Brazil Log Week 1: Feb. 27 – March 6, 2007

It’s true – I’ve been here a week now. And I have friends and adventures to prove it. And pictures, as you can see. I left February 26, my departure put in doubt by a snowstorm. Boy, does that word look strange right now. My friends Henrique and Paulo, from the Rio Trio, picked me up at the airport when I arrived the next afternoon and took me to my new digs that their guitarist Marcus had found for me in Urca. Urca is sometimes called a village in the city of Rio, and it’s definitely a real neighborhood. It’s a peninsula off the side of Pão de Açucar, Sugar Loaf Mountain, between Rio Sul – with its famous beaches Copacabana and Ipanema, and Rio Central (downtown) and very near UniRio and the Federal University of Rio. I feel as safe here as I do at home, which is a big relief. For instance, during the lunar eclipse a few days ago, everyone hung out by the wall at the edge of the water (you can see it in my pics) chatting and taking pictures, some drinking beer from the local restaurant/bar – a friendly casual scene. My new friend Marilia was very impressed that I got a place here – she said everyone wants to live in Urca.

You can see pictures of some of my new friends. My landlord’s name is Roberto, and he’s funny and helpful, and speaks some English, so we have amusing translation sessions. He also cooks for me sometimes and gives me detailed directions, complete with hand-drawn maps, to everywhere I want to go. He took me to a great beach in Ipanema, Praia Apoadoar, within an hour of my arrival at his house, and recommended a good brand of flip-flops – the standard footwear everywhere. He just ran out the door to the opera – got a ticket at the last minute from a friend – and is the sort of sweet guy who seemed genuinely sorry that there was only 1 ticket left – it’s opening press night – so he couldn’t invite me along. (It’s a modern Brazilian opera, he promised to bring all the info so I can go later). His house, as you can see in the pictures, is beautiful, and I’m renting a bed-and-bath suite there, and get to use the living room and kitchen, and the little nook you see in the mandolin stilllife pic, where I practice with Igor. Igor is my new duo partner – a really good 7-string guitarist who plays choro like a whiz, and reads fairly well. We’ve got a couple of concerts coming up, so he’s learning some of my rep – “Leave Something Unexplained,” Will Ayton’s “Tregian” and “Carman,” “Bachianas,” Luiz Simas’ “Meu Bandolim” and of course we are playing choro. We’ve practiced twice and have our first concert the 16th. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Kinho and Handerson run the local internet café (about $1/20 minutes), so I have seen them nearly daily, and today I met Kinho’s wife Rosana. They seem to understand my Portuguese and are really fun to talk to. Today they set me up – on their own time – with a page on what I think is the Brazilian version of MySpace – www.orkut.com – it was a pretty amusing process and I learned lots of Portuguese. They were insistent that I fill out the whole form, even the stuff I didn’t quite understand. Kinho even corrected my Portuguese spelling (amazing how you get those little symbols over the letters on a Brazilian keyboard). If you go to my page you’ll be amused to see that my favorite foods are popcorn, yogurt, and feijõa (a Brazilian bean and rice dish that Roberto made for me on Sunday). So far I have 3 friends (Kinho, Handerson, and Rosana), have joined a choro newsgroup, and started a classical mandolin newsgroup that has 1 member – Kinho. All fun and pretty funny, but I just may meet some musicians there, we’ll see. Kinho also plays soccer – so will be a great source of info on getting to games, rides a motorcycle and started a fishing newsgroup. You can find out more about him by going to my orkut page and clicking on him. How goofy and cool is that! Muito legal! – in Portuguese.

My newest friend, Marilia, I met at the Bip Bip club last night when I went to hear the weekly choro session. Igor was supposed to meet me there, as Tuesday is choro night, but was a no-show (seems Brazilian men do that often). But since I had painstakingly figured out how to take the bus, and there was about to be music, I bought a beer from the wife of the owner, who asked where I was from. Marilia, who was standing next to her had lived in Boston for 8 years, so we talked some between numbers – she’s the first real English-speaker I’ve met. The music turned out not to be choro after all – no melody instruments showed up, just guitars, cavaquinos, and percussion, so they sang. It was a cool scene though, that I knew something about from having been there 2 years ago with Paulo. There’s the somewhat crotchety owner, who scowls at anyone who talks during the music and sometimes throws back his head and yowls out a line of whatever’s being sung. And there’s Mrs. Owner, who deals with the customers if needed.

The main focus of the club is the session. The musicians sit around a big table that takes up the whole room, and the rest of us, owners included, sit at small tables outside. You serve yourself a can of beer from the cooler and wave it at the owner and he marks it down on your account and you pay at the end of the night. There are the regulars who greet the owners with a kiss on each cheek. Marilia is one of those. I was sitting at their table because I was what? – interesting, alone, a musician, had a hand-drawn map of how to get there, whatever. I didn’t dare photograph the owners. I even asked Mrs. Owner if it would be OK for me to take a picture of the club, because I certainly didn’t want to be lumped in with the cute but clueless table of American college students checking out pics on their digital cameras who annoyingly would want to buy shots of cachacha instead of beer, and would expect Mrs. Owner to get up and go to the bar (you can see it at the back) and serve them, and then would expect to pay right away, so would have to have the system explained to them. Marilia left with me to catch the bus, as she lives near Urca, and I think just wanted to make sure I got home OK. She ultimately helped get me do that after waiting in vain for a ½ hour for the 511, my local bus. This involved catching a small bus that seemed more like a group cab, destination only ascertained by asking the guy with his head out the window if they could get us part way to Urca, jumping out before they veered off toward Central, Marilia walking me to UniRio where I got my bearings, and then me walking toward Urca until, surprisingly, I saw my bus, flagged it down and rode right to my front door. Yes, next time I will take a cab home.

My old friends, Paulo, Henrique and Marcus, from the Rio Trio, are so far absent from my daily Rio life, though I have called Paulo once and will meet him Friday. The academic year just started on Monday so everyone is pretty busy. Paulo’s arranged for me to study with my hero, bandolimists Joel Nascimento, and I’ll start lessons next week. I’m continuing my recorded Pimsleur Portuguese lessons, have finished the 30 lessons of Portuguese I, and am on lesson 4 of Portuguese II. There are 3×30, or 90 lessons in all so it’ll keep me busy for awhile. The Saturday Choro School at UniRio starts this week or next – I’ll find out from Paulo – and I’m planning to attend. So music and Portuguese are happening.

It’s late summer here, the temperature varies between 85 and 95 degrees, and it’s humid. The days have been clear and bright so far, with blue skies and transparent water. I took the cable car up Pão de Açucar one afternoon a couple of days ago and took the big-vista pics you can see here. I’ve been to the beach a couple of times but, being alone, what to do with stuff or how to go without stuff makes it somewhat of a logistical problem. I really have everything I need on a daily basis close at hand. I can walk to UniRio in about 15 minutes, and to a big shopping center in a half hour. The bus stops at the end of my street, and actually in front of my house on its return trip. There’s a beach at the end of the block, although you apparently can’t always swim there, and a better one a few blocks away, Praia Vermelha, near a walking path that goes around Pão de Açucar, with beautiful plants and sometimes monkeys (see pics). There’s a grocery store a few blocks away, near the internet café, and a good informal restaurant, and a drugstore on the corner. I can use the washing machine in the house, and I am in love with my new electronc toys – laptop Mac, digital camera, digital recorder, Ipod Nano, back-up hard-drive the size of 4 passports stacked up, and a tiny peanut drive that I’ll put this newsletter and these pics on to take to send at the internet café.

Besides all the external goings-on, I’m aware that this time is a rare break from my too-busy life, my over-crammed brain, and my house full of stuff and responsibilities, and I’m taking advantage of that to step back from normal and think about it. I’m keeping a so-far daily journal, in addition to writing this log, and am writing down my dreams and poems too. Since this is a music page you probably don’t know, but my first art form was poetry, and for the past few years I find I’m writing again, what I call “blank-verse sonnets”. It’s an interesting subjective way to explore situations from a different perspective. I use the 14-line iambic-pentameter sonnet form with its strict and defining rhyme scheme, but write the lines to scan as if unrhymed, on somewhat irreverent topics, and use language more freely than is absolutely correct. My inspiration is the work of some American poets of the 1920′s, especially Edna St. Vincent Millay, and e. e. cummings. If you don’t know their stuff, check out “I shall forget you presently, my dear,” or “Only until this cigarette is ended” and “Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!” by the former, and “next of course to god America I” by the latter, and many more. You’ll find them online, just google the titles.

So while I’m here I’m writing my Rio Sonnets. Here’s the current version of the first one (still messing with the last couplet). It was initially inspired by the thick cloud cover as I flew the first leg of my trip from Providence to Newark at twilight, having left in a whirl of last minute to-do’s. It seemed unreal, something from a storybook scene covered in snow, and like I was truly leaving behind the world as I knew it.

the clouds below create their own landscape
thickly wrapped in cotton batting the sun
is a golden strip on the horizon
beckoning me as I make my escape
physical the Princess of Narnia
bids farewell and lights golden too along
the runway dance to a Brazilian song
on my Ipod as I smile bom dia
to Rio 5,000 miles away in
a morning yet to come usually
I’m driving down the Jersey Turnpike see-
ing planes and clouds above but that time’s been
and this is now and a Brazilian day
waits up ahead and I have songs to play.
2/26-28

So bom dia to y’all, and I’ll check back in in a couple of weeks to let you know how music and life in Rio are playing out.

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