New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'O malandro' (Mack the Knife)

I’m in Munich at the moment visiting the MCMP, but heading back home tonight after an European tour which included London, Prague and Munich. I like to be inspired by the places I visit for my BMoF selection (like last week with a London-inspired post), so following this principle, I was looking for something German-inspired to post. There are not that many salient connections between Brazilian and German music, but there is at least one interesting case. In 1978, Chico Buarque composed the musical Ópera do Malandro, inspired by Bertold Brecht’s The Three Penny Opera and John Gray’s Beggar’s Opera, which was then released in record form in 1979. Most of the songs are original compositions, but the opening song is a samba rendition of ‘Mack the knife’ (or ‘Die Moritat von Mackie Messer’) by Brecht and Weill. So here is ‘O malandro’, sung by the vocal group MPB-4. It is yet another proof of how much of a great, timeless song it is in that it allows for so many different interpretations. (I'm also a big fan of the Ella Fitzgerald version, here live in Berlin. UPDATE: Eric reminds me that he posted before on the great Ella and the fellas.)

What's wrong with Mochizuki's 'proof' of the ABC conjecture?

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

A few days ago Eric had a post about an insightful text that has been making the rounds on the internet, which narrates the story of a mathematical ‘proof’ that is for now sitting somewhere in a limbo between the world of proofs and the world of non-proofs. The ‘proof’ in question purports to establish the famous ABC conjecture, one of the (thus far) main open questions in number theory. (Luckily, a while back Dennis posted an extremely helpful and precise exposition of the ABC conjecture, so I need not rehearse the details here.) It has been proposed by the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, who is widely regarded as an extremely talented mathematician. This is important, as crackpot ‘proofs’ are proposed on a daily basis, but in many cases nobody bothers to check them; a modicum of credibility is required to get your peers to spend time checking your purported proof. (Whether this is fair or not is beside the point; it is a sociological fact about the practice of mathematics.) Now, Mochizuki most certainly does not lack credibility, but his ‘proof’ has been made public quite a few months ago, and yet so far there is no verdict as to whether it is indeed a proof of the ABC conjecture or not. How could this be?

As it turns out, Mochizuki has been working pretty much on his own for the last 10 years, developing new concepts and techniques by mixing-and-matching elements from different areas of mathematics. The result is that he created his own private mathematical world, so to speak, which no one else seems able (or willing) to venture into for now. So effectively, as it stands his ‘proof’ is not communicable, and thus cannot be surveyed by his peers.

Lichtenstein: 'Landscape with Philosopher'

 

Yesterday I visited the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at Tate Modern. It is a wonderful exhibition, which clearly reveals that Lichtenstein as an artist went much beyond the (apparently) 'easily digestible' pop-art paintings that he is famous for (especially the ones inspired by comic books). One of the most rewarding parts of the exhibition were the landscapes he painted at the very end of his career, such as this 'Landscape with philosopher', painted the year before he died (1996). It is one of the most poignant, dignifying representations of a philosopher that I've ever seen, and one which I can only hope contains something true about us philosophers.

"The math community faces a conundrum: the proof to a very important conjecture hangs in the air, yet nobody will touch it."

Kim sympathizes with his frustrated colleagues, but suggests a different reason for the rancor. “It really is painful to read other people’s work,” he says. “That’s all it is… All of us are just too lazy to read them.” Kim is also quick to defend his friend. He says Mochizuki’s reticence is due to being a “slightly shy character” as well as his assiduous work ethic. “He’s a very hard working guy and he just doesn’t want to spend time on airplanes and hotels and so on.” O’Neil, however, holds Mochizuki accountable, saying that his refusal to cooperate places an unfair burden on his colleagues. “You don’t get to say you’ve proved something if you haven’t explained it,” she says. “A proof is a social construct. If the community doesn’t understand it, you haven’t done your job.”--Has the ABC Conjecture been solved? [HT: Clerk Shaw on Facebook]

This piece is a nice inside perspective on the 'political economy' and social epistemology of mathematical proof.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'London, London'

By the time this goes online, I’ll be enjoying a long weekend in London with my family. And while this will likely come across as rather predictable, I just can’t help help myself: I’m posting ‘London, London’, by Caetano Veloso. It is a song from his 1971 album recorded in England, where he lived in exile for about three years after having spent several months in prison as an ‘enemy’ of the military dictatorship in power at the time. Until moving to England in 1969, Caetano’s knowledge of English was virtually non-existent, and yet in this period he regularly composed and recorded songs in English, including ‘London, London’.

The whole album, which is one of my favorites by him, revolves around what it feels like to be in exile: the thankfulness for being received in a foreign country, but also the deep, deep nostalgia (saudade!), the longing for his home. My favorite song of the album is actually 'If you hold a stone' (which soothed many moments of deep nostalgia in yours truly as well), and ‘London, London’ became a bit overplayed when it was recorded by a very successful (but truly horrible) pop band in the 1980s. And yet, it is a beautiful, delicate song. This particular video I'm posting (with tacky pictures of London in the backgroud) also features the lyrics in English, so you can see for yourself that Caetano was already a rather accomplished lyrics writer in English after only 2 years or so of familiarity with the language.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Paulo Vanzolini

One of the greatest samba composers of all times, Paulo Vanzolini, passed away a few days ago, aged 89. He is the composer of classics such as ‘Ronda’ (1951), ‘Volta por cima’ (1959), and ‘Boca da noite’ (1969), songs which any self-respecting Brazilian can sing without missing a beat, and which have been recorded by all the great singers. What is equally remarkable about Vanzolini is that he combined his music career with a highly successful academic career as a zoologist. Among other feats, he was the director of the Zoology Museum of the University of São Paulo from 1963 to 1993, and even after his retirement continued to do research at the museum virtually until his death. (I’m sure this combination of excellence in music and science will make a number of readers somewhat jealous.)

On anonymous grading

This semester, I’ve experimented with anonymous grading for the first time. Now that I think about it, it is a mystery why it took me so long to realize the obviousness of it, but better late than not at all, I suppose. As many other countries, the Netherlands does not have a tradition of anonymous grading at all, but I recently found out that in the UK it is fairly common practice, showing that it can be done. This was one of the topics of Jennifer Saul’s recent Aspasia Lecture in Groningen, and I am happy to report that she made such a good case for it that my colleagues in the evaluation board of the Faculty are already looking into adopting anonymous grading systematically.

Why should it be done? Well, for those of you familiar with the literature on implicit biases, the answer will not be hard to find: we inevitably rely on stereotypes and preconceptions to perceive and judge people, which serve as convenient heuristic shortcuts. This can have a negative effect on how we judge members of stigmatized groups (based on gender, ethnicity, class, geographical origin etc.), and it can also unfairly boost our judgment of privileged groups. With grading in particular, it has been noticed that anonymity significantly increases the average grades of members of these stigmatized groups, simply because their work is looked upon more objectively without the association to a particular person. (See this informative report by the British National Union of Students.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Só tinha de ser com você’

Busy times (and slow internet…) here at Lund, where I am attending the awesome G.I.R.L. conference. So a quick BMoF with a bossa nova classic, ‘Só tinha de ser com você’, here in the Elis Regina & Tom Jobim version. It is one of my favorite songs of their legendary duo album Elis & Tom (1974), also containing other jewels such as ‘Águas de março’.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Villa-Lobos

Here's something quite different today! Today I’m posting what is perhaps the most famous classical music piece composed by a Brazilian, namely ‘Trenzinho Caipira’, the Tocata of the second movement of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras. It was composed in 1930, and the whole idea is to emulate the noises made by a train by means of the instruments in the orchestra. Almost as famous is the fifth movement of the same Bachianas, ‘Aria’, here sung by Kiri te Kanawa. Villa-Lobos is without a doubt the best-known Brazilian classical composer thus far, and is notable in particular for incorporating traditional folk rhythms and melodies into his music. 

(Apologies for the short post today: I'm in the middle of the Groningen Graduate Conference at the moment.)

Talk to them!

 (This post is dedicated to my friends Marian and Jan-Willem, who last week welcomed a lovely baby girl into the world. They will most certainly talk to her an awful lot.)

Why is it that children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds tend to have lower school performance than children from wealthier environments? This may seem like a naïve question at first, but understanding the exact mechanisms in place proves to be much more challenging than one might think. Most likely, the phenomenon is due to a conjunction of factors involving level of education of primary caregiver, parental involvement, a stable environment, adequate nutrition, among others. (Some would like to see ‘genetic predisposition’ on the list. Now, while this cannot be ruled out, I take it that the currently available data are too tangled up with the above-mentioned social factors to allow for an analysis of the genetic component in isolation.)

A recent post at the Fixes blog of the New York Times (Fixes and The Stone are both members of the larger Opinionator family) highlights one specific element: how much people from different socioeconomic backgrounds actually talk to their infants. As reported in the 1995 book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley), it turns out that poorer parents talk considerably less to and around their babies than more affluent parents:

What is logic?

A few weeks ago Jeff Bell had a post with the suggestive title ‘What is philosophy?’, referring to the eponymous work by Deleuze and Guattari. Now, as it turns out, a similar question, ‘What is logic?’, has preoccupied David Marans, a lecturer in logic at St. Thomas University in Miami, for quite some time. He thus created the Logic Gallery, a compilation of statements by philosophers and logicians across the centuries (starting with Aristotle and ending with Tim Williamson) on the nature of logic (or else comments from which one can infer the author’s conception of logic). It is a useful glimpse at the different views on logic held across time, and as such well worth spending some time on. In particular, it illustrates the early influence of the conception of logic as pertaining to debating and discussing, and the later predominance of the conception of logic as pertaining to thought and mental processes.

Marans welcomes suggestions for improvement and additional submissions. (I should perhaps add the proviso that there are no exact references to the original location of the quotes, and also that there may be some issues of translation.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: Cartola

Today again a ‘normal’ BMoF, rather than the ‘on the road’ installments of the last two weeks. I must say however that it was a very pleasant surprise to hear from a number of people at the APA in San Francisco that they are fans of Brazilian music in general and of BMoF in particular. This definitely boosts my enthusiasm for this weekly commitment!

Today I want to post a couple of songs by Cartola (Portuguese for top hat). Cartola is widely recognized as one of the greatest samba musicians and composers of all times (together with others such as Noel Rosa and Paulinho da Viola). He was born at the beginning of the 20^th century, and led a rather eventful life. A typical bohemian, he was one of the founders of the Mangueira samba school in Rio, and lived most of his life in the Mangueira favela (shantytown). In the 1930s he was a widely recognized and successful musician, but in the 1940s his life took the wrong turn due to illness and other infortunes. Little is known about what exactly happened to him then, but he simply ‘disappeared’ from the musical scene, taking up the odd job as car washer or construction worker. He was ‘rediscovered’ in 1957 by a then-famous journalist (Sergio Porto), who began to promote Cartola again as a musician and composer. However, it was only in the 1970s, when Cartola was past 60 years old, that he became again a true musical institution, recording his very first album in 1974 and composing many of the songs he is famous for. He died in 1980, but since then his songs are among the best known classics of Brazilian folk music, and are regularly recorded by all kinds of high-profile singers (including numerous tribute albums).

Time 'wasted' with peer-reviewing

Helen has a very interesting post up on the problematic culture of grant-funded research. (Full disclosure: I have been on research grants pretty much for my entire career, and I see many advantages in this system.) She emphasized the fact that grant-writing is a very time-consuming endeavor, and that many researchers spend so much time securing research money for their group that they virtually stop doing research of their own. In this short post, I want to outline yet another way in which this culture entails waste of precious research time: the time it takes panel members and referees to evaluate the huge number of proposals that get written.

This year, I was a member of the panel for one of the grant schemes of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). I can report that carefully reading the big pile of research proposals has taken something like 50 to 60 hours, not including the actual meetings to discuss the proposals and to interview the candidates. All in all, it must have amounted to 2 full weeks of work, during which time I could have written a new paper or worked on my own research more generally. In fact, I have the feeling that the first 3 months of this year were entirely spent on evaluating other people’s work rather than doing my own: besides the work for NWO, I also wrote multiple reports on (other) research proposals and applications, and countless referee reports on papers submitted to journals -- not to mention my work as an editor for the Review of Symbolic Logic (as every journal editor knows, it is very hard to find referees for papers these days, as everyone is already so overburdened). These three months were exceptionally (or so I hope!) busy in this respect, and I’m sure there are many others who do just as much or even more work of this kind. Still, this just seems wrong.

Allo-parenting and exploitation in Brazil

Being in Brazil this week (but flying back home tonight) allowed me to follow some of the local current debates more closely than I would have otherwise. One of the ‘hot topics' at the moment is the new legislation regulating the working conditions of domestic workers. It is still very common in Brazil for a middle-class family to rely on a wealth of domestic workers, including cleaners, drivers, gardeners and perhaps most importantly, the (almost always female) live-in domestic workers who are responsible for the big chunk of domestic chores (cooking, cleaning, laundry, caring for children), known as ‘empregadas’. (Here is the trailer of a very interesting film/documentary on the phenomenon of a few years ago.)

Up to now, these live-in maids were basically expected to be ‘on call’ 24 hours a day, starting with breakfast early in the morning all the way until washing the dishes after dinner. Needless to say, salaries are usually pretty low, and there was until now no control over the amount of hours they were expected to work; thus the concept of ‘doing extra hours’ did not apply to them. To most foreign eyes, it is a very strange arrangement, which can only be understood as a painful reminiscence of Brazil’s recent slavery past (where slavery was only officially abolished in 1888).

Brazilian music on Fridays: Maria Rita

I’m in Rio de Janeiro at the moment for UNILOG. I had hoped to be able to post something ‘fresh from the over’, but I’ve been too busy conferencing. So instead I will post a couple of songs by singer Maria Rita. (Ed Zalta, a big fan of Maria Rita, is also here, and this is what made me think of her for this week’s BMoF.) As some readers may know, she is the daughter of the legendary Elis Regina, but her success should in no way be credited exclusively to her illustrious genealogy (her father is pianist Cesar Camargo Mariano).

Her 2003 debut album has been her most successful one so far, but she has produced a constant stream of good music since. Her 2007 album Samba Meu also received lots of love, and last year she performed tribute concerts to her mother, 30 years after her premature death. The concerts have now become the CD/DVD Redescobrir. So I’m posting ‘Cara valente’, my favorite track from her debut album, and ‘O bebado e o equilibrista’ from Redescobrir, one of Elis Regina’s best known songs. (I wonder how many readers will now join Ed Zalta in Maria Rita's fanclub.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Saidera'

I’m in San Francisco for the APA at the moment, thankfully with good internet connection but very little time for anything other than socializing, ahem, I mean, attending interesting philosophy talks. I was tempted to skip BMoF this week, but then someone came to me this afternoon to say that he’s a big fan of BMoF (sorry, I didn’t catch your name!). So thanks to this kind soul, there will be BMoF this week after all…

 I’m posting a song by the band Skank, who started out as a ska/reggae band but in the meantime has experimented with different styles. This song, ‘Saidera’ (meaning: one for the road, the last drink of the night), is from their 1998 album Siderado. It’s all very pop-ish, but in my opinion very enjoyable – I danced to this particular song countless times back in the day. I haven’t been able to find the full studio version of this song, so here is a partial version and below a live version.

And now, on to give my talk!

Scruton on hope, truth, and same-sex marriage

The latest The Stone column is by Roger Scruton, with the suggestive title ‘When hope tramples truth’. There is not much to disagree with regarding his apparent main point, namely that we all prefer to hear good news over bad news, and that we have a strong tendency to seek confirmation for the beliefs we already hold rather than to actively look for dissenting opinions. In particular, the phenomenon of confirmation bias (and other similar cognitive tendencies) has been extensively documented by psychologists. So far, the piece is just trivial. (It remains nevertheless sound advice that, to counter confirmation bias, looking for counterarguments to the thesis one wants to establish is quite effective -- as philosophers know all too well but do not always practice.) 

But of course, Scruton has a non-trivial (and controversial) point to make, concerning his own ‘worry of the month’ (see the wikipedia entry for some of his other worries), namely same-sex marriage.

Optimists have therefore united to promote this cause, and, as is so often the case, have turned persecuting stares on those who dissent from it, dismissing them as intolerant, “homophobic,” “bigoted,” offenders against the principles of liberal democracy. Of course the optimists may be right. The important fact, however, is that hope is more important to them than truth.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Krig-ha, Bandolo!

Georgetown philosopher Bryce Huebner informed me via Twitter yesterday that he was listening to Krig-ha, Bandolo! (1973), the legendary first solo album by the legendary Raul Seixas. (I was convinced that I had already written a BMoF on Raul Seixas, but now I can’t find it, so probably not then.) In turn, Bryce was reminded of the album by Boston University philosopher Aaron Garrett – great to see all these philosophers with such exquisite musical taste! So to ensure that Krig-ha, Bandolo! becomes even more popular among my fellow philosophers, here are two of its classics: ‘Mosca na Sopa’ and ‘Metamorfose Ambulante’. The whole album is quite experimental, with psychedelic undertones. ‘Mosca’, for example, mixes capoeira beats with classic rock’n’roll (mixing Brazilian regional beats with rock is a constant theme in his music).

Raul Seixas died prematurely in 1989, but remains extremely popular among Brazilian hippies, psychedelics, mystics, rockers etc. Every year on his birthday (June 28^th), legions of fans throw a parade in his honor in Sao Paulo. It is perhaps hard to appreciate the significance of his music out of this broader context, but I bet many other philosophers will follow Bryce and Aaron’s lead and become Raul Seixas enthusiasts. Raul was himself very interested in philosophy, with a clear mystical bent. It is perhaps also worth noticing that one of his main collaborators early in his career was Paulo Coelho -- yes, that Paulo Coelho. Some of Raul's greatest songs were co-written with Coelho (e.g. 5 of the songs in Krig-ha, Bandolo!); well, I guess it's fair to say he should have kept it to song-writing... Anyhow, without further ado, here is Raul.

Desiderata for formal theories of truth

I have a fairly technical post over at M-Phi on desiderata for formal/axiomatic theories of truth, picking up on some ideas I discussed in a NewAPPS blog post of two years ago. My feeling is that it is a bit too technical/specific for cross-posting here at NewAPPS, but do check it out if formal theories of truth is what you like to read about on a Sunday afternoon!

Brazilian music on Fridays: Djavan in mellow mode

Last year I posted a few songs (all of them of the funky, swingy persuation) by Djavan, one of my very favorite Brazilian singers. But Djavan is also a master of beautiful, emotional mellow songs, and today I'll post two of my favorites: 'Pétala' (1982) and 'Faltando um pedaço' (1980). (Never mind the 'slide shows' accompanying them on youtube...)

An interview with our very own Catarina!

Here. (It reveals secrets about the blogging life and NewAPPS.)

Terry Tao on rigor in mathematics

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

Fields-medalist Terence Tao (among other feats, he spotted the mistake in Nelson’s purported proof of the inconsistency of arithmetic back in 2011) has a blog post on the meaning of rigor in mathematical practice. He files this post under the heading ‘career advice’, but the post in fact touches upon some key issues in the philosophy of mathematics, such as: What is the role of intuitions for mathematical knowledge? What is the role of formalism and rigor in mathematics? How are ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ mathematics related? 

While Tao’s post is not intended to be a contribution to the philosophy of mathematics as such, and while one may miss some of the depth of the discussions found in the philosophical literature and elsewhere, I find it illuminating to see how a practicing mathematician (and a brilliant one at that) conceptualizes the role of rigor in mathematical practice. (Also, much of what he says fits in nicely with some of the views about formalisms and proofs that I’ve been defending in recent years, as I will argue below -- something that I couldn't let go unnoticed!)

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Lingua'

(Minimalistic BMoF today.) I haven't posted a song by Caetano Veloso in ages, I'm sure the Caetano fans are wondering what is going on. So today I'm posting 'Lingua', from his 1984 album Velo -- a rap avant la lettre, and a duo with the incomparable Elza Soares. One of the best lines: "If you have an incredible idea/it is best to write a song/it's been proved that it is only possible to philosophyze in German."

Launch of SWIP.NL

Inspired by the success of the already existing Societies for Women in Philosophy (UK, USA, Canada -- and it seems that there are others in the making), we are now launching the Dutch version of the Society (possibly also to include the Dutch-speaking parts of Belgium in the near future): SWIP.NL. We will have our inaugural meeting on April 10th 2013; the announcement for the meeting is below. All are very welcome to attend!

We also very much welcome offers of help to get SWIP.NL up and running, and thus to promote the position of women in the philosophy profession in the Netherlands and beyond.

Also, notice that Jennifer Saul (Sheffield and SWIP-UK), one of the speakers at the launch, will also deliver the first annual Aspasia Lecture the next day in Groningen. See the flyer for further details.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Trem Azul'

I’ve mentioned a couple of times before that Clube da Esquina is possibly my very favorite Brazilian album of all times. It is one of those rare albums which is a truly coherent whole, while also having an amazing number of individually spectacular songs, like ‘Cravo e canela’, ‘Me deixa em paz’ and so many others. One of them is the now classic ‘Trem azul’. Besides the original version in Clube da Esquina, it has been recorded by a number of musicians of the magnitude of Elis Regina (who is considered by many as the greatest female Brazilian singer of all times) and Tom Jobim. Each version is very different from the others, and I really cannot make up my mind as to which one I like best.

Fortunately, there is no need to make up my mind, and I can post as many versions as I want here at BMoF! So here are the ones I like best: the original one, sung by Lo Borges; Elis Regina’s version, here in a recording for a TV show in 1981, incidentally one of her very last performances caught on video before her premature death (check here for her studio version); and Tom Jobim’s version, curiously also recorded in his last album, Antonio Brasileiro (1994). Tom Jobim’s version is (mostly) in English, so for once you don’t have to be left to wonder what the lyrics are all about (the Enlighs translation follows the original text fairly closely).

The trouble with porn

Pornography has been a topic of interest to feminist philosophers and feminists in general for quite some time. (It has also been an important topic in aesthetics and philosophy of art, but here I will not engage with this literature at all.) I think it is fair to say that most feminists (philosophers or otherwise) tend to be critical of pornography and to view it as yet another form of oppression of women, for a variety of reasons. (For an overview, see Watson’s 2010 review article in Philosophy Compass.) But at least some feminists (e.g. Betty Dodson) have defended more favorable views of pornography, for example by recognizing that there is wide diversity under the general heading of pornography. Some say that there is no such thing as Pornography with capital P, but rather a range of pornographies, different instantiations of the general idea.

Let me state from the outset that I (feminist or not) identify with the second camp. I do not endorse the view that pornography is in principle, by definition, degrading (to women or others). So to define pornography as “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or words” (as MacKinnon and Dworkin did in the early 1980s) is in a sense conveniently question-begging. Moreover, it seems to exclude from the realm of pornography manifestations which most of us would not hesitate to call pornography (say, a graphic sexually explicit encounter between two men).

Further thoughts on parenthood

Here I am, back from my vacation and trying desperately to catch up with the accumulated work and all the interesting events in internet-world of the last week. At NewAPPS alone there are quite a few posts I want to react to, in particular Eric’s post on the genealogy of genealogy. But let me start by commenting on the ‘hot topic’ of the moment, at least among philosophy geeks: L.A. Paul’s draft paper on how decision theory is useless when it comes to making life-transforming decisions such as having a child. Eric and Helen already have nice posts up reacting to the paper, but I hope there is still room for one more NewAPPS post on the topic.

Perhaps the first thing to notice, which comes up only at the end of Paul’s paper, is that the very idea of having children being a matter of choice/decision is a very recent one. For the longest part of human history, and for the largest portion of the human population (excluding, for example, some of those who took up religious vows), finding a partner and procreating was simply the normal course of events, no questions asked. (Indeed, Christian faith even views it as a moral obligation.) It is only fairly recently, possibly only towards the end of the 20^th century, that having a child became a matter of choice at least for some people, in some parts of the planet. Contributing factors are the availability of contraceptive methods, and a wider range of life options which are now deemed ‘acceptable’, or at least more acceptable than before. (People who choose to remain child-free, in particular women, are still often looked at with suspicion.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: Ira!

As I write this, I am mustering the courage to go pack, as tomorrow (that is, today for you, dear reader) we are off for our yearly ski vacation. To top it up, today (again, MY today -- thinking of Predelli here) is my birthday, and somehow I think it is rather unfair that I have to spend my birthday packing. But anyway, trying to get myself in a birthday-ish spirit, today I’m posting ‘Envelheço na cidade’, by the 1980s rock band Ira! (Wrath! -- the name was also inspired by the Irish IRA), which was quite a hit among the kool kids back in the 1980s. The chorus goes ‘Happy birthday/I age in the city’, and I remember listening to it and realizing for the first time that there was a connection between aging and having a birthday! The innocence of a 10 year-old facing the existential malaise of the human condition… And since I’m at it, let me also post ‘Flores em voce’, the other big hit from the same 1986 album by Ira! -- a rather unusual song, with a string quartet as the only featured instruments.

(BMoF will take a break next week.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Space Oddity'

It's Friday, but somehow I'm not much in a Friday-ish mood, after a week which included a stomach flu and some other small annoyances. So it's a bit difficult to find inspiration for BMoF today, but somehow I had to think of Seu Jorge's hilarious versions of David Bowie songs in The Life Aquatic, one of the characteristically bizarre Wes Anderson creations. Seu Jorge (who is also an actor, having performed for example in City of God) is the weird guy on Zissou's boat whose sole contribution to the operations seems to be to provide musical entertainment with his strange renditions of Bowie songs in Portuguese.

In the spirit of my somewhat melancholic Friday today, here's 'Space Oddity'. If you are curious, check this youtube channel for the full collection of Bowie/Seu Jorge songs.

"Go home, evolution, you are drunk"

I’ve been much too silent on the blogging front the last couple of weeks, as I was evaluating a big pile of grant applications – an activity that seems to have sucked all intelligent life out of my brain. I have a few ‘real’ blog posts in mind, but for now let me just direct your attention to an awesome tumblr, ‘WTF, Evolution?’ (which I came across via Hugo Mercier on Facebook). It posts pictures of very strange-looking animals, which by itself is already rather cool, but the best part are the comments. For example, for this animal

 

The comment is: