Category Archives: Brazil

Adjusting to Home

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OK, I’m back from Brazil and adjusting to the time zone. I’ve had a little digestive trouble. And I’m missing Paul, the guy I met in Rio. In fact, I called him today. We have a good email thing going, but haven’t figured out chat yet. I’d like him to come visit, but it doesn’t look like that can happen until May when he finishes his architect stint in Rio.

I visited Steve night before last for dinner in the Castro. I felt a bit put off… he didn’t greet me very enthusiastically as he was cleaning his electric toothbrush in the bathroom.

Lance has found a new job! It’s for a good nonprofit cause as well. But his cell phone is cut off and so I can’t call him for a week. He’s getting his act together at home over the weekend.

I tried meeting up with Matthew on Thursday evening as well, but he was too busy with work.

I’m feeling frustrated that after two weeks in Brazil no one I’m “dating” seems that keen on seeing me.

So instead, I’m at home upacking, doing the laundry, and reading Mercedes Lackey’s “The Fire Rose.” I’ve reserved a bunch of Spanish language books from the library so I can start talking with Paul in Spanish. Actually, I’m surprised I didn’t take up Spanish earlier since I live in the Spanish-speaking area of San Francisco.

Rio Wow! Paul My Hero

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I was sleeping much of the time and the weather was overcast the first couple of days in Rio. That turned out to be a blessing because it was cool. Once the weather cleared, the temperatures soared to more than 35 degrees Celsius every day. Even just walking outside one day for less than an hour without suntan lotion gave me a nasty sunburn.

I met some Americans also staying at the Vermont Hotel in Ipanema: Paul, Dale, and ? (Indian heritage, who I had met through Daniel Bao at the first Life After Capitalism dinner at the World Social Forum). My favorite place to eat is the New Natural Restaurant, just on the opposite side of the same block where the hotel is located. The restaurant has a really wide variety of vegetarian dishes at really reasonable prices. The juice place on the corner of the hotel street and the next street toward Copacabana was a favorite with more than 80 choices of juices!

One of the first nights in town, some of us went to Bofatida Bar on the Rua Farme Amoedo, which is where the guys go to cruise in the evening after hanging out on the rainbow-flag waving gay part of the Ipanema Beach. During Carnival, the gay folks apparently sometimes get into fist fights with rough locals hanging at another choppo, or draft beer bar, on that street. After drinking some rot-gut caparinhos at Bofatida, we headed onward to Le Boy Club. At first, we almost didn’t go in because they tried to charge the woman who was with us twice the entry charge of the guys, but when we went next door to the empty La Girl Club, an employee or perhaps the manager from there convinced the Le Boy folks to let her in for the same price as the rest of us.

That’s when I met Paul… I saw this gorgeous long-haired guy standing in the club watching the drag and hunky guy strip show. I decided “what the hell!” and went over and just started talking with him. We both felt an instant attraction which built as we talked and realized that we have quite a bit in common. We talked and made out for hours. Finally, it was time to go… he for work the next morning and I because I was dead tired. We went by taxi and dropped him off at his place after we exchanged numbers.

I called him the next morning while he was at work and we arranged a date that day and every day for the rest of the time I was in Rio. Often, we snuck him into the hotel room for the night since it wasn’t too cool for me to stay at his place. While he was at work, I checked out sites such as Corcovado, the large statue of Christ atop one of the hills of Rio, and the Botanical Garden, which has nice houses of orchids and bromeliads. We spent almost an entire weekend together walking on the beach, exercising, swimming, sharing dinner and conversation, and making love.

Paul is an architect from Cordoba, where his family lives. He’s the oldest of three sons. His father is of Ukrainian-Italian heritage, works a lot, is very rational, and likes to plant gardens on the land that the family owns in the hills near Cordoba. Paul also has a piece of land there and wants to build a house on it. His mother, who is entirely of Italian heritage, and his father had split up for a year but are back together again now.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been with someone who was willing to really take time to get to know me. Most people in San Francisco are so busy trying to work to pay the rent that it’s hard to find quality time to share. I’d have to say that I enjoyed every moment we spent together, even when we were doing something that both of us thought was boring, like visiting the museum at the fort between Ipanema and Copacabana beaches.

I think Paul is totally gorgeous, sexy, and smart. He’s kind and took good care of me when I wasn’t feeling well. He could make an excellent boyfriend. Of course, there is the slight problem of the distance between San Francisco and Cordoba!

Anyway, I hope that he and I will have more chances to spend time together soon.

Cyberspace After Capitalism at the World Social Forum

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Well, the trip has gone very quickly and I haven’t had any time to write blog entries.

I’m in Rio de Janeiro now, waiting to meet a new friend named Paul one more time, hopefully, before heading to the airport for the flight back to San Francisco via Miami.

So, flashback to Porto Alegre… the World Social Forum was amazing! About a hundred thousand people from all over the world all gathered to improve the world. Well, most people attended from Brazil. The newly elected Brazilian President Da Silva, affectionately known as “Lula”, spoke at the conference, as did Venezuelan President Chavez, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky (whose lectures I attended during university), and Arundhati Roy, representing Indian social movements. These were the stars. And how Chomsky managed to draw a standing room only, nearly rioting crowd filling the Gigantiniu Stadium is beyond me. The content of his speech was excellent, yet he droned in his delivery. That didn’t stop the crowd from singing their “Lula” song to the soccer tune of “Ole” when Chomsky happened to mention the President the people of Brazil are so fond of. I guess it’s understandable since he is a disabled man who rose from the ranks of manual labor in the PT (Socialist Party) in Brazil, running for many many years before his eventual election. Now, he faces the challenge of keeping his principles from his labor activist days in the face of IMF pressures on the Brazilian economy among myriad other problems. Yet, the people of Brazil are almost universally hopeful and supportive.

Besides the “stars”, many people participated on panels and spoke whether from the podium or the crowd. My panel presentation on Cyberspace After Capitalism went quite well, even after mixups by the World Social Forum organizers about room scheduling and publicizing of the Life After Capitalism series of events, organized by ZNet and particularly by Michael Albert. I’m very grateful for his efforts as well as to Peter Waterman for organizing and moderating the Cyberspace After Capitalism panel.

The Life After Capitalism events started with a welcome dinner the day I arrived in town and ended with a going-away dinner the last evening of the forum and evaluation meeting the day after the forum ended.

In between the events, there were many opportunities to meet interesting people from social movements all over the world. I met Marina (actually from the plane), Jeremy, and ? from the New York region, ? from England, Ezekiel, Paula, and Nikito from Argentina, Blicero from Italy, ? from Spain, and many, many others. Actually, I had already met Nikito and Blicero before through Indymedia and Tech Fed activities in the San Francisco Bay Area. And of course I ran into the omnipresent Indymedia maven Sheri Herndon, who is always a pleasure to chat with, even when she is frustrated with the latest Indymedia scandal.

Ezekiel’s accounts of the Assembleas, the piqueteros, and the occupied factories in and around Buenos Aires were fascinating. And his friend Paula’s project documenting the “disappeared” Argentinian film directors of the 1970’s inspired me.

Stories from an Intergalaktika workshop including representatives from Paraguayan, Uruguayan, Argentinian, and Spanish social movements, as well as the Zapatista movement in Mexico, were spellbinding. It was humbling to offer the free Internet services provided by the Online Policy Group to such an incredible variety of important activists.

That workshop took place at the “youth camp”, which was a “city within a city” housing 30,000 people in tents!

Even a workshop explaining the participatory budget process adopted for some time in Porto Alegre under the PT were fascinating. I’d like to try to bring some of that experience back to San Francisco.

I learned about many political theories and activists who I hadn’t heard of. Particularly pressing for me as a non-violent anarchist in favor of maximum decentralization of the decisionmaking process is to come up with viable mechanisms for handling decisionmaking for infrastructure such as telecommunications and mass transit. Interesting topics that people mentioned to me include:

– Eduardo Chaves discussion of self-education with computers in Brazil, available from chaves.com.br (couldn’t find anything good on his site)
– Union for Radical Political Economics (which can perhaps help with an economic analysis of a Free State of San Francisco), provided by Julie Mattaei, jmatthaei@wellesley.edu
– Chilean anarchist Pedro Gonzales
– Chilean socialist Oscar Schanake
– ParEcon, the book by Michael Albert on participatory economics, www.parecon.org
– Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
– The Great Transformation, by Karl Polyani
– Nickle and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
– Etcgroup.org
– ? anarchist recommended by Chilean guy on way back from Christo monument

In the Life After Capitalism evaluation session, as well as in an Intergalaktika evaluation session, the idea came up of not relying so heavily on the organizers of the World Social Forum for logistical support. Organizing some of the logistics independently might help to pull the events off with less aggravation… well, it’s a thought. The idea of renting a separate building nearby the event with space for Indymedia activities as well as Life After Capitalism and possibly Intergalaktika events also came up.

The food in Brazil is excellent, event for vegetarians, especially when one considers the fruit. I tried many new fruit juices that I have never tried before and got lots more experience with ones I didn’t know well. One of my favorites here is maracuja (passion fruit) as well as acai, which apparently has to be frozen immediately when found in the jungle so it can be transported and mixed with guarana to produce this dark brown very sweet thick juice. Banana and guava smoothies were great for a stomach that wasn’t always cooperating, hopefully not because I was eating and drinking so much fruit! Papayas and mangoes are everywhere here! I also tried things called caja, caju (which I think is the cashew plant’s fruit), fruta de caldo, and some others I don’t remember.

I was exhausted from waking up early each morning to take a shuttle from the hotel in a town outside Porto Alegre to the forum events for the day and not arriving back at the hotel until little sleep was possible each night. So, my plan on arriving in Rio de Janeiro was to relax, relax, relax!

Anticipation of the World Social Forum

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It’s been non-stop travel and participation in the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre, Brazil, since I left the United States on January 22.

Starting with the flight from San Francisco to Sao Paolo through Miami, I’ve met many interesting people. On that first flight I met Victor, a guy who lives in Pueblo, a town near Mexico City. He was flying to Recife, Brazil, for a foreign exchange program from his school. He is 23 years old. He’s also going to meet up with his boyfriend Heldaar, a young Brazilian studying marine biology. Victor and I got along quite well and he moved from the seat in front of me to the seat next to me for the last half of the flight from Miami to Sao Paolo. We cuddled under the blanket a bit on the plane and he tells me he’d like to come visit me in San Francisco, perhaps on his way back to Mexico from Brazil.

I started noticing people headed to the World Social Forum while in the Sao Paolo airport waiting for the flight to Porto Alegre. Waiting for that flight, I met Marina who is a journalist and a teacher at New York University. We chatted until the plane filled up with passengers and I talked with a Palestinian fellow, also attending the Forum, who sat down next to me on the plane. We discussed a bunch of topics, including the Islamic religion and its tenets with regard to women, adultery, and homosexuality. The conclusion: fundamentalism is a problem whatever the religion.

I’ve very much enjoyed attending this conference and meeting people from all over the world who are committed to improving the social and political conditions of the world.

Machine Troubles

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The backlight on my work computer died, so I had to send it in to Hewlett Packard for repair, thus making it more difficult to follow my New Year’s resolution to write blog entries every day.

I finished Greg Egan’s “Permutation City” today. Read on the recommendation of science fiction writer and EFF colleague Cory Doctorow, it was a fascinating exploration of the possibilities of storing human consciousness inside computers and the possibility of transcendence of computer hardware and reality as we know it. I followed Egan’s point although I’m still unclear on how the universe actually separates from its hardware underpinnings by “gathering dust” or whatever. Anyone care to comment?

Praveen and I had a great discussion of the book, along with concepts such as nanotechnology, fabricators, quantum computing, and quantum cryptography. He lost his contracting job today, so plans to spend more time doing projects related to the Online Policy Group.

One of those projects is to design an online voting system that the Tech Fed and the California Coalition for Civil Rights could use for organizational decisionmaking, since both are coalitions that need a mechanism for tabulating votes on various issues, along with comments from each organization on why it voted the way it did. Long term, it would be even better to have a system that facilitated consensus process online, provided verification of voter identity, and permitted proportional voting schemes for elections of officers or whatever. The nonprofit world has yet to benefit from one of the most basic benefits that networked applications could provide.

Preparations for a trip to Brazil to attend “Living After Capitalism” in association with the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre are going well. I managed to get the air ticket using United frequent flyer miles and I’ve applied for a U.S. passport renewal. The passport was supposed to be ready yesterday since I paid a heft expedite fee, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Hotel reservations are theoretically complete, although not with a high confidence level. Once I have the passport, I should be able to get a Brazilian visa, which now costs $100 in retaliation for a price increase of U.S. visas for Brazilians. I’ve started learning a bit of Brazilian Portuguese as well.