A Brazilian Summer (in Hong Kong)

More MPB from Mallu Magalhaes (above), Barbara Eugenia and Silva featuring the beautiful voice of old favourite Fernanda Takai.

You’re no good

One of the big names of young Brazilian music, Mallu Magalhães, is back with a lovely, summery and surprisingly traditional-sounding bossa nova number, Você Não Presta (You’re no good). The song also prompted me to go back to one of my old favourites of hers, Velha e Louca, below:

Summer beat

Miss that tacky Latin pop.

Cultural centre: Bangkok to Sao Paulo

Thailand’s Creative and Design Centre (TCDC ), whose exhibitions I have really enjoyed in the past, has reopened in a much larger new premises by the river along the Charoen Krung. It is now housed in a building attached to the brutal 1930s old General Post Office. The centre will spearhead a cultural rennaissance of one of Bangkok’s oldest neighbourhoods, already home to galleries Speedy Mama and Soy Sauce factory and some interesting street art, and to be joined later this month by a massive new warehouse cultural development spearheaded by architect Duangrit Bunnag. He successfully helmed the Jam Factory project on the other side of the river.

In Sao Paulo meanwhile, the Japan House opened this weekend, part of a next generation push by the Japanese government to expand its “soft power” around the globe. Brazil’s centre was the first to open, highlighting the strong links created by generations of Japanese immigration to Brazil and more lately, Brazilian immigration to Japan. The cultural centre opened with an installation by artist Azuma Makoto who sent 30 cyclists through the city to pass out flowers to “spread beauty” and mark the centre’s opening.

Summer songs

 

Spring has well and truly broken with a Summer on its way. On the way home from work I hear birds playing and fighting in the trees, darting out of shrubs flying after each other in hot pursuit, while magpie chicks in dowdy foliage scratch in the grass. In the morning I am woken by a symphony of bird calls, and the long-missing night heron is back in the Wong Chuk Hang canal.

On the streets of Mong Kok this long weekend, pecs were bared in tank tops and people ambled amid the pungent smell of stinky tofu in bared legs and arms, sweating and happy in the sun.

And what better soundtrack to all of this than samba? Rapper Criolo has released a new samba record, available to download for free in its entirety at his website, the sound of a new Summer.

Modern loneliness

 

I saw two films at the International Film Festival which, by coincidence, both explored the theme of loneliness. Oliver Assayas’s “Personal Shopper” stars my new fave Kristen Stewart, as a searcher, a psychic, looking for something more than the unwanted life she has found herself in at the periphery of the fame machine, as a Paris celebrity’s personal shopper. Its a strange, meandering little film, full of moments of stillness but also little revelations, not the least of which is Stewart’s great central performance or her effortless normcore lesbo-chic styling. I saw it on a rainy day, the last day of my holidays, at Kowloon’s eighties-tastic Cultural Centre with the director himself in attendance.

 

A few days later, the Monday night of my return to work to be precise – I journeyed out to Kowloon Tong, to see “Corpo Electrico” – the Body Electric. It is the first film from Marcelo Caetano, who previously worked on Neon Bull, and that film’s tone is evident again here: an almost plotless (and some might find, pointless) slice-of-life drama, but filled with beautifully observed scenes of every day life, almost like an anthropological documentary, and human warmth. We watch the handsome main character Elias as he daydreams at work, drinks with friends, smokes and does his laundry. Elias, played beautifully by Kelner Macêdo, works as a pattern maker in a Sao Paulo garment factory, passing his time with semi-flings with friends and ex-boyfriends.  At the time, I was charmed but slightly bored by his life, but now the day after I find the film lingering in my thoughts for its loving and very real portrayal of gay life in the early twenties : its intense and flirty friendships,  camaraderie and cliquishness, non-career job boredom and hedonistic weekends, all floating under an unformed and seemingly ominous future.

Tropical tastes

  

Aguas de Marco

Its March, and the humidity is back: the Waters of March indeed. While playing this song for my boyfriend I discovered, for the first time, the English lyrics – a masterpiece of stream of consciousness poetry in themselves, even without the jaunty tune:

A stick, a stone,
It’s the end of the road,
It’s the rest of a stump,
It’s a little alone

It’s a sliver of glass,
It is life, it’s the sun,
It is night, it is death,
It’s a trap, it’s a gun

The oak when it blooms,
A fox in the brush,
A knot in the wood,
The song of a thrush

The wood of the wind,
A cliff, a fall,
A scratch, a lump,
It is nothing at all

It’s the wind blowing free,
It’s the end of the slope,
It’s a beam, it’s a void,
It’s a hunch, it’s a hope

And the river bank talks
of the waters of March,
It’s the end of the strain,
The joy in your heart

The foot, the ground,
The flesh and the bone,
The beat of the road,
A slingshot’s stone

A fish, a flash,
A silvery glow,
A fight, a bet,
The range of a bow

The bed of the well,
The end of the line,
The dismay…

 

 

Stars of Neon Bull

What a strange, strange movie this is. Neon Bull is set, like the other Brazilian movie I watched recently, Aquarius, in the Northeastern state of Pernambuco. And like that movie it is a meandering, understated story – more a character study than a traditional narrative. It offers a documentary-like slice of life view on an outrageously sexy rodeo worker, his friend (or sister or ex-girlfriend?) played by my new favourite actress, Maeve Jinkings, and her pre-teen daughter.

The film doesn’t play by the usual rules of independent cinema. Although the story centres around an itinerant group of cowboys and cowgirls in the parched sertao badlands of the Northeast, don’t expect poverty porn. The film downplays the characters’ lack of economic prosperity to show a (generally) happy family (of sorts) striving gently for their own little dreams – with occasional flashes of surrealist imagery.  Maeve Jinkings dances in a strip club in a horse costume and argues with her stroppy daughter while sweet (and very heterosexual) cowboy Juliano Cezarre dreams of becoming a fashion designer. This is interspersed with many scenes of life on the farm, some dreamy interludes and a pretty noteworthy sex scene.

I’m really not sure what to make of Neon Bull. While watching it, I veered towards being bored several times – as well as confused – but afterwards it has lingered in my mind…and  star Juliano Cezarre exudes cinematic pheromones in every scene. He is simply sexy, even eclipsing  Maeve Jinkings, the wonderfully expressive actress I had originally wanted to see, and star of both Aquarius and Neighbouring Sounds (below).

Here Maeve talks (in Portuguese only) about her role in Neighbouring Sounds:

New world star

 

Portuguese producer Branko is part Manu Chao, part Diplo. While his former group Buraka Som Sistema took Angola’s kuduro music to the Europe MTV Awards stage, new album Atlas matches glitchy electronic beats with guest artists from Brazil and South Africa, amongst other places, to create a tapestry of modern world sound.

 

 

Art: Rio

From the lens of the French Rio-based photographer Elsa Leydier.

  

Age of Aquarius

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “Neighbouring Sounds” was a strange, understated tale of deeply submerged injustice played out on the sunny streets of an upper-middle class beach-side suburb of Recife.

The same theme and setting is explored again in “Aquarius.” This time though the director’s trademark light touch, so powerful in his last film, underwhelms. It is all so subtly and slowly unwound that I found myself wondering where the story was in endless scenes of Sonia Braga letting her hair down and listening to 1970s Brazilian records in her lovely oceanside apartment. There are also rambling flashbacks and passing mentions of unexplored plot points, metaphors for cancer and gay sons, flutteringly light social commentary and surprising sex scenes. But what there is not is any sense of tension or excitement, or – in the end – meaning.

It did have one powerful and unexpected side effect though. The boyfriend was inspired to go out and buy a vinyl record player!

Johnny Hooker

Recife’s Johnny Hooker has taken Brazil by storm with his re-imagining of the gender-bending 70s and early 80s rock years. In one interview he called David Bowie the Father, Madonna the Mother and Caetano Veloso the Holy Spirit, his personal trinity, although the glam trappings of Ney Matogrosso and Cazuza are also easy to detect.

Ceu’s sweet summer sangria

Summer sounds

I missed the fourth album by Brazilian singer Ceu when it first came out in July, but thanks to a fashion magazine’s ” best of 2016″ list (see below) I discovered it just in time to crown “Tropix” the album of ( my) Summer, with its winning formula – evident in the single above – of glacial bossa nova vocals, electronic tropical rhythms and just enough surprises to keep it out of the pleasant coffee table music that MPB can sometime slump into.

FFW>> Brazil 2016

It’s been a while now since I was in Brazil and I have lost touch a bit with the rich thread of Brazilian pop culture, but luckily São Paulo fashion mag FFW has published this end-of-year music listicle of Brazilian rappers, soul singers and drag queen superstars to help get me back on track.

Arthur Verocai

The dreamy sounds of Brazilian cult favourite Arthur Verocai, whose self-titled 1972 MPB has just been re-issued.

Brazil, by Tomer Ifrah

   

Brazil, beach

Photography by David Alan Harvey.

 

BRAZIL. Rio de Janeiro. 2011.[lF][lF]Contact email: New York : photography@magnumphotos.com Paris : magnum@magnumphotos.fr London : magnum@magnumphotos.co.uk Tokyo : tokyo@magnumphotos.co.jp Contact phones: New York : +1 212 929 6000 Paris: + 33 1 53 42 50 00 London: + 44 20 7490 1771 Tokyo: + 81 3 3219 0771 Image URL: http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP3=ViewBox_VPage&IID=2K7O3RKCWSKL&CT=Image&IT=ZoomImage01_VForm

The Rio Olympics

And so, the Olympics have come to an end. As someone who has such passionate memories of Rio, I was excited, and scared, as the games approached. Zika, water pollution, a bike path swept out to sea, a virtual coup, a deep recession: what else could go wrong for Rio?

But in the event the games were neither a disaster, nor – from my perspective – a triumph. The opening and closing ceremonies struck me as a little bland – in this least bland of cities. Of course, they were implemented on a much tighter budget than at other recent Olympics but with the incredible richness and breadth of Brazilian culture, it all seemed a bit anaemic. A bit obvious. I have to say that I was disappointed. Giselle Budchen walking to the “Girl from Ipanema” – really?

So what had I expected? I had visions of Carmen Miranda and the legend of Iracema, great black leaders like the Zumbi of Palmares, the Salvador Muslim slave revolts and Chico Rei, the slave who became a quasi-African king.  What of capoeira and candomble? The great national myths – the revolutions of Tiradentes, the teeth puller, and the rebels of the sertao badlands in the Northeast? I had imagined riotously costumed interpetations of the Amazonian folklore of the jungle peoples: the bumba meu boi, boto dolphin spirits, the minhacao and mula sem cabeca, as well as tributes to the literature of Machado de Assis, the Theatre of the Oppressed. This had been a great opportunity to recast Brazil  in its own imagination as a multiracial, but black, country,  a “new” Brazil. I had prayed for Caetano Veloso to kick off proceedings, spotlit on a stool singing his progressive anthem  “Tropicalia”…. but perhaps that was always naive. These things don’t necessarily “sell” to a worldwide audience. After all, Caetano was there but it was barely noted in the world media. Perhaps what they really needed was Jennifer Lopez?

The games themselves were engaging. The Brits made it rain gold and silver, China and Australia sank and bickered over the swimming and the Chinese team provided a great charmer in Fu Yuanhui and a love-to-hate villain in Sun Yang. Singapore scored a gold, and Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps secured their legacies. And then, in a final pleasing touch, the Brazilians faced their football nemesis, Germany, and finally triumphed at Maracana.

But now that it is over, was it worth it? Guanabana Bay didn’t get cleaned up. The promised new subway lines opened – just in time – but the fighting in the favelas goes on and the Rio taxpayers are left to foot a hefty bill. For a city that is used to throwing such amazing parties, this had all felt a little…forgettable.The fact that the highlight of the closing ceremony was Tokyo’s presentation for 2020 said it all.

Elke Maravilha: a marvellous life

Halfway through the Olympics came the news that a Rio icon had passed away. Elke Maravilha was a model and actress, famous for her flamboyance. Blonde and beautiful, she had a huge appetite for life, a magnetic smile and a mile-wide wild streak that had endeared her to generations of Brazilians.

Born Elke Giorgierena Grunnupp Evremides, (you can see why she used a stage name) she had emigrated to Brazil as a child from Leningrad. She came from an academic mixed Russian and German family, and grew up speaking nine European languages before breaking into showbiz as a ditzy blonde appearing on TV talent shows and the catwalk.

It was her work as a fashion model that led her to form a friendship with Zuzu Angel, the pre-eminent Brazilian fashion designer of the 70s and an unlikely rebel, who used her high profile as a constant thorn in the side of the military dictatorship after her activist son had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the regime. Elke was also arrested, after tearing down “wanted” posters offering a reward for his capture. She was held in an infamous prison and torture centre for five days and eventually stripped of her Brazilian citizenship, forcing her to fall back on her German passport.

Still, her show business career went on, often appearing on the television show of the hugely popular surrealist TV comic Chacrinha. She also landed a part as a brothel madam in a TV series that became her signature role. In addition to her huge gay following she was now crowned the godmother of Rio’s sex workers.

Elke married eight times, most recently to a man thirty years younger, and lived in a pink mansion in Copacabana near the beach, continuing her wild ways until she passed away aged 71, a shock-blonde rebel to the very end.