Espantos #663

Jornadas

Sem título #323

Yes, reach and persevere!

Caprichos #419

Muito confortável que estava este gatinho!

Caprichos #418

Queijo da serra

e favo de mel...

... tão bom!

Verão #24

Verão na montanha

com spa!

Coisas que não mudam #629

Adeus Porto Santo

Verão #23

Fim de dia de verão

Verão #22

Modo verão...

... com as Desertas ao longe!

Sem título #322

Reach?

Caprichos #417

Entradas que são verdadeiras refeições

Coisas que não mudam #628

Chegada ao Porto Santo

Coisas bonitas #140

Os deliciosos doces algarvios fazem belas montras!

Palavras lidas #556

Diagnosis
by Sharon Olds

By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

Ditto #555

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property, that they may more perfectly respect it.

--G.K. Chesterton

Caprichos #416

Almoços de verão em Lisboa

Coisas que não mudam #627

Lisboa no verão

Caprichos #415

Miniaturas de pastelaria

Coisas bonitas #139

Pores-do-sol a bordo

Sem título #321

Let it begin...

Coisas bonitas #138

Nascer do sol

Parece que estou a ouvir #409

Omara Portuondo, de 92 anos, cancelou dois dos três concertos que daria em Portugal na sua tour de despedida, nos coliseus do Porto e Lisboa a 8 e 14 de Julho, respectivamente. O único concerto não cancelado foi em Castelo Branco dia 1 de Julho... uma oportunidade!

__________

Veinte Años
Omara Portuondo

¿Qué te importa que te ame?
Si tú no me quieres ya
El amor que ya ha pasado
No se debe recordar

Fui la ilusión de tu vida
Un día lejano ya
Hoy represento al pasado
No me puedo conformar
Hoy represento al pasado
No me puedo conformar

Si las cosas que uno quiere
Se pudieran alcanzar
Tú me quisieras lo mismo
Que 20 años atrás

Con qué tristeza miramos
Un amor que se nos va
Es un pedazo del alma
Que se arranca sin piedad
Es un pedazo del alma
Que se arranca sin piedad

Si las cosas que uno quiere
Se pudieran alcanzar
Tú me quisieras lo mismo
Que 20 años atrás

Con qué tristeza miramos
Un amor que se nos va
Es un pedazo del alma
Que se arranca sin piedad
Es un pedazo del alma
Que se arranca sin piedad

Caprichos #414

Bruce Springsteen has been giving concerts since February, but the London shows on the 6th and 8th of July finally made it to The Economist. Below is the unedited article but the bolds are the passages I find more poignant).

________________

Bruce Springsteen turns back the clock—and stops it

On his epic tour, the Boss pulls off one of music’s best tricks: to meddle with time

image: epa

Jul 11th 2023

Just a “one, two, three, four” and he was off, barely pausing for breath and gathering energy over the three electric hours of his show. On stage in Hyde Park in London on July 6th, Bruce Springsteen tossed guitars to roadies, traded licks with members of his E Street Band, ripped open his shirt and bestowed plectrums and selfies on ecstatic fans. Or he stood still, his Fender dangling at his back, a pose that is a sort of benign American cousin to a gunslinger’s silhouette.

Mr Springsteen is 73. Yet halfway through a ten-month tour of Europe and North America, he is still performing as if his life depended on it—just as it did when, as a teenage frontman in the late 1960s, he eked out a living in the bars of the New Jersey shore. The fight against time, and its remorselessness, are among the main themes of his songs. The ability of music to twist and resist time may be their deepest meaning.

His first number on this tour is “No Surrender”. “I’m alive!” he chants in the refrain of the second, “Ghosts”. Next comes “Prove It All Night” (he does). His show is part knee-slide in the face of old age, part séance for lost friends—both parts rocking to the drumbeat of mortality. Recent lyrics are crowded with the shades of dead bandmates: “You count the names of the missing as you count off time,” Mr Springsteen sings in “Last Man Standing”. Images of departed musicians loom on the screens behind him.

The genius of many of these songs, though, is that they were born old. The friendship and ambitions commemorated in “Backstreets” have long since withered (“And after all this time”, laments the most poignant line, “to find we’re just like all the rest”). In the story told in “Bobby Jean” it is too late even to say goodbye. In “The River”, which these days Mr Springsteen concludes in an eerie falsetto, the high-school infatuation, shotgun marriage and thwarted dreams are all ancient history.

The wellspring of poetry, thought William Wordsworth, is “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. The same goes for lots of these songs: they are about the aftermath rather than the action, the memory of youth, harrowing or consoling, rather than the thing itself. This soulful past tense helps explain the appeal of Mr Springsteen’s hymns to small-town America, threnodies for midwestern deindustrialisation and ballads of blue-collar longing to his fans in London or Barcelona. They may never have navigated the swamps of Jersey, driven 800 miles to Darlington County or worked at the rug mill across the railroad tracks. But they have all looked back with fondness or regret. They have all grown up.

It also helps explain why his hits, many of them written in the 1970s, endure as they do. Since their major key is eulogy, they never go out of date. The older the singer, the songs and his audience, the more moving they become.

These tunes pull off one of music’s most precious tricks: they meddle with time. More powerfully than any madeleine, music can open a portal to bygone gigs or evenings spent listening to cassettes or lps. “Tonight”, Mr Springsteen sings, “I’m ready to grow young again,” and the greying devotees in t-shirts from tours of yore feel the same way. More than that, music can set its own time, seeming to speed up the clock prestissimo or slow it down in a serenade—even, sometimes, seeming to stop it.

Mr Springsteen’s is an art of opposites, which, as he put it in a memoir of 2016, has “one foot in the light, one foot in the darkness”. Youth is an idyll and a prison, America an open road and a broken promise, hope a lie and all you have. Home is a town full of losers that you yearn to leave but never will entirely. Likewise, even as they mourn the passage of time, his songs seize a present moment and stretch it out, rapturously, as the best music somehow can.

“Born to Run” and “Thunder Road” are poised for eternity on the threshold of escape, vowing that, at least until the final chord, you can live with the sadness and find magic in the night. “Kitty’s Back” and “Mary’s Place” invite you to a party rather than a wake. The fearful authenticity that Mr Springsteen projects can be transfixing on its own. On their podcast “Renegades”, he told Barack Obama that all his work was inspired by his troubled father, and it still shows.

“Death is not the end,” he sings at the close, alone on stage with guitar and harmonica. On this tour he revives the past, eyeballs the certain future and—like a rock‘n‘roll Sisyphus bestriding a mountaintop—glories in the urgent instant between them.

Sem título #320

Ahhh the pouch...

Palavras lidas #555

Yesterday
by W. S. Merwin

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time

he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here

I say nothing
he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do

Ditto #554

The public needs poetry; I need poetry, to help celebrate and console.

--Linda Pasten

Sem título #319

Sleep fairy...

Coisas bonitas #137

Com recortes ou sem recortes...

mas sempre lindas!

Parece que estou a ouvir #408

Thousands are sailing

The Pogues

The island, it is silent now
But the ghosts still haunt the waves
And the torch lights up a famished man
Who fortune could not save

Did you work upon the railroad?
Did you rid the streets of crime?
Were your dollars from the White House?
Were they from the Five-and-Dime?

Did the old songs taunt or cheer you?
And did they still make you cry?
Did you count the months and years
Or did your teardrops quickly dry?

"Ah, no", says he, "it was not to be
On a coffin ship I came here
And I never even got so far
That they could change my name"

Thousands are sailing
Across the western ocean
To a land of opportunity
That some of them will never see
Fortune prevailing
Across the western ocean
Their bellies full
Their spirits free
They'll break the chains of poverty
And they'll dance


In Manhattan's desert twilight
In the death of afternoon
We stepped hand in hand on Broadway
Like the first man on the moon


And a blackbird broke the silence
As you whistled it so sweet
And in Brendan Behan's footsteps
I danced up and down the street

Then we said goodnight to Broadway
Giving it our best regards
Tipped our hats to Mister Cohen
Dear old Times Square's favourite bard

Then we raised a glass to JFK
And a dozen more besides
When I got back to my empty room
I suppose I must have cried

Thousands are sailing
Again across the ocean
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery
Postcards we're mailing
Of sky light skies and oceans
From rooms the daylight never sees
And lights don't glow on Christmas trees
And we danced to the music
And we danced

Thousands are sailing
Across the western ocean
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery
Where e'er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies
Still we dance to the music
And we dance

Pedaços de Oxford

It was a lovely day journey to Oxford

starting with a hike at Port Meadow, or the common that originated the tragedy of the commons;

Oxford Centre for Mission Studies;

Radcliffe Camera;

High Street shops;

ceiling at Christchurch entryway (the college was closed);

All Souls courtyard;

Carfax clock tower;

23km later, when we returned to the train station; the amount of bikes consumed my entire field of vision.