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 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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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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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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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 19, 2009
Frabjous day
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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April 28, 2007
It's official...
....I am now a Mac person.
(wallpaper wallpaper by ~zygat3r)
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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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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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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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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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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 18, 2006
Summer Interior, Edward Hopper
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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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November 21, 2005
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 ;-)
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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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June 30, 2005
The blog as a sentimental grandchild scrapbook
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