Journey, Espace

Após anos a ouvi-lo em meios menos próprios e, alguns, com uma qualidade de bradar aos céus, eis que me resolvi a encomendar o Escape, dos Journey, na Amazon. Chegou hoje, ao meu local de trabalho, motivando uma viagem de regresso a casa com tudo aquilo a que julguei ter direito: auto-estrada, vento a passar, volume alto. A imagem é um lugar-comum, e com tão poucas pretensões de ser algo mais quanto  a música contida nesse disco, sendo até essa uma das suas qualidades que mais aprecio, numa altura em que a coolness parece ter chegado a tudo o que foi feito, muitas vezes, apenas para que os folks tivessem uma noite de sábado mais animada e, se possível, com algo que falasse deles e das suas vidas simples (o John Denver e o Bob Seeger que o digam – coitado do Bruce Springsteen).

…..

Weather Report, Confians

Olhava para a carreira dos Weather Report como um crescendo até ao aparecimento do Jaco Pastorius (o pico situava-se entre o Black market e o Heavy weather). Depois ouvi o Night passage e, ainda que menos imediato, não consegui largá-lo durante umas boas semanas. Isto, claro, deu-me vontade de explorar o que até aí me tinha despertado pouco interesse: o último álbum do Jaco Pastorius com o grupo, o errático Weather report, e os álbuns posteriores, já com o Victor Bailey. Destes, conhecia bem o Procession, de que gostava bastante, o que, em parte, me ajudou a entrar nos álbuns seguintes, onde o Wayne Shorter se vai apagando para surgir, no seu lugar, um Joe Zawinul bem entendido na exploração das potencialidades dos novos teclados de então (pasmem-se os cepticos com o seu álbum a solo Dialects). Porém, nada neste percurso me podia ter preparado para a magnificência desta canção do Mino Cinélu, que o grupo decidiu gravar e incluir no álbum Sportin' life.

.....

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, in a letter to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, “When you get the damned hurt, use it. Use it and don’t cheat.” Use it, don’t let it use you. Hemingway knew a thing or two about the “hurt”; it dogged him for much of his life, ran like a seam through many of his fictional caracters. Self-mythologisingold curmudgeon he may have been at times – his former wife, the acclaimed journalist Martha Gellhorn, once described their five-year marriage as “life-darkening” – but he never cheated, even when he pulled the trigger of the gun that ended his life.

Deep emotional pain is a condition that allows immunity to no one. Hemingway won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954; Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize almost forty years later. Yet, in 1996, Mandela, then presidente of South Africa, stood in a Johannesburg courtroom and gave testimony about a struggle – but not the political struggle that had seen him imprisioned for almost thirty years, or the battle to undo decades of apartheid and rebuild his country. It was the struggle to overcome the unhappiness of his fractured marriage to his wife, Winnie. In a statement to the court hearing their divorce proceedings, he said, “I was the loneliest man during the period I stayed with her.”

Karen O'Brien, Joni Mitchell: Shadows and light

The pleasantly round-faced girl in the Riverboat audience was watching her husband drink Joni Mitchell in. The singer's long golden hair floated around her doll's face while her shimmering voice chanted of flowers and sun-warmed shoulders and seabirds soaring out of reach. "Call, and I follow, I follow!" cried the look on the husband's rapt face. "And just who do you think would mend your socks, buster?" asked the small, pained, ironic smile on the face of his wife.

Karen O'Brien, Joni Mitchell: Shadows and light

2013 em temas

Ao contrário do que fiz na minha lista de álbuns, onde ordenei tudo aquilo que ouvi este ano, aqui apenas listo os meus dez temas favoritos de 2013.

.....

01. David Bowie, If you can see me

02. Mário Laginha Novo Trio, Terra seca

03. Kurt Vile, Too hard

04. Motorpsycho, Barleycorn (Let it come/Let it be)

05. Kyle Eastwood, Une nuit au Sénégal

06. Kurt Vile, Goldstone

07. The National, Humiliation

08. The Heavy Blinkers, Someone died today at the ice capades

09. Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog, Your turn

10. Deep Purple, Above and beyond

.....

I believe that we are all ultimately alone and that any deep and lasting human contact is nothing more nor less than a necessary illusion—but at least the feelings which we think of as "positive" and "constructive" are a reaching out, an effort to make contact and establish some sort of communication. Feelings of love and kindness, the ability to care and empathize, are all we know of the light. They are efforts to link and integrate; they are the emotions which brings us together, if not in fact then at least in a comforting illusion that makes the burden of mortality a little easier to bear.

Horror, terror, fear, panic: these are the emotions which drive wedges between us, split us off from the crowd, and make us alone. It is paradoxical that feelings and emotions we associate with the "mob instinct" should do this, but crowds are lonely places to be, we're told, a fellowship with no love in it. The melodies of the horror tale are simple and repetitive, and they are melodies of disestablishment and disintegration ... but another paradox is that the ritual outletting of these emotions seems to bring things back to a more stable and constructive state again. Ask any psychiatrist what his patient is doing when he lies there on the couch and talks about what keeps him awake and what he sees in his dreams. What do you see when you turn out the light? the Beatles asked; their answer: I can’t tell you, but I know that it’s mine.

Stephen King, Danse macabre