Short and Sound

Indytween

explicar o inexplicável

“(...) 

Quão salutar e revigorante foi o contraste com a selecção portuguesa. Eis um conjunto de jogadores com perfeita noção de que a qualidade é um bem escasso e precioso, que deve ser tratado como um recurso finito do planeta. Frugais e poupadinhos com os nossos consumos intermédios (boas ideias, passes certos, remates enquadrados) fazemos apenas o estritamente necessário para conseguir o resultado que desejamos, delegando parte substancial da tarefa à inoperância adversária.

E assim aconteceu no jogo contra Marrocos. Ao minuto 4, Cristiano Ronaldo colocou Portugal na condição que lhe pertence por direito: a inexplicável vantagem no marcador. Daí para a frente foi uma questão de aguardar que os marroquinos percebessem por si próprios - através do método ancestral da tentativa e erro - que nenhum dos seus planos ia resultar, e que a atitude correcta perante as circunstâncias era perderem não só o jogo, mas a alegria de viver.

Uma lição de eficiência. Foi como se toda a empreitada dos Descobrimentos tivesse sido preparada pelo Infante D. Henrique no promontório de Sagres, numa cadeira de baloiço e com uma manta nos joelhos, a desafiar o Atlântico num plácido murmúrio: "Ora então o Cabo das Tormentas que venha cá meter-se com a gente, para vermos se é assim tão tormentoso. Eu aqui o espero".

Esta capacidade recém-adquirida para defrontarmos uma sucessão de equipas que se calhar mereciam ganhar-nos, mas se revelam incapazes de o fazer, levou a comparações com a Itália, comparações que não iluminam o assunto nem favorecem nenhuma das partes envolvidas. A Itália é historicamente exímia a atrapalhar de forma deliberada a manobra ofensiva das outras pessoas. Portugal é contemporaneamente exímio a estar no sítio certo enquanto, por mero acaso, as outras pessoas se atrapalham sozinhas. (O catenaccio tornava o jogo mais previsível e menos excêntrico; nós tornamos tudo incompreensível).

Cada estilo coerente, por ser uma maneira de observar o Mundo e de responder ao que se observa, incorpora uma moral. Aqui estou, proclama o estilo: é esta a maneira como o meu sucesso justifica a qualidade da vossa alegria. O estilo actual da selecção portuguesa, por ser um anti-estilo, não cede ao impulso artístico de olhar para dentro, e limita-se (com a veemência dos predestinados) a apontar para fora. Observamos aquilo de que os outros são capazes, e concluímos que são incapazes. Que não conseguem fazer aquilo que querem, nem sequer têm a sorte necessária para que lhes aconteça o que querem de forma acidental. Um bando de inúteis, no fundo. Pelo que a nossa felicidade consiste em sabermos que, mais uma vez, nos desviámos dois passos para o lado, dois segundos antes de levarmos com um piano nos cornos.

Tendo honrado, desta maneira brilhante, a memória de Figo, Rui Costa, Futre, Chalana e Eusébio, tendo cumprido, em suma, o sonho de D. Sebastião, resta-nos agora perguntar: mas afinal isto serve para quê? Será possível ir ultrapassando todos os obstáculos desta maneira? Um Universo racional permitirá que dois troféus consecutivos sejam conquistados assim?

É pouquíssimo provável, mas o tempo o dirá, e só se deve fazer uma pergunta de cada vez. Antes disso, ainda temos mais esperanças para aniquilar, mais inocências para destruir. Enquanto houver uma criança nas bancadas, sorrindo na expectativa de um grande espectáculo, enquanto sobrar um único circunspecto espectador neutral, convencido de que vai perceber alguma coisa do que se passa dentro de campo, a nossa tarefa não está cumprida. No que depender de nós, ninguém na Rússia se diverte, e ninguém aprende nada. Às armas!

"Uma máquina para matar purismos", por Rogério Casanova, in DN

está um belo dia para matar um borrego com 32 anos

Não se pode odiar para sempre o sorrisinho de um cromo, só porque meteu duas batatas na baliza do Damas (certo, se tivesse sido na do Bento tinha sido pior). 

Acho que até um par de corninhos lhe desenhei na caderneta. Para não dizerem que não fiz a minha parte.

Parábola pop

We are everyday robots on our phones
In the process of getting home
Looking like standing stones
Out there on our own

We’re everyday robots in control
Or in the process of being sold
Driving in adjacent cars
'Til you press restart

chamem-lhe "hueco" chamem

Deusébio está connosco

5 para as de Ouro

"O tempo só estrangula

quem não ama. E sabiam

que deles algo

noutros ficaria, transfluente."

António Osório

Parabéns, meus queridos !

por este andar é a única praia que vamos ter este ano

raio do tempo...

Old Whore

"... much like the act of professional writing. 
It's just another perpetual loop. Think of it like fucking... which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.
(...)
That a writer's real purpose, whether they like it or not, is to pass a judgement on History. Recent or otherwise... The irony being that in passing judgement... a writer enters that same stream of History. Which as good old Dickie Nixon noted is a very tricky thing to escape from. And leads you inevitably... to judgement yourself. Can't escape it. Your achievements... like bricks... will come to found the walls... of your mausoleum..."

"What Is Possible", by Mohsin Hamid

«In California, my mom worked an entry-level job at what now might be called a Silicon Valley tech business. It made audiocassettes. My dad made peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and popcorn. He picked me up from preschool, strapping me into the yellow child seat mounted at the back of his bike. He had a mustache and sideburns and not much more hair than that, and on his bike I toured the campus of the university where he was studying and went to swimming class and the grocery store, and at his side on our sofa I watched cartoons on our small black-and-white TV, a TV in which I always saw colors, though I was told by friends that this wasn’t possible.

My dad never told me that it wasn’t possible. He was my buddy, and we made model planes and ant terrariums, and went hiking in the hills and swimming in Lake Lagunita, which in those days was sometimes dry and sometimes not. We fed butterflies sugar water and watched them unfurl what we called their tongues and drink.

My mom drove to work every weekday morning in our secondhand blue Datsun and drove back every evening in time to make us dinner. She brought home the bacon, in my mind. (Of the non-pork variety, I ought to add, given that we were a Muslim family, though I’m not sure I was aware that there was such a thing as religious identity, back then.)

Once, my mother’s younger brother visited from Pakistan. “Where’s your wife?” I probed. “I’m not married,” he told me. “Then who makes the money?” I asked.

My mother told me that my uncle thought it was odd that I called my parents by their first names.

My earliest best friend was a Dutch kid whose dad was a geologist and whose mom was part Indonesian. My subsequent best friend was an American kid whose father was an African-American poet and whose mother was what I suppose should be called European-American and I think was originally from Texas. The thing I remember most about them was that they had almost the same first name, his mother and his father, different by just one letter.

But I guess my real best friend was my dad. It’s funny to think that, as I write this, I’m twice the age he was when I was born. He was a young dad, and it felt as if he had all the time in the world.

When I was nine, he finished his Ph.D. and we moved back to Lahore, and that part of my life came to an end. He got a job as a university professor, so he wasn’t at home anymore, and, after my sister arrived, my mom worked for another year or two, then stopped, and I grew older, and things changed, as things do.

It’s been the better part of four decades since we first moved back to Pakistan, and in that time I’ve lived all over the place and worn a suit to work in Manhattan and ridden the tube to work in London and lost my hair like my dad and married and had two kids, and now I live next door to my parents in Lahore, and when my kids come home from school I’m the one who sits with them and watches cartoons on TV.

My wife works and I write, so my days are spent in the house, and I get to go hunting for butterflies with my kids and watch the kites build and rebuild their nest in a tree on the back lawn and preen on the water-overflow pipe on our roof like the symbols adorning some proud nation’s currency.

On the weekend, my wife joins us on our outings, and so do my parents, or, rather, we all join my dad, because he has the patience to find the nest of a tailorbird or the slyly dancing form of a praying mantis, which takes some doing, for we don’t live in the countryside; we live in a city of eleven million people.

At times, I miss having a regular job and a place to be during the day with people my age. I miss it a lot. I can be resentful of my wife. I can complain, even as she tells me that I’m doing exactly what I told her I always wanted to do.

But then there are times such as when, a few months ago, my five-year-old son looked at me while we were playing and said, “Baba, when I grow up, I be your brother?”

And I looked at him with wonder and said, “Yes. When you grow up, you be my brother.”»

in The New Yorker, 30 de Maio