New York was an extra push towards and left me drunk at the interstice, vibrating at the wrong frequency. It may be an exaggeration to say that something has changed in me; but I may have found a subtly different state of equilibrium finally facing the Promised Land. There was an added gravity to my return, and maybe it’s me living my own expectations like some child pretending that Disneyworld is magical and not a cynical fabrication fuelled on money, but it felt like, being mostly alone in a foreign city, I went through an initiation ritual that had been on hold (something that I avoided and abhorred most of my life, first instinctively, then politically), vaguely dangerous, soul-threatening, temporary dislodging of vital functions equivalent to going by myself to the woods, and unaided vanquishing the elements, the beasts and my own fears, to come back with a sharper sense of reality, fate and purpose. Yeah, right.

Coming back home I felt that I had stayed at the heart of the empire, the city of Atlantis, groomed after the image it has elaborated over itself, playground, prison and ark, compressed atlas where the unnatural approximation of printed letters gives spontaneous birth to new.

Events had occurred like in a series of patched dream sequences, thanks to my usual inability to experience things as I think I should, mostly detached, incredulous, blasé, environment mediated through an artificial channel, amplified by New York City’s hertzian landscape.

I couldn’t tell a difference between the genuine New York and its cinematic reconstruction, exaggeration of the real, the altitude and the attitude. It has either been swallowed by a most imposing fiction of a city or the fiction is the city. Or maybe it’s the price to pay to be a tourist (and an absent-minded one at that), chronically impaired by this form of daltonism, to always ramble in an intermediate-life state of looking, but not touching, paying for the privilege of the playground without the prison and the ark. But the prison could be seen at the edges, in the ideological angles of the architecture unrecordable by electronic equipment, trapped in the modular conformity of the Upper East Side that makes all life drain to lower surroundings, or crushed beneath the shadows of the black megalithic Financial District in a rainy Sunday afternoon, still like the undecaying body of a lost civilization, awed by its meaningless symbols of religious fervour unsure of the route to follow. And next to it, feeling displaced and inadequate in the 9/11 memorial church, I experienced first hand the clean-faced willing sacrifice of soul, spontaneous burst of a group of highschool students who sang in high-pitched honesty WE ARE AMERICA THE USA which caused one of their teachers to threaten red-eyed tears for witnessing such acritical and vain demonstration of patriotism. I was shocked and wondered, selfishly to be fair, if they thought I also had the right to be disturbed by the 9/11 attacks, or the Tiananmen Square Massacre for that matter.

I wonder how much has fiction influenced the city’s identity in feedback; from what it is to what it should be. Darwinistic, forgiving, familiar, spectacular, will the climbing mean anything to coming generations. Dead or equalized or guilty by lineage.

It was an unashamed mirror, where I could measure my insignificance against everyone else’s, bracing with its logical outcomes of universal affection and revulsion, simultaneously, disappointed that the Statue of Liberty was really far from the shore overlooking Manhattan at the 86^th floor of the Empire State Building, celebrating my birthday alone with hordes of other tourists carrying I heart NY t-shirts and sparkling eyes, successful kings like me, observing armies of people down below oblivious to our indifferent voyeurism, and yellow platoons of taxies manoeuvring for space and clientele, under the shadows of tolkienesque towers that signalled the exhaustion or End of Times at the sound of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Me broadcasting from the cradle of our civilization, spread terribly mundane, and somewhat relating to it, but not enough.

Because I was future-shocked, and looking from MoMA’s windows to the outside, surrounded by buildings that try to topple each other and seem to form a baroque, harlequin mega-structure with emerging properties not predicted by their architects or the sum of their parts, it got me thinking about fantasies of broken futures, where cities are composed of layers which depict social hierarchy, that are nothing else than very obvious visual metaphors that heroes can physically climb the social pyramid to start revolutions, or fall in disgrace given the impossibility of their quest. There are scaffolds everywhere around Manhattan, and sometimes they’re not even associated with buildings. Maybe someone’s discreetly laying the foundations for New York’s second level, and it won’t take much longer until there’s a Dean & DeLuca opening above the scaffolds, welcoming their successful bourgeois clientele who drink designer water bottles to celebrate the dawn of a new social paradigm. And then, their projected new Mole people-like subway system would make even more sense, and the city would confirm that all it is is a metaphor, a blueprint, reinstating and redefining the cosmic order in the image of the corporation, assimilating, processing, perfect.

In this scenario Chinatown, where I felt very foreign and a girl tried to sell me a beads necklace for one hundred dollars, would be the breeding ground of reluctant heroes or a specialized organ, perfectly co-opted quarter for an artificial habitat, fantastic garden of alienation, indigestible, untraceable and growing humbly informed by the city’s mythological heart, Times Square, which is grotesque, the bowels of a self-sustaining lie seen from the inside blown up to spectacular proportions, where signs are taken and processed ad infinitum in an upward spiral, like vomiting in reverse, a beautiful catastrophe, which probably looked worse after walking clueless for nearly two hours in the rain carrying my luggage, trying to find my hostel.

Which was a shithole in Hell’s Kitchen, but that only added texture to an otherwise bland experience, allowing me to claim hardship and feel more like a poor student rather than a privileged tourist staying at the Chelsea Hotel, the closest proxy of a castle for my kings, in which I stayed the first night to absorb what I could from the place where Kerouac wrote On the Road, Leonard Cohen got inspiration and Nancy Spungen got herself murdered, etc, etc.

I don’t think I absorbed much. But I managed to see the Kills, while checking-in, them stepping through the entrance to catch a cab, which became framed in my mind (certainly by posterior editing) as a perfectly choreographed scene for a movie, or a videoclip, like somehow, staying at the Chelsea and expecting a VH1 documentary-like confirmation that it was a hub for the acceptable kind of rock stars and seditionary artists, transformed them from regular people to extraordinary creatures, taller (well, they are), looking from above, unapproachable, confirming their lineage in the celestial family of rock’n’roll. It was, nonetheless, a frustrating sighting for not having tickets for their sold out concert in Williamsburg, like the rush of watching television with the head shoved inside the receiver and slightly epileptic from the bombardment of colour.

But trying to attend the concert would have been probably a disaster, since I managed to get lost in Brooklin in broad daylight and ended up in an orthodox jewish neighbourhood that had all the qualities of a Twilight Zone episode save the moral lesson or the outstanding twist, where everyone dressed exactly the same and where I was very clearly the only non-local.

So to feel again the cold, judgmental embrace of my tribe, I went to the New Museum where all the cool kids hung out, where I got blown away by the Generational: Younger Than Jesus exhibit, where AIDS Wolf are exposed as reactionary villains and we are exposed as worshipping the flimsiest of gods.

But to accept the ritual nature of my visit there was something that had to be done to confirm my passage into adulthood, in a dialectical fashion, an artefact to be retrieved to acknowledge not only the city’s mythology, but also my relation to it, and how it had come indirectly to be almost two decades ago. I’d rather believe it was some sort of sublimated religious impulse, as if on a pilgrimage paying an old promise to a saint, one made during childhood, and not just the reaction of an adult unable to grow up. I bought a Ninja Turtles action figure.

Se, à primeira vista, In The House evoca o universo encantatório do período victoriano – o seu excesso decorativo, o charme da colecção interminável, o fascínio insólito do gabinete de curiosidades –, seduzindo o visitante com promessas de um mundo maravilhoso e fantástico (como pano de fundo, leêm-se os diários da aventura de Darwin a bordo do Beagle), um segundo olhar desconstroi facilmente este apelo superficial: na realidade, a construção é precária, o coleccionismo resume-se a uma idiossincrasia e aquilo que se promete não se cumpre, deixando múltiplos problemas e paradoxos expostos e sem solução à vista. Do mobiliário ao papel de parede, dos bibelots aos instrumentos científicos, os objectos operam assumidamente no território do faux e do pastiche, substituindo-se o racional pelo sentimental e a densidade intelectual do lugar de trabalho científico pela frivolidade do kitsch, num cruzamento lúdico com referências do universo pop contemporâneo, materializadas como visual gags ou private jokes. Expurgado o objectivo didáctico da recriação histórica, o “gabinete” entra, inevitavelmente, em conflito com o meio envolvente – a biblioteca de uma faculdade, espaço por excelência de estudo e acesso ao conhecimento, cuja arquitectura é marcada pelo minimalimo e racionalidade da construção –, surgindo como um microcosmo absurdo e desajustado ao contexto local, um centro de desinformação onde, no limite, tudo vale.

 

              The victory here is that I did them both just over three hours.
 

Acabei de ter esta discussão com o Diogo, o meu ex-discípulo de 15 anos, que fez um estágio de Verão no meu laboratório:

Diogo- diz:

este foi o video mais "LAWL"  que eu vi na vida..

Nazi é o novo fluorescente. diz:

é bastante lawl

Nazi é o novo fluorescente. diz:

eu diria msm q chega a ser

Nazi é o novo fluorescente. diz:

LAHLZ

Diogo- diz:

lol

Nazi é o novo fluorescente. diz:

lol

Diogo- diz:

vocabulário novo mata

Diogo- diz:

eu acho que é lawlzeh

Nazi é o novo fluorescente. diz:

     touché.

A few months back, I was asked by a friend to design something to be printed on a tote bag to be handed out at a school congress. The theme was environment and health, and I was told that the organization favoured *ahem* bold statements. The initial design was the one on the left, but since the printing was limited to 6 colors, it was later changed to what's in the middle. The printed result is the one on the right.

After the Music. A legless grasshopper standing for its whole kind. The army of Allstars standing for nothing at all. After the cow and the crane. Displaced desert Xerox british piling up on cowboy hats and alcohol. After walking past the Black Coast. The sink draining water. (show tune singing) Going back to the crossroads the young man found a wild boar that was versed in several tongues and carried a series of scrolls from banished scholars outside of the System. It had flaming hairs and breathed sulphur and beneath the hairs were all kinds of tattoos from different parts of the world. Eyes were glowing. The boar unscrewed one of its fangs from where it took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and said in Atlantean: They will never take what it used to be. Burn that motherfucking bridge. The young man bowed and then dramatically made an obscene gesture with his hand.

 

  Me and other PhD students after having dinner with, huh, JAMES WATSON.