From BrazilParaty – From Brazil

MIMO and Paraty – the Brazilian cultural weekender

frombrazil — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 19:43:37 +0000

Paraty, the colonial coast town near Rio, is becoming known for its festivals which are attracting more and more culturally curious Brazilians. Dom Phillips reports from MIMO, featuring the complex music appreciated here. Above: the Rum Group with Tareq Al Nasser, from Jordan. Photos Gustavo Otero

Dom Phillips

As the 20 or so white-clad musicians in the Jordanian orchestra on stage, called the Rum Group and presided over by Tareq Al Nasser, romped through what sounded like the soundtrack to a film you couldn’t see, shadows of hula hoop dancers flickered on the white walls of the beautiful old church beside the stage.

Paraty is celebrated for its colonial architecture – and this first edition in the city of the MIMO Festival wisely made good use of it. But it is increasingly becoming known for its cultural events, each of which attracts its own distinct audience. Good news for the tourism industry on which the city depends.

Paraty’s Jazz Festival, for instance, appeals to an older demographic, like jazz festivals all over the world. The creatively-inclined flock to photography weekend Paraty em Foco (Paraty in Focus). Panama hats and pearls are big at the FLIP literary festival. A younger crowd concentrates on getting drunk at the cachaça festival. New Year’s Eve packs out the Pontal beach with axé pop for families and young couples.

MIMO slotted neatly into the “mid-30s, disposable income, culturally curious, and, in the case of the men, bearded” bracket. The festival started out as a caravan of local musicians in 2004 in Olinda, near Recife, as the Mostra Internacional de Música em Olinda. Like Paraty, it is a colonial town big on history and culture. Today MIMO is also staged in Ouro Preto, another historic city in Minas Gerais state, but this was the first time it had ventured this far south.

It was a well-organised event with proper sounds and lights and corporate sponsors that were easy enough to ignore – bar the heavily-branded shed that a cellphone operator inexplicably constructed in front of a screen – and all shows are free, though some of the events held in indoor venues like churches require you to get a free ticket beforehand. And MIMO had the advantage that Brazilian audiences are very open to music that might be seen as too difficult for other countries. Perhaps this is cultural – both samba and bossa nova are considerably more complicated both musically and rhythmically than rock and roll.

There was much interest at MIMO in headliner Herbie Hancock, a jazz funk legend who filled the same main square with an instrumental show in which he performed with a percussionist, a bass player and a drummer, leaving him in charge of every other melody in the show, much of which he played on a keyboard he could carry around like an electric guitar. Thus demonstrating a musical ego as impressive as his repertoire.

If the crowd did chatter in Hancock’s quieter moments, they hooked back in for his career bookending hits ‘Cantaloupe Island’, a jazzy piano bar standard, and pioneering electro classic ‘Rockit’. And the same audience stayed on to see Brazilian rapper BNegão and his group Seletores de Frequência combine lazy funk grooves and an evocative jazz trumpet with live hip hop into the early hours.

Despite its sleepy appearance, Paraty is not scared of the odd late night out, as its carnival shows – the best bloco (mobile samba street party) in town, Paraty do Amanhã (Paraty of Tomorrow), heads out of the main square at 1am. And most of the audience even stood through BNegão’s ‘hardcore experiment’ with thrash metal, even though by now it was gone 3am.

MIMO also had early evening attractions, like the premiere of the film Olho Nu (Naked Eye) about the colourful Brazilian singer Ney Matogrosso, at which the artist himself appeared, and German multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus both performing in a church and then hosting a Saturday morning workshop to explain his work.

All of which could make MIMO sound like hard work, when in fact it was just the right mix of culture, music and fun. Provided, that is, that Jordanian orchestras, hand-held keyboards, and hoola-hoop shadow dancing are your idea of a good time.

FLIP 2013

frombrazil — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 23:10:54 +0000

Brazil’s annual literary festival is a clever, unfussy and efficient event, interspersed with moments of unpredictable intellectual drama. Dom Phillips shares some stories from FLIP 2013.

by Dom Phillips

Literary festivals, like soccer matches and movies, need big moments.

This one came during a ‘table’ – or mesa, as roundtable debates at the Paraty International Literary Festival, or FLIP (Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty), are called – on Saturday. It was about death.

The Chicago-based Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon was asked by somebody in the audience about how and why he wrote about the death of his daughter on a panel.

Silence. Collective intake of breath. Big moment. Jesus.

Hemon’s one-year-old daughter Isabel died in 2010 and he later published an essay in the New Yorker about it. He explained that when he made the decision to become a writer, he had taken a decision to go wherever this vocation took him. The question, to him, was not “how could he write about the death of his daughter” but “how could he not write about the death of his daughter”. No subject was off-limits. “This was the most difficult place I ever went to – and I came back,” he said, to thunderous applause.

The stories told at FLIP can get this dramatic. Even the fluid, ever-changing recipe for the family’s borscht that Hemon described was dramatic – because he had so many other literary ingredients in there, like the emigration of his family from the Ukraine.

But FLIP the event itself rarely is. It is a polite, and clever event, run with an unfussy efficiency. Things work – even complicated things like the simultaneous translation. Coffee is drunk. Restaurants fill up. People buy books. There are a lot of men in white straw hats and linen. Professional women in their 30s come in pairs and threes. There is a balmy atmosphere. People get tiddly but they rarely get drunk. It is completely unlike the rest of Brazil, which sometimes feels like it might stop working at any moment.

So the entrance of the immense, bristly moustache under Tobias Wolff’s top lip, like a big, white brush glued to his face, was a welcome injection of the unpredictable into all this order. Wolff and his moustache had been paired with Karl Ove Knausgård, the Norwegian who achieved literary success with a series of no-holds barred books about his own life – and indeed, ex-wife.

This looked good. But FLIP lucked out with cancellations this year – Knausgård couldn’t make it, French bad-boy writer Michel Houllebecq also cancelled, and poet Tamim Al-Barghouti either lost or had his passport stolen at an airport in London en route and didn’t make it either.

So Wolff and his moustache faced off against the young Mexican novelist Juan Pablo Villalobos, who lives in Brazil and has written about narco-traffickers. Wolff read from his story ‘A Bullet to the Brain’ and mesmerised his audience with the way he plays with time in it. The two discussed violence – its role in their work and in their lives.

Wolff had presence. He is a professor of literature. He did elder statesman gracefully. He had the moustache. The roles were defined. But Villalobos, while deferent, declined to be intimidated. Maybe he is used to big moustaches in Mexico. He told a story about the town he grew up in, somewhere in the back end of beyond in Mexico was so dull that his brother, at the age of three, had invented a whole other family with whom he wanted to live. Wolff laughed happily. Rightly. This had been a big, powerful, stimulating debate.

The festival had organised three debates at the last minute to discuss the protests that swept across Brazil. I caught one. in which the British historian TJ Clark, philosopher Vladimir Safatle and psychoanalyst Tales Ab’Saber took on the theme of spectacle and utopia in the context of recent protests.

Interesting things were said, along the way. I know they were. I just lost them in the haze of the 10-15 minute monologue which each speaker delivered each time they were asked something. They were all in serious need of an edit button. The audience cheered what were generally pro-demonstration sentiments, often vigorously. But it felt like there was a yawning gap between this orderly, if at times impassioned, debate and the manner in which Brazil’s wave of popular demonstrations communicated and organised themselves on Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, often in very few words, often very quickly, often relying on videos that people had filmed themselves on cellphones or twitter. Visual not literary. Talking a different language, a much quicker, more efficient one. One might expect a literature festival to have been more attuned to that.

And there was even more of a gap in communication style between this and the demonstration of a couple of hundred locals who had clattered across the bridge and past the festival that afternoon, banging drums and complaining about education and health, Paraty’s murder rate – 31 this year alone in a city of 36,000 – and the lack of libraries.

Protests aside, the audience, festival and communication came together best in an innovative event that ended up being the surprise hit of the whole thing. It was a sort of live Bossa Nova show cummusic lesson, and took place not in the authors’ tent, which feels a little like a television studio, but in the outdoor marquee where author debates are shown on a big screen at a fraction of the admittance price.

Critic and writer José Miguel Wisnik, guitarist Arthur Nestrovski, who is also artistic director of the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, or (Osesp), and singer Paula Morelenbaum did a show and tell on the work and songs of Brazilian poet and composer Vinicius de Moraes – a sort of combination of live show and music and history lesson.

Moraes is the guy who wrote the lyrics to ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ and dozens of other Brazilian music classics, which were dissected, explained and exquisitely performed with just voice, guitar and a little percussion box that Morelenbaum tapped with a brush. Bossa nova is the most bittersweet of Brazil’s many musical forms, and also the most restrained: here its minimalist sweets of emotion were captured with economy and delight.

On Sunday, as it all began winding down, I asked Tobias Wolff and his moustache if there was an art to doing well on stage at a literary festival. “It would be the art of not being too conscious of it, of relaxing, and enjoying it, not thinking of it as a performance so much,” he said, beaming, as he and his moustache were hustled into another debate.

And if that doesn’t work, try Bossa Nova.

FLIP literature festival – preview

frombrazil — Tue, 28 May 2013 21:41:46 +0000

If you care about literature and/or Brazil , pay attention to FLIP this July – Dom Phillips

The Paraty International Literary Party (Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty), or FLIP, as Brazil’s biggest literary festival is known, announced its 2013 lineup in Rio last Thursday.

Palestinian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti and French novelist Michel Houellebecq are among the star turns. As is the former Brazilian culture minister and elder statesman of Brazilian music, Gilberto Gil (above), who will both perform at the opening show and debate a sociologist (though not, sadly, at the same time). Brit Geoff Dyer, American short story specialist/International Man Booker winner Lydia Davis and Brazilian singer Maria Bethânia also appear, though it could be argued the real attractions are the cobblestone charms and lush tropical coastline setting of Paraty itself. July 3-7. FLIP website in English

FLIP – Paraty’s Literary Festival

frombrazil — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 23:14:53 +0000

Performers on stilts and gringos on paddleboards were two of the unexpected, but wonderful, experiences over the weekend event which brings Brazil face-to-face with the world’s literary powerhouses.

By Dom Phillips

Wobbling atop a stand-up paddle board may not be the most conventional way to view a literary festival. But it’s certainly the most scenic. I attempted to paddle genteelly, determinedly banishing mortifying images of me toppling into the river as we headed down the river beside which FLIP – the International Paraty Literature (Festival Literária Internacional de Paraty) – is staged.

My host Michael Smyth, an adventure tour guide in this beautiful, costal town of Paraty where FLIP is staged would argue that boats and beaches are what most people come here for. Apart from the 25,000 FLIP had brought in for its annual five-day festival, which ended Sunday.

He’d tricked me into taking an alternative route up a river on our Sunday afternoon stand-up paddle trip, and suddenly we were heading past the festival’s riverside marquee, cafes and bookshops and out to sea, in front of thousands of erudite Brazilian literary buffs, hanging out in the sun with their cameras, and suddenly brightening at the sight of two skinny, aging gringos in grubby lycra T-shirts and swimming trunks, grimly paddling towards them.

Paraty is the sort of bucolic Brazilian beach town for which words like ‘picturesque’, ‘colonial’, ‘charming’ and ‘ambling’ could have been invented. But it buzzes with life, ideas and conversation for FLIP when writers are the stars and Brazilian names like Luís Fernando Veríssimo get stopped on the street for photographs. It’s awfully civilized and more than a little posh, but it’s also a lot of fun.

And by Sunday, the last of FLIP’s five days, I’d seen it from every other angle bar the stand-up paddle board, so what the hell. I’d seen it from inside the main authors’ tent, with a couple of thousand literary buffs chuckling at the wry witticisms of English novelist Ian McEwan, or the acute observations on the nature of family from Portuguese writer Dulce Maria Cardoso – a star of new-generation Portuguese literature.

From outside on the grass by the port, watching men in medieval costume on stilts perform an inexplicable theatrical routine. And from the town’s main square, where the words of great Brazilian writer Carlos Drummond de Andrade were being projected onto the side of an old church, along with photos and his old identity cards, while a group played chorinho, the sweetly melancholy pre-samba music and a crowd around them smiled, swayed and sang along.

There were films, art exhibitions, shows and children’s events spread around the town. But the real action was in the authors’ tent, where during mesas, or ‘tables’, in TV chat show style, a mediator tries to get writers to open up and spill their deepest creative secrets. Novelists by nature not being the most exhibitionist of creatures, this can be a hit and miss affair. A little like balancing on a stand-up paddle board.

But the mesas also fill your head with the ideas, revelations and the words of extremely clever and interesting people who spend their lives inventing other worlds for a living, which can frequently be a richly rewarding experience. As John Freeman, editor of British literary magazine Granta, in town to launch its first collection of New Young Brazilian Writers, observed: “Here the ideas are the entertainment.” FLIP, in short, is for anyone who loves books. “The bookstore is insane,” Freeman added. “It’s like a beehive.”

For instance American novelist Jonathan Franzen revealed during his session that for him, writing was the mental equivalent of the Greek Myth of Prometheus (you remember, Prometheus is chained to a rock while an eagle eats his liver on a daily basis). But Franzen also flummoxed both mediator and audience with his endless pauses and oblique flights of imaginative fancy.

Asked about how characters dealt with freedom in his books, Franzen awwwwed for an awfully long time then observed that there were many different types of freedom. For instance, a visitor to American department store Bed Bathroom & Beyond would find so many varieties of shower curtain it would be impossible to settle on one. That’s a kind of freedom too. I thought he was hilarious, honest and profound. But many complained afterwards that he was chatíssimo – dull as death.

This is perhaps where FLIP’s laudable internationalism ran aground. Heard delivered laconically in English, in Franzen’s dry mid-West tones, the shower curtain thing is funny. But Anglo-Saxon irony does not translate well to Portuguese – trust me, I’ve researched this thoroughly on innumerable disastrous dinner dates with Brazilian women. It just sounds rude or, worse, irreverent. And Brazil is a conservative society where great writers and a sort of esoteric intellectualism are revered, and pithy irreverent jokes are not.

As was illustrated last year when a young Brazilian woman complained to me after a mesa by American novelist James Ellroy. Ellroy had got a laugh when he said he had never read the great Russian novelists like Tolstoy and shrugged. Like, so what? How dare he joke about not having read the greats? That, essentially, was her beef. He’s James Ellroy, he can say whatever he likes, was my reply. It didn’t go down very well either.

Brit Ian McEwan and American Jennifer Egan, who were on together, did go down well though: they were funny, honest and intelligent. Charming. Humble. And they avoided long pauses. The crowd gave them a standing ovation afterwards.

A mesa with Dulce Maria Cardoso and Brazilian writers João Anzenello Carrascoza and Zuenir Ventura began slowly, but finished with a bang when Ventura read out a passage from his new book in which a shocked child inadvertently stumbles in on his aunt having sex in a pharmacy. Sex. Now there’s one subject all Brazilians love to have a good laugh about – even the posh, intellectual ones.

As well as, obviously, the site of two bony, graying foreigners edging past them on the river, heading out to the sea, precariously balanced on two stand-up paddle boards, eyes fixed firmly to the front, like models on a catwalk. Pleading silently with every God in the universe: ‘Please, please, please don’t let me fall off…’

The Gods answered my prayers. We did not fall off, and headed serenely out to sea and out of sight. Only problem is now I have to spend the rest of eternity chained to a rock while an eagle eats my liver on a daily basis.

(Note to Brazilian readers, that’s a joke. Seriously, I love Greek mythology, I’ve read all of them… I just can’t remember the names right now, cause I’m balanced on a stand-up paddle board.)