The disillusionment

People make choices and they have to live with them, most of the times. I've made choices too. Usually I like them, and I stick to them. One of my choices is hard and I thought that I would stick to it. And then I changed my mind and started moving to the opposite direction. And I made myself believe that my new choice is the right one. And I hoped for things to happen so that my second choice would be fulfilled. But now I am not so sure anymore.

Because life is as confusing as this post (and then some).

Because choices are made for a reason.

Hasta Siempre Comandante Che Guevara

Seguiremos adelante como junto a ti seguimos y con Cuba te decimos: hasta siempre Comandante.
Aquí se queda la clara, la entrañable transparencia, de tu querida presencia Comandante Che Guevara.

I like El Che because he is my Don Quixote. This is not my line, by the way – I saw it once in an exhibition I’ve seen at the Victoria&Albert about Che as an icon. It was a very enlightening exhibition – I learnt that there was an edition of Magnum ice-cream based on Che Guevara that claimed that the cherries of the ice-cream were being oppressed by the layers of chocolate surrounding them and therefore we had to set them free by eating the said icre-cream. Cherry Guevara, I believe it was called.
This does of course border the ridicule – I’m sure that Che would turn in its noble grave if he had had the opportunity of seeing his name so crudely associated with the selling of candy and the fight for freedom so ridiculed by the comparison with the oppressed cherries. But the ice-cream story does exemplify the commercial icon he has become.
However, his figure and his strong eyes remain as the image of resistance and struggle for what it is right. The Korda photograph (Korda himself bears having his name repeated – he never tried to make money out of his extraordinary photograph because he wanted to honour El Che and only claimed copyright when big corporations like Coca-Cola and Absolut tried to use Guevara’s image to make money) is the image of what happens to you when you have realistic dreams you pursue no matter what. Che Guevara was afflicted by severe asthma and when involved in guerrillas in the middle of nowhere it is extremely hard to find medication to alleviate the cloud that invades your chest and does not let you breathe; still, he persisted. He had children, to whom he wrote letters with the beautiful piece of advice of “do not forget to be good revolutionaries and be kind to your mother”. These are the words of a good man. A man that, when a gun was being pointed at him and death was nigh, said “get on with it, you’re only killing a man”. Ouch.
It is well known that Guevara was not a saint. He was at war. He killed and got killed. But to me that does not change the fact that he was a good man on the right side of history. And I personally get comfort out of knowing there was and are people like that around because when everything else falls apart or fades away (and so many, many things in our life sadly do), this remains - la querida presencia d’el Comandante Che Guevara (and others like him).

Blast from the past

D/a wrote a lovely post, entitled 'letting go' that deserves to be read. It was an early draft abd can be now found under January.

Hallo Kitty's best of 2007, included Fatih Akin's ;edge of heaven'. I just saw it and I have to agree, the movie is fantastic, reminded me of 'habla con ella' somehow. I will write something more about it soon. Until then, look for it in a cinema near you.

Madame Bovary is in us all

When I first started this blog, Youkali proposed that I write something about her. But I hadn't met her yet. My friend CK had also told me to read this book, too. So after stealing it from a Topshop with Youkali (long story) or as another friend said "I rescued the book from being a stupid decor in a stupid shop", I finally read it.

I am usually crap with classic books, I find them too boring and outdated, and eventually I never finish them. But Madame Bovary was great. It would not be advisable for me to enumerate the benefits of the book. It suffices to say that it is a book about boredom where everything is slow and unimportant but it manages to be... erm... a page turner?

My biggest disagreement about MB is that, contrary to what CK thinks, I think that she is not hysterical. I find it thoroughly unimpressive if this is a book about a person with a personality disorder. I don't care about this book, if the story of this woman cannot be generalized. Even if she is hysterical, this is not the point. The point is how people can become hysterical in such situations. Emma Bovary is a woman who leads an unimportant existence, she is married with a man she does not love and has a child she never manages to love. She has no job and no interests in life either. She reads some books and cares about decorating and being fashionable, but not with intensity. She only does that to kill her time.

She takes up one lover after the other and debts accumulate but without any change in her. She is not affected by the love she (never manages to) share with these men or by the beauty that surrounds her. She is an empty woman and stays like that. She dies empty, having committed suicide like the ultimate drama queen.

And the circle of emptiness goes on.

The delay

So many movies, so little time...
So many books, so little time...

I have read Madame Bovary and loved it and still I cannot find time to write a post to do justice to it.
I have seen la vie en rose and loved it and still I cannot find time to write a post to do justice to it.

Ah, modern life, it leaves us no time to enjoy art and contemplate about it...

The buzz

We suddenly were all proud of ourselves as "Europeans" in the context of the four recipients of the acting Oscar awards: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton. So we are taking over Hollywood, right? Us, Europeans that is...

Whatever.

Sometimes people are really looking for a buzz, I think, and journalists are craving for generalizations that make little or no sense. The year English patient won, 1997 I think, everyone was buzzing about the independent invasion: 4 out of 5 movies up for the best movie award were independent productions. Oh my God, this was, like, so important! And then what happened? Did Hollywood suffer a blow? Did Tom Cruise get a pay cut? Did he stop making Mission Impossibles? I don't think so...

Things come and go but stupid Hollywood stays. With its ridiculous blockbusters (Jumper, don't even get me started on this one) and its over-payed stars.

Good things are here and will always be here, some years more, some years less. This year's highlights for me were an ex-stripper receiving a writing award, an excellent two-headed monster of a director receiving the recognition for their truly independent style, an unknown song-writer invited back on stage to finish her acceptance speech after being idiotically cut off by the producers etc. I wish I could have seen the brilliant Paul-Thomas Anderson been awarded with something or Johnny Depp for his rendition of the dark and irrevocably hurt Sweeney but whatever, this is Hollywood after all.

What is modern?

Some time ago, when I was going through my Mark Ronson phase I was thinking a lot about what it means to do a good cover of a song. What does it take to take an old song and make it new? Usually good covers are songs that were unknown in their times and they were reinvented as successful hymns, the artists changing nothing more than the arrangement, making it more current and voilá... the new song is born! Mark Ronson's case is not like that though since all his covers break the basic rules of this business, i.e. that the covered song needs to be old and unknown. His songs were new and/or famous. Yet his record is awesome, current, relevant and his songs are appreciated by many (apart from stupid arctic monkeys who said that they cringe every time the hear his version of the smiths' classic 'stop me if you've heard this one before'). Whatever.

But it is not just Mark Ronson, who is new and modern, it is also Duffy, whose '60's feel is so now, it is covers like 'Umbrella' by the Brighton-based 'Mechanical Bride' (thanks to hallow kitty for sending it to me!), Husky Rescue's version of 'poison' and so many more.

Duffy's story is amazing and I think also very telling: living in a village in Wales, she had no access to modern music and kept listening to her parents' 45's from the 60's. When time came for her to write her own music, out it came this fantastic mixture of soul and '60's sound that sounds so original. And I think maybe that's what it takes to be original in music (and possibly elsewhere): one needs to distance oneself from the what is in fashion at the moment, because it is useless to try anyway. Things change so fast, so trying to keep up is a bit futile (we can leave that to the DJs). Originality means to be true to oneself, even if what one likes seems outdated and old, if it is true it will work. With this in mind, I am making a tribute band to the Suede, do you think it will work?