2/27/04:
Snapshots
The Carnvalistas descend on Ouro Preto.
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The above is my best way to describe the crazy proportions Ouro Preto took on this week as the quaint spaces of this small, historic mining town were stretched to the seams by hordes of party-goers from all over Brazil. The town itself is an absolutely incredible feat of historic
preservation, especially considering the slightly limited political resources here with which to do so.
The town of about fifty thousand residents is still almost entirely built of its early 18th to 19th century structures. Everything from the houses, to hotels to grocery stores, restaurants, banks are really naturally integrated into the architecture and without a sort of overly cleaned Disnified sheen. It's still a tourism town to be sure, and there's little sign of any other sort of economy, but Ouro Preto seems to avoid the North American contrivances that make say the French Quarter in New Orleans or Gastown in Vancouver seem a bit like stage sets.
The mountains of Minas Gerais + the 1000-body strong Bloco da Praia in all their glory.
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Ouro Preto is a college town too and that creates the character that this city's Carnaval takes on - an exceedingly twentysomething crowd. Each of the universities' Rep?blicas, which are (I'm guessing) the equivalent of fraternities and sororities, organizes a giant theme party called a bloco at some site near the edge of the valley.
Each day, there are about four or five of these blocos at opposite ends of the city that assemble in the early afternoon, basically getting completely wasted with 1000 fellow republicanos. Then the bateria, a giant team of marching drummers, comes through and everyone spills out toward the town. It takes about three or four hours of happily singing and samba-ing along in a packed tight crowd of sweaty, confetti strewn revellers, with Ouro Preto's residents constantly throwing buckets of water on the crowd from all the second story windows.
By about sunset, each of the day's blocos have collided at the center of town and it's complete madness after that.
Me with some spontaneously made friends drenched
and giddy after an afternoon in the Bloco da Ladera.
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In many ways Ouro Preto's Carnaval admittedly becomes a sort of MTV Spring Break set to samba. On the other hand, it's a far less commercialized and more off the cuff sort of party than you'd likely find at the major celebrations in Salvador or Rio de Janeiro.
A friend has just returned from Rio his description makes the whole thing out as Copacabana hookers in high season and the American sex travellers who love them. Ouro Preto's to me seems more a party by and for the people that adore the Carnaval every year and less a show for the rest of us tourist folk.
Some very lovely ladies. Some slightly disturbing gents.
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And this is the friendliest place in the world - you'd have to be a complete mosca morta ["dead fly"] to not come out of here with 100 new acquaintances. I travelled alone and am returning with my paperback novel scribbled over with random email addresses and I'm not exactly Joe-talk-to-everybody under normal circumstances. Except for a morning spent with some Swedish backpackers, I spent the entire five days speaking only in Portuguese, although often reduced to exchanging drunken party cheers - "E a?, cara! Beleza! Absoluta! Doid?o! Mata le?o!"
A girl from Salvador took on the sisyphian task of teaching me to samba - "Chuta as pedras, Jeremy!" ["Kick the stones"]. Another girl from Belo Horizante had more success twirling me around outside of a forr? club. After five nights of this constant blurry socializing, I was convinced that I'd developed some sort of doppelg?nger as I was hearing "E a?, Jeremy!" and "Falou, meu amigo americano!" every five minutes from people whom I hadn't the foggiest memory of meeting. There's also a strange scrape starting from the top of my nose and across my forehead and I can't for the life of me figure out where it came from. Either my doppelg?nger's a badass streetfighter or drinking buckets of cheap wine at high altitudes makes for a mean amnesia.
Tearing up the Pra?a Tiradentes on the last night.
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My other casualty is a horribly sunburned neck. But I'll just let that attest to Brazil's rainy climate graciously holding off its storms until the night I returned home. This expanded the 10-hour bus ride to 15 hours of slowly stumbling through disrepaired mountain roads. Here, I met a girl from S?o Paulo who lived in Chicago for two years, a student in Hyde Park, the first Brazilian I've met whose been anywhere in Chicago besides the airport and who can attest that a long cold winter has a charm all its own. In some really specific conversation about everything Chicago, she told me about a store in Roscoe Village called Brasil Legal* that sells an assortment of music, food, and assorted knicknacks from here. So if you're reading this from Chicago and want to try to a salgado without paying the airfare, check it out.
And after five days of blissful Carnaval in a a colorful mountain town, I arrived in a chilly, rainy S?o Paulo, an appropriate Ash Wednesday of a city for sure. I'm returning to work, burning the clothes I took, and throwing together a little photo album that I'll put up here in a few days. Stay tuned.
*Located at 2153 N. Western, according to Fuck Corporate Groceries.
posted by jeremy @ 4:01 AM
2/19/04:
Em fevereiro tem carnaval
Carnaval starts Saturday and everyone in Brazil will be somewhere between either cavorting naked in the streets or at home with an American movie, depending on who you talk to. It's hard to gauge its importance, although compared to Mardis Gras in New Orleans, which I was reminded of in a recent viewing of Easy Rider, I wonder what the latter's big deal is.
A friend laughed when I asked her if Carnaval is more important than Xmas - "Of course not, Carnaval is just everyone getting drunk for a week and a lot of slutty dancing." Sounds fun to me, but I can see how she's annoyed by the stereotype. Another friend, when asked the same, said "Of course it's more important - it last five nights." Being somewhat the workaholic American who'd never previously had a job that gave days off between Xmas and New Year's, an entire country shutting down for a week is an impressive enough justification.
And of course there's a myriad of ways to celebrate - stay home, go to the beaches, go out to clubs, go to the sambadromes in the various big cities, take an elaborate vacation. The really big celebrations in Rio and Salvador are getting really commercialized with prices jacked up insanely even if you're paying in dollars, but there's so many other amazing little street parties too.
Me, tomorrow morning I leave for Ouro Preto, a small-ish town in Minas Gerais which is going to be an 11-hour bus ride to the east of S?o Paulo. This little city of 50,000 blows up to 500,000 for the Carnaval, or so I'm told. I've no idea how much I'll be swept up in the whole bacchanal, that'll all be improvised. But the city is supposed to be a really well-preserved version of its circa-1700s legacy, and the story of its Igreja de Santa Efig?nia, built by slaves and a decorated with the gold dust washed from their hair, is terribly beautiful.
And with that, I'm leaving Beatcorpo.net for the week. I'll return next Wednesday [or so] with some pictures and stories on how the whole crazy thing went down.
posted by jeremy @ 4:00 AM
2/15/04:
A pair of skylines
Saturday morning, I accompanied a couple of friends to their registration at one of S?o Paulo's law universities whose name I forget, although it's housed in a famously hideous 50-story building next to the Viaduto Santa Ifeg?nia overlooking the city's old downtown. Waiting at the 44th floor I found a couple of advantageous windows. Finally seeing this city's endlessly scattered skyscrpaers from above, rather than by following it's randomly connected nodes, I was speechless, fascinated, following the narrow lines of streets like a labrynth.
A couple fo nights before I'd read a passage from Wittengenstein where the philosopher said nothing can be illogical if it exists, nothing can exist if it cannot be pictured and so far I'm noticing that W interestingly omits design or preconception from these treatises, or at least that's what I'm gathering from it so far.
Anyway, the above images are the result from that morning [and not too much time spent with the Photoshop later on]. Click the smaller image for a much larger version [weighing in at 130k and 128k respectively].
posted by jeremy @ 4:58 AM
2/11/04:
The Betacorpo blog is now located at -
Betacorpo.net
posted by jeremy @ 3:26 PM
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Loose deadlines
Hey all. I had a better initial post rolling around in my head, but with extreme business comes writer's block. I thought it be best to finally get this place opened up no matter what. So, if you've been a regular visitor at the old blog - nice to have your presence again - and a welcome to any new ones who rolled in on their referral logs. Enjoy the articles to the side (refreshed daily) and I'll be back soon with stories and photos on places and especially the endlessly fascinating I place I happen to occupy at the moment. And a quick little mission statement - Betacorpo.net will be partly a place to keep my photography portfolio, partly an daily index of articles that inform the art issues that currently interest me [place, urban space, architecture, activism], and partly stories and writing about the things I'm learning from this semi-nomadic lifestyle I currently keep. It'll all be a bit more focused than my initial effort and hopefully a little more the weblog I've always wanted to read. RSS feeds and archives that actually function are in the works - stay tuned. Added: To any of you who are reading this with a Mac, with Netscape, with Safari, or any other non-Windows set-up (and good for you) - could you let me know if anything on this site shows up wacked (and you're a saint if you test the portfolio section for me). Also, if anyone knows how I can get ?cc?nt m?rks to not look like that, that'll help me immensely. You are most gratefully appreciated. Thanks to Tate and some cut-n-paste from a couple of Brazilian blogs, the accent mess is cleaned up, though I'm not exactly sure how.
posted by jeremy @ 4:55 AM
2/4/04:
Slowly killing the corpo
Things have been a bit slow around here, haven't they?
That's 'cuz I've been spending some of my 6-week semi-vacation working on a whole new weblog, finally parked on a real server, something a little more focused, more of a resource, a little more relevant to the particular life situation I'm finally in, a more mature and hopefully more interesting piece of web space than this little public document of my first year of learning this whole blogging thing.
Anyway, it's parked at http://Betacorpo.net and it'll be running hopefully by this weekend. This will be the second-to-last post here before I shut this sloppy little circus down for good.
So, in the meantime, be sure to have some gawks at the weblogs on the left, all fascinating reads (that's why they're there), and hopefully I'll see you all on the other side in a few days.
posted by jeremy @ 8:07 PM
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