one-third Carioca

I am prescient.

Or just completely stupid.

My last blog post ended with “you’re not a Carioca until you’ve been mugged 3 times.” As of yesterday, I am happy to report that I am 1/3 of the way there. Before you freak out, I just want to say that I’m fine. No one was hurt. I’m minus my credit card (already canceled), driver’s license (whatever, it was a terrible picture anyway), 10 reais (blind dumb luck I had most of my money stashed in a moneybelt), my cellphone (sigh), and that little illusion of security that I had built up after living in Rio for more than 8 months without serious trouble. Nothing more.

Really, it was about time. All my friends have been mugged at least once. Honestly, I had already rehearsed it in my head a million ways. Give them your cellphone, give them your purse, and move along. And that’s basically how it happened. Z and I were walking to a friend’s house in Botafogo. Possibly a bad idea, but was so close! We had just crossed the street and I said, are those guys following us? Z grabbed my arm and yelled. The first guy grabbed my purse; I let him pull it away and watched him walk away across the highway median. He didn’t touch Z, but she was more shaken up than I was — she saw the knife.

I didn’t, and I’m glad. I know that this time around, I was lucky, lucky, lucky. I wasn’t by myself, the guys (probably homeless) didn’t seem all that competent or bent on hurting us, and I couldn’t care less about losing most of what they took. All in all, it was a worthwhile warning. I guess I’d gotten complacent, and here of all places that is a terrible idea.

But I’m not going to lie — it still sucks. It makes me sad to think how commonplace these petty muggings (and more serious ones) are here, and the environment of inequality and violence that produces them. And on a selfish level, it sucks to have it driven home, once again, that Rio’s not the type of city that’ll have your back if your in trouble. You have to be careful, and you can’t take anything for granted.

street camouflage

Currently getting ready to grab a bus to Petropolis, and possibly from there to Teresopolis, two historic cities in Rio de Janeiro state. However, this article in today’s NYT about Japanese street camouflage was too good for me to resist. Here’s an excerpt:

Deftly, Ms. Tsukioka, a 29-year-old experimental fashion designer, lifted a flap on her skirt to reveal a large sheet of cloth printed in bright red with a soft drink logo partly visible. By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine.

I’m not saying that this is a mainstream thing in Japan; really, it’s enough that it even exists, and is apparently marketable to some subset of the population (she’s sold about 20 of these vending machine skirts for $800 each). After reading the article I spent a productive few minutes brainstorming with Zachari about how to adapt this idea to the Brazilian market.

– Oh my gosh, look at the feet sticking out from the bottom of the vending machine! If we were doing this in Rio, what would our disguise be?

– See, the main problem is that there aren’t really any freestanding structures in the streets. There’s nothing you could disguise yourself as.

– What if you bent over at the waist and pretended to be a vendor table, like one of those that sell earrings or watches or something?

– No, that wouldn’t work, those always have people by them. Anything that’s on the street probably has someone watching or guarding it. Anyway, you’re not solving your problem because don’t people sometimes try to steal those, too?

– Hm, right. Well, what about disguising yourself as an out-of-place beach umbrella? Or a bus stand?
– Uhhh…

– Okay, forget it. I know! What about making a silver costume for kids so they could curl up and pretend to be those big cement balls that are supposed to keep cars from running over the curb in Leblon? Or, wait — they could be a trashcan!

– A trashcan could work — one of the orange ones that say Prefeitura on them. Those purses that are made to look like manhole covers are cool too, but no one would ever use them here.

– Yeah, no kidding. It would take ages to explain to people how setting their purse on the street would keep it safe from thieves. Not to mention the fact that putting your purse on the ground is bad luck, or it means you’re a prostitute, or something like that. I forget.

– Definitely would never fly. There’s the street thing, but when it really comes down to it, people here just don’t get as worked up about mugging.

– Yeah, you know what they say: you’re not a true Carioca until you’ve been mugged 3 times…

mystery solved

Everyone loves a good mystery, and yesterday I solved mine: where does that Bollywood music in our neighborhood come from on weekend nights? See if you can guess the answer.

a) Flamengo (my neighborhood) has a large population of Indian and East Asian youth who  cruise the streets at night with their car stereos blaring.

b) Flamengo has a large population of Brazilian youth who really, really like Bollywood-type music and cruise the streets and night with their car stereos blaring.

c) Flamengo has one sixtysomething guy who really, really likes Bollywood-type music and cruises the streets at night with his longish gray hair greased back into a deliberate quasi-mullet, wearing sunglasses and a giant red strappy fannypack/backpack hybrid and a big metal case that kind of looks like a barbecue grill in the back of his souped-up, chromed out… 3-wheeled motorcycle.

Which could it be? I’ll never tell, but here’s a hint: the correct answer spends (literally) the entire evening from, say 6pm on, on a few-block circuit, pausing at every corner and stoplight to pose for picture takers and give the Thursday-night bar patrons a chance to fully absorb the delicious combination of his mullet, motorcycle, and music.

craigslist posts

The story in the NYTimes about the gold-digger and the rich banker (supposed) who posted on Craigslist prompted me to go back and look around the site for the first time in a while. Here’s a post I love from August 30 (the original is here):

Survival of The Fittest

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.

Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the “loser,” and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.

I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3×5 card reading, “Please use this M&M for breeding purposes.”

This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this “grant money.” I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.

There can be only one.

what nationality is your car?

At dinner the other night, the conversation turned to one couple’s upcoming visit to the States to see their daughter and her husband. They noted how much they were looking forward to the trip. But, they confided with amused dismay, their daughter has in some ways adjusted a little too well to life in the US: “her car is so — American”.

Before I could finish my mental picture of a giant Ford Explorer, they continued, “you know, it’s just so… full. So much stuff. The backpacks, the skates, the briefcase and papers. Last time they picked us up from the airport our suitcases barely fit in the trunk because they’d forgotten to take their golf clubs out.”

I laughed so hard I almost choked on my sandwich. Because it’s true. You get used to some strange things in Rio, but cluttered cars are generally not among them. Be that as it may, though, it definitely hadn’t occurred to me that it would be one of the things that would stand out in someone’s mind along with supersize drinks and toothpaste, obesity, Hollywood, college sweatshirts, and prepared food (someone told me that her friend who lives in Iowa buys pre-chopped, frozen lettuce for his salad — please say it’s a myth) as a defining characteristic of life in the States.

Of course, there are a few explanations for this. Statistically speaking, a person living in Rio’s Zona Sul is a lot more likely to have someone to clean their car for them than would a person living in Boston. Then there’s the common-sense/security issue — you’d have to be certifiably insane to leave your car unattended with anything (valuable or not) in plain view inside it. Even leaving stuff in the trunk is probably not the best idea. But the explanation that intrigues me most is that the messy-car syndrome has a lot to do with the way Americans live their lives. People multitask while commuting, they get their giant lattes from a suburban Starbucks and gulp them on the way to the office, they pack their baseball gloves and gym shoes in the trunk, they take their laptops and piles of papers to and from work. If they have kids, the ballet shoes and Little League uniforms and homework assignments have to be right there, and there’s probably a McDonald’s bag tucked in the back of the seat and a few soggy french fries on the floor that managed to escape in the after-school bustle.

This isn’t about McDonald’s (actually, I’ve heard that McDonald’s is the largest private employer in Brazil). But it’s interesting to note that at least in the city Rio, people would rather grab a quick snack while standing at a hole-in-the-wall lunch counter than eat it in transit, and drive-thrus have never quite caught on. I guess the phenomenon of the “American car” is just one more sign of how incredibly mobile American society is.

best speech i can’t believe i hadn’t seen

Until today I could not have told you who Hans Rosling is. I can’t believe what I was missing: among other things, the two most riveting speeches on “development” (I hate that word, which is why I keep putting it in quotes) I can remember seeing, ever. Worth a watch, or six.

His 2006 speech from the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference is here.

His 2007 TED speech is here. Watch to the end, I promise you will not be disappointed.

And since I know that after watching either of these videos you will be desperate to find out more about this guy, his Wikipedia bio is here, along with a link to Gapminder, the website he mentions in the 2006 speech.
[by way of Dani Rodrik's weblog]

on guilt

Last week I couldn’t make it to the Wednesday session of the English class I’ve been teaching twice a week since March. I asked the volunteer coordinator on Monday at the NGO if I could get a substitute, figuring it wouldn’t be a big deal. He seemed a little put out but I couldn’t figure out why and didn’t think much about it until yesterday, when I showed up to teach and was a little surprised to hear my students say, apparently sincerely, that they had really missed me. Good grief, I thought, I was only gone for one class. Was the sub truly that awful? No, actually — but it turned out that everyone had gotten the impression that I had quit for good, with two days notice, and was never coming back! Confusion easily solved. But now I feel terrible. I’ve had the same group of students since March and I think it was sort of traumatic for them to find out that I had (apparently) quit, or left the country, or died, or something, without any warning at all. I’m hoping they weren’t serious when they said there were tears involved.

Wow, I feel guilty.

tropa de elite

According to all the buzz — and there’s a lot of buzz — Tropa de Elite, the new movie directed by José Padilha about the notorious Special Operations Battalion (Bope) is the best Brazilian film in years. Everyone’s talking about it — about its brilliant but shatteringly real depiction of police corruption, violence, and the ongoing battles between police and the drug traffickers that control many of the favelas. It’s the kind of movie that I have a lot of trouble watching, which is why I haven’t been able to bring myself to see it yet. But I will, mostly because everyone’s told me in no uncertain terms that I must. I know people who saw it six or seven times in less than a week. It’s that good.

Brazilian national cinema at its finest, depicting the dirty laundry side of life in Rio — things that really do need to be aired, and are usually subject to only cursory or sensationalized portrayals rather than the nuanced treatment that they deserve. Fantastic, right? Well, mostly. See, the problem is that the film hasn’t been released yet, and except for one showing last week at the Rio de Janeiro Film Festival (an awesome event by the way — I saw a great documentary on Tom Zé last weekend for free on Copacabana beach) won’t start its theater run until October 12.

Which means that of the more than 3 million people who have seen the film already (a suspect number if I’ve ever heard one, because of course there’s no way to measure these things, not to mention that it’s from last week and so probably way out of date already. But I’ll use it because I have no way of coming up with a better), maybe 300 — the people who were lucky enough to get seats at the film festival premiere — have been authorized to do so. Just to put that in perspective, according to Veja the most successful national film of the year until now had been a Grande Familia, with an estimated audience of about 2 million.

As far as I can tell, someone got hold of an advance copy of the film about 3 weeks or a month ago, maybe a bit more. From there, it spread to street vendors across Rio and rapidly across the country, as well as being posted online. The version being distributed is not quite the final cut — apparently there are a an extra 5 minutes of footage and a couple of extra scenes as well as some small tweaks in the sound, voiceovers, image color, and a few other things. But essentially, it’s all there. And even though of course content piracy is illegal and there has been some ineffectual posturing from the company (Paramount) and law enforcement, “there” in this case means “everywhere”.

And not only that. As we count down the almost 2 weeks left before the official release date, a quick visit to the Centro of the city reveals that the street vendors have a special offer for you: a four-film package. That’s right — for just a few extra reais, you get:

Tropa de Elite
Tropa de Elite, part II
Tropa de Elite, part III
and
Tropa de Elite, part IV