Democrapitalism

For those accompanying this blog and the ongoing saga of uncreative destruction in Rio de Janeiro there is likely little I can report at this point that will be new or unusual. The horrors of administrative incompetence, corruption, and a generalized lack of concern for public welfare in both the public and private sectors occasionally converge to produce tragedies like the one in Santa Maria, RS two weeks ago. In Rio, we are simply waiting for the next disaster to occur. It is only a matter of time. Will the Sambòdromo collapse? Will one of the overloaded ferries collide with a super-tanker? Will a disgruntled member of the Military Police open fire on an unruly crowd? How many people will the BRT lines kill?

In addition to administrative incompetence and fetid cronyism, a collective lack of indignation, willful ignorance and cruel passivity drive the creaky machinery of Brazil democrapitalism. While the fingers can always be pointed in all directions, it doesn`t hurt to start at the top. Reports that indicate Lula, the soon to be disgraced former president, spent twenty million in public money on hotels in one year. Overspending public money on luxury hotels may not be as bad as having a personal kill list, but the repercussions of presidential attitudes across the cultural bandwidth are undeniable. Lula, Dilma and the PT have repeatedly shown that the old ways are the best, that collusion and corruption bring great rewards and that business as usual is best done between old friends.

This last is a lesson that Sergio Cabral and Eduardo Paes have taken to heart and employed to great personal effect in Rio de Janeiro. The brutal disregard for the public welfare reveals itself in dysfunctional public transportation systems, the militarization and privatization of public space, the criminalization of poverty, the unbridling of capital, the pushing of undesirables to the periphery and the pursuit of public policies that do little to improve the material conditions of those who contribute more than 35% of their salaries to the government. For instance, if you want to stop people peeing in the streets, install public toilets, don`t put people in jail. The ongoing fight for the Maracanã  is but one in a long list of obfuscatory collusions with vested interests that are feeding at the trough of the brothers Grimm.  Why no one raises their voices in the direction of Eike Batista is a mystery to me.

In order to gain the bare minimum of public benefit from public authorities a massive fight has to be waged against the very people that are supposed to have the public good in mind. This requires a strong, institutionalized civil society that is, in theory, supported by the government. However, the political zeitgeist in Brazil is one that privileges the private over the public, the individual over the collective, and the powerful over the weak. The turpitude of the Worker`s Party is partly to blame, but exacerbating the problem are the collective desire for shiny new trinkets and a thought bubble floating above the heads of the middle class that reads “it`s better than it used to be so that`s good enough.”

It could simply be that Brazil has raised expectations and is failing to deliver. I personally think that there is no point in comparing Brazil with other places and that things here will take decades if not generations to shift in significantly positive ways. The World Cup and the Olympics were a good opportunity for that to happen, but the chance has been blown.  Yet the constant search for affirmation from outside begs for comparison at the same time that Brazil, and Rio more than any other place, is chronically self-referential, protectionist and fundamentally conservative.

Rio de Janeiro is Brazil`s self-referential epicenter, never more so than during Carnaval. I used to think that the two week binge was a time when people could exorcise the demons accumulated over the past year while dealing with all of the crap that the public authorities and the city itself heap upon the heads of its citizens. It may have been, in the past, a time of ephemeral transformation, when inversions of all kind became the norm. Now, the party seems like just another opportunity to sell the city to itself and to foreigners while putting on a mask of happiness and openness that hides rapacious consumerism and a singular distain for the very people that make the party possible.

My suggestion for those here enjoying the party: Turn the band of the free Antartica hats around and write your own message. Consider it a form of gorilla marketing. 

Balanço do Carnaval

Balanço do Carnaval

This was my second Carnaval experience in Rio. Much like the first, it changed the way I think about the city and about the possibilities of Carnaval to change space and the social order. The spatial element is easier, so let’s begin there.

I went to the Volta Alice bloco in Laranjeiras at 9am on Sunday meeting two friends. Volta Alice has a double meaning as the bloco does a Volta up the Rua Alice, a narrow passage up towards Santa Teresa and it also means come back, which it does every year. Thousands of people crammed into the narrow street, shuffling forward behind a massive samba-blasting beer can. Not a bloco to bring parents to, Volta Alice is a forward-moving mosh pit. Moving from side to side was only slightly less difficult than back to front. Retreating to the back would have taken about 10 minutes though tightly crammed and increasingly drunk, though always friendly revelers. It was hot and sweaty. When the beer can stopped rolling, the crowd’s density increased. By 10am beer had become a possibility, by 10:30 inevitable.

It was within this context that an ambulance doggedly tried to push through the bloco. Driving this rather impoverished looking conveyance was an elderly gentleman who insisted that he get up the hill to get to work. In the passenger seat, a woman on the phone chatted lightly. There was clearly no medical emergency underway though it seemed as if there would be soon. The bellowing fumes of exhaust poisoned revelers even faster than they could do it to themselves. The license plate was from São Paulo, the way clearly lost. Was there no police control at the entrance to Rua Alice? Why was this siren blasting in the middle of this sweaty, slowly moving wave? C’mon…

These otherwise excellent hats from Belo Horizonte were a poor option for a dense crowd.

People do love to cram together in sweaty lumps of flesh in Rio de Janeiro. I felt badly when my sweaty arm or back slathered those near me. I stepped on dozens of feet, knocked over a beer or two, and bumped roughly into well-muscled, chest-hairless Cariocas. I was one more beer-fueled, sun-soaked biped in a pulsing mass that I could not see the beginning or end of.  This is fun until the herd tries to take the same public transportation system or there is any kind of emergency.

Sargento Pimento is the Portuguese translation of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper. Last year this bloco was a disaster because so many people tried to cram in the small side streets of Botafogo and no one could even get close to the music. This year the good Sergeant was moved to the Aterro do Flamengo and it was still a disaster.

The sound car was terrible, you had to be within 100 meters to hear anything. I talked with a professional stage hand who said he was “embarrassed for them”.

The cell system crashed. With that many people trying to find each other there were probably 100,000 SMS messages a minute bouncing around. None of them made it to their intended destination. Thousands never met up with their friends.

Though I didn’t see it myself, the anecdotal reports from the end of Sargento Pimento were that the Gloria and Catete metro stations were utter chaos. If something went wrong, a fight, heart attack, birth, not as many people would be singing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds next year.  How many people gave each other nerbvous looks, thinking, “Imagina a Copa…” Imagine what this will be like in 2014. Let’s hope the emergency systems aren’t tied to the cell towers?

We clearly need to figure out a better method for measuring crowds, but there were certainly as many as 40,000 and perhaps as many as 90,000 (my guesses) at the bloco (any suggestions on crowd counting techniques welcome). Imagine a stadium full of people emptying all at once into two metro stations that run along one line and most of those people heading south. That’s the situation that unfolded after Sargento Pimenta.

I heard at a debate earlier this year, “Praia não tem catraca.” The beach doesn’t have a turnstile. This means that it’s impossible to control access to Rio’s major public spaces. When you invite millions and they come, you need to be ready to handle it. We’re a long way from that in Rio.

It’s clear that Rio Metrô is not a mega-system. On Monday night as we went to the Sambodrômo via Metrô, there was only one attendant at the Flamengo station and both of the automatic tellers for recharging the metro card were broken. The Metrô is a scandal disguised as a model of successful, privatized urban governance.

There was a sophomoric element to this year’s Carnaval. The tv and radio campaigns to stop people peeing in the street were backed up with more toilets. The arrests for peeing in the street seem stupid, but they did allow for guys to shout “Polícia!” at their friends. Funny the first time.

Despite the lack of traffic control at Volta Alice, there was a greater police presence this year than last. I didn’t really notice them too much when I wasn’t looking for them. Relative to the policing tactics that I have seen in Austin, Texas this is a pretty hands-off approach. When the hands get you though, it’s not good. Why arrest people for peeing? Can’t you write them tickets? Perhaps because there’s no ticket to give, the cops aren’t there to bust people, they’re there to make sure there’s a limit to the possibilities of Carnaval. OGlobo seemed to take a perverse delight in showing the effectinve policing tactics of the police by reporting on how many people were arrested per day for peeing in the street. While peeing strategies are essential for making it through the party, reporting pee-arrests as front page news should also come with a criminal penalty.

Carnaval confuses, confounds and delights in many of the same ways that the city does. The party is stretched out over two weeks, marking the end of summer and the official beginning of the year. It’s seemingly endless, overwhelmingly large, too much to take in. It seems both too near and too far any to get any focus on. Millions are in their neighborhoods dancing and singing where they usually work, go shopping, sit in traffic. There is an apparent liberty of expression that is both constrained and amplified. Rio’s aggressive sexuality is validated, making public life even more uncomfortable for women. The social production of fantasy takes physical form on women's bodies who do incredible things to (butt and bust implants, bigger thighs than footballers) and with their bodies; girls imitate their elders. 

There is a common sentiment that nothing gets done between xmas and Carnaval, but this isn’t really true. People work their asses off to make the party happen. There are tens of thousands of beer vendors, making their investment back R$1 at a time, lugging ice through crowds, pushing heavy carts, and negotiating with drunks.  I don’t know how to estimate the number of aluminum cans consumed, but it is surely in the tens of millions. Plastic bottles? Sustainable tourism? Overload of sewage systems? Who cleans all this mess up? Can it really get bigger and bigger and bigger until 2016?

Once there, the pageantry and beauty of the samba schools was amazing. The creativity, detail, beauty, and coordination filled me with wonder. The Unidos da Tijuca floats were some of the most incredible things I have seen, mindboggling testaments to the creative possibilities of Carioca society. I’m under no allusions of pureza but as a spectacle in-and-of-itself, wow.

As if to remind us that the year is about to really begin, Sunday marks the end of summer hours in Brazil. The long slide into a short winter has begun.

I'm not your John Carioca

Carnaval ended three days ago, I think. I’m still not quite sure when it started. Actually, Carnaval hasn’t really ended, but the banks are open, and people are starting to work again. The official Saturday-Tuesday Carnival confused and amazed, permanently changing my vision and understanding of Rio and Brasil. I’m not sure how, but it did.  I am sure that my first experience will not be my last, and as I repeat the dose in years to come the words I am about to write will no doubt seem increasingly naive. All the same, some reflections…

Carnaval is calmer than Mardi Gras and bigger than Katrina. It’s as exhilarating as Pamplona’s San Fermin without being dangerous. It’s as steeped in lore and iconography as Double Ten in Taiwan, with fewer fireworks, fewer boats, and much more skin. If Halloween in the USA and Carnaval in Brasil were football teams, the result would always be the same. St. Patrick’s Day parade, Erin go tomar banho. Eyore’s Birthday in Austin, TX would be a quaint bloco here. Songkran in Thailand, yup, nice, but not the same kind of party. 

Bigger than I had imagined, Carnaval is more, for longer, than all of those other parties combined, at the scale of a continent.  It is simply the biggest, best party, ever, every year. Leaving the apartment (in Laranjeiras), it was never more than fifteen minutes to the nearest bloco where masses of costumed dancers moved their feet insanely quickly, lurching behind huge sound trucks down suddenly narrow streets. Moving through the crowd was the same as getting to the front of a packed rock concert, in all directions. Everyone was getting pushed, trying to make their way, wherever, closer to the music, away from the crowd, to the port-a-potty, to get a beer, to go across town, to meet some friends, to throw up, to dance, to step on toes, knock into each other, go nowhere at the same time. No one got mad. I did not see a single instance of confusão. The cops were nowhere to be seen. The crowd was totally in control of the city. We took the streets, the plazas, the alleys, the parks, the hillsides, the buses, the taxis, the sidewalks, the city, the country.

450 blocos rolled through Rio over four days. A bloco in Ipanema had more than 400,000 people. One bloco! I went to 7 blocos over four days, a modest and endearing number, but surely my limit. All of the other major cities in Brazil were doing the same thing. Recife, 400,000 people at a concert. Salvador, one million people on the street. São Paulo, probably the same thing, I don’t know. I couldn’t pay attention to the scale of things. It was too much to imagine that the crowd I was being crushed into was being repeated across the entire city, much less the entire country. As I flowed through the streets of Rio completing a beer-soaked hydrologic cycle in sparingly placed public toilets, the drama of the samba schools unfolded in the Sambódromo, which always seemed really far away. The competition was intense and emotional, marred by fires in the production warehouses, stories of perseverance, excellence, brilliance and (almost inevitably) a voting system plagued by claims of corruption. I have only mediated impressions of extravagant costumes, flying flesh, and herculean projects.

After describing my experience of Carnaval in these minimal details, what it is that has changed about my perspective? For one, I now have something to look forward to in 2012. A second, more profound shift is based in my new understanding of Carnaval as a such a profound and important part of culture that no matter how much crap gets dumped on Rio and Brazil in the form of mega-event projects (and all of their wasteful, corrupt, brutal, and shameless ways), there is always going to be a time to invert reality, and at those moments possibilities for “progressive” transformation and revolution (in the sense of turning over) are always more alive. 

Carnaval is a way for society to organize, dis-organize, and re-organize itself in myriad ways.  I was amazed by the lack of visible and official police presence, the general sense of abandonment that had an ordering about it. Everybody followed some rules, but no one knew exactly what they were (except for the peeing on the street bit).  The blocos were organized and registered by the city, the streets were cleaned soon after. As  someone that did not have to work, clean, report, police, sell beer, or make a living for four days, my general feeling was one of a generalized abandonment to an infective happiness spreading from person to person, street to street, neighborhood to city and beyond.

Curtei. Gostei, e muito. Parabéns Rio de Janeiro, obrigado Brasil.

Craques, Carnaval, Câmeras, John Carioca?

Ah, summer in Rio. There's been plenty of interesting football going on in the Campeonato Carioca, if you're interested in teams you've never heard of playing against teams you might have heard of that are filling up with players you have definitely heard of. The return of the Brazilian expats is happening at an ever increasing pace. Last year, Fred went to Fluminense from Lyon, Deco dropped from Chelsea into the Fluminense doctor's office from where he has yet to emerge in 2011, and this year, Traffic and Flamengo put together tens of millions to bring Ronaldinho Gaúcho back to the homeland. So important was this move that Alexi Barrionuevo at the New York Times felt motivated enough to write a stunningly vapid piece about the current president of Flamengo (I'm not gong to dignify the piece with a link). Of course, when the NYT speaks about Brazil, someone listens, even though they never learn much.

Do like Dunga, don't use crack.

Flamengo won the first turn of the tournament (Taça Guanabara)with a lovely free kick by the buck-toothed wonder, who has already paid back the investment through shirt sales.  This brings me to the first of the C-words that start off this post: Craque. In Brazilian Portuguese, Craque refers to someone who is really, really good at something, usually football.  The stars of the Brazilian national team are, obviously, Craques. However, the drug crack is pronounced in exactly the same way. In the lead up to the World Cup a group of friends in Matto Grosso do Sul were displeased with then-coach Dunga's team selection. They pooled their money, rented the above bilboard, making a wholesome statement while at the same time crticizing Dunga.

The surprise of the tournament was that Gaucho's was that his free kick hit the back of the Boavista net. Not Vasco, not Fluminense, but Boavista F.C. from Saquarema, about 200 km East of Rio. Four years ago Boavista did not exist. It was bought by businessmen who are very open about their plans for their team: they want to develop and sell players to larger clubs all over the world. This is the same logic behind Traffic's investment in the Nova Iguaçu team, which did not have a single player over the age of 23 (and whose uniforms are suspiciously like the Carolina RailHawks). The surprise development in this year's tournament is that the traditionally smaller teams are having more success than usual. This is attibutable in part to Vasco's horrible start to the year but also to the changing economy of football in Brazil.

John Carioca, keeping it real

So while there is a wee break before the second turn of the Campeonato Carioca, we have Carnaval to keep us occupied. This is a useful link to see when and where all of the parades are happening. In an era where the city and state governments are increasing their attention to controlling everything (except for skyrocketing rents and inflation), Carnaval must give them more of a headache than five days of drinking SKOL. In order to help with their anxieties and desperate need for Benthamite social controls, the city government is putting spy cameras all over the city, with a centralized command center.

In addition to the 30 new cameras installed this week, we got a look at the new Carnaval mascot today: John Carioca. He will apparently be handing out pamphlets in English, getting robbed on Copacabana Beach, and getting arrested for peeing on buildings in Lapa. I'm not sure where to begin dissecting John Carioca as an anthropological subject (must all tourists must be pasty white men with big ears with smiling gostozinhas at their side?) and am hoping that some comments will be forthcoming.

There should be a new look website coming soon. You have hopefully noticed the jump to www.geostadia.com so reset your favorites. I've got John Caroica working overtime on this, so stay tuned for some marvelous photos!