Chris Smith’s blog

From a randomly found postcard; number two in an occasional series. Photograph by Mary Anne Fackelman, 1984.

My friend Carmelo Iaria has just produced a book of documentary photography on Sao Paulo’s O Centro neighborhood, a gritty, once-rundown section of the city that’s on the rise. The photos are stunning, black and white images of the neighborhood’s street life and architecture. I wrote the introductory essay, which I’m reprinting below. Check it out, then buy the book.

There’s nothing static about cities. They are organic things made of concrete and brick and rebar, shaped by the ceaseless movement of human beings, the ebb and flow of migrants from near and far in search of better lives. Neighborhoods rise and fall, are born and die and are reborn again.

Sao Paulo, Brazil, is a case study in this form of civic entropy. With roughly 20 million people, it is the sixth largest city in the world–a “megacity,” as the planners say. Its borders push out in all directions, toward the western hinterland and the coastal mountains guarding the Atlantic. The city had no zoning codes until 1972, and it has grown unchecked for the last couple of decades, adding neighborhood after neighborhood with a viral speed, the rich barricading themselves behind high walls topped by barbed wire and the poor erecting shantytowns powered by stolen electricity.

Inevitably, the corollary of this breakneck growth is a sort of collective forgetting. Overshadowed by the new, the old places are forgotten. They are still on the maps, but the city’s imagination moves on, drawn ever outward by the lure of the fresh and unsullied.

Such was the case with O Centro, Sao Paulo’s historic downtown. Once the hub of the city’s cultural life and its financial center, the neighborhood began its descent in the 1970s, when the banks began moving to outlying districts. The rest of the money followed, leaving behind a husk of Belle Epoque buildings, modernist plazas, and rundown, once-tony apartment blocks. The First World certainties of the meticulous European-style grid soon faded. The streets filled with hawkers. A riot of plant life began reinserting itself into the sidewalks and walls and vacant lots, a reminder that when cities decline the wild fights its way back. An open-air drug market sprouted within sight of the opera house.

When Carmelo Iaria decided to photograph O Centro, his friends warned him about the crime and the urban decay. Mostly, they wondered why he’d want to go there. They, too, had forgotten. When he first visited, in 2003, he was shocked by what he found. To be sure, he saw blight and crime. But he also found a vibrant and astonishingly diverse place, a neighborhood that had soldiered on after the city at large had turned its attention elsewhere. “Nothing around me matched the description I had gotten,” the San Francisco photographer remembers. “What I saw was the remains of a very sophisticated and rich city.”

Compared to cities like Cairo or Rome, Sao Paulo, which came into its own as a colonial boomtown in the 1700s, is relatively young. It has a deep sense of its history, however, and in O Centro all of those layers are on display, past lives laid one on top of the next. Iaria was drawn to the opportunity to map these layers through his photography.

Some of Iaria’s images possess a distinctly Old World feel. The city, like Brazil itself, was built on waves of foreign immigration. Some of these new arrivals came unwillingly, as slaves from West Africa brought to work on the coffee and sugar plantations. Others, though, from Italy and Germany and Portugal, came seeking opportunities that Europe couldn’t provide. Over the years, then, Sao Paulo grew, and grew rich. O Centro’s faded buildings, many built in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, stand testament to this heritage: a graceful European city carved out of the New World countryside. A photo of the Theatro Municipal, a century-old monolith modeled after a similarly grand building in Milan, mixes past glories with a more prosaic present. At the edge of the frame, a man pedals a bicycle laden with water jugs, a workaday errand far from the symphony orchestra housed within.

In another, a man appears to be tipping his hat to the viewer. Save the ubiquitous iPod earbuds, he would look at home in a fin de siècle daguerrotype. Behind him is the Luz train station, shipped over, piece by piece, from Scotland and built in 1901. Once the transit point for newly arrived European immigrants from the coast, Luz now hosts weekday workers heading to jobs at the stock exchange, or those manning the gold-trading storefronts that dot the nearby streets.

Iaria chronicles the area’s more recent history as well. There is the Copan building, O Centro’s defining landmark. The creation of Rio architect Oscar Niemeyer, the wave-like apartment block was designed with the idea that all classes would live together behind its walls. It towers 38 stories above Ipiranga Avenue, so dominating that it has its own zip code. Iaria’s photo, shot from below, carries a whiff of the sublime. The structure’s sinuous curves speak to the promise of modernism: that a bright future for all was on the way.

Utopia never came. Other monuments to progress were erected in mid-century and left to rot. In one desolate photo, the buildings actually appear to slump, like drunks trying to hold up the sky. Down on the street, lone figures thread their way along a wall, reminders that it’s easy for individuals to get lost in the metropolis.

Indeed, Sao Paulo’s size is inescapable. There is a Sunday morning photograph of a city worker sweeping the Largo de Memoria. The foreground shows mid-century office buildings, erected on a human scale. In the distance, skyscrapers march toward the horizon, totems of the city’s growth.

Iaria, though, is most interested in people, and in “the resiliency of the human spirit,” as he puts it. He focuses not on the elites who take private helicopters to work, nor on the millions of Paulistanos who fill the favelas. Mostly, he trains his gaze on those who are just getting by. And O Centro is very much a place of people just getting by.

He spends long moments with a man selling pineapple slices on the sidewalk, whose earnings just barely support his family. He meets a parking attendant who looks after mopeds and motorcycles, the keys hanging from his neck on a wire. Iaria also happens upon a shoeshine parlor that once served wealthy businessmen. The seats are torn now. The clientele doesn’t have much extra cash.

One photograph shows a man’s hands, rutted from years of cutting limes, apples, and bananas. There are day laborers hauling heavy loads on wagons, and scarecrow-like old men standing on street corners with advertising boards hung from their necks. “Compro Ouro,” the signs read. “Buy Gold.” Iaria makes a portrait of one of these men. There is stoicism in his expression, and also dignity.

In an image shot through the legs of the man in front of him, Iaria captures a street preacher in mid-sermon. A crowd of onlookers surrounds him, an itinerant flock of working men who hang on his brimstone-tinged words. He preaches in the shadow of a grand Catholic church, gesticulating, scolding, encouraging, and with far more energy than the priests behind the church’s cool stone walls can muster. He talks not just of the afterlife but of the here and now, a subject of keen interest to the strivers gathered around him.

Year after year, Iaria kept coming back to O Centro. He began to notice changes. The neighborhood was beginning to regenerate itself, as neighborhoods sometimes do, with an influx of new people, new energy, and new money.

Gentrification of a sort was coming to O Centro. The drug market was still there, but there were hip nightclubs and new boutiques. As in Williamsburg and Silver Lake, young professionals adopted the neighborhood, drawn by the cheap rent and the chance to be pioneers. One of Iaria’s friends, a magazine editor, bought a place in the Copan, on the 23rd floor. The view is amazing.

Sao Paulo is still growing, still pushing outward. But what was forgotten has been rediscovered.

Today, on Huffington Post San Francisco, I’ve got a piece on the Bay Area’s underground metal scene. Besides being a good excuse to name-check a few of my favorite local bands (Acephalix, for instance), the piece is a paean to underground concerts of all sorts, from punk to metal to bluegrass to hip hop.

I have no idea how the guy managed to sleep through Acephalix, because it was really loud. The San Francisco death metal band emitted a growling, galloping roar, the stuff of bad dreams, and it enveloped the room. The pit, meanwhile, was going off, a hostile ballet of bodies pinging off one another in front of the stage.

But this dude? He was dead to the world, mouth hanging open, slumped against the back wall. Next to him sat an equally incongruous giant stuffed donkey.

It was a Sunday night in early summer, and we were at the Victory warehouse in the Oakland ghostlands, a few blocks from Uptown but worlds away from its hipster sheen.

…

There’s something special about an underground show. I grew up outside Detroit in the late 1980s, as the city went into freefall. Paradoxically, Detroit’s collapse was great for the scene: there was no shortage of empty places to play, and the police were too busy to care about permitting or zoning. At college in North Carolina a few years later, I went to the occasional backyard bluegrass show. At a house in the woods about 20 miles from town, Teva-ed types sipped moonshine as guys with banjos and mandolins played Ralph Stanley tunes. While working in South Africa a few years ago, I found myself at a hip hop show in a weedy lot in Soweto, the country’s largest black township. While a succession of aspiring MCs jumped around on a makeshift stage, people drank beer and smoked weed, flirting with one another. Guys showed off their tricked-out cars, a parade of spinning rims and superfluous DVD screens mounted to the seats.

…

A couple of months ago, I acquired an odd new follower on Twitter. The handle was FakeLelandYee, the State Senator and SF mayoral candidate’s tweeting doppelganger. I think that was the name, anyway–Twitter soon took it down.

Not to worry, though, because an account named NotLelandYee quickly replaced the old one. The accounts–run by somebody who really, really hates Yee–have lots of fun with Yee’s weird brushes with the law and alleged ethical lapses, as well as his uncanny ability to play both sides of virtually any issue. As a political writer I’m a connoisseur of “ratfucking,” so I wrote up a squib for San Francisco magazine (see p. 34):

State Senator Leland Yee is one of the frontrunners in this fall’s mayoral race, but not everyone’s a fan. The social-media equivalent of an old-school attack ad, this fake Yee Twitter account quoted here–run by person(s) unknown–hammers on Yee’s penchant for playing both sides of an issue, such as his opposition to both sharkfinning and the ban against it. When Twitter shut down the account, another impostor popped up. It may not be as effective as a TV ad or mailer, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.

The second issue of Longshot Magazine–that’s the one written, edited, and put together in just 48 hours–is out now, and it’s got a piece of mine called “Once Found, Now Lost.” The issue’s theme is “debt,” and I wrote a personal piece about my uneasy relationship with a guy I worked with in South Africa. You can read the story online, or buy a print version of the magazine if you like. I’m proud to have been a part of it.

Late one afternoon, Soul turned up drunk at my place. I was pulling the razor-wired gates shut when he appeared beyond the wall, listing a little. Gray-green clouds massed above our heads; the Highveld rains were coming on. He wanted to know if I’d drive him to Soweto.

…

Looking for a way to quickly and easily describe for Western listeners a virtuoso musician from a far-flung part of the world? Just name-check Jimi Hendrix, as commenters did with Vieux Kante, seen here playing the hell out of a kamelengoni.

In some ways, it’s only natural to use some sort of shorthand to translate, say, the esoteric sounds of the sitar into terms that anyone who grew up listening to rock radio can understand. So we get: the Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele. The Jimi Hendrix of Japan. The Jimi Hendrix of South Africa. And, of course, the Jimi Hendrix of Turkey. I’ve done it myself, in discussing Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Toure’s incendiary new live touring act. At his most recent SF show, I tweeted, “He’s entered his Hendrix phase, with a power trio and everything.” And there was a resemblance to Band of Gypsys-era Hendrix, in both his liquid playing and the swing of the rhythm section. (It should be noted that Mali, a particularly guitar-happy country, has numerous contenders for the title. A few years ago, Vanity Fair reported that Baba Salah was known as not just the “Jimi Hendrix of Mali” but the “Jimi Hendrix of Africa.”

Right after I got out of college, I went traveling for a half-year or so, a dirtbag backpacker following my own version of the hippie trail. I ended up in Essaouria, Morocco, where Hendrix himself had spent some time. Local legend has it that he was so inspired by the ruins of an old fort on the beach that he wrote the song “Castles Made of Sand” (or, depending on the source, “Spanish Castle Magic.”). The songwriting claims aren’t true but, judging by all the drug dealers clogging the narrow streets, at least Jimi didn’t lack for hash. I spent a few days chasing his ghost, from restaurants where he ate to places where he stayed and musicians he supposedly played with. I never found a trace of the guy, of course. Little did I know, he was only an Internet search away. Voila: the Jimi Hendrix of Morocco.

A friend gave me this photo the other day. Don’t know who made the image, but it’s stamped “Apr. 1976″ on the back. After staring at it for a long while, my best guess is that we’re looking at the Hook, just south of the O’Neill house in Capitola. But it’s tough to tell. There’s a lot of open ocean here, with no obvious landmarks.

You can’t throw a rock in Silicon Valley without hitting some dude in business casual claiming his start-up is revolutionary. Sometimes, though, it’s actually true. Such is the case with AnchorFree, which makes software enabling activists to block their governments’ Internet-blockers, without being traced by the authorities. Indeed, without software like this, people in less-than-free countries might not be able to get on Facebook or Twitter to plan protests. It’s been used to good effect in Egypt, Libya, and is in heavy rotation in China and Saudi Arabia, too. The new issue of San Francisco magazine runs a short piece of mine on these guys, who just set out to make money and ended up aiding the Arab uprisings. How’s that for “Don’t be Evil”?

The Bay Area has always been a metal hotbed, spawning the likes of Metallica, with its knifepoint riffs and galloping tempos, and Sleep, masters of the sludgy, bong-fueled stomp. (I caught one of Sleep’s reunion shows last week, by the way. Whoa.) These days, we might be better known for our avant-garde metal bands, united less by any particular sound than by a willingness to experiment. San Francisco magazine’s “Best of” issue this month runs a piece of mine on this burgeoning scene. I could have mentioned a ton of bands but chose to go with Ludicra, Grayceon, and Giant Squid. Check it out–and check the bands out when they play.

San Francisco magazine’s “Best of” issue this month runs my short piece on Keith Olbermann, the angry newsman unbound, and his new gig at Current TV. The new Countdown debuted last week, and it appears to be a lot like the old Countdown–not a bad thing, to my mind. I’ve always been a fan of Olbermann’s but haven’t caught the show yet, beyond a few clips. Why? Well, like so many others out there, I don’t get Current.