Scattered

I cannot think in the summer, it's official. Every day I say I want to write something, every day I force myself to think of something good to write about, an idea, a thought but then it scatters away. I think it is perhaps the heat that makes it dissolve into nothingness. Or my tiredness. I read interesting things (Alias Grace, The Village of widows-I will write something about them one day), I meet nice people, I see plays (tomorrow Medea) but nothing stays. Blogging is not a summer sport, for sure. Winter is excellent for staying in, on a comfy sofa and writing away. In the summer my mind works only partially and my willingness to write evaporates just like the sweat on my skin. The most intellectual thing I can write about is my tan, it seems... Thank you to Youkali who keeps the blog alive on August then...

He was a complicated man...

...no one understood him but his woman.

So cool (on a par with the two others from previous post). RIP.

Life and I, we don't get along

I don't know about other people, but when I bend over to put on my shoes in the morning, I think, Christ-oh-mighty, now what? I'm screwed by life, we don't get along. I have to take little bites out of it, not the whole thing. It's like swallowing bvckets of shit. I am never surprised that the madhouses and jails are full and that the streets are full.

Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, illustrated by Robert Crumb

These two men were the coolest.

Nothing else to add. I'm never surprised either.

Ugly is the new beautiful

What a strange, yet beautiful, similarity... I didn't come up with this myself, I read it on Wikipedia. Ledger as Joker does have something of Francis Bacon.

It is already a cliché to say that the new Joker is perhaps the best thing of the Dark Night. I agree. I also agree that Bale is great as Batman (and as everything else; as far as I'm concerned, he's a great actor). But perhaps what the new Joker brings, which the brilliant performance of Ledger shows so well, is some kind of locus horrendus which was absent in previous movies, even from Batman Begins. And the aesthetics that follow it have to necessarily agree, hence the greasy, evil, Bacon-like Joker, a great dirty counter-part to the clean, straight black of Batman.

I loved Tim Burton's Batman because of the impressive visuals, which is something that the Dark Night also has mainly because of the Joker, I think.

Sometimes, and excuse the massive platitude, ugly is indeed so beautiful.

Tough call

Sometimes I like to wander the streets of the small town where I live with no specific purpose (and it can be fascinating to watch how people live the same life every day), same way as I like to write with no guiding idea.

I wanted to write about Batman and cakes because I like both of these entities, although the latter stimulate me more than the former (I think... given the choice between the perfect cake and the perfect Bale, I'm not so sure, but anyway). I like Batman because (surprise,surprise) he has no particular superpower. He's a man who perfected himself. The latest Batman, which I saw a couple of days ago, is great because of Heath Ledger, because of Christian Bale taking his shirt off and ... aaah.... I guess that's it. However, if we think of books such as 'Becoming Batman', by a guy called E. Paul Zehr, who apparently is an American professor, and which explore the extent to which an ordinary man could actually develop the skills of the Batman, then you kind of wonder if the character is not a little bit more interesting than it seems. For some people, it definitely seems to be, like this Zehr professor. According to Zehr (or to an article I read about his book), the only thing that is not very realistic is that Batman can fight 10 or more men in the movies. In real life, we could only take on about 2 or 3. But if a man with the resources of Bruce Wayne actually existed and if he had the predisposition of training for seven years and if he were to fight only 2 or 3 men at a time, then there you go, the world would be blessed with a Batman.

Ah, and cakes, of course. Buying a perfectly rounded, creamy Berlim Ball when you're lying in the sun listening to the sea where you've just swam is a great memory from childhood that I try to reenact as much as I can.

Now I'm left wondering. Same way as Kundera, that wonderful philosophical writer who indeed is the guardian of the ultimate truth (or so his books would have us believe, since they are so appropriate for that kind of coffee-shop philosophy that not even Paulo Coelho would dare), wondered whether we have to choose between the lighteness and the weight, I need to choose between the Berlim Ball and the Bale. Which will it be, which will it be...

No poser

There is always a fear in me when I go see a live I’ve invested a lot in: I want to feel this magical moment, there’s always one in a live, or at least one, the moment where you feel that your money was worth it. It’s not about the money, surely, it’s just everybody’s fear that maybe –maybe– the artist you’ve gone to see is not really into this, that maybe he or she is bored and not good at lives. That maybe this is not going to be an experience as you want it, but a fake.

With Björk there was no such fear. I saw her last night, in the Greek summer heat (nb last post) in a closed stadium, half-empty due to impending holiday plans of my compatriots. I’ve been wanting to see her for a long time, I think she is the definitive artist of the last 15 years. She is a classic, deeply idiosyncratic songwriter that I think is a symbol for female artists of our era. She is modern, current, but miraculously she is not part of any trend. Even when she works with the most contemporary of artists (like Antony and Timbaland in her last album) she is still herself, her alien, waif-like self.

But the most important thing about her is that she is no poser. She wears ridiculous clothes, dances around the stage like a little goat, moves her hands around like a witch, looks at her crowd with funny faces, but nobody laughs. Everybody looks at her in awe as if she is Dionysus himself.

Long live the Goddess, then (necessary voodoo).