Eccentric Pretentious Intellectuals

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For posting the famous photograph (taken in 1952!) by the American photographer Art Shay of the French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir naked,

Brazilian photographer Fernando Rabelo had his page suspended by Facebook for three days. This extremely bizarre attitude made the news all over the Brazilian press. The outstanding journalist Ancelmo Góis wrote about it in his column in O Globo (one of the two most important newspapers in Brazil), and his brilliant comment, accompanied by the celebrated photograph, was reproduced as a post on Facebook. Soon after being published, it was shared by quite a few people, including myself.

Less than an hour after I published it, the post was withdrawn by the site from all the pages where it had been reproduced. There isn't much to say. In cases like this, words become oddly inadequate.

Images become more eloquent.

Believing in the Greatest Value of Human as a way to God:

http://ludstvo.org.ua/doctrine_en.…

What do you think about this new religion?

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My last post in 2010. Last night I was randomly going over past entries in my own journal through that new tool that enables you to find very easily everything you've written about, or simply mentioning a certain topic. That's how I spent the best part of what should have been a much needed night of healthy sleep. Awful! But then, that's how I found out something really peculiar. While writing in entries with big intervals among them about something that happened to me in the past, I couldn't disagree more about how old I was when it happened. Like my first trip to America. Sometimes I say I was twenty when it happened, sometimes I say I was twenty-one. Sometimes I go as far as shaving two years off my age at the time of a certain episode. Sometimes I say I was older than I really was.

My first impulse was to do edit the stuff correcting all the wrong ages. Then I decided to leave it as is. I will never understand why, but I find inconsistencies in journals and other autobiographical writings absolutely fascinating. In some sort of a crazy way, they seem to confirm that life is inconsistent to the point of making it impossible for anyone to use the written word to entrap time. What you're trying to catch ends up being slippery and much too elusive for your feeble attempt to succeed. Music stands better chances. The written word is forever bound to failure, and that's the beauty of it. Inconsistencies in journals, letters, memoirs, and other reminiscences are as beautiful as the vagueness of dreams. They should be preserved, not edited. Nobody edits his own dreams.

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Christmas again. So fast! This way I'm going to get up one day just like Tom Hanks in Big, go to the bathroom, watch myself in the mirror just the way he did in the movie, and find out that I have become the Highlander. Centuries have gone by and I'm still around. I don't know that I like the idea. But then, who does?
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As my family's celebration approaches, I think of the same occasion in the past. Considering that I'm fast becoming the Highlander, that's one hell of a lot of thinking we're talking about. So many people I loved have now turned into ghosts. Benign, full of warmth and light, but ghosts all the same. I can see them, but I can't touch them. In a way, I envy them. They can read Mário Benedetti's latest poems, listen to Lennon singing a ballad, or go to places like the movie theaters I loved so much, but where I cannot go anymore, because they were demolished along with the old houses in the same block where my childhood friends used to live, perhaps to see Fellini's latest outing, with Giulitta and Marcello once again as the leads. Then I think of the children who will come tomorrow, and about how odd it's going to be to see them with their children. How's that? Surely they must have been to the same amusement park where Tom Hanks said "I want to be big" to that strange fortune telling machine.

In the end I think of myself at nineteen, and about how tremendously impressed I was with the voice in off reading a quote from the novel on which the film was based, right at the beginning of The Go Between. I had waited impatiently for the film's release in Brazil and wanted to see it in all haste because Julie Christie was in it. Some four years earlier I had seen Far from the Madding Crowd and fallen in love with her. I've been in love with her ever since. That explains why I know everything about her. I know for example that the beautiful girl with the irresistible smile will be turning seventy very soon. I think of that voice in off (Michael Redgrave's) and about how much that quote impressed me even then: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."

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I wonder if the year-end has anything to do with it, or if it could be having just moveded out of the apartment where I lived for seven years (which was my mother's house before that, for eight years), being able to occupy the apartment I've bought in another part of town only at the end of the month, and everything I own being piled up in cardboard boxes. Whatever the reason, I seem to have embarked on a trip in time the same way people go spend their holidays in Europe. I'm all the time running into something that makes my mind flow to the distant past. I don't know if it's good or bad or what, but it's funny! Music, for example. The Beatles, for example.

Once again I had an appointment (the last one) with the root canal specialist my dentist had recommended, to see about a tooth that had been misbehaving very badly. He didn't seem to find it funny when he told me that I have very strong teeth and I replied, "Well, maybe that means I won't see you again, or at any rate, not so soon." That's how I learned that making wisecracks under the effects of anaesthesia is not a good idea. ( Read more...Collapse )

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I remember that day. I remember how incredibly young I was. How can you ever be that young? We all are, at one point, I know. But once the sensation of being so light inside flies away from you, whenever a glimpse of it crosses your mind you think you've just had a brief episode of hallucination. Better watch what you've been eating. Surely such an exhilarating state doesn't have to do with reality.

I was at my aunt's. She had a garden. It was very beautiful and required a lot of care. There was this girl who, some years before, had been her dresser and played a bit part in it when my aunt produced and played the title role in a revival of Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife (called Constantina in Brazil), which became the biggest hit of her entire career. No other play she ever did ran for so long, first in Rio, then in São Paulo, and finally on tour to several cities. Nothing she ever did brought in so much money, or made theatergoers love her so much. The play succeeded Marcel Archard's Tiro e Queda (A Shot in the Dark) in the same theater. I had made my professional debut as an actor in Tiro e Queda. The icon picture being used here is from the program. Whenever I look at it I feel like talking to this young person who looks so outrageously hopeful to ask him, "What do you see in front of you that makes you look ahead so intently?"

As the show approached the end, my aunt and three other members of the cast, along with a number of other actors, were already rehearsing Constantina, in which there was no part for me because all the male roles in it were middle-aged and I looked like a school boy. So I took the money I had got for Tiro e Queda, plus the unbelievably generous "nice trip" present my aunt gave me, meaning the full amount becoming the double, and left for New York on my first visit to America. ( Read more...Collapse )

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I guess most people don't realize something really funny having to do with actors. Please follow me: if someone under, say, thirty-five or thereabouts, watches a film with the young Katharine Kepburn, Spencer Tracy, Greta Garbo, the young Laurence Olivier, Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Margaret Sullavan, the young James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, John Barrymore, Carole Lombard, Walter Huston, Luise Rainer, or the extraordinary British actor Robert Donat (who beat Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind and got away with the 1939 best actor Oscar for Goodbye Mr. Chips), in most cases their overall reaction, never mind how clever they may be, will probably be the same: "Gosh, what bad actors! Wasn't there anyone around, like the director guy, or the producer, or somebody else to tell these people that they were overacting so terribly? How could they expect audiences to believe in the characters they were playing if what you see on the screen is so far from reality?"

It took me some time to come up with the fifteen names I included in the previous paragraph. I did my best to make it a list of what I think were the most gifted actors in American films from the first decade of talking pictures. Which means one hell of a long time ago. If you watch the incredibly young Kate Hepburn interacting with John Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement, you will be watching two actors doing their work seventy-eight years ago! Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth will be two of the most brilliant comedians of all time doing their stuff seventy-three years ago!. And so on and so forth, meaning that an awful lot of water has gone under the bridge, the funny thing being that lots of people would probably say that acting has come a long way. It used to be so bad and now it's good. Now you watch actors on the screen and they look and sound like people you know and can meet anytime. As for those old-timers, holy smoke, they looked and sounded phony as hell. ( Read more...Collapse )

Hi you all! I'm Tim, I’m traveller. Sometimes I travel on my country and create short movies.
I want to show you some amazing video.



( Ufa is...Collapse )

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If you liked this post, please register under this reference http://vk.com/reg1084994 , this will help me to win a laptop.

Q: Who are you?

A: A guy in his fifties with an incurable neurological disease who entirely depends on a number of drugs, including two psychotropics that must have their adequacy and dosage constantly checked/adjusted by a neurologist or else there may be a sudden upheaval in the whole nervous system leading to dreadful consequences, and who on top of being far from well-off has a really hard time putting up the money for doctors’ bills and the atrociously expensive drugs.

Q: Any chances that you may be overdoing it, like presenting a worse picture of your own reality than what the facts point to?( Read more...Collapse )