Meet Marvel’s newest creation, Shark Girl
Marvel published the 20th edition of Wolverine with a new mutant in the mix: Iara dos Santos, the Shark Girl. The character is a resident of Boa Viagem, in Recife’s Zona Sul and she eats raw fish and apparently can turn into a shark. The story starts in the city’s port and shows the dilemmas the character goes through when discovering that she’s a mutant. – Source (in PT)
Great idea!
Read a little more at Menos Um Na Estante!
Filed under Business, Literature
In an effort to make this blog more real life than touristic in nature, I believe it a good idea to poke fun at certain aspects of the local culture. Call it “keeping it real”, if you will.
With the recent inauguration of Recife’s newest shopping mall, RioMar, a few people on the internet caught wind of some videos of the opening day and got creative with them. Below is one such video which, at one point, shows people being trampled on the escalator in order to feed their need to consume (this happens in the US too, principally during what is known as ‘Black Friday’, after Thanksgiving). The video reminded me of a clip from the film They Live, which I’ll post a link to below also.
Clip from They Live
“Considered the largest calamity of the century, the floods of ’75 happened between the 17th and 18th of July, and left 80% of Recife under water. Another 25 municipalities of the Capibaribe basin were also affected. One-hundred and seven people died and another 350 thousand were uprooted from their homes.
In the capital as well as inland, 1,000 kilometers of railway tracks were destroyed, bridges came apart and houses were taken away by the waters. Just in Recife, 31 neighborhoods, 370 streets and plazas were submersed; 40% of the gas stations in the city were inundated; the power was cut for 70% of the area; almost all the hospitals in Recife were also underwater, with a food bank that made up part of Hospital Pedro II having been sacked. Via land, Recife was isolated from the rest of the country for two days.
The governor Moura Cavalcanti declared a state of public emergency in the capital and in nine inland municipalities. The president of the Republic, on a national TV station, announced measures to bring aid to the worst off Pernambucan cities. In Recife, the rise in the water level reached it’s high point at 4AM on the 18th of the month.
(a post-flood gov’t pamphlet)
On the morning of the 21st, when the waters lowered and the population began to return to normal life, panic took over the streets of Recife, due to a rumor that the Tapacurá dam had burst and the entire city would be wiped away.
Everything happened at 10 o’clock: all of a sudden, large groups of people ran from one side to the other without knowing where to go; women fainted; drivers no longer respected traffic lights nor cars coming in the opposite direction; transit cops abandoned their posts; several people were ran over; banks, businesses and the central post office closed their doors; at the Barão de Lucena Hospital people jumped from the second floor; while the rumor spread by word of mouth.
In the Governor’s Palace, upon realizing what was happening, the governor Moura Cavalcanti stated: “Now there’s no more tragedy, now there’s mortality”. Radio stations immediately divulged insistent denials. The Military Police gave out an official notice that they would arrest anyone caught spreading the false rumor.
The Federal Police announced that they were investigating the origin (never to be discovered) of the rumor. Panic lasted close to two hours, but remained at its high point for close to 30 minutes. More than 100 people were attended to at emergency service stations set up by the hospitals.
After the panic, technicians from the Water Supply Company stated that the rupture in the Tapacurá Dam (which has capacity for 94 million cubic meters of water) would have brought about unseen consequences for the city of Recife.” - Pernambuco A-Z
Special thanks to my source on Tumblr, Made in Recife via Recifense. If you’d like more info (in PT), check out these stories on UOL (1 and 2). I also recommend reading Vanessa’s account of the floods in the comments section.
Filed under History
The largest Carnival bloco in the world is said to be in Recife and you can find it on Saturday during the week of Carnival in the central neighborhood of São José. It goes by the name of the Galo da Madrugada (The Early Morning Rooster) and it’s pretty hard to miss, just find the giant shiny rooster towering above thousands of people. If you’re more of an observer, perhaps you can find a seafaring local to let you board their boat to watch from the sidelines on the Capibaribe River. However, it’s wise to be aware of what you’ll be missing out on.
The passo is the dance of the frevo, an accelerated polka-like dance best associated with Recife’s Carnival. While there’s no fighting involved in the modern-day frevo-de-rua, its origins point back to the time when knife-carrying capoeiristas traded fighting for dancing and knives for umbrellas. The frevo then spent an entire century marinating under the Pernambucan sun and eventually amalgamating with other styles such as the maxixe, the marcha and elements of capoeira.
If you find luck on your side and end up in Recife during Carnival this year, welcome the weekend with a different kind of rooster and let the frevo give you fervor…which should be easy enough since the two words are related.
Originally written for Street Smart Brazil.
Filed under Carnival, Music & Dance
Midway up the coast of Pernambuco, less than 40 miles from Recife’s International Airport, lies one of the best beaches in Brazil, called Porto de Galinhas (lit. Chicken Port). The Brazilian magazine Viagem & Turismo holds an annual contest for its readers to elect the best Brazilian travel options and Porto de Galinhas has won in the beach category for the last 9 years in a row, making it the paragon of paradise.
How did such a pretty place receive such a strange name, you might ask? Originally, it went by the name of Porto Rico due to all the money made from the large amounts of brazil-wood that left the country from its shores, en route to Europe. The port, though, would later serve as the main point of arrival for illegal slaves in the northeast of Brazil during the 18th century. It is said that the slaves were frequently hidden below the chicken crates (technically, helmeted guinea-fowl known as Angolan chickens in Portuguese). Upon the arrival of new slaves, one would hear the phrase “tem galinha nova no porto!” (“there’s new chicken at the port!”), and thus the beach eventually had its name changed.
Today, the chickens are hand-painted, made of coconut shells and tree trunks, by local artisans to later be bought by the purchasing power and for the viewing pleasure of the many tourists to the region. This wasn’t always so, though, as it was only a few years ago that the local artists decided to find a marketable image that would serve as their golden egg, so to speak.
Chickens are definitely not the only thing being sold in Porto de Galinhas. Aside from the endless beauty of the barrier reefs and the natural pools, there are now resorts, nightclubs and refined restaurants that have moved in and exist side by side with the rustic charm that helped to make this old fishing village so popular in the 1990′s. With all the ‘development’ and changes, I can’t help but wonder where the locals go to ‘get away from it all’.
Filed under Pernambuco
No way to know if this figure is right, but the blog that linked to where I found this picture (in PT), said Bruno Maranhão makes R$6,000/month. The house is apparently in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Recife, called Casa Forte. While being ironic, some commentators have said it doesn’t necessarily make it wrong as long as he fights for people who don’t have a home although I’ll leave it there since I’m not too knowledgable on the MST (Landless Movement).
Filed under News
I was looking at a tourism magazine from Recife called Recife Te Quer, from January of 2008 that a good friend sent me via mail a few years back and I found a really cool building with suggestive sculptures called Oficina Brennand. What follows is a bit on the location and the Pernambucan artist behind it, which I borrowed and translated from the official site. First, a few words on the artist Francisco Brennard, by acclaimed novelist Jorge Amado.
“Today he is unique – him and only him – a Brazilian artist with an assured place in the club of the principal (artists) of contemporary art. Of such importance, that alone he proclaims the universality of Brazilian art.”
Oficina Brennand
The Oficina Brennand came about in 1971 in the ruins of the ceramic factory dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, as a materialization of recalcitrant project of the artist Francisco Brennard. An old brick and roofing factory inherited by his father, installed on a piece of property called Santos Cosme and Damião, it lies in the historic neighborhood of Várzea, surrounded by what remains of the Atlantic Forest and on the waters of the Capibaribe river. The ceramics of São João (the former sugar plantation where the current property lies) became the inspiring source and depository of the story of the Pernambucan artist.
A unique place in the world, the Oficina Brennand can be found in a monumental architectural conjunct of originality, in a constant process of mutation, where the works associate themselves with the architecture to give form to subterranean, dark, sexual, religious, wild and abyssal universe.
The presence of the artist in his continuous work of creation gives the Oficina a daring character, identifying it as an intrinsically alive institution and with a dynamic that leaves the future of the project a mystery, even to the one who is creating it.
Visitation hours are from 8AM to 5PM, from Monday to Thursday and 8AM to 4PM on Friday. The admission fee is R$4.
Filed under Art, Places to See
An inventive portrait of middle class life in Recife, Brazil in the 90s, set at 220 volts. Eletrodoméstica is a short-film by Kleber Mendonça from 2005 which won several int’l awards.
Best Short Film, Huesca Festival, Spain
Jury Special Award, Hamburg Festival, Germany
Best Short Film Critics Award, Recife Film Festival Cine PE, Brazil.
Filed under Film
The other day, I saw a good post on The Good Blood about Cordel Literature and today when I was browsing the online version of the Brazilian magazine Bravo, I came across a section called “Our Bet” (in PT) in which they bet on who or what will be successful in the near future. For April of 2009, they put their bet on William Paiva, a Recifense (from Recife) who is an animator that has used cordel in his work.
His first full animation (below, in PT) has won awards all over Brazil and is titled “O Jumento Santo e a cidade que se acabou antes de começar” (The Donkey Saint and the city that ended before it began). It’s basically a Brazilian version of the creation story, but here’s a short description from Bravo.
“O (jumento) santo nasce (de uma vaca maculada pelo anjo Gabriel) como uma solução para contornar a desobediência de homem e mulher, que comeram do fruto proibido (o caju) e transformaram o mundo em uma grande bagunça, para alegria de um demônio (lagartixa) e rebuliço entre anjos (de asas borboleteantes).”
“The (donkey) saint is born (from a spotted cow from the angel Gabriel) as a solution to bypass the disobedience of man and woman, who ate the forbidden fruit (the cashew fruit) and transformed the world into a big mess, all to the pleasure of the demon (lizard) and to the uproar of the angels (with butterfly wings).”
Filed under Art, Literature
