Showing posts with label Brazil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brazil. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Toda Menina Baiana by Gilberto Gil


Toda Menina Baiana (Every Bahia Girl) is a great song by one of my favorite Brazilian artists--Gilberto Gil. I first discovered Gil in the mid-1980s in the world music section of Tower Records in Manhattan. I used to stop there often on my way home from work, and usually left with a new album or two. I fell in love with most of Gil's music and spent some time trying to learn to pronounce the lyrics (in Portuguese) when I sang the songs. I had no idea what I was singing about, but it didn't matter. The music was captivating and made me happy, which was a welcome change for my life at that time. This song was released in 1979 but I didn't hear it for the first time until the mid-1980s. 

As fate (God) would have it, a young Brazilian scientist (Juli) started working at my research institute in 2006, and we got to talking. I mentioned that I loved Gilberto Gil, and lo and behold, where do you think she came from? Bahia. The area of Brazil that Gil comes from and sings about. Coincidence? I don't think so. She too loved Gil and she gave me a CD with some of his music. Over the years we've become good friends and in 2009 we attended the World Music Festival here in Oslo where Gilberto Gil was performing. His concert was wonderful; people didn't want it to end and kept clapping so that he would continue singing. I would love to see him again in concert, but I wonder if he still tours (he's 80 years old now). Every time I hear Toda Menina Baiana I think of my friend, the Bahia girl. She lives permanently in Norway now and doesn't get back to Brazil very often. I've never traveled to Brazil but I'd love to visit the country at some point, and Bahia will be on my list of places to visit. 


Friday, February 24, 2017

Two songs by Gilberto Gil

Two just-about-perfect songs by Gilberto Gil--one of my favorite musicians.......I finally got to see him in concert some years ago here in Oslo, and it was such a great concert!

Touche pas à mon pote






Toda menina Bahiana

Friday, November 7, 2014

Bureaucracy and the film Brazil

I first saw the film Brazil in 1985 when it was released. It seems to have made a lasting impression on me, since I have remembered its basic message many years later. The message is that an out-of-control bureaucracy goes hand-in-hand with an Orwellian world, a dystopia, where the bureaucratic powers that be control the lives of society’s citizens. Parts of the film (a satire) are funny, but if you’ve lived a while and had anything at all to do with dysfunctional bureaucracies, you’ll understand that what you’re seeing on the screen is far from funny. A functionary named Sam Lowry, who is good at his low-level job but bored with his life, has recurrent dreams about rescuing a pretty blond girl and flying away with her to live a life of ‘happily ever after’. His mother, who is well-connected with all of the important bureaucrats, is trying to get him promoted, which he doesn’t want. She’s also trying to get him together with the daughter of a friend, something neither he nor the young woman wants. One of his assignments is to rectify a form error that resulted from a fly falling into a typewriter and causing the typewriter to type B instead of T when writing the name Tuttle, which has dire consequences for Archibald Buttle (a shoe cobbler with a family), not Archibald Tuttle (a terrorist and enemy of the state). This proves to be more difficult than he can imagine, and in this dystopian future, Archibald Buttle ends up dead. The bureaucracy that caused his death wants nothing more than to cover up this error and to forget it. Lowry ends up meeting Jill Layton, a neighbor of the Buttle family who reports this error (she is the woman from his dreams), and finds out that she is considered a terrorist because she insists on justice for Buttle’s family. When he decides to help her, he is also labeled a terrorist along with the woman he loves. Along the way, he ends up meeting terrorist Archibald Tuttle, a heating engineer who doesn’t play by the rules and who fixes Lowry’s heating system without the proper forms and authorized parts. This causes Lowry a number of problems with the bureaucracy that simply won’t accept that he has had unauthorized repair work done on his heating system, and his apartment is taken away from him. Those scenes are funny and sadly enough, true if you work in bureaucratic public sector workplaces and don’t play by their rules.


I’ve been thinking about this film lately, mostly because a large percentage of work time for many employees these days goes to appeasing the bureaucratic lions, tossing them bones and keeping them happy. It’s not an easy job, especially when the bureaucratic system is nothing but a dense jungle of incomprehensible rules and regulations that can choke the life out of most well-meaning employees. Case in point: you need an account number to order an instrument. You must talk to the accounting department that has its own rules and regulations concerning ordering and setting up an account number, but they haven’t talked to the order department that has its own rules and regulations concerning the same. Emails are sent back and forth, no one is on the same page, and weeks go by, even months. The accounting and ordering departments have the mistaken idea that all employees outside their departments actually understand accounting and ordering procedures and terminology. God help those employees if they make a mistake at any point along the way—if so, it’s ‘bless me father, for I have sinned’ against the great god of bureaucracy. If the system is insulted, it doesn’t take kindly to that. Atonement takes the form of listening to the functionaries’ lectures and demands of obedience to their rules, and generally being subservient to their wishes. I understand the need for bureaucracy in terms of keeping an organization ‘organized’ and running efficiently. I draw the line at having to toe their line, of having to jump when it tells you to jump. I draw the line when the system begins to feel like a totalitarian regime and when you actually become afraid to deal with it.   

The world we live in

 A little humor to brighten your day from one of my favorite comic strips-- Non Sequitur .......