I spent the day today with my new friend, Floyd, a smiling photographer who befriended me over breakfast in the hotel restaurant the other day. A transplant from Jamaica via New York, Floyd spends a couple of months out of each year in Bahia, working from a rented apartment and selling his images to pay his way. Check out his site. It was a pleasure and a privilege to stumble across him at the Village Novo, as he opened up a world to me that I would never have accessed without him. He looked like good people from the outset, sitting in the corner of the café, deep into his Apple Powerbook (in the pic he's the guy on the right. Damien Marley is on the left). In the private echo chamber of my own prejudices, dreads with powerbooks = a better planet. Floyd spent a chunk of that first morning chatting up one of the lovely waitresses of the Village Novo in sly, endearing Portuguese, and when he started talking to me he had those signature island accents to certain words that spell out Jamaica to anyone who listens hard enough. I’m so grateful to have found a friend for my last few days in Barra, because there are scenes beyond my ability to find in Brazil, and it takes someone like Floyd to crack open the door…
We visited the Pelhourinho for my last time on this trip, as I wanted to pick up a few things before I departed. I had the traumatizing experience of having my bank card refused and subsequently locked out by Big Brother, because clearly someone at Chase stateside thought it suspicious that my bank account was suddenly being used in Brazil. So I’ve had no money for my last few days and nights in Brazil, which is not a good place to be in as a tourist, or anyone else for that matter. Funny how your cash flow determines so much of what you take from any given place, or moment in time…
So Floyd decided to take me around the Pelhourinho as he took pictures. The best things in life are free, right? He took me down an alley into a shop owned by a righteous dread named Chilly Stone, transplanted from California, a silkscreen artist, graphic designer, and serious student and devotee of the Rastafarian faith. A conscious soul with a penchant for deep reggae and duotone art, Chilly makes some sick T-Shirts, so I bought a few to hawk at the Africa Hi-Fi DJ nights I work in Chicago. It was a solid connection to make, because I could totally sell a bunch of his T-shirts in Chicago, and it doesn’t hurt to have a friend in Bahia. Chilly & Floyd spent some time catching up, and clued me into the looming crisis on the horizon dealing with the continued devaluation of the dollar. As the dollar continues to shrink in value (the Canadian Dollar is now worth more than the US Dollar), it’ll trigger widespread economic repercussions throughout Latin America, ranging from inflation to capital flight. It’ll look ugly in the US, too, but you never hear people discuss the fact that real wages have shrunk under George W Bush, and that people are in fact making less for more work. Paul Krugman has been riffing on this for years, but he’s largely been written off as a “liberal new york times columnist,” instead of the serious mind he is. The fact remains, if the dollar keeps plummeting downwards, it’ll take a lot of people with it for the ride…
After leaving Chilly’s store we hopped a cab and headed to a rendezvous with a couple of Floyd’s photographer friends in Castella Branca, outside of Salvador, about a 30 minute drive.
No comments:
Post a Comment