First Impressions of Bahia

Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos:
Certain cities are watched over, protected,
Graced by looming presences praised & revered
This region is colored by ancient energies,
Lighting a candle illuminating an angelic throng
All singing a seductive samba song
A serenade to Exu, Senhor do Bonfim,
The orisha who opens the way,
Lord of the Crossroads,
Trickster by day:
while the congregation calls in unision:

Laroyê!

Palm fronds & crooked cobblestone streets
Cachaca and crushed leaves swirled into a drink so sweet
A week in a former monastery, all thin walls & old ghosts
A convent turned hotel overlooking the harbor and coast
Penned in @ the Pelourinho
Aka “the pillory”
A pillar where imported slaves where once whipped and chained
The residual grace now remains
Where capoeiristas ginga and orishas hold sway
Where Africa & the indigenous parlay to play
Guardian spirits overlook this haunted bay
This the epicenter of Exu, the lord of ways…
Laroyê!

“I have the colors and shapes that I want
I am not evil nor saint, I am Exu!
I order and disorder, draw and erase, do and undo.
I am and don’t go. I take and don’t give. I am Exu.
I pass and cross. I draft, I blend and dance.
I am fluster and joy.
I roll, take and put; I gamble and have faith.
I am cloud, wind and dust.
When I want, man and woman.
I am of beaches and tides.
I possess each corner; I am boy, grandfather, even crazy.
I can be Joao, Maria or Jose.
I am the crossing point.
I sleep awake and snore speaking.
I run, cry and jump, I can “make son” whistling.
I am mortar, from dream, flesh and sand.
I am the people without flag.
The spit, my stick.
The seat? The wind!...
I am from the world, nor field, nor city.
I have no age.
I receive and respond through the peak, the horns of the nation.
I am Exu. I am shake, life, action.
I am the horns of the new moon; the belly of the full moon.
Do you want more?
I don’t give, I am not here anymore.”

Mario Cravo Jr., Bahian sculptor, artist, and scribe

Daylight @ the Convento do Carmo

Stirred awake to the sound of a woman singing an aria across the hall. This hotel is a trip, a haunted, ageless place framed by high ceilings and classical columns. A 500-year old former monastery, this convent is filled with ghosts of priests long gone & their answered and unaddressed prayers…

these small rooms we occupy today were once filled with Catholic monks in a new world, hence the name, “Convento do Carmo”…

Had the pleasure and privilege of having lunch with Rosalie and Marina Moraes, LB/Sao Paulo’s veteran PR rep, and an organizer of this conference. A lovely Brazilian woman with a bright smile, Marina, as it turns out, used to work for Brazilian TV in New York. As our conversation over lunch inevitably turned to music, she mentioned casually that she has souvenirs of her days spent working with Paul Simon, filming a documentary for Brazilian TV on how the man crafted the Graceland album, working with South African musicians Ladysmith Black Mambazo… That album, which is iconic and central to anyone with a world music bent, features tracks like “You Can Call Me Al”, “Graceland,” “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Feet,” and “Homeless.” It’s one of my favorites. To know someone who was following Paul Simon around with a camera crew during that period makes me really happy. Marina’s a character, and as we talked some more, she told me she worked with folks like Miles Davis and Muhammad Ali as well. Sweet Jesus… I wish I had pictures of me with Miles Davis… people like that rub off strange juju just through their pores…

Sao Paulo Guarlulhos Airport

Customs was a breeze. Gotta love a country that has futbol games playing on Samsung big screen TVs to entertain the folks stuck in a bottlenecked immigration line. Gol! Talk about good first impressions. The airport is comforting after a long ass flight, in which my erstwhile dickwad of a neighbor spilled his entire drink on me, waking me from sleep, and then, after wiping himself dry, turned aside and reclined back into a deep slumber without offering a word of apology or acknowledgement. Grrr… so I spent most of the flight sitting on a wet seat, with wet-ass pants that looked like I pissed myself, steaming as I watched “Sicko” and “The Simpsons Movie.” It could’ve been worse. But inconsiderate people sitting next to you make for long, trying flights…
Anyhow, this airport in Sao Paulo is OK. I’m stuck here for 7 hours waiting for my flight to Salvador, so I grabbed a “Sandwiche con Chester Club” and Café com Leite from a nice little restaurant, and people-watched while going over my Brazilian Portuguese phrase book The language barrier here is going to be rough, because people have been talking at me as if I’m supposed to understand them, and although my Spanish is good enough to comprehend most of what comes my way in Spanish, this Portuguese is looser, the phonetic sounds are different, and it’s got a different lilt to it. All “zh” and “ou” and “nh”. Communication is going to be a challenge…
The first 6 people to talk to me in this beautiful country were all soliciting for money at the airport. A very pretty teenage girl accompanied by her elderly, and clearly unhealthy mother, pleading for charity with big wide eyes. A chubby child with a backpack, rubbing his fingers together in the universal baksheesh gesture. A woman from an organization handing out “AIDS Awareness” pamphlets and pins. Another woman dropping “I Am Deaf / Donations Accepted” leaflets on café tables, and then collecting them a few minutes later. There’s a lot of poverty lurking in this airport, hustlers and people in need canvassing the folks passing through in the hopes of coming across a generous foreigner. The airport in Dhaka used to be the same way, except most of the fakirs were waiting outside for you, and once you left the building you were damn near assaulted by a horde of crippled beggars and heartbreakingly cute kids in rags pleading with you for money, with their hands out in practiced gestures. Talk about a trigger for liberal guilt... Poverty is a difficult subject to navigate, and its omnipresence in the world is offset by our cultivated detachment from it. There’s a way to give, to be charitable, to truly help people and communities rise from their circumstances to better themselves. Microcredit, certain charities, certain programs, they’re all viable options that have proven track records for improving people’s overall state of being. I don’t know that giving strangers money in airports is really productive beyond the immediate… or maybe I’m just trying to justify my stinginess, my lack of generosity, my tight-fisted first few hours in this new country. I’ll find a way to give back once I’ve been here for a second….

The Limbo that is O'Hare

7 pm, Sunday night
Missed the last quarter of the much-hyped Patriots/Colts game to haul my ass down to O’hare and check in for my flight to Sao Paulo. Given my Muslim name, perpetually disheveled appearance, and the curious collection of stamps in my passport, I’ve discovered in recent years that I’m on some kind of national security watch list. It hasn’t yet caused me any problems, beyond the folks at every airline check-in desk cross-referencing my records each time I fly, and asking me a few pointed questions about my destination & reason for traveling. They also refuse to let me check in without seeing an airline representative. I’m OK with all that, at least I’m not on the “No-Fly-List”, the only trouble it causes me is I have to plan an extra hour into my travel time just in case, and occasionally I’ll miss the ending of a fabulous football game, like tonight. Sigh.

Anyhow. While passing through security, it occurred to me that the O’hare experience is the great equalizer for anyone traveling through the USA, it’s a shitty limbo that offers travelers of all stripes a burocratic nightmare to navigate as they try to get where they’re going. It’s always clogged full of disgruntled passengers en route elsewhere, the layout is neither intuitive nor particularly efficient, and it exudes a certain world-weariness that never fails to leave me feeling drained. There are airports in the world that are actually pleasant to visit, that you get excited about passing through, like Singapore’s Changi Airport, a place that actually people visit in their spare time for kicks. That’s an example of an ergonomic space that feels like a triumph of design and grace, that it makes every other airport I’ve been through feel cluttered, congested, and somewhat hostile. O’hare’s a behemoth like no other, though, a sprawling nightmare that poorly reflects on the city of Chicago, and manages to be an affront to its neighbors because of its perpetually threatened expansion, that would destroy people’s homes and replace them with runways. It manages to give everyone who passes through it a surreal kafka-esque experience, that resembles being trapped in some kind of strange, weirdly-lit purgatory while awaiting deliverance. But at least it works, I can’t complain too much. Zia International in Dhaka and the airports in Calcutta and Karachi, at least through the early 90’s, were at entirely other levels of dysfunction, but they’re in a different class because they’re in developing countries. Lagos in Nigeria is supposed to be the worst in the world… I sound like quite the airport snob, but hell, I’m stuck in airport limbo for 20 hours till I get to my destination, and have nothing else to write about at the moment…