For some reason, interest lists look more anarchic (and less boring) in alphabetical order: abandoned buildings, abandoned cities, abandoned houses, acting (especially in the theatre), actors who make me think of acting as the greatest way to spend your time around, meaning: the ones who were already referred to in the past tense when I first became interested in this sort of thing (Garbo, Gérard Philipe, Judy Holliday, Cary Grant, Vivien Leigh, Walter Huston, Irene Dunne, Eliane Lage...); the ones who were referred to in the present tense (Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Ingrid Bergman, Marcello Mastroianni, Simone Signoret, Max Von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Giulietta Masina, Jack Lemmon, Celia Johnson, Maggie Smith, Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave, Albert Finney, Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Grande Otelo, Ruth de Souza, James Stewart, Lillian Gish, Jozef Króner, Innokenti Smoktunovsky ...); and the ones who came along (Leonardo DiCaprio, John Moulder-Brown, Diane Keaton, Al Pacino, Jessica Lange, Peter Fonda, Ethan Hawke, Isabelle Adjani, Hugh Grant, Helen Mirren, William Hurt, Judi Dench, Tom Hanks, Harvey Keitel, Benicio Del Toro, Javier Bardem ...)agelessness, apples, being alone, being with someone, black-and-white photography, Chekhov, dogs (the crazier the better), DVDs, French films, gramophones, health food, Hinduism (I was born a Catholic. As an adult, I was attracted to Hinduism and became a practioner of Vedanta, one of its six currents, or "darshanas." Now I'm getting tired of people saying that there isn't such a thing as an adopted religion, since you are supposed to be forever a member of the religion that was transmitted to you when you were growing up); humor, Impressionism, invented languages, Italian films, journals/diaries and letters, lost films, moviegoing, my ishta devata, my kind of books, my kind of music, my kind of people, my old old bike, my place, peaches, persimmons, Russian literature, silent films, surreal conversations, swimming, the closeness of the sea, the many meanings of the word "elusiveness," the moon, the original concept of "privacy" (which seems to have been lost), the theatre, travelling, travelling alone, travelling with someone ... There might be a few more. Or not. It doesn't matter. The truth is that interest lists are pointless, never mind in what kind of order. The reason we folks waste time with them is that we folks are wacko. The only lists worth reading would be those containing people's interests when they were children. Trouble is that there has never been anyone who could remember all of them. Most items are lost forever.
Like-minded people. Which probably means I've missed the cue to try and say something witty, or fascinating, or at least surprising. But there's no way out of it. Although meeting antagonists from time to time can teach us a couple of things about ourselves, nobody likes it. Everybody always wants to meet whoever it would be pleasant to be with. It's as simple as that ... There! I hate it when I say something and it sounds like I'm some goddamn 900-year old druid of the forest talking to people about life on Earth. It wouldn't happen if this thing were about whom I'd like to have met. Then the answer would be ...
Jazz and blues, especially modern jazz, the sound of Miles Davis' trumpet, I think, being as close as anyone could ever get to spiritual awakening through music; progressive rock; music of the late 1960s and early 1970s (meaning Janis Joplin and company, although incredibly I must still take the journey to Bob Dylan); French impressionistic music of the late 19th and early 20th century (particularly the piano music of Fauré, Debussy, and Erik Satie); traditional music from India; the piano music of John Field; the piano music of Chiquinha Gonzaga; the music of Gustav Mahler (which fascinates me as much as it scares me); the music of Marco Antonio Araujo; most anything by Chico Buarque; most anything sung by Joan Baez (the voice of my youth!), Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf (who sounds forever like my childhood, because both my mother and my grandfather played her recordings all the time, my grandfather concentrating on the early stuff, my mother preferring the live recordings of the final years at the Olympia and the Bobino), Nat King Cole (minus the stuff in Spanish, which with all due respect to one of my three or four most beloved artists, surely one of the greatest male singers who ever lived, sometimes makes me wonder if from the start those recordings were not meant as a spoof, as if Monty Python had had a hand in them), Paul Robeson, Carmen McRae, Nana Caymmi, Sarah Vaughan, Caetano Velloso ... Although I'm light years away from being an opera fan (I only have recordings of selected areas, which I listen to as if they were songs), I've always been fascinated by the classical female voice. That's why I spend so much time listening to Jessye Norman, Monserrat Caballe, Bidu Sayao, Frederica Von Stade, Gundula Janowitz, Anne Sofie Von Otter, Marilyn Horne, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Eleanor Steber, and Maria Callas ... I don't really follow any patterns while choosing what I'm going to hear. I've been listening to a lot of Mazzy Star lately. And the original Genesis (1969-1975). They're so darn good!! And Jonny Lang, whom I absolutely adore. And ten different recordings of "Beim Schlafengehen," a "lied" by Richard Strauss (nothing to do with the waltz guy) ... But if I had to give a name, just one, to tell what kind of music I'm always listening to, that would be Pink Floyd. I can't quite explain the effect they have on me. Nor do I want to, even to myself. The most amazing, almost unearthly experience I've ever had with live music was being there in 2002, when Roger Waters came up with his one-off show in Rio. It was the kind of thing you never forget, the cliché being inescapable: it becomes part of you. But then, not quite, for there are times when the sound of Pink Floyd seems to have always been part of me. I don't remember the first time I heard it. I reckon I must have been around fourteen. It doesn't matter. In my imagination time doesn't have anything to do with it. I don't remember the first time I heard the sound of my own voice either. Certain things are too strong to be time-related.
"Fanny and Alexander" (probably my all-time most beloved movie), "Winter Light," "Through a Glass Darkly," "The Face" (aka as "The Magician"), "Wild Strawberries," "The Seventh Seal," "Smiles of a Summer Night," and "Sawdust and Tinsel" (aka as "The Naked Night") (all by Ingmar Bergman); most anything made by Francois Truffaut, who may have loved film-making more than any other director, my favorite ones being "La Nuit Americaine"/"Day for Night" and the five titles of the Antoine Doinel saga (not to mention the endlessly moving speech the schoolmaster makes to his class on the last day before the kids leave on their summer vacation towards the end of "L'Argent de Poche"/"Small Change"); Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice" (which, although I could never find anything to support my theory, I've always believed to be about a middle-aged man who, after a personal tragedy, rejection as an artist, and illness making him very frail, retreats to a dream-like environment where, feeling the closeness of death, he is confronted with his former self, the resplendent youth he once was, to whom he cannot explain what happened to the adult he was meant to be and the future that had been there for him--like Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday, I believe Aschenbach and Tadzio are a split representation of the same character); "Deep End" (Jerzy Skolimovsky); "The Go-Between" (Joseph Losey); "Amarcord" and "E La Nave Va" (Federico Fellini); "Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie" (Luis Bunuel); "Limite" (Mario Peixoto); "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Stanley Kubrick); "Rashomon" and "Dersu Uzala" (Akira Kurosawa); "The Bicycle Thief" (Vittorio de Sicca); "La Regle du Jeu" (Jean Renoir); "Casablanca" (Michael Curtiz); "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "Under the Volcano," and "The Dead" (John Huston); "Citizen Kane" and "F for Fake" (Orson Welles); "Lola Montes" (Max Ophüls); "The Third Man" (Carol Reed); "Wuthering Heights" (William Wyler); "The Wind" (Victor Sjostrom); "Easy Rider" (Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda); "Days of Heaven" (Terrence Malick); "Dead Poets Society" (Peter Weir); "Smoke" (Wayne Wang); "Billy Elliot" (Stephen Daldry); "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulin" (Jean-Pierre Jeunet), "Pi" (Darren Aronofsky); "Lost in Translation" (Sofia Coppola); "Atonement" (Joe Wright); most films by Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock (the best, I think, being "Vertigo"), Billy Wilder, Woody Allen, and Jim Jarmusch. And of course the films with great performances by the actors I seem to be forever in love with ... But this disgustingly pedantic list--sure to make people wish they could throw their shoes in my face--is by no means exhaustive. There are others, which I must surely be forgetting (fabulous Almodovar!!) I'm mad about films. It's inevitable that there should be too many titles. On the other hand, this profile is coming out so ridiculously long that nobody's gonna read it anyway. People have better ways to waste their time. So, in the end, it doesn't really matter. It's all about this idiotic pleasure we have of making lists of all sorts of things ... Which reminds me: there's also "High Fidelity" (Stephen Frears), in which John Cusack played a guy who was always making lists. Gee, things are getting out of control here ...
Television has always given me much less attention than I expected, although most people would probaly say, "Tell me something I don't know. What actor doesn't think that way?" So I give as good as I get. I seldom watch it. But when I do, I enjoy stuff like "La Femme Nikita." And, like everybody, I think "X-Files" was great fun. Pitty it's finished. "Lost" is big fun too, especially because the actors are so good. As a kid, I liked to watch old episodes of "Outer Limits." And I never missed "Lost in Space" (gosh, did I ever like to hate Dr. Smith). But nothing compared to the pleasure of watching "The Travels of Jamie McPheeters." I was absolutely mad about it, to the point of recording the sound of each episode (this was before VCRs came along) to be able to listen to it later, like a moron. In Brazil, I think "Cidade dos Homens"/"City of Men" stll stands as the best thing ever made. And some of the mini-series are very very good, like "Amazonia" (in which I made what was probably my briefest appearance on TV. Ouch!) ... Nowadays I think I like documentaries about distant places and ancient civilizations better than anything else. And live cooking shows. I never cook any of the stuff they teach. I wouldn't be able to. But watching those shows is great fun. They're so crazy! Even the idea of preparing a dish on TV, explaining very dilligently how to do it, and expect people to learn everything and do the stuff at home is absurd. My favorite moment is whenever something goes wrong, like cheese sticking to the frying pan, or sauce taking the shape of one of those phony monsters in old Japanese sci-fi movies, or better still, the blender goes berserk and takes to being Freddy Krueger, and the master cook starts talking about something else while frantically trying to get things straight. It's so funny!
"L'Opera de la Lune" (Jacques Prevert); "To the Lighthouse," "The Waves," and "A Haunted House" (Virginia Woolf); "The Catcher in the Rye" (Salinger); "Cien Anos de Soledad" (Gabriel Garcia Marquez); "The Lord of the Rings" (Tolkien); "The New York Trilogy" and "Moon Palace" (Paul Auster); "On the Road" (Jack Kerouac) and practically everything coming from the Beat movement; "Death in Venice" and some of the other stories by Thomas Mann (who's not quite my kind of novelist); the journals of Anais Nïn; the diaries of Christopher Isherwood (I'll be damned if I know why one is called "the journals" and the other is "the diaries," especially because Nin's is ALSO called "the diaries"); the poetry of Rimbaud; the stories of Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Lygia Fagundes Telles, and Julio Cortazar; the writings of Saint-Exupery (yes, including "Le Petit Prince," which so many people find absolutely loathsome); the writings of Clarice Lispector; most anything written by Machado de Assis ... too many things ... There would also have to be the plays ("The Tempest," "Uncle Vanya," "Waiting for Godot"... ), which I'm not including here. And Jules Verne, who managed to make me enjoy reading books more than any other author in the world, although Ray Bradbury has always been such a close second that he sometimes threatens to take pole position. And the wonderful time I'm currently having with the Adrian Mole fictional diaries by Sue Townsend, a delightful recent discovery I owe to an English friend who, three years ago, started giving me one volume at a time as a birthday gift and, without knowing what he was doing, managed to renew in a most fantastic way my pleasure in reading books. And fabulous Italo Calvino. And Amélie Nothomb. So many things ... A full-scale list would also have to include books on acting, and the basic sources of Hinduism and Vedanta ("The Upanishads," "The Bhagavad Gita," "The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali," the works of Shankara, "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna," the four yoga books--"Gnana," "Karma," "Bhakti," and "Raja"--by Swami Vivekananda), and a few other books on Eastern philosophy, like "Tao Te King," which I'm always reading ... I was told once that my list of favorite books and authors points in the direction of a split personality, an elegant way to say I must be wacko. Serves me right. What business did I have making lists of any kind in the first place? Besides, there are always too many things on a list of books somebody reads. There would be more on a list of books somebody wants to read but never does. Or maybe not. Whatever.
Anyone born with the spirit of the anonymous Chinese young man who in 1989 became known as "Tank Man" when he stood in front of an entire column of tanks preventing their advance during the Tiananmen Square protests, in Beijing. He is believed to have been executed fourteen days later. Yet, watching the existing video puts you face to face with someone not giving a damn for the consequences of his act on his own life, but giving the word "courage" a meaning it had very seldom had since human beings first appeared on Earth. That was a hero. The true thing. Not the bullshit they tell us about all the time to make sure we will remain good boys and girls they can rely on to keep the crap going.