Memento's Christopher Nolan is at it again. In Inception, instead of playing with time only, his exploration of the human mind is also spectacularly spatial. The movie, an action-packed Borges-meets-the-Matrix blockbuster, manages to be both emotionally intense and philosophically deep, gathering film critics and audiences in almost unanimous praise. It traps you in its maze only to release you two and a half hours later, breathless, due to an amazing screenplay – almost ten years in the making – and visionary images, alternating plot-effective slow-motion a' la Matrix with metaphysic landscapes echoing Antonioni and De Chirico.

The movie features Leonardo Di Caprio in the role of Cobb, a professional thief specialized in extracting ideas from people's subconscious at its most vulnerable state: dreaming. Cobb and his team are tackling his final mission, a semi-suicidal trip where at stake are not only corporate interests, but also the protagonist's peace of mind.

I'm not going into detail about the complex time ellipsis and the frantic reality/dream/dream-within-a-dream pace of the plot, since I don't want to spoil the film too much. Especially in this context, Inception's relationship with architecture is more insightful.
Much like in The Matrix or the less famous Dark City – where extraterrestrial parasites shape people's lives and their very own city with their collective intelligence – in Nolan's movie the mind plays the role of an architect in building spatial environments. The director introduces the extra spin of lucid dreaming, where a person (architect) builds an imaginary environment and another person, in whose subconscious such an outline is planted, populates it with the texture/projection of their dream-reality.

The characters in Inception are thus able to shape space in many ways: by accessing known areas instantly from remote ones (which reminds me of Guy Debord's famous Naked City), by erecting buildings or architectural elements out of thin air, and even by altering the very dimensions of space; in the most fascinating sequence of the movie the young "architect" interpreted by Ellen Page literally bends Paris over itself, creating a seemingly specular environment where people are walking on both the "floor" and the "ceiling", each appearing as legitimate street levels.
The notion of the architect, as a creator of geometrical and physical constraints around a space that has ultimately to be filled by other people's experience, sharply points out the "virtuality" of architecture itself, today more and more explicit in the rendering aesthetics from which we routinely judge projects on the Internet every day.

In terms of urban aesthetics, the resemblance of Cobb's dream-space, which he has built for himself and his wife as an alternate reality, to actual urban spaces today is also worth noticing. The modernist blocks emerging directly from the water and populating the protagonist's dream horizon somehow look like the new housing blocks on the Eastern Docklands in Amsterdam: massive metaphysical solids standing out from the unmodeled, liquid surface of the water.
Furthermore, the architectural actuality in Inception is shown along the time axis: some of the imaginary locations where the movie is set (like Cobb's old houses) are rooted in particular slices in time, a property of Michel Foucault's heterotopias. According to David Grahame-Shane, who writes about it in his book Recombinant Urbanism, heterotopias have come to be the most relevant urban element in the contemporary multi-centered, "scrambled egg" city. Needless to say, the type of heterotopias Grahame-Shane focuses the most on are those of illusion.

In its use of architecture as a dream-like practice shaping actual experience, Inception captures a few key aspects of the field and represents them with a visually successful rendering. Not only does the movie deploy urban aesthetics as a fascinating leitmotif throughout the story, but it also sheds some light on them. Go see it.

After last week's post about Demolition Man (1993) and the city of Los Angeles, today I'm writing about another action flick dealing with urban imagery, also come out the same year: Last Action Hero. Both movies are cop-tales, reterritorializing a way of dealing with crime and justice from one world to another. In Stallone's sci-fi exploit the change happens in time, while in the more sophisticated – and also more tongue-in-cheek – film starring future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the jump is twofold: from reality to fiction and, quite significantly, from New York to Los Angeles. Before we go further about the retorritorialization I mentioned before, a short introduction to the movie's plot is necessary.

A little New York kid, Danny, is used to go to this old cinema to watch his favorite movie character, an Eastwood-inspired off-the-book cop named Jack Slater and played by Arnold Schwarzenegger (the actual name is mentioned in the movie, that is, Schwarzenegger is playing himself playing Slater), over and over again. At some point, the cinema owner gives him a magic ticket which can supposedly make him travel to another world and which he was never ballsy enough to use. The kid uses it and enters the movie to his and Slater's surprise. As the movie goes on, Danny's expertise on action stereotypes and slaterisms gets him closer and closer to his hero, and both try and stop the film's supervillain, who is an 100% evil stone-cold mass murderer with colored contact lenses. At some point the villain gets his hands on the kid's ticket and enters the real world, where he realizes that, on the other side of the screen, crime does pay. Slater and Danny follow him and eventually defeat him, but the hero is seriously wounded and, for him not to die, his biggest fan has to send him back to the movie where he belongs, and where bullets are little more than sand to him. Things are then back to normal, except the kid has now some kick-ass memories about his special hero-friend.

In Last Action Hero the real/unreal dialectic is eventually preserved, just like in all the stories of the same type: from Alice in Wonderland to Where the Wild Things Are (2009), passing by Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) – where at the end cartoons can finally have their own place to stay – the territory of fiction and fictional characters needs to be somehow separated from our own, in order for them to keep their imaginary appeal. In this case, though, the gap is not only a dimensional jump through a mirror, but a coast to coast flight from New York City, where the kid lives and the "real world" happens, to Los Angeles, where the Jack Slater movies are set. Such geographic polarization of real and unreal – or fictional – is not casual at all.

As pointed out in this great article by Emilio Spadola, which I already linked in last week's post, the lack of urban landmarks on LA's territory makes the Hollywood sign the only visual symbol of the city, identifying it with movies and their magic appeal. A hint to this notion of the city as a celluloid map is also given in the movie, when the young protagonist first tries to help Slater in his search for the bad guys. Danny has seen the movies over and over, and knows every frame of them. When they are driving around in the cop's red convertible, the kid is then able to spot a familiar villa, where the villain actually resides. It is not through coordinates or spatial directions that he moves in the fictional LA, but by recognizing patterns in his visual field.

On the other hand, New York does have landmarks, and the filming in the Big Apple took place almost exclusively in the Times Square area. Despite being highly symbolic itself, Manhattan is a particularily fertile ground for a reality check, as pointed out by philosopher Slavoj Žižek in his article on 9/11 and its related movie depictions. "September 11 is the symbol of the end of [...] utopia, a return to real history." As a landmark, the iconic status of the World Trade Center was also the reason of its election as the most sensible target for the terrorist attacks. In Last Action Hero, New York seems to be the filmic synthesis of the highest grade of the Real. Reality in NYC is shown as ruthless, and evil can happen without people noticing or caring. Although there are no historical symbolisms and despite being shot years before the 9/11 tragedy, the movie clearly identifies the territory of non-fiction with the City par excellence, the dense and heterogeneous urban reality of Manhattan.

The aforementioned geographical polarization of fiction and reality across the US territory is not limited to Last Action Hero, though, and is a recurring element in American movies. As for Los Angeles, the work of director David Lynch is a good example of the city as an imaginary plateau on which a delusional reality is projected. Films like the masterpiece Mulholland Drive (2001) and the later Inland Empire (2006), with their very localized titles and ambiguous plots, are probably the best examples. As for New York, Woody Allen's very recent Whatever Works (2009) shows us a series of characters all finding their own real selves in Lower Manhattan, a place where even the most cynical Larry David can be given a life lesson. Although very different from Last Action Hero, once again the urban density and human confrontation provided by the City prove crucial in establishing a contact with the real world.

Of course these are few and partial examples, and we shoulnd't forget the urban mythology underlying the aforementioned filmic stereotypes might be a driver in grossing record-making, but it is just the most evident face of Los Angeles' celluloid alter-ego. The City of Angels has been taking conscience of its real side as troubled areas like South Central have gained iconic status through films like Boyz 'N' Da Hood (1991) and South Central (1992), without mentioning documentaries like Crips and Bloods: Made in America (2008). The popularization of this imagery is also reflecting on the real, actual city, as guided tours of gang territories become an alternative to taking snapshots of the Beverly Hills villas. And apart from its balkanized ghettos, LA is also deterritorializing away from the Hollywood sign and onto its status of a border territory, as depicted by movies like the immigration-themed Crossing Over (2009). Schwarzenegger definitely wasn't the last action hero, and the Hollywood myth is far from dying, but it seems Los Angeles can aspire to filmic reality after all.

Due to a mostly comedy-oriented film education as a kid, I had missed Marco Brambilla's action-classic Demolition Man (1993) back when I had the chance to catch it in its box-office semi-freshness (17 years ago it took a while before a movie passed from the movie theater to the TV screen). I have recently made up for this lack, and while the roughly-cut screenplay, the flat characters, and the unlikely fighting choreographies might have amused me much more when I was 10 years old, I have to be thankful I could enjoy a first impact with the movie after reading Mike Davis' City of Quartz and watching a couple of documentaries about the riots that shook Los Angeles in the 90s. In the analysis that follows, this article here has also been a big inspiration in terms of the movie's relationship with Hollywood and LA's urban and social landscape.

In a nutshell, Demolition Man is the story of a super-tough cop (Sylvester Stallone) fighting his old-time criminal counterpart (a reckless and unquestionably evil Wesley Snipes) in the future, after both have undertaken a punitive cryogenic hybernation that Stallone obviously didn't deserve. The story is set in 2032: Los Angeles' urbanization has now expanded to include San Diego and Santa Barbara, and is therefore called San Angeles. The infamous violence that characterized the City of Angels has been banned, and even cursewords are punished with fines (a continuity detail hilarously carried on for the whole movie, unlike the protagonist's sub-quest for his missing daughter, apparently cut off). This Brave New World-inspired LA has turned into a peaceful hi-tech heaven, where malice, sexuality, and phyisical contact are frowned upon. The policentric nature that makes Los Angeles such a controversial ground in terms of urbanism has also disappeared, since the city was rebuilt after a terrible earthquake. The patchwork urban fabric has now been replaced by some sort of gentrified suburbia, where Taco Bell is a chain of high end restaurants. The rich wear kimonos (a hint to the Californian New Age trend or to the growing Japanese interest in the city, also described by Mike Davis?) and the underclass is now living underground, eating rat-burgers.

I find this spatial verticalization of class difference particularly significant and contrasting with the paradoxical ghetto/gated community polarization of the actual LA. In Demolition Man, this dialectic is brought back by the return of Simon Phoenix, the super-villain played by Snipes. Pheonix is so crazy he looks like a black Joker, but unlike Gotham City's most dangerous criminal he has a geographical origin: he is said to be based in South Central, the battle ground where he and Stallone first come to blows at the beginning of the movie. No need to point out the movie was made just one year after the riots breaking out in that area, following the acquitting of the four officials responsible for the Rodney King bashing. In comparison to the dystopic and apocalyptic present both antagonists come from – a 1996 which, when the movie was made, was already the future – the new San Angeles reality lacks direct confrontation with poverty and racial diversity, both relegated in the sewers. The infamous police brutality that made Los Angeles the perfect setting for any cop movie has also disappeared, making guns unnecessary and the new policemen inept when it comes to fighting. But, like the only African-American in the SAPD says, it takes an old-fashioned cop to catch an old-fashioned criminal.

Interestingly enough, although Phoenix is the unquestioned villain in the movie, the person responsible for his return is the apparently peaceful and enlightened Dr. Raymond Cocteau, the city's savior and basically the one who has single-handedly created the San Angeles lifestyle utopia. Cocteau needs the criminal to kill the leader of the underground rebels, a bunch of motorized and weirdly-dressed graffiti-writers coming from the sewers. Obviously the rebels eventually benefit of Stallone's help and Truth is somehow re-established.

We could compare the newfound conflict between Stallone's character and the ridiculously stereotyped villain he's trying to stop like a Clockwork Orange-style awakening, in which the Hollywood spirit making Los Angeles almost synonymous with violence (at least in certain contexts) is brought back to life. More than a celebration of urban diversity, Demolition Man looks more like a reclamation of the city as a battleground, where masculine and physical values overcome a spineless and boring future and shake the precarious balance obtained by the ruling powers with a dose of reality. The film's reality is of course not a multi-ethnical and socially complex fabric, but an epic polarization of Good and Evil. Although not shown, the Hollywood sign we see burning at the very beginning of the movie is restored at least in spirit at the end: through the demolition of the peaceful utopia of San Angeles, the city as a violent simulacrum can be restored.

“Dreaming is work, you know – there I am in a comfortable bed, the next thing you know I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord. I want a dream of me watching myself sleep.” – Mitch Hedberg

What is probably the most fascinating thing about Deleuze and Guattari’s way of writing is the spatial vividity with which they literally build their concepts like organic sculptures. They place them in relationship to each other as suspended in a 3D space, taking form as they evolve from primitive solids into more sophisticated and combined abstract figures. In their last book What is philosophy?, almost a tutorial for designing philosophical interfaces, we can see this process clearly. The two French philosophers see what they do as creation rather than communication, and for this reason reading the first pages of the Anti-Oedipus can be at once confusing and liberating. But being the book a manifesto for schizoanalysis, this only makes it more consistent.
Schizoanalysis is meant as a materialist revolution of psychiatry, most notably negating the Oedipical triangulations (Father, Mother, Me) which, according to Sigmund Freud, structure the subconscious. The word “materialist” is not the first Marxian echo coming across the pages of the Anti-Oedipus, which together with its later and also very influential companion A Thousand Plateus forms a project entitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”. The way these two terms intersect will be made more clear later.

First of all, unlike Freud, Deleuze and Guattari argue the subconscious is in perpetual creation, by means of desire, and that the schizo is the perfect point of view from which to understand the real process of production of man and nature, which are not opposed as in a dichotomy, but part of the same process of production. Such process incorporates the production of production (actions, passions), the production of recording processes (distributions, coordinates, points of reference), and the production of consumption (sensual pleasures, anxiety, pain). Man – the schizo in particular, through his desiring-production – is not opposed to nature and is both producer and product at the same time. Schizophrenia is “the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as ‘the essential reality of man and nature’”. In other words, there are only flows and machines producing them.
Desiring-machines make us organisms, but at the same time they make us suffer for being organized in such a way, or at all. To Deleuze and Guattari the full body without organs is the total embracement of schizophrenia, the unproductive and unconsumable body belonging to the realm of antiproduction.

So, we have a production and an antiproduction. The former happens by way of the desiring-machines, while the latter is a sort of surface (Socius) on which all production is projected, “miraculated”, that is provided with a quasi-cause. This happens during the recording process, which we could call a process of abstraction when also a reason is given for all things to happen. Such reason can be God or capital, but in both cases it is equally divine (from here the use of the word “miraculated”). All production is then “legitimated” by means of such disjunction, and moved on what we could imagine as a sort of hovering and parcelled out plane.
There is still another process that I mentioned before, and that is consumption. Such process is only possible because of the emergence of somewhat of a subject from the recording process (as you might have guessed, it is just another abstract surcodification the schizo is lucky enough not to be a total victim of). Once we have the subject, sitting next to the desiring-machines, we can have consumption. The subject has some kind of a reward from this process, and the recording process makes it trace it back to the quasi-cause we mentioned before.

Being the subject the result of the friction between the desiring-machines attached to the body without organs, it can turn out to be very conflictual. The machines that affect it the most are the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, the former making it suffer as an organism and the latter tricking it into staying anchored on the recording surface, with all its delusional constructions (like Oedipus, for example). This type of subject shifts from state to state in a linear way, letting each state define it.
In some cases, another type of machine kicks in. It’s the celibate machine, which is some sort of compromise of good living, a “new alliance” between the desiring machines and the body without organs. Such machine allows the subject to be reborn with each and every state, experiencing delirium and intensities in a perpetual satisfaction. For this case Deleuze and Guattari make the examples of Judge Schreber, one of Freud’s mental patients, and of Friedrich Nietzsche as schizos and homini historia (because they are able to identify with all characters of history).

The schizo desires as a production of subconscious. Deleuze and Guattari consider desire as a lack to be an Idealistic and outdated conception, and instead argue desiring-production is also the only social production. But why is then the schizo, according to the French philosophers, a product of capitalism?
Capitalism, by decoding the recorded flows of symbols and constructions projected on the Socius, can set the desiring flows free even on such deterritorialized plane, making it closer to a body without organs. By disrupting the abstract structure of society (a few examples could be nation states, historical heritage, local laws) capitalism generates a flow of intensities. This happens while the capital is still doing the opposite, that is “miraculating” such recorded production as a quasi-cause, which makes this even more schizophrenic.
The modern day schizo is still convinced capital makes the world go round, and thus relates to it as an actual factor in the determination of his or her life, but at the same time is carried by it as in a stream whose speed and direction you can’t predict.

More than three decades after the Anti-Oedipus was published, schizophrenia has become a mandatory condition for the globalized urban citizen. We are more and more conscious of the ways we produce ourselves and our identity, but at the same time we are victims of the interfaces we use to create it.
From European bloggers to Central American gang members, we all give in to desire and imagination (which, according to anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, has become a social practice). We shape an image of what we want to be, and proceed to adhere to it as much as possible. We do so not only by filling up detailed profiles on online social networks, but by choosing our clothes, interests, friends, colors, signals, slang. They no longer represent a vertical social hierarchy, but an horizontal cartography of imagined lives and shared customs. In the globalized world people flow like information, and those choices are metadata.

For some, choice is both the biggest liberty and the most pressing duty. The creative class praised by Third Wave theorists like Alvin Toffler and urban advisors like Richard Florida fractalises in niche markets and sub-subcultures, making a living (often barely) off ultra-targeted information. On the other hand, immigrants balkanize in gang-ridden slums, physically deterritorialized and also deterritorializing their imagined identity on a globalized recording surface. The Salvadorian gangs Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18 were born in American prisons, later to spread in Central America after the Salvadorians who founded them were deported and brought all the American gang signs, symbols and imagery to their home country. And at least according to YouTube, gangs with the same signals and language have been sprouting in the Philippines as well.
Even if for some imagining an identity is a professional choice and for others a mean to survive in extreme conditions, we’re all grasping towards that disrupted Socius while being carried away by a furious flow, which in both the body without organs and the globalized world is more important than us. We’re projecting ethnic, social, professional identities on a shared surface (movie and internet imagery, mostly American) miraculated by globalization, which gives us a quasi-cause to move and work, but ultimately leaves us more schizo than ever given the eventual limitedness of our choices.

To conclude by referring back to the Mitch Hedberg quote at the beginning: dreaming our identities is a full-time job, and not everybody gets much of a wage.

Arjun Appadurai’s considerations on the work of imagination in modern societies are some of the most interesting and compelling passages of his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. According to the anthropologist “imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies”.
Appadurai focuses in particular on collective imagination, as a tool to create diasporic public spheres through which globalized and often deterritorialized citizens share the same social imaginary.
As an Indian-born American academic, the scholar has been experiencing first-hand what it means to deterritorialize one’s ethnic and cultural background on a different context, and his particular case could be a perfect example of fulfilled American dream. But again the collective, massive dimension of imagination-induced agency is what really makes the difference in comparison to more ancient times: “the images, scripts, models and narratives that come through mass-mediation [...] make the difference between migration today and in the past”. Also, the American dream is all-too-real in our globalized times, and more in general “these new mythographies are charters to new social projects, and not just a counterpoint to the certainties of daily life”.
But migration to a richer country is not the only inherent phenomenon to the rise of imagination as a social practice, and the examples that Appadurai makes are not all positive. There are diasporas of hope, terror, despair.
In support of his thesis that modernity hasn’t seen a total victory of science over religion, as foretold by German scholars such as the Frankfurt school and Max Weber, he mentions Khomeini and the infamous outrage surrounding Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in the muslim world. We could easily add Al Quaeda and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy as other instances of diasporic rage, but what’s important here is the relationship between media and social imaginary.

Relying on Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined community” (or, as he calls them himself, “community of sentiment”), which can also be built by printed or electronic media, Appadurai explains that “global processes involving mobile texts and migrant audiences create implosive events that fold global pressures into small, already politicized arenas, producing locality in new, globalized ways”.
Such locality can be generated through different feelings or actions (resistance, irony, selectivity), but they are all rooted in collective imagination. Even more importantly – and even more so with electronic media – diasporic public spheres make agency transnational, going beyond nation-states. The micronarratives of media in fact “domesticate the megarhetoric of delelopmental modernization, [...] allowing modernity to be rewritten more as a vernacular globalization and less as a concession to large-scale national and international policies”.
In other words, imagination is an important factor in globalization and should not be underestimated, most importantly because of its implications in the process of identity-building.

At this point I would like to step back from Appadurai’s analysis of modernity and collective emancipation via the manufacturing of common myths, approaching a different dynamic (or, as we might better phrase it, a dysfuncion) of the imaginary.
The examples made so far are all “imagined communities” or “communities of sentiment” to the extent that they project each individual as a member of the specific community, and at the same time the sum of all the members as a sort of projected community. There is not only the profile of the individual members, each of whom has something in common with all the others, but there is also a collective profile of the community itself, a sort of imaginary, sometimes fabricated macro-individual who often has a particular spokesperson or underlying principles constituting its foundation. To use a rather extreme example, we might say the “Al Quaeda Project” is the destruction of the Western paradigm as an ideal, and such purpose can be considered as a “vertical” parameter to measure how well their own “modernism” (cause) is going. Also, said purpose defines the group itself.
We might make less extreme examples of separatist movements or diaporic nations, but the important thing to point out here is that imagined communities are often defined by a “vertical” purpose, a direction in which to tend. There are some exceptions though, some communities that are indeed children to a globalized imaginary, but at the same time lack that verticality, the urgence to define the group as a primary need.
A good example of this second kind of imagined communities are street gangs.

As pointed out by one of the gangsters interviewed by Stacy Peralta in his very insightful documentary Bloods and Crips: Made in America, gangs began to gain power in Los Angeles after the Black Panther Party disbanded. But while the emancipation of African-Americans was the primary goal for the party, the Crips and the Bloods soon began to kill each other for turf. Instead of a “vertical”, “modern”, emancipatory goal, gangs had a more “horizontal”, “postmodern” (or maybe we should just say “short-sighted”) focus. A gang and its color may constitute a community, but a red or a blue bandana doesn’t have any other claim than its self-evident difference from another equivalent rag. By defining their communal identity mainly on an arbitrary parameter such as a color, gangs like the Bloods and Crips gave up the emancipatory plan that made the Black Panthers an imagined community with a direction.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tXHLQSmIpI&hl=it_IT&fs=1&]

Interestingly enough, despite the lack of a focused social and ethnic drive to better community life, the style, signs and colors of LA gangs have been channelled by the media (like films and hip hop music) and have fascinated youth worldwide. Nowadays sets of Crips and Bloods are known to be present even in Holland, where apparently the members are of Surinamese origin. This is pretty significant: being Suriname a former Dutch colony, Surinamese-Dutch Crips are experiencing a double deterritorialization.
Despite the worldwide diffusion of the LA gang imaginary, its heaviest effects are probably felt in Central America. In El Salvador, two LA-born gangs have been slaughtering each other ferociously for years now, all because of different signs and numbers tattoed on their bodies. Signs and numbers that have been decided many miles and checkpoints away: la Dieciocho derives from LA’s 18th Street Gang, while MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) was also founded in the City of Angels, but its most characteristic sign, the devil’s horns, was inspired by heavy metal music.
These gangs, now widespread in Salvador, were imported as a sort of franchise: some Salvadorians migrated to the States, wound up being gang members, were deported back to Salvador. Then they recruited more people to go back to the US, only to be deported again. This cycle of deportations has actually fueled the gang phenomenon in El Salvador, while it hasn’t really made the situation North of the border any better: the maras are spreading across the whole North American territory regardless of how many gangsters are sent back, and the process is making the drug trafficking network tighter.
The Salvadorian examples are particularily moving, as they show the way fascination for a globalized imaginary of violence can become all-too-real, even beyond borders, and give way to a bloodshed comparable only to a civil war (to learn more on those gangs you should watch the movie Sin nombre (2009), and deceased Christian Poveda’s La Vida Loca).

As we have seen, Arjun Appadurai’s notion of imagination as a social practice can be applied to very different phenomena, but we should make the due differences between imagined communities with an identifying direction (be it constructive or disruptive) and the ones who share mainly an aesthetic code and economic interests. If the first ones represent a way to claim agency through the interface of social imaginary, the second constitute a more ambiguous and politically segregated alternative.

One of the first things that struck me when I first came to Amsterdam – once I accumulated enough expertise to find my way beyond the deadly tourist triangle of Damrak/Kalverstraat/Red Light District – was the way the city is so open and globalized, but at the same time manages to keep its own relatively-homogeneous feel. Since one of the symptoms usually associated with globalization are fast food chains, I was also surprised to find several local reinterpretations of the standard McDonald's burger stand. Maybe I'm paying more attention to it because I come from Italy, where burger culture doesn't really exist, but I think Amsterdam burgers can be an interesting allegory of the way the city is allowing the world in, while keeping the door keys at hand. The following examples represent a partial depiction of Amsterdam through the greasy lenses of burger-eating.

FEBO

Have you ever bought hot food from a wall? I hadn't before I went to FEBO, which might not necessarily be the lekkerste as they advertise it, but it's sure a killer solution when it comes to late night hunger. Relatively cheap and moderately tasty, FEBO can be spotted anywhere a desperate need for a burger might arise, especially but not limited to touristy neighborhoods. If you take a look at the wide range of croquettes they offer you'll realize FEBO is no McDonald's parody, but it's got some Dutchness of its own. Its yellow brightness clashing with the red logo makes it stand out like a searchlight, a call for the drunk and hungry which doesn't need any subtlety. And did I mention the vending machine formula? Well, I just did.

BURGER MEESTER

Basically, the anti-FEBO. Expensive and culinary versatile, this burger chain serves excellent burger variations of several ethnic cuisines, from sushi-inspired tuna burgers to thai-flavored chicken ones. And you can even suggest them recipes on their website, with the thrilling chance of having them become the Burger of the Month. With diner-inspired furniture washed-up in modern Dutch slickness, Burger Meester is an hybrid fast food/restaurant experience, in terms of both waiting time and price range. It's not a surprise you can only find them in strategic hip and gentrified neighborhoods like the Jordaan, Plantage, and the Pijp.

BURGER BAR

My favorite so far, this fast food is discretely sitting a couple meters away from a humongous Burger King in one of the most touristy areas in the center of Amsterdam. We might see it as a good compromise between FEBO – location-wise – and Burger Meester – quality-wise. But really, it doesn't really matter. In terms of variety Burger Bar gives you a lot of freedom, at the obvious condition that you pay the price. Not as ethnically curious as Burger Meester, you can still choose between Irish beef, black angus and the more pricey wagyu beef, with the possibility of a good burger+fries+drink combo for less than 10 euros (which is kind of impossible with Burger Meester). I should add both their medium-well done burgers and their fries are worth the expense. As for the bar itself, it looks clean and designer-Dutch without depressing you with the morgue-style lighting so typical of McDonald's and Burger King.

Albeit different, all the examples I made share something: they are a local declination of a global formula, conjugating the typically Dutch attention for design – or extreme openness to tourist needs, in FEBO's case – with the need to offer globally appreciated and recognized food. As for me, I'm happy to eat and I'll be even happier to share more as I progressively put up weight in Amsterdam.

As you might have read somewhere (like here, here or here), Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez has just signed a deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures for a future feature sci-fi movie. Raimi was impressed by a short clip Alvarez created and posted on YouTube (see video above), immediately becoming a hit on the video-sharing platform. AtaqueDePànico shows some giant robots attacking the city of Montevideo and destroying all its landmarks, eventually exploding and reducing everything to rubble in a surprisingly good FX spree.

Little else happens in the short movie, which has nonetheless been compared to Neill Blomkamp's Alive in Joberg, the one that eventually led to District 9. Which one is better and YouTube's exact role in hi-jacking the attention of the Hollywood industry's talent scouts are debates I'll leave for other occasions. What I'm really curious about is: where will Alvarez's feature film be set?
As we've seen before, Peter Jackson's support to District 9 has been rather invisible and not patronizing, allowing Blomkamp's movie to become an unprecedented example of sci-fi imagery going global and enriching itself with unexpected locations and social actuality. Seeing Johannesburg taking the place of New York as the theater of human-alien confrontation was one of the reasons why I think the movie is significant: it was also an opportunity to legitimate the ascension of local geographies to the status of global imagery.

Palacio Salvo tower, Montevideo's most famous landmark

But we know Peter Jackson is the New Zealand-born father of wacky pop-culture-bludgeoning underground gems such as Meet the Feebles, and I personally think (wish?) some of that has survived despite his later mainstream exploits (read: King Kong). Rephrasing that: he's not the Industry.
On the other side we have Sam Raimi and his Hollywood-based company. Although the Evil Dead-father has himself been toying and experimenting with genres, famously ranging from horror to comedy in the span of one trilogy, the production background is different than Jackson's and definitely Alvarez's flick will be likely to have a different kind of peer-pressure to begin with.

Will the next alien invasion be an opportunity to extend the sci-fi map and have a fresh look at Uruguayans having to deal (for once) with aliens, or will the rare low-budget prologue to the movie remain a signal for the entertainment industry and commercial strategies 2.0, with Alvarez's robots bombing (yet one more time) the Statue of Liberty?

I just posted an article on ymag.it (former yskira.com) about District 9. You should go read it.

Parker and Stone’s fine-tuned postmodern pastiche formula didn’t fail to amuse and get the usual media coverage, but fan reviews are kind of mild and the accuses of poor taste/bad writing are no news. Most likely, there will hardly be any reference to “Dead Celebrities” in your newsfeeds next week.

The reason why South Park has been so long lasting and true to itself for so many years now is the unprecedented freedom its authors are able to get from Comedy Central. Apart from a few notable examples (like the Scientology-bashing “Trapped In The Closet” – which allegedly led Tom Cruise to take action and have Viacom, Comedy Central’s owner, pull the episode’s second airing – or “Cartoon Wars” – where the network itself didn’t dare showing a depiction of prophet Muhammad right after the infamous riots occurred in the Islamic world following the publication of disrespectful cartoons by a Danish newspaper), the show has lived a relatively undisturbed life so far and lives on in its very own niche on cable TV and the internet.
The show’s particular location in the global mediascape is crucial to both its freedom and attitude: cable viewers know what they pay for, and the decision to make the show go online only hours after the TV airing is proof of the network’s respect for the internet audience, which has been supporting it from day one. South Park not being “mainstream” is then not just a concern for Parker and Stone, but also the very reason of its “being South Park”.

The series is a perfect example of pluralization in contemporary media. In his book South Park Conservatives, right-wing journalist Brian C. Anderson lists it as one of the many examples (along with FOXNews, talk-radio and so on) of the downfall of liberal bias in mass communication.
Although Anderson’s interpretation of the show is quite biased itself (the show definitely tends more towards a libertarian position), his point on its media collocation strikes a nerve. The horizontal, de-centered, postmodern nature of today’s media (especially the internet) makes them a perfect ground for the show to prosper without compromising too much: not only are its explicitness and hysterical display of the unshown and untold typical of porn and gore (two major drivers of internet attention), but South Park’s libertarian values (see “Gnomes“) also perfectly match the free market and free thought utopia embedded in the globalized web.
Despite its zen-infused morals (Parker’s father tried to raise him a Buddhist and both him and Stone worked on a series of animated cartoons illustrating some of Alan Watts‘ speeches), the show comes across as cynical and disruptive, an in-your-face satire always negating two opposite and equally wrong positions to defend a middle-ground “truth”, a sort of compromise of good living.

Both South Park’s urge to destroy illusions through irony and its more subtle proposal of a middle ground are precisely the type of postmodern practices philosopher Slavoj Žižek has been warning us about with his writings.
Through advocating a return to Hegelian dialectics, Žižek’s work reminds us of the importance of the Symbolic (”the realm of radical alterity: the Other”) in keeping ourselves safe from the “unbearable freedom” of the Real (”that which resists symbolization absolutely [...] it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order”). The Real cannot be understood, it can’t make sense to us and we have to filter it by forcingly dividing it into significants. A way of doing this is the creation of our subjectivity via the definition of the Other, a “communal network of social institutions, customs and laws” that are really a “kind of collective lie to which we all individually subscribe” (all quotes come from this page here).
We need to define the Other by opposition in order to know who we are, not to be blown away by the terrible and traumatic wholeness of the Real.
The philosopher’s critical views on liberal capitalism, New Age religions and ecology, as utopian tools to perfect the homogenous system of the globalized world, are also in strong contrast with Francis Fukuyama’s argument on the end of history and call for a revitalization of the Symbolic, now barely kept alive by conspiracy theorists and paranoia.

Although one of the smartest, most powerful and interesting features in South Park is media criticism, by resisting censorship (or conveniently playing the role of enfant terrible under the corporate banner of Comedy Central), what the show does is “filling the gaps”, “saying it all”, exemplifying at the same time the unity between the show itself (legitimated by air space and success) and its not-so-Other counterpart, the media it criticizes.
The symbolic value of the Other, the possibility of censorship or the actual likeliness of a cancellation are de facto disintegrated by an eager viewership, no matter how specific or limited in comparison to the huge spectrum of the mediascape.

Unlike comedy pioneer Lenny Bruce, who got arrested and eventually defeated by the Law, South Park keeps prospering on a much more media-savvy, success-bred crusade in which the most important value is enunciation itself, the possibility to answer an urge to speak so typical of us internet-using generations. But such prosperity is hardly as effective in generating the dialectic opposition with the Other that Bruce famously raised: a petition in his favor was signed by the likes of Bob Dylan, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg, along with comedians like Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge and Woody Allen.
If we think about it, this is not a surprise considering typical ’60s-fashioned countercultural people were looking for something “far out“, whereas the South Park generation is laughing at “inside jokes”.

The Demise of the Big Other is of course not Parker and Stone’s fault, they simply live in a different historical period and work in a much more diverse media environment than comedians used to a few decades ago. Still, by critically reflecting on its limits, South Park can help us all better understand the crucial turn we are taking.

Since Twitter came out it was pretty obvious it was something else. Its minimal, quasi-zen approach (short haiku-style posts, ultra-light interface, a very “carpe diem” real-time nature) won many users over. But why would such a restrictive, limited social network become so popular? There are so many more things you can do via MySpace or Facebook, where you can easily embed everything possibly embeddable.
Nonetheless, although Mark Zuckerberg’s well-tested money-making machine is still bigger than Twitter (I’d go as far as to say it’s almost necessary for internet users), the social colossus has been learning a lot from its younger, smarter brother.
The “twitterification” of Facebook has raised some perplexities and the opening of that once closed and well-guarded environment wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing for their business. I like the definition of Facebook as a “gated community” (read here): you can easily do everything you need on the internet inside of it and forget about the outside web. This has been part of the network’s strenght in the past, one more reason why it is both scary and addictive.
While Twitter’s openness (making information public and searchable in real-time) has definitely played a major role in the social network’s rise to pop culture phenomenon, replacing Facebook as the next internet thing, I think there is another factor worth analyzing (and no, it’s not journalist A.D.D.).

(Image from pixterdust.com)

If we compare the aesthetics of Facebook and Twitter it’s easy to notice there are many differences.
First of all, the logo. The first site timidly features a textual and cold corporative stamp, the second sports the cute-looking illustration of a blue bird, easily entering the popular internet imagery and embodying an image of lightness and speed (as opposed to the heavy and bulky “fail whale”). Also, once we get to using the site, it’s blatant it is far more open in terms of background customization, colors and so on. And that’s just the beginning.
If we use Twitter long enough (and by this I mean as soon as any of our contacts tells us about TweetDeck or any other Twitter client) we find out the 140-character limit is not really an issue and, if we need to post pictures on our feed, we can easily upload them on Twitpic.
As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone points out here, the possibility for users to develop their own Twitter-based platforms has been key the network’s success. While Facebook apps and the “share on Facebook” feature on many sites tend to have everything converging into the standard, visually uptight Facebook interface, Twitter is far more de-centered and image-curious.

With a single account, Twitter users can access many extended interfaces (like Twitterface, Monitter, Re-Tweet Radar and countless more), some of which can get really elaborate and aesthetically spectacular (see Twittervision, Trendsmap or Twittearth).
Of course such open-ness has also generated some scams, but it looks like Twitter development is basically an everybody-wins practice.

(Image from thezeninyou.com)

After browsing through all of these different platforms, graphs and interfaces, one question remains. What has become of Twitter’s eastern-flavored aesthetic appeal? How many users are really thinking tweets over to stay in the 140-character limit, instead of just stuffing anything in via FriendFeed or other transversal means?
Twitterers using the site are less and less numerous compared to the overall client-enthusiasts, and it appears like, instead of sucking everything in its own mini-internet Facebook-style, the blue bird is flying all over the place, re-territorializing its social network on the whole www. But the internet has also been affecting Twitter usage, spoiling much of its micro-blogging potential.
The 140-character challenge might still be a good way to learn how to weigh words before using them, to reclaim some of the juice dispersed in the web’s information cauldron and focus on REAL communication, stripping it off all the viral applications, animated puppets and vacuous statistics.
Twitter could have helped us all develop HDADD, like Steven Wright’s nephew.