Nepenthe

This is the story of Louis Darquier, Commissioner for Jewish Affairs under the Vichy government in France from 1942 to 1944. During those years, at least 75,000 Jews were forcibly removed from France to German death camps. Throughout the Occupation, Darquier was a figure of terror and grim bombast with none of the heroic aura that clung so tenaciously to Pétain and his other henchmen. Contemporaries disliked Darquier in his prime, and distanced themselves promptly after his downfall. Posterity has pretty much wiped him from the record. Today he is remembered, if at all, as a figure of fun, more of a preposterous gallic Sweeney Todd than France's equivalent to Adolf Eichmann. Bad Faith confronts the consequences of a French cultural and political divide that goes back to the Revolution and before. Right-wing conmen and bullies like Darquier flourished between the wars by exploiting a perennial xenophobia grounded in rabid hatred of democracy in general, and the Third Republic in pa...

En su extraordinario y divertidísimo-como todo lo suyo- Diccionario del Cine , Fernando Trueba nos avisa de que el gran riesgo de las películas de época (como Alatriste) es perderse en la reconstrucción, enredarse en las cortinas… Enredarse en las cortinas. Ése fue mi primer miedo cuando, muy generosa y muy insensatamente, Arturo Pérez-Reverte y su productor, el no menos generoso e insensato Antonio Cardenal, me ofrecieron en una comida no sólo escribir, sino, lo que es peor, dirigir Alatriste. Naturalmente, a pesar del miedo a enredarme en todo tipo de cortinas dije inmediatamente que sí. Un director de cine que se precie, sobre todo siendo español y haciendo cine en España, no puede desperdiciar la oportunidad de hacer una película de las dimensiones históricas, sentimentales y cinematográficas de Alatriste. Porque, aunque nadie se atreve a decirlo públicamente, un director español siempre es una mezcla explosiva de fatalismo e irresponsabilidad. Así que dije que sí y seguí ...

Chernobyl

Abril

SOME 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. And, according to the 2000 census, you can hear at least 92 of them on the streets of New York. You can probably hear more; the census lumps some of them together simply as "other." But by the end of the century, linguists predict, half of the world's languages will be dead, victims of globalization. English is the major culprit, slowly extinguishing the other tongues that lie in its path. Esther Allen, a professor of modern languages at Seton Hall University, calls English "the most invasive linguistic species in the world." Spanish and Hindi are also spreading, subsuming the dialects of South American Indians, and of the Indian subcontinent. In the next two weeks, however, some of these endangered idioms can be heard at two international literary festivals that celebrate languages big and small, as well as the power and resilience of words themselves. The festivals are taking place all over town, in places a...

Nos últimos anos da Segunda Guerra Mundial, os Aliados largaram um milhão de toneladas de bombas sobre a Alemanha. No entanto os alemães mantiveram-se silenciosos relativamente à devastação que daí resultou e á perda de vidas que esses terríveis bombardeamentos provocaram, não reconhecendo nunca a terrível sombra que a destruição vinda dos ares lançou sobre a sua terra. Neste livro, W. G. Sebald, um dos escritores mais brilhantes do século XX, pergunta-se e pergunta-nos porque é que viramos as costas aos horrores da guerra e, dirigindo a nossa resposta ao passado, oferece-nos uma visão corajosa e profunda sobre a forma como vivemos.

1. "Casablanca" 2. "The Godfather" 3. "Chinatown" 4. "Citizen Kane" 5. "All About Eve" 6. "Annie Hall" 7. "Sunset Boulevard" 8. "Network" 9. "Some Like It Hot" 10. "The Godfather II" "Casablanca" and a pair of "Godfathers" are among the 101 greatest screenplays, according to members of the Writers Guild of America. Film and television writers ranked the screenplays in the guild's first best-of list, released this month. The screenplay for 1942's "Casablanca," by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, was chosen from more than 1,400 nominated works. Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Billy Wilder each have four screenplays on the list. Charlie Kaufman, William Goldman and John Huston earned three mentions each. 10 HIGHEST-PAID SPEC SCRIPTS $5 million: "Unbreakable," by M. Night Shyamalan $4.5 million: "The ...

This one is called Alentejo (2004) These cork bowls and dishes were inspired by the traditional drinking vessel used by cork harvesters to stay hydrated in the hot, arid fields where cork trees grow. The only liquid I would recommend for these is water, but they are also perfect for fruit, candy, keys, and in a pinch, as a bicycle helmet. Trust me- one day soon it will be very fashionable to ride your bike around town with a big piece of cork strapped to your head... Some facts about cork: Cork is made from the bark of the Cork Oak (Quercus Suber L.), a tree which thrives in arid plains surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, largely in Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Sardinia and Sicily. Cork is a renewable, sustainable product. In other words, the more the material is harvested, the more is created! Cork trees have the amazing ability to regenerate bark for harvest after only 10 years (compare that with chopping down a tree and waiting 30-50 years for it to grow back). If cork is not harves...

Castañuela y Camarina, duas fêmeas

The soldier came knocking upon the queen's door He said, "I am not fighting for you any more" The queen knew she'd seen his face someplace before And slowly she let him inside. He said, "I've watched your palace up here on the hill And I've wondered who's the woman for whom we all kill But I am leaving tomorrow and you can do what you will Only first I am asking you why." Down in the long narrow hall he was led Into her rooms with her tapestries red And she never once took the crown from her head She asked him there to sit down. He said, "I see you now, and you are so very young But I've seen more battles lost than I have battles won And I've got this intuition, says it's all for your fun And now will you tell me why?" The young queen, she fixed him with an arrogant eye She said, "You won't understand, and you may as well not try" But her face was a child's, and he thought she would cry But she closed herse...

eleven years ago. there are no SQUIDS around, as far as I know. «Reif» can pull anything, as far as I'm concerned. Great cast - Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis (practicing for The Licks?), Michael Wincott (you know his voice and baddie roles), Tom Sizemore (Hollywood's great actor, greatest addict, nevermind Downey Jr.), there's even William Fichtner, silent as a killer mouse!

On Don Quixote's Flight from the Feminine and the Physical

“It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness — rather than the will to power — of its fall into conceptuality.” “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.” To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a gr...

If there is one quality that marks out the scientific mind, it is an unquenchable curiosity. Even when it comes to things that are everyday and so familiar they seem beyond question, scientists see puzzles and mysteries. Look at the letters in the words of this sentence, for example. Why are they shaped the way that they are? Why did we come up with As, Ms and Zs and the other characters of the alphabet? And is there any underlying similarity between the many kinds of alphabet used on the planet? To find out, scientists have pooled the common features of 100 different writing systems, including true alphabets such as Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and our own; so-called abjads that include Arabic and others that only use characters for consonants; Sanskrit, Tamil and other "abugidas", which use characters for consonants and accents for vowels; and Japanese and other syllabaries, which use symbols that approximate syllables, which make up words. Remarkably, the study has concluded th...

N FALL 1977, the state vodka monopoly of the Polish People's Republic filed suit in an international trade court claiming that vodka had first been distilled in Poland. For this reason, it argued, only Polish firms had the right to sell the clear alcohol in foreign markets under the name "vodka," just as champagne produced outside France's Champagne region usually must be labeled "sparkling wine." An incredulous Soviet Ministry of Trade initially ignored this as a joke. Who doubted that vodka was as Russian as St. Basil's Cathedral? But it was a particularly pernicious joke, touching the tender parts of the Russian soul, not to mention Warsaw Pact solidarity. The Soviet trade ministry grudgingly asked the Higher Scientific Research Institute of the Fermentation Products Division of the Central Department of Distilling of the Ministry of the Food Industry of the USSR to investigate. When state archives revealed little about vodka's Russian provenance,...

How can a movie barely showing Clive Owen-in-the-lead's face be so appealing for girls? Girls are no different than boys, all we want is a good movie, one that tickles brains and... And then there's Denzel... For me it is a heist movie - so they said - and a film noir , epitomized by Keith Frazier's hat and Terence Blanchard's score, a movie about New York after 9/11 - so they said - and a character movie. And then there's Jodie... Play a Hostage Situation game and access the website here

Man, I'm totally falling down on the job, here -- there are FOUR magician movies due out in the next 18-24 months, not three. I'm so sorry to have misled you the other day. The fourth, entitled The Illusionist, actually already premiered at Sundance, but it somehow slipped through our collective net while we were there, and we failed to even register its existence. That all changes here and now, however: The Illusionist stars Edward Norton as a magician in Vienna in 1900, and is an adaptation of a short story by Steven Millhauser called Eisenheim the Illusionist. (Just so you know, I just watched some clips and read the review at Variety and, despite the fact that Rufus Sewell is sporting some truly frightening facial hair, I'm now so excited about this movie that I almost wish I still didn't know about it. Dammit. All this wait!) In the movie, Norton's character falls in love with a woman above his proverbial station -- played, boys, by one Jessica Biel -- and whe...

From words to pictures 1984 Alice in Wonderland American Psycho Breakfast at Tiffany's Brighton Rock Catch 22 Charlie & the Chocolate Factory A Clockwork Orange Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain) The Day of the Triffids Devil in a Blue Dress Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner) Doctor Zhivago Empire of the Sun The English Patient Fight Club The French Lieutenant's Woman Get Shorty The Godfather Goldfinger Goodfellas Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now) The Hound of the Baskervilles Jaws The Jungle Book A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes) LA Confidential Les Liaisons Dangereuses Lolita Lord of the Flies The Maltese Falcon Oliver Twist One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Orlando The Outsiders Pride and Prejudice The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The Railway Children Rebecca The Remains of the Day Schindler's Ark (aka Schindler's List) Sin City The Spy Who Came in From the Cold The Talented Mr Ripley Tess o...

I will confess that my first impression of Britain, after arriving from America at the age of 27, was neither poetic nor original. Looking out the taxi window, I did not at once apprehend the air of pervasive melancholy, or remark upon the begrimed splendour of London's glowering facades. I just noticed how easy it would be to amend all the TO LET signs so they read TOILET, and wondered why no one had bothered. "What is it with these people?" I thought to myself. "Have they no sense of humour?" Americans don't travel well. We are one of our least successful exports, to the extent that the US State Department, in conjunction with US businesses, has issued a 16-point pamphlet telling its citizens how to avoid behaving idiotically while abroad. It advises them not to brag and not to lecture. It says it is inappropriate to tell people about the Bible "unless you are a professional missionary identified as such." This is a good idea. There are undoubted...

When the English tongue we speak. Why is break not rhymed with freak? Will you tell me why it’s true We say sew but likewise few? And the maker of the verse, Cannot rhyme his horse with worse? Beard is not the same as heard Cord is different from word. Cow is cow but low is low Shoe is never rhymed with foe. Think of hose, dose,and lose And think of goose and yet with choose Think of comb, tomb and bomb, Doll and roll or home and some. Since pay is rhymed with say Why not paid with said I pray? Think of blood, food and good. Mould is not pronounced like could. Wherefore done, but gone and lone - Is there any reason known? To sum up all, it seems to me Sound and letters don’t agree.

Her website alone is amazing. Click Extra Stuff > Miscellaneous > For Girls Only, Probably... and enjoy it all :)

Sigh. That headline was so good, I need a smoke. These are the amazing bloggers

When will they be available? «A public lecture by Albert Power to celebrate the donation of books by and about Bram Stoker and his fictional creation, Dracula, from the library of the late Leslie Shepard. The books were donated by his daughter, Jill Shepard Glenstrup.» Dublin City Library «The books were collected over several decades by Englishman Leslie Shepherd, who developed a strong interest in the occult and the paranormal. He edited books of vampire and horror stories and campaigned for recognition for Bram Stoker in Dublin, the city where the author was born in Clontarf in 1847.» From Belfast Telegraph but no longer available for free :(

(...) Cobain didn’t read with an open mind. He sought what resonated with his fiercely puritanical disenchantment, and with his plan to get rich and famous “and kill myself like Jimi Hendrix,” which he announced to at least seven friends in junior high school. (...) We can study his poetical imagination at work by reading the only poem in his published journals, “A Young Woman, a Tree,” by award-winning poet Alicia Ostriker. Cobain’s response to Ostriker’s poem demonstrates that he died by a willful act of misreading. On page 204 of his journals, he incorporated “A Young Woman, a Tree” into a drawing. (...) The drawing is meant to contrast the muscular comic-book superhero head—the public myth—with the shabby private reality of what he called his “Auschwitz” body, which shamed him. Passing that fiery tree—if only she could Be making love, Be making poetry, Be exploding, be speeding through the universe Like a photon, like a shower Of yel...

French edition, Edition translated to English

"Melancholy: Genius and Madness in Art" is now showing in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. Laszlo Földenyi traces the strands that make the show the foremost of its kind. For years now, a postcard has been sitting on my shelf, propped against some books. It shows a 5,000-year-old Egyptian alabaster figurine. It is said to be the most ancient animal sculpture in Berlin's Egyptian Museum . This statuette, 52 cm high, is connected with Narmer, the last king of the Pre-Dynastic Era. Squatting down like a human being, with its legs tucked underneath it and a protruding snout, this creature stares into space with a look of unutterable indifference . I am certain that were I capable of peering like that I would see nothing at all. My gaze would penetrate everything it met, adhering to nothing. Or I might instead perceive everything, while simultaneously sensing its sheer futility. The baboon's gaze is "bestial". Welling up within it, nonetheless, seems to ...

José Saramago has a taste for alternative realities, for the use of fiction as a form of speculation. In one of his novels ( The Stone Raft , 1986), the Iberian Peninsula breaks off physically from the rest of Europe and floats away into the Atlantic. In another ( The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, 1991), we read a detailed account of Christ's inmost thoughts. In yet another ( Blindness , 1995), a sudden affliction unknown to science robs a whole population of its sight. There is a political edge to all these stories, and more than a hint of allegory. But none of them is as openly political as Seeing, Saramago's new novel, first published in Portuguese in 2004. In the other works things inexplicably happen to people; in this one people are what happen to a whole country, and especially to its capital. The novel opens with an elegant deception, a form of bluff. There is terrible weather in the city on election day; no one is showing up at the polling booths. Perhaps no one ...

How many words are there in the English language? No one knows. But that hasn't stopped an operation known as the Global Language Monitor from proclaiming that—as of this writing—there are exactly 988,968 words in English. GLM has done a remarkable job suckering even the respectable press into believing that we're on the verge of adding the millionth word to English—at which point we'll presumably see another flurry of articles about GLM. Even so, its claim is a bogus one. The problem with trying to number the words in any language is that it's very hard to agree on the basics. For example, what is a word? If run is a verb, is the noun run another word? What about the inflected forms ran , runs , and running ? What about words with run as a base, such as runner and runnable and runoff and runway ? Are compounds, such as man-bites-dog , man-child , man-eater , manhandle , man-hour , man of God , man's man , and men in black , to be counted once or many ti...

oh dear... Ze Germans... Ze Germans are obsessed with asparagus:

In the summer of 1943, the Bomber Command of Britain's Royal Air Force began what it chose to call Operation Gomorrah, "five major and several minor" aerial attacks on the German city of Hamburg, "with the aim of wiping Hamburg from the map of Europe." Most of the bombs it dropped were incendiaries, "small bombs filled with highly flammable chemicals, among them magnesium, phosphorus and petroleum jelly." The result was "the first ever firestorm created by bombing, and it caused terrible destruction and loss of life," almost entirely among civilians. At least 45,000 human corpses were found in the ruins, and more than 30,000 buildings were destroyed. A.C. Grayling writes: "In the cellars, otherwise unscathed people suffocated to death. Police reports and eyewitness accounts later confirmed many of the horror stories told 'of demented Hamburgers carrying bodies of deceased relatives in their suitcases -- a man with the corpse of his w...

The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is about deeply held feelings, a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion, research by the University of London has found. Men : The Outsider by Albert Camus Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald Brighton Rock by Graham Greene Catch 22 by Joseph Heller High Fidelity by Nick Hornby Ulysses by James Joyce Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 1984 by George Orwell The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twai...

'cos these babies here belong to a friend of my friend Miguel :)

Masai Barefoot Technology ... … activates neglected muscles … improves posture and gait … tones and shapes the body … can help with back, hip, leg and foot problems … can help with joint, muscle, ligament and tendon injuries … reduces stress on knee and hip joints Increased muscle activity when walking: Lower limbs ......................... + 18 % Rear thigh muscles ............... + 19 % Buttock muscles ................... + 9 % Oxygen intake ...................... + 2,5 % Increased muscle activity when standing: Lower limbs .......................... + 38 % Rear thigh muscles ................+ 37 % Buttock muscles .................... + 28 % Stresses on knee and hip joints – 19 % Improved posture and more upright gait Spanish/Iberian (!) website Obrigada à Bolotinha :)

Pré-publicação no Abrupto , pioneiros

Pastor soriano, 1955 Pictures by Jose Ortiz Echagüe

Thanx to AdBlather

(back on Euro 2004 days...) Writing this, I've got no idea who will be playing in tomorrow night’s Euro 2004 final, but whoever it is, the fans are in for some real treats, and not just on the pitch. Portuguese is a largely neglected cuisine, and I think unfairly. They produce some great earthy, rustic food and make fantastic use of their coastline. My sister-in-law comes from a small coastal town north of Lisbon, and she goes back every August. It’s miles away from the golf courses and the international set of the Algarve - you don’t have to worry about bumping into Cliff Richard there - and the way of life doesn’t look like it’s changed in years. She’ll live for a month off grilled sardines, clams, mussels, cod, rich peasant stews - simple stuff but none the worse for that. So here is my tribute to Portuguese cuisine. These are great, home-cooked and wholesome dishes and, if you want the authentic Euro finals experience, you could have it on hand to soak up the beers. Just have ...

It’s 11pm, and outside the Fat Duck in Bray, Heston Blumenthal is being pursued across the road by a young Mancunian chef. He has brought his girlfriend down south on a culinary pilgrimage and is not leaving without a souvenir. “Can you sign this for the lads in the kitchen?” he asks, thrusting a menu into Blumenthal’s hands. The Fat Duck’s proprietor takes the menu, scribbles his name and draws a sketch of a chef’s knife. “Thanks, Heston, that’s wicked,” the gastro-fan beams and disappears off into the night. Blumenthal is getting used to the autograph hunters. When a panel of international food pundits voted the Fat Duck the world’s best restaurant in April, the 39-year-old chef found himself elevated to the status of gastronomic messiah. In the past six years, his tiny cottage restaurant in the Berkshire commuter village has picked up three Michelin stars, wowing critics and diners alike with a menu that includes white chocolate and caviar, sardine-on-toast sorbet and green-tea ...