Dispatch from Rio de Janeiro

Severo Sarduy once called the blank spaces between songs on LPs "playas" (beaches). I offer these thoughts even as I'm wedged between other things.



I went to Rio

and it was a good thing that I prepared myself with Chuck Mangione. You arrive and it has all the things you love about those cities you have lost. It is kick back and mellow gold. Rio doesn’t just meet the sea, it allows it take over.

and I never heard Akon sound so beautiful. His “Don’t Matter” rang from the hilltop of Dona Marta, a construction made from struggle and scraps and brilliant hobbit invention. I saw its youngest residents nimbly scale the steep steps with Havaianas made so small they seemed a miracle of manufacturing. The uterus gasped for air.

Dont Matter - Akon

and I came across a body rocking poem from the Museu de Arte Moderna. In the spirit of the object or, better put, the neoconcretist non-object, I’ve taken the liberty to replicate it for you here. It is by Theon Spanudis (the Turkish born and Sao Paolo raised poet) and it is taken from his “Poesias" :

tante

dis


dis tante. I can only begin to tease out some of the potential of this poem-nonobject. It is not only something that awashes us in productive melancholy, but is also a thing that offers an actual listening mode. What do I mean? Just that there is something being modeled here that allows for a way to think about musical influence and collaboration without a map or tracking devices or evidence. Note the placing of the parts of speech, the primary syllable that begins in the south and the final one lands in the north. Let's set aside the actual geographies we might assign to these syllables—from South America to Europe, Rio to New York, or even Rio to Havana--and instead leave it open as something that can generally unsettle how we understand origins and spaces of seeming disconnect. Another way to understand the intermingling between the here and there, of the unison found in fragmentation.


And I was educated by cab drivers who move their mobile conservatories of sound through the city. Through tinny speakers, I met Cassia Eller and her husky and humbling voice. Total badass. And I learned of how we lost her too early, like so many other of her vocal contemporaries from that haunted city.



I bought Eller's "O Marginal." Back in Brooklyn=deep time with her cover of Hendrix's "Hear My Train A Coming."

And I let my laptop sit on a triangle slice of guayaba paste for a few hours. This poetic accident was due to my 4:30am wake up call on the day of my LASA panel (so I could write something new--why do we do that?). I set the clock with urgent cause. I needed to gesture to some of the initial impact the city was having on my thinking; to thread a kind of homage to Rio through my words; to discursively tip my forty to the ground I was standing on. It became a thing on Patato y Totico's guaguancó version (vocals by Virgilio Marti) of Jorge Ben's "Mas Que Nada." This recording was put together at the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship in the New York City of 1968. What is it about this song written by Jorge Ben in 1963 and taken up by Cuban musicians in New York who were busy extending grassroots rumbas far away from home? The space of dis-tante here suggests the song’s passage to another place and taken up by other kinds of hands is quite literally more than nothing.

and I heard Freestyle, ok? And I felt affirmed in a sea of 18 year old girls who new all the words in a language I understand but can’t speak so good. After drinks my Portoñol gets better. Much like the ballad-turn in reggaeton, funk carioca is making other kinds of room for melody—so much so there is a slowly but surely emerging genre called “Funk Melody.” I heard a set by DJ Marlboro which grabbed me by the bodily jugular and turned me out in ways I can only come up with in sleeping life. I heard amazing Lusophone revisions of songs like Dreamgirl. And the Stevie B. mystery began to make sense. Each song bore major traces of the Final Fantasy IV soundtrack (c. 1997). I got to dance for what seemed like forever in that Power 96 traffic beat. It was very serious:

DJ Malboro - Princesa - DJ Marlboro

Which is to say: the Rio chapter in the Miami book will get written (dis tante).

While in Rio, I was always mistaken for a local—which is a beautiful thing if you get no rest from feeling extraterrestrial.

And until that book (poem) gets written and I can thank him properly....
muito obrigada y beijos a Ernesto Solis.


With a carioca-style thumbs up,
ATV