No aeroporto de Newark

Este aeroporto é o único da área de Nova Iorque (e dos poucos nos EUA) com vôos para Lisboa. O português (europeu) é das línguas mais faladas neste aeroporto e na área que o circunda, como se pode comprovar pelo nome da empresa de limpeza. Não sei exatamente com que impressão é que um turista prestes a embarcar para Lisboa ficará ao ver isto; espero que seja a de que Lisboa é uma cidade limpa!



Adenda: como não poderia deixar de ser, é uma companhia que paga mal!

Nova Iorque (3)

Este engarrafamento em Times Square deve-se a obras mais à frente na Broadway, para ampliarem o espaço pedonal e ciclável (algo que seria impensável há dez anos atrás). De resto a imagem fala por si, e mostra como é Nova Iorque hoje. Gostaria de ver aqui o sr. Carlos Barbosa, o tal que diz que para a Avenida da Liberdade em Lisboa só se pode ir de carro.

Nova Iorque (2)

Vejam bem para que serve uma bandeira portuguesa.

Nova Iorque (1)

Das coisas que sempre achei mais piada: as lojas que em Portugal são consideradas das mais sofisticadas, nos EUA comportam-se como hipermercados. Esta é um exemplo. Alguém conhece o tipo de clientes e empregados que tem em Portugal? Alguém imagina isto?

Retratos dos EUA

Não vou dizer que na Europa um smartphone é um objeto de luxo, mas ainda é um objeto que, para a maioria das pessoas, requer (pelo menos) alguma reflexão ao comprar. Não é o mesmo que comprar um par de meias. E, estou certo, ainda é um objeto inacessível para grande parte das bolsas portuguesas, nomeadamente das classes mais baixas.
Nos EUA não se vê ninguém que não tenha um smartphone. Vi no elevador um empregado de limpeza, hispânico, de volta do seu, todo contente, enquanto empurrava um carro de limpeza carregado de lixo, baldes, vassouras e detergentes. A expressão "só na América!" aplica-se a estas situações. Mas não nos deixemos iludir: a vida dele não deixa de ser uma miséria.

A word about our sponsor

As someone who firmly believes that global economy is a zero-sum game, of course in general I do not like millionaires. Still, I wish portuguese millionaires were like Jim Simons, providing funds for real research.

Buffalo

A cultura norte americana em relação à comida e às refeições passa muito por aqui. 20 minutos e já vais com sorte. Este estabelecimento precisava de um cliente como o saudoso Noel Rosa: "Se você ficar limpando a mesa/ Não me levanto nem pago a despesa".

Niagara

Só vi as cataratas do Niagara do lado americano, mas percebo perfeitamente o que se vê do lado canadiano e, contrariamente ao que a maior parte das pessoas diz, acho o lado americano mais espetacular. Do lado canadiano talvez se tirem fotografias mais bonitinhas das quedas de alto a baixo (também se conseguem tirar nalgumas partes do americano), mas estar mesmo ao lado das cataratas, de um fluxo enorme de água cristalina a grande velocidade que poucos metros à frente desaparece no horizonte, ouvir o seu barulho, é fantástico. E mete respeito.

Back to the roots after 11 years

A caminho de Stony Brook, para a Simons Summer Workshop.

So long,dearest dingbat!

Jean Stapleton, Who Played Archie Bunker’s Better Angel, Dies at 90
By BRUCE WEBER (The New York Times)


Jean Stapleton, the character actress whose portrayal of a slow-witted, big-hearted and submissive — up to a point — housewife on the groundbreaking series “All in the Family” made her, along with Mary Tyler Moore and Bea Arthur, not only one of the foremost women in television comedy in the 1970s but a symbol of emergent feminism in American popular culture, died on Friday at her home in New York City. She was 90.

Her agent, David Shaul, confirmed her death.

Ms. Stapleton, though never an ingénue or a leading lady, was an accomplished theater actress with a few television credits when the producer Norman Lear, who had seen her in the musical “Damn Yankees” on Broadway, asked her to audition for a new series. The audition, for a character named Edith Bunker, changed her life.

The show, initially called “Those Were the Days,” was Mr. Lear’s adaptation, for an American audience, of an English series called “Till Death Us Do Part,” about a working-class couple in east London who held reactionary and racist views.

It took shape slowly. The producers filmed three different pilots, the show changed networks to CBS from ABC, and Ms. Stapleton acted in a film directed by Mr. Lear, “Cold Turkey,” before “All in the Family,” as it was finally called, was first broadcast in January 1971.

For three or four months, hampered by mixed reviews, it struggled to find an audience, but when it did, it became one of the most popular shows in television, finishing first in the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive seasons and winning four consecutive Emmy Awards for outstanding comedy series. Ms. Stapleton won three Emmys of her own, in 1971, ’72 and ’78.

“All in the Family” was set in Queens. Most of the action took place in the well-worn but comfortable living room of the Bunker family, led by an irascible loading-dock worker named Archie whose attitudes toward anyone not exactly like him — that is, white, male, conservative and rabidly patriotic — were condescending, smug and demonstrably foolish. Memorably played by Carroll O’Connor, Archie bullied his wife, patronized his daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers), and infuriated and was infuriated by his live-in son-in-law, a liberal student, Michael Stivic (Rob Reiner), whom he not-so-affectionately called Meathead.

Archie employed the vocabulary of a bigot and wielded the unenlightened opinions of a man from a bygone era who refused to admit the world was changing so much that it was no longer his naturally inherited domain.

But he was essentially harmless — small-minded but not meanspirited, ignorant but not unfeeling. Critics routinely referred to him as “a lovable bigot,” as if such a thing were possible. Edith loved him, certainly, though he referred to her, in her presence, as a dingbat and was perpetually telling her to shut up. “Stifle yourself,” was how he put it.

Edith was none too bright, not intellectually, anyway, which, in the dynamic of the show was the one thing about her that invited Archie’s outward scorn. Ms. Stapleton gave Edith a high-pitched nasal delivery, a frequently baffled expression and a hustling, servile gait that was almost a canter, especially when she was in a panic to get dinner on the table or to bring Archie a beer.

But in Edith, Ms. Stapleton also found vast wells of compassion and kindness, a natural delight in the company of other people, and a sense of fairness and justice that irritated her husband to no end and also put him to shame. She was an enormously appealing character, a favorite of audiences, who no doubt saw in the ordinariness of her life a bit of their own, and in her noble spirit a kind of inspiration.

Edith was not, like Ms. Moore’s Mary Richards, a spirited young professional seeking traction in a mostly male workplace, nor was she like Ms. Arthur’s Maude, a brassy, clamorously insistent personality.

Rather, when the issues of “All in the Family” centered on Edith — as when she went through menopause, beset with hilarious mood swings — she became an emblem of all housewives who felt their problems pooh-poohed at home, as if nothing they ever suffered was worth the attention of their husbands and children.

“What Edith represents is the housewife who is still in bondage to the male figure, very submissive and restricted to the home,” Ms. Stapleton, a confirmed if not necessarily outspoken feminist, said in an interview in The New York Times in 1972, with the show still early in its life. (It ran until 1979, and a continuation, “Archie Bunker’s Place,” that starred Mr. O’Connor but not the rest of the cast, lingered until 1983.) “She is very naïve, and she kind of thinks through a mist, and she lacks the education to expand her world.”

Yet as the ’70s went on, and the women’s movement gained a hold in the public mind (and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment began gaining a hold in Congress and in statehouses), Edith herself gained a measure of strength and self-respect that deepened her character movingly.

In one episode, against Archie’s wishes, she took a volunteer job as a “Sunshine Lady,” providing company and support for the residents of an old-age home, and when Archie tried to force her to quit because he didn’t want her working out of the house, her explosive adamancy took him, and the show’s viewers, by surprise, a triumph for her character that made the episode among the show’s most affecting.

“A question I am most asked by the press is, ‘Do you think Edith would support the E.R.A.?’ ” Ms. Stapleton said in 1978, in accepting an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Emerson College in Boston. She concluded, “Of course Edith Bunker would support ratification of the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, because it is a matter of simple justice — and Edith is the soul of justice.”

She was born Jeanne Murray on Jan. 19, 1923, in Manhattan. Her father, Joseph, was an advertising salesman; her mother, Marie Stapleton, was a concert and opera singer, and music was very much a part of her young life.

Jeanne was a singer as well, which might be surprising to those who knew Ms. Stapleton only from “All in the Family,” which opened every week with Edith and Archie singing “Those Were the Days,” Ms. Stapleton lending a screechy half of the duet that was all Edith.

Ms. Stapleton herself had a long history of charming musical performances. She was in the original casts of “Bells are Ringing” on Broadway in the 1950s and “Funny Girl,” with Barbra Streisand, in the 1960s, in which she sang “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty” and “Find Yourself a Man.” Off Broadway in 1991, she played Julia Child, singing the recipe for chocolate cake in the mini-musical “Bon Appétit.” On television, she sang with the Muppets.

After high school, Ms. Stapleton worked as a typist and a secretary, taking acting classes at night. This is also when she changed her name to her mother’s, feeling it was, as she put it once, “more distingué” than Murray. Her older brother, Jack, had done the same. She was not, as often presumed, related to the actress Maureen Stapleton.

Ms. Stapleton studied and performed with the American Actors’ Company, whose alumni include Horton Foote and Agnes DeMille, and did a great deal of summer stock. She toured opposite Frank Fay in “Harvey,” and was the understudy for Shirley Booth in the touring company of “Come Back, Little Sheba.” Even during her television heyday, Ms. Stapleton’s schedule almost always included summer shows because her husband, William Putch, whom she married in the late 1950s, operated the Totem Pole Playhouse in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Putch died in 1983. Ms. Stapleton is survived by their two children, Pamela and John, and grandchildren.

In 1953 she made her Broadway debut as the owner of an oyster bar who dispenses advice to Judith Anderson and Mildred Dunnock in Jane Bowles’s play “In the Summer House,” directed by Jose Quintero. In addition to her musical experience, her Broadway credits include the Eugene Ionesco farce “Rhinoceros” (1961), and, much later, a revival of “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1987).

In the movies, Ms. Stapleton reprised her roles in “Bells Are Ringing” and “Damn Yankees,” and she appeared in “Something Wild” (1961) as the well-meaning neighbor of a rape victim (Carroll Baker) and as a secretary in “Klute” (1971), a thriller about a detective and a call girl starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.

“All in the Family” was Ms. Stapleton’s first television series, but before that she had appeared as a guest on several shows, including “Dr. Kildare,” “My Three Sons,” “Car 54, Where Are You?” and the courtroom drama “The Defenders,” in which she played the owner of a boardinghouse who accused a tenant — played by Mr. O’Connor — of murder.

Ms. Stapleton bowed out of “All in the Family” as a series regular in 1979, but she appeared in several episodes the next year, after the title of the show had been changed to “Archie Bunker’s Place.” The opening episode of the second season of “Archie Bunker’s Place” dealt with the aftermath of Edith’s death.

After “All in the Family,” Ms. Stapleton purposely sought out roles that would separate her from Edith, and in so doing she led a busy and varied, if less celebrated, performing life. She turned down a chance to star as Jessica Fletcher, the middle-aged mystery writer at the center of “Murder, She Wrote,” which became a long-running hit with Angela Lansbury.

But she appeared as a guest on numerous television series, including “Caroline in the City” and “Murphy Brown”; starred with Whoopi Goldberg in a short-lived series, “Bagdad Café”; did turns in films (“You’ve Got Mail,” “Michael”); and made several television movies, including “Eleanor: First Lady of the World” (1982), in which she starred as Eleanor Roosevelt. The film led to a one-woman show that toured the country.

Perhaps the most significant work of her later life, however, was Off Broadway, where she performed in challenging works by Mr. Foote (“The Carpetbagger’s Children”), John Osborne (“The Entertainer”) and Harold Pinter (“Mountain Language,” “The Birthday Party”) to sterling reviews.

“She brings supreme comic obtuseness to Meg, the pathetic proprietor of a shabby seaside boarding house,” Frank Rich of The Times wrote of Ms. Stapleton’s performance in “The Birthday Party.” Contrasting her role with that of her “broadly drawn Edith Bunker,” Mr. Rich concluded, “Ms. Stapleton’s Meg is the kind of spiritually bankrupt modern survivor who makes one question the value of survival.”

After “All in the Family,” it was Ms. Stapleton’s lot to live in Edith’s wake. In 1977, she was one of 45 International Women’s Year commissioners who convened the National Women’s Conference in Houston, a federally financed gathering of 2000 delegates from the 50 states, for the purpose of helping to form national policy on women’s issues.

On the third day of the conference, Ms. Stapleton left the commissioners’ seating area and wandered onto the conference floor among the delegates. She was besieged.

“Look, it’s Edith!” delegates and photographers shouted. “Look, it’s Edith!”

Então bom Halloween para todos!

Está um frio do caraças lá fora...

...e eu estou sempre com este gajo. Não tenho propriamente pena dele e nem da sua indemnização. Mas espero que regresse já a Nova Iorque e que regresse depressa à televisão com o seu humor (que, pelos vistos, não agradou às audiências americanas das 23:30). Até lá vou ter saudades.

Obama continua exemplar

Obama castiga Wall Street com a criação de uma nova taxa

"A minha determinação é conseguir recuperar todo o dinheiro que pertence ao povo americano. E essa determinação resulta da constatação de que a banca regressou aos lucros maciços e aos bónus obscenos", afirmou Obama. A mesma banca que "deve a sua existência ao povo americano", acrescentou.

Veremos é se a medida passa no Congresso...

Também publicado no Esquerda Republicana

The New York Times visita o Ironbound

A baixa de Newark, cantada por Suzanne Vega e onde habita uma grande comunidade portuguesa, voltou a ser visitada pelo The New York Times. A padaria que referem fornecia o pão para muitos supermercados na área metropolitana de Nova Iorque, incluindo Long Island.

Mal ou bem, por tímida que seja, uma reforma sempre passou

Até que alguém teve uma ideia muito parva

The world as of 09/10/2001.

We Can't Afford to Wait

É o vídeo que os REM gravaram para a associação MoveOn, em apoio a um Serviço Nacional de Saúde nos EUA.

Long Island wants to secede

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Long Island Wants to Secede
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Economic Crisis

God got her

God will get you for that!, dizia a Maude quando ficava derrotada e não lhe restava mais nada para dizer. Morreu um ícone da televisão da minha adolescência.

Bea Arthur, Star of Two TV Comedies, Dies at 86
By BRUCE WEBER
Bea Arthur, who used her husky voice, commanding stature and flair for the comic jab to create two of the most endearing battle-axes in television history, Maude Findlay in the groundbreaking situation comedy “Maude” and Dorothy Zbornak in “The Golden Girls,” died Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was coy about her age, and sources give various dates for her birth, but a family spokesman, Dan Watt, said in an e-mail message she was 86.

The cause was cancer, Mr. Watt said.

Ms. Arthur received 11 Emmy Award nominations, winning twice — in 1977 for “Maude” and in 1988 for “The Golden Girls.”

She was a seasoned and accomplished theater actress and singer before she became a television star and a celebrity in midcareer, and she won a Tony Award in 1966 for playing Angela Lansbury’s best friend, the drunken actress Vera Charles, in “Mame.”

But while she was successful on stage, on television she made history. “Maude,” which was created by Norman Lear as a spinoff from “All in the Family,” was broadcast on CBS during the most turbulent years of the women’s movement, from 1972-78, and in the person of its central character, it offered feminism less as a cause than as an entertainment.

Maude Findlay was a woman in her 40s living in the suburbs with her fourth husband, Walter (played by Bill Macy), her divorced daughter, Carol (Adrienne Barbeau), and a grandson. An unabashed liberal, a bit of a loudmouth and a tough broad with a soft heart, she was, in the parlance of the time, a liberated woman, who sometimes got herself into trouble with boilerplate biases just the way her cultural opposite number, Archie Bunker, did. She was given a formidable physicality by Ms. Arthur, who was 5 feet 9 ½ inches and spoke in a distinctively brassy contralto.

The show was considered a sitcom, but like “All in the Family,” it used comedy to take on serious personal issues and thorny social ones — alcoholism, drugs, infidelity.

“We tackled everything except hemorrhoids,” Ms. Arthur said, sounding much like Maude, in a 2001 interview with the Archive of American Television, a collection of video oral histories compiled by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

In the show’s first season, Maude, at the age of 47, learned she was pregnant; her distress was evident.

“Mother, what’s wrong? You’ve got to share this with me,” Carol says. Maude’s response is typical, with barbs aimed both inward and outward, delivered by Ms. Arthur with a flash of simultaneous anger, despair and humor: “Honey, I’d give anything to share it with you.”

The two-part episode was broadcast in November 1972, two months before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal nationwide, was decided. By the episode’s conclusion, Maude, who lived in Westchester County in New York, where abortion was already permitted, had chosen to end the pregnancy. Two CBS affiliates refused to broadcast the program, and Ms. Arthur received a shower of angry mail.

“The reaction really knocked me for a loop,” she recalled in a 1978 interview in The New York Times. “I really hadn’t thought about the abortion issue one way or the other. The only thing we concerned ourselves with was: Was the show good? We thought we did it brilliantly; we were so very proud of not copping out with it.”

“The Golden Girls,” an immensely popular show that was broadcast on NBC from 1985-92 and can still be seen daily in reruns, broke ground in another way. Created by Susan Harris (who wrote the “Maude” abortion episode), it focused on four previously married women sharing a house in Miami, and with its emphasis on decidedly older characters, it ran counter to the conventional wisdom that youthful sex appeal was the key to ratings success.

Which is not to say “The Golden Girls” wasn’t sexy. Like “Maude,” it was a comedy that dealt with serious issues, especially those involved with aging, but also matters like gun control, gay rights and domestic violence. And like “Maude,” it could be bawdy. The women were all active daters and, to different degrees, openly randy. As Dorothy, Ms. Arthur was coiffed and clothed in a softer, more emphatically feminine manner than she had been in “Maude,” but she was no less sharp-tongued, and she and the show’s other stars — Rue McClanahan, Betty White and Estelle Getty (who, though younger than Ms. Arthur, played Dorothy’s mother) — were frequently praised for portraying the lives of older women as lively, uncertain, dramatic and passion-filled as those of college sorority sisters.

Familiarly known as Bea, Ms. Arthur was billed in the theater and on television as Beatrice, but the name was one she made up. She was born Bernice Frankel in New York City on May 13, 1922, according to Mr. Watt. But she preferred to be called B — “I changed the Bernice almost as soon as I heard it,” she said — and later expanded it to Beatrice because, she said, she imagined it would look lovely on a theater marquee. The name Arthur is a modified version of the name of her first husband, the screenwriter and producer Robert Alan Aurthur.

When she was a child, her family moved to Cambridge, Md., on the Eastern Shore, where her parents ran a small women’s clothing store, and she dreamed of being a chanteuse and an actress, and entertained her friends with imitations of Mae West. She attended Blackstone College, a two-year school in Virginia, and later studied to be a medical technician, then eventually moved to New York to study acting with Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. Among her classmates were Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau and the actor and director Gene Saks, whom she married in 1950. (He directed her in “Mame.”) They divorced in 1978; their two sons, Matthew and Daniel, survive her. She had two granddaughters.

Ms. Arthur worked regularly Off Broadway and in summer stock, appearing as Lucy Brown in Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of “The Threepenny Opera” at the Theater de Lys in 1954. And in 1955, in a well-received musical tidbit, “Shoestring Revue,” she was seen for the first time by the man who would become a lifelong friend and professional benefactor, Norman Lear.

She also sang in nightclubs and worked occasionally on television, appearing on “Kraft Television Theater” and other shows featuring live drama. On Broadway, in 1964, she played Yente, the matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof.” In the movies, she appeared in the comedy “Lovers and Other Strangers” (1970), and in a reprise of her stage performance as Vera Charles, she appeared in “Mame” (1974), again directed by her husband, this time alongside Lucille Ball.

In 1971, she was living in New York but visiting her husband, who was directing a movie, “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” in Los Angeles, when Mr. Lear persuaded her to do a guest spot on “All in the Family.” The role he created for her, Maude Findlay, was a cousin of Edith Bunker, Archie’s wife (Jean Stapleton), who arrives to care for the family when everyone gets sick. Her tart sparring with Archie (Carroll O’Connor, with whom she had worked on stage, in a play called “Ulysses in Nighttown”) was a hit with viewers. Almost immediately CBS ordered up a new series from Mr. Lear, with Ms. Arthur’s Maude at the center of it. It changed her life.

“I think we made television a little more adult,” Ms. Arthur said. “I really do.”

Quem quer casa paga

Nos EUA, quando comprei um carro, passei um cheque visado. Era um impresso especial (eles não têm carimbos) que me custou uma ninharia.
Em Portugal, para comprar uma casa, também passei um cheque visado. Era um cheque normal, com um carimbo, selo branco e duas assinaturas. Custou-me 31 euros. Agora que sou um homem do norte apetece dizer-me: "Fooooda-se, cabrões de banqueiros, vão roubar para o caralho!"
É claro que muito mais do que isso tive que pagar em impostos e comissões pela escritura e registo (mesmo com o "Casa Pronta"). Mas dos impostos não me queixo. Do que pago aos bancos (e aos mediadores), sim.