Chega de política. Não aguento mais. Não acredito em ninguém, não acho que nenhum político e/ou candidato tenha boas intenções. Nem um. Nem umzinho. Tanto no Brasil quanto nos EUA. Aqui nos EUA eles terão eleições presidenciais ano que vem, em outubro. Mas as campanhas já estão a mil, um monte de candidatos republicanos e outro monte de candidatos democratas. Debates, brigas, um falando mal do outro. Nesse estágio eles falam mal dos próprios companheiros de partido, porque estão correndo atrás da nomeação democrata prá candidato a presidente. Não consigo entender como uma pessoa tem energia e stamina e paciência prá encarar uma campanha dessas. É brutal, tanto física quanto psicologicamente. Mas talvez políticos sejam feitos de um material diferente, mais resistente. Nas minhas leituras diárias de jornal pulo as páginas que falam das campanhas; pulo sem culpa nenhuma.

Adoro dirigir ouvindo rádio.
Odeio pimentão.

Essa é a capa do livro, Double Game. Comprei sem saber quem ela é, ignorante que sou. Ela é bem conhecida. Esse livro é o seguinte: ela é amiga do escritor Paul Auster. Em um dos seus livros (Leviatham) ele criou um personagem baseado na Sophie Calle. Inventou algumas coisas, outras descreveu como são. Em um momento da história o caminho da personagem e o da inspiradora se separam totalmente. Então a Sophie Calle pega a primeira parte, a que tem um monte de coisas em comum com a verdade (whatever that means) e resolve duas coisas:
1. tudo o que o Paul Auster inventou ela vai viver – por exemplo, ele inventou que a personagem comia uma só cor de comida dependendo do dia da semana: segunda, comidas brancas, terça comidas vermelhas, etc.
2. as outras coisas que ele não inventou, que são reais, ela coloca na segunda parte do livro.
Uma delas é a seguinte: ela se empregou como camareira em um hotel em Veneza.
Em cada quarto que ela entrava para arrumar ela olhava tudo, abria malas, lia agendas, fotografava. E tomava notas. Isso virou uma exposição.
Algumas fotos:

Outra experiência, inspirada por sugestões que ela pediu ao Paul Auster sobre como viver em NY. Ela “decorou” uma cabine telefonica e fotografou e até gravou (totalmente fora da lei) conversas. Essa é a cabine.

E assim por diante, várias experiências, ou sei lá como chamam. Eu achei interessantíssimo.
Que ela é doida e corajosa e criativa, ça va sans dire…
Essa é ela:

Tem vários livros dela na Amazon, com as experiências dela.
Muito legal. É uma das poucas artistas que usam métodos não convencionais que não precisam de longas explicações. Eu sempre achei que boa arte não precisa de longas explicações. Ela quase que se explica sózinha.

O melhor filme que vi esse ano.
Link to site do filme: The Life of Others
Mas não vou me estender, passo a palavra para o Anthony Lane, crítico na New Yorker (é um texto longo mas muito bom).

Guilt Parties

If there is any justice, this year’s Academy Award for best foreign-language film will go to “The Lives of Others,” a movie about a world in which there is no justice. It marks the début of the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, of whom we have every right to be jealous. First, he is a stripling of thirty-three. Second, his name makes him sound like a lover with a duelling scar on his cheekbone in a nineteenth-century novel. And third, being German, he has an overwhelming subject: the postwar sundering of his country. For us, the idea of freedom, however heartfelt, is doomed to abstraction, waved by politicians as if they were shaking a flag. To Germans, even those of Donnersmarck’s generation, freedom is all too concrete, defined by its brute opposite: the gray slabs raised in Berlin to keep free souls at bay.

It is a tribute to the richness of the film that one cannot say for sure who the hero is. The most prominent figure is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), yet if you passed him on the street you wouldn’t give him a second glance, or even a first. He would spot you, however, and file you away in a drawer at the back of his mind. Wiesler, based in East Berlin, is a captain in the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi—the state security service, which, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, employed more than ninety thousand personnel. In addition, a modest hundred and seventy thousand East Germans became unofficial employees, called upon to snoop and snitch for the honor—or, in practical terms, the survival—of the state. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Jesus said. The German Democratic Republic offered its own version: watch thy neighbor, then pick up thy phone.

The movie begins, fittingly, in 1984. The Stasi machine still fulfills its Orwellian function, training its sights on anyone who might be construed as seditious. All the more surprising, then, that Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) should have escaped censure. He is a playwright. He is handsome, affable, and draped in a corduroy suit that must have been made in the West; his live-in girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), is also his leading lady, and supporters of compulsory egalitarianism would consider her beauty an insult. Yet the fact remains that Dreyman is a pet talent of the state—“the only non-subversive writer we have,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), Wiesler’s cheery superior. As for Sieland, she is, in the words of a government minister, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), “the loveliest pearl of the G.D.R.” He should know, the swine.

One evening, Wiesler attends the première of a Dreyman play. What is it that alerts him? The curtain call, brimming with a warmth that he, as a Stasi operative, will never feel? The kiss that Christa-Maria exchanges with Dreyman? Or, most wounding of all, their happiness? Whatever the reason, Wiesler decides that Dreyman, precisely because he has neither said nor written anything suspicious, must be a suspect. Kafka would recognize the logic: a man too good to be true cannot be trusted. Wiesler confides his doubts to Grubitz, who passes them on to Hempf; the upshot is that Wiesler is deputed to spy on Dreyman and Sieland—to enter their lives, like a virus, and lay waste to their innocence until it decays into guilt.

He and his team infest the apartment where Dreyman lives. As they emerge from a van, pick locks, and start to seed the rooms with bugs, the musical score—by Gabriel Yared, best known for “The English Patient”—keeps urgent step with their task. This is the director’s riskiest move; he expects us to deplore the demolition of human rights, yet he knows that, as filmgoers, we cannot help thrilling to the steeliness of Wiesler’s method. (The van is like the one from the TV series “Mission: Impossible.”) Anyone can condemn the Stasi’s record, and we stoutly deny that we would have caved in to its threats; only movies, or the most supple fiction, can whisper in our ears and urge us to wonder whether we, too, might have fallen prey. The most terrifying moment in “The Lives of Others”—and the terror, again, is fringed with awe—comes as Wiesler, having finished rigging Dreyman’s place, crosses to the apartment opposite, knocks on the door, and says to the woman who answers, “One word of this and Masha loses her place at the university.” The captain has done his homework.

One of the marvels of Ulrich Mühe’s performance—in its seething stillness, its quality not just of self-denial but of self-haunting—is that he never distills Wiesler into a creature purely of his times. You can imagine him, with his close-cropped hair, as a young Lutheran in the wildfire of the early Reformation, or as a lost soul finding a new cause in the Berlin of 1933. See him crouched in a loft above Dreyman’s home with a typewriter, a tape deck, and headphones clamped to his skull. Watch the nothingness on his face as he taps out his report on the couple’s actions: “Presumably have intercourse.” How long can you listen to love being made? Especially when your only love comes from a hooker who marches in, performs, then leaves before you have even refastened your pants? Slowly, the tables turn. Wiesler steals Dreyman’s copy of Brecht and takes it home to read; he starts to omit details in his official account; and, for some fathomless reason—guilt, curiosity, longing—he lets the lives of others run their course.

Downstairs, Dreyman finds his own passivity, his tactical playing of the system, beginning to crack. A blacklisted friend hangs himself, and Dreyman feels obliged to write about the terrible suicide rate in the G.D.R. This means smuggling in an untraceable typewriter—more lethal than a gun, in the land of a controlled press—and smuggling out the copy. Dreyman wants not to involve Sieland in this crime, but she is already sunk in sin. Hempf, the government minister, made overtures, and she responded, hoping that it might safeguard her career; there is an unforgettable smear of boredom, repulsion, and self-loathing on her face as she sits in the back of his limousine, after dark, and lets his fumbling trotters do their worst. Wiesler comes to know of this arrangement, and the knowledge both curdles his respect for the Party and grants him a furtive power. We are reminded of “The Conversation,” which kept Gene Hackman, king of the listening device, locked in a Wiesler-like solitude. Dazzling though Coppola’s film was, it was at some level a fantasy, dreaming of dark conspiracies with which to spice our lives. That is a luxury von Donnersmarck cannot afford, and the paranoia shown within his movie is not a nightmare. It’s government policy.

The result is like a clash of puppeteers. Dreyman controls his characters in the theatre, but his strings are pulled by the state. His girlfriend, wanting to be mistress of her fate, is just a mistress, and not for long. (“I never want to see her on a German stage again,” Hempf says, after she summons the courage to spurn him.) Wiesler toys with the destinies of his suspects, but he is finally snarled in his own plans and dispatched to a cellar for the rest of his career, there to steam open the mail of ordinary citizens: the hard labor of a Stasi drone. Above them is von Donnersmarck, shifting his fretful players around the city—his horribly convincing re-creation of a repressive world, ranging from the meagreness of Wiesler’s lonely dinner (a tube of something red, squeezed onto a bowl of something white) to the unchanging nylon gray of his clothes. “The Lives of Others” was shot in color, but you would barely guess as much, since the landscape has long since shrivelled to black-and-white. I am still shuddering at the scene in the Stasi lunchroom, where Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz overhears a young recruit telling an Erich Honecker joke. (Honecker was then leading the G.D.R.) He demands the punch line, laughs heartily, then asks the joker for his name and rank. The recruit blenches, but, after a pause, Grubitz laughs again—he was just kidding. Years later, we see the same recruit sitting behind Wiesler in the cellar. There was no kidding.

It is a shock to find the action lasting until 1993. As the events of 1984 hastened to a climax, with treachery being punished on a damp street, I was already reaching for my coat. So why press onward? Why drag us into the debris of the broken G.D.R.—into the opening of the Stasi files, and the queasy afterlife of politicians and playwrights alike? Against all odds, though, the best is yet to come: an ending of overwhelming simplicity and force, in which the hopes of the film—as opposed to its fears, which have shivered throughout—come gently to rest. What happens is that a character says, “Es ist für mich”—“It’s for me.” When you see the film, as you must, you will understand why the phrase is like a blessing. To have something bestowed on “me”—not on a tool of the state, not on a scapegoat or a sneak, but on me—is a sign that individual liberties have risen from the dead. You might think that “The Lives of Others” is aimed solely at modern Germans—at all the Wieslers, the Dreymans, and the weeping Christa-Marias. A movie this strong, however, is never parochial, nor is it period drama. Es ist für uns. It’s for us.

Rembrandt,

outro Rembrandt,

Ruisdael,

e Vermeer.

São 228 obras. Uma época e um lugar que produziram artistas incríveis.

The best for last. Foi a última e a melhor. Vamos ver o que falaram:
“What’s astonishing though is that this new piece feels like a young man’s play. There is an energy, rawness and passion here one doesn’t associate with the elegant and witty Stoppard, passages of unbuttoned emotion that go straight to the heart.”
Charles Spencer para o jornal Telegraph.

“Like most Tom Stoppard plays, Rock ‘n’ Roll operates on multiple levels. The narrative tracks Czechoslovakian political history over a twenty-two year period: from the Russian occupation in 1968 to the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the election of Vaclav Havel. The play’s primary concern is the relationship between art and politics. Stoppard ponders whether it’s possible to have a free society without complete freedom of expression; however bizarre or banal that expression may be. The aesthetic that Stoppard focuses on is rock ‘n’ roll; a musical idiom that, since its origin in the fifties, many critics have dismissed as not being an art form. That’s been described as a semi-toxic byproduct of market-driven popular culture. Stoppard believes rock ‘n’ roll is art. He brackets his story by referencing two rock icons: the late Sid Barrett, the disturbed genius who started Pink Floyd; and The Rolling Stones, who appeared in Prague in 1990.(…) So, is rock ‘n’ roll art or politics? Stoppard’s answer is that it is both. In its pure, primal form, rock ‘n’ roll is about free expression, the essence of democracy itself. The Plastic People of the Universe succeeded as artists because they championed free expression. They were democrats, not capitalists. Bob Dylan wrote, “To live outside the law you must be honest.” One reading of Dylan is that artists like The Plastic People of the Universe live outside the “law” of the market and, therefore, must keep to their own standard of truth. Rock ‘n’ Roll celebrates their willingness to do this. And their ultimate triumph.”
Bob Burnett para o Huffington Post.

“Tom Stoppard left Czechoslovakia as a baby. Now, 68 years later, he has written Rock’n'Roll – a brilliant exploration of liberty, rebellion and identity that captures the spirit of the Sixties, from the Prague underground to the fragile genius of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett .” Neal Ascherson para o Observer.

“This is a play in which the heart of the matter is the human heart.(…) “Rock ’n’ Roll” isn’t a story of just one person’s passion, but of the many contradictory forms that passion takes in different people(…) For “Rock ’n’ Roll” is no clear-cut debate play. The men and women who inhabit it can’t be boiled down to single, consistent positions, though that would make life much simpler for them.(…) In the second act, when Jan returns to Cambridge in 1990, Mr. Sewell’s performance becomes that rare thing in acting: a palimpsest in which you see all the layers of a single life.”
Ben Brantley para o New York Times.

O elenco:

Sinead Cusack e Brian Cox: já tinha visto os dois no cinema, principalmente ele. Excelentes.

Mas quem brilha mesmo é o Rufus Sewell. Já tinha visto também em filmes, mas no palco ele é impressionante. É uma experiência maravilhosa primeiro ver uma peça extremamente inteligente, e ainda mais ver um ator que “vira” o personagem sem parecer louco.

“Beautiful, messy, exhilarating, awkward, vital: They’re all adjectives you might use to describe first love. So it’s fitting that you could also readily apply them to Spring Awakening, the imperfect but transcendent new musical that opened Sunday at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre.”
Essa é crítica do USA Today. Eu gostei, mas não adorei. O elenco é quase todo de garotos de 20 anos, todos excelentes, principalmente o que faz o papel principal – ele vai longe…

É um musical muito divertido. Não me lembro de ter dado tanta risada em outro musical.