Stephen Levitt of Freakanomics talks today about the difference in viewing habits between blacks and whites in modern day America. There is some subtext in the entry that needs to be discussed:

If this one week of data is a good indicator (and I think it is), there has been a remarkable convergence in television viewing habits. A few years ago almost all the top black shows featured predominately black characters and most were not even on the big four networks. Now, there is almost a perfect match between what blacks and whites are watching and while many of these shows have black characters, none feature a predominately black cast.

He mentions previously that, while Seinfeld was very popular among white viewers, it never hit the top 50 for blacks. What does this homogenization of viewing habits mean?

To make an analogy, it had long been theorized in capoeira, a Brazilian martial art I practice founded in the culture of African slavery, that certain deviations, notably capoeira regional, were no longer truly African in their movements. They incorporated Asian martial arts movements in the 1930s, making the game more outwardly aggressive, with ’squarer’ attacks in order to ‘whiten’ the art, and therefore attract more middle-class Brazilians to the game (who tended to be paler in skin tone). Guess what? It worked out great. Capoeira is now practiced almost exclusively by white people, and most of those who practice it practice the ‘white’ form of the art.

(See two examples of capoeira play for a demonstration of this: Regional (’white’), Angola (’black’).)

The same could perhaps be said of hip hop. Do we feel that hip hop is becoming whiter by appealing to the majority of their audience (aka, white people)? Hip hop has changed a great deal since the 70s. What happened? Does 50 Cent appeal to white listeners, or black ones?

Filed by Julien at 2:12 pm under trends, hip hop, capoeira
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please note that all further posts on this subject are being put on jogolog.com and planet capoeira’s the roda. hope to see you there.

Filed by Julien at 9:14 pm under capoeira
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i assure you i am not exaggerating when i tell you that i watched a total of seven episodes of Lost today. while i’m not normally at all interested in television, i have been seriously fascinated by this weekly show. but that is far from the point of this entry. it is merely the set up.

as i was about to head to bed, i refreshed my RSS reader of choice and found the following post on the planet capoeira website, which i check back to on occasion:

Planet Capoeira is proud to announce the launch of a new feature at our website - The Roda. This new section is a community blog, were we are inviting capoeiristas from around the world to login and simply share their experiences in capoeira with all of us. We’re impressed with the initial response of people who are interested in doing this. If you’re interested yourself in blogging at a place of people who share your passion for capoeira, by all means email us and we’ll set you up with a account.

this may seem familiar to you if you check out the capoeira posts on my website - although i’m aware that a majority of you very likely skip over them, i enjoy writing them tremendously and was planning a seperate blog for it. i’ve been looking to do this for a really long time, and had been working over the weekend to get it happening. here is the link to what i was working on, in case you’re interested.

now the question becomes, do i devote myself to working on my own blog, or write up all the posts i would’ve otherwise done (what i consider to be half-decent quality work) on their new project? i can’t say i have an answer, but i am very interested in what appears to be developing over there.

Filed by Julien at 5:55 am under capoeira
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for those interested, i thought i might write a brief primer of my experiences learning brazilian portuguese for the purpose of immersing myself in the culture of capoeira. i suppose these tips could work for the acquisition of any language, although i suspect it may be more appropriate for romance languages, or at least, those of an indo-european origin.

also, since my girlfriend, a linguist, is asleep right now, so she’ll have to correct the details of this post after it has been published. :)

when i first took capoeira, i started learning a bit of portuguese here and there by trying to randomly memorize vocabulary that i heard in capoeira songs. i assume this is how most people start, and yet, many of the students in classes i attended had a lot more difficulty than i did, despite having more experience in general. although this could be because i speak french, these classes were in montreal, where a majority of people also do. i hope that isolating the things that worked for me can help readers improve upon their acquisition.

since i am a podcaster by day, as well as a capoeira player by night, my first instinct was to move towards audiobooks as a natural tool for learning. it turns out my instinct was correct. although the pickings are scarce due to the language’s lack of popularity (in terms of interest for learners), i did pick up two good audiobooks on audible.com - here and here. these are particularly good if you have an ipod or other portable device. both use words and phrases to help with comprehension, and are far more affordable and helpful than a once-a-week tutor, and allow you to bring it around and use it on a work break or other opportunity-impoverished period of your day.

learning vocabulary, by the way, should not be your first priority. your first priority should be learning just enough vocabulary (say, twenty words) to get you to understand the most basic of sentences and creating real sentences. the grammar of the language is what makes it alive, and sticking words together in an order that makes sense to an english speaker is not going to make the best results (though it’ll do in a pinch). so reading as many complete sentences as possible should be one of the things you work towards very early. after that, work on vocabulary to expand what you can say with the sentence structure you have become familiar with by then.

one of the things i tried for a long time, and that didn’t work at all, is to hire a private tutor. i did this early on, and it left with me with very little additional help in relation to the money i was spending. it’s unfortunate, but i ended up spending several hundred dollars that could have best been invested elsewhere, when what i really should have been doing is just putting in the necessary time. so one of the earliest lessons i discovered (the hard way) is that it’s work, not money, that will get them the comprehension they are looking for. this work usually is best done daily in small amounts, not in big lumps, as most books will tell you. short daily rehearsals will definitely get you better results than cramming, which is a massive waste of energy. once again, those breaks while waiting for the bus are your friend.

i also picked up a couple of books. one came with two CDs and it was ok, and the second came with a wonderful set of stickers to put around your house. although i’m way beyond that level now, i do still have my espelho sticker on the mirror, as well as the fogao sticker on my oven. these were very helpful, and i highly doubt you’ll forget any of the words you end up having stickers for. getting the sticker to stay on your cat is another story (yes, there really is one).

one of the things you should probably know about learning from books is that almost everything you buy is going to be focused on portuguese from Portugal. this isn’t highly problematic, but when you’re starting out, it can be confusing. consonants in traditional portuguese are very hard and usually stop dead, while brazilian ones usually are mushed together. as an example, the common word ending -de:

port: deh (more or less)
braz: dji

you’re probably thinking, ‘whaa??‘, but trust me, you’ll get used to it. for now, just try and relax your mouth away from those hard endings, and remember that you’ll inevitably be a little embarrassed. the faster you make your first thousand mistakes, the faster you’ll be able to correct them. try to act like a woman, rather than a man, in a (straight) dance club: the men make barely any movement or just lean against the wall to ensure what they believe to be maximum coolness, and the chicks end up making out with each other on the dance floor after dancing the night away. only one of them ends up learning how to dance, and it’s not hard to see who ends up having more fun. good luck!

Filed by Julien at 4:47 am under capoeira
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well, i haven’t written anything about capoeira in a while. i’ve really been focusing on other goals for this blog in the past while, like promoting my podcast, but i would like to get back to writing every little while about this subject, which has continued to fascinate me ever since i discovered it at burning man in 2003. i suppose i should start with where i have gone since i started studying it.

in the past two years, i have been playing a version of the game called capoeira regional with a local group. this is a fast, aggressive game which i enjoyed a great deal while i practiced it. despite this, some things have changed. i have, in the past two months, begun to go to capoeira angola classes instead of doing my regular thing. while i don’t want to exaggerate the impression it has on me, i will say that watching and playing in an angoleiro roda is a significantly different experience from playing regional. i would almost go as far as saying that they are at the edge of becoming two different disciplines, so much are different skills required in each.

i am also starting to get the impression that playing capoeira angola is a more complete experience of what capoeira, as a game, dance, sport, and/or martial art, can be. i see so much more trickery and fun in angola than i have in regional - it really does make it feel like playing. it will be interesting to note that, for the uninitiated, capoeira has often been brincar (jokingly playing) or vadiar (slacking off) in the language of its country of origin, Brazil. It leads one to believe that more play is a positive thing, though i could have told you that from the enjoyment i get from it when i attend rodas (the weekly ritual in which capoeira players gather).

i find it interesting to note that, right now, if i type ‘capoeira blog’ into google, i get almost no hits whatsoever that describe personal experiences as relate to the game (although planet capoeira just gave itself a nice makeover). i found this frustrating when i started a little over two years ago, and i’m finding equally frustrating now. so my new personal goal is to get myself onto the first page for these kinds of searches. i want to give valuable information to people looking for it on the web. i’ll start working on this, slowly. i want to give people some knowledge to drink, of sorts, from the well i’ve found, although i myself may never end up finding the bottom of it.

Filed by Julien at 4:02 am under capoeira
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i just received two capoeira books from amazon: Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art and Capoeira and Candomblé: Conformity and Resistance through Afro-Brazilian Experience. if amazon has an accurate representation of the english language books on the subject, i now own 100% (or close to) all of those that aren’t american faux-fitness for-profit trash. (1) (2)

i note that most of the books in that list relate to capoeira regional, which is not what i currently practice; i played it for two years but have recently moved on to capoeira angola, which is a game so different that my observations of the differences deserve (at least) their own blog post. but the most recent pick ups relate more closely to angola - it seems more academics are attracted to writing about it.

i thought i would mention this purchase because i haven’t written on this subject for a very long time. this, despite the fact that capoeira has its own category on my blog. there are a lot of reasons for this, which i intend to go into a little more at a later time. until then, there’s loads of resources in bookstores and on the web, some of which i’ve linked to in this very post. enjoy.

Filed by Julien at 9:15 pm under capoeira
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Ella took a few cool pictures during our capoeira batizado this year. Lighting was a bit low so they ended up a bit dark, but a few really cool pictures stand out, which can be found on her Flickr page.

Feel free to check out her collection of street graffiti as well.

Filed by Julien at 1:56 pm under capoeira, random
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CC had been recently going through my old blog entries and found some entries that related to capoeira. i hadn’t uploaded any pictures of my batizado yet, so i put up two on my abandoned flickr account. though we had a million pictures from it, there weren’t that many that ended up displaying what i call ’showoff capoeira’ (capoeira with lots of acrobatic movements done for a crowd), which our group tends to minimize. for that, you can go to flickr’s tags page re: capoeira. i’ll add some more as time goes on.

Filed by Julien at 9:26 pm under capoeira
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I just watched a capoeira mini-documentary on (get this) the Abercrombie & Fitch website. Someone in my capoeira group directed me to it last night while we were all hanging out at Luba Lounge. So of course it’s utter crap.

Ok, let me revise that statement for political correctness:

• The A&F ‘reps’ hype capoeira up to be stuff that it’s not, and miss out on why capoeira is genuinely cool.
• The game as is played by the capoeiristas is over dramatized and acrobaticized. This could be normal considering they likely haven’t often been in front of a NYC marketing team whose salary is worth a large fraction of a million dollars (if not an entire million or more). Additionally, many capoeira groups does a lot of acrobatics when they need to impress people.
• The doc uses capoeira to sell clothes, not to sell capoeira or (gasp!) not sell anything at all.

Whatever. Go see it I suppose. Grain of salt, you know the drill.

Filed by Julien at 5:37 pm under capoeira
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In a little less than two weeks I will be going through my capoeira batizado. A batizado (’baptism’) is a sort of graduation ceremony one has to go through in order to be taken into the community, and be considered a capoeirista by others. It is also a Big Deal. It is during this ceremony that you receive your capoeira name - a nickname by which you are thereafter called, which all players use during their whole lives.

A short while after getting into capoeira, I discovered what few resources there were for finding out more about the game, whether it be books in English or web sites that could be properly translated by Babelfish. This ended up being rather positive; I immersed myself into a study of Brazilian Portuguese and now have a basic grasp of the language. However, it is because of this lack of information that I think I’m going to try to write about it more. Nobody knows anything; everything is still passed out mouth-to-ear, though I’m told if you can read Portuguese decently you can pick up dozens of books.

I think the point is that I want to have other people to have things to read if they want to know. So that’s what I’m trying to do, though my school’s ideas may be far different from a lot of others’. (This is a subject I may also touch upon later.)

So the batizado is on the 12th. Apparently there are teachers from New York and other cities coming, so it should be pretty packed. Photos later maybe.

Filed by Julien at 1:10 pm under capoeira
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