summer wanderings, ponderings and joy

It is the moment when the plane pitches forward that always gets me. This time it wasn't a panic level, in fact, it wasn't much of a gripping fear, just a lurch in my stomach that makes me wish I was holding someone's hand.  Anyone's really.  Perhaps that's not entirely true.

My summer of mad travel and cultural dabbling has come haltingly to an end.  I am alone, in my apartment, but my sublet has not ended, and the house smells pleasantly of someone else's family.  They are not here, of course, but they will not be gone for another few days. Thus my limbo continues, if briefly.

I spent the last month with I. at my parents' house.  I need not describe the surroundings, as they are always the same.  A house that seems (to me) painfully over-size for the two people (and two fat cats) that generally occupy it, with towering piles of paperwork, boxes and other tchakes taking over the space that under other circumstances ought to be wide open.  Part of the techniques for work avoidance that I regularly employ while visiting them, thus, is to clean.  This visit was no different, although when stepping into the house, after an overnight flight from Rio (my last stop in Brazil, just a month ago, and yet it seems like a life-time has passed), I discovered that there was no bedroom available to me.  Task one, clearing out a space.

This time I chose to sleep in my old bed room, the one that was my teenage respite, out of whose window I would lay quietly and stare at the soft summer rain falling on the gently curved hill, and the marshland behind the forest on the horizon.  I traveled back in time for a bit.  This summer was, in fact, a bit about cleaning up old spaces.  Loved, and missed, forgotten and rediscovered.  If my house were a metaphor for my heart,  the arranging and cleaning, dusting off, shelving, perusing and discarding of objects has been a successful step in preparing me for the next phase of my life.

I have rediscovered joy.  I know this sounds a bit declarative and perhaps shamelessly so.  Better to keep happiness secret, not announce it too loudly, lest a piano fall from the heavens and crush you in your blissful ignorance.  I suppose that could happen, but I think that maybe, just maybe, the piano can fall at any time, whether I am happy or not, whether I declare it to the world or not, and if it crushes me flat (which, if it falls, it will undoubtedly do), I would rather be crushed with a not-so-secret smile on my lips.  There was a lot of clean-up to do, and there was a lot of dust stirred around me, but there are now open spaces and instead of angsty obsession, there is a peaceful enjoyment of culture to which I previously had no knowledge.

I suppose that this whole journey began a long time before now, and I could hardly name the moment, but I look about me, here in my home town (for however much longer this holds true) and I feel substantively different than I did before.

There is so much that I am carrying with me, sounds, and smells that I held inside me, experiences that I never imagined I would have, and others that I opted not to.  In Río, Selene and I wandered around and visited the botanical gardens, as well as the Instituto Moreira Salles, where we saw a photo exhibit of Paul Strand's work, that I believe I may have seen elsewhere, Boston? San Francisco? but that was captivating once again.  (I am fascinated too by the idea that silver nitrate could have been used to capture images of such sharpness and fix them on paper...)  

With Nina I was reminded that there are true friends that we find along the way, and despite the difference of cultures, or languages, or the distance of time or space, we find them, and can hold on to them if we are gentle, and know how.  In Brasilia, I met her friends, and her family, visited the congress and International relations palace with her grandmother, sampled the foods of the Bahian "Festas juninas" in honor of São João, and discovered the deliciousness of "canjica" (a large-grained hominy type corn in a sweet hot coconut/ milky broth) and tapioca (which is from the mandioca - manioc or yucca plant, and is a fine grained flour that is made into crepe-like pancakes that are chewy and white and delicious, with cheese, much like a quesadilla, or just butter...).  I was mildly (and pleasantly) surprised by the pervasiveness of middle-eastern culture in Brazil, and the prevalence of Kibe as a snack/ appetizer at all sorts of restaurants.  It was a pleasure to be in a house, and not have to eat three meals a day on the road (I thought I might be intoxicated by an over-abundance of ham and cheese sandwiches for breakfast), although the "pão de queijo" may be one of my favorite snacks ever when at bars.

What I think was most important for my sense of emotional realignment, really, was the ability to partake of culture in such a profound way. Something not so possible, I find in the U.S., or at least not in the small towns...

One evening in Brasilia, we went to the Clube de Choro, a small, relatively ill-placed, but excellent venue for music of all kinds (not just Choro which is a traditional music, a pre-cursor to Samba).  We saw an amazing child piano virtuoso, Vitor Araújo (who, as I was flying within the country, I noticed was featured in the airline's travel magazine).  Here's an example, but he is worth seeing in person, absolutely. 

On an earlier occasion, Nina's mother, who works for a non-profit, but for years was a professional actress as well, got us tickets to see an amazing Russian clown tragi-comedy at the Centro de Cultura Banco do Brasil.  It was called Semianyki (The family) and below is a video of the entire show... It was unbelievably well put together, and in the spirit of physical comedy (and I daresay a Brechtian bent that requires audience participation at the most superficial and profound levels).

In São Paulo our quest for culture continued, and in search of a good Saturday night concert, we stumbled upon a gem of a museum, really a privately owned foundation: "Fundação Maria Luisa e Oscar Americano", far outside the center of the city, in the commerce-free, land of walled residences and private security.  We were somewhat surprised when we were met by a ten person security team at the entrance, but soon discovered that there was enough colonial Brazilian art, and contemporary treasures (original Portinari's and DiCavalcanti to name a few notable artists) to warrant such excessive precaution.  We were by far the youngest (and poorest? likely) concert-goers, to see the legendary João Bosco.

As we bought ourselves a glass of wine, and swirled it, smelled it, eyed it,  and approved it with knowing gestures, we discovered that we didn't know if we were more uncomfortable because we felt we didn't belong in such a social milieu, or that, in fact, we did.  There is a somewhat crushing self-knowledge that comes with one's acceptance of their uber-cultured bourgeois status, and a painfully binding discomfort when one's social reality is, in fact, not necessarily in line with their ideological beliefs or political tendencies or alliances.  Never is this more apparent than in countries in which the disparity between the wealthy and the poor is marked geographically and architecturally... with walls that keep in and keep out.

Nevertheless, (and how easy for me to say so blithely!) we forgave ourselves for such privilege and enjoyed the concert with baited breath. This was my favorite song, I think, in which, I was moved to tears, not because of any real sadness, for me, but for humanity:

In São Paulo we experienced the typical drizzle, "a garoa" of grey eternity.  We had Italian food for a midnight dinner, (and packed up the huge amount of leftovers to give to someone on the street) ate breakfast at the Bella Paulista, and wandered the city, visited the artisans of A benedictina, where I procured some beautiful leather carnaval masks, made by hand and sold with love.  We listened to Gregorian chant on Sunday morning, and visited the Museo da língua portuguesa, which was a fabulous introduction to the particularities of Brazilian portuguese and the myriad influences from an abundance of African languages (Yoruba being one of the greatest influences), as well as indigenous ones, most notably the Tupi-Guaraní, which was the lingua franca (not Portuguese) for the first three centuries of Portuguese colonial rule.  We ate amazing Greek food at the Restaurante Acrópolis, and experienced a mix of Japanese and Brazilian culture in "A liberdade" section of the city, where, curiously enough, there was a massive presence (a recent immigration trend that will likely grow stronger) of Andean textile workers from Bolivia and Perú, lining the streets and selling their wares to the Sunday tourists.  Blistering feet and motorcycle conventions, throngs of Michael Jackson fans in mourning, and two girls, walking, walking walking.  

The most unexpected and delicious artistic discovery we made, however, was toward the end of our visit.  On a whim we stopped at the MASP (pronounced maspey) Museo de Arte São Paulo, and the special exhibit was a true revolutionary of contemporary art. Vic Muñiz, born in Brazil, and making art out of every day objects, especially those that are considered trash, refuse, and waste by others.  I am so infrequently moved by the sterile spaces of museums, but, here, the concept of the installation itself and the curation of the exhibit was done by the artist, and in such a way as to move things in me that I hadn't remembered existed, much in the way that a good massage will make things hurt that you didn't know you had in your musculature.  There was such love in his work, photos of wire made to look like landscapes, plates with peanut butter and jelly faces in negative space... huge piles of trash sketching the faces of those who collect it, and recycle it... not beauty, not in the traditional sense, but something deeper and astoundingly, powerfully creative, such that you (or I, at least) felt moved to create something real, from the shreds and scraps and crumbling, decaying walls of our lives...  Here he talks a bit:

My travel concluded with two lusciously devoured novels, as recommended by Nina, and purchased for perusal on the Río beaches, Moacyr Scliar's "A mulher que escreveu a Bíblia" perhaps one of the most amusing and thoughtful books I have read in ages, about a very ugly woman, who in a past life was King Solomon's 300th wife, and Martha Medeiros' "Divã" (which was recently adapted to film, but I was unable to see...) about an upper middle-class woman coming to grips with her own mid-life crisis, through a monologue with a purported therapist, López...

I also managed to see a few more films, beyond the films I had seen early on, with Emily, in Río: the commercial "A Mulher invisível" in which Selto Melo stars as a moony-eyed, self-indulgent man who invents the perfect woman, his alter-ego, it turns out, because he cannot commit to a real one, or even really see a woman as anything but an idealized object onto which he must thrust his love.

Also previously viewed at the Latin American Studies Association Conference, of special note: Mariana Rondón's "Postales de Leningrado" a "true story" told through the eyes of a child, with beguiling graphics and innocent take on the armed conflict of the 60's in Venezuela, tinged with the myth of family lore, and Luis Ospina's "Un tigre de papel," an equally engrossing mockumentary about an invented collage-artist, Pedro Manrique Figueroa, a man who was always there when anything big happened... who really could have been any bohemian artist, torn by the ideologies of the liberation movements of Latin America (in this case, Colombia) and the hedonistic lifestyle and drug culture of the intellectual 60's and 70's...

So, Nina and I went to the Belas Artes Cinema, just around the corner from our hotel on Rua Consolação, as a last stop before taking the taxi to the airport and part ways... We watched the Brazil/USA soccer game and were shocked to see the US score first, (but all was well in the universe when we returned and Brazil had scored three goals to win!) while we sipped coffee and waited for a student project which had been commercially distributed, and curiously enough, had been filmed at the PUC- Río (where my conference had just taken place, so I recognized all the locals) "Apenas o fim" directed by Matheus Souza. There was promise, and I would like to see what projects this kid creates in the future, but we agreed that while it encapsulated a post-adolescent moment quintessentially, it lacked some sort of deep emotional thread that would justify the random ramblings of a pair of (not entirely convincingly) fallen-out-of-love 20-year-olds...

When I got to Río, I was alone for my last two days, and they were diligently spent walking along miles of beach, curling up in the sand and bobbing in the tepid water, reading the aforementioned books and sampling the last tastes of Brazilian food, the mandioca that I love and will always miss, the sharp tangy greens, rice, beans and beef (akin to the butter-smooth beef of the Argentine pampas). There I discovered, just blocks from my hostel, on the main coastal thoroughfare - Río Visc. de Pirajá - a cultural center and art cinema, where I watched a documentary on Wilson Simonal: (Simonal-Ninguém Sabe o Duro que Dei, directed by Claudio Manoel) the first Afro-Brazilian musical superstar to take on pop music of the 50s and 60s and 70s, and his tragic decline, and purported association with the repressive dictatorial government police.

Here's a clip similar to those that appeared in the film:


It was only a month ago that I stumbled through customs in Atlanta, Georgia, waded through the airport and touched down in Boston, and then, almost immediately found myself in Montreal for a few days of JazzFest with my parents, my girl and some dear old friends, Paul and Veronica, who I hadn't seen in almost 9 years... On the one evening that they were otherwise indisposed, after a marvelous Belgian meal at L'Actuel (Just off René Levesque on Rue Peel) I walked myself to the Jazz Fest venues and just opened my eyes, my ears, my feelings. Of course, a woman alone is never really a woman alone, but rather, an invitation to someone else to try and keep her company (I still wonder if this will always be true, and am grateful that, at least, in this case, my interloper was pleasant enough, and did not make too much of a fuss when I took my leave). I saw three concerts, a fusion rock/Latin band from NYC - Cordero, which, while they had a rocking female lead guitarist and singer, fell just a bit short when it came to the depth of their lyrics, and their managing to keep in time with one another... though I think they are a young band and show promise, an excellent band that played Jazz standards: Lily Frost and the Debonairs, and finally, one group that knocked my proverbial (and not really present) socks off: a young Argentine band that was intent on reviving the tango as not just Carlos Gardel and Astor Piazzola (both of whom I very much enjoy, but still, the purpose is to renovate, and rejuvenate the genre, and they did so, powerfully:





So, all told, I think that part of what has made me take stock of my situation is the mixing of old and new, the revisiting of people (some not mentioned here, but present in my heart and mind, nonetheless) and places, the rewriting, in positive terms of my history, the immersing myself in music and feeling that is outside of myself, outside of my head. I am reminded that I am alone in this world, and at the same time, not. That my places are mine, and they are shared, and they can be reworked, and renegotiated. I can be forgiven for mistakes and I can forgive myself, too. And, most of all, I can admit a tentative happiness without fear of cosmic repercussions...