<nettime> Town and Country

[Brandon Keim <brandonkeim@mindspring.com>]

Town and Country
(that feeling you get after going days without seeing a horizon)

Last night I watched Orfeu, Carlos Diegues' lovely film adaptation of 
the Greek legend of Orpheus and Euridice.  Set in a Rio de Janeiro 
slum at the beginning of Carnival, Orpheus is an Afro-Brazilian samba 
teacher, and Euridice an orphaned Indian who has recently left the 
country to move in with her aunt. 

Almost immediately Euridice is repulsed by the squalor and amorality 
of her surroundings.  She and Orfeu fall in love, and they make plans 
to leave the ghetto and return to her beautiful Amazonian home.  Of 
course, this being a Greek tragedy, you know the ending . . . but I 
digress.

Orfeu's depiction of poverty in an overcrowded megalopolis was, I 
have a feeling, probably pretty realistic, especially when it dealt 
with the ubiquity of television -- that commercial fountain of common 
mythology, at once a daily soporific and source of unattainable, 
self-destructive desires.  The entire world, city and country alike, 
consumes and is consumed by commercial television; and nearly every 
show, every commercial, takes place in either city or sprawl.  Rural 
reality simply does not exist except as something to escape.

Looking at the vast and terrible panoramas of Rio's slums -- 
interchangeable with the slums of every major city of what we so 
euphemistically call the 'developing' world -- I could not imagine 
why anyone would exchange the country, with its space and sky and 
life, for claustrophobic crime-ridden concrete warrens.

The explanation given by most who are drawn to the cities is the 
prospect of employment and a steady income.  Cultural and educational 
opportunities are another -- but the vast majority come for work, and 
the vast majority of work to be found is menial drudgery.  Is it more 
satisfying to be a janitor working sixty hours a week, spending two 
hours a day on crowded subways, than a farmer?  Of course, as a 
farmer one is less likely to earn enough money to buy the products 
glamorized on television and in mass consumer culture -- and this, I 
believe, is the deepest reason for the appeal of urban life.      

It could be argued that I am romanticizing rural existence.  Small 
villages are  often rife with petty infighting, prejudice, and 
ignorance (something to remember when we glorify the metaphor of 
'global village').  Environmental degradation and social unrest can 
make the country as inhospitable as any ghetto (though this 
degradation and unrest can often be traced to the same 
corporate-military-industrial power structure whose media exalts the 
urban).

Still, there is no reason why the possibilities of community should 
be restricted to immense cities, tiny villages, and anonymous 
suburbia.  Neither must rural living be predominantly agrarian. 
There must be other models for human habitation, just as there must 
be alternatives to consumer capitalism. I believe that most 
contemporary artists and architects -- adulators of fragmentation and 
jaggedness and the straight line, the latter so diametrically opposed 
to the lushness of natural forms -- are guilty of confusing 
inevitability with rightness and blindly accepting, even when they 
resist the orgy of consumption to which we are conditioned, the 
wisdom of conventional power: that urban life is the only authentic 
life, that the megacity is the form of the future.  If 'postmodern' 
fluidity of meaning and the advent of the digital can teach us 
anything, it is the primacy of choice, the potential for wholeness, 
and the infinity of possibility.



Brandon
brandonkeim@mindspring.com
www.djinnetic.org/blog
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