Went to Bar Pitti last night with Malu and Will, and at some point one of them asked, regarding the many waiters running in and out, “Do you have to speak Italian (or be Italian?) to work here?”
I replied, “Imagine if they weren’t. Imagine if the menu and the specials scrawled on the little backboard were all in English—and there’s no reason they couldn’t be—would it be the same experience?”
I wasn’t making a value judgment—I hope. I wasn’t saying it was right or better somehow that this restaurant, and many others, are about way more than the food. Or, that the food is any more or less tasty because of the faux Italian ambience. But what difference does it really make? If the wait staff were all NYU gals and the menu said lamb shanks instead of stinco, would they taste any different? Would our enjoyment having dinner be lessened if the quasi-theme park illusion were shattered? How much of an illusion is enough? How much is an enhancement? And when, if ever, does it slide into an over-the-top Vegas simulation, in which the Eiffel tower and the gondolas and canals of Venice are thrown in as well? When does a little bit of illusion connote authenticity to us by enhancing our enjoyment and our experience (illusory as it might be)? When does it either not ring true at all or go so far and become so perfectly accurate, as to enter the creepiness of the uncanny valley? (The theoretical place where robots and animation are almost good enough to pass as real, but just a hair shy—in which case they totally creep us out.)
I’d argue that some ambience does enhance our dining experience—and we are prepared to pay extra for it, as well. I’m not just talking about noise levels, or whether the wait staff is rude or attentive— I’m thinking more about the physical context. A re-creation of a country inn or a trattoria in Roma is bogus—it’s bullshit. It doesn’t really make the food any better. It is even somewhat inconvenient (having to have the blackboard specials translated), but I think we have to admit we love it.
Would a rose smell as sweet by any other name? It seems Shakespeare’s Romeo was partially wrong. Out of context, the smell of a rose (accurately rendered, chemically, and presented in a glass vial) wouldn’t evoke quite the same feelings. How about Juliette? Would she be the same if she were not forbidden fruit? Hardly. That’s to say nothing of the bouba/kiki effect:
This picture is used as a test to demonstrate that people may not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily: American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India called the shape on the left "kiki" and the one on the right "bouba". (Source)
This research seems to imply that maybe the names of things aren’t arbitrary and switchable—not always. But there are shadings and gradations of restaurants’ (and other institutions’) illusory authenticity—and how do those work? How do we read those? A dumpy storefront restaurant off Roosevelt Ave. in Queens, or in a strip mall in Los Angeles, might have the best Thai food in town, or so we believe. In which case, the banal setting acts as a kind of reverse authenticity indicator—it’s got to be good because the place looks so bad. There’s the McNally brand (Pastis and Balthazar)—over the top recreations of French brasseries that are accurate to a fault. The carefully chipped paint, worn lettering and aged mirrors are often shipped over or painstakingly art directed. In these places, we enter a movie set and we’re the actors living out a scene with our friends—and a few hundred extras, some of whom we might even recognize. Those are extremes, but there are hundreds of less elaborate recreations all over town.
My friend Sally thinks that if these semi-faux places don’t change, if the details and food stay as we remember them for years and years, then they become something else. They enter a meta layer of illusion. They become ‘real’ because they are a part our own histories—part of our personal memories, but we still know we’re not a restaurant on a street in Rome or Paris. That may be true for the places in NY (and elsewhere) that have stood the test of time, but I’m just as interested in the ones that do the blackboard menus, exposed brick walls, some imported country knick knacks, and European staffs that are more ubiquitous and sometimes transitory. These are everywhere. There is the Greek equivalent, the Spanish, the French, the Mexican, and, wait—where are the faux British country pubs?
We have homemade versions as well—faux diners, roadhouses and barns. A lot of American diners were shipped off to Russia, I heard. Little virtual worlds, where taste, smell, music, language and décor evoke a distant (and sometimes long gone) world, transported to four corners of the globe. A constantly shifting shell game of cultural virtual realities—a bit of Mexico now in Osaka, a bit of China in Lyon and a bit of Russia in Manhattan.
This love of illusion applies outside the world of restaurant interiors, too. One form is called a skeuomorph (thank you, Danielle), which is when one material mimics another—usually older and originally functional material. These elements of design serve no useful purpose, but they make the object, even a virtual digital object, feel familiar and comfortable. Plastic items often would imitate the metal, leather or ceramic original (I have plastic sandals in which the “weave” imitates the earlier leather version). Fake wood grain counters, fake marble in many fancy houses. Skeuomorphism is not new—the ancient Greeks and Romans added architectural details to their houses and temples that were fake versions of earlier practical elements, but which were no longer needed.
Digital and web-based skeuomorphing is rampant, especially at Apple—the fake brushed aluminum of the old iTunes screens (some ‘aluminum’ elements have been retained), the drop shadows and shadings of app logos to make them seem like 3D objects, the buttons that look like little round lights, sunken into a virtual panel (which has shading around the edges to make it seem to float on top of the panels/windows ‘underneath’ it), the desktop folders (also shaded and with drop shadows) and the sounds of email—whooshing into the ether. The amount of work that goes into all this is not inconsiderable, and the time these elaborate virtual surfaces take to be rendered must lag a teeny tiny bit as well.
The digital music world is rife with this kind of stuff. Software that emulates the harmonic distortion of a guitar amp (itself evidence of a desire to sound comfortable and familiar) is often designed to look like a physical guitar amp—with knobs and switches and lights that go on when it is in use (that part is actually useful). Other bits of gear mimic pedals, tube limiters, vinyl and other bits of coveted archaic gear.
Maybe those early friendly user interfaces on Mac computers that used icons, folders, and drag and drop motions to imitate physical activities got us hooked. Our intuition leads us to know what to do with these familiar shapes and objects—push a button, open a folder, stretch a picture, turn a knob. How much do the skeuomorphed aspects of the design actually help us? Does creating the illusion that we’re dealing with physical objects make the experience more satisfying?
Wouldn’t you have thought we’d slowly and gently ease ourselves out of the world of illusionism—of digital fake aluminum, virtual buttons and faux wood panels, at least? That a design sense would emerge that is completely unique and integrated with digital interfaces and computer (and phone) software? It hasn’t. Maybe it never will. Maybe these interface designers realize that we function best in our illusory words, be they restaurant interiors or the virtual buttons and bits on our phones. Maybe videogame controller designers will find that what we’re most comfortable with in their world are controllers that resemble the sticks, bows and spears we evolved with—or at least devices that mimic those motions and require those skills.
Pretty amazing! Not only is she not a big pop artist, she's Afro-Peruvian—so even further out of the mainstream. When Luaka Bop began putting out her records, she was pretty much unknown, even in Peru.
Bernardo and I arrived Sunday night and were met by Scott Muller, who works for the Clinton Foundation here. They’re involved in projects that combat global warming. Part of that effort involves advocating for more efficient and sustainable transportation (that’s where I come in) and for use alternative energy sources (geothermal and methane from landfills are 2 possibilities there).
We checked into the hotel in Miraflores, the upscale district overlooking the beach and then we headed out to a local restaurant on some folding Dahon bikes we were leant. Chilean wine and local ceviche—one almost can’t go wrong food-wise in Lima.
One major strand of Scott’s lunch conversation was that Lima is in a real pickle. A former president allowed the importation of a lot of cheap used cars and combis to be used as taxis and buses to combat unemployment -also a kind of populist vote-garnering move—they now have one of the largest per capita taxi fleets in the world! All of these vehicles ran on diesel—really low-grade diesel. The emissions from these vehicles with their super low-grade fuel are 100 times higher than anywhere else. That combined with a few other factors—the extent of the sprawl here, the lack of transportation alternatives (like bikes), and more BRT bus lanes or rail—has resulted in a huge amount of particulate pollution. The pollution rose up, blew east and landed on the glaciers in the Peruvian Andes. One glacier in particular melted super fast as a result—it is now nearly gone due to rapid melting, and that particular glacier was the principal source of Lima's water supply. It took 200,000 years for the glacier to form— a generation to lose. They're now looking at plans to recycle wastewater for irrigation. I'll drink to that.
These places are being forced to take climate change and energy and water issues really seriously, if they don't they are totally fucked—if they aren’t already.
Peru also semi-privatized their water—under Fujimori or his successor, I'm not sure. This didn't raise any flags among the public here, until a Chilean consortium tried to buy the privatized part. Only then did the Lima folks suddenly realize their lives would be at the mercy of a gaggle of Chilean investors whose primary interest would be to see a profit on their investment. 1.5 million residents of Lima don’t have access to piped water.
In reference to the incredibly rapid melting glaciers in this area of the Andes, I was sent a paper detailing the issue. It's from some heavy-duty glaciologist, Lonnie Thompson, in Ohio. Having this stuff made concrete in a place like this makes your skin go all funny.
That, and some other similarly tragic stories, and one can see that places like this—rapidly expanding or already expanded urban regions in countries without deep pockets—are going to get hit by these environmental changes really hard and fast. It's going to happen way sooner than most of us think, and it's going to be more tragic than we can imagine. Lima is home to 8.5 million people. Can you imagine if a city that size that you know—Tokyo, NYC, Mexico City—were suddenly faced with having no water? The Peruvians have therefore been forced to initiate a lot of fairly innovative programs—more on that later. Many of the places on this tour don’t have the financial resources that the U.S., for example, used to have (the U.S., as we know, doesn’t have those resources either, not any more). In New York, we used to build massive and very expensive highway systems, tunnels, underground trains and Tunnel No. 3 to bring water from upstate. Europe and China are spending, or have spent, the cash to upgrade their rail and other systems, but I suspect the U.S. doesn’t yet have the political will to do that. War spending has taken precedence.
Anyway, many of these countries, not having funds to draw on, are forced to find cheaper alternatives, and to be somewhat more innovative and imaginative. Here is their relatively new BRT system-the Metropolitano, the high-speed bus line that goes from Miraflores and other districts into the center city—very quickly. We took it once—it’s fast and it runs on time. As in other cities, it eats up two lanes of an existing highway and the median strip, but runs as fast and efficiently as a train or subway—and is many, many times cheaper to install. The Metropolitano runs on 100% domestic source CNG (natural gas).
OK, one more bit from Scott’s lunchtime download—due to this same rampant use of low-grade diesel, the asthma and lung disease rate here is astronomical. As pointed out by the Mayor, three kids die daily from air pollution or some horrible figure like that. The fog + pollution combo is atrocious, and the new president, Ollanta Humala, is the first one to stand up to the various lobbies and say, “Look, this is happening—we need to respond to it and not just accept it as the price of rapid expansion.”
The car that Scott used to pick us up from the airport runs on compressed gas. They're trying to get a methane extraction system working here, as the piles of garbage on the outskirts of town generate tons of it. At a later dinner we met Matt Evans, a garbage expert from HDR Engineering in Minnesota. He stuck a tube into the landfill and lit it with a lighter and it burned. Needless to say, that same methane is currently leaking into the atmosphere, so tapping it is a great option. Not every landfill is a good candidate for methane extraction—some are too dry (no fermentation/breakdown) and some too wet (in danger of suddenly slipping and shifting), but the climate here seems to be suitable. It doesn’t pour rain very much in Lima, but the sky is light gray and overcast for many months of the year (a look that is referred to as “donkey’s belly”), and there is sufficient dampness to keep the breakdown of waste going.
Scott was an Olympic kayak guy, and later on he used to lead kayak tours in northern Greenland (!) for enthusiastic adventurers. Apparently there are Nazi weather stations up there that are completely intact.
The next day we agreed to go surfing—or have lessons, more accurately. The beach is right next to Miraflores. It’s below a crumbly cliff that runs along the coast—exactly as in Santa Monica.
There is a nice park and bike path that runs along the top of the cliffs, which is not of much use as a mode of transportation, but it is safe and scenic. We rode along it for a few miles to a lunch spot after surfing. There’s the beginning of a similar park n’ path down below, along the beach, but much of that awaits development. As with Santa Monica, much of that area was given over to a narrow highway that runs along the water.
It gets choked with traffic a few times a day, so occasionally there are murmurs about the road being widened. This, of course, would not solve anything, as it would cost a fortune and usurp public land from the beachfront. The few existing developed areas are hugely popular—people hang out, bring picnics and up above there’s a lovers park, too. In a country like this one where a minority own cars, usurping public spaces for cars is in effect privileging a minority of the population over all the others. It’s stealing from the lower larger portion to allocate the smaller wealthier group of car owners.
As we drove along a road coming in from the airport, Scott pointed out the streetlights, saying there’s a huge opportunity to switch out the sodium for LED lights. Then, further on, spying a clump of LED traffic lights, highlighted that they use 90% less energy than incandescent, and won’t burn out for +10 yrs. Here’s a quote from the C40 (a group of large cities committed to addressing climate change) website:
If all 220 million street lights around the world were retrofitted to more energy efficient technologies, we could reduce their energy consumption by 50 percent; cut carbon emissions by more than 40 million metric tons each year; and save approximately $8 billion dollars annually in energy costs.
The surfing was fun! It’s winter down here, so I’m happy to report that the wet suits worked. The “beach” is stony, so getting to the water was painful without booties. Surfing uses a whole different set of muscles and breathing than jogging, so after about 1/2 hour I was totally winded. This time, I managed to get one leg all the way up and the other part way—caught a couple of long rides, so I did a little better than my first attempt in Oz when a group of us went surfing on the last tour.
On the way back to our hotel (we biked to the beach), it was pointed out how far the water receded after the Santiago earthquake—about 1/2 kilometer, I think—and it stayed out for about 20 minutes. The expected tsunami never arrived (there are tsunami evacuation routes posted here). The crazy locals rushed out, scampering over the rocks to gather the fish that had been left flopping on the seabed.
Later, we got onto the ingredients in Inca Cola (which is foul, bright yellow, and tastes like bubblegum), and then ayahuasca and other hallucinogens found here. I was told that that one, at least, is bound to the culture—the preparation is elaborate and requires combining two substances derived from roots and vines—so it unlikely it was travel or be easily exported (though it will probably be synthesized). The name means “spirit vine” or “vine of the souls.” (I like that second translation better—it’s way creepier.) Speaking of synthesized, there was talk of other drugs that are sold as incense (K-2, it is called) in the U.S. and it’s catching on with teenagers in the meth belt. You can buy it legally. There’s also another substance being imbibed in the U.S. sold as “bath salts,” though the users and sellers know it’s not for getting yourself clean.
Bernardo and I rode off along the malecon on Tuesday morning, as I was scheduled to do a TV interview overlooking the water. The new mayor, Susana Villaran, dropped out of doing the intro at our presentation—which is a shame, as she's great and has initiated a lot of good projects, but my guess is she had to make an appearance at some football-related event, as the whole country was waving flags with Peru in the Copa America semi-finals. Even if they don't win, they'll be thrilled they made it this far. The “big” Latin American teams have all been knocked out—Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela— and Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay are left standing. It’s rumored that the superstar players on the other teams have forgotten it’s a team sport.
We rode back along the malecon to an early lunch at restaurant named Sonia—a little family owned place (Sonia is sitting a table near the entrance).
It’s in Chorillos—a less upscale neighborhood than Miraflores (which is nice, but Miraflores does feature mysterious casinos that we all think are mainly for money laundering) or more bohemian Barranco.
A street in Barranco, almost a Peruvian Greenwich village:
The place is all about seafood, of course. It seems the big chef in town—Gaston, who has several restaurants in Lima, two in Bogota and one in San Francisco (hint)—also has a cooking show here, in which he visits small family-run restaurants all over the country, highlighting unique dishes that each one features. Naturally, these places immediately become hugely popular. We had an early lunch so hardly anyone was there at first, though some North Americans arrived, so this place must be in the guidebooks or food blogs or something. Nothing spectacular, but really nice and totally unpretentious—they let us bring our bikes into the restaurant, and I don't mean into a back room—into the restaurant proper.
The meal was (as was typical with most meals in Lima), some assorted ceviches and then some cooked fish and shellfish.
Here is how the coffee is served.
You get a cup of hot water, and of course you immediately think "Uh-oh, here comes Nescafe," but, then comes this from the Peruvian science lab—super duper strong brewed coffee. You just pour a little in your hot water, and you've got a cup as strong or weak as you want it to be. It tasted great. Milk was not offered.
Sonia was not as good as the place the singer Susana Baca and her husband, Ricardo Perriera, took us to on Tuesday night. It’s called Rafael. It was described as "fusion," though what that meant no one could say, but you could sense Japanese influences (Fujimori, right?) with the local fish, ceviches and seasonings. Really amazing food, one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Apparently Rafael is a protégé of the well known chef mentioned above—Gaston, who put Peruvian cuisine on the world map not too long ago. Roberto, a local graphic designer who is also involved with all this transport stuff, said his kid, and many of the others his age, have two ambitions—to be a skater or a chef. Those are the only cool options here.
After dinner we stopped by Susana and Ricardo’s house and had a discussion that began with mention of the current generation of youthful protesters in Chile—kids whose parents were either too timid or too beaten down to rise up publicly. It’s a special moment. Ricardo asked me, “What happened in the U.S.?” He was referring to post 9/11, the Afghan and Iraq invasions and now the financial meltdown.
Wow, I thought—was that the last time I saw them? Susana was in New York, at a studio in what is now the meatpacking district recording a record, when the planes hit. I lived nearby, and after sorting out some family matters, I biked over (there were no cabs downtown) to see if they were all right. Did they want to go home and recommence recording at a later date? No, was the answer. “We’ve lived with Shining Path for decades. This is not enough to stop us.” They finished a beautiful record that week. I rode home and saw people sitting in a sidewalk café—oblivious to the cloud of asbestos and human remains that I could see drifting their way across a lovely blue sky.
I told Ricardo that since then there is a lot of wonderful work being done musically, though much of it isn’t massively popular. There is a lot of art being made too, though much of that world has to be taken with a grain of salt, as there is a lot of money and posturing there. I said that a generation of talented and creative graduates got seduced by the quick power and riches of the financial sector. A smart kid could make a fortune overnight and not have to really make or create anything. It was a waste of a generations’ talent, I told him. But there is still great stuff being made, sung, written, danced and created.
A few days after leaving Peru, I got an email from Scott notifying me that Susana was just named minister of culture for Peru.
There have been a lot of huge demonstrations in Santiago recently. Most of them are focused on education—the government wants to begin charging for public secondary school and universities. Public education, higher education in particular, is often very cheap in much of Latin America. As a result, there are at least a few generations of very well educated folks. One piece of graffiti I saw on the street said, in rough translation, “If we had the copper, we wouldn’t have to pay.” I had to ask what this meant. Minerals in Chile are big business—part of the reason President Salvador Allende was toppled by the U.S. decades ago was because he nationalized the mines. And don’t forget the trapped Chilean miners from a few months ago. Anyway, the copper mines have been at least partially privatized after the Coldelco Law was passed in 1992, so the profits from them don’t go to the government. Much of those profits don’t even stay in Chile—they go to multinationals, as in many other parts of the world. Hence the wording of the graffiti, which ties together the privatization of the mines with the lack of a budget for education.
The demonstrators are incredibly creative here. They don’t just shout, make speeches and wave banners. One group organized thousands of people to dress as zombies and learn the choreography to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. The zombie image links to the education system, since they view it as dying and rotten. Here's a zombie/thriller demonstration link:
Local TV reported that there were three thousand students dancing. In the news clip below one can see a few of the ubiquitous Santiago dogs, lolling about as the zombies dance around them. The city seems to be filled with feral dogs. In India and elsewhere such dogs are usually small and fairly emaciated, but here they’re large Mastiff and German Shepherd blends. It’s a frightening sight if one is used to aggressive and crazy street dogs—crazy with hunger or abuse. However, these seem gentle—most simply lie around, peacefully. One tailed us for a bit. I saw a man in a black cape, a gaucho hat and ponytail reach down and pet one—something I’d never risk doing with a street dog, but maybe these have learned to be docile, and the locals treat them accordingly.
The other things the demonstrators do are what is called a ‘besaton’— a kissing marathon. Here’s a photo set. And they do a jogging thing, where they run circles around the palace.
Sally and I went out in the evening to a local fish restaurant. There is fairly abundant seafood in the Pacific coast of Chile, and the seafood menu is like a wine list. The fish are listed according to whether they are deepwater, shallow water, river fish or caught around a group of nearby islands.
The next morning we decided to go find out what a local breakfast is. Seems we picked the wrong time—Saturday morning. We made it all the way into the old city center and nothing was open, except a funky diner on Plaza des Armas. So that’s where we went. The waiter asked us which we wanted—brewed coffee or Nescafé. As we headed back to the hotel, and I to my tech check, a few places were beginning to put out chairs on the sidewalks for a brunch or lunch crowd.
The event was held in a spanking new cultural center called Centro Gabriela Mistral or GAM for short.
It has a story behind it—a political story, naturally. On this site was once a cafeteria that also served as a small cultural meeting place. When Allende took office, he made that cultural element official, and it was outfitted to be more accommodating as a cultural center for all classes of people. After he was overthrown by General Pinochet and the Americans, it was remade as a headquarters for Pinochet. Then, after a return to democracy, it burned down. Now, it has been returned to its previous incarnation, but much improved. A well known architect, Christian Fernandez, designed this new incarnation that houses multiple theaters, cinemas, rehearsal rooms, art exhibits (a show of photos of Neruda and his circle was up) and, of course, a cafeteria. The ministry of defense towers above and behind the cultural center—a not so subtle reminder.
The event was early, as it occurred on a Saturday. I got some laughs (good), and I have begun to incorporate more images of local initiatives that have transformed various Latin American cities. The incredible library that former mayor Sergio Fajardo had built in a poor barrio of Medellín, the super graphics that Hass & Hahn, the Dutch artists, did in some favelas in Rio (both of these were featured in the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for the New City earlier this year). I plan to add more as I visit other cities along the tour—the rapid bus system in Quito, the libraries in Bogota (the inspiration for Fajardo’s initiatives) and other projects that generally improve the quality of life in various districts.
Patricio Fernández, a writer who is one of the founders of the magazine The Clinic spoke last, and both Bernardo and I found him very eloquent. The Clinic is a satirical magazine that began publication when Pinochet was captured—at a clinic in London, hence the title. It’s a cross between The Onion and Private Eye maybe—more on The Clinic later.
After the event, we took the metro (very clean and quiet) to a bike shop run by Claudio Olivares, one of the panel participants, to pick up loaners and find a place to have lunch. In the metro we saw a diorama of the first encounter between the Spanish and the indigenous Chileans.
Their last minutes of innocence:
A few minutes after picking up the bikes, we were off. I couldn't help thinking—are there bike lanes? How hard is it to ride here? I didn’t remember any lanes networking though the town proper from previous visits, though there are some that border the park alongside the river. There is a BRT (bus rapid transit system) here, which Loreto Araya, the organizer here, complained about—though it seems to be busy and there are lots of busses. We stopped for lunch in the Recoleta neighborhood—an area of low buildings that used to be a red light district, but is now filled with cool restaurants and sidewalk cafes. My lunch was a giant seafood stew, and Sally’s, a massive chicken strew. Delicious, but could have done with just one order and shared. A highway threatened this neighborhood not too long ago, but there was resistance from the residents and others. In the end, the big highway that runs through town is now buried and runs in tunnels alongside the river. Grassy lawns cover much of the top of it—FDR drive, take note.
After lunch, Sally and I took off on our own, roaming aimlessly though other parts of this neighborhood and past lots of Bavarian looking houses, but with tin roofs.
Then we wandered into another mostly residential neighborhood—Conchalí—that features other architectural styles that I can’t identify. How would one describe this style? Hobbit deco cottage?
Mental Maps No, not loony maps, or maps of how our brains function, but maps we construct in our heads as we become familiar with a place.
The Bavarian homes above might seem slightly incongruous looking here, and slightly puzzling, unless you know the immigration history. The Law of Selective Immigration of 1845 encouraged middle class Germans (and some Austrians and Swiss) to settle and colonize the ‘undeveloped’ southern parts of the country. They blended in after all those years, and many of the leading artists, musicians, business people and tennis players were of German descent. The British settled a little earlier, around Valparaíso, and one of the big avenues here is called O’Higgins. They got involved in saltpeter (used for gunpowder) and the Atacama mines.
Some of the Austrians who settled in Chile were fleeing Prussian persecution. Later, waves of German Jews were fleeing the Nazis, and only a year ago Paul Shaefer (not the Letterman guy) passed away. A former Nazi accused multiple times of child abuse, Shaefer founded a religious utopian community (Colonia Dignidad) with the blessing of Jorge Alessandri who was then president of Chile (1961). Shafer had abused two children at another religious ‘charity’ organization he founded in Germany. He disappeared from Colonia Diginidad after twenty-six kids accused him of abuse. He died in prison.
On a wall were plastered a grid of collages, like the ones that might be seen in a young person’s bedroom. But there they were, proudly displayed, someone’s private loves and obsessions, made totally public.
It was nice to have a chance to ride on the side streets and through the neighborhoods, as my past experiences of this city were almost exclusively of office buildings and generic, almost North American, looking edifices. The only structures I saw then that retained some character were downtown. I’m seeing more this time—even though it’s another quick visit. As was the case in Sao Paulo, I’m unconsciously forming a mental map of this place that is very different than what existed in my head previously—an expanded and more complete version than it was previously. The bikes help with that. Walking or cycling gives one a sense of the physical, visual and other relationships between the neighborhoods—how the river runs through the city and where the landmarks are. It’s amazing how fast that mapping process happens—how quickly one develops a sense of where neighborhoods and landmarks are, and how they connect to one another. After just two days I could almost get around Santiago without a physical map and just rely on the one that has appeared in my head.
Sally flew back to NY on Sunday morning and that night there was a dinner for the event participants and others at The Clinic. Not the magazine offices, (though that may be here too), but at a lounge, bar, and now a restaurant that has spun off from the magazine and is like nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere else in the world. It’s a really interesting mix of an obviously hip or fashionable club (no one dressed like what we might imagine as overly fashion oriented, though they did seem to all be wearing black), combined with the intellectual and political satire that the magazine is known for.
The walls are painted black, with blow ups of wittily captioned old B&W photos on the walls (a giant one of Allende), as well as humorous statements and collections of quotes from politicians and others painted in white type—a Joseph Kosuth installation turned into a bar, but funnier. Where else would one find this mixture?
Outside there was a blackboard with a 'quote of the day' scrawled across it.
When I left around 11pm, to walk back to the hotel, there was a line outside waiting to get in to the lounge on the ground floor. If it isn’t clear yet, it should be—politics is very much alive here. The trauma of the years of dictatorship, combined with the now relatively successful economy and high levels of education make for a potent mix. It’s manifested in the humor and politics of The Clinic and the Thriller dance as a creative form of protest. There’s an optimism and hope here that won’t be squashed—it keeps resurfacing over and over.
Speaking of creative protests, Chile isn’t alone there—the protesters in Belarus, one of the last truly repressive Eastern bloc dictatorships, have resorted to standing still (!), spontaneous clapping, strolling or arranging for their cell phone alarms to go off simultaneously. The government there has adopted new measures to enable them to throw folks in jail for protesting in this way.
Monday Morning I ate breakfast in the hotel and then went off for a quick ride around before my flight to Lima. Sally’s friend, Daniel, emailed her a list of spots in Santiago that he checked out when he came down for Lollapalooza here earlier this year. Maybe The Clinic hadn’t opened yet—as it was significantly absent from the list.
There’s a great farmers market alongside the river and the park adjacent to it. Look at the size of those stalks of celery!!
I rode on, through a relatively upscale neighborhood, with houses that could have been lifted from any North American suburb.
On to another zone of high-rise offices, with more of them on the way, and the Andes in the distance—a rare view, given the usual amount of pollution here.
The mountains are close to Santiago. There was a tremor the morning we arrived, somewhere near Valparaiso, on the coast. It registered around .6, so no one here paid any attention. Part of the protests concerns a proposal for a hydroelectric damn in a pristine area. Chileans are proud of their amazing countryside—the Andes, the Atacama Desert, the beaches. So, a giant damn with high-tension wires strung across the pristine landscape is a hot and very symbolic issue. It fucks with people’s image of what their country is, what it represents—even if they only see those pristine areas rarely and sporadically. In the U.S. it might be likened to building a damn in the Grand Canyon that caused the canyon to disappear, or building a lucrative casino around Old Faithful.
I biked back to the center of town, to Bellas Artes—the Beaux-arts style museum here (the contemporary museum is behind it). Free entrance. Some rooms of contemporary Latin artists and others filled with colonial portraits. Hardly anyone here (so I can take pictures!). A silent temple for contemplation. Here are some of those immigrants mentioned earlier:
LeeAnn, from my office, returned to NY from Sao Paulo—having helped in Brazil (and having helped coordinate this whole thing from NY). Planes have been cancelled getting in and out of Buenos Aires recently, as the Chilean volcano, Puyehue, erupted not so long ago. The ash cloud blew east, first over the Andes, and then dropped massive amounts of the stuff in the northern Argentine part of Patagonia. Bariloche, the ski resort in that area, is now buried under a few feet of ash. I was there with a local band some years ago—it’s an incredibly scenic spot, and this ash drop likely killed their yearly ski season (which is now). Oscar Diaz, one of the organizers of this tour, was held up in BA for two days, a week or so ago, so we’re all checking the plane situation—we don’t want to get stuck there. It’s fine so far, though the volcano isn’t quiet just yet.
I arrived in BA and was met by Bernardo Baranda of ITDP Mexico—he, Oscar Diaz and LeeAnn put this little tour together, with help from local book publishers, the Flip festival and many others. I had dinner with some of the panel participants, including Guillermo Dietrich, who is commissioner of transportation here—if they had such an official position. We went to a Peruvian-Japanese fusion restaurant in Palermo Hollywood district—which looks a little more like the meat market area in Manhattan than it used to. Peruvian-Japanese cuisine has been sweeping the continent, more on that when we get to Lima.
A blonde woman who is a city council member joined us and sat between Guillermo and I. She asked me what this is all about, why I’m in BA and a million other questions. Eventually Guillermo pulled out his show-and-tell of the bike lanes they’ve created here, and images of a limited bike share program that he has been instrumental in introducing. When I was here some years ago, there was no one—absolutely no one—on a bike. The city is flat as a pancake, more or less laid out on a grid, and the weather is fairly temperate (it’s winter now, which means not snow, but fall jackets, and maybe a sweater). So, one wonders why no one has taken to bikes, especially as Porteños tend to follow a European lead from time to time and enjoy being more ‘European’ than their Latin neighbors. So, what Guillermo is doing is a major first step. It’s way more advanced than Sao Paulo, for example, where grass roots support is growing, but there's no political will at all. Sao Paulo will wait until the city locks up before doing anything—the wealthy will always have their helicopters. Guillermo’s also done a BRT (bus rapid transit) system here, so the refrain that he’s a car dealer and anti-public transport isn’t a totally justified argument. His family is one of the main car dealers in Argentina, so we got some emails saying he was compromised. He’s done some good stuff, and wants to do more, so we were trying to encourage open thinking, rather than coming in with pre-set attitudes.
Guillermo showed us more bike lane images on his iPad, and some of the bike share system. He explained how it works—unlike Paris or DC or Minneapolis, here the bikes are kept in little sheds manned by young assistants who log you in and out. In other cities it’s all automated. These kids presumably are on top of the repair needs and coordinate shuttling bikes from stations that get too full or others than get too empty. I’m not sure about that though. The sheds and the manual operation might limit the scale and expansion of the operation I fear, but they’re worried about theft I think. The councilwoman made fun of Guillermo because there are a lot of photos of him in his iPad photo folder. Guillermo does look like a works out a bit and his dress shirt is very nicely tailored—maybe he’s getting ready to run for something soon?
There was just a mayoral election here, and the result was close enough for a runoff, which will take place very soon. The mayor, Mauricio Macri, is Guillermo’s boss, so all of these folks are in campaign mode, sort of.
The next morning, Bernardo and I biked past the ubiquitous dogwalkers that crowd the sidewalks here in the Recoleta district, and stopped into El Ataneo—a bookstore in a former theater, with the theater balconies and fly space still in place. The stage is now a café, but why they have covered the front of the stage with heavy and hard to move bookracks is a mystery, as the place would be amazing for readings and other events (the café tables and chairs could be moved easily to clear the stage area).
We biked on to a meeting with the mayor, which turned out to be more a photo opportunity for him. He’s campaigning. Always. Shake hands, pose for pics, and he’s gone. To be fair, the meeting place was changed at the last minute, and Bernardo and I mistakenly went to the previously agreed spot (which wasn’t very photogenic to be sure, but did at least contain a bike share station), so we arrived a few minutes late. That was bad. We headed over to the new meeting place in a nice pocket park. The mayor left and the photographers snapped me heading out on a bike.
Guillermo lead the group on a ride towards the port area—Porto Madero, an area where the roads, the train tracks, the docks and former warehouses all converge. I have to say the little bike lane they’ve put in (it’s a narrow two-way bike lane—not quite wide enough, but hey, it’s a start) is a vast improvement over what I remember going through in this neighborhood some years ago. It was scary then. Bravo. We dropped the bikes at a bike share station and walked to La Boca neighborhood.
We had lunch at El Obrero (the worker), which is a kind of working man’s place in a funky area, but with white tablecloths and absolutely amazing food.
The walls are covered with pictures of cars, football banners, drawings of clients and bullfight posters. The waiter remembered that I’d had lunch there with my friend Amelia—almost 10 years ago! Huge bowls of fresh greens and parmesan (there were lots of Italian immigrants who settled in BA) and amazing fried calamari. Then we split some steaks—we become carnivores, as one does here. I’m not a huge meat eater, but the meat (chicken is not even considered meat here) is maybe the best in the world, and much of it can’t be exported to the U.S. because it doesn’t meet many of the USDA and FDA requirements.
The event was held at what seems to be a funky alternative rock venue called Konex. I arrived first, as I usually do at these things. My presentation is essentially a subjective introduction to the subject, a summary—how we got to where we are, and my own experiences of the situation our cities are currently in. I end my bit with some examples of alternatives to automobile dependency that are being tried in various places around the world and various ways the communities and cities are being revitalized. I sensed that I should have edited my presentation a little more here and there, and all of the panelists rambled on a bit—so after a while there were some walkouts. Uh oh.
Guillermo showed examples of what his department has been doing, but he slipped into campaign mode. He complimented the mayor maybe a little too much for this crowd. He got heckled, more than once, and I started to feel bad for him—though he should have known better with this crowd. The mayor he compliments, who is seeking re-election in this runoff, leans to the right and is not popular with this youngish crowd. Many of the other programs and policies this mayor is involved in, I am told, I would indeed find fault with. But the bike lanes, the share program (however small it is), and the BRT initiatives are commendable. Porteños are notoriously combustible though. One of the folks I am to meet in Lima used to have a Porteño girlfriend, and she was in the habit of throwing printers at him. He went through a lot of them.
I have a number of friends here—musicians, filmmakers and writers—so rather than going to a dinner with the panelists after the event (I did have dinner with Guillermo the night before, after all), I suggested we all meet somewhere and share some wine and appetizers. We ended up at a place called Dada—where we shoved a bunch of tables together, passed bottles of wine and starters around and table hopped.
This morning, the plane out of BA was delayed. Its departure point was shifted due to the volcano—we had to leave out of another airport. There wasn't much information, the assembled passengers were apprehensive, but eventually a boarding time got posted and everyone cheered.
Last week’s cover of El Pais Semanal (the Sunday magazine of the Spanish daily that is distributed worldwide) featured a long article (and some nice photos) on how the cycling revolution is part of a global trend to increase the quality of life worldwide. They're making some pretty grand claims in this cover piece—be nice if they're right.
I'm in the midst of this Latin American tour of bikes, cities and transportation events, and I can say there is some momentum here, but it hasn't caught fire with most of the city bureaucrats down here yet. But soon it will—it's cheaper than building more highways and is also a way of dealing with the congestion and fumes in many of these cities.
Thanks to the helicopter lift, we arrived in Sao Paulo earlier than planned. This hotel is something else! It’s in one of the jardin (garden) neighborhoods, some of which resemble a more tightly packed version of Beverly Hills—the same mish-mash imitation of fake chalets or small palaces. Here, they are wrapped by high walls, which function like the high hedges in those LA neighborhoods. You can’t see more than the tops of the houses, the tops of Corinthian columns or fake Tudor roofs. The inhabitants must have this experience in reverse—the front windows of some of these mansions are barely a meter away from the wall. Passersby may be excluded, but those who live behind the walls are prisoners.
These neighborhoods are surrounded by the more typical Sao Paulo high-rise apartment and office buildings, which are hard for a foreigner to identify one from the other. The buildings stretch to the horizon, covering the low, rolling hills that lie underneath this city. The transition from garden districts to high-rise zones are sudden and abrupt, and from a plane (or helicopter) one can see the borders easily.
The hotel, Unique, lives up to it’s name. In the lobby is a rough painted statue of St. George slaying the dragon. St. George has been syncretized by Afro Brazilians, and to interpret the inclusion of this statue as strictly Catholic might be a mistake. St. George is also the patron saint of Sao Paulo. Anyway, like a lot of things here, it’s a mish-mash—the St. George himself is an old carving, the horse was created more recently, and the dragon was commissioned from a Japanese artist.
Here is the hotel:
It’s tucked into one of the garden districts, and you can see the high rises all around in the distance. The waitresses in the hotel restaurant wear some kind of Comme des Garcon bondage trousers—all in black of course. The first night I woke up in what seemed to me to be the middle of the night (I’d fallen asleep early), to the sound of a woman screaming. I immediately thought something terrible was happening outdoors on the street, and I began to get up. Then I realized it was coming from the next room. Her screams were high-pitched, shrieks really, and if she had a male partner he was keeping a low sonic profile. Was she having a great time? It was hard to tell. For such a fancy place, the walls must be paper-thin.
We went to dinner with Fernando Andrade and Luiz. Fernando directed Quebrando o Tabu (Breaking the Taboo), a doc about alternatives to the war on drugs. The Brazilian group Afro Reggae and I did a song that plays during the end credits. The film begins from the admission that the ‘war on drugs’ initiated by Nixon isn’t working, and never did work. In fact, it has caused suffering to increase, while failing to eliminate the drug trade—and has cost the U.S. and other countries plenty of cash as well. As Fernando pointed out, it’s one thing for people to accept that the war on drugs is a failure (most folks, even North Americans, do), but quite another to agree to abandon it. Most folks shudder at the thought of abandoning the failed war, saying, “if we stop there will be chaos, the disease will spread, so we have to continue, we can’t give up.” The film shows that there is in fact a third option—actually, more options in general—that some cities and nations are trying. There are alternatives to the war that aren’t 'giving up,' and the film interviews and examines the communities that have tried these approaches, with varying amounts of success. The ex-president of Brazil, Cardoso, appears prominently, and acts as a bit of a guide. He has taken this cause on since leaving public office. Good for him, but sad that so many politicians only find their spine and balls after leaving office. Those body parts get checked when you get elected, I guess.
Others make appearances—Bill Clinton, who admits he was wrong about needle exchange programs, and public officials in Zurich, Amsterdam and Vancouver. In many cases, it is the decision to view addicts as people needing help, rather than simply as criminals, that motivates a lot of changes. Needle exchanges, treatment, testing for STDs and providing methadone or other drugs are controversial, because the public sometimes views these programs as coddling addicts—at the public’s expense. The fact is these programs, and Hamsterdam programs like the one depicted in The Wire, not only contain the spread of addiction, AIDS and crime, they’re cheaper than throwing addicts in prison. In the U.S. prisons are big business, so it’s no surprise that imprisonment is widely accepted as the best option.
The film also brings up legalization. It’s been said that if marijuana were legalized and taxed in California, then that state wouldn’t be in the nasty financial state it’s in. The crime and killings in Mexico and elsewhere would be wound down, and the use might even be managed to some extent. This seems to frighten a lot of people—when I mentioned the film in Brazil people reacted by saying "it’s very controversial." Some of that controversy has been generated by the press, who have simplistically painted the film as a 'legalize drugs' polemic. It’s not—but it does propose that legalization might be one of a number of better options than what we’re doing now.
Recently, Hillary Clinton was interviewed on Mexican radio and was asked why the U.S. didn’t take legalization seriously as well as stemming the tide of guns flowing into Mexico from the U.S. Her response stunned the Mexicans; she said that the U.S. couldn’t consider legalization because “there is too much money in it.” Too big to fail, or something like that, eh? Of course, this drug (and the associated gun) industry already has a huge influence in U.S .communities, cities and government—so why not make it at least a little more transparent? Anyway, the Mexicans, their jaws now on the floor, didn’t quite know how to react. The U.S. press ignored her statement.
Fernando said that as a result of all the controversy his film got a fair amount of press in Brazil, and he was told that had he had ready a bunch of 35mm prints, a lot of theaters around the country would have booked the film. Unfortunately, he didn’t—his budget was tight and the price of prints is around $20K per print (for a 60 minute film). And then there’s the price of ads and marketing, which local theaters don’t completely cover. Digital prints are cheap to reproduce—the cost of a serious hard drive, but unfortunately there are few digital projection cinemas in Brazil, so that wasn’t really an option.
The song I did was an expansion of an unfinished song idea I had on file. I sent a few of these to Fernando to see what seemed appropriate to him—which wordless beginning had the right energy, or an uplifting or dark vibe. Whichever seemed right to send the audience out on. Fernando didn’t like any from this first batch I sent, so I sent more, and one clicked. It happened to use a Brazilian beat as a foundation, so it was appropriate in that way too. I then began to work on it more—expanding the song and adding to the arrangement. All of this was done at a room at my home. I wasn’t in a recording studio yet.
I began writing words. They weren’t directly related to the film—I wasn’t going to lay out a message, but they did touch on it obliquely. Oddly enough, when it was all done, the lyrics seemed to actually respond to the subject. I may have done it intentionally, but it almost seemed to happen just as much when the two were connected in sequence—that a continuity from one to the other seemed to be present.
At one point I suggested that I could either hire Brazilians and other drummers in NY to create the groove as it should be, or we could ask the group Afro Reggae—who are featured in the film as an example of a community based initiative that turned a favela away from drugs and crime. I couldn’t go to Brazil to oversee their recording, but basically they’d be covering the groove as it was sketched, and would have a song structure and my guide vocal to follow and overdub to. It would cost me—it would be more that half of my recording budget, but as a way of tying things together musically and culturally it seemed perfect, and worth the risk.
The night before we were scheduled to mix in a proper studio in NY, they uploaded their tracks from Brazil. I was a little nervous—it could have gone all wrong musically or technically, but other than the fact that they had a slightly earlier song arrangement to work on, it fit perfectly.
We heard the story of the movie release over dinner at a nice restaurant that billed itself as a mozzarella bar. Besides other dishes (pasta, pizza, etc), you would approach a long salad station at the rear manned by two attendants. There were about 8 different kinds of mozzarella available to choose from—soft, small, herbed, smoked, chewy, and then a series of leafy greens and other options that could be added to make a really tasty salad.
All the museums are closed on Monday, so we decided to bike (the hotel has loaners) to Liberdade (the Japantown here) and the old downtown. Sao Paulo, based on this first foray into biking, comes close to ranking as one of the worst biking cities in the world (a second foray would temper that impression a little).
We got a little lost, as we attempted to stay on side streets or streets that run parallel to the large Avenidas that criss-cross the sprawl. Eventually we made it to Liberdade, and ducked into a Japanese fast food joint that was pretty tasty. Downtown there were older buildings, plazas and even some pedestrian streets.
The streets are filled with people down here. The nearby Praça da Sé (Se Plaza) is at least half nice—the part with trees. The other part—similar to the concrete plazas all over the world, was devoid of people except for a couple of homeless sleepers. The buildings around here have some character, and it isn’t too hard to imagine it becoming a vibrant area at night, as well as at lunch hour.
I love the various lunch counter joints we passed everywhere. Inevitably, these use displays of colorful tropical fruits to entice you in—as a kind of edible décor. These, as opposed to the gated community look elsewhere in Sao Paulo, were wide open to every passerby. They were welcoming, and while the food in them might be diner food, they feel comfortable and friendly.
The next morning, we rode to the modern art museum that is in the middle of the park—they were installing a new show, so it was closed. The Afro Brazilian museum nearby was open, and is choc-a-block with stuff: shrines, banners, offerings, slave ships and shrine/costume combos (like this one below). Having done a documentary on Candomblé years ago, I was familiar with the iconography—I love it. And some of the artists, like Mestre Didi and Pierre Verger, were people I’d met back then.
The museum was, to my eyes, overcrowded. They’d shoved everything—wonderful stuff—into the two floors, and there wasn’t a lot of order to it. Glad to see it gets a showing though, and that it’s about a vibrant culture—not just a story of slavery.
In the afternoon we were escorted on a group bike ride to the venue. We rode along the fairly quiet streets of one of the garden districts. I could see that these neighborhoods could be good conduits for getting from one area to another. There were about 20 of us, which tended to inhibit aggressive cars, and a local department of transportation cop on a motorcycle, who occasionally stopped traffic when we crossed an intersection. We were privileged, and though it made for a lovely ride, it gave a completely artificial sense of how well one could get around in this town. Ronaldo’s (the Brazilian football star) house was pointed out—that’s how fancy and expensive some of these places must be. Someone told me that after a period of partying, the press was reporting how out of shape he was getting, so he was seen riding a bicycle in the neighborhood. I couldn’t find any pictures.
We did pass through a newly revitalized neighborhood that seemed to have some real street life—Vila Magdalena. Granted the street life there seemed to be mainly bars and restaurants, but it’s a start, for Sao Paulo anyway.
The presentation went fine, though we all talked a little longer than we should have. I vowed to do some editing of my own presentation before Buenos Aires. There is a small grass roots movement to re-think the transportation situation in Sao Paulo, but there’s so much inertia there it’s hard to imagine much will get done unless things get worse than they already are (I was stuck in traffic for 3 hours once when I was there to do a TV show with Caetano—the traffic can be unbelievably bad). A mayor who can cut through some of the corruption and bullshit might make some headway, and the support from the ground is there—but the grassroots folks can’t do it be themselves, not here.
Tom Zé was there and it was great to see him. He was in rehearsals for a NY show at Lincoln Center—getting a new guitar player up to speed, and seemed preoccupied that the new guy could get the feel of his material in time.
I have begun this Latin American tour. I’m doing a series of “Bikes, Cities and the Future of Getting Around” panels in various cities here with the help, coordination and sponsorship of a combination of the local book publishers (my Bicycle Diaries book is finally out in these countries), local bike organizations and the Instituto de Politicas para el Transporte y el Desarrollo, or ITDP as the acronym has it.
As with the similar panels that were done in North America, these usually have a city representative (dept. of transportation, the local mayor or similar) a local NGO advocacy rep, a theorist or historian and myself. We each give short presentations, under 15 minutes, and then do a Q&A with the audience. In North America most of the questions were addressed to the city person, which to me was a good sign that the audience was there for the issue and not to see me.
The first stop was atypical. A literary festival called Flip set in a small seaside town in Brazil, called Paraty. The festival began in 2003 by Liz Calder, a British book editor who worked at Bloomsbury and got them the first Harry Potter book. They fly a handful of foreign writers down every year and mix those in with Brazilian and other Latin American writers. I heard about it from Hanif Kureishi, who was here years ago and must have had a great time as he wrote and said he now loves Brazil.
Because it’s a literary event my panel was a bit of an anomaly. For a while they tried to get Caetano or Tom Ze to join me, but Caetano is wrapping up a Gal Costa record and Tom Ze had a concert somewhere in Brazil—so it was me and Eduardo Vasconcelos, a writer on transportation and equality in the developing world, who is based in Sao Paulo. He’s perfectly appropriate, and he passionately draws lines between the kinds of transportation in a town and the relative equality and representation of the citizens. Like some others, he maintains that when one mode of transport is privileged over the others (usually the car), then one class of people are being represented and catered to more than others (wealthier car owners in much of the world).
We landed in Sao Paulo and were met by Alexandre Agabiti Fernandez and his wife. Alex is a journalist and he was slated to be the moderator of my panel and that of Joe Sacco, the great graphic journalist from Portland. We drove east through rolling farmland—this would be a 4-hour drive, and then hillier grazing land that was pockmarked with waist high termite mounds. We stopped at a roadside food place, which from the outside looked like anything you’d see on a US or European highway, but inside there were some differences. The first thing you encountered was some glass cases filled with a selection of local cheeses. Near that was an arrangement of local breads and jams. I bought some local honey with propolis and a jar of pollen—nature’s antibiotics. You can even smear honey with propolis on wounds.
Eventually we passed into the range of low green mountains that border the Atlantic from Rio to the south. Most of this area is preserved now—the Atlantic tropical forest, a huge repository of biodiversity, used to stretch from Bahia in the north down to south of here—now there is only about 7% of it left.
We emerged on the other side in a town called Ubatuba, where everyone seemed to be riding bicycles—young, old and in-between. If this was a harbinger of Paraty, then this event would be redundant, or too obvious, but in a good way. Ubatuba is a holiday beach town as well, but as it’s easier to reach than Paraty, it’s not as charming- but the scenery is amazing.
Paraty was about another hour up the coast, and its center is a beautiful preserved colonial town that is now a host to many events like Flip. There is a film festival (even though the town doesn’t have a cinema) a jazz festival and a cachaça festival (a lot of micro distillery cachaças are produced around here). The town was founded in 1667, and when gold was discovered in 1696, it became the place where gold from the state of Minas was shipped out, and where the supplies to extract it went in. Slaves built a rudimentary road through the mountains, and it took days to get things in and out to Ouro Preto, the still beautiful town in Minas where the shipments were controlled. Paraty is on a bay inside a larger bay, and besides being a tranquil port, this meant that gun emplacements on nearby peninsulas and islands could protect the town and its gold from outsiders. Many of those islands are now owned by Brazilian billionaires who park their yachts and host parties on them.
Access to the town was only through this very controlled road over the mountains—and from the sea—so the town was fairly isolated. The road from Ubatuba didn’t get built until the ‘70s.
The streets were designed to be lower than high tide—so the water would fill these shallow gullies and folks could clear out the street waste. Ugh. One can only imagine.
Eventually, Rio, the capitol at that time, decided they wanted to be the gold exporters, and a rail line was built, also by slaves, to Minas. I suspect the lords of Paraty were siphoning off a little during their period of control, and now the capitol wanted to have their turn at it. The supplies still went in via Paraty, but this boom period was over for them. (thanks to Michael, our bike trip guide, for this history lesson)
Another boom followed though, this time with coffee. The slaves were put back to work and Paraty flourished again. But in 1888 slavery was abolished in Brazil, and the cheap workforce was no longer available, so the town went into another economic slump.
There was one final trade boom—cachaça. There were hundreds of distilleries around here that fermented and bottled up the sugar cane liquor. It can be produced incredibly quickly and isn’t often left to age very long, so production was continuous. But even that came to an end. Now there are only a handful of artisanal cachaça distilleries around here. The town was more or less abandoned, except for a few fishermen who could eek out a living. Its days as a trading center were over. The houses were abandoned and because of the isolation of the place it was preserved. It never got developed, and the colonial streets and churches fell into ruin but remained intact.
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s it was rediscovered by a new generation—the Brazilian counter culture and bohemians happened upon it and bought up the incredibly cheap and charming houses (there was still no land access), and here they could make art, write and frolic out of sight of the dictatorship that ruled Brazil at that time. There are still some of those folks left—some artist’s ateliers where their work is on display. Now it’s charming, but pretty touristy. The pousada where the guest writers and I stayed had photos on the wall of celebrity guests—Brazilian models and Mick Jagger among them.
I attended a couple of the literary events, sadly just those of the English language writers Joe Sacco and James Ellroy. I’m a huge fan of Sacco’s work, so it was a thrill to hear him explain a little how he works. I could have listened for a lot longer as he described his process—researching historical photos of Gaza refugee camps, interviewing various folks who remembered streets and parts of the camp from the past, and then reconstructing a scene for a flashback as only a graphic artist could do. His drawings are sometimes like cinematic crane shots—a bird’s eye view of a place or moment that captures way more than pages and pages of written description ever could. He puts himself in his journalistic narratives are well, and claimed Hunter Thompson (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail) as a big influence—as someone who called out the bullshit and political maneuvering as he saw it.
Later in the afternoon I saw James Ellroy, the popular noir writer (LA Confidential, The Black Dahlia) make his presentation. I saw him in the hotel the night before, holding court with some young Brits, and complaining that he’d ordered his spaghetti carbonara 1 ½ hours ago—ah, Brazil, it does take some getting used to sometimes. His presentation couldn’t have been more different than Sacco’s. Ellroy is obviously a seasoned performer and he made an appropriate entrance. He’s a big guy and he clomped downstage in his hiking boots and a Hawaiian shirt, spread his legs apart, and began declaiming the opening paragraphs of his recent book. His scansion, meter or phrasing—where he would break and pause in a sentence and what words got accented—was bizarre and completely unnatural. I was reminded of a description in an Oliver Sacks book of mentally damaged patients howling with laughter while watching a Ronald Reagan speech on TV. Like many politicians, he taught himself to artificially break his sentences into bite size chunks, and give dynamic emphasis to various words, which varies the dynamics to hold interest. Though, in Reagan’s case, the choices of where to pause and what to emphasize were almost random—hence the laughter, as the brain damaged could see right through his performance, whereas we tend to accept such speechifying as normal. Ellroy was a bit like that. Not really pompous in the normal sense, he’s down to earth and sometimes funny, honest and even self-deprecating, but it was definitely larger than life as we know it. He was refreshingly honest about his likes and dislikes—doesn’t like Chandler and when compared to Dostoyevsky by Joyce Carol Oates, he had to admit he’d never read the Russian classics.
In the evening there was a small festival in front of a church. A band that sounded a little like Mundo Livre played a kind of sloppy but infectious samba rock, and an 80-year-old woman was on stage with them the whole time, dancing and occasionally playing a tambourine. In the audience were giant puppets with people inside, constructed so that they would appear to be dancing to the music as they mingled with the rest of us. One smaller one—a frog type creature—had a little kids face sticking out of the belly.
Not sure if this was part of the Flip event, or if it was associated with Santa Rita, whose church, built for mulattos, is in Paraty. The Italian Santa Rita had a swarm of bees fly in and out of her mouth as a child. Miracla!
My presentation went fine—I got laughs at the appropriate parts, so I knew it was being understood. Eduardo made a good speech as well—a passionate plea for a re-think on the connection between transportation and equality, especially in this part of the world. My publisher, Amarilys, is an imprint named after a young woman who is the daughter of a publisher of technical and trade books—Manole. This is the first book they have done, but it seems they are off to a good start. Her dad came to Brazil from Romania, fleeing repression of the Jews there. He ended up in Brazil selling English language encyclopedias to wealthy Brazilians who would display them proudly on their shelves. He eventually moved into technical and medical books, a steady and guaranteed source of income for decades. Now however, the technical book market is threatened by eBooks and other developments, which may have prompted the decision to diversify into other sorts of books, like mine.
We were invited to go on a bike ride out of town—to a cachoeira (a cascade of water) and back. It would be about 3 hours. The town itself is impossible to ride in—those paving stones are set far enough apart that the water will wash out the garbage in between them but it’s insane for biking, or for heels. As we left, we were trailed by press—who ran after us until we outpaced them. Brazilian newspapers Globo and Folha de Sao Paulo are both very present at Flip, the latter being a sponsor. The route lead upwards, through the outskirts of town, where the remaining locals got pushed when the center got gentrified. There are no colonial houses here, but it’s still pretty beautiful in parts.
We got stuck behind a bullock pulling a cart that contained a baby calf, just born that morning. I saw a very dirty satellite dish in the jungle—so someone is managing to enjoy their telenovelas, even in this fairly remote place.
The waterfall was a little underwhelming as a spectacle, but there was a nice swimming hole and a few of the biking party jumped in. It wasn’t warm enough for me to try it. It’s winter here—though it never gets really cold, you do need a jacket at night.
Dinner at night, courtesy of Amarilys. I was seated next to Jorge Forbes—a psychiatrist, essayist and philosopher from Sao Paulo—and his wife.
We had a good talk and he drew diagrams on a napkin to help explain his concepts while I took notes. I haven’t read Lacan, but he figured in there somewhere. The food at the restaurant, Punto Divino, was amazing—lots of fresh seafood, as you might imagine. Jorge’s wife said they arrived by helicopter, and the view from one is wonderful and we should try it. Well, maybe someday. I had accepted the inevitability of the 4+ hour drive back to Sao Paulo tomorrow.
So, the next day, as we were preparing to go on a smaller scale bike ride, we got a call from Jorge saying we had been invited to hitch a ride on the helicopter back to SP—we jumped at the chance. It turns out our hosts for the ride were really a young man and his girlfriend. He owns a fleet of 200 planes in Brazil (Go is the name of his company). He was wearing a Ramones T-shirt and jeans. Jorge is psychiatrist for both of them. Here is a clip of the helicopter rounding an Atlantic forest hill to reveal a bay and islands on the other side.
