Pimp My Ride

The other day I took the kids to see "Race to Witch Mountain," which I believe is a remake of a movie whose title, as a kid, I used to confuse for "Race to Which Mountain," conjuring visions of race cars speeding around in search of a finish line. Okay, now I understand that's not the case. I bring this up because in the movie Dwayne Johnson's character says to himself at one point: "Don't go inside the pimped out refridgerator," which caused my son Nicholas to ask what "pimped out," meant. Oh, Nicholas if only it were that simple. I could say, "Festooned as if one were a pimp," but that would still require me to explain to my 10-year-old son what a pimp is. And do pimps even get dressed up like Antonio Fargas's character in the movie "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka," anymore? Somewhere a long the line, pimped out has come to mean, souped up, with all sorts of extra gadgets, bells and whistles, forgetting the implicit misogony. And it was that I sought to impart to my son, reminding him of the time we watched MTV's "Pimp My Ride," while staying at a five star hotel in Gdansk.

Alas, I digress. The car above is a Plymouth Valiant. It is also my response to Jack's Miata shot down below. (Note to Jack: Keep the Miata it looks good on you.) Chrysler, the imminetly disappearing American auto manufacturer, used to make them and they are truly the symbol of another era, another America _ a time when pimped out, really meant dressing like a pimp and cars didn't need pimping. I wanted to take the picture from the other side because there was an American flag on the back window but I couldn't get far enough back on the sidewalk to make the whole car fit in the shot. Boo hoo. Which reminds of the red 1966 Cadillac my dad bought back in 1970. When we first rode in it, we felt like we were in an Airplane, everything about it was lux: electric windows, climate control, you name it. It even had an American flag decal, which as kid I remember excited me. That was until the day after we bought the car and I saw my dad scraping the flag off with a razor. It kind of upset me and I asked him why he was doing it and he told me, "when the U.S. ends the war in Vietnam we can have an American flag on our car." I remember thinking I hoped the war ended soon but for entirely selfish reasons.

Happy Sunday

Dumbo

The other day I took a cab to cover Gordon Brown speaking at NYU. The cab driver outside my office on West 33rd Street asked me how I wanted to go and I really couldn't think it out, so I said "whichever way you think is best." That kind of answer is the kiss of death in Rio de Janeiro and maybe it would have been back in here in New York before I moved to Brazil in 1994 but I was pretty relaxed about it now. I spent the next couple of minutes trying to send an e-mail with my iPhone to someone's Tmo-mail so they could get it as a text message and when I looked up we were in the West Village and I was kind of surprised to see it, I hadn't been in the neighborhood since I got back in September. It hadn't changed that much in terms of character just the specific stores and bars mostly but it was still a surprise. But that was nothing compared to what happened to Dumbo. I headed down to Dumbo _ Down Under Manhattan Bridge (yO) _ last night for this auction to raise money for my daughter's school and the whole neighborhood was totally transformed since the last time I'd been there maybe 17 years ago. I met one of my serious girlfriends at a party in dumbo back in the late 80s and I'd been back a few times or gotten lost around there for various reasons. Back then it was pretty much just factories and lofts. But now it was all big glass windows boutiques and boom! It was very impressive.

Thanks, Michael, for posting that nice picture. I was getting worried the blog was looking too drab again.

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.

Hanging with the Haters

Tech Me Amadeus

I'd say the biggest difference between Brazilian and American life that I've had to get used to is the American tech fetish. Yes, that means you. You Americans are obsessed with your gadgets and blogs and gadget accessories. Every morning, I still marvel on the subway at all the people with their iPods, laptops, Blackberries and what not nerding away and oblivious to their neighbors.

The thing is, in Brazil, no one can afford gadgets because they cost at least double the price here due largely to insane Brazilian import taxes and general Brazilian weirdness. As a result, walking around the streets there, I saw much fewer people with the cyborg blueteeth headsets. I never once saw a Wii there and never played Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Instead, people on the subway just read newspapers (yes, newspapers!) or talked to each other, like back in the old days here.

So as I let go of Brazil and relearn my American ways, I've realized that the first I have to do is tech my shit up. Flatscreen TV? Check. The latest digital camera? Check. This week, I bought myself a Blackberry. Next week, cyborg bluetooth earpiece.

And how does it all make me feel? Somehow, more complete. The difference is back in Brazil, people hung out more, talked to each other, drank endless chopps on the street and ate endless sticks of barbecued meat. That was their world and their community, and it went all night.

Here in the States, I've noticed everybody's purpose-driven. Eat dinner, see movie, go home, fornicate, sleep, find job, read book, on and on. People don't hang out, they don't drift, they're in their own heads.

So no wonder Americans look to virtual Playstation worlds or their little Blackberry pastures with the cute icons for solace. If you were Brazilian, instead of reading this blog, you'd be talking about the same shit with your friends on the street as you chewed on some lamb. 

Which way's better? I have to admit that back in Rio, I'd walk back from the bus stop past a bar packed with people talking and drinking beer, and I'd wonder, "Where the hell do they find the time to hang out so much?" I'm into tech. It fills me up. 

There Goes the Neighborhood

First I was going to call this post, "Ponderations on Architecture and Design," then I came up with something better. The other day I was in a Park Slope bicycle shop to buy a bike pump and I saw Jeremy Irons trying to return a rental bike. My, my I thought, that's either Jeremy Irons or Hank Azaria, I always get them confused. He was rather tall and had a very regal presence so I figured it wasn't Azaria. He also had his pants tucked into boots, not high boots, but boots nonetheless. He had a black leather vest under his tweed jacket. Which reminded me that I heard somewhere he rides motorcycles in some elite club with the likes of the architect Frank Gehry. This set off a lot of different trains of thought. And if you've been reading this blog for any amount of time, you are well aware that multiple trains of thought are my speciality _ or perhaps, downfall, but we'll get to that in another post. Irons was a hero of mine from the days when he played Charles Ryder in the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited. I also enjoyed him tremendously in Stealing Beauty. He was kind of stiff in that film about Claus von Bulow, but he got off a great line about ordering his very own plate of prawns. I thought of saying something to him about how much his performance in Brideshead influenced my foppish early college years, but rather thought the better of it. Stars never return the compliment. Anyway, it got me thinking if Park Slope, or rather my humble stretch of it where it fades fast into Windsor Terrace, is the kind of place you might happen upon Jeremy Irons. I mean, of course it is. I just saw him there, but it seems a little too sleepy for that, maybe Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill perhaps, even North Slope. Whatever, you see where I live there are nice shops, restaurants, schools but they are still a little funky and you get off the main avenues and it falls off fast into those horrible houses with that awful siding. I won't say aluminum siding cause it's mostly wooden, but it's that bad. So while you do get these great old brownstones and sculptured brick row houses you also get a lot of the shabbier looking ones with the siding. Windsor Terrace itself is an archtectural hodgepodge with some great pale brick structures and these awful Queens looking deals, also brick. But real estate being what it was in New York, if it isn't that exactly anymore, had people pushing out to the edges of happening neighborhoods and that's where I found the above pictured structures. It's the two in the middle I'm impressed with, they kind of offer an elegant solution to those houses with the evil siding. I included a couple of adjoining houses with the siding I'm talking about so you understand what I mean when I talk about these evil siding houses. I would be proud to live in either one of the gussied-up ones. The problem is your neighbors are living in the ughs. So they're right next door. A block down, I found something approaching an architectural masterpiece incorporating stone and glass and I'll post a picture in upcoming days. But again the same problem, the other houses next door, just kind of bring it down. A lot of the improvements around here have been kind of hapahazardly designed, its nice to find someone thinking of elegant solutions. The question is who will prevail; gentrification or reverse gentrification? I guess it all depends on the Obamulus. When I was looking for a place to live in the fall, real estate agents kept pulling over to the far reaches of Windsor Terrace, I even made it as far as Kennsington one day. But the houses just freaked me out, I'm funny that way about architecture. Now, if people start remodeling like this there may be hope. Which brings me back to Frank Gehry who is one of those architects you can love without ever having seen any of his buildings up close. In fact, it might be better to see them only in pictures, since the only one I got to see up close on the West Side highway seems completely souless. But one balmy morning in Rio, I met Gehry at a press conference _ this was back when some still dreamed of a Rio Guggenheim _ and he said he was really impressed with the city because, without intending any disrespect for the local architects, the buildings were just buildings and yet they blended in beautifully with natural stunning natural surroundings. In New York we don't have that luxury.

'specially when we used to eat sardines for dinner

I heard near the end of his life Andy Warhol was really impressed by Jean-Michel Basquiat, because Jean-Michel could still think up ideas for things to paint. Wow. But tonight I'm up until 3:00 a.m. and I'm less than inspired. I thought I might talk about how I'd like to be like Hendrick Hertzberg of the New Yorker, but when you're less than inspired it's not that easy. Some political commentary, nicely thought out and well expressed. Well, I don't have it in me tonight.

But I would like to share some thoughts about the media getting played and, though, I think it probably doesn't have to do with the sorry state of newspapers, it might be a factor. One of things that really irks me is all the ink the media gives to people like Hugo Chavez, Sarah Palin and of course the Octamom. I kind of like Hugo Chavez, I've covered him a bunch of times and the man has a certain charm. And, at least, while Bush was president I think he even had a point sometimes. The man is a dictator, but his points about the elites in Venezuela are legitimate as are the ideas of Bolivia's Evo Morales. I think Morales has more of point and is less of dictator, though, I may be wrong. At the same time, I think Morales is less reality-based than Chavez, but that's not the point I'm trying to make here. The point is that while I kind of like Hugo Chavez, I really hate having to cover Hugo Chavez. Because he talks for eight hours and then drops something like "Fidel Castro will live for another 100 years," and everybody goes ape shit and we have to alert it and it's big deal all because it's Hugo Chavez saying something about Fidel Castro _ another leader the U.S. has blown all out of proportion _ but it's not true. Fidel Castro will not live for another 100 years, nobody does and we shouldn't be giving him the ink for saying it. I was once at press conference where Hugo Chavez declared that MCI/Sprint was tapping his phone and everyone went ballistic, we even had to get comment from MCI/Sprit which predictably denied it. Then a couple of weeks ago he said the Russians could use Cuba or Venezuela to base long-range bombers and that was a big story and of course nothing came of it. So stop giving the guy a bully pulpit, okay? Same goes for Sarah Palin, the woman had a story on the wire about how she was offended by Obama's special Olympics comment. Get real. Because she has a special needs kid, because she's the hottest thing the Republican party has to offer she gets to weigh in on Obama's missstatment? And I'm not even going to comment on Octamom, the woman speaks for herself. And then there was Princess Diana, the so-called People's Princess, killed by the paparazzi. Thing was I don't think she deserved any media coverage either, I mean what was she again? A princess? Pul-eeze. But here's the thing, Pricess Diana coverage apparently sold newspapers, people wanted to hear about her. About her doing what exactly, I don't know but the paparazzi were there only because there was a market for Diana news and in that sense the people were the ones who put the paparazzi in place. But what about the media, doesn't the media have a responsibility to say: "Enough, we're going to cover only things important." No, of course not but it would be a better world if it did and we did and everyone was a little bit more responsible. Okay, so it's not that easy to be Hendrick Hertzberg.

The thing I'm playing around with here is getting thoughts down, and then trying to fix them up. The thing about the blogging form is that when I go back later and fine tune and fix things up, I doubt anyone even notices. Of course, I doubt anybody even notices this blog much anyway. In a way, that's kind of nice because it gives us an opportunity to try to figure out what we're doing and maybe one day somebody will actually read it and wow, that would be a terrible responsibility.

Parkway Part III - The Last Dance

Blowin' up Like the World Trade

No, that's not me in the above shot. I don't get off dressing up like a Brazilian federal police officer and marching around with an assault rifle. If I did, I'd be kind of kinky, but I guess I'm not. But I was there when that picture was taken and I am responsible for the shot. Here's the story:

After U.S. Nun and rain forest defender Dorothy Stang was murdered I was the first foreign correspondent to arrive in the town where she was murdered. I got there and photographer Paulo Santos, who arrived the day before, came to pick me up at the airport in Altamira, some hours away over the TransAmazon Highway. While I waited for him and for him at the airport I encountered her coffin returning from the coroner's office in Belem. It was accompanied by all these government officials and I managed to do most of my mornings work there at the airport. Lucky me. Then me, Paulo and another photographer Paco (it's spelled Paco but pronounced Pac-Oh) headed down to Anapu where Stang was killed. We accompanied the body through town along with hundreds of people and all the way to the burial site in a wooded area. Then the next day we didn't really know what to do. Paulo wanted to hang around town and wait for the army that was arriving and I wanted to go to site where she was shot deep inside the rain forest about 50 or 60 kilometers down a bad, dirt road. Paulo was not in the mood and we had a bit of a fight. He was afraid he'd miss the arrival of the army, who the president had ordered sent in to keep order. I figured they might or might not come but it was worth sitting around waiting. Worst case we'd buy the picture from another paper. This really pissed Paulo off, as did my suggestion that I take the pick-up truck and he get around town on a moto-taxi. He is a rather portly man and he argued he had a lot of equipment and it was he through his connection to the Senator (who he was "married" to) that secured us a pick-up truck and driver. He had a point, but I somehow prevailed. As we were heading along the dirt road we ran into a truck load of federal police who weren't able to make it up particularly steep and muddy stretch of road. We said we were going to try and two of them came along in the back of our pick-up. So the first federal police to arrive at the crime scene we're given a lift by the AP. Anyway, we made it there and there was this little cross fashioned from tree branches marking the spot. The federal policemen poked around and Paulo got the shot. When we got back to town, the army hadn't arrived and Paulo became convinced his shot would make the cover of the national news weekly Veja. I told him if it did, he owed me a dinner and he asked why, having totally forgot that he didn't even want to make the trip. Later that night the owner of the hotel let us know he had bought the bottle of whiskey Paulo had asked him to. After drinking for a while with cops, the owner of the hotel came up to me and said pointing around the room: "Michael, Mr. Paulo wants another whiskey but he's got one that's almost full there and there's another one there, and another there." I told the guy to cut Paulo off. The next day I was taking a motor taxi to the accounting office where we'd arranged an Internet connection on the back of the moto-taxi when I heard the helicopters bringing the soldiers rumbling above. And where was Paulo?

The New Me

Part of the confusion I've felt upon returning to Oakland has been in trying to figure out who the hell I am now. I'm no longer a writer, or at least a professional writer. I'm not a foreigner in a strange land like I was in Brazil. And now, I drive a Miata.

This hot number is how I've been getting around for the past five weeks or so. It's my friend's ex-boyfriend's car, and no, it's not the kind of car I would have bought of my own volition. But my friend has very kindly lent it to me, and I'm enjoying the ride.

For example, I drove around the Berkeley hills with the top down a few weeks ago, when the sun was out and the sky was a brilliant blue, and I thought, "Yes, this is California!" Sure, it only fits one other person and has no room for anything other than two bags of groceries and has the kind of 1980s headlights that flip up like a Japanese pencil box's drawers.

But still, I'm Miata-man now. I've been thinking seriously about buying it from my friend.

This decision, however, isn't proving too popular with some people, and I've been having second thoughts. I've also found myself apologizing to people I meet for the first time when I pull up in the Miata, saying, "Ha ha, it's not my car, it's my friend's."

I'm sorry, Miata, for forsaking you. We were always a weird fit, even though I thought I could make it work once. I know I'm a Californian now, but buying the Miata might be rushing things.

Parkway Part II/Internet rant

This crazy idea is stirring around in my head, and I can't get it out. Why don't I take over the Parkway theater and make that my next phase? Wouldn't it be fun to run a theater? Especially one as cool as the Parkway? I only live two blocks from it. I could just walk to work like I used to do in Rio.

A little diversion: Although this is a blog and all, I'm starting to feel pretty pissed off at the Internet lately.

The list of Internet casualties keeps growing and swallowing up some of my favorite things in the world: Newspapers, book stores, record stores, Homefinders (a small business in the East Bay that used to help people find apartments and such), video rental stores, the list goes on, or maybe it doesn't.

Sure, I enjoy reading Roger Ebert, Romenesko and other stuff online and it's great that I know my Facebook friend is cooking paella at this moment, but people, have our lives really gotten any better because of the Internet? I don't know. Sure, Match.com is great, and you can now slay ogres alongside your fellow elf who's really a South Korean boy, but the Internet's also gutting communities and what used to be community fixtures. Newspapers, for one, but also small businesses that are seeing their revenue taken over by Amazon and iTunes. Yes, I know Amazon sends customers to small bookstores too, but overall, it's killed far more bookstores than it's saved.

But you know what, I think things will start turning around again, and people will be seeking real live, not virtual communities again. That's why movie ticket sales are up these days. You'd think what with Netflix and everything else, movie theaters would be on their way out like newspapers. But no, we all still want tactile community, the big experience, it's primitive and necessary.

So what could be more "back to the basics" than taking over the Parkway? Anyone out there wanna join me? How about you New Yorkers reading this? I don't think you guys have anything like the Parkway out there. Maybe Michael can start one there. We'd have Parkway East and Parkway West. Now, that's old school. Like the Fillmore East and West...

Street Cred

Michael receiving his press credentials upon entering the Xingu National Park Indian reservation.

I wanted to talk a little about the future of the Amazon because that's one thing I think I'm actually really qualified to talk about having covered it for the last 13 or 15 years. The Amazon has a lot of cache, like you say "Amazon" and everybody goes "oooh!" Even in Brazil, I remember one night I was interviewing this musician Siba, back when he played with Mestre Ambrosio and I mentioned the next day I was heading off to Roraima to cover the fires there that were spreading on the to Yanomami reservation and he was really interested. He was like, man, you have a cool job and that was kind of wild because I thought he was the one with a cool job. But it's not like it would be easy for Mestre Ambrosio to get a gig in Roraima, not a paying one. I guess he'll have to wait to shoot a video there _ like Sepultura who shot a video at the above mentioned Xingu national park. Anyway, people love the Amazon, in theory at least, and seem to want to save it as much as people tend to want to save the whales. People still think it's the lungs of the planet and so on and so forth. But over the course of time I was covering the Amazon, every once in a while a shrewd editor would ask so what? What happens if it all disappears? Er, well, we'd lose inummerable plant and animal species many of which have not even been catalogued by science. But, again, so what? It would probably wreak havoc on already instable weather patterns. But one scientist pointed out to me that all the forest in Europe has basically been cut down and the weather is well, still the weather. There's the much talked of cure for cancer or AIDS that's nobody's found yet. But like, er, nobody's found that yet. And all the untold rain forest products that our supposed to be worth so much, except for the lumber and minerals, nobody has had great sucess marketing them, except maybe for Acai, whose success in many cases means it's too expensive for the locals to buy because it's all going for export. Don't get me wrong, I am in favor of saving the Amazon, I'm just trying to work out a logical reason why. That's something I'll be grapple with in upcoming posts because now I have to take my son on school trip. That's life.

Slacknexx

I know, i've been slack but I've been battling a cold. Here's some more slackness: an article coming out today that I wrote.

Movie revives interest in US nun killed in Amazon
By MICHAEL ASTOR
Associated Press

In Daniel Junge's chilling new documentary "Who Killed Sister Dorothy," a defense lawyer for one of two ranchers accused of ordering the killing of 73-year-old American nun Dorothy Stang dryly explains the circumstances that led to her murder.
"She irritated a lot of people. In this region, if you irritate people, you don't live long," Americo Leal says, laying down the law of the land in Brazil's rough and tumble Amazon.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Stang spent the last 30 years of her life building schools and teaching poor settlers from Brazil's drought-ridden Northeast to respect the rain forest and to stand up for their rights along the Amazon's hardscrabble logging frontier.

On Feb. 23, 2005, her work earned her six revolver shots at close range on a muddy stretch of red dirt road sandwiched between two dense walls of green jungle.

Stang, who wanted to preserve a stretch of rain forest that a rancher wanted cut down, was just one of over 1,000 activists killed in land disputes since Brazil began pushing to open up the Amazon region in the 1980s.

But her age and American citizenship drew the kind of international attention not seen in the region since the environmental activist and rubber tapper Chico Mendes was murdered in 1988.

That notoriety helped speed the conviction of the gunman, his accomplice and a middleman, all within a little over a year after the murder _ record time in Para state, where trials usually drag on for decades.

The wheels of justice began to grind to a halt, however, when it came time to prosecute the ranchers.

An initial conviction at a high profile-trial for one of the ranchers, Vitalmiro Moura, was hailed as a new chapter for justice in a state where only three other men have ever been convicted of ordering the kind of land-related killings that plague the region.

That conviction was short-lived, however, because Brazilian law grants an automatic retrial to any first offender sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

At the second trial, which took place after interest in the case began to fade and with no members of the international media present, the jury found Moura not guilty.

Another considerably richer rancher, Regivaldo Galvao, has been charged with the killing but has, so far, managed to avoid trial altogether.

Now, pressure is once again building for Brazil to bring Stang's killers to justice.

Stang was posthumously awarded the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights in November, and Junge's documentary, narrated by actor Martin Sheen, is set to premiere on HBO on March 25. It is also slated for theatrical release in Brazil.

"I think the momentum of the film is going to force the politicians' hands, or I hope it will," Junge said in a telephone interview from Colorado. "Two senators saw the film in Brasilia and said they were going to personally take it to president for him to see."

The film takes the viewer to Brazil's bad back country, where "pistoleiros" routinely force settlers from their homes in order to raze the forest for timber and cattle pasture. The region's politicians and courts are in the pocket of land-grabbing ranchers whose holdings can rival the size of some European nations.

Mostly, the documentary details the ranchers' Byzantine efforts to elude justice.

Drawn from over 400 hours of footage filmed over three years during eight trips to Brazil, Junge's work captures the high theater of Brazilian courts and the gritty back room dealings that often determine the outcome.

Defense attorney Leal, whose flowing gray beard and black robes give him the air of a fire and brimstone preacher from an earlier era, denounces Stang as an agent of American imperialism _ linking her, in the same breath, to the abuses at Guantanamo and the bombing of Hiroshima.

Junge also follows the defense lawyers as they storm around town in black suits and sun glasses like something out of Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas," wielding their cell phones like weapons.

The amount of access the defense lawyers provide Junge and his cameras as they brazenly game the system, railroading the gunmen to protect the ranchers, only serves to highlight the routine nature of their actions.

Not long after Amair Feijoli, the man convicted of acting as the intermediary between the gunmen and the ranchers, agrees to testify against them, he was placed in a special cell with another inmate who beats him so badly he fails to appear at the trial the following day.

Footage of his battered face is interspersed with that of a court clerk explaining the defense will be calling one less witnessed than planned.

"The film reveals the entrails of how impunity is constructed in the Amazon and in Brazil, especially in relation to land ownership," said Brazilian Sen. Jose Nery, who arranged for a special showing of the documentary in the country's Senate last month.

"I hope the film can be an instrument to mobilize Brazilian society to demand that the judiciary punish these crimes, and that this case serve as an example," Nery added in a telephone interview from Brasilia, the nation's capital.

There are already concrete signs that interest in the case is being revived by the film, which, along with the U.N. human rights prize awarded to Stang, has won awards at film festivals around the U.S. and Brazil and was short-listed for the Oscars.

Earlier this year, rancher Galvao was jailed on federal charges of illegally trying to seize the plot of land over which Stang was killed.

State Prosecutor Edson Cardoso Souza, who is in charge of the murder case, says he believes the film has helped step up pressure for Galvao to be put on trial.

"The film presents the case from many angles, which allows for a clearer analysis of what really happened," Souza said, in a telephone interview from Para state.

He says he expects Galvao will face trial sometime this year and remains hopeful that a court will overturn the acquittal last year of the other defendant, Moura.

Got Back Just in Time

My new neighborhood in Oakland sits on the southern edge of Lake Merritt and just two blocks from one of the coolest institutions in the Bay Area, the Parkway Speakeasy, a movie theater where you can watch the show on couches while eating pizza and drinking beer. Back in the day, before I went to Brazil, you could also bring your baby on Baby Brigade nights, I think Monday nights, and they also had special film noir, classic horror and other programs.

One of the advantages of living where I am was, theoretically, being a block from the lake so I could go running regularly and living near the Parkway. Well, to my disappointment, the trail around the lake has been under construction so you have to run on the sidewalk by the street traffic, which is decidedly less pleasant. I've only run twice around the lake in five weeks, although I've been doing some nice runs in Berkeley instead.

And then just now, I learn that the Parkway is closing Sunday. The same company opened a newer theater in El Cerrito with the same pizza/beer/couches concept, which is fine, but the one near my house was the O.G., and it's sad that it's closing. I must admit I haven't gone to the Oakland one at all since I've been back, for no reason really, just never came up. But that's a big piece of Oakland now fading into history.

Now, the only remotely cool thing in my neighborhood is the dive bar Baggy's by the Lake and maybe the Merritt Bakery. But Parkway, we'll always have the memories. And I'm glad I got to enjoy your last month on earth even if it meant only driving by you a few times.

Don't Think Too Hard About It

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.