The Cinema of Urgency

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

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

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

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

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)

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

Force be with you brother!

Trisha Brown at Northrup

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

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

An Emotional Response: Don't Sleep...

Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

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

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

Yes We Can!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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!

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

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Boas Festas e Feliz Natal

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

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

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.