A Narrow Escape

The main coach station in Sao Paulo, waiting to get on my coach back to Rio. I had taken a seat by a snack bar and I watched for seconds as a girl walked up to the cash register and ordered, and she was quite attractive. She got some food and came over and sat at the next table.

Now, throughout my life, I’ve always had, say, “lucky breaks” (bear with me) around girls that I was attracted to. In school, when the teachers would set everybody’s proper seats across the classroom, I somehow always happened to get the seat right next to the girl I was infatuated with at the time; even in high school, once, when it was a bit ridiculous for students to have their proper seats, the teachers must have decided to do it because we were especially mischievous, and, guess what, same thing happened again. It has reached the point where I can almost count on it.

So I thought “if I’m really supposed to meet her, I need not worry, surely she’ll just happen to be getting on the same coach as me, to Rio…”. So I went to the cash machine at the same time she left and went on her way to wherever. About an hour later, I get to where the coach is meant to be and who is leaning on the wall waiting for the coach? The same girl. No surprises yet. But I’m afraid you need a pretty good excuse to just walk up to a girl without looking like a jerk. That’s where chance should help. Sadly, I could not have the seat right next to this one, because mine was the stupid sleeper seat and of course no one in their mind would book the sleeper seat for a 6-hour ride from 3:30pm to 9:30pm, my fellow sleepers were certainly a bit silly like myself.

Three and a half hours into the journey, we have a stop, I buy myself a can of guarana. Back by the coach, I head to the door and notice that it is raining. I don’t know what was so interesting about that, but I turned around and walked across the front of the coach to look at the rain. Then just as I’m turning back to get into the coach again, I see the girl again, she’s wandering around eating some snack, and looking at me with the corner of her eye. My head then fails to follow the rest of my body and I just narrowly miss the wing mirror of the next coach with my head. Very smooth. I get back into the coach and pretend like I’m doing something for a moment, and then get out again, the girl has walked to the left side of the coach, I take a couple of steps and pretend like I’m looking at the rain, and now she gets behind the coach. Then I, very inconspicuously, walk back to the door and the girl is gone. She went around the coach and got back into it, she ran away from me!

Could my gender have earned such a pathetic reputation that women can actually run away at the first sign of “danger”? I think of my parakeets and being annoyed by how the male just won’t leave the female alone for even a second, constantly in an exchange of bickering and nibbling the moment she comes out of her nestbox. Guys are such petty pricks, really. But some of us do the best they can.

Look at nature for some solidly irrelevant social insight. The peacock obviously has it way easier than us. Or do they? I wonder if there are any peacocks that neglect to work on their tail and instead perfect a wonderful tune, or learn to peck on wood. And do they singing and woodpecking peacocks ever get to be happy even if no sane woman peacock will be looking for their kind? You’d think there are woman peacocks that could appreciate good music. What were we meant to do originally, before we got all civilized? Were we made to dance? Clap our hands rhythmically? Burp really loud? Decorate our surroundings? Is that what they were doing when they were drawing on the walls in their caves? Could that be the original deviant males trying to come up with new revolutionary ways to attract mates?

The real problem is that the puzzle is actually a very hard one for us to solve. To chat someone up is to try to generate as much confusion and diversion as possible, trying to get around the plainness of the reason you’re there being that you are physically attracted, it’s a real contradiction. In your head you’re trying to come up with a bunch of compelling justifications, or attaching it to rituals to make it look really legitimate, some will take it as a kind of sport, others will surround it with great magic and wonder, the peacock will just lift up his tail and everyone will say “oooooh!” in pure amazement at the advent of “love, pure and true”.

But then what if it doesn’t work and no one is impressed? We guys, especially when we’re young, will self-righteously complain about how the world is unfair because we did everything we understood that we were supposed to do yet did not earn the right to the woman that we wanted, completely and unwittingly ignoring the existence of the woman’s free will in the situation. Sort of like that man that works all week to support the household and then comes home and complains that his wife hasn’t cooked him dinner. They both are giving up their free will. Man to work, woman to family. Who ever wants that burden? The woman’s free will is, to man, as alien as make-up, menstruation, birth control, menopause, all things that men have nothing to do with. And to men, far more important than having a free will of their own is having a woman of their own.

We human beings have clearly fallen into this mad pit of complexities, subtleties and consequences, where things seem to rest a lot more on chance than on performance. I can’t really crack my head. Good things tend to happen often when you fail to prevent them. I will tell myself that as she went around the coach and lept back into it, cleverly elluding me, she remembered a man that she was already committed to, and knew that she could not allow a chance to fall in love with me, lest she might break her lover’s heart. And by tomorrow morning I will completely believe it. But if it’s really meant to be, I’m gonna go out for a coffee tomorrow and she’s gonna be sitting at the next table, in such a way that there will be no other choice but contact. And if she’s not there, it’s because it was not meant to be and it has not been.

The Self-Hometown Parallel

I’ve seen people complain about the selection of Rio as the host of the 2016 Olympic Games, citing fears of corruption and diversion of funds (Brazil’s real favourite pastime), or an expected lack of proper infra-structure (Rio’s greatest landmark). Others complain that the Games will affect them personally in some negative way. If I wanted to be “rational”, I myself could easily find one or two ways in which I would be negatively affected, but I think that any people from Rio that are disqualifying their own city and criticizing the IOC’s decision might be somewhat failing to see their compromising personal connection to the city.

I had never realized how significant it can be for the people from the city that is selected. It’s kind of like a person being formally accepted into the world as a worthy human being, even if against his or her own will. The landscape of Rio is our insides, so looking at it is like looking at your own heart, lungs, your brain, your arteries and so on, your memories, your character, your personal shortcomings. Kind of like in our personal lives, we are often good enough for the world, but most of the time painfully unacceptable for ourselves. As always, it’s all about guilt, just like I apparently can’t forgive myself for anything, not even for existing, I can’t forgive Rio for its all too noticeable shortcomings. Judging from my emotional response to the little video presentation of Rio played during the silly selection show, undeniably I have an emotional, irrational attachment to Rio, and it can only stem from a very intimate knowledge of it, from my growing up here, from the sights and sounds that illustrated the story of my life, as from a too close familiarity with my own self, growing up with it, and the thoughts and feeelings that wrote the story of my life.

This gives me an yet improved understanding of the nature of my disapproval of my own home town of Rio, and an understanding of the actual meaning of its problems, and then my own problems and my own disapproval of my self. I am thinking that truly, surprisingly while predictably, it is only because it’s my home town, and it’s only because it’s me. But that’s easier said than done.

I see nothing but vice, crime, corruption and selfishness in the city of Rio as in the mirror image of myself. Now the question is, is that good? I think there are benefits, so as long as energy is adequately harvested and channelled to real results and the emotional cost is not crippling, it is good. That’s the key to unlocking an enormous potential. I don’t believe the answer is to embrace the problems and pretend like they’re good, I’d rather try to understand the fundamental factor that creates them and then to see what role this factor has in the greater scheme of your being or your home town, like understanding the role of a tiger or a tiny prawn within a given ecosystem. Only then can we know exactly what is going on and then have the chance to make a very powerful change to our lives. The ability to do this, which is rooted in a deep, both inward and outward, critical sense within the individual, is a very powerful ability that can always be the final edge over literally any antagonist the world places against you, even the frightening responsibility and awesome scrutiny of holding the Olympic Games. What we can’t do is pronounce our cities not worthy of holding the Olympic Games or our selves not worthy of existing in its full right. You can be sure the people responsible for bringing the Games to us in Rio could, on a different day, have broken down and joined the ranks of the Rio 2016 naysayers, but that is exactly what gave them the power to bring us the Games, because instead of saying no, they said yes (we can?). Another recurring theme here: it’s a matter of diving in, immersing yourself and swimming through.

But as for why this happens, I still don’t know… Rio as my home town, me as my own self: because it’s my home town, and my own self… the parallel is definitely very revealing and very promising. But I think we have a budget for emotional costs, but none to buy potential with, so we have to tap into whatever we’ve got. The task is to safely balance this very uneven tool.

So, to those out there, if you are from Rio and you are against its selection to host the Olympic Games in 2016, perhaps what feels rational is in fact irrational, and so you are letting your self-deprecation bring you down. Flaws are a part of every living thing in the Universe, to the ludicrous point of inescapability that flawlessness itself can become a kind of flaw. So, Rio may not be good enough for many of us, but it is apparently good enough for the world, and we’ll have to accept that fact and play it out, whether we like it or not.

Cheers,

Thanks for reading.

Notes:

I am very excited about Rio winning its bid for 2016, I think that the next 6 years will be the most important years in the history of  this city, and the opportunity that this brings to Rio as a city seems as unlimited as a dream to me.

On a more personal note, I’ve been very weird lately, and I am experiencing by far the most introspective time of my life. I came back to Rio, have no job, almost no obligations, and honestly, it certainly doesn’t look like it even to people nearby, but it’s one of the most incredibly productive periods of my life. I’m sorry to friends that I haven’t seen for a while, I am really spending a lot of time by myself. It feels too weird sometimes, with all these crazy musings that I come across, I can feel a little alien, but I still see and interact with the lights of the outside world. I think I am almost ready to kind of emerge from this place I am in, back out into the world of the mundane, and I feel like I will be a far better person when I do. See you later.

RJ Film Festival Reviews

I will add here some reviews that I’ve written about some films that I’ve seen recently at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival:

Kuron wa kokyo wo mezasu (The Clone Returns Home, 2008, Japan)

Childhood, guilt and one space suit

Kohei is an astronaut who dies in space and the agency uses experimental technology restores him as an adult clone with all of his memories. An awesome wealth of possibilities and psychological implications to be explored here, and very little is wasted in the opportunity provided by the film. The one complaint I would make is that the film develops in a kind of difficult way for the viewer, so that you need to really follow the movie and say, put some sensory investment into it quite some time before you see what you’re doing here. It doesn’t take away from the potency of the film, but it just demands a little more from the viewer, which unfortunately can easily scare some audiences away, people who routinely decline to put any sensory or intellectual investment into anything. Anyway, thanks to the film’s long meditative contemplations, the sights and sounds really enter your mind. The river where a couple of key scenes take place comes off as a decidedly serene place and I found myself going back to it in my mind afterwards. The main “set piece” that the film presents, say, the situation that gets set up by the story as it develops is very, very interesting, very compelling and unique. The best acting in this film is by Kohei’s mother, though she only appears in part of it; I don’t really think Kohei’s actor does a great job, probably the infant Kohei does a better job than the adult Kohei, actually. But then again, it doesn’t look like the script gave him a lot of opportunities. Overall, I’d say it’s best recommended for someone that’s looking for themes of guilt and childhood memories… Maybe if you’re looking for something about the mortality or immortality of the soul, the relation of the soul to the body, but I think you’d need to branch out a lot in that case. It’s definitely not a science fiction story, though, as it may seem from the synopsis, it’s just not science fiction. There’s just one space suit in it and that’s it. Two days later… the film also touches on some concepts within mortality and the soul, or the soul identity, that are extremely complex to look into, and very rarely are we able to even gain any improved perspective on that and, at first, I thought this movie’s attempt was futile, but now, after some discussion with other people, I believe that this movie is one such rare example where a slightly improved perspective can be gained indeed, but it may take a whole lot of thought in order to grasp it, for it really comes in a very deep layer of the film, it’s unavoidably subtle, but quite striking. However, of course that doesn’t mean that’s what it takes to enjoy this film, this is just an example of just how deep it can get in retrospect. So, to me, that’s the greatest delight that fiction can give you: opportunity to reflect at length and in depth and improve your understanding of life and things… And for that reason, I rate it a 10. It’s surely far too much for most audiences to be able to enjoy, but the reward is well worth the task.

Lluvia (Rain, 2008, Argentina)

Modern metropolitan life, loneliness and lots of rain

I really liked this movie, it’s about one of my favorite themes, which is modern life and how you can live in a big city among millions of people and even have lots of friends but still feel completely alone. That’s really the main theme in Lluvia… there’s not a whole lot more I can say. It’s pretty simple, if you understand it, if you’ve felt this way before, if you understand the dynamic of modern life and big city life and how a massive life structure can sometimes feel imaginary and futile and you feel like you’re in a downward spiral or walking around in circles like you’re already dead in this crazy prison jungle of concrete and steel and every other human being seems alien to you, THEN you will absolutely love watching Lluvia, because you’ll know exactly what it means… If you read what I just said and you have no idea what I’m talking about, then maybe Lluvia won’t really move you… But still, if you feel like you can trust me, give it a shot, go with it…

Arrancame La Vida (Tear This Heart Out, 2008, Mexico)

Excellent acting, a vivid lead and a wide range of significance

I just saw this at the Rio de Janeiro film festival today. I hoped it would explore a theme of sexist society, and of course it did. There are other quite interesting things too, but unfortunately most comes in pretty short glimpses, such as the complex nature of Catalina’s relationship with the General, and just what exactly it is like, it’s obvious that she doesn’t completely hate her husband, but we’re not really given such a fair opportunity to understand the ambivalence of her feelings, so that I found myself often wondering why she still had not left him, until a couple of very small pieces of information start to hint that some things are more complicated than they seem. For this reason, it seems that some of the most interesting nuances you may feel here, on a somewhat personal level, are not really delved into as deeply as you might have liked it, but they are so many that I think it’s fine this way, as each of our minds may hopefully observe and wander off into whatever direction moves us most, you will still be able to follow it with satisfaction. I believe in spite of the story being very good, the best in this film is Ana Claudia Talancón as Catalina. There is something that really struck me, maybe it’s more thanks to the make-up artists, but the difference between Catalina as a 16-year-old and Catalina later as she gets older is really quite remarkable, and I really think it’s in the acting, in her eyes, and I think it’s really fantastic. On top of that, quite pleasing to the “especially interested” audience are Ana Claudia Talancón’s looks: she is very, very beautiful, and the film happily makes use of her awesome physical traits. It can seem a little odd for a film of this theme to make use of so much female nudity so openly, but I think it’s important for the understanding of how much of Catalina’s role as a wife is purely sexual. Well, I hope someone will call me on it if I may be letting, uh, certain things cloud my judgement here, right now I feel like I’m being pretty sincere about it. The actor that plays the general also does a very good job, but in my opinion no one can compare with Catalina on the screen, she is just far more alive than anyone else in the film, perhaps because she is the only character in whose eyes we share, so to speak. Overall, beyond any doubt, worth much more than your 110 minutes and whatever you paid for the ticket, it’s a bargain. I recommend it in particular to anyone who is interested in the theme of gender equality, and the brutal sacrifices that people unfortunately have to make to pay for the way in which our societies work. I see now from other comments on here that the films also carries heavy significance in regards to the history of Mexico, and I think that’s amazing that a film could have this entire other layer of meaning that, while enjoying the film thoroughly, I was completely oblivious of (because I don’t know Mexico’s history). That’s really very cool, and shows that great care and dedication has been put into every step of it.

Maybe I will add more later.

Judaism and I

So, this is to narrate something that happened to me a couple of months ago.

First, I never knew Jews. The first one I met (knowingly) was Nati. And then on the last few hours of 2008, I said to him that “I don’t give a fuck, a jew is a jew is a jew”. I don’t know what context that was in, but it was very serious, and in front of a lot of people. Everyone looked down on me, and I immediately knew it had not gone down well and sought him out to apologize and explain that I don’t really understand what I’m talking about, that all these things are very distant from my reality, so I have trouble taking it seriously. It was the truth, but it doesn’t change the fact.

I always wondered why Jews had always been persecuted throughout their history. I found my answer one time watching a film set in northern England or Scotland, I don’t remember what film, but the title was a boy’s name and the film largely followed the boy. The boy’s father was unemployed and joined an anti-semitic group that made incursions against Jews in the area, because they were very rich and owned all the factories and basically owned all the people, so everyone held them responsible for any financial troubles they might have been in. So I figured it must be because Jews were always rich and everyone’s bosses, so the rest of the people always took grudges against them and passed them on to the next generations. I don’t know how well that holds up thousands of years back in time, but it was my answer to the question why Jews had always been persecuted throughout history. I also found justification in the claim that the Jews, instead of uniting and revolting against german oppression, as I perceived it (pathetically, mostly from movies), tried each to save their own skin, like in the film The Pianist, in which Jews work for the oppressors in order to save themselves and even the main character himself flees alone at the first opportunity, which was very frustrating to me, I believe that it is no solace to yourself not be in danger when others are, it’s no use to just save yourself. This made me so angry. There is one scene in particular which made me very angry, it’s the one where for whatever reason a German officer has a group of Jews lying face down on the ground and he pulls out his gun and shoots one in the head. It deeply angered me that the man heard the sound of the gun being readied and felt it touch his head and all he did was close his eyes tight. I don’t understand how a human being can be so helpless in the face of his own death. This is the one moment in which 100% of your strength is available, your body gives it to you, even. In this moment, I hated that guy and felt the deepest despise for him. I thought if someone fails so miserably to fight for their lives, they were probably never really alive.

But the problem is, that was a movie. Because there was never a real world representation of them in front of me, it was easy to interpret the character of a people and a religion based on fiction, because it was not real for me. It was like forming my personalized critique of one of those films that everyone knows. And it would have little consequence in the real world. So, having learned this much, that experience on New Year’s Eve, in which my misconceptions caused someone else hurt, planted a seed in my head, and I knew I would eventually come back to this some time.

Then one day, about a month ago, I was invited to a Bar Mitzvah. It was my mother’s cousin’s son. The cousin had married a Jewish woman, very nice people. I was obviously curious about it, and remembered what had happened on New Year’s Eve.

So during the ceremony at the synagogue, in one moment the Rabbi took a seat and went on a very sincere talk about how Raphael would have to choose his path soon, and that he would be well advised to follow his desires and to not believe that this or that is not possible in his life. And he mentioned that perhaps he will indeed go into music, as the family seems to like to do (his half-brother is a bassist). It was something very simple, but never too often said. I was also pretty touched by how the ceremony was focused on putting this 13 year old kid at centre stage and giving him responsibility over the proceedings.

Later on, at the actual party, well, right away the food was magnificent. Raphael’s brother was playing bass with his own band through the whole party. It was impressive how everyone was so into it, all these songs that I had never heard before, and the dancing, and everyone was so happy and, most importantly, together.

Then, all of a sudden, the 13-year old Raphael took to the stage with an electric guitar and played two songs along with his brother and the band. The sight of his brother leaning over him even while playing his instrument, as if to make sure he would be alright blew me away. The message here was very clear. This entire room or people, with its very loud speakers, are putting all of their chips on the 13-year old Raphael, and are telling him “It’s you!”. And there was a clear symbolic meaning that this was the welcoming of the 13-year old Raphael into the world of the adults and there was so much truth, everyone was clearly concerned with nourishing Raphael’s experience that morning. And it was pretty breath-taking.

I was mind-numbingly jealous of all this. It turned me into a zombie, or the most pathetic human being I’ve ever been. None of this ever happened to me. No investment was ever put into me from such a young age, no such astounding trust and confidence was ever placed on me at as young an age. Only at 22 years old did I for the first time recognize and validate a deep desire of my own and realized it when I first traveled to the United States. And I had to do it all by myself. At one moment, his father came up on stage and just shook his arms in celebration. I felt like the 13-year old Raphael was unstoppable and there was no way he would not come to be great one day.

Anyway, it was altogether a mind-blowing experience. True, it stems on my own life experiences, and the view may not have been shared by others beside me, but all the same. I later found myself putting on the souvenir Kippah we got, looking at myself in the mirror and wondering “what if I had been Jewish?”.

Not that it makes any sense to actually wonder what difference it would have made, but it’s unbelievable how one biased opinion can turn another one upside down.

This event took on such an importance in later explorations of my own psychology that I now cherish the Kippah actually as a souvenir of this experience that opened my eyes about things that went wrong during my childhood and teenage years and for which I have had to pay the price. And with this, I finally acquired a deeply personal experience to shape my view of Judaism and the Jewish people at a proper level. I now not only admired them, but I envied them.

Quick Commentary:

I would like also to talk a little bit about how ridiculously widespread anti-semitism is. Take for example Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Bruno. He is great at letting people feel comfortable with their prejudices and then spitting on their faces with something they absolutely can’t digest, and in my opinion that is the key to appreciating his work. Watching this film at the cinema, I noticed that people laughed at everything, but they laughed most hysterically at the jokes about the Holocaust and Hitler. With the more edgy gay jokes, people didn’t want to laugh so much, because an image is painted in their heads that they are not comfortable with, but with the Jewish jokes everyone is remarkably comfortable and the threshold is very high, to the point where, in a deleted scene from Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen can excite a crowd into chanting “Throw the Jew down the well” with him. That’s because anti-semitism is the norm in many countries, and in others it is more common than not. And more than anything, the whole thing is trivial. Mind you that I am talking about watching these films at the cinema in Brazil; it may not necessarily receive the same reaction here as in other countries.

I recently read an article on Sociological Images about the identification of Amsterdam’s AFC Ajax with Judaism and Israel, apparently because in the past they had many Jews playing on the team, and the fans appropriated this and now relate the star of David and the Israeli flag with their football team. Then, to taunt Ajax fans, supporters of other teams allegedly chant the following:

Ssssssssssssssssssssssssss… (the hissing sound of gas)

We’re hunting the Jews!

There is the Ajax train to Auschwitz!

Sieg! Sieg! Sieg! (German for ‘victory’, yelled while performing the Hitler’s Salute)

In my opinion, at some subconscious level, just like people at the movie theatre can feel a dark satisfaction with seeing a crowd chant “Throw the Jew down the well”, and that is a big part of why they enjoy Jewish jokes, the football fans must feel some kind of sadistic pleasure in making the hissing sound of gas. It’s not just funny, it’s a secret realization of some people’s dark fantasies. That’s my opinion anyway… See ya, thanks for reading.

Direct Unmistakable Intercourse

In contact with the flux of cosmic consciousness all religions known and named to-day will be melted down. The human soul will be revolutionized. Religion will absolutely dominate the race. It will not depend on tradition. It will not be believed and disbelieved. It will not be a part of life, belonging to certain hours, times, occasions. It will not be in sacred books nor in the mouths of priests. It will not dwell in churches and meetings and forms and days. Its life will not be in prayers, hymns nor discourses. It will not depend on special revelations, on the words of gods who came down to teach, nor on any bible or bibles. It will have no mission to save men from their sins or to secure them entrance to heaven. It will not teach a future immortality nor future glories, for immortality and all glory will exist in the here and now. The evidence of immortality will live in every heart as sight in every eye. Doubt of God and of eternal life will be as impossible as is now doubt of existence; the evidence of each will be the same. Religion will govern every minute of every day of all life. Churches, priests, forms, creeds, prayers, all agents, all intermediaries between the individual man and God will be permanently replaced by direct unmistakable intercourse. Sin will no longer exist nor will salvation be desired. Men will not worry about death or a future, about the kingdom of heaven, about what may come with and after the cessation of the life of the present body. Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all its good and with all its beauty is for it and belongs to it forever. The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world of to-day as this is from the world as it was before the advent of self consciousness.

from the 1901 book called Cosmic Consciousness, by a Richard Maurice Bucke.

This book, as many many others, is available freely on www.sacred-texts.com which is a really good source for all kinds of books relating to any religion, or even anything that can in some way be interpreted as a belief system. The website is a wonderful example in openness, and, I think, all but defines that ideal. The main categories are World Religions, Traditions and Mysteries. To show you how broad its scope is, under Mysteries, pretty much anything you want will fit the description, including even Atlantis or UFOs, and then under each topic there will be a selection of complete books, preceded by a short description, nicely formatted for reading on the web (which must have taken a million hours of work). And for a website that proposes to catalogue such an incredibly broad subject, they do a fantastic job. For those interested in religion as in what they mean and where they originated from, what solutions each one proposes to the problem of the human condition, and what it means in the real world, or to read more about any such subject that you need or want to have more information about, it’s a source that will surely satisfy you for a long time, there is just no way you will not find what you were looking for.

I’ve used the site for a long time and have always wanted to share it in some way and explain what I think is good about it, so there it is..

African girl

Today a picture of an African girl was featured on deviantART.com.

African Girl by ~thefirstdrop

In the description, the photographer says:

please, visit:

Life Straw – [link]

Make Poverty History – [link]

Poverty.com – [link]

so it’s fair to assume that the photo is perceived to carry a message about poverty.

I guess I just don’t see it.

The girl, portrayed in all her wholesomeness, is wearing nice looking African clothes, against a fairly unrevealing background. We can see some straw back there, so she probably lives and works on the countryside, and you could argue things look very dry, so maybe there’s something in the way of a drought. She looks in fair health, though.

In fact, this photo’s message about poverty is carried not by actual human compassion, but rather by civilized west’s prejudice about African people. There is nothing to say that this woman or the place where the photo is taken decidedly has something to do with poverty. The single thing that will make people think about poverty would be the fact that she is black and wearing African clothes.

In my opinion, the photo only reinforces the notion that the people of Africa are something other than us, where us being full humans they would be perhaps not so human, and that the reason we should try to help their plight is that they are so exotic, like a fresh water dolphin or an anteater. Notice that her stare is the same as an animal’s, and she is portrayed sort of like a member of an endangered species. Or, to be even more sordid, maybe in the minds of people simply to be African is to be in poverty, and perhaps the poverty that is being spoken of is the perceived cultural inferiority. The photographer is from Brazil, so I would think he has a better understanding of what poverty is, which I wouldn’t necessarily assume from the photograph alone.

Of course, I don’t know the real facts behind this photograph, but it doesn’t carry the real facts, it portrays only what is perceived, and that is what I’m talking about.

So, by extension, it shows me how impossible virtue is, for humans. Even when people try to do good things, they do it for the wrong reason. And largely the way to get population behind something is to give them whatever reason they need, and almost always the reason has to be a self-serving reason, in some way. There is no true virtue for a human.

Recycling Culture

Shakespeare plays are so good that anything at all related to them is almost sure to be enjoyable in some way.

Brazil’s media giant Globo is currently airing a new mini-series called Som & Furia, directed by Fernando Meirelles, of “City of God” fame, and four others. The title means “Sound & Fury”, a line taken from Hamlet (or its translation to portuguese). It is based on a canadian show called “Slings & Arrows” (out of Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” line), which ran for a total of 18 episodes. It follows a company playing Hamlet, MacBeth and then King Lear, while the plot in each section is somewhat analogous to that of the play they are currently showing. The three main characters were director, actor and actress in a legendary production of Hamlet years ago and now meet again after the actor replaces the director (who is dead and appears as a ghost) and puts on a new production of Hamlet at the same theatre, so that’s where it kicks off from.
The show is quite good, and though I have not seen the original, I am convinced that the brazilian version improves upon it, in terms of production values and acting. There are several really good actors in very good form and the cinematography is far superior to standard brazilian television. It’s one of the shows that evidence how some brazilian actors have a lot of talent largely wasted on telenovelas.
The plot is very faithful to “Slings & Arrows”, apart from where it adapts to a Brazilian setting, which was well done. While the original is set in a Shakespeare festival in Toronto, “Som & Furia” is set in Rio’s traditional Teatro Municipal, which, not coincidentally, has just completed 100 years of existence and is about to re-open after months of refurbishment.
I don’t think “Som & Furia” is bad, it’s actually very good, the merit is beyond a doubt. While my criticism is in relation to the show, it is not exactly to the show itself.
On wednesday’s episode, Oliveira’s wish that his remains be set “over the city” is granted by Ellen and Dante, the two main characters. They get together on the roof of the theatre and flick his ashes into the air, but there is quite a breeze coming in so it gets blown right back into their faces. Well, I really like “The Big Lebowski” too, but the film is still easily available to the public. The scene was just totally uncalled for, made absolutely no sense within the plot (even being completely ignored afterwards) and was not even well executed as a scene. And everyone that has seen “The Big Lebowski” could see it coming and probably is still wondering what the point was.
So, what about it? Well, the vast majority of people watching will not have seen The Big Lebowski, because that’s a type of film that is rarely played on television here. And most people don’t watch anything other than TV, and generally a lot more Globo than anything else.
In another mini-series on Globo, years ago, they recycled a scene from Seinfeld, the one where Kramer tells Jerry that he’s going to send some cubans to his house and that he should please take care of them until he comes to pick them up, but then it turns out that the cubans are not cigars but rather people from Cuba.
But whatever, I’m not making a point about intellectual property here, I’m talking about something else.
Imagine, then, how many times neatly produced mini-series on Globo have featured scenes and plot devices previously featured on foreign, mainly american, television. And then perhaps the people that write for brazilian television are, in the end, little more than people who have lived in New York or London and have seen foreign television and things. And then they turn to Brazil, put it back in the box and sell it as new.
What I am trying to get to is that this is the theme of cultural globalization in Brazil. It’s recycled culture coming primarily from America. It goes next to all those brand names that you know are coming. I went to a mall recently and at the food court saw evidence that Brazilians love McDonald’s much more than Americans ever could have. I ate at a brazilian chain of italian fast food called Spoleto, just because I like it better, not because I want to eat Brazil, and I didn’t have to queue, while there were at least sixty people queueing for McDonald’s right next door. It wasn’t even a weekend or something, but people still seemed to be looking for nothing less than a shopping centre kind of meal with burgers and chips, but even Bob’s (Brazil’s McDonald’s clone) across the food court was dead. So it’s like only McDonald’s would do, in my opinion, more because of the idea behind it than anything else, the idea of being like the americans, consuming their brands, eating their food, looking like them. It’s not that I’m against foreign things for the heck of it, you know I am not really in love with my country, I don’t care about it, and I think it’s fine to be like the Americans, they’re alright. But it just gets really tiring to follow in the footsteps of others. I would rather walk with the frontrunners and have a say over which way to go or else turn another way completely. Wouldn’t you?

Metropolitan Brazil gradually leaves its culture behind and moves into a recycled North American culture, and if you have seen the US, the whole thing feels like deja vu all over again, but everybody’s lovin’ it.