Holly Cole and Gray Skyes
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
-T.S. Eliot
It’s pretty lonesome to be the guy who walks around carrying the weight of the world on his pockets. You’ve got to have really big pockets too. This wandering around, not knowing what to do, and not knowing what’s going the outcome of the struggle between the forces of your laziness and your will to do something meaningful is a very hard activity and, at the same time, no activity at all.
To make it all the more depressing, the sky is as gray as my disposition. I face the everyday task of being nice, smile and nod to everybody as a way of expiating my petty little sins. It’s not so unpleasant as it is dull. When you take upon yourself the task of being nice as a discipline, everything becomes rather gray. But I suppose the whole nice business has become part of my nature anyway.
There is one good thing about today, though. Holly Cole. I’m listening to her Temptation album. I have many albums to feel depressed listening to, but this goes to my top ten list. No, I will not list the others, I’ll mention them if I ever catch myself listening to them in a sad mood, but not before that. Her low key, soft and whispery voice caught my ear as soon as I heard the first notes of Bob Telson’s Calling You, and then I was lost. She really knows how to create a blue atmosphere without screaming her pain like a cat being choked to death. That has become a rather hard to find, much appreciated quality.
Of course I don’t expect many strangers reading this weblog, even though it’s published, but I feel it’s useful to clear out to those of you who are not familiar to the Portuguese language (a very beautiful language indeed, if I may say) that I am an inhabitant of the inexplicable Terra Brasilis, which makes me no more of a potential idiot than anyone else, but certainly makes me a subject to a higher level of pretentious ignorance than people in America or the Old World are obligated to encounter. That happens because here we have a strong intellectual vice of copying the most recent nonsense that turns out to be fashionable in the supra mentioned locations (culturally speaking, of course) without much critical evaluation, as long as it helps any leftist political project. But even so, that is not what makes me depressed. It’s the bloody gray sky (Brazil is not sunny all the time, hard as it may be for some to believe) and this is one of those dreadful days with nothing to do and everything to be sorry for.
So, of course, as any guy with half a brain immersed in this “amazing” cultural environment (I’ve actually read, for example, a college professor write an article on a major newspaper defending the acquisition of transcendent knowledge of the self and the reality of the universe trough the use of mind blowing natural drug from a plant from Amazon region, like we were back in the sixties and everybody was living a life of liberation, drugs and promiscuous sex, and calling it just an alternative lifestyle) I think very highly of my own intelligence, but that doesn’t necessarily makes me right. I only do it because it’s comforting when I find that I can’t talk to most people. The best way a narcissistic like me can have a brake from all the stuff he has to put up to is to feel bad about it and write all down on paper, or on the computer (how little romantic). So, now to the point: I used to express all my malcontent in Portuguese, on another blog, but that got me tired, and I started writing about more important reflections – mostly philosophy – and lost my space to be miserable. What brings me to Prudence Regained, which was created so I could practice my English writing skills, not very good, I fear, and now assigned to bear my complaints as well.
But Holly Cole was the topic in question. Many people must have made better compliments to her talent and her ability to choose a very unexpected and yet captivating repertoire. But the sun is shining again, so this will be it, for the time being.
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
-T.S. Eliot
It’s pretty lonesome to be the guy who walks around carrying the weight of the world on his pockets. You’ve got to have really big pockets too. This wandering around, not knowing what to do, and not knowing what’s going the outcome of the struggle between the forces of your laziness and your will to do something meaningful is a very hard activity and, at the same time, no activity at all.
To make it all the more depressing, the sky is as gray as my disposition. I face the everyday task of being nice, smile and nod to everybody as a way of expiating my petty little sins. It’s not so unpleasant as it is dull. When you take upon yourself the task of being nice as a discipline, everything becomes rather gray. But I suppose the whole nice business has become part of my nature anyway.
There is one good thing about today, though. Holly Cole. I’m listening to her Temptation album. I have many albums to feel depressed listening to, but this goes to my top ten list. No, I will not list the others, I’ll mention them if I ever catch myself listening to them in a sad mood, but not before that. Her low key, soft and whispery voice caught my ear as soon as I heard the first notes of Bob Telson’s Calling You, and then I was lost. She really knows how to create a blue atmosphere without screaming her pain like a cat being choked to death. That has become a rather hard to find, much appreciated quality.
Of course I don’t expect many strangers reading this weblog, even though it’s published, but I feel it’s useful to clear out to those of you who are not familiar to the Portuguese language (a very beautiful language indeed, if I may say) that I am an inhabitant of the inexplicable Terra Brasilis, which makes me no more of a potential idiot than anyone else, but certainly makes me a subject to a higher level of pretentious ignorance than people in America or the Old World are obligated to encounter. That happens because here we have a strong intellectual vice of copying the most recent nonsense that turns out to be fashionable in the supra mentioned locations (culturally speaking, of course) without much critical evaluation, as long as it helps any leftist political project. But even so, that is not what makes me depressed. It’s the bloody gray sky (Brazil is not sunny all the time, hard as it may be for some to believe) and this is one of those dreadful days with nothing to do and everything to be sorry for.
So, of course, as any guy with half a brain immersed in this “amazing” cultural environment (I’ve actually read, for example, a college professor write an article on a major newspaper defending the acquisition of transcendent knowledge of the self and the reality of the universe trough the use of mind blowing natural drug from a plant from Amazon region, like we were back in the sixties and everybody was living a life of liberation, drugs and promiscuous sex, and calling it just an alternative lifestyle) I think very highly of my own intelligence, but that doesn’t necessarily makes me right. I only do it because it’s comforting when I find that I can’t talk to most people. The best way a narcissistic like me can have a brake from all the stuff he has to put up to is to feel bad about it and write all down on paper, or on the computer (how little romantic). So, now to the point: I used to express all my malcontent in Portuguese, on another blog, but that got me tired, and I started writing about more important reflections – mostly philosophy – and lost my space to be miserable. What brings me to Prudence Regained, which was created so I could practice my English writing skills, not very good, I fear, and now assigned to bear my complaints as well.
But Holly Cole was the topic in question. Many people must have made better compliments to her talent and her ability to choose a very unexpected and yet captivating repertoire. But the sun is shining again, so this will be it, for the time being.
posted by Tiago Ramos at 9:27 AM
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