Beautiful Horizons

Marta

As Mr. Trend notes, this is a very good profile of Marta, Brazil's soccer goddess.

I've always been a firm believer that what is most important is not where you are, but where uou came from. The article notes rather vaguely that she grew up in the town of Dois Riachos in "northeast Brazil."

Here is where Dois Riachos is: The middle of the sertao in Alagoas.She's come from the sort of place they refer to in Brazil as so remote, the wind turns around to come back. This just makes her story all the more remarkable.

Coming to Their Senses?

Von at Obsidian Wings points me to this update on the excommunication of the doctors who performed the abortion on the 9 year old rape victim in Brazil and her mother, but he is mistaken if he thinks it means that the excommunications have been rescinded. This may clarify things:

[Archbishop Rino] Fisichella stressed that abortion is always "bad." But he said the quick proclamation of excommunication "unfortunately hurts the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy."

The Vatican teaches that anyone performing or helping someone to have an abortion is automatically excommunicated from the church, and the Vatican prelate underlined that abortion is "always condemned by moral law as an intrinsically evil act."

"There wasn't any need, we contend, for so much urgency and publicity in declaring something that happens automatically," Fisichella wrote.

Writing as if he were addressing the girl, Fisichella said: "There are others who merit excommunication and our pardon, not those who have allowed you to live and have helped you to regain hope and trust."

It appears that the objection is to the public aspect of it, although one gets the impression from the article that Archbishop Fisichella is disturbed as well by the utter lack of compassion on behalf of the Archbishop of Recife as well as the fact that he publicly proclaimed that the rapist stepfather would not be excommunicated, because according to him, abortion is worse than rape.

There remains the possibility that less reactionary more compassionate minds will prevail. After all, the excommunication of a Holocaust denier was rescinded . . .

Stay tuned.

Fun Things You Learn on Wikipedia

When I went to Italy a couple of years ago I was impressed that so many of the airports were named after atists, explorers and inventors: Marconi in Bologna, Verdi in Parma, da Vinci in Rome, Marco Polo in Venice, Galileo in Pisa and Vespucci in Florence.

Brazil seems to be moving in that direction, having changed the name of Rio de Janeiro's international airport to Tom Jobim International Airport, but I was especially pleased to learn that the new airport in Maceió, the capital of the Northeast state of Alagoas, is Zumbi dos Palmares International Airport. It's a belated honor for a man who played such an important and tragic role in Brazil's colonial history.

Salgueiro Wins

The samba school Salgueiro had a solid victory in Rio de Janeiro's Carnaval competition with a near perfect score of 399 out of a possible 400. It's their nonth win overall and the first since 1993.

It's nice to see a school other than Beija-Flor or Mangueira win.

Bad Move, Lula

If you are Brazilian, you pull for the Brazilian team wholeheartedly. You complain about individual players and/or the coaches when they let you down. What you never do is compare them negatively to Argentina's team. Apparently that lesson is lost on Lula:

Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sparked another footballing controversy on Friday after praising the fighting spirit of Argentina’s players and especially forward Lionel Messi.

Brazil coach Dunga said he would prefer Lula to be more supportive and national team goalkeeper Julio Cesar suggested the president should live in Argentina.

Lula, who upset striker Ronaldo on the eve of the 2006 World Cup by asking if he was fat, told reporters that when Brazil’s forwards lose the ball they expect the defence to clear up after them while Argentina’s players, such as Messi, chase back.

The problem with being the Brazilian team's coach are the other 180 million other coaches.

Film Review - The Year My Parents Went on Vacation

The Year My Parents Went On Vacation

Young Mauro's parents are leftists in Brazil in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1970. It was a year of lows and highs in Brazil; the principal high being Brazil's win in the World Cup, making it the first nation to win the World Cup for the third time and the principal low being the rule of Emílio Garrastazu Médici, whose leadership of the nation was without question the most brutal of the twenty-five year military dictatorship that the nation endured.

This was not a good time to be a leftist in Brazil: it was dangerous as the implementation of Institutional Act 5, which unleashed a series of brutal, repressive actions against dissent involving torture and disappearances,  was complete.  Mauro is an eleven-year-old boy whose parents decide to leave him with his paternal grandfather in Bom Retiro, a a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Sao Paulo while they flee for their lives. What they don't know is that in a tragic coincidence, his grandfather has died that same day. The community rallies around Mauro, especially Shlomo, the Polish, Orthodox Jewish immigrant who lives next door and all are enriched by the experience.

You'll be enriched by this film as well. The director, Cao Hamburger, knows the value of understatement in his actors. Michel Joelsas as Mauro gives what may be one of the best performances by a child actor since Brigitte Fossey in Forbidden Games.

Inhotim

When I was planning my trip to Brazil last year, I came across this article about Inhotim, a park, nature reserve and art gallery in the Atlantic Forest amidst the mountains of Minas Gerais not far from Belo Horizonte. I made plans to visit there and am glad I did.

Pictures are below the fold.

Standardizing Portuguese

When you have a nation of some 190 million people who speak your language one way and you're a nation of some ten million who speak it another way, it's probably not a bad idea to make an effort to standardize the spelling, etc. Some in Portugal aren't responding too favorably:

Legislators in Portugal have adopted a widely contested standardization of Portuguese that requires hundreds of words to be spelled the Brazilian way.

Both the governing Socialist party and the main opposition Social Democratic party overwhelmingly backed the proposal in a parliamentary vote Friday.

Portuguese is the official language of countries with a total popular of some 230 million people worldwide, with Brazil accounting for some 190 million Portuguese speakers.

[...]

Some leading writers and other public figures in Portugal have strongly opposed the agreement, calling it an unnecessary capitulation to Brazilian influence.

Opponents on Thursday delivered to Parliament a petition with more than 33,000 signatures.

From a purely practical standpoint, the need to have the Brazilian standard is pretty obvious. The differences, I might add are not simply slotting in an extra vowel, such favorite versus favourite or color versus colour. Words such as óptimo, acto and facto in continental Portuguese and ótimo, ato and fato in Brazilian Portuguese require different pronunciation for obvious reasons.

I have an absolutely horrible time understanding spoken continental Portuguese. This will not help that at all. Even if the written words are changed the way the language is spoken will take generations to change.

Cachaça Making a Splash Here?`

It's culture day at BH.

Seth Kugel writes about cachaça in Wednesday's New York Times. It's worth a read, but it shouldn't have taken him to the fifth paragraph from the end to make this observation:

When Titus Ribas opened the Cachaça Jazz Club last year in Greenwich Village, he envisioned a epicurean cachaça shelf to show off the best of the artisanal cachaças from Minas Gerais state, which is a cachaça hotbed. Caught up in booking bands, though, he gave up and serves Pitú and Leblon. [my emphasis]

The guy who wrote about Belo Horizonte's bars just six months ago should have mentioned from the start about the quality of the cachaça from Minas Gerais. One can go into any liquor store in the Mercado Central in Belo Horizonte and see a wide variety of the beverage. He should also have mentioned that one uses a pretty cheap variety of cachaça in making caipirinhas, the most popular mixed drink made with this liquor.

With all due respect to Rio, when most people think of cachaça, they think of Minas Gerais. I'm getting thirsty . . .

A Lovely Place

Still involved with family activities, but we were able to visit this place today and it was worth every minute of the time it took to get there.

How truly gratifying it is to see that the landscaping tradition as embodied by the work of Roberto Burle Marx lives on in such a lovely place.

Pictures upon my return next week.