terça-feira, junho 03, 2008

Sex&the City/Sarah Jessica Parker

A revista Monet, na edição deste mês, publicou o perfil que escrevi de Sarah Jessica Parker, a Carrie Bradshaw de Sex&The City. O filme, que chega aos cinemas brasileiros na sexta-feira, derrubou Indiana Jones do posto de primeiro lugar nos cinemas norte-americanos neste fim de semana, com uma bilheteria de US$ 55,7 milhões. Trata-se da maior bilheteria de um filme protagonizado por um mulher em toda a história de Hollywood. Obviamente já se fala por aqui de uma seqüência no ano que vem.

O perfil, na íntegra:

O Poder da Marca
Eduardo Graça, de Nova York, para a Monet

SJP. Parece nome de código de aeroporto. Ou de spray desodorante. É, sim, uma marca. E das mais poderosas do mundo do entretenimento. Sarah Jessica Parker – ou SJP, como preferem público e mídia norte-americanos – é, aos 43 anos, um dos rostos mais reconhecidos dos EUA. Quando Sex & the City, o filme, chegar aos cinemas brasileiros, no dia 6 de junho, milhares de curiosos estarão tão interessados em saber o que acontece com Carrie Bradshaw, Mr.Big, Miranda Hobbes, Samatha Jones e Charlotte York Rosenblatt, quanto no que os personagens estarão vestindo. Não por acaso o que primeiro chama a atenção no bate-papo com SJP na suíte de um hotel de luxo de frente para o Central Park é o cinto da atriz. Vermelhíssimo, imenso. “É vintage Yves-Saint Laurent. Mas seu leitores vão pensar que eu gosto mais de moda do que de atuar, o que não é verdade!”, ela protesta, com um sorriso calmo antes de morder os lábios tal qual Carrie em um de seus momentos mais indefesos. Não há quem resista.

Pequenina, com imensos olhos azuis e nariz pronunciado, SJP parece ser uma daquelas mulheres que sabem exatamente o tamanho de seu poder e estão focadas em exercê-lo de maneira sábia. A tarefa não é das mais fáceis. As seis temporadas da série de televisão (vencedora de oito Globos de Ouro e sete Emmys) reativaram sua carreira em Hollywood (ela protagonizou os sucessos de público, embora não de crítica, Tudo em Família e Armações do Amor) e a transformaram em garota-propaganda da Gap. Sem esquecer da oportunidade de criar sua própria linha de perfumes e uma grife de roupas famosa tanto pela qualidade quanto pelos preços baixos. Agora ela se prepara para emprestar sua face a um shopping center de São Paulo. Nos EUA, já há quem fale do ‘Sarah Jessica Parker Mall’ brasileiro. Quando escuta a heresia a atriz gargalha com vontade. “Não! Não! O nome do local é Ci-da-de Jar-dim”, diz, em português impecável.

Quando sua pronúncia é elogiada ela revela ter grandes amigos brasileiros. “Mas ainda não consegui passar muito do muito obrigado, é tão difícil! E preciso aprender mais, pois vocês, brasileiros, são gentilíssimos, agradáveis ao extremo, fica difícil dizer não. No caso do Cidade Jardim, resisti muito até concordar em participar, de alguma forma, do projeto. Mas é assim que a gente consegue negociar e produzir filmes independentes, que não são bancados por grandes estúdios. Abrindo portas em outros mercados, estabelecendo parcerias com gente legal”, conta a atriz, que emprega na casa do West Village duas babás brasileiras. Seu filho James, 5 anos, de acordo com o pai coruja, o ator Matthew Broderick, é famoso na vizinhança por falar inglês com perfeito sotaque brasileiro.

SJP é caseira, odeia badalações e cultiva o saudável hábito de fazer graça de si mesma. Uma das cenas mais engraçadas de Sex & the City acontece quando as quatro amigas resolvem recordar os velhos tempos e saem para tomar aquele que era seu drinque favorito – o Cosmopolitan. Em determinado momento elas começam a refletir por que haviam parado de beber seus Cosmos. “Porque todo mundo parou, né, gente?”, dispara Sarah, ou melhor, Carrie.

Para quem acompanhou as andanças de Miss Bradshaw pelo concreto de Manhattan, fica difícil separar a personagem da atriz. Uma sensação que, aliás, não se restringe a SJP. Kristin Davis chega na suíte nas pontas do pés, andando em pulinhos exatamente como Charlotte em seus momentos mais enervantes. Cynthia Nixon é objetiva como sua Miranda. “Andaram dizendo que eu iria me casar com minha namorada no fim do ano. Acho ótimo poder desmentir isso. Assim posso mencionar que não, em Nova Iorque, nós, homossexuais, não temos o direito de nos casar. Ah, se eu pudesse!”, diz, com um sorriso desconcertante. Apenas Kim Catrall, a Samantha, parece mais uma senhora elegante de 50 anos do que a esfuziante predadora da série da HBO. Foram suas exigências – de um cachê maior e de maior controle criativo sobre sua personagem – que reportadamente levaram o filme (gestado por SJP desde o fim da série) a demorar quatro anos para sair do forno. Coincidentemente, Samantha é o membro do quarteto que tem um final mais singular na nova trama, destoante das outras três ‘meninas’.

O foco principal, claro, é em Carrie, que se vê novamente às voltas com as idiossincrasias de Mr.Big. Desta vez, ele parece ter se superado, criando tamanho trauma que obriga as meninas a uma viagem de recuperação, no distante México. Na volta à cidade querida, a jornalista contrata uma assistente vivida pela dreamgirl Jennifer Hudson. Vencedora do Oscar de melhor atriz-coadjuvante em sua estréia no cinema, Hudson diz que SJP se transformou em uma espécie de ‘mentora’ para ela. “Quando cheguei no set, ela, que é uma figuraça, vivia me pedindo para eu cantar o tempo todo. Até que um dia tomei coragem e disse que não, eu não era uma jukebox, e nos acabamos de tanto rir”, diz.

O segredo por detrás da mística de SJP parece vir mesmo de sua capacidade de interagir com seu interlocutor, com seu público, com o outro. É este também o tema central do filme: encontrar na capacidade de se perdoar o parceiro o significado exato do ato amoroso. Chris Noth, que vive Mr. Big, diz que o filme é quase uma extensão de sua amiga SJP: “Quando a gente se conheceu, na leitura dos textos no primeiro ano da série, comecei a balbuciar as músicas de Sweeney Todd entre um intervalo e outro. Sou fã de Sonsheim e Sarah, que é uma primorosa atriz de musicais, me acompanhou de primeira. Foi conexão imediata! Eu a chamo carinhosamente de ‘meu pequeno verme’. E costumo dizer que ela é o meu céu azul e límpido. É que ela diz que sou um rio turbulento e escuro. Eu concordo, e ela vai me ajudando a clarear as águas enquanto o dia passa. Ela sabe, como poucos, exatamente quem eu sou. É isso: SJP tem este dom de te decifrar”.

Bo Diddley

Lá se foi Bo Diddley, o xerife da música popular norte-americana. Um dos criadores do que chamamos de rock'n'roll, Diddley foi a trilha musical de muitas tardes deliciosas que passamos, Will e eu, trabalhando em nosso estúdio na Almirante Tamandaré, no Flamengo. Volta e meia ele entrava em nossa seleção musical - sempre gostamos de trabalhar juntos e ouvindo música sem parar - com sua batida de guitarra única. O NYT deu hoje em primeira-página um de seus mais belos necrológios, que reproduzo aqui embaixo enquanto cozinho um galeto ao alecrim com batatas ao forno e escuto Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger no último volume.

Bo Diddley, Who Gave Rock His Beat, Dies at 79
By BEN RATLIFF

Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself, died Monday at his home in Archer, Fla. He was 79.
The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman, Susan Clary, said.

Mr. Diddley had a heart attack last August, only months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa.
In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley — along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others — helped to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building on the templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American vernacular culture. His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll. It can be found in Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” the Who’s “Magic Bus,” Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” and U2’s “Desire,” among hundreds of other songs. Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records.

In songs like “Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love,” “Mona,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Say, Man,” “Ride On Josephine” and “Road Runner,” his booming voice was loaded up with echo and his guitar work came with distortion and a novel bubbling tremolo.

The songs were knowing, wisecracking and full of slang, mother wit and sexual cockiness. They were both playful and radical.
So were his live performances: trancelike ruckuses instigated by a large man with a strange-looking guitar.

It was square and he designed it himself, long before custom guitar shapes became commonplace in rock.
Mr. Diddley was a wild performer: jumping, lurching, balancing on his toes and shaking his knees as he wrestled with his instrument, sometimes playing it above his head. Elvis Presley, it has long been supposed, borrowed from Mr. Diddley’s stage moves; Jimi Hendrix, too.

Still, for all his fame, Mr. Diddley felt that his standing as a father of rock ’n’ roll was never properly acknowledged. It frustrated him that he could never earn royalties from the songs of others who had borrowed his beat.
“I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob,” he told The New York Times in 2003.

He was a hero to those who had learned from him, including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. A generation later, he became a model of originality to punk or post-punk bands like the Clash and the Fall. In 1979 Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of the Clash asked that Mr. Diddley open for them on the band’s first American tour. “I can’t look at him without my mouth falling open,” Mr. Strummer, star-struck, said during the tour.

For his part Mr. Diddley had no misgivings about facing a skeptical audience. “You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like,” he explained later to the biographer George R. White. “You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!”
Mr. Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., a small city about 15 miles from the Louisiana border.

He was reared primarily by Gussie McDaniel, the first cousin of his mother, Esther Wilson. After the death of her husband, Ms. McDaniel, who had three children of her own, took the family to Chicago, where young Otha’s name was changed to Ellas B. McDaniel. Gussie McDaniel became his legal guardian and sent him to school.
He was 6 when the family resettled on Chicago’s South Side.

He described his youth as one of school, church, trouble with street toughs and playing the violin for both band and orchestra, under the tutelage of O. W. Frederick, a prominent music teacher at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Gussie McDaniel taught Sunday school. Ellas studied classical violin from 7 to 15 and started on guitar at 12, when a family member gave him an acoustic model.
He then enrolled at Foster Vocational School, where he built a guitar as well as a violin and an upright bass. But he dropped out before graduating. Instead, with guitar in hand, he began performing in a duo with his friend Roosevelt Jackson, who played the washtub bass.

The group became a trio when they added another guitarist, Jody Williams, then a quartet when they added a harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold.
The band, first called the Hipsters and then the Langley Avenue Jive Cats, started playing at the Maxwell Street open-air market. They were sometimes joined by another friend, Samuel Daniel, known as Sandman because of the shuffling rhythms he made with his feet on a wooden board sprinkled with sand.

Mr. Diddley could not make a living playing with the Jive Cats in the early days, so he found jobs where he could: at a grocery store, a picture-frame factory, a blacktop company. He worked as an elevator operator and a meat packer. He also started boxing, hoping to turn professional.
In 1954 Mr. Diddley made a demonstration recording with his band, which now included Jerome Green on maracas. Phil and Leonard Chess of Chess Records liked the demo, especially Mr. Diddley’s tremolo on the guitar, a sound that seemed to slosh around like water. They saw it as a promising novelty and encouraged the group to return. By Billy Boy Arnold’s account, the next day, as the band and the men who were soon to be their producers were setting up for a rehearsal, they were idly casting about for a stage name for Ellas McDaniel when Mr. Arnold thought of Bo Diddley.

The name described a “bow-legged guy, a comical-looking guy,” Mr. Arnold said, as quoted by Mr. White in his 1995 biography, “Bo Diddley: Living Legend.”
That may be all there is to tell about the name, except for the fact that a certain one-string guitar — native to the Mississippi Delta, often homemade, in which a length of wire is stretched between two nails in a board — is called a diddley bow. By his account, however, Mr. Diddley had never played one. In any case, Otha Ellas McDaniel had a new name and the title of a new song, whose lyrics began, “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring.” “Bo Diddley” became the A side of his first single, in 1955, on the Checker label, a subsidiary of Chess. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart. Mr. Diddley said he had first heard the “Bo Diddley beat” — three-stroke/rest/two-stroke, or bomp-ba-domp-ba-domp, ba-domp-domp — in a church in Chicago.

But variations of it were in the air. The children’s game hambone used a similar rhythm, and so did the ditty that goes “shave and a haircut, two bits.”
The beat is also related to the Afro-Cuban clave, which had been popularized at the time by the New Orleans mambo carnival song “Jock-A-Mo,” recorded by Sugar Boy Crawford in 1953. Whatever the source, Mr. Diddley felt the beat’s power. In early songs like “Bo Diddley” and “Pretty Thing,” he arranged the rhythm for tom-toms, guitar, maracas and voice, with no cymbals and no bass. (Also arranged in his signature rhythm was the eerie “Mona,” a song of praise he wrote for a 45-year-old exotic dancer who worked at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit; this song became the template for Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)

Appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1955, Mr. Diddley was asked to play “Sixteen Tons,” the song popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Without telling Mr. Sullivan, he played “Bo Diddley” instead. Afterward, in an off-camera confrontation, Mr. Sullivan told him that he would never work in television again. Mr. Diddley did not play again on a network show for 10 years. For decades Mr. Diddley was bitter about his relationship with the Chess family, whom he accused of withholding money owed to him. In her book “Spinning Blues Into Gold,” Nadine Cohodas quoted Marshall Chess, Leonard’s son, as saying, “What’s missing from Bo’s version of events is all the gimmes.” Mr. Diddley would borrow so heavily against projected royalties, Mr. Chess said, that not much was left over in the final accounting.

Mr. Diddley’s watery tremolo effect, from 1955 onward, came from one of the first effects boxes to be manufactured for guitars: the DeArmond Model 60 Tremolo Control. But Mr. Diddley contended that he had already built something similar himself, with automobile parts and an alarm-clock spring.
His first trademark guitar was also handmade: he took the neck and the circuitry off a Gretsch guitar and connected it to a square body he had built. In 1958 he asked Gretsch to make him a better one to the same specifications. Gretsch made it as a limited-edition guitar called “Big B.”

On songs like “Who Do You Love,” his guitar style — bright chicken-scratch rhythm patterns on a few strings at a time — was an extension of his early violin playing, he said.
“My technique comes from bowing the violin, that fast wrist action,” he told Mr. White, explaining that his fingers were too big to move around easily. Rather than fingering the fretboard, Mr. Diddley said, he tuned the guitar to an open E and moved a single finger up and down to create chords.

As his fame rose, his personal life grew complicated. His first marriage, at 18, to Louise Woolingham, lasted less than a year. His second marriage, in 1949, to Ethel Smith, unraveled in the late 1950s. He then moved from Chicago to Washington, settling in the Mount Pleasant district, where he built a studio in his home.
Separated from his wife, he was performing in Birmingham, Ala., when, backstage, he met a young door-to-door magazine saleswoman named Kay Reynolds, a fan, who was 15 and white. They moved in together in short order and were soon married, in spite of Southern taboos against intermarriage.

During the late 1950s Mr. Diddley’s band featured a female guitarist, Peggy Jones (stage-named Lady Bo), at a time when there were scarcely any women in rock. She was replaced by Norma-Jean Wofford, whom Mr. Diddley called the Duchess. He pretended she was his sister, he said, to be in a better position to protect her on the road.


The early 1960s were low times. Chess, searching for a hit, had Mr. Diddley make albums to capitalize on the twist dance craze, as Chubby Checker had done, and on the surf music of the Beach Boys. But soon a foreign market for his earlier music began to grow, thanks in large part to the Rolling Stones, a newly popular band that was regularly playing several of his songs in its concerts. It paved the way for Mr. Diddley’s successful tour of Britain in the fall of 1963, performing with the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones, the opening act.
But Mr. Diddley was not willing to move to Europe, and in America the picture worsened: the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and the Byrds quickly made him sound quaint. When work all but dried up, Mr. Diddley moved to New Mexico in the early 1970s and became a deputy sheriff in the town of Los Lunas.

With his sound updated to resemble hard rock and soul, he continued to make albums for Chess until his contract expired in 1974.
His recording career never picked up after that, despite flirtations with synthesizers, religious rock and hip-hop. But he continued apace as a performer and public figure, popping up in places both obvious, like rock ’n’ roll nostalgia revues, and not so obvious: a Nike advertisement, the film “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy, the 1979 tour with the Clash, and inaugural balls for two presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

His last recording was the 1996 album “A Man Amongst Men” (Code Blue/Atlantic), which was nominated for a Grammy. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and in 1998 was inducted into the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame as a musician of lasting historical importance.
Since the early 1980s Mr. Diddley had lived in Archer, Fla., near Gainesville, where he owned 76 acres and a recording studio. His passions were fishing and old cars, including a 1969 purple Cadillac hearse.

The last of Mr. Diddley’s marriages was to Sylvia Paiz, in 1992; his spokeswoman, Ms. Clary, said they were no longer married. His survivors include his children, Evelyn Kelly, Ellas A. McDaniel, Tammi D. McDaniel and Terri Lynn McDaniel; a brother, the Rev. Kenneth Haynes; and 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.
Mr. Diddley attributed his longevity to abstinence from drugs and drinking, but in recent years he had suffered from diabetes. After a concert in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 13, 2007, he had a stroke and was taken to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha. On Aug. 28 he suffered a heart attack in Gainesville and was hospitalized. Mr. Diddley always believed that he and Chuck Berry had started rock ’n’ roll, and the fact that he couldn’t financially reap all that he had sowed made him a deeply suspicious man. “I tell musicians, ‘Don’t trust nobody but your mama,’ ” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. “And even then, look at her real good.”

Gente Nervosinha

Esta é uma homenagem aos que acompanham, como eu, por força da profissão, o jornalismo televisivo norte-americano. O compêndio de ataques nervosos - à direita e à esquerda do monitor - é hilário. E dá uma pista do nível do tele-jornalismo diário (há muitas exceções, claro) por aqui.

segunda-feira, junho 02, 2008

Como Se Perde Uma Eleição

A Vanity Fair de julho - que chega nesta sexta-feira na casa dos assinantes e em mais alguns dias nas bancas de todo o país - traz uma bombástica reportagem assinada por Todd Purdum, que durante anos comandou o escritório do NYT em Los Angeles e, não por acaso, é casado com Dee Dee Myers, ex-assessora de imprensa de Bill Clinton. A reportagem - com aspas de um punhado de assessores dos dois Clinton - conta como o 'cavernoso narcisismo' do ex-presidente ajudou a candidatura Obama decolar.

De acordo com a revista, o senador Ted Kennedy, por exemplo, não agüentava mais as pressões nada discretas de Hllary e Bill para que ele anunciasse seu apoio às aspirações presidenciais da senadora de Nova Iorque. Quando Bill percebeu a hesitação do 'leão de Massachusetts', inciou, de forma insistente, debates sobre o 'quão ruim' Obama era como candidato. A tática teria feito com que Ted Kennedy anunciasse ainda mais rapidamente seu apoio público a Obama.

Alguns assessores de Bill Clinton contam na reportagem que dois amigos, o bilionário playboy Ron Burkle e o produtor de Hollywood Steve Bing, são as piores companhias do ex-presidente, levando-o para festas mais do que suspeitas. Há um ano e meio alguns assessores tentaram comandar uma 'intervenção' para evitar que o presidente 'continuasse vendo um monte de garotas durante suas viagens'. Pois é - o velho filme parece se repetir.

A assessoria de Bill Clinton anunciou que negava as especulações e denunciou a reportagem de Todd Purdum como uma 'peça de ataque'. Enquanto isso, espera-se para amanhã ou, no mais tardar, quarta-feira, o anúncio de desistência da candidatura Hillary Clinton. Fontes próximas à ex-primeira-dama dizem que ela deve encerrar a campanha com um discurso aqui em Nova Iorque, onde celebrará os mais de 17 milhões de votos que recebeu nas primárias. Nada se diz sobre um apoio oficial a Obama. Será que os democratas vão se recuperar de tantas chagas a tempo de enfrentar a candidatura cada vez mais fortalecida do vovô do Arizona?