Network Node
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Name:
Sophia Deboick
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City/Place:
Leigh-on-Sea, Essex
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Country:
United Kingdom
CURATION
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from this node by:
Matrix
Life & Work
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Bio:
I’m a freelance writer specialising in the intersection of popular religion and popular culture. I’ve written on music, sainthood, fame and popular icons, cults, pilgrimage and fandom, and a variety of other topics for publications including the Guardian, The New European, History Today and The Quietus, as well as speaking and writing in academic contexts.
My PhD research looked at the cult of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux – ‘the greatest saint of modern times’ – and its commercial promotion by her remarkable sister, Céline.
What's Been Happening?
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I. IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS BRAZIL: "The time has come for these bronzed people to show their worth..." (Assis Valente)
Quincy Jones>Alfredo Rodriguez>Munir Hossn>Roberto Mendes>Alumínio & João Saturno
II. AND THE MISSION (THE OPEN WORLD)
III. AND THE ECONOMIST
Matrix team-member Darius Mans, Economist (PhD, MIT), president of Africare (largest aid organization in Africa), presents Africare award to Lula (2012). From 2000 to 2004 Darius served as the World Bank’s Country Director for Mozambique and Angola, leading a team which generated $150 million in annual lending, including support for public private partnerships in infrastructure which catalyzed over $1 billion in private investment. Darius lives between Washington D.C. and Salvador, Bahia.
IV. LET THERE BE PATHWAYS!
"I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
— Susan Rogers, Personal recording engineer for Prince at Paisley Park Recording Studio; Director, Music Perception & Cognition Laboratory, Berklee College of Music
"Many thanks for this - I am touched!" — Julian Lloyd Webber
"I'm truly thankful... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)" — Nduduzo Makhathini, Blue Note Records
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!" — Alicia Svigals, Klezmer violin, Founder of The Klezmatics
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))" — Clarice Assad
"Thank you" — Banch Abegaze, manager, Kamasi Washington
The Matrix uncoils from the Recôncavo of Bahia, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history and from where some of the most physically and spiritually uplifting music ever made evolved...
...all essentially cut off from the world at large. But after 40,000 years of artistic creation by mankind, it's finally now possible to create bridges closely interconnecting all artists everywhere (having begun with the Saturno brothers above).
Curate anybody in here. You appear on their page. Anybody in here curates you, they appear on your page...
...plugged into a superpower: the small world phenomenon.
By the same mathematics positioning some 8 billion human beings within some 6 or so steps of each other, people in the Matrix tend to within close, accessible steps of everybody else inside the Matrix.
And by extension, to within discoverable reach of everybody everywhere on the planet.
Small world curation is the Matrix's unprecedented innovation.
Because 40,000 years is a long time to wait.
And if all art is discoverable from everywhere, then Brazil's is too.
"The time has come for these bronzed people to show their worth..."
(Music by Assis Valente. Clip by Betão Aguiar. The Matrix was built in Salvador's Centro Histórico above, incorporating these marvelous people.)
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.
Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin.
Brazil was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — the hand drum in the opening scene above — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people).
Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David.
Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof.
Nowhere else but here. Brazil itself is a matrix.
