revista piauí - questões estrangeiras

Chau, Carnaval

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:34:17 -0300

Now that the last blocos have petered out, I guess we can all reset the Carnaval countdown clocks and accept that we’re midway through Lent. On the bus uptown on Ash Wednesday, I was looking for signs that some sort of air of responsibility might have descended on Rio once more. Would people be hanging their heads, squinting hungover and repentant against the sun? Would everyone still be glittery? But things looked disappointingly normal. A few more people than usual on the beach, maybe; there was still confetti in the cracks in the cobblestones despite the street sweepers’ best efforts; and I spotted one feathered hat stuck impressively high in a tree. Apart from that, business as usual. Some people on the beach, others jogging around the Lagoa, people wearing sundresses and shorts and tank tops or sweating in suits like they do any sun-drunk business day of the week.

The secret of carnaval

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:21:12 -0300

Keep your pants on, everyone, I went to blocos besides Carmelitas and did have plenty of fun. And I'm not just saying that. After having Carnaval'd for nearly a week, now, I feel myself qualified to make sweeping pronouncements about it. Aren't you excited? First things first. The recipe for a good bloco, in my opinion, is almost insultingly simple: good music and people who want to enjoy it.

The greek and the fairy

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:21:24 -0300

There’s nothing quite like the solitude of being the only person on the bus wearing a costume.

I’ll just fess up now – on Friday, that was me. If you happened to be an upright carioca commuter on your way to Glória that morning, you were faced with the eternal Carnaval question: how to react. Do you stare? Do you comment? Do you look into the middle distance?

Why are we pushing, again?

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:09:23 -0200

I know, I know, they warned me not to go to the blocos alone. And I wasn’t; I thought I’d meet up with some friends midway through the Carmelitas. It’s Santa Teresa, all narrow little streets, and a traditional bloco to boot! How bad could it be, anyway?

Very, very bad, is the answer.

Purpurin

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:14:55 -0200

After one single ball, it’s become clear that Carnaval is going to have grave, long-lasting repercussions for my life. It wasn't supposed to be this way. The plan was to come back to Rio for a fun week and then go back to studying like nothing ever happened. But now it is the next day, I’ve taken a shower, changed clothes, had breakfast, and I am still glittery. This glitter will never, ever come off. I’m going to study in Argentina and I’ll still be glittery. I’m going to do thesis research and I’ll still be glittery. I’m going to graduate from Princeton and I’ll still be glittery. I’ll have to explain why I’m glittery to prospective employers. I will be glittery at my wedding. I will be buried glittery. And all this because I’d never heard the word purpurina.

O samba e o tango

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:52:21 -0200

How do I feel about Carnaval? For a long time I thought of it the way I thought about prom. It’s all you see in the movies and books and season finales; it’s supposed to be the high point of the year, something you’ll remember forever. Personally, I kind of resented prom’s symbolic hegemony. Why should a high-school dance, that most odious of events, become the defining event of my secondary-school experience? They couldn’t make me go. But, on the other hand, how could I not go?

Carnaval with Training Wheels

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:36:28 -0200

Seeing as this is my first Carnaval, I did decide to start small. Literally, small. With children, I mean. I dragged myself out of bed bright and early the next day to go over to Laranjeiras for the Gigantes da Lira, a bloco that’s managed to keep itself small and kid-friendly by scheduling itself at 9 a.m. on the Sunday before Carnaval. But when I woke up – with exactly the same jolt that I used to on Christmas morning – I realized that it was raining. “Raining on my first Carnaval!” I moaned as I staggered into the kitchen. I was told to suck it up, in effect, and consequently put myself on the bus to Cosme Velho.

Saudade is a Bitch

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:57:15 -0200

I was sprawled on my bed on my first night back in the States, catching up with my best friend, when it slipped out. I clapped my hand to my mouth, hoping he hadn’t registered what I’d just said. But my expression must have been of the utmost guilt. Within a second, he figured it out, and looked very offended indeed. I begged forgiveness with my eyes, but it was too late.

Louco, sim, louco

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:23:55 -0200

All right, so my letter was a failure. I can’t say I was really expecting anything different; by the time the announcement that João Gilberto had canceled the tour finally came, I could only laugh. I’d been expecting it for so long that, at this stage of the game, having to go to São Paulo and back on Sunday would have been both highly unexpected and inconvenient.

Porque é Schumann, meu filho

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:19:36 -0200

“Ah, I thought I was paranoid, getting here at 2:30,” I said to the woman in front of me as I got in line on the theatre steps.

“So did I,” she said, contemplating the couple dozen people ahead of her. A small crowd of paranoiacs was already forming. Fans of the virtuosic pianist Nelson Freire, that is, lined up an hour and a half before the doors were set to open in order to get a seat for his free Sunday recital. 90 minutes of tedium ensue as the full complement of paranoiacs arrive and is subsequently supplemented by a few hundred latecomers, snaking around the block and down Rio Branco.

A plea

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:12:37 -0200

Dear João Gilberto,

As opposed to Caetano Veloso, I’m sure that you’re sure that you’ve never met me. From what I understand, you don’t get out a whole lot. Or at all. But hear me out. Your music got me through one of the most difficult years of my life, including the sudden death of a friend. Even now I have trouble listening to Amoroso Brasil without crying, which is saying something. When I got to Rio, I was shocked to find that some of my new friends had never heard your 1961 or 1973 albums, let alone Amoroso Brasil. Whenever we listened to them, all conversation halted. It was sacred.

Stuck in traffic

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:45:56 -0200

Less than a month left. No time to waste. Stuck na hora do rush: Centro, 18:30. Bus crawling down Rio Branco so slowly you begin to suspect that the driver has just let his foot off the brake and is letting gravity pull us all the way to the sea, it’s the jeito carioca and saves gas to boot. Air conditioning blasting with a vengeful uselessness now that the rain’s cooled everything down.

A thirty-year-old kiss

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:42:21 -0200

d been thinking about it ever since they told me it was there, hidden away in some white box in the innards of the archive. Now my research is done, today was my last day at PUC, it feels like I can count my days here on a blind butcher’s fingers, and so I finally mustered up the courage to ask them to let me see it. The manuscript of A Hora da Estrela. This time they got out the white cloth gloves. I waited nervously in the research room, drumming my fingers on the table and making whispered small talk with a fellow researcher. Forms were signed, the white box was opened, envelopes were shuffled around. And there it was.

Noel

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:18:42 -0200

Noel Rosa always had a special charm for me. Brief explanatory digression: as I will say for the hundred and eleventh time, my family has no connection with Brazil. Until recently I was the only person in my immediate family – and extended, for that matter – who spoke Spanish, let alone Portuguese. (I’ve taught my baby sisters to say “Por favor, você pode ler este livro para mim?”, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count as fluency.) Sure, my grandfather went to school abroad, but that was to learn classical violin in Germany. The novelty of my Latin American adventures aside, everyone has been very supportive. After the confusion of “now, why are you learning Portuguese, again?”, my musicologist dad bought me a four-CD anthology of Brazilian music. That was a tipping point. Within a week of listening to it, I’d decided that “O orvalho vem caindo” was my new favorite song, and whoever this Noel Rosa person was, he was a genius.

Monumental perfection

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:57:30 -0200

Brasília is like a perfectly white wall. The instant you touch it, all you can see is the smudge left by your finger. What was meant to be perfection ends up throwing a spotlight on the fissures in that imperfection.

Signs of life

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:25:34 -0200

Brasília wasn’t built for bipeds, my host warned me laughingly in an email before I came. Coitado do pedestre em Brasília, really. The city is built at the intersection of two massive highways, after all, in a sort of hymn to the automobile industry. São Paulo may not stop, but Brasília abhors red lights. I saw the extent to which cars are king in Brasília right away, as I was being given a tour of downtown (if you can call it that). As we crossed a street (on a pedestrian crosswalk, I hasten to add), my guides gave a helpless little wave to the oncoming traffic. I assumed it was just courtesy, but then I saw the command on the asphalt.

Dear Caetano

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:59:53 -0200

Lately, everything exciting in my life happens on the bus.

By that I don’t mean that things are boring; far from it. Back in September, I was stuck on what would be a 9-hour bus ride back from São Paulo when I got a series of increasingly alarmed phone calls about a post I’d written about PUC, and we all know how that ended up. And Sunday I was on a frescão crawling back from Galeão, just arrived from Brasília, when I got a text message. Did you see Caetano’s column in O Globo today???

City planning

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:46:11 -0200

Of all the places in Brazil, I didn’t expect Brasília to look familiar. But as toon as I caught glimpses of the city out the window of the plane, I was transported in time and space. To Chambersburg, PA in the mid-1990s, of all places.

At my grandmother’s house, my cousins and I had exactly one entertainment. When we weren’t being forced to see other elderly relatives, we’d dash to the dark computer room and spend the interminable dusty afternoons there, jostling for control of the bulky mouse (I never won) and resentfully backseat-driving as the lucky one got to play. Sim City 2000.

Turismo polêmico

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:34:56 -0200

People are mad at me. Friends who stood by me through thick and thin, called me a true Brazilian and a wunderkind, they’re all abandoning me. I’ve burned all my bridges now, without even trying.

Because I’m taking half a week off to travel, I could go anywhere in Brazil (or South America, for that matter), from the peaks of Machu Picchu to the beaches of Cancún to Iguaçú Falls, and I’m going to… drumroll… Brasília.

When poetry goes wild

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:44:06 -0200

So what do you get a poet for his 109th birthday?

If that poet is Carlos Drummond de Andrade, then you throw him birthday parties in five simultaneous cities with film screenings, round tables, poetry readings, and popcorn. And a-duh I was there to take in the festivities – it was liberating to be wearing normal clothes on a Halloween night, for once. The grand finale at the Instituto Moreira Salles was a reading of 5 of Drummond’s major poems, the ones that aren’t done as frequently in public because they’re prohibitively long. Does it sound like fun yet? Just wait.