It has been several years that I have been listening to Tom Zé - a happy, blissful love affair with his clicks, tones and melodic jolts. Tom Zé comes closest to distilling a feeling I have of ‘being’ in my skin, and his fusion of sound, humour and poetry fills me with sweet waves of contentment.
“When I saw
That the Plaza of the Afflicted
Wasn’t wide enough
To hold my affliction
I went to live at the Station of Light
Because everything was dark
Inside my heart”
He plays with and breaks down sounds and meanings, rebuilding and destroying at the same time. There are a couple of academic articles about him I just found:
Tom Zé and the Tropicalist Experience
“When I arrived from the stars
I entered the earth
Through a cave
Called birth
I was a ship
a bird
from a Hail Mary
And like a beast
that roars
I entered the atmosphere
And spit, squeezed
A vegetable morsel
Forcing my way through
The barrier
Bleeding, tearing
Climbing the hillside
Inverted orgasm
I screamed when I saw
I was already breathing”
Zé radically illuminated the possible, but inevitable, horror of self-realization with the song “Nave Maria” (from Brazil Classics 4). The title is an obvious play on the Catholic phrase; Catholicism is the principle European-derived religion of Latin America, and its annual and repetitious rituals were criticiZéd by the Tropicalistas. Maria represents the mother, and in this song Zé seems to portray her as real mother, spiritual mother, and perhaps the cultural European mother of Brazil. This tale of a screaming birth, an “inverted orgasm,” in which the baby struggles and crawls through the bleeding barrier of the vagina, only to scream when reality first confronts him, can be taken as an allegory of Brazil and its long, harsh struggle to break free of its past and enter the future. Zé is saying Brazil must kick and scream to get on the other side. *(from the second link above)*
He does of course have a website (in Portugese), and there are some nice reviews of his work available. David Byrne who (quite rightly) loves Tom Zé, has him as an artist for his label Luaka Bop.
See individual entry…I’m making it clear to confuse you,
I’m confusing you to make things clear.
I’m illuminating so I can blind,
I’m going blind so I can guide.
{conspiracy-theory warning!} I am being patient before my full out rant about the total lack of evidence for WMD. Yes, I would have assumed that the ‘thousands’ of tons of chemical and biological agents should have bee tripped over by now. But I think the US are patiently waiting, setting up some credible scenario of discovered weapons. I know this is all so ‘conspiracy-theory’ - but they can’t afford to not find weapons. A spectacular find will smoothly oil the justification for the war (future ones too). And as anyone knows, a good show needs good planning. They will hold off on UN inspectors, but bring them in once everything is set up just right, to try to bring a soupçon of respectability to the whole thing. The article in the Times yesterday was a little more forward in it’s many worries about this whole scenario:
“On Hoon’s account, the regime was organised and skilful enough to dismantle, transport and hide all these weapons beyond the detective skills of US forces, and yet so disorganised that it could not retrieve and deploy even one.”
The US/UK are desperately treading water at the moment, hoping to hold out until the big cruise ship (courtesy of the Ministry of Truth) comes and rescues them. How’s that for a cynical point of view?
[1] That’s weapons of mass destruction - not odd boxes of vials of out of date chemical agents, or unprepared shells, or pieces of old French Brie to use with slingshots, or whatever else they pass off as WMD…
My site has been down for about 12 days - the host server hacked into and all data destroyed. I’ll have to rebuild this blog from scratch - thanks to google cache I have all the text, but reentering the text will be tedious to say the least. I HATE wasting time I could spend on important things. This is a valuable lesson to keep 2 backups of all my data…
Update: Well I actually was more diligent than I thought - I had a backup of the MT database on my current working machine - so I didn’t even need to reenter any text (thus didn’t waste time). However line breaks are all in the wrong place - so many entries have had their formatting screwed up…
Went to see “In this World” last night, a road movie of two Afghan refugees trying to get to London, it follows them from a refugee camp (around Peshawar) in Pakistan. I have an incredibly sensitive point for ‘immigration’ and societal representation of ‘refugees’ - so this film was going to be affective for me. The film had an Iranian quality to it (narrative driven by images and phrasing, not by dialogue), but the director is actually English (Michael Winterbottom - made ‘Welcome to Sarajevo’) - the actors seemed to play themselves (all non-professional actors), and the almost documentary like quality meant the characters became very believable. The two main protagonists were framed as ‘economic-refugees’ - labelled by Policy and popular opinion in the West as an ‘unjustified’ form of immigration[1]. That the film selects the characters as economic migrants is important, so we see the faces and hear the voices of the most reviled of the refugees[2], those trying to make a better future for themselves. Their journey is (naturally) extremely difficult, and the traffickers often have little regard to their safety. The film never moralises though, but allows the story to unfold in its own time.
Interestingly, the main actor (Jamal), after the film had been shot and he was back in Pakistan, actually smuggled himself back into the UK (unknown to the Director), and is now living as a refugee in London!!! There is a section where Jamal is in Trieste, selling trinkets (lighters, sunglasses etc.) on the streets - it reminds me so much of my time in Italy, with hundreds of people selling this stuff everywhere. The film is shot entirely using a digital video camera, so has a certain ‘dogma’ feel to it, but that gives it a close and intimate quality. The film was deeply moving to me…
[1] Whereas the real distinction between political or economic immigration is often deeply blurred
[2] Reviled by ignorant xenophobes of course - and sentiments amplified exponentially by the press in baseless and hateful flurries of articles.