public outrage at Egypt’s three telecom companies

The story is HERE.

I’m angry at the three companies too. In a sense, Mubarak’s Egypt was a polluted stream that everyone had to swim in, and there are certain limits to how much one can moralize. But hearing that the three companies were engaged with the government in rehearsals for a telecom shutdown as early as 2008 is enough to anger any customer of the companies. (And that includes everyone in Egypt who isn’t either the absolute poorest of the poor or an absolute telecom luddite. Even very poor people have cell phones here and probably email accounts. You’d have to get into the most impoverished rural backwaters to find non-users of cell phones. This is a cell phone-loving country.)

Istanbul tonight

At various times Istanbul has been my favorite city, and that may still be the case right now.

I’ll spice up this post with a photo of the city, of course. But it’s interesting to reflect on why none of these photos are ever quite satisfying enough, and on why I generally don’t like taking photos while traveling, with rare exceptions such as the Kenya/Tanzania safari last year.

For me, travel is primarily a kinetic experience. I like to find a strange atmosphere, and I like to walk through that atmosphere. This means the area should be large enough to make the experience last for awhile.

In order to suggest the magnitude of such an experience, you need a large panoramic photo that shows how large the area is. But such a photo gives everything at once, which undercuts the temporal side of the experience– the strange atmosphere needs to unfold gradually, not instantaneously.

I also like these experiences to follow their own rhythm, guided only by the surprises I find. If I were to stop and take a photo every time I saw something interesting, then a future audience is intruding on what is essentially a private experience.

The other thing photos of Istanbul can’t capture, of course, is the moist sea air. And no photo of the water can replace the kinetic experience of moving across it in a boat, which I generally do several times per day whenever in Istanbul.

No one shot does justice to the city, but here’s one among many possibilities:

a different thought on the Picasso women

The further I get into Gilot’s book, the more I feel a bit colder towards this string of women who remain in the vicinity and agree to become Picasso’s victims. In any given month of Picasso’s life, there is such a fiesta of red flags that anyone who agrees to stay close to him should know what they’re getting into.

One example. Picasso flies to Poland to give an invited lecture. Gilot is pregnant with Paloma and decides to stay behind. Picasso promises to write every day of his three-day trip. Instead, he stays in Poland for three weeks, and Gilot only receives telegrams that misspell her name different ways each day, don’t sound at all like Picasso, and always sign off with crude obscenities that aren’t his style at all. Turns out he didn’t feel like being bothered even to telegraph her, so he sent his chauffeur to do it, and he was the one who wrote those telegrams. When Picasso gets back to France she slaps his face and makes a big dramatic scene, storming into the bedroom and slamming the door shut and locking it. But the next day she lets him back in and the issue is never discussed again.

Another example. Picasso gets halfway finished with a canvas, and decides to have it copied and continue work only on the copy. He orders Gilot to make the copy for him, even though she’s now in an advanced state of pregnancy. He tells her he expects to have it finished by 10 PM the next night, and there better not be any mistakes. She panics at what a big job it is and phones another artist to help her (Gilot is an artist herself, of course). Picasso comes in at night and screams at her that something is wrong. The copy is not exact. They measure it and find that Picasso’s eye was right: the upper right-hand corner of the canvas is a bit off. That diverts his anger to his canvas preparer in Montmartre, whom he immediately phones and berates.

Under doctor’s orders, she needs to go to the hospital immediately and have labor induced. Picasso is angry, because he needs the car to go speak at a conference, and refuses to let the driver take her to the hospital. Finally he agrees, but only if the driver first takes him to the conference and then comes back later to take her to the hospital. She finally arrives at the hospital three hours after the doctor expected her, and the baby is born just a few hours later.

Both of Gilot’s children were the result of arguments with Picasso in which he hadn’t a leg to stand on, but tried to trump her by saying that the only solution to any woman’s problem is to have a child. Amazingly (Gilot is a very bright and tough person) in both cases she was convinced by his argument, and became pregnant almost immediately thereafter. One can only shake one’s head in disbelief.

Gilot starts acting badly herself as well, since Picasso allows little other alternative. He wins a goat in a raffle, and after awhile she hates it and sells it to a band of gypsies while he’s out of the house one day. When she doesn’t like his worn-out clothes, she puts them in a pile and burns them.

Picasso was horrible to all these people, but frankly, they could and should have left much earlier. If you want to hang out in the vicinity of his fame and drama and selfish cruelty, you pay a certain price. Sometimes I feel sympathy for all these people, but while reading today I’ve had quite enough of them for the moment.

good trip

What could be better than a trip to Venice? Answer: a trip to Venice sandwiched by a day in Istanbul on each end. Turkish Airlines just happens to have the best Cairo-Venice route this days.