Ode to Hotel Florida

19th April 2011. We escape the land of frozen dreams and make our way to Montevideo, where belle époque houses warming up in the autumnal sun make us happy like puppies. We stay at Hotel Florida, halfway between Plaza Independencia and the port. It is a palace, dignified, bending under the weight of time. The magnificent lobby - grand staircase and trumpeting cherubs - cocoons a 1900s display cabinet filled with desirable consumables: small whiskey bottles, chocolates, biscuits, beer cans and cigarettes. The rooms have 6 metre high ceilings with intricate moulds, painted at some later point the colour of clotted blood to shrink them to human size, 4 metre tall wooden doors and windows, a mix of crumbling 1930s monolithic armoires, sturdy wooden tables and plastic Chinese fans. It makes us feel cool, like unpunished perverted satyrs, simply for being here. We try to eulogize its phantasmatic largesse in a photographic ode.

Life in barren lands

26th March. Oh, events are sparse in the city of hogs. The legions of marginalized drag the rags of their soul in the dirty snow. The rich gallivant on Bloor Street, flashing Botox smiles and designer wigs and moaning about the scarcity of luxury shops. The trendy crowd gathers in “rough” cafes and pubs, drinking overpriced beer and bragging about Berlin, New York and London. The immigrants fry hotdogs in their street carts, the smell of onion and rancid oil hanging in the cold air alongside dreams of wealth, glory and respect. Huge cars, armors of the mighty Canadian spirit, whizz by, fast and loud like heavy slaps on the back of your head, filling the air with the sour dust of the ice-melting chemicals. Nose against the cold window I contemplate the black trees, their charred limbs cruelly decorated with empty plastic bags that flutter like bandages.

“It’s barren !! There’s nothing here, innit!?!” exclaimed last week, outraged, a friend visiting from England. And she lives in Birmingham ... Expecting the poster-nation of liberal-capitalism, she was appalled. She furiously recounted how someone in their hostel told them you need one full month to properly see the city.

The Eaton Centre, one of the local shopping malls, was apparently high on this proud Canadian's list of ‘impossible to miss’ local attractions. One guesses a solid week should be spent only within this cosmic crown jewel of retail... And then, our guests showed us their ‘Lonely Planet’ guide and even we, although accustomed to the local patriotic deliriums, were impressed. I have no idea who wrote that grotesquerie but it's art. The authors – on SRIs? - dare anyone in their right minds not to adore this land of beauty, kindness, wealth and emancipation. Their descriptions of Montreal and T’rono would made one think they are landing in a futuristic paradise; their descriptions of the social that they visit a post-racism, post-oppression, post-colonial, post-scarcity utopia. A land of milk, honey, avantgarde and multiculturalism. Of course, the authors had to make clear that the awesomeness of Canada’s social arrangements are endangered these days by the unstoppable flow of immigrants.

 Caught in the middle of the intercontinental dick duel between Lawrence Olivier of England and James Dean of USA, Canada feels like the provincial cousin - cruel, insipid, full of pustules and boring stories about beavers and raccoons.  No wonder you hear so many fire camp stories about a Canada that is bigger, better, shinier and tastier than you will ever see. Yes, we’re slowly taking a perverse liking to life in the barren lands.

Stuck in T’rono.

15th September. Thanks to the astute manoeuvres of the Pill, we are in Toronto, Canada (T’rono pour les intimes). What to say about this place? At first sight, a run of the mill North American city: monotonous, verging on the hostile. Such cities fare better when observed from afar, most of their energies focus on a skyline; once you get closer they pixelate like a low resolution digital photo and what seemed a dense, multi-layered world turns into flattened spaces: parking lots, motorway-sized roads, strip-malls. If you try to reach the core it will exhaust you in unrewarding marches through displays of neurotic corporate fun and staged ‘cultural diversity’, all contained by a ruthless grid that shrinks your perspective to a tunnel. We keep searching like a vanquished sailor in a labyrinth of fog.

What sets T’rono apart though is the ambition to prove itself a “world class city”, leading to some hilariously pompous experiments. Horrible condos erupt all over the place like stubborn acne; the local architectural fashionistas seem to favour a cross between ''cheaply updated 1980s'' and  ''props in sci-fi B-film" and crown their creations with names like "Couture", "Ice", "Prestige" or "Shangri-La", making the city looks like a mouth with several teeth knocked out and some fake-gold implants

Except for the back alleys, its most honest and attractive side and some intact shabby neighbourhoods still displaying what a French artist visiting the city called "Psycho houses".

Mild-mannered London

11th September. London is yet another city with a reputation for grittiness that makes it quite hard for the regular visitor to find said grit. Maybe they mean places like the “Favela Chic” bar? Yes, yes, this thing does exist, in Islington, and the London trendies are self-importantly queuing to get in. I consider spitting some green phlegm on their recherché-dishevelled outfits, but decide there isn’t enough of Sid Vicious in me to pull it off and whimper away. But if there are any bourgeois rebels out there looking for London grit without being able to find it, here’s solace: you can have it in the form of overpriced caipirinhas in a bar glorifying ghettoes. Alternatively, you could give London up and go live as a homeless in a North American city that will chew you up and spit you out in a spaghetti mass of cartilage, mucus and psychosis.

Berlin might be stodgy but London is chainified, compulsively groomed, drooling over profit and wanking over its own hype. The familiar overpriced vintage boutiques, fashion shops for babies, organic cafes for their ecstatic mums and massage parlours for the obese family dog thrive here like dandelions on a Victorian grave. We love it dearly.
                                                                                      tchuss, la mordue