Friday, March 05, 2004
Hold that thought. It's not as far out as it might seem, the idea that Matthew Barney could on some sort of conceptual plane, at least, envy me. I remember a couple of years back, well, more than that like in 1998 when I was heading off to Roraima to cover fires in the Amazon. The night before I was leaving I interviewed Siba from Mestre Ambrosio and I mentioned I was heading off to the Amazon the next day and he was like "wow!" Like here was this cool musician who actually thought what I did for a living was cool. I'm not saying he envied me or anything but you know it was something along those lines and who am I to quibble.
Okay, so I wrote a couple of articles where i mentioned Matthew Barney -- so who knows? Maybe our names are both in print on the same page somewhere. I'm going to reprint the articles here. Okay, now here's the thing, Matthew Barney went to Bahia and mounted -- for lack of a better verb -- a trio eletrico. These are basically sound trucks but the thing is his was real strange -- for Bahia, at least. It was all covered in mud and stuff and there was some allusion to the Amazon rainforest being cut down. Now, just briefly, I entertained the thought that maybe, since I've written quite a bit about Amazon destruction, Matthew Barney has read something I wrote. And just maybe, he envies me, but nawh.
Here are the articles I wrote about carnival.
^BC-Brazil-Carnival,0495<
^Brazil's bawdy Carnival draws thousands of spectators<
%photo(^AP Photos<%)
^By MICHAEL ASTOR=
^Associated Press Writers=
¶ RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) _ The samba group Tradicao kicked off the second and final night of Rio's carnival parade with a dance that honored the deities of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble.
¶ Tradicao was the first of seven groups that will mount massive parades through the night and into Tuesday morning, when Rio's carnival returns to the streets for one last day of partying.
¶ "It's fantastic. We have some lively events in the United States, but nothing compares to this," Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was quoted by the Jornal do Brasil news agency after watching Sunday's parade.
¶ Rio's carnival parades, are the highlight of the five-day pre-Lenten bash and they feature Rio's 14 top-tier samba groups.
¶ Each group has 80 minutes to parade thousands of dancers, singers and drummers down the 766-yard-long stadium in their bid to win over the crowd and judges and be declared champion.
¶ The championship brings little more than bragging rights. But carnival participants spend much of the year preparing for their moment of glory.
¶ The parade opened Sunday night to the riveting beat of a 300-piece drum section, when thousands of elaborately sequined and feathered dancers from the Sao Clemente group charged into the stadium in hail of fireworks.
¶ Next, the group Caprichosos mounted a parade honoring children's TV show presenter Xuxa and featuring a giant pyramid made up of over 120 mostly naked men in blue body paint.
¶ The Grande Rio samba group, whose parade advocating condom use was censured by the Catholic Church, marched early Monday with two of their floats covered in black plastic.
¶ Their samba, "Let's Wear the Little Shirt, My Love," slang for wearing a condom, upset the Church who sued at the last minute to require the school to cover floats depicting Adam and Eve having sex and another featuring scenes from the Kama Sutra.
¶ It wasn't the first time that the 70-year-old designer was sued by the church over one of his parades. In 1989, he was forced to cover a float depicting Rio's mountain top Christ statue.
¶ That year, he covered the statue parading under black plastic with a sign that said "Even though you are banned, watch over us." This year the signs on floats merely read "Censured."
¶ In the northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia, 750 miles northeast of Rio, Icelandic singer Bjork joined the fray.
¶ She paraded with the carnival group "Lama Lamina," or mud razor, put together by her boyfriend the artist Matthew Barney and the music Arto Lindsday.
¶ The group's sound truck was covered in mud and pulled by a tractor.
¶ "It's different but then carnival in Bahia is different," Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso, was quoted by the O Globo news agency as saying.
D0709‡intl-
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w0096 08 222
^BC-LA-GEN--Brazil-Carnival,0486<
^Carnival officially begins in Brazil<
^By MICHAEL ASTOR=
^Associated Press Writer=
¶ RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) _ Carnival got underway with supermodel Gisele Bundchen dancing samba in a slum and prosecutors signing off on hastily added coverings to a Kama Sutra-inspired parade float that they had threatened to ban for being lewd.
¶ At city hall, Deputy Mayor Marco Antonio Valles handed a gold-plated key to the city over to Wagner Monteiro, this year's Fat King, to mark the symbolic start of the merriment.
¶ Traffic backed up for miles around the city as well-heeled residents rushed to get out of town and impromptu carnival groups clogged the streets in poor neighborhoods.
¶ "It's a symbol of our popular culture, of our identity and our international visibility," Rio Mayor Cesar Maia told The Associated Press via e-mail.
¶ Bundchen caused a stir on the city's poor north side where she visited Rio's most traditional samba group Mangueira. She even hazarded a stiff-limbed samba alongside some of the school's most accomplished dancers.
¶ Over at the workshop of the Grande Rio samba group, prosecutors signed off on modifications to floats they had threatened to ban for being lewd.
¶ Grande Rio, whose parade theme "Let's Wear the Little Shirt, My Love" _ slang for wearing a condom, has been a lighting rod for controversy in recent weeks, raising the ire of the Catholic church for it's pro-condom message.
¶ Banks, stores and government offices nationwide shut down for the nonstop celebrations which run until noon on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, a period of fasting and reflection leading up to Easter.
¶ In the coastal city of Salvador, 750 miles (1,250 kilometers) northeast of here, whose carnival is growing to rival Rio's celebration, the party got underway Thursday, with bands playing atop speaker-laden trucks roving through streets.
¶ The Icelandic pop star Bjork and her boyfriend, the artist Matthew Barney, were among those attending.
¶ Further north, in Recife and Olinda, carnival groups playing speedy "frevo" music and thudding "maracatu" have crowded the streets since last weekend. In the far western Amazon city of Porto Velho, some 20,000 revelers turned out at midnight to begin celebrations.
¶ Even Sao Paulo, Brazil's normally staid business capital, was celebrating with their own samba parade.
¶ The highlight of Brazil celebration's is Rio's carnival parade Sunday and Monday nights. It features 14 top samba "schools" _ actually neighborhood groups, mainly from poor communities _ that have spent the year preparing for their moment of glory.
¶ Thousands of revelers cheer on each group, with up to 4,000 costumed dancers and drummers, as they parade along the 700-meter-long (700-yard-long) Sambadrome stadium in downtown Rio.
