Calice. Chico Buarque. 1978. Philips.

 Human sensuality, so intrinsic to the routine of modern experience that to not take the function of our senses for granted would task us with immeasurable complications. Enforced separation from, or mutilation to, one’s sensory organs is a common authoritarian governmental tactic, and is, without having to venture too wild a guess, happening even now. On June 14, 1971, Stuart Angel,  member of the urban guerrilla group MR-8, was arrested by officers of the Air Force Information Center and tortured, his mouth forcibly attached to a jeep’s exhaust pipe and his body dragged across a base courtyard. When Chico Buarque sings Calice’s penultimate line in Portuguese—“I want to smell diesel smoke”—memorializing the resistance fighter’s horrific death, he’s already recounted in Baudelairian detail—“Being very fat, the pig no longer walks. After being used a lot, the knife no longer cuts.”—the nightmare of life during a military dictatorship. As if to stress what is lost in the oppressive atmosphere of censorship and compulsory nationalism, Calice’s lyrical imagery is a kind of grim reminder of surrealism’s origins in a time of mass carnage and social upheaval; its creators taught us that the search for beauty during wartime, though not impossible, will cost us untold mental stress. Buarque’s vocal strength is uncanny; his artistic focus never wavers. Because he is witness to human terror, he does not look away; neither does the listener. His singing voice holds its share of tension, which in turn becomes the drama of the record’s fantastic narrative; Buarque only allows himself one moment of overt, unsentimental emotionality, during the song’s opening chorus, which quickly gives way to a deliberative authority whose grip upon the listener doesn’t slacken, and that, by way of a just discernible acceleration of tempo, gains a terrible momentum the closer Buarque pushes himself towards Calice’s unsettling climax. Having emptied the chalice of its “blood red wine,” the singer experiences what he calls “this Homeric drunkenness of the world,” that all-consuming madness already within us, which strips us of all clarity of the senses, and keeps only our starkly exposed vulnerability intact. Like Coltrane’s Alabama, Calice is a sublime record of a  crime against humanity, told from inside the experience with such heartrending tenderness that it has the power, if taken seriously, to adhere you to the side of peace. Beauty is a way forward. 

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