‘It was a damn unicorn’: the pioneering, divisive power of Paul Simon’s Graceland at 40

  

"Kahn believes that Simon had the musicians’ labor rights in mind. “He wanted to have them participate, he wanted them to be credited and he wanted them to be compensated,” said Kahn, emphatically noting that Simon paid the South African musicians triple the daily rate of musicians in American unions. “Did he do it perfectly? No. But there wasn’t a set formula of how to approach this.” Simon has still faced backlash over the years about Graceland’s songwriting credits from several musicians who appeared on the album, including Los Lobos, Rockin’ Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters, and even guitarist Ray Phiri, who helped construct the album’s title track. Against charges of cultural appropriation, Graceland advocates have suggested that Simon’s work in South Africa helped bring these bands, such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who round out the starry-eyed Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, to a larger audience."

READ REVIEW BY ETHAN BECK  

‘It was a damn unicorn’: the pioneering, divisive power of Paul Simon’s Graceland at 40 | Paul Simon | The Guardian

Jon Ossoff went low on Natalie Harp. The plan worked

 

 

"Still, Harp herself might be less unsettling than the near certainty that there are others like her – White House staffers and federal bureaucrats and petty functionaries of the Maga machine – who have made flattery of Trump a large portion, if not the entirety, of their jobs. "

READ COLUMN BY MOIRA DONEGAN 

Jon Ossoff went low on Natalie Harp. The plan worked | Moira Donegan | The Guardian

Climate crisis could be destabilising mountain areas like Nepal, experts warn

 

"Scientists are still examining the precise mechanics of the Himalayan disaster, but many observe that glaciers and permafrost around the world are being weakened by global heating, caused by the burning of gas, oil and coal."

read report by JONATHAN WATTS  

Climate crisis could be destabilising mountain areas like Nepal, experts warn | Nepal-Tibet flood disaster | The Guardian

Ghent professors challenged expertise of Jason Arday’s plagiarism accuser |

 

 

"In an April 2023 Substack post titled “How to take back academia”, Cofnas outlined ways to “remove” academics he described as “wokesters” by “showing that they don’t satisfy minimal criteria”.

In response to allegations of plagiarism, Arday, whose treatment has been described as a “racist feeding frenzy”, admitted “mistakes”, but said he had faced unacceptable cruelty."

read more>  

Ghent professors challenged expertise of Jason Arday’s plagiarism accuser | Jason Arday | The Guardian

James Yorkston & The Second Hand Orchestra - Ella Mary Leather

 

And this is where that beggar, he attacked you
You wanted me to come back here later
And piss on his bags
But I put you off by pouring you vodka after vodka

VAZANTE

 

O resultado da sabatina

FRED

RICO]

 

GENILDO

 

GEUVAR

 

MIGUEL PAIVA

 

 

21 Gipsy Hill

 

Nelson Rodrigues

KLEBER 

Dolly Parton, Superstar Whose Songs Spoke to Millions, Dies at 80

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Known for her outsize persona, appearance and talent, she rose from rural poverty to become a top-selling singer, songwriter and entrepreneur.

But perhaps even more remarkable than the profusion of accolades and awards was Ms. Parton’s unstinting generosity of spirit — her commitment, born of deep religious convictions and an immense heart, to seeing the humanity in all people. "

READ OBIT BY Bill Friskics-Warren

 

Israel’s Ben-Gvir posts video of gallows site for hanging Palestinians

 

 

 

"Reports of the construction of the gallows, which will execute only Palestinians convicted of terror offences in the military courts system, and not Jewish extremists, follows the passage of a new law earlier this year. The law requires military courts to apply the death penalty as the only available sentence, unless the court finds special circumstances allowing for life imprisonment. "

Israel’s Ben-Gvir posts video of gallows site for hanging Palestinians | Israel | The Guardian

MARAL - Come Around

 

Gipsy Hill

 

Almoço com Lula

MIGUEL PAIVA 

 

 

 

AROEIRA

 

 

 

Dolly Parton - Stairway to Heaven (in memoriam)

There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold And she's buying a stairway to Heaven When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed With a word she can get what she came for Ooh, ooh, and she's buying a stairway to Heaven

Tim Curry - Sweet Transvestite (1975) - IN MEMORIAM

 

I'm just a sweet transvestite From Transexual, Transylvania Why don't you stay for the night? (Night) Or maybe a bite? (Bite)

Dave Marsh, Rock Critic Who Loved Springsteen and Hated the Dead, Dies at 76

 A passionately opinionated veteran of Creem and Rolling Stone, he was part of a generation of writers who influenced how the world saw the golden age of rock.

 

"With tastes that ran from the Supremes to the Sex Pistols — with heavy helpings of garage rock, soul, R&B and heartland rock from Bob Seger along the way — Mr. Marsh, proud of his blue-collar origins, was a music populist as well as what Mr. Landau called a “classicist” who steered clear of ephemeral fashions.

The mission of rock, he once wrote, was to bring “a glorious possibility, a chance to communicate across all the gaps in our society — gaps of class, race, region, gender, generation, education.”

Threatening Friends and Courting Enemies in Trump’s ‘Upside-Down World’

The president’s hostility to allies like Oman, Canada and South Korea, and his affection for adversaries like North Korea, may still shock some. But it comes as little surprise after a decade of upheaval.  

“Increasingly, the bullying rhetoric is being priced in by countries around the world,” Mr. Fontaine said. “They don’t dismiss it, but they don’t take the threats literally either. As more and more unfulfilled threats are issued, people listen less. It undermines the president’s credibility.”

READ ANALYSIS BY PETER BAKER  

 

 

After a Scholar’s Awful Death, Mistaken Calls for Censorship

 

Michelle Goldberg

 Last year, Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education, a British magazine, was preparing an article about plagiarism allegations against the star academic Jason Arday. It would have been a big story because Arday, who in 2023 became Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor, was a minor celebrity, thanks in part to his seemingly extraordinary biography.

Among other things, Arday said that he’d gotten his Ph.D. despite severe autism that left him nonverbal until he was 11 and unable to read until he was 18. He’d claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, which would have made him one of the world’s most accomplished ultramarathoners.

Grove sent Arday three emails with questions about both his work and his history. Arday responded by hiring one of Britain’s leading defamation firms — one known for, among other things, trying to quash investigations into Scientology — and reporting Grove to the police for harassment. As Grove later wrote, an officer told him not to contact Arday again because it was affecting the professor’s mental health. The magazine, fearing expensive litigation, killed the piece.

But the story didn’t go away. It made its way to Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge research associate who’d been fired for racist blog posts. Cofnas published his review of Arday’s intellectual misdeeds last month, and it exploded in the British press, particularly on the right, which saw the scandal as an indictment not just of Arday or Cambridge, but of academic diversity policies writ large. Cambridge announced an internal investigation, and Arday resigned.

But the coverage, much of it gleefully vicious, continued, in part because of the publication of Arday’s new memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” this month. On Friday Arday was found dead in what was widely assumed to be a suicide.

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In the wake of Arday’s death, many on the left are blaming the media. “The media lynched Jason Arday,” declared Ibram X. Kendi. The head of a Cambridge college called for an official inquiry into the “media onslaught.”

Important British progressives, including Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, and several Labour M.P.s, signed an open letter demanding some sort of official oversight of journalistic decision making. “Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed,” it said. The writer Will Self called, in an open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for the police to begin “impounding computers,” presumably belonging to people involved in covering the scandal.

Those pressing for new controls on the press are making a serious mistake. Some who once championed Arday seem to be trying to deflect from their own embarrassing credulity, and it is unlikely to work. A deep resentment of both growing societal diversity and bureaucratic diversity initiatives, or D.E.I., fuels the right; it’s why Arday’s story was such catnip to the conservative press. But heavy-handed progressive attempts to stifle questions about those initiatives — to use institutional power to police the boundaries of public discourse about race, gender and religion — have a way of making that resentment even more politically potent.

That’s what happened in America, where a ferocious cultural backlash — much of it involving complaints of left-wing censoriousness — helped spawn the nightmare of Donald Trump’s second presidency. And it could happen in Britain, where Nigel Farage’s nativist Reform U.K. party is amassing frightening strength. This is a particularly bad moment to let the right claim the mantle of free speech.

Like most of Europe, Britain tends to have a less absolutist attitude toward free speech than America does, so the idea of increasing public regulation might appear less threatening there. Still, recent American experience teaches that any limits on speech countenanced by the left will be turned against leftists a hundredfold when the right is in power.

America is now rife with laws banning lessons about race and gender that cause “psychological distress” to dominant groups. When you live in a country whose leader is trying to regulate the press into abject submission, it’s easy to see why it’s dangerous to justify more state oversight of the media.

There’s no doubt that the press coverage of the Arday affair was ugly and overwhelming. But the fault doesn’t just lie with rapacious yellow journalists. It also belongs to the institutions, Cambridge chief among them, that elevated Arday while ignoring obvious signs that he was a fabulist. (As The New York Times has reported, his “supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature,” and turned out to be untrue.)

Cambridge hired Arday — from a pool of finalists that included two more senior women of color — at a moment when it was facing persistent questions about Black underrepresentation. Handsome and charismatic, an intellectual Horatio Alger, he offered the university a P.R. coup.

Many of the people who didn’t bother questioning Arday’s backstory should have known better; today their oversight looks less like respect than condescension, as if no one took him seriously enough to think hard about what he was saying. “Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot,” Jason Okundaye wrote in the left-leaning Guardian.

In retrospect, it would have been much better for all concerned if the story of his scholarly mistakes and biographical inventions had broken in a careful, professional outlet like Times Higher Education, instead of festering until it turned into a right-wing parable. Cofnas’s article catalyzed a journalistic feeding frenzy not just because it seemed to show evidence of plagiarism and falsehood, but also because it claimed there’d been a cover-up, and cover-ups tend to drive reporters wild.

For people on the left, it’s sure easier to talk about the feral excesses of the right-wing press than the willful gullibility of certain elite progressives. But both contributed to the Arday disaster. Denying that won’t protect the left. It will just leave leftists out on a limb that grows ever more shaky.

NEW YORK TIMES  

, A Odisseia parece feita sob medida para as sensibilidades artísticas de Nolan

 

"Saltando entre linhas narrativas que acompanham Telêmaco, Penélope e Odisseu não apenas em lugares distintos, mas em diversos tempos, A Odisseia parece feita sob medida para as sensibilidades artísticas de Nolan, que ainda tem a chance de explorar outros temas e recursos favoritos como traumas do passado, o peso das memórias sobre o presente (e como estas nem sempre são objetivas), ansiedades despertadas por esposas em perigo, personagens que se encarregam de narrar suas trajetórias e, claro, a imagem da água e o constante perigo de afogamento (uma obsessão que observei, por exemplo, ao escrever sobre Dunkirk). Navegando com destreza entre os desafios enfrentados pelos três personagens, o cineasta já comprova esta fluidez ao introduzir o filme em uma longa sequência expositiva que, embalada pela fantástica trilha de Ludwig Göransson, se rende ao silêncio quando finalmente encontramos o herói recolhendo destroços de um barco sem parecer compreender exatamente o que faz, dando continuidade à introdução in medias res sem perder o ritmo."

LEIA A CRÍTICA DE PABLO VILLAÇA 

A Odisseia | Crítica por Pablo Villaça - Cinema em Cena

PAQUETÁ

 

Efeito Kassab

KLEBER

 

M odo sem filtro

FRAGA

 

Luta sem fim

 

"Palmares era o símbolo de uma resistência que não se limitava à escravidão. Era uma nova organização da sociedade, rompendo a ideia da propriedade privada da terra, da exploração de corpos humanos e do chicote.

Três séculos depois, nessa região de Alagoas visitada pelo ICL Notícias, ecoa ainda a luta, num sistema capitalista que permite que usineiros e grandes proprietários de terras perpetuem a organização do próprio estado para que seu poder não consiga sequer ser questionado."

LEIA REPORTAGEM DE JAMIL CHADE
Luta sem fim

Earth is now warming faster than at any point in recorded geological history

 

 JEFFREY ST. CLAIR > 

+ For the first time in 155 years, the weather station at Kew Botanical Gardens in London measured no precipitation for an entire month.

+ It wasn’t just the July air temperatures that cracked records; the temperature of global ocean waters also hit new highs. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that average sea surface temperatures outside polar regions hit 20.96C last month, topping the previous high of 20.89C in 2023.

+ This was the week the Arctic hit 90F.

+ The UK’s MetCast 4 Weather:

Earth is now warming faster than at any point in recorded geological history – around 10 times faster than the extreme warming event 56 million years ago and 20 times faster than at the end of the last ice age.  We are almost certainly in a new extinction event.

+ Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

The extreme heat, fire, droughts displacing > 200000 and killing > 20000 in Europe, happens on a 1.4°C planet. We are inevitably breaching 1.5°C and heading towards 3°C. It will inevitably get worse. It will get worse and worse and worse to the point where, I’m afraid, we’ll be passing the limits of adaptation.

🧵 UNCOVERED: DONALD TRUMP’S CIA DIRECTOR FLEW INTO MOSCOW.

 

JAMES TICHOTA

🧵 UNCOVERED: DONALD TRUMP’S CIA DIRECTOR FLEW INTO MOSCOW. Not a Pentagon envoy. Not a routine diplomatic stop. John Ratcliffe, America’s sitting intelligence chief, entered Russia on Aug. 25 for meetings with Russian officials. The CIA won’t explain the agenda. The Kremlin won’t name the room. So we follow what governments hate most: the fucking receipts.

Before Ratcliffe arrived, Washington asked Ukraine NOT to launch airstrikes around Moscow, St. Petersburg and parts of northern Russia on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday because a plane carrying a senior U.S. official was headed to Moscow. That is Reuters reporting from a source familiar with the request. A three-day strike window was cleared around this trip. That fucking matters.

THE FLIGHT RECEIPT. U.S. Air Force C-17A Globemaster III, tail 07-7181, flew from the Washington area to Riga, Latvia, then into Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. The Washington Post also tracked a C-40B, the military VIP aircraft used for senior officials, from Joint Base Andrews to Riga. One route. Two U.S. aircraft. Riga sitting right in the middle.

Then Moscow narrowed the mystery. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told The Washington Post the visit involved “contacts between security services.” Read that again. America’s CIA director did not wander into Moscow sightseeing. The Kremlin itself says this was security-service business. That puts the CIA-Russian intelligence back channel squarely in the fucking room.

HERE COMES SERGEI NARYSHKIN. Russia’s SVR chief already had a direct channel with Ratcliffe. Reuters reported in 2025 that the two intelligence chiefs agreed they could call each other whenever necessary about matters of mutual interest. Do we have a receipt proving Naryshkin personally met Ratcliffe Tuesday? NO. Do we have an established CIA-SVR channel? ABSOFUCKINGLUTEL

NOW FOLLOW UKRAINE. On the SAME DAY Ratcliffe was in Moscow, Reuters reported Ukraine had drafted a one-page package with U.S. and European officials to be presented to Moscow: a ceasefire idea, a proposed Donbas free-economic zone and questions involving NATO and the EU. We cannot prove Ratcliffe carried that paper. We can prove the timing lands right on top of his secret visit.

NOW FOLLOW IRAN. One day before Ratcliffe entered Moscow, Trump’s administration launched Operation Economic Outcast against Iran “and its enablers.” Treasury had already sanctioned Russia-based Air Cargo Pro Limited for supporting Iran’s Mahan Air, which Treasury says facilitates IRGC personnel, weapons and UAV-related activity. Then the CIA chief lands in Russia. Coincidence is not evidence. Timing is a lead.

Russia is tied directly to the Iran lane too. A Ukrainian intelligence assessment reported by Reuters alleged Russia aided Iran with satellite imagery for targeting U.S. facilities in the Middle East. Moscow DENIES it. Put both on the record. Then remember: Washington had just threatened Iran’s foreign enablers with secondary sanctions when America’s CIA director landed in Moscow for security-service talks.

WHAT WE DO NOT HAVE: no receipt Ratcliffe met Putin. No confirmed face-to-face with Naryshkin. No proof he carried the Ukraine proposal. No proof this was a prisoner exchange. That shit stays OUT of the fact column until somebody produces the document, manifest, readout or human being walking off the airplane. This is how you investigate instead of invent.

WHAT WE DO HAVE is enough to ask the right fucking question: Why did Trump’s CIA director need a protected Ukrainian strike window, a military C-17 routed through Riga, hours on Russian soil and “contacts between security services” while Ukraine negotiations and the Iran pressure campaign were moving at the same time? Governments can hide the agenda. They cannot hide every receipt. FOLLOW THE MONEY. FOLLOW THE FLIGHT. FOLLOW THE FUCKING TIMELINE. 🦂

Crab Hunter | Caçadora de Caranguejos

 

Tomás Improta - Poema Singelo (Vulla-Lobos) - IN MEMORIAM

 

Florence Villa

 

Acordo que nao Acorda, Fogo que nao Cessa

 

LUTE

M ARIO SERGIO

AMORIM

AMORIM

Westow Street

 

Dolly Parton - Jolene (in memoriam_)

 

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Oh, I'm begging of you please don't take my man
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Please don't take him even though you can

Dark Horse saiu de cartaz

 MIGUEL PAIVA

VAZANTE

 

O zoológico particular de Ziraldo

Por Bolívar Torres

Um tatu rabiscado no chão de casa, aos 4 anos, foi o primeiro de uma longa linhagem de bichos de Ziraldo Alves Pinto. A carreira do maior cartunista brasileiro do século XX foi marcada por cangurus, elefantes, pulgas, bichinhos da maçã e outros animais fantásticos, mitológicos ou cotidianos. Mas há ainda um vasto zoológico particular a ser descoberto nos acervos do artista mineiro, morto em 2024, aos 91 anos.

Dois lançamentos póstumos exploram o fascínio do cartunista pelos animais. Inaugurando a série de livros “Tem Zira” (Global Editora), organizada pelo designer, ilustrador e escritor Guto Lins, “Tem bicho” reúne araras, tartarugas, moscas, coelhos, joaninhas, sapos, entre tantos outros exemplares da fauna ziraldiana. Produzidas entre os anos 1970 e 2000 para campanhas publicitárias, cartazes, calendários, capas de cadernos e outras publicações, as ilustrações foram garimpadas nas gavetas do Instituto Ziraldo (IZ).

‘A Turma do Pererê’

Já “A Turma do Pererê: uma história para celebrar” traz de volta os personagens da primeira HQ brasileira inteiramente colorida e concebida por um único autor. Publicada originalmente em 1983 e fora de catálogo desde então, a aventura especial ganha agora uma edição em formato art book, complementada por esboços, estudos, materiais de arquivo e textos de especialistas.

Inspirada na fauna e no folclore brasileiros (uma novidade na época), a Turma do Pererê circulou no formato revista em diferentes momentos entre 1959 a 1976, ano em que saiu definitivamente das bancas. Em torno do Saci Pererê e do garoto indígena Tininim, Ziraldo criou uma série de personagens que roubam a cena, como a onça Galileu, o tapiti Geraldinho, o jabuti Moacir e o tatu-rosa Pedro Vieira.

— Quando você olha um bicho do Ziraldo, abre aquele sorriso porque vê que ele poderia ser seu amigo — diz Guto Lins. — Ele buscava os elementos característicos daquele ser e, ao mesmo tempo, surpreendia acrescentando uma expressividade, uma camada de leitura. Ao olhar para o animal e sentir uma relação afetiva com ele, ele virava o jogo e fazia uma personalidade do jeito que queria. 

 

Ziraldo — Foto: Divulgação/Marcelo Correa

Brincando com os arquétipos dos animais, o cartunista os aproximava dos leitores pelo humor e pela empatia.

—Ele gostava de inverter o que se espera dos animais, como transformar um bicho feroz num bicho meigo, por exemplo — diz Lins. — “A Turma do Pererê” é um clássico disso. O carteiro é um jabuti, o macaco é o leitor, a onça é o bicho mais manso de todos.

O mais difícil na curadoria de “Tem bicho” foi desapegar do que ficou de fora, conta Lins. Entre os 38 mil itens catalogados no Instituto Ziraldo, a fartura de animais é tamanha que daria para editar uns três livros, calcula o curador.

Guto já havia escrito os textos de dois livros organizados a partir de ilustrações deixadas por Ziraldo, ambos centrados em animais. “Entre cobras e lagartos” (2024) tem como protagonista uma cobra sabichona e solitária. “Peixe grande” (2025) faz uma metáfora da trajetória do cartunista na figura de um peixe que sai do Rio Doce, em Minas Gerais, em direção ao mar. Aqui, o bicho é o próprio Ziraldo!

Entre as publicações editadas pelo cartunista em vida, estão obras como “O Bichinho da Maçã” (vencedor do Jabuti de melhor livro de arte de 1982) e “História de dois amores”. Feito em parceria com o poeta Carlos Drummond de Andrade, este último narra a amizade entre um elefante e uma pulga. E há ainda a fábula ilustrada e musical “Os saltimbancos”, enorme sucesso criado em parceria com Chico Buarque, sobre um jumento, um cachorro, uma gata e uma galinha que fogem para a cidade grande para escapar da maldade dos donos.

— Ziraldo já era ecológico antes de esse termo existir — afirma Guto Lins. — O próximo livro de “Tem Zira” vai ser dedicado às árvores. Assim como com os bichos, ele nunca desenhava apenas uma árvore. Antes de fazer um jambu, um caimbé, um jequitibá, ele estudava essas plantas. Era um observador dessa riqueza que o nosso país sempre ofereceu.

Entre todos os bichos de Ziraldo, nenhum parece ter ocupado tanto espaço em sua imaginação quanto o canguru. Ele descobriu o marsupial ainda criança, em uma enciclopédia, e ficou fascinado. Aos 14 anos, deixou sua Caratinga natal rumo ao Rio levando uma pasta repleta de desenhos do animal. O canguru continuaria aparecendo ao longo de sua vida, ganhando até um livro próprio (“Meu amigo, o canguru”, de 1987).

— Centenas de cangurus lotam as gavetas do Instituto Ziraldo — revela Adriana Lins, diretora artística da instituição. — Desde os cartuns publicados nas páginas das revistas Cigarra e O Cruzeiro, nos anos 1950 e 1960, às páginas da Mad americana e da Penthouse, passando pela imprensa de vários países da Europa, pelo Jornal do Brasil e pelo livro antológico “Dez em Humor”, que tem 15 páginas só de canguru.

Em outubro, um canguru de Ziraldo será a imagem do cartaz da Mostrinha, seção infantil da Mostra de Cinema de São Paulo. As curadoras da mostra visitaram o instituto há alguns meses e encontraram a imagem perfeita para estampar o evento.

— Foi impossível resistir ao carinho de uma Mãe Canguru por seu filhote — conta Adriana. 

 

    GLOBO 

 

Tutty Vasques 40 ANOS : Nascido em agosto de 1986

 

 

 

 

O mundo já estava acabando quando eu aqui cheguei há exatos 40 anos. Em agosto de 1986, o planeta ainda tentava se recuperar de traumas muito recentes: o desastre de Chernobyl, a explosão ao vivo do ônibus espacial Challenger, o surgimento do primeiro vírus de computador, ‘la mano de Dios’ do Maradona, a passagem mixuruca do Cometa Halley, a morte súbita mundial do Fusca... Aqui no Brasil, os jornais cobriam o lançamento do natimorto Plano Cruzado do Sarney e a estreia do primeiro Xou da Xuxa. Na época, a virilha da apresentadora já existia, mas dava-se mais visibilidade ao bigode do presidente! Foi nesse caldo meio indigesto que mergulhei na cena do jornalismo sadio e ousado praticado na redação do JB de Marcos Sá Corrêa e Flávio Pinheiro. Vim a público programado para desafinar o coro já ensurdecedor dos indignados analógicos. Vivíamos naquele tempo um princípio de surto que duas décadas depois as redes sociais transformariam no embrião da atual pandemia galopante de gente irritada falando sozinha. De volta ao começo, quando eu nasci adotei o mantra ‘má notícia é a maior diversão’ e nas últimas quatro décadas, pregando em pelo menos 10 igrejas representativas do jornalismo brasileiro, defendi incansavelmente a ideia de que ‘só o humor salva’. Disse o tempo todo a quem me seguia: ‘Tudo isso que você lê no noticiário e parece piada, creia, em geral não é coisa que se deva levar a sério.’ Nos últimos anos, esse caráter messiânico da minha crença em um gênero lúdico de apocalipse encontrou motivação ainda mais forte para seguir em frente: a autoajuda. No momento, perdoem a franqueza, faço humor para me salvar. Não vou dizer “caguei pra vocês” por educação e respeito, mas toda vez que nova sensação de fim do mundo – climático, bélico, metafórico ou familiar – vem me assombrar fora do horário do Rivotril, corro para o computador e me agarro à boia de salvação do personagem topetudo criado pelo querido Pojucan, artista gráfico inquieto que a jornalista Maria Silvia Camargo entregou de bandeja como o cara certo para rabiscar minha imagem naquele agosto de 1986. Pelo menos na aparência, continuo o mesmo. Certos desenhos não envelhecem.

 

PS: A festa dos 40 anos, assim como o agrément para um novo embaixador dos EUA no Brasil, só depois das eleições.

 

DEDICATÓRIA: Aos queridíssimos Artur Xexéo e Alfredo Ribeiro, que me deram à luz!

 

mais tutty vasques no PASMADO

https://pasmado.substack.com/.../nascido-em-agosto-de-1986

Díaz-Canel diz que EUA asfixiam Cuba e nega guinada capitalista

  

"Sabemos que vai ser duro. Sim, está sendo duro. Mas, veja: aqui estamos, em pé, lutando, sem nos render."

leia entrevista com Miguel Díaz-Canel 
feita por MONICA BERGAMO  

Can - Halleluwah

 

 Did anybody see the snowman standing on winter road 

/ With broken guitar in his hand

? Are you feeling sleepy yet?

The Superfans (Like Natalie Harp) With the Keys

"It's worth taking that seriously: loyalty and competence aren't mutually exclusive, and plenty of effective aides are also fiercely devoted to their bosses. The question isn't whether someone likes the president. It's whether the intensity of that attachment is shaping decisions, filtering information, or creating security risk — and whether anyone with the authority to intervene is willing to."

read report by Stephen Snyder

The Superfans (Like Natalie Harp) With the Keys

Julee Cruise - The Nightingale (Angelo Badalamenti)

 

Acordei cantando...
Woke up singing...

The nightingale
it said to me
there is a love
meant for me

A visitor | Visitante

 

Linchamento em Copacabana é vitória do Brasil miliciano

 

LEONARDO SAKAMOTO

  Cláudio Rafael Landeiro Moreira saiu de casa, em Botafogo, para dar uma volta de bicicleta e voltou em um caixão. Entre uma coisa e outra, bastou que um segurança confundisse sua dificuldade de se expressar com uma confissão de culpa e que outras pessoas punissem uma suspeita com uma sentença de morte.

O homem de 37 anos, que tinha transtornos mentais, foi abordado em Copacabana, na noite do último dia 11. Questionado se a bicicleta era dele, não conseguiu explicar que pertencia a uma de suas irmãs. O vigilante concluiu que estava diante de um ladrão e admitiu à polícia ter dado um soco para que ele largasse o veículo. Depois, um grupo de entregadores teria levado Cláudio para outra rua, onde foi linchado. Socorrido pelos bombeiros, morreu no dia seguinte no hospital Miguel Couto. Traumatismo craniano, hemorragia interna e lesões no abdômen estão entre as causas apontadas pela família.

Justiçamento é típico de uma sociedade miliciana, na qual o devido processo legal (que inclui investigação, indiciamento, denúncia, processo, condenação e execução de pena) é deixado de lado em nome da possibilidade de cada um resolver, da forma como melhor entender, os seus problemas. É a lei do mais forte. E o devido processo legal, que não é perfeito, longe disso, existe tanto para a punição correta por um crime (uma bicicleta não vale uma vida) quanto para impedir que inocentes sejam responsabilizados injustamente.
 

Membros de uma sociedade miliciana invadiram as sedes dos Três Poderes, em Brasília, em uma tentativa tosca e violenta de golpe de Estado, guiados pelo que defendia seu líder supremo, em 8 de janeiro de 2023. Não queriam Justiça para o que achavam correto, mas justiçamento, reequilibrando o universo com a força de suas próprias mãos.

O mesmo tipo de justificativa foi dado quando o governo do Rio de Janeiro entrou atirando na Penha e no Alemão, deixando um saldo de 118 civis e quatro policiais mortos. De olho nos frutos eleitoreiros, o então governador Cláudio Castro afirmou que "de vítima, só tivemos policiais", visão que faz da Justiça algo desnecessário. Isso é justiçamento em seu estado mais puro, contrapondo-se ao que está previsto na Constituição de 1988.

Milícia não é apenas o grupo armado que controla territórios, cobra taxas, vende serviços clandestinos e negocia votos. É também um método de organização social baseado na privatização da violência. Alguém se autoproclama responsável pela ordem, identifica quem considera suspeito, suspende seus direitos e aplica a pena que bem entende.

Nesse modelo, a presunção de inocência é tratada como frescura de defensor de bandido. A investigação é perda de tempo e a Justiça aparece tarde demais, geralmente para recolher o corpo. O medo real da violência urbana torna-se combustível para uma violência ainda maior, praticada por quem se considera cidadão de bem. A partir daí, a diferença entre bandidos e mocinhos desaparece.

É claro que furtos e roubos fazem parte do cotidiano do Rio de Janeiro e que, infelizmente, comerciantes, seguranças e entregadores convivem com riscos permanentes. Mas compreender o medo não significa conceder licença para matar. Uma sociedade que combate o crime transformando inocentes em cadáveres não está produzindo segurança, mas apenas democratizando a barbárie.

Quando abandonamos a lei porque achamos que "dessa vez vale", ela abre mão de qualquer limite. Hoje, o alvo foi um ciclista. Amanhã, pode ser qualquer um que a turba decida considerar indigno de viver. E a turba tem sido bastante ativa nesta quadra histórica.

Defender o Estado de Direito não é passar pano para criminoso, mas impedir que a crueldade vire método e que o linchamento seja vendido como virtude.

Se for confirmada a participação de entregadores no linchamento, isso tampouco transforma toda uma categoria profissional em cúmplice. Fazer essa generalização seria repetir exatamente o mecanismo que matou Cláudio: pegar um rótulo, dispensar a apuração e condenar um grupo inteiro. Os responsáveis devem ser identificados individualmente, processados e punidos.

Copacabana é um dos principais cartões-postais do Brasil. Mas, naquela noite, tornou-se o retrato de um país que está autorizando a pena de morte para qualquer grupo disposto a aplicá-la na calçada.

Quando alguém se torna culpado de cometer um crime simplesmente porque foi morto por uma turba, não precisamos mais temer os milicianos. Eles já somos nós.

UOL

Odysseus just cant stop killing

 

 Odysseus and Diomedes hauling Iphegenia to her death at Aulis. Fresco from Pompeii.

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR >  

 In Hades, Agamemnon rises from the grave to tell Odysseus the story of his own homecoming, bearing Cassandra, the soothsaying princess of Troy, back with him to Mycenae in a cage as booty, only to be slaughtered in his own bed by his wife, Clytemnestra. The maniacal king warns Odysseus that he might face a similar fate in Ithaka. Odysseus has reason for concern, for reasons Nolan doesn’t explore. His wife Penelope is Clytemnestra’s cousin and she’s likely to have learned of his own role in the vile killing of Clytemnestra’s daughter, Iphigenia. As the Greek fleet assembled in the port town of Aulis, Agamemnon decided to go hunting in Artemis’s sacred grove, where he killed a deer, enraging the goddess, who loved animals more than men. Artemis calmed the winds and Agamemnon’s invasion force was stuck in port until, warns the priest Calchas, the king sacrifices his own child. Odysseus comes up with the plan. He persuades Clytemnestra and Iphigenia that the young girl will be wed to the great warrior Achilles and escorts her back to Aulis and places her on the sacrificial rock where her father slits her throat.  It would be easier to rehabilitate Harvey Weinstein than Odysseus.

Penelope must know this. She was Clytemnestra’s cousin. She had lived in Mycenae. She was Iphegenia’s aunt. Odysseus had every reason to delay coming home to her. After all, Penelope, the siren calling from Ithaka, means a kind of predatory seabird, a kingfisher, a fisher for kings. And like Iphigenia, Penelope was once sacrificed by her own parents, who had cast her off the cliff into the sea, only to see her saved by the very birds for whom she was named.

What does Penelope think? How does she really feel about the man who left her and took his time coming home, philandering and killing across the Mediterranean? We don’t know. Nolan doesn’t tell us. He doesn’t understand women. They’ve always been one-dimensional characters in his films. But she wasn’t for the Greeks. There’s an ambiguity to Penelope, a mystique, if you will, that makes you ask, how much she’s really yearning for her lost husband. After all, she isn’t weaving a shroud to honor Odysseus, but his aged father, Laertes, who stayed home, faithful to her, her son and Ithaka.

Penelope was exalted in early Christian theology for her fidelity. But you can’t say the same for our hero. While he may have been mesmerized by Calypso, he spent a year canoodling with Circe of his own volition. He wasn’t all that eager to get back to Penelope’s bedchamber. But Nolan elides this telling detail from his film.

Only the brooding nymph Calypso succeeds in slowing Odysseus down. The wanderer stays seven years on Ogygia. But there’s little time for contemplation in Nolan’s slaughter fest. The seven years in Calypso’s thrall are squeezed into seven minutes of film and Calypso is reduced to the role of Odysseus’ therapist, feeding him lotus flowers like Prozac. Is Calypso a Freudian or Jungian? We don’t know. We don’t even learn what’s really bugging him or how he exorcizes his demons enough to apologize to Poseidon, the earth-shaker, and ride the current back to Ithaka. What did he learn? To honor the dead, maybe. But he would continue to make many more of them.

But this is not Calypso’s role in the Odyssey. She is another avenging proto-feminist, who tricks the trickster Odysseus and keeps him captive for seven years, taking her pleasure with him, doing to Odysseus what Odysseus would have done to her and had done to the Trojan women.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus doesn’t unload his story to Calypso, but to King Alcinous of the Phaiacians and his enchanting daughter Nausicca on the island of Scheria (Corfu), a city-state which treated sea-borne immigrants like Odysseus with kindness and hospitality, a running theme of Homer’s poem, which Nolan manages to mangle.

There are unanswered questions, left hanging, because of the box office. What are the sirens singing, “each to each,” Eliot put it. Are they singing songs of seduction, tempting him into the fatal waters? Or are they singing songs of horror, threnodies for the needless death, tempting him to drown himself in shame? Nolan doesn’t even hint at the answer, for there’s another thrilling episode just a few scenes away. This is high-T film-making, cinematics for the manosphere. It’s gotta move, baby. The warrior ethic ain’t got time for introspection.

We see them only at a distance, women lounging on rocks. For the Greeks, the sirens had the bodies of birds. They sang songs of death. They were made by the Goddess Demeter to search the Underworld for her daughter Persephone, who’d been taken into the eternal darkness by Hades to be his bride. Were they taunting Odysseus with shades of the men and women he sent there?

The historian Mary Beard ridiculed Nolan’s film for its lack of sex, which, as Freud made clear, is the driving force behind almost all Greek drama and comedy. But Nolan has no feel for human sexuality. Does divine Eros make even one fleeting appearance to alter the course of any film in Nolan’s brutalist oeuvre? No. He’s only comfortable in the horrorshow realm of Thanatos. Nolan makes movies that appeal to bros with college degrees, usually in finance.

The most generous thing that can be said about Nolan’s film is that it’s a movie about a man who has committed genocide and who is so mentally unbalanced by the experience that he kills and plunders all the way home, making one bad decision after another, until every member of his own army has joined the ranks of the dead. Then he finally arrives home, where he cleanses his bad conscience–to the extent he has a conscience–by killing nearly every man left in Ithaka, especially savoring the murder of a draft-dodging suitor of Penelope, someone who didn’t want to go slaughter Trojans to open the trade routes for the tyrannical Agamemnon. This final act of mass violence instructs his previously non-violent son Telemachus how to kill too, so that he can become king and the killing can go generation after generation. Nolan tacks on an ending that’s more Lord of the Rings than the Odyssey, as Penelope and Nolan’s now sanctified-through-more-blood hero Odysseus set sail for the West to honor the dead, but only the Greeks, not the Trojans whose entire population Odysseus and Agamemnon have wiped out.

In Homer’s poem, a truer ending takes place. The mass slaughter at the palace is greeted with rage by the populace, who gather to storm the gates, until Athena, once again, intervenes to save her own private mercenary, Odysseus. He just can’t stop killing. If Homer had enjoyed Cassandra’s gift (or curse) of prophecy, he too might have had Odysseus setting sail into the West to spread the genocidal method to the nascent empire across the sea.

COUNTERPUNCH