[Nettime-bold] Dj Spooky travel notes: São Paolo, Brazil: FutureMegalopolis

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>]

Travel Journal - New years (Rio/Iquassu/São Paolo 3 weeks travel 
consdensation: re - Brazil - accepted ecletic)


São Paolo, Morumbi section Jan3, 2002:
Marc Chagall Tower, 18th Floor: viewpoint: CD:DIR>phase transition:>>goto>open

"History - at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud..."
Thomas Pynchon

"A Community will evolve only when a people control their own communications"
Frantz Fanon

	The towers of the city stretch away pretty much in every 
direction, and the basic metaphor is unending omnidirectional urban 
compression. Endless favela, endless humanity... it takes a couple of 
hours to drive across the city, but its worth it. The sights are 
almost too much: there's the odd parrot that says the word "mother" 
ad infinitum on one corner... on another corner in Iguassu, a 
homeless child comes up to the car to ask not for money, but where 
I'm from... he asks where my face belongs... another corner has kids 
listening to "baile" music from the "funk balls" that are 
choreographed gang fights between rival favela gangs (the young men 
these days all are dying their hair like Goldie - bleached blonde 
super close cropped, platinum blonde skin-head look, the girls rock 
low cut skirts that are made of plastic and synthetic materials... 
all of this on the corner... an update of Miles Davis's 70's album 
cover artwork... the kids have boom boxes, and that's about it.... 
its summer and the rainy season has kicked in... you can count on 
rain pretty much every afternoon after about 3pm... The Jardins 
section in the center of the city - red carpet, plush hotels, 
expensive restaurants... no kids on the corner... this is a city that 
never had a Baron Haussman like Paris or a Robert Moses like New York 
- architects of urban planning are a remote species here, almost as 
if from another world. The city sprang from the trade winds and found 
itself at the cross roads of the north and south - its a place where 
worlds collide and the sounds all come from outside - dubbed versions 
of NYC hip hop and electro, reggae infused with afro beat for the Axe 
sound systems, live MC's who do not under stand the words they say - 
over rhythms like Dr. Dre's "Guess Who's Back?" glossalalia - many 
tongues, the language of hip-hop reduced for a moment to pure 
enunciation... all of this flows through the streets like water, or 
even better, like information - a "knowledge game" of the 
unconscious... the music... its eddies and currents reconfiguring the 
notion of ethnicity and identity in a stew of "anything goes...." 
>From the rooftop where I'm writing in Morumbi, the city stretches 
out, and its a riddle of many dimensions: the circuit board patterns 
that dominate the Northern American urban landscape are confronted 
with the idea of the city as a generative syntax: each block 
regenerates another pattern, and alters the proportions of the 
buildings that surround it... the roads are almost labyrithine - not 
in the Old Eurpean sense of places like Lisbon or Porto in Portugal 
(places that gave Brazil its early identity - it has moved far far 
far beyond them now....), but more like Lagos: urban planning at the 
whim of the IMF and World Bank, streets that have meaning as long as 
the current moment supports the currency of the project... after 
that, the money vanishes, the project stops, the road ends... the 
favela begins....
	After the New Year, which Europe began as "E-Day" - the 
largest consolidation of currencies in history, the favela becomes 
another kind of temporary autunomous zone... Oscar Niermayer on one 
hand,  Greg Lynn's Deluezian "hyper-surface" on the other.... the 
Utopian dreams of the south translate into compression and sustained 
unplanned growth: that's the architecture of hyper-modern involution 
- think of it as a world "upside down" architecture is the reflection 
held up to the world... a comedy of values, a carnival of all souls 
where identity is like a poker deck... pick a card any card, its the 
dealers game... you can't win...  here in South America the economics 
of consolidation bear a different face - one that is completely 
hybrid, and in a sense, because of the dominanace of the U.S., one 
that will face the extremes of 21st century economic upheaval - 
Argentina as the reflection of E-Day - three currencies, all 
useless... the rich do not care, their money is in the U.S., the 
poor, well... they don't belong to the system anyway... the middle 
class, however, is crushed... new favelas perhaps.... the reflection 
of E-Day is one of seamless-ness - the surface finally absorbing the 
nation states that gave birth to "modernity" - we face the world 
after the fall of the twin towers - the West's "Crystal Palace" that 
gave the existentialists of the 20th century so many things to 
reflect off of... Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" become a world 
where guilt and human dignity face the prism of the architecture of 
the Id and Ego... Aldous Huxley wasn't so far off point, and Jules 
Verne's ideas around genetic engineering and the compression of time, 
all seem like a faint echo of the crisis in Argentina, the global 
crisis of meaning after 9/11.... the crystal palace has myriad 
reflections, and this, perhaps is one:
"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but their 
is nothing to compare it to now.		It is too late. The 
Evacuation still proceeds, but its all theater. There are no lights 
inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an 
iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of 
day through. But its night. He's afraid of the way the glass will 
fall - soon - it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. 
But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only 
great invisible crashing...."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's rainbow

The question for art is how to build new narratives with the material 
at hand... the shards of modernity cut deeply, and they leave wounds 
that will have to heal in new ways.... if Mary Shelley's 
"Frankenstein" was the archetypal parable of early Modernity, then we 
need new forms - the old has combined with the new, "E-Day" as the 
currency made from the shards of the old nations, all like a 
recombinant entity out of the Romantics... recombinant form is pretty 
much now the basic way we look at the world. Combine, split, 
reform... the dj method of synthesis has taken hold of almost all 
aspects of the creative act: "E Pluribus Unum" - out of many, one.... 
the operating system of hypermodernity asks for alot more.... As I 
sit and type, I can see the distant favelas.... the children dance to 
baile music... how can I tell? Its a style that has a certain 
cadence, its a theater of gesture where everyone knows the moves.... 
baile music is considered controversial - people gather to dance and 
to fight... its a modern update on how capoeira evolved out of the 
culture of slavery in Brazil... but its far less coherent... people 
die, and are hurt by the dance moves becuase that's what they go to 
clubs for: the social rituals of identity formation they go through 
are from the dance "funk balls" - the ball in Europe was a place 
where social values were reflected in the precision of dance moves... 
the same thing is going on here... costumes, preparation, and 
intensity of performance are what make it all happen, and violence is 
pretty much part of the basic syntax... its a style where people 
carry razors and use them to stab and carve their dance opponents... 
a missplaced glance, a "wrong" gesture can set off a battle... all 
for social dominance in a realm of theater, and the soundtrack is 
made from fragments of dj mixes from around the world. The sounds are 
the new networks for these kids, and their body language telegraphs a 
theater that is all too close... The Brazilian playwright Augusto 
Boal came up with a term to describe the impact of carnival on 
Brazilian culture - he called it "legislative theater" -  for him, 
the way people interact is through texts that are both distant and 
intimate... I think that the baile music, for him, is a paradox that 
only carnival can resolve.... so to for the rest of the world... one 
can only hope that Brazil's lesson in multiplcity can be shared... 
the loops close in, and become the groundwork for 21st culture and 
aesthetics... as above, so below... the crystal palace has myriad 
reflections, and this, perhaps is one:

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
H.G. Wells

















============================================================================
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe 
they are free...."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Subliminal Kid Inc.

Office Mailing Address:

Music and Art Management
245 w14th st #2RC NY NY
10011

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