saintadatha

i haven't double-checked, but i'm pretty sure my account is about to run dry.
so, just in case it might all suddenly go dark, i thought it was high time i fulfilled my promise and left a proper update.

- i'm still in london, i'm still bartending at events, still getting by. i'm still seeing the same lass (over 8 months now: still seems special and wonderful, every single day).

- i'm cycling more than ever now. my osteo told me that my lowest few vertebrae have been fused for many many years (unnoticed by the standard medical profession), and so i'm taking a break from capoeira for a while. my ankle is still screwed from breaking it this time last year, but, with hope (and therapy... expensive therapy) i might make it back... that said, i've been thinking about returning to japanese arts for a bit. perhaps aikido, i'm not sure. i think i miss the dojo. strange.

- the cycling. yes. riding a fixie now; been about nine months. one gear, no freewheel, and the back-brake comes off in january. so then, i'm riding one of these fuji track bikes:

with some of these bars:

with some sexy brake levers like these (but, as I said, one is coming off in amonth's time: yay!)

and a japanese, mks pedal set-up sent over from milwaukee, like this:


... next, i'm thinking of respraying the frame off-white, with red tires and all black wheels...
add a pair of these

to go with my general cardigan, hat, style, and damn! i'll be the sexiest thing on the streets of london!
remember: four wheels good, two wheels bad. one gear better.
and if you see me (and can catch me) then please do say hi. i'll be the one riding in the navy blue trilby.
honestly.

- check this out (this being the zen of fixed riding, and the reason why i do it like i do it. damn it's awesome!):


- there are just under half a different and essentially unrelated dozen projects that occupy my mind at the moment. a tale of fiction, a written piece of non-fiction, an academically related film, an alcoholically linked film/visual piece, some other articles... my degree is now over, the phd will wait another year at least, and so now i just don't know what to start with. every step down one path feels further from the others... is this more procrastination, or normal of a back-logged brain of creativity? how do i choose? ... of course, this a question that nobody else can really answer (without resorting to yoda-isms anyhoo).

- i'm watching lots of film noir at the moment. key largo is the current fave. what do you reckon?

- listening to the tom waits "orphans" album. when i grow up can i be tom waits? please? i'll be a good/bad boy...

- just finished a huge stack of james ellroy, and just now some more umberto eco. authors to (differently) humble a would-be... murakami also. all of them. so many of them. truly the word was prometheus's flame.

- tattoos: still no more on the flesh; still even more in my mind...

- it was my birthday on sunday. 27 full years old. "ancient!" declare some; "sprog!" insist others. you are only as old as you feel. or rather, though less philosophically, you are only as old as you are. not just a state of mind: certainly a state of body also...

- i got my result for my master's on monday. not bad for a first day of 27-ness (you should hear about the weekend as well...). so the results come through as either a fail (rare), a pass (common), a merit (possible 20% of my course, maybe less), or a distinction (so few it's great), and i got a merit. which is excellent, given the shit that got in the way this time last year. thought i might have fucked things up more, but still it appears that i pulled it off (again). further, it means that, if i do make it to the phd, i am more likely to not only get onto a course, but to get some funding... (my beloved, however, would prefer if i didn't become a student again. see we shall, yes.) what's even better, though, is that to earn a merit my dissertation has to have gained either a merit or distinction by its self... and, in the words of my girlfriend, that means that someone actually read the damn thing. (or didn't, and just guessed). given the amount of editing (read: hacking) that went into it at the end, i'm almost surprised. almost.

- keep an eye on my website over the next month. many things will go up. lots of writing, new photos, schemes, plans, and ideas... should look good. somewhere between now and the new-year and it should start to happen... (also, myspace me. i'm around there more.)

- so, till i wonder by again, let me draw to a close now with a wee peck on the cheek and a loving hug to those of you who, as i always say, deserve it. the rest of you will have to make do with a slap. say hi, tell me how you're doing, fill me in (oo-er), you know the drill.

- to conclude, then, and strictly for anyone who gives two shakes of a shit, here are some wee bits from that merit earning paper. take care bambinas/-os, and i hopefully we shall speak soon.

beijos,
ads
xxx


" hora, hora
It's time, it's time
Vamos s'imbora
Let's go away
Pelo mundo afora
Around the world
E, volta do mundo
Yeah, the turn of the world
Que o mundo deu
That the world did
Que o mundo d, camar.
That the world does, my friend.
- a common capoeira chula, or refrain

It begins here at the p de berimbau, at the foot of the single-stringed instrument that leads the game. Two players crouch beneath it, listening to the message in the singer's words, facing each other, dressed all in white, waiting. As they cartwheel into the centre of the circle, or roda, the game begins, the ring of spectators and fellow players clapping and singing the choruses, reinforcing the songs and rhythms of the musical ensemble. Perhaps the game is fast, the two players a blur of spinning limbs and acrobatics, the rapid game of trust and reflex and ability they call regional. Perhaps it is the slow game called angola, played lower to the ground, closer to one's opponent, the players slipping over, around, beneath the attacks and traps that are set, always seeking to encircle, to trick: escapes becoming feints becoming attacks, and every move a demonstration of control, mastery and cunning. Or perhaps it is one of the number of variations of the game, each a response to a particular berimbau rhythm, each with its own nuances of intent or style. But always they play with a smile on their face and always playful treachery in their heart."

"The spirit of play, of subversion, and ambiguity became all pervasive: my interrelations with both individuals and wider systemic structures became more subtle, more complex, more free, more playful even treacherous. In short, I was indeed becoming capoeira. Leading from this, I concluded that there had to be something in the social complex of London, where I lived, and other similar sites around the world to facilitate capoeira's "renaissance" (Drewal 2000: 248). Or else, surely something in capoeira that might facilitate its movement to and through these other, particularly postmodern, late-capitalist societies that seemed so removed from African-Brazil. Expanding my playing and studying to a wider range of groups, styles and teachers, I have since come to see that capoeira is neither static nor singular, has never been, and never shall. Furthermore, though it might irritate the unavoidable traditionalists perceiving a racial authenticity to the art, the jgo de capoeira (game of capoeira) is continuing with its development: changing, multiplying, thriving in its new and various contemporary contexts."

"The quality of malcia, so important to all capoeira, though emphasised more in angola, is often translated as 'cunning,' but metonymically covers a wide range of subversive tactics and techniques, most centrally that of 'quando finge que vai e no vai,' 'when you pretend you are going to and don't' (Lewis 1995: 231). For the berimbau player, its expression by "artfully creating and breaking rhythmic patterns, [through] the alternation of the [instrument's] two opposing pitches," incites and is in turn fed by the similar creativity of physical play (Lewis 1992: 145). As in Salsa, the music drives the capoeiristas, calling them to improvise, to change pace, tactic, or mood, and the action in the jgo calls for responses and interaction from the bateria (Roman-Velazquez 2006: 303).
Souza, in his typical mode of scientific explanation, adds that

the direct action of the sound waves over the sensory region imprints stimulatory sensations with the capacity to turn the body, interrupt these turns, and start them again, even at high speeds. Furthermore, the sounds obtained by the percussion of the berimbau do not bring about these results merely by bringing about the pretty moves that you see in a game of Capoeira, but by essentially being the identity between the forms that the sound waves express in the body and mind of the player and the movements of Capoeira. (2003: 28)"

"It is hopefully clear that one cannot rely on the traditional homogenous categories of either 'dance' or 'martial art' to describe capoeira (cf. Puri and Hart-johnson 1995: 158; Souza 2003: 29). Aside from the ethical concerns that our discipline has levelled at such culturally relative and reductionist conceptions, the multifarious sociohistoric contexts that have defined the game's development and practice, and the particularly fluid "public culture" (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1998: 6, in Zarrilli 1998: 4) that describes its contemporary, global context, further emphasise the weakness of such an approach. Capoeira could easily be construed as an art-form of the African diaspora (Drewal 2000: 241; Patterson and Kelley 2000: 14), though the racially separatist implications are obviously problematic. Instead, where I have proposed 'nomadism' as a more suitable description, it is in an attempt to bridge the agency of the individual with the wider social facets of the game, whilst simultaneously accounting for capoeira's cultural, racial, and ideological flexibility and inherent multiplicity.
A conservative estimate made at the turn of this century proposed that there were approximately twenty-five thousand capoeira teachers and one million players throughout Brazil, compared to three hundred teachers and ten thousand players in America, with the same amount in Europe (Capoeira 2002: 105), all amassed over the last thirty years (Almeida 1986: 56-61) and having undoubtedly multiplied since then. The constantly exploding and changing universe of the Western metropolis, (Certeau 1988 [1984]: 91), with its simultaneous decline in tradition and custom (Hobsbawm 1983: 11), has been ripe for the cultivation of practices that at once take advantage of the former whilst acting in response to the latter - practices like capoeira. The sociohistoric diversity of the cosmopolitan environment further provides cultural space for an ambiguity and plurality, a "bodily bilingualism" (Desmond 1993: 46, in Reed 1998: 506) that echoes the embodied plurality of malcia in its responsiveness to concepts of appropriation and resistance (Lewis 1992: 31-33; 1995: 231)."

And, as I ended it all:
"Mandinga de escravo em nsia de liberdade.
The slave's mandinga [magic; capoeira] is desirous of freedom.
Seu princpio no tem mtodo,
Its principles have no method,
Sey fim inconcebvel ao mais sbio dos mestres.
Its end is inconceivable even to the wisest of mestres.
- part of a laidanha by Mestre Pastinha

Fed by the ideology of globalization, we have been increasingly encouraged to "move beyond the limits of the nation-state," to conceive the world "in terms of borderlands and diasporas," of movement and (inter)change (Patterson and Kelley 2000: 12). Such a worldview challenges the neat and simplistic model of the human universe that long persisted, feeding instead the ideology of cultural interrelation and flexibility. As the art establishes itself internationally, it cannot be considered apart from the various arenas that define it, from those of the embodied individual to those of cultural production (cf. Zarrilli 1998: 9).
In contrast to Savigliano's (1995) description of the international reproduction of Argentinean tango through processes of exoticization (Reed 1998: 514), I would argue that capoeira is far less passive in its globalized consumption. Following the central principles of malcia - such as, quando finge que vai e no que vai, 'when you pretend that you are going to but don't' - it eats whilst seeming to be eaten, it converts whilst seemingly converted. The apparent consumption of capoeira, potentially so "superficial, consumerist" (Pitts 2003: 33), is the very arena in which it thrives, reflecting the wider cultural contexts in which it is made manifest, whilst simultaneously shaping them. Thus, there is a tangible continuity to the jgo as it spreads around the world, players from opposite ends of the globe, otherwise sharing no means for verbal communication, being able to interact and 'converse' through movement and the manipulation of a communal body of symbols and signs. And yet, I further suspect that forms of capoeira around the world will demonstrate, either immediately or over time, subtle variations to reflect the adaptation to its host society. Accordingly, it is only through a multicultural examination of the game, rather than the hitherto focus on its practice in Brazil as its authentic manifestation, that we may understand more fully the degree of, and interaction between, capoeira's mutability and tradition, together with the full validity of this nomadic epithet.
To facilitate this project, both with regards to capoeira and other, perhaps less specialized systems, the anthropological discipline must heed Reed's call for more movement specialists (1998: 504). Such an academic enterprise, with surely a wealth of potential, clearly necessitates the introduction of a system of movement-writing such as Labanotation into the anthropological educational corpus. For, how can one hope to relate or analyse the subtle variations in movement that make systems so unique, with recourse only to literary approximations? The combination of movement script with personal experience and, perhaps, video recordings, will provide a means for far superior comprehension of the ways in which humans move, whether in everyday life or specialized circumstances, the way these change with time, experience, and cultural influence, and the interrelationship between such systems and their cultural contexts (cf. Farnell 1999: 361; Page 1990: 84, in Williams 1997: 154). Born of the "flexible and protean" African diaspora, capoeira has stood as a vital component of the ideologies of both oppressed African-Brazilians and, centuries later, the countries dominant classes (Brown and Bick 1987: 74). It is this multiplicity and transmutability at the heart of the game that has helped it into the international scene (Lewis 1992: 219), and with capoeira now a transcultural practice, it is the same potential, inherently evasive and subversive, encouraged and embodied in its capoeiristas as malcia, that defines this nomadic game's vitality and importance."



- Still there? Why?! How?!! Go on, git. Get some sleep. Watch a film. Read a book. I'll speak to you soon...

- (Miss me?)

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