When Zach Snyder was announced as the director of Watchmen, I was a little afraid: I'm not a fan of 300 (the movie, the comic is cooler but still no masterpiece). But he's been slowly releasing production shots from the movie, and they look so cool I'm actually getting excited about it (even though I did think 300 looked incredible, I didn't like his changes to the story). Take a look at these:
Recently, Rolling Stone magazine continued their series of Top-Whatever lists with a Top 100 Greatest Singers of All Time special edition. I could literally spend hours discussing that list , but instead I'll write an alternate post: my Top 10 favorite singing moments. Keep in mind I don't have such broad knowledge about the subject, but I'll try to do my best. This is in "I remembered this guys first" order:
In 1995's Grace, Jeff Buckley is fantastic throughout the entire record. He has this unbelievably clear voice, that seems to be able to go as high as he wishes. It's funny 'cause I've heard a few live recordings of his, and I don't think he'd match up live to what he got on record. He was really cool live, don't get me wrong, but I just feel he was extra-inspired during the recording of Grace. And even though the entire record is amazing, my personal favorite is, without a shadow of a doubt, "Lover, You Should've Come Over" (Lilac Wine and Hallelujah are close seconds). I love how the intensity of the song grows and grows towards the end, and, well, the recording is perfect: his voice is amazing, the whole producing is just enough to not get in the way and suits the music really well. I've heard a few live version, but it's far from being the same.... maybe you had to be there to appreciate it, so it's real pity we can't be there anymore, since he drowned while swimming in a river in '97, with Grace being the only studio album he released before dying. Real pity.
The Beatles had many incredible songs, and as much as I love Twist 'n Shout, it probably wouldn't make my Top 10. But I always feel it's Ferris Bueler's (oops, I meant John's) best vocal performance. The story goes that (hopefully it's a true story), after a long time recording Please Please Me, his throat was pretty much fucked up. He just decided to go for one last song, and went for the kill: he probably had a sore throat for quite some time, but it's his rough voice and his screaming that gave life to the song.
I had a hard time picking a Led Zeppelin song. I knew Plant had to be here, he is probably my favorite Rock singer of all time. That's why picking one song was so hard. A short list of the runner-ups would be: Immigrant Song, Gallows Pole, Dazed and Confused, I Can't Quit You Baby, Whole Lotta Love, Black Dog, and Rock and Roll. Those are all amazing tunes, but I had to go with my favorite Zeppelin song ever: Since I've Been Loving You, from III.
Joe Cocker probably has the title of best Beatles cover ever for this song. Also, I guess the fact that I grew up on Wonder Years, and can't help remembering it whenever I listen to his howls, didn't hurt his odds either :-). He carved With a Little Help From My Friends out of Sgt. Peppers, arguably one of the best songs in one of the best albums ever released, and made it his own, changing it around in so many ways it hardly sounds like a Beatles song anymore. He took a great song, and turned into an epic classic. It's just brilliant.
At first I intended to do this list only with rock songs. But then I gave up on that, as I decided to add this song: Elis Regina singing Chico Buarque's Atrás da Porta live. Elis is widely considered Brasil's greatest singer ever, and, in my humble opinion, watching her live performances should be enough to clear any lingering doubts of that...
Ok, I have to admit it: I like Whitney Houston. There, I said it. I like the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, as corny as it may be. But her voice is just otherworldly, I've never heard anything like it. And the other day I happened to catch the original version of I Will Always Love You (I didn't even know it wasn't an original, but I finally understood how it could not have gotten the Oscars), which is by Dolly Parton. It's weak, really, really weak. It's hard to imagine how they could get that song and change around so much that it became what we hear Whitney sing, it's amazing. And I know there's a lot of people involved in that (producers, musicians, etc.), but her voice makes most of the different. It's just beautiful. BTW, the original Dolly Parton is pretty easy to find on YouTube, like here.
Singing practically a capella, Janis delivered one of the best songs in this landmark album, Mercedes Benz. She sings like she is performing to a full stadium, but the bare sounds of something marking the beat and her deep, husky voice, keep in our mid that she is just singing alone in the studio.
Marvin Gaye is such a sad story... He was an amazing talent, certainly my favorite Motown performer, immensely successful in all kinds of genre: good ol' R&B/Soul, pop, politically inspired masterpieces (What's Going On), and the best cheating song ever released, I Heard It Through The Grapevine. Covered by loads of people, from Creedence Clearwater Revival to Marisa Monte, it's Marvin's version (which isn't the first, btw), that stands out. His clear, soulful voice is at its best and the song is just intoxicating.
There are two spots left and I can't decide who to give 'em to: on the one hand, there are too many candidates (Eddie Vedder, Freddie Mercury, Aretha, Ray Charles, the list goes on...); on the other hand, I think none has one song that stands out quite as much as the other eight that I mentioned here... so I'll stop my list here.
I wrote a few weeks ago that if I had to choose a band to watch live while I was in the US, it'd be DMB. Well, no need to soak about missing them back then, now they're coming to São Paulo, and, as if that weren't good enough, they're bringing Ben Harper along!!!! Anybody else going?!?!
Walking back home from the movies tonight I must've thought of a few dozen ways to start this post. I've settled with stating that this movie will blow our mind away. It's really late and I'm lazy, so I'll probably not write as much as the movie deserves, but I'll say this: I probably watched both the best movie of the year and the best comic book-based movie ever made. It's that good. It's long, it's unbelievably tense, it's smart, it's disturbing, it's genius. Batman Begins was incredible, but Dark Knight is so much more! Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan are their usual, incredibly talented selves, as in the previous movie. Good ol' Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are still there. But now there's so much more to it... I'm sure you've heard this before, but Heath Ledger is simply uncanny, he just got the Joker. And I think "getting" goes a long way in describing this movie: the writer got the characters. The story in itself doesn't come straight from any one book that I know. But, somehow, he just got the characters: he was able to distill all the decades of Batman, Joker and Harvey Dent in an amazing, brilliant, two and a half hour long story. I'm in awe, and I definitely will watch it again, this time in IMAX, before I fly back to Brasil. Summer has been good to us so far, making up for last year: Indy, Iron Man, Hulk, Wanted, Sarah Marshall, Kung Fu Panda, Wall-E. But we got a clear winner: just go watch it and then tell me what you think.
If I could choose one band (realistically, no Beatles or Pink Floyd here) to watch live while I'm up here in the US, it would Dave Matthews Band. Their albums are amazing, but from all I can gather they're even more stunning live. This is Dancing Nancies, from the concert they did in Central Park where he does an amazing intro to the song (the bartender bid). I love it when artists change their songs for live performances in a way that you actually believe it's showing a little bit more about how they're feeling at that specific moment...
By the way, "Dancing Nancies", as I recently learned, is idiom for transvestite prostitutes... Just for that, I think it's worth putting the lyrics here (after the video).
And so We Say, And so We Say, And So We Say, Bartender Please, I Know It's Late, I Know Last Call has come and gone, But Why Don't You Fill Me Up With One More Long, Long Drink, And Then I Go Home, C'mon Hook Me Up, Bartender Hook Me Up, Lock The Door, start countin the money If You Need To But, C'mon, C'mon, C'mon, C'mon, Hook Me Up, Bartender Please, Won't You?
I Wasn't Planning On Gettin' Drunk Tonight But, It Seemed Like The Right Decision Tonight, Luck Would Have It, She Stood Me Up, And Now My son, Now My Son, I Was Wondering If,I Was Wondering If,I Was Wondering If I Might Have Been Somebody Other Than Myself, If I Could Have Been Somebody Other Than Myself, Anyone,
Well Could I Have Been, A Parking Lot Attendant, Could I Have Been, A Millionaire up There On fifth Avenue, Oh Could I Have Been, Lost Late At Night Somewhere In Central Park, Could I Have Been, a mistake, Well Could I Have Been, Anyone Other Than Me, Could I Have Been, (Oh) Anyone Other Than Me (Oh) Could I Have Been, Anyone Other Than Me, Could I Have Been, Anyone,
He Stands Touch His Hair His Shoes Untied, Tounge-gapping Stare, Could I Have Been, A Magnet For Money, Could I Have Been Anyone Other Than Me, twenty three I'm So Tired Of Life Such A Shame You throw It All Away, The Images Grow Darker Still, Could I Have Been Anyone Other Than Me And Then I, I Look Up At The Sky, My Mouth Is Open Wide, Lick and Taste What’s The Use In Worrying, What’s The Use In Hurrying, Turn turn We Almost Become Dizzy,
I Am Who I Am, Who I Am, Well, Who Am I? Requesting Some Elightment, Could I Have Been Anyone Other Than Me, And Then I'll, Sing And Dance, I'll Play For You Tonight, The Thrill Of It All, Dark Clouds May Hang On Me Sometimes, But I'll Work It Out, And Then I, I Look Up At The Sky, My Mouth Is Open Wide, Lick and Taste What’s The Use In Worrying, What’s The Use In Hurrying, Turn Turn We Almost Become Dizzy,
Falling Out Of a World Of Lies, Could I Have Been A Dancing Nancie, (ooh) A Dancing Nancie,(I Could Have Been Anyone) Could I Have Been Anyone Other Than Me And Then I'll, Sing And Dance,(La La La Hey La La La Hey La La La) Sing And Dance,(La La La Hey La La La Hey La La La) Sing And Dance, I'll Play For You Tonight, The Thrill Of It All, Dark Clouds May Hang On Me Sometimes, But I'll Work It Out And Then I, Look Up At The Sky, My Mouth Is Open Wide, Lick and Taste What’s The Use In Worrying, What’s The Use In Hurrying, Turn Turn We Almost Become Dizzy
A lot of really cool stuff has happened in this trip to the US, and I'm still hoping I'll get around to blogging about them sooner or later. But this weekend I did such a cool trip that I just had to get the photos online so I could share them here!! These were all taken this saturday at Mount Rainier, a little over 2 hours away from Seattle. Amazing place!
Angelina Jolie is hot. Don't worry, I don't intend to just restate the obvious here, but it had to be said. Now that I got it out of my system, I can talk a little bit about the actual movie. I've been seeing trailers for this for quite a few weeks now, and it impressed me a lot. It looked so cool, may be even a new Matrix (only the "redefining what action looks like" part of Matrix, not the smart philosophical part). This, according to my good friend Diego, is the adaptation of a great comic book (as usual, the book is supposed to be less simplistic and all). The movie is great fun, it really is, it just fell a little short of my expectations. First for the good things: have I mentioned Angelina Jolie is damn hot?! :-) Action sequences are awesome. That's it, but what else do you need, right?! (The ending is pretty cool too, but if I say anything about it, I'll probably spoil it.) Bad stuff: story is simplistic and completely ill-explained. Also, it's just too much: there is no action sequence that is even remotely realistic, and a handful of them are so damn impossible that you're just seating there saying "What the fuck"?!?! By the way, they even use the Matrix trick of starting the movie with anmore-than-impossible action sequence that hits you in the face with a "people do impossible shit in this movie" warning. But, unlike Matrix, there is no plausible-in-their-universe explanation for why people can do such things, as here you're left with: heart rate goes abruptly up and everything slows down because they got some much adrenalin in their brain. Come on!!!!! There is not enough slow motion in the whole fucking world for that!! Finally, that over-the-top unrealistic quality and the lack of any mildly interesting characters, aside from Angelina Jolie's and, maybe, James McAvoy's, is where the movie falls short. I don't think anybody will be remembering or copying this movie in a year or so from now, but it's definitely good, friday-night fun.
I'm sure you've all asked yourself once or twice, what do Alanis Morissette and writer/director M. Night Shyamalan have in common. Well, rejoice, for now I'll tell you exactly that. Both of them came out of nowhere in the '90s (this is sort of a half-true 'cause Alanis was a teen pop diva in Canada, but she had been kinda of forgotten by them... anyway, bear with me) and took the world b assault: Jagged Little Pill, Morissette's 1995 sort-of-debut (again, teen pop diva) was the biggest selling album ever by a female artist and got mostly rave reviews; Shyamalan's sort-of-debut, Sixth Sense, was the surprise hit of the year, got a bunch of Oscar nominations, and made him the rising star in Hollywood. Then came their follow-up works: Supposed Former Infactuation Junkie (probably my favorite Alanis album, not very popular opinion though), Unbreakable, Signs, Under Rug Swept, MTV Unplugged, The Village, So-Called Chaos. With each new release, less and less people liked them; I, on the other hand, was firmly believing they were still cool, as I mostly enjoyed all of Shyamalan's movies (except for that stupid ending in Signs... what the hell were you thinking, Nighty??!) and it would take a lot to get me off Alanis... and then came 2008. I've been reading about Alanis' new album for a few months now, and ever since I came to the US, I haven't been to one movie and not seen the trailer for The Happening. This, I thought naively, was it: finally they would return to their former glory and I would be proven right. To be honest, I wasn't that excited about Alanis' album, but the trailer for The Happening was really cool, I really thought it would be good. Then came the bombs... Flavors of Entanglement sucks. The Happening is one of the worst movies of the year, the year of Speed Racer and Vantage Point!! What happened, guys?!?! Flavors of Entanglement is derivative and electronic-y, which seems to be the way Alanis is headed since Under Rug Swept. Honestly, the only good song of the album is Not As We, a piano ballad where there is basically no room for the over-production that haunts the rest of the album. The thing I always loved about Alanis was her lyrics, but the music in this album is so uninteresting that I haven't really gotten interested in checking out the lyrics (well, except for Not As We, that is). And even though I'm pretty sure Alanis can still write, I don't think I'll be looking at those lyrics anytime soon. The Happening is bad. No, strike that, it's terrible. There's not one really good thing about it. Well, Shyamalan can still direct (sort of), there are some chilling moments, but that's it. The acting is horrible (can that be the same Mark Whalberg from The Departed?!?!?). The script is a joke. I know why all those people are killing themselves: they saw the damn movie!!! So there you go: what do Alanis and Nighty have in common? They both showed up with masterpieces and took the world by surprise in the '90s. Then they both grew less and less popular, but kept me as a fan while losing basically everybody else. And now, in june/2008, they've both lost me. Pity.
Holy shit, just found out one of my favorite Pearl Jam isn't really by Pearl Jam!!!!! Now I definitely have to look for some other stuff from this Victoria Williams girl.
I kinda ran into Damien Rice's B-Sides the other day, while roaming around a Virgin Megastore (yeah, I love doing that... Virgin, Barnes & Noble, Borders... when are we getting those in Brasil?!!?! Well, at least we have Fnac). I immediately picked it up, seeing I'd read about it at some point but never really listened to it. It's kind of a mixed bunch: on the one hand you have three tracks that are songs from O: live version of Delicate, and instrumental and demo versions of Volcano. From this bunch, I'd say the interesting one is the demo, but just for the whole historic curiosity. On the other hand you have another bunch of songs that fit well in the whole O ambience, but aren't up to the standard of the album (and I can only assume were thus discarded). And then there's "Woman Like a Man". I'm fucking addicted to this song now, and the fact that Barra, the guy who is traveling around with me, now can't stop singing it isn't helping. It's a great song, I can only figure it wasn't in O because it really doesn't fit the mood of the rest of the album, being much more "nervous" (yeah, I couldn't find a better word! Listen to the damn song and pick an adjective you like!! Why do we have to do everything for our readers?!?!). Check the video below, and hopefully you too won't able to stop the damn "Woman like a man like a woman like a man..." in your head. Oh, I put the lyrics right afterwords, and if you have any ideas about what the hell he is trying to say, please share it with me, I'm pretty curious myself... and this video is of him singing the song @ BBC, so he cleaned up the lyrics... what exactly does "MUCKED inside out means"?? :-)
I need a piss, I wanna hate, Fuck it up, come. My love, Eat your meat, Keep your teeth, run. You lost me, You cost me, You taught me of me in the end. We're bad, What we do. Stupid fools.
You wanna get boned, You wanna get stoned, You wanna get a room like no-one else. You wanna be rich, You wanna be kitsch, You wanna be the bastard of yourself. You wanna get burned, You wanna get turned, You wanna get fucked inside out. You wanna be ruled, You wanna be fooled, You wanna be a woman like a man, Like a woman like a man.
A woman like a man, like a man, like a woman like a man, you like a man. I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... Woman like a man, woman like a man, like a woman like a man, woman like a man I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... A woman like a man, like a man, like a woman like a man, woman like a man I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... Woman like a man, like a man, like a woman like a man, like a man. 'Cause it really wasn’t worth the ride.
Need a hit? Wanna wait, Suck it up, cum. My love, Eat your meat, Itchy feet, run. You reach me, You bleach me, You teach me of things so familiar. We're bad, What we do. Stupid fools.
You wanna get boned, You wanna get stoned, You wanna get a room like no-one else. You wanna be rich, You wanna be kitsch, You wanna be the bastard of yourself. You wanna get burned, You wanna get turned, You wanna get fucked inside out. You wanna be ruled, You wanna be fooled, You wanna be a woman like a man, like a woman like a man.
A woman like a man, like a man, like a woman like a man, woman like a man. I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... Woman like a man, like a man, like a woman like a man, like a man. I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... Like a man, like a woman like a man, like a woman like a man, like a man. I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... Woman like a man, woman like a man, like a woman like a man, like a man. 'Cause it really wasn’t worth the ride.
You wanna get boned, You wanna get stoned, You wanna get a room like no-one else. You wanna be rich, You wanna be kitsch, You wanna be the bastard of yourself. You wanna get burned, You wanna get turned, You wanna get fucked inside out. You wanna be ruled, You wanna be fooled, You wanna be a woman like a man, like a woman, like a, like a man...
Like a man... Like a man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man... Like a man, man, man, man, man, man... Like a man.
Like a man, like a man, like a man, like a man. I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... Woman like a man, like a man, like a woman like a man, like a man. I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... Woman like a man, like a man, like a man, like a man. I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... Woman like a man, like a man, like a man. 'Cause it really wasn’t worth the ride) (Really wasn’t worth the ride)
Whoa oh oh Like a man, like a man, like a man, like a man. I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... Like a man, like a man, like a woman like a man, like a man. I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... Like a man, like a man, like a man, like a man. I’ll get a cheaper ticket next time... A woman like a man, a woman like a man, like a woman like a man, like a man. Oh. It really wasn’t worth the ride.
Oh, and did I mention Harry Porter's J.K. Rowling gave a brilliant commencement speech this year, at Harvard? I know, I know, I can hear the "Come on!!! That lady who wrote Harry Potter?!?!!" cries, but she really surprised me. God bless YouTube!!
Part 1:
Part 2:
And the full transcript:
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very much.
Oh, yeah, I definitely have!! I've been just too lazy to write about it. First I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall and thought it was amazing (even though I could go with a little less of that guy-frontal-nudity stuff)!! Outrageously funny!!! I think we're finally having some new energy brought into comedies, as I hadn't seen since those long gone times when American Pie first came out (What?!?!!? Has it been 9 years already?!?!? Come on, I can't be that old!!). 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall... those are all amazingly funny movies from more or less the same group of people. Hopefully, there's still much more to come!! Then it was time for Sex and the City and, well, it sucked. I mean, it's not all bad, I still had some fun... but it's long, pointless, and really, really predictable (at least on Carrie's storyline, come on!!). Then I went to watch Kung Fu Panda last friday, which was pretty cool. I love Jack Black, and he is as funny as ever in this movie. The animation is pretty good, the movie is absurdly funny, but I can't shake off the feeling that Dreamworks is still lagging behind Pixar. Even though Panda was very, very funny, I don't think it's gonna be remembered as "one-of-the-greats" (Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, *maybe* Shrek). I'm much more excited about Wall-E, as I'm pretty confident it's set out to be a classic!!! Unfortunately, we're still gonna have to wait for some 20 days before we know...
I was going through my pics from San Francisco and I remembered I should've posted this long ago!!! Everything's been so hectic I hadn't had time to sort through the (literally) hundreds of pictures, but here are we, I and the Enigma:
For the not-cryptographically-inclined, the Enigma is probably the most mythical of all cryptographic machines, extensively used by the germans during WWII. They have one at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, which was so very cool. Actually, this museum is definitely worth the visit, with all sorts of cool memorabilia we've all heard/read about. They actually had the first video-game, Spacewar running on a PDP-1 (the computer form the '60s where it was first programmed). Very nerdy, very cool stuff!
So, I was supposed to have written this a couple of weeks ago when I watched Iron Man, but never got around to: summer (in the US, that is) has begun again, and with it some interesting movies are coming out, thank God!! Iron Man was pretty cool, fun enough a good start to Marvel Comics' new role as a full studio. This week I watched Speed Racer in IMAX (oh, yeah, I'm in the US right now by the way), and it was proof that size doesn't matter; it felt like it sucked twice as much because i was twice as big!! But today was a glorious day, Indiana Jones is back!!!! And he's got it for some weird shiny crystal skull, apparently. Indy is a classic, never matched by any other adventure movie. This last installment has everything that made it so: incredibly talented people, fast pace, great sense of humor, great action scenes, incredibly impossible scenes and legends. If anybody had any doubts about Harrison Ford's ability to do it again, think again: he's still great as ever. Shia LaBeouf is a pretty worthy successor to Indy's charisma, and is pretty cool in his James Dean persona. And, well, Karen Allen is Marion, period (actually I wish she had a little more screen time and got to show off a little more of her personality, like she did in Raiders... but nothing is perfect). I don't really know if I liked Cate Blanchett's weird Russian chick, but it definitely wasn't enough to put me off. On the directing front, Spielberg proves himself once again: the camera travels around the scenes perfectly, showing us incredibly creative and beautiful shots. Well, I could talk all day about how cool this movie is, and about the few details I didn't like, but it would be boring and I would probably spoil some surprise for the few brave ones that read through to the end: just go watch the movie and enjoy it, you're gonna have a blast!!! Oh, and for the curious, I'm in Seattle right now, will do a post about that sometime soon... cheers, guys!!
I spent last week "moving in" to my new place. I used quotes on that, because I've only moved like half of my stuff, there's still so much at a friend's place that I've been kind of afraid to even go there. But it's starting to look like somebody's home already, and I'm really loving it. It took so long that I was kinda losing hope already. Now I just need a TV and a DVD player (I already have a stereo and my turntable), because if I can't watch movies in it, it ain't my home! This was, all in all, a pretty busy weekend: moving, went to see a Led Zeppelin cover band, we did some cooking yesterday at a friend's place (while we watched that shameful 5 x 0 Cruzeiro and Atlético game), I unbraided my hair (which took a whole lot more than I'd hoped and gave me the chance to watch half a season of Seinfeld while I did it). One interesting thing about BH is the music scene: they have so many cool rock bands here, even though they are mostly cover bands. I've seen quite a few since I arrived, but at least three are really worth mentioning: Sgt. Pepper's Band, Gleison Túlio and the Led Zeppelin cover I saw last friday. The first one is a Beatler cover band that is actually one of the best in the world: apparently they've been to the annual festival they have in Liverpool and have been chosen as a Top 3 band quite a few times. They are simply amazing, it's uncanny. Gleison Túlio is an amazing singer/guitar player that desperately needs a better stage name. I saw him a month ago or so and he really blew me away, playing a huge spectrum of different stuff really well, singing, doing bass and percussion on his guitar... it's really hard to describe, but basically he uses loops (you record something and it keeps looping as much as you want) to record each separate instrument (all done on his guitar) and then sings and does solos on top of it. My explanation does not do justice to his show, it's just amazing and you should check it out when you have a chance. The Zeppelin cover band wasn't quite as impressive, but was really good nonetheless: the singer/bass player was amazing, everybody else was really good too, I just didn't love it more because they were more into the hard rock side of Zeppelin and completely neglected their more bluesy stuff (Dazed and Confused, Since I've Been Loving You, I Can't Quit You Baby, etc.) Who could've guessed, BH might actually be a cool place for listening to good music. If I've been lucky with music, I can't say the same for movies: these have been terrible times for those of us addicted to the cinema. The only thing that seemed remotely interesting to watch last week was Once, which to me felt almost like Damien's Rice biography: a busker on the streets of Dublin and how meeting an immigrant who happens to play the piano changes his otherwise beat-up self into a somewhat hopeful person again. The story is not a simplistic hollywood-style love story, which makes it all the more interesting. For people like me, who love the aching singer-songwriter stuff, the soundtrack is pretty good, very Damien Rice-y; but, even I had to admit that they overdid it a little bit, too many too long songs, too much repetition... just too much. This makes the movie a little tiresome, but it was still worth watching: the cast is pretty good, the photography is weird, but in a good way (hand-held camera throughout the movie, which adds to the whole ambiance really well). All in all, a pretty good option in the lack of something better.
It's been awhile, but what better way to get back to blogging than to talk about some movies I watched over the long weekend? :-) Let's start with Bob Dylan's "unconventional" biography, I'm not there. To be totally honest, I was kind of under-impressed with it: I was expecting amazing, epic, timeless; all I got was pretty good. And, well, pretty weird too. The whole idea of telling the story through different characters representing Dylan's "personas" was really interesting, but the execution was a little too confusing for me, maybe I didn't know enough about Dylan to understand it all, maybe I just wasn't having a particularly smart day... But, confusing storytelling aside, the movie is very entertaining, filled with great music (how could it not?), with an amazing cast at the top of their game (kudos Cate Blanchet!!!), and, just to be sure I'd really enjoy it, the funniest Beatles reference!! Overall, it's a pretty good movie, real original, but just a little below my expectations. Yesterday was a holiday, so what better way to spend it (in a beach-less city, I might add), then to wake up late, go to the movies and then go out for some beers? So that's what I did, pity nothing really good was on, so I has to settle for Keanu Reeves' latest flick, Street Kings. I don't like Keanu Reeves, he's probably one of the worst really famous actors out there. But, goddamnit, he is a lucky son of a bitch. He's been playing the same characters for a decade or so (except for trying out some Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing... hum, even I was embarassed for him on that one), but it seems to work with an unbelievably high frequency. This time around good ol' Neo has a slightly higher tendency to kill than usual, and he basically goes Rambo on a lot of sad bastards unlucky enough to be on his way (cheesy, hey?? Well, just so you get the feel of the movie :-) ). It's pretty cool to see Forest Whitaker try to yell some depth into the dullest character ever, but the best part by far was seeing Hugh Laurie (House, for the uninitiated) walking and not limping!!!! Now that was cool. The funny thing is, even with a lot going against it (lack of originality comes to mind), the movie is actually pretty good, some nice, forgettable entertainment, the kind Hollywood is so good at. Well, keep 'em coming. On a sidenote, I finally have a home in BH!!! Will post some news/photos soon.
To end my trip to sunny (but a little cold) California on a high note I went to see Springsteen last saturday in San Jose. I wasn't much of a Springsteen fan before last year, only knew those songs that everybody probably does (Streets of Philadelphia, Born in the USA, Glory Days...). But then I read Rolling Stone's review of Magic and just had to listen to it: now Magic was probably my favorite album of 2007 and I'm a big fan of the guy. Luckily he was playing in San Jose, which is like 10 minutes away from Moutain View, so I had to go (even if the tickets were a little pricey). It was amazing!!! First of all, that guy can't be (almost) 60, it's impossible. He played for way over 2 hours with so much energy, it was really impressive. He played most of Magic and a lot of oldies too, and he'd always take requests, taking signs from the audience and playing the songs they asked for. He and the E Street Band sound just as good live as they do on the records, they know each other so well it's amazing (well, they have been playing together for over thirty years after all). And, to top it all, he did an amazing live version of my favorite song on Magic, the title track... it was really cool and I managed to find (bless YouTube!!) him doing something similar on another concert of this tour... check it out!
There's this very cool, old-fashioned theatre in Palo Alto called the Stanford Theatre. It's a theatre from the '20s that got some attention in the late '80s and since then only shows old movies, with great decoration and ambiance (if you haven't noticed there is a guy playing a Wulitzer organ in the photo on the right... it's very cool, he plays before and after the movie, and he did a part Psycho's soundtrack!!!). The main hall is all decorated with old movie posters, and there's always some cool memorabilia related to the movies currently playing. Particularly this past week they had the last days of a Hitchcock festival, featuring Psycho and The Birds. Now, I'm not really fond of The Birds... I watched it a few years ago but couldn't understand what the hell everybody saw in it. Psycho, on the other hand, is a timeless classic: not even the bad memories brought about by Gus Van Sant's "version" (basically, a frame-by-frame copy of the original with the expection of picking a bad cast, using color, and of a unnecessary scene of Bates jerking off). I watched it last monday. Psycho has grown old a little bit... the countless times we've seen the shower scene takes the edge off it, but luckily there's dozens of other scenes just as good, but a lot less exploited... Everything is top notch: Anthony Perkins gives one of the most memorable performances ever as poor, lonely Norman Bates... Hitchcock is at his best, orchestrating one memorable scene after the other... the soundtrack is amazing... even the black & white photography seems perfect!! It's an amazing, memorable movie, and it was really cool watching it in the Stanford Theatre (and getting to listen the guy wailing Psycho's soundtrack at the end!).
1-) If you're thinking about watching Vantage Point, please DON'T! It's so bad it hurts, and it's giving 10.000 B.C. a decent run for worst movie of the year.
2-) One of the best nerdy jokes I've seen lately (from the nerdiest of all comics, xkcd):
So I'm officially half way through my time in California and I thought it was time to post some news. I've been postponing this, hoping I'd get some pictures to put up here, but since my camera cable is still gone I'll have to go picture-less for the time being... :-) So, what's Silicon Valley like?! It's freaking awesome, kinda like a high-tech american TV suburb. Which is also the bad part: there's not much to do around good ol' Mountain View; I mean, there's great shopping, some movie theaters, fine restaurants and a couple of bars. Enough to go by for who's gonna be here for a few days, but living here probably leads to a very quiet life...
San Francisco, on the other hand, is awesome, and only an hour away!!! It's a gorgeous city, with a very beautiful coast, and very nice people. There's all the touristy stuff, you know, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, the weird winding streets, Fisherman's Wharf... there's great shopping, of course, nice parks, restaurants, bars, everything!!! Up until 2am that is, because there's a very annoying (apparently state-wide) law that prohibits people to sell alcohol after 2am!! Do you believe that?!!?!
I've done some pretty interesting things already, and I will go into more detail when I actually get to my photos to post here, but I gotta say the coolest thing I've done was to bike on the Golden Gate bridge, that was awesome!!!! And yeah, it also made me realize I'm really, really out of shape... will have to work on that... :-)
Oh yeah, to finish off, since I don't have any photos to post (because I have no idea where I put my camera cable), check out this video: this is how I know we're all actually living in a sci-fi book some crazy dude is writing somewhere...
These have been hectic days and the first thing to be neglected was this blog (well, actually the second thing to be neglected... the first was my masters :-) ). But now I got an hour or so to spare in Houston Intercontinental Airport, so I'll post a few updates. First things first, I'm very much in love with my job right now; working at Google has proven to be everything I'd hoped for, fun, challenging, and full of opportunities. Moving to Belo Horizonte has been an interesting experience too. Even though it's the best place I could think of to live in right now, it's a great city with a lot of interesting things happening, concerts, good restaurants, good bars, very nice people, a very nice place indeed. The only thins is it's hard to find an apartment there, but hopefully I'll take care of that problem soon. Now for the news that's probably going to run this blog for the next few weeks: I'm spending three weeks in Moutain View, Google's main headquarters. Mountain View is a little town in the Silicon Valley, near San Francisco. It's gonna be a great chance for meeting people and learning A LOT for more experienced googlers and it's gonna be an amazing opportunity to travel a little bit around, after all God (or whoever) did invent the weekend! Right now I'm in Houston, Texas, waiting for my connection to San Jose, some 30 min. away from Mountain View. This weekend is probably gonna be spent in SF, walking around town and seeing the sights (Alcatraz, Golden Gate Bridge, all the hills and buildings... I'm pretty sure there's plenty to see), and partying in town (there's a Blind Boys from Alabama concert today too, we might go to that). Next week we'll probably go to Vegas, either drive (roadtrip!!!) or fly, specially because Cirque du Soleil has a special show in town inspired by Beatles song (how the help could I miss that??). Then there's one weekend that we don't know yet what to do and on our last weekend here there's gonna be a Bruce Springsteen concert saturday night (also my grandma's birthday, hopefully I won't forget :-) ) before we catch our flight back home on sunday. We might do some wineries saturday before the concert, but nothing is certain yet... who knows what might happen, I'm just sure it's gonna be grrreat!!!!
Hey, it's been a while, right?? Well, life's been crazy lately, haven't found an apartment yet, new job's been very demanding (end of quarter), I've been back and forth from Salvador more often than usual... oh, yeah, and my masters (similar to this blog) hasn't seen much action... but, one thing's still the same: I've been going to the movies! And, well, I've been mostly disappointed, with a few noteworthy exceptions. So, for starters the best movie of 2007 is Tropa de Elite, hands down (and kudos to the Berlinale for recognizing that!). I've seen most of the Oscar nominees, and they're no competition whatsoever. Actually, 2007 was such a bad year that any of the 2006 Top 5 would be the best movie of 2007. Both No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood are very good movies that will be forgotten in a few months. Juno is cute, but no Little Miss Sunshine. The comedies were pretty good, though... Superbad and Knocked Up are awesome!! Finally, the movie I enjoyed the most was Across the Universe, I guess hundreds of people must've thought of making a movie musical with Beatles songs; if they hadn't, it should've come to them after Moulin Rouge! came out. That's exactly what they do here, they use 35 Beatles songs to tell the story of the '60s, of Jude and Lucy, Max, Sadie, Jojo and a bunch of other names right out of the songs we all love. Their use of the songs is amazing: some are obvious but very well done, some are surprising and some are amongst the most moving things I've seen lately (the gospel version of Let It Be is really amazing). The only one song I didn't enjoy so much was For The Benefit or Mr. Kite, but I guess 34 out of 35 is pretty good, right? :-) The movie tells the story of Liverpool-boy-but-America-bound Jude and Ivy League-bound girl Lucy, who meet and (yeah, you guessed it!) fall in love. They happen to move to NY during one of the most complicated (and fun) moments in recent American history (late '60s, Vietnam, Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, Psychodelia) and we live it all through their lives and the Fab Four's songs. If you're a Beatles fan you're gonna have the time of your life. If you're not a Beatles fan, well, you should just rethink a whole lot of things now, shouldn't you?
I thought always the brazilian voices for The Simpsons were better than the american ones... but they changed Homer a few years ago and it's never been the same... so, what's better nowadays, Spider Pig or Porco Aranha???
I seriously think that, after The Godfather's, only Martin Scorcese should be allowed to make gangster movies. There it is, I said it. I doesn't matter how talented the people involved are (and you don't get much better than Denzel Washington, Russel Crowe and Ridley Scott); it doesn't matter how good the story is; it doesn't matter how much money goes into the production, how many awards it gets... it always feels like it's lacking something. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good movie; it's just not good enough to stand up against Casino, Goodfellas, The Departed, and so on... it's the story of Frank Lucas, a nice fellow with a tendency for sudden fits of rage (he's specially fond of banging people's heads against stuff) that became the most successful drug dealer in the US during the Vietnam years. It's also the story det. Richie Roberts, the most honest cop ever, who is gonna spend the better part of the movie trying to catch Lucas (actually, he first has to find out who Lucas is...) The movie is a bit too long and still manages to have kind of a sudden ending... it's weird. Some parts of the story aren't really clear and I think that there isn't enough violence and tension to keep the mood for 157 minutes. Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe are both very good, as we've come to expect, but this isn't a carrer-high for any of them. We've seen they play this before. All in all this a very good movie; just not the classic I was expecting. And since last year's The Departed is still fresh in our memory, I think American Gangster is gonna have a tough time this awards season. On a sidenote, a very promising thing to come out of this movie might be the "unofficial soundtrack" released by Jay-Z; apparently he watched the movie and got so inspired he just had to write an entire album about his own experience as a street hustler.
2007 was the year I stopped being so lazy and started looking for new music. I really listened to a lot of new (for me) stuff and found I liked a lot of them. At least three or four of these "new" bands are now amongst my most-listened. I was wondering whether I should talk about the stuff I discovered in 2007 (even though most of it has been around for quite some time), or the stuff that actually came out last year. Being lazy as I am, I chose the latter basically because it's less to write about :-)... I might come back and do the other later on!!!! Let's start with the Best Album of the year... here, I have three very strong contestants:
I'll have a hard time choosing a favorite. Icky Thump is probably the most irregular of the three: it has some pretty weak tunes (I don't really like Conquest and a couple other), but it also has some of the best songs of the year: Icky Thump, 300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues and Rag and Bone. Spoon's album is a lot more regular, it's one of those albums that you just listen from start to finish without ever feeling like skipping. But there's not really any song on the level of 300 M.P.H... Magic is an amazing record... like Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, there are no weak tracks; it also "tells a story" through some really amazing songs, at least three of which (Gypsy Biker, Girls in Their Summer Clothes, and Magic, not to mention the catchiest of all, Radio Nowhere) can go head-to-head with Jack White's best any day. So, there you go, it wasn't so hard after all:
Magic, by Bruce Springsteen
Icky Thump, by The White Stripes
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, by Spoon
Who You Are, by Cary Brothers
Sky Blue Sky, by Wilco
Some albums may not be in my list simply because I haven't had the chance of listening to them. Others I did listen to and couldn't see what the fuss was all about: specifically, why the hell did everybody love M.I.A., Arcade Fire, and LCD Soundsystem, respectively numbers 1, 4 and 7 in Rolling Stone's Top 50 Albums of 2007 list? It's beyond me... too much electronica for my taste... actually, I might give M.I.A. another shot, it did sound different enough to deserver a few listens... Arcade Fire is interesting, but definitely not great... and LCD, well, I would say that they really suck... but since everybody seems to love them, I'll just say that "they're really not the kind of music I like"... I'll come back later for another post on My Top 5 Songs of 2007...
Well, since my search for an apartment (unfruitfully) continues, and I haven't been able to go to the movies lately, I'll take a few moments to write a little about a couple of books I read recently... The first one is The Act You've Known for All These Years: A Year in the Life of Sgt. Pepper and Friends, (em português) whose title is pretty self-explanatory... it's a great book about one of the most creative and weird periods of pop music. Beatles, Bob Dylan, (Syd Barrett's) Pink Floyd, Beach Boys (well, Brian Wilson really), Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young... those were amazing times... basically Clinton Heylin writes about that year when the world's greatest bands were fighting to see who would come up with the next big breakthrough (you know, after Rubber Soul, Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Pet Sounds...) in pop music, and would set the pace for everything that was to come. Acid is, alongside the aforementioned artists, the main character of the story of the rise (and fall, sort of) of psychodelia. For me it was really cool to get to know much more about one of my favorite musical periods ever. One of the best parts of the book is that, even though Heylin pays the deserved respect to everybody involved he does look at everything with a critical eye... this is no ode to Sgt. Pepper's... it is a serious, fairly unbiased analysis of the environment in which it came to be... oh, and he suggests soundtracks for each chapter, which is pretty cool too!!! :-)
When I came to Belo Horizonte, one of the first places I went to was (of course) the nearby mall. There I went into a bookstore and two books caught my eyes: a fairly short book by José Saramago that I'd never seen before, 1993, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (em potuguês)... I don't really know why I got interested in the latter... I didn't know the author, had never heard about the book, and didn't contain any clues as to what the hell it was about. But it wasn't an expensive book, so I trusted my guts and bought it anyways (I bought 1993 too). I actually do that quite often and I usually end up enjoying the book. This was no exception. It's not an amazing book, that's true. But it's pretty enjoyable. The fact that it's from the perspective of a 9-year-old, and the lengths the author goes to to make sure you don't forget that, is sometimes annoying: like "mispronunciation" of some words, repetition of certain sentences, stuff like that. It's not meant for children, though, no way! There's not much I could write about the story that wouldn't ruin it for you because if you don't have at least a little suspense in the beginning it will be hard to read it all... but if you like little fables that try and tell really heavy stories with a light mood you'll definitely enjoy this... I guess that was the whole point, because the theme in itself has been touched on by so many people before (and yes, with so much more talented) that were it not for the whole fable thing, it would be hard to justify why the hell do we need another little sad story on the matter...
In 1995's Grace, Jeff Buckley is fantastic throughout the entire record. He has this unbelievably clear voice, that seems to be able to go as high as he wishes. It's funny 'cause I've heard a few live recordings of his, and I don't think he'd match up live to what he got on record. He was really cool live, don't get me wrong, but I just feel he was extra-inspired during the recording of Grace. And even though the entire record is amazing, my personal favorite is, without a shadow of a doubt, "Lover, You Should've Come Over" (Lilac Wine and Hallelujah are close seconds). I love how the intensity of the song grows and grows towards the end, and, well, the recording is perfect: his voice is amazing, the whole producing is just enough to not get in the way and suits the music really well. I've heard a few live version, but it's far from being the same.... maybe you had to be there to appreciate it, so it's real pity we can't be there anymore, since he drowned while swimming in a river in '97, with Grace being the only studio album he released before dying. Real pity.
The Beatles had many incredible songs, and as much as I love Twist 'n Shout, it probably wouldn't make my Top 10. But I always feel it's Ferris Bueler's (oops, I meant John's) best vocal performance. The story goes that (hopefully it's a true story), after a long time recording Please Please Me, his throat was pretty much fucked up. He just decided to go for one last song, and went for the kill: he probably had a sore throat for quite some time, but it's his rough voice and his screaming that gave life to the song.
I had a hard time picking a Led Zeppelin song. I knew Plant had to be here, he is probably my favorite Rock singer of all time. That's why picking one song was so hard. A short list of the runner-ups would be: Immigrant Song, Gallows Pole, Dazed and Confused, I Can't Quit You Baby, Whole Lotta Love, Black Dog, and Rock and Roll. Those are all amazing tunes, but I had to go with my favorite Zeppelin song ever: Since I've Been Loving You, from III.
Joe Cocker probably has the title of best Beatles cover ever for this song. Also, I guess the fact that I grew up on Wonder Years, and can't help remembering it whenever I listen to his howls, didn't hurt his odds either :-). He carved With a Little Help From My Friends out of Sgt. Peppers, arguably one of the best songs in one of the best albums ever released, and made it his own, changing it around in so many ways it hardly sounds like a Beatles song anymore. He took a great song, and turned into an epic classic. It's just brilliant.
At first I intended to do this list only with rock songs. But then I gave up on that, as I decided to add this song: Elis Regina singing Chico Buarque's Atrás da Porta live. Elis is widely considered Brasil's greatest singer ever, and, in my humble opinion, watching her live performances should be enough to clear any lingering doubts of that...
Ok, I have to admit it: I like Whitney Houston. There, I said it. I like the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, as corny as it may be. But her voice is just otherworldly, I've never heard anything like it. And the other day I happened to catch the original version of I Will Always Love You (I didn't even know it wasn't an original, but I finally understood how it could not have gotten the Oscars), which is by Dolly Parton. It's weak, really, really weak. It's hard to imagine how they could get that song and change around so much that it became what we hear Whitney sing, it's amazing. And I know there's a lot of people involved in that (producers, musicians, etc.), but her voice makes most of the different. It's just beautiful. BTW, the original Dolly Parton is pretty easy to find on YouTube, like here.
Singing practically a capella, Janis delivered one of the best songs in this landmark album, Mercedes Benz. She sings like she is performing to a full stadium, but the bare sounds of something marking the beat and her deep, husky voice, keep in our mid that she is just singing alone in the studio.
Marvin Gaye is such a sad story... He was an amazing talent, certainly my favorite Motown performer, immensely successful in all kinds of genre: good ol' R&B/Soul, pop, politically inspired masterpieces (What's Going On), and the best cheating song ever released, I Heard It Through The Grapevine. Covered by loads of people, from Creedence Clearwater Revival to Marisa Monte, it's Marvin's version (which isn't the first, btw), that stands out. His clear, soulful voice is at its best and the song is just intoxicating.
Walking back home from the movies tonight I must've thought of a few dozen ways to start this post. I've settled with stating that this movie will blow our mind away. It's really late and I'm lazy, so I'll probably not write as much as the movie deserves, but I'll say this: I probably watched both the best movie of the year and the best comic book-based movie ever made. It's that good. It's long, it's unbelievably tense, it's smart, it's disturbing, it's genius. Batman Begins was incredible, but Dark Knight is so much more! Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan are their usual, incredibly talented selves, as in the previous movie. Good ol' Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are still there. But now there's so much more to it...
Angelina Jolie is hot. Don't worry, I don't intend to just restate the obvious here, but it had to be said. Now that I got it out of my system, I can talk a little bit about the actual movie. I've been seeing trailers for this for quite a few weeks now, and it impressed me a lot. It looked so cool, may be even a new Matrix (only the "redefining what action looks like" part of Matrix, not the smart philosophical part). This, according to my good friend Diego, is the adaptation of a great comic book (as usual, the book is supposed to be less simplistic and all). The movie is great fun, it really is, it just fell a little short of my expectations.
I'm sure you've all asked yourself once or twice, what do Alanis Morissette and writer/director M. Night Shyamalan have in common. Well, rejoice, for now I'll tell you exactly that. Both of them came out of nowhere in the '90s (this is sort of a half-true 'cause Alanis was a teen pop diva in Canada, but she had been kinda of forgotten by them... anyway, bear with me) and took the world b assault: Jagged Little Pill, Morissette's 1995 sort-of-debut (again, teen pop diva) was the biggest selling album ever by a female artist and got mostly rave reviews; Shyamalan's sort-of-debut, Sixth Sense, was the surprise hit of the year, got a bunch of Oscar nominations, and made him the rising star in Hollywood.
I kinda ran into Damien Rice's B-Sides the other day, while roaming around a Virgin Megastore (yeah, I love doing that... Virgin, Barnes & Noble, Borders... when are we getting those in Brasil?!!?! Well, at least we have Fnac). I immediately picked it up, seeing I'd read about it at some point but never really listened to it. It's kind of a mixed bunch: on the one hand you have three tracks that are songs from O: live version of Delicate, and instrumental and demo versions of Volcano. From this bunch, I'd say the interesting one is the demo, but just for the whole historic curiosity. On the other hand you have another bunch of songs that fit well in the whole O ambience, but aren't up to the standard of the album (and I can only assume were thus discarded). And then there's "Woman Like a Man". I'm fucking addicted to this song now, and the fact that Barra, the guy who is traveling around with me, now can't stop singing it isn't helping. It's a great song, I can only figure it wasn't in O because it really doesn't fit the mood of the rest of the album, being much more "nervous" (yeah, I couldn't find a better word! Listen to the damn song and pick an adjective you like!! Why do we have to do everything for our readers?!?!). Check the video below, and hopefully you too won't able to stop the damn "Woman like a man like a woman like a man..." in your head. Oh, I put the lyrics right afterwords, and if you have any ideas about what the hell he is trying to say, please share it with me, I'm pretty curious myself... and this video is of him singing the song @ BBC, so he cleaned up the lyrics... what exactly does "MUCKED inside out means"?? :-)
So, I was supposed to have written this a couple of weeks ago when I watched Iron Man, but never got around to: summer (in the US, that is) has begun again, and with it some interesting movies are coming out, thank God!! Iron Man was pretty cool, fun enough a good start to Marvel Comics' new role as a full studio. This week I watched Speed Racer in IMAX (oh, yeah, I'm in the US right now by the way), and it was proof that size doesn't matter; it felt like it sucked twice as much because i was twice as big!! But today was a glorious day, Indiana Jones is back!!!! And he's got it for some weird shiny crystal skull, apparently. Indy is a classic, never matched by any other adventure movie. This last installment has everything that made it so: incredibly talented people, fast pace, great sense of humor, great action scenes, incredibly impossible scenes and legends. If anybody had any doubts about Harrison Ford's ability to do it again, think again: he's still great as ever. Shia LaBeouf is a pretty worthy successor to Indy's charisma, and is pretty cool in his James Dean persona. And, well, Karen Allen is Marion, period (actually I wish she had a little more screen time and got to show off a little more of her personality, like she did in Raiders... but nothing is perfect). I don't really know if I liked Cate Blanchett's weird Russian chick, but it definitely wasn't enough to put me off. On the directing front, Spielberg proves himself once again: the camera travels around the scenes perfectly, showing us incredibly creative and beautiful shots. Well, I could talk all day about how cool this movie is, and about the few details I didn't like, but it would be boring and I would probably spoil some surprise for the few brave ones that read through to the end: just go watch the movie and enjoy it, you're gonna have a blast!!! Oh, and for the curious, I'm in Seattle right now, will do a post about that sometime soon... cheers, guys!!
This was, all in all, a pretty busy weekend: moving, went to see a Led Zeppelin cover band, we did some cooking yesterday at a friend's place (while we watched that shameful 5 x 0 Cruzeiro and Atlético game), I unbraided my hair (which took a whole lot more than I'd hoped and gave me the chance to watch half a season of Seinfeld while I did it).
Let's start with Bob Dylan's "unconventional" biography, I'm not there. To be totally honest, I was kind of under-impressed with it: I was expecting amazing, epic, timeless; all I got was pretty good. And, well, pretty weird too. The whole idea of telling the story through different characters representing Dylan's "personas" was really interesting, but the execution was a little too confusing for me, maybe I didn't know enough about Dylan to understand it all, maybe I just wasn't having a particularly smart day... But, confusing storytelling aside, the movie is very entertaining, filled with great music (how could it not?), with an amazing cast at the top of their game (kudos Cate Blanchet!!!), and, just to be sure I'd really enjoy it, the funniest Beatles reference!! Overall, it's a pretty good movie, real original, but just a little below my expectations.
There's this very cool, old-fashioned theatre in Palo Alto called the Stanford Theatre. It's a theatre from the '20s that got some attention in the late '80s and since then only shows old movies, with great decoration and ambiance (if you haven't noticed there is a guy playing a Wulitzer organ in the photo on the right... it's very cool, he plays before and after the movie, and he did a part Psycho's soundtrack!!!). The main hall is all decorated with old movie posters, and there's always some cool memorabilia related to the movies currently playing. Particularly this past week they had the last days of a Hitchcock festival, featuring Psycho and The Birds.
Their use of the songs is amazing: some are obvious but very well done, some are surprising and some are amongst the most moving things I've seen lately (the gospel version of Let It Be is really amazing). The only one song I didn't enjoy so much was For The Benefit or Mr. Kite, but I guess 34 out of 35 is pretty good, right? :-)
I seriously think that, after The Godfather's, only Martin Scorcese should be allowed to make gangster movies. There it is, I said it. I doesn't matter how talented the people involved are (and you don't get much better than Denzel Washington, Russel Crowe and Ridley Scott); it doesn't matter how good the story is; it doesn't matter how much money goes into the production, how many awards it gets... it always feels like it's lacking something. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good movie; it's just not good enough to stand up against Casino, Goodfellas, The Departed, and so on... it's the story of Frank Lucas, a nice fellow with a tendency for sudden fits of rage (he's specially fond of banging people's heads against stuff) that became the most successful drug dealer in the US during the Vietnam years. It's also the story det. Richie Roberts, the most honest cop ever, who is gonna spend the better part of the movie trying to catch Lucas (actually, he first has to find out who Lucas is...)
When I came to Belo Horizonte, one of the first places I went to was (of course) the nearby mall. There I went into a bookstore and two books caught my eyes: a fairly short book by José Saramago that I'd never seen before, 1993, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (em potuguês)... I don't really know why I got interested in the latter... I didn't know the author, had never heard about the book, and didn't contain any clues as to what the hell it was about. But it wasn't an expensive book, so I trusted my guts and bought it anyways (I bought 1993 too). I actually do that quite often and I usually end up enjoying the book. This was no exception. It's not an amazing book, that's true. But it's pretty enjoyable. The fact that it's from the perspective of a 9-year-old, and the lengths the author goes to to make sure you don't forget that, is sometimes annoying: like "mispronunciation" of some words, repetition of certain sentences, stuff like that. It's not meant for children, though, no way! There's not much I could write about the story that wouldn't ruin it for you because if you don't have at least a little suspense in the beginning it will be hard to read it all... but if you like little fables that try and tell really heavy stories with a light mood you'll definitely enjoy this... I guess that was the whole point, because the theme in itself has been touched on by so many people before (and yes, with so much more talented) that were it not for the whole fable thing, it would be hard to justify why the hell do we need another little sad story on the matter...
