NEW WAVE.

OSGEMEOS (the twins)

I often come back to this quote from an interview with superstar, São Paulo-based graffiti artists OSGEMEOS, which appeared in Trip magazine back in July 2013. It seems to me to be the best way of teleporting yourself into an understanding of how ordinary people live in São Paulo and how, against all odds, they find something magical in the rhythms of this vast, dirty, mind-assaulting city.

'Uma das coisas mais legais daqui é que não tem praia. Faz a gente pegar outros tipos de onda. E aprender a surfar nelas, todo dia.' ('One of the best things here is that there's no beach. That means people have to find other kinds of waves – and learn how to surf on them, everyday.')

Here's another photo of them from back in the day, before they got into graffiti and were among Brazil's first ever B-Boys, hanging out with all the rough kids at São Bento Metro and getting their auntie to add Nike swooshes to their trainers because they hadn't started selling real ones...

Your Grand Passion.

Here's another interesting thing. I know a fellow whose surname is Paixão. In Portuguese, anything with the suffix ~ão usually indicates something big (so a high-chair is a cadeirão, literally a big cadeira, or chair), just as ~inha usually refers to something small (garrafa is bottle, so a little bottle is a garrafinha). It occurred to me, then, that Paixão might mean 'big passion' and asked my friend as much. He said that is indeed what it means, and that it comes from the tradition observed in the state of Minas Gerais which holds that, if you have a son born on Good Friday, his surname, and the surname of all his offspring, should be Paixão - the passion. This is what happened to his grandfather: he was born into a family called Da Silva, but from the day of his birth he carried a different surname to the rest of them. Apparently, the tradition is not at all well-known outside Minas Gerais, so down here in secular São Paulo, everyone assumes my friend is boasting about how he's such a great lover-man with such a great big passion.

That last bit isn't true, I just made it up to create a punch-line for the story. I'm not sure how i feel about it. What do you think, does it work?

Spies Like Us.

The best thing about this early interview with John le Carré is not that he denied having been a spy, but that the interviewer, Malcolm Muggeridge, almost certainly knew he was going to deny it before he asked him the question, because Muggeridge himself worked in spying for the British. Indeed, it is a young Muggeridge whom you find showing up in Wodehouse's letters as the charming young embassy functionary charged with assisting the couple through their tricky rehabilitation as British citizens after their sojourn in Berlin. At the same time, unbeknownst to the Wodehouses, Muggeridge was observing the pair to assess whether they were, indeed, traitors. His ultimate conclusion that they weren't played a significant role in the British government deciding to leave the Wodehouses alone. And there he is, twenty years later, talking to another ex-spy, each of them happily operating on one level while both of them, it's pretty reasonable to assume, remain aware of the underlying reality. You can't help but be a little bit impressed by that. Or at least, I can't. Anyway, here's the interview. It's well worth a look. http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12208.shtml

Notes From A Road Trip.

Exactly what it says on the label: the mental overspill from a whole heap of driving, toddler-wrangling, sleep deprivation and, dare I say it, fun.

Click to read more ...

Galadriel's Choice.

Scary GaladrielYou know that bit in LOTR when Frodo offers Galadriel the ring and she thinks about it a bit and then goes all scary and then gets all sad and normal again before saying, 'No, Galadriel will fade and go into the West'? First of all, it's a bit Craig David to refer to herself in the third person like that. Second, I've come to realise this is the defining metaphor for growing old. Here she is being offered everything she could ever conceivably want: power, immortality, a life without fear. However, knowing as she does that she can't make the selfish choice without corrupting herself or the sacred balance of the universe, yadda-yadda-yadda, she says no. And that's just like getting old. Sure, you can be a dick about it and cling onto the dream of your youth, when you were amazingly wonderful and important, if only to yourself. But that, as Sauron learned the hard way, does not get you invited to Elrond's birthday party. Alternatively, you can be unselfish and let the natural course of things diminish you gradually, without eradicating whatever it is you still believe in. This is probably how it feels to be a cliff: you stand there every day getting eroded, and after a while you're pretty much unrecognisable even to yourself – but you're still a cliff. There's a certain comfort in thoughts like these. And that's probably why I find myself – most often in the shower when I've noticed some new travesty inflicted by my body's ongoing attritional war with time, whispering to myself, 'No, Galadriel will fade and go into the West.'