Clubitis

Everytime I get attached to a country, be it because I lived there or because I got close to someone that comes from there, I wind up choosing a football team that I support. My extensive list of football affiliation, at this point, stands like this:

Portugal - FC Porto (above and beyond)
Belgium - Sint Truiden VV
Italy - AC Milan
England - Liverpool FC
Germany - VfB Stuttgart

and now,
Brasil - SE Palmeiras

How could I ever not support a team that just lost the city derby against the all-mighty São Paulo FC with an irregular goal by the emperor Adriano (formerly with Inter), put in with his hand. Moreover, I was missing a team that played in green.

Orson Wells Ressurection Award

In Brussels, we used to take turns to choose the movie we'd use our month cinema card on. To my blockbustery taste, she would always reply with one of her "movies in French", the perfect remedy for my suburbaness. Persepolis was the greatest of her victories and one of my owras.

If not for the courage of portraying people as people, Iranian, Austrian or otherwise, for a delicious scene where a perky little Karl Marx incites God to go on with the "struggle".

Oui, Marjane, la lute continue!

Orson Wells Ressurection Award

It is as rare as it is precious the work of artistic creation that manages to tap into the recogniseable core of experiences of what one may call "humanity". To do so in a German context, a German story deep inside the German history, is, for very opposite reason, all the more rare and all the more precious. And all the more worthy of my Orson Wells Ressurection Award.

The film traces the steps of Captain Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, a ruthless, methodical officer of the East German political police, the Stasi, that finds himself a new mission. The film then goes on to collect the events that lead Wiesler, code name HGW XX/7, to change the nature of that mission.

With the intimacy and the reserved distance with which a member of the publikum watches a "play" - in this case, the life of Georg Dreyman and Christa-Maria Sieland - HGW XX/7 will eventually seek salvation for his own life.

Orson Wells Ressurection Award

It is usual to say that Islam constitutes an irrational, violent religion, still immersed in its own Dark Ages. Albeit all, I ask how can such a thing be said about a people that is so in love with something they would spend the whole day singing* to It.

For a love song on the phone sung between two mending lovers, Dans Paris got one my Orson Wells Ressurection Awards.

* Koran means "recitation", which means that, in practice as well as in spirit, everytime they pray, Muslims sing back to God the words God sang to the Prophet.

about a pulse

it couldnt have come as a shock. But then again, how could it not?
My grandfather is dead.

Before i left him for the last time, lying in that bed,
no clothes, no glasses, no skin,
just the breathing bones of a man getting old a little bit too much,
i made one last gesture to him, my last gesture to him

when i was a kid, i was told to have an arrithmic heart,
(a concept i have come to embrasse in a poetic way, in the lack of any particular physical consequence)
and my grandfather would press my whrist, to feel my faulty pulse
to certify that all was well

when he died, no glasses, no skin,
i went to him one last time
and i held his whrist, faultier than mine had ever been
and i felt nothing

with a smile in the corner of my lip,
i sparked a sware word,
"fuck, i cant feel a goddamned thing"

like him, my grandfather,
it is most funny to me
how i was never too good at getting the pulse of others.

Passports for dummies

I’m sitting at the open wireless space at the ultra-fancy Zürich Airport, waiting my long hours for the connection that will eventually take me to S. Paulo.

But if someone had told me this morning, round about 8.00 AM, Lisbon time, that I would be that I would be taking such relaxed advantage of the fanciness of this place, I would have said I doubted it. This morning, round about 8.00 AM, Lisbon time, I didn’t own a passport of my own and the prospects of getting my hands to one before the flight departed at round about noon, Lisbon time just as well, were certainly not great.

This trip started yesterday, as any good trip, before it started, when I realized that my good’old passport, other from not being in the place where I usually keep it, was no-where else to be found. This, I repeat, a few hours shy of taking off. I looked and looked, trust me, time and again, under every rock, in every dark corner, in the middle of every page, but it wasn’t there.

And so it was passportless that I decided to face the airport gateway to Brazil, a country one cannot enter passportless. And yet it all worked out in the end, as things tend to when the end draws ever near. The Portuguese Republic, in all its might, has created a modality of passport that can be made on the spot, in case you find yourself in a tight one. Of course, as with everything with my republic, it wasn’t going to allow me to give it due praise without a fight. Before getting this passport, one must go to the police station at the airport and claim that his good’old document is lost. A number of dumb questions will obviously garnish the whole experience, as a testament to your own dumbness in having lost the God damned thing. “Where did you lose it?”, they asked me.

- Uuurh, I don’t know?

- Well, but how did it happen?

- I guess I thought I knew where it was, but when I went to look for it I found out I didn’t know after all.

- Ok, but what’s your name again.

- I think it’s easier if you just copy it from the ID card I already gave you.

I answered everything calmly, pacified by the notion that I deserved that for not having been able to find my passport the very day before I was ever going to need it. And so I answered, I waited, I saw time passing by, and when the nice officer finally made it to the printer and handed me the piece of paper, I ran.

“No need to hurry”, I was told. The republic shone its brightest face at me again. I met with the officer of the border control, Ana Paula, the nicest person all day (needless to say my parents, and quite rightfully so, lost that title the very second they realized I lost my freaking passport. “What time is your flight, sonny?” Paula asked. “In just 2 hours”, I replied, hiding my nervousness behind my fakest smile. “Oh, there’s more than time”, and she was right. This passport takes 10 minutes to make. It is all hand-written and thinner than the usual one, because it is only meant to last 6 months and one is not expected to ask for the whole lot of strange visas in that period, especially when all you have is a hand-written passport.

It’s also of a different color. It is dark blue instead of the usual burgundy ones, a special color, for a special set of people. As if to say, “count your blessings, jackass! And thank God we won’t make you go around with a good'old «dummy» sign on your back.”

Night train

This night train takes you to an imaginary space of escape, a city at the end of the world, where people talk as if they are imagining; a place that can't really exist. (...)
Has anyone ever been on a night train to Lisbon?
Pascal Mercier, during the launch of the Portuguese-language version of the Nachtzug nach Lissabon.

Sometimes I feel I was one.

Night train

Any story worth telling is always about two characters: The one that understand and the one that is understood.
Pascal Mercier, during the launch of the Portuguese-language version of the Nachtzug nach Lissabon.


Sometimes I feel we were both the both of them.

the sky today

The bluest blue in the sky all but breaks the rock-thick clouds
and yet
one can almost more than guess
the cotton-white topping that the silver lining announces.

Favourite quotes

"All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the
life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this
planet.
But let us begin."

Pres. John F. Kennedy

The Orson Wells Ressurection Awards

Also known as the OWRA, or just "the owras", the Orson Wells Ressurection Awards were based on the review Joel Siegel made of the 2006 movie Little Miss Sunshine. He says: "Orson Welles would have to come back to life for this not to make my year-end Top 10 list", a statement I wholeheartedly endorse.

Since then, whenever I really really like a movie, I kind of recurringly get the feeling that I wouldn't classify it as the "Movie Of My Life or whatever", but that it holds a special place, a place that cannot be better described than "Orson Welles would have to come back to life for this not to make my year-end Top 10 list".
Not that I'm a profound connoisseur of Orson Wells, but the thing just stuck with me.

holiness

In my arrogance, I often ask myself at the end of a day or a moment, if mine were the actions of a holyman. As arrogance is perhaps the unholiest of attributesl, I feel I'm automatically ruled out;
but I sometimes nonetheless try.

prayer

I mum words along the way. One step after the last, I turn my eyes up to the sky, my chin still facing down.

The words then become rhyming, meaningless sounds. The frantic repetition gains the shape of a smooth calling, a recitation, a momentary song without fear.

Nothing says "i'm sorry" like...

... flowers, i guess. I mean, has to be, right?

And the Oscar goes to...

Hope.

The Footballer Who Shagged Me

Last night, Cristiano Ronaldo was reportedly hit by a "laser".

My God, man! Do they want tea?

I was going through the blogs of a few friends of mine as I made my usual stop at João Maurício's good'n old History Spot.

(in all honesty, it used to be "usual". now that blog seems to have gone into hibernation.)

In his last installment of tales of the heroes of the skies in both World Wars, Maurício tells us the story of Hasso von Wedel, a German aviator and officer.

(for those who cannot follow the grace with which the author masters the Portuguese language, I will translate to the best of my scarce abilities the riviting tale of Oberstleutnant von Wedel in England.)

In fact, as the famous battle for the control over the skies of Britain was reaching its peak, von Wedel was shot down and, as he tried and emergency landing, he incidentelly destroy a house, unawaringly killing a woman and her two children in the crash that followed.
Although he was himself unharmed, he felt so distressed by the demise of those innocent people that he readily turned himself over to the local police who, in grand British style, offered him tea.

His feet dipped in water, still, Adam looks on. Memories of a land, of a garden, fade in between two shades of blue.
He stands there, patience his first long lesson.

A rumour of a whisper, curly, calling, becomes unwavering. Adam, adam, adam...
As a tear falls in the wet sand, he lets himself, feeling his first short lesson.

It is not so much the rumour of a whisper as it is the shaddow of a dream. It not so much the beginning as it is the end.

Ich bin ein Tripeiro

My wet dream for tonight's game:

Schröder 04 - null
FC Porto - vier

Viva o Porto!
Fuck Gazprom.

Poison

There is something tragically human in poisoning oneself. There's something quite tragically human in tragedy too.