I have heard many explanations for the birth of the word samba.
And, since, I can’t be sure which one is most likely to be correct, I will refrain from mentioning any of them.
One thing we know for sure is that samba was developed in urban Rio de Janeiro in the closing years if the nineteenth century.
And that like American jazz both the music, and the dance that evolved out of it, is strongly influenced by the rhythms and movements of Africa.
Many people associate it with Carnival in Rio.
They’re right.
Others associate it with Carnival throughout Brazil.
They’re wrong.
In Holinda, for example, the music of Carnival is the frevo.
In Salvador, it’s the axé.
The first samba to be recorded was Pelo Telefone, back in 1917.
Since then, the samba has evolved into many sub-genres, each of which has earned a particular name.
There’s the samba canção (canção means “song”). I posted a good example of a samba canção last week in my post entitled Samba #1.Then there’s the samba enredo, performed by the great samba schools of Rio and São Paulo during Carnival. (Samba schools are large organizations of up to 5000 people which compete annually with thematic floats, elaborate costumes and original music. For a look at what they’re all about check out my post of February 7, 2010 and entitled The Greatest Show on Earth. You’ll find it in the archives of this blog.)
Other forms of the samba include the partido aldo, the samba de gafieira, the samba de breque, the pagoda and the bossa nova.
The last of these was inaugurated by João Gilberto, Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Morais, men who spawned a generation of disciples.
But no one did it better than the masters themselves.
Here are Tom and João performing Desafinado. (Out of Tune.)
About the dance:
You can spot a Brazilian dancing the samba from a kilometer away.
They learn it young.
Watch the rotational hip movement and the footwork.
One day, back in the early years of the eighteenth century, word reached the people of Guaratinguetá that
Dom Pedro Almeida, the new Governor of the Province of São Paulo, would be making a journey that would take him through their little village.
On the eve of the Governor’s visit, the local fishermen were recruited to secure fish for a banquet, something the nearby ParaíbaRiver provided in abundance.
But not on that day.
On that day, the 16th of October, 1717, there seemed to be no fish at all.
Then, just as it was getting dark, the three persistent men who remained on the water agreed to try one more cast.
And brought up a statue from the bottom of the river.
The head was missing, and small enough to pass through the holes in their net, but it suddenly appeared floating in the water next to their boat - and they were able to recover it.
They wrapped both pieces in their shirts, cast again, and their net came up full of fish.
A miracle!
This is the statue, made of fired terracotta, some 40 centimeters in height, weighing about four kilograms, and now venerated as the image of the patron saint of Brazil, Nossa Senhora de Aparecida.
How she wound-up in the river, no one knows.
But, many years later, the clay of which she’s made was analyzed - and found to have had its origins in Santana do Parnaiba, a little town about a hundred kilometers away.
Which gave a clue to both her age and her authorship.
More than a century prior to the statue’s discovery there lived, in Santana do Parnaiba, a Benedictine monk and sculptor, Frei Agostinho de Jesus.
The monk’s style is well-defined. His works display smiling lips, cleft chins, flowers, (and a broche with pearls) in the hair.
And all of those details are characteristics of the statue found by the fishermen.
The color of her skin, a golden chestnut brown, is thought to be symbolically linked to the Brazilian racial mix – and to one of the miracles brought about by the Lady’s intercession – the freeing of Brazil’s slaves.
The influence of the cult of Our Lady of Aparecida upon Brazilian Catholic society can’t be overestimated. There are about 300 parishes dedicated to her – and five cathedrals. In addition, many towns are named after her and so are many Brazilian women and girls.
Her first church in Guaratinguetá was a simple chapel, built in 1737.
In 1834 work on a larger church was begun, which became the “old Basilica” when work was undertaken on the “new Basilica” in 1955.
A walkway connects the two.
And the new one is big, very big.
Second only to St. Peter’s in Vatican City.
The building is in the form of a Greek cross, 173 meters long and 168 meters wide. The tower is 100 meters high, the naves top out at 40 meters and the dome at 100 meters. The surface area is a little over 18,000 square meters, enough to hold up to 45,000 worshipers at one time. The 272,000 square meter parking lot can hold 4,000 buses and 6,000 cars. And it needs all of that space, because the Basilica receives more than 8 million pilgrims a year.
It’s pretty ugly though.
Here, however, is one that isn’t.
Another cathedral dedicated to Our Lady of Aparecida.
Most of the walls are of glass, so looks just as good at night as it does by day.
And from within, with daylight streaming through the glass, it's spectacular.
The building stands in the federal capital, Brasilia, and was designed by Oscar Niemeyer.
The most recent Kubu Newsletter mentions hákarl,fermented shark.
It’s an Icelandic specialty that Yrsa brought to Crimefest for everyone to try. I have heard some pretty cruel descriptions about the way it tasted, and some people have written to tell me I was lucky not to have been there.
Not yet subscribed to the Kubu Newsletter? Click on Stan and Michael’s picture (right here on the page). It will bring you to their web site, where you can access the archive. There are some nice pictures.
And then there was Tim’s cake.
Actually, Lauri’s cake, the one she surprised him with, when he visited her shop, Murder by the Book, in Denver.
If you have yet to read about his visit, you can do that – and admire photos of the cake – simply by scrolling down.
Today, it’s my turn to talk about food.
And I’m going to tell you a little about feijoada, Brazil’s most famous dish.
Beth Kanell floored my wife and I by cooking two different varieties of feijoada (one was a vegetarian version for her non-meat-eating customers) when we visited her and hubby, Dave, at Kingdom Books. (http://www.kingdombks.blogspot.com/)
Could this be the start of a new trend?
Serving food to authors?
I hope so.
With the book market the way it is, many of us are starving.
But I digress.
Feijão, in Portuguese, means bean. And feijoada is a bean stew.
It’s served, as you can see here, with a number of different accompaniments.
The pork crackling, and the fried manioc (yucca) are optional.
The rice, pieces of orange, sautéed manioc meal (farofa), kale (couve manteiga) and pepper sauce are not.
It’s not an evening meal. It’s too heavy.
In restaurants, it’s traditionally served on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
If you visit São Paulo on those days, you’ll see it on the menu in thousands of places, from the most elegant restaurants to the most simple.
The most common belief about feijoada’s origins is that it was first concocted by slaves who used meat scraps to create a delicacy for the slave quarters. This belief is somewhat strengthened by the fact that the original recipes called for things like pig’s snouts and ears.
Others say feijoada is a Brazilian variant of the Portuguese dish, caldeirada, or possibly the Spanish (French) cassoulet. Angola and Mozambique also have variations...
...but all share the common base of having beans and salted meats as the basis of the stew.
Eide, my wife, leans toward a “light” version of the dish. No snouts, no ears, no fatty meat.
Want her recipe?
Click on my picture. That will take you to my website.
Next, click on the “contact me” button.
When the form appears, send me an email with the word “recipe” in the subject line.
If you don’t have the software to read a Word .doc file, add the word “embed” and I’ll incorporate the recipe into the body of my return email.
And, if you would like the recipe sent to another address other than the one you’re writing from give that as well.
My recommendation is that you enjoy your feijoada with a caipirinha or two. It's said to "cut the fat".
You’ll find a recipe for it in one of my previous posts.
The post is entitled Cachaça – The Brazilian Tipple, published on the 28th of March. Look for it in the archives on the lower right, or in the index at the bottom of this page.
Brazilians have an expression: neste país, os ricos não vão para a cadeia.
It means, in this country, rich people don’t go to jail.
Not true in all cases, but…
…consider the case of Antônio MarcosPimenta Neves, well-to-do, politically well-connected and a confessed killer.
The former managing editor of the Estado do São Paulo (Brazil’s newspaper of record; our equivalent of The New York Times) he spent four years carrying on a love affair with a young journalist named Sandra Gomide.
For much of that time, he abused her physically.
Finally, she summoned the courage to end their relationship and went to the cops. They photographed her bruises and abrasions and told Pimenta Neves to leave her alone.
He didn’t.
On the 20th of August, 2000, he showed up at her family’s farm, in the countryside near São Paulo to force a reconciliation.
She refused.
So he drew this revolver and shot her.
Once in the back.
And then, to make certain she was dead, again in the ear.
Arrested, he was released to await final judgment in liberty.
Final, is the operative word.
Final, in Brazil, is after all appeals have been exhausted.
The constitution that defends Pimenta Neves’ rights is one of the most modern and democratic on earth.
It exists, in part, to make sure that no one suffers unjust punishment.
And, to that end, offers numerous safeguards, numerous opportunities for appeal.
Of course, you need good lawyers to take advantage of them.
Pimenta Neves has very good lawyers.
It took six years to get him convicted.
(Yes, he confessed, but, in Brazil, murder cases still have to be submitted to a jury.)
He appealed.
In 2008, his conviction was confirmed.
But then his lawyers sought grounds for a second appeal – and found them.
And have been finding other ones ever since.
He continues to inhabit his mini mansion in São Paulo.
He continues to spend summers at the beach in Guarujá.
In this cartoon, entitled Meanwhile, in Gurarujá, a guy’s wife is saying (black balloon) “Isn’t that Pimenta Neves, the guy who confessed to killing his girlfriend? Look, he’s got a new one.” The guy replies, “Be more discrete. Don’t comment on promiscuous relationships.” The new girlfriend is, of course, justice. And Pimenta Neves is declaring his faith in her.
People are outraged.
Pimenta Neves doesn't care. His permit to carry a firearm has not been revoked; he’s gone out and bought himself another pistol.
He’s 72, and in excellent health for a man of his age.
Meanwhile, Sandra’s father, four years younger than Pimenta Neves, living with the frustration of seeing his daughter’s killer getting away with it, has undergone quadruple bypass surgery, has had one of his legs amputated because of a circulatory problem, has lost his job and is living on a small pension.
Living, he says, for the day he’ll see Pimenta Neves behind bars.
But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon.
The island of Fernando de Noronha is another one of those isolated islands you sometimes hear about.
This is a sign on a post in front of the airport. As you can see, it’s a pretty long way from almost anywhere.
Like Mauritius, it has been occupied by the English, the French and the Dutch.
Like Diego Garcia, the Americans built an air base there. (Back in the days of the Second World War – it’s longer operative.)
Like Devil's Island, it was once a prison.
These days it’s a Brazilian possession, a maritime national park, and a Unesco World Heritage Site.
The sea around the island is an important feeding ground for tuna, cetaceans, sharks and marine turtles.
There’s a huge population of resident dolphins.
It has some of the most pristine, most beautiful beaches on earth.
And it is visited mostly by surfers, marine biologists and divers. (See photos here http://tinyurl.com/25zbonj of the Ipiranga, a Brazilian warship sunk in 1987. Click on each to enlarge.)
For most folks in Brazil, Fernando de Noronha had long evoked nothing more than a tropical paradise, a getaway for the favored few.
That changed on the 31st of May, 2009.
On that night, the aircraft you see pictured above flew directly over the island. An Airbus A330-200, registered as F-GZCP and assigned the flight number 447 by Air France, she was on a nonstop flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
Just after 10:30 PM AF447 passed out of radar range.
And, some 45 minutes later, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean.
No one knows exactly where or why.
The black boxes have never been recovered; the exact spot where the fuselage hit the sea has never been determined.
There were 228 people on board.
It was the greatest disaster in the history of French aviation.
On the 5th of June, five days after the disaster, searchers spotted a piece of the aircraft’s tail.
The first two bodies were recovered on the sixth; sixteen more on the seventh; eight more on the eighth.
The media flooded onto Fernando de Noronha, started reporting from there, kept sending out images of recovered victims.
I was in Paris at the time.
I heard the name of the island cited again and again on French television, saw it appear again and again in French newspapers.
Most, in that country, had never heard of the place before the disaster.
Their introduction to it was horrific.
We, in Brazil, can still think of it as a tropical paradise.
I doubt that is the case for the French.
For them, Fernando de Noronha has become one of those place names associated with death and disaster.
If you say Jabulani around here, people think football.
More specifically, the football, the one being used in the FIFA World Cup.
And they think crap.
Time was, that the Cup was played-out with balls that had no name, and were brown, like the one above. That changed in 1970, when the event was broadcast live, on television, for the first time.
A ball was required that would be clearly visible in black and white, and Adidas, the German manufacturer, was asked to make one.
They came up with a design that most of us are familiar with today, a sphere with 32 panels, white for visibility, and black to help players detect swerve when the ball is in flight.
Enter the Telstar, named after a communications satellite to which it bore a distant resemblance.
The Telstar was a great success. So much so, that Adidas got the contract to supply World Cup balls ever after. (Or through 2014, at any rate.)
But they didn’t rest on their laurels.
No, they kept on tinkering with the product.
Every new ball got a new name, the Tango, the Azteca, the Tricolore, to name just a few.
And now, God help us, we have the Jubulani.
And devoutly wish we hadn’t.
Because this paragon of the ball maker’s art responds to kicks in an entirely new way.
Former Liverpool player Craig Johnston believes the "erratic, wild and unpredictable" nature of the Jabulani is "contributing to a much poorer World Cup".
Júlio César, Brazil’s goalkeeper, called it “as unpredictable as one of those cheap balls you’d buy in a supermarket.”
And striker Lúis Fabiano referred to its radical changes of direction as "supernatural".
In the midst of the ruckus, and responding to the complaints, two Brazilian scientists got their hands on a Jabulani and dragged it off for tests in a wind tunnel at the University of São Paulo.
Here’s what they discovered:
The Jabulani has more wind resistance, and therefore loses velocity faster, than any of its predecessors.
But that’s not the major problem.
The major problem is that, at slow speeds, the Jabulani moves through the air pretty much like any other football.
But at speeds above seventy km/h, the direction of motion begins to become erratic.
And becomes more erratic as the speed increases.
How fast is a kick when a striker is shooting at the goal?
Sometimes as much as 140km/h.
See, now, why so many players and coaches are concerned?
And their concerns are mounting.
Games, from here on in, could be decided by penalty kick shootouts.
And how’s that going to work if neither the shooter, nor the goalie, can be sure of the direction that will be taken by the ball?
The FIFA has, at least, acknowledged that there’s a problem.
After the conclusion of the Cup, they’ve agreed to discuss the matter with coaches, teams and Adidas.
Meantime, everyone is just going to have to live with it.
A footnote: the Brazilian experience prompted scientists at Caltech to test the ball on the 23rd of June. Their results confirm what everyone else has been saying about the Jabulani.
Some say capoeiria has its roots in the n’golo, the zebra dance of the Macupe of Southern Angola, a tribal ritual in which a young man could win a bride without paying the dowry if he could demonstrate great skill in fighting with his feet.
Others say that Brazilian slaves, recently imported from Africa, who were forbidden to possess firearms, knives, or clubs, invented capoeira as a way to fight with the sole weapon left to them: their bodies.
Still others claim capoeira never had a martial side, that it emerged as a sport, or recreational activity. And that it took place around the slave cabins when the day’s work was done.
The truth of the matter is we don’t know how capoeira got started.
We don’t even know, with any degree of certainty where the name capoeira came from.
What we do know is that this mixture of martial art, dance, music and ritual is native to Brazil, and that it was developed there among slaves brought from Africa.
There are three basic movements in capoeira, four defensive movements, eight basic kicks, fifteen takedowns, twenty-one other kicks and movements. If a given player uses any one of them, his/her antagonist uses another to respond. Mastering the give-and-take of capoeira takes years of practice.
In the Portuguese language, capoeira isn’t “fought”, or “danced”, it’s “played” (jogado).
Two players begin play by taking up a position in the center of a group (roda) formed by other players, spectators and musicians. As play progresses, other players step in to challenge one of the two. The unchallenged one, the one judged to be the loser, drops out.
Rodas don’t occur in silence. They happen to the sound of hands clapping, chants (chulas) and musical instruments.
The chulas tend to be somewhat melancholy. Here’s how one of them begins:
No céu entre quem merece,
Na terra vale é quem tem
You enter heaven on your merits.
Here on earth, what you own is all that counts.
The instruments generally include at least one drum (atabaque), a tambourine (pandeiro) and birimbaus of three different sizes.
Birimbaus are single-stringed musical bows with a gourd at one end to amplify the sound. The strings are steel wires, generally taken from the sidewalls of automobile tires.
It’s the birimbau that commands the movements in capoeira.
To best appreciate a roda, you have to see one, which you can best do by visiting Rio de Janeiro, or Salvador, in Bahia. Hang around in the streets of the old city, or go down to the beach, and you’ll stumble across them all the time.
But I know that many of you will never visit Brazil, and there are really no decent videos I know of that transmit the energy you’ll encounter at a genuine roda. So here’s the next best thing, a roda shot at a batizado (baptism) in which students are moving up in rank by demonstrating their ability in the presence of their master.
During the (almost) 59 years of his reign he’d rise daily at 7, seldom retire before 2, and spend the vast majority of his 19 waking hours attending to affairs of state. No Brazilian politician has ever worked longer, or harder, at governing the nation. He inherited an empire on the verge of collapse and left it a place of political stability. Brazil, in his time, was distinguished for freedom of speech, respect for civil rights and vibrant economic growth. He was Pedro II, the last emperor of Brazil, and the very epitome of a philosopher-king.
Here’s his earliest surviving picture. It was taken in 1848, when he was just 22 years old.
In addition to Portuguese, Pedro could read and speak Latin, French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Mandarin, Occitan and Tupi-Guarani.
His library contained more than 60,000 volumes - and he was reputed to have read every one of them. His palace contained a photo lab, another lab dedicated to chemistry and physics, and an astronomical observatory.
In addition to the sciences, he loved literature, poetry, art and music.
He won the respect and admiration of scholars such as Charles Darwin, Victor Hugo and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a friend to Richard Wagner, Louis Pasteur and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was elected a member of the Royal Society, The Russian Academy of Sciences, The American Geographic Society and the FrenchAcademy of Sciences, an honor previously granted to only two other heads of state: Peter the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte.
He financed the creation of the Institute Pasteur
and helped underwrite the construction of Wagner's Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
It was said of him that he kept his emotions under iron discipline, that he was never rude and never lost his temper. He was exceptionally discreet in words and cautious in action. He was diligent in appointing only highly-qualified candidates to positions in the government, insisted that every politician put in a workday of at least eight hours, and sought to curb corruption.
Here you see him with the weight of his years and his troubles upon him. This photo was shot shortly before he was deposed and sent into exile.
What brought him down?
Slavery.
He hated the practice, called it a “national shame”, never owned slaves of his own, but he couldn’t abolish slavery by imperial decree because his was a constitutional monarchy.
Nevertheless, he spent years struggling against it.
But, when he finally succeeded, the rich and powerful coffee farmers had a fit.
They regarded emancipation as confiscation of their personal property and launched a coup, a unique instance of a successful monarch overthrown despite the love of his people and at the pinnacle of his popularity.
When he heard the news of his deposition (15 November, 1889) Pedro simply commented: "If it is so, it will be my retirement. I have worked too hard and I am tired. I will go rest then."
This is the last photo of the imperial family in Brazil.
His last years were spent in Paris, where he lived in modest circumstances and in cheap hotels.
One very cold day he took a long drive in an open carriage along the Seine. He felt ill, contracted pneumonia and died at 00:35 a.m. on December 5, 1891.His last words were, "May God grant me these last wishes—peace and prosperity for Brazil..."While his body was being prepared for burial, a sealed package was found in the room. Next to it there was a message in Pedro’s own hand: "It is soil from my country, I wish it to be placed in my coffin in case I die away from my fatherland."
The package contained earth from every Brazilian province. In accordance with his wishes, it was placed inside the coffin.
This is the last picture of Pedro II, taken on the day after his death, December 6, 1891. You see him clad in the dress uniform of a Marshall of the Brazilian Army. The book beneath his head symbolized that his mind rested upon knowledge, even in death.
The establishment of the republic began a long downhill slide for Brazil. The country slipped into a period of anarchy, dictatorship and economic crises from which it has only recently recovered.
Winston Churchill quipped that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
In The Republic, Plato has Socrates steering us toward a benevolent monarchy as the best form of government.
Study the life of Pedro II.
And, in this one case at least, you’ll agree with Socrates, not Churchill.
