she loves NY

And she's every girl you've seen in every movie
Every dame you've ever known on late night TV
In her steam and steel is the passion you feel
Endlessly

My girl

I don't need no money, fortune, or fame.
I've got all the riches baby one man can claim.
I guess you'd say
What can make me feel this way?
My girl
Talkin' 'bout my girl.

curiosity

Never lose a holy curiosity
Albert Einstein

Discover Antônio Carlos Jobim & Elis Regina!

A dónde van/Where do they go?

She died one day before my birthday one month ago. I have never heard about Tasha Tudor before when, on my birthday, one anonymous dropped a newspaper clipping with a note in my husband’s mailbox in a very tender handwriting: Think your wife may be interested. The newspaper clipping was about the illustrator. Some extracts…

• “The modern world held few charms for Tasha Tudor, the eccentric and adored children’s book illustrator who died last week at the age of 92. In both her life and her work, Tudor exuded an unabashed nostalgia for a vanished time that she never knew first hand. She was born in 1915, but was so intensely fond of the 1830s that she sought almost her whole life to pursue the rural manners of that era.”

• “She appeared to have none of fastidious modernity’s terror of death. She told an interviewer in 1996 that she believed in Albert Einstein’s theory of time as a kind of river. If we could get around the river’s bends, Einstein (and Tudor) thought, we could travel on either direction, “When I die” she concluded, “I’m going back to the 1830s”
• “(Her work): the effect was to create a lovely protected world, a walled garden of the imagination where bands of little children might spend the afternoon playing fairies or pretending to be pirates. ”

• ¨Tudor seems sometimes to have found the world’s acclaim faintly exasperating ¨Everyone who likes my illustrations says, “Oh, you must be so enthralled with your creativity¨ she once remarked. “That’s nonsense. I’m a commercial artist, and I’ve done my books because I needed to earn my living” Still, what a way to live. It’s fair to say that, like the Oscar Wilde, Tasha Tudor put her talent into her work and her genius into her life. May she rest in…1830”

There are some objects, some facts, some people that at first sight impress us in a transcendent way, like Randy Pausch, who left us today.

Discover Silvio Rodríguez!

- Una de calamares y un dibujillo para los que me animan a seguir dibujando!
-Marchando!

(Dibujo rápido mientras estoy trabajando en otro coso, vida a la espontaneidad, verdad Julio?)

Me aplastó el crujir de una locomotora
Me quedé como una linea en el espacio
Me barriste sin querer con una escoba
Me salvaste con un beso y un abrazo

Mi luz mi corazón mi pajarita mi crayon
Por verte fui dejando siluetas en las puertas
Mi luz mi corazon mi tinta china por amor
Le pido al dibujante que me lleve en un cometa.


Pedro Guerra, Dibujos Animados

NY again

Nunca es demasiado, nunca. Una pequeña visita a la ciudad para enseñar el book a un par de editoriales.

He aquí el reportaje

La típica zapatilla que podíamos ver en la Barceloneta, urban stuff... Qué significa?

La típica furgoneta que entra dentro de un hotel a media tarde...

Chicas perfectas everywhere, cómo lo hacen?

Jeje, seguro que no hacen esto... Por cierto, esta es mi wedding cake, el pastel de mi boda, un galleta de la fortuna, sí...Es lo que tiene de bueno, una boda de pobres, digo, siempre puedes ir a por tu pastel. (Me pongo muy nerviosa si la tengo que compartir...Siempre aviso, no comparto)

Y el mensajito de siempre, para Alicia... la crueldad del cocinero

Discover Joe Purdy!

Sweet child o´mine

A project I never finished... But I am going to give it a try...
Sweet child of mine... As other children, I used to have a band... The best of my childhood, for sure.

She's got a smile that it seems to me
Reminds me of childhood memories
Where everything
Was as fresh as the bright blue sky
Now and then when I see her face
She takes me away to that
special place
And if I stared too long
I'd probably break down and cry

Sweet child o' mine
Sweet love of mine

Guns N´Roses, Sweet Child of Mine

Foggy

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there

The song was about encountering Suzanne Verdal, the wife of sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, in a Montreal setting.

And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover

Indeed, many lines describe different elements of the city, including its river (the Saint Lawrence) and a little chapel near the harbour, called Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours (literally Our Lady of Good Help), which sits on the side of the harbour that faces the rising sun in the morning, as it is described in the song.

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers


She is now homeless in Venice Beach, California, USA, where she lives in her automobile.

There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind.

She says she has met Cohen twice since the song's initial popularity; once after a concert Cohen performed in the 1970s and once in passing in the 1990s where Cohen did not speak to her (and possibly did not recognize her).

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors
then Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone


Leonard Cohen, Suzanne
Wikipedia, Suzanne


*****************************************************************
When we go to Venice Beach we just rent a bike to make the curves as fast as we can pretending we can't see the rags on the side....

On the other side Suzanne stares at potential blind rag dolls cycling away

highest

sunny

Brooklyn bridge, one week ago.

4th of July, Independence day

¨America is skyscrapers, but it is also wide-open spaces and deserts; it is scenes of future life but also landscapes of the dawn of the world that are certainly not "our" European dawn but that, from Audubon to Baudrillard are a kind of reminiscence of it, or a reminder. So there it is; perhaps this journey has the peculiarity, finally, of giving us a taste of both. Perhaps it's one of those very rare experiences capable of offering, in one single bundle of sensations, a whiff of the ultramodern and another of the extremely archaic. And perhaps the love we feel for the journey seems from the obscure conviction that here, and here alone, the possibility is offered to a human being to see concentrated the materialization of these two dreams, pre- and posthistorical, both equally powerful, but which usually we can think of only as separated by thousands of kilometers and, even more, by millenia. The American journey, in one single space (a country), in one short period of time (scarcely three centuries, maybe four), in the scarcely one hundred years, for instance, that sufficed for the first American pioneers who entered the territory of Death Valley and the Grand Canyon to invent the hideous Las Vegas (and doing so, to leap from the prebibical to the postmodern): the American journey, then or the endless passage from Eden to Gehenna, the permanent short circuit of the Bible and science fiction, the journey across humanity's golden age and age of lead...¨

Bernard-Henri Lévy, American vertigo

So-called life

Les cerró la puerta del taxi para no girarse más. El llanto había explotado en su estómago y no era buena señal. Cuando se acercó a la puerta se había convertido en hipo y en el hall se escapó de su boca convirtiéndose en llanto de niño. Consiguió llegar al ascensor pero, damn!, que estaba ocupado...

De repente, la otra amiga de los que se habían ido interceptó el ascensor y se sorprendió al ver ese hipo de llanto incontrolado. También ella tenía los ojos húmedos, pero ella llevaba veinte años más de experiencia en despedidas.

No es que llorara la despedida. Lloraba the bells, porque de repente entendió que tocaban por ella, y que la vida se convertiría en una larga y periódica comitiva de despedidas. Se podía aprender a despedirse? ...En realidad, no conocía tanto a esos vecinos, que por aquellos guiños de la vida tenían que ser de Barcelona...

Pero al verles dentro del taxi vio su propia existencia en el asiento de atrás de un taxi de cristales herméticos, siempre con prisas, empezando de nuevo cada poco y despidiéndose eternamente. Era eso factible? Pero estaba tan enganchada a la oportunidad de lo nuevo que tenía una relación dual con la identidad geográfica.

@%!!$%@@&**!!##!*$@@!!!

Los últimos días en Nueva York habían sido de un total relax. Nueva York en Julio huele a Barcelona, a Barceloneta. La gente deambula por las calles con la frescura del adolescente veraniego. Nueva York, es hogar, paradoja. Ruido sí, pero era una cuna internacional plácida, y lo más importante, era vida. Nunca fallaba, era una garantía.

Poco a poco los prejuicios europeos habían resbalado. Henri-Lévy (American Vertigo, 2006) decía algo así como que Estados Unidos era el único sitio donde uno podía ver simultáneamente a sus propios antepasados a la vez que el futuro de la sociedad. Esta era la magia singular del país, sentirse rodeado de pasado y futuro a la vez, o sea, presente continuo, contextualizado, tierra, fiiiirmes!

Y como no, en este presente continuo había continuas celebraciones, continuas despedidas,...Con acento turco esa otra amiga de los vecinos, antes de salir del ascensor le soltó ¨and don´t feel a stranger¨. No se sentía como una extraña, simplemente, su estómago estaba experimentando uno de esos pocos instantes en que uno se sabe vivo, había visto algo, algo muy fuerte, como un trazo de muerte, o bueno, un latigazo de vida. O sea a esa realidad abismal en la que de repente no hay nada más que el envoltorio de uno mismo. Nada más sirve, nadie, sólo uno, sí, la levedad. Sus circunstancias y ella misma, diría Ortega.

A partir de entonces desbancó la injusticia, no era injusto ir conociendo los seres más bellos y saberlos caducos en el primer beso de saludo. Era la construcción del yo. Empezó a imaginarse los primeros inmigrantes irlandeses, alemanes, italianos llegando a Nueva Inglaterra y eso le reconfortó en lo más íntimo, en los genes, probablemente.

El antiguo paradigma se basaba en la vuelta.
Qué hacer en este nuevo paradigma que vetaba la vuelta? Cómo referenciar la propia existencia sin unas latitudes geográficas? Sin un volver, la vida estaba palpable en el aire. No quedaba más remedio que vivirla.