Amazon Dam

The Balbina Dam (north of the Amazon capital of Manaus)


It was just like yesterday. Okay, it was, in fact, yesterday (okay, Monday) that I went to the Plaza Hotel _ New York's answer to the Copacabana Palace _ and reported on a Brazil conference with President Lula in attendance. It was fun running into a bunch of reporters who I knew from Brazil: Josh, who I met in Rio and who just moved to New York in January; Claudia, who I met in Rio but who was just visiting, from Jersey City. Pedro was there, too, who I only met while covering Lula in Washington, but since he's a Brazilian, I'll include in the mix. It was a strange event, there was nothing being presented to investors that you couldn't download off the Internet from the various ministries's websites. And yet, there was the president of Brazil sitting through these powerpoint presentations, as if he had nothing better to do.

There were two things that interested me, though, both involving Dilma Rousseff _ who is Lula's chief of staff. Anyway, Rousseff, is apparently being groomed as Lula's sucessor, which is strange because she doesn't really have any political base that I'm aware of. She was part of the armed resistence during the military dictatorship, which gives her some street cred. But I don't think she was ever elected to any public office, instead she was usually a top aide kind of person. What I do know for a fact is that she recently had a face lift. It was all over the cover of O Globo's website. And what surprised me was how good she looked _ not on O Globo _ but in person. Apparently, she knows better people than Michael Jackson. I mean she didn't look that great, but compared to the way she looked before. Her face still looked a little plasticky but she had changed from a vaguely irrated burocrat who look I might liken to that of a constipated bulldog into a something approaching feminine. I don't know, she seemed almost attractive for the first time.

But that's not the really interesting thing. The really interesting thing was this film she showed after her long, boring presentation which in numbers and figures basically outlined how the government hopes to develop Brazil and open up the Amazon. She mentioned the Tapajos Dam complex in her presentation, but I didn' t give it much attention until I saw the film that followed her lecture. The film had computer renderings of all the dams (5) the government plans to put up along the Tapajos river. Now, the Tapajos is a really gorgeous river that connects with the Amazon around Santarem. In 2006 or 2007, I think, I had the good fortune to ride down the Tapajos in a boat with photographer Andre Penner. The beginning of the ride was beautiful as the sun set over the river and Alter do Chao there were some girls giggling in the front of the boat beyond glass where the pilot sat and we struck up a conversation, they studied nursing in Santarem and were going back to Itaituba for a wedding. Then it got dark and the ride got kind of dull, it was like 12 hours or maybe more. The river was really high so that when we docked at Fordlandia, an old ranch owned by the Ford company, the dock was totally submerged and the people standing on it seemed to be walking on water. We stayed at the best hotel in Itaituba, which wasn't much but it had a pool, about 5 yards long and I actually managed to swim like a kilometer in it one boring Sunday morning. We spent the next day driving along the Transamazon highway following the Tapajos all the way to Amazonia National Park. The driver had a CD of the Calyypso (another story, for another time) but only the first three songs played so we had to hear them over and over again, while a biologist argued with the driver over which soccer team was superior Remo (hers) or Paysandu (his), a pointless argument without end.

But I digress. According to Dilma the dams will only flood the river as much as they natural floods during high season. So if she is to be believed no massive reservoirs evicting settlers and Indians. And the government is going to build them as if they were oil platforms out on the ocean, coming in by helicopter, creating a minimal disturbance to the forest and then replanting the area so only the dam installations stand out. It was pretty impressive on film. I think all five dams together will have a capacity of 10,000 MW - which I think is pretty good. So what to make of this? Well, first of all, all these dam projects act like magnets for the hordes of poor settlers who roam the Amazon in search of opportunity. Dilma's argument seemed to be that by helicoptering in they will avoid this. But she mentioned the center of operations will be Itaituba and that town will certainly see a great influx of people thanks to the dam, whether there are jobs to be had or not. It will also create more pressure to pave the TransAmazon, which despite its grand name, is really mostly an overgrown dirt road _ something that gives it a certain charm. Then there's the fact that none of these places are completely inacessible anyway. People have a way of finding their way to the edge of these projects, setting up little shanties to sell drink, prostitutes whatever the workers might lack. There is also the question of tranmission lines which will cut through thousands of miles of forest just to get to some place where the electricity will be useful, which implies even more environmental degratation. Also having cheap electricity nearby will attract also sorts of industry, especially if there are any minerals to be mined in the area. And then there's what is always a given with these projects: all the over billing and kick backs which drive up the costs to enrich politicians.

Now, I'm a little torn here. I figure the Amazon is going to disappear anyway. There is no serious effort underway to save and economic growth implies lurching ever forward into the jungle. So why not get behind a project like this, that at least appears to be the product of thoughtful planning? Well, first of all, in Brazil (as is the case pretty much everywhere) things never work out like they're supposed to. Secondly, around the world people are pulling out their dams and Brazil is installing them. But aside from some scientists arguments that dams release lots of green house gases in the form of methane _ all the submerged trees rotting, it seems. There's no oil, gas or coal involved, just screwing up some beautiful rivers that no one much sees anyway cause they're in the middle of nowhere.

Now, all my Amazon research has left me at the point that I feel saving the rainforest is largely a romantic quest. I'm in favor of preserving it, but I know it's not the lungs of the Earth and some responsible scientists have suggested to me that they don't even think it's impact on the weather will be catastrophic _ that was kind of a shock to hear. All the carbon going into the atmosphere will certainly speed global warming, but with no serious effort to curtail industrial emissions, it's hard to point a finger. But I don't know, I think its a good idea to keep our forests functioning, maintain the biodiversity for science and general goodness' sake. When you pave paradise all you are often left with is a parking lot, the pink motel, botique and swinging hot spot don't necessary follow.

I am reminded about a wierd press conference I attended years back where some guys were proposing hydro-electric plants that did not cut off the whole river but only extended about a third of the way across using the natural currents to run them. They painted a pretty idyllic picture of rivers lined with a series of tiny little power stations. They shot themselves in the foot, however, when they claimed their chief scientist had devised a way of defying the law of physics to have more energy coming out of their turbines than was going in. No way could I write about that without an accompanying peer-reviewed study explaining how they managed to defy such a basic law of physics.

Another guy who was at the conference, Roger Agnelli, the CEO of Vale Brazil's super-large mining company. He was all GROWTH, GROWTH, GROWTH, the world is going to grow and people will need more things so, we may be in a bit of recession now, but the long term is promising - demand for natural resources will grow etc. etc. He made no mention of the finite nature of natural resources nor the accompanying environmental devastation and pollution that accompany this growth, but then he is a very rich and powerful man.

I think Brazil is missing a tremendous chance not turning the Amazon into a great big labratory for sustainable development. Sending armys of students to study science and implant practical projects, to educate the locals so the only there jobs don't involve slashing and burning. And so they can be better paid and better prepared for the 21st Century economy instead of stuck in the 19th Century. But I don't think there's the will to do this.

The film about the dams said that for every square kilometer developed, the government will preserve 100 plus square kilometers, which brings me back to the story I traveled to Itaituba to cover _ it was about how national parks and other areas protected on paper are actually full of settlers and illegal logging.

Me & Evo Down by the Schoolyard

There's a fine story behind this photo, but I'll let you imagine it. That's me to the left, with Bolivian President Evo Morales to the right. In between us is Alex Contreras, Evo's former spokesman. 

Death of Newspapers

I thought this was a good piece on the death of newspapers. Read it and weep.

Sure as Hell ain't Carnaval

I didn't come back to the U.S.A. for a Saint Patrick's Day parade, but it was more fun than I imagined. I mean it wasn't all that much fun, the drums were lame compared to what you get in Brazil, but you can't beat the Bagpipes. Well, after a while Bagpipes get old and noisy, but they do cause as splash as do men in tartan plaid skirts etc. etc. Nobody was drunk _ I guess post-Giuliani prohibtions on open beer bottles _ or maybe it's just Park Slope. Who knows? It was different from what I had expected, much calmer and the kids loved it.

Up Past My Bedtime

I guess one of the worst things about my new job is the late shifts and weekend shifts I often get stuck with. Tonight, okay this morning I'm working until 3:00 a.m. Not fun. Also I'm not terribly inspired either, so I'm going to do a lazy ass post and put up one of my old articles _ one that I'm proud of, but I don't think I even have the energy to offer much alternative commentary. The photographer got an honorable mention for one of the pictures that accompanied this article and there was this whole story about how the AP didn't even want to run it, at first. Some top editor asked why Recife was any different from any of the other murder capitals around the world? So they just wanted 400 words to accompany the pictures. Then another editor wanted to know why such a compelling story was only 400 words long - go figure. Funny, thing is whenever I saw it published it was always with the most innoucous pictures _ I guess the shots of blase people hanging around dead bodies made editors squeamish. It was kind fun in a perverse way to ride around with the TV news guys going from body to body. Hanging around with the guys from PEBodyCount was a lot of fun, too. They were four young guys who were like the Beatles, in a strange way. I even suggested to them they start up a violence tourism agency _ you know like eco-tourism, violence-tourism, because I really got to see their city in a much different light. But I guess I was only kidding.

(04-27) 04:00 PDT Recife, Brazil -- Ines Maria da Silva stares blankly outside her shack as she describes how she lost all five of her sons to the violence that makes Recife the deadliest major city in Brazil.

The first son died 15 years ago, in a fight over a girl, another after telling a mob he didn't want a pedophile lynched on his doorstep. The third was stabbed while arguing with a friend and the fourth was shot dead, mistaken for a thief.

Her last remaining son was felled by a stray bullet as he joined Recife's famed carnival celebrations a year ago.

"I just want to understand, how come no one is punished?" said the diminutive, 68-year-old widow, who now cares for six grandchildren and three unemployed daughters and collects cans, bottles and garbage to feed her pigs in Recife's squalid Coque shantytown.

"There are people here who just kill for fun," da Silva said. "Two of the men who killed my sons are my neighbors. If I had somewhere to go I would have moved out a long time ago."

This seaside city, a favorite of European tourists, gets much more attention for the shark attacks that have killed 18 people since 1992 than for its human killings - at least 2,617 in the metropolitan area last year. While tourists are warned not to take valuables to the beaches, as in most Brazilian cities, little is said about the murder rate mostly because the violence largely stays in the poor areas.

While Rio de Janeiro's bloody drug war makes international headlines, this balmy city of 1.5 million has a homicide rate of 90.9 per 100,000 - more than twice as deadly as Rio, according to the Latin American Technological Network's Map of Violence.

Now, a group of local crime reporters is working to show the human cost of the death toll.

"For 10 years we've been writing the same story, all that changes are the names of victims and the killers and the authorities giving the excuse of the moment," says Joao Valadares. "It's only going to change when people become aware of the situation, not just when it arrives at their door, but when they realize these are people who are dying."

Valadares and three colleagues have launched www.pebodycount.com.br, featuring a death-toll counter updated daily with details of murders across Pernambuco state. As of April 21, this year's count stood at 1,403 and rising. They are working with another Web site that uses Google Map technology to mark the location of each murder with a little red flag.

The group also used red paint to mark the bodies at a month's worth of crime scenes - 80 in October alone. And on April 30, the group plans to inaugurate a body count clock on one of Recife's busiest avenues - Rua Joaquim Nabuco.

"What's going on here is effectively social cleansing," explains Eduardo Machado, one the group's founders. "The vast majority of victims share the same profile: poor, black men between 15 and 30 living in the outskirts and killed by a .38 revolver."

More than 40 percent of the murders are committed by death squads - clandestine groups of off-duty and former police officers who are dedicated to executing undesirable elements - according to Jose Luiz Ratton, a sociologist who advises the governor on violence.

Other motivations include rural machismo - a culture of honor and revenge killings, Ratton says.

"In Rio de Janeiro the problem is organized crime," he says. "Here the problem is disorganized crime."

Ratton has compiled a plan on how the state government might begin to combat the violence, but little of it has been implemented so far.

The killings are front-page news only on the rare occasions when middle- or upper-class people are killed. But each night's carnage is fodder for the city's three wildly popular TV crime shows, whose announcers compete to narrate the details with a mixture of indignant bombast and gory glee.

The TV crews won't go to the scenes until police have arrived, for fear of being attacked. And shantytown dwellers don't volunteer many details to outsiders.

"Here if you know too much, you die," says a man who would only provide his nickname "Biscoito," or biscuit, as he watched the journalists refreshing a faded red silhouette.

This law of silence is a frustrating reality for police Inspector Cleonice Bezerra de Araujo, a 24-year veteran who deals with between three and 11 murders a night as she runs the city's homicide task force.

"Sometimes if it's a child who's killed or a woman, a mother, it will still shake me up. But the sad thing is you get used to it," she explains after a mostly fruitless half hour trying to discover how 35-year-old Aldivan Joaquim dos Santos ended up dead on the sidewalk.

Crowds of onlookers gather and kids on bicycles swerve to avoid dos Santos' body, spread-eagled on the sidewalk. But even the victim's wife claims she saw nothing.

An hour earlier, Araujo was investigating the killing of a man hacked to death with a machete in a mud hut on the outskirts of town. Neighbors there claimed they didn't know the victim, and couldn't even say how many people lived in the hut with him.

The only lead came as a rumor - that the man had been arrested days earlier for stealing some fruit, casting suspicion on local vigilantes known informally as the whistle squad.

But like 90 percent of the murders in Recife, Araujo says the case won't get more than the most cursory investigation. The killers will probably never be found, much less punished.

State security secretariat spokesman Joaquim Neto acknowledges the murder rate is high but points out that murders so far this year are down 6 percent, which he attributes to his department's success in dismantling 13 death squads.

He also argues that Recife's murder rate is high compared to other cities only because his department counts them more accurately. "Other states don't count police killings as murders or sometimes they count seven people murdered in a single incident as just one killing," Neto said. "We don't do that."

That's cold comfort for Ines Maria da Silva.

"The police don't do anything about the violence - maybe they throw people in jail but when those people get out of jail they have no right to work, so they rob," she said, wearily eyeing her neighbors and kids playing in the muddy street.


This article appeared on page A - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Long Live Obama...

Way to go, Douglas!

Photographer/videographer Douglas Engle was practically the only U.S. journalist I met in Rio upon arriving in 2005 who hadn't left when I returned to the States in October. Almost everyone else - Michael, Henry Chu of the LA Times, most recently, Julie McCarthy of NPR - took off. That was life in Brazil too, the constant coming and going.

Well, Douglas is doing some cool stuff, now shooting video for Reuters. Check it out.

For Some Reason, Brazil's Got Lots of These Stories

This is the kind of story I could imagine Michael tearing into if he was still in Rio. You got crazy, desperate people in the middle of nowhere, violence, an airplane and a shopping mall. In other variations, you might have a burning bus, a drug gang, a bank robbery or a prison riot. But it's about human desperation taken to its limits, and Brazil's got it. The American variation is usually the loner/nerd/jilted husband blowing away people at the school/church/family get-together.

I can see Michael and me hanging out at Amir, the Lebanese restaurant in Copacabana, after work, with him giving me the play by play, bemoaning the sadness of the story but also marvelling at the complexity of it. McClatchy probably would have skipped it. (By the way, Michael, am I breaking your company's copyright by posting this? Well, that's what the Internet's all about, right?)

Brazil: Man hijacks plane, kills self, child
By BRADLEY BROOKS, Associated Press Writer
Friday, March 13, 2009
(03-13) 08:23 PDT RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) --
A man accused of rape kidnapped his daughter, stole a small plane and buzzed a major city before crashing into the parking lot of a mall, killing himself and his 5-year-old child, police said Friday.
Officials said no one was injured on the ground.
Kleber Barbosa da Silva argued with his wife and forced her from a moving car Thursday afternoon near the central state capital of Goiania, then fled with their daughter, said a Goiania police official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the case.
The wife was hospitalized in critical condition.
Silva drove about 150 kilometers (90 miles) to a small airplane club in the city of Luziania and told club officials he wanted to take an aerial tour with his daughter. Once inside the single-engine Embraer Tupi, he brandished a pistol and forced the pilot out while the plane was on a runway.
Silva — whose piloting experience is not known — then took off with his daughter.
Authorities made brief contact with Silva after he was airborne.
"He wanted to cause a bigger tragedy, to cause casualties at the mall, too," police investigator Jorge Moreira told the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper.
Two Brazilian air force planes and a military police helicopter pursued Silva but did not intercept him.
Brazilian television showed video of the plane flying fast and low over the Goiania airport, nearby neighborhoods and a hospital. Shortly afterward, the plane crashed into the parking lot of the Flamboyant Shopping Mall, instantly killing Silva and his daughter, a little more than two hours after he stole the plane.
Authorities were trying to determine if the plane ran out of fuel or if Silva deliberately crashed.
Police said Silva was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl on Monday and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/03/13/international/i082335D69.DTL

There's Got to Be a Morning After

See that photo up there? Yeah, I took it after my first, and to date last, visit to Bar Great Harry. It was a rollicking night for many reasons not the least of which being that it got underway at after 2:00 a.m. Okay, so it was more like a rollicking morning, but anyway. Me and Ron got off the late shift and took the company car straight to the bar where we ordered up a bunch of extreme brews. We started out with the Weyerbacher 13, clocking in at a stunning 13.6 per cent alcohol content. It was brown and really, really tasty, almost like food. Checking back I'm disappointed to find the bar isn't serving it anymore. You snooze you lose, I guess. Then we moved on to a Goose Island Bourbon County Stout 2008 clocking in at a mere 11 percent alcohol. I was impressed by the Bourbon Country (one of the things I missed most in Brazil was Bourbon) and the fact that this beer had a vintage, but the beer itself had a strong yeasty flavour I found objectionable. I drank it anyway. Finally, (and I mean finally because the bartender didn't even want to serve us because it was 10 minutes to closing time and she thought we'd be keeping her at work too late just drinking it) we had the Dogfish Head 120 Degrees which has a respectable 12 percent alcohol content. Brooklyn we go hard. After that we caroused down Smith street to a diner. All the while, I was filling Ron in how the neighborhood changed since I used to hang around there in the mid-1980s. Doubtless, I was very eloquent all the while, but I don't think I managed to paint a mental picture for Ron of what Smith Street once look liked back in the day. Truth be told it's hard to remember when you're that drunk. Oh well. Then we had burgers at this dinner _ I think I remember some guy dressed in purple like Prince, but that might have been an hallucination _ and headed home on the F Train. This was very nice of Ron, since he only lived one stop away. When we got into the train, it was filled with a scattering of tough looking men, all sleeping men all with their hoodies pulled over their heads. For some reason, this shocked Ron but I just sat down, pulled my hoodie over my head and teased Ron about not having a hoody of his own. When I got out at my stop I was so moved by this poster for a TV show call Bad Girls or something that I took the photo posted above. Poor girl, I made her look like Francis Bacon got a hold of her and no one deserves that.

Anyway, that's kind of how I feel about last night's post teasing Jack about mourning the end of newspapers. I was drunk, see, having downed three bottles of Dogfishhead Rasion d'Etre 2000 (another vintage beer but only about 8 percent alcohol). I kind of suspected my post would be trouble when I was writing it but I also thought maybe mashing it up a bit with Jack would increase our readership, earnestness doesn't sell. One of the things I've noticed lately is a number of newspapers and magazines caught short by the Internet seem to be going provocative to keep their audiences _ something that is doubtless contributing to the widening disrespect for the media. I think there were a lot of valid points in yesterday's post, but I don't think they were fleshed out well. I think it mostly sounded like an anti-capitalist rant, or more like just being upset about not getting to fly business class. It might have helped if I found an old black and photo of Godzilla doing battle with Mothra. I also didn't do very well at connecting the dots between Bernie Madoff and Jack. Actually, I'm not sure there's any connection at all. Sorry, Jack.

Actually, it was all terribly insensitive of me, since I've never even worked at a newspaper, only at wireservices. And I don't really know anyone who's getting laid off. Though my friend Jack Epstein at the San Francisco Chronicle would seem a likely candidate, sorry other Jack. Actually, sorry to all the Jacks in the world. What was that Maureen McGovern song from the Poseidon Adventure, "There's Got to be a Morning After."

Carioca Sky

Five months (only five months!) out of Rio, and I can safely report that I haven't seen these kinds of skies anywhere in DC or the Bay Area or probably anywhere else in the world.

Michael, Let Me Mourn

Yeah, you may be right, Michael, or not, but dude, this shit is still just happening. The death rattle is still rattling. A little mourning, especially as it has affected my life in a very direct way, is to be expected.

Joining Journalism 2.0 or maybe it's 3.0 was my plan, you see, although now it seems rather ridiculous. Move out here to the Bay Area, position myself so that I'd catch the next (likely digital) news wave just as it was swelling and then be a multi-billionaire at 45 and retire in the Peninsula. A month into my new phase, however, and I haven't seen too much in that direction.

Although some local news sites like www.missionlocal.org and www.oaklandnorth.net may point the way. Or maybe not. Who the fuck knows? Maybe, in two years, it'll just be TV, blogs and frenzied rumors spreading by word of mouth.

By the way, if any journalist with an opinion wants to chime in, please comment or write me at jtchang23@gmail.com and maybe we can add some more voices to this.

A Cidade Nova

Jack vs. Bernie Madoff, who will win?

Yes, folks it's the fight of the Century: Acabou o Carnaval's very Jack Chang vs. Bernie Madoff. You see, Jack is bugging about the end of an era. There will be no more newspapers and that will be a bad thing. But Que Sera Sera, if you get my drift. Bernie Madoff saw that and in that way he was just more prescient than all the others. Of course, he hasn't said why he done what he did, but I have a clue. He looked at the whole damn thing and saw it was all one giant Ponzi, pyramid, what have you. And so he said, why not take it to its logical extreme. Remember years ago, (I don't remember how many years ago) Albania fell apart over a giant Ponzi scheme and we all laughed and thought: "Those poor stupid Albanians." But really, look at the stock market and think about it. Think about swapoptions for what they're worth. Think about the whole damn stupid thing_ it's all one big pyramid scheme when you get down to it. Like why did I used to have to fly economy class or take the bus to cover stories that were printed around the world and my step-mother, a bank vice-president, had to fly business class to travel around the world moving money. Don't kid yourself, one job is not more important than the other. In fact, bankers are really not that great shakes at all, and yet they say "if you limit the top salaries there will be a brain drain," as if a balance sheet really requires much more than a good calculator. Okay, an average calculator and a functional brain. But this is the skewed logic we've been dealing with and worse yet, it's the language of power. I believe newspapers will disappear and that will be a sad thing. I don't believe the press will disappear, if it did, it would be a bad thing. Though, during the run-up to the Iraq war, the press essentially did disappear and the newspapers were still around. But let's get real, someone's going to have to tell the story and someone is going to have be better renumerated to tell it around the clock and realiably. They just won't be telling it in the newspapers. So get used to it.

Chocolate Wars

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.

Aquela Cidade

Memory Swarm!

You know, Michael's right. It's time to make this motherfucker a little more visually interesting. Even if we're feeling empty and hollow inside. So here you go! It's Ta Pirando, Pirado, Pirou in 2008! A Rio Carnaval bloco made up of patients from the local mental hospital and their relatives. A bloco is like a samba band followed by hundreds of revellers during Carnaval. By the way, in typically un-PC Brazilian fashion, the name of the group translates roughly as "It's going crazy, it's gone crazy!" 

Another by the way, I've just gone live with the 2008 version of my own online literary project, www.march-9.com. Check it and maybe you can contribute this year.

How'd You Like Me Now?

I could say I came back to the United States for the Chinese food, 'cause you can't get good Chinese food in Brazil. It IS that important to me. But I could also say with equal honesty I came back for the beer. Unless it's really cold, Brazilian beer kind of really sucks. There are exceptions but basically all the beer comes from the same company, Imbev _ you know them the Belgium, maybe Belgian-Brazilian, mega-conglomerate that owns everything from Stella Atois to Budweiser. The most popular, and hence most ubiquitous brew is Skol, there are others: Antartica, Brahma, Bohemia but the basic idea is embodied in Skol. Since it has the least amount of character, it is generally considered the best. I personally like Antartica better but I freely admit that may have more to do with the blue cans and the penguins on the label than anything else. There is also Kaiser, made by Coca-Cola, which can, on occasion, taste really good in its draft form. Then there's the dreaded, yes, dreaded Novo Schin, or Schincariol which is brewed in the town of Itu and the only thing available in the Sambadrome during Carnaval. Itu is famous for being the town where everything is really big _ seems a there was a Porno Chancada (we'll save this for another day, but it's not really a porn film) where the guy had a really big dick and so people said everything in Itu was like that. Now, if you go to Itu, you can see an over-sized traffic light, maybe an oversized pencil and over-sized telephone booth I forget what else _ but I actually went there once to cover a really big wedding for the Catholic News Service. Okay, and I guess you can drink a really big mug of Novo Schin there, but take my word for it, it's terrible, dreadful stuff.

In Brazil, the whole idea around beer is about keeping it really, really cold. There are little foam condom-like things you keep around the cans on the beach, draft beer is pumped through something called a "serpent" which runs through ice to keep the beer what they like to call "stupidly cold." There's a bar in Ribeirao Preto, in Sao Paulo state, called the Penguin, famous for this amazing long serpent - maybe somebody should have told them about that in Itu. I've been there, done that, and its good but not THAT good.

Now, this isn't to say there aren't good Brazilian beers _ they're just hard to find and when you find them they can be expensive. There are a few micro-breweries sprinkled across the Amazon, funnily enough and one micro-brewery in Rio, Devassa, which is pretty damn good. Problem is a bottle of Devassa in Rio costs more than a lot of imported beers and in Brazil imported don't come cheap. There's another beer called Cerpa, which comes from the Amazon state of Para. The name is a basically a shortening of the words "cerveja," or beer and "Para" _ I only figured this out after drinking quite a lot of them and then someone asked if they still made Cerma, or cerveja de Maranhao, which is the next state over. Actually, the only stuff that's any good is in the little bottles which say Cerpa on them but which everyone refers to as Cerpinha. The big bottles which say Cerpa on them, and which everybody refers to a Cerpa, are pure shite. I know, it's all too complicated. One word of warning though: A lot of people liken the taste of Cerpa, or Cerpinha more correctly, to cough syrup - while I can see their point, I still like the beer, especially after drinking too much Skol in my lifetime.

Okay, so how does this tie in to the end of Carnaval? Right, so I come back to New York and I'm overjoyed by the wide selection of international beers. My friend Henrique, who never went anywhere in Rio without his personal mini-cooler and was always ready to hand me a Skol, once told me about a bar, on the city's poor northside, where they had "every kind of beer" meaning Brahma, Antartica, Antartica Original (not bad that), Schincariol, Kaiser etc. They probably didn't have Cerpa or Devassa, which Henrique didn't even like - but I wasn't about to split hairs. When I told him there were literally hundreds if not thousands of beers in the world it really threw him for a loop. A couple of days later he got back to me conceding that while this may be true, his personal tastes stayed in Brazil. But I digress. What I'm trying to say is New York is a paradise for beer lovers, there's Sappora draft, there's Newcastle Brown Ale, there's Duvel and Delirium Tremens all at the local grocery.

But since I went away there's even something more: All these micro-breweries and extreme beers. There's Dogfish Head 60 degrees, 90 degrees even 120 degrees - though I haven't tried it yet. And Smutty Nose and Magic Hat and that beer I had the other night at Bar Great Harry that had like 11 percent alcohol and was dark and absolutely delicious but very dangerous. It's a wonder world and I want to go back to Brazil, grab Henrique by the hand and show him what he's missing. Or in other words: Who needs saudade when you've got beer.

How Can You Be So Dr. Evil?

I don't have time for a full on post right now, but I was looking at all the photos Jack and I have posted and thought the blog looked a little drab. So I thought I'd liven it up with this picture of Ana Paula Evangelista, who was Queen of Rio's Carnaval in 2005.

Oakland, Sunday, Good Gigs

So this is what I came back for. Downtown Oakland in the rain, as seen from a bar stool at the Trappist, a Belgian beer bar where beer enthusiasts from around the Bay Area have just paid tribute to ex-Oakland Tribune reporter William Brand. Bill died a few weeks ago after being hit by a trolley in San Francisco as he was leaving a bar. He had just done one of his favorite things in the world - taste beers for his column What's On Tap.

I'm at the bar's front window trying to convince one of my friends not to leave her nice job although she might be getting laid off soon. I'm pouring the weight of my experiences over the past months into my attempt at persuasion. I'm telling her to learn from me, from my mistakes. Hold onto what you've got, although you might not be able to stand it right now. She says she's over it and it's time to hit the road, to try something new. I want so much to steer her clear of the confusion that being cut loose from your good gig brings on. But I see in her where I was a few weeks, months ago. I couldn't be talked out of it then either.

So I turn to the street and drink my brew. It's nice here, I think, this bar in the middle of a random American city, drinking with a few journalists, brewmeisters, carpenters, people from everywhere. This rain falling and stopping.

I turn back to my friend and start my pitch all over again.