In Brazil we have that phrase about the gift horse and it's mouth, but what we really need is the phrase --"don’t wait too long to look at a fox’s mouth or else you will be caught prying at its butthole as it walks away from your henhouse." Only years of cultural acculturation would make this phrase instantly understandable, so let me bring you up to date.

The Buddha above pictured was a gift, though a special kind of gift, a gift from a friend who is selling everything they have to fund a move to another country. It’s a parting gift, a gift that came along with the amply priced pieces of furniture that we took off her hands. A ‘couldn’t fit it in my suitcase, and I love you’ gift.

The giver, a fox both in 70’s and Aesopian parlance, gave us the Buddha. She told us to put it on the fridge and surround it with coins, a charming gesture which instantly reminded me that all religions are equally stupid. Then she stayed at our place for an increasingly tense and unhappy three weeks, during which we saw past the 70’s fox and watched the fable unfold like a slap to our face.

Exactly which animal we are is debatable, perhaps best assigned by another person. Indeed what animal would feel intensely uncomfortable with an already-former friend staying in the house, hogging the computer, bitching dinner guests she’s never even met before, filling rooms with smoke at 9 in the morning, and eating food in quantities designed to be just small enough not to pay for anything, but do nothing about it? Some weak, stupid animal. I go for Donkey. But maybe our petty bourgeois manners and offenses taken fit best with something like a chicken.

Anyway, the moral hit home a few days ago, when the phone bill arrived and the disappeared fox left R$200 worth of droppings in our cupboards, which are now, like the Buddha whose coins went for bus fare, so dastardly bare.

of montreal

Yes yes I am so happy to be here, but OH GOD, I miss our time in Montreal. The city where we met, the city where we spoke all languages possible, neige, duas, poutine, chocolat chaud, iceskating, movie store, casita…
It was us and the world. Sometimes we wanted to be part of outside just to look around, talk to people just to have the big pleasure to come back to our little world one for each other.

Death becomes her...

We are all familiar with death in his above pictured manifestation, black robes worn low, generous if outmoded gillette. I was chatting with an friend this weekend and he was telling me about a short story by Woody Allen, who happens to be very popular in Brazil. Indeed, as Brazil has adopted the Ramones as their own and are proud to say that they're more popular here than Queens, cinephiles with flexable metatarsels are want to say the same about Woody.

Is it really true, as they have told me here, that he can´t find funding for his films in the US? And if it is, would that be for artistic reasons or for those so emphatically stated by Mos Def in his solo debut comparsion with O.J.? (track 10 as stated by my compadre)

One theory goes that Mos had tried to find different director to fit in with his white-people-can´t-be-artists argument, but exhausted an entire rhymebook trying to flip 'Polanski', wisely discarding "couldn't keep it in his pants-ki."

Anyway, as my associate paraphrased the Allen story which in turn parodies the Seventh Seal, since he was speaking Portuguese, he called death a 'she.' This is because death as a noun is feminine, just as for instance, a pen is feminine. Indeed, a direct translation of portuguese would have everyone talking like sailors, "Ah the wind, look at him blow" or "How is your lawnmower? He's a little bit broken."

This is kind of funny because when an english speaker hears these gendered pronouns, we tend to picture pens or chairs or wind with the accompanying genetalia and facial hair, in the spirit world of their essence that is. Or at least I do.

In fact used to play the game- Why is that noun a man or woman? Why is the sea a he? Is the foam his beard? Because he´s strong? Couldn´t he be a girl, a harsh mistress that takes you down into her womb when you drown, poor sailor you? Maybe, I reason, its because when the gender was assigned they didn't know that life first came from the sea, in which case the womb cycle-of-life thing would be a shoo-in and the sea would be a girl.

But what all but the most silly second language learners learn is that when latin-speaker says these nouns, they don´t think about the gender, they assign it correctly as a matter of grammar, but they use he/she in the same way that we use 'it', and not in the spirit of rum-drinking, plank walking, barnacle-bearded seafarers.

So even though my associate called Death 'she,' if he (finding himself in a woody allen type position vis-a-vis the reapster and of a silly woody disposition) were to lift the robes of Death on a prank, he too would expect to find what could only be called a boner.

Say it like a surfer;

boooner

He calls us T and Ta Ta

His first word was Cheese!

Rafael my nephew turned one in February. Today he sat in my lap at the computer and watched videos of himself. Were I as tech-savy as he, I would have filmed him as he watched himself, just to show the calmness on his face.

Remember that movie, Baraka? The best image was the first, the Japanese monkey in the hotspring, soaking in no-minded pleasure as any human would. His look was a little like that, passive, pleasured, supremely calm,I think because the clip we were watching of him he was just chillin, walkin around grandpa´s house and getting followed by the camera. When he sees a video where he is laughing, he laughs again.

Is this because the joke (in this case getting grampa´s hat put on him) is still funny?

Anybody who can tell me what is going on in this 16 month year olds head as he watches himself on video please tell me. He started smiling for photos when he was like 8 months, and now, like the rest of us, he looks at the screen on the back of the camera after the picture was taken to see how it came out. He knows how to turn the electronic keyboard on that was brought out from Her childhood closet to be pounded on and its automatic songs danced to once again. He can also plug a charger into a cellphone with his little hands. Also, he has never complained that he didn't like the sound of his voice on tape.

Today I taught him to turn the little wheel between the two buttons on the mouse, which made the moving picture of him grow and shrink. Its amazing to see how easy it is to learn the relation between button and action. It is easier than, for example, A-B-C. He will rule the world.

What scares me a little bit is that when he points to himself on the screen he says nene 'baby' so there is a small chance that all of this is going horribly wrong and that we and thousands of other over-technologied families are are creating some new sense of the self that will spell the end of all civilization. But then again maybe Rafael is the savior, the only one to actually break oin through to the other side, to run 360 loop-de-loop in the go-kart and not fall at the apex but come sailing through. Having yet to fail at anything, his smile was made for that moment.