Night Bus To Juréia

For the first few miles you weave down enclosed streets past smoked glass offices and busy cafés, large old houses converted into medical centres or ad agencies, expensive car dealerships in modernistic chromium showrooms, sprinklers turning over switchgrass lawns. Then you pass out onto Marginal: three lanes of traffic droning endlessly on either side of the Pinheiros river, a murky brown god hemmed between concrete walls. Beside the road, behind sagging wire fencing, loom the skeleton of a disused rollercoaster and last year’s carnival floats, the papier maché faces falling away to reveal the twisted frames underneath.

Now the city’s hinterland opens up before you: the low tenement housing sprouting satellite dishes and lines of laundry, the open-fronted bars, the castellated compounds of the love motels which cater for the truck drivers and homeward office workers. In the distance high rises float on the horizon like mirages, images from another world; here it is only piles of tyres or stacks of granite or swimming pools propped on their sides which reach towards the sun; here the favelas start to show, crazed mosaics of shape and colour, scavenged materials and dirt roads. Outside on the embankments, kids play beneath images of beautiful women in lingerie and men with white teeth in surf gear, placed there to infiltrate the dreams of the never-ending stream of moneyed traffic which passes by and never stops for them.

You must have fallen asleep. The jungle bored you, its impenetrable barrier of trees, purple-headed barriguda and cassava and Brazilian sassafras; the sad sight of men by the side of the road sheltering under tarpaulin, selling bunches of bananas or corn cobs or manioc root brought back from the waiting jungle. Now twilight is falling and you are approaching the first of the beach-ward towns. It’s a poor place, a rat-run of dusty streets. The shops are little more than stalls: knife sharpeners and key cutters, bags of concrete and toilet seats, hairdressers and discount clothes; all open to the street, all united in squalor. A man delivers giant brass collars from a motorbike. A kid pushes himself along on his bicycle, steel pins in his shin and his crutch grasped in his free hand. Fat women shout outside a bar. A gaudy sign offers express English courses, promising a ticket away from here.

Meanwhile the jungle waits on the edge of town to reclaim this outpost for its own; it has already overtaken the stained concrete shells of empty houses and abandoned chapels, some petrol pumps and street signs. As you leave it behind, the last thing you see is a girl in a truck-stop, bored, staring after the cars and air-conditioned coaches of the rich, wondering if she’ll ever escape the leering fat truck drivers, the endless nights, the cold eyes of older women.

Once darkness falls completely the roadside kiosks light up like toy castles, selling beer and cigarettes, soap and matches, paraffin and plastic toys from China. On a deserted stretch of road a couple sit on the wall beside a concrete bus shelter, she in his lap, the jungle silent and massive behind them. Their bus won’t arrive for hours. They’ve got absolutely nothing. They’re the most beautiful couple in the world.

When you arrive at your destination, you drink and swim and eat with the others, then walk down to the beach. The stars tremble and the Milky Way is a hot spray of weltering light. Frogs baritone-burp and cicadas bow their music to the waiting universe. You stand there half-drunk in the dark, the warm seawater on your feet. Phosphorescence lines the breaking waves and shimmers when you move your feet, so it seems that the horizon itself has been effaced; there is no up or down now, stars above and stars below, and you floating lost among them. Far out to sea a storm unfolds, the lightning among the clouds looks like the voice of God.

Domesticating Sean Bean and Grieving with Karl Urban.

I have come to a realisation. It's not the kind of realisation which imparts a sense of wellbeing or oneness with the universe. Rather, the knowledge chills me to the bone. You see, I have realised that the reason my wife is able to watch football with all the discernment and depth of knowledge normally (and misogynistically) attributed to men is because she watches Lord of the Rings films the way other women supposedly watch football: it’s all about the pumping thighs. And the swords. And all the enormous beards.

She was recently trying to decide which of her two preferred LOTR crushes she’d live with, Sean Bean or Karl Urban. The problem is that she only likes Karl Urban when he’s lamenting the death of his sister (emotional vulnerability + gigantic beard = erotic meltdown), and she couldn’t imagine a domestic scenario involving a constantly grief-ridden Karl Urban; she saw herself coming home to find the flat a mess, the beds unmade, washing up piled in the sink, tear-sodden Kleenex on every surface. Come on, Karl Urban, she would say, pull yourself together.

Sean Bean is, at least superficially, more straightforward. His appeal lies in the ability to embody a sort of righteous wrath; you can see him showcasing this emotion in LOTR, Game of Thrones, Black Death and every other film he’s been in ever – except perhaps Lady Chatterley’s Lover, when he embodied righteous gamekeeping. I tried to point out to my wife that righteous wrath might come with its own unique set of problems, particularly in the enclosed space of a semi-detached house; I suggested that the Bean would invariably end up smiting the soft furnishings left, right and centre. But my wife responded that at least he would be basically functional. I don’t know what exactly she meant by that, but she had a disturbing glint in her eye so I didn't press her on it.

Anyway, stemming from this discussion, I’ve had an idea. I think Sean Bean should volunteer at his local village fete. He’d be the centrepiece of his own stall, enclosed in a plastic cylinder with multiple small holes. Then members of the local community could pay to approach the cylinder, reach through one of the apertures and flick the Bean. Men could see how it felt. Women could do it in public. It would be great. I think I might write to him about it.

Micro-Theory 2: Tesco Spires

You’re driving along a busy dual carriageway. All you can see to either side are dusty trees and high palisades of fencing. Then, just for a moment, you see the shape of a church spire appear and disappear between the trees. And somehow you’re reassured by that – even though you’ll never know the name of the church or go inside it. You’re reassured, perhaps, by the thought that there’s still a rural England out there, a land of quiet spinneys and village greens, the town hall and the war memorial, Easter Egg hunts and home-made jams – and so forth. The only problem is that what you saw wasn’t a church: it was a Tesco Superstore, an out-of-town retail outlet with the same vast acreage and strip-lit aisles as Asda or Sainsbury’s. The difference with Tesco is that they plonk a super-structure on top of their store which is a sort of bastard amalgamation of clock tower, church spire and oast house, complete with picturesque weather-vane. Tesco is, I believe, the only supermarket which seeks to appropriate the traditional iconography of the village green in this way. And while Tesco is certainly not the only greedy supermarket out there, it is, as far as I know, the only supermarket which seeks to disguise the familiar process of draining money away from the town centre by subliminally evoking our collective memory of the same world which they’re helping to destroy, and supplanting themselves there as an empty, trashy surrogate.

A Song of Chips and Gravy

*This image was kindly created for me by my brother-in-law, as I don't have Photoshop. I was only asking for something simple, something deliberately crap, but this actually looks as good as the HBO publicity shots - thus showing up the shittiness of this joke. Thanks, James.

Click to read more ...

Micro-Theory 1: Plainsong.

God, you’d think, was born in the minds of man. But something has made me think otherwise. You see, I’ve recently been using a sort of rubbish circular singing (a combination of mantra with cod-Gregorian chant) to help our baby get through his teething pain, and it occurred to me, as I sat there droning away, that our awareness of a spirit or soul may have been conceived out of such verbal play. Making noises like these feels strangely old, and we have surely been making them since we were living in caves. Imagine how different these noises sounded echoing within a cave to how they did on the plain or in the woods. Indeed, the cave is the antecedent of the church: a locus of power which attains to this power by its capacity to echo and reveal the inchoate, inarticulate realm of man’s spirit, his yearning and supplication. Of course, the mouth is a kind of cave too, and it is as a well of echoes that this transformation occurs; that a thought makes the metempsychotic journey from disembodied essence to embodied sound. Perhaps this is how our awareness of a soul evolved: by tracing the physical manifestation of the defining attribute of our humanity, our speech, to its origin.