What has happened to your town or city in the past couple of generations? Has it transformed itself into a retailing nightmare with no locally owned or family run businesses? Are there sharkish youngsters posing in high street goldfish bowls, acting out a sly CCTV theatrical production of ‘how can I empty that punters bank account?’ Give those youngsters some merit as they may be the saving graces of your community, and with a little economic tweaking, your city itself may be economically sustainable thanks to your retail workers. Have you yet to realise that the artificially aired shopping centre is the best place for your family to implode and cause untold stresses on any of your imagined savings accounts? Is your inner city parade any better? Probably less chance of a deadly influenza or legionnaire's diseases. Or have you ever tried making friends with that person who sells you things in your community cornershop, items you don’t buy at the so-called supermarket, whose management merely pump up their prices on your ever spiralling spend at that place where you know no-one? Where has all that money you’ve spent in ‘Tesco’ gone? Are you insurmountably trying to economize for a holiday break away from the norm? Some of you may have realized that escaping from immoral criminal calamity, which is conceivably driven by fiends via mostly illegal leisure drugsters, who are streamlined by techno soundtracks, associated STD-strewn prostitution and a general malaise of indecent hedonism on the part of most partaking in another millenium’s first decade of decadence, and that perchance, it might just be a good idea to get out of those oversized savagely uncivilized cities.
If that doesn’t make some sense of what has been happening in your capital cities, then perhaps we can focus more on the invasive ‘americanisms’. Is there a fuel station, fast food restaurant or café that isn’t owned or supplied by the monstrous white swirl with a dullened red backdrop, ‘Coca-Cola’? Or in the case of vehicle petrol stations, resource scarce invasive war mongering governments in partnership with ‘oil companies’? Do you still have a neighbouring national government taxing your people and your progress? Can you lead your life without foreign businesses taking your share of what is truly yours? Are you still unable to purchase your local farmers’ products, which could be free from genetic modifications, if and when you buy food? Are you admiring your neighbouring nations’ internationally reknowned cultural icons and wondering why you haven’t been giving life to yours? Is your indigenous language being denigrated by international trends? Are those food industries’ workers in those enormous factories really the kind of people who you want to be preparing your food? It certainly isn’t grandmother’s home-cooking, or is it?
Perhaps you need a short weekend break in Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Tokyo or Vladivostock? Then again, if you’d like to take a hot break, the penny must have dropped, it is here in South America. In this continent, there is a distinct lack of Arezzo’s, Boots’, MacDonalds and Starbucks outlets. Thank goodness, we discover. Why? Because there are audio specialists for cars, living rooms, personal stereos, etc. You will make friends with your local café owner, despite his booming local business. You can have your choice jewellery hand crafted to suit your spouse. You don't risk life nor limb walking to buy what you'd like. You may be able to have a long conversation with a local tailor, dressmaker or cobbler and aquire the services you’d like to create or repair your dream garments, without an attached esteemed brandname of capitalist conflagration. Perhaps I’m not exaggerating my consternation clearly enough. In many South American towns and cities, you can stroll up a recently greased, rainclad, cobbled street, on the rare occasions that it does rain, without the risk of some overgrown monkey skidding its monster 4WD into the path of your spouse, your children and everything that really matters in your life. Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t figured, the sun shines, like on no other cultivable land and South American nations are, not really so coincidentally, famed for their agricultural exports. It may be important to immerse your skin with a solar defensive cream before treading the beautifully adorned streets of South America. And you will find genuine smiles, especially if you know how to live comfortably with yourselves.
If you were lost in a glossy, white strip-lit hallway entrance to a brand new shopping mall with sliding doors and a trance inducing soundtrack in a place where your plastic bank card cannot handle their wishes, where the sun most certainly doesn’t shine and you find yourselves yearning for the old times, when your families’ oft-frequented bookstore would have your requested titles delivered to your or any other doorstep, and the bookshop simply no longer exists, now, maybe internet shopping is the answer. If you think another credit busting christmas is simply the last thing you or any of your fellows should even imagine celebrating, then let me add, yet another religion is probably not a solution! When your friends want you to swallow more muck in the local pub, club or brightly lit restaurant chain, perhaps transforming yourselves into hosts or hostesses in your dinner party imaginings could be a cure to a western illness; how to have some unabated, mind-numbingly repetitive fun?
Well, Brazilians are a people who most definitely do know how to have fun. Most of you will find that your idea of fun is almost certainly catered for in most Brazilian communities, towns and in more cases than not, in the metropolitan centres. Of course, if you simply cannot live without shopping sprees, fast food and modern infrastructurally developed cities; don’t worry, that’s all here and with a big difference. There is an extraordinary liklihood that Brazilians are going to give you the best they possibly can. It does depend somewhat, on your communicative capabilities. Many Brazilians read in several languages and in larger cities you may be surprised how many are competent users of English, often, admittedly and rather annoyingly, with a brash north American accent or a Brazilian’s attempt at it, but in spite of this being our international lingua franca, many are also learning French, some German and in general, Brazilians have a positive attitude towards those who aren’t able to speak Portuguese or Spanish. Notwithstanding this authentic interest in who isn’t familiar, as you’ll have discovered when you visit the next neighbourhood, district, town, city, nation or continent, dissimilar to some locations, in most of Brazil there’s still a warmth of spirit towards an unknown stranger, especially when you are here in the flesh, so to speak. Institutionalized racism is a problem being tackled, not with ‘positive discrimination’, as it is widely known but with statistically managed equal access to education. That is just a small beginning but amongst most Brazilian citizens there is a growing tolerance and sensitivity towards minorities of all types, race, homosexuals of both genders, the elderly and the massive diversity of disabilities, from paraplegics to miopics. What’s more, it is one of the nations with the fastest growing Asian diaspora and there is no lack of African intellectuals specializing in postgraduate education in most cities with federal universities.
In addition to this truly global cultural diversity, in many parts of Brasil you may think you are in a typically modernized conurbation, with multi-lane motorways with their inordinate arrays of down and up ramps, smooth recently constructed metroplitan train services with mobile phone and internet connections in the deepest and longest of tunnels, additionally perfected city bus services and an unchallenged inter-city coach service. If you choose to drive here: take care, as there are also roadsters who seem to be imagining they are some unimaginable god’s given gift to a steering wheel. In all honesty, comparing national statistics on road deaths, it doesn’t surprise me how well Brazil stands and is improving its statistics, as there are evolving police campaigns that are reducing alcohol related accidents and driving test reforms designed to instill defensive driving techniques, better car maintenance, basic first aid and mostly encouraging greater responsibility in future generations, for what are extraordinarily dangerous machines: cars. If I’m not mistaken, according to current United Natons’ statistics, the World Health Organisation ranks road accidents in fourth for the worst killers on the planet. Only heart disease , STD’s and cancer, not in that order, are more lethal, until the militaries and their cohorts are included and can be held responsible for their terrifying actions. In most South American nations there are no international troops and South American troops work exclusively within UN laws emerging as peace-keepers on a better footing than many so-called ‘peace-keeping’ forces. We are also developing pacifying police units, a.k.a PPU’s in some of the poorest urban areas.
Whether you consider Antartica and Australasia as continents in themselves is really geographers’ domain but knowing that Africa and Asia are the real continental giants and exclusively top a billion inhabitants with Asia including 2 nations, each with over a billion, namely China and India, just in case you needed reminding. North America, with Mexico and most of the Arctic being unused and unoccupied Canadian icemelt, comes next. Then South America is the fourth largest continent. Apparently, it isn’t really a piece of cake, writing on a continental scale as the Europeans discovered from Marco Polo’s adventures but you can be sure that South America is more than slightly larger than middling, with 8 continents, eternalising Antartica, Central America and Europe as tiddling in comparison.
Being as massive as it is, Brazil is the fifth largest nation, territorially, there are regional variations with infrastructural progress and in Rio de Janeiro, for example, like many so-called developed nations, there are a few 70’s&80’s constructed architectural icons that now appear to have suffered from the fads and fashions of transitory architectural whims. However, for diverse perspectives on post-modernisms, I think you’ll be pushed to find equivalents elsewhere and despite our keen eyes’ perceptions on dating buildings through architectural trends, most, while not fitting Europeans’ 50’s&60’s drastic, grey, superficial austerities, can be said to reflect a flair and audacity that you’ll seldom find by chance, because as you may discover, many Brazilians love taking risks and in construction, there are no surreal rugby balls or other absurdities as they can all be made functional, like any urbanscapes. This is as appropriate a space as any to mention, Oscar Niemeyer, a living legend for all city dwellers. So, with your own research methodologies and a few discrete links, you are now admitted to admire the architectural master of our era. Like his style or not, it might just be worth considering his architectural school of art as comparably classical as Great Zimbabwe, Scots conical towers, Greek triangularisms&circular pillardom, Gaudi, Byzantine roofless theatricals, the Russian Kremlin, Red Square and the Duma or any number of religiously inspired specialist schools of architecture. If you’ve been lost in freud, sofas, stufas and skyscraping vibrators, more fool you! Where curvature is gracious and yet canonically stationary, look no further than the South Americab cone. Would you care to dance? www.niemeyer.org.br
Oscar Niemeyer-a Vida E Um Sopro
