In the movie Party Girl, when Parker Posey learns the joys of the Dewey Decimal System and starts organizing the 12-inch singles of her DJ roommate, she picks up a Sylvester album and says, "Divas, male."
Add to that list Brazilian legend Ney Matogrosso. Though not that well known in the U.S., imagine my delight this afternoon when I turned the corner from around my house and saw the above handbill in front of the Brava Theater. If you've never experience Ney, here is a clip of him in action.
If Up with People can have a documentary about the why not one about Os Mutantes. The music of Up with People makes me to shiver and wretch, even though I'm laughing at them as I listen and watch. Os Mutantes makes me want to take on the status quo and shake my butt and have a good time while doing it. Bread and Circuses sounds like a lot of fun. Another Brazilian film to track down. This is not a blog about Brazil. Yet.
Things left in the mind that we remember as being shining and glorious ultimately seem to be vaguely out of reach and haunting, even if they were really grimy, unpleasant inconveniences back in the day. When I wove through the snowy streets of SOHO to the film office where I worked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I sometimes tried to imagine which alley off Greene Street was where my great-grandfather Rosenbaum was murdered in early 1889 before a mysterious stranger took his widow and 11 children to the Oklahoma land run a few months later, giving her and the children his Anglo-Saxon name, Biggs.
But I would soon be pulled away from those musings to purchase my "light coffee" in the sacred We Are Happy to Serve You cup pushed towards me by the surly Russian deli worker who clearly took no pleasure in serving me.
I liked arriving at the film office before the others, but much to my chagrin I would find my coworker Laura who grew up in the Bronx and often shared stories of the year she spent with her Cajun husband in Baton Rogue. That year scarred her, she assured me. We could argue about many a topic, but one morning I made the mistake of telling her about having enjoyed a couple of years earlier seeing the Brazilian film Opera do Malandro, Chico Buarque's take on the Brecht-Weill classic Die Dreigrossenoper. She railed at me, as a fellow Jew and lover of Weimar culture. How could I praise this sacrilege and insult to this masterpiece that procariously managed to emerge just before the influx of the Third Reich?
Even our precious coworkers had no idea what we were arguing about and with such passion. And for years I've been trying to find a copy of the film, even on VHS, to see if my impressions now 20 years in the past were ill-advised. The clips below -- from the 1985 film and a recent staging in Rio -- suggest that I was not that off base. I have a couple of feelers out to capture this obscure epic, the most expensive Brazlian film ever made at the year of its release. If I was able to find Skidoo, surely this one will return to me as well.
Someday, I am sure, I will be able to watch The Life Aquatic and find that it is absolutely brilliant. Had it not been preceded by The Royal Tenebaums, a near perfect film that took me into a flawed but ever so familiar and comforting world, I might have been less disappointed. That's not to say there weren't some fascinating details, but to borrow from one of my favorite lyrics from Funny Girl "...very nice deportments, but when they see that assortment! From the gallery they'll be throwing fruit."
However, within the mess that was The Life Aquatic, there was floating above it with a Zen-like detachment was Seu Jorge singing David Bowie tunes...in Portuguese! (Oh, and there was also Scott Walker singing "30 Century Man".)
Much as I have enmeshed myself in Brazilian pop over the 35 years, it was this film that introduced me to Jorge, and I've been hooked ever since. I've been listening a lot to his "Carolina" which has been on KCRW and other places in heavy rotation lately. And as with so much Brazilian pop, it gives me that weird mix of absolute calm and a desire to shake every bone and muscle in my body with a comforting sense that everything is going to be okay.
In another life -- and I seriously believe I've already had some already rich ones and have even better ones ahead -- I think I will be a Brazilian pop star. I, however, will cover Lou Reed. Just imagine "Perfect Day" and "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" in Portuguese with a samba beat.
Location: San Francisco, California, United States
JunkThief is your typical Gallic Jew boy born on the Great Plains, went to Gotham and Ouagadougou and Kathmandu before settling in San Francisco's Mission District. Now he searches the dark alleys of that city to find good conversation, Weimar culture and (but of course) the perfect door knob.
