Brazil Travel Blog

Sergio Rodrigues and His Chair

2010-02-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

Brazilian designer Sergio Rodrigues is famous for his Cornuto chair. While you might find architects and designers with elaborate theories and explanations for their vision and work, Sergio's are most personal, whimsical and lyric. He put a hole in the headset of a chair for his grand daughters ponytail.

Sky Chefs

2009-08-20T12:43:00.001-07:00

Our luggage being loaded on NWA Flight to JFK

Our flight was delayed on the ground in Minneapolis. As I watched them load our luggage onto the NWA plane, I wondered how much longer these aircraft would have NWA paint and when they'd be switched over to Delta and NWA planes will disappear from the sky.

2009-08-15T10:38:00.001-07:00

These photos taken of Kim and I, Karen, Kim, June and I were all taken at the Modern Cafe in Notheast Minneapolis. And they were taken on the iPhone and uploaded to the blog with an application called Pixelpipe. The photos have an old world feel because of the character of the Modern Cafe, the Ritz theater and the mounted swordfish over the bar in the Cafe. I asked June if it reminded her of Nelson's Cafe on main street in Roseau where she grew up and after being amused, she did get the connection of period and diner-style atmosphere.

Akli & Lee

2009-08-02T14:50:00.001-07:00

Lee and Alki at Overflow Coffeeshop in Minneapolis

Akli and Lee catch up on the family trip Alki took the boys and Shabha to Paris and Algeria for the entire month of June 09. Michael and Dylan were very excited to ride or the RER high speed train to Brittany. Apparently it was extremely hot in Algeria. No monkey's were observed this trip to Algeria because they didn't go far enough into the mountains.

They Don't Care About Us

2009-07-03T09:21:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson's controversial video was shot in Brazil's notorious Rio favila's by Spike Lee. MJ collaborated with 200 members and drummers from the social club Olodum to combine 'samba-reggae' music and hip-hop for this song.

Sao Paulo 1943

2009-07-03T08:06:00.000-07:00

Described as the "fastest growing city in the world" Sao Paulo had a population of 1.5 million in 1943. Today the city has a population of more than 11 million with a surrounding metropolis of over 20 million people. As a world leader in the production of coffee, cotton, and sugar, it was Sao Paulo's diversified industries that lead to it rapid and sustained growth for more than 60 years.

Grafica Fidalga in São Paulo

2009-07-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

Brazil Travel Wordle

2009-04-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

Paris - Sainte-Chapelle

2009-03-26T09:30:00.001-07:00

Paris - Sainte-Chapelle
Originally uploaded by 41Dodge

Patricia particularly likes to visit the European Cathedrals and on top of our list are the gargoyles of Notre Dame and beneath a spire on Sainte-Chapelle. I am curious how the gargoyles became so identified with the religious architecture of the times.

When you look at Versailles, the underlying theme is Greek gods and their struggle in nature and with water. In contrast the fierce threat of gargoyles are popular with the cathedrals of Christendom.

Le Louvre - Aile Richelieu

2009-03-24T13:46:00.001-07:00

Le Louvre - Aile Richelieu
Originally uploaded by SergeK

We've been told over and over that in order to get through the entire collection of Musee du Louvre a person would need at least a week. Patricia and I only have a week total in Paris.

QUESTION: Do we skip the Louvre all together or what collections and portions of the Louvre do we summarily dismiss or breeze past quickly?

Of course, we also need to go to the Musee d'Orsey, Center Pompidou and Picasso Museums in addition to the Louvre.

Copyright Violation

2009-03-24T11:49:00.001-07:00

As tradition would have it, art students went to painstaking ends to copy the works and techniques of the masters. In Paris at the Palais Royal, Musée du Louvre it is not uncommon to see art students with canvas and easel in the galleries sketching or painting copies of the works before them.

Theft! Copyright Violation! Call the intellectual property lawyers in America!

Marais Museum Directions

2009-03-23T11:38:00.001-07:00

Museum Directions
Originally uploaded by speattle

I am beginning to think we won't need to leave the Marais district of Paris. There is more to see there than one week will allow.

Most definitely, we will want to visit the Musee Picasso that houses more than 1000 works of the master and then pieces he held in his collection of peers and contemporaries. Also, the Jeu de Paume at the Hôtel de Sully is a museum devoted to film and photography.

The Musée Carnavalet-Histoire, also located in Marais, is an historical museum where you will find paintings, furniture, and some personal items of French notables, from the time of King Henry IV to present and the history of the city of Paris.

As Patricia says, we might be lucky if we do a museum a day. With all the other attractions in Marais, we might be lucky of we get out of the district.

Place des Vosgues

2009-03-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

In one month Patricia and I will be traveling to Paris and will stay at Place des Vosgues. This is one of Paris' oldest squares built originally as a palace for Queen Catherine d' Medici and Henry IV. The palace has been divided up into 36 residences and over the years has housed famous tenants such as Victor Hugo.

Place des Vosgues is located in the Marias district of Paris, a vibrant neighborhood of young and old, gay and straight and is known for art galleries, cafes, shopping and many bakeries, bistros and bars.

During the late 1500s the square was the location for many public events such as jousting which led to the tragic death of Henry IV being poked in the eye and his death after which Queen Catherine vacated the palace. Much history has passed since with the upheaval of the revolution in the nearby Bastille. Marais became a poor section of Paris in he early 1900s and place where Jews were rounded up and children sent to camps in Germany.

We look forward to discovering this rich Parisian history.

On Location of "A Serious Man"

2008-12-17T13:45:00.001-08:00

On Location
Originally uploaded by deeshader

My old friend Michael Tezla on location at the Red Owl on East 7th Street during the filming of the Coen Bros. "A Serious Man" The film is a black comedy period piece set in 1967, located in St. Louis Park where the Coen's grew up.

"A Serious Man" follows Larry Gropnik, a Jewish academic played by Michael Stuhlburg and his existential struggle as his wife Judith considers leaving him for his colleague Sy Ableman. Complicating his life, Larry's ne'er do well brother Arthur (played by Richard Kind) is living in the basement and won't leave and his daughter is stealing to pay for a nose job and son is dealing for marijuana.

Habanero Bill Wins Throwdown

2008-12-15T08:09:00.000-08:00

My colleagues at Mpls/St. Paul magazine, Steve Marsh, Bill Swanson, and Stephanie March decided to challenge each other under the guidance (or threat) of Food Editor Adam Platt. The resulting winner may be of great surprise given popularly held theories of aging and digestion!

Boulangerie du Paris

2008-12-05T05:37:00.000-08:00

My friend Mike is currently living in Paris and running a tech company there. His life in Paris reminds me of when I traveled to Paris to shoot a film back in the 1980s and especially those amazing breads, pastries and coffee's at the Boulangerie.

What's This Masterpiece Doing Here?

2008-11-12T14:46:00.001-08:00

National Gallery Treasure hanging on a wall on Wardour Street
Originally uploaded by Dippingmytoes

The National Gallery of Art in London, in order to promote viewing of the treasures in it collection, began hanging some its most treasured pieces outdoors on the streets of London. This painting by Jan van Eyck is a masterpiece known as the "Arnolfini Portrait" (1434) a portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife in a Flemish bedchamber is on Wardour Street - a replica of course.

Conservatives Voted for Obama

2008-11-11T08:33:00.000-08:00

I especially want to thank the Conservatives and Republicans who saw the light in this election and voted for Obama. An interesting statistic from the recent vote totals was that only 22% of all counties in the nation voted for McCain and most of them were in the deep South. This number shows that county's that voted for Obama were wide spread across urban, suburban, exurban and rural counties.

Thank you. I am optimistic it is possible to find common ground.

If you are a Christian you might want to watch this testimonal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBLnwMbYmUw

In the Middle for Obama

2008-11-10T13:53:00.001-08:00

Obama is Beautiful World!

2008-11-06T10:30:00.001-08:00

Everybody Loves Obama

2008-11-05T22:38:00.000-08:00

A Beautiful Day in America

2008-11-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

As an American born in the 1950s, witness to the 1960s, raised in the 1970s, came of age in the 1980s, disillusioned in 2000 and 2001... I am overwhelmed today. It's the dawning of a new age in America.

I would have to say that one of the most defining aspects of American life for my generation is the civil rights movement. As a kid my parents were Republicans and we moved to Washington, D.C. in 1967. Although my older brother and sister got caught up with being "Clean for Gene" and I was fascinated by seeing the Nixon administration up close as well as what went on inside Capitol Hill -- my parents were totally in favor of Civil Rights. They admired Dr. Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson during his speaking tour across the country to break down racial barriers and segregation stayed in our house.

Yes, I repeat, Jackie Robinson stayed in our house because no hotel would allow him to rent a room in Moorhead Minnesota.. As kids we were thrilled. Robinson was a baseball legend. We didn't see race as an issue. We didn't find his black skin to be anything but cool.

Today, in America, a barrier went down. It is very satisfying and brings us all closer together as a nation.

The Ground Game

2008-11-04T06:53:00.000-08:00

As you can tell I think and feel in my heart that this election will be won today on the ground. I believe Barack Obama when he says that this election is not about HIM it is about US. And what that means is that in every corner of the nation the young people and the old, the black brown, yellow, red and the white people make up of movement that will not be divided by hate, anger and extremism.

When I woke this morning I felt a palpable sense of expectation for something great about to come. I also was slightly haunted by the sense in this country of missed opportunities. For instance, a huge transformation of possibility was cut short when Bobby Kennedy was shot down in Los Angeles. And of course one cannot ever erase the pain in our hearts that Martin Luther King's life was cut short when he still has so much to offer the country in terms of moral leadership.

But today we have a huge potential in front of us for change and transformation. All those young people working in Obama office around the country are a movement. All I will say to them today is: YES WE CAN! This is election ours if we step up and take our country back.

Listening to Charles

2008-10-31T10:44:00.000-07:00

In this time of nasty and dirty politics filled with lies and divisive attacks its is wonderful to hear a Charles Alexnader in Colorado talk honestly. Honesty is severely lacking in todays public life. Let's listen to Charles.

2008-10-31T07:54:00.000-07:00

"A great moment: When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, he did not respond with a politically shrewd "I have no comment," or "We shouldn't judge." Instead he said, "My mother had me when she was 18," which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn't have to."

-Peggie Noonan, Wall Street Journal 10/31/2008

A Higher Purpose

2008-10-29T10:23:00.000-07:00

Honesty is Virtue

2008-10-29T07:02:00.000-07:00

This election in the past couple of weeks has become a referendum on HONESTY. And the most dishonest players in this race are McCain and Palin. The Republican candidates for the highest office in America spend little time talking about their own virtues and policies and almost all of their time speaking lies about their opponents.

When addressing an agitated extremist base, they attribute ideas, philosophies and polices that Obama and Biden have never endorsed, advocated, or supported to them with snide derision. On the campaign trail McCain and Palin's claims have grown increasingly more strident, inaccurate, and frankly wildly freaky.

In Iowa just a few days ago, Palin with her confusing malapropisms, told an audience Obama would confiscate property, investments, inventory, and destroy all the values we teach our children, moving America toward tyranny and away from freedom. This Communist red-baiting is HOGWASH and non-sense born of desperation. But what it clearly shows is the extent that McCain and Palin will use all kinds of lies and deceit to gain political power.

McCain and Palin are not truthful people we can trust with leadership in America.

Endorsement from Another General

2008-10-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

In his endorsement of Barack Obama, Lt. General Robert G. Gard warns of flaws in character that are detrimental to McCain's ability to lead the country.

"The fields of foreign and national security policy, however, are John McCain's disqualifying weaknesses, in my view. McCain has demonstrated clearly that he is a dedicated ideologue when it comes to foreign policy, unwilling to consider opinions or even credible evidence contrary to his preconceived notions.
His temperament, marked not only by impatience but also by rude and sometimes hostile behavior, would discourage advisors from bringing to his attention views that might not be consistent with his preconceptions. A President with this combination of significant shortcomings would be a dangerous commander-in-chief, posing an unacceptable risk to the security of the nation.
McCain has adopted, promoted, and sustained the position of the so-called neo-conservatives and ultra-nationalists who believe that the United States should capitalize on American military superiority to spread democracy abroad. Overthrowing the Iraqi government was seen as the first step in transforming the politics of the Middle East by converting governments in the region to democracies friendly to the United States and its interests. McCain reportedly has bragged in private conversations that he was the first neo-con."

- Lt. General Robert G. Gard Jr. (USA, Ret.)

"Whack-Job" from Wasilla

2008-10-28T15:15:00.000-07:00

Here is a woman who doesn't know the difference between socialism, communism and rheumatism. Yet she just keeps getting more and more wacko in her speeches and misrepresentations of the truth. McCain's own advisors have been calling her "Rogue Diva" and "Whack-Job"

Palin's Iowa speech is extremist stupid-talk way way out on the fringe since Obama never advocated confiscating wealth nor does he intent to raise taxes on the middle class. Lie, lies and distortions of reality is not the qualities we look for in the leaders we sent to Washington. Maybe they do in Alaska?

The statements from McCain ads about Palin that are more telling than the pet-names Rogue Diva and Whack-Job was the statement that she has the trust of nobody in the campaign and "her family." Wow, that's pretty rough-talk. Her own family doesn't trust her?

2008-10-28T07:45:00.000-07:00

“But I also know this. I know that the size of our challenges have outgrown the smallness of our politics. I believe that Democrats and Republicans and Americans of every political stripe are hungry for new ideas, new leadership, and a new kind of politics — one that favors common sense over ideology; one that focuses on those values and ideals we hold in common as Americans.

“Most of all, I believe in your ability to make change happen. I know that the American people are a decent, generous people who are willing to work hard and sacrifice for future generations. And I am convinced that when we come together, our voices are more powerful than the most entrenched lobbyists, or the most vicious political attacks, or the full force of a status quo in Washington that wants to keep things just the way they are.”

- Barack Obama. October 27, 2008

So what? Did you say SO WHAT!

2008-10-28T05:21:00.000-07:00

A lot of people like to assume that businessmen and self-starter entrepreneurs are Republicans and they support McCain. Not so. Absolutely no so. This group is a political PAC of businessmen I know who are progressive forward thinking citizens and strong supporters of Barack Obama.

Even before Obama came onto the national scene, this group of proven leaders in the business sector were deeply troubled with the direction of the country and the arrogance of power that Bush, Cheney and the Republicans used their office toward bad ends.

Opie and Andy

2008-10-24T13:11:00.001-07:00

Ron Howard, Andy Griffith and the Fonz.

2008-10-22T20:51:00.000-07:00

“Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”

- Barack Obama, August 29th, 2008

Video Shows Hate in McCains House

2008-10-21T15:19:00.000-07:00

Straight Talk from A Man of Honor

2008-10-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

Colin Powell is a General, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State in the Bush Administration as well as a centrist Republican.

2008-10-19T14:32:00.000-07:00

"What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon -- that sees our opponents as competitors to challenge, but not enemies to demonize."

– Barack Obama, June 3, 2008

McCain 4.0 or Not?

2008-10-15T10:01:00.000-07:00

Hope and Change

2008-10-15T07:48:00.000-07:00

As much as the professional spin-doctors and political cynics want to twist the truth and create a evil view of Barack Obama, he is just like the rest of us, a decent American who is committed to change for a better future and a greater America.

Listening to Republicans

2008-10-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

Too Close for Comfort

2008-09-29T06:26:00.001-07:00

Obama and the Third Way

2008-09-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

"To me, a good politician should be like a good designer: someone who will not force a constituency or a client into making a choice between the lesser of two evils but who can put the energy into discovering a third, obviously better way to solve a problem. I would like to see more politicians who, like Barack Obama, show this kind of creative thinking."

- Innovative Architect and Designer Erin Moore who's firm FLOAT Architecture Research and Design was located in Tucson AZ until recently when moved to Williamette Valley, Oregon

McCain: What it means to be a Maverick

2008-09-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

I guess one can be comforted with the fact that the RNC did return in its final night to the feeling of a morticians convention. You have to admire John McCain's heroic suffering in Vietnam but I was afraid not that I'd fall asleep during his speech but that HE would. Clearly, this man's time was 8 or 12 years ago but he's way past his prime.

Obviously, the rabid and extremists among us will never change their views on this political campaign. Those who seek government mandated creationism and prayer in the schools, the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, 50 more years of war for peace, and oil drilling and taxpayer subsidization of oil companies everywhere will not suddenly join the euphony of hopeful agreeableness and jump on the Obama train for change.

Likewise, women who have spent three and four decades fight for equal pay for equal work, the right of women to control their own bodies and choices of all kinds for women are not going to suddenly embrace the Phyllis Schlafly-styled Sarah Palin as their goddess Sophia arriving to elevate all women in history. Palin may have brought women's fertility into the political field of play but she ain't a 21st century crusader for the rights of women.

One thing that is clear from the RNC is John McCain is a maverick. All week long I wanted to know what being a maverick meant for the Senator from Arizona, a military-man from a long line of military men, and how it manifest itself in modern day Republican politics. Is being a maverick a good thing or bad thing? Being a maverick is not necessarily being an advocate for change or for better policies.

Apparently, being a maverick means being willing to stir things up, make rash and erratic decisions and having an all-be-damned attitude about it. It means getting angry and accusatory toward anyone who questions your vetting processes and finally the decisions the maverick makes. It means being willing, for the sake of winning and election, to drive wedge politics between urban and rural voters that will divid the nation rather than unite us to make America a better country.

I admire McCain service to country, however, it is time for McCain to put country first and go home to retirement with benefits. Enjoy one of your seven or eight or nine houses - you deserve it. You've made your sacrifice John, spending all of your life on the government payroll and we will not ask you to do more.

And more pointedly, I appreciate McCain's sacrifice for his men and country as a captured American soldier in Vietnam but I do not think we need the same old solutions of the past eight years to the issues we need solved today. We need change in America, not the old wars to fight and past battles with fixed terms of reference that have no relevance.

Sexism and Sarah Palin

2008-09-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

Who "...retreats behind the apron strings." - Dick Morris

A Candidate to Change City Hall

2008-08-26T07:16:00.000-07:00

Brian E. Anderson will return fun to City Hall. Careful, that's what Jesse Ventura said about the Governor's Mansion and look what happened to the Body.

All politics is local but think polka! Meet the Minneapolis Mayoral candidate who has the loyal support of his family.

Brian has a crackerjack team of political strategists who are prepare to take his campaign to a whole new level. Watch this behind the scenes clip from action inside the War Room:

Stand by your phones because you might receive his next call!

Finally, A Candidate of the People

2008-08-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

Second Avenue, Village East, New York

2008-08-01T08:42:00.001-07:00

Village East Cinemas, New York
Originally uploaded by Cezar Del Valle

For all the years I lived in the East Village, the Yiddish Art Theater, a building on 2nd Ave and 12th street with a bold and controversial history in the East Village was boarded up. Now it has been reopened as the Village East Cinema. The building is considered to be Romanesque Revival in style or also referred to as Queen Anne.

Second Avenue in New York was often called the Yiddish Tin Pan Alley and was considered a mecca for Jewish intellectuals and artists. This January marked the finale curtain for an era in the East Village when, regrettably, the Second Avenue Deli closed after a lease dispute between the landlord and the family heir Jeremy Lebewohl shut them down. The original founder Abe Lebewohl, a holocaust survivor was shot to death on March 4 1996 during a robbery. The Second Avenue Deli has confusingly reopened its doors in Murray Hill on East 33rd Street minus the Molly Picon Room and its walk of Yiddish stars.

During the 1980s it was often assumed that the Yiddish Art Theater had been the home of legend rock-and-roll promoter Bill Graham's Fillmore East, a venerate rock-and-roll institution during the 1960s but, in actuality, Fillmore was three blocks to the South on 2nd Ave. Along this gritty New York avenue, beneath 14th street and the origins of Park Avenue south lived a less luxurious working class immigrant Jewish cultural life where matzoh ball soup, corned beef, pastrami, knishes, gefilte fish, cholent and other notables of Jewish cuisine filled the gullet of working Jews who lied shoulder to shoulder with Beatniks (in the 50s) hippies (in the 60s) and eventually punk rockers and yuppies (in the 80s and 90s)

On one trip back to New York a few years ago, a friend commented that Williamsburg Brooklyn was the new East Village. Maybe that's not fair to Williamburg and with the history of the East Village it is not fair to 2nd Avenue, its rich cultural traditions and history of the 20th century.

The Cinema of Urgency

2008-07-25T04:57:00.000-07:00

It is amazing that Juan Guzman is not dead. The story of Judge Juan Guzman and his investigation of Chile's General Augusto Pinochet is a portrait of courage exercised by an average man in the face of brutal repercussions and death.

Last night, the film that opened the Walker Art Film series, The Cinema of Urgency, was Elizabeth Farnsworth and Patricio Lanfranco's THE JUDGE AND THE GENERAL made for ITVS and scheduled to be shown on POV in mid-August. Farnsworth was born in south Minneapolis and her editor, Blair Gershkow who also attended last night's screening and stood up for Q&A afterward is a native of St. Louis Park, Minnesota - home of the Coen Bros., Thomas Friedman, and of course Al Franken.

The films Producer/Director Elizabeth Farnsworth was chief correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer from 1995-2000. She now freelances for The NewsHour and makes award-winning documentaries, including Thanh's War.

The remarkable story of Judge Guzman is about a conservative judge assigned to investigate crimes and human rights violations by the military dictatorship of Pinochet and his government. Originally, Guzman was a supporter of the military coup that brought Pincochet to power. He even felt that some of the violence surrounding the coup and the suspension of democratic processes might have been necessary to restore order in the face of chaos.

However, during Guzman's investigation, which miraculously occurred while Pinochet still held the reigns of power, he discovers a grisly truth of the murder and torture of socialists and anti-military government political activists. And in the face of threats on his life and accusations of the betrayal of his class, Guzman did not back down.

What makes Farnsworth's documentary so compelling is Guzman is not the radical maverick judge one might expect and instead he is a literary man, quiet and reserved, with a French wife who could well have been given a diplomatic portfolio by the conservative government that Salvador Allende defeated to become the first democratically elected Socialist government in South America.

Farnsworth also focuses on the human rather than political dimensions of the struggle for truth. Inside the story of the "disappeared" and mothers of resistance in Chile is another tragedy of a grandmother forced to turn her own daughter and son-in-law into the CIA trained Chilean secret police DINA in exchange for saving the life of her granddaughter who she was babysitting at the time. The brutality of DINA's torture and the excruciating pain of a grandmothers decision is unfathomable to us, still its echo reverberates in Abu Ghraib and secret detention facilities run by the American government today.

During the course of his investigation, Guzman's soul opens to the bright light of human rights in the face of conformity and the dark abyss of apathy when governments call their opposition terrorists. This should be a lesson to all Americans in these corrupt and desperate times.

As Guzman memorably states abut Chile's history, “A wounded country needs to know the truth” and healing can only come when the deceptions, manipulations and lies are exposed.

Minnesota North Shore Trip

2008-06-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

Patricia and I took a summer vacation trip to Minnesota's majestic North Shore. Taking the legendary Highway 61 form Duluth's Bob Dylan Way, we traveled first to Beaver Bay and visited the Split Rock Lighthouse.

Built in 1910, the Split Rock is a marvel in architectural and mechanical engineering when no roads existed along the shoreline leading to Canada. All brick and mortar, materials, and labour had to arrive at the construction site by inland sea and lifted by hoist 168 feet to the top of the Split Rock and then assembled. Construction workers slept in tents in the mosquito infested forest while building the lighthouse and surrounding out buildings. The lamp, lens and rotational mechanics for the lighthouse itself weighed 4 tons. The bearing on which the axis turns is made of liquid mercury. The entire lighthouse community cost $75,000 to build in 1910.

The Split Rock Lighthouse was operational from 1910 to 1969 when it closed because Lake Superior ships contained their own satellite navigational devices and the lighthouse was no longer needed. In 1972 the Minnesota State Historical Society took over the management of Split Rock and reopened it to tourists. They don't build structures like this anymore.

Lunch back in Beaver Bay was at the Lemon Wolf Cafe, a place recommended to us as a favorite of the locals. Lemon Wolf serves fresh walleye and herring caught in Lake Superior by a local Beaver Bay fisherman. We felt the dining-room decor was a bit over the top, oddly chainsaw bears dominating the wolf name, but the food was delicious. Surprisingly, Lemon Wolf's homemade Grammy's Coconut Cream Pie vastly outclassed Betty's World Famous Pies in down the road in Two Harbors.

On the second day we visited the shipping harbor town of Two Harbors, Minnesota where gigantic Ore Docks built in 1883 loaded the iron ore from Minnesota's open pit mines. Two Harbors, still operational but at a reduced capacity, shipped millions of tons of ore to the East for decade after decade beginning in the late 1800s. In 1944 during the height of World War II, Two Harbors shipped 19.3 million tons of ore to fuel the American victory in Europe and the Pacific theater.

One of our most enjoyable adventures was visiting the Edna G. tugboat in the harbor after first doing a self-guided tour of the Two Harbors Lighthouse which is the oldest still operational lighthouse in America. (or at least Minnesota, okay?) and recently became a B&B. The Edna G, was named after the daughter of the president of the Duluth & Iron Range Railroad Company J.L. Greatsinger. The Edna G was built in 1893, spent most of it life on Lake Superior with the exception of being commissioned into the U.S. Navy during WWII and sent to Virginia. where it guided troop ships back into harbor upon their return from war. At the time of her retirement in 1981, the Edna G. was the last coal-fired, steam-powered tugboat operating on Lake Superior.

On the aft deck of the Edna G is a brass water canon the tub boat used to assist in extinguishing fires on ships out at sea and other emergencies. The "Invincible Nozzle" had so much water pressure, it could float thirty yards off shore and roll a Dodge van up a hill for 50 yards.

Our guide let Patricia pull the handle that blew the whistle in the pilot cabin. Check it out:

Back in Beaver Bay we enjoyed long walks in the woods and climbing on the rocky shore line of Lake Superior.

Finally we ended back in Duluth and went to the Tweed Art Museum at the University of Minnesota Duluth campus. In part of the museum we found a library dedicated to Olive Tezla, the mother of our good friend Michael Tezla who beginning in 1957, when her husband joined the English Department as a professor, was a strong supporter who helped built the Tweed. Just down the hall I discovered where my old MacPlus with its 20 MB (that's right megabyte NOT gigabyte) hard drive has been retired for historical reasons right next to the key punch and mechanical adding machines of our youth.

Next we went to the very notable artisan eatery, the New Scenic Cafe and we met the chef Scott Graden. Highly recommend!

Obama Comes to St. Paul in Victory

2008-06-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

Last night Senator Barack Obama came to our home town of Saint Paul, Minnesota to claim an historic victory as the first African-American to win enough delegates votes to become the Presidential nominee of a National Party. Obama came from the back of the pack to defeat the heavily favored and highly connected D.C. insider Hillary Clinton. His message was clearly CHANGE and his supporters motto: "Yes We Can!"

In his Saint Paul victory speech, Obama showed how is has become one of the nations best political orators as national broadcast commentators compared him to FDR, JFK and Martin Luther King for his ability to deliver a moving speech. when he said, tonight after 56 hard fought primary contests our journey has come to an end, an palpable excitation of exhaustion and relief came over the crowd but being in the Xcel Center in Saint Paul marked Obama's determination that it isn't over yet. This will be the site of the RNC and John McCain's Republican nomination in September. Obama's long climb into history is still ahead and the next five months to the finish line has just begun.

Brazil na reta do parto normal

2008-05-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

Ainda me lembro de quando eu era uma garotinha. Todo mundo sonha com o futuro, e eu, naquela epoca, sempre dizia que iria me casar em um vestido vermelho, morar no Rio de Janeiro e ter uma familia feliz. Filhos? Claro, mas adotados, porque parir sempre esteve for a de cogitacao. Crescendo num pais onde todos em sua volta nascem por uma cirurgia cesariana cria tensoes e medos. Ja esta mais que na hora de retornar ao basico instinto: gravidez e nascimento sao processos naturais e devemos nos acostumar a essa ideia.

O primeiro passo e se informar sobre o assunto e o Ministerio da Saude agora participa ativamente dessa questao com a Campanha Incentivo ao Parto Normal. A cesariana já representa 43% dos partos realizados no Brasil no setor público e no privado. Nos planos de saúde, esse percentual é ainda maior, chegando a 80%. Já no Sistema Único de Saúde, as cesáreas somam 26% do total de partos. O parto normal é o mais seguro tanto para a mãe quanto para o bebê. De acordo com a recomendação da Organização Mundial da Saúde, as cirurgias deveriam corresponder a, no máximo, 15% dos partos. E nosso direito e dever como mulheres de assegurar que a experiencia de vida de nossos filhos seja completa em todas a circunstancias, incluindo o parto.

Linha de Passe Wins Best Actress at Cannes

2008-05-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

Sao Paulo. 20 million inhabitants, 200 kilometers of traffic, 300,000 messengers on motorcycles.

Walter Salle and Daniela Thomas have teamed once again to bring the socially conscious but not overtly politicalLinha de Passe to the screen. Sandra Corveloni, who plays their working-class mother in São Paulo won the best-actress award this weekend at Cannes.

At the heart of one of the toughest, most chaotic cities in the world, four brothers try to reinvent themselves in different ways. With the backdrop of Brazil in a state of emergency, every single one is looking for a way out.

Denis (João Baldasserini), the oldest, is one of the mass of motorcycles couriers daily transversing the swarming streets of Brazil; Dario (Vínicius de Oliveria), a talented soccer player hoping his skill at the game will be a path to a better life; Dinho (José Geraldo Rodrigues), tries his escape by joining an evangelical church; and youngest brother Reginaldo (Kaique de Jesus Santos), spends his days riding buses around the city, searching for his absent father.

de Oliveria, who previously starred in Salle's 1998 Central Station is the only professional actor among the four bothers, trained for four years in junior soccer league to play this role. However, Salles and Thomas achieve mastery in obtaining performances from all their young actors regardless of their acting experience.

Salles and Daniela Thomas have reunited to update their portrait Foreign Land made 12 years ago about urban Brazil, which they left in the economic throes of President Fernando Collor.

A Linha de passe is one of the most difficult of the futbol field-of-play rules (FIFA) that states an offensive player can’t be ahead of the ball and involved in the play unless there is a defender between him and the goalkeeper. Basically translated, the rule means a player is off-side, play is stopped and the equivalent in ice hockey would be a blue line offside or in basketball a zone violation. In other words, you can’t hang out at the other team’s goal waiting for the ball as your team comes down the pitch.

However, according to the filmmakers, Linha de Passe is also a children's game not unlike hackie-sack where a group of kids stand in a circle kicking a ball in the air, not to let the others down by letting the ball fall to the ground. Certainly, in Brazil both sides of this expression enrich the depth of the metaphor.

Salle and Thomas use the rule as a metaphor for the four Paolinistas brothers and their attempts to get ahead in modern Brazil.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925 - 2008)

2008-05-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

Two artists that had a tremendous influence over my life as a painter in my 20s were Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. Last night Rauschenberg died at age 82 in Florida. In one very memorable act, the course of art history collided, when Rauschenberg went to de Kooning's Greenwich Village studio with a bottle of Jack Daniels (de Kooning was an incorrigible alcoholic) to ask the modern master of painting and drawing, at the peak of his career, if he could erase one of his drawings. de Kooning wasn't very happy with the request but granted the young unknown painter his wish.

Message to You, Barry

2008-05-02T14:14:00.000-07:00

Force be with you brother!

Trisha Brown at Northrup

2008-04-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

In conjunction with The Year of Trisha being launched at the Walker Art Center, Patricia and I went to the mammoth Northrup Auditorium on Friday to see a career spectrum of Trisha Brown choreography. To say the least, we were disappointed.

Trisha Brown is an interdisciplinary artist who the Walker especially loves and fit nicely into Kathy Halbreich's concept and legecy of the Walker featuring works and artists that move across medium, practice, and aesthetic branch's of contemporary art. And now that the Walker has expanded its space to more fully embrace performance and dance with a majority of the new building being used as a auditorium (and restaurant) it is clear they have an even greater commitment to artists like Brown.

Probably what astonished us the most is that compared to other works and choreographers, the work we saw at Northrup was under cooked and not sophisticated in its use of the vocabulary of present day dance. In the first two pieces, I could only imagine that given the time in which they were first performed they somehow addressed a current restriction or use of the body that struck people as interestingly outside the norm. These movements don't do so anymore.

In the first piece Present Tense it was obvious Brown wants us to be conscious of the frame and the "edge of the frame." In doing so she had dancers half on the visual stage of play and half off. Throughout, Brown seemed to be challenging the edge of the parameters set forth in her field of vision. Yet, that was about all there was - a kind of formal observance of the stages frame while the dancers made dance-like movement. If there was an emotion statement Brown fails to connect and falls short of reaching it.

And, while her piece began in silence, and we had to listen a chorus of coughing from the audience, the small University of Minnesota Alumni band began to play in the lower halls and underground tunnels surrounding Northrup itself. At first being at the University of Minnesota, as I am sure Brown intended, we could not be sure if the band was simply rehearsing for a public campus event or if they were a part of the production. It was fun for awhile. But then Brown never seemed to commit to doing something more engaging with this trick than reinforce her simple ideas about the "edge of the frame."

In fact, much of the evening was filled with choreographic tricks that never translated themselves into deep or astonishing revelations. Patricia and I could not help but compare a piece we saw this winter at the Southern Theater by local group Black Label Movement. BLM took the language and techniques that Brown uses in only a cursory and under-developed way and brings incredible insight and a brilliance of understanding the fragile human condition.

Carl Flink's BLM's piece called "Wreck" had so many layers and innovations with the frame, the dancers movements, their inter-relationships on stage yet made all the more significant by attaching humans on the brink of being sucked into the vortex of the sea. It was like watching great choreography, athletic dance movement, and at the same time experiencing a deep connection you'd experience from watching a fantastic documentary film about survival and death.

Living here in Minneapolis is another astonishing couple Toni Pierce and Uri Sands whose choreography for their company TU is also amazingly innovative but the additional significance of layers of meaning brought from references in history and society enrich their works far beyond what Brown is offering on stage. The make bold decisions and back them up so that you feel the completeness not only of movement, stage, frame and sound, they feel richly a part of a text that speaks about who we are as human beings.

A big part of the problem throughout with Brown is that she doesn't seem to want to commit to the directions in which she is heading with her work. The final piece I love my robots uses "robots" (not really) that amount to nothing more than polls on platforms connected to motion sensors that criss-cross the stage. An interesting concept to work with, however there is not much significance to this piece in the end. There is no real meaningful of revealing interaction between the dancers and the "poles" and it adds up to a sum of nothing. It feels like an interesting idea lazily executed with 1970s technology.

Going back 25 or 30 years to a school of New York and national artists, Brown I find to be emblematic of their desire to challenge forms and conventions, perhaps ever reverse directions yet also unwilling to be tied down to specifics or details. Their defense for a failure to communication with their audience was always the veil of abstraction. Todays artists are not so obtuse and evasive.

Our current dancers and choreographers would do significantly more interesting things than Brown does. Perhaps that means on her shoulders we've come so much higher in the advancement of choreography. We owe Brown a debt of gratitude for being a paradigm buster but I'd rather being watching a newer generation that takes all these ideas and concepts so much incredibly further.

MUTUM: Story of Brazil's Recent Past

2008-04-04T13:25:00.001-07:00

Patricia and I went to the Walker Art Center to see MUTUM during the Women's in the Directors Chair series. This Brazilian film by Sandra Kogut is about a family on an isolated subsistence farm in the arid backlands of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Our central character is Thiago, a ten year old boy who knows little about the outside world except for a few horseback trips into a nearby village.

Thiago's father is distressed by a passing way of life and trying to provide for his family. His mother bares the burden of her husbands anger and frustrations and Thiago throws himself between them as his mother protector.

The feature film is an adaption of Jose Guimaraes Rosa's novel and while it is fiction, it strikes at the heart of Brazil true agrarian migration and the poverty that devastated rural Brazilian states like Minas Gerais and Bahia.

Religion plays a significant role in MUTUM, as the mystery of how nature delivers its fate evades common experience or a social consciousness thus becoming an acceptance of an authority beyond that which you can see or touch. But there is no preaching and deifying of faith.

In many ways, MUTUM reminds me of the brilliant German documentary film THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL for the intensity and detail of how they story is told. Not much dialog and visual detail aplenty, it keeps your head in the world in which Thiago lives. We feel the full power of a thunderstorm as dramatic as it can be in a place where a person is not constantly barraged with manufactured drama.

MUTUM is a mood-piece, a film that is evocative and deeply detailed in creating the sense of a simple life where children spend the day playing with insects, teaching the papagaio to talk, and chasing chickens. The pacing and lack of dialog set the viewer in a different spatial and temporal frame -- a pace of life that is nearly incomprehensible to modern western over-stimulated audiences. But MUTUM's unhurried observations are well worth the effort to persist in watching.

The young actor whose name is also Thiago is astonishing and the film, with all its subtlety and nuance pays off hugely at the end -- even with its small and unsensational emotion. The emotional impact is deep but not blunt. You may never get the chance to see this film but if you do, let it transport you into a different world than the one your are accustomed to living.

But for Patricia and I, MUTUM is a family story and tells the tale of how her own parents were sent from the warm and loving confines of a family with little connection to the outside world, out at an very early age into a world they could never have imagined. For Patricia this is the gripping backstory of Mauro and Odelva who were forced off the land in their early teens and sent to Sao Paulo with nothing to help them get their start. Life can be cruel. And this is a gripping story of a distinctive kind of cruel.

A Voice of Reason in a Sea of Hyper-Reaction

2008-03-20T07:21:00.000-07:00

An Emotional Response: Don't Sleep...

2008-03-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

2008-03-03T05:39:00.000-08:00

Walker Art Center tour guide Gary White takes us on a walk through the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and points out a few of the more than 40 pieces installed around the grounds. This year the Walker will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the garden with special outdoor events and activities.

A Tour of Minneapolis Architecture

2008-03-02T18:39:00.000-08:00

This tour of Minneapolis is hosted by University of Minnesota, College of Design Professor John Comazzi and filmed and edited by Michael Tyburski. Recently, I was in other American cities and they showed me new architecture by world renown achitects. When I told them how many buildings Minneapolis has build in the last 5 years by top 20 architects people are astonished. One of the buildings this short tour neglects to show is the addition to the Minneapolis Children's Theater by Michael Graves. Have a look.

What It Means to Be an American

2008-02-28T11:15:00.000-08:00

Yes We Can!

2008-02-03T08:38:00.000-08:00

Lots of people today like to be cynical about HOPE. Right-wing hate-mongering evangelicals who want government to take control of people's lives. Warmongers tell us we will be at war for the next hundred years otherwise we will be surrender monkeys. $12 billion (yes, BILLION) dollars in taxpayer money gone missing and military contractors cannot account for it. Doomsayers tell us we cannot possible afford to keep Americans in health care. Hipsters who preach apathy. They think it makes them look cool or whatever...

Heading into Super Tuesday, when Minnesotans step up to the Presidental precinct caucus plate, I like Barack Obama's message of HOPE and CHANGE. No more Bush and no more Clintons and all their politics of cynacism, anger, and division.

WE WANT CHANGE!

Putting on Your Game Face

2008-02-02T05:55:00.000-08:00

Super Bowl weekend. Patricia and I went to the Walker Art Center last night (Friday) to see David Neumann’s FEED FORWARD, the last piece this year in the WAC’s INSIDE OUT THERE series.

Neumann’s sets the stage as a playing court or field delineated by the space definitions, lines, message boards and hot spots that made game playing a challenge. This might sound pretentious and gooey with ‘significance’ as Walker curators like to be, “...Feed Forward reimagines the athletic event as contemporary performance,” but Neumann is not.

Neumann’s show is anything but heavy and droll with self-importance. Patricia and I, and the rest of the McGuire theater, were in stitches the whole night with laughter. Cycling through a whole bunch of sporting actions and moments beginning with gymnastics (contemporary dance's closest cousin) tennis, basketball, football, and tennis, Neumann makes light and grace of it all. As the dancers/performers take to the court, we are provided with commentariats who spray morsels of profundities about the players and the lingo laced nuances describing their actions. Probably most humorously, they also provide “color” for their performances.

From time to time, play-by-play men run out onto the court and get the athletes first hand reaction to their failure or success in competition. Growing up with the high media spectacle of sports rituals surrounding the national daily and weekly event, we embrace the conventions as a part of our cultural DNA. Everything about sports is closely regimented by a formal language of motion and the "sports speak" is rehearsed and filled with cliche. Neumann never quits being the humorist, as he highlights the parts of game that catch you off guard.

For instance, two female dancers line up facing each other and move in graceful and astonishing athletic motion, swinging the arms and hands as if the face of their tennis racket. Suddenly, they begin a loud lower gut grunt at the implied moment of impact. Exactly, when did that savage sound of exertion become common to the game of tennis? Now, it is almost signature to the power game that professional tennis (as opposed to gentlemanly English club tennis) has become. Neumann is hip to this insight, he highlights the moment but at the same time makes it funny.

Players run on and off the court as if to be set in and take out tag team style. This is action common to the rules of basketball but many other sports as well. On the sideline, a man wearing a sport coats with insignia on the pocket, shouts and yells obscenities, throws his hands in frustration, protest, and indignation and he too is choreographing high performance. It is all theater or performance and the roles are cast in bronze, silver and gold.

And then you also have the other non-competitors but the ones who somehow find themselves in the middle of the action. In this case it is the dancer, referee and this marginal yet highly significant player in the spectacle. Neumann interprets the Ref as a peacock and comic figure, whose value rests in their ability to arrest the flow of action and then perform hand signals. The dancer blows a whistle, runs to the middle of court, points with impunity and then wiggles his ass.

In the final segment of the performance, a celebrity pitcher enters through a backlight stage door (the bowels of the stadium) with hand raised in victory and massive display of arrogant warriorism. I’m thinking Roger Clements and steroids at this moment. He takes the mound, the dancer mimes all the pacing, spitting, kicking the dirt as we hear an internal voice that could easily be a standup routine on Comedy Central. The audience is rolling on the floor with laughter.

There are times when I think the Walker does itself a disservice by being too high minded and artsy in its talk about performances like this one. This is right out of Comedy Central and its wit is as incisive as Jon Stewart.

Stop the pretense, this is Super Bowl weekend and FEED FORWARD is the best way to get into the mind of it all.

Picasso and Portinari Paintings Recovered

2008-01-08T17:19:00.000-08:00

Photo by: Marlene Bergamo/Folha Imagem

Two masterpiece paintings stolen nineteen days ago just before Christmas from Sao Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) were recovered today. The report of the paintings recovery came just a few hours ago. Brazilian police reported that they had arrested two men and recovered the invaluable and uninsured pantings by Pablo Picasso and Cândido Portinari.

The paintings were returned to MASP with an escort of armored police vehicles, overhead helicopters and as officers of the state police walked into the museum carrying the paintings, they were met by applause from the staff. MASP will reopen on Friday with the Picasso and Portinari back on the walls where they hung before the thief.

Police feared that the paintings were stolen on contract to an art collector and quickly whisked out of the country to avoid detection. However, the paintings were found in Ferraz de Vasconcelos, a metropolitan area of Sao Paulo where the two men were arrested. The paintings appear to be in good condition although no assessment was reported of possible damage or if the captured paintings are the original works and not stand-ins.

The "Portrait of Suzanne Bloch" by Pablo Picasso is estimated to be worth 50 million dollars, and "The Coffee Worker" by Brazil's Candido Portinari is estimated at nearly six million dollars. Both works are important in the canon of works by the two artists. Neither painting was insured, as are any of the paintings in the collection of MASP, prompting a nation debate about the security and administration of Brazil's premier modern art museum collection valued at more than $1 billion dollars.

Estado de S. Paulo newspaper reported MASP officials received two ransom requests for the paintings, including a letter asking for $10 million during the period they were missing. The paper is now saying that the two suspects in custody say they were offered $2.8 million to undertake the art heist.

Just before the New Year, state police conducting the investigation said that, based on interviews with the MASP staff that the art thieves had an inside collaborator. One of the museum guards encouraged others during the night shift to sleep and not pay attention to the video monitors installed to alert staff to the threat of thieves entering the building or approaching from the surrounding plaza. Whether this information lead to today's capture of the paintings and arrest is not yet known.

O Ano em que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias

2008-01-06T09:08:00.000-08:00

Trailer: 2:24 minutes (Brazilian Portuguese)
Directed by: Cao Hamburger
Web site: http://www.oano.com.br/english/index.php

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is a Brazilian film by Cao Hamburger set in the political turmoil of the 1970s. Mauro (Michel Joelsas) is a child living in the city with his radical leftist parents, forced into the underground and fearing his safety, sent him to live with his grandfather in a small town.

Just as Mauro arrives his grandfather dies and he is left trying to make due with strangers and maintain his passion for futebol as the World Cup in Mexico unfolds. This film won the audience award at Rio International Film Festival in 2007, played at Cannes and Berlin all through the year to high critical praise. Hamburger previously directed award winning television programs and "Filhos do Carnaval" for HBO. A Brazilian film worth watching for on DVD or renting.

Antropofagia

2007-12-29T16:38:00.000-08:00

Tropicalismo was a music movement in Brazil in the 1960s and 70s. To use perhaps an objectionable analogy, if you combined Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Joan Baez together into a movement in the U.S., you'd have the equivalent of what became Tropicalismo in Brazil.

Except for one thing - the stakes and scale of Tropicalismo or Tropicalia as a political revolution were much higher than for Dylan, Hendrix, Joplin, or Baez.

At it essence, this musical movement combined rock, blues, samba, jazz, pop kitsch and psychedelic sounds with Brazilian and other Latin American influences. Like the expansively aware artists of the 60s and 70s, they combined all the musical elements of the day into a pop-rock sound set to the lyrics of social and cultural revolution.

In part, tropicalismo was an reaction against a conservative stodginess and comfortable coolness of high-minded bossa nova and bossa nova jazz that its musicians felt was not critical enough of the state of the oppressive martial law that had consumed Brazil.

The leading musicians of tropicalismo were Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Maria Bethania, Rita Lee, Arnaldo Baptista and Chico Buarque.

During the 1960s, once martial law had taken control, everything was censored. Newspapers refused to print the officially sanctioned and edited military propoganda and ran cooking recipes all across the front pages of their papers as protest.

At one time, while performing a concert, the police raided the auditorium and shut down the concert because the musicians on stage were openly critical and dissenting - their lyrics advocated resistance with love. Like the American civil rights movement, tropicalismo advocated a Ghandi-style civil disobedience and opposition to the ruling government.

Caetano, an unapologetic left-wing activist singer and songwriter often compared to Bob Dylan and Gilberto Gil were jailed in 1968 for "anti-government activity" and then exiled themselves to London. Veloso's songs were censored and some were banned in Brazil. Caetano called their songs the words of sweet barbarians from Bahia. He advocated to all the political artists of the time, "Even though many armies invaded Rome with force, Jesus did more to bring down the Roman Empire with sweetness, forgiveness and compassion."

Once while talking about the culture of our countries, Patricia used the word Antropofagia in discussing Brazilian culture. She said Antropofagia is a word that cannot be translated easily to English with all it nuance and complexity of meaning. Antropofagia in a word means cannibalism. A literal translation of antropofagia hardly does justice to a notion that’s driven much of Brazil’s best art, music and literature for the past seven decades. Symbolically, in ancient and classical literature a snake eating its own tail, is called the Ouroboros and it too embodies this notion of antropofagia. Not only does the snake cannibalize itself, the symbol represents continuous change and the cycle of life.

In his book about the tropicalismo music movement, Verdade Tropical Caetano titled one whole chapter Antropofagia expressed in the art and culture of Brazil.

Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão provided a graphic definition of antropofagia in her Estudo do ‘Tiradentes’ do Pedro Américo (Reflexo de sonhos no sonho do outro espelho)” a Study of Pedro Américo’s Tiradentes’ (Reflex of dreams in the dream of the other mirror). Varejão took a classic painting depicting the quartered body of a fatally unsuccessful 19th century Brazilian republican revolutionary, made a copy in her own style, and cut that into pieces. The piece bled with multiple layers of antropofagia.

Patricia, in trying to define this phenomenon in perhaps pedestrian terms, said it is as if the revolutionary movement was swallowed by popular culture and then spit back out. Befitting this image was the fact that in 2003 Lula de Silva appointed Gilberto Gil, one of Tropicalia's leading musicians the Minister of Culture of Brazil. From being imprisoned for "anti-gvoernment activty" to being appointed cultural minister, the radical tropicalismo got swallowed by the culture as a whole.

A more cynical person might use antropogagia to describe Bob Dylan doing Victoria Secret lingerie commercials.

Caipirinha e Batida

2007-12-28T09:03:00.000-08:00

I promised a few friends and family that I would come back with Brazilian drink recipes for the New Years. These recipes below are for one drink quantities. Brazilians usually mix up a big batch for friends and family and pour rounds for all. Size up as you deem appropriate. So here we go:

Caipirinha (little peasant girl)
(made with cachaça, Brazil's national drink) 
Serves 1
1 lime, quartered
1 to 2 tablespoons sugar
2 ounces cachaça*
Ice cubes

Mash the lime quarters in a cocktail glass with a wooden pestle. Do not remove the pieces of crushed lime. Add the sugar and cachaca. Fill a tumbler with ice cubes and stir well. Should resemble picture above.

* Cachaça can be purchased at Brazilian speciality stores or better liquor stores in the U.S.

----------------------------
Batida de Cupuaçu or Batida de Graviola (Soursop)
Serves 1
50 ml of cupuaçu or soursop juice (1.75 oz)
25 ml of cachaça (1 oz)
a splash of Nestlé or Parmalat Table Cream
2 ice cubes, crushed
Shake and pour. The table cream, which is considerably thicker than what we call heavy cream, can be found in most supermarkets. Frozen soursop (called guanábana in Spanish) can be found in the Latino or Ethnic section of your supermarket. Frozen cupuaçu pulp can be found in Brazilian markets around the U.S.

----------------------------
Batida de Coco
Serves 1
50 ml of coconut milk (1.75 oz)
25 ml of cachaça (1 oz)
a splash of Nestlé or Parmalat Table Cream
2 ice cubes, crushed
Shake or blend and pour, preferably back into a hollow coconut shell. A pineapple slice makes excellent garnish.

You can also make this Batida drink substituting passion fruit for the coconut milk.

----------------------------
Capoeira (from Bahia)
Serves 4 or less
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 small bottle of coconut milk
1/2 cup of Creme de Cacao
1/2 cup of cognac
Blend until smooth, add crushed ice and serve in tiny glasses.

----------------------------
Quentão

Quentão, which means "very hot" or "big hot one", is a hot Brazilian drink made of cachaça and spices. It is often served during Festa Junina. The sugar is first caramelized with the the spices, ginger and the peels. This mixture is then boiled with water for 10 minutes. The cachaça is added and boiled for another 5 minutes. A standard garnish would be citrus peel.

One part cachaça
One part water
Sugar to taste
Peel two oranges and a lime
Cloves, cinnamon and ginger to taste

It is very common in southernmost parts of Brazil to substitute the primary ingredient of Quentão, cachaça, for red wine, due to this region being the largest wine producer in Brazil

Oh-oh Frango!

2007-12-28T05:17:00.000-08:00

Back to language. I've been studying Brazilian Portuguese and find it perplexing and fun.

Let's talk about chickens. The male chicken is called Galo, easy enough and the female chicken is called Galinha. The baby chicken or chic if you will, is called the pintinho But the teenage male chicken is called frango.

Teenage chicken?

What the heck? Why the differentiation? Trust me on this: you don't want to be a teenage chicken. Teenage chickens are the ones we eat, so your life expectancy as a male chicken plummets when entering your teen years.

Well, I guess that fact isn't really all that different than humans.

Spreading Holiday Cheer!

2007-12-26T04:36:00.000-08:00

Patricia and I are back in Minnesota, just it time for snowstorms and to spread Holiday Cheer!

Click on this text to see animation! or if the link doesn't work, copy and paste this string into your browser: http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1802891919

Boas Festas e Feliz Natal

2007-12-24T05:17:00.000-08:00

For me Christmas and the Holiday Season is drifting snow, ice skating on the pond, sledding in the park, and jack frost nipping at your nose. My ideal Holiday landscape is filled with mounds of snow and huge feathery snowflakes filling the sky. Maybe its just a visual conceit but I'm not imgaging Christmas here on the streets of São Paulo.

But what do Paulistas know or care about my wintery northern predisposition? What do they care about snow?

When walking through the streets during the day we are easily distracted away from anything having to do with the festive world of Christmas. Patricia would probably agree, here in Brazil there is as much less retail and commercial hysteria around Christmas buying than in the U.S.

My sense is Black Friday has not struck Brazil for the primary reason they don't celebrate Thanksgiving (see earlier November 29th post on "how to" explain Thanksgiving to Brazilians) or mark the day after for shopping frenzy with 4AM box store openings. Additionally, retailers don't seem to pin all their hopes for success on the last three weeks of the year and the Christmas buying binge. Life is more meaningful than that here in Brazil.

However, when the sun goes down, São Paulo is transformed into a dazzling array of lights and building costumes. Along Ave. Paulista building facades become giant trees and ornaments for hanging lights and bulbs. Already baroque styled buildings painted in bright pastel and rich earthen colours get draped in cloth like ornamental tables in the Holiday dining-room.

All along the avenues and between the boulevards, indistiquishable grey cement forms and harsh wire mesh that fail to delight amidst the visual pollution and graffiti during the day, pop out with gusto and become magnificent glimmering light displays at night. The drumbeats of traffic and squeals of motor-boys horns as they make their deliveries is replaced by the bells of Natal.

After a walk in Ibirapuera Park, Patricia and I went into the highly secure upscale neighborhood of Vila Nova and behind the locked gates and priavte security guard was this little orament with the words "Let It Snow" inscribed on a banner above the head of a Christmas elf. Patricia and I had to laugh. It will never, in a million years, snow in São Paulo on Christmas!

But there is always the dream...

BOAS FESTAS (HAPPY HOLIDAYS) and FELIZ NATAL (MERRY CHRISTMAS) to all our family and friends who have been reading our travel blog since the beginning of December. We've truly enjoyed sharing this journey with you and our impressions of São Paulo, Brazil. We hope you will except this as our Holiday letter and greeting and our wish for a healthy and prosperous New Year!

Girl From Ipanema

2007-12-22T04:49:00.000-08:00

In the U.S. we often associate Brazilian music with bossa nova, samba or maybe the frevo bands that play during Carnival. In the 1950s and 60s bossa nova became a world-wide sensation and even made its way onto the pop charts in America. Bossa nova was cool, hipster chic, and happenin among jazz enthusiasts.

As Patricia and I visited friends and family in São Paulo, I never missed a chance to ask if they knew who Astrud Gilberto was because it was Astrud who introduced me to the sounds of Brazilian music. I was shocked to discover that few Paulistas remembered who Astrud Gilberto was, although the name Gilberto is legendary in Brazilian music.

When I mentioned the name Gilberto, many people came back with the names João and Babel his daughter by another famous Brazilian singer Miusha. João Gilberto, most famously, is the father of bossa nova and one of the most influencial Jazz musicians in the world.

Astrud Gilberto was a female vocalist who sang with Stan Getz and brought bossa nova to America in the early 60s. Her sultry rendition of the song Girl From Ipanema sang with Antonio Carlos Jobim won her an American Grammy in the 60s. Astrud's voice was like nothing else I'd ever heard. Her heart rendering melancholy still had a thoughtful and sophisticated edge next to the pop lyric and a jazz nostalgia.

My mother Corrine had few record albums in her collection however, as a young boy, two of them stuck out in my mind -- Astrud Gilberto's Girl From Ipanema and another from Herb Alpert & Tijuana Bass with a beautiful woman naked in a mountain of whipped cream. As a young boy that album cover was the most erotic thing I saw before I could comprehend what erotic or sex was.

Next to her international sensation hit, Astrud is best recognized for singing Fly Me to the Moon (which she also recorded as a duet with Frank Sinatra), Day by Day, Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Queit Stars) and Brazilian Tapestry.

Astrud married João Gilberto in 1959 but they were divorced in the mid-sixties. Astrud is less known in Brazil but became an ambassador for bossa nova because she sang vocals in both English and Brazilian Portuguese at a time when American radio stations would not play any music unless the lyrics were in English.

In addition to Brazilian Portuguese, Astrud recorded Brazilian bossa nova in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Japanese giving her a world-wide audience few artists gain.

Just as it happened here in the U.S. with Free Jazz, there was a backlash to bossa nova and Brazilian jazz in the late 60s and early 70s. The group of artists centered in Rio had become regarded as a egg-head musical elite and with the rebellion of the times, and the imposition of Martial Law, lines were drawn in the sand. You couldn't be successful and comfortable and not directly confront the military leaders without being seen as supporting its brutal oppression. Musicians like Roberto Carlos and João Gilberto were criticized for being priviledged and not taking a strong political stance against the military dictatorship that consumed Brazilian life.

During much of this time, Astrud was not in Brazil and was, instead, living in the U.S. recording and working internationally. This is probably why Astrud is largely forgotten by mainstream culture in Brazil. If you say Astrud was living in New York during much of the political turmoil of the 60s, Brazilian resent that she didn't come back and fight for freedom in her country.

Besides her five year marriage to João, few defining characteristics came to shape Astrud career. First, João had convinced her to sing in studio recording however she had extreme stage fright which prevented her from performing in night clubs and that limited her public visibility. When João and Astrud moved to the United States in the early 60s, the jazz singer attempted to overcome her stage fears by taking classes with Stella Adler in New York.

Astrud's acting classes with Adler lead to roles in two films Get Yourself a College Girl, The Hanged Man, and the sound track for Down with Love. In 1982 she returned to performing in nightclubs and I saw her at the Jazz Cafe in London. In 1992 she received the Latin Jazz USA Award for Lifetime Achievement and was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 2002.

Barraca de suco

2007-12-21T18:55:00.000-08:00

All over South America and Mexico you must take time out of your day to enjoy the incredible barraca de suco (juice bars) and a selection of fruta fresca drinks made from mango, papaya, watermelon, passion fruit, kiwi, pineapple, coconut and other more exotic varieties such as caja. The fruit selections at the bar are not far from the areas where they are grown unlike most fruit we eat in the midwest. In Brazil fruit is picked only after ripe rather than green and then ripened off the tree. This natural ripening method makes all the difference in the world.

My theory is if you eat these fresh fruit and drink their juices regularly, you will be cured of so much that ales us in modern American culinary culture. Almost every meal we ate: breakfast, lunch or dinner, was accompanied by large pitchers of freshly blended fruit juice and the delicious taste of fruit is one of the most memorable parts of daily life in Brazil.

The International Morning Read

2007-12-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

One of my greatest pleasures when traveling overseas is reading the International Herald Tribune (IHT). So after not having much luck trying to find an English language newspaper (The New York Times preferably) I was very happy when Mauro said he could obtain the IHT from his distributors.

When Patricia and I were in Toronto earlier this year, our downtown Yonge Street hotel offered us "complimentary copies" of USA Today each morning. The idea of reading USA Today each morning when outside the U.S. is very depressing. What a horrible newspaper!

After our first morning delivery, I called down to the desk at the hotel and insisted they not do me the favor of putting USA Today in my room. As a substitute they provided a copy of the National Post but I had to pay for it on my room bill. While Toronto's National Post is not the best paper in Canada, paying an additional charge was worth it if I didn't have to open the door and look at the USA Today.

But I've always enjoyed the IHT going back to the time when I was a graduate student living in London. At the time the paper was jointly owned 50-50 by the New York Times and Washington Post but its editoral was completely independent of either paper. IHT editorial offices were located in Paris and it was the first International newspaper to be flown into cities across Europe it time for breakfast Earl Grey tea, crumpets, and kippers.

The paper had an interesting history, originating in 1887 as the international edition to the old New York Herald. During the newspaper wars of the 1960s in New York and the weeding out of non-competitors, the Herald collapsed while the Paris International edition remained vital.

Most people living in London picked up the IHT to get box scores for the Major League Baseball World series in October, the Stanley Cup playoffs (I recall reading about Minnesota's 18 players beating the Russians and going onto win a gold metal in 1980 in the IHT), or tracking NFL football. I read it for the unique perspectives of the IHT columnists.

Yet, even with its play to homesick Americans, in many ways in the 1980s the IHT was better than the New York Times. Based in Paris, many of the American reporters and columnists had a distinctive world view. Writers were ex-pats who could see America through a prism of intimately knowing the country they grew up in and loved, yet, through distant lenses being separated from American daily life. The IHT always was a forward line in understanding the world reaction to America and it policies with the eyes and ears of foreigners.

I must add, however, I was a bit disappointed to see the current IHT running columns by Paul Krugman, Adam Cohn and Howard M. Wachtel about the CIA tape destruction scandal, Hillary and Bill stumping in Iowa, and the weakening American economy while drinking my morning coffee in São Paulo.

These New York Times regulars aren't living the life of an American in Paris. The publishers are simply repurposing the content written for the New York Times instead of seeking to provide a prism other than that whcih can be obtained from the NYT. This might be a recent devolution in the IHT's distinctive reporting and analysis since the New York Times became whole owner of the IHT in 2007 by buying out its partners.

Let's hope the Times editors and publishers see the value of an alternative world view other than one directed out of New York and written by New Yorkers with little day-to-day life experience overseas.

Picasso and Portinari Paintings Stolen, Uninsured

2007-12-20T14:39:00.000-08:00

Paintings Patricia and I viewed just a week ago by Pablo Picasso and Cândido Portinari were reported stolen in an art heist from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) on Paulista Ave on Thursday at dawn.

The paintings stolen, Picasso's blue period 1904 Portrait of Suzanne Bloch (see left) and Brazilian painter Cândido Portinari's 1939 O Lavrador de Cafe (The Coffee Worker) are valued by Christie's at between 50 and 116 million dollars. In an earlier blog (Vidas Secas) I wrote about Portinari's large three panel paintings but also recall vividly his depiction of the coffee worker with his massive forearms and incredible earth gripping feet.

Police are interviewing all 140 museum staff about their possible knowledge of the heist, searching for clues of a plan being hatched prior to the thief itself. The heist went down at approximately 5 AM precisely during the guard shift change. Over the last couple of months, 13 prints of paintings by masters in MASP's collection had been reproduced on glossy stock as posters in Brazil's daily newspaper Folha de São Paulo one of the two largest circulation newspapers in the country. The posters were intended to raise pubic visibility for the museums permanent collection.

Apparently, three men captured on security video cameras, boldly ran across the open plaza beneath MASP at dawn, leaped over the glass barrier and then gained access to a stairwell using a tire iron and jack. The jack was used pry under and raise a steel door (as shown in this picture from the scene). A fourth man remained outside the museum communicating by cell phone. The museums alarmed failed and the thieves escaped inside 5 minutes. The paintings, the musuem staff speculated were grabbed because they were small and easily lifted from the walls and carrried out.

Thursday's robbery is the first art heist in the 60 year history of MASP. The modern art museum was closed Thursday to aid in the investigation of the heist. The museum has reported that the paintings are not insured against thief.

MASP has come under a lot of criticism for not insuring their permanent collection valued at more than $1 billion. Many of the critics leveling their disbelief may not fully understand how difficult and costly it is to procure such insurance for a collection whose value is in a constant state of flux. To put a value on a Picasso or a Portinari is not as simple as a automobile or a house.

Instead of the millions and millions of dollars MASP would need annually to insure the collection, it is probably better to invest in better security and guard the work against thief than paying out huge insurance premiums. As the museum director Eduardo Cosomano stated, the work is invaluable and an settlement could never adequately compensate for the thief. Monetary compensation for an art thief of this dimension is a bit of an absurdity. Many art collections around the world are not insured at that's not just a third world or Brazilian problem as some of the first critics seem to want to suggest.

Brazil ranks fourth for the highest number of art thefts in the world, after the U.S., France and Iraq, commented Jose do Nascimento Jr., director of museums at Brazil's Institute of Heritage and National Arts.

While police felt the thieves might be in the employ of an art collector of dealer targeting the Picasso and Portinari (see right) paintings for a private collection, the museum administration commented that the thieves acted more like amateurs, passing up great works by masters to grab paintings that could be easily carried out. Experts speculated that professional art thieves would not operate in broad daylight and under the recorded eye of security video cameras.

Having just been at the museum and viewing these paintings, the thief feels a little bit closer and raw for both of us.

ADDENDUM: Mauro and Henrique told us by phone that the heist was the third attempt in the last couple of weeks at MASP, the first in October was by a group who tried to overpower a guard who did not have keys to the permanent collection and the second on December 17th thwarded by an alarm. The second attempt was not reported to the police by msueum administration.

Embu Natal das Artes

2007-12-19T17:17:00.000-08:00

On Sunday we headed out to Embu just a few miles west of Patricia's home in Taboao de Serra. Embu is the Jesuit settlement constructed beginning in 1553 on a mission to convert local Indians and use them as farm workers in the region. This is one of the earliest settlements that evidentially lead to the huge population of the city of Sao Paulo.

In recent years Embu has been revived by Feira de Artes and Artesanato, a street fair of arts and artisans that make crafts, ceramics, woodcarving, play music with original Brasilian instruments, dancing and foods. Since 1969, the Embu Feira has opened every weekend and the surrounding streets are filled with antique shops and furniture stores.

Feira's are everywhere in Brazil from the inner cities with fruit, produce, meat, and spices to arts and to the villages were you'll find crafts and antiques but Embu is special for its arts and crafts as well as historical significance.

On this particular weekend in December there are special dances and musical groups in celebration of Natal or Christmas. The streets are bristling with shoppers looking for craft items and art to give as Christmas presents. I still find it difficult to image Christmas without the snow or see a heavily clad Santa with white beard and flannel red sleeves and cap and feel he is out of his element.

Patricia's friend and former teaching colleague Andrea is a single mother who lives in Embu with her teenage daughter Miriam. Andrea was first a English student of Patricia's and then they became co-teachers and, as Andrea pointed out, Patricia was her boss.

Andrea's daughter Miriam was very excited to speak with us in English. She is highly motivated to learn English and very much would like to follow in Patricia's footsteps and come to the United States to learn more English. Miriam also wears a kind of scarey tee-shirt with Ozzie Osborn done up with his goth make-up and goolish appearance. These are the kids who love America and find our culture fascinating.

Andrea teaches English in an American Catholic School called Chapel. Most of the Paulista kids who attend Chapel are privileged but Andrea also volunteers her time teaching English to poor children because she believes in committing herself to changing Brazil and providing opportunity to those less fortunate who cannot afford private Catholic education.

On the hill there is a very old Chapel called the Capela Sao Lazaro where Patricia sits on the front stairs of these sky blue painted front with beveled windows and white trim. We are instantly taken back 400 years when this chapel probably rested alone on the steep hill overlooking the valley. The simple Chapel with wood plank benches, floors and doors is closed for renovations at this time. Today small brightly painted buidling is surrounded by nice single family homes, well kept restaurants, and a newly revived nightclub and disco scene in the village of Embu.

Even though we must walk up and down hills that by Minnesota standards would be considered mountains, unlike Sao Paulo that feels like New York or London, Embu makes us really feel like we are in South America among indigenous people with a long history on this continent. Modernity has left the house.

Accessa Sao Paulo

2007-12-19T14:08:00.001-08:00

Access to the internet in Sao Paulo can be extremely difficult. You can be sure in the upscale neighborhoods and private residences in the cities west end of Jardim and Vila Nova, high-speed internet access can be obtained for a price.

Mauro told me that he noticed a Paulista and customer who lives in Vila Nova had a Apple iPhone. As of this point in time iPhones are not available for sale in Brazil and there is no service plan. However in discussing the iPhone, this owner said that he paid over a thousand dollars for an unlocked iPhonethat he could manage to use under an existing plan in Brazil.

But I can say without question, the people of Brazil need better, faster and freer internet access! All power to the people!

Okay, so let drop the pretense of FREE. In Brazil, the web of government bureaucracy, as is being threatened in America as well, has been thrown over the internet by regulators. Sure, if you can show me the clear and straightforward way that restricting freedom of speech, of access, of communication and invading citizen's privacy will stop human trafficing, stop porn, stop violence of man against man, stop drug kingpins, stop the rape of the Amazon, end crime in our time, bring peace to the Middle East, and stop terrorism than I will grant them the tyranny over the people they govern. But we all know that is a ruse and the stratagem of powerful manipulators to control individual freedom for personal gain. And it is a joke. Throwing a yoke around the throats of free citizens will end none of these ills.

This is true in Brazil and it is true in America.

The Lan House we visit to post our blogs will close without notice. Just yesterday we were told by the grapevine that the Lan House was open. So I rushed in an started making my post. Then they pulled the security doors shut while I was still inside. The proprietor told us that we didn't need to leave but that inspectors were coming around and had been shutting down Lan Houses all day. The reason he gave was that the inspectors were looking for "Christmas tips" -- tis the Season!

But a new generation of Brazilians need to rise up and show that freedom of information is a powerful tool in building a better and stronger more informed society. And our generation in America also needs to rise up and tell our government to stop restricting freedoms of American citizens, stop invading their privacy, stop turning back science and technology to promote narrow and backward ideologies of power because it will only cause all the people to suffer.

One thing I am discovering about being in Brazil, a third-world country albiet a BRIC* one is that human dignity is universal. Our problems aren't that different and our aspirations very similar. We are both faced with the problem of governments what wish to exceed their proper role of serving the people and whose power is restricted and their actions completely transparent.

I frequently hear the axiom - "Freedom comes at a cost." Yes, it does. It comes at a cost to the powerful interests of tyrants and despots like Bush and Cheney who wish to abuse government power. Our founding philosophers and writers of our constitution were absolutely clear that government power needed to be restrained and limited. They understood the greatest threat to freedom is powerful intrusive government and not free individuals.

* BRIC is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India and China and usually is used to describe third world developing economies with vast resources and a development strategy that is making them grow and prosper. Currently Brazil is experiencing economic prosperity but don't get into an argument with Mauro about who should take credit.

I made a joke and they laughed, finally...

2007-12-15T15:21:00.000-08:00

That's right. Not all humor can survive the language barrier.

While eating last night I was treated to rabo de boi (Ox-tail) among a selection of six or seven other poteins. I imagined one night as I lay awake thinking, with all this food Odelva might be slowly pushing me closer and closer to a heart attack from eating so she can have her daughter back. Just a little thought, anyway...

My father-in-law Mauro is a hardworking and driven man who fights the traffic and tussle of commuting everyday to and from the Ibirapuera Moema district of Sao Paulo.

As the evening progressed, Mauro ate one serving of Ox-tail and then another big serving and then yet another our eyes grew with amazement. Finally, as he grabbed the dish for more, I exclaimed:

"Somewhere there is an Ox walking around without his tail."

And it brought the house down. We laughed and laughed. Hours later Odelva would break into a laugh and when asked she'd just say "Ox without his tail."

Ten Minnesota Truisms

2007-12-15T15:14:00.000-08:00

There are a few Minnesota truisms I have been trying to impart upon Paulistas without much success. Maybe it is the language barrier but I suspect, moreso, it is just a healthy skepticism for anything that comes out of my mouth.

Often, the little tidbits of wisdom will pop from my head out of context during fast exchanges of translation which could also lead them to think something is loss in the translation and it is not only that I am crazy. Here they are:

#1: "It's not the heat, it's the humidity."

#2: "The bundt cake was invented in Minneapolis."

#3: "3M stands for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing"

#4: "Rubarb, discovered in Minnesota has magical healing qualities and is known for soothing anxiety, calming aggression and can be used as anti-depressant." AND because of ruburb we have little need for psychology and psychiatric services.

#5: "It's important to dress in LAYERS"

#6: "Canned meat SPAM, invented in Austin Minnesota was decisive in making American the superpower of the world it is today."

#7: "White food can do little harm."

#8: "Post-it notes were invented in Minnesota as the result of a mistake."

#9: "Blood banks were invented at the Mayo Clinic" (I think when I first asserted this, in translation, they thought I said "Blood was invented at Mayo Clinic" causing them to be distrust all of my invented in Minnesota stories.

#10: "We have 356 words in Minnesota for snow."

Escritorio politico

2007-12-15T14:56:00.000-08:00

Olivio Nobrega is a Brazilian politican. His smiling face, uplifted eyebrow above wire rimed glasses and his silvery receding hair can be seen waving on a banner above a sign that also reads ADVOGADOS TEL: 4771-1259.

Olivio has served this district in Taboão de Serra for as long as Patricia can remember switching parties many times on the federal level. He currently serves in the Vereador a tier of government that would be similar to our city or Metropolitian Council.

But there is much more to this story.

Nobrega owned one, two and three of the shoulder to shoulder houses along the street where Mauro and Odelva reside. In one of these houses Olivio lived and raised his family. Another remains the offices for his adult lawyer advocate children Eduardo, Karina, Ferruanda, and his daughter-in-law Luciana Calandra. The other flats he rented out as homes and businesses to augment his elected offical salary.

Quite like Brooklyn New York, politicians in Bazil are oft regarded with contempt and are considered piviledged as well as corrupt. Certainly, a politician holding public office will earn more than a workingman's wage and probably appear to be barons by anyone living in a favela. But most start out as idealists wanting to change society and right the wrongs they have witnessed.

I am fairly certain politicians are not paid enough to get wealthy. Graft, on the other hand, such as in the time of Tammany Hall, or The Shame of the Cities might be more commonly assumed and wide-spread in the political culture of Brazil.

But one momentus event ten years ago caused Olivio to move his family off on this side street in Pinheiras Park.

While living in these modest quarters of mixed income residents, Senhor Olivio's teenage son was kidnapped in highly public hostage-taking act of violence. There is no question Olivio was targeted because of his public profile and his family observed by a gang of criminals who carefully research their victims and hatch schemes to collect ransom to earn a living.

In his book Cidade de Deus (City of God), Paulo Lins who grew up in a Rio favela describes the pull of the gun for desparately hopeless youth and basically how they execute holdups, taxi robberies as well as carjacking as a means to raise money for Canaval celebrations, buy dinner for a sought after girlfriend, or a single nights joyride. Mundane reasons for such grandoise action. Lins' book, when originally published lead to a public outcry and eventually the incredble Oscar nominated film by the same name directed by Fernando Meirelles.

If you can view the photographs of Tuca Viera now on exhibition in December at MASP, particularly Paraisopolis or Menino e Pistola by Andre Cypriano, you will gain a powerful visual bookmark for the wild turbulance that lies just barely underneath the surface of modern Brazil.

What strikes me is how the violence and stratified division has evolved to the point of being commonplace. Patricia's dear friend Luciano told me last night, "Sometimes I fear we are headed for a civil war here in Brazil. The violence has become a part of us. It's accepted." He went onto say after a awhile you don't feel moved by the shock of violence anymore.

Dramatically, Olivio's son was held for many days while captors negiotated terms with Olivio for his release. Kidnappings are common to Brazil and are often successfully undertaken by bandits who have perfected the techniques of apprehending targets, collecting their ransom and then quickly disappearing into the secret inner protected world of the favelas. Obviously, these carefully planned kidnapping are not as random as armed robbery or carjacking.

When Patricia was a teenager and worked at her first job at a bank in Taboão, the manager's family was kidnnapped and manager was instructed to empty money from the bank vault and deliver it to a isolated area without telling the police or anyone else, otherwise the family would be killed one by one.

After the son returned home, Olivio understandably moved his family out of this neighborhood. Frankly, I am surprised he still has his political office here and so many of his family members who felt tramatized and their safety violated by the kidnapping have retruned as advogadosto practice law in the very place they were violated.

It is one of those complex ironies of Brazil.

Olivio Nobrega's web site

Politics and civil discourse

2007-12-15T14:51:00.000-08:00

Mauro and I like to talk politics, perhaps made more easy by the fact that we cannot really debate directly, except by aid of translation, he rants about his favorite dufus, Brazil's President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva (Lula) and I try to out rant him with my favorite dufus idiot President George W. Bush.

On some level our sentiments agree as long as we remain loyal to our countries and criticizing the incompetence, with great patriotism, of our leaders.

The other evening, while eating Oxtail, Mauro began explaining how Lula, as he is both affectionately and contemptuously called, wanted to make a temporary tax permanent. Mauro alleged that Lula was trying to claim his administrations economic policies were working as evidence the strength of the Brazil Real against the American dollar.

I told Mauro that America dollar is worthless everywhere, that even children begging on the streets of India refuse to accept American currency [see International Herald Tribune , Dec 15-16, 2007] because even they know it is worthless.

"Exactly" Mauro exclaimed, "Lula can't claim credit!"

"Bush must take the blame!" I passionately proclaim.

The reason, I say, is because the war in Iraq is costing Americans a billion dollars a day and Bush refuses to even count our debts against the revenues raised each year in taxes. Consequently, America must borrow these billions from China, Saudi Arabia, and other Asian and European countries.

"There is no confidence in the American dollar." I retorted and in this kind of parallel debate, it all works out for both of us.

And then we just grin at each other because what can we say? Not enough to offend.

Pronto do São Paulo?

2007-12-15T14:38:00.000-08:00

Are you ready to do São Paulo?

After threading ourselves through the city many times there are a bunch of things you need to consider when coming to São Paulo aside from avoiding the intense level of automobile traffic surging daily through the streets. These are practical problems you will encounter day-to-day unlike any other city in the world.

First, each car in São Paulo is restricted from driving in the city during rush hour one day a week. For instance, if you have a license plate number ending in 3 or 4, you cannot drive between 7:00 AM and 10:00 AM and from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM in the inner city zone of Sao Paulo on Tuesdays. If you do, you will get a ticket even if it is the day you plan to fly out and need to get to the airport. Know your restricted day and plan around it.

Second, in most outlying neighborhoods, you will need to pay someone to watch your car when it is parked on the street. This is a kind of bribe to protect your car gifted in the form of a tip. The strange thing about this is that the parking monitors have no official status or license. The unofficial guardians are often unemployed guys after a tip and their administration of duty might be spotty. Also, it can be difficult to ascertain which guy hanging out on the sidewalk is the unofficial monitor for the street where you wish to park.

The upside: these parking monitors usually give great customer service unlike the particularly unfriendly and unhelpful staff at the art museums, shops, banks, and indifferent waiters at places you might reasonably expect friendly service and instruction. Parking monitors understand good customer service can reward them financially.

Third, in the inner core of São Paulo the parking monitor system isn't in effect. However, posted next to the street where parking is allowed, you will find a blue box that says you will need to purchased a ticket (the paper sheet resembles a lottery scratch card) with days, hours, months, etc scratched out.

But unlike the lottery, there is no fixed price for the parking and you don't always know where to purchase these parking vouchers. On two different occasions we paid 3 reals and then 2 reals and hour to park near Ave Paulista. The blue tickets are usually not in effect on weekends and only during business hours during the day depending on the street.

Go the the nearest bar, restaurant, or street news vendor and ask where you can buy the parking voucher. Hopefully they speak Ingles or you are carrying a Brazilian Portuguese phrasebook. Be warned, having a blue card does not offer protection from breaking and entering like the monitors do in outlying districts. Always hide anything of value in the trunk of your car or take it with you.

Fourth, when driving in heavily congested São Paulo traffic, you will quickly notice a swarm of motorcycle messengers who fly around your automobile like locus in West Texas in October. These motorcycle dare devils drive very fast down the center strip between cars stalled in a traffic jam. São Paulo is quite unlike any other city for the numbers these drivers running all day and night. You must be hyper-alert to everything going on around you to keep track of the danger they pose to your car and themselves.

Fifth, banks both private and state run in São Paulo are very difficult offices to access. Due to high security, going to a bank is probably one of the most harrowing experiences you'll encounter in Brazil. You will be thrilled by the polite and courteous help from the unofficial parking monitors and happy to give them a bribe after experiencing the extremes of banking customer service. It is just wrong to call the treatment "customer service."

If you need to go to a bank, plan on spending and afternoon or at least a couple of hours. When you walk up to the bank you will notice a bunch of guys standing around with guns. Do not yell at the guys with guns. When you enter the vestibule they will ask you a series of questions and type a bunch of stuff into their computer terminals. More guys with guns. Remember, if they have a gun and a uniform, it is their job to shoot and kill people who act strange, erratic, or angry.

Essentially, bank employees are trying to determine if you have legitimate business and an account with the bank. If you do the will pass you onto a checkpoint more daunting than TSA at airports and these guys also have guns and banish them visibly. Don't taunt them.

You will then be forced into a revolving door that traps you like a rat in a cage if you have metal items on you. You should have placed all metal items in a basket to pass through the system separately. There are far too many false positives and customers get enraged.

Once inside the employees are reluctant to help and provide prompt and polite customer service - not all that different than American banks frankly. The bank tellers are amazingly lax about money and you have very little privacy. If you are exchanging cash be careful because people are watching and you could become a target once you leave the bank.

Patricia told me about customers getting so angry trying to pass through the cage that they stripped all their clothing off down to being completely naked.

Now that's Brazilian Caraval!

Santos e Bahia

2007-12-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

The city of Santos today is thought of as the place where the greatest futebol (soccer) player and statesman in the world Pelê played the game. Founded in 1535 and located on the coast a hours drive south of Sao Paulo, Santos became a rich harbor for the export of coffee after the Scottish came and built the tram.

The train revolutionized the economy of the entire region when its powerful pistons allowed exporters to move large quantities of coffee beans out of the mountains to the market rapidly. Brazil is now the largest exporter of coffee in the world. Santos and Sao Paulo consequently became wealthy off coffee and it all began here in the port of Santos.

Brazil also has the largest population of Japanese in the world outside Japan. Immigration of the Japanese to Brazil began in earnest after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 with almost all ancestors coming through Santos harbor.

In one huge wave of immigration, roughly 150 thousand Japanese came to Santos bound to labor contracts but once freed of their obligation (they had to buy their freedom from the bosses) they moved to Sao Paulo to a section of the city known appropriately as Liberdade or Liberation. In Liberdade the Japanese numbers grew and the prospered. This year Sao Paulo is celebrating 100 years of Japanese assimilation.

BAHIA

Almost everywhere you look in São Paulo there are signs of the immigration of the people from the state of Bahia. near the equator. Patricia's mother Odelva is from Bahia. Baiano cuisine brought down from this hot climate of the North and coastal regions is more piexes (fish) based than carne (meat) and often associated with pheasant food.

The Baiano in São Paulo are regarded similarly to the poor Southerners from Mississippi and Alabama who relocated to New York - often with contempt or embarrassment by upper class society. Bahia is associated with discount furniture marts, street food, heads of fish swimming in you stew, and black magic.

Baiano moved to São Paulo reluctantly due to severe draught but kept together with solidarity and pride in their heritage and cultural traditions.

Odelva told me that when she arrived in São Paulo in the early 1970s at the age of 17, she already had three sisters living in this massive city of immigrants. Yet, Odelva could not find her sisters. As a teenager she was employed by wealthy Paulistas in their homes - given food and lodging but no salary or income - she was an indentured cook.

Years past before Odelva realized she might be entitled to a wage or that she possesed the rights to free herself from her labor.

As closely as my in-laws have been able to figure, Odelva left Cruz das Almas and Mauro Timbauba on exactly the same day at the same time without knowing eachother or being incited to this harmonious seminal beginning.

Henrique has arrived

2007-12-13T05:28:00.000-08:00

All Henrique needs to be happy is peanut butter and apricot jam from Trader Joes. Patricia´s brother arrives from São Carlos where he is studying chemistry and USP. Henrique will now enjoy his summer break to return to classes in March after Carnaval.

Like most men in their early 20s, he sleeps all day and is out all night. However, being a Brazilian, once awake his first impulse is to run down the street to a local escola (school) yard and play a pickup game of futebol with other guys from the neighborhood. For Henrique, playing futebol is a workout regiment but it is also a national passion and birthright.

We are having troubles making our connections the the internet. I feel a little bit like a bandit trying to slip into drak rooms and ask if they have an internet connection. Not speaking Ingles, the proprietors frequently do not understand what I am asking for and even if they did their are such a variety of ways ´internet connection´ can be misunderstood. I am either offered something I am embarrassed to have to turn down or the connections involve complex registrations, paying of elaborate fees or a background check. Legit business people fact hurdles and obsticles to just being open during regualr hours.

Don´t touch that dial, we´re working hard to bring you the news from São Paulo!

Tchau for now!

Comida de rua

2007-12-13T04:58:00.000-08:00

In any large city, London, New York, or Tokyo with a foot mobile fast-paced hardworking population you'll find comdia de rua (street food). For New York it is pizza-by-the-slice, bagels with smear, knish, babka and other wonderful Jewish deli delights. In London you will find fish-and-chips, sausage pasties and rolls, and Greek gyros. Tokyo has its sticky buns. All items you can buy on-the-fly and eat on the go.

In São Paulo you will find exactly the same items that make for an inexpensive lunch between appointments or just off the subway. If anyhting, Paulistas prefer the savory to the sweet. This list of items will cost you approximately a buck a piece and go very well with a visit to the barraca de suco (juice bar) for incredible manga, passion fruit, pineapple and watermelon drinks.

Coxinha -- chicken and cheese inside deep fried dough

Empadinha -- pie-like crust filled with heart of palm and baked similar in name to Chilian empanata, however, can very widely depending on preparation

Pão de batata -- a potato bread baked with spiced chicken

Bolinho de queijo -- cheese filled dough that is deep fried

Pão de queijo -- cheese mixed with a bread-lke dough (no four however) and baked until golden and crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside

O PÃO NOSSO DE CADA DIA

Every morning the padaria makes crusty little loaves called pãozinho with an exquisitely golden brown crust that splits across the top and has a light soft white fluffy interior.

These bread loaves are so much like bread sold in France, Mexico, and that I remember most distinctively from living in England. Even the smell wafting down the street in the morning is as warm to the senses as sunshine. Wrapped warm in small brown bags, with blue inked crested logos and sayings like "Give us our daily bread" there is nothing like this bread to feel you've finally left America and with good reason.

On Mauro e Odelva's street you will hear each morning a variety of sounds and melodies as street vendors come selling aqua (water), propane gas (this truck plays a distinctive melody you might associate with ice cream trucks in the US), and tamales. Odelva tells me there are two different tamale makers and she listens to the call from the better of the two. Patricia laughs when I marvel at the convenience of having these mobile vendors come selling.

AQUA DE COCO

Coconut water is the magic rejuvenator of life. For roughly a buck and a quarter, a street vendor whether on the beach in Rio or walking the sides streets near Ave. Paulista will grab a green coconut fresh off the tree and using a Facão (machete) will whack off the head and foot, then cut a vee-shaped wedge to make a hole in the top and slip in a straw. With this in hand, the desperate feeling of heat and humindity seems less overwhelming. A good vendor will chill the coconut prior to cutting so tha water is cold.

Ah, the joys of big city life!

Vidas Secas

2007-12-12T04:54:00.000-08:00

In modern Brazilian art there is a generation in the history of this massive country that touched the minds and imagination of all poets, artists, and musicians alike. From 1920 thru the 1950s, a draught struck the Northern regions of Brazil, the rivers dried up and healthy propserous people as well as the poor started to perish.

The Vidas Secas (Dry Lives) contain harrowing stories of entended families that packed their vital belongings and began walking south along the river beds twoard cities like São Paulo.

Not unlike Ireland's potato famine, the Vidas Secas radically altered Brazilian society and remains a perminent mark in the psycological inheritance of its people.

At Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) there is a tryptic of three large paintings Os retirantes by one of Brazil's greatest modern artists Cândido Portinari that if you have one will move your soul. The six foot tall canvases have, for Brazil, the equal impact as, perhaps, Picasso's Guernica has for Spain. Each panel depicts a taddered family of nine walking the dry river bed against a ravaged, desolated horizon and heat scorched earth. The sky is filled with the black shapes of vultures waiting for a meal of human remains. [The first panel is shown here]

In the center panel, the youngest child dies and each family member wails a river of tears resembling stones. Not even their tears produce needed fluid. Portinari´s brush makes you feel their wretched and unbreable loss. The final panel shows the mother fallen to her knees, hands desperately raised, fingers extended as if to ask God to take her too. The child is buried - the exodis goes on.

What strikes me most heavily as I sit for many minutes staring on a benched positioned in front of the three paintings - situated perhaps to cushon the emotional intensity - is when a Brazilian menina, of approximately 10 years old, approaches the canvases. I feel almost as if I want to step forward to cover her eyes as if I have witnessed a grostesque automobile accident with a beheaded body next to the road.

For days following of visit to MASP, I imagine I can see in each heart of the Paulistas I meet the unshakable sorrow of the Vidas Secas.

APOLOGY

Patricia tells me that the Vidas Secas is the title of a required text all Brazilian school kids are required to read by Graciliano Ramos about a family that transverses the Northern river beds for their survival. This families fate is similar to the one depicted in Portinari´s painting except for one detail. It is not a child who dies during the migration, instead the family dog. Still, the death of Baleia (the dog´s name ironically meaning whale) is as devasting for its innocence and pathos.

Fotografica

2007-12-11T15:10:00.000-08:00

Across the street from casa de Mauro e Odelva is Foto Murakami a photography business run by a couple going back 25 years to when Patricia was a young girl. Although this is primarily a residental street and area, every third or fourth building houses a small family business, essentailly in its street level garage.

At our home in Saint Paul, we have portraits taken of Patricia and Henrique when they were children by Murakami. Senhor Murakami is Japanese and Lubelia, his wife, is from Portugal. While Patricia is having her hair done, basically a two to three hour process of going to a private residence rather than a salon, I am left to try to fend for myself. I go directly for Murakami Foto, thinking of course, that we share the language of photography and digital gear.

In our broken form of communication, Lubelia speaks little English and I speak even less pouco Portuguese, she was able to tell me a few things about their photography business. Shops like these are peppered all over the residental high streets of São Paulo. First, Foto Murakami is now completely digital. Senhor Murakami uses a Nikon and Lubelia owns a 10.1 megapixel Canon Digital Rebel. Surprisingly, words like megapixel and Digital Rebel are common across cultures.

I am also able to ascertain, without English translation, that the Murakami´s are also videographers and do a good business in passport and mandatory military registration fotos. Lubelia is adament in telling me she uses mini-DVD format for video and not VHS, even though they sell VHS tapes in the store.

Odelva is able to tell them I work with photography for a revista (magazine) in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"Mini-so-dah" Senhor Murakami and his wife Lubelia repeat over and over, "Mini-so-dah" as if they are amazed there is such a word in any language.

Mercado dia

2007-12-10T12:28:00.001-08:00

Saturday is market day and we walk down to the end of Patricia´s street to the vendors who line the twisting hillside drive with their Mercedes, Fiat, and Toyota trucks and from which they roll out the fresh vegetables, fruits, and meat. The small vendor who makes a sweet cloudy drink by pushing a reedy stalk of sugar cane tempts us. Patricia and Odelva buy a prickly vegetable, Maxixi native to Brazil that when skinned and chopped is very much like a cucumber and belongs to the same family.

My job is to assist the meat vendor with sharpening his knives and promote the State of Minnesota among these rolling hills of Taboão de Serra. You can be sure nobody knows what Minnesota means or where I might be from, however, the meat vendor is very friendly and offers and thumbs up to my efforts. Nothing like being a friendly ambassador in Brazil for America. Viva Minnesota!

Chegamos Vivos no Brasil

2007-12-10T12:06:00.000-08:00

Driving in from Guarulhos International Airport you´ll see a bunch of vendedor de rue selling products to cars, trucks and taxi stranded in traffic waiting to change lanes. The vendors sell cell phone chargers, seat beads, steering wheel grips, jumper cables for your car as well as candies and munchies for your stomach. Our taxi drivers tells us the current São Paulo Mayor is cracking down on the vendedors, sending the polícia out to confiscate their product inventory.

Motorcycle messangers speed between the lanes of stalled traffic in acts of daring that leave us with shock and awe. Our taxi driver also tells us that deft motorcycle thieves drive by the car windows slowly trying to spot any bag that looks like it might contain a compuiter. If stranded in traffic, the thief will point a gun in the window and demand the computer bag be handed out and then speed away. I will test my theory that I can negotitate with them, if the opportunity presents itself, and if it works. Standby for proof of theory.

São Paulo has one of the highest crime rates in the world.

The roads this Friday morning in December are hectic. São Paulo has just experienced one of its legendary downfalls of rain that causes traffic crisis and locks up the highways and city streets. Drivers trying to get across the city are very aggressive. Motocycles messangers live an extremely dangerous life under the best conditions. Patricia´s father Mauro tells us 3 are killed everyday in São Paulo.

After bringing Mauro back to his newstand business, we arrive safely in Taboão de Serra at Odelva e Mauro´s casa and, of course, Odelva has prepared a banquet of food.

Carne (meat) is prepared in a roll and roasted with vegetables and bacon rolled inside. Arroz (rice) is served with every meal including those already heavy in starch like pasta and potatoes. Fruta is kept aside for the dessert course.

Leaders are Readers

2007-12-04T11:21:00.000-08:00

I am in the magazine publishing business and Patricia's father Mauro is the master of magazines in the business district of Sao Paulo. This, I feel, is a bond we can explore once I get to Brazil and we meet.

Mauro has a voracious appetite for the news and reading magazines. He often knows more than I do about breaking events and world stories about the U.S. Most certainly, Mauro knows more about Brazilian futebol, Formula 1 racing, and all the subtle shadings of Brazilian politics with its dozen political parties from Communist to Republican, workers parties to business, and Greens to Social Democrats.

This morning Patricia and I were driving to work and on the side of a delivery truck a sign read: "Leaders are Readers: Buy Magazines" and the motto struck a cord her her heart as being a very nice statement.

I'm sure Mauro and I are in total agreement.

Minnesota Snowstorm

2007-12-01T16:45:00.001-08:00

December 1st, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, we got hit with a winter blizzard. As we did our last minute preparations for our trip to sunny Brazil, the winds blew in with a magnificent yet brutally shocking blast of cold and snow.

Patricia and I dashed all over town trying to get our tasks done. As harsh as the wind and snowflakes lashed against our faces, there is still a lot of joy and beauty in a fresh winter snowstorm. We drove slowly. We failed to make our appointed times but still enjoyed the white powdery blanket. Patricia kept her beautiful smile no matter how biting the cold. I love her for her unrelenting happiness or, at least, putting on a good face.

With a 50 degree point spread in temperature, I think it is safe to say we are looking forward to summer again once we step on the ground in sunny Brazil! Yappy, ya-hoe I yah!

20 Travel Tips

2007-11-30T12:45:00.000-08:00

Patricia told me the first item here is her #1 travel piece of advice:

Buy distinctive looking luggage and put a unique marker on your suitcase (mala) so you can easily recognize it on the baggage claim (reguerimento de bagagem) carousel.

When choosing a seat (assento), ask the customer service agent where she or he would sit. - OR - Unless you are traveling children, always ask for an exit-row seat. You’ll get more legroom. web sites like SeatGuru help you find the best seat on airlines by plane type.

Men and women: Don’t wear thong underwear. It's called creeping agony.

While on the airplane (aviáo) for long international flights (vôo internacional) write letters (carta), keep a journal (diario), or jot down ideas or to-do lists.

Pack a bag of Goldfish or cookies in your carry-on — not for yourself or your kids to eat, but to quiet the screaming kid three rows back. Works every time and costs only pennies.

In some South American countries it's possible to bargain with a thief. Usually they don't want to hurt you, so just explain to them you really need your money but you're happy to give over a portion of your funds. Suggestion: $20

Always dress nice or classy yet try to remain comfortable. You will be treated better everywhere in the world if you don't look dirty and sloppy.

Wear slip-on/slip-off shoes (sapatos) to make your security entrances and exits easier.

Cross-pack. Put some everyday cloths into your carry-on in case the airline (linha aérea) looses your luggage (bagagem).

Eye masks.

Never unzip the zipper around the seam of your luggage and expand the bag -- once you've opened Pandora's box you'll never close it again.

Listen to an audio book. It takes up more time than the in-flight movie, and is better exercise for your mind.

Dab a little antibacterial ointment in your nose to help protect from the myriad airborne contaminants circulating in the cabin.

Never let a snake charmer convince you to put a snake around your neck. Especially if the self-identified snake charmer only has 4 fingers (total for both hands). Just because he wears the "garb" and calls himself a professional doesn't mean a thing.

Take sanitary wipes or wet towels with you. You will frequently need to clean or disinfect something onboard.

Always, wear shoes to the restroom (banheiro).

Never place any important document in the front seat pocket — especially not your passport!

Use saline spray. Colds and respiratory illness are common after a flight, but using a saline spray can prevent an illness after flying.

Carry extra zip-lock bags in your luggage, they are useful in collecting small items and sorted small items that get strewn all over in luggage and can serve to protect important and/or fragile documents.

Bring dollar bills, and if a kid starts kicking your seat from behind, bribe him with money. Tell him if he’s good for the remainder of the flight, he’ll get $5. Works like a charm.

Make photocopies of official documents or ID so that, if possible in public places, you can leave original documents in a safe place and carry the passport, ID and/or marriage certificates in the form of a copy. However, do not try to present photocopies at border crossings or to immigration officials - you're only asking for suspicion and trouble.

A Casa de Alice

2007-11-29T15:10:00.000-08:00

As we head into the award season for film in America there is often speculation about films from other countries that are in contention for the Best Foreign Film categories of the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards.

This year Brazil has a contender and its not about the typical hot film subjects we see coming out of South America's largest country and economy - street gangs, violence, poverty, kidnapping and samba. More than any film in a long time, this new film cuts against expectations to give us a richer appreciation for Brazilian life. It is very easy for Americans to get all worked up and think the average life of Brazil is living in favelas but nothing could be further from the truth.

A Casa de Alice or Alice's House is a slice of life film that more greatly profiles an average working class Brazilian woman played by Carla Ribas who has been winning best actress awards around the world. Director Chico Teixeira was influenced by Dogma and documentary-style dramatic films, giving this film a slice-of-life intimacy and makes the emotional intensity of everyday life more realistic.

The films central character, Alice is a manicurist and has been married for the last 20 years to Lindomar a taxi driver. Alice works in a beauty parlour, parents three children, the eldest of whom is doing his military service, and has a mother Dona Jacira, who is slowly going blind and works as a maid in her house. Alice's three siblings pay little attention to their mother, and they treat their grandmother with lack of respect.

The film has won big fans where it has shown in festivals in Sidney Australia, Chicago, Rio and is being hailed as a masterpiece. Definitely put this film on your lists to see for 2007.

Halloween and Thanksgiving for Brazilians

2007-11-29T10:01:00.000-08:00

There are some rituals and events of American culture that need explaining to our friends and allies (if we still have any) around the world. Patricia has always been perplexed with two fall holidays we celebrate in Minnesota: Halloween and and Thanksgiving. She asked me to explain the rather strange events surrounding these two autumn rituals -- one month apart -- to our Brazilian family and friends

In my usual, without much forethought fashion, I'll jump right in and compare Halloween or "All-Hallows-Day" to the Latin American traditions Día de los Muertos or (in English) Day of the Dead when we Americans honor the dead by letting ancestors' ghosts revisit in the form of our children dressed as Hobos, Bear, Princesses, Ghosts, and Spiderman. [NOTE: I understand Brazil is not a "Latin-American" country]

Toward this end, we Americans send our kids, mostly under the age of 9, begging to neighbors and any stranger who will answer their door for treats that they will then put in their mouths. And, we tell our children if they don't get a sugary candy treat, they can do a nasty trick like TP (toilet paper) their houses, throw a stone threw a window, or take the "Welcome" matt and toss it in the gold fish pond. All I hear in response to this explanation from my amazing life-partner was: Huh? Wha...!

Okay, so Halloween with trick-or-treats, jack-o-lanterns, superhero costumes, and anti-social behavior doesn't do the best job of honoring the dead. Maybe she's right.

By way of explanation, I then provide this first-hand documentary that gets under the skin of our unique tradition called Halloween:

And then, one month later, along comes the harvest celebration of Thanksgiving and I found this short documentary essay featuring our best Hollywood actors and TV personalities to explain the touching story of Thanksgiving:

Happy Halloween and Thanksgiving to all the peoples of the world!

From Whence We Come :: Minneapolis

2007-11-27T10:36:00.000-08:00

Just to let all our friends in Brazil, our Paolista brothers and sisters, know something about from where we come upon our landing in the largest city in South America. Patricia and I live in Minnesota, where the thermometer on the car read 17 degrees F (-8 C) at 8:15 this morning.

Being from this often cold place we are friendly, mostly because we are forced to be by the hostile weather. If we don't huddle together with strangers in doorways while waiting for a bus or taxi, we could DIE from exposure. At the time I met Patricia, I was living in Uptown and she was living in Linden Hills. The main retail, commercial and entertainment district of Uptown laid geographically in the middle between us, separated by Lake Calhoune, Lakewood Cemetery and Lake Harriett.

Here is a short film by Dan Dwyer about life in Uptown, Minneapolis:

Bicycle Ride on Sunday in São Paulo

2007-11-27T09:52:00.000-08:00

Our new friend Toni Nogueira is taking us on a bicycle ride through São Paulo and the Big Worm Flyover, into the Republic Square and invites us to eat a traditional snack from Bahia called Acaraje and a fresh coconut milk to put out the fire. Then, further along on the trip Toni stops at a padaria for strong Brazilian coffee, grilled bread, and a strawberry tart. Obrigado Toni! Carb load dude!

Vila Madalena

2007-11-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

One of the many sections of São Paulo is a district called Vila Madalena. Located on the west side of São Paulo, Vila Madalena offers visitors a vibrant nightlife, lively markets, unique craft stores where the owner might just be offering Cachaça in anticipation of the ample opportunities to hear authentic Brazilian music as night falls.

Entrada do Mercado Municipal

2007-11-27T08:25:00.000-08:00

Toni Nogueira, a musician living in São Paulo, takes us on a walk through the cities famous Central food market. Not only is the municiple market a fabulous place for buying spices, fruits, vegetables, meat and fish - it is a great reflection of the Brazilian culture and history in its architecture, the diversity in wealth in the prices for Cachaça its national drink, Brazil's national dish Feijoada and the savory temptations of its street food from Brazil's special preparations of Norwegian cod fish to the famed Mortadela sanduiche. The Central Municipal Market in São Paulo, Brazil, is a microcosm of the country's ethnically and culturally diverse people and food.