Thoughts on Oscar Niemeyer

For weeks now, I have been checking the news daily, afraid that I might somehow miss the news that architect Oscar Niemeyer had died. When he did die, I found out almost immediately. Initially, I was sad, but the more I thought about Niemeyer, the more I felt that he was not simply my favorite architect; his architecture changed the way I see things. I am not a worshipper of Niemeyer. He could be cantankerous, crotchety, and absurd. His tantrum a few years ago over the city of São Paulo not tearing down part of the marquee at Ibirapuera Park (altering the original plan) when they built the auditorium fell somewhere between infantile and beyond the pale.


Yet, I did have an extraordinarily affectionate relationship with his architecture. I started taking pictures of it a decade ago; at that time, I mostly took pictures of architecture and architectural elements. Niemeyer inspired me to look beyond the interesting and find the sublime. His exterior lines were monumental; the interior curves and shadows, elegant.
   
 Some of his sites, like the Memorial da América Latina and even Brasília, became places that seemed surreal when they were empty (which was most of the time) post-apocalyptic when filled with crowds that seemed to be confined into a dream landscape in the middle of nowhere.

Others, like the MAC Niterói, the Museu do Olho, and the Brasília Cathedral, were simply breathtaking.

When I started taking pictures of Niemeyer’s architecture, I was trying to translate the emotion that welled up inside me when I saw or entered his buildings. Indeed, the curves, shadows, juxtapositions, and lines evoked strong emotions in me that I could not possibly express in words and struggled to portray in photographs. Luckily, Cristiano Mascaro was a more successful photographer of Niemeyer’s architecture, often finding angles and details that the architect himself may not have imagined.

From Niemeyer’s work, I learned to look again at buildings that I had not previously found beautiful. I came to see the International School and Modernism as well as contemporary or subsequent movements in new lights. Some of these buildings (and to some eyes, Niemeyer’s as well) were ugly. I started to love the ugly. I started to seek it out. I essentially stopped taking pictures of architecture in general and Niemeyer’s buildings in particular.
 

I still visit them and commune with them. I never see or step foot inside of a Niemeyer building without thinking about the architecture. Sometimes, I still see lines or details in Niemeyer’s buildings that make me weak in the knees. I still feel passion for a particular tree that draws shadows on the Oca building. Yet, I guess I realized that the beauty of Niemeyer’s architecture is self-evident; it doesn’t need my help and I don’t need to record it on film to remember what I saw. Less apparent is the simple elegance of yellow leaves and an abandoned building in Troy or a pile of concrete bricks in São Paulo. Those are the things that I want to share about my world—things that others might not see, and certainly wouldn’t find beautiful.
 

Of another architect, Paul Simon wrote, “Architects may come and/Architects may go and/Never change your point of view.” Every once in awhile, however, one comes along and turns your perspective on its head.
        

The null vote

So the latest Datafolha poll released today shows that 18% of those polled plan on nullifying their vote for deputado (federal representative in congress). On one hand, I think this should be cause for alarm--in a place where the vote is compulsory, this is one way to resist the vote and it implies a lack of confidence in the system. On the other hand, the numbers are not nearly so high for president which indicates that people are specifically protesting against the deputados, most likely because of the two recent scandals (the mensalão and the sangessugas). The statistics--which certainly could change between now and election day--could therefore be read as a positive way of protesting corruption.

I am not opposed to a blank or null vote--I myself have been known to do it in certain elections when there is no candidate that suits me. Still, these numbers are interesting because I remember seeing election results from the late 70s where the "winner" for deputado or senate would have been the blank or null vote. At the time, this reflected the fact that this was the only way to protest the pseudo-democratic elections imposed by the dictators for show.


Partial results of the 1970 senatorial race in São Paulo state.

The only preoccupation with this new trend is that we must wonder at what point such votes represent a disengagement with the constitutional democracy or even an invalidation of this. And it is important to remember that this is not only a problem in Brazil: it is just talked about here, where the vote is obligatory. If we compare the null vote numbers to the numbers of people who don't register or vote in places like the United States or Spain (which saw falling voter turnout every election until the 2004 ones), they are actually very low. Brazilian presidents still aren't being elected by 20% of the adult population, as is the case in the United States.

On Israel´s war...

I was talking to a family member over Skype the other day and was asked how the media was covering the war in Lebanon. I said that it was very different than the coverage in the U.S.—the Brazilian newspapers had taken a decidedly anti-Israeli standpoint, something which they probably would have done anyway but was exacerbated by the deaths of seven Brazilians during the first days of the conflict.

I also noted that I was hearing very different interpretations from some Jewish people here in São Paulo. “Look what they’re doing to Israel!” someone said to me last week. “Do you see?” I initially took her at face value—I interpreted her comment as being about Hezbollah. As time has passed, however, I came to wonder. The night before this woman made that comment to me, a Lebanese man who is living in Brazil (but is not a citizen) was going off on Israel and a mutual friend put her arm around him and said, “Calm down. Everyone knows that Israel is wrong.”

So this brings up an important question in my mind: is the pro-Israel/anti-Israel polemic that you see in the U.S. coming to Brazil? The two groups have always functioned fairly well in Brazil by maintaining the appearance of “Convivência”—the ability to live side by side. I think this has been helped along both by Brazilian (and Luso-Brazilian) cultural expectations but also by the fact that around half of the Sirio-Lebanese immigrants to Brazil were Christians and therefore the Sirio-Lebanese ethnic identity is as tied to being from a specific ethnicity as being Arab or Muslim. What happens, however, when this breaks down? Increasingly, I am noticing that a politically active intellectual left opposes Israel wholesale and I hear a rather absurd number of anti-Semitic comments. Some Jews, meanwhile, are turning their anger and frustration toward Arabs or Muslims. I have also seen this in the U.S. over the last few years and, again, it worries me. It worries me that for some Jews, criticism of Israeli political policy is seen as anti-Semitism and it worries me that many people on the political left have become so anti-Israel that they have, in fact, become anti-Semitic and insensitive to Zionism. Or perhaps more accurately, they were always anti-Semitic but it has suddenly become politically acceptable to express this publicly.

So I was looking at a newspaper online yesterday and I began to wonder what the New York Times was saying. I took two screenshots, one last night and one this morning. The Folha was most interested in the bombing of the U.N. post and the U.S. veto of a condemnation of Israel’s activities while the Times was interested in Israeli losses.

Heloísa Helena and So-called Third Parties

Meet the third-place candidate in the Brazilian elections. I did. Her name is Heloísa Helena and she is one of the senators who was expelled from the PT during the first year of Lula´s presidency for going against the party line on some critical votes, most notably pension reform. She really made her name, however, when she cried on the senate floor. Since then, Heloísa Helena became one of the founders of the PSOL which might be described as the workers´ wing of the Workers´ party if only they were attracting the workers and not the old socialists from the PT.

In order to attract the left, the party (which is admittedly still very young) will have to concentrate more on populism and its image. Heloísa Helena is an interesting spokeswoman for this image. On television, she has her severe ponytail and is portrayed as kind of an emotional woman both in her activities on the senate floor and on the campaign trail. The Folha in the last few days noted that she was having "woman problems" on Sunday and a blog in the same newspaper sayed that she had blown her top over pressing questions about taxes. My sense is that they are trying to undermine her as a candidate by pointing to "feminine" responses to issues and it makes me wonder what woman could run a serious campaign--the alternative would be what happened to Marta Suplicy, who was seen as hard, aloof and elitist.

I must say that in person, Heloísa Helena is very warm and nice (she is, after all, a nurse); she certainly has potential to appeal to the masses if only she can meet them and get beyond the press. The press, however, will never be her friend. The conservative media outlets (Globo, Estadão) favor Alckmin while left-leaning media sources are worried about the PSOL managing to split the progressive vote not only in the presidential election but in congressional elections; the rise of the party as embodied by Heloísa Helena could spell difficulty for the PT. Interestingly, at the moment, she seems to be undermining Alckmin every bit as much as she is undermining Lula; the polls show that she is taking intellectual elite votes from the "main" opposition candidate.

Where I go off on the media and political agendas

So I was reading O Globo online yesterday and noticed an interesting story.

It was about the family of engineer João José de Vasconcellos Jr., a Brazilian engineer who was kidnapped in Iraq on 19 January 2005. Apart from a photo of Vasconcellos’ documents that was released shortly after the kidnapping, there has been no word of Vasconcellos for over a year. At the end of last week, his mother wrote a letter to President Lula, begging for action on her son’s case.

It turns out that the Folha ran this story on Friday. They note that the letter criticizes a lack of “transparency” in the Ministry of Foreign Relations’ negotiations to free Vasconcellos and that she would like to know what exactly happened to her son.

When the kidnapping first happened, I found it interesting that it was such big news in Brazil and yet news organizations in the U.S. had not covered it at all and that no one there had ever heard of the case. It made me realize how inward-looking all of us are but it also made me think that we are only likely to hear news of this kind if there is some political motive. For instance, Brazilians and Europeans hear plenty about bombings and kidnappings in Iraq because Brazilian and European newspapers are generally opposed to the war and have strong anti-American tendencies. When I was in Spain in 1997-1998, the press relished news of school shootings or people who went postal in McDonalds while no one understood the Lewinsky scandal. The press covered it to show how silly the U.S. Americans can be.

This is of course true in the United States; neo-liberals like Fareed Zakaria may discuss with interviewees why the “reforms” of the 1990s (forced implementation of neo-liberal policies) failed everywhere but Chile while the New York Times runs stories talking about why pension reform is failing in Chile. Perhaps far more significant was the coverage of the political situation in Venezuela over the last four years. This has included disproportionate coverage of the opposition to the Chávez government and distortion of the actual size of the opposition. Almost no English- or Spanish-language media source in the U.S. has tried to investigate the situation and figure out the motives for the opposition and how they have advanced their cause. I was living in the United States at the time of the 2002 coup and for over a year after that and it became clear to me that there was a gap in media coverage only after Jimmy Carter requested a meeting with one of my colleagues and told him what he was observing on the ground in Venezuela. “But I’ve been watching the Univisión news,” I stated. Then I realized my stupidity: Venevisión is a part owner of Univisión and thus the Chávez opposition in the Venezuelan media controls what stories run on Univisión. Through the whole crisis in Venezuela from the coup to the elections to today, I am yet to see good U.S.-based journalism about the situation in Venezuela let alone about non Chávez-is-evil-related news. Why? Almost all U.S. Americans on all sides of the political spectrum dislike Chávez and the methods through which he came to power.

I am not writing this to sound like Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. Actually, I am sort of writing for that reason because I think it is important for all thinking members of any society (and particularly a democratic one) to question motives. Every time you read a headline, you should ask why that headline is there. Why is this news organization covering this story and not another? How have they worded this headline to influence how people think? What are the political motivations behind it? What are the differences between how (or whether) CNN, CNN+ (in Spain), Globo, RTE, El País, El Periódico and the Folha are covering a story like the 2004 Spanish elections? Why was Marcus Valério the top story in O Globo yesterday but below the fold in Folha? How does this ultimately influence who people vote for in October?

The story of João José de Vasconcellos Jr. is a sad one because he has been almost completely forgotten, even in Brazil. Imagine how it might be different if he were a white girl from Utah. Even more interesting, imagine the poor kidnappers. They realized too late that they had a Brazilian and, frankly, no one cared. He isn't valuable enough to advance anyone's agenda.

When one company dominates media outlets (or, when real life is better than a soap opera)

Over the last week or so, I have been watching a developing battle between film directors Walter Salles and his partner Daniela Thomas and the screenwriter João Emanuel Carneiro. Salles and Thomas are about to start shooting a new film that Thomas developed with screenwriter George Moura and Carneiro (note that I don’t know if Carneiro will be credited as a screenwriter; he did help with early versions of the script). Carneiro is now writing the new seven o’clock soap opera, Cobras & lagartos and it turns out that his protagonist has much in common with a protagonist of the new Salles/Thomas film. The character in question was apparently not in the script of the film when Carneiro bowed out of the project but was instead the idea of Thomas and Moura. Unfortunately for them, Thomas and Moura continued to include Carneiro by e-mailing him new versions of the script. Carneiro apparently liked some of their revisions so much that he stole one of them.

Walter Salles found out about this affair through an article about the soap opera in the Folha. No episodes had yet aired, but Salles immediately became suspicious when the article noted that the protagonist would be a flute-playing motorcycle delivery boy who falls in love with a cellist. In the film, a motorcycle delivery boy falls in love with a woman who plays the flute and loves classical music. Salles immediately contacted the television network, Globo. They changed the character’s instrument to the clarinet and turned him into a motorcycle driver (but not delivery boy). The network re-filmed seven scenes from the opening episodes.

After the series premiered, Salles and Thomas decided that the changes were not enough and they went public, choosing the Folha as their outlet. Both seemed very upset and suggested that this would jeopardize their film project.

It has now been confirmed that Salles and his production company, Videofilmes, are suing Carneiro.

You might wonder why the series was allowed to air with very minor changes even when Thomas and Moura have plenty of documentary evidence in the form of e-mails that their character was developed after Carneiro left the project and when it is so clear that Carneiro’s character is borrowed from Thomas and Moura’s. Simple. TV Globo, the television network that is airing the show, and Globo Filmes, the distributor of Salles’ films, are all part of the the massive Globo media giant, which also controls companies that provide cable and internet to many Brazilians, a major music distributor and Rio de Janeiro’s largest daily newspaper. Call me a cynic, but I suspect that Globo did not think that Salles, an independent producer and director at the mercy of distribution, would want to bite the hand that feeds him.

He decided to bite, but it raises a bigger question. How often does this happen to less powerful people who are unable to challenge the Globos of the world?

Ongoing political wranglings with Bolivia

So I don't want to harp on this Bolivia thing, but an update:

-As I had speculated, Petrobras has proclaimed that they will not invest further in Bolivia. This includes projects that were underway, such as an expansion of the gas pipeline from Bolivia to Brazil. They have also stated that they will not pay the increased prices for gas. I hate predictions, but I suspect that this is a bargaining chip that Petrobras will use in renegotiating their contract. They are also threatening to take Bolivia to court. Bolivia has accused Petrobras of "blackmail."

-Chávez. It has been noted that he is trying to play two sides: on one hand, he is touting an alternative hemispheric organization that would exclude the U.S. while leading to greater integration of the Latin American economies. On the other hand, he is congratulating Morales for his bravery.

-"Are we the Yankees?" This is the question asked today by Eliane Cantanhêdes in the Folha Online. She noted very much the quandary that I noted on Tuesday: the fact that Lula approved of Morales; the sector of the government (including the Ministry of Mines) that wants to break completely with the Bolivians; and then there is the business sector in Brazil that is just plain freaked out by the power that Morales wields. She closes by noting:

Lula thought himself the great regional leader, but now he's seeing Brazil turned into the victim of one of these "phenomena." In the 1960s, we screamed, "Go home, Yankees," at the Americans. Today, and in spite of a government that was elected as "leftist", are we the Yankees?"

-Long live alcohol, down with natural gas. There had been a program to switch gasoline-fueled cars to natural gas-fueled. For R$3000 (US$1500) you could convert your car; to date, over 1/3 of the 35,000 taxis in São Paulo had done just that. No longer. No one is taking their car in to do the switch. It's a good time to be in the sugar industry.

Nationalization of resources

So what a political, economic and ideological mess.

During the Bolivian elections, I found myself a bit worried about the outcome because I was worried about Petrobras, the Brazilian petroleum company. I knew that the previous government had fallen over privatization and that the new president would most likely be a nationalist and that the nationalist would probably nationalize the national gas industry and possibly also petroleum.

As most people know by now, Evo Morales was elected and immediately began implementing a nationalist project. He has legalized the coca crop and cozied up to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. It would be difficult to look at Morales and not think of the great populists of the last century: Vargas, Cárdenas, Perón, Franklin D. Roosevelt… and Chávez. And once again it was clear that, just as with Vargas, Cárdenas and Perón, Morales would not resist the temptation and indeed the demands from the public to nationalize the petroleum and natural gas industries.

Yesterday Morales celebrated Labor Day by making the big announcement: Bolivia would seize control of all oil and natural gas resources. In a dramatic action, he sent the army to occupy oil fields and refineries. Although this barely merited a mention in the U.S. media, it was a top headline in Brazil, Argentina, Spain, France and Britain because all of those countries host businesses that have investments in Bolivian natural gas and petroleum. Indeed, Morales’ announcement did have repercussions in the U.S. (stock markets that were up in the morning went down dramatically after news spread), but news from the Americas that does not directly impact the pocketbook rarely makes front-page news in the United States.

While most North Americans might hear the news of nationalization and have no response, a Brazilian who is reasonably aware of current events would hear the news with intrepidation. Over the last nine years, Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil monopoly (which is now a publicly traded company), has become the largest foreign company in Bolivia; Brazilians immediately began to worry about Petrobras and the billions of dollars that they stood to lose. By this morning, there was another growing concern: natural gas. Over half of the natural gas that Brazilians use is Bolivian and Brazilian gas consumption has increased as many apartment buildings now have building-wide water heaters (rather than electric heaters on shower heads). People were worrying about their hot showers.

Still, this issue creates an interesting political and moral problem for the Brazilian left. On one hand, the left is generally opposed to privatization. Even left-leaning proponents of the neo-Liberal bonanza of the 1990s have come to see that some industries—including those that control important resources and services such as electricity, telephone and water—should not be subject to the whims of profit and foreign interest. Beyond that, there is a long-running feeling in Latin America that the people should own resources that are in the ground including gas, oil, minerals, ores and water. This sentiment explains why most Latin American countries have nationalized gas, petroleum and mining industries at least once since the 1930s. Although the most famous examples of this occurred in Mexico and Brazil (both in 1938), it is interesting to note that this is the third time for Bolivia (1937, 1969). Still, it is hard when your country suffers. Petrobras is perhaps Brazil’s biggest patron of the arts, historic restoration and education. Beyond that, financial losses could mean higher natural gas prices, which no one wants.

Of course, if Bolivia has nationalized petroleum twice before, one might wonder why companies like Repsol, Total and Petrobras were willing to invest in the country. It was an open market, a place that needed major capital investment but had vast resources. It was also the late 1990s and I think it was hard for companies to imagine a turn away from the neo-Liberal policies that governed the world. This is particularly the case in countries with large debts to the IMF or the World Bank, both of which were force-feeding privatization on debtors. It is a sort of blind faith that a lot of South Americans in particular have, an idea that new or temporary things are permanent and stable. It is this kind of faith, I think, that allows us to see American democracies as permanent even though most of them date only to the 1980s and history is not on the side of enduring democracy.

So anyway, Morales has expanded a bit on what he means by “nationalization”. It turns out that Bolivia does not have the money that would be needed to build the infrastructure that is required for further development of their industry. Instead, he wants to renegotiate the contracts of foreign oil interests with terms that are more favorable for Bolivia. He admits that he dreams of a strong national oil monopoly like those in Brazil and Venezuela but that he will have to raise the money to fund that—and this seems to be a way of doing that. Meanwhile, most of the companies that are currently operating in Bolivia will probably stay and take the cut in profits but they are unlikely to invest in further exploration or development of resources. This is not so great for Bolivia because of their cash flow problems, but perhaps Morales thinks he will raise enough money through these additional gas and oil taxes to begin exploration in areas where the foreign companies are not yet active. If he does this, however, Morales will have to show the fiscal restraint not to divert the oil profits to populist programs that feed and educate the poor (which is what his mentor Chávez does). If multinationals quit pouring more money into development (something that translates into jobs) and the people do not see Morales giving the oil money back to them, it will not bode well for his tenure.

And back in Brazil, this puts Lula between a rock and a hard place. Over the last three years, he has walked a very fine line between the neo-Liberals of the West and other left-leaning nationalists in South America including Chávez and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina. For the first time, he finds himself publicly having to take sides against Chávez (and Fidel Castro) as he defends his own country’s interests.

Party cheat sheet

I can’t even remember when I first saw a headline speculating about the alliances in this year’s presidential election. I do remember the headline, however: the PMDB wanted the governorship of São Paulo state in exchange for a political alliance. I also remember that this was before the PSDB had a candidate for president and before that party had committed against any alliance that involved the governorship of S.P.

Backing up, I think it would be worthwhile to give a bit of a down-and-dirty explanation of Brazilian political parties. As I mentioned earlier, Brazil is increasingly a two-party country where the “minor” parties can have a major impact. The two major parties are the left-of-center PT (the Workers’ Party) and the somewhat-less-left-of-center PSDB. Both parties are essential socially progressive while their fiscal policies are neo-Liberal. Both parties have their roots in the opposition to the last dictatorship (1964-1985) although the demographics of the founders are significantly different. The PSDB’s founders were mostly post-dictatorship defectors from the MDB (a party created by the dictators as the “opposition party”) who had held important political and intellectual posts in government (particularly the state government of São Paulo) and at universities. The PT, meanwhile, grew out of the massive labor movement (also based in greater São Paulo) of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Other founders of the PT included liberation theologists, left-wing intellectuals and people active in the guerilla movement that sought to undermine the dictatorship.

Perhaps because of these historical differences, there is still a fairly active left wing of the PT even as many of the more committed socialists, communists and anti-Liberalism segments have left the party for more progressive pastures. Even though some of the most prominent members of the PSDB have firmly leftist histories, they seem less likely to voice opposition to party positions. A very crude reason for this might be that certain economic models (underdevelopment, neo-Marxism, dependency theory) have gone out of fashion in academia (significant for a party where not a few prominent members are former sociologists and economists) and it is frankly very difficult if not impossible to govern a country that is controlled by the IMF without adopting neo-Liberal policies.

Anyway, after the last round of municipal elections, it was widely reported that Brazil was increasingly a country dominated by the PSDB and the PT; these two parties have occupied the Alvorada (the presidential palace) for nearly 12 years and they now represent a vast majority of mayors in Brazil. Still, neither party holds a majority in any state legislature (that I can think of) or the national congress. This can lead to interesting twists. For instance, even though the PSDB holds the most seats in the São Paulo state legislature and had held the presidency of that body, the PFL managed to take it away last year by allying a broad base of opposition legislators.

Which party is powerful varies from state to state, but two parties that are sort of gold-chip alliances on the national level are the PMDB and the PFL. Here I must disclose that I cannot speak objectively of the ultraconservative PFL, which is particularly powerful in the Northeast and North. My objection, I think, is that many of the party’s principals are former bigwigs in ARENA, the ruling party of the aforementioned dictatorship. I guess I find it remarkable that these guys who were nominated governor by the dictators or elected senator for the military party survived the dictatorship and have remained successful via populist strategies. Perhaps some of them deserve to be elected, but I wish their histories as stooges of a fascist government were more of an issue. We all, I feel, make choices; I think that a politician should answer to scrutiny if that choice is to ally one’s self with a non-democratic government that tortures and murders its citizens, abrogates free speech and amasses a debt that will cripple the country for decades to come.

Besides the PFL, the PMDB holds significant political power in Brazil, particularly in rural states. As you might have guessed, the PMDB grew out of the MDB, which was the party created by the military as the opposition party during the dictatorship.

I’m sure that this sounds funny—my mention of the dictators “creating” the ARENA and the MDB the year after their 1964 coup but that’s exactly what happened. I have seen the actual news reports from when this happened. The government literally made a list of all of the legal political parties in Brazil and declared that certain parties would now become part of the ARENA and other parties would become part of the MDB. In this way, they created a two-party system although there remained significant rifts in both parties that would ultimately lead to the extinction of the ARENA in the early 1980s and the significant 1988 split of the PMDB that led to the creation of the PSDB. This is important because the PSDB took much of the left wing of the PMDB and left a more rural, centrist (or even right-of-center) party. Even as I say that, the PMDB has a strong social democratic current in part because various politicians of the left have defected to the PMDB. The PMDB, along with some more populist parties, is a great example of why “traditional” European and North American ideas of left and right do not fit neatly into many Latin American parties.

There are many other political parties, some of which have significant power in one or more states. Still, these are the four that will determine who is elected president this year. Their alliances will also probably determine the outcomes of several gubernatorial elections.

How´s that for a quick, dirty and probably inaccurate cheat sheet?