Within a Sky Full of Earth

Olha a menina a dançar tão bela no seu saltitar. Canta a roleta a rodar mistérios da sorte e do azar. Olha a menina a dançar quem vai com ela ficar? Canta a roleta a rodar mistérios da sorte e do azar.

É um jogo a que não podemos jogar, um jogo de que somos os espectadores, um jogo de desconhecidos jogadores, um jogo a que nunca iremos ganhar.

Olha a menina a dançar tão bela no seu saltitar. Canta a roleta a rodar mistérios da sorte e do azar. Olha a menina a dançar quem vai com ela ficar? Canta a roleta a rodar mistérios da sorte e do azar.

É um jogo feito para nos comandar, um jogo de que desconhecemos as regras, xadrez de que se retiraram as negras, um jogo feito para nunca acabar.

Olha a menina a dançar tão bela no seu saltitar. Canta a roleta a rodar mistérios da sorte e do azar. Olha a menina a dançar quem vai com ela ficar? Canta a roleta a rodar mistérios da sorte e do azar.

É a nossa a vida que está em jogo, é a nossa a vida que outros jogam.
VOLSTAD - É UM JOGO
{do Tributo aos Mão Morta "E Se Depois", disco que passou no ROOFTOP no dia 35 de Abril.}

Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, he was hill and could not attend a presentation at the official ceremony. The following was his speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, in December 10, and was read by John C. Cabot, United States Ambassador.
[The photo was taken when Hemingway was a soldier in World War I, 1918, in Milan]

Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.
Ernest Hemingway, 1954

'THE SOLDIER, HIS WIFE AND THE BUM'
I was a bum in San Francisco that once managed to go to a symphony concert along with the well dressed people. And the music was good but something about the audience was not. And something about the orchestra and the conductor was not. Although the building was fine and the acoustics perfect I preferred to listen to the music alone on my radio.

And afterwards I did go back to my room and I turned on the radio. But there was a pounding on the wall. 'Shut that god damn thing off!' There was a soldier in the next room bubbling with his wife and soon he would be going over there to protect me from Hitler. So I snapped the radio off and then I heard his wife say 'You shouldn't have done that'. And the soldier said 'Fuck that guy' which I thought was a very nice thing for him to tell his wife to do. Of course she never did.

Anyhow I never went to another live concert. And that night I listened to the radio very quietly, my ear pressed to the speaker.

War has it's price and peace never lasts. And millions of young men everywhere will die. As I listened to the classical music I heard them making love. Desperately and mournfully, through Shostakovich, Brahms, Mozart, through crescendo and climax and through the shared walls of our darkness.
BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI

First is the whole environment where this architectonic project is build, a green area, full of trees and just the sky to watch. It moves and it's called the Sliding House. It's an amazing home created by London architects studio dRMM. The brief was simple: to build a house to retire to in order to grow food, entertain and enjoy the East Anglia landscape. The outcome was as unconventional as they come. A structure that has the ability to vary or connect the overall building's composition and character according to season, weather or simply a desire to delight. The part-prefab home consists of a glasshouse, main house, open space and annexe aligned on a track. A garage, off the track, adjoins the open space, creating a courtyard. This is a video from Wallpaper* Magazine who captured the physical phenomenon in the only medium that serves it justice - film. See by yourself and give us your opinion. We know that Macau is not the spot for these wonders but anyhow we dream with such a place.EXTRA LINKS:
• dRMM Website
• Sliding House at Dezeen
• Detailed project in PDF
• At bdonline
• Stephen Bayley writes about it on The Observer
• Finally another great one!
[CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE VIDEO © WALLPAPER*][BACK TO BLOOMLAND]

Readability is a great and simple tool that makes reading on the web much more enjoyable by removing the junk around when you are reading. it's very easy to use, just check it here.
[BY LAB.ARC90]

From the body to the soul
Where our hearts lead we must go
Wherever love may flow
Oman by DEAD CAN DANCE • TOWARDS THE WHITHIN • 4AD • 1994

In 1958 I wrote the following:
«There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.»
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
"Art, Truth and Politics: The Nobel Lecture" / FABER AND FABER 2006

MCCM Creations, by the hand of the wonderful Mary Chan, started as a publisher in Hong Kong. Their dream was to pubblish beautiful and great books and from the first book they were a world apart. Bloom met MCCM even before we opened and from there on we've mantained a close friendship and venture.
Mary Chan and MCCM flow into the endless possibilities of creativity. Living in an age where people can move freely across boundaries of regions and exercise their thoughts through virtual space. These criss-cross experiences often produce surprises and open up new horizons for thoughts and ideas.
Since going into book publishing since 2001, MCCM aspirations in books have not changed – they wish to bring the original and inspiring books from creators who share a passion in books as well as having a strong desire to explore new concepts and visualise their experiences.
These adventurous spirit often take them across boundaries of different categories. Being a ‘crossover’ appeal to different age and interest groups. Most of the titles are published in English or Bilingual, mostly Chinese and English, with a step into published English and French titles. They don’t publish a lot of books every year, but they do have a special talent to make them.
But now is different. MCCM is giving a step ahead by opening The Bookshop at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. They're running it for a few time now, but the official opening will be held tomorrow with "a casual get-together for books, photography, light drinks, chars and... improvised music by guest musicians Kung Chi Shing and Yank Wong." [click on the image above]

Come with us!
26TH OF FEBRURARY • 6.30 PM • HONG KONG ARTS CENTRE • 2 HARBOUR ROAD • HONG KONG

Dias felizes eram aqueles em que os novos livros chegavam. Esta sensação era mais concreta, em pleno, nos primeiros tempos de vida. Nas primeiras experiências. Era um processo longo, que partia da escolha, da selecção deste ou daquele autor, desta ou aquela editora, e saber se era possível trazê-los. Mas quase que não existiam impossíveis. Trouxemos livros de todo o mundo. Os dias de espera depois da confirmação acabavam com uma carrinha azul com uma caixa uma caixa ou duas, por vezes tantas que não havia espaço na loja. Depois era a questão de qual abrir primeiro e adivinhar onde estava cada título. Sim, as encomendas tinham um remetente, por isso era fácil saber o que lá estava dentro. Mas não deixava de ser uma incógnita e uma aventura. E era um prazer a descoberta, um a um, um pequeno tesouro, como se cada um deles fizesse parte da nossa família e tivesse regressado de uma longa viagem. Era um longo abraço e era uma sensação que até hoje não sei explicar. Era essa paixão que nos fez continuar e que nos fez desejar tanto mais. Agora é difícil olhar para trás e pensar que tudo isso parece já um país distante!

Lawrence was the name, the only one he staged. That's how everybody knew him. No surname, not a family story. Felt was his band and he was one of my cult heroes back in the 80's. Still is, I guess, in a different shape. From time to time I step across his work and for days I play all his songs again. In these occasions I try to check where he is and what he's doing. Nobody knows, as nobody knew before. He had a hard character but the music is timeless and life flies back and forth. 

Cidade
Sem muros nem ameias
Gente igual por dentro
Gente igual por fora
Onde a folha da palma
afaga a cantaria
Cidade do homem
Não do lobo, mas irmão
Capital da alegria

Braço que dormes
nos braços do rio
Toma o fruto da terra
É teu a ti o deves
lança o teu desafio

Homem que olhas nos olhos
que não negas
o sorriso, a palavra forte e justa
Homem para quem
o nada disto custa
Será que existe
lá para os lados do oriente
Este rio, este rumo, esta gaivota
Que outro fumo deverei seguir
na minha rota?
por JOSÉ AFONSO

If you are looking for the best speaker system to pair with your mobile sound device, Zikmu is the choice to make.

Zikmu is the product of the association between the leader in wireless mobile telephony devices Parrot and the awarded designer Phillipe Starck. The system is a set of 2.5 feet tall speakers that use Bluetooth to communicate with each other. Thanks to Parrot's NXT technology they are able to relay sound 360° arround the room , using an extra-flat mebrane to create small-scale vibrations across the speakers' entire surface.

"We were not aiming to create just another speaker," says Philippe Starck. "Our design focused more on making the air vibrate. There is actually a three-dimensional feel to this vibration, meaning that the air is palpable, almost humanlike in presence, like a fragrance."

They're not around yet, you still have to wait untill Spring. In the meantime you can start to save your money because this combo will cost around 12 000 HK$ (1.500 US$). The good news is that you're not buying just an extreme sound quality for something you use everyday but also a work of art on a unique piece of design that you can always be proud, just for looking at. [SOURCE: ECOUSTICS]
• PRE-ORDER OR ASK A QUOTATION AT BLOOM BY THROWING US AN EMAIL.

A morte saiu à rua num dia assim
Naquele lugar sem nome para qualquer fim
Uma gota rubra sobre a calçada cai
E um rio de sangue de um peito aberto sai
O vento que dá nas canas do canavial
E a foice duma ceifeira de Portugal
O som da bigorna é como um clarim do céu
Vão dizendo em toda a parte o Pintor morreu

Teu sangue, Pintor, reclama outra morte igual
Só olho por olho e dente por dente vale
À lei assassina à morte que te matou
Teu corpo pertence à terra que te abraçou
Aqui te afirmamos dente por dente assim
Que um dia rirá melhor quem rirá por fim
Na curva da estrada há covas feitas no chão
E em todas florirão rosas de uma nação
[JOSÉ AFONSO • 1972 - TEMA DEDICADO AO POETA JOSÉ DIAS COELHO, ASSASSINADO PELA PIDE EM 19 DEZ 1961]

Before time, everytime my sista like be the boss of the food.
We stay shopping in Mizuno Superette
and my madda pull the Oreos off the shelf
and my sista already saying, Mommy,
can be the boss of the Oreos?

The worse was when she was the boss
of the sunflower seeds.
She give me and my other sistas
one seed at a time.
We no could eat the meat.
Us had to put um in one pile on one Kleenex.
Then, when we wen' take all the meat
out of the shells and our lips stay all cho cho,
she give us the seeds one at a time
cause my sista, she the boss
of the sunflower seeds.

One time she was the boss
of the Raisinettes.
Us was riding in the back
of my granpa's Bronco down Kaunakakai Wharf.
There she was, passing us one Raisinette at a time.
My mouth was all watery
'cause I like eat um all one time, eh?
So I wen' tell her, Gimme that bag.
And I wen' grab um.
She said, I'ng tell Mommy.
And I said, Go you fuckin' bird killa;
tell Mommy.

She wen' let go the bag.
And I wen' start eating the Raisinetes all one time.
But when I wen' look at her,
I felt kinda bad cause I wen' call her bird killa.
She was boss of the parakeet too, eh,
and she suppose to cover the cage every night.
But one time, she wen' forget.
When us wen' wake up, the bugga was on its back,
legs in the air all stiff.
The bugga was cold.
And I guess the thing that made me feel bad
was I neva think calling her bird killa
would make her feel so bad
that she let go the bag Raisinettes.

But I neva give her back the bag.
I figga what the fuck.
I ain't going suffer eating one Raisinette at a time.
Then beg her for one mo
and I mean one mo
fuckin' candy.
BY LOIS-ANN YAMANAKA

"Boss of the Food" was the introdoctury text that Shirley Lim brougth to us. She read it aloud with all the tones of the little young girl who was supposed to be the voice of this story on the form of a beautiful poem. Lois-Ann Yamanaka is a Japanese American writer from Hawai. She often uses this Hawaiian Pidgin. Somehow shows how your inner voice can be reached on your own special language. And that's what was all about: bringing up your voice as a creative writer.

The Michelin Guide is extending its reach into China with a new edition ranking dining destinations in Hong Kong and Macau for the first time.

The French bible of gastronomy featuring 251 restaurants and hotels in the two Chinese cities is Michelin's second guide outside Europe and the U.S. The debut Tokyo edition was published in November 2007, with eight restaurants receiving Michelin's highest three-star rating. Being a best-seller right in the first week.
Michelin awarded 40 stars to 28 restaurants in Hong Kong and Macau, and two venues got the top ranking. Lung King Heen in Hong Kong's Four Seasons Hotel received three stars, while the hotel's French eatery Caprice won two stars. Inspectors also decided Robuchon A Galera at Macau's Lisboa Hotel, owned by casino mogul Stanley Ho, was worthy of Michelin's highest award.
The team of 12 undercover inspectors, including two Chinese, have been in Hong Kong and Macau testing about 1,200 establishments since late 2007, said Michelin Guides Director Jean-Luc Naret. Michelin plans to expand the guide into other parts of China, Mr. Naret told a news conference in Hong Kong.

The guide, which will go on sale tomorrow, Friday the 5th of December, is published in both Chinese and English. Bloom will have it available at Bloom Yellow in St. Lazarus' Albergue and more close to you at Ou Mun Café, just on the heart of town, on the corner of Senado Square.

• NEWS ABOUT MICHELIN GUIDE HONG KONG AND MACAU
• OU MUN CAFÉ AT LONELY PLANET

MOLESKINE DIARIES 2009
Moleskine keeps exploring more layouts to support your creativity and time management. This year new layouts for the exquisite diaries of the Italian brand. Moleskine has introduced two completely new layouts: Weekly Diary Vertical and Monthly Notebook
A complete diary collection now. 19 different styles, including the previous three most popular layouts: Daily Diary, Weekly Diary Horizontal and Weekly Notebook
Moleskine diaries are available in 3 cover styles: Hard Black cover, Hard Red cover and Soft Black cover; and 3 sizes: Pocket, Large and Extra Large.
Sleek design with unmatched attention to details, the diary that evolved from a legendary notebook, with the same quality features as the Moleskine notebooks.
Moleskine Asia designed a microsite to help you choose your Moleskine diary, click the image on the left or ENTER HERE.
Afterward come back here and order from us all your choices throwing us an email. Thank you!
BLOOM IS THE DISTRIBUTOR OF MOLESKINE DIARIES AND NOTEBOOKS IN MACAU

“When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile—and above all the miracle of survival.
Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where “one either died or came out famous.” But turmoil lay ahead—war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories.
Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, “under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall’s work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life—ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth.
Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including numerous letters from the family collection in Paris, and illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to rank with Hilary Spurling’s Matisse and John Richardson’s Picasso.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jackie Wullschlager is chief art critic for the Financial Times. Her books include a prizewinning life of Hans Christian Andersen and an acclaimed group biography of children’s book writers, Inventing Wonderland.

Chagall, by Jackie Wullschlager
KNOPF • BIOGRAPHY • HISTORY • OCT 2008

The New Coulour Notebooks

Bloom is proud to present the new Moleskine collection : Volant Notebooks. This collection will be launched in Asia in first week of November 2008. The new Volant notebooks are colourful, light, and fit in every pocket.
MOLESKINE Dressed in New Colours!

They are available in:
• 2 rulings: plain, ruled
• 4 colours: pink, blue, green, black
• 3 sizes: Pocket (9x14cm), Large (13x21cm), and the NEW size Xsmall (6.5x10.5cm)
Each Volants is shrinkwrapped in a pack of 2 notebooks (e.g. a pack of blue Volants = 1 dark blue notebook + 1 light blue notebook).

A Huge hit in Europe, US and Japan
The Volant collection was launched in Europe and US in February 2008 and has become a great hit already. Volants was also launched in Japan in July 2008 and replenishment orders are very strong (even higher than classic collection). For sure, Volants has given a new excitement for current Moleskine users, and also bringing in new customers. Especially, the xsmall size is a huge hit everywhere. First, this is a brand new size amongst all Moleskine collections and it is only available in the Volants family. Second, the little notebook size has made Moleskine even more portable than before. The new colour and the cute size have also attracted a lot of new clients (especially female clients/ fashion lovers) for the Moleskine brand.

PRICING
Retail price of Volant notebooks: Xsmall: MOP$ 58 / Pocket: MOP$ 98 / Large: MOP$ 138

«You have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain’t a day that passes that you don’t want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special.
Alma is a Mason Gross student, one of those Sonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatinas without whom you might never have lost your virginity. Grew up in Hoboken, part of the Latino community that got its heart burned out in the eighties, tenements turning to flame. Spent nearly every teen-age day on the Lower East Side, thought it would always be home, but then N.Y.U. and Columbia both said nyet, and she ended up even farther from the city than before. She is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they’ve just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable. She did give you one huge forearm. I told you I’d get the muscles in. The past couple of weeks, now that the warm is here, Alma has abandoned black, started wearing these nothing dresses made out of what feels like tissue paper; it wouldn’t take more than a strong wind to undress her. She says she does it for you: I’m reclaiming my Dominican heritage (which ain’t a complete lie—she’s even taking Spanish to better minister to your mom), and when you see her on the street, flaunting, flaunting, you know exactly what every nigger that walks by is thinking. You met at the weekly Latin parties at the DownUnder in New Brunswick. She never went to those parties, was dragged there by her high-school best friend, Patricia, who still listened to TKA, and this was how you got the chance to strike while, as your boys put it, the pussy was hot.
Alma is slender as a reed, you a steroid-addicted block; Alma loves driving, you books; Alma owns a Saturn (bought for her by her carpenter father, who speaks only English in the house), you have no points on your license; Alma’s nails are too dirty for cooking, your spaghetti con pollo is the best in the land. You are so very different—she rolls her eyes every time you turn on the news and says she can’t “stand” politics. She won’t even call herself Hispanic. She brags to her girls that you’re a “radical” and a real Dominican (even though on the Plátano Index you wouldn’t rank, Alma being only the third Latina you’ve ever really dated). You brag to your boys that she has more albums than any of them do, that she says terrible white-girl things while you fuck. She’s more adventurous in bed than any girl you’ve had; on your first date she asked you if you wanted to come on her tits or her face, and maybe during boy training you didn’t get one of the memos but you were, like, umm, neither. And at least once a week she will kneel on the mattress before you and, with one hand pulling at her dark nipples, will play with herself, not letting you touch at all, fingers whisking the soft of her and her face looking desperately, furiously happy. She loves to talk while she’s being dirty, too, will whisper, You like watching me don’t you, you like listening to me come, and when she finishes lets out this long demolished groan and only then will she allow you to pull her into an embrace as she wipes her gummy fingers on your chest. This is me, she says.
Yes—it’s an opposites-attract sort of thing, it’s a great-sex sort of thing, it’s a no-thinking sort of thing. It’s wonderful! Wonderful! Until one June day Alma discovers that you are also fucking this beautiful freshman girl named Laxmi, discovers the fucking of Laxmi because she, Alma, the girlfriend, opens your journal and reads. (Oh, she had her suspicions.) She waits for you on the stoop, and when you pull up in her Saturn and notice the journal in her hand your heart plunges through you like a fat bandit through a hangman’s trap. You take your time turning off the car. You are overwhelmed by a pelagic sadness. Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertible knowledge that she will never forgive you. You stare at her incredible legs and between them, to that even more incredible pópola you’ve loved so inconstantly these past eight months. Only when she starts walking over in anger do you finally step out. You dance across the lawn, powered by the last fumes of your outrageous sinvergüenzería. Hey, muñeca, you say, prevaricating to the end. When she starts shrieking, you ask her, Darling, what ever is the matter? She calls you:
a cocksucker
a punk motherfucker
a fake-ass Dominican.
She claims:
you have a little penis
no penis
and worst of all that you like curried pussy.
(Which really is unfair, you try to say, since Laxmi is technically from Guyana, but Alma isn’t listening.)
Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby’s beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently be-nutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.
This is how you lose her»
[ALMA BY JUNOT DIAZ • ILLUSTRATION BY JAIME HERNANDEZ • PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORKER • DEC 2007]

• Junot Diaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), this will be the book chosen by Bloom to initiate our Book Club in English. We'll announce it very soon. Join Bloom activities. Save Bloom!

After the success of the limited edition Red diaries, we are excited to announce Moleskine has introduced the Classic Red Notebook Collection, the second incursion of Moleskine into the world of colours. Moleskine Red Notebooks will be available for the two most popular layouts, ruled and plain; and in 2 sizes: pocket and large.

BE STYLISH IN RED
The Red Notebooks of course include the durable oilcloth bound cover binding and acid-free paper pages, the built-in elastic closure, the ribbon placeholder and the cloth-covered expandable inner pocket: all the details that make the classic Moleskines a true icons.
Black or Red: coordinate the classic Moleskine notebook to your mood!

ORDER THE NEW MOLESKINE RED AT BLOOM!
SUPPORT BLOOM! WE NEED YOU!
[DOWNLOAD INFO] [SEND US AN EMAIL HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION]

BLOOM IS THE EXCLUSIVE DISTRIBUTOR OF MOLESKINE PRODUCTS IN MACAU