Recurrent orange flashes, NYE 2012

1st January 2012

We are walking, the dawn is fresh rather than icy, when we hear the dreaded faint hum coming from behind; I turn around in panic and my fears are realized: its lights lick the cars parked on the road side and shortly its strange vintage toy shape appears. “It’s coming!” I shout and the Pill responds “Fuck! Really? RUN!” and starts sprinting. We run as fast as we can considering, giggling and panting. As the tram passes us by I signal it with a limp arm but we have no idea where the stop is, it is marked by a tiny sign glued to a lamp post.. The driver stops 50 metres down the road and waits – a fragile act of kindness in this crabby city. We climb in out of breath and say Happy New Year! and thanks! but the driver does not reply, his reserves of politeness are precious. Inside it is looking like a bathyscaphe from Jules Verne but warm and filling up with exhausted figures, wasted youth with formerly plastinated hairdos now in shards, red eyes with hyper-dilated pupils darting around out of phase, random shouts, weird walks on feet mutilated by trendy shoes, skinny jeans, lumberjack chic, shiny dresses and bling sex worker attires. Swimming through the stroboscopic mosaic of neon lights the bathyscaphe slowly takes us home, shaking and rattling.

6 am, sitting on a bench in front of a hipster-mommy coffee shop on Roncesvalles, a flash of day-glo orange and the Pill stands up and joins me; earlier in the evening she was taking her tights off and stage-diving on a futon, flashing the audience (me and Maria) with her fluorescent blue pants. A bit later on Sid makes an entrance, his Australian accent and party laughter deflecting the hostility of the people he offends, we love it, me and Pill sniffing off his thumb nail on the balcony, us three and Maria on Sid's roof, he is the next door neighbour and one can jump from the balcony on his roof, Sid on his belly, his turn to flash us with his builder’s crack: ‘I’m cleaning the eves trough of leaves as you asked!’ he shouts to a mysterious missus, laughing, laughing and we dance like crazed zombies, 7-8 desperate hedonists left, Pill's orange tights back on bouncing around like glo-sticks, drinks after drinks, Maria collapsed, we get out and start north towards the tram stop. There’s going to be a long wait so we decide to walk along College, into the fresh night, the city a shabby theatre set, Victorian houses of rotting wood and stucco with carved flights of fancy on the roofs, the new night already worn out, other living dead shouting greetings from across the street, the city recoiling on itself and exhaling from industrial chimneys and I hear the dreaded faint hum behind me.

La mordue

European Union film festival, Toronto

December 2011. Once again the feeling of being trapped in a city as stiff as a dirty puddle in a winter prairie night. We get venomously resentful, curse, snarl, spit and humiliate it with cruelty whenever the boredom creeps in, so we need to find stuff to do fast. The EU consulates, as glad to exhibit their cultural standing as ever, organize every year a free 'film festival'. Das Pill is too cool to get there way in advance - only provincials are that eager and she is not to be mistaken for a local - but we do try and make it 30 minutes early. We jump out of the tram that moves on Queen West with the speed of a senile, pregnant caterpillar and start walking fast towards the massive queue outside the cinema alongside other punters, some of which abandon all pretence at dignified artiness and start running for a better position. There are in fact not one but two queues, one to get the free ticket handed in by competently firm volunteers (ours), the other one to get into the cinema once you've got it, policed by the same. There must be around 400 people waiting in the drizzle. Why? Are they terrified of boredom as well? Is it the collective neurosis generated by placing the signifiers 'Europe' and 'for free' side by side? When in the world did they get here, two hours in advance?

A Spanish-accented man and a sturdy Mitteleuropean mittel-aged lady exchange opinions behind us, what chances we still have of getting in and how poorly organized the event is, in half-resigned half-bitter tones. After the 'ticketed' queue is all in ours starts moving sequentially, like a clay snake being chopped in small pieces in stop-motion animation. The conversation stops, replaced by feverish exclamations 'oh my!', 'will we...?', 'almost there...'. And then it's over: just in front of us, admission stops. And then it starts again: inexplicably, we are waved in. 'Oh no, oh no!' the sturdy lady laments, afraid she will be the first one refused entrance. But no, she makes it and we all start running around for seats - there are two in the front row, in a corner, ridiculously unsuited for watching a screen. I am ready to leave when the Pill darts out of her chair, the thrill of the hunt in the eyes; a few moments later she is back, waving me with urgency while trying not to be too obvious in case others realize there is bounty to be had, like the von Trapp family trying to make it illegally into the last train to Switzerland under the suspicious gaze of German soldiers (in fact the adorable über-patriarchal militaristic family eloped by car). I rush upwards behind her - two reserved seats have been freed, last row, left of centre... Some consulate employee got diarrhoea? Well, we thank fate for it.

So, what have we been fighting for here? "Almanya: Welcome to Germany" it's called and it's supposed to be about the condition of the German-Turks. The German cultural attaché - another sturdy lady and true in the most minute detail to the cliché of the German cultural attaché - gives a staccato-accented speech. In a condescendingly agreeable tone she reminds us that it was the Goethe Institut that started this whole festival thing, that she met the two young Turkish German sisters that wrote and directed the film at the Berlin festival and how really happy and excited they were to have been selected and stutters three times before managing to utter a malformed version of the director's name, grinning with complicity at the audience ("he, he, you know how it is with these people's names..."). She also mentions the film is a comedy which makes me and the Pill exchange panicked glances - contemporary Euro-immigrant comedies are a recipe for sentimental, ersatz-intellectual disaster. We are right, the film is naive, clumsy, soppy, sloppy, soggy and Orientalist, a misguided attempt at analyzing the experience of immigration that hides under the carpet everything problematic and ends up kissing gratefully the hand of the German government for allowing these archaic but good-hearted paupers into their civilized world. The farcical stabs at Euro-racism are too simplistic and heavy-handed to be mordant - half-baked reversals of the colonial discourse, where Turkish people exchange stereotypes about Germany: "they eat people there, because they eat Jesus at every mass"; "the Germans are very dirty"; "they only eat potatoes", etc. Such reversals do not work for the simple reason that the colonial relationship is not symmetrical: the colonized desires to become like the colonizer, not the other way around. But the Toronto public laughs hysterically anyway, grinding its own immigrant axe. The film is generously peppered with - maybe unconscious? - aversion towards primitive, frightening Turkey, wholehearted glorification of patriarchal familial arrangements, rejection of abortion on religious grounds and a lachrymose ending where the contribution of the immigrants to the German nation is recognized by a dignified, benevolent Angela Merkel, yes, the very same right-winger who recently affirmed officially - and quite lucidly, I might add - that "Multiculturalism has failed in Germany". In short: cannon-fodder for the Western propaganda machine. Little wonder Germany selected this film to be shown to Canadian audiences in a year of global capitalist crisis, anti-capitalist wriggling and race riots. It grins: "All in all we are still the greatest! Look at these immigrants, how much they want to be like us, how desperate they are to come here, so humble, so grateful".

Once the film is over, the consulate employees of the richest country in Europe line up in the lobby holding little coloured plastic buckets from Dollarama, while one lady, a higher-rank bureaucrat one presumes, enthusiastically shouts in the usual staccato: "Any contribution greatly appreciated, thank you!" It wraps up the evening quite nicely.

P.S. - In the meantime I have found out that "Almanya" has won the public's vote as the best film of the 'festival'. The "self-debasing immigrant neurosis" diagnostic is confirmed.

La Mordue

The bunkers of Vilcabamba

Vilcabamba, 5000 inhabitants, was once ‘discovered’ as a miraculous site where people live almost forever. An international centre for gerontology was promptly established, the special properties of the air, soil, light, water, food and lifestyle feverishly studied (we all know how desperately the bourgeois wants to live forever). It didn’t take long until vigilant US citizens, the gringos, forever scrutinizing their pet countries in South America, found out about this. And soon they were coming over in their drones, hungry for the specialness of being a white foreigner, for adventure, for immortality and, indeed, for profit-making.

In the past 5 years, the area saw several waves of colonizers settling in, Ecuador was placed in the top 5 of ‘best places to retire’ and Vilcabamba acquired the fame of being run over by gringos. They opened cafes, sport bars with baseball themes, yoga and meditation centres, various ‘we save the world (for the future enjoyment of our children)’ associations, restaurants, hostels and new age spas, baked their vile cookies and brewed their insipid coffee. Today you can see them gathered in bunches at the 2 or 3 designated cafes and bars around the main plaza, loud and brash and tribal as you might imagine, holding court, coming back in their jeeps from tennis, debating ineptly the financial crisis backed up by figures memorized from yahoo news, hailing the Ecuadorian waiters in thick accents or straight in American, discussing money, discussing investments, discussing profit, discussing who has one over the other, some wearing cowboy costumes or pseudo-ethnic garbs to drive the point home. Some plan a secessionist coup that would found the ‘Independent Republic of Vilcabamba’.

But this is only the surface. Talking to locals we found out more: the gringo colonizers own most of the land around Vilcambamaba: in classical primitive accumulation spirit, the first ones that came over in search of the simple life bought huge chunks, which they proceeded to chop up and sell at inflated prices to the later arrivals. Most affirm to be disgusted by the USA and be at home in Vilcabamba, while complaining incessantly about the backwardness of the place and people. They bargain for everything: one of them started waving the $15 she was willing to pay for a silver jewellery priced $30 in the shop, a piece she was apparently buying for ‘someone really special’, asking the artisan: “Don’t you need this money? Don’t your children need it?” Another imported Carrara marble for her drive-in; yet another invested the money from land speculation into about 10kg gold just before kicking the bucket; a determinately New Agey one asked a local artist to procure her large, rock-sized pieces of quartz crystal with which she wanted to build a walkway from her fence to her house that would purify all her guests of bad vibes.

And they are paranoid, some with schizophrenic colourings. One thinks the area is invaded by reptilians, CIA mutants that will destroy them all, and rants about it to whoever might listen, scaring the local children. Another is obsessed with conspiracy theories and, while in Lima, planned to hire a helicopter to escape the tsunami wave that was inevitably going to flood the city (the tsunami wave did hit the coast of Peru, 2 hours drive from the capital, in the form of a 45cm wave). Another liquidated all her assets and fled the area before the radioactive cloud from Japan would kill everyone. A group of them allegedly spent $70,000 on food (how many tons of rice?) to be stocked in their underground bunker, as preparation for the 2012 Armageddon; we were told that the local rats are growing fatter by the day. It seems that under the massive villas with incorporated elevators and swimming pools these simplicity-seekers built themselves in the hills there is an impressive number of bunkers. Just before January 2000, a Cuban-American/Real-American couple stocked such a bunker and sealed themselves inside, to await peacefully the predicted end of the civilized world; they emerged in March, pale, half-blind, malnourished, depressed and haggard after the sensorial deprivation, to explore the fuming ruins of humanity. The local expat community billboard proposes holidays in the “Bunker meditation retreat”, “How to Survive Sexual Boredom: A Guide for Survivalists” and “Beyond Scurvy: A Manual for Healthy Eating in the Post-Apocalypse World”.

In the meantime, an Uruguayan old-age researcher left the city in disgust after just one night, claiming that the large numbers of decrepit Americans dragging themselves around the main plaza give a really bad vibe; the travellers in search of a more authentic authenticity started avoiding the place; life expectancy in the area dropped to average standards; and the locals are growing increasingly irritated with the ongoing immigration. We expect a slump in anti-atomic bunker prices to hit the ‘valley of longevity’ sometime during the next fiscal year.
                                                                                               tchuss-tchuss,
                                                                                                          la mordue

Fear and gorging in Zaruma

Another botched gig opportunity. The setting is a little prosperous colonial mining town in the Ecuadorian mountains – the tourists it attracts and the ensuing cosmopolitan atmosphere reigning among the 400 inhabitants made it a worthy option.

The Pill is also keen to visit a mine, lured by the glow of gold – the superficial old layers are just for tourists, deeper down the extraction still goes on – but the other diabolikal diagonal lies slumped in the room, sweating profusely under the faux ceiling of polystyrene, the panels sealed with gaffer tape to keep some grainy substance from falling on the bodies of the sleeping guests, between pink plastered walls whose corroded lower parts give a peek both at the wooden structure underneath and the previous color schemes of the space. He is sweating both because he seems to be sick, and because the wall against which the bed is wedged is hot. A gold brocarde curtain tries both to elevate the status of the room and to hide the merciless sun that beats on the wall, but the light manages to shine through it as if it were a flimsy piece of cloth, and at the corners, where the brocarde does not touch the edges of the window, the sun comes through shaped like blades that stab at whatever is exposed to them.

The Pill is trying to help him out by recapitulating the greasy, stodgy, nauseating foods they’ve had over the last couple of days, which involved many, many hours on shabby buses cruising through landscapes of banana and cocoa plantations, tropical forests with crystalline rivers, mountain villages surrounded by lakes, pastures and more lush rainforests. The order of chicken and 4 side-dishes the Pill picked in a dusty little town on a half hour break between two buses is evoked, a meal meant for 2 but which could have gorged at least 4 people. The two of them had fought to ingest and digest, for what seemed endless rounds, the huge pieces of meat, the fried plantain in both its ‘verde’ and ‘maduro’ forms, all oozing oil. The huge tub of dry rice. The mound of French fries sweating in the polystyrene container, leaking oil too. And the two tubs of thick soup, one based on beans, the other congealing around pieces of chicken feet and necks. The feast proved to be painful from the beginning, even before being processed by the gastric system. The soups were hot and burned tongues and fingers, then were spilled on both laps, where they left colourful odorous marks. As the bus lurched and swayed on the mountain roads, The Diagonikals tried to reduce the number of tubs on their knees, but as much as they swallowed there were still too many of them, stuffed with both liquid and solid ingredients that refused to diminish their volume. As the Pill tried to chop up the chicken into smaller parts, with the plastic knife provided by the ‘Chicken Town’ employee that had prepared her order, she kept on losing her grip on the useless greasy utensil, smearing even larger surfaces of the plastic bag that acted as a plate and skidding onto the surrounding clothing. Her fingers covered in sauce and grease would every now and then point to the paradise landscapes they were crossing, spectacular mountains on which fog was rolling down in thick bales, sunny mountain peaks, green valleys in which happy cows were grazing. Then they would both re-submit themselves to the calvary of the food in front of them. The hefty remains of the chicken and of its robust companions were finally allowed to rest in peace, after one last session of feeding, divided in a few bags that got shoved in the corner of the room, out of sight. But their legacy is alive in the diabolikal’s guts. The Pill hoped that her evoking of the slippery, stomach-churning food would make the diabolikal release some of it, but his oesophageal sphincter resisted.

As the hours pass, it becomes obvious he is in no shape to perform. The Pill swipes his humid forehead and goes out to take some photos of the charming wooden architecture of the town, including the main plaza with its delightful gold-painted priapic baby statue pissing fresh water and the pulp-fiction/heroic fantasy/metal album cover/soft porn illustrations of the old testament adorning the nave of the local church.
Ta-ta, Primrose Pill

At last a gig!! Tropical!!

If you remember our last entry, we are in this tropical island, living in a cabin near our host Melissa’s house. We often have long chats with Melissa, listening  to stories about her life and family and about the comings and goings on the island (according to her, coke smuggling is a glam career choice around here and makes for great narratives of desire, greed, lust and haplessness, ‘get rich or die tryin’ style). We also enjoy playing with the 3 young kids, they have a good sense of humour and we sometimes spend hours together. Well, so much so that the other day Melissa came to the cabin and, sheepishly, confessed that the children would very much like us to watch them sing – their religious hymns!!! Would we take part in the ‘Sabado’ religious festivity the Adventists perform every Friday evening? Confusion ensued... the scene was not really ours (see the ‘S&M and other Christian perversions’ entry for details) – but a gig is a gig! We said yes and keenly joined the family in their house, where we were seated in circle, us enthroned on two mass-produced belle époque bourgeois dining chairs.

A book of psalms and songs was produced and the gig started. The first song went a bit so-so: we didn’t understand we were supposed to sing along, so we just nodded approvingly, smiling encouragingly and tapping our feet while the family was belting it out. But things smoothed out afterwards – the pater familiae informed us we are supposed to ‘help’; I asked them if they knew that we think god is dead (OK, I didn’t quite phrase it this way, I just said I don’t believe); they were a bit stunned but assured me god doesn’t mind that I think he’s dead (he’s either unconscious or doesn’t yet know he’s dead, the poor fellow, as the great stand-up comedian Jacques Lacan might’ve said). From now on, the crowd was ours!! The melodies had the complexity of nursery songs, so we had no trouble mastering the compositional intricacies. They were all written by Anglos, as limp and soggy as a wholemeal biscuit long lost at the bottom of a cup of soup, but the spirits were high, so it didn’t matter!  The lyrics were the usual Goth stuff: damnation, sulphur, doom for the sinner; eternal love and happiness for the devotees.

If I may digress for a second, I often feel that the conduct demanded from the Christian, especially in the newer sects and subcultures, resembles that demanded from a good dog: Semper Fi. Eternal, blank devotion: adore, obey and serve your master, no matter what he demands, no matter his character, no matter you have no idea why you’re asked to do these things or what they mean and that you don’t understand a iota of his desires.  Just obey, love, wait for the reward. But disobey, and the punishment will be fearsome: whipping, canning, your nose will be dragged in your own piss and feces, castration, the kennel, the shot. These Adventist songs were all of the type:

“My master gives me love and food, and bathes me now and then/

And I get treats and flea repellents and, hey, even a toy/

I get a name, a rug, a bone, a neutering and a den/

And if I sit and fetch and roll, he’ll shower me with joy/

Chorus: Oh my master there is nothing, nothing more than serving thee/

To lick your hands, sleep at your feet and be put on leash to pee”.

So we went crazy, belting them out too, nodding knowingly when psalms were read, screaming ‘’amen!’’ like Black Sabbath saying their goodbyes to a loving stadium crowd. It was a blast, the crowd was amazing and we basked in the afterglow for a while. The post-gig party was also an intimate affair, the two of us getting tanked in the cabin. We Have Cracked The Tropics!!! We Are Golden Gods!!! Rock and Fucking Roll! Thank You and God Bless, AMEN!

The terrifying tale of the telepathic peacock

 Melissa, our host in Providencia – a tiny island off Nicaragua’s coast that, somehow oddly, belongs to Colombia and where we are just lazing off, since there is no point whatsoever subjecting the locals to our brand of electro - tells us the horrifying and 100% accurate story of the evil genius island peacock. This peacock, whose cries resembling a melancholy fog siren I can hear as I write, has been abandoned on the island, along with a bunch of other animals, some of its own kind, by an Italian fleeing his Caribbean home. The menagerie owner was by trade an alternative healer and could discover one’s ailments simply by looking at them.  After being abandoned, the peacocks have a terrifying faith: the two females die shortly, unable to survive in the bush. The two males succumb to bestial conducts: they split the territory in two, each owning one side of the road. Each patrols his territory, emitting piercing calls that die, frightened and alone, where the sharp rocks plunge into the sea. Increasingly terrorized by the utter uselessness of their masculinity, they engage in a fight to the death; the peacock owning the side of the road where Marissa’s house is kills the other peacock gruesomely.

Since then, for the past 8 years, the peacock lives alone on his land, flying around, perching on the tall trees, scouring the bush without ever crossing into his dead rival’s territory, no matter how big the threat to his life. He promptly and mercilessly stifles all of Melissa’s agricultural endeavours, devouring her young melons, flowers, cucumbers and peppers with the precision of a vegan piranha.  This converts Melissa, a committed Adventist otherwise, into his arch-enemy: she promises to do away with the evil patriarch and ritually cook him in a spicy Caribbean casserole. “This is for my young cucumbers!” she would cry, before biting into a sauce-dripping leg.  

 But the peacock has amazing abilities, avoiding all her traps: the cane sugar dipped in rum fails to inebriate him. When a noose made of thin fishing rod is laid in the grass, the peacock saunters around it, eating the bait, without even once stepping inside the circle of death whose other end Melissa, hidden in her kitchen, feverishly holds through a crack in the door. When, exasperated, Melissa asks her husband to borrow a friend’s gun, the peacock disappears for three days without trace, confounding their assiduous searches of his territory. Since then he seems to provoke her, eating from the tourists’ hands but flying away as she gets near, permanently spying on her from nearby trees, ravaging her garden in a protracted guerrilla war. Melissa is convinced that the Mesmeric Italian healer endowed his peacock with telepathic powers that allow him to triumph over his enemies, each victory deepening his isolation.

 The Pill, predictably aroused by the romanticism of this classical story, starts thinking of ways to kill the feathered white whale. Discussions about the tastiness of peacocks start (because in Spanish a peacock is a “pavo real”, a ‘’royal turkey’’, Melissa launches one of her main offensives around Christmas); plans of female peacock decoys and fishing nets are proposed. A week later though, das Pill is endeared by the fellow and starts feeding him bread every day which, of course, he takes from her palm.

As we speak, the last peacock of Providencia, aware of all these conspiracies to murder him, flaps his heavy wings from tree to tree, does intricate mating dances to no one in particular and, at dusk, launches shrill calls towards the darkened seas, his powerful telepathic brain squeezed in the castrating vice of solitude.

Signs, Montevideo.