PingPong

Sometime ago I was at my mother's and she had there a book that someone had offered her, or someone had left there, or someone was about to through it away and she rescued. It was a book she clearly was not interested in. The book looked old, the edition was not very beautiful. The title, in Portuguese, could be translated as something like "For the sake of an inventory" and I think is the translation of the French title. The title of the English version is  "The dark brain of Piranesi and other essays". It was the author, Marguerite Yourcenar (an anagram of her real surname, Crayencour), that made me pick it up immediately. And it is true that it contains an essay about a series of Piranesi engravings representing imaginary prisons ( Carceri d'Invenzione ). The subject of this works is mysterious enough and I spent a great deal of time looking at these and other works of Piranesi that can be found easily on the Internet. But as magical as these engraving...

My first contact with Closer to Truth was through an amazing documentary that it's worth to mention separately from their typical interviews. It is a very exhaustive and in-depth exposition of the main difficulties facing philosophers, scientists and theologists dealing with the idea of free will. Big Questions in Free Will (2016) shows and elaborates on hardcore conundrums such as: Do we really have free will or is it an illusion? Are moral judgement and legal responsability strongly linked to free will? Does the possible existence of god perturb our idea of free will? And much more... It is very informative, on one side, to follow philosophers struggling to develop and explain logical arguments that should solve these issues, and on the other, to watch scientists designing and performing very cleaver experiments to test some of the key hypotheses behind those issues. Keeping up with the philosophical and the scientific research is not only interesting, it is actually a great int...

Ever since I found the Bryan Magee TV series on Modern Philosophy and the History of Philosophy broadcasted at prime time by BBC in the late 70s and 80s, I have been searching for similar shows still on air today or at least more recent. It is a difficult quest, but it is fortunately coronated by findings as interesting as Closer to Truth . The host Robert Lawrence Kuhn is a quite different kind host, and the show is very much influenced by the speed and headlines need of the present day media. So, this time you won't find any sofa-lying attitude and a kind of conversational reasoning to help the exposition of very fundamental ideas, a signature of Bryan Magee's programs. Instead, the new host urges the interviewee to go straight to the subject and extracts well-stated concise summaries without giving too much time to the audience to polish their rough interpretations of their actual ideas. Indeed is more an interview-base program and less of debate. But the host is still key...

The last months have been hard, and there haven't been much time left to contribute to this blog. Moreover, Gabriel's posts are so elaborate and have such high quality that I get shy, I can not comply with his standards. And there is no doubt they are stimulating, and they bring lots of new ideas to my mind, ideas that result, at most, in drafts for future posts that I never write.  And when I start writing, I always have to check something with google, or have to find a video on youtube, and that further stimulates my mind and postpones my writing. You all know the process. But I promised Gabriel that I would write something this evening. It is raining, or at least it was raining the all day, so it is the perfect day to seat at write a long post. I could start with a list of things I would like to write about. The book I am reading now, or the books, the movies I saw last week, and the week before, and the months before; some music. One of the books I am reading now is c...

I was about to answer Gabriel's post with a comment but realised that it would be difficult to include a video there. Gabriel asked for a Portuguese example. The example that immediately comes to my mind is Zeca Afonso. Again the guitar and the poetic engaged lyrics, as in Gabriel's examples. One of his songs was broadcast as a sign for the army to start the revolution that overthrew the authoritarian government in Portugal in 1974. The music I am leaving here talks about the people from a neighbourhood known as "The indians of Meia Praia". This was a slum of fisherman in the south of Portugal. After the revolution the people living there gathered and rebuilt the neighbourhood with the help of the architect José Veloso within a program called SAAL, within which the government gave the land, some technical and financial support. The song is full of revolutionary spirit. I do not dare to translate the lyrics, but is has sentences such as: "There were women and...

For a while I've been meaning to talk about the Cuban Nueva Trova -a kind of New Song movement  a là  Bob Dylan. Probably, the first kick of will came from a very curious, intellectually and emotionally rewarding conversation with Claudia and some Italian friends. While talking, we re-discovered with astonishment that there were a bunch of musical movements (one can hardly called them genres), virtually all with the same features (e.g., a mix of local folk music with classic guitar or sophisticated arrangements, poetic lyrics, and ideologically oriented songs), appearing in the world in the late 60s and early 70s. The reasons may vary from country to country. Among the local reasons, in Cuba it is somehow related to the rising of Revolution, and probably, in the US, to the social discontent with the Vietnam war. But actually, it was the state of the world as a whole, the preceding and current History of mankind, the emergence of new progressive ideas (to quote Bob Dylan, the c...

Two Cuban songs to start a new period of posting/bouncing, hopefully intensely. Enjoy! The first song, "Danza Ñáñiga", is interpreted by the all-star Cuban group Irakere, famous in the 1970-80's for mixing jazz, rock and Afro-Cuban music. The song is authored by Chucho Valdés, creator/director of Irakere, one of the best-known jazz composer and pianist player in the world, and probably the most influent musician within modern Afro-Cuban jazz. The second song, "Siempre Happy", is interpreted by another Cuban group Habana Abierta, plenty of talented young musicians, that were a hit in Cuba and Spain in early 2000's because of their rebellious lyrics and their fusion of Nueva Trova style (a more less cult Cuban music genre --think of Bob Dylan) with popular/danceable music of very different kinds. The song is authored by Boris Larramendi, perhaps one of the most creative and fresh-minded composers of Cuban music by now. Aha, I was just missing that the p...