A beautiful scam!

"A beautifully bizarre law of that time, when the National Health started, was that if you were a junkie, you registered with your doctor, and that would register you with the government as being a heroin addict, and then you would get pure little heroin pills, with a little phial of distilled water to shoot it up with. And of course any junkie is going to double how much he says he needs. Now, at the same time, whether you wanted it or not, you got the equivalent in cocaine. The theory being that the coke would counteract the junk and maybe make the junkies useful members of society, on the grounds that if they take just the junk, they’ll lie down and meditate and read things and then shit and stink. And the junkies of course would sell off their cocaine. They doubled their actual need for heroin, so they’ve got half their heroin stash to sell off, plus all of the cocaine. A beautiful scam! And it was only when the program stopped that you really began to have a drug problem in the UK."

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor))
- Highlight Loc. 3801-8

I’m glad he filmed that, but Godard!

"The film Sympathy for the Devil is by chance a record of the song by us of that name being born in the studio. The song turned after many takes from a Dylanesque, rather turgid folk song into a rocking samba—from a turkey into a hit—by a shift of rhythm, all recorded in stages by Jean-Luc. The voice of Jimmy Miller can be heard on the film, complaining, “Where’s the groove?” on the earlier takes. There wasn’t one. There are some rare instrumental switches. I play bass, Bill Wyman plays maracas, Charlie Watts actually sings in the wooo-woooo chorus. As did Anita and maybe Marianne too. So far so good. I’m glad he filmed that, but Godard! I couldn’t believe it; he looked like a French bank clerk. Where the hell did he think he was going? He had no coherent plan at all except to get out of France and score a bit of the London scene. The film was a total load of crap—the maidens on the Thames barge, the blood, the feeble scene of some brothers, aka Black Panthers, awkwardly handing weapons to one another in a Battersea scrap yard. Jean-Luc Godard up until then made very well-crafted, almost Hitchcockian work. Mind you, it was one of those years when anything was flyable. Whether it would actually take off was another thing. I mean, why, of all people, would Jean-Luc Godard be interested in a minor hippie revolution in England and try to translate it into something else? I think somebody slipped him some acid and he went into that phony year of ideological overdrive."

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor))
- Highlight Loc. 3721-31 

O EU

Dolls, Kitano (2002)

Frans de Waal: Moral behavior in animals

La era ou el verano, Francisco Goya (1746-1828)

Por sugestão de um marcador de livros do Museo del Prado de 1996.

A different kind of fog

"It’s difficult to put those middle and late ’60s together, because nobody quite knew what was happening. A different kind of fog descended and much energy was around and nobody quite knew what to do with it. Of course, being so stoned all the time and experimenting, everybody, including me, had these vague, half-baked ideas. You know, “Things are changing.” “Yeah, but for what, for where?” It was getting political in 1968, no way to avoid that. It was getting nasty too. Heads were getting beaten. The Vietnam War had a lot to do with turning it around, because when I first went to America, they started drafting the kids. Between ’64 and ’66 and then ’67, the attitude of American youth was taking drastic turns. And then when you got the killings at Kent State in May of 1970, it turned really sour. The side effects hit everybody, including us. You wouldn’t have had “Street Fighting Man” without the Vietnam War. There was a certain reality slowly penetrating."

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor))

- Highlight Loc. 3690-97

It echoes something in the human body

"There’s something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it. We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute. The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross onto another track, the beat moves. It echoes something in the human body. So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us. The human body will feel rhythms even when there’s not one. Listen to “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it. It’s just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm. Rhythm really only has to be suggested. Doesn’t have to be pronounced. This is where they got it wrong with “this rock” and “that rock.” It’s got nothing to do with rock. It’s to do with roll."

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor))
- Highlight Loc. 3601-8

I’m doing it for me.

"Levitation is probably the closest analogy to what I feel—whether it’s “Jumpin’ Jack” or “Satisfaction” or “All Down the Line”—when I realize I’ve hit the right tempo and the band’s behind me. It’s like taking off in a Learjet. I have no sense that my feet are touching the ground. I’m elevated to this other space. People say, “Why don’t you give it up?” I can’t retire until I croak. I don’t think they quite understand what I get out of this. I’m not doing it just for the money or for you. I’m doing it for me."

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor))
- Highlight Loc. 3551-54

to fuck around with the sound / to create one thing

"Chicago blues was so raw and raucous and energetic. If you tried to record it clean, forget about it. Nearly every Chicago blues record you hear is an enormous amount over the top, loading the sound on in layers of thickness. When you hear Little Walter’s records, he hits the first note on his harp and the band disappears until that note stops, because he’s overloading it. When you’re making records, you’re looking to distort things, basically. That’s the freedom recording gives you, to fuck around with the sound. And it’s not a matter of sheer force; it’s always a matter of experiment and playing around. Hey, this is a nice mike, but if we put it a little closer to the amp, and then take a smaller amp instead of the big one and shove the mike right in front of it, cover the mike with a towel, let’s see what we get. What you’re looking for is where the sounds just melt into one another and you’ve got that beat behind it, and the rest of it just has to squirm and roll its way through. If you have it all separated, it’s insipid. What you’re looking for is power and force, without volume—an inner power. A way to bring together what everybody in that room is doing and make one sound. So it’s not two guitars, piano, bass and drums, it’s one thing, it’s not five. You’re there to create one thing."

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor))
- Highlight Loc. 3475-84

Flash

"But if someone said, “You can play only one of your riffs ever again,” I’d say, “OK, give me ‘Flash.’ ” I love “Satisfaction” dearly and everything, but those chords are pretty much a de rigueur course as far as songwriting goes. But “Flash” is particularly interesting. “It’s allllll right now.” It’s almost Arabic or very old, archaic, classical, the chord setups you could only hear in Gregorian chants or something like that. And it’s that weird mixture of your actual rock and roll and at the same time this weird echo of very, very ancient music that you don’t even know. It’s much older than I am, and that’s unbelievable! It’s like a recall of something, and I don’t know where it came from."

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor))

- Highlight Loc. 3537-42

the strangest TV discussion ever filmed

The same day we were released, the strangest TV discussion ever filmed took place between Mick—flown in by helicopter to some English lawn—and representatives of the ruling establishment. They were like figures from Alice, chessmen: a bishop, a Jesuit, an attorney general and Rees-Mogg. They’d been sent out as a scouting party, waving a white flag, to discover whether the new youth culture was a threat to the established order. Trying to bridge the unbridgeable gap between the generations. They were earnest and awkward, and it was ludicrous. Their questions amounted to: what do you want? We’re laughing up our sleeves. They were trying to make peace with us, like Chamberlain. Little bit of paper, “peace in our time, peace in our time.” All they’re trying to do is retain their positions. But such beautiful English earnestness, this concern. It was astounding. Yet you know they’re carrying weight, they can bring down some heavy-duty shit, so there was this underlying aggressiveness in the guise of all this amused curiosity. In a way they were begging Mick for answers. I thought Mick came off pretty well. He didn’t attempt to answer them; he just said, you’re living in the past.

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor))
- Highlight Loc. 3381-89

what a trip!

There’s not much you can really say about acid except God, what a trip! Stepping off into this area was very uncertain, uncharted. In the years ’67 and ’68 there was a real turnover in the feeling of what was going on, a lot of confusion and a lot of experimentation. The most amazing thing that I can remember on acid is watching birds fly—birds that kept flying in front of my face that weren’t actually there, flocks of birds of paradise. And actually it was a tree blowing in the wind.

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor))
- Highlight Loc. 3002-5

 

The Moroccan specialty was kef, the leaf cut up with tobacco, which they smoked in long pipes—sebsi, they called them— with a tiny little bowl on the end. One hit in the morning with a cup of mint tea. But what Achmed had in large quantities and which he imbued with a new glamour was a kind of hash. It was called hash because it came in chunks, but it wasn’t hash strictly speaking. Hash is made from the resin. And this was loose powder, like pollen, from the dried bud of the plant, compressed into shape. Which was why it was that green color. I heard that a way of collecting it was to cover children in honey and run them naked through a field of herb, and they came out the other end and they scraped ’em off. Achmed had three or four different qualities, decided by which kind of stocking he put it through. There would be the coarser ones, and there would be the twenty-four denier, very close to the dirham, the money. The high-quality one went through the finest, finest silk. It was just powder by then.

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor))
- Highlight Loc. 3198-3205

Coisas boas sobre o mal: duas visões

"Chegamos agora a uma descoberta que parece ser central para compreender a ideia e mal. O mal não tem, ou parece não ter, finalidade prática. O mal é supremamente inútil. Qualquer coisa monótona como uma finalidade mancharia a sua pureza letal.  Nisto assemelha-se a Deus que, a existir, não tem absolutamente nenhuma razão para fazê-lo. Ele é a sua própria razão de ser. E criou o universo, não por haver alguma finalidade, mas apenas por prazer (just for fun). O mal rejeita a lógica da causalidade. Se tivesse uma finalidade à vista, auto-dividir-se-ia, não seria auto-idêntico, estaria à frente de si mesmo. Mas o nada não pode ser dividido dessa forma. É por isso que não pode existir realmente no tempo. Pois o tempo é uma questão de diferença, e o mal é aborrecidamente e perpetuamente o mesmo. É neste sentido que se diz que o inferno é para toda a eternidade."

(Eagleton, Terry, On evil, Yale U.P., 2010, pp. 84-85. Tr LFB)

A visão literária: Um interessante livro que, a partir das ideias psicanalistas e marxistas (combinação exuberante!) realiza um estudo feito a partir de obras literárias para compreender o problema do mal.  

"The standard explanation is that the Holocaust (sadly, as we shall see, echoed in many cultures historically across the globe) is an example of the “evil” that humans are capable of inflicting on one another. Evil is treated as incomprehensible, a topic that cannot be dealt with because the scale of the horror is so great that nothing can convey its enormity. The standard view turns out to be widely held, and indeed the concept of evil is routinely used as an explanation for such awful behaviors: Why did the murderer kill an innocent child? Because he was evil. Why did this terrorist become a suicide bomber? Because she was evil. But when we hold up the concept of evil to examine it, it is no explanation at all. For a scientist this is, of course, wholly inadequate. What the Nazis (and others like them) did was unimaginably terrible. But that doesn’t mean we should simply shut down the inquiry into how people are capable of behaving in such ways or use a nonexplanation, such as saying people are simply evil. As a scientist I want to understand what causes people to treat others as if they were mere objects. In this book I explore how people can treat each other cruelly not with reference to the concept of evil, but with reference to the concept of empathy. Unlike the concept of evil, empathy has explanatory power. In the coming chapters I put empathy under the microscope."

Simon, Baron - Cohen, The Science of Evil, Basic Books, 2011, Highlight Loc. 114-24.

A visão científica: Uma tentativa de produzir uma explicação científica para a crueldade e para o problema do mal. O autor é um reconhecido psicopatologista da Universidade de Cambridge que aqui apresenta um estudo sobre a forma como aquilo que ele designa 'a corrosão da empatia' pode estar na origem do mal.
 

O sistema eleitoral da RAA

Em pequena entrevista, na última página do Diário Insular (20 Mar 012), o professor Carlos Amaral diz coisas certeiras sobre os problemas graves do sistema eleitoral açoriano:

"Nada obriga a Assembleia regional a crescer - a não ser a nossa vontade. (...) Um travão é absolutamente essencial para garantir um mínimo de racionalidade."

Comentário 1: Que a irracionalidade rege o sistema eleitoral já aqui foi registado. Com um sistema eleitoral onde parece impossível saber que deputado é que representa que eleitor - uma vez que não se vota em pessoas, mas sim em partidos - fica a questão de saber como é que "a nossa vontade" pode ser expressa de forma a impor a racionalidade. Um sistema irracional perpetua eternamente a irracionalidade, ou não?

"O modelo misto [vota-se e, como que por magia, são eleitos os deputados e os governantes, digo eu] que enforma o sistema eleitoral açoriano justificou-se numa determinada conjuntura histórica de arranque do processo autonómico. Há muito porém que deixou de servir."

Comentário 2: a história é quase sempre uma boa forma de justificar o injustificável.

"De duas uma: Ou as nossas ilhas são importantes, ou não são. Se são importantes há que assegurar a sua representação política (...) Se não são, então a única representação política que é necessária é estritamente demográfica (...). Por mim entendo que as ilhas são muito importantes para a nossa identidade como povo. Por isso defendo a reorganização da Assembleia regional em duas Câmaras: um Senado, de representação das ilhas e um Parlamento de representação estritamente demográfica. Por outro lado, entendo ainda que a actividade parlamentar regional não constitui actividade a tempo inteiro (...). Ela é perfeitamente compatível o exercício de actividades profissionais próprias. Ser deputado não pode ser uma profissão. Muito menos permanente! Antes, é actividade de cidadãos. Não de uma classe política, mas de todos os cidadãos, alternadamente."

Comentário 3: Está muito bem. Mas é toda uma visão da política que está errada. O lugar de deputado é a tempo inteiro (ainda que se tenha inventado a rotatividade, uma espécie de vou ali e já venho) e é emprego bom, bom, bom.
Para além do mais não se percebe como é que isso resolveria o problema do aumento constante de deputados eleitos. Não é apenas preciso reorganizar as formas de representação é também necessário reformular o sistema artificial de eleição dos representantes. 

E estamos cheios de reformados da política que nunca fizeram outra coisa que não política. E estamos cheios de jovens políticos que nunca farão outra coisa que não política. E há muitos à espera de um lugar. A política não só é profissão, como há, nos políticos, uma consciência de classe que os leva a auto e hetero protegerem-se. Longe vai o tempo em que para se praticar a política era preciso ter dado provas de honestidade, coragem e decência. Sobretudo, já ter resolvido as questões da casa (eco-nomos). Hoje basta ter gravata e um partido do arco como alavanca.

"Os partidos, convém ter presente, são instrumentos ao serviço da sociedade. Não lhes cabe, portanto, "abrir mão" do que não é deles. Não é aos partidos que cabe determinar o que é que os açorianos querem, mas aos próprios açorianos. A não ser, claro, que estes se demitam."

Comentário 4: Ok. Mas essa dos "próprios açorianos" é que parece não ter saída, ou então ser circular. Quem pergunta aos "próprios" o que eles querem? Os partidos. E como é que se faz essa pergunta? E como é que se faz com que os "próprios" compreendam a pergunta? Através dos partidos. É pois mais verossímil ser a sociedade um instrumento dos partidos.

E não me parece que "os próprios" se possam demitir, pois acredito que a política é parte essencial da natureza humana, quer se queira, quer não. Essa parte pode estar adormecida, mas voltará. Aceitam as coisas como são, sabem que os políticos, os partidos, os sistemas, são necessários. Mas não sabem bem porquê. O povo - ou as "nossas gentes" como agora dizem, pois 'povo' tem sabor a democracia popular e a referendos e a deliberações demoradas, tudo coisas boas mas não já - é soberano, mas vá-se lá sabe o que é que isso significa.
Bom era mesmo uma democracia deliberativa, uma democracia onde cada político se sentisse na obrigação de apresentar e discutir com todos as razões para as suas políticas. E isso continuamente e com calma. Acreditar que só porque se foi eleito governante se ganha legitimidade para se fazer o que bem se entender não parece justo nem desejável. E depois há que perguntar: se foi eleito para governar por quatro anos, quem lhe deu legitimidade para contrair dívidas, em nome de todos, por trinta anos?

Straight Time (1978)

 

A resposta é a chave do filme. Se o vir, pode, como exercício, tentar adivinhá-la.