Caetano Veloso

Here is Caetano with Toni Costa on Trem das Cores. This celestial song invokes, among other things, “the blue silk of the paper in which the apple is wrapped” and “that blue which is a pure memory of a place.”
Axé.

El archipiélago de la vanguardia

This post is going to be in Spanish, so if you do not read that exalted language, you are invited instead to read It’s Not You, It’s Your Apartment, on the horrors of dating poor housekeepers. Do not overlook the comments thread.
More serious English language entertainment can be found in the abstracts of two articles [...]

Jirón Camaná

The Archbishop of Lima and his conservative wing of the Church are attempting to intervene in academic affairs at the Catholic University of Peru, which maintains the Riva-Agüero archives.

Casa Riva-Agüero | Jirón Camaná 459 | Lima - PERU
Photo Daniel Duguay
Peru21 has an editorial about this. There are elements of the backstory, which involves in part [...]

Free Gary Tyler

I.
The Nation, a publication the assiduous reader knows I follow with some regularity, has sent me this mail:
Gary Tyler, black, now aged 48, is serving a life prison sentence in Louisiana State Penitentiary. He was convicted in 1975 for the murder of 13-year-old Timothy Weber, a white schoolboy who was shot during an attack [...]

On ‘Intersectionality’

Here are two sentences from Lakshmi Chaudhry: The problem isn’t that we are more sexist than racist as a society. It’s that race and gender are far too often pitted against each other, and one can be used to justify sins against the other. A sentence from me is that the point of understanding ‘intersectionality’, [...]

Country Joe and the Fish

This is Country Joe McDonald on the I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag, at Woodstock 1969. We should be singing along now.
Axé.

Terça Insana - Vovó Arlinda

My youngest brother insists once again that we contemplate standup comedy from Brazil - in drag! This character is called Granny Arlinda. If you like her, or even if you do not, you should get wilder yet and meet Miss Edith.
The São Paulo press is talking about Terça Insana, which has created over 500 original [...]

Sofia Barbosa

Here are Sofia Barbosa and Joana Melo, contemporary fado singers, on “Povo que lavas no rio.” I am a great admirer of Barbosa, and of her dress - I could use one just like that.
The song is by the immortal Amália Rodrigues. It is addressed to the “Countryfolk who wash clothes in the river / [...]

Local Color

This video presents a good deal of the scenery in which I participate during my commutes. It will have to stand in for me over the next few days, as I am abandoning my usual orbits to attend this conference. I will return by the end of the month if not before.
Here to keep you [...]

St. Lucy and St. Lazarus II

Saint Lucy was a beautiful young girl from Syracuse.
She is painted with two magnificent ox eyes on a tray.
She suffered martyrdom under the consul Pascasian, who had a silver mustache and howled like a mastiff.
As do all saints she posed and resolved delicious theorems, before those whose plate glass windows the apparatuses of Physics break.
In [...]