the present

Spotify

Go where we may - rest where we will
Eternal London haunts us still

Thomas Moore

extravagante

Start listening the album in the morning in my way to work. It's finally summer in London, you know. I can dress skirts and dresses. and listen in my ipod to this familiar voice in a travel mood, with the usual subject and new ones. The songs are all in my head now. The track I like the most, for the lyrics and composition, is not the one in youtube so again you'll have to get hold of the cd. Track name is extravagante.

Jorge Cruz.
Poeira.

seven a week

How disciplined am I going to be this week! One tip a day. Promise. Mainly music but other stuff.
Starting with a CD for you to get hold and buy. If you live in London there is another chance of seeing live at the Barbican.
Beautiful voices, very different from one another. He's whisky. She is a velvet gown. Worth seing live, so people in Porto, use your contacts and make they go to Casa da Musica. Or coliseu. Or teatro sa da bandeira. Anywhere really. Just get them.
All in the band are great. Mark Lanegan does not speak during the whole concert but doesn't have to. He sings. Isobel plays everything. The lyrics. check the lyrics.

Ballad of the Seven Seas.
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan.

summer in london

Michael Moore, Sicko, Media and US Health Care

Check this out.

Manamana

There were major festivities and a big street party this weekend in my hometown, Porto. To all those asking whether I went, here is my answer.

thermal

Thermal baths always sounded to me something for the old generation. Maybe because of my childhood memories in Vidago. Maybe because of some old movie shot in some obscure thermal SPA with some obscure bodies trapped in some obscure argument. But even so, last Friday I've decided to go to the Gellert Spa in Budapest. There were many older people. But also young. All had a certain sensuality. An "egalitarian" sensuality of art deco surroundings in which non-perfect semi-naked bodies fitted nicely, emerging from light turquoise warm watered walls tiled up to the skylight. I wished I had a camera and people let me photograph them. It was, still is and will remain a lively and beautiful memory image in my head.

sunday

Today I went to Photo London. And it was a disappointment. Difficult access, hot facility, and general poor quality, where only very few pictures stood out. Will name three.

Araki. As you would expect.

Paul Graham.“Bleached-out images of urban blacktops and parking lots beside which solitary African-Americans wander and wait”

José Pedro Cortes. Yes, he is Portuguese.

Cria Cuervos

É um filme que ainda não vi. Um amigo que me mostrou. Uma música que mal ouvi reconheci. Não sei bem de onde, mas pareceu-me que algures da minha infância. Sensação estranha. Quando era xavalita costumava ir de férias com uns primos meus, a minha avó e a Dona Luíta (comadre dos meus primos, sempre tossi o nome dela), todos numa 4L azul céu. Raios me partam se sei como aquela 4L chegava a Alvor. 600 quilómetros de pesos pesados e eu estrategicamente colocada no meio para não desmanchar a suspensão. Se eu tivesse descambado para cantora pimba a culpa teria sido deles. Cederam aos meus caprichos arruaceiros de comprar K7s da MAria Armanda e, confesso, Quim Barreiros. Raios me partam parte II porque sei de cor a letra do peguei peguei peguei no teu grilinho. O propósito desta dissertação é porque quando tentava encontrar uma explicação para esta sensação estranha de conhecer uma música espanhola, relembrei estas viagens e pensei que talvez a Maria Armanda tivesse feito uma versão portuguesa do "Porque te vas". É. Ainda tentei um google Maria Armanda e porque te vas mas nada. Parece que não. De qualquer forma fica o apelo. Conhecem? E parece que o filme vale a pena mas ainda espero um texto sobre o dito cujo filme para pôr aqui.

Holidays

I know, this is no excuse for not writing for so long. But yet, there were holidays. Istanbul is like Pamuk says it is. It truly was a Turkish delight to read his book and his love and hate relation with the city, while discovering the origins of that relation - in places and people.

Whilst drinking tea in a terrace bar in the 4^th floor of a building in Istanbul, I have copied a few lines from his book into my black book with a view to write them later here in estrujido. That’s right, I did remember my blog.

“The pursuit mattered no less than the attainment, the asking as important as the views we saw through the windows of the car, the house, the ferry. With time, life – like music, art and stories – would rise and fall, eventually to end, but even years later, those lives are with us still in the city views that flow before our eyes, like memories blucked from dreams.”

Orhan Pamuk
Istanbul: Memories of a City

The photo is mine.

new generation

New faces, young people, new blood to the world politics.
Obama, 45 yrs, in the US and Miliband, 41 yrs, in the UK.
Miliband comes from Environment Affairs, runs his own blog and was today in the Observer.
"If David Miliband challenges Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership he will win" - said Tony Blair.

A letter on the 50th anniversary of the EU

Umberto Eco
Dario Fo
Günter Grass
Jürgen Habermas
Václav Havel
Seamus Heaney
Bernard Henri-Levy
Harold Pinter
Franca Rame
Tom Stoppard

Lemur

After all, the animal is real, all these years thinking it was imagination. This one and another 19.

TRILOGY

The tree

Falling into the sky. She was living well above it.

And one day, she collapsed in a grey stone. The tree said she wasn’t looking. And yet she was. One of the edges of the stone was smiling. One other was silent. An ambivalent grey stone. While she was falling, she thought about the tree. The stone was falling just beside her. Both landed in the sky but in different clouds. One went East, the other West. They didn’t see each other again for years. Until she collapsed in a grey stone.

Short story by a fairy

She woke up smiling. Many times she knew she had laughed during the night. He told her. Not this time. This time she was just smiling and nobody noticed. She saw her eyes. She didn’t have red hair. She saw her smile and smiled back. To her daughter to be.

(untitled)

Secrets dissolve or linger under a bridge in Madison County.

principles

Babel

To me, it is a movie about imperfect systems, human beings lost in the inability to deal with certain things, difficulty to live in an imperfect world, yet always pursuing perfectness. Imperfect relationships, the imperfect American system to deal with immigration, the imperfect Japan living on the edge of suicide, erotism and high buildings, the imperfect poor societies of those who live with bare feet on the ground, surprised by new things coming from the richer, such as weapons. How naive they all are, after all. Yet, how human. And this woman everywhere. Cate's turn to shine.

uma coisa é certa

Ouvi-o noutro dia num programa na televisão e gostei. Apesar de não concordar com tudo, achei que sim, essa coisa de impingir desmesuradamente regras Europeias a Portugal porque sim é uma grande merda. Então, a propósito de outra coisa, diz Vasco Pulido Valente no Público dia 11 de Fevereiro:

"O referendo, e principalmente este género de referendo, não une, separa. Resta saber se a hostilidade se prolonga para lá de hoje, como se prolongou na América. Uma coisa é certa, o resultado não será aceite como o resultado de uma eleição. As maiorias não mudam convicções."

Estou convencida que tem razão, especialmente depois de ver o debate pós referendo na SIC.

Research activism

I'm usually very suspicious about petitions. But this one has a rationale and implications I fully understand and agree with. It's about research, that's what I do. It's about the lack of dissemination of findings and projects that sit on someone's desk as nice PhD thesis, or serve as market products for publishers who gatekeep access. A EU report showed that the price of scientific journals rose 200-300% beyond inflation between 1975-1995, in a market now worth up to $11bn (£5.6bn) a year. Who looses? The public, societies and research itself. Free access to research stands as crucial to a much wider and more effective knowledge. 16,000 people have signed the petion already, over 700 from Portugal, over 1,100 from the UK and including Nobel prize winners for medicine Harold Varmus and Richard Roberts. Read more in Publico and the Guardian. Needless to say, the petition is a EU initiative, the US wouldn't agree, would they?

Meanwhile, let's not just blame the system. It's also responsability of individual researchers to make sure their findings leave their offices and houses and to explore creative ways of reaching people. I believe it's part of the process. Unlikely you'll have a press office to do this job for you.

Casa da Animação

Fica uma sugestão e o site.

A rolar sessão de curtas-metragens da FilmesDaMente com cerca de 1h de duração, nos próximos dias 03 e 04 de Fevereiro, pelas 21h30. A sessão conta com a presença dos autores, que falarão sobre os filmes antes da sua exibição. Sempre bom, poder fazer-lhes perguntas desconfortáveis. A ver: O site da casa disponibiliza os filmes da casa online - apesar de demorarem muito a "baixar", vale a pena dar uma olhada. O Presente, é o meu preferido.

Já agora fica a informação: FilmesDaMente, é um colectivo de produção de filmes, nascido em 2002, que produz ficção, documentários, animação ou experimental (em formato de curta ou longa-metragem).

As curtas em exibição são:

- Intemporalidade|Victor Santos|12'|2006 (estreia)
- Noite de Cão|Carlos Amaral|17'|2006 (estreia)
- Ctrl Alt Fly|Victor Santos|3'|2005
- Berço de Pedra|Nuno Rocha|28'|2005

Berço de Pedra ganhou o prémio ficção no VideoCor 2006 e Ctrl Alt Fly assinou um contrato com a :2 de exibição pois o mesmo foi premiado Take One! Conquistado no festival Internacional de Curtas Metragens do Porto 2006.

Bilhete custa 3,5 euros, 3 para estudantes e a loja abre às 20.45. Houve quem comprasse lá prendas de Natal.