June 06, 2012

Toledo

I strongly recommend The Shadow of the Cathedral by Vicente Blasco Ibañez to anyone visiting Toledo. Half of the book consists of detailed descriptions of the Cathedral that, on the day I first saw and visited it, made me feel like I had been there before. It was great fun looking for the details described by the main character who is supposed to have grown up inside the Cathedral.

*****

"The first storey of the façade was broken in the centre by the great Puerta del Perdon, an enormous and very deeply-recessed Gothic arch, which narrowed as it receded by the gradations of its mouldings, adorned by statues of apostles, under open-worked canopies, and by shields emblazoned with lions and castles. On the pillar dividing the doorway stood Jesus in kingly crown and mantle, thin and drawn out, with the look of emaciation and misery that the imagination of the Middle Ages conceived necessary for the expression of Divine sublimity. In the tympanum a relievo represented the Virgin surrounded by angels, robed in the habit of St. Ildefonso, a pious legend repeated in various parts of the building as though it were one of its chief glories.

On one side was the doorway called "de la Torre," on the other side that called "de los Escribanos," for by it entered in former days the guardians of public religion to take the oath to fulfil the duties of their office. Both were enriched with stone statues on the jambs, and by wreaths of little figures, foliage, and emblems that unrolled themselves among the mouldings till they met at the summit of the arch."

"The riches of the Church, thought Luna, were a misfortune for art; in a poorer church the uniformity of the ancient front would have been preserved. But, then, the Archbishop of Toledo had eleven millions of yearly revenue, and the Chapter as many more; they did not know what to do with their money, so started works and made reconstructions, and the decadent art produced monstrosities like that one of the Last Supper."

"At last he decided to follow them, and slowly descended the same steps leading down into the cloister, for the Cathedral, being built in a hollow, is much lower than the adjacent streets.
Everything appeared the same. There on the walls were the great frescoes of Bayan y Maella, representing the works and great deeds of Saint Eulogio, his preaching in the land of the Moors, and the cruelties of the infidels, who, with big turbans and enormous whiskers, were beating the saint."

"The garden in the midst of the cloister showed even in midwinter its southern vegetation of tall laurels and cypresses, stretching their branches through the grating of the arches that, five on each side, surrounded the square, and rising to the capitals of the pillars. Gabriel looked a long time at the garden, which was higher than the cloister; his face was on a level with the ground on which his father had laboured so many years ago; at last he saw again that charming corner of verdure—the Jews' market converted into a garden by the canons centuries before. The remembrance of it had followed him everywhere—in the Bois de Boulogne, in Hyde Park; for him the garden of the Toledan Cathedral was the most beautiful of all gardens, for it was the first he had even known in his life."

"They crossed the gallery covered by the archbishop's archway and entered the upper cloister called "the Claverias": four arcades of equal length to those of the lower cloister, but quite bare of decoration, and with a poverty-stricken aspect. The pavement was chipped and broken, the four sides had a balustrade running round between the flat pillars that supported the old beams of the roof. It had been a provisional work three hundred years ago, and had always remained in the same state. All along the whitewashed walls, the doors and windows belonging to the "habitacions" of the Cathedral servants opened without order or symmetry. These were transmitted with the office from father to son. The cloister, with its low arcade, looked like a street having houses on one side only; opposite was the flat colonnade with its balustrade, against which the pointed branches of the cypresses in the garden rested. Above the roof of the cloister could be seen the windows of another row of "habitacions," for nearly all the dwellings in the Claverias had two stories."

"His little floral world did not change, its sombre verdure was like the twilight that had enveloped the gardener's soul. It had not the brilliant gaiety, overflowing with colours and scents of a garden in the open, bathed in full sunlight, but it had the shady and melancholy beauty of a conventual garden between four walls, with no more light than what came through the eaves and the arcades, and no other birds but those flying above, who looked with wonder at this little paradise at the bottom of a well. The vegetation was the same as that of the Greek landscapes, and of the idylls of the Greek poets—laurels, cypress and roses, but the arches that surrounded it, with their alleys paved with great slabs of granite in whose interstices wreaths of grass grew, the cross of its central arbour, the mouldy smell of the old iron railings, and the damp of the stone buttresses coloured a soft green by the rain, gave the garden an atmosphere of reverend age and a character of its own."

"He would stop before the chapel of Santiago, admiring through the railings of its three pointed arches the legendary saint, dressed as a pilgrim, holding his sword on high, and tramping on Mahomedans with his war-horse. Great shells and red shields with a silver moon adorned the white walls, rising up to the vaulting, and this chapel his father, the gardener, regarded as his own peculiar property. It was that of the Lunas, and though some people laughed at the relationship, there lay his illustrious progenitors, Don Alvaro and his wife, on their monumental tombs."

""Look well at that image, uncle. Is there another like it in all the world? She is a courtezan, a siren who would drive men mad if she only fluttered her eyelids."

For Gabriel this was no new discovery; from his childhood he had known that beautiful and sensual figure, with its worldly smile, its rounded outlines, and its eyes with their expression of wanton gaiety as though she were just going to dance.

The child in her arms was also laughing and placing his hand on the bosom of the beautiful woman, as though he intended to tear the covering from her breast. The image of painted stone, stuffed and gilt, wore a blue mantle strewn with stars, from whence its name."

"These vaultings caused Gabriel a strange impression; no one could guess the existence of such a place in the upper regions of the building. He would walk through the forest of worm-eaten posts which supported the roof, through narrow passages between the cupolas of the vaulting that arose from the flooring like white and dusty tumours; sometimes there would be a shaft through which he could see down into the Cathedral, the depth of which made him giddy. These shafts were like narrow well-mouths at the bottom of which could be seen people walking like ants on the tile flooring of the church. Through these shafts were lowered the ropes of the great chandeliers, and the golden chains that supported the figure of Christ above the railing of the high altar."

*****

Interestingly, we asked a knowleadgeable Cathedral guard about this bit below and he very dismissively said "We have nothing of the kind in here". It turned out to be a badly damaged fresco on both sides of the Puerta del Mollete.

"In the interior of the Mollete doorway was represented the horrible martyrdom of the Child de la Guardia; that legend born at the same time in so many Catholic towns during the heat of anti-Semitic hatred, the sacrifice of the Christian child, stolen from his home by Jews of grim countenance, who crucified him in order to tear out his heart and drink his blood."

*****

Looked for Sancho of Portugal's grave - my mother's main excuse to go visit Toledo thoroughly - but it seems to be either unmarked of one of the 342 Sanchos buried inside the Cathedral. We took pictures of most of Sancho effigies wearing crowns. More research needs to be done...

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May 25, 2012

Catching up

So much for my online (sort of) diary. I failed to note down a California trip notable only for my failing - for various reasons - to do a short Raymond Chandler pilgrimage in La Jolla (his pipes are on display at the local library and his grave is not very far). My struggle and failure to charm a chihuahua who hates me with a passion, the most recent addition to the menagerie of the Mexican branch of the family. I managed to visit Joe Dimaggio's grave in Colma which was more of an ethnographic milestone than powered by a personal sports preference. Some great Egyptian revival mausoleums at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park. Somebody dumbfounded at my questioning where in the cemetery the older mausoleums stood. Apparently the concept of funerary architecture aficionados is not something Colma cemetery officials are familiar with. Some interesting lectures in Bristol. A zillion rants about things in the world that are beyond my power to solve, as usual. A trip to Amsterdam and The Hague to see friends.

*****

The readings have been half academic and half trashy and I blame Fernando Pessoa for this state of affairs. I went through the catalog of his private library to find out what sort of mystery writers he was reading (he was a failed mystery writer himself and rated the genre highly) and ended up with a collection of books which can only be classified as easy reading time wasters. Very enjoyable time wasters. Which lead to other time wasters Pessoa might have enjoyed too.

- Algernon Blackwood's Weird Tales. I thought I would be the first one to notice that the source for Murakami's city of cats tale in 1Q84 is one of Blackwood's John Silence stories but the critic at the New Statesman beat me to it. I wouldn't think it was my sort of thing, but the stories are well written and strangely engrossing.

- Baroness Orczy's mystery tales. Fun lateral thinking sort of mysteries.

- E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case. It was actually a very good mystery with a very decent solution.

- M. R. James's Ghost stories of an Antiquary. So up my alley.

- R. Austin Freeman's mystery novels. Very medicine oriented solutions. But I learned what a Pott's fracture is.

- Mary Roberts Rhinehart's The Circular Staircase. Probably the best of the bunch and very funny too.

- Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels which Pessoa probably didn't read but which gave me a terribly guilty, political incorrect, silly pleasure.

*****

With no "modernist poet used to read this so it's ok" excuse this time, I am moving on to french trash. What the hell, it's the summer and, fittingly, I am planning to spend some time in France so I might as well start the immersion early.

- I'm going back to my beloved Arsène Lupin, gentleman thief, inducer of my childhood nightmares. Well, alternatively I can blame my mother for letting me stay up late watching people's fingers being severed on the TV version of the Leblanc novels while waiting for my dad to come home.

- I could almost cry with joy when another vague childhood TV memory turned out to be, after some googling, a version of a trashy turn of the century sci-fi novelist's tale of a mad evil scientist. Yes, I have found Gustave Le Rouge and his Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornelius series. I have a vivid memory of somebody's face being burned by sulfuric acid and Docteur Cornelius using the opportunity to show off his plastic surgery skills with some evil goal in mind. Blaise Cendrars approved of Le Rouge. That is quite something.

- Téophile Gautier's Le Roman de la Momie. I'm guessing this egyptomania novel had something to do with Gautier's friendship with Maxime du Camp who was one of the first people to write Egypt travel books featuring photographs.

- Some of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's short stories. Trash admired by intellectuals.

- Maurice Renard's Monsieur d'Outremort. We'll see.

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April 14, 2012

Giving In

I have discovered what ereaders are good for: reading erotica in public.

Actually, they're good for a myriad of reasons. I am a reluctant gadget adopter as I tend to only buy them when I have no way out anymore or, obviously, if they seem useful - which is very rare. I still don't understand why people use a GPS when on road trip holidays. The best part is when you get lost! Or why would I like to connect to the internet anywhere so I can look up something quickly rather than wonder, speculate or try to recall - it's bad enough I don't know any phone number by heart anymore.

When ereaders first came out I scoffed at the possibility of having 10000 books at my fingertips. I still do. I wish there were 10000 books I want to read but there aren't. It's like having 300 TV channels. Useless. But I ended up getting an ereader because there were a number of books on gutenberg.org I wanted to read, books which weren't available at my library and that I had no wish to own. In fact, I want to get rid of most books I own as it is - all these boxes we have to schlep around whenever we move. And I just can't read these pdf's and whatnots on a laptop screen. I find myself not attached to the idea of books as objects unless they're gorgeously bound, have beautiful pictures or are signed. Nevertheless, I don't plan on buying any books for my kindle. It's exclusively dedicated to either out of print, extremely expensive antique editions or discardable out of copyright classics - I still love bookshops and have no wish to contribute to their disappearance.

At first it was Fernando Pessoa's fault. He was into crime novels and on his personal library there are all these old fashioned books by writers nobody reads anymore - and there it was, Austin Freeman's The Eye of Osiris at Gutenberg, looking at me and begging to be read. Then it was Eric Rohmer who loved Sax Rohmer's thrillers so much as a boy that he adopted his hero's name. I definitely didn't want a Fu-Manchu adventure sitting on my shelf but I just needed to read it. And then there are all these wonderful retro science books... Centuries year old, inaccurate when not just plainly wrong, non-fiction is the best social history document there is. I've been having a grand time reading psychiatric reports from turn of the century Portugal.

Other than trash literature and faulty science, I managed to get my hands on classics of spanish and french literature I always meant to read and which I would have to order from their native countries and would have to keep even after being disappointed by them.

And lots of John Ruskin. So I can disagree with every line the man writes but not have to see his name on the bookshelf.

Anyway, I'm an addicted semi-luddite and I have no shame.

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April 13, 2012

Easter in Edinburgh

At Edinburgh Books.

******

Edinburgh has brilliant cemeteries. The 18th century graves at St. Dunstan's are the best ones. Memento Mori galore.

*****

The National Galleries of Art exceeded expectations. The only downside was that the shop had run out of the Companion Guide to the Collection - surprising, to say the least, considering how well stocked they were on every other type of souvenir. On top of that, they don't allow photography in the galleries, the online collection isn't complete and the images available are very small. And I obviously had to fall in love with a minor renaissance painting by an unknown master which isn't mentioned anywhere. I probably will never see it again.

Also, they had a cassone which is further proof for my "Quit romanticizing them, Renaissance Italians were just crass" theory. It's decorated with a painting based on a cuckold/female abuse themed Decameron story. Exactly what you want your virgin daughter/bride to see when she puts away her bridal linen in her wedding chest by the conjugal bed.

*****

In the National Museum of Scotland, looking at the "national heroes" section:

C: Here's Robert the Bruce. Oh, he was defeated by Edward I. Took him a while to get anywhere. He did get Scottish independence. But that sort of ended, didn't it? Last thing he did: defeated by the Irish. William Wallace. Captured and hanged by the English. Mary. Beheaded. James I. Took off to London to be king of the island and only came back to Scotland once. So much for a Scottish king of Britain. Rob Roy. Wounded by the English, defaulted on his loans, imprisoned as outlaw. Bonnie Prince Charlie. Fled from Scotland, defeated by the English. So, all Scottish national heroes are either losers or they didn't care enough?
R: Shhh. Quiet. Yes.

We agreed the Scottish would be better off commemorating all the amazing scientists, philosophers and writers the country has produced rather than these characters of dubious loyalty and accomplishments. They could start by putting J. M. Barrie's striking portrait by William Nicholson in a proper place rather than on one of the walls of the back room of the cafeteria in the National Portrait Gallery.

*****

Like many other things in my life, I'm afraid, I first heard of haggis on a Scrooge McDuck comic book. Inducks.org is failing me but I vividly remember Donald Duck feeling nauseous when a Scottish character carves open a sheep's stomach and an aroma comes out, toxic cloud-like. Being an offal loving person and having had much weirder things to eat in the North of Portugal, I'd say the childhood haggis Disney induced trauma exists no more. I love it.

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March 30, 2012

Useless but Addictive.

What do you do when you find the French state has massive portions of their public records online? You go find birth records of writers and artists, of course.

Marcel Proust. Or Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust. His father was the one who went to register Marcel: "Achille Proust, aged thirthy seven, aggregate at the University of Medicine, doctor of the Paris Hospitals, Knight of the Legion of Honor...". I'm pretty sure all they needed was his profession but it turned out that he had his CV on the tip of his tongue. The witnesses were his uncle Louis Weil and grandfather Nathe Weil.

Carlos Gardel, born in Toulouse as Charles Gardes which is probably why Uruguay still claims him as their own despite the evidence.

André Breton's is a mess. That's because the french add marriages to the record and they ran out of space.

Apollinaire's Death notice. "Type of Death: War wounds".

Utrillo's is a fun one as his paternity was only recognized when he was 8. So, they just crossed out his previous family name, Valadon.

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March 21, 2012

Argh.

Claudia's Law of Unwise Reading Choices: sitting next to me on a flight from Lisbon was this very nice and interesting Portuguese lady who turned out to be a scholar, prize winning poet and profusely translated at that. We chatted a bit about poetry, art and generally pleasant high brow subjects. When the moment arrived, the one when conversation between two fellow passengers lulls and both want to go back to what they were doing, I realized I had in my hand a trashy crime novel. I, who make a point of carrying philosophy volumes into the hairdresser to avoid frivolous conversation about soap operas or being offered "women's" magazines, was sitting next to a major literary figure holding a trashy crime novel - holding it very stealthily, in a way that unsightly spine and unsightly cover were hmmmmm out of sight. I don't know if it was charity or coincidence but when we started chatting again, the conversation took a twist into crime novels. I could breath again. And, yes, crime novels can be high brow too in many interesting ways but definitely not the one I was half concealing. My life can be so silly at times.

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March 08, 2012

Misericords

Misericords. I noticed them in Ludlow one of these last weekends for the first time and I only haven't found them earlier because I've been sitting on them. Misericords are narrow ledges on the underside of tip-up seats, offering support when standing through interminable religious functions. The carved ones are obviously more interesting. Although they exist throughout Northern Europe, only the English ones seem to have, in almost every instance, supporters on both sides of the central carving. I read that, probably because of the part of the anatomy which the misericords were supposed to provide support for, only a small proportion of the carvings are about biblical or overtly religious themes. The majority of the carvings are said to embody some sort of vernacular theology by illustrating moral tales of folkloric origin with models taken from now lost frescoes, bestiaries and popular epics and mystery plays.

There are a variety of themes for the carvings but the "Beware of Women" sexist satire ones seem to be well documented. The mermaid holding a looking glass and a comb (destroyed) - meaning a seductress - above is a later development over the early medieval mermaid holding a fish symbolizing a soul.

The story of the Cheating Ale Wife - the woman who used a false bottomed measuring tankard to cheat clients out of their beer - seemed to have been a rich source probably because not only it proves how wicked women are but also because it deals with a very serious issue - alcohol. The devil on the left is the recording devil, Tutivillus, whose job it is to note down idle chatter by churchgoers or negligently recited prayers. The center has a devil carrying the Cheating Ale Wife (plus tankard) over his shoulder while another one plays some kind of wind instrument. The carving on the right has the wicked women being thrown in the gaping jaws of hell (see Hellmouth) .

The woman with the horned headdress (and how men should protect against them - see the man on the side holding a shield) is another common theme. This aversion probably derives from St Jerome's diatribes against women's fashions. The Bishop of Paris wrote a poem about it in the 14th century which says>

If we do not take care of ourselves
from the women we shall be slain.
They have horns to kill the men;
they carry great masses of other people's hair
upon their heads.

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March 07, 2012

On consulting a bibliotherapist

I'm never without a book to read and, despite the periodical frustrations with fiction, I almost always have sucess at finding new authors. Especially through other authors - I just ordered a John Cowper Powys on the strength of a George Steiner recommendation, for instance. It may not work out but until it arrives I live in the anticipation of finding a new favorite. No shortage of ideas or choice, then. Yet, I signed up for Mr. B's Reading Year - I will be the recipient of 11 volumes chosen by Nic at the great Bath bookshop.

The reason why I signed up is twofold: I've never left Mr. B's without thinking to myself how marvelously knowledgeable the staff is over there and, mostly, because I am aware of how terribly prejudiced I am.

There are authors whose nationalities put me off - it's not xenophobia, I promise, just a conditioned reflex which is the fruit of a string of bad experiences fueled by a tendency for pessimistic forecasting. Yes, profiling it is. A pink cover will send me running. The book with too many national newspaper endorsements on its back cover will get scoffed at. Book club endorsements likewise. I end up avoiding any "feminine take" because I'm a woman and I don't really see how having a vagina fundamentally changes my metaphysics. In fact, there is an infinite array of other irrational prejudices for which I can't find even marginally defensible reasons. At least I'm aware of it, no?

Also, I love surprises. These surprises arrive by mail wrapped, sealed and with a little note explaining why my bibliotherapist thinks I might enjoy the book they're sending.

And I got for my first monthly installment... Ismail Kadare. Which is fabulous because I have an irrational prejudice against him and I didn't even mention my prejudices to Nic or my goal to exterminate them - that would be embarrassing in a way that exposing then on a blog post is not, for some unfathomable reason. In fact, I am very aware of having irrational prejudices in general against writers from behind the iron curtain.

I am so aware of this that I made an unnatural effort to read Solzhenitsyn, for example. I'm thinking Kundera was easier because I can read his politics as a backdrop to his more philosophically interesting plots. I think I end up liking the allegorical novel as long as it's not too partisan, too much against communism per se but against totalitarianism in general.

I gave it a little bit of thought and I can only imagine that communism has a different meaning to me which is a personal, emotional meaning with no political connotation. Communism was all pervasive in my childhood. It was the exact opposite reaction to the fascist dictatorship that had disappeared just before I was born. My childhood was one long succession of left wing rallies, red carnations and singing protest songs. One of my first memories is of queuing with my mother for her first opportunity to vote - she obviously voted for the communist candidate. The word communism was some abstract ideal that many people couldn't define but that naively sounded like just something everybody must want - a more equal and just society. The last thing on anybody's minds was stalinism, gulags or that what looked like the exact opposite of the right wing regime would inevitably go down the same path. And so these cautionary tales about the perils of communist totalitarianism always sounded to me as cynical remarks by people who love deflating everybody's balloons. It's not they are not correct. It's just that I refuse to connect "my" communism, my first years of life in an exhilarating time of hope of renewal, with those atrocities. A bit like how the Obama voters must feel when somebody points out to them on whose mandate a major terrorist was murdered without even the pretense of a trial.

In any case, The Palace of Dreams was an enjoyable read even if it felt like it was written by the product of a crossing between Salman Rushdie and Bohumil Hrabal - the Rushdiesque vaguely mystical fantasy with the inventiveness of the oppressed Hrabal. Paradoxically, I ended up finding the novel not daring enough in its subversiveness. It made me realize I'm glad I saved some Hrabal for a rainy day. This means I will definitely choose the Czech over the Albanian whenever I feel the need to smother my prejudice a little bit further. But before reading Kadare like a good schoolgirl on an assignment how could I have known?

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Almost makes me want to go to Milan.

Why am I not going to heaven? Certainly for very good moral reasons, but for much more practical reasons too: I've already been there. What is heaven? It is the Galleria in Milan. I'm sitting with a real cappuccino, in front of me is La Stampa, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Le Monde and the Times. I've got a ticket to La Scala in my pocket, and coming at me are the ten or twelve complex smells in that Galleria — of the chocolate, the bakery, the twenty bookstores (which are among the world's best bookstores); the sound of the steps of people moving towards the opera or the theaters that night; the way Milan vibrates around you. I've been to heaven, so I'm not getting a second one.

--George Steiner, Paris Review Interview

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March 04, 2012

British weather is character forming

Dorothy L Sayers in her essay "The Gulf Stream and the Channel", from the book "Unpopular opinions":

"It has, I believe, been said that Britain possesses no climate, only weather. The weather of this country has been much abused (...) by ourselves, with no justice at all, (...) for our weather is our character and has made us what we are. (...)

All British institutions have an air of improvisation; and seem allergic to long term planning. Indeed, what else can you expect in a country where it is impossible to predict, from one hour to another, whether it will be hot or cold, wet or dry, windy or still - where every arrangement for an outdoor sport or public function may have to be altered at the last minute owing to uncontrollable causes? "Rain stopped play", "If wet, in the Parish Hall", "Weather permitting" - such phrases punctuate the whole rhythm of our communal life, and compel a general attitude to things which is at once sceptical, stoical, speculative and flexible in the last degree. (...)

The whole aim of the British weather is to make everything difficult and nothing impossible."

*****

This last sentence has been much quoted in this household. When we first moved to London, we lived in a Georgian building overlooking a leafy square where, at the first ray of sunlight, lawns would be covered with pasty white bodies lounging like lizards.

The pair of us, having been brought up 5000km away from each other but sharing the experience of a permanently sunny childhood - R. even more so, living the T-shirt and Shorts Californian life - were unprepared for the whims of the British weather. We'd lazily wake up on a Saturday morning and notice, after weeks of what seemed exceptionally low, dark grey clouds hovering over the city, that it was a sunny day. Cheered up by the prospect of a walk in a sunny park, we'd calmly get ready, shower, cook breakfast, eat and, by the time we were ready to leave the apartment, it would be raining.

So we learned to hastily join the pasty white bodies downstairs in the square at the first glimpse of sunlight but, conversely, we have learned that if you let the weather stop you from whatever you feel like doing, you'll never do anything at all. And so we've come to understand that stoicism is not about sacrifice but about freeing yourself from external hindrances and therefore, if we want to go hiking, there is no rain or wind that will stop us. Because we are free. And also because if we put it off until the day after, the weather may be even worse anyway.

Sussex in July. See what I mean?

The most startling thing is that we've grown fond of the weather. Last Christmas in Portugal we found ourselves commenting how sunny and cloudless it was and realized we were bored by the immutability of it all. Portuguese weather would make for a very uneventful stop motion movie. Sitting back home at my perch over the Frome valley, I find myself making a sport out of figuring out whether I can see the Welsh Black Mountains in the distance or if the tops of the hills around us are dusted with snow or if the cows are lying down -that is always a sure sign of rain to come - or if that gap in the clouds will bring a few rays of sun in a short while. It is truly exciting and suddenly Turner makes sense, in an anthropological way.

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February 28, 2012

At the Movies

The Muppets. Unexpectedly, the level of silliness was below par. It was probably the mixture of nostalgia pangs and "misfit identity crisis" plot which, while never reaching a stage that could be mistaken - not even remotely - for serious psychological or social analysis, did hinder the full blown Muppets surreality somewhat. To sum it up, too much batrachian pathos, not enough nonsense. Still, I loved it.

****

(We're having a private Jim Jarmusch festival.)

****

Night on Earth, Jim Jarmusch. I first saw it when it came out. I was a teenager and I loved it. I've never stopped listening to the Tom Waits soundtrack ever since. But what did I love about it? It would have been impossible for me to understand it - there are too many cultural references, socially significant accents and national stereotyping in-jokes. I'm assuming a polyglot teenager stuck in a provincial backwater in pre-internet days must have been dazzled by the cosmopolitanism of it. I still am.

****

High Heels, Pedro Almodóvar. Another one I watched when it first came out. Teenagerhood must have limited my attention span and all I could remember from it was both Miguel Bosé in drag and Miguel Bosé practically naked. Teenagerhood, or rather, the lack of critical sense that comes from inexperience, must have prevented me from noticing how flabby Bosé's buttocks are. Not that it matters but it comes as a good excuse to my teenage self to say that I fear that is all I'll remember in the future from this non remarkable standard Almodóvar plot with a brilliant kitsch soundtrack. (I also failed to identify the Mexican interior decoration in Marisa Paredes apartment the first time around.)

****

Ghost Dog, The way of the samurai, Jim Jarmusch. It combines two of my favorite things: it nods to Asian mafia gang war movies and winks at cheap philosophy. Thanks to Ghost Dog, my quite belated new favorite thing is the Wu Tang clan, much to R's chagrin. He has been trying to convince me of the artistic significance of vintage rap or hip hop or whatever it is for years. Well, he should have played The Rza to me a long time ago.

****

Coffee and Cigarettes, Jim Jarmusch. After a while you start noticing black and white checkered patterns everywhere. It feels a lot like an intimate production done with friends which you are allowed to peep in to try and discover the recurrent themes in the vignettes. And it features the underground icon Taylor Mead who starred in Andy Warhol movies. To turn this post into a homage to C&C's structure of inter-vignette hints and imagining Almodóvar will read this:

Taylor Mead's Ass (1964) is a film by Andy Warhol featuring Taylor Mead, consisting entirely of a shot of Mead's buttocks, and filmed at The Factory. Warhol came up with the idea for the film after reading a review in The Village Voice which said of his previous film "Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of" that "... people don't want to see an hour and a half of Taylor Mead's ass."

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February 24, 2012

Snowdonia

We spent the weekend climbing to see hidden lakes on top of mountains.

Llyn Cau. It's in a protected area and there was no one in sight. Other than sheep. If it weren't so cold out I would have skinny dipped. They need to install a finnish sauna up there, although soaking in a beautiful free standing tub afterwards at the isolated Old Rectory on the Lake (yet another lake, Tal y Llyn) made up for it. Watching Mynnyd Rugog from our window.

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February 12, 2012

Bath Spa Outskirts: Venetian Fountains and Henry Fielding

Despite living in the much famed Cotswolds, we have as a favorite day trip a jaunt to the city of Bath Spa in Somerset. You don't realize "awarded World Heritage Site status for its outstandingly preserved Georgian architecture" means until you've seen it. The centre is indeed magnificent but once you leave it and start climbing the many hills that surround the city, the architectural sightseeing is still never ending. So, armed with the Bath Pevsner Guide, we took to go see the beautiful villas of Widcombe, bagging Priory Park Gardens and its Palladian bridge in the process.

(as a recently arrived expat excited to find out more about the city where I was living, I went into Foyles on Charing Cross Road and tried to describe these series of books I had seen elsewhere to the bookshop assistant: "Their covers have a black background; they're about the architecture of the different counties; published by a university press, I think". She looked at me as if I were an alien - which was figuratively correct - and said "You mean the Pevsner Guides? Of course we have them!". Now I can't live without them.)

The Pevsner guide describes the smallest architectural features in great detail but often fails to mention signficant places of cultural or literary significance. One of such is the house, Widcombe Lodge, where Henry Fielding wrote most of Tom Jones while staying with his sister. The book "A Henry Fielding Companion" says this story of his stay is a tradition which should be a polite way of saying there is no documentary evidence for it. Tradition also has it that he might have written books while staying next door's at Bennett's Widcombe Manor.

And so, right next to Fielding's Lodge sits Widcombe Manor which, other than the obviously impressive façade, has a late 16th century bronze fountain said to have been taken from one of the Grimani palaces in Venice. The fountain was added by one of the previous owners of the manor, Sir John Roper Wright - a steel tycoon - in the 1920's. Authentic or not (and I suspect that zoologically correct seahorse gives it away), it looks rather exotic in the middle of the English countryside.

	At the top there is a putto riding a seahorse.
	Baby satyrs sitting on the rim of the bowl on the second level.
	Tritons around the Medici family coat of arms and turtles at the base.

The next owner of Widcombe Manor, Horace Annesley Vachell, a prolific novelist and playwright, wrote a family saga entitled "The Golden House, a romance of Bath" using the Manor as a model. Vachell writes in one of his books that Fielding wrote Tom Jones in the lobby of his "Golden House".

Jeremy Fry, the "British inventor, engineer, entrepreneur, adventurer and arts patron" and friend of James Dyson also owned Widcombe Manor from 1955 to 1967 and held memorable parties there - or else, any party attended by Princess Margaret seems to have been memorable judging by the frequency by which mentions of the princess and the phrase "memorable party" appear together in English memoirs.

From there we walked to Priory Park Gardens - built by Ralph Allen with advice by Pope and, unsurprisingly, later coveted by William Beckford - to see one of four surviving Palladian bridges (three are in England and another one is in Russia).

19th century graffitti. So elegant probably because good penmanship was something to be proud of and pocket knives were popular.

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February 10, 2012

Lateral Evidence to Support Fantasy Theories

(quote that proves my theory that the Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey is, in fact, a bitchy gay man)

William Beckford in a letter: "I take airings everyday like an old Dowager".

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February 08, 2012

Keeping tabs

Double happiness: it snowed and my favorite spot - I always have one wherever I am, like a cat - will be spared the ignominy of fake beautification (also known as "development" or "progress"). The spot being the ruins of Capel's mill by the river Frome pictured above and "development" being the potential destruction of said ruins by the very retro project of making a 19th century canal navigable once again.

*******

Watching or rewatching Hitchcock's 30's thrillers - The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes. They're a cross between Tintin's adventures and Agatha Christie's novels. A lot happens on trains. Also, Shadow of a Doubt. Trains again.

Billy Wilder's The Apartment. A story about doormats. Nonetheless, I will be using a quote from it:
''Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring --
Nothing --
No action --
Dullsville!"

Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis. Jacques Prévert's witty dialogue.

Max Ophul's Lola Montez. I have a feeling he just wanted an excuse to design Bavarian rococo sets.

The Thin Man and its sequels. Highly entertaining; like watching cartoons. Period value too: great jackets with wide lapels, 30's style outlaws and their jargon, gags with pet dogs, beautiful old cars, and general pre war merriment.

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February 03, 2012

Special! Turkish Poet's Abstruse New Song. Scottish Authors' Opinions

Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Glasgow 1960’

Returning to Glasgow after long exile
Nothing seemed to me to have changed its style.
Buses and trams all labelled "To Ibrox"
Swung past packed tight as they'd hold with folks.
Football match, I concluded, but just to make sure
I asked; and the man looked at me fell dour,
Then said, "Where in God's name are you frae, sir?
It'll be a record gate, but the cause o' the stir
Is a debate on 'la loi de l'effort converti'
Between Professor MacFadyen and a Spainish pairty."
I gasped. The newsboys came running along,
"Special! Turkish Poet's Abstruse New Song.
Scottish Authors' Opinions" - and, holy snakes,
I saw the edition sell like hot cakes!

Heavy irony, as the Scottish Review of Books - in an article defending the funding of a Museum of Literature by putting an end to the 2.4 million pounds spent in policing football games - put it.

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January 26, 2012

Alexander Historiatus

There must be a person somewhere at Gloucestershire's library headquarters who knows my name by heart at this point. That same person which regularly must say "Which odd, never borrowed before book do I have to go search the reserve stock for this time?". Well, Alexander Historiatus - A Guide to Medieval Illustrated Alexander Literature has a clean bill of borrowings judging by that front page pasted sheet for inserting return dates library books used to have before electronic tags.

Just when I was wondering how up to date this book published in 1963 is, I found "From Alexander to Jesus" through Anthony of Time's Flow Stemmed. It promises to be a great follow up to Historiatus which is mainly an inventory of manuscripts. Considering my knowledge of Alexander's mythology - a very different and rather more entertaining affair than historical fact - was close to nil, I'm happy to consider Historiatus as the ultimate source for now. Other than tracing the literary genealogy of the myths and its iconography, all this book gives me is a list of manuscripts and the libraries that hold them which means there is a lot of room for further readings and picture hunting. I might as well jot down some notes here.

The author, D. J. A. Ross, identifies the Greek manuscripts of the Romance of Alexander by Pseudo-Callisthenes going back to the third century AD as the main source for the Alexandrian legend and he proceeds to describe the main lines of transmission which originated versions of these stories, sometimes with local color added to it, in such places as Armenia, Spain, Syria, France, Germany, the Balkans and Russia (and by the author's own admission leaving out a myriad of asian and middle eastern variations on the stories). The origin of most of western Europe's accounts is Historia de Prellis Alexandri Magni by Bishop Leo of Naples in the mid tenth century which is an interpolated version of the Romance and evolved to include a number of other texts like the letters between Aristotle and Alexander, Orosius Historiarum Adversum paganos libri septem, Pseudo-Methodius, etc.

Ross ventures that the original picture cycle which was supposed to illustrate the original Greek manuscript of Pseudo-Callisthenes survived in Greek, Armenian and Latin illuminated versions and fragments or, at the very least, these illustrations were created as far back as the fourth century AD as two scenes from the cycle can be traced to mosaics from villa Soueidié in Baalbek, Lebanon, from that century (now housed in the National Museum in Beirut).

Source: Yewco on Flickr.

The same author wrote an article interpreting the mosaics by using the Romance of Alexander as his source for the iconography*. The first scene in the mosaics reflects Chapter X of Book I by Pseudo-Callisthenes where Alexander's mother Olympias is impregnated by the exiled Egyptian pharaoh Nektanebos disguised as an astrologer who convinces her to have intercourse with him by pretending he is actually the god Ammon and by mutating into a snake (very phalic, no?). In order to avoid Philip of Macedonia's wrath at arriving home from his battles and finding his wife pregnant, he magically sends Philip a message in a dream telling him a God is the father of his son and that his wife is not to blame. Later, Philip does doubt Olympia's fidelity and Nektanebos turns into a serpent again and shows his affection to Olympia during a banquet by kissing her with his forked tongue. The medieval and renaissance versions of this story translate the snake into a dragon.

Utrecht, c. 1467, in the National Library of the Netherlands (source: renzodionigi)

*****

A few of the episodes of Alexander's life are derived from the Jewish tradition: Alexander's visit to Jerusalem, the enclosing of Gog and Magog and the enclosing of the 10 tribes of Israel variation, the tale of the wonderstone and the visit to earthly paradise.

The tale of the visit to Jerusalem is already in the Jewish antiquities of Josephus and made its way into Historia de Prellis: Alexander, by honoring the high-priest and exempting the Jews from taxation found favor with God who let him conquer Persia.

Faicts et conquestes d’Alexandre de Jean Wauquelin : Arrivée d’Alexandre à Jérusalem. Willem Vrelant, c. 1467, Paris, Petit Palais, ms Dutuit 456, f. 140v.

Josephus identified the evil peoples Gog and Magog - who, according to Ezekiel will ravage the earth with Satan - with the Scythians. Alexander built a wall or a gate to enclose these peoples until the end of the world.

The enclosing of the ten tribes of Israel is a variation on the previous tale where the tribes are enclosed for apostasy and it's the invention of Petrus Comestor on his Historia Scolastica which was a very popular book.

Faicts et conquestes d’Alexandre de Jean Wauquelin : Enfermement de Gog et Magog. c. 1448-1450, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms Fr. 9342, f. 131v.

Alexander is supposed to have visited Earthly paradise where his emissaries were given a stone carved with a human eye. It's impossible to weigh this stone unless it's covered in dust. Only then a feather will outweigh it (or two coins in another version).

Cod. Pal. germ. 336, fol. 149r, Bibliotheca Palatina, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg

******

From the Germans come the adventures of Alexander in scientific research: flying and deep sea diving which eventually made their way to the French and Italian versions. The submarine adventure in particular is rather contrived. Alexander goes down to the bottom of the sea on a glass diving-bell taking with him a rooster, a cat and a dog (optional in some versions). The rooster lets him know if it's day or night, the cat's breathing purifies the air and the dog, well, the dog Alexander kills to get back to the surface as the sea won't tolerate a corpse in it. There is a chain for lowering and lifting the diving bell which, depending on the version, gets dropped to the bottom of the ocean either because of the treachery of Alexander's enemies or because his wife is convinced by her lover to do so.

"Le Livre et la vraye histoire du bon roy Alexandre". Roy.20.B.XX.fol.77 v, The British Library, London, Great Britain

"Le Livre et la vraye histoire du bon roy Alexandre". Roy.20.B.XX.fol.77 v, The British Library, London, Great Britain

*****

* Olympias and the Serpent: The Interpretation of a Baalbek Mosaic and the Date of the Illustrated Pseudo-Callisthenes, D. J. A. Ross, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (1963), pp. 1-21

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January 24, 2012

Snapshot

Listening to the very civilized FIP and Monocle 24 radio stations.

Watching old french movies ever since finding out about the fabulous Dimitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant from 1926 (which means I should pay more attention to Pauline Kael who named it her favorite movie of all time). Fantastic camerawork and editing. Unusually subtle acting. Narration so perfect it can do without intertitles. So poetic. So well done. I am a fan. Jean Gremillon's Maldone. Rewatching Renoir's The Rules of the Game. René Clair. And so forth.

R has been practicing his jazz chords on the resuscitated piano.

I have been dueling with German grammar.

Planning to visit out of the way lakes in Wales.

Playing Hive. Perfect strategy board game for two.

Missing a Lisbon that doesn't exist. Before the burning down of the building holding childhood Christmas memories. Missing a time before I was born when, for once in their lives, the inhabitants of that silly little rectangle by the sea took matters in their own hands.

(always trying to spot my father in the crowds in these '74 revolution photos with no success)

Visiting Salisbury Cathedral and out of the way pubs serving underrated British food. That would be theBeckford Arms in Wiltshire. Behind it stood William Beckford's folly or Fonthill Abbey, the remains of which are in private property and unreachable to us common hikers.

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January 17, 2012

Read, read, read

El Mármol by César Aira

Too wacky for me. The narrator, a retired left wing man with the usual hangups, finds himself in an adventure with a Chinese young man inside a Chinese shop with extra-terrestrial life and multiple dimensions thrown in. The most interesting part was the narrator's questioning of his left wing egalitarianism when he catches himself making racist comments. Which came right after I had remarked it to myself.

******

De la elegancia mientras se duerme by Vizconde de Lascano Tegui

This is the favorite of this recent batch. The self-styled Vizconde hobnobbed with the parisian bohemians in the 20's and it shows. It's a sort of diary/autobiography of a murderer but written like nobody could write it today - and even then a pedophilic bit had an addendum by the typographer protesting same. No fears, no compunctions. Death and sex. Savage and poetic at the same time. Here's an excerpt which doesn't add to the story other than establishing the narrator as outside society norms:

I saw the two white she-goats once more. One of them was looking at me. She has eyes like a young woman's. The afternoon was filled with silence and I felt a goat inside me who understood her. Goats are the animals closer to me and I couldn't help but return that gaze and start approaching the more comely of the two - whose pink udder is a woman's breast.

******

Selections from Delacroix's Journals

It's always comforting when great celebrities of the past sound so silly. Silliness is underrated.

******

The life of Berlioz by himself

After watching his opera (extremely) loosely based on Cellini's life , I read a short bio of the composer which promised to be as colorful as Benvenuto's own. And sure enough, Berlioz wrote autobiographical texts which are full of drama, exaggeration and exclamation marks.

******

Mis Dos Mundos by Sergio Chefjec

Chefjec follows the tradition of the philosophical rambling while going on a walk - I see it more as an essay than fiction - which is always such a pleasurable read if you are so inclined yourself. In this case you spend half of the book wondering where it's going and the other half where it's gone. And then you need to reread it because it's short and you can't believe how short it was despite seemingly containing details and descriptions numerous and ample enough to fill a large tome. It's the literary equivalent of fibre in your stomach: a book that expands inside your mind. And then you want to reread it again because there are bits here and there that seem to be paraphrasing other authors - Cortázar, Borges? - but you can't really narrow it down because it's all done so seamlessly. I enjoyed it greatly and the only fault I can find is that I am left wondering why does Chefjec believe he has only two worlds. I don't think he's thinking it through.

******

Au nord par une montagne. Au sud par un lac. À l’ouest par des chemins. À l’est par un cours d’eau by László Krasznahorkai

It's rather surprising how some authors are able to change their whole general theme - not just the setting for the stories but also their concerns (which they disguise as literature). Most write the same book time and time again with slight variations (Philip Roth or Paul Auster come to mind). This was my first Krasznahorkai but it seems almost impossible to relate this novel to the others that have been translated into English from what I gather from synopses and reviews. This one feels like a long new agey oriental style meditation aid - the visualize a beautiful pagoda type - and I'll readily admit that this judgment is substantially based on a very personal and profound prejudice which prevents me from taking seriously any western take on buddhism. Not that I didn't have pleasure reading it - I even dreamt of Japanese monks one night - but I'm surprised it's not being recommended in yoga classes.

******

Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art by T.J. Gorringe

I don't understand it. It's probably my fault but it seems there is hardly any challenge in seeing God in secular paintings if you are so disposed. The joy of creation, the abundance of God's offerings, Jesus as the image of God creating the precedent for further representations of God's world, the supposed spirituality of abstract painting can be easily channeled into religion-like ecstasy, etc. Didn't finish it.

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January 11, 2012

Trimming Delacroix's 1849 Journal

Saturday, 18 January

I have been reading about an English judge who desired to live to a great age and accordingly proceeded to question every old man he met about his diet and kind of life he led. It appears that the only thing they had in common was early rising and, above all, not dozing off once they were awake. Most important

Tuesday, 27 January

This morning I received a letter announcing the death of Gericault.

Tuesday morning, 2 February

Got up about seven o'clock. I ought to do this more often.

Wednesday, 3 March

It takes a pitchfork to rouse me; I drop off to sleep when there is nothing to stimulate me.

Thursday, 4 March

Fedel came to see me at the studio and we dined together.

Sunday, 7 March

Fielding and Soulier came to the studio.

Tuesday, 16 March

Dined at Tautin's with Soulier and Fielding.

Friday, 19 March

Looked at the Goyas in my studio with Edouard. Then we saw Piron. Met Fedel. We all dined together.

Thursday, 25 March

Went to Saint-Cloud with Fielding and Soulier, and dined there. Evening at Pierret's - punch.

Saturday, 27 March

Pierret came in. Dined with him.

Sunday, 4 April

Everything tells me I need to live a more solitary life.

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January 10, 2012

On Literary Prizes

"Isn't it a necessary condition that the books which change the course of literature are, precisely, illegible at the time? Even more probable is that literary prizes have the peculiarity of not addressing the new but the contemporary, which is precisely its opposite."

--Anibal Jarkowski, in Clarín (2/1/12) on the 70th anniversary of the first edition of Borges's The Garden of Forking Paths which did not win the National Book Prize because it was "an arbitrary brain exercise" among other great things.

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January 08, 2012

Sharing

My nocturnal procedure is emerging from the search for a harmony between the barbarian and barely legible reality and its antagonist, more readable, but also more artificial for it reads the world as if everything has an explanation.

My procedure is capable of creating precursor methods. Borges’s method could be, with Gombrowicz’s, one of the closest forerunners. I recall that in Ricardo Piglia’s Crítica y ficción, he refers to Borges and talks about his theory of lineages and comments how this writer, by building the genealogy of his own oeuvre, put into practice a reading tactic that harmonized two antagonistic and very distinct Argentinian literary styles (he joined José Hernandéz and his gaucho poetry with Sarmiento) to establish the two strains on which he founded his original poetics, his innovative procedure.

Piglia concentrates on the famous story “Borges and I” and says that it is a paradigmatic piece because it is a sort of microscopic version of the great tradition of the autobiography of the artist, “with a fantastic turn, a sort of literary Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. For Piglia, Borges’s theory of lineages (Borges himself would be the point at which those lineages cross) created an extreme tension around the old dicotomy of Argentinian literature which, by having it as a given that the two writing traditions were radically opposed, made it mandatory to swear allegiance either to Hernández or Sarmiento.

Borges took a shortcut and vampirized the two, he converted himself into the two of them at the same time. Maybe he took his theory of lineages to extremes because he understood that if he opted only for one of the theories he wouldn’t attain the complexity he wished for his work. Borges, we are told by Piglia, is a populist like Hernández who believes that experience is more imporant than books but also, at the same time, somebody who lives behind the closed doors of a library and who thinks that the world is constituted solely by culture and reading: “The remarkable is that, of course, he does not solve the contradiction but instead maintains the two elements alive and present. And for that he had to invent a form, a procedure, a type of fiction which allows him to sustain the tension.”

- Vila-Matas, Chet Baker piensa en su arte (Ficción Crítica). I'm to blame for the translation but that's what VM's publishers get for not going much further than France.

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January 04, 2012

Walking up Calle de Caracas, Madrid

...
R: So "secretária" in Portuguese means both a desk and the person who works as a secretary?
C: Yes.
R: That's rather sexist for the "secretária", isn't it?
C: Well, there's "secretário" for men but in general means more of a prestigious role... so it does sound sexist.
R: I always loved the Spanish word for desk: "Escritório". Where you do your writing, your "escritos" and so "escritório". It's perfect.
C: Doesn't make any sense to me. It probably comes from the latin scriptorium which was the room where the monks copied books. The Portuguese word for "Escritório" makes more sense because it means office rather than desk. It's the place where "writing" work is done.
R: Well, office in Spanish is "oficina".
C: I suppose it has the same origin in english and in spanish. Something to do with "oficio", professional work? Anyway, "Oficina" in Portuguese means garage, where you take your car to get fixed. Or more generally, a place where manual labor is done.
R: A mechanic's garage in Spanish is "Taller".
C: Hmm. "Talher" is almost homonym and is Portuguese for cutlery.
R: I forget how to say cutlery in Spanish.
C: Good. Otherwise we could go on like this forever.
...

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January 03, 2012

Moving continents. Readings-wise.

We welcomed 2012 in Madrid. It was a perfect weekend. We are no strangers to the city and there was nothing to do but to walk aimlessly taking in the architecture and to stop randomly for vermouth here, sherry and cheese there and tapas everywhere. Museums were closed solving the problem of checking-out-all-special-exhibitions induced anxiety. On Monday the Prado graciously opened for the Hermitage exhibition - showing the most horrible Matisse I have ever seen, among other things. The mandatory hour inside La Central bookshop at the Reina Sofia - the most cosmopolitan and artistic of bookshops - yielded a nice harvest of future readings.

I had been reading English fiction to keep up with the local zeitgeist and then I realized I don't give a flying fuck about the local zeitgeist. Pardon me for the expletive but it's still milder than the sentiment. Last year I got sucked into reading the Hare with Amber Eyes - I hated it with a passion - so I should have known better than attempt to read any books recommended on best of 2011 lists. Well, stupidly, a couple of recommendations on the TLS got me to Philip Hensher's The King of the Badgers*. That intellectual disaster coupled with Enrique Vila Matas erudite "critical fiction" in "Chet Baker piensa en su arte" made me realize I am wasting my time with anglo fiction. Too much storytelling, not enough introspection. Too much creative writing techniques that aren't even that creative. In short, not enough Art. Not enough Beauty. Not enough Philosophy.

Vila Matas talks about trying to find a path for the novel which sits somewhere between Joyce's Fineggan's Wake, the beautiful and daring unreadable, and Simenon's Hire, quality writing that follows conventions. So, literature that is both artistic and readable. He spends pages and pages commenting on Sergio Chefjec's "Dos Mundos" as an attempt to achieve just that. I had never heard of Chefjec and, somehow, reading reviews and biographies I ended up with Aira and Saer on my to-read list. Quevedo was overdue, recommended by Borges. I can read all these in their original language. What was I thinking wasting my time with badgers?

I was going to inaugurate the Argentinian season with Aira but R snatched it. He says Aira writes like Murakami. I guess he means well written, bordering the surreal trash.

(next stop: old french authors I somehow missed - in french!)

(problem: I love german literature and always stop myself from reading it by conjuring up the fantasy that, some day, my german will be good enough to read in the original. High time to do something about that?...)

*****

*I'm hoping it's an ironic novel. It's a portrait of contemporary England taken from the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. It's a long succession of tabloid stereotypes: constant fear of crime, pedophiles who are random strangers and kidnap your kids and keep them in basements, council housing people being involved in fraud, brown skinned people selling drugs, gay couples having sex and drugs orgies despite the "normalcy" of being able to get married, dishonest italians, hot gay brazilians, english housewives being pimped by their husbands for free sex, people living above their means and blaming the bankers for not being able to pay mortgages, rude teenagers, american academics on holidays disguised as research projects. The drugs of choice, the slang, the preoccupations are so of today and of such a tiny geographic importance that the novel will be dated quickly. Like the tabloids.

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December 29, 2011

Christmas

I was sitting down at the table reading the Book of Disquiet while my father dozed off in the couch after a mostly sleepless night of wandering around from room to room in the apartment. I saw his eyes slowly opening and the barely perceptible glint of curiosity in them when he saw me. Unexpectedly, he gingerly stood up and gently snatched the book I had closed down, using my finger as a bookmark. He paged through it, quickly lost interest, and his face brightened up with recognition when he saw the photo on the cover. He said "It's Fernandinho!" as if Pessoa had been his childhood pal or a beloved family member.

Appropriately, I was reading a passage where Pessoa - or Bernardo Soares, his lonely, philosophical heteronym - was saying that to live is to be a new person every day. If you feel like you felt yesterday, you are not feeling at all: you are merely remembering how you felt. Pessoa means well and he's got a good point but he obviously never sat in the same room as somebody with dementia. I was also thinking what an interesting literary illustration to a chapter on Kahneman's "Thinking, fast and slow" - which I just finished reading - the passage is. Kahneman talks about how we have a "remembering self" and an "experiencing self" and how we rely so much more on the former - a study cited showed that most people would go through an important surgery with no anaesthetic if promised that they would have no memory of it. Kahneman says something like memories are all we have from the experience of living and therefore we confuse the memory with the experience itself: a cognitive illusion. Since memories themselves are subject to biases, the decisions we make based on them might be flawed and not lead to our own best interests.

It was almost lunch time and the subject of food - or maybe the hunger is spur enough- is one of the few that my father still has any initiative about. But his brain is like a TV set with all the channels jumbled and showing simultaneously, layered on the same screen. I can divine his intentions from habit and intonation but every sound and image interferes with his speech and what comes out of his mouth is a mish mash of short term memory references and words distantly associated with the subject he wants to approach: "Let's go talk to mother and see if she wants to go carve Fernando Pessoa", he said.

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December 13, 2011

Readin' and watchin'

Handwritten volume 1 of Jane Austen's works at the Bodleian.

Death comes to Pemberley by PD James. So much fun. I read (or re-read) all of Jane Austen's in the past year and was hoping for that headline, you know, the same one I hope to hear about Shakespeare someday: "Treasure trove of author's manuscripts found in grandma's attic." It starts out almost pitch perfect and then loses the Austenite turn of phrase midway, time by which it doesn't matter anymore because you're in the middle of the whodunnit.

The folding star, Alan Hollinghurst. I'm on a Hollinghurst binge. This one's a uninhibited Death in Venice except it takes place in Belgium and there's no death. With the standard Hollinghurst fictional biography of an older gay man thrown in.

Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, Rudolf Wittkower. Essays. Iconography is always entertaining. Didn't know about Carracci's divinarelli pittorici (visual riddles):

(a builder behind a wall showing top of head and trowel, a capuchin monk in his pulpit bending down to take a breath in the middle of his sermon, a knight jousting with his lance behind a wall, a blind man begging right around a corner with his alms box and stick showing.)*

The Bayeux Tapestry by Carola Hicks. I wanted a long description of the tapestry and a short history of it but this book is the precise opposite. Learned there is a 1885 replica of the tapestry in the Reading museum which is only a 1 hour train ride away. That will save me a bit of time.

(I've been meaning to keep a cinema diary but I always forget about it)

The Cave of Dreams, Werner Herzog. Where can I get a print of those beautiful 30'000 year old paintings of lions? I'm not sure I care much about having this movie shot by Herzog - it gives it a quirky feel but that's all. Given the quality of the subject matter, I'd be amazed by any cheapie discovery channel doc about the Chauvet caves.

George Harrison Living in the Material World by Scorsese. Rather odd. George Harrison is not the stuff of legend but then I realized his wife was the producer. Put off by all the new agey superficiality. Surprised - that's unfair but, you know, sports celebrities and all that - by Jackie Stewart's insights. Terry Gilliam looking very non star struck and the only one to point out the irony of calling Harrison an anti-materialist when on his dying days he was buying a house in Switzerland to avoid taxes. I resent having the editing done as if the subject matter is so well known that you need not to give the viewer any other information about the clips they're watching (also, I entertain this hope that in a hundred year's time no one will know who the Beatles were but Yoko Ono will be hailed as a great conceptual artist.)

Filme Socialisme, Godard. I have no idea what was that about. Maybe a long piece of video art. Best line I've heard in a while (maybe it's a quote like most dialogue in the film is) was when the little kid who is painting something we can't see replies to the lady asking him what is he doing: "I'm welcoming a bygone landscape". Than it turns out he's painting a Renoir.

*image and description stolen from:
Annibale Carracci and Invenzione: Medium and Function in the Early Drawings
Clare Robertson
Master Drawings , Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 3-42
Published by: Master Drawings Association
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1554287)

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December 12, 2011

Super Saints

I saw a painting at the Ashmolean this weekend which reminded me I've been meaning to look into flying saints ever since I saw a Sassetta last year at the Louvre. While saintly flight is well documented, it seems mostly to regard ecstatic levitation rather than engagement in full superman like flight into distant lands to save the faithful from harm.

Saint Nicholas of Bari Rebuking the Storm by Bicci di Lorenzo at the Ashmolean, Oxford. (1433-35)

Saint Nicholas, who when not being Santa is the patron saint of sailors and voyagers, is here performing a posthumous miracle. This painting comes from the predella of an altarpiece from the church of S. Niccolo in Cafaggio, Florence. There are two other paintings from this predella at the Met: on one of them, the giving of the dowries to the poor maidens, he is portrayed as younger and reaching into a high window rather acrobatically thus proving he had no flying powers while alive. Bicci modelled (which is to say copied) these paintings on Gentile da Fabriano's Quaratesi Polyptych.

Blessed Ranieri saving the Poor from Prison by Sassetta at the Louvre, Paris. (1439-1440)

There is no official hagiography for Ranieri - he was only acknowledged as Blessed in 1802 and had always been a sort of saint of the people of Borgo S. Sepolcro - but there is an extant play describing his miracles. A lay franciscan friar, he started performing miracles on the days following his death while his corpse exuded a smell of saintliness.

(I'm realizing this painting is from the predella of the same altarpiece as Berenson's favorite painting, a Saint Francis Sassetta, which we saw at the Villa I Tatti.)

James Banker* found a document where the Franciscans stipulate the iconography for Sassetta's altarpiece which states "Nella predella quatro storie de' Beato Raniero como noi frate Frachesco et frate Michelagnilo ve mandaremo". So, four stories of the Blessed Ranieri would be described by the two friars to Sassetta further on. The Louvre has two, Berlin has another one where the blessed Ranieri is shown in full flight again, this time to let a Bishop know that someone is coming to ask for balm to have his - Ranieri's - body embalmed. According to Baker, this half-body representation is meant to convey that it was Ranieri's soul and not his body that appeared to the Bishop. The same author also says that the escape of the poor was performed while Ranieri was alive. Either that defeats the "half-body as soul" theory or the Blessed Ranieri's soul could detach itself from the living body.

At least in these cases Saints in full flight seem to be an indication of posthumous intercession, the soul being represented by the body in flight. Or the half body.

*The Program for the Sassetta Altarpiece in the Church of S. Francesco in Borgo S. Sepolcro
James R. Banker
I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance , Vol. 4, (1991), pp. 11-58

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December 10, 2011

On Emily Dickinson's Birthday

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--


Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--


Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--

*I've always thought that had Wallace Stevens been a secluded spinster in the 1800's, he would have written this.

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December 01, 2011

Favorite bits from Kafka's Diaries.

1912

June 1: Wrote nothing.

June 2: Wrote almost nothing.

June 7: Wrote nothing today. Tomorrow no time.

July 6: Began a little.

July 9: Nothing written for so long. Begin tomorrow.

August 7: Long torment.

August 10: Wrote nothing.

August 11: Nothing, nothing.

August 14: In a letter: I am enclosing the little prose pieces you wanted to see;

August 15: Wasted day.

August 16: Nothing, either in the office or at home.

August 30: All this time did nothing.

September 25: By force kept myself from writing.

1913

May 2: The uncertainty of my thoughts.

May 3: The terrible uncertainty of my existence.

May 4: Nowhere a welcome.

June 21: The anxiety I suffer from all sides.

July 1: The wish for an unthinking, reckless solitude.

June 21: Only dreams, no sleep.

August 13: I shall gradually pull myself together, she will marry.

August 14: I love her as far as I am capable of.

August 15: Saw only solution in jumping out of the window.

August 21: [Kierkegaard] bears me out like a friend.

August 30: Where am I to find salvation?

October 15: To sit in the corner of a trolley, your coat wrapped around you.

October 20: The unimaginable sadness in the morning.

October 21: Lost day.

October 22: Too late.

October 26: "Who am I then?" I rebuked myself.

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November 30, 2011

Copenhagen

The dates for a long weekend in Copenhagen had been determined determined once we got a reservation for lunch at Noma.

The days were short, the wind was cold but, nonetheless, we took long strolls through the various neighborhoods - amusingly, the ethnic neighborhoods where cool things are advertised to be happening felt very white.

We visited the Copenhagen museum and Assistens Cemetery so I could satisfy the fetishistic nerd impulse by looking at the last vestiges - private possessions and grave - of Kierkegaard. Did the same for R. (physics instead of philosophy)and his chosen Danish dead person, Niels Bohr.

Found a very entertaining 17th century painter at the National Museum of Art named Cornelius Gijsbrechts who painted a very modern trompe l'oeil back of a painting and saw a few Caspar David Friedrich paintings set against those of Dahl's. I wonder if the Museum already had a Hammershoi room before Michael Palin discovered how good he is. (sarcasm).

It was very silly but we bought a Villa Matas book, in spanish, at Café Rayuela. I suppose it was a consolation buy after entering a danish bookshop and feeling sad we weren't able to read Piet Hein's Grooks.

******

Noma was fun. It's an experience. In the end, I'll probably remember best the food design that the actual taste of the dishes. The chefs seems to be young and everybody there is relaxed and happy. We got the Noma guide to Copenhagen and the suggestions by all the people who work there are pretty much hipster off the beaten path recommendations. Considering this is the best restaurant in the world and not horribly expensive but not exactly cheap, it's a bit surprising to feel that the Noma philosophy seems to be to create a bubble away from the commercialism, mass production, high street entertainment without appealing to a sense of luxury. On the contrary, it feels like they're proud to share the neighborhood with Christiania - the social anarchist experiment - as if eating meals over engineered to look simple was a step into non-conformism.

An apple deconstructed to be joined with Jerusalem artichokes and to be made to look like an apple again. It was described to us as an apple fallen from a tree, landing in the grass.

It was fun to be momentarily part of a creative gastronomy zeitgeist but congratulations go mainly to the genius at Noma who thought of making fudge with bone marrow rather than butter.

*****

In the student district, a Norwegian man named Mats at Galleri Krebser/Krebsegaarden put together for us (it took him quite a while and he'd come back from the kitchen periodically to very excitedly report on his progress) the ultimate danish cheese tasting board which included the best cheese of 2010 of which only 14 roundels are produced each year. I will think of him with respect for his Phd in Cheeseology for the rest of my life.

*****

Also, Copenhagen is the place where jazz musicians come to die.

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Readings

Max J Friedlander, On Art and Connoisseurship. The Netherlandish art equivalent of Berenson. Adviser to Goering. Wondering if Goering did really have any taste or artistic sensibility or was this guy doing the curating for him? There is a book out about Goering's collection but, at the price of 250 dollars, I don't think I care enough.

Letters of Paul Cézanne. The man couldn't write but he could paint.

Orthodoxy by Chesterton. Amusing to watch him bend over backwards to find logical arguments for his non-rational choices. I love Chesterton even when I disagree with him. Actually, the first chapter has one of the best descriptions of psychosis I have ever read. I wonder if he was a good dinner guest or if his apparent verbal fluidity and wit was reserved for the written page.

The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst. That was extremely enjoyable. Clever structure. After reading the Swimming Pool Library and finding out I enjoy gay erotica mixed in with well written prose and a taste of social history, I went for the most recent novel. I like how his main thesis seems to be that, once you reread a person's biography knowing they were gay, everything suddenly makes sense.

The Girl with a Green Gown, Carola Hicks. Despite the cheesy title and reminiscence of other art inspired fluff, this is an enjoyable non-fiction read even if not academic enough for my taste. I now know more about the Arnolfini portrait that I ever wanted to and wonder why the Spanish government doesn't reclaim it back as it was plundered from the royal collection. I suppose having the Brits liberate them from the claws of Napoleon would make the claim look ungrateful.

The Swerve, How the Renaissance began, Stephen Greenblatt. I'm not sure he makes a good point - Lucretius de Rerum Natura being a sort of enlightened book which would have saved humanity from the dark ages had it not been relegated to oblivion or how Christians tried to suppress Epicureanism with catastrophic effects for human progress - but it was immensely entertaining. Other than one ranting chapter where he goes on and on about the role of self-flagellation as diametrically opposed to pleasure (a bit naively if you ask me), the whole book tells a wonderful tale of libraries, copyists, popes and humanists.

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November 11, 2011

Anti-Climactic

Some people do meditation, some attend yoga classes and others swear by the Dalai Lama's words. I find myself planning to read John Climacus' Ladder of Divine Ascent during Lent.

I am, in all likelihood, the most devout faith impaired person around.

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November 03, 2011

Snippets. San Diego. San Francisco.

My father in law's nickname for me: "Mi flaquita de oro". So sweet.

Uncle P buying me Uchepos - had no idea you could get them outside Mexico - after I complained how much I missed them.

Brother in Law frying bacon in the morning, R and I coming from upstairs half asleep but entranced like cartoon characters following a scent.

Aunt B hugging me and calling me "Mi sobrina" after making sure what my "raza" was.

Narco stories from their village in Mexico. Which I hope to visit next year without getting murdered.

Carrying a fake parrot into Karl Strauss Brewery in Carlsbad.

Seal watching at La Jolla cove.

Nephew hugs. Nephew as victim of racial profiling by San Diego traffic cops who think they have the right to ask him where was he born and where is he going and coming from.

Nortena band hired for birthday party. Hopefully the neighbors didn't pay attention to the lyrics of the Chapo Guzman narcocorrido. Police paying visits about complaints for excessive noise but not doing anything about it. Mother in Law: "In Mexico your neighbors would come by to wish you a happy birthday on hearing a live band. Here the Americans call the police on you."

Bought a $2 Moby Dick at Book Tales in Encinitas where R used to buy his books as a kid.

Dia de los Muertos altars at San Luis Rey Mission.

********

If Wallace Stevens had lived in San Francisco:

(seen at City Lights bookshop but erased my SD card, so using Electric Stove's instead)

I could have spent my whole time in San Francisco sitting at the table at Brenda's Soul Food. A food trip to Louisiana is long overdue.

Richard Serra's drawings at the SFMoMA. Meh.

Walking in the gritty Tenderloin. Dodging drunks, drug pushers and latino gangs but still managing to admire this wonderful showcase of San Francisco architecture. Congrats to the bunch of people who managed to enter more than 400 Tenderloin buildings into the National Register of Historical Places and thus making real estate developers weep. I hope.

Yet another earthquake. My first earthquake was in San Francisco in late 2007 sitting at Bourbon & Branch, a prohibition times style speakeasy where you need to know a password to get in. My second earthquake was at the hotel Nikko a couple weeks ago. And on the same day by the evening, there I was again at Bourbon & Branch being pushed off my bar stool by tectonic plaques.

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October 15, 2011

Velazquez, Los Borrachos

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso and friends, Paris, 1908 from Biblioteca de Arte.

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October 14, 2011

The readings

Gore Vidal's Palimpsest which should be renamed "Why I am superior to Jack Kennedy". Learned everyone lies except Vidal.

Pytheas the Greek by Barry Cunliffe is highly entertaining. Pytheas circumnavigated Britain 2300 years ago and his book about the adventure is lost but several authors quote him. Cunliffe uses this lost book to imagine - more than imagine since he is an archaeologist and specialist in Atlantic people's pre-history - what Pytheas might have seen in his voyage.

Julian Barnes' A sense of an ending. I loved it. If Rohmer was mildly British (and ignoring the fact that he didn't care a fig about people over 30) he could have written this.

Joe Orton's diaries. I have an affection for Orton. Even when he goes on his neocolonialist sex vacations and despite women bashing diatribes. Go figure. What puzzles me is why anybody has doubts about why Kenneth murdered him after reading that diary.

Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. It was overdue. I think I should have read it in college but my university was Keynes leaning (when not right-down marxist). I could have lived with the wikipedia summary only.

Games for Actors and Non-Actors by Augusto Boal. I picked this up because I chatted with a theatre director at a Brecht conference and she had told me the work she was doing with Boal's techniques in a shelter for battered women. Now I'm realizing I played most of theses "games" in theatrical expression classes I attended in my childhood. Boal worked as a madeleine. I hadn't thought about these classes in ages.

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. So sad.

A field guide to melancholy. Theoretical justification for my "overmedication of sadness" and "tyranny of happiness" and "prozac is killing artistic genius" rants. Cf. Van Gogh.

Suetonius Lives of the Caesars. Long overdue. It's mostly gossip and hopefully projections of sexual fantasies by commoners onto their leaders. I really didn't need to know Tiberius had blow jobs performed by babies who were still breastfeeding. Because now that's all I remember about him. Still, fun read. Why was Julius Caesar worried about pulling down his toga to preserve his modesty while suffering knife blows? So, Caligula was schizophrenic and they took 3 years to realize he wasn't fit to be an emperor? I have the feeling Claudius was a misunderstood genius with a wicked sense of humor. Could Nero really sing? At all? Augustus shaved his legs. The problem is I have the memory of a Parisian concierge in charge of a building inhabited by adulterers. Only the sordid details remain in my brain.

Teju Cole's Open City. It's beautifully written but I'm underwhelmed. I'm having a hard time reading fiction when I feel my real life is painfully calling for deep philosophical analysis and, in a very selfish way, imaginary angst looks trite by comparison. Or as the cliche goes, facts are stranger than fiction. I enjoyed Barnes though. Maybe it's just a more youthful writing that isn't striking a chord or maybe Cole is too much of my generation to show me anything I don't know already.

Szymborska's Collected Poems. Every five years or so I remember her and pick up one of her books.

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September 30, 2011

Nevada Stoody, Chapman, Hayes, Agnew, Van Valkenburgh...Duchess of Oporto?

I love secondary characters and by that I mean real people who hold minor historical roles or who simply, as Wilde said, put their genius into the art of living. Those who albeit having existed, sound so novelistic that they couldn't possibly be true. They leave practically no work of art, no great deed behind to be remembered by other than having lived in remarkable, colorful, artistic ways. I think the first time I realized how product-less lives could be fascinating was after I watched a film essay about Arthur Cravan.

Which brings me to a personal little frivolous treasure I am the keeper of: a book with a connection to a very entertaining minor character. It all started with a visit to Maggs Bros and seeing that they proudly displayed a certificate signed by Manuel II, King of Portugal, appointing the famous bookseller as their official provider of antique books. At first I ranted about the sham of it all: it was from the 1920's and Portugal was a republic by then, so there was something pathetic about clinging to the title of King.

In any case, I started reading on what was the disgraced and exiled royal family up to in the years following the birth of the Portuguese Republic and ended up researching Dom Afonso - brother of the late king Carlos and the uncle of the last king of Portugal - who found himself as a potential pretender to the throne if his childless and crown-less nephew would die before him or didn't have the nerve to go back and fight for the restoration of the monarchy. I was immensely entertained to find out he had married an american "gold digger" who had been married three times before. Or at least that's what most Portuguese accounts say. I looked for Afonso's memoirs online and the only one instance of that book I could find was advertised as being signed by the author. Which was ridiculous as the book was published after his death. Little did I know.

I ended up buying a first edition of HRH the Duke of Oporto's Memoirs signed by his widow, Maria Pia de Bragança - Crown Princess of Portugal. Supposedly. Also known as Nevada Hayes. She claims to have changed names when she converted to catholicism and took her husband's mother's name. But not even that is certain. In fact, almost nothing about this woman is certain. The only thing I can say is this book is dripping with wishy-washy sentimentality and at times is painful to read.

I wondered how much information I could get about her from the comfort of my armchair. A lot, it turned out. This is the age of online census, passenger lists and newspaper archives so I had a serious good time undoing the knots in the threads of Nevada Hayes' life (and her many other pseudonyms). Having turned into a time traveling stalker, If I learned anything from this is that trying to track somebody's life through society pages makes little sense - the contradictions and rumours abound to an extent that it turns Nevada's life pretty much into a fiction. I still don't know what she was up to in France. That's a project for the next months if I get around to it. This stalking side project has been going on for some time already.

And as for gold-digging and general southern european chauvinism... as Príncipe Afonso said, he was poor as a church mouse and she was known as the 10 million dollar widow. Enough said.

(A monarchic friend commented that she wanted a title as she already had the money. Royal title-digger it is then.)

(chronology after the fold)

More..."Nevada Stoody, Chapman, Hayes, Agnew, Van Valkenburgh...Duchess of Oporto?"

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September 27, 2011

Whoever you are, prisoner in Gloucestershire: good luck.

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September 26, 2011

Illustrative

*****

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August 11, 2011

100

My maternal grandfather would have been 100 years old today. Odd to think about it. I was only 7 when he died and yet I have so many memories of him. I blame him for my xenophilia. He made my early childhood so much more interesting with tales of exotic and distant lands, of chinese girlfriends and epic descriptions of closely won football matches. Absurdly, I have a distinct picture in my mind of a scar made by a Hong Kong football player who left a permanent impression of a boot stud on my grandfather's leg. That scar which he would always proudly show at the end of a tale as a corroboration like some soldier who narrowly escaped alive from a battle would. He's one of the few people who are gone but whose scent and tone of voice I can still bring up if I close my eyes.

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August 10, 2011

Gastronomica

I have only so long to live - so many books to read, so many ironies to contemplate, so many meals to eat.

Nero Wolfe says in Rex Stout's "Too many cooks"

****

Artusi prematurely died at the age of 91 due to an overdose of good food. There is no great cuisine (or health) where there is room for margarine, seed, palm, or coconut oil, processed fats and "light" cheeses, or other disgusting abominations. This is sensorial squalor... It occurs when butter (a great deity among foods), lard, rendered pig cheek, and rendered lard (why not?) are ostracized. You cannot live to be almost one hundred if you allow yourself to be ground up by nutritional whims, by fears of lipids and cholesterol. These are diseases of the soul.

Emanuela Djalma Vitali quoted in the introduction to Pellegrino Artusi's La Sciencia in Cucina

****

Our sensibility is a single entity. Who cultivates it, cultivates the whole of it, and I insist that he is a false artist who is not also a gourmet, and a false gourmet who can see no beauty in a color and no emotion in a sound. Art is the understanding of beauty throug the senses, through all the senses, and in order to understand the dream of a Vinci, or the inner life of Bach, one must, I repeat, be capable of adoring the scented and fugitive soul of a passionate wine.

Dodin-Bouffard claims in Marcel Rouff's The Passionate Epicure
*****

The eclectic readings of the past weeks have included a lot of food related books.

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July 29, 2011

The funny bits

(The emblem of Jersey is the toad and that of Guernsey is the donkey. Jèrriais - the Jersey dialect - is strangely reminiscent of Queneau's Zazie dans le métro colloquial language.)

Dgèrnésiais au Jèrriais:
J'crai qu'j'éthons d'la plyie,
car j'vai qu'les crapauds sont sortis!

Jèrriais au Dgèrnésiais.
J'n'ai pas d'peine à l'craithe,
car j'entends les ânes braithe!

Guernsey man to Jersey man: "I believe we'll have rain for I see the toads are out!" to which the latter replies "I have no trouble believing it for I hear the donkeys braying!"

(in the TLS)

*****

After the Resurrection, Christ can be shown going to Emmaus, appearing to his disciples, and sitting with them at supper.(...) But the bread, which was divided by Christ's divine hand, should not be shown cut into equal parts, as if sliced in half by some sort of razor, for this seems to endorse the absurd view that the Savior was recognized because of his miraculous ability to bisect bread perfectly.

Frederico Borromeo in Sacred Painting, 1624

Marco Marciale, Supper at Emmaus, 1506

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July 28, 2011

Mr. B's Emporium of Reading Delights

Among many other delightful things, Bath has one of the best bookshops I have ever set my feet in. I am a cynical, jaded creature who disdains prizes and accolades - bookshops who win prizes around here seem to be all about author events or book clubs and I couldn't care less about hearing authors speak or what my neighbors think about some provincial prize winning fluff novel. Grumpy anti-social reader, yes, that's me. Reading the Bookshop's website in advance, I was put off by Mr. B's "reading spa" and thought their seemingly "squash the competition by coming up with novel services" strategy was the only way to cover up the fact that they were selling the same books as W.H. Smith. Even I am amazed at how malevolently prejudiced I am.

Then I entered the bookshop, grudgingly, saw the fantastically curated selection of books on display and had to let my pride stay in the way of my enjoyment of finer things in life for some moments more by trying to find an objectionable title on the shelves while muttering "Bah, humbug!". Finally swallowed it when I saw the stair case wall covered in Tintin album pages. They even have books in spanish and french. Not many, but they're there. That's unheard of. Also, the green armchair did me in. Can't resist cozy and good books.

Now I'm even considering signing up for Mr B's Year of Reading Delights which I previously considered the work of the illiterate devil. It's a miracle conversion and didn't even take any proselytizing. I just saw the light on my own. Mr. B's Year of Reading Delights will get me 11 books - 1 a month - picked by the staff according to a questionnaire I need to fill in. I'd sooner let Bernard Madoff run my finances than have anybody pick books for me. This is to show how confident I am that Mr. B will introduce me to wonders my sickly snobbish soul would certainly overlook.

*****

We came out of Mr B's carrying Christopher Lloyd's "In Search of a Masterpiece - An Art Lover's Guide to Great Britain & Ireland". It's a wonderful book and a very personal one. It doesn't feature the most famous works in each museum but rather the author's personal preferences with short essays describing the reasons for his choices and a background of the artist. I can't say I share the author's taste but it is a great introduction to a lot of (mostly) British painters I have never heard of and whose merits are expertly expounded.

It got me thinking about which works would I pick if I had to write a similar guide. I was trying to remember which paintings did I really enjoy at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, for instance. Despite the collection of Monets, there were a few Welsh and English painters unknown to me who managed to find a drawer to file themselves away in my memory of beautiful things. The Monets get filed in the important-things-that-everyone-expects-me-to-know-about section.

John Armstrong, A Farm in Wales, NMW

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July 11, 2011

(saving these because they were so important at one time to the point of causing trouble and also turned out to be premonitory)

"But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

"Necessity knows no magic formulae -- they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."

Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being

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July 06, 2011

Twin Souls & hikes & readings & cookings

I finally read the latest John Waters and, as I suspected, we are twin souls. Not only do we share a love for weirdly striped socks, fascination by non-famous people leading quirky lives, contrarian views on high profile criminals and intellectual curiosity for the aesthetics of retro gay porn, he also writes things like this:

"Would he be appalled at the crucifix cigarette lighter on my living room table? (...) The leather bound Baader-Meinhof wanted poster kit, carried by all german police at the height of these hippies radical's reign of terror, that I show proudly to all my visitors? Would he gasp at the Alberto García Alix photo of Nacho and Michelle that hangs blatantly on the wall of my top floor? Would he understand the happiness of Michelle as she wraps her legs around her head, totally nude, showing her perfectly formed vagina and asshole as Nacho, also nude except for a pair if white gym socks, holds her legs in porn arrogance and dignity?"

I read this out loud to R. and his only reaction was a vehement "No." guessing (correctly) that I was hinting at novel decoration ideas. Even though I would still prefer a Jeff Stryker poster and some creative taxidermy, the crucifix lighter is soooo me. But I have to resign myself to a home devoid of kitsch for the sake of conjugal harmony.

*********

It's official that Tintern is, so far, my favorite place in England. Surprisingly, it isn't exactly the abbey that does it for me (even though it's a fabulous ruin) but the bend of the river, the seaside-ish feeling, the row of houses against the steep hills behind and... Stella Books. We got there after hiking the Wye Valley from Monmouth and took Offa's Dyke path to Chepstow after spending the night in Tintern. 35 km, including a detour to Lancaut Nature Reserve to go see the ruins of St. James church.

*********

Trying to read Dante properly - and as an excuse to get side tracked by theological and philosophical minor questions - so I got a bilingual edition and will be looking into Yale's online course.

*********

That I'm almost running out of the corn grits I got in California made me realize how corn-poor Europe is. Polenta is a poor sibling. American corn is one of the things which makes that country great along with Southern and Louisiana cuisine, Mark Rothko, Woody Allen and Sequoias. Sadly, the "anyone can be president" and "the land of opportunity" slogans are myths easily debunked by social mobility statistics. But, still, the corn. Amazing.

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June 06, 2011

Lately...

These northern latitudes and their 9pm sunsets have been reminding me of Virginia Woolf. I read the last two volumes of her diaries recently and it was both sad and exasperating to realize how bitter and joyless the woman was. Very few things seem to have given her pleasure, emotional pleasure that is - plenty of relatively appreciative literary judgement in there. And yet, despite the gloom and the apparent burdensome chore life was to her, there were times when she seemed genuinely enthralled: when she had walked in Hyde Park and had seen the sunset, violets and reds and golden clouds bewitching her. Sunsets have become such clichés. I blame the 1970's poster design aesthetics and the tiki revival.

*****

In love with Primo Levi's short stories. And with the Penguin mini modern classics which are the literary equivalent of bitesize delights; amuse-bouches in print.

*****

For the past year I have been reading Jane Austen on and off, finally finishing the last of the six novels last month. Now I am mourning the loss of an anxiety free, witty - at times hilarious - companion.

*****

Intrigued by the Sufragettes and their acts of terrorism against works of art. Torn between admiring the sparing of human lives while still using violence - I'm afraid I'm with Sartre on this one - and having chills down my spine when contemplating the possibility of a knife through a Piero della Francesca. But in the end, like the "terrorist" said, it's just a picture.

Attacks on Works of Art in 1914 as reported by the Times in June:

March 11 – National Gallery, ‘Rokeby’ Velasquez damaged.

March 16 – Birmingham Cathedral, Burne-Jones window defaced

April 10 – British Museum: Porcelain exhibits smashed

May 5 – Royal Academy: Mr. Sargent’s portray of Mr. Henry James damaged

May 13 – Royal Academy: Sir Hubert von Herkomer’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington damaged

May 18 – Royal Academy: Mr. Calusen’s ‘Primavera’ damaged

May 23 – National Gallery: Five Italian pictures damaged

May 25 – Royal Scottish Academy: Mr. Lavery’s portray of the King mutilated

May – 25 British Museum – Attack on an exhibit

Rokeby Venus, symbolically murdered.

*****

There's a short story in here somewhere:

"St Albans clock tower reopens- It is thought the clock tower was built as a result of tension between the people of the town and those at the nearby abbey. Councillor Sheila Burton, portfolio holder for culture and heritage at St Albans District Council, said: The consensus of opinion is that the merchants of the town got together [to build it because] they were fed up of being ruled by the abbey. They [people at the abbey] controlled the clock and rumour goes that they would stick another 10 minutes or half an hour on the time, just so that the people working in the fields worked a bit longer if it was a nice evening. So it was put up in defiance of the abbey really."

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June 01, 2011

Virginia Woolf substituted by Laurie Lee at half time

We left leafy Bloomsbury Square and the Duke of Bedford's hospitality for a converted Victorian cloth mill in the Cotswolds. Neither of us has lived in the countryside before but, in reality, the countryside isn't what it used to be. With fast railway connections, airports close by and broadband there is little we are missing right now by living surrounded by hills where cows graze, where a vast sky suddenly can be seen dramatically changing and where there is actually a proper horizon to be gazed at.

(Gloucestershire's library catalogue is pretty good so not even in the book front is there a problem; only a need to think ahead and have reading material ready rather than going out on a whim to buy a book. Hay on Wye is not that far away either.)

The walks by canals and clear brooks are immensely relaxing and I'm in better shape just by walking uphill almost every day. Better shape for me means I'm not panting after mild exertion. This sudden immersion into nature made me realize how much my natural history knowledge is lacking...

We are living in a peculiar small town which the neighboring villagers seem to be a bit snotty about. Maybe it's the hippies that roam the high street, the vegetarian cafes, the new grassroots movements that spring up every other week, the constant art shows (and two huge art supply stores) and the survivors from anarchist commune shipwrecks that ended up here. It is certainly not provincial. It's not exactly a melting pot either but you have the feeling there is a high tolerance for quirkiness and alternative lifestyles. The real estate man who showed us our place called the locals "those sandal-wearing, tofu-eating hippies". We don't eat tofu or wear sandals but we appreciate misfits. Moving a brown skinned husband and a decidedly foreign looking me deep into BNP land wouldn't be pleasant but this is just about right, sociologically-wise. There's a Waitrose, so all is well.

Coincidentally, I was reading GB Shaw's essays on Ibsen and Wagner (and marvelling at the modern, open minded stance of the man) and he quotes Wagner on moving to the countryside:

"Believe me, I too was once possessed by the idea of a country life. In order to become a radically healthy human being, I went two years ago to a Hydropathic establishment, prepared to give up Art and everything if I could once more become the child of nature. But, my good friend, I was obliged to laugh at my own naivete when I found myself almost going mad.".

(nearby Ruskin Mill)

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May 17, 2011

Ephemera II

(Well, not really ephemera but an inscription inside a book which prodded me into doing a bit of bookish sleuthing on the other side of the world.)

On my quest for the odd and the bizarre and while looking for some historical literary figures in San Diego I ran across Jesse Shepard. Or Francis Grierson as he was later called. Shepard was an all around fraud but in a good way. In the fashioning-a-life-aesthetics-philosophy-and-living-by-it kind of way. He was born in England in the mid 1800's but grew up in the USA; started off his minor celebrity days as a musical wonder touring the european courts and playing for the crowned heads of Europe, claiming to be untrained and only able to play guided by spirits from deceased composers; convinced some gullible locals into building him a gorgeously oddball gothic villa in San Diego - the Villa Montezuma which can be visited once refurbishment works end - where he lived with his life partner Lawrence Tonner and held séances; moved to England and changed names to start off his writing career; lived in Richmond while writing books and articles for magazines; ended up and died in penury in Los Angeles. He was a typical neo-romantic, new age pioneer of the beginning of the 20th century, offering up mysticism as the alternative to the "materialism" of the world.

In any case, at one point he was considered one of the most important writers of the century - mostly by fellow spiritualists - and he did write a book about Lincoln and his childhood memories of one of his speeches which is a (very) minor classic of americana. There was once a time when his name would be mentioned in the same sentence as Strindberg, Edith Wharton and, um, George Gissing. And then he went into the oblivion due to second rate, celebrities of the moment.

He went to Vermont to meet Blavatsky and even she thought he was a fraud. That's how bad he was.

The Richmond apartment house where Grierson later lived and wrote while Tonner worked as a tailor.

I was planning on making my brother in law drive me to the Villa (it's ok, he doesn't read the blog so he can't see how calculating I am) on our next trip to San Diego and so the name Jesse Shepard kept running in the background in my brain. Next thing I know, I was buying a book in french signed by Jesse Shepard from a Madrid bookseller.

The inscription reads: "To Doña Patrocínio de Biedma, etc, etc, Paris, July, 1889).

After a bit of investigation I found out that Shepard did publish his first book "Pensées et Essais" in Paris and in French. Supposedly, Grierson had good friends in the parisian literary salons, hobnobbed with Dumas and Maeterlinck called him his twin spirit.

The dedicatee of the book turned out, surprisingly, to have been a minor celebrity in her own right. Doña Patrocínio de Biedma was a spanish writer and journalist, a defender of women and of peace.

I was mystified by how improbable it was that these two people ever met (I got HP Simonson's biography of Grierson and apparently he never travelled to Spain; Biedma seems to not have been the travelling type). My first guess at how these two people were connected was the Princess Rattazzi, a third minor character - a sort of fake noble, journalist and intellectual - who was portrayed in one of Grierson's essays about parisian celebrities but who was also a friend of Biedma, the two ladies having founded a literary magazine in Cádiz together.

Through HP Simonson's biography I found out there was an unpublished autobiography of Grierson which is now housed at the San Diego History Society Archive. So, I did what every biblionerd would do and contacted them to see if I could read it on my next visit to California in hope of finding the connection between my two minor celebrities. The librarian at the archives was extremely helpful and once I was there showed me one of the files that contained the manuscript. I didn't learn anything amazing about the man - the text was a muddled affair consisting of random excerpts from his old essays; the only well written, thoughtful sounding bits were the ones written by his partner Tonner. I think I can safely guess who the brain of the duo was.

I turned then my attention to the file with his correspondence from Europe. After a brief shock (and momentarily burning cheeks since literary fetishism is hard to control) when I deciphered the handwriting and realized I was holding a letter signed by Arthur Conan Doyle - a mere postcard thanking Grierson for who knows what spiritism piece of information - I finally found what I was looking for. There it was: a letter from Biedma thanking Grierson for his book Pensées et Essais which had been brought to her by Prince Wisniewski. The letter was written in Spanish, dated from July 27th 1889 and also asked for the permission to translate some of the essays to Spanish to be published in a magazine. Hooray!

Double hooray when I searched the wonderful Hemeroteca Digital at the Spanish National Library and found this (the newspaper is La Correspondencia de España, July 30th 1889 edition):

It says that the russian (!) writer Jesse Shepard has dedicated his book Pensée et Essais to Biedma and that Prince Wisnievski, his fellow countryman (!), (an admirer of the glories of Spain, sent a letter saying that Shepard and Biedma had coinciding thoughts. Then they quote from the letter where the most cliche metaphors are used (you know... stars orbiting, fertile fields, immortal flame, etc.).

On August 21st of the same year, "El Correo Militar" publishes this:

One of the essays from Shepard's book (the one about a visit to the czar of Russia which sounds totally fabricated) translated by Biedma!

It would be so exciting to think I'm holding the book from which she made this translation if the people involved were not extremely minor characters in the history of literature. Nonetheless, lesser intellectuals have their charm, don't they? And the sleuthing was rather entertaining.

(remaining mystery which I don't care enough about to pursue: who the heck was Prince Wisniewzki?)

(also, there was another letter from Biedma but dated from 1909 asking Shepard to write something on a postcard to be auctioned off for charity. I suppose he was well known then if she was expecting to make money out of it.)

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April 30, 2011

Emblems & Etc

A visit to Portugal isn't complete until we spend some days in semi-desertic, southern Alentejo (my mother and R. always conspire against my North bound travel tendencies) and this time we ended up staying the night in a 15th century convent turned hotel in Redondo. We slept in converted monk's cells and the hallways and corridors were magnificently and profusely covered in blue & white tiles depicting biblical scenes and episodes from the lives of saints. The convent belonged to the hermits of the order of Saint Paul of Egypt, the first hermit, and legend tells of the existence of a religious dwelling here back to the 4th century. But realistically it is all very 16th-17th century, especially the tiles. It's known as Convento de S.Paulo or Convento da Serra d'Ossa.

As it was storming outside, we bought the scholarly guide book to the fabulous convent and went admiring pretty much all the 50.000 tiles. At the top of a steep staircase - on the walls the history of the lives of St John the Baptist and of Saint John unfold as you climb the steps - there was a landing with some shields, emblems, assorted monks and biblical verses which the guidebook couldn't help interpreting as it informed that its meaning was still being ascertained. The tiles might be by António de Oliveira Bernardes and/or his son Policarpo de Oliveira Bernardes, master azulejo painters.

I just can't resist an iconographic (or is it emblematics?) mystery so I did a bit of research and found a book which has all the meanings of the symbols and inscriptions. In latin. Which only added to the fun. Mundus Symbolicus was first published in 1653 and written by the Augustinian Filippo Picinelli in Milan. There's a scanned copy at the Internet Archive.

All the shields but one have on top the word "Prelate" (prelatus). I'm assuming the mottos and emblems are related to virtues or funtions of the prelates either of the order or of the church in general.

On the left side, the shields containing an elephant and a diamond:

On top of the shield it reads "Prelatus" and above the elephant the inscription is "Neque Vorax Neque Rapax" - "Neither voracious nor rapacious".

As far as I understand from Picinelli, Johannes Ferrus (a canon from Milan where Picinelli himself lived most of his life ) is the source for the motto that accompanies the elephant. What I understand from the text is that, quoting Saint Anselm, a priest or bishop should not be voracious in the sense that they should not succumb to the vice of drinking "wine and strong drinks". He says that the apostles themselves order us to live a sober life yet live "highly". Like a tall elephant, I guess. Nor should the priests be rapacious in the sense that they shouldn't be greedy. Priests and Bishops should follow Samuel's example on that one. As a side note, Picinelli refers to 1 Tim 3:2: "A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach;"

The bible verse is from Luke 11:21 "Cum fortis armatus custodit atrium suum, in pace sunt ea quæ possidet" - "When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace" (KJV).

*****

On the diamond shield it reads "Durum Duro Frango" - Sort of "Breaks the hardest hardness" or "Hardness is broken with something hard". Picinelli quotes Amos 7:7 - "These things the Lord shewed to me: and behold the Lord was standing upon a plastered wall, and in his hand a mason's trowel." (Douay-Rheims) but mentions that the Vulgate version of the verse mentions diamonds: "ecce Dominus stans super murum adamantinum et in manu ejus adamas". Picinelli quotes Cornelius a Lapide's interpretation of the verse which states that the diamond stands for the hardness with which God castigates those who oppose him even though they are hard and adamant themselves on their opposition. Picinelli compares the motto to Jerome's quote from Letters to Oceanus "Malo arboris nodo, malus cuneus requirendus est" - "An ill knot requires but an ill wedge to split it."

The accompanying verse and illustration to the diamond (I'm presuming) is this one:

It's Psalm 91:13 - "super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis et conculcabis leonem et draconem" - "Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet." (KJV)

*****

On the right there is a shield with Neptun and another one with a horse.

The Neptune motto is "Tumida Aequora Placat", from Virgil's Aeneid : "Sic ait, et dicto citius tumida aequora placat, collectasque fugat nubes, solemque reducit." - "Thus he speaks, and swifter than his word he clams the swollen seas, puts to flight the gathered clouds, and brings back the sun." Picinelli quotes Saint Basil who says that the heart is like the sea, uneven and full of passions but the ship is the soul or the mind that like a merchant ship, despite all the adverse conditions and the demons/pirates, keeps itself from becoming a prey. So the prelate should be like the captain of the boats of the souls of those he guides.

The biblical verse is from Song of Solomon 4:4. The complete verse reads "[Sicut turris David collum tuum, quæ ædificata est cum propugnaculis;] mille clypei pendant ex ea, omnis armatura fortium." - "[Thy neck like the tower of David builded for an armoury,] whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men." (KJV)

*****

The Latin motto associated with the horse is "Amore et Timore" - "Love and Fear". This one's more obvious, the prelate or the prince should inspire love and yet fear from his subjects (the source is D. Diego de Saavedra Fajardo who, on his The royal politician represented in one hundred emblems, suggests on Emblem XXXVIII that the prince should make himself beloved and feared by all men and presents the horse emblem with the spanish motto "Con Halago I con Rigor").

The biblical passage is from Psalm 110:6 - "[Judicabit in nationibus: implebil ruinas,] conquassabit capita in terra moltorum" - "[He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the places with the dead bodies;] he shall wound the heads over many countries." (KJV)

And there's Jesus on a cloud with a hammer ready to hit the heads of those hurting religion. Very literal.

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March 31, 2011

Lurking: Ephemera 1

London used book fairs are dominated by gentlemen in tweed suits who flip over the first pages of the book they're handling, check for the edition number and, not being a first, put it back where it was. The latest charity book fair I went to added a family of iphone powered abebook price searchers to the usual treasure hunting troupe. They just sat in one corner with a pile of books and punched ISBN's into their phones.

It's always odd to feel that I'm the only one there looking for books to read. This last time, not only did I find some good reads for a pound each, I had also the satisfaction of picking up a tattered book without a spine - attracted by the marbled paper covers and beautiful, worn out binding- which nobody had looked twice at and finding inside it a letter with a BBC Scotland header, dated of 1931 and addressed to Catherine Carswell. The book itself, an 1858 edition of a comparison of a french poem to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim Progress, falling apart, worthless, is inscribed "Catherine Carswell from Daniel, 1938".

Catherine Carswell was a scottish writer and journalist infamous for writing in 1930 an uncanonical biography of Robert Burns for which she even got death threats. She was also the first woman to get a divorce on grounds of (her husband's) insanity. She was one of the few women who were part of the Scottish Literary Renaissance and "She was rebellious, determined, intellectual, and no stranger to conflict." as a recent biography announces.

On the other side of the letter, there are scribbles in black ink which I can only decypher as being themes and off the beaten path stories related to Scotland. I'm assuming these constituted her notes for the "ideas for a series of shows" which the letter requested of her. Another blank piece of stationery inside the book has a London address. On the other side of the sheet there is a childish pencil drawing that I like to imagine was either a memento of her daughter who died at 12 of pneumonia or by her son and editor John.

I payed a pound for it and came home with my own (most likely not very financially valuable) treasure. Everybody knows treasures can only be found when you're not looking for them.

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March 21, 2011

Kertesz

Q: You’ve said that it’s easier to write literature in a dictatorship than in a democracy.

A: That was too sweeping a statement, but there’s a truth to it. Because I didn’t write what the communist government wanted to see, I was cut off and alone with my work. I never thought my book would ever be published, and so I had the freedom to write as radically as I wanted, to go as deep inside as I wanted. In a democracy you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is “interesting” and “spectacular.” That may be the toughest censorship of all.

(interview with Imre Kertesz, stolen from the Second Pass)

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March 18, 2011

GAF & etc. or where Claudia rants to make herself feel better

If there is a Stendhal Syndrome causing physical effects from seeing too much good art there must exist its opposite effect. For me there is a Gossaert Affective Disorder: a depression caused by seeing too many Gossaert paintings, especially if they're being labeled as masterpieces by a major National Gallery. It's a mixture of physical pain caused by too many unsightly portraits and a melancholy caused by a feeling of alienation from your fellow human beings who write exaltedly of what looks to you like a feeble attempt at trying to be "modern" in the renaissance sense. An experience which disengages you from what you love best in the world is utterly disheartening.

The gift shop was a further source of estrangement. I found myself wondering why would anyone buy postcards of the portrait of a woman with a head stuck on somebody else's neck, misaligned eyes, an arm shorter than the other and a ear floating above her hair.

*****

"Look at the poet Samuel Coleridge, writes Piers Steel, the Calgary professor who’s becoming known internationally for his insights on procrastination, in his new book The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things off and Start Getting Stuff Done. The poet spent 25 years writing the poem Kubla Khan. His excuses were legendary. For other people, Steel writes, the pain of procrastination “is about diets postponed, late-night scrambles to finish projects and disappointed looks from the people who depend on you.” -- from Macleans.

Why anybody would think poetry should be efficiently written is beyond my comprehension. Or that people in poor health who become opium addicts (legendary excuse?) should just get things done, for that matter.

"Days earlier, Hachette Book Group and Patterson’s representative, the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, hammered out the terms of a new 17-book deal. (Forbes reported that the contract is worth at least $150 million, though Little, Brown and Patterson dispute the number.) “Don’t you need to be home writing?” I joked with Patterson. He told me matter-of-factly that he’d already started 11 of the 17 books, and even finished more than a few of them." -- NYT

I rest my case.

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Where Claudia posts pretty pictures to cheer herself up

Yellow always brightens my day and I also love paintings that look like failed photographic snapshots. Degas is my man today.

*****

My short attention span in the past couple of weeks meant that the new lovely collection of Penguin Mini Modern Classics was just the right thing for me. I am now a devoted fan of Primo Levi's (very) short stories, especially The Magic Paint.

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I had things to write about but (outer) life got in the way.

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February 24, 2011

Snippets of the past weeks

Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le metro, bought at a quai bouquiniste last month in Paris in another episode of Uncle M.'s adventures - the bouquiniste, a philosophy teacher, had been in Lisbon in pre-revolutionary days so my uncle and him had a long discussion about how the leftist dream of their youth had gone up in smoke. Zazie has made me laugh out loud and insist on reading passages to R repeatedly.

Still in Paris, a special, erudite guided tour by M&M - who seem to turn into locals just minutes after having moved in - made me realize what blessing it is to have interesting friends.

*****

Superbowl Sunday in North County San Diego at Aunt J's. 30 people eating, drinking, dancing and occasionally falling into melancholy singing about how life is worthless ("la vida no vale nada")- you need Octavio Paz' Labyrinth of Solitude to get that one. Nobody paying that much attention to the giant TV screen set up in the garage door. Mexicans will use any excuse to party. My father in law grilling medium rare meat just for me and him - "everybody else likes it burned to cinders", he said disapprovingly. While the bbq was going and my brother in law, the family's DJ, blasted rancheras from the stereo on the front lawn, I was wondering what curses the Japanese family next door was hexing on us, their silent bamboo curtains and blooming cherry trees oozing disapproval.

Learned the very useful - when you become a member of a mexican family - expression "pachangueada" - "partied out".

*****

In Berkeley, two homeless young men begging for money with a sign that said "For Random Projects".

*****

In London, T. sitting at our dinner table after a couple of glasses filled with good Port wine - courtesy of my mother's choice and superior palate - trying to convey the meaning of the word Genießen, giving up his austrian scented english and resorting to a very convincing mime act of a man having substantial, sophisticated pleasure out of the good things in life.

*****

Finding a letter by Arthur Conan Doyle at the library of the San Diego History Society in the middle of a file full of worthless scraps, my cheeks set on fire once I deciphered the signature. Nerdy, literary fetishism induced pleasure is very hard to defend. But I should write more about my visit to the library.

*****

Meeting E&J, who live minutes away from my in-laws, the heartwarming reunion of R with his childhood unofficial computing mentor. Serendipitously, they turned out to be inspiring people in many other aspects of life. They make their own cheese which in my book is an ability that ranks you at the level of demi-god.

*****

My father on the phone: "Gaddafi needs to find a new place to set up his tent." Not only funny but important for more than one reason.

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February 19, 2011

Genetics

I just had a Charles Swann moment - speaking of which, I'm planning to reread Recherche:

Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission and Monsieur de Norvins, diplomat and government official who worked for Napoleon (by Ingres). Didn't participate in the peninsular war, however.

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February 03, 2011

(i just wanted to save this where i can find it again and my bookmarks are a mess)

If anything in this life can puncture the fantasy that we have some control over our lives, dementia may be the ultimate reminder, not just of its unpredictability but of its incomprehensibility. And its absurdity.

When, before these last months, I thought about why it's so hard for us to learn from the experience of others, I would have said that it's because we live in a society built on the myth that we're in control, a "can-do" society and a culture that believes anything is possible, that to be "forewarned is forearmed," even that we can continue to extend our lives well into our second century with no cost, social or personal.

--Salon

(or why I hate the expression "battling cancer" which makes the dead losers; it's a whole attitude to sickness and death and the semantics that goes with it which brings no consolation to anybody; I'm not sure it derives from arrogance (being in control) or is simply a lack of imagination)

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February 02, 2011

San Francisco. Again.

A little bit less than six years ago I visited San Francisco for the first time and, following the cliche-ridden song, I left my heart there. I went back there an unreasonable amount of times for a couple of years after that first visit but never went back to the piers until last week. I did the same walk I had done years ago and once again ran into that Deena Metzger poem on the sidewalk that had made me so happy. Lo and behold, it made me happy again.

*****

Having pretty much exhausted the tourist sights in San Francisco and having made the mandatory visit to Moe's in Berkeley, I went on a mini tour of Silicon Valley by Caltrain. In San Jose I visited the Egyptian Museum set in the Rosicrucian Park - even though I knew the complex was composed of buildings modeled after existing egyptian monuments I was still taken aback by the sheer oddity of the sight.

The highlight of the trip, however, was to be found in Palo Alto. The Stanford campus grounds are a zoo. Literally. I may be becoming britishized and therefore overexcited with natural history, but! in the space of a minute: I was trying (unsuccessfully) to take a picture of a dark brown squirrel when I noticed something moving right near my feet. I looked down and there was a little creature compulsively sticking its head out of a hole and going back in at such a speed that, no matter the settings on my camera, it came out as a blurry spot. That was my first groundhog. While I was trying to photograph it, I heard a sound of wood being hammered behind and above me. I knew it was a (my first) woodpecker before I even saw it.

The Cantor Center for the Arts (previously the Leland Stanford Jr Museum) is a very nice art museum with pieces from different points of the globe and a reasonable art collection. Yet, the best part is the Stanford Family room. I was overjoyed with the tacky pioneering capitalist value of the family's memorabilia and hagiographic descriptions plastered on the walls - the Stanfords, having lost their only child at a tender age, gave away part of their fortune to be used for education founding the University on their own 650 acre ranch.

I had recently been watching Berger's "Ways of Seeing" and realized he would have a field day in this room - he has a penchant for identifying, a bit too obsessively in my view, sexual exploitation and capitalist propaganda in all art as it is and this room would prove him right. I also had been reading about Ambrose Bierce and his fight against the railroad tycoons so it was incredibly amusing to read this:

In reality, the big four railroad tycoons of California, Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker, built their empire on funding and land grants from the Federal Government and with little of their own capital invested and using Stanford's political influence for their own private benefit. When the time came to pay back the federal loan they tried to get a bailout claiming they would be bankrupt if they had to pay it (San Francisco newspapers conveniently listing at this time how Stanford was buying his wife $100k jewelry and spending millions on an university and race horses). Legend has it that Ambrose Bierce - who called the university founder Stealin' Landford - confronted Huntington who tried to buy his silence on the lobbying for a railroad bailout law on the steps of the Capitol. Bierce replied that his price was 130 million dollars and that he could pay it to his friend, the US Treasury. In the end the bill did not pass and the big four were still rich anyway.

Also, remembering Berger's assertion that many a landscape painting is only a commissioned work for a landowner to show off his property, I didn't wonder much what he would have made of the painting commissioned by Mrs Stanford to catalog her jewels. In your face. Has any european aristocrat done this? It looks so nouveau riche.

Another interesting piece of trivia was that Stanford was a keen horse collector (the preserved ears of his favorite trotter are in this room also) and he was the one who payed Muybridge to do a study of horse's movements. At the time there was a dispute among horse lovers whether horses flew (as in, kept their four legs off the ground while trotting or galloping). I'm supposing this painting from his collection was a result of that. Stanford was one of the "unsupported transit" party so this should be a sort of trophy or maybe a conversation piece:

"What an odd painting Leland, it looks like the horse is flying!"
"And it is! Let me show you these photos I commissioned of a horse in motion."

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January 12, 2011

Nor Here Nor There

Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?

-- Ezra Pound, 1962, Paris Review Interviews

*****

(National Gallery, Lent by the Trustees, Stansted Park Foundation, Stansted House, Hants, © Private collection.)

The coziest painting in the National Gallery in London. A lady pouring hot chocolate with a footwarmer beside her, a painting of an interior of a dutch church inviting contemplation. (Liotard)

*****

Perhaps you should say “factualist” rather than “realist.” (...). Literalism, factualism, will smother the imagination altogether.

--Saul Bellow, 1966, Paris Review Interviews

*****

There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All of them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about.

-- SJ Perelman, 1963, Paris Review Interviews

*****

His mistress at that time - indeed the very concept "mistress" for him - was French.

-- Anne Carson, The beauty of the husband

*****

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

-- Wallace Stevens, Adagia, Opus Posthumous

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January 11, 2011

Photobiography based on Minor Childhood Memories - Chapter 2

One of my favorite comic books when I was barely able to read was a collection of Donald Duck comic strips which were no more than illustrations of very simple jokes. I loved re-enacting those cartoon strips - as I still love re-enacting comedy skits, I suppose - and there were two particular ones which my father and my mother would willingly and repeatedly be the co-stars in.

Just like one of Donald's nephews, I had a little fish tank with several, indistinguishable goldfish and my father, reading the Donald Duck lines, would point at one of them and ask me what was its name. I'd answer "Jack", my father would reply "How do you know?" and I'd deliver the punch line: "Because I named them all Jack". To this day, both me and my father go through the routine whenever we go to an aquarium or seafood restaurant with a lobster tank.

My mother's role was the nephew instead (a very small part) on the re-enactment of a comic strip where Donald and his nephew are at a museum looking at what seems to be a classical statue entitled "The Reader". Donald climbs up the statue to look at the book the old sage is reading and when he comes down the nephew asks what was written on it. Blushing, Donald answers "Curiosity killed a cat".

Serendipitously, a statue with comic-strip-re-enacting-potential existed on a street near where my mother worked and, luckily, it never occurred to me that the moral of the story was that I wasn't supposed to go read the book she was holding. In fact, I always interpreted it as "what I'm reading is none of your business" rather than "it' dangerous to go around reading everything just out of curiosity". More to the point, I took it for a condemnation of prying rather than a censorship of intellectual curiosity. Lucky, naive, 5 year old me.

While searching for the origin of the expression - it seems to be as recent as 1898 but a similar phrase was employed by Jonson and Shakespeare using "worry" rather than "curiosity" - I found another, more poetic, animal friendly, version: "He that pryeth into every cloud may be struck with a thunderbolt" (John Clarke, in Paroemiologia, 1639).

Similarly, Saint Augustine is quoted (by reputable sources even!) with saying "God fashioned hell for the inquisitive". It's easy to make church men look like bigots and yet theologians live for the challenge of coming up with tortuous answers to difficult questions. If you bother to read the entire passage you can see how unfair this particular quote is out of context:

How, then, shall I respond to him who asks, “What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?” I do not answer, as a certain one is reported to have done facetiously (shrugging off the force of the question). “He was preparing hell,” he said, “for those who pry too deep.” It is one thing to see the answer; it is another to laugh at the questioner--and for myself I do not answer these things thus. More willingly would I have answered, “I do not know what I do not know,” than cause one who asked a deep question to be ridiculed--and by such tactics gain praise for a worthless answer. (Confessions, Bk. XI. Ch. XII)

(I said I had a weakness for Saint Augustine so I couldn't let this one pass, could I?)

(Arquivo Fotográfico de Lisboa)

In the old days of post-revolutionary Portugal, it was fairly common for civil servants to take their kids to work once in a while. I used to have fabulous play days visiting people on the other departments, being given candies by old ladies and smearing my hands with a violet ink pad while playing with official rubber stamps. Not to mention the crush I developed for the computer programmer - the computer being an enormous machine, more like an A1 printer, with multi-colored switches - or my introduction to the fascinating world of microfilm. But the fun had a limit and, once it was time to go home, we'd climb a steep street in the heart of Lisbon where a statue of a woman reading on the doorstep of a bookshop was begging to take part in a little comedy - Rua Nova do Almada pictured above in 1965 and where a bit of the window of the bookshop can be seen on the bottom left corner.

These days the bookshop is still a bookshop but has a different name - Luso-Espanhola turned into Coimbra - and a different specialty - Medicine and Science gave way to Law - and the reading lady is now inside, safe from the wrath of the elements and, above all, safe from graffitti.

****

I found one of the donald duck comic strips on the fantastic INDUCKS website.

Sculpture by Maria Helena Matos.

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January 10, 2011

Mary Beard's Parthenon

Finished reading Beard's Parthenon and decided to go inspect and share some of the details she points out as being relevant to the discussion of the unauthorized Duveen cleanings in the 1930's (he was the maecenas behind the building of the Parthenon galleries; he wanted the friezes to be squeaky clean and therefore didn't bother to ask permission to the BM) which, according to some, did irreparable damage by destroying archaeological data. It turns out the patina he had had chiseled off is actually a vestige of the ancient greek's base for the application of paint or a treatment to reduce the natural glare of the marble.

As Beard says, on the left side room that precedes the galleries, a few broken pieces from the pediment have the orange-brown (honey or golden as others put it) coating/patina much discussed in the book.

*****

Having seen that, it's easier to spot it on the friezes as in this case (East Frieze).

Compare to this piece of the west frieze which has been cleaned:

*****

I always wondered what these seemingly cement drippings on the surface of the marble were and Beards explains them as being the ridges of harder stone that stand out as the softer stone erodes (Metope XXVII)

*****

The trace of original paint (also known affectionately as "the brush stroke of Phideas") was easy to spot: it's on the statue on the left, underneath the rectangular cutting: a sort of horizontal brush stroke turned black by weather and time.

*****

The "tide-mark" on the thigh of pediment figure G took me a while to figure out but finally got it. Manipulating the photo for exposure and contrast makes it easier to see where the cleaning process was halted. Above is dirty, below is clean.

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January 06, 2011

Voluminous

"Falsehood and insincerity, unsuitable as they seem to the dignity of public transactions, offend us with a less degrading idea of meanness, than when they are found in the intercourse of private life. In the latter, they discover a want of courage; in the other, only a defect of power: and, as it is impossible for the most able statesmen to subdue millions of followers and enemies by their own personal strength, the world, under the name of policy, seems to have granted them a very liberal indulgence of craft and dissimulation."
--Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

I am enthralled. I started by picking up an (abridged) copy of Gibbon's monumental work at the bookshop wondering if it was readable and found that I couldn't put it down. Ended up getting the first two (unabridged) volumes edited by David Womersley for Oxford. Riveting. And so many themes to follow up on thanks to the fantastic footnotes.

(meanwhile, R is reading Les Misérables so I think we're out of the book market for a few months as there's a biography of Thomas Hardy and the complete collected fiction of Borges waiting on the sidelines)

*****

Looking back at 2010, I am amazed by how much we saw in Florence and environs with my parents. I'm looking back fondly at our visit at Bernard Berenson's Villa I Tatti which was such a special treat. And visiting cell after cell at San Marco finding Fra Angelico frescoes felt like opening a box of candy, unwrapping sweet after sweet. But R and I agreed that the surprise of the year was the Savoy and the magical Annecy lake. We had the most amazing lunch at Bernard Gay's restaurant, completely empty save for the pair of us. The table we sat at overlooked a snowy peak and the hours we spent being fed flavorful dishes while gazing at the swift movement of the clouds over the mountains must have been the 3 most relaxing hours of 2010.

******

Christmas by the sea in Ericeira, sleeping with the window open to listen to the waves crashing was pretty much zen-like too.

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December 30, 2010

Photobiography based on Minor Childhood Memories - Chapter 1

Let me start with a non-memory. My parents tell me that as they were driving away from the maternity hospital where I was born - which was in a narrow, shady, curvy street leading into a large avenue - the car was suddenly in the sun; it hit my newborn face and I sneezed for the very first time in my life. Or rather, for the very three first times in my life.

The corner of USA Avenue and Rome Avenue where I sneezed.Photo from the Lisbon Archives, 1980's.

I remembered this little piece of Claudia's trivia - which, surprisingly, my parents still mention fairly often and on cue as I still sneeze when coming out of the shade and into the sun - recently as I was signing up to have my DNA examined. On the long list of potential ailments and odd characteristics that my genes will eventually disclose to some scientists in Silicon Valley figures the susceptibility to sneezing when coming from relative darkness into bright light - what they call the Photic Sneeze Reflex. I was amazed: there is a gene for it. I am in awe of this gene as I love pointlessness and have a Chestertonian grudge against evolution. Nobody knows what triggers this reflex but one of the theories says that it might be the result from an over stimulation of the trigeminal nerve which is the nerve responsible for sensation in the face. This would make sense as plucking my eyebrows also sends me into a sneezing fit.

Sneezing aside, I love to plot my first car trip for the same reasons I love reading my horoscope. What motivates me is not so much a belief in fortunetelling but a feeling that any sort of prediction is a pathway to introspection. When my horoscope predicts my day will be filled with social obligations that usually makes me think about my social life and how I am neglecting this or that friend or how I should make time to meet up with someone I enjoy spending time with. Likewise, plotting the names of the first streets I ever travelled on is a sort of introspection exercise. I should start my own school of divination and call it "School of Topomancy".

I was born on a street named after a portuguese friar who belonged to the order of the Augustinian Hermits- Tomé de Jesus. I am proud of that as he was part of one of the most defining events in the Portuguese collective psyche. He was a member of the group of people who accompanied the king, Sebastian, to Alcacer Quivir. The king was supposedly killed (but secretly every portuguese person believes he will come back in a foggy morning) but Friar Tomé was captured and imprisoned. While in prison he wrote a book on the sufferings of Jesus which was supposed to make his fellow captives feel better. It just occurred to me I should read his book. Also, he was the initiator of reformations in the order to lead it into further self-abnegation. As for myself, I practice my own variant of self-abnegation. My writing has just been interrupted as R. - a professed hedonist - and I just had a brief row over the correct ratio of gin in a Dubonnet cocktail. R says it's 2/3 and I say 1/3. I rest my case. But I do have to mention that I longed to be a hermit when I was about 10 years old. And I have a weak spot for Saint Augustine.

The street where I was born in is a one way street that leads into the United States of America Avenue. This is the proof my topomancy divination method is infallible as I am happily married to an american citizen who insists he is mexican.

From there, you turn right into Rome Avenue. I've been to Rome twice and unless this is some sort of hint at my love affair with catholic theology, I'd say there is something waiting for me over there. I do have to say that my favorite monument in the world is the colosseum.

Further down, you turn right again into the street where my parents lived at the time and which was named after a portuguese air pilot. He was the first portuguese pilot to die in combat - and the only one so far. He was trained in England where he lived for a while and he died over France during World War I. As I live in England, let's just say I'm not that keen on flying over France anymore.

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December 08, 2010

McCarthyism, The Theatre, The Messiah

I suppose the best description for Tom McCarthy's novel "C" would be that of a retro futurist novel. Not neofuturist as that would imply a similar aesthetics regarding contemporary technology but retro in the sense of being imbibed by nostalgia for a future which is now in the past, a past future that the author didn't experience and therefore romanticizes. Which has its dangers. If you read C without realizing it is the literary embodiment of the Necronautical society's Declaration on the Future (which would deserve a post in itself since I couldn't disagree more with it and yet I love the darned shameless french theoretician name dropping piece of drivel) it ends up being either

an historical novel if you consider that it's a recreation of an era that the author researched and describes to such a degree that real people are mentioned (the egyptian antiquities officer Lacau comes to mind) and even real places whose historical accuracy is of no consequence figure in it (there was indeed a dairy shop on Rugby street which is now a jewelery store - it's supposed to have been the building where Serge lived),

an anachronistic attempt at writing a late 19th century/early 20th century novel complete with country doctors in carriages, sojourns in eastern european spas (inexplicably the spa town doesn't seem to exist in reality or was it supposed to be Podebrady?) and adventures in exploration of exotic lands (I object to the comparison with bildungsromans as there is no "bildung" of any sort to be seen anywhere, Serge dies as apathetic and oblivious as he was born, caul or no caul),

a young adult novel hyped for adults where the flat, dull main character is a device for introducing non expert knowledge à la Sophie's World or Theo's Voyage, facts and more facts, detailed descriptions of physical objects and mechanisms and very little humanity (as the author intended or so he says on his anti-humanist rants)

or, if you're so inclined, take it as a sort of puzzle for the obsessive compulsive. You can have a notebook close by and write down every place name or important object that begins with C and the recurring themes: poison, crypts, insects, lack of perspective and the like. Or note down the allusions to Freud's Wolfman case or Ballard's Crash. Lists, lists, lists.

At one point I got a bit annoyed with the novel and I suppose what set me off was that moment when I was relaxed, reading leisurely and these were the sentences my brain paid attention to:

"The wooden blocks have geometric figures painted on them (...) On a single side of each block (the side that were they dice, would bear the number six)" several of these figures had been combined...

While my eyes were already on the next paragraph I quickly thought "If all the sides of cube were figures how can you know where would the six go?". And then I reread the paragraph and realized it was one of those IQ measuring questions turned into literary description:

"The wooden blocks have geometric figures painted on them, like numbers on dice: squares, triangles, circles and other, more complex forms. On a single side of each block (the side that were they dice, would bear the number six) several of these figures had been combined..."

I like my novels complex but this is more of a party trick than, say, a deep ethical conundrum. Also, the geometric figure representing the number 2 seems to be missing from the sequence. The more I realized this book was a feat of engineering rather than some artistic endeavor (in the reactionary sense, McCarthy would probably say), the further I abused it by finding parallels between it and bad hollywood movies. That's the risk you take by making it clear a novel is borrowing themes and symbols. Some freak might come along and find all the wrong references. For instance, Sophie's lab covered in newspapers headlines making up messages in a secret code that only she could understand was supposed to be Burroughesque of sorts but it also reminded me of "A brilliant mind" and there's nothing like Russell Crowe creeping into your brain for literary turn off. I went totally heretical when I found echoes of Top Gun in the WWI airplane training section. The main character's partner is named Steadman (Cruise's nemesis was Iceman and there was a Wolfman too) and their juvenile adventures while training in England evoked the whole Top Gun callous stunts. Actually a younger Tom Cruise would make a great Serge in a hollywood version of C since he too has only a limited range of expressions.

Anyway, it's a book that needs to be read more than once to get all the clever allusions but I wasn't excited enough to do it as a very enticing biblical studies volume was patiently waiting for my attention.

I'm hoping Tom McCarthy will consider rewriting Hamlet in C style. Maybe entitle it H. Have Hamlet describe in excruciating detail the chemical composition of the poison that killed his father, the physics involved in Ophelia's drowning, the decomposing process that lead Yorick to that poor state and bore his friend Horatio to tears by giving long lectures on what he learned in the university in Germany. For maximum C-like effect, he would leave out all the angst.

(It might not sound like it, but I am grateful for the existence of a Tom McCarthy in the island where books with absurd titles like "Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper" win prizes and where John "Trains and Buttered Toast" Betjeman is considered a great poet.)

*********

The theatre:

Alan Ayckbourn's "Seasons Greetings" at the National Theatre was extremely enjoyable if you are the type who appreciates long sitcoms played live. I am.

Tennessse William's The Glass Menagerie and the Young Vic. One of those cases where I go into a theatre with zero knowledge of the play and come out thinking there was something not quite right with it - the main character does warn in the beginning that we are about to see truth masked as illusion. Then it hit me that Laura's disability was only a metaphor for difference and that the whole play was about homosexuality. And suddenly everything fell into place. From Tom's outings to the movies to the absurd moment when the gentleman caller does that self-conscious homophobic stunt of coming up with a never before mentioned girlfriend when he realizes he fell in love with the "wrong" type of person. It's all very subtle and the directing doesn't help at all. Makes it look like it's all about mommy issues.

**********

Thomas L Thompson's The Messiah Myth was clearly given the title by a greedy publisher - not that the author doesn't treat all religious literature as myth while giving good reasons for it, but it was clearly intending to create some controversy. It's a very interesting and well documented account of the influence of ancient literature (egyptian, assyrian, greek, ugaritic) on the old testament and of the latter on the new testament. From a comparative literature perspective is fascinating.

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December 07, 2010

In which SHE reveals that she is a Manichean

There is no justification for the creation of a bad poem: it is always better for such a poem not to exist than for it to exist. Bad literature isn’t merely, as a Thomist might say, an absence of good literature; rather, it is, as a Manichean might say, an active presence of aesthetic Evil.

Stanislaw Baranczak, Ocalone w Tlumaczeniu (Rescued in Translation).

Unashamedly stolen from the original Manichean.

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December 02, 2010

Best academic paper ever.

Full pdf can be obtained here, via Mindhacks.

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December 01, 2010

Uncle Milan's Encounters

Kundera's essays are usually easy reads and I don't mean it in a demeaning way. Maybe conversational would be the right term as I picture him as someone who has used wisely the gift of time and therefore has not only interesting larger points to make, but can fill the skeleton of his theory with meaty tidbits of minor or personal history that I wouldn't otherwise have encountered.

For instance, I totally missed Fellini's attacks on Berlusconi's TV strategies and subsequent almost pornographic exploitation by Berlusconi's TV channel of Fellini's death. Now I need to watch Ginger and Fred again.

I loved the short essay on a lecture delivered by Vera Linhartova: the practical, direct way she addressed the myth of the writer in exile. Indeed, more than saying that writers are not bound by borders or belong to any one place, maybe exile is a valid artistic path that should be sought. It provides a freedom from provincial constraints, a widening of the linguistic possibilities. Look at Beckett, Nabokov, Milosz, Conrad.

*****

Kundera got me into a El Lissitzky mood. In my head El Lissitzky and El Greco have funny conversations in painterly heaven regarding their spanish exile. Obviously El Lissitzky has no clue what El Greco is talking about.

*****

I want to save this Francis Bacon quote which I presume to illustrate my own description of self-stereotyping theoretical author: the ones that fall into a formula, eruditely conceived, and end up writing what feels like parodies of themselves. Crystallized oulipians. You use one formula once and it's art, you spend your whole life doing it and it becomes just a job, a technique.

"I wonder if Beckett's ideas about his art didn't end up killing his creativity... there's something too systematic and too intelligent about him.. in painting, you always leave too much in that is habit, you never cut enough out, but with Beckett I often get the impression that because he wanted to hone down his text, nothing was left, and in the end his work sounds hollow."

*****

Kundera's mention of Danilo Kis sent me searching for a book by him I knew for sure I owned and hadn't finished. In the middle of the search I ran into Daniil Kharms and for a moment I thought my terrible, xenophobic memory for any name outside the portuguese-anglo-french realm had tricked me again. Daniil Kharm's "Today I wrote nothing" was one of those instances of books bought by R. that get re-shelved after he's done with them, escaping my to-read pile. Kharms is perfect for hit and run reading: short absurd stories, poems and plays which run from the silly tragic fable to the absurd thesis to the hilarious dialogue.

Let us suppose that one comlpletely naked authorized apartment resident decides to settle in and surround himself with objects. If he starts with a chair then he'll need a desk to go with the chair, and a lamp for the desk, the a bed, a blanket, bed sheets, a dresser, underclothes, outer dress, an armoire, then a room to put it all in, etc. Here, at every point in this system an unusual little system branch might manifest itself: The desire might arise to place a doily on the small round table, then to place a vase on the doily, then to shove a flower into the vase. Such a system of surrounding oneself with objects, in which one objects snag another - this is an incorrect system, because, if the flower vase has no flowers in it, then this vase is made meaningless, and if the vase is taken away, then the small round table is made meaningless; (...) The annihilation of one object disrupts the whole system. And if the naked authorized resident were to put on rings and bracelets and to surround himself with spheres and celluloid lizards, then the loss one or twenty-seven objects wouldn't make any essential difference. Such a system of surrounding oneself with objects is the correct system. --Daniil Kharms

Obviously this gives me ideas for interior decoration which R. won't approve of even when confronted with a theoretical basis like this one... I kid but I do love the celebration of the non-utilitarian character of art implied. Also, I have no idea where to get a celluloid lizard.

I did find my Danilo Kis but just doesn't work for me. Maybe I need a french translation.

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November 30, 2010

The usual random stuff

Those were the great days of excavating. Anything to which a fancy was taken, from scarab to an obelisk, was just appropriated, and if there was a difference of opinion with a brother excavator one laid for him with a gun.
---Howard Carter in "The Tomb of Tu.ankh.Amen" regarding the days of Belzoni, an earlier fellow excavator who was more of a grave digger and prize hunter than an archaeologist.

I imagine sentences like this mustn't have helped to advance the cause of keeping Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum from being repatriated.

(Carter not as good as Layard, but entertaining nonetheless)

*****

Gorgeous book art as window decorations at Tiffany & co on Bond street.

****

I've been collecting random sentences I hear while walking around in London. I like the out of context, no follow up situation where I'm left wondering what could those people have been talking about.

In a pub, a clean shaven boy in his 20's to his mates, eagerly.

- It's all a big show, isn't it? Like Odysseus.

In a throng of people on Oxford street, a man to presumably his wife who looked a bit annoyed.

-... I'm no connoisseur but...

Near the Barbican, two 60ish old men in suits, one using his hands to demonstrate.

- ...the most perfect breasts...

Or more prosaically, a sentence by a passer by to his friend that sent everybody inside Neal's Yard Dairy cheese shop in Covent Garden into a fit of giggles.

- It smells like my socks out here!

********

'Tis the season to feel guilty about ignoring contemporary books this year: Tom McCarthy's C is sitting right here next to me, waiting for an opening in the archaeological adventures mania. Also looking forward to reading Kundera's Encounter and De Waal's The hare with amber eyes.

Waiting for the Economist's top 2010 books to get recommendations for "serious" nonfiction. I always end up keeping up with the times though I try to be a hermit. I'm more like a semi-detached hermit. Still, top of my to-read list, ignoring everything else, will still be Max Mallowan's memoirs.

*******

Abraham sacrificing Isaac (China, Jingdezhen 1750) at the overwhelming, gigantic, jaw dropping ceramics gallery at the V&A.

Other than the western centric surprise caused by the apparent incongruity of seeing a biblical scene re-enacted by asiatic looking characters - and reflecting the brainwashing performed by western art that makes you believe that a blonde, blue eyed jesus christ is perfectly normal - what makes me marvel at this one is how Abraham doesn't look like it's much of a sacrifice to butcher the pesky looking little kid. In fact he looks quite keen on it. Maybe it's the grabbing the kid by the eye. Maybe it's this feeling he might as well have been chopping the head of a chicken. The standing instead of laying Isaac on a sacrificial table doesn't help. As if a sacrificial table made things less violent by giving it a sacred context. Odd.

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November 25, 2010

Neither good nor bad

"I mean", said Miss Marple, puckering her brow a little as she counted the stitches in her knitting, " that so many people seem to me not to be either bad or good, but simply, you know, very silly."
-- Agatha Christie, The 13 Problems

*****

Some years ago I found out I had a somewhat famous homonym. Small posters announcing a performance by a Portuguese choreographer were all over Lisbon. The poster had my name on it in bold lettering and under it there was a photo of a naked woman, a brunette, her face not really that discernible. I had the shock of my life. It was like having a one-second nightmare in broad daylight - one of those where you find yourself naked in the middle of the street reaching out for discarded newspapers to cover yourself while the passers by seem oblivious of your nudity. I was reassured by looking more closely and finding that those were definitely not my breasts and by my quick reasoning that my carefully curated ex-boyfriends are such honorable souls that they wouldn't resort to that sort of extreme revenge - had I ever grieved them. Once in a while I get twitter notifications of something cultural going on in Portugal where my homonym is said to be presenting a new piece of work somewhere and for a fraction of a second I panic as if I had deadline to come up with a choreography and had forgotten all about it. I hate her.

*****

Today is the anniversary of the death of Freddy Mercury. This is definitely silly: Freddy and Nureyev were the only two celebrities for whose death an embarrassed tear escaped my eye. What can I say, two gay men shaped my childhood aesthetics. I would listen to Queen albums nonstop as soon as I found out how the record player worked and I also wanted to be a ballerina like every other girl in the early 80's. Except that I wished I had been born a man to be able to do what Nureyev did. Also, he had those neo-assyrian legs.

Which brings me to my guide for identifying the author of any early Queen song using the album Jazz. Later Queen is a bit more complex because they all got better.

- If it's camp (Jealousy), operatic(Mustapha) or upbeat (Don't stop me now), chances are it's Freddy's. If it sounds silly it's Freddy's and it's because there's some sexual innuendo, bitchy subtext or gay slang reference, eg Bicycle Race for bisexuality.
- If it sounds american (Fat Bottomed Girls, Dreamer's Ball) or is heavy on the guitar side and fast paced (Dead on Time), chances are it's Brian May's.
- If it is a standard subpar rock n' roll song (More of that Jazz) or features somebody singing over drums only and sparse guitar riffs (Fun it) chances are it's Roger Taylor's.
- If it sounds like a sentimental song Freddy could have authored but it's not camp or complex enough (In only seven days) or if it sounds like a nice rock n' roll song sometimes a bit on the hard rock side (If you can't beat them), chances are it's John Deacon's.

The conclusions can be extrapolated to any other albums. Take "A Night at the Opera":

- Death on Two legs: bitchy subtext: Freddy's.
- Lazying on a Sunday afternoon. Camp, camp, camp. Freddy's.
- I'm in love with my car. Although it's silly, it's also a subpar rock song. Taylor's.
- You're my best friend. Sentimental but not complex enough. Electric piano makes it not camp. Deacon's.
- '39. Sounds american folksy. May's.
- Sweet lady. Lots of guitar and fast paced. May's.
- Seaside Rendez-vous. Camp, camp, camp. Freddy's.
- The Prophet's Song. It's just weird. Doesn't matter who wrote it. I want to forget it.
- Love of my Life. Sentimental. Could be John Deacon's but it's too good. The harp gives it a camp flavor. Freddy's.
- Good Company. A banjo? It's May's.
- Bohemian Rhapsody. Operatic. Freddy's.
- God Save the Queen. It's like Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner and it's all about the guitar. It's May's.

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November 19, 2010

Pinorama, Assyrian bliss, etc.

I've been reading Giuseppe (Pino) Orioli's Adventures of a Bookseller and Pinorman, a memoir by Richard Aldington of his times with Pino Orioli and Norman Douglas. It's been immensely entertaining - even though I had a goal in mind related to a "sub plot" in a research I was doing and of which I hope to write more about in the future. Orioli's memoirs - edited/censured by Douglas some say - are filled with those vitriolic jibes, stereotypically gay at times, that turn any memoir into an airing of dirty laundry.

(Orioli is probably better known for being the first publisher of Lady Chatterley's Lover.)
*****

This was before I started my Faulkner: Light in August. It wasn't going badly until I got sidetracked by an acquisition at a London antiquarian books fair: Layard's accounts of his discoveries at Nineveh. It's so exciting, such a page turner, I can't put it down. Layard wins my heart whenever he quotes passages from the Bible or Herodotus that match the things he's discovering, even though he downplays how thrilling it must have been to find these biblical sites.

I am continuously enthralled as I read it especially as I am an odd British Museum visitor in that I tend to ignore the Egyptian and the Parthenon sections and go directly into Assyria. I am in such awe of Layard's descriptions that I am now fantasizing about the Greeks getting their friezes back so the BM has space to show the Assyrian wall reliefs properly, in order and as they were found with reconstructions, drawings, ...the works. Transformation of the Parthenon galleries into a mock Nineveh/Nimrud - that's my dream. It's time for a Mesopotamian revival.

This also means I am looking forward to reading the newly published The Mythology of Kingship in Neo-Assyrian Art by Mehmet-Ali Ataç...

Assyrian soldier using an inflated animal skin as a floating device.

*****

I will go back to Faulkner shortly but I'm at a point where I don't appreciate the prose enough to care what happens to Christmas. Paradoxically, I think I need to read more non-fiction for pleasure and less fiction for education. I drudged through Henry James's Portrait of a Lady before all this. Periodically I go for James. And periodically I am reminded how I can't see the point of the plots and get tired of the pretentious, meandering, long descriptions and digressions. Trying - unsuccessfully, it seems to me - to be George Eliot. Poor man's Middlemarch.

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November 12, 2010

La Bovary

I've been feeling totally mystified by the hype around the new Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary. Being a cynic and seeing that many bookshops are now prominently displaying Davis' novels and advertising them as "by the translator of Bovary" while adding praise for that translation made me even more suspicious. I imagined that finding pleasure in reading Flaubert would make you want to read more Flaubert and not the translator (no matter how much of her personal style she put into it or not). Reading that Davis' didn't even like the novel to begin with raised in me that personal aversion for technocrats - I have no ideas supporting my decisions, I just want to do a good job. Maybe, but especially in art, you want some passion. Or I do. The problem is I don't feel the urge to read Davis translation: I've read Bovary both in french and portuguese (a very apt language for translating french into) so I'll go on with my cynical prejudices, I suppose.

And so I come to Julian Barnes' essay in the LRB. There are a great many things I don't like about his writing, but when it comes to discussing Flaubert you have to get out of his way and let him run away with it. He's passionate. And an englishman passionate about french culture is something you don't see everyday. In the essay he proposes a little exercise which I duly completed.

"Take a simple sentence from the first pages of Flaubert’s novel. In his early years, Charles Bovary is allowed by his parents to run wild. He follows the ploughmen, throwing clods of earth at the crows; he minds turkeys and does a little bell-ringing. Flaubert awards such activities a paragraph, and then summarises the consequences of this pre-adolescent life in two short sentences which he pointedly sets out as a separate paragraph: ‘Aussi poussa-t-il comme un chêne. Il acquit de fortes mains, de belles couleurs.’

The meaning is quite clear; there are no hidden traps or false friends. If you want to try putting this into English yourself first, look away now. "

My own version:

"And so he throve like an oak. He developed strong hands, handsome colors."

Thrive because plain grow is not commensurate with the strength and volume of an oak tree. Developed because we're talking about growing and "acquiring" has too much of a monetary or value connotation for me that the french version doesn't. I suppose I mean that I don't see the verb acquire that often in referring to a personal and physical growth process in english. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention but, alas, that's how little linguistic prejudices develop. Growing strong hands makes me imagine a little hand coming out of a stump and getting bigger. Which is freaky. Handsome because it felt more masculine and healthy - not forgetting that "couleurs" is feminine but that shouldn't really matter. Handsome also because that's how I'd describe the colors of an oak tree. Kept the spliced comma to sound poetic, for it sounds poetic to me in french. Kept the plural of colors because, well, I imagined Flaubert was describing all of Charles' body colors changing in the open air, in the sun: his skin, his hands, his complexion, his hair. Amazing how many personal choices which I can't really defend neutrally go into one single sentence.

Here are the other translations, 125 years worth of them, the last one being Davis'.

1) Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong of hand, fresh of colour.

2) And so he grew like an oak-tree, and acquired a strong pair of hands and a fresh colour.

3) He grew like a young oak-tree. He acquired strong hands and a good colour.

4) He throve like an oak. His hands grew strong and his complexion ruddy.

5) And so he grew up like an oak. He had strong hands, a good colour.

6) And so he grew like an oak. He acquired strong hands, good colour.

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November 08, 2010

Pastiche

Found this at the wonderful blog over at Ptak Science Books:

(Jordi Teixidor in his studio)

Which looked eerily similar to this postcard of Mark Rothko which I happen to look at every day as it's on my fridge door.

I'm guilty of never having heard of Teixidor before but this line from his biography was... unsurprising to say the least.

One of the most important abstract painters of his generation in Spain, Jordi Teixidor identifies with the intentions, strategies and content of the work of Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman.

I don't even know this guy's work and already it feels like a pastiche (he was born in 1941). First impressions and all that.

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November 03, 2010

Whatever happened to modernism?

Apparently not much. If modernism is, for Josipovici, that periodical rupture with tradition in which art and the artist put into question their value and their possibilities or that which refuses to be absorbed either into realism or abstraction, for whichever reasons (individual or collective disenchantment with the world and so on), there's no reason to think modernism ended. Maybe we have to wait another hundred years for the next rupture. As much as I have enjoyed this book (and felt secret relief to find a compelling justification for my own literary preferences, or rather, sensibilities), I still have the feeling Josipovici suffers from that anxiety (or is it wishful thinking?) that you can nudge out of the current society a literary genius in your own lifetime. One that everybody will agree upon and that will match your own personal choice. Mostly, because we should be able to recognize it if we are erudite and cosmopolitan enough. We surely won't be finding the next modernist work in the New York Times top 10 books list. It's more likely that 50 years from now somebody will find an amazing work of literature that some crank self published on lulu.com.

The use of art criticism made by Josipovici was extremely clever; art criticism tends to be more self critical, more meta - the problem of what is art is always there whereas literary critics and authors tend to take for granted what literature is. J. seems to equate art with painting though and the challenges of art these days are way beyond mere painting. So, I'd love to know Josipovici's views on where are the Jacques Rancières and Boris Groys of the literary world. There aren't enough philosophers around, I suppose.

The last pages of the book are mostly rants. I sympathize. They are my rants too. In fact, I recall ranting about the 3 for 2 book promotions on this very blog years ago.

This tendency of ours to think that everything is more evil, more commercial, less literate than it used to be, is obviously a mere error of perception. For example, I was - naively - a bit shocked to find out, while reading a paper for a side project, that Liszt toured Iberia in the 1840's playing on a Boisselot piano and advertising it constantly. Conveniently, the son of the piano maker travelled with him. With the order book ready I suppose.

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October 31, 2010

R says he is the keeper of sanity

I am a big fan of Polly Morgan's work. I first saw her pieces at Haunch of Venison a couple of years ago and, naturally, when I saw last weekend that the same gallery had some of her prints for sale, I asked for prices. I noticed R. looking a bit panic stricken and slowly walking backwards towards the exit while I waited for the attendant to ascertain availability. I figured he wasn't interested in the print as much as I was.

C: So, you don't like it?
R: I like it, I just don't want it hanging in my living room. It's fine in a gallery.
C: But why not?
R: Because it' creepy.
C: Creepy? It's beautiful.
R: There's dead birds heads.
C: Arranged as a bouquet.
R: It's creepy.

C gives what she thinks is a bit of a convincing art spiel, rambling about memento mori, the innovative uses of taxidermy, symbolism, etc.

R: No.

C tries another strategy.

C: But I had this vision of Polly Morgan hanging on the wall next to a poster of Jack Wrangler.
R: Who?
C: Jack Wrangler.
R: Who's that?
C: An iconic gay porn actor from the 70's.
R: Your knowledge of retro gay porn is frigthtening.
C: Anyway. It would make a fantastic statement on the transience of lust and physical beauty.
R: What? No.
C: Come on.
R: No.
C: Ok.

C looks sad and hopes R will fall for the "the lesser of two evils" strategy. He doesn't.

C: What about the Polly Morgan minus Jack Wrangler?
R: I'm not falling for that one.
C: Darn it!

Later.

C: So, if the print featured whole birds rather than just the heads it wouldn't creep you out, would it?
R: That's a good point. No.
C: So, it's the dismemberment that ruins it?
R: Correct.
C: But dead chicken with their heads still on like you see in chinese supermarkets creep you out?
R: It's the heads that do it, severed or not.
C: I should ask Polly Morgan to make one of those with bird's bottoms then.

Much later.

C: Wouldn't having it hanging in your living room and seeing it every day numb your reaction to it?
R: Probably.
C: You'd get used to it and not find it creepy anymore.
R: But guests would be creeped out and I'd have to explain. They'd come in and say "Hey, nice apartment you guys got...", turn around and go "Whoa, what's with the dead birds?"
C: It could be a nice conversation starter.
R: I don't want to spend my life explaining something I don't like to every single guest.

C gives up. But she is still looking for a graphically appealing gay porn poster.

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October 29, 2010

lit-bits

A little note to remind myself of that bit from Woolf's diaries that sent shivers down my spine (ignorant as I was of Eliot's political ideas which tend to be hushed, I found):

Monday, May 30 1938
Tom (TS Eliot) came... very friendly & elaborate description of his triumphal progress through Portugal as Brit. Rep. on some prize giving commission.

This was the Camões prize for foreign literary and scientific works about the country, awarded for the first time in 1937 but only given away in 1938. Yet another piece of totalitarian propaganda - as the main regime strategist put it on his book "Literary Prizes", the portuguese regime's "spiritual politics" aimed at battling every work of art which is ugly, evil, sickly either because of sheer sensuality or satanism. It was awarded to a swiss count - a right wing intellectual who defended authoritarianism, monarchy, nationalism and the Catholic church - Gonzague de Reynold, who wrote a book entitled "Portugal". The bits I've seen are a bit frightening: he thinks Portugal's political model is the right one but the people are weak because they don't exercise enough and because they have been mixed up with exotic races - too many africans were welcomed in the land and Salazar should be careful about preserving the white race. Double shiver. Also, 60% of the population being illiterate was not a problem. The problem would be if they were taught the wrong things. Anyhow, this all sounds terribly familiar and I'm afraid I have a visceral reaction which usually puts a brake on detached analysis so I'll stop.

I wonder if dear old Tom read the book or was just smug about getting invited for a free holiday? He probably did read it as he was also the coordinator for the translation of portuguese propaganda materials into english and of their publishing by Faber. He also suggested that Salazar's collected speeches should be entitled "The Rebirth of a Nation". Even Salazar thought this was too much and it ended up as "Doctrine and Action".

Just in case I follow up on this:

*Gonzague de Reynold's correspondence.

*Article: T. S. Eliot and the Premio Camoes: a brief honeymoon and anointment of Portuguese fascist politics.(Critical essay) Article from: Yeats Eliot Review Article date: June 22, 2009 Author: Silva, Reinaldo

*A Master's Thesis which cite Eliot's involvement in propaganda translation efforts - João Pedro Cotrim

******

I browsed Woolf's 1920's diaries and read that bit - which someone else had mentioned on a comment on this blog - where she says that Ulysses/ Joyce is basically juvenile. But I do have another thing in common with Virginia: we both think he is a good writer but whereas she says to TS Eliot that Joyce is "virile, a he-goat", I more crudely remarked to R. that "Joyce was a horny bastard". We can't all be poets.

******

Philip Forest, Le Siècle des Nuages - Got this book at a wonderful bookshop in Lyon - it just came out. I paged through it and miracle of miracles: it was well written and it sounded Sebaldian - you know, fact and fiction intermingled with erudition. Minus the photos. Very excited about it but postponing pleasure until I have the mind to sit down and read a big chunk of it. Note to self: consider turning to french contemporary literature when everything else fails, although Villa-Matas in spanish is also a good backup plan. Anglo-saxons too concerned exclusively with their pointless navels, Portuguese authors always write the same (serious, deep, sad, allegorical) novel, they're like a collective Paul Auster. I need to learn more languages.

******

Got Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? If nothing else, he mentions some authors I've never read, some literary theorists I've never heard of. And yes, I wonder whatever happened to modernism. Also, very happy to see he mentions Muriel Spark as one of the few modern anglo-saxons and who, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the geniuses this island has produced. Which reminds me I've been meaning to blog about my pet theory regarding "The driver's seat". So brilliant I could reread it again and again.

*******

Other things to follow up on:

Chesterton's rejection of Darwin on humanistics grounds parallels much of the contemporary scientific community rejection of studies on the evolution of the human brain in the last 10k years on fears of racial discrimination. Compare to linguistics taboo about some societies having more complex grammars than others and the study that said that the ancient greeks were color blind.

*******

I'm considering Faulkner.

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October 28, 2010

A Suicidal Writers Literary Tour of Torino

"Turin: Ville belle, alignée, droite, ennuyeuse, stupide;" Gustave Flaubert (Voyage en Italie)

Despite Flaubert, who evidently never tasted agnolotti del plin or set eyes in the da Vinci drawings housed at the Biblioteca Reale, Torino still rests high on my private top cities in Europe list. Another visit, prolonged visit that is - courtesy of french train service strikers - and yet another few days of gastronomical and architectural bliss.

While on vacation, I usually try to squeeze in some detour to see the house of a writer or a town that served as background to a novel - they are often out of the way and serve as an excuse to explore lesser known neighborhoods or regions. It was so with the visit to Rabelais cottage near Tours and Lawrence Durrell's villa in the Languedoc. So, in preparation for the Piedmontese sojourn I ran into an interesting piece of trivia: I found three writers who committed suicide in Torino. All of them in different circumstances and times - Cesare Pavese of barbiturates overdose in 1950, Primo Levi of a fall from a third floor in 1987 and Emilio Salgari from harakiri (no, really) in 1911. And thus the urban hike began.

Hotel Roma, Piazza Carlo Felice. A porticoed piazza, home to some excellent book and sweet shops where not only I found a lovely edition of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia but also replenished my domestic Leone pastilles stock at Confetteria Avvignano.

The first stop was immediately outside the Puorta Nouva train station, in the Piazza Carlo Felice. The Albergho Roma (now upgraded to "Hotel") still exists and it was there, on the second floor, that Pavese took a dose of sleeping pills and finally escaped "this longing for death". His was not a surprising death if you have read his diaries - not only suicide is mentioned and ideated several times, it's drenched with melancholy. Or as someone else described it, it's a portrayal of existential solitude. The diaries have been used in one medical/word analysis study which concluded that

"The proportion of words related to positive emotions and optimism increased over the last year of Pavese's life, and the entries became less complex and more self-oriented.
The results confirm the changes in mood documented in diaries and letters from suicides in previous research."

But there's hardly anything optimistic about his last sentence in that same diary: "All this provokes disgust. Not a word. A gesture. I shan't write anymore".

Urban legend has it that Pavese, while prohibited from publishing his works because of his anti-fascist activities, was for some months teacher of italian to the young Primo Levi in the Liceo d'Azeglio.

Primo Levi's birth and demise place: Corso Re Umberto, 75, a long, elegant street with tall buildings, many in art nouveau style or, as the italians say, stilo Liberty. Famously, on one bench on this avenue, students from the same high school that Levi would attend, formed the Juventus Football Club in 1897.

Primo Levi's case is thornier. Most people wouldn't question the news that an Auschwitz survivor suffering from recurring bouts of depression while being a long term carer for both his elderly mother and mother-in-law took his own life. And yet, despite the coroner's opinion, many doubt the suicide thesis as he left no suicide note and, being a trained chemist, he'd probably find a more interesting way to go than to throw himself down a stairwell. We'll never know. Coincidentally, Primo's homonymous grandfather also took his own life but by jumping out of a window.

Primo Levi recalled how his father would buy him any book he wished as long as it wasn't one of Emilio Salgari's swashbuckling adventures. Well, it isn't exactly highbrow literature, but Sandokan's adventures are great fun. There was a Salgari revival when I was a child and there were a number of TV series and comic books based on his works. At least in Southern Europe.

The yellow building at 215 Corso Casale, South of the river Po, a very distinct setting from the two previous suicide spots. Surely a middle class or worker's neighborhood in the early 1900's. The church of the Madonna del Pilone in the back, probably Salgari's church if he did attend it. A long walk from Piazza Vittorio Veneto, it feels as if Torino ends there; as if Salgari's is the last house before hitting the woods and the hills.

Salgari's harakiri was motivated by the classic reason for suicide. As he put it on the suicide note to his children: "I am a loser". Having his wife committed to an asylum and a father who took his own life probably had something to do with it too. Despite the success of his books, he found himself constantly struggling financially and left a note to his publishers demanding they pay his funeral since they were getting rich at his expense.

Whatever the reasons, Salgari, true to his histrionics and keen interest in all things exotic, walked into the woods near his house and, with a barber's knife, disemboweled himself. Two of his children followed the same path. That of suicide, that is.

*****

While in Torino I read the last volume of Virginia Woolf's diary which ends some weeks before she walked to Southease and drowned herself. I didn't plan it that way, but it ended up being a very appropriate read: fitted the theme, so to speak.

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October 13, 2010

Claudia's world log #34561

I'm off to Torino to lounge around in fin-de-siècle cafés, deeply immersed in Savoyan splendor, and to indulge in Piedmontese cuisine. Then off to the Rhône-Alps for a driving trip around Lyon and Geneva. It will be a peripatetic, extended joint birthday celebration as my own birthday was last week and R's is coming up shortly. I turned 35. I remember turning 30 and being immensely excited about it as if leaving the 20's behind was the equivalent of a coming of age which would give me admittance to a more select member's club. Believe or not, I was right. These have been, despite recent family vissicitudes, some of the happiest, tranquil, studious, loving, wise years of my life.

For the good reason that a librarian bothered to go roam a dusty basement reserve stock to find it for me, I'll be taking volume 5 of Virginia Woolf's diaries on this trip. The woman could write, couldn't she? Damn her and her informal yet exquisitely phrased diary.

*****

Finished Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and am halfway through Origin of Species. The former illuminated the part of my brain that didn't understand faith and the latter made me wish Mendel was born or published earlier to fill in the gaps. Euclid's Elements arrived in the mail and will make for good nerdy entertainment for winter evenings.

R's been reading Chesterton out loud to me. We started out with Father Brown's stories which are always food for theological thought - when they're deeper than mere catholic ranting - but I can now wholeheartedly recommend the overlooked The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond.

*****

My plan to make Seneca achieve world dominance posthumously advances. I peddled - translated, edited, adapted and stealthily sent off, that is - Consolation to Marcia to a grieving friend with highly successful results.

*****

I love that TLS last page Christmas feature where J.C. goes hunting for overlooked authors or books under 5 pounds in London's thrift shops and used book stores. The problem with replicating this project yourself when you're not british is that it's hard to get excited in situ at some parochial author that nobody has heard of and who writes about specific cultural events that are of no consequence to you nor do they evoke any type of nostalgia.

I ended up buying Roy Strong's Feast and Revel's Culture and Cuisine - can't resist gastronomic erudition - at My Back Pages outside Balham station. It seems to be a locals bookshop; lots of people coming in greeting the owner by name and vice versa. I was precariously perched on a high stool trying to read the titles in the theology shelves when a relatively wide man - wide enough to block the way out of the little nook that is the religion section - sternly said to me "You're in my section". And then smiled happily and said: "It's the first time I've seen anyone in my section." I obviously and quickly moved to the adjoining politics nook even though I had not the slightest interest in it. I'm sure he's a lovely person and was happy at finding a like minded soul but as Seinfeld says "Strangers have a bad reputation".

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September 24, 2010

Arundel & more

My uncle is probably the only tourist who leaves London saying the food is marvelous and the city is peaceful. He's obviously spoiled by the treatment provided at this Bloomsbury oasis we call home. He came to visit at the same time as the Pope and so Benedict missed out on seeing us as we were fully booked. We went to Arundel Park where my uncle became the pace maker, leaving us behind and completely out of breath, especially whenever there was a hill at which foot he'd double his speed. We finished the hike 2 hours before we had planned. Not bad for a 67 year old, recently widowed, prostate cancer treatment convalescent uncle.

The highlight of his visit, according to uncle himself, was attending a service at Westminster Abbey. We had good seats in the Quire and the music was excellent. It was his first Evensong and he loved it mostly because he's keen on singing and was impressed he could shake hands with the Canon and an ex-Bishop as we exited. Walks in St. James park and Regent's Canal, strolls in the British Museum galleries, a swim in a Lido, some excellent meals in carefully picked restaurants and the weekend was a success. Not to mention the family memories reminiscing which was my favorite part.

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I have to admit there's hardly any contemporary fiction that I look forward to reading these days but unfortunately I am not totally immune to hype. So I went to the LRB bookshop, picked up Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and sat down. This is hardly a book review for I read the first two pages. He lost me when he said somebody was greener that Greenpeace. Where's Saul Bellow when you need him? He should have been standing behind Franzen whacking him in the head every time he'd go for the facile, mundane comparison. Actually, he lost me by page 2 when he mentioned those times when you didn't feel self-conscious driving a Volvo 240. Or 420. Cars are not my thing. Feeling guilty for driving an expensive, polluting car does not, for the majority of the world, constitute a problem for various reasons other than environmental so I confirmed my suspicions that the reviews which said that Franzen describes contemporary life as it is, tragic realism and whatnot, were risible. This was before I read the TLS review which tries to be gentle but kills it off immediately when it says that quite a lot of the dialogue seems like something out of the flimsiest episodes of Desperate Housewives.

I'm not going to read Freedom. I may be the loser but I suspect that, presently, many an american book - which invariably is about suburban, environmental conscious americans who drive Priuses and shop local but who buy every new useless version of the gadget of the moment while petitioning against council housing in the neighborhood so their property value doesn't sink - is most likely irrelevant.

These same authors tend to be praised by the accurateness of the scientific, technical descriptions which are usually extremely detailed and boring rather than nonchalantly thrown in; authors seem to spend a long time researching and are praised for it rather than for their imaginations or style. I suppose this mirrors the tendency to praise movies with realistic 3D effects. As for me, I love fake scenarios. I love stylized settings. Imagine Casablanca filmed in Technicolor. Imagine The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari filmed in the streets of a real town. It wouldn't work, would it? But if writers insist on being realists, whatever that means, at least they could try to be interesting. Or deep. As in, try some empathy, try to look deeper than appearances, try to find out what are the big questions of our time for yourself rather than learning them through CNN or Wired Magazine.

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September 21, 2010

Also, Autumn is here.

My favorite season.

Ran to the farmer's market to get the first apples. The Red Windsors won the tasting contest.

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Fungi

We went on yet another hike, this time in the New Forest in Hampshire. The english summer being pretty much over, - I'm still astonished there was a summer at all - my butterfly spotting has been replaced by the more autumnal fungi identification. I have signed up for a workshop but until then I'm doing the best I can with the help of Roger Phillips' tome.

Mushrooms are the most exquisite and mysterious creatures. Keeping an eye out for new species to photograph - I'm not into foraging yet - appeals both to this need of classifying the world around you- which in my mind is something very english - and to a child-like enthusiasm for exploration, for digging into leaf litter and touching dead wood with your bare hands. There might be something in it that also appeals to some primeval survival instinct: the identification of the edible. In any case and in short, I get heaps of pleasure from it.

Stomach Fungi or Puffballs - the ones whose spores are contained within the body of the fungus. As they mature, the outer case splits and the spores are released.

A Spiny Puffball - Lycoperdon echinatum.

Polypores - brackets growing on trees with pores and tubes instead of gills.

Dryad's Saddle - Polyporus squamosus.

Bay Polypore - Polyporus durus.

Macrolepiotas - with rings around the stems.

Parasol mushroom - Macrolepiota procera.

Hypholoma - means mushrooms with threads because of the thread-like veil that connects the cap to the stem.

Sulphur Tuft - Hypholoma fasciculare

Tooth fungi or fungi with spines - whose cap undersurfaces are covered by spines or teeth.

Terracotta Hedgehog - Hydnun rufescens.

Agaricus - the field mushrooms, common in the shops.

Meadow or Field Mushroom - Agaricus campestris

Chanterelle mushrooms

Boletus Mushrooms

Orange Oak Bolete - Leccinum quercinum.

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September 08, 2010

Stuff your Dreams

Lately I've been running across people, articles, facebook status and such, partially and incorrectly quoting Shakespeare: "We are the stuff dreams are made of." as if it were an inspirational quote à la Disney or a can-do American motto. Unfortunately, the quote - from Prospero's last speech in the The Tempest - runs as follows:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Or alternatively, Bogart/Sam Spade paraphrasing it rather clumsily at the end of The Maltese Falcon:

Detective Tom Polhaus: [picks up the falcon] Heavy. What is it?
Sam Spade: The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.
Detective Tom Polhaus: Huh?

So, unless you're trying to make a larger point about the transience of life or the futility of human pursuits, lay off it.

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August 23, 2010

Snippets

If one had time to write the whole of one's life thus, bit by bit as a novel, how rewarding this would be. The pleasant parts would be doubly pleasant, the funny parts funnier, and sin and grief would be softened by a light of philosophic consolation.

-- Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

I suppose you can say the same of your own memories, whether you write them down or not.

*******

The Greeks thought of the past as stretching out before them while the future waited behind their backs.

-- David Wheatley, TLS review of the Letters of Louis MacNeice

My first thought was "Silly greeks!" but then I realized they were right. So right.

*******

The highest ideal of a translation from Greek is achieved when the reader flings it impatiently into the fire, and begins patiently to learn the language for himself.

--Philip Vellacott in the introduction to his own translation of the Oresteian trilogy.

Giggle.

*******

Throughout history the domestic pig has been sadly and unjustly neglected, while its more illustrious cousin the wild boar has, since classical times, been revered by warriors, hunters and composers of epic poems.

--Julian Wiseman, A History of the British Pig

Best opening line of a non-fiction book ever.I had to buy it. Got this one at Much Ado Books in Alfriston. With characteristic British dry wit, the customer ahead of me in line said "I almost got that one for myself".

******

The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of gladness, a Gloria in Excelsis that such Good exists;

-- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

The best description I've found of my secular meditations at prayer time whenever I'm attending a service.

*******

Entertained by the Point of View Naming Syndrome: what the English call Peninsular War the Portuguese know as the French Invasions and the Spaniards as the War for the Independence of Spain.

*******

As it was growing dark we passed under one of the massive, bare, and steep hills of granite which are so common in this country. This spot is notorious for having been, for a long time, the residence of some runaway slaves, who, by cultivating a little ground near the top, contrived to eke out a subsistence. At length they were discovered, and a party of soldiers being sent, the whole were seized with the exception of one old woman, who, sooner than again be led into slavery, dashed herself to pieces from the summit of the mountain. In a Roman matron this would have been called the noble love of freedom: in a poor negress it is mere brutal obstinacy.

-- Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle

I read the junior abridged version of this as a child. Lately I've decided I am grown up enough to read the real thing. I am in awe.

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August 16, 2010

Cézanne in Sussex

Some weekends ago, we went on a 2 day hike through Sussex ending up at the seaside. As usual, there were a few cultural/educational stops related to a literary theme - the Bloomsbury group. The sites of minor interest we visited were Berwick Church - decorated mainly by Duncan Grant - and the grave yard at Firle where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant are buried.

Charleston Farm House, the country side seat of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant & Co, is in stark contrast to the Woolf's Monk House. There is a sense of it being a hospitable place, luminous even in the darker rooms and filled with small little personal touches that it almost feels still inhabited. Of course, the hand made decorations - patterns painted on doors, walls and table tops, and even a frescoed bath tub - look like they were made by an eccentric old aunt but it gives it that warming personal touch.

The window of the studio, a beautiful airy room where photography is not allowed. Luckily, they sell postcards of it.

Vanessa Bell's experiments with "modern" art made the conservative in me come out. Her previous paintings were beautiful. If I were to do a memory exercise and try to remember all the paintings I saw hanging on those walls, the first that comes to mind is a small portrait of a man at a piano and the second a still life with what looks like a medicine jar. The pseudo Cézannes and especially Duncan Grant's works (of such uneven quality that you wonder if it was the same person painting all of them), I tried to bury in the deep drawer in the bottom shelf of the cabinet labelled as "You might need it sometime but it's not likely" in my brain.

Speaking of Cézanne, I learned the most entertaining anecdote regarding the Bloomsbury Group, a hedge and a Cézanne Painting. Keynes held a high position in the Treasury and Duncan Grant convinced him to raise government money to buy some masterpieces which were going to be auctioned in France. Keynes and the Director of the National Gallery went to secure some of the works for the nation but the latter couldn't be persuaded to buy a Cézanne still life so Keynes bought it for himself. Arriving in England, Keynes took a lift from a civil service colleague who dropped him in the middle of the road, in front of the path that leads to Charleston Farm House. As he was carrying too much luggage and couldn't manage it all by himself, he left the Cézanne painting sitting on the hedge and carried his cases instead. As he arrived and explained what happened, Duncan Grant ran down the path - probably establishing a sprinting record by an English artist - and rescued the first Cézanne to arrive in this island from the inclemency of English weather. Insert hedge fund joke here.

The Cézanne painting was later donated by Keynes to the Fitzwilliam Museum.

End of the hike, the chalky seven sisters covered in fog.

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August 13, 2010

Paço dos Negros

My mother, the portuguese history nerd, made me drive around in the middle of nowhere in Ribatejo (a region North of Lisbon by the side of the river Tagus) until we finally found some obscure ruin that she saw mentioned in a book. It turned out to be quite interesting - and mysterious, given the lack of ready available information about it.

The portico, chapel and water mill that still can be seen are the last vestiges of a royal palace built by King Manuel I in 1512, a second (or third, or fourth) home destined to hunting holidays. The Palace was initially named after the place where it was built - Ribeira de Muge - but around 1685 became known as Paço dos Negros or of the Negroes since the royal servants were mostly black african slaves who eventually mixed with the local population through the centuries. It's sadly neglected - it seems that people live inside it - and one can't help wonder if there have been any proper excavations. There were some holes covered with wood planks but considering there's also a legend that a treasure is buried there, I wouldn't put it past the locals to try to find it. Some informational signs were put up long ago but you can hardly read them anymore, being severely faded courtesy of sun, rain & badly planned signage materials.

My father, the source of anecdotes and gossip that balances my mother's research-like seriousness, remembered that one of my great-grandfathers was from this area. Who knows, there might be a little bit of african slave blood in me.

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August 04, 2010

I'm one aunt short

Less than a year ago, my aunt and uncle were visiting London: their first time ever since their honeymoon in the 70's. My aunt had a nose for food, her beautiful green eyes would sparkle at the sight of a good raclette - cheese being a favorite - and she would lead you through throngs of people in farmer's markets ending up at the stall offering delicacies you wouldn't otherwise have noticed. One evening, my uncle and aunt made a little duet singing french songs and dancing under the rain in deserted London streets leading to St. John's restaurant where she had her first Welsh Rarebit. She told me family stories - how relatives told her she looked like her paternal grandmother, how her uncle went underground during the dictatorship period for opposing the regime and how all her family seemed to plagued by cancer, her twin brother having died 10 years ago at age 50. 9 months later she is dead. A few weeks before she died, despite the morphine and being pretty much paralyzed, she still described to me her hospital meal with delight and engaged in a discussion with a nurse on where to get the best fried squid south of Lisbon. I can't help thinking that the grandchildren who became the centre of her life in these past four years may grow not having memories of their grandmother. My aunt's mother has lived long enough to see her own children die. The unbearable cruelness of all this could only be redeemed if there was a sort of paradise with a 24 hour cheese buffet.

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July 28, 2010

Virginia Woolf and the South Downs

Yet another hike in the countryside made possible by including a visit to Monk's House, Virginia Woolf's last address, in the itinerary- the only way to make me exercise is to stick a nerdy carrot in front of my nose.

Virginia Woolf's writing shed. I will try not use the "room of one's own" cliche.

Inside there was a pot of green ink laying around which was a clever touch. No sign of the board which she would hold in her lap to write on.

Virginia Woolf's ashes are buried under this tree; Bust by Stephen Tomlinson.

After visiting the house - which despite the colorful flower gardens I found rather gloomy - we took the path to the river Ouse nearby where Virginia drowned. There are so many marked trails in the English countryside (thorough signage everywhere, impossible to get lost) we were surprised there isn't a Virginia Woolf Suicidal Trail. Turns out that she took a different path and actually drowned near Southease but seeing that the only lifesaver we saw on our 5 km walk on the river bank was at the end of the path leading from Monk's House, I suspect this must be a popular suicidal spot. Why people choose to end their lives in the same place as a celebrity is something I hope I'll never understand.

Obviously, only after this hike did I find out there is such a book as "From the Lighthouse to Monk's House: a Guide to Virginia Woolf's Literary Landscapes". I found it as I browsed the poetry section at the library. It was misshelved and I didn't even know it existed. Talk about a lucky find.

Nest stop: Charleston House. But this time I have extra info thanks to Katherine Hill-Miller. I will be looking for Keynes cottage too.

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July 21, 2010

Take Off!

Ulysses - Episode 1. If Joyce didn't write so well ("wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide") I wouldn't go further than the first chapter. It's boyish - I get the same reaction from reading Conrad. It's a high brow version of a nerd juvenile male life. I swear I try to read it with 1920's eyes but these boys are so much like any other boys who found out they can use their erudition to mock religion or to make clever Nietzschean jokes (and who have these prejudiced views of what girls are like) that I can't stop rolling my eyes once in a while. In any case, I am disappointed Buck Mulligan wasn't naked under his yellow gown: shaving au naturel on top of a martello tower first thing out of bed, wind engulfing the gown, was the very image I was entertaining in my head. But no, he had to be wearing trousers. I forgot Joyce is still a moralist; otherwise he wouldn't be so keen on smut. Fine continuation of Portrait: anti-british, anti-catholic, and generally bitter Stephen continues his non-adventures.

This chapter has already caused an odd conversation in this household. I was puzzled for a few seconds by one sentence and queried my male guinea pig for confirmation:

C: When you enter the sea does your scrotum tighten?
R: Ooooh yes.
C: Ah.
R: Why?
C: I just read the sentence "The scrotumtightening sea." and let's just say it's something I can't readily grasp the meaning of.

It goes to show what kind of public Joyce had in mind. Those of us who are scrotumless are left wondering.

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The Martello Tower in Sandycove, aerial view

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Oh, and I realized I couldn't care less about how this follows or not the structure of the Odyssey. I'll think about it later.

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July 08, 2010

How odd...

... I hadn't looked into my Google Docs account in ages and I just discovered this discretely hidden in the middle of all the useless files:

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

--Pablo Neruda, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada

Je me rappelle souvent de ce temps quand j'ai visité la maison de Neruda à Valparaiso - La Sebastiana. Ça m'amusait qu'il avait nommé ses maisons d'après des femmes, peut- être des amantes imaginaires. Neruda a aimé plusieurs de femmes; il y avait un temps que je croyait qu'il était un Casanova, qu'il utilisait sa poésie comme une arme de séduction. Mais seulement quelqu'un que a aimé si tant peut écrire des paroles si belles a propos de la perte.

J'ai une toute petite théorie qu'il y a des biographies de certains artistes qui devaient être écrites autour de ses femmes. Chaque chapitre devait avoir par titre le nom d'une femme comme les maison de Neruda. Picasso est le cas le plus évident. Il n'y a pas de période rose ou période bleu chez Picasso. Il y a une période Dora Maar, une période Jacqueline. Woody Allen et la période Diane Keaton, une période Mia Farrow en suite, une période Soon-Yi. Neruda et Matilde, Delia.

Eluard a aimé Gala, Nusch, Dominique. J'ai récemment acheté ses derniers poèmes d'amour. La dernière moitié du livre est lourdement remplie avec des poèmes écrits après la morte de Nusch. Je ne savais pas qu'il était possible d'écrire des vers si tristes. C'est surprenant qu'il n'est pas mort d'amour car je suis sûre que la duprass d'après Vonnegut n'est pas de la fiction du tout.

J'étais si près de toi que j'ai froid près des autres. -- Eluard, Ma Morte Vivante

(some Eluard induced francophilie, I assume)

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July 06, 2010

Against dullness

I think I need to read more W.H. Auden.

Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue,
Which runs as follows:

Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,
Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis
On education,
Thou shalt not worship projects nor
Shalt thou or thine bow down before
Administration.

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.

Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms,
Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose,
Nor, above all, make love to those
Who wash too much.

Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
And take short views.

Extract from Under which Lyre, A Reactionary Tract for the Times

Oh dear, I've broken so many of these. How do you atone at the church of Auden?

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July 05, 2010

A visual guide to the fifth chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Entrance to Trinity College at the en of the 19th century, from the National Archives of Ireland.

The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city's ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his mind downward and while he was striving this way and that to free his feet from the fetters of the reformed conscience he came upon the droll statue of the national poet of Ireland.

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—I don't know if you know where that is—at a hurling match between the Croke's Own Boys and the Fearless Thurles and by God, Stevie, that was the hard fight. My first cousin, Fonsy Davin, was stripped to his buff that day minding cool for the Limericks but he was up with the forwards half the time and shouting like mad. I never will forget that day. One of the Crokes made a woeful wipe at him one time with his caman and I declare to God he was within an aim's ace of getting it at the side of his temple. Oh, honest to God, if the crook of it caught him that time he was done for.

"Each player had a wooden hurley to strike the ball, generally of ash, about three feet long, carefully shaped and smoothed, with the lower end flat and curved. This was called camán [commaun], a diminutive from cam, 'curved': but in old writings we find another name, lorg (i.e. 'staff'), also used. The game was called iomán [immaun], meaning 'driving' or 'urging': but now commonly camán, from the camán or hurley." from a Smaller Social History of Ancient Ireland.

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The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

—When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked.

—From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

—These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.

—If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws.

—Ha!

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A visual guide to the fourth chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The director had begun to speak of the dominican and franciscan orders and of the friendship between saint Thomas and saint Bonaventure. The capuchin dress, he thought, was rather too... Stephen's face gave back the priest's indulgent smile and, not being anxious to give an opinion, he made a slight dubitative movement with his lips. —I believe, continued the director, that there is some talk now among the capuchins themselves of doing away with it and following the example of the other franciscans. —I suppose they would retain it in the cloisters? said Stephen. —O certainly, said the director. For the cloister it is all right but for the street I really think it would be better to do away with it, don't you? —It must be troublesome, I imagine. —Of course it is, of course. Just imagine when I was in Belgium I used to see them out cycling in all kinds of weather with this thing up about their knees! It was really ridiculous. LES JUPES, they call them in Belgium.

*****

A chasuble and a dalmatic from the fascinating Sacristan's Manual. A humeral veil from a catholic supply shop.

He had bent his knee sideways like such a one, he had shaken the thurible only slightly like such a one, his chasuble had swung open like that of such another as he turned to the altar again after having blessed the people. And above all it had pleased him to fill the second place in those dim scenes of his imagining. He shrank from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased him to imagine that all the vague pomp should end in his own person or that the ritual should assign to him so clear and final an office. He longed for the minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle of subdeacon at high mass, to stand aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people, his shoulders covered with a humeral veil, holding the paten within its folds or, when the sacrifice had been accomplished, to stand as deacon in a dalmatic of cloth of gold on the step below the celebrant, his hands joined and his face towards the people, and sing the chant ITE MISSA EST.

A thurible, a chalice and a paten.

*****

Bull island (is an island located in Dublin Bay in Ireland, about 5 km long and 800 m wide, lying roughly parallel to the shore off Clontarf)

From the door of Byron's public-house to the gate of Clontarf Chapel, from the gate of Clontail Chapel to the door of Byron's public-house and then back again to the chapel and then back again to the public-house he had paced slowly at first, planting his steps scrupulously in the spaces of the patchwork of the footpath, then timing their fall to the fall of verses. A full hour had passed since his father had gone in with Dan Crosby, the tutor, to find out for him something about the university. For a full hour he had paced up and down, waiting: but he could wait no longer.

He set off abruptly for the Bull, walking rapidly lest his father's shrill whistle might call him back; and in a few moments he had rounded the curve at the police barrack and was safe.

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A visual guide to the third chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Hell. The fear of it. Catholic guilt, etc.

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July 02, 2010

A visual guide to the second chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Uncle Charles smoked such black twist that at last his nephew suggested to him to enjoy his morning smoke in the little outhouse at the end of the garden.

(Got this image from a tobacco shop. This costs 150 euros! Made for coprosmokingphiliacs with too much pocket change if you ask me.)

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I wanted to find some videos of musicians performing the songs Uncle Charles used to hum in the morning but they all sound like celtic music which causes no-no-no-no-please-no reactions in this household. So here's a link to a wonderful site called Music in the Works of James Joyce.

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Belvedere College, which also still exists.

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A horse drawn tram in Dublin:

It was the last tram. The lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked with the driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. On the empty seats of the tram were scattered a few coloured tickets. No sound of footsteps came up or down the road. No sound broke the peace of the night save when the lank brown horses rubbed their noses together and shook their bells.

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The Mardyke in Cork

The leaves of the trees along the Mardyke were astir and whispering in the sunlight. A team of cricketers passed, agile young men in flannels and blazers, one of them carrying the long green wicket-bag. In a quiet bystreet a German band of five players in faded uniforms and with battered brass instruments was playing to an audience of street arabs and leisurely messenger boys. A maid in a white cap and apron was watering a box of plants on a sill which shone like a slab of limestone in the warm glare. From another window open to the air came the sound of a piano, scale after scale rising into the treble.

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July 01, 2010

A visual guide to the first chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Clongowes school not only still exists but has a James Joyce Library just to prove the point of how ironical life is. Or how the jesuits are such good sports. Or both.

>

Images stolen from here and here.

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"Their master had received his deathwound on the battlefield of Prague far away over the sea. He was standing on the field; his hand was pressed to his side; his face was pale and strange and he wore teh white cloak of a marshal." - Maximilian Ulysses Browne was the ghost of Stephen's febrile delirium.

from Bildarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Wien.

******

I could't find a picture of a pandybat nor any allusion to it other than Joyce's when I came across some text saying he called it a pandybat as a pun with the latin word pendebat (a conjugation of the verb to hang). The correct name for the jesuit corporal punishment device is Ferula, a whale bone covered in leather.

Found a contemporary picture of a "Ferrula" on a S&M products website:

— Lazy idle little loafer! cried the prefect of studies. Broke my glasses! An old schoolboy trick! Out with your hand this moment!

Stephen closed his eyes and held out in the air his trembling hand with the palm upwards. He felt the prefect of studies touch it for a moment at the fingers to straighten it and then the swish of the sleeve of the soutane as the pandybat was lifted to strike. A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears were driven into his eyes.

*****

What people were wearing at the turn of the century Dublin:

From the Clarke Collection at the National Library of Ireland.

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"The game of Conkers is a traditional English game where competitors use nuts from horse chestnut trees with a piece of string tied through them. Players take alternate hits at their opponent's conker and the game is won when one player destroys the other's conker. " says LIFE magazine as a caption to an illustrative photo:

"That was mean for Wells to shoulder him into the square ditch because he would not swap his little snuffbox for Well’s seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty."

*****

Where stood the city of Sybaris?
In Great Greece, near the southern extremity of Italy: its inhabitants were noted for their luxurious and effeminate lives.
How did the Sybarites betray the weakness of their character?
They are said to give marks of distinction to such as excelled in giving magnificent entertainments: they removed from their city those citizens and artisans whose work was noisy; and even the cocks were expelled, lest their shrill cries should disturb the peaceful slumber of the inhabitants.
-- extract from Magnall's questions

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"Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper."

A cachou was a liquorice breath freshener produced by a french pharmacist.

And if you think this is an irrelevant detail, academic papers have been written about it and why it isn't a cashew nut instead.

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June 27, 2010

Claudia's Great Summer Enterprise

Me & Jimmy at tarry-easty, last summer.

It's official, this shall be a Joycean Summer. Everything is (almost) ready. I've got Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hamlet, The Odyssey, will be getting a nice edition of Ulysses, a map of Dublin and also Gifford's Notes. I'm still considering if Campbell's Wings of Art will be post or concomitant reading.

I love Dubliners. I read Portrait many years ago. Read bits of Finnegan's Wake while shaking my head, baffled. I gave a go to Ulysses using a portuguese translation (now THAT was nonsense gibberish) as a teenager. I've listened to an Ulysses audio book while driving 6 years ago. I picked it up and browsed it a few times in bookshops and never felt ready. Here goes.

(this being part of that well-known anti-giving up strategy which consists in committing in public)

*****

Another great enterprise for which I've been sort of preparing for will be to go on a 2 day walk through the South Downs, about 35 km in total. The highlight of the hike will be the Woolf's Monk's house near the river Ouse where Virginia took her own life. Also featuring cute little english towns and cream teas and ploughman's lunches and mysterious looking dark woods and all those things I thought Enid Blyton was making up when I read the Famous Five as a kid in sunny, quasi-desert lands where afternoon meals suffered french influences and the scones I dreamily yearned for were nowhere to be seen. this walk will certainly include a stop at Alfriston to visit Much Ado Books.

Hothouses at Darwin's house. 16 km walk around Downe.

Hugging a beautiful oak tree on the Hever-Chiddingstone-Penshurt-Leigh walk. 16 km.

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June 22, 2010

Catenology

I fell in love with this portrait at the National Gallery; it's almost a "naif" version of a renaissance painting with a limited palette. There's something childish about it that appeals to my motherly instincts. The National Gallery says it's by Vincenzo Catena. When I tried to look up more paintings by him I got confused because they presented such a variety of styles that something had to be wrong. It turns out that there is one good monograph about Catena by Robertson so all my information comes from there. Now I realize nobody knows who Catena is. Or else, comparing with other minor painters who died in obscurity, there is a lot of documentation about his private doings but almost none of his artistic endeavours. To top all that, he is said to have had gone through a lot of phases, mimicking Bellini in his beginnings and ended Titianesque, which further adds to the attribution confusion. As usual, very few paintings are signed. And when you try to figure out why a painting has been attributed to that or other painter you realize that everything seems a little arbitrary and depending on the "feeling" of some experts of the beginning of the 20th century.

For example, the above portrait was bought by the National Gallery at the Hamilton palace sale in 1882. It was lot 344 and was supposed to be a da Vinci. Thanks to Berenson this painting was attributed to Catena later on despite objections by Collins Baker who thought is could be at least a Basaiti (see below). An inventory of the property of the Duke of Hamilton from 1634 probably helped since it included a painting described as "A heade of Catena". And it looks terribly like the portrait of a man as a martyr in the Borromeo Collection:

I've made a picture in my head of this Catena after reading what little there that comes from reliable sources. He was an amateur. He was rich - a trader in spices - and had free time to spare. He convinced Giorgione to let him be his business partner and Giorgione accepted which probably means that the division of labour was something like this: talent lay with Giorgione and the funding with Catena who was allowed to use the studio and have lessons as a sort of voluntary apprentice. He may have been the first person to paint for pleasure. He was querulous and had a weakness for jewelry. He never married and had a live-in boy, Gherardo, to whom he left very little money and an older governess who was a mothering substitute. He was a social butterfly, mixing in with the right humanist circles, in intimate terms with booksellers but not owning one single book. He was a profound admirer of Bellini who he knew personally - having received a painted towel rack as a present from the great master - and desired to be buried side by side with him at SS Giovanni and Paolo in Venice where both lived for, in his mind, he was himself also a great artist. Alas, I have no idea which paintings he did paint or which he merely ruined - he's known to have "restaured" some works by Bellini.

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Basaiti at the National Gallery, fortunately showing once a week in the basement. Good grief.

Some paintings believed to be Catena's have been attributed instead to Basaiti (pupil of Vivarini and "rival" of Bellini) by Berenson and others. I can imagine the experts discussing it: "Not even Catena could paint this badly!". Catena was indeed thought to be a mere copyist of styles - and even compositions - and lacking originality.

And couldn't they get another background at Vivarini's studio rather than that awful green curtain?

Vivarini and Basiati, two versions of Virgin and Child at the National Gallery

This one is at the Museo Correr in Venice and is supposed to be a Basaiti too. Looks more likely than the one at the National Gallery, if you catch my drift. Somebody painted that donor for him, didn't they?

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Fun unexpectedly Catena-related anecdote: the above portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti at the National Gallery was used as evidence for the libel case involving Ruskin and Whistler. The painting belonged to Ruskin and was used by his lawyer to exemplify what "finish" was.

Here's a transcript of the action in the court room:

Examination continued: “Does it show the finish of a complete work of art?”

“Not in any sense whatever. The picture representing a night scene on Battersea Bridge, is good in colour, but bewildering in form; and it has no composition and detail. A day or a day and a half seems a reasonable time within which to paint it. It shows no finish—it is simply a sketch. The nocturne in black and gold has not the merit of the other two pictures, and it would be impossible to call it a serious work of art. Mr. Whistler’s picture is only one of the thousand failures to paint night. The picture is not worth two hundred guineas.”

Mr. Bowen here proposed to ask the witness to look at a picture of Titian, in order to show what finish was.

Mr. Serjeant Parry objected.

Mr. Baron Huddleston: “You will have to prove that it is a Titian.”

Mr. Bowen: “I shall be able to do that.”

Mr. Baron Huddleston: “That can only be by repute. I do not want to raise a laugh, but there is a well-known case of ‘an undoubted’ Titian being purchased with a view to enabling students and others to find out how to produce his wonderful colours. With that object the picture was rubbed down, and they found a red surface, beneath which they thought was the secret, but on continuing the rubbing they discovered a full length portrait of George III. in uniform!”

The witness was then asked to look at the picture, and he said: “It is a portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti, and I believe it is a real Titian. It shows finish. It is a very perfect sample of the highest finish of ancient art. The flesh is perfect, the modelling of the face is round and good. That is an ‘arrangement in flesh and blood!’”

Turns out that same painting was attributed to Catena much later and it's a copy of the Tintoretto at the Doge's Palace which on its turn was supposed to replace a Titian lost in a fire. It belonged to the art dealer with the propitious name of Gutekunst at the time it was donated to the NG.

Titian did paint the same Doge. There's one at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Another workshop of Titian at the Met.

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Spotted this Bellini in the Uffizi which immediately reminded me of my favourite Catena portrait. Legend says it's a self-portrait.

This is also supposed to be a Bellini self-portrait at the Capitolini, in Rome:

Am I the only one to think that something doesn't quite add up?

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I said Catena was convinced of being a great painter because a letter from Marcantonio Michiel from Rome to somebody in Venice mentions that Raphael had died, Michelangelo was ill and that he sends wishes to Catena to take good care of his health since all the great painters are dying. It sounds like a good joke to me.

Catena was a witness at Sebastiano del Piombo's sister's wedding.

The only contemporary description of Catena's paintings is the Anonimo Morelliano which identifies six paintings by him, untraceable to the ones we think he painted:
- an altarpiece with Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene in the Church of Crema;
- in the house of Antonio Pasqualino a half length madonna by Bellini in which Catena painted a blue sky over the original curtain background;
- in the house of Andrea di Odoni, a half-length portrait of Francesco Zio (Odoni's uncle) and another portrait of the same man in three quarter lenght, in arms;
- a portrait of Giovanni Ram and another one of a head of a young Apollo playing pipes, hanging in Ram's house in Venice (we supposedly know what Ram looked like as Titian painted him into a Christening of Christ);

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June 21, 2010

We reenact this little comedy routine over and over: whenever we enter a certain room in the National Gallery in London, R. invariably says in a surprised voice "Look! There's your king!" and I look eagerly to the painting he's pointing at as any other citizen of a lesser-known country in search of a token of national recognition would. Seeing that he's pointing at Philip IV "the chin freak" of Spain, I immediately do my best imitation of that Asterix character that shouted "I have never heard of Alesia! No true Gaul has heard of Alesia!" and with a mock patriotic air I reply: "He is not my king!". Loudly.

Yes, we are nerds.

(As a matter of fact there is a portrait of a Portuguese person in the NG: Damiao de Goes who was probably worth 15 kings)

************

R. spent most of the weekend in Lisbon reading museum flyers and posters in Portuguese and remarking how everything is written in a formal language more suitable for a power point slide presenting a business case. In the moor castle in Sintra an area was off limits because of construction. On the tarpaulin, a sign said something like "In order to increase customer satisfaction and to further the enjoyment of this monument, we are refurbishing this area to provide extra space which will potentially increase the number of activities available". R. says "In the US we'd say We're working on it so you can have more fun!". To prove his observations further, when we arrived at the airport a sign in Portuguese said "The esteemed passengers are required to present their identification documents when boarding their airplane otherwise they won't be allowed on their flight". The english translation underneath said: "No documents - No flight".

********

Trying to make my way through the greek tragedies and accompanying literature. I'm considering a joycean summer - a lot of rereading must be done. Maybe.

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June 17, 2010

More assorted stuff

Thanks to Uncle J, to whom I am indebted for a crash course in Mexican music, I had that etnographically induced pleasure of finding further evidence for my thesis on the similarities of the mexican and portuguese identities. And all that thanks to Amalia Mendoza who sings beautiful songs with titles like "Bitter Christmas", "A train without passengers", "My heart, you failed", "Put the blame on me", "Suffering alone", "Dove without a nest", "You will cry", "You will pay for this" and so on.

I can now successfully conclude that Mexicans and Portuguese share the curse of being the most fatalistic people on earth except that the portuguese see life and destiny as a burden that has to be endured while the mexicans have a much sharper sense of tragedy and refer more often to suicide. Whereas the Portuguese whine, the Mexicans weep.

And that is all for the quick stereotype of the day.

*****

Speaking of Mexico, we watched another great movie entitled "Lake Tahoe" by Fernando Eimbcke, the director of the thoroughly enjoyable "Duck Season". I love deceptively simple movies where nothing much seems to happen but whatever does happen seems to have such an emotional charge that you find yourself trying to put together the pieces of the great puzzle which is somebody else's mind. Very touching. I'm also fond of any work of art on the seemingly absurdity of everyday life following a loved one's death, on how life teaches you about mourning and letting go using small trivial symbolic incidents.

*****

In Wilkie Collins "The Moonstone", Colonel Herncastle is described earlier as a "opium-eater". So when I read that on his deathbed he was penniless because of his "Chemical Investigations" I thought that was a great euphemism for drug addiction. Turns out he was indeed funding investigations in chemistry. Oh well.

*****

One extra benefit of having read War & Peace is that I found a great trick for when I have trouble falling asleep: I try to name the characters by the order they appear in the novel and I never go beyond Anna Pavlovna's soirée.

*****

Had that classic realization that some things never change. I was reading one of those free newspapers on the way to the airport, more specifically one of those miracle life story pieces that become biopics on second rate cable channels: a woman who had been stabbed while pregnant and became paraplegic not only gave birth to that baby but has now given birth to another one despite doctors advising against it. The very british writer started the paragraph with "Mrs. XYZ, a catholic, successfully gave birth to..." in what seemed to me a vague recrimination on these papist anti-contraceptive manias. Or maybe it was because I was reading Villette on that same journey and the constant Bronte's anti-catholic rants stroke a nerve - some misguided loyalty to an institution I don't care much for.

*****

Also thanks to uncle J, I now know the cutest stories from R.'s childhood that will make great blackmail material. (just so you know, I have my eye on a Trollope Palliser novels set which I will gladly accept in exchange for not blogging the piglet story).

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June 04, 2010

More breadth than depth

Tolstoy playing chess.

War & Peace ended up being more entertaining than I previously predicted (although I confess to have skimmed more than a few of the descriptions of battle fields; what can I say? It bores me to death). I realize now the novel is mostly a vehicle for Tolstoy to expound his views on history and faith - none of which I care much for - but the breadth of characters, situations and settings makes it a thoroughly absorbing read. I wish I could read it in the original Russian; would the romantic lives of some characters still strike me as having the emotional depth of adolescence? Would the metaphysical pursuits of the existentially anguished characters seem as vapidly pious? Would Tolstoy's amateur historian claims outrage me as much as they did?

Here are two bits that made me rant for hours (R. nodded as he patiently listened. Or maybe he didn't, which would explain why he looked glassy eyed).

"To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense..."

"When an apple has ripened and falls - why does it fall? (...) The botanist that finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decomposes, and so forth, is just as right and as wrong as the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall."

So, simplistic summary: novel as vehicle to propound historical determinism and the romantic notion of the wisdom of simple folk vs. intellectual spiritual pursuits. Some leader envy; patriotic fluffiness in describing an ineffectual, constantly tearful Tsar; some confusion on micro versus macro actions - are individuals responsible for the course of history in their infinitesimal roles or is it an all-encompassing spiritual force that drives events? God, Natasha is annoying. Bitterness towards organized religion. Too many love at first sight/in a new light occurrences and idealized mates leading to disappointment. The women are either futile, immoral or excessively pious and admired by their faith, beauty or joyful mood. Mood seems to be confused for personality, by the way.

*****

More entertaining national stereotyping (and more ranting against science...):

"A German bases his self-assurance on an abstract idea: science, that is, the supposed knowledge of the absolute truth. A Frenchman's self assurance stems from his belief that he is mentally and physically irresistible to both men and women. And Englishman's self assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do, and that whatever he does as an Englishman is unquestionably correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and others. A Russian is self-assured simply because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe in the possibility of knowing anything fully."

*****

Coming up next: Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, for the sole reason that when it came out in installments by an anonymous author there was speculation it had been written by George Eliot. Can't get a better endorsement than that.

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May 24, 2010

Not much Peace yet

I find myself struggling with War & Peace. I know it's too early in the book to start commenting but the long descriptions of warfare strategy are incomprehensible to me. To this day I still don't understand what a victory in a battle means unless one of the sides has surrendered but it appears to be more complex than that. I don't care enough about military tactics to get excited about it. I find disconcerting the fits of patriotism and leader worship that some characters suffer from time to time ("Rostov... felt an even stronger access of love for his sovereign. He longed to express his love in some way, and knowing that this was impossible, he was ready to weep."). To sum up, so far the reading hasn't been wholly pleasant and it's pretty clear that it's not a novel in the orthodox sense of the word. Oh, and Tolstoy (or the translator, who knows?) talking about "our troops" breaks the spell of the invisible, nationless narrator.

Hat of Napoleon I, seized at Waterloo and now at the German Historical Museum.

Nonetheless, it does offer a glimpse of something I find fascinating which is Napoleon as a cultural product - in the sense that the myths about the man are so abundant that at this point we'll never have much information about him other than what his mesmerizing charisma allowed people to know and what anti-napoleonic propaganda succeeded in turning into beliefs. I've always found extraordinary that remnant of collective memory that still survives in cartoons and movies: whenever you want to portray a lunatic all you have to do is draw a man with a hand inside the front of a jacket.

Asylum Worker #1: Hey, Pierre! Here's another Napoleon.
Asylum Worker #2: That's ze twelveth one today.
[Drags Napoleon away]
(from Bugs Bunny's Napoleon Bunny Part)

I do have a secret pleasure in the less political correct bits, mainly the digressions of the more cosmopolitan superficial characters like Prince Dolgorukov, when he is stereotyping national characters:

"Very sorry you didn't find me in yesterday. I was busy the whole day with the Germans. We went with Weyrother to check the dispositions. And when a German starts being accurate - there's no end to it!"

"My brother knows him; he's dined with him - the present Emperor (Bonaparte) - on more than one occasion in Paris, and he tells me he's never seen a more subtle, cunning diplomat - you know, a combination of French adroitness and Italian theatricality."

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May 13, 2010

In which Claudia indulges in Proustian navel gazing

(I thought I'd take advantage of the so called democracy of content creation and answer the famous "adapted" Proust questionnaire since there is no plausible reason for Vanity Fair to interview me)

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Being able to feel love, tranquility, fortitude in face of unavoidable obstacles, a heart free of resentment.

2. What is your greatest fear?

Clouded judgment. My own, that is.

3. What historical figure do you most identify with?

I know I am responding to a personal questionnaire and publishing it on the internet for everybody to see but identifying with an historical figure would be too presumptuous even for me. Let's just say in my pubescent years I had a liking for Queen Elizabeth I, if you catch my drift.

4. Which living person do you most admire?

Judge Baltazar Garzón for the noble pursuits, Amartya Sen for using his intelligence wisely, Agnès Varda for the aesthetics and irreverence, Sempé for drawing that which I wish I could draw.

5. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

Taking friends and family for granted which results in carelessness in personal relationships. There's that cliche about nurturing relationships as if they were plants and I'm not exactly known for my green thumb. My love is relentless though.

6. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Lack of frankness. Although compulsive liars are a source of endless entertainment.

7. What is your greatest extravagance?

Taking friends and family for granted.

8. On what occasion do you lie?

When there's no hope of improvement by saying the truth.

9. What do you dislike most about your appearance?

I have a love-hate relationship with my ankles. They're too thick and inelegant. High heel shoes with ankle straps help. Nonetheless, I have a secret pride in imagining they're the Darwinian proof of my descending from a long line of strong peasant iberian women accustomed to carrying heavy burdens.

10. When and where were you happiest?

I remember being happier than usual in San Francisco in August 2005. I knew exactly what this verse meant when I ran into it on one of the piers.

These days it's usually on sunny days in Lisbon when I'm with all the people I love most in the world.

11. If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?

Other than the trait I most deplore and since I made peace with my ankles? I'd be more daring.

12. If you could change one thing about your family what would it be?

I wish I had even more of it.

13. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Taming my impatience even though I'm not sure the merit is wholly mine.

14. If you died and came back as a person or a thing what do you think it would be?

A marble statue on top of a mausoleum with a jaw dropping in perpetual amazement that death wasn't the end.

15. What is your most treasured possession?

Worthless childhood mementos stored in a box as a monument to that time when I was attached to symbolic objects. These days, I can't thing of anything I'd regret too much losing.

16. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Hopelessness.

17. Who are your heroes in real life?

Gandhi. John Stuart Mill. Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Ada Lovelace and all the women who wouldn't stay put.

What are your favorite names?

Abigail, Diego.

18. What is it that you most dislike?

Being subject to arbitrary decisions.

19. How would you like to die?

In my sleep, of old age and - selfish bit here - before my husband. Considering almost all his grandparents died in their 90's and his great grandfather way into his hundreds I might be granted that.

20. What is your motto?

Like the Woody Allen character, I like "Whatever works" which could sound a bit mercenary at first but I interpret it as an unprejudiced willingness to try different solutions rather than submit to the status quo. If the status quo isn't working.

Or Sarah Vowell's "It could be worse".

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May 05, 2010

La Varda

I had somehow mixed feelings when R. announced he had booked tickets for a screening of a Agnès Varda movie followed by a Q&A avec elle-même. Living in London opens up the doors to seeing live all these people I admire and yet... Paul Auster talked endlessly about watching baseball on TV, Almodóvar about his vision for the clothes and hair styles in his movies...and I yawned all the way through a couple more Artistes and then gave up.

Varda was different. She is actually interesting - in the crazy artist sort of way. Not just in the movies. And she is now an old lady - everybody knows that the elder, not the teenagers, are the real rebels. Teenagers want to be different from the previous generations but end up being like everybody else and old people have finally shaken off the bonds of social pressure and do as they like.

First she confirmed R.'s theory that she had chosen to do the Q&A after the screening of a lesser known movie to make people watch it. Sure enough, she confirmed "Otherwise, everybody just watches Cleo and Vagabonde and end up not knowing anything about my other movies." and then proceeded to ask for a show of hands. Five people at the NFT1 of the BFI had seen "Jane B by Agnès V". Nobody had seen the short "Sept pièces..." that we were also about to watch.

In the middle of all this, her cellphone rings, she picks it up and says "I can't speak right now, I'm busy." as if she was bagging her groceries in the supermarket rather than presenting a movie. Hilarity ensued.

I loved Jane B not just because Birkin is one of those mythological women of my childhood but I just can't resist any movie with Doors on the soundtrack and with a special appearance by Gainsbourg (there's something about ugly mean bastards that makes them so attractive). And Varda always astounds me for her capacity to create whimsical poetry through images.

The Q&A could have gone forever. She was chatty. Somebody asked how did the Gainsbourg participation came about and she then described how he arrived late to shoot the scene and asked for pastis, drinking the whole bottle without diluting it. She also ranted a bit about how Birkin let him photograph her naked and handcuffed to a radiator; you could tell her feminism was wrestling withe her liberal side but her interviewer calmed her down by saying something like "It's some men's idea of love" and she replied "yes, I suppose it is". She revealed she wanted to make a mock-obituary movie of Jane Birkin: excerpts of interviews with her intercalated with some of her best scenes from movies - except they were all fictional.

The further downside of these Q&A's - other than when the auteur is boring - is when what I call "the creative process people" show up and start asking things like do you write by hand or use a laptop, what's the brand of your pen, do you write at home or do you have an office... as if talent is a magical formula you can emulate with the right ingredients. The good news is that these people weren't around and so the questions ended up being a gateway to Varda's ramblings. I'm not even sure she actually answered anything objectively. It was wonderful.

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May 03, 2010

Overview of Claudia's inner and somewhat outer life in the past month (cont'd)

A nice surprise was to arrive in Rome after lunch and pretty much walk in into the Musei Vaticani. No lines, even though there were some scattered crowds inside. I was pretty stunned considering my last visit consisted of a 3 hour wait in a line that almost reached St Peter's followed by a no stops allowed perambulation inside, still in line the whole time. And the Raphael rooms were now open to the public unlike the previous visit when they were being restored.

The next best thing was taking our binoculars into the Sistine Chapel and being the subject of every other tourist's envy. Ha! Never forget to take binoculars when visiting churches with ceilings covered in frescoes! Since the Sistine Chapel image rights are the property of a Japanese corporation, you can't take pictures inside. And there are some really stern guards there that almost whack your head off if you try anything funny. So, third best thing was being subject to an aggressive warning followed by an embarrassed apology on two different occasions from two guards who mistook the binoculars for a camera.

Still took a walk into St Peter's aka church of cheeze. Hate all that colored marble and overdone baroque tombs.

*****

Speaking of hates, I am now a quick identifier of paintings by Barocci. I hate his paintings with a passion. I always complained about him at the National Gallery in London - it's hanging in the same room as Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks, for crying out loud - and then ran into him everywhere, even at the Prado where the most odious portrait of children with rosy cheeks was hanging.

(detail from the painting in the NG)

God, I hate it. It's just something you stick on cheap christmas cards or cheap chocolate boxes.

*****

The saga of reading thick 19th century english novels continues - Jane Eyre and Silas Marner in the waiting list. Can't live without them - even Austen! which I couldn't stand years ago. Trollope is still my favourite - slowly making it through the Barsetshire Chronicles and loving it. Still puzzled by the economics in them, though. What does "She has a thousand pounds a year", "Lord X had 14 thousand pounds a year" and all that exactly means? There was no inflation? Their incomes were steady even though they seemed to depend on rents paid on their property? Agricultural prices had no fluctuations? In what did they invest to get "3% interest a year"? Anyhow, something to look up but not spend too much time on.

******

Up next: internationalization with the same length requirements. Flirting with a lovely edition of War & Peace. Looks like a good translation too since the original bits in french are still in french. Can't understand why you'd translate them but it seems to be the case in most editions I've seen.

******

Flirting with the Seidensticker translation of Tale of Genji.

******

Having a hard time contemplating the idea of going back to reading any novel shorter than 300 pages. Nabokov will do the trick. Saving Ada for such an occasion.

******

Wanted to make this blog more of a commonplace book kinda thing. Will try.

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Overview of Claudia's inner and somewhat outer life in the past month

Just before heading to Tuscany, we visited the london zoo which has made me coin the expression "paranoid as a meerkat". Not even in a glass cage do they stop looking stressed out and constantly looking for predators. They must have short lives and suffer frequent nervous breakdowns.

*****

At the airport, on the way to Pisa, there was a man reading a book entitled "Consciousness Regained" and at his feet, inside a transparent shopping bag, there was the biggest bottle of cognac I've ever seen. Should have taken a picture. It was a real life Sempé cartoon.

*****

Don't let the guidebooks fool you. The best thing ever in Florence is the convent in San Marco. Dozens of monk's cells and each one decorated with its own Fra Angelico fresco. Amazing.

(stolen from the Web Gallery of Art as photos aren't allowed which is very smart otherwise I'd still be there trying to get the best angles)

Second best thing was being able to pry into the private quarters of Bernard Berenson (responsible for authenticating pretty much every renaissance painting hanging in your museum of choice) at Villa i Tatti and having the most highbrow, instructive guided tour of my life - Villa i Tatti is now a little haven for post-doctoral renaissance research.

Third best thing were the marble inlays at Siena's cathedral made by an ancestor of Hergé. Renaissance ligne claire.

*****

Oh my God, Sagrantino wine.

*****

(graffiti in Florence: "Don't believe in television. Inform yourself.")

Italian TV has to be one of the worst in the world. Hours and hours of mind numbing football commentary, half naked women, teenagers burping old italian classic songs, you name it when it comes to juvenile, crass, sexist entertainment. A volcano had gone off disrupting world travel and their opening news was some provincial incident, for God's sake! Not to mention how tired I get every single time I go there either because I spend my time either trying to avoid being scammed or because I want to grab the people who put up direction signs and squeeze their necks. I have a pet theory that states that the road signs in Italy are put up by blind people. Because all the others that can see and understand what road signs are for have immigrated to Germany.

With that in mind and after finding surprising embarrassing bits in some well regarded paintings and frescoes, I want to put forward the thesis that renaissance painters were in their most part crass italian men with a knack for drawing.

(detail from the fresco in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, by Vasari and helpers)

(detail from Piero della Francesca's fresco in San Francesco's church in Arezzo, way up there, seen using binoculars)

I can almost see Piero sitting in mass giggling at the priest conducting mass facing a peeking scrotum.

I kept remembering Mary Beard's rant about how lots of scholars interpret the phallic engravings in Pompeiian walls as fertility signs or signs pointing to the brothels. Quoting from memory she basically responds to that with "these romans were just crass and juvenile". I'll add to that: only if you've never been to Italy and haven't seen the profusion of phallic graffiti everywhere would you have any romantic notions about it. Some things never change.

*****

It's the third time this has happened to me: again, I helped a woman who was locked in a museum toilet. She had been there a while and everybody was ignoring her desperate knocking on the cubicle door. The previous tourist that didn't ignore her, informed the italian security guard in english who nodded and, in turn, ignored the tourist. I had to resort to italian vocabulary I didn't even know I had to pass the message across and almost had to fetch the lady that had the spare keys myself. Not to mention that the security guard initial reaction was "What? How stupid can you be to let something like that happen to you?" and took a good 5 minutes to figure out what to do next. I ended up spending 25 minutes more in the Galleria dell'Accademia than I intended.

******

A serendipitous volcano eruption extended our vacation into Rome to get on a flight to Madrid to get on a flight to Lisbon and wait it out there rent-free :)

Driving in Rome without a map is not for the faint of heart but I need not go into that rant again. Madrid was amazing: we had totally forgotten about the temporary exhibition in the Prado where they put side by side Las Meninas and Singer Sargent's portrait of Boit's daughters. It was such a joy to be able to see it.

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April 06, 2010

titbits

We were going by the news stand and the Daily Mail had on its front page something like "EXPOSED: Hospital's employees are nationals of more than 70 countries". We looked at each other and said "That's great!". I guess we're not the Daily Mail target audience.

*******

March was Shakespeare Month. In this household at least. We went to see 4 Shakespeare plays of which 1 was great, 1 was horrible, 1 was awkward, 1 was entertaining. Interestingly enough, the bad ones were the most enjoyable since it made us think harder about what was wrong with them and led to nerdy research in academic papers. The play classified as "great" was Richard III at Riverside Studios, a minimalist production so well done and so well acted but which suffered from the fundamental flaw of omitting my favourite scene. How can you cut out the Strawberries from Holborn bit!? I have a special affection for St Etheldreda's Church in Ely Place - the last standing building of the property of the Bishops of Ely - from whose gardens the said strawberries were supposed to come from.

*******

Spent Easter in Canterbury, hugging big trees among other things. I lie. The main reason was to attend Easter mass at the Cathedral and listen to the Archbishop's Sermon - I have a weak spot for the Church of England. The sermon was a bit disappointing. Jesus had risen - shouldn't it be a moment of joy? - and all the Archbishop said sounded terribly bitter (reading the transcript doesn't sound half as bad; Rowan seemed a bit annoyed and gave his lines with a piercing irony). Quoting Monty Python didn't save it.

I was expecting something happy and joyful... oh well. Instead, motivated by some scandal about a nurse being barred from wearing her crucifix at work, I got myself on the listening end of a rant about how christians in England shouldn't victimize themselves and remember that there are people around the world actually being violently persecuted by their christianity so it's unjust to complain. Then he proceeded to decide that the "attacks" on christians in this country were because bureaucrats feared the Church of England. And then reminded everybody that also Jesus Christ was persecuted by the bureaucrats of his time. Therefore defeating the whole initial message of "Don't victimize yourselves" because if comparing yourself to a crucified Christ isn't victimizing, I don't know what is. I even thought it was a sin. But that might just be my catholic background.

Then more ranting about how the political power wanted to render the cross invisible and, meanwhile, I was thinking to myself what a paradoxical thing to say when you're talking from the pulpit from one of the biggest cathedrals in the country. Were we in a secret basement or behind a wall (like the synagogues in Portugal) I'd understand. But this? Nope.

This was one of those times when I felt there should be a Q&A slot at the end of the sermon. But most religions aren't that democratic, not even the anglicans for all their liberality.

******

I'm in awe of George Eliot. Middlemarch just entered my top 10 novels list. She writes with such intelligence and brilliancy, her characters are so complex, her philosophical musings are so interesting that I wish she was alive so I could hug her as if she were a big tree. Now all slim volumes pale in comparison to that big tome that made my arms hurt. It seems now impossible that a novelist can create a credible world in just 100 pages. It's a passing whim, I'm saving slimmer Nabokov's Ada for another literary pleasure induced coma. It may be a passing whim but now I'm reading bulky Vanity fair so this "passing" might be a bit long. I'm not very impressed so far; for satire I still love Trollope and Thackeray seems a bit too quick in passing judgement, not to mention that the use of an anti-heroine always annoys me - why, oh why, do women have to be portrayed as either saints or devils? But it's so long that it feels like there might be a whole world in there that I haven't met yet.

******

Carefully planned trip coming up! Looking forward to an immersion in Renaissance art and italian countryside strolling.

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March 22, 2010

I just realized I have to go vote for the London local elections in May. Not that I have any doubts who I'm going to vote for but I thought I'd take a look around the three main parties to see what are they up to and got sucked into the general election campaign.

I visited the Conservatives' web site and found out that Cameron wants to fight vested interests which made me think that the vested interests will have nobody to vote for in that case. I have a weak spot for Cameron because I keep reading these headlines that make him sound like a liberal hero. "Cameron wants to stop inequalities", "Cameron says kids in school should be taught to respect gay people", "Cameron says that if it wasn't for the NHS his son would have been long dead", etc, etc. What can I say? He makes me feel slightly less pessimistic about the likely event of a Tory government. "Fighting vested interests" is the type of thing the communist party back in Portugal keeps as they pet slogan. Weird.

Although the parties have a button on their homepage to donate money, Labour is the most annoying. There's a little gizmo on their website with testimonies of people who have donated money. A gentleman says "The Labour Party is the best means we have of trying to build and maintain a better world.". That's what I call insularity. I'm used to americans thinking of themselves as "the world" but never heard this one before.
And gets weirder and weirder: there's a "parents for labour" who fear for the lives of their kiddies because the tory monsters will eat them for breakfast; in the "values we stand for" there's stuff like strong community, decency and reward for hard work. Yikes. These sound a lot like the stuff the far right wing party in Portugal defends. Weird.

The Lib Dems have the advantage of being able to sum their mission into a paragraph without bullets. Feels very professional and I can't personally find fault in it. It's probably the only statement of intentions of the three parties that matches my expectations. The only unfortunate random thing is that the top news on the website was that some lib dem said that the government has to honour the promise of cheap tickets for the olympics in 2012. This makes me feel at home. Sports as a major concern is something very Portuguese.

Usually, I just have to take a look at the crime and justice policies to know who do I support. In this case they're all pretty horrible:

Conservatives: "Under Labour, the privacy of convicted criminals, including dangerous fugitives, has
been prioritised over public protection. We will end the confusion over criminals’ anonymity and give police the power to identify offenders in order to protect the public and prevent crime." aka come out with your pitchforks, we're gonna have a fine lynching this afternoon.

Labour: "Continuing to introduce tough and effective sentences for the guilty alongside action to tackle re-offending, focussing on education and work and ending the early release scheme through provision of new prison places as part of the largest ever building programme." aka let's compete with the USA in % of population behind bars.

Lib Dems: "The best way to cut crime is as simple as it sounds – to catch the people who
commit crime and set them on the straight and narrow. Labour and the Conservatives prefer instead to posture on penalties, but that’s not much of a deterrent if there’s little chance you’ll be caught. That is why the Liberal Democrats are committing at this election to putting more police out on the streets, to catch criminals." aka get off your fat asses and go catch the petty criminals running around the streets while their bosses sit at home and then hmmm set them on the straight and narrow. Since penalties aren't an option I suppose this means walking the plank.

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March 16, 2010

1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2nd Gent. Ay, truly: but I think it is the world
                That brings the iron.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

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March 09, 2010

En Amsterdam

I hadn't seen V. in almost three years and, remembering a shared fondness for the same authors - all the more exciting as we come from such different countries and backgrounds - I asked what was he reading these days. He replied "Have you heard of this old english novel called Middlemarch?". Had I heard of it!? I'm reading it! What's more, it turns out we are almost on the same page. Obviously we proceeded to discuss - almost felt like gossiping - what the heck was going through Dorothea's mind to marry that boring old man while admitting we were both charmed by Lydgate. It was like a book club for two.

*****

Being with M. is always such a treat as we had that friendship version of a coup de foudre happen to us years ago. This time there was the added benefit of having her take us to the restaurant where I have had the best italian food outside Italy so far.

(cartoon by Peter Van Straaten for Lekker Amsterdam, a foodie guide written by Johannes Van Dam). The cartoonist wasn't there us but he correctly portrayed our post-prandial bliss - except that R. wasn't wearing a suit and coffee was not on the house.

We had a fabulous meal at L'Angoletto - a place not trying to look posh and closed on saturdays for dinner which is always a good sign - and if it wasn't for the fact that the kitchen is in the middle of the restaurant and so you literally can see what's cooking, I'd swear there was an old italian nonna in there dishing out this amazingly flavourful home cooked food. Turns out the cook is a Claudio from Milano. The man is a genius. And, like all geniuses he seems a bit temperamental and was a bit puzzled and looked around the room suspiciously when the waitress told him a client had asked which region in Italy was he from (that would have been me). For as long as I live I will not forget those perfectly fried zucchini flowers stuffed with mozzarella, nor the most amazing osso bucco that has ever touched these tastebuds.





*****


At the sauna Deco, italian men were whispering about how odd to see women undress in the co-ed locker room and expressing a tiny bit of disgust at the situation. Since I was the only woman there I might as well have embarrassed them by saying "Some of us understand Italian" but we were all about to be sitting together naked in dark hot room and I though the better of it. Also, the vision of 5 semi-naked muscled italian men chatting in a locker room seemed too much like the beginning of a porn gay movie and I was expecting the cheesy muzak to start at any moment. Despite the odd start, Deco turned out to be a little slice of paradise tucked away in a non-descript house by the side of an Amsterdam canal and we envied the people who remembered to bring books and were lazily reading in the beautiful (art deco) resting areas. We now are perfectly convinced that spending afternoons at Deco followed by substantial dinners at L'Angoletto would make the perfect holidays.

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March 04, 2010

If I didn't have the attention span of a butterfly...

...I'd be writing some thesis on how the narco bosses in Mexico (and Colombia in the old days) resemble to a certain extent the old italian families of the Medici or the Sforzas. They hold court, they have intestine wars as well as wars with their rivals for territory; their business ethics aren't the most straightforward; they patronize architects and musicians and hold grand feasts. Ever since my kitsch hero singer Paquita del Barrio said that the narcos were classy people, I've been mulling this theory over. I'd name it "Escobares, Beltráns & Co: the kitsch Medicis". I suppose the right word for kitsch in the mexican context would be Naco (slang for "tacky") but Naco Narco sounds redundant both in meaning and in sound.

Here's Paquita singing her greatest success "Rata de Dos Patas" ("Two legged Rat"). She's known for the line "Me estás oyendo inútil?" ("Are you paying attention, idiot?) which she throws generously at male members of the audience.

Not only do the narcos sponsor mexican music - a number of bands have been arrested for being associated with the narcos - there's even a musical style called the narcocorrido.

Narcocorrido lyrics refer to particular events and include real dates and places. The lyrics tend to speak approvingly of illegal criminal activities such as murder, racketeering, extortion, drug smuggling, illegal immigration, and sometimes political protest due to government corruption. - from the wikipedia entry.

Here's a clip for a narcocorrido. Gory stuff, severed heads and corpses, not for the squirmish. The lyrics are fascinating: they are basically laying down the rules on how to deal with the Familia Michoacana (one of the most powerful cartels) and they say how they have the whole area of Uruapan under their eye and make a list of the types of guns they own. They also boast of bringing down military planes. I suppose all this singing about the glories of your patrons is a bit troubadorish.

And as if that wasn't enough, there's a mexican painter and restorer called José Espinoza who is known as the "Decorator for the Narcos". He paints frescos in walls and ceilings in the narco mansions. No, really.

The narcos even have a patron saint, a Sinaloan bandit called Jesús Malverde just like the Medicis had Saint Cosmas and Damian.

The existence of Malverde a.k.a. 'El Rey Guei de Sinaloa' is not historically verified, but according to local legends he was a bandit killed by the authorities on May 3 1909. Accounts of his life vary – sometimes he was a railway worker, while others claim he was a construction worker. There is also no agreement on the way he died, being variously hanged or shot. Moreover, the tree where he was hanged dried and never was green again.
Since Malverde's death, he has earned a Robin Hood-type image, making him popular among Sinaloa's poor highland residents. The outlaw image has caused him to be adopted as the "patron saint" of the region's illegal drug trade, and the press have thus dubbed him "the narco-saint." -- more on wikipedia and some great pictures of the shrine here.

The Medici had a menagerie which at one point featured a giraffe and Escobar had a private zoo which has been abandoned since his murder and that recently made the headlines as one of his hippopotamus escaped and was shot down by the army.

What I didn’t know is that the Colombian drug lord, one of the richest men on earth then, had a hacienda (ranch) where he had kept many exotic wild animals shipped in from different parts of this earth.
Of these were four hippos which Escobar had bought from New Orleans in the 80s. When Escobar was gunned down in 1993, the Colombian authorities who took over the ranch did not know what to do with the hippos and so left them to roam the 20 km² Hacienda Napoles (Naples Estate).
In June 2009, three of the now more than 20 hippos escaped the Hacienda and were said to be roaming in the neighbourhood, destroying crops and threatening humans and their livestock. The Colombian Authorities after several complaints by residents and recommendation by security people, gave a go ahead for the hunting and killing these three ‘dangerous’ hippos. -- from here.

The dead Escobar hippo.

Obviously, with power comes the need to show it also in the small things so ostentation also comes under the guises of gold and silver plated machine guns which can be seen at the Museum of Narco trafficking in Mexico City (which is on my must-see list for whenever I go back). So even goldsmiths are covered by this patronage.

When narcos die, their families build gigantic mausoleums which sometimes have air conditioned and are filled with a regular supply of tequila and tecate beer.

A cemetery in Culiácan, Sinaloa.

Not surprisingly, José Espinoza also decorates mausoleums:

Espinoza was hired to decorate his first mausoleum nearly 20 years ago. It was erected for a woman caught between a trafficker husband and a trafficker lover. She and her two young children were slain in a gruesome rivalry between the men. A portrait of the smiling mother and children floats on the ceiling "as if going off to heaven," Espinoza says.

He rationalizes this work, saying he paints for the survivors, for bereaved families who may not have been involved in the dirty dealings of the deceased. "It helps them in their communion with God. It helps them in their grief."

Given his clientele, it is no surprise that the Mexican army has raided Espinoza's studios. But they went away empty-handed.

"I am an artist," Espinoza says.

"People don't go to museums anymore, no one has time for contemplation. So at least, as they lie in their Jacuzzis, or climb their staircases, they can contemplate a beautiful work of art."

To sum up, let's just say that I believe there's more than enough material for UNAM to start an Ma in Narco Studies.

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February 24, 2010

Found it

My new favourite spot in London: the Thomas Hardy tree in Old St. Pancras Churchyard. Combining my love for cemeteries, old trees and literature.

Thomas Hardy was given the task of supervising the removal of tombs in 1865 for the construction of a raliwaly line while working as an apprentice to an architect. The tombstones were all placed around this ash tree which has been growing since making it look like a land art project of sorts.

Also, the churchyard won my heart as soon as I realized Mary Wollstonecraft (the philosopher not the novelist which would be her daughter) is buried there.

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February 15, 2010

Disneyesque

I had an excellent weekend involving jerusalem artichoke soup, slow roasted pork belly, cherry tart, mariage frères tea, the TLS, a walk in the Heath, the heating pumping at full steam, the prospect of a 800 page Middlemarch, R. creating relaxing music playlists on spotify, reading a big chunk of Middlemarch, Disney oldies at the Barbican, freshly baked bread & poacher cheese, long hot showers, canelles, scallops, sweet pineapple. To think I only weigh 51 kg.

*****

Speaking of Disney oldies, The Jungle Book is a piece of social conservative drivel. The jungle is populated by spineless liberals who, at the first sight of the powerful bigot - the tiger Khan who has a prejudice against humans- will carefully review their positions and send the misfit - Mowgli - to where "he belongs". Bagheera is the sort of liberal with good intentions that would never start a revolution. Baloo will help Mowgli because he is a vagrant, a good for nothing. He is the resident hippie. He has no prejudices and he doesn't fear bigots, therefore it's considered that he has no common sense. King Louie is a mestizo type; too human to fit in with the animals and too apish to fit in with the humans. But he wants desperately to fit in. He's a social climber but his attempt at securing his place makes the little he has crumble into pieces. Kah has nothing against the misfit but will take advantage of Mowgli's less powerful, isolated position to his advantage. Kah is more of the mercenary type since he won't give Mowgli up to Khan. The vultures are another bunch of misfits who, nonetheless, have enough in common with the rest of the animals. And they have each other. Being castaways, they have nothing to lose by helping Mowgli. Also he has nothing for them to take advantage of. He has no meat in his bones for them to pick, literally and figuratively. Interracial marriage is out of the question, Bagheera asks Baloo the bear "Would you marry a panther?" to make a point about segregation. The jungle is patrolled by citizen's militias - the elephants - who, again, seem well intentioned but whose motives and goals are shady. And the story conveniently ends with the proof that birds of a feather stick together since Mowgli goes to the village of his own accord putting to rest any doubts whether ghettos are the answer to social unrest. It is also implied in the song the girl sings at the end that Mowgli will grow up to be a hunter despite his initial friendliness with the animals and therefore there is no hope for individual personal development when it comes to social inadequacy. Tradition will prevail.

I had fun writing that. I should start a conspiracy theory blog about conservative messages in kid's cartoons. Except that it's not much of a challenge. One thing is sure. This movie has the best soundtrack ever. We've been humming "I wanna be like you" ever since.

******

And then we watched Fantasia. And there was a jewish conductor starring in a 1940 movie, bacchanalia, paganism, nudity, sexual innuendo, bare nipples and hippos in ballet tutus. Makes you think the only thing Walt couldn't stand was commies.

******

A propos, giggle material seen in Lisbon last Christmas.

Walter Dias Circus - the biggest show on earth (not related to me, as far as I know)

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January 21, 2010

Apparently I'm stupid and uneducated

"Speaking at a meeting in La Granja, Spain with other European Affairs ministers Ronchi said simply that there is no racism in Italy and that only uneducated people would make such claims. He even offered to provide a complimentary sight-seeing tour of the country for those who claim there is a racial question. Anyone who still believed that racism existed in Italy was just stupid according to Ronchi." from Italy claims to be the friendliest country in Europe.

"They suffered immigration and now they live in reservations"

I wasn't particularly surprised to see about the escalating of racism in Italy ever since seeing that Northern League poster in Mantova last summer (see above) and, most of all, because one of the RSS feeds I read is the Corriere de La Sera. One day doesn't go by when I don't read about those evil foreigners raping and robbing the God fearing italians. And this is a well regarded newspaper. I went back on my RSS feeds for 5 minutes and found these recent headlines pretty quickly.

"A 42 year old woman was brought down to the ground and raped in a industrial warehouse near the station. A bulgarian has been arrested."

"Three romanians end up handcuffed. They had raped a young barista on New Year's eve."

13 year old sexually abused, "arrested a 25 year old Colombian, a 45 year old and a 65 year old italian friend of the family"

"Homicide of a pizzamaker in Fenis, two Dominicans arrested" (and those are not friars)

"Frontal car crash in the Centre, a 26 year old girl is killed"
"The driver of the BMW, a Tunisian, was probably drunk and didn't respect the red light..."

"Girl beat up in Via Cenisio, one man arrested: perhaps a serial rapist"
"The man, an illegal Senegalese, was recognized by the victim and another passer-by who was robbed"

Yes. I do believe language matters and that naming supposed perpetrator's ethnicities and nationalities in headlines helps propagate prejudices in the minds of the readers.

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January 20, 2010

More new words

I can't believe I've lived my whole life without knowing about emic. I don't care if it's a technical term, I'm appropriating it for current usage. So, whenever we're in Portugal and R. jokingly points out some portuguese cultural idiosyncrasy I'll be able to say: "Meh, you don't get it, it's emic." Or, inversely, whenever I'm in a good mood and he successfully grasps the contradictions of the portuguese psyche and makes an insightful remark I will be able to say "Baby, you're getting more and more emic."
There. It works an a noun and as an adjective. "Emically" would be useful too.

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January 19, 2010

Readings

I wish I'd remember what made me pick up Max Frisch's novels. I have a vague recollection of someone talking about the effects of technology on our lives and mentioning "Homo Faber" in passing which prompted me to look for it in the library. It might have been Zizek. In any case, after being done with "Homo Faber", I'm now enjoying reading "I'm not Stiller". The novels are old fashioned at times as you'd expect from a product of the 50's to be but I still don't understand why did their popularity subside. Spiritual and identity crisis are always fashionable. What do I know, maybe Frisch is still selling well in Switzerland.

*****

I'm keeping a journal of my readings, a hand written one. I needed it. My penmanship was getting worse and worse. I long for a calligraphy course; my luddite area of the brain is commanding it.

*****

I've been good as I've already read one of the portuguese classics on my New Year's resolution reading list (not much to report other than it was a gripping, well crafted novel where all the characters are petty and provincial and that it could have been written in the 19th century rather than in the 40's). Five more are waiting already, brought in by my parents who seemed to have had a good time tracking down old copies in second hand book sellers in Lisbon. R. briefly browsed them and declared them either boring or depressing. Except for "O que diz Molero". He may be right.

*****

Picking up reserved books at the library (most of them from the Reserve Stock aka the unreadables/unfashionable bin), a librarian I hadn't seen before holds my card and says: "Oh, so you are Claudia!". I'm sure the guy that has to drive the van to the reserve stock warehouse at least once a week would like to meet me too.

*****

I found Iris Murdoch. A bit late, I know, but I'm working on improving the gender balance in my reading habits by increasing the number of female authors. Previously, I had great pleasure in making the acquaintance of Muriel Spark. The only problem is that, after reading The Green Knight, I went to wikipedia to get more info on the author and there was this: "Her novels often include upper middle class intellectual males caught in moral dilemmas, gay characters, Anglo-Catholics with crises of faith, empathetic pets, curiously "knowing" children and sometimes a powerful and almost demonic male "enchanter" who imposes his will on the other characters." Now, that pretty much describes The Green Knight. I wonder if I can look forward to the same gripping style and erudition but hopefully have some variety in the plots. We'll see, it is true that the good authors always write the same story, but I'm hoping it will be more subtle than this wikipedia description.

*****

The next few months will be occupied by anthropology (the real thing, not the convenient name I give to my silly explorations) and food. Should be interesting. At the very least, I'll have new topics for dinner conversation openers.

*****

The current mood is ochre yellow. It's a quieter yellow. Contemplative. Cozy.

(Goya, from the wonderful Dark Paintings in the Prado)

Degas and his candid photo-like paintings of yelllow walls. Who cares for the dancers.

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January 07, 2010

New useful words

Claudia has expanded her knowledge of mexican vocabulary and slang.

When in Spain you say "Joder, tío", in mexico you say "Qué onda, güey" ". The spanish are very fond of their "Joder" but I haven't found a suitable mexican corresponding word. But everybody's a "güey".

"Gusguerías" and the verb "Gusguear". Maybe the spaniards use this one too. So useful and it's one of those words that you can guess what it means just by the way it sounds. It's a bit like "Tapear" or to snack on yummy little nothings.

"A huevo". As in "I'll do what you're asking me to do in a bit because I have heavy testicles and therefore move slowly and lazily". Or that's how I interpret it in any case. Huevos meaning eggs but also slang for testicles.

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Guadalajaaaaara

With a few hours to kill in Guadalajara, I found there a few of my favorite things, as Julie Andrews would put it:

A magnificent bandstand (I love bandstands and gazebos) made by the Fonderies d'Art do Val d'Osne, the famous parisian foundry! It was installed there in 1910 at the time of the commemorations of the centenary of Mexico's independence (100 years ago precisely) and caused many people to complain that it was indencent (because of the naked ladies). It is an awkward sight in the middle of modern and colonial architecture.

******

A homage to Palomo in a gallery I randomly walked into - one of the cartoonists I most cherish ever since childhood days and who I had almost forgotten about since putting my copy of his book "The fourth Reich" in storage. A chilean, he draws some mean political critique, courtesy of Pinochet and of his host country Mexico where he fled to.

- the writing on the wall says "Down with the Dictatorship" and he says "I think...."
- next he spots the political police thugs coming his way and he says "Although...er...actually...er"
- he walks away thinking "I play the fool...."
- last square, "therefore I am/exist".
Sensible advice for anybody living in a dictatorship, I suppose.

*******

In the cathedral, an effigy of Saint John Nepomuk who I met for the first time in Prague and who is one of my favorite saints and not that easy to spot. Patron saint of silence and bridges, another two of my favorite things.

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January 06, 2010

Mexicania

My Christmas anthropological expedition to the depths of Mexico was a success since I spent time...
- surrounded by people shooting guns in the air as a way of commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ;
- digging old papers belonging to R.'s family and finding out his grandfather was, among many other things, a secret agent in charge of finding the murderer of a famous politician;
- hearing about ghost stories, corpses of zapatistas thrown down wells and hidden treasures;
- visiting pre-columbian and purepecha indian sites;
- trying fruits, vegetables and cooked foods I had never laid eyes on before; I didn't refuse anything I was given to eat so R.'s family was enthusiastic about food shopping and cooking for me. T. would bring me some concoction in a plastic cup and say "Hey, try this" and I would gulp it down without even asking what it was and invariably ending up saying "Delicious!". When uncle J. offered to cook us lunch and asked my mother in law what didn't I eat, she answered "Claudia will eat anything!". I guess she could have phrased it more elegantly;
(Anyway, the love of food always brings people together)
- freezing in the mornings and evenings and getting sunburnt during the day;
- hearing T.'s stories about the drug cartels that plague Michoácan and how the army, tipped by a jogger(!), found a stash of guns in an old abandoned house outside town;
- checking out A.'s fighting cocks. Alas, I didn't get to watch a cock fight. They say they put blades on their spurs to make it more exciting. And it's legal, believe it or not.
- listening to mariachi music until ears start to bleed.

I have much less respect for the magical realism writers. With so many oddities available, they were just writing what they saw.

*******

Zapateria=Shoestore. Not sure it's a pun or it's just because it is on Zapata Street. Either way.

*******

Fighting cocks. Notice how the crest/comb of the rooster on the right has been cut off to avoid its opponents grabbing it.

*******

Pre-columbian ruins of Tingambato, very similar architecturally to Tenochlitan, complete with ball field (not in picture).

*******

C: Why on earth are there dogs on every roof?
R (non-chalantly as if it were the most natural thing in the world): They keep them there because they don't have backyards.
Extremely annoying. You can't go down a street without being startled by barking coming from the sky. I have a flickr set of Roof Dogs of Mexico.

*******

No Claudia Expedition is complete without a trip to the local cemetery. The local celebrity is, not surprisingly, the founder of a famous mariachi band.

*******

Pragmatic people.

*******

Tarascan/purepecha signs on public offices in the indian villages (this one's Inchán, I believe)

*******
Freshly made corn tortillas are the best thing in the world. Free if you order 4 or 5 of them, 10 pesos (50p) for one kilogram. You have to try very hard to go hungry in this place.

*******
Purepecha indian ladies and their colorful skirts.

*******
In Nuevos Morelos, people dress as old men or witches and take advantage of the speed bumps to beg for money. It's kinda scary.

*******

My new favorite food. Uchepos. Tamales (corn paste steamed inside corn husks) made of sweet corn, a bit of sugar and served with sour cream.

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December 08, 2009

'Tis the season

... for New Year's resolutions.

This coming year, I will commit myself to reading 12 books in Portuguese by Portuguese authors (some are well deserved rereads).

So, here's the list for my own reference:

- Húmus, Raul Brandão.
- O que diz Molero, Dinis Machado.
- O Dia Cinzento, Mário Dionísio.
- O Vale da Paixão, Lídia Jorge.
- No Reino da Dinamarca, Alexandre O'Neill.
- O Pequeno Mundo, Luísa Costa Gomes.
- Gente Singular, Manuel Teixeira Gomes.
- A Casa Grande de Romarigães, Aquilino Ribeiro.
- Mau tempo no canal, Vitorino Nemésio.
- Seta despedida, Maria Judite de Carvalho.
- Um homem de barbas, Manuel de Lima.
- Finisterra, Carlos de Oliveira.

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December 03, 2009

The week's collection

The actor-manager Henry Irving was a real-life inspiration for the character of Dracula (Stoker worked for him).

Everytime we walk by his statue behind the National Gallery I mention the Robertson Davies passage from World of Wonders that R. keeps saying he doesn't remember reading.

"I'm going to lay a few yellow roses - I hope I can get yellow ones - at the foot of the monument to Henry Irving behind the National Portrait Gallery. You know it. It's one of the best-known monuments in London. Irving, splendid and gracious, in his academical robes, looking up Charing Cross Road. (...) The Irving monument stands in quite a large piece of open pavement; near by a pavement artist was chalking busily on the flagstones. Beside the monument itself a street performer was unpacking some ropes and chains, and a woman was helping him to get ready for his performance. Magnus took off his hat, laid the flowers at the foot of the statue, arranged them to suit himself, stepped back, looked up at the statue, smiled and said something under his breath."

*****

Saw Clive Wearing's diaries on Thursday at the wonderful new Wellcome collection exhibition (always a high brow cabinet of curiosities exquisitely curated). He has "an acute and long lasting case of anterograde amnesia and thus only a moment-to-moment consciousness".

His diary entries are eery and, as usual and by some fetishistic innate attachment to objects, seeing the diaries in the flesh was much more impressive than reading a transcript online:

8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.
9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.

*****

Paul Dirac and Cary Grant were classmates as children. What an unlikely duo.

*****

Reading surrealist artist Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. Turns out the author is 92 this year, the same age as the protagonist of the story. The novel is comic and sad and probably the only one I've ever read where almost all the characters are senile old women.

"Everyone's had an interesting life," she says. "Unless they're interested in business or something." -- Leonora Carrington interviewed by the Independent.

*****

(on describing a couple whose only daughter got married and moved away)
"the Clementses felt dejected, apprehensive, and lonely in their nice, old drafty house that now seemed to hang about them like the flabby skin and flapping clothes of some fool who had gone and lost a third of his weight." --Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

How on earth did he come up with such wonderful similes?

*****

Also as a result of the Wellcome Collection exhibition on Identity, need to research more about Claude Cahun's Héroïnes (part of which is online at the french national library).

"Feminism is already in the fairytales," Cahun remarked, the slightest shift in the angle of view will make the suppressed content plain. Cahun reformulated a dozen or so fables from the viewpoint of their "misunderstood" heroines and contributed several, including "Judith, la sadique," to the prestigious literary journal Mercure de France 6 for publication." -- in Acting Out

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December 02, 2009

Humbug

"I want to thank the people of Britain for the legacy of Charles Dickens and the chance to tell this story. This story couldn't be more important now - it's about the immorality of greed."...

...Jim Carrey said as he switched on the christmas lights of the two biggest shopping streets in London as part of the publicity stunts for the opening of a Disney movie grossing $196.2 million since being released. Was he being facetious?

Also, Dickens works are on the public domain so the chance to tell the story is thanks to the fact that Mickey Mouse was born a few decades later. Otherwise...

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November 24, 2009

Anglicans and Hairs

Sign posted at St. Barts in the City (lovely church, lovely music).

"The current proposals for a Covenant between Anglican provinces represent an effort to create not a centralised decision-making executive but a 'community of communities' that can manage to sustain a mutually nourishing and mutually critical life, with all consenting to certain protocols of decision-making together. As Harvesting notes, Anglicans have been challenged to flesh out their rhetoric about communion through the crises and controversies of recent years, and this is simply part of a variegated response that will, no doubt, continue for a good while yet to be refined and formulated.
The recent announcement of an Apostolic Constitution making provision for former Anglicans shows some marks of the recognition that diversity of ethos does not in itself compromise the unity of the Catholic Church, even within the bounds of the historic Western patriarchate. But it should be obvious that it does not seek to do what we have been sketching: it does not build in any formal recognition of existing ministries or units of oversight or methods of independent decision-making, but remains at the level of spiritual and liturgical culture, as we might say. As such, it is an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some; but it does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground. It remains to be seen whether the flexibility suggested in the Constitution might ever lead to something less like a 'chaplaincy' and more like a church gathered around a bishop."

Enchanted by the Archbishop of Canterbury's address in Rome. Still stunned that there are Anglicans ready to defect to the Catholic Church. Ever since I've moved here I've been continually surprised by the openness, tolerance, inclusiveness and diversity of opinion in the Anglican church. Why would anyone want to give all that up that is beyond me.

*****

And now for something completely different.

*****

I donated hair for an art project. I visited a independent/small publishers fair held at Conway Hall some weeks ago and there was a norwegian artist there selling a book with photos of stuff that was inside his vacuum cleaner. Since I have a similar, yet only in the realm of ideas, pet project involving belly button lint, I was interested. I ended up giving him two hairs and I am still fantasizing he is a mad genetics engineer who will populate some inhospitable part of Norway (shouldn't be hard to find) with Claudia clones, roaming the wilderness like little animals waiting to be tamed. Phew. Just reread the paragraph and, boy, does this sound terribly weird. Oh well.

*****

Bought the book "Transmission" by Chisato Tamabayashi at the same book fair. It's so beautiful that tears come to my eyes everyt ime I open it and all this intricate sculptures of colorful paper pop out.

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November 20, 2009

Following Eco's Poetics of Cataloguing

I like Jerusalem Artichokes | Sempé's Cartoons | Mendelssohn | Camilleri's Montalbano | Conceptual art | Being read out loud to | Sunny, cold Autumn days | Warm clotted cream rice pudding | to cook | to read | to go on long walks | to be naked in the cold rain after a hot sauna | to drive abroad without a map | Caillebotte | the colosseum in Rome | BBC Radio 3 | Eric Rohmer's movies | Lamb's Conduit | snow | heirloom tomatoes | Freud's Wolfman paintings | Francis Alys | Mariage Frères Tea | the smell of roasted peppers | warm wool socks | head massages | Purcell | Stationery | quakers | pedestrianized bridges | the Prado | moss | ripe persimmons | ligne claire drawings | making quince paste | older people | the japanese garden in Holland Park | Amartya Sen | Turin | old cemeteries

I dislike the monument to Vittorio Emanuel II in Rome | celebrity chefs | almonds | shopping malls | pre-prepared meals | "working lunches" | strong winds | bitter fruit | italian operas | noise | shopping for shoes | having a haircut | yoga | bracelets | boats | long skirts | Berlusconi | strong coffee | the toes in the subjects painted by Botticelli | the smell of disinfectants | pink flowers | squirrels | cemented front yards | gps | Tony Blair | Dogu figurines | women wearing leggings without a skirt on | bull terriers | Barcelona | chocolate with nuts | Wedgwood's Jasper White on Pale Blue Porcelain | Live chickens | People speaking on bluetooth headsets | old plays adapted to a contemporary setting | guitar jazz other than gypsy swing | Rothko paintings hanging in brightly lit rooms | putting the liner bag inside the garbage bin | celtic music | when there's wet cardboard on the sidewalk | Schoenberg

***

Asked R. for help with the dislike list. He said "that's easy, you're always ranting about something" and then proceeded to remind me of my pet hates.

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November 18, 2009

Prosper

It's such a joy for me to subscribe to Sotheby's auction announcements and to be able to browse their e-catalogues. It's as if I am awarded a glimpse of a beautiful work of art or of a piece of memorabilia that will soon submerge once more into the deep waters of private ownership. Almost in a week's time, they're auctioning off some wonderful items on a Paris book sale. My favourite being a doodle-like self-portrait of Merimée in prison.

Merimée has been lately on my mind ever since I compiled a little guide (self-published on Lulu.com and everything!) for our summer roadtrip in the south of France and realized how much of our sightseeing was provided by his conservation efforts as a Inspector of Monuments. This led me to find more about Merimée and his life which in turn made me want to draw a relationship map of his lovers, friends and acquaintances. I'm pretty sure it would cover a huge part of 19th century France's intellectuals. And through Merimée's biography I discovered Guglielmo Libri. Reading "The life and times of Guglielmo Libri (1802-1869) : scientist, patriot, scholar, journalist, and thief : a nineteenth-century story" is like paging through a bookish thriller, the sort where you end up hoping the bad guy will get away with it - even though he is a book defacer and manuscript robber. In any case, Merimée did side with Libri and that's why he ended up in prison. It's also why Sotheby's has this particular sketch to sell since otherwise, Merimée seems to have been a law abiding citizen.

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November 09, 2009

Historically induced awe

A feeling of awe: attending a book launch among a small audience that included 92 year old Eric Hobsbawm. It's like having the whole 20th century sitting there with you.

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November 04, 2009

Domestic silly scenes

C: What are you thinking about?
R: Nothing at all.
C: But that's amazing!
R: Huh?
C: There are people who spend decades in buddhist convents trying to achieve that.

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October 28, 2009

I've been having weird, weird, weird dreams. "Aren't they all?", you'd say. I know, I know. But mine are usually very frivolous and I wake up annoyed at myself for losing REM time with things such as Carla Bruni turning out to be Juliette Binoche wearing a wig. Yet, lately, I've been having dreams that sound like Umberto Eco plots. The best of them all was one where I was sitting in a dusty library reading manuscripts and I had made a fantastic discovery regarding John Chrysostom and cartography. Whatever the discovery was, it was so exciting that I woke up, convinced it was real and that I should get up and write it down. I didn't, so I have no idea what it was.

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October 26, 2009

Huh?

Can anybody explain to me why is that the french trailer for the new Zemeckis animation movie boasts "Jim Carrey est Scrooge" when the movie is dubbed in french (presumably not by Jim Carrey, says I)?

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October 22, 2009

Fall out

The letter was suprisingly rather informal and asked her why hadn't she responded to the previous ones. It finally said "Take a look at the last New Yorker you received. How would you live without it?"

"Just fine", she said while she unfolded the Times Literary Supplement which was also in the mailbox.

(and to compensate for the lack of the odd Sempé cover, I'll buy a couple of the Phaidon albums)

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The education of an american

Walking by the British Library, I point at a poster with a Marie Curie quotation: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood."

C: That's a good one.
R: Didn't she die of radiation poisoning?

To think I am supposedly the cynical european in this couple.

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October 14, 2009

Catching up

I've been so neglectful of this blog and I blame Twitter and Facebook. And my laziness. It's so much easier to write a sentence and click enter. And then one fine day I'm trying to remember the name of an author or of a book that I've read, I google my own blog to find it and realize why I do this after all. It is public which means that at least I have to write complete sentences rather than jotting down some notes but, in the end, it's my own diary without the naughty bits.

******

I've been thinking that this obsession with cooking and chefs has to be related with that endangered species: the housewife. There was a time you'd learn how to cook with your grandmother or great aunt; they'd teach you the little tricks for the perfect steamed rice or how to skin a garlic clove in 1/2 a second. And they probably didn't even attend school. Now, you trust that some man (in most cases) knows all about that arcane science of cooking. It's a bit like all those books about child rearing. Everybody has been doing it for ages and humanity isn't, on average, getting any cleverer or less screwed up. So it is with cooking. There's no mystery.

*****

Just as the Queen does, I moved my birthday to the following Saturday because of a sore throat acquired while visiting the fatherland. Yet, I couldn't miss going to the LRB's 30th anniversary party/book sale that coincided with my own birthday. Got meself the new Max Weber biography.

*****

Also at the LRB, I attended a talk by John Bainville and John Gray about Simenon. It was entertaining in the way that listening in on a conversation by literate people around a table is but they couldn't claim to be experts in any case. The highlight of the evening was when during Q&A a Drunken-Zizek-on-a-bad-personal-hygiene-day-lookalike asked if Simenon wore a mustache or a beard because if he had slept with 3000 women he HAD to sport a beard since that's what women prefer. A reminder: Zizek has a beard and so did his lookalike.

*****

We went on a adventure of epic proportions to Paris. Which means a family trip involving 3 people over 60 and a 59 year old. They all behaved really well, got along well and were very un-fussy and would have been happy to have been fed sweet crêpes all day.

Mom in a Toulouse-Lautrec background at the Musée d'Orsay

*****

I need to get a book on Caillebotte. I don't think I was aware of the existence of this painting at the Orsay and, on entering the gallery, I was attracted to it as if it were a claudia-magnet.

*****

I finally read "The Maltese Falcon". I was shocked: Spade is described as having pale brown hair. Hammett didn't have the prescience to imagine that Bogey would be the perfect Spade. All tough guys are dark skinned and dark haired. Everybody knows that.

*****

Sociologist David Riesman's 50's book "The Lonely Crowd" summarized in one sentence: "Most people don't know what they want from life until their neighbor gets it".

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July 13, 2009

By the end of the nineteenth century, Florence was a key destination for cultured travellers from Europe and America. Writers such as Wilde, Rilke, and Mann, painters such as Degas and Klee, and, not least, the young art historian Aby Warburg and his wife, Mary, flocked to Florence to escape the encroachments of modern life at home and to revel in the city's rich artistic and cultural past. This beguiling book fuses narrative and ideas to consider how the encounter between modernism and Renaissance culture was experienced by both visitors to Florence and its inhabitants. Based on Aby Warburg's letters, diaries, and notebooks, on Italian and German archives and on conversations with E. H. Gombrich (director of the famous Institute Aby Warburg later founded), the book is an intimate guide to life in Florence and the theatres, restaurants, galleries and salons frequented by visiting cultural exiles. At the same time, the book paints an evocative picture of a city at the cusp of the modern age, adjusting to electricity and the motor car on one hand and to social unrest and a clash of cultures on the other. -- publisher's blurb

****

I want to sing the non-scholarly-bookish-art-amateur praise of Bernd Roeck's "Florence 1900" published by Yale UP. In fact, I liked it so much that I hate myself for already having finished reading it. And for not knowing enough German to read his other books.

It's highly scholarly and yet very readable. Permeated with valuable information - and interesting tidbits - you'll never find anywhere else because Roeck read the unpublished sources (including Aby Warburg's personal papers and a magazine 'Il Marzocco" that I'd kill to get my hands on - preferably translated and annotated). If there's a book that can vividly portray the zeitgeist of any particular era or place this is it.

*******

Meanwhile, I need to keep the links to all the interesting things (so many of them in the public domain!) I've learned via Roeck somewhere, so bear with me.

Leo S. Olschki, Florentine collector and bookseller of Renaissance books and prints.
Found a catalog of his ("Choix de livres anciens rares et curieux en vente à la librairie ancienne Leo S. Olschki (1907)" on archive.org from where this pre-darwinian drawing was taken from.

Charles Godfrey Leland's Etruscan Roman remains in popular tradition; (1892) should be entertaining since the information source for the work of this amateur ethnologist were italian "witches" who accepted money in return for the confirmation that secret worshiping of ancient gods and etruscan magic was still in use in Tuscany in modern times...

Jacob Burckhardt's "The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy. For the Use of Travellers and Students (1879)" is online! Burckhardt was seemingly against the "documenting" of history so it ends up being an entertaining collection of informed opinions. And it was the book everybody at that time used an arts oriented travel guide. Of it Nietzsche enthusiastically said: "It seems to me that one should wake up and fall asleep reading Burckhardt's Cicerone: there are few books that can so stimulate phantasy and prepare one for the conception of the artistic.

The aesthetic sensibilities of an age as seen through the writings about Botticelli in Anatole France's "Le Lys Rouge": "Darling, do you not know it is the custom of Florence to celebrate spring on the first day of May every year? Then you did not understand the meaning of Botticelli's picture consecrated to the Festival of Flowers. Formerly, darling, on the first day of May the entire city gave itself up to joy. Young girls, crowned with sweetbrier and other flowers, made a long cortege through the Corso, under arches, and sang choruses on the new grass. We shall do as they did. We shall dance in the garden."

In Zola's "Rome": "Narcisse for his part had not raised his eyes to the overpowering splendour of the ceiling. Wrapt in ecstasy, he did not allow his gaze to stray from one of the three frescoes of Botticelli. "Ah! Botticelli," he at last murmured; "in him you have the elegance and the grace of the mysterious; a profound feeling of sadness even in the midst of voluptuousness, a divination of the whole modern soul, with the most troublous charm that ever attended artist's work."

People in the quattrocento preferred Gozzoli to Castagno. "the affably conciliatory was preferred to the emotionally impressive" as Aby Warburg put it.

Isolde Kurz's Die Humanisten. Lost manuscripts and monks à la Umberto Eco.

Vernon Lee's "Renaissance fancies and studies (1896)".

Bernard Berenson's essays and catalogues. "Among US collectors of the early 1900s, Berenson was regarded as the pre-eminent authority on Renaissance art. His verdict of authenticity increased a painting's value. While his approach remained controversial among European art historians and connaisseurs, he played a pivotal role as an advisor to several important American art collectors, such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, who needed help in navigating the complex and treacherous market of newly fashionable Renaissance art. In this respect Berenson's influence was enormous, while his 5% commission made him a wealthy man." -- from wikipedia

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July 12, 2009

There must be a name for those perception errors in which we incur when, after finding out about something previously unknown, that same something seems to pop out everywhere afterward.

I had never seen people surfing on a river before the last two weeks (in Munich, in the English garden and it did indeed look like a lot of fun) and suddenly the NYT Travel section has a piece about it and how it all started in Germany and there seem to be more and more "standing waves" surfing in land locked places.

Likewise, just a couple of weeks ago I was strolling the streets of Trieste and admiring the antique bookshop previously owned by Umberto Saba. I had even compiled a little personal cultural guide to the city and had it printed on lulu.com - very nerdy I know - which included some of Saba's poetry among the literature references. And now I find the TLS has a piece on him and on his upcoming book, the first translation into english of his work.

*****

Great finds:

Two Maigret novels in a bouquiniste in Uzés, Provence for 1 euro each. "Maigret hésite" and "Maigret et l'homme tout seul". This last one with a lame denouement but I have to admit I read them mostly for the food. Somebody needs to compile a book with the menus of food and drink Maigret goes through each adventure. My favorite bits are when Maigret gets caught up in work and calls home to say he's not coming to dinner. He invariable asks his wife what was she cooking and invariably gets sad he'll miss that meal.

"Dans son esprit, tandis qu'il dégustait l'andouillete juteuse et croustillante, accompagnée de pommes frites qui ne sentaient pas le graillon..."

"Ils en étaient au dessert. Ils avaient bu, avec les rougets grillés, un Pouilly fumé dont le parfum flottait encore autour d'eux."

"Trieste: Un'identitá di frontiera" by Angelo Ara and Claudio Magris from the nice bookshop at Castelo Miramare. My favourite type of non-fiction literature. What makes a regional or national character, the culture of a place and its people dissected preferably by a self-obsessed native. Or two.

Vies Imaginaires, Marcel Schwob. Bought at the excellent bookshop Goulard in Aix. I own a portuguese translation but it's somewhere in my storage boxes and there's nothing like the real thing.

******

The New Yorker has been disappointing lately. Hardly find anything I want to read these days. Too much Malcolm Gladwell type pop sociology based on anecdotes; too much profiling of romance writers and other celebrities of dubious interest and movie reviews I don't care for. The tipping point - aha, a pun - was Gladwell's review of Chris Anderson's Free. I was led to believe that book was a pointless exercise in platitudes and in which the author didn't even bother to reference his sources properly transcribing chunks of wikipedia articles and all. If that's New Yorker worthy...

But not all is lost. My Lapham Quarterly arrived. And it's the most wonderful thing ever. Add to it the TLS and either the LRB or NYRB and I'll be damned if I renew my New Yorker subscription.

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June 23, 2009

The apostles were a bit thick (Matthew 16)

6 Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.
7 And they reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have taken no bread.
8 Which when Jesus perceived, he said unto them, O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread?
9 Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up?
10 Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye took up?
11 How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?
12 Then understood they how that he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

Duh.

*****

11 Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.
12 Then came his disciples, and said unto him, Knowest thou that the Pharisees were offended, after they heard this saying?
13 But he answered and said, Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up.
14 Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.
15 Then answered Peter and said unto him, Declare unto us this parable.
16 And Jesus said, Are ye also yet without understanding?

*****

Which makes me think that if these were the people closest to him and were supposed to spread his word they can't have done that a good a job, can they?

I understand parables are a helpful rhetoric device but you have to know your audience better than that.

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June 22, 2009

More Portogallo

R (still in shock over the low usability level of the Lisbon airport): Your slogan should be "Welcome to Portugal, where we unnecessarily complicate what could be extremely simple."

*****

(comparing passports - forgot to bring reading material for the flight)

The Portuguese Passports
First page has an illustration of a scene from a 500 year old poem glorifying the feats of the Portuguese explorers. The illustration features naked ladies which means that immigration officers in sexually repressed countries usually say "Hmmm, I'll have to take a closer look at this in my office before stamping it. I'll be right back." The naked ladies are a Goddess and her companions who, by swimming alongside it, save a Portuguese ship from the enemy. As in, "Christ! We're lucky the tide turned!". So much for confidence on their sea faring skills.

The American Passport
It's the pocket version of those unbearable motivational posters + cowboy movies cliche imagery. Whenever an american is abroad and is feeling overwhelmed by, say, the portuguese pessimism or general european cynicism, he/she can get a boost in their can-do attitude by opening the passport in a random page and reading some of the inspirational quotes printed above old wild west drawings. You know, stuff like "It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win" next to a cactus in a desert.

*****

C: The latest news is that 28 notable economists say that all the big public investment projects should be re-evaluated - as in stopped. You know, the high speed train connecting us to Spain and the rest of Europe, the new and hopefully bigger airport, more highways...
R: Uh? Yeah, isolation will solve all your problems.

******

Trying to get to the check in area in Lisbon Airport. For some unknown reason, you have to cross a security barrier to get to it.
C: Hmm. Check-in counters are in there right?
Security: Yes. You need your ticket in order to get through.
C: My what?
Security: You know, proof you're on a flight today.
C: Well, I won't get that until I check in.
Security: But when you booked it you must have been given a ticket.
C: It's an electronic ticket.
Security: Yes, where's your print out of it?
C: It's an electronic ticket. The point is to not have to print out anything. I show up at the check-in counter, hand them my ID and they give me my boarding pass.
(meanwhile a hundred portuguese people better informed about this silliness and with no love for trees go by me waving around their sheets of paper and being let in)
C (sorry she was too lazy to check in online): Look, I have a flight in 1.5 hours and I need to check in.
Security (condescending): Oh well, ok, but I shouldn't let you. Next time, print your electronic ticket.
C (I'll be damned if I ever check in here ever again): Uh...sure.

*****
First installment here.

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June 06, 2009

So...

...you vote for the UK Independence Party whose main goal is to get the UK out of the European Union. A bunch of their candidates get elected for the European Parliament (I guess they want to work against it from the inside). Four years later they are running again and the UK is still part of the EU. Why would you vote for them again (nevermind that one of their MEP's has been jailed for fraud and another one is under investigation)?

*************

...you are an editor at faber & faber and you have a lot of really great reviews and endorsements by significant publications and authors (like the TLS and Pritchett) on this volume of Flannery O'Connor's Short Stories. Do you REALLY want to print an endorsement by Dean Koontz on a prominent position in the cover? Because if you did this when you were sober and in full control of your mental capacities, I'll probably avoid editions of your books in the future. Please don't sell out like that again.

Can't wait to read what Danielle Steel has to say about the new Ishiguro. Not.

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June 02, 2009

Have I mentioned the weather's great in London right now?

MCCORQUODALE ( pause, weary). In the closet you'll find a rope.
        CAULFIELD opens the cupboard.
    I bought it a month ago. I intended hanging myself.
CAULFIELD. What stopped you?
MCCORQUODALE. The weather turned nice.

Funeral Games, Joe Orton

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April 07, 2009

Monet & Bouguereau

(self-portraits of each one)

When Claude Monet first put on a pair of glasses he exclaimed: "Good Lord, I see things like Bouguereau!".

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April 04, 2009

Baroque exhibition at the V&A

R: It says here the word "baroque" might come from the portuguese "barroca" which was used to refer to these misshapen pearls. So, your family name means misshapen pearls! That's you, a misshapen pearl!
C: Thanks a lot!
R: Well, you're precious but a little bit weird.
C: .... actually, I like that.

******

R: So this exhibition is about the history of cheesiness?

******

R: Hmmmm. How can you tell the difference between bad baroque art and good baroque art?

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April 03, 2009

Stages of the Annunciation in the Quattrocento

1. Conturbatio/Disquiet
(What are you talking about, I am the favored one? Leave me alone!)

2. Cogitatio/Reflection
(Hmmm, could it be true?)

3. Interrogatio/Enquiry
(But, but, but...I am a virgin and intend to stay a virgin. How am I supposed to become pregnant?)

4. Humiliato/Submission
(Oh well, if you say so, I am the Lord's humble servant)

5. Meritatio/Merit
(aka Annunziata)

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April 02, 2009

Daydreaming

In a perfect world, Kathryn Hunter would be doing a different monologue every week in a theatre near me.

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March 26, 2009

On Gustave's Shelves

Des erreurs et des préjugés répandus dans la société.

Publiés à Paris en 1810 et 1811, par F. Buisson, libraire rue "Gille-Coeur" [Rue Git-le-Coeur], ce sont les oeuvres d'un certain Jean Barthélémy Salgues, né en 1770 et mort en 1830.

Les animaux sont très présents (ce qui est normal, les hommes vivaient en leur compagnie) et doués de pouvoirs mystérieux. Voici quelques unes des interrogations qui hantent les esprits :
- L'araignée annonce t-elle de l'argent ?
- Les abeilles ont-elles un Roi ?
- Les Abeilles piquent-elles de préférence les dames qui manquent à leurs devoirs ?
- Les vieux coqs pondent-ils des oeufs ?
- Les sangsues ont-elles le don de prophétie ?
- Une piqûre de tarentule fait-elle danser comme les meilleurs danseurs de l'opéra ?

From Pages napoléoniennes.

From a bulletin: "En 1853, de plus, Flaubert lit pour Madame Bovary un ouvrage de la bibliothèque paternelle: Des erreurs et des préjugés répandus dans la société, de Jacques-Barthélemy Salgues (Paris, Vve Lepetit, 1811-1813), qui semble avoir inspiré certains articles du Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues."

**********

Hétérogénie; ou, Traité de la génération spontanee, basé sur de nouvelles expériences (1859)

Cet ouvrage est le fruit de trois années d'expériences et de recherches incessantes. Lorsque, par la méditation , il fut évident pour moi que la génération spontanée était encore l'un des moyens qu'emploie la nature pour la reproduction des êtres, je m'appliquai à découvrir par quels procédés on pouvait parvenir à en mettre les phénomènes en évidence : là fut la tache
laborieuse. (...)

La question de la génération spontanée a divisé les savants en deux camps opposés, et les hommes les plus illustres ont pris part aux luîtes animées et incessantes auxquelles ce grave sujet a donné lieu depuis tant de siècles. La victoire est encore indécise; aussi reste-t-il quelque gloire à conquérir pour celui qui la fera pencher de son côté.

Pour nous, nous combattons à l'abri d'une bannière bien respectable et bien imposante, puisque déjà, dans l'antiquité, elle portait les noms d'Anaxagore, de Leucippc, de Démocrite, d'Épicure, d'Aristote, de Pline, de Lucrèce et de Diodore de Sicile; et que depuis la Renaissance jusqu'à nos jours, on a vu successivement inscrire ceux de Rircher, Rondelet, Aldrovande, Matthiole , Fabri , Bonanni, Burnet, Gassendi, Morison, Dillen, BufTon, GuéneaudeMontbéliard, Needham, Priestley, ïngsnhousz, Gleichen, Stenon, Baker, Wrisberg, Fray , Werner, 0. F. Muller, Braun, Pallas, Rudolphi, Bremser, Goeze, Nées d'Esenbeck, Eschricht, Unger, Allen Thomson, de Lamélherie, Cabanis, Lavoisier, Lamarck, Saint- Amans, Turpin Desmoulins, Latreille, Bory Saint- Vincent, Dumas, Dugès, Eudes Deslonchamps, Gros, Tiedemann, Treviranus, Bauer, J. Muller, Burdach...

(I love the "I can't be wrong since all these clever people think like me" argument.)

Full text.

**********
Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, dans le milieu du quatrième siècle avant l'ère vulgaire

En 1788, l'abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716-1795), philologue, publia les Les Voyages du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, un récit de voyage détaillé et érudit décrivant les sites et la géographie de la Grèce classique (une version française de la Description de la Grèce de Pausanias).

Quel vide dans tout ce qu'il fait! que de variétés et d'inconséquences dans ses penchants et dans ses projets! Je vous le demande : qu'est-ce que l homme?

Je vais vous le dire, répondit un jeune étourdi qui entra dans ce moment. îl tira de dessous sa robe une petite figure de bois ou de carton, dont les membres obéissaient à des fils qu il tendait et relâchait à son gré. Ces fils, dit-il, sont les passions qui nous entraînent tantôt d'un côté et tantôt de l'autre; voilà tout ce que j'en sais. Et il sortit.

Full text.

**********

(found while creating Flaubert's Legacy Library at Librarything; darn George Sand and her overabundant writings, I thought they'd never end)

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March 23, 2009

Quick thoughts and a reading list

	Expediente del Atentado, Alvaro Uribe I have this feeling only latin americans excel at building narratives around failures. This is a captivating book: an imaginary file of paper clippings, diaries, letters related to the failed murder attempt of Mexico's dictator Porfirio Diaz. It strikes me as a serious, more literary sibling of Jô Soares' Twelve Fingers. Found via Passou.
	La petite Bijou, Patrick Modiano It's so sad and beautiful. After reading his bio I have the feeling this is the type of writer who writes the same story over and over again. It becomes more art than literature, if there is such a distinction. Recommended by Amazon.fr through Régis Jauffret's Microfictions.
	Beaumarchais in Seville, Hugh Thomas Beaumarchais had such an adventurous life that it's actually possible to write a short book about only a couple of years he spent in Madrid. I wish there were more books like this: edifying entertainment. Found through the LRB's recommended books.
	The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt It reads like an old mad professor telling you a bedtime story. This is History pre-"Nouvelle Histoire" and pre-"identification of sources required". My version has no footnotes and more than once I'm amused by the way the author just alludes to people and events as if he's expecting his audience to be perfectly familiar with the more obscure details of his subject. I love it. Where else would I find out about Ferrante of Napoli's room of mummies of his murdered enemies or that Attila was murdered by Dardanus who hit him with a chessboard? And even if this isn't true, I much prefer Burkhardt's version. Found in the National Gallery Bookshop.
	Lord Cucumber, Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell All I knew about this pair was something about defacing library books, a penchant for dark humor and a real life murder tragedy. This book must be the most highbrow mix of camp and classical british comedy I've ever read. Suffice to say that the characters end up on a cruise of the Odyssey's locations. Classic gay fiction with homeric reference to boot. Seen on the local library shelf.

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Ko Un

I was browsing an anthology of middle eastern and asian poetry and fell in love with one of Ko Un's zen poems. I didn't memorize it - which just goes to show how relying on Google is a bit like storing phone numbers in cell phones: the result is a memory not exercised. Arriving home, I looked it up and what I found didn't quite match. I didn't remember the precise words but the image conjured by this version was all wrong.

I have spent the whole day talking about other people again
and the trees are watching me
as I go home.

So, today I went back to the bookshop and this time I've got it.

I spent the whole day being someone else's story again
As I journey homeward
The trees are watching me

Much better.

I wonder if this is a case of poetry which improves on the original with a certain type of translation like Cavafy's.

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March 21, 2009

Claire's Knee

As Roger Ebert said: ""Claire's Knee" is a movie for people who still read good novels, care about good films, and think occasionally.

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March 13, 2009

I "inherited" a box of diaries which belonged to my grandfather. In fact I seem to be the official family archive - my uncle and aunt saying "you keep that, you're the one who always cared about trinkets and mementos" while we cleared my grandmother's place after she died and as a I salvaged valueless chinese cups and saucers, my grandparent's wedding night linens, boxes of old eyeglasses, newspaper clippings.

The diaries run from the late 30's - when he came home after being stationed in Macao - to the early 70's after he moved from the south of Portugal to Lisbon with all the family. They're impressive and scary. My grandfather obsessively noted down on each day the time he started working, times spent having lunch and at what time he stopped working. This was Portugal in the 40's and 50's, under a petty dictator that glorified poverty, and he was working from 4 am to 10 pm almost every day. On the good days he wouldn't start until 8am and he'd be home by 7pm. He was a truck driver, delivering groceries all over the country and sometimes in Spain. I remember my grandmother feeling aggrieved that he never got any overtime payed. When the revolution came and, with it, rights for workers, I think she secretly kept the illusion that if there was any justice in the world they would be able to receive what they were, at least morally, owed. I think that's why she held to this absurd registry of punch ins and outs. That day obviously never came but knowing that the situation wouldn't be that bad ever again was at least comforting.

Reading those timekeeping records really breaks my heart. For a number of reasons but foremost because I know his children loved him dearly and were thus deprived of his company. But by the end of the sixties, when he moved to Lisbon and became a private driver, his schedule was more relaxed and he started noting down mainly what he had had for lunch that day. Occasionally the stress went up and he'd note down times and addresses where he would pick up his employer, a well known lawyer.

It fascinates me how much I can read into these simple annotations, apparently giving no clue to his private thoughts.

By the time he retired, he still kept diaries. But there were no more working hours, no obligations. So he started copying meanings of words from the dictionary (an orange thick volume of which I am also the keeper still). I guess he was a pioneer of the concept of "word of the day". Eventually he moved to notebooks since his schedule-free life didn't ask for any more diaries. I also keep finding, to this day, random pieces of paper torn down from newspapers with scribbled word meanings on them inside the dictionary and inside other books. He became a compulsive Dictionary-phile.

There is one diary, however, from 1959, in which he noted down a quotation which to this day I'm not sure what was the intended meaning of. It's something in the lines of "Even if God didn't exist, religion would go on being holy and divine. God is the only creature that doesn't need to exist to rule." I never understood if this was an atheist's lament or a misguided religious excuse*. And I certainly don't know what grandfather thought of it other that he found it remarkable enough to jot it down. I wonder if he was wondering about God's existence as he drove a truck heavy with bags of refined sugar through the night?

*So, I did the obvious just now. I googled it. It's from Baudelaire's Journal Intime.

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Unfinished theses

The Romanticizing of Motherhood: how men are being shut off from equality in parenting by self defeating pseudo-feminism.

inspired by: essay about breastfeeding in the Atlantic and all the feminist movements who strive to accentuate the differences between the sexes rather than what binds us together. And a conference I once attended where the chief apron wearing person of the Portuguese Freemasonry (I forget the title) said women weren't allowed in because they already contained in themselves the secret of life (undervaluing semen is fair game when it comes to prejudice).

*****

The animistic stockbroker: how the stock market is fueled by superstition disguised as statistics and by the need for symbolic milestones to transmogrify a Bear into a Bull.

inspired by: stocks soar as Maddoff pleads guilty and, as some financial news agency put it, "marking the end of a negative cycle". Also, the superbowl indicator, irrational fear of the month of October, "Madoff rally", "Obama bear market", etc, etc.

*****

Analyzing the contemporary Portuguese essay: is the lack of writers who actually get to the point an exercise of subtlety as a narrative style or is it a historical product of repression?

inspired by: reading an article in a portuguese magazine from 1968 and realizing that the subtle allusions, use of irony and noncommittal about anything, essential for it to clear the censorship office, made the piece completely unreadable. Which pretty much describes a big chunk of opinion pieces in newspapers these days, minus the censorship office. The thesis should be inconclusive and vague.

*****

Hacking Ecclesiastes: keeping God out of Epicureanism.

inspired by: reading that some think the pious, ominous bits were introduced by an editor to compensate for the continual doubt about the fairness of God's justice and appeals to joy, making it look like it was written by a very confused person.

*****

The end of the football club: how eventually supporters as emotional stakeholders will realize they are not supporting the team but cheering for a publicly traded company. It's just as ridiculous as wishing that Bayer will have bigger profits than Merck when you're not even a shareholder but only someone who is hooked on aspirin.

inspired by: one of the best bits of sports journalism I've seen in a long time. The need for sponsorship is having ridiculous outcomes. The football stadiums are named after insurance companies rather than named after great players (and then in smaller print, "sponsored by company X", as decency would have it) but some might argue that it's all business after all. Which leads to my pet hate of that thing Tate Modern calls the Unilever series. I swear the first time I saw it, it meant they were selling ice creams and detergents in the Turbine Hall. And I suppose I was right.

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March 11, 2009

Reading Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Ferrante I of Napoli
"Besides hunting, which he practiced regardless of all rights of property, his pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him, either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in the costume which they wore in their lifetime. Fearing no one, he would take great pleasure in conducting his guests on a tour of his prized "museum of mummies".

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March 08, 2009

Edmund Crispin proved to be a clever, if lucky, choice. R. read The Moving Toyshop out loud to me in the evenings last week and there were times he had to stop for a few minutes while we laughed. The crafting of the plot around the crime is not what we would call a real master's work but the quips, literary references and pure farcical action make it a gem (also, there is a certain satisfaction in finding out that the murderer is the character who loves Jane Austen). The detective is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford, Gervase Fen, and every other character seems to have strong opinions about literature: the police constable tries incessantly to discuss Measure for Measure with the detective, there's a will which involves Edward Lear's nonsense rhymes, and two gangsters whose identity is unknown are named Scylla and Charybdis by Fen. Also, whenever the hero and his sidekick get stuck or imprisoned, they start playing literary games to pass the time such as listing unreadable novels or naming hateful novel characters that were originally portrayed to be lovable. Which started our classic household discussion since R. added Anna Karenina to the list and I jumped in her defense.

*****

Schwob to dinner.
Daudet told us this. He was having dinner at Victor Hugo's . The great poet of course presided, but in isolation, at one end of the table. He was almost deaf, and no one spoke to him, the guests gradually drawing away, toward youth, toward Jeanne and Georges (his adult grandchildren). He had practically been forgotten, when suddenly, at the end of the meal, the voice of the great man with the bristling beard was heard - a deep voice, coming from afar: I didn't get any cake!

--from The Journal of Jules Renard, a mix of high brow gossip and clever aphorisms.

*****

I love Patrick Caulfield for sentimental reasons. It reminds me of Herge's ligne claire and that brings back childhood memories.

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March 07, 2009

Are you the Messiah or what?

(this reads better with a new york jewish accent)

"(John the Baptist's envoys) said unto him (Jesus), Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?"

Matthew 11:3

Jesus replied, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cured, the deaf hear, the dead rise, and the good news is preached to the poor."

MAtthew 11:4,5

(what more do you want!?)

To be perfect, they should ask "yes, yes, yes, but are YOU the Messiah?"

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March 06, 2009

A break from the world of claudia; a bit of the real world

Either I have a short memory (or was half-asleep at that particular history of economic thought class which is improbable because an attractive lecturer -which was the case - is always a good motivator to open your eyes and ears) or I had never heard of Pigou.

Either way, I've been defending his theory lately without knowing it was his.

(also, these days, I'm so proud I went to a Keynesian college)

*****

However, Keynes can be our savior only to a very partial extent, and there is a need to look beyond him in understanding the present crisis. One economist whose current relevance has been far less recognized is Keynes's rival Arthur Cecil Pigou, who, like Keynes, was also in Cambridge, indeed also in Kings College, in Keynes's time. Pigou was much more concerned than Keynes with economic psychology and the ways it could influence business cycles and sharpen and harden an economic recession that could take us toward a depression (as indeed we are seeing now). Pigou attributed economic fluctuations partly to "psychological causes" consisting of

variations in the tone of mind of persons whose action controls industry, emerging in errors of undue optimism or undue pessimism in their business forecasts.[5]

It is hard to ignore the fact that today, in addition to the Keynesian effects of mutually reinforced decline, we are strongly in the presence of "errors of...undue pessimism." Pigou focused particularly on the need to unfreeze the credit market when the economy is in the grip of excessive pessimism:

Hence, other things being equal, the actual occurrence of business failures will be more or less widespread, according [to whether] bankers' loans, in the face of crisis of demands, are less or more readily obtainable.[6]

Despite huge injections of fresh liquidity into the American and European economies, largely from the government, the banks and financial institutions have until now remained unwilling to unfreeze the credit market. Other businesses also continue to fail, partly in response to already diminished demand (the Keynesian "multiplier" process), but also in response to fear of even less demand in the future, in a climate of general gloom (the Pigovian process of infectious pessimism).

--excerpt from Amartya Sen's article at the NRB, yet another successful case of clear writing; it would make Feynman proud (he once said that if you really understand something in physics you should be able to explain it to your grandmother)

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March 04, 2009

Sarcasm

(Paul talking to philosophers in Athens)

When they heard about a resurrection of the dead, some began joking about it, while others said, "We will hear you again about this." - Acts 17:32

As in, "Let's talk about it when you resurrect"?

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March 03, 2009

La vie en rouge

When Degas ran out of paint.

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March 02, 2009

The evening bliss

Mendelssohn's Lieder Ohne Worte played by Daniel Barenboim

"People usually complain that music is so ambiguous; that they are doubtful as to what they should think when they hear it, whereas everyone understands words. For me, it is just the reverse. And that is not for while speeches but for single words also: they seem to me so ambiguous, so indefinite, so open to misunderstanding in comparison with real music which fills one’s soul with a thousand better things than words. To me, the music I love does not express thoughts too indefinite to be put into words, but too definite…If you ask me what I thought (in connection with one or another of the Songs without Words), I must say: the song itself as it stands. If, with one or the other of them, I had a specific word or words in mind, I should not like to give them those titles, because words do not mean the same to one person as they mean to another; only the song says the same thing, arouses the same feeling, in one person as in another—a feeling that, however cannot be expressed in the same words…The word remains ambiguous, but in music we understand each other rightly. -- Mendelssohn in a letter (source)

***

Rouge Bourbon tea by Mariage Frères. The best tea in the world.

Grande finesse, thé rouge parfumé à l’arôme de vanille bourbon. Parfum délicat et goût subtil. 100% sans théine. Thé pour les moments agréables.

***

The Drunken Universe - an Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry.

The Persian poetry ends up being more of a set of mind bending puzzles than anything else:

Nonexistence
within existence
is my rule
getting lost
in getting lost
my religion.
(Ayn al-Qozat Hamadani)

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March 01, 2009

In a hidden treasure of a bookshop, upstairs from the tulip-bouquet-carrying mobs of Columbia flower market, beautiful old editions of penguin pocket books line the hallway wall and someone who I presume to be the owner asks a kid - he couldn't have been more than 8 - sitting behind the counter:

Older man: Do we have a copy of the Six wives of Henry VIII?
Child: We did have one. I'll go look, it must be under History.
(runs away, literally, comes back)
Child: I'm afraid to say but we ran out of copies, granddad.
Older man: All right.

I couldn't resist it. I asked for George Orwell's essays. He looked at me and asked if I meant a biography or other writings. No biographies, I answered. He jumped from his stool, ran to the next room and pointed me to "Orwell's England". I'd hire this kid if I was running a bookshop.

Ended up making some entertaining acquisitions. Who can resist buying from a little bibliophile? It's also called buying-on-a-impulse-inspired-by-intriguing-book-titles.

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Entre les murs

Automatic reaction as the ending credits roll by: "I love plotless french movies."

Someone sitting next to me said "you cannot teach like that, this isn't plausible." Obviously he hadn't met my 7th grade Portuguese teacher (or for that matter my 7th grade class from hell) who, in moments of despair, would shout "You Brussel sprouts! You souls in purgatory!". The latter strikes me as a perfect description of that state in between pubescent creatures and teenagehood, now that I think about it. I Still don't know what he meant by Brussels sprouts.

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February 25, 2009

Lent

Sunday, Hopper

Today is the beginning of Lent. I'm giving up idly surfing the Internet and reading the news online for 40 days. I'll use the internet only when I need to communicate - and blogging is communicating - or for limited and necessary searches without getting caught on the vice of mindless site hopping which is the equivalent of channel zapping.

This is the best I could come up with. I can't think of any other things I indulge myself with to give up. I don't like sweets and I hardly ever eat dessert. The rest of the food I can't really afford to not eat or I'll slowly disappear. I don't watch TV. I don't eat snacks. I don't drink coffee. I don't smoke. Sex is non negotiable. I already avoid buying things I don't need as a principle so that wouldn't be much of a plan. Obviously there are things I love doing but to me the spirit of the thing is to abstain from activities or items without any real added value; I don't see it as much as sacrifice but as a way towards simplicity. Simplicity can also mean giving up things that are relatively useful but which aren't worth the time spent acquiring. I won't stop reading books, for example.

It's a shame I'm a non believer, I'm a sucker for arbitrary religious discipline. I even have my own version of the Sabbath which I must say I haven't been a good observant of: I try not to work, use machines or make noises on Sundays. I don't know, it just makes sense to me.

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February 23, 2009

Portogallo #2

More of the same.

*****

The Portuguese: Publico says this was the saddest carnaval in recent history and that it was tinged by mourning.
The American: Why? What happened?
The Portuguese: Apparently some tourists were mugged.
The American: In Rio??? Nooooo...Anyway, I'm looking it up and the Times says there were 100 tourists robbed out of 200 thousand. Sounds like a success to me. Mourning? You know that in most countries in the world that word is actually used when people die.
...
The American: "Oh no! The side dish in this 10 course meal burned! The whole dinner is ruined!". It would take a gang waving machine guns and killing a couple hundred people in the Carnaval for the other journalists around the world to use the word 'sad' and 'mourning' in a headline.
The Portuguese: Yes, yes, I get your point.

*****

The Portuguese: Remember I told you the government is giving away computers called Magalhães to kids in schools?
The American: Yes and everybody seemed to be against it for some unknown reason.
The Portuguese: Well... now they're saying that the delays in the distribution of the computers are causing anxiety and greed among children because they don't understand why some of their colleagues receive their computers before they do.
The American: Well, they're Portuguese, they can't help being anxious about irrelevant matters. Sounds like a good opportunity to explain the basics of logistics to these kids.

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February 19, 2009

Frabjous day

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February 14, 2009

Milk

I don't get what is all the hype about. It's a nicely filmed biopic but could as well have been made in documentary form. What really puzzles me is the number of articles about it claiming it's some sort of hagiography. Am I the only one to think this man was not a saint at all? On the contrary, he came across as rather nasty - from organizing riots that could have ended badly to outing people against their will, there's no end to the man's bullying. And people wonder why Dan White shot him - the killer was obviously deranged but the movie does not try to conceal the dishonest tactics Milk employed to humiliate him. But then again I'm the kind of person who believes the ends don't justify the means, no matter how much I support the cause. And I do support Milk's cause.

Sean Penn does a nice job - although the prosthetic nose gets a bit in the way - but I have this nagging feeling that he's getting some homophobic disguised praise. As in "Oh look at that butchy heterosexual man playing a slightly effeminate gay guy... he's an excellent actor." I'm also disgusted at the thought that he'll get an Oscar for it. Mostly because I can't tell if he'll get it because he is indeed an excellent actor or for the same reasons the award went to Daniel Day-Lewis for his cerebral palsy character, Dustin Hoffman for faking autism, Jack Nicholson for his obsessive compulsive stunt. They were all essentially playing the part of "The Other", "The Different". And that seems to be a challenge which strikes me as mildly offensive. Gay roles also seem to be the way to go, considering Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (oh please) and William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman.

But the main thing is that this movie helps the LGBT movement as much as a biopic of MLK would help against racism. Now, what we really need is a Bill Cosby type family oriented sitcom where the parents are gay and their kids are as happy or screwed up as any other kids.

(Josh Brolin is magnificent; probably the most underrated actor around.)

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Orwell's own surveillance camera

It's just too ironic to be true. But it is. It's in Hackney by Broadway Market. I'm not sure Orwell would feel vindicated or amused. I ordered his biography after reading several references to restaurants in London from which Orwell was thrown out because he insisted on taking off his coat.

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February 05, 2009

New finds

(copyright Yvonne Mayer / Crafts Study Centre)

I found Lucie Rie through Ipek (who turns out to share my favorite Monty Python skit - which is the more remarkable as it is an obscure one that no one else seems to find funny).

*****

More than once, while browsing the non-fiction section, I can't help thinking that most of the books there would be fine reads as essays. Why ruin it by eliminating brevity?

*****

At the LRB, I always have a nanosecond of excitement when, neck twisted reading spines, I find "Anatomy of Restlessness". The hope that it is a cross between the Anatomy of Melancholy and the Book of Disquiet is shattered as soon as I find out (again) that it is just a good title for some writings on the author's (who I particularly dislike) theories (which don't seem more than whims to me). I wonder why I keep forgetting it exists.

*****

Thanks to Lisa, added Orwell's Diaries to my RSS feeds. Now I can keep track of the eggs myself. Also, I'm reading the Howard Zinn book she brought from Boston which R. says it gives me extra fuel for my fits of outraged, hand waving disgust at the occasional bit of political news.

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February 02, 2009

This is pathetic

I arrive in London to find that everyone's gone mad. My train was a bit late, I grant that, but it was speeding through snow covered plains like nothing was the matter. In London, cabbies were driving by with their usual disregard for human life. But, mystery of mysteries, there were no buses. Stopped by the supermarket on the way home from the train station and people were hoarding bread and pasta. It's 4 inches of snow. As Her Majesty should have said this morning - after all, what's a monarchy for if incompetent bureaucrats can decide to shut off the transportation system, making the country lose 1.2 billion pounds - "Keep Calm and Carry On".

Also, the view to the backyard is gorgeous. I love snow.

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January 29, 2009

Portogallo

or an exercise in frivolous commentary on what's going on in the little rectangle by the sea as seen from the living room sofa. C reads the Portuguese headlines, the American R comments.

(published on the Guardian on the day after the 1974 revolution)

C: The teachers are on strike again.
R: Why?
C: They don't want to be evaluated and don't want their career progression to depend on the evaluation.
R: Are they all incompetent?

***

C: So, this sociologist says that only peasants would care to think of a personal achievement like Cristiano Ronaldo being elected best football player in the world as something that a country could be proud of and claim responsibility for. And that the silly optimists in the government are trying to use it to make people believe Portugal is better than they think.
R: Hasn't he heard of role models? Of an enabling environment? Of self confidence being the key to achieve stuff? You people need to be less hard on yourselves.
C: Well, he says that there are more important achievements like the lowering of the child mortality rate.
R: Yeah, the crowds go wild when you throw data at them.

***

C: The Portuguese are the most pessimistic in Europe about the economy.
R: About everything... you people need to relax.

***

Watching the Pt news online on Inauguration day. Supposedly, a happy day as seen from the heights of American optimism. Wrong.

R: Why are they spending so much time on Ted Kennedy?
C: They're saying his seizures at the luncheon ruined the whole day.
R: What?? The images we're watching right now of Obama and his wife smiling and shaking hands with the people are from after that happened. Do they look like their day was ruined to you?
C: Anyway.
The anchor addresses the american correspondent and asks him if the americans were disappointed at the speech.
R: What?? That's the first thing she asks? Why would they be disappointed? What the hell? You people are so negative.
Fast forward to "reactions from other heads of state to the inauguration". Somehow, the conclusion of the segment lingers gloomily on Putin's "From great expectations come great disappointments".
R: That's it. I'm not watching this crap anymore. I'm pretty sure the show ends with someone singing a weepy fado.

***

C: Ooops. There's a possibility the current PM got a 4 million euro bribe years ago when he was the Minister for the Environment...
R: Who's investigating it?
C: What do you mean? The Police, the DA...
R: Oh, so he doesn't control them?
C: My country isn't a banana republic!
R: Well, you started out the conversation by saying your PM might be corrupt...
C ignores him.

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January 22, 2009

People who are about to die generally don't regret the parachute jumps they haven't made (unless they're falling from an aircraft without one). Instead, they regret the love they haven't given or haven't expressed. Generally, the reason they haven't done this is because they've been too full of hate, too in love with themselves or simply too crushed by the business of survival.
-Guy Browning, on the Guardian

(I wanted to save this not only because it strikes me as very wise in a pragmatic way but also because it will be a more articulate and compelling reply to anyone who invites me out for an adventure activity than my usual "Not in a million years, are you out of your mind?")

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January 21, 2009

The Old Vic is a beautiful intimate venue though

Quick review: Meh*. At heart is the usual liberal American difficulty to distinguish the country from the government and the "am I a patriot or not" conundrum that ensues. It kinda bores me, as a patriotic leftist - perfect candidate for the Misfit Party - who can't understand what the trouble is. Also, I didn't find the dialogue engaging enough to compensate for the sparsity of action and that device of not giving enough context to start with and then filling in the blanks progressively didn't work for some reason. Moreover, it felt like the actors didn't know their lines properly and so the timings were lost. Poirot - I don't care who he is, he'll always be Poirot to me - kept me awake on a otherwise soporific play.

Also, there was a mob of American students sitting around me looking like a bunch of meercats trying to spot Kevin Spacey in the audience who, judging by the speed by which he got up from his seat and zoomed backstage as soon as intermission started, wasn't feeling as lethargic as I was. I kept imagining him as a football coach whose team is losing badly, doing his motivational speech and changing the strategy so I stayed for the second part. One thing is certain, he is no Mourinho.

*(almost) Monosyllabic Scale: Wow!, Weeeee!, Hmmm, Meh, Double Meh, Yuck!.

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I needed this. I had just finished watching the last season of The Wire which was so darned pessimistic and portrays the world (as derived from the little human microcosm that is Baltimore) in such a fatalistic and disheartening way that my brain was tuned to expect the worst possible outcome of any work of fiction. The Times said it was a "feel good movie that doesn't insult your brain". And it is. A very odd feel good movie considering all the slaying and violence that goes on ( a little bit of religious fueled murdering here, kids living in a garbage dump there) but, still, it does leave you with a smile on your face. And it has a happy and highly improbable ending. A life without fantasy is pointless anyway. Also, it made me feel like watching the gorgeous Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham again in which stars Amitabh Bachchan who coincidentally makes a good point about western partiality when it comes to film aesthetics:

If SM projects India as Third World dirty under belly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky under belly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. Its just that the SM idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a Westerner, gets creative Globe recognition. The other would perhaps not.

The commercial escapist world of Indian Cinema had vociferously battled for years , on the attention paid and the adulation given to the legendary Satyajit Ray at all the prestigious Film Festivals of the West, and not a word of appreciation for the entertaining mass oriented box office block busters that were being churned out from Mumbai. The argument. Ray portrayed reality. The other escapism, fantasy and incredulous posturing. Unimpressive for Cannes and Berlin and Venice. But look how rapidly all that is changing. -- from his blog.

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January 19, 2009

Let me tell you the one thing I have against Moses. He took us 40 years into the desert in order to bring us to the one place in the Middle East that has no oil! -- Golda Meir

I've started rereading the bible. The first time I read it, I picked a Portuguese version from 1921. The narrator's voice in my head was an old catholic priest which I pictured looking at me menacingly, his reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, his index finger a gun ready to fire. Which is obviously not fun and even a little scary since the classic catholic seminary speech style is also guilt inducing. This time, I'm reading the King James version. When I read it in english the narrator's voice belongs to a New York jew. Which makes it seem like I'm reading a script from a Mel Brooks movie. Other times it's a David Mamet character talking in that peculiar rhythm and in constant aporia. Now, THAT is fun.

Example (Exodus 17, Mel Brooks plays Moses, Fran Lebowitz plays "the people", the narrator is Jerry Seinfeld):

So they argued with Moses. They said, "Give us water to drink."

Moses replied, "Why are you arguing with me? Why are you putting the Lord to the test?"

But the people were thirsty for water there. So they told Moses they weren't happy with him. They said, "Why did you bring us up out of Egypt? Did you want us, our children and our livestock to die of thirst?"

Then Moses cried out to the Lord. He said, "What am I going to do with these people? They are almost ready to kill me by throwing stones at me."

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January 17, 2009

The ugly little duckling mermaid

Zooming in the Garden of Earthly Delights (which reminds me it has been a while since I've last been to Madrid). Taken from the new VERY high resolution Prado Masterpieces on Google Earth. Perfect for busy paintings where a pack of tourists blocking it is a permanent fixture.

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January 16, 2009

Woody Schmoody

I've been trying to figure out what happened to Woody Allen. Following on my theory that his style of filming and writing is directly related to whoever is the woman in his life, it's been puzzling to see the decaying of quality - "and all the hype about his latest films proves just that", she said sporting a snobbish nose high up in the air - while he is still (as far as I know) with Soon-Yi. To be fair, a downward slope started in 1997 when he married Soon-Yi after some glorious years in between Mia and her, making the theory a bit more complicated since now I have to also include the girlfriend/wife dichotomy into the equation.

This pet theory came about while reading about Picasso and his muses so the logical thing to do is to look at the end of his career (Woody is almost 80) and try to draw some parallels. And I've got it. Woody is going through the Musketeer phase. He is impotent. He is a horny impotent old man, trying to get an erection out of filming his own little outdated fantasies about lesbian sex between hot film stars and such nonsense. The alternative theory is that if New York is a woman, he left her. And Woody filming away from New York makes as much sense as Spike Lee making movies about white folks.

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January 14, 2009

obamicon.me

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January 05, 2009

Counterpoint

It took Ezra Pound 1 year to write the image poem "In a station of the metro" which started out by having 30 lines and got reduced to this:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Now, I wanted to create a poetry poster for an empty frame that was lying around and considered Larkin's poem The trees ( I wanted a verbalization of the other "picture" on the wall: the garden's London planes framed by the living room sash window) but it was too long and the rhyming put me off so I Pounderized it. Much better.

We will have to wait until Spring for it to make sense.

*****

I could spend hours looking at the Assyrian reliefs in the British Museum. Especially at the design of male legs. It's just one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

*****

I think I saw a guerrilla book re-shelving action today. At Foyles, on the Bibles of every size, version and color display someone sneaked in one single volume of a beautifully red bound copy of Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales. There's too much sex and violence in the Bible for that comparison to be even remotely clever. Or else, it looks like something Dawkins would do. Meh for narrow minded atheists.

*****

You know your brain has been messed up by the British press when distractedly looking at headlines and reading "Gaza" you wonder what's Paul Gascoigne up to again.

*****

Found Luis Molina-Pantin on Babelia this weekend.

Informal study on hybrid architecture Vol.I. Narco-Architecture and its contributions to the community (Calì-Bogota, Colombia)2004-2005 is a series of images that shifts us towards another of the artist’s interests: cultural phenomena linked to architecture. The photos were taken between 2004 and 2005, in particular in the Parque Jaime Dunque near Bogotà, and in Calì, two places among those sadly known as the headquarters of important Colombian drug cartels.

This hybrid architecture, as Pantin defines it, shows a mix of local stylistic elements and occidental and oriental models, generating an architectural potpourri that once would have been defined as whimsy: it shows the obscene aesthetic taste of the Colombian drug lords of the 1990s. In those years, local schools of architecture were adulterated, victims of a civic variation due to the mad and heedless accumulation of wealth, combined with the arrogance and ignorance of the narcos. There is no human presence in these images; the vanished inhabitants and the detached gaze of the artist who does not judge, comment or document, demonstrate the taxonomic vision of a folly. The artist creates a de facto museum of narco-architecture pervaded by an unadorned poetic of places that brings to mind De Chirico’s Italian piazzas.---source

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January 02, 2009

Letting out excess bile or when Claudia rambles about stuff that has been annoying her for no particular reason

There's nothing like starting the year by completely breaking my only new year's resolution. A life of contradiction and of opinionated gibberish is so much more fun.

*****

It's too late - and the 2008 Turner prize is as relevant by now as the work of most people who have won it in past years - but once in a while the interview the winner gave to radio 4 pops in my mind. I can't find it but it was even more entertaining than this stunthere. It involved something about how he uses the Simpsons to give meaning to the experience of contemporary life. Had he used Futurama and I might actually have cared. Not.

Also, about his favorite films: "I’m a big fan of the director James Cameron and I think Titanic (1997) is an incredible film – a big film about big ideas".

An excerpt of an essay by Orwell comes to mind:

"Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. (...)

But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one of the first things that one notices when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from southern Europe. Does it not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really, because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does link up with, however, is another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the PRIVATENESS of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official—the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’."

*****

Funny how the same people who get all worked up and rave about how greed caused the recession are the same ones who seem to only find time to speak about finance. So much for a shift in values.

Nonetheless, I've come across a number of sites and post-bubble gurus prattling about frugality and living with less. My favorite is one that has a title in the lines of "Simplicity: how to become rich slowly" (paraphrasing here, there's no way I'm going to link to that; heck, there's no way I'm even going to google for it).

*****

I remembered recently a story by a brazilian writer who was staying in some remote village where there was no TV. He found reading the newspapers strangely relaxing since he stopped being manipulated by the lineup of the TV news, the anchor's histrionics, the skewed and useless people in the street point of views. Then there was some sort of storm and they didn't get the papers for a few weeks. Suddenly there were no news and he realized how the events he used to worry about didn't really have any practical effect on his life.

Considering how bad the media in general has become (I have to exclude at least El Pais from this generalization), the alternative to being news-less is the RSS reader. Every piece of news (discounting headline sensationalist phrasing, that is) has the same importance, the same typeface, the same colors, the same font size. You're your own editor.

*****

Random aesthetic pet hate: I find blue jasper Wedgwood-style porcelain repulsive.

*****

(from the epicurious blog)

So, instead of following and critically analyzing recommendations by people who devoted their lives to studying a subject and to reviewing the most items related to their field of expertise they are able to, we should rely on the opinions of random people on the internet and follow the majority ruling? Hmmmm. Someone is confusing entertainment with learning.

*****

Paul McCartney should just give up. He's on a crusade to prove he's cooler than a dead man.

"In an interview with the intellectual journal Prospect, Sir Paul said that he persuaded Lennon to oppose the war in Vietnam."

"John's Revolution 9 is very far out. It came out of a lot of experimentation I'd been doing with two Brenell tape recorders at home. My greatest regret is that I've lost them all now. I'd take them round to friends' houses. John Dunbar [artist ex-husband of Marianne Faithfull] used to plug this little Philips tape recorder into his system and we'd play my avant garde experiments. Someone might have my loop symphonies in a box of tapes somewhere. Can I have them back please?"

In the post Beatles era, Lennon gave us "Imagine" and McCartney "Mull Of Kintyre". Oh God, and "Ebony & Ivory". Paul McCartney is a Knight of the British Empire and John Lennon returned his own MBE. In 1976, Time magazine was saying Paul was a sort of conservative Republican. John was providing funding for anti-war protests while under CIA surveillance. Enough said.

*****

Phew.

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December 20, 2008

The Holidays book stack

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November 30, 2008

At the National Theatre.

Pirandello at the Gielgud.

At the Barbican.

Beckett at the Young Vic.

Reza at the Gielgud.

*****

It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance, the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does in the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, anytime. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it.

Public taste is 25 years behind, and picks up a style only when it is exploited by the second rate.

Philip Larkin, The Pleasure Principle

**************

Klee once wrote a poem and filled the spaces between the letters with various colors. the result was that the words revealed themselves to the consciousness in slow motion. The futurists composed their tavole parolibere according to this principle, while poems have also been written with one word in each page. (...) a good designer could set a text with the reading time varying according to meaning and emphasis, just as a person changes speed in speech. To a certain extent, of course, this is already done with punctuation.

Bruno Munari, Design as Art

**************

Janus words, oxymorons in one word, also known as antagonyms or antiphrasis: clip (to cut a little piece of and to put a little
piece on), dust ( to remove dust and to apply dust), sanction (a punitive action and to endorse).
In portuguese: já (means already but also soon) and in Spanish: huésped (means either guest or host).

Seen in Mikael Parvall, Limits of Language

*******

Arnold (Schoenberg) taught himself several instruments and played in a string quartet that occupied a room set aside for messenger boys. He learned instrumental forms by subscribing to an encyclopedia, and waited for the S volume to arrive before composing a sonata.

Intellectuals of fin-de-siècle Vienna were much concerned with the limits of language, with the need for a kind of communicative silence. (...) The impulse to go to the brink of nothingness is central to Webern's aesthetic; if the listener is paying insufficient attention, the shorter movements of his work may pass unnoticed. The joke went around that Webern had introduced the marking pensato: Don't play the note, only think it.

Alex Ross, The Rest is Silence.

*******
Realized how it is so much easier to find these here again than in the notebooks that mysteriously disappear into the black holes - aka my purses which I'm am sure are gateways to other dimensions where all my tiny possessions gather together and make fun of me.

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November 06, 2008

Bittersweet

I'm just furious that Obama won. I just realized how the moral power shifted in this household. How can I now make fun of the resident American here? He already started telling brits: "Oh, don't worry, I'm sure any black man can become king here...oh wait, no they can't!". Now we need to start working on electing a lesbian gypsy woman for that planned role of President of the European Union if we want to get back our sense of moral superiority. Sigh.

Just kidding. Couldn't be happier. As a little girl, those very scarce female role models in politics were the only reassuring fact that I wasn't completely screwed; so, I'm hoping non-white boys (and girls) all over are dreaming of becoming presidents of something someday...

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October 24, 2008

No fair.

She just went as she always said she would, paraphrasing a portuguese comedian: "One day, I'll wake up dead."

"To me the thought of my dead friend is sweet and appealing. For I have had them as if I should one day lose them; I have lost them as if I have them still." - Seneca, Epistles, On grief for lost friends

(us heathens have to find consolation in philosophy since that stuff about heaven doesn't stick.)

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October 19, 2008

Of late

Piemonte. Gastronomer's paradise. Wondering why would walking on Via Po where Nietzsche went definitely mad by hugging a horse in public would give me such a thrill.

Also, who would have guessed that only a few months after seeing the marvelous Vittorio Sella's pioneering mountaineering photos and learning about the Duke of the Abruzzi at the Estorick Collection, I would be visiting the Torino Section of the Clube Alpino Italiano?

*****

At the Tate Modern:

The Turbine Hall thing is boring and predictable. The books left on the bunkbeds are War of the Worlds, Hiroshima mon amour and the like. If it was supposed to have a post-apolcalyptical feel, someone whould have considered not painting the beds in bright colors.

The Rothko exhibition was unnecessary. The Tate already had the Seagram murals in a dimly lit room which was practically deserted on Friday nights when the galleries close at 10pm. It was just perfect for any aspirer to religious ecstasy through contemplation of color. Now I'm dreading that it won't be there anymore after this.

Cildo Meireles is amazing. A brazilian conceptual artist that completely blew my mind.

"You recently paid tribute to Manzoni at Herning Park in Denmark by standing upside down on his Socle du Monde plinth. Like so many of your works, the title you gave the tribute – Atlas – is wonderfully ironic, inasmuch as you invert the mythological character’s performance."

*****

Las Vegas wasn't the explosion of kitsch I hoped for or, at least, my expectations were too high. However, driving back to San Diego we found the cutest american tourist trap: a wild west ghost town complete with saloon, sheriff's office and silver mine.

*****

Oh. Oh. Oh. The Wire. Magnificent. I find myself mentally going over the episodes and marveling at the social commentary embedded in it.

Stringer Bell being my favorite character...gangster and macroeconomics nerd.

*****

Found Thomas Dutronc, a fellow Djangophile.

Also, his is the 5th version of September Song on my iTunes now. I love September Song.

*****

Standing on a red light on Market Street, a San Francisco homeless woman joined me and R. on a futile lover's quarrel. We ignored her as you do in a city full of homeless people who unfortunately seem in their most part deranged. She listened attentively to the arguments on either side and, as the light turned green and we were about to set out, she said "I wish I had your problems". End of discussion. And I suspect that just the memory of it will be a stopper to any idiotic quarrel to come.

*****

Amazon's recommendations on drugs.

Obviously wanting to buy a foilcutter means I drink wine which means I have a toddler. And buying Pushkin's biography makes me the owner of an HP printer.

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July 28, 2008

Baden Baden and Strasbourg

Baden-Baden is a relaxing and quiet little town with one of the most beautiful little parks in the world: the Lichtentaler Allee with a paved waterway running beside it and many species of superb trees randomly scattered on the immaculate green lawn.

The casino where Dostoievsky lost his shirt is very low key and doesn't feel like a casino at all, a perfect image of teutonic restraint in face of Fate and Luck.

The baths are reason enough for a trip there. Friedrichbad is the one where you go through 15 stages, from saunas, soap massages, wet saunas, jacuzzis, warm water pools, cold water pools...and at the end you feel clean as you've never been. On Sundays both men and women are admitted - it's a textile free place, or else, you're naked as a baby - and we had fun spotting a japanese gentleman who seemed to be lost all the time and never seemed to stop more than 2 minutes at each station after checking out all the women in sight. Caracalla's ground floor is for families; pools at different temperatures, saunas, waterfalls and everyone wearing swimsuits. Now, the real fun is upstairs where there is a bridge to the mountain right beside it where there are log cabins with dry saunas inside and cold water showers for the brave. And it's all nude. It's like being back in San Francisco. Avoid evenings and nights because the towel clutching freaks show up. The type of people who don't understand it's a faux-pas to not be totally naked in a nudist place while staring at others.

Strasbourg was an unplanned visit. France was just around the corner and that's the place to go in search of a fine meal. The Cathedral is one of the most monumental buildings I've seen, stretching dramatically into the sky. The town is beautiful and lively, full of quaint streets and medieval looking buildings.

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July 27, 2008

Mad Detective

I have a weak spot for Hong Kong made thrillers. Maybe it's because they're so good as opposed to Hollywood blockbusters infested by terrible actors with pretty faces declaiming cliches.

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July 25, 2008

What's on Mundo de Claudia reading pile

Bouvard et Pécuchet is a treasure. R. has been reading it to me in the evenings, the perfect book to be shared as we follow the two gentlemen through their pursuit of knowledge and from failure to failure in putting it to practice.

The Rest is Noise is the proof that a lenient god exists as he answered my atheistic prayer for a book that would read like a long New Yorker article (the erudite yet accessible ones, not the Obama-is-our-God-and-all-Republicans-are-evil ones).

Carnegie's bio. I dunno, I was in the mood for a high brow excuse to peep into other people's lives. That's what bios are all about, no?

The Death of Virgil. I'm scared of it - shouldn't I be brushing up on my Aeneid beforehand? Thomas Mann says it's one of the most profound and extraordinary experiments to have been undertaken under the form of a novel. Steiner says it's the only genuine technical advance that fiction has made since Ulysses. We'll see.

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July 24, 2008

Veronese's Allegories of Love: the Set

These paintings were destined to be hanging in a ceiling in a order that is unknown. They've been called different aspects of love or paired as the pleasures and pains of love. There seem to be only four of them if we are to trust Veronese's preparatory drawings for it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Whatever the narrative was supposed to be, there's an obvious moral purpose.

You should avoid the easy woman because easy as she is, others will possess her and she will bring you no fortune or children. But, if you lust after a woman who doesn't give in to your desires, who is chaste and virtuous, by marrying her Fortune will bless you with peace and fertility.

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Veronese's Allegories of Love: Happy Union

A married couple (the two main characters from the other paintings) is rewarded by Fortune, the holder of the horn of plenty, abundance and fertility, who crowns the virtuous wife. Not only are they married as symbolized by the golden chain held by the putto, they are faithful - the dog - and peace and harmony reigns between them - the olive branch.

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Veronese's Allegory of Love: Jealousy

A half undressed woman is dividing her attentions between two men and although she seems to be holding the bearded gentleman's hand (our main character from the other paintings) she's discreetly giving a written piece of paper to the other man. The fig tree was believed to be so obstinate as to destroy even marble. It is depicted here as a symbol of decadence. Maybe it is a barren fig tree, destroying everything in its way and yet having no future, bearing no fruit. Eros seems dumbfounded by the whole scene while he plays the clavichord, music leading men out of their senses, the woman being the maestrina.

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Veronese's Allegories of Love: Respect

I wouldn't call it respect but restraint. A naked woman sleeping in a drunken stupor - note the half empty jar of wine - isn't respectful, she is easy. Eros as sexual temptation, once again rather than love, is quite graphically represented here as he holds the phallic sword and points at the woman's vagina with his arrow. An older man, certainly wisdom, pulls the main character away from the sleeping woman and the meaning of the allegory is further reinforced by a scene of the Continence of Scipio painted on the ceiling of the archway. Scipio, the roman general, having conquered Carthago Nova and being offered a beautiful captive shows his clemency and sexual restraint by giving her back to her fiancée.

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Veronese's Allegories of Love: Scorn

A man is tormented by desire for a chaste woman.

Eros is savagely hitting the man with his bow, embodying the pangs of desire and not those of love or why else there would be statues of Pan - holding his flute in a suggestive way - and a satyr in the background ruins? It's the male as a sexual animal and the woman-victim running away and shown the way by Chastity symbolized by an ermine, an animal which won't let its white fur get dirty.

The woman has the upper hand in the moral dispute.

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July 12, 2008

The latest random annotations

"...They were mostly 'His Master's Voice' and 'Columbia'; the latter, however, although easily pronounced, had only letters, and the pensive doggy was a winner.(...) It took me a least a decade to realize that 'His Master's voice' means what it does: that a dog is listening here to the voice of its owner. I thought it was listening to the recording of its own barking, for I somehow took the phonograph's amplifier for a mouth piece too, and since dogs run before their owners, this label all my childhood meant to me the voice of the dog announcing his master's approach."
--from the essay "Spoils of War", so far the only of Joseph Brodsky's writings I have enjoyed, a poignant account of his childhood and youth in the USSR and the meaning of foreign objects left behind by Americans after the WWII in his life.

---

"Dearer to me than a host of base truths
is the delusion that enobles us." -- AS Pushkin

---

"il n'y a de bonheur que dans les voies communes" - Chateaubriand

---

"I hear from people who have seen you that you are becoming stout, optimistic and genial - in other words, Americanized. I believe that I had already noticed traces of this in your letters, and I'm not sure I entirely approve."

Edmund Wilson's letter to Vladimir Nabokov, 14 Jan 1946

___

"Don't let the smallest chance slip by; you never know until you try."
"If you're a salesman worth the name at all, you can sell razors to a billiard ball."
"The salesman who will use his brains will spare himself a world of pains."
"Well kept hands that please the sight seize the trade and hold it tight, but bitten nails and grubby claws well may give the buyer pause."

maxims from Montague Egg's Salesman Handbook (the other Dorothy L Sayers detective)

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May 14, 2008

How to write about an exhibition you haven't attended

Matthew Bliss, Beyond Abstraction, May 3rd-June 2nd (extended until the 8th!) at Sharada Gallery, Rhinebeck, NY

I met Matthew only once in a cold February day in New York City; my memory of this event is not an accurate but a cinematographic one: I remember it as if it were the scene of a Wim Wenders movie, a gritty urban environment, the streets dirty with the recently melted snow and the feeling that this could only have happened in this particular place - a geographical appropriateness. In the back of a yellow cab, like members of an underworld in a country where art was forbidden, Matthew carefully and almost in stealth extracted from a canvas bag a small sculpture that fitted the palm of his hand, a restless hand, anxiously showing a treasure. And there it was, a sturdy object that despite its small scale was the antithesis of flimsiness and that looked the more minute in its creator's long and elegant fingers. And it quickly disappeared back into its case.

Probably because of the secretive and intimate atmosphere I associate with this encounter, I imagine that in order to see this exhibition you'd have to whisper a password to get through the door, like a speakeasy. You climb down a few steps and there is a room, darkened and damp as a wine cellar, where flickering lightbulbs throw a blanket of yellow light over the exquisite little sculptures set in holes cut into the walls. They would possibly be lit from below casting long shadows on the rugged walls, adding a hint of drama. Exit this Boltanski's The Candles inspired stage and back to the most natural gallery setting, the ever-ubiquituous white cube. I start imagining that each sculpture has the right to its own white pedestal, high enough for the viewer not need to bend over to examine it more carefully but not as high as to leave the work at eye level either. Somewhere in between, a perfect height to see the sculpture from the front but still have a good grasp of its depth and dimensions.

These assemblages could pass for objects trouvés, industrial debris from a giant contraption, abandoned and corroded by the elements and the relentless action of time. Better even, they could be attempts at its reconstruction, the plans being lost and its aim forgotten.

Oh. Soft jazz should be playing.

As for the drawings and watercolors, they would be hanging in a small back room with a skylight. The false Rothkos, more simulacra than forgery, should be here in a contrarian stance to the Rothko hall at Tate Modern, as if Man Ray had come by and solarized the entire room. Rather than a somber and meditative atmosphere reminiscent of a chapel, a room evocative of a joyful and bright afternoon in the sun drenched roof of a house in Alexandria, a blue sky dome stolen from Klein, where the Quartet's characters would be contriving dissertations on the philosophy of love.

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May 12, 2008

Many years ago in Lisbon, my very British-crocheted-tie-and-tweed-jacket-type teacher Simon was telling me how he had gone back to London for a short break and how he made a fool of himself for not remembering the appropriate english terms for the several bank operations he had planned to take care of while there. The teller looked at him as if he was demented - or at the very least as if he had a very limited vocabulary - since with that fine Queen's accent there was no doubt he was an englishman. He concluded, "Not only do I speak a poor Portuguese, I'm beginning to forget my own language!".

I haven't been away long enough to have a similar complaint but, whereas I was before a gold card Amazon.co.uk client (if there was such a thing), I find myself now pining for some Portuguese literature. As they say, I can't get no satisfaction. In the absence of an Amazon.pt, my kind and patient parents brought me exactly what I needed:

A modern classic that I managed to procrastinate reading indefinitely until now; a posthumous work of a famous author; the most recent book by my favorite Portuguese contemporary writer.

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April 09, 2008

"Serenidad, Yulma, tu peor enemigo puede ser el miedo."

Help, my home is being invaded my Mexican memorabilia
or
how I learned about Lucha Libre and Kaliman, el hombre increíble.

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April 05, 2008

"Men, commonplace and ordinary, do not seem to me fit for the tremendous fact of eternal life. With their little passions, their little virtues and their little vices, they are well enough suited in the workday world; but the conception of immortality is much too vast for beings cast on so small a scale." -- A Writer's Notebook by Somerset Maugham

quoted by Julian Barnes on Nothing to be Afraid Of, a book I couldn't put down not out of reading pleasure but of suspense on what would he write next that I couldn't disagree more with. It's a memoir verging on becoming an anthology of quotations by famous novelists and artists about death and dying, as entertaining as any other anglo-saxon memoir and their typically detached accounts of family's eccentricities and anecdotes. Yet, I was appalled to find, even already discounting the different nationalities, generations and gender, that this man has a way of seeing the world that is so alien to me. From small insignificant details like "when you're a child you think your family is unique" - when I was a child I thought every other family was like mine and was very surprised to find they weren't - to his interpretation of Maugham's quote "The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love" which, following a story by Browne, he believes is all about growing older, having everyone die around you until there's no one else to love - as if you'd stop loving the dead.

I hope to outlive Mr. Barnes - and I'm only saying this because he actually addressed me, the reader, asking me to consider that I might die before him. I think it will be very appropriate that on the day he passes away, there will be a book on one of my shelves in which his signature will become a sort of modern relic.

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March 26, 2008

Actually, this makes sense.

What do artist Jeff Koons and prostitute Ashley Alexandra Dupré have in common? Both can be had for a hefty price through the Emperors Club. Citing a report on Artnet, Le Monde's Harry Bellet discovers that the escort service, which counted the former New York governor Spitzer among its clients, also offered contemporary artworks through its online site. "Emperors Club was not satisfied with providing women to our financial elites but also took an interest in contemporary art," writes Bellet. "Their business, Emperors Publishing Media Group, owns a site called Emperors Club Contemporary Art, which is responsible for providing its clients with works by renowned artists like Jeff Koons, David Salle, and Richard Prince." Emperor's Club describes itself as "a highly informative venue through which you may acquire exceptional contemporary art directly from a group of highly selected artists, dealers, galleries, and members." Members are required to earn at least $450,000 per year. Sotheby's and Christie's logos appear on the site's page, although, according to Bellet, the auction houses insist that they were not informed about the posting. But auction houses are not the only ones to be roped in to the Emperor's Club experience. "The site offers images of artworks, each accompanied by a notice usually taken from the best sources," writes Bellet. "A painting by Jeff Koons is accompanied by a review by critic Jerry Saltz." -- from ArtForums's news digest

It's all about aesthetics, no? And power. And prostitution. Which has everything to do with the art market these days, Jeff Koons being one of the great meretrices. But I always thought that it was part of his artistic manifesto. No need to take it literally.

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March 04, 2008

As it happens, I was present during one delirious afternoon when the children finally did catch on to the basic principles of number - the fact that with numbers you can count anything. Released from the schoolhouse, the excited children ran hither and tither in little groups, applying their new found insight: they counted the houses, the dogs, the trees, fingers and toes, each other - and the numbers worked every time.

Account of Umeda children of Papua New Guinea learning to count numbers by Alfred Gell (cited on the Routledge Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of Mathematics)

(I'm not sure if the Umedas originally could count up to 47 using parts of the body for each number or could count up to 5 using combinations of 1's and 2's. Either way, i found the account of this sudden realization of abstraction very exciting.)

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March 03, 2008

Visual Greguerías

by Chema Madoz, spanish photographer

(a Greguería, invented by Ramón Goméz de La Serna, is an aphorism based on a decontextualized metaphor, à la Dada)

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February 19, 2008

Gibraltar Airport Runway

Finally made the plane into Paris,
Honey mooning down by the Seine.
Peter Brown called to say,
"You can make it O.K.,
You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain".
--The ballad of John and Yoko

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February 09, 2008

São Paulo Stripped Bare by the Aesthetes, Even

Last year, the Brazilian city of São Paulo outlawed billboards, logos, posters or any kind of advertisement in the streets or even on buses.

(from the wonderful Flickr set by Tony de Marco documenting the process)

This year, the famous São Paulo biennial will showcase an empty exhibition space:

(Biennial Pavillion stolen from Frieze)

Considering the fact that there are almost two hundred biennials around the world working on similar issues, showing the diverse art practices which constitute the territories of the current visual language, it seems necessary to ask: How does the São Paulo Biennial evaluates this cultural phenomenon, propagated through the so-called peripheral countries or in regions of political or cultural tension? What is a biennial's role in the era of globalization? What role do biennials play for the cultural, tourism and event industry? What contribution to the discussion proposes the São Paulo Biennial based on its experience, being the third oldest organization of this kind and the first outside the hegemonic centers?

In El Pais, an interview with the curator, Ivo Mesquita:
Hay una frase de Beckett al final de Esperando a Godot: 'We are nummbed' (estamos embotados). Y es lo que me parece. Doscientas bienales, ferias, revistas, premios, más arte... No estamos mirando. Estamos perdiendo el sentido de la mirada".

****

(I have a feeling they are actually light years ahead of us all)

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January 31, 2008

Free association

Tom Zé, "All the eyes" album, Brazilian Musician


And when I brought the razor closer and with my fingers separated the borders of his anus, Estefania, my astonishment knew no bounds. My first thought was that Palinuro mistrusted me and had decided to spy on me; you won't believe this, Estefania, but there, in his anus, Palinuro had an eye.
'It's an optical illusion.' he said.
'No sir, it's an eye.' I answered.
'What colour?'
'Blue.'
'It's the Universal Eye.'
'That's a metaphor,' I said to him, 'And what you have in your arse is no metaphor but a real eye.'
'Are you crazy?'
'No, I'm not crazy. The General's glass eye, which you must have swallowed last night in your drunken stupor'.
--Palinuro de Mexico, Fernando del Paso

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January 27, 2008

The weekend's little pleasures

But a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction - from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to "know" them; they should not be "stereotypes", they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. A glance at the thousands of foolish "reader reviews" on Amazon, with their complaints about "dislikeable characters", confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader "couldn't find any characters to identify with", or "didn't think that any of the characters 'grow'". -- James Wood in the Guardian, last Saturday.

This is pretty much an elaboration of what Nabokov said on his Literature lectures. They're also both as truculent:

Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use. -- Nabokov, Literature Lectures

*****

Taking books out of boxes.

*****

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. --Arabya in Dubliners by James Joyce

*****

Roi Vaara, Artist's Dilemma, 1997 (my pic of the London South Bank Centre February leaflet)

Which illustrates perfectly why the cult of the author who researches extensively and writes realistically is actually very non-artistic. A novel is one thing, literature is quite something else.

*****

Um homem que se passeava nu na Praça de S.Marcos em Veneza foi salvo no último momento de ser preso por atentado ao pudor, por um bando de pombas que o vestiram completamente de branco.

As autoridades marítimas investigam o misterioso desaparecimento da linha do horizonte ao longo de toda a costa atlântica.

Levaram-no ao Serviço de Urgências. Perdera a fala subitamente. O médico que o assistiu veio a apurar que ligara as cordas vocais entre si para conseguir escapar da sua prisão interior.

Extractos de A greve dos controladores de voo de Jorge Sousa Braga

(esperando que o Jorge Sousa Braga não se zangue) Here's a probably poor translation:

A man who strolled naked on St. Mark's Square in Venice was saved at the last moment from being arrested for indecency when a flock of doves dressed him in white.

The maritime authority is investigating the mysterious vanishing of the horizon along the whole Atlantic coast.

They took him to the Emergency Room. He had suddenly lost his voice. The doctor who attended to him came to the conclusion that he had tied together the vocal cords to escape his inner prison.

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December 31, 2007

Random 2007 Music notes

Top 10 on my iTunes (#Play Count)
Adieu Mario (Extrait de Mon oncle)	Jazz	Trio Rousseau, Tortiller, Vignon
What a Difference a Day Made	Jazz	Sarah Vaughan
Life On Mars?	Pop	Seu Jorge
Habla Con Hella	Soundtrack	Alberto Iglesias Featuring Vicente Amigo & El Pele
Yumeji's Theme (In the Mood for Love)	Soundtrack	Umebayashi Shigeru
Cantaloupe Island	Jazz	Herbie Hancock
Koop Island Blues	Electronic	Koop
I Say A Little Prayer	R&B	Aretha Franklin
Linus & Lucy	Jazz	George Winston
Just Can't Get Enough	World (???)	Nouvelle Vague

*****

Recent and automatic favourite right after seeing them live at the San Francisco Jazz Festival: Tord Gustavsen Trio

Site.

In musicology, my main field of interest is the psychology and phenomenology of improvisation. Although recognizing the importance of established jazz analysis and jazz history, I try to develop this field of research in directions that are not covered very well in jazz theory as we know it. I draw heavily on the psychology of relationships developed by German psychoanalytic Helm Stierlin and Norwegian psychologist Anne-Lise Løvlie Schibbye, both of whom offer a very exciting approach to the ancient notion of dialectics. It's all about living the paradoxes of life and art dynamically and fruitfully. It's about coming to terms with contradictions recognizing both sides of polarities without getting stuck in the middle-of-the-road. It's about synthesizing – locally, non-monolithic and (if you like) "post modernist" – your dilemmas. It's about moving creatively in a neo-Hegelian "Aufheben" kind of way. I approach dilemmas like closeness vs. distance, moment vs. duration and gratification vs. frustration, and I try to explore them combining empirical jazz research (interviews and analysis) with contemporary "scenic" music theory, psychodynamic theory and dialectical philosophy. -- Tord Gustavsen on the themes of his Musicology Ph.d. Dissertation

*****

In love with Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". The piano original version, not the silly Ravel orchestration.

"Pictures at an Exhibition was written as a group of pieces for piano in 1874. The pictures were mainly watercolours, painted by Victor Hartman, a friend of Mussorgsky, who had died the previous year.

The piece is a musical description of walking around an exhibition of Hartman's paintings. A recurring 'Promenade' movement represents the visitor. Each of the pieces has a movement conjuring up the mood invoked by the picture, or in some cases even painting the picture in music." -- from the BBC

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December 27, 2007

I don't want to discuss politics. This lady belongs to my private set of female figures for whom I'm grateful for comforting me at that defining moment in your childhood when you realize your possibilities are substantially narrower because you were born into the wrong gender.

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December 26, 2007

Francis Bacon, Oedipus and the Sphinx (after Ingres), 1983

This Bacon is, for some unknown reason to me, hanging on a far off corner in the new Modern Art Museum in Lisbon. And that's about the extent of my criticism of this fantastic new venue in my home city. It's a great painting - even despite the annoying powerpoint-like circles and arrow -, it's highly valued commercially these days and it's a great example of one of Bacon's greatest influences: Greek tragedies, fury waiting behind the door and all, as an impending doom over Oedipus' head as he answers the riddle. Commercial value shouldn't be a curator's main concern unless he works for the Sotheby's showroom but, please...

Unlike Ingres, Bacon chose to portray a submissive Oedipus, presenting his hurt foot as if it was an offerend. The name Oedipus can either mean "swollen feet" or "to be aware of one’s feet."

*****

OEDIPUS: You were a shepherd, just a hired servant
roaming here and there?
MESSENGER: Yes, my son, I was.
But at that time I was the one who saved you.
OEDIPUS: When you picked me up and took me off,
what sort of suffering was I going through?
MESSENGER: The ankles on your feet could tell you that.
OEDIPUS: Ah, my old misfortune. Why mention that?
MESSENGER: Your ankles had been pierced and tied together.
I set them free.
OEDIPUS: My dreadful mark of shame—
I’ve had that scar there since I was a child.
MESSENGER: That’s why fortune gave you your very name,
the one which you still carry.

--Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

****

Maybe because I just finished reading Nureyev: the Life, when I look at the muscled figure in the painting with the bandaged foot, I can't help thinking of the ballet dancer's feet, crippled from decades of obsessively intense training. Also:

"One of these snaps, showing a gaunt Rudolf with his head turbaned in a towel, was given by Joule to Francis Bacon, who was so taken by the image that he stuck it to the wall of his chaotic studio. ... As the old master painted from photographs, Joule thought 'Maybe, just maybe' but Bacon returned the snapshot a week before he died saying 'You have it back. I know I'll never paint him.'. In the artist's archive, however, there are early photographs of Rudolf that he 'Baconized' with daubs and swirls of paint." -- Julie Kavanagh, Nureyev: the Life.

****

Ingres, Oedipus and the sphinx

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December 20, 2007

Despite the flu and the rain, today is a very happy day and I just wanted to convert a blog post into a milestone. For personal future reference.

Chagall

2007 has been great. 2008 will be even better.

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November 27, 2007

Random notes from a trip to Mexico City

Museo Nacional de Antropologia
Figurine from Isla de Jaina, Campeche, 600-800 d.c.

According to the Lacandón creation myth, the Gods were born from flowers.
*****

Self-Portrait from the author's papers at Princeton University

"There was once a lightning bolt that hit twice on the same spot; yet, he found that the first hit had caused damage enough, that he was no longer necessary, and he became severely depressed."

Augusto Monterroso

*****

"And, finally, the guide showed Palinuro a special section from the museum of what might have been and for which a number of experts and computers had calculated all eventualities and possible internal and external factors, including hereditary and environmental, somatic and psychic, nutritional and climatological elements that might have affected the bodies of numerous historical figures had they lived another ten years, thirty years, fifty and, on the basis of these results, created a series of wax figures giving the idea of the likely physical aspect of these individuals. And Palinuro saw that Jesus was a man of ninety years of age, stone death and with a sizeable nose and stomach. And he saw that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was sixty years old, bald and with wrinkled hands. And he saw Marilyn Monroe, who had passed the half century mark and was immensely fat as a result of a glandular malfunction. And he saw Popeye on a wheelchair and Tarzan who had gone blind and Batman who had turned into an old pederast."

---Fernando del Paso, "Palinuro de Mexico"

*****

Quesadilla de Huitlachoche

"Huitlacoche is the fungal, culinary delicacy Ustilago maydis that grows on ears of corn. Inhabitants of Mexico and indigenous people from the Southwestern United States enjoy this rich, smoky ingredient in foods like tamales, soups, quesadillas, appetizers, and ice cream. While farmers treat huitlacoche as an infectious affliction that ruins corn crops, it has a long history in the cuisine of Aztecs, Hopi, and Zuni.

The word huitlacoche, pronounced whee-tla-KO-cheh, comes from two words in Nahuatl, the language of ancient Aztecs occupying the area that became Mexico. "Huitlatl" means excrement and "coche" means raven. Europeans have tried to rename what they consider a grotesque word to popularize the unusual fungus by calling it Mexican Truffle, Aztec Caviar, or Maize Mushroom. Yet huitlacoche remains a regional specialty because it is best fresh, but has also been canned or frozen for export." --from Wise Geek

*****

Leon Trotsky's Dictating Machine
Trotsky's house, Coyocan, Mexico City

"By about 1910, the Thomas A. Edison Company (the name of the firm that made dictation equipment changed several times over the years) and the Columbia Phonograph Company split the U.S. market. About this time they began promoting their brand names; Columbia began to advertise its Dictaphone, while Edison countered with the Ediphone. "Dictaphone" would become the generic term for dictation equipment, to the chagrin of the Edison interests." -- from recording-history.org

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November 15, 2007

More Bourbon & Branch

The first time we se William Powell in the 1934 film The Thin Man, he's educating a nightclub's bartender on the proper way to shake cocktails: "Always have rhythm in your shaking," Powell tells them. "Now a Manhattan you shake to a fox-trot time, a Bronx to a two-step time and a Martini you always shake to waltz time."

-- Eric Felten, "How's your drink? Cocktails, Culture and the Art of Drinking Well"

***

Amuse Bouche: Sparkling Raspberry Lemonade

Old-Fashioned: Bourbon, Angostura Bitters, Lump Sugar and mineral water

Vanilla Mimosa: Orange juice, Navan, Sparkling wine (duly noted and transmitted to A. for our next party brunch)

****

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November 13, 2007

A visit to the SF MoMA - Aesthetical Ecstasy

Also, I finished reading Yasmina Reza's Plays. I love "Art":

The comedy, which raises questions about art and friendship, concerns three long-time friends, Serge, Marc, and Yvan. Serge, indulging his penchant for modern art, buys a large, expensive, completely white painting. Marc is horrified, and their relationship suffers considerable strain as a result of their differing opinions about what constitutes "art." Yvan, caught in the middle of the conflict, tries to please and mollify both of them. -- summary by the wikipedia.

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November 09, 2007

(answering Rui)

I'm currently reading 3 books - in english, alas - so here it goes:

From: "Imbibe! From absinthe cocktail to whiskey smash, a salute in stories and drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, pioneer of the American bar" by David Wondrich (more here).

"Early evidence is lacking, but by the early 1800's Sangaree (usually based on Madeira) is a constant feature in traveler's tales of the Caribbean."

No, I haven't gone alcoholic. These days, I'm fascinated by cocktail trivia and, if may say so, its culture.

***

From: "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem (more here)

"We have plenty of time."

I usually don't read sci-fi but this is too good to be missed.

***

From: "The Tempest" by Uncle Bill

"We are brought to the heart of the matter by the cantankerous assertion, spoken by Miranda, but obviously the thought and vocabulary of her father."

(unfortunately The Tempest is quite a short play so the above is from an essay by George Lamming which is included in my copy)

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November 08, 2007

Look! No fog!

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November 07, 2007

Aziza

"the kitchen & the bar have collaborated to develop an innovative moroccan inspired cocktail list attuned to the restaurant’s cuisine."

Moroccan Caipirinha (I still think they should come up with a name for this, El-Caipira or something)
Tarragon, Cardamom, Lime Cubes, Cachaça

Gin Cocktail that tastes like cough drops (which I love btw)
Gin, Lavender orange blossom honey, Lime

(Aziza on Geary Boulevard)

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The Premier Tequila Bar on Earth

Margarita - Pueblo Viejo Tequila Añejo

"Tommy's, at present, carries 18 Extra Añejo Tequilas. No one else can say this." -- Tequila 101

(Tommy's Mexican Restaurant on Geary Boulevard)

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November 06, 2007

Bar Drake

Bar Drake Manhattan
Woodford Reserve Bourbon, Port, Angostura Bitters, Maple syrup

The Heated Affair
Partida Añejo Tequila, hot spiced apple cider, whipped cream

(at the Hotel Francis Drake near Union Square - where the cocktails are like candy)

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November 02, 2007

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from “idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.

--Henry David Thoreau, Walking(1862)

****

The Last Clown, 2000, is an endless animated loop by the Belgian Francis Alÿs. Set to the music of Charles Mingus, a man strolls along a path, lost in his thoughts. A pratfall and a glance over his shoulder elicit laughter, after which he returns to his private world.

****

"There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them."

-- Walter Benjamin

****

One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

--Guy Debord

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November 01, 2007

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from “idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. --Henry David Thoreau, Walking(1862)

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To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of the dry martini. To be frank, given the primordial role played in my life by the dry martini, I think I really ought to give it at least a page. Like all cocktails, the martini, composed essentially of gin and a few drops of Noilly Prat, seems to have been an American invention. Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. At a certain period in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin's hymen "like a ray of sunlight through a window — leaving it unbroken."

--Luis Buñuel's autobiography, My Last Sigh

****

Erte, Cocktail party

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The reason I like Edna St Vincent Millay
Is that her name
sounds like a basketball
falling down stairs.

The reason I like Walt Whitman
Is that his name
sounds like Edna St Vincent Millay
falling down stairs.

David Mamet

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October 31, 2007

The Current Obsessions

House of Games. I was a Mamet virgin. I hate this movie. I hate it so much it borderlines passion. I keep re-watching scenes when I'm by myself. The more I watch, the more I complain about that awkward theatrical dialogue and weird actor's directing. I groan everytime I hear an expressionless and emotionless actor say something like "Give me the God damn money" or "The bitch panicked and blew it" in a casual tone of voice. I loathe Lindsay Crouse. I read about Psychoanalysis and Con Games and how the whole last shooting scene is a dream like sequence in which the psychoanalyst is actually performing a purging therapy on herself. I read about Jewish Aporia or the rhythm of talking in Mamet and how the characters ask too many questions which are in their turn only answered by more questions. It's driving me nuts. Help.

*****

Cocktails. I was a cocktail virgin. Gone is the prejudice of seeing hard liquor as the monopoly of boozers. After slowly reading the brilliant collection of fictional articles by MEC about barmen and the art of mixing drinks, the refinement and gourmet skills needed to appreciate a good cocktail, I have surrendered. Throwing in some literary anedoctes about Hemingway's Daiquiris and Buñuel's Dry Martinis helped a lot too. Reading the simple statement that a cocktail is always composed of 1 or 2 doses of liquor, 1 dose of a liqueur and 1 dose of juice felt like deducing one beautiful equation. One of those evident truths you knew all along but never cared to systematize.

Tuesday night was my first visit to Bourbon & Branch in San Francisco. A 1920's speakeasy on a corner street bearing only an antique looking sign saying "Anti-Saloon League". A password is needed to get in. No cosmos are served. Only serious cocktails. Appropriately, the ground shook beneath my feet. Really. A 5.6 earthquake in the south bay area. The biggest since the 1989 one. I was an earthquake virgin.

The Menu

The Aviation: modified to be an amuse-bouche; the Gin was substituted by sparkling wine to give it an air of appéritif, Maraschino and lemon.

Negroni: Gin, Sweet Vermouth and Campari

1794: named after the year of the whiskey rebellion; whiskey, Campari, sweet vermouth.

Black Manhattan: a variation of the American classic; bourbon, Averna and home made cherry coffee bitters.

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The Life Aquatic

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October 30, 2007

More lists

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October 29, 2007

Valencia Street, San Francisco CA

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October 18, 2007

What a good movie watching year this has been so far

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October 17, 2007

Clues

"I saw a rhinoceros there, just such a one as Hans Clerberg had formerly showed me. Methought it was not much unlike a certain boar which I had formerly seen at Limoges, except the sharp horn on its snout, that was about a cubit long; by the means of which that animal dares encounter with an elephant, that is sometimes killed with its point thrust into its belly, which is its most tender and defenceless part." ---Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, published in 1532 in Lyon

****

Portrait of Johann Kleberger by Albrecht Dürer, painted in 1526 in Nuremberg

During his sojourn in Nuremberg, in 1525-26, he had Dürer paint his portrait and, after having married the daughter of Willibald Pirckheimer - Dürer's friend - he returned to Lyon, where he acquired various properties. He gave enormous financial donations to the city, as in 1531 when, during the plague epidemic, he gave 500 livres to benefit the orphans of the plague victims. He was called le bon Allemand, and a monument was erected in his honour, of which a replica still exists today. -- source.

****

Drawing of a Rhino by Albrecht Dürer, 1515, Nuremberg

The inscription on the woodcut, drawing largely from Pliny's account, reads:
“ On the first of May in the year 1513 AD [sic], the powerful King of Portugal, Manuel of Lisbon, brought such a living animal from India, called the rhinoceros. This is an accurate representation. It is the colour of a speckled tortoise, and is almost entirely covered with thick scales. It is the size of an elephant but has shorter legs and is almost invulnerable. It has a strong pointed horn on the tip of its nose, which it sharpens on stones." -- source

****

A trace of Dürer in Rabelais, Salomon in 1943

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October 12, 2007

lessing doesn't care less

Reporters opened the door and told her she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, to which she responded: "Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less."

"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot, OK?" Lessing said, making her way through the crowd. "It's a royal flush."

"I'm sure you'd like some uplifting remarks," she added with a smile.

"I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise," Lessing said. "I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."

She acknowledged the $1.5 million cash award was a lot of money, but still seemed less than thrilled.

"I'm already thinking about all the people who are going to send me begging letters. I can see them lining up now," she said. The phone in her house, audible from the street, rang continuously.

*****

I like her. I don't know if I like her books but now I'm definitely going to read them. Also, I'm hoping her acceptance speech will be a riot.

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A gerund goes into a bar, and the bartender says, “What are you, drinking?”

*******

The governor of the Federal District of Brazil, José Roberto Arruda, has ordered regional public employees to abolish the use of gerunds, a measure that he defines as a "nice" message against inefficiency.

Upon defending the decision, Arruda said that he has lost patience with some members of his own government who are always "doing", "getting", "studying", "sending" or "preparing" but never finish their work or establish ways to finish it.

Local government calls the use of gerunds "a plague", which only serves to make excuses for unsolved problems.

via vivirlatino

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October 07, 2007

Aaltra - Sonny - Bouli Lanners

I knew it wasn't finnish! But what the hell was he saying? Well, this kind gentleman has the transcription:

Sonny, you fucking haven't d[ø]ze, I'd happen to fire
Sonny, you fucking haven't d[ø]ze, I (k) happen to fire
Oh, your dick in the frost, I can lag in the side
You can snarfel the phones, I can snarf my baby
Sonny, once of you, I love you do

Sonny, you fucking half an h[ø]ze, I'd happen to fire
Sonny, you freaking half an toast, I'd happen to fire
Oh, you carfel the phones, I can hide in the phones
You can hardly defies, I can(s) house my honey
Sonny, once of you, I love you boo

Sonny (ah), your frequency even hind, I'm targling to fire
Sonny, you're afraid on of and h[y]se, I happen to fire
Oh, you haven't the frames, I can happen to frost
You can happen to face, happens half my honey
Sonny, wanted you, I love you ou

Sonny (ah), it happen you can find, I'm talking to find
Sonny, you fraking hick and h[y]s, I'm h[y]lting to find
Oh and h[y]ffen the phones, I can d[y]ppen the p[y]ms
You can happen to phones, happens half my honey
Sonny, wanted you, I love you ou ou ou

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October 04, 2007

Superman lies among men disguised as the journalist Clark Kent; as such he appears fearful, timid, not over intelligent, awkward, near sighted (...) From a mythopoetic point of view the device is even subtler: in fact, Clark Kent personifies fairly typically the average reader who is harassed by complexes and despised by his fellow men; through an obvious process of self identification, any accountant in any american city secretly feeds the hope that one day, from the slough of his actual personality there can spring forth a superman who is capable of redeeming years of mediocre existence.

--Umberto Eco, Il mito de Superman e la dissolozione del tempo (1962)

*****

This made me want to watch Unbreakable again.

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October 02, 2007

I am obviously a cat person

So first, your memory I'll jog,
And say: A CAT IS NOT A DOG.

Now Dogs pretend they like to fight;
They often bark, more seldom bite;
But yet a Dog is, on the whole,
What you would call a simple soul.
Of course I'm not including Pekes,
And such fantastic canine freaks.
The usual Dog about the Town
Is much inclined to play the clown,
And far from showing too much pride
Is frequently undignified.
He's very easily taken in -
Just chuck him underneath the chin
Or slap his back or shake his paw,
And he will gambol and guffaw.
He's such an easy-going lout,
He'll answer any hail or shout.

Again I must remind you that
A Dog's a Dog - A CAT'S A CAT.

T.S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

****

Much to Neska's credit, she does have some cat like traits which make our co-habitation bearable. By the way, why should anyone name that butch, oversized dog "Neska" - "girl" in basque - is a mystery to me. Even more puzzling is why the two other people in this house insist on calling the Great Pyrenees-white-fluff-ball-monster "poochie".

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October 01, 2007

The Adventures of Claudia in America

This blogger went to the big book sale in San Francisco and all she got was this because she is a narcissist who can't resist it when she sees her own name in print. This completely messes my project of writing "The Book of Claudia" to be added to the bible or to start a new religion, though.

It was a great buy. I'm sure it's not what the author intended but has made me roll on the floor laughing.

"It had been a beautiful night and she loved him more than ever in the morning. 'If it weren't real love', David told her, 'if it were only physical, it wouldn't be that way.'

Claudia, who was eighteen and who did not know very much about love, had the greatest respect for her husband's superior knowledge of sex. Not that he'd ever led a wild life, or run around, but he'd read a great many books on the subject and knew as much as a doctor."

Of course. There's nothing sexier than a gynecologist.

I also "found" and bought the fabulous Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats illustrated by Edward Gorey for 1 dollar and finally got the complete poems of Cavafy, among other cheap finds.

Big. Like everything else here.

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September 20, 2007

Making lists

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September 06, 2007

Testing the "embed" feature of google books. Meh. Nothing I couldn't do with a screen capture but whatever. Also, Rabelais can be distracting.

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August 31, 2007

Lisbon Lemon

Lisbon lemon is one of the most widely-grown lemons in California and is planted extensively throughout the citrus-growing regions of the world. It is believed to be a Gallego seedling selection of Portuguese origin.

Lisbon is of Portuguese origin, although it is not known there by that name. It is believed to be a selection of the Gallego seedling clonal group, which in Portugal is somewhat comparable to the common sweet orange groups of Spain, Italy, and numerous other countries. A selection known as Portugal in Morocco and Algeria is said to be indistinguishable from the Lisbon introduced from California.

--from a page of the University of California Riverside

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August 23, 2007

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge - for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions -
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.

---Philip Larkin, Ignorance

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August 22, 2007

Nectar vina cibus vestis doctrina facultas -- Venantius Fortunatus

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August 21, 2007

by Bronzino, National Gallery, London

"Venus holds an apple in one hand, and an arrow in the other. What does that say: I tempt you, and I have a wound for you. And look at all the secondary figures - the raving figure of jealousy behind Cupid, speaking so clearly of despair, of love despised and rejected; the little figure of Pleasure who is about to pelt the toying lovers with rose leaves -- see at his feet the thorns and those masks of concealments and cheats of the world, marked with the bitterness of age; and who is that creature behind the laughing pleasure - a wistful, appealing face, a rich gown that might almost blind us to her lion's feet, her serpent's sting and her hands that offer both a honeycomb and something beastly - that must be the Cheat - Fraude, in Latin - who can so prettily turn love to madness. Who are the old man and the young woman at the top of the picture? They are plainly Time and Truth, who are drawing aside the mantle that shows the world what is involved in such love as this. Time - and his daughter Truth. A very moral picture, no?" -- What's bred in the bone, Robertson Davies.

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August 19, 2007

Just wondering...

Why has Putin gone fishing (pictured below, Rambo style) with Prince Albert II of Monaco? This most unlikely pair's holidays sounds like the setup for a dry joke.

***

What to do with Poland in the EU, considering thy have a religious extremist, xenophobic, homophobic government?

The brothers appointed him last year as one of three deputy prime ministers, and as minister for education, a job he has exploited to transform Polish youth. Giertych started by laying down an “essential” reading list for schools that includes the popular Christian novel Quo Vadis? by Henryk Sienkiewicz, John Paul II’s autobiography, Memory & Identity, and a history of Catholic priests in Dachau. He wants to ban Joseph Conrad (a Pole, but too close to Nietzsche for comfort), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian, obviously), and the works of the Polish Jewish writer and homosexual Witold Gombrowicz. on the Sunday times

Not that there's a pulp fueled bonfire in Warsaw yet, but this reminds me of Heine: "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too."

Prime Minister Kasimierz Marcinkiewicz, also of Law and Justice Party, has stated that if a homosexual “tries to 'infect' others with their homosexuality, then the state must intervene in this violation of freedom." -- Human Rights News.

A senior Polish official has ordered psychologists to investigate whether the popular BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes a homosexual lifestyle.
The spokesperson for children's rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head.
"I noticed he was carrying a woman's handbag," she told a magazine. "At first, I didn't realise he was a boy." on the BBC.

Censorship in Poland is a deadly serious subject. The censorship situation with David Cerny's Shark represents a radical change in the nature of what is censored in Poland. Artist Dorota Nieznalska has been punished by Polish courts, ordered to perform community service after a work of art was found offensive to the Christian religion, she is still in court appealing the decision. In Bytom, Poland, gallery manager Sebastian Cichocki is currently being investigated for allowing a work of art by the Prague-based Guma Guar to be displayed. There is a serious ambiguity with Polish laws governing free speech, but it is clear that laws concerning religion and free expression have yet to be tested in court. on Prague TV.

A group of Polish members of parliament have submitted a bill seeking to proclaim Jesus Christ king of their overwhelmingly Catholic country. on the BBC.

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August 17, 2007

The death of Peter Fechter

At midday on 17 August, 1962, Peter Fechter and Helmut Kulbeik, two teenage citizens of the GDR, jumped from a ground floor window on Zimmerstraße, Berlin, into 'the death strip' - an area of no-mans land leading up to the Berlin wall.

As they reached the wall, ignoring orders from the GDR guards to halt, they were fired upon, with a total of twenty one shots. Helmut made it over the wall to safety but Peter was hit a number of times in the back and abdomen.

Seriously wounded, he lay a few yards short of the wall shouting for help. Having seen what had happened, hundreds of citizens of West Berlin gathered, shouting demands at the GDR guards and American soldiers to help Peter, though they did nothing.

After fifty minutes of calling for help, his calls fell silent. More than an hour after the attempted escape, GDR guards finally removed his dead body from the death strip.

Out of an impulse I signed up to go see this event being re-enacted this Saturday at an undisclosed location. I'll have to show up at the ICA door in the morning and a pack of us will be taken there by bus - not blindfolded I hope. Now I'm dreading it. Considering I have gun phobia and always get out of movie theaters with clenched fists, sore jaws from all the tension and puffy, swollen eyes from all the crying after watching any war movie, what the hell was I thinking? I suppose that's the upside of being brought up in a catholic country no matter how much of an atheist you are: the idea that sacrifice will be rewarded gets imprinted indelibly on your soul.

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August 16, 2007

And there were other things in our companionship that took strong hold of my mind: to discourse and jest with him; to indulge in courteous exchanges; to read pleasant books together; to trifle together; to be earnest together; to differ at times without ill-humor, as a man might do with himself, and even through these infrequent dissensions to find zest in our more frequent agreements; sometimes teaching, sometimes being taught; longing for someone absent with impatience and welcoming the homecomer with joy. These and similar tokens of friendship, which spring spontaneously from the hearts of those who love and are loved in return--in countenance, tongue, eyes, and a thousand ingratiating gestures--were all so much fuel to melt our souls together, and out of the many made us one. -- St. Augustine, Confessions (Book IV)

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August 15, 2007

Weekend in Dublin

Somehow found myself on a non-tourist mood so ended up doing whatever I would do at home and ignored most monuments - ended up at the Yeats manuscripts exhibition at the National Library by chance. If nothing else, Dublin has some good breakfast and brunch places. The magic words being "...served all day". Heaven.

The Mermaid Cafe on Dame Street

A classic: Bewley's on Grafton Street.

Saw "A Streetcar car named Desire" for the first time on a theater at the Irish Film Institute. Had forgotten the young Brando was a God. The middle aged Brando was fond of butter and the old Brando was a capo di tutti capi.

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August 10, 2007

Warwick Road, London

British raunchy humor or unintended pun by non native speaker?

******

The opening song is Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Adolf Loos singing "Form follows function", like "Fugue for Tinhorns" begins Guys and Dolls. It finishes and who enters but Alma Mahler herself, in a frock Jennifer Lopez would wave off as skimpy. With Alma is her composer husband, Gustav. "Let's go, gloom puss", she says, "move it."
"Just one more strudel", the fragile tunesmith replies. "I need the blood-sugar high to keep me from sinking into my quotidian preoccupation with mortality." -- Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy (his first new humor collection in over 25 years, as they announce)

Ah, good stuff.

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August 09, 2007

Favourite tune to listen to while driving on highways. Usually on a loop, very loudly and when alone since no one else would put up with such foolishness. Had a sudden urge to send my CV to Jeremy Clarkson after watching this.

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August 07, 2007

Small Grand Tour

Went on an art fair marathon this last weekend visitng Kassel and Munster for Documenta 12 and the Sculpture Projects, respectively.

Not very impressed by either, I must say. Documenta was an amalgam of stuff with no curatorial guidelines that I could identify and the sculptures were nothing memorable to me. Anyway, always fun to find out on a friday night that my cell phone stopped working, my flight was late, the man at the rent a car insisted that 70% of europeans speak German so why would English be the lingua franca taking him 30 minutes to give me the car keys, the hotel I booked on a quaint town near a forest was closed at 1 am and no one would come to the door, that I had no map of Kassel so randomly drove around looking for an hotel, found a laptop case (with a laptop inside) in the middle of an empty street and finally found a shitty hotel that turned out to have one of the best buffet breakfasts I've ever had. I love breakfast.

The funniest thing was this Gonzalo Diaz piece entitled "Eclipse". You'd go into a drak room and a circle of light was projected on the wall, over a silver square. When I came in, about 4 people were looking at it from near the door. I obviously stood there. Nothing happened and they left. Another row of people came in and out. And then I thought "What eclipse? There will only be an eclipse if I walk in front of the damned light." So I did. And found that something was written on the square and hurriedly summoned all the germans behind me - looking at me in disapproval for my obvious lack of respect for the work of art - to come and read it. Apparently it says something like "You have arrived to the core of Germany because you are reading the word art in your own shadow". And then people started taking turns to do the same I did. I complained to the guard outside that there should be some instructions but now that I think of it... nah!

Someone told me that there was a great sound piece at the Munster Sculpture projects under the bridge over the Aa. I went there. Waited for it to start. It was a woman singing. Meh.

HIghlight of the weekend: The Museum for sepulchral culture in Kassel. Beautiful museum with a great collection of tombstones, coffins and funeral props in general. Also houses a beautiful collection of prints and drawings on the theme of death. If you're into that sort of thing. Which I am. It was founded by the Study group for cemeteries and memorials. How do I join this thing???

More pics of the trip here.

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August 03, 2007

Dobrý Deň

Had a great time in Prague but not necessarily because of the city itself. There are hordes of tourists everywhere, British stag & hen parties that invariably go wrong and it's basically all a big Kafka amusement park. And people who never read a line by the man flock to where he lived, where he studied, where he pooped and where he fucked since these are, of course, landmarks of touristic interest. "I often hear Kafka described as a Czech writer, but he wrote solely in German and considered himself a German writer" says Kundera. The irony of it all.

****

What I've learned: the Americans are loud, the French are arrogant, the Estonians are lazy, the Dutch are cheap and the Portuguese like to stereotype.

****

The Dutch: Portuguese is just bad Spanish.
The Portuguese: Dutch is just bad German.

Ah, the joy of making friends through mutual insult.

****

Somehow, found myself driving a Ford on a Czech highway on the way to a town that is today practically owned by wealthy Russians, with a Belarusian sitting by my side, a Kazakh, a Kyrgyz and a Dutch on the back seat while Johnny Cash sang on the radio. Carlsbad (or Karlovy Vary) is one of the prettiest towns I've ever visited. If it weren't for the Escada and Chanel shops I could almost say it had frozen in time.

****

The Philosophical Hall.

Highlight: the beautiful libraries of the Strahov Monastery and the remnants of an 18th century Wunderkammer that are housed there.

A dodo.

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August 02, 2007

Hay on Wye

I managed to not buy a single book even though I spent a few days in the Welsh book town. I found that most bookshops hadn't much to offer other than editions of old books on gymnastics and MS-DOS. There was a good children's bookshop where I almost bought a "Famous Five" first edition. Then I realized 55 pounds was too much money for a book I wasn't going to read and that I craved out of childhood nostalgia. As an exception to the rule, the Poetry bookshop was excellent - again, I almost bought Cavafy's Poems but then realized there were three different editions on the shelf, each translated by a different person into English and they were strikingly different. On one of the prefaces, Auden commented on the difficulty of translating him, and hence the different versions, but also how Cavafy's poems were immediately recognizable since they don't depend on language but on their themes and imagery. Nonetheless, I couldn't decide on which to buy and left.

Also took some long walks to Clyro where the Baskerville Hall is. Even saw a grave at the village cemetery for people who perished during WWI where there was a reference to a Captain Baskerville. Supposedly Conan Doyle stayed here visiting the family and drew inspiration from local lore about a hound that haunted the moors.

Highlight: the B&B where I stayed had some books for guests to read and that' where I ran into Alan Bennett's Untold Stories. His fun and witty diaries kept me company through days of hard rain. Almost had to swim back to London...except that I can't swim.

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Meh

The New York Times Arts section. One step away from being removed from my RSS reader.

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August 01, 2007

The Daily Mail sucks

(the best caption they could come up with on the day of Bergman's death)

and so does most of the British press...and to think I saw an ad today in the tube that said something like "yadda yadda England brought culture and sophistication to the world...". Yeah, right. Before tabloid era, maybe.

*****

Still have some posts to write about Hay on Wye, the floods in Wales, Alan Bennett's diary, odd coincidences, Prague, Carlsbad, the Strahov Monastery, Central Asia, stereotyping (as usual), Harry Potter and all the stuff I've been up to lately.

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July 13, 2007

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July 12, 2007

If I hear the word "Organic" one more time I'm going to puke. Too much sculpture appreciation.

*****

Favorites: Doris Salcedo and Zadok Ben David. So much for British art.

Then again, I'll include Judith Dean's Field. Fake land art. Bronze.

****

Can't live without Circus Ponies Notebook Software ("Organization for Creative Minds") anymore. So glad I got a Mac.

****

How to spot an IT consultant in an art class at a sculpture park:

"The title of the sculpture is Oracle. What does this remind you of?"
"Databases?"
"Greek mythology."
"Ah, right."

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July 10, 2007

Zizek

I had never seen Zizek in my life until last sunday. He was giving a lecture at the Ethical Society as a sort of commemoration organized by the Freud Society on the centennial of the publishing of "The sexual enlightenment of children".

I'm glad he said it himself during the lecture because I'd be too polite to mention this. Or maybe not. He said someone asked him to be that person's analyst and his reply was "Look at me! I'm a nervous person! I'm crazy!" and the person agreed and gave up. He is insane. But, or precisely because of that, strangely stimulating. He was a nervous wreck all through the lecture, scratching his eyes, ears and nose compulsively and read from a typed sheet all the way through with the occasional stop to illustrate a point. He has a funny eastern european accent that, conjugated with the enthusiasm with which he delivers his speech and matching and vehement wave of the right hand, makes you think you're at a retro communist rally.

But he is fascinating in the way he shoots theories at you like a machine gun, drawing examples from the most sophisticated of philosophers to quirky pieces of news. I'm not completely sure everything makes sense, it was such an intense experience that I'm still digesting it.

In one hour he managed to talk about: Freud (obviously), the Masturbathon, the myth of Dapnhe and Chloe, Shakespeare's All's well that ends well, Lacan, Hegel, genetically modified beans that don't cause gas, Kant, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, The Da Vinci code, Chinese translations, the Bible and the Catholic Church, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the north-american tribe that thought all dreams had sexual meanings except the dreams about sex themselves, Antigone, advertisements for sun screens, the myth in communist countries that everyone believed the secret information officers were the inventors and propagators of jokes about the government and a lot more I can't recall right away. All this to arrive, through a very tortuous journey, to a thesis - there were some collateral ones along the way - in which he states adults need sexual education even more than children because they know the mechanics but lack the knowledge that each of us must have his/her own personal fantasy on which to focus on while having sex.

Best quote of the night, while answering a question: "I have written about this on one of my books, can't remember which, there's so many of them."

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July 09, 2007

Celebrity Spotting (kind of)

Went to the Art Car Boot Fair on Sunday. A strange fair on Brick Lane in which artists sell weird items - Tim Noble & Sue Webster were selling signed toilet paper rolls -for symbolic prices. Among others, I spotted Gavin Turk presumably haggling over prices of his signed car boots and Bob+Roberta Smith painting letters on wood.

Gavin Turk is the fellow that got himself thrown out of art school because he submitted one single piece for his graduation show which was a metal plaque to hang on the wall saying "Gavin Turk studied here". Bob+Roberta Smith is in fact a man and not a pair. He paints signs and banners and launched an amnesty on bad art in 2002.

I got myself an Ian Monroe sticker but when I got home I realized the bastard - who is very nice and chatty, by the way - had signed it in the back and I wanted to stick it to my laptop. So now I am the proud owner of an unsigned piece by Ian Monroe and also of a star shaped bit of paper - signed.

Other than the general craziness and drunkenness going around the funniest stand/car was the one where you could shoot a spinning diamond skull and win prizes if you hit the big diamond on the forehead. There was also a fake diamond covered skull for sale for 1000 pounds. And a Kunst Clown. And people selling puzzle pieces by the ounce. Very weird and strangely frivolous.

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July 07, 2007

Seen at the counter of Skoob books. You can tell when someone starts a second-hand book business out of love: this very persuasive anti-impulse-shopping quote is inconveniently located by the cash register. I almost returned "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to its shelf when I read this.

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July 05, 2007

Fascinating how someone writing a straightforward, one paragraph long biography managed to squeeze in such a huge value judgement.

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July 04, 2007

Gormley

I'm not fond of Antony Gormley's work (for reasons a blog post is too short to contain) but Event Horizon, a major work that consists of casts of his own body on top of various buildings of London, sure makes cute pics.

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July 02, 2007

Several works from the National Gallery are hanging in the streets of London - it's the Grand Tour initiative and it's hoping to lure more visitors into the museum.

Holbein's Ambassadors is particularly fun since this public display makes it easier to see the anamorphic skull. It isn't easy to come this close to a painting in a museum.

I'm just sorry no one has defaced any of them. Artistcallt speaking, of course. Where are the Banksys, the Duchamps? Why hasn't any one stamped an HP logo stencil on it? Tss.

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July 01, 2007

This first got my attention.

Entering a little shop crammed with retro toys, I realized that was in fact a toy museum. A maze of little rooms in an old buiding holding spooky looking old porcelain dolls, antique toy soldiers, vintage robots, scruffy looking teddy bears and all sorts of victorian doll houses. Scary. Perfect setting for a horror movie, if you ask me. I should have never watched the Chucky movies. Can't stand the sight of a fuzzy channel on TV since Poltergeist either.

Pollock's Toy Museum on Scala Street, London

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June 30, 2007

Random

The share of space taken by books devoted to gardening in London's chain bookshops is equivalent to that of self-help books in the US.

***

Out of nowhere, while walking in Soho it dawned on me that Elias Canetti's chess playing dwarf in "Auto da Fé" must be a reference to the Mechanical Turk! Duh!

***

The Gay Pride Parade in London was an oxymoron. Blame it on the weather or on the bomb scare, this was the dullest gay parade I've ever seen.

***

Strange country this is. They had running bets on the color of the hat the Queen would wear to Ascot.

***

Saw the cutest personal ad on a free London newspaper the other day but unfortunately threw it away, as one does with these ecological crimes disguised as information. It ran something like "Mature man seeks Rubenesque lady for wine, theatre and love." Hell, weren't I taken and more of the Modiglianesque build, I'd answer that :)

***

Amused by Pakistan's claim that making Rushdie a knight "breaches a United Nations resolution aimed at calming tensions between different religions". Obviously, the maintenance of a fatwa calling for the writer's execution is perfectly compliant.

***

So glad I got to read Nabokov's Lolita precisely when I was almost giving up on finding an engaging novel. Can't forget: the classics!. Got a cheap copy at Judd books. Such a beautiful, rythmic and sensual writing. Along with "A hundred years of solitude" this is one of my favorite ouvertures of all times:

"Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Perfect alliteration.

***

Nerd. Orange. Tote Bag. Perfect.

Good title too, considering the crappy London street map I carry.

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Advanced Creative Portuguese - Lesson #1

Bijoquinzinhos - multiple kisses like the popping sounds of small fish in a frying pan.

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June 29, 2007

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June 27, 2007

Revenge

Araeen's Third Text magazine

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June 24, 2007

Keep Clear

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June 22, 2007

An interview with Bacon is online over at the always wonderful UBU web.

"What do you gain by throwing paint directly at the canvas?"
"I only did that in a few paintings...I was sick of the look of them, I just threw a lot of paint on them..and they turned out well...I quite like them."

"I only paint portraits of myself because there's no one else around."

There's nothing like getting to know the deep philosophical and aesthetic choices of the artists through their own voices.

Apart from the bit where he seems to get drunker and drunker, I particularly liked the whole idea of wrestling with the canvas and the reason he gives to paint couples having sex: "because it's when they generally talk less and I'm not a conversational artist". The very last part is very gossipy, with Melvyn Bragg trying to extract an "I love S&M, do you want to see my dungeon?" confession from him in a rather insistent yet subtle way (if you disregard the number of times the word "pain" is used).

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June 21, 2007

-Happiness- is to grow in small steps. We have learned to want less.

(from the Marjetica Potrc exhibition at The Curve, Barbican)

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June 20, 2007

London

I moved to London temporarily where I'll be busy busy busy drowning in paintings, sculptures and written assignments.

The view:

*****

Made it to the White Cube gallery today and saw "For the love of God", the latest Damien Hirst. I loved his work when I first got to know it but by now it just seems too much mainstream/marketing stunt to me. He's no longer an enfant terrible but he insists on being outrageous. And however I try to cooly dismiss him, he keeps surprising me. Yes, it's just a skull covered in diamonds, big deal...but the fact is that it's really exciting. A group of people is let in a dark room where you can't see anything but the skull in a glass case, cleverly lit. We were allowed 2 minutes inside and we were advised to circle it. It was like a religious ceremony, 8 adults walking around a skull that shined with all the colors of the rainbow, like a tribe performing a ritual dance around a totem pole. Everyone was gaping for is a truly beautiful, strangely seductive piece. And the whole dark mystery setup just adds glamour to the bloody thing. Argh, 4 days I've been here, mostly surrounded by Americans, and still I have used the expressions "Bloody hell", "That's rubbish" and "Loo" way too many times.

(also saw Richard Hamilton himself at another gallery, an old man wearing a long white beard and levi's jeans chatting with an employee)

*****

So much to blog about, so little time.

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June 07, 2007

Excitement Adventure Romance...

Picasso, La Joie de Vivre

*+*+*+*

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,

pray that the road is long,

full of adventure, full of knowledge.

--Cavafy

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June 05, 2007

It just occurred to me...

that all footage of Elvis either in his beardless, boyish, white sock wearing, teenage-screaming phase or in his bloated, cheesy white outfit, intoxicated, middle aged women on anti-depressants screaming phase should be erased. An Elvis in a fit body, wearing black leather and singing in a sexy, coarse voice is all we need to remember. Oh and, leather or no leather, I'd erase the teddy bears, lonesome girls and love me tenders crap too.

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May 29, 2007

Fascinating Stuff

(David - photo by Richard Carter)

In the domain of pleasures, for instance, the longer prepuce often serves as the object of erotic interest and as a signifier of the sexually attractive male, as demonstrated by the following ribald passage from the Lexiphanes of Lucian:

"Surely," I said, "you don't mean that notable Dion, that lusty, low-scrotumed, cuntish, and mastic-chewing youth who masturbates and gropes whenever he sees someone with a large penis [πεωδη] and a long prepuce [ποσθωνα]?"

Lucian is not satirizing the fact that a long prepuce should function as the visual cue that triggers Dion's erotic responses. On the contrary, he is satirizing Dion's general lack of decorum and self-control in the face of such self-evident visual stimulants. The desirability of the long prepuce, hence, remains beyond question.

The eroticization of the prepuce is also evident in the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes, where the lusty father-in-law, pressing to his face a garment owned and worn by the young and handsome poet Agathon, exclaims: "By Aphrodite, this has a pleasant smell of [a little] prepuce [ποσθη]!" The diminutive posthion (ποσθιον), as opposed to the standard word posthe (ποσθη), is most likely used here as a term of endearment.

-- Frederick M. Hodges, The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics
and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration, and the Kynodesme (in the The Bulletin of the History of Medicine)

The most erudite piece I have ever read on such an entertaining subject.

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May 23, 2007

The Queen of England posing for Lucian Freud (photo by David Dawson)

The photo is actually much better than the portrait. I can't help giggling at seeing her majesty wearing this glittery diamond covered crown in the badly lit, dirty and slightly run down corner of the studio. Looks like conceptual art to me. Just think, the power some artists attain. The queen succumbs to the vanity of having her portrait painted by the most famous painter alive
and submits to his conditions. Just one century ago, painters would fight for the honor. That's a lot to think about. But I'm too lazy.

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May 22, 2007

I wanted to write about...

...the centennial of Hergé and how despite being a Tintinophile I am also a contrarian. Hergé used to say that there was no place for sex or women in Tintin's male friendship world. So I started a post on Tintin porn parodies only to realize this site has a fantastic compilation of bootleg Tintin albums from the 80's and Arte channel aired a great documentary called "La vie sexuelle de Tintin". I also found a couple of bloggers or website owners who got sued (and condemned) for promoting "illegal" Tintin album versions. Which made me want to blog about copyright, civil liberties, the moustache on Mona Lisa, the power of dead people's wishes over the creativity of the living and trash Belgian law but I'm too lazy.

(Roy Lichtenstein is allowed to throw a Matisse painting on Tintin's living room)

...Elias Canetti's Auto da Fé and how if were this book edible it would leave a bitter-sweet taste on my mouth. It's a wonderful bizarre and funny novel, a chimera born of crossing Lynch with Ionesco with a german twist. Alas, the version I own seems like someone pasted the results of Babel Fish "German to English" translation into it (my book says the translation was supervised by the author). Here I am holding what could be one of my favorite novels of all times, wondering if this will be the final trigger to upgrade my current tourist babble german language level. Which made me want to blog yet again about the difficulties of translation, the wonder of learning a new language, post an hilarious excerpt of the novel when the main character tries to convince his books to go to war and faces the opposition of buddhist texts and of Schopenhauer who suddenly found the will to live, quote Walter Benjamin, add an excerpt of Saramago's Baltasar & Blimunda and show you how crappy the english translation is but I'm too lazy.

...Gilbert & George's downloadable art and how the open source paradigm should invade every corner of knowledge, cadavres exquis, the recent trends on how art can be an effective political and social integration tool, how weird that most art reviews I read are favorable and hardly ever anyone dares to say that - although Gombrich says there is no such thing as a bad work of art - that red canvas with a bit of newspaper glued to it brings nothing new and is a lame attempt at originality, the New Yorker article on Banksy and how even the most wannabe rebels give in to money and vanity despite maintaining their anonymity, the Hopper exhibition at the MFA in Boston, the underrated value of art in the developing world and Maslow's hierarchy of needs but I'm too lazy.

...my plans for the second semester of 2007, Cavafy's poems, Socrates' "know thyself", healthy doubts, status quo, Ecclesiastes, Ovid on fishing, missing oneself, the Bloomsbury group, low cost airlines, auction houses, journalism, aging, optimism, adventure, excitement and romance but that would be too personal.

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May 01, 2007

Ole Worm's Cabinet of Curiosities

" a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included." -- Francis Bacon on the ideal Cabinet of Curiosities.

****

I'm compiling a list of museums or collections which first started as Cabinets of Curiosities or Wunderkmmern for my own future travel reference.

KunstKamera in San Petersburg, Russia - Today, collections of Peter the Great’s Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkammer) are among the most complete and interesting in the world. (includes anatomical specimens made by the famous Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch)

Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milano, Italia - houses the collection of Manfredo Settala, also known as the milanese Archimedes.

Ambras Castle, Innsbruck, Austria - houses the only surviving collection of the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand II.

Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala, Sweden - The Augsburg art cabinet, the best preserved of the Kunstschränke made by Philipp Hainhofer, which was given to Gustavus Adolphus in 1632 by the City of Augsburg, is on display in the Gustavianum.

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK - The collection presented to the University of Oxford by Elias Ashmole (1617–92) was in origin already half a century old by this time, having been founded by John Tradescant (d.1638) and displayed to the public (for a fee), first by him and later by his son John (1608–62) in their dwelling house at Lambeth, widely known as 'The Ark'. The contents were universal in scope, with man-made and natural specimens from every corner of the known world.

Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, La Rochelle, France - houses the cabinet de curiosité Lafaille

*****

Frederick Ruysch's Anatomical Curiosities

*****

More info on Cabinets of Curiosities:

Peter Huber's excellent site (in german) on wunderkammern, featuring a list of museums mostly in germany.

Cabinets de Curiosités (french), interesting site by a canadian phd student including his reading notes on selected bibliography.

A lecture on Museums and their functions, featuring slides with engravings depicting famous cabinets of curiosities.

A bibliography by the University of California.

The King's Kunstkammer is an Internet exhibition, which is a partial reconstruction of the Royal Danish Kunstkammer which was established by King Frederik III in the mid-1600s - a collection which was broken up some 200 years later when all the pieces it contained were distributed among newly created specialist museums.

Curiositas (in french) has an extensive research on cabinets of curiosities based, as far as I can see, on Pierre Borel's inventory "Roole des principaux cabinets curieux, et autres choses remarquables qui se voyent ez principales Villes de l'Europe" or Huguetan's.

An article from Cabinet magazine. Very appropriate.

*****

Stephan Zick, Anatomical teaching model of a pregnant woman
Nuremberg, around 1680

(seen on Georg Laue's Kunstkammer)

*****

And from the New World, a cabinet of curiosities in itself:

The Wachsach Museum of Oddities and its shrunken heads and feejee mermaids;

The Museum of Jurassic Techonology which houses, for example, an exhibition about the dogs of the soviet space program;

P.T. Barnum's Museum turned Circus;

The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington featuring, among other attractions, the stomach of the compulsive hair eating girl;

And my personal favorite, Ripley's Believe it or Not, a man's quest for oddities turned into a museum chain and turist trap.

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April 28, 2007

It's official...

....I am now a Mac person.

(wallpaper wallpaper by ~zygat3r)

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April 16, 2007

Alfama, Lisboa

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April 12, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut died. So it goes.

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March 24, 2007

Madrilidades

No sera la no dimensión del presente la que hace posible la vida, como la no dimensión del punto hace posible la geometría?
No vi el viento vi moverse las nubes.
No vi el tiempo vi caerse las hojas.
-- Escritos, Eduardo Chillida (exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional)

"Pasó seis horas examinando las cosas, tratando de encontrar una diferencia con el aspecto que tuvieron el día anterior, pendiente de descubrir en ellas algún cambio que revelara el transcurso del tiempo.(...) El viernes, antes que se levantar nadie, volvió a vigilar la aparencia de la naturaleza, hasta que no tuvo la menor duda de que seguía siendo lunes." -- Cien años de soledad, Gabriel Garcia Márquez (got a new copy at the Paseo del Prado book fair)

****

Amused by the odd cataloging at La Casa del Libro. No self-help section so the next good thing seems to be philosophy.

****

Overheard at the Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid: "Un bonsai es um árbolito chiquitito".

****

Lazying in the sun at El Retiro park.

****

"Tenemos otros usos propios, al cristal le llamamos también luna. Así pueden enamorar sin querer a una española, cuando en un taxi le pregunte si quiere que le baje la luna" -- Marcos Martos Carrera, president of the Peruvian Academy of Language about the specificities of the peruvian spanish (a propos of the IV Congresso de La Lengua in Cartagena de las Indias, Colombia)

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March 12, 2007

Two things impressed me greatly this last weekend: a scene from El laberinto del Fauno and a Crucifixus Dolorosus at the exhibition of medieval art from the National Museum in Warsaw. And in a way they're related, being Jesus Christ the rebel par excellence.

The crucifix was hanging on the last room I visited. It's life size and dramatically lit. The Y cross somehow makes it look more real to me. And so does the position of the body and head: the crucified eventually would die suffocated as he wouldn't be able to exhale for his body's weight was suspended from his arms, the nailing of the feet being an extra aid to prolong the agony as he would be able to rise and breath from time to time. The Crucifixus Dolorosus was supposed to make the bystander meditate and this one worked for me. Whether Jesus lived or not, the capacity of some to die or withstand pain for their beliefs and as martyrs of causes is something that I have an immense admiration for.

(this painting came to my mind as one of the scenes unfolded and, sure enough, I find that Guillermo del Toro claims Goya to have been an influence in this movie).

And so, despite the dedication of the heroes in El Laberinto del Fauno and the sacrifices and readiness to die they showed throughout the movie, the bit where the doctor kills the tortured republican out of mercy by giving him an overdose of painkillers - although the orders of the Capitán Vidal were precisely the opposite, he should make him stay alive so that he could torture him more - will be the one scene I know will stay in my mind:

Vidal: Dígame, porqué no me obedeció?
Doctor: Es que-

Una larga pausa.

Doctor: Obedecer por obedecer - Así, sin pensarlo...

Vidal aprieta las quijadas, tienso.

Doctor: Sólo lo hacen gentes como usted, Capitán.

And Vidal shoots him in the back as he walks away.

******

It is better to die standing than to live on your knees. -- Emiliano Zapata or was it Che?

******

Des idées réclamant le fameux sacrifice
Les sectes de tout poil en offrent des séquelles
Et la question se pose aux victimes novices
Mourir pour des idées, c'est bien beau mais lesquelles ? ---Georges Brassens

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March 03, 2007

Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas

Paula Rego was commissioned by the Gulbenkian foundation to paint a Vanitas - a symbolic still life reminding us of the fleeting condition of life. It's also supposed to be the companion of a short story where the eponymous collector laments that despite his collecting of still lifes, he never managed to buy a Vanitas.

The tryptich is like a novel, there's a narrative that rises in intensity as it progresses.

I find this tryptich very upsetting. For me, it's not a Vanitas at all. All the symbolism is there: skulls (some of them reminiscent of Posadas' calaveritas and mexican day of the dead sugar dolls), withering flowers, a clock to remind us of the passage of time, a guitar and dolls symbolizing the temporary nature of enjoyment...

But I can't help thinking that the woman in yellow is a self-portrait. The central painting shows us her looking defiant, angry even. The body language of her crossed arms is saying "leave me alone". She seems to be awaken from the sleep that overcame her in the previous panel, suddenly aware of what those objects on the table meant: "What? Me? Die? Never!". And while she looked unaware of pending death on the first painting, on the last one she has snatched the sickle away from the grim reaper and looks menacing at us, a macabre glare. What I find upsetting is that the menacing look she's giving me should be directed to "Death". Or is she just saying that her paintings are her way to immortality? Anyway, it feels like Paula Rego has won.

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March 01, 2007

Infinite Library

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors." -- The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges

(too much Borges lately)

Book Cell by Matej Krén

It's right there, upon entering the modern art museum. A tower of books with a passage through it. Cute, I thought. As I walked in I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit-hole, only this was an infinite tunnel of books - an illusion created by cleverly placed mirrors. Fighting vertigo, it became one of my favourite art installations of all time.

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February 28, 2007

Silence is underrated

"Don't talk unless you can improve the silence." -- Jorge Luis Borges

*****

"Nestled deep in the postcard-perfect French Alps, the Grande Chartreuse is considered one of the world’s most ascetic monasteries. In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning wrote to the Carthusian order for permission to make a documentary about them. They said they would get back to him. Sixteen years later, they were ready. Gröning, sans crew or artificial lighting, lived in the monks’ quarters for six months—filming their daily prayers, tasks, rituals and rare outdoor excursions. This transcendent, closely observed film seeks to embody a monastery, rather than simply depict one—it has no score, no voice over and no archival footage. What remains is stunningly elemental: time, space and light. One of the most mesmerizing and poetic chronicles of spirituality ever created, INTO GREAT SILENCE dissolves the border between screen and audience with a total immersion into the hush of monastic life. More meditation than documentary, it’s a rare, transformative theatrical experience for all."

A lover of silence myself, I enjoyed this documentary immensely. I'm not sure if its even a documentary: there's no soundtrack or voice over, just a succession of short clips and beautiful images of the french Alps. But what made it truly remarkable was that it was the first time in my life where there was almost complete silence in a room ful of people for nearly three hours.

I understand the need for solitude and withdrawal but I frankly don't understand it as a way of life. Especially to be closer to God as one monk admitted. A life of ascetism in a high peak in the Alps is nothing to brag about. What else is there to do? Try to find God while waking up every day to go to work, be underpaid, try to raise a family and make ends meet, resist the temptation of getting yurself into debt to buy symbols of status, find what makes you happy even if it's not what is socially prescribed, be good unto others although they don't really seem to care, be immune to marketing strategies and, if you're a believer, still have faith in God despite all the difficulties. Now THAT is a challenge. Withdrawing from society is plain cowardice.

Silence is the key to find solitude in the middle of others. Silence allows us to think deeper and, if you're a believer, it's the way to listen to God. I've been thinking how it's getting increasingly more difficult to find silent places in cities. My favourites were museums but somehow the old rule of keeping silent doesn't seem to apply anymore. I find catholic churches too grim. I can't get any peace of mind staring at the sight of a crucified man. There isn't one shop, cafe or public place in general that doesn't have some background sound, the dreaded muzak most times. Most of my friends and family can't arrive home without immediately turning on the TV or the stereo even if they're not paying attention. I have my own pet theory that all this is related to fear. Fear of thinking. It's easier to limit your interaction with the world to hearing and seeing and not giving it much thought. If you are constantly bombed with sounds and images, there's a relief from not having to think, from not having to face the probable emptiness.

You know when you eat something that tastes so good that you have to close your eyes so that nothing else can interfere with that sensual pleasure? The same goes for a beautiful work of art; I want to enjoy it in silence, the needed silence of contemplation which allows beauty to be perceived as a religious experience.

*****

Amused by the huge line of people at the Gulbenkian Foundation. There's an exhibition of jewelry by Cartier and I was doing my usual anthropological stunt by observing all these well dressed middle aged couples and groups of women. By the way they looked completely lost as where to buy tickets or how they spoke loudly on their cellphones giving directions to friends on the best places to park around there, I'm sure they had never set foot on the museum before. A strange setting. Reminded me of Bianca Castafiore. I may be a bit prejudiced but I can swear I saw a glitter of greediness on those eyes or whatever it is that makes people appreciate gems and gold. A woman who started mindlessly chatting with me about how she was anxious to see the Cartier exhibition was startled when I said I was not going there but to the museum instead. And even more startled when I said that no Cartier jewelry can beat the Lalique collection which is in the permanent exhibition.

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February 26, 2007

Lame

Seen "No sos vos, soy yo". My life - entertainment wise - just got more uncertain. Portugal is a small country where only blockbusters and a few strikingly good independent movies are shown. Argentina isn't, as far as I know, a big movie exporter. So, statistically speaking, if an Argentinian movie is shown in Portugal it's got to be good. But this one was terribly lame. It's one of those romantic drama/comedies where Hugh Grant could easily be the star. The cinematic version of those mushrooming novels in the genre "screwed relationships and finding real love for thirtysomethings". As I said, lame. The only interesting bits are the ones the main character's appointments with his shrink. And the credit goes all to the shrink who even quotes Borges which I'm sure is mandatory on any Argentinian production - there must be a law. If only the movie had some good shots of my beloved Buenos Aires, I'd be willing to forgive all those cliches and awkward plot reminiscent of a mediocre Woody Allen's "Play it again Sam". But not even that.

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February 23, 2007

Notes to self

“As a matter of fact, he almost never takes the liberty of being himself unless someone builds up his confidence and leaves him alone in an empty room,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in a 1957 essay, “The Venetian Pariah.” For Sartre, Tintoretto is an avatar of existential anguish, who was both behind his time—as the last native-born master on a scene ruled by a cosmopolitan élite—and ahead of it, as the ideal artist for a rising bourgeoisie that was too intimidated by the pomp of the ducal republic to recognize itself in his demotic trashings of aristocratic decorum. Intellectuals of the era, while in awe of Tintoretto’s gifts, scolded him for being too fast, careless, and insolent; when Vasari credited him with “the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced,” it wasn’t meant as unalloyed praise. (Vasari also called him the medium’s “worst madcap.”) --- PETER SCHJELDAHL in the New Yorker

Go see the Tintoretto exhibition at the Prado and the Portraiture in the age of Picasso at the Thyssen. Go, go, go to Madrid.

*****

Go visit Venice despite your long standing prejudice against a city that can only stink with that much canals. The biennale starts in June.

*****

Graffiti on a wall, an ejaculation, spatters of bird droppings and chewing gum flattened on the pavement, inarticulate curses - "every body has prombles woste then mine" reads one hopeless message they found scrawled on the street and incorporated in a picture. Gilbert & George's London is more than a backdrop. It teems with life and dirt, shock, surprise, boredom and beauty. Their retrospective is as relentless, cumulative and varied as anyone could ask for. You exit winded - you've seen too much. Like the city itself, the show is uneven and sprawling, and goes from dark to garish, sexy to monstrous. Their best and worst are here - and which is which, one keeps on asking, and what do we mean by best and worst? Good filthy or bad filthy, raving mad or just raving? Are they brave or are they bores? They provoke ambivalence. The contrariness and contradictions are essential to their art, and to our responses to it. --- Adrian Searle on The Guardian

Go visit the Gilbert & George exhibition at Tate Modern. It ends in May! Go, go, go to London.

*****

"Hay is a tiny market town in the Brecon Beacons National Park, It has 1500 people and 41 bookshops."

Go to Hay-on-Wye! Someday.

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February 22, 2007

Random belated posts

It's been a while.

******

I wanted to write something clever about a Milan Kundera article that was published on the New Yorker but I'm feeling sick. I derived much pleasure from it and had R. reading it out loud from the book "The Curtain" where it's originally from. Very apt too, since it speaks of the provincialism of both small and large nations.

******

Hated Scorcese's "The Departed". No one who has seen the fantastic Hong Kong "Infernal Affairs" trilogy - of which the Scorcese movie is a remake - can think this silly movie deserves an Oscar. I was deeply irritated by the use of foul language that seemed completely out of context. It seemed like a teenager wrote the script. Argh.

The only fun thing was seeing one of the characters sitting at Boston Commons looking up at the golden State House dome and a few hours later I was getting out at Park Street Station and having exactly the same sight. And also from a corner of the hotel room :)

******

Saw "The Lives of Others". So brilliant. One of the best movies I've seen in years. Made me prompt my parents to go look for their secret police files at the National Archives. If this one doesn't win the Oscar for best foreign movie, the little respect I have for that Hollywood event will never even have a tiny chance of being restored.

*******

Saw "Little Children". The ending can be frustrating in two ways. The characters don't break up with the status quo and do not pursue their passions nor there is the edifying ending which would be something along the way of finding that it's not their lives that are wrong but themselves, hence the solution would not be trading a partner for another but finding out how to be happy regardless of relationships. That's why I said to Rui that I hadn't learned anything from it since I don't see how the problem posed has been solved. He seems to think otherwise.

The only fun part was when Kate Winslett appears naked and automatically me and Monica look at each other and whisper simultaneoulsy "She's got stretch marks on her thighs!". And we both sighed at that strange frivolous consolation.

*******

Read "The Accidental Masterpiece", got Siri Hutsvedt's "Mysteries of the Rectangle" and Julien Levy's Diary at the excellent Museum of Fine Arts bookshop in Boston. The Museum in itself is chaotic. I couldn't follow a logical path to the exhibition rooms and found hilarious that they should hang a Tagore portrait in the India section, amidst the hindu gods statues, for no apparent reason other than he was from India.

******

And since it's been a long time I've insulted anyone through stereotyping (at least online), I can say that in Boston:
- people smoke a lot more than in any other place i've visited in the US
- everything, from a school, to a park, to a subway station, to a pebble in the street seems to be "the first in America"
- too many bricks.

Had a great time at L'Espalier but also at Ten Tables. Yum. No Boston baked beans, though.

It was freezing.

Had a fun sentimental tour of Harvard Campus and Adams House.

Enjoyed Piotr's Smurf Explosion and Lisa's Jesus Line up. And also the cheese fondue, reminiscent of Astérix in Switzerland childhood reading days.

********

Fascinated by cultural differences. The same game show - with a few modified rules - is on TV in the US and in Portugal at the same time. The portuguese version relies on the presenter's jokes and anedoctes to keep it alive otherwise the public is so passive that it could be a popular cure for insomnia. In the US version everyone seems to be on cocaine. Or speeds. Or something - I'm not very savvy when it comes to recreational drugs, I'm afraid. Also, the difficulty level of the questions is....very different.

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January 03, 2007

2007

A foggy yet sunny first day of the year in San Francisco.

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December 23, 2006

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December 22, 2006

New Year's Resolutions

1. Be more decisive.
2. Hmmm....

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December 19, 2006

Buddhist temple in Hong Kong.

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December 17, 2006

Faves

I'm always saying I'm not a musical person but...here are the most recent acquisitions at the iTunes Store for slatkushee's iPod :)

****

Henry Mancini - "Pink Panther Tune" - coolest music ever.

****

Harry James - "You made me love you" - first heard on Woody Allen's "Hannah and her sisters". In fact, Hannah has the best movie soundtrack ever.

*****

Fatboy Slim - "Bird of Prey" - because I love Jim Morrison's voice and The Housemartins were one of my 80's favourite bands.

*****

Geoffrey Burgon - "Brideshead revisited (Main Theme)" and "Sebastian's Summer" - most beautiful TV series ever; the rare case, or probably the only case, where I find the series better than the book.

*****

Beastie Boys - "Ch-Check it out" - I love the concept of jewish rappers.

*****

Miles Davis - "So what" - second coolest music ever.

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December 15, 2006

Macau

The bottle next to this one was Portuguese wine. Very odd.

*****

I had just read an article on the New Yorker about how the Las Vegas millionaire Steve Wynn had poked an elbow (and ruined) a 139 million dollar Picasso - Le rêve pictured above - he owned.

Wynn opened a luxurious casino in Macau. While walking around the obssessive looking gamblers, I said to R. I had no idea how did the roulette thing worked. Just to show me the mechanics of the thing, he bets on my birthdate. The roulette spins and the ball falls on 7 - I was born on Oct 7th! We collect our money and leave immediately; oh the joy of taking money from the I-have-so-much-money-I-can-dig-a-hole-on-my-own-Picasso Steve Wynn!

*****

Macau has the feeling of a ghost town or something out of a twilight zone episode. There are signs written in Portuguese everywhere but I couldn't see any portuguese people neither meet anyone who spoke the language.

A pharmacy and Portuguese custard pies, a traditional pastry. Apparently it's a Macau specialty too.

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December 14, 2006

Amadeo Amadeo

There's a fantastic exhibition going on in Lisboa at the Gulbenkian Foundation! A very complete showing of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso's works, some of them held in private collections and unseen by the public until now. Fell in love with his drawings.

***

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso was a Portuguese modernist painter; he went to live in Paris in 1906 and was friends with Modigliani and Brancusi. He participated in the famous Armory Show:

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December 12, 2006

Wabi Sabi

"Imperfection is in some sort essential to what we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. In all things that live there are ceratin irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed." -- John Ruskin, On Art and Life

-----

It just came to me the memory of reading a Roman Polanski biography, that description of the moment he got the news of Sharon Tate's murder and couldn't stop thinking about a little scar she had on her knee and how he wouldn't see it ever again.

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December 11, 2006

I was thinking how I was such an avid reader as a teenager partly because I wanted to know so many things and books seemed to be the best source for instruction for whatever I didn't know yet, intellectually or emotionally. In part all this reading was helpful, in other ways I suppose I got some prejudices on matters I didn't have enough real experience to have an opinion on. Yes, I was - and I still am - an impatient person. And one of my favourite quotes is still Einstein's "There's nothing as practical as a good theory". Or something like that.

The best part of getting older, book wise, is rereading. If you're fairly smart, you'll understand the book on a first read. For instance, I read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" when I was 17 and thought it was brilliant. I read it again 12 years later. As I finished it, closed it and laid it on the bed of a hotel room in a distant country that smelled of musk & sea & dirt, I put my hand on my forehand and realized how naive I had been. I imagined Milan Kundera, somewhere in France, in a control room filled with TV sets from floor to ceiling, monitoring his readers reactions, spying on me and going: "Ha! Silly girl! Did you think you could grasp the meaning of my book the first time you read it without having been through love & jealousy & desire & heartbreak?"

I wonder what will it tell me if I reread it 10 years from now?

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Before & After #4 (the last of the series)

Macau, Largo do Senado, 1930's and today

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December 10, 2006

Before & After #3

Macau, Post Office Building, 1930's and today

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December 05, 2006

Before & After #2

*****

My maternal grandfather was stationed in Macau in the 1930's as an infantry soldier. The army duties weren't heavy since he was also one very good wing back at soccer and played for the Macau Army Football team. The childhood memories I treasure the most are the quiet afternoons when he would tell me stories of Macau, of football matches and of the goals he scored, the Chinese ladies he dated, how he found impossible to eat with chopsticks and when he'd show me the scar on his leg, the imprint of a boot stud a Hong Kong player left on him during a ball dispute.

So, my first visit to Macau felt like a revisit.

*****

Macau, Camões Garden and Grotto, 1930's and today.

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December 03, 2006

Before & After #1

Macau, border with mainland China (Portas do Cerco), 1930's and today.

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November 16, 2006

Ding a ling a ling

Going over half of the world to:

- kill many saudades (a literal translation; give me a break, I'm portuguese);
- revisit a place where I've spent my early childhood dreams.
- attend a wedding - the main excuse.

I'd say it's mainly an anthropological expedition.

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November 09, 2006

In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki

It can be easily said of this essay that it is a set of jottings about the aesthetic power of darkness. The author's writing is like a stream that runs through architecture, takes a turn into gastronomy, goes swiftly by human beauty and ponders on old age, with a turn of prose so compelling that makes you wish you owned minimalistic decorated japanese house and were reading by candle light.

The considerations on architecture and decoration can be taken as the oriental counterpart to Bachelard's Poetics of Space, taking the way the lived experience of the space is that which matters for his aesthetics and practical purposes.

Tanizaki is a man who can write beautifully about sensuous experiences like sight or taste never losing from sight his theme.

But what exactly is the theme? It seems to me to be a mourning of a traditional way of life, or should we say of lighting, that was quickly disappearing. The view that glorifies darkness which makes lacquer and gold stand out or that softens the whites as opposed to artificial light which makes everything glitter and brings the unbearable brightness can also be just a romantic vision of a lost Japan that never existed. But that really isn't an issue if you are aiming to enjoy this book for its sheer beauty and bits of witty humor.

*****

"It has been said of japanese food that it is a cuisine to be looked at rather than eaten. I would go further and say that it is food to be meditated upon, a kind of silent music evoked by the combination of lacquerware and the light of a candle flickering in the dark."

*****

This edition is lacking a glossary of untranslated japanese terms used throughout.

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November 06, 2006

Itsy Bitsy Exhibition

My friend AP and his latest outdoor painting experiences at Quinta do Alcube...

I'm going to start charging a rent for this :)

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November 01, 2006

Fontana

I remember the first time I saw a Fontana - a spatial concept one. It was at Berardo's collection, here in Portugal, and I admired the boldness of it, a creative destruction, the turning what could be a painting into a sculpture, the possibility of dimension, the birth metaphor, etc. A breakthrough in aesthetics and art language as great as Malevich's white square.

"Spatial concept"

After roaming around some modern art museums around the world and seeing Fontanas like this all over (there are many from Lisbon to New York, London or Buenos Aires), I couldn't help thinking that this guy had been running a great business; whenever he needed a new car he just had to get some canvas, sometimes not even bothering to paint it, and slit it open in any direction. There are things that have meaning if you only make them once.

And just last year I saw this work by the brazilian Nelson Leirner at the MALBA. So clever, I'm such a sucker for witty art. I remember saying, "look, he put a zipper on Fontana!" while laughing. Very nerdy.

"Hommage to Fontana"

He made a series of these and tried to sell them at their production cost. He says: "If anyone now asks me if I make art, I reply: 'No, I make a product.' I have no wish to be an artist. Society wishes me to be one. If someone wishes to call me an artist, he can, but I’m not an artist. I’m the head of a business."

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October 31, 2006

The Pequod Meets the Jeroboam. Her Story,
Frank Stella (Moby Dick Series)

"It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the white whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the chief mate, burned with ardor to encounter him; and the captain himself being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all the archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat's bow, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman's head; but the mate for ever sank."

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October 30, 2006

In March the gypsies returned. This time they brought a telescope and a magnifying glass the size of a drum, which they exhibited as the latest invention of the jews of Amsterdam. They placed one gypsy woman at the end of the village and set up the telescope at the entrance of the tent. For the price of five reales, people could look into the telescope and see the gypsy woman an arm's length away. "Science has eliminated distance" Melquíades proclaimed "In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house".

---G.G.Marquez, One hundred years of solitude

+++++++

from Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say by Gillian Wearing

+++++++

Image and sounds are not enough to shorten distances.

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October 26, 2006

Rigo is in Lisboa! How funny, the artist I "found" in San Francisco last July is suddenly paining murals here - for the first time I think.

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October 25, 2006

Adam Cvijanovic, Love Poem (10 minutes after the end of gravity), 2005 (detail)

I need to go to the new Saatchi...

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October 24, 2006

At the aftermath of the recent spanish changes, there's an ongoing debate about gay marriage here with the government dismissing it as not important at this time and as being a dividing issue.

I can't resist to summarize this three-fold comment by Miguel Vale de Almeida on the recent polls in which some newspapers/TV stations have asked random people if they agreed with same sex marriage - to which a vast majority of Portuguese people said no.

- the right to same sex marriage is a political one and not just a law issue or a moral issue: its denial goes to show how citizens are not treated equally before the law thus going against the Portuguese Constitution;
- on surveys about "values" they never ask if the respondent agrees with the situation of there being so few rich people and so many poor ones: it's a given fact, it's not questionable;
- why not come up with a survey to see if Portuguese people agree with letting women vote (they should be given alternatives such as "Yes, but their vote only should count as half" or "Yes, with the bulletin pre-filled by their husbands"); no one asks this because the right of women to vote is not a "values" related issue, it's the product of an unquestionable right to being treated equally.

++++

“I will never understand those who proclaim love as the foundation of life, while denying so radically protection, understanding and affection to our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, our colleagues. What kind of love is this that excludes those who experience their sexuality in a different way?”

— José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s Prime Minister, May 11, 2005

++++

“Prejudices are what fools use for reason.”

— Voltaire

++++

“Same-sex relationships have long been part of our African history and heritage. There is ample research illustrating that African people have loved and had sexual relationships with people of the same sex for hundreds of years. For example, in Namibia, Kenya, Nigeria and SA, bond friendships, ancestral wives, female husbands and male wives have existed for centuries as forms of same-sex relationships.

All these relationships were accepted and respected in Africa, long before Africa was colonised. In addition, these forms of partnerships and marriages were protected by common law. Same-sex practices have always been a part of our sexual desires, intimacy and practice. In SA, the practice has been traced among the Zulu, Lovedu, Sotho, Tswana and Venda tribes. It is important to understand the traditional and cultural institutions that form families, marriages, and clans before we pronounce on these matters.

There is no record of traditional African societies legislating against homosexuality. Such laws are a western import, manifested through colonial penal codes and the criminalisation of sodomy across the continent. So, one could argue with authority that it is homophobia, not homosexuality, that is un-African.”

— Fikile Vilakazi, editorial: “Protect South Africa from Sexual Apartheid”
in Business Day, September 7, 2006

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October 23, 2006

Engraving from "Selenografia sive Lunae Descriptio" by Johannes Hevelius, 1647

From the many things that I've learned on this weekend's astronomy class- from equinoxes and the earth's orbit to parsecs and how to determine the latitude based on the North star, I know the ones that will last longer is the fact that I need to go to the southern hemisphere again since I've failed to notice Magellan's clouds before, the very poetic and intriguing thought that one is looking at the past when one looks at the sky and how Camões' Lusiads is filled with pieces of geocentric astronomy theory.

Por este largo mar enfim me alongo Do conhecido pólo de Calisto, Tendo o término ardente já passado, Onde o meio do mundo é limitado. Já descoberto tínhamos diante, Lá no novo Hemisfério, nova estrela, Não vista de outra gente, que ignorante Alguns tempos esteve incerta dela. Vimos a parte menos rutilante, E, por falta de estrelas, menos bela, Do Pólo fixo, onde ainda se não sabe Que outra terra comece, ou mar acabe. Assim passando aquelas regiões Por onde duas vezes passa Apolo, Dois invernos fazendo e dois verões, Enquanto corre dum ao outro Pólo, Por calmas, por tormentas e opressões, Que sempre f az no mar o irado Eolo, Vimos as Ursas, apesar de Juno, Banharem-se nas águas de Netuno.

From this open sea I looked my last At the constellations of the North. For we had by now crossed the burning line Which marks division in the earth's design. Our sailors had discovered long since In that new hemisphere, the Southern cross, Though those who had not witnessed it For a while doubted its existence. We saw new heavens less sparkling, And, for lack of starts, less beautiful Nearing the pole, where no one comprehends If a continent begins or the sea ends . By now we had left behind both tropics Where Apollo's chariot twice pauses Coursing from pole to pole, making Its contrasting winters and summers; At times becalmed, at times wracked By storms whipped up by Aeolus, We saw both bears, for all Juno taught us Plunging headlong into Netptun's waters.

Os Lusíadas, Canto V

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October 15, 2006

I'm jammed between Heidegger who was a boozy beggar, Nietzsche (there's nothing he couldn't teach ya about the raisin' of the wrist) and Benjamin whose name doesn't rhyme with any thing doing with drinking alcohol and therefore wasn't included in the Monty Python song. Hmmm. Maybe "Walter Benjamin would get suicidal with only a bottle of gin".

I'm pondering whether I should dip into the thick prose of "Time and Being" or just cut and dress old Martin Heidegger up.

(from the man who fell asleep)

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October 07, 2006

Birthday Girl

By the time this pre-scheduled entry is posted automatically, I'll have been away for some days and will be enjoying my 31st birthday in the middle of quiet Alentejo, reading the pile of books that my ongoing amazon shopping spree has provided and cherishing the gifts that have been sent from the other side of the Atlantic, a heartwarming array of pleasures (including a compass from a very special pirate shop). Oh, and I probably will have gained a few pounds from all the pancake eating!

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October 02, 2006

My theory, which is mine.

I was delighted to read Ricardo's post about Shakespeare and how one astrophysicist is claiming that by studying the astronomic events mentioned on his plays one can determine not the years during which he lived but rather the ones in which he didn't.

Many scholars have been researching the true identity of Shakespeare and there is a strong current in favour of naming Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the true author of the works. Many historians have also presumed he was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth I.

My own pet theory is that the only person to live at that time, that knew all the royal court's intrigues, who was in a position to know about the letter Christopher Hatton, Vice-Chamberlain, wrote to the queen and which is parodied on Twelfth Night, and who had enough time in her hands to come up with so many rhymes, was Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen herself!!!!

But...there's more.

Were Liz and Ed ever seen together in the same room? De Vere was appointed as a royal ward in the household of William Cecil, the Queen's most trusted and closest advisor. De Vere's mother wrote to Cecil:

“I confess that a great trust has been committed to me of those things which, in my Lord’s lifetime, were kept most secret from me”.

My own conclusion? The Queen and the Earl were one and the same person!!!!!! So Elizabeth was a transvestite which can explain why she never married or had any children: she secretly wanted to be a man but at the time there was no such thing as sex change surgery!

Elizabeth posing as De Vere and posing as the Queen

****
There's nothing quite as liberating as making public an outrageous pet theory :)

A special thanks to my research associate Ricardo! We could write a Dan Brown style book on this and make money!

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September 28, 2006

I realized Mother's Day was just two days
away, so I went into the florist and said, "I'd
like to send my mother a dozen long-stern red
roses." The guy looked at me and said, "My mother's
dead" I thought this was slightly unprofessional
of him, so I said, "How much would that be?"
--The Florist

Justine called on Christmas Day to say she
was thinking of killing herself. I said "We're
in the middle of opening presents, Justine. Could
you possibly call back later, that is, if you're
still alive?"
-- Making the Best of the Holidays

From "Return to the City of White Donkeys" by James Tate, a curious little book I've been reading at a slow pace, one poem every night before going to sleep.

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September 26, 2006

Luz de Luna

Lune by Bruno Peinado, an installation for Luzboa - the Lisboa's Art of Light International Biennale.

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September 25, 2006

I was reading on Spiked how ballet is slowly dying in the UK because of political correctness and general mass hysteria about child molesting:

"One problem is the virtual ban on teachers touching students. Child protection policies now mean that male tutors touching female dancers is ‘virtually prohibited’; students need a letter from parents in order to permit limited touching in certain circumstances; and classes must be observed ‘to make sure that there’s no indiscretion"

And suddenly all the corrective pushes & turns & smacks in the bottom I got from the now director of the Portuguese National Ballet Company Ana Caldas ("Have you ever seen a ballerina with her tush sticking out?!?!?!") when I was younger came back to my memory. I wonder if I can still sue? :D

(this was all a lame excuse to go dig for my old ballet shoes and take a photo, of course)

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September 21, 2006

"The astonishing reality of things
Is my discovery every day.
Each thing is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to someone how much this makes me happy,
How much it’s enough for me.

It’s enough to exist to be whole."

From "Poemas Inconjuntos" by Alberto Caeiro (one of Pessoa's heteronyms), taken from a wonderful online project at the Portuguese National Library

(translation stolen from this wonderful blog which owes its existence to the fact that Pessoa's writings are now in the public domain)

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September 20, 2006

Peristil

Peristil at Diocletian's Palace, Split, Croacia

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September 19, 2006

My grandmother moved and I realized that I am not as attached to the home where I spent so much of my childhood as I am to worthless, random objects with which I used to play. Old eyeglasses of every shape; a 60's record player and a ventriloquist's 45 rpm in which he engages on a dialogue with Donald Duck (how silly is it to listen to a puppet on a record?); old necklaces, some made of coffee beans and plastic beads; colourful buttons which I used to pick up on the streets (what happened? are clothes more resistant today and no one loses buttons anymore?); my grandfather's diaries and notebooks where he obsessively scribbled words and their definitions.

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September 18, 2006

Metaposting

I was resisting temptation....

On the hydrofoil from Split to Hvar - after attempting to translate a sign in croatian, dictionary in hand:
The American: So, is "HIJK" the croatian for row?
The Portuguese:...no, it's H-I-J-K for identifying the seats.....
(laughter)
The American: Oh no! You're going to blog this aren't you?
The Portuguese: Maybe not.
The American: I can foresee the post on your blog: the american said... and then the portuguese said...

If it's any excuse, croatians do use a lot of silent j's in words :D

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September 13, 2006

El Bosco

The Mimara Museum in Zagreb, Croatia has a painting by Bosch which seems to be either a cropped replica or study for the central panel of the triptych held at the MNAA in Lisbon, Portugal: "The temptations of St. Anthony". I had never heard of it before and never saw it mentioned here, where this Bosch painting is one of the most emblematic paintings of our museum.

Mimara Museum, Zagreb

MNAA, Lisbon

The Mimara version looks like a fake to me :)

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September 10, 2006

"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method."

--Chapter lxxxii, Moby Dick (Melville)

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September 06, 2006

me, me, me

Manga me, Mucha me, Botticcelli me & Modigliani me

Playing with this fun, fun, fun face transformer thingie (through fellow flickrite Striatic)

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My hotel in Zagreb featured a quirky decoration: pillows, bed covers and curtains all had an interesting pattern of faces of famous/genial people in arts & science.

I particularly like the set on this pillow:

Clockwise: Matisse, Einstein, Stravinski, Manu Chao. Yes. Manu Chao. Croatian humor?

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September 05, 2006

Hadn't studied enough croatian grammar and already was getting suspicious about the large number of streets that seemed to be named after women. Until I saw this.

Zagreb, Croatia

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September 04, 2006

Library Thing

Having fun lately with Library Thing: "LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth."

Author cloud

That's what I call a social network! Just added the few books on my tiny bookshelf and some others piling around. I miss my stored-in-the-basement-of-a-friend books. Now I'm starting my own online library. Great!

(found it through misteraitch whose blog is such a source of many delights - which lately includes a post with my favourite Xul Solar painting and a mention to Javier Marías - the cause of my sunday El País newspaper obsession.

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September 01, 2006

Hrvatska

Hvar, Croatia

+++++

Beautiful and - now- peaceful country. Didn't find a place to eat where I can truly say I had a great meal, though. The Croatian people I met were not even slightly customer-oriented and I got the "Oh no, here comes a tourist" facial expression in almost every bar/cafe/restaurant I went to.

Rent-a-Car in Split:

C: There's a road map in the car, right?
Employee: Road Map? There's only one road from here to Dubrovnik! What do you need a map for? The sea will be on your right all the way down there, you can't miss it.
C:....

At a bar:

After finally getting the attention of the waitress behind the counter - who was writing something that seemed to be as lengthy as War and Peace :
- A beer and a bottle of water, please.
- We don't have bottled water.
And promptly gets back to her unfisnished masterpiece oblivious of my existence.
-....can I have a glass of tap water then?
(pause)
- Ok (shrugging shoulders)
And I could swear she rolled her eyes as I got back to the terrace.

Very strange, considering 40% of their GDP comes from tourism.

+++++

Dubrovnik, Croatia

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August 17, 2006

Mare Hadriaticum

"A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those mighty tombs. In a hotel bedroom, designed for a warmer season, I wrote long letters to Sebastian."

--Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

********

Not Venice, no Charles Ryder around but a warm season to go on a break to indulge on (even more) selfishness, ignoring bombings on foreign lands & ex-nazi nobel prize winners & earthly worries in general.

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August 14, 2006

The Heart of the Mission

"El Corazón de la Missión is part mobile public art project, part site-specific performance, part tourist attraction and all serious fun. Guillermo Gómez-Peña —the renowned writer, border activist, performance provocateur, reverse anthropologist, and NPR commentator — has scripted and narrated this 80-minute tour to take you deep into the heart of the Mission, the place he has called home for almost 15 years. From Dolores Park to Clarion Alley and the 24th Street Corridor, ride shotgun with Gómez-Peña as he honors the Mission’s ghosts, from fallen labor leaders of the 1930s to testosterone-driven low-riders of the 1980s, and celebrates the ever-evolving social, cultural and political sensibilities of his favorite neighborhood in San Francisco."

****

R. got us tickets for a Mission tour organized by Galeria de la Raza - an awful name, I know, but apparently "raza" doesn't have a nazi connotation for latin americans. I didn't realize it was performance art until, shortly before hopping on the bus, a woman dressed in what I imagine to be a mexican hooker outfit tried to sell me vaginal enhancing cream while Gómez-Peña read a subversive statement that I couldn't follow since the woman was by then offering me a threesome and it was hard to concentrate on politics at that point.

We got on a pink and green bus with a mexican kitsch designed dashboard, were offered tequilla shots while Gómez-Peña's assistant sat on the participants laps and threw her skirts over their heads.

All this was accompanied by the pre-recorded narration of the tour by Gómez-Peña and the presence of the man himself. A discourse on immigration, american imperialism and the cultural mix of the city with a touch of sarcastic humour that made it an interesting experience.

---

Never heard the Mission being called "Chilli-con Valley" before but it is a very funny pun.

---

At one point the artist's assistant asks "Are there any Americans here?" and a choir of voices go "Yeah!". She goes on "What do you feel at the sight of the American flag?". The responses varied from "Shame", "Disgust" to "Anger". If it sounds strange to you, bear in mind that San Francisco is known to republicans as "that leftist enclave". She grabs her skirt, pulls it up and shows her american flag panties in a sexually meaningful pose: "What do you feel now???"

---

We stopped by at Clarion Alley - a street known for its beautiful murals and drug peddlers - and Gómez-Penã and his assistant tried to convince everyone that going down the alley naked would be a true and faithful experience to the culture of the Mission. Two couples almost promptly volunteered. While they undressed in the middle of the street I looked behind me and just across from us there was a police station.

Naked Man: "Come on, come naked with us...."
Me: "Well, I would but the police is just right there, isn't this dangerous?"
Naked Man: "This is San Francisco!"
Me: ...

Naked couple #1, the Assistant, Naked Couple#2 and Gómez-Peña.

Of course, by the end of Clarion Alley there was a group of people, immigrants and prostitutes among them, gaping in amazement at the sight.

-----

After going to an art gallery - where the same couple got naked again for no apparent reason other than "This is San Francisco" which prompted the artist showing there to get naked himself and run around the gallery - , we stopped by at a "true immigrant's bar" where some latino men sitting at the bar or playing pool, not looking that hospitable, suddenly stopped to see why was a weird group of turists invading their space.

Me: So, are you guys going to get naked again here?
man previously naked : Nah, not here.
woman previously naked: I don't know...they've got pool tables....

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August 12, 2006

Old city, New Delhi - India

16th & Bryant, San Francisco - USA

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August 11, 2006

Note to self

Try This:

1. Ask yourself the same question, "When in your life did you feel most alive?"
2. What were you doing? Why did it feel so good? Which of your core values were you living?
3. It's likely you were taking some risks at the time.
4. If you've haven't felt that alive in a while, what could you do to re-engage, to push past your comfort zone?
5. Remember, the gift of risk lies not in what you achieve, but in who you become by taking them.

-- from the wonderful Fast Company blog; this particular entry by Doug Sundheim • Executive Coach, New York City

+++++

Promenade, Chagall

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August 10, 2006

Take me out to the ball game

My very first baseball game: San Francisco Giants vs. Washington Nationals. Until that moment I had never understood the rules or even why is it such a cult sport in the USA. I kinda like it, to be honest. The game in itself is nothing much but it's one interesting cultural experience.

Firstly, it's the laziest game ever followed closely by chess. The pitcher throws the ball, the batter bats it (or not) and all the other players linger around, scratching themselves. Sometimes, when the batter actually hits the ball some of the players have to run a bit. If they see that the opponent team will easily catch the ball and throw it back to the base they are trying to reach, they won't even bother. The big aim is to hit a home run and I suspect that the extra motivation - beside the points - is that since the ball will be out of reach, the players can do a victory walk from base to base until they get home instead of sprinting which must be very tiresome. All the players are chubby - not to say plain fatsos - and I was marveled that they could actually run at a fair speed.

The Charlie Brown place for meditation is actually called the Pitcher's Mount.

Secondly, the whole game is very childish. It reminded me of the Little Lulu comic books that I used to read as a child where the boys would have their own club, secret codes and were always competing for lame reasons. The baseball coaches use an intricate code of hand signs which make them look like chimps. They touch both nipples, pat their own heads, do the Martini man thing with the lips and the like so as to pass to their own players what the strategy is without giving it away to the other team. Likewise, the players sometimes all get together on the pitcher's mount to discuss the game with their hands covering their mouths. You never know when your adversary can read your lips.

Thirdly, American supporters are extremely strange. Apparently it's ok to arrive after the game starts and before it ends, like it was some porn movie continuous session where the plot doesn't matter much. The only difference being that the plot doesn't matter much because this is all an excuse to eat and drink like pigs. I should have suspected it when I mentioned I was going to a ball game at the AT&T stadium and J. promptly remembered how good the garlic fries were rather than say something about the team's latest deplorable performance.

$26 for two corn dogs, a beer and garlic fries. I expected it to come on a gold plate.

Also, every little break is taken over by the announcers to advertise for something and I still can't believe they haven't thought of putting some ads on the players uniforms.

More quirkiness: "The seventh-inning stretch is a tradition in baseball that takes place between the halves of the seventh inning of any game. Fans generally stand up and stretch out their legs and other muscles and sometimes walk around".

I was rooting for the home team (mainly because I love San Francisco and it seemed arrogant that the other team should be called Nationals just because they were out from Washington) and was appalled to see how the Giants fans started trotting out as soon as their team was being hopelessly beat. By the 8th inning you could actually hear the flock of anxious seagulls waiting for the game to end to attack the food leftovers.

The Portuguese: Hey! Why is everyone leaving!?
The American: There's no way the Giants can turn this game!
The Portuguese: What!? But you should stand by your team until the end! Where is the American optimism, the can-do attitude?
The American: No one likes a loser.

And it's true. The Giants suck. Go Giants!

**********

Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don't care if I never get back,
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game.

$3.95 for a bag of peanuts, by the way.

*****

And, of course, now all that baseball metaphor used in Hollywood juvenile movies - which I believe is one of those cultural mysteries to any non-US national - makes much more sense.

* First base: Kissing, especially "French" kissing.
* Second base: Fondling or groping, especially of the breasts or genitals.
* Third base: oral sex, full nudity or a non-intercourse orgasm or dry humping (clothed genital to genital stimulation).
* Home run: Sexual intercourse.

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August 08, 2006

Reliquary

The outside walls of the Chicago Tribune Tower feature several pieces of rocks labeled as being once part of famous monuments from around the world. Apparently this was the idea of Colonel McCormick who asked correspondents for the Chicago Tribune to bring back rocks and bricks from a variety of historically important sites as mementos. This building on MIchigan Avenue is the modern day version of a reliquary, I suppose. Preserving tangible memorials would be similar to owning a bit of the wood of the cross where Jesus was crucified. Or a flask of water from the river Jordan.

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August 07, 2006

Portuguese people everywhere you look

I was walking from Potrero Hill to the Mission in San Francisco and I saw this neat piece of conceptual public art much
to my intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment. I'm just sorry there weren't any birds perched on the roof when i took this. And I'm not of the photoshopping kind.

Googling about it, I find that the artist's name is Ricardo Gouveia (RIGO) - a fellow Portuguese - and that he went to the USA at age 19, "earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 and a Master of Fine Arts at Stanford in 1997. He has been creating his large-scale outdoor paintings since the mid-1980s." -- more here and an interview with him here.

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August 05, 2006

I was trying to avoid it but this painting crept in when I wasn't looking. Running out of Hoppers, though.

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August 04, 2006

Triskaidekaphobia

Triskaidekaphobia is a fear of the number 13. Sounds just silly to me especially because I work on a 13th floor and nothing relevant of an unlucky nature has happened. Except that freaky accident with the coffee machine grinder. Or the colleague permanently disabled because of that paper shredder. Hmmm.

Hotel Allegro, Chicago

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American Gothic

Art Institute of Chicago

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August 03, 2006

Hot

Temperatures soared in Chicago, the public, digital artsy fountains at the Millenium Park were invaded by kids in bathing suits trying to escape the heat.

Mandatory tourist photo of the bean:

North Milwaukee Avenue is a great place to wonder around or have a hearty american breakfast at the Bongo Room ; bought the first volume to the wonderfully entertaining Deptford Trilogy at Myopic Books; mouth watering dinner at Butter (I can still recall the taste of that salmon dissolving in my mouth).

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July 27, 2006

"Misplaced"

The interesting side of being away from Portugal on work related activities is to have a more distant and objective look at it.

I was thinking about a site that promotes random Portuguese silliness - from appalling spelling mistakes on roadside signs to steel barred emergency exits - and which is sarcastically named "Portugal at its best". I suppose this sort of things exist in most countries where self-deprecating comments and jokes are imbued into popular culture. But, the next time any Portuguese person looks at a lamp post planted in the middle of a road and says "Only in Portugal!", I'll remind her of this:

">
(through a naive spanish colleague who would never imagine i'd be blogging about this :)

Tough to beat that. Spain has managed to rise the concept of "making a complete ass of yourself" to such a high standard that I don't think most of us can even dream of getting close.

****

Ah. The joy of stereotyping and making fun of your neighbors.

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July 20, 2006

Chic-a-go-go-go

+++++

Off to the windy city. I'll be back in a couple of weeks.

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July 18, 2006

A rug was too tired to fly. --- James Tate

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July 14, 2006

I have the memory of a gossiper. I have a thing for the quirky, for the meaningless detail, for the piece of shiny shattered glass by the side of the road and seem to ignore completely the big picture or the big truck coming in my direction.

For some reason still unknown to me (maybe too much alcohol in my late teens) I majored in Economics. The only things I can remember from my History of Economic Thought are silly details of biographical nature. Most of them embarrassing. That and the jokes.

For instance, Keynes was married to a russian ballerina although he was gay. And he's known for saying "In the long run, we'll all be dead". Can I elaborate on the IS/LM model? Of course not. But I know he got rich by speculating in the stock market.

Walras proposed himself fot the Nobel Peace Prize for he believed his general theory of equilibrium would bring harmony between nations.

Jevons drowned while swimming in the south of England. Which seems to be a very un-utilitarian thing to do. And helped to give birth to the joke "An Economist Drowned While Crossing A River That Was An Average of 3 1/2 Feet Deep".

Mills had a nervous breakdown when he was twenty-one mainly because he spent his whole life studying and revealed himself to be a child prodigy since he had read all the classics - in the original greek and latin - by age 8.

John Kenneth Galbraith institutionalized, among other things, the phrase "the shit hit the fan".

Adam Smith died a virgin. It's not an historical fact. It's my opinion. Too many invisible women in his life.

Cantillon, a founding father of economics, was tried for usury, faked his murder and fled to South America.

Bentham's mummified body is on display in London as stated on his will. A hedonist: once his mummy disappeared and left the note "gone on holidays".

Lucas' ex-wife proved she knew what her ex-husband was talking about for she demonstrated very rational expectations when she asked for half of his Nobel prize money on a divorce settlement clause seven years before he actually got the award.

A student at a Milton Friedman class fell asleep. He was very upset and banged on her table with his fist. She awakes suddenly and says: "The answer is to increase the money supply".

And so, these are my mnemonics and ice breakers at economist's dinners.

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July 13, 2006

Stereotyping Portugueseness

Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice

Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.

--Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon disaster; Or an Examination of the Axiom, “All is Well”

*****

I am convinced Portugal is an island. Most times there's this claustrophobic feeling there is no way out of here, just an endless ocean in front of us, a sense of isolation. Portugal has the oldest unchanging borders in Europe. A whole identity based on myths and fictions and immobility. An old, old country that sees that the best it could have has already gone by. The sea here is much larger than anywhere else I've been. An abyss of water. On our backs there's this improbable Europe, miles and centuries away. There's also a huge country called Spain but whose inhabitants have nothing to do with us, we like to think. We cannot understand their pride and passion. There's only melancholy and nostalgia for an imagined past in the blue, cold ocean ahead. An overwhelming sense of the power of destiny that inspires lethargy and throws life in the hands of fortune.

A country of people obsessed with the meaning of being portuguese and that can't help themselves (ourselves) from writing about it.

*****

Malhoa, O Fado (1910)

*****

"E assim o génio de aventura, decaindo, transformou-se na mais completa falta de persistência. Ela aparece em todas as manifestações da nossa actividade, a cada passo interrompida ou abortada, o que a torna tristemente caricatural. Ei-la passeando o seu desânimo, pelas estradas que pararam, mortas de cansaço, a dois quilómetros do ponto de partida. E vive num belo edifício público sem telhado."

"And thus, the genius of adventure, decaying, has become an utter lack of persistence. It appears in all manifestations of our activity, at each step interrupted or aborted, which renders it as a sad caricature. There it is, showing off its lack of stamina in the roads that stopped, dying of exhaustion, a couple kilometers away from the starting point. And it lives in the beautiful roofless public building."

The Art of being Portuguese (1915) - Teixeira de Pascoaes

*****

"O já agora, e a variante popular Já que estás com a mão na massa..., significam a forma particularmente portuguesa do desejo. Os Portugueses não gostam de dizer que querem as coisas. Entre nós, querer é considerado uma violência. Por isso, quando se chega a um café, diz-se que se queria uma bica e nunca que se quer uma bica. Se alguém oferece, também, uma aguardente, diz-se: «Já agora.» Tudo se passa no pretérito, no condicional, na coincidência.(..) tudo o que sucede é absolutamente incontrolável. Por isso, a mentalidade do «já agora» traduz-se na ideia de que se deve aproveitar o acaso, já que nada mais se aproveita."

Note: "Já agora" is literally translated as "now now"; it actually means something like "As long as we are here...." or "Considering that this happened..."

"The 'Já agora' and the popular variation 'now that you're dealing with it'..., are examples of the particularly portuguese form of desire. The Portuguese don't like to say that they want something. Among us, wanting is considered an aggression. And so, when you go to a café, you say 'I could have an espresso' and never that you want an espresso. If anyone offers a brandy too, we say 'Já agora'. Everything happens in the past, in the conditional, in the coincidence.(...) anything that happens is totally uncontrollable. Therefore, the mentality of the 'já agora' gives meaning to the idea that you should take advantage of randomness, since you can't take advantage of anything else."

Explicações de Português(2001) - Miguel Esteves Cardoso

*****

Oh sea of salt, how much of your salt
Is tears of Portugal!
For us to cross you, how many mothers wept,
How many sons prayed in vain!
How many fiancees remained to be wed
In order that you be ours, oh sea!

Mensagem, Fernando Pessoa

*****

”O medo é medo do poder, mas também da impotência própria diante do poder. (...) O medo de «não estar à altura» impera, arruina as potencialidades criativas; medo que implica e arrasta outros, como o de ser avaliado, de ser julgado, de «ir a exame».”

"The fear is fear of power but also of the impotence in face of power.(...) The fear of not being up to the situation is ever present, ruining the creative potential; fear that implies and drags the others, like the fear of being evaluated, of being tried, of being examined."

Portugal today - the fear of existing (2004) - José Gil

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July 12, 2006

Random small pleasures

"No philosopher came close to solving the problem of guilt and weight until Descartes divided mind and body in two, so that the body could gorge itself while the mind thought, Who cares, it’s not me. The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup?" --Thus ate Zarathustra, Woody Allen in the New Yorker

+++

Weston, Pepper#3

+++

"Yves Klein. Symphonie Monoton-Silence (1957). Meant to provide a sonic equivalent of his monochomes paintings, the second movement of Klein’s Symphony consists of twenty minutes of silence -- just enough time to give the audience a chance to shake the sense of ringing from their ears: the first twenty minutes consists of a sustained D-major chord." -- Unheard Music, Craig Douglas Dworkin on UBUWeb(PDF)

+++

Moi je t'offrirai
Des perles de pluie
Venues de pays
Oú il ne pleut pas
--Jacques Brel, Ne me quitte pas

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July 11, 2006

The Women, directed by Cukor, script by Anita Loos based on a play by Clare Boothe Luce

*****

Countess DeLave: This sweet thing is getting her first divorce too! She's a very dear friend of mine... What did you say your name was again darling?

*****

Joan Crawford gets the best lines:

"Thanks for the tip. But when anything I wear doesn't please Stephen, I take it off. "

"There is a name for you, ladies, but it isn't used in high society... outside of a kennel. "

Pretty bold for 1939.

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July 09, 2006

Beatles & Geekiness

Hey you! You have never written a line of code and you don't know Beatles lyrics by heart. Skip this post.

*****

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be.
And there's a milestone hanging over me.
The system crashed, so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong,
What it was, I could not say.

Now all my data's gone,
And I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

*****

Something in the memory I know
A pointer's got to be corrupted.
Stepping in the debugger will show me...
I don't want to leave it now
I'm too close to leave it now.

You're asking me can this code go?
I don't know, I don't know...
What sequence causes it to blow?
I don't know, I don't know...

*****

Eleanor Rigby

Sits at the keyboard
And waits for a line on the screen
Lives in a dream

Waits for a signal
Finding some code
That will make the machine do some more.
What is it for?

All the lonely users, where do they all come from?
All the lonely users, why does it take so long?

*****

When I find my code in tons of trouble,
Friends and colleagues come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
"Write in C."

As the deadline fast approaches,
And bugs are all that I can see,
Somewhere, someone whispers:
"Write in C."

*****

import java.util.ArrayList;

public class Beatles
{
//-----------------------------------------------------------------
// Stores and modifies a list of band members.
//-----------------------------------------------------------------
public static void main (String[] args)
{
ArrayList band = new ArrayList();

band.add ("Paul");
band.add ("Pete");
band.add ("John");
band.add ("George");

System.out.println (band);

int location = band.indexOf ("Pete");
band.remove (location);

System.out.println (band);
System.out.println ("At index 1: " + band.get(1));

band.add (2, "Ringo");

System.out.println (band);
System.out.println ("Size of the band: " + band.size());
}
}

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July 07, 2006

Portrait of AP as a Young Artist

The most recent AP masterpieces :-)
-----

Yet again, inspired on the Colors of Infamy by Cossery:

"Com a alma em paz, tirou do bolso a carteira de que acabava de se apoderar e abriu-a com a delicadeza de um amante rasgando o sobrescrito da missiva da sua querida. Era uma carteira em pele de crocodilo, sem dúvida de um preço inconfessável, e que exalava um forte perfume a corrupção. Continha uma carta. Ossama retirou-a e leu o nome do destinatário no sobrescrito previamente aberto com um corta-papel, pois estava hermeticamente fechado."

"With the soul at peace, he took out of his pocket the wallet he had just got hold of and opened it with the delicacy of a lover tearing the envelope of the letter by his beloved. It was a wallet made of crocodile skin, undoubtedly of a price beyond confession, and that exhaled a strong smell of corruption. It contained a letter. Ossama took it out and read the name of the addressee in the envelope previously opened with a letter opener, since it was hermetically closed."

------

AP's title: Gerês
RRP's title: Landscape nr 5 (to make it sound more artistic)

This one is being exhibited at Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes as we speak. It's the annual exhibition of student's works.

------

Why you should have dinner with AP:

after having cleared up the plates, on finding the crumbs of the garlic bread he had shared with Z: "Ah! The stories these bread crumbs could tell..."

Why you should play football with AP:

On why he had "Me" inscribed on the back of his Benfica jersey instead of his name: "Now I can lend it to anyone."

Why you shouldn't count on him for basic household maintenance:

"The electrician came over to see why the lights didn't work in the living room and it turns out the lightbulb was dead."

Why you shouldn't ask him to store your books in his basement while you look for an apartment:

AP: "I was reading Kandinsky's 'Of the spirituality in art' and...."
C: "Hey, I own that book."
AP: "I know, it's your copy I'm reading."

Why you shouldn't bring up the subject of sex, especially if there are religious people around:

C (poking him and in a low voice): "Don't ask the man that...."
AP: "A, do you ever have sex?"
AL: "No, I don't have sexual relations, I'm a missionary."
C (ironically): "How come they call it the missionary's position then?"
AP: "Because having sex in the missionary's position or not having sex is practically the same thing."

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July 03, 2006

Collective madness, as usual

I had a cunning plan to go buy me self a nifty new bag while everyone was watching the Portugal - England match, anticipating the fact that the stores and streets would be empty. What I wasn't counting on was that EVERYONE was watching it.

(blah, blah, the store will be closed between 16:00 and 18:00 because we're supporting Portugal)

I really mean everyone.

I particularly like the electricity plug.

And Portugal won. Yay. And that one was for Britain taking over Port wine. Ha.

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June 27, 2006

Like, Thousands. Thousands of Euros spent on english teachers from the British Isles and, like, this Californian dude, like TOTALLY ruins, like, my english, like.

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June 26, 2006

Childhood Nostalgia

Tough times, the late 70's and early 80's in Portugal. But my parents have always spoiled me. Still do.

+++++

Never understood this Barbie thing. My Sindy Ballerina was the cutest.

+++++

The Fonz action figure with moving thumbs. Can't believe I thought Henry Winkler was a hunk. And I loved watching Happy Days. What was I thinking?? (it could be worse, I could find Richie Cunningham cute - but I didn't)

+++++

I could spend hours making Mickey catch the rolling eggs. A bit numbing though.

+++++

Great success with friends and family. An italian cult object, a Mupi Super 8 projector. I had Disney tapes. Fun!

+++++

And my ZX Spectrum, of course. But I've written a whole post about it. I miss my Spectrum so much. I miss BASIC. 16Kb were more than enough. So odd.

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June 23, 2006

"I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand serendipity?" --Correspondence, Horace Walpole

"The kaleidoscope (...) has always fascinated me as a metaphor for life: how a seemingly slight incident can alter the course of one's destiny, just as an almost imperceptible shift in the angle of the lens changes the composition to form an entirely new pattern". --"The Cairo House", Samia Serageldin via J Ryder.

"Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences." -- "The Glass Bead Game", Hermann Hesse

"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons, writes Bokonon, that person may be a member of your karass." --"Cat's Cradle", Kurt Vonnegut

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June 21, 2006

Gerês

Will someone please cut the top off that damned tree? It's ruining the view from Pousada de S.Bento.

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June 20, 2006

Bacchanalia

I don't think I ever used my blog to advertise anything (maybe a bookshop or two and my dentist :-) but I finally found a "product" I can sponsor with the greatest conviction.

A rainy evening in Porto. A crooked street near the the river Douro waterfront, in Miragaia. I called in advance to book a table and on the other side was someone who was not just booking tables but was trying to chat with me, addressing me by my name and asking if I knew how the restaurant worked. I dismissively said yes, believing it was one more of these places mushrooming all around offering a "menu degustation". How I was wrong.

I was surprised to find a tiny restaurant. The host introduced himself and asked for our names. From then on, a very presonal treatmet: "my good friend Claudia, please have a sip of this honeydew melon juice". On the table sat beakers bearing a greenish liquid. The lamp looked also like a beaker. Later I found that this was really a laboratory. Sensory experiments.

The host, Mario, brought chilled white wine and grapes "to dress the table". We were invited to taste the wine before and after having a grape. To feel the nuances between sweet and sour. We tasted different types of olive oil, we were given quizzes - which olive oil was used in the confection of this dish?, we were incited to moist the tips of our fingers with olive oil and flower of salt and suck them like kids. Mario, our host, is also the resident DJ; a cool, lounge music was playing. A popular party outside brought some new sounds and, while we waited for our next course, Mario invited us to take our white port glasses outside and dance. An unusual combination of tastes and smells were successively presented. He sprayed balsamic vinegar on my ice cream and you know what? It was delicious.

A series of the most carefully selected wines and tasty dishes - while we played with luminous gadgets - were accompanied by Mario's bright dissertations on smell, touch and taste.

A feast for the senses and a great experience. That is what I call service. And I'm not even talking about the food...

When we left, I almost felt like I just had dinner over at a good friend's place.

*****

À mesa com Bacchus
Rua de Miragaia, 127
4050-387 Porto
Tel: 222 000 896

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June 19, 2006

Post-it Portraits

Leftovers.

+*+*+*+*+*+

Sam the Eagle: Will you stop this foolishness?
The Great Gonzo: What foolishness would you like to see?

I rest my case.

+*+*+*+*+*+

jaquinzinhos.wine.oliveoil.mario.thieves.lightning.dinheirobrasileirofoleiro.moules.festa.
alfama.moon.caipiroska.silly.hot.handcuffs.tower.scream.sun.thunder.
miguelestevescardoso.charisma.reading.friends.physalis.sardines.football.muppets.
PORTUGAAAAAAL!!!!!!

+*+*+*+*+*+

+*+*+*+*+*+

Live blogging :-)

1. Clouds
2. Thunder
3. Lightning

The light from the sky flickered across your body as you stood naked by the window.

4. Dawn

+*+*+*+*+*+

*dramatic music* ... "The Tower"

+*+*+*+*+*+

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June 18, 2006

Summer Interior, Edward Hopper

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June 11, 2006

Contagion

But if there can be epidemics of crime or epidmics of fashion, there must be all kinds of things just as contagious as viruses. Have you ever thought about yawning, for instance? Yawning is a surprisingly powerful act. Just because you read the word "yawning" in the previous two sentences - and the additional "yawns" in this sentence - a good number of you will yawn within the next few minutes. If you're reading this in a public place, and you've just yawned, chances are that a good proportion of everyone who saw you yawn is now yawning too, and a good proportion of the people watching the people who watched you yawn are now yawning as well, and on and on, in a ever-widening yawning circle.

---Malcolm Gladwell, TheTipping Point

*****

Ducreux, 1780

*****

I'm trying to start a yawning epidemics :-)

I read this on the plane from SF to LIS and couldn't stop yawning as I did it. Since I'm always sleepy on planes I thought I should give it another try on firm land. I yawned. Five times. I'm actually yawning as I write this. And I'm not covering my mouth because I use both hands to type. So rude.

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June 10, 2006

So cute

Google is commemorating Portugal Day with us.

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I'm....

.....too sexy for this blog.

******

random summer cheesy euro-disc silliness

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June 07, 2006

Sometimes memories come up unexpectedly, triggered by this Lisboa heat that glues to the skin, softens the movements and turns the act of remembering into a whole body experience. A remembrance of summers past, of joyful hours with friends or little pleasures. Portraits, glimpses of moments.

Prosciutto and cantaloupe melon at Sant'Andrea in Amalfi. A hot August in which each dinner was crowned by an intoxicating shot of limoncello. Andrea Pansa's delizia de limone pastries in a cove by the warm, green Mediterranean sea.

Escargots and red wine out in the terrace of Café Serpente after an evening concert in the cathedral. Feeling a child again, laughing and learning a mysterious foreign language. A labyrinth. A moleskine.

Mushroom and goat cheese tapas in La Latina. Too much Ribera del Duero and a long walk under a full moon, from Puerta de Toledo to Puerta de Atocha. I may have talked about going to Africa and saving the children.

Sitting in a clawfoot tub, dipped in hot sulfurous water. Raining outside, the cold air in the cheeks and the creek running wild, pretending to be bigger than it is. Pancakes and maple syrup. Naked bodies.

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June 05, 2006

XXX, NSFW, shocking content ahead, read this only if you're above 18, etc.

I found out that James Joyce was a coprophiliac through Javier Marías' entertaining little book "Written Lives". The idea of defying the authority of someone by means of ridicule is a dishonest one. But it's so much fun. I personally have a very mean strategy for the very few situations in which I find someone intimidating: if it's a man I picture him wearing nothing but socks and shoes and if it's a woman I imagine her brushing her teeth, drooling toothpaste all over her chin, looking like a dog with rabies. Works every time.

No one is intimidating as soon as you get to know them better.

Time Magazine, Coprophiliac of the year

I was googling for Joyce's letters to Nora Barnacle in order to see for myself if Marías' diagnosis wasn't the fruit of his own dislike of the man - which he bluntly states in the prologue.

"My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or to fling you down under me on that soft belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shame of your upturned dress and white girlish
drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair."

"Have I shocked you by the dirty things I wrote to you? You think perhaps that my love is a filthy thing. It is, darling, at some moments. I dream of you in filthy poses sometimes. I imagine things so very dirty that I will not write them until I see how you write yourself. The smallest things give me a great cockstand - a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers, a sudden dirty word spluttered out by your wet lips, a sudden immodest noise made by you behind and then a bad smell slowly curling up out of your backside. "

And lots more here.

This is perhaps one of the weirdest things I have ever read. The letters are at times beautiful, poetic, erotic, romantic and simultaneously...yucky (to me, at least....a big apology to all the coprophiliacs reading this). I find this insanely funny. I suppose he meant it to be private...tough luck. You're dead, buddy.

(I warned you)

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May 21, 2006

Book Bliss

Associação de Loucos e Sonhadores, Lisboa

(((((())))))

Finally read Vonnegut's SlaughterHouse 5. My mouth is open in amazement. I love the simple and yet powerful and imaginative writing. Fascinated by the Tralfamadorian concept of time. (sighs with pleasure)

Now I can't hear anyone talking about death without thinking: "So it goes".

Can't wait to get my hands on Cat's Cradle.

(((((())))))

One of those happy succession of synchronicities led me to Enrique Vila-Matas. His name came up at least once every day of this past week, through friends, articles in newspapers, referenced in books I was reading and culminated on the happy, thrifty find of a set of 6 of his books for 18 Euros at FNAC.

The sheer erudition of the man. Pure intellectual bliss and aesthetic enjoyment. So happy.

Also, he writes beautifully about Lisboa:

Lisboa es el nada nunca jamás. Lisboa es para llorar, puro destino y llanto, fado y luz de lágrima. Pero al mismo tiempo es una inmersión radical en la alegría. “Otra vez vuelvo a verte, / ciudad de mi infancia pavorosamente perdida /Ciudad triste y alegre, otra vez sueño aquí”. No es la ciudad blanca que creyó ver un suizo equivocado, sino una ciudad azul de alegres nostalgias inventadas.

Lisbon is nothing never ever. Lisbon is for crying, pure destiny and weeping, fado and light of tears. But at the same time is a radical immersion in joy. "I see you once again, / city of my dreadfully lost childhood / Sad and happy city where I dream again". It is not the white city that a mistaken Swiss thought he saw, but a blue city of cheerful invented nostalgia.

The original text is here (in spanish).

(((((())))))

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May 16, 2006

Always learning from the new kids at work.

Recent hire: "Hey, your laptop's got a clitoris mouse!"
Claudia:"What? Ah! Shhhh!......" (bursts into laughter)

+++++

For the clueless: I've posted this extremely pedagogic one before and now this helpful diagram. And I can't resist posting this very entertaining one, just for fun ;-)

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May 15, 2006

Labyrinths

El laberinto de la soledad / The labyrinth of solitude - Octavio Paz
O labirinto da saudade / The labyrinth of saudade - Eduardo Lourenco

A Mexican poet and a Portuguese philosopher. Both tried to put into an essay what means to belong or to be born in their respective countries.

I like it how soledad and saudade sound similar but carry different meanings. Soledad meaning solitude and saudade being that very Portuguese word for the longing for other person or time that is gone.

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May 10, 2006

Favourite name for....

...a video store

...an optics store

...a costume shop

....a pizza place

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May 09, 2006

Not at the same time, I hope

San Francisco

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May 08, 2006

Perfect Recommendation

Green Apple Books, San Francisco

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It feels as if one has stepped onto the right train. That is, even if you don't know the ultimate destination, it still has this overwhelming feeling of beautiful inevitability.

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May 07, 2006

“Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man, because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness. For he wishes only to live like the beast, neither weary nor amid pains, and he wants it in vain, because he does not will it as the animal does. One day the man demands of the beast: "Why do you not talk to me about your happiness and only gaze at me?" The beast wants to answer, too, and say: "That comes about because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say." But by then the beast has already forgotten this reply and remains silent, so that the man wonders on once more.”

----Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of history for life”

++++++

"The road to Hobb's orchard wound past a dairy farm where several dozen speckled cows passed the time grinding the wet grass with their blunt teeth. I'd tried making friends with them a year earlier, standing by the fence and waving sandwiches until their owner informed me that they didn't eat chicken or pork, not even as snack. They were dumb, these cows (...) Did these animals have any idea that their summer was coming to an end? Could they remember their lives as young, carefree veal? Did they ever look forward to anything or entertain regrets? I dropped my duffel bag and approached the barbed-wire fence, hoping they might rush forward, wagging their ropy, shit-smeared tails in recognition, but they just stood there, methodically working their jaws."

-----David Sedaris, "Naked"

++++++

Not everyone gets the philosophical implications of grazing cattle :-)

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Edward Hopper

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May 05, 2006

Globalization is...

...a can of Portuguese sardines bought at Lucca, an Italian grocery shop in the latino Mission district of the American city of San Francisco.

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I'm Not Your Sweet Baboo!

Went to Charles M. Schulz museum in Santa Rosa, California. As most cartoon museums do, they hang cartoon strips on the walls, exhibit art inspired by Peanuts and keep the office of the cartoonist like it was a shrine and nothing else much.

A lady there made sure she told us everything she knew about Schulz and his family and each time we'd say "Thanks" and made that classic body move of someone who wants to go on with the visit, she'd come up with some new anedocte until some other suckers, ahem, tourists drawed her attention. One of Schulz's daughters was on Ice Capades so I guess that's where the idea for "Snoopy on Ice" came from :-).

Highlight of the museum: Snoopy's doghouse wrapped by Christo.

+++++

And this post wouldn't be complete without this:

Which Peanuts character are you?

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May 03, 2006

Walked my feet off around SF; great murals in the Mission....

and spotted some cute sidewalk aphorisms on Valencia Street.

------

When in Rome be a Roman. Walden is a constant reference I had been missing and so I bought a copy:

American #1: Oh no! You're reading Walden?
American #2: Yuck! Thoreau is such a lousy writer...
American #1: Boring!
Portuguese: You guys had to read it in school, didn't you?

And so it seems that this mandatory readings in school have the same post-traumatic effect around the world and across cultures.

-------

On May 1st there were huge demonstrations around the USA against the Bush Administration immigration policies which propose to criminalise illegal immigrants. In San Francisco the immigrants protesting were mainly Latinos; as a consequence of the "A day without immigrants" initiative, most of the shops and restaurants closed.

(in the middle of the protesters screaming "Sí se puede"):
Portuguese: This is great! Political activism in the USA! It's a rare sight!
American: Cut it out, you silly European snob!

------

After a great meal - including chocolate soufflé, crêpes and strawberry rhubarb crumble overdose - at Range:

A: You know how burping in some cultures is a sign of satisfaction? Well, I am anticipating the pleasure of burping this meal!

------

Bliss: Lying on a hot tub, having a funny New Yorker article about low cost airways read out loud to me.

------

Fridge magnets at Happy Trails:

"Marriage? I can't mate under captivity!"

"A clean house is a sign of a wasted life."

------

Listening to Fernando & Greg ranting about how would "A day without the gay" be on KNGY.

Their sports show tagline is "If they're playing with balls, I'm all over it!"

------

Too much fun!

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April 24, 2006

Disappeared

"It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world."
Oscar Wilde

+++++

View from Coit Tower, San Francisco

+++++

"All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally explaining to himself that what he sought was something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past, it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreigness of what you no longer are or you no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places." - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

+++++

The changing light
at San Francisco
is none of your East Coast light
none of your
pearly light of Paris
The light of San Francisco
is a sea light
an island light
And the light of fog
blanketing the hills
drifting in at night
through the Golden Gate
to lie on the city at dawn
And then the halcyon late mornings
after the fog burns off
and the sun paints white houses
with the sea light of Greece
with sharp clean shadows
making the town look like
it had just been painted

But the wind comes up at four o'clock
sweeping the hills

And then the veil of light of early evening

And then another scrim
when the new night fog
floats in
And in that vale of light
the city drifts
anchorless upon the ocean

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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April 19, 2006

Train Literature

I had been missing travelling by train. I missed the relaxing rythmic sound, the landscape outside blurred by the motion. And I certainly missed reading on a train. The most extraordinary things seem to happen on trains. At least in literature :-)

+++++

That night you have a dream. You are in a train, a long train, which is crossing Ircania. All the travellers are reading thick bound volumes, something that happens more easily in countries where newspapers and periodicals are not very attractive. You get the idea that some of the travelers, or all, are reading one of the novels you had to break off, indeed, that all those novels are to be found there in the compartment, translated into a language unknown to you.

--Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

+++++

We hadn't a idea that she was close by at the station. In the wvening I had only just gone to my room, when my Marya told me a lady had throwned herslef under a train. Something seemed to strike me at once. I knew it was she. The first thing I said was he was not to be told. But they'd told him already.His coachman was there and saw it all. When I ran into his room, he was beside himself - it was fearful to see him. He didn't say a word, but galloped off to the station. I don't know to this day what happened there, but he was brought back at death's door.

-- Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

+++++

A grimy European train compartment (Second Class) . . . In the window seat a pretty young widow in a heavy black veil and tight black dress which reveals her voluptuous figure. She is sweating profusely . . . The train screeches to a halt in a town called (perhaps) Corleone. A tall languid-looking soldier, unshaven, but with a beautiful mop of hair, a cleft chin and somewhat devilish, lazy eyes enters the compartment . . . He is sweaty and disheveled but basically a gorgeous hunk of flesh, only slightly rancid from the heat. The train screeches out of the station.
Then we become aware of the bouncing of the train and the rhythmic way the soldier's thighs are rubbing against the thighs of the widow . . . He is watching the large gold cross between the widow's breasts swing back and forth in her deep cleavage. Bump. Pause. Bump. It hits one moist breast and then the other. It seems to hesitate in between as if paralyzed between two repelling magnets. He is hypnotized. She stares out the window, looking at each olive tree as if she had never seen olive trees before . . . He rests his left hand on the seat between his thigh and hers and begins to wind rubber fingers around and under the soft flesh of her thighs. She continues staring at each olive tree as if she were God and had just made them and were wondering what to call them . . .
Then the fingers are sliding between her thighs and they are parting her thighs, and they are moving upward into the fleshy gap between her heavy black stockings and her garters and they are sliding up under her garters into the damp unpantied place between her legs.
The train enters a galleria, or tunnel, and in the semi-darkness the symbolism is consummated. There is the soldier's boot in the air and the dark walls of the tunnel and the hypnotic rocking of the train and the long high whistle as it finally emerges.
Wordlessly, she gets off at a town called, perhaps, Bivona.

---Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

+++++

And then, Messieurs, I saw light. They were all in it. For so many people connected with the Armstrong case to be travelling by the same train through coincidence was not unlikely: it was impossible. It must not be chance but design.

-- Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

+++++

My grandmother, anxious as ever that the presents which were made me should take some artistic form, had initially wanted to offer me an ancient "imprint" from this journey, and for us to repeat, partly by rail and partly by road, the route that Madame de Sévigné had taken when she went from Paris to "L'Orient" by way of Chaulnes and "the Pont-Audemer". But realizing that "it would be a shame" to have me pass by beautiful things without seeing them, she was obliged to renounce her plan, on the advice of my father, who Mamma had kept up-to-date by letter, and who knew that when my grandmother organized any expedition with a view to extracting from it the utmost intellectual benefit that it was capable of yielding, what a tale could be foreseen of missed trains, lost luggage, sore throats and broken rules. In short we were simply to leave by that 1:22 train which over the years I had often sought out in the timetable where its departure time gave me the emotion, almost the illusion of departure. To take it, to get out at Bayeaux or Coutances for a long time had symbolized for me one of the greatest of all possible forms of pleasure; and as the delineation in our minds of any form of happiness depends more on the nature of the longings that it inspires in us than on the accuracy of the information which we have about it, we believe that we know this happiness in all its details, and I had no doubt that I should feel in my compartment a special pleasure as the day began to cool, should contemplate such an impression at the approach of a certain station; to such an extent that this train always awoke in me images of the same villages which I swathed in the light of those afternoon hours through which it sped, seemed to me to be different from any other train; and I had ended, as we are apt to do, with a person we have never seen but who we imagine constantly, by giving a distinct and unalterable countenance to this fair, artistic traveller who would have taken me with him on his journey, and to whom I should bid farewell at the foot of a cathedral before he disappeared towards the setting sun.

-- Marcel Proust, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs

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April 18, 2006

Il Gattopardo

"What a great job Burt Lancaster does in this movie. I remembered him as some butch guy in westerns, can't believe he's so good!"

"When I was young, the star of the movie was that baby face Alain Delon, no one cared about Burt."

"Are you kidding? Burt Lancaster is much sexier than that skinny, clean-shaven Delon!"

"You're getting old."

(which is not true; I remember watching The Color of Money with my girlfriends as a teenager and while they drooled over that awful, ugly actor who has a squeaky voice when he gets excited and that has a neck and shoulders that makes you think he swallowed a coat hanger and whose initials are TC, I lusted after Paul Newman). Hah.

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April 17, 2006

Chemistry by Ignasi Aballí at the Fundação de Serralves, Porto

(stickers on a window)

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April 14, 2006

Random Pleasures

Apocalipse do Lorvão (12th Century)- Medieval Manuscripts at the National Archives Treasures

Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.

--Revelation 2:22

+++++

The event that made conceivable the realization that it was possible to “speak another language” and still make sense in art was Marcel Duchamp’s first unassisted Ready-made. With the unassisted Ready-made, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said. Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function. This change – one from “appearance” to “conception” – was the beginning of “modern” art and the beginning of conceptual art. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.

--Joseph Kosuth, Art after Philosophy

+++++

The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things-but the oddest part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.

--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

+++++

Browsing engravings at the National Library.

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April 10, 2006

The upside of moving and having to go through all the books and six years of accumulating assorted junk is to find little precious mementos of past times. I'm not talking about the sentimental, irreplaceable books offered once by loved ones but of those objects that evoke moments which had their uniqueness.

+++++

A warmish Sunday in Buenos Aires. A visit to San Telmo's flea market. It's like a treasure hunt, a search for something that can be taken home as a more original keepsake. The square is covered with stalls. Books, old Argentinian magazines, old metal boxes, used clothes, old Tango records. There's an antique shop behind almost every door in the streets around the main square of this neighborhood. A hunt for old stereoscopic images proves fruitless. But there's a man with two open plastic bags squatting on the sidewalk of the main square. I peek inside and have a glimpse of some copies of Sur, the magazine published by Victoria Ocampo. There's one that features an article by Jorge Luis Borges, from 1954. The man could obviously see by my face how much I wanted it - my eyes gave it all away, I'm sure. It was a hard bargain.

+++++

Senegal has a smell that I miss once in a while. All countries smell differently. Senegal's is a warm, humid smell of dust & sea & dried fish & wood & garbage by the side of the road & trees with red flowers. I bought some books in Dakar. Some folklore tales. So cute. Elephants and lions talking. I suddenly felt sorry for not asking the people in the tribal villages I visited to tell me these stories. The tale of some tree spirit as told by a Marabout must have been much more interesting. I eagerly sniffed the books but there's no scent of Senegal left. They're my gri-gri.

+++++

The plane to Chile was involved in an accident in Bogotá which meant another night in Lima. In the afternoon, while strolling trhough the park near the Museo del Arte, there was a big crowd watching some street performance. Lima has great weather. Or at least the kind of weather in which my body adjusts perfectly. As I reached the crowd, I saw a mime doing some silly stunts and making the children around him laugh really hard. I hate mimes. But not this one - he was funny and he had the extra attractive of being extremely handsome. Even under all that silly mime makeup. By the end of the performance, he comes around the spectators with a bowler hat. I gave him a good tip. A big one (everything was extremely cheap there). He gives me a flyer and a wink. What a great name for a mime company: "Sociedad del silencio". Inside some childish jokes.

Por qué se suicido el libro de matemáticas?
Porque tenia demasiados problemas.

Why did the maths book commit suicide?
Because it had too many problems.

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April 04, 2006

[Marco Polo to Kublai Khan] "I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unimaginable dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

"I have neither desires of fears", the Khan declared,"and my dreams are either composed by my mind or by chance."

--Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

"On the banks of a great river in the povince of Cathay there stood an ancient ciy of great size and splendour which was named Khan-Balik, that is to say in our language, "the Lord's City". Now the great Khan discovered through his astrologers that this city would rebel and put a stubborn resistance against the empire. For this reason, he had this new city built next to the old one, with only the river between. And he removed the inhabitants of the old city and settled them in the new one, which is called Taidu, leaving only those whom he did not suspect of any rebellious designs;for the new city was not big enough to house all those who lived in the old." -- Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo

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April 03, 2006

On the move

A: "Why do you keep all those books? You've already read them. You should open a store and sell them."

P: "But she knows where she bought and where she read each one of them. They have sentimental value."

A: "She could remember who bought each book afterwards."

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March 28, 2006

The obvious title would be "Big Brother"

(area under electronic surveillance, Barcelona)

Stolen from the wonderful tech art archive of igargoyle.

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March 27, 2006

I am intermittently afflicted by periods of portugueseness. Meaning that I am not much of a patriot but sometimes I get hyper conscious of how being Portuguese has a big role on who I am, on my personal identity. And suddenly I have this urge to explore this feeling of portugueseness just as I would explore a newly found land.

I don't often speak ill of my country as does the common Portuguese person (whining and complaining but not trying to solve the problem is kind of a national sport) nor do I overpraise it. But I went to the old books fair and suddenly I noticed I was carrying 3 books about the Lusiads. Such a great national epic poem. Homer who?

(it took me a while to get over the fact that it was mandatory to read it in school; everything tastes more sweet when it's not forced down your throat)

++++++

Os Lusíadas ("The Lusiads") is considered one of the finest and most important works in Portuguese literature. Written by Luís de Camões in the Homeric fashion, and first printed in 1572, this epic poem focuses mainly on a fantastical interpretation of the Portuguese discoveries movement, in the 14th through 17th centuries. It is often regarded as Portugal's "national epic", much in the same way as Virgil's The Aeneid is for the Romans.

In Os Lusíadas, Camões presents the Portuguese people as descendants from Lusus, companion of Dionysus and mythical founder of Lusitania, and loosely describes the country's history until the mid 16th century — concentrating on giving a heroic edge to the journey of Vasco da Gama, the first European to reach India by sea.

Consisting of ten 'cantos,' Os Lusíadas documents the voyage of Vasco da Gama from Portugal around the Cape of Good Hope, along the Eastern coast of Africa, and eventually finding some respite in Melinde, of present day Kenya. From there, da Gama and his crew travel onward to India and the East, eventually finding their reward on the Isle of Love.

--in the Wikipedia

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March 24, 2006

Snow White & The Black Dwarf

Joe Tilson,1969 (from the Berardo modern)

An excerpt from the texts in the collage:

When silence
blooms in the house,
all the paraphernalia of our existence
sheds the twittering of value
and reappear as heraldic devices - Robert Duncan

Heraldic devices: airplanes as penis symbols rather than "modern conveniences". One of the eternal verities is the human body as the measure of all things, including technology. The businessman does not have the last word; the real meaning of techonology is its hidden relation to the human body; a symbolical or mystical relation.

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March 23, 2006

Cornell

I like it when a sudden reference to something new keeps showing up afterwards.

M. was talking about Joseph Cornell's boxes at the Pink Pony. I didn't recognize the name but mentally noted it down (which also reminds me: I have to dig up a recipe for eggs florentine).

The next day I saw one of Cornell's boxes at the MoMA with R.

Then, while reading Lee Miller's biography:

"Lee's friendship with Joseph Cornell moved each artist to depict the other. Julien [Levy], who was Cornell's dealer, may have mentioned the eccentric collagist to Lee during their affair in Paris, when he was combing the Flea Market for the antique boxes he brought back to encourage Cornell's homegrown surrealism. " - Carolyn Burke, "Lee Miler: a life"

I was checking out Berardo's Collection (a Portuguese millionaire who has one of the greatest private collections of pop art ) online after going to an exhibit about freedom of the press and I find out that he owns a Cornell.

++++

(eggs, spinach and cheese. so perfect.)

Eggs Florentine

For Mornay Sauce:
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
2 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup milk
Pinch of ground nutmeg
1/3 cup shredded Gruyere cheese
2 large egg yolks
1/4 cup unsalted butter

For Eggs:
1 lb. fresh baby spinach leaves
1/4 cup vinegar
8 large eggs

RECIPE METHOD

FOR MORNAY SAUCE: Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-low heat. Sprinkle the flour over the butter and cook for 1-2 minutes without allowing it to color, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. Remove the pan from the heat and slowly add the milk, whisking or beating vigorously to avoid lumps. Return to medium heat and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Simmer for 3-4 minutes, or until the sauce coats the back of a spoon. Stir in the nutmeg, then remove from the heat. Set aside, covered, and keep warm.

In a large skillet, melt the butter over low heat and add the spinach. Cook for about 5-8 minutes, or until dry. Set aside and keep warm.

Whisk the cheese into the mornay sauce, then whisk in the egg yolks. Season to taste, with salt and pepper. Place over low heat and mix until the cheese is melted, then heat until very hot but not boiling. Set aside, cover the surface with a piece of waxed paper and keep warm.

FOR EGGS: Half-fill a large skillet with water and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the temperature to low and add the vinegar. The water should be barely simmering.

Crack the eggs one at a time into a cup or bowl and carefully slide into the vinegared water two or three at a time. Cook for 2-3 minutes, or until the egg whites are firm but not hard. Very gently remove, using a slotted spoon and drain thoroughly.

Divide the cooked spinach evenly among four warmed plates. Place two poached eggs in the center of each mound of spinach and cover with the hot mornay sauce. Serve immediately.

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March 22, 2006

Girl Scout

My good deed of the day, posting AP's latest oeuvre:

But I was thinking that I should also post stuff he says. He's so quotable ;-), as quotable as a 7 year old kid trapped inside the body of a 30 year old man can be.

***** 

"You're so impatient that you get impatient with yourself for being impatient."

*****

"You're so superfluous."

"You mean superficial?"

"And you're so fussy about words too."

*****

Looking out of the window, no context whatsoever: 

"Where does the word Tango come from?"

*****

 Driving and, suddenly, out of the blue:

"Why did WWI begin?"

 *****

Cooking spinach. Spinach reduces in volume when boiled.

"Look, spinach is slowly disappearing. Just like time."

*****

"I'm not going to Lisboa's Erotic Fair. They treat sex in such a superficial manner."

*****

"Imagine you have two bowls. The kind of bowls in which you have your cereals in the morning. Which one would you say is more perfect: the one produced in a factory or the one made by a craftsman?"

"That depends. What kind of cereal?"

 

 

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March 21, 2006

Great Ideas

Since I still have a pile of books to read, I was avoiding entering any bookshop; ah, the sacrifices I put myself through. But...since I lack the personal discipline to resist temptation, I did go to a bookshop in the weekend and ran into this wonderful set of books: the Great Ideas series published by Penguin. Such cute books with such simple yet beautiful covers. I *had* to bring a few back home with me and as I was chatting about it with the girl at the counter, she stops packing them and says: "Interesting. You just picked the same ones as Paulo Portas who just left some minutes ago". That's the kind of stuff that can ruin my pleasure. Paulo Portas is the former leader of a Portuguese right wing party and one of the last persons in the world I could imagine sharing reading preferences with. I bumped into the guy as I was walking away and I had a glimpse of *my books* inside his transparent plastic bag as he stopped to light a cigarette. He probably thought "Why is this lunatic peeking at my bag and why is she staring at me in disgust?".

On Art and Life, John Ruskin
Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo
The Inner Life, Thomas a Kempis
On the Pleasure of Hating, William Hazlitt
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus (had already read that one but couldn't resist the malevichian cover)

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March 20, 2006

Peddling a poet

I was waiting for an exhibition to open and this man comes up to me and asks where the door to the exhibition is.

- It's right here. They open at 3.
- Thank you. Are you a journalist?
(the exhibition took place at a portuguese newspaper gallery and I was standing at the building's front door which, obviously, qualified me for the job)
- No.
- Oh.
(pause)
- You know, there's this great Portuguese poet no one talks about anymore...but I love his work so much. Pessoa used to say that he was the most trascendental of our poets. He was a great man. A fighter for freedom, a scientist, a man of ideas. At a time when the rate of illiteracy was 78% he said this sublime sentence: "There is more light in the letters of the alphabet than in all the firmament".
At this point I'm thinking whether I should give him the "get lost creep" treatment. But I'm a sucker for literature and curious as a cat.
- Who is this poet you're talking about?
- A great man, miss. A great, great man. One of our greatest poets. He's buried at the national pantheon, right next to Amalia. His name was Guerra Junqueiro.
- Oh, I've read "A Velhice do Padre Eterno" by him.
And so I have a new item for my "what not to say to weirdos" list. The man's eyes shined and he didn't leave me alone during the time I was wandering around the Schwitters, Warhols and Paiks.
He's carrying a plastic bag and excitedly takes out a sheet of paper with the poet's quotations which he gives to me.

- I also have here with me xerox copies of the newspaper edition when he died in 1923. He made the front page!
-Thank you (he's now between me and the Jacquet).

Alain Jacquet, Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe (1967)

Manet, Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe (1865)

- He was a great Republican. He fought to bring down that useless monarchy we had...what a man. Here, I have extra copies for you to give to your friends and let him be known to everyone.
(maybe he's founding a new religion)
As I was trying to read Jenny Holzer's electronic-display signboard he comes up to me again.
- You know, he was a man of ideals. He was very active politically, he worshipped freedom but got away from it all when he realized that the parties weren't fighting for the country's benefit but for themselves. He returned to poetry. And today our poets can't get away from politics.
(one of the candidates for last January's presidential elections was a poet)
- Ah.
(and he hands me another sheet of paper with quotations; but this time they're not by Guerra Junqueiro)

What matters most in life is not duration but intensity - Jacques Brel

- You really like culture and art, right?
- Right.
- Good, good. It's important that there is freedom of expression. People should be free to paint and write whatever they feel like. I belong to a very repressed generation. I wish the revolution took place much earlier, we could have avoided a war. It's one of the things I regret the most about my life: to have lived all my youth and adult age under a dictatorship. We have to prevent this from happening again. No more censorship, ever.
(and I'm also a sucker for anti fascists so I'm beginning to like the guy)

He hands me another piece of paper, a xerox copy of a text by Guerra Junqueiro, and walks away.

Posted by claudia Permalink

March 15, 2006

A Benfica Match step by step

(to ZL who is one of the greatest Benfiquistas of all times - the kind that makes you feel guilty for not attending the upcoming match because you lost the will to go after enduring 90 minutes of a not so good performance by the team as if you were refusing to visit a old, sick relative- , closely followed by my parents)

As any Benfica supporter might testify, going to a Benfica match is more of a religious ritual than anything else. Also, I checked my blog counter stats and the Americans (23.86%) are beating the Portuguese (23.74%) so I thought I should write something about more homely matters.

Dress code: red.

Any match should start or end with a visit to the trailers outside the stadium. You have a choice between a variety of sandwiches which will increase your cholesterol to a probable-death-by-heart-attack level:

- "bifanas" - greasy pork meat sandwiches
- "entremeadas" - greasy pork meat sandwiches; can be identified by the stripe of pure fat in the middle of the rest of the meat;
- "coiratos" - greasy pork skin sandwiches; these are pure fat.

A tip: the trailer with the lowest standards of hygiene always has the best sandwiches

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Entering the stadium, it is mandatory to praise its magnificence and mock the rival team's yellow and green bowl. Ridiculous.

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An eagle (the team's symbol) flies from the top rows to a podium in the middle of the field. As it gets to the podium there is a collective burst of joy.

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On the big screen, each player is announced. The opponent's team is basically ignored unless they are big rivals in which case they are booed. The team of referees are heavily booed and cursed at by both sides. They *always* rob us.

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The Benfica hymn is played as the teams enter the pitch. It is mandatory to sing along. The hymn has been published on this same blog under happier circumstances.

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The match starts.

You bond with complete strangers.

Otherwise good mannered people insult the referee's mother.

If Benfica fails to win, you insult the player's mothers. They are obviously not worthy of playing for the greatest team in the world.

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You run into your cousin (who is a 1,90m tall married man by now but who will always be your baby cousin) who, after a brainwashing afternoon with my father 28 years ago, uttered his first word: "ben fi ca". Oh wait. That only happens to me.

Posted by claudia Permalink

March 12, 2006

The Streets of Lisbon

Whenever I can, I go in the Gulbenkian's Modern Art Center and just stand there looking at this.

Anna Hatherly, The Streets of Lisbon 1977

I always get a bit emotional looking at this collage. When I was a child, the walls of the streets of Lisbon were covered by political propaganda. Beautiful murals, walls crammed with posters glued one on top of another.This reminds me of my childhood and of a brand new country, born out of a revolution. It reminds me when the future was open and everything seemed possible. It reminds me of a people who were once euphoric because they felt they were finally free. Of how lucky I am for not being born under a dictatorship but, instead, being born on one of the happiest moments of a nation. A moment when, as the slogan stated, "poetry is in the streets".

And I'm not making any judgements about the political choices made back then. These are emotional memories which I have chosen not to critically review. I am just grateful to be born into a time where ideals were taken seriously, whatever form they took. I felt that I was born into a prison whose doors were opened. Everyone was running wild. Music and poetry everywhere. Old people were being alphabetized. Women could vote. There were never ending lines of people to see movies that had been censored before.

I particularly remember how children's day was a big event. How April was a synonym of freedom. How a red carnation was really more than just a flower. How there was this wave of solidarity towards countries under dictatorships or going though wars. Especially Chile - which may explain why I have this hate for Pinochet; Neruda's poems were finally read out loud. How my parents would tell me that, just a couple years ago, the books that sat on our shelves would be reason enough for them to go to jail. How my mother remembered that, as a child, the whole family secretly and silently gathered round the radio set and my grandfather would tune the BBC - the only way to know what was really happening in the world as the news outlets were controlled by the government. How my father remembered that the family of his best childhood friend vanished one night, how he got to their house in the morning and there was broken furniture everywhere - the police had taken them all for opposing the regime. How some of their friends were killed on a stupid war in Africa which was the last pathetic attempt to maintain the colonies of that moribund Portuguese Empire. How my father discovered that he was under surveillance by the regime's police and how he would probably have been - if not worse - interrogated if there hadn't been a coup.

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Ok. Historical context ahead (have to keep in mind that 2/3 of my visitors are not Portuguese):

More on the Carnation Revolution on the Wikipedia.
More on the regime's police - PIDE - here.

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25 DE ABRIL

Esta é a madrugada que eu esperava
O dia inicial inteiro e limpo
Onde emergimos da noite e do silêncio
E livres habitamos a substância do tempo

April, 25th

This is the dawn that I longed for
The first day whole and clean
when we emerge from the night and from the silence
and free we inhabit the substance of time

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

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Assorted stickers; obscure little parties that were mushrooming everywhere; the newly born unions;new cultural centers; the agrarian reform and so on, and so on.

Posted by claudia Permalink

March 10, 2006

Pessoa by Almada Negreiros

Nenhum problema tem solução. Nenhum de nós desata o nó górdio; todos nós ou desistimos ou o cortamos. Resolvemos bruscamente, com o sentimento, os problemas da inteligência, e fazemo-lo ou por cansaço de pensar, ou por timidez de tirar conclusões, ou pela necessidade absurda de encontrar um apoio, ou pelo impulso gregário de regressar aos outros e à vida.
Como nunca podemos conhecer todos os elementos de uma questão, nunca a podemos resolver.
Para atingir a verdade faltam-nos dados que bastem, e processos intelectuais que esgotem a interpretação desses dados.

Fernando Pessoa, in "Livro do Desassossego"

No problem has a solution. None of us can untie the Gordian knot; either we give up or we cut it.
We brusquely resolve intellectual problems with our feelings, either because we're tired of thinking, or because we're afraid to draw conclusions, or because of an inexplicable need to latch on to something, or because of a gregarious impulse to return to other people and to life.
Since we can never know all the factors that a problem entails, we can never solve it.
To arrive at the truth we would need more data, along with the intellectual resources for exhaustively interpreting the data.

Fernando Pessoa, in "The Book of Disquiet"

(seen here)

Posted by claudia Permalink

March 06, 2006

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”

“If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.”

-- Lyn Yutang

I've mastered the skil described on the first quotation but will have to work on the second one - too much restleness.

Posted by claudia Permalink

March 05, 2006

Forsyth St., NY

Posted by claudia Permalink

March 03, 2006

The Hotel Chelsea

A resident, taking the dog for a walk

I've been meaning to visit the Hotel Chelsea ever since I read Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannolli. Funny, clever woman:

"Then he saw Warhol's film The Chelsea Girls, a split-screen, three and a half hour bore/smut fest, which shows things like Ondine shooting speed and Nico in tears. Its poster, a nude woman-as-hotel in which the Chelsea's entrance is situated at her vagina, was like some exotic travel brochure to Lance Loud. To him, it was his dream destination: 'Some people want to go to Valhala. Some people want to go to El Dorado or Shangri-La. When I was a teenager I wanted to end up at the Chelsea Hotel. With or without a needle on my arm and lipstick on my face.' He arrived at the hotel as the companion of a psychotic drug addict. Who says dreams can't come true?"

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The lobby

I arrived late. The few steps I had to take from the subway station to the hotel, along with the long flights and airplane food, must have made me look somewhere in between hoplessly cold and dead beat tired. As I walk to the reception desk, I see two middle aged men there listening to Aerosmith's "Walk this way" which was playing on a radio and following the rythm by ways of a very discreet headbanging.

They finally notice me and say "Hey! You've made it!". Which is nice, considering they had never seen me before :-)

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Going up and down the stairs, it's fun to take a look at the semi-closed doors of the residents who, by the scent in the air, must have been reading Baudelaire. There's a praying altar in front of a canvas; there's art everywhere, even in the most hidden doors in badly lit corridors. There's a door where scraps of paper containing the words "Every story is the truth" are glued to.

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"At least I end up facing 23rd street: Dylan Thomas got stuck in a dark room at the back on his final trip and everybody knows what happened to him." - Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli

So did I. Room 823 with a view to the roofs of the buildings across the street.

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Here's a great site on the Hotel's architcture and history.

The official website: Hotel Chelsea - a rest stop for rare individuals.

Also: the Hotel Chelsea Blog - Living with Legends.

Posted by claudia Permalink

March 02, 2006

NY, NY

The Melancholy of Departure by de Chirico, MoMA

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It was coooooold. And windy. That kind of wind that bites your cheeks and leaves them numb.

Central Park

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Notes for a personal DSM-V (RD version):

- a pessimist is someone who has a backup plan for survival all lined out in case a severe crisis hits the world economy.
- someone who worries about terrorist attacks is just plain paranoid.

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Staying at the Hotel Chelsea - (in)famous for being the place where Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend to death - was an interesting experience. Will have to blog more about that.

Funny related woody-allenesque-line on meeting M:

"You're staying at the Chelsea? When I had my first solo show my brother wanted me to stay there and commit suicide."

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Great new acquisitions at St.Mark's Bookshop.

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My mouth's watering for more fresh water eel nigiri at the Blue Ribbon.

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And now I know that SoHo is the New York version of The Mission.

Posted by claudia Permalink

February 24, 2006

“If you're not in New York, you're camping out.”

-- Thomas E. Dewey, Governor of New York (1943-1955)

Posted by claudia Permalink

February 23, 2006

"Is a translation meant for readers who do not understand the original? This would seem to explain adequately the divergence of their standing in the realm of art. Moreover, it seems to be the only conceivable reason for saying "the same thing" repeatedly. For what does a literary work "say"? What does it communicate? It "tells very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information -- as even a poor translator will admit -- the unfathomable, the mysterious, the "poetic," something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet? This, actually, is the cause of another characteristic of inferior translation, which consequently we may define as the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content. This will be true whenever a translation undertakes to serve the reader. However, if it were intended for the reader, the same would have to apply to the original. If the original does not exist for the reader's sake, how could the translation be understood on the basis of this premise?"

-- Walter Benjamin, The task of the translator

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Tricky, the art of translating. Isn't it?

Banubula had a great post on the various English versions of a Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer poem.

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The young daughter of the Honourable Master had a go at translating AB's poem I posted here.

I'm not sure he sent me this as any flaunty proud father of a talented (Portuguese) 15 year old would or if he means that "Even a junior high school kid can translate this better than you" :-)

Be attentive,
Be attentive to the conquests of your strength.
Tear the new days with what you've learnt from your weaknesses.
Pledge with the chalice of your tears
Hold it high and well.
Never, never detain yourself and cry out the dreams you will capture.
The springs you crave to discover await you.
Always follow the North of your woes.

Posted by claudia Permalink

February 22, 2006

Reading Yourcenar's biography.

On her reflections on the writing of Hadrian, there's such a beautiful dedication to Grace Frick, her life companion:

"This book bears no dedication. It ought to have been dedicated to G.F., and would have been, were there not a kind of impropriety in putting a personal inscription at the opening of a work where, precisely, I was trying to efface the personal. But even the longest dedication is too short and too commonplace to honor a friendship so uncommon. When I try to define this asset which has been mine now for years, I tell myself that such a privilege, however rare it may be, is surely not unique; that in the whole adventure of bringing a book successfully to its conclusion, or even in the entire life of some fortunate writers, there must have been sometimes, in the background, perhaps, someone who will not let pass the weak or inaccurate sentence which we ourselves would retain out of fatigue; someone who would re-read with us for the 20th time, if need be, a questionable page; someone who takes down for us from the library shelves the heavy tomes in which we may find a helpful suggestion, and who persists in continuing to peruse them long after weariness has made us give up; someone who bolsters our courage and approves, or sometimes disputes, our ideas; who share with us, and with equal fervor, the joys of art and of living, the endless work which both require never easy but never dull; someone who is neither our shadow nor our reflection, nor even our complement, but simply himself; someone who leaves us ideally free, but who nevertheless obliges us to be fully what we are. Hospes Comesque."

Posted by claudia Permalink

February 21, 2006

Suzanne Duchamp, Radiation de Deux Seuls Éloignés (Radiation of Two Lone Ones at a Distance), 1916-18-20.

The combination of wireless technology and erotic desire becomes more explicit in this work by Suzanne than in her brother's Large Glass. According to Linda Dalrymple Henderson "The upper form resembles a cage-type emitting antenna [see adjacent image] and the lower gridded one implies a surface on which the 'radiations' are to be recorded. [...] the theme seems to echo that of the Large Glass: here an antennalike 'Bride' (Suzanne herself?) projects her message." (Henderson, cf. note 6, p. 112). The metaphor of an electric or magnetic attraction between lovers has its roots way back in the age of romanticism: In 1827, Goethe told Eckermann "between lovers the magnetic force is especially strong." Around the same time, the possibility of telegraphy via the "loving needles" of two distant compasses synchronized by myserious forces was seriously discussed.

Posted by claudia Permalink

I've been meaning to write a post about the relationship between extra dimensions and art&literature, kind of inspired by my reading of "Hiding in the Mirror". But this won't be it. Yet.

"The erotic act is the perfect four-dimensional situation. This idea is important to me: a fixed idea, stemming from a tactile apprehension of all the facets of an object, provides a tactile sensation of the fourth dimension. Because, naturally, none of our senses have any application in the fourth dimension, except, perhaps, for touch. As a result, the act of love as tactile sublimation can be envisaged or rather felt like a physycal apprehension of the fourth dimension."
-- Marcel Duchamp

Posted by claudia Permalink

My friend António Bento, one of the sweestest, most uplifting people I know, just published his poetry! The book - Pegadas - can be bought online here. Not only he's a poet (in part-time as he says) but also is/has been a teacher, a swimmer, a consultant, an expert in psychosociology, a marathonist and father of two cute kids.

(the author's tie, the book and the blogger's necklace)

An excerpt. My own faulty translation was replaced by that of the Hounourable Master who kindly (or not so kindly "Get some rythm for Goodness sake!") emailed me a better one:

Atenta,
atenta nas conquistas da tua força
rasga os novos dias com o que nas fraquezas cresceste.
Brinda com o cálice das tuas lágrimas
ergue-o bem alto.
Nunca, nunca te prendas e grita os sonhos que vais agarrar.
Aguardam-te as nascentes que desejas
descobrir.
Segue sempre o norte das tuas crostas.

Mind
Mind the acquisitions of your strenghts
Break through new days, having grown from your weaknesses
Toast with your tears-filled chalice
Raise it further
Never ever imprison yourself. Shout your dreams about to be grabed.
Awaiting for you are the Springs you long to discover
Follow the North of your own wounds.

Posted by claudia Permalink

February 20, 2006

Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.

And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.

It’s a magnificent idea – an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.

-- Joseph Campbell

(see? always making me spend money on books I wasn't planning to read :-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

I'm fascinated by Gulliver's Travels. How come a book published in 1726 has, beutifully put, the reason I didn't vote for the man who is going to be Portugal's next President?

(a short explanation follows)

Last month, Cavaco Silva has been elected our next President.

He is an economist or even better, a technocrat. Portugal is, as always, in a not so good financial situation. The President has very limited powers and has merely a representative role. Somehow, he convinced everyone that, despite being able juridically to do next to nothing about it, he's going to boost the economy.

I didn't vote for him myself because:

- As any Portuguese person can confirm, his most popular quote is "I never make mistakes and I seldom have doubts.". No need to comment this one.

- his campaign slogan was "For a bigger Portugal" which made me think he wanted to reconquer parts of Spain;

- the only qualities I find in him are:
* that he dislikes our former prime minister Santana Lopes (the worse side effect of a democracy of all time);
* and, although he's 60-something, he looks good in a bathing suit.

(here he is, some years ago climbing a coconut tree)

- and, last but not least and the reason I wrote this post, Jonathan Swift says it all:

"In chusing Persons for all Employments, they have more regard to good Morals than to great Abilities; for, since Government is necessary to Mankind, they believe that the common Size of Human Understandings is fitted to some Station or other, and that Providence never intended to make the Management of publick Affairs a Mystery, to be comprehended only by a few Persons of sublime Genius, of which there seldom are three born in an Age: but they suppose Truth, Justice, Temperance, and the like, to be in every Man's power; the Practice of which Virtues, assisted by Experience and a good Intention, would qualify any Man for the service of his Country, except where a Course of Study is required. But they thought the want of Moral Virtues was so far from being supplied by superior Endowments of the Mind, that Employments could never be put into such dangerous Hands as those of Persons so qualifi'd; and at least, that the Mistakes committed by Ignorance in a virtuous Disposition, would never be of such fatal Consequence to the Publick Weal, as the Practices of a Man whose Inclinations led him to be corrupt, and had great Abilities to manage, and multiply, and defend his Corruptions."

Posted by claudia Permalink

February 19, 2006

The lives of others

After a string of weekends where I didn't have much quiet time, these have been some great days consecrated to the pleasure of reading.

- Finished Frida Kahlo's biography. A sea of tears and the sudden urge to visit Mexico City;

- Finished Duchamp's biography. Realized how much I want to get back to the plan of spending sometime in Cadaqués (I was there for a couple of days in 2003 and adored it);

-Through R. I discovered what a joy it is to read Gulliver's Travels. I had never picked it up because, as a kid, there were so many cartoons and simplified versions of it that made me believe this was a story about a giant living among tiny people. Given my obsession for languages, as soon as R. told me about Yahoos and Houyhnhnms, I rushed to get a copy (I think it is now one of my favourite books of all time);

- I'm reading Marguerite Duras' bio now.

Marguerite Yourcenar's bio is waiting for me. I think there's a pattern here - I had read Maria Filomena Mónica's autobiography the week before (a Portuguese sociologist whose intelligence and cunning have always surprised me). Out of nowhere came this need to read women's biographies - a "femme de trente ans" need of reassurance perhaps. And such great women they are.

(looking forward to getting Lee Miller's and Peggy Guggenheim's bios on my next visit to NYC - I miss St. Mark's)

Posted by claudia Permalink

February 18, 2006

I know...

...I am going insane after waking up and remembering I dreamt I was having tea with the President and with the Central Bank Governor. They were having a childish fight over some economic theory and I kept shushing them.

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...my professional image will never be the same after bumping into a client in the supermarket; he tried to reach my hand for a handshake and I was holding a pack of tampons.

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Posted by claudia Permalink

Herida

Mi noche me observa. Su mirada es lisa y se funde en cada cosa. Mi noche desearía que estuvieses aquí para deslizarse en ti con ternura. Mi noche te espera. Mi cuerpo te espera. Mi noche quisiera que descansases en el hueco de mi hombro y que yo descansase en el hueco de tuyo. Mi noche quisiera ser el mirón de tu placer y del mío, verte e verme temblar de placer. Mi noche quisiera ver nuestras miradas y tener nuestras miradas cargadas de deseo. Mi noche quisiera ter entre sus manos cada espasmo. Mi noche se vuelvería suave. Mi noche gime en silencio su soledad al recordarte. Mi noche es larga y larga y larga. Pierde la cabeza pero no puede alejar tu imagen de mí, no puede tragrase mi deseo. Se muere al saber que no estas aqui y me mata. Mi noche te busca sin cesar. Mi cuerpo no consigue concebir que algunas calles o cualquier geografía nos separan. Mi cuerpo se vuelve loco de dolor al no poder reconecer en medio de mi noche tu silueta o tu sombra. Mi cuerpo quisiera besarte en tu sueño. Mi cuerpo quisiera dormir en plena noche y en esas tinieblas ser despertado porque tú lo besabas. Mi noche no conoce sueño más hermoso y más cruel hoy que éste. My noche grita y desgarra sus velos, mi noche choca con su propio silencio, pero tu cuerpo permanece inencontrable. Te echo tanto de menos. Y tus palabras. Y tu color. Pronto va a amanecer.

Carta al Ausente, Rauda Jamis in "Frida Kahlo"

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"Diego on my mind", Frida Kahlo

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February 17, 2006

Favourite Gallery Name

ARCO 2006, Madrid

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February 15, 2006

Extremes

Madrid

"Out of Print Books and New Editions"

How does that work? It was night time or I would have stepped in.

On the right side you have mouldy, old books, arranged alphabetically on wooden shelves and, on the left, the brand new editions, shiny dust jackets and sorted after El Pais chart of Top Selling books. When they don't sell all the new editions' stock, they carry it to the back of the shop where they have a paper mill (Hrabal's "Too loud a solitude" style).

Posted by claudia Permalink

February 14, 2006

La Lupe

La Lupe de Chueca, Madrid

The public humiliating confession: sometimes my love for kitsch takes hold of my body and I just can't control it. It usually makes me play the CD "Las canciones de Almodóvar" in the car, really loud, as I sing (or should I say scream?) to La Lupe's "Teatro" (from one of my favourite movies of all time, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).

Such classy lyrics:

Teatro, lo tuyo es puro teatro
falsedad bien ensayada
estudiado simulacro,
fue tu mejor actuación,
destrozar mi corazón
y hoy que me lloras de veras
recuerdo tu simulacro
perdona que no te crea me parece que es teatro.

¨y acuerdate que según tu punto de vista yo,
soy la mala¨!!!

Posted by claudia Permalink

February 13, 2006

Spanish Kitsch

Rey del Pimiento, Madrid

I just got back from a quick visit to the Contemporary Art Fair (ARCO) in Madrid. Interesting stuff.

Bought a great biography of Frieda Kahlo.

Too much Ribera del Duero (so hard to admit that the Spanish have good wine ;-)

Found there's a bar there named Nietzsche. And no, they don't play Wagner there. They show old episodes of Thunderbird on a flat screen hanging behind the counter. And sofas where you can lie down trying to figure out why the hell did you have a crush on a doll when you were a kid. Maybe because his name was Brains. Always had a thing for the clever ones.

Posted by claudia Permalink

February 08, 2006

Just because a person is alone does not mean that he is solitary; just as when one is among many people, he is not therefore accompanied.

--Epictetus, Discourses

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We must take the soul back and withdraw it into itself; that is the real solitude, which may be enjoyed in the midst of cities and the courts of kings; but it is best enjoyed alone.

--Montaigne, On Solitude

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These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day during which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, and during which I can truly claim to be what nature willed.

--Jean Jacques Rousseau, The reveries of the Solitary Walker

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Posted by claudia Permalink

January 31, 2006

"Under Suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.

When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, "Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!"

But this desert is filled with the spirit of nonobjective sensation which pervades everything.

But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the "desert," where nothing is real except feeling . . . and so feeling became the substance of my life.

This was no "empty square" which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of nonobjectivity.

I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea."

-- Suprematism, Kasimir Malevich

+--+--+

"Like the old ideal of God, the abstraction itself in its nakedness is never directly apprehensible to us. As in the case of God, we can know its manifestations only through works, which, while never completely revealing the total abstraction in the round, symbolize it by the manifestation of different faces of itself in works of art. Therefore, to feel beauty is to participate in the abstraction through a particular agency. In a sense, this is a reflection of the infiniteness of reality. For should we know the appearance of the abstraction itself, we would constantly reproduce only its image. As it is, we have the exhibition of the infinite variety of its inexhaustible facets, for which we should be grateful."

-- The Artist's reality - Philosophies of Art, Mark Rothko

+--+--+

And thus I find a match between my suspicions about Catholic representations of God and naturalistic/realistic paintings.

Believing that Jesus Christ was God himself and spreading crucifixes all over the planet is a way of making the believer associate a human form with something that should be an abstract entity. Thus, abstract thinking, which can lead you to a deeper understanding of life, was replaced by this vague hope that a human could also be divine. This obviously can come in handy for any religion who is recruiting followers. No one wants to think hard, you just want an amulet to get you through life, a tangible proof of salvation.

So, in the same way many people can't think of God as an abstract concept and must give it some kind of recognizable representation, many people say they don't like abstract paintings because they can't understand them ("What is it?").

As Rothko says, it takes sensuality, emotionality and intellect to apprehend the beauty of a work of art. Too much trouble :-)

Also, as I learned from Vacapinta, there's a Mark Rothko Chapel in the US, "a modern meditative environment". Schopenhauer would be so proud. The perfect example of theory put to practice: salvation through aesthetic experience. (why is Malevich so hard on him ? :-)

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January 30, 2006

Le Fil de Pensées - The Thread of Thoughts by Roger Vieillard

I saw this some time ago in Fundação Vieira da Silva. I love engravings and this one especially. Had it some knots and it would be a perfect illustration of my own thread of thoughts which sometimes becomes so intricate that all creative activity ceases, including blogging.

Wait. I just untied one. Hence this post.

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 22, 2006

"É na diferença entre aquilo que sentimos e aquilo que acontece, entre o que pede o coração e não pode a vida, que muito cedo encontramos o hábito da tristeza."

"It is in the difference between what we feel and what happens, between what the heart asks for and life can't afford, that early we find the habit of sadness."

--Miguel Esteves Cardoso

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 21, 2006

The Poetics of the Line

A great engravings exhibition in the Vieira da Silva Foundation in Lisboa.

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Untiltled, 1935

"A very enigmatic artist indeed - Anton Prinner was born Antonia Prinner until he changed his name and sex at unknown time.(...) Passionate about occult sciences and esoterics, he stopped painting for a few years after his arrival in Paris. " - from the exhibition catalogue.

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Minerve ou Le fil de Pensées, Roger Vieillard

(the thread of thoughts)

I especially liked this one because I've done this myself at times. Draw a line that bends and turns as my thoughts evolve. An abstract mind map.

++++++

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January 20, 2006

A Theory of Contact

I will now turn my sullen mouth to the discussion of meaningless matters:

"I have sometimes thought of constructing a system of human knowledge which would be based on eroticism, a theory of contact wherein the mysterious value of each being is to offer to us just that point of perspective which another world affords. In such a philosophy pleasure would be a more complete but also more specialized form of approach to the Other, one more technique for getting to know what is not ourselves.(...) when each fraction of a body becomes laden for us with meaning as overpowering as that of the face itself, when this one creature haunts us like music and torments us like a problem (instead of inspiring in us, at most, mere irritation, amusement, or boredom), when he passes from the periphery of our universe to its center, and finally becomes for us more indispensable than our own selves, then that astonishing prodigy takes place wherein I see much more an invasion of the flesh by the spirit than a simple play of the body alone."

-- Marguerite Yourcenar, The Memoirs of Hadrian

Such a quotable book. I feel like copying it all to the longest blog post ever written :-)

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January 19, 2006

One of these days I'm going to write a story about a character from a book, a character in a novel mentioned in that same book and a dead abstract expressionist painter.

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January 18, 2006

Random Silliness

I know this post will sound xenophobic but it's not (I can almost see R. rolling his eyes and saying "Oh no, there she goes again!"). Actually, I am a xenophile :-). Americans come up with these cute, silly, distinctive ideas that I find particularly amusing. If you knew me personally you'd know I like the country, I just hate their foreign policy and that medieval insistence on maintaining the death penalty. Oh, and when they call themselves "America" forgetting there are other countries in the same continent(s). The European Community is picking up a similar habit. You just have to take a look at their URL (http://europa.eu.int) to see that they too over a whole continent themselves. But I digress.

********

Somewhere around Los Angeles

No need to comment on this one.

********

This fascinates me. I'm just sorry I couldn't take a pic of the section of the highway that was "adopted" by the Santa Barbara Masonic Lodge.

"Adopt A Highway Maintenance Corporation (AHMC) provides an opportunity for your company or organization to be recognized for sponsoring a section of highway. We do all the work and you get all the recognition!"

Obviously, this could lead us into a lengthy dissertation about the contrasting role of the state in the USA and in most European countries and to a critical evaluation of the choices made in American public expenditure....but this is not that kind of blog.

********

Power tools! Yeah!

San Francisco

********

Love Happened (in Monterey)

"A vanity plate (US), prestige plate, personalised registration (UK) or personalised plate (Australia) is a special type of number plate (license plate in America), on an automobile or other vehicle. The owner of the vehicle will have paid extra money to have his or her own choice of numbers or letters, usually forming a recognisable phrase, slogan, or initialism on their plate. Sales of vanity plates are often a significant source of revenue for North American provincial and state licencing agencies." - from the wikipedia which seems to be still a good source for information despite the use of "America" in the definition.

(didn't know they had them in the UK; never noticed it)

********

Every time I fly to the USA on an American airline there's always this magazine in the airplane seat pocket. I have to mention Hammacher Schlemmer and thank this store for so many good laughs during take off.

Double Decker Pet Stroller

Barzebo - A Gazebo with a Bar.

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 16, 2006

Lit Quiz

(found in Anne's blog who saw it in Dick's blog who saw it in The Observer)

1. The Bible or Shakespeare?

Shakespeare. I don't find the Bible particularly well written. Maybe except for the Song of Solomon. And some psalms.

And Shakespeare wrote great jokes & great insults. And you don't get sexual innuendo like this in the Bible:

SAMPSON

'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I
have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the
maids, and cut off their heads.

GREGORY

The heads of the maids?

SAMPSON

Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads;
take it in what sense thou wilt.

GREGORY

They must take it in sense that feel it.

SAMPSON

Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and
'tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.

GREGORY

'Tis well thou art not fish; if thou hadst, thou
hadst been poor John. Draw thy tool! here comes
two of the house of the Montagues.

(Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene I)

2. A word you like

In Portuguese: Oxalá (I think it's an adaptation from the Arabic inch'allah - "may god allow" - but don't listen to me, I didn't even google for the origin of the word)

In English: Flabbergasting (must be said with an affected, British accent). Just because I have fun saying it.

3. Most romantic moment in fiction

If I assume that romantic is something that follows the rules of ideal love...then I choose Romeo and Juliet again. Can't help it.

JULIET

What's here? a cup, closed in my true love's hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end:
O churl! drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after? I will kiss thy lips;
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them,
To make die with a restorative.

Kisses him

Thy lips are warm.

(Act 5, Scene III)

4. Overrated writer

Dan Brown is the obvious one. Oh wait, a writer. Maybe Coetzee.

(and in my more personal universe I have a not-so-secret-anymore antipathy towards Hemingway)

5. Favourite translation

The recent translation of Homer's Odyssey to Portuguese by Frederico Lourenço. Not that I know Greek but it was the first time I enjoyed reading it. The previous Portuguese translations didn't keep the poetic form.

6. Best meal in English Literature

Not really a meal...but the first time literature made me hungry.

In every "The Famous Five" book by Enid Blyton, they'd never depart for yet another adventure without a basket full of goodies. I was intrigued by the obsessive eating of scones, butter and raspberry jam. I was nine, Portuguese and had no idea what a scone was. But it sounded delicious. And then I came across a recipe for scones on one of my mom's cookbooks...oh, the joy (how did I survive without the Internet?)

7.Underrated writer

Bohumil Hrabal. "Too loud a solitude" is such a fantastic book.

8. Favourite Children's books

As a child: "The Boy Who Was Followed Home" by Margaret Mahy, illustrated by Steven Kellog. A surrealistic story of a boy who starts being followed home every day after school by hippopotami. Increasingly more and more of them.

Now: "The wind in the willows", Kenneth Grahame. Wait! Does the Harry Potter series count as children's books?

9. Book(s) by your bedside now

Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita"
Feynman's "Six Easy Pieces"
David Lodge's "Author, author"

10. Sexiest book

I can't pick one.

For a more poetic approach of eroticism: Anaïs Nin's "Little Birds"
For plain sex: Any Henry Miller's.
For some S&M fun: "Gordon" by Edith Templeton.
Funny and intriguing: Alberto Moravia's "Me and Him" - yes, I find a talking penis sexy :-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 13, 2006

Lexicophile

The reading of the adventures of Dr. Johnson remembered me of my grandfather. He was not an educated man but he was somehow obsessed with the meaning of words. After he retired he would spend hours filling in notebooks and the odd piece of paper with words and meanings he'd copy out of the dictionary.

I'm writing this and I'm looking at his thick dictionary with orange covers sitting on my shelf (along with the other emotionally indispensable books). My precious inheritance :-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 12, 2006

Personal, Randomly

How ridiculous is it that I spent years of my life wearing a school uniform that included a tartan patterned skirt that actually looked more like a kilt? (in Portugal!!!)

I found out that it's called the Royal Stewart over at House of Tartan.

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The building's tenants annual meeting. Big discussion on how much should they pay for an extra fund for maintenance emergencies. After 15 minutes of arguing to decide between a 20 or 25 Euro monthly payment:

My father: "I think each of us should pay 75 Euros."
Everyone: "What?? No! 25 euros and that's that".

He has a special gift to put an end to silly discussions by making up even more silly arguments. He's the only person I know who is happy to open the door to Jehovah's Witnesses just to come up with the silliest theories about religion and afterlife only to try their patience. Or that has surrealistic conversations with dodgy people who call to make him go to some hotel for a cocktail and sell him time-share holidays. I think he may have led some of them to suicide.

"Congratulations! you just won a mystery prize Mr. Dias! You have 3 hours to come and collect it at Hotel X."
"Prize? I don't recall entering any kind of contest."
"No, you were picked up randomly by our services to win this prize! How lucky you are!"
"Oh, ok. Do you have my address? Mail it, I'll pay for the delivery."
"No, no, you have to pick it up yourself!"
"Oh really? Ok. So give me the authorization number for this contest."
"What?"
"Please....you must know that every contest must be authorized by the city's civil authority?"
".....but you've won a prize....I don't have that kind of information, I'm just letting you know you won! Aren't you coming to collect the prize at Hotel X?"
"Well. If it's an illegal contest I may be considered your accomplice. And this may be just a scam to get me somewhere and kidnap me, so I'd like to check."
"....No, no, no, it's all perfectly legal! You are throwing away the opportunity to win this extraordinary prize?!?!"
"What prize?"
"The mystery prize!"
"What is it?"
(puzzled pause)
"You'll have to pick it up yourself at Hotel X, it's a surprise"
"Hmm. I'm not sure. Is it tax free?"
"What?!?!"
"You know, if I win something I should declare it to the IRS. Is it a tax free prize or will I have to declare it?"
"I don't have that information either! COME AND COLLECT YOUR PRIZE!"
"You sell time-share holidays don't you?"
"YES!!!! I'M SORRY BUT I REALLY NEEDED THIS JOB!!!..." - hangs up.
Dad with a victorious smile.

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 11, 2006

HuggerMugger

Found a board game I adored at the nudist hot springs resort: HuggerMugger.

++++

"He put on his splatterdashes and sauntered over to the haberdashery. He got into a snit on hearing the woman with the flaxen hair stating that there should be gallows on their bailiwick."

++++

"The Skeleton Key or Key of Knowledge represents the Definition category. The player will be given a word with its correct spelling and a choice of 3 definitions. He must then choose which of the choices (a, b, or c) is correct."

"What's a bosk? A- ..., B-.... or C - A thicket?
"What's a thicket?"
"You're right, it's a thicket."
"No, no, I was asking what a thicket is."
"Oh, I thought that was your answer."
"No."
"..."
"So?"
"So what?"
"What's a thicket?"
"It's a bosk."
"I know that now! But what's a bosk?"
"It's a thicket!"

+++++

Hugger Mugger - the habit, practice, or policy of keeping secrets: clandestineness, clandestinity, concealment, covertness.

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 09, 2006

Showing some skin

There's a hidden treasure somewhere in a valley in California. A hot springs resort in the middle of a forest, cute little wooden cabins, a creek. Naked people. Lovely setting, laid-back environment, great hot tubs where to stay for hours, reading a book, looking outside at the rain falling. And naked people. Lazy, fat cats sleeping on the lobby's couches, a game room filled with board games and gossip magazines. Have I mentioned naked people?

(and no cameras allowed, yet...)

+++++

I have never been able to go to nudist beaches in Portugal. I'm always imagining I'll run into my boss when I least expect it. And he's not naked or else that would even things out. But 9.000 km seems like distance enough to forget about my self-inflicted trauma.

And there I was, in a nudist hot springs resort. And it was cold. And everything is on the open air, the tubs, the changing room, the swimming pool.

At first I thought there would be no way I'd go around naked in that weather. Than I gathered courage, undressed in the changing room and headed to the lovely claw foot bathtub with hot flowing water. The private tubs are inside these cute, little rooms where you can leave the door open, look at the sky and the trees, hearing the creek run by. An interesting book - a good company - and it's heaven.

The water is so warm that feels great to step out in the rain and feel the cold drops of water on your skin. Then you run to the dry sauna (I can't breath in the wet sauna) under the rain. After some minutes of pure heat, the cold water pool awaits for you. Not for me, since I tried climbing down the pool steps until the freezing water hit my thighs and then I just ran back to get my towel. And then head off to the very hot redwood communal tub.

A doubt persists until today. Do nipple piercings get hot in the sauna? If so, don't they burn your skin when you walk and they dangle?

++++

This place must have been originally a hippy camping or something. Now it has grown into the New Age style. People here are sweet, laid-back, easy smiling and talkative. And all are reading books entitled "The Call of the Sacred Mountain", "The Mysteries of Crop Circles", "The Power of Intention" and the like (I heard a woman sigh "Oh my Goddess" in the sauna).

Except for one, none of the cabins has a kitchen. So, there's a communal kitchen. You get your own bin to store the food. As I was choosing what to make for dinner, I peaked at the other guest's bins and they all had organic stuff, soy milk, tofu...

Nonetheless, they all seemed to be gourmet chefs and prepared the most amazing meals, complete with appetizers and decorated plates. Which could make you a bit self-conscious about bringing canned sardines.

++++

I'm at the cabin (the one with a kitchen). It's the morning and I'm making breakfast. I'm always so hungry in the morning, eagerly anticipating the taste of maple syrup and buttermilk pancakes. As I'm drooling over the frying pan, someone knocks on the door.

"Sorry you guys, but you have to evacuate; the river's flooded and CalTrans is saying they're closing the road any moment."

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 08, 2006

His birth

my birth - amazing! you shoulda been there, i mean jesus, there's this doctor guy, right? and he's all like "forceps" and i'm all like oh geez, here it comes, and then there's all this light and there's the doctor guy and he sorta looks like god, who i was talking with just before the link got severed, and then the nurse's all "it's a boy" and the doctor's like "shut up, saying that is my job" and he bitchslaps her, right? ooooh, my god, she just falls straight to the floor. then my dad comes in, and i'd never seen him before, he starts singing to me, but for the love of i don't know who, he's pacing back and trips on the nurse, then mighty man randy savage comes in and does a piledrive on the doctor, then some strange man in chicken outfit comes in and starts singing what he calls a telegram and i piss on him. he calls me a son of a bitch and my mom says "i'm gonna sue your ass you cum-mouthed dumbfuck" and that's why we're rich today, then we all go home, but when i get here i realise i have a sister, and she loves me very much and all, but i'm thinking geez, she's 14 years older than me, i'm never gonna be able to score with her friends, but then someone introduced me to the concept of "young boy toy" and i was like ok, that's cool, then i fall asleep and the next day everyone's calling me henrique, but my real name is edgar, so i didn't know what was up with that, so then they started telling me all these bed-time stories and i sorta lost most of the intelligence i had brought from the before-life

--Henrique on the verge of a caffeine OD

Posted by claudia Permalink

The modernity of Lent

Disclaimer: I am faith impaired and have the spiritual depth of a soup plate. And I'm also tremendously envious of those who can find comfort in religion.

++++

I have a hard time dealing with religious rituals and traditions because most of them are outdated and its meaning is lost in the dust of Time. And I hate doing anything just because I'm supposed to (I'm the nagging person in the last row of chairs in the church that keeps repeating "Why???"). Rituals shouldn't be followed like a superstition - as "if you don't go to mass you'll be punished" - but its original meaning should be acknowledged - "I attend mass because I'm celebrating my faith in God with fellow believers".

Once in a while I come across some clever interpretation of a religious ritual. Being able to get into the spirit of an action - rather than obeying mindlessly to some prescription - and coming up with new solutions fascinates me.

And this is what I found browsing through the very interesting, high brow blog The Penkill Papers. Yes, Anne, I'm fascinated! :-) And cheese....the supreme sacrifice!

"After the excesses of Christmas it's good to know that Lent will soon enough be here again (begins on Ash Wednesday, March 1). I've decided to keep it again this year in my own way by giving up sugar, cheese, wine and other alcohol. The wine and alcohol will be easy for me to live without, but life without sugar and cheese will present a real challenge. Especially the cheese. Oh, the cheese!

A forgotten benefit of fasting in our time is that what we don't consume ourselves becomes available to others. This is perhaps no longer true in our global economy, or at least not with quite the same directness as in the Middle Ages. In any small community long ago, the local population would be more or less dependent on whatever food was raised by local farmers. As Carolyn Walker Bynum documented in Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, women who fasted for religious reasons (giving up much more than sweets and cheese, needless to say — Catherine of Siena was reported to have survived for extended periods on a diet of nothing more than consecrated hosts, an extreme dietary fetish that the Church frowned on) saw the direct results of their sacrifice in the distribution of surplus food to the poor.

In this spirit, I've decided to donate all the money I save on wine and other drinks and treats during Lent to charity. After seeing this World Society for the Protection of Animals commercial about bear farming in Asia (where thousands of wild bears are held captive in tiny cages to have the bile from their gall bladders painfully extracted daily), I've decided to give my 'Lent money' to the WSPA. (If anyone objects that my donation will benefit animals rather than people, let me assure them that my Lent donation is not made in isolation.)"

I just hope more people who were considering fasting will be inspired by this.

Posted by claudia Permalink

Let's get Physic-al

I'm reading Lawrence M. Krauss' "Hiding in the Mirror - The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String theory and Beyond".

What's interesting about this book is the way the author links the developments in physics to art & literature. The quest - even if unintentional - for extra dimensions brings together Einstein, Bohr, Kaluza, Dirac and Picasso, Wells, Faulkner, Duchamp, Lewis Carroll.

Like in many other things in my life, I'm not that interested in the practical side of physics. I'm interested in the concepts and how they interact with or inspired other fields of study. Pure intellectual masturbation.

And also, Krass has a sense of humour (he was born in NY but grew up in Canada):

"Quantum mechanics is, as I like to say, just like the White House: As long as no one can measure what's going on, anything goes!"

"In cooking, the proof is in the tasting. In physics, it is in the testing."

"As any European high school student could tell you, the sum of the angles inside this triangle is 180º."

Although it's an easy read, I realized how much I need to brush up some basic physics concepts and my geometry.

I've always felt like physics was a low priority subject for me. Somehow, I must have had this mystical notion of nature and had no interest in understanding how the world works, risking stopping being marveled at things with a child-like innocence. And physics concepts were not as intuitive to me as other more abstract ones. I can understand the maths behind it but to say that I fully apprehend the meaning of it in practical terms takes me a lot of work.

So, it'll be like going back to school, only this time I have a purpose and no examinations. Which will be much more fun.

Not to mention being motivated by my private interest in space & time.

++++++

One example of these literature/science links I had run into before:

-"Are you saying I'm superficial?"
-"No...what others call profundity is only a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube."
in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Although I know now what a tesseract is - especially after being enlightened by Banubula's post on Hinton's cubes and after checking an applet featuring a tesseract visualizer sent by István - I still have no idea what Eco meant.

Salman Rushdie mocked this same excerpt on "Imaginary Homelands" as intellectual pretentiousness/gibberish.

I kinda like it. I'm having fun coming up with alternative interpretations.

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 07, 2006

Melancholy

1. A disease supposed to proceed from a redundance of black bile; but it is better known to arise from too heavy and too viscid a blood; its cure is in evacuation, nervous medicines, and powerful stimuli.
--John Quincy

2. A kind of madness, in which the mind is always fixed on one object;

3. A gloomy, pensive, discontented temper

This melancholy flatters, but unmans you;
What is else but penury of soul,
A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind?
--John Dryden

(found on "Defining the World - The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary" by Henry Hitchings)

+++++

Edward Hopper, Morning Sun

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 06, 2006

The Standard Hotel, Hollywood

"Sitting up on the bed, it was one of those unexpected moments when the whirl of thoughts stops suddenly, a warm feeling of happiness invades the body. An unannounced grasp of the randomness of life.

It was dawn. His peaceful, rhythmic breathing was the only sound in the bedroom. The pale light coming from the window sharpened the contrast between his skin and the white sheets. Dreaming of distant galaxies, of imaginary cities, of lost books and unsolvable puzzles. Of chocolates. Curling up under his arm, she saw a tiny raven, black as the night, escaping from his hair."

- found on a torn piece of paper in the bottom of my backpack.

Posted by claudia Permalink

January 04, 2006

Survivor

There's nothing like starting the year in the middle of a natural disaster. More exactly in the middle of the California floods. Even more exactly, trapped in a motel in Ukiah zapping between a Twilight Zone Marathon on Sci-Fi, "The Blues Brothers" on Comedy Central and VH1's "I love the 70's". Water everywhere, roads closed. And I thought this kind of thing only happened on Hollywood movies.

++++

So much to blog about, so lilttle time:

Los Angeles. Hollywood. Plates of Gargantuan proportions on a breakfast place where the waiter kept calling me sweetie.

(The triple threat - perfect for anyone carrying gallbladder stones, isn't it?)

The place is called the Saddle Ranch on Sunset Boulevard. A texan inspired restaurant (mechanical bull included) with an outdoor patio. Sitting outdoors, I was puzzled by how every tour van would slow down while passing in front. It turns out that it used to be the Thunder Roadhouse Cafe, opened by "Easy Riders" Dennis Hopper & Peter Fonda. And that makes it a tourist sight, obviously.

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Big Sur and how I didn't get to visit the Henry Miller Library because of three clocks set to three different time zones, none of which was the proper one;

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My very first stay on a nudist hot springs resort north of San Francisco (yes, it was cold, it's winter down there too). Before being evacuated to lovely and exciting Ukiah . This deserves a whole post. Later.

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Of course it is. Apparently, Christmas is the perfect time to get a new vibrator in San Francisco.

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Dinner in bed at the Supper Club in SF and meeting a woman who has been a standup comedian, a professional scrabble player, a sitcom writer (including some episodes for Sex and the City) and is now a "Namer". She names stuff. Like products or companies.

++++

Too much time waiting for a connecting flight in Amsterdam. Hopped on a train and made the mandatory visit to the red light district. It's becoming a tradition for me to be offered coke by sleazy men and invited in by hookers from behind their windows.

Irene accepts major credit cards and publicizes her specialty buy hanging a bullwhip on her window.

+++++

VH1's "I love the 70's" showing a bit of an episode of a sitcom I had never watched:

Obese Kid character: "Don't make fun of me! Being fat runs in the family!"
Skinny Kid character: "No one runs in your family."

+++++

And much, much more.

Posted by claudia Permalink

December 21, 2005

Oh no, it's Christmas again!

Drowning in work, worries, Christmas lunches and dinners. A situation which is only worsened by the attribulations of gift finding.

Paralyzed by the cold weather.

Will find a way to inflict pain on myself for being so impatient and not waiting in lines to have someone wrap up my presents at the store. Hoping stapled plastic bags will be the new chic.

This blog will be completely neglected during the holidays which I will be spending far, far away.

Looking forward to some Christmas Tamales :-)

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" I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it." -- Steven Wright

Posted by claudia Permalink

The colors of infamy

"O que mais alegrava Ossama era contemplar o caos. Debruçado ao parapeito da passagem suspensa cujos pilares metálicos rodeavam a praça Tahrir, ele ruminava idéias atrevidamente contrárias aos discursos propagados pelos pensadores oficiais, os quais sustentavam que a perenidade de um país estava subordinada à ordem. O espetáculo que tinha diante dos olhos condenava sem recurso essa afirmação imbecil. Já havia algum tempo que aquela construção, imaginada por engenheiros humanistas para resguardar os infelizes pedestres dos perigos da rua, servia-lhe de observatório panorâmico, reforçando sua íntima convicção de que o mundo podia continuar indefinidamente a viver na desordem e na anarquia." - Cossery, As Cores da Infâmia

"Contemplating the chaos was what cheered Ossama the most. Leaning over the railing of the overpass whose metallic pillars encircled the Tahrir square, he insolently ruminated contrary ideas to the speeches propagated by the official thinkers, which stated that the longevity of a country was subordinate to order. The spectacle his eyes beheld condemned without appeal this imbecile idea. For some time now, that construction, imagined by humanist engineers to protect the unhappy pedestrians from the dangers of the street, served him as a panoramic observatory, strengthening his intimate conviction that the world could indefinitely continue to live in the clutter and the anarchy." - Cossery, The Colors of Infamy

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AP's latest. Inspired by the excerpt above.

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A la question : « Pourquoi écrivez-vous ? », Albert Cossery répond : « Pour que quelqu'un qui vient de me lire n'aille pas travailler le lendemain ».

To the question: "Why do you write?", Albert Cossery answers: "So that anyone reading it won't go to work the next day."

(AP! Stop reading that! You've got a mortgage!)

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Albert Cossery is an egyptian anarchist who is 88 years old and has lived the past 56 years in a hotel room in Paris. He was admired by Henry Miller and Camus and has only written 8 books. It took him 16 years to write "The Colors of Infamy". Sometimes he would write only one sentence a day. As he says, he can't afford to waste any more time on writing because he's having so much fun with other stuff.

More on The Colors of Infamy here.

Posted by claudia Permalink

December 17, 2005

Slow blog

Lélé Senior has a new blog - a slow blog as he puts it.The fast blog doesn't leave much space for his more elaborate musings. I have loved his writing ever since we were college students.

When are we starting that Portuguese Knights Templar version of a Dan Brown's style novel? We could become filthy rich ;-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

The Odyssey from Stick Figures to Male Torsos

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I am indeed a theory lover. I'm probably the only one at drawing classes to prefer the times when the teacher talks to the times we have to draw.

This is a very weird drawing course. The teacher is a very grumpy man, even rude, who takes his art very seriously. Which can sometimes be hilarious.

We were told to forget everything we knew about drawing (which in my case wasn't much) and start looking at the world with new eyes. We slowly integrate degrees of complexity into our sketches. Right now we've passed movement drawing (a doodle of the motion of the model) and we're starting volume. Anytime anyone complains about his own sketch as "It's completely out of proportion", the teacher says: "Good, we haven't covered proportions yet."

Oh. And there's a nude model on every class.

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I arrived really late. I had no idea what the exercise was and tried to sneak a peak at the next colleague's sketch without any success. I started playing with my crayon, praying the exercise would soon be over. The teacher comes behind me:
Teacher: [blah, blah, blah, shouldn't have arrived late, no method whatsoever, we're doing volume drawing] "That drawing is ruined, you won't be able to make it transmit volume even if you crawl on your knees to Fatima * ".
Claudia:" It's OK, I'm not a believer so that wouldn't even be an option."

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After being criticized yet again by something I did on a drawing, I promised to mend it. Of course I didn't, I am lazy and was hoping the teacher wouldn't pass by me again. He did.
Teacher(sarcastically): "So, I guess you're happy?" [with the drawing]
Claudia:" I'm not particularly happy today, but I suppose you weren't asking about my private life?"

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We were told to look at the model, who is changing positions continuously; a beautiful, improvised choreography. Only when the urge to draw comes should we start. There was a day that it just wouldn't come to me so I just sat there, waiting for the "click". It was a male nude model.

My friend AP sitting next to a colleague who was asking him why I wasn't drawing: "She only comes here to see naked men live."

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Teacher: "Some people come to me to share what their purpose is on taking this course. Some say that they're here as a past time. I tell those people that even if you don't come here, time will pass anyway. We're here to learn how to draw!"

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One of the male models is sitting naked on a stool, head and torso slightly to the right, left hand on his knee, his legs open in my direction. I suddenly think how much fun these boring classes would be if he got a bit excited.

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Chubby women are much easier to draw.

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Everyone wants to finish their drawings. Sometimes students complain that there's not enough time to complete an exercise. That's when the teacher started accusing western civilization and how we only get to see the finished products and how everything that is incomplete is not worthy. And then he started showing slides of incomplete drawings/studies by Rembrandt.

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*Fatima: Portuguese catholic shrine where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to 3 children. It's a popular pilgrimage destination and believers who ask for miracles and are granted them usually crawl on their knees around the shrine.

Posted by claudia Permalink

December 13, 2005

Stolen from AC's Encyclopedia

Tudo o que é vivo tem um ligeiro cheiro a morto – exclamou Marija de Breslov, parteira de William Möller, enquanto lhe cortava o cordão umbilical. Admoestada pelo pai da criança sobre a rudeza da frase, respondeu: – Quando nasce uma criança, sr. coronel, abre-se uma cova. O cordão umbilical é o que nos liga à origem e não nos deixa perder num labirinto, liga-nos à matriz. É o fio de Ariadne que nos cortam para sermos abandonados à mercê do monstro de Minos, à vida labiríntica. Esse cordão, o umbilical, vai para o lixo e é substituído por outro que começa nas minhas mãos de parteira e termina nas do meu marido. Ele é coveiro.

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Everything that is alive exhales a discreet odor of death - said Marija de Breslov, William Möller's midwife, while cutting his umbilical cord. Admonished by the father on the harshness of the phrase, she answered: - When a child is born, Colonel, we dig a hole in the ground. The umbilical cord is what links us to our origin and saves us from getting lost in a labyrinth for it binds us to the womb. It is our own thread of Ariadne which is cut in order to abandon us at the mercy of the monster of Minos, to the labyrinthic life. That cord, the umbilical cord, is thrown in the garbage and is replaced by another one that starts on my hands as a midwife and ends on my husband's. He's a grave digger.

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I would link to the blog from where I stole this but it's password protected. It's a precious little gem only some are allowed to enter :-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

December 10, 2005

Winter Sun

One of my greatest winter time pleasures is to sit in a bench in a sunny spot in a park, a new book in my hand. The promise of a quiet time, all to myself, the anticipating of the opening of the front cover and reading the first lines. You can easily judge a book by its opening lines. Some of them stick to your memory even though you can't remember anything else. They are the author's chance of making a good, lasting first impression.

Now that I am physically separated from my books, it seems I appreciate every new acquisition even more. It's like starting all over again, the excitement of building a new private library. It started out as an interesting - yet painful - exercise: having to leave your books behind and considering you can bring a dozen or so with you, which ones would you choose? My grandfather's dictionary; the Quartet, the Sheltering Sky; Gordon; Shakespeare; Palomar; Ficciones; some Kundera; some philosophy books. I get jealous of my books. P has been lending some to his new housemaid's daughter. Apparently she likes to read, they're poor and she got very excited when she entered the study, covered by books from wall to wall. I have mixed feelings about this borrowing.

I hadn't been to the Gulbenkian gardens for a while. I felt like a lizard desperately looking for a nice, smooth rock where to rest and warm up. But the winter sun was playing a trick on me. Hanging low in the sky, it completely shattered the picture I had imagined of a splendorous sunny garden. Only two months ago, I sat in the open air amphitheater, savouring a Gonçalo M. Tavares. Instead, I had to find my way through the maze of paths to find a decent spot. I didn't feel like sitting on the grass and all the benches were covered in the shade. My only option was to sit on the concrete pedestal of a modern statue which turned out to be quite comfortable. Is it just me or concrete is much warmer than stone?

I open the book, it looked promising:

"I was looking for a quiet place to die."

A woman comes and sits on the same pedestal on my left. I was thinking that the garden was big enough for her to find another place but I quickly returned to my reading. She starts smoking. I don't smoke. I don't like that people smoke next to me, especially on a public park and when the wind isn't blowing. In a such a situation and depending on my mood I either ask politely for the person to have her smoke somewhere else or I move away. It felt warm, I didn't want to move. I didn't say anything either. I remembered being told that sometimes what we call superstition is just sense of aesthetics or balance about how the world should work. First, I had to fight to find a sunny spot and now this. Maybe my reading just didn't fit the aesthetics of the situation. She finally finished her cigarette while I delved on my thoughts. Got back to the book.

"Like him, I had majored in English at College, with secret ambitions to go on studying literature or perhaps take a stab in journalism, but I hadn't had the courage to pursue either one. Life got in the way - two years in the army, work, marriage, family responsibilities, the need to earn more and more money, all the muck that bogs us when we don't have the balls to stand up to ourselves."

A man with a crooked back that had been walking back and forth on the pathway just in front of me suddenly stops. He too is enjoying the warmth of the winter sun. I could appreciate this scene if it wasn't for the fact that he was casting a long shadow, all over my feet and legs. I moved slightly to the right. He automatically throws his weight on his right leg, thus making me feel like I'm on a cartoon, a two dimensional Claudia running away from a shadow. He finally picks up where he had stopped that back and forth autistic stroll. My boots are getting warmer again.

"It's about nonexistent worlds, my nephew said, a study of the inner refuge, a map of the place a man goes to when life in the real world is no longer possible."

The woman sitting next to me turns out to be Spanish. Her family, who apparently had been visiting the museums while she waited outside, comes to join her. Now I've got 5 Spanish people next to me, speaking loudly, commenting on the hideous statue they saw and what they should do next. It's always hard for me to concentrate when someone next to me is speaking in a foreign language. I usually don't overhear other people's conversations but my brain can't stop from trying to decipher the weird, unfamiliar sounds that are coming in my direction. It seems that the next stop will be the Spanish department store El Corte Inglés. How imaginative. The equivalent of an American going to the Hard Rock Café when abroad.

"Tom put them off with his doubts and soul-searchings, his obscure disquisitions on the nature of reality, his hesitant manner."

I suddenly feel observed. What is this primitive skill humans still have, this alertness that doesn't leave us to rest, like preys waiting to be hunted? I look behind me and between the iron legs of that grotesque statue figure, I see a man with a camera taking a photo. Of the statue? A photo of me? It doesn't matter, by this point I am convinced there is a universal plot against my reading. The man puts his camera down and I see a familiar smile. Ricardo L. is smiling at me. A "gotcha" look on his face. "Too bad you saw me, I was going quietly away and then I'd send the photo by email". At least this was a nice interruption. R&A are very friendly, interesting people. After a short chat about hiking, rainy weather, crappy Portuguese translations of American authors from the 80's and ginger cookies they leave me to my book.

"Thousands of items were crammed onto the shelves down there - everything from out of print dictionaries to forgotten bestsellers to leather-bound sets of Shakespeare - and Tom had always felt at home in that kind of paper mausoleum, flipping through piles of discarded books and breathing in the old dusty smells."

Despite the occasional kid running by, the garden seems to have quieted down. Which is completely understandable, considering the sun has now dropped behind the museum building. I'm getting cold. I'm going home.

Posted by claudia Permalink

December 08, 2005

Depressed princesses and wizards

"The tradition of a deadened, lethargic woman aroused from her numbness by a man's call was well under way in the nineteenth century: suffice it to recall Kundry from Wagner's Parsifal who, at the begginning of Act II and Act III, is awakened from a catatonic sleep(first through Klingsor's rude summons, then Gurnemanz's kind care), or - from 'real life' - the unique figure of Jane Morris, wife of William Morris and mistress of Dante Gabriel Rosetti. The famous photo of Jane Morris from 1865 presents a depressive woman, deeply absorbed in her thoughts, who seems to await a man's stimulation to pull her out of her lethargy.
(...)
The philosophical name for this depression is absolute negativity, what Hegel calls 'The night of the world', the subject's withdrawal into itself. And the link between this depression and the indestructible life-substance is also clear: depression, withdrawal-into-self, is the primordial act of retreat, of maintaining a distance towards the indestructible life-substance, making it appear as a repulsive scintillation." - Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment

Paula Rego, "Snow White choking on the apple" - which, had I painted it and would have entitled it "where's a Heimlich manoeuvre specialist when you need one?" :-)

This also reminded me of Bruno Bettelheim's interpretation of fairy tales and how all of them seem to be directed at conditioning women's behaviour ("Waiting for Prince Charming" Syndrome, etc.)

And how I immediately associated the description of the Dementors in Harry Potter's books with the symptoms of depression:

"Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can't see them. Get too near a dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself...soul-less and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life." - J.K.Rowling, Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban

( maybe this is the Jane Morris photo he's talking about)

Note to self: will have to post about that annoying habit people have nowadays of saying "I'm depressed" when they're just sad.

Posted by claudia Permalink

December 06, 2005

Why Dan Brown should pursue the "Jesus Lived In India" Theory

I read the DaVinci code last year. I was at New Delhi's airport facing a long flight to Frankfurt without anything to read. I rushed to an airport bookshop and bought it. I tend to avoid popular books - it's my intellectual pretentiousness, you see :-) - but it seemed an easy read for a flight and I wanted to see what everyone was talking about.

I enjoyed it immensely. Like I enjoy popcorn-eating-hollywood movies when I'm in the mood for it.

When some friends and colleagues started talking to me about it I was amazed to discover how everyone took it rather seriously ("Dan Brown did a lot of research for it", "There are several historians who say it's a very well written book with solid proof", "maybe it's all true", etc.,etc.)

I had fun reading it. The scholarly, conspiratory tone only made it more fun. Accurate or not, it doesn't matter. Like reading a magazine horoscope. Or it's like reading a much poorer version of some of Arturo Pérez-Reverte entertaining adventure novels.

And I'm not even a religious person, I'm not offended by some of the assumptions the book makes, I was quite amused by them.

So, I was relieved to read this article by Umberto Eco:

"G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.

It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn't crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown's book.

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes."

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In the same aiport bookshop I bought another popular book in India: "Jesus lived in India" (synopsis here). It's even more outrageous which makes it even more fun than Dan Brown's fantasies. It's so far fetched I swear I wish it was true :-)

I had read Catherine Clément's "Jesus at the stake" in which she writes about these jesus-lived-in-India theories in fictional terms. I found it very interesting and amusing that Jesus had had tibetan buddhist teachings, survived the crucifixion by practising yoga and fled to Kashmir, dying there of old age. As a secular humanist, it seemed as good explanation as the Vatican's :-). When I went to India I had the chance to ask some Indians about this theory. All of them said: "Of course he lived and died here! Everyone knows that! His tomb is up there in Srinagar...go see it for yourself!" - rather mockingly. Too bad that Srinagar is in Kashmir and that I'm rather cowardly or else I would have gone there.

"Ahmadi Muslims believe that the physical ascension of Jesus to Heaven is a later interpolation. The term "heaven" is used for spiritual bliss which the righteous enjoy after a mortal life.

Jesus was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt. 15:24). Out of twelve tribes of Israel, only two were in the region where Jesus preached. The other ten tribes, as a result of exile, were domiciled in the eastern countries, especially in Afghanistan and Kashmir. It was imperative for Jesus to migrate eastwards to complete his mission.

There is overwhelming evidence that the people of Afghanistan, Kashmir and neighbouring regions are of Israelite ancestry. Their physical features, languages, folklore, customs, and festivals attest to their Israelite heritage. Evidence also comes from the names they give to their villages, their monuments, and ancient historical works and inscriptions.

The presence of Jesus in India is recorded in the ancient Indian literature, and records of Kashmir. Jesus came to Kashmir from the Holy Land during the reign of Raja Gopadatta (49-109 AD) to proclaim his prophethood to the Israelites. He was known as Yusu (Jesus) of the children of Israel. It is recorded that great number of people recognized his holiness and piety and became his disciples. " - more here.

They're making a documentary on it in India.

"According to legend Jesus Christ's tomb lies at Rozabal in Srinagar's old town . "Rozabal" is an abbreviation of Rauza Bal, meaning "tomb of a prophet". Isa (the Islamic name for Christ) was in fact also known as Yuz Asaf (Leader of the Healed). At the entrance there is an inscription explaining that Yuz Asaf is buried along with another Moslem saint. Both have gravestones which are oriented in North-South direction, according to Moslem tradition. However, through a small opening the true burial chamber can be seen, in which there is the Sarcophagus of Yuz Asaf in East-West (Jewish) orientation.

According to advocates of this theory there are carved footprints on the grave stones and when closely examined, carved images of a crucifix and a rosary. The footprints of Yuz Asaf have what appear to be scars represented on both feet, if one assumes that they are crucifixion scars, then their position is consistent with the scars shown in the Turin Shroud (left foot nailed over right). Crucifixion was not practised in Asia, so it is quite possible that they were inflicted elsewhere, such as the Middle East. The tomb is called by some as "Hazrat Issa Sahib" or "Tomb of the Lord Master Jesus". Ancient records acknowledge the existence of the tomb as long ago as 112AD.

Thus the legend that Jesus Christ Himself is buried in Kashmir!"

More books about it here.

Posted by claudia Permalink

December 05, 2005

Christmas Escherism

Posted by claudia Permalink

December 03, 2005

Deviant Delight

(After Bosch, 2005 by makeoutartist - copyright protected!! but I asked politely) - click to enlarge!

I can remember the first time I went to the Prado and saw the Garden of Earthly Delights. It was such a great impact that, to this day, I can't go to Madrid without going to see it - which usually involves waiting behind dozens of tourists and finally getting close, mouth open in amazement and always finding a new detail I hadn't noticed before.

I came across this fantastic, cartoon-like version of it on DeviantArt. So pop. So great. (thanks Kevin!)

More by makeoutartist/Kevin Strickland here.

Posted by claudia Permalink

December 02, 2005

Greguerías

Ramón Gomez de La Serna was a Spanish writer, inventor of the Greguerías - humorous and poetic epigrams which, for the most parts, were published in newspapers. He defined it as:

Greguería = Humor + Metaphor

Some make great quotations, others great jokes. All are just plain beautiful and witty.

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El amor nace del deseo repentino de hacer eterno lo pasajero.

Love is born out of the desire to render eternal what is fleeting.

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Entre los carriles de la vía del tren crecen las flores suicidas.

In the middle of the train tracks grow suicidal flowers.

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Hay un momento en que el astrónomo, debajo del gran telescopio, se convierte en microbio del microscopio de la luna que se asoma a observarle.

There's a moment when the astronomer, under his big telescope, turns into the microbe which the moon sees with its microscope.

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Serpents are the trees' neckties.

(Illustration by David Vela)

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Tenía tan mala memoria que se olvidó que tenía mala memoria y comenzó a recordarlo todo.

He had such a poor memory that he forgot that he had a poor memory and started remembering it all.

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Escribir con lápiz es marcar sólo la sombra de las palabras.

To write with a pencil is just to mark the shadow of words.

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(found this in english only)

It is only in botanical gardens that trees carry visiting cards.

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La ü con diéresis es como la letra malabarista del abecedario.

The ü is the juggler of the alphabet.

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Los remos son las pestañas de los barcos.

The oars are the boat's eyelashes.

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Era un pintor tan viejo que se le habían quedado calvos los pinceles.

The painter was so old that his brushes had gone bald.

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El Pensador de Rodin es un ajedrecista a quien le han quitado la mesa.

Rodin's "The Thinker" is a chess player whose table has been taken away.

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El libro es el salvavidas de la soledad.

The book is the life-guard of the lonely.

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 30, 2005

Narcissisms

Took a fun personality test (quite accurate, me thinks)

* High Curiosity Level
* Low Emotional Reactivity Level
* High Multi-tasking Ability
* High Need for Variety
* High Assertiveness Level

(wondering if the image I have of myself is similar to how other people see me)

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 29, 2005

Marxisms

"While preparing to film a movie entitled A Night in Casablanca, the Marx brothers received a letter from Warner Bros. threatening legal action if they did not change the film’s title. Warner Bros. deemed the film’s title too similar to their own Casablanca, released almost five years earlier in 1942, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. In response Groucho Marx dispatched the following letter to the studio’s legal department:

Dear Warner Brothers,

Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal document warning us not to use the name Casablanca.

It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.

I just don’t understand your attitude. Even if you plan on releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don’t know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.

You claim that you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without permission. What about “Warner Brothers”? Do you own that too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about the name Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the sticks as the Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor’s eye, and even before there had been other brothers—the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit; and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (This was originally “Brothers, Can You Spare a Dime?” but this was spreading a dime pretty thin, so they threw out one brother, gave all the money to the other one, and whittled it down to “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”)"

And you can read the rest here....(through GrowABrain)

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 28, 2005

So Happy!

Yet another borrowed nephew!

R&M are pregnant! (honoured to have my painting posted on R's blog as Lelezinho's first ultrasound!)

Correction: ok, ok, it might be a niece. But I've been calling him Lelezinho even before they were considering conception ;-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

Arpad & Vieira

Vieira da Silva is probably my favourite Portuguese-born artist. There is a museum with her and Arpad Szenes' works near where I work. I sneaked there the other day on my lunch break to see a temporary photo exhibition. Special photos: portraits of artists on their studios. From Braque to Picasso, from Vieira to Miró.





I've been fascinated with Vieira and Arpad not only because of their brilliant paintings but also because of how I perceived their relationship; realizing how their respective works intertwined and by looking at photos of them together. I've seen photos dated from the 30's to the 80's. 55 years of living together and in all of the photos we can sense this marvelous cumplicity, like art was a special bond that made them inseparable companions.

As a Portuguese artist, Mario Cesariny, said: "Arpad Szenes e Vieira da Silva são a mais bela história de amor e pintura que jamais conheci" - "Arpad Szenes and Vieira da Silva are the most beautiful love and painting story I've ever known."

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 27, 2005

I've made it!

I met the Great Persky; I tried to be discrete but someone has already found me. Off with his head!

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 25, 2005

ZX Spectrum Blues

I miss my ZX Spectrum. I've been avoiding downloading the emulator because the last time I did (before having to format the disk) I spent a weekend in my pajamas playing Chucky Egg II, jumping over spiders and rats, finding milk and cocoa.

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I miss Lazy Jones (a video game using the Linking Room narrative device :-). My very first game after Pong.

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I miss Hungry Horace, that incipient, fruit eating version of Pac Man.

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I miss Auf Wiedersehen Monty, where Monty Mole goes around Europe collecting money to buy a greek island.

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I miss Daley Thompson's Decathlon (desperately pressing "O" and "P" to make the characters run).

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I miss Jet Set Willy II and its maddening, annoying background music.

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I miss Herbert's Dummy Run, a toddler looking for his parents inside a department store.

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I miss typing LOAD "" and hearing that awful sound coming from the tape recorder. I miss POKE.

( so 80's)

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 24, 2005

IKB

My very short mention to Yves Klein's patented shade of blue was too short and not that accurate, as AJ pointed out to me (handy links he sent me too). So, here goes another attempt.

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"Klein rejected the idea of representation or personal expression in painting, and became obsessed with immaterial values, beyond the visible or tactile. He began making monochrome paintings in 1947 as a way of attaining total freedom. A decade later, he developed his trademark, patented colour, International Klein Blue (IKB). He executed a series of paintings using IKB, as well as sculptures made from objects such as sponges dipped in the colour.", from the Tate.

"Once, in 1946, while still an adolescent, I was to sign my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic "realistico-imaginary" journey. That day, as I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.

Birds must be eliminated."

---Yves Klein, The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto

Posted by claudia Permalink

John Currin

Dear George "help, I'm having writer's block" B. asked me if I liked John Currin's paintings. I had no idea who this was. Googling for images of his work, I realized I had seen this painting at the Tate Modern "Nude/Action/Body" exhibition when I was in London two weeks ago.

"More recently Currin has turned to the mood and atmosphere of Flemish and Italian Renaissance paintings as the vehicle for his exploration of the foundation of cultural clichés and the desires behind them."

R. said "Strangely beautiful". I thought it was creepy.

More creepy is the fact that "Most of Currin's women are blonde; most resemble him, and this is no exception."

There. Where's my short story?

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 23, 2005

Kugelmass

"The Kugelmass Episode" is one of my favourite Woody Allen's short stories for two main reasons:

- he uses a fictional character crossover as a narrative device which is something rather common in film and tv but seldom used in literature;
- the idea of a magical machine that can transport me to the inside of a book sounds fascinating.

****

"In Woody Allen’s New Yorker short story “The Kugelmass Episode,” collected in Side Effects (Allen 1982), Kugelmass is a professor of humanities at the City College of New York who, longing for some excitement in his middle-aged life and sick of the sensible advice offered him by his analyst, hooks up with a magician named The Great Persky. Persky has invented a machine that can insert living human beings into books: the client climbs into a coffin-like box and The Great Persky throws in a book of the client’s choice, whereupon the lid is closed and the client is magically transported into the chosen book.

Kugelmass chooses [Flaubert's] Madame Bovary, and appears in Emma’s bedroom at an auspicious period in between her affairs with Leon and Rodolphe(...). They have a steamy affair, and college students all over the country wonder who this bald Jew is, kissing Emma Bovary on page 100. " --- more here

****
Emma couldn't hide her excitement at seeing him. The two spent hours together, laughing and talking about their different backgrounds. Before Kugelmass left, they made love. "My God, I'm doing it with Madame Bovary!" Kugelmass whispered to himself. "Me, who failed freshman English."

****

So, if you're reading "Alice in Wonderland" and all of a sudden there's a thin brunette wearing glasses walking around, making small talk to the Mad Hatter and taking photos, that means I found the Great Persky :-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 22, 2005

Kunst Bar

Clever online animation here: the Art Bar. In a few minutes a trip through History of Modern Art, alcoholic drinks involved.

(A Miró Menu at the Kunst Bar)

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 21, 2005

Random Thoughts & Notes

Listening to Leonard Cohen while driving this weekend. He's probably the only serious composer/songwriter who can get away with the verses:

Give me crack and anal sex/Take the only tree that's left

(The Future)

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The subversive painter Yves Klein patented this shade of blue. I hope he's dead, otherwise I'm in trouble.

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Since Ian Curtis commited suicide and you optimistically think that you're experiencing mild symptoms of SAD due to this uncommon lack of sunny days, Joy Division might not be the best choice of music to listen to while driving to work.

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Thou shalt not reshelve books in bookshops according to your own filing system.

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Just found out how I love Rooibos with lemon and ginger (perfect companion to Anna's Pepparkakor Ginger Thins).

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Can't drive in the rain without humming a Tom Waits song:

Well, these diamonds on my windshield
These tears from heaven

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I've been getting some visitors who are googling for odd stuff:

"everything to know about senegal chameleons" - I've been to Senegal and didn't see any;

"why does claudia run away from home?" - never did.

"claudia sexy web site" - thank you! :-))))

"examples of cyclical time in 100 years of solitude" - hmm. nice idea for a blog post.

"what does it mean claudia" - unfortunately, if you're named Claudia like me, you don't want to know. That's one big disappointment. You pick up one of those books about the meaning of names and every feminine name means either "beautiful", "gentle", "flower", etc. Claudia just means "the one who limps" after Claudius, the roman emperor with a leg shorter than the other.

My personal favourite:

"what do portuguese people look like?" - I'd post a photo of myself but since I've been told several times I look french that shouldn't be of any help.

UPDATE

My new personal favourite:

"claudia you are the center of my mundo" - the feeling is mutual ;-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

Mr. Mojo Risin'

When I was 13 I decided to paint my bedroom walls bright red. I hanged a huge Jim Morrison b&w poster (the young lion photo series by Joel Brodsky, see below) by my bed. I bought every biography of his life I could get my hands on - which was not that easy seeing that we’re talking about Portugal in the 80’s!

More often than I care to admit, I have been made fun of by pseudo-intellectuals for having been a Jim Morrison fan as a teenager. I know it’s a bit pathetic for a 13/14 year old girl to lust after a dead, alcoholic, drug abusing rock star but the fact is that Mr. Morrison was such a great intellectual influence in my life.

I realized this the other day, while meditating about synchronicities, and mentally mapped some of the connections(click to enlarge):

(I've been having so much fun lately drawing mind maps)

I read so many, many books during this period which in one or other way were triggered by these references. I became an obsessive reader - like a chain smoker, I couldn't stop. Then I found boys…… Just kidding, it’s hard to distract me from my reading even today ;-)

(even later, as any true morrisonite, when I visited Paris I HAD to visit his grave at Père-Lachaise. And take a look at the building where he lived –and died - Rue Beautreillis, nr 17)

And none of this would have happened if it hadn't been for my very cool parents LP collection (Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Queen, The Doors, AC/DC, Cream,Yes, Moody Blues, Procol Harum, Leo Ferré, Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg and many, many more).

*****

synchronicities, coincidences, etc. I went to see "The Constant Gardener" yesterday (fabulous movie). There was an intermission and as I was deep in thought about the brevity of life, how petty my own problems are compared to my other fellow human beings who are striving to survive, how my hapiness is sheer luck and all the thoughts one has on a particular sentimentally vulnerable day, when I suddenly realize that the theatre's background music is "L.A. Woman" by the Doors ;-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 20, 2005

"But there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as this. He had the key, and no one else could enter it. Beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean. What did it matter? No one could see it. He himself would not see it.

Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? He kept his youth-- that was enough.

Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow's feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible.

The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are.

There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood. The picture had to be concealed. There was no help for it."

--Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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"But at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret; for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from canvas merely, even to regard the countenance of his wife.

And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sate beside him.

And when many weeks bad passed, and but little remained to do, save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame within the socket of the lamp.

And then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and, for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, 'This is indeed Life itself!' turned suddenly to regard his beloved:–She was dead!"

-- Edgar Allan Poe, The Oval Portrait

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Posted by claudia Permalink

November 19, 2005

Scopophilia

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 16, 2005

Britishness

Random memories from last weekend's trip to London to attend my very first anglican christening.

++-++

Lunch at Upton House just before the christening. Looking at the map of the gardens, I see that number 8 is a "Ha-Ha". Neither the Brit nor the American knew what this was and there was no time to check it out...so the Portuguese had to google it up.

"A haha or ha-ha was a variety of sunken border used in formal European gardens and parks of the 18th and 19th centuries. They typically consisted of a garden wall set in a trench or dry moat, with the top of the wall at the garden's ground level. This would prevent cattle or unexpected guests from entering the garden without disrupting the sightlines." from the Wikipedia

(stolen from wordsmith)

"You will hurt yourself, Miss Bertram," she cried, "you will certainly hurt yourself against those spikes - you will tear your gown - you will be in danger of slipping into the ha-ha." - Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Obviously, the first question that comes to mind is how is a "ha-ha" related to Pope's aesthetic principles...:-)

++--++

Paper poppies pinned to jackets - it was remembrance day.

++---++

Having fun with britishisms: Got to go to the loo and take off my knickers or Got to go to the bathroom and take off my panties?

++----++

Always a nice topic of conversation:

"Oh, you're Portuguese? I once was in Portugal on holidays and had my appendix removed there."

And after someone said that the same story had been told to a spaniard:

"Well, it's all Iberia, isn't it?"

(actually, Spain has taken over the word Iberia; no Portuguese actually thinks of him/herself as an inhabitant of Iberia)

++----++

Ruth running away once the Vicar said that she would be cleansed of all sin by baptism. Ruth crying and screaming before being taken to the stoup by her godmother and staying put, completely stunned, once the freezing holy water hit her head.

Such a great church in the middle of nowhere. Well, not nowhere but somewhere in Burton Dassett, Warwickshire.

++----++

Feeling back in India while having dinner at the Red Fort.

++----++

Mandatory visit to Tate Modern. Big Rousseau Jungle paintings exhibition.

"He couldn't paint, could he? These are awful."

" What do you mean? Apollinaire praised him!"

" Well, Apollinaire was a big joker, wasn't he?"

++----++

Drooling over books by Foucault and Barthes at the Tate Bookshop.

"You really like theory don't you?"

++----++

Perfect: Sex & Books. What a great idea ;-)
(Charing Cross Road)

++----++

Jan (the proud American grandfather named after the polish politician and pianist Jan Paderewsky) convincing me how the Portuguese used Chinese maps copied by a Venetian to go on their seafaring explorations. (note to self: got to buy 1421)

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 14, 2005

personal map

jim morrison

Posted by claudia Permalink

Hate

As r. says, "You're full of hates!".

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 11, 2005

Time gifts

"Do you remember the story about the astronomer?" Without turning around she pointed her thumb to the right to one of the three paintings on the wall. "If it hadn't been for his nighttime visit beore the execution, Lazar would have happily gone to the stake, convinced of how correct, even exalted, his sacrifice would be."
"But it was a mistake. Visiting the future showed him that his sacrifice had no meaning."
"Do you think that people should be freed from their mistakes? Even when it ends up destroying their happiness?"
"Happiness based on illusion, deception?"
"And what happiness isn't?"
He did not know how to reply at first. He felt like a chess player whose opponent had made what seems like a quiet move, but with many traps hidden behind it.
"What is the meaning of happiness if it entails the loss of a life?" he asked at last, in a muffled voice.
"And what is the meaning of life without happiness? That is the impossible choice Lazar was forced to make. With the best intentions. Everything would have been much simpler if he had not seen the future."

--- Time Gifts, Zoran Zivkovic

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 10, 2005

Plagiarism :-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 09, 2005

Lampedusa

"On one occasion, he did not move for four hours, the time it took him to read a large novel by Balzac, from start to finish. Then he would undertake his long tour of the bookshops, after which he would go to another café, where he would sit but not mix with a few acquaintances of his with semi-intellectual pretensions. He would listen to "their nonsense" and hardly say a word, and then, after all these marathon sittings and feeble peregrinations, return home on the bus. He is always described as walking wearily along, looking very distinguished, but with a somewhat careless gait, his eyes alert, holding in his hand a leather bag crammed with the books and cakes and biscuits on which he would have to survive until evening, since lunch was never served at home. He carried that famous bag with great nonchalance, quite unconcerned that volumes of Proust were sitting cheek by jowl with titbits and even courgettes. Apparently the bag always contained more books than were strictly necessary, as if it were the luggage of a reader setting off on a long journey, who was afraid he might run out of reading matter while away."

Javier Marias on Giovanni Tomasi di Lampedusa (what a sexy name! - to be honest, it was the only reason I ever started reading Il Gattopardo); at the ThreePenny review.

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 08, 2005

Tesserae

The nerdiest birthday gift ever: roman numeral dice.

(sort of an excuse to post this nerd joke)

----

He was so upset that he went to a bar near his house for a drink to settle his nerves.

"What'll it be?" asked the bartender.

"A martinus," said the latin teacher.

"Don't you mean martini?"

"If I wanted more than one I'd ask for more than one."

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 07, 2005

My thighs hurt like hell

Another R&A guided hike. This time we walked (and climbed steep, rocky hills) from Cabo Espichel to Sesimbra. A great opportunity to go to some small, pretty beaches which are usually only accessible by boat.

"The Sea is Water's exaggerated way of not being shy." - Gonçalo M. Tavares in A perna esquerda de Paris

(author exchange with Sunday Morning and founding out that Pedro is blogging too)

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 04, 2005

Avoir l'apprenti dans le Soleil

To have the apprentice in the Sun, Duchamp, 1914

Or how to make the viewer uncomfortable wit this total incoherence between the pictorial and the verbal image. The absence of the usual complementarity between image and written word leaves us perplex. The title, or signifier of meaning, and the object, the signified meaning, do not produce a sign, a way to understand.

Duchamp later explained that "To have the apprentice in the Sun" is the caption of a drawing that represents an ethical cyclist climbing a hill which is reduced to a line". He also said that art shouldn't just be visual. It should also increase or desire to think and understand. It carries us to the land of metaphors.

Posted by claudia Permalink

Note to Self

Stress is your enemy. Stress is your enemy. Stress makes you want to murder your drawing classes colleagues and teachers for stating the obvious during one hour and a half. Stating the obvious in a painful, needlessly detailed way while I'm tripping on my own adrenaline, on the edge of the seat, refraining myself from shouting "get on with it!". I should have signed up for something more physically demanding. How can anyone take one hour and a half to go through a list of drawing material consisting of ten items as complex as "25 sheets of A4 paper"? Have I mentioned how hate when people state the obvious? *take a deep breath*

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 03, 2005

The Center

Woodcut from William Cuningham The cosmographical glasse, 1559 -- Copyright Adam McLean 1997-2004, This image is taken from the alchemy web site www.levity.com/alchemy

"This illustration from William Cuningham's The Cosmographical Glasse (1559) represents Ptolemy's conception of the universe. Atlas, dressed like an ancient king, bears on his shoulders an armillary sphere representing the universe. In the center of the sphere is earth, made up of the elements of earth and water. Surrounding the earth are two more elemental spheres, for air and for fire. Other bands represent the spheres of the planets, the firmament of fixed stars, the crystalline sphere, the primum mobile, and the signs of the zodiac. Below Atlas are lines on cosmological themes from Virgil's Aeneid." ----taken from world treasures of the Library of Congress

I've always been so much fond of the Ptolemaic conception of the Universe. And it is accurate in conceptual terms if not scientific: the Earth is currently the center of my Universe! :-)

Posted by claudia Permalink

November 02, 2005

It sounds just perfect

 

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

 

There. I'm feeling nepheloid. Figure that out.

 

 

Posted by claudia Permalink

Conversation inside a car - closed windows

C: I've read this silly theory on the internet the other day that explains why yawning is contagious: you yawn to equalize the pressure on your eardrums. The air you expel while yawning unbalances other people's ear pressures, so they too must yawn.

(pause) 

Lunatic at the wheel: Does that mean that if I pass gas right now you'll yawn? 

 

 

Posted by claudia Permalink

October 31, 2005

Posted under protest

Ok! Ok! There! I posted it! Get off my back!

(AP is trying to turn my blog into his online portfolio)

Posted by claudia Permalink

Memoraphilia

"Simonides was engaged to recite a poem at a banquet, given by one of his patrons, and after doing so the room fell in, burying all in its debris, and disfiguring the bodies so as to render identification impossible. Simonides, however, had noted the position each guest had occupied, and was thus able to point out the remains of each. Cicero and Quintilian both refer to his system and advocate its use; and we may add that it is the basis of most modern methods. Simonides found that to fix a number of places in the mind in a certain order was a great help to the natural faculty. His plan was to form in the mind a building which was divided and subdivided into distinct parts arranged in a certain order. The order of these parts were to be thoroughly learnt. As many words as there were parts were then symbolised by the images of living creatures, and when a number of things were to be committed to memory in certain order, mental images representing them were to be placed regularly in the several parts of the building.."

+++++++++++++

"The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci went to China in 1582 and spent the remaining 32 years of his life there.
In 1596, Ricci wrote A Treatise on Mnemonics, in Chinese, for the governor of Jiangxi Province. In it he recreated the medieval European idea of a memory palace - an edifice you build in your mind and furnish with mnemonic devices. Recollection is a process of walking through the rooms and associating information with their contents. Those contents must be distinct and dramatic."

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Johannes Romberch, Congestorium artificiosae memeoriae, 1533

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Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, 1619

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Giulio Camillo, the Theatre of Memory

"Various accounts describe the structure as a building which would allow one or two individuals at a time within its interior. The insides were inscribed with a variety of images, figures, and ornaments. It was full of little boxes arranged in various orders and grades. Upon entering the Theater, the spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero as he stands on a stage looking out towards the auditorium where the images are placed among seven pillars or grades. Each grade representing the expanding history of divine thought. In the first grade there were the 'seven essential measures' depicted by the 'seven known planets' which were the First Causes of creation and from which all things depended. The highest grade of the Theatre was the seventh level, which was assigned to all the arts, 'both noble and vile,' and is represented by Prometheus who stole the technology of fire from the gods."

+++++++++++++

"Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered justice in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventory of mnemotechny; Metrodorus, who practised the art of repeating faithfully what he heard once. With evident good faith Funes marvelled that such things should be considered marvellous. He told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been - like any Christian - blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything - almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible."

-- Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious

+++++++++++++

"Memory is, therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember."

-- Aristotle, On Memory and Reminiscence

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+++++++++++++

"One of the things for which I am still grateful is the way in which we were taught to memorize. Most Tibetans have good memories, but we who were training to be medical monks had to know the names and exact descriptions of a very large number of herbs, as well as knowing how they could be combined and used. We had to know much about astrology, and be able to recite the whole of our sacred books. A method of memory training had been evolved throughout the centuries. We imagined that we were in a room lined with thousands and thousands of drawers. Each drawer was clearly labelled, and the writing on all the labels could be read with ease from where we stood. Every fact we were told had to be classified, and we were instructed to imagine that we opened the appropriate drawer and put the fact inside. We had to visualize it very clearly as we did it, visualize the "fact" and the exact location of the "drawer". With little practice it was amazingly easy to - in imagination - enter the room, open the correct drawer, and extract the fact required as well as all related facts."

-- Lobsang Rampa, The third eye

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An excerpt of Proust and his madeleine here.

"But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."

-- Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu

"Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth."

-- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

Posted by claudia Permalink

October 28, 2005

A prophylactic post

It struck me the other day that there are awkward names for condom brands (yes, weird topic on which to waste my time but I am addicted to language in general).

It's funny how we get so used to or familiar with some brand names that most times we won't think about the real meaning of the word or what does it evoke.

+++++++++++++++++

Trojan from the USA

My own free association: Trojan ----> Trojan Horse.

Trojan horse: a way to gain malicious access; (from the wooden horse where the greeks hid to conquer Troy to the computer programs that perform undesired functions)

Hmm. It sounds like it's hiding an unpleasant surprise. Not the least appealing.

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Durex from the UK

I personally associate it with the latin phrase "Dura lex, sed lex" - "The law is tough but it's the law". But the company says that "The Durex brand name was derived from the three principal attributes of the product – Durability, Reliability and Excellence." Durability? In most cases it really doesn't need to be THAT durable and it's not like it will be reused or anything ;-)))

I don't know, it just seems to be the appropriate condom brand for lawyers :-)

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Control from Italy

Control: to adjust to a requirement; regulate; to hold in restraint; check.

I understand the rationale behind that one. But shouldn't sex be about losing control? You go to the chemist and ask "I need control"??? How repressed does that sound?

+++++++++++++++++

But then again Durex does have some fun ads that make me forget how judicial it sounds:

Posted by claudia Permalink

October 27, 2005

Feeling like a foreigner

On the last post before my holidays I quoted Chesterton:

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."

So were I a foreigner and I would probably blog about:

- Portugal's banking system shuts down at 5am. Never try to pay anything with your VISA card at that hour: that's when they're "restarting the servers" :-))) Even the ATM's: "For technical reasons you are not allowed to withdraw more than 25 Euros"!!!

- A musical time warp: in every hotel, restaurant or shop it's playing music from the 80's. Really. Everywhere. Alphaville rules.

- Only a Portuguese person will feel it's natural that an old woman's gigantic panties are hanging outside a window on the ground floor; in the middle of a street in the Castle district in Lisboa;

- Will have to give this another thought: "Portuguese people like to look at problems from different angles, appreciate the exploring of possibilities but never really come up with a solution." - which could explain the high level of hours spent in meetings in every company or public institution in this country with little results;

Other random thoughts not really in any way related to Portugal but holidays-induced:

- Why does it take me no more than 5 minutes to check in at the airport counter but every other passenger ahead of me takes... forever? (e.g. people who chat God-knows-what-about with the assistant for ages or those who, carrying two carts with 37.987 bags, look very surprised when they're told they've got to pay for having exceeded the luggage weight limit)

- Another one I have to spare a bit of time to think about: the relationship between memory and olfact. There are some feelings that can be "felt" again by smelling something that evokes a memory. It's not that the smell brings back only the memory of the feeling but also the feeling itself. Like Proust's madeleine.

Posted by claudia Permalink

Life Instructions

ExperimentaDesign, Lisboa

Sounds good to me. But I suppose you should just be happy just by following the instructions and not really strive.

Posted by claudia Permalink

October 26, 2005

Lately, I've been...(among many other things)

shouting numbers in german...

++++

pretending to be a tourist in my own Lisboa and feeling at home in Madrid...

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completely offline/unreachable...

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taking naps...

++++

amused by Smullyan's "5000 bc and Other Philosophical Fantasies" (what a great birthday present from R!)...

"Saul Gorn once told me his theory of asceticism :"It is well known that the longer one postpones a pleasure, the greater the pleasure is when one finally gets it. Therefore, if one postpones it forever, the pleasure should be infinite."

:-))

++++

finding out about Remedios Varo eerie paintings at Reina Sofia's bookshop...

++++

fantasizing about buying every book at Librería La Central in Atocha...

++++

communicating with an otter...

++++

finding secret doors at Quinta da Regaleira...

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laughing at Hugo & Nicole's purple outfit dancing and singing on the Eurovision Song Contest...

++++

singing silly portuguese cartoon songs...

++++

trying to understand spanish slang/smut on the El País classified ads while sitting on a bench in Parque Del Retiro...

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Hah. In short, great holidays.

++++

and more recently...

irritated by an HR coworker who insisted that I should have had my cellphone on during my holidays because she had something very urgent to tell me. Since that urgent call was not about having been fired or given a raise, it was obviously not that important....

(which makes me want to post about the "cellphone induced social high availability syndrome" and how everyone assumes that just because you own one or because it is on, you MUST take all the calls no matter where you are or what you're doing.)

Maybe later.

Posted by claudia Permalink

October 14, 2005

Paseo & Tapeo

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land." - G. K. Chesterton

I'll be back (can't write this without hearing Schwarzenegger saying it in my head; damn it!).

Posted by claudia Permalink

October 13, 2005

Advertising?

Gomes Freire, Lisboa

I have no idea what this is. There's an art gallery across the street...I wonder.

+++++

Addendum: Miguel tells me this is an art project from a visual art school - Maumaus.

Posted by claudia Permalink

October 12, 2005

Cold feet

I definitely need one of these...before the winter comes.

Design by Maria Vinka for IKEA

Posted by claudia Permalink

Maria Cecília Marra

I realized why I liked Manuel Mujica Lainez drawings (see this post) so much. They remind me vaguely of some Brazilian books of my childhood which were beautifully illustrated by Maria Cecília Marra (who, according to my googling, is now the art director of a magazine).

One of my favourites was Ruth Rocha's Romeo and Juliet story where the characters were butterflies.

Posted by claudia Permalink

October 11, 2005

Slowness, Milan Kundera

(one of my favourite books ever)

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There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics, this takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

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The feeling of being elect is present, for instance, at every love relation. For love, is by definition, an unmerited gift: being loved without merit is the proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you are intelligent, you are decent, because you don't chase women, because you do the dishes then I'm disappointed. Such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer is to hear: I'm crazy about you even though you're not intelligent nor decent, even though you're a liar, an egotist, a bastard.

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...the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off both from the past and the future: he is wrenched from the continuity of time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy. In this state he is unaware of his age, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

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Reality

I've been fascinated by this grafitti for a while; then I started reading Paul Watzlawick's "How real is real?" and there was a very similar sentence in the preface.

Campo Mártires da Pátria, Lisboa

"The worst illusion is to think there is only one reality."

Posted by claudia Permalink

October 10, 2005

Hopping

pointingit - Finding architecture with Google Earth.

Backwards - a Google Mirror, literally.

Muppets take over Google - The Swedish Chef was one of my favorites. Bork, Bork, Bork.

Living is easy with your eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see - Beatles' Strawberry Fields Original Video (love them, one of these days will have to post a photo of my mother, as a teenager, wearing a Beatles hairdo ;-)

I love me - the shower curtain at the Triton in San Francisco!

Walking project - Desire lines are those well-worn ribbons of dirt that you see cutting across a patch of grass, often with nearby sidewalks — particularly those that offer a less direct route — ignored. In winter, desire lines appear spontaneously as tramped down paths in the snow. I love that these paths are never perfectly straight. Instead, like a river, they meander this way and that, as if to prove that desire itself isn't linear and (literally, in this case) straightforward. - wordspy.com

Map of the Kingdom of Love from Cartographical Curiosities (Land der Lüste sounds promising)


Le Cool Magazine - What's happening in Madrid, Barcelona, Lisboa?

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Green

ExperimentaDesign's Lounging Space, Sta. Catarina, Lisboa

A reflection on a Chinatown ad. San Francisco.

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Short Anthology of Erotic Mirrors

The Chevalier stops, dazzled, at the door: the mirrors covering all the walls multiply their reflections in such a way that suddenly an endless procession of couples are embracing all around them. (Slowness, Kundera)

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Eugenie: (lies down) How comfortable I am in this haven! But why, my friends, have you put up all these mirrors?
Saint-Ange: There is a great sensual excitement in seeing lewdness multiplied around oneself in an infinite variety of positions. All parts of the body are exposed simultaneously, and perceiving the splendid combination of images adds enormously to one's pleasure. (Philosophy in the Bedroom, Marquis de Sade)

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He was in a bedroom with a canopied bed on a dais. There were furs on the floor and vaporous white curtains at the windows and mirrors, more mirrors. He was glad that he could bear these repetitions of himself, infinite reproductions of a handsome man, to whom the mystery of the situation had given a glow of expectation and alertness he had never known.
There were mirrors all around them, repeating the image of the woman lying there, her dress fallen off her breasts, her beautiful naked feet hanging over the bed, her legs slightly parted under her dress. (Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin)

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Each home elicited a specific way of looking at it. In Éric's apartment the bed was the nerve center in a kaleidoscopic arrangement of camera lenses, screens and mirrors. (The sexual life of Catherine M., Catherine Millet)

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...she was seated on this chair, naked, and they kept her either from crossing her legs or bringing them together.
And since the wall in front of her was covered from floor to ceiling with a large mirror which was unbroken by any shelving, she could see herself, thus open, each time her gaze strayed to the mirror. (The story of O, Pauline Réage)

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I had such a good image to go with these excerpts...but this is a respectable blog after all ;-)

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October 08, 2005

Intermission

"Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."
-Miriam Beard

"There is a third dimension to traveling, the longing for what is beyond."

Jan Myrdal

"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

Robert Louis Stevenson

"Traveling through the world produces a marvelous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose. This great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves. There are so many different tempers, so many different points of view, judgments, opinions, laws and customs to teach us to judge wisely on our own, and to teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness."
silvertoes

Michel de Montaigne

"Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Traveling is not just seeing the new; it is also leaving behind. Not just opening doors; also closing them behind you, never to return. But the place you have left forever is always there for you to see whenever you shut your eyes."

Jan Myrdal

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."

G. K. Chesterton

"We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing."

Henry David Thoreau

I'll be back. (Shit. Why can't I write this without thinking of Schwarzenegger???) :-)

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October 07, 2005

XXX

(from Story People, by Brian Andreas)

-----

"Only to certain women at a certain age is it given to put language into their attitude. Is it joy or is it sorrow that teaches a woman of thirty the secret of that eloquence of carriage, so that she must always remain an enigma which each interprets by the aid of his hopes, desires, or theories?" - Balzac, A Woman of Thirty

Marilyn had no idea what she was singing about. Books are a girl's best friends.

-----

(yes, I'm turning 30 years old today :-)

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October 06, 2005

They do it with mirrors

A (very) pregnant mother, a smiling (as usual) father and a couple of (very) 70's looking friends. 1975, a funfair.

One of those photos that sticked to my memory. And that would made me put my head in the middle of the open mirror-covered wardrobe doors to see myself reflected a hundred times. I thought I might just put it online so that I can take a look at it any time I miss it.

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Meaning

"Either we remember the words but their meaning remains obscure; or we discover their meaning when we forget the words."

loosely translated from Gilles Deleuze's remark on Klossowski's "Le Baphomet".

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Deleuze as created by Toogle (fun, fun, fun)

"Toogle is a Text version of Googles Image Search. Currently it creates images out of the very term that was used to fetch those images, later we will endeavour to create images out of the search terms entered by users past and present. But for now please, go play."

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October 04, 2005

Natural Habitat

bookshop, Lisboa

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Competition

Mr. Valéry did not like to compete.

Of any competition he would say that from the first to the last, any place was a bad place to finish.

And he would wonder:

- To win a competition from others or to lose a competition for others; what's the point!?
- I prefer to be vice-last or sub-last - he said, ironically.

And explained:

- A competition is fair only if all competitors start on equal conditions. But such a situation does not exist, it's a known fact. And if all were equal, how could one be better than the other? In a competition people finish as they started - concluded Mr. Valéry.

And Mr. Valéry added:

- I would like to see a 100 meters race where each track would finish in a different point.

- Imagine four 100 meters tracks like this ... (and he would draw)

-... in this way - continued Mr. Valéry - when finishing the competition, each athlete would better understand what was waiting for him on the following day. Even if he had won the race he would end it alone, which is a small life lesson.

And after this somewhat ambiguous statement, Mr. Valéry continued his daily stroll, with his slightly crooked body, the hat stuck in his head, and alone, completely alone, as always.

"O sr. Valéry", Caminho, 2002

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Gonçalo M. Tavares is one of my favourite Portuguese contemporary writers. Highly exportabe but I doubt it if he has been published abroad.

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Portuguese version down here.

More..."Competition"

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I dream of the day when everyone will wear wigs

I don't know why, but I keep taking philosophy books to read at the hairdresser.

Well, I'm lying, I do know why. Going to the hairdresser is a painful experience for me. It's the most wasted of times. Making small talk about hairdos or shampoos is the ultimate torture. And I do feel guilty for wasting my time with frivolous matters so I always take a highbrow book with me. A Linus & the blanket kind of thing.

---

"We're running a bit late, do you mind waiting?"
C: "No that's all right. Where can I sit to read while I wait?"
"Oh, you can sit here; wait, I'll bring you some magazines."
And she starts handing me gossip magazines, "women's magazines" - whatever that means-, while I reach for my purse and take out William James' essays on pragmatism.

---

I'm not faithful to any salon in particular which means that I usually don't make an appointment and get my hair cut by the only available hairdresser.
"Have you got any preference on the hairdresser?"
C:"No."
"Let me see who's available..."
It turns out the only available hairdresser is invariably a trainee or the woman/man with the most extravagant haircut in the room. Or both at the same time.
"X will cut your hair."
C:"OK", while gasping at the sight of a woman with a side-shaved head and a rainbow colored Mohawk.

-----

Random weird hairdressing memories:

The Tom Cruise in "Cocktail", hairdresser version: a woman juggling with the hairdryer. Impressive. And scary.

*

The hairdresser who would knock my head to make me shift it to the position she wanted to.

*

"Why don't you dye your hair? Men find blond women much more attractive."
C(sarcastically):"Sure, that would look lovely with my black eyebrows..."
"Oh, we would dye them too."
C:"OK, let's stop it here."

*

"I once cut a hair of a man who hadn't part of his skull due to an accident. It was really weird, I could feel his brain, it was like a sponge or something."

*

The woman who was wearing these eyeglasses with the thickest lenses I have ever seen. She takes them off before starting to cut my hair.

*

High-pitched voice, too much enthusiasm: "So, are we doing something special today? Let's make you look pretty for the boyfriend?"

*

"Here, take a look at this hairstyling magazine...I think this haircut would suit you." - (the most awful haircut, beautiful model who would look beautiful even if she was bald) - "When we finish, you'll see. I'll make you look like that."
C: "Are you a plastic surgeon then?"

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October 03, 2005

Time smiles in my hand

Is it because I'm turning 30 soon - and I'm strangely feeling very good about it - or is this just the perfect verse?

Somewhere on the Promenade by the Piers, San Francisco

-----

Waking in the morning
Time smiles in my hand.
This dawn
Lasts all day.

Deena Metzger

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Hiking Sunday

I had the chance of practising two of my three favorite aerobic activities ;-) this past Sunday: Walking and Laughing.

I went hiking in Sintra with a group of fun people; after a somewhat stressing week at work, there's nothing like physical exhaustion (not quite, but it was kind of a long hike) to rebalance the energies.

I met Sunday Morning; great photos, V! And I met Mônica who is the sweetest girl!

(thanks to Ana and Ricardo for all the planning and guiding!)

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September 30, 2005

Brazilian Visual Poetry

Here is the site for the online Brazilian Visual Poetry Exhibition.

This one is by Bené Fonteles (it says "discover the other"):

Omar Khouri ("Vagina/Ioni among the vaginas or Sapho and the Girls"):

Paulo Miranda ("a POE m"):

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September 29, 2005

Torel

An umbrella-like iron structure above a bench at the Jardim do Torel, Lisboa.

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Stichomancy

I just recently found out there's a name for something I do almost since I learned to read.

"Stichomancy or Bibliomancy is a form of divination that seeks to know the future by randomly selecting a passage from a book, frequently a sacred text. The most common procedure involves placing the book on its spine, and with eyes closed, allowing the book to fall open to a random page. Then, with the eyes still closed place a finger on the open page and read the passage indicated."

Not that I do this to "predict the future". I use this method just like I use my I Ching cards: as an aid for meditation. It's a very useful exercise in imagination and self-analysis to try to come up with an explanation that links the passage that I just read with the problem/doubt that is troubling me.

Well, I just felt like sharing this after I got Salman Rushdie's newest book "Shalimar the Clown" yesterday. Which I used for my very particular variation of stichomancy:

"And memory was not madness was it, not even when the remembered past piled up so high inside you that you feared the files of your yesterdays would become visible in the whites of your eyes. "

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September 28, 2005

The Theologian & the Philosopher

"A philosopher," said the theologian, "is like a blind man in a darkened room looking for a black cat that isn't there."

"That's right," the philosopher replied, "and if he were a theologian, he'd find it."

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Aspen Magazine

Aspen Magazine is online!

Aspen was a multimedia magazine of the arts published by Phyllis Johnson from 1965 to 1971. Each issue came in a customized box filled with booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards — one issue even included a spool of Super-8 movie film.

Found at Aspen#3:

VAROOM by Roy Lichtenstein

One of the things that interests me is solidifying an action, like an explosion— something that is ephemeral— formalizing or symbolizing it in concrete terms.

Another interest is the visual representation of sound— such as "Varoom! !" Some call it "audio-scription."

Explosions give me a perfect opportunity to do a completely abstract painting which seems, on the surface to he realistic.

— Lichtenstein

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15

Two magic squares found in Lisboa in one week. How odd.

Grafitti, Sra. do Monte, Lisboa

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September 27, 2005

Post Secrets

(Through BV who sent me this great link.)

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September 26, 2005

Parque

Parque Subway station, Lisboa

My favourite subway station in Lisboa is an enigmatic cave of walls filled with maps, mathematical and astronomical references, symbols, philosophical and literary quotations...the main theme being the Portuguese seafaring explorations.

(Mare Incognitum - The Unknown Sea)

(Ptolemy's Theory)

"Ptolemy formulated a geocentric model of the solar system which remained the generally accepted model in the Western and Arab worlds until it was superseded by the heliocentric solar system of Copernicus." more on Wikipedia

("I don't evolve, I travel" - Fernando Pessoa)

(Dürer's magical square)

"The order-4 magic square in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholia I is believed to be the first seen in European art. It is very similar to Yang Hui's square, which was created in China about 250 years before Dürer's times. The sum 34 can be found in the rows, columns, diagonals, each of the quadrants, the center four squares, the corner squares, the four outer numbers clockwise from the corners (3+8+14+9) and likewise the four counter-clockwise (the locations of four queens in the two solutions of the 4 queens puzzle), the two sets of four symmetrical numbers (2+8+9+15 and 3+5+12+14) and the sum of the middle two entries of the two outer columns and rows (e.g. 5+9+8+12), as well as several kite-shaped quartets, e.g. 3+5+11+15; the two numbers in the middle of the bottom row give the date of the engraving: 1514." - from Wikipedia

(Segredo - Secret)

"The Ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a snake or dragon swallowing its tail, constantly creating itself and forming a circle. It is associated with alchemy, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism. It represents the cyclical nature of things, eternal return, and other things perceived as cycles that begin anew as soon as they end.
In alchemy, the ouroboros symbolises the circular nature of the alchemist's opus which unites the opposites: the conscious and unconscious mind.
Christians adopted the Ouroboros as a symbol of the limited confines of this world (that there is an "outside" being implied by the demarcation of an inside), and the self-consuming transitory nature of a mere this-worldly existence" - more on Wikipedia.

(Zacuto's astronomical tables)

"Abraham Zacuto perfected the Astrolabe, which only then became an instrument of precision, and he was the author of the highly accurate astronomical tables that were used by ship captains to determine the position of their portuguese caravel in high seas, through calculations on data acquired with an Astrolabe. His contributions were undoubtedly valuable in saving the lives of portuguese seamen, and allowing them to reach Brazil and India."- more on the Wikipedia

(L'éthique est être à la hauteur de la situation/ Ethics is to be up to the situation - Gilles Deleuze)

-----

(a Françoise Schein project: "It was through working on the physical mapping of cities that I discovered how human rights principles were a geological bed on which societies had transformed into permanent, physical democracies: that is, the conception, expression and recognition of human rights was an integral component in defining the physical form that cities, societies, and communities ultimately took. From that moment on, I was determined to incorporate written expressions of fundamental human rights, such as the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, into my projects; thus emerged the urban inscription project that is the backbone work of Inscrire today. By inscribing this and other fundamental expressions of the rights of man in artworks throughout the world, we leave behind indelible reminders to all who see them.")

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September 23, 2005

Linguistic Jokes

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class.

"In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

*****

Dyslexics of the world untie.

*****

A team of archaeologists was excavating in Israel when they came upon a cave. Written across the wall of the cave were the following symbols: a woman, a donkey, a shovel, a fish, and the Star of David.

They decided that this was a unique find, and that the writings were at least three thousand years old. They chopped out the pieces of stone and had them brought to the museum, where archaeologists from all over the world came to study the ancient symbols. After months of conferences to discuss the meaning of the markings, they held a huge meeting.

The president of the scholarly society stood up and pointed at the first drawing and said: "This looks like a woman. We can judge that the race was family-oriented and held women in high esteem. You can also tell they were intelligent, as the next symbol resembles a donkey, so they were smart enough to have animals help them till the soil. The next drawing looks like a shovel of some sort, which means they even had tools to help them. Even further proof of their high intelligence is the fish, which means that if a famine hit the earth, they would take to the sea for food. The last symbol appears to be the Star of David, which means they were evidently Hebrews." The audience applauded enthusiastically.

Then a little old man stood up in the back of the room and said: "Idiots! Hebrews read from right to left. It says: 'Holy Mackerel, dig the ass on that woman!'"

*****

And many more here.

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HTTPanties

Panties for sale over at ThinkGeek.com

Why on earth don't they sell:

- 503 Service Unavailable
- 402 Payment Required
- 303 See Other

????

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September 22, 2005

Casino

Estoril, Portugal

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September 21, 2005

Ophelia

Millais

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

Hamlet, Shakespeare

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The Pirate Shop

There's a Pirate Shop on Valencia St., San francisco. No, really. They sell eye patches, fake glass eyes, pirate hats, pirate shirts. Books.

There's also a lard bucket.

Of course they also hold writing workshops and promote young unknown authors but that's not the fun part :-)

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September 20, 2005

Ripley's Believe it or Not!

As a kid, I was a big fan of the "Ripley's Believe it or not!" TV Show hosted by Jack Palance.

So I HAD to go to the "Ripley's Believe it or not!" museum in San Francisco. There isn't much to see there apart from some photos of odd people and other curiosities.

But I do like the idea of Ripley roaming around the world looking for the odd and the unthinkable. A quest for strangeness, for anything or anyone that is different or unimaginable. Isn't that what travelling is all about, after all?

(the life size kaleidoscope)

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September 19, 2005

The Semantics of Emotions

"Saudade is a Portuguese word generally considered one of the hardest words to translate.

In his book In Portugal of 1912, A.F.G Bell writes: The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."

Fado and Saudade are two key and intertwined ideas in Portuguese culture, "Fado" meaning "Fate" or "Destiny". It is, in part, the recognition of this unassailable determinism which compels the resigned yearning of Saudade, a bittersweet, existential yearning and hopefulness towards something over which one has no control."

From Wikipedia which has a great article for Saudade.

Saudade Street near the Castle, Lisboa

I've always been fascinated by the interface between language and reality. How can one be sure that translating a word that conveys a feeling into a foreign language will actually express something we believe to be an abstract universal concept? Are emotions really universal or culturally formed?

“Anyone who has attempted to define a word precisely knows that this is an extremely difficult matter, involving intricate and complex properties. Ordinary dictionary definitions do not come close to characterising the meaning of words.” - Chomsky

"Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said at all can be said clearly. But not everything that can be thought can be said." - Wittgenstein

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Having said that, I already feel excused for the translation of this poem by lobalpha which will be the crappiest one on this blog to this date. And I'm not translating the word Saudade...just because I don't know how.

Fado da Saudade Quero falar-te da Saudade Este fado português Que há muito não lembrava Sinto falta dos momentos Aqueles que ainda não partilhámos Sinto falta do teu cheiro Aquele que não tive tempo de reter Sinto falta do teu toque O teu beijo A minha mão passeando em ti Tenho Saudade Saudade que não conheces Onde estás não existe Aqui, tenho-a comigo desde que partiste Um abraço fugido Um beijo esquecido E eu aqui Neste fado da saudade que te guardo

Fado da Saudade I want to tell you about Saudade This portuguese fate That I hadn't felt in a while I miss the moments Those moments we haven't shared yet I miss your smell The smell I haven't had enough time to retain I miss your touch Your kiss My hand strolling along your body I feel Saudade Saudade which you don't understand Where you are, Saudade doesn't exist But over here, it's with me since you left A quick hug A forgotten kiss And here I am In this fate of Saudade which is my fate because of you

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Listen to contemporary Fado here and here.

The classic Fado: Amalia.

"Fado is a traditional song styling from Portugal, rising out of Lisbon's lower classes in much the same way that rembetica (urban Greece) and jazz (urban America) did. The genre's name has usually been translated as "fate" but the real meaning is as untranslatable as "saudade", the phrase frequently used to describe fado's emotional core, a mournful, fatalistic sound often crafted around lyrics radiating a resigned despair." - conscious choice

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Yet another self-centered blog post

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September 18, 2005

No Comment

The commenting feature on this blog hasn't been working for a long time now (several spam incidents have been affecting weblog.com.pt) and I have better things to do than to rebuild the files of this damned thing every day.

Now I'll just shut off commenting for good so that every visitor's email message won't start with "Commenting isn't working, I'm writing to let you know blah, blah.."

Email address on your right. Use it with parsimony.

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How Portugal time travelled 50 years back on one weekend

I went to the opening of the Gay & Lesbian Film Festival in Lisboa, on of the many LGBT events going on here at the moment. It should be a sign of the modern times of a otherwise conservative country but...

At the same time a bunch of pathetic people who founded a pathetic little fascist party organized a public demonstration against homosexuality. Whatever this means. The horror is that it was authorized by the public authorities. And so I'm left with this mixed feeling: should I just emigrate in disgust and disappointment or stay and do something about it? Without abandoning completely the idea of moving away, I'm doing something about it:

(image stolen from MVA)

Here is the link for the online petition for the approval of same sex marriage in Portugal.

(and now I patiently wait for the emails from the usual bigots who think that writing "you fucking lesbian" is an insult :-))))) - yes, every time I post anything related to LGBT matters I get them. If you know me personally, you know how much fun I have with this kind of ironic stuff.)

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Implicación by Julián Quintanilla is a brilliant short movie. Chary, a mother who stands up to Don Francisco, her son's ex-boss. Through a very cleverly written dialogue Chary shows Don Francisco that his latent homophoby was the reason he fired her son.

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September 17, 2005

BS

"There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutrtive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. In this respect, excrement is a representation of death that we ourselves produce and that, indeed, we cannot help producing in the very process of maintaining our lives. Perhaps it is for making death so intimate that we find excrement so repulsive." - Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit.

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September 16, 2005

Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z

English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.

English is what you get from Normans trying to pick up Saxon girls.

American English is essentially a tool to keep a person from ever being able to speak another language.

American English is essentially British English without the redundancies, including the monarchy.

Norwegian is essentially Danish spoken with a Swedish accent.

Danish is essentially Norwegian spoken with a sore throat.

German is essentially a language developed by a group of Teutons who gathered in the forest one day to come up with a language that their enemies would have no chance of grasping.

Germann ist eßentially Dutsch and Englisch with a few Tschanges.

Spanish is essentially Italian spoken by Arabs.

Mexican is essentially Castilian Spanish as spoken while excreting hot peppers, therefore without the superiority complex.

Italian is essentially bad Latin.

French is essentially the language that Americans don't learn before travelling abroad.

Portuguese is essentially bad Spanish, mumbled.

Portuguese is essentially Brazilian without vowels.

Catalan is essentially Spanish and French spoken at the same time.

Romanian is essentially a Romance language trying really hard to blend in with the Slavic languages around it.

Irish is essentially an Indo-European language cunningly disguised as gibberish to perplex the English.

Hungarian is essentially all counterintuitive consonant pairings.

taken from here and compiled by John Cowan.

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September 15, 2005

HyperSpeech

She was feeling so impatient, she wished she could insert hyperlinks to whatever she was saying so as to not having to explain it all.

(is allusion a different form of hyperlinking that only knowledgeable people can click on?)

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City Lights

City Lights Bookstore is dangerous. I wasn't past the first set of shelves and already felt like buying all the books I'd seen :-)

"Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture's only "Literary Landmark."

I went there with Ricardo and he got me interested in Murakami, Sebald, Mexican Wrestling (he bought a great book filled with the kitschiest photos ever) and Osman Lins. It was the favourite authors exchange moment of the holidays :-)

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September 14, 2005

The Mirror

Taken at Swallowtail. A specialty interior design shop on Polk St., San Francisco

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September 13, 2005

Alamo Square, San Francisco

While most tourists are taking photos of this:

Right on their back there is an odd shoe garden:

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September 12, 2005

30% Off

A clever Saatchi & Saatchi Milan campaign for Mondadori Books.

(1984 - 30% = 1388.8)



(The 3 Musketeers -30% = The 2.1 Musketeers)



(100 years of solitude - 30% = 70 years of solitude)

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Altered Murakami

(an attempt to do something I first saw at this wonderful, wonderful project: Altered Books)

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September 09, 2005

Rafael

Rafael was born today. Cool! Another kid for me to spoil and leave the repairing of the damage to the parents.

Rafael was tagged. He has this giant RFID tag on his ankle. Fancy high security hospitals.

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September 08, 2005

Time Travel

"If there was anything that grabbed me about the book, it was the underlying conceit, the notion of time travel itself. Yet Wells had somehow managed to get that wrong too, I felt. He sends his hero into the future, but the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that most of us would prefer to visit the past(...). If given the chance of going forward or backward, I for one wouldn't have hesitated. I would much rather have found myself among the no-longer-living than the unborn. With so many historical enigmas to be solved, how not feel curious about what the world had looked like in, say, the Athens of Socrates or the Virginia of Thomas Jefferson?(...)To see your mother and father on the day they met, for example, or to talk to your grandparents when they were young children. Would anyone turn down that opportunity in exchange for a glimpse of an unknown and incomprehensible future?"
Paul Auster, Oracle Night

This bit affected me particularly. Thinking about it, if I could travel in time, I had no intention of visiting the future whatsoever but it didn't even cross my mind to visit my ancestors. I actually had a cunning plan :-) to change the course of History of the entire western civilization which I can't really post about (XXX-rated, I'm afraid).

I also asked some friends where/when would they travel to, out of statistical (and personal) curiosity. I'm posting a very non-representative sample of answers - since in its composition there are only highly intelligent beings of the opposite sex - but a high quality one :-)

I'm developing a theory that links the answer to the person's personality...

"The Holistic Bourgeois" said:

"I would go nowhere before the 20th century. I can't imagine myself not driving a car or not having paper to wipe my ass :-)
I'd go to the roaring 20's, USA. It must have been a great time socially, economically and culturally; also it should be a lot of fun mingling with artists and gangsters."

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"The Cautious Curious" said:

"Although there's the temptation to confirm some 'truths' that we think we know about the past, if given a chance to travel in time, I'd risk it and travel to the uncertain future (like 500 years from now), even if inside an indestructible device that would protect me in case I decide not to "land" there. The reason? This is the supreme curiosity, what's there for us on the following day, the only land of chances that we have. The Past, we slowly discover it through History and that itself is a Time Machine that has improved with the years. Discovering the future is much more complicated. Ah immortality, immortality..."

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"The Ambitious Inventor" said:

"Maybe back to the time of Leonardo Da Vinci or Isaac Newon - the time when great ideas / inventions / discoveries were being made. Today, revolutionary science is usually revolutionary to 10 super-experts in a corner, not the general public. Being the inventor of the parachute or discovering gravity - now that would be cool!"

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"The Lazy Laid-Back" said:

"Time Travel? What for? I like the Present. The Future is ours to build and the Past is of no interest to me. It's gone." - after which he makes me read out loud a passage from a book by Gonçalo M. Tavares about how there's no point in wanting to change the past since the connections between any two events are far too complex for us to understand. So destiny isn't really predetermined but we have no way to figure it out out either.
"Oh, wait. Maybe I would travel to the beginning of August 2005 so that I could go on holidays again."

-+-+-+-

"The Hesitant Traveler" said:

"I'd like to meet Leonardo da Vinci because he was, probably, the most brilliant mind ever to have lived. I'd like to travel aboard the Niña with Columbus and the Espera with Cabral because, if it is great to travel, it must be unbelievable to travel on a (re)discovery expedition, and those were two of the greatest (re)discovery expeditions ever. But there were so many times and places to go, it's tough to choose... I just feel like traveling, so I went for the Discovery option... :-)))"

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"The Intensity Craver Cartographer" said:

"I'd like to travel back maybe 30,000 years into our past. What was the world really like then? Were we still cowering from beasts or starting to come into our own? During the Paleolithic, we were just starting to write on bones. The sky and stars and moon must have been like some strange fire lighting up the night sky. The howls of beasts a reminder that Death could come tomorrow and swiftly. That this very moment was a borrowed moment. The next day would bring on a new struggle, a new fight to survive. The depths of despair must have been deeper but the joys of the abbreviated life, I imagine, must have been euphoric."

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September 07, 2005

I'm not afraid!

This Firefox extension has been amusing me lately:

Get it here. (If you don't know what a Firefox extension is...well. Start here and then download it here.)

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A night at the Castro

The organist playing at the Castro Theatre, San Francisco

Harold Lloyd: "Safety Last" and "Girl Shy". I hadn't laughed so hard in a long time. I still have flashes of the movies' scenes now and then and will start laughing for no apparent reason.

Whatever happened to Harold Lloyd? Bio here.

I don't know why but it seems natural to me that someone who played shy, innocent characters would end up taking stereoscopic photos of naked girls :-)

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September 06, 2005

The longest path

Golden Gate park, San Francisco

Tourist: Look. That building looks like the DeYoung Museum.
SF resident: Oh no! Not again! We've been walking around in circles! I was sure we were going West!
Tourist: I've got a compass.

(and I did have a detailed Golden Gate Park map but I didn't notice it until the next day :-)

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I hate stereotypes but I do stereotype a lot for the sake of a joke (and only among friends). I did that a lot in SF (mostly about American people) and made a very nasty (and unusually loud it was too) remark about the so-american profession of "bag boy" in a supermarket.

A practical example.

At a restaurant, by the end of the meal:

Waiter: Would you like an espresso or american coffee?
The European: An espresso, please.
The American: American Coffee.
The European: You know that the Monty Python joke about american beer* could be easily applied to american coffee too?

-+-+-+-

As a kind of punishment for my behavior here's some American stereotyping of Europeans:

- All Europeans drink a lot of espressos;
- All Europeans wear denim jackets;
- All Europeans smoke;
- All European women don't shave their armpits;
- All Europeans think they're superior to Americans.

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* The joke:

Bruce #1 (Eric Idle): I find you American's beer like making love in a canoe.
Bruce #3 (Michael Palin): Why's that, Bruce?
Bruce #1: 'Cause it's fucking close to water!
-An aside in the Bruce sketch from Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl

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Look

(near Chinatown)

The advantage of having a local San Franciscan showing you around town is that you feel relaxed enough not to keep looking up the city's map, right?

Unless the San Franciscan, at least once a day, suddenly stops walking, looks around and asks: "Where are we?".

I was hoping it to be a philosophical doubt and that it would be followed by "Who are we?" and "What is the meaning of life?" or "Why didn't I shave this morning?" :-)

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September 05, 2005

Good Vibes

There's a fantastic shop in San Francisco called Good Vibrations:

"Good Vibrations is the San Francisco-based retailer women have trusted for nearly three decades to provide a comfortable, safe environment for buying sex-positive products and educational materials to enhance their sex lives."

Or else: it's like a sex shop but rather clean looking, ran by women and one of the nicest places to sit down, read a book on oral sex or S&M (surrounded by all kinds of sex toys and other props) and feel strangely at ease with the whole thing :-)))

"We look forward to the day when talking about sex, shopping for sex toys and teaching our kids about sex is so easy, so comfortable and so common that we take it for granted. We like to think our work is bringing us one step closer to that day and we cheer on those with the same mission."

There should be more interesting, educational places like this one in the world.

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The Flower

Parque Eduardo VII, Lisboa, Portugal

Lisboa's sidewalks are covered with white cobblestones, making it the brightest of cities. On some areas, there are also black cobblestones, forming intricate patterns sometimes geometrical, others just figurative. Here are some examples. Even the symbol of Lisboa (a caravel with two ravens) can be found all around the city's pavements.

I suppose a municipal worker fancied leaving his mark on the park's sidewalk and sculpted this simple, lonely flower there.

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A shadow is a kind of mirror, isn't it?

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September 03, 2005

Claudia in every language

My name in Sumerian.

My name in japanese.

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September 02, 2005

Vitia Carnalia

This is more of a gourmandise memoir post than anything else.

Here's what I want to remember:

This is the kind of gastronomical delight that makes me look like a slightly more discrete Sally at the diner. I just close my eyes and sigh with pleasure. Gluttony or Lust? I think I'll take both ;-)

*****

Bix
56 Gold St
San Francisco, CA 94133
(415) 433-6300

*****

"In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision." - Italo Calvino

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Fake B&W

It looks like a B&W photo but it was actually a very gray day at Stinson Beach, San Francisco.

What I've learned about how to cope with San Francisco weather: Layers of clothing.
It can be freezing in the morning;
then the sun comes out: you remove a layer;
the wind stops: you remove another layer;
the fog crawls in: you put on a layer;
the wind starts blowing: you put on the last layer and pray it doesn't get any colder.

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September 01, 2005

Steep

The common San Francisco tourist pic: it feels like the cars are going to flip over anytime.

(and the reason why my leg muscles are a lot stronger than before)

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August 31, 2005

The Triton

I missed a connecting flight on my way to San Francisco which means I arrived a lot later than expected. I was so tired of all those hours of flying and waiting; all I wanted was a shower and a bed. I got much more than that.

As I walk into the hotel room, I couldn't stop laughing. This must be the quirkiest hotel decoration ever. There was this huge king-size bed with what looked vaguely like a zebra-patterned headboard by a dark red wall. With a sun shaped mirror. I'm just sorry it didn't have a mirrored ceiling.

So, I'm in a good mood now but I still need a shower. And I found the cutest shower curtain waiting for me:



I'm "so clean" now, "naked and happy" and go directly to the cupboard to see if there are any snacks. Not only they provide lots of snacks but also bright yellow rubber duckies (the baseball duck is sitting on my shelf right now). A little plastic case with the label "Intimacy Kit". A yoga meditation CD. Some mints. Chocolates.

The staff is great. The guy that checked me in would say every time: "Have a good night Meeezzz Diazzz!"

And they have wine tasting parties every day at 5pm.

The Triton Hotel 342 Grant Ave. San Francisco, CA 94108 local: 415.394.0500 fax: 415.394.0555

(and the next time I'm in San Francisco I'll be asking for a special discount for all this free publicity ;-))))

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End of August

August Street, San Francisco

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August 30, 2005

Escape aka The Perfume Ad Shot

Stinton Beach, San Francisco

A woman wearing a bikini is escaping from R's dreams.

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August 29, 2005

Random San Francisco Travel Notes

*****

A beggar in the street holding a sign: "Testing for human kindness".

*****

*****
A dutch guard at Schiphol Airport passport control, not reading my itinerary correctly:
- You're going on holidays to Detroit??
- No, San Francisco is the final destination...
- Ufff. That would have been suspicious.

*****

*****

At a winery in Napa Valley:
- What kind of food would you eat with this wine?
- I'd personally have a Big Mac but that's probably not what you're asking.

*****

"I know this great restaurant in the Mission."
"There's this great bookshop in the Mission."
"There are great coffee shops in the Mission."
"The best bars are in the Mission."

(and yes, I give up, the Mission is my favourite neighbourhood too :-)

*****

*****

San Franciscan: "Everyone around here knows what Madeira wine is! Look." (to the bartender) "You know what is Madeira wine, don't you?"
Bartender: "Sure. It's that Spanish wine, right?"

*****

(serendipity)

*****

(in case you're wondering: yes, I've enjoyed my holidays very, very much.)

*****

Things learned & new or renewed interests:
- Mexican Wrestling;
- Haruki Murakami;
- Hiking;
- Pirates;
- Edgar Arceneaux;
- Good Vibrations;
- A very cool internet radio station (downtempo, lounge, chill out): SOMAFM;
- & much, much more coming up on the next posts.

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August 12, 2005

Holidays (again)

I won't be wearing flowers in my hair but I sure hope to find some gentle people there.

*****

"Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection." - Lawrence Durrell

*****

I was taking a look at my site counter, more specifically at the search terms that have lead visitors to my blog. Lots of them are about sex. Duh.

A message for a visitor from Japan who is persistently googling for "I had sex with Claudia": I'm pretty sure that's not me. Give it up.

A word of caution to another one looking for "photos of me and claudia having sex": I sincerely hope that's not me. You'd be in great trouble.

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August 11, 2005

AP Syndrome

My friend AP has been taking painting lessons and here's the result. I'm impressed. I thought he couldn't even draw :-) and went there only to see naked girls live.

It's 100 cm x 116 cm and it's on sale. 800 Euros. I get a fee. Email me :-)

*****

In Italy, the magnetism of museums is irresistible. Last June the Roman Institute of Psychology released the results of a national study involving 2,000 visitors that found 20 percent of them had embarked on an "erotic adventure" in a museum. Also according to the study, a Caravaggio painting or a Greek sculpture is more likely to lead to sex than works by Tiepolo or Veronese. The experts have even compiled a hit parade of Italian museums, listing the institutions in order of their ability to awaken Eros. This state of emotional arousal has been called the Rubens Syndrome, a term derived from the sensuous, superannuated nudes painted by the Flemish Old Master.

from ArtNews (through Banubula)

*****

Now I know why AP wants to hang the painting in his bedroom ;-)

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August 10, 2005

Collage

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August 08, 2005

Words of Wisdom #467873

"I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

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August 07, 2005

Moi, je t'offrirai
des perles de pluie
venues de pays
où il ne pleut pas.

Jacques Brel, Ne me quitte pas

*****

*****

A french weekend, not in the mood for translations; try google.

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Great Expectations

I have a friend who says that teenage girls shouldn't watch porn movies. It creates false expectations about a man's anatomy :-)

I suppose this advertisement has the mission, among others, to lower those expectations :-)

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August 05, 2005

Freud's 50 minute Wristwatch

Then there's the psychiatrist. Why is that with the psychiatrist every hour is only fifty minutes? What do they do with the ten minutes that they have left? Do they just sit there going, "Boy that guy was crazy. I couldn't believe the things he was saying. What a nut. Who's coming in next? Oh no, another head case." - Jerry Seinfeld

This actually can be bought at the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild.

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August 04, 2005

Conceptual joke

21. Two artists talking, one a conceptualist:
(Conceptualist) - What's the matter, do I have to draw you a picture?

from "Comments for an Art interview (a Source Book), Installment one" by John Baldessari

******

******

Thanks to J and to David, I got the MuMoK Catalog of the current Baldessari exhibition; an express personal delivery from Vienna. Very nice :-)

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August 03, 2005

Self-absorbed

My mind's sunk so low, Claudia, because of you, wrecked itself on your account so bad already, that I couldn't like you if you were the best of women, —or stop loving you, no matter what you do.

- Catullus

"Claudia Pulchra Tertulla, born in circa 95 BC, was the third daughter of the patrician Appius Claudius Pulcher and Caecilia Metella Balearica. Despite being a woman, Claudia was very well educated in Greek and Philosophy, with a special talent for writing poetry. But she shared the recklessness of her younger brother, the political agitator Publius Clodius Pulcher. Her life, immortalized in the poems of Catullus and the writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero, was lived on perpetual scandal.

Madly in love with her, Catullus wrote several poems about his feelings towards Lesbia, the name he gave her."

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August 02, 2005

Words of Wisdom #564678

Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you anyway.

(adapted from I.)

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Marco

As any other portuguese from my generation might agree, "Marco - Dos Alpes aos Apeninos" was one of the cartoons (japanese anime, in fact) on TV during our childhood which left the most enduring impression. I used to cry my heart out watching it - the theme song was particularly depressing.

"3000 Leagues in Search of Mother is, as can be gleaned from the title, the chronicle of one boy who sets off all alone across an ocean and makes a grueling, bitter journey in search for his mother. His desolate trek spans the Atlantic, starting off in Genova, Italy and concluding in Cordoba, Argentina. The boy's name is Marco Rossi. In Genova, Marco's father oversees a free clinic which treats the vast number of people unable to afford the cost of medical treatment at a hospital. Due to the inexhorable debt into which this line of work has entrenched his family, and the national work shortage which plagued Italy at the end of the nineteenth century -- a glaring side-effect of the drive towards industrialization --, Marco's mother is forced to leave Italy, and go to Argentina in search of work. There she is to find work as a nurse to the poor, like her husband, to return only when the family's debt has been repaid." (more on the book and the anime here)

Recently, while reminiscing about our childhood with friends, I got two interesting pieces of information:

- the japanese series is based on the book "Cuore" by Edmondo de Amicis - "the italian Huckleberry Finn" (which was what triggered an intensive session of googling for this post);

- Ricardo C. tells me he has a group of friends who defend the theory that Marco's mother went to Argentina to become a prostitute; so much for childhood memories :-)))

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August 01, 2005

Heroes

Javier Cercas, in El Pais (plaisir de dimanche), on discovering through a news article that one of his childhood heroes was actually a horrid person:

"Pensé: es posible que todos los hombres necesiten de héroes, pero lo que es seguro es que la de tener héroes es una necesidad infantil. Pensé : uno prolonga la infancia hasta donde puede, o hasta donde lo dejan. Pensé que, a medida que se hace mayor - para lo cual es útil leer a Shakespeare, a Cervantes, a Dostoievski y a Kafka-, uno va háciendose menos ilusiones. Pensé que, de todos los avanzados de la humanidad que incluía mi enciclopedia, hasta aquel desdichado reportaje aún me quedaban tres a quienes podía no considerar unos desalmados sedientos de sangre. Pensé que ya sólo me quedaban dos: el Mahatma Gandhi y Florence Nightingale. Pensé: el día menos pensado se descubre que Florence Nightingale era en realidad una asesina en serie, y Gandhi, un tratante de esclavas. Pensé: no cedas a la tentación de pensar que ese día serás por fin un adulto."

"I thought: it's possible that all men need heroes, but what is certain is that the need for heroes is a childish one. I thought: one prolongs childhood until one can, or is allowed to. I thought that, as one grows older - for which is useful reading Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoievski and Kafka-, one is less prone to illusions. I thought that, from all the great people on my encyclopedia, until that unfortunate news article there were still three who couldn't be blood thirsty, heartless persons. I thought that I still had two left: Mahatma Gandhi and Florence Nightingale. I thought: when I least expect it, someone will discover that Florence Nightingale was actually a serial killer and Gandhi a slave trader. I thought: don't give in to the temptation of thinking that on that day you will be, finally, an adult."

note: only I am to blame for the translation

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July 29, 2005

Philemamania

Socratic kiss - a Platonic kiss, but as it is the Socratic technique it will sound more authoritative; however, compared to most strictly Platonic kisses, Socratic kisses wander around a lot more and cover more ground.

Kantian kiss - though you don't actually feel the kiss at all, you are, nonetheless, free to declare it the best kiss you've ever given or received.

Kafkaesque kiss - a kiss that starts out feeling like it's about to transform you but ends up just bugging you.

Sartrean kiss - a kiss that you worry yourself to death about even though it really doesn't matter anyway.

Marxist (Grouchoic school) kiss - a kiss given by someone who will only kiss those who would not kiss him or her.

Procrustean kiss - suffice it to say that it is a technique that, once you've experienced it, you'll never forget it, especially when applied to areas of the anatomy other than the lips.

Heisenbergian kiss - a hard-to-define kiss, the more it moves you, the less sure you are of where the kiss was; the more energy it has, the more trouble you have figuring out how long it lasted.

Taken from somewhere I can't remember but found it again here.

*****

Klimt

*****

"When one of them takes both the lips of the other between his or her own, it is called 'a clasping kiss'. A woman, however, only takes this kind of kiss from a man who has no moustache. And on the occasion of this kiss, if one of them touches the teeth, the tongue, and the palate of the other, with his or her tongue, it is called the 'fighting of the tongue'. In the same way, the pressing of the teeth of the one against the mouth of the other is to be practised."

Kama Sutra

*****

Now the amorous spirit that is in me commands me that I say that amorous kisses are given in six parts of the beloved person, and in four ways, and no more.

And what are these six parts?

They are the nostrils, the breast, the neck, the cheeks, the eyes, and the mouth.

And the ways?

The ways are these: with the tips of the lips, with moisture of the lips, with a bite, and with the tongue.

I thank you, Love, for making me able to follow this. And so I ask again for your kindness that you enrich me with your secrets. But you, Spirit in the heart of Patricio, deign to detail these things one by one.

So I shall. Of the parts, my signor Angelo, the less sweet to kiss are the hands. More sweet that these is the breast. And it is an important thing to say what I want to say now, that though the breast is softer and more delicate than the neck, nevertheless more sweetness is experienced in kissing the neck than kissing the breast. This sweetness is so great, that if it does not equal that of the cheeks, which alone in great part are the dwelling of beauty, surely it lags behind but by little.

You speak truly: the sweetness from a kiss on the neck is great, but that it is so in comparison with the cheeks, I will take your word for that, amorous Spirit, because I have not had the experience.

If you wish to do that, you will sense what I way to you is true. The kiss on the eyes is very sweet, but the kiss on the mouth is the kiss that exceeds and surpasses all other kisses, even when they are taken together.

Francesco Patrizi, Dialogue concerning the kiss (XVIth Century)

*****
Philemamania, a craving for kissing

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July 28, 2005

Words of Wisdom #23998

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or to lose.
-- Lyndon Johnson

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July 26, 2005

The Vimanika Shastra

In the Vedic literature of India, there are many descriptions of flying machines that are generally called Vimanas. The word Vimana originates from the Sanskrit words Vi-Mana, Vi meaning Bird and Mana meaning like.

*****
from the Third Chapter - Mirrors

"We now consider the Kuntinee mirror. The wise say that the mirror by the glare of whose rays people's minds get deranged is Kuntinee mirror. Paraankusha says that in the region of the solar electric heat waves of the sky, seven streams of poisonous whirl-winds derange the mind. Scientists have discovered the Kuntinee mirror as a protection against that evil effect.

Fat, blood, flesh, marrow, bone, skin, intelligence are adversely affected by the evil wind currents known as gaalinee, kuntinee, kaalee, pinjulaa, ulbanaa, maraa, in the electric heat wave regions of the upper sky.

The manufacture of this mirror is thus explained in "Darpana-prakarana":

5 parts of sowraashtra earth, 7 parts of snake's slough, 3 of sea-foam, 5 of shanmukha seeds, 8 of zinc, 3 parts of rhinoceros' nails, 8 of salts, 7 of sand, 8 of mercury, 4 of conch, 6 parts of matrunna, 3 parts of yellow orpiment, 4 of elephant and camel salts, 7 parts of suranghrikaa, 5 of gingelly oil, 8 of pearl-shells, 3 of sea-shells, 4 parts of camphor, purified and filled in shinjikaa crucible, and placed in shinjeera furnace and boiled to 700 degrees, the fluid poured into the Darpanaasya yantra, will form into a morning sun-like kuntinee mirror."

The text of the Vimanika Shastra is available at Sacred Texts Archive. More on vimanas at A tribute to hinduism.

*****

"Thereupon arrived the car, adorned all over with gold, having fine upper rooms, banners, and jewelled windows, and giving forth a melodious sound, having huge apartments and excellent seats.

Beholding the car coming by force of will Rama attained to an excess of astonishment. And the king got in, and the excellent car, at the command of Raghira, rose up into the higher atmosphere. And in that car, coursing at will, Rama greatly delighted." - from the Ramayana.

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July 25, 2005

Octavio Paz on my notebook

Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sinbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.

****

Al cerrar los ojos
los abro dentro de tus ojos.

(Closing my eyes
I open them inside your eyes.)

****

Óyeme como quien oye llover

(Listen to me as one listens to the rain falling)

****
Note to self: the blog as an online notebook - instead of pieces of paper everywhere and half-used moleskines; rebuild categories!

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Googlism

Fun site - "Googlism.com will find out what Google.com thinks of you, your friends or anything! Search for your name here..."

And the funniest results for "Claudia" on googlism are:

claudia is a gifted and caring psychic healer
claudia is a fisting slut
claudia is a sweet little horny pussy crazy about cum
claudia is a single mexican woman
claudia is a special person
claudia is 5'2'' and of slight build
claudia is also known for her humour off the set as well as on
claudia is wearing white lace underwear
claudia is a charming beachfront hotel in central puerto vallarta
claudia is a wonderful partner to work with
claudia is an ex
claudia is not as much a "model"
claudia is happy to advise and encourage young artists
claudia is winking her eye for some reason
claudia is a little different
claudia is totally rocking that couture barbie effect today
claudia is also in love with her yuppie best friend
claudia is very confused

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July 24, 2005

quotes

"No pleasure endures unseasoned by variety"

Publilius Syrus

"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will." - Epictetus

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July 22, 2005

Haiku

nothing at all
but a calm heart
and cool air

Kobayashi Issa (1813)

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It's only a matter of attitude

Cartoons can be so philosophical...

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July 21, 2005

Rohmer meets Rimbaud meets Ferlinghetti meets Duchamp

Le Rayon Vert - Delphine has a superstition: the playing cards she finds on the streets are omens.

(Rohmer)

Betrayed by the people at the Cinemateca, a Jules Verne adventure was replaced by a more highbrow, obscure reference to an optical phenomenon.

*****

Ah ! que le temps vienne
Où les coeurs s'éprennent.

Ah ! Let the time come
When hearts are enamoured.

(Rimbaud)

The verses that inspired Rohmer.

*****

(La Hire, french commander in the Hundred Years War, a loyal companion of Joan of Arc)

The Jack of Hearts - A dear friend, good news, a declaration of love, a date

*****

The Man from La Mancha riding bare back
The one who bears the great tradition
The Mysterious Stranger who comes & goes
The Jack of Hearts who speaks out
in the time of the ostrich
the one who sees the ostrich
the one who sees what the ostrich sees in the sand
the one who digs the mistery
and stands in the corner smiling
like a Jack of Hearts

(Ferlinghetti)

Because.

*****

(Duchamp)

Inspired by Jules Verne's "Le Rayon Vert"?

Verne said that those lucky enough to see the green ray are able to see clearly into their hearts and the hearts of others.

****

More on the Green ray/flash on the wikipedia.

Note to self: Alice as a witness at the trial of the jack of hearts

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July 19, 2005

Growing Pains

You know you've grown up on an unorthodox family when:

* Mom tries to teach you how to smoke:
     - Come on now, inhale!
     - Cough! Cough!
     - If you don't inhale you won't feel the pleasure of smoking!
     - But this is disgusting!
     - Ok, give me that back! Don't spoil a perfectly good cigarrette...

* Dad is underprotective:
     - I'm going out tonight. I'm wearing this skirt, I want to impress someone!
     - That skirt is way too long...

* Both use reverse psychology on a good teenage girl trying to be a rebel:
     - I'm going to the disco, I don't know at what time I'll be back.
     - That's OK. We trust you.
     - (Dammit)

* Mom & Dad go to the video store and rent an X-rated animated movie to explain about the birds & the bees to a pre-teenage daughter:
     - Are you both out of your freaking minds?!?!? There's no way I'm gonna watch that with you!!!

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July 14, 2005

The Dreadful Dungeon

Blackadder having a communication problem with a spanish torturer:

Torturer: Batardo
Blackadder: Batardo...Barrister?
Torturer: Batardo...
Blackadder: Embarrrasing.

The torturer jumps off the rostrum and mimes walking with a big pregnant belly. He then mimes cradling a baby in his arms before chucking it away...Basically it has turned into a game of charades.

Blackadder: You're embarrassing. I'm embarrassing. Erm, rogering! Pregnant? Baby...bathwater...sounds like...bastard! Ah. I'm a bastard.

Torturer: Si. Esterminado hijo, hijo.
Blackadder: Donkey.
Torturer: Padre y hijo.
Blackadder: Big bastard. Little bastard.
Torturer: Padre...

The torturer mimes panting.

Blackadder: Son. I'm a bastard son.
Torturer: Di perra.
Blackadder: I'm a bastard son. I'm a thirsty barking bastard.
Torturer: No, perra.

He barks.

Blackadder: Oh, dog, dog.
Torturer: No...

Mimes breasts.

Blackadder: Woman.

The torturer mimes woman and dog simultaneously

No, woman dog...ah, bitch. I'm a bastard son of a bitch.

Torturer: Si! Si!
Blackadder: In that case you are a fornicating baboon.
Torturer: Que?

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July 12, 2005

Adapting Pascal's Wager to your own selfish interests

"(...)whenever there is infinity, and where there are not infinite chances of losing against that of winning, there is no room for hesitation, you must give everything. And thus, since you are obliged to play, you must be renouncing reason if you hoard your life rather than risk it for an infinite gain, just as likely to occur as a loss amounting to nothing."- Pascal, Pensées

or, for a very simplistic interpretation, if you haven't got anything to lose, go for it. Always handy to have a highbrow philosophical excuse.

More on Pascal's Wager.

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July 11, 2005

Summer days

Guincho, Portugal

It doesn't look like it but Sunday was a warm summer day. A thick fog covered the sea.

note to self: you drive way too fast when you're alone. The music is always playing too loud when you're driving alone. In order to avoid further embarrassment, remember to lower the volume before stopping at the tollbooth, especially if you're listening to Nouvelle Vague's version of "Too drunk to fuck". (and remember to return the borrowed CD)

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July 08, 2005

The Thief of Baghdad

Genie: You're a clever little man little master of the universe, but mortals are weak and frail. If their stomach speaks, they forget their brain. If their brain speaks, they forget their heart. And if their heart speaks [laughter]... they forget everything.

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July 07, 2005

Bird Watching

Bandia, Senegal

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July 06, 2005

Where the money goes

I've been wondering where the money I donated last year to this particular institution (Assistência Médica Internacional) went to. Now I know.

AMI Portugal at Yoff, Senegal.

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July 05, 2005

Moravagine

"I can understand your wanting to rest and get back to your books. Of course you need to think things over, you always needed time to think about a whole pile of things, to look, to see, to compare and record, to take notes on the thousand things you haven't had the chance to classify with your own mind. But why don't you leave that to the police archives? Haven't you got it through your mind that human thought is a thing of the past and that philosophy is worse than Bertillon's guide to harassed cops? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it’s just that you’re scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral and animal, all disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions and systems. It’s always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There’s no truth. There’s only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction. Life." - Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine

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lisbonphoto 2005 - Aaron Siskind

"When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder)." - Aaron Siskind

Note to self: never wear high heels to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga again. The sound of your footsteps is magnified a hundred times by the aged wooden floor and high ceilings, making it feel like a giant is clumping about the halls laden with paintings of agonizing Christs.

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July 01, 2005

Joke Wisdom

There's a very politically incorrect joke that goes something like "Men are like parking spaces: the good ones are always taken and the ones left are for the handicapped or too small."

I wonder if this applies to women also (not the small part, obviously). I hope not ;-)

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June 30, 2005

The blog as a sentimental grandchild scrapbook

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June 29, 2005

Clitoris Envy

It is a known fact that History is excessively male-centered but this is ridiculous:

1559 - De re anatomica is published by Matteo Renaldo Colombo, claiming to have discovered the clitoris: "Since no one has discerned these projections and their workings, if it is permissible to give names to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus."

Even Joyce(in Ulysses)...
"VIRAG (Cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow, draws down his left eye with a finger and barks hoarsely.) Hoax! Beware of the flapper and bogus mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor's button discovered by Rualdus Colombus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon."

I suppose that the clitoris was "discovered" by some cave woman, while the "discoverers" were out hunting :-)

And for those who haven't got a clue: everything you wanted to know about the clitoris and were afraid to ask.

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June 28, 2005

Photos of Senegal

The B&W Senegal holidays photoalbum is here.

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June 27, 2005

It had to be you

As my gallbladder has been giving me a hard time again (geez, I sound like my grandmother...) there's nothing left to do except to curl up on the sofa, watch a movie and wait for the wonderful pills to do their magic...

I realized that probably one of the reasons I like watching "When Harry met Sally" and "Annie Hall" - which, above all, are heartwarming, romantic comedies although of a very different nature - is that the song "It had to be you", one of my favourites along with "Night and Day", is on both soundtracks. Sung by Uncle Frank on the first case and Diane Keaton on the second.

(and it's also on Casablanca's)

And both have that kind of memorable lines:

Harry: I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

Alvy: Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes I have to invent, of course I - I do, don't you think I do?

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June 23, 2005

Assorted bits of senegalese wit and humor

Entering a touristry handicraft fair:
"Appelez les gendarmes! Voici les sans-papiers!"
"Bonjours les émigrants temporaires!"

"My name is Ousmane, like the boulevard in Paris."

Mamhadou, watching me put some sun cream on:
"Is that for you to get a tan? Can I have a bit?"
...and I naïvely and hesitantly pass him the bottle (as his skin is dark as the night)...
"Ah! Nevermind! I forgot I am black already; as for you, you really need it if you want to get this color!"
And bursts out laughing.

"Senegal is a peaceful country: we don't have neither diamonds or oil, so the americans leave us alone."

"In France you have the TGV and we have also a TGV: Train à Grande Vibration."

"Un homme africain entre dans un tunnel. Quelle est sa nationalité? I-voi-rien."

"Our currency is the Franc CFA: Catastrophe Financière Africaine."

"My party is the FLAG: Front de Libération des Alcoholiques de Gauche."

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June 21, 2005

Les stylos

Senegalese children don't ask tourists for money or candy: they ask for pens. Had I known this before, I had taken a whole suitcase of them with me...

I gave the only pen I had with me to Ousmane who kindly signed my notebook before running happily away with his new "stylo", proudly showing it to all his friends in the Dakar suburb.

I hope he grows up to be very famous. I'll sell the signed notebook on eBay then :-)

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June 20, 2005

Back from Africa

Back from Senegal, home of people who are obsessed with jogging and sports; some new flavours have been tasted, some new odours have been smelled, some new wisdom has been acquired.

That was time enough to know a bit about the country, to read on politics & love (no, not on the same book) and to gather somewhat dispersed thoughts. And to turn into a slightly darker shade of pale, inevitably.

A whole CF card has been formatted by "accident" but some photos have survived...

First time ever: I've been offered the professional sexual services of a handsome senegalese young man right in the middle of the street. After a "Pardon?" as I couldn't believe my ears, a polite "Non, merci." followed. The final reply which made me realize how naïve I can sometimes be: "You DO know that european women prefer senegalese men?". Very close to us, a scandinavian looking woman - old enough to be his mother, I guess - was embracing a rather athletic bare chested local.

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June 09, 2005

Sénégal

I'll be back in a week or so...I'm visiting what I expect to be a very interesting country seeing that its first president was a poet, philosopher, a great patron of the arts and a champion of African culture.

Apparently he also had a sense of humor:

"Cher frère blanc, Quand je suis né, j'étais noir, Quand j'ai grandi, j'étais noir, Quand je suis au soleil, je suis noir, Quand je suis malade, je suis noir, Quand je mourrai, je serai noir. Tandis que toi, homme blanc, Quand tu es né, tu étais rose, Quand tu as grandi, tu étais blanc, Quand tu vas au soleil, tu es rouge, Quand tu as froid, tu es bleu, Quand tu as peur, tu es vert, Quand tu es malade, tu es jaune, Quand tu mourras, tu seras gris. Alors, de nous deux, Qui est l'homme de couleur ?" Poème à mon frère blanc..., Léopold Senghor

"Dear white brother, When I was born, I was black, When I grew up, I was black, When I am in the sun, I am black, When I am sick, I am black, When I die, I will be black. Whereas you, white man, When you were born, you were pink, When you grew up, you were white, When you are in the sun, you are red, When you are cold, you are blue, When you are afraid, you are green, When you are sick, you are yellow, When you die, you will be grey. So, of the two of us, Who is the colored man?" Poem For My White Brother..., Léopold Senghor

I'm sure I'll be the living proof of the truthfulness of the above poem as I turn from pale white to light brown (carefuly avoiding the red tonality with huge amounts of sun screen) under the African sun.

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June 07, 2005

The Grave of Jorge Luis Borges

Rui: We're going to Switzerland, do you want us to bring you anything?
Claudia: Well... a bar of solid gold; if you happen to go to Basel, bring a catalog from the museum of modern art; and if you go to Geneva, a photo of Jorge Luis Borges' grave which is in the Cimitière des Rois.

So, a big hug to R&M for fulfilling the entire order...even though I'm a bit disappointed at the chocolate gold bar ;-)

"The inscription 'And ne forhtedon na', formulated in old English, has been translated over and over again - perhaps by the influence of Maria Esther Vázquez's book "Borges, esplendor y derrota" - as "the doors of the sky were opened to him"; nevertheless, this seems like an error condemned to repeat itself, and the correct translation - according to the article "Siete guerreros nortumbrios" by Martín Hadis, published in the magazine Idiomanía - is in fact "and who did not fear".

"The engraving of the seven soldiers is a copy of the engraving of another tombstone - possibly the tombstone erected in the IX century in the monastery of Lindisfarne, in the north of England, which commemorates the viking attack suffered by the monastery in the year 793 and that Borges related to 'La balada de Maldon'."

Translated from here (in spanish).

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June 03, 2005

The Death of Archimedes

"But nothing afflicted Marcellus so much as the death of Archimedes, who was then, as fate would have it, intent upon working out some problem by a diagram, and having fixed his mind alike and his eyes upon the subject of his speculation, he never noticed the incursion of the Romans, nor that the city was taken. In this transport of study and contemplation, a soldier, unexpectedly coming up to him, commanded him to follow to Marcellus; which he declining to do before he had worked out his problem to a demonstration, the soldier, enraged, drew his sword and ran him through. Others write that a Roman soldier, running upon him with a drawn sword, offered to kill him; and that Archimedes, looking back, earnestly besought him to hold his hand a little while, that he might not leave what he was then at work upon inconclusive and imperfect; but the soldier, nothing moved by his entreaty, instantly killed him."
Plutarch - "Parallel Lives: Marcellus"

(yet another print I bought in Tomar - 1809)

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June 01, 2005

The Gazebo

Every weekend in Tomar is a fruitful one, bookwise. This time I bought some prints that were torn away from badly preserved books. This one is from 1771 and unfortunately I don't know which book it was supposed to illustrate.


I have a thing for gazebos. I like the sound of the word especially if it's pronounced with a fancy aristocratic british accent. I always like when small, trivial things get somehow connected in my life; I was reading "Arcadia" on the weekend, a play by Tom Stoppard (an extraordinary read, by the way), which has this scene:

Septimus:	Now, sir, what is this business that cannot wait?
Chater:	I think you know it sir. You have insulted my wife.
Septimus:	Insulted her? That would deny my nature, my conduct, and the admiration in which I hold Mrs Chater.
Chater:	I have heard of your admiration, sir! You insulted my wife in the gazebo yesterday evening!
Septimus:	You are mistaken. I made love to your wife in the gazebo. She asked me to meet her there, I have her note somewhere, I dare say I could find it for you, and if someone is putting it about that I did not turn up, by God, sir, it's a slander.
Chater:	You damned lecher! You would drag down a lady's reputation to make a refuge for your cowardice. It will not do! I am calling you out!
Septimus:	Chater! Chater, Chater, Chater! My dear friend!
Chater:	You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction!
Septimus:	Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family. As for your wife's reputation, it stands where it ever stood.
Chater:	You blackguard!
Septimus:	I assure you. Mrs Chater is charming and spirited, with a pleasant voice and a dainty step, she is the epitome of all the qualities society applauds in her sex - and yet her chief renown is for a readiness that keeps her in a state of tropical humidity as would grow orchids in her drawers in January.

More gazebos: the fabulous Kasdan film noir "Body Heat" (which has a great sensual soundtrack):

"The TINKLING is distinct out here. Matty and Racine come out onto the porch. There are about thirty wind chimes of various, lovely designs -- crystal, metal, wood hanging at intervals from the rim of the wide porch awning, completely encircling Matty and Racine.

Halfway down the long lawn is a white gazebo. Beyond it, the waterway is shimmering in the moonlight. At the edge of the water is a small boat house.

Racine walks along under the chimes, looking up at them. A smile plays across her face."

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May 31, 2005

Bernd and Hilla Becher

"Vernacular industrialized architecture has been the sole subject of Bernd and Hilla Becher's work for some forty years. Their vast photographic inventory now ranges geographically from western Europe through North America and taxonomically across an enormous array of heterogeneous building types, many verging on obsolescence—mine shafts, lime kilns, silos, cooling towers, blast furnaces, tipples, gasometers—all classified by reference to function. (...) Once husband and wife started working together, in 1957, they assumed identical roles: tasks are not separately assigned to one or the other; both are involved in scouting sites, negotiating with the owners and other authorities, setting up the cameras, and printing. The art they have produced does not fall within conventional categories of documentary photography, though it has many affiliations with that long-standing tradition. The disciplined ethic with which this dedicated German couple defined, then refined, their project of recording for posterity the increasingly neglected relics of the industrial era, with its domestic offshoots, has yielded not just an aesthetic but a vision.

Typically, their works present each industrial motif in what soon evolved into a rigorous, disciplined signature manner whose focus is an exploration of the relation between the subject's function and the resulting photographic representation. Isolated, centered, and frontally framed, each motif is shot in as objective a manner as possible. The combination of large-format cameras and finely grained black-and-white film ensures a remarkable tonal range in each print. By working only under slightly overcast skies and early in the morning during the seasons of spring and fall, the Bechers are ensured of an even, diffuse light with minimal shadows, a lambent ambience that enhances their intensive focus on the motif, which is revealed in crystalline detail, grounded in a formal factual clarity. All anecdotal incident, such as intrusive foliage, stray animals, and humans, is sedulously avoided: nothing disturbs the systematic ascetic neutrality. Tellingly, the vantage point tends to be subtly elevated. "Looking at an object from a point half way up it [causes] it to appear before you in its full reach and free of distortion," they explain.2 The raised camera position also causes the horizon to appear to recede, the surroundings to become more panoramic, and the object to stand forth prominently so that, while clearly related to its environment, it simultaneously appears somewhat removed, apart, an effect enhanced by the expansive neutral skies. The results evidence a brilliant understanding of scale relations—of how a vast structure can be made to fit a small-sized pictorial format—without rhetoric or expressive distortion.

By the mid-1960s the Bechers had also settled on a preferred presentational mode: the grid. Groupings of prints, each print measuring sixteen by twelve inches or smaller, either framed discretely or encased within a single large frame, facilitate direct, immediate comparison between motifs, which are arrayed without hierarchy, according to type, function, and/or material. Juxtaposition permits industrial structures that at first might appear prevailingly similar, even uniform, to register as significantly different one from another. Given that most viewers know little about the economic, engineering, and functional requirements that determine the generic forms and characters of these structures, comparison of the several components in any of these multipartite works operates primarily at a formal level—that is, in an aesthetic dimension."

excerpt from an essay by Lynne Cooke

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May 27, 2005

Art Terrorism

One of my silly-not-to-be-fullfilled-because-I'm-a-good-girl-dreams is to make a forgery of a label, put it under a fire extinguisher on a contemporary art museum and wait to see if someone actually stops to admire that "piece of art".

As a friend recently pointed out to me, there is a guy who goes way beyond my wildest dreams and actually places fake art inside museums.

He is known as Banksy and he is an Art Terrorist/Culture Jammer!

He has placed this piece ("Early man goes to market") inside the British Museum:

And this one ("You have beautiful eyes") inside the Met:

At Wooster Collective there are some images of Banksy in action...

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May 25, 2005

The chiropractor

I'm lying on my stomach.
- Relax. You'll hear your spine crack but don't worry.
Pushes my back between my shoulder blades with TOO MUCH strength. I suppose most men won't have a problem with having their chests crushed against a not so soft "adjustment table". Most women do.
Nothing cracks.
- That didn't go that well. Let's try again.
No cracking sound.
He has another try, pressing longer and harder.
Nothing cracks yet again.
- You're a challenge, we're gonna have some fun! You're back's too rigid. Relax!
How can I relax when I'm staring at the floor with a man breathing heavily on my back, making weird effort sounds and saying things like "Yeah! It's almost there!"? I feel like I'm on a low budget bad porn movie.
- Let's try the neck, lie on your back.
He starts moving my head from one side to the other and suddenly I have a flashback: I was 7 or 8 and I saw a woman, on my grandfather's backyard, killing a rabbit by twisting its neck.
-Come on! Relax!
Yeah. Sure.

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May 23, 2005

Infinity

The first epiphany: infinity. I must have been 5 or so; while helping my grandmother bake a cake. Had I been Andy Warhol and this would have been my Campbell soup.

****

The obsession goes on. A Disney book where Professor Ludwig von Drake shows how to make a Möbius strip.

I can produce Infinity.

****

The greek gods punishments, far more powerful than any catholic threat of eternal damnation on a pre-teen:

Sisyphus rolling a boulder to the top of the mountain;
Boulder fall backs on its own weight;
Sisyphus rolling a boulder to the top of the mountain.

An eagle eating Prometheus' liver;
Liver grows back overnight;
An eagle eating Prometheus' liver.

Tantalus immersed up to his neck in water, fruit hanging on the trees above him;
He bends to drink, the water drains; he reaches for the fruit and the winds blow the branches beyond his reach.
Tantalus immersed up to his neck in water, fruit hanging on the trees above him.

****

The philosophical years: Achilles and the Turtle.

****
The literary years or how Borges overtook Cantor:

"Cada cosa (la luna del espejo, digamos) era infinitas cosas, porque yo claramente la veía desde todos los puntos del universo."
El Aleph - Jorge Luis Borges

****

It's all about me right now. Claudia's own Infinity inside a Hotel Elevator:

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May 22, 2005

Ser Benfiquista é ter na alma a chama imensa

Ele há coisas lamechas e terrivelmente foleiras que só nos saem na nossa língua materna.

Ser Benfiquista é uma doença aguda incurável e, na maior parte dos casos, geneticamente transmitida (tenho um primo que a primeira palavra que disse não foi pai nem mãe - foi Benfica).

É mais do que gostar de futebol ou de um clube, é um sentimento irracional, misto de orgulho e de sensação de pertença, e em tudo semelhante a uma paixão que nos faz sofrer intensamente. São memórias e heróis de infância tingidos de encarnado.

Já me fartei de chorar. De felicidade.

Cá fica o hino do Glorioso.

Note to non-portuguese readers: Sorry about that but my football team won the championship after 11 years of cruel losses and I'm a bit emotional. Since 6 out of a total of 10 million portuguese are Benfica's supporters we are expecting a GDP increase and a sharp reduction on antidepressant sales :-)))

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Rereading

"When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before" - Cliff Fadiman

Note to self: Ana Karenina.

A rereading list:
The razor's edge - Somerset Maugham

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May 20, 2005

A poetry of intellect rather than emotion

UBU web, a fantastic source of intellectual pleasure and amusement, has an anthology of conceptual art/writing from where I stole some of these:

John Baldessari - "I will not make any more boring art"

****

"It is always changing. It has order. It doesn't have a specific place. Its boundaries are not fixed. It affects other things. It may be accessible but go unnoticed. Part of it may also be part of something else. Some of it is familiar. Some of it is strange. Knowing of it changes it."

Robert Barry - Art Work (1970)

****

Jenny Holzer

****

Damien Hirst, Last Supper Series

****

"Five words in a line."

Gertrude Stein (1930)

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May 19, 2005

Plant Sematary

What do they want? I painted the balcony wall blue as the sky, I bought a new shelf, I even framed a pretty picture I took of a flower...

This plant expired and gone to meet its maker. Either that or it's pining for the fjords :-)

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May 18, 2005

Claudia In Chains

My friend Rui "forwarded" me a chain questionnaire; since he is the wisest and most sensible person I know, and for that reason only, I'm going to answer it.

1. Which was the last movie you saw in a theatre?

Not one movie but seven or eight short ones in two hours at Lisboa's Independent Movie Festival. I particularly remember a japanese short film, called "Bonten" by Keisaku Sato. Very weird; in short it's about cleaning inner ears and deriving sexual pleasure from it. I look at cotton swabs now from a totally different perspective ;-)

2. What is you favourite session? I prefer a 7-ish pm session followed by an excellent late dinner. 3. Which was the first movie that fascinated you? "Mary Poppins" at the Tivoli Theatre in Lisboa. I was six years old. It's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

4. To which movie would you like to be "transported"?

To Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo" where a movie character is "transported" into real life. Seems it would be a nice paradoxical situation.

5. Which movie character would you like to meet some day?

Any of those "characters" played by John Holmes. I'm kidding.

That would be Lawrence of Arabia.

6.And which actor/actress/director/scriptwriter/producer would you like to invite for dinner?

I'd invite Billy Wilder. He isn't much of a dinner companion right now but when he was alive it seems to me he had a hell of a cynical sense of humour.

7. To whom are you going to send this questionnaire?

I'm not inflicting this pain on anyone else :-)

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May 17, 2005

Reading bliss

Buying and reading books about books is a very serious compulsive mania from which I suffer. Fortunately, this last time I found a little gem called "The library" by Zoran Zivkovic, a fantastic set of short stories which are in fact a bibliophile's delight:

"A cycle of six thematically linked stories, droll renditions of the nightmares ensuing upon misplaced, or (of course) excessive, bibliophilia. A writer encounters a website where all his possible future books are on display; a lonely man faces an infinite flow of hardback books through his mailbox; an ordinary library turns by night into an archive of souls; the Devil sets about raising standards of infernal literacy; one book houses all books; a connoisseur of hardcovers strives to expel a lone paperback from his collection."

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May 13, 2005

The Kama Sutra of reading

Stolen from Booklust

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May 12, 2005

Wall

Mural painting near Pablo Neruda's house in Santiago de Chile

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May 10, 2005

Reine Claude

Mr. Ryder (a modern Antrobus under a blogger's disguise) calls me Queen of The Green Prunes. The last time I got a nickname was in 6th grade - it had something to do with some encyclopedical qualities I had at the time.

I'm quoting him, rambling about prunes/plums/ameixas:

"They are superb fruits but a bit of a paradox. What their surface tells us is different from what lies deep down at the core of the fruit.

The Reine-Claude can be entirely green on the outside, pretending to be slightly acid, youngish and immature, when the pulp tells us a different story. Mature, deliciously sweet. The Frogs call it the "Queen Of Prunes", a fruit of the Sun par excéllence, achieving her maturity only at the end of July and allowing herself to be enjoyed for only six short brief weeks. A conundrum fruit, indeed. "Reine-Claude" are all those no longer that young ladies that Nature and good Cosmetics make them look juvenile and "green", while they are in fact perfectly ripe to be tasted."

Despite the wrinkles around my eyes (I smile way too much) and the fact that I'm almost a balzaquienne femme de trente ans, I'm still not in need of that much cosmetics. Also, this kind of fruit has a very powerful laxative effect so it's only fair to add a warning that they should be "enjoyed" with moderation :-))))

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May 08, 2005

A lentidão

A lentidão
Milan Kundera

Há um vínculo secreto entre a lentidão e a memória, entre a velocidade e o esquecimento. Imaginemos uma situação das mais comuns: um homem andando na rua. De repente, ele quer se lembrar de alguma coisa que lhe escapa. Nesse momento, maquinalmente, seus passos ficam lentos. Ao contrário, quem está tentando esquecer um incidente penoso que acabou de vive sem querer acelera o passo, como se quisesse rapidamente se afastar daquilo que, no tempo, ainda está muito próximo de si. Na matemática existencial, essa experiência toma a forma de duas equações elementares: o grau de lentidão é diretamente proporcional à intensidade da memória; o grau de velocidade é diretamente proporcional à intensidade do esquecimento.

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May 06, 2005

Disease

He descended from a long line of hypocondriacs who, at first sign of illness, would rush to the doctor and take whatever pill he prescribed notwithstanding it had fatal contraindications. He had a preferential client card at the local pharmacy.

She came from a family of people who resorted to doctors only when on the verge of being given the last sacraments and who, if necessary, would perform small surgeries at home, on themselves, with kitchen knives.

Him: My leg hurts.
Her: Stop whining. Ignore it.

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May 03, 2005

Don't walk too fast

Easter procession in Lima, Peru

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May 02, 2005

Cryptic critic

I was waiting for a friend to go to one of the n movies I saw last week (hooray for Lisboa's International Independent Film Festival) when I read this synopsis for a short movie we were going to see:

"UNTITLED SEQUENCE v1.1 é o produto cruzado entre o orgânico e o inorgânico e constrói-se num contexto evolutivo, passando através diferentes estados num processo contínuo de contaminação."

"UNTITLED SEQUENCE v1.1 is the cross product between the organic and the inorganic and it builds itself around an evolutive context, going through different stages of a continuous process of contamination."

I hate it when they give the plot away ;-))))

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May 01, 2005

San Martin de Porres

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La Bombonera

La Bombonera, Boca Juniors Football Stadium - the day before the club's 100th birthday.

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April 29, 2005

Grammar

"But love has its grammar, even though it doesn't recognize tenses but only moods, and only one of those, actually: the present in-fin-it-ive. When you love it's forever and the rest doesn't matter. Any old love, no matter what kind. Because it's not true you get over it - you don't get over anything, which is a bit of a drawback most times; rather, you bring it along with you, like life, which in itself is nothing to shout about, except that you get over love even less than you do life. It's there like the starlight. Who cares if the stars are alive or dead? They shine and that's that, and even though you can't see them in the daytime you know they're there."

Claudio Magris, To Have been

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April 28, 2005

Through the Looking-Glass

"One CAN'T believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!" Lewis Carroll

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April 27, 2005

Magritte's true inspiration

Another "find" from the SA trip: Miguel Repiso(Rep), "the most original cartoonist that Argentina has produced in recent years" as Quino (my favourite cartoonist) himself puts it.

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The order of surnames

Up

I got a free upgrade to Business class on my flight from Madrid to Lima. A very fortunate event considering it's a 12 hour flight and I am terribly scared of the coach class syndrome. And then, as I was thinking I couldn't be that lucky twice, I got another free upgrade on the way back from Buenos Aires.

Down

My flight from Lima to Santiago de Chile was cancelled and I had to stay there an extra night at LANChile expense. It wasn't that much of a downside since I loved Lima and didn't mind having some more extra time there.

All the people on my 7pm flight were transferred to the 6am flight; we all checked in the evening before and got picked up at 3am to have another try...

At the LANChile counter where I was supposed to pick my boarding pass since I had already checked in the evening before (and all of this in spanish, since her english wasn't that good):
LANCHile lady: Your passport please.
I hand over my passport, she looks at it, inserts my name on the computer. And then she starts pressing different keys, moves her head up and down, looking for my name on the screen, clearly not finding it.
LANCHile lady: Why did you miss the flight?
Me: I didn't miss the flight; it was cancelled.
LANCHile lady: Oh.
And goes on banging furiously on the keys.
LANCHile lady: Ok. The flight was cancelled but if it hadn't you would probably have lost it, right?
Me: No! I checked in three hours in advance yesterday!
LANChile lady: I don't have your name on the passengers list.
Me: That's impossible.
LANChile Lady: Where's your boarding pass, then?
Me: For God's sake! I have already told you that your colleague kept all the boarding passes of the passengers on the cancelled flight and we were supposed to pick them up today!!!

She goes away and comes back with a man:

LANChile man: So, you arrived late and missed your flight yesterday?
Me: NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! I checked in at 4pm!!! The damned flight was cancelled! Where's your supervisor?!
LANChile man: Sorry, but there's no one here at this hour. Where's your boarding pass then?
Me (holding my self not to hit him in the face): Look, I've already told your colleague what happened to my boarding pass; it must be with all the other boarding passes. Just look for it, I don't care if you can't find it on the computer!

The lady had a big pile of boarding passes on her hands and was going through it again and again, looking for mine. And obviously not finding it. She goes through them again, stops looking very puzzled, looks at my passport, again at the boarding pass, again looks at the passport and says:

LANChile Lady: How weird!! They checked you in using your last name!
Me (sarcastically): No way!!! Give me that!

And I went away cursing all those spanish conquistadores who landed on South America centuries ago and had to bring silly traditions like using a totally different surname order from the rest of the civilized world.

Whereas in most parts of the world, the last name is usually the father's family name:

"In Spain and countries of Hispanic culture (former Spanish colonies), each person has two family names (although in some situations only the first is used): the first is the first (paternal) family name of the father; the second is the first family name of the mother."

Which means she was looking for my first surname - my mother's - (Claudia Lobato) on the list instead of my last surname - my father's - (Claudia Dias).

I was asking for it, having two given names and three family names.

Not happy with altering the order of surnames, the mother's name is usually ignored. For instance:

Miguel de Cervantes was actually called Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
Francisco de Goya was actually called Francisco de Goya Y Lucientes.

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April 26, 2005

Cultural Awareness 101 and elementary manners

Useful tips while travelling in Argentina, learned the hard way:

- When asked if you'd like to have dinner and watch tango never reply: "I couldn't possibly endure two hours of tango!"

- Never smile back at macho immigration officers who give you back your passport with a lusty grin and a wink while saying "you can go through"

- Don't block the other tourist's view of Evita Peron's resting place while trying to take a photo of a much more beautiful mausoleum just across from hers

- Don't ask for "only a caprese salad" at a grill restaurant where everyone is eating steaks of gargantuan proportions; argentines are very proud of their meat, no pun intended

- NEVER ask a cabby, whose car's dashboard is covered with River Plate stickers, to take you to La Bombonera - the Boca Junior's Football Stadium (and eternal rival)

Maradona wine is the sort of classy souvenir one can buy at "Todo Boca", a Boca Juniors souvenir shop just across the street from the stadium

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April 22, 2005

Manuel Mujica Lainez - Luminosa Espiritualidad

I bought a beautiful book (in more than one way) by the Argentinian writer Manuel Mujica Lainez at the bookshop on Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires.

Its title is "Luminosa Espiritualidad" and contains a series of something we could call visual poems. Poems are written as if they were part of these labyrinthic naïf drawings. A beautiful form of expression.

"Mi amor es como un río, a veces liviano e musical, ya veces tormentoso, cuya corriente fluye sin pararse, te refleja sin cesar y te lleva consigo, a través de dulzuras y tempestades; te lleva, siempre, como se fueses su único e hermoso navío."

"My love is like a river, sometimes light and musical, other times stormy, whose current flows without stopping, reflects you incessantly and takes you with it, through sweetness or storms; it takes you, always, like you were its only and beautiful ship."

"Por esta puerta me fui, por esta puerta a buscarme, uma mañana de julio, por esta puerta a buscarme. Boca del infierno la llaman; para mí del Paraíso, que todo está en encontrarnos mientras andamos perdidos. Cada uno debe hallar en tierra su laberinto y recorrerlo hasta el fondo para saberse a si mismo. Lo que es gloria para alguno, para el otro es suplicio: la mano oscura se dan el Infierno, el Paraíso. Haber hallado la Puerta, le agradezco a mi destino, que bien puede no encontrarla y seguir siempre perdido."

"Through this door I left, through this door to find myself, one July morning, through this door to find myself. Mouth of Hell, they call it; for me it's Paradise, all is in finding ourselves while we are lost. To know oneself, each person must find on shore its labyrinth and cross it until the end. What is glory for some, for others is suplicy: Hell and Paradise, hand in hand. I thank my destiny for finding the Door because I might have not found it and go on, lost forever."

As usual I'm the only one to blame for the translation...

To AB; thanks for the lunch, book and conversation.The next one's on me!

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April 20, 2005

Xul Solar

"A man well versed in all disciplines, curious about each and every mystery, father of alphabets, languages, utopias and mythologies, host of paradises and infernos, author, pan-chess player, and perfect astrologer in indulgent irony and generous friendship, Xul Solar is one of the most peculiar events of our times" - Jorge Luis Borges

Xul Solar was one of my great "finds" from this last trip to Argentina. I loved his paintings and enjoyed his fabulous creativity through his imaginative inventions which range from
* Languages - Pan Criollo, a mix of spanish and portuguese, and Pan Lingua - "a system to communicate and link mathematics, music, astrology and the visual arts in unexpected combinations with untold creative potential"
* Religions and divinatory methods - firm believer in Astrology, Tarot, I Ching, Buddhism and reincarnation
* Games - Pan chess or non-chess, "whose indeterminate rules were simultaneously a group of musical notes, a dictionary for the creation of new languages"

I particularly liked this modified piano, where the original keys were substituted by colorfoul ones, "to accompany the music of his paintings".

More about Xul Solar on the Wikipedia, Words without Borders and Museo Xul Solar in Buenos Aires

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April 18, 2005

Dying is a precondition for becoming a Saint

I was thinking about posting something about this collective madness (Or should I say amnesia) that has overcome journalists, politicians and the like right after the pope's death.

Whatever I could write would never express what I feel as well as does this great article by the dissident theologian Hans Küng in Der Spiegel - The Pope's Contradictions - and this brilliant and sarcastic text by the great spanish writer Juan José Millás.

My own - probably a very poor attempt- translation into english:

*****

Commotion

You were rigth mother, if I don't think like everyone else, in the end I will end up alone. I will not do it again.

As a token of my repentance, here they are, these deeply felt lines about the Pope: a champion of freedom has died, a man who took the Church to incredible levels of internal democracy, and who recognized the rights of the persecuted or the traditionally forgotten groups, were they the poor, women, homosexuals or philatelists (in the case where philately is a venereal option for which I do not fall anymore). Its hatred towards tyrannies was such that he administered the eucharist to Pinochet, also known as the liberator of the South Cone, with whom the Church of John Paul II collaborated actively and without complexes. And I speak of Pinochet not to mention smaller heroes like Videla, who carried out his redempting mission thanks to the effective aid of the Argentine bishops.

Hopefully the Church does not take advantage of the Pope's death to again relegate women to the servile condition of which Wojtyla rescued them. Hopefully the Vatican continues supporting the base communities, in favour of the disinherited of the Earth, like John Paul II did when supporting the theologians who defended the diffusion of the message of Christ between the poor men. I ask God to illuminate the cardinals so that they choose a successor able to continue the revolution that this man took to an institution which was already so advanced. Or perhaps can we, the Spaniards, forget the complicity, said is in the best sense of the word, of the ecclesiastical hierarchy with Franco, whose tortures were by them applauded until remaining without hands? Also Franco, as demonstrated by History, was another champion of freedom. For when his beatification?

I will not be alone again. In the future I will repeat what the television commands, even if it contradicts my experience.

I write these lines under an April sun, in the terrace of a cafeteria. Nobody around me shows signs of having suffered a great loss, but it must be an optical effect because the television newscasts speak of a universal pain, that affects all and each one of the inhabitants of the planet.

I surrender, mother, and I will right now abominate condoms and adhere to the unique speech.

******

The spanish original version:

Conmoción

Llevabas razón, madre, si te significas demasiado, al final te quedas más solo que la una. No volveré a hacerlo. Ahí van, como muestra de mi arrepentimiento, estas líneas hondamente sentidas sobre el Papa: ha muerto un campeón de la libertad, un hombre que llevó a la Iglesia a cotas increíbles de democracia interna, y que reconoció los derechos de los colectivos tradicionalmente perseguidos u olvidados, fueran pobres, mujeres, homosexuales o filatélicos (en el caso de que la filatelia sea una opción venérea, que ahora no caigo). Su odio a las tiranías fue tal que administró la eucaristía a Pinochet, también conocido como el libertador del Cono Sur, con el que la Iglesia de Juan Pablo II colaboró activamente y sin complejos. Y hablamos de Pinochet por no mencionar a héroes menores como Videla, que llevó a cabo su misión redentora gracias a la eficaz ayuda de los obispos argentinos.

Ojalá que la Iglesia no aproveche este óbito para relegar de nuevo a la mujer a la condición servil de la que Wojtyla la rescató. Ojalá que el Vaticano continúe apostando por las comunidades de base, por los desheredados de la Tierra, como hizo Juan Pablo II al apoyar a los teólogos más comprometidos con la difusión del mensaje de Cristo entre los pobres. Pido a Dios que ilumine a los cardenales para que elijan un sucesor capaz de continuar la revuelta que este hombre llevó a una institución ya de por sí avanzada. ¿O acaso podemos olvidar los españoles la complicidad, dicho sea en el mejor sentido de la palabra, de la jerarquía eclesiástica con Franco, cuyas torturas aplaudió hasta quedarse sin manos? Y es que también Franco, como ha demostrado la historia, era otro campeón de la libertad. ¿Para cuándo su beatificación?
No volveré a quedarme solo. En el futuro repetiré lo que ordene la tele, aunque contradiga mi experiencia. Escribo estas líneas al sol de abril, en la terraza de una cafetería. Nadie, a mi alrededor, da muestras de haber sufrido una gran pérdida, pero debe ser un efecto óptico porque los telediarios hablan de un duelo universal, que afecta a todos y cada uno de los habitantes del planeta. Me rindo, mamá, y en este acto abomino del condón y me adhiero al discurso único.

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April 15, 2005

Mi Buenos Aires querido

Apart from being ridiculously cheap these days - even though I hope the argentine economy is recovering - Buenos Aires is that kind of city that has a flare to it which I personally can't see on the photos I took. Maybe except for these pics of bookworm paradise: El Ateneo - the most beautiful bookshop in the world. I'm not a big fan of big bookshops (I prefer the cozy little ones selling rare and non-mainstream books) but this one I must admit is a reader's paradise. It is housed on an antique theater on Santa Fe Avenue.

I also got to know the work of a lot of argentine painters previously unkonwn to me... Xul Solar being the most astonishing revelation of all.

And Palermo Viejo is a place I could easily live in...

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April 14, 2005

The Rainbow

It could seem like Cuzco (in Peru) is a gay friendly town seeing that their rainbow flag is all over the place...

Until you walk into on of the many small shops selling school books and these very educational posters:

The poster reads:
"Nuestra Sexualidad - Dios creó al hombre e a la mujer con una conducta sexual bien definida"

"Our sexuality - God created men and women as having a well defined sexual conduct"

The rainbow flag isn't celebrating diversity but it is rather the traditional flag associated with the Inca empire.

Of course, probably the same people who wrote the poster noticed the similarity between the flags:

"Gay Pride" Rainbow Flag Unwelcome in Peru

LIMA, Aug. 31 - The days may be numbered for the rainbow flags that fly in the mountain breezes of Cuzco, Peru's tourism mecca and ancient capital of the Inca Empire.

Cuzco Mayor Carlos Valencia and members of the City Council want it scrapped. Valencia s concern is not with the rainbow itself, but with a similar rainbow flag used to symbolize gay pride.

"Cuzco's emblem has been usurped by the gay community. We have called together a commission of intellectuals and noteworthy citizens to debate the issue and help design a new flag," Valencia said.

The rainbow had deep meaning for the Incas, whose empire extended from the Peruvian Andes south to Argentina and north to Panama until the early 16th century. The famed Coricancha Temple in Cuzco has a room honoring the god of rainbows. Some historians argue that rainbow was actually the banner of the empire.

Valencia's second-in-command, Councilman Gustavo Infantas, said the city urgently needs to change the flag or run the risk of becoming known as a "gay city." "We need to avoid the moral deterioration of Cuzco's society," Infantas said when comparing the two flags.

Infantas says there are also economic reasons for changing the flag, because heterosexuals may think that stores and restaurants flying the rainbow flag only cater to homosexuals. The mayor says he has wanted to change the flag since New Year's Day, when he watched a group of tourists parade around cuichi the Quechua name for Cuzco's seven-stripe flag thinking it was the gay banner.

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April 13, 2005

The narcissistic blogger

Hotel, Lima -Peru

Enoteca on San Cristóbal Hill, a great window over Santiago de Chile

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April 11, 2005

Peru Photos

The photo album is here!

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April 06, 2005

Favourite

Favourite photo from the whole trip...

Baby carried on mother's back, peeping out! Pisaq, Peru

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April 05, 2005

Back to Work

These have been some great vacations. It seems I've been away for ages - it's always a good sign when I forget passwords and phone numbers after some time away from work!

In short:

Peru is a wonderful country, very friendly people, great sights (as can be seen above).

Chile. I don't understand the fuss about chilean wine - portuguese red wine is one of our best kept "secrets" mainly due to the lack of producers and distributors marketing skills. Well, two words about Chile: Pablo Neruda. I visited two of his houses which are now museums and I might dare say that thankfully he turned out to be a poet and not an interior decorator :-))))

Argentina: only visited Buenos Aires where I could have stayed many more months and wouldn't be bored for a second...

Lots of stuff to post about on the next days!

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March 18, 2005

South American Way

Here I am, heading for the fulfillment of a few dreams.

#1 A childhood dream: visiting Machu Picchu (I loved to watch the animation series "Les mystérieuses cités d'or").

#2 A teenage dream: visiting Chile free of Pinochet (I even had a pi-NO-chet badge).

#3 A more grown up dream: visiting the Argentina of Cortázar and Borges.

"The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page." - Saint Augustine

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March 16, 2005

Kaleidoscopical

Crystal chandelier on a corridor, seen from below, Casa de Serralves, Porto

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March 15, 2005

The hair of Mr. Ruskin

Too tired to drive, I took the train to Porto last weekend. I had planned to read a book on the journey but the smooth, crib-like motion of the train made me go to sleep – a much needed, even though not very comfortable, sleep.

Anyway, I went to the Fundação de Serralves which houses a museum of contemporary art and always features interesting temporary exhibitions.

There was a particular project by João Penalva - a Portuguese artist working in London whose work I saw for the first time and rather enjoyed – which I found particular amusing. Not for the work in itself but because of the circumstances of a theft involving it.

The South End Gallery had a framed lock of John Ruskin’s hair – a famous Victorian art critic, among other talents - on display and Penalva made 7 other different frames, each one complete with a lock of hair and a handwritten annotation that goes something like “The hair of Mr. Ruskin”. His installation is comprised by the 7 not-so-exact imitations and the original one:

I don’t know which one is the real one…neither did the thief that stole one of the fake frames from the gallery.

This event has some rather interesting implications regarding authenticity in art. Either way, the thief would have won (meanwhile the frame was recovered): either he ended up with the original John Ruskin’s lock of hair, which I suppose has some kind of junk memorabilia value especially if he had some weird obsession on the guy, or with a piece by João Penalva even if it made completely no sense by itself.

“ (…) works of art can possess what we may call nominal authenticity, defined simply as the correct identification of the origins, authorship, or provenance of an object, ensuring, as the term implies, that an object of aesthetic experience is properly named. However, the concept of authenticity often connotes something else, having to do with an object’s character as a true expression of an individual’s or a society’s values and beliefs. This second sense of authenticity can be called expressive authenticity. “ - Dennis Dutton (in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics)

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March 07, 2005

...And I've been working like a dog...

A cynical New Yorker cartoon

Two weeks to go until my Easter holidays. That's the light at the end of the tunnel while working insanely long hours and weekends!

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March 04, 2005

Madame Récamier

I saw this on Giulio Carlo Argan's book "L'arte moderna" and found it hilarious (yes, I know, weird sense of humor...)

aa

Madame Récamier by Jacques-Louis David

Magritte's surrealist version

I suppose sonwhere this is interpreted as a symbolic way of representing the absurdity of death or something else deeply psychoanalytical...I like to think that he painted it for fun.

Just like many intellectuals tried to read between the lines of a Boris Vian novel -can't remember which - and he would say that he wrote it "only to make the gang have a good time" (of course there's more to it, but why not simply enjoy it for the sake of entertainment without any intellectual pretensions?).

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March 02, 2005

Fishes

Cascais, Marina

Liu Ts'ai - Three Fishes (circa 1068)

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March 01, 2005

Commenting has been off

As you may have noticed, commenting has been off...apparently my host (weblog.com.pt) is having trouble with all the commenting and trackback spam. Sometime this week they'll be migranting the servers and istalling some kind of security that will improve the situation.

Until then....MundodeClaudia at gmail.

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February 28, 2005

The Graphoscope

My latest acquisition at a flea market: a graphoscope. As far as my research goes (if one can call research to googling for antique online auctions), it was actually a bargain.

The large magnifying lens' purpose is to watch details in photographs and the two smaller ones are supposed to work as a stereoscope.

The fun part of this antique gadget is actually the stereoscope! This means I'll have to start collecting sterographs (I only bought three with it)...and I've seen some great ones on sale on ebay.

"A stereograph is simply a simultaneous double-image of the same subject that, when viewed through a stereoscope like the one pictured here, appears to be one three-dimensional photograph. Stereographs are made by a single camera with two lenses set approximately two-and-a-half inches apart--about the same distance as that between the eyes. The viewer places the stereograph in the wire slots in the holder and then looks through the two lenses, moving the holder back or forth until the single three-dimensional image is in focus. Like lithography, stereography was of great importance in the mass production and distribution of images in the nineteenth century. The technique dates to the 1830s, but popular interest in the stereograph took off with improvements in photography and the development in Britain of a simple and easy-to-use viewer, which caught Queen Victoria's eye and the attention of the world when it was displayed at the 1851 London Crystal Palace."

More about graphoscopes and stereoscopes here and here.

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February 24, 2005

Looking down

Hotel, Madrid

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February 22, 2005

Ramón Masats

I felt ARCO'05 was a bit disappointing. Maybe my expectations were too high since last year was an immense pleasure to wonder through miles and miles of creative stuff.

Anyway, if I had to say something positive about it, I'd say that at least I got see some of the work of a spanish photographer previously unknown to me: Ramón Masats.

Two of my favourites:

Tomelloso (Ciudad Real) 1960
Seminario (Madrid) 1960

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February 21, 2005

Rugs

This doormat was actually a contemporary art piece exhibited at ARCO '05.

It's funny, it's clever. But why is it art? If this is art, my own doormat is a masterpiece (the only trouble being that I don't actually live in the Netherlands and it needs a bit of cleaning).

Bought at the tomtom shop (in Lisboa).

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February 20, 2005

Portugal won!

Today was election day. Whatever the results, Portugal won. The first estimates show that there was a higher than usual participation rate. It comforts me that my fellow citizens wake up whenever the country is going down the drain...and I prefer not to describe any humiliating details about this last government (and believe me, there are plenty).

Not to mention the most ridiculous campaign song I have ever heard and the most embarrassing campaign letter I ever got in the mail - the current prime minister, a dreadful socialite, tried to play the victim of some weird, farfetched conspiracy.

By the way, fortunately this last prime minister wasn't properly elected, he stepped in to substitute Durão Barroso who suddenly left us to be the President of the European Commission (and turn Portugal into the original Banana Republic). Great timing.

More about these portuguese political depressing times on BBC and on Der Spiegel.

I always have a hard time picking the party to vote for. There are a few automatically excluded (the monarchics, the radical right, the extremely small crazy either left or right wing parties). My results at the political compass quiz might explain my difficulties... There isn't a political party in Portugal which is barely in the middle between left and right - economically speaking - and, at the same time, insanely libertarian...

The political compass has a very interesting and simple concept: instead of classifying your choices between left and right (which is the economic scale), there is an axis representing the social scale (libertarian vs. authoritarian):

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February 18, 2005

Black and White

While I was in Madrid last weekend there was a huge fire at the highest skyscraper in town, the Windsor Tower, in the financial district that started on Saturday night.

The building was still fuming on Sunday afternoon and there was a terrible traffic jam at Castellana because the police didn't allow any cars to go by. The Windsor Tower was completely burned down, making the Picasso Tower look whiter and brighter.

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February 17, 2005

The Shining, Claudia's version

All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.All work and no play makes Claudia a dull girl.

And this is where I start killing people with an axe.

No I'm not insane YET, you'll have to watch Kubrick's The Shining. Here's a short animated version of the movie with bunnies :-)

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February 11, 2005

Arco '05

I'm off for a quick 5-hour drive to Madrid :-).

This year's ARCO guest of honour is Mexico:

"Lejos de sufrir una pérdida de identidad en la era de la globalización, el arte contemporáneo que se hace en México es fruto del diálogo: se integra y se resiste, asume y a la vez cuestiona; es profundamente crítico del sistema, y a la vez resulta un mecanismo positivo de reflexión y análisis."

or for the spanish impaired readers :-))))

"Far from suffering a loss of identity in the era of
globalization, mexican contemporary art is born out of dialogue: it integrates and resists, assumes and simultaneously questions; deeply critical of the system and, simultaneously, a positive mechanism for reflection and analysis."

Let's see.

So much to do, so little time (and trying to ignore the recent bombings).

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February 09, 2005

Perspective

Subway - Saldanha, Lisboa

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February 08, 2005

Billions of billious barbecued blue blistering barnacles!

A complete list (in english) of Captain Haddock's curses at Tintinologist.

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February 07, 2005

Symmetric composition with two bald heads :-)

SNBA, Lisboa

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February 04, 2005

Famous Writer's Last Words

More literary humour/anedoctes:

When Ibsen's nurse commented that he seemed to be feeling much better one morning, Ibsen loked at her, said "On the contrary" and promptly died.

Lope de Vega: "All right, then, I'll say it. Dante makes me sick".

Paul Claudel:"Dou you think it could have been the sausage?".

Allen Ginsberg: "Toodle-oo".

Eugene O'Neill: "I knew it! Born in a hotel room - and goddamn it- dying in a hotel room."

Brendan Brehan, to a catholic nun taking his pulse in the hospital: " Bless you, sister. May all your sons be bishops."

Oscar Wilde:"Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."

J.M.Barrie: "I can't sleep."

H.G.Wells to the his nurse: "Go away, I'm all right."

James Joyce: "Does nobody understand?"

Dylan Thomas:"I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I believe that's the record."

Voltaire, to the priest imploring him to repudiate the devil: "Is this the time to be making enemies?"

compiled by John Green for The Common Review

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February 03, 2005

Reflection #2

Cascais, Marina

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February 02, 2005

Inspiration

"Form for me is never something abstract. It is always a token of something... For me, form is never an end in itself." - Joan Miró

And so, this "Dutch Interior #1" (in the MoMA, NY)

was inpired by Sorgh's "The Lute Player" (in the Riijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

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February 01, 2005

Waiting

Mise en Scène, Cascais

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January 31, 2005

Recharging batteries

Mise en scène, Cascais

It was a lovely sunny Sunday. I'd recommend a winter in Portugal for anyone suffering from SAD :-) I'm preparing myself for a month of hard work, tight deadlines and a total obliteration of social life and leisure time (excluding the weekend for the annual pilgrimage to Madrid, obviously). The recipe: grilled eggplant, cheese and Mariage Frères tea (Elixir d'amour :-))).

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January 27, 2005

Reflection #1

Cascais, Marina

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January 26, 2005

Saber mirar

Saber mirar es un sistema completamente nuevo de agrimensura espiritual. Saber mirar es un modo de inventar. E no existe invención tan pura como aquella que ha creado la mirada anestésica de ojo limpíssimo, ausente de pestañas, del Zeiss: destilado e atento, imposible a la floración rosada de la conjuntivitis.

La fotografia, como pura creación del espíritu (1927), Salvador Dalí

Knowing how to look is a completely new system of spiritual surveying. Knowing how to look is a way of inventing. And there isn’t a purer invention as the one created by the anesthetic glance of the most clean eye, absent of eyelashes, that is the Zeiss: distilled and attentive, impossible to the pink flowering of the conjuntivitis.

Photography, as a pure creation of the spirit (1927), Salvador Dalí

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January 25, 2005

V. Mescherin's Ensemble of Electro-Musical Instruments

Why is it that kitsch appeals to me so much? I do have a weird sense of humour at times; maybe that's why I find aesthetic worthlessness amusing?

Thanks to a colleague, I found a store in Lisboa that sells cd's for 1 Euro. Among other weird, unsellable stuff was a two volume set called "Easy USSR". I had a heard a bit of it before (it was one of my colleague's acquisitions) and had found it hilarious. The cover had a nice retro graphic design style... I bought it.

Inside, the leaflet unfolds to show a chronology of V.Mescherin's life and USSR history (I think, since it's in russian). Mescherin, according to the wikipedia, was a Soviet musician who used synthesisers in the 60's, 70's and 80's and "his music could be heard virtually everywhere, in elevators, on television backgrounds; the Soviet government asked him to prepare a version of the Internationale (The former national anthem) for use in a Sputnik satellite in 1959".

Inside, a perfectly bizarre, the kitschest primitive electronic music from the 60's and 70's with terrible titles like "On the kholkoz poultry farm" or "Ethiopian joker's dance". Here's a sample from 1973's "Dancing Dwarves":

More about Mescherin here.

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January 24, 2005

The DNA of Literature

Thanks to PdS I've been downloading the Paris Review Interviews. A free little treasure (only the interviews from the 50's and 60's are available - I'm waiting for Bowles...)

Some bits I found amusing:

Interviewer: What have you learned from Joyce?
Vladimir Nabokov: Nothing.

****

Interviewer: And what does the doctor represent for you now?
Louis Ferdinand Céline : Bah! Now he's so mistreated by society he has competition from everybody, he has no more prestige, no more prestige.(...) Doesn't have much to say anymore, the housewife has the Larousse Médical, and then the diseases themselves have lost their prestige, there are fewer of them, so look what's happened: no syph, no gonorrhea, no typhoid. Antibiotics have taken the tragedy out of medicine. So there's no more plague, no more cholera.

***

Interviewer: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?
Dorothy Parker: Need of money, dear.

***

Interviewer: Henry James was a strong influence, then?
James Thurber: I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. which would argue for a misspent youth and middle age.

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January 21, 2005

The Sun Clock

Portuguese maintenance: pile up the medieval headstones, sunclocks so that it looks like rubble on the castle's entrance during the restauration works in Castelo de Vide. Clever. This way the thieves will think they're worthless.

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January 20, 2005

Mozzarella di Bufala

I am totally nuts about mozzarella di bufala. I drool over the counter while checking out at the supermarket, anticipating the greatest of pleasures: eating... It also brings back memories of some perfect holidays, years ago, in Amalfi where I tasted mozzarella di bufala for the first time. And when I had the best pizza Margherita in the world in Naples. And when I accomplished a long childhood dream of visiting Pompeii.

I have no idea why do the italians have buffalos in the South of the country. According to this site, opinions differ. Some say that it is a native species (they found fossils as far as Tuscany), some say the arabs introduced them to Sicily and then to the South of Italy, others say they were brought there by the barbaric invasions in the VI century...

I had Buffalo's milk in India but I don't think they have something like Indian Bufallo's Mozzarella, unfortunately.

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January 19, 2005

Too loud a solitude

"I can be by myself because I'm never lonely, I'm simply alone, livinh in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me."

A wonderful choice: the first book I have read this year was Bohumil Hrabal's "Too loud a solitude". The story of a man who compacts wastepaper and book into a pulp for a living. And does his bit of art by decorating the compacted bales of wastepaper with reproductions of masterpieces by Rembrandt or Gauguin. He can't avoid "saving" books from destruction, drinks a bit too much beer and has extraordinary visions of dead philosophers.

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January 18, 2005

The Rialto Bridge

The Rialto Bridge in Venice links the two banks of the Grand Canal. Several wooden bridges that would either collapse or burn down were built since the 12th century.

Il Miracolo della reliquia della Croce al ponte di Rialto, Vittore Carpaccio

The actual Rialto Bridge was built according to the project of Antonio da Ponte between 1558 and 1591. His plan was chosen between dozens of projects by reknowned artists like Palladio and Michelangelo.

The Rialto Bridge, Canaletto

The Gulbenkian Museum in Lisboa houses a painting by Francesco Guardi in which there is a fantasy bridge over the Grand Canal. This bridge was painted according to the project of the great architect Palladio, author of the important treatise "The four Books of Architecture".

The Rialto bridge acording to Palladio, Guardi

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January 17, 2005

Historical usage of the "F" word

"What the f*** do you mean we are sinking?"
Capt. E.J. Smith of RMS Titanic, 1912

"What the f*** was that?"
Mayor Of Hiroshima, 1945

"Where did all those f***ing Indians come from?"
Custer, 1877

"Any f***ing idiot could understand that."
Einstein, 1938

"It does so f***ing look like her!"
Picasso, 1926

"How the f*** did you work that out?"
Pythagoras, 126 BC

"You want WHAT on the f***ing ceiling!?!??"
Michelangelo, 1566

"Where the f*** are we?"
Amelia Earhart, 1937

"Scattered f***ing showers, my ass!"
Noah, 4314 BC

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January 14, 2005

Hyacinth

Some Hyacinth bulbs I bought before Christmas are blossomkng in my kitchen!

They aren't only beautiful, they also fill the kitchen with a wonderful fragrance. I feel like it's spring in the flat :-)))

"Hyacinthus, in Greek mythology, beautiful youth loved by Apollo. He was killed accidentally by a discus thrown by the god. According to another legend, the wind god Zephyr, out of jealousy, blew the discus to kill Hyacinth. From his blood sprang a flower which was named for him" from Bartleby

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January 13, 2005

Priorities

A filosophy teacher is standing in front of his class. He puts a big cup on the table and fills the cup up with a few rocks and asks his class:"Is this cup full?" They reply "Yes". So the teacher takes a handfull of tiny stones and drops them in the cup and the tiny stones fall between the rocks into the cup and he asks: "Is the cup full now?" Again everbody is mumbeling "Yes". Then he takes a hand full of sand and the sand goes between the rocks and the tiny stones and again he asks "Is the cup full now?" Everbody answers "yes" again.
And he explains:"Those things are all symbols for something. The cup resembles your life. The rocks are the essential things of life, like your partner, your friends, your health. The tiny stones resemble the important things of life, like your job, your other interests. The sand resembles the extras in life, like a luxury car or a second house. The filosophy behind it is this: You got to make sure you fill the cup that is your life with the essential things of life first, because if you fill it up with the extras - the sand - there is no room anymore for the rocks and the tiny stones."

While everbody in the class thinks about this in silence, one student gets up, walks over to the cup, opens a can of beer and pours the beer out over the cup, filling the empty space between the rocks, the tiny stones and the sand.

Moral of the story: no matter how full your life is, there is always room for one more beer.

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January 12, 2005

Melinda and Melinda

Melinda and Melinda is one of the best movies directed by Woody Aleen in the last years. Finally.

It's yet another movie about difficult relationships, infidelities and neurotic new yorkers but with some very interesting insights and a very good directing. The apparent main goal of the movie is to show how the same story can be either tragic or comic depending on the way it is told to the audience.

My main conclusion (that I had reached long before watching this movie but got only confirmed) is that there isn't anything we can't joke about. Laughing is just releasing the tension, it's a rebellious act. It doesn't change anything but it sure takes off the weight of the tragedy. Which is perfect when one is confronted with an inevitabilty. And that's why I'm not a good company for funerals :-)

Favourite movie quote:

him: "Do you think we don't communicate anymore?"
her: "Of course we communicate, can we stop talking about that?"

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January 11, 2005

Cinq fois deux

I went to see a brilliant movie by François Ozon this weekend. It's the story of an ordinary couple's ordinary relationship told backwards, from the divorce to the "Coup de Foudre". The succession of events shows how the breakup hasn't got one explanation, only one reason. It's amazing how the story of our ordinary lives could make an exceptional movie.

Maybe this is not that ordinary :-) but the bride in this movie gets a one night stand with a complete stranger (a foreigner, an american) on her wedding night. It reminded me of Erica Jong's book "Fear of Flying" and her coining of the concept of a zipless fuck (pardon me, but I'm quoting!!):"The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is, rarer than the unicorn and I have never had one."

The definition provided by urban dictionary is:

"A phrase coined by Erica Jong in the book "Fear of Flying". As described by her - It is a sexual encounter between strangers that has the swift compression of a dream and is seemingly free of all remorse and guilt. It is absolutely pure, there is no power game and it is free of ulterior motives. It has also been described as the perfect one night stand."

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January 10, 2005

Boy with cherries

Boy with cherries by Edouard Manet, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisboa

The boy portrayed was Manet's studio assistant, Alexandre, who commited suicide at age 15 by hanging himself in the artist's bedroom closet in 1859. Manet shared the studio with Albert de Balleroy.

Apparently there were some insinuations about the incident which triggered Baudelaire to write the short story "La Corde", written in the first person, in which he defends the actions of his friend Manet and makes a cynical case for the meaning of motherhood.

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January 07, 2005

Religion

We were late and only caught up with him as he was filling in an immigration form. Against the column marked "religion" he had written "Protestant - purely in the sense that I protest".

from "The Alexandria Quartet" by Lawrence Durrell.

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January 06, 2005

Les Clochards

Before entering the gallery at the Gulbenkian Modern Art Center in LIsboa, I was browsing some photography books at the bookshop and I was quite impressed by some pictures by Brassaï.

I went to the gallery and stepped to the lower floor. I went to the end of the corridor and looked at some paintings I usually ignore. I looked at this painting and, to my amazement, it resembled a lot like a photo by Brassaï I had just been admiring. And the accompanying text said nothing about it.

"Clochard de la Place de La Concorde", António Soares

Of course I had to run out of the gallery, buy the book and go down again. How can I put this? These little findings make me happy.

"Clochard, Quais des Tuileries", Brassaï

The titles are slightly different but the Quais des Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde in Paris are pretty close.

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January 05, 2005

Novella

A New Yorker Cartoon.

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January 04, 2005

The rocks

Yet another brilliant photo by Gérard Castello Lopes. The rock seems to be floating just like in Magritte's painting.

Rochedo, Gérard Castello Lopes

Le Chateau aux Pyrenées(detail), Magritte

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January 03, 2005

2005

Taking into account that last year I reached my health insurance coverage limit by May and, oddly enough, I didn't need to go (or I wouldn't go, keeping a family tradition of ignoring medical advice) to a doctor for the rest of the year, 2005 can only be better, healthwise.

I was taking a look at my 2004 resolutions and, strangely, I probably kept about 80% of them. Not bad.

This year's list of perfectly attainable goals is:
- read all those books and authors that are constantly either on my shopping list or on the to-read pile but something always gets in the way: Ulysses, Sebald, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Goethe's Theory of Colours, Bohumil Hrabal, Georges Perec, Tibor Fischer, Georges Bataille...

- really try to have a healthy diet... my cholesterol levels must be sky high by now. I'm a thin person, all the fat must stick inside the arteries instead of going to my ass :-)

- will not exercise, as usual, so there's no point in writing a resolution about it;

All the other stuff I should do this year doesn't really depend on me; I already accomplish a lot, considering my lack of free time.

Maybe I should start smoking. At least I would have a proper resolution for 2006.

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December 29, 2004

Regarding our own pain

Watching the news coverage of the tsunami catastrophe I recalled some passages of Susan Sontag's book "Regarding the pain of others". And now I find she passed away tonight...

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, Hokusai

I haven't seen any pictures of tourist's corpses. I have seen a lot of dead asian people, a lot of dead babies carried in despair by their mothers. I have seen full coverages of the damages that luxury hotels suffered. I have seen images of tourists in clean and modern hospitals, getting free food at the aiports.

There was a british couple being interviewed that said the most amazing sentence, between sobs: "The water filled our bangalow...we lost everything we had".

I have a feeling - and hopefuly I'm terribly wrong - that the news have more impact when westerners are affected. Is it that we actually are more compassionate when we think "that ACTUALLY could have been me"? It's easier to identify ourselves with the people killed in the 9/11 attack. It's easier to identify ourselves with the tourists in exotic resorts.

I'm sure that the story of the german kid who was reunited with his mother is much more appealing than the thousands of similar stories that I hope happened to the inhabitants of the affected countries.

I'm wondering what happened to the asian tourists. Maybe I have seen their corpses after all. I suppose a blonde head is easier to spot in the middle of the chaos...

"Staying within the bounds of good taste was the primary reason given for not showing any of the horrific pictures of the dead taken at the site of the World Trade Center(...).The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.(...) The exhibition in photographs of cruelties inflicted on those with darker complexions in exotic countries continues this offering, oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own vitims of violence; for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded as only someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees." Susan Sontag, Regarding the pain of others.

I'm going to shake off the cynicism now.

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December 22, 2004

Going on holidays! (Again!)

Terreiro do Paço, Lisboa - The city's Christmas decorations are quite modern this year :-)

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December 21, 2004

The high brow quiz :-)

Which British Literary Period are you? Restoration 1660-1785--Pope, Swift, Johnson. Times they are a changing. You're very cynical and you like looking out for the little guys. You have a sense of humor a lot of people just don't get.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

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December 20, 2004

The missing apostle

This may sound really strange but I get an unexplainable pleasure out of finding last supper scenes with the wrong number of apostles. Which means I can't go pass a painting or scuplture depicting that scene without counting the number of people at the table.

Here are two of my findings:

Museu de Évora, Portugal
And what exactly is that apostle doing on Christ's lap????!?!?

Museo Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

These two are probably paintings that have been cut up leaving the missing apostle out, but I don't care :-)

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December 17, 2004

Christmas for the Cynical

The Christmas spirit hasn't kicked in. The only Christmas related things I have done this year were decorating the tree (a bit unwillingly...) and sending cards to friends and family I won't be spending the season with.

I don't have enough free time to shop for the perfect gifts for those I love and I don't have the patience to go around crowded streets or shopping malls. I'm doing something different this year but can't post it here or it won't be a surprise :-)

Some inspiring quotations for the season ;-)

Christmas at my house is always at least six or seven times more pleasant than anywhere else. We start drinking early. And while everyone else is seeing only one Santa Claus, we'll be seeing six or seven. - W.C. Fields

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph.- Shirley Temple

Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred.- George Bernard Shaw

Christmas is the one time of year when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.- Bart Simpson

The parent who gets down on the floor to play with a child on Christmas Day is usually doing a most remarkable thing -- something seldom repeated during the rest of the year. These are, after all, busy parents committed to their work or their success in the larger society, and they do not have much left-over time in which to play with their children. -Brian Sutton Smith

Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human- like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family... - Berke Breathed

Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed, and the rejected. - Jimmy Cannon

The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn't for any religious reasons. They couldn't find three wise men and a virgin. - Jay Leno

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December 16, 2004

The Deconstruction Joke

What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist and a mafioso? He'll make you an offer you can't understand.

Stolen from here.

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December 15, 2004

Le renard et le buste

Azulejos, Igreja S.Vicente de Fora - Lisboa

Les Grands, pour la plupart, sont masques de théâtre ;
Leur apparence impose au vulgaire idolâtre.
L'Ane n'en sait juger que par ce qu'il en voit.
Le Renard au contraire à fond les examine,
Les tourne de tout sens ; et quand il s'aperçoit
Que leur fait n'est que bonne mine,
Il leur applique un mot qu'un Buste de Héros
Lui fit dire fort à propos.
C'était un Buste creux, et plus grand que nature.
Le Renard, en louant l'effort de la sculpture :
Belle tête, dit-il ; mais de cervelle point.
Combien de grands Seigneurs sont Bustes en ce point ?

The great are like the maskers of the stage;
Their show deceives the simple of the age.
For all that they appear to be they pass,
With only those whose type's the ass.
The fox, more wary, looks beneath the skin,
And looks on every side, and, when he sees
That all their glory is a semblance thin,
He turns, and saves the hinges of his knees,
With such a speech as once, it's said,
He uttered to a hero's head.
A bust, somewhat colossal in its size,
Attracted crowds of wondering eyes.
The fox admired the sculptor's pains:
"Fine head," said he, "but void of brains!"
The same remark to many a lord applies.

La Fontaine, Fables (IV,14)

or

Aesop's Fables (Phaedrus 1.7):

Personam tragicam forte vulpes viderat;
quam postquam huc illuc semel atque iterum verterat,
'O quanta species' inquit 'cerebrum non habet!'
Hoc illis dictum est quibus honorem et gloriam
Fortuna tribuit, sensum communem abstulit.

A Fox beheld a Mask- "0 rare
The headpiece, if but brains were there !"
This holds-whene'er the Fates dispense
Pomp, pow'r, and everything but sense.

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December 14, 2004

Earthquake!

A 5.1 earthquake was felt yesterday in Lisboa, fortunately not by me.

The inhabitants of Lisbon are constantly haunted by the memory of the great earthquake of 1755 and we are always expecting some sort of catastrophe. Oddly enough, we don't move away. It's the portuguese way of life: you have to accept your fate :-)

"Although not the strongest or most deadly earthquake in human history, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake's impact, not only on Portugal but on all of Europe, was profound and lasting. Depictions of the earthquake in art and literature can be found in several European countries, and these were produced and reproduced for centuries following the event, which came to be known as 'The Great Lisbon Earthquake'. The earthquake began at 9:30 on November 1st, 1755, and was centered in the Atlantic Ocean, about 200 km WSW of Cape St. Vincent. The total duration of shaking lasted ten minutes and was comprised of three distinct jolts. Effects from the earthquake were far reaching. The worst damage occurred in the south-west of Portugal. Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, was the largest and the most important of the cities damaged. Moderate damage was done in Algiers and in southwest Spain. Shaking was also felt in France, Switzerland, and Northern Italy. A devastating fire following the earthquake destroyed a large part of Lisbon, and a very strong tsunami caused heavy destruction along the coasts of Portugal, southwest Spain, and western Morocco." taken from here.

Never understood how come the tsunami didn't put out the fire, though. :-)

This great catstrophe triggered Kant to write "On the Causes of the Terrestrial Convulsions" and Voltaire to write "Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne" - a critique of religion and the philosophical optimism of people like Leibniz. Voltaire actually included a chapter in "Candide" describing the earthquake.

Images from the Collection of Historical Images of Earthquakes.

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December 13, 2004

Meta-joke

A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar.
Bartender says, "What is this, a joke?"

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December 10, 2004

The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus

1618, Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish baroque painter - Alte Pinakothek, Münich(Germany)
1947, António Pedro, Portuguese Surrealist Painter - Centro de Arte Moderna, Lisboa(Portugal)

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December 09, 2004

Dark, very dark

A little story Paul Bowles remembers Dali telling him:

"Then he told a story about a small girl lost in a blizzard in the Alps. When she was more dead than alive, a fine St.Bernard arrived with a keg of brandy around his neck. The dog then attacked and ate her."

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Atheism

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

from nedmartin.

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December 07, 2004

Symbols of the Virgin Mary

Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisboa Painted between 1540 and 1560 by an unknown author.

The painting shows Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus and Mary's parents: Saint Joachim and Saint Ann. The woman kneeling is probably the one who donated the painting to a convent in Lisbon.

What I like about this painting is that displays a profusion of symbols of the Virgin Mary. The traditional symbols of the Virgin Mary are a common sight in most religious works of this period but this one has the particularity of having perhaps a more pedagogical approach similar to some engravings I have seen from several Books of Hours. On each symbol is painted a ribbon or a caption in latin, thus easying the interpretation of the observer.

Some of the symbols are references to the litanies of the Virgin, namely the Litanies of Loreto. A litany is a devotional prayer for two or more people gathered together. The principal phrase is said or chanted by one person, and the responses by the others in unison.

These symbols are sometime referred to as the "names of the virgin" for which the book Song of Songs from the Old Testament was the main foundation or source. There are a number of references to deuterocanonical books too.

The ribbon beneath God and amidst the angels has the following inscription: "TOTA PULCHRA EST AMICA MEA ET MACULA NON EST IN TE".
This is Song of Songs 4:7, meaning "This is Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee."

The sun's and the moon's captions are "elect ut sol" and "pulchra ve luna", from Song of Songs 6:9
"Quae est ista, quae progreditur quasi aurora consurgens,
pulchra ut luna, electa ut sol,
terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata?"

"Who is this that looks forth like the dawn,
fair as the moon, bright as the sun,
terrible as an army with banners?"

The star's caption is "stella maris" from the hymn "Ave maris stella" found in the Hours of the Virgin.

ç

"

	"Speculum sin macula", a mirror. Book of Wisdom 7:26 "Candor est enim lucis aeternae et speculum sine macula Dei maiestatis et imago bonitatis illius" "For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness."
	"Fons Ortorum", a fountain. Song of Songs 4:15 "Fons hortorum : puteus aquarum viventium, quae fluunt impetu de Libano." "A garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon."
	"Cipressus in monte sion", a Cypress. Sirach 24,13 "Quasi cedrus exaltata sum in Libano et quasi cypressus in monte Sion" "I was exalted like a cedar in Libanus, and as a cypress tree upon the mountains of Sion."
	"Liliu inter spinas", a lily. Song of songs 2:2 "Sicut lilium inter spinas, sic amica mea inter filias." "As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens."
	"Civitas dei", the city of God (Jerusalem). Psalm 86:3 "gloriosa dicta sunt de te civitas Dei diapsalma" "On the holy mount stands the city he founded;"
	"Virga iesse floruit", branch in blossom. Isaiah 11:1 "et egredietur virga de radice Iesse et flos de radice eius ascendet" "There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots."
	"Plantatio rose", a rose. Sirach 24:18 "et quasi palma exaltata sum in Cades et quasi plantatio rosae in Hiericho" "I was exalted like a palm tree in En-gaddi, and as a rose plant in Jericho"
	"Puteus Aquarum Viventium", a well. Song of Songs 4:15 "Fons hortorum : puteus aquarum viventium, quae fluunt impetu de Libano." "A garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon."
	"Cedrus Exaltata", a cedar tree. Sirach 24,13 "Quasi cedrus exaltata sum in Libano et quasi cypressus in monte Sion" "I was exalted like a cedar in Libanus, and as a cypress tree upon the mountains of Sion."
	"Turris david cum propugnaculis", Tower of David. Song of Songs 4:4 "Sicut turris David collum tuum, quae aedificata est cum propugnaculis : mille clypei pendent ex ea, omnis armatura fortium." "Your neck is like the tower of David, built for an arsenal, whereon hang a thousand bucklers, all of them shields of warriors."
	"sperius"??? still googling for this one...

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December 06, 2004

Yet another philosophy joke

Layman: So what do you think of determinism?
Libertarian: Whatever I want to.

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December 03, 2004

Igreja de Jesus

Lisboa, just before getting an annoying woman screaming in my ears "You are not allowed to take pictures in here! Orders of the priest". Not only did I take it, I'm also publishing it. There!

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December 02, 2004

Gérard Castello Lopes

My favourite photographer.

Carcavelos, 1956

"(...) The act of photographing is the personal expression of a reality, which makes us define photography not as a testimony but as a fiction."
in Reflections on Photography

Lisboa, 1957

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November 29, 2004

Perhaps it's some pagan god of manhood

I couldn't believe my eyes...

But when seen from the front...

it's just a sledge hammer. Maybe it's Hephaestus. It looked much more fun from the side anyway.

Avenida de Roma, Lisboa

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November 26, 2004

The Window

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November 25, 2004

El fulgor del relámpago

One of the Best things in Life #457 - Picking up a book by chance, opening it on a totally random page and finding a beautiful poem.

   Hay cosas que la vida te da cuando ya apenas
podías esperarlas, y su luz
maravillosa, elemental, purísima,
te hace feliz de pronto. Y desgraciado
pues comprendes que no te corresponde
ese milagro ahora y que no debes
a ciegas entregarte a lo que era
propio tal vez de otro momento tuyo,
de um momento anterior, cuando tenías
fuerzas para ser libre.
Mas déjate llevar, y vive esa hermosura
con coraje, sin miedo. A qué pensar
en lo que conviene. Es muy fugaz la dicha.
No la desprecies. Tómala. Y apura
el fulgor del relámpago.
                                             Después,
tiempo tendrás para seguir muriéndote.

    There are things that life gives you when you could barely expect them, and its
marvellous, elementary, purest light,
makes you suddenly happy. And you feel unfortunate
because you understand that that miracle
does not belong to you now and that you shouldn’t
blindly engage in something that what was more appropriate
perhaps of another time,
of a previous time, when you had
the strength to be free.
But let yourself go, and live that beauty
with courage, without fear. Why think
about what is more convenient to you. Happiness is fleeting.
Do not despise it. Take it. And exhaust
the radiance of the lightning.
                                             After,
you will have time to go on dying.

Eloy Sánchez Rosillo, Autorretratos

As usual, I am to blame for this very faulty translation.

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November 23, 2004

Top 10 Reasons why sex at the speed of light is not advisable

10. Penile length contraction:
An average penis of length 13cm traveling at 99% the speed of light will contract down to a length of only 1.8cm. At the speed of light, length contraction leads to an interesting paradox in which the penis seems to have no length at all, but is still managing to have sex somehow.

9. Penile black hole formation:
At the speed of light, relativity also predicts that the penis will attain infinite mass, essentially becoming a black hole. When its owner realises that his penis has turned into a black hole, he will become profoundly depressed and overcome by a feeling of loss.

8. Penis vaporisation:
If the penis is not lost to a black hole, it will be lost to the uncaring force of friction. A penis traveling in and out of a vagina at close to the speed of light will be subjected to enormous resistive forces. Since resistive forces are proportional to speed, this will heat up the penis enormously. The temperature of the resulting internal environment will be so high that the penis molecules will actually undergo a phase transition into a gas, vaporising the penis almost instantaneously.

7. Relativistic flaming semen:
In the unlikely event that a vaporised penis can perform ejaculation, then the relativistic semen will create enormous air resistance, burst into flames almost instantaneously, and generate enormous impact forces. These forces will be sufficient to pierce a small hole straight through a woman's lower torso, just like a speeding bullet, only incinerating the surrounding tissue as it passes through.

6. Time-dilated necrophilia:
Unfortunately, the woman will probably be dead before ejaculation anyway. According to the relativistic theory of time dilation, then if the man is to actually thrust in and out at a speed infinitesimally close to the speed of light, then from his point of view, his partner will be ageing extremely quickly, and will be long dead before he ejaculates. Legally, he will be committing necrophilia.

5. Lack of visual appeal:
Time-dilated necrophilia, flaming relativistic ejaculation and penile black hole formation are all very dramatic, but unfortunately they don't translate well onto the big screen. In reality, relativistic sex would only last for a fraction of a second, and would appear as a sort of muddy grayish white smudge, since the eye merges all images together at such high speeds. This is probably not visually appealing enough to make a porn-at-the-speed-of-light series out of.

4. Religious values:
Certain branches of Christianity would view porn-at-the-speed-of-light immoral anyway. It's in the Bible.

3. Property damage:
A penis is made up of a collection of charged molecules, and accelerating charged molecules emit radiation. To accelerate charged penis molecules up to the speed of light in a single thrust requires enormous acceleration. This will produce a frequency and intensity of radiation similar to that produced by a small nuclear explosion. It may be worth hiring out a hotel room if you don't want your own room obliterated.

2. Deafening sonic booms:
As a penis accelerates up to the speed of light, it will inevitably surpass the sound barrier, producing deafening sonic booms with every inward and outward thrust. If the neighbours haven’t already been woken by your moaning, they will be now. Or then again maybe not, because they will be conveniently deafened and unable to hear you.

1. Excessive dietary requirements:
The amount of energy required to accelerate an average person up to 99% the speed of light for a single inward thrust is approximately equal to 16 million billion kilojoules. This is equivalent to the amount of energy gained by consuming 78 trillion weetbix. But 78 trillion weetbix will increase an average person’s mass by approximately 1.2 trillion kilograms, requiring them to eat even more weetbix just to accelerate this additional load up to the speed of light. Nine out of ten nutritionists may recommend weetbix, but this is slightly more than the recommended daily intake.

short version of the actual text in the The Joy of Sexual Physics, (Love is a matter of chemistry, sex is a matter of physics)

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November 22, 2004

2046

Wong Kar Wai makes such incredible visualy beautiful movies that I forget to pay attention to the plot. Every frame is a work of art. A sequel to the astonishing In the mood for love.

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Comme une image

Agnés Jaoui's and Bacri's clever and funny dialogues were the perfect ending for a weekend of watching movies, eating, reading and sleeping. I needed that.

I wonder what wonderful movies are the french making that don't reach Lisboa's theaters (flooded with the usual mindless hollywoodesque wastes of perfectly good film like "Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid" or "Bridget Jones: The edge of reason").

Here's an excerpt of an interview I found interesting:

The character played by Marilou Berry is very self conscious about being fat. On an interview you were outraged by the fact that Charlize Theron, who is a beautiful woman, was made up to look ugly in order to star on Monster. Why?

Agnés Jaoui - I think that is the equivalent to what Al Jolson used to do, he was a white actor painted to look like a black man. Instead of casting a fat actress to play Bridget Jones and an ugly one to play Monster, they took two beautiful women, made one gain weight and the other look ugly. It's a kind of physical racism.

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November 18, 2004

Donkeys in Literature and Cinema

Monsanto, Portugal

Donkeys are so cute. Most people consider a donkey a poor excuse for a horse but I always liked animals with a personality.

If I ever get to have any donkeys (when I'm really old and demented and move to a farm for no good reason), I'll name them after famous asinine characters:

-Platero (from Jimenez, "Platero Y Yo")
-Donkey (from Shrek)
-El Rucio (Sancho's donkey from "Don Quijote" by Cervantes)
-(can't remember the name of the female suicidal donkey in Kusturica's "Life is a Miracle")
-Modestine (from Robert Louis Stevenson's "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes")
-Bottom (who has a donkey's head for a while in Shakespeare's "A midsummer night's dream")
-Lucius (from Apuleius' "Metamorphosis")
-Cadichon (from Comtesse de Ségur's "Les Mémoires d'un âne")
-Aliboron (from La Fontaine's "Fables")
-Eeyore (from Winnie the Pooh)
-Midas (he got donkey's ears on one of the myths)
-Benjamin (from H.G.Wells "Animal Farm")
-Patience (from Victor Hugo's "L'Âne")

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November 17, 2004

The Pig

Monsanto, Portugal

The pig, if I am not mistaken,
Supplies us sausage, ham and bacon,
Let others say his heart is big--
I call it stupid of the pig.

Ogden Nash

I'm so happy I'm not the only one who only sees food when looking at a pig :-)

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November 16, 2004

Wisdom at 90?

"El sexo es el consuelo que uno tiene cuando no le alcanza el amor."

"Sex is the consolation one has when one hasn't found love."

in Memória de mis Putas Tristes - Gabriel García Márquez

Magritte, The Lovers

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November 12, 2004

A Glass of Water

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November 11, 2004

Bollywood!

I finally started watching the Bollywood DVD's I brought from my India holidays. The movies are way too long (4 hours at least), excessive in every way (loads of music, everyone dances every five minutes, too much crying), refer to cultural traditions that I just don't get but I must admit that Kabhi Khushi Khabi Gham has a great photography and a very interesting directing. And it has Hritik Roshan who, from my googling, must be the most photographed man in India and the one with the most number of online fan websites. Which is completely understandable given this:

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November 10, 2004

If poets wrote poems whose titles were anagrams of their names

nice smug me
by e.e. cummings

this here verse's
disjunct
                    i used to
                    stick to regular metered
       poetry
now i write onetwothreefourfive poemsjustlikethat
                                               Jesus

but this is simple work
              and what i want to know is
how much am i going to get paid for this
mister editor

Stolen from the Modern Humorist

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November 09, 2004

Bug #2

Parque de Monserrate, Sintra

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Bug #1

Parque de Monserrate, Sintra

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November 08, 2004

Romeo and Juliet - Text Messaging Version

Act 1

Login: Romeo : R u awake? Want 2 chat?
Juliet: O Rom. Where4 art thou?
Romeo: Outside yr window.
Juliet: Stalker!
Romeo: Had 2 come. feeling jiggy.
Juliet: B careful. My family h8 u.
Romeo: Tell me about it. What about u?
Juliet: 'm up for marriage f u are.. Is tht a bit fwd?
Romeo: No. Yes. No. Oh, dsnt mat-r, 2moro @ 9?
Juliet: Luv U xxxx
Romeo: CU then xxxx

Act 2

Friar: Do u?
Juliet: I do
Romeo: I do

Act 3

Juliet: Come bck 2 bed. It's the nightingale not the lark.
Romeo: OK
Juliet: !!! I ws wrong !!!. It's the lark. U gotta go. Or die.
Romeo: Damn. I shouldn't hv wasted Tybalt & gt banished.
Juliet: When CU again?
Romeo: Soon. Promise. Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu.
Juliet: Miss u big time.

Act 4

Nurse: Yr mum says u have 2 marry Paris!!
Juliet: No way. Yuk yuk yuk. n-e-way, am mard 2 Rom.

Act 5

Friar: Really? O no. U wl have 2 take potion that makes u look ded.
Juliet: Gr8

Act 6

Romeo: J-why r u not returning my texts?
Romeo: RUOK? Am abroad but phone still works.
Romeo: TEXT ME!
Batty: Bad news. J dead. Sorry l8

Act 7

Romeo: J-wish u wr able 2 read this...am now poisoning & and climbing in yr grave. LUV U Ju xxxx

Act 8

Juliet: R-got yr text! Am alive! Ws faking it! Whr RU? Oh...
Friar: Vry bad situation.
Juliet: Nightmare. LUVU2. Always. Dagger. Ow!!! Logout

by cartoonist Roz Chast, first published in the New Yorker

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November 05, 2004

Quinta da Regaleira

Initiation Well

A lake hiding secret tunnels

"The Quinta da Regaleira as we know it today, was built at the begining of the XX century in accordance with some very well defined aesthetic and philosophical principles. The imagination of the owner, Antonio Carvalho Monteiro, together with the talent of architect and set designer Luigi Manini, successfully achieved these aims. They blended architectural styles inspired by Romanesque, Renaissance and, most importantly, the Manuelino school.
Magic and mysticim unite the different structures of the Quinta da Regaleira, and in the garden, the plants and trees brought from all over the world, mix perfectly with native vegetation. Our walk can take us from an orderly and domesticated area to one where everything grows freely and naturally, as if in the wild.
Secret tunnels, grottoes, terraces and sculptures scattered over the garden, are all noteworthy, but what is special is the monumental initiation well. The cross of the Templars is carved on its base, and looking down into the very depths of the earth, one can feel part of a mysterious initiation rite.
We can be entertained every step of the way as we try to understand the significance of what we find, and it is an experience that shouldn’t be missed. It is sad that guided tours last barely an hour, not allowing enough time to savour fully the fantastical ambience that permeates the Quinta da Regaleira." (feeling to lazy to write and this sums it all: stolen from here)

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November 04, 2004

Yet another biblical prophecy fulfilled

Jewish Theological Seminary, New York

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Dante's Inferno Test

I am an heretic, according to this fun Dante's Inferno Test. And this will be my punishment:

Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis

You approach Satan's wretched city where you behold a wide plain surrounded by iron walls. Before you are fields full of distress and torment terrible. Burning tombs are littered about the landscape. Inside these flaming sepulchers suffer the heretics, failing to believe in God and the afterlife, who make themselves audible by doleful sighs. You will join the wicked that lie here, and will be offered no respite. The three infernal Furies stained with blood, with limbs of women and hair of serpents, dwell in this circle of Hell.

Since I don't tolerate low temperatures that well, I suppose hell will be warmish. And there must be lots of interesting people there. But I'd rather stay in Level 2 with the lustful. It sounds like so much fun.

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November 03, 2004

Yorick is Not Dead - He's Pining for the Fjords

Hamlet meets the Dead Parrot sketch - you have to know this Monty Python sketch and Hamlet, of course - if not, don't bother reading any further.

Hamlet: Whose grave's this, sirrah?
Digger: Mine, sir.
Hamlet: I think it must be thine indeed, for thou liest in it.
Digger: And you, sir. You would carelessly fondle the skull of Yorik, the King's jester.
Hamlet: Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times. I cannot believe he is dead. Tell me, good sir, what is wrong with my friend Yorik?
Digger: I'll tell you what's wrong with him, my Lord. He's dead, that's what's wrong with him.
Hamlet: No, no, he's resting. Look you upon those lips that I have kissed.
Digger: My Lord, I know a dead jester when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Hamlet: No, he is not dead. He is merely resting.
Digger: Resting?
Hamlet: Yes, a remarkable fellow, Yorick. Beautiful skin tone.
Digger: His skin tone don't enter into it - he's stone dead.
Hamlet: No, no, he's resting. Where be your gibes now Yorick?
Digger: All right, if he's resting I'll wake him up. Hello, Yorick, I've got a flagon for you when you wake up.
Hamlet: There - he moved.
Digger: No he didn't. That was you moving him.
Hamlet: I did not.
Digger: Yes you did. Hello, Yorick. Wake UP, Yorick. Now that's what I call a dead jester.
Hamlet: No, no, he's stunned.
Digger: Look, my Lord, I've had just about enough of this. That Yorick is definitely deceased. He hasn't moved since you picked him up out of his grave.
Hamlet: He's probably pining for the fjords.
Digger: Pining for the fjords? That's Norway. This is Denmark, you twit.
Hamlet: Yorick is from Norway, and he prefers kipping on his back. Come Yorick, give us a song. Where is that flash of merriment that sets the table on a roar?
Digger: My Lord, the only reason that fellow is upright is that you've propped him up.
Hamlet: Yes, and a good prop he is too. Look how he pines.
Digger: He's not pining, he's passed on. This jester is no more. He has ceased to be. He's expired and gone to meet his maker. This is a late jester. He's a stiff. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. If you hadn't wrenched him from the earth, he'd be puushing up the daisies. He's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisble. This is an ex-jester! He cannot speak, and he cannot be!
Hamlet: To be or not to be...
Digger: God, not a soliloquy! I have work to do.
Hamlet: Right then, wrap him up. I'll take him with me. Yorick loves a good ride.

(stolen from here)

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November 02, 2004

Overcompensating

Stolen from S.

Hmmmm....I know what I'm going to think the next time I see a guy driving a Smart!

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Haven't we met before?

I never forget a face. The problem is that most of the times it will take me days to retrieve the name or situation that matches the face. Now I have adopted a much more pragmatic approach and I just start talking to anyone who looks familiar in order find who they are immediately and to avoid the memory scan processing on the following days. Which means that I sometimes end up talking with people who are complete strangers. Which can be embarrassing.

Saturday night. A jazz club in Lisboa. A foreign looking woman comes down the stairs and I find her oddly familiar. As she crosses the room and comes in my direction, the little men inside my brain start to frantically open every drawer looking for her file. As she is really close to me now, I have to make up something to ask her really quickly.

Me: Are you english?
Her: Well....I used to live there...
Me: Were you a teacher at Cambridge School?
Her: Yes! Were you one of my students? Did I torture you?
Me: Aha! That's where I know you from...and, er, you didn't torture me...
Her: That must have been ages ago!
Me: Yes, probably more than 15 years, I'd say.
Her: Are you still doing your homework like a good girl?

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November 01, 2004

Spam Attack

I had a nasty comment spam attack this weekend and I was considering implementing some changes but my digital landlord says it probably won't happen again. Let's see. I have better things to do with my time than to clean silly comments. They were all porn related and, to make it even more annoying, their links didn't work. I know this beacuse I admit that the one that said "Disney sex - cartoons f***ing" did catch my attention. Thanks to my VERY pictorial imagination, I immediately visualized Donald Duck getting it on with Daisy, ducky-style ;-), which completely destroyed a series of happy childhood memories.

Anyway, Justin has got a useful link about spam avoiding strategies on his blog: "Tutorials and helpful tips for beginners to the Movable Type Publishing System".

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Writer's Joke

A writer died and was given the option of going to heaven or hell.

He decided to check out each place first. As the writer descended into the fiery pits, he saw row upon row of writers chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they were repeatedly whipped with thorny lashes.

"Oh my," said the writer. "Let me see heaven now."

A few moments later, as he ascended into heaven, he saw rows of writers, chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they, too, were whipped with thorny lashes.

"Wait a minute," said the writer. "This is just as bad as hell!"

"Oh no, it's not," replied an unseen voice. "Here, your work gets published."

Stolen from Pete

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October 31, 2004

Arthur Cravan

On Sunday I went to see a documentary by the young spanish director Isak Lacuesta about Arthur Cravan. The myths and anedoctes regarding this strange character are so many that the documentary can be paradoxically interpreted as being partly fictional.

Arthur Cravan was a boxer, a dadaist poet, a critic and probably a big fat liar. He would do strip tease acts on his own conferences, he fought the world box champion in Barcelona and he mistriously disappeared in the Gulf of Mexico. He was an adventurer, travelled across Europe, joined a circus, went to New York...He wanted to shake the foundations of society by creating scandal after scandal. And he would do it with a sense of humour.

There's an interesting article about him here.

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October 28, 2004

I - Icon

Fun site (portrait illustration maker) where we can design our own iconic self. Here I am, having a brilliant idea! :-)

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October 27, 2004

Coolsex

I've just come across a spanish design studio xnografics that has created a funny self-promotional project called "Coolsex - Solutions for sexual active people".

(the guy's t-shirt reads "Ejaculating frees your mind")

The designs for the real clients are also quite good.

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October 26, 2004

Incontro

Esitammo un instante,
e dopo poco riconoscemmo
di avere la stessa malattia.
Non vi è definizione
per questa mirabile tortura,
c'è chi la chiama spleen
e chi malinconia.
Ma se accettiamo il gioco
ai margini troviamo
un segno intelleggibile
che può dar senso al tutto.

We hesitated an instant
and after a while we recognized
that we have the same disease.
There isn't a definition
for this marvelous torture,
that some call spleen
and others melancholy.
But if we accept the game
on the margins we can find
an intelligible sign
that may give a meaning to it all.

Eugenio Montale, Literature Nobel Prize 1975

This is a poem from Montale's Posthumous Diary (Diario postumo). According to Wikipedia, "it was purported to be conceived as a literary time-bomb carried out with the help of a young fan, Annalisa Cima. In 1968 Cima met the poet Eugenio Montale, by then in his early 70s, and became his last muse. He divided the poems into eleven envelopes. Ten (numbered I to X) contained six poems each, while the eleventh contained another packet of six poems (numbered XI) as well as eighteen additional poems for three further envelopes. Montale entrusted the collection to Cima under the condition that they would not appear until after his death.
The work immediately caused a scandal in Italian literary circles. Some critics believed that the poems were composed by Cima out of conversations with Montale, while others believed Cima had forged them outright. Maria Corti, a curator at the University of Pavia to whose library Montale had donated most of his papers, publicly stated that Montale had told her about the poems, which he intended as a practical joke on his critics."

P.S: I'm the only one to blame for the translation!! UPDATE: I'm sharing the blame for at least one word with Carlos! :-)

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A Taxonomy of friends (continued)

Friends who know that your favourite capital sin is gluttony bring you home made marmalade as a birthday gift.

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October 25, 2004

Waiting for the winter

A glorious sun on Saturday made me think of whatever happened to Autumn. I am now longing for dark, rainy days. The kind of days that make me want to spend the whole weekend inside, in my pajamas, reading and eating.

With a sky like this, who can tell that this is late October?

And I miss the sunny but cold days, when I sit on a garden bench and the wind cools my sun warmed face.

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October 21, 2004

Girlie Layout

I've just upgraded to MT 3.11 and took the opportunity to give the blog a new look and add a page (under constant construction if I have the time) with links.

The little readers will stay here.

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teste

teste

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October 19, 2004

Brooklyn on the other margin

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October 18, 2004

A Taxonomy of Friends and Other Animals

Imaginative friends wish you a happy birthday by writing your name in the sand.

Artistic friends print one of your own photos, run out of toner, complete the photo in watercolor and glue it to a birthday card.

Wacky friends go to sex shops, buy you hooker's lingerie as a birthday present and ask if you don't mind posting pictures of yourself wearing it on your blog.

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October 15, 2004

Daily Moment of Zen

Listening to Jorge Luis Borges' lectures (on his own voice) while driving to work. Pure bliss.

Bought at St. Mark's , a brilliant bookshop (thanks C!!)

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October 14, 2004

Ovid's Metamorphoses

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there are at least two beautiful paintings depicting scenes from Ovid's "Metamorphoses".

The Golden Age by Wtewael

The teeming Earth, yet guiltless of the plough,
And unprovok'd, did fruitful stores allow:
Content with food, which Nature freely bred,
On wildings and on strawberries they fed;
Cornels and bramble-berries gave the rest,
And falling acorns furnish'd out a feast.
The flow'rs unsown, in fields and meadows reign'd:
And Western winds immortal spring maintain'd.
In following years, the bearded corn ensu'd
From Earth unask'd, nor was that Earth renew'd.
From veins of vallies, milk and nectar broke;
And honey sweating through the pores of oak.

The Feast of Achelous by Rubens & Brueghel the Elder

The grot he enter'd, pumice built the hall,
And tophi made the rustick of the wall;
The floor, soft moss, an humid carpet spread,
And various shells the chequer'd roof inlaid.
'Twas now the hour when the declining sun
Two thirds had of his daily journey run;
At the spread table Theseus took his place,
Next his companions in the daring chace;
Perithous here, there elder Lelex lay,
His locks betraying age with sprinkled grey.
Acharnia's river-God dispos'd the rest,
Grac'd with the equal honour of the feast,
Elate with joy, and proud of such a guest.
The nymphs were waiters, and with naked feet
In order serv'd the courses of the meat.
The banquet done, delicious wine they brought,
Of one transparent gem the cup was wrought.

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Urban Oasis

Bryant Park, New York

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October 13, 2004

New & Old

Near Battery Park, NY

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Hirsute

Hirsute: covered with hair; set with bristles; shaggy; hairy.

Hair Salon, Wall Street, NY

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October 12, 2004

New York Public Library

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Literatures

On the sidewalk near New York Public Library

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October 11, 2004

Elections

Seen at Union Square, NY

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Woody Live!

Fulfilling teenage dreams - when all the other girls had posters of Tom Cruise on their walls I had a picture of Woody Allen....never mind the looks, I always fall for intelligent men... I went to see him play his clarinet live at the Cafe Carlyle with his New Orleans Jazz Band. It was obviously toooooo expensive but I'll die a happy woman now. Well, hopefuly he'll go first ;-)

He even sang a bit at the end!

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October 07, 2004

Birthday Girl!

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September 30, 2004

Going West

"That is New York." I pointed to the waterfront just ahead as if the city were mine. - Gore Vidal

I'll be back in time for my birthday next Thursday!

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Underground Art in Lisboa #1

On the busy subway/train station "Cais do Sodré" the rabbit from "Alice in Wonderland" was appropriately :-) painted on the azulejos that cover the walls.

" There was nothing so VERY remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so VERY much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, `Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!' (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually TOOK A WATCH OUT OF ITS WAISTCOAT- POCKET, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before see a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge." - "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carrol

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September 29, 2004

Poetic Graffitti

Poetic graffitti seen in Alfama, Lisboa

It's by Fernando Pessoa: "We always love in what we have what we don't have when we love."

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Lisboa - City Hall

Being a natural-born tourist and seeing that the annual travel budget is completely worn out (especially after next week's vacations when I'm going West for a change :-), there's nothing left to do than to"visit" my own city.

On Sundays, there are guided tours of the City Hall building which is a beautiful albeit small palace.

One of the rooms holds a painted ceiling which is an allegory of Lisboa.

Lisboa is the woman holding the shield. She has a crown that represents one of the city's ex-libris: St. George's castle. The shield has the coat of arms of the city: a ship where two ravens are perched. Lisboa lays by the river Tagus estuary, represented by the old man. The putti are holding a manuscript where it can be read:
"D.Afonso Henriques 1147" - The first king of Portugal conquered St. George's Catsle from the moors in that year;
"Pombal 1755" - The year of the great earthquake and the man who was responsible for rebuilding the city: the Marquis de Pombal;
"D.Pedro IV ????" - King of Portugal and the first emperor of Brazil whose statue lies on the main square of Lisboa, the Rossio.

After a fire in 1996, the top floor rooms have been refurnished and round windows open to the palace's painted interior.

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September 27, 2004

The Green Butchers

Anders Thomas Jensen has a bizarre sense of humour. And since I had a great time watching The Green Butchers and Wilbur wants to kill himself, apparently so have I :-)

The plot from Hollywood.com:
Svend is a twitchy, petulant geek who’s been picked on since he was a child. Bjarne is an anti-social pothead determined to stay as far away from the rest of humanity as possible. They’re best friends, of course. Unable to put up with their arrogant boss any longer, the two go into business for themselves and set up their own butcher shop. Business is slow until Svend accidentally locks an electrician in the freezer overnight. He tries to cover up the death by grinding up the corpse, but, finding himself short of meat, is unexpectedly forced to sell the only “stock” he has in the shop. Almost immediately, the two entrepreneurs become the toast of the town. Riding high for the first time in his life, Svend is determined to keep things going--despite Bjarne’s resistance--and soon people start disappearing.

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September 23, 2004

Picasso

Artist Pablo Picasso surprised a burglar at work in his new chateau. The intruder got away, but Picasso told the police he could do a rough sketch of what he looked like. On the basis of his drawing, the police arrested a mother superior, the minister of finance, a washing machine, and the Eiffel tower.

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Susan Sontag

"Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of the lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover -- moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality -- that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar -- if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations. And, as in life, so in art both are necessary, husbands and lovers."

Against Interpretation, "Camus' Notebooks

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September 21, 2004

Redondo

Redondo, Alentejo

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September 20, 2004

Weekend in Alentejo

Terena

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September 17, 2004

The vast structure of recollection

This picture is my personal equivalent to the taste of a madeleine.

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Blue and White

Alfama, Lisbon

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September 16, 2004

Addition

I do not question whether I am happy or unhappy.
Yet there is one thing that I keep gladly in mind --
that in the great addition (their addition that I abhor)
that has so many numbers, I am not one
of the many units there. In the final sum
I have not been calculated. And this joy suffices me.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1897)

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September 15, 2004

Rainy day

Caillebotte

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somewhere i have never travelled

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

e e cummings

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Azulejos

Castelo, Lisboa

AZULEJO is the portuguese word for the painted ceramic tiles that, among other uses, cover up some of the older buildings' entire facades.

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September 13, 2004

Starting a conspiracy theory

Is it a coincidence that my "Extraordinary Objects" Taschen Calendar has the image of a Mosque shaped alarm clock on September 11th?

"Azan alarm clock - Muslims pray five times a day, and this clock reminds them to do so. As the time approaches, red lights inside the temple minarets flash and a voice from inside the battery operated clock wails a melodious "Allah Akbar" (God is Great")."

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September 09, 2004

The Disinterested Arbiter

Two Dogs who had been fighting for a bone, without advantage to either, referred their dispute to a Sheep. The Sheep patiently heard their statements, then flung the bone into a pond.

"Why did you do that?" said the Dogs.

"Because," replied the Sheep, "I am a vegetarian."

Aesop Fable

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September 08, 2004

1st International Independent Film Festival

"IndieLisboa will be a privileged event to meet the most recent and interesting works of independent cinema from all over the world. The main aim of the Festival is to discover new films and new directors, in the universe of independent cinema.

IndieLisboa wants to promote the cinematographic culture and enlarge cinema audiences by showing an ensemble of films that would otherwise be difficult to see in Portugal. "

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September 07, 2004

Indian people

Yet another great book I bought at Bahri's: "Indian Travel - Diary of a Philosopher" by Count Hermann A. Keyserling.

This book was written in the 1920's but it still describes my own travel impressions much better than I ever would:

"The unique magnificence of colour in Indian life, which delights my soul more and more from day to day, is due to the Indian indifference to all questions of cohesion and uniformity. I have hardly travelled in India as yet, and nevertheless I have seen more variety than anywhere else among men."

"The Hindus are famous for their dialectics, their logical powers and complicated systems."

"Logic in India has never pretended to establish connections of ultimate validity; it has very wisely recognized its own limitations and left this problem to mystic intuition."

"In logical acuteness the Hindus are not behind the Europeans, and it would not have been difficult for them to have invented similar systems. They have not done so because, as metaphysicians, they were too profound; because they knew logical understanding does not plumb the depths."

"The indians are rich in imagination rather than exact."

People of India - Photoalbum here.

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September 06, 2004

The Cow and the Elephant

Sights of India - Photoalbum here.

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Shopping in India

Rule #1 Every price is negotiable.
Rule #2 Bargaining is mandatory.

There is no such thing as simply going inside a shop, buying an item and leaving. Every acquisition is painfully long and demands skills that I obviously lacked but during these weeks in India I had excellent training.

Favourite lines:

"You are such a beautiful lady, you need a beautiful saree!"

"My daughter! Can I call you my daughter? Look at the quality of the weaving on this carpet!"

"God gives me the opportunity to give you a 30% discount!"

"With this pashmina shawl you'll look like Miss India!"

"You want a 25% discount?!?! Look at this! It's so cheap for you! You come from Europe!"

"Don't walk here at night; it's not safe to go any further than my shop."

"You have such a sweet face and this colour looks so good on you; I'll give you a 5% discount"

"This is for your mother? I have a mother too and because I have a soft heart, I'll give you a 10% discount"

Fun ads and signs in India. Another Photoalbum here.

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September 03, 2004

Elections

On my inbox today:

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.- H. L. Mencken

Very appropriate, considering I woke up to the news about the american elections campaign on the radio.

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September 02, 2004

AUM

Aum or Om is a sacred syllable and can be seen everywhere around India. It is a sound that represents the divine, a mantra.

The Upanishads are the philosophical treatises contained in the Veda, which is the sanskrit word for "knowledge" and is usually used to refer to the hindu religious scriptures.

In Mandukya Upanishad the meaning of AUM is explained:

AUM. This imperishable word is the universe.
It is explained as the past, the present, the future;
everything is the word AUM.
Also whatever transcends threefold time is AUM.
All here is God; this soul is God.
This same soul is fourfold.

The waking state outwardly conscious,
having seven limbs and nineteen doors,
enjoying gross objects common to all, is the first.

The dreaming state inwardly conscious,
having seven limbs and nineteen doors,
enjoying subtle objects that are bright, is the second.

When one sleeps without yearning for any desires,
seeing no dreams, that is deep sleep.
The deep-sleep state unified in wisdom gathered,
consisting of bliss, enjoying bliss,
whose door is conscious wisdom, is the third.

This is the Lord of all; this is the omniscient;
this is the inner controller; this is the universal womb,
for this is the origin and end of beings.
Not inwardly wise nor outwardly wise nor both ways wise
nor gathered wisdom, nor wise nor unwise,
unseen, incommunicable, intangible,
featureless, unthinkable, indefinable,
whose essence is the security of being one with the soul,
the end of evolution, peaceful, good, non-dual---
this they deem the fourth.

It is the soul; it should be discerned.
This is the soul in regard to the word AUM and its parts.
The parts are the letters,
and the letters are its parts: A U M.

The waking state common to all is the letter A,
the first part, from "attaining" or from being first.
Whoever knows this attains all desires and becomes first.

The sleeping state, the bright, is the letter U,
the second part, from "uprising" or from being in between.
Whoever knows this rises up in knowledge and is balanced;
no one ignorant of God is born in that family.

The deep-sleep state, the wise, is the letter M,
the third part, from "measure" or from being the end.
Whoever knows this measures everything and reaches the end.

The fourth is without a letter, the incommunicable,
the end of evolution, good, non-dual.

Thus AUM is the soul.
Whoever knows this enters by one's soul into the soul;
this one knows this.

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August 31, 2004

Humorous Urdu Poetry

I spent a few hours inside the Bahri & Sons Bookshop in Delhi; and that was time well spent - it's the most delightful bookshop I have had the pleasure of browsing. It's small, filled up with books to the ceiling and I wanted to bring them all home :-). I found some true gems, among which is the "Masterpieces of Humorous Urdu Poetry". Here's a sample:

If eighty men with one voice term the day as night,
the twenty must agree with him, accept the wrong as right.

This is the democratic age,
who can question or rebate?

If fifty five declare a buffalo as the beauty queen
The forty five must acquiesce, or in vain scream.

This is the democratic age,
who can question or rebate?

If sixty-eight elect an owl as their president
the thirty-two will stand condemned by their lack of sense.

This is the democratic age,
who can question or rebate?

Ninety-nine laugh and sing, Kabir alone bewails,
Crying over spilt milk is of little avail.

We are helpless, you and I,
we cannot do a thing, o guy,
This is the democratic age.

by Majid Lahori

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Mr. Picasso Head

Fun site where I made my "drawing".

Via Misha.

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August 30, 2004

The Monsoon

Being a rain lover, the prospect of going to India during the monsoon didn't put me off a bit. I have found a beautiful text about the monsoon and the effect it has on the people (which I have witnessed through the lens in Jaipur - the first drops of rain from the monsoon and the children running around screaming with joy :-).

"Before the monsoons arrive, delhi bakes in a heat wave of 115F+ weather for about 4 months. Everything is dry. Plants and people alike are thirsty and dried out. Theres a desert dust wind, called the loo, which blows from one end of the city to the other kicking up little dust devils in its path. Its like a flying piece of sandpaper. Then, in early june, the monsoons hit India’s southern states and starts marching northeastwards through the country. Everyone is glued to the news to follow its progress. Every television news channel has a special monsoon bulletin. The heat continues to build in delhi and crosses 120F. around mid june, the humidity starts to rise rapidly in delhi. The heat becomes so intense that it leaches what little moisture there is in the ground and in the river into the air. Every 5 or six day, there is a short sharp thundershower which brings the temp down for a few hours. By the end of june, its pretty unbearable – the heat is still at its highest and now there is a huge amount of humidity too. That’s when people start praying. Around the last weak of june or, as is the case this year, in the first few weeks of July – things come to a head. There is one day when you wake up in the morning, or you leave work in the afternoon and it seems as if day has been turned to night. The monsoon clouds are identifiable since they are a good bit blacker than any others. They carry sea rain. And you can see this bank of cloud, stretching thousands of miles across the length and breadth of India and now moving rapidly towards you. And then the wind picks up (as it is just now) and the temp plummets. Then people come out of their houses and sit in their verandas. Leaves are kicked up and the birds fall silent. Everyone knows whats going on and everyone is waiting. Then the thunder and lightning begin. And that’s when the smiling starts. And this is loud thunder – worse than anything heard in willytown. And then the thing to do is to go to a place where there is soil. Any garden, park whatever. And it starts raining. And it doesn’t start slowly and it doesn’t creep up on you. It’s the definition of a cloudburst. Within seconds you are drenched. But you have time to see the first drops hit the ground. And its like hundreds and thousands of tiny little dark stars that form on the groundone second and then disappear, only to be replaced by more and more and more, till there are no more stars on the white earth but only a brown firmament. Then the monsoon get own to the arduous ask of throughly soaking the city, recharging both the aquifers and my hope in life. Oh and the smell – its the most heavenly thing in the world. Its sweet and salty and erotic and fresh and renewing and fertile and pleasing and full of all the goodness of life. It’s the smell of the earth drinking – and its intoxicating. And it only lasts for a few hours – only the first few hours of the monsoon. But it is the most heavenly thing you can experience. And suddenly, everything is green, and everyone is happy (except motorists) and everything is alive and people are dancing in the rain. Life begins anew. The monsoons are back. The wind picks up my laughter - it floats over the city and rains down to get washed away again with the detritus of a city starved." by Ananda.

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August 29, 2004

Moment of Zen

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August 27, 2004

Driving in India

What impressed me the most was the feeling that India is a giant temple. Every little aspect of life, no matter how insignificant it may seem, appears to be in some way associated with a religious or transcendental aspect. From the auto reekshaw drivers who glue little paintings of hindu gods above their dashboards to the omnipresent swastikas, religion here seems to be the most important and enforming aspect of one's life. I must say that even for someone like me, who has the spiritual depth of a soup plate, was an enriching life changing experience.

The most striking aspect upon arrival is the traffic. It's a big mess. A total chaos. Cows wander in the middle of the highways, looking terribly peaceful despite the honking and screeching of the tyres. Trucks come in our direction even though it's a one way street. Drivers don't have the tiniest notion of what is a lane and what it's for. Most of them don't even have rearview mirrors. They just honk when they are 1 cm away from the next car to let the other driver know they are overtaking. In fact, most trucks and cabs have a sign on their rear saying "Honk, Please!". Elephants, camels, pigs, monkeys and people in general cross the street whenever they feel like it. I won't make fun of italian driving anymore :-D

As my driver Gurdev explained to me, you need 3 things to drive in India: good brakes, good horn and good luck :-D And a total lack of fear of getting killed, I'd add.

Here's a truck coming our way in the middle of the highway, while going from New delhi to Jaipur.

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August 25, 2004

Swastikas

The first few days I would always get a chill down my spine whenever I saw a swastika. I knew that the nazis had "borrowed" the swastika from India but still... there is probably no better example of the power of a symbol.

After a while I got used to it and there's no way anyone can associate the original swastika with evil after seeing drawings of it made out of petals or of salted appetizers.

The swastika is actually a good luck sign. It can be used as a talisman. I saw brand new cars with swastika badges on their radiator grills, on temples, on commercial ads...

It comes from the sanskrit expression su-asti which means (very loosely translated, I suppose) "let good things happen". The inner line represent rays of light or the four cardinal directions. The clockwise direction indicates the rythm of time. The outer lines represent the four possibilities of afterlife: plants, animals, divine or demonic. Some say that the nazi swastika was oriented counter-clokwise and that in India it is not considered evil but inauspicious.

More information about swastikas here.

And here's my first attempt of a web photoalbum. Thanks to Adobe Photoshop Elements, of course :-)

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August 23, 2004

Back to work

These have been some incredible holidays! India is amazing and I'm still sorting out 1Gb of pictures. Here's the obvious one (although the most appealing sights in India to me are certainly not the monuments but everyone kept asking "Did you see the Taj Mahal?"):

Of course I did!

Then to the south of Portugal, Tavira - a nice sunny break from the monsoon. And then way up North again to Caminha (where G&E proved once again to be great hosts :-) for a more green scenery and where I took some time to read, enjoying the shade, surrounded by an orchard but still with a view to the ocean.

I'll be posting much more about India when I have the time...during the breaks I'll take from reading the portuguese traffic law for work :-)

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July 23, 2004

Going East

The Holidays! Hopefuly I won't be posting anything until somewhere in late August! And despite the monsoons I'm hoping for a very rewarding, learning, exciting travel experience this summer. I'll need a rest after these holidays :-)

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July 19, 2004

Triple Filter Test

In ancient Greece (469 - 399 BC), Socrates was well known for his wisdom. One day the great philosopher came upon an acquaintance who said excitedly, "Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your students?"

"Wait a moment," Socrates replied. "Before telling me anything I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called the Triple Filter Test."

"Triple filter?"

"That's right," Socrates continued "Before you talk to me about my student, it might be a good idea to take a moment and filter what you're going to say.

The first filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?"

"No," the man said, "actually I just heard about it and ..."

"All right," said Socrates. "So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my student something good?"

"No, on the contrary ..."

"So," Socrates continued, "you want to tell me something bad about him, but you're not certain it's true. You may still pass the test though, because there's one filter left: the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?"

"No, not really."

"Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell me is neither true nor good nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?"

This is why Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem.

It also explains why he never found out that Plato was banging his wife.

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July 15, 2004

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

1 - Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

2 - The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

3 (the golden rule!!!)- A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

4 - Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

5 - A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Full text here by Carlo M. Cipolla, an italian historian who has written a marvelous little book in which this essay appeared: Allegro ma non tropo; thanks to Gregor for making me browse my bookshelf and read it again!

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July 14, 2004

Binary Humor

There are 10 kinds of people: those who get binary humor and those who don't.

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July 12, 2004

Pablo Neruda

Today would be the 100th anniversary of one of my favourite poets: Pablo Neruda.

Photo: Fundación Pablo Neruda

Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada XX Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. Escribir, por ejemplo: "La noche está estrellada, y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos". El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta. Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso. En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos. La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito. Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería. Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos. Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido. Oir la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella. Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío. Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla. La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo. Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos. Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido. Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca. Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo. La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles. Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos. Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cuánto la quise. Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído. De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos. Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos. Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero. Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido. Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos, mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido. Aunque éste sea el último dolor que ella me causa, y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair XX Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write for example, 'The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance.' The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. I kissed her again and again under the endless sky. She loved me, sometimes I loved her too. How could one not have loved her great still eyes. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. To hear immense night, still more immense without her. And the verse falls to the soul like dew to a pasture. What does it matter that my love could not keep her. The night is shattered and she is not with me. This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. My sight searches for her as though to go to her. My heart looks for her, and she is not with me. The same night whitening the same trees. We, of that time, are no longer the same. I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her. My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing. Another's. She will be another's. Like before my kisses. Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes. I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is short, forgetting is so long. Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.

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July 08, 2004

Religions of the World in 1 minute

Taoism: SHIT HAPPENS
Confucianism: Confucius say "Shit happens."
Buddhism: Shit happening is an illusion
Islam: Shit happening is the will of Allah.
Zen: What is the sound of shit happening?
Hinduism: This shit has happened before.
Catholicism: If shit happens, you deserve it.
Judaism: Why does shit always happen to us?
Calvinism: Shit happens because you don't work hard enough.
Christian Science: If shit happens, pray and it will go away.
Protestantism: Let shit happen to someone else.
Atheism: Shit happens for no reason.
Agnosticism: Maybe shit happens, maybe it doesn't.
Hare Krishna: Shit happens, shit happens, shit happens...
Stoicism: Shit happens. I can take it.
Jehovah's Witnesses: Let us in and we'll tell you why shit happens.
Rastafarianism: Let's smoke this shit and see what happens

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July 07, 2004

The big ocean

Praia do Carvalhal, Odeceixe, Portugal

Courage is not the lack of fear. It is acting in spite of it. - Mark Twain

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July 06, 2004

A glimpse of the holidays

I spent a lovely weekend in the Algarve, that british colony on portuguese soil :-), she said trying to avoid the topics of the Portuguese team defeat by Greece and the fleeing of the "I have a strategy for Portugal for the next 8 years" Prime Minister who changed his name so that foreigners can pronounce it. Unfortunately, undesirable topics have a life of their own and build entire paragraphs without the author's consent ;-)

Although I prefer less crowded destinations, I have to admit that the weather down there is great. And by crowds I mean the mob of drunk englishmen on their late 20's behaving like they are 16 years old. Peter Pan syndrome?

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July 02, 2004

Top ten reasons to procrastinate

1.

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June 30, 2004

Training before the weekend

Funny little game.

My personal best so far is 28 meters :-D.

Via Hugo.

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June 29, 2004

W. H. Sainsbury's?

The experience of going to a bookshop has become less of an intellectual pleasure to me. I had this thought while browsing the shelves at Heathrow Airport while waiting for my connecting flight to Düsseldorf. W.H.Smith looks more like a supermarket than a bookshop to me. The "3 for 18£" yellow signs , the painfully colourful book covers, the lame book titles; it all made me feel like the target of a marketing campaign for a new dish washing liquid.

Unfortunately they are marketing what I call "fast-reading literature". Don't get me wrong: I like a book cover with a great graphic design; I probably will pick up a book with an esthetically appealing cover before any other.

Writers these days act like sellers of entertainment rather than artists/thinkers: they write for a target audience rather than write what they feel and then see how many are interested...

There's an awful "pink"/"light"/"pop" literature portuguese writer that proudly states that she got portuguese people into reading and that she can live off her writing which is something many "serious" other authors haven't managed to do. Silly woman. Writing (good writing, at least) is an art. The book industry left the Culture(hard to define Culture with a capital C, but...) sphere and has turned into a branch of a mindless entertainment industry; and mindless entertainment hardly ever increase's a whole nation's intellectual capacity even if it improves their reading habits.

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June 25, 2004

I give up!

Ok. Portugal beat England. It was a very good match. After it ended, the usual cheering and honking began. I had to go see what was happening around town and people were unbelievably happy and strangely united. People of every race, color or creed :-)

The sign above says "Boa sorte, Inglaterra" = "Good luck, England". Ha!

Even the police couldn't resist it. If football is the only way to make portuguese people feel more close to one another...well, what the hell. It's better than if we had to stick together because we were at war or something. Oh, and I got mooned by an englishman. Too bad I hadn't the camera ready or else his ass would be on the internet right now. :-D

I bet yesterday's Daily Mirror front page doesn't look as amusing now!

I heard on the radio this morning that the Governor of the Bank of Portugal says the recession is over. Or maybe he's been carried away by the national enthusiasm? :-))))

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June 24, 2004

L'enfer c'est les autres

The argentinian Quino is one of my favourite cartoonists.

Freedom is the right to live as we wish. - Epictetus

He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom. - Schopenhauer

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June 23, 2004

Gay Pride

Gay Pride day is on Saturday. There will be a parade and a party in Lisbon Some people always complain: "Ok, they're gay, but why do they have to show it off on a parade?" David Nava explains why. Why Have A Gay Pride Parade? by David Nava "When do we get our parade?"

The question was asked more in fun than with envy, more in joking than with malice, but it struck a chord with me. I had casually mentioned to a couple of my straight friends that the Gay Pride Parade was coming up and I was looking forward to it.
"What about Straight Pride Day?" the female of the couple asked with a grin.

"Everyday is Straight Pride Day," I answered, also grinning. "This culture celebrates it with gay abandon." She laughed.

"When do we get our parade?" demanded her male counterpart.

"Turn the television on." I said. "There's your parade." We all laughed and went about our business but the brief exchange kept coming back to me through the week. The more I thought about it the more serious it became.

Why have a Gay Pride Parade? It's a question many straight people might be asking in the next few weeks. Gay people, I believe, inherently, intuitively know why we have a parade. We have a Gay Pride Parade because 25 years ago a bunch of drag queens at a bar called The Stonewall fought back for the first time when the police overstepped the bounds of their authority for the millionth time, thereby launching the Gay Liberation Movement. We have a Gay Pride Parade so that at least for one day in a year we can walk down the streets of where we live and show our numbers for all the world to see. We have a Gay Pride Parade to celebrate our defeat of The Closet, to have a day when we can proclaim, without reservation, who we are and who we love.

So, when do the straight people get their own parade?

When straight people are prevented from marrying the people they choose to marry, precluded from enjoying tax benefits available to married people, then they should have a parade. When straight people are barred from serving their country in the military, then they should have a parade. When straight people are routinely fired from their jobs because of who they love with or live with then they should have a parade. When straight people are blocked from holding sensitive jobs in the government merely because of their sexual orientation, then they should have a parade. When straight people are forbidden to raise their own children or to adopt others, if they so choose, then they should have a parade. When straight people are beaten, harassed and shot at for holding hands in public then I'll march in their parade.

A man who lives in my neighborhood was shot on our street 2 years ago by a carload of young thugs because he was bidding a companion farewell with an embrace. The companion was another man. The Human Rights Commissioner of this city publicly intimated that the men were "asking for it" through engaging in "provocative behavior" by embracing to say good-bye. That's why I'll be at The Gay Pride Parade. Unless we stand together, march together, care together, no one will do it for us. We Gay and Lesbian people are on our own and we must depend on each other.

So, when some well meaning, or not-so well meaning straight acquaintance of yours questions the need for a Gay Pride Day Parade, educate the poor soul. I'm picking up the phone to call my two friends now.

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June 22, 2004

Antwerp Medicine

After experiencing a very odd night out in Düsseldorf and after visiting some good museums, I realized Belgium was just around the corner and so went to Antwerp which turned out to be a beautiful city. And I ran into this unprobable group of people outside an irish pub. I wonder if this is a common Antwerp sight?!?!?!? :-D

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June 21, 2004

Toilet Map of Australia

The National Public Toilet Map of Australia sponsored by the Department of Health and Ageing? This can't be true :-D

I suppose that's a top priority e-government project... :-)

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Bikini Time!

This has been a good weekend, not too hot. I went to a lovely beach (Comporta - photo below) to see if I could get a darker shade of pale :-)

But..It's hard to be a woman ;-)

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June 20, 2004

Patriotism Index

Portugal won the game against Spain and got to the Euro 2004 quarter-finals. It's 11 PM and my fellow citizens are cruising around the city, honking madly and waving the national flag like there's no tomorrow. I live on a busy street but this is ridiculous.

I promise I'll cheer like mad when Portugal gets to the top 10 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index - A composite index measuring average achievement in three basic dimensions of human development—a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living (currently we're 23rd).

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June 17, 2004

FrauenParkPlatz

I had never seen before going to Germany (at least in Köln and Düsseldorf) parking places reserved to women. These parking places - I only saw them at underground parkings - are conveniently located near the exits to prevent women from being mugged and who-knows-what-else.

If anyone in this little southern rectangle by the Atlantic should have the idea of creating parking places for women there would be the usual gang of sexists that demand that women and men should be treated equally. For better and for worse. Obviously, they ignore that the principle of equal treatment does not exclude the adoption of positive action to prevent or compensate for disadvantages linked to sex.

By the way, if Janis Joplin had driven a Mercedes Class A, she would never had sang "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?"! :-) It's a damned unstable car. And really not user friendly.

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June 09, 2004

I see dead snails

...every summer. I've been researching and apparently only in Portugal, France, Italy and Greece do people eat snails (and somewhere in Asia, I'm almost sure). Although in most countries snails are a gourmet delicacy, over here is a popular cheap snack. It's probably the last thing we would think of as a fancy meal. The portuguese recipe is much better than the pretensious nouvelle cuisine escargot thing ;-)

The perfect spot to eat snails is by the river, with a beer in one hand and a toothpick in the other. Forget that. You need one hand to pick up the actual snail. To make it more fun, eating snails in a tourist packed cafe or restaurant is ideal to gross them out, watch them turn green and head quickly for the restrooms :-)))

Here's the recipe:

2 kg of medium sized snails;
2 tablespoons of olive oil;
A handful of oregano ;
1 leaf of laurel;
2 cloves of garlic;
1 onion ;
salt ;
pepper;
1 very red hot chilli pepper;

The snails must be alive, of course. After washing the snails several times (until their "glue" is washed away), put them inside a pot filled with water. Add all the other ingredients. The heat should be increased gradually so that they stick their heads out before they die; this way we can easily suck them out of their shells without using a toothpick. This sounds cruel. And it is. But it's so good.

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June 08, 2004

Breakfast with Venus

I got up really early to watch Venus crossing the Sun and this was the best shot I could get without a proper filter or a tripod...

Astrologers must be having a field day with this.

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June 07, 2004

The Football Patriots

There are lots of events happening around here: the Rock in Rio and SuperRock Super Bock concerts and the European Football Championship 2004 are the biggest. Not a big deal to me since I'm not a big concert fan (my favourite musicians are either dead or very low-profile) and watching football only makes sense to me when my team Benfica is playing.

The european championship is particularly annoying. And this football mania is getting too silly. When I turn on the TV it seems like every commercial must refer to it, no matter what they are trying to sell, from Mc Donalds to supermarkets. We even have football shaped telephone booths.

The portuguese people is a very odd one. It seems like we're only patriotic when it comes to football. We readily admit (and sometimes too insistently) to any other country superiority in any field of arts, economics, culture...excluding Spain, of course :-) But when it concerns football, our team is the best. And our team can be readily expanded to include all of us :-) All of a sudden, the portuguese started buying flags and sticking them out of their balconies and even putting them on their cars.

The madness is such that even Infante D.Henrique (a portuguese icon, the mentor of the portuguese maritime expansion in the XVth century) can be seen on posters holding a football.

Good thing I'm going to Düsseldorf on Thursday. Let's hope that when Portugal loses the first match (for which there is a very high probability if you look at their recent record) everything will come back to normal.

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June 05, 2004

How to write unmantainable code

Here's how to document the code :-)

Since the computer ignores comments and documentation, you can lie outrageously and do everything in your power to befuddle the poor maintenance programmer.

1- Lie in the comments: You don't have to actively lie, just fail to keep comments as up to date with the code.
2- Document the obvious: Pepper the code with comments like /* add 1 to i */ however, never document wooly stuff like the overall purpose of the package or method.
3 - Document How Not Why: Document only the details of what a program does, not what it is attempting to accomplish. That way, if there is a bug, the fixer will have no clue what the code should be doing.
4- Avoid Documenting the "Obvious": If, for example, you were writing an airline reservation system, make sure there are at least 25 places in the code that need to be modified if you were to add another airline. Never document where they are. People who come after you have no business modifying your code without thoroughly understanding every line of it.
...
9 - Documenting Variables: Never put a comment on a variable declaration. Facts about how the variable is used, its bounds, its legal values, its implied/displayed number of decimal points, its units of measure, its display format, its data entry rules (e.g. total fill, must enter), when its value can be trusted etc. should be gleaned from the procedural code. If your boss forces you to write comments, lard method bodies with them, but never comment a variable declaration, not even a temporary!
10 - Disparage In the Comments: Discourage any attempt to use external maintenance contractors by peppering your code with insulting references to other leading software companies, especial anyone who might be contracted to do the work. e.g.:
/* The optimised inner loop.
This stuff is too clever for the dullard at Software Services Inc., who would
probably use 50 times as memory & time using the dumb routines in .
*/
class clever_SSInc
{
.. .
}
If possible, put insulting stuff in syntactically significant parts of the code, as well as just the comments so that management will probably break the code if they try to sanitise it before sending it out for maintenance.
12 - Monty Python Comments: On a method called makeSnafucated insert only the JavaDoc /* make snafucated */. Never define what snafucated means anywhere. Only a fool does not already know, with complete certainty, what snafucated means. For classic examples of this technique, consult the Sun AWT JavaDOC.

The rest is here.

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June 04, 2004

Untitled :-)

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My bedroom is a rose garden

Almost :-)

I am known for my plant murdering instincts. Either I forget to water them or just soak them wet just in case I forget to water them.

A month ago I bought 5 different plants including a rosebush which was obviously doomed even before it reached the flat. Left them on the balcony and never gave it another thought. Well, I have watered them a bit. And last evening and to my astonishment, a beautiful little rose had bloomed on my bedroom window sill. Nice.

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June 03, 2004

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I had to go see this movie for two reasons:

a) the title is brilliant and is only topped by Dave Egger's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" :-); unfortunately, it's not kaufman's title, it's a verse of Alexander Pope poem's "Eloisa to Abelard":

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;

b) Charlie Kaufman writes the most amazing movie scripts (I loved "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation")

Either I am too much sleep deprived or this movie really stinks.

The directing is awful. I hated the gloomy image hand camera style.

The characters are shallow and look like they haven't bathed for days.

My really high expectations were brought down by continuity mistakes on the editing that make me really annoyed.

Jim Carrey is much too old for this role and I can't help seeing him as clown and not a serious actor.

The plot is ridiculous. Being John Malkovich was a wacky fantasy, funny and creative. This one is just a pointless story about having memories erased from the brain.

Now, that is silly. Why should anyone erase memories of a failed relationship? That's just a childish, teenage-like fantasy. Life is just a continuous learning experience. If we delete our mistakes, we don't learn from them. Life might not be perfect but that's what makes it interesting.

I really must be sleep deprived. I'm usually so nice ;-)

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June 01, 2004

Science Fiction Museum Opening

A Science Fiction Museum is going to open in Seattle. Cool. Another excuse to travel :-)

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Angels in America

After a television starvation period (portuguese TV stopped showing Six Feet Under some months ago and there isn't almost anything worthwhile watching these days), finally Angels in America started yesterday.

One of the scenes is inspired by Jean Cocteau's "La belle et la bête" which is one of my favourite movies of all time. I just love the arms sticking out of the walls holding the chandeliers!

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May 30, 2004

Working weekend

As my manager always says: if you have an interesting career you don't need a personal life ;-)

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May 28, 2004

The king of kitsch

I went to see Almodóvar's "La Mala Educación" last night. It's a very good film noir.

Sex, drugs and the catholic church. Recurring themes... but there's something missing. I think Almodóvar is a true expert on creating the best, strongest leading female characters. This one lacks women.

I loved the previous movie "Hable con ella" and its beautiful soundtrack. It's going to take a much better movie to top that one.

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May 27, 2004

Orgasm Simulator

The difference between male and female orgasms :-D

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Portuguese Improvisation

Hilarious! And it's in wikipedia. And it's true :-)

Desenrascanço (impossible translation into English) is a Portuguese word used to describe the capacity to improvise in the most extraordinary situations possible, against all odds, resulting in a hypothetical good-enough solution. Portuguese people believe it to be one of the most valued virtues of theirs.

Via Cris

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May 26, 2004

Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle

Interesting article: Themes in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy as Reflected in the Work of Monty Python. :-))))

"My aim in this talk is to present a comprehensive overview of each and every one of the main themes endured by analytic philosophy in the last sixty years or so, and to argue the bold historical claim that the whole lot is well represented-indeed, often best represented-in the work of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, collectively and henceforth referred to as "Monty Python." Since I have all of fifty minutes to make my case, I expect we'll have time for a song at the end. So let's get to it."

Here's the lyrics:

Philosopher's Drinking Song

Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant who was very rarely stable.
Heideggar, Heideggar was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel.
And Whittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nieizsche couldn't teach 'ya 'bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stewart Mill, of his own free will, after half a pint of shanty was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
And Hobbes was fond of his Dram.
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
"I drink, therefore I am."
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.

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May 25, 2004

Defective

Mentira by Enrique de Hériz was one of my readings while in hospital. Very clever choice (not). A story about the supposed death of an anthropologist who researches funerary rituals throughout the world. Really appropriate, isn't it? ;-)

It's rather interesting to find these kind of defects. I had to imagine the rest of the text...

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May 24, 2004

Gut Porn

I didn't bring pictures of sexy nurses (sorry, Alex :-); but my doctor did say I had a beautiful interior so I might as well publish it ;-D

By the way, my date of birth is 7th October 1975, not January. I wonder if I gave the wrong date or the man mistyped it. I was a bit drowsy...

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May 19, 2004

Intermission

I'm in hospital. I'm not sure when I will be blogging again. Hopefully soon but until then...bye!

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May 14, 2004

Japanese :-)

I am known for my total and complete lack of skills when comes to handwork. Of any kind. Really. It's genetic. My dad breaks everything he touches and I'm slightly better than him.

Having said this, I CANNOT eat with chopsticks and never quite understood why I should since some of the greatest inventions of mankind are available: the spoon, the fork and the knife.

For some reason it's IN to eat with chopsticks in japanese restaurants around here. The waiters always look at me like I came from another planet when I ask for a fork and knife.

But this embarrassment is finally over (and a new one is obviously on my way, but much funnier :-) : I bought Typhoon's rookie chopstix! Quite a clever idea, if you ask me!

Still can't figure out how to chew a whole nagiri because they don't fit inside my mouth, though :-)

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May 13, 2004

On war

"War crimes" and "War attrocities" are expressions I can't and will never understand. War is one big crime. Period.

Why is it that the killing of soldiers by civilians is murder but the killing of civilians by soldiers is their job? Why is it that the torture of prisoners is damaging to the Bush Administration reputation but the war itself is not? Something is very wrong.

"The U.S. is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the U.S. and the community of law abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating and prosecuting all acts of torture." — George W. Bush, U.N. Torture Victims Recognition Day, June 26, 2003

"I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying. These prisoners, you know they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals." - U.S. Sen. James Inhofe

"I want to talk about the hypocrisy of General Kimmitt's comments on 60 Minutes II tonight. "This is wrong. This is reprehensible. But this is not representative of the 150,000 soldiers that are over here. I'd say the same thing to the American people. Don't judge your Army based on the actions of a few." Hmmm... On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and crashed them into buildings in the United States. It just so happened that these nineteen men were all MUSLIMS. And what has happened in our country ever since? Muslims have become the enemy. Muslims are the object of hate crimes. Muslims have become the object of Bush's "war for freedom." The United States used the nineteen men as a representative sample of the over one billion Muslims in the world." - Diane Rejman, Counterpunch

"No matter how he crunched the numbers, however, he found himself in the uncomfortable position last week of having to tell occupation authorities that the report they commissioned paints the bleakest picture yet of the U.S.-led coalition's reputation in Iraq. For the first time, according to Dulame's poll, a majority of Iraqis said they'd feel safer if the U.S. military withdrew immediately." - Hannah Allam

"George W. Bush epitomizes and mines the American popular imagination with his mantra of “spreading freedom,” which carries a strong implication of stopping torture. Saddam Hussein’s horrific legacy of mass torture was one of the arguments deployed to justify preemptive war against Iraq, and torture has become retroactively more important since weapons of mass destruction have failed to materialize. On April 30, 2004, Bush said, “A year ago I [gave a] speech…saying we had achieved an important objective, accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. As a result, there are no longer torture chambers or mass graves or rape rooms in Iraq.” - Lisa Hajjar

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How to decrypt a DVD is art

Mickey Gas Mask, by Barminski , Filter "The laws governing "intellectual property" have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork--as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s--will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed. The irony here couldn't be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas but is now being used to stifle it. The Illegal Art Exhibit will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the "degenerate art" of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court."

Great links and articles on intellectual property. I particularly like the DeCSS Haiku ("How to decrypt a
DVD: in haiku form"). :-) Clever.

"Under the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), breaking the encryption on any software program is a federal crime. In 1999, the hacker magazine 2600 posted DeCSS on its website, 2600.com; this code, which breaks the encryption on DVDs, enables Linux computers to play DVDs (when encrypted, DVDs can only be played on Microsoft products) and also allows DVDs to be copied. The movie industry sued 2600's publisher, and although the court ultimately ruled against the magazine, the case inspired hacktivists to create art that incorporates the code. In so doing, the artists argue that computer language is speech and should be protected under the First Amendment. For more examples, see Gallery of CSS Descramblers."

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May 11, 2004

Timing and Delivery

Jokes are everything about timing and delivery. Some people can't really tell jokes and some make anything they say sound funny.

For instance, this is John 1:45-51:

Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth? Philip saith unto him, Come and see. Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile! Nathanael saith unto him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel. Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these. And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.

Pretty dull, uh?

This guy "manually" inserted the right way to read it:

Philip found Nathanael and said unto him, "We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." Nathanael said to him, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" [Joke!] Philip said to him, "Come and see!" [Boom!] Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and said of him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed in whom there is no guile" ["Hey, here's an honest Jew"--joke]. Nathanael [not getting it] said to him, "How do you know me?" Jesus answered him, "Before Philip called you, I saw you yesterday, standing under a fig tree." Nathanael said [losing his cool], "Rabbi, you are the son of God! You are the king of Israel!" Jesus answered him, "Because I said I saw you standing under a fig tree, believest thou?" [Big joke! Gets laughs!] "You shall see greater things than these." [Release.] And he said to him, "Truly, truly I say unto you, you shall see the heavens opened and the angels of the Lord ascending and descending upon the Son of Man." [Boom!]

Who said there weren't any jokes in the bible? :-)

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May 10, 2004

The origin of jokes

I just discovered the existence of Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) through this great article on the New Yorker.

He is the author of one of the first compilation of jokes: a book called Facetiae. Interesting hobby, considering he was secretary to 8 popes at the Vatican :-)

Far more interesting was that the author of the article, Jim Holt, says: "Copies of the Facetiae are not easy to come by today. The only thing I could find in the library of New York University was a photocopied facsimile of an 1878 Paris edition that was the first unexpurgated translation of Poggio’s book into French (even then, the really bawdy bits were left in Latin)."

I find this remark interesting because I found an online version in latin and an e-book. Doesn't Jim Holt have internet access? ;-)

But even before Poggio, the greek Philogelos had already put together the book "Lover of Laughter".

It's fascinating how jokes and what is considered funny changes through the centuries. Still, some of Poggio's and Philogelos' are told today. But what was extremely funny then might just be a stale joke now:

A professor on a sea-voyage, when there was a big storm and
his slaves were weeping, said: “Don’t cry. I’ve set you all
free in my will.”

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May 07, 2004

Inlight

My very good friend Paula is an interior decorator and her company's site has "opened for business". The company's name is Inlight and it has a very cool, glamourous site :-)

She has very good taste and her work features on this month's interior decoration magazine "Casa Claudia". Funny coincidence because my curtains were all made by her and she has offered me this beautiful and all-year comfortable silky/furry couch potatoe accessory :-D

But the real portfolio can be viewed on her site :-)

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May 06, 2004

Happy Birthday!

Just like Port wine! Improving year after year ;-)

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May 01, 2004

Crazy Belgians

I have posted here a weird ad for Brussels Airlines but this one beats them all...It's advertising the Proximus Telecom MMS services and the catch phrase is "Could you say this with an SMS?"

Stolen from here.

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April 30, 2004

Writing Guidelines

1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Contractions aren't necessary and shouldn't be used.
12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary;
it's highly superfluous.
14. One should NEVER generalize.
15. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
16. Don't use no double negatives.
17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be ignored.
21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
23. DO NOT use exclamation points and all caps to emphasize!!!
24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
25. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth shaking ideas.
26. Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed.
27. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
28. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
31. Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
32. Who needs rhetorical questions?
33. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
34. The passive voice should never be used.
36. Do not put statements in the negative form.
37. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
38. A writer must not shift your point of view.
39. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
40. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
41. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
42. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
43. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
44. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
45. Always pick on the correct idiom.
46. The adverb always follows the verb.
47. Be careful to use the rite homonym.

And Finally...

47. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

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April 28, 2004

Contemplation

Madalena dreaming about holidays overseas? ;-)

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April 26, 2004

If

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Rudyard Kipling

I'm not a kipling fan and the ending of this poem is a bit too sexist for my taste but it's motivational, isn't it? Not cheeky motivational but poetically motivational :-)

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April 25, 2004

The Revolution

Taken on a very warm day at Praia do Meco.

On the April 25th 1974 a revolution took place in Portugal; a 40 something year old dictatorship was overthrown. Here is why it's called the Red Carnation Revolution.

On this day and precisely in 1974, my parents were going on their first date! Of course they didn't: they didn't go to work(where they met the first time) but they both went separately to see the action and got mixed in the middle of the crowd!

I think everyone can imagine (if not experienced) the atrocities and the general repression of a dictatorship in every section of society. Here's some trivia on the dictatorship and how it prevented the people to access information and culture; as usual, I prefer to talk about things that make me laugh (even if bitterly):

- The Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci), A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick) and many other movies were not shown in Portugal because of censorship; here's my favourite argument against a movie (sarcasm here, of course):

Oh! What a Lovely War by Richard Attenborough (a musical!) - "We do not approve this movie because it's a cruel story against war."

- The secret police would invade people's homes and apprehend subversive books (and often the owner); the problem was that, in a country with a minimal alphabetization rate, was hard to find capable employees:
One police agent once apprehended a book by Racine saying "Racine, Estaline, Lenine, it's everything the same!"

- When the soviets launched the world's first artificial satellite Sputnik in 1957, the newspapers published an interview with a patriotic astronomer that said that it was all a lie;

- Coca-cola was forbidden; the dictator Salazar wrote to the company's representative: "Portugal is a rural, paternalistic acountry and - praise the Lord- underdeveloped, an expression that I find more flattering than pejorative. I tremble at the thought of your big trucks driving at all speed through the streets of our old cities, accelerating, as they drive by, the rhythm of our centuries old habits.";

- in 1961, 10 people arrested by the secret police for political reasons escape from prison using the bullet-proof car that belonged to Salazar;

On a sidenote(or Harry Potter trivia :-)), J.K.Rowling spent some years in Portugal, teaching english and that's why the founder of the Slytherin at Hogwart's is called Salazar (the bad guy!!).

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April 23, 2004

Unesco's World Book and Copyright Day

Today I'm celebrating World Book Day by...reading (or trying to read, at least).

The Librarian, by Arcimboldo (the only reason I can think for going to Sweden is to see this painting live)

Leer, leer, vivir la vida que otros soñaron. Leer, leer, leer, el alma olvida las cosas que pasaron. Se quedan las que quedan, las ficciones, las flores de la pluma, las olas, las humanas creaciones, el poso de la espuma. Leer, leer, leer; ¿seré lectura mañana también yo? ¿Seré mi creador, mi criatura, seré lo que pasó?

To read, to read, to live the life that others dreamed. To read, to read, to read, the soul forgets the things that happened. Remains what remains, the fictions, the flowers of the pen, the waves, the human creations, the traces of the foam. To read, to read, to read; will I be read tomorrow also? Will I be my creator, my creature, will I be what happened?

Miguel de Unamuno in Cancionero, diario poético, 1953

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March 25, 2004

Procession of the Candles

Apparently at least in Condeixa, Portugal there's a tradition in which children dress up as saints whenever there's a Procession. This one is supposed to be St. Teresa de Avila, Doctor of the church.

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March 22, 2004

ESP Game

Fun Game. And useful?

Labeling an image means associating word descriptions to it. Computer programs can't yet determine the contents of arbitrary images, but the ESP game provides a novel method of labeling them: players get to have fun as they help us determine their contents. If the ESP game is played as much as other popular online games, we estimate that all the images on the Web can be labeled in a matter of weeks!

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Joy of Living #2

Meeting a friend on a Paris street one day, Henri Matisse told him, "If I were not doing what I am doing, I would paint like Picasso." Amazing, the friend replied: Picasso had just said the same to him about Matisse.

Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre, 1905-1906 (Barnes
Foundation, Lincoln University)

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Joy of Living #1

Picasso once visited an exhibition of children's drawings: "When I was their age, I could draw like Raphael," he declared, "but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them."

Picasso, La joie de vivre, 1946 (Musée Picasso, Antibes)

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March 20, 2004

Vernal Equinox

Here's a fairly simple explanation:

What Happens at the Equinox?

Far from being an arbitrary indicator of the changing seasons, March 20 (March 21 in some years) is significant for astronomical reasons. On March 20, 2004, at precisely 1:49 a.m. EST (06:49 Universal Time), the Sun will cross directly over the Earth's equator. This moment is known as the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. For the Southern Hemisphere, this is the moment of the autumnal equinox.

Equinox Means "Equal Night"

Translated literally, equinox means "equal night." Because the sun is positioned above the equator, day and night are about equal in length all over the world during the equinoxes. A second equinox occurs each year on September 22 or 23; in 2004, it will be on September 22 at 12:30 p.m. EDT (16:30 UT). This date will mark the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and the vernal equinox in the Southern (vernal denotes "spring").

Reasons for the Seasons

These brief but monumental moments owe their significance to the 23.4 degree tilt of the Earth's axis. Because of the tilt, we receive the Sun's rays most directly in the summer. In the winter, when we are tilted away from the Sun, the rays pass through the atmosphere at a greater slant, bringing lower temperatures. If the Earth rotated on an axis perpendicular to the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, there would be no variation in day lengths or temperatures throughout the year, and we would not have seasons.

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March 18, 2004

Always look on the brigth side of life

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best...

And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...

If life seems jolly rotten
There's something you've forgotten
And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing.
When you're feeling in the dumps
Don't be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle - that's the thing.

And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...

More..."Always look on the brigth side of life"

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March 12, 2004

Peter Pan

No Tinker Bell in sight...

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Imaginary Girlfriends

How pathetic is this?

"This is a service provided by a real life girl where she will pretend to be your long distance girlfriend by sending you personalized love letters, emails, pictures, leave phone messages (if you want), and provide other girlfriend-like services. This relationship appears real to others that may see these things, but it is not. There will be no actual real life meetings or relationship between you and your Imaginary Girlfriend other than that specified in your order."

"Anyone who has difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy should NOT use this service. ".......noooooo, why not? They're weirdos anyway :-)

Oddly enough (or probably not) there's no Imaginary Boyfriend service available. This means that women like the real thing or...men are just too easy :-)

This surely needs a deeper cybersociological analysis...but I just don't have the time!

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March 11, 2004

Philosophy Jokes

Descartes walked into a bar. The barman asked "Would you like a drink?"
To which Descartes replied "I think not!", and vanished.

Seen on a restroom wall:
"God is dead."- Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead."- God.

What does an agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac do?
Stays up late at night, pondering the existence of Dog.

At a philosophy class:
Teacher: Prove to me that chair exists.
Student: What chair?

PS: I must be such a geek to actually laugh at this! ;-)

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Arco 2004 #6 - Orange Suit

On such a tragic day for Spain, I dug out a bit of color....:-(

There's nothing like an orange suit against a white background :-)

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March 08, 2004

Robots are a girl's best friend

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International Women's Day

I never cared much about International Women's Day.

It seems to me that it means that the other 364 days were Men's Days.

But what the heck...it's a good excuse to indulge on some feminist (and even sexist) blogging behavior :-D.

I'll obviously start with the Feminist Manifesto:

Because a woman's work is never done
and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious
and we're the first to get fired
and what we look like is more important than what we do
and if we get raped it's our fault
and if we get beaten we must have provoked it
and if we raise our voices we're nagging bitches
and if we enjoy sex we're nymphos
and if we don't we're frigid
and if we love women it's because we can't get a "real" man
and if we ask our doctor too many questions we're neurotic and/or pushy
and if we expect childcare we're selfish
and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and "unfeminine"
and if we don't we're typical weak females
and if we want to get married we're out to trap a man
and if we don't we're unnatural
and because we still can't get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon
and...for lots and lots of other reasons...
I am part of the women's liberation movement.

and I'm buying this T-shirt for PMS days ;-)

It can be bought at the Feminist Majority Foundation shop.

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March 05, 2004

Literary bar jokes

Charles Dickens: Please, sir, I'd like a martini.
Bartender: Sure thing. Olive or twist?

James Joyce: I'll take a Guinness.
Bartender: So Charles Dickens was in here yesterday.
James Joyce: (drinks)
Bartender: And he asked for a martini and I said, "Olive or twist?"
James Joyce: (drinks)
Bartender: You see, it's funny because he wrote a book called "Oliver Twist."
James Joyce: What a shitty joke.

Ernest Hemingway: Gin.
Bartender: So Charles Dickens was in here two days ago.
Ernest Hemingway: Joyce already told me that story. Fuck off.

Franz Kafka: I'd like a mineral water.
Bartender: Olive or twist?
Franz Kafka: I can't digest solid food.

Mark Twain: Give me a brandy.
Bartender: So Charles Dickens came in the other day and ordered a martini.
Mark Twain: Did he take an olive or twist? Ha ha ha!
Bartender: (tearful) You did that on purpose, didn't you?

Virginia Woolf: I'll take your second-best cognac and unadulterated experience.
Bartender: We don't have that. This is a bar.
Virginia Woolf: Patriarchy! (drowns)

from Iowablog

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March 04, 2004

Who's your inner artist?

Mine is Keith Haring:

"With your good-natured charm and fun-loving attitude, it's no wonder you're paired with the cartoony style of Keith Haring." :-)

Test is here.

Via Ana

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February 25, 2004

Progress?

Jorge Luis Borges lived in this building and wrote here his first ultraist poems. Now there's a model looking out the window...

Madrid, Puerta del Sol

AUSENCIA Habré de levantar la vasta vida que aún ahora es tu espejo: cada mañana habré de reconstruirla. Desde que te alejaste, cuántos lugares se han tornado vanos y sin sentido, iguales a luces en el día. Tardes que fueron nicho de tu imagen, músicas en que siempre me aguardabas, palabras de aquel tiempo, yo tendré que quebrarlas con mis manos. ¿En qué hondonada esconderé mi alma para que no vea tu ausencia que como un sol terrible, sin ocaso, brilla definitiva y despiadada? Tu ausencia me rodea como la cuerda a la garganta, el mar al que se hunde.

ABSENCE I shall raise the wide life that is still your mirror: each morning I shall rebuild it. Ever since you left, so many places have become empty and without meaning, like lights during the day. Afternoons that were the niche of your image, musics in which you always waited for me, words spoken in those times, I will have to break them with my hands. In what hollow shall I hide my soul so that I can not see your absence that like a terrible sun, without sunset, shines forever and without mercy? Your absence surrounds me like a rope around the throat, like the sea where one sinks.

From Fervor de Buenos Aires, Borges' first book of poems.

p.s. - My own crappy translation! Corrections are welcome.

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Tech Support Nietzsche Style

When a user is calling in need of help, don't forget that he is a weakling. Only a loser would need to come groveling to you, begging for crumbs of help that may fall from your godlike lips. And he knows that he is a loser in the race of the weak and the strong, that his kind is doomed to extinction. Therefore, show him no mercy. Treat him with the utter contempt that he deserves. It is the law of nature that you should do so.

Key Phrases:

"You aren't very smart, are you?"
"I can't believe you call yourself a programmer!"
"Our product is obviously too complex and advanced for you. Please desist from using it -- you are soiling it."

Nevertheless, there may come a time when you actually must help the user, even though he is sucking away your magnificent intellectual vitality with his grotesque shambling confusion. He is a lower form of life and you must make him feel it, lest he take on ambitions of evolving to your level.

Key Phrases:

"Now I will read aloud the section of the manual that you failed to comprehend."
"You have ignominiously blundered on line 35, committing an error that a Mongoloid programming an abacus would be ashamed of."
"What you've done in your function foo is the coding equivalent of failing to empty your colostomy bag."

Alas, upon occasion there comes a time when it is obvious that the compiler is at fault. This is no reason to let the user feel superior to anyone, however. The design of a compiler is still far beyond his limited mental capacities. His duty is to worship, not criticize.

Key Phrases:

"The inner workings of the compiler are far beyond your antlike comprehension."
"That behavior is described in ANSI specification 21.11.45.7.3.8. You are familiar with that section, I assume..."
"Our software can behave in that manner only if it has been corrupted by long exposure to users of your caliber."

And finally, a user may eventually want you to code something for him, or send him an example. The user has asked something that is against the laws of nature. Such creatures as himself exist to serve you and not you him. Therefore such a request is impossible and against nature, and does not exist, and therefore never happened. Response is not possible.

credits to: Jim Dyer

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February 24, 2004

Arco 2004 #5 - Tintin

I'm not proud to say I woke up a while ago....watched a bit of Euronews and realized that probably only in Portugal is Carnaval a holiday....lazy bastards, aren't we? :-))))

A more mature Tintin? by E.Lopez, Galeria Altxerri

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February 23, 2004

Inês by Velazquez

My friend Inês admiring "Las Meninas" by Velazquez at the Prado.

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February 20, 2004

Arco 2004 #4

By Atsuko Arai. I just found out Mario Vargas Llosa wrote an article about her:

"Lo fascinante de su exposición (...) a la sutileza e inteligencia con que ha sido concebida cada una de ellas para dar fuerza persuasiva a esta tesis: que, en los tiempos en que vivimos, el mundo es de veras un pañuelo, pues cada ciudad contiene de algún modo a todas las ciudades, es un pequeño microcosmos en el que se refractan gentes, paisajes, usos y semblantes del conjunto de la humanidad. "

Translated in a hurry, he's saying that the fascinating thing about her photos is the intelligence of their conception; her thesis is that the world is really a piece of cloth, since every city contains in itself every other city; it's a small microcosmos that mirror the people, landscapes, costumes and faces of all humanity.

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Arco 2004 #3

Eleni Lyra from Greece put up a spooky performance. She was trying to blend in the scenario, I guess. At least this was the stand with the most visitors :-)

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Addicted to Love

Surprisingly, The Economist has news about love.

"Scientists are finding that, after all, love really is down to a chemical addiction between people". And what is The Economist's concern? Answer: "is this useful?"

Utilitarian magazine... ;-)

Robert Palmer was right: we are addicted to love!

"the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction"

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Arco 2004 #2

Andreas Savva (from Cyprus), a contemporary greek artist

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February 19, 2004

Arco 2004 #1

Here's a piece I liked: it was created by the danish/norwegian duoElmgreen & Dragset.

A very nice gentleman offered me an invitation for two people while I was in line to buy the ticket to ARCO!! That's a 46 Euro worth gift! Lucky me!

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Viva Madrid!

I spent a really interesting weekend in Madrid. Madrid is one of that cities where is such a waste to sleep because there is almost as much to do at night as there is by day!

Saturday was St. Valentine's day and the restaurants were packed with couples on their romantic nights-out; ARCO was over the weekend and attracted lots of tourists; and still the Prado was full of people on Sunday...

Well, I had some vermouth, ate lots of tapas and drank lots of coffee to keep myself awake!

I saw lots of interesting stuff on ARCO and took some pictures. Me and my friend Pedro were wondering: is a photo of a work of art a work of art in itself? :-) We saw so many weird things being called art that maybe we'll rent a stand on next year's ARCO and exhibit the photos we took this year...

Here's the symbol of Madrid; explained here.

The bear is picking what I've seen translated into strawberries but they're not. They're madroños or medronhos in portuguese. They are used to make a delicious...aguardiente/aguardente (schnapps???).

Apparently funny legs are fashionable in Madrid!

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February 12, 2004

ARCO 2004

Today starts ARCO 2004, the contemporary art fair in Madrid.

The guest country is Greece. I'm quite curious to see what are they doing artistically there. Is the "birthplace of civilization" a fertile ground for modern artists? We'll see.

Anyway, if you're thinking about going, don't bother. I just booked the last two affordable hotel rooms in the city ;-).

This ARCo-related column here about photo portraits is really interesting. I didn't know Susan Sontag had a book "On Photography". There it goes, to my wishlist. Here's an excerpt:

"Most tourists feel compelled to put a camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable they encounter. Unsure of their reasons they take a picture. This gives shape to the experience: stop, take a photo and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic - Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working ... "

Hmmmm. Well, I'm portuguese but I work for an american company :-). I am probably handicapped by a ruthless work ethic. I can't have a do-absolutely-nothing-sit-back-and-relax holiday :-D

Another excerpt from here:

"Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. "

She also wrote piles of articles on photography to The New York review of Books.

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Make them sing!

Jonathan at Puerta del Sol is, as he says, working in possibly the finest Spanish audiomagazine in the World :-)

I just wanted to share this bit; it made me laugh.

"(...)a feature on the Segovian folklorist Agapito Marazuela - an interesting chap, partly blind, who walked round the villages of central Spain collecting regional songs. Apparently when shy people refused to sing for him, he'd tell them that he'd just come from the neighboring village, where the songs were really good. At which point they'd start singing - it never failed."

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February 11, 2004

Big Fish

Another great movie this week! Big Fish by Tim Burton! I'm a sucker for dark humor (Tim Burton says it's therapeutic to laugh at death instead of fearing it) and "burtonesque" mythology but I really think this is one great movie. A bit more commercial, I'm afraid but a very good waste of two hours:-) In this case it's the fisherman's tall tales that create a gallery of weird but touching characters...

It's based on a book I'm definitely going to buy: Big Fish : A Novel of Mythic Proportions by Daniel Wallace. Hint: the author appears in the movie as the economics professor!

It' wonderful... each tale the father tells is a little movie in itself.

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February 10, 2004

Glamour?

Rossio, Lisboa

Is there anything more glamorous than being a model?

Somehow, it doesn't look that glamorous when being a model means that, for the sake of a photoshoot, you have to bath on a fountain's dirty water, in the middle of Winter, with a few dozen drooling men looking at your...hmmm...soaked clothes ;-)

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Portrait of the weblogger as a young woman

Self-Portrait at theGunpowder Factory - Fábrica da Pólvora

Forgive me for the pretentious Joycean title... :-)

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February 09, 2004

It's just like anything else

I went to see Woody Allen's latest movie "Anything Else".

It's my kind of movie. Just telling a story, with a few intellectual jokes in-between, making up some interesting metaphors for world events and great jazz music on the background.

It's surprisingly different from the last few. It's more modern. While Allen got us used to watching middle-aged people with relationship problems, he has turned to more youthful characters. His own (relatively small) role is funny and is really what makes the action take place. The relationship problems (love at first glimpse of common intellectual interests, unfaithfulness, divorce) are still the main focus, but just like the cabbies say: "It's like anything else".

His character's obsession with guns and emergency kits because of his lunatic fear that some anti-semite revolution might occur, seems to be a metaphor for the current events in the middle east.

Over the years, I have developed my own Woody Allen theory ;-) - at least I haven't read anything similar anywhere else :-). Although the recurring themes in Allen's movies are Religion, Relationships/Sex and Death, I have this theory that it is possible to detect some patterns (or what I could call artistical periods) in his movies - I have some improbable lounge theories to entertain/bore friends to death ;-) To me these patterns are directly related to his own relationhips/marriages at the time. It's a bit difficult to make it all sound bulletproof as I don't have all the data on his personal life but...

There's a primary phase in his directing career until he met Diane Keaton that relied on loung jokes, surreal humor and physical comedy. After Diane Keaton, it gets more urban and intellectual; psychoanalysis, mid-life crisis and failed romances are the main themes. With the start of the relationship with Mia Farrow, he combines his intellectual humor with early childhood memories (radio days and the purple rose of Cairo being the most illustrative). When the relationship with Farrow starts crumbling down, the main obesessive themes are adultery and guilt (Husbands and Wives, Crimes and Misdemeanors). The "freedom" from Mia and all the parenting and legal problems sparkle the humor back again, to what I call the Soon-Y phase :-) (Everybody says I love you, Mighty Aphrodite) and then he sinks to a 30's revivalistic stream (Smalltime Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion).

All the people I know that are or have been in relationships where the couple has a big age difference have suffered either of these effects: the younger gets more mature and sometimes feels like he/she is almost the same age as the partner; or the older one starts acting like he/she's 30 years younger!

I'd say that with this movie, a new pattern is starting: either Soon-Y makes him feel 30 years younger or he has found himself a new love interest...

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February 05, 2004

Pet Therapy?

Update:

The dog on the right is saying to the middle dog, "Crikey, I hate to worry you but there's a lady growing out of your rear end, mate." - caption by Alkam. :-D

There’s an increasing number of people who live alone in Lisbon. This lady has pet therapy and she probably doesn’t realize it.

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February 04, 2004

Elizabethan Court Music

I love shopping for CD's without listening to them first. I choose them by the cover and by genre (of course). It's like choosing wine by the way the label looks. It usually works for me ;-)

This time I bought XVIth century court music: Armada - Music from the courts of England and Spain.
What caught my attention is that there's a picture of Queen Elizabeth I of England on the cover.

She was one of my female rolemodels! While a teenager and desperate to see whether the world was really ruled by men (and if so, schedule a sex-change surgery :-D) I browsed encyclopedias for women of strength. Queen Elizabeth was a fierce ruler, cunning and she made the bravest choice a woman could make in the XVIth century in order to maintain her independence: she never got married and she didn't have any children.

When Henry VIII turned protestant, Elizabeth (his daughter) told him that he should have converted to Islam: that way he could have several wives instead of chopping their heads off. Well, at least that's the point of this story, she probably said something like this with much more tact :-)

Enough gossiping. The CD is excellent, it has pieces by William Byrd and Antonio de Cabezón, among others.

The CD's now have a permanent address in my car's glove compartment :-) It's my listening-to-music time of the day: driving to work and back again later.

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February 03, 2004

21g and SixDix

I went to see 21 grams on Friday night.
It's a really sad movie, with an interesting editting and adequate photography.
The movie follows a tangled storyline that makes the viewer anxious to complete this higly dramatic jigsaw puzzle. It's extraordinary how such a trivial plot can be made into such a compelling movie. No happy ending, just a feeling of emptyness; it has the most depressing sex scene I have ever seen. I even dropped a tear.
When I say trivial plot, I just mean that the "heart transplant changed my life and I'm going to look for the donor's family" or something alike is a bit overused by now. There's Clint Eastwood's "Blood Work", Almodóvar's "Todo sobre mi madre" and several brazilian soapoperas :-)
But this one is simply brilliant. How one life event can be the source of such different emotions to three different people: life, loss and redemption. Makes one think about things we usually try to avoid thinking.

An interview with the director here.
Interview with the screenplay writer here.

By the way, 21 grams is supposedly the weight one loses when one dies (just another urban legend about death). On hearing this, my movie company Celeste started doing her maths: "Hmmm, let's see how many times I would have to die to lose those extra kilos...."

After the movie, we went to xafarix bar for a sixdix show (this sounds like an Asterix story :-)). I always prefer to go to live shows (even if they only play covers of other bands) than to sit around listening to "boxed" music. The show started half an hour later than it was announced (1 am) but...these guys are pretty good musicians and funny too. Recommended for a rock n' roll night out.

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February 01, 2004

Rainy Days

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January 30, 2004

A Gymnopediac Bargain

This was a bargain: a 2 CD Set of Erik Satie’s Piano Music for 8 Euro at FNAC. Not bad.

I’ve always loved Gymnopédie no. 1 – Lent et douloureux. Here’s a sample…

“Trois Gymnopédies is an example of what has often been called Satie’s ‘cubist’ style of composition. In these cubist works, Satie treats his musical material as if it were a piece of sculpture, viewing it from a number of different angles by essentially composing the same piece several times over. Satie called this an 'entirely new form which [he had] invented', but the links with the much older theme-and-variations form can be clearly discerned, once it has been grasped that there is no clear ‘original theme’, as in a set of variations by, say, Mozart. Any one of the three pieces can be seen as the original, and each of the three as a variation on the other two.” In here.

Satie was probably an eccentric: his pieces had odd, to say the least, titles like “Embryons Desséchés”,”Pièces Froides” or “Sonatine Bureaucratique”. He wrote precise and ...hmmmm…strange instructions for the musicians who would play his pieces. These are the instructions to play “Vexations”:

“To play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities. “

He was friends with Picasso and…he founded his own church. He was also the “inventor” of Furniture Music, i.e. background music. He was surely ahead of his time :-)

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January 29, 2004

Big Blue

Torre de Belém, Lisboa

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January 28, 2004

My pathological weakness ;-)

Nelson says:

(...)If you enjoyed it, probably you have a tendency for masochism (which can be used in better ways – see The Secretary). And then there’s also Woody Allen…another director that preys on viewers pathological weaknesses* instead on building something new. But I’ll leave him for later. * Denial being the first symptom.

Firstly, I loved "The Secretary". Great weird, dark humor movie.

Secondly, I'm not in denial :-). And I don't know what you mean by pathological weaknesses. My only weaknesses (in this context, of course) are
* to love jewish humor
* to find funny intelligent men sexy (yes, Woody Allen is sexy!!!)
* and loving jazz (his movies have the best soundtracks!)

It's probably true that his movies are variations of a same theme. But that's art! Look at (or listen to) Tom Waits' Night on Earth, Erik Satie's Gymnopédies, Picasso's Musketeers, Dali's obsession with Caplligat's rocks, etc.

And you are now publically challenged to come and watch Anything Else when it opens here :-)))

p.s.: Hannah and her sisters is my all time favourite. We'll discuss this again when you have watched it!

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January 27, 2004

A different type of networking ;-)

It has been brought to my attention quite a different type of networking from the one I rambled about before ;-)

Apparently, Erotic Networking is hot (in more than one aspect) in New York. And it has created some new job descriptions: female social entrepreneurs and erotic event planners.

One Leg Up,Cake ,Flirt NYC and Skin NYC are the promoters of erotic events that frame the gatherings as political acts rooted in a postfeminist interest in women's sexual empowerment.

And being women in charge of the events (men must ask permission to engage in anything sexual), any similarities with Eyes Wide Shut or Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice are just coincidences.

And obtaining membership (for One Leg Up, for instance) can be really hard. You’ll have to write an erotic essay and send a photo to be given the pass phrase to the sex party.

Cliff has an account of a girl’s experiences at these erotic networking events.

And check Chris "ON GENDER POLITICS & ROLE REVERSALS: Networking For Sex with the Empowered Female Class & My First Lesbian Relationship........
"

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It’s a small world…or isn’t it?

The sociologist Stanley Milgram developed what he called the "Small World Hypothesis", which stated that everyone was connected to everyone else by six degrees or less.

That’s the basic idea behind the multiple social networking sites that are mushrooming all around like Friendster, Tribe and the more recent and selective Orkut (by the way, if you want to join this one, Jill and Vika get you an invitation).

The internet and these social tools are just amplifiers to a natural phenomenon; people are social actors who interconnect and share contacts and knowledge.

I believe these will be useful tools and the aim should be to reach the model proposed as the Augmented Social Network:

Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries; 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society; and, 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of "online citizenship" for the Information Age.

The major barriers for these tools to succeed, from what I have gathered from my readings, are:
• Achieving critical mass;
• No payback to for someone to share their business contacts (as one’s business contacts are obviously one big professional competitive advantage);
• No integration with other systems that might use the social network data;
• No interoperability between the systems which means having to share the same information repeatedly;

While as a business/citizenship tool this really appeals to me, on a more sociological level the concept of Computer Based Friendship creeps me out. When I joined one of these sites I was taken back to my teenage years instantly. A big singles party, a “do you want to be my friend” first-grade flashback.

It’s always fun to know other people, especially if they share the same interests; the internet provides a wider audience for meeting new people of any nationality, race and creed; and I’m not questioning the social software suitability for the maintenance of close social bonds but, to be honest, I wouldn’t call the people I’ve met through the internet “friends”. They are just internet acquaintances. Some are really interesting and I’m happy to have found them, but there’s no real significant attachment. I’m just concerned about the decreasing ability of people to socialize “normally”; the building of relationships seems more and more difficult. Maybe we need a cultural shift on the relationship building dynamics. The offline social capital and civic engagement are probably not that easily replaceable by software. And not half as fun, I must say :-)

Well, at least people are establishing ties, have a feeling of belonging to a group, sharing beliefs and interests. And maybe that’s a way to prevent the durkheimian anomie attendant upon living in modern urban-industrial societies.

Update: Orkut is down.

More..."It’s a small world…or isn’t it?"

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January 26, 2004

Delicious

I added my delicious bookmarks to the links on the right. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager.

The system is pre-pre-alpha: it hasn't got any fancy features and the design is non-existent. But it's quite useful (since I work with more than one computer) to have one place where I can find kind-of my list of useful links, categorized by me; of course that the great advantage is to check what others are bookmarking and subscribe to their own listings.

The main page looks just like a linkdump but with classy/geeky subjects :-). The categories are created by the users what can create a bit of confusion. Let's see. It has lots of room for improvement.

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Miklós Fehér (1979-2004)

I am completely schocked after watching the death of a 24 year old football player live. And realizing he was dead right there on the pitch by seeing his colleagues expressions and tearful faces.

Hungarian Miklos Féher playing for my team Benfica suffered a cardiac arrest on the last minutes of a match.

This must be the saddest victory ever.

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January 23, 2004

British Pathe

"British Pathe are one of the oldest media companies in the world.
Their roots lie in 1890s Paris where their founder, Charles Pathe, pioneered the development of the moving image.
They were established in London in 1902, and by 1910 were producing their famous bi-weekly newsreel the Pathe Gazette. After the First World War they started producing various Cinemagazines as well. By 1930 they were producing the Gazette, the Pathetone Weekly, the Pathe Pictorial and Eve's Film Review, covering entertainment, culture and womens' issues.
By the time Pathe finally stopped producing the cinema newsreel in 1970 they had accumulated 3500 hours of filmed history amounting to over 90,000 individual items.
Over the last 30 years this material has been used extensively around the world in television programmes, home videos, advertisments, corporate productions and, most recently, in web publishing."

It is now possible to download preview versions for free.

I picked 4 interesting ones:

*The first aerial cinema(1925); an obvious percursor of showing movies on flights!

*Eve's wireless(1922); well, not really wireless...but at least it's a mobile phone :-)

*Postal Automation (1956) - New inventions of the Post Office Research Department: letter sorting machine and speech synthesiser!!!

*The Informator : push some buttons and the machine will give the answer!

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January 22, 2004

A Mother in Law isn't family! It's a punishment!

Lucky Italians! If they have a mother in law from hell, that's enough grounds to ask for a divorce!

Fortunately, in portuguese, the word for "mother-in-law" doesn't include the word "mother"! :-) But someone told me that when you get a divorce, she is still your mother in law!! :-((((

What's the definition of mixed emotions?
Watching your mother-in-law back off a cliff in your new Mercedes.

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Catching the last rays of sun #2

In Tomar, by the main church, a man looks at his own shadow as the sun sets.

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January 21, 2004

Sunset

Torre de Belém, Lisboa

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January 20, 2004

Book-a-Minute

"We at Book-A-Minute understand that your time is valuable. You want to experience the wonder and excitement of the fine art of literature, but reading actual books requires a significant time investment. We've got the solution for you. Our ultra-condensed books are just the ticket."

Here's a sample. An ultra-condensed version of a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:

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January 19, 2004

To the lighthouse

The weather was fabulous this weekend. Not really warm, but there was a glorious sun and a beautiful blue sky! This is the lighthouse in Cape Espichel, Portugal. I'm very pleased with this photo! :-) I zoomed in to check the red iron work and found those little lion heads!

I was thinking how lighthouses stir the writer's imagination. There are so many books where the action is set in a lighthouse or are related in some way to them. The obvious one that came to my mind was "To the lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf. A very creepy terror book I bought the last time I was in Madrid had the most bizzarre adventures set in a lighthouse: it's called "La piel fria" by Albert Sanchez Pinol. And of course, from my childhood memories (especially the hot summers at my grandmother's) came The Famous Five and the Lighthouse Mistery.

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January 15, 2004

Anarchic Manifestation of Social Freedom

Graffiti at Costa do Castelo, Lisbon.

"Graffito means "scratch" in Italian, and graffiti (the plural form) are drawings or images scratched into the surfaces of walls. Illicit graffiti (of the "Kilroy was here" variety) dates back to ancient Egypt. Graffiti slipped into the studio as a subject after World War II. Artists such as Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock were interested in the way it looked, the Frenchman Jean Dubuffet was interested in what it meant as a kind of outsider art, and the Spaniard Antoni Tapies was interested in the ways it could be incorporated into his imagery of urban walls.

During the early 1970s, soon after aerosol spray paint in cans became readily available, New York subway trains were subjected to an onslaught of exuberantly colored graffiti. The words and "tags" (graffiti writers' names) were soon augmented with elaborate cartoon-inspired images. Most Graffitists were neither professional artists nor art students but streetwise teenagers from the Bronx and Brooklyn.

The popularization of Graffiti raised questions of unusual aesthetic and sociological import. Was graffiti vandalism? Or urban folk art? The writer Norman Mailer romanticized it as the anarchic manifestation of social freedom, while critics such as Suzi Gablik charged that ghetto youths were being exploited by a novelty-crazed art market." in e-fineart

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January 14, 2004

Cool Digital Art

Shinichiro Sato from Japan designed the most incredible interactive digital art.

I find tinygrow a zen experience :-). It's like trimming a bonsai...

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January 12, 2004

Learn economic theory in 5 minutes

Although only actual economists laugh at these jokes, the really illustrate (ridicularize?) the essential views of each school of thought:

Q: How many Chicago School economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. If the light bulb needed changing the market would have already done it.

Q:How many mainstream economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Two. One to assume the existence of ladder and one to change the bulb.

Q:How many Keynesian economists does it takes to change a light bulb?
A:All. Because then you will generate employment, more consumption, dislocating the AD (agg. demand) to the right,...

Q: How many marxists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: None - the bulb contains within it the seeds of its own revolution.

Q: How many environmental economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Eight - one to turn the lightbulb and seven to do the environmental impact study.

Q: How many neo-classical economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: It depends on the wage rate.

Q: How many conservative economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. If the government would just leave it alone, it would screw itself in.

And to summarize the inefficiency of it all:

Given 1000 economists, there will be 10 theoretical economists with different theories on how to change the light bulb and 990 empirical economists laboring to determine which theory is the *correct* one, and everyone will still be in the dark.

PS: nowadays, I really identify more with this one :-))))):

Q: How many IT Consultants does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. They just have to convince the client that "Dead Bulb" is a feature.

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Hayek

Good article about Hayek here and how is theories are being rescued from oblivion.

Some highlights:

Hayek's most important insight, which he referred to as his "one discovery" in the social sciences, was to define the central economic and social problem as one of organizing dispersed knowledge. Different people have different purposes. They know different things about the world. Much important information is local and transitory, known only to the "man on the spot." Some of that knowledge is objective and quantifiable, but much is tacit and unarticulated. Often we only discover what we truly want as we actually make trade-offs between competing goods."

The economic problem of society," Hayek wrote in his 1945 article, "is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate `given' resources -- if `given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these `data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in totality."

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The road not taken

Sintra, Portugal: foggy first day of the year!

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

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January 09, 2004

Manuelin in Tomar

The manuelin style is a regional version of the gothic style. It developed in Portugal around 1500(during king Manuel reign, hence the name), during the times of the great portuguese discoveries. Its main characteristic is the use of maritim elements in the decoration of buildings.

In the Convent of Christ can be found the supreme example of this style: the Chapter Window.

Seen more closely, the decoration is a bit surreal. The armilar sphere (an astronomical instrument which is still a symbol of Portugal) is placed next to rocks, seaweeds, sailing ornaments and even a belt (a marine version of the Order of the Garter of which King Manuel was a member).

Below are more details:

More..."Manuelin in Tomar"

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January 08, 2004

The quest for the Graal in Tomar

Everytime I go to Tomar I visit the Church of Santa Maria do Olival (Our Lady of The Olive Trees). In every guidebook it says this was the mother church of all churches in Africa and Asia and it was the Templar Church. I was so disappointed whenever I went there because it's a very simple church with, what seemed then, no particular interest.

This time I was lucky enough to have a guided tour of the church with an expert! I saw a couple of things I never noticed and never saw written anywhere so I'm going to share them.

Take a look inside the church so that you can get a clearer picture.

The number 8 is a mystical one. It represents the infinite for has no beggining and no end. The octogonal shapes usually represent the link between God (the circle) and earth (the square). To enter the church you must climb down 8 steps. This is quite unusual but it could have two meanings: climbing down is a way of showinh humility; or as is said that the templars attended mass in horseback just in case they had to go to battle, it's far more easy for a horse to climb up when in a hurry than down.

There's a large stone on the far right corner that is said to be the entrance to a tunnel leading to another church (which used to be a nun monastery ;-) and to the castle. There is an octogonal shaped well outside the church that never had any practical purpose as it didn't have any water. A few locals poured gasoline into it and set it on fire only to prove that this well was only a way to let oxygen in for the tunnel. And in fact smoke appeared inside the church coming from under the stone.

Apprently there are people from all over the world who come here to pay devotion to an overlooked and forgotten (as far as I can see in any book or guide) pavement stone. They take their shoes off and step on the stone where something looking like a cup is carved so that they can "receive positive energies". They say Gualdim Pais (the 12th century founder of Tomar and Great Master of the Order of the Temple in Portugal) brought the Graal and hid it around here. I'm sure he wouldn't be stupid enough to leave a mark :-)

Funny thing happened (spooky some would say). There I was, with my mocking but healthy skepticism taking the picture of the supposed Graal, when my camera stopped working. It didn't work again until I left the church and entered the car.

More interesting speculation: the "charola" at the Convent of Christ is said to be a replica of the temple of Salomon in Jerusalem; on the other side of the river Cedron in Jerusalem, opposite to the temple was the Hill of the Olive Trees; here, on the other margin of the river Nabão is the church of Our Lady of the Olive Trees;

Here is a good site with information about the Knight Templars in Portugal. This one covers the evolution of the templars and their imprtance for the portuguese seafaring adventures.

This one has the 360º panorama of the Convent of Christ including the famous "Charola", mentioned on Umberto Eco' book "Foucault's Pendulum".

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January 07, 2004

The synagogue in Tomar

The synagogue of Tomar is the oldest (XVth century) and one of the few synagogues that exist in Portugal.

The jews were expelled by royal decree in 1496. The ones who stayed were converted to cristianism and so the jewish religion and culture in Portugal are practically unknown.

The synagogue is very small and was converted into a prison after the expulsion. Later became a warehouse and 1923 was bought by Samuel Schwarz and donated to the portuguese government.

The ceiling is supported by 4 columns that represent the 4 mothers of Israel: Sarah, Rachel, Rebecah and Leah. From these columns stem 12 arches representing the 12 tribes of Israel.

Although this is a very simple building with a very discrete façade, there is an interesting feature: a primitive (but effective) sound amplifying system.

On each corner of the synagogue, inside the wall, are 2 jars made of clay. These were put inside the wall, upside down, leaving a hole for the entrance, creating a sound amplifying system!

More..."The synagogue in Tomar"

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January 06, 2004

Tomar

I spent a few days in Tomar, home of the Knight Templars in Portugal and the subsequent Order of Christ. It's a place filled with mystical tradition. It's visited by people from all over the world but it still isn't "touristry".

It's a great place for a short, relaxed vacation. At least for me it has the perfect ingredients:
* The Convent of Christ - the knight templars headquarters in Portugal;
* Churches...with strange symbols and mysteries ;-)
* An old synagogue;
* An hotel with an indoor swimmingpool ;-)
* One of the best restaurants in Portugal: Chico Elias;
* Interesting shops;

One quick note about the shops: Tomar is a small town, one doesn't expect to find anything...let's say...too urban. But:

*There's an excellent bookshop called "Companhia dos Livros" ("The book company") that sells the latest editions AND old books. Some from the XVIII century. The bookshop has a medieval well just in the middle of piles and piles of old books where I always waste a few hours browsing :-)

*"Livrário" is an arts&crafts shop selling beautiful handmade stuff, from clay jars to wooden children games; they make their own line of handmande notebooks, address books and the like;

* there is also an "esoteric" shop that fits right in the town's mystical flare! the owner will promptly guide you through shelves of books dedicated to the most incredible themes; I was personally given an explanation about how, according to a mayan propehcy, the world will end in 2012, there will be catastrophes similar to those that made Atlantis disappear and the chosen ones will be carried to other planets by spacecrafts; like this wasn't enough, you can buy all kinds of good-luck charms, spider's dust, viper's dust, african seeds, candles, incense, dried plants and gemstones.

*B.M.S. sells the most cute pijamas with the cutest patterns :-) produced by a northern portuguese company called "Sétimo Céu" - "Seventh Heaven"; perfect name...

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January 05, 2004

Before 2004

Lisbon, shortly before the fireworks at Terreiro do Paço.

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December 31, 2003

Good Taste :-)

João Espinho has given me a "prize"! And he is a very good photographer!

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New Year Resolutions

I always make a few new year resolutions that I obviously don't keep. So why should I bother to do it this year? Well, this article has some good tips and so this year I'm going to try a different approach :-). By posting my resolutions here, instead of keeping them to myself, I know that a few friends will remind me of them throughout the year (especially if I don't keep them :-)). Instead of listing everything I always wanted to change or do, I'll only aim for realistic and different-from-last-year resolutions. So, here goes:

* Read the Odissey, by Homer;
* Plan for more adventurous and different holidays;
* Finally use all the face and body lotions that costed me a lot of money and are stored at the back of the bathroom cupboard (this is a difficult one ;-)
* Get rid of some prejudices (silly ones like avoiding buying books from new portuguese authors and proven completely wrong after reading the novels by Frederico Lourenço this Christmas);
* Control my cholesterol levels and be careful with what I eat: the last time I tested was 220 mg; please note that this resolution is only about controlling the levels and not about doing more exercise which would be totally unrealistic :-);
* Do some charity work if I have the time ;-)
* Study semiotics;
* Be brave, go to a shooting range and defy my inner fears ;-)
* Start learning a new language;
* Pay more attention to the portuguese current events (I gave up after pedophily, corruption, nepotism, mediocre political commentators (90% are politicians themselves), mediocre government, mediocre opposition and portuguese tradition to "criticize everything and don't give any solutions" wouldn't leave my TV set (sensationalist press) at prime time);
* And according to the quiz, I should break stuff :-D

Take the What Should Your New Year's Resolution Be? Quiz

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December 29, 2003

Catching the last rays of sun

These cats are the "employees" of Oeiras City Park rodent biocontrol programme.

How to find a cat: wherever there is sunlight...

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December 22, 2003

La vie

La vie, c'est comme une dent
D'abord on y a pas pensé
On s'est contenté de mâcher
Et puis ça se gâte soudain
Ça vous fait mal, et on y tient
Et on la soigne et les soucis
Et pour qu'on soit vraiment guéri
Il faut vous l'arracher, la vie

Boris Vian

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Adam and Eve's nationality :-)

Loosely translated from Flores do Campo....

A german, a frenchman, an englishman and a portuguese are at a museum looking at a painting depicting Adam and Eve in Paradise.

The german says: "Look at their fit, tall, athletic bodies. They are surely german."

The frenchman doesn't agree:" But no, can't you feel the erotism? They know temptation is coming their way...they are french!"

The englishman says:"But can't you see they are english? Look at their dignified posture, the soberness of their gesture...."

After looking for a few more seconds the portuguese says: "I'm sorry to contradict you but these guys are obviously portuguese. They don't have any clothes, they don't have any shoes, they don't have a house, they only have an apple to eat, they don't complain about any of this and still think they are in paradise!"

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A cat's perspective

Taken at Ruínas do Carmo, Lisboa.

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December 21, 2003

I'm hopelessly in love with Google!

I was already addicted to Google and now this: the Google Print (Beta) let's you search for books>!!!!

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December 19, 2003

Lord of The G-Strings ;-)

Went to see The Return of the Kings last night. I'm not a big fan of Lord of the Rings and I only slept 4 hours the night before...so there are bits I don't remember :-)). It's an entertaining movie and some people can see some deep metaphysical meanings in it.

This Lord of the G-Strings probably has much more action ;-):

"In the mythical realm of Diddle Earth, diminutive yet delectable Throbbit Bildo Saggins (Misty Mundae) is sent by Smirnoff the Wizard to destroy the legendary G-String - most powerful weapon in the land. The G-String was forged by the ancient villainess Horspank (Paige Richards), and those who possess the slinky and sexy under-garment experience supreme invincibility…and untold sensual pleasures."

I wonder why they didn't call her Dildo Saggins? ;-)))

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December 16, 2003

Christmas Funnies #2

It's an oldie...but it's a classic:

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau).

At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.

More..."Christmas Funnies #2"

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Christmas Funny #1, via Sofia

December 1st

TO: ALL EMPLOYEES

I'm happy to inform you that the company Christmas Party will take place on December 23rd at Luigi's Open Pit Barbecue. There will be lots of spiked eggnog and a small band playing traditional carols... feel free to sing along. And don't be surprised if our CEO shows up dressed as Santa Claus to light the Christmas tree! Exchange of gifts among employees can be done at that time; however, no gift should be over $10. Merry Christmas to you and your family.

Patty Lewis Human Resources Director

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 2nd

TO: ALL EMPLOYEES

In no way was yesterday's memo intended to exclude our Jewish employees. We recognize that, Hanukkah is holiday that often coincides with Christmas (though unfortunately not this year). However, from now on we're calling it our "Holiday Party." The same policy applies to employees who are celebrating Kwanzaa at this time. There will be no Christmas tree and no Christmas carols sung. Happy Holidays to you and your family.

Patty Lewis Human Resources Director

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 3rd

TO: ALL EMPLOYEES

Regarding the anonymous note I received from a member of Alcoholics Anonymous requesting a non-drinking table, I'm happy to accommodate this request, but, don't forget, if I put a sign on the table that reads, "AA Only," you won't be anonymous anymore.

In addition, forget about the gifts exchange-no gifts will be allowed since the union members feel that $10 is too much money.

Patty Lewis Human Researchers Director

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 7th

TO: ALL EMPLOYEES

I've arranged for members of Overeaters Anonymous to sit farthest from the dessert buffet and pregnant women closest to the restrooms. Gays are allowed to sit with each other. Lesbians do not have to sit with the gay men; each will have their table. Yes, there will be a flower arrangement for the gay men's table. Happy now?

Patty Lewis Human Racehorses Director

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 9th

TO: ALL EMPLOYEES

People, people - nothing sinister was intended by wanting our CEO to play Santa Claus! Even if the anagram of "Santa" does happen to be "Satan," there is no evil connotation to our own "little man in a red suit."

Patty Lewis Human Resources Director

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 10th

TO: ALL EMPLOYEES

Vegetarians - I've had it with you people!! We're going to hold this party at Luigi's Open Pit whether you like it or not, you can just sit at the table farthest from the grill of death," as you put it, and you'll get salad bar only, including hydroponic tomatoes. But, you know, tomatoes have feelings, too. They scream when you slice them. I've heard them scream. I'm hearing them right now... Ha! I hope you all have a rotten holiday! Drive drunk and die, DO YOU HEAR ME ?!?!

Patty Lewis Human Resources

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 14th

TO: ALL EMPLOYEES

I'm sure I speak for all of us in wishing Patty Lewis a speedy recovery from her stress-related illness. I'll continue to forward your cards to her at the sanitarium. In the meantime, management has decided to cancel our Holiday Party and give everyone the afternoon of the 23rd off with full pay.

Happy Holidays!

Terri Bishop Acting Human Resources Director

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December 15, 2003

Why do you link to who you link?

Geeky Weekend. Finally starting up my blogrolling list. Installing the new cable modem. Customizing Amphetanews (the original is ugly as sin). Working a bit at home since I'm taking a few days off around Christmas.

Blogrolling! Added a few blogs that came to mind instead of looking at the "Favourites". I'll update the list...someday.

I found these interesting explanations of how one chooses which blogs to link to (via Jonathon Delacour, based on Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini):

*Reciprocity (If I put you on my blogroll, you’ll feel obliged to put me on yours.)

*Commitment/Consistency (Now that you’re on my blogroll I’m unlikely to remove you.)

*Social Proof (If all those other people have X on their blogrolls, then he definitely should be on my blogroll.)

*Liking (The people I link to and have on my blogroll are similar to me, have praised me, are associated with events or projects I’d like to be a part of… at the very least, since I’m never going to reach the A-list, I can bask in the A-lister’s reflected glory.)

*Authority (Anyone on the Technorati Top 100 must automatically be knowledgeable, wise, and powerful.)

*Scarcity (Since the A-list has so few members relative to the total blogging population, what A-listers write must necessarily be of high quality. Similarly, a link from an A-lister is enormously valuable—regardless of the quality of the item at the end of that link.)

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December 14, 2003

Why I don't watch CNN anymore

"Following hard upon a raid which killed nine Afghan children last week, yesterday the military announced that six more children died in an assault on a weapons compound.

There were enormous differences in tone in the way news outlets headlined the story:

The BBC was neutral: More Afghan children die in raids

The New York Times was relatively direct: Military Says 6 Children Died in U.S. Raid in Afghanistan

The Washington Post more so (although leaving the quick reader with the impression that the dead were legitimate targets): U.S. Kills 8 in Afghan Assault

The Guardian was harsh: Six children die in fresh US blunder

But CNN was morally clueless: U.S. assault: Children found dead"

Read it all at Body&Soul

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December 13, 2003

Food for thought

Interesting site: it's an online text by JL Borges called "The book of sand". It's also a puzzle:

"The pages of the Book of Sand are infinite and randomly numbered. The pages of Borges' story The Book of Sand, as presented here, are also randomly numbered, but conveniently, there are only eight of them. Can you put the pages in the proper order?(...) If you guess the sequence of pages correctly, you will be instantly initiated into the BORGESIAN ORDER OF OMNIBIBLIOLOGICAL KABBALISTS (B.O.O.K.)! You will then be able to read The Book of Sand in its entirety."

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December 12, 2003

Lemmings

Via beautifulstuff.

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December 11, 2003

Online marriage

You can now tie the knot on the web.

It's very practical. When asked the traditional "in sickness and in health until death do you part" you can always hit the "Back" button.

I find the small print at the bottom of the page amusing: "LiveWED is not a Legal Binding". REALLY???? :-)))

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December 10, 2003

R!R - International Comedy Festival :-D

I've been to Elliot's Awards Comedy Show on Sunday night. The man is really funny! The best sketch using a spray(!) I have ever seen! I usually prefer the stand-up, crack jokes type of comedy to physical comedy, but this guy is a creative clown without make-up. And finishes his act with a very softcore strip-tease :-).

What is it about comedians and nudity? I have tickets for Rainer Hersh next Saturday and as I was googling for him, I came across this picture: "Rainer nude at horseguards parade"!

Hersh's show sounds promising: "the brilliant Rainer Hersch, the world's only classical music comedian". His show is called "All Classical Music Explained" - a simple and stupid approach to the difficult subjects "How to play instruments without practicing"; "Why is organ music so boring?" and "What do conductors actually do?". :-)))

He has some copyrighted jokes on his website ;-). Look at "Towels" and "Pan Pipes" :-)))

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December 09, 2003

Myers-Briggs Personality Test

I am a:

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December 08, 2003

Nothing's moving but...

Cool optical illusion.

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December 07, 2003

Grandmother's Christmas Spirits

There's nothing like spending quality time with family to get me into the right Christmas mood. I took my beloved grandmother to an italian coffeehouse yesterday and we had a good chat.

She's 82 years old and still witty and funny. She had her 4th espresso of the day and smoked her cigarette while yours truly here coughed and drank my herbal tea ;-).

My grandmother decidedly belongs to a generation where only the fittest survived...I just hope to have such a healthy and long life as she has had so far. Her most valuable inheritance will be her genetics. At least I got her legs :-)

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December 05, 2003

L'homme à la fenêtre

Wandering around the Musées Royales de Beaux-Arts de Belgique, this painting caught my attention. The melancholic and intimate atmosphere and how beautifully the light comes through the window (clearly reminding Vermeer who is one of my favourite painters) appealed to me.

Here's the "official" interpretation (useful site, this one):
"Cette scène intimiste est une perle en son genre, de la poésie peinte dans toute sa pureté, avec pour sujet la quiétude et les considérations sur la fuite du temps. Un personnage silencieux regardant par la fenêtre est une métaphore bien connue dans l'histoire de l'art et ici aussi l'artiste montre une réalité qui dépasse l'anecdote. Réalisée durant une période d'introspection qui précède une grave crise psychique, elle appartient à une série iconographique peu étendue ; mais ces peintures sont toutes considérées comme les meilleures et les plus profondes de l'artiste. Peut-être n'est-ce pas un hasard si De Braekeleer, célibataire quelque peu déphasé, est, à cette époque, à la recherche d'un nouvel atelier. Est-il impensable d'établir un rapport entre cette oeuvre et cette quête solitaire ? Regarder par la fenêtre, n'est-ce pas là le premier geste d'un artiste lorsqu'il s'installe dans un atelier ?"

It's very good to "discover" a new painter! This artist is Henri de Braekeleer(1840 - 1888) and Google tells me I must go back to Belgium to visit the Antwerp museum that holds a big collection of his work ;-)

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December 04, 2003

Belgian Sense of Humour?

Brussels Airlines' slogan is "Passionate about you". I have nothing at all against a company willing to pamper their clients but this new campaign is really...unbelievably ridiculous/creative?. The most strange example is the one below: the air hostess breastfeeds the passenger's baby while she sleeps. Handy.

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December 03, 2003

Chez Tintin

I spent a long weekend in Brussels, the "capital of Europe". Although it's not a spectacular city, it has lots of interesting and beautiful things to see and do. Here's my top ten list of reasons to visit Brussels:

1 - The best chocolate in the world
2 - The best chocolate in the world ;-)
3 - Freshly baked Gaufres in every corner
4 - Moules et Frites
Ok. Besides food:
5 - La Bande Dessinée!! (check the mural below)
6 - The Belgian Sense of Humour
7 - Art Nouveau
8 - Magritte
9 - Very Good Beer
10 - Definitely not the weather :-o

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November 28, 2003

Mariana and the Green Lemons

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Raindrops

It's so relaxing to be in the countryside...waking up and finding crystal pure and perfect raindrops on the green leaves.

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November 27, 2003

What can you see from the moon?

Just the other day a colleague was telling me that the great wall of China couldn't be seen from space=modern myth.

I checked because I remembered that "What human made construction can be seen from the moon?" is a Trivial Pursuit Classic question. The answer is "The Great Wall of China".

Well, apparently it's wrong. This article explains that Apollo astronauts could not make out manmade features from the Moon but many human constructs like highways or egyptian pyramids can be seen from Earth orbit.

So you are right, Luis! :-)

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Porto, seen from the South ;-)

As it would in practically any other country, the north/south rivalry "forbids" ;-) me to praise Porto, the "capital" of the north of Portugal. But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

2 pictures = 2000 words? :-)

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Blog Fire Escape

Gary Turner came up with an interesting idea! Click if your boss is coming your way!

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November 25, 2003

Christian Iconography in Caminha

The main church of Caminha dates back to the 15th/16th centuries, is made of granite and has gothic origins.

One possible interpretation from left to right:
*The first statue is holding an anchor. It represents faith (Hebrews 6:19);
*St. Peter can be recognized by the key he is holding. It's the key to the Kingdom of Heaven given to him by Jesus (Matthew 16:13-19);
*St. Mark has a lion at his feet. The (winged) lion is also the symbol of Venice because St. Mark is its patron saint;
*St. Luke is symbolized by an ox. The ox is a symbol of strength, of patience and of sacrifice, ready either for the plough or for the altar (Matthew 11:30);
*St. James was originally identified by a sword, symbolizing the apostle's martyrdom (beheading) under Herod (Acts 12:2).

On the top of the church is something I had never seen before: lying beside the cross is a lamb.

The lamb is a symbol of unblemished sacrifice, of modesty, and of innocence. It might be a representation of Christ: "The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said: Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"(John 1:29)

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November 24, 2003

Up North

I spent a lovely weekend way up north...in Portugal :-). Caminha is a little city by the river Minho, on the verge of meeting the ocean.

On the other side of the river is Spain. Hence the cannons (rain water drainers) aiming there :-D.



ps: thanks Virginia and Eduardo for such a lovely weekend!

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November 19, 2003

Movie Quotes

IMDB has a very cool feature: movie quotes.

Of course that Kill Bill quotes are top rated. These quotes are going to become classics...:-)

I actually found two of my favourite movie quotes of all time:

Bob: I never believed in God. No, I didn't even as a little kid. I remember this. I used to think even if he exists, he's done such a terrible job, it's a wonder people don't get together and file a class action suit against him.
in "Everybody says I love you"

Archie: Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone "Are you married?" and hearing "My wife left me this morning," or saying, uh, "Do you have children?" and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we'll all terrified of embarrassment. That's why we're so... dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know, we have these piles of corpses to dinner. But you're alive, God bless you, and I want to be, I'm so fed up with all this. I want to make love with you, Wanda. I'm a good lover - at least, used to be, back in the early 14th century. Can we go to bed?
in "A fish called Wanda"

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Search Engine Decoder

Everything you wanted to know about search engines relationships.

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November 18, 2003

Let them sing it!

On a swedish radio website you can send a singing message to a friend. You just type the lyrics and a collage of famous singer's voices will sing it for you!

Click to hear a U2+UB40+Pink Floyd sample.

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Mathematical Symbols

Very interesting site with the History of Mathematical Notation. Ever wondered where all that came from?

Here are some other names for zero: naught, tziphra, sipos, tsiphron, rota, circulus, galgal, theca, null, and figura nihili. Here's a very good and entertaining book on the story of zero and on the abstract idea of nothingness.

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November 17, 2003

The Fall

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November 16, 2003

Flower Power

Happy Anniversary!

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November 14, 2003

Laziness= Creativity?

Stolen from Bluemoon :-)

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Women and Technology

I found an interesting blog: Misbehaving. It's about the relationships between women and technology, which incidentally was the theme of my Master's thesis. Ironically enough I ended up working in technology; there's a secret universal plot to make me go through the experiences I read and wrote about :-)

They have an entry on a new report about the glass ceiling in tech industry:
"The United States leads the world in technological advances, but women are still denied many of the high-tech industry's leadership roles, according to a study released today by Catalyst, a non-profit research and advisory group dedicated to advancing women in business."

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November 13, 2003

Google IPO

I was so excited about Google's IPO...but our weblog landlord :-) cleverly points out that Google deskbar may be an answer to Microsoft's intentions. This image explains it all!

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Robots

Did you know the word "Robot" was coined in a play by Karel Čapek in 1920?

This site has a collection of victorian era robots illustrations, namely the "Electric Man" by Luis Senarens and Edward S. Ellis' "Steam Man".

Wikipedia has a list of robots in literature. Cool. Or is the list of fictional computers even more interesting?

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November 12, 2003

Bloga?!

My contribution to Bloga?! :

You know you're a blogaholic when...Every time you try to start a conversation with friends (or even complete strangers) they roll their eyes and say “yeah, we know, we already read it on your blog.”

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Ocean of Love

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Countries of the world

Nice little website with info about every country in the world. It still says that Macau is a portuguese administered territory but the info on the prime minister and some statistics are recent.

Isn't the short history description depressing? Couldn't they bring out the good points? ;-)

"Following its heyday as a world power during the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal lost much of its wealth and status with the destruction of Lisbon in a 1755 earthquake, occupation during the Napoleonic Wars, and the independence in 1822 of Brazil as a colony. A 1910 revolution deposed the monarchy; for most of the next six decades, repressive governments ran the country. "

Via Miguel Esteves Cardoso at Metafilter

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November 11, 2003

Autumn

When it starts to smell of roasted chestnuts in the streets of Lisbon...it's a sign Autumn has finally arrived.

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Incan Lost City

Using infrared aerial photography these scientists found a lost Incan city.

Will they ever find the Eldorado? :-) (silly childhood dream inspired by Disney books)

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November 10, 2003

Need an Idea?

Fun fun website. They have fresh baked ideas about anything, from advertising to design, from language to technology.

***
Board Games: Sexual Jeopardy

"I'll take 'The Morning After' for 400, Alex"
"Alright, and the answer is: 'Carol, and you're in my house.' "
"What is: 'Who are you, and where the hell am I?' "
"That is correct!"
***

Culture: Art Deco industrial design revival

"Art Deco would be a perfect movement to resurrect, as it combines futurism with classicism, and thus offers classic style without automatically being pretentious. One could also get away with using contemporary materials (titanium or modern plastics, for example) without it seeming anachronistic or tacky (as, say, a neo-Victorian steampunk MP3 player would look unless it was made of real brass and ivory)."

***
Fashion: Extra Medium - A new standard in clothing sizes

A new clothing size that could realistically fall on either side of "Medium" (XL is larger than L, XS is smaller than S). Customers should not know which side though.

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November 08, 2003

Kill Bill Vol.1

It looks to me that everyone gets killed in this movie except Bill :-)

This movie practically has no plot. Ths story is as well written as porn movie script. Yet, it's one of the best movies I saw this year. How can I explain this? Tarantino is a grown-up teenage boy: extreme violence and rape are portrayed in an uncontrolled, careless manner.

He films without fear, emulating his favourite childhood movies; technically, the directing of this film is genial; he combines colourful sceneries with black and white segments and with Anime; the integration of music and image is perfect; the traditional Tarantino's use of chronology, mixing flashback with the future, leaving us realizing we don't know how it all started but we already know how's it going to end.

The violence depicted here is so unrealistic (limbs sliced off creating a blood shower) that can be seen as wacky dark humour.

Oh! And I love female heroes :-).

The movie has so many references to others that you must be an expert in the martial arts hong kong movie genre to understand them. Here's the annotated Kill Bill. A few interesting annotations:

*The women's pseudonyms are taken from poisonous snakes.
*The Bride's yellow tracksuit is the same that Bruce Lee wears in "Game of Death".
*Appropriately enough, the box of KABOOM cereal has a gun in it.

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Kill Bill Vol.1 - girlie talk

The sport shoes on this movie are really cool. The yellow ones Uma Thurman wears are Asics' Onitsuka Tiger Tai-Chi classic sport shoes. You can buy them at classicsportshoes (your source for retro sneakers :-).

Uma Thurman has the ugliest toes in movie history :-D

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November 07, 2003

The Lego Bible

This people have way too much time in their hands...The old testament as told by Lego!

My personal favourite: A newlywed man shoud stay at home for a year to cheer up his wife!

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Google Deskbar

If you're a Googling addict like me, here's the tool for us! (via A)

"Google Deskbar enables you to search with Google from any application without lifting your fingers from the keyboard."

Cool!!

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Plug'n'Pray

"Do you need to change religion to grab the chance for a career outlook? Are you going to work abroad? Getting a new customized god is easy with Plug'n'Pray. A new spirituality and a new respectability can be yours at a mouse click."

Funny, funny, funny. And it has a very interesting concept behind it: "religion is no longer a mystical experience or a personal journey to get closer to our transcendent inner dimension - it belongs now to the FCG (Fast Consumer Goods) segment".

They have the funniest art gallery; the goal is to explore how is religion wired to technology. I HAVE to contribute with a picture. I foresee a very challenging weekend, hopping from church to church :-)

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Antena 1

My friend Sofia called me yesterday morning saying that my site was mentioned on a national radio show ("O que vem à rede" by Mario Rui Cardoso).

Antena 1 is a great radio ;-)

p.s. for Sofia: Congratulations! ;-)

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November 06, 2003

As promised/Como Prometido

I have a very good dentist! And on top of all, I have fun when I go there!
Eu tenho um óptimo dentista! E ainda por cima divirto-me quando lá vou!

Beijinhos para o Dr. Carlos, Filomena e Sandra!

Free Publicity:
Clínica Dentária Aviz
Edifício Aviz
Avenida Fontes Pereira de Melo, 35 2ºH
Tel: 21 314 69 95

Credits to the photographer:

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Innovation and Creativity

Ideo is an american company responsible for the design, among other things, of Apple’s first mouse, the Palm V handheld computer, Nike’s wraparound sunglasses and Crest’s stand-up toothpaste tube.

Creativity is bubbling over there. They say the secret for their sucess is their capability to concentrate on people's experiences, perceptions and needs. They have extensive experience in technology

The Ideo Method Cards are a very interesting way of developing your creativity and still center it on the customer's needs (and I'm definitely going to buy them :-). They are based in multidisciplinary techniques and they are divided into categories: Learn, Look, Ask and Try.

An example of an Ideo's Method that provided them with the ability to generate concepts for an airplane interior:

***
Bodystorming
HOW: Set up a scenario and act out focusing on the intuitive responses prompted by the physical enactment.

WHY:Helps to quickly generate and test behavior based concepts.
***

Fastmagazine has an interesting article about Ideo and the Method Cards.

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November 05, 2003

Minimal Porn

Minimalism is a style of art in which objects are stripped down to their elemental, geometric form, and presented in an impersonal manner.

This is Porn but it's also Minimalistic Art!!

This is just silly porn.

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Bluejacking

Great and funny new use for my recently acquired bluetooth enabled cellphone: bluejacking! (via A)

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November 04, 2003

Sylvia Plath

A new movie about the life of Sylvia Plath has opened.

Like any artist who dies young, Plath is an idol for self obssessed teenagers, associated with self-destruction and depression.

The Bell Jar made quite an impression on me as a teenager; a brilliant woman losing her sanity for reasons we can't really understand was a terrifying awakening to the real world.

Poem-->

More..."Sylvia Plath"

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November 03, 2003

Symbols of Freemasonry

In the Cemetery of Pleasures there are several mausoleums where freemasonry symbols can be found.

One of their principal symbols is the square and compasses, tools of the trade, so arranged as to form a quadrilateral. The square is sometimes said to represent matter, and the compasses spirit or mind. The compass is an ancient symbol of spirituality and spiritual creativity. Some medieval paintings show God creating the Universe with compasses.

More..."Symbols of Freemasonry"

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The Cemetery of Pleasures

Only in Portugal would you have a Cemetery of Pleasures and a Holy Ghost Bank.

The cemetery of pleasures (Cemitério dos Prazeres) is named after Our Lady Of Pleasures: now, THIS is an oxymoron (a contradiction in terms).

I'm interested in funerary art, especially in gravestone symbolism. This cemetery is very rich in symbols whether they are religious, masonic, profession-related or heraldic.

I took some pictures of a few interesting ones. This one is the from the mausoleum of a newspaper co-founder:

More..."The Cemetery of Pleasures"

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October 31, 2003

Figures of Speech

Have I mentioned I love figures of speech :-) and Monty Python?

"An announcement Because of the Anagrams dispute it has been decided to devote the rest of this space to a page specially written for people who like figures of speech, for the not a few fans of litotes, and those with no small interest in meiosis, for the infinite millions of hyperbole-lovers, for those fond of hypallage, and the epithet's golden transfer, for those who fall willingly into the arms of the metaphor, those who give up the ghost, bury their heads in the sand and ride roughshod over the mixed metaphor, and even those of hyperbaton the friends. It will be too, for those who reprehend the malapropism; who love the wealth of metonymy; for all friends of rhetoric and syllepsis; and zeugmatists withsmiling eyes and hearts. It will bring a large absence of unsatisfactory malevolence to periphrastic fans; a wig harm bello to spoonerists; and in nosmall measure a not less than splendid greeting to you circumlocutors. The World adores prosopopeiasts, and the friendly faces of synechdotists, and can one not make those amorous of anacoluthon understand that if they are not satisfied by this, what is to happen to them? It will attempt to really welcome all splitters of infinitives, all who are Romeo and Juliet to antonomasia, those who drink up similes like sparkling champagne, who lose nothing compared with comparison heads, self-evident axiomists, all pithy aphorists, apothegemists, maximiles, theorists, epigrammatists and evengnomists. And as for the lovers of aposiopesis -- ! It will wish bienvenu to all classical adherents of euphuism, all meta thesi stic birds, golden paranomasiasts covered in guilt, fallacious paralogists, trophists, anagogists, and anaphorists; to greet, welcome, embrace asyndeton buffs, while the lovers of ellipsis will be well-met and its followers embraced, as will be chronic worshippers of catachresis and supporters of anastrophe the world over." by Monty Python

If you don't find it funny, you'll have to read this first.

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Meiosis

Meiosis is a figure of speech which intentionally understates something or implies that it is less in significance, size, than it really is. A form of irony.

Examples:

Said of an amputated leg.: "It's just a flesh wound" ; Monty Python and the Holy Grail

***
Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Owner: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, isn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
Mr. Praline: The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
Owner: Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!

The dead parrot sketch, Monty Python
******

Why did't we study figures of speech in school through Monty Python instead of boring portuguese authors? I would have payed so much more attention...

I just realized I use meiosis a lot.

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October 30, 2003

Economics

I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

J.M.Keynes

It's a quotation but it sounds like an economist's joke ;-)

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October 29, 2003

Neologisms

I love new words.

Here are a few:

*googling - searching the web;

*ostalgie - german contraction of the word east and nostalgia; nostalgia for the goods, symbols, and culture of the former East Germany;

*brain fart - quick-and-dirty creative output. The byproduct of a mind stuffed with food for thought that can therefore produce information without effort;

*Picasso porn - the scrambled signal of a pornographic cable channel as seen by a nonsubscriber;

*Kodak courage - the greater-than-usual level of courage exhibited by people who are being photographed or filmed;

*butt call -an unintended phone call placed by sitting on one's cell phone.

Source: WordSpy.

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October 28, 2003

Anagram

An anagram is a word or phrase formed by reordering the letters of another word or phrase.

Check this site to find anagrams for your name. They make great pseudonyms :-). Here are my favourite anagrams for my own name:

* lucia is dada
* suicidal ada

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October 27, 2003

Thunderstorms and Lightings

Saturday night: scattered thunderstorms on the other side of the river over St. Michael's church.

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It was raining cats and dogs

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October 25, 2003

The devil's playground

Phaidon has launched a new book featuring Nan Goldin's photos with some poems and texts wrote by Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen and others.

Quotation by the artist herself:

"I always thought that if I managed to photograph somebody often enough, I could never lose them. My photographs are, however, the proof of how much I have lost."

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Zembla

I bought a great Literary magazine today: Zembla. It's brand new (first issue!) and has a great design and very interesting articles and short stories. If you go to their website and select "Magazine Spreads" you can't actually read it but you can see how good it looks :-)

One of the articles is by Alexandre Bard: a swedish popstar, philosopher and author of Netocracy.

An excerpt:
"(...) with the arrival of interactive information technology, the framework for social power structures and thought patterns changes drastically. While the mass media obsess over the all-new gadgets, philosophy is interested in the social and cultural implications of interactivity."

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Futurama #2

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Futurama #1

Click to zoom. More Futurama here.

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October 23, 2003

Yes!

BBC Prime is showing a rerun of "Yes, Prime Minister". Sir Humphrey is my favourite comdey character of all times (closely followed by Archie Bunker from "All in the Family").
I found a great website with info about the actors, episode plots, memorable dialogues and the like.

Here's a classic:
Sir Humphrey: "Hello Bernard, I hear the Prime Minister wants to see me?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes, Sir Humphrey."
Sir Humphrey: "What's his problem?"
Bernard Woolley: "Education."
Sir Humphrey: "Well, it's a bit late to do anything about that now."

:-)

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Moaning

This could be really funny if you are REALLY drunk: porno karaoke, the latest nightlife craze in Germany.

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October 22, 2003

Hoplophobia

Hoplophobia is an irrational fear of firearms. I discovered recently that I "suffer" from a mild hoplophobia. Mild because my symptoms are only discomfort, rapid breathing and irregular heartbeat.

Not very good news seeing that I'm working with policemen (and thankfully they are the gun carriers that scare me the least!) :-)

Someone suggested a shock therapy: go to a shooting range and fire a gun! I'll probably run away even before I have a gun on my hands, but you never know....

OR....do it the "scientific" way: go to a Phobia Clinic and have it taken care of in 24 hours! (credit cards accepted :-)). I especially like this reason for going there to be healed: "It can cause panic attacks and keep people apart from loved ones and business associates" (??????). Where do their clients live? In the old american west? Or Columbine?

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Obey the Suit

This is the best ad for men's suits I have ever seen! :-D Obey the Suit!

A bit(!) sexist but quite persuasive... I wonder if they have a women's store?

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October 20, 2003

Retorta

Cool photoblog...the guy's a pro!
Great links to photography sites!
Give us some free tips, Mário! ;-)

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Dogville

Boring, Boring, Boring.....didn't get the point. Is the message that deep down, everyone is cruel and takes advantage of those in poorer conditions? And everyone who has power uses it with no regrets?
I'll see it in a couple of years again. I was in a pragmatical, happy mood....that doesn't help to understand european movies :-D

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October 19, 2003

Turma da Mônica

I just fullfilled a childhood dream! I met Mauricio de Sousa, the creator of my favorite cartoon character as a kid: Monica! (rói-te de inveja, Rui)
This was a complete suprise, I didn't know he was at the comics fair I went on Sunday! I even got an autographed drawing....

I've been thinking about female rolemodels for children. I was quite lucky. I had Monica who has an unexplainable strength (she beats up all the boys) and Little Lulu, the one who always outsmarts the other kids. What rolemodels do girls follow today? The pop singers? Barbie (yuck!)?

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Another toy...

Two things that make me happy (I'm such a futile consumist, I know): a Nokia 9810i and funny books. Check my Amazon list here!

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October 16, 2003

Experience

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

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Juggling with fire

I met a juggler and his girlfriend in Chiado this evening. They live on the streets and don't "work" for free: this picture costed me 2 Euros! :-)

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New Toy

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October 14, 2003

Django

I got a CD by the gipsy jazz guitar player Django Reinhardt from the "Jazz in Paris" collection for my birthday. He's one of my favourites!

Here's a sample:

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October 13, 2003

A new Bookmarker

Another trip, another bookmarker for my collection!

This one has a nice quotation by Ismeretlen(which means Unknown, as far as I can google for :-D) :

"Nem az tesz gazdaggá, ami a miéns, hanem aminek örülni tudunk." ;-D

which means:

"Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance."

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Optical Art

One of the hidden jewels of Budapest is the Vasarely Museum! His works are everywhere around the world's museums but here you can find 300 superb paintings.

Victor Vasarely is the "father" of Op' Art. Optical Art is a mathematically-oriented form of art, which uses repetition of simple forms and colors to create vibrating effects, moiré patterns, an exaggerated sense of depth, foreground-background confusion, and other visual effects. Another good example (although he's not an abstract artist) is M.C.Escher.

Here is an extremely interesting site on the mathematics of Escher's work.

And some pictures of Vasarely's paintings in Budapest:

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Statue Park

The old communist monuments in Budapest were not destroyed. Instead they created a park that is supposed to be a memorial to the 1989-1990 change of the political system; the statues there are quite impressive (in a socialist realism style, of course).

Lenin is a classic....

But the others are quite good:

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Buda and Pest

Budapest is divided by the Danube. The hilly side where the Royal Palace and the old city stand is Buda (very good restaurants!!!- try the Pest Buda Vendeglo on Fortuna street); the other side is Pest.

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Budapest

I have spent the weekend in Budapest, Hungary.

Two lessons learned: first, the Budapest American Express Guide stinks; second, I will never ever complain about portuguese cab driving again!

More..."Budapest"

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October 07, 2003

My day

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October 06, 2003

The Seagull

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October 05, 2003

White Smoke?

The news about the Pope's fragile health and the rumours about his expected death may make you a rich person: bet on who will be the next Pope!

While googling for bios of the candidates, I came across this site: Church Business - Providing Strategies and Solutions for Today's Churches! There's an interesting line of work! :-D Apparently it's a magazine with stories such as:

*That Sound's Great! - The Sunday Soundman helps you build in acoustic success;

*Staff Compensation - Does your church have a plan?;

*Ethical Investing: How to avoid the devil’s bribe;

*Take Your Medicine - A great capital campaign not only heals your church — it leaves it better than before;

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Laziness

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble. - Agatha Christie

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Under the Bridge

I know there aren't that many public WC's around...but is this really necessary? JC watching and all..?

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October 02, 2003

Nobel

J.M.Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature....never read anything by him :-(

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Mid-Century American Ads

Cool site with lots of ads from the 50's: Ephemera.

This an Otis Ad:

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September 30, 2003

The Whore of Mensa

I found one of my favourite Woody Allen's short stories online!!!

Read The Whore of Mensa!

Here's a sample :-D

"For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master's, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine's over Freud's conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing - the perfect evening, for some guys."

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Pangloss

My intrusion detection system BlackICE reported this intruder who was probing my TCP port:

And I thought that this is really clever.....the Pangloss node is in the Utopia group :-)

Pangloss is a character on the satiric novel "Candide" by Voltaire and he is a very annoying eternal optimist; on one of the chapters Candide and Pangloss arrive in Lisbon on the precise day the big earthquake happens. After helping the wounded and walking around the ruins of the town:

"For," said Pangloss, "all this is for the very best end, for if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could be in no other spot; and it is impossible but things should be as they are, for everything is for the best."
By the side of the preceptor sat a little man dressed in black, who was one of the familiars of the Inquisition. This person, taking him up with great complaisance, said, "Possibly, my good sir, you do not believe in original sin; for, if everything is best, there could have been no such thing as the fall or punishment of man."
Your Excellency will pardon me," answered Pangloss, still more politely; "for the fall of man and the curse consequent thereupon necessarily entered into the system of the best of worlds."

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Bellissimo

As part of the ExperimentaDesign exhibition, there's a video installation ("Beyond Visual Consumption") running on a warehouse by the river. Its goal is to show how creativity can become a product and how design is all about the relationship between words and images.

It was created by the italian company Bellissimo; they say they aren't an advertising agency but a creative agency! Some of the messages were quite interesting:

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September 29, 2003

New dimensions

A while ago someone sent me this link: www.politicalcompass.org. I have to post it now, since I plan to take the test again.

By taking the test there you can find out more about yourself politically. Not just if you identify more with the left or rigth wing but also where are you in social terms. Basically the left and the right are economical political standings and socially you can be libertarian or conservative.

The first time I was somewhere in the right/centre in what concerns the left/rigth axis; but I am a BIG libertarian....I should be a hippie yuppie! :-D

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Intelligence

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others.

by Bertrand Russell

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September 27, 2003

Praia do Meco

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The Morning

Lisbon at sunrise; view from the Sheraton Hotel, 24th floor.

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September 25, 2003

Find A Grave

Useful site for all the weirdos like me who visit the local cemetery when travelling. I prefer to find famous people's graves, though. For no particular reason :-D

Photo by Jim Tipton

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September 24, 2003

Houbi :-)

The Marsupilami character in Spirou cartoons was created by Franquin. He's a fabulous animal, with super-strength and a very long multi-purposed tail.

My favourite book is "The Nest of the Marsupilamis" where we find out the subtle differences between the genders of the species (being mainly that the male says "Houba!" and the female more elegantly answers "Houbi!").

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Pleasure & Pain

The greek philosopher Epicurus (342-270 BC) is commonly associated with hedonism. He believed that the greatest good was to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. It sounds really common sense, doesn't it?

More..."Pleasure & Pain"

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Demotivators :-(

Do you know that really tacky inspirational/motivational posters? Well, if you're feeling good and need some demotivation go to www.despair.com!

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September 22, 2003

Poets

It's not everyday that you see the two most famous portuguese poets together :-)

The bronze sculpture is Camões and the one on the painting in the back is Fernando Pessoa.

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Campanas

Yet another ExperimentaDesign2003 design exhibition....by the brazilians Fernando and Humberto Campana. The floor of the exhibition room was covered with multi-coloured pieces of plastic; it felt like walking on sand (or almost, don't wear flippers - I learned it the painful way:-().

They had several interesting objects there, from a couch made of children's furry animals to an Anemone chair:

It looked really comfortable but...visitors aren't allowed to sit!

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S*COOL

Yesterday evening I went to yet another design exhibition (S*Cool) in Bairro Alto. I especially liked this piece: the 747 spoon. Is there a nicer way to make kids eat? :-)

The author is Joana Amado, a student from ESTGAD.

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September 21, 2003

Flash Mobs

What are flash mobs?

"Flash mobs are sudden gatherings of people at a predetermined location at a predetermined time. People in flash mobs usually perform according to a written script, then disperse quickly. Flash mobs can be for many purposes but most groups stick to having fun. " in flashmobs.com

I've always been interested in crowd behaviour, collective action and this recent flashmob happenings deserve some reflexion.

Some say it's art, others say it's fun. Others say that in a world where everything must make sense it's good to act non-sensical; it's a kind of social protest against the seriousness of the world.

More..."Flash Mobs"

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Moviemercial

Apparently there's a new trend in Hollywood: instead of creating merchandise for a movie, why not base a movie on already existing products?

No need to complain about product placement in movies anymore...they will turn into a long ad!

At least they are starting with movies for kids based on toys like Lego's Bionics or G.I. Joe; but imagine when they start doing it for grown-ups (well, they almost did with "Cast Away" starring Tom Hanks)

But coming to think about it, it's not a new trend! Remember Disney's "Herbie, the Volkswagen Beetle" movie series (1966 to 1982!!!)?

Do you want to know more?

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September 20, 2003

A Tree in Alentejo

I spent a couple of days in the Alentejo... and this tree caught my attention!

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Experimentadesign2003

I went to the opening of the Bright Minds, Beautiful Ideas exhibition on Thursday night. The exhibition is one of the events of Experimentadesign2003 whose theme is "Beyond Consumption". One of the designers whose work I really liked is Martí Guixé, a very creative spanish designer with a sense of humour.... After a bit of research about him, I find his concept of "Sponsored Food" immensely interesting. He "created" a potatoe omelette with the Calvin Klein logo on it: "The idea of sponsored food is to get multinational companies to pay for food, so that it would be possible to eat for free." The "art+creativity+humour" part of my brain hadn't had so much fun since I went to the Saatchi Gallery in London to see the works of Damien Hirst. More stuff about Guixé here!

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