Keep it simple, keep it safe.

On first impressions, the breezy good cheer of most Brazilians seems at best misplaced and at worst mildly dangerous. By this, I mean that you actually worry for their mental health. Surely their reserves of optimism will be exhausted, you think, by contending with the daily round of insane driving, broken and piss-raddled pavements, staggeringly inane bureaucracy, painfully obvious inequality and thoroughly inedible snacks. Then, when they get home of an evening, they must also deal with the improbable laws of Brazilian physics whereby water either comes out of the tap too fast or not at all, a cupboard either won’t close or slams shut on your fingers and a wardrobe door either swings open without you touching it or falls off its hinges if you try and repair it (these examples are all drawn from personal experience).

The funny thing is, though, that Brazilians don’t lose their patience. They just keep on smiling. Worst of all, you even find yourself starting to agree with them; perhaps this or that irritation really isn’t worth bothering about. This is a pretty terrifying inversion of the natural order for an Englishman, because optimism, however small-scale and innocent seeming, threatens to undermine the perpetual whinging which is the cornerstone of our national identity. We whinged our way through Agincourt and Waterloo, we whinged our way through the Blitz, and there can be few who doubt that the Christian Martyrs whinged their way to the scaffold. Our empire, brief and bloody as it was, was an empire built on complaint and the consumption of hot, milky beverages. How, then, forsake it?

As it turns out, it’s really not that difficult. All you have to do is get up on Saturday morning, wander through the quiet sun splashed streets to your favourite café, order a pão na chapa (a bread roll slathered with butter and squished on the hotplate), watermelon juice and açai na tigela and break your fast in the most delicious and leisurely fashion as you watch the traders at the Saturday market chat and drink coffee and vaguely attend to setting up their stalls. This, then, is the perfect spot to reflect on why it is that Brazilians remain, in spite of enough irritations to unseat the reason of most Europeans, so sanguine.

The fact of the matter is that Brazilians actually like themselves – I know, I know: so weird. I’m not saying they’re blind to the faults of their country. But, on balance, they still come out in favour of it. They think it has the best beaches, the most beautiful women, the greatest football teams, the strongest cocktails, the dancingest samba and the wisest attitude towards the unsightly problem of work (the latter being summed up as ‘all in good time’). An indirect consequence of this nationalism is that Brazilians also seem inclined to like each other, and to tolerate each other’s foibles – hence the inability of the cupboards, plumbing and pavements to exercise them. Another decided benefit of this ability to like themselves is that it reduces their perception of lack: even the well-travelled and wealthy who have seen the bright lights and alluring plumbing of other countries don’t seem to spend as much time as we do pining after the next elusive, unattainable pleasure. 

This is why Brazilian tastes can seem narrow and repetitive to foreign eyes; they are content with a limited palate – with their corner cafés and bakeries, their caipirinhas and samba, their rituals of feijoada and churrascaria. The cafés are a particularly illustrative example of this blithe disposition. These little places are open daily from seven in the morning until 11 or 12 at night, and they’re always busy, with people popping in to buy cigarettes or ice cream or an água de coco, or sitting down to a meal or a snack. The secret of their popularity is that they offer good food at affordable prices. The menu is limited, and the same items are offered at nearly every one (which is why the waiters and waitresses generally don’t offer you a menu but expect you to know what you want).

Bearing in mind the simplicity and economy of these places, you might expect them to appeal only to those with less money. But that’s not the case. You see all kinds mixing in there: rich, perfumed women with faces like relief maps of the Andes; labourers in dust-stained jeans and flip-flops; businesspeople; a shy policeman in his bulletproof vest; rowdy students and school kids, old men in pressed shirts and slacks.

The cross-cultural appeal of these cafés says something about Brazilians. First and foremost, it shows that they are, at least on a cultural level, inherently resistant to globalisation. Yes, they do have McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, and they enjoy them. But they also appropriate and edit these global icons to suit their tastes – and the corporations are canny enough to allow this to happen. And yet, if you ever tried to take away from them their uniquely Brazilian pleasures – the feijoadas and churrascarias, corner cafés and bakeries –, you would have a revolution on your hands. That’s because these places and pastimes aren’t merely signifiers of national identity, they’re also symbols of what makes this nation special – its diversity, its lack of pretension and, above all, its faith in equality.

Perhaps Brazil is not as eclectic in its tastes as London or New York. But sometimes less choice is liberating. Provided the food is fresh and delicious, what have we to complain about, what have we to yearn after? On a broader level, Brazilian society is enriched by its relaxed and forgiving self-perception and, on the basis of a very rough quantitative assessment, people of broadly similar economic and social background are happier than their counterparts in the UK. And that can’t be bad.

Zombie Love.

There was an article in The Guardian a while ago wondering why Resident Evil Afterlife was doing so well at the box office despite its poor critical reception. This immediately merited a deluge of bitching in the comments about the supposed intellectual elitism of the journalist. The main gist of the rebuttal was that this is just a good pop corn movie, so can we please just enjoy it as such.

But I’m not sure our pleasure is as simple as that. Pleasure rarely is. Personally, I think that we love all things zombie because zombies are comforting, and the reason zombies are comforting is because they don’t have a subtext. Compare them with the other main monster groups: vampires are a metaphor for sex as death, werewolves are metaphors for our sublimated feral nature, aliens are a metaphor for otherness and Frankenstein’s monster is a metaphor for the hubris of Promethean ambition. Zombies, on the other hand, do precisely what it says on the tin (of zombies): they want to eat your brains, and they will follow you slowly and predictably and with surprising, almost endearing, patience in order to do so.

Sure, they can make us shriek if they lurch unexpectedly out of a doorway. But they also make us laugh. And if you get caught by a zombie, well, ultimately it’s your fault. You were too slow, or too cocky, or you were distracted by having sex. It’s as simple as that. And, in an age when we’re seriously afraid, of everything, a little simplicity, a little controlled fear presented to us in a safe and unambiguous package, can go a very long way.

Of course, every zombie needs someone who understands him. And that’s why God made Ash. 

New stuff.

I'm feeling a bit restless as I write this because I'm meant to be doing a dozen other things right now, most particularly arranging into some coherent form all my notes for a long project which I've been thinking about for the past (brief check) entirety of human history. However, I can also recognise that it's high time I put up some of the stuff I've been working on recently, because otherwise everyone in the world will get depressed, their marriages will collapse, their crops will fail, their cities will crumble to their very roots, leaving only the wind to howl through the mouldering precincts, intoning an ethereal 'WHY?'. All because of me. I can't have that on my conscience.

So, to wit, here are two new poems, 'The Lovers' and 'Counting Sheep', plus a story imaginatively titled Untitled Story, No. 4. I must say, I do feel like I've made some progress with these pieces and am largely satisfied with all of them - excepting Counting Sheep's title, which is rubbish. However, I can't think of a better one at the moment so ho and, indeed, hum. Oh yeah, if you look closely you'll also find a sample of some of the work I've been doing for M&C Saatchi over the last few months. More of that will be posted when the work itself has gone live. Now, go forth and sound the splendid trumpets of your passion. Or, to put it another way, have a nice day.

Questions of Travel.

I never heard of Elizabeth Bishop until this morning, when I listened to Andrew Motion's brilliant essay on her poem 'Questions of Travel' in his series The Path and The Poem. I wanted to paste it up here because it's the best poem about Brazil I've yet read. It captures absolutely the simultaneously enchanting and frustrating irregularities of the lifestyle (e.g. the discordant clogs) and the country's mind-bending natural beauty (the cloud-swaddled mountains and waterfalls remind me of approaching Ilha Grande by boat, during an afternoon storm, and the precise duration of a summer deluge is spot on; we are just now entering the season when you can almost set your watch by them). I also like her open, unanswered questions about why we succumb to the longing for other places (the programme reveals that the poet lived a determinedly itinerant life), and whether travel constitutes an a priori virtue or a form of escape. I also relished Motion's point about the poem espousing a view of the imagination as a positive force which requires mediation or correspondence with lived experience, with the mundane matter of existence; seen in the right way, i.e. with the eyes of the imagination, the mute phenomena are revealed as a wellspring of wonder and, as Motion puts it, 'a proof of life'. This reminds me of Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in County Wexford' and another wonderful poem, whose title I can't remember now (how I miss my books, entombed in a shed near Ipswich!), which somehow manages to find a harmony between his dream of 'a bue Cycladic dawn' and the soap suds in his Portrush sink. I also think that the likening of fireflies to bubbles in champagne, from another poem by Bishop, is incredibly exciting. Anyway, here's the poem with, below it, a link to Motion's radio essay (which will be taken down in six days and which does a much better job of describing the poem).

Questions of Travel

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

hurry too rapidly down to the sea,

and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops

makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,

turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.

--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,

aren't waterfalls yet,

in a quick age or so, as ages go here,

they probably will be.

But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,

the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,

slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life

in our bodies, we are determined to rush

to see the sun the other way around?

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,

inexplicable and impenetrable,

at any view,

instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh, must we dream our dreams

and have them, too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity

not to have seen the trees along this road,

really exaggerated in their beauty,

not to have seen them gesturing

like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.

--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard

the sad, two-noted, wooden tune

of disparate wooden clogs

carelessly clacking over

a grease-stained filling-station floor.

(In another country the clogs would all be tested.

Each pair there would have identical pitch.)

--A pity not to have heard

the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird

who sings above the broken gasoline pump

in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:

three towers, five silver crosses.

--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,

blurr'dly and inconclusively,

on what connection can exist for centuries

between the crudest wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.

--Never to have studied history in

the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.

--And never to have had to listen to rain

so much like politicians' speeches:

two hours of unrelenting oratory

and then a sudden golden silence

in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?"

Andrew Motion Essay from The Path and the Poem

http://bbc.in/c5kSIR

Photo Essay.

To offset yesterday's ridiculously long entry, here’s a text-light ramble based on some of the weirder things I've seen round Sao Paulo of late. Sorry for the picture quality – my phone is absolute dog droppings.

First things first, here’s a photo from our friend’s balcony taken just before our joint birthday/housewarming party.

She’s up on the 18^th floor and the view below is of the close-packed mausoleums which make up the Necropolo de Sao Paulo. Each mausoleum extends downwards about thirty feet with three or four tiers for coffins; space is a premium here in SP, so you build upwards for the living and downwards for the dead. I once saw some unspecified event taking place there at night from up on this balcony, some vigil or internment by candlelight, the flickering light of which was swamped within the hundreds of metres of darkness and tombs stretching off in every direction; it made me feel like getting out my Cure albums. Behind the cemetery you can see Vila Madalena sloping upwards to the horizon. If stared at for long enough, this view starts to feel like that bit in Inception where the street slowly curves up and tilts over your head. At least, it does for me.

In the foreground is a can of Devassa beer, with its current ad campaign offering the chance for four lucky young men (I'm not being sexist here - that's what the copy specifies) to go to L.A. and meet Paris Hilton if they dial the number and hear her voice; losers only hear their dignity sobbing and self-harming at the other end. Employing Paris Hilton for this campaign is a wonderfully backhanded compliment because ‘devassa’ is slang for ‘slapper’ and the strapline for the beer is ‘bem loura’, which translates as ‘well blond’, with the derogatory double meaning present in the original language. Thus, in addition to her numerous high-profile campaigns on the international stage for moral decency and the public good (which include taking legal action to allow public distribution of her sex tape only on the condition that she received a percentage of the profits), Ms. Hilton can also congratulate herself for striking a blow for feminism right here in Brazil. 

Moving on, the next shot is of a wedding dress shop near where we live. They routinely feature in their windows the nastiest wedding dresses my wife or I have ever seen. One had a v-shaped décolletage (I know this word because I am a pervert) which plunged down all the way to the navel. Another presented a woman holding a bouquet of brown and pink flowers roughly the same shape, size and density as a football, which may have been because it was the World Cup at the time.

The dress featured here attracted our attention not simply because of the dress (though it is lovely), but because of the mannequin’s suspiciously powerful arms and the wonderful way the dresser has made the mannequin look completely gormless. You are in love. She’s your fiancé. It’s OK, you don't need to deny it. I love her too.

Here is a photo of another window display, this time of a sex shop down our street.

I don’t want you to think that we live in Sodom and Gomorrah, though. It’s actually very posh where we live. I mean, this shop is actually opposite a very popular children’s nursery, so you can rest assured that it’s a thoroughly wholesome area. Incidentally, this is by far the least shocking item in the window, so I don’t know how parents explain it to their kids. Presumably they say it’s a fancy dress shop for mummies and daddies and then bundle them into the car as quickly as possible before they can ask any more questions/start screaming at the lady in the crotchless nurse's uniform. Anyway, I know that the moment you finish reading this you'll all be pestering me to place an order on your behalf for your very own thong + bow tie + Mickey Mouse ears combo, but can I please ask that you BE PATIENT: the demand for this item is off the hook. I’ve been going in there everyday for the past six weeks to see if mine's arrived, but they just keep giving me that regretful, slow head-shake like they did when J. R. Hartley went into that bookshop to ask if they had a copy of Fly-Fishing by J.R. Hartley. (He was such an egomaniac, though, right? I mean, browse some other books or something while you're in there. I hear they publish new books all the time - you should check them out.)

But I digress. The next photo is from a posh supermarket, showing that it’s not all squalor in my life: the ratio of squalor to inexplicable is in fact steady at around 90% to 10%. 

So, this is a box of chocolates. The chocolate is called ‘Language of the Cat’. Assuming that the title alone might not be enough to tempt you, the designer has kindly photoshopped the head of a stuffed kitten onto the cover. Because the lady loves stuffed kittens.

Finally, because I like to end on a note of mystery like I’m a sort of modern Count of Monte Cristo, here is a photo of a storm drain. Faintly arousing, no?