I wrote about Glória many times before, but never went and put the whole thing online for everyone to watch. Now, keeping with my ongoing exploration of the 'information must be free' philosophy, you can watch Glória in two somewhat different versions:



Glória, played by the excelent Ana Margarida Carvalho, is a woman who was just left by her husband. She's all of a sudden lonely and bored, so she goes and starts stalking a man, looking at his trash, breaking into his apartment and even hiring help to make the stalking easier. Only that... Well, why don't you just watch it? Embedded above is the brand new 15' 'short' version, which I edited for better traction at festivals while bringing it more similar to my original screenplay.

Over at Vimeo you can also watch the original 22' 'long' version, in which the story is told in a non-linear way and features an unscripted final montage in which we watch the fate of secondary characters, as proposed by the actors.

Thanks again to everyone who played a part in the movie. The cast — Margarida, Mariana, Inês and Alex — and also Cristina (who played a part besides executive producing), Sara Monteiro, Sara Nogueira, Joana Gaio, Joana Costa, Ana, Marcelino and John — thank you all. Enjoy. ···

As I write this I'm listening to the maddening honking of people protesting against the rise in the price of petrol. My office is adjacent to the main square of Porto, and these people have nothing better to do than spending a Saturday afternoon driving up and down the square blasting their gas-guzzler's horns. They seem to have had enough of the oil companies' abuse.

They're stupid. They are like junkies protesting against their dealers.

These are hard times if you drive a taxi, if you have a fleet of trucks, if you buy a bus pass every month, if you buy food that happens to have fertilizer involved in its production, etecetera. Hard times for all, and harder still they'll be. But you feel robbed because you drive alone to work every day in a car that has a bigger-than-1000cc engine because it's a bit chilly outside? You are just the bastard who's ruining it all for the rest of us. So shut you mouth.

It's true I drive a gasoline-powered car sometimes. But when I can't, I won't. I already take the subway or the bus during the day and if there were half-decent mass-transit solutions past 10pm I'd be more than happy to take my car in a last drive to the junkyard.

The personal automobile was one of the 20th century greatest mistakes, like asbestos or DDT, and is responsible for an addictive vicious circle of incompetence in both local politics and geopolitics. It turned urban planning to shit while sparking wars. So for once I'm on the Big Oil & Speculators' side. I do hope the Money Wizzes do manipulate the price of gas to rise as fast as possible, buffering it as much as possible from the real unavoidable, supply-and-demand price of crude, so that perhaps the inevitable changes in our way of life can start before the logic of failing supplies brings those changes in a way brutal and uncontrolable. ···

For a couple of months now I've been reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It's a big book, and a tough one to read. Like the work of José Saramago, the style of Pynchon's writing turns reading it into work, made worthwhile by the golden nuggets scattered about (clever observations, plot twists, etc). But, writing density aside, Pynchon's work is quite different, full of postmodern style shifts and surreal episodes, some hardcore enough to make Pier Paolo Pasolini blush. Still, I'm writing all this because of the following passage from Gravity's Rainbow:

“And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide..."

'Nuff said.