91. Exploring Rio

91.


Exploring Rio

I walk by a downtown movie theater--Kubrick’s “2001” is playing. It’s one of my favorites so I pay and go in.

The film has Portuguese subtitles and is badly worn with significant passages simply missing. The film breaks twice while I am watching and I suppose that every time it breaks the projectionist’s repairs makes the film a few feet shorter so this mysterious movie will become ever more mystifying, especially to the Brazilians!

I visit the new Museum of Modern Art where the Brazilian painter Ivan Serpa is featured in an exhibition. I appreciate this genius who seems open to the highest inspiration of The Flow, courageously communicating his humor, his fear, and his sexuality.

The ocean at the Copacabana Beach smells good to me and the tourists smell rich. It is enough like Waikiki that I know the scene; the fine jewelry shops with their expensive trinkets, the exclusive boutiques with their expensive clothes, the restaurants with their expensive viands.

There are miles of high-rise apartments and hotels with a green mountainous backdrop.

An enormous white statue of Jesus tops a peak above the town and He looks quite spooky hovering over the city at night when He is lit up.

Rio has a good natural history museum and a grand zoo including such life forms as turtles, elephants, bears and camels. To me mankind seems not the top animal of an evolutionary chain but perhaps one of many creative experiments conducted by life on this planet. We are no doubt the best vehicles for the “human Spirit” and if Homo Sapiens become extinct along with the other failures of biological design that are biting the dust in our time; the human spirit might have to wander off into the cosmos to find another suitable means of physical expression.

I take a city bus across town to the famous Ipanema Beach. A major sewer renovation is under way and the beach is a stinky mess though teenyboppers in very abbreviated bikinis enhance the view.

Ipanema is as good as Waikiki and that is my highest compliment!

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