"A Jew is a Jew is a Jew.

  The Marranos were enmeshed in some of the same identity-metaphysics as were their persecutors. For them, too, there was an inviolable fact of the matter concerning true Jewish identity that remained untouched by all outer performance. They may have gone through formal Christian conversions, taken the sacrament, and gone every week to confession, but within the confessional of their inner being they, too, continued to insist on their essential Jewishness.

A Sephardic friend tells me his grandfather used to tell him a joke that perhaps goes back to Marrano times. A Jew has undergone a conversion process, in the course of which the priest has put his hands on the Jew’s head and repeated several times, “You were a Jew, now you’re Christian, you were a Jew, now you’re Christian.” A few weeks pass and the priest comes on a Friday to see how his converso is getting on. The priest finds, to his shock and dismay, that the New Christian is not eating fish for his Friday night dinner, as he ought to as a good Catholic, but rather a roasted chicken. The Jew, ordered to account for himself, explains that he had simply put his hand on the chicken’s head and repeated several times, “You were a chicken, now you’re fish, you were a chicken, now you’re fish.

Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza:The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, p.127.

Meeting John Berger (D: Jos de Putter)

Pentti Sammallahti

Por sugestão de John Berger, Why Look at Animals?, (Penguin books, 2009, p.8-9) onde se pode ler:

"Early this morning, when I was still in bed, a swallow flew in, circled the room, saw its error and flew out through the window past the plum trees to alight on the telephone wire. I relate this small incident because it seems to me to have something to do with Pentti Sammallahti's photographs. They too, like the swallow, are aberrant.

I have some of his photographs in the house now for two years. I often take them out of their folder to show to friends who pass. They usually gasp at first, and them peer closer, smiling. They look at the places shown for a longer than usual with a photograph. Perhaps they ask whether I know the photographer, Pentti Sammallahti, personally? Or they ask what part of Russia were they taken in? In what year? They never try to put their evident pleasure into words, for is a secret one. They simply look closer and remember. What?"

John Coltrane - Coltrane Plays The Blues

Dante, A Divina Comédia, inferno I:55-57

E qual è quei che voluntieri acquista,
  e giugne 'l tempo che perder lo face,
  che 'ntittu suoi pensier piange e s'attrista;

                             ...

E como quem os ganhos que conquista,
  chegado o tempo que a perder o abala
  em seu pensar só chora e se contrista.

                       (tradução de Vasco Graça Moura)

                            ...

We all so willingly record our gains,

   until the hour that leads us into loss.

   Then every single thought is tears and sadness.

                       (tradução de Robin Kirkpatrick)

                           

Gerry (D: Gus Van Sant)

Bill Evans, Goodbye

Bill Evans (p), 

Monty Budwig (b), 

Shelly Manne (ds)

Fumio Hayasaka, Seven Samurai

Smog, the desert

Birth of a golem (D: Amos Gitai)

In the Desert

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it

“Because it is bitter,

“And because it is my heart.”

Stephen Crane, Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2004)

O EU

Shelly Manne & His Men at the Black Hawk - Summertime

Théodore Monod

Benny Golson - Staccato Swing & Yesterdays

por sugestão de: "o grande mestre Benny Golson"

Shelly Manne, Hava Nagila (Come let's be happy) & Bokrei Lachish

Shelly Manne - Speak Low

: para o Alfredo :

Caetano Veloso - Come As You Are

The longest Day

O Eu