Division Street America

The title is from a book by Studs Terkel (1912-2008), a best-selling American author and journalist who lived in Chicago. It's a book of interviews published in 1967, in the midst of one of the hottest periods of XX century cultural transformation in the US; the civil-rights movement is one good example of that transformation, to mention just one major thing.

It's a book about Chicago, and it's part of my evolving love affair with this town. It's a great selection of testimonies, by people from all walks of life, and a fascinating way to get inside America, and inside a city that shaped so much of what we know about the US as a whole; free-market capitalism, sky-scrappers, post-Bauhaus functionalist architecture (by the German-born Mies van der Rohe), the industrialisation of meat production and its consequences on civilisation as we know it, racial zoning laws and Black ghettos, labour and anarchist movements, the birth of urban sociology, the invention of futures and derivatives in agriculture, gangsters (remember Al Capone?), the melting pot, the Blues, anti-Vietnam war protests, a new concept of community work with Jane Addams and Hull House. NYC, move over!

Part XXI, called The Inheritors, a series of interviews with young people, opens with the following lines by Lucky Miller, aged 19, "I love life. I only wish some of it would come my way". Ah, Lucky you, to make poetry so easily!

butterflies in a powerpoint

And what if butterflies came flying into your powerpoint? Then what? Would you leave the office with the softness of flowers in your eyes? Would you cross the street and see a river? Would you caress the walls? Would you sleep inside a tree? Would you?

Just imagine, you are doing a powerpoint presentation. The world is grey. And suddenly butterflies burst into your powerpoint presentation. Then what? Would you carry on oblivious? Would you flutter your eyelids? Would you sing a love song to your boss? Would you kiss the geranium in its pot? Would you make a bed of twigs? Would you become like light? Would you fly? Would you hold my hand? Would you?

Imagine a butterfly, then two, then three, then four, then five, then six, then seven, then many, invading the screen, one after the other, running, flying. Then what? Would you scream? Would you go outside and lay on the grass? Would you eat a sandwich? Would it be Times Square in New York? Would you become a neon light? Would you sigh? Then what? Then what? I know, I know. What good is there in telling? No good, no good at all. Just butterflies, butterflies, butterflies inside your eyes, into your life, in your powerpoint presentation. Everybody mesmerized. And alive. Alive. Alive. Like in a dream.

Today, I watched with Jarl a short film called Futures & Derivatives by Arthur Halpern of the USA. It lasted 18 minutes. And I agree with Caetano Veloso when he sings that Americans bring lots of happiness to this world. Just 18 minutes. Oh, wow!

Uma Casa Portuguesa

Uma Casa Portuguesa (A Portuguese House), is an iconic Portuguese song, made famous - I mean stratospherically famous - by Amália Rodrigues, an icon herself of flesh and blood, and miraculous powers some would say...

But I read in one of my recent book explorations - Angola, Terra Prometida (Angola, Promised Land) - that the song was first created in former Lourenço Marques, now Mozambique's capital Maputo, and sung there in 1951 by Sara Chaves at the age of 19 (an Angolan-born, white Portuguese singer). This was two years before Amália would make it known.

This so-very-Portuguese song of all times, was first heard in a contest for young singers in a small theatre house in the neighbourhood of Lhanguéne. This is Portugal the way I like it. Creole. 'Nha Terra.

Brussels was beautiful tonight

I was walking home tonight after an office New Year reception at the house of my Director General. Entertaining to say the least. All the ambitious people, me included, trying to mingle, get information, be on top of the game. We played a lottery, with all the gifts he gets from foreign visitors and which he doesn't wish to keep. I wonder if they ever heard about this... Some people were lucky. I came away with a book about Raphael's Villa Madamma (chosen from an ad hoc selection; first come first served), which Jarl says costs 60 euros on the Internet. Anyway, this doesn't really deserve a post.

My post is about discovering the beauty of Brussels. It took me 13 years to find it. Yeah, I'm slow in love. I was by the Royal National Library. There's a garden there, with two rows of trees, a fountain, several sculptures, an equestrian statue. It was all covered in snow and there were supertroopers in rainbow colours shining from the roof of the library onto the bushes below. And then, to the side, there was a square of blue transparent glass coming out of the earth. It's the entrance to the new Brussels Conference Centre. It looked precious. Like a cube of ice.

One of the buildings in the garden had been transformed into a Chinese pavilion. Europalia is about China this year, it seems. A bit odd, but there it was, with thousands of yellow and red paper lanterns, like a dream in the night. There was absolutely nobody around. Just me and my footsteps. In the distance I could see the steeple of the Hôtel de Ville, illuminated from within and the Flemish brick houses around it. It smelled of calm and silence. Of order too.

Brussels looked beautiful for the very first time. It spoke to me for the very first time. I could recognise in it a little of my home. I was touched. Goodness, it took me 13 years to get here, to find its beauty. To find it beautiful. For it to speak to me. For me to understand it. Can you imagine? A momentous moment. It really deserves an alliteration.

My footsteps sounded like felt on the pavement. The snow has the power to erase all ugliness. The cold creates a feeling of awe. The empty garden was suspended in light, and glass, and night.

1st thought on new year's first day

My first conscious thought this morning just out of bed was "ser é uma batalha para a vida inteira", "being is a battle for one's entire life". It came to me while walking from the bedroom to the bathroom. 2010 has started under the aegis of being. It was, is and will be my life's enduring battle. Ser.

Erasure - the band

Ooh, Sometimes,
the truth is harder
than the pain inside,
yeaah,
Ooh, Sometimes,
it's the broken heart
that decides.

The first time I heard this song, and saw the video, I was 16 or around that age (the band released the single in the UK in 1986). I remember Andy Bell, the singer, with his crisp blue-jeans and immaculate white shirt, and gorgeous hair, and toned body, dancing on a building's rooftop. I wanted to dance like him.

At the time, it was not just the rhythm but the lyrics too, that enthralled me. There was something queer about them, something that appealed to me, deep down, as if I could also speak their language, or they could speak mine.

Been thinking about you
I just couldn't wait to see
fling my arms around you
as we fall in ecstasy.

This wasn't the way male singers talked about their girls in pop songs. This was about a boy, I felt (I didn't have enough words at the time to make it a thought, just a feeling).

Erasure, the band, was part of my gayducation. And that's my own word, by the way.

Erasure - the book

I said some time ago that I would write a post about this book. I said I was hooked. It's difficult to convey now all the emotions the book made me go through at the time of my reading. It suffices to say that it was a fine surprise of a book, which I bought in a tiny English-speaking bookshop in Brussels, Nicola's Bookshop; sadly gone. I guess it was another victim of the economic downturn. But while it lasted, it was one of the best places to find unexpected books, by unexpected authors. The owner made her own selection, as if she was offering her library back home to the public to discover, and that's what was so special about the place.

Now, back to Erasure, the book. It dealt with race issues in the US, and played with our prejudices, misconceptions and expectations. It was amusing and at times difficult to understand. The main character, a writer and a professor of literature, makes a speech in one of the chapters of which I almost didn't understand a word. But somehow it really didn't matter, I just went with the flow.

There's a book inside a book. In order to get published as a "black writer" - a category everybody seems to be interested in pinning him down into - the main character writes a "black book", i.e. what it's "really" like to be black in America. What's disturbing about it is how entertaining his stereotypical description of ghetto life is. I actually enjoyed it, and it was sometimes easy to forget that although it sounded real, it wasn't real, but a construct, a codified literary construct of what "black life" in America is supposed to be.

Anyway, the real story, with real people, in real time, the one that takes place in Washington D.C., for instance, is what kept me turning the pages, the one I wished would keep on going for a little while longer when the book finally ended, because I liked the characters and got to enjoy their company. But yes, I know that they too were literary constructs.

By the way, the author's name is Percival Everett. Beautiful. And as someone in the novel might have asked, the character's literary agent for instance, "is that supposed to be a real black person's name?". Ah, reality...