The return of the death penalty

I am not very conservative, I think. I always slate the Americans for shamelessly advocating that they are the 'land of the free', while they keep the death penalty. But sometimes my animal instinct prevails, and this is one of these times.

This story has been all over the news for a couple of days now and I still cannot believe my ears: a "father" who has sexually abused his daughter for decades, at some point locked her in a cellar, and kept her there for 24 years, raping her repeatedly and fathered 7 (SEVEN!!!) children from her. Ah, one of them died and then he burned it in the oven. HE BURNED HIS DEAD BABY IN THE OVEN. And all this while his "legal" family was living upstairs. I mean, how sick, unbelievable, profoundly awful is this?

It is in cases like this, that I think, us Europeans might actually benefit from the re-introduction of the death penalty.
But my reader do not be deceived. I don't want the death penalty for that misuse of the term "father". He does not need it. All he needs is to be locked into the same cellar and stay there for the end of his days. Maybe that and some "ghost" images of his children playing in the background for additional effect.

The death penalty should be reserved for his wife. His wife who says was "unaware". I mean, is there any possibility that this is true? Don't you know what kind of monster you got married to? He abuses your daughter from the age of 11 until 18, in your own house, and you are "unaware"? He then pretends that she ran away and locks her up in the cellar downstairs and you are "unaware"? She forbids you to go to the cellar and you obey, you don't even think that something is not right here? He tells you that babies arrive in your doorstep and you suspect nothing? Isn't this criminal negligence?

I think the worst type of criminals, the serial killers, the sadistic monsters, usually lead fairly lonely lives. This is because if someone was close to them, they would know, they would figure it out, what kind of monsters they are. This woman, wants us to believe that she lived with a monster for a lifetime and never, EVER understood or suspected anything? I don't think so...
I would reserve the death penalty for her.

My religious studies teacher at school had an obsession with the parable of the good samaritan. Everyone knows the story: poor guy is attacked by a thug and left to die. First passer-by comes by and does nothing. Second passer-by comes by and does nothing. Then the good samaritan comes by and helps the guy, all is good. Our teacher used to ask us "who does bad in this story?" Most of the students would say that the thug who mugged the poor guy is the one that does bad. Then our teacher would say no, the passer-by's who DID NOT DO GOOD also did bad. Absence of good equals bad. This woman, this "mother" who claims that she didn't know anything, this woman who did nothing also did bad. Maybe even a greater bad than the actual monster of this story.

Happy Easter

No, I'm not forgetful, I am just Greek. And today is Greek Easter.
Happy easter then.

I've lived outside Greece for 7 years now, going to 8. It's the first time I didn't celebrate Easter. When I lived in C, I went to church, there was an orthodox church there, and then I always managed to scrap something together, something that seemed remotely festive and Greek.

Today I didn't do anything special. The sun was glorious, I stayed home and read and listened to nice music. Then my friends came with their baby, I had cooked lamb, my only Greek thing for the day.

It was really nice.
Was it Easter though? Was it Greek? No. But who cares? Its was nice.

Overload (a.k.a. death by posting)

Random (after)thoughts of the day:

(a) It seems that the Lady V-crowd is inspired on Fridays. We all post together.

(b) Remember this line from interview with a vampire (uttered by Kirsten Dunst's character while watching the vampire gran guignol theatre in Paris?
'Vampires, who pretend to be humans, who pretend to be vampires. How avant garde!'

Is this an awesome line or what?

(c) I just had crumpets. Hallo Kitty was giving me crumpets, a century ago when I was going to her pink house for coffee. I love sweet memories, packed with jam or honey, like crumpets.

(d) Duffy is amazing. Her album is amazing. Her lyrics are amazing. And Bernard Butler (from Suede's first line-up) is producing. Un-fucking-believable album. We're talking about serious soul.

That's all from me. Now go read Youkali's post, which is much cooler :)

Abril

Without wanting to crowd on the beautiful post that Lady V wrote today, I have to proclaim my joy and happiness to be celebrating 34 years after the revolution that ended dictatorship and a bloody colonial war in my country. Portugal does not have many reasons to be a happy country. We have everything to go wrong: we're poor, we're unemployed, we drop out of school, we are afflicted by child labour, we survive on EU money, we have no productivity, we have no money, we owe all our houses and holidays to the bank, we have low education standards, we have mediocre politicians that can hardly spell, we have fires every summer, we are melancholic, people think we're Spanish, we are said to be lazy. I could go on, but I won't. Because it can still be nice to live here. We have a glorious sun. Lisbon is a splendour. We have smart people that are being driven to make a living in foreign countries but who could come back given the right incentives. And although the Portuguese are still obsessed with authority and how to be respectful towards authority (our language is all about that: everybody is a doctor and a mister and Your Excelency in Portugal), got damn it, we made a great revolution on 25th April 1974 without shedding a drop of blood. We did something for ourselves apart from the Discoveries and I am hoping we can do it again.

Now please go read Lady V's post which is much more interesting, specially to someone who is not Portuguese.

Ambiguous love

The one good thing that came out of me watching the embarrassingly bad movie adaptation of 'love in the time of cholera' is that it reminded me of the great book, and Marquez's ideas on love.

The book tells of such an unconventional love story: the two main characters fall in love when they are very young, exchange passionate letters and agree to marry each other. The girl's father predictably disagrees, because he wants a better luck for his daughter, and takes her away, hides in the heart of the Amazon for a year, hoping that the love of the two lovers will go away. They keep in touch with letters and when she comes back, he is waiting. In a brief encounter, the first time they see each other in a year, she tells him that she realized she is not in love with him any more. He swears eternal love, she marries another. He spends his whole life in numerous (622?) insignificant affairs, she stays happily married to her doctor husband. He waits. Her husband dies, and so she asks her to marry him. She sends him out of the house. He perseveres. He perseveres and flirts with her, sending her letters again, like 50 years ago when their love begun. He manages to win her over but the conventions of their lives, their age, her children, comes to haunt them again, like her father did 50 years ago. Their only choice is to live away from everyone. In a river-ship, raising the flag of cholera, forever cruising up and down the river. Forever the cursed lovers or maybe blessed with being eternally together, alone?

All this made me think about second chances in life and love. It made me think (once again) that things are not black and white: you might love someone and then not love them anymore and then (oh, the blasphemy) love them again. Who cares? Who says that this not supposed to happen, who says that it's wrong? If there is one thing life ever teaches us, I think, is that there is no good reason of getting stuck to what people think is right and wrong. This might sound a bit immoral, but I don't mean it like that. I just mean the very (very) cliché thought that morality is a social construct, and a ridiculous one indeed. It only restrains feelings, and leads to miserable lives. Marquez tells us that love, in all its glory, cannot survive inside this ridiculous society, it can only survive in a lonely riverboat, with a flag of cholera proudly raised.

In Bruges? Yes...

True artist's cinema? Irish play-right Martin McDonagh (who wrote cult play 'pillow-man' and got an oscar for his short movie, Six Shooter) directed his first full-length feature film and I loved it.

Tragicomedies can either be extremely good or extremely bad. The issue with them is that it can either work as one genre complimenting the other or one canceling the other. "No man's land", the Bosnian movie that deprived "Amelie" of her oscar, was a perfect example of a tragicomedy, that starts like a comedy, makes you laugh and feel that this will be a light-hearted war parody and then when tragedy strikes, you feel it much more deeply.

"In Bruges" is like that as well. The movie starts with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson goofing around essentially playing a modern version of Laurel and Hardy, complete with the facial expressions and all. They are supposed to be two hitmen sent to hide in Bruges after a deal went slightly wrong. Their boss, Harry, played in a cartoonish but surprisingly non-annoying manner by Ralph Fiennes, is supposed to call them to tell them what to do. They wait and nothing happens, and when Harry calls things are not as good or as simple as they seemed.

The second part of the movie is dark, deep and poignant. And when you're entangled in the story, the story that started so lightly and superficially you think 'how did I get into this mess? Why do I care about these guys that are essentially killers?' But you do and it hurts you, you care what happens to them.

I guess what I want to say is that sadness affects you the most right after you've been happy.
And that's that: that's my wisdom for the day.

Perfection

"Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs."
Richard Papin
from the "Secret History" by Donna Tartt

I will never, ever get over this book.
Listen to Donna Tartt read the prologue and part of the first chapter of her book here and feel the perfection. Listen to her at home, loud in the speakerphones and feel her eerie voice fill the space around you. Close your eyes and imagine that this is your dead grandmother reading you your favourite ghost story. And then pick up the book and read it again and again and again.

How I love going back to that book, how much comfort I get is unbelievable. I don't know why exactly though, I never did. Is it because its characters, I know them so well, make me feel like being in the company of friends? Why does a story of deception and immorality give me so much pleasure and comfort. I don't know, I think I never will.

On a second thought, maybe it is because this book satisfies, perfectly I must add, my morbid longing for the picturesque.

Blame it on my youth

When I was younger, I had one dream: to eat chinese out of a paper box, like in the movies. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't only because Chinese came to Greece late (for a while I also think it was kind of a status symbol: "-I've eaten Chinese-Wow!"). It was also because, in my naive mind, that was the definition of independence: a lonely, self-sufficient individual having take-away dinner home alone.

I am an adult now, I work and I earn my own money and I live alone. If I want I can eat take-away, I don't have to cook.

I went to the Thai place next to my house the other night and got myself a nice dinner in a box. And I went home and I tried to eat it out of the box, so I can finally-finally!- live my fantasy. I had my chop-sticks and all, sitting in front of my TV and I tried. But it was too hot, so I had to put it on a plate. But then suddenly it hit me, this is not nice-looking and independent, this is plain sad! I am by myself, at home, eating some unidentifiable oriental dinner that looks like a lump of things. My fantasy crumbled, the movies had lied to me! And then I remembered Holden Caulfield, my beloved Holden from 'catcher in the rye', who said in one of his amazing lines 'I hate the movies like poison, but I get a bang imitating them.'

I have to read that book again...

April is the cruellest month

I’m finally understanding the first line of The Waste Land. I never used to think that April was cruel. It was a month of renovation, of a new life, of prolonged glimpses of sun.
But now I get it: April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire.
Sometimes, the renovation of life is an awful spectacle to watch. Especially when you feel you’re being fed on memories that cannot bring anything new. People and nature around you are preparing for something better to come, but all you can do is live off memories and you feel incapable of contributing to the emergence of life. And it does become cruel.
‘I wonder if a memory is something you have or something you lost’ – I’ve heard this line in a Woody Allen movie called Another Woman and I’ve been thinking about it. I prefer to think that a memory is something you lost. At least you know you can't get back the things you lose and you feel your only chance is to try to overcome the winter (the winter that kept you warm and was dark and made you forget – it covered earth in forgetful snow) and rejoice when April comes. But you do feel you’re trying to breed lilacs out of the dead, that the new life you’re trying to celebrate is more of a death than an actual life. It is indeed fucked up. I’m sure I’m not making sense. Like all of us, I grow old.
All this to say that I finally get the first line of The Waste Land.

Iconic lyrics

When I was young, I knew lyrics of my favourite songs by heart. I bought CDs and then spent days and days with the booklet in hand, listening to the songs and figuring out, deciphering, memorizing and analyzing their lyrics. Suede (my first serious obsessive musical love), the Cure, Radiohead were all so important to me.

Now it's different: I listen to songs but I don't pay an attention to the lyrics as I used to. Fewer and fewer songs make me want to write something about them (with the notable exception of Antony and the Johnson's amazing album, Fistful of love being the brightest jewel on its crown. But to analyze this song, one needs a post by itself, so until another time...).

This morning I was going to work with my ipod, listening to music and two songs' lyrics hit me on the head.

"Let's make love and listen death from above'
Amazing line. It could also work as a pick-up line methinks. But what does the poet mean? Does she mean: let's make love here and listen to death who is above us (all)? Or does she mean: let's make love here and listen to death from above, us being above of death? Isn't ambiguity the best?

"I'm gonna get you out of your cave. I'm gonna get you out of your cage, man, and set you free."
(Hallo Kitty's favourite song for 2007 everyone.) Amazing again. The duality of human nature, rational man vs. primitive animal, expressed by the rhyme of cave with cage. Are all our cages caves and vice versa?


Back to the future, then, back to adolescence and analyzing lyrics...
Searching for our (my) lost inspiration...

Pills

Some people say they don't like pills, but I don't share this opinion. I love pills. The more the merrier. Specially the ones that make you doze off and forget who you are. Or the ones that make you unable to pay attention to what people tell you because everything around you just floats and you can't be bothered.

A Portuguese poet wrote about the pain of thinking once. This is the worst pain of them all. Pills can make you forget your thoughts and that can be a bliss. Oscar Wilde wrote that mankind's worst crimes happened in the brain, which goes to show how dangerous your brain can be if you let it run free.

The pain of thinking is a bitch. I wish I knew how to turn it off and numb down for a while. Alternatively, I could also get into drugs.

Difference/tolerance

Unless you live in another planet, you might know that there is a pregnant man these days. He is from Oregon, and he was born as a woman. Some years ago he did a sex change operation but kept his reproductive organs "in case one day a miracle would happen and he could have a baby". He got married to a woman, who is unable to carry a baby and when they decided to have a baby of their own, and since he was able to, they decided that he would be the one carrying the child. Yesterday he gave an interview to Oprah that can be seen here.

I saw this interview just now and I am so amazed with this story. Two things made me more of an impression: firstly some of this guy's words, he said "I feel that the desire to reproduce is not a male or a female desire, it is a human desire. Wanting to carry my own baby, did not make me feel more 'female'." I find this quote very impressive, because it illustrates so clearly, the arbitrariness of categorization. People are people, they are all born the same, little lumps of life and depending on the hormones they have, they turn out as women or men. When they are born, enter society with its social stereotypes and da dah, here you go. The guy of this story was not like that however. Calliope/Cal in Middlesex is not like that, some people are not like that. Is that so bad, so difficult to accept (even if you cannot understand)?

The second thing that made an impression on me was the doctors' response. Apparently this guy and his wife, were turned down 5 times by various doctors who claimed that either they or their staff feel somehow uncomfortable with this situation. Because the baby will not be normal, they said. Their doctor who finally agreed to take them, is this plain American lady who, when asked about how she felt about the 'normalcy' of this pregnancy, she responded 'the baby is normal, therefore I treat this as a normal pregnancy'.

I think all this is very interesting. Difference, for me, is the most treasured ideal of our times. That's why I love people who obsess with it, like Tim Burton. A boy with scissor hands, a corpse bride, an avenging barber, a pregnant man. It's all the same. We're all different, but we all feel the same.

Inspiration

I feel guilty for not having posted anything for a while. (Guilt; a topic I shall discuss another time.) The problem is that I feel utterly uninspired: I came back to work and I feel overwhelmed, I am supposed to multitask to death and I find it hard, still. I have no time to think, I have no time to reflect on things I see or read. I read the Persepolis "graphic novels" and I liked them a lot (the first more than the second) but I have nothing inspired to write. And then I remembered that I never write about the things I loved the most. Oldboy, Lady vengeance? I never wrote about them! The edge of heaven, the lives of others (Germany's pride)? I never wrote about them either. Maybe the things we like the most, we cannot analyze.

And maybe just now, I am starting to sound like Carrie Bradshaw's blogger twin.