Staff Benda Bilili band from the streets of Kinshasa



Jupiter's Dance: manual for guerrilla musicmaking or the new mode of antitourist marketing

VISUAL PROPAGANDA / VISUAL POLLUTION



The island of Manhattan still balances between its "culture of congestion" (vs. culture of dissemination, dispersal) and concerns over privacy and tourism. A figure is needed on a scale very different from Bloomberg's grid imagination, to effect a radical reorganization of the urban system/landscape. Such experiments for now are reserved for the metropoli of the unexpected (formerly "3rd world", whatever that meant) future:

* São Paulo's mayor's war on "visual pollution" (advertisements, logos and displays) became an unprecedented reclamation of public space;

* Curitiba's master plan (dating back from the late 1960s), managed to integrate a transportation system in a city with a rate of population explosion that would effectively paralyze most modern administrations;

* Lagos, longtime fetish of Rem Koolhaas, offers a working version of megalopolis outside of accepted scenarios of modernization and/or development.

New York on the other hand, inherited and perpetuates the "quality of life" campaign that roughly translates into the suburbanization of America's most spectacular city (ban on smoking leads up to regulating photography and video). Maybe instead of exporting the culture of suburban paranoia (along with its ex-mayor's consulting practice), this city should consider importing foreign experience. Not likely, even if the metropolitan hubris leads to a spectacular tragedy.

And speaking of hubris, here is a libertarian critique of suburbanization mythology and the Vice mythology of travel.

One day, weeks after the event, the few survivors will have retired into adapted underground shells, while the entire infrastructure will continue its existence and maintenance on its own. Spambots will keep creating profiles, sending friends requests on MySpace, tracking each other's browsing habits, and posting comments with gift shopping cards for clinically deserted department stores.

A global synaptic network not unlike a brain stretched thinly across the urban surface - a brain, continuously involved with networking and marketing parts of itself to itself.

True exteriority achieved on a planetary level, one could almost hear its soundtrack.

Summer dripping oily residue from the overpass onto the amplifiers: traffic music abandoned for the unexpected pedestrian. When discovered, one is reminded of the proximity between heat intensity and sound pitch. Barebone rhythms and liquid beats... or is it rather liquid bones and bare rhythms?

Which brings me to this trash gem sent by my friend Al Jerrari; let's call it "The Liquid Bones Kid vs. Casio 8-bit Kuduro":