LondONline

Come and meet us

Karo — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:44:00 +02:00

Our next meeting will be held on Thursday, 25 October at 6.30pm at the Gallery Bar at University of London Union (ULU).

The new Managers and Officers will be reporting about their first progresses and we will discuss how to advance further.

Please let us know if you'd like to attend to get to know us and our project, so we know how many people to expect: london@cafebabel.com

Our newly created team

Karo — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:11:00 +02:00

After some great preparation and brainstorming efforts, the London team is now newly established and restructured.

Please welcome the new Managers and Officers:

Activity Manager: Annette Detmer

* PR/Media Officer: Shruti Dudhia

* Events Officer: Timur Topalgoekceli

* Events Volunteer: Agnes Baritou

Business and Finance Manager: Bruno Alajouanine

* Fundraising Officer: Carlo Svaluto

* HR Officer: Daria

Editorial Manager: Karolin Schaps

* Online contributors: Abla Kandalaft, Laura Eid

The following positions are still to be filled:

* Online Editor

* New Media Officer

If you are interested in filling any of these positions, please email us your CV and a brief explanation of why you would like to fill this job: london@cafebabel.com

Haute Couture, Low Disagreements

Karo — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 01:16:00 +02:00

Timeliness is everything. In line with the London Fashion Week, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is opening an exhibition on the blooming period of luxury fashion. I went to have a look what to make of the Golden Age of Couture 60 years on.

Fashion is arguably the one thing that Europeans have been able to agree about. The likes of Christian Dior (FR), Cristobal Balenciaga (ES) and Hardy Amies (UK) showed that European 'Haute Couture' goes beyond national boundaries. All that counted during their times was glamour, glamour and more glamour. Who knows what the presentable ladies would have worn had the grand designers argued about the correct translations for 'cocktail dress' instead of concentrating on its making.

On 22 September the London Victoria and Albert Museum is opening an insightful exhibition on the 'Golden Age' of couture, focusing on fashion products from Paris and London between 1947 to 1957.

Roughly 180 garments make up the compact exhibition, showing dresses from Princess Margaret's wardrobe to the first brassieres dating from the after war period. A personal favourite of mine is the cream coloured blazer and black skirt, supposedly weighing an impressive 80 pounds alone! To strengthen the fit, apparently. The items are accompanied by a number of fashion photographs, most of which featured in Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, which gives a very lively feel to the exhibition. Afterall, without the magazines constantly chasing the latest creations and presenting them on the most beautiful women, none of the designers would have reached the fame they enjoyed. As Carmel Snow, journalist at Harper's Bazaar, wrote: 'Editors need to recognise fashions while they are still a thing of the future. The dressmakers create them, but without the magazines, these fashions would never be established or accepted.'

Christian Dior's launch of the 'New Look' in 1947 clearly marked the beginning of a new fashion era. Claire Wilcox, curator of the exhibition, said that Dior replaced a very military style from the war time with a sort of new beginning look. Most significantly, he created longer skirts for the ladies, which aimed at stimulating the economy by requiring more fabric. The inspiration of economic matters was also later reflected at fashion shows when the most sought after designs were called 'Fords'.

The exhibition concludes with an astonishing collection of evening gowns and cocktail dresses. Beautifully matched by colours, the dresses feature big bows, studs and low cleavages. Dior's, Balenciaga's and Amies' creations glowing side by side paint a promising picture for the future of a Europe united in fashion. Then and now.

How to organize a successful Music Event for cafebabel.com London...by Maira Fj

Karo — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:37:00 +02:00

I joined the London Team of cafebabel.com in January 2007 and after the Festival of Europe the next big thing was the Celebration of the Europe Day, on the 9th of May. For it we decided to put on a different kind of event, a music party, with bands from different parts of Europe to spread the word about cafebabel.com but also to show how different European music influences meeting in London are reinventing and constantly shaping contemporary music.

So, how to stage something like that with no budget? First of all find good friends who are willing to help and are well placed in the field…..

The venue is the first problem; when you have no founds a usually successful way to secure a good place is to promise you'll bring lots of people which means the venue will get extra revenues generated from the extra people drinking from the bar. That was how we got hold of one of the best venues in East London, the Spitz Gallery. The Spitz is a bistro-gallery-music venue well knows in London for promoting and presenting the most interesting underground bands coming from all over the world. It is also based in a great location, the Old Spitafield market, or simply 'Spitalfields' which ‘lives’ between Liverpool street, the heart of the ‘City of London’, financial capital of London and Brick Lane, one of the most vibrant and innovative parts of the town, home of a flourishing creative community . Instead of being in the main music venue, the cafebabel.com party was staged in the Gallery, a spacious room facing on one side the busy Commercial road and on the other the interiors of the Spitafields with its old market style wooden and steel structure. On the day the gallery was also hosting an exhibition of Graffiti pictures which added to the melting pot of arts and styles in which we were diving.

Once you have the venue you have to find bands which, of course, will be willing to play for free. London has a great website called gumtree.com where, if you post an ad, you can be quite sure that you’ll have tens of answers in a couple of days for any kind of request. Gumtree is international but if you don’t have it in your city try to any young community websites, preferably on music. I posted an add saying exactly what I was looking for: band with European members who wanted to play for free but in one of the most famous venues of East London (the name Spitz, I have to say, really help). In less than a week I was overloaded with mails from bands of any provenience and genre and my job was to check their myspace page and decided the ones that I liked more. With the approbation of the other members of the London team I selected 2 bands (the other two where friends of mine). I meet the bands showed them the venue and talked about equipment requirements. That’s a very important part of the job as well. In our case, what we needed was quite minimal because the event was acoustic, but when organizing something like this, always ask what the bands need.

Here comes one the worst problem: the PA, for those who have no clue what that is ( I discover it only when I was organising the party), is the technical equipment you need for the gig such as the mixer, speakers, various leads, microphones, amplifiers, monitors etc. Unless you have a friend who can lend you one you have to rent it. That’s of course what we did, but we paid for it. It usually doesn’t cost an arm and a leg (we paid 50 pounds) but when you have no budget you need to invest yourself. There are places that rent it, but I suggest you to ask around and see if you can find somebody through friend that owns a PA and can rent it to you. That might be cheaper.

Then you need a sound engineer which you have to pay as well. Likely one of my friends, who is a sound engineer, agreed to do it for us for free.

Once all those things are sorted out you need to start with publicity. Write a catchy press release and contact International Cultural Institute who can put a notice on their websites for free. Is quite useful to put notices also on universities websites or propose interviews or articles for communities (one of our target were minority communities’ media) and students’ newspaper and radios. We designed a flyer and printed some black and white copies in house (…or from work…) and distributed those in bars and universities’ unions and we e-mailed it to all our contacts which then send it around to all their contacts and so on…..

Then the day comes, the venue is ready, sound check’s done, you just have to wait and hope that everything will turn out right……which in our case did, we had a great party, the bands were fantastic and we had a good number of people. I have to say that something like this involves a great degree of stress and work for at least couple of months before the event and you won’t see a penny for you, on the contrary you will have to put some money in, but I can promise you that it is also lots of fun and a chance to learn lots of things about managing and organizing events…..and you will want to do it again.

What has the EU ever done for the UK? Myth-Buster

Nina — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 11:38:00 +02:00

Many people in England that I have spoken to (mainly from Bath, Rugby, and Oxford) and, from what I've heard people in Wales concur, that they are not opposed to the EU in principle, but it is rather the direction that they see it going and how the principles of the EU get put into practice that they oppose. What are their main complaints? Are these complaints based on fact or misunderstanding?

The main complaint of those who oppose the direction they believe the EU is headed, namely towards becoming a super-state, is that majority of the legislation made in Westminster these days is merely the transcribing of legislation from Brussels. "Brussels" is spoken about as if it is an entity completely separate from the UK, of which the UK is certainly not a part (Side note: at the post office one can buy three kinds of stamps: UK, Europe, international. Another reminder that the island sees Europe as something outside of the UK.) This view is partially based on fact, because something like 70% (I think) of legislation being passed in Westminster originates from the EU. But it is also partially misguided, since that the Council of Ministers has the final power to take decisions on the majority of EU legislation, and the UK has a seat at the table in the Council of Ministers. The image of Brussels being an anonymous legislation-making machine separate from EU member states themselves is a misunderstanding.

A second complaint is that the Eurocracy produces loads of unnecessary red tape and that the Eurocracy's administration consumes large amounts of resources. The former statement describes a two-sided coin. On the one hand, sharing governance horizontally between nation-states and vertically between different levels of supranational, national, regional, and local government creates an administrative nightmare, where certain pieces of the same policy must be approved by different levels of government and each level of government involves a variety of actors (e.g. Supra-national level = European Parliament, Council of Ministers, European Commission, committees, etc; National level = chief executive and cabinet, parliament, advisory committees, etc.) On the other hand, streamlining the EU's policy-making process would certainly mean leaving out some actors' ability to check and balance the decision-making power of other actors. Thus, some call it red tape, others might call it democracy in action.

As for the latter point, the consumption of resources towards EU administrative costs, this only constitutes 3,5 to 4,5 percent of the budget for the 2007-2013 financial perspective. This figure hardly compares to the 30 to 45 percent of government budgets that European state administrations typically consume. A final complaint is that aside from the Single Market, and particularly the free movement of people, there is no benefit for the UK to being in the EU.

This last point I would like to leave open for debate. To kick it off, I encourage you to watch a clever video: What has Europe ever done for us?

On the whole, I find that English criticism of the EU is based on grains of truth that only reveal the tip of the iceberg, but which have nonetheless become conventional arguments that perpetuate a misunderstanding of how the EU works and the UK's role within it.

Does the EU's Reform Treaty Erode the UK's Sovereignty?

Nina — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 11:12:00 +02:00

This post is in response to an opinion expressed by Ruth Lea, Director of the Global Vision think tank in the UK, on the BBC's "For and against the new EU treaty" (available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6914468.stm). Lea argues that the EU reform treaty is good for EU integration, which inevitably makes it bad for the UK. Her view is representative of a many people in the UK with whom I've spoken to about the European Union. One of her statements that summarizes this view and that provokes my reaction is when Lea states:

"Once enforced, there will quite simply be no more significant powers left solely with the governments of the member states, and outside the orbit of the EU's formal institutions. Of course, member states may still pursue their individual foreign and defence policies, for example, but their activities will be increasingly circumscribed by the EU and their national sovereignty diminished."

If one tIhinks of sovereignty as the power to redistribute wealth and the power to use force, then Lea's opinion is misguided and unhelpful as it feeds the sensationalized news depicting the EU as something like "The Blob," which is slowly taking over the competencies of member states.

Her argument takes things like an EU Foreign Minister for its superficial face value and ignores the fact that any powers (of negotiation, mandate, etc) given to the EU Foreign Minister will require unanimity of the member states. Every EU member state must endorse the powers given to the EU Foreign Minister and their ability to veto policies that go against their national interest means that they retain complete sovereignty over foreign and defense policies, despite the creation of a new job title for someone at the EU.

At best, the EU Foreign Minister might have the power to persuade EU member states to soften hard lines, but in areas of member states' core interests this influence is unlikely to make a difference. For example, changes to the French line on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been more the result of structural changes to the domestic agricultural sector within France than persuasion by other countries. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that an EU Foreign Minister might soften Estonia's stance to condemn Russia for criticizing Estonia's removal of Russian statues, but I would be doubtful of an EU Foreign Minister's ability to persuade the UK to remove troops from Iraq, renegotiate military cooperation with the U.S., or to lift the EU's arms embargo on China. These issues remain within the core interest of the UK, and the UK's continued ability to veto anything that touches on these issues means that it has not lost its sovereignty, nor has the EU reform treaty changed that ability in any way.

The reform treaty does not make any significant changes to other core competencies of member states, like taxation and redistribution. These remain the sole competencies of the member states. I acknowledge that the single market and the Eurozone (which doesn't apply to the UK) puts constraints on the redistributive policy choices that states can pursue within the EU because of the free movement of goods, services, capital, and labor (i.e. high corporate taxes in one member state can lead to businesses fleeing to other member states with lower corporate taxes), but this occurs regardless of the reform treaty and is a consequence of EU membership in general. Aside from the minimum and maximum limits on value-added tax (VAT) that EU member states agreed to impose on themselves to prevent a race-to-the-bottom and race-to-the-top, the supranational EU institutions have no say over who gets taxed how much and where that money goes. This power remains in the hands of member states and remains a key source of member state sovereignty.

Where the EU is perhaps stepping on areas you would expect to remain the sole competency of member states in education (the attempt to put for an EU History book) and health policy, the reform treaty does not add or take away from this in any way. The most shocking creeping on the part of the EU, to me, is the rulings by the Commission regarding health policy and the free movement of goods, services, and people.

Two activities come to mind: 1) patients can seek treatment in any EU member state and their home national insurance must pay the cost and 2) the Commission is trying to harmonize standards the pharmaceutical market, because I'm not entirely sure that mutual recognition applies 100% here.

The implications of these activities on European welfare states could be enormous. But the EU reform treaty does not address this at all, because it changes voting weights and does not make any significant changes to enhance the Commission's competency over EU competition policy or member states' ability to appeal these policies. If anything, one could argue that French President Nicholas Sarkozy insisting that competition be taken out of the EU's objectives, may weaken the EU's ability to make rulings that would increase competition in the medical sector, although such weakening of the EU's competency over competition policy because of Sarkozy's stance is disputed by the Financial Times.

The EU reform treaty does not erode the UK's sovereignty any more than being a member of the EU single market already has done. If one takes sovereignty to mean the ability to use force either against one's own population or another's and the ability to redistribute wealth, then the UK has preserved it sovereignty entirely, with the caveat that the single market has limited some policy choices. Whether or not these choices are limited, the ability to take decisions in these areas remain in the hands of member states and "outside the orbit of the EU's formal institutions." The EU reform treaty has not transferred these competencies to the EU's institutions, nor is it likely that any future treaty will.

The Science Museum

Karo — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:59:00 +02:00

The Science Museum by Nina

Another offbeat thing to do in London is to check out the British Science Museum's exhibits on the history of medicine. It certainly gives you an appreciation for modern technology - for better or worse.

In the display you'll find old medical instruments that you would think had been used to torture prisoners, not to heal patients. Pacemakers were the size of a 4x4, a roof-shaft made for a blood-cooling device, kidney dialysis was performed with what looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.

There is also a section with sculptures depicting the historical evolution of medicine. It really shows how far we've come in the last 2000 years. In the earliest days, the museum shows how the cavemen believed that sickness was caused by demons in the brain, so they'd use rocks to make holes in peoples' skulls to let the demons escape. On the Roman battlefield, soldiers would be healed in private homes. During the Medieval times, cathedrals served as hospitals. During battles at sea in the 17th to 19th centuries, some people got limbs amputated without anything but a shot of whisky and a piece of leather to bite on for comfort.

Even on land, people were not drugged before surgical operations up through the mid-1800s. The surgeon would perform operations in a suit and bare hands and other people could stand around and observe. Until the early 20th century, doctors' offices were normally just a furnished room in their house (sometimes this is still around today, but is rare).

After looking at how much things have evolved even in the last 50 years, I would rather wait another 50 years and let things evolve even more before my next doctor's appointment!

Europe in London

Karo — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:17:00 +02:00

This category is designed to publish Europe-related news snippits from London. We hope to create a little space which allows to give an overview of European news from London, which will hopefully encourage a bit of discussion.

What we do...

Karo — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:13:00 +02:00

Our team in London has been around for almost three years now. Having led its activities over the past years, I can say that it is quite a challenge to spread a Europe-focused enthusiasm here in London.

Nevertheless, there is hope and we are continuously trying our best to get people interested in European issues and also to spread the word about the wonderful world of cafebabel.com.

This space will keep you up to date with what we're doing, planning and preparing. Of course, we are very happy to welcome new members to our team at any time and of any sort. At the moment, we are especially keen on people who would like to contribute to this very blog. Any feedback and comments are welcome!

So, what's going on at the moment? Summer-time recession...Many of our team members are students, therefore the summer months always tend to be a bit quiet. But we are planning a lot of interesting events for the coming months...An exciting debate series at the beginning of next year and our participation in the next round of Europe on the Ground!

Get in touch if you'd like to help out: london@cafebabel.com

Watch this space for further info!

Living in London is…

Karo — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:57:00 +02:00

Living in London is… by Laura

Welcome to this interactive category of the blog !

Our goal is to share and exchange insider knowledge of the Global City with you newcomer, temporary resident, Londoner born and bred, expat, city-hopper or future Londoner for life! All comments welcome!

Brick Lane.

Home of the Bangladeshi and the ‘alternative’ communities, prepare for the multi-kulti journey Brick Lane will take you through. For those who have had a spell at living in Berlin, welcome back! This area of the city has the same indie, alternative edge the German capital is renowned for. Live-in bars, beer gardens, clubs, live concerts, open-air art exhibitions, sheesha lounges, second hand stores, there’s no other place in London to chill out on a lazy or rainy week-end.

Hungry? Stop off for a bagel to whet your appetite at the top end of the street. The two neck-to-necks bagel shops offer the best New York buns in town as the steady queues indicate. Mint tea in one of the hazy Middle-Eastern sheesha lounges will wash down the snack and allow you unwind in their cushy chairs and eavesdrop the foreign conversations around you. Alternatively, hop into Benglatown in the southern part of the street for a budget and tasty meal from the sub-continent. Be sure to haggle the offers waiters waiting outside their restaurants will throw at you. Generally no alcohol on the menu so bring your own bottle from one of the near-by corner shops if you want to splash out.

One of the Indie crowd? Then dress the part! Leggings, bright neon tights, golden shoes, Robert Smith-like hairstyles, keffiehs, Converses full of holes. You’re going to have to in order to mingle with the art students, graphic designers, entrepreneurs of all sorts oozing coolness and detachment as they stroll in the Lane coffee in one hand and shades on their noses. Browse through the independent designer or second-hand clothes shops or through the adjacent indoor markets for that unique present you’ve been eying for your best bud. Vinyls, vintage dresses, past issues of Vogue, quirky household objects all available and exposed to the Fashionista’s heart content.

Welcome to the world in London

Karo — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:10:00 +02:00

Hi everyone,

the aim of this blog is to tell you what we have been up to as the London team of cafebabel.com.

Over the weeks, we will add posts on recent events we organised, hopefully including some flashy pictures!

This blog is still in baby shoes, but we are in the process of adding some more exciting features. We are thinking of dedicating a section to all things European in London, and a sort of "insider" guide book to where to go/eat/drink/dance/be amazed around this exciting town.

So watch this space for more action! Any feedback is welcome - tell us what you'd like to hear from us!

Looking forward to lots more Babelian blogging entertainment!

The London team

This was in May 2006 at our "Who is afraid of Europe"-discussion with Commissioner Margot Wallstroem! Since then, some members have left and others have joined, but silly mousy ears always belong in our pictures! From l t r, top-down: Amana Khan, James Fontanella, Edoardo Troina, Timur Topalgoekceli, Annette Detmer, Ruth Bender, Karolin Schaps, Davide Rizzo, Carlo Svaluto, Greg Mounier, Tomas Ruta