The Balaio Bulletin n.2: Negative Nostalgia
TV pieces, self-censorship, own goals, Marie Antoinettes, and other goodies
Balaio (noun) Masc. A wide-mouthed basket made of wicker, bamboo, or rope.
Crumbling memories
Brazilian streaming powerhouse Globoplay has recently made available a string of incomplete telenovelas from Globo Network in a collection called Fragments. Some of them comprise only a couple of episodes out of 100-plus-chapter long series. There are many reasons for that.
First, the elements. Globo studios were hit by two major fires that severely damaged its archive. A 1969 fire in Sao Paulo city center destroyed the local studio and another one in 1976 devastated its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. There is very little left of its 1960s lineup of shows. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of its Sunday variety-and-news show, Fantastico, Globo reconstructed its premiere with the help of AI. The network’s earliest surviving complete telenovela is from 1970.
Expensive storage and materials also played a role. Videotape was not cheap so people would recycle a lot. Unless someone comes up with some advanced technology that can dig through the layers of re-recorded magnetic tapes the way it became possible to do with palimpsests, a lot of cultural artifacts are lost forever. This is a global issue. To this day, BBC and independent sleuths go hunting for documentaries, Doctor Who episodes, entire shows that might help tell twentieth-century British and world history.
Finally, there is the whole idea of what deserves to be saved. Before the rise of Prestige TV, the television set was the “idiot box”, a vapid purveyor of mass entertainment — and mass entertainment rarely deserved Marxist analysis in those days. The Museum of Brazilian Television was founded in 1995. But television drama had long attracted writers and playwrights who wanted to experiment with the medium — and earn a steady salary. The Fragments project brings one of those experiments.
Braulio Pedroso’s O Rebu (1974-1975) is a 112-episode murder mystery that took place in a single day. It was both a whodunnit and a whowasdunawaywith: a corpse is floating in the pool in the first chapter (the only remaining episode along with chapter 92) but their identity is only revealed in chapter 50. It is such a juicy high concept that Globo remade it in 2014.
Stay mum
The federal police is investigating the illegal use of Israeli firm Cognyte’s spyware FirstMile by the Brazilian intelligence agency (Abin) to snoop on perceived enemies of the state like journalists, opposition politicians, the usual suspects in any democratic society, during the Bolsonaro years. Guess what, the three major telecoms in the country — Tim, Claro, and Vivo — were aware of the spying but failed to alert the telecommunications regulatory agency (Anatel), which started investigating the matter only in 2023. So far, the companies have not explained why they omitted this even though they worked to patch up the vulnerabilities in their systems. It is the kind of self-censorship you would see in the military regime days.
FirstMile is also the favored spyware of the Myanmar dictatorial regime.
A short anthology of race quotes by Brazilian presidents
1994: “Another candidate told me I’ve got white hands. Not me! I’ve got mixed-color hands… I’ve always said this, I’ve always joked with myself. I have a foot in the kitchen [something like “some of my blood comes from the service quarters”]. I don’t have any prejudice.” (Soon-to-be President Fernando Henrique Cardoso)
2003: "Those who arrive at [apartheid-era Afrikaner-built] Windhoek don't seem to be in an African country. Few cities in the world are so clean, so architectonically beautiful as this or have such extraordinary people like this city." (President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, during an official visit to Namibia)
2017: “I visited a quilombo and the least heavy afro-descendant weighed seven arrobas [rougly 231 pounds in a weight unit used for cattle]. They do nothing! They are not even good for procreation.” (Soon-to-be President Jair Messias Bolsonaro)
2024: “This pretty lady here, I was wondering: What is she doing sitting there since I haven’t heard anyone saying her name? I said, Is she a singer? Is she gonna sing? No, there will be no music. So is she gonna bang the drums? Because an afro-descendant loves some drumbeat…” (President Lula, during a visit to a Volkswagen plant when he was introducing an award-winning trainee to the audience.)
Portuguese-language lessons through dubious headlines
Probably because they were dead?
They who? Some people shot police officers and died of spontaneous combustion, maybe. The editor and the writer were so shocked with the events that they killed the semicolon with their bare hands.
Numerophilia
Dying species: in 1995, 3.3 billion checks were cleared in Brazil. In 2023, there were just 168.7 million of those.
Cleared in the playoffs: a Butantan Institute single-dose vaccine showed 79.6% efficacy against dengue in a phase 3 clinical trial. Single-dose vaccines usually work out better in vaccination programs.
Let them eat cake
Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, was wrongly cursed with a quote originated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau but there is nothing equivocal about these late adopters of the historical slight.
To celebrate Sao Paulo’s 470th anniversary, the city’s first lady, Regina Carnovale Nunes, listed a series of milestones on Instagram, all of them involved the consumption of luxury goods by the city’s elite. She edited her post after the backlash.
In January, when Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande Sul state, faced excess rainfall, the local daily decided to cover some entrepreneurship rather than citywide challenges: “Facing power outtage, hair salon takes to the street” was its headline story and the only one about the floods — a major issue — that merited a front-page treatment.
A playlist: cover songs
Sujeito de Sorte - Belchior (original) and the Ana Cañas version.
Pantanal - Marcus Viana & Sagrado Coração da Terra (original) and the Maria Bethania/Almir Sater version.
Alegria, Alegria - Caetano Veloso (original), the Daniela Mercury version, and the Xande version.
Caçada - Chico Buarque (original) and the Mestre Ambrósio version.
Pagode Russo - Luiz Gonzaga (original), the Alok remix, the Alceu Valença version, and the Zeca Baleiro version.
Chocolate - Tim Maia (original) and the Marisa Monte version.
The water from above
“I learned what the Amazon rains are, what flying rivers are. I learned how it is important to integrate humans to biodiversity, I found out we are biodiversity.”
Sebastiao Salgado used these words to describe a series of photos that he snapped between 1998 and 2000 in the rainforest in his signature high-contrast black and white. Those flying rivers are water vapor that travels from the Amazon Basin to the south of the continent. They’ve been the secret weapon of Brazilian agriculture and its record harvests but you wouldn’t know this from the way the agriculture lobby sees the area.