Then it was off to the airport bright and early the next morning. Onward to São Paulo, Brazil this time –and just in time to stop over there for my old Skull Ring brother Iggy Pop’s upcoming show.

As I drifted off to sleep in the First Class cabin (Scumbaggery has its perks!) on the south-bound night flight from NY, I was glad to finally be on my way home to Brazil, back to Rio and my girl and my kittens and my big black pet vultures roosting under the Jolly Roger flag on my roof.

The minute I got off the plane in São Paulo after a twelve hour red-eye flight, the summer heat of South America hit me in the head like a golden shower from an angry King-Kong. By the time I made it to the hotel that my girl’s friends had booked for me near the festival venue there, I was ready to draw the blinds, turn off the phone, turn on the AC and crash for the next ten hours — which is exactly what I
did.

The next day, I was awakened by my grinning Paulista cousin, Theo Castilho. He’d borrowed some girlfriend’s car and come to find me. We got in the car and drove through the most horrifying bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic known to man for hours and hours, struggling against the foul currents of that apocalyptic urban river of shit to get to the Sao Paulo Hilton where Iggy was staying to pick up our credentials and backstage passes for the next day’s show. Of course when we got there it was the usual Brazilian beurocratic cluster-fuck. Iggy, of course, was nowhere to be found. Smart guy.

Finally, credentials in hand, we battled our way back through the asphalt jungle of São Paulo highways and back streets, honking and lurching through the choking, smoking, bleeting motorized sheeple hordes of hell. Back at my hotel again, I was met by my girl Tali in the lobby.

“Where the fock you been? Do you got my pass for the show?” She hissed after a brief hug.

“I missed you too, baby!” I said as she greeted Cousin Theo with a kiss on the cheek.

She had just driven down from Rio with the friends who had reserved my room there. We took our leave of Cousin Theo and went upstairs to the room. We had to smoke cigarettes in the bathroom so as not to set off the smoke detector place in the middle of that horrible corporate cubicle. I’d already tried unscrewing the accursed surveillance instrument on my first night there — which only resulted in a call from the lobby and a knock at my door. Sometimes ya just can’t win.

Tali’s friends didn’t know it at the time they booked our rooms there, but the place could best be described as The Air Conditioned Nightmare Hotel. The Nightmare, it seems, is part of the Monopoly Board held by a creepy, faceless multi-national hotel chain called IBIZ. What a shit excuse for a hotel the Air Conditioned Nightmare turned out to be.

Like most profit-before-service reptilian enterprises, this hotel chain’s corporate strategy is inhuman and dehumanizing and soul-less at best. These modern new globalist hotel chains are an ugly modern day plague that seem to be spreading across Brazil along with the general cancer of Globalization that’s making the whole world sick. Their business strategy is to create a bland and “comfortable” sterile
artificial enviornment that caters to the lowest common denominator of middle-class bourgeois tastes and then charge abusive rates while effectively isolating their “guests” (ie: prisoners) from all local commerce and culture in order to hold them hostage in a shitty little Pre-Fab cookie-cutter limbo.

Like any would-be monopoly, they’re set up efficiently to exploit their victims mercilessly, charging more than double the local value for basic services and products. Not to mention the exorbitant room rate. What shit. And then you can’t even smoke a fucking cigarette in your own fucking room. To make matters worse, the windows don’t open in these stifling corporate jail cells! And just a couple of miles
away in downtown São Paulo I couldve gotten a much nicer, better-equipped hotel room with a fucking balcony overlooking a green plaza in a nice human enviornment for half the fucking price, right in the middle of everything and walking distance to shops, restaurants, whorehouses, the works.

But no. The ignorant exploited masses of middle-class, mind-controlled sheeple want to feel safe and protected from their-media-warped perception of the real world. They wanna be tucked away safe and sound in some reptilian fairy-tale pink pseudo-gringo air-conditioned bubble. They want fucking Disneyland. And now their brains are slowly turning to mush — just like their gringo neighbors to the north.

Well nevermind. At least I got a good rest there. My jet lag was zero by the time my girl showed up with a bag full of trouble and paranoia and accusations of infidelity to drop right in my lap within minutes of our happy reunion! At least I was well rested for all the upcoming drama. And if I hadda lay up in some corporate Air Conditioned hell for ten hours to get that rest after weeks of work and travel and
people, it was all for the best. Soon enough, I thought to myself, I’d be back home in Rio again, breathing the filthy polluted air of the filthy polluted real world of real people living real lives.

After a raging pre-dawn jealous tirade in which my girl – true to form- yelled and cursed at me so loudly she must have woken up half the other prisoners in that foul reptilian shit-hole, we finally kissed and made up sometime around dawn. Another sleepless night. Great! Feeling repentent perhaps for creating another ugly public scandal over essentially nothing, just some random chick she’d found a picture
of me with, she made it up to me by going off around 8 in the morning to hang with her friends, mercifully letting me to finally — you guessed it —  draw the blinds, turn off the phone, turn on the AC and crash for the next several hours — which is exactly what I did.

Beauty and The Beast

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The day after Halloween, the city seemed to casually shrug off its Satanic hangover and get right back down to the business of being the modern-day Babylon it is. The next few days in NYC were spent making the rounds of people, places and things there and getting reaquainted with my old home after all these years in happy exile.

To sum it all up, the recent visit to NYC was a good and satisfying trip all around. But after so many years away from the old home that was once the center of the universe to me and so many exiles, I find that I really like NYC a lot better now that I live and work in a kinder, more laid-back enviornment. Like the man said, “it’s a nice place to visit.”

Still, it was just like old times for the few days I was there, sharing a few brotherly moments with old friends like Jim Jarmusch, Gibby Haynes, Bonge and some of my other old NY cronies. As the days went by it became more and more like old home week. Even my fellow Ukrainian Gypsy transplant and Cigano Carioca, Eugene Hutz showed up in town with the rest of his band, Gogol Bordello, taking care of record company business and getting visas for their upcoming South American tour. It was real nice to see Eugene and Frankie from Gogol at my reading the next day. In the blink of a fly’s eye, NY was a non-stop whirlwind of people and activity.

But the main event, for Narcisa at least, was over in Brooklyn where I begrudgingly went limping across the bridge for yet another book signing and reading the night before my great escape from North America. By that point I think I was pretty much just glad to get the whole thing over with. Alotta people turned out for my final literary gasp of the year which, like most things in NY, went by in the wink of an eye. Mercifully perhaps, I barely even remember being there now.

This public reading shit is starting to run on Auto-pilot for me already. Big thanks and a big shout out to my old friend John Bloodclot of Cromag fame and Max G Morton, my co-readers. Also thanks to Eugene and Frankie from Gogol Bordello who showed up. Mixto, prala!! Also props to Kembra Pfahler, my gracious NY hostess and her glamorous sidekick, filmmaker, Bijoux Altamiro. Thanks as well to the notorious Gibby and company, and the good Dr. Bruce Paly, one of my oldest living friends who showed up out of nowhere. The thing even got a nice little write-up in the reptilio-spawned NY Press (ARTICLE HERE) — Henry Kissinger’s personal butt-poodle. Fuck it. I’ll take whatever small kindness I can wherever I can get it.

So after a final hang after the reading and a delicious dinner at a nice little joint in Brooklyn, I hung until late with Kembra, Gibby, Bijoux and the great  Dustin Yellin, an artist friend of Gibby’s over at his impressive and innovative Red Hook studio.

Finally, after sitting up till the wee hours with Bijoux in a Macdougal St coffee house talking about possible future film projects and collaborations, I made a bee-line back to Kembra’s place at dawn to pack and sleep a few hours before another upcoming travel day.

JS, Kembra and Bijoux by Gerry Visco

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Finally took my leave of the land of La La and boarded a plane for NYC. Got there right on Halloween afternoon. Weirdness was already in the air. I could almost smell the burning souls of transplanted yuppy NYU students as I rode across the Manhattan Bridge after being picked up at the airport by one of my dear old friend Kembra Pfahler’s band roadies. The guy, a sort of scruffy rock n roll throwback from better days we once knew in NY, drove me in his battered old Death-Van over to Kembra’s blood-red Voluptuous Horror bunker on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — or what’s left of it in the wake of the putrid Post-Giulianni globalist Gentrification program that’s effectively decimated the once-cutting-edge underground gory culture and color of the old hood where CBGB’s is now a fucking Starbucks or something.

The legendary Kembra herself was in temporary exile, staying way uptown in nose-bleed land, while making new art for the Whitney Museum at her glamorous new art studio. So after making myself at home in her empty pad on 2nd and Ave C, I walked straight over to 3rd Street to drag my old black motorcycle out of the backyard by the Hells Angels clubhouse. Squirrels and other lesser rodents were nesting on the engine block, of course, but amazingly, the old Road Warrior started right up, even after several years of weather-ravaged hibernation.

Always one to respect the laws of the land, I screwed an old expired California license plate I had with me on the back and jumped on the old rat-fucker, just like old times. I rode right over to Tony Shafrazi’s art gallery in Chelsea, dodging through the thundering herds of tipsy Halloween revelers and nearly ending up with a grinning, half-drunk jay-walking college student dressed as an unconvincing Grim Reaper as a front fender ornament for the bike. The traffic was apocalyptic, as one might expect in downtown Manhattan on the eve of a pop-culture Satanic hootenanny. Thank god for motorcycles. Somehow I made it to the gallery intact, and just in time for my old friend, the great “lowbrow” painter Robert Williams‘ long-awaited new art show.

All the usual suspects were already in attendance at the gallery when I walked in. My old brother, the great visionary painter Joe Coleman and his tipsy sidekick Whitney were there to drink free wine and pay their respects, along with old-school NY art critic and pop-culture journalist Carlo McCormick, who stood in a corner talking intensely with Jacaeber Kastor from the old Psychedelic Solution Gallery — the same place where I had my own very first NY art show over 20 years ago.

Surprisingly, though there was no crackers, cheese or wine — not even any water. Nothing! What kinda fucking art opening is this? I’m thinking. Still dehydrated from just stepping off a plane from LA I silently cursed the cheapskate gallery owner under my breath as I guzzled tap water by the gallon from the bathroom sink. I would soon get my revenge though by crashing the fancy dinner he held later, along with half the other scumbags in attendence. Hah!

And speaking of scumbags, a lot of NY history was in the house there at Shafrazi Gallery. A virtual Who’s Who of East Coast scumbag royalty. There was my old pal and running partner Steve Bonge, the notorious NYC Hells Angel photographer. The soft-spoken and ultra-cool composerJ.G Thirlwell aka Foetus, was also in the house, along with the ever-present Anthony Ausgang and a nice general mix of all sorts of downtown hipsters, scumbags, grifters, angels and goons.

Across the room I spotted Jamie, the ex-Editor-In-Chief of Juxtapoz Magazine, talking to the underground art magazine’s new owner, a rather square looking middle-aged woman who seemed not to know or care very much about underground art. She looked as if she’d be more at home at an Upper East Side cocktail party than a gathering of outlaw artists and cultural upstarts.

Weird. Is this what it’s all come to now? I guess if you got enough Trust Fund money, you can buy just about anything these days — even hipster street-cred. It’s not too surprising though, as one observes the so-called “lowbrow” art scene steadily cannibalizing itself for pennies on the dollar while hordes of highly derivative and mediocre artists clamor for their coveted 15 minutes of fame and glory; after all, there can only be so many innovative big dogs like Robert Williams and Joe Coleman. After that it’s all basically just a big bottom-feeder fest on some levels. Well, fuck Art and Artists anyway! I’ve always felt more at home around craftsmen and criminals than with culture vultures.

It was still pretty nice, however, to see so many of my old peeps again, and all gathered under one roof — especially while flying by the seat of my pants in that bizarre traveling time-warp state of culture-shock after so many years spent away from the NY scene holed up writing my horrible, obscene novels in Rio.

After the show, most of those still standing around piled into a fleet of waiting limos (all but Bonge and I who followed the bizarre motorcade by motorcycle) and headed downtown to crash the fancy gourmet meal hosted for the artist and “a few friends” by the unsuspecting Mr Shafrazi. Hah!

There at the highbrow Mr Chow’s, the champagne and MSG-laden scallops on the half-shell flowed abundantly as I brazenly stuffed my gut like a rabid pit-bull, thinking triumphantly all the while of the bathroom tap water bar at the gallery. At one point the millionaire art-merchant who gained worldwide fame and fortune peddling the works of art notables like Basquiat to the likes of Johnny Depp, made his way around the crowded joint, going from table to table, smiling and shaking hands all around. Perhaps he was just curious to know who the fuck some of the dangerous-looking hungry freaks he was about to foot a massive tab to feed WERE in the first place.

As the food went down though, I found it in my heart to forgive the illustrious mogul for his bathroom tap-water art reception. By the end of the night the good Mr Shafrazi was bosom buddies with all sorts of questionable reprobates like Joe Coleman, Bonge the Hells Angel, and myself. And so a good time was had by all — especially by the Man of Honor, Robert Williams, whose latest show with Shafrazi was completely sold out, as usual, and deservedly so, even before the prestigious gallery’s doors were opened to the Robert’s rude tribe of friends and the general public that fateful Halloween night.

After the Grand Bouffet. it was off to the Lower East side again, where some of the braver, or more desperate-for-company of us hung out front of the crowded LIT Bar on 2nd Avenue and watched Tweety Bird and the Three Stooges projectile vomit in the general direction of The Giant Cockroach (played by downtown art empressario, Jonathan Levine) before finally calling it a night as dawn rose like a cloud of beery pink vomit over the whole stinking mess of another Manhattan Halloween.

New Painting by Robert Williams

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Hollywood

Another fucking saturday night in party land. Ugh! Culture shock. Liquor and drugs and irrelevent gringo sheeple chatter. I know the game long and well and it has finally lost all promise of glamor, romance and thrill for me once and for all now at last.

How sad, I think. I do rather long at times for the desperate longing that used to be such an integral part of my being that it’s almost easy to feel lost without it as I suddenly find myself these days.

Longing to be longing! Shit! It’s almost like a sick man missing the disease he has been cured of after a long and painful convelescence. Like missing a festering goiter or a lover who has betrayed you with your friends and other longing dogs on your bed and sold your most cherished posessions for crack money.

Sometimes I really do miss my illusions and my own desperate longing to just believe in the Big Lie.

Even as I write these words I am watching a chubby Mexican-American looking suburban bitch from hell puke her dinner into the gutter outside the Burgundy Room on Cahuenga. Cahuenga. Shit! What a name for a street! It sounds like the sound effects of a fucking car crash.

CAHUENGAAA!!!

I used to like to sit out here on Cahuenga late at night when taking a break from writing to watch the nightly Running of the Drunks before they all got in their cars to smash them into each other. CAHUENGAAA!!

This fat drunken cow goes about her gak-fest beside a parked SUV just as casually and gracelessly as she must have wolfed down her Burger King Whopper before going out to spend more money than a good Mexican laborer like her daddy earns in a week on her pig’s ration of watered-down piss-drink bar whiskey. Disgusting overfed American Chola pig!

Just as I finish writing the last words, I catch a whiff of her bocal excrement from upwind. Just then, another chubby failure with a cunt tipsily approaches me sitting curbside on the bike and asks me for a ride. Hah! Not fucking likely! I tell her I would rather stick my dick in a garbage disposal than continue to look at her goofy mug and she smiles and blinks as if I was just kidding. I am not.
Finally she gets it and waddles across the street toward the Beauty Bar, a place where niggers far more desperate than I am tonight will gladly pay attention to her maddening white bitch prattle in exchange for a boozy blow job in the parking lot. Wonder if they like it when these drunk bitches barf on their Jimmy. Wonder if they got a name for that shit in ghetto-ese.

The Beauty Bar. Fuck! Where do they get a name like that for such a pimply fat butt cattle-fest? Eyes of the beholder, I guess. And isn’t that why god invented booze in the first place? So that fat charmless Armenien secretaries can get knocked up and reproduce more of the same? Where is a Nucular Holocost when ya need one?

I wanna go home now at this stage of the ugly preceedings, but my ass is glued to this motorcycle seat like a rubbernecking commuter watching a 10 car pile-up with hamburger all over the highway. CAHUENGAAA!!! Shit. A grey mist decsends over the whole pathetic mess and I sit here praying for an earthquake of devastating magnitude to justify my being out here on these eye-bleeding streets of Hollywood once again. Waiting for the Apocalypse. Waiting for The Big Cahuenga!!! May it come soon to this pathetic parking lot of lost souls. Good night, Ladies.

So, finally needing a little break from the  solitary confinment psychosis of rewrite fever that sets in here in Hollywood, I took up my friend Inger’s invitation to the Art Opening.

I was standing out front of the gallery smoking and talking with my good friend Billy, the owner, when these two overdressed, over-thirty broads who looked like expired strippers attempting to relive their long lost teenage years — desperate divorcees out on the prowl most likely — walked up to Billy and rudely interrupted our talk, brashly positioning themselves right between us with their chubby backs right in my face like a defensive line of football players.

“Billy! It’s old home week!” one of them squealed obnoxiously, working that L.A. Minny Mouse squeek-box for all it’s worth. Poor Billy gets a lot of that. As a gallery owner in a town where everybody fancies them self an artiste, Billy has juice.

“Looks more like old HO week,” I mumbled to myself as I wandered off to the parking lot for a piss.

 Another Saturday night in La La Land. Makes you wanna never leave the fucking house. Call me disgruntled.

 But It’s definitely a good place to be an artist. Fuck all else to do here…

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.

Lapa during Carnaval. It’s like Where’s Waldo of alkies and perverts… Except they’re everywhere!

The Paderia at breakfast time.

Favelas

Santa Teresa at Dawn.