Room with a view. Montevideo.

We have moved out of Hotel Florida and got a cheaper room on the 9th floor of a new block of flats. The views from the big window send our imaginations on loops and spirals. It's also great for spying on the neighbours. The following photos are taken from this window.

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

Madame JoJo would put up (with) anyone

9th September. We go to see this gig at Madame JoJo’s. The place seems a bit self-important these days, but the comings and goings in Soho are always a sight. The opening band, Still Corners, do an enjoyable revisiting of the Cocteau Twins (they’re trendy again?). A mediocre G&T is 5 pounds, outrageous but still cheaper than in nasty Bar25. Then the headliners come on stage, a girls’ band. I’m a bit put off by how excessively they are done up in this obsessive-compulsive North-American way, where after 3 laborious hours in front of the mirror the aspirants come out looking fully plastinated and put such amounts of effort into looking effortlessly cool that it makes even the most affable observer squirm.

Anyway, these girls look like America’s next top model doing “retro rock” and they attract a coordinated crowd. They also sound like America’s next top model, come to think of it. Re-heated vintage R&B, sterilized into the aseptic chick-rock you get as a free CD with Glamour magazine. The Go-Go’s are probably this band’s ideal, but they sound more like a pompous Bangles cover-band. And then comes the posturing... flicks of the trendy haircut so that the locks fall on your face in that cool way; matching lascivious flicks of the hips that swing your guitar in that equally cool way. The singer keeps repeating in her insufferable sexy drawl: ‘’ So yeah, our new album will be out soon ... and, yeah, you guys should buy it!” A powerful, hypnotising, subliminal advertising technique she’s deploying, this one. The Pill doesn’t bother getting up from her seat, placed in a corner from where she can’t see them, and even eager me gives up before the last song. Remembering this band will give me hope in the dark moments when Primrose tells me we’re too saccharine-pop. They are called The Likes and yeah, you guys should buy their album.

Dildo masks and shameful intoxication in Shoneburg

7th September. I suggest to das Pill that we wear penises on our faces so that she feels less old during the gig. Yeah, a schlock tactic, obsolete since 1977 - I mean, is there any respectable bourgeois offended by S&M gear these days? Not even me mom, I suppose... bourgeois sophistication means edgy experimentation and a sore arse. Of course, I am hiding this facile gimmick behind a popoststructuralist explanation: “It’s a mockery of the phallus, you know, rock stars trying to convince themselves they have it by screaming and posturing and shaking and flaunting and dangling, obvious as a dick in the middle of one’s face”. Of course, das Pill sees right through it and snarls at my intellectual laziness without lifting her eyes from the “Dos & Don’ts” page on the Glamour website.

So, tonight I’m on, solo and ‘unmasked’, in a pub in Schoneburg. Around, as far as the eye can see, fit moms coo over their offspring, compete in buying expensive German arts materials for their exceptionally gifted children and drink fair-trade macchiato with organic rhubarb cake (as  part of their daily toil to save the impoverished farmers of the third world and the planet). Sometimes, the keen glances bourgeois moms send passers-by seem to say: “Hey, did you see my offspring, what a marvel, huh? Oh yes, I know, I’m so blessed, it is miraculous really, I’m deliriously happy...” you get the picture... But here in gritty Berlin, these beaming moms, gulping down their social justice-flavoured cakes and rotating their lighthouse eyes, seem to say: “An expert mom, activist and international philanthropist, all in a day’s work. Who can argue now that a housewife is a talented butler with a keen uterus?”

Anywayz, this is a sort of neighbourhood pub, away from the activist moms, and through Florian’s connections with the landlady I am advertised as: “Tonight: La Mordue (The Diagonikals) - Electropop”. Last night they had two ageing long-haired geezers self-defined as “The String Wizards” and tomorrow it’s “Bands from Latin America” night. It’s a laid back corner pub, people with cute fat old dogs; youngsters with crew cuts, golden earrings, and trousers half jeans-half camouflage; and a very friendly young waitress dressed like Nena circa 1983. So I reckon das Pill was right, the penis masks would’ve been a bit inappropriate.

One of the landlady’s mates shares a spliff with me in the back, and I’m downing these mate and vodka drinks they love over here – vodka on top of a sort of Red Bull thing, hyper-caffeinated, hyper-carbonated, hyper-sugary, the strong artificial flavour suggesting it was hard to hide the burned rubber taste ... It’s VERY Berlin though, I’m told, so it’s cool. Soon I’m babbling like an overexcited bunny.

Later I’m trying to stand up but I’m unable to, the world is rippled tunnels, slips from my grip left, right and round-and-round. I seem to be stuck between a car’s front and the wall against which it is parked and there’s a pinkish puddle very near... I lean on both car and wall, like a climber in a crevasse, and get half up, enough to hear Florian calling my name, I even see him, blurry, wavering, and cannot respond. The fear of seeing myself in the frigid light of the act pushed me to obnubilation again. Cold sweats of terrorized self-doubt around 5 a.m. in my bed...