Recortes

Recortes de periodista

[sextohombre]

«The Houston Rockets were like an unwary couple pulled over on the highway for going 3 miles over the speed limit by a burly Georgia cop with the mirrored sunglasses.

It wasn’t their day. The cop’s name was Bird. The bailiff’s name was Bird. The court stenographer’s name was Bird. The judge’s name was Bird. And the executioner’s name was -- guess what? -- Bird.

Welcome to Bird Country, boys, and while you’re at it, why don’t you congratulate the Boston Celtics on the occasion of their 16th NBA championship? He didn’t make every shot, or grab every rebound, or account for every assist, or make every steal, or sell every hot dog, but he plugged himself into every conceivable aspect of the game to the extent that all the other players had to do was feed off his energy level.»

‘Larry Bird buries Rockets as Celtics crowned champions’, Bob Ryan (1986)

[sextohombre]

«There is a long ditch in the village of My Lai. On the morning of March 16, 1968, it was crowded with the bodies of the dead—dozens of women, children, and old people, all gunned down by young American soldiers. Now, forty-seven years later, the ditch at My Lai seems wider than I remember from the news photographs of the slaughter: erosion and time doing their work. During the Vietnam War, there was a rice paddy nearby, but it has been paved over to make My Lai more accessible to the thousands of tourists who come each year to wander past the modest markers describing the terrible event. The My Lai massacre was a pivotal moment in that misbegotten war: an American contingent of about a hundred soldiers, known as Charlie Company, having received poor intelligence, and thinking that they would encounter Vietcong troops or sympathizers, discovered only a peaceful village at breakfast. Nevertheless, the soldiers of Charlie Company raped women, burned houses, and turned their M-16s on the unarmed civilians of My Lai. Among the leaders of the assault was Lieutenant William L. Calley, a junior-college dropout from Miami.

[...] In testimony before an Army inquiry, some of the soldiers acknowledged being at the ditch but claimed that they had disobeyed Calley, who was ordering them to kill. They said that one of the main shooters, along with Calley himself, had been Private First Class Paul Meadlo. The truth remains elusive, but one G.I. described to me a moment that most of his fellow-soldiers, I later learned, remembered vividly. At Calley’s order, Meadlo and others had fired round after round into the ditch and tossed in a few grenades.

Then came a high-pitched whining, which grew louder as a two- or three-year-old boy, covered with mud and blood, crawled his way among the bodies and scrambled toward the rice paddy. His mother had likely protected him with her body. Calley saw what was happening and, according to the witnesses, ran after the child, dragged him back to the ditch, threw him in, and shot him»

‘The Scene of a Crime’, Seymour Hersh

Foto: Katie Orlinsky

[sextohombre]

«When I first began visiting Scott-Heron, he would leave the room at intervals and go into his bathroom. The next time I went to his apartment, he went into his kitchen and a stream of smoke drifted out. One day, I turned around, and he had his crack pipe to his lips, and after that he didn’t bother to leave the room anymore. Sometimes he would fall asleep in the middle of an interview, and I would excuse myself.

Monique de Latour, an artist who lived with Scott-Heron for three years beginning in 1997, says that he would smoke crack for four or five days without rest. The longest she saw him stay awake was seven days. She knew he was getting tired when the things he said no longer made sense».

'New York Is Killing Me', Alec Wilkinson

Foto: Henrietta Butler

[sextohombre]

«Ortiz had designed unorthodox campaigns to battle the FARC before. In 2008, he dreamed up an operation to persuade pregnant female guerrillas to defect: the army air-dropped 7 million pacifiers into the jungle with a message encouraging rebels to return to civilization. The operation involved seven helicopters, three airplanes, 960 flight hours, 17,800 gallons of fuel, and 72 soldiers flying twice a week for four months. During the holidays, the army illuminated giant Christmas trees across the jungle to remind guerrillas what they were missing. They also wrote messages promoting peace on soccer balls and floated them down the river toward the rebel encampments».

'The Code: A declassified and unbelievable hostage rescue story', Jeff Maysh

Ilustración: Allegra Lockstadt

[sextohombre]

«Take a look sometime at a London street map. What a mess: It is a preposterously complex tangle of veins and capillaries, the cardiovascular system of a monster.

[...] The result is a town that bewilders even its lifelong residents. Londoners, writes Peter Ackroyd, are “a population lost in [their] own city.” London’s labyrinthine roadways are a symbol — and, perhaps, a cause — of the fatalism that hangs like a pea-soup fog over the Londoner’s consciousness. Facing the dizzying infinitude of streets, your mind turns darkly to thoughts of finitude: to the time that is flying, the minutes you are running late for your doctor’s appointment, the hours ticking by, never to be retrieved, on the proverbial Big Clock, the one even bigger than Big Ben. You can see it every day in Primrose Hill and Clapham, in Golders Green and Kentish Town, in Deptford and Dalston. A nervous man, an anxious woman, scanning the horizon for a recognizable landmark, searching for a street sign, silently wondering “Where am I?” — a geographical question that grades gloomily into an existential one. Which is where the Knowledge comes in. It is a weird city’s weird solution to the riddle of itself, a municipal training program whose graduates are both transit workers and Gnostics: chauffeurs taught by the government to know the unknowable».

'The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS', Jody Rosen

[sextohombre]

"En los jardines de Cecilio Rodríguez en ese momento el gremio de editores estaba dando un homenaje al gremio de ebanistas. ¿Quién había hecho más por la cultura de este país? Sin duda, los ebanistas. Ellos fabricaban estanterías que había que rellenar de alguna forma. En el salón-estar-comedor de los pisos modernos siempre había una pared inútil. De pronto, a un ebanista, doctor en Románica, se le ocurrió tapar el hueco con anaqueles de pino melis, y a partir de ahí generó la necesidad de comprar fascículos encuadernados para que no se viera el tabique. El problema podía remediarse con algunas porcelanas de Lladró, con algún plato de Macao, con alguna loza de Talavera, pero no era lo mismo. De hecho, en este instante había en la feria un decorador pagando siete metros cuadrados de enciclopedia con lomo de tonalidad azul, que hiciera juego con el sofá de su cliente".

'El rey de la feria', Manuel Vicent

(via jaimegmora )

[sextohombre]

Google wants people never to leave the internet at all.

[...] Whatever serves to connect people to what they want also serves to educate Google’s giant artificial brain about what they want, enriching the data-stream on which advertising’s value depends. The search box learns what you’re looking for; location-enabled phones running Google’s Android operating system learns that too, along with where you are, how fast you’re moving, or whether you seem to be stuck in traffic; Gmail learns what you’re communicating about; web-connected thermostats might guess when you’re on holiday; Glass could come to know precisely what you’re looking at; self-driving cars could rapidly build a detailed picture of users’ daily rhythms [...].

"[Google] has a prediction it wants to fulfil: that data will flow through everything, your re frigerator, your clothing, every aspect of human interaction. And if everything’s quantifiable and traceable, Google wants to be the company that monetises that. It’s an immodest vision – but nobody every accused Google of modesty."

'Death, drones and driverless cars: how Google wants to control our lives', Oliver Burkeman (via guardian )

[sextohombre]

"I don’t like turgid, voluminous sentences, full of adjectives and descriptions, purring and purring into the reader’s ear. I know it’s very charming, of course. It’s very beautiful but it’s not me. I’m more on the side of Jorge Luis Borges. He has always been an enemy of the baroque; he tightened his writing, as if with pliers. Well, I write in a very different way than Borges, but the great lesson he taught me is one of economy. He taught me when I began to read him, being very young, that one had to try to say what one wanted to with economy, but with a beautiful economy". 

Entrevista a Julio Cortázar en theparisreview (No. 93, Otoño 1984) .

[sextohombre]

«Nací el 1° de octubre de 1875 y desde este desarreglo empezó para mí un continuo vivir. La autenticidad de mi condición de solterón en ese momento fue indiscutida, pero yo le añadí el malhumor que la distingue pidiendo inmediatamente en el idioma que no tiene filólogos el Libro de Quejas. Cuando me lo facilitaron tres meses después en una sacristía me había olvidado de los motivos de protesta, fuera de que no habían dejado espacio en el sucio, malhadado y gran tomo los que se habían quejado primero. Puse mi nombre, y la fatuidad de tenerlo me distrajo de reflexionar que aquél era el Libro de Quejas de la vida».

'Papeles de Recienvenido', Macedonio Fernández

[sextohombre]

«Porque se escucha "oro", "Mundial", "Japón", y a muchos no se les aparece un título de campeones del mundo de 2006, sino Pau Gasol abandonando la pista, embadurnado en lágrimas, sudor y pánico, como un Jesucristo descolgado, en brazos de su hermano Marc y de Jorge Garbajosa. Se recuerda "oro" y no emerge de la memoria una medalla, sino imágenes de piel de gallina».

'Estos maravillosos años', Luis Fernando López

[sextohombre]

«Uno no va a Foyle's a comprarse un libro. Va de safari. A perderse, por ejemplo, en el departamento de cálculo matemático y encontrar quizá algún raro ejemplar de poesía traspapelado hace décadas. Los empleados son tipos ojerosos y resignados como enfermeros de un hospital de campaña, seguramente abrumados por el tonelaje de papel que les rodea, y resultan de poca ayuda cuando se busca algo concreto: el título en cuestión siempre figura en el listado informático y debería estar en esa estantería de ahí, pero en esa estantería hay otra cosa que debería estar en otra parte».

'Historias de Londres', Enric González

[sextohombre]

«Kingsley Amis, padre del también escritor Martin Amis, llevaba una vida mucho más ordenada que Jeffrey Barnard. Era un hombre tan ordenado y tan amante de las pequeñas comodidades de la vida, que sólo accedió a divorciarse de su esposa con la condición de que ella y su nuevo marido le acogieran en su casa y le cuidaran. El trato fue escrupulosamente cumplido hasta la muerte de Amis».

[jaimegmora]

La movilización (Uno y dos) Agustí Calvet, Gaziel, a quien la Primera Guerra Mundial pilló en París estudiando Filosofía, cubrió para ‘La Vanguardia’ toda la contienda desde los frentes aliados.

Entre el barro y el sexo. (link) 1915 es el año de los cielos plomizos. Va quedando claro...

[sextohombre]

«Cuando nos fuimos de Roma, las autoridades competentes nos advirtieron de que era imprescindible conseguir un pasaporte para cada gato. Hubo que ir a una remota oficina con los gatos y pagar 17 euros por cada documento, sin el cual, se nos insistió, no podrían hacer el viaje de vuelta a Barcelona. Evidentemente, nunca nadie en ningún aeropuerto nos pidió pasaportes gatunos. Bastaba con los certificados de vacunación. La cuestión de los pasaportes me pareció, sin embargo, una elegante manera de combinar la filigrana burocrática con la virguería recaudatoria; un ejemplo, en fin, de la administración romana».

'Historias de Roma', Enric González

[sextohombre]

«En el interior del [Palazzo Grazoli], entre estancias majestuosas, antigüedades, obras de arte y la corte berlusconiana de señoritas alegres, hay un salón que reproduce con total precisión, banderas y bustos incluidos, la sala de consejos de ministros del Palazzo Chigi (se pronuncia "Quichi"), sede de la Presidencia del Gobierno. Berlusconi se lo hizo construir durante el mandato de Romano Prodi, cuando se encontraba en la oposición, para apaciguar el síndrome de abstinencia del poder.»

'Historia de Roma', Enric González

[sextohombre]

«I tend to think he will be an important historical figure, yes. He certainly sees himself as one, as the figure who will reassert Russian power and primacy in the modern world. He considered the collapse of the Soviet Union to be the greatest geostrategic catastrophe of our times. Not an ideological catastrophe; he didn’t care one bit about Marxist-Leninist ideology. It was about power. [...] I think initially there was not an ideology. He is a state builder. It was all about reasserting the Russian state. But what you see since his return to power is a distinctly conservative Russian ideology, which you might call “Putinism.” What is it? It is a dog’s breakfast ideologically. He is capable of quoting Stolypin, Solzhenitsyn, and any number of people from the Russian or Russian Orthodox past, where useful.»

Entrevista a David Remnick en 'The New Republic (11/03/2014)

[sextohombre]

«Putin, Kiselyov has said on the air, “is comparable among his predecessors in the twentieth century only with Stalin.” He meant it as a compliment.

Nearly a quarter century after the fall of empire, Putin has unleashed an ideology of ressentiment. It has been chorussed by those who, in 1991, despaired of the loss not of Communist ideology but of imperial greatness, and who, ever since, have lived with what Russians so often refer to as “phantom-limb syndrome”: the pain of missing Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltic states; the pain of diminishment. They want revenge for their humiliation.»

'Watching the eclipse', David Remnick

Ilustración: Barry Blitt