I like to think of a place where everyone locks themselves in, the lights spin and fermented and distilled roll in the saloon. The fundament is to set yourself free. The music is loud, and when the poison hits, we assume the desire locked and hidden during the blank common days. Everything is to tribal, so human. I love it. My best carnal and spiritual sensations must have happened in those kind of places.

My story with the nightlife began inside my own house. I transformed my home in this space where people lock themselves in, turn the music up, drink fermented and distilled drinks and take all kinds of venom – or antidotes, why not?

I might be exactly in the middle of my life, who knows? The thing is, that makes me think I can double every night I dived into.

Tuesday June 7^th

When the question pops up, it is always followed by a deadly silence.

• Let’s go out?

Silence.

Do you wanna go out? Today? Where? Why there? Who’s playing?

Yes, the questions don’t stop when one of us urge desire for the night. Desire, addiction, need, it was always like this.

Zeca Gerace: I’m from the time when we used to say I was going out, or “going to the club.” I can’t ever say “balada” (a common expression referring to party in Brazilian Portuguese).

Victore Corrêa: There was no “balada”.

Z: It sounds fake coming from my mouth. Before “going to the club”, where did we go?

V: Don’t know, can’t remember what I used to say.

Z: Discotheque? lol

V: No, that’s too 80’s.

Z: Boite?

V: Really? I think boite is more recent…

Z: Oh, we sound like two old ladies. I was born in the 80’s!

V: hahahahahhahahahaha And you saw your first night through in 1986?

Z: 1987. I like remembering this time line, how the nightlife evolves in the city. Where was what, how it was, where I never went, stories of gay clubs, those people cite in some songs…

V: Which club?

Z: “Val Improviso”, I was dead curious to know what as “Val Improviso” like.

V: And those showed on soap operas and movies?

Z: Which ones?

V: Regines, Dancing Day’s, Gallery, Hipopotamus…

Z: But at this time we still were little children, it all started afterwards for us…

V: You know when everything started. Can you tell? In the book “Just Boys” Patti Smith tells everything herself.

Z: This is not a biography and I’m not Patti Smith.

V: Ok, so ask me. What else do you want to know?

Silence. TV, computer, sound, light, candy, coke, cigarettes, fucking cold night.

Z: I don’t like to think that the past was better. Today a friend was saying about how depressing the 80’s were. You would get all beautifully dressed up, spent the whole night swinging your head to a British depressing rock… What a sin with the young people of a whole generation…

Help, all I want is to give a good laugh. I’m from the crew of marvelous fun, the sons from the crossing of the fags, the Dzi Croquetes!

Thursday June 9^th 

Zeca and Victor in a skype conversation with friend, Evandro Mano:

[18:47:37] Zeca: Victor disappeared. I need a partner for this subject. It only can be you.

[18:48:12] Evandro Mano: What’s the subject?

[18:48:21] Zeca: Answear me, please…

[18:48:59] Evandro Mano: Call me! But what subject is this?

[18:49:37] Zeca: I need to talk about nightlife for a magazine… Talk about it with me, please?

[18:50:11] Evandro Mano: Me? I don’t go out in ages!

[18:50:28] Zeca: I go out a little too, but I know you’re on about what’s going on… You were the one who told me you shook your head listening to drepessing Smiths at Madame Satã.

[18:52:16] Evandro Mano: Oh yeah, and those ridiculous people sayin the 80s’ where pure joy. Pure depression! But I go out since I was 16, if seen a lot of thing… The beginning of disco… hahahahah

[18:52:55] Zeca: The text I was writing with Victo also started with the past. I think there is no other way.

[18:53:30] Evandro Mano: It was so delicious to go out and have to pay to gat in, without that tackiness of clubs with minimum consummation… Disco was such a liberation… Then everything became the same. The 80’s started to look all the same.

[18:53:55] Zeca: Are you talking about Rio de Janeiro?

[18:54:03] Evandro Mano: Rio and São Paulo. But the nightlife from the 1980s to nowadays only happened in São Paulo. Rio got stuck in time.

[18:54:51] Zeca: We met in…

[18:54:56] Evandro Mano: 90’s?

[18:55:03] Zeca: l remember you were in a trip of staying at your place…

[18:55:42] Evandro Mano: Oh yeah, I was in this faze of staying home. I lasted a couple of months… What year was that when the Chinese Saloon started at your place?

[18:56:33] Zeca: 1997. At the time I was living at Prédia, at Rua Augusta, now the Lowear Augusta.

[18:57:48] Evandro Mano: You started the lower augusta!!!

[18:58:06] Zeca: No, there was people there, way before

[18:59:05] Evandro Mano: What panics me, is to think that all this happened such a long time ago and, yet, it seems that nothing really changed. You know, I scared to death of revivals? I don’t want any revival, I wan newness. Even though there might be elements of the past, it has to be somewhat new. That feeling of entering a place and do something new.

[19:08:28] Zeca: Our eyes keep looking for what is beautiful in the nightlife.

[19:09:10] Evandro Mano: You know, looking back I get the feeling that it has been a long time since something really spontaneous shows up. It seems to me that all clubs are now focus on the commercial side of it.

[19:09:52] Zeca: It might be. I don’t like being so accretive, but I think I like things a bit more visceral. I can’t ever separate nightlife from a kind of expression, or even art movement in music.

[19:11:44] Evandro Mano: But that’s the way. When something new happens, it shakes everything: art, music, all the creators feel this thing coming. Those are moments very special – of renovation. Suddenly everybody wakes up different.

[19:12:25] Zeca: Do you think this renovation always tends to happen at night?

[19:12:37] Evandro Mano: I think the nightlife is the first symptom. I think that one of the signs of the end of a cycle is it’s commercialization and trivialization. Then some group of people that doesn’t have a penny starts doing something out of nowhere, from the pieces around them. The true underground has this advantage: freedom.

[19:13:58] Zeca: That’s so Age of Aquarius!

[19:14:04] Evandro Mano: It is. But today it seems that even the underground is stuck in some kind of label.

[19:16:43] Zeca: But do we still need to hide in the corners to be this select group which belong to the underground? Is there glamour in this?

[19:18:47] Evandro Mano: Do you think this young people who haven’t lived the nightlife of 10 years ago, bother with all this?

[19:19:07] Zeca:  Liana (Padilha, a DJ here in São Paulo) told me that nobody gives a shit.

[19:19:22] Evandro Mano: They should think it’s all new!

[19:20:07] Zeca: Oh, we are starting to sound like our time was better…

[19:20:11] Evandro Mano: Noooooo! Look, I’m not being pessimist. Actually, it is all sings of the time. Years before there were those great time shifters, like the 60’s to the 70’s, it was all very different. From 2000 to nowadays the world has changed a lot. There are all these little things happening all over the time, all over the places. It is no more on gigantic movement attracting attention. So, it might be that there will never be another huge thing at night. I might be that for some time, the nightlife (or the nightlifes) will get specialized in tiny segments, tiny groups. People will just have to find their own.

[20:08:51] Zeca: That might be cool, actually…

[20:09:14] Evandro Mano: This gives opportunity for a lot of people to use their creativity to do new things. But about the commercialization and pasteurization of the nightlife… I’m out of it!