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Live @ Carioca Club, Brazil - 12/06/11.

Live @ Carioca Club, Brazil - 12/06/11.

SEMINÁRIO DESIGN DE RESULTADOS: 28 de junho de 2011, em São Paulo, das 14:00 às 18:00. Na...

Richard House, a journalist who covered Brazil for the Washington Post and The Economist  in the 80s and 90s, has a post at his blog on his concerns about the sustainability of Brazil’s economic growth:

On political stories, every foreign correspondent learns to interview his taxi driver when leaving the airport – then discount 50% of the pessimism and rightwing bias. For economic pieces, the rule is that if the same cabbie makes more than four airport trips a day, the local economy’s overheating; two or less and it’s tanked.

The last airport cab I took in São Paulo (fare R$ 110) left me flummoxed.

Passenger: “How many airport trips today, compadre?”

Driver: “Well, I would have made six or eight, but I got stuck for four hours in traffic so it’s just you. All this consumer credit has put a million new cars on the road just this quarter. Because of the traffic jams I can’t get enough rides to pay off my auto financing plan.”

The late-model air conditioned cab had leather seats and upfront looked like theChallenger cockpit. The driver’s dash had a GPS, two handsfree cellphones, PDF digital link to his office, an onboard TV – and in the back seat there was a 3G tablet for me to browse the web in heavy traffic. The guy told me he needed to earn R$ 500 (US$320) a day just to stay on the road. The cab license plate now costs over R$100,000 ($63,400). Still below New York City medallion rates but closing fast.

Pity my Paulista cabbie: Pity the urban über-middle classes too. The cost of their fixed service infrastructure of security guards, apartment concierges, drivers, cleaners, cooks, car park attendants – and above all nannies – is spiralling upwards to make  life in São Paulo costlier than New York.

untitled by moshi moshi jonas on Flickr.

Ordem e Progresso by Lu.Siqueira on Flickr.

Going up the Serra Pelada mine

Brazil, 1986

Sebastiao Salgado

I picked up Ann Patchett’s newest book, State of Wonder, this weekend after someone tipped me off to an interview Patchett gave on NPR last week about her new Amazon book. State… tells the story of a middle-aged pharmaceutical scientist who leaves the comfort of Minnesota for a Heart of Darkness-style adventure deep into Brazil to retrieve her awol mentor.

A post this morning at The Millions picks up on an interesting literary theme that I’ve noticed in true life, in non-fiction books like The Lost City of Z:

History and art provide some useful examples of how things turn out when the white folks rush headlong into the wilderness, brimming with ambition and delusion, and Patchett slyly pays her dues. “Dr. Singh, I presume,” Marina is greeted when she arrives at the upriver research station. Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s 1982 film about dragging a steamship over a small Peruvian mountain, makes an appearance, as does Lost Horizon, the 1933 novel that invented Shangri-La. Dr. Swenson has been living among the remote Lakashi tribe for more than a decade, unlocking the secret to their astounding fertility, which allows women to bear children into their seventies. “Their eggs aren’t aging, do you get that?” an excited researcher asks Singh. “This is the ovum in perpetuity, menstruation everlasting.” Now there’s an idea that only a male drug exec could love. And though the stakes—and potential profit margins—couldn’t be higher, we don’t feel the tension build until the human dramas begin to play out at the station.

It certainly seems like a great book featuring a good romp through a fascinating part of Brazil. I look forward to reading it.

Abduction by KIMERA# on Flickr.