The plot against Gaza - Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 17 January 2009

Displaced Palestinian families from the northern Gaza Strip who survived an Israeli attack on a UN school where they were seeking refuge, take refuge yet again at a hospital in the Jabilya refugee camp, 17 January 2009. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)


Israel has justified its assault on Gaza as entirely defensive, intended only to stop Hamas firing rockets on Israel's southern communities. Although that line has been repeated unwaveringly by officials since Israel launched its attack on 27 December, it bears no basis to reality. Rather, this is a war against the Palestinians of Gaza, and less directly those in the West Bank, designed primarily to crush their political rights and their hopes of statehood.

The most glaring evidence contradicting the Israeli casus belli is the six-month ceasefire between Hamas and Israel that preceded the invasion. True, Hamas began firing its rockets as soon as the truce came to an end on 19 December, but Israel had offered plenty of provocation. Not least it broke the ceasefire by staging a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas members. Even more significantly, it maintained and tightened a blockade during the ceasefire period that was starving Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants of food, medicine and fuel. Hamas had expected the blockade lifted in return for an end to the rockets.

A few days before Israel's attack on Gaza, Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel's domestic security service, the Shin Bet, noted Hamas' commitment to the ceasefire and its motives in restarting the rocket fire. "Make no mistake, Hamas is interested in maintaining the truce," he told the cabinet. "It seeks to improve its conditions -- a removal of the blockade, receiving a commitment from Israel that it won't attack and extending the lull to the Judea and Samaria area [the West Bank]." In other words, had Israel wanted calm, it could have avoided invading Gaza simply by renegotiating the truce on more reasonable terms.

Israel, however, had little interest in avoiding a confrontation with Hamas, as events since the Islamic group's takeover of Gaza in early 2006 show.

It is widely agreed among the Israeli leadership that Hamas represents a severe threat to Israel's ambition to crush the Palestinians' long-standing demands for a state in the West Bank and Gaza. Unike Fatah, its chief Palestinian political rival, Hamas has refused to collude with the Israeli occupation and has instead continued its resistance operations. Although Hamas officially wants the return of all the lands the Palestinians were dispossessed of in 1948, at the establishment of Israel, it has shown signs of increasing pragmatism since its election victory, as Diskin's comments above highlight. Hamas leaders have repeatedly suggested that a long-term, possibly indefinite, truce with Israel is possible. Such a truce would amount to recognition of Israel and remove most of the obstacles to the partition of historic Palestine into two states: a Jewish state and a Palestinian one.

Rather than engaging with Hamas and cultivating its moderate wing, Israel has been preparing for an "all-out war," as Ehud Barak, the defense minister, has referred to the current offensive. In fact, Barak began preparing the attack on Gaza at least six months ago, as he has admitted, and probably much earlier.

Barak and the military stayed their hand in Gaza chiefly while other strategies were tested. The most significant was an approach espoused in the immediate wake of Hamas' victory in 2006. Dov Weisglass, former prime minister Ariel Sharon's fixer in Washington, gave it clearest expression. Israel's policy, he said, would be "like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die."

John Wolfensohn, envoy to the Quartet of the United States, the United Nations, Europe and Russia through most of 2005, has pointed out that the US and Israel reneged on understandings controlling the border crossings into Gaza from the moment of Israel's disengagement in summer 2005. In an interview with the Israeli media, he attributed the rapid destruction of the Gazan economy to this policy. However, although the blockade began when Fatah was still in charge of the tiny enclave, the goal of Weisglass' "diet" was to intensify the suffering of Gaza's civilians. The rationale was that, by starving them, they could be both reduced to abject poverty and encouraged to rise up and overthrow Hamas.

But it seems the Israeli army was far from convinced a "diet" would produce the desired result and started devising a more aggressive strategy. It was voiced last year by Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai. He observed that, if Hamas continued firing rockets into Israel (in an attempt, though he failed to mention it, to break the blockade), the Palestinians "will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves." The Hebrew word "Shoah" has come to refer exclusively to the Holocaust.

Though his disturbing comment was quickly disowned, Vilnai is no maverick. He is a former major general in the army who maintains close ties to the senior command. He is also a friend of his boss, Ehud Barak, the Labor leader and Israel's most decorated soldier. The reference to the "shoah" offered a brief insight into the reasoning behind a series of policies he and Barak began unveiling from summer 2007.

It was then that hopes of engineering an uprising against Hamas faded. The diet regime had patently failed, as had a Fatah coup attempt underwritten by the United States. Hamas struck a pre-emptive blow against Fatah, forcing its leaders to flee to the West Bank. In retaliation the Israeli government declared Gaza a "hostile entity." Barak and Vilnai used Gaza's new status as the pretext for expanding the blockade of food and medicines to include electricity, a policy that was progressively tightened. At the same time they argued that Israel should consider cutting off "all responsibility" for Gaza. The intention of Barak's blockade, however, was different from the Weisglass version. It was designed to soften up Gazan society, including Hamas fighters, for Israel's coming invasion.

Far from being threatened by the intensifying blockade, Hamas turned it to its advantage. Although Israel controls two of the land borders and patrols the coast, there is fourth short land border shared with Egypt, close by the town of Rafah. There Gaza's entrepreneurs developed a network of smuggling tunnels that were soon commandeered by Hamas. The tunnels ensured both that basic supplies continued to get through, and that Hamas armed itself for the attack it expected from Israel.From March 2008 Barak and Vilnai began pushing their military strategy harder. New political formulations agreed by the government suggested the whole population of Gaza were to be considered complicit in Hamas actions, and therefore liable for retaliatory military action. In the words of the daily Jerusalem Post newspaper, Israeli policy makers took the view that "it would be pointless for Israel to topple Hamas because the population [of Gaza] is Hamas."

At this point, Barak and Vilnai announced they were working on a way to justify in law the army directing artillery fire and air strikes at civilian neighborhoods of Gaza, as has been occurring throughout the current Gaza campaign. Vilnai, meanwhile, proposed declaring areas of the tiny enclave "combat zones" in which the army would have free rein and from which civilians would be expected to flee -- again a tactic that has been implemented over the past three weeks.Although Israel is determined to crush Hamas politically and militarily, so far it has been loathe to topple it. Israel withdrew from Gaza precisely because the demographic, military and economic costs of directly policing its refugee camps were considered too high. It will not be easily dragged back in.

Other options are either unpalatable or unfeasible. A Fatah government riding in on the back of Israeli tanks would lack legitimacy, and no regime at all -- anarchy -- risks losing forces more implacably opposed to a Jewish state than Hamas, including al-Qaeda. Placing Gaza under a peacekeeping force faces other hurdles: not least, the question of which countries would be prepared to take on such a dangerous burden.

Instead Israel is planning to resort to its favorite diplomatic maneuver: unilateralism. It wants a solution that passes over the heads of Hamas and the Palestinians. Or as Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, put it: "There is no intention here of creating a diplomatic agreement with Hamas. We need diplomatic agreements against Hamas."

The formula currently being sought for a ceasefire will face opposition from Israel unless it helps achieve several goals.

Israel's first is to seal off Gaza properly this time. Egypt, although profoundly uncomfortable at having an Islamic group ruling next door, is under too much domestic pressure to crack down on the tunneling. Israel therefore wants to bring in American and European experts to do the job. They will ensure that the blockade cannot be broken and that Hamas cannot rearm with the the help of outside actors like Iran. At best, Hamas can hope to limp on as nominal ruler of Gaza, on Israeli sufferance.

The second goal has been well articulated by the Harvard scholar Sara Roy, who has been arguing for some time that Israel is, in her words, "de-developing" Gaza. The blockade has been integral to achieving that objective, and is the reason Israel wants it strengthened. In the longer term, she believes, Gazans will come to be "seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims."

In addition, Gazans living close to the enclave's northern and southern borders may be progressively "herded" into central Gaza -- as envisioned in Vilnai's plan last year. That process may already be under way, with Israeli leafletting campaigns warning inhabitants of these areas to flee. Israel wants to empty both the Rafah area, so that it can monitor more easily any attempts at tunneling, and the northern part because this is the location of the rocket launches that are hitting major Israeli cities such as Ashkelon and Ashdod and may one day reach Tel Aviv.

The third and related goal, as Barak and Vilnai proposed more than a year ago, is to cut off all Israeli responsibility for Gaza -- though not oversight of what is allowed in. Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian analyst, believes that in this scenario Israel will insist that humanitarian supplies into Gaza pass only through the Egyptian crossing, thereby also undercutting Hamas' role. Already Israel is preparing to hand over responsibility for supplying Gaza's electricity to Egypt -- a special plant is under construction close by in the Sinai.Slowly, the hope is, Gaza's physical and political separation from the West Bank will be cemented, with the enclave effectively being seen as a province of Egypt. Its inhabitants will lose their connection to the wider Palestinian people and eventually Cairo may grow bold enough to crack down on Hamas as brutally as it does its own Islamists.

The regime of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, meanwhile, will be further isolated and weakened, improving Israel's chances of forcing it to sign a deal annexing East Jerusalem and large swaths of the West Bank on which the Jewish settlements sit.

The fourth goal relates to wider regional issues. The chief obstacle to the implementation of Israel's plan is the growing power of Iran and its possible pursuit of nuclear weapons. Israel's official concern -- that Tehran wants to attack Israel -- is simple mischief-making. Rather Israel is worried that, if Iran becomes a regional superpower, Israeli diktats in the Middle East and in Washington will not go unchallenged.

In particular, a strong Iran will be able to aid Hizballah and Hamas, and further fan the flames of popular Muslim sentiment in favor of a just settlement for the Palestinians. That could threaten Israel's plans for the annexation of much of the West Bank, and possibly win the Palestinians statehood. None of this can be allowed to pass by Israel.

It is therefore seeking to isolate Tehran, severing all ties between it and Hamas, just as it earlier tried -- and failed -- to do the same between Iran and Hizballah. It wants the Palestinians beholden instead to the "moderate" block in the Arab world, meaning the Sunni dictatorships like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia that in turn depend on Washington for their security.

The prospects of Israel achieving all or even some of these goals seems improbable. Too often Israeli meddling in its neighbors' affairs has ended in unintended consequences, or "blowback." It is a lesson Israel has been all too slow to learn.Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

Trentemøller - Moan (live)

Animal Collective

Despite the evident appeal of their deliciously skewed songs, heartbreaking hooks and deep pop sensibilities, Animal Collective is clearly not a simple or stable ‘band’ proposition. Friends and musical partners since 1992, core members Avey Tare and Panda Bear came together in 2000 with the intention of moving pop music in a direction that would place heavy emphasis on sonic experience. Soon after this, they began operating as Animal Collective, an umbrella name now used for a grouping of four people: Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist and Deaken, who play together under different names and in different configurations (anything between 1 to 4 people), and whose releases are prone to continual musical change: from beautifully skewed pop ballads to fiercely ruptured noise-squalls to tribal rhythmic work-outs to simple folk songs, to who knows where; from fully orchestrated group freak-outs to a the intimacy of an acoustic duo. The Collective’s first offering was a stunning collaboration between Avey Tare and Panda Bear called ‘Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished’, released on their own label (Animal) in August of 2000. A second album, ‘Danse Manatee’ (remastered for this release) was released by Catsup Plate in July 2001, which was accompanied by a month-long US tour with their friends Black Dice. The following year saw the release of a limited edition (300 copies), vinyl-only release on St.Ives (a sub-label of Secretly Canadian) called ‘Hollinndagain’, which was made up of recordings from live shows. 2003 saw their most prolific year to date - as well as FatCat's repackaging of the first two albums, they released ‘Campfire Songs’ - a collection of songs recorded live on a screened-in porch in rural Maryland on Catsup Plate; ‘Here Comes The Indian’ on Carpark’s imprint label Paw Tracks (which is being run by the band themselves); and 3 tracks from Avey Tare also appeared on a Split 12" shared with fellow New Yorker David Grubbs. May 2004 saw the release of their twisted yet masterly pop album, 'Sung Tongs' - their most outwardly 'accessible' work to date - which drew widespread critical acclaim, making end of year top 10's including The New York Times, Mojo, The Wire, Pitchork. This popular and critical support was advanced with the band's October 2005 album, 'Feels', again receiving widespread acclaim across the board, and seeing the band score some serious cover features across the States. Immediately on top of this album, the band completed their first ever headlining European tour, selling out venues as they visibly moved up a notch or three. In 2007, we released the 'People' EP and, with their deal with FatCat ended, Animal Collective signed to Domino.In whatever formation, Animal Collective are a genuinely thrilling live unit, passionately committed and unafraid to put themselves on the line. Their refusal to accept obvious formulas and creative desire to continually shift and rapidly move forwards has meant them testing audience expectations and always appearing to be one step ahead of themselves.But, crucially, it is Animal Collective’s natural affinity with pop music that makes up the crux of their sound. Whilst they may recall a wide array of past and present influences, it’s without ever aping them or sounding retro. And most of all, in whatever guise they assume, Animal Collective always manage to sound like noone but themselves – stunningly unique and resonating with a deeply commited self-belief.Like Splinter label-mate Dorine_Muraille, Animal Collective are a perfect addition to FatCat’s Splinter Series - their grasp of pop hooks and dynamics being counterbalanced by a love of noise / friction and musical anarchy; their songs wavering on the tightrope between deeply affecting beauty and unrestrained chaos.

Famous Photo

Life Revealed The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the "Afghan girl," and for 17 years no one knew her name.

Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story.

She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.
The photographer remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her picture. "I didn't think the photograph of the girl would be different from anything else I shot that day," he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan's refugees.
The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the "Afghan girl," and for 17 years no one knew her name.
In January a team from National Geographic Television & Film's EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes. They showed her picture around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee camp near Peshawar where the photograph had been made. A teacher from the school claimed to know her name. A young woman named Alam Bibi was located in a village nearby, but McCurry decided it wasn't her.
No, said a man who got wind of the search. He knew the girl in the picture. They had lived at the camp together as children. She had returned to Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near Tora Bora. He would go get her.
It took three days for her to arrive. Her village is a six-hour drive and three-hour hike across a border that swallows lives. When McCurry saw her walk into the room, he thought to himself: This is her.
Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist. Time and hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened. "She's had a hard life," said McCurry. "So many here share her story." Consider the numbers. Twenty-three years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is the story of Afghanistan in the past quarter century.
Now, consider this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes challenge ours. Most of all, they disturb. We cannot turn away.
"There is not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war," a young Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story that appeared with Sharbat's photograph on the cover. She was a child when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried. And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread.
"We left Afghanistan because of the fighting," said her brother, Kashar Khan, filling in the narrative of her life. He is a straight line of a man with a raptor face and piercing eyes. "The Russians were everywhere. They were killing people. We had no choice."
Shepherded by their grandmother, he and his four sisters walked to Pakistan. For a week they moved through mountains covered in snow, begging for blankets to keep warm.
"You never knew when the planes would come," he recalled. "We hid in caves."
The journey that began with the loss of their parents and a trek across mountains by foot ended in a refugee camp tent living with strangers.
"Rural people like Sharbat find it difficult to live in the cramped surroundings of a refugee camp," explained Rahimullah Yusufzai, a respected Pakistani journalist who acted as interpreter for McCurry and the television crew. "There is no privacy. You live at the mercy of other people." More than that, you live at the mercy of the politics of other countries. "The Russian invasion destroyed our lives," her brother said.
It is the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will it ever end? "Each change of government brings hope," said Yusufzai. "Each time, the Afghan people have found themselves betrayed by their leaders and by outsiders professing to be their friends and saviors."
In the mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village in the foothills of mountains veiled by snow. To live in this earthen-colored village at the end of a thread of path means to scratch out an existence, nothing more. There are terraces planted with corn, wheat, and rice, some walnut trees, a stream that spills down the mountain (except in times of drought), but no school, clinic, roads, or running water.
Here is the bare outline of her day. She rises before sunrise and prays. She fetches water from the stream. She cooks, cleans, does laundry. She cares for her children; they are the center of her life. Robina is 13. Zahida is three. Alia, the baby, is one. A fourth daughter died in infancy. Sharbat has never known a happy day, her brother says, except perhaps the day of her marriage.
Her husband, Rahmat Gul, is slight in build, with a smile like the gleam of a lantern at dusk. She remembers being married at 13. No, he says, she was 16. The match was arranged.
He lives in Peshawar (there are few jobs in Afghanistan) and works in a bakery. He bears the burden of medical bills; the dollar a day he earns vanishes like smoke. Her asthma, which cannot tolerate the heat and pollution of Peshawar in summer, limits her time in the city and with her husband to the winter. The rest of the year she lives in the mountains.
At the age of 13, Yusufzai, the journalist, explained, she would have gone into purdah, the secluded existence followed by many Islamic women once they reach puberty.
"Women vanish from the public eye," he said. In the street she wears a plum-colored burka, which walls her off from the world and from the eyes of any man other than her husband. "It is a beautiful thing to wear, not a curse," she says.
Faced by questions, she retreats into the black shawl wrapped around her face, as if by doing so she might will herself to evaporate. The eyes flash anger. It is not her custom to subject herself to the questions of strangers.
Had she ever felt safe?
"No. But life under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and order."
Had she ever seen the photograph of herself as a girl?
"No."
She can write her name, but cannot read. She harbors the hope of education for her children. "I want my daughters to have skills," she said. "I wanted to finish school but could not. I was sorry when I had to leave."
Education, it is said, is the light in the eye. There is no such light for her. It is possibly too late for her 13-year-old daughter as well, Sharbat Gula said. The two younger daughters still have a chance.
The reunion between the woman with green eyes and the photographer was quiet. On the subject of married women, cultural tradition is strict. She must not look—and certainly must not smile—at a man who is not her husband. She did not smile at McCurry. Her expression, he said, was flat. She cannot understand how her picture has touched so many. She does not know the power of those eyes.
Such knife-thin odds. That she would be alive. That she could be found. That she could endure such loss. Surely, in the face of such bitterness the spirit could atrophy. How, she was asked, had she survived?
The answer came wrapped in unshakable certitude. "It was," said Sharbat Gula, "the will of God."

The Album Leaf - Into the Blue Again

Life as a traveling musician can become monotonous. Sleep, eat, perform. Load in, load out, pass out. Repeat. This is your day, and before you realize it, your life. After a decade of the three-step grind James LaValle—the classically trained multi-instrumentalist whose tone poems have been collated as The Album Leaf since 1999—decided to get off the well-worn path.“A lot of traveling and time away from home, learning about yourself while losing yourself, that’s what has gone into recording for me,” says LaValle. “Following a year-and-a-half of straight touring I took a break from worrying only about where The Album Leaf was going and instead concentrated on the best parts of what it’s been this entire time.”If musicians could keep time in a bottle its consumption would likely outpace vodka and bourbon combined within the first year. Next to a comfortable place to sleep, time is the luxury few touring musicians are afforded. Time alone is even more rare. Following stints with instrumental artisans Tristeza, post-hardcore spastics the Locust, contorted punk-funk ritualists GoGoGo Airheart, shadowy conjurers The Black Heart Procession and is often a special guest of Iceland’s celestial menagerie Sigur Rós, LaValle recognizes this lifestyle and its constraints.Bottled up on the road long enough, LaValle felt the timing was right to give it a go from a different angle. Using time bought by the success of his Sub Pop debut, 2004’s In a Safe Place (which saw songs as the soundtrack to six episodes of The OC, and stints with CBS, NBC and Showtime). LaValle sequestered himself for six months in his San Diego house solely to write. This upswing of downtime resulted in his fourth full-length, Into the Blue Again.At the core of The Album Leaf (named for a Chopin piece) has always been LaValle’s melodic daydreams personified. But while 2004’s In a Safe Place featured embellishments from members of Sigur Rós and Amina (the Sigur Rós string section), Into the Blue Again sees a return to The Album Leaf’s conception and LaValle handling virtually all of the instrumental duties. LaValle’s few collaborators on Into the Blue Again are Josh Eutis of Telefon Tel Aviv, who aided additional drum programming and engineering on choice songs, The Black Heart Procession’s Pall Jenkins adding vocal harmonies on "Wherever I Go," violinist Matt Resovich (who performs with The Album Leaf live, and also played on In a Safe Place), Drew Andrews adding additional guitar work on select songs (Drew also performs with The Album Leaf live) and Brigir Jon Birgisson, “Biggi,” engineer at Sigur Rós’ Sundlaugin studio.Sundlaugin, also the studio used for In a Safe Place, is a former swimming pool turned into a primarily analogue recording facility. This contoured, textural environment lends itself well to LaValle’s lustrous, resounding palette. Wanting to employ his own equipment (not possible on the last record, recorded wholly in Iceland), LaValle loaded up a van and held his initial three-week tracking session with Ryan Hadlock at appropriately earthy Bear Creek Studio, a converted turn-of-the-century barn isolated outside Seattle. LaValle then took the concentric billows of feathered keyboards, filmy strings and chiseled drums to Iceland for three weeks of mixing to tape to maintain Brian Eno-informed translucence.“Rough warmth, that’s a good description,” says Birgisson of LaValle’s intonation on Into the Blue Again. “The goal was to make sure you’re not overproducing to keep things live, organic and intimate.”“I like drones and keeping notes intact,” admits LaValle. “A lot of times songs become written around a sound I feel is important and should not be forgotten. But I anchor them in a verse-chorus-verse structure. It helps focus the melodies.”Indeed, personal focus has been LaValle’s primary objective with Into the Blue Again. The album’s 10 tracks exhibit an elegant, ascendant assurance informed by LaValle’s more settled relationships at home. While still delivering the placidity of a track such as album opener “The Light,” LaValle has composed even more corporeal, insistent cuts such as “Shine” and “Red-Eye.” Into the Blue Again also showcases LaValle’s increasingly confident, buoyant vocals striking heightened presence on unfeigned selections “Always for You,” “Writings on the Wall” and “Wherever I Go.” There is a greater sense of both the “I” and eye in the way LaValle lays out the topography of his pivotal past and makes it universally palpable.“The Album Leaf is my little solo endeavor, my little toy,” says LaValle in summation. “It’s something to keep you happy when you’re alone and frustrated, and sometimes frustrating in itself when it doesn’t do exactly what you want. But still something fascinating.”Having shared so much time and space with others on the road, LaValle proves with the personally charged Into the Blue Again that The Album Leaf resonates most profoundly when he goes it alone.

Cafe del Mar - The begining

Café del Mar was inaugurated on 20th June 1980 on the island of Ibiza in the town of San Antonio de Portmany. A well-known Catalán architect, Lluis Güell, was in charge of the design, decoration and architecture Well-known personalities, including writers, bohemians and intellectuals, among others, soon began to visit the café to contemplate the sunset, undoubtedly one of the most incredible and marvelous sunsets on the planet.Well-known personalities, including writers, bohemians and intellectuals, among others, soon began to visit the café to contemplate the sunset, undoubtedly one of the most incredible and marvelous sunsets on the planet. The ritual is accompanied by a type of music we are not accustomed to hearing on the Ibiza night scene (jazz, classical, blues). It was precisely this music and the sunsets that made this magical place famous.
The collections of the music played at the café were first sold on cassette at the end of the eighties. In 1994, the English company React published the first “Café del Mar” CD, which included works by world-renowned artists such as Underworld, A Man Called Adam, Stelle, Tabula Rasa, etc. The success of this first collection was followed by the publication, in the summers of 95 and 96, of “Café del Mar – Volume Two” and “Café del Mar – Volume Three”.
The CDs were so successful that the executives of Polygram UK (Universal Music) decided to publish “Café del Mar – Volume Four” and “Café del Mar – Volume Five” in 1997 and 1998, which again include the works of world-renowned artists.
The first Café del Mar shop opened in the 1998, selling personalized sport-wear: t-shirts, polo shirts, sweatshirts, merchandising.

Yo Galaxy's Mama Is a Black Hole - ブラックホールが銀河を生む？

ほぼすべての銀河の中心部には、あらゆる物を飲み込む超巨大質量のブラックホールが潜んでいる。そして、新たな研究によると、銀河を生み出したのはこのブラックホールである可能性があるという。これこそが、長年にわたる天文学上の「ニワトリが先か卵が先か」の議論に対する答えとなるかもしれない。
[数多くの銀河の中心部に、太陽の数百万倍から数十億倍という大質量のブラックホールが存在することは、1990年代から確認されている]
今回の研究で、天文学者らは数々の銀河を観測してその内部に渦を巻くガスの動きを測定することで、銀河とその内部にあるブラックホールの質量の計測に成功した。その結果、ブラックホールの規模と、その銀河で中心部に形成される星々とガスの膨らみ(銀河バルジ)の規模とには、概して直接的な関係があることが判明した。ブラックホールの質量は通常、銀河バルジの質量のおよそ1000分の1になるという。
[渦巻銀河や棒渦巻銀河は、横から見たときに凸レンズ状だが、その中央部のもりあがりを銀河バジルと呼ぶ。銀河中心部に超巨大質量のブラックホールがあり、その重力により星が集まっていると考えられている]
しかし、はるか遠くにあり、従って宇宙の歴史における比較的初期の段階を見せている銀河に目を向けたところ(遠いものほど、対象が発する光が地球に到達するまで時間がかかるので、より昔の銀河の姿なのだ)、驚くべきパターンが発見された。
こうした銀河では、ブラックホールと銀河との間に、通常の質量の割合が保たれていなかった。最も遠くに位置する銀河(つまり発達の最初期の段階を見せているもの)では、予測される比率よりもブラックホールの質量がかなり大きかったのだ。
ビッグバンから8億7000万年以内に同時発生した、超巨大質量のブラックホールと巨大楕円銀河。米国国立電波天文台(NRAO)の天文学者Chris Carilli氏は1月7日(米国時間)、カリフォルニア州ロングビーチで開催された米国天文学会(ASS)の会議の中で報告を行ない、「最も単純な結論は、まず最初にブラックホールが生じ、そのブラックホールが何らかの形で周辺に銀河を成長させるというものだ」と語った。
これが本当だとした場合、ブラックホールと銀河はなぜそこまで関係があるのか、ブラックホールは銀河をどのように成長させるのかという問題について、重大な疑問がいくつも出てくる。
同じくこの研究に関わったカリフォルニア工科大学の天文学者Dominik Riechers氏は、プレスリリースの中で「どのようなメカニズムが働いているのか、また、プロセスのある時点において質量がなぜ『標準的な』割合で安定するのかはわからない」と述べている。
ブラックホール周辺の強力な恒星風と宇宙ジェットが、星の形成を後押しして銀河の成長を誘発する、と理論づける向きもある。一方で、ブラックホール周辺の過酷な環境は、安定した星の形成を促すにはあまりに無秩序だという考え方もある。

Lurking deep inside the center of almost all galaxies is a ravenous, super-massive black hole, and new research suggests the black hole may have given birth to its galaxy. This could be the answer to a long-standing astronomical chicken-and-egg problem.
By observing a series of galaxies and measuring the motions of swirling gas inside them, astronomers were able to weigh the galaxies and their resident black holes. They found that in general, there is a direct relationship between the size of a black hole and the size of the central bulge of stars and gas in the galaxy around it: Black holes usually weigh about one one-thousandth of the mass of the galactic bulge.
But when the researchers looked at galaxies that were farther away, and thus effectively dating from earlier periods in the universe’s history (because the more distant we look, the longer an object’s light has taken to reach us, so the older it is), they found a surprising pattern.
The usual mass ratio between black hole and galaxy didn’t hold up. Instead, the black holes in the farthest away galaxies — the ones we are seeing in the youngest stage of development — were much larger than expected.
"The simplest conclusion is that the black holes come first and they somehow grow the galaxy around them," said astronomer Chris Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory during a briefing Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Long Beach, California.
If this is true, it raises many significant questions about why the black holes and galaxies are so linked, and how black holes help galaxies grow.
"We don't know what mechanism is at work here, and why, at some point in the process, the 'standard' ratio between the masses is established," said Caltech astronomer Dominik Riechers in a press release. Riechers also worked on the study.
Some theorize that the strong winds and jets surrounding black holes could help feed star formation and induce galaxies to grow. But the violent environments of black holes have also been thought too chaotic to harbor stable star formation.
The researchers hope to better understand the seemingly symbiotic relationship between galaxies and their gobbling black hole inhabitants when new observation tools come online soon. The Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) being built in New Mexico, and the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, expected to be completed by 2012, should dramatically increase the sensitivity and resolution available for studies of distant galaxies.
"We really do need to confirm this with further observations," Carilli said. "In fact the future looks extremely bright for these kinds of studies."

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