20 October 2009

God bless our little civil war*

* see Joe Henry.



I haven't had much to say about the 2016 Olympics being awarded to Rio because like any natural-born Carioca, I'm filled with pessimistic trepidation. Tell anyone from Rio that you know someone who just visited there, and the first reaction you get will be, "Oh god - please tell me they weren't mugged or worse."

As a kid, I remember going out one night - somewhat rebelliously - with my friend Julio. We wanted to get something to eat, there was nothing in my dad's apartment, and so we just went out. This was not often done at our age for some reason. We didn't know why. It was 9:30 on a Sunday or something. And we were a certain age and a certain size: the street kids who could have mugged us a few years back were 3, 4 inches shorter than us now. We did pull-ups and some lifting. We felt pretty bad-ass, even knowing that in Rio, the concept of a good neighborhood or good street is awfully fluid. But going out was a statement of normalcy, I guess, or something like that.

So out we went. And no, this story doesn't end in a mugging or a robbery. It ends with us - two skinny teenagers wearing t-shirts and flip-flops, feeling invincibly middle class - scaring two older women. They heard us walking, heard us talking tough like characters in Rio's version of a Bruce Springsteen song or something, and turned, frightened to death, convinced that we were the very bad guys that our posturing was meant to hold off. As we passed them, Julio sighed and said, "This is what I hate about Rio. You hear someone behind you, in flip flops, when it's late at night, and you're afraid."

There was a recent New Yorker article about the gangs of Rio. I can't link to it, but the author has a pretty captivating two-minute audio slide show here. The keeper line in the article to me was a quote from Alfredo Sirkis about the disparity between rhetoric and actions:
It's all Scandinavian talk in an Iraqi reality.


I thought about the line as I read part of an email from my dad:
I'm not much for giving advice advice these days because I am completely disappointed with life in Riode Janeiro. Everything seems wrong. This civil war is developing an unpleasant momentum as the confrontations escalate. And I find that life is ever more restricted, as we have to choose carefully where to go, and at what time to go out. But this has been more pertinent for me than for Laila. She leaves anytime, to go anywhere, even very late at night. Me, I need a few months away next year.


And that is as good a reminder I can summon as to why life in Rio is beautiful and impossibly difficult. The news continues to be bad. Helicopter shot down, more-dead-than-a-bad-month-in-Gaza bad. The city that, goes the song lyric, greets you with open arms in postcards, but with clenched fists in real life is waiting for its time to shine. Brazilians also like to say that Brazil is the country of the future - and it always will be. Here's hoping that the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games are what helps Rio finally turn the corner.

12 October 2009

Best comment I've heard about the Nobel thing so far

KF: I mean, this is like giving me a PhD even before I’ve written a dissertation. You know, sure, the thing isn’t done, but I have a really good abstract!

M: But remember that the student who went right before you stabbed all the professors.  

08 October 2009

When I was a little lothario

Sometime back in 1990 or 1991, my parents sent me to spent to the States to spend a month with a family friend and her son, who was about my age. They thought this would be a positive experience or some such thing. Me, I saw it in terms of having an entire month where I would have access to things like stores that sold Stephen King novels in English, American candy, and most importantly, Nintendo games. Buying these things as imports in Rio was prohibitively expensive, and typically when you knew someone going to the States, you considered yourself really lucky if you could put in an order for, say, Whatchamacallit chocolate bar, or your own copy of Contra (so you didn’t have to hang out with that annoying kid who lived two buildings over just to play it, and that kid always got surly when you were better than him anyway, so you couldn’t ever make it past the third or so level without him throwing a tantrum.)

 

To be sure, the perks of the trip were many. I read a ton of Stephen King novels during that month. I drank a ton of apple cider (a product that for some reason you couldn’t get in Brazil and which I absolutely loved.) I ate donuts and I became acquainted with American tv shows like “The Wonder Years.” But the apple cider…seriously, I drank it until I realized that it wreaks havoc with the digestive process, and then I stopped completely. I bought games like Super Dodge Ball, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Gradius, and so forth. This was also my first taste of an East coast winter, being that the family friend lived in Columbia, MD. It was colder than anything I had ever experienced. I remember my first heavy snowfall. I had to buy boots, gloves, a hat. I was so cold at first that we had to go get long johns, and I didn’t even understand what they were at the time. I was like, “But I already have pants…what do I need these for? And why are they so tight?”  

 

I had left summer in Rio behind, and I was shocked to find out that American kids only got two weeks off at the end of the calendar year. Kidsitting arrangements being what they were, I actually had to go to a junior high school for a few weeks during my vacation. (Interestingly – I was here on a tourist visa, and I went to a public school for three weeks. I’m not sure how that worked out, now that I think about it.) I discovered that I was way ahead of the class in math – we spent weeks learning stuff I had learned the previous year. I knew very little about American history, of course, but I did fine in most of the other classes. I didn’t do so well navigating the social setting of an American junior high, but I have relatively few emotional scars to show from that time, so I guess it wasn’t too traumatic. I remember spending an unseemly amount of time picking out a Trapper Keeper. “This is going to be very important, you want to pick something cool,” my friend told me. “Grown-up. Something with sports cars on it, probably.” “But,” I would reply, “this one’s got a tiger on it.” “No,” he would say, “that might as well be one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You need the one with the sports car.” 

 

What I remember most about this trip isn’t really the month I spent in Columbia, Maryland. It’s the flight from Rio to Columbia. See, my parents and my grandmother in particular subscribed to the notion that you get dressed up for flights. I had to wear my finest clothing, lest I appear to be some sort of slovenly indigent. This meant dress pants, dress shoes, and a belt. For a twelve year old male, wearing dress shoes and a belt is a fate worse than death, basically. It also meant, however, that I had to wear my “finest” dress shirt. The shirt that was reserved for baptisms and weddings and Christmas. And the shirt in question was a gold silk shirt.

 

What I remember about the shirt is not how repellent it must have looked, but rather the fact that I learned a valuable lesson about how good of a conductor silk is. Stepping outside of the airport when I arrived – setting foot in 0 C temperatures for the first time since I was a baby living in Chicago – the entire shirt basically turned to ice on my body. One second my body temperature was normal, and the next I was gasping for air as if I’d been plunged into Arctic waters. It sucked.

 

And what set me off on these memories was Ms. Abstract Citizen, the other day, watching someone being interviewed on Good Morning America – he had saved someone from a fire, or something? And he was wearing a shiny silk shirt. She paused the show so we could admire his shirt, and I suddenly flashed back to that month, and more importantly, to the moment where I thought my lungs had frozen, all because of my gold pink shirt.

 

 

 

07 October 2009

When musicians devalue their own back catalog

Phish, Pavement, Pixies. All “P” bands, all extremely important to me through the last decade and this decade, and all are currently reunited in some capacity.

 

Phish’s reunion is clearly not a nostalgia act – rather, it seems as though the post-hiatus dreck from the early 2000’s will be the asterisk for an otherwise pretty consistent career. I say “consistent” because if you liked them before, you probably like them now. If you didn’t like them before, you probably still don’t like them.

 

The question of value with Phish comes into play with how most fans heard the band in the 1990s: we had a few precious soundboard recordings that gave us arbitrary snapshots of performances that we probably overvalued because it was simply harder to get your hands on good concert recordings before the Internet. The NYT did a great piece on the Grateful Dead’s legendary 1977 shows, and meekly suggested that it’s possible that so many people like those shows so much because there was an abundance of high quality recordings from that time period (not that the band wasn’t also playing at a really high level at this point – this has been pretty well established.)

 

Two things happened since many of us started collecting Phish shows on Maxell XL-II cassettes: one, the aforementioned Series of Tubes known as the Internet brought us bittorrent. The other is that the band opted to begin recording every new performance through LivePhish.com. Since I have a basket full of cassette tapes in the trunk of my car, this creates a strange situation where I almost certainly overvalue some cassettes (Eugene, 4/22/92, for example) simply because of the format. Curiously, though, the new shows tend to be good enough that they make older shows sound less…remarkable. Part of this is a function of the fact that the band is proving they are “back” by over-playing some of their big-show tunes (Harry Hood, Mike’s->Groove, etc.) On the one hand, the move is necessary to win back skeptical fans like me who hated most of the post-hiatus pablum from 2003 to 2004. On the other hand, how do I value a “Mound” from 2009 as compared to a mound from 1994? I have no idea.

 

Pavement’s reunion is promising: it’s a one-off, they say. There’s no plan to attend to the band’s catalog. It will be a straightforward, “hey, everyone’s still alive, we can still play our songs, these are good songs, why not do it?” sort of reunion. It’ll stand completely apart from the band’s previous body of work, I hope, though it will (I also hope) remain in the glorious shambolic tradition that characterized Pavement shows.

 

Now, the Pixies…a tough one. They are venturing ever closer to wedding band territory. They pretended they were going to record new material, but instead, the nostalgia act has been chugging along since 2004, like a loveless marriage that lives on out of habit. Now they are playing an all-Doolittle show – hey, that sounds great to me, considering that Doolittle may be the finest single recording from the 1990s – but it’s a little desperate. It’s a little too clearly backward-looking. And the end result is somewhat cheapening, to me, the original output. It was tons of fun to see the band in 2004 – the crowd was old, eclectic, free, everything I expected from a Pixies crowd (having been too young to see them the first time around). But now? Like I said, it seems desperate, in a “do you still like us?” kind of way.

 

In this manner they sort of resemble Liz Phair, whose insistence on putting out records after “WhiteCholateSpaceEgg” is just absurd. I am less likely to listen to “Exile in Guyville” as a result of this fact. I hate that, I really do, because “Mesmerizing” came up on my ipod today and I remembered how much I love that album.

 

Of course, the only person who defies analysis in this respect is Bob Dylan, whose body of work increases in relevance as a result of his complete lack of interest in it. It’s not mindful, on his part: you get the sense he has fully digested his past and is just happy not to look back. To use a baseball analogy, Liz Phair and the Pixies seem, in hindsight, like minor league call-ups who got really hot for a couple of months. Mackowiak, Chris Shelton…the list is long. Maybe they love baseball, maybe they don’t. They just happened to be pretty good at this one thing for a stretch of time, so naturally, they milked it. Dylan, on the other hand, had peaks and valleys. But there’s no doubt the man was born to swing a bat.

 

01 October 2009

General immigration: things to remember for whenever The Great Debate happens

The U.S. is definitely tightening the screws on H1-B employers, though this really just amounts to doing a better job of enforcing existing laws. It's consistent with what Obama promised during the campaign, and what's more attractive about it, it goes after the employer rather than the employee. We'll know in the coming months whether companies targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are known to be repeated violators, or whether they'll spend their time seemingly harassing companies that happen to hire someone who's not American.

This in the aftermath of some interesting recession-type news: immigration (legal immigration, that is), seems to be down across the board, which means filing fees are going up. There's a bit of Gov 2.0 window-dressing to help petitioners, but transparency sometimes only helps reveal the extent of your dysfunction. (By the way, funny to note the comment about how it might be "several weeks" before you find out that your fingerprints didn't take. Try six months.)

Amidst these developments, some truly touching stories: a sad story about a greencard scam ending in murder; and an uplifting tale about a doctor whose emotionally devastating volunteer work includes evaluating the survivors of torture who are applying for refugee status.