Her skirt billows in a gentle breeze, and she fixes her gaze forward and upward, aglow with expectant ease. She handles her own luggage, insists on elegant travel clothing, and comes from a time everyone pretends to remember. Is she picking up the suitcase, or setting it down? Is this the end of her journey, or the beginning? For what or who does her heart long?

Maybe it’s a model posing for a photographer, but something about her certainly seems real. This photo hangs on the bathroom wall of an upscale and incredibly popular Italian restaurant in Itaim. The people disgorging their wine therein can afford authenticity.

Elsewhere in Itaim, you can have your hair cut in a Las Vegas-themed barber shop, watch a Guns n Roses cover band, sip a US-based corporate coffee, and eat a California fish taco.

The point is, São Paulo’s similar to other cosmopolitan cities in that a search for authenticity feels like a fool’s errand. Food, culture, and services are a hodgepodge of the entire world–one large Afro-Euro-Asian-Latin rainbow sushi roll so neatly compressed you hardly notice it, especially after it marinates in the soy-wasabi of relentless, US-centric commodification.

My initial forays into Samba, perhaps Brazil’s most quintessentially Brazilian cultural avatar, are emblematic of this post-global, bourgeoise calabash.

I attended a pro-Palestinian samba rally in a bar near Centro. I was too nervous to take photos of the framed photos on the bar’s walls, which depicted people in robes and civilian clothing holding AK-47s. After waiting for ten minutes in what could only generously be described as a line, an extremely friendly doorman wrote my name in Arabic in a spiral notebook and waved me inside. Past the framed photos, I found a spot to stand near a piano against the back wall and listened in the band.

“Real” samba bands sit in a circle to play, instead of facing the crowd, western-style. At least, that’s what this particular band was doing, in front of a huge Palestinian flag. The crowd encircled the group, dancing and singing as depicted here:

I know very little about samba, but I do know that many famous songs are almost a hundred years old, and many more are 40ish, composed during the military junta, and of course samba songs are being composed right up to this day, with techno influences, and etc. Nevertheless, the mostly young people at this bar sang along with each and every song, and danced as well.

A friend gamely sallied to the bar for drinks. I asked him to order me a Karl Marx IPA, but because of his imperfect Portuguese he came back with a Lenin Porter. Same side of the political spectrum, so close enough:

At one point, everyone struck up an anti-Bolsonaro chant with some fist-raising, but that didn’t last long. The band rekindled its enchanting rhythm, everyone began again to dance, and despite all the decidedly non-Brazilian details, it felt pretty authentic and real to me.

For the English to See

A week later, I took another opportunity to hear live samba, this time back in Itaim, the jumbled, post-global land of investment bankers and upscale ethnic restaurants. What I found was an excellent band, and again everyone was singing along, and the women were dancing. The men stood in a ring outside the dance floor, and I stood with them. The women danced a combination of samba, twerking, and a psychodelic electric slide.

Contemporary Brazilians use the phrase para inglês ver to describe rules or aspirations that are written down and professed to foreigners, but that no Brazilian person intends to actually follow or pursue. The phrase derives from the time when crafty ships captains invented all manner of subterfuges to trick the English, who were attempting to enforce a ban on the slave trade.

Whatever you may want to say about my first Brazilian samba shows–how un-Brazilian they were, how polluted with politics and hipsters and Middle-Eastern propaganda and strangeness–at least they did not feel to me like events concocted para ingles ver.