Otra Luna

Township Palms by The Fader

2009-02-28T15:25:00.013-02:00

DJ Mujava´s killer kwaito-tune Township Funk was easily one of the last season´s biggest hits in the Helsinki club scene. One definitely cannot be mad at this and the whole phenomenon seemed to spark an increased interest in sounds like kwaito, kuduro, cumbia and funk carioca.

Boldly going straight into the heart of this South-African sound, The Fader offers an interesting three part journey into the past, present and future of kwaito. First part comes with a fine little mix to enjoy while reading the second part and the third one, the former being an interview with aforementioned DJ Mujava, and the next interviewing DJ Cleo, "the Timbaland of Kwaito."

Ghetto Palms Kwaito and Pitori House (direct link, via The Fader)

And if you missed Mujava´s mega-hit, fear not, as The Fader also serves us with Radioclit´s take on the Township Funk.

DJ Mujava - Township Funk (Radioclit remix) (direct link, via The Fader)

The Soca Delivery

2009-02-25T08:56:00.006-02:00

Here´s a fine soca-mix, The Soca Delivery, fresh out of oven from Finland´s very own Komposti Sound. An incredible dose of energy to lighten up the long, dark Finnish winter.

Komposti Sound: The Soca Delivery (inc. MP3, artwork & tracklist)

Super Classics of Funk Carioca: Injeção

2008-11-12T06:14:00.003-02:00

"'Ai, ai... When I go to the doctor´s. I´m feeling a little ache. Why don´t you give me an injection? Prick me doctor! Injections hurt when they enter, they rub when they enter. Oh my God, doctor, my butt can´t bear any longer.' - It was listening to this music that I became funkeira... This is the first lesson I learnt with funk carioca: it´s not for dullards or for anyone who takes themselves too seriously."

That was journalist Claudia Assef explaining how a hard-core paulista sees the light of funk carioca, on the sleeve-notes of Mr.Bongo´s Slum Dunk presents Funk Carioca-compilation. Released on 2004, it was one of the first vinyl releases of funk distributed worldwide. The song she is talking about is "Injeção" - "Injection" - by Deize Tigrona, a former housecleaner originally from São Conrado in Rio on her way to funk-superstardom.

It is a prime example of putaria funk - songs devoted to extremely dirty, explicitly sexual lyrics. If a putaria song has any (hardly covered) double-sentiment, like Injection, it´s just for the sake of funny, ironic symbolism: metaphor here is not meant to hide the sexual content, but rather makes the song much more entertaining than a mere explicit description of sexual intercourse would have been. And while often tiresome, the best of putaria songs, like Deize´s tune, manage to be not just naughty, but also funny, clever and even liberating.

Deize Tigrona: Injeção (zShare)

Today, Deize Tigrona, 29, is married - to funk DJ Raphael - and a mother of three children. September´s issue of the Brazilian Rolling Stone ran a small interview of the artist, where she seems to feel slightly restricted by the conventions of putaria funk and explains how working with electro funk and artists like Diplo or Buraka Som System allow her more creative independence. "My daughter is already asking a lot of questions", she comments on dirtier funk lyrics.

In a way Injeção became world-famous when Diplo sampled the song for M.I.A's first hit "Bucky Done Gun". Indeed, Deize Tigrona seems to be one of the most in-demand MCs in the global funk scene. Currently she´s been singing for Buraka Som Sistema, the portuguese kuduru act, and laid down lyrics for a number of releases for Berlin´s Man Recordings, including the 7" single "Bandida" with Diplo. "Now I can make lyrics with more content, more quality", Deize explains to Rolling Stone, clearly tired but happy about the global success that has given her a chance to tour all around the world.

As a bonus and small demonstration of new directions for Deize Tigrona, here's a song by Lisbon-based producer DJ Manaia. See also his blog and the original Discobelle-post for additional Manaia-goodies.

DJ Manaia: Sobrevivente do Rave (feat. Deize Tigrona) (a direct link, via Discobelle)

Note: I don´t feel very happy about posting a song from a compilation that is still available world-wide. Yet - to white-wash my conscience a bit - I feel that it´s such a fine selection of great funk carioca-tunes from a bunch of central artists in the game that if you like the Deize Tigrona-song, you absolutely have to go and buy the whole album. So shoo, go get it now, clickety click.

Lens Politica

2008-11-10T16:32:00.002-02:00

Third Lens Politica, a festival for political film, is organized November 19th – 23rd in Helsinki. The whole programme (well, almost whole programme) is now available on the festival website.

Festival opens with extremely interesting What would Jesus Buy? (19.11. 18:00 Kiasma-theatre, 21.11. 21:00 Andorra) Without further ado, just take a look at the hilarious trailer and see for yourself. The director of the film Rob VanAlkemade and the main characters Reverend Billy and Savitri D will also visit Helsinki as guests of the festival.

Another key film is Full Battle Rattle (2007) by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss (22.11. 21:30 Andorra). Quoting the website, "the film tells about the training in an American war simulation village, Medina Wasl. The American soldiers practise for the war in Iraq in very surreal surroundings built in the middle of California."

More related to this blog might be the screenings with the themes New Eyes on Cuba and Venezuelan Contemporary Cinema. There will also be a panel discussion on the topic "New film and political landscapes in Latin America" with Venezuelan filmmaker Willmer Perez and Cuban director Manuel Perez Paredes.

The Lens Politica-exhibitions, spreading all over the city, showcase political fine art ranging from videos and photography to sculpture and environmental art. Exhibitions are open 20th to 30th of November. Group exhibition (Galleria FAFA, Lönnrotinkatu 23) features The Divided City, my selection of images from Rio de Janeiro. Other interesting works - just to mention a few - should be Sacha Huber´s Rentyhorn (you might also want to sign the Rentyhorn petition here) and Elena Kovylina's video installation Dying Swans (Kaiku Galleria, Kaikukatu 4).

Lens Politica in Internet
Festival website
Facebook-event
Facebook-group

Super Classics of Funk Carioca: Rap do Borel

2008-11-03T19:26:00.005-02:00

When Carlos Eduardo Cardoso da Silva left the favela of Borel at age of 11 for neighbourhood of Santa Cruz, he was crying. "I swore that I will return to Borel", he told to journalist Silvio Essinger in the book Batidão - Uma Historia do Funk.

No only did he return: he confessed his love for his home in a funk song that put Borel on the map for every kid sweating it out on the floors of Rio´s bailes. Carlos would become known as Duda do Borel, the other half of duo William & Duda, men behind funk hit "Rap do Borel" (aka "Rap da Liberdade").

Carlos moved back to his beloved Borel at age of 19. He wanted to become a football star, but broke his leg in while playing and decided to leave these dreams behind. In Borel, he met an old friend, William Santos de Souza, who convinced him to instead step on the stage and start singing funk.

"Rap do Borel", distributed on casettes around the community, was a hit before the duo even performed it in the local bailes for the first time. Grandmaster Raphael from the legendary sound system Furacão 2000 broke the song for all the Rio through the Furacão's radio show and it was then released on Pipo´s "Volta do Homem Mau"-compilation. Eventually "Rap do Borel" became one of the three classic funk hits of 1995 that propelled the genre into the Brazilian mainstream media. (Other two I have covered in this blog earlier - see articles on "Rap das Armas" and "Rap da Felicidade.")

Fame quickly followed, including performances on TV Globo, "the CNN of Brazil", and even a remix for pop-rock star Lulu Santos. But like so often, success, fame and cash also brought the hardships. First came problems with the manager and personal disputes between William and Duda followed, leading to the breaking up of the duo. "We were like a family, I feel he started to see much money and lost his head", Duda laments in Batidão.

Borel até morrer

Borel até morrer - Borel till you die, rather freely translated. This is what the song is all about, the pride over one´s community. "Rap do Borel" is a celebration of the good will and friendship between the residents of the community: "The most humble hill in big barrio of Tijuca / for my friends, we all are friends / there it´s like a family". (1.)

But the song later takes on a darker tone, lamenting the friends lost to violence. "Lots of friends went to heaven / that´s why William and Duda ask peace for the Hill of Borel / we came to sing, to remember / a little the friends who went, never to return / since our world is blue like sky". (2.) And to conclude, the song also lists other fine favelas to give them a shout-out.

In a way the lyrics are very typical for this genre of funk songs. Very similar song is "Rap da Rocinha", by MC Galo. First, the praise for the home favela, then plea for peace, list of parts of favela and finally some love to a number of other communities. Naive? Perhaps, but I still find these songs very touching in their own way and their simple message is a highly important one: a change for better starts with self-confidence and pride over where you come from and who you are.

A Rolling Stone

When the duo broke, Duda felt crushed. Who convinced him to continue his career was a young up-and-coming MC by the name of Mr.Catra, now a legendary funk MC himself: "Duda was desperate, he was saying that he was not going to sing anymore, that life was at end... So I said: 'Get up!'"

And get up he did. Duda is still working hard, one of the most respected veterans in the funk game of Rio de Janeiro. He has even travelled all the way to Finland to rock the show, thanks to DJ Rideon (read all about Duda´s very succesful Finnish invasion here). His funks are still highly socially concious, as "Rap do Guerreiro" from a few years back demonstrates: "Look at the kid growing / looking for work but not finding / two years later look at the kid / on the hill carrying an AK." (3.)

Rideon describes Duda´s incredible stage prencence pretty perfectly after witnessing him live in January 2007: "Duda is a huge, playful man, reminded me of Biz Markie because of his size and character. He was really taking his singing to another extent with grouwling, shouting, moaning and barking. He was constantly moving around the stage bouncing and he really got the crowd going. It seemed like everybody knew the lyrics and were singing along." (Rio Baile Funk: I Love Baile Funk at Circo Voador)

William e Duda: Rap do Borel (zShare)

As a bonus (and as a sort of an apology for bad sound quality of the previous file), here´s another classic song by the same duo:

William e Duda: Rap da Morena (zShare)

- - -
Notes

1) "O morro mais humilde o bairro Tijucão / porque meus amigos nós somos todos irmãos / lá é como uma família"

2) "Foram muito amigos que foram pra o céu / por isso William e Duda pede a paz pro Morro do Borel / viemos cantar, para poder lembrar / um pouco dos amigos que se foi pra nunca mais voltar / pois o nosso mundo é azul igual o céu"

3) "Olha o moleque crescendo / procurando emprego mas sem encontrar / olha dois anos depois o moleque / no morro portando um AK"

Mad Decent meets Cumbia

2008-10-29T13:33:00.008-02:00

Diplo´s wonderful record label Mad Decent announced signing Toy Selectah from Monterrey, Mexico, to their roster. As the label describes him, Toy is an icon in Mexican music. He produced one of the first and biggest hip-hop acts in the country with Control Machete back in the '90s, moved on to A&R - direct for the biggest latin acts on Universal - and revived the Mexican cumbia scene with live DJ-sets around the world.

Toy Selectah is putting out his 12" on Mad Decent in January with his crew Sonidero Nacional under the new title Cumbias Machine. While digging into my song archives, I ran into the following Sonidero Nacional remix of Mexican pop princess Julieta Venegas´ song "Eres Para Mi". The remix fuses pop, reggaeton and cumbia into something called... cumbow? (Should such title leave you puzzled, let a professional musicologist shed some light on the issue.)

Julieta Venegas - Eres Para Mi (Sonidero Nacional Cumbow remix feat. Anita Tijoux and Sonidero Nacional) (zShare)

After that Toy Selectah´s official remix of Calle 13´s new single almost feels like a natural move. Calle 13 is one of the most progressive reggaeton acts hailing from Puerto Rico. Group´s previous albums took the Latin America by a storm and the third one is about to drop. Here Calle 13 manage to write a love song that has the group's trademark wit and dryish humour, yet is kinda touching at the same time.

Calle 13 - Nadie Como Tu (Toy Selectah Raverton remix feat. Café Tacuba) (direct link, via Mad Decent)

And finally Toy´s somewhat unique take on Chromeo´s Fancy Footwork.

Chromeo - Fancy Footwork (Toy Selectah Raverton remix) (zShare)

(Read more from Mad Decent´s blog.)

Yes, we are back.

2008-10-28T06:45:00.003-02:00

After months of silence, I am working on taking this blog back on-line. Especially a lot of articles on funk carioca are right on their way. Meanwhile, a few free goodies for anyone interested in how is that experimental cumbia stuff doing. Pretty well, apparently.

The grand ol´ men of experimental cumbia in Buenos Aires, ZZK Records, have put on-line a nice selection of mix-tapes from the biggest names in the city: Villa Diamante, Chancha via Circuito, El Remolon and my favourites, the Mendozan "digital cumbia ragga dancehall" duo Fauna (mixed by Daleduro). Also grab the new Fauna song Los Piratas del Zanjon (Zurita Mix) for free. And congratulations to Zizek for club´s second anniversary - and November 2008 European Tour!

Cabeza! is a net label offering digital cumbia (and anything related, from hip-hop to dancehall), on-line, all for free. In their own words, they want to invite you to have a taste of sounds that are nothing less than "super-original, incredibly tasty and finely selected. Danceable in any moment and any place on planet. Rhythms with seal of quality." So give 'em a try and go get that stuff!

And if that isn´t enough cumbia for you, or you want to get your hands on something more physical, Bay Area´s Bersa Discos are there for you. Their third EP is out, this time featuring Chancha via Circuito and DJ Panik. The EP is again getting a lot of love from Turn Table Lab and is available in other selected on-line stores too.

Cinemaissí 2008

2008-10-22T05:22:00.005-02:00

Cinemaissí 2008, a film festival for Latin American and Caribbean films starts today in Helsinki.

Films featured include Jose Padilla´s Elite Squad (22.10 18:30 Kino, 24.10. 21:25 Kino, 25.10 18:45 Kino and 27.10. 19:00 Bio Rex), or Tropa de Elite, the controversial Berlin Film Festival winner featured in this blog earlier - and a fine pick of other very interesting films.

Just to mention one, I could recommend Argentinian documentary Trelew (26.10 18:45, Dubrovnik). The film is a story about a failed espace attempt from a political prison during the Dirty War, the darkest chapter of the country´s history and one of central themes in Argentinian Cinema.

The rest of autumn will not be bad for film freaks either. Lens Politica, a festival for political films, is arranged in Helsinki again, so keep an eye on this site. Part of the festival will be an exhibition in Gallery FAFA of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, featuring a selection of my photos from Brazil.

Border Crossings: Bogotá

2008-07-28T17:30:00.004-03:00

29 stencils and pieces of graffiti from the gritty streets of Bogotá, Colombia, are now available here for your eyes. Read more about the Border Crossings-project in the earlier post.

Cumbia Invaders

2008-07-14T06:04:00.006-03:00

The finest of the experimental cumbia scene of Buenos Aires, Zizek, toured the North America and have clearly left their mark. A lots of blogs are writing about cumbia and there's this article on subject in URB and another one in The Fader. And XLR8R put out a mix-tape by Villa Diamante, the master-mind behind a lot of what´s happening in the cumbia movement down in Buenos Aires. Up in north Bersa Discos have released their second vinyl EP of experimental digital cumbia already a while ago - and while at the store, you probably should get this collection from Zizek's ZZK Records too. Equally curious are the rumours of some strange mergings of reggaeton and cumbia going on in between the Americas - read more here.

So cumbia just might be slowly invading the northern hemisphere too. It´s been a long trip from the beaches of the Caribbean Colombia via the suburbs and villa miserias of Buenos Aires, but apparently it´s far from over.

A Few Old Mixtapes

2008-07-01T16:21:00.014-03:00

To end my vacations for good and to put some action into this blog, a couple of old mixtapes. The first is a mix of tango songs, from old classics to electronic fusion things. It's a very basic introduction, and thus includes loads of basic classics like La Cumparsita. The mix also features number of songs by Astor Piazolla, but none of them played by the maestro himself, just to show the importance of his work.

El Corazón Mixtape vol. 1 (zShare)

Second one was made over a year ago. It was a quick promo-mix for a club called We Try Too Hard, that never became reality, in a bar called Siltanen, that, I guess, never opened it's doors either. It contains hot songs of that time. Some of them are almost nostalgic already, some are just plain over-played. But I post it as the range of the styles on the mix - from baile funk to baltimore and R'n'B, from electro pop and blog house to kuduro - in a way serves to illustrate the focus, or lack of thereof, of this blog.

We Try Too Hard presents: Ruffmixxx 1 (zShare)

And here are covers for the mixes (click on images to enlarge):

The Color Trilogy

2008-06-04T12:43:00.005-03:00

The Color Trilogy is a short photo essay on the Bolivarian revolution-movement in Venezuela. It's a small trip into Hugo Chavez´s bizarre mixture of furious nationalism, militant populism, erosion of democracy, dreams of La Gran Colombia, fancy for old-fashioned communism - and perhaps, on the bottom of it, a bit of genuine social progress.

Simon Bolivar was a legendary figure in South America's independence struggle, highly admired in every Spanish-speaking part of the continent and made into something of a figurehead by Chavez for his government. Bolivar can be seen revered in Venezuela along with the characters such as Ernesto Guevara and Fidel Castro. Worth noting is also the resurrection of Bolivar's plans of La Gran Columbia, a union of Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. Illustrating the shared history of the three countries, the same three colors are shared by the almost identical flags of the three.

View The Color Trilogy as a slideshow.

Can a Playboy do the Funk?

2008-05-31T11:51:00.008-03:00

The last saturday, May 24th, Eu Amo Baile Funk - a monthly funk carioca-event in Circo Voador - celebrated it´s second birthday. The bigger stars like Tati Quebra Barraco, Menor do Chapa, Galo and Duda do Borel shared the stage with loads of up-and-coming artists: DJs, MCs, dancers and even VJs. In other words, something for everyone and something happening on the stage all the time.

The crowd of the event was curiously different from the one dancing to the funk in the community bailes. Girls from better neighbourhoods were drifting around on their high heels, clinging to Luis Vuitton-handbags, and playboys were playing it cool, carrying caipirinhas to their ladies, white Air Force Ones shining in the night. The scene was more reminiscent of the Sao Paulo Fashion Week than a saturday night in Rocinha. This is hardly surprising as the tickets to the event at the gate would set you back 40 reais, over 15 euros, something that a few favelados can afford.

But then again, who am I to complain - which would be completely besides the point of the whole event anyway. Funk for everyone: Forget the class borders and take consolation in the hope that certainly some of those 40 reais (20 for those who have a student card) we paid to get in would trickle down to the actual artists. Everyone did certainly enjoy the show and as the evening wore on, the patricinhas and marcelinhos were shaking their butts on the sweaty dancefloor like any favelado. Happy birthday, Eu Amo Baile Funk. Todo mundo ama baile funk.

Here are a few rather random tunes from the evening's artists. Tati Quebra Barraco, the big bad girl of funk carioca, was already featured in this blog. Menor do Chapa is, ironically enough, a prohibidão-artist singing the praise to the Commando Vermelho. Duda do Borel is the second half of the legendary duo William & Duda from the favela of Borel, more on whom later. Their tune Rap do Morena, below, is a somewhat classic song. Duda is one of the biggest and most charismatic stars on the scene, a proper old schooler, and has performed even in Finland - see for yourself.

Menor do Chapa: Eu tô Boladão (zShare)
Tati Quebra Barraco: Sequência do Entra e Sai (zShare)
William & Duda: Rap do Morena (zShare)

You can read more about Eu Amo Baile Funk from DJ Rideon´s fine report, and Finnish-speakers also enjoy this little clip they made. Or take a look at the event's page in Last.fm.

Super Classics of Funk Carioca: Rap das Armas

2008-05-21T11:46:00.016-03:00

All the guns of favela

Guns I encounter when I walk up the hill, through a maze of buildings hastily constructed of red brick, while dodging the moto-taxis wheeling past: pistols and revolvers are carried on belt even when not on guard duty. Uzis go past every now and then. The definitive weapon of choice is an assault rifle, typically an AK-47. Hand grenades don´t seem to be carried around on a regular basis but are used in combat situations. Sniper rifles are not visible either, they are positioned on the top of the favela, from where they can be used without being seen, in case of a police invasion or an attack by an enemy faction. I carry my groceries past the guns with down turned eyes, without daring to look at the traficantes guarding the close-by boca-de-fumo, leisurely leaning over their huge weapons. I wonder how long it will take to get used to the sight, and if I ever get used to it, is that a good or a bad thing?

Rap das Armas starts with Junior and Leonardo singing "My Brazil is a tropical country / The land of funk, the land of carnaval / My Rio de Janeiro is a postal card / But I´ll be talking about a national problem". In the background we can hear blasts of firearms. Then the duo goes on, "pa ra-pa pa-pa-paa-pa-paa", imitating the sound of a machine gun. The song continues:

"Metralhadora AR-15 e muito oitão / A Entratek com disposição / Vem super 12 de repetição / 45 que ´um pistolão / FMK, m-16 / A pisto UZI eu vou dizer para vocês / Que tem 765, 762 e o fuzil da de 2 em 2 ... vem pistola Glok, a HK / vema intratek Granada pra detonar / vem a caça-andróide e a famosa escopeta / vem a pistola magnum, a Uru e a Bereta / colt 45, um tiro so arrebenta e um fuzil automático com um pente de 90"

Selective misunderstandings

You don´t need to understand Portuguese to realize that it is a list of guns. The song also mentions the Commando Vermelho slogan "paz, justiça e liberdade". Back in the beginning of 90´s, all this made the media do the math: "a glorification of crime", the favourite slogan of all the witch-hunts against the certain genres of popular music in Brazil. "Written by Leonardo and Júnior, well-known brothers from the Valão area of Rocinha, the hit underwent a major process of vilification by the media in the mid-nineties connecting them to the drug underworld. As a result, the Rio police constantly harassed the brothers as they came in and out of the favela, despite the fact that their song was never intended to promote the drug gangs and that their own older brother is a police officer in the Polícia Militar", sums up Paul Sneed the controversy around the song in his often quoted Machine Gun Voices.

This is what the media chose to ignore: the brothers also sing "In this country everyone knows / The favela is dangerous, bad place to live in / and is much criticized for the whole society / But there is violence in every corner of the city / because of the lack of education, the lack of information" and the song ends in the sentence "Say no to violence and let the peace reign."

Ironically enough, the conscious content of the songs was also the duo's weakness, according to Silvio Essinger's book Batidão - Uma Historia do Funk (Record, 2005): "...after four years of struggle, Junior and Leonardo decided it wasn't possible anymore to live of music. Both bought a taxi... funk would stay as sporadic activity, in the circuit of few bailes in the city who were interested in conscious funk, based on lyrics, which, in the end, they knew how to write." And I suppose a little has changed today - still remeber Dança de Creu?

Laws of silence

Residents of favelas are not happy to talk about violence. There is one extreme of presenting violence in media, that of films like City of God. Here the media portrays just the flip-side of the coin, favelas packaged in an exiting, violent form and sold to the western markets. "Most people in the community did not see the film because they can't afford the cinema, and the ones that did see it didn't like the fact that it showed only the negative side of life. It suggested that everyone in the favelas is black, violent and ready to be judged", commented MV Bill on the film to The Guardian in the article already quoted in this blog. "After the film came out, people from City of God would go into town for their jobs as maids and cleaners as usual... Their bosses would sack them when they discovered that they were from somewhere so horrible." Despite City of God being one of the most important films in the history of Brazilian cinema both artistically and financially, MV Bill has a point.

But equally disturbing is the silence of favelas. In book Notícias da Favela (written by Christiane Ramalho, Aeroplano Editora, 2007), the story of Viva Favela-portal, Regina Novaes, the anthropologist behind the Favela Tem Memória, asks how can there be any social memory in a space ruled over by 'the law of silence'. She reminds how, according to the anthropologist Michel Pollack, the society only started constructing the history of nazism when the Jewish themselves were able to discuss their suffering. This is what makes it important that Junior and Leonardo are talking about the national problem.

Viva Favela, by the way, is a very interesting project well worth checking out if you can read Portuguese. Aim is to build an Internet-based media for favelas and so far Viva Favela has been very succesful, every now and then making waves also in the Brazilian mainstream media. While the stories are written under the guidance of professional journalists, all the stories in the portal are by "correspondents" living in favelas.

Pages of a history book

But back to our tune of the day. The extremely famous song was a great hit back in the day and is heard everywhere again after being included on the soundtrack of Tropa de Elite. Despite the controversy, along with the duo´s other hit Endreço de Bailes, Rap de Armas brought them chance to grab a full-lenght record with Sony Music, De Baile em Baile. Together with Cidinho & Doca (of whom we've talked earlier) and William & Duda, they were pioneers building the road of funk into the record industry.

Much has been written on it, but I still decided to post the song, as it is made here in Rocinha, catches a part of reality of favela so well, has a huge historical importance and finally, the guys who made it just happened to live right next to Fundação Dois Irmãos.

Junior e Leonardo: Rap das Armas (zShare)

And as a bonus, a track that is in many ways an opposite of Rap das Armas. The song is a prohibidão funk describing the change of power in Rocinha, when Amigos dos Amigos took over and Commando Vermelho lost the control of the favela. But in addition to being a forbidden gangster song, it is - as a friend who copied me the tune described it - a document of an important page in the history of Rocinha.

Unknown: Track 3 (zShare)

(Unfortunately, I cannot provide any information on the artist and sadly end up doing exactly the same thing as the guys behind the Sublime Frequencies´ much critized prohibidão-collection.)

50 Years of Bossa: Nara

2008-05-16T22:22:00.006-03:00

This year Rio de Janeiro is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bossa Nova. I am far from a specialist in the genre, but I do feel obliged to join the party by posting some of my favourite bossas. I already wrote a post on Onde Brilham os Olhos Seus by Fernanda Takai, a recent album of modern versions of the songs that made Nara Leão famous. Now let's take a very brief look on Nara herself - my favourite bossa artist.

Following songs from the debut album Nara take us on an emotional rollercoaster ride. "When launched in March 1964, the fabulous first disc of Nara seemed distant from Bossa Nova. But the time erased this distance", writes Ruy Castro in the linear notes of the album´s remasterized edition. Perhaps it is this originality and unpredictability - the album not sticking to proven formats of bossa, but bravely including songs by sambistas like Zé Kéti and Cartola and back-then up-and-coming composers like Edu Lobo and Baden Powell - that makes Nara so enduring and interesting.

The first song - "March of Ash Wednesday" - is about the Brazilians' favourite subject of mourning: the end of the carnaval. Diz que moves to a more playful mood and finally Maria Moita is a melancholic classic about two generation of repressed females. The first and the last are also notable for the beautiful lyrics of the Bossa Nova's greatest poet Vinicius de Moraes. Moraes is nothing short of a national hero in Rio, right up there in the pantheon with the likes of Antonio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto.

Nara Leão: Marcha da quarta-feira de cinzas (zShare)
Nara Leão: Diz que vou por ai (zShare)
Nara Leão: Maria Moita (zShare)

And because right now I am feeling very, very sad, the following song catches the moment perfectly. "Always alone / I live searching for someone / who too suffers like me / but I cannot find no-one / Always alone / and life will go on like this / I have nobody to pity on me / I am arriving to the end" - well, maybe I´m not quite that sad.

Nara Leão: Luz Negra (zShare)

Fresh Funk: the Bad, the Good, and the Ugly

2008-05-12T19:02:00.001-03:00

Sunday Night Fever

Sunday night´s program at the club Emoções in Rocinha: the sound system Espião Shock de Monstro and the devastatingly popular MC Creu, the man behind the most annoying song in the history of funk carioca.

I arrive early and the club is still pitch black and half empty, but it wont stay long that way. Lighting equipment I didn´t even know existed wakes up one by one to brighten up room. Bondes - trains of dancers, crews who go to bailes together - snake through the audience and stop once in a while to perform a sequence of well-practiced, synchronized dance moves. It is an impressive sight. There is a gangster with a ton of bling-bling weighing down his neck, a young man drinking beer through a straw, girls in smallest mini-skirts that still hide most of their underpants and a kid hardly reaching my waist, all sweating it on the dancefloor. Tamborzão-beat sounds incredible when played through an enormous wall of speakers. It forces you to dance. The sensation is physical; you cannot keep still when the bass waves make your flesh tremble.

But let´s leave Emoções for a moment and enjoy funk on our humble little home sounds. Funk carioca is more available to western audiences than ever: two noteworthy compilations have hit the stores in the world outside Brazil in recent months, both subjects of a lot of talk in the blogosphere. Prohibidão C.V. from Sublime Frequencies and Pancadão do Morro: O Funk do Flamin Hotz, Já É? from Flamin Hotz couldn't differ more from each other.

The Bad

Prohibidão C.V. is a collection of prohibidão-songs, forbidden drug faction-promoting funks, recorded on field and presented without any information on artists. Collection is either a documentation of an important aspect of the funk phenomenon, or, depending on how you look at it, a shameless, misinformed attempt to cash on the appeal of violence and danger in the western market. A lot has been written on the subject, so I wont add anything, but instead I let DJ Rideon lead you forward. Or you can just take a look at Gregzinho's paper on it, clever, insightful and highly critical as always. I woudn't be that hard on the album, but he´s got a point.

The Good

Pancadão do Morro, on the other hand, is a sort of "fair trade funk collection", as aforementioned Greg, the man behind the disk, calls it in his blog. It looks like a perfect package in every way, unless you count the fact that it is only published on CD (though there is a vinyl EP available). The collection boasts great artists, biographies of them all, photos, the lyrics to each song in Portuguese and English and all this is packaged neatly in wonderful cover art. Images are painted by Tony Minister, a funk legend and a cover illustrator since the beginning. I've been in the process of digitalizing some of the fascinating cover art of the old funk LPs I've bought in Rio and Tony is the man behind all the coolest illustrations, so more on this subject once I get the cover art show on-line.

And the Ugly

To get the ugly one too in the mix, here's a little song from Neo funk, a compilation by Porto Alegre´s DJ Chernobyl, released just in Brazil. The disk consentrates on more poppy hipster acts like Bonde do Role and Edu K, features a few rather unbearable songs and lots of guitar samples. This tune has pretty nasty ones, in a positive way.

Miami Bros: Umbanda Larga (zShare)

The ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of beholder. Thus I don´t comment on Creu in this aspect, though personally I would put him in that category out of the three available. So let´s return to the Emoções. The secret of Creu is finally dawning to me: interaction.

Creu has perhaps around three songs, all of them based on him talking sexually-oriented nonsense over a pretty basic tamborzão-beat. The hit Dança do Créu - which consists of repeating the word "créu" at an increasing speed - is streched live into a 15-minute performance: how fast can a well-trained popozuda shake her big, round butt? The next song involves the whole audience taking three steps to right at same time and so forth, "Jack says", we all played this at kindergarden. And then back to the grande finale of booty shaking performance. The answer to the previous question: lightning fast. Looks kinda idiotic on YouTube but is amusing in it's own stupid way when you are actually there.

So the Dança do Créu, if you´ve missed it. You were warned.

MC Creu: Dança do Créu (zShare)

The Preacherman

2008-05-11T13:56:00.005-03:00

MV Bill - or Alexandre Barreto - is something of a KRS One of the Brazilian hip-hop, a self-made preacherman who started out as an MC and has since widened his scope to span pretty much every possible medium of expression and informing. Despite the consious hip-hop usually being more of a paulista cup of tea, MV Bill hails from the infamous Cidade de Deus in Rio de Janeiro.

The young Alexandre initially got into hip-hop when Miami Bass arrived to Rio, the very same sound that gave the birth to today´s funk carioca. "MV" humbly stands for Mensageiro de Verdade, "Messenger of Truth", a nickname given to the young rapper by his fellow residents of CDD after noticing Bill's penchant for preaching the message of the favelas. In 1998 he released his first album, CDD Mandando Fechado, a collection of true stories from his favela that was later re-released as Traficando Informação. Declaração de Guerra (2002) followed some years later and the most recent album, Falcão - O Bagulho é Doido (2006), is actually a sound track for Bill's documentary film.

Bill has published a pile of books - Cabeça do Porco (with Celso Athayde and the former security secretary Luiz Eduardo Soares), Falcão - Meninos do trafico (with Celso Athayde) and Falcão - Mulheres e o trafico (with Celso Athayde). His documentary film Falcão - Meninos do trafico, based on the book of the same name, made headlines and shocked the Brazil. Bill is also a community activist and one of the founders of Central Uníca das Favelas (CUFA). CUFA has spread all over the country from Rio Grande do Sul to Pernambuco and the community centers of the organization have seen guest lectures by people like Ronaldo and Ceatano Veloso.

The strength of Bill's journalistic work is in his position in favelas. As a highly respected resident he can go to places that are beyond the reach of normal reporters. "When I go to the shantytowns to speak to the kids, I'm one of them, so they are completely honest with me. What struck me most was the hope that they all had. I had barely got back to Rio when I started receiving calls from the mothers of the teenagers to tell me that their children had been killed. My next project was to film all of the funerals. How can I be just another rapper going 'yo yo yo' after that?", he told to The Guardian ( 'Only hip-hop can save us', 13.1.2006). The newspaper was interviewing him about the book Cabeça do Porco that collected the stories of 16 teenagers from favela, all of them already dead.

This friday MV Bill had invited a couple of friends from Sao Paulo - DJ King and MC Mister Bomba of SP Funk - on stage of Circo Voador to celebrate the first 365 days of A Voz das Periferias, his radio show on Roquette Pinto (94,1 FM for those around Rio, also available on-line for streaming). Rainy weather slowed down the party a bit and the paulista guests didn´t quite seem to set the carioca audience on fire. But the time MV Bill got on stage - backed up by a horn section, a few violins, a DJ and two drummers - the party finally got started. Bill gave his best performances when rapping together with the female MC Kmila and the chemistry between the two was a delight to watch.

The video for the song Só Deus pode me julgar (Only God can judge me) from MV Bill's second album is largely shot in the capital city Brasilia, with Niemayer's architecture providing impressive ready-to-film sets, and includes some very slimy scenes of giving a birth.

Soldado do Morro (Soldier of the hill) features an impressive arsenal of weapons in the hands of young men hardly on their twenties. Unfortunately, these are not gangster fantasies of main-stream rap. Instead, Soldado do Morro is actually a controversial documentary clip about kids working for drug-dealers. Clip was accused of being "a glorification of crime", despite it rather just depicts the sad reality. Trafficantes toting huge assault rifles are an everyday sight in many favelas: I walk past a number of them each time I go down the hill to the grocery store.

And to conclude, here´s a selection of tracks from the most recent album:

MV Bill: Falcão (zShare)
MV Bill: Nao Acredito (zShare)
MV Bill: Aqui Tem Voz (zShare)

MV Bill in Internet
Home page (in Portuguese and English)
MySpace (in Portuguese and English)
blog (in Portuguese)

A Street Corner in South

2008-05-09T20:13:00.000-03:00

There is a very special place for street corners in the collective heart of Buenos Aires. They are the mythical scenery of tango songs, places for lovers to meet and depart, places for enemies to engage with knifes and places for heroes to bleed to death.

There is a street corner in Boedo district of the city, the most famours street corner of them all. The intersection of streets San Juan and Boedo. The location of the legendary Bar Sur. Immortalized in countless legends and the famous tango Sur - "South". South refers here to the working class neighbourhoods of the southern Buenos Aires, where tango originally was born and where most of it's lyrical dramas are acted out.

The famous tango was composed by the legendary bandoneonist Aníbal Troilo, also known as El Gordo ("The Fatso"). The lyrics are penned by the equally legendary poet Homero Manci. It's a nostalgic, desparate lament of lost love and downfall of the beloved barrio:

Sur,
paredón y después...
Sur,
una luz de almacén...
Ya nunca me verás como me vieras,
recostado en la vidriera
y esperándote.
Ya nunca me alumbraré con las estrellas
nuestra marcha sin querellas
por las noches de Pompeya...
Las calles y las lunas suburbanas,
y mi amor y tu ventana
todo ha muerto, ya lo sé.

San Juan y Boedo antiguo, cielo perdido,
Pompeya y al llegar al terraplén,
tus veinte años temblando de cariño
bajo el beso que entonces te robé.
Nostalgias de las cosas que han pasado,
arena que la vida se llevó
pesadumbre de barrios que han cambiado
y amargura del sueño que murió.

A rather crude translation would be something like this:

The South,
a wall and after...
The South,
a light of corner-store...
Never will you look at me like you looked then
leaning in the window
and waiting.
Never will I light with the stars
our march without disputes
for the nights of Pompeya...
The streets and the suburban moons,
and my love and your window
everything dead, I know.

San Juan and ancient Boedo, lost sky,
Pompeya and arriving to the embankment,
your twenty years trembling with tenderness
under the kiss that I stole.
Nostalgies of the things that have passed,
sand the life swept away
sadness of the barrios that have changed
and bitterness of the dream that died.

It's probably my famourite tango song, one that still send cold waves running down my spine. Here's three versions for your enjoyment. A fatal, bone-chilling, merciless version performed by the great contemporary tango-diva Adriana Varela - think of Diamanda Galas singing tangos. One by the famous Argentinian rock artist Andrés Calamaro. And a classic version with the composer Aníbal Troillo on bandoneon and, speaking of legends, sung by the mighty Roberto Goyeneche.

Adriana Varela: Sur (zShare)
Andrés Calamaro: Sur (zShare)
Aníbal Troilo, Roberto Goyeneche y Su Orquesta Tipica: Sur (zShare)

The myth of South was also traced in the movie El Sur, from 1983, directed and written by Fernando E. Solanas. Here´s a clip from the beginning of the film, with Goyeneche performing the song.

All that remains now in the famous corner are a few rather cheesy tango joints, and a rumour has it that barrio might indeed be on a verge of a change: Some people think that it will become the next Palermo Soho, a trendy barrio of bars, clubs and fashion boutiques. Boedo definitely has it's own rundown charm, and at least it's still cheap enough for artists and such to live in. Whether the change would be for good or bad is a matter of opinion.

The Sky Above Bogotá

2008-05-08T20:30:00.010-03:00

The Sky Above Bogotá is a photo essay about Bogotá. It's a story about wind-beaten walls, asphalt shining in the rain and a grey sky. It´s a story about soldiers and old men, metal-fans and teenage-girls, criples and homeless people and many, many others. It's a story about pigeons, books and angels.

View The Sky Above Bogotá as a slideshow.

Some Mellow Sounds of Salsa

2008-05-07T18:35:00.012-03:00

A long, long time ago I posted the song Llora, Llora by Tego Calderon. It features Venezuelan salsa-legend Oscar D'Leon - also known as El Leon de la Salsa, that is nothing less than The Lion of Salsa - singing parts from the classic salsa song Lloralás.

Here´s a live version of Lloralás, just to celebrate the fact that I am back in Rio, almost settled in my new little home in Rocinha and almost ready to start my work at Instituto Dois Irmãos - and I am finally able to go through all the photos and music and notes collected along the way through Amazon, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. This song came on the huge pile of records that - I yesterday found out to my shock and amazement - had in some mysterious manner made their way into my backpack.

Oscar D'Leon: Lloralás (zShare)

And as a bonus track, almost fresh out of studio, a mellow salsa tune Te Lo Voy a Devolver from La-33, coming from Calle 33, Bogotá, Colombia. Originally envisioned by two brothers in 2001, La-33 quickly grew into a collective than a mere group - with members ranging from musicians to graphic designers - and released it's second album Gózalo in 2007.

La-33: Te Lo Voy a Devolver (zShare)

El Cielo Sobre Bogotá

2008-05-02T01:05:00.004-03:00

The sky above Bogotá is lead-grey and alive in a furious tempest. Heavy clouds race across the sky and cloak the surrounding mountains in soft darkness. Vast highways cut the city into pieces and skyscrapers of blackened concrete loom, merciless, above. Huge, grim graffiti decorate the dirty walls. It´s raining, like it´s raining everyday. The businessmen walk over you, in their black trenchcoats, and the beggars limp after you up and down the mountain slopes, begging for una moneda.

Indeed, Bogotá is a hell - in the books of Mario Mendoza, that is. Mendoza is one of the most prominent young Latin American writers. Born in Bogotá in 1968, he studied literature, worked in Spain and Israel and published his first novel, La Ciudad de los Umbrellas, in 1992. Following novels, Scorpio City (1998) and Relato de un asesino (2001) kept buiding Mendoza´s fame and in 2002 the book Satanás brought him the Premio Biblioteca Breve de Seix Barral-award. Mendoza writes gloomy tales of survival in a hostile environment that is the capital of Colombia; violent tales of murderers, robbers, whores, police officers - and often, artists - all those walking on the shadier streets of life. In Mendoza´s Bogotá, the sky is always gray and rain is always falling.

Forgive me for for rushing into this somewhat exaggerated statement: what a huge positive impact García Márquez made in this country! Colombia seems to be full of exiting authors, both struggling to get out of the huge shadow of the nobelist and at the same time embracing his ideas. The young generation has developed an own voice, a dark realism that still carries a spark of something magical.

A collection of short stories Una Escalera al Cielo (Stairway to Heaven), published in 2004, is one of the Mendoza´s more recent works. It starts with a tale of a desperate young man committing his first robbery and failing miserably, a gloomy story with a mood of escalating terror that ends like a splash of sulphuric acid over the reader´s face. After the shocking start, the reader will learn about a coma-patient finding love (in a fashion disturbingly similar to Pedro Almodovar´s Hable Con Ella), a secret that destroys the possessor´s soul, a young man overcoming a lost love through facing the death and an old guerilla bombman´s long wait together with a man who believes in a revolution of mind - among others. The collection ends like it started, with a tale of robbery. But this time, rather than the end, the robbery is a start of a new life: a depressed dancer, after being dumped by a taxist in a deadly sidestreet, gets mugged, nearly killed, and suddendly learns the value of life.

Below is an extremely short story by Mendoza. I chose it obviously because it is only one page in length, but also because it sums up in a few paragraphs a number of Mendoza´s main themes and one of the most surprising aspects of his writing: The strange, bittersweetly optimistic undercurrent of Mendoza´s stories. Saying that as long as there is life there is hope might be exaggeration, but still, every day lived is better than nothing. And this in itself, to me, is an boldly optimistic claim. Despite the hellish environment of Mendoza´s tales, they are often also accounts of human warmth and empathy. Characters of the stories find tender caring exactly where there should be none, from murderers, prostitutes and drug addicts.

(Please note that I am far from a professional translator and neither Spanish nor English is my native language. Thus, this is a quick and somewhat free translation. Forgive me and go get the original.)

- - -

Mario Mendoza:
Christmas Tale
from Una Escalera al Cielo (2004)

It is a few minutes before the midnight. The place could be an abandoned warehouse, a few shops out of service or an antique railway station, since from afar one can hear the characteristic noise of a cargo train. A man is tied to a chair. His face is broken in panic: his skin is yellow, eyes injected with blood, a days old beard covers his cheeks, dark rings under his eyes give him a bad look, a corner of his lips trembles nervously. To his side, a young man in loose pants and a wool cap has the role of a guardian, with a revolver in hand.

The door opens in the back and another young male enters. He says quickly, rushing the words:

- Ready, we gotta do it.

- They gave the order? - asks the first one.

- Yes, let´s get this over quickly.

The prisoner pleas, cries, begs, offers money to his murderers. The men throw a coin to choose the executioner, heads or tails. The guardian loses, he checks the bullets in the barrel of his revolver and brings the gun to the temple of the prisoner. When he is about to push the trigger they hear artificial blasts and the place is quickly illuminated with multicolored, phantasmagoric lights. The hitman turns to look and his eyes are lost afar, beyond the window. He lets the gun go down and says:

- We´ll do it tomorrow. Today is the chrismas.

- - -

The sky above Bogotá is light grey with a slightest promise, but the sun is too weak to struggle through the clouds and rain drizzles down on the streets. Bogotá might not seem like a welcoming place, but give it a chance and it soon reveals itself as one of the more exciting cities in the South America. It is a highly cultural city, a thriving center of modern art with innumerable galleries and top-quality museums, and possibly the most well-read and book-loving place on the continent north of Buenos Aires (of course, there is no beating Bs.As. in this respect, with all the hundreds of labyrinthine bookstores lining the Corrientes). It is not as dangerous as you might think, as areas where a foreigner walks are heavily guarded by the police. And in the end, beneath their dark coats, people are hospitable and friendly - like in the stories of Mendoza.

It´s Ugly and Doesn´t Like the Cursor

2008-05-01T16:06:00.007-03:00

The museum hub consisting of Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Donación Botero and temporary location of Museo del Oro in Bogotá is one of the finest art museum complexes in the South America. Museo del Oro exhibits a shining collection of pre-Colombian art, Donación Botero includes works from all the central modern artists from Monet to Picasso - in addition to a huge collection of Fernando Botero´s work, for those interested - and finally El Banco´s museum features quality exhibitions of international contemporary art and permanent collections of Colombian art.

One of the El Banco´s recent innovations is the exhibition Net Art Colombia: Es Feo y No Gusta el Cursor, exhibited on an internet site opened in september 2007. It´s a selection of 25 Colombian artists whose projects use Internet as their primary medium.

The name of the exhibition - "It´s ugly and doesn´t like the cursor" - comes from El Neme: es feo y no gusta el cursor, one of the first works of a Bogotá-based mathematician and artist Santiago Ortiz, from year 2000. El Neme is a very simple digital mascot, an animated bird that is both curious about the cursor moving on the screen and afraid of it. It´s a rather simple piece of software, but according to the curator Juan Devis, this paradox of curiosity and scepticism is very typical to the practise and consumption of net art in Colombia.

Without commenting further on the individual works, the show in itself is an important and brave venture. The website proves that the artists in South America are at least equally able to absorb new technology as their northern counterparts. Despite the Finnish being highly technologically-oriented people and Helsinki supporting a strong media art scene (including a number of schools, organizations and festivals - for an example - time for a word from our sponsors - see Media Lab of University of Art and Design Helsinki, now sadly dormant Katastro.fi-collective and the yearly festivals Avanto and PixelACHE), I cannot recall similar net art-exhibition with a such a powerful institutional backing happening in Finland.

The website is arranged in well-chosen thematical categories, ranging from the open source to the play. Categories manage to keep a local focus, for an example upload death concentrates on works addressing the ever-present theme of violence in Colombia. The site offers a wealth of information on the works, curator´s comments plus biographies and interviews of each of the artists. Unfortunately - and rather strangely, considering the inherently global nature of the Internet-based art - the website is only available in Spanish.

But without further blabbing from my part, see it - and interact with it - for yourself.

The City of Heroes

2008-04-18T00:00:00.021-03:00

1.

On the bus to Cartagena I am still the only gringo in the whole world and I get attention accordingly. The army officer, smiling and joking with everyone, finds my Finnish passport hilarious. "Él es gringo", shouts someone as an explanation, when the officer wakes me up and, disoriented, I mumble back a greeting in a mix of portuguese and spanish. Apparently it is these tiny details that make the gringo so funny. But the high-spirited officer seems to make the whole situation of the Colombian armed conflict and the constant risk of bus robberies somehow less threatening, and right now we are all very grateful for him being there, political issues aside.

At the border, the walls of the immigration office were filled with posters promising rewards for tips leading to capture of FARC-terrorists. The more important man, the fatter the reward and the bigger the mugshot. A somewhat unclear photo of recently killed FARC-leader Raul Reyes and a few of the smaller crooks had a red X drawn over them. Meanwhile in Caracas, the walls were announcing their love to Reyes: memorial slogans thrown on every surface, a stencil of his face on a Coca-Cola-truck, along with a message, short and clear: "Mata Columbianos!" (But no matter the political stances, this continent won´t give up on Coca-Cola. Even the socialist revolution is fuelled with Coke. "Argentina produces the best meat in the world and some of the best wines in the world, but the Argentinians, they eat the meat with the Coke and mix the wines with the Coke", a friend in Buenos Aires sighed one evening a hundred years ago, when we were gathered for a dinner in his strangly sad but homely apartment on Corrientes, high above the rooftops of the city, and a tropical thunderstorm was raging all around us.)

Other sights along the way: A lay preacher, furious, is screaming the Word at a busstop, veins throbbing in his arms that are desperately gripping a Bible against his chest like a drowning man might be hanging to a shard of driftwood, while I am trying to explain the Finnish weather and seasons to another highly interested and amazed local. How is it possible to sleep if the sun doesn´t set in the summer? (It all started, as usual, with following sentence: "¿Finlandia? ¿Es muy frio, no?") The roadside is a somewhat African sight, littered with a colorful mosaic of thrash. Motorbikes loaded with exotic, unknown fruits. Boys riding skeletal mules.

2.

And then Cartagena de Indias, Ciudad Heroica. Basic facts from a travel guide: founded in 1533, Cartagena quickly flourished into the main Spanish outpost in South America, a port for African slaves and gold looted from the continent, and a hub between Europe, Caribbean and South-America. Riches piled into the city, waiting for shipping to Spain, which attracted a number of fierce pirate attacks. After the most famous one, launched by the legendary English corsair Sir Francis Drake, the city underwent heavy fortification and during two centuries, a thick walls were built to protect it. Today, the old city is still incredibly well-preserved and Cartagena has become a trendy tourist resort, main Colombian port and a city of nearly one million inhabitants. Despite it's somewhat touristy atmosphere, it is a beautiful city with a rich mix of the black, spanish and indigenous cultures.

It's already night when I get into the town. The surreal atmosphere of all the Latin American clichés coming to life: There are busses, with blinking discolights both on the inside and the outside, pumping vallenato at ear-blasting volume, painted in wildest colours and patterns. The busses are stuck in a hopeless mess of a traffic jam, together with ancient, imported American cars ready to fall apart any moment and tiny rikshas: a honking, beeping, banging and singing Gordion's knot tied of neon lights and rusting metal painted in tropical colors.

Outside the taxi I am immediately assaulted by the street vendors. Everything is on sale. Cuban cigars. Jewelry made of coral. Drawings of historic streets, this is the Plaza Bolivar and the Palace of the Inquisition behind it, but don't be scared, all the five witches found in Cartagena were burned centuries ago. Pictures of saints, collections of reggaeton, pirated, naturally. Fruits, fruits, fruits I´ve never imagined even existed. "Llamadas, llamadas!" A girl sits in a street corner, she is a call-center, offering calls on her mobile phone, about 0.1 euros for phoning home. A street kid is selling an emerald for a dollar. Columbian pesos are exhanged at an incredibly bad rate. "No, gracias", I tell the huge black vendor, but he is not satisfied. "No, gracias, de verdad, no necesito." Perhaps it is something in my tone, perhaps something about my face, but the vendor gets really mad. "Fuck you! Fuck you!" he screams, the only sentence he knows in English. For the rest of the evening, while wandering around the less well-kept streets of crumbling colonial Getsemaní I seem to bump into this same man and then the dirty walls decorated with puke and spit echo with that same scream. "FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU, GRINGO!"

The sunrise brings with it the atmosphere of all things Caribbean. Rhum and pineapple juice. Straw hats, white cotton. Colorful umbrellas in pastel colors. The heat and the cool breeze from the sea. Colonial houses in Technicolour and overhanging balconies full of flowers in a seemingly endless bloom, palm trees, banana trees, all kinds of nameless trees shading the plazas that carry the names of generals and war heroes from the past. Like a set for a pirate film, everything is ready to transport you centuries back in time, old black ladies in colorful dresses, bowls of fruits meticulously balanced on their heads, bananas, pineapples, watermelons, all carefully selected by their color, then cut open and maybe sprinkled with water, and nothing too exotic, but safe, familiar fruits, and you cannot help asking yourself, is this all just for the tourists?

3.

The invasion of barbarians. All kinds of tourists fit in, but the lines are clearly drawn. Getsemaní, dodgy and in a state of sad disrepair and decay, is packed full with backpackers in the search of the cheapest prices and perhaps some of that so-called authentic atmosphere this market segment so highly appreciates.

The rest of the historical center is in an almost too perfect condition. This is where the wealthier tourists flock, mainly loud, middle-aged Americans. They live in the modern highrises of the southern barrios like Bocagrande, in blindingly white towers designed to resemble decks of a ship; the architects dreamed of luxurious ocean cruisers and sleek sails ready for a race around the world and hidden in the wall I count seven air conditioners per an apartment, even the balconies have a ceiling fan. These people came here on a daily direct Avianca-flight from Miami, professional pensioners, grey-haired men and blonded-haired women, they know all about lounging in the shade holding a sweet coctail. At a coffee shop, wealthy locals sip on excellent Colombian expresso and two middle-aged males, armed for the tourist picture-race with professional-quality cameras, are shamelessly taking advantage of their nationality and their wealth, hitting on two beautiful Colombian girls half their age. Men only speak English, in fat, southern accents, describing their home state Florida, and the girls sit quiet, wide-eyed, either bewildered by the glamorous (though wrinkled and slightly over-weight) aliens or wonders hidden in the few English words they grasp. Nothing, if even all the cannons of Drake failed, can destroy the charm of the colonial Cartagena, but at the same time, there is something highly themeparkish to it.

But what right do I have to deny the locals the chance to take an advantage of the flood of the tourists, being one myself? In my search for authenticity, that mythic off-the-beaten-track experience, desperately preached on the pages of Lonely Planet's South America on Shoestring-guide that is found in every dusty old backpack on this continent, mine included, would I rather see the city in ruins? Is the authenticity then found in the homeless lying in the filthy shadows of the meaner streets of Getsemaní? Or perhaps the dirt-crusted street kid begging for a dollar, a whore hissing after you, "shh, senhor, mira aqui", or maybe the pusherman, "senhor, tengo porro, tengo cocaina" - is that the taste of sweet, fabulous authenticity?

4.

Meet William: The honest con-man, the benevolent trickster, the saint of bullshit. William's big trick is that he believes in his own lies. He greets you when you haul your backpack around the Getsemaní and he honestly wants to help you. A thin, jet-black man on his fifties, dressed in humble and cheap but always smart and clean clothes. Bad teeth, big, mostly white smile and shining eyes. He owns the whole barrio, he tells you, and all the people on the street can confirm this, sure William, what ever. He knew another Finnish guy, a very nice person but drank three beers every morning, every morning under William's window this guy was shouting: "Oi, William, wake up, let's go for a beer!" William won't leave you before you've found a place to stay and he only charges one beer, or the price of four, for his services.

Next morning he is there again, waiting for you at the hotel door, he's playing with the row of pens and small tools decorating his shirt pocket. There is a girl looking for you, he announces proudly, but you don't know any girls in the town, you just got here. Are you sure? William is alarmed, he draws his hand from the shirt pocket, holding, disappointedly, a tiny screw-driver. You don't want to let William down: Well, perhaps this German girl you met along the way here, but there's really no way she'd be looking for you, that was weeks ago. William's eyes light up, yes, she probably was German, now could you spare a little money for the Saint William, because he has this sweet lady he needs to meet, he will certainly pay back tomorrow.

No, haven't got any. That is a white lie. You just think that certainly you have already given William enough. But today William still really believes that he will return the money tomorrow - so did the tables just turn, did you then become the liar in here? Okay, everything is cool, how about a tour to Playa Blanca, William knows a good one, and did you already check out La Habana? Perhaps tomorrow. Okay, tomorrow then, but could you at least spare a coke? No, sorry, totally broke. Honest. William smiles sadly, waves a goodbye and you feel like one dishonest piece of shit while you turn and climb the stairs to your room.

If both of you believe in the William's words then perhaps they really become true in a strange way? There is a band playing every evening at the close-by salsa bar La Habana, an enormous hall decorated from the floor to the ceiling with Cuba-memorabilia and spider-webs and black and white photos of musicians and dusty maps of Havana and of course the christmas lights and flags of Cuba in all sizes. Maybe some foreign friend had a peso to spare and William is dancing with the young Colombian girls, whirling around an amazing girl in a thight, short dress of yellow flower-prints. William has nothing nasty in mind, he dances with both ugly and beautiful girls, both fat and thin, he just enjoys dancing, flashing that mostly white smile, a screw-driver still in the front pocket of his old but clean almost white shirt.

5.

Posters of Orient Express, Constantinople and French absinth. In each street corner, a fabric sack, full of coconut shells hacked to pieces, leftovers of the steaming day. Antique stores selling ship-parts and books ready to fall apart. Scenes from some romantic dream. At the intersection where the main streets connect lights and diamonds sparkle, lights on the opposite shore, lights of the roaring cars, diamonds in the deep velvet sky, diamonds on the string tops and the deep velvet eyes of mulata-girls. On the peaceful, residential sidestreets of barrio San Diego, glimpse the life of the regular families as they open their windows for a taste of cool evening air: grandmothers forgotten in rocking chairs, kids clinging to the iron bars of the windows like little monkeys, a young mother lazily browsing YouTube below the anguished eyes of a huge, grim painting of the Jesus bleeding on the cross. And as the streets bathe in the soft light of the full moon, it becomes obvious that they are haunted. There are the ghosts of the generations of generals, slaves, bankers and maids, whores, mariners, pirates, indians; inquisitors and preachermen, witches and beggars and fishermen, singers and drummers and violinists, thieves, murderers and murdered, accountants, lawyers, doctors and merchants and cooks, woodsmiths and caretakers, and there are a thousand other ghosts of those who are only remembered on the dusty pages in the archives, and finally there are a ten thousand fading ghosts more, hardly more than shadows, of those not remembered at all, their sad moaning lost in the wind from the sea.

According to Jorge García Usta´s book García Márquez en Cartagena - Sus Inicios Literarios (2007, Seix Barral) it was here that the great Colombian Nobelist Gabriel García Márquez found his literary roots. Márquez lived in Cartagena during the years 1948-1949, working in the liberal newspaper El Universal. Here, the young novelist-to-become started developing his style in an intensive exchange between a group of friends. And even though the main point of Usta´s argument is the nourishing effect of the close circle of kindred spirits, it is tempting to think that something of Cartagena´s rich mix of cultures and mythic history remains visible in the rich, lush, magical style of Márquez.

A Few Notes on Venezuela

2008-04-14T14:19:00.006-03:00

Welcome to Caracas. First day in the capital of Venezuela, seven o'clock in the evening, right next to a big, policia militar-guarded avenue, I am mugged. I lose my passport and my quick just-passing-thru becomes a tedious wait of two weeks.

Today´s El Universal tells that during the last friday, between 8:00 in the morning and 8:00 in the next morning, 51 people were killed violently in Caracas. Compared to this, Rio de Janeiro is a peaceful trip to a beautiful place in the country - Rio´s average daily body count hovers around 17. One victim that made headlines was a 19-year old male, shot to death in his own home, by a thief who was robbing the clothes hung to dry in a window.

Welcome to The Bolivarian Revolution. After ten years of Hugo Chavéz, for better or for worse, Venezuela is one of the least democratic countries on the continent. Chavéz is everywhere, supported by a huge propaganda engine building a cult around the leader´s charismatic personality. The graffiti on the streets screams Sí, Chavéz! Open the television, any time during the day, and after a little surfing you´ll find a channel running a speech by Chavéz. "With Chavéz, people are the government", goes the official slogan of the nation, and the face of the president seems to mark every official or unofficial surface.

Chavéz might be on the side of the poor people against the evil forces of the international capitalism, but he is also a fanatic, a militant and a populist. And very much like George Bush he loathes so much, Chavéz just can´t keep his fingers of the affairs of the other nations, spending the country´s oil riches on political adventures abroad. Crisis of March 2008, following Colombia´s strike against FARC on the Equador´s territory, was seen by many - and not completely without a reason - as a shameless attempt by Chavéz to spark a war on the continent.

Welcome back to the Spanish-speaking part of the continent. The duo Wisin & Yandel are ruling the reaggaton right now. And thus, they are pretty much ruling the airwaves everywhere. There are two songs that you will hear every single day, many times, unless you stay in your hotel room and keep the windows shut tight. And don´t turn on the television.

First, on Donde Está El Amor, featuring Franco de Vita, they are lamenting over the bad things happening around the world.

And Sexy Movimiento should be pretty self-explanatory.

I don't really like either of these songs. I don't actually care that much about the whole Los Extraterrestres-album of Wisin & Yandel, but my taste doesn´t matter here. This is what the Latin America is playing.

And finally, welcome to Venezuela. Despite all the violence, difficulties and challenges, Venezuela is a beautiful country, full of incredible natural wonders and riches.

Favela Snapshots 2: The Tale of Two Hills

2008-03-24T17:19:00.012-03:00

After O Cativeiro, it is a pleasure to write about Patrícia Melo's Inferno, published in 2000, a book that could be crudely described as the film The Godfather II set in favela. Inferno succeeds in almost everyway: it is an exciting, touching, sharp and insightful description of a young man's odysseia through the criminal life. And at the same time an image of a whole society captured in an impossible situation.

The author Patrícia Melo is a novelist, dramaturgist and scriptwriter. Her other works include Acqua toffana (1994), O matador (1995), Elogio da mentira (1998) and Valsa Negra (2003). She's won a number of awards, including Prêmio Jabuti for Inferno in 2003. Fine Brazilian film O Homem do Ano, directed by José Henrique Fonseca, is based on the book O Matador. In 1999, Time Magazine included Melo on the list of 50 "Latin-American Leaders for the New Millenium."

King of the Hill

Inferno is a story of a young boy called Reizinho. Reizinho dreams about becoming a king. He grows without a father in the favela called Berimbau. He becomes addicted to drugs at the age of 11, drinks, sniffs glue and runs away from home. He promises to his mother to stop doing drugs if he gets to work for the local drug gang. Her mother has no other options. Eventually Reizinho becomes the leader of not just Berimbau but also the neighbouring hill and one of the most powerful drug trafficers in Rio. And then it all comes down, as it always does.

Inferno is a story the family. Reizinho's father has abandoned his family, fallen into alcoholism and left his wife Alzira to take care of both Reizinho and Reizinho's sister Carolina. Alzira is under constant strain. She is working as a house maid for a middle-class lady called Juliana, and at home, both Reizinha and Caroline give her more than enough trouble: Reizinho with his career choice in drugs and Caroline by getting constantly pregnant with all the wrong men. Reizinho's desperate search for his father is what largely drives the drama for the first part of the story. Often, the only support for Reizinho is Suzana, an older girl who is something of a foster mother to Reizinho when his real mother fails to understand the boy. Family is where the story starts and family is what finally breaks everything apart.

Inferno is a story about every one in the favela. There are drug-dealers, the ones who drive the drama forward. Reizinho's tutor Miltaõ, who slowly descends into madness. Fake, Reizinho's best friend, aspiring rap artist who in the end is pretty much what his name implies. Leitor, "reader", Reizinho's right hand, who claims to read at least 200 pages every day and is a treasure house of colourful theories.¹ Zezinho, powerful ruler of the neighbouring favela, Reizinho's mentor, husband of Suzana, father of Reizinho's great love Marta - and eventually Reizinho's deadliest enemy. And then there are the normal people, a mixed bunch who might not so much push the story forward but provide it with an infinite depth and humanity.

And Inferno is a story about violence. Violence that is a river.

The stream starts with Dona Juliana, abusing Alzira. Juliana is a useless middle-class housewife, spending her time with forbidden romances, losing weight and amusing her friends by telling everyone how stupid Alzira is. The stream flows downwards: Alzira returns home and beats Reizinho up when the boy constantly fails her tight expectations. The stream becomes a river: Reizinho joins drug gangs and makes his way upwards in the hierarchy through violence. His first kill is something of an initiation rite. His most painful kills are few of his closest friends.

Hectic, sharp and humane

Inferno is written in a fluid, hectic, economical style. Story moves fast, sometimes even two fast: despite spanning nearly 400 pages, some strings are left untied. For an example the father, in the beginning so important, disappears into the background when Reizinho thinks he has been saved. Melo writes highly rhythmic language: onomatopoetic words, sounds, names, lists and swearwords structure the beat of the paragraphs.

Melo is always sharp and amusing. Inferno is full of clever viewpoints and opinions but these are never pushed on the reader. Instead, Melo let's the characters of the story speak out their mind. Churchmen, drug dealers, housewives, sport teachers, hookers and barkeepers, all get their turn to speak. There's even an American film director, "specialized in exotic locations", who comes to favela to film a commercial, since it's such a visually fascinating place (and there's some really good, pure white coca available). As I said, Melo is always funny and critical. And actually, something like that has happened, except it was a music video for Michael Jackson.²

But Melo is also able to build deep, touching characters. Even the less important ones are complex, credible and fully drawn. Despite their shortcomings and blood-stained hands, all the characters are humane and evoke empathy in the reader. There are many genuinely moving moments in the book: the few happy days of love between Marta and Reizinho, when they even go to the toilet together. Reizinho taking care of Leitor, after Leitor is bound to wheelchair and unable to move or speak, Reizinho lovingly calling him the most clever vegetable in Rio. Zezinho's limiteless love for his family, even though he is one of the most ruthless drug trafficers of the story.

And that bittersweet encounter between the father and the son somewhere in the first half of the book: The father is a drunkard, a piece of human garbage thrown somewhere in the Praça Argentina, without a clue about Reizinho. Reizinho has ran away from home, is hopelessly addicted to crack and glue, he's even sold, for a tiny amount of crack, her grandmother's precious trophy from the time she crafted fantasias for the legendary samba school Mangueira. Reizinho sits, tired, hopeless, lost, next to his father. He doesn't say a word, he won't reveal his identity until much later, but somehow the two sad failures feel connected, taking comfort in each other.

Finally, Inferno is a book about the life in a state called cabeça de porco, "head of a pig", a situation without an escape. Like Michael Corleone in Godfather II, Reizinho seems to destroy everything he seeks to protect. Towards the end of the story Reizinho is given two options: Kill Zezinho, the beloved father of his girlfriend Marta and the husband of his foster mother Suzana, neither of whom will ever forgive him. Or get killed by Zezinho. Two impossible options. No way out of the situation. That is the tragedy, the inferno, of the favela.

- - -
Notes

1) Leitor brings to mind William da Silva Lima, O Professor, "The Teacher", one of the founders of Commando Vermelho. Highly intelligent and idealistic, Silva Lima perceived CV as a tool for Leftist Revolution and considered his role to be something of a Brazilian Robin Hood.

2) In february 1996, Commando Vermelho-leader Márcio dos Santos Nepomuceno, or Marcinho VP, made a deal with the producer of a music video for Michael Jackson's song "They don't care about us" to use the Morro Dona Marta in Botafogo as a set for the video.

Favela Snapshots 1: The White Man's Burden

2008-03-24T15:11:00.018-03:00

O Cativeiro by Cícero Leitão and Inferno by Patrícia Melo have very little in common. Both have a cover design featuring a picture of favela and a story largely set on a morro, but other than that, they are pretty much opposites of the each other. I'll start with the worse one.

A few notes first. I read the books in portuguese, but Melo's works are widely available as translations. And O Cativeiro, on the other hand, isn't really worth the trouble. Also, contrary to my usual way, I stole the pictures for these posts from the net. I unfortunately left my tools for editing images in Rio. All the credits and honour to the creators of these photos.

White man's burden

I initially grabbed O Cativeiro just because it seemed like an easy and entertaining read, something to practice my portuguese with, and because it was displayed visibly in my favourite book store in Ipanema. Easy to read, yes; entertaining, hardly. And apparently the reason for that spot of honor at the book store was because the book has a scene set in that particular shop.

O Cativeiro is an ordinary police thriller, telling the story of a young, promising TV-reporter William Rossi. He happens to come across a suitcase containing some highly valuable secrets and soon gets hijacked by a bunch of drug trafficers. As the police, including William's cousin Giovana, get on the William's trail, they find out that the one who is pulling the strings is actually a highly powerful politician, with number of corrupt cops on his side...

Unfortunately, the one behind it all is pretty apparent to reader right from the beginning, and the rest of the suspense is based on trying to guess which of the insignificant, one-dimensional cop characters get whacked and what is the deadly secret in the suitcase. Except that reader doesn't really give a damn. The plot is full of holes, the writing is rather amateurish and the reader is always three strides ahead of the characters.

Why then do I bother to write about this book? Because it is also an interesting, though scary visualisation of the mindscape of the succesful, professional middle-class in Rio.

Professional-class heroes

The profile of Williams, a professional class hero: Williams is "handsome and charismatic", "calm, intelligent and polite". He is highly educated and was also succesful in the army: the best shooter in the class, he was begged to pursue a military career but his devotion telejournalism won. Seeing his face in television is his biggest dream. Being so good with firearms, though, proves to be a useful survival skill as Williams manages to single-handedly escape from his torturers. Also, note the pseudo-English name of the hero.

Interestingly, three most significant police characters are women, all of them "trained", "attractive" and "well-formed." All the main characters are described as highly ambitious and devoted to their work. Most of the heroes are also naturally blond. For an example Ana, Williams' ex-girlfriend and also a succesful journalist, still desperately aching for Williams, has "blue, intelligent eyes" and "a sensational body".

Monsters and losers

In O Cativeiro, there are two kinds of people in favela, the bad guys - traficantes, vagabonds, marginals - and the ordinary people.

The bad guys are either black or mulato. They are vulgar, cruel and stupid. They constantly fumble even in their profession of crime, relying solely on firepower and numbers instead of skill or tactics. Most of the young people in favela, too lazy to get an education, are more or less linked to the organized crime: "Unoccupied youngsters were talking banalities in front of the habitation. When they passed by, they shot malicious looks on the direction of hips of Luciane, which she moved gracefully." When not mongering vicious commands and barking at each other, the bad guys always talk "banalities."

Favela is a nightmare landscape of poverty and dangers. Right after Williams espaces he stumbles on a clandestine cemetary, with human skulls and bones. He feels like he's "in the middle of a Stephen King novel." Diabolic funk pulses somewhere on the background.

Later, he meets a few of the normal residents of favela. Old couple hesitantly helps him to escape. White husband Manolo manages to craft a plan to get him out of his house. He masquerades Williams as a part of a carnivalistic crew promoting an electorial candidate, mostly to safe his own covardly ass and partly because he bitterly hates traficers: he lost two of his sons to the traffic. Manolo's wife Dona Maria is "black and weights almost hundred kilos. She passes most of her time complaining about her aching feet." She is stupid and superstitious: Dona Maria watches a lot of television, so she recognizes Williams, but because Williams has been declared dead in the television she thinks that she's seeing a zombie. After all, she also saw Michael Jackson's video The Thriller on the telly.

Sadly, the cover of Williams is busted by another favelado, a silly young girl Michele. Michele dreams of a glamorous life and when the colourful electorial crew, with MCs and samba bands, rides into favela, she thinks that her chance is here. She doesn't like studying, so she puts on her better clothes and pushes herself into the glamorous group. There she meets Williams, whom she also recognizes as she too watches a lot of television. Williams begs her to help him, which she gladly promises to do. Of course, Michele immediately calls all her girlfriends and soon the whole of the favela knows - including the gangsters pursuiting Williams

Thus, we learn that the reason for all the misery in the life of favelados is mainly their lack of ambition. A lazy bunch, they spend their time watching television - whereas, we have earlier learned, the heroes just can't sit still and channel surf even when the've been ordered for a sick leave. There are those that get shown on the TV and those that just watch it: the active and the passive, the professionals and the losers. Favelados spend their time brooding, complaining and talking bullshit with their friends. They do, naturally, dream about the good life, but they do pretty much nothing about: the old couple is hoping to win in the lottery, and Michele, despising school and hard work, builds her future on a vague scheme of seducing somebody famous.

John Rambos of everyday

But the clumsy criminals of the favelas wouldn't probably pose such a threat to the white professional class, if they weren't lead by the corrupted upper classes. This reflects the growing insecurity of the middle-class: they are losing their trust on authorities who are failing to control the raising wave of violence. The corrupt politicians are clearly the target to blame, especially populists with leftist sympathies. O Cativeiro is a paranoid cry for help against these threats from all sides and a tribute to the brave vigilantes among the ordinary people. There is still need for John Rambos of everyday.

There is one imaginitive scene in the book. A crime boss is captured by the good cops and taken away for interrogation and torture. The torturer is called Dr. Mengele. He's an obviously crazy old man with a toolbox of strange, sharp medical tools and a heavy german accent. He starts his work in a rather unorthodox way and when the hardened criminal, expecting a painful torture, wonders what the hell the doctor is doing, Mengele slips that the sex-change is painless operation if the patient would just please keep still. The criminal speaks immediately and so would I. This might be funny in a film of Quentin Tarantino, but in the context of O Cativeiro, the scene is plain ridiculous. Of course "the doctor" is an actor. But the trafficers are just so simple.

These are not just personal attitudes of the author, but reflect a wider opinion of the society. As a study by Nova S/B and Ibope - published in O Globo ("Aculpa é dos otros" and "Entre os mais ricos, tortura é aceita por 42%; nos pobres, por 19%", March 9th 2008) - shows, 26% percent of Brazilians accept the use of torture as means of interrogation. There is a significant difference in the opinions between the classes: 42% of the higher income population accepts torture, where as "only" 19% supports the practise among those earning less than a minimum wage. "Rights? Human rights are for humans", sums one of the O Cativeiro's heroes it all, when capturing a black skinned, demonic traficante whining for his human rights.

Admiring the distance

2008-03-22T16:51:00.006-03:00

I am in Belem now, up in the northern Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon. 50 hours in the bus turned into more than 60 as a small riot, including a bonfire of tires and road blocks, interupted the journey. As the sun set and the drizzling rain started, a tired looking Policia Militar-officer, toting a H&K, managed to send the people back home.

I was warned against such a long ride, again and again, but I enjoyed the trip. It's much better than flying, as long as the bus is okay and you're not competing against time, that is. You'll get much better idea of the distances in this vast country. There's nothing you can really do in the bus - just enjoy some good music, read a little and watch as the incredible nature of Brazil rolls past the window. Occasionally something goes wrong, so you'll wait an hour or so at the gas station as the bus gets fixed. Sit back, have a beer and practice your portuguese - there's always someone in the bus who really wants to know what on earth the gringo is doing up here.

Belem. The metropolis of Amazônas, they call it. Towering highrises, crumbling colonial buildings reminding of the days of the rubber boom, bustling markets, huge old cranes creaking at the harbour, all the smells of the ageless river and dead fishes, screaming of vultures hunting for leftovers, fruits in a thousand colours and forms. Wide smiles, though few teeth, and both thumbs up. Tudo bem? Tudo bem.

Water, water, everywhere. Pouring tropical rain turns the streets into little rivers, every day. An umbrella is the local accessory number one: both guarda-chuva and guarda-sol, protection against the rain and the merciless sun. It's said that the weather gives the rhythm to the local life: Let's meet after the rain.

And the rainforest, everywhere. While out there the Amazon is destroyed at an alarming speed, the life still tries to fight back, creeping into every little space available. From my window I can see a concrete wall of a skyscraper, and there, in the middle of the wall, in the height of 20 meters, grows a tree. The little puddles of water in the shower, never quite drying in this humidity, are bustling with insects and worms within minutes. Disgusted, at first I tried to stomp them to death: what a waste of time, what an insanity. Life is everywhere here, in a thousand shapes and sizes. Live and let live.

Now I am waiting for a river boat up to Manaus and from there I aim to continue to Colombia. My computer I left in Rio, so no music or pictures here for a month or so. But I have time to read now, so I'll try to post an occasional book review. I have a lot of interesting reading to make my backpack more challenging to haul around.

Guilty pleasures

2008-03-15T15:42:00.003-02:00

For a while now, I've had this weird feeling that something is missing. A background noise, a smell perhaps, something. Until I realized what it is: reggaeton. In the rest of the Latin America there is no way to escape reggaeton - even the monkeys must be pumping it in the Venezuelan jungle - and in Brazil I haven't heard a single "boom-chi boom-chick"-beat. A continent divided by the two languages.

I didn't imagine missing reggaeton. It's not a sound that would hold a very high esteem in my native Finland, and I can't say I liked it that much either. Yet recently I've developed it into something of a guilty pleasure. Up north reggaeton usually gets dismissed as the cheesy Latin bastard-son of hip-hop and reggae. Language is again one obvious barrier, but it's a matter of cultural understanding too. I stumbled on this great blog, by the Hunter College researcher and journalist Raquel Z. Rivera, and reading such an in-depth analysis on the genre and it's background makes also the music much easier to grasp. And there are really great reggaeton artists that should appeal outside the Hispanic world too.

The greatest of them all, to me, is Tego Calderon. There is no match for his laidback flow, scarred voice, fat accent and the calm, super-cool style that would eat the aggressive boasting of youngsters for breakfast, without even breaking the sweat. And it doesn't hurt that Tego's beats include few of the most interesting fusions of various Caribbean and Latin American music styles. Seeing is believing: I witnessed Tego live at Buenos Aires, and there is no way to beat his charisma.

Rivera and Frances Negrón-Muntaner descibe the importance of Calderon in breaking the reggaeton into the main-stream of Puerto Rican culture in a highly interesting article Reggaeton Nation: "A turning point in gaining critical attention was the musically, poetically, and politically sophisticated 2003 debut album of Tego Calderón. His populist lyrics — which reminded many of salsa’s El Sonero Mayor, Ismael Rivera — together with his innovative musical fusions, use of world-renowned musicians in live shows, and charismatic yet humble demeanor appealed to the old-school salsa lovers and the intellectual left."

Allow me to introduce The Underdog. Here's a couple of my personal favourite songs. First two from the album The Underdog / El Subestimado and next two from the most recent album El Abayarde Contra Ataca. And to illustrate Tego's love for the salsa, the song Llora, Llora features the Venezuelan salsa-legend Oscar d'Leon.

Tego Calderon: Slow Mo (zShare)
Tego Calderon: Llora, Llora (feat. Oscar d'Leon) (zShare)
Tego Calderon: Ni Fu Ni Fa (zShare)
Tego Calderon: Los Mios (feat. Pirulo) (zShare)

Super Classics of Funk Carioca: Boladona

2008-03-12T23:08:00.008-02:00

There is no question that Tati Quebra Barraco is the baddest bitch in the funk game. If funk carioca often tends to treat the ladies with a highly objectifying, though playful attitude, Tati is there to strike back for the girls. The big lady beats the guys in their own game: Tati's lyrics are openly, explicitely sexual, super-funny and dirty enough to make a grown man blush like a teenager sneaking to buy his first porn mag at a local kiosk.

As Paul Sneed wrote on Tati: "She sings that she doesn’t like “little dicks, “Não gosto de piru pequeno,” and graphically describes what she does to the men she catches. She is perhaps the most enduring and widely known female entertainer in funk and almost all of her songs play with the objectification of men and the liberation of the female libido."

Tati also got into the headlines of the tabloids some days ago, as her brother confessed the killing of his ex-wife. The motive for the murder was that the poor woman had been possessed. I didn't read which spirit, demon or other evil entity had taken over the victim, but from the angle of the recent development in the Brazilian religious field the motive isn't that bizarre. Pentecostal christian cults like hugely popular Universal Church - sometimes described as "the McDonald's of religion" - have popped up everywhere and are actually holding sermons to banish the orixa-spirits of the umbanda- and candomble-religions.

But more on the affairs of faith later. Here's a classic Tati-song, produced by DJ Marlboro.

Tati Quebra Barraco: Boladona (zShare)

And now for something totally different

2008-03-12T22:54:00.005-02:00

Huoratron's $$ Troopers video has nothing to do with the usual content of my blog, but I have to post it as both the song and the video are just so awesome. I've worked as a VJ for Huoratron on a number of occasions, ever since Koneisto 2003-festival, and it's always been a pleasure to co-operate with this guy (I have nothing to do with this video though). Now the long avaited single on the man's New Judas-label is finally out and is getting everyone very exited. I'll go and buy one as soon as I get back to Finland.

The Divided City I

2008-03-12T11:57:00.014-02:00

"Exite o Rio de Janeiro, o Rio de Janeiro e o Rio de Janeiro. Três cidades que occupam o mesmo espaçi geográfico, mas raramente o mesmo espaço simbólico." -Silvio Essinger: Batidão

Rio de Janeiro is a divided city, as is every third world metropolis. But Rio is divided in a unique way, because of the geography of the city. The city is a mosaic of the sea and the city, the hills and the rainforests, a labyrinth of the asphalt and the unpaved paths.

The poor in Rio live right next to the rich. They haven't been pushed to the fringes of the city, which would be the usual solution to get the slums out of sight and out of mind, nor has the middle-class fled to seek refuge in the suburbs, as is the case in the North American cities. The poor have built their favelas on the hills overlooking the richer neighbourhoods.

Such proximity evokes fear in the rich. Poverty and social problems breed violence and Rio has plenty of both. The media is happy to pour gas into the flames. News of murders, robberies, kidnappings and car highjackings. The rich are caging themselves in, seeking protection from the dangers real and imagined.

This is the first Rio, a city of metal bars, locks and private security. A city of door-men, red carpets and refridged, freezing air. A city hidden by behind the darkened windows and bullet proof glass. A city of birdcages.

I had planned to file these images in my Flickr under a collection called Photo reportages. But it sounded too pompous, as professional photo journalism these pictures are not. They move somewhere between pure artistic expression and an attempt at a social documentary, yet I do try to convey an honest (if somewhat personal) image of the issues tackled. I ended up naming the collection Photo essays. Maybe that would be more accurate. First "essay", The Divided City, is about the social divide in Rio de Janeiro and I just got the part one - A Life in a Birdcage - on-line. Please follow the link below to see all the images in their proper size and order. The second part "A View to the Sea", on life in the favela of Babilônia, will hopefully soon follow.

View A Life in a Birdcage as a slideshow.

Super Classics of Funk Carioca: Rap da Felicidade

2008-03-06T23:09:00.013-02:00

Caetano Veloso, the Brazilian super hero of MPB (Música Popular Brazileira) said in an interview in 2004 that if it was up to him, Rap de Felicidade would be one of the funks that had a guaranteed spot of honour in the history of the Brazilian music. The song, published 1995, is perhaps the biggest funk song of all the time and if you are even slightly interested in the genre, you probably have heard it already a countless of times.

Rap da Felicidade is sung by MCs Cidinho & Doca - born as Sidney da Silva and Marcos Paulo de Jesus Peizoto - from the favela of Cidade de Deusin Jacarepaguá, the Zona Oeste. The infamous favela was built to accomodate the refugees of a deluge in 1966 and quickly descended into an inferno of violence, due to the rich neighbourhoods rising around it and the resulting increase in the demand and traffic for drugs in area. Cidade de Deus was made famous by the book of the same name from 1997, by Paulo Linz, and especially the already classic film based on the book.

The song became an immeadiate success. Together with Rap de Armas and Rap do Borel, the equally classic hits of Junior & Leonardo and William & Duda, published around the same time, it paved the way for the funk carioca to enter the record industry and the main-stream consciousness. Cidinho & Doca made their first full album, Eu só quero é ser feliz, and got to taste a slice of a sweeter life: Cidinho later recalled how he suddendly found himself as a happy owner of a house and a car - the stuff of dreams for a young favelado - and 21 pairs of imported tennis shoes on top of that. Cidinho & Doca have kept up a succesful career for over ten years and Cidinho's daughter, born in 1996, is already following in her father's footsteps on the career of an MC.

The impact the song has made is partly due to it's highly conscious social content. It serves to illustrate that not all the funk music is about praising the organized crime, like the proibidão-funk, or detailed descriptions of sex. That's why I've posted the lyrics below, with a somewhat free translation. I especially like the part about the tourists and coconuts, since like a proper gringo, I often enjoy coconut water by the beach, too. Aqua de coco even rhymes with sufocu.

Rap da Felicidade

Eu só quero é ser feliz
Andar tranqüilamente na favela onde eu nasci
E poder me orgular e ter a consiência que o pobre tem o seu lugar
Fé em Deus... DJ!

Minha cara autoridade eu já não sei o que fazer
Com tanta violência eu sinto medo de viver
Pois moro na favela e sou muito desrespeitado
A tristeza e a alegria aqui caminham lado a lado
Eu faço uma oração a uma santa protetora
Mas sou interrompido a tiros de metralhadora
Enquanto os ricos moram numa grande e casa bela
O pobre é humilhado e esculachado na favela
Já não agüento mais esta onda de violência
Só peço a autoridade um pouco mais de competência

Diversão hoje em dia não podemos nem pensar
Pois até lá nos bailes eles vêm nos humilhar
Fica lá na praça que era tudo tão normal
Agora virou moda a violência no local
Pessoas inocentes que não têm nada a ver
Estão perdendo hoje seu direito de viver
Nunca vi cartão-postal que se destaque uma favela
Só vejo paisagem muito linda e muito bela
Quem vai pro exterior da favela sente saudades
O gringo vem aqui e não conhece a realidade
Vai para a Zona Sul para conhecer água de coco
E o pobre na favela passando sufoco
Trocada a presidência uma nova esperança
Sofri na tempestade agora quero a bonança
O povo tem a força só precisa descobrir
Se eles lá não fazem nada faremos tudo daqui

Rap of Happiness

My only wish is to be happy
Go peacefully in the favela where I was born
And be proud and know that the people have their place
Faith in God... DJ!

My dear authority, I don't know what to do
With such violence, I'm afraid to live
'Cause I live in favela and am very disrespeced
The sadness and the joy walk here side by side
I do a prayer to a protector saint
But am interrupted by shots of a machine gun
While rich live in a big and beautiful house
The poor are humilated and told off in the favela
No longer do I stand this wave of violence
I just ask from the authority a little more competence

Amusement today, we cannot hope for
Since there to bailes they come to humiliate us
There in the square everything was so normal
Now the violence is a fashion in the place
Innocent people who have nothing to do with it
Are asking today for their right to live
Never saw a post card that pictures a favela
Just landscape, very nice, very beautiful
Who goes by the favela feels sadnesses
The gringo comes here and doesn't meet the reality
Goes to Zona Sul to meet the coconut water
And the poor in the favela have a hard time
Change of the precidency, a new hope
I suffered in the storm, now I want the calm
People be strong, all you need to see is
if they do nothing there we’ll do it all from here

"Eight years later after the song's initial success, the Rap da Felicidade is one of the few funks that, in the mixed crowd of the TIM festival, under the direction of DJ Marlboro, is sung together by everyone - from the patricinhas [a nickname for the daughters of the upper middle-class, among whom Patricia is a particularily popular name for a girl] to the waitresses selling beer, from the clubbers to the security", writes Silvio Essinger on the importance of the song in the book Batidão: Uma História do Funk. Batidão, by the way, is a highly recommendable reference, full of interesting anecdotes, for the funk carioca-fans reading portuguese.

And after the duo's letter to the authorities, from the favela with love, let's finally take a listen to the song:

Cidinho & Doca: Rap da Felicidade (zShare)

A Reminder for the Film Oriented

2008-03-04T13:34:00.007-02:00

What people outside the film festival circuit often might not know, there is a vibrant and skillful film industry in South America. Argentina produces tons of great flicks every year and Brazil is not far behind. And then there is Mexico, the giant of Central America, of course. There are movies to suit all the tastes, from action to art house. I've already posted a few notes on the Paraguaian oddity Hamoca Paraguayana and this year's most talked about Brazilian movie Tropa de Elite, and I'll post some tips on Argentinian cinema in future.

Sadly, outside the blockbusters like City of God and Amores Perros, it's not very easy to find Latin-American films in countries like Finland. So, here's a film festival, happening the next fall, people in Helsinki and Tampere should keep an eye on: Cinemaissí - Festival de cine Latino-Americano y Caribeño Finlandia. Film-makers, check out the call for entries and act; film-goers, mark it up in your calendars. Call for entries closes on 15th of May. From what rumours I've heard of this year's edition, it is gonna be something nice indeed.

Big Skulls and Men in Black

2008-03-02T22:13:00.024-02:00

A view from my window had it's fifteen seconds of fame when the Brazilian film Tropa de Elite, directed by José Padilha, picked the Golder Bear for the best film at the 58th Berlin Film Festival and shocked the audiences with a merciless description of police violence. Film starts with police cars racing up the ladeira - a curvy, steep road climbing up the hill to the favela - just outside my window, to a baile - a funk party - that in a few minutes turns into a blood bath.

Now the road up the hill to the favela of Babilônia is quiet. On a crude brick wall, a throw-up reminds the passers-by that Leme is the property of CV. There is no need for explations, everyone knows that CV stands for Commando Vermelho. A few guys are hanging around the entrance to the favela, laughing and chatting up the passing locals. I don't know if they are guards on the watch for the police or just youngsters doing what the yougsters do on a friday night. Occasionally a series of firecrackers goes of, a warning from falcões, the scouts watching over the favela. But there are no guns visible, big or small.

Dynamics of power: The favela logic

Favelas in Rio de Janeiro are the nexus of a complex web of power and violence. Organized crime, community organizations, churches, businesses, different types of police forces and politicians, all have their part to play. And most importantly, there are of course the regular people inhabiting the favelas: over one third of Brazil's urban populations lives in slums.¹

All the favelas are controlled by one the three leading drug trafficing organizations: Commando Vermelho (CV, "Red Command"), Terceiro Commando (TC, "Third Command") and Amigos dos Amigos (ADA, "Friends of Friends"). These are powerful criminal factions with armies of soldiers armed up to the teeth, carrying modern military-grade weaponry, from machine guns to sniper rifles and hand granades. Their main business is controlling the drug traffic in the city.

The factions rule the shanty-towns with a cruel but efficient hand: Theft and other kind of crime in favelas is quickly and heavily punished, death-sentences being far from uncommon. This makes the situation so complex. As most favelados - the residents of favelas - percieve that the city and the state have abandoned them - and they probably are right to a certain extent - the factions fullfill a social need. Their rule is not exactly democratic, but they do provide security, some basic services and pay for entertainment like bailes. In exchange, the residents accept their activities within the community and keep their mouths shut should the police dare to come sneaking around. The factions have created themselves an image as social bandits, modern-day Robin Hoods, as is illustrated by Paul Sneed's highly recommendable research work Machine Gun Voices.²

The favelas hardly offer opportunities for the young people to get an education or a job, despite the best efforts of numerous volunteer organizations. That makes joining the drug gangs often the most lucrative - and regularily only - career option for the kids growing up in Rio's shanties.

The other side of conflict, represented in the favelas by the occasional invasions of the police, are seen as either corrupt and hopelessly ineffective - which sadly usually is true - or as brutal murders - which also unfortunately is often true, especially in the case of the BOPE-forces, the subject of the film Tropa de Elite. The letters stand for Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais. BOPE is the black-uniformed elite division of the Military Police, specialised in urban warfare - in other words missions in the favelas - and known for both cruelty and incorruptability. Just seeing them guarding a plaza in the centro in the broad day-light - carrying piles of bleeding-edge killing technology - is enough to send shivers down my spine. In the shanties, they are usually seen riding in the caveiraos, "big skulls": fearsome armored vechicles named after the troop's skull symbol.

But of course also the police force consists of regular people. The corruption is a deeply rooted epidemic in the public services. For regular cops out on the street, the main reason for accepting bribes is probably the next-to-non-existent salary: closing eyes on the activities of the narco-trafficers is the most certain way of getting back home to the wife and the kids in a one piece - and it also pays better. Up the ladder, corruption, hypocricy and opportunism among the politicians stir up the mess even more and they are, more or less rightfully, often seen as the root of all evil.

Most of the violence in favelas occurs between the drug factions fighting each other or the police. But innocent people do die, too, on a regular basis, due to the stray bullets and berzerker sprees on the side or the other. The violence outside the favelas, against the citizens of the asphalto, for an example robberies, is more often not related to the drug gangs but simply to the terminal poverty faced by a huge percentage of the city's population. In the end, all the violence is a result of the disgusting level of inequality in the whole country. Already in 1996 Brazil's disparities of income were second only to Botswana in the whole world, and the situation has hardly gotten better.

The Troop of the Elite

The movie Tropa de Elite received mixed reactions in Brazil, which were followed by the heavy criticism in Berlin. It was seen as fasistic and in Brazil audiences had people actually cheering when a drug trafficer hit the ground on the silver-screen. What shocked the reaction boils down to the viewpoint. The already classic film City of God (2002, dir. Fernando Meirelles) showed the street violence from the angle of the favelados on the both sides of the law. Carandiru (2003, dir. Hector Babenco) made the point that even the criminals are humans. Then the excellent TV-series City of Men presented the more peaceful side of the life in favela, often in a hilarious way, and exposed a reality that rarely makes headlines in the news papers. The series was a surprising success and continued for four seasons.

Now Tropa de Elite seems to strip the favelados of their human rights by showing the reality of the slum strictly through the eyes of the police. And not just any police, but the most efficient and brutal force of urban warfare in the world: BOPE of the Polícia Militar. Not an easy but definitely a provocative viewpoint. One might wonder what is a force trained for war doing in a favela in the first place, and that's just the start of the social complexities the movie seeks to tackle.

In short, the film is a hyper-realistic story about a captain of BOPE called Nascimento - a role that made the actor Walter Moura into a huge celebrity in the country.³ After Nascimento's wife gives a birth he starts facing mental problems and wants to get out of the force. The film is a story of Nascimento crafting himself a replacement, in an attempt to redeem himself.⁴ The victim is Mathias, a young, black, idealistic policeman who dreams of becoming a lawyer. Despite the pitiless style of the film, I see it as a cruel tragedy where a Mathias' dreams are swept under the wave of violence and a man yearning to become a hunter of monsters is consciously turned into a monster himself.

The movie draws a vivid, bloody and often shocking picture of the dark web of violence the city is tangled into. It does not pretend to offer many answers. At least easy ones. This would be naive, an understatement of the gory mess that is Rio de Janeiro.⁵ And also hypocritical, movie seems to say, showing the rich kids from Zona Sul going for a peace march on the sunday - after they've spent the saturday night playing with fire, dealing drugs from the favela to their well-off friends. After all, it is this white demand for the narcotics that fuels the fires burning down the favelas.⁶

Beneath the action-packed surface, Tropa de Elite is a complex movie. It is not a film one would fall in love with, but it is a powerful and important film, even if not an easy one to watch. It raises more questions than offers answers. It leaves an uncomfortable feeling. Considering the subject, these are good things.

The Elite of the Troop

Before the film there was a book. Elite da Tropa, published in 2005, is written by Luiz Eduardo Soares, a political scientist and an anthropologist, with two ex-members of BOPE, André Batista and Rodrigo Pimentel. It's a work of fiction, in the sense that the names and the places have been changed and the events mixed up, but it's strongly based on the actual experiences of the authors.

The book is even harder piece to chew and swallow than the movie. It starts with a little tune from the song-book of BOPE - a few roughly translated verses give you the idea: "Man of black, what is your mission? It's invading favela and leaving corpse on the ground ... Do you know who I am? I am a damn dog of war. I'm trained to kill. ... If you ask where I come from and what is my mission: To bring the death and the desperation and the total destruction."

First part of the book consits of a number of short stories, illustrating various dilemmas and situations from the lives of members of BOPE. Writing is not perfect nor elegant - let's just say it's functional - but the plots tend to be clever. They create an disturbing image of the grey area of moral these men operate in, where torture is just one of the necessary professional skills, where men are systematically turned into savage dogs but yet where there still exist a strick moral code and dishonesty is punishable by death.

What hits first, from the page one, is the violence. The book goes much further than the movie: when in the film the trafficer confesses after the torture by suffocation, mercifully before one of the officers pushes a broom up his rectum, in the book the officer goes all the way with the broom. That chapter is with a somewhat grim humour named Sexo é Sexo - "Sex is Sex". This is just one example of the book´s detailed descriptions of torture and murder.

Second part of the book book steps two years forward and presents reader with one longer story. And, curiously, at some stage the reader has become numb to the violence and the most disgusting parts of the book turn out to be the ones that describe the ruthless opportunism and selfishness of the politicians and the corrupted part of the police force. This theme is central to the second half of the book, during which the real enemy reveals it's face. Unfortunately, on the second half the book also loses much of it's power, becoming a clumsy conspiracy thriller.

Like the movie, the book excells at forcing the reader to form an opinion and pushes him beyond the most obvious ideas. But written word has a power to drag the reader very deep into the head of the character. So deep that, whether this is intention of the authors or not, it gets hard to see the favela from the shacks. The first half of the book suffers from the fact that the only viewpoint you have is that of the narrator. And he doesn't give much options, constantly repeating same arguments: "Accept my truth, like it or not, or keep your head stuck in the sand, I don't care." And I cannot accept his truth, methods or most of his arguments and thus the narrator inevitably pushes me away from the book too.

Lost in Babilônia

"In Barra, two citizens were murdered during following days... Why not rule a death penalty for these cases? It would be a just response to innocents' outcry for blood", writes a reader on the letters-page of O Globo, Rio's main newspaper. The pages of the local news are filled with crimes: 17 people are murdered daily in the city. I can imagine how tired the people are of the all the violence. Everyone has either experienced it or lives in the constant fear of it. I can imagine how frustrating the problem seems when there are hardly easy solutions in sight. I can imagine that people are starting to feel so tired that just killing 'em all seems like a viable solution. But it must not be.

When I for the first time climbed up that ladeira, it was because I'd been asked to come to Babilônia to film a capoeira practice. It was already dark when I got here: a quiet friday night. A few times I ducked at the last moment to dodge a motorcycle taxi. They are an example of favela inventing it's own ways to get by the everyday-problems, like the exhausting walk up the road: for two reals you're taken with a motorbike where every you want on the hill. But of course when coming down the road they spare gas by keeping their engines off, silent ghosts rolling through the darkness.

Finally getting to the top I ended up hopelessly lost among the shacks, crossing paths, stairs going up and down, trees and deep shadows. I wasn't sure if I should be scared, but I considered it the most efficient policy for my safety to supress any sign of fear. I decided that the attack is the best defence and asked everyone for instructions. It took me a while to get to the capoeira hall - I even ended up chatting for half an hour with the president of the community - but everyone gave their best effort to help me.

A friend living in the neighbouring favela told me yesterday how the cops had again raided their community the previous night. But in here, I've seen no guns. There are, of course, guns in the favela. But they are not blazing every day.

- - -
Notes

1) 36,6 percent of the Brazil's urban population - amounting up to 51,7 million people - lived in a favela in 2003 according to estimates of United Nations presented in Mike Davis' book Planet of Slums (London, 2006). The same book shows how Rio has grown from 3,0 million inhabitants in 1950 to 11,9 million in 2004, a rate of urban growth extremely hard if not impossible to control in a sustainable, planned fashion, inevitably resuting in a exploding number of slums.

2) Paul Sneed (Machine Gun Voices: Bandits, Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Funk, 2003) summed up the role of trafficers elegantly: "The drug traffickers of the hills and favelas of Rio de Janeiro: demonized and romanticized, pre-modern and post-modern, social bandits who are oddly millenarian even as they are anti-revolutionary, the fear, neglect and complicity of the middle- and upper-classes have allowed them to come to power and helped them to stay there. The poor have made them their champions, albeit reluctantly, and they have come to occupy a crucial role in the administration of power in the larger Brazilian social order... Now, the “divided city” is the great challenge for the restored democracy in Brazil in the years after the military dictatorship."

3) In the light of the generational change between Brazilian film-makers, shed by Carlos Diegues in essay Como as Coisas São in a recent book on Brazilian cinema, Cinco Mais Cinco, what might be mistaken for nihilism in Brazilian cinema could be rather seen as a part of the younger generation's move from idealism towards realism, from utopianism to individualism. "Para o Cinema Novo, imporatava cultura e politica; para os cineastas da Retomada, arte e tecnologia." ("For the Cinema Covo, important was culture and politics, for filmmakers of Retomada, art and technology.") A political message might be implicit in the story but is never placed before the realism and the artistic purposes. I've included here a few further notes based on that essay, since I feel that they provide a useful background for the Padila's controversial film.

4) This hope of redemption for Nascimento is not without parallels in Brazilian cinema. Diegues writes: "Como essa lute é individuel e ninguém, a princípio, deve estar solidário conosco, a única proteção em que ainda podemos confiar é a do que nos restou da harmonia natural da família... a família é uma espécie de lugar de suspensão da luta contra o outro, onde o poder se disputa e se exerce de outra maneira, em nome do amor." ("Like this fight is individual and no-one, in principle, should support us, the only protection in which we always can trust is the one remaining in the natural harmony of the family... family is a kind place of suspension from fight against each other, where power is disputed and exercised in in another manner, in name of love.")

5) According to Diegues, the cities have become symbols of hell in Brazilian cinema. "Não se trata mais de procurar uma harmonia com os outros para viver bem e em paz; trata-se simplesmente de sobreviver... Nesse esformaço solitário por sobrevivëncia e se possível ascensão, amizade, amor e sexo, são, de fato, meros exercíos de poder." (One does no more seek to find a harmony with others to live well and in pace; one simply tries to survive... In this solitary attempt for survival and if possible, social ascension, friendship, love and sex, are, in fact, mere excersices of power.") Against such a bleak view of the life in Brazilian cities, it's hardly surprising that the ethic of kill or be killed is shown as a natural process of survival. Everyone is using the means of power available to them, and on the level of streets it comes from the barrel of guns. Again, this does not imply it is right, but the way the realism of contemporary Brazilian cinema chooses makes it's point: by showing the things as they are.

6) After being awarded with the Golden Bear, Padilha explained his aims and corrected misunderstandings in Jornal do Brasil ("Filme 'Tropa de Elite' ganha Urso de Ouro em Berlim", 17.2.2008): "Fiz o filme sem partir de idéias marxistas ou neolibérais. O princípio foi o de levantar as regras de vida de cada grupo de personagem e como eles fazem suas opções a partir delas." ("I did the film without marxist or neoliberalist ideas. The principle was to show the rules of the live of each group of characters and how they create their options onwards from those.")

Sounds of two cities, part 1: Meu samba é assim

2008-02-24T00:05:00.021-02:00

A rainy saturday night in Rio

Yesterday there was a show of Marcelo D2 at Circo Voador in Lapa. Marcelo is a rare bird: one of the few big rap artists based in Rio de Janeiro - ones that also need to be mentioned include MV Bill and Mr. Catra, who is actually a baile funk star, but has a very wide spectrum of skills and is also highly respected by the hip-hop-scene. But all in all, it could be said that in Brazil, hip-hop is more of a paulista-thing - that is, born and raised in Sao Paulo.

The difference between the cities is also audible in the hip-hop of the local artists. This is a very crude generalization, but carioca hip-hop might be more playful, like the city itself, whereas paulista sound tends to steer towards very minimalistic and dark aesthetics. It's often produced in prisons and the songs are gloomy tales of life in favelas and jails. More on the essential artists like Racionais MCs and 509-E later, for now let's settle for the softer sound of Marcelo.

D2 is a talented artist. His albums are concious of the importance of samba in the Brazilian musical tradition and many songs go to great lengths to integrate samba into hip-hop - and sometimes rather vice-versa. The songs are skillfully composed, with a lush and rich production. D2 is intelligent, his music is intelligent and he draws totally reasonable comparisons between his work and the Brazilian modernist concept of "the cultural antropofagia". And in all honesty, therein lies the dilemma, for me: personally I prefer the grimy old-school sound of the paulista artists and find Marcelo is a bit too smooth for my tastes.

But let's not linger on my personal preference of bleak beats and bleaker tales, when we could rather listen to a few fine tunes from along the D2's career.

A Dead Kennedys T-shirt and a band of 23

Marcelo grew up between the favela and the "asphalt" - wealthier normal districts - and saw most of his childhood friends eventually die in drug-gang violence. Wearing a T-shirt of the legendary American punk-band Dead Kennedys hooked him up with his first group, Planet Hemp, which released a number of succesful albums and toured Europe, Japan and USA. In 1998 Marcelo released his first solo album, Eu Tiro É Onda, and sold over 150,000 copies.

Marcelo D2: Samba de Primeira

When Planet Hemp broke up, Marcelo decided to continue searching his own sound. The result was the album À Procura da Batida Perfeita, released in 2003. The disc collected loads of awards, got Marcelo recognized for his lyrics by the Academia Brasileira de Letras and was released all over the world.

Marcelo D2: Re-Batucada

After the record the artist built up a band of 23 live musicians to "unplug" the hip-hop. This experiment led to the album Acústico MTV, based on the acoustic versions of the songs from the two previous albums. 1967 here is from the first one and A Procura from the second.

Marcelo D2: 1967
Marcelo D2: A Procura da Batida Perfecta

Marcelo's latest album, Meu Samba é Assim - "my samba goes like this", freely translated - was released in 2006. The album featured respected guest performers from both the worlds of samba and hip-hop, and propelled him to tour the mayor arenas all around the world. The hit Gueto is an honest, dance floor-filling banger, whereas Dor de Verdade shows what I ment with D2's work sometimes being more samba than hip-hop.

Marcelo D2: Gueto
Marcelo D2: Dor de Verdade

And as a little bonus to conclude, I cannot resist the urge to post a song by the aforementioned great Mr.Catra. Here's a funny tune that illustrates his versatility, combining baile funkish singing and an amusing hip-hopish beat.

Mr. Catra: Mercenária 2

3 x Border Crossings

2008-02-23T22:18:00.008-02:00

Border Crossings is a hobby project I've been fooling around with for over five years. While travelling, I've collected more than 2000 photos of street art from different cities, from South-America to Asia, from Africa to Europe. Project has been exhibited a few times, most recently as a part of Lens Politica-festival. In the exhibitions the pictures are printed on small stickers. Stickers a popular and tragi-comically controversial form of street art in Helsinki - people have been punished with ridiculously heavy sentences for sticking little pieces of paper on public walls.

At the Border Crossings-exhibition people can pick their favourite pieces of street art, in format of handly little stickers, and do what ever they want with them. Stick them on the fridge door - or spread them out to the local streets and make the project into a sort of international street art exchange. Although I don't really like the term street art and I would like to include more traditional graffiti into to the project, it's hard to do justice to bigger pieces and productions on such a small scale, so the collection consists mostly of stencils and smaller works.

As a little peek into the street art-culture in South America, here are a few pictures I've collected along the way. With an exception of Brazil, the best street artists on the continent are probably found in Valparaiso, Chile. The city has taken admirably open-minded stance to the graffiti and people are painting the streets of the cerros, the residential districts on hills around the port, in broad daylight. This policy reaps beautiful profits - unfortunately my camera got stolen in the very same city and I only have left the smaller stencil-pictures I took with the crappy camera of my cellphone. But they are pretty interesting too and also provide a few insights into the political issues in the country.

Click here to see the photos from Valparaiso (Flickr)

The street art in Brazil comes in numerous original styles. The bigger productions are as colourful as the country itself and are excecuted with a skill and grace of a capoeira-dancer. Pictures from Santa Teresa and Lapa-districts of Rio de Janeiro can only give a pale idea of what the huge pieces really look like.

Click here to see the photos from Rio de Janeiro (Flickr)

Yet there is also another, highly original style of graffiti in Brazil. Pictures from Curitiba, the capital of the wealthy Paraná-state, include some examples of this style. These pieces are extremely crude, brutal and minimalistic tags, painted in huge size and in highly inaccessible and visible places. In Sao Paulo I've witnessed whole highrises painted in this fashion, from rooftop to the street level. I love the unique, rune-like typography and the certain back-to-the-roots-brutality of these works. There's little style, they are all about spreading your name, getting up - often very literally. Primitive, tribalistic painting meets the concrete futurism of Oscar Niemayer.

Click here to see the photos from Curitiba (Flickr)

Download the illustration in wallpaper-size (direct link)

Pop Interlude

2008-02-22T01:55:00.013-02:00

Apparently I cannot help myself. I've just spent a week in Rio and already a note-worthy pile of new records has grown on my table. It mostly consists of Brazilian hip-hop with a little flavour of baile funk. But before I've had time to properly listen them through and do some background research on the artists, it's time for a tiny pop interlude.

The following songs are from a little jewel of an album, Onde Brilhem os Olhos Seus by Fernanda Takai. The artistic director of the album, Nelson Motta, describes on the linear notes how first seeing Takai perform evoked in him a ghostly impression of the departed legend and renovator of bossa nova and MPB, Nara Leão: "...this girl is Nara Leão of pop rock. The opposite of the exuberance and the vulgarity of pop stars, Fernanda was discreet and original, cool and elegant, had a half oriental look and sung intelligent and ironic songs with sweetness and firmness, a girl as modern, shy and talented as Nara in 1959." Thus, much later, when Motta got to know Takai, he had to suggest her to make an album of songs that defined the career of Leão. Onde Brilhem is the wonderful result of that idea.

The first song is actually a very sad one. If someone is misled to think that Brazilian music is just about partying, let me tell you a little bit about saudade. Especially now, after the carnaval, that strange, sad longing is heavy in the air. It's everywhere, like an obscene scent of some strange flower, bringing back memories of a love that never was there. A lot of the saddest songs in Brazil are about the first day after the carnaval, quarta-feira, the wednesday (the carnaval finishes on tuesday). The dream has ended and the harsh reality takes over. No more are we princes, heroes and harlequins, but beggars, thieves and peasants. I have an impression that the saudade is a lot about longing to a place that in reality does not exist - where as for an example tango is about longing for a happier time or a better place that now is lost and beyond reach. The saudade is the flip-side of the coin, the counter-measure of the carnaval, as creating a temporary realm of fantasy and happiness is the whole essence of this party of parties.

A lot of saddest songs in Brazil sound actually pretty happy. And that makes them all the more tragic. Listen to Odeon (written by Ernesto Nazareth and Hubaldo, with lyrics of Vinicius de Moraes) if you don't believe me.

Fernando Takai: Odeon (zShare)

Well, of course saudade is also about that usual subject of sad songs, love. And of course some of the songs sound properly devastatingly sad. Like the second one, Luz Negra (by Nelson Cavaquinho & Irani Barros) - now even the light in the end of the tunnel is black:

A luz negra de um destino cruel
Illumina um teatro sem cor
Onde estou representando o papel
De palhaço do amor

And forgive me for my crude translation:

The black light of a cruel destiny
Illuminates a theatre without colour
Where I am playing the part
Of the clown of love

Fernando Takai: Luz Negra (zShare)

But clearly we can't end a pop interlude in such a depressing tone. So here's a little more positive tune, by Capinam & Robertinho do Recife.

Fernando Takai: Seja o Meu Céu (zShare)

The hardest beats in Brazil

2008-02-20T00:30:00.019-02:00

Every time I am here, back among the lush green peaks and endless, sun-bathing beaches of Rio de Janeiro, I am confident that this is the most beautiful city in the world. All the old clichés about cidade maravilhosa and the encanto do Rio, they are true. Despite the current weather - blazing heat and tropical rain taking turns - the city is as playful, sexy, wonderful, shamelesly sensual, exciting, elegant, outrageously incredible, dangerous, deadly and dirty as ever.

So, let's venture into the Brazilian music for a change and start the adventure with maybe the most succesful Brazilian band ever. Just to take a brief walk down the memory lane, a couple of tunes from, yes, that's it: Sepultura. Refresh your memories with a classic song Territory and a couple of bonus tracks included on some releases of albums Arise and Chaos AD. They actually fit in quite well with the palm trees gently swaying outside my window.

Sepultura: Territory (zShare)
Sepultura: C.I.U. (Criminals In Uniforms) (zShare)
Sepultura: Amen / Inner Self (live) (zShare)

And then to the point: For those following electronic music blogs it's nothing new that Seputura's former drummer Iggor Cavalera now has a very different project going on, called Mixhell. And it's fast becoming a very succesful project.

Though Mixhell, as we will soon find out, might sound very different from Sepultura's grinding death metal, the bottom line remains the same. To quote the Mixhell MySpace: "Hard beat is the main line of Iggor´s work. In his life, the beat has an intensive meaning and appears in everything he does." Which actually sounds pretty much like any Brazilian life.

Mixhell, with headquarters in Sao Paulo, is Iggor's DJing project, spiced up with live production elements like samplers and drummers. And Iggor actually is not alone on this mission: Mixhell is a duo consisting of Iggor and his wife and producer Laima Leyton. They describe their sound as "influenced by underground electronic music... DJ sets travel to many different places blending electro, discopunk and old school hip-hop, with lots of rocks and electronics. With the MPC Sampler they modify and increase elements to the songs so they fit perfectly to the dance floor."

Mixhell has made their own songs, worked with producers like DJ Hell, remixed songs of electro banger acts like Bitchee Bitchee Ya Ya Ya (for Kitsuné Maisón's new 12" release Fuck Friend) and MSTRKRFT - and made a bunch of great mixtapes. A lot of these have been circuiting around the blogs for a long time, but in case you missed them, here's a taste of their numerous parallel lines of work.

From own songs...

Mixhell: Kids are alright (zShare)
Mixhell: Sour Throat Break (zShare)

...and some fine remixes...

MSTRKRFT: Easy Love (Mixhell Favela Blast remix) (zShare)
The Bell: Target Group (Mixhell remix) (zShare)

...to samples of their DJing work. I especially like the funk carioca flavors on the XLR8R podcast. And Iron Maiden-samples.

Mixhell: Electrobangertrashset (zShare)
Mixhell: XLR8R Podcast January 2008 (zShare)

And to put the respect where the respect is due, most of these songs are from a fine Swedish blog called Stockholm Beat Connection. They have been the first to put out the new stuff from Mixhell, so check 'em out, bookmark 'em and keep your eyes on 'em.

Kumbia, bloody kumbia

2008-02-19T16:01:00.005-02:00

"Te gusta Cumbia?", asks an Argentinian friend, in a slightly surprised tone, while browsing the towers of records that somehow always pile into my bags when travelling. There's also a few cumbia villera-albums.

I'm not quite sure what to answer. "Pués... Mas o menos." I try to explain that I find it interesting, and I like how phenomenons like cumbia villera rise from the poorest and saddest neighbourhoods in the metropolis. I like the idea that these unpriviledged people have taken something from the other side of the continent and turned it into their own thing. And that this thing has actually won popularity among the masses. I kinda like the idea that this has happened in a city often too concerned with maintaining it's reputation as the Paris of South. I already know quite well what my friend is going to say: He tells me he hates cumbia.

4AM the following morning he, and all the other fine young porteños, are dancing in the backyard to cumbia like there would be no tomorrow, while trying to teach us gringos the proper cumbia moves. This pretty much sums up why I want to post a couple more cumbias. All of them are very different, an example of the variety which, by my guess, could be a result of this strange schizophrenic love-hate-relationship. Love them and hate them. Like the argentinos do, too.

First, to illustrate where the cumbia came from and what is sounded like back then, a few gorgeus old Colombian cumbias. Here you have clearly audible the musical roots of the sound: the African drums, the Spanish and Andean influences and a certain Caribbean wibe. The first song was posted by some kind soul ages ago on the Lifesaver-records message board (one of the finest record stores in Finland, by the way - visiting the store at Laivurinkatu 41, Viiskulma is an essential part of any shopping trip to Helsinki) and the other two are from the collection Historia Musical de la Cumbia Colombiana, released by Discos Fuentes.

Gladys Vierra & Orquestra Sonolux: Dice Que Me Quiere (zShare)
La India Meliyara & La Sonora Dinamita: Las Velas Encendidas (zShare)
Benetia & La Orquesta De Ray: Columbia Tierra Querida (zShare)

Then a couple of tracks from a brand new album Kumbia Nena! by Kumbia Queers, a bunch who call themselves tropical punks, look like a garage rock band and I suppose sound a little bit like one, too. A lot of the songs on the album are covers, for which they are best known for - below an amusing version of a song by The Cure - but I wanted to also post one of their own songs, since I actually like those better.

Kumbia Queers: Kumbia Dark (zShare)
Kumbia Queers: Kumbia Zombie (zShare)

Next, a track from an equally new Imperio Diablo-album. On the album covers the band looks like a mix between trendy fashion design students and a bunch of backpacking hippies straight back from Bolivia. Which, believe it or not, actually looks kinda cool. The songs have quite strong world music-influences and also add a bit of hip-hop into the mix. This song is a version of a Colombian cumbia paying tribute to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Imperio Diablo: Los Cien Años De Macondo (zShare)

And finally, a big smash-up hit by El Remolon, the one he played in the last Zizek I attended. This song drove the people absolutely mad.

El Remolon: Music (Andres Lanredo vs. Madonna) (zShare)

The endless afternoons of Paraguay

2008-02-13T16:10:00.012-02:00

I haven't left the bus station at Retiro when I am already flashing the cash to get all my luggage on the bus to Asunción. I am relieved, though. I've gotten a gargantuan additional bag on the board for 2,5 euros - not much per extra kilo. And I suppose the bus assistant was happy too: he gained ten times the tip he usually would recieve per bag, even though this one took two men to lift.

At the border in Puerto Falcon the corruption reveals an uglier face. A Paraguayan family is forced to pay 350 pesos - around 80 euros, a huge sum for poor people - for a minor mistake in the paper work. In Paraguay, South America's most corrupted country, bribery is the way of life. The forgotten country is the third poorest in the continent, a surrealistically sleepy, isolated backwater. Yet there are shiny, brand new Mercedez-Benzes rolling around the capital.

The fields of war

History of the country - sad and tragic, like most histories are here in south - is stained with the usual bloody dictatorships and two of the most bizarre wars fought on the continent.

In 1865 megalomanic and obviously mad dictator Francisco Solano López declared a simultaneous war on Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Allied forces outnumbered the Paraguayan ten to one. For five years the insane war dragged on. Half of the population of the country was annihilated. In the end of the war, 12 year old boys were dying at the front lines.

Equally pointless Chaco War of 1932-1935 against Bolivia was especially tragic for the involvement of the greedy foreign businesses in starting the whole conflict. Unclear border of Chaco region had been raising tensions between the two countries for years, and Bolivia - left land-locked in the War of Pacific against Chile (on which the Bolivians bear grudge to this day) - was hoping to get at least an equivalent of a sea-shore port by forcing it's way to Río Paraguay. Yet what in the end sparked the full scale war in 1932 was the handiwork of the usual suspects, the international oil companies. These started to speculate on petrol resources in the region and used the local armies to settle their competition, Shell backing up Paraguay and Standard Oil co-operating with Bolivia. Guerilla tactics and fighting conditions favoured the eventually triumphant Paraguayan forces against the much stronger Bolivian army. War left 80,000 dead. Oil was never found.

...and a Paraguayan hammock

This is the backdrop of the Hamaca paraguaya, the first feature length film by the Paraguayan director Paz Encina (b.1971), from year 2006. Hamaca has been gathering awards and praise in the festival circuit around the world, including a FIPRECHI-award at Festival de Cannes. A minimalistic film, melancholic, lyrical and beautiful. Suggestive, surprising, extremely original. Opens your heart and lingers in your soul. In the words of the critics.

Paraguay, 1935. An aging farmer couple, Cándida and Ramón, are waiting for their son to return from the war. And waiting for the rain and wind to take away the heat. Like Beckett's sad clowns waiting for Godot, their waiting seems hopeless from the beginning. Thunder is rumbling in the heavy, grey sky, amid barking of their son's dog and omnipresent noise of locusts. But the rain drops never fall. Days are spent sitting in a hammock, going through petty arguments and fighting through the daily routines. Cándida is tired of waiting and tries to convince Ramón that their son is dead. Ramón decides to firmly believe in their son's return. Until both hear news that their son is almost certainly dead and the tables turn. Both decide to keep the news to themselves and Cándida starts to firmly deny the death of her son. It's better to keep on waiting. Someone must keep on hoping or the world will end.

Film moves on in a hypnotic, dreamy pace. At the same pace as the life in this country. There is something ageless about the film, as there is something ageless about Paraguay. In the film the past and the present melt together under the blazing heat of Paraguayan autumn. Dialogue moves separate from the static, long shots that rarely dare to move close to the characters. Sometimes we hear conversations from the past, their son leaving to war, sometimes we hear arguments of the moment, in sync with images. And in a similar fashion, on the streets of Asunción you can simultaneously exist in a time and place that has remained unchanged for centuries and shop in desolated malls for the latest eletronic gadgets, from iPod Touches to fanciest Nokias.

Finally, in the end, when the couple decides to keep on waiting, it becomes apparent that the future will be the same as the present, like the present is the same as the past. Cándida and Ramón are still sitting somewhere in the end of the world, in the netherworld of the Paraguayan country-side, waiting.

The Bajofondismo

2008-02-10T14:47:00.005-02:00

Bajofondo is a little bit complex thing to explain. It started as a collective experimenting with electronic tango fusion. Over the time it has developed into a band and acted as an umbrella for a number solo projects by the members of the collective. And add to the mix tons of collaborators, remixers and featured vocalists on all the albums.

After Gotan Project the electronic tango has exploded into something of a trend in Argentina. The tango electrónico outfits range from excellent to downright awful, but Bajofondo Tango Club is easily one of the best and most devoted groups around. Their take on electronic tango is faster and more dance-oriented than the dubby sound of Gotan Project. The group hates to be labeled as tango electronica, though, as their music is a much more complex mix of different styles and influences. "We are not tango composers, we don't make tango. It would be very pretentious to say that we are making the new tango. That would have to come from a musician who has devoted his life to tango, and that's not my case", points out Luciano Supervielle from the collective in an interview by Hernán Siseles.

Bajofondo is now building up fame outside the Argentina - they have toured both Europe and North America - but here in Buenos Aires they are huge. This was evident at their gigs in Teatro Gran Rex, on December 14th and 15th, that celebrated the publication of Bajofondo's second album, Mar Dulce. Bajofondo gave a huge show, clearly loved by the audience and clearly having great time on the stage. The audience, dancing on the balconies of the theatre, just didn't let them go, but applauded them to do an encore time after time.

Bajofondo's self-titled debut album Bajofondo Tango Club won tons of awards, including a Latin Grammy, and sold triple platinum. Album, as all of the Bajofondo-records, was produced by Gustavo Santaolalla, and his top-notch production has become something of a trademark for the group. Santaolalla has also made a career producing film soundtracks, his filmography including flicks like Brokeback Mountain.

Bajofondo Tango Club: Montserrat (zShare)

After Tango Club, Luciano Supervielle - a french-born pioneer of hip-hop in Uruguay hailing from Montevideo - released his solo album Supervielle and the group also put out Bajofondo Remixed, a collection of remixes from Tango Club and Supervielle-albums. These records picked prestigious Premio Gardel-awards as the best electronic album and the best instrumental pop album. And as an example of the usual variety of guest stars, Perfume is sung by gorgeous Adriana Varela and Miles de Pasajeros features Daniel Melingo with the Uruguayan rap-duo Contra Las Cuerdas.

Supervielle: Perfume (feat. Adriana Varela) (zShare)

Supervielle: Miles de Pasajeros (Omar remix feat. Daniel Melingo & Contra Las Cuerdas) (zShare)

For their second album, released the last fall, Bajofondo dropped the Tango Club from their name, to emphasize that their music had become something more varied than the name Tango Club would imply. Speaking of names, mar dulce means sweet sea. It refers to the fact that Rio de la Plata, the sea between Montevideo and Buenos Aires, is not actually a sea but a river delta, thus sometimes sweet, sometimes salty.

Perhaps a proof of the group winning the respect it earns are the guest performers on the album. While I prefer their Argentinian collegues, it tells something that album features songs with Nelly Furtado and Elvis Costello. The record also boasts the last performance of now sadly departed "Black Pearl of Tango", Uruguayan legend Lágrima Ríos. The single Pa'Bailar is a wonderful, silly piece of absolutely shameless tango-pop and El Andén features Spanish female rapper Mala Rodríguez, more of whom later.

Bajofondo: Pa'Bailar (zShare)

Bajofondo: El Andén (feat. Mala Rodríguez) (zShare)

The show at Gran Rex started with Javier Casalla performing a song from his solo album, standing on the stairs of the darkened theatre, alone in a dramatic spotlight, with his Stroh violin. It is a rare instrument with a unique sound that uses a metal horn - like one on a gramophone - to amplify the sound, instead of the wooden box of a traditional violin. Casalla's excellent solo album actually ventures into direction of experimental classical music and was released in Europe by Deutche Grammophon. Following song CABJ has Daniel Melingo, the Tom Waits of the contemporary tango, on vocals.

Song also has a very amusing subject: CABJ stands for Club Atlético Boca Juniors. It's the legendary football team of Diego Maradona and a passion for millions of South Americans, especially those of working class background. It's also a huge lifestyle business - CABJ must be one of the greatest brands created in South America. The club's colors of the Swedish flag evoke unquestioning loyalty: the old cliché goes that Boca Juniors is not just a football club to support, it's a way of life. And CABJ has definitely taken an advantage of this, extending the brand into everything, from pizzaboxes (you can construct your own Bombonera-stadium from two boxes) to rather bizarre dimensions - the latest Boca-branded innovation is a a graveyard where fans can get buried next to their heroes.

That said, of course I'm a Boca-fan. And by the way, according to a legend, they actually are the colors of the Swedish flag: when pondering on colors for their new football club, the frustrated founding fathers eventually decided to pick the colors of the first ship to drift to the port at La Boca, a working-class port barrio, and of course the ship had to be Swedish.

Javier Casalla: CABJ (feat. Daniel Melingo) (zShare)

And to conclude, an example of Bajofondo's musical variety is following song by the award-winning Puerto Rican hip-hop and reggaeton group Calle 13, produced by Bajofondo, with a sublime tango touch to it. It's a song that the whole South America has been bumping loud and on repeat. So, when after a few familiar beats Calle 13 marched on the stage at Gran Rex, it was one of those wonderful "pleasant surprise-moments" of a superb gig.

Calle 13: Tango del Pecado (feat. Bajofondo Tango Club & Panasuyo) (zShare)

Paper planes in cumbia style

2008-02-07T12:35:00.002-02:00

Paper planes by M.I.A. probably was one of the greatest songs last year and the whole album Kala ranks pretty high on my top ten of 2007. Paper planes is finally about to be released on a single with loads of remixes from names like DFA, Afrikan Boy & Blaqstar, Adrock, Diplo and Scottie B. Sounds good? Well, here's the catch: we still get to wait for it until the beginning of March.

With hits like this, it doesn't take long before a someone in the BA's electronic music scene - so fond of mashing up everything into a cumbia beat - comes up with a cumbia remix. So while waiting for the official versions, here is Sonido Martines' take on the song. Considering that M.I.A. hasn't been shy about putting influences and beats from every corner of the world into her music, I suppose this is quite fitting mash-up.

M.I.A - Paper Planes (Sonido Martines Guacharaca remix) (Direct link)

Sonido Martines is an Argentinean DJ whose sets combine global urban music with a spectrum of traditional Latin American sounds. In his words, "Colombian cumbia meet vallenato and chicha, dub hits upon electronic music, and hip-hop gets married to Latin American street rhythms." He's also been organizing Festicumex-events - the name stands for Festival of Experimental Cumbias - together with the festival founder Dick el Demasiado. History of Festicumex is pretty amusing and you can read it from the Dick el Demasiado-interview already posted.

Out of the white box and into the streets

2008-02-07T12:19:00.002-02:00

They come out at night, each evening travelling all the long miles from the suburbs. After the sunset they start their work, in the shadows of the proud new highrise projects that stand against the night sky. The cartoneros. They go through the trash - your trash - piled on the street in big, black plastic bags. Looking for something worth selling. Cardboard, mostly. Sometimes you still see them in the light of the morning, pushing their huge carts full of cardboard. What they do to this trash, you don't really even think about.

And after a while you pay less attention to them than you would pay to rats. Rats - or cockroaches - at least give you that disgusted shiver every time. These people, dressed in grey rags, seem to melt into concrete walls behind them, like chameleons. And stepping over the homeless people sleeping on the streets becomes your second nature. As disgusting as it sounds, it's what this divided metropolis does to you. There's one Buenos Aires that is booming, and then there is one living in the shadow of it. One you would like to forget about, as you go on enjoying your lavish lifestyle.

This is what the economic crash of 2001 did to Buenos Aires, the city once proud of it's big middle class and relative economic equality. A new city was born around it. A shadow city, that still is there, despite the middle class slowly recovering from the crash. It's right there, out on the streets below - and also inside the grandiose apartments in glassy skyscrapers, it's there, in the cramped rooms of the maids most of the middle class families employ. You just need to start seeing it again. Or it will never go away.

The unconfortable process of opening your eyes

"You see plans for apartments of 300 square meters and the dependencia (maid's room) is two-by-two. Son of a bitch. With 300 square meters, don’t you think you could offer something a little better?" That was the photographer Sebastián Friedman (b. 1973, Argentina), commenting on his project Domésticas in an interview by Wicked BA (available on-line on pages of Whats Up Buenos Aires). Friedman has taken as his job to point out the existence of this conciously forgotten city, and judging from the waves he's been making, he's doing a pretty good job.

In Domésticas Friedman exhibited portraits of families together with their maid - creating a strangly uncomfortable images - in Biblioteca Nacional, and even built a fully furnished maid's room on location to illustrate cramped conditions the domestic servants live in.

And in second exhibition, Friedman took the photographs of the carteros out of gallery and exhibited them in their natural environment. Show was held in a partly ruined factory in rundown suburb of Lanús. This was the place the cartoneros actually used to sell their nightly lootings. Friedman wanted to show this space and the actual reality to the people willing to see the exhibition. They had to step out of the safety of a gallery, to a place full of trash, where the cartoneros would be working while spectators were looking at the photos. "To smell the odors that there were in the space, see the cartoneros, it creates a space that’s not so secure", explained the photographer his ideas.

Give it back to the people you took it from

Currently there is another, a bit less grim exhibition hitting the streets of Buenos Aires. Award-winning Project YECA, by photographer Luis Abadi (b.1975, Argentina), is exhibited outside Edificio de la Administración de Parques Nacionales (Av. Santa Fe 690, Retiro), open for all and free of charge.

On the project website, Abadi explains how he went out to streets to take pictures of people he came across and started feeling that he has to give them something back. "They lend me themselves for the picture without asking anything back. It's not fair, there has to be an exchange, I have to show them the photos." Abadi also wanted to make a comment on commercial billboards that are omnipresent in Buenos Aires by putting art into their place - art that is usually hidden from the every man in the galleries, far from the general public.

You can browse the pictures from Proyecto Yeca on the website. Some of them are quite hilarious and create a group portrait of the melting pot of people called Buenos Aires. The good, the bad and the ugly, the bold and the beautiful, the rich and the poor and everyone between. Work men, old ladies in matching furs, nuns and businessmen, protesters and police officers, transvestites and whores, they're all there. And of course the dogs. You must not forget the dogs in Buenos Aires.

From Bay to BA

2008-02-06T01:34:00.002-02:00

Oro11, featured briefly earlier in this blog, is launching his own record label Bersa Discos together with another immigrant DJ Disco Shawn. Label is aiming to come out with with their first EP of experimental cumbia later this month.

In their own words, "Bersa is the brainchild of Oro11 and Disco Shawn, two Bay Area DJs who moved to Buenos Aires (separately) and found themselves swimming in a sea of experimental cumbia mayhem. After hooking up in the Buenos Aires DJ circuit, the boys quickly realized that many of the local cumbia sounds were never being given a proper release. Bersa Discos was launched to change all that."

You can read more from Discobelle (one of my favourite blogs) and also grab songs by Daleduro and El Hijo del Cumbia, both artists often seen on the stage at Zizek. El Hijo del Cumbia takes pride in a sound that while modern and sample-based, has more in common with vintage cumbia from Colombia and Mexico than local villera. Daleduro on the other hand is known in Buenos Aires especially for his work of promoting genres like dubstep and grime. I've had the pleasure to witness his dubstep-sets a few times.

The darker side of Argentinian fashion

2008-02-03T15:31:00.002-02:00

Buenos Aires is in love with style and fashion. From the glamorous dress code of tango dancers to the hip styles of youngsters on the street, this is one of the most stylish and fashion-obsessed cities in the Southern hemisphere.

Buenos Aires is also in love with it's fashion scene - there are number of gorgeous, glossy fashion books and magazines like Menta or Quiero published, solely devoted to Argentinian fashion. Stars of this scene are, naturally, the big name designers of the capital. Fashion mags rarely forget to mention that Pablo Ramírez was included in Phaidon's fashion tome Samples as one of the most influential designers in the international scene. Or that Jessica Trosman shared the pages of Taschen's Fashion Now with a number of the brightest rising stars in the world.

Fashion, like people, in Buenos Aires comes with two sides: one dark, dramatic and brooding; another romantic, sensual and colourful. More on the brighter side later, let us focus now on two designers from the darker side of the Argentinian fashion.

Pablo Ramírez is the master of the gothic in local fashion and possibly the most respected fashion designer in the country, a title well earned. Born 1971, he studied fashion design at University of Buenos Aires. Winning several prestigious awards early in his career opened him a possibility to set up his own brand, sold at his boutique in San Telmo (Peru 586, San Telmo).

Ramírez has created a consistent style that is clearly his own, yet he still manages to keep constantly developing, transforming and moving forward. His clothes tend to come exclusively in black and while palette - in his own words, this gives spaces for his main interest: the silhouette. This is the focus of Ramírez's work, a silhouette that is changing shape each autumn and spring, seeking out new forms, always with incredible mastery and elegance - just take a look at the pictures above, from No name, no title, collection for autumn/winter 2006.

Ramírez has called his style retroish, but this should not be mistaken for mere grave robbery of earlier styles. Like a proper porteño, Ramírez constantly reminds how important influence Buenos Aires and the city's architechture is to him. Maybe this is why his collections like Tango (A/W 2001, above) seem to engange in such a natural dialogue between the romantic past glory of the city and the most recent trends in the international fashion.

Mariano Toledo has a more colorful surface in his collections (sold at his boutique, Tienda House Tornado, in Armenia 1450, Palermo Soho and in Madrid, Spain), yet there is something darker always lurking right beneath the surface. An architect turned into a fashion desiner, Toledo escapes easy definitions: he tends to get nicknamed énfant terrible of Argentinian fashion, experimentation being his second nature.

Toledo uses a lot of leather, giving his collections sexy, fetishistic look, and models have often marched on the runway in sado-masochistic masks. This spring's selection, full of colourful, caleidoscopic patterns, was juxtaposed with silvery neck-corsets on models. Previous autumn/winter collection, called The Goat, symbolizing nothing less than battle between good and evil, was full of references to tarot and witchcraft, wrapped in shiny black leather. "Tarot cards tell us about a hidden and unknown world where we are protagonists; the destiny lives in them", explained Toledo philosophy behind the collection in Quiero.

Menta recently published an interview with Toledo, under appropriate headline Terrible and refined, where Toledo summed up his complex aesthetics: "...there's a little side of me that plays with the sinister and the unknown, that thing that on one side is beautiful and on the other side immensely ugly."

Cumbia, all over the continent

2008-02-01T15:06:00.002-02:00

Buenos Aires by Night

When the song ends there is a deaf silence. Like in that scene in a war movie, where a bomb explodes next to the hero, and for a moment all he hears is an echoing silence. Then, in a blast, the sounds of the surrounding world return: the amazing, murderous noise that is Buenos Aires.

A late night hot dog joint, late at night. Built under a railway bridge in a shabbier part of the city. One litre bottles of cheap beer circulate around the tables. Out of three fan-light-combos hanging from an exposed tile ceiling two fans and one light are working.

A kid from a table in the darkest corner walks to the huge ancient jukebox. Instructions are shouted after him. Jukebox makes clicking and cracking noises for a while and then the beat rolls in waves over the dim room. The cumbia beat. This is cumbia villera, the sound of the villa miserias - shantytowns - of Buenos Aires, the sound that has taken over the whole city. Kid, dressed like a proper cumbiero, hair dyed blond, sporting a cap dangerously clinging to the back of his scalp, dances back to the table.

Cumbia villera is the dirty Argentinian bastard son of the Colombian cumbia. The sound is cheap, home-made, a ghetto sound. Lyrics bear more resemblance to gangsta rap or proibidão funks of Rio's favelas than to romantic laments of original Colombian cumbia. And of course it has roused a proper controversy in the city, and eventually ended up being hugely popular.

Here are a couple of older tunes from Pibes Chorros, Yerba Brava and Damas Gratis, the old school of the villera sound. Pablo Lescano of Damas Gratis is often recognized as the inventor of cumbia villera, deed that has made him into a something of a working class hero (though he says that it was the record label who tought of the term and insists on calling his music just cumbia).

Pibes Chorros - Las Pibas Quieren Sexo (zShare)
Pibes Chorros - Con Una Nueve (zShare)
Yerba Brava - Los Borrachos (zShare)
Yerba Brava - La Cumbia De Lost Trapos (zShare)
Damas Gratis - Quiero Vitamina (zShare)
Damas Gratis - Se Te Ve La Tanga (Version remix) (zShare)

Websites like Paraeltablon offer news about artists (for an example, yesterday's headlines told about members of certain group getting accused for sexual abuse, "con penetración", of a 17 year girl, and a theft of a cellular phone - not that the band looks much over 17 years either), downloads of cumbia villera-music - and amateur soft porn.

Indeed, there is a dark undercurrent in villeras singing merrily about boozing and smoking marihuana. For an example, one of the Pibes Chorros songs above is about robbing supermarkets. In one interview, Pablo Lescano, now in rehabilitation, describes his serious addiction to drugs. As the case in villas often is, the drugs were of the cheapest and the most dangerous kind: "Paco, crack... Everything. Everything." His home barrio he describes as a disastre - "They'll kill you just to rob your cell phone."

Picture (c) Zizek Urban Beats Club

Niceto-club, Buenos Aires

A club called Zizek at a restaurant called Niceto (Niceto Vega 5510, Palermo Hollywood), in trendy Palermo-district. A DJ called Villa Diamante behind the decks. A man often hailed as the undisputed mash-up king of the city.

Fashionable, artsy crowd is dancing wildly. To that same cumbia beat. But very different sounds. Here we are on the experimental edge of the cumbia sound. Here it merges with - and smashes into - international genres like hip-hop, r'n'b and baltimore. Dubstep or electro-pop. What ever suits you, sir, this is the testbed for weirdest samples and bold ventures into strange new directions. And pretty much one hell of a party, too.

Villa Diamante offers most of his music for free, available for download on his site. For starters, Bailando se entiende la gente contains a whole album of Diamante's bastard pop, giving a good idea about this man's work, tastes and skills.

Villa Diamante: Bailando se entiende la gente (direct link)

Other interesting artists include Oro11 - here remixing Pibes Chorros-song - and Cancha Via Circuito, mashing porteño rap-queen Princesa into cumbia beat. Just to name a few. And we must not forget Dick el Demasiado ("Dick the Too Much"), the grand-father of the experimental scene, probably smiling somewhere in the background while admiring all the strange growth his work has sparked in here. He's a man with incredibly complex background, a fact audible in the wild influences of his cumbias experimentales.

Oro11 - Pibes Chorros vs. DJ Unh: Que Calor (direct link, via Muy Bastard)
Princesa - Con la Misma Moneda (Cancha Via Circuito remix)
(direct link, via What's Up Buenos Aires)
Dick el Demasiado - Rueda de las Unas (zShare)

Also international super-stars like Diplo have performed here at Zizek. Diplo hypes cumbia-sound in Mad Decent-blog and provides us with his own little cumbia-mix.

Got interested? Good resources to find out more include What's Up Buenos Aires and Muy Bastard-blog.

Potosí, Bolivia

A shack selling pirated records by the bus station. Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in the South America. There are hardly stores selling original records here. Stacks of collections of Argentinian cumbia villera: Villeras Argentinos, Villeras 2007, Exitos Villera 2008. Three albums for price of one. Just the greatest hits.

Here too that cumbia beat, everywhere, taking turns with occasional reggaeton songs. Where as in Argentina cumbia was always a musical style associated with lower classes, something to be frowned upon, in Bolivia - and of course in Colombia - cumbia seems to be in the blood of the whole nation. Immigrants from these countries once brought the cumbia to Argentina. So maybe this is just the bastard son returning home.

Artists popular on the countless villera-collections here offer a different sound, though. Softer, more romantic, usually to the point of a heavy sugar-overdose. One of the biggest stars is El Polaco. Despite his tough guy-appearances with tattoos and all, his songs mostly deal with various bumps on the road of love, and consequently he is very popular among teenage-girls both here and in Argentina. Here's few of his least annoying songs, just to give an example. Another one is about getting drunk because of heart-aches.

El Polaco - Amanecio (zShare)
El Polaco - Tomaré Para Olvidar (zShare)

Valparaiso, Chile

A street in port of Valparaiso. A quick piece of graffiti thrown on a rusting, weather-beaten metal wall.

"SATAN ES CUMBIA."

Everybody loves cumbia.

Oscar Bony, the Magician

2008-01-31T15:38:00.002-02:00

Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) is the sparkly new museum of contemporary art in Buenos Aires. It exhibits an interesting collection of modern and contemporary Latin American art - including works from classic names like Antonio Berni, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but also pieces by the cream of the younger generation. Changing exhibitions feature design in addition to fine art and there are daily screenings of films from Argentina and abroad. For me, one of the high lights of the recent months' exhibitions was Oscar Bony, El Mago - the retrospective of Argentinian artist Oscar Bony (1941-2002).

Bony started out as a painter, but quickly ventured into variety of different modern art forms. His paintings literally grew into installations and sculptures, as he started experimenting with adding objects to his paintings. Bony became one of the "young rebels" of the Buenos Aires art scene, trying his hand at performances, happenings and video art, and finally focused mainly on photography.

Conceptual side was important in Bony's works through out his career. He sparked controversy with La Familia Obrera, in 1968. Bony hired a whole working class family to sit in the gallery, promising to double their hourly wage.

During the oppressive reign of the infamous military junta in Argentina, Bony among number of other artists stopped creating art for a number of years. "We undertook a fantastic utopia: unable to change society, we committed suicide", Bony later commented the resolution of his and his collegues. He then worked as a professional photographer, creating visual indentities for bands of the rock nacional-movement. He returned to the fine art in mid-70's, but soon moved to live in exile in Milan, where he actively participated the Europian art scene. Bony returned to Buenos Aires in '90s, working on photography, pictures typically framed behind a glass and then shot at with a 9 mm pistol.

There is something immensely powerful in the simple components Bony uses to construct his photographs. Often there's a picture of him, dressed in a dramatic black suit, his age clearly visible on his face. Or perhaps a faded picture of him as a young man. And there are brutal gun shot holes and shatters in the glass and the photograph behind it. Might almost sound corny, but the visual impact and certain strange ambiguity make these pictures unforgettable.

What is this?

2008-01-31T00:49:00.000-02:00

Welcome to Otra Luna, my blog. It's about things I find interesting - mainly art, design, cinema, culture in general - and especially music. In a way it's a travel blog, as I write about things I run into while hopping between my native country Finland and the southern hemisphere.

I wished to call this blog otro lado - other side - referring to the other side of a vinyl record and the other side of the planet, well, pretty much to the other side of anything - but the name was already taken. I thought this would have been kinda clever name, as it works both in Spanish and Portuguese, and the initial focus will be on Latin America, as I am currently living there.

Yet in future I will write about other places too. For an example there's a huge stack of Senegalese rap music, on old c-casettes, back in Helsinki - demanding to get rescued into digital format. I collected them while I was staying in Grand Yoff, Dakar, making the documentary Sunu Misik (Our Music) about young local rap-artists. Just to give an idea what to expect.

Anyway, this thus became other moon. The stars are different on the southern side of the globe, there's the Southern Cross you can't see up in Finland, for an example. Maybe the moon looks a little bit different too, then. So okay.

I stole the name from this song. It's an electronic tango from Carlos Libedinsky, one of the best artists in that scene. Take a listen.

Carlos Libedinsky (Narcotango) - Otra Luna (zShare)