Either/Or.

It’s a risky business, being a foreigner and presuming to comment on your host country. Not only is there the danger that any Brazilians I know will read this and exact grim reprisals (I’m a coward) – but also, and perhaps more importantly, who am I to pass judgement on the gigantic, complex world outside the window? Can I really pretend that I understand how it all fits together, if it fits at all – the Skol trucks passing in the sunlight, the crowds at the intersection, the helicopters buzzing towards Avenida Paulista and, beyond that, the interstates curving towards the horizon, the miles of beaches, the samba rising out of tin shacks to the stars, the great brown god of the Amazon, the high sierra? Then, of course, there's the fact that anything I say will seem like my definitive pronouncement, condemning or condoning everything, undermining the alternative perspectives which constantly suggest themselves, overlooking the myriad currents of influence and idea which comprise the mad and glorious whole. Indeed any single pronouncement is inherently unsuited to Brazil, since Brazil, I’ve come to realise, is ineffably plural and, not only plural, but specifically dual: it is a country defined by the contrast between extreme opposites, from sublime to ridiculous, rich to poor, beauty and horror. Accepting and embracing these contrasts is the secret to getting on with the place – otherwise it will drive you up the fucking wall.

The best analogy I can come up with to describe how it feels is that it’s like having an exciting new girlfriend who keeps punching you in the face and then hugging you.

Now, to illustrate my point, I could provide you with loads of examples – but one will suffice. It was such a ridiculous experience, yet it had such a happy outcome that it encapsulates perfectly this whole duality business and epitomises the essence of Brazil as I know it.

So, it was my birthday recently, and we decided to go out to a posh restaurant. I was a bit depressed and edgy when we got there, as I don’t like birthdays in general and I especially dislike my own birthday – all those people staring at you, touching you, humping your legs: horrible. Anyway, the restaurant soon assuaged my self-pity and delirium tremens because it was utterly beautiful, the food was excellent and the atmosphere, despite being a bit swanky, was really good. There was even a giant fig tree in the room. Here’s a picture of it: 

Everything continued swimmingly right through the starter, main course and saturnine aftermath, right up until it came time to pay. That was when I demurely wafted our debit card towards the waiter, who took it, studied it and then, with evident regret at the anguish-bomb he was about to detonate in my chest, informed me that they didn’t accept this type of card. The supreme irony of this moment was that I had very nearly brought our credit card out with me that night, thinking to be on the safe side in this strange and posh new land, but decided against it because our debit card had never given us any problems before then.

But this was no time for irony, people. It was a time for action, specifically the action of finding a cash machine. So, I stood up, kissed my wife farewell (mentioning something about being ‘some time’) and disappeared into the night.

It all seemed pretty simple as I set out: I would follow the waiter’s directions to the nearest cash point for our particular bank, withdraw the needful and return to a hero’s welcome. However, concealed within the phrase ‘our particular bank’ is the maggot in the apple and the pooh-pooh in the sandpit. The problem is that, on account of this being Brazil, the banks have not elected to provide cash points which communicate with the cards of any other banks. Living somewhere sane, you find this strange. Why don’t the banks just get together, agree on a standard operating system (the ones in the UK run off Windows XP, for example) and rake in the profits that will follow from more people being able to withdraw more money, spend more money and get into more debt? No, no, no! SILLY RABBIT. That would be logical, efficient and profitable which, as we all know, are the three deadly sins of modern banking.  

With it being the case that I had to find not just any cash point, but a cash point for our particular bank, my expedition (and make no mistake, it was an expedition) first of all took me past one, two, three, four other banks which in any other country I could have used to access my money. I didn’t mind, though. I had confidence in the waiter. I knew that soon enough I would come to the right bank, the promised land, the sleepless beacon of hope where our money slept and dreamt little piles of interest during the night. Except I never found it. The directions I had didn’t seem to be right, or I had misunderstood them, because after ten minutes’ walk there still wasn’t an Itau (this being the name of our bank) in sight. However, there was a petrol station. Perhaps I was saved! Petrol stations here often have a 24Horas cash machine inside, these being the only exception to the non-cooperation policy of the banks which provide cross-platform coverage for most cards. Except, when I went in, there wasn’t one there. Bugger.

I stopped and pondered what to do. The night was hot, I was dressed mostly in Spandex and chafing was becoming a problem, so I decided to go back the way I came and ask for some directions. I stopped and asked a parking lot attendant where the nearest Itau was. He pointed me over the road. This, evidently, was the one I had missed. It was a weird, fancy Itau with gold doors. It was also locked. There was an employee on the steps. I asked him what was going on. He said the bank was shut. I considered kicking him in the face, but decided instead to ask where there was another Itau. He pointed down the road, in the opposite direction to the one I had originally gone, a direction which would take me over the crossroads near the restaurant and into a strange new world. I went in that direction. After another five minutes of walking, I saw the bank. Feeling excitement mount within me like soda bubbles, I moved to go inside.

As I was walking up the steps, another guy coming from the opposite direction joined me. We struggled with the card-reader by the door, eventually getting it to admit us and developing an unlikely, buddy-movie kind of bond in the process. I felt a surge of joy as the air-conditioned, electrically toasted air of the little ante-room with all the cash machines in it wafted over me. It smelt like victory. It wasn’t. As we moved inside, we both realised at more or less the same moment that there was something wrong with the cash machines. They all looked a little too dark. They were, in fact, completely dark. They were switched off, one of them even had a recharging light on it (have you ever, ever seen a cash machine recharging before?), while another had a curt notice informing us that the cash machines were switched off between the hours of 10pm and 8am. It was precisely 10pm. I went outside with this guy, asking him if he perhaps knew there was another Itau. He told me what I had hoped he wouldn’t, which is that they would all be the same, all closed for the night. He suggested I find a 24Horas, but he didn’t know where there was one. I felt the bond between us wither and realised we would never make that buddy movie. At the same time, I was conscious of my wife waiting for me, so I hurried on into the dark. In my desperation, I tried one, then another, and another cash point from all the foreign banks which, in my heart of hearts, I knew would reject me like all the women I’ve ever loved. None of them worked. Some of them laughed at me and spat deposit envelopes over my feet.

By this point I was feeling a little desperate and upset. I’m a repressed, bourgeois Englishman, after all: the prospect of not being able to pay the bill in an expensive restaurant fills me with a primal terror. I calmed my nerves, gathered my wits and levelled my head (and dabbed my wrists with a little restorative essence of lavender). Then I asked a cab driver near the restaurant if he knew where there was a 24Horas. He pointed back down the original road and I resisted the urge to weep and say, ‘PROMISE YOU’RE NOT BULLSHITTING.’ He carried on to explain that there was one at the petrol station. Of course, I already knew there wasn’t one at the petrol station, as I had been there already. But by this time I just wanted to go. Once again due to being English, I went in the direction he’d suggested, even though I knew he was wrong. I passed the many closed and inhospitable banks and went into the petrol station. As I had thought, no cash machine. I asked the counter guy where there was a 24Horas, and he said at the next petrol station, and pointed further up the road – so the taxi driver had been right. I mentally apologised to him and left in that direction. When I got to the second petrol station and went inside, I was delighted and terrified to see that there was indeed a 24Horas there. I was terrified because I could not quite bring myself to believe this would be the end of my nightmare. What if it was Out of Order? What if it didn’t have any money in it? With considerable trepidation, I approached and inserted my card (into her…No, no, this is not that kind of story).

The machine thought about it, emitted a whirring from deep within its innards and popped up the screen asking for my pin. I did as requested (by this point I would have bought it a fish supper and taken it dancing if it had asked me) and everything seemed to be going well. But then disaster struck: an alert popped up saying that, in the interests of security, my bank’s customers would only be permitted to withdraw R$100 (roughly £35) between the hours of 10 and 8. The bill for the meal was three times that. Desperate, thinking that some money was better than none, I agreed, pushed the relevant buttons, got my hundred. Ever hopeful, I put the card in again. Perhaps, I thought, the machine only mentioned this condition as a suggestion for how to behave, rather than a rule per se; perhaps customers would be allowed to withdraw R$100 three or four or as many times as they liked if they chose. But no. I was presented with an insulting red alert screen and my card was vomited back out at me. I went outside feeling very dishevelled. It was warm. My Spandex felt like fire. I could not go on. I called my wife, explained the situation and we agreed that I’d come back to the restaurant and offer myself as a sacrifice to the management.

I arrived back at the table ten minutes later, enraged, exhausted and limp as a dish cloth. I slumped into the chair which the waiter had rather unctuously pulled out for me. I was hot and wanted to take my jacket (Spandex) off. I closed my eyes and tried to think how we would negotiate the tricky subject of our inability to pay using my woeful Portuguese. My wife stroked my hand, possibly to judge how much meat they’d get out of me. A moment later there was a flash of light from behind me. I tried to ignore it, but the light got brighter, and still brighter. I turned to see what it could be and was presented with the vision of a small thermite explosion in a slice of cake approaching me, held aloft as high as possible to attract the attention of all the other diners by our beaming and, curse him, utterly lovely waiter. It was a birthday cake, you see, and there was also champagne and artesanal cachaça, the ubiquitous sugarcane liquor of Brazil, and two glasses, and everyone was smiling at me.

I was furious! How dare these people inundate me with kindness while I was trying to hate and blame them for the awful humiliation I was still anticipating. To my left, I could see my wife desperately trying not to laugh as I sat there fuming by the happy glow of the roman candle in the birthday cake. It was like being a toddler again, wanting to cry but knowing you had nothing to cry about and that crying would only make everyone laugh at you more. I knew that the proper response would have been to laugh and show gratitude, but knowing this was the proper thing to do made it impossible for me to do it. I glowered at my shoes, refusing to meet the eyes of the other diners sitting nearby, smiling encouragingly while I defied them through sheer force of will to say anything or start singing (there’s an extremely embarrassing birthday song used here in Brazil, which gets louder and louder as everyone, in the spirit of fun, joins in – if this had happened, I would have stabbed myself in the face). The waiters, who had all gathered nearby, possibly to add a barbershop quartet to the proceedings, shuffled around a bit, obviously wanting to help this strangely melancholic gringo, and concerned that they had offended me in some way. Very slowly, thanks to the tender (or tenderising?) ministrations of my wife and some of the cachaça, I calmed down.

When the other diners had returned to their meals and my pulse had returned to normal, I caught the eye of the maître-d’ for our section of the restaurant and brokenly, feebly, explained our situation. I portrayed my wife and I as victims of fate, beaten down by the cruel machinations of an indifferent cosmos. We were like him, I claimed: children of the flood cast out of the garden to wander the wilderness. We needed to band together now to survive these terrible times. It was our only hope. I continued in this vein for some five to ten minutes, long after the maître-d’ had, with the utmost courtesy and, more importantly, gentleness, explained that it was quite alright, sir, these things happen all the time, and he would be only too happy to send the bill to our home for payment in due course. This was the final nail in the coffin of my animosity. When the information finally sank in, I flopped back into my chair and realised that Brazil had done it once again: given me every reason to dislike the place and then one spectacular, transcendent reason to love it.

CODA

What I’m trying to say is that, however much this country frustrates you (and it does, a lot), the incredible generosity of spirit which you encounter not only in posh restaurants but also on street corners, in shops and entirely at random, always brings you round. We don’t have it in Europe anymore – instead we have call centres and customer collection points and personal injury lawsuits, which is a pity. 

Kevin Smith Is Unwell.

I’m worried abut Kevin Smith, you guys. I think he might be making the same film over and over again – and it wasn’t even that good in the first place. Correct me if I’m wrong, but here’s the formula: take one charmless no-hoper (who may well also be fat to create added autobiographical symmetry), give him a trite or predictable existential crisis (his wife has died – Jersey Girl; he hasn’t got enough money – Clerks 1, Clerks 2 and Zack and Miri Make A Porno; he loves a lesbian who doesn’t love him – Chasing Amy) and then get him together with a conveniently located, unfeasibly attractive girl who for some catastrophically inexplicable reason isn’t put off by his physical shortcomings and exhaustingly relentless talk of eating out her ass. This outcome represents both the resolution and ‘message’ of the film, because love, miraculous and painlessly obtained, enables the main guy to see that his shitty existence really isn’t so shitty after all.

It’s a weird message for a number of reasons. First and foremost the idea of this love-match coming into being, and then lasting, tests our credulity beyond breaking-point. Second, the inference that such a love match could ever exist in the real world will do no good and indeed potentially distort the outlook of the 14-25 year old males who comprise Smith’s target audience. If they believe even a tenth of what Smith’s films suggest about the ease with which love is attained, then it’s going to come as a bit of a shock when they discover that: a) smart, beautiful women don’t spend their thirties in shitty jobs in dead-end towns waiting for short, fat losers to get their shit together; b) women do not fall in love with men on the basis of them constantly talking about where and how they would like to fuck them; c) Smith’s self-serving, imaginatively foreclosed narcissism only works for him because he tapped, rather haplessly, into the lo-fi zeitgeist of the nineties.

But that’s not all. Smith’s films also say something fairly prescriptive and ultimately restrictive about men - namely that we’re all weak, priapic assholes who need women to redeem us. This is no doubt true on occasions, but not always – and it ignores the fact that, in the real world, the flow of redemption flows both ways and is called a relationship 

Then there’s the increasingly icky postulation of love as a redemptive force. In Clerks, the triumph of love at the end felt at least nominally earned through conflict between realistic (i.e. abysmally self-absorbed) characters and because its half-baked aesthetic imbued it with an ambiguity which seemed potentially meaningful (do we care if these people end up happy? Are we meant to?). Now, however, we can be under no illusions: the protagonist is our hero and the love which saves him is the only outcome which delivers any meaning. Hence we must now sit through the obligatory deus ex machina speech from the protagonist’s buddy (Randall, Jason Lee) about how you sometimes experience a moment which transforms everything, when some force comes along and changes your whole world, and which finally compels the sad sack to act.

Now, the overt analogy in these speeches is to romantic love, which the character is enjoined to accept from the smoking babe. But the miraculous, wholly implausible manifestation of secular love in Smith’s films is perhaps not merely an attempt to rationalise just how massively the director has lucked out in terms of his career: the miraculous appearance of redemptive love is also, I suspect, a clumsy metaphor for Smith’s own Catholicism. The director believes, I fear, that these sentimental denouements enable his films to work on two levels, overtly talking to the kids in a language they can understand (boobies! fellatio!) while subtextually placating his own conscience by spreading the word about the life-changing effect which REAL love (nudge, nudge, Jesus) can have.

Now, whether or not this is in fact true, I must point out here that I have no objection to the presence of Christian ideology in any film or art work. Done intelligently, with an assumed equality of intellect on the part of the audience, I love it (yay, Fellini!). What I object to is the way that Smith’s idea of love, whether romantic or divine, has completely supplanted the subversive appetite for questions and meaning which seemed to be present in Clerks and which endeared him to his fans. Of course, there is always a character arc of some kind for the protagonist, but it’s pretty token. We can tell the character doesn’t change or learn not just because in Clerks 2 we revisit Dante Hicks eleven years later and he hasn’t changed, but because this is the case in more or less all Smith’s films: we meet the same individual, more or less, in the same situation, more or less. Therefore, the ultimate message in Smith’s films is that love – which is neither earned nor understood, and which insinuates its way into one’s life like so many tears of Christ’s infinite mercy – is all you need wait for. This is a plastic and hollow pretence of meaning which actively undermines the genuine pursuit of truth or understanding, and if this is all that Smith’s philosophy has to offer – the redemption without the question, the subordination of free will to the immovable force – then it does not offer us very much.

Finally, this limitation of meaning is made all the more infuriating by the hypocrisy with which Smith seeks to conceal his mawkish sentimentality beneath a cloud of dick jokes. These gags are meant to persuade us that Smith is still one of us, rebellious and alternative. But, despite the fact that the jokes are often very good, the desperate distortion of the surface cannot help but draw our eye towards the yawning emptiness which lies beneath these characters and their paper-thin struggles. This is perhaps why my favourite Smith film is still Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back – because it’s entirely free from subtext.

There are, however, signs that things are changing and that Smith may finally be moving beyond his New Jersey comfort zone: the director recently released a buddy caper Cop Out and is currently filming a Gothic horror about Midwestern Fundamentalism gone wrong (Red State). Perhaps the demise of Miramax has something to do with it. Without the prop of the infamous fratboy studio and his heavyweight cronies (Tarentino, Rodriguez et al), Smith may finally be embarking on a new direction – and we wish him both a safe journey and a speedy recovery.  

Whilst We're On The Subject Of Religion.

P.S. Can't remember where I found this - happy to acknowledge source if anyone knows.

Latitude.

When I was in India, and young and stupid enough to believe any idea no matter how ridiculous, I was told a theory about religion which has nonetheless stayed with me ever since. The idea was that religions which evolve independently yet on the same line of latitude will often share fundamental similarities beyond the basic stuff common to all religions (do good things, don't do bad things). Now, this friend of mine was referring to similarities between Tibetan Buddhism and Native American religious beliefs at the time, but I think that you could usefully add others to this grouping – including Shintoism in Japan, Paganism in Europe (including Roman and Greek religions) and Hinduism in India. The fundamental similarity shared by these religions, and which I am using to justify lumping them together, is pantheism.

Pantheism can be convincingly argued to have derived directly from the latitude thesis. My thinking is this: there is an inherent plurality of phenomena associated with living in a temperate climate. We are surrounded by fields, woods, rivers, rocks, streams, lakes, animals, plants, berries, fruit. Therefore, the people who live in these environments naturally adopt a perspective which accommodates this plurality; they seek to placate a multitude of forces and conditions in order to sustain their lives. Over time, these forces and phenomena become storied and, ultimately, personified as gods – the god of the harvest, of light, of the trees, of war, of the river, of the household, the moon, the hearth. These practices then gradually harden into a complex system of ritual and belief, a religion. Hence we shape our religions to fit our environment.

But what of religions from adverse climates? What effect does this have? Well, the obvious conclusion is that environmental adversity leads to monotheism. Along those lines of latitude where extreme conditions were the norm, life depended on a series of either/or scenarios, such as whether the harvest took or the locusts came or the war was successful. On one side was life, on the other death. The austerity and fragility of this existence naturally lent itself to the anthropomorphism of a single deity, a deity who sat in judgement over the entire imaginable universe dispensing death or life, blessing or punishment. Life was so hard that an afterlife became the only way to rationalise the adversity, suffering and death of your loved ones. Out of this type of environment, then, stem all the Abrahamic religions – which is an interesting proposition, since it means that Europe’s predominant religious system of the last thousand or so years is effectively a surrogate from a harsher, less forgiving world.

However, one can also introduce to this geographical model other variables. For example, historic social relevance is a determining factor which might account for the endurance of certain religions and the demise of others. The first principle here is that religions live or die by their relevance to the particular society to which they minister; adding time into the equation raises the notion that societies change and therefore that the relevance of this or that religion to a society will vary. This accounts for the obsolescence of the Viking pantheon, for example, which didn’t endure because it was fundamentally a martial religion, i.e. it was shaped by the necessity of ensuring the survival of a fledgling society threatened by other young, warlike societies. By contrast, the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism, etc., all retain relevance because they have a message of compassion and moral guidance which concerns the self and which therefore remains relevant whatever the condition of society. 

Of course, it would be ludicrously easy to shoot this argument down with one or two well-chosen examples. I haven't, for example, considered Confucianism and Taoism because I don't know enough about them. Inuit religion, which hails from one of the most extreme latitudes on earth, is animist and therefore seems to contradict my thesis, as does African shamanism. The Ancient Egyptian religion, which developed within spitting distance of the Holy Land, boasted more gods than nearly all the other religions put together. And yet, for all its flaws (of which there are clearly many), I can't shake off the appeal held by this demarcation between the many gods of the green and diverse lands and the one god sitting in stern judgement among his deserts and white stone. Perhaps it's just the symmetry of the thing, I don't know. 

Cats and Flowers.

There is a florist the next road over. A Chinese family owns the shop and they all work there from time to time, but it’s most often the daughter you see. She’s about forty-five, extremely quiet and has that economy of gesture which shy people have. I go in there every Friday to buy a red rose for my wife. Yes, yes, very romantic. Of course, it sounds a lot less romantic when you realise that the giving of this rose commemorates the day on which I slaughtered her entire family. (It doesn’t really. Sorry about that.) Going to the florist is always a pleasure. The lady is so shy you half-suspect she’s having some complicated conversation with the flowers which you can’t quite hear, yet which you absorb through the moist green air. I also love the place because of the cats. There are always at least three of them there, although it’s not always easy to see them at first. You have to look. They might be on a shelf above the counter, snuggling up against the TV or stalking through the geraniums. Sometimes they’re curled up asleep on a spare chair or peeking out through the pale fingers of orchids. Sometimes they’re just picking delicately away at a bowl of biscuit. They’re all different types, long and short hair, snow white and tabby, and sometimes there are kittens. My favourite time to visit is when it’s not raining (which is not that often during the São Paulo summer), because that’s when the lady puts a spare cardboard box out on the pavement which the tabby loves to sleep in. If it’s sunny, he’ll doze there all day. If it’s cloudy, the box might be empty or he might be there in one of the little jumpers which the lady knits. Whenever he is there, passersby step quietly around him, because we all sense there’s something inviolable about a sleeping cat. I do occasionally try and give him a stroke when I’m walking out of there with my rose. He suffers the attention with regal hauteur until I wander off, feeling a little bit sad that I ever have to leave that quiet place given over entirely to cats and flowers and the unmarked passage of untroubled time.