‘Fire in the Underwear:’ An Excursion of Carnival Parties in Rio de Janeiro (Part 1)

A dozen glitter-faced fairies, dwarfs and a dead bride line up by the seaside to take a pee. No wonder, given all that beer they’ve just had. Some pee free-handedly, some awkwardly squatting behind a rock, most still swaying to the drums. When they are done, they bounce (and periodically stumble) back to the crowd for some more. Because that is what they are here for.

It is 11pm at a beach of Rio de Janeiro during its most manic time of the year.

Carnival in Brazil used to mark the time of preparation for Christ’s resurrection, 46 days before Easter. It was a time to clear oneself; many would stop eating meat (carnelevare=”lifting the meat”). From a religious event, Carnival turned into a communal celebration of Brazilian culture and probably the most elaborate and excessive party in the world. For one week, practically the entire country shuts down to dance, sing and drink beer.

Brazilian Carnival celebrations differ by region, but generally, they can be separated into formal and informal festivities. The beautiful women in exuberant, tiny dresses with massive head décor that often represent Carnival in popular media, unfortunately, belong to the formal part, theSambadrome. This structure, built pretty much exclusively for this very purpose, hosts the official Carnival parade for four nights a year. Samba schools spent the whole year preparing for this competition. A professional jury evaluates them based on choreography, costume, theme, music, etc. At the end of the week, one Samba school will emerge as the winner and proudly parade once more. Again, in the  Sambadrome. Sounds exciting, but with tickets to the Sambadrome averaging something like $200, it is safe to say that Carnival in Rio is all about blocos.

Blocos are the more informal side of Carnival. These mini parades take place all over town and country and are free for everybody to join. This, however, does not mean that they are less professional. Or fun. Each bloco has its own theme (some examples: “Fire in Underwear,” “Friendliness of almost love,” “Push to Get” and “Empire of Folia”) and thus, its own crowd. Naturally, photographer Sam Wolson and I decided to make it our mission to check out the blocosof Rio de Janeiro this week. The crazier, the better.

The first night, we take it slow. We go down the street to a small bloco in Leme, a fairly affluent neighborhood located North of the infamous Copacabana Beach. Around 500 people have come to go a bit nuts tonight, including 60-year old women samba-ing to traditional Carnival tunes as well as foreign youngsters singing along to an improv version of “Hit the Road, Jack.”

Photograph by Sam Wolson

Paper garlands fly above the many dancing fairies, dwarfs and dead brides who occasionally take strolls to the seaside. Among the madness of it all, between the bright lights and drums, fishermen, only several hundred feet away from the partying crowd, carry on fishing, just like every other night. They are still there when most have left for another party and only a few loners remain dispersed along the beach on plastic chairs.

Check out piece and full slide-show: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-wolson/fire-in-the-underwear-an-_b_1286643.html#s707739

Loving The Ugly

Falling in love is easy for some, an utter impossibility for others. Nobody has ever been able to uncover the secret of love, what it is, when it happens, and whether it exists at all. It often hurts: the beauty, the nostalgia, the loss. When you love something ugly, the hard realization that love is a selfish act in itself is soothed by the thought that if you did not love it, noone else would. A temporary exaggeration, a juvenile infatuation, you think. You lull yourself in fuzzy, false security, and in no time, you have already fallen too deeply to ever get out again.

That is when you catch yourself admiring her savage outline from a distance. You approach her silhouette to touch the dirty, chipped skin with an an endearment and familiarity unknown to you before. You adore how she gives herself to you when you ascend her highest tip and look down at her spread out before you. You lose yourself in her many winding paths. You love her many faces and personalities, her harshness and even her complete ignorance of you. She has become your home, and everything they sing in love songs is true.

You decide to surrender to the itchy mosquito bite that is love and scratch it till it bleeds.

It has happened to me once: I fell for an ugly city. And it has been happening over and over ever since. And now, here I am, in the middle of a concrete closed-off highway of another ugly city on a Sunday, admiring the framing high rise buildings with Plexiglas in place of necessary real-glass windows, the graffitied, aligned but awkwardly bent, lamp posts, the torn fences and patches of old grass infested with cigarette buds that peek through the concrete road. The runny traces of spray paint marks under another ugly pichação. The precious public spaces, so rare that they are much fought-over or totally abandoned. The dreadlocks of Rastafarians selling their wooden jewelery at the street corner. The random strangers who become as close to you as your family. The drops of sweet, colored Popsicle water running down your finger, dripping onto the asphalt below. The rugged beggar who, crunched at a street corner next to his affairs, looks up at you with a hundred questions in his eyes. The jungle of differing house heights in the distance. The dodgy police stopping you at the side of the road that you may or may not have to bribe. The shifting of objects and persons on the public bus. The way the polluted indigestion of the city colors in the sky in pink and red at night. The rubbish bins filled to the rim. The old lady at the neighbor’s house who is always on the balcony, leaning over the railing as if waiting for something. The flickering lights of a tv in the opposite building at night. The bright eyes of a child in a baby carriage on the metro.

In all that you admire what’s at the bottom of it all. It is ridiculously perfect because of its profound imperfection. Its ugliness is nothing but life. And you love it.

How could you not?

To my first city love, Johannesburg, and the ones to come.

My Very Own Jerusalem Syndrome

The Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center in Jerusalem has over the years admitted more than 450 cases of individuals suffering from the so-called Jerusalem Syndrome, a temporary psychotic condition in which perfectly healthy tourists coming to Jerusalem suddenly dissociate from reality and believe themselves to be biblical figures instead. About two of those individuals a month run around town in robes, preach before the medina walls and attempt burning down the Al-Aqsa mosque until they are admitted, sent home and usually recover.A similar psychotic phenomenon — without the religious obsessions — can be observed in visitors to Florence (the Stendhal syndrome whereby individuals begin hallucinating after being confronted with particularly beautiful and large number of art pieces in one place) and in Japanese tourists visiting Paris (believe it or not, there is a specialized hospital ward located in the East of Paris dedicated to the 12 or so cases a year of Japanese tourists, usually women in their 30s, slightly losing it at the sight of not so perfect Parisian loves, streets and croissants). And then there are some very shaky accounts of Westerners, in particular French citizens, going a bit nuts in India.

Well, this is the tale of my stay in Calcutta/Kolkata, the time when I almost lost my mind.

When I arrived in Calcutta/Kolkata late at night, a cab took me to a dark house in a residential neighborhood. An tiny, old man opened the door for me and led me inside. He gestured to a room at the end of the hallway and closed the door behind me. We did not exchange a single word, but I felt right at home and dozed off easily. The next morning, the same tiny man wordlessly made me breakfast (a delicious combination of Indian-dinner left-overs, an omelet, pickles, coffee and juice), while I sat in his kitchen feeling like his granddaughter. Then he called a 20-something year old to show me the bus stop. As I climbed onto the bus, the young man murmured some words to the conductor who nodded my way when I sat down. For about an hour, the bus cruised the streets of Kolkata, carrying my fellow passengers to work, to appointments and to school and me along with them. I sat on the designated women’s side of the bus, paid my seven rupees bus fare and belonged.

When the conductor thoughtfully nodded at me once more, I got out and asked a sweets seller at a street corner about Victoria Memoria Hall. Silently, he pointed in some direction and I started walking. It was a misty, early morning and I was in a part of town that was oddly deserted for an Indian city. I passed huge estates of some kind, groups of police officers and big, empty streets. From time to time, I would ask the occasional lonely person I would meet along the way for directions and they would assure me that I was on the right path. When I emerged from one road winding along a cricket field to another wide field, it hit me. Just as the Westerners in Jerusalem and the Japanese in Paris must experience it before they resolve their cognitive dissonance by fleeing into the sweet resolution that only madness can provide, everything stopped making sense.

The air felt humid, yet cool. It was one of those mornings in India when people wear scarves around their faces and socks in their sandals. Along the bus ride, I had seen a man squatting down and shivering so hard, I thought he was going to fall over and die on the spot. Two men standing behind him had placed their fingers on the shaking man’s forehead, but the bus moved and I lost their sight.

In the park before me, I saw the majestic tip of a palace in the distance, inundated by mist, fog, uncertainty — a figure on top of the highest tower, an angel maybe. On my left, a white horse peacefully grazed next to a pack of dogs. Several hundred meters away, young men were playing cricket and two groups of a blue-white uniformed marching band were practicing. The sound of muted cricket cries and drums carried over to me as I stood and stared. I had to resist the urge to rub my eyes. It was true. And as I walked closer to the palace, I saw that one group of those military-dressed people was practicing marching steps, while the other played. I approached them. The band was very bad, the sound of mismatched horns and drums horrible, and the marching group not synchronized, but the seriousness of their faces kept me captivated. As I passed between the two groups towards another grazing horse in the distance, only meters away from the marching individuals, nobody even seemed to notice me.

I looked at the ground and saw a deck of old, dirty cards. They were spread out in the misty grass. I paused in my step — dissonant marching band music all around me — and caught the glance of the Queen of Spades. Like unfortunate gambler Herman in Pushkin’s story Queen of Spades, I felt that she was mocking me as she stared into my eyes. The vision at the corners of my eyes blurred a bit but then the wind turned her face over.

In a daze, I carried on, past the marching and cricket groups, past another horse, a scarved off face, and after several minutes, I touched a grey-ish horse to verify it really stood there. It did and I sort of came back to myself. I reached a road, realized the horses were for the tourist carriages parked in front of Victoria Memorial Hall (no palace after all)  and the illusion was really over. Now, even the leashed, dressed-up monkey kids sitting on the shoulder of a rugged Indian man could not bring back the sensation of my melting mind, but I am sure it is just a matter of time.