Anyone who’s made prank calls before the invention of 141 knows the most that happened when the sucker on the other side caught on was a big, fat “fuck off.” But there were always those rare times you’d manage to pull it off without anyone catching on. Last week that happened: Someone gave interviews to foreign radio stations passing themselves off as Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Posts Tagged ‘Brazil’
CHASING LULA
CRACKLING SCULPTURES
If it’s possible to make some humans look like grotesque pigs with the help of plastic surgery, why shouldn’t we do it the other way around and turn pigs into grotesque humans? Brazilian artist Zé Carlos Garcia constructs such things, along with super-insects, four-legged animals with wings, Carnival trucks, and a whole bunch of other things.
Brazilians are Spain’s favourite treat
Brazil’s main export to the rest of the world is beautiful women, literally. According to the people at APRAMP (Asociación para la Prevención, Reinserción y Atención de la Mujer Prostituida, which you probably don’t need to speak anything other than English in order to get the jist of), in 2008 more Brazilians worked as prostitutes in Spain than from any other Latin American country. Those girls with perfect skin and cornrows that all the tourists think are from Nigeria? Nuh-uh. Wrong.
São Paulo - What’s happening outside our window
Two months ago, on Easter night, 800 families took advantage of Jesus’s rebirth and the predictable laziness of Brazilian police during all holidays to invade and take up residence in this property that’s been abandoned for more than 15 years. Now eight vehicles from the military police and a fire truck are parked in front of the building. There are also two trucks employed to “help” move out the inhabitants.
Brazil - After the floods
I went back to Maranhão, one of many cities that had been devastated by floods last month, to survey the progress after the damage. The waters that were once nearly up to roofs have almost totally receded, leaving a huge amount of toxic mud that has dried in the harsh tropical sun and is now blowing around in the air. The pools of water that are still left around town are full of fish, including piranha. Here is a photo of a girl, bleeding from a piranha bite, showing off the fish that bit her. She took it home, fried it in coconut oil, and ate it. Read more »
Brazil Issue extras: Literary
This month’s brain food mostly concerns: Nato, squat parties, graffiti, misery, humour, drawings, biography, philosophy and the significance of the goat in black magic. Read more »
Brazil - Catastrophic floods…meh
Right now I’m in Maranhão, in Northeastern Brazil, in the middle of an annihilation station of a flood that has left 300,000 people homeless. I spent yesterday afternoon cruising around in a boat through the flooded streets of Trizileda de Vale, a town that is now 90 percent underwater. I expected to see all of this sadness and misery–and it is pretty sad to see all of these people losing their homes–but the surreal thing about it all is that people are just walking around normally through the streets, all la-la-la with water up to their chests. There are people drinking cachaça, couples holding hands, people fishing, doing laundry. And every house that is more than one story high still has people living in it. Read more »
The international conference of cool
This month is an important one for trendsetters like me as the annual Google Zeitgeist Conference is held in Hertfordshire. Prince Charles, Nicolas Sarkozy, Peter Mandelson and, it’s fair to assume, all the other most switched-on trendsetters (Dov Charney, Cobrasnake, and this guy natch) are all meeting up to discuss what’s in and what’s out. Obviously we were totally pissed not to be invited, it’s practically a Dos and Don’ts festival after all, but we’re still really pleased that the guys in power are facing up to the significance of staying on-trend. This is what we anticipate them discussing over these two fateful days. Read more »
