Só gente bonita

Since I get home at midnight and we don't have stolen cable, no longer does dinner hour pass by in dubbed CSI episodes. The tight structure of american tv makes blatant its theft of your life- at commercial time, mid-grip of a mystery, you know that when the episode is over bed-time is upon you and you have not lived your life.

Thus the brilliance of Brazilian TV- it doesnt want your full attention. In a room of yapping godmothers on Sunday it just wants to be another voice, taking hold of the conversation no more or no longer than any other Nega.

By midnight the Novelas have released their grip and a real classy presence hits Rede-Tv. It's Amaury Jr, the godfather of society television. Whisky drinking, chain smoking, jug eared, pockmarked, user of suits where the tie is skinny and the suit shirt has a really small, round-tipped collar that I have never seen before but must be common in the world of italian fashion. I all makes him look a little bit like an emaciated Alf.

Most importantly, the man does not mess up. Check the hold on the microphone. That's Frank Sinatra Jr, by the way. Just another fish, and Amaury skins them all with class. Arm around the women's waist. Every name, every buisiness with which it is associated, flawlessly dropped. He doesnt just say, this is Paulo, President of XX, tell us about whats going on here at the Copacabana hotel, no, he lays the red carpet out for the guy, explaining everything for at least 30 seconds, so that the interveiwees first response is always. "Exatamente Amaury. "

It has to be that smooth, because the majority of the people are paying him to visit their new restaurant or club. Its a question I can't answer: you start a new upscale french restaurant, why are you going to pay supposedly over 100 thousand bucks to bring a TV crew in there and film people eating in unflattering light, proving againg that society people aren't actually gente bonita. Are the wealthy of Brazil, like me, up at midnight eating rice beans and beef in front the TV?

Ask and you shall...

Approximately 150 days after the last post on this blog,

eu fiz meu gol.

We was supposed to go out, but she got lazy, and I got in the habit of going the corner bar for another garrafa and hanging sticks off my lips. I wasn't ready for the big leagues, but

eu fiz meu gol.

Foi a minha unica chance, num jogo bem cauteloso,

mas eu fiz meu gol.

If I saw him, I would say...

We are back. No, that's not what I would say. Wait till the end of the blog for Zac to be relevant.

Ya see, sometimes it takes the innocence of a child to remind adults of what is great in the world, and get back to writing about it. But this effect is usually limited to very young children. Once kids get to be around the age enacted by the cast of high school musical, the achievement of potential has already ruined the dream of it.

A dream deferred, in an onto/tautalogical and not a political sense, is a pretty dream. That is why this blog will not be afraid to reach back into the past that is everyday purer than the present in an act of asking for forgiveness.

What woke us was a phrase, a stream of beauty shattering a news report about HSM that otherwise makes the elder wonder if someday the children will rise in primary color-clad hordes and kill everyone on earth. The dream of the 9 year old fan interviewed on TV, when asked why she liked this guy, said (refer to title)

Ele e lindo. Se eu visse ele, eu ia falar:

"You is one cat"

The translation, innocent as its speaker, truly at the foot of the wor(l)d.

one word's existence that a student reminded me of today

nope

leading you

Two days a week I arrive at an office building and have to give the reception my passport number before I can go in. I arrive at a time when a lot of english teachers are arriving. One guy today, who I heard speaks six languaged and who I overheard today speaking english with a germo-slavic accent, smelled like some eastern bloc-issue cologne I would guess to be milky green.
Adjunct the glass lobby, the smokers section is through a glass wall, some benches under the lid of the second floor. Lots of days while I wait a blind guy comes out of the turnstyle via gentle stick smacking and makes his way to the bench near the door. This is in the early morning, so I suppose he has just gone upstairs and left his things and come back for what is probably not his first cigarrette of the day, unless he takes the nicotene as some kind of shot that propels him through his morning.

On the bench he crosses his legs and lightes up and smokes deeply. The cheeks go in, the tip goes conical. His eyes, as this is the kind of blindman he is for us observer, are calm, closed and unmoving, but he doesn't always take a regular breath among drags and face-enveloping outpuffs.

"Does a blind man enjoy a cigarrette more?" I ask myself in the morning, having long abandoned interesting thoughts. And another, "Does he know he hits it so much harder than everyone else?"to which I answer.
Probly

The weather underdifferentnumericschemes

As I was walking down the street, my eyes getting baked open like two blue-yolked eggs, I noticed one of the evenly spaced street signs that alternate temperature and time. Somewhere in the Dali desert of my mind, clocks a-hanging off the branches, I thought, damn, it must be 34 degrees. The time flashed away and I was proved correct, point being, CelsiusI feel you now!

This picture, which I pulled from another blog, was taken because the ad is pretty nice, saying,

"The thermometer shows that the earth is heating up. The clock, that there's still time to save it."

Montevideo in 1 Metaphor and 2 Photos

All these vegetables may have since been eaten, but the news is new!

Its a beautiful city, with an old-port pearl inside the oyster of a typical South American urban landscape, though like everything in Uruguay, smaller. Besides the requisite 'first church' and 'exact replica of the French theater house' that every Southern Cone city seems to have, the port is packed with Belle Epoque style palaces interspersed with slightly later Art Deco that blends in perfectly.

This beautiful and agéd old port has lead us to one major metaphorical conclusion: Montevideo is the Montreal of South America.
Say it: MMMontreal,
MMMontevideo.

Just like tourists in Montreal, we have basically just been walking around and taking pictures of each other taking pictures of grey stone buildings of impressive age.
Like Montreal, we are on a huge river and the wind whips through the city incredibly. We wanted cold, but this is a little more Canadian than we bargined for! And when shutter fingers start to tremble, what do we drink? Hot Chocolate!

I went out for the famous steak dinner last night (poor Renata had to watch me devour it) and tonight we are going to a concert of a local rock band, then we are off at 315 tomorrow afternoon. The airport was so small we actually disembarked on the tarmac, which is so glamorous. I ran down the stairs so that I could turn and take a picture of Renata in her Jackie O sunglasses. Also glamorous was the official blue and gold United States of America airplane parked next to our plane- the secretary of something was visiting from Washington to talk about buying more steak and wine in exchange for old fighter jets. (kidding!)

On the whole we are excited to get back to Brazil- people here are, shall we say, more European than Brazilians, and we miss the smiles and the non-brown-wool items of clothing. Not to mention that perhaps the most European thing here is the hotel breakfast- ham, cheese, rolls, apples (not a papaya in sight, but ohhh the dulce de leche!)

In truth, too much of our impression may have been formed by an encounter today where a used-book vendor in a plaza accused us of stealing a book when I put my camera in Renata's purse. We opened it up for her inspection, but she didn't even apologize. Bitch!

We walked away miffed, an emotion that was instantly transformed when we bought a hand-knit sweater for Rafael to steady rock through the rest of winter.
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

Montevideo in 4 pictures and 3 poems

I
Cuando llegamos ella quería hacer una ligación
(everything brown)
a gente quiere sair,
o barfo inaguentable,
(everything brown)
intolerante de las efusiones
del otro,
dos cavallos ligados por
couro o cor das
(everything brown)
folhas da plaza,
ela lo quebrou
quando colocou un
boligrapho na bunda
and bucked in the bed
like her own horse.

I showered
(Tudo marron)

II
pdababa bu bu bu bu

paduba du bu bu bu

pdabubadu bu bu bu

Queria fazer charme
no farol
Mas equanto la ciudad
fue por viejo a gastado

muito predio muito bonito
muita vontade de verlos mañana

Con maquina melhor, frutilla
Sabor remedio, la levares?
Sim.
I have to poop.

III
Stronger light means
wintry light in the plaza
the leaves less there
the city like rocks on
the blue hills of smog
a distant church, multi-pico-ed

A wailing man in the plaza,
barulho de que religion isso?

Last night, useless,
a documentary on the removal of settlers
grubbing land in the desert
but usually with less hub-bub
in Uruguay
coats of wool,
one brown or another.

Something like a phenomena

I started playing soccer on the East Zone of town, the tough side, with some nice guys. We play late at night and the field is alongside one of those big transit arteries where the two sides of the street are separeted by a hundred yards of boulevard. Both times that we've played, in the middle of the game I suddenly heard strange music coming from the blackened boulevard, a twisting, sinuous, seemingly horn-based music that sent my imagination to one place- gypsylandia. Did the gypsys, whom I have seen camping in the circular spots of grass formed by curling exit ramps, gather here in the darkness of the east zone and blast their music out of the trunk?

During the first game I was afraid to ask, mainly because of the old school nature of the tough guys around me. My friend, Silvio of the fishing expedition, was the only one I could imagine asking, but he was on the other team and far away. Most of the other players were his uncles, nice but supremely tough guys, and more than anything not the type of guys that you ask in imperfect portugues about the possibility of an illicit gypsy presence on the boulevard.

On the second game I got the courage up to ask one of Silvio's friends, a guy nicer than tough, who always plays in full São Paulo gear. He told me,

No, no, I know it sounds like it, but really it's just a regular bar, way on the other side of the street. It's that there are a lot of cars....

Oh.

From then on, when I tried, I could almost make out the brazilian accordian-based pagoda music that must have been leaving the speakers on the far side of the darkness, but I needed as much imagination to put it back together as I did to invent the gypsys. And still, it's pretty cool that typcial music, when cut to ribbons by perpendicular traffic, sounds just like those ribbon-clad masters of the road.

hay una substancia que controversa el efecto del botox?

We love GNT.

Doi tudo

Iris is on tv, and doi tudo. Doi ainda mais because one of our houseguest dried thier face with one of our towels after using a caustic facial product, staining the green towel white. Cassete! The role of towel use in the fortunes of our guests would have been a key post had this blog forced its way into existence 6 months earlier.

The weather is grey in our city, and if you recall the weather reporting I promised to do, its a dark day indeed. Our house, I must admit, is governed by seasons...

And Iris? Oh she's the girl whose booty be in my face every time I walk by a newspaper stand. She is seasonal as well, the product of Brazilian Big Brother, meriting another post. The show has ended and the housemates are busy staying on TV as long as possible. Some who went before them have made it into Novelas and other tv shows. Iris, a working class hero, besides the big bucks for playboy, has landed a billboard holding a jar of olives and the TV commercial that just passed in which she announced that thanks to a new credit plan, a digital camera is with reach of everyone.

The Weather Underground

To prove my newly remember autofocus, I'm going to start a project that I've planned for a long time. It's a list of Her maladies. Similar to a weather forecast, this information is useful for all those who plan to spend a day inside the wide outdoors of her personality, as well as for the creation of a historical register amassed in the hopes that a pattern might one day emerge to explain such profusion.

Today is a tough day to start. Heavy cough and difficulty breathing in the night time- so much lying on top of me wasn’t impossiblizd by gravity/phlegm physics. This condition was, however an improvement to Monday, where the not-uncommon state “doi tudo” (everything hurts) was declared.

I'd sworn I'd wear purple

I woke up this morning, looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe it- I had become just the blog I swore I would never be. You know, one of those horrid blogs who delight in picking nits out of hair of others, lint off the fabric of society, kinks in the Rube Goldberg machine of language.

Gente! Disculpa! From now on I promise I’ll stick to mowing my own back yard, as the original intent of this blog was much the same as the gardener’s- to grow and watch grow your own.

Aquela coisa chata

Why do words, suddenly appear,
so every time, you can hear
just what they mean, and all the things
they’re supposed to do?

This phenomena of the suddenly appearing word is part of living as a foreigner inside a language world. Starting out, it can be an incredibly basic word, even one of those that straddles the line between word and sound, which you then realize is everywhere. I can imagine a visitor to English one day finding the language full up of like like like everywhere he goes, stumped as to how he didn’t hear it before.

The longer you hang around a language, the more you feel the right to dislike a word, and that happened to me with a basic Brazilian word that's used in an annoying way. The word is Aquela- that. Reference the above foto and her most famous song to understand the special way it’s being used.

That thing, that thing, that thiiiiiiiiiiiinng, is what I want you to hear. Now imagine if the song were “the thing, the thing, the thiiiing.” It would be missing something.

The answer, besides that thing, is emphasis. This is the way people be using it down here.

I identified/hated the word for the first time when I was overhearing a conversation on the bus, in which a very performative storyteller was telling about another time he was on the bus and there was a couple having a fight. But it wasn’t a fight, it was that fight. Indeed, it seemed the couple had started having that fight. But considering that the reason for the fight wasn’t known or much less communicated by the storyteller, so that aquela, a specifying word specifying nothing, wasn’t just some sauce for your sentence but actually a hotdog bun with no meat and all ketchup.

There is another guy who I know who, instead of sending a hug like everybody does when they are hanging up on the phone, he sends that hug, much better because he is playing off it, and at the same time implying that his hug is special and memorable, which it certainly is since he be 5 foot 2.

Day in the Office

One shitty thing that can happen is that you have to sit down and interview someone and they turn out to be your doppelganger, he was bearded like me, small headed. But when I extended some kind of look across to him acknoowldeging this, a kind of open look, it went totally unregistered. I had to sit there and speak, deciding whether he had ignored it or missed it completely. In the end though, I got a chuckle out of him. Then I went out and wrote up my sincere report.

south side of the world

Today I was walking in Morumbi, strange newish neighborhood that brings together richest and poorest. When Bush was here he stayed in the Hilton Morumbi, with the above pictured view (yes, I have friends in high places) out on the highway and the favela alongside it. It was the first clear day in at least three, and there was a fingernail clip moon in sky. As I came up to the highway I saw a teenage kid in a baggy favela sweater standing by the red light where exit ramp cars make their first stop.

I had a sinking feeling, thinking I might have to share a long light on the same corner with him, have him ask me for something and see that I'm a gringo, here where you can't even carry a laptop type bag with peace of mind at any time of day. To my relief the light turned red as I came to the corner and the kid went out among the cars as I crossed. As he approached the nearest one he lifted up his sweater and twirled 360 in front of the hood before moving to the driver side window with his hand out. I made out the flour-white face of a grampa through the blue tinted glass, waving him off angrily.

Then the kid repeated the twirl in front of another car. I had first thought it was the beginning of a dance performance, as juggling is a common red light peddle technique among the young, but there was no show, only the twirl. Is he showing his shapely torso? offering his body to a more lecherous grampa? is he showing that he's hungry? Halfway down the block I realized what it was. He was showing that he didn't have a gun in his waistband.

Explicitly showing you don't have a gun is a good practice considering that in this same neighborhood last month a couple was shot to death in front of their 7 year old when they stopped at a red light . Unfortunately it doesn't have the intended effect. Just like the translation client of mine working in a skyscraper near there who made me suspicious when he assured me that I didn't have to worry about him paying me for my work.

I kept walking and there were some pink cumulous clouds low on the horizon, the five or six skyscrapers ahead of them in relief, it looked like a still of a hollywood-sized seismic event that was leveling the city, the stack of cloud a plume of dust, the buildings in the foreground the next to go. It looked so strange that I thought it might be the smoke from the plane that crashed here yesterday, but then I remembered the TV had showed that that specific end of the world event was down to embers and assigning the blame.

In Brazil we have that phrase about the gift horse and it's mouth, but what we really need is the phrase --"don’t wait too long to look at a fox’s mouth or else you will be caught prying at its butthole as it walks away from your henhouse." Only years of cultural acculturation would make this phrase instantly understandable, so let me bring you up to date.

The Buddha above pictured was a gift, though a special kind of gift, a gift from a friend who is selling everything they have to fund a move to another country. It’s a parting gift, a gift that came along with the amply priced pieces of furniture that we took off her hands. A ‘couldn’t fit it in my suitcase, and I love you’ gift.

The giver, a fox both in 70’s and Aesopian parlance, gave us the Buddha. She told us to put it on the fridge and surround it with coins, a charming gesture which instantly reminded me that all religions are equally stupid. Then she stayed at our place for an increasingly tense and unhappy three weeks, during which we saw past the 70’s fox and watched the fable unfold like a slap to our face.

Exactly which animal we are is debatable, perhaps best assigned by another person. Indeed what animal would feel intensely uncomfortable with an already-former friend staying in the house, hogging the computer, bitching dinner guests she’s never even met before, filling rooms with smoke at 9 in the morning, and eating food in quantities designed to be just small enough not to pay for anything, but do nothing about it? Some weak, stupid animal. I go for Donkey. But maybe our petty bourgeois manners and offenses taken fit best with something like a chicken.

Anyway, the moral hit home a few days ago, when the phone bill arrived and the disappeared fox left R$200 worth of droppings in our cupboards, which are now, like the Buddha whose coins went for bus fare, so dastardly bare.

of montreal

Yes yes I am so happy to be here, but OH GOD, I miss our time in Montreal. The city where we met, the city where we spoke all languages possible, neige, duas, poutine, chocolat chaud, iceskating, movie store, casita…
It was us and the world. Sometimes we wanted to be part of outside just to look around, talk to people just to have the big pleasure to come back to our little world one for each other.

Death becomes her...

We are all familiar with death in his above pictured manifestation, black robes worn low, generous if outmoded gillette. I was chatting with an friend this weekend and he was telling me about a short story by Woody Allen, who happens to be very popular in Brazil. Indeed, as Brazil has adopted the Ramones as their own and are proud to say that they're more popular here than Queens, cinephiles with flexable metatarsels are want to say the same about Woody.

Is it really true, as they have told me here, that he can´t find funding for his films in the US? And if it is, would that be for artistic reasons or for those so emphatically stated by Mos Def in his solo debut comparsion with O.J.? (track 10 as stated by my compadre)

One theory goes that Mos had tried to find different director to fit in with his white-people-can´t-be-artists argument, but exhausted an entire rhymebook trying to flip 'Polanski', wisely discarding "couldn't keep it in his pants-ki."

Anyway, as my associate paraphrased the Allen story which in turn parodies the Seventh Seal, since he was speaking Portuguese, he called death a 'she.' This is because death as a noun is feminine, just as for instance, a pen is feminine. Indeed, a direct translation of portuguese would have everyone talking like sailors, "Ah the wind, look at him blow" or "How is your lawnmower? He's a little bit broken."

This is kind of funny because when an english speaker hears these gendered pronouns, we tend to picture pens or chairs or wind with the accompanying genetalia and facial hair, in the spirit world of their essence that is. Or at least I do.

In fact used to play the game- Why is that noun a man or woman? Why is the sea a he? Is the foam his beard? Because he´s strong? Couldn´t he be a girl, a harsh mistress that takes you down into her womb when you drown, poor sailor you? Maybe, I reason, its because when the gender was assigned they didn't know that life first came from the sea, in which case the womb cycle-of-life thing would be a shoo-in and the sea would be a girl.

But what all but the most silly second language learners learn is that when latin-speaker says these nouns, they don´t think about the gender, they assign it correctly as a matter of grammar, but they use he/she in the same way that we use 'it', and not in the spirit of rum-drinking, plank walking, barnacle-bearded seafarers.

So even though my associate called Death 'she,' if he (finding himself in a woody allen type position vis-a-vis the reapster and of a silly woody disposition) were to lift the robes of Death on a prank, he too would expect to find what could only be called a boner.

Say it like a surfer;

boooner

He calls us T and Ta Ta

His first word was Cheese!

Rafael my nephew turned one in February. Today he sat in my lap at the computer and watched videos of himself. Were I as tech-savy as he, I would have filmed him as he watched himself, just to show the calmness on his face.

Remember that movie, Baraka? The best image was the first, the Japanese monkey in the hotspring, soaking in no-minded pleasure as any human would. His look was a little like that, passive, pleasured, supremely calm,I think because the clip we were watching of him he was just chillin, walkin around grandpa´s house and getting followed by the camera. When he sees a video where he is laughing, he laughs again.

Is this because the joke (in this case getting grampa´s hat put on him) is still funny?

Anybody who can tell me what is going on in this 16 month year olds head as he watches himself on video please tell me. He started smiling for photos when he was like 8 months, and now, like the rest of us, he looks at the screen on the back of the camera after the picture was taken to see how it came out. He knows how to turn the electronic keyboard on that was brought out from Her childhood closet to be pounded on and its automatic songs danced to once again. He can also plug a charger into a cellphone with his little hands. Also, he has never complained that he didn't like the sound of his voice on tape.

Today I taught him to turn the little wheel between the two buttons on the mouse, which made the moving picture of him grow and shrink. Its amazing to see how easy it is to learn the relation between button and action. It is easier than, for example, A-B-C. He will rule the world.

What scares me a little bit is that when he points to himself on the screen he says nene 'baby' so there is a small chance that all of this is going horribly wrong and that we and thousands of other over-technologied families are are creating some new sense of the self that will spell the end of all civilization. But then again maybe Rafael is the savior, the only one to actually break oin through to the other side, to run 360 loop-de-loop in the go-kart and not fall at the apex but come sailing through. Having yet to fail at anything, his smile was made for that moment.