28.12.20

Livros sobre música que vale a pena ler - Cromo #84: Vítor Rua - "Eu Só Queria Dizer O Seguinte..."


autor: Vítor Rua
título: eu só queria dizer o seguinte...
editora: asoka miau house
nº de páginas: 214
isbn: 978-989-20-4310-4
data: 2013






Vítor Rua - eu só queria dizer o seguinte..."

texto: Vítor Rua
Ilustrações: Ilda Teresa Castro
edição de 100 exemplares [livro feito à mão]
este é o #011 - autografado e numerado pelo autor.
uma edição asoka miau house
© 2013 Vítor Rua & Ilda Teresa Castro
ISBN: 978-989-20-4310-4

prefácio e resumo biográfico dos autores, por António Duarte, on demand.



71. 45 & 33 rotações

… uma vez, pouco depois do 25 de Abril, o Jorge Lima Barreto, foi convidado a participar num colóquio sobre Jazz; estavam lá todos os do Jazz: o José Duarte, o Jorge Curvelo, o Raúl Bernardo, etc.; O Jorge queria falar de Free Jazz e das novas tendências do Jazz; enquanto os outros ainda estavam todos no BeBop; a determinada altura, eles começam todos a dizer ao Jorge que o Free Jazz não era música; e o Jorge diz-lhes: “Então ouçam isto e digam-me o que pensam”; e mete um disco a tocar; no final, começam todos a dizer que aquilo é só gritos, e barulheira e que, portanto se comprovava que o Free Jazz era “ruído”; então, o Jorge pega no disco que meteu a tocar, mostra-o ao público e diz: “A obra que eles estão a criticar e a dizer mal, é um disco do Thelonious Monk, só que o meti em 45 rotações quando é um LP de 33 rotações; ora, estes imbecis, nem sequer foram capazes de reparar nisso. Nem distinguiram que os instrumentos estavam a ser tocados a uma velocidade diferente; agora, querem continuar este colóquio comigo, ou com estes tipos?”; e o público em uníssono disse o nome do Jorge e os outros tiveram de abandonar a sala…

 

92. chocolate & chocolate

… uma vez eu e o Jorge Lima Barreto, fomos a Londres para dar um concerto Telectu; encontramos os nossos amigos Gonçalo Falcão e a Inês W Carmo; e andamos a passear por Londres os quatro; eu e a Inês fomos a uma gelataria assim para o chic; sentámo-nos e veio um empregado; era preto; eu peço um “ice cream” e ele pergunta “What flavour?”, e eu digo em português “chocolate”; e ele “Sorry?”; e eu “chocolate” e o gajo “I don’t understand”; até que eu, já nervoso, aponto para a cara dele, e digo-lhe “Chocolat… Chocolat”; aí ele entendeu. Depois, estávamos no metro, nas escadas rolantes, e o Jorge em vez de se meter do lado direito, estava no lado esquerdo; ora, isso fazia com que as pessoas passassem a todo o gás por ele, e dissessem “Please Sir” ou “Sorry Sir”; e o Jorge parado, olhava com estranheza, pensando porque estariam aquelas pessoas a andar numa escada rolante; até que, passa, um muito irritado com ele e diz-lhe “Go to your right”, e vira-se o Jorge para ele, em português: “Estás com muita pressa, tu… Até parece que vais apanhar o metro”…

 

5. Telectu na china

#01 – “o subsídio de cachet”

… fomos à China através do nosso amigo António Duarte; fomos lá tocar; tocámos, por exemplo, no maior clube de jazz de hong kong; tocámos num show multimédia na Casa de Macau; mas o que o António Duarte nos arranjou foi uma outra coisa única; sermos os primeiros ocidentais a gravar na China Record Company. Mas era necessário dinheiro para as viagens de Macau para Pequim; então fomos falar com o presidente do Instituto Cultural de Macau; já não me recordo se falámos com o Monjardino ou com o João Amorim; o que importa é que, a determinada altura, o presidente diz: “Nós não temos cachet para os Telectu”, e o Jorge, olha para ele e diz: “Mas nós não vimos aqui pedir-lhe cachet nenhum!”, e o outro: “Então, o que pretendem?”, e o Jorge: “O que nós estamos a pedir não é um cachet, isso sabemos que vocês não podem dar, o que nós queremos é apenas um subsídio de cachet!”, o presidente do instituto olha para o Jorge e pergunta: “Um subsídio de cachet? O que é isso?”, e o Jorge: “O nosso cachet seriam uns mil contos, ora nós só lhe vamos pedir trezentos contos, logo, o que estamos a pedir-lhe é apenas um subsídio de cachet!” o gajo riu-se e deu-nos o subsídio de cachet!





21.12.20

Livros sobre música que vale a pena ler - Cromo #83: Boyd Rice - "No"


autor: Boyd Rice
título: No
editora: Edição de Autor
nº de páginas: 166
isbn: 978-1976-39277-1 / 9781976392771
data: 2017




Third Edition

Copyright © 2017 Boyd Rice

First and second editions originally published in limited edition format by Heartworm Press. This edition published independently by Boyd Rice and printed by CreateSpace.

Layout and additional editing for this version by Whale Song Partridge.

Thanks to Brian M. Clark for editing the Rebellion chapter, and to Rory Hinchy.

Special thanks to Karin Buchbinder

 

166 PÁGINAS

978-1976-39277-1

9781976392771

 

Prologue and Introduction à on demand.

 

ÍNDICE:

I – Prologue

II – Introduction

1. LIES

3. EQUALITY

7. INDIVIDUALITY

9. LIBERTY

11. PEACE

14. HARMONY

17. DIVERSITY

20. IMPERIALISM

24. CAPITALISM

28. CONSUMERISM

31. WORK

34. POVERTY

37. NO FREE LUNCH

40. TIPS

43. COMPETENCY

45. RIGHTS

46. POLITICS

53. DEMOCRACY (DIVIDED WE STAND)

56. RELATIONSHIPS

59. THE SEXES

64. HOPES AND DREAMS

70. COMPLAINTS

72. RESPECT

23. KEEPING IT REAL

74. IT’S ALL GOOD

75. OUTSIDE THE BOX

77. THE STATUS QUO

80. HYPOCRISY

83. IDEALISM

86. REBELLION

95. ACTIVISM

97. TRANSGRESSION

100. IN YOUR FACE

102. ANGER

105. BLAME

107. LAW AND ORDER

110. POLICE STATE

112. THOUGHT POLICE

114. THE NAZIS

118. CULTS OF PERSONALITY

121. FAME / SUCCESS

124. LAZINESS

127. THE WILL

129. PRIVACY

132. INFORMATION

136. INTELLIGENCE

139. COMMON WISDOM

140. CHOICE

142. DELUSION

144. MEANING

147. PHILOSOPHY

151. UTOPIA

153. THE APOCALYPSE

155. SOCIOPATHY

158. THE PERENNIAL DICHOTOMY

161. THE DICHOTOMOUS MIND

165. EPILOGUE

 

COMPLAINTS

“Never complain and never explain”

Benjamin Disraeli – 19th Century British Prime Minister and statesman

 

If you’re going to complain about something to someone, please don’t let it be me… It’s not that I don’t care, per se (I don’t), it’s because it is an exercise in futility to complain about something (to anyone) unless they’re in a position to rectify the situation. And in regard to complaints, this is rarely ever the case.

If, for example, you and I went out to breakfast and your eggs were over, or under, done, and you complained to me but proceeded to eat the unacceptable meal – who profits? Certainly not me. And I would have had to endure your whining first thing in the morning (not a pleasant eye-opener). And surely you wouldn’t have profited either. Your meal would still be bad, though venting about it may make you feel better somehow.

Guess what? Most folks find the “venting” of others much less tolerable than poorly cooked eggs. Guess what else? No one gives a fuck about your problems. If you really cared about dealing with your situation, you’d address your complaints to the waiter; the one person who could have your eggs returned and cooked properly. It’s that fuckin’ simple.

Of course, bad breakfasts are a small problem, perhaps the smallest. Bigger problems, however, require the use of the same tactics and strategies, and provoke the same attitude on my part. If I can’t fix it for you, I don’t want to know about it.

Your stepfather blew his brains out? Tough break. Your car caught on fire? That’s a shame. Life’s unfair? Welcome to the world.

Other people’s problems are like other people in general: they tax your consciousness and deplete your calm. Their problems, of course, will never be resolved, merely rehashed ad infinitum. That’s (I’m sure) as they’d wish it. At the end of the day, I care less about such problems being fixed, as I do they be discussed elsewhere.

A wise friend once advised me never to burden others with your problems, unless it was evident they wanted to help. Great advice, but unfortunately, the fellow stopped short of completing his thought. He never went on to explain that most “others” were incapable of helping. Why? Because life is sometimes unfair. Because bad things happen to good people. And because some folks seem to be nature-ordained losers. The latter are easy to spot – because they love to complain.



 

OUTSIDE THE BOX

People love the idea of, “thinking outside the box,” but don’t seem to care much for those who actually do so. Why? Because it involves venturing into realms beyond their comfort zone, which virtually no one desires (or relishes).

It’s fine when cutting edge thoughts or actions belong to those already dead. Such things pass into the arena of mere abstractions and cease to be realities. But iconoclastic ideas espoused byy the living seem to constitute conditions which need to be confronted and dealt with. Or at least the general public seems to feel so.

Oscar Wilde is a British national hero – a great poet and author. His statue today graces a public square and historical plaques adorn paces where he once lived. In his own way, he was imprisoned. Once free he was driven from his native land to be exiled in France, and died a broken man. But hey, all that’s in the past: let bygones be bygones.

The history of our world is a story of people who were pilloried, imprisoned, burnt at the stake, or made to drink poison for thinking outside the box. The list of their names could go on for pages…

So what’s changed? Certainly not the desire to embrace radically new and different modes of thought. Few want that and far less could accept it. Most people want business as usual; little more, little less.

What’s really changed are people’s ability (most people’s) to embrace whole-heartedly concepts and ideals that aren’t part and parcel of their true character. Perhaps, at the most fundamental level, they understand instinctively that they’ll never be called upon to adopt certain ideas so long as they possess the capacity to pay lip-service to them.

After all, it’s in no one’s interest to live out new and radical percepts while simply pretending to understand, or tolerate them, will do.

Ideas can be controlled, those who espouse them cannot. Ideas can be defined, redefined, and interpreted this way or that; perhaps even edited, censored, or nullified. They can even become the subject of college courses and academic study, but only as long as those who originally elucidated them no longer intervene.

Dead men have it easy, but the ideas they birth during life are like an infant child abandoned on the plains of the Serengeti.

 

REBELLION

Q: “What are you rebelling against?”

A: “What have you got?”

The Wild One (1953)

 

The notion of rebellion is bullshit. It’s been the dominant paradigm of the so-called counterculture for 50 years or so, yet hasn’t existed in any tangible manner for the lion’s share of the time. Nor, for the matter, has a counterculture. So-called manifestations of “underground” culture – art, music, movies, publications – are simply expressions of those categories which exhibit a far smaller degree of success than their mainstream counterparts. Commerce alone decrees whether something is mainstream or relegated to the underground.

In the late-Seventies, a well known punk rock singer made a name for himself with an ironic anti-capitalist song called, “Kill The Poor”, and walked the streets of San Francisco in an “Eat The Rich” t-shirt. Today he lives in a multimillion-dollar house in the city’s Noe Valley; a house paid for by the very anti-capitalists who wore his band’s t-shirts and sported their own “Eat The Rich” bumper stickers on their vehicles. Obviously, one can’t go broke in the U.S. of A. selling platitudes to those who want to believe in them. Even more obviously; however easy it is to reject capitalism, it remains far harder to reject the results of its clear-cut success. One’s bank book doesn’t lie. For now, the same singer/songwriter who ironically penned, “Kill The Poor”, assures himself that he remains steadfast in his anti-authoritarian stance by affixing a “Kill Your Television” bumper sticker to his large-screen plasma TV. But the day perhaps draws near when the more hardcore of his fans storm his multimillion-dollar sanctuary and turn him into the main course at a punk rock barbecue.

In the Fifties leather jackets became a symbol of rebellion. Why? Because rebellious behavior was synonymous with people who role motorcycles, and motorcycles wore black leather jackets. Marlon Brando became the archetype of the postwar rebel in The Wild One, and the image stuck. Flash forward too the late-Seventies. In the years that intervened between The Wild One and the inception of punk rock, the archetype of the rebel became more important than rebellion itself. Behavior and lifestyle took a back seat to pure symbolism. The Ramones sported black leather jackets, but had probably never mounted a bike in their lives. In their wake, a whole generation donned “motorcycle jackets” as a visible  signifier of their rebellion, their outward rejection of mainstream values. But if mainstream values equated leather jackets with rebellion, were they actually more an extension of those values than a denial of them? Buying a leather jacket on mom and dad’s dime while living in their house in the suburbs represents a rejection of nothing.

Across the pond, in England, the leather jackets became a symbol of even greater potency. Why? Because it was an American archetype, and America remains a mysterious abstraction to the Brits. In England, punk was purportedly about “working class values” and being poor in a land with little or no jobs prospects. Yet all these poor punks sported expensive, brand new leather jackets with slogans or band names painted on the back. How is this possible? Simple; the kids bought the jackets with money from their dole checks. They were purchased courtesy of the British government; the same government they wished to destroy. Meanwhile, these rebels lived in their parent’s homes, ate meals there and probably watched the weekly episodes of Coronation Street with mum and dad. Today, 30 years later, it’s doubtful much has changed. These ‘kids’ now have kids of their own, watch the same programs, and eat the same food. Only now there is an excess of the sort of mediocre jobs such folks so mourned the absence of in the late-Seventies. Members of the punk band Chelsea who demanded the “right to work” in 1978, no doubt got it in spades. Be careful what you wish for…

Hippies embraced peace and love as a means of transcending the unthinking consumerism of the Baby Boom Era. Punks embraced hate and violence as a means of transcending the hippie ethic, and as a rejection of the emerging yuppie ethic. Of course, long hair or short, hippies and punks were one and the same. Both became yuppies when and if commerce permitted.

Today, erstwhile Sex Pistols front man Johnny Rotten dwells in an expensive seaside home in Venice, California, a stone’s throw from the pier there. In his yard is a hot-tub. Does his worldly success render him a hypocrite? Of course not. But there is surely an abyss that separates his real life from the message which subsidizes the details of it. The youth which continue to purchase Sex Pistols albums make take seriously the message of anarchism; but in truth, John’s success is more a story of capitalism. Selling the notion of anarchy to hundreds of thousands of consumers is still, at the end of the day, more a manifestation of capitalism than anarchy. In words, Johnny is an anarchist; in deeds, a capitalist. One is an abstraction, the other a reality. To know what he is, observe what he does. In truth, of course, Johnny is little more than a singer/songwriter. An entertainer.

Those who fancy themselves rebels place the label of integrity at a premium. Integrity?! Really? The idea has been in the air since Rebel Without A Cause, or before that. The Fountainhead. You have the archetype of the lone, rugged individualist who’d rather sacrifice everything than betray their unique vision, or relinquish their integrity. But think a moment; how many people do you run across in the course of a day who you imagine possess any degree of integrity whatsoever? And how many people have you encountered in your entire life possessed of what might be deemed a unique vision? Most people’s daily lives are bereft of unique visions and lack the need for integrity. Characters in novels and films grapple with such issues – the common man and woman only imagine they do, or wish they could. Another common theme interwoven with the notion of rebellion is the steadfast desire to never sell out. Again, most people will never even be presented with the opportunity to sell out. They have nothing to sell and no one wants to buy. Yet the idea remains central to their identity somehow. Since many people live their lives and practice their rebellion vicariously through certain celebrities. It’s the celebs that may most suffer the downside of this archetypal abstraction. Faux bad boys are the saints of the New Church, but if their ersatz rebellion should sell too well or to widely they are quickly cast aside as “sell outs”. The people harshest in their judgment of such types are folks who have never done anything whatsoever and never will. They purchase the product of the self-proclaimed outsider, imagining they are participants in the lifestyle or worldview being promoted. They aren’t. Those most vehement in their opposition to selling out are largely those whose only options are futile attempts to buy in. They buy into abstractions and ideals. They do so by buying the products created by those who seem to embody the ideals and abstractions they want so desperately to believe in – to claim as their own.

The rebellion in America over the last half century is a media-driven masterpiece of marketing. Over-the-counter counterculture. Punk was an extension of the Hippie Movement, which appeared to be an extrapolation of the Beat Generation. But was it? If most assume the Maynard G. Krebs character from The Many Loves of the Beat ethos, then the thread connecting it all seems fairly clear-cut. But Jack Kerouac was not Maynard G. Krebs. Jack was an arch-conservative. He was a lapsed Catholic in search of God. He was less a rebel than a man who desired to get married and live happily ever after. He desired above all a bourgeois conservative life, but lacked the ability to achieve even that. In short, he was a fuck-up. A loser. He spent far more years living with his mother – subsidized by her – than ever did hitchhiking across the U.S. Those who’ve followed in his wake hit the mark insofar as being fuck-ups and losers, but lost the message of conservatism so central to his true vision.

Jack’s pal William Burroughs was a trust fund kid, heir to a fortune from the adding machine company which long bore his family’s name. His faggot-junkie lifestyle and trips to Morocco were subsidized by an inherent fortune, as was his literary career. Again, this doesn’t necessary render him a hypocrite or invalidate his literary works – but I’m just sayin’…

Neal Cassidy, the larger-than life protagonist of Kerouac’s On The Road, seems a figure destined for literature. But then so do mentally-unbalanced chicks. What seems romantic on the printed page or movie screen is often, in real life, little more than a royal pain in the ass. Neal Cassidy was obviously a professional bullshit artist and a sociopath; a marginal personality who managed to get through life on a combination of lies and charm. Great character for a novel, horrible guy to have in your life. Though it’s endearing to know he could quote Schopenhauer. It’s a shame that none of the Beat Generation took his lead. If they had, things might have turned out different…

By the time On The Road came out, it was already a period piece. It took six years to get published and many of the events discussed within it were then ten years old. The America that Kerouac had set out to discover no longer existed. By the time the book had generated an audience, interstate highways had all but rendered hitchhiking a thing of the past. If Kerouac had documented his post-Road life, it may well have been called On The Couch. He devoted his time mostly to drinking and watching TV in his mother’s living room while she worked at a shoe factory to pay the bills. Sound pathetic? Well, maybe.

Mind you, this was the Golden Age of Television. Gin and daytime TV may have actually been far more intense than smoking dope in Denver, Colorado.

At the end of the day, Jack and Neal had the great good fortune of simply having good genes: they were born good looking. Let’s face it. America requires its rebels to be photogenic. Outsiders are only interesting or compelling insofar as they’re handsome. On The Road would never have sold had it been written by a pudgy nebbish or a pencil-necked geek.

There is an ancient bronze bust of the Greek god Apollo which – though it is well over 2,000 year old – resembles precisely a young Elvis Presley. The eyes, lips, nose, and contours of the face are identical. Obviously, our sense of aesthetics hasn’t changed much in two millennia. Nor has our capacity to confuse imagery with ideology changed much either. How can it be that an image, a face, a countenance, can encapsulate and manifest ideals so seemingly intangible? And in a manner so seemingly real?

Why is a mere actor, 50 years after his death, still synonymous in the minds of so many with rebellion? The life of James Dean amounts to this: he only ever play-acted three roles in three movies. Actors are by their very nature inauthentic. They pretend to be what they are not. Their stock-in-trade is a falsehood. Pretense. Dean was a guy paid to wear a costume and mouth lines written by someone else. He was a guy working for paycheck – no more, no less. James Dean had the incredible luck to die young. He never choose to live fast and die young, he just fucked up. He wasn’t acting out a philosophy, just acting. It’s doubtful that he even had a philosophy.

The Beats, for all their faults, were at least well read. They could quote Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Dante, The Vedas; you name it. The Hippies read maybe Herman Hesse or Carlos Castaneda, but most of their information about the world of ideas was gleaned from Top 40 radio and long-playing records. In such a milieu, a literate figure like Jim Morrison seemed like a genius – the proverbial one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. Jim was so smart he could compare himself to Dionysus! Wow! To a generation raised on “Combat,” “Gunsmoke,” and “Ozzie and Harriett,” a guy who took a class in comparative mythology at U.C.L.A. must have looked the modern incarnation of The Oracle at Delphi.

Flash forward a decade or so… The audience is even less well-read with even fewer points of reference. They’ve never even heard of Melville, Whitman or The Vedas; or even Hesse or Castaneda. Enter a brilliant entrepreneur who witnessed the Paris Riots of May ’68 – or at least remembers it. Malcolm McLaren, who cut his teeth as manager of the New York Dolls (David Johansen called him their ‘haberdasher’), resurrects the hyperbole of Situationism to promote the emerging phenomenon of Punk Rock. Music critics bought into it hook, line and sinker. As did social critics. England was on the verge of collapse. Punk was a response to this collapse. McLaren had tied it all up with a bow and handed it to the Press.

The Paris Riots of May ’68 were, and still are, a wet dream to leftists. Student rebellions collapsed the government and youth took the reigns of power. Ten years later, tourists visiting the Sorbonne could still see the visible signs of the rebellion – where students had pried bricks from the pavement to throw at cops. One of the leading lights of Situationism was Guy Debord, who penned the movement’s manifesto, The Society Of The Spectacle. It maintained that in the modern world, very little was real anymore, that most of what transpires is pure spectacle – empty symbolism. Debord and his philosophy were obviously derided by those who “restored order” to Paris following the student uprisings. They conceded that the protesters were likely sincere, but following an “ill conceived,” “half-digested” philosophy that lacked any understanding of the world. Was it? Certainly it suffered from left-leaning idealism, but was the basic premise flawed? Are we not living in The Society Of The Spectacle? What Debord spoke of as a relative abstraction in 1968 is today a simple fact of life.

Malcolm McLaren took the Situationist images, slogans, et cetera, as his point of departure. Yet, he consciously knew he was marketing it all, that he was using The Society Of The Spectacle itself as a marketing tool. If Debord’s contention was correct, then so were McLaren’s actions. If society thrived on empty symbolism, he’d give it to them, explaining its meaning and collecting a check for so doing. And he did just that for a good long time. The critics ate it up. They loved it because it conformed to every falsehood and conceit they’d learned at university.

But at the end of the day The Pistols weren’t The Monkees, and McLaren was not Don Kirshner. Yet the similarities between the two were nonetheless eerie. As The Monkees proved uncontrollable, so did The Pistols. Neither group understood or appreciated the role played by their respective Svengalls. But were little more than studio musicians tossed together by producers. In the Sixties, The Monkees were treated as seriously as The Beatles, The Doors, or Hendrix. In the late-Seventies, The Sex Pistols were seen as the gold standard of the serious rock band. Why? Because of marketing, plain and simple.

But the marketing of The Pistols is precisely what renders them irrelevant. They were always intended to be a manifestation of The Society Of The Spectacle, never a refutation of it. Nor could they be. From the word go, they were empty symbolism; never a true threat. If four or five years on, you steal your haircut from David Bowie or your riffs from The Dolls, who’s threatened? In a better world, David Johansen might kick your ass, but I’m not holding my breath.

Empty symbolism is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Where yesterday there were meat and potatoes, today there’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of Twinkies, Ho Hos, and cotton candy; and the populace grows fat and satiated on a diet of meaninglessness. Sure, this smile sounds all together trite and corny. I wouldn’t even bother writing it, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s so fundamentally true. In terms of genuine rebellion, the meat and potatoes seem virtually nowhere to be found.

Bon Appetite!






18.12.20

Tickets de concertos: agora a lista do Tiago Carvalho - #1


 

#1    ---    

1989-11-24 Essa Entente, A Kausa, Critika, Capitão Fantasma, K4 Quadrado Azul, Censurados


# 2 ---------- 

1989-10-07 João Peste & o Acidoxibordel



#3 ------- 

1990-01-06 Mão Morta, Rua do Gin, Desperdícios Pós Apocalipse







As Melhores Músicas De Sempre (#6 e #7): Balla - "O Fim Da Luta" + Micro Audio Waves - "Down By Flow"


 Vá lá agora 2 portuguesas giraças para a mixtape:


Balla - "O Fim Da Luta"




Micro Audio Waves - "Down By Flow"





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