The Lisbon revelations: Rock’n Roll IS noise pollution!

17th August. Lisbon, one of these little old plazas that, squeezed between stone houses, knot together some of the meandering streets. And a trendy cafe behind, full of local hipsters, playing some trendy ironic music. It’s a heterogeneous collection of hits homogenized into easy-jazz, cafe-concert style: lush trumpets and a cool mezzo-soprano voice. Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’, Soundgarden’s ‘Black hole sun’, No Doubt’s ‘Don’t Cry’, Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’, Nirvana, Radiohead, Lenny Kravitz, all get the ‘Nora Jones’ treatment and are consumed along steak, chips and beer. After drawing the initial smile, the record makes me wonder: isn’t this reduction to easy-listening form revealing the true core of rock’n roll? Isn’t it stripping reality naked of rock’n roll ideology, like these shades in John Carpenter’s “They live”?

I mean, ‘rock’ songs automatically summon the 'Mr. Hyde' of our bourgeois ego. The whole rock imaginary is a pastiche of a nihilist manifesto, a histrionic mime of the death drive, tickling the bourgeois desire for rebellion, risk, nomadic lifestyle, free sex and cheap drugs. In the flattering mirror of rock'n roll the bourgeois listener sees herself as a dark adventurer, a trangressive vampire feeding on the blood of bourgeois order.

The rock'n roll fantasy survives, generation after generation, just like a vampire; how could it not, each rock song is a member’s card that authorizes anyone to dream, for a moment, that she bites the hand that feeds her, shouting, stomping, throwing angry fists in the air. Rock fans everywhere, from confused teenagers to depressed housewives, from bank clerks to accountants, from masseurs to aromatherapists, from pizza delivery people to suburban high school students, from professors to artsy students gain the right to behave like threats to social order, dress in leather, tatoo a snake-and-skull on their arse, pierce their tongues, put up posters of bikes in their room, talk rudely to their pets, get slightly tipsy or, for the coolest, adopt the louche air of the 1930s apaches they've seeen in Brassai’s photos. By listening to rock you too, the Starbucks waitress, you too, the Gap shop assistant, and yes, especially you, the HMV shelf stacker, are rebels that display their disgust for bourgeois society by wearing dangerously edgy clothes and hairdos. The system is in cold sweats!

In the meantime the rock media, desiring rock to remain the signifier of transgression, keep touting the dirty and dangerous adventures of the rock stars. Rock magazines have developed a morbid obsession with the ‘casualties of rock’, the stars’ stories of hardship, from squatting and poverty to addiction, depression, self-mutilation and suicide. They follow with necrophiliac fascination the handful of ‘self-destructive’ stars, attempting to prove themselves and the fans that rock IS rebellion. A worthy effort, cruelly undermined by our very revolutionary leaders, the rock stars, who show their true desires whenever they get the money: singing their way into the upper bourgeoisie, living the life their songs spit at. What is more satisfying than seeing another ageing rock star being knighted/lady-ed by the Queen? Accepting an aristocratic title from a formaldehyde-smelling medieval monarch? Now that’s anarchy! How many of them send their mediocre kids to the poshest public schools they can buy with the money made by selling songs of fury, danger and revolution? The terror makes the bourgeois order piss its pants. 

By taking the plastic fangs out of all their mouths, this genius cafe-concert band we are listening to brings the form of the songs closer to their function: feeding the bourgeois sack’s desire for comfortable consumption. So here are our 3 axioms:

‘Cafe concert is the artistic essence of rock’n roll!’ 

‘Cafe concert is rock’n roll stripped of ideology!’ 

‘Rock’n roll is cafe concert in denial!’

Yup, rock rebellion is alway the same teenage punk rebellion against dad, while living in the parental house, being driven to the Green Day gig by mom, buying clothes and records on the weekly allowance and putting ‘Danger! No Entry!’ signs on her bedroom door. The bourgeois order is hyperventilating. I should know, I’ve been a rock fan since I was 13!

tchuss-tchuss, la mordue.

The saviour of sea cucumbers.

12th August. At low tide Primrose-the-Pill has made a duty of rescuing stranded sea cucumbers that seem to be gasping for air. In all honesty, it is a bit difficult to ascertain what precisely the sea cucumber feels, our Verstehen of the sea cucumber remains rudimentary. But I join the movement, sandwiching them between my Havaianas and dropping them in the pools of water trapped by rocks. We’re not sure they are sea cucumbers either, they look like giant, spotted, 700 grams slugs. In Messianic mood, we save them anyway. Some of the rocks are fully covered by the soft skin of animal colonies that look like pink viscera from outer space - a strangely repulsive and fascinating thing, as close to the Lacanian Real as any other alien we have seen.

My own private motoboy

10th August. After more than 8 hours of bus ride between the sertao and the coast, we arrive in Trairi, a little town some 30 km of our destination, knackered and stinky, as the sun is about to set. The moto-taxi boys (some of them in their 50s) surround us as we get off the bus: “Going to Mundau? 2 motos, 12 reais each”. We each carry a backpack of about 8 kg and these motos look quite narrow. The Pill sends me the ‘detached-skeptical' look but before she can say anything I agree loudly with the 2 ‘boys’. We climb behind them, and the motos are indeed rather thin and a tad too short for my thick calves. I’m slightly out of balance, the backpack pulls me backwards. And it’s my very first time riding a moto. Yes, we are the other facet of the “rebel rock’n roll gods” social group, the one that uses public transport. Pretty avant-garde, I know. So anywayz, the distribution of weight on and around my body seems to suggest that the safest way to keep my arse from walking the plank backwards is too lean forward and lock my arms around the thick, soft midriff of my 50-something motoboy. That’s how they do it in the films too, right? when the rebel leather boy gives the prudish girl in a tulle headscarf her first moto ride? All the locals gathered in the small plaza watch us with mildly intrigued, slightly amused faces. A guy in a shop encourages me to hold the motoboy tight and, as a joke, i tighten my grip getting the air out of the poor man’s lungs. a bit. we depart, the sudden acceleration almost throwing me to the ground, and i’m holding very tight indeed! By now our public is cheering loudly and i hear their laughter and ‘woooo-hooo’ cries thin out as we move towards the main road. It’s a thrill, to say the least... the moto threatens to throw me off at each bump, so i keep my strong hold on the motoboy, until he tells me, in a slightly offended voice, that i should hold on to the handle at the back of my seat. I get off one arm, prudently, at first, and as he keeps on staring at my other arm still clutching his belly, i let go of this one as well. It’s pretty precarious, my balance. Soon we stop for the motoboy to put 3 reais worth of petrol in his moto and the Pill throwns me a slightly glacial smile of “it’s fun, if we survive it” from the other moto. It’s heaven and hell on wheels from here: i’ve got my shades on against suicidal flies, my cap is stuck down to my ears and i’m holding that slippery chrome backrail behind my back, riding at what i find to be supersonic speed (50 km/h?) on a road that nudges its way between sand dunes and the sea, the sun setting in front of us in an orgy of 80s-cocktail-bar-sign colours, coral and pinks and mauves, the clouds like discarded erotic garments, diaphanously lined in matching tones (see photo, above). Breathtaking, in more ways than one. At every bump or turn in the road, when gravity and centripetal forces whiten my knuckles, i think “not a bad way to go, actually”.

The motoboys have the smoothness of experts though, and we arrive in Mundau 40 minutes later, a bit shaky and a bit hysterically excited. We exchange money and goodbyes on the sandy road going to our pousada and i think i sense a little nostalgic tenderness in my motoboy’s look. Or was it the sad look that the Christian gives the sinner? Of course the Pill, cool as a sea cucumber, tells me she has attentively studied the locals beforehand and absolutely ALL of them are ALWAYS holding on to the back-rail, NEVER to the driver. Oh well, i sure worked hard for those cheers and that look. Plus, the Pill is not unscathed herself, since she has a nice, round, purple branding mark from where the hot exhaust pipe burned her naked leg. We go for a refreshing night swim in the ocean and a swing in the hammock before collapsing on the bed. Another legendary battle in the 100-year war against mosquitoes is about to begin...

Tchuss-tchuss, la mordue.

Tropical Bella Lugosi is undead!

23rd July. Japaratinga is a lovely village, where the tourist in search of self-affirmation can frolic on the beach all day and go to the central plaza in the evening to munch on a roasted corn cob. However we soon sense a dark presence, invisible yet constantly portentous. One stormy night, the demon revealed itself: the count, protected by the auspicious climate of local religious fervor, hiding under the cloak of local benefactor padre Cicero during the day, hunting for haemoglobin at night! Undead, undead, undead.

la mordue.

Sao Paulo museum of contemporary art (miam!).

17th July. The Sao Paulo museum of contemporary art, the MAM, has two locations, one in the Parque do Ibirapuera and one in the University campus. Both quite far from where we live, so the trip is beleaguered with touristic perils: by the time we get to the University location, Miss Pill is peeing her brains out, while hordes of students are cycling, rolling, running and walking all over the place, making her usual bush guerrilla tactics inapplicable. As usual, she keeps her cool under such duress (I’m the annoying panicky/whingey type), but she seems unusually happy to find the museum building, even for such a lover of contemporary art . Both locations are free and we were utterly mesmerized by both: enlightening stuff, curated very intelligently, way beyond my scraggy words - so I'm posting some photos. First, above, some from the temporary exhibit of communist-era Polish posters. Beautifully designed, in the fairly particular aesthetic style of the time and place, they are even more remarkable in their lack of commercial purpose: their sole point was to be a metaphor for the symbolic content of the event advertised. Unfortunately, I do not know the names of the artists, I apologize for that...

We have become so unfamiliar with such a ‘devoid of financial goal’ approach to art: most museums in Toronto, where we find ourselves stranded at the moment - on the particular circumstances leading to this, later - do ‘blockbuster’ exhibits, boasting such avant-garde themes as ‘The Amazing World of the Pharaohs’, ‘Vanity Fair portraits of celebrities’, ‘Unusual dildos of the Middle Ages’ or ‘Contemporary Espresso Machine Designs'. I suppose contemporary art has to be wholesome family fun around here; without doubt, more risque stuff would cause enuresis in the bourgeois kids, curl the bourgeois mum’s uterus, inflame the bourgeois dad’s hemorrhoids, pervert the bourgeois family dog and not go so well with the art-themed bonbons purchased in the museum cafeteria.

The rest of the art in the photos is by a couple of French artists we found interesting, Jean Rustin and Herve Fischer (another temporary exhibit). Sorry for the poor quality of the photos, they are taken with a shitty point-and-shoot that cannot cope with dim light (a Sony actually, if we are to point fingers...).

tchuss-tchuss, la mordue.

Klepp shrimp pizza moment.

15th July. Today we’re back from roaming the city and are starving. And at the desk, the reception guy and another fellow are munching on a ‘shrimp pizza’. It is greasy and gooey because of all the cheese and oil and it stinks of sea food and we’re both drooling like snails in heat. And before you know it, they are offering us about 2/3 of that gigantic pizza! Manna! We must’ve looked famished? Plus, Brazilians often have a slightly amused-slightly intrigued momsy attitude towards the looks, habits and incompetence of foreigners. Anyway, we refuse politely once and, after waiting breathlessly for it to be offered a second time, which it very fortunately does, we plunge our naked fingers into the soft, warm mass, lift up big, sloppy chunks that cling to the mother-ship in long filaments of melted cheese, and gulp them down, various fats running down our fingers, inebriated by the aroma of garlic and camarao. I will remember this meal as one of the most remarkable Klepp moments.

“Oskar knocked, entered and was hit by the smell that is so characteristic of Klepp. To call this effluvium acrid would be to overlook its density and sweetness. ... To say sweet and sour would also be misleading. This Munzer, or Klepp as I call him today, this corpulent, indolent, yet not inactive, superstitious, readily perspiring, unwashed, but not derelict flutist and jazz clarinettist, had, though something or another was always preventing him from dying, and still has, the smell of a corpse that never stops smoking cigarettes, sucking peppermints, and eating garlic. ... We struck up conversation, taking pains at first to give it an easy flow, and sticking to the most frivolous topics. Did he, I asked, believe in predestination? He did. Did he believe that all men were doomed to die? Yes, he felt certain that all men would ultimately have to die, but he was much less sure that all men had to be born; ... We both believed in heaven, but when Klepp said “heaven,” he gave a nasty little laugh and scratched himself under the bed covers: it was clear that Mr.Klepp, here and now, was hatching out indecent projects that he was planning to carry out in heaven. ... Then it happened. This was just what I had feared, but hoped that a long and widely ramified conversation might avoid. “Ah, my dear sir, won’t you please join me in a plate of spaghetti!” There was no help for it. We ate spaghetti prepared in the fresh water I had brought. I should have liked to give his pasty cooking pot a thorough scouring in the kitchen sink, but I was afraid to say a word. Klepp rolled over on one side and silently, with the assured movements of a somnambulist, attended to his cookery. When the spaghetti was done, he drained off the water into a large empty can, then, without noticeably altering the position of his body, reached under the bed and produced a plate incrusted with grease and tomato paste. After what seemed like a moment’s hesitation, he reached again under the bed, fished out a wad of newspaper, wiped the plate with it, and tossed the paper back under the bed. He breathed on the smudged plate as though to blow away a last grain of dust, and finally, with a gesture of noblesse oblige, handed me the most loathsome dish I had ever seen and invited Oskar to help himself.

After you, I said. But nothing doing, he was the perfect host. After providing me with a fork and spoon so greasy they stuck to my fingers, he piled an immense portion of spaghetti on my plate; upon it, with another of his noble gestures, he squeezed a long worm of tomato paste, to which, by deft movements of the tube, he succeeded in lending an ornamental line; finally he poured on a plentiful portion of oil from the can. He himself ate out of the pot. He served himself oil and tomato paste, sprinkled pepper on both helpings, mixed up his share, and motioned me to do likewise. “Ah, dear sir,” he said when all was in readiness, “forgive me for having no grated parmesan. Nevertheless, I wish you the best of appetites.”

To this day Oskar is at a loss how he summoned up the courage to ply his fork and spoon. Strangely to say, I enjoyed that spaghetti. In fact, Klepp’s spaghetti became for me a culinary ideal, by which from that day on I have measured every menu that is set before me.”

(Gunther Grass, The Tin Drum, Vintage Books, 1964: 501-5; singled out and transformed into myth by Miss Primrose Pill)

Tchuss-tchuss, la mordue.

The Brazilian Grammies of Christian Pop-Rock

10th July. From the hotel window we see a pedestrian street, filled with countless rivulets of people meandering around each-other and the stalls that sell watches, batteries, bags of all sizes and functions, amounts of plastic objects so vast that they (still) make one marvel at China’s manufacturing output and bootlegged CDs and DVDs from where blurry supersaturated stars stare at you with an offended air, resenting the indignity of being commercialized in so lowly a place and manner. People are coming in and out of the lancheonetes, pizza places, clothes shops, supermarkets, key cutting and electronics shops; elderly gents sandwiched between ‘Compro Ouro’ ("We Buy Gold") signs get a hot coffee from the thermos-totting ambulant vendors, elegantly poured in plastic shot glasses; people are scanning the rubbish bins, recycling the casks of other people’s pleasure.

In the evening the homeless come back from their daily toil to their pavement beds; some lie on ragged bits of cardboard just across from our window, in front of a bar that puts on live music every evening. People drink beer, eat chips, smoke, flirt, prance, sing along and dance with enthusiasm. The homeless sometimes join in with voice plastic percussion and hand claps. Under the orange street light, it suggests a colourful, benign world, where the ‘cour des miracles’ and the bourgeoisie gently touch each other.

It’s a delusion: Brazil is a cruel mommy with a gargantuan appetite for conspicuous consumption, enormous inequalities and massive religious infestation, kept from fracture by constant State and private violence sponsored by the upper bourgeoisie.

This religious infestation is so widespread that not an eye is blinked when neo-protestant churches display sulphurous menaces towards the non-converted, sport titles like ‘Igreja Mundial do Jesus Cristo’ (watch out neo-liberalism, there’s a new flock in town), put on nightly TV live shows with pastors curing live the ill, invalid, unhappy, unsuccessful, varicose, perverted or incontinent or commercialize pop music. We watched with giggly excitement the kitsch fervour of what could be called the Brazilian Grammies of Christian Rock, where wholesomeness, righteousness, piousness and gravitas (humour is a sin, irony a blasphemy, sarcasm gets you the stake) were constantly and comically bumping into the obligatory clichés of rock n’roll show-biz. 3 Brazilian cars out of 4 proudly display Jesus messages (from the popular ‘Jesus e fiel’ to the cocky ‘My car is bigger than yours because Jesus loves ME more’ and to the more biting ‘May god give you twice of what you wish me’- we found this latter one to be quite a hit with drivers in Malta too!); and so do 3 in 4 shops (“Jesus and Saint Priapinho are my stock managers”; “Jesus watches over my net profit”).

A media and governmental paranoid-compulsive obsession with ‘crisis’, ‘violence’, ‘gangs’, ‘anti-social behaviours’, the ‘dissolution of family values’ and, of course, ‘drugs’, complete the picture and respectable Brazilians often imagine the country as a war-zone where blood-thirsty criminals will ambush any good-hearted, tax-paying, Jesus-loving and drug-hating citizen and finger them mercilessly before removing their children and internal organs to auction on the black market (which fortunately keeps them barricaded inside their homes). It’s a place that often buries its head in the sand when it comes to staring at its image, reminding us a lot of North-America and quite a bit of Europe. And yet such a seductive place for the tourist in search of strong experiences...

Limp erotica.

9th July 2010. We are staying at the fabulous Hotel Rivoli, in the centre of Sao Paulo. The hotel is probably from the late 1940s and it has sprawling, narrow corridors and long and narrow rooms, with wooden floors and sparse, cheap furniture; in some way, the whole ensemble retains a dignified air. We feel smugly bohemian. Above the bed there’s a pastel portrait of a semi-nubile woman, blonde, head bashfully but coquettishly tilted to avert her gaze from that of the man she is offered to, strap of her chemise sliding to reveal a breast. In ultra-soft-focus, powdery pinks and baby blues and lilacs. Signed with an Italian-sounding namet that the manufacturing company thought would bestow a Renaissance sophistication on their “tasteful” product. It manages to put a smile on my face every time I enter the room.

what all this is about...

The Diagonikals are an approximation of a band (for the curious, www.myspace.com/thediagonikals). And this débutante blog is a semi-fictional tour diary. Actually, a bit more than half is fictional and, retrospectively, it wasn't really a tour, more of a swirling. So, let's be disciplined about this, and systematize: you will be reading a 'more-than-semi'-fictional 'swirling' diary. Join me and the delightful Primrose Pill as we stumble through 3 continents in search of misplaced time, electro jouissance and petty bourgeois cool.

tchuss-tchuss,

la mordue