Death and Memory

It's another one of those "where were you?" type of days. I don't know who I got it from -- probably a combination of my history-obsessed father and my keepsake-hoarding mother -- but I am big on memories and memorials. I believe in ritual mostly so that we can sensibly organize our uncontrollable desire to remember, to celebrate, to honor, to mourn.

So, ten years ago I was in Denver. I was visiting Cameron. I was confessedly madly in love with him at the time. It was 1997 - the year I complete reinvented myself and cast off the wounding, traumatic experience of the most painful and humiliating break up of my entire life the year before. My trip to see Cam was the end of a cascade of romances that began on Valentine's Day that year, when I met Troy. We'd fumbled for a couple of months through dating until we realized we were much better friends and happily called it a day. I met Cam almost immediately after, in a pretty hilarious fashion that I'll save for my memoirs (Troy was sitting next to me at the time - that's all I'll say.) But Cam didn't seem serious about me that spring, and I was afraid to get too attached to anyone. Then I met Steve, and we dated for the summer. It was nice, innocent. But in almost a combination of the issues in both of the previous situations, Steve and I decided to be friends and to this day are still close despite his move to France thereafter. The summer was almost over, and I missed Cam. It suddenly became passionate. Steve saw how down I was and gave me a buddy pass, and off to Denver I went.

But by the time I'd realized the depth of feeling I had, it was too late. He'd moved to Denver, and we were both smart enough to realize that there was no way we could pursue a relationship. He had finally fixed on a career in design, and enrolled in school out there; I'd fixed my star to Washington irrevocably. And in retrospect, as I maneuvered through my 29th year, I can see that all my many passions that year were merely designed to propel me ever forward from the abyss of 1996. And my trip to Denver, while real in its affections and passions, was a fleeting moment in the larger picture.

And that night that Cam and I went to a gay cowboy bar for a larf, we saw on the TVs that CNN was on, and the caption read: "Princess Diana Dead." Immediately I thought it was terrorism, probably IRA. (How ironic that on September 11, 2001, as I looked at Tower 1 on fire I thought it had to be an accident.) But the story came out over the hours that followed, and we were sad.

I read Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles this year on a flight home from Washington. It was a very interesting read, and I was struck at how I felt about Diana now. I saw a woman who was so young when she decided she had it all and knew it all. And then she consistently defeated herself throughout her 20s until she finally exited her marriage. She was forever seeking unconditional love, and put it all on Prince Charles quite mistakenly at the age of 19. A big mistake she refused to see through, and sank into a period of self-destruction. All throughout the book, Brown allows the reader to think (without disliking Diana in the process): "she didn't HAVE to be the Princess of Wales! What was she DOING? She should have gotten a life, for Christ's sake." Easy enough to say. But the tragedy was that it seemed she had a chance to finally emerge from all the self-induced wreckage of her life and become herself for real. And then she was dead.

Indeed, Brown argues that by losing her "HRH" title in her 1996 divorce, something she was at first very angry about, she was free not only of the stifling limits of royal controls. She was also freeing herself from the overwraught, totally unrealistic expectations of bliss that she'd concocted as a 19 year-old girl headed toward the altar to become a future queen.

And at that moment in her life -- that carefree summer of 1997 -- she was realizing it. She had a fling with Dodi Fayed (largely, we now know, due to the conniving of his whacked-out father). She was getting over being dumped by Hasnat Kahn. But she was also telling friends that she was beginning to get it about herself. She was just starting to figure out what she wanted to be, and where she wanted to go with this crazy life of hers now that the dust was clearing and she could get a grip on it. At 39, I can relate to that light, airy feeling she probably had. She wasn't in love with Dodi, per se. She would have seen that soon enough, and looked fondly back on that summer nonetheless.

She'd be only 46 today, probably just as gorgeous as she was then, and very well planted in who she really was, finally, and enjoying it. But alas, she was killed in a car crash, and Prince Charles had to go claim her body in Paris the next morning and look at her dead face laying in the coffin, an earring missing and the thought of her suffering and terror ringing in his mind along with all the inevitable feelings of guilt he held. Her sons have to live with the fact of her death forever. And there was no happy ending to the story of Diana, nor will there ever be. She was unlucky in 1997.

I was very lucky. The person I am today was, in many ways, born that year, too. It finally began to shake itself awake that long, carefree summer of 1997. Nearly all of my current friends (minus just Dena, I think, and work friends from my old political career) have only known me since 1997 or later. There's a reason for that. I had the good fortune to see myself through from 1997 to today, and here I am, very well planted in who I really am, finally. And enjoying it.

But after you shake awake, you have to stay awake. The lessons of one's past are always coming. You never stop having to face reality.

There is a beautiful and haunting painting of Diana by Ran hanging in his penthouse apartment back in Washington. There's also a wonderful painting of Jeff in a different room that he did many years earlier, not at all as haunting, at least not to me. It's very Jeff. I smile every time I think about it. I met Ran and Jeff the year Diana died.

I've been thinking about death, about memory. About mourning. Ran is still grappling with Jeff's death and all that it meant for him. Without a doubt, I am also. More than I realized just a week ago. I still have some unresolved anger towards Jeff for what he did.

I have to admit to myself that I don't 100% accept that he died of depression like a person dies of cancer. He faced tremendous emotional strain, not to mention several physical ailments, and he decided the solution was suicide. I am very sad about his suffering, as I was when he was alive. I also loved him very deeply as a friend, almost like a brother. But I can't deny that the memories I have of Jeff are tinged with a deep anger that I wish I could resolve a bit faster. I'm angry he did this. I'm angry he did this to Ran. And yes, despite what Jeff said in death, and others will try to argue, Jeff did this to Ran, too. He abandoned him in my book, and I'm very angry about that. When people act out self-destructively, they do indeed hurt others, and it makes me furious. I want to be a comfort to Ran, because I love him very much, too. But I am so angry at Jeff sometimes that I can't be any use.

I have to face this feeling inside me and find a way to let it go. Just being able to write it here is a gigantic relief.

Thinking about both Diana and Jeff on the same day reminds me that death is really final. Death takes a person completely off the Earth, and they are never coming back. But memory is eternal, and it's so elastic that we can shape and twist it into almost anything we want, if we so desire for whatever emotional purpose or end. That's certainly the case with icons like Diana, and I'm sure it upsets her sons to no end. We can also allow memory to traumatize us so deeply that we, too, begin to defeat ourselves. Or even destroy ourselves. Or, we can strive and struggle to learn the lessons of history and free our memories of all the baggage of today's emotion. We can be cautioned by some events and forever delighted by others.

But to do all this, we have to face reality through the brutally necessary open coffin. Death is real, and it cannot be avoided. We also have to face memory, unvarnished, with a recognition that the memory of the awful moments are not the moments themselves. They're not real, and they can be put in their proper place, even if it means the bottom of the mind's basement closet. Most importantly, though, they hold so many lessons for us. So many simple guidances towards happiness and fulfillment, if we'd just let them come out.

I want to liberate the memories I have of Jeff from the anger I still have. I know I'll get there. Hopefully soon. I'm already so blessed in this life; what's one more challenge?

Tuesday A/V: "Thank you all very much for coming out today..." (ba-dum-dum)

This shit just writes itself people - punchline and all. It's funny because he is at once guileless and an obvious liar at the same time. Very impressive.

In fact, I think that Senator Larry Craig's opening line -- and his total inability to realize how stupid it was -- just points out the damage that a lifetime in the closet can do to a man. It seems also that the more you repress your sexuality, the kinkier and more dangerous your sexual behavior becomes. Mark Foley (pedophilia), Ted Haggart (sex on crystal meth) and now Larry Craig (tearoom queen) -- it all makes sense.

But it would be a big mistake to think that various forms of severe self-repression are just a problem of Republican closet cases, and to cartoon the whole thing. My experience tells me this is a gigantic problem among many, many gay men - including many who are also very out of the closet. Among these men, there is a level of shame that goes with their life -- sometimes having only tangential links to their homosexuality -- which they repress forcefully, and which then find expression in dangerous, highly risky and often very secretive sexual behavior. The longer they refuse to face their shame, root it out, and embrace themselves, the longer and more damaging the acting out becomes.

Seriously, do you think all these tina addicts in the gay circuit are really, truly, deeply proud of themselves and in a good place mentally? I don't see much difference between their sad stories, and this one with Larry Craig in the airport toilet. Just different contexts of the same problem, and his has clearly gone on for decades and become a sort of demented kind of split-personality disorder, where he seems to think someone else is the one blowing guys in toilets while - Jiminy God! - he's a United States Senator.

Indeed, a friend of mine who is openly gay is also engaging in an increasingly dangerous private sex life that is literally threatening his life -- while projecting an image to all his friends and work colleagues of being such a straight arrow that it is often used as a point of criticism. And the way I found out about his behavior was about as shocking as Larry Craig's arrest in a public bathroom. I can't believe he thinks it won't be discovered. I'm dumbfounded about what he thinks he's achieving by continuing to do it, and heartbroken over what this is doing to him.

So, yes -- I laughed out loud at the opening line of Craig's press conference today. But I'm also very saddened when I see a person who is so damaged by unresolved emotional turmoil that he acts out in self-destructive ways that threaten to destroy all the good in him - whether he's openly gay or a complete closet case. In the process a talented individual wastes a lifetime of potential happiness because he won't face his own truth - whatever it might be - and move on.

Going Home

I'm at Miami International Airport now, waiting to board an American Airlines flight home. Indeed, it feels more and more like home where I am going, especially as my heart rises in my chest when I hear Vini's voice on the phone, and I know he is in our bed talking to me, and I hear Clancy next to him.

I ended up having a generally very positive visit with my extended family in New York. I stayed with my father's sister, a very dear aunt, and she and I found great solace in being a little outside the the arena. There is a great deal of desperately unhappy people in my family. They do their best with each other's blood relatives. The married-ins either cause tremendous friction or they tread lightly. The whole enterprise is so tense. I finished the visit with dropping by my close-in-age cousin who just left her second husband. It was the right thing to do in every way, for her and her three kids. But she was hiding out in shame, and didn't join us on Saturday for the big party. I find it so hard to imagine what it is like for her, to be right and to feel ashamed at the same time, simply because she is the only divorced person in our family there.

Well, I'll have plenty to say on all that someday. But I'm going home now.

I can't wait to be in my loving, wonderful home.

p.s. -- I also saw Xanadu on Broadway. LOVED IT!!!

What Happened to My Family?

So, I've been here in the U.S. for a couple of days, staying at my parents' house in Maryland. They moved here two years ago from New York, where they both were born and had lived their whole lives as first-generation Americans. They moved to a burgeoning community where my sister and her family first made their home over a decade before.

It is as non-descript a suburban setting as you can get in the United States today. The lush, green trees and lawns are more magnificent than I remembered from before I moved to Brazil last March. The air is clean and fresh, and the houses are so perfect that I think I'm sometimes on a movie set. I've been able to slow down and really look around, and see detail I never noticed before. My parents' daily lives are very functionally arranged around the way they've set up the house, and the division of territory is stark. My mother has a truly commendable decorating style for a woman born poor who doesn't enjoy studying such things. She has found all sorts of interesting things big and miniscule to perfect the ground floor of the house, and some of the detail is amazing. I wonder how she squeezed all this out of this nameless little burgh.

But I've also caught other details now that I'm just enough of an outsider again, as I was when I was young, but with an adult man's view. This is a typical American suburban town. And it's a powder keg of spiritually crushing anger, abuse, self-destruction and pitiless loathing on a scale that is so awful that I almost find the slums of Latin America less frightening.

I've been hearing almost ritual chanting about the downward spiral of all the relationships among the leadership of the family here -- my parents, my sister, her husband. They are all pitted against each other in rage and recrimination like the three giant nations of George Orwell's 1984. And the world war going on here is as pointless and remote from its incendiary beginnings as the one of the novel.

Basically, it boils down to two completely loveless marriages that are hopelessly broken down among four people who long ago surrendered any sense of fulfillment, happiness or spiritual wholeness to some truly fucked-up sense of "responsibility." One notable product is that all the children born of these two marriages have been deeply scarred emotionally, with two having expressed suicidal thoughts (one actually attempted it twice).

I sat at the kitchen table last night at my sister's house with the four of them, and it was almost a nightmarish ballet of verbal sparring and emotional violence I can't believe that they subject these poor kids to. Naturally, the children often turn on one another violently, surrounded by sparkling clean kitchens and yards, all the most expensive toys and the most sinister air. At one point last night, the bickering and sparring became so intense that it was almost like a card game. Someone would throw out a card, and everyone would either ante-up or fold, and the stakes slowly rose and there was this sort of sick attempt at coming up with the most points, albeit in a pointless, pointless gambit. Sitting quietly, my eyes straight down at the table and my arms folded, I was so uncomfortable and overwhelmed that I just wanted to leave.

Once long ago I felt a burning need to take care of them all, or to join in the bedlam for one reason or another. Today, I just feel pity. And I love my husband so much more.

OK in Kingston

Just as a side note, I've gotten word that the principals on my project in Jamaica are all okay. Homes are intact, as are spouses and children. The airport re-opened today, so I could have conceivably ridden out the storm and gotten out on my scheduled flight tomorrow if I really wanted to. Glad I didn't.

Tuesday A/V: Why Infomercial Hosts Should Drink on the Air

Oh, how many, many times have I turned to Sean at many a party and slurred, "Oh I feel fine, but it's awful hot in here..."

Must have been due to the fact that I'd "popped out" at said party...eventually, I would poop out.

In honor of my best buddy's birthday, I wanted to post this marvelous melange of health product mania, wacky Latin husbands, and being completely fucked up, as our Tuesday A/V.

Too bad, tho, that a full version of this clip is not yet on YouTube. Lucy's totally wasted meltdown at the end is what makes it so funny...So funny, cuz it's so real.

Happy Birthday, Seanie!!

p.s. - At 5:58, Lucy enters the "I love you" phase .... hehe

Increasing Worry for Kingston

Now that I'm safe and settled for my week back in the U.S., it's only natural to be worried for those left behind in Jamaica as the only news anywhere now is about Hurricane Dean's arrival on its southern shore.

I got a text message from my chief colleague back in Kingston - the one who was most responsible for getting my American colleague and me out of there Friday night. It was about 10 minutes before Jamaica Public Service shut down the power grid, as had been done in 2004 when Ivan hit the island. She reported that she'd just arrived back to her own home from her mother's house where they'd been preparing it for the storm. She was "aching all over." She also said she was glad we'd "made it out of all this madness." The message ended: "Here goes..."

We then got an email from her just as the power was going out around 10am local time. She was "trying to get some dinner cooked -- Last Supper :)" Then I got a final text message on my cell phone: "Good wishes to your mum on her birthday."

It's a testament to the warmth and humanity of the people I am lucky to know and work with on such gratifying projects in Kingston that she would expend precious battery power to send such good cheer to a person she hasn't met in a different country. But I know Kingston all too well, and I know well enough that this storm is going to devastate that city and its people in the next few hours. We were a bit glum for a moment as she drove us through a residential area to get over to the Hilton so we could check out and race to the airport on Monday. "It's so strange to be looking around and know that this is all going to be under water in a couple of days." People were inexplicably watering their lawns that Friday morning. It hadn't really sunk in yet in all parts of town.

Kingston is a port city, right on the ocean, with a peninsula protecting the harbor, but also containing the only road to the airport. Even a category 2 storm would wash the road out for days and cut off escape from the city. It has a lot of poor people living in shanties, and other folks living in concrete homes built to last, but many are built into the sides of hills and mountains around the city.

The picture above is the part of Kingston I know best -- known as New Kingston, or the business district. The old downtown area was deserted by businesses and this new area was developed on a former racing ground. The sculpture of a naked man and woman is certainly the most eye-catching part -- it sits at an entrance to Emancipation Park, which has a very nice running path. It's surrounded by the main business hotels -- the Pegasus (which I have stayed at most times I've visited), the Courtleigh (right side of picture), the Dorchester a bit off towards the water, and the Hilton further inland (gold-colored hi-rise pictured), where I was staying this trip. Knutsford Boulevard winds through New Kingston, and has a strip of stores and fast-food restaurants.

The corporate headquarters of many companies that I work with are nearby, as well as the British High Commission (aka embassy), the Brazilian embassy, the U.S. Embassy and the satellite headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) mission in Jamaica. Every one of them has good people in their walls every day, who work hard and care deeply about the island.

Along the airport road, there are always local people walking the roadside, as well as many stray dogs. The stray dogs tend to be female more than male, and they can all be charitably described as quite lean. I never saw one dead in the road, despite the abundance of them around the city. I noticed several of them scampering along the water's edge as we were leaving. Also some Jamaicans sitting along the huge barriers made of piled up boulders on the ocean side of the airport road, staring out at the incredibly calm seas under a sunny, blue sky.

I'm trying to remember all the people I have met and spoken to on my many visits. The workmen down at the shipyards, and the tough-as-nails nurse who seemed to be the only woman on site. The beautiful schoolchildren who all smiled and said "good afternoon" in unison one day in the lobby of the Pegasus, as they were about to head into a spelling bee contest in one of the event rooms as I stood waiting for my ride to a meeting last year. The taxi driver who boasted that he'd seen President Lula da Silva of Brazil wiping sweat off his face and laughing a few days before, and who wouldn't believe me when I said I lived in Brazil. The young assistant in our local office who traveled an hour by bus and on foot, each way, every day to come to handle our busy schedule. My local colleague's children, and her many friends all over town that say hi to her wherever we go.

A person could spend all day complaining about Kingston's many faults. It's a dangerous place for a gay foreigner to be, and it's the capital of a poor country with deep social problems. But the people of Kingston that I know are an absolute marvel, more than they ever seem willing to acknowledge themselves. I'm worried about them, but they are all very strong.

I've got to stop carrying on about this. I've got to turn off the Weather Channel and try to focus on my visit with the family.

Made It Out

I'm sitting at Philadelphia airport waiting for a flight out to Eastern Maryland after a crazy, chaotic escape from Kingston last night. The hurricane watch was declared just as we headed to board our flight out, and as the flight sat delayed, waiting for the last passenger who was apparently lost in the terminal somewhere, there was a sense of tension and urgency to get moving.

I won't soon forget how the taxi driver told us on the way to the airport that in 2004, when Hurricane Ivan was on its way, the power companies shut off the electricity on the island as a way to ensure electrocutions and fires wouldn't break out. As a result, he said, "we'd shut out the lights and Ivan couldn't find us." The storm brushed the southern shore but never came onto land.

As I look at the developments today, and hear updates from folks back there that Kingston is indeed quite afraid now, I can see that I got off the island by the skin of my teeth. I am so grateful to the local colleague who greeted us -- a bit grimly -- outside our morning meeting on Friday with the news that it was time for us to leave. Had she not done that, we could not have made it.

I hope to get back there fairly soon, and see all the old sights intact and as they were.

Shut off de lights, mon, and Dean cyaan see ya. God bless.

Getting the F**k Out of Jamaica

I've had a lot of interesting events unfold on all my recent business trips. There was snow in Buenos Aires, then crazy delays and dysentery in Mexico. But my two-week project trip to Kingston has been cut short in somewhat more dramatic fashion. Hurricane Dean is on its way.

And, therefore, I'm on my way, too.

The plan was to be here in Kingston until Thursday, then come back through the U.S. to visit my family for my mother's birthday. Well, they are naturally pleased that I'll be making a very early unscheduled arrival tomorrow night. My team colleague from D.C. and I managed to get the last two seats on a flight out today, just as the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration has posted a new storm track that has Dean making a direct hit on Jamaica as Category 4 storm on Sunday. There wasn't a mob of fleeing guests in the lobby of the Hilton in New Kingston as we checked out, despite it being the main hangout for Americans here on business (and the hotel was crowded all week). The airport, where I am now, isn't a scene of panic or anything. But with the new announcements coming out on the path of the storm, I'm sure a sense of great urgency is gripping Kingston, and tomorrow the airport will be a mob scene. We would not have made it off the island if we hadn't gotten on today's flight to JFK.

I'll be staying with relatives tonight in New York, and then flying to visit my parents on the Eastern Shore of Maryland tomorrow. It's a happy outcome to what has been a stressful day wondering if I would be stuck here or not.

I only worry about my Jamaican colleagues here who didn't have the option to leave. I hope they make it through this okay.

Tuesday A/V: Dark Lady

This clip is from Sonny & Cher's TV variety show in 1974, performing her single "Dark Lady" which was -- as it turns out -- the first 45 record I bought with my own money (I think it was 99 cents). I played that damn song over and over and over on my Fisher-Price record player until it was worn out. I think the B-side was a song called "Dixie Girl" but I can't remember. Some interesting trivia - this was Cher's last #1 song on the Billboard singles chart until 1998's "Believe".

I was a fanatical viewer of "The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour" on CBS. It was a Saturday night staple in my house, and if there was dissension, I would cede the big TV in the family room and watch it on the tiny, ancient black-and-white TV with broken rabbit ears up in the porch off the kitchen. I was an even more slavish devotee of "Cher", the solo TV variety show that briefly replaced it when their marriage --and their namesake show -- went up like the Hindenburg in 1975. A year later, Sonny & Cher were back on the air as divorced parents and back in our living room. It was obvious, though, who I was rooting for in every show.

Oh, and since it was on Saturday nights, that was also a bath night for me. I'd come down after bathing and wear the towel on my head -- "like Cher's hair."

OK, so, Mom and Dad....when exactly did it hit you that I was gay?

São Paulo: A Journey to Opposite-Land

I'm heading back out onto the road tonight, quite reluctantly. Maybe more reluctantly than ever since I moved to São Paulo in March. Not that I don't like my job. I just love my home more.

What "home" actually means now is in quite a bit of flux. Its limits aren't clearly defined, but its core is surely defined by Vini, Clancy and the walls of our apartment. It ripples around Jardins, and it's undeniably got a zip code in Jardins. And with a variety of recent events, I can't deny that I feel more at home in Brazil than I have in a long time, although not quite as much as I did as a teenager. Not yet.

So, I naturally take all this pondering to the uppermost level. There's no other way to understand the rest of it other than starting there -- way above our rooftop -- and drilling down until I lose the thread. I'm a big picture person. Standing from lofty heights for a good moment is the best way to see everything more clearly where you spend your microscopic day-to-day life.

From high, high above the ceiling above our bed and our living room couch, our dining room table and our kitchen, there is the picture at the top of this post. It is a satellite photo of the gigantic and chaotic civilization that swirls around my everyday life. São Paulo really does look like the after-effects of some giant object hurling toward the Earth and splatting on its surface with great, sudden force. I couldn't summarize this city any better.

And who better to headline this posting than Homer Simpson himself, who observed from an airline seat (as Lisa painfully tried to explain Brazil's southern-hemisphere seasons to him) that this country is Opposite Land:

In so many ways (some I've already whined on about here), this is indeed an opposite land from the NY-to-DC megalopolis that I spent the formative decades of my life. The tremendous differences are so stark in some ways that I naturally resisted this place for all these months, and now have accepted the fact that this place is a challenge to so many fundamental parts of the wiring of my brain, my basic functions and my identity that I must welcome somehow. It will in many ways define the rest of my life, which very likely will be spent outside of the United States and long from that comfortable East Coast world.

Back in New York and D.C., there is a structural order to the cities where there are literally grids and patterns and an order to the flow of nearly everything, even the way one walks down the street or uses a public escalator. It is literally programmed into the heads of a majority of citizens how these things are done (like imaginary fast lanes on the sidewalks, and standing to the right while walking on the left). There is a kind of built in radar in the head of most folks back there so that the high-energy flow of humanity can achieve its ambitious daily to-do lists, and multitask comfortably without collisions and intersections that will cause a break in the flow. There have been quite important and literary debates there over how technology (the i-Pod and cell phone especially) may be altering or complicating these hard-wired systems of urban civilization, and what it might do to the pace of its evolutionary track.

In D.C., people of every social and economic class feel a sense of intense civic responsibility to throw open their car windows and scream at people who don't clean up after their dogs, or who toss even the tiniest piece of litter on the ground anywhere in the city. New Yorkers will call the police if a man is even perceived as bothering a woman with any sort of advance in a public setting. The depth and breadth of the social contract is so highly developed there that it is jarring to one's senses to consider a world where litter and dog poop is ignored (oh, those smelly European heathens) and people have the gall to stand on the left on an escalator (!!!!).

In Opposite Land, there is absolutely no sense of order to almost anything -- even the road. Rules are so fundamentally flouted most of the time that I've found that Brazilians seem to even lack a sense of personal radar as pedestrians. They often just amble along at all different paces, in all different directions, and have no idea there are people around them. I never fail to find myself heading in a very certain direction, with a very certain goal, when I'm on the sidewalk here and there will be a person ahead of me rushing along who will invariably stop cold and instantly become a collision hazard. I've done all sorts of acrobatic moves, and more than once crashed right into them. And have clenched my teeth in anger more and more each time.

And the design of the city is one of almost mortal chaos. São Paulo was built quite literally like it was created by an adolescent playing Sim City. Major connecting roads are arbitrary. No public transit system effectively exists. Interstate trucking runs right through downtown. The municipal airport is famously plunked into the middle of a pack of skyscrapers, and was mysteriously tapped by the country's aviation authority as the main hub of the country's domestic air traffic. When it rains, the freeways flood and poor people in favelas drown. The city has no effective control over policing (the federal and state governments hold those reins), nor does it seem to know how to deal with growth other than to say yes to everything, and no only after it's too late. The only thing missing here to finish off the metaphor is an attacking spaceship, or a rampaging Godzilla, along with a tinny Maxis soundtrack.

Being the passenger in a car (I can't ever imagine actually driving) is also an occasionally terrifying experience. We won't even get into the danger of being carjacked or held up at gun point at stop lights throughout the city at night. Crime is a matter for other postings. But the way in which cars just leap out of hidden driveways and entrances, flagrantly ignore traffic signs and lights, and seem completely oblivious to pedestrians is really nerve-wracking for me. Sometimes, my reactions are so big that I frighten Vini for no reason as he drives like a normal Brazilian.

And these are just microcosms for the ways in which life is literally hard-wired differently here, and not just in the way plugs are all different and the seasons are in reverse. It's also a microcosm for how I face it every day, and how I'm sure it puts some strain on my relationships here. Everything about São Paulo - the way the city came into being, how it was built, how it manages to function and how life unfolds - springs from chaos, not order.

So I realized that all of the strengths and comforts and methods that I would say I have relied on all my adult life were, indeed, very "back there." They were very grounded in the structure of life in New York and Washington, for good or bad. I now feel quite intensely what the good was, from my admittedly biased standpoint. But alas, the vast majority of the billions of people on this planet do not live back there and never will. And many manage to thrive nonetheless. So the question before me now, as I slowly begin to embrace my opposite-land existence here, is this -- what is the good here, and what bad from back there can I reshape and make good? What are those things that can ground my life here, and provide me with new sources of strength and comfort?

What kind of new level of excellence can I achieve in the next phase of my life, defined and shaped by the experience of living amidst an absolutely opposite form of urban civilization?

I guess we'll see.

(p.s. - Homer is literally right about one thing, unfortunately. Crooks do chase cops here.)

Tuesday A/V: Cities in Dust

Vinny Cannata turned me on to Siouxsie & the Banshees in 1983, back in the old country. I remember when this song came out, I'd been back to Long Island for my final year of high school (hating every minute of it) after my life-changing year as an exchange student in Brazil. I yearned to get out of Great River, to get off Long Island. To get into Manhattan whenever possible.

And so some night in the fall of 1985, I heard this song on WLIR for the first time. Like all the kids in my predicament, I was verrrry into the apocalyptic genre of New Music, but the more ironic, romanticized flavors and the less truly subversive, anarchic, violent stuff like hardcore speed metal and such. It was hard to let oneself get too angry back then. We were the first real suburban rebel generation that fought battles of style and ideas rather than actual fist fights. Maybe the only one, who knows.

"Cities in Dust" did the trick. It was a sort of Ken Russell-meets-David Lynch kind of sexy destruction concept. I love the opening lyric for how sly a social warning it was to the hellaciously cowed suburban world around me then, brimming with a sense of doom unless one escaped: "Water was running/Children were running/You were running out of time."

Respect for Life

Despite bad weather, upwards of three thousand people marched down Avenida Paulista on Saturday to protest the Lula government. The themes were many -- such as "Society Demands Respect" and "We're fed up". Overall, it had the appearance of a middle-class revolt against the central government, an expression of outrage at the feeling that the entire southern half of the country, along with the interests of middle-class families, has been ignored and abandoned to the point that chaos, disaster and death are occuring. This YouTube video was a bit of propaganda produced by an enthusiastic participant in the protest, but it is a window into the growing polemical sentiment here in São Paulo across all social classes that something is horribly wrong with the governance of this country.

Meanwhile, news came out last night that some of the 154 victims of last year's mid-air collision between a Gol commercial airliner and a private jet may have had their personal items stolen off their bodies or from the crash site area. Given the extreme remoteness of the crash site in the Amazon jungle, this would possibly implicate the recovery crews as well as local inhabitants of the region. It is known that the Gol plane broke apart before crashing in pieces on the jungle floor, so items may have been thrown wide of the primary wreckage site. But the sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach (which was expressed at Saturday's protest) only worsens when you read that a cell phone from one of the victims turned up on the black market in Rio de Janeiro only days after the crash, and personal identity documents that are always carried on the person here were used by criminals to purchase things like cars.

On Sunday, I had my own brush with tragedy on the streets of Jardins, in fact it was right under our living room windows. Mid-afternoon, I heard the sound of screeching wheels outside, and then the sound of a woman crying out shortly after. There is a crosswalk in front of our building, and a woman from the building next door was walking her dog when the animal's leash apparently slipped her grasp and the small dog ran out into traffic and was killed instantly. The person driving the car made a valiant effort to stop given the sound I heard, and I looked out warily to see what happened. Doormen and neighbors from all around gathered right away to be of assistance, and motorists passing by slowed down to respect the woman and the dead dog in the immediate aftermath. Two men carried the dog's body to the sidewalk, and I noticed that the driver -- a young man -- and the dog's owner were both dissolved in tears together, getting equal comfort by the onlookers and each other. The owner couldn't bear to look at the dog's body, and the driver was calling someone to come and meet him because he felt he couldn't drive himself home.

The dog was an adult toy dog, very well kept and healthy in appearance when he died. He was very loved. I took a towel from our linen closet and brought it downstairs to cover its body on the sidewalk, to give it some dignity and to help both of the people in tears get through these awful moments a bit more. I didn't say anything to them other than I was sorry because I was too afraid I would get upset, but I was struck when I saw their faces, struck with how no one's sadness turned to rage, how this was a terrible tragedy all around that could not have been prevented, and there was grace there on the street along with the tears. Yes, people with dogs here often don't control them properly, and drivers in this city are almost oppressive in their lack of attention to pedestrian rights. But none of that showed itself on our sidewalk yesterday, and I was moved by it.

There is a deep sense of respect for life in this city, and in this society, and it is remarkably mature given all the hardships and challenges thrown at it on a daily basis for generations.

Jardins Eats: PARIS

It's fitting that Restaurante Paris 6 (or known to the locals as just "Paris") landed on Rua Haddock Lobo in Jardins, squarely in the heart of São Paulo café society. Much like the still-hopping Santo Grão on Oscar Friere, old-standard Bar Ritz on Lorena, and the Buenos Aires import Havanna Café on Bela Cintra, the folks in Jardins pride themselves on street-side socializing until the wee hours. Something about getting out of the house, but not having to drive far, will always appeal here. And there's the inevitable love of seeing and being seen in everything that you do (even grocery shopping at Santa Luzia) that is a bedrock principle of Jardins living.

Paris is as authentic a French brasserie as you can find in São Paulo, and its got both the light and hearty fare a true brasserie lover craves, especially after midnight. There isn't even a nod to Brazilian cuisine on the menu, nor any sort of cutting corners in ways so many of the city's restaurants fall short. The French onion soup is impeccable, the foie gras unmistakable, and the wine selections, while expansively South American, have a pleasing mix of French choices at the core. Vini has the steak frites nearly every time we go, and he makes noises as he eats, marveling at the flavor. The quiches are just right, and always made fresh no matter the hour. And as expected, the desserts from the pâtisserie are heaven. Get the mille fouillé à Toti for sure.

The atmosphere is also surprisingly pleasing. Day or night, the small but not cramped dining room is lively and fun, and patrons can indulge their lazy Brazilian ways by lingering for hours without a shove towards the door (hence, the long waits). The patio seating out front is not the best place to sit, as you have to contend with the sidewalk's traffic (including the occasional beggar), as well as the patrons coming and going, often climbing over your seat. The faux alley seating along the side of the restaurant is more classic Parisian café, as the tables are lined up side-by-side and pressed together. It makes for a haze of chatty, smoky glass-clinking on weekend evenings, not to mention actual table-hopping when groups of 10 or more show up.

There's also the old Jardins pastime of evesdropping, which Paris indulges more than anything else. Lulu, Vini and I went a few months back, and we were highly entertained by spying on the foursome at the table next to us. An older American and his French buddy were hosting two classic Brazilian trophy girls, who were putting away the champagne and speaking loudly in so-so English about how they adoooore shopping in Manhattan (wink-WINK-jiggle-the-bracelet). Then some drunken bad French and some sex talk bubbled up, and they all stumbled out in a cloud of smoke. I caught a gay Brazilian guy's eye as he, too, was sitting near them, listening intently and smiling as they left. We had a chuckle. It's Paris after all...

Restaurante Paris 6 - Rua Haddock Lobo 1240, Jardins (11) 3085-1595 - Open 24 hours, with a special breakfast buffet on weekends and holidays from 8h to 12h. Wear something cute. Best evesdropping: back corner tables inside.

Landouar Murder: "Punk" Under Arrest

Almost 2 months after the senseless murder of Gregor Ervan Landouar, a French tourist, in front of the gay hangout Ritz in Jardins, the police have captured the confessed killer, and apparently are holding two alleged accomplices.

He is 23 year-old Genésio Mariuzzi Filho, known as "Antrax", and a member of a gang called Devastação Punk, who say they worship the film A Clockwork Orange, in which young men commit random acts of violence and murder for fun. According to a police spokesman, the killer's gang had just been beaten up by a rival gang in a different part of Jardins, and they wished to take out their humiliation on the first available target. "The French man was the first one who appeared," said the spokesman. Apparently, the killer has made emphatic denials that he was targeting what he perceived to be a gay man.

So, we're to believe that it was just a coincidence that this all happened during the end of the gigantic Pride parade in the same neighborhood. That this demented gang member's male pride was harmed in such an atmosphere was pure coincidence. My question -- what were these two punk gangs doing in Jardins on a Sunday, on Gay Pride day, when that entire part of the city had been paralyzed by the parade? Are we really supposed to believe it was a coincidence?

And is there a connection between Devastação Punk and the gang that murdered John Clayton a few hundred feet away just two weeks later? In that case, the killing was allegedly precipitated by the fact that the victim didn't have a proper cigarette lighter when asked.

Something just isn't adding up...