« December 2008 | Main | February 2009 »
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.
Posted by claudia Permalink | Comments (2)
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?")
Posted by claudia Permalink | Comments (0)
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!.
Posted by claudia Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted by claudia Permalink | Comments (1)
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."
Posted by claudia Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted by claudia Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted by claudia Permalink | Comments (0)
January 14, 2009
obamicon.me
Posted by claudia Permalink | Comments (1)
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
Posted by claudia Permalink | Comments (3)
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 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.
Posted by claudia Permalink | Comments (0)