(Nothing But) Flowers

When I was 13 I painted the walls of my room alternately bright red and bright green. This wasn’t an act of adolescent rebellion (my Mum wasn’t bothered), I just thought it would look interesting. The inspiration behind this particular colour scheme was the cover of an album by David Byrne (former front-man of Talking Heads) named Rei Momo.

I saw those red circles on the bright green background and thought to myself "Yes, that colour-scheme will look great in my bedroom...".

Funny how things link up isn’t it? All those years ago, I loved this album but had no idea what ‘Rei Momo’ meant. Then 20 years later, after randomly settling in Brazil, I was writing a blog post about the oversize chairs on public transport in Brazil. I needed an image of a larger person sitting in one such chair and what did I find?

This São Paulo’s Rei Momo (King of the Carnival – traditionally a tall, fat man) testing out new chairs for the obese. This guy is 140kg (308 pounds, 22 stone).

So I discovered that the album that inspired my bedroom kaleidoscope was named after Brazil’s traditional king of the carnival character! The album (which I haven’t heard in 20 years) is a collaboration between David Byrne and various Latin American artists and features probably the first samba-style music I ever heard (though in those days, for all I knew, ‘samba’ was just a setting on my friend’s Casio keyboard, right next to ‘bossa nova’ and ‘cha-cha-cha’…).

And today another connection jumped out at me. I was about to write today’s post which was going to be a selection of the photos I took while hiking through Ibitipoca. I’ve got quite few images, so today was just going to be all the flower pics (yeah, I’m a bit of a nature-nerd at heart). I was going to use the title “(Nothing But) Flowers” (a Talking Heads track) as it would be descriptive and also people who recognised the title as a Talking Heads track could feel smugly clever (and maybe they’d think I was smugly cool too – perhaps I could regain a little of the coolness lost from doing a post purely consisting of flower photos. Obviously I’ve blown all that now…).

I decided to have a quick listen to the song on YouTube in case I could use it as backing music to a slideshow of the flower pics and what do you know? It turns out Caetano Veloso (everyone’s favourite Brazilian singer) covered the track! Caetano is too interesting and talented to cover here – he deserves a post (at least one) of his own. In the meantime, why not listen to his (frankly hilarious) interpretation of the Talking Heads track (Nothing But) Flowers while you check out my (super-cool) flower pics?

Mini-quiz: One of these is NOT a flower - can you spot the odd one out?

The left and bottom pics here are both orchids. Not the huge specimens you see in people's houses, but real, wild orchids, no more than an inch (2.5cm) across.

Some rather fetching pink lichen (bottom right) and some funny hanging seeds.

I have to admit, I had no idea I was so into flowers. But they were very pretty. And stopping to take photographs meant that I could take a rest on the uphill sections of the 16km walk.

Including this photo makes a mockery of the post title doesn't it? If only Caetano had covered that other famous Talking Heads song "Flowers, Seeds and Furry Red Leaves".