Carnaval's Never Really Over

One of the things I spend an inordinant amount of time doing since I got back from Brazil is consigning all these press releases and other information sent to me by flacks to my junk e-mail folder. But it just keeps coming. Nearly 15 years gets you on a lot of lists, I guess. But some of them I keep, things I'm still interested in like the e-mail I get, from Adan Nascimento, who appears to be Rosiane Pinheiro's (pictured above) press agent. I don't know why I get them but I appreciate them. I've always appreciated Rosiane. I think she's a dancer for Gang de Samba, one of the a million bands that go under the loose rubric of Bunda Music (or butt music) I'll dedicate an entire post to that sub-genre someday but today I want to talk about something else. About what we in the Northern hemisphere can learn from Brazil. And that is that Carnaval is never really over, it keeps coming round again year after year. You may not get on down and party, but you can't avoid it, when it comes barreling down the street. I want to fix the little blurb I've written up at the top about the blog and its purpose to extend the Carnaval's over metaphor to the current economic crisis and general depression Jack and I have come back to here in the old U.S.A. and I want to use the fact that Carnaval never really ends to make things more hopeful. Ohh chile, things are going to get easier. In Salvador da Bahia, the never ending Carnaval can be a little much, though. When they see gringos on the streets months after Carnaval has ended they always ask if you were in town for Carnaval it's an easy in. And after it actually ends on Ash Wednesday the Baianos are like kids trying to sneak their hands back into the cookie jar with spontaneous outbursts and off-season Carnavals, the next weekend and the weekend after that. I once wrote an article explaining that for 50 out of 52 weeks of the year you could experience and off-season Carnaval somewhere in Brazil. That's where Rosiane Pinheiro makes a good deal of her money, it would seem. I met a guy who had been to Bahia and told me that we needed to learn to live more like the Baianos, learn to live more and work less. Nice idea but actually the Baianos really over do and the economy is a mess. You could romanticize and say the people are poor but they're happy, which is amazingly enough true, but they are REALLLLY poor and most of the time that just sucks. But remembering that Carnaval comes back around might help us soldier through these trying times.