domingo, julho 27, 2008
quarta-feira, julho 23, 2008
sexta-feira, julho 18, 2008
Uma Aventura na Campanha de Obama
A vitória de Barack Obama sobre Hillary Clinton nas primárias do Partido Democrata foi o triunfo pessoal de um candidato carismático, mas também a vitória de um enorme grupo de cidadãos que se empenharam em mudar o rumo da política norte-americana. Tendo começado com considerável desvantagem sobre a campanha favorita, a 'Obama team' conseguiu reverter a tendência através do uso eficaz dos media, do webpage ao facebook, de mobilizar novos eleitores, através de uma multitude de pequenos eventos de campanha espalhados pelas cidades, vilas e freguesias dos EUA, e de montar uma gigantesca rede de angariação de fundos que fez da campanha de Obama a mais rica de sempre. O sucesso é resultado de diversas acções oficiais de campanha, dirigidas directa ou indirectamente do 'Obama headquarters' em Chicago, mas também, e principalmente, de um movimento independente de cidadãos que trabalhou e trabalha para eleger Obama. Este movimento chama-se 'grassroots campaign' - ou seja, a campanha de raiz, do povo. Sem ele, Barack Obama não estaria onde está e os Republicanos estariam hoje certamente mais tranquilos. A ideia parecia promissora e, por isso, decidi investir um parte do meu tempo para descobrir o que é afinal a 'grassroots campaign.'
A primeira etapa desta minha indagação passou-se em Harvard Yard, junto de um anúncio para 'Summer Campaign Jobs' que prometia salários entre 2,000 e 4,000 doláres em dois meses. O papel dizia: "Call Sam at: 617-338-7882 www.bringchange2008.org". Lá liguei para a Sam e em menos de 5 minutos fiquei com uma entrevista marcada para 3h 30 da seguinte Quinta-Feira. Na altura, perguntei se os estrangeiros também podiam participar e recebi uma resposta afirmativa. O George também quis ver o que era e portanto fomos os dois. O escritório ficava no quarto-andar de um edíficio vulgar e, como a maior parte dos escritórios de campanha (acho que por esta altura já vi suficiente escritórios de campanha para criar o meu esteriótipo), estava indescritívelmente caótico: as paredes calafetadas com recortes, notas, fotografias e lembretes, pilhas de papel nos cantos da sala, encostados às secretárias, junto dos telefones vários, cobrindo as mesas, lixo dentro e fora dos respectivos caixotes, cabos e fios traçando a alcatifa de lés-a-lés e cadeiras, todas elas singulares, como estátuas abandonadas pela sala. No apogeu dos seus vinte e muitos anos, a Sam era uma daquelas pessoas que anda sempre a fazer mais coisas do que é humanamente possível, e mandou-nos entrar para uma sala onde já estavam outras três pessoas sentadas: uma rapariga loira respeitosamente arranjada para a entrevista; um sem-abrigo de cinquenta ou sessenta anos, e uma outra rapariga com um ar mais relaxado. Ninguém disse palavra até a Sam entrar na sala para nos explicar como funcionava o 'grassroots campaigning'. O objectivo era angariar o máximo de dinheiro para ajudar Barack Obama a ganhar as eleições em Novembro. Todos os dias, entre as 2 da tarde e as 10 da noite, às vezes até mais tarde, deveriamos percorrer uma área da cidade e tocar em todas as portas para pedir dinheiro. O dinheiro que ganhariamos dependia do dinheiro que conseguissemos angariar. "Os melhores angariadores," a Sam explicava, conseguiam fazer mais de 1000 dólares num dia e conseguiam viver só da campanha. Ela própria, por exemplo, tinha abdicado do seu emprego em Janeiro para se dedicar em pleno à causa.
Acabada esta fase, passamos à parte das entrevistas que foram conduzidas uma a uma na sala caótica. Primeiro a rapariga loira e depois fui eu. A Sam começou por dizer que até agora tinha falado ela e agora era a minha vez de contar a minha história: o que estava a fazer nos EUA, a minha experiência na área, porque queria trabalhar no 'grassroots campaign', etc. Até aqui tudo muito bem, aliás acho que a impressionei com o meu interesse em importar o modelo da 'grassroots campaigns' para a Europa. Foi na última pergunta que a vi o reflexo da minha cara perder o brilho na dela: devia imaginar que tinha tocado à porta dela a pedir dinheiro e que ela tinha dito que iria votar no Barack Obama, mas que não queria doar dinheiro agora, mas só mais perto da eleição. O que responderia eu a isto? Chegar à resposta foi bastante simples ("agora é que Barack Obama precisa de dinheiro, mais tarde já não fará diferença), mas a falta de convicção na minha voz foi dolorosa. A verdade é que não me identifiquei com este modo de angariar dinheiro e muito menos compreendi a diferença de 10, 15 ou 50 doláres agora ou mais tarde para Barack Obama, quando porventura fariam falta a quem os desse. Seriam esses dólares que ajudariam a pagar a dívida de Hillary Clinton? Ou seriam esses dólares para pagar o meu tempo? A entrevista acabou por aí e a Sam disse-me que ligaria até ao final da semana se tivesse alguma coisa para mim. Como é óbvio, nunca mais ligou - nem a mim, nem ao George. Algumas semanas mais tarde, o George encontrou-a por acaso no metro. Ela disse-lhe que não nos tinha ligado porque eramos estrangeiros e não tinhamos um visto de trabalho nos EUA...
(continua com uma "Obama Party")
quarta-feira, julho 16, 2008
Diplomacia no sec. XXI
Dizia um comentador ingles a respeito destas celebracoes que Sarkozy e um homem surpreendente porque permanece em continua campanha eleitoral. Seja isto positivo ou negativo, a verdade e que o Presidente Frances tem vindo a definir um novo estilo para a politica externa do seu pais e, 'por arrasto', da Europa. Aqui, o dia da Bastilha transforma-se num ritual diplomatico entre a parada militar fascista, o culto da celebridade anglo-saxonico, o triunfalismo napoleonico e o paternalismo gaulista. Surpreendente? Peut-etre.
terça-feira, julho 15, 2008
sábado, julho 12, 2008
Hoje no New York Times
Lisbon Comes Alive
By SETH SHERWOOD
Published: July 13, 2008
FOR its 99th birthday last year, the decrepit Fábrica Braço de Prata factory complex underwent the real estate equivalent of a Saul-to-Paul spiritual conversion.
A manufacturer of weapons during the dark years of dictatorship in Portugal, the long-disused facility was reborn as Lisbon’s most ambitious new cultural venue. Guns and grenades were replaced by concert rooms, exhibition spaces, a sprawling bookstore, a cinema, a restaurant and various bars.
When the metamorphosis was complete, only one potentially troubling question lingered: Would Lisbonfolk actually drag themselves to the city’s outskirts to visit an old industrial space with sinister associations and an unusually eclectic booking policy encompassing everything from electronic music to philosophical conferences to free-form jazz?
“It was a big risk,” said Michel de Roubaix, a resident artist who is the accordion-playing leader of a postmodern cabaret show at the center.
After all, this wasn’t a metropolis with a well-established avant-garde tradition like Paris or Berlin, but dowdy old Lisbon, a small Catholic city that is best known for inexpensive seafood meals, throwback cable cars and faded colonial architecture from Portugal’s long-vanished international empire.
But on a balmy night in March, the throngs filing into the complex made it clear that the city was more than ready for a bit of progressive bohemia in their remote corner of the Continent. Looking like the assembled listenership of some Portuguese version of National Public Radio, a buzzing crowd of tweedy academics, tattooed cool kids, bourgeois couples and bespectacled grad-student types fanned out to sample Fábrica Braço de Prata’s typically diverse offerings: a jazz combo, a reggae outfit, a Leonard Cohen documentary and a 1 a.m. after-party featuring D.J.’s and alternative bands.
“It’s creative in all areas — theater, art, music, dance,” Mr. de Roubaix said of the venue’s appeal, clearly pleased by its unexpected success. “There’s a fast turnover of events and shows that keeps the place very dynamic.”
The same could be said for 21st-century Lisbon.
Fábrica Braço de Prata’s transformation is emblematic of the city’s sudden cultural emergence. Like the factory, Portugal languished for much of the 20th century on Europe’s geographic and cultural margins. From the 1920s until the 1970s, a repressive dictatorship smothered the nation, sending the creative classes fleeing to London and Paris and severely stunting any potential arts scene. The economy also slumped. Once the center of a global trade empire, Portugal sunk into notoriety as Western Europe’s poorest nation.
As dust collected on Lisbon’s monuments — Roman theaters, Moorish edifices, Gothic churches, Baroque squares — the city became the Miss Havisham of Western Europe: a relic, forgotten and forlorn.
The last of the Western European capitals to experience a cultural bloom, Lisbon is avidly making up for lost time. All over the city, an upstart generation is laying waste to the sepia-toned stereotypes and gleefully constructing edgy and forward-looking ventures amid the time-worn monuments and quaint cobbled lanes.
“I remember being a kid and thinking, ‘Nothing happens in Lisbon. Why should we have to go abroad to see stuff happening and new stuff and to get inspired?’ “ said Nuno Pinho, 33, co-owner of a gallery called In-Cubo that opened last year. “Now there are so many things happening in Lisbon that you can’t get to everything — concerts, exhibitions.”
“It is not an old-fashioned city where the women still carry fish on their heads.”
A former antiques store, In-Cubo is devoted to graffiti and other contemporary urban art forms. Similar renovations are taking place throughout the neighborhood, Principe Real, where dilapidated buildings are filling with concept stores, galleries and boutiques. A short walk away, a formerly louche strip club called Cabaret Maxime has reopened as a much-ballyhooed new nightclub for the city’s most unusual and alternative bands and performance outfits. Throw in Lisbon’s new world-class art museum, the Berardo Collection Museum, and a nascent fashion scene, and you have Western Europe’s fastest-rising cultural center.
The future appears even brighter. Next year may see the much-awaited opening of MuDe, an eight-story museum of international fashion and design. Meanwhile, Norman Foster has been hired to construct a vast new development in Lisbon’s emerging design district, Santos , that will add even more cutting-edge shops and art spaces to the waterfront. The star architect Jean Nouvel, this year’s winner of the Pritzker Prize, is also slated to add his postmodern stamp to the Lisbon cityscape. His Alcântara-Mar project, if realized, will contain four sleek buildings of restaurants, cafes, boutiques, gardens and apartments.
And as the city’s cool factor has surged, so has its international profile. MTV Europe held its music awards in Lisbon in 2005. Last year, the influential London-based World Travel and Tourism Council held its annual convention there. If anything, the global spotlight seems likely to get even more intense thanks to a bevy of high-profile international festivals that have started in recent years, including the biennial ExperimentaDesign (next up in 2009) and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (coming again in 2010).
On a balmy spring night, the gala 30th edition of Moda Lisboa, Lisbon’s twice-yearly fashion week, was in full swing. As a pulsating electronic-music beat filled the Estoril Casino ballroom, female models filed down a catwalk in futuristic black and gray garments suggesting haute-couture flight suits. Conceived by a young designer named Katty Xiomara, and known as “Metropolis,” the retro-futuristic collection owed a clear debt to Fritz Lang’s sci-fi film.
“In the beginning we didn’t have buyers, no fashion magazines, no journalists and only one modeling agency,” said Eduarda Abbondanza, the festival’s director, of the early editions of Moda Lisboa, in the 1990s. Next to her, Portuguese and Italian camera crews interviewed designers and local VIPs, many with champagne flutes and BlackBerrys in hand.
“Now we have fashion universities, and the world media is here,” she observed before shooting off a list of Portuguese designers now working senior positions in major international fashion houses: Balenciaga, Givenchy, Betsey Johnson.
For designers who have chosen to stay at home, the old lanes of the Bairro Alto and Chiado districts have become the choice spots for launching stores and showrooms.
By night, hipsters and young professionals fill the area’s myriad bars and D.J. lounges. By day, tranquillity resumes and savvy clotheshorses snap up locally made threads in boutiques like Ana Salazar and Alves/Gonçalves. Much of the best work imaginatively channels Portuguese history, geography or even literature into distinctive 21st-century garments.
“I’m from Madeira island, from the sun,” said Fátima Lopes, 43, the dark-eyed queen of Portuguese fashion, as she sat one afternoon in her eponymous Bairro Alto boutique. “I am used to wearing miniskirts and shorts. For me the body is nothing to hide.”
It’s hardly a surprising statement coming from a woman who in 2000 astonished Paris Fashion Week by mounting the runway in a self-designed bikini outfitted with about a million dollars’ worth of diamonds. (They were supplied by an Antwerp merchant.)
Similarly, a Latin warmth radiates throughout the angular, postmodern shop, whose bright orange and red walls hold all manner of colorful, finely cut and close-fitting clothing: slimly tailored gunmetal blue suits for men, long, low-cut red diva dresses for women. The Fátima Lopes woman, the designer said, “is strong and at the same time very feminine.”
When the metamorphosis was complete, only one potentially troubling question lingered: Would Lisbonfolk actually drag themselves to the city’s outskirts to visit an old industrial space with sinister associations and an unusually eclectic booking policy encompassing everything from electronic music to philosophical conferences to free-form jazz?
“It was a big risk,” said Michel de Roubaix, a resident artist who is the accordion-playing leader of a postmodern cabaret show at the center.
After all, this wasn’t a metropolis with a well-established avant-garde tradition like Paris or Berlin, but dowdy old Lisbon, a small Catholic city that is best known for inexpensive seafood meals, throwback cable cars and faded colonial architecture from Portugal’s long-vanished international empire.
But on a balmy night in March, the throngs filing into the complex made it clear that the city was more than ready for a bit of progressive bohemia in their remote corner of the Continent. Looking like the assembled listenership of some Portuguese version of National Public Radio, a buzzing crowd of tweedy academics, tattooed cool kids, bourgeois couples and bespectacled grad-student types fanned out to sample Fábrica Braço de Prata’s typically diverse offerings: a jazz combo, a reggae outfit, a Leonard Cohen documentary and a 1 a.m. after-party featuring D.J.’s and alternative bands.
“It’s creative in all areas — theater, art, music, dance,” Mr. de Roubaix said of the venue’s appeal, clearly pleased by its unexpected success. “There’s a fast turnover of events and shows that keeps the place very dynamic.”
The same could be said for 21st-century Lisbon.
Fábrica Braço de Prata’s transformation is emblematic of the city’s sudden cultural emergence. Like the factory, Portugal languished for much of the 20th century on Europe’s geographic and cultural margins. From the 1920s until the 1970s, a repressive dictatorship smothered the nation, sending the creative classes fleeing to London and Paris and severely stunting any potential arts scene. The economy also slumped. Once the center of a global trade empire, Portugal sunk into notoriety as Western Europe’s poorest nation.
As dust collected on Lisbon’s monuments — Roman theaters, Moorish edifices, Gothic churches, Baroque squares — the city became the Miss Havisham of Western Europe: a relic, forgotten and forlorn.
The last of the Western European capitals to experience a cultural bloom, Lisbon is avidly making up for lost time. All over the city, an upstart generation is laying waste to the sepia-toned stereotypes and gleefully constructing edgy and forward-looking ventures amid the time-worn monuments and quaint cobbled lanes.
“I remember being a kid and thinking, ‘Nothing happens in Lisbon. Why should we have to go abroad to see stuff happening and new stuff and to get inspired?’ “ said Nuno Pinho, 33, co-owner of a gallery called In-Cubo that opened last year. “Now there are so many things happening in Lisbon that you can’t get to everything — concerts, exhibitions.”
“It is not an old-fashioned city where the women still carry fish on their heads.”
A former antiques store, In-Cubo is devoted to graffiti and other contemporary urban art forms. Similar renovations are taking place throughout the neighborhood, Principe Real, where dilapidated buildings are filling with concept stores, galleries and boutiques. A short walk away, a formerly louche strip club called Cabaret Maxime has reopened as a much-ballyhooed new nightclub for the city’s most unusual and alternative bands and performance outfits. Throw in Lisbon’s new world-class art museum, the Berardo Collection Museum, and a nascent fashion scene, and you have Western Europe’s fastest-rising cultural center.
The future appears even brighter. Next year may see the much-awaited opening of MuDe, an eight-story museum of international fashion and design. Meanwhile, Norman Foster has been hired to construct a vast new development in Lisbon’s emerging design district, Santos , that will add even more cutting-edge shops and art spaces to the waterfront. The star architect Jean Nouvel, this year’s winner of the Pritzker Prize, is also slated to add his postmodern stamp to the Lisbon cityscape. His Alcântara-Mar project, if realized, will contain four sleek buildings of restaurants, cafes, boutiques, gardens and apartments.
And as the city’s cool factor has surged, so has its international profile. MTV Europe held its music awards in Lisbon in 2005. Last year, the influential London-based World Travel and Tourism Council held its annual convention there. If anything, the global spotlight seems likely to get even more intense thanks to a bevy of high-profile international festivals that have started in recent years, including the biennial ExperimentaDesign (next up in 2009) and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (coming again in 2010).
On a balmy spring night, the gala 30th edition of Moda Lisboa, Lisbon’s twice-yearly fashion week, was in full swing. As a pulsating electronic-music beat filled the Estoril Casino ballroom, female models filed down a catwalk in futuristic black and gray garments suggesting haute-couture flight suits. Conceived by a young designer named Katty Xiomara, and known as “Metropolis,” the retro-futuristic collection owed a clear debt to Fritz Lang’s sci-fi film.
“In the beginning we didn’t have buyers, no fashion magazines, no journalists and only one modeling agency,” said Eduarda Abbondanza, the festival’s director, of the early editions of Moda Lisboa, in the 1990s. Next to her, Portuguese and Italian camera crews interviewed designers and local VIPs, many with champagne flutes and BlackBerrys in hand.
“Now we have fashion universities, and the world media is here,” she observed before shooting off a list of Portuguese designers now working senior positions in major international fashion houses: Balenciaga, Givenchy, Betsey Johnson.
For designers who have chosen to stay at home, the old lanes of the Bairro Alto and Chiado districts have become the choice spots for launching stores and showrooms.
By night, hipsters and young professionals fill the area’s myriad bars and D.J. lounges. By day, tranquillity resumes and savvy clotheshorses snap up locally made threads in boutiques like Ana Salazar and Alves/Gonçalves. Much of the best work imaginatively channels Portuguese history, geography or even literature into distinctive 21st-century garments.
“I’m from Madeira island, from the sun,” said Fátima Lopes, 43, the dark-eyed queen of Portuguese fashion, as she sat one afternoon in her eponymous Bairro Alto boutique. “I am used to wearing miniskirts and shorts. For me the body is nothing to hide.”
It’s hardly a surprising statement coming from a woman who in 2000 astonished Paris Fashion Week by mounting the runway in a self-designed bikini outfitted with about a million dollars’ worth of diamonds. (They were supplied by an Antwerp merchant.)
Similarly, a Latin warmth radiates throughout the angular, postmodern shop, whose bright orange and red walls hold all manner of colorful, finely cut and close-fitting clothing: slimly tailored gunmetal blue suits for men, long, low-cut red diva dresses for women. The Fátima Lopes woman, the designer said, “is strong and at the same time very feminine.”
O resto do artigo em:
terça-feira, julho 08, 2008
Doa a Quem Doar
Um editorial recente no New York Times trazia alguns dados interessantes sobre a rede de patrocinadores dos candidatos presidenciais, um 'hot topic' nos EUA visto Barack Obama ter, pela primeira vez na história das presidenciais americanas, renunciado ao financiamento público. No entanto, a lista de doadores vinha acompanhada da advertência de que 'change e hope' não existem sem a Goldman Sachs...descubram porquê:
- os advogados representam a maior fatia dos doadores da campanha de Obama, tendo contribuido com 18 milhões de dolares; a mesma profissão contribuiu apenas $5 milhões para a campanha de John McCain.
- seguem-se os profissionais das áreas da comunicação e electrónica que doaram $10 milhões a Obama e apenas $2 milhões a McCain.
- os advogados representam a maior fatia dos doadores da campanha de Obama, tendo contribuido com 18 milhões de dolares; a mesma profissão contribuiu apenas $5 milhões para a campanha de John McCain.
- seguem-se os profissionais das áreas da comunicação e electrónica que doaram $10 milhões a Obama e apenas $2 milhões a McCain.
- os profissionais das áreas de seguros e investimento doaram cerca de $8 milhões a Obama e $4.5 milhões a McCain.
- Professores e outros profissionais na área da educação doaram cerca de $7 milhões a Obama e apenas $700,000 a McCain.
- Profissionais do sector da saúde doaram $7 milhões a Obama, e $3 milhões a McCain.
- Profissionais do sector imobiliário doaram $5 milhões a Obama, e $4 milhões a McCain.
- Empregado bancários doaram $1.6 milhões a Obama, e $1.2 milhões a McCain.
- os funcionários da Goldman Sachs foram os que doaram mais para a campanha de Barack Obama. Estes foram seguidos pelos funcionários da University of California, UBS, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, National Amusements, Lehman Brothers, Harvard e Google.
- apenas 45% dos fundos de campanha de Barack Obama originaram de doações de $200 dolares ou menos.
A conclusão do artigo, escrito por David Brooks, é a seguinte:
"The real core of his financial support is something else, the rising class of information age analysts. Once the wealthy were solidly Republican. But the information age rewards education with money. There are many smart high achievers who grew up in liberal suburbs around San Francisco, L.A. and New York, went to left-leaning universities like Harvard and Berkeley and took their values witht them when they became investment bankers, doctors and litigators."
P.S.: Ficamos à espera que esta 'mudança', com ou sem Goldman Sachs, também chegue a Portugal!
segunda-feira, julho 07, 2008
De volta a NYC
O terraço do Ben na noite de 5 de Julho...música ao ar livre.
Greenwhich village:
O 9/11 sempre presente...
Greenwhich village:
O 9/11 sempre presente...
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