among the gaffa trees 2

Spotted among the gaffa trees

exile in gaffa 2

exile in gaffa

no more, no more...

...and further even...

No more people 3

...further and further in...

No more people 2

I'll be making my retreat into the woods

deviation

This is absolutely amazing. Reminds me that hardest body to posess is your own. Should make a nice anatomy study once I'm back to drawing such things.

No more people

No more drawings of people for a few days.

Sometimes I feel we are simply too many. Craving for the same, of which there is too little, we step on each other's toes in our mad rush for salvation. In blind panic we claw at each other like a drowning man at his would-be saviour. Caught between fear and desire, we become murderous and petty, like so many rush-hour christmas shoppers, stabbing for possession of that last useless shiny trinket. We create abstract notions of scarcity by our greed. We create abstract notions of desire, by the projection of our emptiness. And the real scarcity, and the real desire, and the real emptiness, get masked under the light and thunder of pain and anger, and are put aside, and forgotten, but for that weight in the chest, that vacuum that hurts, the absence of something you cannot quite put your finger on...

And when it becomes too crowded, that simple gift - happiness - seems too childish, its voice too soft to sound important in face of the thunderous shoutings of pain and anger and turbulent feelings. And it gets silenced. Happiness, the seeking of it, was never a subject of public policy. It never launched a vessel, never started a war, never kept a love affair afloat. It just doesn't seem important enough. Need, greed, and fear, those make the world go 'round...in a downward spiral, so it seems...

And when it becomes too crowded, you all seem so many, I forget to love you. I forget you are all a bit of me. Even if I can still say it. And I would trade the whole blue globe for a bubble with room for two.

So no more drawings of people for a few days. Not until I love you all again...

Chiquita

Ok, she was young and frisky...but a bit of a dog...:)

ephemera

Braga. Last time I was here I came hunting for the sun with the moon. This time they tell me it has something to do with a shooting star.

Whatever the ephemeral alibi, it is the North of Portugal, so you have little choice but to eat 'till you burst and drink 'till you fall. I also got to read 'till I slept, quite cozy, with a fireplace at my feet and a young lady improbably called chiquita on my lap. She was a bit too young for me, but I wasn't complaining. Also, she didn't shave her legs, so I guessed she was either french or a leftie. Again, that was fine by me either way. Ok, ok, her picture will go up on the next post, you perverts :)

Will it?

The Dynamic of a Bush Scandal: How the Spying Story Will Unfold (and Fade)

I am too tired to comment upon this, but it should be read even if only for the sake of the violent discussion that ensued from the article itself. Maybe people are finally getting angry enough, at least around the fringe.

Memories from Skydiving: My first solo jump

Exiting the plane, no place to hold on to, no ground under my feet. Then the plane itself, last remnant of a perceived connection to the safe and solid world, lifts away from the field of vision. Nothing but emptyness remains, a freefall with no bearings. No hope but to just let go, and concede...

There are days when life feels just like this.

Mug Shot

Deep into Lisbon winter. Now, this is a true mug-shot! :)

wide eyed

Was he seeing the same?

Restless hands

Lovely, creatively shifting, moving, sliding, curling-up, restless hands.

on the bus

He kept sneering in a very particular fashion. I wonder what was on his mind.

The good, the bad, and the beautiful

As I was coming down Lisbon's Chiado, speakers were shouting tepid christmas music into the street. Some sort of plastic voice radio presenter explained how we should all be happy that the city hall decided to give us this oportunity to do our shopping to the sound of bottled ,predictable, hypnotic, boring christmas music. It reminded me of BusTV and made me sick.

But a little further down, I heard some very nice playing of drums. This girl with a very friendly smile was playing her drums while her friend asked passerby's for coins. They were also giving a couple of little puppies away.

It was all so nice and warm and cute, I just stopped there and made a drawing of them.

Some beautiful things manage to survive even the Christmas rush.

Sensory Overload

Today was a day of excessive stimuli. Too much of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Too much joy, too little, too brief, too much beauty, too much ugliness, all separated by too little time. I am far too tired to describe it all. So I'll just single out a random moment.

As I was going home, on the subway, I looked around. Now, lately, I've been finding that people vary, physically, mostly in rather discrete ways. Sometimes I despair of being able to get, not a likeness really, but a difference. Not today. As I looked around I was surrounded by so much beauty, so much ugliness, so much difference...

A man with such a strange cartoonish nose...so wide and flat on the top, so thin and round on the bottom; a woman, her face so long I couldn't believe it; an old man with a huge jaw; a fantastic bulging vein on the back of another man's hand; a girl with protruding jaw and pouting lips... It was all so much, all of a sudden, that I could not take a pick. I was too tired. Like a boy in a toy shop that is just too huge, I jusr gave up, relaxed, and took no notes at all. My brain was buzzing with a far too stratospheric high...

Triptych

This portrait turned into a triptych as I decided I could not lose the curve of right shoulder, that beautiful strap pressing down against the skin, or the shape of the right arm. I love the way her whole body leaned to the right at a sharp angle. Unfourtunately, the moleskine could not be opened down, for the right hand was holding the left one in a most delightful way, that would have lent a different grace and balance to the whole composition...some mistakes cannot be corrected...

Good Intentions (3)

Good Intentions (2)

Good Intentions (1)

In an attempt to concentrate on my maths I started carrying around a squared (what a crime!) moleskine in my pocket, instead of my usual japanese pocket album. The end result was a little more maths done...

...and a lot of drawings on squared paper....:(

Is there no hope for me?

Independence Day

Today, December the 1st, Portugal commemorates the national holiday consecrated to the restoration of independence. Notice that mostly we commemorate the national holiday (we love holidays) more than the restoration or the independence themselves.

But that's not all.

While Portugal commemorates the fact that it got rid of the Spanish...

...Spain commemorates the fact that it got rid of the Portuguese. :)

Some would perhaps venture that the fact that Spain has no holiday for it (though it actually got the better deal) is probably one of the reasons it is now much richer than Portugal...:)

Next month, on January the 1st, both countries commemorate the loss of their independence, with their peaceful anexation by the European Community in 1984.

It is sort of a christian thing, isn't it? Comemorating the death and ressurrection, only in this case we do it in reverse...

SOS BusTV

One of the most surreal ads on BusTV, currently, is the one by SOS racismo, a Portuguese organization against racism. Why surreal? First because the whole ad is based upon a childish music that registers on the high frequencies and gets into your head in a truly horrid way. Really, on a bus it sound so condescending, I have hallucinations about being treated like one of those poor old men that fall into those terrible nursing homes that treat them like children - or like sheep. Second, because it is quite amazing that a supposedly humanitarian association should torture citizens like this.

Don't you realize that your little ad does nothing but make people angry - and therefore turn them against you, and, by association, against your cause? Why do you share ad space usually reserved for parasites like Cofidis and friends? Are you just another money-grabbing corporation?

The only way your ad connects with your cause is that it is truly - dare I say it? - indiscriminate. Like Carpet bombing.

Is that what you mean by being against discrimination? That you torture all citizens in the same measure, without care for colour or religion?

I will assume you just made a mistake. I will assume it, of course, once you take your ad out of BusTV and stop implicitly supporting this attack upon the human rights of citizens.

PS: Oops! SOS racismo has answered my email and stated they have no knowledge of such and ad. I am pretty sure that I am not mistaken, but my disgust for ads on public transportations (and the fact that I mostly hear them, not look at them) may have caused me to confuse them with some other association of the same type. I will clarify this tomorrow, until then consider this post as an un-confirmed rumour, with apologies if I do turn out to be mistaken.

UPDATE: The ad was not running today anymore, so I couldn't confirm the logo on it, but I asked another passenger if she remembered the ad and she said she remembered it clearly and that the logo was indeed from "SOS racismo". So this isn't really proof, but either we are all going senile or "SOS racismo"'s right hand doesn't know what the left is doing...I still haven't heard back from them, so I'll just wait...

Shanghai Daily reports:

Bus stops to install TV screens

Waiting for the bus will no longer be quite so boring as bulletin boards with TV screens will be installed at bus stops. The screens will broadcast everything from entertainment programs and traffic news to weather forecasts and how long it will take before the next bus arrives, the Shanghai Urban Transport Bureau announced yesterday. The screens will be installed at more than 3,000 stops and the project will be completed by 2007. (...)

(Shanghai Daily, 2005-11-25 05:18:13)


In other news, TV screens to be installed at the crapper in your bathroom. TV screens to be installed at hospital surgery rooms. TV screens to be installed in prison cells at Guantanamo Bay. I have an idea: Why don't they just install them inside our eyelids at birth and be done with it once and for all? Waiting for death "will no longer be quite so boring". There's nothing boring about torture, after all.

Auditory Terrorism

The first time I noticed BusTV (on a Vimeca Bus) was quite curious. I was reading my book when suddenly I heard the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun going off, which I thought was quite at odds with the usual auditory landscape of Lisbon's outskirts. Were we being attacked by a bunch of Al-Qaeda operatives armed with ak-47s and an itch to scratch? I'd rather wish we were, at least Bin Laden I could handle - but when I lifted my eyes and noticed the TV screen for the first time, I knew we were in real trouble!...

Now, I don't know about you, but I think that a commercial for a first-person shooter ("Battlefield 2", as I recall) is not exactly what people need on their commute to the job at 8 AM. Not exactly relaxing to hear plastic explosive cum small weapons fire simphonies in a crowded bus. The insensitivity of the choice is quite amazing in fact. Would they play the same commercial in a London Bus? I am sure any Londoner would appreciate crossing Tavistock Square by the sound of explosives going off! I can just picture them on the mobile: "Could you say that again, love? I couldn't catch it because of the rocket launcher firing". What about on the subway, would you appreciate such a commercial there? Who the hell decides these things? Are they imbecils?

Are they terrorists?

BusTV: Why in English?

Why do I write in English about Portuguese BusTV - clearly a local matter? Because it is not local.

BusTV is a global menace that is already spreading. Corporate drones do not miss any niches. There is BusTV in Portugal now, but there are also plans to take it to Spain. There is BusTV in some London buses now, I've seen it myself. And there is a veritable plague of BusTV in Hong-Kong. A group of citizens has protested this abomination over there (see the "Hush the Bus" campaign site). I found their site accidentaly while googling for information on Portuguese BusTV, and found their predicament, and their views on it, quite similar to mine. This BusTV absurdity probably exists in many other places, but I am not aware of it (info is appreciated, especially if it has actually been stopped somewhere).

This is something that must be stopped now, and stopped everywhere. Even if we lose the fight in Portugal it can be won elsewhere - and I am hoping that some country in Europe will have the strength to bring this up at the EC level and legally ban this thing from the whole EU, as the attack that it is upon the rights of citizens.