Tag Archives: Brazil

September 21, 2010 · 3:24 am

The truth and narrative, 3: my life with Roberto Bolaño

1987

I met Gondim in Rio de Janeiro in 1987.  He brought me to Morro dos Prazeres, a favela whose name translates into English as “Hill of Pleasures.”  We took the streetcar from downtown up to the neighborhood of Santa Teresa, climbing a couple thousand feet along the way.  It was (and still is) Rio’s last streetcar line, and the trip is a step back in time.  At the end of the line, you arrive in Santa Teresa’s walled streets and tight alleys, a Bohemian retreat high above the Rio’s noise and splatter.  It’s a nice place, and the mountain air is cool.

One turn and a hundred feet down another street, Santa Teresa gives way to small houses climbing up the hillside in seemingly ramshackle fashion, stacked one atop the other to the sky.  Children play on rooftops, their kites hanging in the ocean breeze.  The two neighborhoods cling to each other on the steep hillsides of Rio de Janeiro in an uneasy relationship marked by occasional hostility, outbreaks of violence, and cheap domestic help.  The views are breathtaking across the Guanabara Bay.  Back in 1987, Gondim introduced me to Walter, the “professor,” a fan of Fidel Castro’s and leader of the neighborhood association in Morro dos Prazeres.  I spent time there talking to people, hanging out, following Walter around.

At that time, Gondim lived in Santa Teresa, among artists and musicians and dancers.  It was love and revolution all night long over cachaça, weed, and samba.  At night, and sometimes during the day, I played music anywhere I could, with Rogerio or for the girls on Avenida Atlântica between tricks, the ocean crashing across the road beneath the moon and the Southern Cross.

1992

Five years passed and I wasn’t a very good correspondent.  Neither was Gondim or Rogerio or anyone in Rio.  In 1992, I found Rogerio in Flamengo, the neighborhood down on the beach below Santa Teresa.  He asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was on my way to Belém.  Belém!, he screamed—there are only crooks and thieves and whores there! Madness to go there! he told me.  My people, I thought, and then he gave me his sister’s phone number and said I should look up her up when I get there.  Next I went to Gondim’s offices at the magazine, but the editor told me he had moved.  Where to? I asked.  Belém, she said, and she gave me a phone number.

In Belém, it was sweaty nights on the street in Cidade Velha with Gondim and his friends, among them Petit, a Catalan who had married a Belemense girl and become a professor at the university.  We drank beer, ate chicken and rice, and sang songs about everything.  With Marga (see the Tamba-Tajá stories) I took in the arrival of Iemanjá on the beach at Mosqueiro in 1992.  Márcia took me to her neighborhood, Bom Futuro, which like Morro dos Prazeres had a meaning that seemed at odds with its circumstance, “Good Future” in Portuguese.  We had great parties at her house and a photograph of all the women in her family, four generations, hangs in my office next to my desk, not far from a photograph of my own mother.

Bom Futuro was an invasão—they didn’t call them favelas in Belém—in a swampy area amid the mega-invasão of Área Cabanagem (pop 200,000) named after Oscar Neimeyer’s nearby monument to the slave and Afro-Native rebellion that occurred in Belém in the 1830s.  Chiquinho took me to his invasão in Aurá, a suburb about an hour or 90 minutes from central Belém by bus.  I spent years with him and his comrades as they struggled to pave the streets and keep the lights on.  I cherished these friends dearly, as I also loved M-J, who became my accomplice in dreams for a few years.

Then things changed.

The details are unimportant.  What matters is that things changed because I made decisions that I don’t understand today.  The right thing to do now seems so obvious, though it was so obviously the wrong thing to do at the time.  My mistake was not so much in doing right or wrong, but in doing either only half way.  I forgot my passion at some point, and my calling went to rest beneath a rock of responsibility or reason that did not suit me very well.  Maluco Beleza was the song I loved, and it became the life I lived a little by accident and not nearly enough by design.

2008

Years later, when I picked up The Savage Detectives in Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore, I felt like I found something I had lost.

My lives with Greene and Cortázar were there on Bolaño’s pages, in the stories of Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima and their band of poets—the visceral realists—by way of hundreds of small depositions from everyone who had crossed paths with them over four continents and twenty years, chronicling their lovers and affairs, their triumphs and tragedies and madness.  About half way through, the literary and historical sweep of the novel becomes staggering, Cortázar resurrected in the granularity of Bolaño’s storytelling and an entire generation of Latin American literature (including at least two Nobel prizes) left in the dust.  This was my world.

I laughed out loud on the subway to read Amadeo Salvatierra reminiscing on his hero during the years just after the Mexican Revolution (p. 396),

… I emerged from the swamp of mi general Diego Carvajal’s death or the boiling soup of his memory, an indelible, mysterious soup that’s poised above our fates, it seems to me, like Damocles’ sword or an advertisement for tequila …

And also at the exchange between Belano and Lima and Salvatierra over the one published poem by Cesárea Tinajero, the original visceral realist in the 1920s (p. 421),

Belano or Lima: So why do you say it’s a poem?

Salvatierra:  Well, because Cesárea said so … That’s the only reason why, because I had Cesárea’s word for it.  If that woman had told me that a piece of her shit wrapped in a shopping bag was a poem I would have believed it …

Belano:  How modern.

I felt my heart tug when Joaquín Font spoke about his release from the mental hospital where he’d spent the last several years (p. 400) …

Freedom is like a prime number.

… and when Edith Oster, a heart-broken, ill, displaced Mexican in Barcelona, told of how she went to find a payphone to call her parents in Mexico City (p. 436),

In those days, Arturo and his friends didn’t pay for the international calls they made … They would find some telephone and hook up a few wires and that was it, they had a connection … The rigged telephones were easy to tell by the lines that formed around them, especially at night.  The best and worst of Latin America came together in those lines, the old revolutionaries and the rapists, the former political prisoners and the hawkers of junk jewelry.

She had broken Belano’s heart, too, but the image brought me back to Vargas Llosa’s revolutionaries in Historia de Mayta, who sat around debating the finer points of Marxist theory in their garage, perched atop stacks of their party’s newspaper that had no readers and never saw the light of day, much less of a dim bulb or candle for covert reading in a dormitory, prison, or monastery.

Bolaño himself was at one time or another an old revolutionary, a former political prisoner, and a hawker of junk jewelry. Adding rapists to the mix only put down the rose-colored glasses of our generation’s passions and all those fights between Garcia Marquéz and Vargas Llosa as if to say “enough, already.”  Yet being Bolaño, it would have been more like a visceral scream from the front row during a book reading at a polite salon or book store.

The Savage Detectives is a fractured narrative told in the shards of pottery and broken mirrors laying about the floors of the places where Bolaño slept.  I read Bolaño and I saw what had become my life.

Notes and Credits

The photo of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives was taken by the author on his nightstand.  This is the normal appearance of my end table.  I picked up the leather Brazilian street scenes in Salvador, Bahia, in 1993.

Bolaño’s biography is well-noted and I won’t go over it here, except to say that the last 10 years of his tragic life (cut short by terminal illness) was one of those artistic outpourings that will live in legend.  In a brief period of time, Bolaño the cast-off cast-away reshaped Latin America an became its voice (for now, at least).

The photo of Santa Teresa and Morro dos Prazeres comes from the Wikimedia Commons and a photographer named “chensiyuan.”  The photo of Belém from the Amazon River was taken by the author in 2000, arriving in Belém on a boat trip that began in Manaus about 10 days earlier.  The photograph of Bom Futuro was taken in 1995 on a visit to Márcia’s house. I’ve chosen for now to leave out my photos of Márcia, her family, and the parties we had.

The picture of the Bolaño graffiti was taken from gsz’s photostream on Flickr.  The photo of the author and Gondim was taken on the beach at Mosqueiro in 1995.  Mosqueiro is the old resort area of Belém, still within the city limits but on a remote island, where the elite used to have weekend vilas and houses.

Earlier this year, torrential rains caused flooding in Rio that resulted in a huge landslide in Morro dos Prazeres and other areas.  As a result, the mayor of the city developed a plan to remove the neighborhoods, on the pretext that the danger of flooding is no longer tolerable.  The problem with this logic, however, is that Rio’s favelas have always had this problem in the annual rainy season.  To many, it seems the floods are just an excuse to to solve some of Rio’s other problems with crime and drugs (really a police problem) by blaming the poor and tearing down their neighborhoods.

This is the same issue that drew Janice Perlman to the favelas in the 1960s and me there, later, in the 1980s.  Unfortunately, the problem of drugs and organized crime is all too real.  In 1987, when I was there, the police routinely went into Morro dos Prazeres and rounded up young men for summary executions – this as a warning to others and a means of controlling the population.  Twenty years later, the film Trope de Elite (Elite Squad) chronicled the same story, Morro dos Prazeres still there at the center.

The Memorial da Cabanagem is a landmark in Belém.  It was built by Governor Jader Barbalho after he became one of 9 resistance candidates to win election to governorships against the military regime in 1984.  The pretext is that Barbalho’s victory signaled a rebellion of Cabanagem-like proportions, the people rising up against the elite.  After humble beginnings, Barbalho himself has been governor twice and held seats in both the national congress and the senate, where he was that body’s leader for a short while until he was impeached while rumors and allegations of corruption mounted.  Barbalho is one of the richest men in Pará.  As with Fernando Collor, time conquers all, and Barbalho is back in the national congress representing Pará.  Jeferson Assis’s Flickr photostream has many images of the Cabanagem monument, as does Jeso Carneiro.

Bolaño’s rigged payphones reminds me of stories my friends told about the payphones in Washington Heights in the 1980s.  The Latin American drug traffickers (or so my friends said) would rig them to make free international calls, and everyone in the neighborhood used them.

When all is said and done, I wish peace to my friend Gondim and pray that I will see him again.

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September 9, 2010 · 4:27 am

The truth and narrative, 2: my life with Julio Cortázar

In the midst of my Greenean visions, fueled from the outset by Pulling’s trip from Buenos Aires to Asunción, I picked up a novel called The Winners at my local bookstore.  I was still in college, and I hadn’t met R in Mexico City yet.

I was possibly still reading One Hundred Years of Solitude or soon to do so. This would have been immediately after exams, either in December or May, when I went to the book store to find novels to fill my holidays away from studies and those other books that gave me purpose without vision.

The Winners had a thick grey paperback cover with a waxy finish.  The design appealed to me, and I can say honestly that book design is an art I admire and cherish and that does indeed achieve its purpose of inviting me to open the book.  It was published by Pantheon, an imprint I always looked for because their titles were leftist and internationalist, like an American Verso.  The novelist was Julio Cortázar, an Argentine writer who was new to me at the time.

It was a narrative of people thrown together by chance.  They’d all won a cruise trip in a local lottery, but once out to sea it became clear that something was wrong.  They were prohibited from going certain places on the boat. There seemed to be a disease somewhere, but there was little information on what was happening and how it might end.  They created alliances and enemies and friends, like Lord of the Flies but not really.  Perhaps more like an inverted episode of Doctor Who, the British inter-galactic time and space traveler who would alight in different worlds and plunge head-first into local controversies and disputes—only in the case of The Winners, it was like a Doctor Who-less Doctor Who with Lord of the Flies-like consequences.

The Winners reflected the real world I knew at the time, in which people become intimately concerned with each other when circumstances gave them common stakes in something.  The something could be anything and was often potentially dreadful, but I was an existentialist.  Cortázar wasn’t my first attempt at anti-narrative or pre-postmodernity.  I’d just come off reading Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow in the same term. The difference between Pynchon and Cortázar was that I chose Cortázar, and next I read Hopscotch (Rayuela).  The die was cast.

My copy of Hopscotch was from the same grey-covered series on Pantheon.  I was captivated by the photograph of the thin strawberry-blonde woman on the cover, blouse off her right shoulder, looking down or away, smoke from her cigarette trailing upwards, obscuring her face.  The book came with “instructions” for reading—in linear form, in the order of my choosing, or Cortázar’s indications at the end of each chapter pointing the reader through the book in a semi-random way.  I chose the last alternative, which however random-seeming hung together around a life-time of doing what R and I did in Mexico City for the summer of 1984.

A few years later, in 1987, Sérgio talked about Cortázar as we drank chopp in the sidewalk cafes on Avenida Atlântica in Rio de Janeiro.  Sérgio was the 40-something son of Dona Nazaré, a nice woman in her 60s who rented her rooms as something of a cottage bed-and-breakfast business on Rua Duviver in Copacabana, one block from one of the most famous beaches in the world.  Sérgio was writer; he stood at a podium every day typing while standing, in an odd bedroom or in Nazaré’s kitchen, adding more words and pages to his self-described Kafkaesque stories about life in mid-twentieth century Brazil.  He would publish them on his own, but he had no grand ideas about how many copies they would sell.  For money, he had a state pension (disability after being sacked from a state job and tortured by the military regime), his mother, and the sales of his uncle’s paintings, which he hawked on weekends Copacabana and Leblón.  In whatever combination, it was enough.

Sérgio himself had walked off the pages of Hopscotch.  I liked him, in spite of his off-putting arrogance, and I added many like him to my cast of friends and supporters around Rio.  As we sat there under the umbrellas on Avenida Atlântica, Sérgio named the working girls, many of whom were friends of his and more than few of which, he made of point of mentioning, were not girls in the genetic sense of the word in spite of all (quite convincing I should add) evidence to the contrary.  Avenida Atlântica was his world, and for a while it became mine.  With Sérgio, I read Cortázar and heard a calling.

Notes and Credits

The opening photo is of a volume that R gave me when I visited her in Mexico City in the summer of 1986, Nicaragua tan Violentamente Dulce.  In the background, Gary Fuss’s photo of Chapter 7 of Hopscotch sits at the opening of an earlier version of this post.  Gary was kind of enough to allow me to use his photo, which can be found on his Flickr page here, along with many other interesting photos of Chicago and elsewhere.

The photos of Copacabana Beach and Cortázar’s grave site were both taken by the author, in 1987 and 2002, respectively.  This was the view of Copacabana from across Avenida Atlântica, where Sérgio and I would sit, talking and drinking chopp in the sidewalk restaurants.

My volumes of The Winners and Hopscotch have been lost, sold to the Dawn Treader bookstore along with 40 shelf-feet of books that I liquidated when I left Ann Arbor in the early 1990s.  This sale involved nearly every single book I had ever owned in my 28 years up to that point.  It was a literary purging.  I saved some (like my Pynchon) and would have thought Cortázar’s among them, but no.  To this day I can no longer find The Winners or Hopscotch (Rayuela) among my holdings.  Along they went with the lot, over $400 of books at about 50 cents per book.  At that point in my life, it was half a month’s salary.

It was a lot of books for anyone, 28 or 82, but books were where I lived to that point, in my head and in the imaginations of my writers.  For a while, I entered Dawn Treader lore, and a photograph taken from one of my books went on the store’s bulletin board with other artifacts retrieved likewise over the years.  I know that the photo stayed there for some time, a few years it seems.  I remember the woman reviewing my books for purchase was struck by the notes my father wrote on the cover page of every single he’d ever given me.  Perhaps there are still books of mine on the shelves.

In Brazil in 1987, I was fortunate to have brought Kafka’s The Castle.  It kept me company after Sergio’s lectures.  At home in the mid-1980s, I had Doctor Who—the Tom Baker version who with the lovely Romana took me all the other places literature and social science couldn’t.

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July 25, 2010 · 3:10 am

The truth and the recursive (in search of search terms)

There was a time when searching any string of words with “Lascaux” in it would bring up my post, “The truth and change, 3a:  From Life on Mars to Linden,” as one of the top three hits in the images section—because of the photograph I used of the caves in Lascaux, France.  I got the photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Then there was “bee tree,” or “bee bee tree,” which for a long time brought up my photograph of a tree in Prospect Park, Brooklyn (11215), where I observed a bee swarm with my son in 2008.  I took the photograph, along with the photograph of the bee warm itself.  This photo was in the post, “The truth and Twitter, part 3:  The Swarm.”

And then these images completely disappeared from the Google Images searches.

Which made me begin to wonder:  How do search terms work?  A friend told me to embed vivid descriptions in my photographs, because Google really likes this.  And then I thought about all those search terms that I see every day on my data.  Some are downright weird—“life goes on symbology” or “rocket party dei black eyed beans”—and some sound really cool—“gilgamesh Foucault” and “shot of major truth and rocket science.”

I’m no whiz in SEO (search engine optimization), but I thought it would be fun to post all the  search terms I have seen, down to a certain level (all these are multiple viewings) that people have used to find truth and rocket science, whether they intended to or not.  What happens when people search these terms?  Do they come to this posting, or some other? Does this (not entirely) random assortment of words bring about some kind of Internet query magic?  Would be fun to see …

Update, 15 minutes after I posted this originally

Within 15 minutes of posting this, these search strings came up.  I just had to add them.  It’s obvious why.

medieval witch killings paintings

envy the epic of gilgamesh

eclectic

bee tree

wolverine michigan desk

maghan lusk

sleeping dogs

pond @wordpress

blacklight poster

zebras

brigadier pudding

hubris fingerprint

faroeste gary cooper

mirrors “lady from shanghai ”

blacklight poster

bee bee tree (almost every day for a while)

lady from shanghai mirror scene

“not many people make me laugh”

tett creativity complex

john locke public domain pictures humane

iran twitter

rocket party dei black eyed beans

bacon francis house

Walgreen

lotte zweig

“kareem fahim”

zebras

twitter iran

reichstagsbrand

sleeping dog

bee tree

sleeping dogs

Walgreens

zak smith

tattoo and tattoos

“life goes on” tattoo

tattoo design principles

Credit:  The photograph is of tattoo work by Grisha Maslov, copyright 2010, obtained from Wikimedia Commons.

Gilgamesh

heroism in Gilgamesh

gilgamesh Foucault

Foucault Gilgamesh

Note: I am not sure where this came from, since Foucault is not mentioned in the post with Gilgamesh.

amoebas and dysentery

gas exchange in amoebas

amoeba pictures

poem on dysentery

amoebic dysentery brazil

live amoeba vs. fixed amoeba

Amoeba

Brazil

brazil land of the future by Zweig trans

lolalita brasil1

brasilia architecture falling apart

brasilia

faroeste caboclo

brazil colony

forest manaus

social science

standard deviation diagram

one standard deviation bell curve

stats bell curve normal curve

standard deviation bell curve

bell curve

iq bell curve

bell curve standard deviation

iq bell curve diagram

standard deviation diagram

bell curve diagram

unicorns and medieval stuff

medieval maiden painting

unicorn pictures

unicorn truths

unicorn Bristol

unicorns

unicorn

unicorn medieval

unicorn museum castles in new york

the unicorn leaps out of the stream

the start of the hunt

unicorn in captivity

the unicorn is found

the start of the hunt

the truth about unicorns

the hunt of the unicorn

Sylvia Plath and Leonard Shelby

Memento, the film, a timeline

plath writing

leonard shelby

Credit: The chart of the timeline of Memento (Christopher Nolan) is by Dr Steve Aprahamian, and can be found on Wikimedia Commons.

truth and rocket science

truth and rocket science (lotsa times)

rocketscience.com

rocket science in our lives

shot of major truth and rocket science

truth and rocket science

the truth about diamonds

the truth and sleeping dogs

Lascaux

The House of Tomorrow, 35,000 BCE

Lascaux

lascaux cave pictures

lascaux paintings

lascaux cave paintings

lascaux cave

lascaux painting

lascaux images

cave art Lascaux

lascaux caves france

cave paintings Lascaux

lascaux pictures

cave of Lascaux

lascaux caves

caves of Lascaux



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June 12, 2010 · 3:11 pm

The truth and fearlessness

Macha Chmakoff, Daniel et l'ange dans la fosse

My God has sent his angel and closed the lions’ mouths so that they have not hurt me.

Daniel 6:23

Of those who are fearless, there two kinds:  the reckless and the serene.

The reckless attract more followers, for they are dashing and dramatic.  Yet that which is dramatic is also sloppy and careless.  The reckless laugh in the face of danger, but only because doing anything else would seem lifeless and limp.  The reckless cannot appreciate the little things, nor can they understand the subtle, warm moments in between danger, fear, excitement and ecstasy.  They see and feel only in extremes and abandon all judgment in between.  They search out life at the margins where few dare to go or dwell and in this they seem like heroes, but they are not.  Heroes can understand triumph in sadness, and they always know where they are.  The reckless, by comparison, are lost.

I—I can remember
Standing, by the wall
And the guns, shot above our heads
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall
And the shame, was on the other side
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever
Then we could be heroes, just for one day

David Bowie, “Heroes” (1977)

Fearless Heroes

The serene can be heroes.  They know where they are and what they want.  They are motivated by the desire to do the right thing, and they do so regardless of the odds of success or failure.  They are not reckless because they endanger no one but themselves.  They accept the risk even as they try to minimize it because they are as simply human as the rest of us and they do fear death and pain and suffering.

Giotto, St. Francis Preaching to the Birds

Heroes who are fearless and serene become vessels for a love larger than they are.  They seek nothing from their actions but to be made even more whole in the act of giving to another.  St. Francis of Assisi—once a street brawler, solider, and libertine—found his calling in service to the poor and in love for the animals.  He became the friend of all those in harm’s way, the trampled upon, oppressed, and marginal.   The prayer of St. Francis puts all of this in simple verse.  We used to sing it in church when I was a child.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace
where there is hatred, let me sow love
where there is injury, pardon
where there is doubt, faith
where there is despair, hope
where there is darkness, light
where there is sadness, joy.

O Master, grant that I may never seek
so much to be consoled as to console
to be understood, as to understand
to be loved, as to love
for it is in giving that we receive
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

Modern Heroes

Padre Bruno Secchi and Pastora Rosa Marga Rothe—he a Catholic priest and she a Lutheran Minister—are both human rights workers in Brazil. I met them in 1992, as I was beginning fieldwork for research on social movements and politics.

Padre Bruno came to Brazil in 1964 and in 1970 founded the República of Emaús, a ministry with street children.  Emaús has just celebrated its 40th anniversary and is still going strong.  Padre Bruno’s work is dedicated to creating the space and opportunity for street children to grow into productive, happy people.  It is humble work, dedicated not to changing these children but to allowing them to find their potential and calling in life.  Emaús in Belem was a part of the worldwide movement that eventually resulted in the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was ratified in 1989.  The CRC is a milestone on the path to a better world, appointing the rights of the child in the world we would like to have, not the world we know right now.

Rosa Marga I have written about already, in the Tamba-Tajá stories.  She teaches and practices liberation theology, the interpretation of Jesus’s life and works as a message of liberation for the oppressed and marginalized of the world.  She has been a leader in the women’s movement in Brazil and Belém.  From 1997 to 2005, she was the Ombudswoman for the State Police in Pará, responsible for representing and investigating claims against corruption, brutality, or human rights violations by the police.  In this position, she received international recognition.  She and her family took me in as a friend.  There is always much joy in her house.

Giotto, "St Francis Giving his Mantle to a Poor Man"

In 2004, along with my colleague Sasha Abramsky, I once again interviewed Padre Bruno and Rosa Marga for my work as a researcher.  Afterwards, I reflected on what I had learned from them over all these years.  I was struck by their constancy in the face of overwhelming odds.  They work for the small victories and see joy in every one, rather than the long road left.  Serenity, I thought, is what makes them so effective and compelling.  Without serenity, they would not be able to endure the suffering that their struggles have brought them personally.  Without serenity they would not be able to bring young people into adulthood with hope, promise, and love.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the “Serenity Prayer” at some point in the 1930s.  It has been widely adopted by many who struggle with changing themselves in a world that resists change.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

What is remarkable about people like St. Francis, Padre Bruno, and Rev. Rosa Marga, is that the “wisdom to distinguish the one from the other” leads them to take on the most enduring and difficult challenges of all.  That is real heroism.

Notes and Credits

The opening image is “Daniel et l’ange dans la fosse” (“Daniel and the Angel in the Pit”) by Macha Chmakoff (www.chmakoff.com), a contemporary painter who has an extensive set of works in Biblical themes and images.  The original painting is oil on canvas, 52″ x 39″ (130 x 97 cm).  Ms. Chmakoff is a psychoanalyst and painter who has been exhibited across France and has gained international noteriety for her paintings.  The image was provided by Ms. Chmakoff and is used here with her permission.  She recently had a reproduction of one her paintings, “Jésus, souviens-toi de moi,” exhibited between the columns of the Église de la Madeleine, the magnificent Greek classical church in Paris.

David Bowie’s song “Heroes” was recorded in Berlin with Brian Eno, near the Berlin Wall. When guitarist Tony Visconti and backup singer Antonia Maass snuck away for a kiss near the wall, Bowie wrote them into the song and they became heroes.  The song is a masterpiece of experimentation that sounds so much less than experimental today.  Radical as it was in its day, it’s purely beautiful today, and its sentiment is timeless.

The images of “St. Francis Preaching to the Birds” and “St Francis Giving his Mantle to a Poor Man” are from the series of frescoes known as “The Legend of St. Francis,” which can be found in the Upper Church of the Basilica de San Francesco in Assisi, Italy.  The frescoes date from 1297-1300 and are usually attributed to Giotto de Bondone, though they may have been done by several painters.  These images are taken from The Atheneum, an organization devoted to making tools for art, scholarship and community-building available over the Web.  They encourage people to post photographic images of art from around the world and then make it possible for others to repost and use that art in ways that will bring it to others.

St. Francis’s ministry to animals and to the poor are radical and enduring parts of his ministry.  St. Francis is a constant reminder of the simple fearlessness in Jesus’s ministry.

A Note on Heroes, Villians, and Justice

Not all who are serene and fearless can be called heroes.  I have chosen to dedicate this post to the heroes, but I have to recognize that villains, too, can be fearless and serene.  In this way, they are like heroes, even though they are not.  Let me clarify.

Only those who work for the cause of justice are heroes.  There are others who are equally fearless and serene but who are concerned only for themselves, their narrow interests, and personal pleasures.  They are sociopaths.  Those sociopaths who intentionally harm others are the criminals of sensational accounts in films, television, books, and magazine.  They are rapists and serial killers and destroyers.  Some find a legitimate outlet for their urges in mercenary exploits, military conquest, dogma, and institutional authority.  These sociopaths are dangerous and horrible, but they are not numerous.

Far more pernicious are sociopaths whose violence is exerted at a distance under the cover of ideology and reason.  They kill without ever coming close to the trigger.  They command armies and industries.  They tell us we need them in order to live our own lives and that without them we would not have jobs or homes or food to put on the table.  They are serene.  They are fearless.  They are all around us and hidden in our midst.  “Sometimes Satan,” Bob Dylan sang, “comes as a man of peace.”

As for justice, there are many definitions, but I prefer to keep it simple.  That which reduces needless suffering and cruelty is just.  The definition of needless suffering and cruelty usually is apparent by sight alone, without words.  Once people start to bring words into play, the cause of justice is damaged.  This is a cruel irony for those of us who are writers and seek to paint beauty in words.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child is one of the UN’s landmark accomplishments.  It is a form of aspirational justice, more a signpost on the way to the world we would like to live in than a description of the world we have.  All member-nations of the UN have signed on to the CRC, except for two:  Somalia and the United States of America.  Serenity now.

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January 18, 2010 · 5:17 am

The truth and amoebas

The mighty amoeba

Your body isn’t your own,
exposed for all it really is:
permeable, full of holes,
part of the world.
A floating thing tossed and spit
on tumbling water not always clear,
you become home to others,
little animals here
at play in the world.
You could be a tree, or grass, under
tiny feet that make no sound of their own,
their steps heard in quickened heartbeats
and restless groans
that shake the world.
You’re full of holes that leave
you open, a window lost of glass,
panes rattling, short of breath,
waiting, waiting, hoping to pass
this sense of a world
stumbling moments from death,
moments from life.

____________

The name of the poem is Sickness.  I wrote it in Belém in February of 1993, as I was coping with the onset of amoebic dysentery.  It was rather a rough time, and this, the worst and latest in a cascade of different ailments since my arrival in Brazil the previous November.  I was adjusting to my new home, I told myself, but I began to re-conceive my relationship to the world.  Except for a bout of the flu at age 9 and a one-day bug at age 13, I’d never been seriously ill in my life.  When I met the amoebas, my body-as-fortress gave way to a new understanding of myself as a being in the world, no different really than a bug, participating in the world along with all the other creatures of existence, open to all those creatures, part of the landscape.  In the world – the amoebas helped me understand Heidegger and Sartre.

We’re all part of the landscape here, guests of each other, parts of each other.  Somewhere in the human genome, shot through my body and yours, there is DNA that we inherited from a common of ancestor with amoebas.  According to Richard Dawkins in his lovely The Ancestor’s Tale, our most recent common ancestor (MRCA in biospeak) would have existed between about 1.3 and 2 billion years ago.  This being, some kind of single-celled thing, would have eventually given rise to amoeba and other protozoans, in one evolutionary path, and the things that became plants and animals on another path.

Most recent common ancestor, collapsed tree

All creation is locked in struggle for the limited energy of this world.  This struggle produces rainforests when so many beings stretch to outdo others in an effort to trap the sun.  The struggle produces abundance as well as scarcity, cooperation as often as annhiliation, and a long-standing collaboration between us humans and the hoards of friendly bacteria (and even some amoeba) that live inside our bodies and help us be “human,” as it were.

Notes and Credits

A really interesting article about amoebas can be found here, by Wim van Egmond, and it includes really great photos of amoebas in action.  The photo of an amoeba at the beginning of this posting is taken from the site, Helpful Health Tips, which discusses the causes and treatments for amoebic dysentery.  More detail on the different kinds of amoebas can be found in this piece on Innvista.  Getting past dysentery meant mountains of Flagyl and a lot of examinations and tests, not only in Brazil but also after I got back to the US in 1993 and in 1994.  I never was the same again, but then again, were we ever?

When I was looking around the web for amoeba-related sites, photos, and such, I came across this company, Rogue Amoeba Software, LLC, and it’s blog.  It has nothing to do with this post specifically, except that it’s a very cool name for a company, and especially suggestive for a software firm.  Our computers and their software are, like our bodies, permeable, full of holes,
part of the world.  We’ve made information systems in our image, both on purpose and by accident, just as it was presumed by some we ourselves were made.

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January 12, 2010 · 5:44 am

The truth and the still

Parintins, Brasil 1993

The still photograph is not so still.  The photograph asks questions.  It suggests a story.  It presents an idea in a language without words.  It is even as it signifies. Video killed nothing, and the still photograph survives (even as the radio star carries on).  Unlike video, you can take the still photograph in.  You have a role in your experience of the photograph.  It speaks to you at a speed that you can handle, that doesn’t overwhelm, that invites your participation and imagination.  You can look into its nooks and crannies and seek out all it has to offer.  All this at your own pace, and for your own reasons.

Snow on Sterling Place, Brooklyn 2005

The still photograph is a water that runs deep.  If it seems to sit there, that’s its charm.  The still makes you active, because it’s impossible to just look.  Indeed, that’s the point, and all the while the still is not nearly inert.  It just moves differently, at a different pace, like a tree.

Detail of a rock on the beach, Long Island Sound, 2009

You fill the stillness with motion, the silence with voices.  You hear these people, feel the breeze come across the flowers, sympathize with a long face or smile with happy eyes.  Or you imagine the immediate suspension of all motion and noise and concentrate on only the image and the miracle of capturing time itself.

Intensity . . .Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 2009

Video?  Its harsh, grating noise, the motion too fast to keep up with – video steals your ability to think about what you’re seeing and replaces your mind with its own images.  The difference between the still photograph and video is the difference between democracy and dictatorship.

Fixing the sidewalk, Prospect Park Parade Grounds, Brooklyn 2009

Notes and Credits

On December 15, 2009, I had the opportunity to hear two award-winning photographers, Lynsey Addario and Damon Winter, discuss their work at the Museum of the City of New York.  After the panel discussion, one member of audience asked them if they were experimenting with video, given the prominence of video on the Web and current developments in social media and journalism.  Of course they were interested, but they were still committed to the still photograph.  That’s what got them aroused in the first place, and the still continues to drive them today.  Moderater Kathy Ryan, photo editor for the NYT Magazine, chimed in that photos are still much more popular than videos on the Magazine’s website, perhaps because the photos allow the viewer to control what they are seeing.  So that got me thinking . . .

Sidewalk fixed, December 2009

All the photos featured in this post were taken by the author.  Go back and double-click them to see a larger view.  Enjoy.  If you want to see some interesting and incredible photos by others more talented and adept with shutters than I, check out the work of some friends at T’INGS, Chloe, and the No Words Daily Pix on Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn.

Astor Place, New York 2009

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January 3, 2010 · 3:43 pm

Tamba-Tajá, 3

Nego and his little brother outside the family’s house in Moju.  This the final installment of Tamba-Tajá, the story of a trip to rural Amazonia in 1993.  Double-click the photos to see them in original size.

______________________________________________________

We ate our fill at Nego’s uncle’s place.  It was nice, after a long morning of travelling on a hangover.  We had a lot of things to carry, bags of food and drinks, some clothes, and things from the city that Aluízio brought for the people we’d see on the way.  All fed, we started down the path single file, away from the road, the little house, the clearing, and into the woods.  We were carrying a lot, but behind us we left some sacks of food and other things – we’d be back to get them.

The family farm was a couple more kilometers through the woods.  The trees were tall and lush and green.  Leaves littered the forest floor off the path, which began to turn and then turn back again, as if cutting back to go up a steep hill or mountain, only the land was flat.  Flat and densely covered with trees and shrubs.

After a good bit of walking, we came to a creek – igarapé – that had cut a gorge about 6 feet deep and maybe 20 feet across.  It wasn’t terribly deep, but it was enough to slow us down a bit.  Another 20 or 30 minutes and we arrived at the house, which was surrounded by fruit trees of all sorts.  Huge limes hung from one, and we’d use those limes later to bathe in the igarapé behind the house.  The house was shingled on one side, straight boards on another, with windows open to the air and what seemed like a lot of space as we approached.  You could see through the spaces between the boards.  There was no electricity.  The water came from a well drawn by a hand crank, up to a thousand-liter tank 10 meters up atop a scaffold.  PVC piping brought the water down from the tank and into the house.

On the other side of the path, in front of the house, there were fields of manioc and pepper plants.  Pepper was supposed to the salvation of Amazonian smallholders, a marketable crop easy to grow in the climate and soil conditions.  Some folks made money on it, but few were truly saved.

The women settled into the house.   They wiped the dust from the tables and chairs.  They opened the hammocks we would sleep in and hung them from the house’s frame.  They began cooking.  The man who took care of the place while the family was in Belém came round with the horse, and we took the charrette back to the road to fetch sacks of food and other things needed for the next few days.

Cajú

Later, I went off with the men into the forest.  Aluízio wanted to show me his Amazonia.  We brought a bottle of cachaça (ka-SHA-sa), a clear, potent cane liquor, and we walked along pulling cajú from the trees.  The cajú grows as a fruity, pulpy bulb with a nut, the cashew, hanging from its end.  After a slug of cachaça, you suck on the juice from the cajú to dissipate the burning sensation of alcohol on your tongue.  We did this for an hour, stopping from time to time for Aluízio to show me the plants near the ground and explain each one’s medicinal purpose.

After a bit, we reached the virgin rainforest.  The trees were as large around as any I’d ever seen, taking three or four men to encircle a trunk, hand to hand. They grew high in their struggle for sunlight, competing with each other as they threw up ever larger leaves, leaving very little light to filter down to the forest floor, were it was damp and cool.  In the forest, you feel a chill even as you sweat under the leaves.

Vines hung everywhere and swayed with the gentle breeze that ran through the trees.  Bird sounds came from every direction, a dense concert in the round of cackling and crowing, the flapping of wings and stirring of leaves.  Echoing caws of differing pitch and resonance shot through the distance from near and far.  This was the sound of the forest breathing.

We took a twisted path through the woods and then headed back to more settled places.  We stopped to visit neighbors who lived further from the beaten path, in houses of wattled clay daubed onto wood frames made of sapling branches and topped with palm fronds.  The clay dried hard as bricks, but I thought it must take a beating in the rain.

One man was making birdcages from reeds and bamboo, fine little pieces fitted together.  He caught forest birds and sold them to another man, who took the birds in their hand-made cages to Belém, where he sold them to another man, who in turn sold them on the streets of the city to visitors and local people alike.  Of the three men involved, the one in the middle made the most money.

The farmers were talking about the price of pepper and whether or not they’d make any money this year.  Then the conversation turned to the price of lumber, and Aluízio asked one farmer if he was going to cut the madeira nobre – the valuable wood, like mahogany – on his land.  Some of it might wind up going into beautiful headboards and armoires for sale at specialty importers in Chicago.  Some would wind up as yet another wall for yet another room on yet another house in Jurunas.

Back at the farm, darkness began to close in as the women put out the food for dinner.  Beans with chicken and meat, rice, fruit, bread, crackers, coffee and farinha, the raw manioc flour grown right there.  We mixed the farinha into everything. Farinha de manioc isn’t much to speak of in taste or nutrition, but it stretches the food on your plate and lets you “fool the stomach” into thinking you’ve eaten much more than you have.  It tastes good with the beans and brings a crunchy texture to the soupy froth.

By dark, the house was lit with a couple of kerosene lamps not larger than Bunsen burners.  A soft light, it brought out the curves and contrasts in everyone’s faces as we talked about life, the weather, the family.  OOOOOO-go!, the boy’s mother rang out time and again as the he ran about making noise, upsetting things carefully stowed and stacked and, in general, being a boy.  Nego took out his guitar, and we all went outside to sit under the trees and sing.  Nego played.  His brother played.  I played.  We shared our stories and ideas and adventures.

Between songs and laughter, the forest told its own stories as the birds calmed and other noises came.  Nego told of the time he spent a week at the house by himself.  The forest noises scared him so much he would never do it again.  Aluízio told older stories about jaguars and snakes and mythical creatures who came out of the forest at night and are sometimes men in appearance.  Legend had it that the boto, the pink freshwater dolphin found in the Amazon, would turn into a tall white man in a white hat and white suit, showing up at the village dance to sweep a young girl off her feet and take her back to the enchanted city under the river, where the boto made her his queen.

We became tired and went inside.  I crawled into my hammock and pulled up the sheet under a chill.  I listened to the night forest and fell asleep to the sounds of snoring and swaying hammocks.

Crossing the Moju River, Aluízio, Dona Maria, and Nego (Augusto)

Notes and Credits

The photos for this installment of Tamba-Tajá are all from my 1993 trips to the farm with Nego, except for the photo of the cajú, which is from Wikipedia Commons.  The Tamba-Tajá closed by 1995.  Nego got married and moved to a small town in the interior of Pará, a town much like Moju, where he became a school teacher – music of course.  The small town life in Amazônia is what suited him, so I imagined he was, and still is, happy there.

Writing this post has taken me on an interesting journey through my old photos and Brazilian research material, in search of journals and photographs, things to help jog my memory about certain events.  I know I have a journal entry somewhere on this trip, but I can’t find it.  It’s probably on an old 3.5″ floppy disk somewhere in a box under my son’s bed.  I looked through those boxes just now.  Among other things, I found the daily calendar I kept in 1993, showing the dates of the trip recounted in this story:  I arrived at the Tamba-Tajá around 10 p.m. on Friday, January 8 and came back on Tuesday, January 12.  It was the first of a couple more trips, including Holy Week and Easter, April 8-11.  One day I will find the journal entries and figure out how well my memory has recounted these events so many years later.

The land issues encountered by the smallholders who Aluízio talked with in this story are quite difficult.  I deleted a couple paragraphs from an earlier version of the story that got into those issues; they didn’t work for the story I wrote.  But they are real.  The further south you go from Belém, the more dangerous it gets, southern Pará being rife with more land conflict than any other place in Brazil during the 1990s.  Church people and unionists tried to organize the small farmers and ranch hands, but they were constantly harassed by the big farmers and their henchmen, who as often as not were also the local police.

A good up-to-date article on land issues in Amazônia appears here, by Paulo Cabral for the BBC.  The murder of Sr. Dorothy Stang, of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, an international Catholic religious order that works for social justice and human rights, was a major issue in Brazil and internationally.  A lot more could be written and said about these issues, and I’m working on writing something that was inspired by Rosa Marga Rothe and the Book of Daniel.  Coming soon …

For now, I’d like to leave this story with a photo I took of Rosa Marga and Iza that I took in 1998, not too long before Iza passed away.  They started this story, and so they should end it.

Marga and Iza, Belém 1998

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December 13, 2009 · 5:21 am

Tamba-Tajá, 1

Santa Maria de Belém do Grão-Pará

I’d been introduced to the Tamba-Tajá by Marga, who was a Lutheran minister, human rights activist, and liberation theologist.  The bar’s owners were her friends, Iza and Rosângela, who were related by marriage.  Iza had been a revolutionary and women’s rights activist in Brazil for many years, including the worst years of the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s.  Rosângela was raising her children and grandchildren while selling apartment leases in Belém and generally dabbling in real estate.

They named their bar for a plant of local legend, called Tamba-Tajá by Amazonian natives, known as the Elephant Ear plant to others, which people grew in their yards.  The Tamba-Tajá can tell if there is much love in the house, very little, or if one of the spouses is cheating.  A friend of mine in Belém made a point of telling me that a smart woman always plants one in her yard.

The bar called Tamba-Tajá was a family affair in the working class neighborhood of Jurunas.  In January, during the height of the rainy season, the streets of Jurunas are deep with a mud of dark, red clay which can also be home to ferocious tribes of fire ants out in the countryside. People debate which is better, the mud during rainfall or the fine red dust kicked into the air when the streets are dry.  The dust gets in your nostrils and mouth, leaving the taste of clay on your tongue.  They say the dust causes the “gripe,” colds and fevers everyone lives with and no one likes.

A street in Jurunas, 1993

The Tamba-Tajá opened right on to the unpaved street.  It was in the bottom floor of the house where Iza’s estranged and still quite revolutionary husband lived.  He was a poet of some local fame.  The bar was completely open to the outside, inside and outside having little meaning in a place where inside is often outside, defined less by bricks or wood than by the way people inhabit those spaces.  In the front, palm trees shade the patio and keep the rain off people as they eat and dance and drink.

The windows are open to the outside air, too, as there are no screens in Belém, except on Marga’s house, perhaps because she was descended from Germans.  In the streets and through the windows of the Tamba-Tajá you can see dark silhouettes of palm trees swaying in the breeze over Jurunas and its little, wooden houses, home to too many people with too little money, though they always seem to have enough to stop by the Tamba-Tajá and the other housefront bars in the neighborhood on a Friday night. Cold beer beats the heat in Belém.

There’s a group of reggae musicians who hang out at the Tamba-Tajá, along with political dreamers and the friends and family of Iza and Rosângela.  These musicians spin records on some nights and everyone dances.  The sweat soaks your body as you twist and find a place in the scratchy rhythms booming from the old, battered speakers Ivan dragged to the bar on the back of his bicycle. Over crackling, jerry-rigged wires and pounding drums, Bob Marley lived for a while at the Tamba-Tajá.

The first time I went there was to meet Marga and celebrate Iza’s birthday.  They had me play for them.  The stereo wires were re-rigged to a microphone that had seen much better days many years ago, and they gave me a guitar that made the microphone look like a piece of new equipment.  I didn’t know any Brazilian songs, but that’s not what they wanted to hear from me.  “Let It Be” always brings down the house in Brazil.  And it did again, that night at the Tamba-Tajá.

Rua Tupinambás

Now Iza’s birthday had passed, and it was a Friday night.  I hadn’t been over to Tamba-Tajá for a while, and with no plans to speak of I headed for Jurunas, a slow walk about 10 blocks down Rua Tupinambás, like “Jurunas” the name of one of Brazil’s original, native peoples.

It had been a long day for me, with much work to do, and the rain storms were particularly hard.  In Belém, the blue skies of morning typically give way to clouds and showers by mid-afternoon.  From January to May the rain can start in the afternoon and not stop til near daylight.  It washes the city and cleanses its ills and keeps the equatorial sun from burning everyone and everything to a crisp.  In all, about 86 inches of rain falls in Belém each year, a little over 7 feet.

The rain leaves the air smelling fresh with the breeze off the giant Guarajá Bay, which brings the ocean to into the mouths of the three rivers that surround Belém:  the Amazon, Toncantins and Guamá.  The ocean tides are sometimes so strong that they send waves up the rivers, so that they seem to flow backwards for a while.  Pororoca, they call it.  All this water gives life to the land and its people.

As I walked down Tupinambás, I looked to the sky for signs of rain, letting my eyes graze the cloud bottoms and measure how far or close they might be.  The city lights bounced back from the clouds, and the clouds glowed orange in the distance, a false sunset that lasts all night long until the clouds dissipate in the coolness of dawn and the new day.

Tonight at the Tamba-Tajá there was no one I knew, save for Rosângela.  I greeted her, got a frosty Kaiser, and sat down at a table of strangers, just listening to the conversation.  A man was speaking to a boy.  The man held his right arm across his chest.  He held his right arm with his left hand, as he would the neck of a guitar.  The boy did the same.

So we began to speak about music.  The man called himself “Nego,” which is a common nickname meaning “black dude.”  The boy I recognized from reggae nights at the Tamba-Tajá.  He had wide, brown eyes that spoke of youth.  Nego had curly black hair thick atop his head, a round face and full lips like my own. His smile and manner drew me in.  He asked me questions, about music, my life, why I was sitting in the Tamba-Tajá and what I was doing.  We talked for a long time, over a few more Kaisers.  The others round us had their own conversations, and we had ours.

Nego wanted to know if I’d ever been out of the city to see the forest.  I hadn’t.  He asked me if I’d like to go with his family to a farm they have in the middle of the forest, a day away from Belém in Moju.  I said, “sure, Id love that.”

“We’ll leave in a couple hours,” he said.

Notes and Credits

This story, Tamba-Tajá, will be told in 3 parts on truth and rocket science.  It recounts a visit I took to the bar on a Friday night in 1993, during my year of doctoral research on Belém.  There I met a young man who became a close friend for most of 1993, and he invited me out to his family’s farm in the rainforest.  I returned home on Tuesday.

I took the photo of Belém’s docks in the “Cidade Velha” in April 1993, as the boat left Belém for the journey that is recounted in this story.  “Cidade Velha” means “old city” and refers to the original colonial settlement of Belém that was established in 1616 to consolidate Portugal’s claims over the Amazon.  The other photos of Jurunas were taken around the same time by me, except for the photo of Rua Tupinambas.  That photo comes form the site Skyscraper City, which contains a great number of photos of Belem.  Very nice collection!

For more on my friend, Rosa Marga Rothe, see her Wikipedia page.  Her daughter, Iva Rothe, is a accomplished musician.

The picture of the Tamba-Tajá plant in the text is from the website, “Pasarela Cultural,” which goes on to discuss the legend of the Tamba-Tajá.

The legend of the Tamba-Tajá can be found all over the Web.  Silvana Nunes’s fotolog has a great photo of the plant and a simple text of the myth, which I have translated.  Nunes, a teacher and photographer, has another blog called “Foi desse jeito que eu ouvi dizer…” (this is how I heard it…).

In the Macuxi tribe there was a very strong and intelligent Indian.  One day, he fell in love with a beautiful Indian woman from his village.  They were married a little later, and they were very happy, until one day the woman became very ill and was paralyzed.

So that he wouldn’t be separated from his love, the Macuxi man made a sling to carry the woman on his back, taking her everywhere he went.  One day, however, the man noticed that his cargo was heavier than normal.  When he untied the sling, he found that his beloved wife was dead.

The man went into the forest and dug a hole on the edge of a creek.  He buried himself together with his wife, for there was no reason for him to continue living.  Some time passed until a full moon appeared in the same place where they were buried, and a gracious plant unknown to the Macuxis began to grow there.

The plant was the Tamba-Tajá, with dark green triangular leaves, which have on their backside another, smaller leaf which appears similar to the female gentialia.  Together, the two leaves symbolize the great love that the Macuxi couple had.

Amazonian caboclos grow the plant near their houses and attribute mystical powers to it.  If, for example, the plant grows well with exuberant, lush leaves, it’s a sign that there is much love in that house.  But if the larger leaves don’t have the smaller ones on their backs, there is no love in the house.  If there is more than one smaller leaf on the backside of the larger one, one of the spouses if unfaithful.

The photo of the Tamba-Tajá plant in the story’s text shows the “small leaf” or flower on the backside of the Elephant Ear quite well.  Without that flower, love ain’t going right in the house.

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October 31, 2009 · 3:34 am

E/F – the glass of youth

halfglass-beer

E.  Things that we never would have done had we known better, but that we must live with to the end of our days.

F.  Wonderful things and great discoveries that never would have happened had we known better.

Note:  E/F will be a recurring feature of truth and rocket science. If you have a half-glass photo to share, or want to create one, send it to me at jguidry.7 AT gmail DOT com and I’ll use it in a future posting, with full credit to you.  Make sure that you tell me the story behind the photo, including the contents of the glass, in the following manner . . .

Credit:  This standard Williams Sonoma pint glass is half-filled with Hoegaarden whitbier.  Its taste is semi-tart and well-accented with a slice of lemon.  It sits on a small faux-marble coffee table, in front of a love seat futon that was found on the sidewalk in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Sixth Avenue b/t Garfield and Carroll, on a spring day in 2008.  As the mattress was clean and the frame in almost perfect shape, we took it home because we needed a sofa.  Ah, providence.

IMG_3264

a comfortable living room, for people and cats

The paintings were acquired in Bahia, Brazil in the summer of 1998.  The artist signs himself “Alberto,” and they are of mixed media, acrylic paint with splatters of sand and swatches of cloth added for texture.  I don’t recall the name of the shop, but I could certainly find it in a minute upon return to the city.

The coffee table was given to me by a friend to hold for her while she moved back to Rockford, Illinois to live in the barn on the family farm while writing her first three books.  One day she may want the table back, but until then, it’s here.

IMG_3260

Pixie, ace mouser

Pixie, the cat, is about five and a half years old.  She came into the family in February of 2005, for the specific purpose of eradicating the mice that had beset us in the fall of 2004.  As I told Duke, Pixie was “a technician,” and she proved a very effective one:  in her first 14 days, she took out 13 mice, and we never saw another one.

112-1222_IMG

Duke loves Pixie

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October 29, 2009 · 2:22 am

The truth and Brasília, 3: Faroeste Caboclo

Brasília, Metropolitan Cathedral

Brasília, Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida

Brazil is a country of inspired appropriation.  Its peoples, cultures, sounds, and visions grind against each other.  They rise up and smash together like tectonic plates.  In the collision of Brazil and Brasília, the city of candangos gave the country Renato Russo.

No “torso of steel,” no “[w]inged elbows and eyeholes,” but like Zweig and Plath a literary mind and poet, Russo’s voice became his generation’s.  In his epic song, “Faroeste Caboclo,” Russo tells the story of a poor kid’s migration to Brasília across 159 lines of free verse, punk sensibilities, and an affecting melody that calls to mind the traditional country music of Brazil’s Northeast.  Faroeste is what they call a “Western movie” in Brazil, and caboclo refers to the Brazilian mestiço everyman, a mixture of races and cultures, poor, seeking his or her fortune in some faraway place.  Faroeste Caboclo is Walt Whitman, rogue-Gary Cooper and Joe Strummer together in Niemeyer’s white palace.

The hero is João de Santo Cristo, from Brazil’s Northeastern “backlands.”  Brazilians call this region the Sertão, a rural, agrarian, drought-afflicted area that is the poorest place in the country and carries the deepest currents of Brazil’s premodern past.  João robs the poor box from the church.  He goes after the girls in the town.  People don’t trust him.  He feels the effect his skin color has on others who are lighter, more well-to-do.  He’s arrested and goes to reform school, where he is raped and degraded.  He is filled with hatred.

When a man on his way to Brasília decides not to go and gives his bus ticket to João, he becomes an accidental candango, leaving his past for the “beautiful city” where everything will be different.  He works as a carpenter’s apprentice, but he can’t make ends meet and becomes a drug trafficker.

After some time in the criminal world, he tries to go straight when he falls in love Maria Lúcia, but eventually the drug trade pulls him back in.  João’s enemy, Jeremias, steals Maria Lúcia and they have a child together.  João challenges Jeremias to a duel, which is covered in the press and shocks the city’s elite but makes João a hero to the people.  In the duel, Jeremias shoots João in the back and wounds him fatally.  Maria Lúcia rushes to her first love and gives João a gun.  He challeges Jeremias to die like a man and shoots him.  In the end, Maria Lúcia and João die together in each other’s arms.

The people declared that João de Santo Cristo
Was a saint because he knew how to die
And the bourgeoisie of the city didn’t believe the story
That they saw on TV

And João didn’t accomplish what he desired like the devil
When he came to Brasília
What he wanted was to speak to the president
To help all the people that

Suffer

Russo and his bandmates in Legião Urbana (Urban Legion) grew up in Brasília in the late 1970s.  Their songs of protest, love, and everyday struggles became the nation’s soundtrack to the last years of the military dictatorship and the re-emergence democracy in the 1980s.

“Será,” a love song with an anthemic refrain, could be heard blaring from sound trucks at the massive marches and rallies of the caras-pintadas (“painted faces”) in 1992, as they challenged the nation to bring down Fernando Collor, Brazil’s first democratically elected president since 1960.

So called because they painted their faces in the Brazilian national colors, green and yellow, the caras-pintadas had grown up under the military regime and saw their hopes threatened by Collor’s massively corrupt regime.  They led the way for the whole country, which stopped each day at 7:00 for the allegorical soap opera, Deus Nos Acuda (God Help Us), a comedy in which the angel Celestina tries to save Brasil from the excesses of its social and political elite.  In the show’s opening, the rich are smothered in mud and flushed down a whirlpool shaped like the country itself.

Collor was impeached and left office by the end of 1992.

Russo died on October 11, 1996, of AIDS-related illnesses.  Russo’s wishes were to have his ashes spread over the gardens of Brazilian landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx, returning him to Brasília and its modernist vision.

In 2006, Fernando Collor was elected Senator for his home state, Alagoas, for an 8 year term (2007-2015).  Brazil has absorbed Brasília.

Notes and Credits

Photo:  interior of the Brasília Metropolitan Cathedral.  As with the previous post, the photo is taken from the Flickr site of Shelley Bernstein, aur2899.  She works at the Brooklyn Museum (according to the Flickr “about”) and has a lot of pictures from Brasília and elsewhere.  Her Brooklyn Museum blog posts are here.

Renato Russo was born Renato Manfredi, Jr., in Rio de Janeiro.  He moved to Brasília in 1973 at the age of 13 and became a songwriter and musician.  He renamed himself after the philosophers Rousseau and Bertrand Russell, and the painter Henri Rousseau.

Faroeste Caboclo plays on the iconic stories of migration from the Brazilian backlands, the sertão, to cities in search of a better life – one of the central storylines of Brazilian history.  It’s a story of spiritual depth and apocalyptic reach, most famously told in Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões.  Da Cunha’s book, published in 1903, tells of the Brazilian military’s destruction of the city of Canudos in the 1890s.

Canudos was a city that grew up around the milennial teachings of a folk preacher, Antonio Conselheiro, bringing tens of thousands of poor Brazilians together in a sertanejo enclave to await the last days.  The Brazilian government saw the city as a grave threat to its own project of bringing Brazil into the community of modern republics while still maintaining the class and racial divisions of its colonial and plantation (slavery) past.  Canudos was utterly destroyed by the military, and its inhabitants were massacred.

The destruction of Canudos removed one “sore” from the Brazilian body politic, but in the predictable irony of history and unintended consequences, Canudos gave birth to the next social threat.  Soldiers from the campaign, unable to find work on retrn to civilian life, migrated south from the Northeast to Rio de Janeiro and built their own squatter colony on a hill.  Thus was born the first favela, later to become the 21st century dystopian Canudos that continues to challenges the Brazilian modernizing project.

During 1992 and 1993, I lived in Belém and accompanied the protest marches through the city.  I was officially a researcher, but I was also 28 years old, not much older than the caras-pintadas who I spoke to.  Just a few years earlier, as a college student in New Orleans in the mid-1980s, I used to grab the New York Times every day to read up on the military’s exit from power in 1985.  In 1992-93, like everyone else in Brazil, I was glued to the television every day for Deus Nos Acuda.

Another song that rang out from the sound trucks and radios everywhere was the first Legião Urbana hit, “Tempo Perdido,” with the echoing call of the refrain, selvagem, meaning wild, untamed. It was a song about love and not losing the time at hand, but it was also about the passion for breaking free of repression that made this song the “anthem of an entire generation” (O hino de toda uma geração), according to Alexandre Inagaki.  In the video the band pays homage to all their forebears in rock and roll.

“Tempo Perdido” follows in the footsteps, or looking down from the shoulders of Raul Seixas and “Maluco Beleza.”  Raul Seixas was Brazil’s Elvis (his idol), Jim Morrison, and John Lennon rolled into one.  He “was not just a musician, but a philosopher of life …” (Raul não era apenas música, Raul era uma filosofia de vida), “Always Ahead of his Time.”  See Jesse’s portrait of Raul on her blog, Mundo de Jesse.   “Maluco Beleza” (“Crazy Beauty”) is for many the epic statement of individuality and creativity from the central icon of Brazilian rock.

Senhor Hype reports that the Brazilian RockWalk is in development, creating a walk of fame that will include both national artists as well as some international artists like the Scorpions.

For an English translation of “Faroeste Caboclo” along with the music, go here.  The translation of the ending of the song above is taken from this video, and credit goes to Alexandre Mello and Andrea Hilland.

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