(Photo: The Guardian)

If social media tools are enabling the opposition protests in Iran, and helping us outside the country understand what’s transpiring, some credit for this is due to Hossein Derakhshan—Iran’s “Blogfather” and the author of a life that’s taken some very enigmatic turns of late. Derakhshan is currently being detained by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry.

In 2001, while living in Toronto, Derakhshan made available online a step-by-step guide to publishing a blog in Farsi (according to Wired, he had “figured out a way to combine Unicode and Blogger.com’s free tools to handle Persian characters”). Derakhshan’s instructions, along with his outspoken blogging, directly influenced thousands of Iranians to create their own web pages. The subject matter of these blogs varied widely—pop culture, sport, personal matters—but much of it was cyber samizdat and critical of the regime, establishing a space where Iranians could communicate openly to each other about living under a theocracy. The outbreak of self-publishing in Iran was so staggering, I gleaned one statistic that suggested Farsi was the internet’s fourth most blogged-in language—Farsi, with about 70-80 million native speakers, ranks as only the 22nd most spoken language in the world. (*Update: a BBC reporter has said Farsi is the second most used language on the internet but I find this impossible.)

(Photo: Hossein Derakhshan, Toronto Star)

Derakhshan’s story has taken some strange and slippery through-the-looking-glass turns since. He travelled to Israel in 2006 on his Canadian passport, and used his blog to challenge Iranian misconceptions about Israelis. After that trip, however, he began writing more favourably about Ahmadinejad, supported Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and was accused of making anti-Israeli comments; he decided to return to Tehran to live in 2008. Shortly after arriving in Iran last November he was arrested on the grounds of spying for Israel; a newspaper affiliated with the government reported that he had “confessed.” After being allowed a few phone calls upon his arrest he hasn’t been heard from. Canadian consular officials have been unable to get access to Derakhshan. His detention has garnered international media attention and a campaign for his release, but some of his former supporters, disturbed by the apparent about-turn in his views, are ambivalent. There are even bizarre internet whispers that Derakhshan is, in fact, an Iranian spy.

*

(Photo: The Guardian)

As the regime steps up its efforts to control the information space (blocking websites, shutting down SMS systems, jamming satellite TV—email, it turns out, is the most reliable way to get word out), I found this snippet of history provided by a BBC diplomatic correspondent interesting:

In the old days of the Soviet Union, it was shortwave broadcasts the regime targeted.

But as computers and satellite dishes replaced shortwave radios, the Politburo faced a dilemma.

I remember Mikhail Gorbachov’s former ideology chief, a liberal reformer called Alexander Yakovlev once recalling how his bosses in the old Soviet Politburo ordered him to cost the business of jamming all satellite TV. This was the mid-1980s, in retrospect the last dying decade of the old USSR.

Mr Yakovlev said he looked into it, and reported back: radio jamming was expensive but just about doable. But when it came to TV jamming, it was just too expensive. The genie was effectively out of the bottle. The Politburo had to accept that the USSR could no longer practically enforce an isolated information space.

Which is the situation the Iranian government now finds itself in. It can physically prevent foreign journalists from reporting, but it can hardly keep pace with a growing movement of people, able to capture and transmit events in real-time, and becoming ever more adept at the tactics of digital evasion. The regime will try, and sometimes succeed in holding back the torrent of images and tweets, but these are only temporary, jerry-rigged retaining walls in an escalating game of info-tech cat and mouse.

*

(Photo: The Guardian)

For all the talk of a possible behind-the-scenes struggle among country’s ruling clerics (Rafsanjani v. Khameini), an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times argues that the “sham” elections and Ayatollah Khameini’s avowed preference for Ahmadinejad belies an altogether different dynamic—that Iran has, by stealth, evolved from “a theocratic state to military dictatorship.” Although technically the Ayatollah and his Guardian Council retain supreme authority, the authors point to the unprecedented prominence of former members of the  Revolutionary Guard (like Ahmadinejad) in central government and among the business elite; they also speculate that Khameini has “deliberately undercut his own clerical class” at times and thrown in his lot with Ahmadinejad, as a survival strategy:

Far from fretting about an impending attack from Israel or America, guard leaders have been warning the ayatollah that the most formidable threat to the Islamic Republic is a “soft regime change policy” involving the use of “orange revolutions” (as the hard-line Iranian newspaper Kayhan recently editorialized).

Encircled by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, besieged from within by disgruntled citizens, the supreme leader has turned to a bellicose strongman to preserve the system that elevated him. Indeed, Ayatollah Khamenei — who was scorned as a religious lightweight by many more established mullahs when he was chosen for the top post in 1989 — has repeatedly shown himself willing to undercut the “Islamic” in Islamic revolution. In doing so, he has painted himself into a corner — a permanent alliance with Mr. Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards. And this fraudulent election will only push them closer together.

*

Also of note:

“The Web v. The Republic of Iran”, Anne-Marie Corley, MIT Technology Review
“Iran’s Perpetual Revolution”, Steve Coll, New Yorker (Think Tank blog)

While I was in Manaus I struck up a friendship with Omar Gusmao, an arts editor at A Critica, one of the local daily newspapers. On my next-to-last day there he asked me to pop by the newspaper’s offices, I wasn’t exactly clear why—to meet some of the writers there, I supposed.

At the office, I was escorted into a closed meeting space adjacent to the newsroom. A young staff reporter was there and she proceeded to interview me, for which I was not at all prepared. She asked about the book, why I was in Manaus, what I thought about globalization. Our conversation resulted in the brief article above. Had I known I’d be photographed as well, I likely would’ve bothered to shave that day and take a nap, because, really, I look rather unfortunate and hungover.

I did learn that the title of the book does have a splendid hum in Portuguese: Atlas Quebrado. If I only I’m lucky enough to see it one day appear on an actual book cover (hey, the Portuguese-language rights are still available!).

Later in Rio I made the acquaintance of an odd but lovely woman who was once a ’60s leftwing radical but now works for a state-owned bank. She had a sideline interest in psychoanalysis and mythological archetypes. When I told her the name of the book she was over the moon. But I quickly learned for the wrong reason. She thought ‘Atlas’ referred not to a map, but to the Greek god Atlas, son of Zeus, who was consigned by his father to forever support the heavens on his back (thus preventing the earth and heavens from returning to their primordial oneness). As he is a time-worn symbol of male fortitude and stoicism, she thought by suggesting Atlas was “broken” that I was writing a deconstruction of male identity and patriarchy. She was very disappointed to be disabused of his notion.

(Photo: Etica e Coragem/Ethics and Courage, Cf.)

As I finish up my work in Manaus and thereabouts, some last thoughts on current flashpoints of conflict, the resolution of which may point the way to the Amazon’s future—for better or worse.

In an area this vast, there, of course, are many disputes simmering at once: the drug-running that bedevils badly-policed border areas, ensnaring indigenous people into their economies, such as at the tri-border frontier (Brazil-Colombia-Peru) around Tabatinga in the west; the soy distribution terminal built by multinational Cargill in Santarém that environmentalists argue will induce even greater destruction in the state of Para as more rainforest is cleared in favour of soy plantations (Greenpeace has pursued an injunction to halt operations at the terminal).

But the two that were most talked about during my stay were the ongoing legal battle to recognize a demarcated territory for the indigenous people at Raposa Serra do Sol in Roraima, adjacent to the border with Venezuela, and the rehabilitation of an old highway project that would connect Manaus with the rest of the country.

Raposa Serra do Sol was declared an indigenous reserve by former president Henrique Cardoso in 1998, but the necessary legislation wasn’t signed into law until Lula did so in 2005. The demarcation would force several major rice growing operations to leave the territory, but they’ve fought tooth and nail to resist their eviction despite provisions of compensation. There have been some violent episodes over the years between the politically-connected agri-businesses and Indians; while a Supreme Court challenge on behalf of the farmers was in the works, the general who commands the Brazilian army unit in Amazonia attacked the government’s Indian policy, suggesting he would refuse to order his troops remove the farmers if required to do so.

A couple weeks ago the Supreme Court upheld the demarcation and the farmers have run out of legal options. Many feared further violence, but according to one source who was just in the area, the plantation owners appear to be backing down; they’re negotiating with Indian leaders for an additional month to shut operations, and in some instances selling their equipment locally.

If the situation does wind down peacefully, it could be landmark moment. Brazil has a habit of passing laws and constitutional resolutions it has little ability, or sometimes enthusiasm, to enforce. Paulo Adario, director of the Greenpeace office in Manaus, joked to me that, “Brazil loves to have the biggest constitution in the world, but when it comes to enforcement or enactment there is no one to fucking do it.” There are several tribes awaiting resolution of demarcation disputes and the redistribution of land they invariably require. The Supreme Court ruling may finally bring some nascent semblance of law and order, and respect for Indian land claims, to the region.

The other development, the highway project, actually brought Lula to Manaus while I was there. The capital of Amazonas state is presently connected to the rest of the country only by river or air. In the 1970s the military government embarked on a series of grand highway building projects in Amazonia, among them the BR-319 linking Manaus with Porto Velho, about 800 kilometres to the south (from Porto Velho you can drive to Cuiabá, Brasilia and the rest of southern Brazil). But the highway was little used and the forest, as is its want, eventually took it back.

Most regular people in Manaus I surveyed were unreservedly in favour of the road, arguing it would make it easier for them to visit family in the south and leverage more development in the area. Adario at Greenpeace, along with other environmentalists, insist the road would have marginal economic impact (a point backed up by several studies) while opening up what remains one of Amazonia’s last pristine quadrants to logging and ranching. Of the six states considered part of the larger Amazon basin, Amazonas is the least deforested at about 3 percent (Para is as much as forty percent deforested according to some estimates). Adario points to Para state and the highway that runs south from Sanatarem to Cuiabá. On either side of that highway, for fifteen miles inland, the forest is mostly gone. He expects the same to happen should the BR-319 get the go-ahead.

Halting the BR-319 may be a losing battle. There’s a lot of popular support, and the revitalization of the highway is a pet project of Lula’s Minister of Transportation, who is from here and has ambitions to run for governor of Amazonas. Making the road happen would give him something to campaign on.

If there’s one thing I’ll miss about Manaus and Amazônia, it’s the fish—the best fresh water peixe I’ve enjoyed anywhere. Generally fatty but not rich, served lightly fried with little fuss with or sauces (a little lime or hot sauce suffices), they come in tastily exotic names like pirarucu, tambaqui, filhote. My favourite joint was a stall run by two busy ladies at the docks across from the wholesale food distribution market. Shipmen and dockworkers bench themselves here for overflowing plates of pirarucu, rice and beans, and salsa for about 5 Reais a pop ($3 CAD). I went almost everyday, sometimes treated by locals to bottles of guarana (a local fizzy pop derived from a berry with caffeine-like properties) just for showing up.

(Photo: Mateus in front of a squatter shack on his property, Cf.)

Mateus Cabral is from Sâo Gabriel de Cachoeira, a town of almost 40,000 on the frontier with Venezuela and Colombia. It’s an isolated place that takes a boat ride of four or five days upriver from Manaus to reach. The area around Sâo Gabriel is home to the Kótiria tribe and an army contingent of about 5,000. I met Mateus in Manaus, and from there he guided me on a three-day trip south of the city, into the Amazon,  and we ended up spending more time together afterward.

His niece owns a parcel of land outside Manaus, inland from the Rio Negro, amidst what is still mostly primary forest. Together they are acquiring funding from the state government to develop the plot into a self-reliant community for other Kótiria who have migrated to Manaus but are unhappy in the city. (I’ll go into this further in another post.)

Meteus spoke pretty good English—a result of having lived in the U.S. for six years. As he explained it to me, he was brought first to New Mexico, to work with an anthropologist who was studying the Kótiria’s language. When he arrived he spoke no English. He eventually moved to Denver and returned to Brazil in 2005. This is how he met his fiancé…

Near the end of my time in the U.S., I was staying with a friend in Washington. I would call my girlfriend back in Manaus at the public phone in her building but she was never there. Instead, there was this other woman who would always answer, and after calling a few times and getting her instead, she started keeping me on the phone. She wanted to talk to me. I didn’t really want to talk to her, you know, I want to talk to my girlfriend! But I don’t want to be rude. So I stay on the phone. This happens many times. And she gets me talking for longer and longer. She says one day, I like talking with you: you sound so different from everyone else. You say funny things. “Why are you like that,” she asks. Maybe because I’ve been living in America, I tell her.

She would always laugh when I call. Finally, she says I want to meet you. I think, okay, we can do that. So when I move back to Manaus we go to a party together. It was nice. When I met her I liked the way she was. Because we had talked on the phone so much she didn’t seem strange to me… But I only wanted to be in Manaus a few days. I had to go to my hometown, Sâo Gabriel, and visit my family. She insisted on coming with me because she said liked to travel and wanted to see what Sâo Gabriel is like. We had just met but I said okay. She’d never been any place like that. It’s very far for her. She’s a mestizo from Santarém. It takes four or five days by boat from Manaus.

We went and she liked it there. And she liked my family. I had it in my mind if she likes me and wants to stay with me—that’s good. But if ever she don’t like me she can go. We stayed together. That was almost five years ago now. I’m forty and she’s twenty-seven. Our daughter is three. That’s why I don’t blame people who meet on the Internet. Modern world, you know.

(Photo: Cf.)

There are points where the river is so wide the distant shore appears to be little more than insignificant scrub, a slight, squiggly line of green. Sometimes, gazing up or downstream while in the middle of it, there’s hardly a horizon at all, just a vanishing point where water blurs into air and pools of refracted light distend from would-be horizon like pockets of nothingness.

They say the land of Amazonia is itself continental, a territory more expansive than Western Europe. Out from beneath its forest canopy, on the river, the sky, too, appears continental. Incomprehensibly vaster even than the big skies of flat, limitless prairie or savannah, due to the luminance of its equatorial light.

At either side of high noon, as the sun leans at the river rather than bearing down, there can be a different light and micro-climate apparent in every direction. Some kilometres downstream a storm gathers. Over there, nearer the banks, crisp, cerulean blue. Where we are, directly above, the clouds are maps, countries constructed of pure gas; I pick out the white-wooly British Isles, the chipped, downward pointing arrow-head of Africa. Gradually, the maps and territories dissolve, into renderings of picked-over fish bones and slumbering caimans. Then these too lose their shape, and the sky reveals itself as a transient canvas of forgetfulness and loss.

(Photo: Amin Nipen Gets Tattooed, Andrew Gregg)

Chris Rainier is one of the world’s best photographers, according to me and some other people I’ve heard of. I’ve been trying for a few years now—along with Gordon Henderson at 90th Parallel—to sell a documentary film on Chris and we finally got some broadcasters on board (Bravo, Documentary Channel, Smithsonian) so we jetted off to Indonesia last month.

Chris has spent the better part of the last 15 years searching out and photographing the world’s tattooing cultures, indigenous and otherwise (check out this link to his portfolio, Ancient Marks, which includes an array of body-mod images, from Yakuza mistresses to African tribal). His last, best place for tattoos was on the island of Siberut, six hours by boat from the west coast of Sumatra, then another six hours up river in a motorized dugout canoe.

The Mentawai people are among the world’s oldest and most traditional tattooing cultures, and we spent two weeks with them—and Chris. We just got home last weekend. The film is still in production, but here is a sneak peak of the trip. My photos aren’t as good as Chris’, but then again, no one’s are…

Tattoo artist tapping

Close-up of nail used.

Amin Nipen’s finished tat.

Terocha makes a bracelet.

Sharp teeth and tattoos.

Kids take pictures with rocks.

Check out friend Sarah Goodman’s film, When We Were Boys, screening at the Hot Docs international documentary film festival in Toronto, May 1st and 10th. The doc follows a group of boys at an elite Toronto prep school over the course of a school year. Coming from a family of Jewish artists and activists, Goodman was drawn to a world very different from the one she grew up in, feeling that while many movies have explored the travails of teenage girls, the emotional terrain of adolescent boys remains a comparatively closed book. From her director’s statement:

I am drawn to make films in worlds that can be easily stereotyped, and to look for what is more complicated within them. I like to challenge the viewer through an experience of empathy with characters they didn’t expect to identify with. I do it to challenge my own preconceptions as well. I was often struck by the progressive thinking within this quite traditional school, though I also noticed that the boys’ privilege was buffering them from the realities of the outside world.

What I found through two years of making the film was that the boys were very emotional, but their feelings were often buried. As I observed the boys being positioned for success, I noticed that their lives were becoming more solitary, full of unexpressed emotion.

In her previous doc, Army of One, Goodman focused on another “easily stereotyped” world, that of young, U.S. army recruits in the run-up to the Iraq war.

(Photo: Cf.)

Our boat floats up to Abrozinho’s dock, past a drowned tree, fútbol goal posts part-submerged, and a water-logged canoe. This is not uncharacteristic for the rainy season, as many ribeirinhos (river people) of Amazonia tend to settle on or near alluvial floodplains (várzea), living in floating houses, or, like Abrozinho, shanties erected on wood pilings, knowing that part of their land will be underwater between April and June. Here, the fishing and turtle hunting is sweetest, and the prospects are good for harvesting palm fruit and Brazil nut, or tapping nearby clusters of rubber trees.

Ribeirinhos are the most visible of Amazonia’s forest peoples, skilled backwoodsmen and ingenious cultivators who possess the sort of esoteric local knowledge derived from generations of living at the interstitial space between river and forest. Most are detribalized indigenous people or mestizos, working the land in isolation for their own use.

Abrozinho, an impish fellow with absurdly large toes I imagine clinging monkey-like to the brim of his canoe, leaves a half-eaten fish lunch to welcome us. I’m travelling with field workers from Fundaçao Amazonas Sustentável, visiting small river communities on tributaries of the Rio Negro within a two to three hour boat ride of Manaus. FAS administers the Bolsa Floresta program on behalf of the Amazonas state government—a two-year-old initiative that pays forest families directly up to $50 a month not to deforest.

This river man is not shy. I expected him, and the other ribeirinhos I met, to be somewhat retiring and suspect of visitors with their cameras and questions (the field workers were documenting the trip), but they were all instantly gregarious, generous to offer whatever they had to eat, and eager to talk our ears off—the case, I guess, of the lonely, isolated bloke in the sticks, happy to have anyone new around to gossip with, or gab about whatever he’s been up to.

Abrozinho, for example, talks about hunting, and then, switching gears, gives a more detailed than required account of his romantic life outside his otherwise happy marriage—a necessity of the travelling river man’s life I think he explains. He fetches a spiral-bound notebook in which he has recorded the first names of all twenty-three women he’s been with and reads them aloud to us in his soft, slightly slurred, melodious Portuguese. There’s something suggestively poetic to his recitation, each name containing a story, another human episode somewhere in the vastness of Amazonia.

After that, he retrieves a stick of wood and describes the medicinal merits of its bark and sap. Its sap, radiating in blood-red concentric circles inside the wood, is used topically to mend wounds. The bark, steeped in hot water and drank as a tea, could treat an array of nagging ailments. It is also, he says, the river man’s Viagra. Hearing this, I neglect to ask whether the list of names he read out to us is thus unfinished.

(Photo: Crosby Street and Spring Street, 1978 by Thomas Struth)

In the spirit of getting creative and making things, I have moved up the self-imposed completely arbitrary deadline for completing the first draft of the novel-in-eternal-progress. Attempts to rationalize my lack of new pages due to the distraction of looming bankruptcy are met with Skype assisted exhortations from my writing mentor in Toronto: You are in the zeitgeist! Use this energy, channel it into your writing! Now drop and give me five! I think, hey, finally I know how to pronounce ‘zeitgeist’ and then realize he is right. I may not be able to stay in New York much longer, but while I do, every day here is a gift.

The rich tradition of New York as a fulcrum for artistic recognition provides incomparable inspiration. Every day I look up at office of The Paris Review, still gathering great writers from around the world in the spirit of George Plimpton who founded the magazine in 1953 (it moved its offices to New York in 1973). On Greene Street, I walk past the building where Chuck Close lived, hanging out in the 1960s with Andy Warhol, Philip Glass, Janis Joplin. This is the stomping ground of Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen in the ’70s. CBGB was just over there on the Bowery at Bleecker. On Centre Street, I pass the loft where Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington perched when they first came to shoot for Vogue with Anna Wintour in 1986. On Crosby, the 1990s crash pads of Courtney Love and Lenny Kravitz. And every day I walk past Heath Ledger’s building on Broome…

Manhattan may no longer offer the same energy for emerging artist collaboration, the way Brooklyn does today or perhaps Berlin. But it continues to be the global headquarters of industry recognition and commercial success. You can write the book in Mumbai, but at some point you will dream of selling it here.

I find the muses most palpable in the early morning, walking through Soho in search of coffee before the tourists wake. Many writers insist on writing during these oneiric hours, I prefer to take the morning like Mrs. Dalloway, like a lark, like a plunge into the open air. Turning from Howard onto the cobblestones of Crosby, the streets are empty and tranquil. Here is where I breathe and become aware of black, wet morning rock and brightening sky against the grimy edges of cast iron buildings. It’s here where I shake off the morning chill and my mind reverts to the lucid dreams of the night before, to solve problems of plot, characters and the Canadian health care system (tontine, anyone?). It’s here where I tread the ground of so many writers, painters, actors, dreamers, who came here with something to achieve, something to try, something to prove.

There are few places in the world where you feel democracy so viscerally. Whatever you have your sights on, if you can earn it or pay for it, in New York it can be yours. Access and opportunity are boundless. In a recessionary environment, chutzpah and creative negotiation can reap greater reward than ever before.

I recently attended a tribute to John Updike at the New York Public Library. David Remnick and a number of editors from The New Yorker read from Updike’s work. When the program ended, I stepped out onto 42nd Street and 5th Ave. Sitting there was a gleaming black towncar with the name of “Mehta” on the window. Sonny Mehta, chairman and editor-in-chief at Knopf Doubleday, who I knew was still back in the room shaking hands and having photos taken with the Updike family.

I stood there looking at the waiting car. If only I had my manuscript with me. If only my manuscript was done. If only I had the nerve to jump into the backseat, pay the driver 50 bucks to let me sit there until Mr. Mehta arrived and then deliver a brilliant elevator pitch on my novel. If only I had 50 bucks.

New York teaches you to be fast and to be ready. You have to be clear about what you want because all the options exist here. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you came from. Every waiter/actor/model/writer knows this. It’s all about finding yourself at the right place at the right time, manuscript in hand.

The sting of leaving New York will be ameliorated by the pristine beauty of a Canadian summer. I will consider the past year as a reconnaissance mission. Now is the time to retreat and martial resources.  Until I find my way back however, I will be haunted by Updike’s words: “A writer living anywhere other than New York must be kidding.”

(Photo: Boi Bumbá at Parantins, from Boibumba.com)

It’s shortly before midnight when we arrive at Manaus’ Sambódromo. The atmosphere outside the concrete stadium with facing grandstands, purpose-built for Carnaval, is a bit Saturday night-at-the-rodeo meets samba party. Fireworks explode, half the friends I’m with are already drunk and screaming nonsensically, and so too are many of the others streaming inside.

Entering the Dromo’s main level from beneath the grandstands it’s a sudden, panoramic blur of impressions: there at stage-centre, the MC/bandleader/singer bedecked in a psychedelic bugle boy uniform is belting out lyrics against a batucada beat; behind him a battalion of shuffling drummers hammering out said thundering beat; and behind them other instrumentalists (guitarists, keyboardists, horns) against a weird painted backdrop that could be dubbed Alice in Amazonian Wonderland; the crowd on the floor is involved, engaged in synchronized, choreographed dance steps; those not dancing are chugging back beers and chatting with friends; there is a white plume of pyrotechnic fire scratching out sparks from somewhere amidst the throng; blue flags blurring as they furl this way and that; and best of all, on the catwalks flanking the stage, and on a float stationed in the middle of the stadium, handsome, lithe, and copper-skinned young women and men in kitschy but scant Indian costumes, gyrating along to it all.

And this is only a rehearsal. The big show, the Boi Bumbá festival, is yet two months away. When that happens, gigantic animatronic puppets will also be in the mix, plus more people and much more firepower. Still, there was no skimping on spectacle. Tickets are sold (10 Reais a pop), the beer vendors and food kiosks make brisk trade, couples make out, and the party keeps on keeping on deep into the night. Meanwhile the band works out this year’s batch of new songs, and its supporters (the galeras, who will be in attendance at the final showdown) learn the dance steps.

Boi Bumbá, also known as Bumbá Meu Boi, is the Amazonian version of Carnaval, with its own local folklore, sounds and iconography (although it must be noted Carnaval is also celebrated here, because, really: why have one massive blow-out party when you can have two). It culminates in a three-day contest during the last weekend in June, upriver in Paratíns, at which two competing teams—Caprichoso in blue, Garantido in red—struggle for Boi Bumbá supremacy as decided by the judges. Starting in March, the teams stage “practices” at the Sambódromo on alternating Saturdays. This is what the real thing looks like:

Each side’s performance is a re-enactment, an epic-scaled pantomime of a folkloric tale, in which the slave Pa Francisco slaughters his master’s bull to satisfy his pregnant wife’s craving for ox tongue. Learning this, the master uses some Indians to apprehend Francisco. But in true, syncretic Brazilian fashion, a priest and witch doctor together intercede to revive the bull, and Pa Francisco is saved. Through Boi Bumbá, this story is transformed into a densely allegorical, insanely choreographed, hedonistic, technologic party-ritual, led by bandleaders who pull it all together like twenty-first century shamans.

Of course, the celebration has little to do with “authentic” Indian or slave traditions, it’s more like one ritualistic riff, or mash-up based on whatever ideas are floating around in the cultural ether. The festival originated about a hundred years ago in Parintíns, a city of 100,000 located halfway between Manaus and Santarém on the Amazon River. By the 1990s it was transformed into a party to rival Carnaval; Manauans are lucky to play host to the rehearsals.

Boi Bumbá devotees demonstrate an enthusiasm for their chosen side shared only by futból supporters, albeit without the occasional propensity for violence. But as there’s no philosophical or geographical affiliation upon which to choose one’s “team”—really, there are no markers of difference other than colour—it’s an option based almost entirely on whim, unless you happen to especially like one side’s bandleaders. I ask my friend Omar, a native Manauana and culture editor at a local newspaper, why he supports Caprichoso (blue). “My family always supported Caprichoso while I was growing up. Then two years ago my sister decided she was for the red. Then, because of her, my mother changed to red. Now my whole family supports Garantido, and I’m the only one who goes for blue.”

Omar also points out that Boi Bumbá events are the places in the world where Coca-Cola permits its logo to appear in blue.

I was out on the Rio Negro much of the day, visiting ribeirinho (river people) communities along with field workers from a local ecological foundation, and was out late already the night before. The whole Boi Bumbá scene is enervating enough on its own and I struggle to take it all in. There is no shortage of drama, on stage or in the crowd. For a while I am fixed on a dancing, dwarfish, perhaps transgendered, indigenous man in too-tight spandex shorts, who is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a real-life Shakespearean sprite. Then there’s the bandleader’s announcement during a rare stoppage, as the beat hardly ever ceases: “One of the drummers has just given birth backstage!”

And, like I said, this is only rehearsal.

*

The previous night supplied another treat: witnessing Gilberto Gil perform his first concert since leaving his job as Minister of Culture in Lula’s government last year. It’s a treat for Manauanas, too, as most major acts consider the city as an afterthought on their Brazilian tours. Although, heavy metal nostalgic acts The Scorpions and Iron Maiden did play here recently. (This solved a riddle for me from my first couple days in Manaus: What was up with all The Scorpions tees?)

Along with Caetano Veloso, Os Mutantes, Gal Costa, Tom Zé and Maria Bethania, Gil was on the vanguard of the ’60s Tropicalia movement, earning the enmity of both the ruling military government for their outspokenness, and leftist intellectuals for their cultural cannibalism, defiling trad Brazilian sounds by going electric and borrowing freely from American R&B and British rock. After being arrested by the government in 1969, Gil and Veloso were allowed to leave for London, where they spent three years in exile.

In Brazil, Gil and Veloso are almost as tightly identified with one another as McCartney and Lennon, but they’ve remained friends and occasional collaborators. Nowadays, I’m told that among the music cognoscenti you’re either totally for one or the other, and there are many for whom Gil is simply the best. Personally, I don’t get this; my heart has also been with Veloso, whose career has been far more consistent and innovative than Gil’s; I’m also not a fan of Gil’s mid to late career dalliance with reggae, which he’s widely credited for introducing to the Brazilian musical vernacular. (He played two Bob Marley songs during Friday’s concert, including his popular Portuguese version of “No Woman, No Cry”.)

The concert was fabulous. Amazing energy from a man of 66. I recognized most of the songs, and for the first time got to see how Brazilians respond to music I’d been loving in a vacuum for years.

(The video above is from an “Unplugged” performance for MTV Brazil in 1993, featuring my fave Gil song, “Tenho Sede”. Friday’s show was much more rock than this, but it’s too bad he didn’t play it.)