I wish...

I was drafted into the Army and got really scared about it...walked down to the river and sit on the steps of the quay, watched the river flow for a long time. Let my troubles drift downstream with the flow.
When I was going back home, found this green marble in the floor, pick it up and in a whim, went to your door instead : “- Please, I said, keep this while I’m away, for good luck.”.
Never asked you no more about the green marble, in fact never talked that much with you anymore, but it sure gave me luck. Some kind of goodness people do unto others that get by unsaid, but not forgotten (I wish).

scrumptious

scrumptious
One entry found.

Main Entry: scrump·tious
Pronunciation: \ˈskrəm(p)-shəs\
Function: adjective
Etymology: perhaps alteration of sumptuous
Date: 1830
: delightful, excellent; especially : delicious

— scrump·tious·ly adverb

see weird

eerie
One entry found.

Main Entry: ee·rie
Variant(s): also ee·ry \ˈir-ē\
Function: adjective
Inflected Form(s): ee·ri·er; ee·ri·est
Etymology: Middle English (northern dialect) eri
Date: 14th century
1 chiefly Scottish : affected with fright : scared
2 : so mysterious, strange, or unexpected as to send a chill up the spine (a coyote's eerie howl) (the similarities were eerie); also : seemingly not of earthly origin (the flames cast an eerie glow)

synonyms see weird

— ee·ri·ly \ˈir-ə-lē\ adverb

— ee·ri·ness \ˈir-ē-nəs\ noun

O que será

Brad Mehldau is great

real estate bubble Venus

Ao progresso...

To Progress...

a report to skeptics

There are so many great talents...this is a lady photographer that I found on the Net, check it out...

white horse

Sou uma princesa e tenho um cavalo branco,
um cavalo branco que me leva a todo o lado
procuro por um principe ou por um sapo - já esqueci
o cavalo branco leva-me a todo lado, só não me diz qual procuro...

I'm a princess and I have a white horse
a white horse that carries me everywhere
I'm looking for a prince or a frog - in fact I forgot which one
the white horse carries me around, just doesn't tell me what to look for...

Underground

pic from Graham's Travel Blog

AX rushed down the mechanical stairway that led to the Subway, by the corner of his eye he noticed big fat ZP, sitting in the station floor already two beers bottles by his side at 9 am, arghhh…
AX gingerly took a sit, it was the first station on that line, so the car was quite empty. AX looked around, he liked to check on people, being well on his thirties, he never kept a proper job on his life, gravitating around school all this time, always taking a Course on something. Ah, the social sciences, a never ending, all-encompassing field of study, human nature itself.
His parents were kind enough to support him, even got him a small apartment on the back of the family house, so he had his privacy.
On front of him, was a bald man with a moustache already gray, organizing his papers, further on the car, an attractive brunette took a sit, it was Summer and she was beautifully tanned, opened a gossip magazine, ignored AX after a quick glance. He was used to that, his attire revealed very much of his social inadequacy, so people usually chose to ignore him on the spot and he didn’t really mind, he had decided to keep the silent loser stance way back, in high school, when his skinny build and general ineptitude to sports, mixed with a congenial shyness enclosed him in books and the school library.
A young girl arrived and saluted the mustached man : “Good morning, Professor, you here ?”, the man mentioned some business he had to attend to that morning. The door alarm sounded and with it a big African woman, in a blue dress and a black veil rushed in, she looked around as if looking to something or somebody, she started to walk along the car and the train started to move too, she balanced a bit, but kept going, as the train made a steep curve, there’s was this hissing noise and some sparks flew from the wheels of the train, flashed on the tunnel walls.
AX decided to open is book, he was reading Harushi Murakami’s “Underground”, an account of the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway.

to betray

Lena Olin as Sabina

"But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown."

Milan Kundera
The unbearable lightness of being

titillating

titillating
Function: adjective
Date: circa 1714
: pleasantly stimulating or exciting ; also : erotic
— tit·il·lat·ing·ly adverb




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No more talking

Watch you walking from behind, silently, furtively like a thief , love the way you move your hips…you raise your arms and tie your hair behind your head, you do it so naturally and it’s so… so perfect - I’m your junkie, girl.
Then we talk and each word comes loaded with meanings, like heavy rain clouds and they start to pour and it’s a flood and we shout and fight and we can’t talk anymore…We just can’t talk anymore, but I’m your junkie, girl, I will lick your wounds any day, I will carry you, I will carry you whatever it takes…
Just can talk to you anymore.

Espio-te enquanto caminhas, furtivamente como um ladrão, adoro o balanço das tuas ancas...levantas ambos os braços e prendes o cabelo na nuca e é tudo tão perfeito, que me arrepia – sou um junkie por ti, rapariga.
Falamos e cada palavra, sai carregada de sentidos, emoções, como aquelas nuvens negras de borrasca, que de repente desabam sobre nós e tudo é um dilúvio, assim ficamos nós a gritar e a lutar como destroços na corrente...mas eu sou um junkie por ti, rapariga, lamberei sempre as tuas feridas, levo-te ao colo, levo-te ao colo o tempo que for preciso...
Só não conseguimos falar, não conseguimos falar mais.

what will survive of us

An Arundel thomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigures them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin

Clap hands

Clap hands, be glad, cars honk on the avenues and the river of time, goes on unstoppable. I feel unbreakable, I feel redeemed, washed in a new light, as flowers bloom everywhere I look.
This is a crisis of global proportions, but then again, it’s only the same ones that are hiding and we don’t see them as we don’t reach out for them and the ones we got to see are the same ones, we see all the time in TV news and they come from Africa or Asia or those places where everybody knows the climate is not fit for you.
It doesn’t rain for a long time, but we can water the gardens and we can walk our dogs, everything is so right, just some bankers had to be replaced but music festivals did happen in time and beach migration had reasonable size, hey don’t you worry baby, says the singer or the song, nevermind, this is a crisis of global proportitions but we are going through it as if we were rowing a boat, in a lake, on a garden. I love your garden, did I already tell you that, really love your garden.

Lovesong

Lovesong by Ted Hughes

He loved her and she loved him
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and Sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy place
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His word were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assasin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

India blends old and new and it's magical

Born in 1954 in Delhi, Arpana Caur was brought up by her mother an award-winning novelist who had a great impact on Arpana's work. A self-taught painter, Arpana has drawn inspiration from her mother's writings, Punjabi folk literature, the Pahari miniature tradition and Indian folk-art motifs.

Since 1975 Arpana has had 18 solo shows of her paintings, and her work can be found in private & permanent collections including in NGMA, New Delhi, Ethnographic Museum Stockholm, Kust Museum Dusseldorf, Victoria & Albert Museum London, Glenberra Museum Japan, Singapore Museum of Modern Art. A recipient of the AIFACS award in 1985, today Arpana Caur is one of India's most celebrated women artists who believes, "India is an exciting mixture of the old and new. Rural and urban India coexist in the strangest of ways."

Watch it.

I won't say anything, no I won't say anything at all
I won't go anywhere, no I won't go anywhere at all
I'll just stay put, keeping my cool.

Watch it.

Sonhos

é quase sempre com muito prazer que se lê a crónica de Maruja Torres no El País Semanal, a desta semana é muito boa

Limits

Quem nos Ama não Menos nos Limita

Não só quem nos odeia ou nos inveja
Nos limita e oprime; quem nos ama
Não menos nos limita.
Que os deuses me concedam que, despido

De afetos, tenha a fria liberdade
Dos píncaros sem nada.
Quem quer pouco, tem tudo; quem quer nada
É livre; quem não tem, e não deseja,

Homem, é igual aos deuses.

Ricardo Reis, in "Odes"
Heterónimo de Fernando Pessoa

giant steps

Fairy Child

I'd Love to be a Fairy's Child
by Robert Graves

Children born of fairy stock
Never need for shirt or frock,
Never want for food or fire,
Always get their heart’s desire:
Jingle pockets full of gold,
Marry when they’re seven years old.
Every fairy child may keep
Two strong ponies and ten sheep;
All have houses, each his own,
Built of brick or granite stone;
They live on cherries, they run wild—
I’d love to be a Fairy’s child.

Stillness

Moments are nothing, only stillness matters

Os instantes não contam, apenas vale o que permanece

quiet laughter

Fragment of Juan Muñoz' series of sculptures "Thirteen Laughing at Each Other" (2001), Jardim da Cordoaria, Porto, Portugal

You feel like sitting under the trees and join your laughing companions, it's nice in the shade and after a moment you start to enjoy, this odd, happy company...
They're simple, quiet fellows, in spite of their broad laughing mouths, your can hear your own thoughts and start to appreciate them.

MittelEuropa(2)

Praga, Budapeste, Varsóvia todas arrancadas ao Ocidente, felizmente de volta ao seu lugar histórico.

Prague, Budapest, Warsow all thorn out from the Ocident, hopefully now back to their historic destiny.

MittelEuropa

Poets don’t invent poems
The poem is somewhere behind
It’s been there for a long time
The poet merely discovers it.

Jan Skacel

Vorticism

Vorticism...the XXth century started with a great fascination with speed and machinery...things went terribly bad and here we are - will we be more lucky this time ?
So many brilliant lives gone to waste.

Heaven of delight

MA: How do you delegate work in colossal endeavors of the order of Castle Tivoli (1990) or Heaven of Delight (2002), your recent ceiling for the Hall of Mirrors of the Royal Palace in Brussels?

JF: Castle Tivoli was a drawing/sculpture and a sculpture/drawing that you could penetrate or walk around—it was a vibrating piece of drawn sculpture. In my work, I have sought to achieve the independence of drawing as a self-sufficient medium. I want to rid drawing of its personal signature. What better to achieve this than by creating a colossal drawing—a large energy field—with 30 assistants in which the hand of the artist becomes irrelevant. Castle Tivoli raises questions as to what exactly is a drawing and what exactly is a sculpture. It was the culmination of that particular period in my career. I was involved with Heaven of Delight for three years, although actual work on the ceiling took three months. This sculpture/drawing comprises 1.4 million jewel beetle shells. My first drawings in blue ballpoint were created by following insects on paper—the splitting of space. Next, I proceeded to replace the ballpoint line by the insect itself. The shimmering ceiling at the Royal Palace is the apotheosis of my development involving the beetles. That is why I am currently conducting research on the body, that strange laboratory we wake up with every morning.

My work is concerned with the release and the absorption of energy, with electricity. I still do a lot myself. I register energy, time, and intensity. I am interested in the act of making. I could have drawn over a photograph of that castle in Mechelen, but instead I chose to cover the entire castle with blue ballpoint. The process of making, or letting others make, gives me tremendous pleasure. I cannot get away from that—I love that physical experience. My nerves cannot be tamed.

As far as the ceiling is concerned, I first created a wide variety of forms and patterns by gluing beetles onto small surfaces. Then I told my 29 assistants that they could start inventing forms, knowing full well what they would come up with. This process allowed me to discover who was good at what type of pattern. Once I had this information, I could assign different areas of the ceiling to different assistants. Those thousands and thousands of beetles form drawings within the larger drawing, as in my large ballpoint drawings. My sculpture seeks to conquer space.

MA: Where do you get thousands and thousands of beetles?

JF: I obtain the scarabs from universities I have connections with and through the open market. The Sternocera acquisignata used in the Royal Palace is a non-protected species that appears abundantly in certain countries. In Thailand, the beetle is fried for consumption and its shell is discarded.

MA: Your work can look extremely delicate. Is it ephemeral?


JF: I use strong materials, which happen to have a fragile appearance. The color of those beetle shells will never fade, for the outer integument contains chitin, one of the strongest and lightest materials on earth, which was used for objects destined for the Mir space station. Scientists are once more studying the world of insects. I love the durability of things. I create for the future. I believe that my work contains many riddles and layers, which will reveal themselves more clearly to the beholder in, say, 50 or 100 years. Only then will my work be better understood. I find it such a beautiful thought: we live in a society where no one is concerned with durability, while artists are precisely engaged with issues of durability. Durability is a rather old-fashioned concept. You are no longer allowed to believe that your work will have value in, say, 100 years. I believe, on the contrary, that its significance will increase. I would stop making art if I believed that my work could hold no future meaning.
Michaël Amy is a frequent contributor to Art in America, tema celeste, Sculpture, and The New York Sun.

People

Clint Eastwood as Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino

"São precisas várias vidas para fazer uma só pessoa"

"It takes several lives to make a single person"

Carlos Fuentes

Eleições no Outono

Vêmo-los na rua. Vêmo-los na TV.
Podemos até votar num neste Outono.
Pensamos que são pessoas como nós.

Mas estamos enganados. Mortalmente enganados.

(Se pensam que é brincadeira, leiam isto)

The end

"...Mas se o homem perdeu a necessidade de poesia, será que se apercebe do seu desaparecimento ? O fim, não é uma explosão apocalíptica. Talvez não haja nada de mais tranquilo que o fim."

Milan Kundera - A arte do Romance

"...But if man lost all his need for poetry, will he be aware of his own doom ? The end is not an apocalyptic explosion. There may be nothing so quiet as the end.”

Milan Kundera – The Art of the Novel

Peace. Health. Love.

Not blessed by faith, no.
Still immaterial forces drive me, on many ways that I can explain.

Não fui abençoado pela fé.
Contudo, forças imateriais tem um papel na minha vida, maior do que alguma vez conseguirei explicar.

Color

A turning point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter".

soundtrack

I run and I run and it's all dark and I'm scared inside my head, I have an itch on the base of my head and I run faster... I run and I run till I pass the gates and I'm safe again.
Tomorrow I will come running again.

world chest

O meu peito nunca foi tão grande, os dias nunca mais foram tão brilhantes e a fruta tão doce...
Espero o dia em que tudo recomece e sejam vossos os peitos imensos.

My chest was never so big, light of day never so bright and the fruits never so sweet...
I long for the day that it all begins again and bigger will be your chests.

‘Dido and Aeneas’

Dido, also called Elissa, was princess of Tyre in Phoenicia. Escaping tyranny in her country, she came to Libya where she founded Carthage, a great city which Aeneas and his comrades, who had become refugees after the sack of Troy, visited seven years after the end of the Trojan War. As Queen of Carthage, she received the Trojans exiles with hospitality, and having given Aeneas more love than he could take, felt betrayed when he left for Italy, and committed suicide.

Gloria

il Prete Rosso

Flora

Tell me I'm alive