bipbip1

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/cultural-patrimony-tribute-alfredinho-jacinto-melo/"></div>In the summer of 2010, I traveled to Rio de Janeiro to research the life of my estranged grandfather, American photographer David Drew Zingg. Because David had spent the final thirty-five years of his life in Brazil, I grew up knowing little about him. In college, I learned that my grandfather had been a celebrated figure in Rio’s music scene, designing album covers for legendary musicians and helping to organize the first bossa nova concert in the United States. My trip would allow me to piece together David’s story and make my own discoveries about his adopted country.
In Rio, I interviewed dozens of my grandfather’s friends and tried to locate important sites of bossa nova lore. One night, I went out in search of a bar called Bip-bip, which hosted live Brazilian jazz. I arrived early to find an elderly stooped man arranging a couple of tables on the sidewalk in front of the building’s closed façade.
“Você veio aqui pra ouvir música?” He asked.
The man’s ashy voice startled me. It was gravellier than any I had heard before — like that of someone on the verge of choking — and yet it suited him perfectly. A grizzled beard covered the man’s face and small glasses magnified his expectant eyes. He was short, probably about five foot three, though it was hard to say exactly because of his pronounced hunch. A sizable belly protruded from beneath his short-sleeved button-down shirt. He looked like a cartoon drawing of a bohemian.
I told him yes, I had come for the music.
“Tá bom,” he said. “The performance will start soon.”
After our short exchange, the man turned around and pulled up a garage-style door. Structurally, the bar looked identical to all the other botecos I had walked by that day: it consisted one continuous room that spilled out onto the street. Still, Bip-bip, now shining with light, stood out. Instead of a smattering of seating arrangements spread out around the floor, a long banquet table traced one side of the room. What’s more, photographs and paintings covered every inch of wall space, and most featured one unmistakable subject: the bar’s hunchback proprietor. Snapshots showed the man as a young, svelte Romeo with a luscious black beard. Hand-drawn caricatures exaggerated his long nose, his demanding scowl. One picture revealed his name in elaborate cursive font: Alfredinho, Little Alfred.
As I stared at the portraits, a group of white-haired musicians with instrument cases filtered into the bar. They walked into the back of the room, retrieved cold beers, unsheathed their equipment, and took seats around the banquet table. The percussion section positioned themselves at the head. A portly guy squeezed a bass drum between his legs; a blind man tuned his tambourine; a pale geriatric caressed a small, wooden box-like contraption. In front of the box player sat the only woman in the group — the singer, I gathered, from her lack of instrument. As the percussionists tinkered with their drums, she let loose a mane of wavy tresses. Across the table, the lead guitarist sipped from his beer can, his role apparent in both his posture (confident and erect) and his fashion sense (tortoiseshell glasses and a well-groomed silver beard). Three more men flanked him, holding identical instruments.
Four acoustic guitars? I thought. Isn’t that a bit excessive?
When the motley group began their jam session, they cancelled my doubts at once. Improbably, the four guitars danced in sync without stepping on one another. As the lead man choked a descending riff down the neck of his axe, another player fluttered his fingers upward for an ascending line in the highest register. Meanwhile, the third and fourth guitarists chugged along, plucking chords in interlocking rhythms. Beneath the melodic give and take, the percussionists established their own synergy. The squat man with the bass drum pounded the backbeat (bap-ba-DOOM, bap-ba-DOOM) while the tambourine player tapped out a uniform, hissing shuffle. The wan senior with the box played off his partners’ consistency, slapping hollow, syncopated accents to reinforce the guitarists’ articulations. It was clear that these men had played together for years.
By the time the band had run through its instrumental loop a few times, a large crowd had gathered in front of Bip-bip. On my left, an old woman in a black dress and flip flops planted sloppy kisses on friends from the neighborhood. Behind me, some tourists chattered in French. On my right, Alfredinho took a seat at the small table he had set up for himself. He scrawled notes on a clipboard ledger and kept one eye on the rotary phone in front of him.
After a few minutes of instrumental performance, a voice rang out: “Deixa, fale quem quiser falar, meu bem.” Amid the clutter of guitars, it was difficult at first to determine who was singing. While the woman with the white curls belted the melody, her body looked frozen. And yet, even without a microphone, her voice pierced through the wash of guitar and percussion, inspiring others to join her. All around me, onlookers began to sing along, first in a reverent murmur than in unhinged euphoria. The neighborhood woman in the black dress opened her arms and began moving her feet in a shaky, flip flop samba. “Deixa,” she shouted along, tunelessly.
As I listened, I wanted to sing, as well. The tune sounded familiar. It spoke of letting things be, listening to your heart, saying “yes” instead of “maybe,” because no one lives more than once. Perhaps my dad had played the song before, sometime in my youth, but I couldn’t say for certain. I stood silently and watched.
After the opening number, Bip-bip settled into a kind of rhythm. Occasionally one guitarist would leave the table for a cigarette and a member of the audience would step up and take his place. A few songs later, other musicians would cycle in and out. At this unusual bar, the line between performer and spectator appeared entirely fluid.
In the market for a beer, I studied the established procedure. To procure libations, customers careened dangerously close to the circle of musicians and visited the fridge in the back of the room. Then, they stopped by Alfredinho’s table, where the proprietor recorded their names in his ledger. Over the course of the night, patrons would give the bar owner a little wave every time they grabbed beers, and he would add a tally mark beside their names. The whole system seemed to hinge on the customers’ honest self-reporting; in a penny-pinching mood, one could easily sneak away with free beers. How trusting, I thought and then submitted myself to the process.
Over the course of the night, I struggled to read Alfredinho’s mood. When the woman in black came over and kissed the top of his head, he cackled. When the well-groomed lead guitarist sidled up next to him, they bantered arm-in-arm. Most of the time, though, the proprietor’s face remained twisted in its signature scowl.
Sometimes, he lashed out at audience members.
&#8220;Keep it down!&#8221; he hollered, his voice a frayed wire. “We have free music here!”
Other times, he chastised the performers. When the percussionists walloped a particularly vigorous rhythm, Alfredinho creaked out of his seat and waved his arms at the band, like a crazed conductor who’d lost control of his orchestra.
As the musicians eased up and the crowd realized what the old killjoy had done, some listeners protested: “Come on, man! It was sounding good. What gives?”
Alfredinho refused to tolerate the outrage. “We’ve got to moderate,” he said. “The neighbors complain.”
I was shocked. I had never heard of a music venue that required its performers to play quietly. It seemed unreasonable; Bip-bip didn’t even use any amplification.
Later in the night, Alfredinho made an earnest appeal to his constituents, pausing the music and launching into a speech.
“Bip-bip is a democratic bar,” he said. “It’s a space of resistance, Brazil’s cultural patrimony. Here, we don’t just listen to music, we gather together to support one another. We have a duty here to love our neighbor, to lift up those less fortunate than ourselves, to remember the ones our society has forgotten.”
Alfredinho spoke as if delivering a sermon, pacing back and front in front of the silent crowd, pointing his fingers in every direction. With each step, he trained his eyes on a different member of the audience, and I began to wonder whether my grandfather had ever been to Bip-bip. A plaque above the door declared that the bar first opened in 1964, the year that David moved to Brazil. Alfredinho’s establishment was located just a few blocks from Au Bon Gourmet, the defunct bistro where my grandfather had heard bossa nova for the first time. Was my experience at Bip-bip anything like the transformative night David spent listening to bossa nova’s forefathers, João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim?
After a few more hours of music, I decided to call it a night. It was 2am, and Alfredinho remained at his perch, a makeshift cash register of stacked bowls now overflowing with bills. I approached and told him I’d like to close out. As he flipped through his ledger, I swore I caught a fleeting glance at the name “David Z,” struck through in blue pen. I blinked twice and told myself I had dreamed it up.
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This spring, eight and a half years after my first visit to Bip-bip, I learned that Alfredinho had died. Upon hearing the news, I thought back to something one of my grandfather’s colleagues, a former model, had told me. “Brazil has no memory,” she said. David’s collaborator was referring not to the recollections of individuals, but to her country’s institutional memory. The way she saw it, there was no infrastructure for commemorating artistic forbearers, no investment in preserving cultural history. She decried the fact that one of Rio’s most esteemed legacies — the Golden Age of Bossa Nova — had been relegated to a few rusty plaques and kitschy tourist bars.
Bip-bip refused to take part in such marginalization, resisting erasure for more than fifty years. But Alfredinho’s death poses a question: what will become of the establishment without its uncompromising leader? For now, the nightly jam sessions continue, but it’s quite possible that Bip-bip, like most other bars, will eventually shutter. The plaque above its door may well rust over, and those of us lucky enough to have enjoyed the music will cling to our memories. When institutional preservation fails us, personal recollections are all we have left. In the wake of Alfredinho’s death, I choose to commemorate the hallowed space he created, a portal connecting me to my lost grandfather.
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Cultural Patrimony: A Tribute to Alfredinho Jacinto Melo

zingg-mann

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/confessional-room-interview-lucas-mann/"></div>Lucas Mann is a memoirist who knows how to cover ground. His first book, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, recounts his experiences following a minor league baseball team. His second book, Lord Fear: A Memoir, reckons with his older brother’s fatal heroin overdose. His new book, Captive Audience: On Love and Reality, investigates his fascination with reality television and his love for his wife. In an unexpected sequence of events, Mann ends up writing the book as a letter to his wife, his companion in reality television fandom. Through the epistolary form, a simple study of Mann’s favorite television programs becomes what he now calls, “maybe the most personal thing that I&#8217;ve ever written.” Before a reading at Powell’s in Portland, Mann spoke with me about the organic writing process that generated Captive Audience, the intersections between reality TV and creative nonfiction writing, and the popular assertions that we are living in a “reality TV world.”
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ANDREW ZINGG: How did you decide to write about reality TV in the epistolary form? Was that something baked-in from the beginning or was that something you arrived at later?
LUCAS MANN: That kind of just happened. I think it started pretty early on, but the end product was more that, like the whole book feels that way now, and that wasn&#8217;t the idea. But I think it grew out of being like, &#8220;The person that I watch these shows with is my wife and part of our relationship is loving being around each other and talking about this shit with each other.&#8221; And so something about it early on felt helpful or interesting or potent to be like, &#8220;This is not just me riffing on something, but this is me being in conversation with a specific person and trying to understand what we like and also trying to understand us.&#8221; It felt like it organically worked in that way.
Then, I think I also became interested in, the more it went along, this idea of trying to mirror the really intense, weird emotional experience that people offer up on reality TV in my own performance of myself on the page. And so I kind of liked the idea of these little sections to my wife almost serving as the confessional room in a reality show.
That was one of my favorite things about the book: the moments where you discussed potential intersections between reality TV and nonfiction writing. Were there any lessons you learned from reality TV that you applied in your writing? How did you conceive of those parallels?
I think I realized early on that, whatever I was doing, I had no interest in writing about reality TV like a cultural critic on high and doing: &#8220;This is something low and base, and I am not low and not base, and I am analyzing that.&#8221;  What compelled me to reality TV as a viewer was this weird sense of risk that they were offering up. Then it became important to me to at least try to honor that. Whatever you want to say about reality performers, that’s the tone of their performance, that&#8217;s the appeal of performance, that&#8217;s the intensity of it. I wanted to meet the subject at that pitch.
Again, I don&#8217;t think I realized this going in, but I did find a lot of parallels — in this sense of performing yourself, but also feeling like you&#8217;re exposed — this weird balance between intimacy and artifice, and then also the commodification of that. All of those things exist on a smaller scale — and I think a less horrific scale, usually — in personal writing. It does feel that way, and I thought it would be interesting to try to deal with the sort of murky gross implications of the work that I do while thinking about the weird murky gross work that these people do.
I started really writing the book after my second book came out, Lord Fear, which ended up being this intense thing about my brother who died of a heroin overdose and it mined my memories of him and mined his life and it mined my family&#8217;s grief and all these different things in ways that I stand behind. But when the book came out I had these weird, parallel feelings of &#8220;Why the hell did I put this out there? What a weird fucking thing to put this out there,&#8221; and then also, &#8220;Why isn&#8217;t it a bestseller? Why isn&#8217;t there a front page thing on the Times?&#8221; And so it felt like I was actively dealing with that combination of ambition, performance, and intimacy, and not wanting myself to be out there. It felt like there was no way for that not to seep into the subject matter.
What you said about &#8220;the confessional room&#8221; resonated with me, too, because there are certain parts of this book that feel quite confessional. What comes to mind are some of the moments where you talk about mimicking NeNe Leake&#8217;s speech patterns. I was wondering about your approach in this kind of confessional mode. Do you ever worry about being too intimate?
Everything that I&#8217;ve written, every book that I&#8217;ve published, is called a memoir by some and is talked about as being more intimate and more personal than I experienced when writing it. And so part of that is maybe just me fooling myself, and that I think the only way that I get myself to write is by telling myself that all I&#8217;m doing is going after an idea that I think is interesting. Then, if personal stuff comes into it, it&#8217;s in the service of that thought process. It totally could be that I&#8217;m just bullshitting myself, but that&#8217;s how it feels when I&#8217;m writing. Then, I&#8217;m sort of surprised after the fact when people ask personal questions, which is nuts because why wouldn&#8217;t they? But this started as a project that I thought wasn&#8217;t particularly personal and became I think maybe the most personal thing that I&#8217;ve ever written. I think everything that I&#8217;ve written has gone in some way through that process. The first versions of it, the first drafts of it, and the idea of it in my head were far less personal and far more of a study of something than the end became.
Could we talk a little about that other side, too — that sort of “study” aspect? How do you approach research in a book like this? Did you go back and watch the shows that you wrote about here, or were you more interested in conjuring the memories of watching those shows with your wife? 
It definitely started with the memory aspect. There was definitely a point where it was like, &#8220;All right, do I want this to be a book where I go back and aggressively watch all the seasons of these shows and do a sort of academic survey, or do I want to have the structure of it based on things that strike me as being important in memory?&#8221; And so I erred on that side of it. But then there are all these sort of close readings of the shows that I watched. And so a lot of that was sort of, I would write down what I had in memory and then I would go back and watch scenes and keep watching and sort of refine these things or be like, &#8220;Oh, this is what I was wrong about.&#8221; So a lot of it was sort of intense re-watching.
In the last chapter of the book, you directly address the Trump presidency and the claims that we&#8217;re living in &#8220;a reality TV world.&#8221; Have you had any revelations about those ideas since writing the book? 
One of the points that I wanted to make, I guess, was that it feels like so much of the conversation about Trump and the origins of Trump becomes trying to put &#8220;Aha&#8221; moments or trying to put a feeling of &#8220;This makes sense&#8221; or &#8220;I have an intellectual explanation&#8221; onto something that is pure, unquantifiable gibberish or just intensified emotion. And so, if I was going to write a postscript about Trump, I wanted to try to be honest to the helplessness that it feels like. Whatever I want to say about him, it feels like, &#8220;Okay, this is a thing. Yes it&#8217;s true,&#8221; but then also, all I understand is the intense feeling of watching this dude and being horrified by him. I feel like that continues to be my experience. I can sit around and write things about Trump, and I&#8217;ve written things since I wrote an essay for The Atlantic about Trump as the reality TV president or not or whatever. You can think about things, you can try to be logical, you can research things, but what&#8217;s most terrifying and most pervasive to me is this sense of constant, high-pitched emotion that doesn&#8217;t bend to reason or explanation. That&#8217;s kind of all I feel like I have still.
And do you feel like that&#8217;s consistent with the reality TV world? 
I do think that, as I wrote in the book and have written since, there&#8217;s something limiting about just saying, &#8220;He&#8217;s a reality TV president.&#8221; In the same way that, long before him, the easiest way to wring your hands about the state of the modern society was saying, &#8220;Blank became reality TV.&#8221; Like, &#8220;Oh, I used to watch football before it became a reality show&#8221; or &#8220;I used to watch CNN before it became a reality show.&#8221; It&#8217;s the easiest thing to say, and all you&#8217;re really trying to say is, “It’s shit and I&#8217;m pretty sure I remember something better.” So I think that it is lazy and unhelpful, and I think that there are more subtleties to Trump’s role on reality TV compared to other reality stars. But I do think what is maybe most recognizable or most terrifying is just the fact of a close-up on a face presenting himself to you over and over and over again without really a care for veracity or logic or consistency — just the intensity of having to confront that face at a high-pitched volume. That&#8217;s a world that he has operated in successfully. And that feeling of being totally engrossed and also totally helpless, that does feel recognizable as a reality fan.
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The Confessional Room: An Interview With Lucas Mann

Born and raised in Northern California, Andrew Zingg is a recent graduate of Oregon State University's MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction. He is currently working on a memoir about his grandfather, American photojournalist David Drew Zingg.