BLOGZIL!

2005-07-26T03:14:00.000-04:00

kids in paraty

gestos

2005-06-28T15:44:00.000-04:00

Jamie recently put up a post on Japanese kinesthetics, by which he means the postures and gestures that constitute extra-verbal communication in Japan. This has inspired me to do a similar post on Brazil.

Let's start with greetings. The standard male/female greeting is the beijinho, or "little kiss." There is some regional variation (São Paulo, for instance, does one cheek only) but in Rio, as in most of the country, it's a two-cheeker. The key is it's not actually a kiss. Rather, you place your cheek against your friend's cheek and emit a kiss sound, vaguely in the region of the ear. Then repeat on the other side. Female/female meetings are quite the same, but male/male pairs favor the abraço, or hug. This, similarly, is usually not a hug but a handshake accompanied by a back-patting reach-around. Particularly close male friends will usually bump collarbones, while people who have never met may well leave each other at an arm's length.

It is worth noting that these are such common forms of greeting and leavetaking that they have spilled over into writing and telephone. The common email or text message signoff when writing girl-girl or boy-girl is "beijos", often abreviated "bjs," which every time makes me think unsettlingly of blowjobs. With guys it's often "abçs" or "abs". On the phone you say bye by saying "um beijo" or "um abraço."

Speaking of kissing, the negative connotation of PDAs (public displays of affection) does not exist here. To the contrary, it is considered rude to your companion if you are unwilling to make out with him or her on the street. It's like saying you don't want to be seen with them. Some people have made a big deal about different concepts of personal space, and tell stories of gringos at parties being backed around the room by Brazilians who talk too close. I haven't seen much of this myself. I think perhaps some overeager amateur social anthropologist (like moi?) saw one socially awkward dude and drew a few too many conclusions.

Moving on, the "come hither" gesture seems to be identical in Japan and Brazil, a outstretched arm with fingers flapping down as if scooping sand toward oneself. Another common gesture is the finger wag. Index finger extended, the hand windshield-wipers back and forth while the head shakes a sad, slow "no." This gesture looks very grave, like you are reprimanding a youngster for supergluing the cat to the TV screen, but it reality it's a pretty light negatory. Like no, I don't want another beer yet.

Yet another thing you can do with your hands is to make one into a fist and then smack the top of that fist with an open palm. This means "fucked!" As in, "you ought to be fucked!" but more commonly the less-confrontational "man, am I fucked!" Thumb and index making a circle, with palm facing the body, is another possibly rude gesture. It means "ass," as in "go take it in the ass!"

One gesture that confused me for many months, but that now I find myself doing involuntarily, is the following: two hands face each other fingertip to fingertip, palms in. Then the hands begin to wave forward and back, fingers smacking into each other like a set of ill-fitting saloon doors. This means, roughly, "it doesn't matter" or "there was nothing I could do." It's sort of a resignation gesture, somewhat akin to a shoulder shrug.

There are myriad minor strange ones. An earlobe is often tugged when describing a tasty food. Snapping can mean "it took a long time," whereas a thumb and forefinger held an half-inch apart means "just a moment." I've never actually seen this, but my dinner companion tonight (a native) swore that rubbing one's elbow and forearm is code for "heartbroken."

Then there is the Special Brazilian Snap Action, which people do whenever they get excited for whatever reason. It's not snapping like we know it in the US; rather, the index finger goes limp and, by whipping the arm, is snapped against the thumb and middle finger. Seemingly all Brazilians can do this at will, at high volume, and many times in rapid succession. After several months of practice I have about a 20% success rate, and only perhaps a third of those reach a satisfying volume. If I ever become truly proficient I'll know I have finally arrived.

2005-05-18T11:15:00.000-04:00

save charmin' and brawny for the trailer parks

various morsels

2005-05-13T19:16:00.000-04:00

Y'all should take it as a good sign whenever I don't write much -- it means my life is actually a little bit exciting. Still, for reasons I don't entirely understand, I like to troll the internet in my free time and find dumb things. Case in point.

Also, two people actually having a reasonable debate about women in the sciences.

off topic some more

2005-05-08T23:45:00.000-04:00

Again, not about Brazil, but interesting nonetheless. A guy's memories of his mother's boyfriend, the serial killer.

kashi good friends

2005-05-06T09:39:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder about those Kashi Good Friends cereal boxes? Well here, at last, is the story.

(via American Scene)

my new apartment

2005-05-05T00:55:00.000-04:00

Various people (read: my parents) have been urging me to send pictures of my new apartment, so now that I have internet I will oblige them. I really like my new apartment. It is simultaneously cozy and airy. It manages this combination by being a) owned and decorated by a lovely hippie-ish woman who is extremely into raw and sprouted foods, and by b) missing a wall. Look at the "table" picture closely and you will see the tarp that is my east-facing barrier to the world. Safety-wise this isn't much of a problem, since I live on the fourth floor of a four-floor building. If the thieves really want to do the grappling hook and zip line work needed to get in here, they might as well just have my stuff. (Knock on wood, if it would happen anywhere it would happen in Rio.) The rest of the apartment isn't exactly air-tight either. The "windows" in the first kitchen picture are in fact no more than empty panes of wood, and there are significant gaps between the roof and the extant walls as well.

My apartment makes me happy, which is what a good apartment should do. Except for the easy permeation by ants and mosquitos, and for a while birds (when my landlord still had her wheat-grass-growing trays in here I'd wake up in the mornings to like fifteen birds munching on them, then bolting out my windows, leaving bird shit on my floor), the place is great. It's a block from the beach (which I stupidly never go to) and costs about as much as a Cambridge walk-in closet. Satisfied customer.

The only problem is occasional loneliness. I live alone now, and it's kind of quiet. Life with Márcia was never quiet. I loved it, but there was no privacy, and I used to long for solitude like this. Now that I have it it's a mixed blessing. I miss Márcia.

2005-05-05T00:43:00.000-04:00

table

2005-05-05T00:41:00.000-04:00

kitchen

2005-05-05T00:40:00.002-04:00

communications nerve center

2005-05-05T00:35:00.000-04:00

more kitchen

2005-05-05T00:30:00.000-04:00

veranda

arcade fire: pure freaking gold

2005-05-05T00:20:00.000-04:00

Whenever I feel bored, which is much of the time, I monitor the progress of the Arcade Fire from afar. I do this for three reasons. First, I really like their music. Second, the lead singer, Win, was a good friend of mine in high school. We wrote a play together, edited a poetry journal together, started Winter Thaw Weekend together, created an improv comedy troupe together, etc. It is very fun to see a friend of mine famous, and to read various accounts of hipsters... gasp... being three inches away from him!!!! The third reason is that, although I have an outwardly globe-trotting life, in fact things have been pretty sedate for me lately and so I read of the Arcade Fire's exploits, their European tours, and I live vicariously the rock star life. Of course, Win is married and quite religious so his rock star life is probably slightly different from the rock star life of my imagination, yet it works for me all the same.

Another reason, unmentioned above, is that though I've listened to their CD countless times, and heard Win and Regine fooling around in their own living room, I've never actually seen the band perform. My one attempt, summer 2004, was foiled. They were opening for the Unicorns somewhere in Boston, and I'd been told that they were going on at 8:30pm. Dutifully, I arrived at 8:30 sharp, only to find them packing up their instruments. They'd gone on at 8, and now were done. This is before people gave a shit about them. I then had to suffer a set of the Unicorns themselves, but was rewarded by a nice sleepover in Boston with the high-school crew that had come to see them. Now I read the rapturous accounts of their shows, written by the hippest hipsters in the blogosphere, and my mouth can only salivate. This is their golden era, and I have a fear that by the time I come back stateside all the love will be gone. They'll be playing stadiums with the can-do attitude of a post-rehab Axl Rose. Win himself will be rancorous and morbidly obese, throwing beer bottles at reporters and fans alike. They'll be on their seventh drummer, and Win his third wife/collaborator. Regine will have divorced him, written a tell-all biography, and started her own psychic hotline.

Or not. I think they'll be fine, actually.

Photos via Us Kids Know, le blog exuberance, and me.

2005-05-05T00:01:00.000-04:00

crowd surfing at coachella

2005-05-04T23:57:00.000-04:00

it's the canadian edition, but still...

2005-05-04T23:55:00.000-04:00

win in ego-stroking stereo, also at coachella

2005-05-04T23:30:00.000-04:00

quieter days: new year's eve 2003

supreme court of laffs

2005-05-04T23:05:00.000-04:00

Is this funny? Why is this the first thing I think to post? In any event, Volokh Conspiracy has a thread about "funny" passages in Supreme Court decisions, such decisions, of course, being typically stroke-inducingly boring. These are moments in which the justices, punch-drunk surely after a wacky all-nighter of deliberation, realized that nobody really read these things that carefully, and anyway they had tenure. Some selections:

Justice Stevens' concurrence in Widmar v. Vincent (1980):

Because every university's resources are limited, an educational institution must routinely make decisions concerning the use of the time and space that is available for extracurricular activities. In my judgment, it is both necessary and appropriate for those decisions to evaluate the content of a proposed student activity. I should think it obvious, for example, that if two groups of 25 students requested the use of a room at a particular time -- one to view Mickey Mouse cartoons and the other to rehearse an amateur performance of Hamlet -- the First Amendment would not require that the room be reserved for the group that submitted its application first. Nor do I see why a university should have to establish a "compelling state interest" to defend its decision to permit one group to use the facility and not the other. In my opinion, a university should be allowed to decide for itself whether a program that illuminates the genius of Walt Disney should be given precedence over one that may duplicate material adequately covered in the classroom.

Scalia's dissent in Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419, 466-67 (1995):

Facial features are the primary means by which human beings recognize one another. That is why police departments distribute "mug" shots of wanted felons, rather than Ivy-League-type posture pictures; it is why bank robbers wear stockings over their faces instead of floor-length capes over their shoulders; it is why the Lone Ranger wears a mask instead of a poncho; and it is why a criminal defense lawyer who seeks to destroy an identifying witness by asking "You admit that you saw only the killer's face?" will be laughed out of the courtroom.

Ginsburg in her dissent in Muscarello v. United States:

"Popular films and television productions provide corroborative illustrations. In 'The Magnificent Seven,' for example, O'Reilly (played by Charles Bronson) says: 'You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers.' See http://us.imdb.com/M/search_quotes?for=carry. And in the television series 'M*A*S*H,' Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda) presciently proclaims: 'I will not carry a gun. . . . I'll carry your books, I'll carry a torch, I'll carry a tune, I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even "hari-kari" if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!'"

Scalia again, in Blakely v. Washington, 124 S. Ct. 2531, 2542 n.12 (2004):

To be sure, Justice Breyer and the other dissenters would forbid those increases of sentence that violate the constitutional principle that tail shall not wag dog. The source of this principle is entirely unclear. Its precise effect, if precise effect it has, is presumably to require that the ratio of sentencing-factor add-on to basic criminal sentence be no greater than the ratio of caudal vertebrae to body in the breed of canine with the longest tail. Or perhaps no greater than the average such ratio for all breeds. Or perhaps the median.

Scalia yet again, in Chicago v Morales:

My contribution would go something like this: Tony, a member of the Jets criminal street gang, is standing alongside and chatting with fellow gang members while staking out their turf at Promontory Point on the South Side of Chicago; the group is flashing gang signs and displaying their distinctive tattoos to passersby. Officer Krupke, applying the Ordinance at issue here, orders the group to disperse. After some speculative discussion (probably irrelevant here) over whether the Jets are depraved because they are deprived, Tony and the other gang members break off further conversation with the statement–not entirely coherent, but evidently intended to be rude–"Gee, Officer Krupke, krup you." A tense standoff ensues until Officer Krupke arrests the group for failing to obey his dispersal order.

blogging back from the dead

2005-05-04T18:58:00.000-04:00

Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek. The coffin lid swings slowly open, and one emaciated hand, its flesh greened and decaying, reaches out into the darkness... grasping toward... the keyboard!

I'm currently listening to Michael Jackson's Thriller, and recently read Dan Savage's advice to a zombie fetishist, if that's any explanation. Also, I'm returning to blogging.

Why the no blogging? (You might ask, if anyone is still coming here, which is doubtful.) Well, I've got a simple explanation: no internet. I moved to a new city, and took a trip to the States, and it wasn't until this week that I got internet connected at my new apartment. Sure I frequented the odd internet café, and sponged access off a friend or two, but it just wasn't the same. I need to be in my pajamas to blog. And they look at you weird if you wear them at the public library terminals.

The short summary of my life is that I am now pleasantly ensconced in Rio de Janeiro, in the swank neighborhood of Ipanema, and am working at Viva Cred, an NGO that is Rio's largest microlender. I have been here about a month now, subtracting out my US trip, and I am enjoying myself. Still working on building up a friend base, as everyone I knew I left behind in Salvador. But all together, things are good. Good. Now begins the process of unpacking leftovers from the last couple months...

friends on the web, and news of me

2005-03-25T16:14:00.000-04:00

Some friends of mine have recently had notable web-events. The good folks at Third Ward Community Bike Center have just put up a new website, handmade in the style of 1997 homepages, featuring far more and better information than their old site and many photos of adorable children operating spot-welders. Also neo-neocon, who has been blogging far more prolifically than anyone else I know, just got profiled by bigtime blogger Norman Geras. Read the interview.

As for me I'm in the US right now, checking out econ PhD programs, visiting friends, and trying to make big decisions about the next 5+ years of my life. So far it's been a fun and completely hectic trip. It's something of a relief to be back in the States for a little while, and to get to speak English to everyone. (Though for a while I was still saying "excuse me" in Portuguese whenever I bumped into someone, and it took me nearly a week to break the habit of throwing used toilet paper in the wastebasket.) Life is easier here in the States, at least for someone like me who grew up here, and it's been wonderful to see friends. But I'm also eager to get back. I find myself doing that annoying thing where I start every sentence with "In Brazil..."

I'm going to be in the Bay area Saturday the 26th to Tuesday the 29th, New Hampshire Wed nesday the 30th to Friday the 1st, and Boston Saturday the 2nd to Friday the 8th. If you're in any of those places and want to hang out, please give a holler.

roland goes public

2005-03-20T13:03:00.000-04:00

The New York Times Magazine just came out with a feature on Roland Fryer, the Harvard professor I worked for for about a year. I'm actually mentioned a little bit (in a scene that the journalist misinterpreted, but oh well). In general I think it's a pretty good article, so you should read it.

viva, viva cred!

2005-03-07T19:55:00.000-04:00

Hooray. I finally, finally hav ea job. Today I went in for what I expected to be an interview (man, how I was dreading that Portuguese interview) at a microcredit agency called Viva Cred here in Rio, but in fact it was my first day of work. Fine by me. I am quite relieved. And also actually really exhausted -- I forgot what it was like to spend a long day at work. I more or less shadowed a guy named Berto, who goes around to all the different satellite offices and has the case workers make little presentations to him about potential clients, then he acts really skeptical andlowers the amount of money the caseworker wants to give. I really like Berto -- he was really funny and smart. Most of the clients live in favelas, and the main office itself is at the base of what may bethe city's largest favela, Rocinha. By large I mean an estimated 180,000 people. Berto himself grew up in Rocinha. Anyway, still many things to work out like how much time I'm going to spend there, what I will be doing, where I will live, etc. But I'm excited and relieved and exhausted. I'll surely write much more about this place once I know more and I'm not at an insanely expensive internet café (Rio is awful in that respect). But yeah, I'm really happy I can stop searching and start working and learning.

off to rio...

2005-03-04T15:59:00.000-04:00

As you might have gathered from my last couple posts, I haven't been having a really awesome time in São Paulo. Mostly this is context -- I'm here to try to get a job, so I've put off friend-making and all that enjoyable stuff for later. Social isolation makes me work harder, and it doesn't make much sense to put a lot of energy into meeting people if there's a good chance I'm about to leave. But beyond that, it really is a big old gray city. They weren't kidding about that.

So, I am rather pleased to announce that my non-roots São Paulo policy is paying off. I'm leaving tomorrow. One of my leads in Rio just got a whole lot more promising, and I'm going out there to have a meeting at the place I might work. Nothing is set of course, but they seem quite nice and interested in having me. It would be wonderful if this job-search thing could finally come to an end. And I know more people in Rio than in São Paulo, so social adjustment would be easier. Plus, it's like the most beautiful city on earth. I'm trying not to get too excited, because I know from experience how promising things can unravel.

To Rio!

regional specialties

2005-03-04T15:39:00.000-04:00

I find that most people think of foreign countries as all one thing, or all another. France has berets and baguettes. Russia is snowy with vodka and chronic depression. We all know the stereotypes, and surely there are places in these countries that fit the stereotypes rather well. But rarely do we pay attention to variation within countries. I remember being shocked to learn that Swiss people, near the Italian border, spoke Italian. But they’re Swiss! How could it be?? How could someone wearing leiderhosen speak Italian? Oh wait, they don’t wear leiderhosen there either. Specifics aside, I think that most people are unaccustomed to the very idea of such variation, don’t remember that countries contain interlocking cultures and linguistic groups, and that national boundaries don’t always fall along the natural fault lines.

This is equally true of foreigner’s opinions of the US. Probably the most common question I am asked regarding the US is, it is hot there? Well, that kind of depends on where you are, and when. The US is a big place. There is a lot of variety within the US, with regards to weather and nearly everything else. There are parts that speak Spanish, and parts that speak English, parts that are tropical, freezing, liberal, conservative, and on and on. We Americans are used to this by now, with regard to America, but for a lot of people here it’s news. And likelwise, most Americans don't extend the insight to other countries.

Brazil is also a big place. In fact, it’s slightly bigger than the continental US. And, unsurprisingly, it contains a lot of variation. It contains far more variation than I’ve had opportunity to see so far—the Amazon region to the northwest is gigantic and purportedly different from everything else, with a much stronger Indian culture than elsewhere. But I have seen Bahia, and I’ve seen a little bit of the south, and now I’m in São Paulo. (Moving from Bahia to SP is a little like moving from New Orleans to Chicago, and about the same distance.)

Regional differences in Brazil are stark—geologically, racially, linguistically, and culturally. I’ve already talked enough about Bahia and the northeast that if you are a regular reader you are probably crying mercy. But to recap, the climate is tropical, the people are almost entirely black, and the region is a font of arts and culture: much of the music, dance, and religion and many associate with Brazil as a whole are in fact endemic to Bahia. It’s the sort of place where you actually encounter dancing in the streets regularly. Márcia likes to take her pandeiro around with her and start little parties: on the bus, on the ferry, waiting in line. People join in.

In contrast, I spent a few days in Belo Horizonte, a little north of SP, and one night I went to a club. A club, I thought—time to cut loose. But everyone was standing around. A couple of the Brazilians I was with started to joke around and try to get the gringo to dance, but within a minute or two it became clear I was actually the only one who could dance, or at least the only one who was willing. One of them, it all seriousness, came up to me afterward to say that I danced really well. It was bizarre—I was like, aren’t you guys Brazilian? In Bahia my fairly unskilled dancing ensured I was nearly always the worst on any dance floor. There is in fact a classic bossanova tune called “Falsa Baiana” about the Bahian girl who doesn’t know how to dance, and therefore isn’t a true baiana. And in fact I saw four year old girls in Bahia who could samba the pants off most professionals. But there in Belo Horizonte they don’t grow up with it. They receive it second-hand, and try to imitate it sometimes, but it’s not part of their culture.

Down south near Porto Alegre, things are different yet again. The people are mostly Germanic and Scandinavian. There are cities in which German is the main language, and is taught in schools. The music is polka-rhythmed and accordion-heavy. The accent, for reasons I don't understand, features r's that are almost exactly like American r's. There are also many Spanish-speakers from Argentina and Uruguay. Everyone goes around sipping those crazy addictive maté things, which make you look like you’re drinking grass-clippings through a smoking pipe, and taste about the same.

I’m interested in how culture and context effect how one thinks and acts and interacts. For instance, I found it incredibly difficult to do anything in Bahia besides hang out. Now that I’m here in SP I’ve been a little flurry of activity. (Though I don’t know if this is culture or desperation.) It was very easy in Bahia to strike up conversations with random people, but here it feels harder for the simple reason that it’s less commonly done, and therefore perceived as weirder. (It is still, however, far easier than in Boston.)

My perceptions of race have also changed. In Bahia, virtually all of my friends were black. I was in fact the only white person at my surprise birthday party. After just a day or two in the city this felt really natural, more natural than I had ever expected. I think that when everybody is X, X starts to feel like the normal order of things and you kind of forget about it, even if you yourself are not X. It’s just the norm, and other salient characteristics arise that distinguish people.

In the US, I sometimes feel a barrier in interacting with black people. I don’t particularly think this is my fault, or “racism.” I just think that in the US, still, a white person and a black person being friends is a thing, and any friendship you might have will have that thing-ness hanging over it. Brazil has a much different history, and though it also had slavery, things have since worked out quite differently (not necessarily better, mind you). For one, there’s been a lot more intermarriage. I’ve often heard people say “tinha um monte de missegenação,” which means “there was a mountain of miscegenation.” Sometimes they’ll say this while narrating the features of their faces: curly hair from Africa, a straight nose from Europe, wide cheekbones from South America. In any event, there has always been more intimacy between races in Brazil than in the US, and a white and black person being friends is definitely not a thing. Given this context, I found it extremely easy to slip into a mostly black social milieu.

But here in São Paulo, for the first time in a long time, I’ve been getting a little twist of nervousness when I'm on the street and a couple of young black men turn the corner toward me. What is this? Did I suddenly get racist? Well, I think it’s context. In Bahia, being black is the norm. It doesn't give the observer much information. In mostly-white São Paulo, being black means you’re more likely to be poor, more likely to be desperate, more likely to mug me. People I wouldn’t have blinked at a week ago, or might have considered potential friends, I now find myself eyeing warily. It's unfortunate, but I can't help it.

To take another example, in Bahia I spent a lot of time with working-class people. In Belo Horizonte, I stayed with a family solidly in the upper middle class. Driving around town in their car (something I hadn’t done in months), with the mother compulsively locking the doors whenever someone the slightest bit raggedy came close, the fear became infectious. And I realized, if someone up to no good saw me with the folks in Bahia they’d leave me alone, but here sitting in this car with a bunch of nervous rich people I became a potential target. It's a lot more likely, to the observer at least, that I would have money. Context influences a lot. We’ll see how things go in this new context.

a good day in são paulo

2005-02-28T20:22:00.000-04:00

To be honest, I've been down a bit the last couple days. São Paulo is dreary, I have no friends, and nobody seems to want a volunteer messing up their microfinance operation. But today marked something of a change. I've been on a truly awful schedule ever since Carnaval (which I will blog about some day) wherein I go to sleep between 4 and 5:30 and wake up between noon and 1. Today I wanted a change so I set my alarm for 9:30, and though I fell asleep at 5:30 like usual, I woke up on my own at 8:30. I tried to go back to sleep (I didn't want to be a total wreck) but I couldn't -- I was jittery and ready to go.

My friend Rachel wrote to me to say she thought it was good I left Salvador, that it was:

...like one of those fairy tales where the hero stops to rest in a beautiful garden,
but then begins to lose days and days there because it's so relaxed and all the
attractive people want him to stay. You can check out any time you like,
but you can never leave. But then finally he rouses himself because he
really believes in the Holy Grail, or the damsel, or the microfinance
job.

To which I responded:

Your enchanted garden metaphor was quite apt. I finally shook off the fairy
dust, picked up my now rusted sword, used it to hack off my immense beard (now
gray with age), and barreled off into the forest.

It feels like that. I'm really sad to be gone (and listening to tons of nostalgia-inducing baiana music) but I'm also kind of buzzed, and ready to get a move on. So this morning I shot out of bed after three hours sleep, took a shower, and headed to my favorite internet café to write all the emails I could possibly think of to everyone who ever had anything to do with microfinance. If I don't get a job after this, I'm not getting one.

My favorite internet café is in Liberdade, the Japanese part of town, and it is perpetually filled with Japanese-Brazilian youth yelling and playing networked wargames. Strangely, my favorite internet café in Vancouver was almost exactly the same, but with Korean-Canadians. But back up, Japanese-Brazilians? you might be asking. Yep, a whole lot of them. For reasons I don't quite understand, there has been a massive immigration of Japanese people to Brazil in the last hundred years, centered around the São Paulo area. A fun factoid is that SP has the largest Japanese population of any city outside Japan. Some day soon I plan to go to the Museum of Japanese-Brazilian history, around the corner from the internet, and then perhaps I'll tell you more. Or maybe Jamie knows about this.

So anyway, I sat for four and a half hours trying to compose formal-sounding emails in Portuguese, while all around me people squawked that so-and-so had killed their half-elf. It was weird. But I got a lot done. Then I went out into the sunlight (first sunny day!) and wandered around a bit, finally finding myself in front of a real estate agency. I had decided to wait for a job before committing to an apartment, but I was already here so why not take a look. Inside an extremely nice Japanese woman named Keiko showed me listings while serving me green tea. It was wonderful. She spoke Portuguese in that slow immigrant's way, which for me is easier to understand than a native speaker. Then we went out together to see apartments in the neighborhood. She became concerned about my cough (I've got a lingering cough from my Carnaval cold) and insisted on buying me a cup of acerola juice.

The upshot is that I really liked one of the apartments. It's cheap enough, nice view, big windows and terrace, and has a great location two blocks from the Metro and on one of the main streets of Liberdade, near lots of cheap noodle shops. There's wireless internet in the lobby of the building, and the landlord is really nice. Best of all it's month-to-month, so I don't need to pay a large fee for breaking my lease in August. I want desperately to move in but... I have no job. And if I get one, there's no guarantee it'll be in São Paulo. I want to put down roots here but I don't think I can yet.

i'm in sampa, yo

2005-02-27T00:11:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone, I just wanted to do a little explaining of my up-til-now inexplicable absence from the blogosphere. There are two reasons for it, actually.

Reason one is that I got a little sick of blogging. After enthusiatically pouring out reams about the WSF et al., I got a bit burnt out. I think it needs to go like that for me: a while on, a while off. I have no clue how the bigtime bloggers manage. (Though now even Andrew Sullivan has decided to take a rest after 4 1/2 years of steady blogging. However, his idea of a rest has so far included far more blogging than I've ever done.)

Reason two is that I just moved to São Paulo. I did this because I really want to find a job/volunteer microfinance thing, get to work, and fulfill the terms of my fellowship. I think there are opportunities to do this here in SP than in Bahia. Up until now I've been living an excruciatingly lazy life in Salvador, only occasionally making very weak attempts at moving forward with this plan. It's very easy to put things off when people are contantly inviting you to the beach. I think I really internalized some of the Bahian attitudes during my time there -- and not in a good way.

After a while it became clear that nothing would ever change if I stayed in Bahia. I loved Márcia dearly, and the city was an orgy of delights, but, well, I just wasn't getting anything done. So I packed up my shit, made my goodbyes, and left.

Now I'm in São Paulo. Whereas all of Brazil adores Salvador (today I bought mangos from a man extolling their Bahian origin, as if it mattered: "Bahian mangos! Land of Caetano! Land of Gil!") all of Brazil loves to heap scorn on São Paulo. Ever other popular song is about the wonders of Bahia, but the one song in the cannon about São Paulo, "Sampa" by Caetano Veloso, scrapes the bottom of the barrel by praising the "hard concrete poetry of [its] streets" and then just totally loses it and describes the "ugly smoke that rises, blotting out the stars."

In short, Sampa is not a pretty town. So far it has rained every day. There is no ocean. It's huge: the fourth, third, or second largest city in the world, depending on who's counting. And it's ugly, no doubt about it. And yet somehow... I dunno, I'm enchanted.

Everyone thinks I'm crazy to leave Salvador for Sampa, and maybe I am. But there's something about this place -- I have the feeling things are actually getting done. It's Brazil, but totally different. It's far more international. I don't stick out as a tourist, and indeed there aren't many tourists at all (unlike Rio or Salvador, for reasons that should be now be obvious). It makes me excited, I can't explain it.

Also, I'm now getting stuff done because I'm in a sort of social exile. I'm staying with a 60-something-year-old friend of a friend, who is an extremely nice man, but I don't know anyone my age and indeed have nearly nothing to do every day but set up this job. I pursued some seemingly unpromising leads, and now they seem far more promising. I won't go into details, but I hope I'll have something soon. Then I'll get an apartment, which should be easy -- according to my host there are currently 16,000 empty apartment units in the city, perhaps testament to how everyone seems to hate the place. But not me. At least not yet. Time will tell.

wsf addendum: separation anxiety already

2005-02-17T02:09:00.000-04:00

My observant and intelligent friend Seth sent me an email today I'd like to excerpt from:

If you had explained why you once believed in some of this stuff and why you changed your mind, then you would allow people the opportunity (and I think that this is what Bananarchist wants) to debate you point for point on what is reasonable... What I imagine is frustrating for Mandy is that you make statements that you're leaving her camp (which she clearly strongly identifies with), and yet you don't provide her with an opportunity to defend the reasons. It's like never arguing with your girlfriend and then breaking up, without ever giving her a chance to hash out your differences and deal with your problems, but just telling her that you've finally realized that she's a total bitch and walking out the door. . . Actually it's not like that very much at all, but maybe you see my point in there. And I hope that you understand that I see your side of not wanting to turn your blog into a point my point discussion of left/right politics and policies, but just wanting to make some statements about the strong (and reasonable) reaction that you had to the world social forum.

Yeah, he's right, I haven't really given my reasons. I would if it were at all simple, but it's not. My modified opinions are the result of 1,000 different things I've read and experiences I've had over the course of several years. I don't know if I could go back and retrace the steps, and even if I could it would take more time than I'm ready to spend. There was no silver bullet argument I read somewhere. I realize this can be frustrating to the people who want to know why. Perhaps sometime I could do it for a particular topic: try to go back and find some of what I thought were the more persuasive facts and arguments, then put them out there for Bananarchist and others to take potshots at. This would be a very good thing, but I'm not ready to do it right now. (Note: Seth may be cooking up a blog dedicated to this very concept. Stay tuned.) So I'll say I recognize this as a problem, I'm sorry about it, and maybe sometime soon I'll address it. But for now: CARNAVAL!

back to brazil

2005-02-16T01:05:00.000-04:00

Enough for now with the heavy politics. My friend Mariamma just dumped a bunch of pictures on me so here are some to share. First off are pictures of the Festival de Yemanjá, the mother/ocean godess in the Candomblé pantheon. This festival involves throwing flowers into the ocean. It is a very beautiful festival, but I opted out because this year it happened to fall on the day after the Forum and the day before Carnaval. I sat at home with the lights off and tried to recover my energies. Luckily though, Mariamma took pictures for you all.

There are also pictures of a cool community recycling program I know nothing about, the area around Lençois which I went to but neglected to take a camera, and the Lavagem do Bonfim, which is another festival which happened in January.

2005-02-16T00:57:00.000-04:00

throwing flowers into the sea

2005-02-16T00:56:00.000-04:00

the bay full of boats

2005-02-16T00:51:00.000-04:00

balls made of fitas (good luck ribbons)

2005-02-16T00:50:00.000-04:00

a procession at yemanjá

2005-02-16T00:49:00.002-04:00

a capoeira circle at the festival of yemanjá

2005-02-16T00:49:00.001-04:00

more capoeira

2005-02-16T00:49:00.000-04:00

more capoeira

2005-02-16T00:48:00.001-04:00

more recycling

2005-02-16T00:48:00.000-04:00

a community recycling program called "paciencia viva" in the neighborhood of rio vermelho

2005-02-16T00:47:00.001-04:00

a dog and a mosaic in rio vermelho

2005-02-16T00:47:00.000-04:00

more recycling

2005-02-16T00:46:00.000-04:00

some pictures of the landscape and caverns around lençois, where i was a month ago but forgot to bring my camera

2005-02-16T00:45:00.000-04:00

the cachoeira da fumaça, one of the tallest waterfalls (380m) in brazil

2005-02-16T00:44:00.000-04:00

families cavort near a natural waterslide

2005-02-16T00:43:00.001-04:00

yet another pre-carnaval festival, the lavagem do bonfim. it is literally the "washing" of the church of bonfim -- they scrub the steps. this is part of the way along the 8km march to the church.

2005-02-16T00:43:00.000-04:00

i can't resist -- it looks just like a dick

2005-02-16T00:42:00.000-04:00

a man ties a fita on the gate of the church to make a wish

2005-02-16T00:41:00.000-04:00

the crowd at bonfim

2005-02-16T00:39:00.000-04:00

the photographer at leisure

wsf finale(?): i just can't shut up about it

2005-02-15T20:26:00.000-04:00

I can't shut up about it. Because it was really memorable. It got me interested and riled up and hopeful and mad. It was a really strange place, and I'm trying to make some sense of it and of my own political feelings right now.

Bananarchist has accused me of focusing not on politics, but on style and image. I can't say I disagree. I think that style and image matter. A fashionable issue can edge a less fashionable but perhaps far more important issue entirely out of the discourse. Style sets the stage for politics, and can seriously circumscribe it.

What I saw at the Forum was not, for the most part, people debating politics. It was people engaging in elaborate shows of support for one or another cause. People displaying their credentials as enlightened radicals for one another, then going for drinks. I went to a lot of workshops, a lot more than most people, but I'm not exaggerating when I say I saw very little debate or dissention of any kind. This is of course not simply a problem of the left. I think that any group, when they all get together, has a tendency to appear to agree. Actual dissention happens in the halls, afterward, when people speak one-on-one: "I'm not sure what I thought of that..."

The real problem I've been trying to pin down is perhaps not the lack of debate. As I said, I don't think that conferences actually foster debate. My problem was the "conscensus" at the Forum. I use the quotes pointedly. As both Bananarchist and I agree, it was of course not a conscensus in the sense of a thing everyone believes. But it was, I think, still very important. It was the set of ideas one could hold without having to explain oneself. It was the square one of the Forum. Any divergence was a statement, a challenge.

To be a little more explicit, I am talking about beliefs such as the following: The US is an imperial power hellbent on world domination. Israel is a terrorist state and ought to be destroyed. Free trade is nothing more than a scheme for multinationals to tighten their stranglehold on the people of the world. And so on. I could have run around the Forum with a cape on screaming any one of these things and no one would have batted an eyelash. But if I had held up a placard saying something quite moderate, something like "The US Occasionally Does Positive Things", I know that I would have been pounced upon. Not violently, but people would have come up and said "the US never does positive things!" or "why do you have that placard?" and then we might have talked about it. Probably they'd even concede a positive thing the US had done (tsunami relief?) and that would be that, but the fact remains such a sign would be a statement. The conscensus made certain things hard to say.

Several people have accused me of being condescending in my description of my "shift", for lack of a better word. For instance, Seth writes:

What strikes me about your WSF posts and your unveiled conservatism is that it
is done with a flair that you sometimes have for pulling the legs out from under
false prophets... you sometime seem to allow the pleasure in being the one to
knock the legs out from under a poorly constructed leftist obscure the fact that
it was deserved. It seems a little mean.

Well, it was never my intent to be mean. Neo-neocon writes:

I have noticed that it is almost inevitable, when one is saying something like,
"I used to believe 'A,' but now I believe 'B,'" and you are addressing someone
who continues to believe "A," then there is a tendency for that person to hear
you as condescending, whether you are really conveying that attitude or not.
Inherent in the idea of someone changing his/her mind from one position to
another is that the person must think the second position is superior to the
first--else why the change? So, whether or not the changer intends to be
condescending, the reader/listener hears condescension because in fact it is
implicit. There doesn't seem to be any way to avoid this--it is inherent in the
situation.

And what is my "shift" after all? Bananarchist writes, "I'm not sure from what he describes that there is any movement in his beliefs or values." If my core values haven't changed then something else has. Maybe certain of my opinions about how best to achieve those core values. Maybe the strength of my self-identification with the left has wavered. Again, Seth:

You're assuming that you had the best argument for leftism out there, and once
that argument was overcome you switched camps. Most people... assume that just
because their argument has lost doesn't mean switch camps, it means search for a
better argument and try to stay in the same camp.

I have two thoughts on this. 1. Why, except perhaps the desire to not admit one may have been wrong in the past, do people feel the need to stay in the same camp? 2. Though I say I'm flirting with the right, I don't really mean it. I could no sooner "join" the right than I could wear penny loafers and alligator shirts and attend bible study every week. In this context, left/right it is less a political label than a cultural/fashion/style label. I've always felt like a leftist and will probably always continue to feel like one. It's just hard to cozy up to a right that is so, well, culturally different from me. I'm of the left, and whatever beliefs I end up holding I will do so as a member of the left.

The people at the Forum were not, as Bananarchist wrote, "an arbitrary cluster of people whom you have taken as representative of what you call the 'far left.'" They were not "arbitrary" -- the Forum is explicitly a forum for the world's left. When I criticize, say, the conscensus the at the Forum I believe I am fingering a real problem of the left right now, something that it needs to deal with. But it is true that the Forum is not all there is to the left, not by a long shot. Neo-neocon again:

As for your quest for a left with more honesty and more sense--you write, "And I
know there are millions of people out there ready to join that left, ready to be
well-informed thoughtful participants, ready even to give Bush his due if he
actually does something right. I want to join that movement, but it doesn't
exist." Actually, I think that it does exist--or, at least, that there are a
number of like-minded people actively speaking out as representatives of that
group, and searching for others.

For starters, among bloggers, there are the following liberals (I don't think
they'd call themselves "leftists," but at least they do not consider themselves
conservatives, and many of them used to be leftists prior to 9/11) who might be
considered to be part of that movement you are seeking--although they are on the
more conservative wing of it. The first one that comes to mind would be Michael
Totten at http://www.michaeltotten.com ; also there is Jeff Jarvis at
http://www.buzzmachine.com/ and then there is Roger Simon at
http://www.rogerlsimon.com . Although Christopher Hitchens is not a blogger,
he's a man with much of interest to say (although I certainly disagree with some
of his positions). He clearly identifies himself with the left, and he supports
the war in Iraq. Further on the left (in fact I believe he's a Marxist and a
socialist) is Norman Geras at http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/ .
Particularly interesting is his call to fellow-leftists (what he calls the
"principled left"--that's a nice term, isn't it?) to stop being apologists for
tyranny and tyrants
http://www.normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_07_27_normangeras_archive.html#105948316257163866. Also, you have folks such as these (I'm not too familiar with them, but they
certainly seem to be leftists who support some of what's going on currently in
Iraq) http://www.labourfriendsofiraq.org.uk/

One last note on political engagement and this very long post will be done. Bananarchist criticizes me for complaining without doing anything about it:

When you don’t like the politics that you are being associated with, you get the
chance to reshape those politics. Airing your political gripes is a lot more
meaningful than silently filling up on Hate-o-rade at the forum and then coming
home to blog your misgivings about something that can’t return your fire. So if
the recycling and trash bags at the conference are overflowing, then make a
sign. Talk to the organizers. Take twenty seconds to put up a $.01 piece of
folded plastic to remedy the immediate situation. Don’t just blog about it.
If you think that your small acts of speaking out didn’t give you enough of a
voice at the conference, organize a caucus of like-minded people to air your
concerns at the next WSF. That might still make you feel like you are a tiny
island of reasonable dissent in a sea of illogic, but I urge you away from your
first response this time around, which was to flee toward any alternative (in
this case, your "flirtation" with the "right"). Get over your fear of being
categorized with people whose political beliefs aren’t exact mirrors of your
own, and then reshape this category so that voices of reason like yours can be
heard. All right? Don’t pretend "left" is something that it is not.

First, though I didn't organize a caucus I did talk to a lot of people. Some were receptive but most, though polite, were not. Second, blogging is not a place to gripe that "can't return your fire." Bananarchist has proven that well enough. I came here to blog as a way to work things out in a place where everyone could see, and comment, and criticize. The Forum did not end in Porto Alegre two weeks ago. It lives on in these discussions, in this caucus. (Now I'm getting melodramatic, sorry.) All I mean is that this is as good a forum as any I've found, and anyone who thinks blogs can't have effects in the real world has been in a coma since 2002.

Third, and lastly, though I am currently attached to the left, I don't see this as such a good thing. I would like to be as unattached as possible. Too much investment in labels, left or right, can seriously dement one's thinking, making one unwilling to criticize within ranks, and too ready to criticize outside them. I'll always be a leftist by culture, but I hope that when it comes to the issues I'll take them one by one.

wsf 8: photos

2005-02-15T11:34:00.000-04:00

For those of you who hate to read, here are photos.

2005-02-15T03:58:00.000-04:00

imagine a couple miles of this

2005-02-15T03:57:00.001-04:00

a common sentiment

2005-02-15T03:57:00.000-04:00

i liked this dude. he was dancing a samba very badly

2005-02-15T03:56:00.001-04:00

one of the forum's less-well-expressed ideas

2005-02-15T03:56:00.000-04:00

a workshop with simultaneous radio translation. to get a radio people had to leave an ID. passports from around the world

2005-02-15T03:55:00.000-04:00

many workshops took place in these warehouses. water on other side

2005-02-15T03:54:00.000-04:00

me working the information booth and holding up an amazingly juicy peach

2005-02-15T03:53:00.000-04:00

rebecca & co. had their workshop in one of these cool mud-and-thatch buildings made expecially for the environmental section

2005-02-15T03:51:00.000-04:00

these people woke me on the last day by playing sertanejo music right beside my tent. i would have been mad, but they were really good

2005-02-15T03:50:00.000-04:00

camp moveout day was really hot and the fire department came by with some hoses. the crowd spontanteously started to chant "the people, united, will never be defeated" but changed the word "united" to "wet". it rhymes in portuguese

wsf 7: afghanistan and darfur

2005-02-14T02:52:00.000-04:00

The first revelation came while viewing a photo exhibit about the women of Afghanistan. The photos showed middle-aged women learning the alphabet, young women taking computer courses. There were mini-interviews in which the women talked about the challenges they experienced, their dreams and aspirations. Though the exhibit's intro text was fairly dark, talking about oppression and such, the pictures and interviews themselves were nothing if not uplifting. The women's lives were difficult, sure, but they expressed a great deal of hope.

Stepping back, I was struck by the fact that this was the first time I'd seen any mention of Afghanistan at the Forum. Why no Afghanistan? Perhaps because it was pretty stable right now. There had been elections, there was a new government, no one was getting blown up. You have to imagine that if there were still an insurgency Afghanistan would have been on every other placard in the place, like Iraq was. But things were going relatively well, so no one spoke of it. (I'll also mention that good news from Iraq was similarly unmentioned. The last day of the Forum was the Iraqi election, but you wouldn't know it to be there.)

The exhibit itself appeared to have undergone some sort of heavy editing. There was no mention of either the US or the Taliban. How could this be? In an exhibit on the current state of Afghanistan? It was as if the organizers had done everything possible to avoid any insinuation that the US might have played any sort of positive role in Afghanistan. Why were these middle-aged women learning to read now, as opposed to any other time? Makes you wonder.

So there I stood in front of a beautiful set of pictures and interviews of Afghani women, an exhibit which, if some context were supplied, would have reflected somewhat favorably on the US. I wondered what other people thought of this, so, taking Mandy's advice retroactively, I resolved to do something about it. I wrote out a set of questions to ask people who came to see the exhibit. "After seeing these pictures, what do you think of the current state of Afghanistan?" "Who do you think is responsible?" "Do you think the country was better or worse under the Taliban?" "Do you think the US was right to overthrow the Taliban?" I sat with these questions (and a few more) nearly 20 minutes, waiting for people to come. But the hour was late and the room was poorly-marked and uninviting. Nobody came. My resolve waned and I moved on.

The second revelation was the combined result of two art pieces. The first was a dance performance by a Palestinian dance troupe. It was actually really good -- circle dances and such.During this performance someone went around handing out leaflets denouncing the "Israeli genocide" of the Palestinians. Whatever one's feelings about the Israel/Palestine situation, "genocide" seems a tough case to make. For one, the total number of people killed is, in the greater scheme of things, rather small. A pro-Palestinian site lists an estimate of 3,334 Palestinians killed during the first 4 years of the intifada. This is of course not a happy number, but from the numbers alone it seems a stretch to make the case for genocide, especially in the context of an ongoing war of attrition in which people from both sides are dying.

(A note about death toll numbers. I have a few problems with how they are often used in the Israel/Palestine conflict. For one, the Palestinians numbers almost always include suicide bombers themselves, and Palestinians killed by other Palestinians. Also, there is rarely a distiction made between combatants and non-combatants. According to this rather detailed report, as of Feb. 2003 45% of Palestinian deaths were civilians, as opposed to 80% of Israeli deaths. Similarly, 32% of Israeli deaths were women, but only 5% of Palestinian deaths.)

Jump ahead a couple days, and I'm back at the art exhibits, wandering around the really back rooms. And there I find, totally deserted, an exhibit dealing with Darfur. And again I think, where's Darfur at the Forum? Why does no one mention Darfur? Darfur is probably the biggest ongoing human tragedy in the world right now. There is most definitely a genocide there. But not a word about it at the Forum, just a little art exhibit in a back back room.

Seriously though, why? Why do people run around crowing about genocide in Israel when there's a very real genocide happening in Sudan? What are their priorities? Do they actually care about stopping the slaughter of innocent people? I've got a theory, which you can make of what you will. My theory is that there is a narrative going around which is "West screws Developing World." Stories that fit this narrative become popular in places like the Forum. Stories that don't get ignored. When the bad guys are themselves people from the developing world, like the Taliban or the janjaweed, the Forum crowd loses interest. The story has no teeth; you can't use it to nail someone you want to nail. It's not about stopping genocide, it's about sticking it to the West. This is a very cynical view I know, but it seems borne out by what I saw at the Forum. Darfur and Afghanistan wiped from our mental maps.

And I guess this is why I get mad. Because this isn't just about whether you say the US is good or bad. This isn't just about opinions, or fashion, or whatever. I don't make the case that Israel/Palestine isn't genocide just to vindicate Israel. I make it because I want everyone to turn around and do something about a real genocide. There was so much energy, zeal, and rightous fury on display there at the Forum, if just some of that political will were turned toward Darfur there might be some real changes. Hundreds of thousands of people not raped, not killed. Maybe.

wsf 6: microfinance!

2005-02-14T01:41:00.000-04:00

I've now been home from the Forum quite a while, and a whole bunch of notable stuff (Carnaval) has happened in the meantime. However, there's still much to say so I'm just going to keep plugging away when I have the time.

While at the Forum I stayed in the "Acampamento Juventude," which was greatly reminiscent of the great tent cities there used to be at Phish's large summer festivals. Imagine a modestly-sized park filled with, by the official estimate, 35,000 people. Prohibitively long lines for the showers, only not enough portalets to go around. I'm getting old and crotchety, yet I still kind of loved it. I started out in the hip-hop section of the camp, which basically meant that really bad Brazilian MCs freestyled over weak canned beats (but with excellent amps) until 5:30am every night. Then the public address would come on at 8am announcing the day's events in Portuguese (and, as always, pleading for English translators to rise out of their tents and pitch in -- I never quite made it) leaving, you can do the math, very little time for sleeping. After a couple days of this I moved to another section where, though the 8am wakeup call was the same, if I stayed up until 4:30 debating politics with 18 year old Marxists at least I had only myself to blame. Here is a fairly representative picture:

Though there were various special events and speeches (notably Lula and Hugo Chavez) the meat of the Forum was the workshops. There were literally thousands of workshops held in rooms and tents all over the city. The organizers divided the workshops into 11 "thematic spaces." The individual workshops were given by whoever wanted to give them. Any organization in attendence could simply submit a title and be given a room. This had some real advantages (democratization, variety, lots of workshops) and disadvantages (many of the workshops didn't actually occur). My friend Rebecca, who herself gave a workshop, joked with me that there were three basic types of workshop. (Snarky comments to follow.)

The first I will call the "hater" workshop. Someone gets up and talks about how the US/the West/capitalism/corporations/etc. is bad and needs to be stopped. There was a lot of this -- it was maybe the most common kind of workshop. The second type was the "special interest" workshop. Basically, in this workshop an obscure NGO or group of people present their work. The work is probably good and worthwhile, but you really need to be a specialist to understand the context and get anything out of it. Examples:

Participatory Management of Hydrographic Basins: Lessons Learned, Trends, and Challenges
Digital Inclusion: The Experience of the Accessa São Paulo Program
Is Independent Latin Photo-Journalism Possible?

The last kind is the "connections" workshop. In this workshop, several seemingly unrelated related issues are brought together and discussed. Rebecca's workshop on "Forest Rights, Indigenous Communities, and Academia" fits squarely into this category. There is also a fun game where you make up workshops from this category.

And to this I should add a hidden fourth category, unknown to Rebecca, which is the "what the fuck?" workshop. Like this one:

Carbon Trade and the Commodification of the Atmosphere: What Next?

Huh? What next indeed. Most environmentalists support carbon trading as a way to reduce worldwide carbon emissions (some think it's not enough, but that's another issue) but the people running this workshop have bizarrely recast the debate as a public goods/privatization issue, as if it were water rights or something. But there are no carbon rights -- no one wants atmospheric carbon! It's a pollutant and it's not in short supply. I desperately wish I had gone to this workshop just to administer a beatdown.

In any event, reading the program it soon became clear all the workshops that interested me had been shoved into one particular "thematic category":

Autonomous Thought: Reappropriation and Socialization of Knowledge and Technologies

What did it mean? I'm wasn't sure, but on the first day of the Forum I climbed out of my tent at 8am sharp, after two beautiful hours of rest in that maelstrom of radical Brazilian youth, put on my most presentable rumpled clothing, and packed off to the Autonomous Thought section in search of... microfinance. Yes, I had ostensibly come to Brazil to learn something about microfinance, and here was a genuine opportunity.

The morning was clear and my spirits were high as I walked among the waterfront industrial warehouses that had been converted into conference rooms. There were many others out, ID lanyards around their necks, programs in hand, searching for the right rooms. And suddenly I noticed something: these people were adults. Where were the 19 year old hippies? Apparently back at the camp smoking a morning bowl. These people were in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. They wore clean clothing, and the crispness of their step suggested 8 hours sleep in a good hotel. I was consistantly shocked by how little of the conference most of the young people actually attended.

What to say about the microfinance workshops? Well, they appeared to be part of an entirely different conference than the Acampamento. The attendees were almost exclusively people working for microcredit organizations all over Brazil. On the first day we went around introducing ourselves and I was one of the least-credentialed people in the room. Many people wore suits. One of the workshops was actually held in a conference room of Porto Alegre's Central Bank. It looked like this:

In November of 2004 President Lula announced a new initiative to create a federal microfinance program, and much of the debate focused on what form this new program would take, and how to make the transition. People talked a lot about two possible models for the new program, which I'll call "open" and "targeted." The open model seeks the widest access possible, with a minimum of transaction costs. Little attention is paid to vetting the business plans of potential borrowers, or supervising how they spend it. Anyone who wants credit and meets the basic requirements can have it. The targeted model explicitly seeks to use microfinance as a tool for "local development." In this model much more work goes into vetting clients and much more attention paid to how they are going to use the money. Often training of some sort will be offered with the loan. And credit may be withheld from people whose enterprises the lenders believe won't help the community.

The majority of the participants came down on the side of the targeted model. I tend to favor the open model. First, I believe that virtually all microenterprise will help the local community, and that even if some does not, people looking at business plans are unlikely to be able to figure out which is which. I think that by cutting down administrative costs and expanding access you have the potential for much greater impact. I also think that as soon as you ration access you introduce the possibility of politicking. Who gets it and who doesn't are more likely to be determined by who one's friends are (or who pays bribes -- this is Brazil after all) than by merit. I think that adding an extra level of supervision and rationing invites corruption.

Did I raise these points? Well, I was having a hard enough time following the conversation. My doubts about understanding the models correctly, together with my fear of making some huge mistake in Portuguese, plus the natural fear of speaking in front of a large group of experts effectively silenced me.

On the second day the workshop was moved to the Bank, and the crowd was even more distinguished. Brazil's Secretary of Planning spoke from the audience (he wasn't even on the panel) and told a funny story. He had first gone to the tents of the Forum, but found a sign telling him to go to... the Central Bank. He asked someone directions and was told "keep going right!" He finally got there and was surprised that "it wasn't very far after all." This became a little speech on how microfinance had recently moved from the left to the center and from the fringes to the mainstream, and what this might mean for the movement. You kind of had to be there -- he was a really funny guy. There was more discussion about the national program, including political economy stuff I definitely don't know much about. One speaker talked about how, by making this a government policy, it became vulnerable to partisan politics. Apparently a few years ago the city of Belém had a very successful municipal program, but it was completely shut down when the city government changed. Now they are worried that switching much of the microcredit portfolio from independent NGOs to federal bureaus would make it vulnerable when Lula leaves office. This type of political sustainability seemed a larger issue for the participants than financial sustainability, which the only thing I've studied in the past.

All in all, I greatly enjoyed the microcredit conference. Unsurprisingly, I found it the most worthwhile thing at the Forum. It was a little island in a sea of generally unnuanced anti-capitalism. I wondered what the participants in the thematic group "Sovereign Economies: For the People Against Neoliberal Capitalism" (that's not a workshop but one of the 11 categories of workshop) would do if suddenly plopped down there in a room full of people talking about finance. I looked for other things like it at the Forum, but there wasn't much. So yes, the Forum had a diversity of workshop topics. But the proportions were 99%/1% at best.

downloading stuff

2005-02-14T00:02:00.000-04:00

Surfing around the 'net, as they call it, I came across this post on the penalties for file-sharing, which prompted me to rant on and on in the comments section. Here's some of that rant.

Basically, as things stand the penalties for downloading copyrighted material far outweigh the penalties for just walking into a store and shoplifting. The author of the post made the point that this might be justifiable as a way a of detering downloading and shoplifting equally -- if you're much less likely to be caught downloading, it might make sense to have higher penalties in order to achieve an equal deterent effect.

However, is this how our criminal system is supposed to work? Perhaps high penalties for downloading would equalize the determent of downloading and shoplifting, but so what? The point isn't to equalize determent between crimes, but instead to extract the maximum determent for each crime without making the penalties completely out of proportion with the crimes themselves. You could really deter jaywalking if you applied the dealth penalty (think Singapore) but who wants that? And who cares if jaywalking is being detered more or less than public nudity? I'd prefer we deter each crime (except perhaps public nudity) as much as possible without making the penalties unreasonably onerous.

And I think current penalties for downloading copyrighted material are in fact unreasonably onerous. I say this not just because $14,875 is an awful lot to pay for a DVD of Shrek 2. I say it because I believe that, in a fundamental sense, downloading copyrighted music (or movies or anything else) is very different from stealing it.

I believe that a very high proportion of downloaded material -- 95% or more -- is stuff that the downloader would not otherwise buy. Record companies act as if each album downloaded is a CD unbought, and hence lost revenue, but a person will download a lot more albums at $0 than he or she will buy at $15. Back in my Napster days I used it almost exclusively to get pop singles I would never think of buying, and listen to bands people had told me about but that I wasn't ready to drop money on. Napster replaced my CD buying hardly at all (I still bought CDs when I wanted complete albums) and, since it exposed me to much music I wouldn't otherwise have heard, it may actually have increased my music purchases.

This is all to say that the relation between downloading and buying is ambiguous at best, and certainly is nothing near the 1-for-1 that record companies would have you believe. In this context, I see inflated penalties as particularly misguided.

hello works again

2005-02-13T01:33:00.000-04:00

Don't know what went wrong, but Hello is now working again so here are the leftover photos I meant to publish before. I'm not going to mess with that photo/text interleaving stuff anymore. I'm sticking to captions. My blogging skills are eminently defeatable.

2005-02-13T01:27:00.000-04:00

my life is not really as bohemian as this picture would suggest

2005-02-13T01:26:00.000-04:00

i was at a house party and this woman just started doing this

2005-02-13T01:22:00.000-04:00

Something happened on the way to the Forum: I stayed for 4 days in Belo Horizonte with the extremely hospitable Guimarães family, pictured here. I got to know Sarah in Boston when I was learning Portuguese and she was learning English. Her father, Mozart, reminded me strangely of my own father. Within minutes of my arrival he was showing me videos of "Crossing Over with John Edward," dubbed into Portuguese of course. When I asked him to play a song for me on his guitar he instead made an elaborate video of himself playing the guitar, including a speech to me in "english", and then had me watch the video. A quirky and gentle-hearted man.

2005-02-13T01:14:00.000-04:00

streets in ouro preto, near belo horizonte, were impossibly steep

2005-02-13T01:12:00.000-04:00

drinking aboard the forummobile (my one-day girlfriend, carla, on the right)

arcade fire keeps rocking shit

2005-02-13T00:54:00.000-04:00

They just played a show in New York with David Byrne on vocals, and David Bowie in the audience.

Also, check out the fansite...

the day i stole 9 cents from a street kid

2005-02-10T15:25:00.000-04:00

That would be today. After four solid days of torrential rain I decided to take advantage of the balmy weather and walk with some friends down to Pelourinho, the old colonial center of the city. Pelourinho is fairly close to my home geographically -- a mere 15 minutes walking -- but it is worlds away in other respects. I live in a quiet working-class residential area with relatively few foreigners coming and going and few people begging in the streets. Pelourinho is the tourist capital of Salvador. Its streets are always buzzing with drumming groups, capoeira circles, and dance performances. Tourists sit at outdoor tables eating expensive food while street urchins and prostitutes hastle them for money. I don't much like Pelourinho because it's the one place in Salvador I get consistently harrassed. Also, its full of some of the less awesome tourists the city has to offer: package tour old people breezing through for a couple days, stoner backpackers who don't speak a lick of Portuguese, and sex tourists -- the worst kind -- who come for the cheap prostitution, both adult and child. But all that aside, Pelourinho is a pretty place on a pretty day, when the late-afternoon sun slants off the yellow, pink, and blue buildings. I decided to go.

In the central square of Pelourinho a 25 centavo coin, worth about 9 American cents, rolled by me and almost hit me in the foot. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. A moment later a boy appeared, about 10 years old, screaming at me. I'd seen the boy many times before. He's one of the regulars in Pelourinho, and in my opinion one of the worst.

I never know how to act when there is a person who has obviously been shaped by horrible forces -- hunger, poverty, cruelty, desperation -- and who, as a result, has become horrible him or herself. This child in particular is hard and pitiless. The sort who would kill dogs for fun. I have absolutely no doubt he will grow up to be (and no doubt already is) a violent criminal. The causes of his condition are obvious, but do nothing to mitigate the fact of his condition. What does one do with someone like this? I feel sorry for him, and yet I cannot help but hate him.

He saw me pocket the coin and he wants it, so he starts screaming in my face, saying that it is his coin, he dropped it. It did come from his direction, but there are tons of people around and given the lag in his arrival this seems unlikely. More likely he heard the clink, saw the roll, and found me. I can't stand him screaming in my face, I hate his hate-filled eyes, I do not want to give in to this browbeating he is dishing out, so I refuse to give him the coin. I tell him to get lost. Out of principle, or so I tell myself. Because this is no way for a person to act, and if I give him the coin just because he's screaming in my face then he'll know screaming in people's faces is a great way to get things. So goes my thinking.

But he doesn't want to get lost. He wants to run after me and my friends and pinch my arm, hard. I jerk aside his hand, whirl around, and yell a little louder. He still follows, swearing a blue streak, screeching "that gringo stole my money!" One of my companions spoke my name, and he seized on this, screaming "Alex Alex Alex!" I turned on him again, put on my best I'm-going-to-kick-your-ass face (which wasn't hard, given how much I wanted to kick his ass) and started coming after him. He ran away fast. But thirty seconds later he was back, with a handful of pebbles. He started chucking these at me, still cursing at the top of his lungs, saying "I'm going to kill you Alex!".

Awesome, thought I. Now I've got a street kid who wants to kill me. None of the rocks hit, but still I stepped toward a nearby police officer and politely informed him of the crazy violent child who was throwing rocks. The kid arrived too and did the I'm-about-to-cry face, which was so convincing I almost handed over the coin right there. Why didn't I give him the coin, after all? Then I could be out of the situation. Oh yeah, principle. And also because by now I really hated the little fucker and would have been sorely pressed to give him a rope if he were drowning. The policeman tells him to stop throwing rocks and I slip away around the corner.

Of course a minute later he's back, all hint of crying gone from his face. I had only come to Pelourinho for the walk and had already been planning to go back early (my friends were buying stuff in a music store) so, with the pronouncement "this is why I hate Pelourinho," I told them I was going home. The little demon was filling me so full of both rage and guilt, I just had to get away.

What was 9 cents to me? Suffice to say it was nothing. To him? Probably still not much. Even here there is very little one can get for 25 centavos. Would he learn a lesson about rock-throwing if I didn't give him the money? Probably not. Would anything I might do change his plight, undo his years of misery, and make him into the theorical bright sunny boy he might have been? No. Would anything stop him from growing into pitiless thug, and dying before thirty? it was unlikely. Would anything stop me from getting hit by rocks? Giving him the money would probably do that. But I am a stubborn person by nature, and I couldn't give in.

I set out toward home at a fast clip but he ran after, wielding two baseball-size stones, much larger than before, and still screaming my name at the top of his lungs. I couldn't believe it: he hadn't given up yet. The ferocity of his pursuit was beginning to make me think that, in fact, it had been his coin. Many times people beg with a couple coins in their hand, to give a hint to people who might not get the picture. It's totally possible one might have rolled away from him. How else to explain this scene? Twenty-five centavos is not much to go to such lengths for. But what if it really was his? What if he really believed that I, this gringo, had stolen it from him? What if I really had? How else to explain this 15-minute chase, the mad and furious gleam in his eye as he raised his stone?

I began to advance on him again, both to threaten him and to avoid getting hit in the back of the head. He threw and my forearm deflected the rock aimed at my gut. At this point I was very near him, near enough to grab him and break his neck. His eyes filled with fear. I was on the verge of beating him. It would have been easy -- he was so skinny. But lord! What had my life become? What was I doing? There was no way I could beat a 10-year-old street kid. What to do with all this anger, this guilt?

I took the moment to slip into a crowd of people and set out across the square again toward home. Looking around and not finding him, I slipped the coin out of my pocket and on to the edge of a bench. I wanted nothing to do with this money. I continued across the square and on the far side, beside another police officer, turned around to look back. Through a temporary break in the crowd I saw a hand reaching up, and the sunny glint of gold. Of course he had been watching me, and now he had the coin. He was showing me he had it. Then he turned away.

Now I'm back home and my forearm still smarts. So does the memory. There is a tiny spot of blood where the rock broke the skin. The kid won, that's for sure. But of course I'm the one in a home right now, and no doubt he's still out there, hastling someone else. I will never know if the coin was really his, though after everything I now believe it probably was. Why else would he do all he did, but to avenge the injustice of a rich gringo stealing his money? But it's also possible he's simply a liar, likes to throw rocks at rich people, and fills with rage when people don't give in. Either way he was wrong to curse and scream instead of speak and explain, wrong to throw rocks. Either way he is a deeply troubled and violent child, and will become a deeply troubled and violent adult very soon.

And what about me? We've seen that I am stubborn, capable of great anger, and maybe capable of violence. That I believe that people should not act like he acted, whatever their history, and that I don't mind withholding things, out of spite, from people who do act that way. And that guilt and anger are a bad combination. It was not my finest hour, but what should I have done? The best would have been to resist the instinct to pick up the coin at all, and leave it to someone more needy on the streets of Pelourinho.

photos & cia

2005-02-09T22:09:00.000-04:00

I've heard the word cia translated as "conversation" and here in Brazil it seems like every other restaurant or shop is called "____ & Cia". Like "Sorvete & Cia" (Ice Cream and Conversation) or "Frango & Cia" (Chicken and Conversation). I recently figured out the secret of inserting photos in my text, so unlike past photo dumps these pictures will be commented along the way rather than just all coming in a pack at the end: hence "Photos & Conversation". My blogging skills are now unmatched.

I've once again been having trouble keeping up with all the things I might like to say. I still have several untouched topics on the Forum (microfinance among them!) but, in the meantime, Carnaval has happened. For those who might not know, Carnaval is a 6-day nationwide party involving nearly nonstop parading, drinking, dancing, and sex. I was lucky enough to get a bad cold just in time for Carnaval, probably from overexertion at the Forum, which made Carnaval all the more fun. Also there were torrential downpours the last two days. There are stories, and they are coming some day soon.

In the meantime, I'm due to clear out the dustbin of old photos. I'll do it thematically-ish.

The first theme is people in funny costumes. For some reason in our house people are always being made to put on funny costumes, which is one of the reasons I like living here. First we have my friend Paizão (which I should mention means "Big Daddy") wearing a dress and pretending to be pregnant.

Next up are three gringos (Sharon, Lisa, and Manuel) wearing the fantasias for Cortejo Afro. During Carnaval, a good way to go out without getting physically crushed is to join a bloco, which is basically a bunch of people all dressed in the same silly outfits (fantasias) all grouped around a Mack truck with giant speakers, protected by an outer ring of people with a cord who will only let in people with such costumes, all moving down the road at about 1000 feet an hour. I joined Cortejo Afro because I know several people who play with them (Márica and Paizão among them), but unfortunately this meant wearing these costumes all the time. Note the red feather in the hat. According to many people, I looked like some wannabe sheik. There is sadly no quality picture of me in the costume.

And finally there is a combo picture, taken today, of our gringo friend Mike wearing the fantasia of Ilê Aiyê and playing a berimbau, while Márcia wears my clothes and tries to look "American".

The next theme is the tiny weak little kitten that Márcia picked up on the street and that lived with us until recently, when he was farmed out to Márcia's mom's house. This cat was about the size of a large hamster, and significantly less charming. It had been abandoned by its mom and Márcia, ever the champion of underdogs (cats?) and lost causes, couldn't just pass it by. It lived in the box my parents sent my birthday presents in, and screeched all the time. It could hardly walk, spilled milk everywhere every time we tried to feed it, had a tail that looked like it had been sat on my an elephant. Every day I was certain it would die. We came to call it gatinho chatinho, which rhymes and means "annoying little cat". Here Márcia feeds the bugger, and I hold him in one hand.

Next there are some photos from my all time favorite theme, which is Márcia doing stuff. In the first picture she talks on two cellphones at once, not at all in jest.

Next we have Márcia coming home drunk one night and demonstrating how she had just danced with a girl and kissed her, using of course a chair as the girl-substitute.

Oh wait, my photo-blogging has been interrupted in midstream. I just made the silly mistake of upgrading Hello, the program I use to post photos, to the new version. Silly me, I thought maybe it might go faster. Now it doesn't work at all. Remind me never to update a program that is working fine. So no more photos for now, but hopefully I'll work it out soon.

UPDATE: Someone had given me a bad translation. Cia doesn't mean conversation at all. Instead, it's like the "Co." in "& Co." So disregard this entire post.

wsf interlude: spanking mandy (gently)

2005-02-02T18:54:00.000-04:00

I knew it was going to happen sooner or later: one of my friends would call me out for being a raving right-wing nutjob. Bananarchist let the axe fall on my forum vogue post, and I definitely owe it to her to address the issues she raises. And since I seriously doubt anyone reads my comment section thoroughly, I'm going to do it here in a separate post. First the specific issue of forum fashion, then the general issue of me being a raving right-wing nutjob.

About forum fashion, this may sound like a lame excuse, but what you see up there is only half the post I intended to write. I was getting booted off the computer, and I posted the part I had already written but never got back to it to finish it. I concede it was weak to flog the dead horse of Ché couture as I did, but really it was just a lead-in to the meat of my real topic: Palestinian/Arab fashion.

Someone had made a whole lot of cheap plastic Palestinian flags and must have been giving them out free because nearly every tent had one flying. They were as ubiquitous as the program of events. And not only that, many many non-Arab people were wearing Arab headscarves. For instance, check out THIS guy:

Solidarity or fashion? You decide. The scarves had a habit of finding their way off heads and around the necks or waists of attractive young women. Can someone who knows more than I do tell me if this is sacrilegious? Are they secular or religious objects? In any event, the adoption of Arab and specifically Palestinian symbols was very widespread at the Forum, be it fashion statement or political statement.

But about the bigger issue of my politics, let me collect my thoughts. Mandy accuses me of being condesceding and holier-than-thou. Specifically she says:

The reason I am picking on you so much for this posting is because it is
representative of the derisive tone you take in describing your conversion from
uninformed antiwar activist to wiser-than-thou left-center center-war war-right
neoneoconcon. You exaggerate your differences with some fictitious monolithic
"left," which creates a heroic oppositional narrative that casts you as the sole
figure of righteousness holding forth against a sea of radical idiocy, but
doesn't really describe the cautious pro-democracy
realism/anti-torture/pro-transperancy left that I see. You pick on details (Che,
consensus) but perhaps you misapprehend the position of the people who protest
against expensive and undermanned wars.

I guess a few points are in order. First, please note my context. I was not reacting to the "cautious pro-democracy realism/anti-torture/pro-transparency left" that Mandy describes. That left describes me pretty well, actually. (I never said I wasn't left -- just not far left any more.) However, though I'm sure that description is also true of many individuals at the Forum, it was nowhere in evidence on a mass scale. What was in evidence was banners "honoring the heroes of the Iraqi resistence." As in, the people who murder election workers and old women trying to vote. In short, the conscensus on display at the forum (which I'm sure was not a real conscensus actually believed by everyone) was, to my eyes, ludicrous and wrong. Like the worst strawman I could imagine. And this is what I was reacting against, and feeling (I believe justifiably) derisive of and holier-than.

Mandy may have also been reacting against the rags-to-riches, ignorant-to-enlightened, hippie-to-asshole bildungsroman I presented earlier. If so, I can hardly blame her. But I felt the need to include something about where I was coming from. Basically, I've been on this little vision quest of mine because I think the issues are really, really important, and though that makes me sound sanctimonious it's the truth. I have no desire to spank leftists for being leftists (I like to spank them because they've been naughty) but when I meet people who appear to know rather little about these topics (like they don't know the Iraqi elections are happening or they've never heard of Darfur) but who still have fiery opinions about the state of the world, I get a little mad. And holier-than-thou, yes. Because the world is important and you won't get very far towards the truth spewing the shit your friend who's all political told you about. I saw a lot of things at the Forum I didn't like, and a lot of people not challenging them at all, and I got upset.

And when I challenged the conscensus in small ways, I found a lot of receptive ears. Like a woman from Spain who had come to see a representative of the Basque separatist movement speak (he didn't show) who told me about how she was against the Basque separatists, and how she felt out of place at the Forum. Or one American I spoke to, who once I started went on a rant of his own against what he saw as the wanton US-bashing all around him. These people are left too, but there was no forum for them at the Forum.

So Mandy, thanks for your comments and I'll try to be less smug in the future. But good god, it was a small tent I saw at the Forum, and a pretty looney one. It's not the vision of the left I'd like, nor I suspect one you'd like (and I haven't even touched on economics here). I want some other left -- one that's a little more honest, that doesn't just ignore the things that don't square with its vision of the world, one that isn't willing to explain away atrocities just because they are committed by people in the developing world. And I know there are millions of people out there ready to join that left, ready to be well-informed thoughtful participants, ready even to give Bush his due if he actually does something right. I want to join that movement, but it doesn't exist. So I'm flirting with the right. Sue me.

wsf 5: things i like about the forum

2005-01-30T15:51:00.000-04:00

Well, it really does have a big mass of worldwide humanity. This was driven home just a moment ago when I poked my head into a tent in which soothing classical-ish music was playing. Inside the participants were doing what appeared to be a trust/healing type exercise. They had broken into pairs and one of the pair closed their eyes while the other, with an arm around the waist, slowly led the first around the tent. And it was suddenly beautiful: slanting afternoon sun, cheesy music, and pairs of people of all colors and sizes, old and young, men and women, doing a waltz infinitely slow. And I was really happy to be here, speaking with people from all over the world in whatever language works best, good people with their hearts in the right places. The diversity here makes a Benneton ad look like a convocation of the KKK. It's not token -- it's deep. This sounds trite, but this appears to be is a happy, peaceful, world community, at least for a week.

I'm also happy that, as an American, I haven't met with any personal animosity. Sure everyone hates the United States, but they don't hate me, even when I speak up in some small way in favor of the US, which I feel compelled to do from time to time. The Minas Gerias kids have a running joke that I'm a "spy of Bush," but it's all in good fun. When confronted with an American, and even an American who speaks against some of the anti-American notions going around, have continued to be friendly, respectful, and eager to engage in conversation. In fact, the only person who has been genuinely hostile toward me because of my nationality since I've been in Brazil was a Chilean trumpet player I met in Salvador. Everyone else, and everyone here, has been great.

Lastly, I was bitching to a Canadian about all the rhetoric of "dialogue" and "exchange of views" while actual dissenting views (such as my own) seem nowhere in sight. And he made the point that that's not really what they mean or what they want. He said I should imagine it's like the Republican National Convention, but for the worldwide far left. When they saw they want to promote the exchange of ideas, they mean between places and cultures, but within the ideology. This conference is not to debate issues, but to feel solidarity across world-wide gaps. Participants want to share experiences, ideas, find common ground, and feel part of a truly global movement. Though I have serious reservations about the conscensus here, I do now feel I understand the place a little better, and I do enjoy this sense of intercontinental solidarity. Went to a talk on forest rights and heard speakers talking about similar struggles in India, Indonesia, and here in the Amazon. It's somehow wonderful to see two people from native populations at opposite ends of the globe talk about their experiences and get up and shake hands.

wsf 4: forum vogue

2005-01-30T15:29:00.000-04:00

I've always had a good dose of scorn for those who wear Che Guevara t-shirts. Fidel Castro is rather a more important figure in Latin American communism, but do you seeing anyone wearing his gnarly face on their baseball cap, boxer shorts, or baby-tee? (Well, I did see a Fidel t-shirt on sale for the first time here, but no one was buying.) No, you don't. People don't like Che for any real ideological reason. They like him because he's hot. They like him because he wrote The Motorcycle Diaries. He's Karl Marx and Jack Kerouac and James Dean all in one. Needless to say, there's a lot of Che here: his mug stares out off of keychains, paintings, mugs themselves, and the t-shirt of every third dredlocked 17-year-old. I even saw a guy with a Che tattoo on his chest. This is communist vogue, nothing more.

I have a feeling a good number of the Forum's young people come for style more than politics. It's hip to be communist, or anarchist. It's hip to hate the US.

wsf 3: wishful thinking

2005-01-29T19:59:00.000-04:00

Two problems, briefly treated, one serious.

The first problem is that someone decided that there would be compost and recycling bins everywhere, but not normal old trash bins. The problem with this is that everyone, lacking regular trash bins, simply throws all their regular trash in the compost and recycling. The result of course is that the recycling can't be recycled, nor the compost composted. By succumbing to wishful thinking, namely that everyone would somehow produce waste in the earth-friendly proportions mandated by the wastebaskets, the planners have ensured that virtually nothing will be composted or recycled.

The second problem is more serious. According to an English-speaking acquaintance who was here two years ago and is back now, the translation two years ago was stellar. Everything was done simultaneously by radio in several languages. But this year, according to on translator I spoke with, they wanted to democratize the translation process. Instead of hiring a cadre of professionals, they left it to bi- and tri-lingual volunteers to do the job. And while there are certainly many good translators here, the overall effect has been horrendous. Translation is often of extremely poor quality, and many workshops go without them altogether. Every single English-speaking-only attendee I have spoken with has complained about it, and some have questioned the utility of coming at all to a conference they cannot really understand. Furthermore, seeing this problem I thought I'd at least volunteer myself, but was told by the office they already had enough (obviously not true). Organization is not the strong suit here.

They did send me to work at an information desk which, in addition to not making great use of my English skills (almost all my interactions were in Portuguese) was also derailed because I didn't know any of the information anyone needed. However, I made some friends and it was still really fun.

wsf 2: how i got here

2005-01-29T19:32:00.000-04:00

I don't know how actual bloggers do it. It seems basically impossible to both do things and blog about them. I guess bloggers don't tend to do things. I'm hopelessly behind on things to say and this place closes in 20 minutes, but I'll do what I can.

This isn't even about the forum but it's a story I want to tell. I wanted to travel from Belo Horizonte south towards Porto Alegre, but because these places are so far from one another (like 36 hours) I could only get a ticket to São Paulo (8 hours). This was bad though, because I knew that getting a SP-PA bus was going to be a bitch, what with everyone in that city of 17 million coming down for the show. I had visions of being stranded. But on one of my bus's many stops we pulled alongside a delegation of charter buses filled with hip-looking 20-somethings in matching t-shirts. These kids were going to the forum, it was all too obvious. I envied them greatly -- a sure ride and good company. And then I had a rash idea. Why not try to talk myself onto their bus?

I just started asking, and after a few tries found one particular group who was into the idea of having a strange gringo aboard. So right before my own bus left the rest area I pulled my bags off and was smuggled aboard the new bus (they didn't want the driver to see me with my backpack). Within an hour the wine was flowing, the rock and roll was rocking, and I had a gaggle of new friends. Three hours later I was drunk and had a new girlfriend. This continued for the next 30 hours or so. I'm pretty sure I caught the right bus.

They were college students from the state of Minas Gerais ("General Mines"), all members of Lula's worker's party (which makes them hardline conservatives in the context of the Forum). I have acquired a lot of Minas Gerias pride in the last few days, and can now sing the song: Minas Gerais / A gente conhece / Não esquece jamais / Mina Gerais. Trans: Minas Gerais / People get to know it / And forget it no more / Minas Gerais. I'm currently camped with the gaggle of them. More soon.

world social forum, dose 1: setting the scene

2005-01-27T15:18:00.000-04:00

So I'm here at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. There are a lot of things to say, so this is going to come in many installments. First off, some background on the Forum and myself.

The World Social Forum is an annual gathering of human rights groups, environmental groups, "social justice" groups, farming and land-rights groups, anti-war groups, and assorted leftists: radicals, communists, hippies, and anarchists. The 3rd forum and this, the 5th forum, have been held in Porto Alegre, due in large part to the leftist (and outgoing) local government here. The WSF (or FSM if you speak Spanish or Portuguese) is quite heavy on anti-globalization and anti-American rhetoric. Most people who attend are South American, with healthy doses of Europeans and East Asians, a smattering of North Americans, a few South Asians, and trace numbers of Africans and Middle Easterners. There are hundreds of mini-conferences spread over a period of six days, as well as a march, concerts, films, parties, and the sprawling and fetid Acampamento Juventude, where many of the Forum's younger members are staying, myself included.

A couple years back I had spotless credentials to attend an event like the Forum. I was both activist and radical, and harbored fairly strong anti-American and anti-corporate feelings . When 9/11 happened (we still haven't found the right verb for that -- "happened"?) I worked my ass off to help organize the first anti-war rally at Harvard, which about a thousand people attended on 9/20.

But since then I've shifted. I don't think my core beliefs or goals have changed at all, but I've done a lot of reading and thinking in the last few years about economics and foreign affairs. And I now believe that the leftist conscensus that has emerged, at least the one on display at the Forum, would be a disaster if it were ever put into effect. Widening rifts have emerged between me and the average Forum-attendee. With caveats, I am pro-capitalism, pro-globalization, and pro-Israel. I even don't mind GMOs. While I still think that launching the Iraq war was probably a bad idea, if we ever defeat Iraq's lingering terrorists I do believe we will leave the country better than we found it. And Afganistan is looking more and more like a success. Though I roundly hate Bush's domestic stances (especially re homosexuality and the environment), and I could never vote for the man, I certainly don't see him as the Hitler-figure so much of the world seems to have gobbled up. In short, though I still want the same things of ever (liberté, egalité, fraternité!) and still feel like exactly the same person as always, new information and knowledge have made me more conservative.

So why then am I at the Forum? There are a few possible explanations.

I want to give far-leftists one last shot at convincing me they don't have their heads up their asses.
I want to see close-up the current state of the left.
I can still look and act the part and secretly get off at being a neoliberal spy.
It's a big party and I want to get laid.

Any and all of these are true. I've got to run off and be a volunteer right now (more on that later), but there is much more to come, should I ever get enough computer time to write it. Also photos, if only I could upload them somehow.

lowly insect my ass...

2005-01-27T15:06:00.000-04:00

I'm a little offended that neo-neocon got Lowly Insect status by dint of my two links, while I myself still languish as a Crunchy Crustacean because for some reason TTLB doesn't recognize my 5, count them, 5 unique inbound links, one of which I might add is from tenuously famous people. I guess the way to blogging superstardom is to start an unread shadow blog with links only to yourself.

UPDATE: Yay! Now I'm a Slimy Mollusc. I guess that's, um, better.

apologies

2005-01-24T08:24:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been committing the capital sin of blogging: not posting anything. My excuse: I've been having a life. There seems to be an essential conflict between doing things and writing about them. I'm trying to work out a balance.

Right now I'm in Belo Horizonte, a city in the interior, where I'm visiting a friend. Soon I'll be traveling south to Porto Alegre, where I'll attend the World Social Forum. And after that it's back up to Salvador for the week of Carnaval.

So if you're someone who reads this blog, sorry. I'll try to get back on the wagon soon.

como uma onda...

2005-01-21T18:26:00.000-04:00

...is the name of a popular soap opera here. But forget that: instead read neo-neocon's new essay on the tsunami, natural disasters in general, and collective memory.

campina

2005-01-12T20:35:00.000-04:00

I recently got back from four days in the Chapada Diamantina. This is a mountainous wooded region about 7 hours inland from Salvador, with soaring bluffs and mesas, waterfalls galore, and a lot of tourists into natural foods and spiritual energy and healing and aliens and smoking maconha. It's a bit like Sedona.

My trip started with me waking up at exactly the time my bus was supposed to leave the station. Awesome, thought I. I was traveling with my friends Michelle and Mariel, and was just making peace with the fact I was going to have to find another bus and travel alone, when Márcia suggested a solution that definitely wouldn't work in the US. Take a taxi to a nearby point on the highway that she knew the bus would pass, and call Michelle and have her get the bus driver to stop and pick me up. So before I knew it I was in a cab racing down the highway. We raced and raced, but in the end we missed the bus by a minute! I was again reconciling myself with the fact I'd missed my bus when the taxi driver, who dreams of days like this, says he thinks he can catch the bus. I politely decline, of course. (Parents please skip to paragraph below.) But then again, I've already gone this far. What the hell. I call Michelle again and she somehow convinces the now unamused driver to pull over. We speed like crazy and get there a minute later. I climb on the bus, to the glares of all.

The upshot of all this is that I forgot to bring several key items, among them my camera. So no pictures. You would have seen a lot of waterfalls and jutting rocks, and a cavern or two. I jumped off a lot of rocks into deep swimming holes, went snorkeling in a grotto filled with bats, and even went on a zip line. It was fun. This dude took some pictures, so you can look at them. I climbed one of the big mesas, named Morro do Pai Inácio after a slave who, the story goes, slept with the wife of the French consul and then fled here. The authorities came to get him but, nearly surrounded, he delivered a stirring speech about how he'd prefer death to captivity and with that tossed himself over the edge. Here the storyteller's friend, who had been acting the part of Inácio, ran to the edge and tossed himself off. Everyone gave a little gasp. Turns out there's a hidden ledge just below, and Inácio, thought dead, thereby escaped capture. Except that the story is apocrophal. Too bad.

But the real thing I want to write about is the hippie commune I visited, Campina. I find it somewhat remarkable that they have a website and an email address -- they don't even have a phone. About a month ago I met a woman named Nadine who has lived in Campina for the 14 years of its existence and was in Salvador on business. She told me a little about the place, and I filed it in the back of my mind. I remembered it was in the Chapada, but not where. I also didn't remember its name. But with Michelle and Mariel returning home to Salvador I decided to stay and find it, and began asking around. After eliminating other nearby communes from the running (Roda and Lothlorien) I zeroed in on Campina, near the town of Capão. I spent a night in Capão, where I had a brief and fairly chaste romance with a young mother, and set out the next morning for Campina. Campina proved elusive. (Parents please skip to another post.) After some hitchhiking I ended up being left along a stretch of deserted dirt road, with a rough trail leading off it. I walked for a couple miles, careful to take good account of where I had been, and finally found a man working near a group of houses. This wasn't Campina, but it was a ways over there, he said. You have to cross a river, and some barbed wire, and another river, and some other stuff, and it was really hard to tell because this guy had quite the regional accent. Feeling I'd already come all this way I kept going, and crossed a whole bunch of things, and then reached an area with a network of trails. It was not at all clear where to go. Here's where my behavior gets sketchy. I started kind of wandering up and down these trails looking for signs of life. (In my defense, the brush was low here and I kept the houses I had come from in view most of the time. I was careful, sort of.) I started despairing. What the hell was I going here, wandering alone through these mountain in the hot sun, my water running low, in search of a bunch of hippies? I never did quite answer that question, but I did think of the novel I recently read, O Alquimista by Paulo Coelho, which is essentially a self-help book about following your dreams, but because it was in Portguese held my attention. Anyway, one of the trite lessons that book teaches is that people are tested right before they achieve their goals. So with that in mind I took like twenty more steps and saw... corn. And hand-painted signs explaining that it was corn. I was in Campina!

Serendipidously the first person I ran into was Nadine, who greated me like an old friend and led me around by the hand introducing me to people. There was Tassa, another founder, and Brunão, and herbal healing specialist from Portugal, and her four children, and so on. I never did see the whole place or meet all the people -- it just went on. More houses and tents, more gardens. According to Nadine there are 15 permanent residents, 10 children, and a variable number of long-term visitors from Brazil and abroad. Campina is centered around the eating lodge, which is the only building with electricity (car-battery supplied). I wish I had pictures for you, but I don't. Gotta actually write this time. All the food is cooked on the wood stove or in the clay oven, which is about the size and shape of an small igloo. The food itself is mostly things from the gardens. There are fruit trees everywhere, and Nadine soon sat me down to a plate of 3 papayas, which I devoured. Unlike most of Brazil you can drink the tap water at Campina, which comes from a nearby stream. At mealtime, comunity members are called in from the fields with a large conch-shell horn. There are dogs and chickens and kids all over, and a monkey named Mica who lives in a tree near the lodge. Nadine invited me to stay a week, and, having commitments in Salvador, I agreed at least to stay the night.

I must say I was impressed by the place. As most readers of this blog probably know, being as they are exclusively close personal friends of mine, I lived in a co-operative for three years and on an organic farm for 6 months. I have a large soft spot for places like this. I've never been much for anything smacking of spiritualism or mysticism (which this had in spades; the night I was there Nadine was busy in a ceremony with a local shaman) but natural food and community and beautiful wilderness really hit me where it counts. I perused this album they had of photos from the annual "Encontro" of Brazilian Alternative Communities, which appears to be a yearly meeting where all the people from places like this get together and have a big party: baking bread, dancing in circles, bathing naked in streams, and conducting strange healing rituals. On the whole the picture was of a healthy, lively, vibrant community of communities. They really seemed to be living the dream.

But of course, not all was well in Campina. It never is. Nadine told me about how she and one of the other community members, Luis Miguel, could never get along. They'd lived together 14 years and learned to tolerate each other, but there was always tension. For instance, there was a large group of visitors coming in a few days and Luis had decreed that they weren't taking any other visitors until after the group had passed. He had already turned away a couple of hikers, but Nadine wanted me to stay and so declared me a "personal guest", thus bypassing Luis' decree. I didn't see much of Luis, but something was definitely up. Also, where was the father of Nadine's children? Turns out he's in Capão, running a pizza shop. He left the community, for reasons unspecified. And it was clear that much of the work was falling to a few people: from what I could see Nadine, who was a flurry of farming and sewing and cooking the whole time I was there, and Tassa, who is one of those quiet guys who, while you aren't looking, goes and constructs a whole new irrigation system.

Communes and co-operatives are interesting because they are designed exploit one economic dynamic, increasing returns to scale (i.e. cooking dinner for 40 is much less than 40 times as hard as cooking for one), while leaving themselves extremely vulnerable to another, the tragedy of the commons (i.e. freeloading). (Note that the original Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin, had a strange Mathusian population-control element that I think is quite misguided. But I believe the basic idea is correct that people who engage in a commons--in this case Campina--get all the benefits of shirking but only suffer a fraction of the costs, and this, predictably, leads to shirking.) Anyway, a commune's best defense against shirking is the close personal bonds that come from small size and shared experience. Yet the smaller the commune is, the less the returns to scale and less self-sufficient it can be. Campina buys many things from outside: grain, candles, soap, matches, and so on, and they sometimes make crafts to sell for money outside the community. This risks bringing the community even farther from its ideal of the self-sufficient island, turning it into a psuedo-firm.

The larger a community is the higher the quality of life it can achieve self-sufficiently. Theoretically a single person can be self-sufficient, but at the level of a hermit: living in a shack or cave, eating berries, hunting, and subsistence farming. A place like Campina provides a higher quality of life: greater variety of foods, textiles, better housing, but still they cannot reach their desired level qulity of life (which includes things like candles and soap) without trade. A community that could achieve this self-sufficiently, say a small town, would be hopelessly too large for the type of social bonds that permit communal living without large-scale shirking. So people within the town revert to specialization and trade--in a word, capitalism--in order to avoid a tragedy of the commons. And this of course brings with it a loss of communal feeling, the possibility of polarization into rich and poor, and all the familiar problems. Theoretically, I see no reason why a network of Campina-sized communities, each providing most of their own needs but also acting as pseudo-firms by producing specialized commodities for trade, couldn't persist successfully. Yet we don't tend to see that. Nothing about capitalism forbids it, but people don't tend to do it. I don't know why.

That night I slept in a small house without light, in a room where one wall was a hung quilt, a room in which Nadine said she and her family had lived for 4 years. On my way from the lodge to the house the path was very dark, and I suddenly realized that I couldn't see a light anywhere on any of the surrounding hills. I waited a while for my eyes to adjust, then I looked up into the moonless sky and saw the black silouette of a great tree, the Milky Way like a glowing gash behind it, and the stars thick and teeming, tumbling over one another into view. Then I turned slowly, and went into the house.

read reihan

2005-01-12T14:17:00.001-04:00

I've added another link in my friends' blogs section. It's to a group blog, and a conservative one at that (watch out, you commies!). My friend Reihan is an irresistably funny writer, a sharp thinker, and a mensch to boot. Plus he put up a link to my blog, and in the vicious quid pro quo of today's blogosphere, I have virtually no choice but to respond in kind. So read Reihan. Think of him as the Bengali hip-hop Margaret Thatcher.

Also, I can't resist putting in yet another plug for my friend Jamie's blog. He's lived in Japan 2+ years now, and writes the sort of perceptive social commentary, leavened with humor, that I would wish to write about Brazil if only I had the slightest clue how shit works here.

UPDATE: Just one example of what's in store.

more ridiculous praise for the arcade fire

2005-01-12T14:10:00.000-04:00

Pitchfork Media, the pseudo-official arbiter of indie cool, just named Funeral the number #1 album of the year.

Also, NPR just did a piece.

photo leftovers

2005-01-05T01:11:00.000-04:00

I had some extra photos that seemed good enough to post, so here a bunch of them together. Two themes can be discerned. The first is the zoo. I went to the zoo a couple weeks ago, in the hopes of seeing the flamingo. I had gone to the zoo once before and seen the animals, but none impressed me like the flamingo, and I wanted to see it again and take a picture. Have you ever seen a live flamingo? I hadn't. We're all familiar with the lawn ornaments, but they just don't prepare you. Imagine a six-foot-tall stick, eight inches wide and the color of fine-spun cotton candy. It's baby-breath pink and otherworldly. And it walks around and does things. While I watched it, the elegant flamingo walked straight into the large sign with information on its gestation and natural range. I guess it was having trouble with its range.

And maybe that was the problem. See, when I went back there were men cleaning the enclosure. Turns out: flamingo died! No one could tell me how. So no flamingo pictures. But I tell you, if you ever get the chance, see yourself a flamingo.

Other dead animals included the giraffe. They seem to be having some troubles at the Salvador zoo. They're also understaffed. While there I watched three surly college students climb, unmolested by staff, into the enclosure of the hippos, an animal I was taught was actually the most dangerous in the world. This didn't seem to burden them as they marched right up and started sticking their hands in its mouth. I was chomping my own fingers, ready to see geysers of blood at any moment, but nothing happened.

The other major group is more pictures of people with those damn face cards. For some reason I continue to think they are really, really funny.

2005-01-05T01:02:00.001-04:00

some intrepid 20-somethings climb in the pen with the hippos

2005-01-05T01:02:00.000-04:00

this is what happens when a zoo is understaffed

2005-01-05T01:00:00.001-04:00

the giraffe died two years ago, but they haven't given up

2005-01-05T01:00:00.000-04:00

salvador's famous deer 'n' duck exhibit

2005-01-05T00:59:00.000-04:00

food for the leopards. the man next to me commented that there are many people on the street who do not eat this well.

2005-01-05T00:58:00.001-04:00

workers clean the dead flamingo's enclosure

2005-01-05T00:58:00.000-04:00

world's largest rodents

2005-01-05T00:57:00.001-04:00

brazil's favorite pasttimes, soccer and drag, together at last

2005-01-05T00:57:00.000-04:00

2005-01-05T00:56:00.002-04:00

alicia

2005-01-05T00:56:00.001-04:00

the funny thing is márcia sort of looks like this anyway

2005-01-05T00:56:00.000-04:00

me and márcia

2005-01-05T00:55:00.000-04:00

i don't remember this guy's name

how to get money from harvard

2005-01-04T23:11:00.000-04:00

I recently applied to grad school at Harvard, and in the financial aid section they ask a bunch of questions to find out if you qualify for "special" funding. Presumably these are special pots of money earmarked by their donors for people fitting particular descriptions. The questions starte getting strange, so I figured I'd share. Here are some of the things that might get you money from Harvard:

Citizen or native of:

Argentina
Australia
Canada
China
Colombia
Croatia
England
France
Germany
Greece
Luxembourg
Mexico
New Zealand
Philippines
Spain
United Kingdom
Hawaiian Islands or the islands west of Hawaii (Please specify which island)
Southeast Asia (Please specify which country)
Africa (Please specify which country):

A permanent or long-term resident of:

Boston, MA (Please specify which neighborhood)
Bourne, MA
Bridgewater, MA
Brockton, MA
Cincinnati, OH
Dorchester, MA
Everett, MA
Fitchburg, MA
Hingham, MA
Lincoln, MA
Malden, MA
Marblehead, MA
Mattapan, MA
Milton, MA
New Haven, CT
Orangeburg, SC
St. Louis, MO (area)
Carbon County, PA
Stark or Tuscarawas County, OH
Westchester County, NY
Connecticut
Delaware
Maine
Minnesota
Ohio
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Vermont

A graduate of:

Boston Latin School
Any public or parochial high school in Cambridge, MA
Mansfield, MA High School
Gadsden, AL High School
Any high school or secondary school in Providence, RI

A member of:

The Fly Club (Harvard)
The Society of St. John the Evangelist

Planning a career in:

the US Diplomatic service
Public Service (Harvard College graduates only)

A lineal or collateral descendent of:

John Austin Amory, A.B. '07
John W. Appel of Lancaster, PA
Henry Bright, Jr. of Watertown, MA
Gov. Thomas Dudley of MA
Joseph Ernest and Octavia Walton Goodbar
John and Hannah Ellis of Walpole, MA
Henry T. and Lilla P. Handy of Cataumet, MA
David Ellis and Beulah Newell of Dedham, MA
Charles William Eliot
Alan Bedford Hudson
Robert Pennoyer
Edward Frederick Slater

Harvard class of:

1889
1902

[who's alive from these classes and still applying to grad school? -ed.]

Please indicate if you have a family surname of:

Baxendale
Downer
Hudson
Thayer

If yes, please give exact relationship . Be prepared to provide documentation.

An employee of Godfrey L. Cabot, Inc. or any associated companies.

bananarchist

2005-01-03T01:20:00.000-04:00

Another friend compromises her privacy and dignity.

happy new year (and happy birthday to me...)

2004-12-31T20:32:00.000-04:00

So it's my birthday today. I'm 25. Because tonight is such a huge party I decided that if I was going to celebrate at all I would have a little gathering the night of the 30th, since I didn't want to compete. But, in a string of ridiculous events that involved, at times, a broken water pipe, someone getting slugged by their ex-girlfriend, and me being locked in the house of people I hardly knew without them being home, the whole thing unraveled. This being my birthday and me being far from home, I was upset and had a little meltdown. I was also pissed at Márcia for various reasons I won't bore you with, except to say that I thought she was being insensitive about my birthday. In the end a small handful of folks came over, we ate churrasco, and I had a good time.

This morning I woke up and stumbled out to find the table laid out for guests and a big breakfast on top. I asked Márcia if guests were coming. She said yeah, her mom and some relatives. Which reminded her, could I clean my room since it was messy and her mom was coming? I said sure and cleaned the room. Then my friend Mariamma showed up unexpectedly. We had talked earlier about doing a thing with her photos on my computer, but the table was in use now and since we had guests coming it was going to be difficult to work on it, and I didn't know if we had enough food, so I tried to do it quick so I could get her out of there. Then my friends Mariel and Michelle showed up and, dense as I am, it still took me like 10 seconds to realize that Márcia's mom wasn't coming, that it was all lies, that the table was for a surprise party for me. I must say I almost started crying. It was so nice and thoughtful. I think that all anyone ever really wants on their birthday, or at least all I ever want, is to feel special and cared about, and a surprise party does that. Especially important when one is far from home. I instantly forgave Márcia for all her apparent callousness, knowing that this had been brewing the whole time.

So happy new year everybody. Thanks for reading. I'm about to go out. Salvador has a tradition where the color you wear on new year's signifies what you want from the new year: white is peace, yellow is prosperity, etc. I, like most people, am wearing white.