Mom plan March -> summer or end of summer

An interview with the director of BOPE: Tropa D'elite

There is a film that is absolutely rocking Brazil right now. Called
"BOPE: Tropa De Elite" or "BOPE: Elite Troop" it's about a SWAT-style
police unit in Rio that fights drug traffickers using summary
executions and Abu Ghraib-style torture. If this film launched in
America it would be your basic late 70s / early 80s
clean-up-the-streets-with-more-than-a-touch-of-fascism police drama.
Here it is blowing everybody's mind. It also leaked a month before
the release to the vast network of pirate DVD sellers, and then broke
records in its opening weekend.

I just watched a long interview of the director on national TV
(something that people crowded around the TV for) and it made me want
to write something about the film and the phenomenon, so I'm writing
some notes here that I might use.

* The interview format was surreal. It was setup like an inquisition,
with raised, circular seating around the director sitting in the
center.

* It was one of those situations (which I understand because I've been
in them) where everybody else is having the argument for the first
time, and the director is having it for the 500th time. He is armed
to the teeth, and knows every punchline, every twist and turn of the
labyrinth, and every slippery way out when things get hairy. More
than that, he's a smooth talker.

* The director's defenses of the film as anti-violence
pro-social-change just didn't sync with the way the majority of the
audience receives the film (and even his own assessment of this). You
got the impression that this is one of those times when an artist
makes a work of art he knows is really good, but that he doesn't
disagree with. The dignified thing to do when this happens is just
take the heat (and the money) and just shut up, because the defense is
just going to be half hearted and slimey.

* If there was a woman in the panel, she did not speak during the part
I observed.

* Questioners mostly academic. One standout was a police captain from
the military police in Rio.

* I'd heard this before, but he clarified: the movie was filmed in
some of the favelas it documents (as no less than war zones). At one
point the film crew was held up and robbed by traffickers. But even
more interesting, at one point the folks from BOPE (the SWAT team)
were around when they were filming a torture scene involving a plastic
bag over the head and threatened sodomizing with a broomstick.
Filmmakers were worried the police would interfere, but when the
police came down and interrupted, it was to say "hey, you're doing
this all wrong. The bag is supposed to be like this, so it won't
leave a mark". Etc.

* Director describes interview with journalist where the journalist
lays down a series of reasons why the film is definitively fascist,
and a series of lame responses.

* I think there are English subtitles of the film on the internet now.
A search brought me to this collaborative subtitling forum, which is
incredible:
http://www.divxsubtitles.net/forum/showthread.php?p=5614

* I'd like to get the interview subtitled too.

* The host of what somebody described to me as a cheesy pop TV show
for teenagers and kids was robbed a few days back for his rolex, and
wrote an op-ed about it saying, wistfully, "where's Captain
Nascimento? [the protagonist uber-cop]"

* The film is definitely succeeding at provoking a massive debate, and
it's giving him a forum to strongly state the benefits of
decriminalization, and a fresh-start restructuring of the Military
Police.

In Fortaleza

In Fortaleza now. How's that? Not bad!

Who's butts?

I watched the Seattle WTO documentary "This is What Democracy Looks
Like" a few nights ago, and lately I've been playing with this one
toddler a lot.

A funny thing to do while coloring is to draw "circle A's" on their
diapers. Some time later:

--"Did you draw a circle A on my daughter's butt?"
--"Um, no."

Sports and Lazer

Whenever I see the Portuguese word for leisure, lazer, I think they're
talking about laser tag. So when I read this sentence in wikipedia
about this really big and pretty piazza I walk by a lot...

"currently the plaza is used in the community for sports and [lazer]"

...I was like, "No way!!!! Oh wait.... aw."

A conversation about Açai

Holmes Wilson 

want anything from brazil that can be bought at an airport?

11:54

stark@gmail.com 

yooo

haha

lots of acai ;)

you're coming back??

11:54

Holmes Wilson 

doesn't travel well.

so I ate two bowls today.

11:54

stark@gmail.com 

<3333333 acai

11:54

Holmes Wilson 

a few weeks too see family and friends.

dear god.

acai

Belem is the acai capital

11:55

stark@gmail.com 

ohhhh

then back to brazil??

I FUCKING LOVE ACAI

11:57

Holmes Wilson 

I ate two bowls with fried fish today.

This is what I love about ACAI.

You are eating fried fish, with a purple smoothie-ish thing on the side.

With yucca grapenuts in it

11:58

stark@gmail.com 

oh weird

i've never had that

minitodo.rtf

Get acai icecream

Take shower.

Talk to Arthur (r2)

Stash stuff.

Write down all ticket information.

Prepare backpack with necessities.

Burn CDs of important docs.

Google cheapest way to get from MIA to FLL.

Burn Tricky vidz for G 

Email Mary

Email other folks in Providence.

Send email to Brazil folks with address.

Set alarm for 7:00A

Eat breakfast

Buy sandals for friends at airport.

Wheeeeeeeeeee!

An article about the boredoms drum thing

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/arts/music/09bore.html?

ex=1186459200&en=9b6e9be0dc922e3c&ei=5070

Wow. The time I saw the Boredoms play it was one of the best shows
I'd ever seen. I bet this was really really cool.

I was just reading this Kelefah Sanneh article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/arts/music/23sire.html?ex=1186459200&en=1c9c9cbee7b3cb68&ei=5070 

"To name just a few recent gigs: the 77-drummer Boredoms performance under the Brooklyn Bridge; Vampire Weekend on Roosevelt Island; Animal Collective at South Street Seaport; the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival; Built to Spill and Cat Power at McCarren Pool."

Wait.  77-drummer Boredoms performance in the Brooklyn Bridge space?  Did that really happen?  Fuck, man.  I hope somebody I know went to that.

More Brazilian Food

Maniçoba is a stew based on a leaf that must be cooked for one week
(!) to remove a highly posionous substance. I tried that the day
before yesterday, but it was too salty.

I had Tacaca again last night, which was awesome. It's a soup
consisting of ransparent goo that looks like wheatpaste, with broth,
boiled green veggies, and salty little shrimps on top. I think the
goo and the broth are both made of Yucca.

Videos and photos of party

Up now! Metainformation coming soon.

http://flickr.com/photos/notsurewhen/
http://wstr.org/Videos (all the as-yet un-named ones... if you can't
play them try VLC)

Tecnobrega parties are fucking rad

This has got to be the next shit or something. The first thing I see
when I walk in is this huge bright LED screen with animations that
remind me of the demo scene (including plasma and rotating cubes).

I met one of the producers and barely understood him say something
like "I'm making electro-brega... it's a mix between Benny Benassi
and technobrega". Sure enough, later that night the guy is up in the
spaceship DJ cockpit and I hear the baseline from "Satisfaction" all
cut up to fit into your standard rolling reggaetonish brega beat. So
amazing.

By that point me and my friend Giseli were totally just being DJ ho's
(is that designation still current and/or acceptable?) just laughing
and basking in it.

Other awesome reappropriations included melody rips of Rhianna
"Unfaithful", Ace of Base "Don't Turn Around", "Girls Just Wanna Have
Fun" and this song by the Italian R&B artist Tiziano Ferro (actually
pretty awesome) from back in 2001 that I never thought I'd hear
again. "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" even had a really strong phonetic
imprint from the original version in some of the verses.

Photos should be going up tonight.

Açai

Açai (pronounced "ass-eye-EE") is one of the coolest foods you will
ever find anywhere. Yesterday I ate it as a cold thin soup with ice,
then with a crunchy carb made from roots, and then as ice cream.
There's also a really sweet milkshake form with chopped up nuts and
guarana.

It has a very cool deep purple color.

So amazing. I could eat the ice cream every day. Everybody should
go to the Brazilian bakery on Lincoln Street (right near Forbes) and
see if they have it.

If they don't have it, ask if they can get it! And more generally,
see if you can get Brazilian ice cream in Worcester. It's so cool!

I miss Trinidad so much

http://wstr.org/nynex/Kevin%20Lyttle%20-%20ROTI%20(Soca%202007).mp3

In case that link is broken, go here and download the Kevin song: http://wstr.org/nynex

That lonely point in the trip where I desperately google for local karaoke

http://yamaga.com.br/images/sapporokaraoke1.jpg

I hope I get here someday soon.  It is far though.

Phone with FM radio

I have a phone with an FM radio and it is the raddest shit. I listen
to funny brazil radio all the time when walking around. The only
downside is I will be sadder if it's stolen.

Brazilian word games

1) The word "comer" in Brazilian Portuguese means both "to eat" and
"to fuck". So there's a joke, "As duas coisas melhor na vida sao
comer" which translates (literally, radio-editly) as "The two best
things in life are eating".

2) The word "pasta" means "crack" (as in cocaine).

3) There was a Brazilian folk hero who, when under attack by an
invading army, yelled "O Mata o Moro!" to his followers, which
translates roughly as "kill or be killed!". However, it also
translates as "Either the forest or the hills!" and some say that as
he waved his sword in the air he indicated each respective exit.

4) There is a Brazilian verb that means "to lick all over and cover
with saliva", and not in an eew way. I just forget what it is.

Brazilian tough kids fly kites

And they look so badass doing it. This needs to be in a hip hop video.

Videos

http://wstr.org/Videos

Some miscellaneous videos up there, including one of the time we saw
dolphins!

Belem

Got to take a nice aimless walk around Belem today. I like it here.
Nice old-city ultra-modern-city vibe.

Some of the people I've met say that it's a bit slow in terms of
social life though. I've definitely been hanging around the house a
lot, which is nice because I'm out of the sun. The plan is to stay
here until next week when the street party scene kicks up again after
this week, which is a holiday week where tons of people go to the beach.

Ton of new photos

I'm staying with some cool cats in Belem, and they have internet. I
just uploaded a *ton* of photos of the past few weeks.

There should be some videos of Trinidad and Dolphins at sea here in a
couple hours too:
http://nynex

Also, if you use flickr on a Mac and want to kill the uploading tool,
try fotofox, it is wicked better:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3945

Brazilian ice cream is extraordinary

Brazilian has a totally separate universe of ice cream flavors. Tons
of crazy tropical fruits. A couple days ago I got an ice cream
called "Romeo and Juliet" that was like peppermint-stick-like gooey
guava paste with a cheesecake flavor base.

Other highlights: something that tastes like macadamia nut, chocolate
with coconut, white chocolate, and Acai, a strange all-purpose jungle
food that gets into thick energy drinks, milkshakes, and savory
cooking as well (like, as a soupy mix alongside fried fish or
chicken). Bonkers.

If you travel with a laptop...

Travel with one of these:
http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/

So worth it. You can just plug it in to people's internet
connections and get Wifi everywhere in the house.

The only thing wrong with it is that it doesn't have 2 ethernet ports
(one to go to the computer you just unplugged).

Latest jam

I've been in the jungle for a while. Has anybody done this yet?

http://wstr.org/nynex/Nobody%20wanna%20remix%20to%20ignition%20the%
20stripper%20song%20(nynex%20remix).mp3

If not why not?

Brazilian Margarine

Apart from having trans fat in it, has an artificial butter flavor
that tastes and smells unbearably bad. Yuck!

Wheels spinning

I've been here for almost four weeks and my Portuguese is in a
"shitty Spanish" holding pattern. My interest in cool linuxy
projects here has been luring me away from language learning (primary
goal) and internet projects (secondary). Met a few cool people, but
my wheels are spinning even harder than in Trinidad.

Need a better Portuguese dictionary

I bought this Portuguese dictionary for Mac (Ultralingua) and the
dictionary they include kinda blows. The word results are ordered
alphabetically instead of by best-fit (so you get marginal
translations starting with the letter "a" before you get the most
useful ones), it isn't very comprehensive, and it gives minimal
explanation for the different possible translations so you're left
guessing.

The best dictionary I've ever touched (in terms of content... the
software was windows only, not great, and DRM'ed) was the Garzanti
Italian dictionary. Using that thing was a dream, there's something
so rad about never having to guess the meaning of a word or expression.

I want a Portuguese one of those.

Traveling? Don't get a camera, get a phone.

If you're thinking of traveling around the world, don't bring a camera, bring a good camera phone.  I bought a camera before I left and I totally regret it. Here's why:

Having a camera that takes big high resolution photos is a total waste.  High res pictures are a pain in the ass on the road.  You run out of memory in a second and then you're fucking around with buying more memory or burning CDs in internet cafes, which is not how you want to spent an evening.  I'm even traveling with my laptop, which should mitigate the problem since I have a hard drive to dump them onto, but laptop hard drives aren't big, and pretty soon you're stuck in the same position.  

Most of the space on my disk is already taken up by music.  And when it comes down to it I'd much rather be using the space for music.  What would you rather have when you're thousands of miles from home: one of your favorite albums from highschool, or 10 photos you took yesterday?  

Saving space by being choosy about what photos you snap or keep defeats the whole purpose of digital photography for travelers, that being the way a series of photos can tell or anchor a story.  And buying extra memory cards like you would rolls of film defeats the other purpose of digital photography: not blowing a ton of money.

The other reason not to take big photos is that these photos will only be seen on a computer screen.  It's not like you're going to make 5x7 prints.  And it probably isn't even worth keeping most of them on your computer; everybody else will see them on Picasa or Flickr.  And bigger pictures don't just use extra storage space, they also take much more time to transfer on your computer, and more time to crunch down to a size suitable for uploading.

So you're going to end up taking pictures at a resolution that most recent cellphones are capable of.

Traveling outside the US without a cellphone will INDISPUTABLY have a SIGNIFICANT negative impact on your trip.  Not traveling with a GSM* cellphone is my #1 biggest regret.  Here's why:

If you have a phone you will get more peoples' numbers.  When I have my cellphone on me I am way more likely to just pull it out and get somebody's number than I am if I have to interrupt the conversation to go searching for a pen and a bar napkin.  Plus when you're traveling you can get numbers in situations where at home you'd have to earn it.  This is so important, because meeting people who live in a place instantly opens up all kinds of scenes and experiences that would otherwise be closed to you as a traveller.  It also gives you a real insight into the culture of the place.   Meeting people is how you get away from skimming the surface Lonely Planet-style and start sinking your teeth into a place.  The best thing is, it works even if you're only there for a few days. 

If you have a phone you will lose less peoples' numbers before you wake up sober the next morning.  Sometimes you will wake up in the morning with names and numbers in your phone and be like, "oh yeah, I should call them".  No phone and those numbers are gone, dude.

If you have a phone you're more likely to follow up with these people in meaningful ways before your time runs out.  You know how it is; plans get made that night, and kids might call you up if they have your number but they won't track you down at your hostel.  In countries where everybody has a phone, making plans to meet without them is really difficult.  You're late.  She's late.  One of you decides to bounce and now no gorgeous girl with a cool accent for you, buddy.  You're working with very small amounts of time and lots of other barriers (you don't know the language, the city, the scene) so you can't afford missing connections. 

Email is not a substitute.  Even if you check email every day, the people you meet probably won't, and even a day or two of latency is too much if you're just there for a week.  Plus with foreign handwriting on bar napkins and emails from people speaking in other languages or with weird syntax looking like spam to either you, them, or spam filters there are many possibilities for email attempts to simply fail.  Some of the people you meet will be very, very beautiful women.  Why take that chance?

If you have a phone you will have more independence from hosts or larger groups.  Staying with friends is awesome, but communication problems can make it hard to go off on your own for a bit, because you don't want to worry or inconvenience them.  Having a cellphone solves this problem.  A similar thing happens when you're traveling with a group.  You might stick with the group even if you'd rather do your own thing just because of how difficult it will be to reconnect.  Being tied to a group sucks, and no matter how cool and gracious your hosts are, being forever tied to them is a drag.  

A new GSM phone with a pretty good camera costs between $200 and $400.  You could easily spend that on a camera, and if you have a nice digital camera already you could sell it for that much.  Be serious about your trip.  You're spending a significant amount of money just to be in these new and interesting places; it's stupid to scrimp on something relatively cheap that will hugely improve your stay.  And it's even dumber to bring along another piece of expensive electronic equipment that will be much less useful.

*Why GSM:

GSM phones (the kinds with the little swappable chips that link you to a number and a service) are perfect for traveling because you can keep the same phone and just buy new prepaid chips when you enter a new country.  A chip gives you a local number and sets you up with a local carrier.  In Brazil, a chip costs like $7.  If you have Cingular/AT&T or T-mobile you already have a GSM phone (though you may need to unlock it).

Good spam subject

Spam subject:

I'm disappointed that Band of Bugs didn't do more with its insect theme to make it stand out, but what it does, it does quite well.

Okay, I'll read you, you deserve it.  Even tempted to buy your stock.

New jam available in a few moments

http://wstr.org/nynex/Big Day for Promiscuous Girl.mp3

Uploading now. I'm pretty happy about this one. Started it late
last night and finished this morning.

Casetta e Planeta: Baile Funk parody on Brazilian TV

So there's some Brazilian sketch comedy show that parodies two Baile
Funk artists, Casetta e Planeta ("Casette" and "Planet"). One has a
scraggly afro (scraggle-fro?) and the other has parallel light and
dark stripes (skunk-hawk?). They talk in really Baile Funk -esque
cadences, and in this episode of the sketch Casette and Planet go to
Venezuela, where they are greeted by a parody of Hugo Chavez who
speaks in a robotic, military Spanish in the fashion of the square
not digging this crazy music.

They sing him a really silly Baile Funk song and get chased out of
the country. Then they go to Argentina. I'm not sure what happens
in Argentina, cause I got distracted.

(kevin and andy, thought I'd CC you on this, but this is basically a
blog post, if youtube has anything matching this, please link to it
in the comments).

Da un nike

There's a funny expression that is kind of like "talk to the hand"
that involves saying "da um nike" (give/do a nike) with a hand motion
in the shape of the nike logo. As in, "get the hell outta here".

Casetta e Planeta: Baile Funk parody on Brazilian TV

So there's some Brazilian sketch comedy show that parodies two Baile
Funk artists, Casetta e Planeta ("Casette" and "Planet"). One has a
scraggly afro (scraggle-fro?) and the other has parallel light and
dark stripes (skunk-hawk?). They talk in really Baile Funk -esque
cadences, and in this episode of the sketch Casette and Planet go to
Venezuela, where they are greeted by a parody of Hugo Chavez who
speaks in a robotic, military Spanish in the fashion of the square
not digging this crazy music.

They sing him a really silly Baile Funk song and get chased out of
the country. Then they go to Argentina. I'm not sure what happens
in Argentina, cause I got distracted.

(kevin and andy, thought I'd CC you on this, but this is basically a
blog post, if youtube has anything matching this, please link to it
in the comments).

Tons of new pictures up today

Check 'em out!

Parentins crazy Brazilian party Day 4

After waking up in my hammock to Parentins music and checking my
email, I had a boat to find. Turns out the fire station was a little
far, but the walk was great. It took me outside the mayhem a bit,
down a slightly shaded boulevard and a curved market street. I
bought a heavy tapioca pancake flavored with coconut and wrapped in
big leaves, which I picked at as I walked and ate more of than I
meant to.

The streets got quieter and it looked like I might be on a dead end
when I saw the fire station. Across the street I could see an
offshoot of the Amazon, some broken down looking boats tied up--some
grounded--and a few guys sitting in the shade near a propane
station. "Have you seen a boat with foreigners?" I asked. They
hadn't. I walked back to the road and continued down to its end
where more boats sat in the mud and a small bar was set up on the
street. No boat here either. And there wasn't really any good way
to follow the river, I had to just backtrack to the next cross
street, go up a block, and walk down to the next dead end. After a
couple iterations of this in the hot sun, I decided to check one more
street and then go home. At the end of this next street floated the
boat I was looking for.

There were about 12 folks on the boat; kids (three Germans a dutch
and a Swede) from the hostel in Manaus and family and friends of the
Brazlians who owned the boat. We ate grilled fish, jumped off the
boat into the water, and then drank caipirinhas (sugar+lime+cachassa)
and danced around on the deck for the next five or six hours,
surrounded by muddy water, river boats, trees, and houses on
stilts. At one point it started pouring rain even though 3/4 of the
sky was clear blue. That was wonderful.

One of the Germans was really good at flips and dramatic dives. The
other German was really good at doing this funny Brazilian dude dance
(half dance half stance, actually) in a speedo while water poured
down from an outdoor shower on the deck. The Germans were both about
20 and had spent the past 10 months in Rio fulfilling a civil service
requirement, so they'd developed Brazilian extensions to their
personalities, which was fun to see. There was a young Brazilian guy
Lucivan (sp?) who was just a total treasure, trying to talk to
everybody in whatever language they spoke, none of which he knew.
Everybody was just being silly.

We slept in hammocks through the evening, until about midnight, and
then hit the same techno party as the night before. That night the
music was a lot better, and I ended up staying out until 8. During
the day we'd made a plan to go swimming out by the river, so I was
psychologically prepared and surprisingly un-hungover when somebody
woke me up an hour later.

yo!

http://www.gmail.com/app/v1.1.1/L1/gmail-g.jar
http://www.gmail.com/app/v1.1.1/L1/gm-Generic-Advanced_MIDP2.jad

Place them in your phone using your computer and USB cable or

Parintins Day 3

When I woke up a band was playing onshore next to the boat. I'd seen
them setting up the day before. They were playing Parintins songs,
which I got to know real well, because there are about 8 of them.
Some background on the theoretical framework of the history and
practices of the festival is in order. If anything seems unclear,
don't ask me because I have no idea. Just relax your need for
explanation as much as possible and use your imagination to fill in
gaps.

So there are two bulls. Bulls correspond to colors (red and blue),
to vaguely stated personality traits ("garantido" and "caprichoso")
and to two tribes of people who affiliate as one or the other and
where the corresponding color t-shirt, armband, etc. The words
"garantido" and "caprichoso" translate directly to "guaranteed" and
"capricious" so if you thought a dictionary was going to help you
understand this better, you're out of luck. Some of this had been
explained to me the night before while I was drinking, other stuff I
was just intuiting or (maybe) hallucinating.

Each side has it's own songs, like "I'm blue, I'm blue, I'm blue, I'm
'caprichoso'" or "Garantido... garaaantido". And there are four of
them. Did I say eight? No, I think there were four.

For lunch the crazy guys from the boat were having a barbacue. Huge
chunks of salted meat and sausage, and some of these really mean
looking river fish with tough black scales that you have to rip apart
like a lobster. Later that night I realized how cheap beer was and
got really drunk and ran around dancing at the techno party. At some
point I ran into a swede from the hostel scene in Manaus; they'd come
down on a smaller boat that day, but all she knew was it was near the
fire station. So the next morning when I woke up (pretty early
considering) I checked my email and went to find this boat.

Orcootchie

I officially inaugurated my stay in Brazil by making an Orkut account.
Orkut is this weird social network site (like Myspace or Facebook)
that Google bought several years ago.

It blew up in Brazil, where it is pronounced "Orkootchie".

Parentins, visually.

http://images.google.com.br/images?gbv=2&svnum=10&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=parintins&spell=1

Skip the pictures of costumes and look at the big stadium shots.

Pictures in a week or so

I have a bunch of awesome pictures of Brazil, but the internet in the
areas I've been is ridiculously slow, so I'm not even trying to post
them yet.

Dolphins

Last night while chilling next to the Amazon we saw dolphins. There
are fresh water river dolphins here, and some of them are pink (no
joke).

But the really cool thing about river dolphins is that at night the
river was as calm as a puddle and the town was quiet so you could
hear them breathing. Snort. And you could hear the squeaks they
made as they echolocated in the muddy water.

Parentins or Crazy Brazilian Party - Day 2

The next day I woke up feeling like a million bucks. I lounged in my
hammock half asleep and half awake for ages, soaking up the morning
chatter and swaying hammocks around me, watching the jungle slide
by. When I finally got up to walk around, I was delighted to see my
vision of an armada partly realized. In front of us I counted 9
boats trailing off into the horizon, and another 8 or so behind. It
was like a convoy crossing the Atlantic in an old war movie, keeping
sharp lookout for u-boats. And knowing that our floating hammock
city of sleepy people was part of a larger confederation just
deepened the warm feeling that'd been diffusing through my body since
I woke up.

I took a shower in river water pumped up to a tank in the top of the
boat, and then walked to the front to dry off in the breeze and watch
the country slide by. Junior was holding court. Junior lives in Sao
Paolo, a huge city, and the way to picture him in relation to other
people we met is: he's the guy from the big city who loves traveling
around his country and seeing the sites. He was basically a big,
outspoken New Yorker (or Statin Islander) taking a boatride down the
Mississippi with a bunch of locals (and a miscellaneous foreigner).

I think when I was dry I just went back in my hammock, and spent a
little time copying music onto one of the other DJs' mp3 player.

We rolled into town in the early evening, and Junior and I went off
on our own to get something to eat. We walked into town, passed the
cemetary, and up to the stadium where a huge number of absolutely
ridiculous floats and large puppets were standing by. There were
trees three stories tall, giant skulls, miscellaneous vegetation,
enormous elf-like figures and giant lizards. I had no idea what any
of this was for, and figured a parade maybe but didn't give it much
thought. The streets were full of people but everyone was just
milling around in anticipation, and even though there were some
tremendous crowds watching something on a stage by the stadium it was
too chill to be much fun. After dinner we went home early and went
to sleep.

Know anybody in Brazil?

If you know anybody who lives in Brazil or who's recently lived in
Brazil, drop me a line: hwilson at the gee mail. I'm in Brazil now,
I'm planning to live here for 5 or 6 months, and I'm looking for a
good place to settle down. So I'd love to hear ideas about cool
cities, or get contacts of friends you might have living here or
elsewhere. Feel free to pass this on to others you know.

Parentins or Crazy Brazilian Party - Day 1: Boatride

Junior already had his ticket, so early Wednesday afternoon we went
down to the boat to buy mine. The boat was crammed with others of
varying shapes and sizes along the busy river front. It was among
the larger boats, three levels high, and was made of white painted
wood. It looked like a Mississippi riverboat but without the
paddlewheel. We walked down a shifty gangplank and aboard. There
were very few people on the boat at this point--mostly just the
boat's crew and their friends-- but hammocks of all different colors,
textures, and sizes already hung from the ceiling. A guy was selling
woven cloth hammocks and I bought his cheapest one for $6. It was an
ugly set of colors and slightly smaller than the others, but seemed
fine. He tied it up to the ceiling for me in a totally inefficient
way (a few days on a sailboat and now I'm a knot snob).

The operators of the boat asked if we wanted to have a look around,
so we took a walk up to the top level where somebody stood fussing
over a table crammed with DJ equipment: amplifier, CD decks, and a
computer. I remembered that these boats were known for playing loud
dance music all night; awesome. One of the guys in charge of the
boat caught me eying the equipment and asked me if I DJ'ed. I don't
DJ, so I said "yes". "Great, so you can DJ later then!" Awesome.

After buying my ticket I went back to the hotel to get my DJ set
together, but ended up just making a soca megamix of Akon "Nobody",
"Remix to Ignition" and the old Wyclef "Stripper Song". I got kind
of sucked in and did that until I had just barely enough time to
pack, check out of the hostel, and run down to the boat. I didn't
make it on time, but the boat didn't leave on time either, so I
checked in with Junior (who was already down there) and went to buy
DEET and--as it turned out--a hat as well.

Groups of shirtless dudes in surf shorts were pushing big motorcycles
down the gangplank and lowering into the boat's hold. I boarded.
The sun was setting, the boats' engines were on, some were already
blasting dance music, and the smell of engine oil in the forest of
white painted wood made me feel like I was on an old wooden
rollercoaster at a cheap amusement park. Someone told me that there
were at least 200 boats. I had a vision of them all spanning the
river in formation, the dreaded armada of the Beer and Techno empire,
conquering the first the Amazon and then the Atlantic, the world. It
didn't happen *quite* like that.

The sunset was incredible. The sky was perfectly clear and rays of
light shot out from below the horizon through a fiery gradient of
yellow to orange to red. Then it got dark, and then we left. Music
came on and the dancing started. This was the first real Brazilian
dance party I'd seen, so first impressions were strong. First they
played Parentins music and some sugary pop songs. More on that
later. Then it was techno and people starting dancing for real. One
thing about Brazil is that dancing is more universal than music, so
the old ladies who were dancing to funny holiday songs continued
dancing when techno came on. Then forro (fo 'ho) which is Brazil's
merengue--fast dirty music for dancing close to--except the steps
looked way more complicated than merengue and there was more/faster
twirling.

Then it was baile funk (here just "funk" pronounced "funky") and
people went crazy. The dancing was less structured but still really
complicated; lots of big steps forward and little fast steps back,
like in breakdancing (uprock?).

More fojo. I tried dancing for a bit, letting the girl lead and,
well, more or less humor me. Nobody wanted to for more than half a
song or so, which was fine. I've already promised somebody I'm going
to learn how to dance bachata and merengue, which seem similar and
easier (merengue is simper, bachata is slower) so fojo seems like a
good target.

The music had shifted back to techno and almost all the girls had
stopped dancing, so it looked like a good time for me to DJ. When I
got my laptop they didn't have an 1/8th to RCA cable for connecting
it. I felt mostly relief with a touch of disappointment. But it
turned out I had one in my bag, so no escape. My laptop only has
only one audio output, and I probably could have eked out something
using the left for playing and the right for cueing, but I was drunk
so I said fuck it: I couldn't listen to a song before fading it in so
I was flying blind, so to speak. But it was fun. I'd decided the
theme was going to be hip hop remixes, since I like that and since
it's really American. I started with an Usher remix Will Schachterle
did (Let it Burn + Seven Deadly Strokes) and then had to follow with
the Akon soca megamix I'd made that afternoon since none of the other
songs were done importing into Ableton yet. That was a little
weird. Then I played another remix I made that was a little more
straightforward, and closed with two Kelis remixes back to back:
Bossy and Milkshake. And then I totally abdicated my DJ reign. I
had no idea how well it went, but the sense I got from Junior was
that I was a terrible DJ but people liked it because it was something
different. I can live with that, and now I want to be a DJ here.

Pretty soon after that I went to my hammock and went to sleep. When
I woke up in my hammock the next morning I was not at all hungover as
I'd expected-- on the contrary I felt amazing.

Parentins aka Crazy Brazilian Party - Preface

I came into Brazil by bus from Venezuela, which lands you in Boa
Vista and eventually Manaus. From there, if you want to go anywhere
else in Brazil other than back to Boa Vista, you need to get on a
plane or go by boat down the Amazon. Since so many legs of this trip
had been by boat so far, I felt compelled not to fly, even though it
was $20 cheaper and several days faster. This will eventually let me
say that I made it from the US to wherever I end up in Brazil without
flying--so long as Puerto Rico counts as the US, and it might as well).

Junior my Brazilian hostel (and in another life prison) bunkmate said
that a day's travel down-river there was a massive regional festival
called Parentins, in a town called Parentins. I'd vaguely heard
about this from somebody else too, and was beginning to realize that
nearly every billboard I saw in Manaus for beer or cola was Parentins-
themed, and I'd wanted to break up the trip by stopping somewhere, so
this sounded perfect. Junior was going to Parentins. I was going to
Parentins. But Junior had a much better idea of what the hell it was
going to be like, and I had none.

"Flirty gym class" or "Brazil is for teenagers"

Guess who saw another amazing thing today? Me!

I was walking back from language book shopping with a woman from the
hostel scene (hi Claudia!) and we passed a high school in the center
of the city. There was a large paved area inside a fence next to the
school, just like you'd see in New York or Philly. And on it a huge
group of high school kids was out in the playground doing a really
flirty, dosie-doe-ing version of gym class.

We just had to stop and watch from the sidewalk. And we stood there
with huge grins on our faces.

Everybody was in the gym version of their school uniform: collared
short sleeves, grey athletic pants, and optional but often opted-for
grey short skirts for girls. There was loud Brazilian dance music;
this high school had a bumpin' PA. A few young teachers or older
students were the flirty jazzercise drill sergeants, bouncing around
and blowing whistles in an awesome fusion of authority and complicity.

At first there were two lines, and pairs had to run up the middle of
the lines grabbing hands behind their backs as they swapped sides.
The move seemed designed to distract the teenagers from being awkward
and goofy, so that they grasp hands in a moment of unselfconsciousness.

Then the next thing was even crazier; it was pretty much a G-rated
gym class version of wining! Everybody stood in two concentric
circles facing the center, standing with their back to someone else.
They did a booty shake down and back up, and then shifted to the
right. Then after a full revolution the inside circle switched
places with the outside circle.

Everybody's dancing style was different. Sporty, chill, lazy,
aloof. Oh, and did I mention that a few of the guys were really,
really flamboyantly gay? It was great!

Thinking about it now it reminds me of the parts of Brave New World
that--admit it--were pretty hot. One imagines alpha plus Brazilian
education technocrats convening meetings to puzzle over questions
like "How can we ensure everyone is socially/sexually well-adjusted?"
or "How do we boost attendance in after school programs?" (this was
at 5:00PM in late June) or "Adolescent males need to learn to be in
Brazil without having erections all the time. But how?"

We were part of a small assortment of onlookers that also included
some old guys (hey maybe that's cool here?) and one girl's mom or
someone who knew her mom (mom laughing, girl mortified). The German
felt funny watching once the sheer joy wore off and so we walked to
get ice cream and sit down to watch some more. Appropriately, the
German got popcorn flavored ice cream. Appropriate and totally
gross. Anyway, in the ice cream shop there were more teenagers who
seemed to be having a really good time, and I realized that the only
people I've really seen having fun in Brazil so far have been
teenagers. It seems really fun here to be a teenager.

So, international businesspeople, professors with sabbaticals,
lefties looking to escape Bush's America, here is my recommendation:
Based on everything I know about Brazil, there is nowhere better you
could bring teenage children. If you dragged your teenagers here, it
would be *so* hard for them to even feign grumpiness. They'll get in
shape, find teenage love, eat exotic jungle flavored ice cream, learn
to dance and get fluent in the raddest language around. Seriously.
Okay, semi-seriously.

River to river, backyard to yard

Tonight I went to something wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.

It was a free concert of choral music and gospel performed by a
choral music group from St. Louis at the Manaus opera house. Manaus
is a bustling city in the middle of the jungle that grew up in the
rubber boom. Rubber boomed, and as the global economy sucked rubber
down the Amazon and out of the jungle, the jungle sucked money and
fanciness in. To Manaus. And the Opera House was the center of the
vortex.

Everywhere you turn ostentation borders on maniacal, sharpened by the
fact that in the middle of the jungle lots of stuff would have to be
imported anyway, even if no one was planning to boast about it in
drawing rooms. So it's steel from England. Architects from France.
Engineers from Germany. Painters and sculptors from Italy. Wood
from a self-consciously long list of different places tiled into a
floor so as to make you notice how many types of wood there are. And
the dome is a rainbow of individually painted ceramic tiles with
those of the Brazilian flag being the *least* intense!

When I took a tour of the opera house on Saturday I asked about
events, and saw on the calendar that there were several free concerts
coming up; the one on Monday was a gospel music group from St.
Louis. How fitting. "River to river," I thought (and kept wanting
to follow with "backyard to yard").

After Trinidad's dress codes I had a light worry about showing up in
"camper's casual", but when I arrived Monday evening, far from it
being a problem, I fit right in: everybody was dressed for a free
summer concert in the park. And even though everyone was sitting in
individual ornate mahogany (?) chairs with deep red upholstery in a
fabulously ornate concert hall, that was the vibe: summer concert in
the park.

On stage was a single piano in front of some risers, and since I
thought I'd seen the word "orchestra" in the program I felt a
momentary twinge of "uh oh" that I'd confused the date. But then a
string of singers filed onto the risers looking very much like a
small city American choral music group, and put to rest my doubt.
The conductor walked on to the stage and, working with their
interpreter and tour guide (who was in jeans and a t-shirt) greeted
the audience and announced the first few pieces of the program. One
interesting intercultural hiccup: the standard greeting ("This is our
last show in the country, we've loved its scenery, food, people,
etc.") ended with the almost-punchline "and we've spent lots of
money," which the interpreter, it seemed deliberately, didn't translate.

The first few selections weren't gospel at all; they were
ecclesiastical choral pieces sung in Latin. I felt a twinge of doubt
again: "I thought this was going to be gospel?" but that soon was
overwhelmed by the memories of my father--who died of cancer 18
months ago--singing in the Worcester Chorus. They sang music like
this to audiences like this. I'm not sure if they ever toured
Brazil, but they toured Poland and Russia, traveling bubbly in a tour
bus, singing free concerts in old, beautiful spaces that they strove
sometimes successfully, always admirably to fill with sound, drinking
a lot at dinner and then singing even more-- all this a Chorus buddy
may have reminisced in the days around his funeral, reflecting that
nook of his life back at us like a convex mirror, as happens.

The St. Louis Chorus was not well balanced; only a handful of altos,
four men-- only two tenors. And dear Missourians if this post finds
its way back to you through Google someday please understand that
this critic has an entirely unrelated bone to pick.

The program shifted into gospel, which everyone loved ("Hu--sh!" and
"My white robe" and "Children don't be weary") and then into a string
of songs for the Catholic mass sung in gospel fashion, commissioned
by the pope and composed by the conductor who stood before us. The
first of these was actually the Creed (it was pure for the virgin
birth, woeful for the death, and gospel energetic for the
resurrection). Following this were parts of the mass you would be
more likely to hear sung, again in Gospel style. I started to feel
like the whole presentation had a detectable Catholic vibe, in that
it was a bit more reserved and prim than you'd expect, but I haven't
seen enough gospel to be sure.

After intermission it went back into gospel and the conductor
encouraged the Brazilian audience to clap along, which many had been
itching to do from the start. They sang "Jonah in the Belly of the
Whale" which I either remember from some Worcester Chorus performance
or maybe even singing myself at some point in some church summer camp
somewhere. I really had no idea, but if you heard this when you were
a kid you'd remember it forever so it could have been ages ago.

The gospel thing meant that way more people had soloist chops. Some
of the soloists were amazing, and for all of them it was so much fun
to follow their flourishes.

When the last two soloists got up it sounded a little jarring. The
song they were singing sounded more like a musical than gospel, and
then it broke into a skit, "Flossy, where were you? I've been
looking all over!" in a cheesy broadway voice. The oddness quickly
became the most adorable thing in the world when I realized they were
closing their set with "Meet me in St. Louey": awww... they had to
represent the lou!

I went home delighted, and on the way back stepped into a restaurant
where who should I find but my bunkmate, Junior, who was just
finishing his meal. He ordered a beer and recommended the fish,
which was scrumptious. He told me he runs a business providing party
equipment ("you know, like helium balloons, mechanical bulls") for
kids' parties. After dinner we went for ice-cream by the kilo and
tromped home together.

Traveling

Each other phase of this trip was sort of its own very defined and
coherent thing. Visiting a friend in Puerto Rico, for example, or
camping on an island, or staying with a friend's family in the
Dominican Republic, a visit to Haiti, 12 days at sea, 5 weeks in
Trinidad waiting for the boat to be fixed. Each phase had a very
coherently defined home base, set of people, and rhythm attached to it.

Right now however, even though I'm in closest proximity to the
ostensible goal for this trip (speaking Portuguese), I am just
straight up traveling. Youth hostel backpacking dollar watching
meeting europeans on old-style Grand Tours traveling.

This post won't go out until the next time I connect my laptop to the
internet. God willing I'll have escaped by then.

Norfloxacin

After traveling for a while in places with sketchy water and food
safety, I let my guard up and got got by Venezuela. So last night I
was like "ah ha I can eat whatever I want because tomorrow I'm taking
Cipro, motherfuckers!" and drank beer and ate street meat sticks and
stopped at a by-the-kilo ice cream sundae buffet.

Then I opted to just take the even more bacterially homocidal
Norfloxacin because it came with instructions (Cipro was way cheaper
but required waiting for a morning trip to the internet to look up
dosage info).

I also got my laptop power supply fixed today, but it doesn't help
much because Brazilian internet providers seem to use PPOE (that
bullshit where you need a password to connect on a broadband
connection and nobody remembers it after entering it the first time
ages ago) so connecting at the hostel is difficult.

Stomach feels pretty good today. Yay for hi-tech antibiotics bought
without needing to visit a doctor.

There should be an exam or something you can take in the US where if
you know enough about medicine and interpreting reference material you
can just buy certain prescription drugs.

Brazilian Girls

On the most-pretty-faces-per-square-mile list I've been keeping,
Brazil rates below New York so far. Especially in my age range.
Interesting. Could just be this region, or an early sign that the DR
is on its way to topping the hemisphere.

Me and a big tatooed Brazilian dude named "Junior"

Are hostel (one could easily imagine prison) bunkmates and we're going
to travel on a boat down the river together to some crazy traditional
Amazonian party that's on the way to where I'm going (and that I may
have cruised by or flown over had I not met said dude).

Ready, set, get your tiny monkey on

I went to the Science Forest in Manaus and saw little monkeys playing
in the trees around me. I also saw manatees and river otters in
unhappy tanks. But the monkeys were happy. Pictures soon.

In Brazil

I´m in Brazil. Left for Venezuela Wednesday on the Ferry from
Chaguaramas Trinidad. It was a little boat they use for party
cruises, so we listened to soca and reggaeton on the way over.
Decided not to sail because it would have been three weeks or more at
sea that I wanted to spend here.

Landed in Guiria Venezuela, a pretty chill reception for a pretty
chill place. Bussed out of there that afternoon, passing through
places like Santo Piritu, San Felix before getting to the border town
Santa Helena. Venezuela is the land of muscle cars and ridiculously
cheap gas.

A quick talk with a nurse at the bus station near San Felix and a few
chance vibes left me with a pretty negative initial impression of the
Chavez thing. Her take was that he was doing some good stuff but
nothing spectacular, and meanwhile stuffing every institution in the
country with friendlies. I´m 80% sure one of the bus passengers had
to show a piece of paper to some soldiers at a checkpoint about a
professional video camera they were carrying.

The huge tourbusses are over air conditioned and coup you up in a box.
If I go back to Venezuela I want a car or motorcycle-- gas is so
cheap. Something like 30-40 cents a gallon depending on the exchange
rate you get (another silly thing about Venezuela is that Chavez is
fucking around with the exchange rate so you need to exchange dollars
on the blackmarket at rates that very wildly from dealer to dealer and
across regions).

The busride through Venezuela went like: standard caribbean lushness,
massive ascent into a cloud forest, and then a subtle descent into
high, mostly treeless plains that stretched for ever under spectacular
skies.

I crossed the border that night-- nobody checked my passport on either
the Brazil or Venezuela side and I had to walk back in the morning
when the bus ticket lady spotted this and wouldn´t sell me a ticket.
It was my fault and makes total sense... folks from either country
just need a yellow fever vaccination certificate to cross from one to
the other.

I camped the night at the bus station in Paracaima (sp?), the border
town. A man named Manoel paid for my dinner just to be nice. In the
morning after the passport stamping silliness I took a shared taxi to
Boa Vista... so much nicer just to be able to feel the outside
temperature and the breeze in your face. Boa Vista is a small city on
the river. Tonight I´ll go to Manaus on a bus and arrive in the
morning. Then it´s probably a riverboat down the Amazon to Belem (in
keeping with the "use as many different types of transportation as
possible" maxim) and a bus to Fortaleza, but I might head straight to
Rio, I´m not sure.

My Portuguese is laughably bad.

Karaoke revolution

Late att karaoke tonight the Akon song "Nobody" comes up on the
screen. A Texan says "hey, this is Akon, you were gonna do Akon,
right? Is this you?" and with a sinking feeling I say "No." I
didn't even know this song was in the book. Damn, I've always wanted
to sing it but I didn't even know they had it; it wasn't in the book
for being too new.

So the guy gets up and starts singing and he's doing a great job. He
not only has the chorus down but he has perfect flow on the verses.
Everybody loves it and I'm totally jealous. Especially because I've
always wanted to do this song and do the Kels / 'Clef medley.\ I
deflate and start thinking about when the next karaoke night is and
if I'll still be in the country.

But then a glimmer of hope appears. Maybe I can jump in?

I'm hovering. He gets to the point in the song where it starts to
get repetitive. I make eye contact and go for it, jumping in all
slurry and sleazy with (oh shit!) "It's the remixto ignitiiona hotn
fresh outthe kitchenamama rollin'that body gotevery manin here
wishinga sippin oncoke and rummm. I'm like sowhatI'm drunnnkits the
freakin weakinbabyimaboutta have me some..." By the word "kitchen"
people start screaming. After the verse we jump back in to the Akon,
alternate lines and then end up hugging and belting out the chorus
together screaming into mikes over eachothers' shoulders. I give a
quick look and jump into "Just cause she dance the go go, that don't
make her a ho no" and this time it takes a little longer for
everybody to scream, but they do. We close out the song together and
it's fucking amazing.

It could not have worked out better.

Also, I really wanted to do Rhianna Umbrella, but the karaoke DJ kept
kicking me back in the queue because I sang in songs with other
people. Eventually I manage to convince them, do the Jay-Z verse,
and then there's like 12 guys and girls on the three mics rallying to
sing umbrella as the last karaoke song of the night, before it
switches to dance party. Coup # toup.

Up in VIP

Wednesday night I went to karaoke as usual and since it was a
national holiday the next day and a big party night that night I
tagged along with some folks I met to a club called "Zen". The
friend I went to the last club with said he would never be caught
dead in the place, but I couldn't see a huge amount of difference...
except that this place was maybe just a touch trashier.

Through some awesome personal connect we got in free, and then some
Canadians in the big corporate part of the software biz were high
rolling there with a bunch of booze to offer us, so that part worked
out well. There were pretty big name producers from Jamaica
deejaying (I think they made the riddim to Sean Paul's "We be
burning'" for example) so that worked out well too.

The deejays more or less did a straight dancehall set, with just a
few big soca jams thrown in (including a soca "Time After Time" and
"Take on Me"). The set was pretty ADHD--no one song for more than 90
seconds. They didn't do any long mixes of songs on one riddim, which
surprised me; I guess that's out now.

We got in free, but we also got into the VIP section free, which
included a packed-like-sardines but heavily air conditioned hip hop
room, and a balcony where you could watch the crowd below. We spent
all our time on the balcony.

There was some excellent dancing, but it was heavily interfered with
by people's club agendas. There were pockets of people (both girls
and guys) who left their agenda at home or decided that the best way
of pursuing it was to just dance and look awesome. Seeing people do
the dance to "badman move forward badman pull up" was pretty great.
But I definitely felt like dancehall works better as an injection of
sexual aggressiveness into a friends-having-fun party than it does in
an already sexually aggressive club setting. Techno (for being just
energy) or house (for being sexual in an abstract way) both work
better for me in clubs.

Seeing guys with "dorky Indian guy" style griding dorkily with girls
gorgeous and not at all wining dorkily was--and I'm not sure of the
right word--empowering, maybe?

Right before we left there was some incredible dancing on the bar.
At least least one woman (in a sort of punk rock / bondage club
outfit and half shaved hairdo looking something like Pink in the
videos for one of the angstier songs the Four Non Blondes lady wrote)
was not at all dancing for male attention (some were) and seemed to
not give a flying fuck. And she was trying really hard in a really
endearing way to get this big woman who'd danced on stage earlier
(and really well-- the DJs said she had it lock) to come up on the
bar. She was shaking her head resisting, and if she finally caved we
left before that.

My sense is that Carnival for Trinidad is this big release from
having to party in clubs or club-like atmospheres. I'd like to see
that.

Jamaican macho bullshit

At one point in the set on Wednesday, they threw on that "Nobody
wants to see us together" Akon jam. (Look out for my karaoke medley
of that, "Remix to Ignition", and the Wyclef "Just cause she dance
the gogo" song-- it's going to blow minds.)

Anyway, so they run the "Nobody wants to see us together" chorus for
a second--which everybody loves--and then one of the DJs comes in on
the mic saying "Now the gay fraternity in America..." as he lowers
the volume on the music... He starts again "Now the gay fraternity
in America has made this song their anthem..." I'm thinking "Oh, I
get it" and then "Uh oh". He continues, "So this is now a battyman
song, and we aren't gonna play any battyman song" and then there's
that record scratch / rewind song, and he throws on another version,
to the same melody with a okay imitation of Akon's voice that goes:

"Two man dey must not lie down together..." and then I didn't catch
the second part.

My only regret was that I wasn't watching the crowd's reaction
closely enough, since I was too pissed off. I have a sense that as I
was yelling "fuck you" and giving them the finger from the balcony
other people were making noise too, and most likely cheering. The
macho anti-gay bullshit is more of a Jamaican thing than a Trini
thing, but it seems to fly here, which sucks.

If I were a girl I would've splattered my drink on them from the
balcony, but that seemed way too unpredictable in this setting, and
anyway, talk is cheap.

Whose streets indeed

http://www.publicjustice.net/pr/wto040207.htm

Cha ching.

Seasickness is real

So I'm still in Trinidad. Yesterday we set out really early but had
to come back due to technical difficulties. We've had a bunch of
repairs on the propeller system made in Trinidad and some of them
weren't done exactly right, or caused other problems.

Yesterday we stared really early, and I went out with some folks I'd
met here the night before. Started with karaoke and ended up going
to a club. The dj-ing at the club was just throwing together a bunch
of hits back to back-- nothing that creative. But since Trinidad has
the best shared body of pop music in the world, it was a really good
set.

So seasickness probably happened because my stomach was f'ed from
drinking so much the night before and I was really tired. And coming
out of the DR it was much easier for me to ease my way into things,
since I basically had less responsibilities. Also, the German/Slovak
couple got really sea sick, and so that effected me psychologically.

Wikipedia says that seasickness happens because your brain sees a
conflict between input from your inner ear and eyes, believes your
inner ear, assumes you're hallucinating, and then decides you've been
poisoned, to which the only solution is blargh! They said normally
vomiting doesn't stop the nausea in the case of seasickness, but for
me I felt like a million bucks afterwards, though it kicked up again
a bit later.

Funny advice

When Frank Sinatra sang "I bit off more than I could choose" nobody
thought he was motivated by greed!

When hearing for the first time the expression "It's raining dogs and
cats" everyone knows it is not the end of the world...

Likewise, in Portuguese it happens the same. You shouldn't always
take the words 'ao pé da letra' – which means 'literally, by the book'.

The Sacrifice of a Pig

Hey all.  This is one of the longer pieces I've talked about writing.  I'd like to edit it more and give it more context-- it's not perfect.  But you should read it.

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Elien (our Haitian host who was a Brujo himself) told Pippen and I (Pippen was the nickname of my Dominican friend whose real name was Alberto and who goes by Glaem) that we were going to a Brujo party that day, at the house of the other Brujo (we'd met him before, and I'd left my hat and sunglasses at his house).  Brujo is the Spanish word for voudou practioner.  

He was giving people beer, said Elien, and food: a pig was to be killed for the occasion.  The image I had in my head was something vague about drumming, free beer, and a pig roasting on a spit--basically a voudou barbeque.  Early that afternoon, we walked down from our mountain (our neighborhood was called Montagne Noire), took public transport down through the city, and were soon walking down that familiar (I'd been there before) but still vertiginous path out over the valley, with the sheer drop to the right, over the bidon-ville (shanty town) and its unfinished houses.  This time I noticed some PVC pipe poking out of the stoney dirt under my feat, carrying water from a source beneath the street into the concrete chaos of structures below, and leaking some.

There were some people near the entrance, chatting and occupying that space between the everyday sunlight and the excitement of the party inside.  There were people in the dark stairwell too, to nod to, navigate around, and brush against as we ascended in the pupil dilating dark, single file behind Elien.  I had that tickle of excitement you get when walking into any party.  

The room still had smooth red walls and a rough concrete floor caked with dirt, but this time it was full of people, who sat in chairs along the walls, up the steps of an unenclosed stairway on the right, and in the doorways to adjoining rooms.  A few were standing awkwardly around the edges with a cluster at the entrance, and some children sat on the floor near parents.  These were the spectators, and they had the look in their faces of a bunch of people at a long church service on a hot Sunday afternoon, pacing themselves.

The spectacle in front of them was anything but church-boring, however.  Facing me on the opposite side of the room were four drummers, backs against the wall and sitting behind gnarly traditional drums of wood and leather.  The beats ranged from interesting in a jammy-folk-drumming way up to heights that would make a minimal techno fans' brain explode.  No lie, it was usually the latter, but by now I was used to it so the music's intensity washed around and through me instead of welling up in my head and making my brain explode.

I recognized one of the drummers: he was the father of the family that was staying at Elien's house since they'd been evicted for lack of rent money, the ones with the baby daughter with the dangerously botched umbilical cord, and the mother whose milk may have been drying up and who walked with a limp.  He'd left his troubles at the door or somewhere else, however; the man played on and on and on with an energy that always matched the musicians at his side, and sometimes seemed to lead them.

 

In front of the drummers sat the Brujo.  I'm not even going to start on him yet; hold your horses a few paragraphs.

Immediately in front of me was a group of singer-dancers: four or five teenage girls, one teenage boy, and one man wearing matching outfits made of shiny green and red nylon that had a robin hood or Santa's elf aspect, pointy hats included.  The women danced in a group, in a loose, low-key shuffle that could go on forever and still leave plenty of lungs free for singing.  Compared to the drummers, they were just as relentless but less wholehearted.  Like young people in your average exhibition of folk dance, they know what they have to do, and they'll put on the costume and go along with it, but they're not going to have too much fun, except maybe once in a while by accident.  

The man elves wore similar uniforms but with pants instead of skirts, but they were more oriented around attending to the Brujo, especially the older of the two.  He danced at a much higher energy level and attended to the shrines, lighting candles and pouring liquids from decorated bottles.  He also kept bringing ceremonial bottles of hard liquor to the Brujo--yes, very important.  The younger, probably 17 or 18, looked kind of cool and listless most of the time, like a kid standing in the background in a hip hop video; he was more a part of a group with the women, but (how classic!) seemed subject to fewer expectations.   

The singing was all call and response: a leader would sing out a line, and the singers would echo back, usually repeating the phrase, sometimes returning something different.  Others in the room sang too (some harder than others) and melodies bounced back and forth between leader and chorus (and walls) and swung up and down between stomachy lows and palatal highs.  Of course every few moments a chord or a warble or a phoneme would slip by that I was sure I'd heard before (or more accurately "after"?) in a blues standard or a Timbaland beat.  But again I was already used to it.  When one melody lost steam, a new leader would jump in with a new one.  Twice it fell to Elien, who was almost nerdily stiff in his delivery and dancing, but better than anybody else at whipping the crowd up to peaks of intensity.  

The room was sparsely decorated, but three shrines more than compensated for the absence of other decoration.  The first was on a table immediately to my right, and was mostly covered by a sheet-- I'm not sure why, maybe it didn't fit with the occasion.  The only thing visible on top of the table was a crucifix a couple feet high in a delicate balance; it got knocked over a couple times and it seemed the thing to do to stand it up again, so I did.  Around the base of the table on the dirt covered ground were elaborate designs traced in a yellow powder, which I guessed and later confirmed was corn meal.  A google image search for "voudou symbols" would give you a better idea, but in the meantime just picture an excessively elaborate compass rose on a medieval map of the firmaments and you'll be close to the mark.  The second shrine I don't remember well; but vaguely it was a small volcano of colors and bottles and candlewax in the corner of the room, sitting, that's right now I remember, under a thick bunch of hanging animal skulls.  A bunch of skulls together don't look like much until you think about each one of them as a skull, if you know what I mean, and there were a ton of skulls.  At least thirty.  Elien pointed out that these were the skulls of all the animals that had been sacrificed there, but for some reason my impression that our pig was off roasting on a spit somewhere remained intact.

And now for the Brujo.  

In his general appearance and demeanor he was a full faced and big bellied black man of medium height, with the sensual swagger of a consummate performer.  His clothing changed through the course of the afternoon (his attendant helped him in and out of different shirts) but it was soft and loose-fitting and looked indulgently comfortable over his soft and loose-fitting body.  He also had the sensual swagger of somebody in the process of getting or (eventually) already very hammered.

Then there was the handshake.  I could call it an awesome handshake but really I should go farther and say I've never met anyone who was better at physically greeting people, and I doubt that any exist in North America (though one dimension of the experience, and it should be obvious which as you read on, recalled to me an encounter with Wesley Willis on a Chicago street in 1999).  

It began with a violent, almost wrenching double armed shake: shake the left hand, cross over, shake the right hand.  The tug on each hand felt strong enough to either dislocate my shoulders or tip me over my tiptoes into the Brujo's ample lap (and perfectly calculated to bring me to the verge of both but do neither).  While his hands were flopping out to snatch mine his eyes were fixed on me with an intensity that seemed to say "Fuck up this handshake and it's your ass" but also "Precisely how much you feel out of place is how welcome you are in my house".  Then he pulled me in close for an intimate headbut-- the kind where after making contact you roll your heads around just a few millimeters to make it sink in.  What an embrace.  And even though the combination of handshake was so precise and authoritative it felt like "the" voudou handshake (codified centuries ago, taught to kids in voudou catechism, etc.) Elien and Pippen got completely different ones.   So either the Brujo had a deep, deep arsenal of sublime handshakes or he was freestyling each time, and I'm not sure which possibility would make me esteem him more.

Then there was the way this king held court.  He was a bacchus, lord over the slow building feast.  He sat on a throne; he made the chair he sat in a throne.  He passed bottles of liquor around but drank as much as he shared.  When he danced the floor shook.  Sometimes he was singing or shouting instructions, other times he sat eyes half closed not moving a muscle in the stifling heat.  But he was always demanding something, even if it was just complete engagement.  As a master of ceremonies he was a tyrant.

And he had a queen.  She was big too, round too, with cropped hair not much longer than his shaved round head, in a yellow satin suit, boozing like he did, dancing just as he did: intensely focused, but lazy with supreme confidence.  Much of the time she sat tending to a small boy in her arms; their son perhaps.  There she seemed almost like another spectator, but then she would drift into his wavelength and be transformed.   

****

The singing and dancing continued, and the Haitian environment started to get to me.  It was extremely hot; we'd been there for two hours, it seemed.  The music hammered on.  I shared a chair with Tami or Elien until my but hurt and then stood awkwardly, shifting my weight from foot to foot as they got sore, in a corner of the room where a hot smell of urine dominated my senses.  Everybody else was hot and sore on their feet or in their chairs, but they all seemed like they were in church, and pacing themselves.  I did something that always worked in church, I started looking around the room.  First I scanned the people: some were dressed like urban professionals, with cellphone holsters on their belts and sunglasses that didn't look fake. Others looked more typically roughed up by Haitian life.  

Like I was in a hot last period history class, I started looking out the windows.  Through the window on the left I could see a house up on a hill, stuccoed and painted yellow, shining out among the raw landscape of cinderblock and re-rod.  Many of the houses had a level above in some stage of construction.  The re-rod stuck up in the air at the corners of the structure and cinderblocks followed, as time and money allowed.  I supposed that there was no cost to exposing concrete construction to the warm dry air, so you might as well slowly build skywards as your children grew up.  Through the windows straight you could see the power lines that spanned the valley, tangled with homemade kites.  Perpendicular lines of different colors and gauges ran down to feed the houses below.  I'd looked out the same windows before, and I'd looked out at the valley from the street, but I hadn't seen the kites.

Elien might have figured we needed a break, because he took me and Pippen back up to the street to get water pouches.  These particular pouches were the coolest looking of any I'd seen; the logo was a big smiley face with sunglasses on, and the brand had the words "cool" and "local" in it, I think.  Maybe it was "Local Cool"; it sounds to good to be factual, but the more I think about it the more I convince myself that's what it was.  The back of the pouch was tiled diagonally with the sunglassed smiley face.

We got back inside refreshed, but I could feel myself slowly sliding back into sleepy doggedness.  Soon after, I heard a long, loud squeal coming from the entrance.  "Ah," I thought, "that's the pig" and the "Brujo BBQ" notion collapsed into something that made a lot more sense: they were going to kill this pig right now or real soon, right in front of me.

The large pig appeared at the doorway with dark matted brown hair and a heavy hemp rope around its neck.  A youngish man in jeans and a blue golf shirt dragged it into the room.  It squealed again, it did not want to come into the room.  But with a few tugs it was in the center of the room, nervous and looking around as the singing continued.  The Brujo now had a machete.  

In just a couple mental clock cycles after that first squeal I'd moved miles closer to knowing what the fuck would unfold, but I wasn't all the way there.  I now pictured the killing of the pig, but I pictured it as an open and shut thing.  That is, I thought they'd kill it more or less like a farmer facing the facts of life, with solemnity but equanimity too, equanimity in imitation of nature.  So the moment I realized the nature and destination of the train I was on (all aboard!) was the moment when the brujo grabbed one of the pig's ears and with one flourish of the machete sliced it off.

A smooth, red line ran down one side of the ear the brujo now held in his hand.  A matching red line ran down the stub of the pig's ear, marking the first step in its transformation from pig to meat.  The pig had squealed and strained at its rope, and it squealed again when the brujo took its other ear.  Turning, he displayed the ears to the room, and then placed them a dish by a shrine.  

The singing steped up.  

Up until now I've been using the Spanish word "brujo", but (or becasuse) the Haitian word is so much bettter.  In Haitian, voudou priests are called "Papa Kriminel".  Yes, "Papa Kriminel".  As if the first Brujos built a time machine and took their name from the most bombastic phrase they could find in 2012 street slang.  And the similarity to the word "Criminal" is not coincidental, and therefore I think it's entirely kosher to draw the vague impressions of badassness  (without expicit reference to crime as such) that you'd get from hearing the word in modern slang.

So imagine the effect, of a room full of people singing "Ooooh Papa Kriminel Kriminel Kriminel Papa Kriminel Wooooah..." over and over again to their own Papa Kriminal who is, as we say in Massachusetts, bombed out of his gourd and yikes waving a machete around as sliced pig pants and shuffles panicky at his feet.  "Woooah! Papa kriminel!"

The brujo took in his hand a dagger about a foot long with a red tassle on the end.  Uh oh, kriminel.  The man holding the rope pulled in, reducing the pig's range of movement.  Then the brujo straddled the pig and stuck the dagger deep into the pig's back, entering near the shoulder blade and, I imagined, piercing the lung on that side.  The pig squealed, and began to pant, but it was unsettlingly clear that this wasn't the death blow, it was ornamental.  Moments later the brujo drove an identical dagger in near the opposite shoulder blade.  At some point the pig had shat on the floor.

Then the song changed and the Brujo himself sang the call to a silent room and was echoed back by--now it seemed like everybody.   He began dancing facing the crowd.  Then he pointed the machete at the pig, lowered his head so he could look at it with wide open earnest eyes and eyebrows raised, and continued singing repeating the same phrase with theatric intensity.  I realized he was singing to the pig.  The only words I could understand were "mange ou" ("Eat" and "you") and I sang along an imagined translation in my head, "We're going to eat you, we're gonna eat you.  We're going to eat you, we're gonna eat you" and later confirmed that's more or less what it was.  The singers and crowd continued to sing this to the pig as the brujo began preparing the machete for the final blows.

Now at some point something very ugly happened.  I honestly don't remember if it was before or after the pig was pierced with the daggers, but it was before the pig was killed, so I'll describe it now.  For some reason, the Brujo, who was drunk, became angry with one of the young women singing.  He yelled at her, she cringed and said something, and then he smacked her on her bare upper arm with the flat of the machete.  She cowered, and he seemed to reflect and decide this wasn't enough of a punishment because in a moment he grabbed her and pushed her into a side room and started hitting her more.  The entrance to the room was right by my side, and though it was dark in there I could see him hitting her about the head as she cried and tried to protect herself.  Most people had their eyes raised to the entrance of the room, though some stared straight ahead.  At least one person approached the entrance to the room and watched, and at some point other people entered the room and the brujo left. The girl came out a few minutes later with some blood coming from her head near her ear.  Her ear had been cut.

The reaction of the crowd was extremely mixed and complex.  Most of the men put on a face of concern.  Elien did this, and as soon as the girl came out of the room he went into doctor mode and jumped up to inspect her cut.  I remember one man was more disturbed, and kept shaking his head.  Looking at the people sitting around the room I saw a woman whose eyes filled with tears.  She didn't cry, but she rubbed her face with her hands.  There were a few other women who were very disturbed, but at least two women who looked at the girl and nervously laughed it off, almost jeering, and said something I didn't understand, probably telling her to buck up, or that she shouldn't have done whatever it was she'd done.  I don't even remember what Tami and Joanne's reactions were; I think they were part of the grave and silent crowd.  The other young women singing were startled, but they seemed to see the girl as the lowest in their pecking order, and seemed to feel pretty secure it wouldn't happen to them. The girl who'd been hit was still humiliated and in pain, but she gradually returned to singing and dancing.  I meant to ask Elien what had happened, at one point I even said I wanted to know, but he didn't take me up on it and I didn't press him.  Pippen thought it was because she wasn't singing or dancing enough.  The brujo was a tyrant.

The singing continued for a bit and the nervousness and horror from of the girl's beating wore off.  The brujo began inspecting the machete, and taking practice swings with it.  I became preoccupied with whether or not he'd be able to kill the pig with one swing, more out of some strange desire for the aesthetic perfection in the ceremony than for the pig's sake.  Something was wrong with the machete, and an attendant ran for another.  The man holding the rope pushed the pig down on its front knees.  It resisted, dropped as the pressure on its back became too much, but then staggered back on its feet.  The brujo inspected the new machete, and started taking more practice swings, by now almost staggering.  I thought, "He's too drunk to kill it with one swing," even though I had no basis for thinking it was possible in the first place.  I was also tensing up, ready to shift position in a flash if case the machete got too close.

The singing died down and a circle formed around the brujo.  He raised the machete a few times, and shuffled around with the man holding the rope to get the right position.  Then he dropped the machete into the pig's neck.  The pig squealed, but the machete had only gone down three inches, leaving a triangular split in the pigs neck that sagged open with the unsupported weight of the head.  In the smooth, precise, primary colored cut cut against the pig's hairy living back, the inanimate claimed more territory.  But the pig was still alive, and still standing.  It even stopped squealing.

I started breathing shallow breaths into a tight chest when I realized it wasn't over.  The pig was breathing shallow two.  The machete came down again and sunk in another inch.  The pig squealed but lived.  Then, after a pause, the brujo chopped again and again in rapid succession.  Three.  Four.  Five.  Six.  The pig was screaming and my eyes stayed on its neck as the blade drove deeper.  The split was sagging open so much now it looked impossible that the pig could still be alive.  Seven or eight and I seem to remember a different sound, a spatter of blood, and the pig stopped squealing and dropped to the ground in a seizure.  Through the split in the neck you could see the spinal column, cut but not completely severed but enough.  I looked down at my bright orange Haitian t-shirt and there were three flecks of blood from the final chop.  The pig was still twitching on the ground and a pool of blood was forming, mixing with the urine and shit from before.  The brujo's attendant brought a bowl from the base of a shrine to collect some of the blood.  

To believe my take on the next thing that happened, you need to know that many parts of voudou practice adopt aspects of the slave's existence as symbols.  There's the whip, for example.  Exact replicas of the hemp whip used on slaves 200 years ago gets cracked in celebrations and ceremonies and as part of dances.    

When the pig finally lay still, the man who had held the rope removed it from the pig's neck, slowly and solemnly.  Many parts of voudou practice adopt symbols from slavery and the sugar trade.  The bullwhip that Europeans used to beat the slaves gets cracked as part of dances and ceremonies.  The houses of many Brujos have a column with a wide cylindrical base that symbolizes the central shaft of the machine slaves used to push in circles (while whipped) to crush the sugar cane.  It's there to draw supernatural force from the memory of suffering, and in ceremonies people dance around it.  So when they solemnly removed the heavy hemp rope from the neck of the pig once it was dead it was clear that the pig was the slave, and the gesture said to it, "You're dead; you're free now".

Then they dragged the pig off to cut up the meat.  This would take a long, long time, and I sank from the adrenaline of the killing back into the stupor of the full room and the thick air in the hot afternoon, floating between the keen engagement with the music and grumpy physical discomfort.  There was an awkward episode where Elien sent Tami and Joanne to get food and they came back with hamburgers.  I apologized and said I couldn't eat meat, and she said it was a cheeseburger.  I thought she meant she'd asked for just cheese, no patty, but it turned out it was a normal cheeseburger.  Anyway, Elien got really intense and said to them in Spanish, which they didn't speak,  "No, no come eso!"  I felt bad and took a bite of the burger, and then felt paranoid it would make me sick (I was traveling the next day) and exasperated by the whole situation.  To be fair, Tami had seen me eat a cheeseburger before, and my criteria for when I would and wouldn't eat meat were very instinctual and fickle, so much of the misunderstanding could've lay there.  "No come eso!" became a running joke between Tami and Joanne for the rest of the evening.  

This all might have happened before the pig was killed.  But after the pig was dragged off, they brought out the cheeseburgers and ate.  Once in a while somebody's cellphone would ring.    

When the meat was ready the Brujo began passing it around to the people there, in chunky fistfulls.  Most folks had brought bags, but some people were definitely improvising and wrapping the huge hunks of flesh in paper.  Some people seemed to take the meat for participations' sake, while others took it as a quantity of protein and fat that mattered a lot.  Elien said some people would eat the meat raw, but I didn't see anyone do that.

After the meat was passed around, the Brujo and his queen started seeming very, very drunk.  He slouched in his chair with his eyes half open, and eventually dropped his chin down into his neck and fell asleep.  The queen danced ecstatically, eyes drooped, and at one point collapsed in a frightening way that looked almost like a seizure.  Others ran to help her back into her chair, and she stood up to dance more, staggered, fell again, and was helped back into her chair.  Eventually, she slumped too.  The singing and drumming continued, but Elien started getting ready to go, and in our funny group we vanished with our share of pig meat out into the twilight.  

The walk home was eventful.  It looked like rain, and we rushed to find public transportation since it would be impossible to get home once the rain started because public transportation went to shit.  We found one and made it to the center of Petionville just as the rain was starting and people were scrambling to get themselves and their wares the hell home before they got soaked.  The electricity was out so everything was either a car headlight or a silhouette.  When the rain began we ducked into a restaurant and Elien ordered me tripe, but I ate Sprite and fried plantains, setting Tami and Joanne riffing "no come eso!"  While Pippen and Elien were having a really loud conversation about the origin of reggae, a man had an epileptic seizure in the doorway.  Elien looked him over and flicked water on him, but nobody had moved his head from where it had fallen on the edge of a concrete stair before we stepped around his body and out into the street.  The busses had stopped working and taxis were gouging so we walked home, back up the mountain.