Page 2 of 2 THE ROVING
EYE The hottest party in the
galaxy By Pepe Escobar
singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil -
known in England as the "Minister of Cool" - gets
cozy with Quincy Jones, who's ready to do for
Brazilian rhythms what he has done to Michael
Jackson: he's pre-producing a documentary to be
filmed next year in both Rio and Bahia called
Brazilian Soul.
Revelers are still
trying to make it home - or to the beach - on
Sunday morning while we, sleepy-eyed but
rejuvenated by a
bucketload of
pineapple-with-mint nectar, are already on a mad
bus ride cross-town to hit another of the 30
blocos of the day, the Boitata. Once again
it's 9am under the scorching heat - and they are
all there, the guy with a knife stuck on his
forehead, the transvestite dressed as a ballerina
with an "I Love Jesus" T-shirt, an army of
cadavers, devils, clowns, archetypal
cross-dressed, wig-on,
face-splattered-with-cheap-paint street revelers
whose only aim in life is cair na folia
(literally, "plunge into folly"). Top banner of
the morning: "F*** Bush, let's samba."
All
day Sunday - in overcrowded beaches, in bars, over
the frenetic updating on the laptop of Ana Claudia
Souza, the exuberant black woman who edits a
celebrity website tracking all carnival gossip in
real time - the excitement inevitably converges to
the Sambadrome. That's the ritual catwalk where
all the cathartic myths of the Afro-Brazilian mix
that the artsy tropicalist movement in the 1960s
dubbed "total jelly" literally explode.
For millions in Rio living in a slum in
the back of beyond and slaving away in the
informal economy, like practically 50% of all
Brazilians, a magic 90 minutes - the time it takes
for a school to cross the glamorous Sambadrome
asphalt catwalk - is capable of turning anyone
into king or queen, the alter ego shining high on
the altar of carnival. One does not have to be a
"highlight" - like the glittering, Hollywoodish
soap-opera stars and talk-show hosts who headline
the samba schools' parades.
One just has
to be a drummer in the baterias - the
mighty, head-churning percussive factories
powering the schools with the thrust of an F-16.
Or a chambermaid dressed up as a Nordic deity.
Thus the stirring spectacle of those working-class
masses arriving at the big stage on crammed buses
and trains, clutching their prized costume and
finishing dressing up and applying makeup at the
terminal station.
But seen from ground
level, this has nothing to do with glamour. We
decide to leave the Central do Brasil - Rio's
shabbier, sweatier answer to New York's Grand
Central Station - and literally cross a border to
mingle with the crowds preparing for the Big
Night. On the other side, squeezed body-to-body in
the dark, you are on your own. It's like leaving
your Abrams tank if you're a US soldier on patrol
in Baghdad - as it took us just 100 meters to find
out.
The attack happened with military
precision. A foamy spray hit my face, impairing my
lateral vision. As I turned around a
lightning-quick hand, in a single movement, opened
my zippered pocket, extracted my wallet and
disappeared into the crowd. My companion still
clutched her backpack, but only minutes later she
would find out it had also been opened, and a
small purse had disappeared. The whole incident
lasted less than two seconds. Those brothers at
the Help disco would have been as stunned as I
was. Yes, the Sunni Arab guerrilla syndrome is
ubiquitous. And the message was unmistakable: you,
gringos, don't belong here, but to the free
champagne-flowing VIP booths at $800 a pop (the
Rio equivalent of the Green Zone). As in black US
ghetto folklore, "The Man control the day, but we
control the night."
It could have been
worse - like getting popped and showing up post
mortem as a video in a funk ball. We had just been
added to the average 128 (registered) muggings a
day in Rio - as we learned a while later in Rio's
Sixth Police Precinct. The precinct was on a roll:
the investigators were working a non-stop 24-hour
shift, before midnight more than 30 people had
already been arrested, and five dodgy characters
were laid out on the dirty floor before me as an
identification lineup - alleged members of a
pickpocket ring. Jose Carlos Esch, the weary
inspector in charge, answered non-stop calls of
journalists who wanted to know about a homicide
("It was not here").
As he typed our
report number 006-00757/2007, suddenly we heard
fireworks. No, it's not Baghdad: it's a
celebration for one of the samba schools finishing
its parade. The police inspector climbed up from
his seat, opened the window and the three of us
stayed there, in silence, as in a Fellini movie,
staring at the arabesques in the sky. A few meters
away, the five dangerous but frightened criminals
waited for someone to go medieval on them, as no
loot had been found in their possession.
And then there was the clincher. Walking
back to the station - without bothering to stay
and watch the parade - some quick hand in the mass
body-to-body friction even tried to steal a flask
of sunscreen from my back pocket. "This is very
wild," murmured my companion. Geopolitical
message: the underprivileged masses of the global
South are desperate, and ready to do anything just
to survive. Undocumented, un-credit-carded and
flat broke, I felt just like one of them.
So the next day we did what we had to do.
Before, once again as journalists, succumbing to
the demented flow of non-stop breaking news, we
paid a Nietzschean homage to the death of all
idols - God, motherland, revolution - and sang the
body electric; we joined one more bloco -
loosely translatable as the "Suck but Don't Drool"
- and sang a thousand marchinhas at the top
of our lungs. If only Bush and Muqtada al-Sadr
could join us.
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