they found a manuscript in Saragossa, written by a polish fighting under the Napoleonic Grand Armée. Its contents are unglued and unrelated, but, still, it originated a cult movie in the 60's. Jerry Garcia was said to have paid for a print of the polish movie. the historical significance of the manuscript is not the same as the one atributted to the "Nodicia de Kesos" manuscript (the first time a leonese romance language was transcripted, here as a relation of cheeses handed out by a zelous monk), but it is a utter proof of the presence of multinational armed forces during the Peninsular Wars.
opposite to the french and the cited polish, the brits were on the other side of the barricades, teaching along the portuguese as they fought back the invasors and coped with some ungrateful spaniards. a notable british general, Wellesley, the first duke of Wellington, received higher portuguese military condecorations. In 1977, for reasons alltogetherly different, General Josip "Tito" Broz, was the recipient of portuguese distintions of the same kind, mainly for his role in the Non-Aligned Countries movement. Tito was the only Communist Leader tolerated by South American fascist dictators and North-American Presidents, gaining such a substancial prviledge after cutting relations with Stalin.
today was played the final game of the MLS cup. Dallas ended up being defeated by a fighting Colorado side, in a surprise comeback from a 0-1 fist half to a 2-1 extra-time score, with an own goal just ten minutes from the end. Colorado Rapids would end up reduced to ten men due to injury in those final dramatic minutes, but Dallas FC was unable to score the equalizer. It was not a match that caught the eye: the mvp of the final was some giant raging bull striker from the rockies team, who is a technical nulity, but surpasses every other player in the field in matter of tackling, hackling and head-butting. he's an all-american footballer!
Why don't we see technical teams winning soccer competitions in america? the likes of former stars like the talented Dave Mullholland, the first and only american to play in the defunct soviet championship, in 1990, representing Lokomotiv Moscow, always had to fled the country to play the beautiful game, leaving ever since the home leagues to the rude and the beasts. where are Donovan, Altidore and such other US Soccer starlets?
It is no coincidence that American Football is a much more virile game than Association Football. In the primitive american society, a great deal of gratuitous violence wes often overlooked as a sign of competition and personal affirmation. many died, litterally, in the fields of the first grid iron football games. the incipient nation was ruled by the law of the stronger, the free market and all those symptoms of atavic intelectual minds still around today. When Europe's old matured sports codes were pushing down violence to the street sub-worlds, and turning a priori violent games like rugby football into gentleman's sports, their cousins from the other side of the atlantic were cementing their nationalism on aggresive myths around baseball and american football creation, thus invoking the rights to create their own laws. Spite for the colonisers was still present.
It was not until the World Wars that the situation reversed. USA were now the saviors of their former governors, and this was translated in a superiority in almost every field (still, not on the soccer pitch!) In areas like literature and music, although, it was visible that, albeit americans were as able as europeans, they were severely limited by puritan costumes that derived into absurd decency laws. Often, these will concurr to the expatriation of artist geniuses to cities like Paris, where they would find the liberty to pursue their creative visions. This was the case of Henry Miller. Among others, Miller glorified the city of lighs and it's whores alike . There is a movie about him, Henry and June, based on the Anais Nin romance of the same name.
Other movie based on works of Nin is the soft-core erotica playboy-style flick Delta of Venus, where a dreamy Audie England stars a Zalman King lousy production. Audie England is probably one of the most beautiful women to be caught on film, ever, but, even though her acting abilities were not those of a Julia Roberts, she was only casted in softcore movies of the same kind. And of the same director. Some of them went straight to TV, namely the Red Shoes Diaries series, where future tv stars like David "X-Files" Duchovny or Matt LeBlanc of the Friends fame portrayed the hunky stud that the girl cant resist to. Even if a bad movie, Delta of Venus was the high point of England's acting career, which, in all cases, wouldnt last more than 5 years from that point on. In one of her last movies, she made an appearance as princess Kitana. If you are a Mortal Kombat fan, you know what I am talking about. Just to see how low a beautiful woman can get after betting her career on a type of movies that are story-void, and, sexually-wise, are either not here neither there.
In the Henry and June film adaptation, the part of Anais Nin is played by portuguese petite Maria de Medeiros. it's one of her two great mov(i)es in showbizz, alongside Pulp Fiction. June Miller was the second wife of Henry Miller, and a very important character in the Rose Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Nexus and Plexus). She appears right on the first book, Sexus, under the alias on Mona, a new Miller lover in his New York, prior to Paris, days.
Although it went on prohibited by both French and American stances for quite some time, under the accusation of pornography, the book is widely considered on of the best ever written, making some of the most important lists of great books of the XX century, and an inspiration for several generations of writers, from the Kerouacs and Burroughs of the Beatnik period, to the likes of Science Fiction guru William Gibson.
Names like Miller, Gibson, Don DeLillo, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs and Joseph Heller, among others, have portraied america's culture, institutions and idiosincracies in such diverse and original ways, that it is impossible to simply overthrow literature as the main cultural artifact of modern times. It is a fact that internet is growing in many menacing ways to traditional print, but will books ever dissapear completely? sites like google or youtube arent eve 10 years old, and Facebbok in not even 5 (!), and yet, they represent such a massive amout of our spent time, that one must wonder where does the modern online-sucked homo sapiens sapiens find the time to read a 300 page book every week.
There is the half empty glass way of looking at things, and there is the half full way. this one tells us to look what sites like youtube have made for lesser known artists, or movies, promoting them in a fashion they never would have thought possible 20 years ago, i.e., without a major company backing up with the ads and marketing money. Can writers benefit of the same hype? Music may have lost sales revenues, but still has important fees coming in from concerts, and while Movies are all around the free torrents sites, 3d theaters thrive and studios keep making multimillion-epics in the sure awareness that people want to see the show on the right canvas. What is there left for writers besides the poorly paid book commissions, in some cases ranging from 5 to 10 percent?
How can the internet hack the writers bank account, is one thing I would like to know for sure, but in the mean time we dont have to be a genius to know that we cannot keep the technologies and litterature appart. Digitalization is the way, or is it just one of the ways? Young creators like me will be destined to lead the path in the transition to digital litterature media or confined to write manuscripts that are nothing but cheese lists in the footprint notes of history, only to be discovered centuries into the future, when civilization has passed it's apex and magnetic wars have destroied all the information we keep storing on this babel tower of internets. Either way, we wont probably be here to see it happen.
No Comments
* Listening to: The Flattrakkers - Werewolf Baby
* Reading: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
* Watching: Delta de Venus (1995)
* Playing: Teste dos Famosos | Descobre se es Famoso
* Eating: Lidl Crackers
* Drinking: not drinking today
