Notting Hill Carnival

A Small Taste of London's Summer Carnival!!!

Way beyond all the community, integration, values, performance, spectacle and the exoticism things' that tend to characterise Notting Hill Carnival held in the middle of metropolitan's babylondon.

One of the images that most vividly comes in to my mind is related with an affective moment in The Rum Diary, from the novel written by Hunter S. Thompson, when Chenault disappears under a black cloth of human bodies at Porto Rico's local pub; or in one of the 70's pushing boundaries of what was then acceptable on movie screens, Emmanuelle, when the character played by Sylvie Kristel is raped by one of the denizens at an opium den, in Bangkok, or in the movie Mandingo, with the British actor James Mason, when the sexually repressed white woman, from the South US, has sex and become pregnant by the husky male slave in order to get revenge on her white husband and his bed-wench black woman (the same cross-cultural confrontation happens in the novel Equador, by Miguel de Sousa Tavares, when Ann Jameson, the wife of the British's observer in São Tomé e Principe, is spied while having sex with a local worker).

I'm use to the brazilian carnival, a bateria, a theme, colourful and bright outfits, almost naked men and women, dancing and singing throughout the spectacle lasting three whole days. In here, we have a PA, a DJ, on a truck, with all the family behind. Some strange mating-rituals – that's carnival e ninguém leva a mal! – happen in the meantime.

I'm wondering, if those films are the reason why one to the stereotype reflecting European culture and woman, to people from the other side of the Mediterranean sea, is that of European woman just want to fuck!? Believe me, I had some girl friends being asked that question just because they are European! I know almost all the continents (except Oceania). I have been there (Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, North America, India, Japan, and Europe in general)! Digging deep into all those Venusian' mountains and the sustainable feeling is the same everywhere: some women do, others' don't!