Brazil Blog!!!

Welcome to the Brazil blog! Thanks to all who took part....

The last section of it is political as I paid a visit to the MST, so if things like that bore you then tough, cos you need to read about it!

All the stuff about birds, booze, drugs, gigs and the other aspects of my holiday that went on entirely in my own mind can be found earlier on.

Finally, but by no means leastly, thanks you to my main man Gibby: host, translator, agent, manager, photographer, man with the game plan, INSPIRATION and then some!!! I know it's cissy shit but luv ya bro!

My main blog is here.

Playing at a soiree in Sao Paulo

Like I said, Brazil is a land of contrasts.

Top time was had that night.....!! Particular thanks to our hosts Jesse and Roberto, and also to the dancers!

This Movement Needs YOU!!!!

MST: concluding thoughts....

Big thanks to everyone we met and who helped us out. Words cannot express. That's the first thing.

Next up: well, well, well.

The MST is an organistation that empowers landless people to have land, status, education, healthcare, self-respect....

It's one that takes direct action against the government and has survived 20 years of being a pain in its backside.

It's one that organises according to collectivist principles.

Hmmmm.....

Maybe I'm just a naive Westerner who's been shown around in a whirlwind few days, seen just what he wants to see and taken off back to my decadent, privileged life. But.....

There's a book you should get if you are interested in the MST. It's called Cutting the Wire: the story of the landless movement in Brazil, by Sue Banford and Jan Rocha.

In it, there is a quote that would be well worth including here. Only thing is I haven't got a copy to hand.

The sense of it is something like this: the MST take action, occupy land, do what they do and we're happy.

We're happy because we can then go on with our lives, do our little projects, work, pay off our debts/mortgage, whatever, and give them all a big pat on the back for being more revolutionary than we ever dare.

Catch my drift?

I'm writing this sat back home on my computer, planning my next few gigs, getting ratted with my mates and moaning about being back at work. I go off to the odd anarchist meeting and stuff but.....

My concluding thoughts are: fuck knows. This is a blog, not an academic paper or opinion piece.

You write some!

Some alternative views of the MST are available here.There are other articles about it here.

And there are some interesting views on NGOs and Latin American revolutionary organisations including the MST here.

Revolutionary Education IV

This mural at the school was made in memory of a young MST militante who was killed by the government on an action.

You can find more info about the Florestan Fernandez National School here.

Revolutionary Education III

On the day we got shown around, there was a meeting of the MST national women's leadership.

One of the things they were discussing was the effectiveness of the action against Aracruz, (see below).

There are also regular exhibitions on matters South American and global....

Revolutionary Education II

A lot of the resources have been donated, and the teaching and administrative staff work in a voluntary capacity.

When we arrived, many students from nearby colleges were helping to catalogue the books in the library.

Revolutionary Education I

All the computers run on Linux, the ultimate anarchist operating system!

Florestan Fernades Uni

We said our goodbyes on our last morning at the settlement and headed off to school.

Revolutionary school, to be exact.... otherwise known as the Florestan Fernandes National School in the municipality of Guararema, 65km from Sao Paulo.

It took 5 years to build by various brigades of MST volunteers and was opened in January 2005.

That's right, folks, time for some real education!

Binha

This is Olga and her mum Binha. We got talking to Binha on the last night we were at the camp.

She comes from a favela in Sâo Paulo. She left there and joined the MST a few years ago. She says she misses her family and friends and the favela, but she made the right decision to come here.

Like I said, many of those who got displaced from the countryside in the 60s and 70s went to the cities to find work and ended up in favelas, where all the drug gangs are.

Maria Helena, whom we spoke to earlier, says that the MST is trying to get people out of the favelas and back in the countryside, away from that kind of lifestyle.

Matters of the Revolution .....(Or Revolution Matters??!!)

The good times were rolling, and during a break in the gig, I caught sight of this banner just outside the house where we were partying. It's a rogues' gallery of Communist leaders.

I have never been too gone on Communism. My father came from Hungary to the UK during the Cold War, and I visited the place during the 1980s and became aware of how it worked there.

Waldir, Carmen's boyfriend, who is sitting just to my left in the picture in the previous post, is a dirigente and I asked him about it.

I said my piece and told him that I mainly come from an anarchist perspective. I said I thought that the structures and organisation of the MST seemed to be in line with this way of doing things as they don't involve having a state or government, unlike Communism or Socialism, which does.

He told me that in his view leftist groups and anarchists have a lot of common ground, and many of the leaders depicted on the banner had betrayed a lot of these revolutionary ideals.

He said that uniting on common ground is important and used the example of the Spanish Civil War. Anarchists, socialists and communists gained a lot of control at that time but they ultimately lost out to fascism because groups that should have been united against Franco were not.

Gibby and I explained our frustration with the left back home, particularly with the SWP and its hijacking of grassroots campaigns.

There followed a big discussion about politics. Gibby, fair play to him, was acting as the simultaneous interpreter, UN stylee!!! Most impressive!

I was interested in the relationship between the MST and the Brazilian government. Waldir told me that the MST does not support any party or government and hasn't done since its inception. However, when Lula came to power many of them in the organisation were hoping for land reform, but Lula's party, the PT, has been dragging its heels and not bothering.

He also told us that the state oil company, Petrobras, has done a deal with the MST. They will pay them money for any plants they grow that can be used for biodiesel.

It seems like a kind of one foot in the establishment, one foot out situation.

We talked about technology. One of the advantages of capitalism is that it can make huge leaps in technological development very quickly. Technology solves so many problems but can come at a high environmental and social cost. We discussed whether it was possible to make it more answerable in this respect. In the end we agreed that capitalism is here whether we like it or not and we have to work alongside it.

Waldir also explained that the MST were not interested in replacing the government, rather it wants to be a kind of parallel power.

I noticed people had started to drift off from the party as the music had stopped. I laughed and said to Waldir that we were driving everyone away by talking politics. He looked at me strangely and I wondered if I had offended him

I looked around me and a strange feeling came over me. Aside from the obvious cultural differences, there was something so familar to this situation. Sitting around playing guitar in the pissing rain in a camp full of politically-inclined people with scant resources trying make a stand. It could have been a protest camp back home.

Only it wasn't. In this situation, people didn't have homes or government handouts or jobs to go back to if babylon came in and cleared everyone off the land. This wasn't some pissed up, hypothetical conversation I was having with a bunch of mates in a boozer in the UK.

This was about people's lives, the only way they could make a difference and have some dignity and respect. We had been showered with so much kindness since we arrived that this basic fact hadn't quite sunk in for me.

I felt very humble and overwhelmed the rest of day. Blimey..........

More gigs!!!

Everywhere we went on the settlement, people offered us food, drink and friendship.

We didn't have to dip in our pockets once.

Families cooked up meals when we came by. Some of them killed a pig or chicken specially.

Sorry, vegan posse....

People's humour really reminded me of being back in South Wales. Everyone rips it out of everyone and everything, and nothing is sacred. The guy with the hat on in this picture kept calling me "Toucan" cos of my hooked nose.

He kept saying to Gibby: "Tell Toucan to play some Pink Floyd/Dire Straits!!" or whatever, (he actually gave me my his hat in the end!).

I laughed at them all cos I said I've come here to play them my revolutionary music and all they want is Pink Floyd and Dire Straits!

We all agreed it was crap, but we also reckoned it was funny how stuff like that was a common link between us, despite it being shyte. I played World Turned Upside Down by Leon Rossleson, explained what it was about and we all felt better.

More importantly as far as I was concerned, we sung some MST songs together, including a number in Portuguese called Não Chores Mais, which is to the tune of No Woman, No Cry.

Culture is really important here. They gave me a song book produced by the MST which has hundreds of political songs in. I'm hoping to learn some before I come back....

There is also the tradition of spontaneous street theatre or mística which occured during the MST march on Brasília. You can read more about mística here. Gibby's making a film about the march and he showed a trailer for it in the evening.

The MST march on Brasília also got reported in SchNews here.

Eucalyptus is really shit....

March 8th 2006.

On International Women's Day, 2000 women activists from La Via Campesina, a Latin-America-wide land reform organisation of which the MST is a part, invaded a tree nursey belonging to Aracruz Cellulose in Barra Ribeiro in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

They trashed it.

The idea was to draw attention to the company's appalling record in planting eucalyptus and driving indigenous tribes off their land in order to do so.

Fair play. Full respect. You can read more about it here.

This was a change to the MST's usual scheduled programme of land occupation, folks. Here was a full-on action with a major news fallout. Several of the activists were caught on camera afterwards by the Brazilian TV company Globo. All of them have since been released without charge.

Nevertheless, the media did go mental, despite the fact that when companies like Aracruz Cellulose violently evict people from their own land, the media more often than not remains silent.

This action was discussed in the organisation as a whole before being carried out. There is now a debate going on about its effectiveness.

Enough debauchery, more politics, please...

What is most important about the MST is that they provide people with stuff they need.

But I was also interested in the way decisions are taken. For me, it's equally as important.

Here's what I learned.

The family is the bottom line. The base unit.

Fourteen families consitiute a nucleo. Maria Helena has been delegated by a nucleo to speak about the decisions they have made collectively or any needs they may have.

Next up is a coordinador who relays the collective decisions of the camp as a whole.

Then there are the dirigentes. They operate on the regional, state and national level.

Elections for positions occur every two years. Majority rules, (51%), but consensus, (100%), is something that is always sought.

Some other terms:

Militantes. As I said before these are usually local people who are trained to get people involved in and co-ordinate the occupations.

A brigado is a unit of people that is put togther for a specfic purpose, (e.g building someone's house), and then dissolves. Lots of the houses I saw were not built by individual families but by brigados.

Children ten or younger can take part in meetings. After the age of ten they can vote. Like I said, all decisions, whether elections for delegates or those regarding administrative matters, are achieved through majority voting, but consensus is seen as desirable.

Why is all this important?

Decision-making can be slow but everyone participates, young and old. As such, they have a massive say in the day-to-day decisions that effect their everyday life.

Also, everyone is provided with information and educated about important matters. A good example of this is the kind of farming that a settlement might choose to practice. Information is provided and people make the choices they want.

The MST enables people to take responsibility for their lives and empower them about the kind of choices they need to make. The fact that people feel a part of this process is a big part of their appeal.

Contrast this to our own consumer-led society and its bullshit media and education system.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

Another thing that came over is that family is really important and as I see it part of the strength of this movement. I think, again, this is something we have forgotten about in our culture.

Having said that, with the MST, "family" does not necessarily mean a straight hetero couple with kids. We met queer couples who were cohabitating and they were as much a part of what was going on as everyone else.

Cachaça

Demonstrating the ancient art of drinking locally-brewed fire-water Cachaça out of a recycled vessel....

Forro III

Here, Carmen, (centre), Maria Helena and others get fed up with our lack of ability with forro moves and decide to dance on their own....

Forro II

Here, I'm shown a few moves. Not bad, considering my mashed up foot....

Forro I

I finished the gig by playing La Bamba, which was the only song I knew that everyone else knew, and everyone had a dance about.

After that, a sound system got set up and we danced a bit of forro, which is a kind of country sound from the North East of Brazil.

Everyone went totally mental.

Here, Gibby is shown a few moves.

Sod politics, time for a gig II

Olga Benário , after whom the camp was named, was a German anti fascist who married a Brazilian revolutionary. They were arrested together for agitating in Rio de Janeiro and she got sent back to Nazi Germany where she died in a concentration camp.

Brazilians still look up to her. You can find out more about her here.

This is Olga Jnr, named in her honour. 6 months old. My youngest fan!

Sorry. Politics creeping in there....

Sod politics, time for a gig I

This was a gig I did that night in the base camp opposite our room.

Eucalyptus is shit. Really....

Eucalyptus: shit

Land occupation Brazil-stylee can be a tricky business. A bit like a game of chess. Take this place, camp Olga Benario, for example. How and why did it get occupied by a bunch of direct-action toting maniacs????

MOVE ONE!!!! INCRA, the governement agency responsible for earmarking land for reform, says, yes, this land is not being used! Under the Constitution, the landowner must therefore give it over to the poor!

MOVE TWO!!!! The MST step in and say, well these land owners are little bastards. As soon as they know INCRA have said we can have it, they'll plant a load of eucalyptus there and tell us they are in fact using it. So we'll get a legal team to look into it and send in a posse to occupy an area beside the said land, hence side-stepping some particular legal nastiness and putting pressure on the landowner.

MOVE THREE!!!!! Aracruz, the said landowner, does exactly what the MST thought it would do and plants a load of eucaplyptus. Wait a minute!! Not EUCALYPTUS, with its high environmental impact, using 36, 000 litres of water per tree a year and creating a green desert where nothing else can grow?!! Oh yes, mate. Those landowners, huh?

MOVE FOUR!!!! INCRA the government land-owning agency steps in again. Sorry, MST, they're using the land. You can't have it.

MOVE FIVE!!!! The MST legal team steps in and say, hah! Turns out Aracruz didn't pay the old landowner the correct amount when they bought the land. Therefore, under more legalese in the Constitution, we can have it. CHECKMATE!

The landless families formally moved onto the 700 acre land a year ago. 360 hectares are good for farming. There are 50 families with five hectares each. Many of them live on government subsistance, literally a bag of rice and beans and a few bits of veg per week. They decide to pool resources and cultivate the land sustainably and collectively, with a view to selling what excess they may grow and putting the money back in to the community.

But first they had to remove every fucking eucalyptus tree by hand, making sure they took the roots out so it didn't grow back. It took them three months.

Technofoot lives!

The MST camp I am staying on used to belong to a large company called Aracruz Cellulose. Aracruz are a large, Brazilian land-owning family. The possess 375 hectares, have 2000 workers and made nintey million quid in the first 3rd of 2006!

Compare this to Maria Helena below who was working all hours for 200 sq m as a serf.

The problems caused by the concentration of land ownership became acute in Brazilian society in the 60s and 70s. Changes in the economic structure of the country meant that thousands of smallholder families were driven from the land by large companies.

Many of them went to the cities to find work, but most had no luck. They simply stayed where they were in the shanty-towns. Hence the favelas.

Others ended up eeking out a subsistance living back in the country.

The MST started to mobilise as the dictatorship totterered, performing their first land occupation in 1985. It had a lot of support from the grassroots and the Church, including liberation theologan Leonardo Boff. The basic fact was it provided poor families with land, security and infrastructure that society had been unable or unwilling to do for so long.

When democratic elections were held in 1989, the MST refused to ally itself with any party, although many involved look to the ruling left-wing Workers' Party of Presisdent Lula.

The fact is, though, that by stepping outside of the political mainstream it has been able to keep its integrity and carry on with its mission of helping the dispossessed.

Maria Helena

The next day it is completely pissing it down and and all the tasks scheduled have been postponed.

Looks like my run of luck is up. It is winter in Brazil and yet the weather has been better than back home. Till now, that is.

So we go for a walk with Maria Helena, one of the people we met yesterday, and have a look around the camp.

Maria Helena used to work as a domestic in Sao Paulo. However, she was brought up in Bahia in the North East, where she lived on a farm with her mother until the age of six. She always hated city life and longed to return to the country.

Her boss in Sao Paulo owned a farm near to where the camp is now and he needed someone to work for him out there. Maria Helena seized the opportunity and moved.

She says she got a mortgage on a small piece of land but she was working very hard keeping the farm and the family together.

Then she was approached by MST militantes, as were others who worked on the land in the area. The militantes are local MST activists whose job it is to get people interested in and co-ordinate a particular land occupation.

Maria Helena said she didn't want to know. She had heard on the TV and on other media outlets that the MST were a bunch of terrorists and she didn't want anything to do with them.

But as the area was occupied she got talking to several of the families and individuals involved. She came to change her opinion as to what was going on, and what the MST were about.

This is a very common theme I found running through many of the stories from the people I got talking to.

She decided to join, despite the fact that she only had a year to go on her mortgage repayments. That was in 2003. The families involved in the occupation lived in an encampment just next to the area of land targeted. Then a year ago they got the legal go ahead and they moved onto where they are now.

Maria Helena told us that she was working like a serf before, and now she has dignity, community and respect. Now, she says, she has a little piece of heaven.

Camp Olga Benário

Camp Olga: Our room is just behind the big building.

We arrive at the coach station in Taubete. We're waiting for a lift to the MST settlement nearby but we don't know who to look for.

The people we are waiting for at least know that I have a crutch cos of my twisted ankle, so I wonder around the coach station for a bit.

I see a man with a red baseball cap and a young girl, and they come up to me and start speaking Portuguese.

Oh dear. I smile and say in English "Quick - let's find Gibby, he speaks Portuguese!!!"

Fortunately it doesn't take too long. The man asks Gibby the name of the woman who he had contacted to arrange the visit. Gibby says Carmen....and everything is OK. The man, whose name is Aldice, smiles and whisks us away in his car.

Proper revolutionary like, innit.....

When we arrive it's dark. we're greeted by Carmen and two other women who show us to our room. It's the HQ of the camp but it is in fact a storeroom and the only place on site with any electricity. The settlement has only been occupied for a year and there is no leccy anywhere else.

Looks like we have the luxury suite!

We then wonder up to the top of a hill in near darkness to someone's house, where we are given a meal of red beans with pork and rice. Everyone is very welcoming and pleased to see us. There's a lot of conversation which Gibby translates, and lots of laughter too. Looks like they're looking forward to hearing a bit of music.

They tell us there are lots of things planned for tomorrow which we can check out but it means an early start.

So we head off back and go to bed....

Jesus, get over yourself.....

Come on down off there, son. You're doing your cause no good. This won't achieve anything. Get a job.....

UK activists can be messianically egocentric. Probably.

MST

Pity the life of the poor UK activist.

You go to demos, get hassled, beaten up and nicked by the cops. You tie yourself to trees and trash offices in the name of eco-salvation. You set up newsletters that other activists read but no-one pays much attention to. You throw yourself headlong into campaigns that never achieve much in the way of victory.

And for what?

All your mates think your either nuts, naive or messianically egocentric. Others worry for you and your personal safety. They ask you why you do it and what you hope to achieve and tell you to stop being so stupid.

And still you go on....

I tend to like being on the winning side. Like when the roads programme got stopped for a while in the mid-nineties, or the Criminal justice Act campaign united the disparate youth subcultures around the same time, or Seattle 1999 put globalisation in its current form on the map.

But it aint always like that. Wars go on, people suffer and everyone seems to bury their heads in the sand most of the time.

I don't know what point it was that I got fed up and actually thought, where the hell are we going with this? What do we want to achieve? What kind of world do we want to live in?

My experience of living real anarchism, for example, was confined to setting up squatted community centres, hanging around on protest camps or traveller sites and making a short film about the Exodus Collective in Luton.

There was always something inspiring to be found in those situations, but nothing permanent. Nothing to really give big, bad babylon a run for its money.

And that was why when I booked my ticket to Brazil, I knew I had to go and visit the MST.

******************

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, or in Portuguese Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), is the largest social movement in Latin America with an estimated 1.5 million landless members organized in 23 out 27 states. The MST carries out long-overdue land reform in a country mired by unjust land distribution. In Brazil, 1.6% of the landowners control roughly half (46.8%) of the land on which crops could be grown. Just 3% of the population owns two-thirds of all arable lands.

Since 1985, the MST has peacefully occupied unused land where they have established cooperative farms, constructed houses, schools for children and adults and clinics, promoted indigenous cultures and a healthy and sustainable environment and gender equality. The MST has won land titles for more than 350,000 families in 2,000 settlements as a result of MST actions, and 180,000 encamped families currently await government recognition. Land occupations are rooted in the Brazilian Constitution, which says land that remains unproductive should be used for a “larger social function.

The MST’s success lies in its ability to organize and educate. Members have not only managed to secure land, therefore food security for their families, but also continue to develop a sustainable socio-economic model that offers a concrete alternative to today's globalization that puts profits before people and humanity.

From the MST website

It was the co-operative farms that intersted me the most. I wanted to see all this stuff in action. For real, man.

And that is why I found myself with Gibby at camp Olga Benário, about an hour's drive from São Paulo.

Jean Charles de Menezes

This was the Brazilian guy who got shot on a tube by British coppers in the aftermath of the 7/7 bomb attacks. While I was away the UK Crown Prosection Services decided no police would be charged with his death. They did say, however, that there may be prosections under Health and Safety law.

Like it was an outbreak of foodpoisoning, not a load of bullets in the head of an innocent man.

Big up to those back home who are pushing for justice for John Charles de Menezes. Go, Yasmin, go!

Beckenbauer the angel

OK mate, let me in. I've led a good life. I'm a moralising twat at times but I write the odd good toooon....honest!

And yes, his name is really Beckenbauer

Anarchist bookstall, Sâo Paulo

The booklets on the right are called "string literature." They are about issues of the day written in a unique, rhyming style to be performed.

I've got one about government corruption but my Portguese is still crap.;;;;

Not so ridiculous places to play a gig I: At a ballet school for favela children

Well, I didn't exactly blast down the doors of the UN and start a revolution, but definitely had a lot of fun doing this gig.

The Ballet de Santa Teresa was started when a little girl from a favela called Lais started pestering a ballet dancer called Vânya for a lesson. One thing led to another and now the project occupies a little shed in the Santa Teresa area, once home to Ronnie Biggs, and lots of kids come there for ballet, hip hop and all sorts..... Their website is here.

It's run on absolutely nothing and the volunteers are fantastic. One of them explained to me how there is a war in the favela up the road from them. Some of the children don't know where to run where the shooting starts. They don't feel safe. Many of them have lost family and friends.

As you can see from the looks on their faces, one thing they do here is provide kids with a much-needed resource: a childhood.

Warzone

This is Luke Dowdney.

He's from England but he came to Rio de Janeiro over ten years ago and formed a boxing club. In a favela - one of Rio's drug and gun infested shanty towns.

What did the locals make of this crazy English guy? They loved it, the boxing club is a raging success and it is now a way for many ghetto youth to find a way out of the limited options they encounter.

Perhaps more remarkable is his book Children of the Drug Trade. It describes the escalation of the drug wars between the police and rival gangs in Rio over the last twenty years.

The most crazy thing about this is that children, some aged younger than twelve years old, are given access to war grade weapons and are engaged in armed confrontations on a regular basis.

An incredible statistic is that in 2000, there were exactly 325 deaths in the Israel/Palestine conflict.

In Rio there were over 2500. A lot of them just children. It's a forgotten war.

He took his study to the UN, and they have since come up with a new category of Children in Organised Armed Violence. This has allowed a lot more funding to come the way of projects like his to get children out of the cycle of violence here. This is the website.

Here is another one. And another.

Fair play, geezer.

Demo against Israel and the war in Lebanon

At the start of the recent war in Lebanon, ther were 200,000 Brazilians living there. When hostilities kicked off, the government had a job getting everybody out.

Brazil has the largest Lebanese population outside Lebanon itself. Many of them have family out there now. A Brazilian child was killed during an Israeli bombardment and there have been other casualties from here since then.

Acaraje

From the North East, Bahia to be exact. It's different up there, I'm told.

São Paulo

São Paulo. Now that's a city.

Mae West

Feijaoda

On the lash last night were you, sir?

Head off to the boozer on the Sunday after and get a load of this. It's called feijoada and it's the kind of equivalent of a UK Sunday roast.

It's made of offcuts of meat and black beans with rice and green stuff, and it has its origins in the time of slavery.

Not vegan, but very nice.

Fear not, Vegan !!!

...you can live off this stuff. It's called açai and it's a fruit found in the rainforest that hasn't quite made it back to the militant muesli belt in the UK.

It is served really cold and tases like a grainy version of ice cream. Mmmm.... It swells up slightly once you've eaten it and one bowl will do ya for a whole day.

Believe!

More Gilberto!!!!

Gilberto Gil AGAIN, this time playing at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, 2003.

Once again, top music and top politics!!!

He´s also big into his creative commons copyright, which allows his music to be freely downloaded and shared on the interweb. His site is here, and there´s an English langauge link you can hit. By all accounts, he's a bit of a pioneer in the creative commons field.

Is it obvious I'm becoming a bit of a fan?

Giana Viscardi

This is Giana Viscardi and she sings MPB - Música Popular Brasileira, which is the generic term for Brazilian traditional pop music.

She was singing in Sâo Paulo and I went down and checked out the grooves. Well worth a listen folks - www.gianaviscardi.com.br.

Brazilian people are like English people insofar as they call the UK as a whole England - Inglaterra in Portuguese.

Of course, as the Royal Ambassador for the House of Splott here in Brazil I have to counter this most firmly with the fact that I am from Wales - Pais de Gales.

This gets Brazilian people going. Of course they have heard of Pais De Gales, because they played Brazil in the 1958 World Cup quater finals!

Wales to them is pure chic, as exotic and farwaway as Brazil is to us. And that´s the word they use to describe it when I tell them where I am from - chic!

Can you fucking believe it?

I gave Giana Viscari a copy of my Bedsit Blues CD.

She said: "It´s very nice but why does the picture on the front have a house falling down?"

Oh, man! How can you shatter someone´s illusions?

Inspiring things to do in a Military Dictatorship no. 2039373292

Chico Buarque was another musical exile from Brazil´s military dictatorship, which seized power in 1964. He effed off to Italy after getting nicked in 1968, but soon found his way back and used his music as a way of protesting against the regime.

A bizarre game of cat and mouse followed, as he produced song after song which contained veiled criticisms of the government. Sometimes the censors would cotton on and ban them, but sometimes......well, they were just too stupid to notice.

A classic example of this is Chico´s album for children, Os Saltimbancos. Imagine an album for kids with fairy tale-like songs on it, like a cross between Sesame Street and the Brothers Grimm. The kind of songs that you grow up singing and everyone knows from generation to generation

Well, in this case the dozy censors weren´t doing their homework, cos this album may look and sound like a children´s album, but in actual fact it contains powerful satire against what was happening in the world of politics at the time.

Unfortunately my Portuguese isn´t up to appreciating it, (I know about three words!!!!), but I´m told it´s a bit like George Orwell´s Animal Farm.

Fecking wicked!

Quinteto em Branco e Preto

Checked these fellahs at a club in Sao Paulo last night. They´ve been lighting up Europe lately and are up and coming samba stars.

Samba always meant hugh drums and big carnivals. But technically it´s a musical form not unlike the blues, with percussion, guitar and voice.

Last night was strictly freaky dancing, tho! Check their site here. And listen to the music here.

Little Freddy Seaside strikes again!

Public transport in Sao Paulo: crap.

Unfortunately I have to put plans to visit the MST on hold for the moment, and eff off from Itatiaia. Big shout out to Christian, Tatiana, Julie, Leo, Graham and Mary! Nice 1!

Off to Sao Paulo, which is a kind of warzone at the moment.

Rio and Sao Paulo, as I mentioned before, are run by drug gangs who have more power than the state authorities. The state jail their leaders but if the leaders get pissed off for any reason, the drug gangs shut down the city.

The top boys in Rio de Janeiro are called Comando Vermelho - Red Command. Their leader goes by the name of leader Fernandinho Beira-Mar, or `Little Freddy Seaside´ in English. Lots of the Funk Carioca tracks I´ve been checking out are from Red Command hip-hop crews.

They´re good toones, but then again I wouldn´t want to say anything to piss off Little Freddy Seaside.

The top boy in Sao Paulo is Marcola. He got wind of the fact that him and his chaps on the inside were going to be transfered to a new, hastily-built high-security prison.

So he got his mates on the outside to mash up a few buses, (see photo). It´s OK, they were evacuated first.

But things are cool, man! In a cit of 18 million people, (fourth largest in the world), a few buses getting mashed is no big deal.

Or so you would have thought, judging by peoples´ reactions here.....

News just in...Little Freddy Seaside has been transfered to Brazil´s first federal prison. It cost 5 million quid to build it. He´s the only inmate.

OTHER NEWS...Big shout out to the Welsh anarchos in Russia protesting against the G8. Some of them got nicked, some have been released and some are still there. Read all about it here.

World Cup Voodoo Shock!

When I was in Rio, I did some voodoo magic and made the World Cup appear, but only on condition my hair turned into the worse bouffant cut imaginable.

Voodoo. Amazing.

Gilberto Gill

Just after Brazil slid into dictatorship in 1964, Gilberto Gill released the song Aquele Abraco.

It was a kind of big shout out to Rio de Janeiro, then the country´s capital, to hold on tight. Kind of like An Open Letter to NYC by the Beastie Boys, which came out after September 11th.

Gil went into exile along with several other Brazilian musical luminaries. He and Caetano Veloso ended up in London, and their output at the time reflects this.

Like I said earlier, he´s now the country´s culture minister, and still a bit of a dude really...Check out the sounds!

Lula

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former shoeshine boy and now President of Brazil.

Working class hero, mate!

Ridiculous places to play gigs V: In a Masonic meeting

Leo: Painter and Ents manager of Hotel Simon!

Absolutely true!

Imagine my delight when Christian came down and explained that the Sao Paulo Masons were meeting in the local hotel up the road. Gibby managed to persuade the ents manager Leo to have me play.

It was funny, with Christian, Tatiana and Christian’s parents in the audience, (along with several Masonic kids!) and Gibby filming.

I managed to sing a version of Oi Mush Fuck Off and a cover of Ryan Harvey’s excellent re-write of The Times they are a Changin’ entitled The Times they are not a-Changin.’ Nice.

But obviously I was spotted cos the next night I fell down the stairs and twisted my ankle.

Obviously some black magic at work.

(Left): Facing down the Masons at Hotel Simon!!!!


(Right): Masonic kids!!!!

Ridiculous places to play a gig IV: In a disused swimming pool with lots of frogs making mating noises.

This is Tatiana and I sitting in a disused swimming pool, while Christian and Gibby were recording and filming frogs mating nearby.

Made for an interesting gig.

Tatiana assures me she was cold, rather than trying to block out the music by covering her ears.

Brazilian Birds

A lot of you have been asking whether or not I have encountered any decent Brazilian birds.

Well, like I say, in my new-refound hippydom I´ve taken to enjoying watching the natural world with new-found curiosity.

As you can see from the photo, Brazilian birds are very different from the ones back home.

Ridiculous places to record songs about signing on the dole: In a sacred cave.

In the studio....again!

This is Christian. He lives in the rainforest with his wife Tatiana and they are both artists. She´s Brazilian and he´s from Australia.

He´s big into his music and before I came out we arranged to record some stuff. Sometimes we start from scratch with ideas we come up with there and then, sometimes he pulls apart my songs and puts them back together before my eyes. Sometimes we just record things straight and make mad arrangements, taking the songs in unexpected directions. It´s lots of fun.

He´s also making a film about wildlife in the forest. He filmed some rare monkeys recently and showed the footage at a local gathering. It caused a huge storm as the monkeys are very rare and as a result of an internet buzz there are lots of people wondering around from all over the world trying to film the monkeys as well.

It´s amazing to stop and look at the natural world for a change.

The last goodbye

The other night I had a dream about telling Gibby how Bloke died. In the dream we were both crying buckets.

That night we decided to go on another late night blunder into the jungle, armed with some tins and a couple of torches, which we didn’t really need cos the moonlight was so bright.

I told Gibby about my dream and then proceeded to tell him the story of what happened and the fall out from Bloke’s death. Gibby had got to know Bloke through being in Flannel but all our connections run deep.

We were walking in the direction of a lookout post that gives you a 360 degree vista of the whole jungle, and the Three Peaks National Park. The lookout post is called a ultima adeus in Portuguese: “the last goodbye” in English.

Strange coincidence....

So we decided to head out there despite the fact that it was really late and it was a hour away. I had wanted to do something personal in Bloke´s memory for ages and this seemed to be an appropriate time.

When we arrived it was cloudy but you could see the moon and it lit up the whole surrounding area. It was breathtakingly beautiful in the moonlight. We sat down in the circular lookout post and I imagined Bloke was there making up the third point of a triangle with me and Gibby. We talked about him and about his life and about life in general and prayer. We laughed a lot and felt deeply sad and had a hug.

I remembered what it was like to have Bloke around and felt him and his family and promised to myself I would do everything I could for them.

And then we left.

The last goodbye.

Ridiculous places to play gigs III: In a haunted house

Late one night, Gibby and I decided to eff off to a deserted house in the jungle he knew to record a few tunes on the front porch. Armed with beer, a guitar and a minidisk player, mission was verily accomplished, despite the fact that we were so drunk we weren’t sure if we were working the on/off controls on the recording kit correctly.

The next day we were talking to our mate Tatiana about the mission and she said that the house used to belong to a local musician called Joquinho who was murdered in the nearby town aged forty.

Some workers who were doing the place refused to finish the job because, they said, spirits haunt it. As a result, the property has remained uninhabited cos no-one wants to buy it.

We haven’t listened back to the recording yet. Maybe we have some ethereal accompaniment.

Ridiculous places to play gigs II: In front of a waterfall

Nice audience but it just wouldn’t shut up.

Ridiculous places to play gigs I: In front of lots of trees.

This one was a major attraction for busking fans in the tree community but as you can see from the empty guitar case no-one was prepared to cough up.

That Zidane moment recreated....

Spot the difference between this and the original!

Julbilant scenes from England-Brazil World Cup Final

Just did´t quite work out as each of us had planned......

Innit

Psychic poison from urban living and the weight of the emotional turmoil of the last few years is seeping out of me. I feel it as it leaves, sometimes in my dreams, sometimes as the day pulses along in its strange, rainforesty kind of way.

That I guess is the yang.

Balancing it out on the positive ying side of things is music, which is escaping from me into the ether all around.

I’m finding that the waterfalls, the rainforest and all its inhabitants are much more receptive that Cardiff audiences have been for a while.

Probably just as well I’ve effed off and given ears in Wales a bit of a break!

Been recording. On the front porch. You can just about make it out in the photo downstairs. Upstairs is Christian, (more about him later), and his ma Mary.

In case your worrying that I´m gonna turn into Sting and write songs bleating about rainforest destruction fret not cos it looks like this next album´s gonna be a concept album about siging on.

More of that later in all.....

Itatiaia

Rio oozes attitude and urban extremes....

But no time to look too deep, I’ve been spirited away to Itatiaia, deep within the rainforest.

From one kind of jungle to another.

This one surrounds you with its tentacles and opens you right up. You sing it your secrets and it whispers possibilities back to you in your dreams.

The beauty is so primal and all-enveloping that you run with it and exude it and become part of it. It nurtures you like a small child.

Welcome back, it says.

I think I may have turned into a hippy. Again......

This place is secondary rainforest, about 100 years´ old. Nearby is primary rainforest, old as the hills mate....

Christ - the gig III

Met these chaps on the train on the way back from the Christ statue and had a jam!

Christ - the gig II

....and play a gig at his feet!!!!

Christ - the gig I

Get the Holy One in your sights.....

Skol

The best lager you can get in Brazil. Yes, it´s still shyte.