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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