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?

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.

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Three-Part Essay.

An inter-connected thought about a forthcoming 'festa junina' party, a Panorama special about the dark side of the World Cup and Brazil's most vulnerable people.

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Postcolonial Dictatorship Blues.

Updated on Saturday, February 1, 2014 at 10:01AM by Matt Phipps

Following yesterday's piece about the weekend’s protests against the World Cup, I decided to work up a piece about what I perceive to be an endemic lack of accountability in Brazilian culture, with some speculation as to how it arose.

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