Carnival breakdowns

I've always read about the importance of keywords if you want to drive traffic to your website or blog. I've never put that much in the front of my mind given that this isn't a commercial venture. I'm happy when people find their way here but I'd probably be just as likely to do it in a vacuum.

In the past few days however, I have learned that if I really wanted to drive traffic here, the keywords to use are:

Carnival
Sex
Nude

There, see I said it. Again. And now all you perverts who dropped in can just move along. Nothing to see here folks.

Still with me? Oh good, you're the ones I wanted to hang out with. Not those creeps.

Carnival for me this year has turned out to be a royal pain in the *@!%!!

Last week we started to notice a funny smell in our water. When I got into the shower on Thursday morning it had developed into a funky eggy-sulfery smell and I did a quick "french shower” but wasn't brave enough to get my head wet. By Friday the smell was vomit inducing. So our water was shut off, phone calls were made. It's the big national holiday, so more phone calls were made. Saturday someone showed up to drain and clean our rooftop cisterns (caixas de agua) and it was discovered that sewage had infiltrated the fresh water underground pipes at the point where they enter our building. Ewww, blech! We spent the day without water on Saturday. It was 90º. I hadn't showered since my half attempt on Thursday. It was miserable.

The building super finally managed to jerry-rig a garden hose-type system up to the cisterns, by-passing the broken pipes, and by Sunday morning the water was turned on again. But the water pressure is terrible and we have to be very careful not to over-do it until Carnival is over and we can get someone in to fix the problem.

Then yesterday afternoon we had a huge windstorm that knocked our power out. A few phone calls yielded half-hearted responses from the power utility company that were none too reassuring. On this account we got lucky however, and the power came back on right before the Oscars started at 10pm.

This morning we were without internet.

Why does everything conveniently fall apart when the country is all out drunk in the streets?

All right, I'll stop with the kvetchn.

Instead I'll ply you with some photos I took at the Sambadrome a few years ago. That's much more entertaining, right? And I aim to be entertaining!

Carnival Nostalgia

This has got to be one of my all time favorite photos:

It is my mother-in-law, Dona Clá, and her three sisters. She's on the right. As you can see it was taken in 1939.

This one was also taken at Carnival. There isn't a date, but they look a few years older so it must be the early 1940's. Her grandfather was a pioneer in the textile industry in our city. He had one of the first and largest factories in town. They were also the first people in town to own this new fancy model of car. A photo of her father posing with it even appeared on the front page of the paper. They look so proud.

Dona Clá tells me Carnival in her childhood was a much simpler affair. Children in costume danced and played on the streets. When they were older her family would go to a club across from the town square and watch the Carnival parades from the rooftop.

Today is so different. Everyone with money has left town and the commercial center is deserted except for a few random stragglers from the marginalized blocos whose attendees are too poor to have traveled. A couple of years ago we did walk down to the praça where the concentração for one of the oldest and biggest blocos takes place. But the scene was much less about foolish revelry than angry self-destruction. People weren't just drunk, they were high and strung out and a bit violent. We were too uncomfortable and left before the band even started.

There is a movement afoot however to move the date of Carnival in our city. The local business really suffer from being shut down for a week (Carnival officially ends on Tuesday, but no one returns until following Monday.) So our new mayor has proposed moving Carnival to May to coincide with the anniversary of the city, which is an official holiday with no official celebration. The idea is it would generate revenue because neighboring towns would come it to enjoy the parades and festivities and spend money. Carnival wouldn't be canceled in February, it would just get a second act. Personally I think it is a great idea. Carnival part II will be much better organized and attended, and who doesn't want another excuse for days off and a party!

Nude you say? Wouldn't dream of it!

Alright, and in our continuing coverage of Carnival, we now move on to the lighter, sexier side of things.

Every year the big samba school desfiles or parades in Rio and São Paulo are broadcast on the country’s dominant media outlet, Globo. For weeks leading up to Carnival they advertise their coverage with a vignette a featuring a sambista wearing nothing but body paint.

Here you go. (While this is fine for Brazilian national primetime TV, it might be somewhat NSFW for my American friends.)



Actually she’s not totally nude.

She’s wearing what’s called a tapa-sexo, which is basically a few inches of masking tape over the front of her ya-ya. (Yikes, how do you take that off??) Total nudity is outlawed, but every year the dancers push it as far as they can. Last year, there was a bit of a scandal when the São Clemente Samba School in Rio had points deducted in the competition for breaking the no-nudity rule. Judges claim that the sambista Viviane Castro was totally in the buff, which she countered by saying that she was in fact wearing a tapa-sexo, but being that it was only 3.5cm the judges must have missed it. (I’ll let you google the photos yourself, less run the risk of having my blog flagged as inappropriate!)

Even better than the above vignette is this clip – which shows the behind the scenes making of the advertisement. You can watch her getting painted up (which took over 7 hours) and then some slow-motion footage of her dancing. You can't deny that she is absolutely stunning. There is no exaggeration about the generalization that Brazilian women are beautiful. But the best part of the clip has got to be the accompanying soft-core soundtrack.




You’re welcome.

(By the way, that little telephone “ring-ring” in the clips is the official Globo network sound byte. It was actually “composed” by a friend of C’s. He’s a great jazz musician, but his legacy will probably be this famous sound byte that everyone in Brazil knows and which just might function somewhat like Pavlov’s bell when it comes to bringing people to the TV for the nightly novella.)

Carnival: Down the Racial Rabbit Hole

Yesterday, while Eric Holder was busy calling the United States “A Nation of Cowards” and the NY Post was getting slammed for its “humorous” take on the stimulus package, this was going down in my city.

Didn’t quite catch that? Let me show it to you again.

Yes, that is exactly what it is. A bunch of white men in blackface dressed as domestic servants. They form the Carnival bloco called the “Domésticas de Luxo,” or the Luxurious Maids. It’s just so many shades of wrong, where do I even begin with this?

Well first off, they are white men in blackface. And second, they are dressed as maids – a job held in the majority by poor black women, who despite the tenacity with which they hold on to any sense of dignity they might have been able to scratch out for themselves, are still the most vulnerable to parody.

There was also something slightly creepy about the fact that you couldn’t tell who any of these men were – they could be a friend, a father, a banker, your fish monger. The costumes pretty much obscured any identification in a way that sort of hearkened back to a certain secret society I don’t need to name.

But then I noticed the completely confusing fact that not all the Domésticas were white men in blackface. Some were black men in blackface.

And that at least half of the reveling crowd dancing and partying were black. Many of them women. Many of whom are very likely employed as maids.

Obviously I’ve had a really hard time wrapping my ivory-tower-liberal-white-guilty-educated head around this. Similar to the ease at which Brazilians accept and celebrate folk characters like Nêga Maluca (or as we Americans would be inclined to call her: “Mentally Challenged African American Woman”) the return of the “Domésticas de Luxo” after a nine-year hiatus from the bloco scene was embraced with full-tilt exuberance that they charmingly call irreverente.

And the huge crowd that turned out absolutely loved it. Everyone was whooping and hollering (and drinking of course) and asking to have their photos taken alongside of the Domésticas, or lining up to have their bottoms swatted with their sparkly feather dusters. The children were particularly besotted.

The most confusing thing for me about this whole thing was that I actually had a good time! I found myself fighting my way to the front of the crowd, angling for better photos, laughing and taunting the Domésticas to lift up their skirts and show off their bloomers, which in some cases were lacy string bikinis (appreciatively worn over their black leggings.)

When we got home later that evening I flipped on CNN and there was Anderson Cooper moderating a bunch of pundits who were duking it out over Eric Holder’s earlier statements on race. My head was spinning. How, I asked C, can Brazil, where over 30% of the population live below the poverty line, the majority of whom are black, so openly celebrate such blatant racial subordination.

Actually, according to a recent census, only around 7% of the population identify as being black, while 43% of Brazilians consider themselves “pardo” or brown which basically means they are a mix of black, white, indigenous, and occasionally Asian. Scholars (particularly white Brazilian ones) like to call Brazil a racial democracy, claiming that the country has escaped racism and that while economic disparity is a valid issue, race is not. I’m not so sure that I agree. Brazil missed out on the energy of the civil rights and black power movements in the 60’s and 70’s, having been in the repressive clutches of a (US backed) military dictatorship. The extraordinary economic gap has since continued to hamper any awareness-building of the many ways that racist attitudes and prejudices have continued to hold back the disenfranchised, predominately dark-skinned populace.

I think Brazilians really want to see themselves as living in a racial democracy, but I seriously wonder if their harmonious attitude is just an illusion that would be challenged if the recent wave of economic good times continues and begins to lift the subjugated masses into literacy and financial solvency. If education and economic stability become the norm for even half of the population living below the poverty line, will the irreverence of things like the “Domésticas de Luxo” still be seen as a celebration of their relaxed attitude about race?

C tried, but couldn’t provide an answer that made my head reel any less. In the end he simply said, “I guess that for now in Brazil, a joke is just a joke. It doesn’t stand for anything bigger.”

Oh, and just to further confound me, this morning I read that the most popular Carnival costume being sold this year is an Obama mask. I think I need to go get some advice from the Caterpillar or eat from the other side of the mushroom because nothing is making sense anymore!



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It's that time of year!

Carnival doesn’t officially start until this coming weekend but, true to fashion, the partying gets kicked off as early as possible.

The Carnival season accentuates an already existing social schism that finds the population embarking on two divergent headings. There is the upper middle class who, taking advantage of the Brazilian summer and the work and school closings, sequester themselves at their country homes or at resorts whose prices conveniently double during the national holiday. And then there are the unmonied, the povão, the great-unwashed masses who spend the year looking forward to a weeklong hiatus from their troubles by way of debauchery-induced amnesia.

In the past we haven’t really fallen into either category. We’ve stayed home, or visited a friend’s house and watched the lavish parades on television. One year we had a friend visiting and as his prompting we actually did buy tickets to the Sambódromo in Rio, the main exhibition stadium where the immense samba schools compete. It’s an incredible spectacle. One that makes a New Orleans Mardi Gras look like a backyard talent show.

But back home in our city, as with many, things are much quieter. Businesses are all closed and anyone with money has gotten out of Dodge, so to speak. Our normally packed and bustling main avenue becomes a genuine ghost town. My first Carnival in Brazil caught me by surprise. A few years ago the official exhibition parade was moved out of the city center and to an avenue that runs along the river so that it wouldn’t disrupt commercial activities. It doesn’t really make much sense because everything is closed anyway. I’d always heard that it was a wild, crazy time to be in Brazil, yet when I took a walk downtown it was eerily deserted.

In most places in Brazil, official Carnival activities fall into two categories. There are the samba schools that parade along a designated route that is often set up with bleachers and box seating, depending on the financial resources of the city (which is directly tied to how much the politicians managed to embezzle that year.) And then there are the street parties called blocos. I guess you could translate it as block party. Like the samba schools, the blocos have their own band, write their own official samba song, and have their own theme. In my city the blocos have sort of died out over the last 15 years, but are now starting to make a comeback.

This year, we decided to check one out.

A bloco goes something like this. It begins at a roughly designated time with the concentração, or the gathering, which basically means that everyone gets together stands around and starts to drink while the bateria (the drummers) examine their various noise makers and occasionally launch into some premature jams that tend to fizzle out after a few minutes. The concentração goes on until a certain spontaneous juncture is reached, whereby the forces of critical mass and level of inebriation converge, someone flips the switch on the truck carrying enormous speakers and the bloco's official samba starts blasting out at mind-numbing decibels. The bateria then lines up behind the truck to have their eardrums blown out, while the singer grabs the mic, pamphlets with the samba’s lyrics are passed around and everyone starts dancing and carousing in what essentially amounts to a big drunken sing-a-long.

Not being able to fully understand the lyrics and feeling very self-conscious that my non-rhythm bearing gringa hips stuck out like a sore thumb, I stood on the sidelines and dedicated myself to documenting the whole experience. Here's a few of my favorites.

The last photo is of Arnaldo Baptista who is something of a god-figure that this particular bloco has dedicated itself to worshiping. (And you get a star for being extra hip if you know who he is... hint, he's over there in the sidebar under the Amazon music!)


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