Flat Roof. From the Centre Octubre in València.

Terrat octubre 2, originalmente cargada por trams4.

Terrats de Ciutat Vlla, Santa Caterina, el Micalet. That's part of the skyline you can see from the Centre de Cultura Contemporània Octubre in València. Roofs of the Old Town, Saint Catherine and the Micalet (Cathedral Bell Tower).

Això és part del que es pot veure des del terrat del Centre de Cultura Contemporània Octubre de València (Contemporary Culture Centre in València).

Kim Carnes: Bette Davis Eyes.

I like this song, Carnes' performance and Bette Davis Eyes'. Such a deep penetrating look... can one stare it?



Kim Carnes (1945,Pasadena, CA) is a Grammy Award-winning American singer-songwriter. She is noted for her distinctive, raspy voice which she attributes to many hours spent singing in smoky bars and clubs.

Carnes was a member of New Christy Minstrels in 1967. During this time, Carnes met and married Dave Ellingson with whom she would write most of her songs.

She began releasing albums during the early 1970s.

In 1981, she recorded the Jackie DeShannon and Donna Weiss song "Bette Davis Eyes", it became a worldwide hit.

Ironically, "Bette Davis Eyes", written in 1974, was originally rejected by Carnes. It was only after a new instrumental arrangement that Carnes agreed to record the song and it became a huge hit.

Bette Davis admitted to being a fan of the song. Davis wrote to Carnes after the song was released and stated that she was very pleased with the song as it made her seem very up-to-date with her grandson. She had Carnes sing the song live for her at a tribute held just before her death.

(from the wiki)

A corner in the old town in Valencia.

A corner in the old town 1, originalmente cargada por trams4.

I took this picture on Januray, 2003. This is a place set in the old town near the Llotja (gothic silk market), Saint Catherine Church ant the Plaça Redona in Valencia.

Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame.

Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (Buda As Sharm Foru Rikht). Hana Makhmalbaf (2007).

Last Saturday I went to the cinema. I saw an impressive, touching film which shocked me. This is an interesing story full of pain and beauty. The main character is a little girl who just wants to buy a notebook and a pen to go to school but he does not live in a west country, she lives in Afghanistan. The girl is harassed by boys playing games cruelly mimicking their violent society. The boys want to stone Baktay (the child) or destroy her like the Buddha or shoot her like the Americans do in the labyrinth of caves. Will Baktay be able to overcome these obstacles in order to learn the alphabets of her mother tongue?

The film is a poetic and frightening journey into the minds of the children who live in the desolate area where the Talibans’s destruction of cultural treasures sickened the world – and children affected by violence everywhere. The story is a reflection of war and the seemingly unbreakable cycle of violence in children.

Since the cute little Baktay serves as the narrative guide on this journey, it is very easy for the viewers to empathize with her aspirations and disappointments, despite the very basic dialogue. The purity of the child and her struggles illustrate the very core of Afghanistan's problems and challenges, as the audience experiences first-hand the ruthlessness of the Taliban via the boys' war game.

Very common for Makhmalbaf, is the neo-realist style of filmmaking, with simple and naturalistic portrayal of events, handheld cameras and non-actors in leading roles. However, the main story is told symbolically through the specific surroundings, the games characters play, the clothes they wear—all of these, plus the music, accentuating the climactic moments of the film, guide us on this colorful but devastating journey to the Middle East.



The film feels extremely authentic, but this is not a documentary. Through the eyes of the child the film sneakily reveals all sorts of narrative surprises and political critiques despite its simple exterior. And, as custom dictates in this kind of film, the little girl is almost too cute for words, evoking gushes of sympathy toward her numerous trials.

The film’s title comes from Hana’s (Hana Makhmalbaf, the director) father. According to her, Mohsen meant that “even a statue can be ashamed of witnessing all this violence and harshness happening to these innocent people and, therefore, collapse.” Shots of the looming emptiness in the Bamian cliff faces that once housed these serene Buddhas are indeed among the film’s most devastating moments.
Hana’s done a brave and intelligent work and only with 19 years old. A brilliant poetic story against violence, intolerance and in defence of culture as the tool for tolerance peace and freedom, for a better world.

Sydney Pollack dies.

Thanks to him I've watched so many times this beautiful film called Out of Africa. Rest in peace!
A small summary from The Guardian:

Director Sydney Pollack dies at 73.

Pollack always struck me as one of the last, best representatives of the Hollywood studio system - an old-school film-maker.

Pollack significantly plumped for Robert Redford - kicking off a fruitful collaboration that stretched from Jeremiah Johnson to The Way We Were to Three Days of the Condor before culminating in 1986's Oscar-winning Out of Africa. The handsome embodiment of Hollywood glamour, Redford proved the perfect front for a Pollack production.

For all that, one could argue that his most challenging, interesting films were made outside the Redford aegis. The Swimmer was a cold-eyed, compelling study of suburban affluenza and one of the great underrated films of the 60s. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is as a devastating tale of the American Depression. Tootsie was one of the smartest, funniest comedies of the 1980s.

At the same time as his films were turning blandly anonymous (The Firm, Sabrina, The Interpreter), he discovered a vibrant sideline as a character actor (eg. dissembling father figure in last year's Michael Clayton)
Pollack's last film as a director was a heartfelt, personal study of the architect Frank Gehry.

Sydney Pollack was an intelligent, versatile and often brilliant film-maker. Cinema is poorer without him.

Xan Brooks (The Guardian)


Two vids I've found in youtube of Out of Africa: the film trailer and the excellent Flight over Africa scene:

Poetic Recital.

This evening I've been to a Poetic Recital held in the Centre de Cultura Contemporània Octubre in València. Every last Thursday of each month (this month has been the next to the last) there is a literary activity called Escriptors al Terrat (Writers at the flat roof) in which two writers, one younger, one older talk about their work. Today two poets: Ramon Guillem and a young woman poet, Àngels Gregori (22), have read some of their poems in Catalan. It's been a pleasure!




From Guillem's book Solatge de sols (1999):


TARDA IMPREVISTA:


L´amor és una tarda imprevista,
una taronja del color de les natges,
un trau on es posa el clavell de la vida.

Aigua callada
que una nit de lluna morta
de la pedra brolla i s´escampa,
fluix secret que nodreix
l´arrel de tenebra dels arbres,
corrent d´esperma que amara la terra.



From Angels' last book LLibre de les Brandàlies:


ACLARIMENT:

I faria un poema
com faria l’amor a un cos prohibit:
amb l’ànsia de saber
que només cal l’imprescindible.
Faria un poema
escrit amb sang menstrual,
o amb tinta de tauró, que perdurara.
I escriuria poemes, llavors,
com faria les coses que més m’agraden,
que fer poemes és també
fer l’amor amb el llenguatge,
que escriure versos és també
violar els límits de la pàgina,
i que les paraules, com les putes,
s’assemblen totes una mica.

VI:


Sempre hi plou, a sobre del meu cap.
L’hivern m’ha dut la freda sorpresa de la solitud,
la de les artèries histèriques.
I és un malson, t’ho jure, veure’m al mirall.
Cada dia més lletja, més sola,
més malalta, més boja encara,
talment una granota lluny de l’aigua.
M’he cansat de mi mateixa,
allà on vaig, sempre m’hi trobe,
perduda i fora d’enlloc.
I sóc com un ravioli
que s’ha quedat l’últim per menjar,
ell sol, pobre ravioli,
al fons del roig del plat.

Sempre hi plou, a sobre del meu cap.
L’hivern m’ha dut l’espasme del temps,
la tuberculosi als ossos, el desfici als llavis.
I de tant d’estripar minuts al dia
m’han sortit padastres als dits
per fer-me companyia.



AVÍS:

Al diccionari,
les paraules que existeixen s’hi troben,
i les que no hi són,
s’inventen.

Billie Holiday.

She is in my list. This woman is one of my favourite singers. What a lovely wrecked voice and song!

Two years before her death, in late 1957, she had one final burst of glory, when she sang "Fine and Mellow" (composed in 1939) on The Sound of Jazz telecast while joined by tenor saxophonist Lester Young (who stole the show with an emotional chorus) and other members of all-star band seen here: Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Roy Eldridge, Don Cheatham, Vic Dickenson, Danny Barker, Mit Hinton, Mal Waldrom.... Reunited after many years, introduced by Robert Herridge (producer/host of CBS' "The Sound of Jazz"), this is perhaps the single most famous "live jazz" performance in TV history. We shall not see them again.

Billie's visual reaction to L. Young's moving solo remains as eloquent as anything she ever sang; a touching finale to their historic musical partnership.

Billie's voice wasn't the biggest or even the best, hers was small which became the biggest one when she put all her emotional intensinty into the words she sang. As someone said, she delivers the hell out of a tune.
Her voice can make my heart ache. It is an experience not easily duplicated by strength of voice, tone, or precision; it is deeper than technique!

Here Lester is speaking to Billie with his horn and it is heart breaking. Her face
goes from ecstasy to bitterness to pain, as does her wrecked voice. The emotions come from their sounds. There you have jazz or blues.

She is in my list. This woman is one of my favourite singers. What a lovely wrecked voice and song!

Two years before her death, in late 1957, she had one final burst of glory, when she sang "Fine and Mellow" (composed in 1939) on The Sound of Jazz telecast while joined by tenor saxophonist Lester Young (who stole the show with an emotional chorus) and other members of all-star band seen here: Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Roy Eldridge, Don Cheatham, Vic Dickenson, Danny Barker, Mit Hinton, Mal Waldrom.... Reunited after many years, introduced by Robert Herridge (producer/host of CBS' "The Sound of Jazz"), this is perhaps the single most famous "live jazz" performance in TV history. We shall not see them again.

Billie's visual reaction to L. Young's moving solo remains as eloquent as anything she ever sang; a touching finale to their historic musical partnership.

Billie's voice wasn't the biggest or even the best, hers was small which became the biggest one when she put all her emotional intensinty into the words she sang. As someone said, she delivers the hell out of a tune.
Her voice can make my heart ache. It is an experience not easily duplicated by strength of voice, tone, or precision; it is deeper than technique!

Here Lester is speaking to Billie with his horn and it is heart breaking. Her face
goes from ecstasy to bitterness to pain, as does her wrecked voice. The emotions come from their sounds. There you have jazz or blues.

Irena Sendler.

This is my personal tribute to Irena Sendler, an exceptional woman with an amazing, very interesting and moving life. The best of human beings. Rest in peace!

(I've summarized it from timesonline):

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 Irena Sendler had no doubt how to respond. “I saw the Polish nation drowning. And those in most difficult position were the Jews. And among them those most vulnerable were the children. So I had to help.”

Sendler, a social care nurse for the Warsaw city council, spent the next four years risking her life in the Warsaw ghetto, delivering essential supplies and, when the true purposes of Nazi policy became apparent, smuggling out as many children as she could.

She saved many hundreds of lives — perhaps as many as 2,500. Even under torture and sentence of death, she refused to reveal the whereabouts of the rescued children to the Nazi occupiers, and after escaping captivity went back to the underground, making sure that those she had hidden survived the war.

She was born in Warsaw in 1910, the only child of Dr Stanislaw Krzyzanowski who had a reputation as the only doctor who would treat Jewish patients during typhoid epidemics; Irena, unusually for a Catholic child, was allowed to play with Jewish children and said that her father taught her “that if you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not”.

She became a social worker, caring for poor Jewish families in Warsaw. Under German occupation, conditions for the city’s 400,000 Jews deteriorated rapidly, and Sendler, defying Nazi orders, began bringing them supplies, despite the risk to their (herself and some colleagues) own health and the horrors they witnessed.

Starving children, abandoned corpses and SS officers using skulls for target practice — “I saw all this and a million other things that a human eye should never have to see,” she later said, “and it has stayed with me for every second of every day that God has granted me to live.”

In the summer of 1942 deportations from the ghetto to Treblinka death camp began. Sendler joined Zegota, the Polish organisation set up to help Jews, and began getting children out. “We would go to the ghetto every day and try to get as many children as possible because the situation would worsen every day.”

Smuggling them out was risky, because any Pole caught helping Jews was sentenced to death. Sendler used false documents, hid small children, sedated, in sacks and boxes — even coffins — and sent older ones out through the sewers or basement passageways. One mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox. Others went through a courthouse which had one entrance in the ghetto and another on the “Aryan side”.

But for Sendler, the hardest part was persuading parents to part with their children. Though the parents knew the children would die if they stayed, Sendler could offer no guarantee that they would be any safer if they left. She later described “infernal scenes. Father agreed but mother didn’t. Grandmother cuddled the child most tenderly and, weeping bitterly, said ‘I won’t give away my grandchild at any price’. We sometimes had to leave such unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I went there the next day and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway siding for transport to death camps.”

Once the children were out, Sendler used her network to find them homes in Polish families, orphanages and convents. To help them blend in, the children were taught Christian prayers and given new identities. Sendler kept a careful list of their real identities in the hope that they could at some point be reunited with their families. But in October 1943, alerted by an informer, 11 German officers arrived to arrest Sendler. She had no time to dispose of the list and gave it to a colleague, who hid it in her underwear while the soldiers ripped Sendler’s house apart. Sendler was taken to the notorious Pawiak prison, where she was methodically tortured and beaten, leaving her permanently scarred. She never revealed the names of the children or of her underground colleagues.

Officially, she was executed in early 1944. But in fact, Zegota had bribed a German guard to let her escape from death row.

Even after this ordeal Sendler continued her work, going back underground with a new identity, bringing supplies and medicine to the hidden children, and moving them on when suspicions were aroused.

After the liberation Sendler retrieved the list of names from where she had buried it during the Warsaw uprising of 1944, in jam jars under an apple tree in a friend’s garden. She helped Jewish organisations to trace those few children whose families had survived the Holocaust. But even these reunions were painful, for the children had to be uprooted from their homes yet again. Many of the rest were eventually sent to Palestine.

Sendler herself received little recognition immediately after the war. The communist regime which came to power in Poland had little use for the sufferings of the Jews, nor for non-communist war heroes. In a still often anti-Semitic climate, those who had rescued Jews were targets of suspicion or contempt.

Her work was, however, known to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, which recognised her as Righteous Among the Nations in 1965. A tree was planted in her honour, but she was not allowed to visit Israel until 1983.

In recent years she had become increasingly well known in her homeland, and she was awarded the country’s highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, by President Kwasniewski in 2003. A biography appeared in Poland and Germany in 2006. Last year the Polish senate passed a unanimous resolution honouring her for “the rescue of the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology: the Jewish children”.

She wrote in response: “Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory.” She was too ill to attend, and this statement was read out by Elzbieta Ficowska, who was smuggled out of the ghetto in 1942, at the age of 6 months.

Sendler described her actions as “a normal thing to do” and refused always to think of herself as a hero. “That term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true — I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little. I could have done more. This regret will follow me to my death.”


She was born on February 15, 1910. She died on May 12, 2007, aged 98. REST IN PEACE, Irena!

Fly me to the Moon: Frank Sinatra & Diana Krall.

I adore this song. I've found some information on the wiki. I've summarized it down here:

(It was written by Bart Howard in 1954.It was first recorded in 1954. The original singer of "Fly Me to the Moon", Felicia Sanders, recorded the song in 1959.

Frank Sinatra recorded the song on his 1964 album It Might as Well Be Swing. This became the rendition that many people identified the song with. Sinatra's recording was played by the astronauts of Apollo 10, on their lunar mission).

Many singers had sung it. Here two of them. The gorgeous voice ot The Voice itself, Frank, Mr. Sinatra and
that wonderful lovely jazzy voice, Ms Diana Krall's version playing the piano- wow, I adore her!!!-, both on behalf of them.

Sinatra's ( pics and lyrics):




Ms Krall's live version accompanied by John Clayton:

Slideshow.

I've just added a Slideshow at the sidebar on the top left. It's Picasa stuff. As I can see it is all about flowers and leaves. It is very beautiful, isn't it? I like it.