Marcela Valdes via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Marcela Valdes:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Marcela Valdes
- City: Bethesda, Maryland
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Marcela Valdes is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine who specializes in Latino and Latin American politics and culture. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, Bookforum, and NPR.org, among other publications. In 2010 she received a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism from Harvard University and the Roger Shattuck Award for Criticism from the Center for Fiction. A selection of her past publications may be found here.
Valdes was born in Massachusetts and grew up in California before moving to New York City and, later, Maryland. She has worked as a book review editor for Publishers Weekly and as a columnist for The Washington Post Book World. She was a founding editor of Críticas, an English-language magazine devoted to Spanish-language books, and has twice served on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle. She has appeared on “The Diane Rehm Show,” “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition,” “The Kojo Nnamdi Show,” and “Morning Joe.”
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: valdesmarcela
- ▶ Website: http://www.marcelavaldes.com
- ▶ Articles: http://www.marcelavaldes.com/clip-file
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
