Diadema, Brazil

Diadema, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

One more photo while we're at it.

"If I were starting a business, it would be in either concrete or hair gel. I'd be the richest man in Brazil."

Avenue Paulista - Sao Paulo, Brazil, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Some people were complaining about the look of this blog, so I've done some HTMLing, and added my top 100 favorite blogs to the sidebar. Now you can procrastinate just like I do!


This is a quick entry to write about the horrendously intense clouds that were looming over Avenue Paulista this afternoon. The day had started with an unbearable 90 degrees of heat and humidity and awfulness, but as the day wore on, and I know this is a cheap cliche but I'm running with it, you could palpably feel the tension in the sky as the clouds rolled in and got ready to rain like all get out as it tends to do here in Sao Paulo. Granted, this afternoon we were spared the onslaught, but after years and years of Portland's six-month someone-left-the-faucet-on-upstairs drizzle, the sheer volume of the water falling from the sky is quite impressive. Even the storms in Minnesota's summer, complete with afternoons spent in the basement listening to the radio for information on tornadoes, doesn't quite compare. Sao Paulo is a pretty tense city; the streets are loud and full of cars that won't cede an inch to pedestrians, the pace is fast and the fumes noxious, and the general concrete fortifications that parcel out this entire city create a pretty stressful metropolis. I've already written some on the way safety is constructed spatially and it's relationship to health, and considering how much of a beating Sao Paulo has already given to my lungs (pollution), my liver (caipirinhas), and now my heart (all this stress) it becomes a lot easier to see the tolls and frustrations with urbanity that have long driven everyone from Thoreau to the Brady Bunch to my parents to choose shelter by living in the suburbs. I wrote about New York a few weeks ago, comparing the city to Anne Spirn's conceptual Granite Garden, but here in Sao Paulo the term "Granite Jungle" seems more fitting; Sao Paulo humid, sticky, and full of the invasive species of homo concreteus-sprawlicus that suggests that guiding growth of the city is impossible. After a particularly busy day on the train system today, a suburban commuter line pulled above ground to a neck of town I had never visited before; the urban landscape still continued in all directions, as far as I could see. The enormity and sheer size of Sao Paulo remains conceptually out of my grasp, especially as a kid used to living within a mile of Portland's Urban Growth Boundary. But I digress. I have more that I want to write about water in the city of Sao Paulo (specifically in the way that the rivers have been straight-jacketed with concrete and asphalt, like everything else in this city, and the torrential summer floods turn the steep city street gutters into gushing streams, guiding the water to who-knows-where downstream where someone less fortunate probably lives) but I should be sleeping to rest up for Carnival this weekend, the futebol game tomorrow, and hell, even some academic work somewhere in there.

To end on a happy note, I arrived early to the Metro station today, and while flustering about my generally horrendous Portuguese, the woman working at the convenience store took a liking to me and, after asking where I was from, gave me my coffee for free. This only really saved me about forty five cents - the Real/Dollar conversion rate is generous - and they only serve coffee around here in the tiniest thimble-like shot glasses, but it made for a good start to my day. I've also been meaning to write about experiencing culture through literally consuming it in the form of Brazilian takes on pizza, sushi, mangoes, alcohol, and the like, but that post will come in time too, I guess.

On another happy note, I received the most adorable email from my next host family in Curitibas. I'm pretty sad to leave Aldeni, my mom-away-from-mom who feeds me super well and greets me with a long, cheerful "Oi!" every time I come home from class, but this program is of course continuing at break neck speed. I've been on IHP for about a month?! What?!

Casa do Hip Hop, Diadema Brazil

Casa do Hip Hop, Diadema Brazil, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

"Return, I will, to old Brazil..."

Paulistanos

Kids, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

"Anyone who predicts the death of cities has already met their spouse".
-Clay Shirky, Here Come's Everybody.

Some sort of holiday passed this weekend back in the states about love and relationships and Hallmark cards and those heart-shaped candies that are delicious in January but always manage to be pretty stale and chewy by the time the actual day itself rolls around. But yes, Valentine's Day. Here in Sao Paulo, there was no perceptible uptick in romance, lust and love, but then again, it would be difficult for people in this city to live more passionately anyway. In my travels around the city, love is surprisingly in the air around every turn; couples seem to really get into tonsil hockey pretty much anywhere, whether on the street, the 701U onibus that takes me to class, the Universidade cafeteria, bars and restaurantes, wherever, really. With a quick conversation and a "você quer ficar comigo?" almost any two clubbing brazilians will swap saliva for a while and then get back to the club, commitment-free, to see who else is around. Kissing isn't just for hardcore making out, either; it's traditional to kiss someone on the left side of their face when first meeting them, a practice that I find fascinating because of what it says about construction of gender relations (men never greet other men with a kiss, only man/woman and woman/woman) and the different sort of cultural understandings of personal space, physical intimacy, and "closeness" different societies create for themselves.

Talking about "closeness" in Brazil is a pretty decent segway, really, into talking about the urban form here in Sao Paulo. My study abroad program has done a pretty stellar job of encouraging us to explore and understand the urban fabric here in a city teeming with twenty million people, unbearable heat, and blunt social inequality. In a city with such absurd power imbalance and a premium for basic social services, the differences of Paulistano lifestyles and abilities for to control their surrounding environment create blatantly absurd landscapes. On consecutive days we visited a fortified enclave of million-dollar condominium towers in suburban Morumbi followed by a visit to a Favela, a courageous undertaking by urban homeless to reclaim unused private land and scour for discarded concrete to build an informal, undocumented neighborhood. The contradictions between these two landscapes are many, and I was really happy to see that one of our readings referenced Mike Davis and his notion about the creation of a geography of fear. Are people in those high towers, with 150 security personnel and gates and guarded entries, really safe at night? Do they feel safe at night? Are the people in the tiny shacks and beer-bottle-window favelas, with neighborhoods ardently guarded by druglords and an unspoken dominant power hierarchy, really unsafe at night? Do they feel unsafe at night? We had a fantastic speaker last week that really challenged our notions about safety, and how its constructed spatially, and I couldn't help but link it to health. In the city of Sao Paulo, with traffic galore, everyone feels safer using an automobile to get around, and most cars own the streets by even run red lights at night to avoid carjacking. Yet the air pollution is abundant here; every day's worth of air here is equivalent to smoking three cigarettes, a nasty, uncomfortable pollution that clings to your skin in the muggy weather and never quite gets scrubbed off, much of it mostly related to the supreme reliance of cars necessary to get around the city. While kidnappings are rampant here in Sao Paulo, I'd argue the nasty air here is just as likely to kill you. Perhaps in the 21st century, its time for cities to start developing a geography of fear that doesn't build walls and install fortified security cameras but instead well-lit mass transit, wind turbines and sidewalks.

This computer's battery is low, and while I want to write so much more about my trip, I probably shouldn't, at least not tonight. I apologize for cutting my last entry short (i think my roommate clicked "post" before I was ready to), and I'll try and keep current with whatever I'm up to. It's Sunday, we watched a great football game today, I had the best pizza of my life last night at three in the morning, Carnival is this next weekend, and I leave for MST and Curitibas sometime next week. I apologize for my above attempt at linking my experiences to Valentine's day, and doing so a day late anyway. I've already been on IHP for about a month?!

Tudo Bem.

Life in the Cidade

Life in the Cidade, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

According to GOOGLE ANALYTICS, the link to this little ol' blog of mine from Kira's Out of a Suitcase has resulted in a whopping six hits from Poughkeepsie, New York

The Summer's Life is Good

The Summer's Life is Good, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Still alive, having a great time in São Paulo. I´ve been collecting a handful of scribbled notes about things I want to blog about, so stay on the edge of your seats, a significant update may be coming your way this weekend.

Happy Birthday Oregon! 150 years, and never looked better.

Ilhabela

Ilhabela, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Sure beats Minnesota right about now.

More ruminations on contested spaces and colors.

The IHP program takes our classes at Universidade Mackenzie, which is some private school about the size of Macalester a good 45 minute walk from my host family's house in Pinheiros. Being summer and all here (I know, in February, crazy, right?) this is the beginning of the semester for Mckenzie students, and for many freshman, their first week of college. While Orientation is always a big deal at Macalester, it doesn't quite prepare to the revelry and ridiculousness of Orientation week here in Sao Paulo. On our walk to school last week, we encountered an entire group of students, covered in bright paint colors, throwing eggs at each other and shaving their heads as part of a ritualistic beginning of their studies at university. We could hear their celebrations all day in our classroom (which made the presentations somewhat hard to sit through), and after class a few of us joined this gigantic party that had formed in the neighborhood streets surrounding the school. Colors, colors everywhere, and coolest of all, there were so many kids streaming out of the bars that they took over the streets, stopping traffic and celebrating in a gigantic summer's party.

Later that week, we went to a Samba School, in which the group is eagerly practicing for the upcoming celebration of Carnival, and they too were able to formally close down the streets so that the 50 part drumline, the dancers and the singers could practice strutting their music and costumes. They played one song for about twenty minutes, which had a chorus about how Samba is in everyone's DNA, and watching this tiny older woman move to the beat and shout every word of every song made me think about how lame America is and how much I wish Americans made it a point to celebrate life more often. There's something fantastically emblematic about shutting down the streets for cars, stopping traffic and formal commerce so that the entire block can be turned into a setting for a party with cheap, informal food shops, lots and lots of dancing that goes on all night, and an opportunity to get out and reclaim all of that public space for yourself.

And to speak of contested space, you can't talk about cities without talking about density. I think the first time I really noticed it on this trip was in New York, where I would have difficulty maneuvering around the tiny tables at cramped restaurants, each arranged to fit as many people into the place as possible. There is such a premium on space, such a demand to use it efficiently and for a profit, that the whole island of Manhattan was built on a grid to make it easier for speculators hundreds of years ago to purchase their plot and make their investments. Here in Sao Paulo, I see the contests of density not so much in restaurants as in traffic. Cars flood the streets in Sao Paulo, and traffic is a mess as people use buses, subways, cars, and even helicopters for the very rich to get around this sprawling metropolis. On Consolacao, a major road leading towards our University, there are miles of buses clogged on the bus lane, each bus beyond capacity with heads sticking out of windows to grasp a bit of less-humid summer air, while the next two lanes in each direction are full of sparcely populated cars, each comfortably sitting in their own spheres of comfort, a space in which 15 people would fit with the same density as the bus. I can't help but think about the notion of transportation justice, as we read and hear about poor construction workers and house maids who commute hours upon hours, standing on buses to get into the inner city and retreat to their favelas or farther outposts away from our garden city, well kept neighborhoods.

Speaking of colors, I am horrendously red from my trip to Ilhabela, which might be one of the most serene places I have visited on earth. I will write more about all that later, but I'm trying to keep my posts short and relevant, neither of which will happen if I allow myself to continue rambling on. Life is good, and I am sunburned.

Third Largest City in the world

Third Largest City in the world, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

20 million is a lot of people.

As I think of the next thing worth blogging about, be sure to check out my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dietpoison. I post the best photos here, or at least the ones most pertinent to whatever I'm thinking about, but I'll be keeping my flickr fresh, at least until we leave for Curitibas. I'm fortunate to have a nice (read: understanding) roommate that is allowing me to relinquish my internet needs for the next few weeks by letting me use his computer to updatez my google readerz and see the top stories (Daschle? Transit Stimulus Bills? Blazers over Hornets? Funny hipster runoff posts?) and update this blog. My family is absurdly wonderful to me, Aldeni makes me a giant plate of food every night, and her chirpy English is better than my emerging (read: nonexistant) Portuguese. Things are looking as though we'll be heading to Ilhabela this weekend, an island a few hours northeast of here out in the Atlantic covered in rainforest, and I'm sure that'll bring about many pretty photos, stories, and blogworthy ideas. Until then, I'm trying to come up with some sort of connection between how, you know, I go to school in St Paul, and now i'm in Sao Paulo, and how different they are/similiar they are, you know... yeah.

São Paulo

São Paulo, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

I took so many photos in New York in black and white, and why not? Winter in The City means short days, lots of artificial lighting, washed out condescent-lit faces, and shooting black and white (especially with contrasty settings and high iso) helps photos take on that gritty, blunt, stiff aura about The City that I wrote about a few days ago. New York in January, not unlike in many other months, is the product of an almost entirely man-managed environment forced to deal with extreme temperature, unpredictable weather, and even snowfall, all of which are natural features that mankind is only starting to learn to manipulate and to which we are largely at the fate of mother nature. While residents of New Orleans and other sites of natural disasters can justifiably claim that there is a spatial, social logic as to who takes on the blunt of environmental hardship, we have obviously not found a way to prevent the environment from figuratively/literally raining on our parades and adversely impacting ourselves, especially those of us in cities, the places that are seemingly the farthest removed from nature in the first place. But I digress. Even on the crisp, sunny days we enjoyed during my stay in The City, I found that shooting in color didn't represent the way the Brooklyn Bridge, the 1 line Subway or the South Bronx and the people who inhabit these spaces defiantly built, shaped and reshaped their environment. The 125th St Subway station in New York is such a testament to audacity; who dreamed up building such a large lattus of steel to move the subway above the smaller valley? Similiarly, the efforts to pull the South Bronx out of disinvestment and urban blight are best viewed through black and white; the racial disparity of urban society are still clearly demarcated, but the film exposes all the shades of grey that exist only when you look for them.

And yet, after a ten hour sleepless flight and waking up in São Paulo, all I see is color, color, color. The different colors of skin on the streets, where race is also heavily contested yet constructed in so many unique ways, the colors of the absurdly potent caipirinhas and other drinks at The City's voracious bars, the vibrant colors of the sunset that sneaks through endless lines of towers, the colors of the delicious mangoes I am graciously fed by my host family with every meal, the colors of graffiti and murals on every wall that, not unlike New York's own citizen initiatives, hint at an underground meritocracy where anyone with creativity and drive can have a lasting impact on the built environment, or even the figurative colors of portuguese, a language that is as much about expression and emotion as it is about grammar, where the innovative pronounciations of the letters C, J, and D keep the language bouncy and keep me on my heels as I navigate a country and language in which I'm inescapibly, entirely immersed.

But perhaps most prominent are the colors of a warm, southern hemisphere summer and an oppressively hot sun that watches my every move and oddly sets in the North. Things have been cold for a while. If you look at this blog, I've been posting my favorite photos since December, almost entirely in black and white, photos that look great on a bleak, black background that tried to convey that blurry-eyed bon-homie from late night hotcakes and coffee back in Portland. But in so many ways, I'm not there any more. There are just too many colors in São Paulo to rely on those quiet nights for entertainment, to dwell on the harsh, dark urban landscape, and above all, to shoot in black and white.

In other news, I definitely scored the email address of an attractive brazilian girl at a bar last night. As they say in Brasil, Tudo Bem.