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THE “PRAFRENTEX” GENERATION AND THE SEA OF “CAPTAIN IPANEMA” [TEREZINHA BITTENCOURT]
As the author Guimarães Rosa wisely said, “To tell the story of the past is very difficult, not because of the years that have passed by, but because of the cunning that certain things in the past possess.” There always exists the risk of letting memory not only recall, but “trans-see”3 through being inundated by the sensations and experiences that are evoked. It’s what happens with anyone who dares to reconstruct, with fragments of their recollections, the events of the 60’s and 70’s, periods singularly characterized by movements of social rebellion and iconoclasm. The youth were hungry for transformation : in customs, in politics, in social relations. Thus, there arose cultural movements that attempted to deeply reform all fields of art. Among them, the most well-known may have been the underground movement (udigrudi, as the filmmaker Glauber Rocha called it) or counterculture, which came into being with Flower Power, Black Power, Gay Power, Women’s Lib, and ended up landing in Rio and clashing with the fierce and violent opposition of the military dictatorship. It was an attempt, in sum, to transform and overcome all the values considered conventional or conservative related to the previous generation, the “paratrasex” generation, as it was called. And of course, the subsequent “prafrentex”4 generation, which “loved not just the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but also Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, Janes Joplin, Mercedes Sosa, Vinicius-Toquinho, Taiguara, Aldir Blanc-João Bosco, Sá-Rodrix-Guarabyra, Clube da Esquina-Milton Nacimento, Secos e Molhados, Chico Buarque, Os Baianos, Os Novos Baianos, and Belichor, all “ the Latin-American guy from the the countryside” could do was to let loose a yell of rebellion on the ocean sands of Ipanama. Truly, it couldn’t have been any other place. It was there, in the stretch running from Barril 1800 and Castelinho – bars where people would drink their post-beach beer while listening to the beautiful singing of Paulo Diniz – past Montenegro street
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(currently called Vinicius de Moraes street) to Anibal De Mendoça street, that marked the borders of the marvelous world of these young people. It gets difficult to explain how, under such adverse political conditions, with the organs of repression persecuting, intimidating, torturing and killing, it was possible for such cultural movements to appear- cultural movements of the sort that can still be felt. It was exactly in this period that a new language imposed itself on cinema (Cinema Novo), music (protest music) and theater (aesthetic of aggression). The press couldn’t help but to feel the effects of this cultural climate under rapid transformation. It soon managed to found a newspaper that served as vehicle for the new ideas. The stage was already set for the appearance of an alternative press whose consolidation is owed to the paper O Pasquim, which the youth of the prafrentex generation used to lovingly call their mouthpiece. Pasquim ended up exercising power over a vast readership, to the extent that it spawned a legion of faithful readers that referred to themselves as “Pasquimaniacs” and adopted a modus vevendi advocated by the paper. There can be no denying the paper’s influence over the youth of the time, such was the way that it was able to shape opinions, propagate change and, as the paper’s cartoon character Captain Ipanama2 put it, “subvert the structures.” Its acceptance among the youth owed itself mainly to its place of birth, the city of Rio de Janeiro and its consecration by the sea of Ipanema. Just that tribe of youth, tanned with the help of the beet and carrot-based tanning cream sold on the beach - maybe it would be better to say “seared” by the summer sun (skin cancer must just be an invention of the jealous yankees, go home ) enjoyed, naturally, in the sea of Ipanema, could have served as inspiration for such a creative newspaper. Its power to criticize the patterns of the time, employing the painful (at least for those that were victims of its jokes and accusations) weapon of humor, had a special flavor to the youth. Nobody understood better than an Ipanema beach regular the cathartic laughter, light and transgressive, above all in that ominous period of permanent terror-panic,