I've recently met Lady Visentainer again. Along with about half a dozen of the avatars of school years. By avatars I mean those guys who'd get the highest grade on just about any subject and who seemed realtively devoid of a personal life. Milady has remained the same edgewalker, much to my joy. Good to reasure myself that the law course isn't brainwashing her. But the avatars are really turning into an interesting bunch. I always wondered what happened to those guys once school was over. I always thought they'd have promising careers right from the start. But now I see it takes a little social skill to do well in these first few stages of adulthood. Social skills that I do not posess, and neither do they. On the other hand, we've all began edgewalking. As if they had found out that life is more than just grades... And as if I had gradually lost some of my nerve... Some of them have even turned homossexual or bissexual. And I know many people back at school would taunt them in such a manner, but they'd be surprised to see that they actualy did become homossexual. Meanwhile, one of milady's friends is dating a scottish fifty-year-old she met on the net. And all through the night, milady was as insinuating as she had always been, though she respected Tinkerbell at my side. I like that. Tsc... I can't understand why she has a hard time landing a boyfriend.
Anyway, it was nice to get toghether with a gang that wasn't so normal... I needed that. Perhaps I'll keep in touch this time.

Mamãe não entende por que tenho tanta má vontade em fazer coisas simples nesta cidade. Lembro em uma ocasião em que tive que ir a um borracheiro consertar um pneu do meu carro (deve estar anotado aqui em algum lugar...). Conversando sobre isso, eu deixei escapar: "lá se vai o meu dia de amanhã...". E ela desatou a dar sermão sobre como isso só demora alguns minutinhos e eu não preciso perder meu dia.

Pois bem, nesta semana tive um exemplo perfeito do meu ponto de vista: a visita o consulado italiano para renovar meu passaporte para a viagem de fim de ano. A odisséia começou na segunda. Ligo para lá e descubro que eles atendem das oito ao meio-dia. Olho no relógio: 12:45. Fica para amanhã. E então descubro que eles não atendem às terças sabe Deus por que... Passo para a quarta. E então, falho em acordar com o despertador. Chego lá às dez da manhã. A fila, calculando por cima, demoraria umas quatro horas no mínimo. Passo para a quinta-feira, chegando uma hora antes da abertura do consulado e já pegando uma pequena fila na porta. La dentro, mais uma hora e meia. Finalmente, dou de cara com um senhor relativamente simpático, que no entanto explica as coisas tão rápido que não tenho tempo de assimilar tudo. Resultado: me agenda um horário para voltar em Agosto, sem pegar fila e para ir direto ao assunto, se eu tiver toda a documentação... Ou seja, aquilo que mamãe disse durar um dia, vai provavelmente se estender para alêm do mês que vem.

*Suspiro*

Nessas horas eu detesto cidades grandes...

Seria ótimo se todas as gramáticas fossem tão simples como a italiana. Um S é um S. E não um SC, Ç, C, Z e variações... Cada letra tem um som e apenas um som. No mais, a única preocupação que se deve ter é a de saber quando se duplica a consoante ou se o acento no E final é agudo ou grave (a única letra que tem os dois, como o nosso A, e eles só acentuam letras no final da frase...).

Já levo duas semanas de aula e aprendi bastante. Já dá pra falar um pouco e fico feliz de me pegar pensando em italiano de vez em nunca. É um idioma com uma sonoridade belíssima. Tento a toda custa aprender como a criança aprende. Foi do jeito que aprendi o inglês e o espanhol: "esta palavra significa este conceito", e não "esta palavra significa esta outra em português que significa este conceito", como as pessoas mais velhas aprendem... Capisce?

Aula passada terminou com traduções da música do Eros Ramazzotti que eu tanto gosto: Cosa della vita. A pedido meu. Algumas partes complicadas, mas foi interessante.

P.S.: Aprendi o que quer dizer o pernacchia que eu ouvia tanto por aí entre decendentes de italianos...

Seen a couple of movies on the weekend...
First, there was Charlies Angels: full throttle on theatres. . I have to say: the director, a fellow who goes by the name of McG, must've been really stoned while directing this. There are a bunch of really cool action scenes, but most of them are simply too riiculously far fetched, even for an Angels movie. Like for instance, Demy Moore, the villain, jumping off a builiding and flying half-way across an avenue with clothes that look like a silk version of X-men's Banshee. On the good side, I can enlist the appearence of fellow countryman Rodrigo Santoro, who doesn't actually do anything relevant, but hey, it's one of our actors on the big screen! Also, I really liked the enourmous amounts of references to pop culture idols. I mean, the movie is one big collage of references. From Drew Barrymore wearing David Bowie's Alladin Sane make-up as a wrestler (to the sound of Bowie's Rebel Rebel...), going through Matrix-like action scenes, Moulin Rouge choreographies, and your obvious references to angels, heaven, hell, etc... Nice roles played by X-Files' Robert Patrick and Bruce Willis, who seems to be one more actor to chalk up on that list of guys who always play the same role. Oh, I almost forgot! You also get to see the return of that thin guy who fought with them on the first movie!! Definitely one of the coolest characters (aside from the angels themselves, that it...).
After all that excitement, I came home to find that my parents had rented 007: Dr. No. Yes, it was the very first 007 movie. Dad wants to do what everyone always talks of doing: rent them all, in sequence. The first movie seems to be just one big detective story. Nothing too great about it. Bond doesn't even have any of those nifty gadgets he uses. It is, however, the movie that introduces the famous Walter PPK, his famous, yet tiny pistol. Bond is played by a very young Sean Connery, who depicts him as a seductive gumshoe with one or two tricks up his sleave (and bellow the belt...). One thing that really drew my attention is how simple are the fight scenes. Nowadays both the villain and the hero fly up into the air in slow-motion break out the fancy martial arts. But back then, Bond would just unarm his opponents with a simple flick of the wrist. No camera tricks. I'm curious to see how he'll evolve...

Well, that's enough for now... Still haven't seen Spirited Away. But there'll be other weekends...

Just when you thought you'd seen enough quizzes...


SPIRIT is your chinese symbol!


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Uma Malibu e duas tequilas num estômago vazio...
Saldo:
Fala arrastada, desorientação , descoordenação e algumas idéias meio esquisitas na cabeça...

Italian seems to be going fine, thank you. Of course, I still can't make it through five minutes of conversation. But nonetheless I've learned quite a lot. It's the first time I face a language class knowing virtually nothing of the language. To me, the weirdest thing of all is not knowing wether the teacher speaks an accurate italian. In the pointless english classes I had at school, I was always noticing teachers' mistakes. Their accents and wrong pronunciation. Seldom did I find a teacher with a 100% correct english. But in the italian course, I have no reference of such things. For all I know we could all be speaking with terrible foreign accents and not knowing it. By the way, It's palpable how I'm progressing way faster than everyone else, save for one other spanish-speaking girl. Spanish really helps me understand it all faster, even though a few words get me confused every now and then: there are words that have different meanings in spanish and italian, but the word is the same.
Today there was an interesting observation to be made. The teacher had us all play a memory game. You know, the one where you put cards on the table with figures (in our case, they were sentences) and you have to find the matches? I did very well. As oposed to some of my coleagues who were either too tired to remember anything or simply had crappy memories. After that, I noticed how the same people who did well on the game could remember vocabulary and grammar rules while the others seemed to be eternaly on their first day of class. Goes to show how memory and learning are two versions of the same thing.


On other, unrealted news, Pete Bunny seems to have found a way to correct the puctuation problems that we potuguese writters have had lately (characters being replaced for question marks...) How did you do it? PLEASE!!! WE MUST KNOW!!!

Going by the video rental shop, this old nostalgia hit me. I decided to leave aside the high-quality movies and go for some old-fashioned 80's terror. And who could be better than good old Freddy Krueger, the icon of such an age? . I used to watch some of his movies when I was a kid. My favorite was the 3rd Nightmare on Elm street, called Dream warriors. The thing with Freddy is that he had no specific victim. For all I knew when I was a kid, I could be the next one just as soon as I fell asleep. And you couldn't stay awake forever... That's what made Freddy better than, let's say, Jason, who had a very specific story and a setting. I knew he couldn't come after me in the middle of the city because he always stayed close to water. Reminds me of another horror classic of the 80's: Puppet master. The monsters were this team of small puppets and dolls. Imagine what it was for a kid to watch such a movie and then be put to sleep in a room full of armed G.I. Joes and other toys... Last but not least, there was also Aracnophobia. A movie that seemed to tease our fear of common house spiders.

I went back home asking myself why do kids like horror movies so much. And I figured it's because horror movies meddle with one of our most basic feelings: fear. See, a child can't understand enough of a romance to feel anything for it. And comedies seem to be made mostly for adults who understand the dirty jokes and the social and political satires. Sure, adventures are fun. But terror is what really gets their blood going and their minds working for days. Also, it deals with morbid curiosity: you always want to know how each of the dozens of characters dies in the movie. It's like collecting cards: "yep, I've seen that one...", "woa, cool, I've never seen that!!". In the case of Puppet master there was an even bigger appeal to morbid curiosity: every now and then a new puppet would be created with many more fun ways to kill.

Remexendo em coisas que escrevi h? muito tempo, encontrei uma anotaç?es de uma narrativa que escrevi para um projeto do colégio. Era uma idéia interessante. Mas como n?o escrevo narrativas h? um bom tempo, vou deix?-la aqui para algum escritor que precise de uma idéia.

A hist?ria contava dobre uma raça de seres que havia sido criada por outra raça de seres. Estes ?ltimos j? estavam extintos, talvez por causa desta raça que criaram. Na verdade, o conceito todo veio dessa idéia de filmes como O Exterminador do Futuro e mais recentemente em Matrix, onde as maquinas tomam o lugar dos humanos. Sempre imaginei que, quando os alien?genas chegassem, n?o haveria mais humanos e as m?quinas criadas por n?s ser?am os ?nicos "seres" no planeta. E que talvez os alien?genas nem soubessem que n?s existimos. Nas anotaç?es que fiz, esta raça criada artificialmente teria um hist?rico da raça anterior e a noç?o clara de que eles eram seus criadores. Mas em vez de, como n?s, acreditarem que os criadores s?o seres infinitamente poderosos e superiores, eles saberiam que eram seres que foram superados por eles. No mais, isso incorporaria no processo evolutivo um outro tipo de evoluç?o, diferente da seleç?o natural darwiniana. E talvez seja este o ponto que mais me interessou nessa idéia. Talvez algum dia eu ainda escreva a hist?ria. Mas por enquanto, deixo a idéia aqui para quem quiser.

Nota para alguém que se importe...

Aqule professora maldita me passou. Com um cinco, mas me passou. Agora não seria justo descer o cacete nela como eu queria... Mas que haverá reivindicações no futuro, isso sim!

Surreal revelations X:

This one tends to get rather schizotypal on the way, so follow carefuly.

What if we had gotten to such a degree of development, that we could travel through space forever? The day would come when we would have travelled throughout the entire universe. Now, just imagine that life as we know it didn't exist anywhere else. That we would be the only intelligent life in the universe. This would mean that the universe is ours for the taking. We could do whatever we wanted with it. What would be the first thing we'd do? Set up colonies in every planet. Because by then, Earth's resources would have been sucked dry. So we'd raid other planets for resources. And we'd keep on raiding and destroying planets (because quite frankly, I don't think humans will ever learn...) until we'd cause our own extinction. Then the universe would be allowed to grow again until life could again be created.

What I'm saying is, what if life -- and I mean intelligent life -- isn't the creative force in the universe? What if we are indeed the virus, the destructive force? Then the universe would, as some scientists think, undergo cycles of expansion and contraction. Think: forces in the universe create things at a steady rate. This is expansion. It all builds up to a point where life can be created. Then it develops and starts travelling through space, destroying what is created. As life develops, it's capability for destruction grows until it can destroy at a faster rate than the universe can create. The contraction starts. It goes on until life can no longer sustain itself because there are not enough resources and vanishes from the universe. Now things can go back to expansion because the destructive force has been eradicated.
You know, when I was younger I heard this thing about the universe going through cycles and I always though it had been exactly the same for countless times. That is, there had been countless Jesuses and Hitlers and Peter Pans that had all been rock stars (I wanted to be a rock star at that age...). I guess I was a determinist in childhood.

Did I lose you back there? Well, surreal revelations are meant to keep you thinking...

Random literature:
She had a heart that beat in a fragile rythm. As fragile as the rest of her. I would lay on her chest, in that state between sleep and wake, and I'd wonder if that tiny, weightless pulse was that of an old and tired heart, almost giving up; or that of a terribly young fledgling heart, still too weak to beat loudly but filled with possibility. Then, drifting towards that state of slumber where any idea is possible, I'd feel the rest of her grow smaller and smaller with each heartbeat. More and more fragile. Tiny. Minuscule. By then I could hold her entirely in the palm of my hand, with all the care in the world. The slightest twitch of a finger would injure her. And I'd stay there, crouching on the nothingness, holding her with both hands and peeking between my fingers like a child who's just caught a butterfly. Or a fairy, for that matter...
Still, I felt strangely at easy with that weakening beat. I mean strangely at ease, like when I was immersed in that bathtub, only my mouth and nose above the water, in that womb-like stillness that would make so many people agonize, but seemed so healing to me. This would make others agonize as well, pleading for her heart to beat louder, stronger. Pleading for her to live. To me, that tiny thing was the sweetest of songs. Something for my ears only.

Fazenda no final de semana.

A estrada que pegamos para ir à fazenda de minha avó passa pelo trópico de Capricórnio. Sabemos porque há uma placa enorme na estrada. E desde criança repetimos a brincadeira banal de fingir que a temperatura fica mais quente quando passamos por ele em direção à fazenda. Ou fingir que esta linha imaginária nos estrangula. Ontem, indo em direção à fazenda, alguns minutos antes da placa, vi no céu uma pipa. E um menino de cor correndo ao lado da estrada segurano um carretel nas mãos. Pouco tempo depois, percebi em uma fração de segundo uma linha branca atravessando meu campo de visão. Apenas uma fração de segundo. Seguida por um som esquisito de tensão partida. Levei um susto seguido por uma sensação de estupidez cômica ao me pegar olhando pelo retrovisor, procurando o garoto ainda aferrado ao carretel sendo arrastado pelo carro de minha mãe pela estrada. A linha da pipa ficara presa na antena. Viajamos por uma meia hora com aquele trópico de Capricórnio falso tremulando atrás de nós como os tecidos de Priscila, a Rainha do Deserto.

Eu voltei para casa furioso com a prostituta da minha professora de ponto de venda. Aliás, prostituta não seria o xingamento adequado. Afinal, ela não se vende por dinheiro. Ela é vagabunda, desdentada e com uma profunda, latente e total falta de homem. Essa revolta toda é porque ela vai me fazer ficar de recuperação porque se recusa a pegar o trabalho que eu deixei no escaninho dela. Diz que eu devia entregá-lo em mãos. E ainda vem me falar sobre profissionalismo. Não vejo profissionalismo algum em uma pessoa que chama palestrantes o semestre inteiro, não dá uma aula e ainda joga um capítulo de livro para que a gente leia e faça o trabalho final porque ela não deu matéria alguma. E eu ia escrever um post enorme aqui sobre isso, conclamando meus colegas ecanos para colocar ela também na lista de professores picaretas cretinos contra os quais estamos nos rebelando. Mas então o jantar foi servido e meu pai contou tantas piadas, que agora estou com um humor que não me permite tanta violência...

Bom. Talvez seja melhor assim... de alguma maneira.

Tarsila

Trissy's portrait was a real jewel. I mean, I don't believe it'll have any value to the galeries, like Tink's, but I'm extremely proud of the outcome. The whole technical concept came up while I was organizing things in the atelier. I found these tiny canvases I did in the third semester of the art course, when we were tutored by Yolanda Bessa. She had this huge knowledge of materials and methods, and taught us about toxic materials and a few techniques. She gave us ten easy lessons in oil painting, perhaps the only lessons in oil painting my class ever had. One of them was a technique used by old renaissance painters. The image is modelled in ochre, black and white, resulting in a monochrome yellowish image. Then, once dried, it receives all the colours applied in thin, diluted, transparent layers of paint. In my little exercise, my doodles looked like one of those watercolored photographs from the early 1900s. You know, the artist would take someone's black and white picture, then color it using watercolors. There's some kind of irreality in those colors: they're vibrant, and yet so dirty. See the way her lips and her hair shine and the way the background seems dead...

So, here you are. If the Fairy's portrait left much to be desired, I think Trissy's will make amends.