Blogue-Blague

Then and again the same situation, for so many years....

2011-12-16T17:46:00.003-02:00

Pray tell if the current crisis is all about humankind’s digressions and subsequent actions on things utterly beyond their grasp. One should not go to the oracles such as Bill Gross at Pimco, or peruse the musings of Krugman, boring as that sun shining in the green catholic abodes of a Bayerisch quasi-crescent laughing it all the way.

We may as well go to the heart of Woody Allen, Larry David, and Joseph Heller. The latter on a minor key – nonetheless telling it all… No one should be taking “seriously” the current state of affairs. Let’s then riff off an internet description, alas quite apt I might add, of “Good as Gold”, Heller’s novel. We have the metal, the man, the archetypes and stereotypes.

“…Bruce Gold, a Jewish, middle-aged university English professor and author of many unread, seminal articles in small journals, residing in Manhattan, is offered the chance for success, fame and fortune in Washington D.C. as the country's first ever Jewish Secretary of State. But he must face the consequences of this, such as divorcing his wife and alienating his family, the thought of which energizes him and makes him cringe at the same time. Furthermore, he's faced with the task of writing about the Jewish experience in America, but isn't sure he's lived it and thus has to figure out what it is, not knowing that he was invariably going to describe his own life….”

Italy is going down, Greece already lost the match. Monty Python had them wining against quite a German squad when Archimedes screamed “eureka” and scored the winning goal. PIGGS on the wing...

Eric Fry reminds us that “…Nearly ten years after the war ended, the British were still rationing sugar and meat.” So how long until we come out the current misery?

“If ideas could file for bankruptcy,” James Grant muses in the latest edition of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, “the modern model of money and banking would have beaten MF Global Holdings to the courthouse. The concept of leveraged finance in a world of paper money and socialized risk deserves rehabilitation under an intellectual Chapter 11.”

Now you see, these people are like gold, good as gold, or… Goldman…

Maurice Roche finished his book on the legendary institution with a different viewpoint. It is not even available in English yet. He is the UK correspondent for Le Monde and starts his saga with Goldman advising the neo-Platonists, where representation, so it seems, passes for the actual form. What he pointed out is that Goldman Sachs also hedged the chicken and potato out of the pan. They were not betting very much on their own ideas for the pan-Hellenic feta lovers.

The machinery needed some oil, but not enough olives to grease the wheels – and/or hands.

We start missing Cockburn, Trotsky and the permanent revolution, as we know there must be casualties.

Back to Eric Fry: In general, the central banks are borrowing and/or printing money to buy “distressed assets.” By removing these distressed assets from the marketplace, the central banks hope to clear away some of the rot in order to “stabilize” the financial system and, by extension, the value of the currencies they print.

“But since central banks are functionally outlawing bankruptcy for every large institution and government in the Western world — along with a few of those in the Eastern world, the rot remains...and it’s spreading. The rot is not only undermining economic activity, it is also undermining the entire global monetary system.

“And the worst of it is that these multi-trillion-dollar interventions do not remove the rot from the financial system; they merely relocate it from the private sector to the public sector.

(Are we kidding? Or is Roubini a happy St. Francis?)

The European Central Bank (ECB), for example, holds sub-AAA assets equal to 14 times its equity. Large portions of those sub-AAA assets are the very sub-AAA government bonds of Greece, Portugal, Italy and Ireland. If these assets, in the aggregate, were to lose 7% of their value, the ECB’s equity would be zero. (For perspective, the government bonds of Greece, Portugal, Italy and Ireland have already lost 30% to 60% of their values).

If Dante would tumble over the gates of delyrium and steps to hell…

Meanwhile, Italy too has been forced to get rid of its popular, but difficult to control, elected leader — Silvio Berlusconi. It has put in a company man. Yes, a company man. What company? Goldman Sachs, of course. The new fellow, Mario Monti is an ex-Goldman guy. And so is the new fellow at the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi. Monti was also an EU commissioner. Draghi ran the Bank of Italy as the nation built up one of the world’s biggest piles of debt. Then, when Italy’s cost of borrowing shot over 7%, in came Monti and Draghi.

(Berlusconi’s media propagated the anti-Goldman sentiment while he is back singing in cruises or in a bathroom with fantastic acoustics… But no one will hear…)

So how does Bill Bonner think we can match the yang with the thing?

“…Tax evasion is the only thing that keeps these economies going. People prevent their government from squandering their money. They spend it themselves. But the new Goldman guys won’t like it. They’ll want to get their hands on as much of that ‘black money’ as possible. And more safety net…

“…So far, they seem to be making great progress towards their objectives. They stuff the world with debt. It blows up. Then, they push out democratically-elected leaders...gain new power and authority...and take charge of the rescue.

You know the plot? Or the Pol Pot?

We do...

Mar Sem Fim - Klink

2011-11-04T10:59:00.000-02:00

“Um homem precisa viajar. Por sua conta, não por meio de histórias, imagens, livros ou tv. Precisa viajar por si, com seus olhos e pés, para entender o que é seu. Para um dia plantar as suas próprias árvores e dar-lhes amor. Conhecer o frio para desfrutar do calor. E o oposto. Sentir a distância e o desabrigo, para estar bem sob o próprio teto. Um homem precisa viajar para lugares que não conhece para quebrar essa arrogância que nos faz ver o mundo como o imaginamos e não simplesmente como é ou pode ser; que nos faz professores e doutores do que não vimos, quando deveríamos ser alunos e, simplesmente, ir ver. (...) Pura verdade, o mundo na tv é lindo, mas serve para pouca coisa. É preciso questionar o que se aprende. É preciso ir tocá-lo.”

J. Cunha - FSP

2011-11-03T10:06:00.000-02:00

"...CASA DE VIDRO

Em "A Insustentável Leveza do Ser" (Cia. das Letras), o tcheco Milan Kundera trabalha esse difícil equilíbrio a partir de dois amantes com ideias opostas sobre o que seria "viver na verdade".

Para a personagem Sabina, só existe verdade na privacidade, quando não se é observado. "Ter um público, pensar num público, é viver na mentira. (...) Quem perde sua intimidade perde tudo (...) e quem renuncia voluntariamente a ela é um monstro", diz Sabina.

Ela não foi apresentada às redes sociais, esse reduto de "monstros".

Já seu amante acha que viver na verdade é abolir a barreira entre público e privado. É morar numa casa de vidro onde todos sabem de tudo.

Construir uma com paredes meio finas e algumas gavetas trancadas é o desafio..."

Guillaume Le Blanc

2011-10-28T10:32:00.001-02:00

Mais louco é quem me diz
Por Carla Rodrigues | Para o Valor, do Rio

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"A Extração da Pedra da Loucura", de Bosch: pensamento de Foucault está sendo ameaçado por argumentos científicos que buscam configurar a loucura como um defeito no cérebro, diz Le Blanc

O filósofo francês Guillaume Le Blanc nasceu em 1966, cinco anos após Michel Foucault ter publicado "História da Loucura", livro cuja importância tem merecido comemorações e homenagens pelo seu caráter revolucionário. Foi a partir de Foucault que se modificou a maneira como a sociedade encara o louco, o estranho e todos aqueles que não podem enquadrados nas categorias de normalidade. Dedicar-se a estudar Foucault foi, para Le Blanc, perseguir o caminho do questionamento das estruturas de poder que promovem a classificação das vidas comuns em perigosas, submetidas, portanto, a estratégias de dominação que hoje, em um contexto de mudança nas formas de tratamento, está em franco processo de deslocamento.

Com Foucault, Le Blanc discute também as novas formas de normatização da vida, submetidas às razões médicas e aos interesses da indústria farmacêutica. "Temos que inventar novas formas de subjetividade que não se deixem capturar pelas razões médicas", defende.

Le Blanc é professor da Universidade Michel de Montaigne, em Bordeaux, onde também mantém um grupo de pesquisa sobre medicina e suas relações com a vida social. Na próxima semana, participará em São Paulo do VII Colóquio Michel Foucault, promovido pela Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC-SP) em comemoração dos 50 anos do livro de Foucault.

Autor de livros consagrados a estudar essas figuras de precariedade que inspiraram a obra de Foucault ("Vidas Ordinárias, Vidas Precárias", 2007; "Dentro/fora - A Condição do Estrangeiro", 2010; "O Que fazer da Nossa Vulnerabilidade", 2011), Le Blanc acha que a força do pensamento de Foucault está sendo ameaçada pelos argumentos científicos que buscam configurar a loucura como um defeito em uma parte do cérebro. "É um risco grande", diz ele nesta entrevista.

"Temos que inventar novas formas de subjetividade que não se deixem 'medicalizar' e façam uma crítica das razões médicas"

Valor: Qual é a atualidade de "História da Loucura", 50 anos depois?

Guillaume Le Blanc: As coisas mudaram depois do livro de Foucault. O sistema manicominial, criticado por Foucault nos anos 1960, já não parece capaz de conter os selvagens de hoje. O que é a loucura atualmente? É o clamor inquieto de um grupo de sem-teto que precisa ser abrigado em dispositivos de cuidados sociais? É o silêncio do prisioneiro em sua cela? É a rua, essa é a prisão? O medo do louco é reavivado a partir de seus supostos perigos e o manicômio não parece ser capaz de responder plenamente a esse medo. O que se assiste agora é a uma multiplicação de dispositivos de controle, nos quais a loucura parece se disseminar em um grande número de estruturas, promovendo novas confusões entre o louco, o pobre e o criminoso.

Valor: O livro de Foucault marca o início de um movimento antipsiquiátrico para mostrar que o conceito de loucura é uma construção. O senhor acredita que esse movimento conseguiu interrogar os manicômios e suas condições?

Le Blanc: Houve de fato uma associação muito rápida entre Foucault e a antipsiquiatria. Mas nem o gesto de [Philippe] Pinel de liberar os loucos nem o gesto antipsiquiátrico de tirar os loucos dos manicômios seriam suficientes, para Foucault, como estratégia de anular as formas de saber e de poder que construíram a loucura e seus dispositivos terapêuticos e sociais. O trabalho de Foucault se inscreve numa história da contestação das linhas divisórias entre o normal e o patológico. Ele questionou o tipo de separação que nossas culturas ocidentais modernas produziram entre loucura e razão. Desde o seu primeiro prefácio, ele argumenta que seria preciso fazer uma "história dos limites, dos gestos obscuros, necessariamente esquecidos ou ocultos, com os quais uma cultura rejeita qualquer coisa que lhe seja exterior". Parte da crise atual do hospital psiquiátrico também se explica pela retomada dos discursos da biologia do cérebro e do afastamento da psiquiatria em relação à psicanálise. A tarefa que me parece urgente é pensar a disciplina numa situação de crise da disciplina. Trata-se de governar os indisciplinados? Se é assim, a disciplina tende a se expandir para estruturas sociais anônimas, como a rua, ou mais arcaicas, como a prisão.

Valor: Quais são as consequências, ainda hoje, de pensar a loucura como construção histórica e cultural?

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Guillaume Le Blanc: "A psicanálise deve voltar a ser uma arma de crítica social. As pessoas não querem mais ter a cabeça governada por novos saberes ou novas formas de polícia"

Le Blanc: Foucault nos permitiu compreender que antes de tudo há um indivíduo que incomoda, alguém com quem não se sabe o que fazer e abala nosso ideal de humanidade. Esse potencial do pensamento de Foucault está sendo ameaçado pelas novas tentativas, todas muito científicas, de recolocar a loucura dentro de uma parte do cérebro e assim renaturalizar o louco como esse indivíduo cujo cérebro está desajustado. O risco, hoje, é de "biologizar" de novo o louco e assim perder os seus contornos sociológicos e antropológicos. É um risco grande. A loucura instalada numa área do cérebro novamente justifica a circunscrição do louco como o anormal.

Valor: Tomando como referência o grande número de diagnósticos de depressão, síndrome do pânico e transtorno de ansiedade, o senhor acha que escrever uma história da loucura, hoje, seria interrogar os discursos médicos sobre essas doenças?

Le Blanc: É uma questão muito importante. Estudando a história da formação do saber em relação à história da formação dos poderes, encontraremos um domínio no qual as fronteiras entre o normal e o patológico são particularmente frágeis. Trata-se de pensar sobre as implicações sociais e éticas das análises históricas numa proporção que Foucault talvez não tenha podido explicitar totalmente. Um exemplo: a construção da criança como sujeito potencialmente patológico, hiperativo, e a conexão desses saberes sobre a hiperatividade com o domínio muito poderoso da indústria farmacêutica e o uso da ritalina. Quando a criança é declarada hiperativa, o diagnóstico dado pelo médico é acompanhado de uma prescrição farmacêutica sem precedentes, na qual o alvo é uma população inteira de sujeitos. O que fazemos diante desse poder e desse saber? Queremos ser governados como esses pais que se tornam intermediários do poder farmacêutico e garantem a "medicalização" do poder familiar? Não se trataria de organizar outras narrativas da vida infantil, outros modos de educação que teriam a tarefa de rejeitar essa "medicalização" excessiva sobre nossa vida? Temos que inventar novas formas de subjetividade que não se deixem "medicalizar" e façam uma crítica das razões médicas.

Valor: Quais são as consequências políticas do reconhecimento de que a distinção entre o normal e o patológico é uma forma de enquadrar aquele que aparece como o estranho, o Outro. O que há de profundamente ético no livro de Foucault é a percepção de que o Outro, o estranho, o estrangeiro, só pode ser definido por um discurso?

Le Blanc: Sou um estudioso das figuras sociais da alteridade, sobre as quais escrevi em meus livros. Observo que a alteridade não é uma figura neutra a ser simplesmente reconhecida. O outro é, antes de tudo, aquele que é tornado outro por uma comunidade de sujeitos que se supõe ao lado da norma. O precário tende a se tornar outro como parte de um trabalho de integração que precisa apontar para o que está fora do grupo. O estrangeiro é o sujeito que o grupo considera não fazer parte da nação, ele é usado como instrumento de constituição do grupo. É preciso compreender que o fato de apontar para uma determinada vida como a que representa o outro é uma forma de recusar a sua alteridade, a sua vulnerabilidade. O que aconteceria se nós vivêssemos com a percepção de que somos também precários, estrangeiros, vulneráveis? Apenas com uma atitude ética de não violência que reconhece a violência das nossas exclusões poderíamos assumir uma alteridade que não seria sinônimo de injúria, mas o reconhecimento da pluralidade de formas de vida.

Valor: "História da Loucura" foi um livro homenageado ao longo de todo o século XX. No congresso de comemoração do 30º aniversário de sua publicação, uma grande controvérsia em torno do trabalho de Foucault foi protagonizada pelo filósofo Jacques Derrida, ao afirmar que o trabalho de Foucault não poderia ter sido escrito antes da invenção da psicanálise e da formulação freudiana do conceito de inconsciente. Derrida propunha, então, fazer justiça a Sigmund Freud. Em que medida as críticas de Derrida eram pertinentes?

Le Blanc: Acredito que teremos que ler de outra forma os pensadores dos anos 70, como Foucault, Derrida e todos aqueles que parecem ter participado de uma prática filosófica como contracultura, como uma tentativa de não ser totalmente governado pelas normas dominantes. A psicanálise foi um discurso hegemônico nos anos 70, lugar que não ocupa mais hoje, diante do poder do paradigma naturalista nas ciências da psiquê. Ser justo com Freud, segundo a célebre formulação de Derrida, significa que a psicanálise deve ser questionada também como um dispositivo, como Foucault demonstrou em "As Palavras e as Coisas". Mas isso supõe que a psicanálise faça justiça a Foucault, aceitando questionar os pertencimentos simbólicos que ela põe de maneira excessiva nos sujeitos, com um discurso de ordem ou de lei particularmente insuportável. A filosofia de Judith Butler se constitui numa boa maneira de fazer justiça, ao mesmo tempo, a Foucault e a Freud. A psicanálise deve voltar a ser uma arma de crítica social. As pessoas não querem mais ter a cabeça governada por novos saberes ou novas formas de polícia.

Valor: Já que o senhor mencionou a filósofa americana Judith Butler, muito bem recebida na França, onde muitos de seus livros são traduzidos: acredita que a atualidade do pensamento dela é justamente a sua capacidade de criticar os limites de pensadores franceses dos anos 70? É curioso, ou pelo menos irônico, que essa crítica venha dos Estados Unidos?

Le Blanc: O primeiro livro de Judith Butler traduzido na França foi "A Vida Psíquica do Poder", no qual ela se inspirou em Foucault e em Derrida. Ela propõe um diálogo com a psicanálise de Jacques Lacan e de Freud, fazendo cruzamentos de leitura inéditos na França. Para mim, ela é o relançamento de uma crítica social ao fazer uma análise das produções de si dentro das normas, especialmente nas normas de gênero. A originalidade do seu pensamento está no fato de ela operar uma desconstrução não por uma libertação dessas normas, mas por uma forma de subversão que se elabora no próprio ato de atender a essas normas. As identidades, assim, não precedem o exercício da norma, mas é esse exercício mesmo que acaba por criar as identidades. A repetição das normas está sempre acompanhada da possibilidade de subvertê-las. Existem nas universidades americanas, não nos departamentos de filosofia, mas nos de literatura e ciências políticas, novas maneiras de fazer filosofia que se inspiram no pensamento francês dos anos 70. Talvez seja outra América.

Elena Landau OESP

2011-10-28T10:30:00.000-02:00

Bola quadrada no campo enlameado

'Esporte no Brasil é o seguinte: a gerência é privada, mas os recursos são públicos. Assim fica fácil', diz economista Elena Landau

23 de outubro de 2011 | 3h 06

O Estado de S.Paulo – Seção ‘Aliás’

CHRISTIAN CARVALHO CRUZ

Botafoguense tem cada uma... Dia desses a economista e advogada carioca Elena Landau praticava caminhada e sentiu uma dor aguda no quadril. "Fisgada no ilíaco. Meu amigo, você sabe o que é uma fisgada no ilíaco?", ela destrincha, na maior das intimidades atléticas com o músculo acomodado nas cavidades ósseas das ancas. Com dificuldade para andar, foi afastada pelo departamento médico das cadeiras do Engenhão, de onde costuma ver as partidas do Botafogo quando o time joga no Rio. Trocou o estádio pela sala de casa. A visão direta do campo, pela intermediação da TV. Bem sem graça, ela achou. "Só que aí o Botafogo começou a subir na tabela e eu não quis arriscar: melhorei do ilíaco, mas não voltei pro estádio", conta.

O time ainda vai bem no Campeonato Brasileiro, com chance de ser campeão. Se isso tem a ver com a heterodoxia de arquibancada de Elena, não há como saber. Mas não deixa de ser curioso comparar. Integrante da linha de economistas da PUC-RJ que formaram a zaga do governo FHC, naqueles tempos ela era chamada de ortodoxa por comandar - "sem jogo de cintura", diriam os oposicionistas de então - o processo de privatização das empresas públicas. A plaquinha na porta do escritório ajudava nessa imagem: diretora de desestatização do Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social, o BNDES.

É de dentro da área, portanto, que Elena fala: "O projeto da Copa do Mundo no Brasil está errado de partida. É um evento privado, destinado a atender interesses privados, mas que conta com recursos públicos. Tem cidade que faria melhor uso do dinheiro do BNDES se construísse metrô e corredor de ônibus, porque não tem renda nem público suficiente para fazer um payback do investimento". Elena hoje trabalha como advogada numa grande banca no Rio e assessora o Instituto Teotônio Vilela, órgão de estudos ligado ao PSDB.

Numa semana rica em bolas quadradas rolando por campos enlameados - acusações contra o ministro do Esporte, Orlando Silva, ONGs de fachada, queda de braço entre o governo e a Fifa por meias-entradas e venda de cerveja nos estádios da Copa - o Aliás convocou Elena para comentar o jogo, mas ela avisou: "Houve um tempo em que eu acreditava que a gestão do esporte brasileiro podia mudar. Montei uma consultoria esportiva e até trabalhei no Atlético Mineiro e no Botafogo". Diz que desistiu por cansaço. Deu cãibra na paciência, estiramento no desencanto. Sentiu-se vencida pelo jogo travado que se disputa no setor e, apesar de conhecer bem a cancha, agora prefere atuar como uma torcedora especializada, por assim dizer. "Hoje em dia os meus comentários sobre esporte são de pessoa física." A eles, pois.

Esporte é questão de Estado?

Depende. O esporte ligado a educação, sociabilidade, cidadania e formação do indivíduo, como agente transformador de vidas, este é questão de Estado. Mas Copa do Mundo certamente não é. Trata-se de um evento privado. Como um show do U2 ou do Justin Bieber. Uma Copa só seria assunto de Estado se usada para alavancar uma transformação do espaço urbano. E, pelo que estamos vendo atualmente e também pela experiência dos Jogos Pan-Americanos de 2007 no Rio, sabemos que não é esse o caso. O Pan de 2007 não revitalizou nada, não melhorou a cidade. Tem o estádio do Engenhão, que é onde joga o meu Botafogo e é até um bom estádio. Mas e o entorno? Aquilo é um abandono só, não há sequer transporte público decente para chegar lá. Acho importante separar esses conceitos entre público e privado para entender as causas da precariedade do esporte no Brasil.

Terceirizar o esporte para ONGs seria uma dessas causas?

O Brasil conseguiu desmoralizar a utilização das ONGs, que conceitualmente têm valor. Mas houve um exagero nessa terceirização do esporte. No fundo, as ONGs de esporte fazem hoje o que a escola pública fazia antigamente, mas deixou de fazer por causa do abandono e da decadência do ensino público, decadência física, inclusive. Há colégios que não têm quadra de esportes e precisam fazer convênio com academia de ginástica para ter aula de educação física. Para resumir, eu diria que o Estado brasileiro deixou de cumprir seu papel. Se achamos que o esporte é suficientemente relevante a ponto de ter um ministério específico, precisamos definir uma política esportiva clara para o País. Mas ministério no Brasil serve para assegurar governabilidade, preencher cotas dos partidos da coalizão.

Nada se salva em termos de política esportiva por aqui?

Em 2016 vamos sediar uma Olimpíada no Rio. Ok. Mas queremos desenvolver seriamente quantas modalidades olímpicas até lá? Três? Trinta? Temos aptidão para todas elas? Vamos investir só nas quais já somos bons ou também nas quais precisamos melhorar? O Brasil nem sequer sabe responder a essas perguntas. O projeto do Ministério do Esporte para a Olimpíada no Rio em 2016 é só fazer a Olimpíada no Rio em 2016. É um projeto de obras, não um projeto esportivo. A Austrália, quando sediou os Jogos em 2000, criou um programa para a natação que dá frutos até hoje. Eles não queriam passar o vexame de não ganhar medalha dentro de casa. No Brasil impera a mentalidade da escavadeira: "Oba, vamos sediar uma Olimpíada porque assim podemos usar o orçamento pra fazer obra. Se ficarmos em último lugar no quadro de medalhas, não tem problema". É vergonhoso ver os ginastas brasileiros, que são uns heróis, talentosíssimos, mendigando patrocínio. E ao mesmo tempo ver uma ONG levando dinheiro do governo para comprar camiseta. Que diabo o governo tem que comprar camiseta pra ONG?! Por outro lado, não acho que ONG deva formar atletas olímpicos. Como se forma um atleta de competição, eu não sei. O Brasil vive de modismos, de ídolos momentâneos, como a seleção de vôlei do Bernardinho, o Gustavo Kuerten no tênis, anos atrás.

Mas por que nunca aproveitamos essas modas para criar uma política esportiva consistente?

O problema é que o Brasil não tem uma filosofia de trabalho nesse sentido, não segue nenhum dos dois modelos básicos de programas esportivos que conhecemos: o de participação maciça do Estado no desenvolvimento de atletas, como em Cuba ou na China, e o de formação nas escolas e universidades, como nos Estados Unidos. Aqui não temos nem um nem outro. Estamos perdidos no meio do caminho. Apesar de dizerem que nós temos a participação do Estado nos esportes, o fato é que o Brasil privatizou - e privatizou mal - os esportes. Entregou sem critério nenhum para federações e confederações, que não passam de feudos políticos. Então, quem cuida do esporte brasileiro? As ONGs, micro-organismos pulverizados e sem uma política unificada e organizada, ou as federações e confederações. Ou seja, quando é conveniente, o esporte é público, e aí pede dinheiro ao governo para os programas das ONGs, e quando não é conveniente, quando tem que prestar contas, ser transparente, reclama-se da interferência do governo em assunto privado. Eu sou a última pessoa a ser contra privatização de alguma coisa, mas vejo claramente uma apropriação indevida do esporte brasileiro pelo setor privado. Nosso modelo é o seguinte: a gerência é privada, mas os recursos são públicos. Assim fica fácil.

Qualquer semelhança com a Copa de 2014 é mera coincidência?

A Copa do Mundo é um evento da Fifa. Não é de governo de país nenhum e ninguém obriga um governo a se oferecer para sediá-la. Quem tem vontade de receber uma Copa se candidata porque quer. E desde o começo conhece as regras estabelecidas pelo dono do negócio, no caso, a Fifa. Então não vale agora, no final do segundo tempo, vir discutir se o Brasil está vendendo sua soberania ao ceder a pressões da Fifa para mudar esta e aquela legislação interna. Isso é uma bravata, uma coisa nacionalista, ufanismo bobo. Quando apresentou sua candidatura, o Brasil sabia perfeitamente onde estava se metendo. E aí fica discutindo a filigrana da meia-entrada e da venda de bebida dentro dos estádios. Aliás, deveriam aproveitar o momento para liberar de vez a venda de bebida. Isso é uma hipocrisia. Bebe-se tranquilamente nas barraquinhas em torno do estádio. E até parece que as torcidas organizadas deixam de brigar porque não podem mais beber. É simples resolver a questão da violência. O cidadão arrumou encrenca? Que ele seja retirado, fichado e impedido de voltar. A Inglaterra fez isso e funcionou...

Você falava que o Brasil conhecia as regras do jogo quando apresentou a candidatura.

Por causa do nosso histórico futebolístico, nós até gostaríamos de acreditar que para a Fifa é uma honra fazer uma copa no Brasil, o "país do futebol". Mas a Fifa, obviamente, não poderia estar ligando menos pra isso. O que ela quer é ganhar o dinheiro dela e acabou. Ela chega, não coloca um tostão, ganha bilhões e vai embora. Isso não é novidade. O projeto da Copa no Brasil está errado desde a partida, porque foi feito pela CBF, também uma empresa privada, a fim de preservar seus feudos políticos regionais. É um projeto sem sentido. O governo brasileiro entra com dinheiro público - dinheiro do meu, do seu, do nosso imposto - em um projeto privado destinado a atender somente a interesses privados. Aí vem o BNDES e financia estádios em locais que jamais terão público suficiente para fazer um payback do investimento. Jamais. Isso é dinheiro a fundo perdido. Nem o estádio do Corinthians vai dar retorno. Teria se o clube colocasse 60 mil pessoas lá dentro em todos os jogos. Mas vemos pelo Campeonato Brasileiro que a média de público do Corinthians, que tem a maior torcida do Brasil (os flamenguistas que me desculpem), mal chega à metade disso. Se o setor privado tivesse se interessado pela construção dos estádios, o BNDES poderia financiar a transformação urbana das cidades. Eu não vou citar quais, para não melindrar prefeitos e governadores, mas tem cidade aí que certamente faria melhor uso do dinheiro do BNDES se construísse metrô e corredor de ônibus.

Por que o setor privado não se interessou pelos estádios?

Por que eles não vão dar dinheiro. Fizeram algum estudo econômico sério nas sedes da Copa? Desconheço. Vamos ter estádio digno de país com renda per capita de US$ 10 mil encravados em cidade com renda per capita que é um quinto disso. Como é que a iniciativa privada vai se interessar por algo assim? Mas o problema maior é mais antigo, vem antes da Copa. Nós devíamos estar nos perguntando por que o Brasil, com toda sua força de pentacampeão do mundo e gerador de craques, não tem estádios com nível internacional até hoje. A resposta é simples: porque não tem público, a média de público é deprimente, e não tem público porque o futebol brasileiro não é feito para atender o público. Quem programa um jogo de futebol para as 10 da noite de quarta-feira não está interessado na receita gerada pelo público. Mas deveria estar, porque um tipo de geração de receita não exclui o outro. Na Europa adotam um modelo de receita tripla: tem a parte da televisão, a do público pagante e a do marketing dos clubes. Só que lá, quando você vai assistir a um jogo de futebol, o estádio é limpo, confortável, seguro, tem transporte público na porta, comida de qualidade, lojas, lugar marcado, horário decente para que o jogo seja um programa familiar e um calendário imexível. Não tem esse negócio de adiar jogo porque vai haver um amistoso inútil da seleção contra o Gabão só para satisfazer interesse de patrocinador da federação. Desse modo, o público é garantido; e público garantido faz brilhar os olhos do setor privado. Mas o que temos no Brasil? Se a CBF não faz nada direito no futebol interno, como é que podemos esperar que ela possa fazer uma Copa direito?

Você estatizaria a CBF?

Eu preferiria que não fosse privada. Ao contrário do que se fez no setor elétrico, por exemplo, em que a exploração do serviço foi concedida mediante licitação, nunca houve uma licitação que desse à CBF o direito e o monopólio de representar o futebol brasileiro. Mas não tem como mudar. Não há elemento jurídico para isso. Me incomoda que a CBF não esteja preocupada com o futebol brasileiro. Não vejo problema que ela ganhe dinheiro, desde que licitamente, mas acho mal resolvido o uso que ela faz dos símbolos da Nação. A CBF não tem dinheiro público, não tem subvenção, só que usa o verde-amarelo da nossa Bandeira, canta o Hino Nacional... Quem a elegeu para fazer isso por nós e quanto ela paga ao governo para usar esses símbolos? Então, eu preferiria que ela não fosse privada. Nós brasileiros damos muito mais à CBF do que a CBF dá para nós. O futebol brasileiro não amedronta mais adversário nenhum. Jogamos de igual para igual com a Costa Rica. E eu tenho certeza que a decadência está diretamente relacionada a essa administração da CBF.

A Fifa alega que pode ter prejuízo de R$ 1,8 bilhão se não houver as adequações que ela espera na Lei Geral da Copa.

Prejuízo?! Como é que ela pode ter prejuízo num negócio em que não está gastando nada? Não estou entendendo essa conta. A Fifa deve estar procurando uma desculpa, pensando se vale a pena fazer a Copa no Brasil ou não. Mas ela não vai levar o evento para outro país. A relação entre Fifa e CBF é muito forte. A Fifa só tira a Copa do Brasil se o Ricardo Teixeira (presidente da CBF) quiser, não tem nada a ver com o governo brasileiro.

Qual a sua avaliação sobre as denúncias de corrupção contra o ministro do Esporte, Orlando Silva, e o impacto delas na organização da Copa?

Me parece que desde o início da gestão a presidente Dilma Rousseff tinha a ideia de contar com alguém de fora do ministério para tocar a Copa. É um evento específico, não precisava misturar com o dia a dia do ministério. Mas isso não vingou. O fato de a presidente assumir o controle da Copa mostrou a importância que o governo brasileiro está dando ao evento, o que é muito bom. Dá mais moral para o cronograma, para a execução das obras. Agora os envolvidos terão de despachar diretamente com a presidente da República, e ela já tem essa imagem de gestora determinada, incisiva. Talvez seja uma boa oportunidade de colocar alguém no ministério com perfil estritamente técnico, para que a pasta deixe de ser só essa simples repassadora de verba para ONGs.

ELENA LANDAU é economista, advogada, ex-diretora do BNDES, ex-consultora em Gestão Esportiva e botafoguense

Tenses

2011-10-14T09:18:00.000-03:00

Simple Forms
Present Tense
Present tense expresses an unchanging, repeated, or reoccurring action or situation that exists only now. It can also represent a widespread truth.

Example
Meaning

The mountains are tall and white. Unchanging action
Every year, the school council elects new members. Recurring action
Pb is the chemical symbol for lead. Widespread truth

Past Tense
Past tense expresses an action or situation that was started and finished in the past. Most past tense verbs end in -ed. The irregular verbs have special past tense forms which must be memorized.

Example
Form

W.W.II ended in 1945. Regular -ed past
Ernest Hemmingway wrote "The Old Man and the Sea." Irregular form

Future Tense
Future tense expresses an action or situation that will occur in the future. This tense is formed by using will/shall with the simple form of the verb.

The speaker of the House will finish her term in May of 1998.
The future tense can also be expressed by using am, is, or are with going to.

The surgeon is going to perform the first bypass in Minnesota.
We can also use the present tense form with an adverb or adverbial phrase to show future time.

The president speaks tomorrow. (Tomorrow is a future time adverb.)

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Progressive Forms
Present Progressive Tense
Present progressive tense describes an ongoing action that is happening at the same time the statement is written. This tense is formed by using am/is/are with the verb form ending in -ing.

The sociologist is examining the effects that racial discrimination has on society.
Past Progressive Tense
Past progressive tense describes a past action which was happening when another action occurred. This tense is formed by using was/were with the verb form ending in -ing.

The explorer was explaining the lastest discovery in Egypt when protests began on the streets.
Future Progressive Tense
Future progressive tense describes an ongoing or continuous action that will take place in the future. This tense is formed by using will be or shall be with the verb form ending in -ing.

Dr. Jones will be presenting ongoing research on sexist language next week.

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Perfect Forms
Present Perfect Tense
Present perfect tense describes an action that happened at an indefinite time in the past or that began in the past and continues in the present.This tense is formed by using has/have with the past participle of the verb. Most past participles end in -ed. Irregular verbs have special past participles that must be memorized.

Example
Meaning

The researchers have traveled to many countries in order to collect more significant data. At an indefinite time
Women have voted in presidential elections since 1921. Continues in the present

Past Perfect Tense
Past perfect tense describes an action that took place in the past before another past action. This tense is formed by using had with the past participle of the verb.

By the time the troops arrived, the war had ended.
Future Perfect Tense
Future perfect tense describes an action that will occur in the future before some other action. This tense is formed by using will have with the past participle of the verb.

By the time the troops arrive, the combat group will have spent several weeks waiting.

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Perfect Progressive Forms
Present Perfect Progressive
Present perfect progressive tense describes an action that began in the past, continues in the present, and may continue into the future. This tense is formed by using has/have been and the present participle of the verb (the verb form ending in -ing).

The CEO has been considering a transfer to the state of Texas where profits would be larger.
Past Perfect Progressive
Past perfect progressive tense describes a past, ongoing action that was completed before some other past action. This tense is formed by using had been and the present perfect of the verb (the verb form ending in -ing).

Before the budget cuts, the students had been participating in many extracurricular activities.
Future Perfect Progressive
Future perfect progressive tense describes a future, ongoing action that will occur before some specified future time. This tense is formed by using will have been and the present participle of the verb (the verb form ending in -ing).

By the year 2020, linguists will have been studying and defining the Indo-European language family for more than 200 years.

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Robert Levine

2011-10-03T08:36:00.000-03:00

'Chegou o momento do contra-ataque da indústria da cultura'
PUBLICIDADE

NELSON DE SÁ
ARTICULISTA DA FOLHA

Robert Levine foi editor da revista "Billboard", que cobre música, e antes trabalhou na "Wired", que cobre tecnologia. Acreditava que a indústria fonográfica e os produtores de conteúdo em geral deveriam abrir seus produtos, gratuitamente, na internet. Até notar, aos poucos, que as empresas de tecnologia cresciam lucrando com os mesmos produtos, mas resistiam a pagar por eles.
Passou a "seguir o dinheiro" e levantou que as instituições que defendem abrir tudo na internet são financiadas pelas mesmas empresas de tecnologia. Que o Creative Commons recebeu US$ 1,5 milhões do Google em 2008 e mais US$ 500 mil em 2009.
O resultado é o livro "Free Ride", carona grátis, que faz ao longo de 320 páginas um relato detalhado de "como a internet está destruindo a indústria da cultura" e sugere "como contra-atacar". O livro foi lançado no Reino Unido há dois meses, com elogios do "Financial Times" e restrições do "Independent", e sai nos EUA no próximo dia 25.
Questionado, Levine diz que evitou tratar de revistas por ser sua área de atuação, tendo passado pelas redações de "New York", "Wired" e "Billboard", além de contribuir com outras.
Relata que algumas pessoas o criticaram, após lançar o livro, como "amigo da indústria fonográfica", mas nega e afirma que "as gravadoras não diriam isso", pois escreveu negativamente sobre elas, em reportagens e artigos: "Ninguém na indústria fonográfica diria que fui bonzinho."
Garante que não recebe dinheiro para dar palestras para empresas, "como fazem muitos jornalistas hoje". E afirma: "Veja, meu conflito mais óbvio é que eu ganho a vida escrevendo. É o conflito real: eu ganho a vida com copyright. Eu tenho um contrato de livro."
No caso, com Bodley Head, no Reino Unido, e Doubleday, nos EUA, selos da Random House, a maior editora de livros do mundo, parte do grupo alemão Bertelsmann.
Abaixo, trechos da entrevista realizada por telefone:
*
Folha - Você escreve que o conflito em torno da internet não é entre ativistas e empresas de mídia, mas econômico, entre empresas de tecnologia e empresas de mídia, de conteúdo.
Robert Levine - Era o ponto principal que eu queria abordar. As pessoas veem essas questões em termos de bem e mal. Quando você tem empresas, elas tendem a agir segundo seus interesses econômicos, a fazer o que dá dinheiro. Na internet, você está falando de grandes provedores, Verizon, At&T, e de Google, Facebook. Mas os ativistas ainda falam, por exemplo, em blogs: "Somos nós contra as grandes empresas de mídia". Mas a indústria fonográfica já não é tão grande, se comparada ao Google, e é pequenina, se comparada às teles. As pessoas dizem: "A indústria fonográfica manda em Washington". E ela não é nada comparada ao Google, às empresas de tecnologia.
Folha - Qual foi seu ponto de partida?
Levine - Eu trabalhei na "Wired", tempos atrás, e acreditava que as gravadoras eram antiquadas, atrapalhavam o progresso. Com o tempo, pensei: "Espera aí, muitas dessas empresas de internet não querem pagar por conteúdo". O Napster ainda tinha um plano para pagar por conteúdo. Não era bom, mas era um plano. Glogster, não. Limewire, não. A ideia sempre foi fazer um livro crítico, mas nem tanto quando acabou sendo. Descobri que havia todo esse dinheiro que os ativistas recebiam. Temos uma frase no jornalismo americano, "siga o dinheiro", não tenho certeza da origem, mas apareceu em Watergate.
Folha - A origem foi o roteirista do filme [William Goldman].
Levine - Exato, "Todos os Homens do Presidente". Ok, você conhece a sua cultura pop. (risos) Para mim, é o que você faz, como jornalista: você segue o dinheiro. E eu examinei o Creative Commons e [seu fundador] Lawrence Lessig, o Center for Internet and Society, da Universidade Stanford, a New America Foundation. Muita gente me disse, "eles são legais, boas pessoas". Provavelmente são, não penso que ninguém seja o mal. O mal é matar alguém, não infringir copyright. Mas eles são enviesados.
Folha - Parte do financiamento dessas instituições vem das empresas de tecnologia.
Levine - Muito do financiamento vem. E o que é interessante é que as pessoas não sabem. Se você ler os jornais, não há qualquer menção. Como é que esses ativistas recebem todo esse dinheiro do Google e ninguém diz nada? Trabalhei seis meses no levantamento da proposta para o livro. Mais e mais eu me surpreendia. Comecei a pensar: "É um conflito de negócios: Quem vai controlar a distribuição de música é a Warner ou o Google?". Não penso que as gravadoras sejam o bem ou que o Google seja o mal, porque sou um jornalista de negócios. Mas creio que alguns desses ativistas... Dias atrás, almocei com um, aqui em Berlim, e ele não sabia de onde vinha o dinheiro do Creative Commons. Não é estranho?
Folha - Aqui no Brasil, talvez Gilberto Gil também não saiba.
Levine - É curioso que você cite o Brasil, porque havia dois países que eu queria visitar, para o livro, mas não pude, porque não tinha o dinheiro: Brasil e Nigéria. Sou um "nerd" de música, comecei como jornalista musical. Brasil e Nigéria tiveram grandes cenas musicais nos anos 60 e 70. Tropicália, Gil, Caetano Veloso, Os Mutantes. Na Nigéria, Fela Kuti, Tony Allen, o Afrobeat. A maioria foi bancada por grandes gravadoras. Gil estava na Philips.
Folha - Uma grande gravadora na época.
Levine - Que depois virou parte da Polygram, que agora é parte da Universal. Mas hoje as pessoas falam: "No Brasil existe essa grande cena tecnobrega, que não precisa de gravadoras". Sim, mas ela não gera qualquer recurso de exportação para o Brasil. Todos aqueles discos de Gil geraram recursos para a economia. Por isso eu queria ir, porque vocês têm essa imagem de que o mundo em desenvolvimento deve ser contrário ao copyright. E eu não acredito que ela seja correta.
Folha - Gil e outros artistas, como Radiohead, tentam incorporar a distribuição grátis via internet. Como você essas tentativas de construir pontes?
Levine - O que o Radiohead fez foi realmente esperto. Eles conseguiram mais dinheiro ainda com aquele álbum, o que deram de graça. Deixaram você pagar o que queria, conseguiram muito dinheiro e promoveram sua turnê. Foi realmente inteligente. Por outro lado, o Radiohead pôde fazer porque já era famoso. E já era famoso porque, por um lado, na minha opinião, é uma das bandas mais talentosas que há, mas também porque teve muita promoção da EMI.
Folha - Para começar.
Levine - No começo. Você tem muitos artistas talentosos que ninguém conhece. A EMI gastou muito dinheiro falando ao mundo sobre o Radiohead. Imagino que a Philips tenha gasto muito dinheiro para falar ao mundo sobre Gil. Tenho vários daqueles discos, mas não conheço tanto a história. Mas ele estava na TV brasileira. Então, quando se torna conhecido, você não precisa de uma gravadora, mas quem será o Gilberto Gil de amanhã?
Folha - O livro aborda também imprensa e TV. Diz que tiveram duas formas de tratar a internet, no início; a primeira seguindo a opinião geral e abrindo quase tudo na internet, caso do "New York Times", e a segunda mantendo o conteúdo fechado, caso do "Financial Times", o que fez toda a diferença. E daqui para a frente?
Levine - A indústria de jornais nos EUA e no Reino Unido sempre foi ligada à publicidade. Dez anos atrás, a divisão tradicional era de 85% de recursos oriundos da publicidade e 15% da venda de exemplares. Se você examinar os EUA, a proporção do PIB que vai para publicidade não mudou muito desde 1995. O PIB sobe e desce, mas o percentual se mantém. Você tinha, digamos, essa torta que sustentava jornais, TV, revistas. Agora você corta essa torta pela metade. Google e Facebook ficam com uma metade. Todos os jornais e todas as TVs estão disputando a outra. Eles têm de vender o conteúdo, não têm alternativa. Não sei se vender o conteúdo vai funcionar, mas sei que distribuí-lo de graça na internet não vai. Não para um jornal ambicioso, que gasta muito dinheiro com seu conteúdo. "New York Times", "Wall Street Journal", "Zeit", "Le Monde", alguns poucos em cada país. Não são todos que querem cobrir guerras, esse tipo de jornalismo, mas, se quer ser um grande jornal, tem que cobrar.
Folha - Vale também para os emergentes?
Levine - Pode ser diferente no Brasil ou na Índia, porque suas economias estão se expandindo. Não sei muito do Brasil, mas quando uma economia cresce mais rápido, você tem mais pessoas na classe média e mais gastos, internamente. E, quando você tem mais gastos internamente, aí a publicidade realmente decola. Mas é muito difícil fazer previsões sobre o Brasil, porque é um país tão grande, com tantas diferenças, São Paulo e Manaus são quase mundos diferentes. Mas, num país desenvolvido, você tem que vender as notícias. E acredito que as pessoas vão comprar. Eu pago US$ 23 por mês pelo "New York Times". Se mudarem amanhã para US$ 33, continuaria pagando. As pessoas são muito sensíveis à conveniência ao pagar, elas querem que seja fácil, mas não creio que se importem tanto com o custo. A maioria dos americanos paga US$ 60 por mês pela TV a cabo. E a maior parte da programação é muito ruim.
Folha - Centenas de canais, nada para ver.
Levine - US$ 60 pelo cabo ou US$ 30 pelo "NYT"? Para mim, US$ 30 pelo "NYT". Nos EUA, o iTunes aumentou o preço das músicas de US$ 1 para US$ 1,29. E vendeu 13% menos músicas, mas obteve 20% mais de dinheiro. Se você está no negócio para ter, é realmente inteligente.
Folha - Por que você escreveu sobre direitos de músicas, jornais, filmes, e não sobre patentes de forma geral?
Levine - Uma das razões é que patente é uma questão de vida ou morte. Se você precisa muito de um remédio e não pode pagar, você pode furtá-lo. E eu não posso dizer que seja uma coisa ruim você estar furtando remédio. Mas se você furtar um álbum do Led Zeppelin...
Folha - Não é a salvação da vida de ninguém, necessariamente.
Levine - Espera aí, para mim é. (risos) Mas eu cresci em Connecticut, não havia nada para fazer. Mas são coisas diferentes. Você pode dizer que o governo da Índia ou do Brasil ou da Nigéria tem uma motivação política legítima. Você tem o direito de expropriar propriedade intelectual americana se vai salvar vidas? A resposta é talvez. Mas você têm o direito de expropriar "Gossip Girl"? "Desperate Housewives"? Aí é algo difícil de defender. Se você examinar o que acontece na Organização Mundial de Propriedade Intelectual, na ONU, muitas pessoas do Creative Commons e do Google confundem as duas questões, copyright e patentes. Para mim, são muito diferentes, porque o que está em jogo é muito diferente. Não penso que furtar uma música do Led Zeppelin seja uma coisa horrível, embora me pareça, de fato, desnecessário.
*
Folha - No fim do livro, você fala dos diferentes caminhos possíveis daqui para a frente. Um deles seria o esforço crescente, na Europa continental, para combater a pirataria na cultura. É uma saída?
Levine - Sim. As divergências legais que estão sendo debatidas hoje são muito pequenas. Ninguém diz que baixar algo pelo qual você não pagou seja correto. Ninguém diz que postar um filme na internet é correto. Tudo o que estão discutindo é quem deve responder legalmente pelo ato. O YouTube diz: "Vocês não podem nos processar, têm de processar os indivíduos". Mesmo se for difícil garantir o respeito às leis, é importante delimitar, com leis que digam "ei, isso é errado". Só deixar o sinal já é importante.
Folha - O Google tem um lema, hoje pouco lembrado, "don't be evil", não seja mau. Mas agora, com o Google tão grande, com o Facebook tão grande, a imagem do bem está mudando?
Levine - Ah, sim.
Folha - No livro, você cita que [o editor] Chris Anderson proclamou, na "Wired", que "a web está morta", porque está se fechando, com dispositivos como Xbox Live e App Store. Os malvados se tornaram as grandes empresas de tecnologia? Elas são o novo alvo?
Levine - Sim, mas me permita dar algum contexto. Sempre houve dois lados na indústria do entretenimento: o produto e a plataforma. Hoje, o Google controla a plataforma. Também os provedores de serviços de internet, as teles, são uma plataforma. Apple e Amazon têm plataformas fechadas. E parte do problema é: quem tem o poder, o produto ou a plataforma? Na indústria tradicional de mídia, o produto tem muito poder. Se estou tentando fazer você comprar TV paga, você vai querer o canal com os melhores programas. Se tenho um cinema, preciso de bons filmes. Com a internet, você não precisa pagar nada, está tudo lá. Então a questão é como fazer a plataforma pagar pelo produto. Quando Chris diz que "a web está morta", uma das coisas de que está falando, penso eu, é que muitos dos criadores de conteúdo não gostam da internet, porque é uma forma muito ruim de vender coisas. A internet foi criada por cientistas que queriam compartilhar informação acadêmica. Para isso, ela é extraordinária. Mas não estamos mais usando a internet para compartilhar pesquisa acadêmica. Estamos usando para serviços bancários, para tudo.
Folha - Para mídia.
Levine - Mas a internet só é boa para compartilhar informação. Se você quer vender informação, ela não é, na verdade, um sistema bem estruturado. Daí a pergunta: Que passos podemos tomar para mudar o sistema? A Apple tem um sistema muito bom para vender coisas. O Xbox tem um sistema muito bom para vender coisas. Você pode achar os videogames idiotas, mas tecnicamente é um sistema muito bom. Mas o Google diz: "Espera aí, você não pode fazer mudanças, é imoral". Eu não penso que seja imoral. É ruim para os negócios do Google, porque, quanto mais informação vai para a internet, mais o Google lucra. É ótimo para eles. Mas, se você quer lucrar também, alguém tem que comprar sua informação. Temos que estruturar um sistema ou regular um sistema para mais gente.
Folha - Regular como?
Levine - Me desculpe se soa pretensioso, mas eu acho que a pergunta é: "Quem está no comando?". Os políticos regulam a plataforma ou as plataformas regulam os políticos? Eu não votei no Google. Eu vou e volto quanto ao governo americano, mas no ano que vem posso votar novamente. Provavelmente votarei em Obama outra vez, mas eu posso votar e você pode votar em não sei quantos anos. Você não pode votar no Google ou na Apple.
Folha - Eles estão lá e ponto.
Levine - Eles simplesmente estão lá. Uma das coisas de que eu gosto sobre a Europa é que, quando os EUA não regularam a Microsoft, a Europa o fez. Quando os EUA não regularam a Intel, a Europa o fez. Não acredito que os EUA vão regular o Gooogle. Porque eles são muito próximos de Obama.
*Folha - Google e outras empresas de tecnologia têm feito encontros e jantares com Washington ultimamente.
Levine - O Google doa muito dinheiro para Obama. Eric Schmidt [executivo do Google] foi um sério candidato a secretário do Comércio. Como você pode ter um secretário do Comércio que pensa que tudo deve ser grátis? É um pouco estranho.
Folha - Além de Chris Anderson, Tim Berners-Lee, o inventor da web, escreveu que a internet está em perigo por causa de "ilhas" como o iTunes.
Levine - Mas aí eu tenho de perguntar se está em perigo ou se está evoluindo. Não quero voltar a comprar fitas cassete e discos de vinil. As coisas avançam e mudam. Podemos comprar música no iTunes, no Spotify, mas compramos on-line. Isso não vai voltar atrás. A indústria fonográfica tem de se adaptar, as editoras de livros têm de se adaptar. E adivinhe? Também Tim Berners-Lee tem de se adaptar. Por que todas as pessoas que defendem o progresso tecnológico querem que a internet se mantenha exatamente como era em 1995? Tim Berners-Lee e Lawrence Lessig e todos esses caras querem que a internet continue exatamente igual. A internet vai crescer, amadurecer.
Folha - Mas Berners-Lee criou a web, ele não deveria ser ouvido?
Levine - Ele é um cientista, muito inteligente. Mas eu não quero um cientista decidindo como a sociedade deve funcionar. Para isso, ele não é qualificado. E deveria calar a boca. Aliás, eu não sou qualificado também. Isso precisa ser uma conversa política. Os chamados valores "geek" [dos aficcionados de tecnologia] na verdade não têm muito apoio entre as pessoas. Poucos parecem concordar com Tim Berners-Lee. Então, quem se importa com o que ele diz? É um gênio, mas só porque é um gênio da ciência da computação... Ter professores muito inteligentes decidindo como a sociedade funciona nos deu algumas das piores economia do século 20. Se você vai e pede, "estruture uma sociedade", você termina com a União Soviética.

Viegas

2011-09-27T19:27:00.000-03:00

Ponto de Vista

Incertezas

A busca do saber por necessidade profissional favorece o aprendizado, é o que confirmam os pedagogos. No mundo chamado pós-moderno, haveria muita gente dedicada à aquisição de conhecimentos somente pelo prazer de ampliar os horizontes de sua cultura? Há os que pesquisam para passar o tempo, o que implica na existência de pessoas à quais cansa a contagem das horas. Dignos de inveja? Penoso é sem dúvida o estudo exigido apenas por imposição circunstancial, por mera obrigação.

Mas há alguns que procuram insaciavelmente o saber em busca do poder e ainda para dominar os semelhantes ou talvez para acabar com as doenças e até mesmo com a morte. E a massa de curiosos, querendo saber o que acontece depois do sepultamento ou cremação dos corpos, alimenta crenças e teorias, além de alentar o ânimo e o bolso de bruxos, haríolos e de todos que se arrogam o privilégio de possuírem faculdades divinatórias. E tais compulsivos incansáveis estão sujeitos a crises de ansiedade e de angústias perante inevitáveis desencantos e desamparos. E nem se dão conta de que com frequência terminam se transformando em cansativos que alugam os ouvidos alheios para chorar suas pitangas. São pessoas que não aceitam as balizas peculiares ao tipo de conhecimento próprio do ser racional.

Refletindo recentemente sobre os limites da capacidade humana de saber, deparei-me com Manoel de Barros (*1916). Ele lembra: “A maior riqueza do homem é a sua incompletude. Nesse ponto sou abastado. Palavras que me aceitam como sou – eu não aceito...”. E o poeta cuiabano continua suas profundas indagações: “Tentei descobrir na alma alguma coisa mais profunda do que não saber nada sobre as coisas profundas. Consegui não descobrir.”

Mas o poeta não pendurou as chuteiras por causa da incompletude. Ao contrário, reage, tentando rasgar horizontes. E acrescenta: “Eu penso renovar o homem usando borboletas”.

De fato a vida continua em evolução e o futuro é imprevisível. E é poeticamente que Manoel de Barros irá se descrever nessa trajetória: “Quem anda no trilho é trem de ferro, sou água que corre entre pedras, liberdade caça jeito”.

E acha, com certeza.

LUIZ VIEGAS DE CARVALHO

10.IX.2011

Sore Europe NYRB

2011-09-23T17:49:00.000-03:00

Does the Euro Have a Future?

October 13, 2011 George Soros

The euro crisis is a direct consequence of the crash of 2008. When Lehman Brothers failed, the entire financial system started to collapse and had to be put on artificial life support. This took the form of substituting the sovereign credit of governments for the bank and other credit that had collapsed. At a memorable meeting of European finance ministers in November 2008, they guaranteed that no other financial institutions that are important to the workings of the financial system would be allowed to fail, and their example was followed by the United States.

Angela Merkel then declared that the guarantee should be exercised by each European state individually, not by the European Union or the eurozone acting as a whole. This sowed the seeds of the euro crisis because it revealed and activated a hidden weakness in the construction of the euro: the lack of a common treasury. The crisis itself erupted more than a year later, in 2010.

There is some similarity between the euro crisis and the subprime crisis that caused the crash of 2008. In each case a supposedly riskless asset—collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), based largely on mortgages, in 2008, and European government bonds now—lost some or all of their value.

Unfortunately the euro crisis is more intractable. In 2008 the US financial authorities that were needed to respond to the crisis were in place; at present in the eurozone one of these authorities, the common treasury, has yet to be brought into existence. This requires a political process involving a number of sovereign states. That is what has made the problem so severe. The political will to create a common European treasury was absent in the first place; and since the time when the euro was created the political cohesion of the European Union has greatly deteriorated. As a result there is no clearly visible solution to the euro crisis. In its absence the authorities have been trying to buy time.

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In an ordinary financial crisis this tactic works: with the passage of time the panic subsides and confidence returns. But in this case time has been working against the authorities. Since the political will is missing, the problems continue to grow larger while the politics are also becoming more poisonous.

It takes a crisis to make the politically impossible possible. Under the pressure of a financial crisis the authorities take whatever steps are necessary to hold the system together, but they only do the minimum and that is soon perceived by the financial markets as inadequate. That is how one crisis leads to another. So Europe is condemned to a seemingly unending series of crises. Measures that would have worked if they had been adopted earlier turn out to be inadequate by the time they become politically possible. This is the key to understanding the euro crisis.

Where are we now in this process? The outlines of the missing ingredient, namely a common treasury, are beginning to emerge. They are to be found in the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF)—agreed on by twenty-seven member states of the EU in May 2010—and its successor, after 2013, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). But the EFSF is not adequately capitalized and its functions are not adequately defined. It is supposed to provide a safety net for the eurozone as a whole, but in practice it has been tailored to finance the rescue packages for three small countries: Greece, Portugal, and Ireland; it is not large enough to support bigger countries like Spain or Italy. Nor was it originally meant to deal with the problems of the banking system, although its scope has subsequently been extended to include banks as well as sovereign states. Its biggest shortcoming is that it is purely a fund-raising mechanism; the authority to spend the money is left with the governments of the member countries. This renders the EFSF useless in responding to a crisis; it has to await instructions from the member countries.

The situation has been further aggravated by the recent decision of the German Constitutional Court. While the court found that the EFSF is constitutional, it prohibited any future guarantees benefiting additional states without the prior approval of the budget committee of the Bundestag. This will greatly constrain the discretionary powers of the German government in confronting future crises.

The seeds of the next crisis have already been sown by the way the authorities responded to the last crisis. They accepted the principle that countries receiving assistance should not have to pay punitive interest rates and they set up the EFSF as a fund-raising mechanism for this purpose. Had this principle been accepted in the first place, the Greek crisis would not have grown so severe. As it is, the contagion—in the form of increasing inability to pay sovereign and other debt—has spread to Spain and Italy, but those countries are not allowed to borrow at the lower, concessional rates extended to Greece. This has set them on a course that will eventually land them in the same predicament as Greece. In the case of Greece, the debt burden has clearly become unsustainable. Bondholders have been offered a “voluntary” restructuring by which they would accept lower interest rates and delayed or decreased repayments; but no other arrangements have been made for a possible default or for defection from the eurozone.

These two deficiencies—no concessional rates for Italy or Spain and no preparation for a possible default and defection from the eurozone by Greece—have cast a heavy shadow of doubt both on the government bonds of other deficit countries and on the banking system of the eurozone, which is loaded with those bonds. As a stopgap measure the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped into the breach by buying Spanish and Italian bonds in the market. But that is not a viable solution. The ECB had done the same thing for Greece, but that did not stop the Greek debt from becoming unsustainable. If Italy, with its debt at 108 percent of GDP and growth of less than 1 percent, had to pay risk premiums of 3 percent or more to borrow money, its debt would also become unsustainable.

The ECB’s earlier decision to buy Greek bonds had been highly controversial; Axel Weber, the ECB’s German board member, resigned from the board in protest. The intervention did blur the line between monetary and fiscal policy, but a central bank is supposed to do whatever is necessary to preserve the financial system. That is particularly true in the absence of a fiscal authority. Subsequently, the controversy led the ECB to adamantly oppose a restructuring of Greek debt—by which, among other measures, the time for repayment would be extended—turning the ECB from a savior of the system into an obstructionist force. The ECB has prevailed: the EFSF took over the risk of possible insolvency of the Greek bonds from the ECB.

The resolution of this dispute has in turn made it easier for the ECB to embark on its current program to purchase Italian and Spanish bonds, which, unlike those of Greece, are not about to default. Still, the decision has encountered the same internal opposition from Germany as the earlier intervention in Greek bonds. Jürgen Stark, the chief economist of the ECB, resigned on September 9. In any case the current intervention has to be limited in scope because the capacity of the EFSF to extend help is virtually exhausted by the rescue operations already in progress in Greece, Portugal, and Ireland.

In the meantime the Greek government is having increasing difficulties in meeting the conditions imposed by the assistance program. The troika supervising the program—the EU, the IMF, and the ECB—is not satisfied; Greek banks did not fully subscribe to the latest treasury bill auction; and the Greek government is running out of funds.

In these circumstances an orderly default and temporary withdrawal from the eurozone may be preferable to a drawn-out agony. But no preparations have been made. A disorderly default could precipitate a meltdown similar to the one that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, but this time one of the authorities that would be needed to contain it is missing.

No wonder that the financial markets have taken fright. Risk premiums that must be paid to buy government bonds have increased, stocks have plummeted, led by bank stocks, and recently even the euro has broken out of its trading range on the downside. The volatility of markets is reminiscent of the crash of 2008.

The authorities are doing what they can to forestall an immediate breakdown. The Greeks are meeting the troika’s demands so as to receive the next installment of the rescue package. The ECB is allowing banks to borrow dollars for up to three months instead of just one week, as has been the case. The Bundestag is expected to pass legislation establishing the EFSF. These steps will delay the climax from September to December.

Unfortunately, the capacity of the financial authorities to take additional measures has been severely restricted by the recent ruling of the German Constitutional Court. It appears that the authorities have reached the end of the road with their policy of “kicking the can down the road.” Even if a catastrophe can be avoided, one thing is certain: the pressure to reduce deficits will push the eurozone into prolonged recession. This will have incalculable political consequences. The euro crisis could endanger the political cohesion of the European Union.

There is no escape from this gloomy scenario as long as the authorities persist in their current course. They could, however, change course. They could recognize that they have reached the end of the road and take a radically different approach. Instead of acquiescing in the absence of a solution and trying to buy time, they could look for a solution first and then find a path leading to it. The path that leads to a solution has to be found in Germany, which, as the EU’s largest and highest-rated creditor country, has been thrust into the position of deciding the future of Europe. That is the approach I propose to explore.

To resolve a crisis in which the impossible becomes possible it is necessary to think about the unthinkable. To start with, it is imperative to prepare for the possibility of default and defection from the eurozone in the case of Greece, Portugal, and perhaps Ireland. To prevent a financial meltdown, four sets of measures would have to be taken. First, bank deposits have to be protected. If a euro deposited in a Greek bank would be lost to the depositor, a euro deposited in an Italian bank would then be worth less than one in a German or Dutch bank and there would be a run on the banks of other deficit countries. Second, some banks in the defaulting countries have to be kept functioning in order to keep the economy from breaking down. Third, the European banking system would have to be recapitalized and put under European, as distinct from national, supervision. Fourth, the government bonds of the other deficit countries would have to be protected from contagion. The last two requirements would apply even if no country defaults.

All this would cost money. Under existing arrangements no more money is to be found and no new arrangements are allowed by the German Constitutional Court decision without the authorization of the Bundestag. There is no alternative but to give birth to the missing ingredient: a European treasury with the power to tax and therefore to borrow. This would require a new treaty, transforming the EFSF into a full-fledged treasury.

That would presuppose a radical change of heart, particularly in Germany. The German public still thinks that it has a choice about whether to support the euro or to abandon it. That is a mistake. The euro exists and the assets and liabilities of the financial system are so intermingled on the basis of a common currency that a breakdown of the euro would cause a meltdown beyond the capacity of the authorities to contain. The longer it takes for the German public to realize this, the heavier the price they and the rest of the world will have to pay.

The question is whether the German public can be convinced of this argument. Angela Merkel may not be able to persuade her own coalition, but she could rely on the opposition. Having resolved the euro crisis, she would have less to fear from the next elections.

The fact that arrangements are made for the possible default or defection of three small countries does not mean that those countries would be abandoned. On the contrary, the possibility of an orderly default—paid for by the other eurozone countries and the IMF—would offer Greece and Portugal policy choices. Moreover, it would end the vicious cycle now threatening all of the eurozone’s deficit countries whereby austerity weakens their growth prospects, leading investors to demand prohibitively high interest rates and thus forcing their governments to cut spending further.

Leaving the euro would make it easier for them to regain competitiveness; but if they are willing to make the necessary sacrifices they could also stay in. In both cases, the EFSF would protect bank deposits and the IMF would help to recapitalize the banking system. That would help these countries to escape from the trap in which they currently find themselves. It would be against the best interests of the European Union to allow these countries to collapse and drag down the global banking system with them.

It is not for me to spell out the details of the new treaty; that has to be decided by the member countries. But the discussions ought to start right away because even under extreme pressure they will take a long time to conclude. Once the principle of setting up a European Treasury is agreed upon, the European Council could authorize the ECB to step into the breach, indemnifying the ECB in advance against risks to its solvency. That is the only way to forestall a possible financial meltdown and another Great Depression.

—September 15, 2011

Beato com Obit de Amy

2011-07-29T10:26:00.000-03:00

AMY WINEHOUSE (1983-2011)

LIFE IS A LOSING GAME

“Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Pete Townsend (The Who), My Generation”
(TOWSEND, Pete, My Generation, in http://www.lyrics007.com/The%20Who%20Lyrics/My%20Generation%20Lyrics.html,
acessado em 26/07/2011).

«É melhor viver
dez anos a mil,
do que mil anos a dez»
(Lobão, Décadence avec Elegance,
in http://letras.terra.com.br/lobao/446178/,
acessado em 26/07/2011).

«É melhor morrer de vodka que de tédio»
(Vladímir Maiácovsky).

«ll n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux:
c'est le suicide.
Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d'être vécue,
c'est répondre à la question fondamentale de la philosophie.
Le reste, si le monde a trois dimensions,
si l'esprit a neuf ou douze catégories, vient ensuite.
Ce sont des jeux; il faut d'abord répondre.»

Camus, Albert, Le Mythe de Sisyphe,
Folio Essais Folio Essais # 11, Gallimard © 1942, pages 17 et 18, in http://www.philo5.com/Les%20philosophes%20Textes/Camus_AbsurdeEtRevolte.htm,
acessado em 26/07/2011).

“Ó Shariputra, aqui a forma é o vazio e o vazio é a forma; tudo que tem forma é exatamente o vazio e tudo que é vazio é exatamente a forma. Dessa maneira as sensações, as concepções, a discriminação e a consciência são também vazias e desprovidas de substância. Ó Sariputra, o vazio de todas as coisas não foi criado e não pode ser destruído e dessa maneira no vazio não há forma, não há sensações, não há discriminação e não há consciência. Não há olho, não há ouvido, não há nariz, não há língua, não há corpo e não há mente. Não há cor, não há som, não há cheiro, não há gosto, não há tato e não há fenômenos. Nada existe desde o reino da visão até o reino da consciência. Não há ignorância nem extinção da ignorância, não há sofrimento, não há causa do sofrimento, não há velhice, não há morte, não há extinção do sofrimento, da velhice ou da morte, não há sabedoria e iluminamento e nada há para ser ganho. Como nada há para ser ganho, o Bodhisatva vive em Prajna Paramita e não há obstáculos em seu coração, e sem obstáculos não há medo e muito além dos pensamentos ilusórios,e ele atinge o Nirvana”.

(Sutra do Coração da Grande Perfeição da Sabedoria (Índia, século 1. D.C.), acessado em http://www.sanghazen.com.br/sutras.pdf, página 49, acessado em 28/07/2011).

Amy Winehouse talvez nunca tenha lido Émile Cioran (De l´Inconvénient d´Etre Né, Éditions Gallimard, Collection Folio – Essais, 1973), mas sempre soube do enorme inconveniente que é ter nascido, e que a própria vida, e não só o amor (Love is a Losing Game, in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n35ffD9H6pA&feature=share e http://letras.terra.com.br/amy-winehouse/879972/traducao.html, acessados em 28/07/11), era uma mão errada no poker de tudo, que todos nós tiramos, um jogo perdido desde o início para todos, seja pelo tédio ou pela vodka e seus congêneres. Preferiu entregar-se a estes a perecer daquele, porque mortos já estamos quase todos, e só pela arte, sexo ou música ressuscitamos por alguns momentos, e os estupefacientes podem nos mostrar, ainda que a um preço altíssimo, como seria uma vida como a sonhamos, intensa e extasiante como um orgasmo eterno taoísta ou tântrico. Ou seja, tudo o que não é a existência da maior parte das pessoas, sóbria, burocrática e repetitiva como uma neurose intratável. Segundo o principal jornal holandês (“Amy Winehouse wist dat ze jong zou sterven", in http://www.telegraaf.nl/prive/10258804/__Amy_wist_van_vroege_dood__.html?fb_ref=art&fb_source=profile_oneline, acessado em 28/07/11), Amy previra sua associação ao Clube dos 27 de Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison et caterva, o dos que preferiram morrer enquanto, a vida ainda ardia como uma chama incontrolável que, em sua volúpia, tudo consumia, arte, música, corpos e tudo mais que era belo e celebração. Muito antes dos ídolos da década de 60 os poetas românticos do fin-de-siècle que morriam tuberculosos já estavam e eram, como eram todos os cantores da vida desmedida e desregrada, Baudelaire e seus companheiros nos Paraísos Artificiais da Paris por onde flanavam. Sua morte é também a morte da morte de Janis Joplin, também ela mulher, excessiva, bêbada e drogada, mas desbravadora, em uma época de contestação onde queimar sutiãs, ou não usá-los, ainda era novidade. Agora não há mais nada contra o quê se insurgir, mais resta a culpa e o blues de ser tão louca, ácida e mulher (“Amy Winehouse sang of a deeply feminine suffering”, in http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jul/26/amy-winehouse-lyrics , acessado em 28/07/2011), a forte e agridoce melancolia do amor intensamente físico e fácil. Em sua vida excessivamente intensa e curta, foi integralmente trágica como toda mulher, pois não podia se impedir de ser o que era (“You know I´m no Good”, in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr56knoA1rA&feature=share e http://letras.terra.com.br/amy-winehouse/879973/, acessados em 28/07/2011), e sabia que nenhuma reabilitação (“Rehab”, in http://letras.terra.com.br/amy-winehouse/858528/# , acessado em 28/07/2011) era possível, nem como todo amor do Pai. Preferiu partir de volta ao Negror do Nada de onde todos viemos e para onde retornaremos, Back to Black (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJAfLE39ZZ8&ob=av2n e http://letras.terra.com.br/amy-winehouse/932418/, acessados em 28/07/2011), com sua alma presa na foto dos mass media e seus irresistíveis rendimentos, ela que era tão suas canções que eram tão ela, nascida na terra que inventou a privacy só pelo prazer de violá-la a cada instante. Lembro de alguém que me contava de um grande poeta, alcóolatra, que depois que se curou, nunca mais escreveu um só poema que prestasse, e de outro que me contou de encontros com um mesmo jovem, esquizofrênico, um em um bar, animado e cheio de vida, e outro numa festa de família, um zumbi impregnado de medicação antipsicótica, antes do inevitável suicídio. Toda mulher quer um algoz prá chamar de seu, mas Amy, que teve todos os homens e mulheres que quis, preferiu se sacrificar por todos nós, mostrando como a vida pode ser foda ainda que insana, a nós que passaremos incólumes por uma existência perfeitamente banal e inútil, atravessando por 40 ou 80 anos o deserto da (in)existência sem sequer avistar, mesmo de longe, a Terra Prometida onde escorre o Leite o Mel, nós que não estaremos entre os muitos chamados nem entre os poucos escolhidos, que andaremos pelo Vale da Morte sem que ninguém nos conduza, depois de uma vida em que não teremos ganho nada, porque nada arriscamos. Esse é o impasse. Que talvez, entretanto, sequer exista, e nada haja para ser ganho, e tudo seja o instante em que nossos dedos apenas sentem a carta marcada do jogo da vida, sem saber que é vida, ou que é jogo.

Beato Salu de Volta

2011-07-25T14:32:00.000-03:00

DOIS ARTISTAS
NEGROS, POBRES, DEMENTES
―
RICOS, SANTOS:
ITAMAR ASSUMPÇÃO E ARTUR BISPO DO ROSÁRIO

– ITAMAR ASSUMPÇÃO

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

(THOMAS, Dylan, “In My Craft or Sullen Art”, in http://www.naic.edu/~gibson/poems/dthomas1.html, acessado em 22/07/2011).

Daquele Instante em Diante, documentário de Rogerio Velloso, da série Iconoclássicos do Itaú Cultural, sobre a vida e a obra de Itamar Assumpção, Beleléu vulgo Nego Dito ― entidade que esse filho de Xangô recebia nos palcos paulistanos ―, como Arrigo Barnabé, integrante da linha de frente da vanguarda paranaense que se estabeleceu na capital bandeirante, Isca de Polícia reformando os Rumos da MPBosta junto com Premeditando o Breque e outros. Escolheu viver a vida em estado de criação, misturando samba, reggae e atonalismo, teatro e canção, obsessivamente trabalhando seus arranjos, fugindo do star system e de seus esquemões, mas ao mesmo tempo agridoce, lamentando a fama que não veio e pela qual não conseguiu, não conseguimos não desejar, ainda assim quase um autista da estética, TOC do som, pesquisador musical inexaurível, Negritude Sênior, bom pater familias e marido exemplar de italianíssima do Paraná, caseiro e global, cotidiano e anarquia, ultrapop fundindo Marley e Miles, Schönberg e Ataulfo, no final quase um velho sacerdote rastafári, magérrimo por seu tumor, dreads grisalhos. Como teria digerido o rap carioca e o batido no seu liquidificador de toda a música, samba de break, rock de breque, funk jazz de reggae? Como permanecer sempre ligado em som, des-reconstruindo-se musicalmente, ser de verdade independente, sem deixar de lidar com a questão material ou, pior, o ego _ e os outros? Por que alguns são tão à frente de seu tempo, chegam antes da hora e saem tão antes de a festa ficar boa? Hoje teria sido tão mais fácil sua produção independente do que em seu tempo de vinil. Mas não, nada, nirgends mais o negão que um dia pulou da Penha para abalar Berlim, aonde quase foi antes de ir-se, e que ainda permanece como um bólido sempre na contramão, no front da resistência da canção, abrindo a força outros caminhos _ ainda que ninguém mais os percorra. Alternativa àqueloutra alternativa que um dia cansa e se oficializa, Pretobrás preferiu a cada vez sair pela tangente e fugir antes que para ele se abrisse o proscênio da glória pasteurizada da indústria cultural, persistindo “Em seu ofício ou arte taciturna”, música é aqui e agora ou não é nada, pura, ainda que imperceptível para as massas, ainda que a falta de reconhecimento doa como um câncer.

Vide http://www.pastilhascoloridas.com/2011/07/doc-itamar-assumpcao-daquele-instante.html; http://www.maissoma.com/2011/7/13/itamar-assumpcao-daquele-instante-em-diante-2011; http://cinema.uol.com.br/ultnot/2011/07/08/itamar-nao-foi-absorvido-pela-industria-como-os-mutantes-ou-tropicalistas-diz-diretor-de-daquele-instante-em-diante.jhtm; http://www.itamarassumpcao.com.br/; http://fortaleza.etc.br/o-que-fazer-geral/details/6208-cinema-daquele-instante-em-diante-documentario-itamar-assumpcao-em-um-documentario-sobre-sua-v.html; http://www.negodito.com/musica-confira-o-trailer-de-daquele-instante-em-diante-doc-sobre-itamar-assumpcao/, acessados em 22/07/2011.

- ARTUR BISPO DO ROSÁRIO

“Hoje executarei meus versos
na flauta de minhas próprias vértebras.”

(MAIACÓVSKY, Vladímir, “A Flauta-Vértebra”, in http://versofractal.blogspot.com/2011/05/flauta-vertebra-maiakovski.html,
acessado em 22/07/2011).

“Não faço isto para os homens, mas para Deus.”

(Artur Bispo do Rosário, in http://pt.shvoong.com/humanities/1768645-arthur-bispo-ros%C3%A1rio-biografia/, acessado em 22/07/2011)

“Wo Es war,
Soll Ich werden.”

(Sigmund Freud)

Toda riqueza está dentro nós, toda a arte, todo o sexo, todo o Deus, Do Todo e de Todas as Coisas, é o que mostra a mostra “Artur Bispo do Rosário – O Artista do Fio – Caixa Cultural”. Artur Bispo do Rosário, nordestino, preto, pobre, passou a maior parte da vida interno no que antes de chamava um hospital de alienados, a Colônia Juliano Moreira. Como, desprovido de todo suporte, produzir arte? Com o fio de seu, e de seu próprio uniforme de doido oficial, seu e dos outros internos, não diria companheiros de infortúnio porque além disso ser brega, loucura é que nem a morte, cada um tem a sua, e próprio dela ser uma coisa que nos torna únicos e torna a todos distantes. Dizem que o louco não vive no corpo, está fora dele, e responde mal aos sinais que os (cinco ?) sentidos lhe dão. Mas sua representação dos diversos objetos que via era ultra-realista, cafeteiras, arreios, chaleiras, sem distorções à la Bacon ou Lucien Freud, nem gordas nem magras, concretas, exatas, re-costurando objetos com fios azuis até fazer deles suas ORFA's (Objeto Recoberto por Fio Azul), como micro-maquetes de tudo o que há no mundo. A exposição suspende os ORFAs no ar por fios nada azuis, quase invisíveis: pensei nos nossos pensamentos que, quando certa vez, em meditação, profunda, na forma ensinada por George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (http://www.gurdjieff.org.br/mestre.htm, acessado em 22/07/2011), entendi que apenas passam pela mente que é como uma televisão permanentemente ligada, pela qual, porém, logo nada passa se não somos por hipnotizadas pelo que apenas passa, mas apenas pensamos no não-pensar. Parece que Bispo se impôs a missão de recriar toda as coisas existentes para que, no Dia do Juízo, desse a Nosso Senhor testemunho de Sua criação. Se pôde ou não cumprir sua promessa, nunca saberemos. Mas é fato que, ao tornar tangíveis as coisas que o pensamento representa, é como se o quisesse agarrar, ele que é tão fugidio e que invade a todos nós, e aos (mais) loucos, da forma mais terrível. (Re)Criando as coisas, Bispo se assemelhava ao Criador original, nomeando-as, inscrevendo-as no único mundo que parece real – o da matéria. Psicanálise do precário, sua arte ultrapovera foi, se não sua cachaça (ou seu Haldol), seu atarático ― homeopático ― de sua esquizofrenia estóica, seu remédio para aquilo que nos invade e que é em nosso lugar, aí mesmo onde deveríamos ser.

Vide http://guiadecidades.terra.com.br/pe/arte-e-cultura-exposicao-arthur-bispo-do-rosario-o-artista-do-fio-en-rio-de-janeiro; http://www.cultura.rj.gov.br/espaco-evento/caixa-cultural-unidade-almirante-barroso/artista-do-fio; http://saitica.blogspot.com/2010/07/artur-bispo-exposicao-no-margrs.html; http://pt.shvoong.com/humanities/1768645-arthur-bispo-ros%C3%A1rio-biografia/; http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=246328042060651; http://www.brasil247.com.br/pt/247/cultura/7147/Os-fios-azuis-do-Bispo-do-Ros%C3%A1rio.htm, acessados em 22/07/2011.

Bomb Magazine on Luke Butler

2011-06-13T11:37:00.002-03:00

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http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/5167

ART
The Body That Doesn't Belong To You Anymore
by Bhanu Kapil Jun 08, 2011
(Painting, Artists Draw)

Bhanu Kapil interviews Luke Butler, with ancillary notes on vertigo, citizenship, and Gerald Ford’s penis, in the fifth installment of BOMBlog’s reprints of [ 2nd Floor Projects ]’s editions.

Luke Butler, Leader of Men 38: Pergamon, 2008.

The Body That Doesn’t Belong To You Anymore: an interview with Luke Butler, with ancillary notes on vertigo, citizenship, and Gerald Ford’s penis.

Since 1974, when I first saw one, I’ve seen approximately eight. Well, somewhere between eight and twenty-four, including my stint as a volunteer in the geriatric ward of Mount Vernon Hospital in Northwood, Middlesex, when I was seventeen. My father wanted me to be a doctor and so, in an effort to bulk up my pre-med C.V., I spent most of late March 1985 swabbing the blackened remnants of diverse genitalia. It was the worst job in the place, but the nurses would share their chocolate digestive biscuits with me on tea break, which came at 10:30 sharp, and during which they told me stories I became addicted to, stories about anatomy, about an old person’s clothes being removed for the first time in years and what was underneath. It was horrible—though I could not, for the life of me, not listen. My heart would nearly burst and when I went back onto the ward, the two genders separated by a massive grey curtain, I felt relieved that it was me doing this work and not the nurses, who would tell a person to their face, glancing down between their legs: “Look at this. Disgusting.”

No, I think it’s best to begin with Gerald Ford’s penis, with the proviso that I was born in England to Indian parents and thus stared for a long time at Luke Butler’s “Leader of Men 37: Self Portrait”, a collage of President Nixon shaving without his underpants on, and thought that he, Nixon, was Ford, until I realized my terrible mistake. Gerald Ford is the one in the redwoods, toweling pine tar off his left foot as he stares at something on the forest floor. The trees above him accelerate into the sky. Here, in “Leader of Men 38: Wolverine Towel”, the casual public nudity of a figure no longer in existence combines with the convulsive effect of a speeding, vertical landscape to make you, automatically, cock your head.

Though I became accustomed to Gerald Ford’s dizzying genital prospect, I cannot say the same for President Nixon’s, with its side-view presentation, dark red hue, and its position in the image next to that iconic 1970s bathroom fixture, the bulky chrome tap. In considering the community of penises in Luke Butler’s archive of public servants, a sequence that includes a naked, coastal Vice President Agnew, whom I had never heard of in my life despite recently becoming a US citizen, I thought of them (the penises) as replicant, as somehow in alliance. It was at this point that I recognized the need for outside help and dialed the Immigrant Assimilation hotline. It was disconnected, and so I called Luke Butler’s cell instead.

Luke Butler Hi . . . Can you hear me? I’m in some kind of wind-tunnel. I’m trying to find a little shelter. Okay. That’s better. Hi!

Me Er . . . Is this the Gerald Ford Library?

Luke Butler Yes, it certainly is. Can I help you?

Me I hope so. Okay, I can talk in a normal voice. Luke. Luke Butler, I’ve been trying to write about the kind of figures you’re making in your art, the way so many of them are captured mid-grimace, or in a moment of imbalance or crisis, like Chekov pricking his fingers on the yellow flowers, or Captain Kirk collapsed and insentient on a pile of grey rocks. Or Gerald Ford wiping himself off with a towel while standing on one foot, and then the one where he’s slathered in shaving cream.

Luke Butler The shaving cream one? That’s President Nixon.

Me [Trying to sound as if had made casual mistake]. Right, right. Nixon. All this surplus energy, excessive nudity, men in power . . . . as if their bodies form the repository of a powerful, latent force that doesn’t go anywhere, it just loops back into the domain of the images, to make another one. Another President, or Vice President. Like these dead but living creatures that just keep coming. Like zombies.

Luke Butler Monsters . . .

Me Do you think of your work as monstrous?

Luke Butler Well, I think of a true monster as an unleashed natural force. Like a tsunami, which is an inextricable event. Did you get the image I sent you of the ocean, “The End”? I look at that and see a wave that lurches out of its natural firmament. I look at Nixon and Ford and I think what fascinated me about them is that they’ve got this tremendous ancestral power, but they’re somehow buried in our collective memory. We don’t think about them anymore. Especially Ford, who was actually, apparently, this modest, decent person. And then there’s Agnew. Agnew is Nixon’s first Vice President, who resigned over bribery/tax evasion. Nixon appoints Ford to replace him, and when Nixon steps down a year later over Watergate, Ford becomes the first and only man to hold both offices while being elected to neither. They were these average people who became emperors, these indelible figures, but at the same time are completely obscure. Like these ghosts, ghosts more than zombies I think, who have sort of collapsed inside our shared memory, and when you look at that it’s very strange. They’re so isolated . . . . like valueless, lonely, forlorn abandoned houses. And then the naked pictures . . . emphasize that loneliness. They’re like a toy that no one wants to play with anymore, and at the same time they’re this common American property. Their bodies don’t belong to them anymore.

Luke Butler, Leader of Men 37: Self Portrait, 2008.

Me And then there’s your work with outer space . . . . Captain Kirk splayed on an alien outcrop, surrounded by all that wet grey paint, which I love. I saw the photos from Jessica Silverman’s studio visit, for Whitehot magazine . . . and how your “characteristic grey background,” as she described it, drips and smears onto the wall, extending the abstract, unpopulated matter Kirk and his crew are wandering in. Define: grey paint.

Luke Butler Built-in obscurity.

Me I used to work in the KFC on Birmingham New Street. That’s separate. Back to you. Star Trek. Did I hear you say when you were a kid, you liked action figures?

Luke Butler Yes! Toys, action figures, all the tiny heroes . . . . My work really is about the people on the other side of monsters, the heroes—I both venerate them and see through their imperviousness, trying to make them at least partly small, like me!

Me Okay, then I’m still thinking again about the way you collate these contracted, yet explicit male bodies. The way you put the penis that is not their penis but is nevertheless a penis on the body. Luke Butler, what is the definition of a penis?

Luke Butler [Laughing in wind tunnel, but because of the wind it’s a completely supernatural sound, all crackled and echoey]. A penis has a blunt, natural, reproductive presence in our lives. And at the same time it’s a monster, it’s incredibly unwelcome. There is no more common or ordinary yet despised figure than the penis. As a male in this world, you’re surrounded by men and so, there are all these penises but you never see them. You don’t see them anywhere . . . and there’s so much loneliness connected to that. I’m fascinated by the illogical convention of the penis—this symbol of American sexuality—and yet, it’s such an unwanted thing. There’s no room for the image of the penis in our world. It’s like, as a male, “What am I supposed to be doing with this?” You can’t really put it on display. The only way your sexuality is safe is if it’s never touched. So, because, as an artist, I want divergence, it’s really funny and interesting to me, to see these rigid, masculine, static figures—these heroes—completely, naturally naked. It’s a way, also, of claiming and manipulating this history, which high school students don’t even know about, they can’t even recognize Nixon’s face . . .

Me That’s terrible—

Luke Butler And at the same time, there’s this unpredictable erection.

Me All this intensity. But for what? I’m looking at “Leaders of Men 37: Batman and Robin” and, specifically, I’m curious about Spiro Agnew’s erection. It’s more dominant than Nixon’s. There’s something about it that implies pleasure, coupling, though, like all the other leaders, Agnew’s face is totally blank. Why is his face blank?

Luke Butler Because he’s a ghost. In a way, these men really are like giants, or monsters, these ultra-masculine figures who were once so powerful and are now all but forgotten. It’s amazing to me how little anyone talks or thinks about them (in the Bush era it may be very comforting to imagine a day when he is no longer thought of). But they are like monsters to me in that they sit in our collective histories doing nothing, and to look back and find them and their stories can be very, very surprising. Ford especially, he has a very low profile, nobody but me ever talks about him. And they are naked—male nudity is still rather shocking in this culture, monstrous even—the penis is a terrible dragon! So why not have the old presidents lead us to it?

Luke Butler, Chekhov, 2008.

At this point in our conversation, the wind picked up and we said goodbye. If you are reading this, perhaps you are looking at Luke Butler’s collages, or did, earlier in the evening, or yesterday. Perhaps you, too, have become obsessed with Gerald Ford and notice that people mention him in conversation more frequently and randomly than before you encountered Luke Butler’s art. For example, I was recently sorting muddy scallions into cardboard boxes at Cresset Community Farm, a biodynamic farming cooperative on the high plains of Colorado. There could not be a simpler place, more gelled with brownish-silver clods of dirt. There, as I was passing the bundles of onions to a woman who had come up from Denver to barter physical labor for vegetables, I said, being a polite person originally from the United Kingdom: “So, that’s a long drive. Do you listen to books on tape in your car?” She said: “How did you guess?” And proceeded to narrate the contents of a book she was currently listening to, about the history of the CIA. She said: “But Gerald Ford . . . he wasn’t too bad, actually. He wasn’t too involved in all that stuff. He wasn’t like those other nasty men.” Me: “Do you think Gerald Ford was sexy?” Woman from Denver: “Oh my word. I turned nineteen the first year he was President. I thought he was so handsome.”

Ancillary Notes

1. In 1985, I met Arthur Scargill in a café in Euston. It was a working man’s café, totally rough, and me and Ann John, en route to our interviews at The Royal London Hospital, had ducked in for a runny egg breakfast with its accompaniment of chips and beans, which you do not get in the more vendor-based establishments north of the river. “Was that who I think it was?” “Yeah.” “Oh my god….” “I’m going back in.” “No!” “Yes.” What must Mr. Scargill, miner, activist, political leader, have thought of the Indian kid in a green blazer and knee-high grey socks telling him she “really, really” admired his work? On a napkin, he scrawled: “Working together towards a better future! Yours, Arthur. January 6th, 1985.” A napkin I still possess.

2. A ghost mutates through intensity, gathering enough energy to touch you through your thin blouse, or your leggings, or your scarf. A ghost damages the triptych of ancestors composed of descending, passive, and synthetic scraps. But what if the ghost is empty because it’s making a space for you? Vertigo is a symptom of profound attraction. An excess of desire. Once, after a long shift at KFC, during which we ran out of baked beans and the manager sent me across the Birmingham New Street plaza with a twenty pound note, to Marks and Spencer, for a family-size tin, I didn’t go back to the flat in Selby where my boyfriend lived. I went to the cinema in my red and white striped shirt and watched Au Revoir Les Enfants. A Londoner, I blinked in the rainy quiet darkness that had fallen by the time I left. I ducked into a bright room. There, I was picked up by a Muslim man with a thick Yorkshire accent, who bought me a Malibu and orange. I was conscious of having wasted my entire summer on a boyfriend. My parents thought I was interning as a trainee journalist on a regional broadsheet. I’d told the KFC manager my mother was dying, and that I had to take every weekend off to be with her in the hospital. On Saturday mornings, my boyfriend would drive us to the sea in his refurbished Nash Metropolitan. Once, he drove us to France. I drank coffee on the ferry, staring into the blazing pink sun while he slept, his head on my lap. But that night, a Thursday night, I ended up in a graveyard with the man from the bar, and his friend, who had arrived as we were leaving. A ghost is a duplicate, a tall and handsome man who contracts then dilates so swiftly, you can’t refuse. In fact, you don’t say a word when a ghost, when two ghosts, lead you by your upper arm into an empty place, verdant with cypress and elm.

3. I want the grey paint extending to the wall in writing. Why? I can’t say why. It filled me with such desire to see the photograph of the studio in the Whitehot article. A wet wall incarnates an image. The matter a figure is made of is scraped from an undocumented environment. That wet page is a silver page, and perhaps this is why I am always elated when I visit San Francisco. It is dark too, but with red and yellow flowers in the writer’s garden. Chrome yellow, a merged color, and I want that too. Inflorescence. I write because I cannot paint. I write with the painter in the pink afternoon, the red day, and sometimes at night, true night, evacuating future books and writing new ones, in which countries and bodies are visible.

Luke Butler, THE END #23, 2007.

About [2nd floor projects]:

Since establishing [ 2nd floor projects ] in San Francisco in 2007, I have featured twenty writers in the exhibitions, with six writers forthcoming in 2011. My programming includes commissions to writers throughout the country to produce an edition: essays, personal narratives, interviews, poetry, or mixed-genre pieces in the form of handcrafted broadsheets or chapbooks. From early on in my art practice, I have been interested in trespassing disciplines. These visual, theoretical, and narrative crossings perhaps address an interstitial space of engagement with the artists’ works from the writer’s point of departure. A distal approach rather than the traditional essay model, such as an exhibition catalogue. For each exhibition, I design and print in-house a limited run of 100 on archival papers. The writers are also invited to give a reading during the run of the exhibition, or to send a recording if they are not in the area. [ 2nd floor projects ] participated in the NY Art Book Fair in 2009 and 2010. BOMBlog will be re-publishing these pieces regularly over the next several months.

—Margaret Tedesco, Director

Bhanu Kapil is a British-Indian writer who lives in Colorado, where she teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, as well as Goddard College. Her full-length collections are: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), and humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009). A new prose work, Schizophrene, is coming out this Spring from Nightboat Books.

Gil Scott-Heron RIP bro... All my loving...

2011-05-31T10:06:00.000-03:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvHNmx41fo0&feature=autoplay&list=PL75CDE29E8CAF7B24&index=13&playnext=8

Western Media Fraud in the Middle East

2011-05-30T08:00:00.001-03:00

Western media fraud in the Middle East

Too many journalists report official narratives of the powerful, missing the stories of working class people.

Nir Rosen Last Modified: 18 May 2011 17:44

Most Western reporters covering the war in Iraq do not speak Arabic, so they are dependent on translators and various officials and getting opinions average people becomes challenging

Too often, you consumers of mainstream media are victims of a fraud. You think you can trust the articles you read - why wouldn't you? You think you can sift through the ideological bias and just get the facts. But you don't know the ingredients that go into the product you buy. It is important to understand how knowledge about current events in the Middle East is produced before relying on it. Even when there are no apparent ideological biases, such as those one often sees when it comes to reporting about Israel, there are fundamental problems at the epistemological and methodological level. These create distortions, falsehoods and justify the narrative of those with power.

In discussing the manners in which the Western intelligentsia and media depict the Middle East, the French intellectual and scholar Francois Burgat complained that two main types of intellectuals tasked with explaining the "other" to Westerners dominate. Firstly, there is what he and Bourdieu, another philosopher, describe as the "negative intellectual" who aligns his beliefs and priorities with those of the state, and centres his perspective on serving the interests of power and gaining proximity to it. And secondly, there is what Burgat terms as "the facade intellectual", whose role in society is to confirm Western audiences with their already-held notions, beliefs, preconceptions, and racisms regarding the "other". Journalists writing for the mainstream media, as well as their local interlocutors, often fall into both categories.

A vast literature exists on the impossibility of journalism in its classic, liberal sense with all the familiar tropes on objectivity, neutrality, and "transmitting reality". However, and perhaps out of a lack of an alternative source of legitimation, major mainstream media outlets in the West continue to grasp to these notions with ever more insistence. The Middle East is an exceptionally suitable place for the Western media to learn about itself and its future, because it is the scene where all pretentions of objectivity, neutrality towards power, and critical engagement have faltered spectacularly.

Framing the 'other'

Journalists are the archetype of ideological tools who create culture and produce knowledge. Their function is to represent a class and perpetuate the dominant ideology instead of building a counter hegemonic and revolutionary ideology, or narrative, in this case. They are the organic intellectuals of the ruling class. Instead of being the voice of the people or the working class, journalists are too often the functional tools for a bourgeois ruling class. They produce and disseminate culture and meaning for the system and reproduce its values, allowing it to hegemonise the field of culture and since journalism today has a specific political economy, they are all products of the hegemonic discourse and the moneyed class.

The working class has no networks, that applies too to Hollywood and television entertainment and series; it is all the same intellectuals producing them. Even journalists with pretentions of being serious usually only serve elites and ignore social movements. Journalism tends to be state centric, focusing on elections, institutions, formal politics and overlooking politics of contention, informal politics, social movements.

Those with reputations as brave war reporters who hop around the world, parachuting into conflicts from Yemen to Afghanistan, typically only confirm Americans' views of the world. Journalism simplifies, which means it de-historicises. Journalism in the Middle East is too often a violent act of representation. Western journalists take reality and amputate it, contort it, and fit it into a predetermined discourse or taxonomy.

The American media always want to fit events in the region into an American narrative. The recent assassination of Osama bin Laden was greeted with a collective shrug of the shoulder in the Middle East, where he had always been irrelevant, but for Americans and hence for the American media it was a historic and defining moment which changed everything. Too often contact with the West has defined events in the Middle East, but the so-called Arab Spring with its revolutions and upheavals evokes anxiety among white Americans. They are unsettled with the autogenetic liberation of brown people. However, the Arab Spring may represent a revolutionary transformation of the Arab world, a massive blow to Islamist politics and the renaissance of secular and leftist Arab nationalist politics.

But the American media has been obsessed with Islamists, looking for them behind every demonstration, and the uprisings have been often treated as if they were something threatening. And all too often, it just comes down to "what does this mean for Israel's security?" The aspirations of hundreds of millions of freedom-seeking Arabs are subordinated to the security concerns of five million Jews who colonised Palestine.

There is a strong element of chauvinism and racism behind the reporting. Like American soldiers, American journalists like to use the occasional local word to show they have unlocked the mysteries of the culture. 'Wasta' is one such word. One American bureau chief in Iraq told me that Muqtada al-Sadr had a lot of wasta now so he could prevent a long American presence. 'Inshallah' is another such word. And in Afghanistan it's 'pushtunwali', the secret to understanding Afghans. Islam is also treated like a code that can be unlocked, and then locals can be understood as if they are programmed only through Islam.

Arab culture and Islam are spoken of the way race was once spoken of in India and Africa, and it is difficult to portray Arabs and Muslims as the good guys unless they are "like us" as in Google executives and other elites who speak English, dress trendy and use Facebook. So they are made to represent the revolutions while the poor, the workers, the subalterns, the majority who don't even have internet access let alone twitter accounts, are ignored. And in order to make the revolutions in Tunisia and especially Egypt seem non-threatening, the nonviolent tactics are emphasised while the many acts of violent resistance to regime oppression are completely ignored. This is not just the journalists' fault. It is driven by American discourse which drives the editors back in New York and Washington.

I've spent most of the last eight years working in Iraq, and also in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen and other countries in the Muslim world. So all my work has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror and has in fact been thanks to this war, even if I've laboured to disprove the underlying premises of this war. In a way my work has still served to support the narrative. I once asked my editor at The New York Times Magazine if I could write about a subject outside the Muslim world. He said even if I was fluent in Spanish and an expert on Latin America, I wouldn't be published if it wasn't about jihad.

Seclusion and narrow narratives

It is important to understand the environment journalists inhabit, the interlocutors, translators and fixers they rely on to filter and mediate for them and the nature in which they collect information, accounts and interviews. One of the popular myths about reporting in Iraq is that journalists stayed in the Green Zone, the walled off fortress neighbourhood that housed the American occupiers and now houses the Iraqi government along with some foreign embassies. This is not true. Throughout the occupation, almost no journalists actually inhabited the Green Zone. They stayed in green zones of their own creation, whether secure compounds or intellectual green zones, creating their own walls. The first green zone for journalists was the fortress around the Sheraton and Palestine hotels in Baghdad, which was initially guarded by American soldiers and later by Iraqi security guards. The New York Times soon constructed its own immense fortress, with guard dogs, guard towers, security guards, immense walls, vehicle searches - so too did the BBC, Associated Press, and others, then there were was the Hamra hotel compound where many bureaus moved until it was damaged in an explosion in 2010. CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera English had their own green zone, though freelancers like myself could rent rooms there. And there is one last green zone which is a large neighbourhood protected by Kurdish peshmerga, where middle class Iraqis and some news bureaus live.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with staying in a secure compound. Foreigners are often targeted in conflict zones and authoritarian countries. You want to go to sleep at night without wondering whether men will kick down your door and drag you away, or whether you should go to sleep with your clothes on so that if a car bomb hits you wont be caught sleeping naked under a pile of rubble. You want to eat decent food and have running water, constant electricity, internet access, conversations with colleagues. A journalist doesn't have to live like an impoverished local. But the less local life you experience, the less you can do your job, and this is what readers need to understand. The average person anywhere in the world goes to work and comes back home. He knows little about people outside his social class, ethnic group, neighbourhood or city. As a journalist, you are making judgements on an entire country and interpreting it for others, but you don't know the country because you don't really live in it. You spend 20 hours a day in seclusion from the country. You have no basis for judgement because to you, Iraq is out there, the red zone, and the pace of filing can make this even harder.

Most mainstream journalists have since 2004 treated reporting in Iraq like a military operation: going out on limited missions with a lot of planning, an armoured car, a chase car for backup, in and out, do the interview and come back home to their own green zone. Or they would more often just make the trip to the actual Green Zone, where officials are easy to meet and interview, where you can enjoy a drink, socialise with diplomats and feel macho because you live in the red zone. But in their artificial green zone, they are still sheltered from life - from Iraqis and from violence.

They did not just hang out, sit in restaurants, in mosques and husseiniyas, in people's homes, walk through slums, shop in local markets, walk around at night, sit in juice shops, sleep in normal people's homes, visit villages, farms, and experience Iraq like an Iraqi, or as close as possible. This means they have no idea what life is like at night, what life is like in rural areas, what social trends are important, what songs are popular, what jokes are being told, what arguments take place on the street, how comfortable people feel, or what sorts of Iraqis go to bars at night. Hanging out is key. You just observe, letting events and people determine your reporting. They also did not investigate, pursue spontaneous leads, develop a network of trusted contacts and sources. Dwindling resources and interest meant bureaus had to shut down or reduce staff, and only occasionally parachute a journalist in to interview a few officials and go back home.

Finessing the social fabric

And since they don't know Arabic, they literally cannot read the writing on the wall - the graffiti on the wall -whether it is for the mujahedin, for Muqtada Sadr, or for the football teams of Madrid or Barcelona. It means that if they talk to one man, the translator only tells them what he said and not what everybody around him was saying, they don't hear the Sadrist songs supporting the Shia of Bahrain, or hear the taxi driver complaining about how things were better under Saddam, or discussing the attacks he saw in the morning, or the soldiers joking at a checkpoint, or the shopkeeper cursing the soldiers. In fact they don't even take taxis or buses, so they miss a key opportunity to interact naturally with people. It means they can't just relax in people's homes and hear families discuss their concerns. They are never able to develop what Germans call fingerspitzengefuhl - that finger tip feeling, an intuitive sense of what is happening, what the trends and sentiments are, which one can only get by running one's own fingers through the social fabric.

A student of the Arab world once commented that any self-appointed terrorism expert must first pass the Um Kulthum test - meaning, has he heard of Um Kulthum, the iconic Egyptian diva of Arab nationalism whose music and lyrics still resonate throughout the Middle East? If they hadn't heard of her, then they obviously were not familiar with Arab culture. In Iraq an equivalent might be the Hawasim test. Saddam called the 1991 war on Iraq "Um al-Maarik", or the mother of all battles. And he called the 2003 war on Iraq "Um al-Hawasim", or the mother of all decisive moments. Soon, the looting that followed the invasion was called Hawasim by Iraqis, and the word became a common phrase, applied to cheap markets, to stolen goods, to cheap products. If you drive your car recklessly like you don't care about it, another driver might shout at you, "what, is it hawasim?" If you don't make an effort to familiarise yourself with these cultural phenomena, then just go back home.

Relying on a translator means you can only talk to one person at a time and you miss all the background noise. It means you have to depend on somebody from a certain social class, or sect, or political position, to filter and mediate the country for you. Maybe they are Sunni and have limited contacts outside their community. Maybe they are a Christian from east Beirut and know little about the Shia of south Lebanon or the Sunnis of the north. Maybe they're urban and disdainful of those who are rural. In Iraq, maybe they are a middle class Shia from Baghdad or a former doctor or engineer who looks down upon the poor urban class who make up the Sadrists. And so in May 2003, when I was the first American journalist to interview Muqtada Sadr, my bureau chief at Time magazine was angry at me for wasting my time and sending it on to the editors in New York without asking him, because Muqtada was unimportant, lacking credentials. But in Iraq, social movements, street movements, militias, those with power on the ground, have been much more important than those in the establishment or politicians in the green zone, and it is events in the red zone which have shaped things.

You don't understand a country by going on preplanned missions; you learn about it when unplanned things happen, when you visit a friend's neighbourhood for fun and other neighbours come over. You learn about it by driving around in a normal car, not an armoured one with tinted windows. That's when Iraqi soldiers and police ask you to hitch a ride and take them towards their home. A few months ago, soldiers at a checkpoint outside Ramadi asked me to give one of their colleagues a ride to Baghdad. He was from Basra. In addition to the conversation we struck up, what was most revealing was that a soldier outside Ramadi felt safe enough to ask a stranger for a ride, whereas before he would not have even carried his ID on him, and that a stranger agreed to take a member of the security forces. I've since given rides to other Iraqi soldiers and policemen.

Class politics

Over the last year, there have been a slew of articles about whether the Iraqi security forces are ready to handle security for themselves, but these have all been based on the statements of American or Iraqi officials. Journalists have not talked to Iraqi lieutenants, or colonels, or sergeants, they have not cultivated these sources or just befriended them, met them for drinks when they were on leave, sat with them in their homes with their families.

So the views of the Iraqi security forces, the Iraqi soldiers and policemen who man checkpoints and go on raids, are not written about. Meeting with them also lets you understand the degree to which sectarianism has been reduced in the security forces, while corruption and abuses such as torture and extra judicial killings remain a problem. And just travelling around the country since 2009 would reveal that yes, Iraqi security forces can maintain the current level of security (or insecurity) because they have been doing it since then, manning checkpoints in the most remote villages, cultivating their own intelligence sources, and basically occupying Iraq. The degree to which Iraq remains heavily militarised has not been sufficiently conveyed, but since 2009 Iraqi security forces have been occupying Iraq, and the American presence has been largely irrelevant from a daily security point of view.

And then there are the little Abu Ghraibs. The big scandals like Abu Ghraib, or the "Kill Team" in Afghanistan, eventually make their way into the media where they can be dismissed as bad apples and exceptions, and the general oppression of the occupations can be ignored. But an occupation is a systematic and constant imposition of violence on an entire country. It's 24 hours of arresting, beating, killing, humiliating and terrorising, and unless you have experienced it, it's impossible to describe except by trying to list them until the reader gets numb. I was only embedded three times over eight years - twice in Iraq for ten days each, and once in Afghanistan for three weeks.

My first embed in Iraq was in October 2003, six months after I first arrived. I was in the Anbar province. I saw soldiers arresting hundreds of men, rounding up entire villages, all the so-called military aged men, hoping somebody would know something. I saw children screaming for their daddies while they watched them bloody and beaten and terrified, while soldiers laughed or smoked or high-fived or chewed tobacco and spit on the lawn, as lives were being destroyed. I know one of the men I saw arrested died from torture, and countless others ended up in Abu Ghraib. I saw old men pushed down on the ground violently. I saw innocent men beaten, arrested, mocked and humiliated. These are the little Abu Ghraibs that come with any occupation, even if it's the Swedish girl scouts occupying a country.

Many journalists spent their entire careers embedded, months or even years, so multiply what I saw by hundreds, by thousands and tens of thousands of terrorised traumatised families, beatings, killings, children who lost their fathers and wet their beds every night, women who could not provide for their families, innocent people shot at checkpoints. Then there are the daily Abu Ghraibs you endure when you live in an occupied country, having to navigate a maze of immense concrete walls, of barbed wire, waiting at checkpoints, waiting for convoys to go by, waiting for military operations to end, waiting for the curfew to end, military vehicles running you off the road, fifty calibre machine guns pointed at you, M16s pointed at you, pistols pointed at you, large foreign soldiers shouting at you and ordering you around. Or maybe in Afghanistan, the military convoy runs over a water canal destroying the water supply to a village of 30 families who now have no way to live, or they arrest an innocent Afghan because he has Taliban music on his cell phone - like many Afghans do - and now he must make his way through the Afghan prison system.

But if you are white and identify with white American soldiers, then you ignore these things, they just don't occur to you. And so they never occur to your readers. Likewise you never think of how your average Yemeni or Egyptian or Iraqi deals with their own security forces on a daily basis because you focus on the elite level of politics and security, and your cars don't get stopped at checkpoints because you have the right badges. You don't get detained by the police because you have the right badge. Until you get beaten up by regime thugs like Anderson Cooper, then you can become a hysterical opponent of Mubarak and crusader for justice. Television reporting is overprotective of the celebrity correspondent - they barely go out, they just embed -and they do their live shots on the street inside their safe compounds, while making the story more about the celebrity correspondent rather than the story. Then they show the "back story" about the journalist and his work rather than the story.

Robert Kaplan, a terrible writer and great supporter of imperialism, said one smart thing by accident when he criticised journalists for not being able to relate to American soldiers, because journalists represented an elite while soldiers come from rural areas, went to public schools, and come from the working class (we're not supposed to use that word because everybody in America thinks they're middle class). But equally they cannot relate easily to the working classes anywhere, and so they gravitate to the elites. Focusing on elites and officials is a problem in general, not just in Middle East coverage. An American official visiting the region warrants articles about the region, but it is not studied empirically in its own context. People in power lie, whether they are a general, a president or a militia commander. This is the first rule. But at best, journalists act as if only brown people in power lie, and so they rely on the official statements of white people, whether they are military officers or diplomats, as if they should be trusted. The latest example is the bin Laden killing, when most mainstream journalists lazily relied on US government "feeds", and they were literally fed an official version that kept on changing, but this is business as usual.

The revolution must be televised

One reason for the failure of journalists to leave their green zones may be a combination of laziness and aversion to discomfort. But in Iraq, Afghanistan, other developing countries and areas of conflict in some countries, you have to leave your comfort zone. You might prefer an English-speaking whiskey-drinking politician over six hours of bouncing along dirt roads in the heat and dust in order to sit on the floor and eat dirty food and drink dirty water and know you're going to get sick tomorrow, but the road to truth involves a certain amount of diarrhoea.

When there are no physical green zones, journalists will create them, as in Lebanon where they inhabit the green zones of Hamra, Gumayzeh, or Monot, which shelters journalists from the rest of the country, giving them just enough of the exotic so they can feel as if they live in the Orient, without having to visit Tripoli, Akkar, the Beqa, or the majority of Beirut or Lebanon where the poor live. Like other countries, Lebanon has a ready local fixer and translator mafia who can determine the price, and allow a journalist who parachutes in to meet a representative of all the political factions, drink wine with Walid Jumblat and look at his collection of unopened books (including one I wrote) and unread copies of the New York Review of Books while never having to walk through a Palestinian refugee camp, or Tariq al Jadida in Beirut or Bab al Tabaneh in Tripoli and see how most people live and what most people care about.

A green zone can be the capital city or a neighbourhood or a focus only on officials, as long as it shields you from the red zone of reality, or poverty, of class conflict, of challenges to your ideology or comfort. In Egypt, even before the revolution, Cairo got most of the media's attention, but during the revolution journalists barely ventured outside Tahrir Square. Egypt is 86 million people - it's not just Tahrir, it's not just Cairo or Alexandria. Port Said and Suez were barely covered, even though Suez was such a key spark in the revolution. In Libya at first everything was new and everybody was an explorer and adventurer, but now the self-appointed opposition leadership is trying to manage the message so you can be lazy and just refer to their statements. Yemen was totally neglected, but when people came, it was almost always just to Sanaa. And Yemen's capital has its own green zone in the Movenpic hotel, situated safely outside the city. Now Yemen is portrayed as if it were two rival camps demonstrating in Sanaa, even though the uprisings started long before (and were much more violent) in Taez, Aden, Saada and elsewhere. Yemen is viewed mostly through prism of the war on terror, through the American government's prism, rather than the needs and views of the people.

But if you spend any time with the demonstrators, you realise how unimportant al-Qaeda and its ideology are in Yemen, so that they don't even deserve an article. And you would do well to remember that even though the Yemeni franchise of al-Qaeda is portrayed as America's greatest threat, AQAP's record is little more than a failed underwear bomber and a failed printer cartridge bomb.

American reporting is problematic throughout the third world, but because the American military/industrial/financial/academic/media complex is so directly implicated in the Middle East, the consequences of such bad reporting are more significant. Journalists end up serving as propagandists justify the killing of innocent people instead of a voice for those innocent people.

There are many brave and dedicated journalists working in the Middle East whose work deserves attention and praise. Some even work for the mainstream media. Too often their independent voices are drowned out by the mass of writers who justify power instead of opposing it. Our job should not be about speaking truth to power. Those in power know the truth, they just don't care. It's about speaking truth to the people, to those not in power, in order to empower them.

This article is based on a speech given at a conference sponsored by Jadaliyya on teaching the Middle East at George Mason University.

Nir Rosen is an American journalist who writes on current and international affairs. He has contributed to The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, among others. His latest book is Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World.

Western Media Fraud in the Middle East

2011-05-30T08:00:00.000-03:00

Para Tudo

2011-02-25T10:46:00.001-03:00

Play that Funky Bristol Sound...

2011-02-06T08:28:00.001-02:00

Interview with Guido (Guy Middleton)
Interview from De:Bug Musik of Guido, 21 year old dubstep master:

Your album has been released for nearly a month now. Are you happy with the feedback so far? Anything that surprised you?
Yes it has been astonishing the amount of people from different places like it, I am very happy. It surprised me that Mad Sax has received perhaps more attention than the others.
The first time you heard Garage and Grime, what was intriguing about it for you?Was it only the music or was there something else that caught your attention?
Simply I just liked the music. There was nothing overly special about it for me just something i listened to a bit whilst growing up.

What came easy for you when you started making music and what did you struggle with?
I started learning the different software from an early age, Fruity Loops, Reason and Cubase. I seemed to have lots of ideas when I first started but looking back not all of them were that great haha. The only thing I struggled with was learning how to express myself musically something which I still do now but you get better at doing along way.

Before “Anidea” you had only released two eps. There are not many young producers who face the challenge to produce an album so fast (especially not within dance music, where dj-tools still reign supreme). How did “Anidea” and the idea to do it come about?
Pretty simply, I was asked by Peverelist if I was up for doing an LP for his label. Seeing as I had lots of tunes and was working on more we decided to have an aim to put it out. It wasn’t produced that quickly it has grown over a year or so.

It seems to me that melody is at the core of your tracks rather than rhythm or bass. Where does this fascination with hooks and melodies rather than breakbeat science come from?
Melody and the harmonies created from this for me is the most important aspect of making music. I tend to have that in mind most when making music but everything contributes as well which means rhythm can be just as important. I tend to feel most inspired by melodic sounds therefore it feels right to approach making music from that angle also.

In another interview you talked about your love of the music of computer games like Fnal Fantasy. How big is the influence of those soundtracks in your music? When you started making music at the age of 14, what place did you have have in mind for your music to be played at – a club or a game? And did this change over the years?
I did not think once about what place the music should fit in. I just made music because it was something I enjoyed doing a lot. The computer game music I listened to resonates with so many different feelings growing up, that’s why I have mentioned it. In particular the Final Fantasy series was just what I played as well as other games like Sonic, Mario etc.

A lot of the so-called “Bristol Sound” had a dusty, kinda dark and gritty tone to it. Your sound is synth drenched and rich in colorful melodies. Is Bristol’s musical history from the soundsystem culture to Drum and Bass and Trip Hop something that you can relate to or is it just one influence under many others?
It’s nice being from a city with such a great musical history and it has been inspiring at times. But sometimes I get confused about the saying “Bristol Sound” I just see that different artists that come from here have all had there own sound and have been described to be apart of a whole Bristol Sound which is cool if that’s how people want to interpret it.

Egypt - Chris Kline

2011-02-06T08:24:00.001-02:00

Saladin Awake: Revolutionary change in the Middle East

Feb 5th, 2011 | By Chris Kline | Category: Op-ed, Op-ed Featured

The late Anwar Sadat once stated that “you are not a realist unless you believe in miracles.” The spark of populist uprising against the forces of an autocratic status quo ignited in Tunis that soon engulfed Algiers now burning brightly in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as never before in the nearly thirty years of Hosni Mubarak’s draconian rule seems nothing less than a miracle, however precarious and fraught with danger, Egypt’s people’s revolution in the making remains. And if it is a stark awakening for every authoritarian regime still entrenched in rule by decree, cronyism, cleptocracy and brutality in the whole of the Middle East, North Africa and the larger Muslim world, it should come as a warning to dictatorships everywhere. A seemingly cowed and fearful population armed with little more than its courage, anger and hope for democratic change inexorably reaches a breaking point when it can no longer withstand misrule and misery that has lasted generations. The police state becomes meaningless when an entire nation does not run from its guns and torturers. The miracle IS reality in the Sahara and Egypt today and it already is echoed albeit in milder form in Yemen and Jordan. Perhaps it will also reach Teheran in time. The Iranian people’s stunted leap to revolution last year has been driven underground, but to judge it will never reawaken is folly, especially now.

This cataclysmic change is as much a shrill alarm bell for Western foreign policy that business as usual in the region is finished forever. Western cultural myopia and the arrogance of might that has traded alliances with repressive regimes, for an ephemeral, corroded stability in the Middle East cannot endure. The US which has long inherited the mantle of the now bygone British and French colonial powers in the region, must now read the slogans on the Arab street and grasp their meaning clearly. Democracy, free societies, a more even handed chance at prosperity and the transparent rule of law, are not gifts Washington can selectively hand out or withhold as it pleases, nor can it impose them by force. Arab societies will be themselves, on their terms, not what outsiders wish or force them to be. As demonstrators and Mubarak’s praetorian guards are alike silent to outside pressure or influence as Egypt’s showdown ensues, the White House, its allies at Number 10 Downing Street and the Elysee Palace have seldom seemed quite as superfluous and powerless as actors in the Middle East. That Barack Obama or David Cameron fail to find any words that could offer solace, wisdom or even a clear signal to the Egyptian people seems to underscore this impotence.

The Middle East like Africa, seen through a Western prism is often presented as an inherently dysfunctional powder keg, readily given to fanaticism and fierce hatreds. The sub text in bipolar contrast is the presumed calm, logical rationality of the West. The volatility of the Middle East and the larger Muslim world is not make believe but we seldom look at the complete picture of causality for the turbulence that reigns. We choose not to look in the mirror too closely. It’s always them, not us who made the mess, somehow. And it still beggars credulity how former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who so fervently championed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, could serve as the EU’s Middle East peace envoy.

If we consider the strident hostility of Ahmadinejad’s Iran towards the West, do we remember the instrumental role Anglo-American skullduggery played in toppling Mossadeq and installing the Shah? Would Israelis, who do face a genuine existentialist threat from Iran, acknowledge that the Mossad was a key player in training the Savak, the dreaded secret police of the Peacock throne? Could we then regard Western complicity as Shah Pahlevi’s principal sponsor as bearing any responsibility for the backlash against the doomed Emperor’s repression that birthed, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Khomeni, and the intransigent Iranian theocracy that rules today with a Holocaust denier as President? The archive of modern Middle Eastern history is full of the ghosts of bad Western choices.

The Sykes-Picot treaty at the end of the First World War neatly divided the choice morsels of the fallen Ottoman Empire between the British and French empires, shaping much of the map that comprises the contemporary Middle East. Since it bears on the disastrous Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 it is worth revisiting a nascent British mandated Iraq. The monarch the British installed had little to no claim over his subjects. The proxy power structures the British imposed were defined by a complete disregard for traditional tribal, ethnic, religious and geographical fault lines. They empowered a Sunni minority over a Shia majority and thus the seeds for both the blueprint of Saddam Hussein’s savage regime and future sectarian conflict that still grips Iraq were sown. Worth noting that it was the British Empire that first used poison gas to subjugate rebellion among restive Kurds in the 1920’s. Winston Churchill himself then Colonial Secretary judging aerial chemical warfare a cost effective and expedient method of counter-insurgency. But when Saddam Hussein notoriously unleashed gas on Hallabja in 1988, viscerally we understood such bestial conduct as antithetical to our own.

But then the West has difficulty even now looking at its more recent mistakes unequivocally. Former US President George W. Bush and Tony Blair are both unrepentant and morally secure in having devised the invasion of Iraq, a conflict fought in the name of stopping entirely illusory weapons of mass destruction and avenging a 9/11 conspiracy and linkage to Al Qaeda that proved as fictitious. So some 5000 Allied dead later, hundreds of thousands of mostly civilian Iraqi dead with several hundred still dying violently each month and untold billions spent, Al Qaeda is now a firm presence in Iraq. Moreover a demagogue theocrat like Moqtada al Sadr is a key player in Iraqi politics and the future or even remote possibility of a unified and cohesive Iraq that isn’t blood soaked is as unpredictable as the desert winds.

While the Iraqi quagmire deepened two pivotal fronts in the quest for stability in the Middle East and security in ever contentious South Asia, foundered from sheer neglect: the Palestinian Israeli Peace Process which no longer merits the name and the war in Afghanistan where all hangs in the balance by a frayed thread despite a massive influx of US and NATO troops. The Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan seems as implacable and powerful as ever and the Palestinian Territories are a house divided the Palestinian Authority virtually powerless, Hamas ruling Gaza and most Palestinians still in abject poverty and seething with anger.

Which new direction then can Western policy take to regain relevance and coherence, build real friendships and yield a positive impact in the Middle East to better serve its own strategic interests and the aspirations of the region? It can throw out the previous handbook on diplomacy and power politics as utterly obsolete and counter-productive and start from scratch. It could stop ignoring the legacy and forces of history, acknowledge its own mistakes and for a change listen to the pulse of the people, now given an historic opportunity to do so. Re-examining the West’s unholy alliance with Wahabbi Saudi Arabia, the leading financier for radical Islamic terror groups and extremist indoctrination worldwide would be helpful. It is somehow fitting that the Saudi Monarchy, one of the last absolute kingdoms on earth, has been the only voice in the Middle East to offer moral support to Mubarak. The necessary change is at its core an attitudinal one and the West would do well to shed its growing Islamophobia, its equating of Islamic extremism with the whole of Islam, when the butcher’s bill for radical Islam’s atrocities is predominantly borne by Muslim suffering not Westerners.

Islam is not a monolith; it has never been and never will be, it is a universe as diverse as Christianity, ideologically, spiritually, politically, culturally. The societies of the Middle East must be recognized for their own uniqueness. Egypt, Algeria and Iran, have thriving, well educated, large, liberal thinking, middle classes. French President Nikolas Sarkozy recently stated that the only choice lay in dictatorship or the Taliban. Surely, the Egyptians on the street clamoring for democratic change, seek a third path. In the larger Muslim realm Indonesia and Turkey remain in the secular fold and so too, there is no indication in Egypt that because the Muslim Brotherhood has rallied in open defiance to the ancien regime that an Islamist revolution is in the making. On the contrary, all the signposts point to the Egyptian people seeking a far broader, tolerant and inclusive society to be born.

Israel does have cause to be concerned as it awaits the ultimate outcome of the Egyptian debacle, fearing its long peace with Egypt may evaporate. It is also understandably nervous that Hezbollah has continued its march to dominance in Lebanese politics and essentially called the tune that formed the current Lebanese government. It is as unfortunate that the recent Wikileaks on Israeli Palestinian negotiations reveal an Israel seemingly incapable of granting a pathway to peace when the Palestinian Authority was offering territorial concessions of such magnitude, other Palestinians deem them traitorous. Where there is room for less fear perhaps is that Hezbollah, regardless of its Iranian and Syrian patrons, will likely look to consolidate its political position, continue building its prestige internally and not seek to precipitate another war, especially when it is celebrated as the victor of the last showdown with Israel among its followers. And Egyptians may not be enamored of the Israelis but with so much internal reform sorely needed, it is doubtful either the population at large or the armed forces would countenance military adventurism. And nobody in the neighborhood wants another Iraq.

The urgent message, the demand for change on the homemade banners in Tahrir square is for everyone in the Middle East, the West and indeed the whole world to read and comprehend in its true meaning. What was acceptable yesterday is not palatable today to downtrodden people who refuse life on their knees and are now bravely standing upright. The cry for justice and self-determination of the Egyptian people cannot be drowned out by the rifles that answer them. Clearly there are violent forces deaf to their pleas and others in far away but powerful capitals who prevaricate and fumble unable to interpret the signal that has been so passionately conveyed. If the streets of Cairo are silenced by indifference and an iron fist, quashed peaceful dissent will become the rag in the bottle of gasoline of armed insurrection. It will only burn more terribly in the hell of civil war. At that point of no return, when hope becomes rage and tolerance becomes vengeance in an escalation of violence there is no telling what form of extremism could yet emerge. The Frankenstein would then be real and all fears would be realized, the grim cost of inaction.

Like so many Arab nations the insignia of the Egyptian army and security forces is the proud eagle of Saladin, the greatest warrior king, peacemaker, lawgiver and unifier of Islamic antiquity the Middle East ever witnessed, deeply respected even by his Christian adversaries, the Crusaders from whom he wrested Jerusalem free. It is often forgotten that he wasn’t even an Arab but Kurdish. He was also a Sufi, an adherent of the most tolerant even ecumenical, mystical form of Islam, regarded today by Al Qaeda and their fellow travelers as apostate and heretic. Sufi masters, as he had been undertake a vow of poverty. Saladin did not amass wealth though he was supreme overlord of all the lands he had freed or conquered. When he died, at the apex of his power, he left but a few pieces of coin. Mubarak, the arrogant, soldier statesman who refuses to leave his post, his enforcers and the cleptocrats he has enriched, would do well to heed Saladin’s example. To serve the nation now means to exit and answer to the will of the people. It is good Tahrir, translates as Freedom Square. May freedom come.

** Chris Kline, a former CNN Correspondent is an independent, international frontline journalist and documentary maker with extensive conflict experience in the Caucasus, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. He is the American grandson of the late Ahmed Sukarno, founder of modern Indonesia, the world’s largest predominantly Muslim nation.

BM

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Egberto Ontem

2011-02-03T08:09:00.002-02:00

O segundo recital da série Concertos no Jardim trouxe ontem, na quarta-feira, dia 2 de fevereiro, o maestro e compositor Egberto Gismonti e a Orquestra de Sopros da ProArte ao Espaço Tom Jobim (dentro do Jardim Botânico mesmo) – para os incautos – que sempre surpreendem em termos de quantidade. Em tempos de inflação, vale dizer que a série é gratis.

Dizia o programa que “o frevo, o maracatu e o lundú seriam alguns dos gêneros apresentados em arranjos inovadores dos renomados Carlos Malta, Zeca Assunção e Matias Corrêa.” E foram. O grande clássico de Egberto “Frevo” teve pitadas de maracatu, curiosamente. O Malta estava sentado duas fileiras adiante. Músicos de renome estavam coalhados na plateia. Ele mesmo, um talento monumental cujos arranjos estavam bem ricos e criativos, ouvia embevecido um dos maiores compositores vivos do planeta.

Egberto faz com Hermeto uma espécie de dupla onde o populacho fica num pedestal de melodias e harmonias indescritíveis. Sangue italiano e libanês de Carmo e karma. E pode ser que tenha uma programação de Ivettes e Luans, como diria Dapieve, mas Egberto e Hermeto não tem por aí todo dia, e como não sobram muitas horas no meu caminhar por esses senderos terráqueos, tenho que agarrar a oportunidade. Como eremita e “hermetão”, somente assim para enfrentar os bafos do Coisa Ruim, com as temperaturas de Alighieri. O acaso nos concedeu uma refrescada após a queda do sol no horizonte.

O programa ainda me auxilia mais ainda, e algo que Egberto contou à plateia. “Há menos de um ano, a orquestra carioca, formada por jovens de 17 a 25 anos, passou a se apresentar com [Gismonti] em concertos e festivais por várias regiões do país.

- Eles estão felizes e eu também. É uma diversão e daqui a um tempo alguma coisa que ainda não sei o que é sairá deste encontro - garante o maestro….”

Bom, de fato o que se pode ouvir foi primeiro Egberto sentado ao piano numa espécie de rapsódia de suas várias mélanges musicais, onde quem conhece a obra pode ouvir e ver um destaque especial dado ao “Fantasia” de 1982 – no original ele tocou com sintetizador OBX - que ele mesmo chamava de “obsha”. Ouvi ecos de “Palácio de Cristal” e outros temas do disco de enfiada. Depois voltou a temas (acompanhado da Orquestra) do “Em Família” de 1981, e seus grandes hits como “Frevo” e “Palhaço”.
Além dele mesmo tocar Villa-Lobos (Miudinho das bachianas), nessa colagem sonora que evoca tudo ao mesmo tempo.

No piano tem ecos de Tom, Debussy, contrapontos meio Chopin, Mussorgski, de tudo um pouco. Uma nota apenas - dissonante - para enfeitar uma melodia circular, e uma quebra de compasso e parâmetro para ilustrar um tema que é quase uma “fuga” ou “fantasia” mesmo, em “musiquês”. O cara é sacanagem, por isso na minha religião, que como a dele, é a música, ele é santificado e reverenciado – deveria ser parte do currículo escolar público no Brasil. Seria a única teocracia tolerável. A respeito de “música” em si ser expressão do Divino, basta consultar os grandes filósofos agnósticos, pernósticos e ateus. Eu não vejo Deus, com meus cinco sentidos, mas ouço ele com muita frequência.

Realmente no nosso universo esses caras é que deveriam lotar uma temporada de Municipal de meses, como nos grandes centros da música. Pois é o seu quintal. Pela demanda, observamos que a oferta não foi suficiente.

A Orquestra tem meninos aplicados, jovens em formação, que precisam realmente do pulso firme de um maestro permanente. No caso deles houve uma perda exatamente dessa figura que era mais que isso. E estavam já com um projeto de reverenciar Egberto, o primeiro no qual a reverência seria a um músico que ainda respira.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWxv_VFCx-s

Deixo aqui (nesse link aí arriba) no post a versão original de Lôro, no Youtube existem outras, somente no piano solo, uma dedicada a Hermeto até. Como disse um amigo, dos guitarristas mais exímios no país tecnicamente, essa canção, que ele tocou aliás, tem uma linha melódica de repetição contínua de apenas uma nota. E é algo absolutamente rico. Acho que somente Tom e Egberto demonstraram ao mundo o poder de uma nota apenas, dentro de um contexto harmônico mais sofisticado como revestimento... E Lôro é isso. Como ele estava tocando ali no JB, baixou talvez esse repertório 80s, em termos de “gismontiana”.

P.S. Não deixem de ouvir também o trabalho de duos de piano de sua filha, o “Gisbranco”, e para quem é “aficionado”, o Hamilton de Holanda lançou disco reverenciando somente Egberto e Hermeto. Vi milhares de apresentações desses dois expoentes de nossa música, multi-instrumentistas que fazem coisas que não teríamos capacidade de fazer nem com anos de aplicação e dedicação, ambos com o dom do sopro divino.

Em termos de música instrumental brasileira é o que há de mais superlativo por aqui feito. Juntos, vi apresentação somente fora do Brasil, uma vez, mas aí chega a ser um “overload” emocional pois depois de ouvir Egberto, vem um Hermeto e parece um tsunami, o teatro desaba.

São sim já clássicos pois trabalham com essa dicção erudita na obra popular. Como fazia o Villa. Só que ao contrário. Nada diferente.

Brazilian Hair

2011-01-24T19:49:00.002-02:00

Melhor descricao de cabelo tonhonhom ou Don King do mundo, que nos caracteriza, locais aqui.... Louis Agassiz numa expedicao na Amazonia levou o William James que com 23 anos desenhava as coisas, e a "diarista" deles la era uma tal de Alexandrina. Eles estavam numa expedicao de "catalogacao". Agassiz, o grande naturalista suico levou William junto, o filosofo e psicologo que desenhava e escrevia pra cacete. Eh a melhor e mais poetica definicao de cabelo ruim em outro idioma....

"...The adjoining sketch is a portrait of my little house-maid Alexandrina who, from her mixture of Negro and Indian blood, is rather a curious illustration of the amalgamation of races here. She consented yesterday, after a good deal of coy demur, to have her portrait taken. Mr. Agassiz wanted it especially on account of her extraordinary hair, which, though it has lost its compact negro crinkle, and acquired something of the length and texture of the Indian hair, retains, nevertheless, a sort of wiry elasticity, so that, when combed out, it stands off from her head in all directions as electrified..."

Isso devia estar pregado em todos os saloes de beleza de escovas progressivas. Sempre fomos os animais exoticos estudados por outrem... Que belo texto.... Very funny.....

Isso foi no Solimoes, depois pegou outro "buque" e foi ter com Tavares Bastos, rio abaixo, a epoca deputado por Alagoas mas interessado nas coisas amazonenses, for sure...

My girl

2011-01-10T20:19:00.002-02:00

My girl,

I am a man of words only, very little action, but above all words. You blow me away with your extravagant laughter, your contagiousness, your courage above all. Everyone is unique in one sense or more than three… You are more than all of that. You are my Henry V. You took the doubters, you shat on everyone’s head and you still made them laugh with you. Sometimes people have to stop and recognize the greatness in others… You are one of the very few, the proud few, the happy few (polish up your Shakespeare). I am so proud to be your father that I have no words to express my affection. Keep on with your life, share it the way you are sharing it now. What purpose is life without sharing it, right? I will send a fastball in the middle, do not worry. This is because you always help me to become a better person.

You still have a long way to go, keep the consistency. The other paths are treacherous and dangerous leading to tears and pain. Stay the course. We all must. Time always runs out. But love will always be there. A sad Papi turns its lonely eyes to you. Where have you gone, like a DiMaggio…? Now you are far but I carry you in my heart.

Remember uncle, love and only love will endure. And like Neil Young would say further, love only love, will break it down. Thanks for the impeccable behavior of affection. That is what I expect.

The best thing I can tell you and the most truthful one. I hope I can be like you one day….

Love, Papi…..

Rational Irrationality

2011-01-04T17:53:00.002-02:00

John Cassidy on economics, money, and more.« Top 10 Main January 3, 2011

Facebook-Goldman: Where Is the S.E.C.?

Posted by John Cassidy

Happy New Year everybody. I’m working on a post about the economic prospects for 2011, but, first-up, a quick memo to Mary Schapiro, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission: Mary, once again the boys and girls at Goldman Sachs appear to be making a mockery of you and your colleagues.

How else to describe the news from Dealbook that Goldman is setting up a special purpose vehicle to allow rich people to invest in Facebook? Under the securities laws, once a company has more than five hundred investors it is obliged to convert into a public company by issuing stock to investors at large. It is well known that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, doesn’t want the hassle of running a public company, not yet, at least, and Goldman’s latest wheeze seems to be designed to let him have his cake and eat it. If the deal goes ahead, Facebook will get up to two billion dollars of new capital to invest in its business but will, for the moment, remain a private company—of sorts.

As part of the deal, Goldman will reportedly invest $450 million in Facebook and Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment firm which already has a substantial stake in the social network platform, will invest another $50 million, but that is only stage one. In stage two, according to Dealbook, “Goldman is expected to raise as much as $1.5 billion from investors for Facebook at the $50 billion valuation, people involved in the discussions said.” The story goes on: “While the S.E.C. requires companies with more than 499 investors to disclose their financial results to the public, Goldman’s proposed special purpose vehicle may be able get around such a rule because it would be managed by Goldman and considered just one investor, even though it could conceivably be pooling investments from thousands of clients.”

Say one thing for Goldman: the firm has chutzpah. Just last July, there it was acting all contrite and paying $550 million to settle an S.E.C. suit that charged it with misleading investors in marketing some complex securities tied to sub-prime mortgages. Goldman failed to disclose that one of its biggest clients, John Paulson, the hedge fund manager, had helped to select the sub-prime loans underpinning the securities, and that he stood to gain handsomely if the securities fell in value, which they quickly did. Six months later and Goldman again appears to be trying to twist the securities laws for the benefit of itself and one of its clients—Facebook.

Maybe, there’s more to the story than this, but based on today’s reports it looks like Goldman is, once again, running rings around the regulators.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2011/01/facebook-goldman-where-is-the-sec.html#ixzz1A698uyrr

Freud in China New Yorker

2011-01-04T17:51:00.000-02:00

Dispatches by Evan Osnos.« China on the Couch Main January 4, 2011

Americanitis vs. Chinitis

Posted by Evan Osnos

Becoming a richer, more powerful country has rarely been relaxing. In the magazine this week, I write about the advent of a new era of psychology in China, which reflects the mounting pressures on ordinary citizens in an age of prosperity. There is precedent here. In 1881, at the height of the American industrial revolution, New York doctor George Beard published “American Nervousness,” about the fraying effects of modern life. Every person was born with a limited supply of nervous energy, Beard wrote, and depleting it in the hustle of modern civilization led to “neurasthenia,” a mix of fatigue and confusion named after the Greek for “tired nerves.” Neurasthenia rapidly became a household word in America, a fashionable affliction that carried the air of sophistication and striving. Its famous sufferers included Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Addams, and William James, who popularized its nickname, “Americanitis.” In 1925, a doctor estimated that a quarter of a million people were dying before the age of fifty every year because of “the hurry, bustle and incessant drive of the American temperament.” The Rexall drug company patented “Americanitis Elixir” for the “man of business, weakened by the strain of your duties.”

Neurasthenia eventually lost favor among American psychiatrists—Sigmund Freud, among others, redirected the study of the mind toward the inner workings, not the outer pressures—and it was ultimately sidelined from American diagnostic manuals. But one of the only places in the world where Americanitis maintained a foothold well into the nineteen-nineties was China. It was an easy fit for China because it echoed traditional medical concepts of qi, the vital life force, and it allowed patients to avoid the stigma of mental illness by describing their symptoms as fatigue, headache, or other physical sensations. When Arthur Kleinman, the Harvard psychiatrist and China expert, studied a hospital in Hunan province in the early eighties—the first frantic moments of China’s economic rise—he found that the most common diagnosis at the hospital was none other than neurasthenia. China, in other words, had come down with an acute case of Americanitis.

These days, Americanitis has fallen out of use again; Chinese doctors are far more likely to apply more familiar diagnoses, such as depression and chronic fatigue syndrome. But there many questions about China’s mental-health future that have yet to be settled. Some things worth exploring:

• Kleinman, of Harvard, is tracking whether the sheer speed and scale of China’s economic improvements will spare the country the full traumatic effects of its political upheavals. He’ll be writing about that soon, but, in the meantime, “Rethinking Psychiatry” remains the classic look at the impact of culture on the treatment of the mind.

• In the book “Crazy Like Us,” Ethan Watters argues that the West is exporting a one-size-fits-all approach to mental illness. He draws on the good work of Professor Sing Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lee has tracked various ways in which China’s changes have been reflected in the minds of its people, including, as he described to me recently, the peculiar case of “Traveling Psychosis,” which produced a string of violent outbursts aboard Chinese trains in the eighties and nineties. The attackers were overwhelmingly young, first-time travelers en route to China’s booming coastal factory towns, without the money to pay for seats. After two or three days of standing in the aisles or toilets, on trains packed to the hilt with two or three times the legal limits, the young travelers began to wound and kill each other. As soon as they were removed from trains, the attackers often went right back to normal. “Traveling Psychosis” is rarely, if ever, found outside China, but as Sing Lee reminded me, it echoed the experience of nineteenth-century America, when the sudden new experience of the railroads left people addled by the experience.
KeywordsArthur Kleinman; China; Ethan Watters; Sing Lee; mental health; psychiatry; traveling psychosis

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2011/01/americanitis-vs-chinitis.html#ixzz1A68ctaKg

Everywhere is War

2010-11-25T21:04:00.000-02:00

Na Lata…

Não, não sou Wilson Leite Passos e vi constrangido as cenas que ocorreram no Rio com uma frieza monumental. Claro, não sou morador do Alemão. O que mais me chocou não foram bandidos correndo a esmo, desorganizados, ou outros tacando fogo em pneus. Foi sim a moradora, tal qual uma Dalva de Oliveira, acenando uma bandeira branca, no meio do Alemão.

Há um consenso geral, e vi as imagens com alguém ao meu lado que empunhou armas contra a ditadura, que disse que era guerra. Era hora de atirar, no mínimo, para tornar o adversário “inabilitado” a prosseguir na luta. De atear fogo em pneus, ou o que fosse. Convenção de Genebra. Depois traga o indivíduo para ser fichado e apresentar sua defesa. Para os que “atacam”, a resposta é na mesma moeda.

A pessoa que estava a meu lado ainda é de esquerda bem tácita, votou em Dilma – que também apoiaria todo o movimento para tratar o que temos atualmente como guerra.

Fica fácil, como durante o debate sobre o Tropa de Elite, dizer que o Capitão Nascimento e quejandos demonstravam uma forma fascista de agir. Somente Arnaldo Bloch teve coragem de dizer, mas José Padilha demonstrou que seu argumento era deveras mais complexo que esse maniqueísmo que gera isquemias em certas hostes. Nunca houve consenso tão grande. Parece Copa do Mundo. (Que valha que nessa torci pelo Uruguai, e dormi no Brasil e Chile todinho)

Esse governo estadual, ou bem ou mau (sic), resolveu investir numa política de segurança que está mais amparada no “risco e retorno” do Freakonomics. Como hoje em dia, após a inclusão social de Lula, milhares de jovens não necessitam tanto assim do tráfico de drogas, esse foi perdendo “staff” e “pessoal”. Hoje não compensa tanto. E o próprio livro de Leavitt demonstra que ser avião ou comparsa dos “dealers” é a pior escolha de profissão do mundo. Nem dá pra trocar, pois você morre.

Portanto houve uma escolha da cúpula pensante do tráfico de aterrorizar precisamente a massa trabalhadora que votou de forma contundente em Dilma e Lula. Pois sim, madame está ocupada vendo novela no seu condomínio fechado e o pau come do outro lado do Cristo.

E a população local pela primeira vez recebe Caveiras com aplausos e alívio, doidos para que o extermínio seja rápido e rasteiro.

Portanto a esquerda esclarecida ou opta pelos desfavorecidos, ou fica nesse onanismo intelectual. Eles já fizeram sua escolha. Dos carros queimados, segundo fontes, 80% eram financiados, não pagos, ou seja o maior patrimônio da classe emergente. Eles não querem saber de direitos desumanos. Agora movimento de inimigo armado, com delito de formação de quadrilha e porte ilegal de arma merece pelo menos ser “inabilitado”.

Não tenho problema com minha posição. Estou bem acompanhado de Mao, Stálin, Fidel e vários outros camaradas que entendiam bem da coisa.... Esse é o nosso governo e seu regime no que há de melhor.... Vamos enfrentar. E outra coisa. UPP???

Que tal os comitês de defesa cubanos que são uma aula de auto-governo e auto-patrulha. Sou a favor. O morador plantar sua muda e cuidar do seu quintal evitando delitos.

P.S. No tempo de Darcy e Brizola, não tínhamos o neo-pentecostalismo, importação americana que fez mais mal ao nosso déficit cultural que qualquer iêiêiê massacrado por Tinhorão. Ou seja, os estados azuis aqui são os dos liberais econômicos com tolerância social como anti-homofobia. O resto, é o neo-pentelhocostalismo homofóbico emergente e vermelho, que quer matar bandido na porrada.

Que casamento pronto para um belo divórcio....

Cover?

2010-11-24T10:31:00.000-02:00

Fica uma impressao interessante daquela bola que levantei do pos-cover. Eu tenho um DVD sensacional, claro, do Macca, fazendo um show igual a esse ai de Sampa admirado e de-cantado, soh que ha exatos vinte anos. Vai musico, vem musico, fazendo a sonoridade identica e temos o cover que nao eh cover, pois o cara tem o dedo de Midas. Desde RAM a Band on the Run, e ao ultimo, soh tem coisa de Macca que eh fulminante... E eh ele menos ele, mas ele. Mas no contexto e continuo Baudrillard/Delleuze-Benjamin/Adorno (O humano estabelece-se na imitação: um homem torna-se um homem apenas imitando outros homens, segundo Adorno), esse negocio me pegou de jeito. Quando ouvi Foxtrot inteiro ali na nojenta 50 e poucos, ha semana e pouco, com seus candeeiros encantados iluminados em plasma pos-neon apo-capitalista, vi que o simulacro ja eh o real e o Baudrillard ganhou a guerra o feladapota. Eu ouvi Musical Box identico mas aquilo nao era Peter e nao tava no Bataclan, mas a sonoridade identica seria um radio de Pandora? Ou "the chambers were in confusion....", no Caneco Grande ali na Urca? Essa brincadeira esta ficando perigosa. Os inimigos conceituais estao no poder... Doravante me fio no que eh magnetico. Isso...

P.S. - Como contraponto, ali perto do Iridium entrei pra comer algo e tinha uma house band com tres, um menino com cara de Ben Stiller, guturalmente cantando como Stevie Wonder, tocando um Rhodes e um baixo e bateria. Levantei e no guardanapo pedi por "Don't You Worry Bout a Thing", no qual ele agradeceu e tocou ao dizer que era sua favorita, mas que nunca tocavam. Casais pos-meia idade sairam se requebrando num local onde isso nao era de se esperar e eu fiquei espantado olhando aquele comp caribenho no piano de intro e pensando que esse mundo enlouqueceu de vez. Ele soava melhor que Stevie, tilintar de talheres em tacas de vinho e "flutes" imitando cow bells imaginarios...

Riders in the sky....

Poemeu

2010-11-22T13:42:00.001-02:00

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Great Exhibit

2010-10-24T23:28:00.000-02:00

Fifth, Fourth, and Third Floors

The Last Newspaper

Multimedia available
The New Museum will present “The Last Newspaper,” a major exhibition inspired by the ways artists approach the news and respond to the stories and images that command the headlines. The exhibition will animate the Museum with signature artworks and a constant flow of information-gathering and processing undertaken by organizations and artist groups that have been invited to inhabit offices within the museum’s galleries. Partner organizations will use on-site offices to present their research, engage in rapid prototyping, and stage public dialogues, opening up the galleries as spaces of intellectual production as well as display. For visitors, “The Last Newspaper” will be a unique site of dialogue, participation, and critical thinking, posing new possibilities for a contemporary art museum experience. The exhibition is co-curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator of the New Museum, and Benjamin Godsill, Curatorial Associate.
The partner organizations that will form the active “departments” of “The Last Newspaper” exhibition include: the Center for Urban Pedagogy; StoryCorps; Latitudes; The Slought Foundation; INABA, Columbia University’s C-Lab; Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnlis/Netlab; and Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere. These partners will weave their topics together in on-site offices and a discussion space that will host scheduled programs such as talks and informal conversations between participants, museum visitors, and featured guests such as The New York Times Feminist Reading Groups, a project by Liz Linden and Jen Kennedy dedicated to examining that day’s issue of the newspaper.
A weekly newspaper compiled by partner organization Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Canepa Luna) will report on the events and discussions that take place throughout the galleries during the run of the exhibition. This publication will be distributed, free of charge, to New Museum visitors and will serve as a record of the exhibition’s proceedings in lieu of a traditional catalogue. A second weekly publication, to be called “A Temporary Newspaper,” will evolve from a series of discussions, debates, interviews, and research into the epochal shifts occurring in the global information industry today. The “Temporary Newspaper” team (led by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab: Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture) will engage in the entire publication process, from conception to editorial discussions and design, in full view of the public.
“The Last Newspaper” will also include a selection of important art works from 1967 to the present, in which twenty-seven artists explore their own reactions to the news, the mechanics of its dispersal, or both. Paintings, works on paper, and performance pieces by artists like Judith Bernstein, Andrea Bowers, Sarah Charlesworth, Thomas Hirschhorn, Luciano Fabro, Hans Haacke, Emily Jacir, Mike Kelley, and Wolfgang Tillmans, all disassemble and re-contextualize elements of the newspaper in an effort to take charge of, and remake, the transmission of information that defines our daily lives. Using methods of collage, mimicry, and repurposing, these works deconstruct the newspaper and address the ambiguity about what is “news”.
The earliest work in “The Last Newspaper” exhibition is Luciano Fabro’s Pavement Tautology (1967), which is based on the traditional method of cleaning terrazzo, or tile floors, wherein the previous day’s newspapers are used to dry a freshly mopped floor. The most recent work in the show will be a series of paintings by Nate Lowman which he will create and install every week, working from a newspaper story and/or image that has compelled his attention. William Pope.L will supervise a performative restaging of his seminal work Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) enlisting a team of collaborators to occasionally wander throughout the museum eating the financial daily. A suite of twenty works by Dash Snow, Untitled (2006), follows the downfall of Saddam Hussein as captured on the front pages of New York City tabloids, while Sarah Charlesworth’s Movie-Television-News-History (1979) addresses the coverage of an American newscaster’s on-camera murder by the troops of Anatasio Somoza at a check-point in Nicaragua. Featuring this arresting image as it appeared (often framed by a television window) on the front page of 27 U.S. newspapers, Charlesworth’s work shows the newspapers’ emerging dependency on electronic news formats, but also its import as a temporary but tangible record of events.
In many ways the exhibition is an exercise in citizen journalism whereby the constant re-ordering and annotation of information in both the artwork and the processes of the resident participants becomes an arena for the structuring and restructuring of truths.
PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
Center For Urban PedagogyFounded in 1997, Brooklyn-based CUP is a nonprofit organization that uses art, design, and visual culture to improve public participation in urban planning and community design, particularly among historically underrepresented communities. For this exhibition, CUP will present work from the Envisioning Development Toolkits program. Created in partnership with designers and community organizations throughout New York City, the toolkits are interactive teaching tools that demystify complex topics about land use and development. Organizers use them to reach their constituents and build their own advocacy campaigns around such topics as affordable housing and zoning. In this exhibit, CUP's toolkits will be on view, and CUP staff will conduct workshops with the completed Affordable Housing Toolkit, as well as field test hands-on activities from the forthcoming Zoning Toolkit.
StoryCorpsBrooklyn-based StoryCorps gathers the life stories of Americans by having close friends and family members interview each other in specially designed recording stations placed across the country. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants. StoryCorps Conversations are preserved at the American Folklife Center and at the Library of Congress, and shared through weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition. For this exhibition, StoryCorps will use the New Museum’s visitor experience to research and rapidly prototype new ways to make their hundreds of thousands of hours of recorded information more readily available to the public.
Slought FoundationThis Philadelphia-based experimental organization, founded in 2002 by Aaron Levy, engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change through collaborations with cultural producers, communities, universities, and governments. For this exhibition, Slought will animate the entire New Museum with discursive displays about their Perpetual Peace Project, which explores Immanuel Kant's essay on the idea of "peace" with social theorists and political practitioners. Media stations in the interstitial spaces of the museum will accompany a shared community "arena" in the fourth-floor gallery intended for public programming, and a reading room "retreat" between the third- and fourth-floor galleries. For this exhibition, Slought and its partner institutions, including the European Union National Institutes of Culture and United Nations University, have collaborated with architect and designer Ken Saylor, as well as filmmakers Laura Hanna, Alexandra Lerman, and Project Projects.
LatitudesLatitudes, a Barcelona-based curatorial office founded in 2005, will act as instigators and connectors between the various artworks, departments, and other participants of “The Last Newspaper.” They will conceive, report, write, edit, design, and print a weekly newspaper “THE LAST POST / THE LAST GAZETTE / THE LAST REGISTER...” cataloguing the events and discussions that will take place in the gallery spaces during the duration of the exhibition. This free newspaper will be distributed to museum visitors, and a collected volume of all of the issues will serve as a record of the exhibition’s proceedings.
Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/NetlabJoseph Grima is the current editorial director of Domus magazine and the former director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Kazys Varnelis the director of the Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Along with an expanded network of collaborators, Grima and Varnelis will create The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space in a performance-based editorial residency at the New Museum. This residency will transform a portion of the exhibition space into a forum for discussion as well as an editorial office. Grima, Varnelis, and their collaborators will publish a weekly publication that will be distributed in the galleries and will also be posted on walls around Manhattan allowing for open public reading.
Angel Nevarez and Valerie TevereA Dutiful Scrivener looks at the framework of the obituaries section of The New York Times. Through an interview with Bill McDonald, NY Times Obituaries Editor, A Dutiful Scrivener takes viewers through the journalistic criteria of posthumous representation, writing style, judgment, newsworthiness, and the obituary to be written. We see this as an alter-mausoleum where the logging of one’s achievements and failures is transformed into a process of questioning. How might we critically reflect upon this form of writing, its limitations and word count, in order to sum up a life?
Jeffrey Inaba/C-LabNew York-based architect Jeffrey Inaba will be working in collaboration with C-Lab, a think tank he directs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation which studies urbanism and architecture and makes policy recommendations, to animate the galleries by examining the role of weather in the news. The focus will be on weather as the single element in newscasts that is simultaneously predicative, interactive (with other stories at the top of the hour news broadcasts), and regularly featured on the front page of newspapers.
Jacob Fabricius/Old NewsJacob Fabricius, director of the Kunsthalle Malmo in Sweden, will continue his five-year-old practice of inviting artists to create newspapers that are themselves compilations of newspaper articles and advertisements gathered over time. Fabricius will present past examples of “Old News” as well as a new issue, commissioned by the New Museum for this exhibition.
Blu DotBlu Dot has created prototypes for self-assembly office furniture. Exhibition partner organizations can select from the available parts to create their workspaces from the central storage unit displayed within the gallery. The furniture is a combination of off-the-shelf parts and custom hardware.
ARTISTSAlighiero e Boetti;Judith Bernstein; Pierre Bismuth; Andrea Bowers; Francois Bucher; Sarah Charlesworth; Luciano Fabro; Robert Gober; Hans Haacke; Karl Haendel; Rachel Harrison; Thomas Hirschhorn; Emily Jacir; Larry Johnson; Mike Kelley; Nate Lowman; Sarah Lucas; Adam McEwen; Aleksandra Mir; Adrian Piper; William Pope.L; Allen Ruppersberg; Dexter Sinister; Dash Snow; Rikrit Tiravanija; Wolfgang Tillmans; and Kelley Walker.

Baltimore City Paper on Jazz Scene

2010-10-20T09:40:00.001-02:00

Music
Baltimore's Buzz
New jazz albums showcase some heady contemporary talent with local ties

By Geoffrey Himes
Published: October 20, 2010
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Since Michael Formanek moved to Maryland in 2003 to take a full-time teaching position in the Peabody Institute’s jazz department, the bear-like bassist has been a regular presence in Baltimore’s jazz venues. He quickly proved himself a fascinating composer and a fearless improviser, a musician who raised the game of everyone around him. None of this music, however, was documented, because Formanek hadn’t released an album under his own name since 1998. He claimed that he was staying away from the studio until he had his new teaching gig under control, but it was frustrating to hear all this terrific music in the clubs and then have it evaporate into thin air.
So it’s welcome news that Formanek is not only releasing a new album this month but is releasing it on one of the world’s top jazz labels: Germany’s ECM Records. The disc, The Rub and Spare Change, doesn’t feature one of Formanek’s Maryland bands but rather a group of his old New York friends—alto saxophonist Tim Berne, pianist Craig Taborn, and drummer Gerald Cleaver—who have all played with the bassist on Baltimore stages. The quartet showcases the impressive new album at An die Musik Oct. 29.
The Rub and Spare Change features six Formanek compositions that renegotiate the give-and-take between notated and improvised music in jazz. At its best, jazz works as a kind of democratic collaboration, where all musicians contribute musical ideas and respond to their colleagues’ ideas. A bandleader who is too controlling can stifle the flow, but a bandleader who is too passive can allow the interaction between ideas to wither with too many disconnected individual statements.
Formanek finds the sweet spot in between. He doesn’t determine the entire piece, as a classical composer or big-band arranger would, but neither does he offer one theme and then allow his soloists to go wherever they will. Instead, he offers several as guideposts through each tune and allows his musicians to travel from post to post as they think best. Because the improvisers share a starting point and several interval points before the ending, they tend to stay in contact with one another along the journey. Rather than one person soloing while the other three hang back in support, all four musicians are constantly improvising, alternating who takes the foreground, but all of them always prodding and responding. And because Formanek is a bassist who thinks rhythmically, this give-and-take is as much about divisions of time as it is about pitches of notes.
The title track, for example, begins with a Monkish theme that develops a stutter step, knocked out by Cleaver but adopted in various ways by everyone. About halfway through the nine-minute piece, a dreamy piano motif commands the foreground, even though Cleaver is still rattling in the background. Berne picks up Taborn’s reverie and starts murmuring along with it, but the sax grows increasingly agitated until it’s wailing like a siren over Taborn’s broken chords before subsiding again. It’s a joint journey for all four musicians, and it holds together only because Formanek has provided a good map. But the journey is more satisfying because the composer has allowed for so many scenic detours.
Formanek is also the bassist on a new album credited to two more Maryland musicians, saxophonist Carl Grubbs and pianist Lafayette Gilchrist. Maryland Traditions in Jazz takes its title from a program sponsored by the Maryland State Arts Council that pairs young, developing artists with older, established masters—not just in jazz but also in folk-culture fields ranging from Irish accordionists to Eastern Shore muskrat skinners. Gilchrist studied with Grubbs (who has recorded with Stanley Clarke, Julius Hemphill, and Kenny Barron) from 2007-2008. They performed the music they had worked on at An die Musik in 2009, and a recording of that show was released this year.
Because the emphasis was on Maryland’s own jazz history, the set list includes compositions by locals such as pianist Eubie Blake, singer Billie Holiday, drummer Chick Webb, and Grubbs himself. The results are about what you’d expect when four talented musicians (Eric Allen is the drummer) who don’t work together regularly tackle some familiar standards: There are a few rough patches (especially with intonation), but there are plenty of bravura moments too. What you mostly hear are the three bandleaders feeling relaxed, liberated from the challenge of inventing new music, and enjoying a romp through the past.
One of Formanek’s colleagues at Peabody is voice teacher Jay Clayton, who commutes from New York. Clayton—who has recorded with Steve Reich, Charlie Haden, John Cage, and Muhal Richard Abrams—has just released a solo album on Sunnyside Records, In and Out of Love. “Although I am primarily known as an avant-garde singer (kind of outdated term but it works),” she writes in the liner notes, “I love the jazz standards.” She recorded the new album at the same time she cut her 2008 disc, The Peace of Wild Things, a truly experimental project that had her inventing melodies for the poetry of e.e. cummings (among others) with no accompaniment but her own voice and manipulated electronics. Just as the tunefulness of jazz standards informed that effort, so does the experimental spirit of The Peace of Wild Things influence the approach of In and Out of Love.
On the new album, Clayton’s supple soprano is backed only by guitarist Jack Wilkins and bassist Jay Anderson. This wide open soundscape forces the singer to act as much as a horn player as an interpreter of lyrics. In fact, Clayton sings Eddie Harris’ “Freedom Jazz Dance” entirely in scat syllables—and she doesn’t just follow the original melody but bends it and twists it into knots. She adds a percussive snap to the front edge of these syllables, making her sound as much like a vibraphone as a horn. Several other songs, such as Kenny Barron’s “Sunshower” and John Carisi’s “Israel,” were instrumentals before words were added, and Clayton’s vocal approach is instrumental first and textual second. But even on standards as familiar as Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean” or Rodgers and Hart’s “Falling in Love with Love,” Clayton takes welcome liberties.
The most prominent Maryland jazz musician (with the possible exception of Gary Bartz) over the past two decades has been Cyrus Chestnut, who released a series of brilliant gospel-flavored jazz piano albums for Atlantic Records in the mid-’90s. Since then most of his releases have been high-concept projects—a Latin jazz outing, tributes to Elvis Presley and Pavement, a Christmas disc, a pair of hymn collections—all of them quite likable but most of them constrained by their concept. So it’s a pleasure to learn that Chestnut’s new album for Jazz Legacy Productions, Journeys, returns to the format of those Atlantic masterpieces: the pianist leading his road trio through a set of original compositions. The result is his best album since 2001’s Soul Food.
Chestnut opens the album with “Smitty’s Joint,” a blistering hard-bop number that proves just how melodic and precise he can be at even the fastest tempos—and bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Neal Smith have learned how to stay right there with the leader. “Little Jon” boasts a jaunty, Monkish theme that should seduce lots of pianists into playing it, while “New Light” surrounds its arresting center with a post-bop agitation. But Chestnut doesn’t have to play fast to impress; romantic ballads such as “Eyes of an Angel” and the title track generate a rhythmic tension even at slower tempos while they unleash a flood of feeling through harmonies that turn stretching into yearning. Something similar happens on the two slow hymns, both instrumental originals, that close the disc with a meditative yet intense prayerfulness. ■
Lafayette Gilchrist and the New Volcanoes are joined by Carl Filipiak for a free concert at the Towson University Center for the Arts Oct. 24 at 3 p.m. Michael Formanek, Tim Berne, Craig Taborn, and Gerald Cleaver play An Die Musik Oct. 29. Cyrus Chestnut performs at the Kennedy Center Jazz Club Nov. 19.

Econophysics Blog - Cool

2010-10-15T16:11:00.003-03:00

(BTW Kapuscinski also wrote a bio of Jah himself, Sellasieh the First)

Friday, May 04, 2007

The Black Swan ... "Well, That's Life!"

The late, great Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, wrote -- in his book on the last days of the Soviet Union, Imperium -- that the genius of the Russian people can be summed up in their oft-repeated phrase, "Well, that's life!"A young boy finds that his hometown is no longer a part of Poland but is, instead, a part of the Soviet Union due to the extremely improbable (and brief) courtship between Hitler and Stalin. Well, that's life! Shortly thereafter, that same boy finds many of his friends and neighbors being carted off on trains to Siberia by the NKVD (the forerunner to the KGB) for no apparent reason. Well, that's life!On some perverse whim, Stalin decides to (literally) starve ten million Ukrainian peasants -- almost a third of the population -- to death. Well, that's life! At the death/work colony of Kolyma -- a place that gave birth to another phrase of relativist consolation, "Don't despair, it was worse in Kolyma!" -- Beria's henchmen gave their victims the 'choice' between dying of hunger, hard labor, sleep deprivation, disease, sadism, hopeless despair, (literal) freezing, and, for the fortunate few, being shot. Well, that's life!All of a sudden, the mighty Soviet Union -- which had terrorized, humiliated, enslaved, and froze people to death -- collapses and disappears from the maps ... its red tzars going the way of the tzars of old. Well, that's life! Just as unexpectedly, there are new nations and quasi-nations that arise out of the Imperium that virtually no one -- including the people who are part of these would-be nations -- had known had existed. Well, that's life!The genius of Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- on masterful display in his new book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable -- is that he has managed to capture what Kapuscinski calls the "essence of truth," as represented by the aphorism "Well, that's life!", in an even more succinct (but no less scientific) concept/turn-of-phrase: "The Black Swan."This being (in part) a book review, I feel compelled to offer up some sort of recommendation for the book buying public. So here it is: Buy this book. Read this book. Read it carefully. Read it again.The Black Swan, the book, is the most important book in social science since Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Nassim Taleb's book also happens to be the most significant contribution to the science and philosophy of uncertainty since Andrey Kolmogorov axiomitized probability theory (which along with Bayes, gave us the solid foundation necessary to think clearly about chance) and made progress (with contributions by Chaitin and Solomonoff) towards a more mathematically precise definition of randomness. In terms of epistemology, reading The Black Swan gave me a sense of intellectual kinship that I have not felt since reading Isaiah Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox."The rest of this essay will be dedicated to explaining, at least in part, why I am heartily endorsing Nassim Taleb's latest book. As a bonus, I will explain why I started The Econophysics Blog."Amen," Platonicity, and 'The Little Prince'I am slightly embarrassed, but not too embarrassed, to admit that reading The Black Swan was an almost quasi-religious experience, full of sublime epiphanies. There were parts of this book where I found myself muttering "amen" -- in the fashion of many in the plebeian parts of Protestantism -- in delighted agreement with the sentiments of its author. (I don't know whether the Reverend Thomas Bayes ever generated an amen from his congregation, but I'm sure he would have given a hearty amen to Nassim Nicholas Taleb.)All of this genuine enthusiasm is despite the fact that I was expecting to be slightly disappointed by the latest book. After reading his previous book, Fooled By Randomness, I had the impression that Taleb's next book, which became The Black Swan, would be a book that would be geared toward a more technical audience and would be something akin to an anthology of NNT's more formal writings with a sprinkling of more accessible material. Instead, The Black Swan, the book, that we have before us is targeted toward more-or-less the same audience as Fooled By Randomness had, and follows a similar format and tone. But this superficial similarity is (unintentionally) deceptive.The Black Swan goes into intellectual territory that Fooled By Randomness almost but did not ultimately tread. The best way to distinguish the two books (and contrary to some book reviews out there, there definitely is a distinction) is via the following: Fooled By Randomness raised important and discomforting (which is precisely why it is important) questions about our understanding of, and decision making under, uncertainty; that book inspired the creation of The Econophysics Blog (more on this in the next section). The Black Swan either answers many of the questions raised by the previous book and/or it provides a solid road map to arriving at whatever solutions (and there may ultimately be no solutions) that may exist to the fundamental problem of living in a world where changes in time and chance profoundly affect us all.In other words, The Black Swan, the book, is one of the best maps available to help us navigate through a world of uncertainty. The idea of distinguishing between useful versus misleading maps is one of the themes that stood out in my mind as I read the book.Nassim Taleb mentions the analogy to maps in relation to his disdain for what he calls "Platonicity." Taleb defines Platonicity (named after the philosopher Plato) as "our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined 'forms,' whether objects, like triangles, or social notions .... we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures ..." The cardinal sin of Platonicity is that it "makes us think that we understand more than we actually do."As he makes clear throughout the book, Taleb is not absolutely against the use of intellectual 'maps' (i.e., idealized forms, concepts, methodologies, etc.); what he is opposed to is the uncritical acceptance and use of such Platonic maps and to the use of wrong or misleading maps for inappropriate situations.Taleb's idea about the foolishness and dangers of Platonicity reminded me of the observations Kapuscinski made about the map used by Antoine de Saint-Exupery as recounted in Saint-Exupery's book, Terre Des Hommes (the English translation: Wind, Sand and Stars). Saint-Exupery was an aviator, adventurer, and writer, who is best known for writing a book that is considered by some to be a classic in children's literature and by others to be a fascinating work of philosophical fiction, Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince).In 1926, Saint-Exupery was to make a flight from Toulouse (in France), across Spain, to Dakar (in north Africa). Kapuscinski sums up Saint-Exupery's predicament in the following manner (from Imperium):
Saint-Exupery studies the map of his route, but it tells him nothing; it is abstract, general, "vapid." He decides to consult his older colleague, Henry Guillaumet, who knows this route by heart. "But what a strange lesson in geography I was given!" the author recalled. ". . . Instead of telling me about Guadix [Cadiz], he spoke of three orange-trees on the edge of town. 'Beware of those trees. Better mark them on the map.' " And those three orange-trees seemed to me thenceforth higher than the Sierra Nevada." .... "I also assumed a defensive posture vis-a-vis the thirty sheep scattered as in a loose battle formation on the slope of a hill. . . . 'You think the meadow empty, and suddenly bang! there are thirty sheep in your wheels. . . .'"When Taleb is warning us against the Platonic confusion between maps and territories, what he is suggesting is that we are all in the same predicament that Saint-Exupery found himself in. Just as Saint-Exupery needed a good map to help him navigate in the highly dangerous and risky world of early aviation, we need good maps to help us navigate through a world full of high impact but difficult to predict risks (i.e., Black Swans, the concept). Yet, like that French aviator/writer, we are given useless and/or misleading maps by the so-called experts.Platonic 'maps' based on (Gaussian) bell-curve probability/statistical distributions (what Taleb calls the "Great Intellectual Fraud (GIF)") are like Guillaumet's map; they are (as Kapuscinski would have put it) 'map-mementos.' Platonic maps are too devoid of detail, too vapid, to serve as a useful guide when navigating a world shaped by extreme, catastrophic risk; those maps exaggerate non-dangers (like Guillaumet's 'giant' orange trees and the platoon of 'fearsome' sheep) while totally ignoring (or severely discounting) very serious dangers (like the actual mountains and platoons of hostile natives that Saint-Exupery was really worried about).One of many examples that Taleb dissects of a psuedo-expert promoting Platonic/Guillaumet maps of risk is the book on catastrophic risk written by Judge Richard Posner, a highly controversial U.S. federal appeals court judge, law school lecturer, and public 'intellectual' (I use the term loosely here). I can't think of someone who is less qualified by temperament, education, training, skill set, life experience, etc., to claim to be an expert on catastrophic risk. So what does he do? He writes a book about it! (Presumably, it sold well enough.) At least Henri Guillaumet had the decency to be qualified to make his map.Posner, along with a rogue's gallery of pseudo-experts (and, to be fair, real experts), advocate the use of Platonic Gaussian models of probability and risk despite the fact that one doesn't need to be Ramanujan or Karl Friedrich Gauss to figure out that events like 9/11 and many financial market crashes are double-digit sigma events, i.e., essentially impossible in the bell-curve, GIF world. Frankly, even from a textbook Gaussian perspective, many of these would-be Platonic 'mapmakers' are creating more confusion than clarity by their attempts to over-simplify the risky world we live in. Platonizers, like Posner, are essentially dismissing the possibilities of Black Swans, the concept; because they have seen thousands of white swans, they severely discount or completely dismiss the possibility that 'all swans aren't white.'What Nassim Nicholas Taleb does so well in this book is to offer up an intellectual map of our risk-filled world (an a-Platonic map) that is more accurate and realistic than the pedantic view of chance that routinely misses the black swans. In The Black Swan, Taleb embraces the emerging scientific field of complexity theory -- especially the fractal mathematics of Benoit Mandelbrot. Power law-Zipf-Mandelbrot-Pareto-Levy-whatever one wants to call it probability distributions, self-similarity / self-affinity, scale-free structures, undefined (or infinite) statistical moments, and 'wild,' fractal randomness, are what Taleb calls "Grey Swans of Extremistan," and they serve as viable alternatives to the Platonic models when it comes to understanding the high impact, almost unpredictable nature of extreme and catastrophic Black Swan events.I was GIF'ed (and Why Crowds Can Never Be Wise)When I took my first class in statistics (this was before Nassim Taleb started writing books), I faced an intellectual crises of confidence. I felt I was reasonably good at mathematics (at least the marks I received in math courses and exams said so), but some of what I was being told in my statistics class sounded daft to me.My biggest dilemma was over the concept of 'outliers.' In a nutshell, outliers are observations or data points that are considered to be so far outside the range of the expected (or hoped for?) bell-curve Gaussian density distribution that they could be ... ney, they should be! ... dismissed. I had a very serious problem with this cavalier dismissal of outliers. Why? It wasn't because I was too dull (or perhaps I was) to understand what the lecturer was saying or what was written in my introductory statistics textbook. I could deal with dogma as well as anybody. No, the problem went much deeper than that.I'm from a rough working class background. The 'outliers' -- what NNT calls Black Swans, the concept -- that my statistics class so easily waved away are what shaped my life and what shaped the lives of the people I was familiar with. The outliers ... the Black Swans ... are what we -- for better or worse (usually the latter) -- lived by. Most of the Black Swans people like myself faced were ugly: the spectre of poverty, humiliation at the hands of 'betters,' crappy hand-me-down clothes, illness and injury with no time or money to fix it, abusive families, alcoholism, tyrannical bosses, dead-end jobs, hopeless despair, fear. What kept us going was the possibility of a good outlier for a change: winning the lottery, hearing our favorite song on the radio, dreaming of a better life, and a down-on-his-luck kid somehow getting a fancy education.So I'm sitting in my statistics class trying to get a fancy education, and I'm in the grips of an intellectual (and, almost, moral) dilemma. On the one hand, every fiber of my blue-collar common sense being wanted to point out that it is ridiculous to dismiss some infrequent or improbable event when it is precisely such events that may have the biggest impact in the real world (keep in mind, this was well before NNT started writing books and I had heard of Sextus Empiricus, et al.). From where I came in life, you'd have to be a dummy to think that some out-of-the-blue thing wouldn't change (usually, mess up ... I'm trying to avoid profanity) your life. On the other hand, I knew I would be considered an idiot or a worm by those 'better' than me if I seriously challenged the pedantic notion of outliers.So I kept my mouth shut (for once in my life). I was a good boy and accepted the 'wisdom' of the bell-curve, along with the idea of outliers. But this always bothered me.So a few years ago, I bought and read a book by some guy named Nassim Nicholas Taleb titled, Fooled by Randomness (the second edition). This book was usually shelved in the business section in most bookstores, which automatically made me suspicious and reluctant to buy the book since I find most business books by business 'gurus' to be too vapid to be worth my time (I'd rather read a book by Kafka or a book on neuroscience, particle physics, or poker). I was pleasantly surprised to read Dr. Taleb's book. Here was someone who was my social 'better' giving me permission to think the way I always wanted to think. To me it was a proclamation of intellectual freedom.That is why I started blogging about a year ago and started The Econophysics Blog, which you are reading if you got this far. My original intent was to promote the spirit of Nassim Taleb's ideas ... basically, because the way he thought is basically the way I thought. On the masthead for this blog I could have put, instead of the nerdy stuff I have up there, the motto "I'm an intellectual explorer searching for truth in a world of uncertainty inspired by Taleb, Popper, et al.," but that sounded a bit too soft-in-the-head.That is also why I am writing this ringing endorsement of Dr. Taleb's latest book, The Black Swan. As I wrote in the previous section, The Black Swan picks up where Fooled By Randomness left off. Any would-be intellectual explorer searching for truth in a world of uncertainty must buy and read this book.There is one book out there that I will never give a positive review to. I agree with the idea that a book should not be judged by its cover, but some things on the cover, in this case the title, are so odious to me that I can't possibly like it. There is a book out there called The Wisdom of Crowds; the title is daft. Crowds can't be wise. They can never be wise.Yes, crowds can often have more information and, even, knowledge, but they may also be more ignorant than even the most marginalized individual. Crowds, or 'swarms,' can be more correct than individual judgments, but they can also be terrifically and terrifyingly wrong. But even if crowds were almost always better informed and almost always right, they can still never be wise.Wisdom is an outlier; wisdom is a Black Swan. By its very nature, wisdom goes against the grain. Wisdom cannot be manufactured by groupthink, or by a swam of bildungsphilisters, or a bildungsphilister(s) that happens to get a publishing deal.The Black Swan is full of that extremely rare and improbable quality, wisdom. As the book jacket states, The Black Swan, the book, is itself a Black Swan ... the good kind, the kind that is wisdom itself.Black Swan Virgins (or Did They Really Get It?)Needless to say, I have no serious criticism of The Black Swan, the book and the concept, or its author. But, since this is a (sort of) book review, I suppose I am expected to say something critical. In that case, the only criticism I can have is directed toward the potential readership of the book.Most of the book reviews of The Black Swan (with one unfortunate exception) have been positive. As of the time of writing, the book is number five on the New York Times Bestsellers' List. Someone not having read, or not understanding, the book might conclude that all of this good news is confirmatory evidence that the public gets it ... they really understand the Black Swan, the concept and the main point of the book. Unfortunately, as much as I love the book, I am skeptical about whether the reading public really gets it or will get it.The problem is not with the book, its author, or its editors. The book is well-written and well-thought out. There aren't any major errors or typos in it ... certainly, nothing that would cloud someone's understanding of the main points of the book. No, the problem lies with the readers themselves.As I wrote in the last section, reading Dr. Taleb's previous book opened up intellectual vistas for me. But this made me wonder, "How can this guy with a fancy pedigree understand things that cab drivers, auto mechanics, factory workers, janitors, truck drivers, et al., understand but those socially 'better' than them not understand?" I eventually got the answers when I read Malcolm Gladwell's excellent profile of NNT in The New Yorker (you can get a similar biography by reading The Black Swan book). Taleb got it 'because' he had experienced Black Swans -- homeland and culture torn apart due to an out-of-the-blue event, and health problems that the GIF-prone mind couldn't have foreseen.I want to take a slight digression here. I want to make it clear that I do not want to make the same logical mistake the southern Italian professor makes in chapter six of the book. This mistake is something that the book constantly challenges. The mistake -- which Taleb calls "the round trip fallacy" -- is really the idea of the sufficient condition being confused with the necessary condition in formal logic (e.g., "all poodles are dogs" does not make all dogs poodles). The mistake that the Italian professor makes in chapter six is a variant of this fallacy -- with the twist that the notion of assigning causality is involved along with the problem of sufficient vs. necessary.(By the way, I strongly object to the Italian professor's characterization of Protestants as being incapable of appreciating Black Swans. As Rev. Thomas Bayes and Sir Dr. Karl Popper could have attested to, being Protestant is no impediment to believing in Black Swans.)Clearly not all Lebanese Orthodox Christians who experienced the civil war and wound up becoming financial traders are Black Swan believing skeptical empiricists. What I am saying is that -- while it is not sufficient to have experienced (suffered) Black Swans to become a Black Swan believing skeptical empricist -- it is absolutely necessary.It is interesting to note that the two people that Nassim Nicholas Taleb expresses the highest respect towards -- Benoit Mandelbrot and George Soros -- are men who experienced Black Swans in their lives (escaping the Nazis during World War II). It is also interesting to note that my hero and the father of modern probability theory, the mathematician, Andrey Kolmogorov, experienced Black Swans in his life (lost both of his parents at an early age and was raised by his maternal aunts).One of my other heroes, Ryszard Kapuscinski, would have loved Nassim Taleb's book. Kapuscinski would have really gotten it. It's not because of any quantitative ability; Kapuscinski wasn't Stanislaw Ulam. I doubt Kapuscinski could have solved a stochastic differential equation to save his life, or had the foggiest notion of what a power law or a fractal was.But, time and time again, Kapuscinski experienced Black Swans. In fact, he made his career out of Black Swans by telling the stories of Black Swans that took the form of armed revolutions, ethnic conflict, deposed Middle Eastern shahs and African emperors, fearful and fleeing colonists, disintegerating empires, and wars fought over football (soccer).This leads me to another set of fallacies that are directed toward NNT. Many people claim that Taleb and those who are like minded are advocating taking no risks whatsoever. Nothing could be further from the truth!Obviously, Nassim Taleb, as a financial trader, has had to take a tremendous amount of risks in his professional life. Ditto for George Soros.Benoit Mandelbrot has taken on a tremendous amount of risk intellectually. Instead of taking the safe and intellectually deadening route of most academics, he has worked at the margins to make the idea of fractals a viable academic discipline. A similar sort of thing could be said about Andrey Kolmogorov.As for Ryszard Kapuscinski? He once asked the rhetorical question of why he did what he did, "Why do I risk my life time and time again?" Why did he risk his life time and time again when faced with murderous rebels, soldiers, and policemen? The answer: He was on a "mission" ... the mission was to get the story behind the story ... to get to the "essence of the truth."So those who believe in the Black Swan often take incredible risks ... they've stared the Black Swan in its face and they often want to do it again and again. As Nassim Taleb has so eloquently answered his critics, it's not that he wants people to take no risks, it's that he doesn't want us to take risks in ignorance or blind to the reality of 'wild,' discontinuous randomness.Other criticisms directed towards NNT -- that he is denying all casuality (no, he is not; he believes that assigning causal links should be based on skeptical empiricism -- which can include applying Einsteinian 'thought experiments'), or that he is opposed to all reductionism (i.e., Platonicity) in science (again, no; he -- as Einstein would have put it -- wants 'science' to be as simple as possible but no simpler) -- can be addressed in a similar fashion. But I must end this essay.In closing, why am I so skeptical that potential readers (recognizing the fact that buying a book is not the same thing as reading it) won't really get it? Because many readers of this book -- especially the MBA totting types (or want-to-be's), and, I suspect, even people with solid scientific backgrounds -- are Black Swan virgins. They've won't really get it 'because' they have never really experienced Black Swans. I'm not saying these people have never experienced problems or challenges, it's just that the problems they have faced belong in Mediocristan while Black Swans are creatures of Extremistan (read the book and you will know what I mean).I think Nassim Taleb makes the point about the importance of distinguishing between those who are experienced with Black Swans versus the Black Swan virgins eloquently in the Prologue of The Black Swan (p. xxiv):
I don't particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. ... the normal is often irrelevant.There used to be a time when -- even in the swankiest professions and socio-intellectual circles -- there were some old-hands and young 'Horatio Algers' that had experienced Black Swans ... i.e., those who had been tested under severe circumstances. It might be a financial trader who had been affected by the Great Depression or had to flee their homeland with only a suitcase or two. It might be a scientist (natural or social) who survived a war, revolution, genocide, or a famine. It might be a student whose parents didn't know the lingua franca (usually English) and really knew what hardscrabble meant without ever having heard that word because he or she lived it.But those times have passed. It is ironic that -- as I wrote in my previous blog post, Tyranny of the Power Law -- that the very thing that brought the 'elite' success in life, the power law -- a symptom of the Black Swan, makes people blind to Black Swans by allowing the Black Swan blind to 'protect' themselves by entrenching their privilege.Anyone who reads and understands The Black Swan, the book, will realize, however, that this can't last. Black Swan virgins -- especially those who are responsible for billions of dollars (or pounds, or Euros, etc.), or those responsible for the lives of millions (or even billions) of innocent people -- will eventually experience the Black Swan. Sadly, for innocent pension holders or even more innocent peace-loving, law-abiding citizens the world over, these Black Swan virgins won't know what to do. They'll fumble at the moment of destiny because they were blind to the fact that life is punctuated by extreme risks and they were blinded to that reality by the Platonized idea that risk can be 'managed' or controlled ... "risk leaps not glides."Even a book of rare genius like Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book -- unless read carefully and with humility -- can do much to prepare these Black Swan virgins. When they face their Black Swan -- what the truly great historians and thinkers used to call 'destiny' -- it will be too late. Well, that's life!

Felipe Campelo - Nosso Novo Bilac

2010-10-07T11:58:00.001-03:00

Quem me compra ?

Quem me compra…
Este cavalo alado?
E este tigre deitado?
Quem me compra...
Este casarão?
E este facão?
Quem me compra...
Esta bala?
E esta moça na sala?
Quem me compra...
Este colégio?
E este badejo?
E quem me compra este canzarrão?
Nenhum homenzarrão?
Quem gosta do meu leilão?

Reciclagem Cultural e Ecologia Religiosa Pós-Tudo

2010-10-06T07:58:00.003-03:00

(Trecho do conto "Intestino Grosso" de Rubem Fonseca, em "Feliz Ano Novo")

“Você disse, pelo telefone, o lema, adote uma árvore e mate uma criança. Isso significa que você odeia a humanidade?”

“Meu slogan podia ser, também, adote um animal selvagem e mate um homem. Isso não porque odeie, mas, ao contrário, por amar os meus semelhantes. Apenas tenho medo que os seres humanos se transformem primeiro em devoradores de insetos e depois em insetos devoradores. Em suma, tem gente demais, ou vai ter gente demais daqui a pouco no mundo, criando uma excessiva dependência à tecnologia e uma necessidade de regimentalização próxima da organização do formigueiro. Vai chegar o dia em que a melhor herança que os pais podem deixar para os filhos será o próprio corpo, para os filhos comerem. Aliás é chegado o momento de fazermos, nós os artistas e escritores, um grande movimento cultural e religioso universal, no sentido de se criar o hábito de nos alimentarmos também com a carne dos nossos mortos, Jesus, Alá, Maomé, Moisés, envolvidos na campanha. Está havendo um terrível desperdício de proteínas. Swift e outros já disseram coisa parecida, mas estavam fazendo sátira. O que eu proponho é uma nova religião, superantropocêntrica, o Canibalismo Místico.”

“Você comeria o seu pai?”

“Em churrasco ou ensopadinho, não. Mas em forma de biscoito, como foi mostrado naquele filme, eu não teria a menor repugnância em devorar o meu pai. É possível ainda que alguém queira devorar a mãe assada, inteirinha, como uma galinha, para depois lamber os dedos e os beiços, dizendo mamãe sempre foi muito boa. É uma questão de gosto.”

Pau Intelectuau

2010-10-04T13:37:00.001-03:00

28/05/2010 - 17:39 - O tabu em torno da razão

MAURÍCIO TUFFANI O pensador alemão Martin Heidegger problematiza as próprias noções de verdade e de razão, ou seja, ele as recusa como absolutas Em seu artigo "Irracionalismo" (Ilustrada, 23/5), o colunista Antonio Cícero contestou os que acusam Descartes de ser autor de um pensamento conservador e repressivo. Mas o fez atribuindo indevidamente a Martin Heidegger um "feroz anticartesianismo" e também a "desqualificação" da tradição filosófica e da razão. Com o devido respeito ao colunista, suas imputações ao pensador alemão do século 20 são simplificações falseadoras, assim como as próprias acusações ao filósofo francês do século 17. Descartes é uma das melhores provas da fragilidade da famosa 11ª das "Teses sobre Feuerbach", de Marx: "Os filósofos se limitaram a interpretar o mundo. Cabe transformá-lo". É inegável o papel revolucionário do cartesianismo na consolidação do ideário que dessacralizou o mundo e possibilitou submetê-lo aos rumos da burguesia em ascensão. Heidegger não deixou de reconhecer o valor do pensamento moderno. Não faria sentido o rótulo "anticartesianismo", mesmo sem o adjetivo "feroz". Leitura cuidadosa de suas obras desautoriza a mostrá-las com uso do prefixo "anti". Aliás, como disse ele em "Sobre o Humanismo", de 1947, "no âmbito do pensamento essencial, toda oposição é supérflua". Em relação especificamente a Descartes, a obra principal de Heidegger, "Ser e Tempo" (parágrafo 24), ressalta não ser contestação à validade da concepção de certeza do pensador francês. Trata-se, isso sim, de mostrar a noção cartesiana não como essência da certeza, mas como derivação dessa essência. Em outras palavras, Heidegger problematiza as próprias noções de verdade e de razão. Ou seja, ele as recusa como absolutas. Mas isso -que o colunista não aceita - não é desqualificar a razão nem a ciência, a técnica e a modernidade. "Seria insensato investir às cegas contra o mundo técnico. Seria ter vistas curtas querer condenar o mundo técnico como uma obra do diabo", disse o pensador alemão em 1949, numa palestra para uma plateia não especializada, publicada com o título "Serenidade". Sua objeção é outra: "Contudo, sem nos darmos conta, estamos de tal modo apegados aos objetos técnicos que nos tornamos seus escravos". Há muitas críticas contundentes a Heidegger. Aqui mesmo, no Brasil, um de seus ex-alunos, o gaúcho Ernildo Stein, destacou que seu pensamento se torna vulnerável quando é preciso fazer juízos históricos sobre o aqui e agora. E acrescentou: "A tentação de se apresentar como profeta, enquanto se é filósofo, além de absurda, é ridícula. E Heidegger nem sempre consegue fugir a essa tentação". Por sua vez, Carlos Alberto Ribeiro de Moura, da USP, apontou na leitura heideggeriana de outros filósofos, especialmente de Nietzsche, a "tortura dos textos para extorquir-lhes "confissões" ao gosto do intérprete". Por falar em Nietzsche, vale lembrar que, em "Além do Bem e do Mal" (parágrafo sexto), ele destacou que toda filosofia esconde intenções morais. Sejam quais forem as de Antonio Cícero, elas parecem fazer do questionamento da razão um tabu.

MAURÍCIO TUFFANI é jornalista, editor do blog Laudas Críticas e assessor de comunicação e imprensa da Unesp.

ANTONIO CICERO

Heidegger, Descartes e a razão

Heidegger assegura que Descartes representa "o início de uma mais ampla decadência da filosofia"

EM ARTIGO intitulado "Irracionalismo", publicado há duas semanas nesta coluna, observei que, paradoxalmente, uma das explicações para a enorme influência de Heidegger sobre tantos intelectuais franceses parece ser justamente o seu feroz anticartesianismo.
Além disso, relacionei o irracionalismo que identifico nesses intelectuais "pós-modernistas" com a relativização a que o autor de "Caminhos de floresta" tenta submeter o próprio conceito de razão. Esta semana, o sr. Maurício Tuffani publicou na Folha um artigo intitulado "O tabu em torno da razão", em que, por um lado, afirma ser indevida minha atribuição a Heidegger de um feroz anticartesianismo e, por outro lado, pretende questionar minha crítica à tentativa heideggeriana de relativizar a razão.
Confesso que o artigo me surpreendeu. Supõe-se que alguém que se arvore em defensor de determinado autor tenha um grande interesse nele, de modo que, além de ter lido ao menos algumas de suas obras, conheça e admire o teor geral do seu pensamento.
Ora, as palavras do sr. Tuffani evidenciam que ele não leu nem conhece, ainda que indiretamente, a obra do autor que pretende socorrer. Não há outra explicação possível para sua declaração de que, em relação a Heidegger, "não faria sentido o rótulo "anticartesianismo", mesmo sem o adjetivo "feroz'"."
Digo isso porque um dos pontos em torno do qual há praticamente consenso entre os comentadores de Heidegger é exatamente quanto ao caráter anticartesiano da obra do "Mestre da Floresta Negra". É que Heidegger considera Descartes o fundador da metafísica moderna da subjetividade. Essa metafísica, segundo ele, leva às últimas consequências aquela que, iniciada na antiguidade, com Platão, identifica-se com o que o autor de "Ser e tempo" considera o "esquecimento do ser".
Heidegger pensa, ademais, que toda a filosofia moderna, inclusive a de Nietzsche, é refém da interpretação cartesiana do ente e da verdade. Ora, o pensamento de Heidegger pretende lutar exatamente contra esse esquecimento, do qual supõe decorrer o niilismo moderno, "o sombreamento do mundo, a fuga dos deuses, a destruição da terra, a massificação do ser humano, a suspeita rancorosa contra tudo o que é criador e livre". É evidente, portanto, que tal pensamento não poderia deixar de se constituir fundamentalmente contra a interpretação cartesiana do ente e da verdade: ergo, contra Descartes.
Naturalmente, reconhecer alguém como seu inimigo fundamental é antes respeitá-lo do que desprezá-lo. E embora, ao contrário do que o sr. Tuffani afirma, Heidegger nem sequer mencione Descartes no parágrafo 24 de "Ser e tempo", ele dedica os parágrafos 19, 20 e 21 do livro -e incontáveis parágrafos de outras obras- a atacar o filósofo francês.
Se isso não bastar para qualificar de "feroz" o anticartesianismo de Heidegger, lembro que ele, em "As questões fundamentais da filosofia", queixa-se da importância que é dada, nas universidades alemãs, ao estudo de Descartes, pois assegura que esse filósofo representa "o início de uma mais ampla decadência fundamental da filosofia".
No meu artigo, eu dera um exemplo da tentativa de Heidegger de relativizar o conceito de razão, tal como empregado pela tradição filosófica. Tentando rebater-me, o sr. Tuffani diz que "Heidegger problematiza as próprias noções de verdade e de razão. Ou seja, ele as recusa como absolutas". Ora, sr. Tuffani, o que é recusar uma coisa como absoluta senão relativizá-la?
Concluindo seu artigo, o sr. Tuffani, citando a tese de Nietzsche de que toda filosofia esconde intenções morais, afirma que as minhas, sejam quais forem, "parecem fazer do questionamento da razão um tabu".
Primeiro, confesso não entender como alguém que pense desse modo não tenha explicitado nem as intenções morais que o levaram a assim pensar, nem as que o levaram a afoitamente criticar meu artigo e tentar relativizar a razão e a verdade.
Segundo, observo que o questionamento da razão não é um tabu; contudo, como todo questionamento é feito pela própria razão, é evidente que esta, ao se questionar, não pode deixar de se afirmar. Terceiro, chamo atenção para o fato de que defender a razão, assim como defender a liberdade de pensamento contra o dogma, já constitui indiscutível obrigação moral.

Beato sobre Hopper

2010-09-23T20:07:00.001-03:00

(Sensacional o Beato Salu sobre Hopper, sobre o qual queria falar mais no meu momento artes e humanidades, apos sair do canal ciencias exatas. Maravilhoso, e vejo uma linha narrativa comum nas suas apreciacoes. Sempre uma nobre verdade budista, com uma coda meio que ecumenica mas no sentido transgressor de adicionar muita pitada agnostica e empiricista e na meiuca da observacao sempre um questionamento totalmente kantiano no sentido de antever uma salvacao dionisiaca pela razao pura. Uma coisa meio anti-Nietzsche no seu texto apesar de contraditoriamente voce apostar no romantismo... E te escrevi sem acento e assento de chapa)

EDWARD HOPPER OU A PRIMEIRA NOBRE VERDADE

“Uma tarde/ é suficiente para ficar louco/ ou ir ao museu ver Bosch”

(Roberto Piva, Piazza I, em http://www.revista.agulha.nom.br/ag40piva.htm, acessado em 21/09/2010)

“KADDISH

For

Naomi Ginsberg 1894-1956

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while
I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up
all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud,
listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the
phonograph

the rhythm the rhythm -- and your memory in my head three
years after -- And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas
aloud -- wept, realizing how we suffer --

And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing,
remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the
Buddhist Book of Answers -- and my own imagination of
a withered leaf -- at dawn --

Dreaming back thru life, Your time -- and mine accelerating
toward Apocalypse,

the final moment -- the flower burning in the Day -- and what
comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and
a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never
existed --
like a poem in the dark -- escaped back to Oblivion –

No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the
Dream, trapped in its disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom,
worshipping each other, worshipping the God included in it all -- longing or inevita-
bility? -- while it lasts, a Vision -- anything more?

It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back
over my shoulder, Seventh Avenue, the battlements of
window office buildings shouldering each other high,
under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant -- and the sky
above -- an old blue place.

or down the Avenue to the South, to -- as I walk toward the
Lower East Side -- where you walked 50 years ago, little
girl -- from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes
of America -- frightened on the dock --

then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what? --
toward Newark --

toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-
churned ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor
boards --

Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation,
teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream --
what is this life?”

(Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish”, acessado em http://www.questia.com/read/93673010?title=Kaddish%20for%20Naomi%20Ginsberg%201894-1956 em 21/09/2010)

“Aucune volupté ne surpasse celle qu´on éprouve à l´idée qu´on aurait pu se maintenir das um état de pure possibilité. Liberté, bonheur, espace – ces termes définissent la condition antérieure à la malchance de naître. La mort est un fléau quelconque ; le vrai fléau n´est pas devant nous mais derrière. Nous avons tous perdu en naissant. Mieux encore que dans la malaise et l´accablement, c´est dans des instants d´une insoutenable plénitude que nous comprenons la catastrophe de la naissance. Nos pensées se reportent alort vers ce monde où rien ne dagnait s´actualiser, affecter une forme, choir dans un nom, et où, toute determination abolie, il était aisé d´accéder à une extase anonyme.

Nous retrouvons cette expérience extatique lorsque, à la faveur de quelque état extrême, nous liquidons notre identité et brisons nos limites. Du coup, le temps qui nous précède, le temps d´avant le temps, nous appartient enpropre, et nous rejoignons, non pas notre figue, qui n´est rien, mais cette virtualité bienheureuse où nos résistons à l´infâme tentation de nous incarner.”

(Cioran, De l´inconvénient d´être né, Éditions Gallimard, Collection Folio – Essais, 1973)

“To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.”

(William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/not-that-question, acessado em 23/11/2010).

Edward Hopper, 25 de Junho – 17 de Outubro de 2010, Fondation de l´Hermitage, Lausanne, Suíça.

Uma tarde é suficiente para ficar louco ou ir ao Hermitage de Lausanne ver Edward Hopper, retrospectiva que sublinha seu passado europeu. E o que se vê é que o experimentalismo dadaísta e a densidade européia apreendidos em suas curtas estadias em Paris ― patente em quadros como Soir Bleu, de 1914, e várias ilustrações ―, passaram ao fundo de seus quadros, introduzindo um elemento estranho em sua atividade (quintessencialmente norte-americana) de diretor de arte em agências de propaganda, ilustrador e caricaturista, fazendo dele ao mesmo tempo profundamente americano e profundamente inserido na tradição européia, esta descontruindo a norte-americaneidade, as ilustrações ficando para sempre weird. O realismo do ilustrador potencializa o surrealismo do pintor, e a figura, realisticamente reproduzida, parece entretanto despro-vida de toda intensidade, como bonecas velhas esquecidas sem seus olhos de botão, ou homens congelados numa melancolia ancestral e irremediável, para tudo desencorajados. Imagens estadunidenses, inquietação européia, sugestões de silêncios, histórias subentendidas, mas, com certeza, nenhum final feliz. A luz é metáfora de estados anímicos, a arquitetura sinônimo da opressão, fábricas onde os homens se consomem, arranha-céus enormes, mulheres solitárias que vão sofrer sempre em sua nudez inútil sobre as armações metálicas do mundo, sem o didatismo de poema algum, em apartamentos onde de repente não há nenhum sol, nem uma lua, ou qualquer transcendência. Os rabiscos obssessivamente arquivados pela mulher de Hopper mostram como ele reduzia todo retrato ao essencial dramático, eliminando elementos inúteis à atmosfera como fotos de hierarcas stalinistas afinal expurgados. Ser um indíviduo no anonimato da metrópole é não ser, ao menos para a massa de fracassados que perambula em Grandes Depressões, porque a grande cidade burguesa é sempre uma melancolia onde o Ego não atinge nada do que quer _ como de resto jamais atingiria _, nem há, para ninguém, o conforto de um lar aconchegante ou uma família feliz. Nenhum encontro é possível porque amor não há e o transporte erótico errou de endereço, há toda uma seção com mulheres que são só uma bunda branca ou uma inútil buceta rosácea sobre o sol que ilumina nigérrimos pentelhos e cuja masturbação é o único êxtase possível na solidão da megalópole anticlimática, onde o erotismo se degrada em pornografia e sordidez, putaria e brochuras, nenhum prazer além do narcísico da própria memória, o Outro é miragem inatingível e sem solidez, nenhuma compaixão budista ou amor cristão, Luz Vermelha para o amor no Bairro escuro da Alma. Morar na grande cidade americana ou no vazio imenso de suas pradarias é estar condenado a si, exilado no próprio corpo entre tantos outros corpos igualmente insignificantes, indiferentes como prédios. Atirar-se no Lago Lémans à noite neste setembro já daria uma morte segura por hipotermia, mas a história tem de continuar.

Mas por que a gente sofre tanto, como pintou Hopper? Por que temos de ser quando o ser não existe, porque somos apenas algo que não existe – o Ego -, por que o que julgamos ser é mínimo e insatisfeito no mundo de grandes edifícios e da grande finança? Os homens pateticamente banais de seus quadros ignoram a resposta, são eternos coadjuvantes de suas próprias existências que se desenrolam sem sua participação, sem controle algum, vidas que se esvaem entre desvãos e escorrem pelos bueiros como água de chuva, nostalgia inatingível de uma plenitude há muito perdida ou apenas intuída, talvez uma infância que é a antítese do mundo infinitamente adulto da grande cidade, um por do sol especialmente belo quando éramos crianças, o colo materno, regressão impossível, sonho de um sonho, Coletivização forçada, Confucionismo já, Unio Mystica, Que o Dharma do Apocalipse retorne ao Dharma correto Ora pro Nobis Gaudium et Spes.

Terta, Entortam o Debate... Te(rr)ologia Errada...

2010-09-17T11:08:00.001-03:00

http://torahweb.forumbrasil.net/lei-de-moises-f1/septuaginta-x-tanach-t571.htm

Os Cristãos Católicos nos acusam de retirar livros da bíblia. Nos, Cristãos Judeus (aaannnh????), não concordamos. Quais são os livros que pertencem ao Cânon do "Velho Testamento"? Por que só os 39? A Igreja Católica Romana, desde o Concílio de Trento, (1546), tem recebido outros livros como canônicos. Estes são 14 apócrifos, que vem do adjetivo grego "apokriphos" (ocultos). Estes livros são: 1° e 2° Esdras, Tobias, Judite, Adições a Ester, Oração de Manassés, Epístola de Jeremias, Livro de Baruque, Eclesiástico, Sabedoria de Salomão, 1° e 2° Macabeus, Adições a Daniel, que inclui a Oração de Azarias, o Cântico dos Três Hebreus e Bel e o Dragão. Vamos examinar o conteúdo e origem destes livros duma maneira bem resumida, depois verificar porque não foram aceitos pela Igreja Evangélica.Os Apócrifos, originaram-se do terceiro ao primeiro século AC. a maioria dos quais de autor incerto, e foram adicionados a Septuaginta, tradução grega do "Velho Testamento", feita naquele período. Não foram escritos no hebraico da Tanach (Tanach ("Velho Testamento")). Foram produzidos depois de haver cessado as profecias, oráculos e a revelação direta do Tanach ("Velho Testamento") e Flavio Josefo rejeitou-os totalmente. Nunca foram reconhecidos pelos judeus como parte das Escrituras hebraicas. Nunca foram citadas por Yeshua , nem por ninguém mais na Brit Hadasha ("Novo Testamento"). Não foram reconhecidos pela Igreja Primitiva como de autoridade canônica, nem de inspiração divina. Quando se traduziu a Bíblia para o latim, no segundo século A.D. sua Tanach foi traduzida, não a Tanach hebraica, mas da versão grega da Septuaginta da Tanach. Da Septuaginta esses livros apócrifos foram levados para a tradução latina; e daí para a Vulgata, que veio a ser a versão comumente usada na Europa Ocidental até o tempo da Reforma. Os Evangélicos baseando seu movimento na autoridade divina da Palavra de YHWH, rejeitaram logo esses livros apócrifos como não fazendo parte dessa Palavra, assim como a Igreja Primitiva e os hebreus antigos fizeram. A Igreja romana, entretanto, no Concílio de Trento em 1546 A.D. realizado para deter o movimento protestante, declarou canônicos tais livros, que ainda figuram na versão de Matos Soares, etc... (Bíblia Católica Romana). Não podemos dizer que esses livros não tem nenhum valor, pois isso não seria verdade. Tem valor, mas não como as Escrituras. São livros de grande antigüidade e valor real. Em parte, preenchem a lacuna histórica entre Malaquias e Mateus, e ilustram a situação religiosa do povo de YHWH naquela época.PORQUE NÃO FORAM ACEITOS NO CÂNON DA TANACH ("Velho Testamento")?1) - Nenhum dos livros foi encontrado dentro do cânon hebraico. Um estudo da história do Cânon dos judeus da Palestina, revela uma ausência completa de referências aos livros apócrifos. Josefo, diz que os profetas escreveram desde os dias de Moisés até Artaxerxes, também diz, e verdade que a nossa história tem sido escrita desde Artaxerxes, não foi tão estimada como autoritativa como a anterior dos nossos pais, porque não houve uma sucessão de profetas desde aquela época. O Talmude, fala assim: "Depois dos últimos profetas, Ageu, Zacarias e Malaquias, o Espírito Santo deixou Israel". Não constam no texto dos massoretas (copistas judeus da maior fidelidade) entregar tudo o que consideravam canônico nas Escrituras da Tanach. Nem tão pouco parece ter havido "Targuns" (paráfrases ou comentários judaicos da antigüidade) ligado a eles. Para os judeus, os livros considerados "inspirados" são os 39 que hoje conhecemos como a Tanach (Velho Testamento). Eles os possuem numa ordem diferente da nossa por causa da forma pela qual dividem os livros. 2) - Todos estes livros foram escritos depois da época quando a profecia cessou em Israel, e não declaram ser mensagem de YHWH ao homem. Fora dois deles, Eclesiástico e Baruque, os livros são anônimos, e no caso de Eclesiástico, o autor não se diz profeta, nem asseverou que escreveu sob a inspiração de YHWH. O livro de Baruque que se diz ser escrito pelo secretário de Jeremias, não pode ser aceito como genuíno, pois contradiz o relato bíblico. Os livros de Macabeus não tem nenhuma pretensão para autoria profética. Mas registra detalhes sobre as guerras de independência em 165 A.C. quando os cinco irmãos macabeus lutaram contra os exércitos da Síria. I Macabeus é geralmente considerado como de maior valor histórico do que o II. 3) - O nível moral de muitos destes livros é bastante baixo. São cheios de erros históricos e cronológicos, por exemplo, Baruque 1.1, diz que ele está na Babilônia, enquanto Jeremias 43.6, diz que ele está no Egito. Baruque diz que os utensílios do templo foram devolvidos da Babilônia, enquanto Esdras e Neemias revelam o contrário. Baruque cita uma data errada para Beltesazar e diz que o cativeiro era de sete gerações 6.3, o que contradiz as profecias de Jeremias e o cumprimento de Esdras. Tobias e Judite estão cheios de erros geográficos, cronológicos e históricos. Tobias 1.4,5 contradiz 14.11. Mentiras, assassinatos e decepções são apoiados por este livro. Judite é um exemplo. Temos suicídios (4.10), encantamentos, magia e salvação pelas obras (Tobias 12.9 ; Judite 9.10,13). 4) - Não foram incluídos no Cânon até o fim do 4° século. Como já observamos, os livros apócrifos, não foram incluídos no cânon hebraico. Os livros apócrifos foram incluídos na Septuaginta, a versão grega do Tanach e que não é de origem hebraica, mas de Alexandria, que é uma tradução do hebraico. Os Códices Vaticanos, Alexandrinos e Sinaíticos, tem apócrifos entre os livros canônicos. Porém temos de notar vários fatores aqui. Nem todos os livros apócrifos estão presentes nos Códices e não tem ordem fixa dentro dos Códices. Por ser um livro de origem egípcia, pois vem de Alexandria, a Septuaginta não tinha os mesmos salvaguardas contra erros e acréscimos, pois não tinham massoretas orientando a obra com o mesmo cuidado que usaram no texto hebraico.Manuscritos, naquele tempo, ficavam em rolos, não livros e são facilmente misturados, e seria fácil juntar outros que ficaram numa mesma caixa. O preço de material para escrever pode influir também. Não era tão fácil calcular o espaço necessário para fazer um livro. Que fariam se cortassem o couro e descobrissem 30 ou 40 páginas de couro sobrando no livro? Naturalmente encheria com conteúdo devocional. A tendência seria de misturar livros bons com os canônicos até o ponto que os não canônicos fossem aceitos como canônicos. Os livros não canônicos não foram recebidos durante os primeiros quatro (4) séculos. Melito, o bispo de Sardes em 170 D.C., visitou a Judéia para verificar o número certo de livros do Tanach. A lista que ele fornece, inclui os livros canônicos do Tanach, menos Ester (porque não reconheceu entre os apócrifos) e não incluiu os apócrifos.ORÍGENES, o erudito do Egito, com uma grande biblioteca, incluiu os 39 livros da Tanach, mas em 22 e seguindo a lista ele fala: "Fora destes temos os livros dos Macabeus". Outros pais da Igreja, como Atanásio, Gregório de Nazianzus de Capadócia, Rufinus da Itália e Jerônimo, nos deixaram com uma lista que concorda com o cânon hebraico. JERÔNIMO, que fez a Vulgata, não quis incluir os livros apócrifos por não considera-los inspirados, porém, os fez por obrigação do bispo, não por convicção, mesmo assim só traduziu Judite e Tobias, os outros apócrifos foram tirados diretamente dos versos latinos anteriores. Parece que a única figura da antigüidade a favor dos apócrifos era Agostinho, e dois Concílios que ele mesmo dominou (393 e 397). Porém, outros escritos dele (A cidade de YHWH) parecem revelar uma distinção entre os livros canônicos e os apócrifos (17.24; 18.36,38,42-45). GREGÓRIO,O GRANDE, papa em 600 D.C., citando I Macabeus falou que não era um livro canônico, e o cardeal Ximenis no seu poligloto afirma que os livros apócrifos dentro de seu livro, não faziam parte do cânon. Os livros apócrifos não foram aceitos como canônicos até 1546 quando o concílio de Trento decretou: "Este Sínodo recebe e venera todos os livros da Tanach e Brit Hadasha (Novo Testamento), desde que Deus‚ o autor dos dois, também as tradições e aquilo que pertence a fé e morais, como sendo ditados pela boca do Messias, ou pelo Espírito Santo". A lista dos livros que segue inclui os apócrifos e conclui dizendo: "Se alguém não receber como Sagradas e canônicos estes livros em todas as partes, como foram lidos na Igreja Católica, e como estão na Vulgata Latina, e que conscientemente e propositadamente contrariar as tradições já mencionadas, que ele seja anátema". Para nós o fator decisivo é que C risto ( O Messias) e seus discípulos não os reconheceram como canônicos, pois não foram citados pelo Messias nem os outros escritores da Brit Hadasha (Novo Testamento)!

Janela - Foto Rogerio Carneiro

2010-09-14T22:00:00.002-03:00

A Way Out...

2010-09-08T19:26:00.000-03:00

Arts & Entertainment : Music Review
Beautiful Dreamers Bill Frisell (Savoy Jazz ) Spark of Being: Expand Dave Douglas and Keystone Greenleaf New jazz records that are adventurous, genre-hopping, and conversational
By Geoffrey Himes on August 27, 2010

Triple Fantasy: Frisell’s new record with his Beautiful Dreamers trio is the stuff of dramatic back-and-forth.
“Some of this music we’re playing for the first time,” Bill Frisell told the rapt audience at The Barns at Wolf Trap in March. The jazz guitarist had brought along his new Beautiful Dreamers trio, and they were still working out their arrangements. Frisell, with his gray blazer, graying hair, and amber-frame glasses, led the way, teasing out sinuous melodies and his signature smeared-butter tone from a brown-and-white Fender. Eyvind Kang, in a twitchy goatee and brown-plaid shirt, responded by bowing or plucking his viola, at first in parallel to the guitar but soon in counterpoint. Drummer Rudy Royston, his height exaggerated by a black Adidas stocking cap, rattled his brushes across the cymbals and toms, creating a rhythm as translucent as the melody and harmony around him.
This wasn’t your typical jazz gig, where five guys in suits hurriedly get through the opening theme so they can each take a long solo that shows off his hottest, fastest licks, even if those licks have little to do with the theme. This was a three-way conversation where each musician seemed to be saying, “How about this?” and “Yeah, that’s cool, but how about this?” and “Oh, I like that; what if we do this to it?” If jazz is all about collaborative invention and democratic give-and-take, this was jazz at the highest level.
A few weeks later, the trio went into Berkeley, Calif.’s Fantasy Studios and recorded most of the music from the Wolf Trap show for an album called, yes, Beautiful Dreamers. It’s an important release not only because it’s full of gorgeous, adventurous music but also because it’s coming out just a week after trumpeter Dave Douglas’ Spark of Being: Expand. Frisell and Douglas, together with such co-conspirators as Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Jenny Scheinman, Esperanza Spalding, and Brad Mehldau, are spearheading a movement that is leading jazz away from an emphasis on familiar formats and fast, flashy solos and toward a greater openness to new instruments, new tempos, new sounds, and new repertoire. Both records make a powerful case for that shift.
Beautiful Dreamers, for example, contains 10 Frisell originals and six standards, and while the standards include Benny Goodman’s “Benny’s Bugle” and the 1925 show tune “Tea for Two,” they also include Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” Blind Willie Johnson’s “It’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” the Carter Family’s “Keep on the Sunny Side,” and Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Goin’ Out of My Head.” Frisell’s insistence that blues, hillbilly music, and doo-wop can be turned into jazz not only opens the windows in a stuffy musical house, but also makes his own compositions sound fresher than yet another rewrite of Gershwin chord changes. Frisell uses the viola as a lead instrument here, and in the past has made similar use of dobro, steel guitar, cornet, banjo, and looped samples.
Douglas has recorded a tribute album to Joni Mitchell and has worked with cello, accordion, and tabla. Keystone, his current band, features tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland, bassist Brad Jones, drummer Gene Lake, electric keyboardist Adam Benjamin, and turntablist DJ Olive. Douglas has found ways to integrate these electric and acoustic instruments so the former don’t overwhelm the latter but engage in an equal back-and-forth. That balance is perfect for a soundtrack about Frankenstein, the tale of decaying nature jolted back to life by a mad scientist’s voltage, and Spark of Being does, in fact, stem from the score for Bill Morrison’s experimental Frankenstein film of the same title. The newly released version of Spark of Being: Expand is not the Morrison soundtrack, but rather a jazz exploration and expansion of seven themes from that film score. (On Sept. 21, though, Douglas will release a three-CD box set that will include this album, the actual movie soundtrack, and a third CD of music composed for the movie but not used.
But ultimately, it’s not important that Frisell and Douglas have tastes for new influences and new instruments; what counts is what they do with them. Neither Beautiful Dreamers nor Spark of Being contain a single lyric, yet both convey tremendous feeling, not so much through bravura passages as through charged textures and tones. Frisell’s “A Worthy Endeavor,” for example, pits the viola’s lovely, hopeful melody against the guitar’s prickly, effects-heightened doubts. At first the drummer sits back, allowing these mixed feelings to simmer, but he gradually increases the heat and brings them to a boiling climax. Similarly, Douglas’ title track opens on a squirming, chaotic soundscape of cymbal splashes and laptop bleeps before the protagonist enters in the form of a deliberate, dignified theme for trumpet and tenor sax. There’s a sense of slowly dawning wonder in the music, as if a reanimated corpse or a reinspired everyman were rediscovering the world, moving through the electronic chirping and trumpet fragments as if wading through water. Both the guitarist’s “Who Was That Girl?” and the trumpeter’s “Prologue” are romantic ballads that seem to ache with wistful yearning for something just beyond reach.
Both leaders are capable of playing brisk, thumping numbers, as Frisell does on the John-Adams-meets-Radiohead clockwork music of “Better than a Machine” (dedicated to Vic Chesnutt) and as Douglas does on the drum-driven funk of “Tree Ring Circus.” Yet both seem at their best on slower tempos where the listener can easily imagine singers taking over the wordless, punctuated melodies played by the leaders and their primary foils, Kang and Strickland. This is a marked change from decades of jazz practice where the most praised solos spat out eighth and 16th notes in long phrases that sounded nothing like human conversation. Frisell, Douglas, and their allies seem to be suggesting that perhaps jazz improvisation would be better served if it resembled athletic competitions less and dramatic dialogue more.

150 years ago... Valor..

2010-08-31T12:25:00.003-03:00

Há 150 anos, morria Arthur Schopenhauer. Como ele, e desde a Grécia, os filósofos escrevem a história do mundo, tentando compreendê-lo.

O vasto ofício de pensador

Por Cristina Dantas, para o Valor, de São Paulo27/08/2010

"Escola de Atenas", afresco de Raffaello de Sanzio, no Vaticano, pintado entre 1509 e 1510: Platão e Aristóteles aparecem no centro, entre filósofos de diversas épocas
Demócrito de Abdera divisou o indivisível: pensou o átomo. Pensou também a ética enquanto andava pelas ruas de Atenas, entre o sorriso e a gargalhada. Diógenes de Sinope, esfarrapado e sujo, empunhava sua lanterna sob o sol do meio-dia em busca de um homem de virtude. Anaxágoras das vestes vermelhas se dizia um deus. Não que na Antiguidade Clássica essas atitudes exóticas fossem comuns, mas, como conta a professora Olgária Matos, "os atenienses conviviam tranquilamente com as extravagâncias de seus filósofos".
São figuras do passado, que, por suas ideias e idiossincrasias, deixaram marcas de presença importante na história da filosofia. E os filósofos de agora? De que se ocupam? O que se espera deles? O mesmo que em qualquer época, de acordo com o filósofo e poeta Antonio Cicero. "A filosofia pretende tratar racionalmente das questões fundamentais que dizem respeito ao ser, ao conhecimento, à ética. Ao fazê-lo, questiona e submete à crítica as respostas tradicionais e convencionais. É assim ainda hoje."
Ana Carolina Fernandes/Folhapress
Antonio Cícero: "A filosofia pretende tratar racionalmente das questões fundamentais que dizem respeito ao ser, ao conhecimento, à ética. Ao fazê-lo, questiona respostas tradicionais e convencionais"
Vêm à lembrança os olhos enviesados e o cachimbo pendendo eternamente da boca de Jean-Paul Sartre, ou Michel Foucault - ambos, personagens recentes de uma tradicional linhagem de filósofos que transitaram pela academia e pelas questões públicas com igual desenvoltura. É nossa herança. A universidade pública brasileira nasceu de um modelo francês, que nos legou a figura do intelectual que toma a palavra em público e pensa as questões do nosso tempo, como lembra Olgária. Ela aponta, porém, uma diferença. A tradição francesa teria no espaço público o lugar do "debate sem segundas intenções". Para Olgária, no Brasil, quando o intelectual sai do registro daquilo que a mídia e a opinião pública dele esperam, é desqualificado. Há mais variantes nessa equação, e uma delas está na pauta proposta aos intelectuais, especialmente aos filósofos.
"Há 25 anos vivemos uma democracia e a vivemos como se fosse sinônimo de corrupção", analisa outro respeitado mestre da filosofia política no Brasil, Renato Janine Ribeiro. A queixa é sincera e tem explicação justa. Em primeiro lugar, porque os escândalos que surgem na esfera do poder ocupam espaços demasiados, que deveriam ser dispensados a pesquisas relevantes - a falta de uma ágora adequada e receptiva acaba por confiná-las ao ambiente da academia. Em segundo lugar, porque nem sempre é convidado ao debate aquele que está mais aprofundado no tema proposto. Que fique claro: a discussão deve ser franqueada a todos, mas seriam desejáveis, para Janine Ribeiro, uma sintonia mais fina e um portfólio mais vasto de intelectuais a serem ouvidos. "Em que medida a atuação de alguém da área da filosofia tem a ver com o tema a ser tratado? Às vezes você dá sua opinião de cidadão."
Silvia Costanti/Valor
Olgária Matos: "O conhecimento de conceitos, do registro em que a filosofia opera, exige iniciação, mas um outro plano, o da fruição, está disponível a todo o público", como nos cursos livres
Alguns anos atrás, Janine fez um levantamento entre os pesquisadores do CNPq - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, ligado ao Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia. A intenção era aferir, entre os bolsistas de primeiro nível, quantas citações haviam tido na grande imprensa, durante cerca de seis meses, os pesquisadores de filosofia, ciências políticas, sociologia e antropologia. E sempre para assuntos não específicos dessas áreas. Ao final, uma constatação surpreendente: os bolsistas de filosofia exibiam o mesmo número de citações das três ciências sociais somadas.
Por que essa abertura tão ampla aos filósofos? "É porque sabemos fazer resenha de livro", ironiza Vladimir Safatle. "Você vira uma espécie de comentador de rodapé da notícia do dia." Para exemplificar a tese, cita a ideia desenvolvida por Foucault: "O filósofo está se transformando em um jornalista transcendental", teria acusado o fundador de conceitos fundamentais da filosofia do século XX. Por trás da ironia, uma explicação plausível: a própria formação do filósofo, que transita por uma vasta gama de campos, da política à estética - e isso, apenas na graduação. Com seu repertório sólido e abrangente, é natural que o filósofo possa escrever, para o grande público, textos, como diz Safatle, "minimamente coerentes".
Sergio Zacchi/Valor
Janine Ribeiro: "Em que medida a atuação de alguém da área da filosofia tem a ver com o tema a ser tratado? Às vezes você dá sua opinião de cidadão"
Aceitando-se que sejam tantos os assuntos de interesse do filósofo, pode-se incorrer no equívoco de acreditar que a universidade não tem pauta própria. E "a imprensa, como é normal em qualquer sistema organizado da vida social, também tem sua pauta de interesses. A gente acaba se adaptando", diz Safatle, que aos 37 anos exibe no currículo dez livros editados - quatro como autor, seis como organizador.
Seu arsenal de críticas se volta em algumas ocasiões para a própria universidade. É o caso de episódio recente da vida política brasileira. A decisão do Superior Tribunal Federal de não rever a Lei de Anistia, com o fim de julgar agentes do Estado por crimes cometidos no país entre 1961 e 1979, transcorreu sob "uma ausência quase aterradora de debate na universidade", e deixou Safatle inconformado. "Do ponto de vista filosófico, a questão toca vários problemas: a memória social, o peso da história, qual o significado de elaborar o passado, como se relacionar com ele", analisa, listando alguns importantes filósofos que se ocuparam do tema, entre Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt e Walter Benjamin.
O episódio tem agravantes. "A universidade foi a que mais sofreu com a ditadura militar. Ela teria um interesse orgânico no assunto", diz Safatle. Com Edson Teles, ele organizou o livro "O que Resta da Ditadura", para trazer à tona o que ficou soterrado nos escombros de uma era vil da historia do país. As críticas, de maneira mais ampla, estendem-se aos colegas de sua geração. É possível que parte deles acredite que um pesquisador rigoroso deva viver integralmente dentro de sua especialidade, resvalando, se tanto, para suas adjacências. Essa prática, que foi importante na formação dos intelectuais brasileiros, pode hoje afastá-los da esfera pública. "Cabe a nós não perder aquilo que outras gerações construíram", alerta Safatle.
É um risco que se corre. E o reverso disso também. Se é grave a classe intelectual silenciar, ainda que eventualmente, ter filósofos frequentando o debate público - ou qualquer debate que se apresente - fez nascer um novo personagem, e justamente em nosso berço universitário, a França. Desde os anos 1970, a imprensa é um palco em que se exibe o grupo batizado de "nouveaux philosophes", tendo à frente Bernard-Henri Lévy, misto de filósofo, jornalista e diretor de teatro. Para Safatle, antiintelectuais que tomam textos sérios por rebuscados, enquanto produzem suas "platitudes".
As notícias não são boas: "Essa é uma tendência do mundo contemporâneo, a desvalorização de todos os valores, em que tudo se equivale", informa Olgária. "Não se tem mais a ordem das urgências. As pessoas não sabem mais diferenciar o que é significativo do que é insignificante."
Enquanto o planeta gira em velocidade de cruzeiro, cada vez mais pessoas procuram o estudo da filosofia, que pede pagamento em moeda rara: tempo. "Há um aspecto da filosofia que exige iniciação, o conhecimento de seus conceitos, do registro em que ela opera. Mas um outro plano, de fruição, está disponível a todo o público", diz Olgária, que vê com muito bons olhos o crescimento dos cursos livres, e nisso não está sozinha.
"Acho bom que seja oferecida a oportunidade de estudar textos clássicos de filosofia e de praticar o pensamento filosófico a pessoas que estudam ou estudaram matérias que nada têm a ver com filosofia", elogia Antonio Cicero.
E o que essas pessoas procuram? "Pensamento livre", diz Janine, deixando claro que, quando dá um desses cursos, costuma tratar de algum assunto específico, como a liberdade vista pelas lentes do cinema, por exemplo.
Mas é pelo primeiro aspecto da filosofia citado por Olgária, o que não prescinde de iniciação, que muitos se sentem atraídos. Às aulas ministradas por Safatle, na Universidade de São Paulo, acorrem alunos de outras disciplinas, gravitando em torno de um objetivo comum: aprender a ler. Pelas características próprias do departamento, eles consideram o estudo da filosofia, de certa forma, mais rigoroso. Enquanto os alunos de outras cadeiras chegam a ter nove ou dez disciplinas por semana, na filosofia eles têm duas ou três, o que permite aulas de quatro horas e tempo para a leitura. Além disso, os professores podem exigir maior rigor de suas alunos.
Há também o fato de que os textos clássicos que nos legaram os maiores pensadores da história estão no outro extremo das "platitudes" dos "nouveaux philosophes". São textos que oferecem resistência. Pedem que se volte a eles mais de uma vez, até que sejam finalmente desvelados. Obras em que "a escrita se transforma em elemento fundamental de definição do objeto. E nem todos os objetos se submetem ao mesmo padrão de clareza - alguns precisam de zonas de sombra, não têm a clareza de uma proposição publicitária", diz Safatle, para quem essa resistência é necessária por mostrar que existem formas de pensamento que não são as do senso comum.
Olgária situa o momento que culminou com essa procura pelo estudo da filosofia por parte de estudantes e profissionais das mais diferentes atividades. Aconteceu no início dos anos 1970, quando a filosofia desapareceu do mapa das escolas do segundo grau. Com ela, foram subtraídas também as disciplinas que davam sentido a esse ensino: o grego, o latim, o francês e as literaturas. "Com o tempo", diz, "as pessoas começaram a sentir que lhes faltavam recursos para pensar determinadas questões."
Pode parecer contraditório, no mundo que não flui, mas escoa, que haja uma corrida a um saber, afinal, sem objeto. Mas, para Olgária, esse conhecimento é procurado justamente por não ter uma finalidade prática. E aí, diz, vale um olhar aos primórdios da humanidade: nenhuma sociedade, nem mesmo no paleolítico, teria permitido que a sobrevivência material suplantasse as necessidades do espírito. "As pessoas que se ressentem dessa carência dos seus tempos de formação vão buscar a filosofia e também a literatura, a música, tudo o que a escola deveria ter dado no passado. E que, por ser privilégio de poucos, retirou-se de todos igualmente."
Vivemos, assim, uma espécie de reinado do pragmatismo. Teríamos abandonado, de acordo com Olgária, tudo o que era antes preconizado pela educação, como "o aprimoramento de si, a sensibilidade, as máximas morais, o tempo longo da formação do pensamento". Ter uma profissão e um bom salário, essas urgências pragmáticas dos nossos dias não estavam excluídas da educação humanista, que previa isso e "previa também a formação de homens melhores, mais felizes". A questão não se restringe ao Brasil. O mundo contemporâneo é marcado por uma formação antiintelectual e os espaços alternativos surgiram para preencher essa lacuna.
O problema se apresenta quando, ao pretender adquirir um saber filosófico, a pessoa acaba levando para casa nada mais do que uma bagatela de saber, menos que um aceno. Ou, na opinião de Safatle, uma "autoajuda de luxo", que ele considera detestável: "É algo do tipo 'Sêneca pode me mostrar o que é uma vida feliz', ou 'como Platão pode me ajudar se eu estiver desempregado'".
Os títulos que se exibem nas prateleiras das livrarias não diferem muito desse dizer imaginado por Safatle, não escondem seu propósito imediatista. "Tudo se passa", diz ele, "como se você pudesse expor todo e qualquer conteúdo no mesmo tipo de discurso, produzindo uma espécie de nivelamento em que o tempo da descoberta desaparece."
Para além do trabalho acadêmico (cada vez mais integral e mais internacionalizado), do debate intelectual e das questões levadas a público, mesmo que às vezes mais miúdas do que gostariam, os filósofos também atuam próximos das outras ciências humanas. Não tanto quanto poderiam, no entanto. Janine levanta a importância de uma pesquisa mais articulada, que não excluiria o trabalho individual. Ele cita o trabalho de repertoriamento das línguas indígenas brasileiras feito pelo CNPq, e conta o caso de um missionário americano que teria vindo para a Amazônia e descobriu uma tribo que não articula os tempos verbais. Para os habitantes dessa tribo, só há o presente. O missionário teve a vida revirada com essa descoberta: comprou uma briga com o filósofo e linguista americano Noam Chomsky, que colocou em dúvida seus métodos de pesquisa, e viu evaporar sua crença em Deus.
Para Janine, a questão extrapola os limites da antropologia e surge como um chamado irresistível à filosofia. A questão que se coloca é o sentido da vida em um caso concreto. A pesquisa deveria ser refeita e levada ao público. "Se um pequeno grupo dessa enorme humanidade pode viver assim, talvez seja uma capacidade que todos tenhamos", imagina, intrigado com essa vida que transcorre no instante. "Mas a pesquisa ainda é muito pulverizada", lamenta.
Janine pode ser considerado um dos intelectuais mais presentes no debate público, daqueles que não se abstêm de colocar o dedo na ferida. Não por acaso, já participou de vários seminários organizados pelo filósofo Adauto Novaes, que há 30 anos reúne intelectuais de vários campos para pensar nossa época. O primeiro deles, no início dos anos 1980, foi "Os Sentidos da Paixão", seguido por "O Olhar, Ética, Ensaios sobre o Medo" e outros, totalizando 30 seminários. Organizados em livros, já ultrapassaram a marca dos 200 mil exemplares vendidos, segundo os cálculos do filósofo.
Enquanto falamos, ele está a uma semana de abrir mais um ciclo de palestras, que acontecem em Brasília, São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro. Explica que "A Invenção das Crenças", ciclo que acontece entre agosto e setembro, é o quarto da série intitulada "Mutações", transformações radicais pelas quais o mundo ocidental passa hoje e que se dão em todas as áreas da atividade humana: nas artes, na política, na ética, a partir de uma revolução tecnocientífica e com uma estarrecedora predominância dos fatos em detrimento das ideias. No programa do próximo seminário, Novaes escreve, a respeito do último ciclo, "A Experiência do Pensamento", prestes a sair em livro: "Porque [a racionalidade técnica] se origina na revolução tecnocientífica e praticamente sem a ação dos pressupostos das ciências humanas, tendemos a dizer que ela é feita no vazio do pensamento".
"Temos que pensar o que está posto hoje para a filosofia", diz Novaes. Por isso, é preciso colocar de outra forma as ideias de tempo e de espaço. E de trabalho. "Pensava-se que a classe operária faria a revolução". Pois as relações de trabalho, diz, já não são as mesmas e o que vivemos hoje não é uma crise, que afinal, sempre acompanhou a modernidade. Já uma mutação acontece a cada 400 ou 500 anos.
Pode-se ter uma noção da época em que vivemos a partir de outra colocação de Novaes no programa do seminário: o Renascimento foi, em suas palavras, "outra prodigiosa mutação". Este ano, uma exposição em São Paulo marca a trajetória dos ciclos criados pelo filósofo, com apresentação do crítico literário Antonio Candido, um dos mais respeitados intelectuais do país.
Enquanto se discutem questões de tamanha magnitude, os mesmos intelectuais que hoje pensam para onde caminha a humanidade certamente continuarão a ser chamados para opinar sobre todo tipo de assunto. E, a despeito das críticas às vezes devastadoras que possam sofrer, continuarão a "colocar o dedo na ferida", como disse Janine. Antonio Cicero fecha a questão: "Longe de aceitar o papel que lhe querem atribuir, o filósofo deve meter-se onde não é chamado".Home > Valor Econômico > Impresso > EU & Fim de semana > Cultura

Schopenhauer, o filósofo do pessimismo

Cyro Andrade, de São Paulo27/08/2010

Schopenhauer: o mundo é feito somente de vontades insatisfeitas e dor. O prazer nada mais é que a ausência de dor. A única saída é a renúncia ao desejo
Completam-se em 21 de setembro 150 anos da morte de Arthur Schopenhauer, nascido em 1788 em Danzig, Prússia. O "filósofo do pessimismo", assim chamado por causa de traços de sua personalidade e o sentido que escolheu dar às suas reflexões e escritos, não tinha amigos, nunca se casou e passou boa parte da vida em desavenças com a mãe, Johanna, mulher de predicados intelectuais que se tornaria conhecida por suas novelas, ensaios e relatos de viagens.
Seu pai, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, pretendia que Arthur fizesse carreira nos negócios, como ele próprio, o que o levou a frequentar a escola de comércio de Hamburgo. Morto o pai, em 1805, Arthur sente-se à vontade para experimentar novas possibilidades de realização pessoal. Prepara-se para a vida acadêmica.
Em 1809, matricula-se na escola de medicina da Universidade de Göttingen, onde se torna assíduo principalmente nas aulas de ciências naturais. Ainda antes de completar um ano no curso, porém, transfere-se para a área de humanidades. O período de 1811 a 1813, agora na Universidade de Berlim, antecede, no fim deste último ano, o doutoramento em filosofia na Universidade de Jena.
No pensamento de Schopenhauer, o si-mesmo se apresenta sob dois aspectos: como objeto de percepção e como manifestação de vontade. Esta exerce influência velada e deformadora do caráter. Intelecto e consciência, em Schopenhauer, afloram como instrumentos a serviço da vontade e o conflito entre vontades individuais é a causa de contínuo atrito e frustração. O mundo, então, é feito de vontades insatisfeitas e dor. O prazer é, simplesmente, a ausência de dor. A única saída é a renúncia ao desejo (uma associação com a negação da vontade no budismo). Alívio temporário, no entanto, pode ser encontrado na filosofia e na arte.
Essas ideias são desenvolvidas em sua obra mais conhecida, "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" (O mundo como vontade e representação), publicada em 1819, à qual se dedicou quase exclusivamente por três anos e que se tornaria fundamental no campo da filosofia moral. A ideia principal, condensada no título, é desenvolvida em quatro livros, constituídos de séries de reflexões que incluem sucessivamente a teoria do conhecimento e a filosofia da natureza, da estética e da ética.
Em "Die Welt...", Schopenhauer diz que o mundo é "minha representação". É compreensível somente com a ajuda de constructos do intelecto - espaço, tempo e causalidade. Mas esses constructos mostram o mundo somente como aparência.
O livro assinala o ápice do pensamento de Schopenhauer. Nos anos seguintes à publicação, em 1819, nada muda em sua filosofia. Ele faz apenas reelaborações, para esclarecimento e reafirmação.
Morreu recluso, em Frankfurt, em companhia de seus cães.

Fontes: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy e BBC Radio 4

Leon on Nusseibeh's book...

2010-08-30T07:05:00.002-03:00

Sympathy for the Other

Sari Nusseibeh,Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (Book)

By LEON WIESELTIER

Published: April 1, 2007

How does one regard a good man in a dark time? With joy, obviously, but also with sorrow. Seneca said in one of his letters that you must either hate the world or imitate it, but there are few things in this world so stirring as a man who neither hates it nor imitates it, but in the name of what is best in it resists what is worst in it. Such a man secures hope against illusion, and by example refutes any argument against the plausibility of historical action. It would be too hard to act if decency itself had still to be invented. And yet the uncommonness of such a man casts a long shadow over the faith in eventual justice or eventual peace, because the figure is so lonely against the ground. The good man in a dark time is the unrepresentative man. He has the honor of an anomaly. He marks the distance that still has to be traveled. And how much, after all, can a single individual accomplish, all the uplift notwithstanding? Heroes are not policies.

ONCE UPON A COUNTRY
A Palestinian Life.
By Sari Nusseibeh with Anthony David.
Illustrated. 542 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.50.
Related
First Chapter: ‘Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life’ (April 1, 2007)
Sari Nusseibeh’s book provokes such an ambivalence — more precisely, such a double-mindedness — about the malleability of history, but not an ambivalence about itself. “Once Upon a Country” is a deeply admirable book by a deeply admirable man. It is largely a political memoir, about a reluctantly political Palestinian trying to bring politics to his people, as the forces of occupation, religion and terrorism interfere with the very possibility of politics. Nusseibeh’s book is written out of a refreshingly candid awareness that the reasons for the persistence of the Palestinians in their stateless misery are multiple and complicated. He is the very rare participant in the Israeli-Palestinian disputation who does not spend himself in fits of self-justification; the rights and the wrongs, in his view, are cruelly distributed across all the sides in this apparently ceaseless conflict. Nusseibeh is plainly a rational man, but he does not dwell in reason’s neighborhood.
He is one of the Arab aristocrats of Jerusalem, the scion of a family descended from one of the tribal leaders who accompanied Muhammad on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the seventh century, and whose brother, the first Muslim high judge in Jerusalem, was charged by the caliph Omar with the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Nusseibeh, whose early years were dispersed between Damascus and East Jerusalem, relates the lore of his high-born family with an affectionate irony; there is a certain noblesse in his book, but there is no grandiosity. He is keenly alive to the injuries that the past may inflict upon the present. He makes a point to tell the legend of Omar’s refusal to pray in Christianity’s most sacred church, because “he feared later Muslim leaders might be tempted to turn the glorious church into a mosque.” We know from our own time what the caliph was dreading. In Jerusalem, as in many afflicted regions of our allegedly globalized planet, the past is not a foreign country.
Nusseibeh is by training a philosopher, and married the daughter of one of Oxford’s most devastating philosophical minds. A scholar of Islamic philosophy of the Middle Ages, Nusseibeh regularly, and affectingly, turns to medieval thought for modern enlightenment. (He even has kind words for Leo Strauss’s method of interpretation. The Straussian from the P.L.O.!) From al-Ghazali’s discussion of miracles, he grasps that things may change because their elements may be manipulated for new ends and combined into new forms, and so “it’s up to us to turn hatred into understanding.” From al-Farabi, he infers that the ideal government is not one “run by God or his prophet,” but by “a wise and learned ruler,” and he teaches this secular Muslim notion to the perfervid Islamicists at Bir Zeit University. From Avicenna’s theory that “our knowledge is a construct of the will,” he learns to reject “inherent identities” in favor of “a theory of identity as a dynamic function of the will, whether ... of the self or of the nation.” And this Islamic speculation about the accountability of the self and the nation puts him in mind of a recent visit to Monticello, where “what was so astounding for me about Jefferson, in contrast to Robespierre, say, or any of the Arab revolutionary leaders, was the systematic manner in which he went about putting flesh and bones on the conception of liberty by building free institutions.” “Once Upon a Country” may be (I do not know for sure, I do not read Arabic) the most naturally democratic book to have emerged out of Palestinian nationalism.
Whatever the pertinence of medieval philosophy to modern politics, Palestine is not exactly a place for contemplation, and so the scholar given to metaphysical reveries and cafe afternoons — how do you say luftmensch in Arabic? — is irresistibly drawn into his people’s troubles. Nusseibeh was in charge of the media campaign for the first intifada and dodged Israeli soldiers to smuggle bags of cash to comrades in hiding. During the Oslo years, the philosophy professor was an “engaged — sometimes bemused but mostly anguished — spectator.” Nusseibeh recounts his political activity in vivid, witty and excessive detail. He believes that the only moral and practical resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the sharing of the land between the peoples, two free and sovereign states, Israel and Palestine — what used to be called “partition” and is now called the “two-state solution”; and he believes that political violence will fail to achieve this goal, and is an evil. “The Palestinian Arabs and the Jews are natural allies,” he remarks, “not adversaries.” His book is a personal history of the Palestinian nationalist struggle — and its failure — from the 1967 war to the stalemate of the present day. His role in that struggle has been to formulate principles and to establish committees. He was especially concerned with building the infrastructure, and the spirit, of a state.
Any person who has been involved in a cause, and pity the person who has not, knows the pressures that political ardor puts on intellectual honesty. When one’s universe is separated into sides, and one has chosen among the sides, the surest signs of intellectual honesty are expressions of sympathy for one’s other and antipathy for one’s own. “Once Upon a Country” is not only a celebration of Palestinian national life, it is also a criticism of it — a ferocious criticism. Nusseibeh despises its maximalist hallucinations, and prefers to emphasize “the liberation of the human being” over “a return to the seized lands of the past.” He was the P.L.O. representative in Jerusalem in 2001 and 2002, but quickly fell out of Arafat’s favor; and while he respects Arafat, the portrait that he paints of him is rather withering. He complains that Arafat’s manner of rule was “a formula for a Baathist-type dictatorship.” When Arafat presided over the Palestinian struggle, “the Palestinians were once again falling into that perennial trap,” he remarks. “They thought somehow the ‘world’ would step in like a deus ex machina and set things right.” Arafat, he says, “clearly blew it by not closing some sort of deal at Camp David.”
Nusseibeh also worries that the Palestinian Authority is developing a reputation as “a sleazy Arab kleptocracy,” and describes the second intifada as “a catastrophic slapdash brawl” and “a ruinous and sanguinary fit of madness.” His contempt for Hamas abounds. It is “a political-religious movement systematically throwing shackles on the mind.” He deplores “the cult of violence, the myth of the martyr and the delusions of actually ‘punishing’ the Israelis.” He insists that the Hamas charter “sounds as if it came straight from the pages of Der Stürmer.” These sterling opinions are proof not only of Nusseibeh’s extraordinary intelligence, but also of his extraordinary courage. And while he imperils himself with his attempts to persuade his brethren to accept a two-state solution and to reject Hamas, the fearless progressives at The New York Review of Books promote a one-state solution and dare to wonder whether the ascendancy of Hamas is “the last chance for peace.”
I do not mean to say that Nusseibeh is a “good Palestinian.” He hates Israel’s occupation, and its settlements in the territories, and its military harshness, and its security fence. But he does not hate Israel. His respect for it, his curiosity about it, his entanglement with it, is apparent on almost every page. About his first visit to the Jewish state, in 1967, he remembers that “just as I had suspected since listening to the Beatles over enemy radio waves, they were normal people just like us.” In 1968, Nusseibeh studied Hebrew and worked on a kibbutz in the Galilee, where “what impressed me most was their idealism.” In his treatment of the first intifada, he exhilaratingly declares that “a Manichean view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with one side all light, the other all darkness, is impossible to take.” And in perhaps the most unforgettable sentence in his book, Nusseibeh summarizes the situation this way: “The Jew seeks space to continue living, while the Arab defends his space to the death.” The observation is impartial, and chilling.
In early 1991, Nusseibeh spent three months in an Israeli prison, but still I wish he did not compare the Israeli prisons, for all their asperities, to the Gulag: there is an independent judiciary in Israel to which Palestinians have frequent and fair recourse, and the grossness of Nusseibeh’s historical analogy flies in the face of what he otherwise knows about the democratic character of the Jewish state. And his account of the war of 1948-49 is grotesque. “It was never a fair fight,” he writes, “nor could it have been.” Since this misrepresentation is becoming a regular feature of the new anti-Zionist discourse in America, it is worth pointing out that recent scholarship — incomplete, to be sure, because the relevant Arab archives are closed to scholars — shows that the Jewish state enjoyed no military superiority in the war into which it was born, not least because the Arabs of Palestine were joined by the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, which were augmented by troops from Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. Nusseibeh, rather astonishingly, does not even mention this invasion, which was undertaken to destroy a state whose legitimacy had just been established by the United Nations. He treats the founding conflagration as a Palestinian-Israeli war, when it was an Arab-Israeli war. And the fact that Israel did not lose it does not mean that Israel was ordained to win it.
Yet there is nothing mean or heartless in Nusseibeh’s writing about Israel. And there is much in his account of Israel’s policies of occupation that should make Israelis and their supporters squirm. Since, insofar as one can believe in countries, Israel is one of the countries in which I believe, this book certainly made me squirm. The futility and the brutality of some of Israel’s actions beyond its borders are abundantly clear. Not all of them, to be sure: though hideous as a matter of symbolism, the fence is effective as a matter of safety. But almost the entirety of the Israeli settlement of the West Bank has been a moral and strategic blunder of historic proportions; and whereas it is difficult to gainsay the use of force against terrorists, the sowing of southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in the final hours of last summer’s war was an act of genuine malignity.
But even more discomfiting than Nusseibeh’s picture of the Israelis is his picture of the Palestinians. There is a civil war in Palestine, and the resolution of the external conflict will be determined by the outcome of the internal conflict. There are no grounds for any optimism about that outcome, no basis for any confidence that secularity and modernity and diplomacy will prevail. Israel, with all its power, can do little to influence it, except at the margins; only the Palestinians can determine the character of Palestine, and it is an insult to them, an imperialist’s insult, to suggest otherwise. But consider only this season’s commotions. When Palestinians are unhappy with the composition of their government, they fire their guns at one another. When they are happy about the composition of their government, they fire their guns into the air. What they will not do, it appears, is stop firing their guns. And so Sari Nusseibeh’s formidable achievement — his articulation of a liberal nationalism, his championship of nonviolence in the midst of savagery, his humane understanding of an inhumane predicament — leaves a drop of despair, because of how exceptional it is.

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.

Weisberg on Slate

2010-08-30T07:03:00.001-03:00

Et Tu, Elvis?

Shame on the entertainers boycotting Israel this summer.

By Jacob WeisbergPosted Friday, July 23, 2010, at 4:35 PM ET

Meg Ryan

If you follow the news closely enough, you might have caught a small item recently about Meg Ryan canceling a scheduled appearance at a film festival in Jerusalem to protest Israeli policy. This was significant not because anyone should care what the nose-crinkling movie star thinks about the Mideast but precisely because no one does. Ryan, a conventional Hollywood Democrat, is a barometer of celebrity politics. That sort of sheeplike, liberal opinion once reflexively favored Israel. Now it's dabbling in the repellant idea of shunning the entire country.

Support for the Israeli cultural boycott has been growing in surprising places lately. After the Gaza flotilla incident last month, rock bands, including the Pixies, canceled performances at a music festival in Tel Aviv. Elvis Costello announced in May that he was cancelling two upcoming performances to protest the treatment of Palestinians. On his Web site, Costello wrote, "[T]here are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung and it may be assumed that one has no mind for the suffering of the innocent." Unlike Ryan, Costello is a thoughtful person whose views are worthy of respect. So how is he wrong? Why is a private embargo—which includes an academic boycott and the push for divestment on the anti-apartheid model—an unacceptable way for outsiders to protest Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories and press for political change?
One argument—advanced by Alan Dershowitz and Anthony Julius—is that academic boycotts are intrinsically unacceptable because they violate the principles of free expression and the universality of science and learning. A parallel objection applies to cultural boycotts, which don't just affect but directly target the most open-minded and forward-thinking members of a society. In the case of Israel, shunning writers like Amos Oz and David Grossman, who serve as national consciences, seems not only intrinsically vile but actively counterproductive from the point of view that opposes the Netanyahu government. On the other hand, it would be hard to justify a blanket rule that cultural and academic sectors are always off-limits. In authoritarian societies, cultural institutions tend to become ideological proxies—think of the National Ballet in Cuba or the East German gymnastics team. Carving out big loopholes merely ensures that sanctions will fail. There's no blanket cultural exemption in American sanctions in place against Iran. Israel itself is calling for comprehensive international sanctions against Iran that would cover artists and intellectuals.
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An even weaker case against the cultural boycott is that it's unlikely to work. While it's certainly true that cultural sanctions, on their own, are more inconveniences than lethal weapons, they can have a real impact. In South Africa, for example, many scholars argue that sports sanctions, generally classed as a form of cultural boycott, were an effective form of outside pressure. Banning racially discriminatory teams from the Olympics, and from international cricket and rugby competitions, took away something people really cared about. When it comes to Israel, it's hard to predict what effect cultural and academic isolation—or bans on participation in sporting events—might have. Some in Israel take international rejection as an affirmation, concluding that amid a sea of hostility, it has no recourse other than self-sufficiency. On the other hand, Israel does care about world opinion, and opponents of the Netanyahu government might cite growing global opprobrium as an argument for a different course.
Perhaps boycotts should be off-limits as a tactic against democratic societies where other means of peaceful protest exist. But here, too, it's impossible to defend a blanket rule. The immediate resort to sanctions when an elected government does something objectionable but reversible seems extreme and disproportionate. I'm thinking here of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's interdiction of official travel to Arizona because of its draconian immigration law or the European Union's boycott of Austria after the neo-fascist Jorg Haider joined the government in 2000. But an elected democracy like the Milosevic regime in Serbia can oppress ethnic minorities or even commit genocide as well as an unelected one. And, indeed, one could argue that only in a democracy are the people fully responsible for the actions of their government, making a collective sanction more rather than less justified.
The stronger case against the cultural boycott of Israel is based on principles of consistency and proportionality—and on history. Supporters of boycotting Israel seldom focus on China, or Syria, or Zimbabwe, or other genuinely illegitimate regimes that violate human rights not in deviation from their own principles but systematically. This underscores their bad faith. Boycotters are not trying to send a specific message, such as "We object to your settlement policy in the West Bank" or "We think you need to be willing to give up more for peace." What they're saying instead is: "We consider your country so intrinsically reprehensible that we are gong to treat all of your citizens as pariahs." Instead of warning that Israel risks becoming an apartheid society if it fails to make peace, boycotters have concluded that Israel already is an irredeemable apartheid society. Like the older Arab economic boycott of Israel, which dates back to the 1940s, the cultural boycott is a weapon designed not to bring peace but to undermine the country.
Because Israel is a refuge for persecuted Jews, this kind of existential challenge is hard to disassociate from anti-Semitism—even if people like Meg Ryan and Elvis Costello intend nothing of the kind. It is for this reason that unlike in South Africa, where the internal opposition supported sanctions, none but the most extreme voices in Israel are likely to come around to the idea that their country deserves to be boycotted, divested from, or punished with sanctions. When people are trying to murder you because of your religion, it is difficult to credit the bona fides of those who merely want to shun you because of your nationality.
That leaves the question of what opponents of Israeli policies can legitimately do. Given the unlikelihood of the U.S. Congress ever using military aid as leverage to pressure Israel—or allowing President Obama to do so—it makes sense to look for more discriminate ways to challenge the most objectionable Israeli policies. For instance, the high court of the European Union ruled earlier this year that goods manufactured in the West Bank don't qualify for preferential treatment given to Israeli exports. In a similar vein, the New York Times recently delineated the way in which American supporters of the settlements claim hundreds of millions of dollars in tax deductions. When Elvis Costello takes on that scam, I'll be right behind him.
A version of this article appears in this week's Newsweek.

"In general, I think the way to Describe the World is to get Longer not Shorter"

2010-08-12T15:45:00.005-03:00

Chegar em NYC e ficar no meat packing district. Eis quarto e Coca Sarli. NYC? Baltimore na veia - agudo ou circunflexxxo. Quem diria que essa fedentina imunda ia ter loja do Alexander McQueen e Stella McCartney? Isso nem no tempo em que o Lower East Side estava mudando. Como é perto e colado a Chelsea, o bairo mais badalado agora, há vida inteligente ao redor. O Lower West é perto do Village e perto do Soho, com seus artistas plásticos; os caras tomaram tudo de assalto. Ficou legal, mas ainda fede perto do Hudson, e construiram o “Standard Hotel” (Google and pictures please) em frente à planta do Department of Sanitation, metáfora apropriada. Mas o travelogue aqui tem que rezistrar que a linha de trenzinho que levava peru congelado pra embarcar no rio, bem como carne desossada, agora virou um grande “paseo” suspenso, com jardins - tudo ficou “sanitizado” e bonito. O hotel é louco, somente design, concierge de calças pescando siri, parecendo modelo de NY Fashion, tudo mais gay que Berlim. Design e design. Em tudo. Instalação de arte muderna no elevador. Mas muito bom. E aviso (em papel timbrado estrategicamente posicionado em cima da cama) ao chegar no quarto para que se evite ficar nu pois é vidro totalmente transparente “do”... pau a pique “ao sapê”. Nem fosco, nem tosco. Do chão mesmo ao teto. Então voyeur vai voiar e ver. Mais uma novidade. Bom, pegamos o Voice e Time Out pra ver o que rola...

De show vai de ruim a pior, claro – pra quem tem acompanhado essa discussão sobre a criação autóctone. NYC virou de novo importadora de arte, o que não é ruim nem pra cidade e o mundo agradece. Em cima da hora somente populacho, então que tal checar jazz? As apresentações do Blue Note, que há muito reforça a tese que o jazz morreu, se assemelha à minha coleção de fitas cassete, (e o que joguei fora) Ron Carter, Lee Ritenour (!), Dave Grusin (!!), Tuck and Patti (!!!!), ressalva faço ao grande Mulgrew Miller, mas ele toca com Ron Carter agora. Acabou o mundo, viva a misantropia. Museu mesmo. Não tem mais graça. No Vanguard tem Greg Osby – que hoje faz coisa mais datada do que fazia nos anos 80 – tem o Iridium, Birdland e o Puppet’s, mas é triste, requiêmico e não tem jeito. Fico com as fitas cassete e os CDs roubados do meu pai – nada sem ética posto que só ouve hoje em dia a voz do William Bonner e do Boechat – e a da minha mãe, volta e meia.

As artes plásticas sim fervem e no Rubin foi bom ver exposição de arte Himalaia, se é que esse acidente geográfico vértico-promontorialmente cordilheirico possa servir de adjetivo, ou tal atividade adjetivada. Tem o Museu do Marco Zero, ali no distrito do açougue azougue, onde eles falam que não há nada gráfico e pode-se levar criancinha. Claro, estas podem ser comidas por comunistas ou agora muçulmanos. Corajosa a posição do Rick Hertzberg (sim é Hedrick) na New Yorker sobre a construção da mesquita nas proximidades. Eu mesmo estava lá no dia 10 de Setembro de 2001 e a Amtrak me salvou, pois peguei um trem na véspera; cinco e meia da tarde rumo a Jaçanã (D.C.). Claro que o Pentágono levou avião na fuça. Há teorias conspiratórias que dizem que no Pentágono não foi avião, e sim míssil tentando acertar o outro que caiu em Penn. Enfim, whatever. Mas não tem foto não.

Museu, não precisa falar. Chega deles. Não vou. A rua é o museu de tudo e todos. Basta andar ao lado do Marco Zero pra se sentir a energia mais estranha do mundo. Ver aquelas escavadeiras empilhadas, não dá nem pra fazer parque e pisar em cima. Quatro mil almas derretidas no quadrilátero. Faria uma floresta de tundra, mais mata nativa, isolada do público, um monumento à misantropia, onde nenhum ser humano possa pisar, de puro castigo, plantaria mudas, jogaria uns bichos nativos, da região (italianos de Jersey se adaptam bem) e cercaria tudo. Fica um monumento à “Não” Humanidade, pois é o que merece...

E enquanto a CCBB no Rio prestava homenagem a Russ Meyer, a Film Society do Lincoln Center fez uma retrospectiva de todos os filmes de Isabel “Coca” Sarli, o maior símbolo sexual argentino e ex-miss em 1955. Armando Bo, o diretor, foi seu marido, e “Fuego” é ponto máximo da obra – que não tive o prazer (lato auauau) de ver. Retrospectiva de três dias que tinha começado no dia 6. Em Fuego ela faz uma ninfomaníaca que não pode se satisfazer nem com homem ou com mulher. Ninguém menos que John Waters (autor da obra prima “Pecker” que é mais “camp” e pior que Pink Flamingos, onde a corrida pro fundo do poço sempre é o padrão de medida) disse que Fuego entra na sua lista de “movies that will corrupt you”. Com essa benção, corram ao YouTube ou tentem achar cenas espalhadas por aí.... Waters psicografado no Globo recentemente e conterrâneo de Baltimore.

O que há em comum entre as películas de Meyer e o que fez Coca é basicamente enaltecer um tipo de mulher; uma espécie de naturalismo, digamos assim. Um ode à grandeza e grandiosidade. Essa é a parte onde a misantropia não deve entrar. Quando pensamos em Waters, Meyer e os atributos de Coca, vemos que a humanidade pelo menos não ficará para trás na corrida reprodutória, que se valha Freud amordaçado num armário (que não seja de vidro). E o italiano de Jersey correndo pelado no Parque do Marco Zero.

Livro então? Não? Sim, está na hora... Está uma NYC muito mondo cane, nada de Midtown, mas bem Village trash dessa vez, me lembrando muito de Baltimore e vendo New Jersey do outro lado do Rio, não senti trissteza; apenas nada tinha mais vida. A alma evaporou-se com o calor. Coca Sarli seria a solução? Que nada, o elevador vinha com sua instalação permanente de arte em vídeo, bem como oito canais na TV HD no quarto do hotel. E os funcionários glabros e famélicos andando atenciosamente, todos os fashionistas de plantão. O ex-governador Elliott foi empichado por se envolver com prostiputas e entrou o governador cego. Elliott era o Collor dos “prosecutors”, se insurgiu contra Wall Street. Tirésias não tiraria onda melhor de “psychic” com essa. O estado é governado por um deficiente visual. Saudades do Lois. Penso em quando será a vez de um deficiente ou de um eficiente emocional, precisando de atendimento especial. Aqui ele governa.

Livro... Aproveitar o whisper network pro Kindle. Light my fire. Rick Moody,”Quatro Dedos da Morte”, dedicado a Kurt Vonnegut e mandando a cartilha da “concisão” prum pagode do Marquinhos PQD, pois vem com mais de 700 páginas de pura prosa e glosa boa. Numa entrevista reproduzida no Voice, o autor diz algo perfeito.

"In general, I think the way to describe the world is to get longer not shorter,"

E seu livro é meta-meta-meta também. Ou seja, o a(u)tor hoje em dia deve explicações. Ah se deve, e muita!

Segundo a resenha, três espaçonaves rumam à Marte – chamadas Excelsior, Pequod, e Geronimo (sic) – misto de Colombo com... (dica: Longfellow, Melville e Forte Apache). E Mood delira no texto falando que “aí teve um tiroteio, pois o que mais poderia ocorrer?” . O tiroteio ocorre entre macacos, lutadores mexicanos, e um colecionador de tralha esportiva. A mão de um astronauta cai na terra e começa a enforcar algumas pessoas. Montese Crandall, prima persona, chora a morte de sua mulher – uma deficiente física que é apostadora compulsiva no mercado futuro, falando do fim da América num pacto Sino-Hindú. Somos salvos por um germe marciano com o sugestivo nome de thanatobacillus que chega na Terra com sede. Os cosmonautas debatem todos os assuntos e cometem as perversidades mais atrozes. Segundo ainda a resenha do Voice, parece ser Pynchon, David Foster Wallace e um tal de Ron Currie Jr. Esse aí escreveu também sobre bactéria, foguetes e o significado das coisas diante do horror. Enfim o livro é esculhambado por não ter sentido e propósito (como se algo aqui nessa porra desse planeta, e a dita existência, fizesse algum – ou tivesse certo – sentido). Mas criou-se um novo gênero musical, chamado “namorada morta” e o Pulverizador. Existência é o cacete, desistência mesmo. Ou melhor (D)existência.

Observando isso tudo volto ao aeroporto e vejo que a América é para os bravos, tem que ser macho pra segurar esse balaustre. Volto logo pra empunhar as armas de Jorge. Já parece meu quintal e foi rápido reengatar a marcha lenta rumo ao oratório e ao crematório. Fora isso temos Times Square e aquele inferno de turistas lotando as calçadas.... O cheiro fétido de esgoto no Baixo Hudson é preferível. Pois quem gosta de metafísica sabe que a proximidade com Wall Street nos leva aos crimes mais hediondos que ainda são cometidos contra os homens de má vontade. If you can’t fight them, join the party dressed to kill... Os atarantados Tarrantinos vão filmar tudo. A Europa já acabou. E NYC prenuncia o começo do fim infinito. Nome da minha obra que um dia terminarei. No infinito. The end.

Api New Inquiry - Benjamin and Stuff - Literally....

2010-07-11T14:43:00.001-03:00

Walter Benjamin & Travel as Collecting

“…what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship between a collector and his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection….This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories… The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are frozen as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. … To renew the old world—that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things… Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationary store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in pursuit of books!” “…Now I am on the last half-emptied crate, and it is way past midnight. Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about—not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the cities in which I have found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris: memories of Rosenthal’s sumptuous rooms in Munich, of the Danzog Stocktum where the late Hans Rhaue was domiciled, of Sussengut’s musty book cellarin North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of Iseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me…. For a collecteor—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” –Walter Benjamin, Unpacking my Library“…and yet for all of that, I had still never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things.” –Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
We approach the world, futilely, as collectors. Travel demonstrates as much as any personal intimacy that we cannot elicit perfect, unmoving loyalty. Writing anything down is basically sentimental, an act of preservation, an attempt to hold a moment or image still. Travel writing wants to defeat the impermanence of being in any one place. In keeping records of the intangible—people or places or experiences –we attempt to forget that the things we love are not, in fact, things, and therefore can’t be kept, preserved, or possessed.
Benjamin writes in Unpacking my Library, about the relationship between a collector and the things he or she collects, figuring that relationship as an extreme intimacy. This figuration extends into much of his other writing. His massive Arcades Project is in part an accounting that turns Paris into a collection, numbered, categorized, recorded and kept permanent. The same intimacy between a collector and his things characterizes Benjamin’s relationship to the places he visits and then describes.
Location is necessarily fleeting. As with art and with beauty and even, finally, with people for whom we feel things, there is nothing to be done about it. Our impulses toward everything that we encounter are essentially frustrated. Even the literal collection of objects, as chronicled in Unpacking my Library, is in the end an exercise in futility, as mortality of course erases all ledgers. Owning a place by governmental authority is no more feasible than guaranteeing love by marital law. Neither is in fact a promise; there is no security from one moment to the next.
Conquest of one kind or another has forever been one human answer to the looming truths of impermanence. Collection, particularly as Benjamin figures collection, is a sort of small-scale conquest. If you collect shoes or books or records, you want to conquer shoes or books or records by having the most of them, by having enough of them (though, of course, there’s never such thing as enough). Benjamin’s pieces recounting Marseille or Spain or Naples have always seemed to me reminiscent of early American explorers’ journals, in which trees and birds and animals and everything else are written down in minute detail. If something is unrecorded, the logic goes, it is therefore unknown and unpossessed, and the person who names it owns it. Columbus gave names to newly discovered objects, trees and animals and fruit, in order to claim ownership of them. He collected them by announcing them.
This recording or naming was a literal method of ownership when travel existed primarily for the purpose of conquest, when travelers brought nations and pieces of land back to monarchs like so many wrapped presents. Benjamin’s naming has a far less literal consequence. He does not gain any active ownership of the places he visits, and he isn’t recording anything that isn’t already known. This uselessness lends poignancy to his actions in writing and recording. As in our relationships with people, we think we can put our hands on a place or a person and record our relationship to it or them, record our presence there, as tangibly as sailing to an uncharted country and declaring its name to be “America.”
Of course, we’d like to collect the people we love and the people we desire. That’s why we tell stories about them. Narration is a kind of collecting. Cities and bodies are interchangeable in much travel writing because going somewhere is the same thing as being with someone physically, and each activity is as fleeting, as impossible to hold onto or to concretely prove, as the other. In old stories about seduction, physical proof is often the object; a lock of hair, a bedroom key, a letter in the lover’s handwriting. Consider the miasma over a handkerchief in Othello. Consumerist acquisition appeals, sets up its camp in the same place as sexual and romantic desire, because it promises to assuage these afflictions. What a relief that one can in fact own something. It doesn’t matter as much to own a pair of shoes as it matters to prove that someone once wanted you or loved you or that you really did travel to Paris or Thailand or Africa, but maybe if you buy enough shoes, the ache of impermanence will calm, close up into a peaceful silence. Of course, it never does, so we continue to apply a consumer’s impulse to essentially un-acquirable things. Perhaps the explorers who documented fruit and trees and animals and land-masses and brought them back to European rulers as though in boxes with price tags experienced a greater alleviation of this longing than we can imagine. Maybe by conquering, by naming a country and populating it with their subjects or relatives, they were able to in some way bridge the gap between personal desire and material acquisition.
Chronicling, like acquisition, is a failed defense against impermanence. We can’t take our stuff with us when we go, but we can’t even take our experiences with us into the next moment, except by recording them, by talking about them. Gossip can be understood through these texts as perhaps a function of longing rather than a malicious impulse; if we don’t tell someone about what happened or where we’ve been, that experience may just vanish. Telling people what happened is the acquisitive impulse applied to experience. Buying too much stuff is the same thing as telling secrets. Indiscretion is a kind of longing.

Desconfiava...

2010-07-07T20:34:00.001-03:00

The Central Claim. The Apeiron article and the sample chapters below concentrate on showing that Plato used a consistent scheme of symbols to embed a musical structure in each genuine dialogue. In short, each dialogue was divided into twelve parts. At each twelfth, i.e., at 1/12, 2/12, etc., Plato inserted passages to mark the notes of a musical scale. This regular structure resembles a known Greek scale. According to Greek musical theory, some notes in such a scale are harmonious (if they form a small whole number ratio with the twelfth note) and the others are dissonant or neutral. Plato's symbolic passages are correlated with the relative values of the musical notes. At more harmonious notes, Plato has passages about virtue, the forms, beauty, etc.; at the more dissonant notes, there are passages about vice, negation, shame, etc. This correlation is one kind of strong evidence that the structure is a musical scale. This musical structure can be studied rigorously because it is so regular. Subsequent work will show that other symbols are used to embed Pythagorean doctrines in the surface narratives. It is surprising that Plato could deploy an elaborate symbolic scheme without disturbing the surface narratives of the dialogues, but in this respect he does not differ from other allegorical writers like Dante or Spenser.

For more on this article, the full one can be googled and is on pdf....

http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/

I Wonder Why... A Cara e o Coroa....

2010-07-06T17:58:00.001-03:00

Gestor de fundo de hedge decide que melhor é consertar banheiros

Financial Times

06/07/2010

Texto: A- A+

"Diary of a Very Bad Year"

HFM e Keith Gessen. Harper Perennial. 272 págs., US$ 14,99

Sir Howard Davies lamentou certa vez a pobreza da ficção financeira. "A maior parte de nossos escritores está mais preocupada com a vida depois do dia de trabalho e abaixo da cintura", disse o ex-presidente da Financial Services Authority, que na ocasião, em 2007, presidia o júri do prêmio Man Booker de ficção. "Até certo ponto, isso é compreensível - mesmo banqueiros de investimento arrumam tempo para ter um caso amoroso -, mas há limites."
Aparentemente, para os homens de letras as finanças eram uma coisa maçante: as coisas que aconteciam na City de Londres e Wall Street durante o dia eram impenetráveis e pouco interessantes. No entanto, poucas semanas depois dos comentários de Davies, o banco de investimento americano Bear Stearns foi forçado a contabilizar perdas enormes, porque dois fundos de hedge estavam implodindo; o Northern Rock, um dos maiores bancos hipotecários do Reino Unido quebrou e houve uma corrida aos bancos em todo o mundo.
De repente, o mundo financeiro passou a ser fascinante para um grupo muito maior de pessoas. Embora não seja ficção, "Diary of a Very Bad Year" é, à sua maneira, uma tentativa de reduzir a distância entre os mundos literário e financeiro.
A ideia é colocada com clareza: o livro contém transcrições de entrevistas entre um gestor de fundo de hedge anônimo e bastante articulado, baseado em Manhattan, e Keith Gessen, editor da "n+1", uma revista literária de Nova York.
A leitura é fácil. O formato, simples e claro, funciona bem como a estrutura sobre a qual a crise do mercado vai se desenrolar. Cada uma das entrevistas - conduzidas em tempo real no decorrer de 2007 e 2008 - carrega um sentido redobrado de urgência.
Embora o livro esteja carregado de jargão financeiro, isso contribui para sua credibilidade. Com muita frequência, as descrições da crise financeira passam tempo demais explicando a mecânica do mercado de uma forma que confunde, mais do que esclarece.
Esse exercício é bem-sucedido, graças à personalidade e carisma do gestor anônimo entrevistado, um tal "HFM". Mas, embora nunca se mostre intimidador, e sendo sempre envolvente, mesmo assim ele é um indivíduo falível, com um ponto de vista errado colocado às vezes, pelo entrevistador, de maneira bajuladora, como se fosse um oráculo do mercado.
Os comentários feitos no livro parecem sinceros, mas também são extensos e às vezes inconclusivos, talvez compreensivelmente. Gessen, que faz as perguntas, confessa honestamente que "nunca ouvi falar disso".
A conversa tem, também, momentos que causam desconforto. "Sabe, você tem uma bela mente..." é uma introdução um tanto ingênua para o que de outra forma seria uma pergunta muito bem colocada para um gestor de fundo de hedge. "Você sente que sua mente está sendo usada neste momento da história da melhor maneira possível?"
HFM esquiva-se, mas na medida em que a entrevista prossegue - e a crise financeira se desenrola, ao mesmo tempo -, fica cada vez mais claro que a resposta provavelmente será "não". "Tenho dinheiro suficiente, não preciso mais dessa dor de cabeça, vou trabalhar consertando os banheiros de minha casa", diz HFM. Na verdade, muitos gerentes de fundos de hedge espalhados pelo mundo chegaram à mesma conclusão nos últimos tempos - ou foram forçados a isso.
Os elementos mais pessoais das transcrições - a grosseria para com colegas, ser ameaçado por banqueiros de investimento ou desejar uma semana de trabalho de três dias - tornam a leitura mais interessante, especialmente porque o diálogo deixa de ser um relato amplo, ainda que longe de original, do "crash" do mercado, para se transformar em uma conversa pessoal sobre os altos e baixos de se trabalhar no setor financeiro e na indústria dos fundos de hedge.
Em última análise, "Diary of a Very Bad Year" tem seus limites. É, afinal de contas, simplesmente uma série de transcrições de entrevistas. As respostas de HFM são sempre perspicazes e cativantes, mas isso é tudo que alguém pode aprender com uma pessoa cuja identidade se limita a três letras.

Beato Salu no Futebol

2010-07-06T17:54:00.000-03:00

GYAN, DE GANA, INSANO ABREU, O EGO E SEU CONTRÁRIO –
ALGUMAS REFLEXÕES SOBRE A COPA DO MUNDO DE 2010

Uruguai e Gana, insólito jogo — ou match, como se dizia antigamente — de quartas-de-final da primeira Copa do Mundo realizada em solo africano. No último minuto da prorrogação, o momento fatídico: pênalti para Gana, em sua melhor atuação no mundial de futebol. Gyan, a estrela do time ganense, prepara-se para bater. Ele sabe que esta é a grande chance para fazer com que, pela primeira vez, uma seleção de um país africano passe pela primeira vez às semifinais da Copa. Sabe também, por outro lado, que, se errar, deixará sua seleção sem moral para a cobrança de pênaltis que se imediatamente seguirá para decidir qual das duas seleções ficará entre as quatro melhores do mundo. É, portanto, um homem só diante da história — senão a História Geral, ao menos a do esporte bretão. Quanto a nós, sabemos, ou não, que pênalti não é coisa que se perca, que é tão importante que devia ser batido pelo presidente do clube (Neném Prancha), que as chances do jogador em converter a cobrança são muito maiores que as do goleiro em defendê-las. Daí porque ninguém que entenda um mínimo de futebol entende aquele título do livro do Peter Handke, O Medo do Goleiro diante do Pênalti. A penalidade máxima — em alemão, simplesmente elfmeter, a distância da marca até a linha do gol — é, para o goleiro, uma oportunidade de ser herói, ao passo que para o cobrador representa apenas a possibilidade de, com um mau chute, dar um mau passo, pois pênalti não convertido é presunção absoluta de negligência.
O fim da história todo mundo já conhece – ou melhor, todos os milhões que assistiram à Copa, o que é metonímia de todo o mundo. Gyan perde o pênalti, e Gana, sua chance de ser o primeiro país africano... na primeira Copa.... etc. etc. Mais interessante, talvez, que esse ponto, raro mas não incomum em momentos decisivos, foi seu contraponto. O mui propriamente alcunhado Loco Abreu converte o último pênalti — que levaria o Uruguai de volta às semifinais de um mundial, 40 anos depois de fazê-lo pela última vez —, com sua clássica “cavadinha”, que antes contribuíra para o título de seu Botafogo contra o Flamengo, forma de cobrar pênaltis pela qual, ouvimos, teria sido criticado no México, pela aparente displicência dessa forma de cobrar algo tão importante como um pênalti, máxime (!) num momento tão decisivo para seu país. Como o louco do último ato do Rei Lear, o Insano Abreu mostra a Gyan e a todos que tiverem olhos de ver toda a verdade: mesmo na vitória, o futebol é apenas um jogo — e não só na derrota, como se apressam em lembrar os Galvões Buenos ou Malos e outras aves em extinção. Então , porque essa toda agitação que cega, todo esse medo que paralisa o pé, que faz mover mãos nem sempre de Deus, se o mundo é apenas uma bola que rola, se a vida toda é somente um jogo? “Olha só, olha o sol... O Maraca domingo”... Os velhos e os Novos Baianos e os Pernambucanos como Nélson Rodrigues já sabiam que o futebol é tudo menos imanente, está cheio de mãos de Deus ou com todos os diabos e Sobrenaturais de Almeida invisíveis rondando o gramado, tudo isso para construir um resultado que já se sabia há mais de 2.000 anos, como o gol de mão de Wilton contra o Flamengo no último minuto de um Fla-Flu lembrado apenas pela crônica genial. No ludopédio (!), todos os países e mitos estão representados, não precisa de psicanalista algum prá nos dizer o óbvio ululante: o futebol é o inconsciente de chuteiras. Mil demônios famintos se apossam do corpo de Gyan, esvaziado de terror ante a perspectiva do êxtase, e a Jabulani, apropriado nome que parece de divindade animista africana, caprichosamente – futebolístico advérbio! – bate no travessão e sai pela linha de fundo. De tanto falar em pais-de-santos e outros xamãs, em coisas primevas, me lembro da fantasia de um povo supostamente primitivo, cujos filhos não se deixavam fotografar por temor de que a câmera lhes roubasse a alma. Mas será que não rouba? Uma vez assisti, em um trailer de um documentário sobre futebol, a um fragmento de entrevista com Barbosa, o goleiro eternamente responsabilizado pelo Maracanazo de 1950. Parecia uma sombra de si próprio, de tal modo a ausência absoluta de auto-estima era sua única presença, apologético até o final dos tempos, como se pedisse eternamente desculpas por sua falha no gol sem ângulo de Gigghia. Se em todos os outros lances foi um bom goleiro, se foi um bom filho ou um bom pai, se madrugou no subúrbio para treinar na esperança de subir na vida e melhorar sua vida de proletário e negro brasileiro, nada disso importa. Dele a história só vai reter que falhou na hora H, quando não podia faltar, quando poderia redimir a si e a todos nós de nosso suburbanismo local ou mundial, de sermos negros num mundo de brancos, subdesenvolvidos, pobres e derrotados em tudo, mas podendo, naquela hora, nos vingarmos, ao menos no futebol —que não tem importância nenhuma, ainda que, na copa e na mídia, ainda mais na ultramoderna, com seu zilhão de espelhos televisivos e internéticos, pareça ter toda. Após o chute do Louco estufar as redes de sua meta, Gyan, com seu choro convulso, talvez tenha se sentido o Barbosa de Gana, imaginando que o mundo guardará dele somente o retrato de seu fracasso, que é não só o de seu, mas de seu país e de toda a África. Ou seja, o contrário de seu / nosso duplo, o do filho do país que foi criado apenas para ser um algodão entre cristais, jogador desse time-enigma (o Botafogo), Abreu quem, no entanto, com seu deboche em forma de chute, Alienista de si próprio, liberou a si mesmo e fez ver a todos nós o mass-sanatório em que nos internamos, mostrando o que essa e todas as copas e troféus querem a todo tempo negar: que a vida verdadeira está além; dentro, talvez, do gol, mas sempre fora do desespero eterno do ego, esse pequeno argentino que mora dentro de nós, que queremos sempre sermos campeões em tudo como nossos amigos, mas que não somos sequer uma Pessoa, e que nem ninguém, nem coisa alguma nos redimirá nunca de nosso Nada, são apenas 11 metros, é só um segundo — em que, no entanto, a não-vida toda passa.

Mais Loco Loki Quem Me Diz... Eu Estou Feliz....

2010-07-02T19:13:00.001-03:00

Soccer is the Nigger of the World

2010-06-28T17:56:00.000-03:00

As the World Cup starts, conservative media declare war on soccer.

Now it appears as if Glenn Beck has waged a war against the world cup which he sees as an indicative of Barack Obama's policies.
"Barack Obama's policies are the World Cup." In an extensive rant on the June 11 Glenn Beck Program, Beck purported to explain how President Obama's policies "are the World Cup" of "political thought." Beck stated, "It doesn't matter how you try to sell it to us, it doesn't matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn't matter how many bars open early, it doesn't matter how many beer commercials they run, we don't want the World Cup, we don't like the World Cup, we don't like soccer, we want nothing to do with it." Beck stated that likewise, "the rest of the world likes Barack Obama's policies, we do not.
And it seems, from the comments of G. Gordon Liddy, that what they object to is the idea of America even joining the rest of the world in a competition; as America should embrace it's own exceptionalism.
G. Gordon Liddy: "Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?" Discussing soccer's popularity in the U.S. on his June 10 program, G. Gordon Liddy asked, "Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?" Liddy noted that "this game ... originated with the South American Indians and instead of a ball, they used to use the head, the decapitated head, of an enemy warrior."
As always, Liddy is talking nonsense. Football originated in the public schools of England, and had nothing whatsoever to do with South American Indians and decapitated heads.
But MRC's Dan Gainor gets a little nearer to the truth regarding why these people hate football so much.
Also on the June 10 G. Gordon Liddy Show, Media Research Center's Dan Gainor said, "the problem here is, soccer is designed as a poor man or poor woman's sport" and that "the left is pushing it in schools across the country." He added: "generally football games in this country don't devolve into riots or wars." He later added that the sport of soccer "is being sold" as necessary due to the "browning of America."
Original article at Media Matters

Api Again - Just Trying to Get What We All Say...

2010-06-28T17:47:00.001-03:00

My Generation

Benjamin Kunkel writes in LRB regarding Frederic Jameson's new book of collected essays:

In ‘The Valences of History’, the concluding essay of the new book, Jameson argues that when the fitful apprehension of history does enter the lives of individuals it is often through the feeling of belonging to a particular generation: ‘The experience of generationality is … a specific collective experience of the present: it marks the enlargement of my existential present into a collective and historical one.’ A generation, he adds, is not forged by passive endurance of events, but by hazarding a collective project. That this too is uncommon enough can be deduced from Jameson’s example of the process: ‘Avant-gardes are so to speak the voluntaristic affirmation of the generation by sheer willpower, the allegories of a generational mission that may never come into being.’ So the small sect crystallises the would-be universal – an ironic and possibly dialectical contradiction, and a fitting suggestion for a Marxist professor to make amid a near unchallenged global capitalism.
The theme of generations recurs from time to time in Jameson, whose work in any case proceeds less by straightforward argumentation than by a kaleidoscopic rotation across a consistent set of problems. In ‘Periodising the 60s’ (1984), he noted that ‘the classification by generations has become as meaningful for us as it was for the Russians of the late 19th century, who sorted character types out with reference to specific decades,’ and in that essay and elsewhere this rigorously non-confessional writer has hinted at the decisive importance of the 1960s in his own formation. Jameson’s fellow Marxist critics Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton (with some cosmic design evidently at work in the similarity of all three names) have already testified to his eminence in such a way as to give some sense of his importance to their own generation. It is a generation in which a younger person notices, though not especially among the Marxists, a widespread and not infrequently pathetic tendency toward serial intellectual and cultural faddism, which makes it the more impressive and even inspiring – to Jameson’s peers as well, it may be – that he has stayed so true to the utopian stirrings of the 1960s while remaining open to so much of what’s come since.
Jameson once likened the goofy eclecticism of certain postmodern architecture to the recipes inspired by ‘late-night reefer munchies’, and it may be an observation to bridge the gap between his generation, steeped in the 1960s, and my own to say that reading Jameson himself has always reminded me a bit of being on drugs. The less exceptional essays were like being stoned: it all seemed very profound at the time, but the next day you could barely remember a thing. Indeed there’s no other author I’ve frequented or admired to anything like the same degree so many of whose pages produced absolutely no impression on me. And yet the best of Jameson’s work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you’d always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. One of the trippier as well as more affecting passages in Valences of the Dialectic is a sort of aria on the condition of living, through global capitalism, in a totally man-made world, one in which even the weather patterns and the geological age (the Anthropocene, it was recently declared) are human productions:
We have indeed secreted a human age out of ourselves as spiders secrete their webs: an immense, all-encompassing ceiling … which shuts down visibility on all sides even as it absorbs all the formerly natural elements in its habitat, transmuting them into its own man-made substance. Yet within this horizon of immanence we wander as alien as tribal people, or as visitors from outer space, admiring its unimaginably complex and fragile filigree and recoiling from its bottomless potholes, lounging against a rainwall of exotic and artificial plants or else agonising among poisonous colours and lethal stems we were not taught to avoid. The world of the human age is an aesthetic pretext for grinding terror or pathological ecstasy, and in its cosmos, all of it drawn from the very fibres of our own being and at one with every post-natural cell more alien to us than nature itself, we continue murmuring Kant’s old questions – What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? – under a starry heaven no more responsive than a mirror or a spaceship, not understanding that they require the adjunct of an ugly and bureaucratic representational qualification: what can I know in this system? What should I do in this world completely invented by me? What can I hope for alone in an altogether human age?
In such a passage it’s possible to see a few things. One is as much evidence as a few lines could offer for placing Jameson among the important American writers of the age tout court. Another is his special way of being one of those (to vary what Henry James said) by whom nothing is abandoned: the apprehension of the alienness of the world is the signature experience in Sartre’s Nausea, whose author was the subject of Jameson’s PhD thesis and first book; the ‘human age’ alludes to the trilogy of novels by Wyndham Lewis, subject of another book-length study by Jameson; and the situation described here, of humanity confronting its own handiwork as something alien and exterior, is very much that of Marx’s alienated labour, in which the worker is dominated by the product of his own hands, his estranged ‘species-being’ ranged against him in the form of someone else’s capital. But the reader’s impression of tremendous intellectual power is accompanied by one of political paralysis. Who is this collective human ‘I’, in a world ‘completely invented by me’? Nobody at all, of course. Again, the analogy with drugs: perceptual journeys across the universe, confined to the couch.

You Gotta Have Balls - The Atlantic Monthly

2010-06-28T17:43:00.000-03:00

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The Year Without Sex
Jun 23 2010, 3:00 PM ET Comment

VikingHephzibah Anderson is an attractive, successful British journalist in her early 30s who enjoys a life of jet-setting between London, New York, and Paris. And after ringing in her 30th birthday, she swore off sex for a year. Fed up with the "kind of sex I was supposed to be cool with as a postfeminist, twenty-first century Western woman—a casual sort of intimacy without intimacy," Anderson decided to take on a vow of chastity in an effort to make sense of what was missing in the dating mishaps of her 20s. The year-long journey Anderson embarked on became about uncovering the sets of rules, expectations and assumptions that she—and many women—often create for themselves in dating.Anderson's new book, Chastened, chronicles the ups and downs of her year without sex. Here, she discusses why sex changes relationships, the challenges (and benefits) of delaying physical intimacy, and whether her experiment brought the revelation she was looking for.
Just to give our readers some quick background of the book, could you talk about how you decided to take on this year of chastity and what you hoped to find out? Well, it's interesting. I would say that if I had known that I would write a book about it, I would've gone about it in a much more organized way. But because it was something I was doing for completely personal reasons, at least at the start, it was a decision I really felt I had to make. The real reasons for why I made it became more apparent as the year progressed, in an odd way. There are essentially three things that caused the decision. I was in New York, I saw somebody who looked awfully like my college boyfriend, escorting a girl into DeBeers. I got back to England, and it turned out that it probably was my old college boyfriend, and he was going out with his girlfriend, and proposed, and they come back with a ring, and I was intent on wringing some kind of meaning from this serendipitous sighting. So that really got me thinking and looking back, and I realized that not only was he the first person I somewhat belatedly went to bed with, but he was the last person in almost a decade that I'd dated to have said "I love you," which seemed a terrible indictment of my romantic choices. I was about to turn 30, so there was some necessary self-reflection, and then I met somebody who I really thought might be, if not 'the one,' someone with whom I could have a meaningful future. And he not only didn't say "I love you," he said "I don't love you," which was honest, I suppose. And in the middle of all of this, a good male friend told me he had finally, unintentionally, won the girl of his dreams by saying to her, "I'm so happy being with you, I'm so happy just hanging out that I don't care if I never get to sleep with you," which seemed, to me, to kind of encapsulate everything that had been missing from my relationships in my 20s. So, I really thought that I needed to step back, because it seemed that sex was really clouding my judgment. So, I decided on a year—it seemed a nice, round chunk of time—and I dated it from the time that I made the decision because it was really about taking control of my emotional life. Did you pinpoint what changed in a relationship after sex? Was it a perceived shift in the power dynamic, was it one-sided or mutual?Yes, I felt that I needed so much more from them. And, to me, it felt like I needed much more than my right. At the end of the year, I would be able to say, "Well, that's ridiculous." I think we've lost any sense of healthy emotional entitlement. I think if you go to bed with somebody, it is a kind of bond; it's not nothing, however much we try to say it's nothing. Whether you're a man or woman, you're absolutely in your rights to expect there to be some kind of emotional gain. That's interesting, because for many young women there seems to be a lot of anxiety and pressure about appearing to be a burden, or needy—Yes, needy—which I think makes us really guarded, emotionally. It was actually only during that year that I realized how guarded I'd become after a decade of not-ideal relationships. And it's a lot easier to open up emotionally, when you've set some boundaries physically, or certainly when you slow the pace. And I think there a lot of women out there who are very emotionally frustrated because they're terrified of seeming needy. And I wonder whether men perceive it that way. Many women seem to be afraid that if they send a text message a day later, the man is going to run away scared. But I guess you'd ask why we need to tiptoe around men, when they should be tiptoeing around us?Exactly! Exactly. It's interesting that you ask that question because I think those are rules we make as women.So it's us?I think it is.Why did you pick the word "chaste" and not "celibate"?"Chaste" just seemed to have more romance about it. "Celibate" seemed to have more of a religious edge for a start, and I was very keen to stay clear of that, because one of the things I wanted to do was reclaim chastity for a mainstream, secular, non-politically divisive audience. What did you find most challenging about taking on the vow?It was interesting; it wasn't necessarily the things that I would have expected at the start of the year. Certainly I missed sex, but as the year wore on that actually got easier. The six-month mark was a bit testing, but certainly toward the end that had become almost manageable because there were so many compensations. But I think that that feeling of being slightly almost trapped in a cell, in a way, just being horribly self-aware during the year was a bit challenging at times. And I was forced to see things about myself that I hadn't liked to think of myself being—you know, passive and always going along with things because that was always sort of what was expected. So, coming face-to-face with those realizations was a bit challenging. One of your suitors, the Boy-Next-Door, invites you to dinner, which you find surprising. You ask yourself whether that invitation would have materialized had you already slept with him. How important, after that year, do you think "taking things slow" matters in the longevity of a relationship? Is this something that's changed how you approach dating?Yes, it really has, actually. I don't say, "Oh, it's going to be X number of months."Actually, I've got a friend who always tells guys it's going to be three months. And she says that she never intends [for it to happen]—she never really puts that into sorts, but she always gives it till two months and that sort of sorts them out. And I don't take that approach but I've certainly slowed things down an awful lot. And it's weird, it's little difficult, at this stage. I'm taking the effects of the year itself and the effects of the book, obviously. Now that the book is out there, that tends to source very candid conversations very early on.Have you spoken to any of the men detailed in your book since its release?Most of them, I have. I was incredibly worried the Jake character would put it down feeling awful about himself. And I really didn't want to villainize any of these men...so, I think he was fine about it.Did he learn anything? Was it a revelation for any of them, about how they were going about dating?Well, the updated final chapter—which is in the U.S. edition and only in the U.K. paperback edition—I did send that before it went to press to the old friend that appears. And he said, "Well, it's so interesting to see what was going on in your mind at that point, because you very rarely get the chance to do that." And I just thought, well, communication is so hard. Nobody's been furious...I've had an odd case of a male friend saying "Am I in it?" and me sort of thinking "Well, why on earth would you want to be in it?" Caitlin Flanagan's recent piece about hookup culture for The Atlantic generated a lot of discussion online. One commenter said casual sex allows her to feel more ownership of her body. You mention in the book that this is a good idea in theory, but question whether this is what women really want.I think it certainly works for a percentage of women out there, and that's great and it's wonderful that we all have that option. And I'm in no way advocating for the clock to be turned back, but I think that a lot of women know that they have the right to say no, but actually feeling like they have the right to say no in certain situations is a quite different thing. Where is the conversation about men in this debate? In writing this book and thinking about chastity and relationships, have you considered the male perspective?I did do a talk a few months back, and it was a very mixed audience, but there was a front row of very sweet, innocent- looking student boys. And it was so funny because their questions were all, "Well, we love the idea of there being more romance in the world, but our girlfriends are the ones who really set the pace, and set it perhaps all the quicker than we would've liked.." But I think certainly if some women have a hard time feeling they have the right to say no, men—it's just considered really freakish if they say decide to say, "Let's wait." So yeah, I think it's difficult for teenage boys. And they're just bombarded with these images of female raunch wherever they look. I did speak to some male therapists who specialized in male patients. And I asked them what kind of changes they'd seen and they said a lot of their patients were getting younger, and they were coming to them with sexual problems that usually don't present until men are in their 50s. And this one guy said it was purely the result of internet porn, and they were just seeing too much and it was always on tap. Which is kind of awful, they had this kind of porn idea of what sex should be. I don't think we should go back to the point where sex is this terrifying thing and most people are so ignorant they're never going to be satisfied. But on the other hand, you need a sort of space to make it your own, imaginatively and if we're just constantly bombarded by images of what it should look like, and if movie series are hiring sexual choreographers it makes it sort of an impersonal experience and it means that today's teenagers aren't learning about sex by fooling around with each other, they're learning about it through watching what feels good to other people online. Which is kind of voyeuristic...it must be strange for them.There is a line at the end of book where you mention a relationship that you had been carrying on after the year was over. Did you dabble in chastity after the designated year had come to an end?After the year, it was over...but it has really changed everything. And it seems to proceed at a much slower pace. Would you change how you dated in your 20s?I think I would, actually. I really would. I'd be more assertive about my right to be romanced. And I think that would have probably sent some of the cads running, and then I might have then noticed some more interesting fellows. Well, I don't regret my 20s. But I wish I'd been more in tune with what I'd actually wanted, wish I'd taken some time to figure that out, and then ask for it. Are you in love at the moment? Is there someone in your life?I joked to a friend a couple months ago, "Oh, God, this book's coming out again. Maybe I should just hire somebody. Even my male friends took on the part of fiancé for that happy ending, however cynical we are, we still...But I think in a way it makes it more informative, and makes it more the experiment I was thinking of, because I'm implementing these lessons that I've learned. And I'm actually quite happy, actually quite content. There's been a lot less sex, but more romance. And a lot more emotional closeness.

Personagens da Vida...

2010-06-10T20:53:00.000-03:00

“… Tenho inveja de quem faz blague. Eu não sei fazer isso. Se fizer, vai ser um desastre. Não sou eu...”

(Michel Temer)

Father of Hypertext Circa 99

2010-06-10T13:52:00.000-03:00

Interview with Robert Coover

"I AM AN INTRANSIGENT REALIST"

by Susana Pajares Toscaspajares@eucmos.sim.ucm.es

Robert Coover is one of the most respected American contemporary writers. He has written fourteen books – the last one Ghost Town (1998)—and his innovative prose caused a literary revolution in the seventies when Pricksongs and Descants (1969) and his next works came out. Coover´s use of language and his philosophical reinterpretation of familiar myths and stories make him an original and necessary voice in this end of the century´s cultural panorama. He is also well known for his engagement with hypertext –he was the first major author to write about it in The New York Times Review of Books and he has worked with it for many years-- and his work as professor at Brown University.
E- Let´s start outrageously, you wrote in "The end of books", that you were interested "in the subversion of the traditional bourgeois novel and in fictions that challenge linearity". Why is nineteenth century novel not valid anymore? (People still write it)
RC- Perhaps people are still writing nineteenth century novels because that century's enterprise has returned with such a vengeance, our own fin de siecle being more akin to that of a century ago than to more recent decades. Forms--social, artistic, other--echo (and reinforce) each other; if one is an iconoclast in one arena it makes no sense to be an unquestioning camp follower in another. But I'm not dogmatic about that, either. Let a thousand flowers, as they say... I merely opposed the entrenched novelistic dogmas of form at the time, wanting to break them open and make more sorts of fiction possible. I think that has happened, because it chanced that this was a widely shared conviction.
E- You´d like to be Cervantes´ heir (as you state in Pricksongs and Descants), because literature was exhausted back in the sixties and it needed new visions. What is the situation now?
RC- In that little dedication to Cervantes, I suggest that what made our circumstances (if not our talents) comparable was that we were both standing at transitional moments in human intellectual history. In his case, it was a more or less universal move from Platonism to Aristotelianism; in ours, from Aristotelianism to what I've called in the past the New Sophism. If the circle in some manner exemplifies Platonism and the line Aristotelianism, then perhaps the best image of this new shift in thought and discourse is the hypertextual web, for the transition has been accelerated by the computer and the Internet. In any event, the line with its implicit assumption of progress was what seemed stale in the 1960s, but the closed Platonic circle would not do either: our age is more skeptical. So what I called for was more formal innovation everywhere (which was itself a Sophist dictum, I suppose: make it new).
E- When talking about Sophism, do you also share the traditional complain against them: "too many words, too much decoration, too little really said"? (Some would also describe the Internet/Web this way)
RC- For the Sophists, language is power; in an actional ("existential") and relativistic world without fixed or knowable principles, the power routes are via rhetoric and persuasion. There is not a lot of conviction that "what" is said has much substance. Certainly it has no permanence or universality. Sophists doubt Socratean "insight" and do not believe there are singular solutions to alleged, isolated problems (nothing is isolated: the Aristotelian "categories" have all broken down). One makes choices among the myriad of choices (of which the Internet is becoming a kind of field of presentation) and wins arguments. There is so much noise, it is not easy to be heard, so the techniques of persuasion are increasingly looking like hightech advertising. Getting the message out: byword of the day. Even if the message is only "buy me".
E- You have sometimes been misunderstood as an elistist writer too concerned about word-play and fantasy and too little with reality. But there is a strong critical component in your work, from The Public Burning to your last book, Ghost Town, you seem intend on destroying American mythology... What kind of weapons are parody, humour, fantasy or even blasphemy?
RC- They are probably relatively powerless weapons, but--parody, humor, blasphemy, etc.--they are what I have. As for fantasy, I am not the least bit interested except for the ways, in the real world, that it impinges upon my life (religion, jingoism, tribal myths, the managed news, etc.), and then I often hate it. Only reality interests me and it is all that I write about, whether or not it can be said that I understand it. My forms are playful and so may conceal that from the inattentive reader, but it's true. I have said it from earliest days: I am, like Kafka, like Beckett, an intransigent realist.
E- Considering tales, religion and the news under the same category of fantasy would be subversive in itself for some people who like to dismiss literature as "non-serious stuff". Your literature is intransigent realism only read by a (happy) few, what are the mass media that most people consume?
RC- Somewhat answered, I think. Mostly forms of escape. "Light entertainment", as it´s called in the bizz. As reality´s not all that easy to take, it´s not surprising that most of us duck out most of the time. It´s easy to see how mass media (including Internet email and pornography), religion, shopping, drugs, professional sports, etc., serve in this way; only slightly more controversial is the notion that the managed news (TV, magazines, newspapers, radio) is also a kind of escapist entertainment. But any look at decade-old programming or articles will make it transparent that, though some of the data may retain some limited validity (if not itself faked), the stories that held the data together are all outdated fictions.
E- In relation to this, many critics admire your use of language, not merely as a medium to tell things, but as a message in itself. Your cycles, metaphores, double meanings... Why is it worth to add another layer of complexity to the act of reading?
RC- From infancy on, we are entangled in vast webworks of layered meanings in
our language. Fantasists may simplify all that to create a passing entertainment (most movies, for example), but realists cannot. In this, I suppose, I am the child of that great realist James Joyce. I might add, though, that translators admire this use of language less, for it makes their task all but impossible.
E- I suppose you have heard this before, but as your reader, I sometimes have been angry with the particularly "heavy" language of a paragraph, only to be enthusiastic again about the next. You don´t let us readers go to sleep or ever be sure that we know what comes next, how do you think of the reader when you write? (if at all)
RC- As the ideal reader, one who has read everything, knows far more than I do about any subject, is a severe critic of careless thinking or sloppy prose, is bored by anything short of the most testing challenge.
E- José María Guelbenzu describes your use of metafiction as "a transformation of reality". In fact, your phantasies are sometimes epiphanies, moments of revelation. I´m not only thinking about Joyce, but also about writers like García Márquez. Who do you read and why?
RC- Nowadays, mostly the work of students, ex-students, and friends, as their books come tumbling through the door. This had not been my intention and will hopefully not be my permanent fate, though many of them are in fact among the best writers I know. But the two writers you mention are of course favorites to whom I return often, as with a couple of dozen others I could list here, to no useful purpose. I am still restlessly on the lookout for the unusual voice and still do read widely if maybe less exhaustively.
E- Now I´d like to talk about a couple of your novels more specifically. Back to The Public Burning, what shapes history? What kind of terrible game is this? Is the power to shape history an American quality? (It made me think of the Roman Empire)
RC- History is shaped by many things--accidents, cataclysms, even the weather--but mostly by human actions. Which is what I am interested in. Human actions and the mythological and other structures that govern and provoke them. Americans, being footloose and untethered from the outset, may be more aware of the sort of "game" (as you say) that history is, and so more quickly able to adapt to its shapeshifting patterns and rules. (For a variant on this theme, see my essay on "Soccer as an Existential Sacrament.")
E- Can you tell us a bit more about this essay?
RC- It was written on commission 15 years ago for Polaroid´s house magazine, Close-Up (the photographer is mentioned), an issue later produced as a book.
E- The concern with belief systems is also present in your "religious" works, like The Origin of the Brunist and A Theological Position, and even in baseball as religion in The Universal Baseball Association. You seem decidedly postmodern problematizing this kind of discourse, but also imply that human beings need it. What is your position regarding this now?
RC- You mean I imply that human beings need some sort of mythological or story structure to get through life? I think that's probably so, though it needn't be handed-down dogma and it can constantly metamorphose. That is to say, becoming an atheist does not free one from the need for a condensed "story" of how the universe works, though you may have to turn from primitive texts (the Bible, say) to those of geneticists and astrophysicists. Flexible, open, and loving stories are better than closed and hateful ones.
E- Do you think there is a difference between scientific texts and mythological-literary texts considered as explanations of the world? Or rather, what does it mean to choose
one or the other kind of explanation?
RC- In a Sophist world, these texts have blurred boundaries. But science strives for precision, while art focuses more on the ambiguities of the world. Science talks about things that can be defined and described, even if not fully understood or experienced (as when working with particles), art about things like goodness, truth, love, beauty, the human emotions. Art appeals first and foremost to the emotions, science to the intellect. No need to choose between them. Better to understand their respective validity and limitations.
E- The Universal Baseball Association makes imagination triumph over life. Is life really so dull?
RC- Oh no. Life is certainly not dull, though some sad lives may be. All too often it is appallingly fascinating. Imagination is NOT there to displace life: see my replies above.
E- Spanking the maid was part of the curriculum in one of the literature courses I took at the University. I remember the students (including myself) being fascinated with its kafkaesque quality, the way the rituals of life are uncomprehensible and its reflection on freedom. The novel ends when the characters have understood the ritual and want to break it. Is literature´s duty to make us understand?
RC- "Duty" is a heavy burden for a work of art. But if it is truly beautiful, then it will probably also be in some manner true, and grasping that truth can lead to some sort of understanding. A thought that often boils up as I sit and gaze, often somewhat perplexed, upon the great works of the Abstract Expressionists.
E- What kind of "duty" do you recommend your writing students? Can writing be learned?
RC- Attitudes towards writing can be learned or at least experienced, tested out. I am impatient with market-oriented genre writers, even when young. I work closely with prose and style problems, but mostly because I´m paid to do so. I´m much more interested in helping serious young writers develop innovative structures and approaches to the literary enterprise, based on their own peculiar genius. That´s one reason I have become so engaged with hypertext: a great pedagogical tool for young aspiring writers and readers.
E- In Briar Rose, there is this line about the sleeping beauty: "the fairy's spell binding her not to a suspenseful waiting for what might yet be, but to the eternal reenactment of what, other than, she can ever be", is the writer like her in this?
RC- Maybe that does reflect back upon the author's own dilemma, though I hadn't thought of that before. What I think I had in mind when I wrote it, however, was that these eternal reenactments are indeed much like the spells of wicked fairies, and as spells they can be broken.
E- In relationship to Briar Rose and Pricksongs..., what is the role of popular tales (and stories from the Bible) in our post-everything era? What can they teach us and how can we use them?
RC- The stories have invaded us and colonized themselves inside us. We can be a generous and tolerant and unquestioning host, or we can challenge them and refuse to be their mindless servants. Can't easily analyze these things away once they get inside. Have to wrestle with them on their home turf, make them show their true shapes, convert them to something we can live with.
E- Is the good reader a resistant reader?
RC- A good citizen is a resistant reader.
E- Gerald´s Party could be considered a genre fiction, a whodunit, but you trascend the genre and turn it into a carnavalesque farce. This is also cervantine, and it appears in much of your work. What does "genre fiction" mean for you?
RC- Genre fiction is the elaboration of the folktale, often just as entertaining and certainly just as conservative. Useful to me like all other "natural" forms and icons.
E- John´s wife starts and finishes with the word, "once", and like the "once upon a time" it´s the novel of the perfect storyteller. We learn about the interconnected lives of the little town and at the same time about present-time America in a very disturbing way. What is America now?
RC- Actually the last several words echo the first several in reverse, as if a palindrome were closing. But your question is too broad. I'll let John's Wife (and all my other books) stand as the answer to it.
E- Last year, Pricksongs and Descants and Briar Rose were published in Spanish. I also know you lived in Barcelona for some time. How has your work been received here?
RC- Well. When well translated. As with those two books.
E- A Night at the Movies is a book about films, another medium you love. What can films give us that books cannot?
RC- Another question asking for a book in reply. Here I was playing with the syntactical impact of film upon text. Exercises en route what will hopefully be the next large work.
E- And let´s move on to yet a more modern medium. Your two famous articles about hypertext in The New York Times Book Review are always quoted as being the moment where hypertext is "oficially born" for the literary world. Were there any inmediate repercusions? (I ask this because the situation looks pretty much the same now as it did in 1992 in terms of hypertext´s popularity)
RC- I am presently working on a longish essay about all this. The situation right now is actually markedly different, largely because of the proliferation and vast popularity of the Internet. Just held a huge conference on the topic here at Brown, covered by the NYTimes, as you know (http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/TP21CL/).
E- You are considered "the evangelist of hypertext" in the literary community, but for the hypertext "tribe", you are still a "classic" writer, that is, your books are printed. Do you feel like an outsider in both fields?
RC- Well, not just in those two fields...
E- Why haven´t you written a hypertext? (This is suspicious)
RC- Are you certain that I haven't?
E- Oh! I hadn´t considered your Hypertext Hotel, probably because it´s collaborative writing and I´m after all a child of print. Point taken. Once you asked: "What´s so great about "interactivity" anyway?" Is hypertext incompatible with narrative as we know it?
RC- No. But it's different.
E- (You´ll hate me for this one) How do you see the future of the book?
RC- What´s most important about the moment is the emergent domination of our lives by the electronic media, and above all by the computer and the Web. Writers and artists have been reluctant to jump in, largely because of the new skills required and the numbing ephemerality of the technology: nothing stands still. But either they will do so, or literature will play an increasingly insignificant role in our lives. That´s where the readers will be, if in fact they can still read at all. So far, books show no sign of fading away, and indeed have enjoyed a kind of revival, thanks to Internet sales and pitches and home pages. But all it takes is a paper or fuel (for transporting those ponderous things) shortage. And such shortages will come.
E- What are you working on now?
RC- The next collection of stories and a return to my old pornographic film hero Lucky Pierre, a text first launched in 1969 but, having been picked up and dropped from time to time, still far from finished...
E- Thanks a lot for this interview.
Versión española
© Susana Pajares Toska 1999
Espéculo. Revista de estudios literarios. Universidad Complutense de Madrid
El URL de este documento es http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero12/cooverinen.html

Casa da Palavra

2010-05-27T10:48:00.000-03:00

A Terceira margem do Rio

(Guimarães Rosa )

Nosso pai era homem cumpridor, ordeiro, positivo; e sido assim desde mocinho e menino, pelo que testemunharam as diversas sensatas pessoas, quando indaguei a informação. Do que eu mesmo me alembro, ele não figurava mais estúrdio nem mais triste do que os outros, conhecidos nossos. Só quieto. Nossa mãe era quem regia, e que ralhava no diário com a gente — minha irmã, meu irmão e eu. Mas se deu que, certo dia, nosso pai mandou fazer para si uma canoa.Era a sério. Encomendou a canoa especial, de pau de vinhático, pequena, mal com a tabuinha da popa, como para caber justo o remador. Mas teve de ser toda fabricada, escolhida forte e arqueada em rijo, própria para dever durar na água por uns vinte ou trinta anos. Nossa mãe jurou muito contra a idéia. Seria que, ele, que nessas artes não vadiava, se ia propor agora para pescarias e caçadas? Nosso pai nada não dizia. Nossa casa, no tempo, ainda era mais próxima do rio, obra de nem quarto de légua: o rio por aí se estendendo grande, fundo, calado que sempre. Largo, de não se poder ver a forma da outra beira. E esquecer não posso, do dia em que a canoa ficou pronta.Sem alegria nem cuidado, nosso pai encalcou o chapéu e decidiu um adeus para a gente. Nem falou outras palavras, não pegou matula e trouxa, não fez a alguma recomendação. Nossa mãe, a gente achou que ela ia esbravejar, mas persistiu somente alva de pálida, mascou o beiço e bramou: — "Cê vai, ocê fique, você nunca volte!" Nosso pai suspendeu a resposta. Espiou manso para mim, me acenando de vir também, por uns passos. Temi a ira de nossa mãe, mas obedeci, de vez de jeito. O rumo daquilo me animava, chega que um propósito perguntei: — "Pai, o senhor me leva junto, nessa sua canoa?" Ele só retornou o olhar em mim, e me botou a bênção, com gesto me mandando para trás. Fiz que vim, mas ainda virei, na grota do mato, para saber. Nosso pai entrou na canoa e desamarrou, pelo remar. E a canoa saiu se indo — a sombra dela por igual, feito um jacaré, comprida longa.Nosso pai não voltou. Ele não tinha ido a nenhuma parte. Só executava a invenção de se permanecer naqueles espaços do rio, de meio a meio, sempre dentro da canoa, para dela não saltar, nunca mais. A estranheza dessa verdade deu para. estarrecer de todo a gente. Aquilo que não havia, acontecia. Os parentes, vizinhos e conhecidos nossos, se reuniram, tomaram juntamente conselho.Nossa mãe, vergonhosa, se portou com muita cordura; por isso, todos pensaram de nosso pai a razão em que não queriam falar: doideira. Só uns achavam o entanto de poder também ser pagamento de promessa; ou que, nosso pai, quem sabe, por escrúpulo de estar com alguma feia doença, que seja, a lepra, se desertava para outra sina de existir, perto e longe de sua família dele. As vozes das notícias se dando pelas certas pessoas — passadores, moradores das beiras, até do afastado da outra banda — descrevendo que nosso pai nunca se surgia a tomar terra, em ponto nem canto, de dia nem de noite, da forma como cursava no rio, solto solitariamente. Então, pois, nossa mãe e os aparentados nossos, assentaram: que o mantimento que tivesse, ocultado na canoa, se gastava; e, ele, ou desembarcava e viajava s'embora, para jamais, o que ao menos se condizia mais correto, ou se arrependia, por uma vez, para casa.No que num engano. Eu mesmo cumpria de trazer para ele, cada dia, um tanto de comida furtada: a idéia que senti, logo na primeira noite, quando o pessoal nosso experimentou de acender fogueiras em beirada do rio, enquanto que, no alumiado delas, se rezava e se chamava. Depois, no seguinte, apareci, com rapadura, broa de pão, cacho de bananas. Enxerguei nosso pai, no enfim de uma hora, tão custosa para sobrevir: só assim, ele no ao-longe, sentado no fundo da canoa, suspendida no liso do rio. Me viu, não remou para cá, não fez sinal. Mostrei o de comer, depositei num oco de pedra do barranco, a salvo de bicho mexer e a seco de chuva e orvalho. Isso, que fiz, e refiz, sempre, tempos a fora. Surpresa que mais tarde tive: que nossa mãe sabia desse meu encargo, só se encobrindo de não saber; ela mesma deixava, facilitado, sobra de coisas, para o meu conseguir. Nossa mãe muito não se demonstrava.Mandou vir o tio nosso, irmão dela, para auxiliar na fazenda e nos negócios. Mandou vir o mestre, para nós, os meninos. Incumbiu ao padre que um dia se revestisse, em praia de margem, para esconjurar e clamar a nosso pai o 'dever de desistir da tristonha teima. De outra, por arranjo dela, para medo, vieram os dois soldados. Tudo o que não valeu de nada. Nosso pai passava ao largo, avistado ou diluso, cruzando na canoa, sem deixar ninguém se chegar à pega ou à fala. Mesmo quando foi, não faz muito, dos homens do jornal, que trouxeram a lancha e tencionavam tirar retrato dele, não venceram: nosso pai se desaparecia para a outra banda, aproava a canoa no brejão, de léguas, que há, por entre juncos e mato, e só ele conhecesse, a palmos, a escuridão, daquele.A gente teve de se acostumar com aquilo. Às penas, que, com aquilo, a gente mesmo nunca se acostumou, em si, na verdade. Tiro por mim, que, no que queria, e no que não queria, só com nosso pai me achava: assunto que jogava para trás meus pensamentos. O severo que era, de não se entender, de maneira nenhuma, como ele agüentava. De dia e de noite, com sol ou aguaceiros, calor, sereno, e nas friagens terríveis de meio-do-ano, sem arrumo, só com o chapéu velho na cabeça, por todas as semanas, e meses, e os anos — sem fazer conta do se-ir do viver. Não pojava em nenhuma das duas beiras, nem nas ilhas e croas do rio, não pisou mais em chão nem capim. Por certo, ao menos, que, para dormir seu tanto, ele fizesse amarração da canoa, em alguma ponta-de-ilha, no esconso. Mas não armava um foguinho em praia, nem dispunha de sua luz feita, nunca mais riscou um fósforo. O que consumia de comer, era só um quase; mesmo do que a gente depositava, no entre as raízes da gameleira, ou na lapinha de pedra do barranco, ele recolhia pouco, nem o bastável. Não adoecia? E a constante força dos braços, para ter tento na canoa, resistido, mesmo na demasia das enchentes, no subimento, aí quando no lanço da correnteza enorme do rio tudo rola o perigoso, aqueles corpos de bichos mortos e paus-de-árvore descendo — de espanto de esbarro. E nunca falou mais palavra, com pessoa alguma. Nós, também, não falávamos mais nele. Só se pensava. Não, de nosso pai não se podia ter esquecimento; e, se, por um pouco, a gente fazia que esquecia, era só para se despertar de novo, de repente, com a memória, no passo de outros sobressaltos.Minha irmã se casou; nossa mãe não quis festa. A gente imaginava nele, quando se comia uma comida mais gostosa; assim como, no gasalhado da noite, no desamparo dessas noites de muita chuva, fria, forte, nosso pai só com a mão e uma cabaça para ir esvaziando a canoa da água do temporal. Às vezes, algum conhecido nosso achava que eu ia ficando mais parecido com nosso pai. Mas eu sabia que ele agora virara cabeludo, barbudo, de unhas grandes, mal e magro, ficado preto de sol e dos pêlos, com o aspecto de bicho, conforme quase nu, mesmo dispondo das peças de roupas que a gente de tempos em tempos fornecia.Nem queria saber de nós; não tinha afeto? Mas, por afeto mesmo, de respeito, sempre que às vezes me louvavam, por causa de algum meu bom procedimento, eu falava: — "Foi pai que um dia me ensinou a fazer assim..."; o que não era o certo, exato; mas, que era mentira por verdade. Sendo que, se ele não se lembrava mais, nem queria saber da gente, por que, então, não subia ou descia o rio, para outras paragens, longe, no não-encontrável? Só ele soubesse. Mas minha irmã teve menino, ela mesma entestou que queria mostrar para ele o neto. Viemos, todos, no barranco, foi num dia bonito, minha irmã de vestido branco, que tinha sido o do casamento, ela erguia nos braços a criancinha, o marido dela segurou, para defender os dois, o guarda-sol. A gente chamou, esperou. Nosso pai não apareceu. Minha irmã chorou, nós todos aí choramos, abraçados.Minha irmã se mudou, com o marido, para longe daqui. Meu irmão resolveu e se foi, para uma cidade. Os tempos mudavam, no devagar depressa dos tempos. Nossa mãe terminou indo também, de uma vez, residir com minha irmã, ela estava envelhecida. Eu fiquei aqui, de resto. Eu nunca podia querer me casar. Eu permaneci, com as bagagens da vida. Nosso pai carecia de mim, eu sei — na vagação, no rio no ermo — sem dar razão de seu feito. Seja que, quando eu quis mesmo saber, e firme indaguei, me diz-que-disseram: que constava que nosso pai, alguma vez, tivesse revelado a explicação, ao homem que para ele aprontara a canoa. Mas, agora, esse homem já tinha morrido, ninguém soubesse, fizesse recordação, de nada mais. Só as falsas conversas, sem senso, como por ocasião, no começo, na vinda das primeiras cheias do rio, com chuvas que não estiavam, todos temeram o fim-do-mundo, diziam: que nosso pai fosse o avisado que nem Noé, que, por tanto, a canoa ele tinha antecipado; pois agora me entrelembro. Meu pai, eu não podia malsinar. E apontavam já em mim uns primeiros cabelos brancos.Sou homem de tristes palavras. De que era que eu tinha tanta, tanta culpa? Se o meu pai, sempre fazendo ausência: e o rio-rio-rio, o rio — pondo perpétuo. Eu sofria já o começo de velhice — esta vida era só o demoramento. Eu mesmo tinha achaques, ânsias, cá de baixo, cansaços, perrenguice de reumatismo. E ele? Por quê? Devia de padecer demais. De tão idoso, não ia, mais dia menos dia, fraquejar do vigor, deixar que a canoa emborcasse, ou que bubuiasse sem pulso, na levada do rio, para se despenhar horas abaixo, em tororoma e no tombo da cachoeira, brava, com o fervimento e morte. Apertava o coração. Ele estava lá, sem a minha tranqüilidade. Sou o culpado do que nem sei, de dor em aberto, no meu foro. Soubesse — se as coisas fossem outras. E fui tomando idéia.Sem fazer véspera. Sou doido? Não. Na nossa casa, a palavra doido não se falava, nunca mais se falou, os anos todos, não se condenava ninguém de doido. Ninguém é doido. Ou, então, todos. Só fiz, que fui lá. Com um lenço, para o aceno ser mais. Eu estava muito no meu sentido. Esperei. Ao por fim, ele apareceu, aí e lá, o vulto. Estava ali, sentado à popa. Estava ali, de grito. Chamei, umas quantas vezes. E falei, o que me urgia, jurado e declarado, tive que reforçar a voz: — "Pai, o senhor está velho, já fez o seu tanto... Agora, o senhor vem, não carece mais... O senhor vem, e eu, agora mesmo, quando que seja, a ambas vontades, eu tomo o seu lugar, do senhor, na canoa!..." E, assim dizendo, meu coração bateu no compasso do mais certo.Ele me escutou. Ficou em pé. Manejou remo n'água, proava para cá, concordado. E eu tremi, profundo, de repente: porque, antes, ele tinha levantado o braço e feito um saudar de gesto — o primeiro, depois de tamanhos anos decorridos! E eu não podia... Por pavor, arrepiados os cabelos, corri, fugi, me tirei de lá, num procedimento desatinado. Porquanto que ele me pareceu vir: da parte de além. E estou pedindo, pedindo, pedindo um perdão.Sofri o grave frio dos medos, adoeci. Sei que ninguém soube mais dele. Sou homem, depois desse falimento? Sou o que não foi, o que vai ficar calado. Sei que agora é tarde, e temo abreviar com a vida, nos rasos do mundo. Mas, então, ao menos, que, no artigo da morte, peguem em mim, e me depositem também numa canoinha de nada, nessa água que não pára, de longas beiras: e, eu, rio abaixo, rio a fora, rio a dentro — o rio.