Bethlehem, PA

I am in Bethlehem, Penn- sylvania for a couple of days to give an invited talk to a small conference on globalization at Lehigh University and to work on a book project with my former student John Jirik, who teaches here now.

Here is my host, John, framed against the Lehigh River, that cuts through town.

Bethlehem is a very traditional looking small town that has been around since 1741. It was started by the Moravian Brethren who arrived here as political or religious refugees from Germany, and originally what is now the Czech Republic.

This was one of their buildings, now part of Moravian College.

It is a beautiful town with a lot of well preserved historical homes. Here is a nice example, with a bit of autumn color in front of it.

During the industrial heyday of the USA, the town was known as the home of Bethlehem Steel, the firm that made the steel for the Golden Gate Bridge and other markers of the age.

For better, or I would say, for worse, after the steel mill finally failed completely and shut down, part of it was turned into a casino, someone's idea of a clever replacement for those jobs. Here you see the Sands Casino sign framed against a decaying and unredeveloped part of the steel mill.

One of the nice things about this trip is being back in the Eastern part of the USA in October, when the leaves of the hardwood trees and forests begin to turn red and gold, as you can see from this tree that stands in front of the Lehigh University building that houses the Journalism program.

My Brazilan Skin

I had not been back to Brazil in two years. Long time. But after I had been back a day or so, it felt like home again. Sort of like home feels when you have been gone for a while. You don't know the latest political scandal that people are talking about, but the air smells good, the language feels comfortable in your ear and mouth, the little details of a typical street scene make you smile in both recognition and pleasure. I slow down my feet and speed up my ear, so I can try to catch everything because every little detail is interesting: what has changed? What is still pretty much the same?

I had several levels of Brazilian home-coming this time. The first, the three days, was just being back in São Paulo. My hotel was quite close to where we lived in 1989-90, so it was a constant feel of pleasurable deja vu, to recognize that most things really had not changed that much in 20 years. The way that little service shops, like tailors, are still tucked into side streets. The way that people bustle into corner restaurants for a snack. The way people walk on the street and greet each other. The familiar buildings and streets. Things do cost more there relative to their dollar value. I decided I did not want to pay what it took to eat in several places that would have been quite affordable 20 years ago.

The second was specifically spending a couple of those days in São Paulo at the University of São Paulo (USP), meeting with people and using the library to catch up on Brazilian media books and magazines that I can't get at UT. The Benson Latin American Collection at UT actually has an astonishing amount of the things I do need, but they can't afford every academic journal on communication in the Lusophone countries or business monthlies on cable TV. USP is huge and nicely green, as you can see in the photo here of a path near the the communication school (shown in the next photo here) has quite a bit bigger footprint than the one at UT, which mostly means we at UT are way overcrowded. I taught at USP 1989-90, so the communications school has a pleasant familiarity to me, too, and there are some nice new touches like a nice restaurant for faculty and grad students a few blocks away. I was there mostly to get a research project on digital inclusion moving and to see if we can revive our exchange of faculty between the schools. I made progress on both, so we will see how things go.

The third nice level of being back was going to the annual meeting of the Brazilian academic communication research association INTERCOM. I have probably gone to at least ten of these since 1981, when I went the first time to discuss my new completely dissertation research on Brazilian television. So I saw people I have know literally since then or even before. Sandy says academic meetings are a lot like summer camp for grown ups. You get to see your friends, in this case for me a somewhat specialized but remarkably close set of friends that I had not seen for a couple of years. (The photo shows a couple of them, Anamaria Fadul and Sonia Virginia Morreira , as we had lunch in cafeteria at the Universidade Positiva in Curitiba at the meeting.)
You get to do interesting things like presenting your own research or listening to interesting new things being done by others. (This really is fun if you are a bit of a research and culture geek.) In my case, it was a great, quick way to catch up on a lot that is being done in Brazil right now. A great package of things to do for a couple days -- and you thought summer camp was gone forever.

The fourth thing was a bit of surprise at how some things are indeed changing in Brazil. Since the public universities cannot keep up with the demand, new private schools are springing up like crazy in Brazil, some good, some bad. The one hosting us in Curitiba was the Positive University, owned by the Grupo Positivo who are started doing private schools, like some of the private charter school chains in the US, with similarly positive results, then branched into curricular materials and school books, then computers and learning software, and now universities. It is funny how the main Positive School seems pretty normal for a charter school, but a bid odd for a major university to be the Positive University, whose symbol is a big thumbs up.

One Afternoon at Habib's, or When Old Telenovelas Never Die

After a couple of meetings today, I went book and DVD shopping at one of my favorite bookstores in the world, Livraria Cultura, which has five different spaces -- one bigger than your average Borders-- in a small mall on Avenida Paulista. So many new books on Brazilian media that I got footsore standing and looking at them. So I took a break, going kitty corner across from the back corner of this mall on Rua Augusta, to another of my favorite places, one of the world's most interesting fast food joints, Habib's, which serves good, cheap Lebanese fast food: kibes and esfihas instead of burgers, although they will sell you a burger and fries, if you must. Not much to look at, as you see here, but a lot of good places aren't.

Sitting there happily munching a small snack, I noticed that everyone in their dining room was more than usually glued to the large TV hanging from the ceiling, so I glanced up, too. And what was showing but a rerun session (TV Globo calls mid-afternoon reruns the "Vale apena ver de novo" -- "worth seeing again"-- series) of Sandy's favorite telenovela, which features an Indian girl who is apparently the reincarnation of her boss' long lost (murdered it turns out) and beloved wife. Here you see her and a friend looking at the soon to be boss' house, to which she is curiously drawn. He breeds and creates roses, so she is further drawn to his greenhouse.

So then before long I was literally watching one of THE crucial scenes of the whole nine month telenovela, where the girl is strongly, inexplicably drawn to the one rose that he created for the lost wife. They are indeed destined for one another TahDah! (although it takes MONTHS for their seemingly pre-destined romance to work out--but that is indeed how this genre works).

Some things are just too overwhelmingly melodramatic to die! The whole restaurant clientele, except the ones actually working, was raptly watching this scene. So it is pretty clear that Sandy's tastes run close to the core of what rivets the Brazilian audience most. (I have to admit that I kinda like this one, too.) One of those moments where personal life and our lifelong, ongoing ethnography of media and Brazilian life completely merge. Cheesy but cool.

Back to São Paulo

When I woke up in the plane this morning over Brazil, I popped an eyelid open and looked out the window at the sunrise over the clouds. (Couldn't resist snapping a picture with my trusty iPhone -- the Brazilian guy in the seat ahead was doing the same thing.) I was already filled with anticipation. Brazil really feels like a second home country to me. I get excited thinking about the people I know, the fun of speaking Portuguese again, the fun of catching up on what is going on, even the food.

It is wonderful to get back to São Paulo for a couple of days. I have been here a lot off and on over the last 33 years, including living here 9 months in 1989-90, and teaching at the University of São Paulo. I get hungry for a taste of big city life now and then, even thought Austin is certainly easier to live in.

The city is much too large and sprawling, when you look at it from the air, as in this photo, flying in, it is overwhelming. It goes on forever before you even land. A number of people argue that huge Third World metropolises, surrounded by rapidly growing slums, are one of the main faces of the world's future. Planet Slum, one book by Mike Davis, calls it.

The surprising thing is how green small parts of it can be. People cultivate trees or at least a few shrubs between buildings. The green is almost more delightful, sandwiched into such a sprawling mass of concrete, as the view from my hotel window, at the very nice but trendily and oddly named -- Golden Tulip Interactive, shows. The breakfast room looks out onto the garden by the tree -- a nice oasis.

So time to go walking in the city, enjoying a little observational update a la de Certeau, as I walk to meetings and get re-acquainted with one of my favorite cities.

Fine dining in Horseshoe Bend

Recently on vacation in Idaho, we drove up to visit my brother Jack and sister-in-law Shirley in McCall, where they (lucky them!) had rented a cabin on the lake for the summer. Here are Jack and Shirley on their deck at the cabin.

I have always really enjoyed talking to them, ever since I was 12 or so, and they did me the great kindness of talking to me seriously like I was on my way to being an interesting human being. I craved that more than I can express, as I suspect do many 12-year-olds out there.

Here is the view from their cabin deck. Nice. Sandy said it was like Finland, but with mountains, which is a real compliment, since she thinks Finland has gorgeous lakes and summers.


On the way back down to Boise, we stopped for dinner in a funky, former logging town named Horseshoe Bend. We had hear that Kit's Riverside Restaurant had great views, so we stopped in.

Here is the view from the backyard dining area, over the Payette River and up over the mountains beyond it.


Here is Kit's. It has great burgers, which I had -- a half pound burger loaded with sauteed mushrooms and remarkably good salads -- which Sandy had, with grilled Salmon. Not to mention steaks, which would have been a bit heavy since lunch had been meatloaf in a similar joint in McCall, called Lardo's -- I kid you not, that is its name. But then Lardo was the name of the town, before someone thought better of it.


It has a great sort of road house cafe ambience, which is the kind of word most of their clientele would probably not use.

In fact, you get a sense of most of Kit's regulars from this bumper sticker in the parking lot. Of course, Rolf tells me he has seen the very same bumper sticker in our neighborhood in Austin. Maybe we could import Kit's (and its view) to liven up the neighborhood a bit.

Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology

One of my favorite things about Mexico City is the Museo Nacional de Antropología, one of the world's most interesting museums. It has an incredible collection of statues, pottery, jewelry and large scale reproductions of pre-Colombian buildings from all over Mexico. It also takes a nicely serious but accessible stab at educating the museum-goer about the history of Mexico and its peoples. The pre-Colombian part is the most spectacular, but the whole second floor is devoted to the colonial and post-colonial cultures of the same peoples and places, showing both some considerable continuity of images and cultures, but mostly a great deal of hybridity between those older traditions and what the Spanish brought it. Fascinating stuff at both levels.

Here are some of my favorite items and images, from those I took there with my trusty iPhone camera. Unfortunately, I had forgotten my good camera, but the iPhone did pretty well. The first, above, is a very figurative statue of Mictlantecuhtli, the God of Death, from about 100 AD.

The second here is an image from a reproduction of an entire wall from the temple of Quetzalcóatl in Teotihuacan, just outside Mexico City, about 400 AD.

The third is a wall painting from Cacaxtla, about 800 AD.

The fourth, which made me think of my son, Christian, for some reason -- thinking that he would like its expression, is a Toltec statue of a jaguar, from Monte Alban, probably around 200 AD or so.

This doesn't even count all the Aztec and Mayan things that people are probably more familiar with.

Amazing times and places, but probably not ones I would want to live in. Very serious mixtures of warfare and religion that perpetuated warfare. Related to a very serious pre-occupation with death. But a lot of people also had time to create amazing art.

Adios México

I spent last week in Mexico City at a conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. Of the various academic meetings (quite correctly seen by my wife Sandy as summer camps for grown up intellectuals--read David Lodge novels for very amusing takes on these) I go to, this is one of the more fun since it draws most heavily from Europe, then the US, then Asia, Latin America, and lots of other places. Very cosmopolitan. Found myself at the closing social dancing to mariachi music with Portuguese, Indians, Australians, Chileans, and a whole bunch of Mexican students who had been volunteers at the event.

Here is a representative picture from the opening social, at a former convent, turned mansion, turned art museum, built over a corner of the sacred central plaza of the Aztecs, which built over a lot of earlier folks. (The downtown of Mexico City near the Zocalo has more layers of history than anyplace in the Americas.)

Shown are two Portuguese professors I am doing research with, Cristina Ponte and José Azevedo, with a gigantic 20th century statue and party-goers below in the background.


One of the things I like about this particular organization is that they always pick interesting places to meet in and the organizers do their best to give you some flavor of the city and country. Sometimes one goes to meetings at the airport hotel in St. Louis. Not quite the same.


We were meeting in a building that was formerly the cultural center for the foreign ministry and now does the same for the National Autonomous University of Mexico, deliberately named to show its independence of both church and state. Nice building with nice rooms, but at a big meeting, you still end up sitting in auditoriums a lot, like the one shown here.

However, I was listening at the time to one of my favorite academic researchers in the world, a Mexican anthropologist named Nestor Garcia Canclini. He helped define a lot of how we think about how cultures met and hybridized together in Latin America, so hearing him is always interesting. I found it better to listen directly to him in Spanish because the English translation was awful-- reinforces my feeling that although many things eventually get into English, sort of, you get a much better understanding if you can read or listen to the originals.

It is always fun to be in a big city with a distinct local flair. Mexico City has modern cosmopolitan areas, our hotel was in one on Paseo de la Reforma. But what I like most about the city is its distinctive folklore. Here are two indicative images I saw. First the classic Mexican image of the fashionable lady as a skeleton, the calavera catrina, who reminds us that the glamorous and wealthy die. To reword a bumper sticker, I saw in Austin, the one who dies with the most toys, still dies.

Second is one that shows another of my favorite things about Mexico, its unbelievable ability, in high art, low graffiti and in between to borrow or take in things and hybridize them around. So here is the ubiquitous Bart Simpson as calavera Bart.

Que vive México!