Shanghai # 2

Millions of people running to the city centre each morning, hold their breath for a moment, then the moment's gone and off they go again. Gigantic TV screens show goods to buy, if someone could just switch the channel there would be images of thousands of Buddhist monks being beaten by the army not so far away from here. Everything is alright. The typhoon has weakened and turned into a tropical storm and, apart from the heat and the moisture which is almost unbearable and the frenetic traffic, everything seems quite calm. Suited Caucasians pass by, bums and small time merchants block your way, cyclists cut you off in true Chinese fashion. The city regain control after a close escape from total disaster and as we walk towards The Bund between the skyscrapers and the sick yellow sky I wonder what would happen if! Had they authorities moved all 15 millions or so citizens into a safe place and the worst typhoon of the century had stroke viciously leaving nothing on its way, who would have cried for this place? Apart from the corporations, that is!

(photo by Kate)

Shanghai

There's this city, where nothing ever ends. It just goes on forever in circles, a labyrinth, not a cm of space wasted. The city is an example of human failure or people's lack of coherence and managing of space. Your neck hurts from trying to find the horizon, the end of the skyscrapers, the start of a storm, a dawn that is struggling to find the way out of the buildings. The Chinese obsession with the 'bad spirits' that can only walk on earth in a straight row gave way for the Western obsession with modernity whose monstrous architecture flooded the city worse than a tropical storm.
Yet, if you look close enough you can clearly see how nature, no matter how oppressed by concrete it is, always comes back and the Chinese mastery of creating harmony finds its way even on this nightmarish place. There are plants bursting along the highways, small - almost tropical - parks in the midst of the traffic, a garden that shuts out the noise and invites the visitor into a short oblivion from the anxiety that surrounds this puzzled place...

Bohemian Sunset

In downtown Mexico City thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and longlapeledjackets over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, some of them kneeling in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were rubble, with open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You had to jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was the ancient lake of the Aztec. You came out of the bar with your back to the wall and edged back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere. Hundreds of whores lined themselves along the dark and narrow streets and their sorrowful eyes gleamed at us in the night. We wandered in a frenzy and a dream. We ate beautiful steaks for forty-eight cents in a strange tiled Mexican cafeteria with generations of marimba musicians standing at one immense marimba -- also wandering singing guitarists, and old men on corners blowing trumpets. You went by the sour stink of pulque saloons; they gave you a water glass of cactus juice in there, two cents. Nothing stopped; the streets were alive all night. Beggars slept wrapped in advertising posters torn off fences. Whole families of them sat on the sidewalk, playing little flutes and chuckling in the night. Their bare feet stuck out, their dim candles burned, all Mexico was one vast Bohemian camp. On corners old women cut up the boiled heads of cows and wrapped morsels in tortillas and served them with hot sauce onnewspaper napkins. This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin- childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road. Dean walked through with his arms hanging zombie-like at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes gleaming, and conducted a ragged and holy tour that lasted till dawn in a field with a boy in a straw hat who laughed and chatted with us and wanted to play catch, for nothing ever ended.

(words by Jack Kerouac, photo by Vortex Bits)

Suburban Paranoia

He has a router and a table saw
and you won't believe what Mr. Sticha saw
There's poison underneath the sink of course
but there's also enough formaldehyde to choke a horse
What's he building in there?
What the hell is he building in there?
I heard he has an ex-wife in some place called Mayors Income, Tennessee
And he used to have a consulting business in Indonesia...
but what is he building in there?
What the hell is building in there?

He has no friends
But he gets a lot of mail
I'll bet he spent a little time in jail...
I heard he was up on the roof last night
Signaling with a flashlight
And what's that tune he's always whistling...
What's he building in there?
What's he building in there?

We have a right to know...

('What's he building?' by Tom Waits)

Life/After/God

'Sometimes I want to go to sleep and merge with the foggy world of dreams and not return to this, our real world. Sometimes I look back on my life and am surprised at the lack of kind things I have done. Sometimes I just feel that there must be another road that can be walked--away from this became--either against my will or by default.

Now--here is my secret:

I tell it to you with the openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God--that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.'

(Words by Douglas Coupland, photo by Stephan Houde)

Everyman's An Island

Wine's pouring like acid rain. J. looks at me all drunken eyes. She's trying to whisper something but never comes out. "You know I walked this road before..." she finally says. "It led me right here in the middle of nowhere, and if it wasn't for you I don't know what I would end up doing. All things are already discussed, same music has been played over and over again, films have bloodied our eyes and books, who really needs them anymore. Here we at the edge of the world. A step before the abyss. What keeps us in one peace, I really wanna know. Most of the people are hanging on by ignorance (a bonafide advantage nowadays). Would it be too naive to ask you what gets you up in the morning?"
"Curiosity. I want to see future! I can't let go, there must be something there in the distance worth waiting for. Sometimes meaning lies where you don't see it, right in your face, in trivial things, looks, gestures, a change of weather, a thunder, a storm..."
"Who do you think you are, Homer, the blind poet?"
"Probably the cartoon character but that's irrelevant. You ridicule our conversation."
"I'm sorry to say that I'm probably up to here with abstraction. I want definite answers."
"There's no definite thing when you can't predict much really. Think about it! Let's say that you've been given the gift of seeing into the future. What an awful gift! I'd slice my wrists without remorse. Total Knowledge? Fuck it! It's the learning process that keeps us in one peace"

(photo by Rui P.)

Trading Cities

n Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

(Words by Italo Calvino, photo by Marielito)