Happy Easter

Goofing on Elvis

Music saves my life,
literature saves my life,
people saves my life,

say baby :
- Are you having FUN ?
(nothing is cool, yeah, yeah, yeah...)

Alhandra

where I come from, first there's the river.

Nowhere

Most of the places, we go through
are just so shapeless, so much like
nowhere.

I don't care who I hit

Supposedly this is what Peter Gabriel was running from...superstardom, paranoia, acid trips...
Rock'n'roll, man, one of the greatest advances to mankind provided by the late XXth's century...

Being your own man...

I could really relate to this song when it come out, someone who decides on the course of his life..."Son, he said, grab your things I'm coming to take you home...".
It must be of one of those times for me, too.

Universal truths

Polly Toynbee in the Guardian, talking about a Bristish banker...why does it sound so familiar, so close to home ?

"He just doesn't get it, and why should he? It's not his fault, it's a bad upbringing among grab-what-you-can and eat-what-you-kill predators. His feral overclass thinks it owes nothing to society: the notion of citizenship is incomprehensibly alien. You could write a "Gee, Officer Krupke" song about him: it's not his fault, he has a social disease. Like the smirking hoodie who sticks one finger up at the judge's sermon on antisocial behaviour, Sir Fred is a product of Britain's winner-takes-all culture that Labour never attempted to civilise. The two extremes here in Europe's most unequal country mirror one another in the social dysfunction they cause. Sir Fred's mob thieves from fellow citizens and their pension funds by avoiding tax and snatching monstrous "remuneration" instead of mugging and looting, but "everyone does it" is how they would each explain their milieu."

Tempted by the fruit of another...

Today I woke up with this song in my head...What's it story ? How the guys who created it decided on doing it this way ?
If I had a go at creating a TV show, I would do the archaeology of music pieces, like this song : "tempted, by the fruit of another...".
Great lines in pop songs...lifesavers all.

Staff Benda Bilili

Bought this record yesterday...Africa never ceases to amaze us(also, the human race seems endlessly resourceful...)

Verdes são os campos...

******* why more words...

Easter in Newark

“Got to take care of our own, it’s how we survive.”



Everyday more Portuguese are forced to emigrate to earn their lives…It has been a constant in our History and so is now. My direct family contributes with one of my brothers, soon another one will go too and several cousins.
Portugal has always been too poor to support all of us, when the Estado Novo regime crashed in the seventies of last century, everybody thought, at least for a brief utopian, noisy, messy while that this could be changed and Portugal would be the coronation of all the sixties revolutions and hopes.
Reality soon set in and the country started slowly to adapt to “normalidade”(normality) and with the signing into the European Union in the eighties, this accelerated even more. Now we have come a long way from where we were on the seventies, but still, we are not a more fair, a more balanced country.
Opportunity just doesn’t knock the same way at every door and the Sun doesn’t shine the same way to all the children of the land.
At the same time, there's an opposite phenomena, being part of the European Union we attract thousands of others who want to enter Europe and access its riches, also we are becoming an elderly people with a low fertility rate, emigrants are our way of renewing the social tissue, not counting the added value to our pension system and the cheap labor force they constitute. Being the destination port of thousands of people coming back from Africa after Portuguese decolonization in the late seventies of the XXth century, we also have a lot of second generation, local born African descendants.
Will we be able to use all this forces to forge a new country? will we use all this connections in the right way? can we face prejudice and overcome it – even the well established one, that we Portuguese don’t harbor no prejudices…Africa, Latin America and Asia, are emerging and some of its countries are becoming major players in world affairs, we have been there, we have dealt with those peoples for centuries can we still do it now ? Can we function as a link between all this interests and the interests of the West that we are part ?

Verdade e parábola

Encontrei esta parábola na Net(Have I been telling you lately, what a marvellous thing the net is ?)

Perguntaram uma vez ao Dubner Maggid:
– “Porque razão têm as parábolas um efeito tão grande nas pessoas?”
Ao que o pregador respondeu:
– “Posso explicar contando uma parábola.”
E foi esta a parábola que contou:

Há muitos, muitos anos, a Verdade caminhava pelas ruas, nua como no dia em que nasceu. O povo recusava deixa-la entrar nas suas casas naquele estado. Qualquer pessoa com quem ela se cruzasse fugia a sete pés. Vagueava a Verdade com grande tristeza quando um dia se cruzou com a Parábola, que se vestia com roupas de esplêndidas cores. A Parábola perguntou-lhe: “Diz-me amiga, o que te faz andar tão triste?” Ao que a Verdade respondeu: “É terrível, minha irmã. Sou muito velha e por isso ninguém me liga.”
“Não é por causa da tua idade que as gentes não gostam de ti. Eu também sou velha, mas quantos mais anos passam mais as pessoas me apreciam. Deixa-me dizer-te um segredo: o povo gosta de adornos e encobrimento. Vou emprestar-te algumas das minhas roupas e verás como o povo também vai gostar de ti.”
E assim foi. A Verdade seguiu o conselho e vestiu as roupas da Parábola. Desde esse dia, a Verdade e a Parábola passaram a andar sempre juntas e o povo gosta das duas.

Rabino Yakov Krantz (1740-1804), conhecido como “o Pregador de Dubno” (Dubner Maggid), Ucrânia.
in Jewish Preaching 1200-1800, Marc Saperstein, Yale University Press, 1989.

Cow of Deities

‘Devataon ki Gai, Kamadhenu’ (Cow of Deities, Wish Cow)
Print with the caption: Ravi Udaya F.A.L. Press, Ghatkopar, Bombay
c. 1940s
© Jyotindra Jain

Really like this cow, it's a shame the copy is small...looking forward to read White Tiger, which I recently bought.

Penas

- Bebo para ahogar mis penas, pero las jodidas han aprendido a nadar.

Frida Kahlo

Common sense, I guess...

Ted Kooser "Selecting A Reader"

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

Delicate

Mark E. Smith

Sure worth a look...

Miles

Passion

I love chocolate and this Belgian chocolate it's quite something, I think you can order it from here

for ambiance :

Wonder