited.

I can think of lots more examples.

So all that anthropological primate grooming with pokes, vampire bites, blogging and twitters pretty much self actualises when we get to have something like a cup of coffee or a beer with people of a likemind. Simple isn't it?

I got thinking about this again earlier because I see that PicnicMob are trying to get a large group of people together in one city and have an online picnic. By working out what your interests are they will seat you next to someone similar. Personally I quite like meeting people who are into stuff I haven't come across but I'm sure you see my point. The irony is that the Post Coldies are pretty much trying to create, with all this social(ist) media, what the Coldies have already being doing all their lives; albeit with global reach, greater transparency, less small talk and networking at the speed of light.

Its not for everyone but I am reminded that Marshall McLuhan predicted that electronic technologies would lead us back to an oral culture.