Tag: brazil

By Posted on Posted in Depeche Mode Tagged with , , , ,

Last month I was asked to write two short reviews about Fletch’s DJ performances in Rio de Janeiro that took place in October 2007 and October 2011, respectively, for my friend Jean Campagner of DepecheMode.com.br. You can find the originals in Portuguese here and here with some extra pictures. Here are English versions of both.

October 5th, 2007. It was a Friday night. The club had just opened a few months before and was always crowded. Yet, Andrew “Fletch” Fletcher’s first visit to Rio wasn’t exactly a success. After the warm up with DJs José Roberto Mahr and Tony Viegas, the main guest DJ took over the booth shortly after midnight.

In case you’re still in doubt, he is really spinning. But his style is sort of unique. He doesn’t beatmatch and doesn’t always pick very danceable tracks. Of course there’s a lot of Depeche Mode in his set. And, obviously, these were the tracks that would get the crowd cheering the most.

I was probably one of the few people who paid extra to get to stay at the VIP area, behind the DJ booth. I already knew the club configuration and I knew the DJs had to pass through it to reach the booth. Before, during and after his set, Fletch would wonder around or go to the loo (only when playing very long tracks would he do it during his set).

Whenever he was not playing, he was in a more reserved area with his guests. During one of his ventures outside of the booth, I managed to intercept him and ask for an autograph on my “Playing the Angel” CD booklet I had brought with me.

I was prepared for the autograph, but when I left home, I ended up forgetting my camera. I took some pictures with my phone which were terrible and that was it, but I was already happy. It was definitely worth paying a little more and having had some great reward.

October 13th, 2011. After the disappointment caused by the cancellation of both of Depeche Mode’s shows in Brazil of the 2009 Latin American leg of the Tour of the Universe, there came our hero Fletch to gives another taste of one of his DJ nights.

This time things were slightly different. In fact, it had all the ingredients for a disaster compared to 2007.  It was on a Thursday and at the Costa Brava Club which is hard to reach (think of a venue on the top of a cliff by the shore in the isolated neighborhood of Joá). It’s the kind of place most people from Rio see from a bridge when passing from the South to the West side, but hardly anyone knows exactly how to get there. But in the end it all worked out fine and I made it on time.

Another thing made an entire difference. My devotee friends managed to arrange some time for us and Fletch with the event organizer. I think I was the first one to arrive, given how anxious I was. I took the “Sounds of the Universe” vinyl for him to autograph. We had roughly 20 or 30 minutes alone with him for pictures, autographs and his famous video promising that Depeche Mode would play in Brazil on their next tour. His promise would only come true two tours later, but better late than never.

This time the event was sponsored by a condom manufacturer. The dance floor of this club is smaller than the the one from 4 years before. If it didn’t get fully crowded, at least it didn’t look empty, like in 2007.

I confess I didn’t even pay that much attention to what the other DJs played before him after the state of grace that was that spontaneous meet-and-greet we were given. If Fletch didn’t surprise us in his setlist, his kindness made that night totally worth it.

By Posted on Posted in The World We Live in Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The edge of democracy

Just a few days after my post asking “where’s the revolution”, the documentary “The Edge of Democracy” premiered on Netflix. It’s a visual version of what I tried to say on that post. Except here you get to see, and specially listen to the actors involved.  Director Petra Costa already starts the film claiming her left-leaning views, yet, she did try to give room for all sides to speak. She is slightly younger than me, so our views coincide most of the time. I just didn’t have a family that needed to go into exile or involved in big businesses or politics. The film already made it into the NYT’s “Best Films of 2019 so far…” list

I wanted to see the first half before going to the gym, but after I started, I just couldn’t stop. And , mind you, I’m a person who followed all of that. Nothing in the documentary is new to me. But it could be very close to home for those of you in Poland, Italy, Hungary, Hong Kong, Turkey, Germany, UK, and yes, you, USA. I recommend this documentary to anyone living on planet Earth right now. The English title sums it all (I think it’s even better than the original in Portuguese). You can check more info on the trailer below and here.

It’s worth mentioning the brief, yet poignant speech by former congressman Jean Wyllys. He was elected for a 3rd mandate last year, but he resigned due to life threats (speacially for being openly homosexual) and now lives in exile in Berlin. He was replaced by fellow party member, David Miranda, also gay, who is also receiving barbaric life threats to him and his family. He’s married to none other than Glen Greenwald. In fact, you may remember David was detained at London Heathrow under vague accusations using the Terrorist Act 2000 at the height of the Snowden leak scandal. He later sued the British government and won.

Going back to Glen Greenwald for a second, too bad the film was finished in January. Just earlier this month, Glen and his team from The Intercept unveiled evidence of what everyone always suspected (and the documentary also leaves it almost clear): even the Judiciary and the Federal Prosecutors acted with a political agenda. The ones who were supposed to act without any ulterior motivations, but the law (let alone political ones), apparently, didn’t do so. You can read all the leaks in English here.

if you still have 20 minutes left to spare, I can only finish this post with a recent episode of “Last Week Tonight” about impeaching Trump. If you watch the documentary first, John Oliver’s show presents a creepily similar situation going on in the USA about halfway through the episode. The comparison with Watergate is undeniable, yet part of the press focus more on how the compromising messages were obtained rather than their republic shaking consequences. Anyway, I leave it all here for your appreciation.

By Posted on Posted in Life in General Tagged with ,

It’s no news that the entire world is undergoing some sort of crisis of democracy. It’s as if principles we adopted way back and have been polishing and upgrading ever since the Age of Enlightenment are being thrown out of the window at the speed of a piece of fake news being shared on social media. Some fundamental rights that we deemed absolutely unbreakable were now being bent. You could quote the “eternal vigilance” line. And I won’t dispute the world today faces challenges that were not there some 2 or 3 centuries ago. And in some sort of twisted seesaw of politics, people are being polarized against each other. But the rise of the “alt-right” (just a rebranding of what had been happening here in Germany circa 1920’s and 1930’s) is worrisome. The book “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt is the base of what I’m talking about here. If you haven’t read it (or don’t have time to), just watch this review. It’s somewhat based on American democracy, but it draws examples from everywhere and several periods in history. If democracy in the US is in danger, imagine countries with still young democratic periods like Brazil, Poland, Hungary…

I could make an ever-growing list of jabs and uppercuts democracy suffered in just a couple of years. But I’ll just name drop Brexit and Trump before moving to the current Brazilian president. You can all say all three were democratically chosen.  But all three had shady events surrounding them. Brexit, for exemple, in my opinion, is something you shouldn’t even put up for vote. It’s like having a referendum on bringing back slavery, ending marriage equality or human rights altogether. You just don’t. We’re not supposed to be going backwards. Yet we are.

Now, my home country is being governed by a dude who sold himself as an outsider, despite having been a congressman for nearly 30 years. He openly praises the military dictatorship the country freed itself from in 1985. Ironically, he had to retire form the army before he could suffer some severe punishment for insubordination. The reason? He was an active voice for a raise in the armed forces’ salaries and threatened to bomb away water reservoirs that serve Rio de Janeiro if his demands were not met (yes, you read that right, just plain terrorism). Between being punished in a first trial and appealing form this decision, he retired and back then it got swept under the rug as he first got elected as a city counselor in 1988. He defines himself as the voice of the right wing in Brazil and won, basically, because he antagonized against the left-wing Workers’ Party (who also has its big share of skeletons in the closet). But he is, in a way, a union leader for the military. Much like his biggest opponent, former presidente Luís Inácio Lula da Silva rose to power for being a union leader and founder of the Workers’ Party.

But that was 30 years ago. Fast forward to the beginning of this decade and he went from just local nut that Rio de Janeiro sent to the Congress every 4 years to some sort of troll which we fed and now we have to deal with. In 2013, there was a certain turmoil in Brazil as people started to realize the World Cup and the Olympics were NOT gonna leave “the legacy” politicians spoke so proudly of in their speeches. It started as protests against a raise in the bus fares in major cities, but it soon escalated to protests “against-all-of-what’s-going-on”. Without any centralized command, the Brazilian alt-right also surfed on these protests. The Workers’ Party government (now under president Dilma Rousseff) was caught short with its pants down and did too little, too late. She got reelected a year later in an election that never really ended. She won, but the Congress was no longer on her side. Along with a massive corruption scandal involving her party (but not her and not just her party), they came up with some technicality that didn’t even exist and ousted her in 2016 with hopes to also halt the investigation where it was. Too many politicians had been waking up with the police on their doors with arrest warrants. Her vice president, Michel Temer, took over, however, his political capital turned into ashes as he was also caught in a secret recording negotiating shush money to members of his party that were already in jail. He gave up any positive agenda in exchange of not being ousted himself. Pointless. He is also in jail right now, by the way, since he’s no longer president. So the country was drifting ashore these 4 years between the last election and this one. The price drop in commodities was not managed by anyone. The country starts to dwindle further down into economical crisis along with the political one. We have to blame someone. And we have to find a hero who will come and save us. Who will know how to take up these roles? Who is gonna walk in their shoes?

So this was the recipe: blame it all on the previous government. Demonize them. And sell yourself as the remedy for that. Adopt the most populist speech you can. Can you talk about economy, pension reform, tax reform, or human rights without sounding like the ignorant you are? No? No problem! A convenient stab on your bowels during the ONLY day in your campaign that you were not wearing a bullet proof vest will guarantee you won’t have to open your dirty mouth during the campaign or attend any debater have to speak to journalists. Add some fake news in a context where social media played a major role for the first time (yes, they were there before, but this time people didn’t bother with conventional media – their messiah was talking to them from the hospital bed directly to their phones on their hands). Communication only goes in one way. You don’t listen. They have to listen to you. And that’s how we got where we are.

This post is already too long, so I’m giving you a break for now. But we’ll resume on this topic sometime soon, you patriotic junkies.