Clint Mansell - The Last Man

Jonestown: Vida e Morte no Templo do Povo

Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool

Jack Johnson (music by Miles Davis)

Miles Davis Story

Miles Davis, Kind Of Blue

Esperanza Spalding - "Wild Is The Wind"

Ballads, John Coltrane Quartet.

Richard Strauss - Metamorphosen - O. Klemperer, Philarmonia Orchestra

"In the summer of 1944, Strauss began to plan a large-scale piece for string ensemble in the nature of a funeral oration or lamentation. (...) The new piece would be called Metamorphosen - another homage to Ovid. Strauss had in mind the process by which souls revert from one state to another - though (...) the transformation may be a negative one, in which things devolve to their primordial state. The composer also took inspiration from a a short poem by Goethe, whose complete works he read from beguinning to end in his last years:

No one can know himself,
Detached from his self,
Yet he tries to become every day
What is finally clear from the outside,
What he is and what he was,
What he can and what he may.

Strauss finished Metamorphosen on April 12, 1945. Franklin Delano Roosevelt died the same day. (...) That afternoon in the ruins of Berlin, the Berlin Philarmonic presented an impeccably Hitlerish program that included Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Bruckner's Romantic Symphony, and the Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung. After the concert, members of the Hitler Youth distributed cyanide capsules to the audience, or so the rumor went. Hitler marked his fifty-sixth birthday on April 20. Ten days later, he shot himself in the mouth. in accordance with his final instructions, the body was incinerated alongside that of Eva Braun.

Hitler possilby envisaged his immolation as a reprise of that final scene of the Ring, in which Brünnhilde builds a pyre for Siegfried and rides into the flames. Or he may have hoped to reenact the love-death of Tristan - whose music, he once told his secretary, he wished to hear as he died. Walther Funk thought that Hitler had modeled the scorched-earth policy of the regime's last phase on Wagner´s grand finale: "Everything had to go down in ruins with Hitler himself, as a sort of false Götterdämmerung." Such an extravagant gesture would have fufilled the prophecy of Walter Benjamin, who wrote that fascist humanity would "experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure."

 But there is no evidence that the drug-addled Führer was thinking about Wagner or listening to music in the last days and hours of his life. Eyewitness reports suggest that the grim ceremony in the bombed-out Chancellery garden - two gasoline-soaked corpses burning fitfully, the one intact, the other with its skull caved in - was something other than a work of art.

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise - Listening to the Twentieth century, Harper Perennial, 2009, pp. 367-370

Leonor Fini, L'Homme aux masques (1949)

Astor Piazzolla -- Loving - Kronos Quartet - Leonor Fini.

Roy Eldridge, I Can't Get Started

a quimera da felicidade

"Então o homem, flagelado e rebelde, corria diante da fatalidade das coisas, atrás de uma figura nebulosa e esquiva, feita de retalhos, um retalho de impalpável, outro de improvável, outro de invisível, cosidos todos a ponto precário, com a agulha da imaginação; e essa figura, — nada menos que a quimera da felicidade, — ou lhe fugia perpetuamente, ou deixava-se apanhar pela fralda, e o homem a cingia ao peito, e então ela ria, como um escárnio, e sumia-se, como uma ilusão."

 Machado de Assis, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, Loc. 195-99.

comparison of the English boarding school to a totalitarian regime.

"I think it was that last point which impressed itself upon me most, and which made me shudder with recognition when I read Auden’s otherwise overwrought comparison of the English boarding school to a totalitarian regime. The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is “systematic.” The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong. The ability to run such a “system” is among the greatest pleasures of arbitrary authority, and I count myself lucky, if that’s the word, to have worked this out by the time I was ten. Later in life I came up with the term “micro-megalomaniac” to describe those who are content to maintain absolute domination of a small sphere. I know what the germ of the idea was, all right. “Hitchens, take that look off your face!” Near-instant panic. I hadn’t realized I was wearing a “look.” (Face-crime!) “Hitchens, report yourself at once to the study!” “Report myself for what, sir?” “Don’t make it worse for yourself, Hitchens, you know perfectly well.” But I didn’t. And then: “Hitchens, it’s not just that you have let the whole school down. You have let yourself down.” To myself I was frantically muttering: Now what? It turned out to be some dormitory sex-game from which—though the fools in charge didn’t know it—I had in fact been excluded. But a protestation of my innocence would have been, as in any inquisition, an additional proof of guilt.

(...)

There were other manifestations, too. There was nowhere to hide. The lavatory doors sometimes had no bolts. One was always subject to invigilation, waking and sleeping. Collective punishment was something I learned about swiftly: “Until the offender confesses in public,” a giant voice would intone, “all your ‘privileges’ will be withdrawn.” There were curfews, where we were kept at our desks or in our dormitories under a cloud of threats while officialdom prowled the corridors in search of unspecified crimes and criminals. Again I stress the matter of sheer scale: the teachers were enormous compared to us and this lent a Brobdingnagian aspect to the scene.

 In seeming contrast, but in fact as reinforcement, there would be long and “jolly” periods where masters and boys would join in scenes of compulsory enthusiasm—usually over the achievements of a sports team—and would celebrate great moments of victory over lesser and smaller schools. I remember years later reading about Stalin that the intimates of his inner circle were always at their most nervous when he was in a “good” mood, and understanding instantly what was meant by that. And yet it still wasn’t fascism, and the men and women who ran this bizarre microcosm were dedicated in their own weird way. The school was on the edge of Dartmoor—the site of the famously grim prison in Waugh’s Decline and Fall—and haggard, despairing escaped convicts were more than once recaptured after hiding in the sheds on our cricket grounds. Yet the natural beauty of the region was astonishing, and our teachers were on hand all day and at weekends, many of them conveying their enthusiasm for birds and animals and trees. We were all of us compelled to sit through lessons in the sinister fairy tales of Christianity as well, and nature was sometimes enlisted as illustrating god’s design, but I can’t pretend that I hated singing the hymns or learning the psalms, and I enjoyed being in the choir and was honored when asked to read from the lectern on Sundays."

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir, Loc. 934-60

Worse still

"It is a terrible thing to feel sorry for one’s mother or indeed father. And it’s an additionally awful thing to feel this and to know the impotence of the adolescent to do anything at all about it. Worse still, perhaps, is the selfish consolation that it isn’t really one’s job to rear one’s parents."

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir, Loc. 296-98

contingency, absurdity, and horror

"Cogito: In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy you criticize the attempts of Aristotle to found morality on human nature, and of Kant to found it on the nature of reason itself. But if all the big theories have indeed failed, and if there is no prospect of a successor, what is left of moral philosophy?

Williams: I think an awful lot is left of it. People are always asking, ‘What would you put in its place?’ If they mean, ‘What item(s) of the same sort would I put in its place?’, the answer is none. There is a great deal of difference between, on the one hand, theoretical structures that enable us to think about the relation of ethics to the world and, on the other hand, moral or ethical theories that are supposed to tell us how to decide what to do. The removal of the latter, which is the main focus of my book, seems to me to remove very little at the moral level. Take, for example, the ethics of Aristotle. Not everyone who is a good agent, on Aristotle’s view, needs to be armed with Aristotelian theory. In fact, one of the things he says in his book is that you won’t be able to understand it unless you are already a good agent. I simply do not believe that what keeps most people going through their ethical lives is something in the form of a theory; and I don’t think that what is needed to sustain moral life is philosophers’ producing more theories. I do accept that there are images and conceptions which help people to organize their experience, and may thus be useful at the political level. I have in mind images of what societies are—whether they are organic, or based on a contract, or whatever. Such images may help us to think about our relation to the State, what the powers of the State should be, and so on. Some sort of conceptual apparatus for thinking about these issues is especially important in modern society, where such things as open discussion and transparency are both particularly important and particularly vulnerable. And of course these political conceptions will have consequences and implications for ethics. On my view, it is a mistake to start with the theories of ethics and then ask what we are to do if they are all discredited. Rather, we should say, ‘Look, we find ourselves living under certain kinds of pressures to make the world sensible to ourselves. How much and what kind of theory do we need?’ Then we’ll see how ‘theoretical’ the structures will need to be to serve their purpose.

(...)

We also have to accept, in my view, that human affairs are largely shaped by luck, contingency, and even absurdity. People sometimes do find themselves in situations that seem to them to be absurdly, even surreally horrible. There is therefore a tension here. Ethical thought is bound to address itself to the usual—that’s almost a matter of necessity. But we live in a world in which the usual is constantly subverted by contingency, absurdity, and horror. How can we reconcile those two things? It may help to distinguish here, not between the fantastic and the real, but between extraordinary and ordinary cases. Having made this distinction, I think there are two things we can say about the use of extraordinary examples. The first is that the extraordinary should be represented in realistic terms. If we draw our extraordinary examples from science fiction, or from wildly counterfactual stories, the effect can be very misleading. It insulates you from their horror, for one thing. Also, it confuses the difference between the fantastic and the extraordinary because, by being contrary to the laws of nature, such examples make us think that the extraordinary belongs to another world. And it’s very important that it doesn’t. So we should take realistic examples of the extraordinary. Some of the torture and threat cases are relevant here, e.g. those that turn on the sorts of threat that actual terrorists do use. Take, for example, being in a room with twenty innocent people, where the terrorists take one out of the room every hour and shoot them. Questions about what you should do in cases like that are, I think, perfectly proper in moral philosophy. The second consideration which is very important here is whether the extraordinary case is one from which anything can be learned. One of the troubles about the method of principle and counter-example in moral philosophy is that it always assumes that the case is one from which you can learn something of a general kind, that is, that you can modify your principle. Now some cases are of this kind: what you may learn is that a certain kind of extraordinary case is continually coming up, so you’d better be prepared for it. But consider, on the other hand, the sort of extraordinary case that comes up in tragic drama. Such cases may teach us something about moral psychology, but nothing about general questions of moral principle. Some moral philosophers seem to think that the whole of the moral world can be tamed by principle, and if your current principles aren’t serving too well, you should get yourself some more complicated ones. But not every form of extreme situation should be reacted to in that way.

(...)

I suppose I was also dimly aware of something that Nietzsche reminds us of, which is that the material conditions for the production of things of value, including morality itself, often rest on the violation of morality. I’ve always been impressed by the thought that if you took morality absolutely as seriously as it demands, almost nothing that we value would exist. It seems to me that this conflict requires us to rethink entirely the balance between rules and constraints, on the one hand, and various sorts of creativity on the other.

(...)

Cogito: In 1979 the Williams Report was published, the report of a committee you chaired on pornography. In view of your rather modest conception of the competence of moral philosophy, what role do you think philosophers can and should play in the formation of public policy on such matters?

Williams: I don’t have modest views about the competence of moral philosophy. Or rather, I have modest views about one thing in particular: its supposed authority as based on theory. It seems to me that a lot of the pretensions of moral philosophy to contribute to public policy are based on a false view of its authority as based on theory. The idea seems to be that someone will turn up on a Royal Commission, or a hospital board, and claim to have an authoritative voice because they have taken a degree in moral philosophy, or have a PhD in applied ethics, or whatever, I really do think that, taken at face value, this is just nonsense. You can get an academic qualification without having any practical judgement whatever; and how can we expect that someone who hasn’t got any judgement in other matters will be competent to make good decisions in, say, medical ethics? However, I don’t underestimate the powers of moral philosophy— particularly if it’s historically informed—to serve a number of valuable roles in relation to public policy. For one thing, it’s helpful in sorting out one argument from another. I am strongly opposed to the claim that analytic expertise is a monopoly of philosophers—that, I think, is an insult to other people who think clearly about anything—but there is a certain level of abstraction that philosophers, in virtue of their analytic training, may help with.

(...)

Second, some expertise in moral philosophy may help you to get some hold on aspirations and ideals that are rather ill-defined, and to focus them onto a particular case. They may help you to see that a certain dispute is a species of a more general kind of argument, or resembles an argument that is going on in another area. If you are lucky and approach the matter in the right way, you may be able to unite ethical ideas from apparently very different domains. So I don’t think that moral philosophy is all that limited in relation to public policy; I think its limitation is only in respect of a false model of its authority as based upon theory. A further point about the pornography case is that you have to remember that the report was a public policy document of a very special kind, namely, a legislative proposal within a given state. As such, it is a public document, and one that must couch itself in terms of the discourse of that politics and that legislature. For instance, suppose that my colleagues on that commission and I had felt that the constitution of the USA was much better in this respect than that of England, because it founds pornography legislation on the First Amendment, on a right of free speech of a very unqualified kind. It would have been no good our saying, ‘Everyone has an absolute right to free speech, as expressed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution’, because that is not part of the political tradition in which we were operating. You have to start from the law, and the understanding of the law, that are already in place. This produces a particular kind of political discourse. It’s not necessarily conservative, but it has to be continuous, i.e. it must address itself to the ideas that are expressed in existing institutions and practices. Moral philosophy may help here because it may help you to see what is essential and what is not. But of course it isn’t sufficient, because you still have to have the political judgement to determine what is practicable.

(...)

Cogito: Campaigners for a ban on pornography have traditionally cast their argument in causal terms—porn is sometimes defined as material that will ‘deprave and corrupt’. Now according to conventional views about causality, causal claims involve us in counterfactual conditionals, i.e. claims about what would have happened if… But claims about what would have been the case raise notorious problems for philosophers interested in their truthconditions. Do you think such propositions have definite truth-conditions? And if so, could we hope to know them? Or is this an area in which ideological bias will always prevail on either side? 

Williams: I don’t think that the metaphysical issues about the truth of counterfactuals are relevant here, because there are clearly acceptable counterfactuals about public matters. For example, we may all agree that if certain events hadn’t happened at Chernobyl, there would not have been an explosion; or that if a lot of people hadn’t started smoking, the incidence of lung cancer would be much lower. So I’m not worried about that. There is, however, another feature of counterfactuals which is clearly relevant to public policy debates. In philosophers’ jargon, counterfactuals are not monotonic—that is, you can’t get from ‘if p then q’ to ‘if p and r, then q’. This is of course the whole basis of David Lewis’ theory of counterfactuals, which relies on the similarity of possible worlds.

Cogito: Your most recent book is entitled Shame and Necessity. Can you give our readers, in a few words, some idea of its contents? 

Williams: It’s a study, in good part a historical study, of ethical ideas found in the earliest ancient Greek literature, particularly Homer and the tragedians. I’m concerned mainly with literature that was written before Socrates and Plato, although there is some discussion of Aristotle. Its negative aim is to combat a certain view of our relation to those ethical ideas, a view that I label ‘progressivism’. On this view, the ancient Greeks had certain primitive, elementary, pre-modern (even pre-moral) ethical ideas on such matters as moral responsibility, guilt, and so on. That progressivist view is associated with celebrating what all of us will regard as improvements: the abolition of chattel slavery, an improved respect for the equality of women, and so on. My thesis in brief is, firstly, that the ethical ideas of ancient Greece have been misunderstood; secondly, that we have much more in common with the ancient Greeks than we believe. A lot of the ideas that actually ‘keep us going’ are fundamentally the same, I argue, as those of that world; and in so far as ours are different in some respects, they may even be worse. We have fooled ourselves into believing that we have a more purified notion of moral responsibility than we have. This belief is thus a form of illusion. To the extent that our situation represents progress or an improvement over theirs, understanding that progress requires the ancient ideas rather than our modern ones. Put another way, the degree of self-understanding of post-Enlightenment ethics is rather poor. I don’t want to take the archaising, reactionary view and say, ‘The Enlightenment has been a terrible disaster— back to the Greeks!’ If you were to go all the way back to the ancient Greeks, you’d get a very black picture indeed. Of course there has been some progress: our ethical situation is not theirs, because the modern world isn’t the ancient world. But there is more in common, ethically, than people think, and we actually mislead ourselves when we suppose otherwise.

"Bernard Williams" in, Andrew Pyle, Key Philosophers Conversation, Loc. 2759-76, 2910-24.

Once corroded, it is virtually impossible to restore.

"The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society. The great Jane Jacobs noted as much with respect to the very practical business of urban life and the maintenance of cleanliness and civility on city streets. If we don’t trust each other, our towns will look horrible and be nasty places to live. Moreover, she observed, you cannot institutionalize trust. Once corroded, it is virtually impossible to restore. And it needs care and nurturing by the community—the collectivity—since with the best of intentions no one person can make others trust him and be trusted in return."

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, Highlight Loc. 689-93.

One person steadies the ladder, another climbs. Why?

"All collective undertakings require trust. From the games that children play to complex social institutions, humans cannot work together unless they suspend their suspicion of one another. One person holds the rope, another jumps. One person steadies the ladder, another climbs. Why? In part because we hope for reciprocity, but in part from what is clearly a natural propensity to work in cooperation to collective advantage. Taxation is a revealing illustration of this truth. When we pay taxes, we make quite a lot of assumptions about our fellow citizens. In the first instance, we assume that they will pay their taxes too, or else we would feel unfairly burdened and would in due course withhold our own contributions. Secondly, we trust those we have placed in temporary authority over us to collect and spend the cash responsibly. After all, by the time we discover that they have embezzled or wasted it, we shall have lost a lot of money. Thirdly, most taxation goes towards either paying off past debt or investing in future expenditures. Accordingly, there is an implicit relationship of trust and mutuality between past taxpayers and present beneficiaries, present taxpayers and past and future recipients—and of course future taxpayers who will cover the cost of our outlays today. We are thus condemned to trust not only people we don’t know today, but people we could never have known and people we shall never know, with all of whom we have a complicated relationship of mutual interest. 
(...) But who is ‘we’? Whom exactly do we trust?"

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land,  Highlight Loc. 654-65; 670.

Eastern Sounds - Yusef Lateef

Para o Carlos - O grande Imediato!

Wystan Hugh Auden - As I Walked Out One Evening

W. H. Auden - Tell Me The Truth About Love

Philip Larkin - High Windows

High Windows
by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives —
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin: Love and Death in Hull

Tears from the Children - Modern Jazz Quartet

&

Digging, Seamus Heaney

Like someone in love, Paul Bley

Jorge de Sena, Entrevista em Moçambique, julho de 1972

Jorge de Sena "Poemas seleccionados e ditos pelo autor" (1974)

The Scarlet Letter (1926, Victor Sjöström)

Black Narcissus (1947 -Michael Powell)

Lamento Della Ninfa

God on Trial (D: Andy de Emmony)

Lament - Dylan Thomas

Lament

When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Nine-pin down on donkey's common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings' wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a half
And the black beast of the beetles' pews
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),
Not a boy and a bit in the wick-
Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,
I whistled all night in the twisted flues,
Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,
And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!-
Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,
Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,
Whatsoever I did in the coal-
Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a man
And the black cross of the holy house,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),
Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,
No springtailed tom in the red hot town
With every simmering woman his mouse
But a hillocky bull in the swelter
Of summer come in his great good time
To the sultry, biding herds, I said,
Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,
And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was half the man I was
And serve me right as the preachers warn,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),
No flailing calf or cat in a flame
Or hickory bull in milky grass
But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,
At last the soul from its foul mousehole
Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;
And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,
Gristle and rind, and a roarers' life,
And I shoved it into the coal black sky
To find a woman's soul for a wife.

Now I am a man no more no more
And a black reward for a roaring life,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room
I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw--
For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

Let my children hear music - Charles Mingus