Soundtrack of my life

I remember that just before I decided to come to London in 2002, I used to listen to a lot of post-rock, things like Slowdive, Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky in the half-light.

My playlist also included a lot of bands that nobody ever heard of and all sort of one-hit wonders that only I would remember – Mutton Birds, Urge Overkill, EMF, the list goes on…I used to write hit lists all over the place and my favourite lyrics all over walls and school benches.

But my real favourites were punk and post-punk bands. Since I was as young as six, I was heavily influenced by what my cousins were listening to – mid-eighties – and it was Sex Pistols, The Exploited, Buzzcocks, The Clash and Ramones at first, then came all the Cure records, Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, Siouxsie…

We always had a lot of records lying around in the house. My cousins’ mates would come by and bring LPs, cassettes and the lot, so I always had contact with new music.

Later, when I started developing my own taste within that same genre, I would borrow CDs from a mate of mine, who owned a record shop in Sao Paulo. All he would say is: “Bring the CD in one piece TOMORROW, so that I can sell it!”

It may sound silly now, but when I was deciding where to go eight years ago, when there were no jobs in Brazil at all and prospects were so bleak, I could only think of the music.

To me, the thought of ‘London’ brought some fuzzy made-up images of an ancient place to mind, where everyone was awfully polite and everything was tightly controlled. Not that all these things aren’t completely untrue, but most importantly, it was the place of origin of most of my music heroes.

Since that year I arrived in the Big Smoke with not much apart from a rucksack and £200 in my pocket, I have managed to see pretty much of my idols who aren’t dead – New Order, Morrissey, The Cure. And I actually SPOKE to Siouxsie in London and got an autograph. How cool is that?!

The London music scene is something I will miss quite a lot when I eventually leave. Not that I have gone to loads of gigs recently, but I want to make sure to go to at least a few this year.  I still want to see Depeche Mode in February!

The return of the prodigal daughter

This is my first week of work here in Soho, London. I had a bit of sluggish return to work, after travelling for three weeks in Brazil.

Still jet-lagged, tired from a long trip from Sao Paulo via Mexico City – I left SP at 5pm on a Friday and only arrived in London at 12.30pm on Sunday. Now I am slowly going back to normality…

Obviously, I always look forward to going to Brazil, because it is my home. But every time I have visit, I now have a feeling that the inexorable passing of time did exactly what I feared the most: turned me into an almost-outsider.

So much has happened since I decided to board a plane to London in 2002, at the peak of my twenties, fearless, ready to work hard and play even harder.

During the time I’ve been away, Brazil has seen the explosion of mobile communications, expansion of broadband, contactless cards, the lot. A million different brands appeared and I am not familiar with many of them.

People’s interactions have also changed so much. Eight years ago, there was much more of a need for face-to-face communication between groups of friends, as not many people had money to buy a mobile or access the web. Today, use of  SMS (torpedoes, as they are called in Brazil) is widespread, as is Orkut, Facebook, etc.

Before I continue with the old rant that we are ‘losing touch’ (because that isn’t true; Brazilians are more connected than ever), I would add that people there have changed because the social and economic environment around them has changed.

Sure, Brazil continues to be home to a lot of inequality, with 15 million people in metropolitan areas still in a situation of total misery (the total population is 190 million) but on the upside, it is one of the last countries affected by the recession and one of the first out.

This has had a really noticeable influence in people’s lives and in their confidence about the future.

My mum’s house, for example, is in Diadema – one of the most violent areas of metropolitan Sao Paulo – but her home has increased 35% in value nevertheless. A river at the end of her street had slums built on both its margins five years ago, which has now been removed and the river will be canalised to give way to a new avenue.

And the lives of everyone I know are much better than they used to be. Even my mates who moan about their situation have all the comforts of a modern home, like internet, cable TV and etc, manage to go out and get plastered and have a standard of living that is much superior to that of someone earning the same wage in London.

I could go on and turn this into a full country analysis, but suffice to say I am very excited about Brazil, its many opportunities and I am full of optimism about a future there, even if it means I will have a lot of catching up to do.

Many friends of mine have said they heard me saying that someday I would go back home a thousand times… Perhaps that wasn’t quite true a few years ago, when I was changing my mind at the same speed I change my underwear and generally too busy planning the next rave weekend or binge drinking event to think too hard about anything else.

Maybe my fast-approaching 30^th birthday is bringing me some much-needed sanity, I don’t know. But now I have great plans and I have been lucky to find someone who is just as excited about a new life in Brazil as I am, and together we will make it all happen – 2010 is our year!

New year, new you…

‘New year, new you’. How many times have I heard or read that old pony? I don’t know, but one of my decisions for this year is to write more.

I already read and write constantly for a living, but writing (more) is the most obvious outlet for my rants apart from therapy – and it is cheaper, too.

Anyway. It is known that many people write better when they are in pain and just because today is the most painful day of my very first period of 2010, I decided to give this blog a go, after creating it and leaving it aside for many months. Let’s see what happens.