From the AV Room: Portraits of a Megacity, Then and Now

Today, I return to São Paulo, my favorite megacity, for a weekend of sophistication and debauchery. Brazil's largest city presents me with ample opportunities to sate every aspect of my being. I love her for that. The four videos below juxtapose images of the world's largest underrated city from its adolescent growth spurt to its mammoth adulthood and accompanying developmental issues:

São Paulo, 1943: This propaganda-soaked documentary, produced by the US government in 1943 (when Sampa's population was a mere 1.3 million), highlights the seeds of industrial development that have served as a blessing and a curse for São Paulo. Despite the film being skewed towards an upper-class, light-skinned Brazil, it's still fun to see images of the bustling old downtown districts (my favorite parts of the city) in their heyday.


São Paulo 1954: This short film, with unfortunate sound editing (the rockem-sockem instrumental score should have been used to punctuate the footage of traffic and movement, not static skyscrapers), conveys the sense of emerging power and importance of the nascent metropolis.


São Paulo 2008: Featuring the modern metropole of 20 million that I know and love, this short film captures the vibrant realities of SP, good, bad, and ugly. Chaotic, inspirational, tough, profound, crowded, progressive, imposing, impressive, endless.


São Paulo 2009: Part of a National Geographic multi-part series on megacities, this 45-minute documentary features the green revolution taking place in São Paulo and the aspirations to sustainability as good business for Brazil's financial capital.


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A Brief Assertion: There Is No Other Country On Earth With As Many Amazing Cities As The USA

Photo by niddler.

I've never been known as a flag-waving, red-white-and-blue-bleeding patriot (often, quite the opposite), but there is one thing I am constantly in awe of and can never begrudge the United States: the greatness of its largest cities. Over the past few weeks, I've been to several American burgs, each one unique in its history, culture, and atmosphere; each a national, if not international, center of industry, commerce, communication, and transport; each with myriad museums, restaurants, concerts, festivals, and other markings of cosmopolitan sophistication. Say what you will about Wonder Bread suburban monoculture—America's cities as parts of a larger whole are unmatched anywhere else on the planet. I doubt any other country has as many places peopled by representatives of every cultural group on Earth:

Miami, Atlanta, Washington, Houston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Dallas, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York*

Take any of the cities I just named, and you can come up with any random dish, type of music, style of dance, or artistic movement: there's samba and salsa in Seattle, pad Thai in Miami, Guinean drum circles in Houston, and Tahitian dance classes in New York. And the ease of internal migration and the abundance of external immigration means the fusion of local traditions with recent additions.

Naysayers might erroneously invoke Europe as a comparison: there is none. Europe is a collection of independent nations with their attendant histories, languages, and former colonial empires. The majority of major cities on the Continent and the Isles are ex-imperial capitals, where wealth and power were concentrated during a multi-century competition with neighboring metropoli. The greatest American cities developed through a balance of domestic and international interests, without being national, or sometimes even state capitals. Besides, the United States is still only one country; there are others larger and more populous.

Then, there are equally vast nations, such as China or India for instance, with a large cadre of population centers that are, unfortunately, just that: agglomorations of people drawn together, like all cities, by virtue of resources and opportunity, but largely homogenous relative to their enormous population size and not very well-known on an international scale as models of economic or cultural diversity.

Yes, American cities deal with gang violence and grit, economic and social disparity, declining educational output and unemployment, pollution and inadequate public transportation. But these ills drive the best and brightest in their quest for liveable, enjoyable hometowns. The country is the biggest beneficiary of that work, manifested in those swarming hubs of human interaction where city lights outshine stars.

*I'm purposely excluding "niche" cities like Las Vegas, Orlando, Honolulu, or New Orleans; or "secondary" places like Charlotte, San Antonio, Portland, or Denver, despite soaring cosmopolitanism in each.

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It's the Weekeeeeeend, Baby! (Part 1)

So, I was blind-sided by a ridiculous amount of paperwork and test grading over the last couple of weeks, which reduced my reading time to nil (my Google Reader account has hit 1,000 unread posts since I last checked it) and my writing time to even less. I'm finishing up four years in Colombia with a mixture of excitement, trepidation, anxiety, regret, relief, and pragmatism, but I'll explain all that in a later post.

This weekend, I jetted off to Bogotá and Caracas to see and say goodbye to friends that I've made in both cities, since it'll probably be a while before I'm in the region again. Having booked an award ticket on Avianca, I only had 23 hours to spend in Bogotá before popping over to Venezuela for two nights. I'd say out of 72 hours, I only slept about fifteen; had lots of whoring to catch up on.

Here's the run-down of last Friday:

The perpetual blanket of gray, rainy clouds lifted over the Colombian capital as soon as my plane touched down, as if I had brought the sun with me from the coast. Still, the high-altitude air was chilly to my thinned blood and I had to wrap up as the cab sailed past the new glass mid-rises popping up like mushrooms on the grassy savanna of Bogotá. The place is growing like mad and I was reminded that Colombia is not a poor country, it just has shit-loads of poor people. Still, Bogotá truly does get better each time around...y'all should visit.

I met up with Roberto, my ace boon in Colombia, for some shopping, and being some supastah soap opera actor and model, he was supposed to be hookin' a brother up with some style tips for my big trip. After a two hours, he had purchased three shirts; I, none. Anyway, after lunch at Gaira Cumbia House, a little bit of the Caribbean in Bogotá, owned by the brother of tropi-pop legend Carlos Vives, I met up with my friend Indira (actress/model) and her Venezuelan husband, Noé (not an actor/model), who just had a little teeny-tiny, expressive, very-well-mannered baby named Maximiliano a few months ago. The lil punkin, whom they said never approaches people, crawled over to me, sat on my lap, and started drinking water out of a cup I was holding, bless 'is lil ol hart. I was so proud.Then, after my last granizado de café at Juan Valdez for the foreseeable future, I met up with the whole gang at Gaira again for some kick-ass salsa and some kick-ass sandwiches til 2am.
A couple of restless hours later (the altitude plus the cold air and no heat killed any teensy iota of sleep that I may have liked to have obtained), I was headed back to the airport for my jaunt across the border into Chavezlandia, aka la República Bolivariana de Venezuela.

Gracias Róvel, Indira/Noé/Max/Bruno, PPCCS, Mike, Guillo, Kathy and John, and Super Ratón for helping to wrap up mi Colombian sueño 8500 feet up in the nosebleed section of the Andes.

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Vicky Cristina...Rio?: Movies That Take You There

Photo by MorBCN

Over the weekend, I went to the movies to catch Woody Allen's much-discussed Vicky Cristina Barcelona with the hope of being transported to Spain's legendary Mediterranean port city with the Freddy Mercury theme song. I was indeed wrapped up in the topsy-turvy tale of polyamory, laughing at the snappy dialogue and more than once felt exposed ("You've got chronic dissatisfaction," Penélope Cruz angrily diagnoses Scarlett Johansson). But I didn't feel like this otherwise diverting film ever engaged its titular locale. The characters and the camera passed by the major sights, going gaga over Gaudí and little else, and we got two incredibly bland panoramas over the city, both times giving me more Mexico City/Santiago/Bogotá than Barcelona. I didn't even feel a connection between the two Spanish (Catalan?) protagonists and their storied burg. I felt the same storyline could have been set, just as enthrallingly, in any hot-blooded coastal scene with loudly passionate lovers: Capri, Mykonos, Miami, Rio. I had been entertained, but not transported.

So I rented All About My Mother. The bold oranges and reds and blues, the twisty columns and arches and kitschy tile and wallpaper, the palm-lined streets, multicultural denizens, nuns and whores, wind and water, all drew me into the salty-sweet confection of Barcelona. Almodóvar made me want to experience the city in a way Woody couldn't convey. The story didn't just take place in Barcelona; the characters lived there, were a part of the place, and the place itself became a character, not just backdrop.

And I was reminded of some other movies that pique my desire to know a place or remind me of why I love that place:

Baz Luhrmann's Australia swept me up me the harsh, dusty expanse of the Outback, and rained down buckets of tropical greens and blues reminiscent of Typhoon Lagoon. It's the continental bigness of the land and sky beyond the Opera House that would have me itching to get out of Sydney.

In the wonderfully moody Eve's Bayou, the natural pleasures of the American South, specifically Louisiana, wrap themselves around the tragic Batiste family: strong oak trees with low-hanging branches suitable for lounging, flat and green fields running the length of the slow-moving waters that keep them fertile, mangroves rising from swamp like ghostly sentinels, Spanish moss hanging languorously in still, humid air.

Both Paris, Je T'Aime and Amélie purposefully ensconsed themselves so thoroughly into the oeuvre of enchantment that is Paris, that even the funky attitudes of its customer service sector couldn't keep me away after watching these cinematic love-letters (the waiters and cashiers know you'll come back, which is why they act so stank).

Another city pair, Bad Boys and Any Given Sunday, run from the squat, pastel-colored concrete and stucco of El Portal and North Dade; through the sun-beat, tropical grit of Allapattah and Liberty City; past the tangy richness of Little Haiti and Little Havana; across the man-made, mansioned isles of Biscayne Bay; down to the chic, shiny sins of South Beach. It's all the real Miami, baby.

Caracas makes an unflattering but impactful screen debut in Secuestro Express, a disturbing film about a quickie kidnapping gone awry. Around-the-clock shots of Venezuela's dirty, sweaty, crowded, intense, vivid, quirky capital - ghetto fabuloso - keep the adrenaline flowing and make me wanna throw up a hand (and not in a peace sign). In fact, I think this might be my Holy Week excursion.

Lost in Translation descends from the cream-and-onyx splendor of the Park Hyatt Tokyo into Electric Ladyland herself, a whirlwind of sound and color and people and objects that the film's protagonists can't even wrap their heads around. Maybe that's why they fall in love. And that's why I love this movie.

I know I'm missing all of the classics; these are just a few of my favorites. What are some of the movies that really take you "there?"