The Cultural Center of Federal Justice

The trick in which one projects an image of a speaking face on an inanimate object has spread far and wide. Your correspondent first saw it presented as art by Tony Oursler, and the first time you see it, it's undeniably cool. It was also well done at the Latvian speaking stones installation. The Brazilian Federal Justice Cultural Center has a less expertly installed version in which various primary source legal experts discuss the formation of the modern Brazilian court system. For the enlightenment of our readers, one such installation is pictured above for those who are impervious to nightmares about slightly malformed disembodied heads discussing jurisprudence on command.

Vidigal

We haven't visited the favela of Vidigal. Favela is the Brazilian word for "shanty town" or "slum" or "poor neighborhood." As the Rio police undertake a slow but successful campaign of "pacifying" the favelas and forcing out the most prominent drug-trafficking elements, the hillside towns have become a tourist attraction. In this case, we took a picture from the safe distance of a couple miles of water away, with Vidgal's lights spreading up the Two Brothers at sunset.

Grumari

Hey, we made it outside the city! Not far outside the city, but far enough to find this lovely beach, called Grumari. Best part is that it has a park behind it rather than a series of apartment buildings as is the case in Ipanema. The whole baby thing on top of two work schedules has definitely slowed down our pace of exploration in comparison with prior tours, but it hasn't quite stopped us entirely. More soonish!

A cheap one from around the house

I think this picture of a nationalistic bar of soap really says a lot about life in Brazil. Exactly what that is, I don't know. Probably something more than the fact that they spell Brazil "Brasil." Let me know if you figure it out!

Hip Hop

Ok, last picture from Carnaval. There might be more interesting pictures and crazy costumes, but I'm getting tired of them, so our few readers probably are, too. But these costumes are great! Right? I'm sure there's a great history somewhere about how the carnaval costumes developed from elaborate to ridiculous. We're certainly in the latter category now.

A rainbow of Carnaval fun

In theory this ought to be a better picture than it turned out being, what with all the color and contrast and such. But we couldn't really move to a place where the composition would have wound up better, which is a pretty serious constraint on trying to photograph a parade from an assigned seat. Anyway, we have a few more nice carnival shots, and then we're going to try to move on to new territory soon. Our biggest problem at the moment is getting out with the camera. We get out sometimes, but now we carry so much baby stuff around that we don't always want to add a camera bag to the load. But for our adoring and dwindling viewing public, we will try!

Uh, More from Carnaval

Sorry, we should really move on. But we can't yet. So here are some portrait-style pictures of people in the same general section Carnaval parade.







Yeah, the guy in the middle is smacking himself on the ass for the camera. Good times.

Germany...

There were some portions of the German-themed parade that were just vaguely about nature and such. Germany definitely has nature. So do a lot of places. This was a float with a bunch of dancing trees on the top and a bunch of dancing mushrooms in layers beneath. I guess that's pretty German... right?

Germany.

So if you're on the $25,000 Pyramid, and the theme is "Things Associated with Germany," you have to figure "Beer" is going to be one of the clues, no? Belgium and the Czech Republic may be rivals for the title, but with Oktoberfest and what-not, German affinity for beer is pretty notable. So, this is clearly one element that the samba school got right. Also, in an illustration of the crazy level of effort put into the floats, the glasses of beer these dancers are standing on actually had bubbles rising through them, and the head on top of the beer would periodically foam up and the dancers would fling clumps of froth into the air. Quite a feat of engineering.

Germany?

From the "less sense" category, one of the floats in the Germany-themed parade was this big model of the moon. It was a really fun float, with the fancy-dress lady on top and all the dancing moon men attached to the sides of the globe sticking out at all angles and waving their arms in time with the music. You can only see the top here, but it was a full-circle 360° moon. Really quite cool. And I'm sure a lot of work for the designers/builders as well as the dudes in the spacesuits.

However, as a Consul representing the United States Government, I might, with all due respect, note: Only one country has ever put a man on the moon. That country was not/not Germany. That is all.

Germany (in Rio)!

On the night we went, one of the samba schools in the parade competition had selected the theme "Germany." It was quite a show. They might have won, had one of their floats not caught on fire.

The parade consisted of a series of floats and groups in elaborate costumes reflecting elements of German culture, with connections ranging from direct to, um, less direct. Among the more direct (in your correspondents' view), and very cool: A group of guys carrying parts from the bodies of old Volkswagen Beetles, who would dance for a bit, and then cluster together into the shape of a full Bug, as if they were a Transformers Dance Troupe; and a bunch of guys wearing cherry-red helmets and costumes in the shape of German Chocolate Cake. Brilliant.

This group, celebrating German music -- more Bach and Beethoven than Kraftwerk and Einstürzende Neubauten, one gathers -- was also in the "makes sense" category. Over the next few days, some entries from both the "makes sense" and the "makes less sense" categories.

More from the Vinicius de Moraes/Ipanema group. Gotta love the "surfer hair."

Girls from Ipanema

Another of the schools chose a theme commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vinicius de Moraes, a legendary poet and composer, probably most famous to Americans for writing the lyrics to "The Girl from Ipanema." So I guess this crew are supposed to be Girls From Ipanema, or something like that. In general the parade was kind of a celebration of all things beach-y and/or Bossa Nova-y.

Zombies!

The parade is actually a competition, with an elaborate judging system where each different component of the parade -- floats, drum corps, pretty ladies carrying flags, etc -- gets judged and one of the 12 schools is declared the best for that year. Like in soccer leagues, the school that comes in last is relegated to the second division, and the winner of that parade is promoted to the top division the next year. One element of all this is that each of the 12 samba schools competing in the parade picks a theme. This year, for example, one school's theme was "Germany;" another was "Fame" (yesterday's photo of a portrait gallery float was from the "Fame" theme). This group, despite the fact that I saw the whole thing, I can't recall what their theme was. There was something that looked like a Mississippi river paddle boat and... uh... some other random stuff... and this float of ultraviolet zombies. It was all fun, but I don't think they probably won high marks for coherence and dedication to theme.

One of the prominent features of the Carnaval parades are people in elaborate costumes riding along on truly massive floats. I don't know how she got up there in that get-up. They must help them up with a ladder or a cherry-picker before the parade starts, but you better not need to go to the bathroom because I don't think she has the option of coming down even in the case of an emergency. And there was an emergency -- we didn't see it but later on in the parade route one of the floats caught on fire and had to be evacuated or some such.

The Sambodromo

So this is what the Sambodromo looks like. Above, looking from our seats toward the finish of the parade route to the right. Below, one of the floats going by. We had of course heard of the famous Rio Carnaval and something about parades or some such, but had never realized that they have a special-purpose parade stadium taking up several blocks of prime real estate that they use for one week each year.

For the rest of the week -- and probably next week, too -- pictures of the crazy, elaborate floats and costumes they put together for these parades.

Rio in One Picture

So here you go: One picture with Samba, Carnaval, and Soccer all in one. Taken at night one of the two-night official Samba School Championship Parade in February.

I guess it's too bad they don't do the parade on the beach.

For no good reason, one more picture from the epic walk to get into the Sambodromo.

We briefly walked by the real Carnaval

Not exactly a fine art photograph, but a moment for us nonetheless. We took a more-circuitous-than-intended route to get to our seats at the Sambodromo. The Sambodromo is a crazy stadium that is several city blocks of bleachers on either side of the street where the Carnaval samba school competition takes place. It's a pretty unconventional piece of urban design. And if you wind up trying to get to seats sort of on the other side of the Sambodromo, it involves a longish walk, sometimes along streets that are blocked off for parade staging, and thus everyone trying to get in or out of the Sambodromo is crammed onto a few meters of sidewalk. It kind of sucks.

And then, one might pass a random little bar like this, with a bunch of random people dancing up a storm to the sounds of the television broadcast of the samba parade that is happening literally 200 yards and 200 dollars away from them. I don't regret going to the Carnaval parade, but next year it might be a lot cheaper to just find this bar again.

Post-parade

Ok, so we're two weeks in to our take-it-easy weekly posting schedule and already falling behind. But this is the first of probably quite a few pictures from Carnaval, which was a couple weeks ago at this point. This was on the somewhat circuitous path we took to get into the Sambodromo, near where the parade ends. One of the samba schools was already finishing up as we went by, because we were absorbing the Latin culture and showing up late. We spotted this woman in her full regalia talking on a cellphone and took a quick snap with the pocket camera. The more colorful side of the Sambodromo is coming up soon.

Bom Dia, Cristo

Shot from the same spot as last week's photo. If you're lucky, we'll get around to something else soon. I can't promise there won't be dramatic Cristo pictures every now and again over the next few years.

Introducing the Rio de Janeiro Edition

Hey, we're in Brazil! Back abroad after ages in DC. Washington was not an ideal location for us in terms of travel photography, but having a kid was the major culprit in this publication being updated sporadically over the last few months. Now we're abroad again, putting the Foreign back in Foreign Service, and hope the Holla will be the better for it. Of course, The Kid came with us, so it would be wildly optimistic to think we'll get back to our daily posting schedule.

So: Above, find a photo from the top of Pao de Açúcar, or Sugarloaf Mountain, in our new home of Rio de Janeiro. We hope to be able to provide further photos and stories of life in Brazil on a semi-regular basis. We're shooting for a minimum of once a week, and maybe more when events warrant (such as the hundreds of pictures we took at Carnaval a week ago).

Upon preview, I see that in the months of my not-so-vigorous blogging, Blogger has changed their formatting. So now it doesn't make a link to the original photo in full size. So, if you want to see the above in a larger version, here you go.