A celebraçom do Apalpador chega cada vez a mais pontos do país. Umha recuperaçom que parece imparável e resultou extraordinariamente rápida, levando em conta que apenas há quinze anos a figura era apenas conhecida nas montanhas orientais, e ficava restrita à memória oral, sem nenhum interesse por parte dos estudos académicos. Hoje, bem metidos no século XXI, o carvoeiro está presente numha ampla oferta lúdica e cultural. Sobrevive com força no lugar onde renasceu, o movimento popular, mas extendeu-se também aos ámbitos institucionais livres do domínio da extrema direita, à literatura infantil e à música.
Imagem: puntocarballo.blogspot.com
O nome do investigador José André Lôpez Gonçález ganhou merecido reconhecimento, por ser o primeiro que, num texto do Portal Galego da Língua, deitou luz sobre esta figura do nosso património. O pulo militante deu-no a Gentalha do Pichel e por extensom a rede de centros sociais que na primeira década do século levárom o carvoeiro a palestras, passa ruas, colantes e postais. Mais adiante, e motivando a ira dos inimigos da cultura galega, algumhas instituiçons mais sensíveis à cultura de nosso pugérom em contacto parte da infáncia do país com o também chamado ‘Pandigueiro’.
Fundamentaçom histórica
Como nom podia ser de outro modo, os partidos e cátedras intelectuais mais hostis à recuperaçom cultural galega nom demorárom em lançar o seu ataque: o Apalpador era um ‘invento’, um enxebrismo ridículo, ou umha ‘forma de adoutrinamento’. Rebatendo as falácias, o movimento popular aginha dispujo para o grande público as suas poderosas razons, e também ferramentas formativas. Em 2011, a Gentalha do Pichel editou ‘Teoria de Inverno’, umha achega multidisciplinar que dava conta das raiceiras antropológicas da figura. Para rebater os mais cépticos, umha Comissom da Gentalha deslocou-se à Serra do Courel para entrevistar as pessoas mais idosas, que lembravam como na noite do Natal umha figura misteriosa baixava às moradas a apalpar as barrigas das crianças. Mais de 30 gravaçons davam prova irrefutável da presença do carvoeiro até nom há muito tempo na Galiza rural.
Por seu turno, o mundo das artes plásticas e a literatura infantil faziam o seu contributo ao processo recuperador. A figura icónica foi desenhada polo artista ferrolao Leandro Lamas, mas logo aparecêrom múltiplas versons do gigante do Natal. Em 2009, numha ediçom conjunta entre Ediçons da Galiza e A Fenda, saia a lume ‘O conto do Apalpador’, umha das primeiras versons para público infantil. Também o cantigueiro para meninhos e meninhas se enriquecia cada ano com novas achegas.
Ao se tratar dumha figura senlheira da montanha, a recuperaçom do Apalpador tinha por força que ser valorizada também na beira oriental das serras. Assim, o colectivo pro-galego berciano, Fala Ceive contribuiu também desde 2008 a espalhar na vizinhança da comarca esta nova celebraçom natalícia, no fundo mui familiar às formas de vida e relaçom com o meio que nom há tanto tempo se viviam nesta zona do país.
Movimento popular e instituiçons
O circuito do carvoeiro polos principais centros sociais autogeridos da Galiza continua mais um ano; também a sua visita a centros educativos de educaçom infantil e primária, por vezes por iniciativa de certo professorado, em outras ocasions a instáncias das equipas de normalizaçom lingüística. Por volta do Apalpador tenhem-se organizado concursos de ilustraçom, de cartas, obras teatrais ou rondalhas. Um repasso aos centos de visitas do carvoeiro em todo o território nacional seria impossível, mas em todo caso a expansom dá ideia do grande potencial que tenhem ideias e projectos saídos do trabalho voluntário e do movimento popular.
No ámbito institucional, a iniciativa mais ambiciosa partiu desde ano da Deputaçom de Ponte Vedra, baixo a legenda ‘Natal em galego’. Com visitas organizadas em 37 concelhos do sul da Galiza, as celebraçons natalícias de ‘apalpador e apalpadora’ pretendem, segundo a deputada Maria Ortega, ‘fomentar os valores da língua, a natureza e a igualdade’. Precisamente foi a extensom da campanha a que motivou os ódios do PP, que acusou concelhos governados por nacionalistas de ‘fomentarem o adoutrinamento da infáncia’. As figuras consagradas do Natal, caso dos Reis Magos ou Pai Natal aparecem ‘neutras’ e nom ideológicas segundo a mídia dominante, enquanto visons alternativas desqualificam-se como ‘parciais e tendenciosas’. Esta operaçom de privar os próprios símbolos de qualquer cárrega política, deslegitimando os contrários, é um recurso clássico do poder contra os movimentos populares.
This wholesome and funny guide to dog breeds was created by Grace Gogarty and is full of very true facts that describe each of them perfectly. Can you find your dog here? Is the description accurate? Tell us in comments below!
En nuestro tradicional homenaje a los caídos del año recordamos algunos de los músicos fallecidos en 2019. No están todos los que se fueron, pero sí que brindamos a la salud de todos aquellos cuyas canciones formen parte de nuestras vidas.
Playlist;
(sintonía) THE RONETTES “Be my baby” (HAL BLAINE, 11 de febrero, 90 años)
DICK DALE “Hava Nagila” (16 de febrero, 81 años)
ANDRE WILLIAMS “Bacon fat” (17 de febrero, 82 años)
THE MONKEES “You told me” (PETER TORK, 21 de febrero 77 años) (2’22’’)
LET’S ACTIVE “Every word means no” (SARAH ROMWEBER, 4 de marzo, 55 años)
THE WALKER BROTHERS “The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore” (SCOTT WALKER, 25 de marzo, 76 años)
HUELYN DUVALL “Three months to kill” (15 de mayo, 79 años)
ROKY ERICKSON “Starry eyes” (31 de mayo, 71 años)
DAVE BARTHOLOMEW “Four winds” (23 de junio, 100 años)
THE CELIBATE RIFLES “Tick tock” (DAMIEN LOVELOCK, 3 de agosto, 65 año)
EDDIE and THE HOT RODS “Do anything you wanna do” (BARRIE MASTERS, 2 de octubre, 63 años)
THE MUFFS “Saying goodbye” (KIM SHATTUCK, 2 de octubre, 56 años)
CREAM “I feel free” (GINGER BAKER, 6 de octubre, 80 años)
DANIEL JOHNSTON “Life in vain” (11 de septiembre, 58 años)
JACK SCOTT “The way I walk” (12 de diciembre, 83 años)
FLMIN’ GROOVIES “Teenage head” (ROY LONEY, 13 de diciembre, 73 años)
But there comes a point at which rational people have to put adorable hijinks aside and recognize otters for what they are: disease-ridden, murderous, necrophilic aqua-weasels whose treachery knows few bounds. They are not "wonderful animals," as Ms. Deschanel would have you believe. They're merciless hellspawn who use their intellects for great evil. Here's what you need to know about these terrible animals, and why you should fear and hate them.
1) What is an otter?
Jaime Green/Wichita Eagle/MCT via Getty Images
A river otter at the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas, gets some snow on his face.
Otters are mammals of the subfamily Lutrinae, one of two subfamilies contained within the family Mustelidae. The other, Mustelinae, includes badgers, weasels, and ferrets, among other similar mammals. Lutrinae contains seven genuses and 12 different species, spanning every continent save Australia and Antarctica; a 13th species, the Japanese river otter, was declared extinct in 2012, like many otter species before it. Fourdifferentspecies of otter live in Central or South America, anotherthreein South and Southeast Asia, twoin sub-Saharan Africa, and one in Europe.
The two species found in North America are river otters and sea otters, the latter of which are also found in Japan and the Pacific coast of Russia. River otters are not currently threatened, and are pervasive in Canada and the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico coastal areas in the US.
Sea otters, by contrast, nearly went extinct due to aggressive pelt hunting in the early part of the 20th century. While the governments of the US, Canada, Japan, and Russia signed a treaty banning the hunting of sea otters, it took the Endangered Species Act — under which sea otters gained protection in 1977 — for a recovery to begin in earnest. "The saving of the sea otter," writes Glenn Vanblaricom of the University of Washington in his book on the animal, "is indeed one of the great success stories in marine conservation."
But the last 40 years haven't consisted of unerring progress for the sea otter. The species' recovery has been considerably slower in California relative to other areas. In Alaska's Aleutian Islands, the species has seen a marked decline since the 1980s.
Theories for what's behind the drop range widely, but the US Fish and Wildlife Survey's recovery plan for the species highlights predation, in particular from killer whales, as the most important factor behind the decline.
2. Do otters attack people?
You bet they do! A 2011 study found 39 anecdotal reports of river otter attacks in North America, 35 of which occurred after 1980. Either due to better reporting or to increased otter savagery, the numbers grew over the decades, from three in the 1980s to 13 in the 1990s to 17 in the 2000s. A decent share of the attacking otters have been rabid; in the '90s, 46 percent of otter attacks involved rabies, and in the '00s, 24 percent did. The researchers found four prior scientific publications documenting attacks, including one that reported a deadly otter attack in India.
To be fair, the vast majority — 77 percent — of the attacks the researchers analyzed involved North American river otters, and none appear to have involved sea otters.
3. So sea otters treat humans well?
You keep hoping that. I couldn't find any reports of attacks on humans from sea otters, but that may just be a function of sea otters being much rarer than river otters, and spending less time on or near dry land than river otters do. Moreover, sea otters have in at least some cases shown a willingness to attack primates, as in the case of the above sea otters in the Bronx Zoo, which killed a monkey with whom they shared an exhibit. One sea otter off the coast of British Columbia apparently raped and murdered a dog.
4. Well, sea otters are nice to animals besides monkeys and dogs, right?
Geoff Walsh/Facebook, via the Independent
An otter attacking an alligator.
Nope, they are horrific menaces to other species. And I don't just mean in the way carnivorous species always are to their prey. Sea otters murder even when it doesn't provide them with food or offspring, like straight-up sociopathic spree killers. In 2010, veterinarian Heather Harris and her co-authors Stori Oates, Michelle Staedler, Tim Tinker, David Jessup, James Harvey, and Melissa Miller published an article in Aquatic Mammals documenting about 19 cases of sea otters attacking baby seals. Here's just one:
A weaned harbor seal pup was resting onshore when an untagged male sea otter approached it, grasped it with its teeth and forepaws, bit it on the nose, and flipped it over. The harbor seal moved toward the water with the sea otter following closely. Once in the water, the sea otter gripped the harbor seal’s head with its forepaws and repeatedly bit it on the nose, causing a deep laceration. The sea otter and pup rolled violently in the water for approximately 15 min, while the pup struggled to free itself from the sea otter’s grasp. Finally, the sea otter positioned itself dorsal to the pup’s smaller body while grasping it by the head and holding it underwater in a position typical of mating sea otters. As the sea otter thrust his pelvis, his penis was extruded and intromission was observed. At 105 min into the encounter, the sea otter released the pup, now dead, and began grooming.You read that correctly. After raping a baby seal to death, this psycho licked his paws, like Hannibal Lecter or something.
5. Oh … oh no. But if that's what male sea otters are like with baby seals they mistakenly think to be female sea otters, what are they like with real sea otters?
Approximately that brutal. Harris cites another study that finds that about 11 percent of sea otters found dead on the California coast from 1998 to 2001 were killed, at least in part, by trauma associated with mating. Indeed, trauma is the norm from sea otter mating, not the exception. Here's Harris again:
Copulation normally occurs in the water where the male sea otter will approach the female from behind, grip her around the chest with his forepaws, and grasp her nose or the side of her face with his teeth.…Facial biting by the male commonly results in the development of skin and soft tissue lacerations of the female's nose and face that can occasionally be fatal.The problem is worse for females, of course, but younger males often mimic mating behavior with each other, which can cause similar injuries.
6. This is just horrible. Other species don't do this, do they?
So that aspect of otter sexuality isn't too unusual. What's weirder are a) otters's tendencies to menace baby seals, b) the fact that male otters kill an awful lot of the female otters with whom they copulate, and c) the necrophilia.
7. Necrophilia? Seriously?
(Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
This visual is meant to represent death.
Otters, man. From Harris again:
In one prior report on breeding-associated mortality, a tagged territorial male sea otter held a struggling female underwater until her body became limp and then copulated repeatedly with her carcass. Ten months later, this same male was observed with the carcass of another female sea otter. In both cases, the male was swimming, diving, guarding, and copulating with the carcass.
8. Stop! I don't want to hear any more terrible things about otters.
Too bad! Here are two more.
First, male otters sometimes hold pups ransom to force their mothers to give up some of their food. Here's how biologists Heidi Pearson and Randall Davis describe it:
A male approached a pup floating on the surface while its mother was diving for food. The male forced the pup under water as if trying to drown it. When the female surfaced, the male stole her food (a clam), after which the female and pup quickly departed.The human equivalent of this is probably going to a grocery store parking lot, finding a woman coming out with a small child, and holding a gun to the kid's head until the mom gives you some of her food.
Second, otters can give you H1N1, better known as "swine flu," as our friends at The Verge have reported. Sampling along the coast of Washington State found more than 70 percent of otters there tested positive for H1N1.
9. C'mon, there's got to be something otters are good for.
Fine, fine, I'll give them this much: they appear to be helpful in the fight against catastrophic climate change. As explained by the National Wildlife Foundation's Robyn Carmichael, sea otters frequently eat sea urchins, which in turn are known for eating massive amounts of kelp, which is very good at taking in carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. More otters -> fewer sea urchins -> more kelp -> less global warming. One studyfound that kelp beds where sea otters are present soak up 12 times as much carbon dioxide as beds where they're not. The overall effect isn't that large, but every bit helps, and otters deserve some credit for chipping in.
For the record, I'm not actually against attempts to save sea otters as a species. Those efforts are admirable and valuable to the ecosystems of which otters are a part. I just think otters are jerks.
From Watchmen to Succession, from Fleabag to David Makes Man — these are the top shows of the year.
The TV of 2019 gave me hope for the medium’s future.
Don’t get me wrong: There’s still way, way too much of it (688 series airing in primetime or on a streaming service, by one count). No one person can reasonably hope to watch all of it, and no one person should try.
But in 2019, I felt like TV abruptly remembered what makes TV great, which was a feeling I didn’t have last year. More than any year since Netflix came on the scene in 2013, television was dominated by great shows that were released the old-fashioned way — week to week — and forced us all to watch new episodes more or less together.
Shows like Succession and Watchmen and Stumptown asked viewers to keep coming back, to make the time for them each week. So did two of the biggest TV stories of the year — HBO’s final season of Game of Thrones and Disney+’s Baby Yoda star vehicle The Mandalorian. And audiences obliged. Social media discussion would spike with every new episode, and what ratings data we have suggests each of these shows found an audience.
Were there great binge-watch shows, too? Of course. I would be remiss not to recognize, say, Amazon Prime Video’s Fleabag or Netflix’s Russian Doll. But in 2019, TV felt like TV again, a medium of giant stories that are, nevertheless, made up of smaller stories, and that felt good.
Here are my top 18 shows of 2019, ranked from bottom to top.
ABC’s private eye show isn’t perfect. But it stars Cobie Smulders as the scuzzball detective of my dreams, and with each and every episode, it figures out a little more what it’s doing. The central trio of Smulders, Jake Johnson, and Michael Ealy gets both more comfortable and more fraught with sexual tension. And it earns bonus points for treating Smulders’s character’s bisexuality (mostly) matter-of-factly.
Stumptown airs Wednesdays at 10 pm Eastern on ABC. Previous episodes are streaming on Hulu.
The third season of HBO’s famously uneven anthology series was its best yet, leaping across three separate decades — the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2010s — to tell the story of one man who nearly lost himself by plunging headlong into the investigation of a missing girl. Mahershala Ali was tremendous playing versions of the central character at three distinct ages, and the final few episodes were a powerful evocation of memory and the way trauma haunts us endlessly.
Netflix
A young woman is questioned by the police.
Netflix’s true-crime miniseries could be hard to stomach, despite Kaitlyn Dever’s deeply committed performance, due to its story about a young girl who was raped, then had her testimony discredited by the police. But it was also a winning cop show, with Merritt Wever and Toni Collette offering a modern riff on the female buddy cop story that was all the more remarkable for having really happened. (And, yes, these first three shows are all variations on the detective show, which had a good year.)
The fantasy drama’s controversial fourth season also proved its most thoughtful. The second half of the season comprised a series of smaller gut punches that led right into a massive gut punch of a finale, and all along, it kept asking questions about why we keep putting cis, straight white guys at the center of our power fantasies. The Magicians also aired an unexpectedly poignant musical episode set in a desert, something no other show on this list can boast.
The Magicians’s first four seasons are streaming on Netflix. Season five debuts January 15, 2020 on Syfy.
HBO
Jared Harris was stunningly good in Chernobyl.
In their five-episode HBO miniseries, writer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck turned the 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl power plant into a pure horror story, without distorting the record of what actually happened (at least not too much). Jared Harris led a note-perfect cast, and Chernobyl’s evocation of the grim slog that was thanklessly saving the world from nuclear disaster made for a series that never once blinked while staging enough, “How did they do that?” set pieces to make a surprisingly easy binge-watch.
After briefly losing focus during a funeral episode that tried mightily to be the cable drama version of Angels in America, the back half of Pose’s second season was the strongest the series has been, thanks to a genius cast and a warm depiction of queer found families that argued they are perhaps even more important than blood families, simply because they are chosen. The season’s ninth episode, featuring a boozy beach getaway for a group of trans women, was as loose and lovely an hour as TV produced this year.
Pose’s first season is streaming on Netflix; its second season will be added in the new year. A third season has been ordered and will air on FX.
Hulu
PEN15 resurrects adolescent angst with painful exactitude.
Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle co-created (with Sam Zvibleman) this excruciatingly awkward middle school comedy set in 2000. But perhaps even more importantly, the two women — both in their 30s — also play their 13-year-old selves. It absolutely should not work, and yet PEN15 not only doesn’t fall on its face, but thrives. TV is experiencing a bit of a teen TV boom right now, and this is one of the few shows to truly capture the inner lives of adolescents with thoughtful insight.
PEN15 is streaming on Hulu. A second season has been ordered.
A reality show about couples therapy could be so very disastrous. A documentary series about couples therapy, though? That has promise. And in the hands of the same folks who made the award-winning documentary Weiner (about the scandal-plagued politician Anthony Weiner), Couples Therapy is a soothing but unflinching weekly dive into the lives of four deeply broken couples, guided by the coolly compelling Dr. Orna Guralnik to confront their core differences and talk through their biggest arguments. This show was perhaps 2019’s strongest argument for TV as a force for good.
Rod Millington/Warner Bros. Entertainment
A visit to the principal’s office kicks off much of the action in David Makes Man.
Or maybe 2019’s strongest argument for TV as a force for good was David Makes Man, focused on a black teenage boy growing up in Florida. The series, from Moonlight co-writer Tarell Alvin McCraney, alternated between theatrical flights of fancy, depicting David’s visions of the world around him as a kind of dreamscape, and more realistic looks at how horribly underfunded David’s school was and how much poverty had hurt? affected? his neighborhood. Newcomer Akili McDowell is terrific as David, and Phylicia Rashad gives a wonderfully guarded performance as a teacher who wants to help the boy.
A marathon of David Makes Man will air on OWN on New Year’s Day. OWN has ordered a second season.
Scott McDermott/USA Network
Darlene isn’t sure what she’ll find when she looks for Elliot.
I know the conventional wisdom is that Mr. Robot made a grand entrance in a fun first season, then choked on its own hype. But both its third season (which aired in 2017) and this year’s fourth and final season have provided fascinating looks at what happens when capitalism creates division and dissension among people who might otherwise connect. The final season has been a wildly entertaining, throw-everything-at-the-wall sequence of events, which resolved Mr. Robot’s main conflict with several episodes still to go, delivered a silent episode and a stage play homage episode, and concluded with a trip to an alternate universe. It was truly unique.
Mr. Robot’s series finale airs Sunday, December 22, on USA. The show’s first three seasons are streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
The wondrous third season of Pamela Adlon’s meditation on womanhood at middle age saw the show’s storytelling grow more serialized, with fully developed arcs involving Samantha Fox (Adlon) and all three of her daughters, as well as most of the other important people in their lives. And despite Better Things’s focus on biological family, it’s also very wise about chosen families — about the way that people with similar spirits are drawn to one another, while blood relations we don’t quite fit with become almost like ghosts. The show remains one of TV’s hidden treasures.
Better Things’s first three seasons are streaming on Hulu. A fourth season is currently in production and will air on FX.
HBO
Barry can’t quite shake this dangerous little kid.
Bill Hader’s work as a hitman who really wants to be an actor reached new heights in the show’s second season, as Barry himself reached new depths. Several sequences in which the character channeled his rage into his performances — but never quite figured out how to effectively temper that rage so as not to terrify the audience — made for some of the best TV acting of the year. But, really, Barry might have TV’s best ensemble cast, from top to bottom, and the show’s blend of over-the-top humor with genuine pathos and a fair dose of bloodletting is one of TV’s most unpredictable mixes.
Barry’s first two seasons are available on HBO’s streaming platforms, and HBO has renewed the show for season three.
2019’s most unfortunate cancellation was this AMC drama about wastrels drawn together by a fraternal order that just might have been sitting on real magic — or maybe just a vague approximation of magic. The second season brought all of the characters together in a quest to find meaning amid the ruins of both capitalism and their personal lives, continuing the series’s celebration of friendship and human connection in a world that seems intent on splitting everybody apart. Plus, it had one of the TV year’s most inspired guest turns, from Paul Giamatti as a rapscallion of a crime novelist with an immense appetite for life.
Lodge 49’s only two seasons will eventually both stream on Hulu. For now, just season one is available there.
FX’s eight-episode biographical miniseries was an okay biography of legendary Broadway choreographer and director Bob Fosse; an excellent biography of Gwen Verdon, the muse Fosse ground down into a fine dust; and a transcendent biography of Fosse/Verdon, the unusual alchemy that developed between them. The show was criticized for the way it seemed too willing to celebrate the controversial Fosse (a rampant sexual harasser who endlessly propositioned women he worked with, mistreating them if they said no), but those critiques missed the way the miniseries’s ingenious structure doubled back in on itself to reveal the rot within Fosse and the instability of any partnership founded atop such decay.
Netflix
Natasha Lyonne is brilliant in Russian Doll.
Building a TV show around a time loop is such a natural fit for a medium where every single episode resets to a status quo that it’s a wonder no one has ever done it quite as well as Russian Doll, a brilliant dark comedy co-created by star Natasha Lyonne, director Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler. You might come to the show for the story of a woman (Lyonne) who just keeps dying and then being resurrected again on the night of her birthday party. But you’ll stay for the show’s crackerjack plotting and the way that Headland and the show’s other directors depict the time loop’s decay with each new iteration, as things falling apart, people disappear, flowers wither. Lyonne’s performance is excellent, too, all bruised soulfulness and hard-won hope.
Russian Doll’s first season is streaming on Netflix, and the show has been renewed for season two.
The top three shows on this list almost ended up in a three-way tie for first place, as I seriously considered all three the show of the year at one time or another. Succession transcended its already excellent “operatic soap about horrible rich people” roots in its second season, leaning more heavily into both comedy and tragedy. It was frequently the funniest show on television — I don’t think I laughed more at any line of dialogue this year than when a disgusted senator read, “You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking a few Greggs” — but it was also full of crushing sadness and horror, as Succession made very clear that its characters all live in the shadow of patriarch Logan Roy’s tyrannical abuse. Few shows have so artfully captured how it feels to live in a world where the ruling class seems intent on driving us straight off a cliff.
Fleabag season two was very nearly perfect. Phoebe Waller-Bridge followed up the show’s already great first season with one that was somehow more accessible yet still had Fleabag’s dark edge. Fleabag herself (Waller-Bridge) had softened a bit between seasons, but her quest for self-improvement hadn’t yielded much in the way of happiness or fulfillment. Then she met a priest — a Hot Priest (Andrew Scott) — and the series kicked off six brilliantly conceived and structured episodes that flirted with and subverted romantic comedy tropes before revealing that the show’s real subject wasn’t love, but the remarkable power of knowing that somebody sees you for who you truly are.
Fleabag is streaming on Amazon Prime Video. It’s probably over for good, but you never know.
TV’s wildest ride in 2019 was HBO’s fanfic reinterpretation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s landmark 1986 comic. For its move to TV, Lost and The Leftovers co-creator Damon Lindelof rearranged the comic’s bones around an entirely new story that still resonated and intersected with the old one. Beloved characters from the comic — Laurie Blake! Adrian Veidt! — dropped in as 30-years-older versions of themselves, but Watchmen’s real trick was inventing an entire supporting cast of folks from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who could stand toe-to-toe with the legends.
The season’s dominant theme was race in America, a dangerous minefield for a white showrunner and an especially dangerous one for a genre series that combined depictions of historical race massacres with a superhero whose power involved being able to slip and slide on the ground. But the show’s absurdist streak and its love of superhero goofiness allowed it to create a rich reflection on the many horrors wrought by white Americans on nonwhite Americans, and especially on black Americans. Its most memorable episode retconned the rise of superheroism itself to be something white folks appropriated from one black hero, and its ultimate subject was the way that white supremacy is a cancerous growth on society that is extremely tough to kill.
There were more flawless shows than Watchmen in 2019. There might even have been better shows than Watchmen in 2019. But there was no show I felt more evangelical about this year than Watchmen, no show I pressed as fervently on other people. It was a grand, messy, messed-up TV experiment, and it left me as excited by the possibilities of the medium as anything I’ve seen this decade. It ended perfectly, and I never wanted it to end.
Watchmen is available on HBO’s streaming platforms. The network hasn’t yet made a decision on whether to order a second season.
11 honorable mentions
Food Network
I love Girl Meets Farm, and I don’t care who knows it.
I flirted with including all of these shows on the list at one point or another, so it’s only fair that they get a shoutout, too.
Dickinson (AppleTV+) was the kind of teen comedy that felt like it was designed less for teens and more for former English majors in their 30s, but you know what? It was pretty perfect at being just that.
Evil (CBS) took the creators of The Good Wife from the courtroom to the horror genre, putting a weirdo modern spin on The X-Files by daring to suggest that maybe it’s demons who’ve made the world as bad as it is.
Girl Meets Farm (Food Network) is my favorite comfort food show of the moment. Host Molly Yeh’s Midwestern folksiness conceals a winking deadpan that makes her one of food TV’s most engaging personalities.
I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Netflix) was as hit-and-miss as all sketch comedy shows, but when it hit, it left me in stitches.
One Day at a Time (Netflix) wasn’t as strong in its third season as it had been previously, but it remained TV’s warmest and most watchable family comedy, with an ensemble cast operating at the peak of its powers.
Ramy (Hulu) featured a rich, empathetic portrayal of Muslims living in America, from the devout to those whose faith has all but faded away. Its look back at the characters’ lives before and after 9/11 was one of the best TV episodes of the year.
Superstore (NBC) followed up a barn-burner of a fourth season with a fifth season that deflated just a little, but when the show is on its game, there are few comedies more pointed or funny.
Undone (Amazon Prime Video) didn’t entirely convince me it knew what it was talking about when it came to mental illness, but its story of a young woman who starts seeing her father’s ghost — and learns she can time travel — looked like nothing else on TV.
Vida (Starz) is one of TV’s sexiest shows and one of the only shows that’s trying to talk about how gentrification is changing historically significant neighborhoods where people of color have traditionally lived. Maybe an acquired taste, but a vital one.
When They See Us (Netflix) had the slight air of “eat your vegetables” TV in its first couple episodes, but its methodical portrayal of the systematic failure of the falsely convicted Central Park Five built and built to a thunderous roar against racism in America.
You’re the Worst (FXX) wrapped just about perfectly, with a series finale that twisted itself into timeline pretzels to tell the story of its central couple’s wedding — and then to peek beyond that happy day. The show was TV’s most unconventional romantic comedy, and its conclusion a potent reminder of what made it so good.
Si su pareja es turca le expresará su amor con la frase ‘seni seviyorum’, pero si es inglesa le dirá ‘I love you’. ¿Son estas frases equivalentes? ¿O turcos e ingleses aman diferente? Un estudio publicado hoy en la revista Science ha comparado más de un tercio de las lenguas habladas en el planeta para concluir que existen variaciones en cómo las emociones se expresan entre culturas.
Comparar el significado de la misma palabra en diferentes idiomas no es fácil. En París se guarda el Prototipo Internacional del Kilogramo, el kilogramo ‘original’ con el que alguien podría comprobar si la pesa que guarda en casa se desvía de la medida correcta. Esto no existe cuando hablamos de lingüística y de emociones como la envidia, la vergüenza, el miedo y la esperanza.
La solución propuesta por los investigadores fue utilizar un nuevo método comparativo que mide la variabilidad y la estructura en los significados de las palabras. Para ello aprovecharon un fenómeno conocido como ‘colexificación’.
“[Este] ocurre cuando una palabra tiene más de un significado en un idioma, lo que frecuentemente indica que sus hablantes consideran ambos conceptos similares”, explica a SINC el investigador de la Universidad de Carolina del Norte (EE UU) y coautor del estudio, Joshua Jackson.
Por ejemplo, los hablantes de ruso usan la misma palabra para describir la mano y el brazo: ‘ruka’. ‘Blow’ en inglés se puede usar para soplar con la boca, tocar la trompeta y también cuando sopla el viento, mientras que los alemanes tienen tres palabras para ello (‘spielen’, ‘wehen’ y ‘pusten’).
“Al medir muchas colexificaciones puedes evaluar si un concepto tiene un significado universal”, continúa Jackson. De esta forma, un estudio publicado en 2016 en la revista PNAS encontró que los idiomas de todo el mundo tienden a unir ideas como mar, lago y agua; día, sol y cielo; así como tierra, polvo y arena.
Sentimos como hablamos
El trabajo publicado hoy en Science sigue la misma estrategia, pero enfocada a las emociones. Así, los investigadores analizaron el significado de 24 emociones en 2.474 idiomas —algunos de ellos poco estudiados y hablados— de 20 familias lingüísticas. Los resultados mostraron que las emociones humanas son menos universales de lo que parece, aunque sí existen ciertos puntos en común.
“Encontramos una amplia variedad en el significado de las emociones según cada lengua”, dice Jackson. Por ejemplo, mientras que los hablantes de persa juntan la “aflicción” con el “arrepentimiento” en la palabra ‘aenduh’, el idioma darguin la fusiona con la “ansiedad” en el término ‘dard’.
“Las emociones variaban más del triple [entre lenguas] respecto a los colores”, comenta el investigador. Estas discrepancias no tenían lugar al azar, sino que los significados “eran más similares en familias de idiomas geográficamente próximas”. Los investigadores consideran que esto sugiere que la experiencia de las emociones humanas está moldeada por las propias palabras, además de por la evolución biológica.
“Nuestros hallazgos reflejan el papel de la cultura [en la expresión de emociones]”, comenta Jackson. “El hecho de que idiomas próximos [en el mapa] tengan una comprensión más similar [de los sentimientos] indica que estos significados pueden ser compartidos conforme los grupos humanos entran en contacto a través del comercio, la conquista y la inmigración”.
El amor también es compasión
Al mismo tiempo, los investigadores hallaron que los idiomas del mundo diferencian las emociones según sus niveles de valencia y activación. La valencia divide las emociones en agradables y desagradables; por ejemplo, alegría y arrepentimiento. La activación hace referencia a la actividad fisiológica implicada en ese sentimiento —por ejemplo, el ritmo cardíaco— y que puede ser alta, como en la ira, o baja, como en la tristeza.
“Las lenguas casi nunca unían emociones positivas con negativas, o emociones de alta actividad con otras de baja actividad”, dice Jackson, lo que implica que se trata de “dimensiones psicofisiológicas” compartidas por todos los seres humanos.
Jackson concluye que, “mientras que la valencia y la activación representan bloques de construcción universales para las emociones, podemos aprender de nuestra cultura y de las vecinas a la hora de dotar de sentido a estos sentimientos”.
¿Significa esto que los hablantes de dos lenguas diferentes pueden no amar de la misma forma? “Precisamente. Algunas culturas pueden conceptualizar el amor de formas similares, pero nuestro análisis abre la posibilidad de que no haya un amor universal”. Por ejemplo, en algunos idiomas austronesios —familia a la que pertenecen el malayo y el indonesio— este sentimiento se relaciona con la lástima. Esto implica que ven el amor de forma más negativa... o la lástima de forma más positiva.
No escasean teorías acerca de las fuerzas motrices de la diferenciación evolutiva que nos separó de nuestros parientes simios. La fabricación de herramientas, la predisposición a la violencia asesina, la caza cooperativa, el dominio del fuego, el pensamiento, el cambio climático o el bipedalismo han sido señalados como factores decisivos.
A la lista se ha sumado ahora la cocción de los alimentos. Tal sería, según el primatólogo Richard Wranglam, la responsable de que nuestro tracto digestivo se encogiese en beneficio del aumento del cerebro, con las consabidas consecuencias.
La importancia de la cocción en la prehistoria humana ya había sido reconocida por Claude Levi-Strauss. La transformación de los alimentos crudos en víveres cocidos, afirmaba el antropólogo, impulsó el paso de la naturaleza a la cultura, sin llegar nunca a sostener que ese pasaje incidió drásticamente en el organismo de los homínidos. Para Levi-Strauss la cocina modeló la mente (el orden simbólico); para Wrangham, determinó el cerebro (el orden anatómico).
Apuntalar esta hipótesis es el objetivo de su libro En Llamas: cómo la cocina nos hizo humanos,publicado por Capitán Swing, cuya portada ilustra la fotografía de un chimpancé con gorro de cocinero. Sostiene que, mientras el primer gran salto evolutivo en nuestro árbol genealógico –de los simios a los austrolopitecinos– estuvo ligado a cambios climáticos y a la adopción de una dieta de tubérculos, el pasaje del Homo habilis al Homo erectus ocurrido hace 1,8 millones de años se debió a la invención de la cocina.
¿Cómo? Por el menor esfuerzo digestivo que exigen los comestibles cocinados en comparación con la ingesta de comida cruda. Esto habría propiciado la disminución del tamaño de dientes, mandíbulas y aparato digestivo del linaje Homo, en beneficio del cerebro, a cuyo crecimiento y mantenimiento se dedicó la energía metabólica ahorrada en la digestión.
Sin evidencias empíricas
Cabe advertir que Wranglam, profesor de antropología biológica en la universidad de Harvard, no dispone de evidencias empíricas directas que sostengan su hipótesis (los hornos más antiguos conocidos no superan los 250.000 años; y las evidencias prehistóricas del uso del fuego no superan el millón de años).
Toda su argumentación consiste en una serie de analogías y ejemplos aportados por su experiencia con los primates y por los conocimientos de los nutricionistas acerca del impacto de los alimentos cocinados en el metabolismo humano, trufada con observaciones antropológicas acerca de la dieta de los pueblos cazadores-recolectores.
En poco más de 200 páginas aprendemos que si nos alimentásemos exclusivamente de comida cruda, acabaríamos dejando de menstruar (si somos mujeres) o muriendo por desnutrición, sea cual fuera nuestro sexo.
Nos enteramos asimismo que digerir alimentos crudos exige mucha masticación, largas digestiones y, en definitiva, un cuantioso gasto energético. Y que el valor nutricional de numerosos alimentos aumenta al ser calentados (un huevo cocido es digerible en un 90 %, y uno crudo, en apenas un 50 %).
Deja claro que la carne es una importante fuente de proteínas, pero solo cocinada; y nos informa que en el registro etnográfico no existen cazadores-recolectores con una dieta exclusivamente cruda ni tampoco culturas, por más primitivas que sean, que no cocinen.
Cocineras perpetuas
A partir de este abigarrado conjunto de observaciones y especulaciones, Wranglam realiza algunas sorprendentes inferencias. Por ejemplo, explica el patriarcado sobre la base de la necesidad masculina de asegurarse cocineras a perpetuidad y, de este manera, disponer de un suministro constante de alimentos elaborados (en los pueblos primitivos, señala, la violencia machista solía estallar a raíz de fallos femeninos en la función culinaria).
También sugiere que en la cocción comunal, surgida de la necesidad de organizarse para preparar los alimentos y comerlos, se halla el fundamento de la sociabilidad humana. Y afirma que la caza no hubiera sido posible si nuestros ancestros, como sus primos simios, tuvieran que pasarse el día masticando comestibles duros.
Ciertamente, el ser humano es la única criatura viviente que se nutre de forma regular con alimentos cocinados. Igualmente cierto es que la morfología del Homo erectus –sus mandíbulas y dentaduras pequeñas– es congruente con una alimentación basada en esa clase de viandas.
Sin embargo, los postulados de Wranglam presentan flancos débiles. Para empezar, el hallazgo del Ardipithecus, un homínido que ya caminaba erguido hace 5,6 millones de años, ha restado importancia al posible impacto del fuego (y la cocina) en el proceso de hominización. Para continuar, olvida que el fuego no es el único medio para hacer digerible una sustancia, pues se puede conseguir el mismo resultado mediante moliendas o marinados.
La evolución es más compleja que esto
Finalmente, su hipótesis sobre el patriarcado no aclara por qué los hombres no podían cocinarse para ellos de forma grupal, al estilo de las cofradías gastronómicas vascas; ni por qué no cocinaban los días que no iban de caza; lagunas sugerentes de que en la opresión de la mujer intervenían otros factores aparte del cuidado de los fogones.
Huelga decir que el talón de Aquiles de cualquier teoría monocausal de la evolución como esta radica en el sobredimensionamiento de un único factor por encima del resto de agentes intervinientes.
Los últimos descubrimientos muestran un panorama evolutivo complejo y multicausal, con causas de diversa entidad conjugándose en buena medida aleatoriamente para producir una especie única como la nuestra. Incluso con estas pegas, la tesis del “simio culinario”, tal como se expone en este libro de divulgación antropológica, no deja de resultar una lectura amena e instructiva, y sobre todo, como decía Levi-Strauss de los alimentos, “buena para pensar”.
Ficha técnica
Título: En llamas: cómo la cocina nos hizo humanos
Deep fakes, influencers, viral fashion – we live in a world unrecognisable from the one we stood in ten years ago. As a chaotic decade comes to a close, we're speaking to the people who helped shape the last ten years and analysing the cultural shifts that have defined them. Explore the decade on our interactive timeline here, or head here to checkhellip;
The way I see it, there are two ways to round out the end of the year. You can end it on a positive note, "WOOO!"-ing out 2019 in a tinsel-covered, glitter-dusted, eggnog-drunk, singing Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" in a subway flash mob blaze of glory. Or, you can accept the crushing weight of the past 11 months and [checks calendar] 19 days and feel the light flickering out of you like the link on a string of Christmas lights that someone stepped on with a glass-shattering crunch.
If you relate to the former, the next two weeks might be a pleasant blur of posi Christmas content, as you loop Elf over and over again like an unhinged Santa's helper who just downed a plate of spaghetti and candy. Congrats to you. If you and your seasonal affective disorder relate more to the latter experience, however, might I suggest welcoming a new addition to your Christmas movie canon: It's time to watch Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, the ultimate anti-Christmas movie.
There are indeed spoilers ahead, but the best Christmas movies are the ones you already know the plot to, and anyway, Phantom Thread is a movie in which the plot matters much less than the way the story unfolds.
Phantom Thread follows the controlling and highly particular fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he becomes entranced by Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps), a waitress who becomes his muse and then his lover and then eventually his caretaker, after Alma begins poisoning him with wild mushrooms. It's implied at the end of the film that this poisoning turns consensual, with Reynolds eating the tainted mushrooms in order for Alma to care for him.
This all might not scream "Christmas!" to you, especially if you're of the Elf school of sugar-high holiday positivity, but Phantom Thread is a fashion movie, it's arguably a food movie, and it's definitely a holiday movie. For one thing, Phantom Thread was released on December 25, 2017; it was intended to be watched at the holidays. It features Christmas and New Year's scenes, and while set in London, its godforsaken icy vibe feels not unlike late December in the American northeast.
Unlike Bad Santa and Black Christmas and, dammit, Die Hard, or whatever else we might think of when we say "anti-Christmas movie," Phantom Thread is not a middle finger to Santa or to the season. Instead, Phantom Thread is about succumbing to its struggles. Reynolds gives in to love and the guidance and presence of another; he succumbs to inspiration and to illness, just as we give in to the coldness of winter and the sadness of another year gone by.
Reynolds is indeed a Mood. And as he and Alma navigate the tangles of their shared life, it captures the stark nihilism we sometimes face, especially at the end of the year when we suddenly take stock of all our blessings and curses.
Giving is part of giving in, and Phantom Thread reveals itself to ultimately be about a very special gift. As the bossy Reynolds hands over control to Alma—as he sweats and hallucinates while feverish in bed—his subservience is a kind of gift he's giving her. If you're into that, it's kind of sweet, and thoughtful gifts are what the Christmas season is all about! With the daunting prospect of a new year ahead, who among us does not want to be poisoned mildly, and then lovingly cared for in bed?
If you, like Reynolds and myself, are fully over it right now, might I recommend watching Phantom Thread on Christmas morning? Make a nice, warm mushroom omelette while you're at it.
English is not our mother tongue, but so many of us speak it. So many of us even take pride in how well we speak it.
I grew up in the post-colonies—namely India, Hong Kong, and immigrant communities in the U.S. The whole time, my head was deep in British classics; I read them as if they were my own history.
One of my favorites was The Mill on the Floss, a Victorian novel written by Mary Ann Evans under her pen name, George Eliot. The protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, was a rebel. I vividly remember how Eliot describes her, shaking her head like a Shetland pony before chopping off her hair in defiance of femininity. I so closely identified with Maggie that the little town of Lincolnshire, where the novel was set, could have been Rajkot, Gujarat, where I first read the book in secondary school.
“If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie?” — The Mill on the Floss
I carried my radical, unnecessary self-identification with Maggie Tulliver on through college, through semesters of alienation in writing classes where professors would liken me to Jhumpa Lahiri and tell me how lucky I was to be “exotic.” During my last semester, I even wrote a term essay on how women in Victorian British novels demonstrate virtue.
In addition to Vanity Fair, The Heart of Midlothian, and Bleak House, I studied The Mill on the Floss.
In the entire essay, not once did I mention race. I must have tacitly understood that those elevated to classical protagonist must be white, as white was not a color but the absence of it; that in narratives, whiteness performs as a sort of blankness, a canvas to paint metaphor and simile on; that it lends neutrality to fraught topics, and allows the story to enter the mainstream. The literary white woman, whether she was snipping her locks off with farm scissors, blushing through Derbyshire, or yearning for a room of her own, was my unquestioned role model.
Katherine would have me clatter the far keys of her baby grand piano to create a dramatic atmosphere while she paraded around in her mother’s fancy clothes. In our fantasies, she was the princess, about to get married. She acted like she was a celebrity, but she was just a white British girl. I thought she was the most cosmopolitan, most self-possessed of our Hong Kong elementary school classmates. (My mother, now hilariously, accused me then of “kissing white ass.”)
When Princess Diana died, Katherine and I sat in my room and wept, because we thought there were no more princesses in the world. Her death made our own lack of royalty more real. I performed a mournful solemnity I had picked up from books about childhood capers like those of Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and recalled a picture of Diana touching Black children with HIV/AIDS. “What a saint,” said an older aunty type. “For a princess to touch disease like that.”
Burnett’s fixation on princesses—more a state of mind than a title—through the lofty, imaginative protagonists of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden fostered literary narcissism in me. Sara Crewe of A Little Princess was a storyteller; despite her fall from fortune, she unnerves her elders by retaining her regal stature and ability to weave narratives. Though demoted to a lowly servant, she benefits from what she calls "magic" —dinners set out by a monkey-toting lascar who parkours into her quarters every night. She feels deserving of the remarkable kindness because she will always be a memsahib, one who can speak both posh English and strangled Hindustani. Then, when the diamond mines in the stories about her family turn out to be reality rather than childish fantasy, she is able to turn back into a princess.
The idea that one could have innate worth was so attractive to me—after all, the Hindu concept of karma fundamentally justifies caste supremacy and privilege. I wanted to be recognized as worthy just for my speech and manners, as Sara Crewe had been.
“Everything’s a story—you are a story—I am a story.” — A Little Princess
In 7th grade, we were encouraged to enter a Commonwealth essay writing competition. The prompt was to imagine new worlds. I came up with one where I became a doctor and created a township village where education was free and jobs were guaranteed. I was benevolent and rich and would visit to serve tomato soup to the populace. It was a neoliberal fantasy wrought of white guilt I had unknowingly absorbed. As Sara Crewe would call it: “largesse,” the kind that rationalized the Commonwealth extending the “gift” of English to its former colonies.
But largesse is not a negotiation, nor is it altruistic. Establishing English as a lingua franca around the world benefits the English the most, just as fulfilling the White Man’s Burden of “civilizing” indigenous peoples involved, for example, stealing an estimated $45 trillion from South Asia, about 17 times the U.K.’s annual GDP. I guess that is what England means by “commonwealth.”
Because of “largesse,” England is the stepmother who never loved any of us. I am preoccupied with my place in her embrace. Today, I bring up the Kohinoor Diamond often, as the massive jewel, which was expropriated and remains unreturned, is just one example of how we were mistreated and how that mistreatment has been denied. I hug the train of England’s dress because I cannot reach up to her bosom; I still want her approval, but she is hard to please. She never wanted me anyhow.
The message of the British period drama is clear: that history is charming, that nostalgia can cloak any monstrosity, that the British deserved every plunder.
I am guilty of spending hundreds of hours watching all the historical drama series. The pleasant diversion of period dramas is, in its essence, psychosocial integration made possible by colonial propaganda. You watch period dramas and take as truth their message: British colonialism was quaint, glorious, and a high point in civilization.
Imperialism is crucial to the cultural representation of England to the English. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes in her own reading of nineteenth-century British literature, the erasure of imperialism as a focus of analysis “attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project.” By showcasing the quintessence of the past, for example, Raj nostalgia as invoked in the 2017 movies Victoria and Abdul and The Viceroy’s House, is packaged in genteel manners and meaningful walks on grassy estates funded by invisible colonial exploits. Victoria and Abdul deems the relationship between Queen Victoria and a brown man “history’s most unlikely friendship.” Meanwhile, the young man introduces Victoria to mangoes. This is supposed to be light-hearted and cute—but is there anything truly cute about a monarch exploiting a huge section of the world and only gaining a modicum of cultural literacy by way of tasting fruit? Does Victoria tasting a mango mean that she believes South Asians are people?
Last summer, I found myself on a beach outside of Havana, drinking a Cuba Libre and reading Pride and Prejudice zombie fan fiction written in 2009. In it, the Bennet sisters are miraculously the best fighters in England, but were trained by the Chinese, who were considered lesser fighters than the Japanese. The book, rife with icky descriptions of “Orientals,” countless ninjas that wavered in the face of Bennet fury, and a throwaway interracial relationship, was the lucrative marriage of two high-performing genres and casual racism by a white male author.
Why was I sitting beside the lazy seafoam green waves amid a glorious July swelter in a socialist haven reading fanfiction about cold, shitty England and its cold, shitty people? Despite all my issues with them, I’m attached to these narratives—I grew into my own writing practice emulating them. They’re relaxing because I don’t have to work to understand them. They are familiar.
“You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” — Pride and Prejudice
But that fact that they’re familiar is what makes them insidious. It is the job of the professional Orientalist, filmmaker or writer, to create a restored picture of the Orient. It’s a messy history, a messy relationship, but the Orientalist finds a way to “circumvent the unruly (un-Occidental) non-history of the Orient with the orderly chronicle, portraits and plots,” as Edward Said says.
After dehumanizing the Orient through fiction, the colonizer must also find a way to occupy maximum space in these portraits—to suck up agency and air from people of color in order to maintain supremacy. Through these stories, I wasn’t learning how to be white and powerful from the colonizer. I was learning my place by noting his. He took our jewels and cultivated opium addictions and connived for power, and then he starved us all.
Such dramas and novels remain popular, however, precisely because that dominance is waning—and everyone knows it, although the English would deny it. “[Britain is still the nation] that ruled a quarter of the world,” invoked Margaret Thatcher, in the flush of the British’s Falklands War victory in 1982. Salman Rushdie remembers the declaration in his essay “Outside the Whale,” pointing to the imperial anxiety of the country. He likens Raj fictions to the “phantom twitching of an amputated limb.”
I’ve only visited England once, six years ago. It was cold and wet and I choked on my own bitterness as well as sluggish piles of the most substandard curry. I did not see the Kohinoor, because the entrance fee was too high. But I did get followed around a store by a security guard who made me pull my hood down.
In college, I shared a joke with my white friends that hasn’t aged well: “You’ve been colonized, bitch.” They’d say it every time I added sugar to my tea or pronounced “laboratory” with too many syllables. “I’ve got postcolonial rage,” I now say with toothy jocularity.
“One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward.”— The Jungle Book
It’s true that I am, in bursts and spurts, angry. Angry, that our minds were colonized. Angry that education systems uphold the colonization of the mind. Angry that I didn’t even have to live in England to be indoctrinated into believing in its supremacy. Angry that I retain only the slightest grasp of my mother tongue, a connection vanquished by colonial powers from Britain and Portugal and now, the U.S. Angry at the cinematic and literary canon. Angry at the pen I took up.
But more than anger, I increasingly feel awe: the whiteness of protagonism I grew up with, like many generations before me, is finally changing. Together, creators of color and their audiences are building new literary traditions that center our voices and our stories. With that broader shift, comes a personal one: maybe I’m ready to stop watching period dramas.
Warning: This article includes excerpts featuring transphobic writing.
Fans and critics alike have been calling out Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for years for her history of playing online footsie with noted transphobes. This week, she finally made explicit what a lot of those fans and critics have argued: She's an aggressive biological essentialist, and vocally supports known transphobes and their beliefs. It's the latest stage of the slow-burning, deepening estrangement between Harry Potter readers and a woman who has often been as ill-suited to the role of pop culture celebrity as she is eager to play it.
But this latest turn in the conversation also underscores the degree to which Rowling has been successful in downplaying the peevish condescension and personal conservatism that she has flaunted in her writing outside the saga of the Boy Who Lived. It's also perhaps revealed how many literary critics were either happy to overlook, or were unable to perceive, the prejudices and grudges that she has exercised since becoming a successful adult fiction author with the Cormoran Strike mystery series (that she writes under the pen-name Robert Galbraith). If J.K. Rowling has been a disappointment in her public statements and interviews and troubling on Twitter, she's been positively abhorrent as a mystery novelist. And there might be nothing she's written more vindictive and grotesque--and revealing--than 2014's The Silkworm.
The Silkworm is that most dangerous of things: a dark satire of the literary business, with all its rivalries, resentments, and pretension. It's impossible for an author to write one of these without basically showing their whole hand. It's not a subject anyone wants to write about unless they personally have some axes to grind. Nobody reads a book and thinks, "Damn I'd love to know how this publishing deal was structured!" Only writers are drawn to this theme, a way to complain about a job that typically involves writing about the jobs and lives of others.
Now let's establish upfront that mysteries, particularly British whodunnits, are as a rule full of preposterous dirtbags. But they also tend to be clear about their perspectives, about who we are meant to sympathize with and treat as a reliable narrator within the world of the story, and who is just one more suspect who richly deserves either to be one of the victims or punished as the killer. Within the world of Rowling's Galbraith mysteries, our guides are the shabbily irresistible Cormoran Strike (imagine Jack Reacher by way of Patton Oswalt) and his loyal assistant and protege Robin Ellacott (basically a disappointed Hermione). And this makes the Strike series rather revealing for who it satirizes, who it attacks, and who it admires.
In The Silkworm Rowling is largely concerned with literary losers: the victim is a pretentious author of awful literary fiction, Owen Quine, and he's killed in a particularly lurid and horrific fashion. In the wake of his murder, oily colleagues and business associates abound: a resentful and greedy agent, oafishly opportunistic publishing executives, and the superstar author who had a long-ago falling-out with the victim.
Don't think for a moment that this character is intended as a stand-in for Rowling, a way of taking a jab at her own reputation. It is clear at every turn that this is the world of literary publishing, a world that never took the Potter series or its author particularly seriously and which is somewhat easy to lampoon as being insular and self-absorbed while producing little that makes an impact on popular culture.
But a major part of the case turns on an affair the victim was having with one of his writing students and their own protege, a young trans woman named Pippa.
There's a viciousness in Rowling's descriptions and characterizations in the Galbraith books from time to time. But her descriptions of Pippa, the features and mannerisms she chooses to focus on and emphasize when writing from Strike's POV (generally one of our two reliable narrators in this world) are consistently objectifying and othering in ways that are very familiar from the ways transphobes describe and debate the validity of trans men and women's identities.
Critic and VICE contributor Katelyn Burns wrote about this last year, using this particular sequence to contextualize some of Rowling's other statements and behavior on Twitter and to persuasively make the case that Rowling is transphobic in very familiar and common ways. She writes:
In the scene, a trans woman, Pippa, follows and tries to stab the protagonist, Cormoran Strike, before getting trapped in Strike’s office. After demanding Pippa’s ID, her trans status is revealed and her visible Adam’s apple is noted, while it's noted that her hands were jammed in her pockets. Pippa tries several times to escape the office before Strike finally says, “‘If you go for that door one more time I’m calling the police and I’ll testify and be glad to watch you go down for attempted murder. And it won’t be fun for you Pippa,’ he added. ‘Not pre-op.’”
This is unpleasant stuff, and there is indeed far more where that came from, because as scathing as a few passages can make The Silkworm sound, the full novel is much worse. It's a work in which Rowling relentlessly brutalizes the story's most vulnerable characters and their aspirations.
But I think Burns may even undersell the poisonous sympathy Rowling's characters express for Pippa and Kath, the woman and aspiring writer who has effectively adopted her as a surrogate daughter. It's not merely Pippa's gender identity and physical appearance that Rowling is keen to point out, it is also her foolishness and futility.
When Strike and Robin finally get the full story on this secret family that murder victim Owen Quine was hiding, what's revealed is intention to create a new family with his lover Kath and their surrogate child Pippa. The picture Rowling paints is of people who are fundamentally deluding themselves, whose happy ending will at best be a parody of a family.
It's a nasty scene. The condescending sympathy extended to Pippa is framed by an overall contempt for her and Kath. They both cherished dreams of making it as writers, dreams that Rowling's hero Strike finds contemptible narcissism ("What was this mania to appear in print?" Strike wonders). Kath talks over every attempt of Pippa's to join conversations about writing, and it's crystal clear that even here in a relationship where Pippa feels safe and valued, she's just being used to flatter her friend's ego.
"I write fantasy with a twist," said Kathryn and Strike was surprised and a little amused that she had already begun to talk like [a famous author]: in rehearsed phrases and sounds bites. He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks…
What's remarkable here, and elsewhere in this book, is how it moves from the kind of thoughtlessly and pruriently cruel transphobia displayed towards Pippa and into a very specific kind of malice toward people who dream they might be worthy of the kind of success and importance that Rowling achieved. In The Silkworm, Rowling's narration is consistently othering and patronizing towards Pippa as a trans woman. But it hates Kath and Pippa for their creative ambitions, despite the fact that Rowling herself made much of the fact that she began her career as a struggling single mother.
It's hard to read this as anything other than the meanest kind of punching-down. It might work as a kind of dark self-portrait of Rowling before the Potter series became a global phenomenon, but then we'd expect to find some kind of character who parallels Rowling's rise to riches. That's not what The Silkworm gives us, however. There is no commentary anywhere in The Silkworm on Rowling's own arc. Its viciousness is for other people.
The cruel portrayal of Pippa is not the only painful characterization in the series. In the first Strike mystery, Cuckoo's Calling, we are repeatedly treated to weirdly fetishizing descriptions of mixed-race black characters and this unbelievably sweaty passage:
A masterpiece produced by an indecipherable cocktail of races, Kolovas-Jones's skin was an olive-bronze, his cheekbones chiseled, his nose slightly aquiline, his black-lashed eyes a dark hazel, his straight hair slicked back off his face.
But while Indecipherably-of-Color Is Sexy and Beautiful, Cuckoo's Calling also lingers over the conniving, grasping Blackness of another character who holds a key piece of the puzzle in the murder case. When Strike meets a reluctant witness, Rochelle, Rowling is at pains to reproduce a working-class accent and portray her as ugly and alien.
She was uncompromisingly plain. Her greasy skin, which was the color of burned earth, was covered in acne pustules and pits; her small eyes were deep-set and her teeth were crooked and rather yellow. The chemically straightened hair showed four inches of black roots, then six inches of harsh, coppery wire-red. Her tight, too short jeans, her shiny gray handbag and her bright white trainers looked equally cheap.
It's hard to argue this is an example of Strike being an unreliable narrator, because when we get Robin's POV in other sections of these books, Strike's judgments are largely confirmed except when it comes to understanding women's feelings. Nowhere does the racial lens that Strike turns on Rochelle get questioned, and in fact by the end of the novel Rochelle is undeniably revealed as a manipulative crook who is too greedy and stupid to see the danger she's in.
Now Rowling's book is also full of dysfunctional and venal white people, particularly white men. Robin is involved with a fiance named Matthew who seems like an extended mea culpa for Ron Weasley. As in the Potter series, Rowling seems to reserve most of her ire for posh public school types, people born to privilege and power who nevertheless seem to relish stripping that power from others. And this being a Rowling series, there are still long descriptive passages of Britain through gloriously changing seasons, and the occasional moment of cutting clarity. Talking about how middle-class values cheapen the lives of others whose realities are more vulnerable or complicated, Strike thinks:
How easy it was to capitalize on a person's own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.
But while the Potter books benefitted from a combination of historical specificity (the entire series is a period piece about the cruel plutocratic revanchism that defined the Thatcher era) and troublingly simplistic analogy (house elves!), the Strike series struggles with the vague and under-considered liberalism of its author. Strike considers anti-war protestors in light of his own service and trauma as a military policeman who lost a leg in Afghanistan, but only to piously reflect on his own complicated (and completely unstated) thoughts and feelings about Britain's role in the War on Terror. There are the requisite observations about how London is changing, the city's rapid polarizing between the Have-It-Alls and the Have-Nones, but divorced from any kind of critique or wish to bring change. Given the strong undercurrent of resentment and prejudice running through the books, it's easy to understand why they have so little insight or conviction. It's hard to identify problems or think about their causes when you lack the empathy to care.
Reading the Strike books, however, it seems clear that Rowling's politics got worse because of her celebrity. The transphobia directed at Pippa is in proportion to Pippa's demands for dignity. Pippa's friend Kath is not hard to read as being analogous to the fans and fanfiction authors who dreamed of bringing their own visions to life. People who at one point turned against Rowling, or demanded that she do better at respecting segments of her fanbase, all find themselves transformed into a vicious archetype in the Strike novels.
J.K. Rowling is transphobic. She wrote a transphobic novel. She tweets transphobia. She's also written a racist one (maybe more than one, given the stereotypes that are strewn throughout the Potter books, but I'm only talking about the mysteries here). But the thing that really haunts me about the Strike novels, and what they reveal about Rowling, is that their worst traits and authorial decisions seem fueled by a kind of defensive contempt. She became a beloved juvenile fiction celebrity for writing a story about a very privileged group of "misfit" friends who fought exaggerated avatars of classism and racism. But at every turn, success seems to have made her more vindictive, more resentful.
As they grew older, many of the young readers who loved these stories, but struggled to see themselves in them, started asking Rowling why her attempts at inclusion only came via retcons after the series was finished. Countless people aspired to be the next J.K. Rowling, and offered their own thoughts about how her stories might have been better. And confronted with criticism and questions about her work and the biases and prejudices that may have shaped it, Rowling's response was to take another name and lash-out in another series where she finally just said what she thinks of all those people who think they might deserve better than being ignored.
Tras unos meses desde que se iniciasen los primeros rumores, Mediapro ha cerrado este jueves la compra de El Terratsegún informa Variety. La productora fundada por Andreu Buenafuente pasará a formar parte del brazo productor de la compañía después de cerrar una operación de la todavía no se ha desvelado más detalles.
Esta compra viene en el contexto de expansión que la compañía de Jaume Roures está experimentando durante todo este año, con la creación de Mediapro Studios el pasado mes de marzo. Bajo esta marca han estado presentes en la producción de una treintena de series nacionales e internacionales solo este año.
Por otro lado, con la adquisición del El Terrat, se adentran en el terreno de la "commedia", género en el que se especializa la productora. Actualmente la compañía de Buenafuente y Agustí Esteve nutre de un buen número de programas a varias cadenas, principalmente a Movistar+.
Ahí tenemos espacios como 'La resistencia' de David Broncano, el 'Locomundo' de Quequé y el 'Late motiv' del propio Buenafuente además de la magnífica serie de Berto Romero 'Mira lo que has hecho'. También desarrollan programas para la SER y la RAC, TV3, Neox, laSexta ('Sálvados'), etc.
Así, la compañía de Roures da un paso más en su plan de ser uno de los principales proveedores de contenido audiovisual en España más allá del fútbol con el que se ha movido durante tantos años.
No hay nada como acudir a los fans para poner orden en lo que todo está saliendo mal en una franquicia, ¿no? Bueno, Rian Johnson no las tiene todas consigo (y sabe de lo que habla: ahora mismo puede ser, junto a Kathleen Kennedy, la gran bestia blanca de Star Wars de cara a los seguidores más radicales). Y para ser sinceros, nosotros tampoco.
Y no es manía persecutoria: 'Star Wars: El ascenso de Skywalker' es la prueba palpable de que no siempre conviene tomarse las correcciones de los fans al pie de la letra. Te lo explicamos en nuestra videocrítica, a la que puedes acudir con la paz de espíritu obligatoria antes del estreno, ya que viene absolutamente libre de spoilers.
En ella te contamos qué funciona y qué no en esta nueva entrega y por qué, te parezca irregular o un auténtico triunfo de la voluntad del pueblo, quizás la saga debería descansar durante un tiempo para replantearse sus logros y problemas durante los últimos años.
Hablamos de cómo esa presión de los fans ha estropeado la interesante historia de Rey, que estaba protagonizando un crecimiento a partir de la mismísima nada, sobre todo en 'Los últimos Jedi' y que los fans exigieron que tuviera un sentido.
Aquí la vemos entrar a formar parte de un legado que no solo no necesitaba, sino que echa por tierra hallazgos de las anteriores entregas. Además de que, con las prisas, nos propone una de las casualidades cósmicas más inverosímiles de la franquicia.
‘Star Wars: El ascenso de Skywalker’: catálogo de guiños
El otro aspecto que podemos entender como una genuflexión hacia los fans es el de la avalancha de guiños que suponen a veces un palo en la rueda del ritmo de la películas. Cosas como la aparición de Lando Calrissian o la flota de naves rebeldes son cromos sin demasiada vida ni justificación. Aunque otros, como determinados escenarios con solera o la recuperación de C3PO como el mayor pesado de la galaxia son resultones y funcionan.
La película funciona cuando más descerebrada y frenética se pone. El tercio inicial, por ejemplo, recupera lo mejor de las aventuras desprejuiciadas y algo pulp de la primera trilogía, con más aventura a lo Indiana Jones que ciencia-ficción de naves, y muchos desiertos, trompazos, trampas, humor y un trío protagonista que desborda química. Aunque el argumento en este arranque no tenga ningún sentido, su ritmo febril es contagioso.
El resultado en su conjunto es un desbarajuste argumental más preocupado de parchear lo que no estaba roto que de contar una genuína historia con vida propia. Un final algo amargo para la tercera trilogía, un entretenimiento competente a ratos y un aviso para Disney de que tiene que replantearse las cosas.
Garam Masala is a wonderfully versatile Indian seasoning blend that will bring an incredible depth of flavor to a large variety of dishes. The different spices play their own unique part in delivering a phenomenal…
If you’ve been following the fire signals, you know it’s been a BIG ONE for me, King Priam, the kids (especially Cassandra, Hector, and Paris) and the entire country of Troy. I won’t bore you with the details (you’ll be able to hear all about it when The Iliad hits your local oral storytellers next year), but I did want to mention that after Priam got Hector’s body back following his murder by Achilles, we had a beautiful funeral at the house. We were truly touched by how many of you turned up to lament and rend your clothing with us. Community is everything.
Daedalus
Hello, dear friends, Icarus and I are taking a big leap — literally! We’re jumping off this tower in Crete and moving to Sicily. It seems like just yesterday that Icarus and I were imprisoned in this tower here by King Minos. I guess time flies when you’re wondering about your complicity in the seven young Athenian boys and girls sacrificed to the Minotaur each year in the labyrinth you built.
As close friends know, I’m a bit of a tinkerer, so I built wings out of feathers and wax I had lying around. Icarus is a bit nervous since this will be his first time outside ever, but I’m confident those nerves will melt away as soon as he sees the sun.
Sea you all next year!
Echidna
Hi there from the ‘mother of all monsters.’ I love my kids but they can truly be terrors sometimes — I get it!
Quick updates on just a few of my little darlings:
Cerberus continues to be Hades’ favorite hellhound, excelling at guarding the Underworld and turning would-be visitors into stone with one look (let’s be real: he has three faces only a momma could love).
Medusa “lost her head” over a little Greek warrior named Perseus. They’re currently traveling the world together, turning people into stone. Even decapitated, this is really shaping up to be Medusa’s year!
Our sweet Chimera continues to pave his own path outside of Greece by terrorizing all of Asia Minor. We jokingly call him the black lion/goat/snake/sheep of the family!
If you happen to swing by the Underworld or one of my little monsters sends you here, make sure to swing by and say hi.
Demeter
Hello and Season’s (which I control) Greetings!
If it’s winter, then you know that my darling daughter Persephone is back ruling over the Underworld with my son-in-law/brother, Hades. Sorry for the despairing, cold weather everyone, I just never pictured my daughter meeting her husband through a kidnapping on a chariot led by dead horses. But I’m so proud of her when I’m not weeping uncontrollably or causing worldwide famines. I’ll be spending the holiday solo, finding new ways to turn the fruits and vegetables I control into pure alcohol.
Hera
Happy Holidays to all our family and friends! All is well on Mount Olympus, where I’ve been busy as Queen and Protector of Women (but only the ones that I like — inside joke).
As you all know, because we won’t shut up about it, Zeus and I have been trying this whole open marriage thing. I made the reasonable rule that he could be with other people if he were not a human. So far he’s been a bull, a swan, an eagle, and even a bunch of gold light. I didn’t know light beams had reproductive organs, but an open marriage teaches you something new every day! I’m very cool with this, but if I see any of those other women or children, I’ll kill them… just kidding.
Speaking of, Zeus and I are expecting a beautiful baby soon. At least I hope it’s beautiful. Otherwise, I’ll have to throw the baby off a cliff (aka “pull another Hephaestus," I’m so bad).
Clytemnestra
Agamemnon has had a lot of father-daughter bonding time with Iphigenia during the decade of war over in Troy. Apparently, some bad storms have been delaying his return (I think Aggie just wants more boys time), and he joked about how he and the crew might have to ‘sacrificially burn Iphigenia to appease the gods.’ Ugh, I hate his dad jokes so much sometimes I think I could just murder him in cold blood.
Stay dry, y’all.
Cronus
Dear Titans,
Rhea and I hope this letter finds you well. It still feels surreal to say, but recently I was promoted to King of the Titans (all of you) and God of Time. Boy, the standards for being King of the Gods sure have fallen, haven’t they? Who died and made me King, right? I guess it was my father, Uranus, who I castrated with a sickle my mother gave me. Fun fact: his blood and semen created most of the life on this planet. Neat, huh? All kidding aside, I’ve really been enjoying the position and my additional responsibilities like making war with the Giants, torturing primitive humans, and managing a team.
In other news: Rhea and I are expecting again. I know what you’re thinking: Will I eat this baby just like I ate our other five bundles of joy so that he won’t kill and castrate me like I killed and castrated my dad? Only (the God of) time will tell ;).”
Jocasta
A lot of you have been asking me how my husband/son Oedipus and I will be ‘celebrating’ this holiday season. STOP ASKING.
I went to college in New York City during the first decade of the millennium. It was just after smoking was banned inside bars and restaurants (though you could still sneak one sometimes). Sex and the City was still on television and it was kind of thrilling to know that Carrie’s haunts were just a subway ride away.
On Wednesdays, I had a ritual: I would swipe a free copy of the Times from the student center, cozy up on an armchair, and tuck into Frank Bruni’s weekly restaurant reviews. I lived through those articles. Bruni’s words, by turns decadent and biting, provided a window into the white-table-clothed restaurants that were otherwise inaccessible, what with my $8 an hour work-study gig.
As festividades de Nadal compréndense no que se dá a chamar como “duodenario místico”, o período de doce días comprendido entre finais dun ano e comezos do seguinte, coñecido no mundo anglosaxón como os Twlvetide e que hoxe en día podemos situar entre a Noiteboa e a Epifanía. O que moita xente ignora é a escuridade que envolve o ciclo festivo do Nadal.
Astronomicamente esta é a fase do inverno na que o sol cesa o seu movemento estacional, quizais por iso na Anatolia a este período se lle chama Zemheri, o frío terrible.
Mais esa etapa de perda de forza do astro rei ten tamén unha implicación espiritual. En Serbia a estes doce días chamábanselle Некрштени дани, os Días non Bautizados, e considerábase que nesas datas as forzas e os seres malignos estaban máis activos e eran máis perigosos do normal. Un período de sombras que, baixo o influxo da cristianización, entendíase perigoso por comprender o tempo en que Xesús estivo sen bautizar.
Nalgunhas oracións da liturxia católica advírtese desta inmersión no mundo das tebras que non esvaecerá plenamente ata a resurrección de Cristo o Sábado Santo. Así, o Exultet ou pregón pascual refire que por fin totius orbis se sentiat amisisse caliginem (por fin “se sinta libre das tebras que cubrían o orbe enteiro”), por que haec igitur nox est, quae peccatorum tenebras columnae illuminatione purgavit (esta é a noite na que a columna de lume esclareceu as tebras do pecado).
Nesa “noite tan ditosa, na que se funden o ceo e a terra, o humano e o divino”, nese tempo limiar de doce días, o contacto entre o mundo terrenal e o alén é especialmente intenso e perigoso. Xa na tradición pagá do mundo xermánico podemos atopar referencias na saga de Hákon góði a unha serie de cultos aos antepasados e unhas cerimonias de protección ante os Draugr (fantasmas) ou os Aptrgangr (os que camiñan despois da morte), criaturas cualificadas como non mortas e que amosan maior actividade nestas datas. En Grecia inténtase espantar os Kallikantzaroi, uns monstros subterráneos que atormentan a xente con pequenos actos de maldade como agrearlle o leite, mexarlle no lume ou obrigalos a bailar ata a extenuación. En Anatolia estes monstros denominábanse karankoncolos, en Bulgaria karakondjul e en Serbia karakondžula. En concreto, no Pirot, no sueste de Serbia, o patriarca saía fóra da casa chamando polo german, un ser mitolóxico relacionado coa choiva e o pedrazo, gritando o seu nome tres veces e dicindo: “german, german, german, onde sexa que esteas, ven cear agora, e no verán non me deixes ver os teus ollos por ningures”. Logo acendía unha candea, tomaba un sorbo de rakia, probaba un pouco de pan chamado “da boa sorte”, bebía viño e regresaba a súa casa. Nas granxas da península escandinava os patriarcas realizaban ritos de sacrificio en honor dos elves (elfos).
Falando de Galicia, en Salcedo o antropólogo Rafael Quintía documentou o xeito de escorrentar os Trubincos, unha caste de trasnos amigos do enredo e propios do Nadal, que baixaban pola cheminea na noite de Noiteboa. Do mesmo xeito pódese apreciar como en Noite Vella a campá de Coiro (Cangas), ao igual que o fai nas noites de San Xoán, congrega as bruxas na praia de Areas Gordas para celebraren cerimonias satánicas diante do demo en forma de castrón. De aí a expresión de que en “San Silvestre meigas fóra”. Tal era a crenza en que no Nadal o mal podía presentarse con maior facilidade que en Galicia se cría que os que nacían neste tempo podían ser vedoiros, homes ou mulleres-lobo, pois foran concibidos na Coresma, período onde o sexo estaba prohibido.
Representación dos Kallikantzaroi.
No Nadal certos personaxes enmascarados comezaban a desfilar por algunhas vilas galegas co obxectivo de purificar a comunidade e escorrentar os malos espíritos. Xa no século IX o Códice Albeldense describe a procesión de máscaras de animais e de demos (orcum), máscaras que representan o inframundo onde habitan os deuses pagáns, os demos e as ánimas dos mortos que son liberados nestas datas. Por iso, algúns autores vinculan os nosos cigarróns cos kukeri da antiga Tracia, unhas máscaras que encarnan un home disfrazado con peles, careta de madeira decorada con animais totémicos e chocas. Estes kukeri visitan as casas dos veciños dende o Aninovo co fin de espantar os malos espíritos co ruído das súas chocas. No concello da Teixeira a xa perdida figura do murrieiro puido desempeñar esta mesma función. Como ben documenta Carlos Ares na súa recente obra Festividades de Inverno na provincia de Ourense, esta representación vestía antigamente pelicas de animais, “facía soar as chocas (…) e cunha fusta golpeaba e sacaba as murrias das pernas”, establecéndose unha “dobre visión do seu cometido (…) como sandadores no caso de curar as murrias (feridas producidas polo lume e con risco de podrecer) ou transmisores do mal se o que fan e impedir que sexan tratadas”. Para algúns autores esta personaxe puido ser unha representación dos antepasados ou de outros espíritos.
Esta comuñón durante o ciclo de Nadal entre o real e o mitolóxico, entre os vivos e os mortos, iso que Mircea Eliade denominou coincidentia oppositorum, pódese recoñecer nas tradicións galegas que reflicten a presenza das ánimas durante as festividades e os banquetes familiares. Para iso, déixanselles ofrendas as ánimas tal e como amosa un rito documentado en Cualedro, onde se lles ofrecía leite ou cera. Ao igual que na Provenza se lle ofrecía leite e mel ao Bûche de Noël mentres ardía na lareira, e se lle guindaba sal para protexerse das bruxas. Esta tradición das ofrendas aos defuntos foi cristianizada en moitos lugares e neste caso é o Neno Xesús quen, en Noiteboa, baixaba a cear. Dicimos que baixaba, xa que un lugar onde se focalizan os ritos nestas datas é a lareira, o único punto de luz nese tempo de escuridade: o “lume novo”. Así, a lareira non se debe varrer nin se debe apagar o lume, xa que é aí onde acoden os defuntos da familia e onde senta a Virxe María a cambiarlle os cueiros ao Neno Xesús.
O Nadal era, pois, un tempo escuro e perigoso, un bo momento para incentivar, con lume, a Pirunte, Éoo, Aetón e Flegonte, os catro cabalos que tiraban do carro no que viaxaba Helio, a divindade solar da mitoloxía grega, cos seus catro nomes evocando, cada un, a idea de lume, chama e luz. Chega, pois, o tempo de acender o tizón de Nadal, comezar a escorrentar os escuros visitantes, varrer o lume vello e acender o novo.
O ano pasado deixou tan bos discos que á hora de comezar a recopilar os lanzamentos máis interesantes das bandas e artistas galegos durante este 2019 seguiamos a escoitar traballos como DEIXAAS de Mercedes Peón ou Castro Verdi de Mounqup. Pero o mundo segue a xirar e a escena musical de Galicia non se toma descansos.
Ao longo do ano falamos dalgúns dos discos que máis nos chamaron a atención pero moitos outros pasaron desapercibidos polos nosos radares no momento do seu lanzamento. Nesta lista reunimos os 20 álbumes que máis nos gustaron deste 2019, 20 coleccións de cancións que se moven entre estilos moi diferentes pero que amosan todo o que teñen que ofrecer os nosos artistas.
Como sempre, esta é a nosa opinión. Animámosvos a que nos comentedes cal foi o voso disco galego favorito deste ano 2019, que vos pareceu a lista ou se pensades que hai algún traballo que debería ter feito unha aparición entre os álbumes que seleccionamos.
En Había que intentalo Familia Caamagno amosan ao longo das nove pistas que o compoñen a primeira transformación notable do seu son. Sen abandonar de todo o rock sesenteiro nin o factor humorístico que sempre definiu os seus traballos e introducen novos matices power pop.
En Danças Líquidas Bifannah permítennos darnos un novo chapuzón nos sons tropicais e psicodélicos con letras en portugués, como xa escoitaramos en Maresia (2017). Aínda que estemos as portas do inverno, entre temporal e temporal, cada vez que lle damos ao play a este disco voltamos ao verán.
Dende Vigo, ou como eles lle chaman, Cidade Caballero, os Treintañera Cañeras sacaron o seu segundo EP. Tres cancións de estudo e unha en directo cheas de rock and roll ateigado de humor e retranca son suficientes para facernos saltar unha e outra vez seguindo os ritmos das súas guitarras. Sen dúbida, unha pequena xoia que escoitar ata rebentar os nosos altofalantes.
A produción electrónica de Chisme fai de Médium un disco que soa a un futuro dixital cada vez máis próximo. Os ambientes escuros e paranoicos e os samples de Jonas Mekas atopan un espazo común neste álbum que podería describirse como o son de internet.
Esperamos que Boyanka Kostova nunca se deteñan, porque isto significaría un auténtico desastre. Nova Canción Galega é o novo traballo de Chicho e Cibrán, compoñentes do grupo e nesta ocasión tamén o nome dunha das cancións que conforman o álbum. Neste novo traballo, o dúo afina mellor os seus tiros e converten a súa música nalgo ineludible en calquera festa galega. Imos á orquestra!
Segundo Fogar de Os amigos dos músicos é un traballo que non require moito para funcionar. A instrumentación, principalmente acústica, e as harmonías vocais, conforman todo o que precisa un disco para colarse nas nosas playlists: boas cancións.
Ataque Escampe voltaron este ano e fixérono de novo con Álex Charlón á voz principal, tras a súa saída da banda no 2015. A Alma é un lanzamento breve pero que se sinte moi grande. O seu tracklist confórmano tres cancións acompañadas dunha introdución e uns créditos finais en formato sonoro nos que atopamos unhas letras tan acertadas coma sempre e unha instrumentación máis atmosférica do habitual.
Tras revolucionar o panorama musical galego con Solpor, Baiuca regresa na súa revisión do folclore galego. Na mesma liña dun entramado electrónico envolvente, pouco evoluciona este Mesturas do publicado o ano pasado, máis aló dun maior achegamento a percusións tribais. Porén non deixa de ser igual de desfrutable e accesible.
Vinte e nove temas parece unha loucura para calquera traballo musical. Con todo, ao falar de GLITCHGIRL e de DESPACITO V3, isto é un adxectivo totalmente positivo. A produtora asturiana afincada en Galicia converxe a súa música cos estilos de moitos outros artistas para traer un traballo colaborativo fantástico onde todo ten cabida, e sempre con moito tino.
Dous anos despois do seu esperanzado LP debut, Está Bien, a banda viguesa volve con seis cortes que seguen a mesma estela psicodélica. Nun lixeiro abandono do lo-fi, Dois somérxese máis no dream pop e no surf rock, a través de punteos e rasgueos de guitarra reminiscentes dos primeiros Beach Fossils.
O primeiro disco de longa duración de Loiros supón un prometedor proxecto que parte do jazz moderno e converxe no post-rock, no shoegaze e no grunge. Longos desfiles de mesturas psocidélicas conforman un primeiro achegamento a unha banda á que lle queda moito que amosar. A peza Fomos nenos é sinxelamente inesquecible.
O noise-rock de Jay pasou xa a outra vida, e das súas cinzas nace Mundo Prestigio, un cambio radical tinguido de novas formas e cores. O EP debut desta nova e refrescada formación supón todo un despregue de sampler que bucea entre o hip hop, o pop a música negra e o post-bop ao máis puro estilo BadBadNotGood.
No seu segundo disco de longa duración, Agoraphobia conseguiron rexistrar a versión definitiva da proposta sonora que foro desenvolvendo ata este momento. As dez cancións que conforman Unaligned traen consigo novos estribillos cheos de guitarras afiadas e enerxía sen pausa que ben merecen unha escoita.
Con Ultraligero Novedades Carminha decidiron dar un paso máis cara adiante e rachar definitivamente coa homoxeneidade de xéneros, empaquetando un disco que bebe do funk, da cumbia, do hip hop, das verbenas de aldea e incluso das novas ondas do trap.
A música de Juramento Mantaraya é capaz de encher de cor calquera habitación durante o que duran as dez cancións que compoñen este novo traballo de Aries. O proxecto da bilbaína Isabel Fernández, afincada en Vigo, segue a soar tan cheo de vida como sempre. Se buscades unha proposta de música pop, accesible ao mesmo tempo que chea de persoalidade e de ideas atrevidas este é o voso disco.
O nome de Pálida é xa un valor seguro dentro da electrónica galega. Desta volta, o proxecto de José Garnelo, máis coñecido como Nelo trouxo consigo o EP The Forest no que ao longo de tres composicións os sintetizadores se entrelazan cos ritmos de maneira áxil creando ambientes máxicos, naturais e futuristas, todo ao mesmo tempo.
Oileán Fada foi unha deses discos inesperados que sempre aparecen cada ano. O primeiro álbum de longa duración de Kaleikia mistura de maneira áxil o stoner rock con pianos con certos aires clásicos en longas composicións instrumentais que nos fan viaxar por todo tipo de paisaxes durante máis dunha hora.
Parece ata unha
cousa do destino que un artista chamado Balea apareza nas liñas do noso portal.
Con todo, o incrible de verdade é o traballo que ten, xunto a Thomas Dylan,
detrás. Retratos é, sen dúbida, un dos mellores discos que saíron do noso país
este ano.
Ás veces, a
lírica é o principal motor do álbum. Moitas outras, é a música a que fala por
si soa. Podemos atopar un álbum cheo de jazz, experimentación e rap clásico,
todo sempre fusionado á perfección para traer temas convincentes e máxicos capaces
de levarnos ao nirvana.
No punto máis experimental, temas como Autoretrato ou Fuck the Artist traen baixo o seu brazo unha liña que busca unha agresividade ante a calma fantástica. Os toques clásicos do álbum, lonxe de desentoar cos anteriores, demostran un respecto polo xénero ao que poucos peros lle poderiamos poñer e que axudan a conformar o corpo do álbum.
A aparición dende un primeiro momento de Ortiga na escena musical galega foi unha alegría. Dende aquela, poucas veces podemos imaxinar un momento de celebración no que non sexa boa idea poñer algunha das cancións que conforman Chicho & Sus Chichas, o seu debut en solitario.
Se hai algo
típico en Galicia, gústenos máis ou menos, é que ir á orquestra en verán ás
festas das nosas vilas e aldeas é algo tan típico como a choiva ou os nosos
montes. Con todo, era cada vez unha poboación máis vella a que podía conectar
con isto.
Ante esta problemática,
había dúas opcións en relación ás novas xeracións do país: deixar escapar o
tópico, fuxir dos esquemas e convencernos de que outro ocio era xa unha
realidade, ou reconvertelo para os máis novos. E o éxito de Ortiga reside no
segundo.
Chicho & Sus Chichas é un disco fantástico, onde aínda que a música da corrente popular mencionada anteriormente é a que leva a voz cantante, os sons do álbum tentan ir máis alá e buscar espazos onde crecer e evolucionar, achegándose a outras correntes musicais lonxe do verbeneo. Pop, trap e cumbia atopan no álbum un fantástico espazo no que convivir, sempre buscando o sorriso na faciana do ouvinte.
A boa noticia para a música tradicional galega é que ten futuro na vangarda musical do país. Temos a sorte de que é cada vez algo máis común ver como máis e máis artistas ven tirón neste xénero musical para transformala, xogar cas súas normas e buscar os seus límites. Vimos en Baiuca varios exemplos de converxencia musical, e como Mercedes Peón en DEIXAAS esnaquizaba calquera desas regras.
Tanxugueiras, por
outra banda, tenta algo tan diferente a eses proxectos como gratificante no
resultado final. As normas da tradición están aí, no fondo, pero é dende esta
estrutura e cun respecto infranqueable onde se aproveita para crecer, deixando
ideas interesantes en cada unha das pezas para levar a cabo un proxecto tan
redondo como difícil de levar a cabo.
Pandeiretas e voces a coro en ritmos clásicos conviven en Contrapunto con elementos actuais que toman o papel protagonista en moitas das cancións, pero sempre sen saírse das pautas establecidas, para crear auténticas xoias de actualidade, renovando e mantendo o xénero como ninguén.
Perfidia, Niña Nena, Desposorio ou Malquereza, sen desprestixiar ao resto de temas, convencen e estar chamadas a ser das mellores pezas musicais que a tradición ofreceu a xa non só o seu público habitual, senón á música galega na súa totalidade, cun son ecléctico que namora e hipnotiza.
Sería, como
mínimo, difícil imitar para outros o que as Tanxugueiras conseguen neste álbum,
cheo de matices e que a cada escoita agrándase como poucos. E tampouco fai
falla, pois estamos ante presente e futuro dalgo precioso.
O Apalpador, a tradicional figura do gigante carvoeiro que cuida das crianças e traz presentes para todos e todas.
Em breve passaremos o Solstício de Inverno (05:19 hora oficial galega do dia 22) e com ele ficaremos a um nada da Noite Nai. Eis umha das festividades menores contempladas na Roda do Ano da Druidaria e que incluem solstícios e equinócios, à parte das quatro grandes celebraçons religiosas.
Como tantas cousas aparentemente paradoxais na nossa cultura, continua o frio a sério justo quando a luz do Sol quer fazer o caminho de volta. Aparentemente paradoxais, claro, mas só para quem nom repara nos pequenos detalhes e na maravilha da Natureza.
Mais umha vez, demonstra-se que nom há súbitos finais nem mais confusom da que nós queiramos criar. Antes o contrário, nos rigores do Inverno, na noite mais longa e o dia mais curto, reparamos em que a partir de agora a luz só pode triunfar (embora ainda tenhamos que sobreviver qualquer possível perigo ou adversidade).
Parece que o tempo voara desde o Magusto e já queremos alviscar o brilho do Deus Bel nas folhas de acivro e sagrado visco branco, que ainda que está algo longe começou já decidido o seu caminho de retorno da mao da Deusa Brigantia. Ela sim terá muito trabalho em breve…
Aliás, outras tradiçons druídicas celebram esta noite mais longa do ano como sinal do eventual regresso de Bel e ainda de Lugus através de Brigantia, simbolizando a sobrevivência sobre as trevas e lenta chegada da luz. É o enraizamento e gestaçom durante três dias (21+3) do Infante Sol a partir do Ventre Materno, a escuridade da Deusa Anu (Dana ou Danu na Irlanda, Dôn em Gales).
Som as datas da Modranecht ou Matronucta (a Noite Nai), tamém do Meán Geimhridh (‘Meio Inverno’) eLá an Dreoilín(‘Dia da Carriça’), o dia no que em Éire este pássaro é “preso”, guardado e depois libertado como sinal de continuidade, da passagem definitiva do ano anterior, pois canta sem parar tanto no verám como no inverno sem interrupçom; isto era algo que tamém se fazia na Lourençá, na comarca da Marinha, mas uns dias mais tarde. A Roda gira, a vida continua, os ciclos nom param.
Nestas datas na IDG honramos aos grandes Deus Larouco (o An Dagda irlandês), Deusa Anu (ambas Deidades primeiras e essenciais) e a sua descendente, a Deusa Brigantia.
Seja dito, já que estamos, que trânsitos como o Solstício de Inverno som momentos de extrema importância na tradiçom germânica (festividade de Yule) e nas crenças Wicca, mesmo no calendário chinês (o Dong Zhi ou “chegada do Inverno”) entre outras no mundo. Na Europa outras religions tamém empregarom e adaptarom a posteriori estas datas como marca do trânsito cara a um período de maior esplendor.
Arredor destas datas os e as Caminhantes podemos nos reunir com a nossa gente, família ou Clã (incluídos os que foram para o Além), na confiança de que o futuro sempre há acabar por destruir os gelos da fria temporada.
O Solstício astronómico é em nada, mas as celebraçons continuam. É a época do Apalpador, o gigante da tradiçom galega que virá trazer alegria e diversom às crianças. Queima-se o facho e manifesta-se a Coca numha piscadela cúmplice, deixando-se comer em forma de doce. Adornamos e alumeamos as nossas casas, magnificando o brilho da nova luz à que ajudamos a renascer.
Bom Solstício de Inverno sob a protecçom do visco e o acivro. Que corra a raposa e que cante a carriça!
“Meses do inverno frios
que eu amo a todo amar,
meses dos fartos rios
e o doce amor do lar.
Meses das tempestades,
metáforas da dor
que aflige as mocidades
e as vidas corta em flor.
Chegade, e trás o outono
que as folhas fai chover,
nelas deixade que o sono
eu durma do nom-ser.
E quando o sol formoso
de abril torne a sorrir,
que alumee o meu repouso,
já nom meu me afligir.”
(Rosalia de Castro, Folhas Novas, 1880).
As montanhas do Courel, desde onde desce o Apalpador (tamém chamado Pandigueiro) cada Inverno com os seus presentes e castanhas.
Gostas da IDG? Tu podes ajudar a que este trabalho continue – Do you like the IDG? You can help us continuing our work
(Aciprensa)- La Asociación Internacional de Exorcistas (AIE) advirtió de los peligros de un nuevo libro sobre demonios para niños que ha sido publicado en Estados Unidos con el título A Children’s Book of Demons, y precisó que no es correcto intentar mostrar que el satanismo es algo bueno y positivo cuando en realidad no lo es.
A Children’s Book of Demons ha sido escrito por Aaron Leighton y tiene como objetivo llegar a los niños de entre 5 y 10 años, “un público particularmente indefenso y condicionable” a quien se le quiere presentar “el satanismo como una alternativa normal entre otros cultos”.
En una nota de la AIE se denuncia que en el libro “se llega incluso a afirmar que el culto al demonio se limita a celebrarlo y que quien lo practica no comete ningún crimen ni hace nada de malo”.
“Esta afirmación denota una falta de discernimiento entre el bien y el mal, ya que el satanismo tiene principios que promueven la opresión de la persona en su dignidad y autonomía, y por lo tanto, quien rinde culto al demonio tarde o temprano será presa de una conducta interna que originará un comportamiento según principios lesivos y destructivos de la dignidad humana”, indica la nota de la AIE del 11 de diciembre, firmada por su presidente el P. Francesco Bamonte.
Además, refiere el texto, el libro “es un ulterior aporte al nefasto proyecto de normalizar el contacto con el demonio y presentar la práctica del satanismo como algo bueno y positivo”.
A Children’s Book of Demons presenta afirmaciones como “evocar a los demonios nunca ha sido tan divertido” y sugiere a los niños cosas como estas: “¿No quieres botar la basura esta noche? ¿Tal vez estás nadando en tareas? ¿De repente ese gordo prepotente es un verdadero fastidio? Bueno, toma tus lápices de colores y usando la habilidad del diseño de sellos ¡llama a algunos demonios! Pero ten cuidado, aunque estos espíritus son más tontos que atemorizantes, siguen siendo demonios”.
La nota de la AIE alerta también sobre los grimorios que se proponen en el libro para los niños de manera simplificada y que se sugieren como algo divertido, comparándolos con un “número de teléfono” para contactar demonios.
Un grimorio es un tipo de libro de conocimientos mágicos de la Europa de la Edad Media, que contiene datos astrológicos, listas de ángeles y demonios, instrucciones para aquelarres, hechizos, invocación de seres sobrenaturales como el diablo, entre otros.
La nota de la Asociación de Exorcistas recordó que “con los demonios no se bromea. Quien invita a un niño a evocar a los demonios es como una persona que coloca en sus manos una granada, para que juegue con ella. Tarde o temprano el pequeño jalaría el seguro y le explotará entre las manos”.
“Quien invita a un niño a evocar demonios procede como si le dijese que es posible ayudar a un criminal para obtener cualquier cosa” y “lo está induciendo a perder su identidad, su personalidad y a ser destruido moral, psicológica y espiritualmente”, prosigue la nota de la AIE.
Los demonios, recuerdan los exorcistas, son “ángeles que voluntariamente se han hecho malvados, enemigos de Dios y de la humanidad, seres llenos de odio hacia todo hombre, con la intención de sugerir todo mal y toda perversidad con el fin de enemistar a uno con otros y al final separarnos definitivamente de Dios y conducirnos a la perdición eterna, en un sufrimiento sin fin”.
El libro, precisa la nota de la AIE, “representa una última etapa del oscuro proyecto que, iniciado en los años 70’s, busca, partiendo de una primera aproximación genérica al esoterismo de las nuevas generaciones, y de ir paso a paso hasta la propuesta explícita de darle culto al demonio”.
La nota de los exorcistas recuerda finalmente un pasaje del capítulo 18 de Mateo: “Pero al que escandalice a uno de estos pequeños que creen en mí, mejor le sería que le colgaran al cuello una piedra de molino de las que mueve un asno, y que se lanzara al mar”.
Let’s start with the redeeming qualities. First, the honorable mayor of Adventure Bay is a woman of color. Second, the gray dog named Rocky is really into recycling. Otherwise,Paw Patrol is a moral and aesthetic catastrophe. More »
A voceira do BNG, Ana Pontón, volveu protagonizar un dos acareos máis tensos que se viviron ese mércores no Parlamento galego. A nacionalista botoulle en cara ao presidente da Xunta o favorecemento continuo ao dono da entidade bancaria Abanca, Juan Carlos Escotet, que impulsa a primeira universidade privada que se crea en Galicia. Alberto Núñez Feijóo respondeu apelando a que esta universidade privada está vinculada unha “fundación sen ánimo de lucro” en referencia á Afundación da entidade bancaria.
Eroski Paraíso, codirixida por Jorge Coira e Xesús Ron a partir da obra homónima da compañía de teatro Chévere, recrea o proceso de rodaxe do filme que Alex (Cris Iglesias) quere facer sobre os seus pais e como se coñeceron na sala de festas Paraíso. Un centro de reunión en Muros para toda a comarca hoxe transformada nun Eroski no que súa nai traballa como peixeira.
O tema principal desta comedia
é o desarraigo e a partir desa historia pequena, gran parte de todos os galegos nos sentiremos
identificados coas arestas que que compoñen o relato. O filme trata o
desarraigo coa familia esquecida, co propio pasado e a memoria, o desarraigo
cun mesmo e o proxecto vital que toda persoa debe ter. Tamén co país, un tipo
de perda que representa de dous xeitos diferenciados.
En primeiro lugar, fai unha mirada externa, xa que a protagonista viviu case toda a súa vida fóra. Primeiro en Lanzarote, onde o seu pai (Miguel De Lira) aínda reside. Máis tarde en Barcelona coa súa nai (Patricia de Lorenzo) tras a separación do matrimonio. Agora ela volve vivir en Muros de novo obrigada polas circunstancias e detestando vivir nese lugar.
REPRESENTACIÓN DOS USOS DA LINGUA
Dende o punto de vida interno, entronca dun xeito directo co uso da lingua e unha denuncia da súa situación. O pai fala o galego de Mazaricos utilizando expresión que os que non somos da zona tiñamos como mínimo esquecidas. A nai fala en castelán, pero nun castelán impostado que soa a calquera cousa menos a castelán. Iso si, falar galego en público é unha vergonza para ela. É a representación máis literal e forte da diglosia.
Por último, a protagonista é unha neofalante que apunta as expresións que lle son descoñecidas. Soamente con esta representación, Eroski Paraíso representa unha novidade no cinema galego e unha reivindicación moi poderosa, pero a adaptación que se fai da obra de teatro é respectuosa pero fala a linguaxe do cinema. Non se queda anquilosada no formato orixinal, un dos maiores perigos desta clase de proxectos.
As secuencias son bastante longas nun acercamento á fonte orixinal e a localización é semellante -simplemente un plató que tenta parecerse a un Eroski-. Pero onde rompe e fai unha declaracións de intencións dende o principio é a través da fotografía e das decisións estéticas, como o uso da pantalla partida ou a determinación de que o propio equipo técnico do filme sexa parte activa do mesmo, unha personaxe máis.
UNHA RODAXE SOBRE UNHA RODAXE
Porque ao final non é o mesmo facer unha obra de teatro sobre unha rodaxe que un rodaxe sobre un rodaxe e son eses toques de metacine onde Eroski Paraíso alcanza os matices máis interesantes. Todo isto unido á marabillosa actuación do reparto, fai que a nivel interpretativo e formal o filme gane enteiros. Mención especial merece Lucía C. Pan na dirección de fotografía, que volve facer un gran traballo (unha vez máis) despois de triunfar en longametraxes como Dhogsou Trote.
Ademais, sen ser a temática central do tema, trata aspectos sociais moi vencellados a Galicia. Dende as problemáticas sociais de vivir no rural ata as consecuencias da droga durante os anos oitenta e noventa. Tamén fala da emigración, case tan de actualidade hoxe como noutrora. Todo está incluído dun xeito orgánico nos excelentes diálogos. Lamentablemente, isto non é tan así cando se fala do valor antropormórfico do Paraíso para a comarca, xa que se recorre a elementos máis artificiais que non rematan de funcionar ao cen por cento.
En definitiva, Eroski Paraíso é un filme sobre a memoria, sobre o que hoxe é diferente a fai un tempo. Ademais, é unha obra que é quen de conectar con moitos tipos de poboación diferente. Porque eu podería ser un fillo concibido no cemiterio de Muros e non merco o pan onde saía cos os meus amigos fai décadas, pero todos os vigueses da miña xeración botamos de menos o Barrica e o Marexada. O desarraigo non ten idade, soamente se acumula co tempo.
Dirección: Jorge Coira, Xesús Ron Guión: Chévere Fotografía: Lucía C. Pan Música: Varios Ano: 2019 País: Galicia
Galicia ostenta el dudoso honor de ser la comunidad con más condenados a permanente revisable. De hecho, fue David Oubel –vecino de Moraña– quien inauguró esta figura procesal en España en julio de 2017, al ser castigado por asesinar a sus dos hijas con una radial dos años antes.
En octubre de 2018 Marcos Mirás pasó a engrosar esta nómina por matar a su único vástago, de 11 años, en Oza Cesuras el Día de la Madre de 2017 para vengarse de su ex. El Chicle cierra ahora esta lista, aunque a diferencia de los anteriores su crimen fue sexual y no un filicidio.
El también gallego José Luis Abet, autor del triple crimen machista de Valga, podría ser el siguiente en alimentar este fatídico registro, pues todo apunta a que se expondrá a una petición de condena similar a la de los anteriores.
Hay otra comunidad cuyos tribunales también dictaron tres penas máximas, Andalucía, si bien no todos los condenados son españoles, pues la más célebre, Ana Julia, es dominicana. Mató al niño Gabriel en Almería, donde también se dictó otra condena de este tipo. La otra fue en Sevilla.
El resto se reparten entre Castilla La Mancha –con una en Guadalajara y otra en Toledo–, Castilla y León, Madrid, Cataluña, Islas Canarias y País Vasco.
Los gallegos, con tres, acaparan casi la cuarta parte de las penas máximas dictadas en España, concretamente el 23,3%.
Faleceu en Sandiás con 86 anos. Con só 15 botouse ao monte e participou nas accións armadas do maquis, sendo encarcerado un ano despois. Nos anos 60 e 70 participou na reconstrución do Partido Comunista en Galicia e das Comisións Campesiñas, sendo detido e torturado novamente.
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HBO
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Food Network
