Somewhere near Salinas

So the other night my friend Gabe, who I met in Brazil but who grew up in Park Slope, came over for dinner and I started talking about all the different beers I was discovering and he kind of dissed me saying, I did the same thing with cachaca in Brazil: that I got all into the manufacture and manufacturers like I was on some kind of nerd shit. He also dissed Junot Diaz, so I thought I'd thought I drop some lingo like that, just to get up in his face. Then, he said he just drank the stuff, he didn't really make a study of it. Ok, sure, play at your own risk. It wasn't the first time I didn't see eye to eye with Gabe over alcohol. See, once a while back me, him and our friend Eric were going to make an epic road movie: "The Moto Taxi Diaries." The idea was simple: We would hire moto taxis in the Rocinha favela and have them drive us hundreds of miles to the city of Salinas _ the capital of Cachaca. In Salinas, Minas Gerais, not the city in the Kris Kristofferson song implied above, there are something like 180 different small artesinal cachaca stills. The idea was to make a pilgramage and get smashed, each of us with a hand held DV camera to film the whole mess. Of course, we were drunk on cachaca when we came up with the idea, but I kind of liked the dumb unity of the idea. All we had to do was make it there, get drunk and make it back alive, filming all the while. Okay, there would be problems getting all three of us lunkheads into a single scene if each of us were camera men, but I figured we could hand off the camera to one of the motoboys or something. But then Gabe started expanding the idea to make a film about foreign correspondents, a category of people he thought possessed a certain glamour _ why he thought that kind of eluded me at that point. And some of the correspondents he wanted to include in the film remain less than glamorous to me today. He was fucking with the lunkheaded unity I so adored and I kind of let the idea die. It's funny though Gabe and Eric are two of the people who I first met in Brazil that I've seen in New York since I got back, Jack and Henry are the only others. Henry is actually a professional camera man, so maybe we should have brought him along on the moto-taxi trip just to avoid embarrasment, or rather to better document our embarrasment as we went along. It was also Henry's idea that I start a blog. So, "Crazy shout out to Henry!" Anyway, now that I've left Brazil, I kind of get what Gabe was going on about _ even if I still think his idea for expanding the film is kind of lame _ foreign correspondents do possess a kind of glamour, at least from a distance. I mean, unless you happen to be one _ or you're the kind of foreign correspondent who is all self-involved and given to delusions of grandure. When Jack was here and talking about skipping out on his job, I was like: I wouldn't do it, I used to get to go to Amazon a few times each year and now, I'm changing Ill. to Illinois. But he pointed out that when I came back from my trips I had a family and a dog waiting for me and often he had no one. Once when I came back from Recife and the family was still on vacation and the dog in the kennel, I was confronted with one of the emptiest feelings of my life. On the positive side of coming home, people in the United States generally have some idea what the AP is, in Brazil only some very old guys remembered the Associated Press from Radio Tupi, where apparently they used to say, "Now international news from the Associated Press," probably with some pompous trumpets in the background. I wouldn't have even known what radio Tupi was except for those old guys. So on a whole other note, I made a film with my son the other day for his science fair _ I know it appears to be something off subject but one of the categories was technology and one of the options was to make a short film using iMovie. So I'm going to post, in a second, (it should appear above this post if everything goes well) the film Chocolate Wars for all to see. Okay, now that we've discussed what the movie doesn't have to do with science, I'll discuss what it does have to do with this blog _ in another post though _ which is all about my kids learning English and how freaky it is to hear my daughter say something is "awesome," when only a couple of months ago she only spoke Portuguese. Enjoy.