square white world

He was staying at the Hotel Montecarlo, about ten blocks from the Hotel Ritz, a great shabby building that looked like the former residence of a military general. One entered it through a wide carriage drive, paved in black and white tile like a bathroom floor. This gave into a huge dark lobby, also tile floored. There was a grotto-like bar-room and a restaurant that was always empty. Stained marble stairs wound around the patio, and going up behind the bellhop yesterday, Guy had seen through open doorways and windows, a Japanese couple playing cards, a woman kneeling at prayer, people writing letters at tables or merely standing with a strange air of captivity.

– Patricia Highsmith, strangers on a train, Vintage, London, 1999, p. 50

On-U
blood & fire
wall of sound
ninja tunes
warp
universal egg
axiom
restless
ruffage
pussy foot
mercury
middle earth
pressure sounds
orthlorng musork
e:mit
asphodel
domino
nothing
palm
V2
pork
mu-ziq
soma
luaka bop
shout
mute
instinct
post
tommy boy
ziguiriboom
white
mushroom
calliope
capricorn
shock
fourth & broadway
sire
work
ntone
geffen
dreamworks
crammed
creamed
crepuscule
4AD
compost
compact
onyx
fluff
bitch
chandos
emi
morr
emu
polydor
polystar
warner
ole
flaunt
dumb
sub rosa
brassland
mute
eye q
onion
psalm
will
lacrimosa
ecm
virgin
silver planet
epic
lachrymose
columbia
mfc
metro
urine
atlantic
island
stumm
scant
lo
rephlex
leaf
b.anch
elektra
point
fat
demon
maverick
pipit
restless
chandos
parlophone
sine
lune
ashmatic kitty
decca
DFA
ripped off
fucoffee

The barrel vault itself, clearly original (dates to 1927, part of the structure built as an alternative entrance to the Prince Edward Theatre, a vaudeville and later picture theatre), is a suspended ceiling, constructed of reinforced plaster. It hangs on wires from the supports of the lean-to pitch roof, which roof-line, the grand facade hides. This aids the impression on entering the building that despite its narrowness it opens up. It opens upwards – to the heavenly vault.

Visitors to Cafe Brazil often commented on the archipelagos of greenish blue and white paint left after we sanded off the loose paint and muck accumulated over the building’s long history. It ceased being an entry-way and became a fruit and vege store, cut off from the theatre, in the mid-1950s. Some plebs in jocular fashion suggested we do the, you know, the old Michael-And-Jello, unappreciative of our happiness at the ceiling’s distress. The seas of bare and white-capped plaster and the splotches of remaining paint appear more earth- than heaven-like, appropriately, since from this vantage we gaze up at the world.

The light source is the K, coming in through the louvred windows, above which, centre right, you can perhaps make out the signature plaster curlicue. Tristan used this motif on the last generation of Brazil menus. The trapdoor opening, into the skin of the barrel, a black rectangle, top right, we’d considered as a position for a snouted spotlight. Its beam would have cut across the entrance to the space and like a godfinger pointed to the coffee-machine. Never got around to it. Top and bottom, right, you can see the edges of the monitor-mounts. Something we did get around to, even to finally hooking up the monitors, evading by being green the copyright of whatever was played back.

– Elliott’s work, Condom Alley, Upper Symonds St.

On about day 23, RJF @ sf broke for a big pause. Days 21 and 22 revolved around setting Barnie’s piece as K., “I’m not a writer, I’m a mole,” and Paul’s piece as Francis, “my friend is following me” [see pages opposite, working script, RJF]. For the former, we have Jeff on mixing-bowl and brushes, for the latter, Barnie on bass. The simple contrast of textures works. It’s as if the “bent and twisted knottiness” of the section leading up to our song, sung by the buggers’ Veras Lynn, is being teased out into into clearer structures. That this is the case has yet to be confirmed. It could merely be an unexamined impression caused by the longer narrative reaches of Barnie’s two pieces as K., the two “mole” pieces, where they sit in the overall arc of the work, keystone-like, near the middle.

Our last day, before our Pause, the last Thursday in September, Young Han, of City Art Rooms, Uri Khein, and, for the final minutes, Dominic, my brother, are in attendance. We perform the first half of RJF. Paul throws all into disarray by renaming the work, highly appropriately, A Bugger’s Opera.

This is the first time we’ve put the thing together, the renderings, the sequences. It’s not too Frankensteinian, although there are the expressive superfices of monstrosity in the K. piece, “The taste of the word, when I lick the scar on her face…,” and in the Francis piece, which ends with the image of a screaming pope. However, the reason I’m able to see at all what’s there is the cast suddenly working to see that it does work. They hold it together. Whatever ill-conceived misshapenness the work possesses can be attributed entirely to me.

Both Paul and Barnie have other gigs for the next two months. We hope to reconvene early in 08 and bring the thing to completion in production. I’m relieved. Our Pause allows time for other events. Sunday 30 September is Brazil’s final day of trading. And, looking back now as I write this a week later, I realise the enormity of our going out with a bang, not a whimper, at Brazil. It is a minor apocalypse, a major revelation: what is revealed, in its end, is what it was.

Brazil ends. RJF makes a pause. Even if the latter is merely temporary, it means a break in continuity. The permanence of the former will have consequences, if only locally, that have yet to present themselves. Although, a readily discernible consequence is that I am currently unemployed and lack even the young man’s occupation of putting burning weeds in my mouth and smoking them. All is change and if only one could wholeheartedly say, Pain is love.

Please don’t hesitate to get in contact if you have a job for me.

then I turned on the radio and heard nothing but evasiveness, the sort that exists close to lies, as if the national pastime were evasiveness. The Chief Commissioner of Police wanted to lie. You could hear it in his voice. He wanted to charge his accusers with lying, which is just as bad. The Australian media had somewhere compared our police force to the Keystone Cops for not doing the obvious thing and searching the car left behind by a Mr Xue, martial arts expert, where, after, one presumes, bumbling around, they finally discovered the body of his wife. “The liars!” he wanted to say. “The reason I’m lying isn’t anything to do with slapstick, it’s the law!”

I’m not going to attempt to provide a summary of twelve years at Cafe Brazil, 256 K’Rd., Newton, Auckland, and I hate the fact that I find myself incapable of making a full account, with particulars. Neither a brief eulogy nor a fat history will do. What is worth recording in the life of a cafe? The purely fortuitous, which was in every hour, and the simply habitual, which placed it all in parentheses. This is the trouble. To do Brazil put life on the outside of it. And a certain amount of life got lived beyond the indoors bracket of the barrel vault that hung over our heads for those twelve years.

What would be doing it justice? The life inside? Over the timespan, which is not vast, the changes seem geological. They are at least generational. When we closed, 30 September, 2007, our youngest employee was nineteen and therefore seven when we opened, in September, 1995. I consider it now, in the middle of saying goodbye to a twenty-three-year-old tobacco habit, and finding it difficult to set one word after another, and I can’t see a way of making sense of it … exactly to its merit. It was to the last absurd. Like anything really worthwhile.

I can tell you what I thought we were doing when we did this or that, when we opened the doors for the first time. No. I can tell you everything but that. We opened the doors, that is, we lifted the roller-door, and a world came in. We were almost looking in the opposite direction when it happened. The cafe filled and stayed full for a dozen years. That the world which entered identified itself with Brazil or ended up identifying itself with Brazil, yes, we were aware of and culpable for to the extent that we noticed but refused to reduce Brazil to whatever journey, whatever trip, they were on or we were on; culpable, because, speaking from here, beyond the limit, over the fucking edge, we looked elsewhere than Brazil for getting satisfaction. Did I miss it? Some of it, definitely. Do I miss it? I miss having missed some of it.

I think I should qualify the statement that we were aware of the communitarian aspect to Brazil: about halfway through our tenure, the business went soft-focus, not that the profit motive had really ruled beforehand, but the service aspect, service in the old black-and-white-tv sense – like I heard an early BBC World Service statement today, saying, Don’t expect too much. The stories aren’t going to be good or even interesting – the service we were became a despite-ourselves. We didn’t set up to make or serve a scene; we didn’t in the end make or serve a scene: we did better than that, we were the future.

I think I should qualify the statement that we were the future. Something or nothing could be made of our name. Terry Gilliam’s vision advanced into the past. I remember how pasty-faced brit 1984 looked beside it, although I’d loved John Hurt since I, Claudius. Brazil was an issue. Many delightful people were appalled; many despicable people delighted, as Robert David MacDonald wrote in an altogether different but contiguous culture, and at our beginning as at our end.

I think I should requalify the statement that we were the future by saying that it was not us. Although, as I said to my daughter, in an aside, and immediately exploded into snot and tears, we can now own it. Brazil was for twelve years elsewhere and us. That it was elsewhere I’ve heard repeated many times. It was not Auckland it was for the freaks. The others. The kids. The … what? I really hope it was because I’d like to see whoever it was who thinks it was for them take the city, take the world.

And here it is, the silly thing. Brazil was not it. It was never intended as it. It was supposed to be a way to get to or get at it. The it it was is important and needs to be honoured. It will be important. And for those who knew it, be inspired. Get out there you fuckers and make a difference.