MAS SEMPRE AO LADO DO POVO
foto: fernando gonçalves
nota: manisfestação de hoje, em lisboa.
BARGANTE: Que ou quem tem maus costumes; libertino,patife,velhaco. Trabalhador que trabalha em grupo, indivíduo de baixa extracção que se agrupa com outros, soldado, mercenário. Homem do mundo que anda com gente alegre, malfeitor. UM BLOGUE DE FERNANDO GONÇALVES

O maior sacana português
1 - PSD pede "cabal esclarecimento" sobre licenciatura de Sócrates.
Moscow, said Gogol, “doesn’t like to do anything halfway. If the aristocracy decide to party, they will party until they drop and won’t worry if it costs more than they have in their pockets.” Replace the 19th-century novelist’s nobility with today’s nouveaux riches and the spirit of Russia’s capital seems pretty much the same. There is nothing halfway about the petro-dollar tycoons with their gas-guzzling Hummers, gilten-crusted nightclubs and haute-couture girlfriends. So, when it comes to the art biennale that opens this week, you can’t expect Moscow to behave like some bashful newcomer — even if it is one. A team of eight international curators — fronted by the “commissioner” Josef Backshtein — have been hired. Together they stage a sprawling, multifaceted event. Footnotes on Geopolitics, Markets and Amnesia is the theme — and if you don’t know what that means, the catalogue offers no illumination. Gabble about “macro-economic battles” and “neo-liberal reality” meet all the currently acceptable standards of artistic impenetrability. Besides, Backshtein has been far too busy battling hydra-headed problems. “The amazing thing about this biennale,” as one astonished Muscovite told me, “is not that they have put it on, but that they thought they could put it on when they knew that the bureaucracy would be a complete and utter mess.” The principle exhibition, for instance, was originally...
In a gents’ club in downtown Moscow somewhere, Jeremy is keeling over like a stricken junk. He is still wearing most of his London suit, but he’s also casually thrown on a virtually naked Ukrainian lady with legs longer than the Trans-Siberian railway and a smile that could melt buttons. She’s not wholly naked, she’s still wearing the merest thong... Oh no, that’s come off, revealing a pubic tonsure as slim as a gulag snout. Though I expect it looks like a mohair beanie from where Jeremy’s sitting.
“My, these are very attractive lap-dancers,” he shouts by way of polite conversation to our host, a charming and taste-free Russian plutocrat who...
The start of the season pulls toffs, aspiring toffs and pretty much everyone else to the banks of the Thames for the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race at the end of March or beginning of April – the theory is that they stay in their finery for a glittering sporting and cultural programme that stretches through to Cowes Week in August.
On her return from Barbados, as soon as the spring’s collections slip onto the rails of Bond Street’s most exclusive stores, Ratiu begins her search for the perfect outfit for the royal enclosure at Ascot. There follows a round of lunches, at which she checks that none of her friends will be wearing anything similar. “That would be a disaster!” the 45-year-old jeweller says, her deep-blue eyes wide, and...
Roman Abramovich has lost a title that he would rather have kept and kept one that he wanted to lose after a day that illuminated the rules of life in President Putin’s Russia.
The Chelsea owner was overtaken as Russia’s richest man by an aluminium magnate whose estimated fortune of $21.2 billion (£10.8 billion) is said to make him $200 million richer than Mr Abramovich, whose football club is second in the English Barclaycard remier-ship. In another reversal, Mr Putin compelled Mr Abramovich to remain in office as governor of a far-flung region in the Arctic Circle two months after he tried to resign.
Mr Putin plainly means to keep a grip on the oligarchs as next year’s presidential elections approach. Despite Mr Abramovich’s billions, he has to display loyalty to Mr Putin. Mr Putin’s power-play also illustrates the uneasy relationship between the Kremlin and the business elite whose wealth is resented by ordinary Russians, who believe that much of it was stolen in privatisation deals in the 1990s. The Kremlin said that Mr Putin valued Mr Abramovich’s work as Governor in impoverished Chukotka.
Mr Abramovich’s huge investments to improve living standards in Chukotka are often cited as an example to others in showing loyalty to the Kremlin.
The jailing of Mikhail Khod-orkovsky, who was the richest...
"Os hooligans chegaram à política. De fatinho às riscas e cabelo lambido.
O nosso pequenino mundo está em grande ebulição. À direita, no PP, onde antes havia personalidades que se odiavam cordialmente - expressão usada por um velho dirigente -, caiu o "cordialmente". Nos salões bem almofadados de um hotel de cinco estrelas, montou-se uma enorme peixeirada com os mais inesperados intervenientes. O resultado final será catastrófico.
FROM TROPHY WIFE TO TOXIC WIFEI'm not talking about the ones who sacrificed careers at the altar of family life only to be cruelly abandoned when their useful days are done. I'm talking about the ones who knowingly take their husbands to the cleaners claiming, while they are at it, that they could do with £20 million or so to keep them in blow-drys. What kind of person actually needs £20 million for spending money? The Toxic Wife, that's who.
Such was the furore earlier this year over my identification of Toxic Wife Syndrome in the pages of the Telegraph that it is clear I have hit a raw nerve. From the staggering response, from Japan to Iraq and America to Berkshire (where my article is now framed in the gentlemen's loo of a Lambourn pub), there...
Por me parecer muito esclarecedor, e por ter sido publicado na revista Time, de radicalismo notório, já citei em outras ocasiões, e voltarei a fazê-lo, o artigo de John Elson, intitulado The Millennium of Discovery. How Europe emerged from the Dark Ages and developed a civilization that came to dominate the entire world (“O Milénio da Descoberta. Como a Europa emergiu da Era das Trevas e desenvolveu uma civilização que acabou dominando o mundo inteiro”) . É de lá que procedem estas linhas: “O triunfo do Ocidente representou, de muitos modos, uma vergonha sangrenta – uma história de atrocidade e de rapina, de arrogância, cobiça e poluição ecológica, de desprezo insolente por outras culturas e intolerância para com credos não-cristãos.” Só num ponto deve ser modificada esta sentença verídica e rude: o uso do tempo verbal no passado. Tal história não é somente o que “o triunfo do Ocidente” foi, mas sim o que continua sendo para o resto do planeta. Há tantos exemplos recentes, que nos sentimos dispensados de lembrá-los. Nos últimos tempos, vem-se generalizando a prática de usar, em lugar de Oeste, ou Ocidente, o vocábulo Norte, o que transforma os outros países, por exclusão binária, no Sul. Como no caso anterior, não faz sentido apegarmo-nos ás origens geográficas. No caso, trata-se de diferenças estruturais, e não topográficas.

The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos) gathers 14 contemporary living artists from seven countries in Central and South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay and Venezuela), all of whose work contends with the horrors and violence stemming from the totalitarian regimes in each of their nations during the mid- to late-20 th century. Some of the artists worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The youngest were born into the aftermath of those dictatorships. And still others have lived in countries maimed by endless civil war. These artists whose work is represented in the exhibition are Marcelo Brodsky , Luis Camnitzer , Arturo Duclos , Juan Manuel Echavarría , Antonio Frasconi , Nicolás Guagnini , Nelson Leirner, Sara Maneiro , Cildo Meireles , Oscar Muñoz , Ivan Navarro , Luis González Palma , Ana Tiscornia and Fernando Traverso . Also included is a collaborative installation Identity/Identidad by a collective of 13 Argentinean artists.
The range of visual languages -- drawings, prints, photographs, installations and mixed media -- incorporated in The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos) frequently employs similar forms to evoke the presence of the missing person or persons. Bodies, faces, personal possessions and names, often methodically compiled and arranged, appear both boldly and subtly throughout the work in the exhibition. “Through their intense visual and emotional impact, these works communicate the unspeakable and reveal the artist’s assumed role of social responsibility towards ending the silence surrounding these extreme cases of human rights violations,” says Julián Zugazagoitia, Director of El Museo del Barrio. “In this context of public awareness and education through art, El Museo, as the only venue in the Eastern United States for this internationally traveling exhibition, aims to assemble as broad an audience as possible to confront and preserve the memory of these recent historical tragedies.”
Segundo o matutino local Koelner Stadt Anzeiger, citado pela Lusa, Dammann (substituto de Pinamonte no S.Carlos) "faz bem em sair [da Ópera de Colónia]": o prolongamento do seu contrato após Agosto de 2009, escreve o jornal alemão, não estaria, de todo, garantido.
Que avaliação faz desta ministra da Cultura?
O DN publicou, na edição de segunda-feira, uma longa entrevista com Augusto Santos Silva, um dos ministros e dirigentes do PS que têm a reputação, merecida, de há muito reflectirem sobre a acção política e a ideologia que a deveria enformar.
..."Mas não. A qualidade não parece ser o critério do momento. Mais depressa a mentira e a manipulação (veja-se a forma despudorada como a saída de Pinamonti foi apresentada como correspondendo a uma demissão, utilizando para tal um extracto fora do contexto de uma das cartas que escreveu a uma ministra que nem merece que se lhe cite o nome). Mais depressa o populismo sem horizontes (que é isso do São Carlos para turismo cultural? Matinés para japoneses?). Ou, pior ainda, mais depressa dirigista e controleira, velha tentação de quem já foi controleiro na vida política e de quem entende que, na cultura, também há uma linha justa.
From the moment the footage from the infested Taco Bell aired, the rat story had legs. Tourists came to gawk and have their pictures taken at the Greenwich Village restaurant where the large rodents had been seen scurrying across the floor and climbing the tables. Passersby scrawled rodent-themed graffiti on Health Department closure notice ("Gimme a Side of Mice and Beans!"; Try Our New Burrato!"). The rats were "the best local news story you could possibly have," gushed an editor for WNBC. David Letterman made jokes about them on late night television. Officials at City Hall, however, did not seem so amused. Having rats take over a restaurant was a major embarrassment, especially given that the Taco Bell/KFC in question had passed a health inspection less than 24 hours earlier. The department closed over a dozen other restaurants for health violations since February 23, and city officials have talked up the toughness of its inspection process.
Once again, City Hall seems to be at war with...
Tate’s US fund-raising organisation is offering its members the opportunity to attend a reception hosted by Tony and Cherie Blair at 10 Downing Street.
FACTOS
Cosmopolitismo ou provincianismo?
Entrevistado no Jornal das 9, da Sic Notícias de ontem, e já perto do final da entrevista, o Secretário de Estado dos Transportes e Obras Públicas justificou a opção da Ota para a construção do novo aeroporto de Lisboa com o facto de existirrem inúmeros estudos que apontam para aquela solução.
Sorry Steve, Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work," BusinessWeek wrote with great certainty in 2001. "It's desperation time in Cupertino, Calif.," opined TheStreet.com. "I give [Apple] two years before they're turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake," predicted retail consultant David Goldstein. Yet five years later, at 4:15 A.M., a light flickered on. Onlookers were bathed in the milky-white glow of the Apple logo, suspended in a freestanding cube of glass at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South in Manhattan. Dazzling in clarity and 32 feet on a side, the structure was likened variously to a temple, the Louvre Pyramid, Apple's G4 "Cube" computer, a giant button, and even - in the words of NBC's Brian Williams - Steve Jobs' Model T. But it was, everyone could...
SOCRATES FAZ DA QUALIFICAÇÃO UM DESÍGNIO