Nightclubs are hell (??)

This is not recent, but very good writing and food for thought. I share some of the guy's points - how many times haven't I felt out of place in a night club? who hasn't? - but I must say that, overall, I've had more good experiences than bad ones in night clubs. Three things are the norm though - 1) it sucks if you're not with friends 2) it sucks if you're not with money 3) 1 and 2 are invalid if you pull.

Anyway, enjoy.

Nightclubs are hell. What's cool or fun about a thumping, sweaty dungeon full of posing idiots?
Charlie Brooker
The Guardian, Monday August 13 2007
I went to a fashionable London nightclub on Saturday. Not the sort of sentence I get to write very often, because I enjoy nightclubs less than I enjoy eating wool. But a glamorous friend of mine was there to "do a PA", and she'd invited me and some curious friends along because we wanted to see precisely what "doing a PA" consists of. Turns out doing a public appearance largely entails sitting around drinking free champagne and generally just "being there".

Obviously, at 36, I was more than a decade older than almost everyone else, and subsequently may as well have been smeared head to toe with pus. People regarded me with a combination of pity and disgust. To complete the circuit, I spent the night wearing the expression of a man waking up to Christmas in a prison cell.

"I'm too old to enjoy this," I thought. And then remembered I've always felt this way about clubs. And I mean all clubs - from the cheesiest downmarket sickbucket to the coolest cutting-edge hark-at-us poncehole. I hated them when I was 19 and I hate them today. I just don't have to pretend any more.

I'm convinced no one actually likes clubs. It's a conspiracy. We've been told they're cool and fun; that only "saddoes" dislike them. And no one in our pathetic little pre-apocalyptic timebubble wants to be labelled "sad" - it's like being officially declared worthless by the state. So we muster a grin and go out on the town in our millions.

Clubs are despicable. Cramped, overpriced furnaces with sticky walls and the latest idiot theme tunes thumping through the humid air so loud you can't hold a conversation, just bellow inanities at megaphone-level. And since the smoking ban, the masking aroma of cigarette smoke has been replaced by the overbearing stench of crotch sweat and hair wax.

Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they "enjoy" clubbing. They don't. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.

Drugs render location meaningless. Neck enough ketamine and you could have the best night of your life squatting in a shed rolling corks across the floor. And no one's going to search you on the way in. Why bother with clubs?

"Because you might get a shag," is the usual response. Really? If that's the only way you can find a partner - preening and jigging about like a desperate animal - you shouldn't be attempting to breed in the first place. What's your next trick? Inventing fire? People like you are going to spin civilisation into reverse. You're a moron, and so is that haircut you're trying to impress. Any offspring you eventually blast out should be drowned in a pan before they can do any harm. Or open any more nightclubs.

Even if you somehow avoid reproducing, isn't it a lot of hard work for very little reward? Seven hours hopping about in a hellish, reverberating bunker in exchange for sharing 64 febrile, panting pelvic thrusts with someone who'll snore and dribble into your pillow till 11 o'clock in the morning, before waking up beside you with their hair in a mess, blinking like a dizzy cat and smelling vaguely like a ham baguette? Really, why bother? Why not just stay at home punching yourself in the face? Invite a few friends round and make a night of it. It'll be more fun than a club.

Anyway, back to Saturday night, and apart from the age gap, two other things stuck me. Firstly, everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety. I'd still secretly like to be them, of course, but at least these days I can temporarily erect a veneer of defensive, sneering superiority. I've progressed that far.

The second thing that struck me was frightening. They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that's all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs.

Surely this is a new development. Clubs have always been vapid and awful and boring and blah - but I can't remember clubbers documenting their every moment before. Not to this demented extent. It's not enough to pretend you're having fun in the club any more - you've got to pretend you're having fun in your Flickr gallery, and your friends' Flickr galleries. An unending exhibition in which a million terrified, try-too-hard imbeciles attempt to out-cool each other.

Mind you, since in about 20 years' time these same people will be standing waist-deep in skeletons, in an arid post-nuclear wasteland, clubbing each other to death in a fight for the last remaining glass of water, perhaps they're wise to enjoy these carefree moments while they last. Even if they're only pretending.

Tyler Durden

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JAuki07wiUo

INT. LOU'S TAVERN - BASEMENT - NIGHT

LOUD. An enormous CROWD of guys, including Jack and Bob,
stands around Tyler, who's in the center of the circle,
holding up his hands to quiet them...

TYLER
I look around... I look around and
see a lot of new faces.

An enthusiastic RUMBLE from the crowd.

TYLER
Shut up! Which means a lot of you
have been breaking the first two
rules of fight club.

A glum silence falls. Guys look at each other.

TYLER
I see in fight club the strongest and
smartest men who have ever lived --
an entire generation pumping gas and
waiting tables; or they're slaves
with white collars.
Advertisements have them chasing cars
and clothes, working jobs they hate
so they can buy shit they don't need.
We are the middle children of
history, with no purpose or place.
We have no great war, or great
depression. The great war is a
spiritual war. The great depression
is our lives. We were raised by
television to believe that we'd be
millionaires and movie gods and rock
stars -- but we won't. And we're
learning that fact. And we're very,
very pissed-off.

The crowd erupts into a DEAFENING CHORUS of agreement. Jack
looks at the blazing excitement in the eyes of the crowd.

TYLER
We are the quiet young men who listen
until it's time to decide.

Rethinking Facebook

Must-read food for thought from the Guardian Unlimited.

Best bits:

"does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk?"

"by his own admission, Thiel [a member of Facebook's board] is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer."

""Share" is Facebookspeak for "advertise". Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships."

"Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn't it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK's? Thiel and the rest have created their own country, a country of consumers."

"Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven't read Keats' Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don't want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It's free, it's easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it's called talking"

Imperdível

Entrevista de Oscar Niemeyer ao Paulo Henrique Amorim no Conversa Afiada.

Soros, Orwell, Rove...

Excellent discussion on political discourse and advertisement, and on manipulation of truth.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/george_soros/2007/11/from_popper_to_rove_and_back.html

Musings about the French language

I'm sitting in a self-service restaurant inside the boarding area of Roissy airport in Paris, on a connection from Belgium.

In front of me a sign reads "A L'epoque de Clement Ader". My limited French allows me to understand it is about an engineer from the turn of the (last) century. And it shows some things that happened at his time, such as "1905 - Les frères Wright parcourrent 38km en 38mn sur le Flyer III".

I am considering learning French. It is close to Portuguese and therefore might be easy. You must be touched by the way it sounds. Merci, fermè, non, allez, all sung with mouthful and lippy hisses, like in Marie Antoinette's court.

Plus Paris is an inspiring place and knowing French is really handful there. And France Football and L'Équipe are great papers.

And old French songs are très cool.

All right. Will start learning.

Authenticity

I have engaged on re-reading "On Writing Well" by william Zinsser, which I had taken a look at during universiity. Excellent book, a must-read for any prentense, amateur or wannabe writers like myself.

The book brings a series of commandments useful to any writer: avoid clatter; be authentic; be human. The last thing people need is a series of vague, long, unnecessary words that tell meaningless things.

There is also one powerful message in one of the earlier chapters: writing is not easy, It is hard, toiling, tense, and exasperating. Many people tend to think it is not, and therefore express the wish that they become writers "when they retire" - as if writing was a much less important profession than the others, as if anyone could become a proper writer at the flick of a finger.

I had not realized the power of that statement until a mundane event during dinner last night. I noticed that the starter I ordered was really good: a burrito made of bacon and aspargus. I thought, "hm, maybe next time I have a dinner at home I surprise my guests with this starter. Or, think about it, I can improve it, and make a prsociutto and aspargus burrito, with soy sauce..."

Stop. If you don't know me, I have never - ever - cooked a single meal that did not come out of the microwave or steam pot. Yet recently I have developed a sudden interest for cooking - some form of delirium which arose after watching too much Gordon Ramsay while in the UK. But who am I to think I can go on and create something nice to eat just because I had a whim of 'creativity'?

With writing is the same. Blogs accept anything (as a quick browse thorugh this one will show), but let's respect real writers. Non-fiction writing is a profession, a very difficult one. Fiction writing is a form of art, of craftmanship, and as any craftmanship it takes practice. Let us not fool ourselves that we are George Orwell. Or Will Zinsser.

So the blogger's challenge is to keep it real. Keep it authentic. Do whatever we do in life first, and when we write, let's not invent too much. Let's communicate. Let's be clear.

Anyway, just realized I had that moment of insight while eating an aspargus burrito in a self-proclaimed Argentine Steak House in Samara (interior of Russia), while a local singer went on, his guitar the only background, on a rendition of "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You" with a thick, nonchalant Russian accent.

Now talk about authenticity.

Planes

No. I'm not talking about my plans. It's really about airplanes.

First I talked to a friend these days (Michelle) who, recently, could not work for a full day, stuck first in an airplane and then in an airport because of bad weather.

It happened to me already, more than once actually, to get flight delays because of weather - especially early mornings going from São Paulo to Curitiba or Porto Alegre. Foggy cities are these - forget the stereotype of sunny beaches and bikini girls that is generally associated with the word Brazil. Porto Alegre, with its German/Italian descendants and its weather, is more like a suburb of London.

Anyway, as much as weather delays has bothered me in the past, I think it must happen so much more frequently in America, because of the "hubs". In South America, flights between small- to medium-sized cities are not frequent, so the majority of the flights are direct.

But in America (except for Southwest Airlines), all flights kind of converge to big airports first (the hubs, like Atlanta or Dallas) and then people connect to another small city. Like Michelle went from Miami to Little Rock via Dallas, which is a kind of a triangle in the map. Then, if the big hub has a problem, it is suddenly EVERYONE'S problem.

Here the delays are much more due to agressive targets of turnaround time set by the airlines. I've seen Gol, the low-cost carrier, land, let a full plane of people out, put another full plane of people in, and then takes off in SEVENTEEN minutes. Seriously. I've been told their target is 25 minutes, and their network is designed to that, but my POM classes taught me about variance in service time - and hence there are a lot of delays caused by late people, bags that don't fit as cabin luggage, wheelchaired guys, and so on.

Apart from the delays, Gol is pretty OK - I've flown easyjet in Europe and Gol is far better in my opinion. Though my friend Tim disagrees - a delay in a Gol flight he took made him miss an Europe connection and sleep in the Rio airport lounge for a couple of days.

Anyway, Gol has a general perception of being inferior to TAM (the other carrier), which I disagree - apart from the delays. Gol planes are newer and faster. Turnaround is faster. They have a great inflight magazine. Flights are 30% cheaper on average. I'm sending my Mom off on vacation to her native state in the Northeast in a Gol flight with no regrets.

Plus the stewardesses at Gol are hot and wear sexy clothes. Yoo-hoo.

(soundtrack - "What's happening brother", Marvin Gaye)

composition

i'm actually really cheery tonight.

Fight Test

Comprei o DVD do Flaming Lips e é muito legal.

"I don't know where the sunbeams end
and the starlights begin, it's all a mystery"....

Excuses, excuses, excuses

I dodged the sushi dinner!

Well I did not go, eventually. Things happened and I gave a lame excuse. Anyway.

I don't wanna sound like my sister's blog, but this has been typical of me these days. Avoiding my problems. I guess I arrived back to Latin America with a lot of plans and did not expect some things not to work out as I had thought, and saw myself with less energy to overcome obstacles than I thought I had.

Vague, I know. But I took some resolutions as to things that are not smooth in my life, that I will from now on try to put into practice. For the time being, let the following specific information be disclosed: I will look for an apartment more actively and I will finally finish an overdue project at work.

Soundtrack: "Summer soft" by Stevie Wonder.

Pedro the sushiman

Yes, I once took a sushiman course.

No, I cannot cook sushi.

Well, I wouldn't rule it out completely, I mean, I guess I remember the theory, but having not put it into practice for the past year-and-a-half makes a difference, I would say.

Here and there, I admit I have bragged a little more than I should've about my fish-slicing and rice-rolling abilities. It is a great bar talk and it draws the attention (and interest) of girls. Now, however, the magic has turned against the wizard - one of the persons I entertained with this metrosexual man-cook tale has actually invited me to a dinner in which I'm supposed to cook my own sushi... Deeper than that, I'm supposed to go and buy my own fresh fish! Oh Lord help me....

I might be making a needless drama because it is actually really easy to cook sushi and sashimi. I mean, to do it an acceptable level, of course. Please, invitees, do not expect anything like the fish market in Tsukiji (Tokyo) - but that is actually the best sushi in the planet so I might be putting the expectations too high. Let's say it should be better than the sushi they serve at regular self-service all-you-can-eat restaurants in São Paulo........

More updates to follow after the dinner.

A vacuum

I have been trying to find a reason to write again. Tough work as it already is to find subjects, I decided to ponder deeper, to search for something that would be a definite style: a pattern, something that would be elemental and definite of myself, like a piece of Peruvian fabric is so distinguishly recognizable as being Peruvian anywhere. That search, dear friends, is long and ardorous and I have not quite finished it.

I have experimented with football commenting a la chalkboards, which always enticed me and still do - especially David Pleat at The Guardian. However, they are much more fun to be thought about than written - it is long and dutiful. Plus it bores the readers in the long run.

Song lyrics have been tried as well, and they work very well when all the blogger wants to convey is his current mood. But they lack in creative spirit - I have to admit that many of the times I have published song lyrics I was just too lazy to type.

I have been thinking of writing about relationships - about my views on friendships, on work relationships, on romantic relationships, on family relationships, on aspects of relationships such as distance, dedication, absolute and relative care, and so forth. But after drafting a couple of times I gave up - relationships are more fitting when discussed in terms of fiction. So I may start short stories or a novel in a while.

But as of tonight, nothing new under the sun. Just a reminder that I am alive. And I'm gonna keep on trying till I reach the highest ground.

I feel a little spaced out

Ando meio desligado, como diriam os Mutantes. Eu tenho estado um pouco ocupado - "atucanado" como dizem em Porto Alegre. A tradução de atucanado, acho, é uma combinação de ocupado + incomodado com alguma coisa que não se sabe bem o que.
Até por isso não sei muito sobre o que escrever, afinal continuo ouvindo Portishead sem parar mas já escrevi sobre isso alguns dias atrás.

Então, pra refletir um pouco sobre como andam algumas coisas na minha vida, segue uma frase da Ellen deGeneres:

"Procrastination isn't the problem, it's the solution. So procrastinate now, dont put it off."

E fiquem também com alguns cirros no horizonte. Apenas nuvens. Onde está minha cabeça.

Bits of Buddha

Quem me conhece sabe que não sou muito místico ou religioso, mas meio que por impulso curioso aceitei o convite de minha amiga Laura pra acompanhá-la à visita da Lama Djordge Drolma ao Brasil.
Quem? Bom essa Lama é uma lama mesmo, tipo o Dalai Lama, mas mulher. É uma senhora suíça, de cabeça raspada e olhos bem azuis. Ela está no Brasil pra fazer uns acampamentos de meditação em Alto Paraíso de Goiás, troço bem hippie, sei lá, mas a princípio me pareceu uma boa oportunidade pra (1) encontrar a Laura e a Julia prima dela que são ótimas companhias (2) aprender um pouco sbre budismo que parece interessante, mas sem pretensão nenhuma de me converter ou coisa do tipo.
Não vou dizer que a companhia das meninas não tenha sido boa, mas a segunda parte me surpreendeu muito positivamente. Um tanto pelos preceitos do budismo - que basicamente te dizem pra levar uma vida melhor sem exigir muito em troca - e um outro tanto pela própria lama, que achei uma pessoa fantástica.
A lama falava em francês com uma tradutora riponga mas a mensagem parecia um pouco nebulosa pra mim - coisas como "se libertar do ciclo de vidas passadas", "se desvincular de identificações", "sentir os Bodhivatsas presentes no lugar", etc etc etc - mas ela falava de um jeito que não era um discurso pronto de padre na homilia. Não sei. Era estranho. Era sincero, era calmo, era sobre pequenas coisas do dia-a-dia que fazem sua vida melhor. Como dicas de meditação para o farol vermelho.
Fui falar com ela em inglês e ela me desarmou com a candura e empatia. Perguntei se para aceitar os ensinamentos dela eu tinha que acreditar em vidas passadas e participar em rituais - e se tem coisa que me afugenta de religiões são dogmas e rituais. Ela disse que pelo contrário, ela pouco se lixava no que eu acreditava desde que eu praticasse. Isso me tocou. Era tipo o padre falando que não precisava ir à missa ou ler a Bíblia desde que eu fizesse o que ele falava! E a lama ainda deu a entender que "rituais existem porque tem pessoas que precisam deles, mas se você não precisa deles não tem porque fazer"! Não é o máximo?
Enfim, ela me impressionou o suficiente pra voltar lá no dia seguinte, sem a Laura, e falar mais com ela sobre pequenas coisas da vida. Não acho que me converti mas definitivamente parei pra pensar - what the fuck have I been doing? Esses primeiros dois meses do ano têm sido de adaptação pra mim - ainda sem ritmo de trabalho, ainda sem casa, começando planos e não terminando, negligenciando pessoas que não deveria negligenciar, enfim, não sei se deixo transparecer mas não tem sido simples. Talvez o que eu precise é de um pouco de meditação e de reduzir a marcha um pouco.

Ah e li um resumo de "A República" de Platão no fim de semana. Muito bom. E tô finalmente quase acabando "On The Road" do Kerouac.