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URBAN MYTHOLOGIES1
THE FANTASTIC AND THE ARCHAIC IN THE GENESIS OF THE CONTEMPORARY METROPLIS. “… It seemed that the sound, that every fabulous chord of the melody got into every cell of my body and transmuted it, its physiology. The beats seemed to glow in the air, reverb as if I were in a cathedral…” (Matthew COLLIN, Estado alterado (Spanish ed.) 2002)
“… In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. (…) You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” (Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) in “Fight Club”2)
The project of the modern city presented the urban as an entirely rational environment, a place where science and philosophy had their place, a space for enlightened revolutions to happen. It constituted the real and tangible world, far away from rural fictions and superstitions. However, modern urban culture always stresses the unpredictable and the illegible; it creates products that actively evoke a lost past, like urban tribes, cult trends, pop idols, urban legends. If the ancient civilizations measured their world and time in the movement of stars, contemporary citizens deposit their faith in ubiquitous movie stars. MUF Architects (UK) carried out a project for a new square in Barking (London) in which they placed an artificial wall made up with old stones from different ruins, ironically building history. Soon after the project was finished, the local people had invented new origins for the wall: it now was an ancient part of Barking Abbey that had been unburied – they explained proudly to the tourists. Is thus the myth or the fantastic an essential component of the urban? The main urban feature is that cities are places where we are able to hide: citizens are able to keep their secrets fusing in the unconcern of the metropolis, unlike villagers, who are unable to bear a double life. Our paper in the city is basically that of a voyeur3. We gaze our cities from the window of glazed skyscrapers, taking the role of a new god. It’s precisely the disapproval of some other gods which make those skyscrapers crumble, bringing the real back into the city. Those images of the urban disintegration overlap other myths and legends that bring about a fear of an annihilation of biblical The term ‘urban myth’ or ‘urban mythology’ has been seldom applied as a synonym for ‘urban legend’. However I shall use it as a transposition of the classical mythology into the urban, thus meaning roughly “a body of myths/stories of a particular culture that use the supernatural [fantastic, illusory, unreal] to interpret [urban] events and to explain the nature of [cities].” (Based on the original definition of mythology from Wikipedia). 1
2
Fight Club, David FINCHER, 1999 USA.
Michel DE CERTEAU, The practice of everyday life, University of California Press 1984 BERKELEY and LOS ANGELES, p 92. 3
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proportions: the fall of the Babel Tower, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra; the eradication of the urban because of its utter potential to produce evil. Cities, forbidden fruits, produce a special perception of the hidden, the magical and the mysterious. We experience our cities on foot, drifting into a constant blow of images, as spectators. As we run through them, we select and fragment the space traversed; we omit whole parts4, bringing about a necessary ellipsis, the basic feature of Western cinema. This links with the idea of cinema, perhaps the most important contemporary form of fiction, the one that creates the most powerful modern legends. David Lynch’s movies, which began as a mere reference, gradually took hold of the essay, proving to be a very illuminating portraits of these amazingly complex places that lead to schizophrenia, places with ordinary façades that cover unbearable secrets. Perhaps “the city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”5
THE OTHER CITY. URBAN ‘DOPPELGÄNGER’. “… We can call anonymously from a public phone… Come on, it will be just like in the movies, we will pretend to be someone else…” (Betty Elms trying to persuade the counterfeit Rita in “Mulholland Drive”6.)
David Lynch’s vision of the urban condition could be a good example of the exploration of this other city that is imagined behind or actually within the real city. The idea of the ‘doppelgänger’7 is very common in the filmography of the director, in which characters usually split into different personalities or have an evil double. Lynch has repeatedly expressed his fascination on what hides behind appearance, how germs and bacteria can proliferate in the clear skin of a face 8. Perhaps where this ambivalence is more evident is in the starting sequence of “Blue Velvet”9 where these two worlds, meant to be apart, 4
Id, p 101.
5
Jonathan RABAN, Soft city, Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1974 LONDON.
6
Mulholland Drive, David LYNCH, 2001, USA/FRANCE, CIBY 2000.
The term ‘doppelgänger’ (from German: ‘double walker’) is used in fantastic literature as a (typically evil) double of someone. “The word is also used to describe the sensation of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral vision, in a position where there is no chance that it could have been a reflection” (Wikipedia). It’s usually related to the notion of an inherent, hidden ‘dark side’ of a person emerging and taking hold. 7
8
Andrés HISPANO, David Lynch, Claroscuro americano (Spanish edition), Glénat 1998, BARCELONA, p 22.
Blue Velvet, David LYNCH, 1986, USA, De Laurentiis. Sequence retrievable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=nM975_Ld9S0 9
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come together opening a deadly Pandora box. We are transported from the naive façade of Lumberton, North Carolina deep into the filthy underground world of bugs that crawl beneath. The bright world is pleasant, but also brings about repression and social conventions. On the other hand the dark world shows the shadows of the city, but it is also a space for the fantasy 10. The lady inside the house, totally unaware, is watching a noir film in her TV. This “introduction of a fiction inside a fiction” 11 is a constant feature in Lynch’s cinema. Precisely that blend of fiction and folded realities is the one that takes place in the contemporary city. Jonathan Raban dreams of “living in a city like Dickens's London, that marvelous labyrinth of dark alleys, secrets, surprises, extreme economic inequalities, coincidences, possibilities, where every kind of human imperfection and eccentricity finds its niche.” 12 However, he is not talking about the actual city of London, but referring to a fictional London, or anyhow the perception of the city that Charles Dickens made visible in his literature. This materialization of urban perceptions that takes place seems to always make reference to itself; the image of the city folds over the actual city. The metropolis is, thus, a place where everyone lives in and finds everything they look for –a place there is no need to leave 13. This independency also brings to mind the long-lost polis, the ancient autonomous Greek cities which embody the origins of the urban. This polis idea seems to define the city as the starting point of the touchable and the rational; a space where citizens sit and discuss, constructing democracy, setting the rules to organize the real, a place where later social revolutions and scientific discoveries could only take place. However, this apparent realness is also the stage where many people can carry out their façades, their doppelgangers. The city’s crucial contribution is that of the hideout, the appropriate setting in which to conceal their other life, a life that is probably far from urbanity, that escapes from the tight politeness it mirrors. The appearance of the urban tribes, one of these mythological or archaizing elements of the city, is claimed to exist as an “emotional shelter from urban coldness”14. This ‘neotribalization’15 of contemporary society sounds like a quite anarcho-primitivist response to the isolation of the modern city; a creation of bonds and
10
Charo LACALLE, David Lynch, Terciopelo azul (Spanish edition), Paidós Ibérica 1998, BARCELONA, p 117.
11
Id, p 99.
12
Jonathan RABAN, The perfect city. Originally published in Monocle, Aug 1st 2007. Retrieved Dec 23rd 2007 from http://www.jonathanraban.com/article.php?id=11 In the movie “The thirteenth floor” (Josef RUSNAK, 1999, USA) the characters find they are living in a computer simulated reality only when they try to get out of their city and find out there is no more reality. Apparently, they didn’t feel the need to leave Los Angeles before that moment, they were voluntarily trapped. 13
14
Pere Oriol COSTA, J. Manuel PÉREZ TORNERO, Fabio TROPEA, Tribus urbanas: El ansia de identidad juvenil, Paidós Ibérica 1996 BARCELONA, p 11. 15
Ibid.
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a voluntary marginalization from a society that embodies “the fall of modernity” 16. The capability of becoming someone else is a common skill of Lynchean characters, and it is only possible in the middle of urban confusion. Characters seem to merge, divide, disguise themselves as another, change their names… This attribute is also applicable to the actors that play those roles17, producing again that feeling of something overlapping over itself. In a classical movie, one of the actresses would have to be a blond and the other a brunette to be easily recognizable and distinguished by the viewer. In a David Lynch’s movie, the brunette becomes a blonde wearing a cheap wig, or else both are played by the same actress. Nevertheless, this real city that we run away from can also appear as dreamlike. In “Mulholland Drive”, Lynch depicts a city of Los Angeles that shows the weirdness of ordinary life. He uses the unreal just to make us more aware of the real, because “Hell according to Lynch anchors in the real, it nourishes from the real, it names the real.”18 However the outer look of the locations has an organic, tacky quality which makes them detach from the tangible, the real and artificial world of the city. Acknowledging this ability for creating other worlds, certain critics have created the term ‘Lynchtown’ 19.
16
Id, p 32.
After being offered the part for Frank Booth in “Blue velvet”, Dennis Hopper called David Lynch in a rush, very excited, yelling “I am Frank” before he had time to reply. (Andrés HISPANO, David Lynch, Claroscuro americano (Spanish edition), Glénat 1998, BARCELONA p 134.) 17
Juan VICENTE ALIAGA, El infierno según Lynch. From Ángel ROMÁN, El infierno que baila conmigo (Spanish edition), Estudio Euroláser, 2005, p 66. 18
19
Andrés HISPANO, David Lynch, Claroscuro americano (Spanish edition), Glénat 1998, BARCELONA p 12.
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THE DREAMT CITY. DREAMS THAT MELT INTO NIGHTMARES. “…You were in the house, calling my name, but I couldn't find you. Then there you were, lying in bed... but it wasn't you. It looked like you, but it wasn't.…” (Fred Madison talking to Renée right before the ‘Mystery Man’ takes hold of her in “Lost Highway”20.)
In “Mulholland Drive”, Dan and Herb meet for breakfast at a Winkie’s in the most anonymous part of the city. Dan talks about a recurrent dream he has concerning them both being in that diner, in which he later finds a man that is hiding in the back; it is the precise person “who is doing it”, he can even “see him through the walls”21. Following Herb’s determination to see if the man is really “out there”22, they both get out with again fatal consequences: Dan collapses when seeing (or imagining) a terrible figure that grins at him. According to Lynch, when you re-produce or re-present23 your dreams you take the risk of making them real, or turning them into a nightmare. Cities have actually stand for the materialization of dreams, like the pursue of modernity, building a new reality in Haussmannian Paris or Betty’s character in “Mulholland Drive” that arrives to the city of Los Angeles after her dream of becoming a movie star. The city is the representative space par excellance24, everything in it refers or recalls something else; as we drift from the city we encounter different street names that link to other places, persons and events, building “constellations that hierarchize and semantically order the surface of the city (…), they detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting points.” 25 In “Mulholland Drive”, names seem to go beyond the things they actually recall. Starting by the title, which evokes the road that leads to Hollywood (the real and the dreamt one), and followed by Sunset Boulevard26, the street in which Betty’s aunt lives but also the name of one of Lynch’s favorite movie. Through the movie we hear the name of different places, some visited by the characters and some not, most of them are Spanish words (Sierra 20
Lost Highway, David LYNCH, 1997, USA.
21
Dan’s lines from Mulholland Drive, David LYNCH, 2001, USA/FRANCE, CIBY 2000.
22
Ibid.
In some Romanic languages, like Spanish, the verb ‘representar’ (from Latin representare) means actually to “Interpret a role in a dramatic theatre play.” (RAE Spanish online dictionary), which links it again with the world of fiction. 23
24
Jordi BORJA and Zaida MUXÍ, El espacio público: ciudad y ciudadanía (Spanish Edition), Electa 2003 BARCELONA, p 15. 25
Michel DE CERTEAU, The practice of everyday life, University of California Press 1984 BERKELEY and LOS ANGELES, p 104. In fact in its Spanish translation, the movie (Billy WILDER, 1950, USA) was re-titled “El crepúsculo de los dioses” (lit. “The sunset of gods”), which again evokes this mythical quality of the city. 26
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Bonita, Club Silencio), which conceal a mystery, a secret. The name of the city itself, Los Angeles, has different meanings, and also unfolds in different names: LA, the city of angels, the city of dreams. Names bear for Lynch an intrinsic secret that provide places with a new quality, they represent the “value engraved on them”27. Language represents here the greatest and most common of the disturbing of our everyday ordinariness, we have a name for everything but, like in Lynch’s movies we only know the peak of the iceberg. Quoting the title of a David Lynch’s painting, it is as if “Billy finds a book of riddles right in his own back yard28.” The city becomes, then, the space where everybody ought to be represented, and also the space that represent us. The name of the city is sometimes used as the representation of a whole country or state (Brussel’s response meaning the response of the European Union), but whole countries are swallowed by the city in other cases (like Little Italy and Chinatown). These public, communal qualities of the modern city of the thirties have turned into a society of the individual of the late 20th century; advertisement takes hold of the city pointing directly at the individual citizen. This tension between the one and the many, the public and the private, is a characteristic feature of the city, again a double of itself, which makes it more complex and hard to understand. The illegibility of the contemporary city is portrayed in many of Lynch’s movies. He normally depicts places that have no clear allocation or that feel detached from the rest of the world. Interiors are normally not linked to exteriors; the bright and suburban landscape of “Lost Highway’s” outdoors contrasts with the shadowy interior of Fred and Renée’s apartment, where it seems that daylight is never seen. Lynch has stated many times his insecurity about the city, about the outdoor world, a place that is so complicated and dangerous that “it is not clear if it is worth getting out of your house in the first place” 29. In “Mulholland Drive” outdoors scenes are mostly surrounded by cars in motion, they are not places to stay but to see from a moving car, where our characters are doomed to stay. The flat city of Hollywood is seen twinkling at night from the heights of Mulholland Dv. by an amnesiac Rita right after the car crash, as an illusion. She has to descend to the city crossing the rough, earthy woods that separate the road from the city (a metaphor for Betty who is also trying to get to Hollywood). Later on we hover over Los Angeles grid, in an oblique direction. We can see the top of the skyscrapers with their installations and asphaltic fabrics – which are normally concealed. In a quasi-silence, we subtly grasp the sound of the helicopter that is transporting us, but even that fails to stop making the view extremely illusory.
Michel DE CERTEAU, The practice of everyday life, University of California Press 1984 BERKELEY and LOS ANGELES, p 104. 27
28
“Billy Finds A Book of Riddles Right in His Own Backyard”, David LYNCH, 1992. 167 x 167cm. Cardboard
29
David LYNCH in David Lynch. Scene by Scene, BBC TWO Scotland, 1999.
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THE SIMULATED CITY. REHEARSING REALITY. “This is no longer your film.” (One of the Castiliane brothers is taking control of Adam’s film in “Mulholland Drive”.)
The notion of the real and the fake is more blurry than ever at the beginning of the 21 st century. More than ever, European city centers seem to be void of any trace of authenticity, filled with tourists, no dwellers living in them, there seems to be a process of ‘thematization’ 30 of the historical in the city. Tourists that go to Paris for the first time are surprised by the fact that they actually cannot see the Eiffel Tower from any point of the city, as the Parisian fictions promised. However in the Asiatic generic cities, they have no need for a historical city center; they can always build it. In Shenzhen (China), a new European city center has been created, “quite well done, in fact, with its own Eiffel Tower” 31. The idea of living in a simulacrum of reality is inherent in contemporary society. The globalization process has not only affected culture and economy, but also geography: the globalization of the place. This “loss of geographical projection” makes possible the disappearance of some “frontiers but the acceptance of some other ones.”32 It makes possible the “emergence of the tribal after the discredit of modernity.”33 This feeling of the need to build the notion of place also relies on the iconic, the city develops its own language with yellow cabs, the highest tower in the world, or its name written in capital letters in the biggest traffic sign one could possibly find: HOLLYWOOD. However Lynch again shows how deceitful this signs can get: they don’t provide any warranty. The name tag of the waitress(es?) at Winkie’s in “Mulholland Drive” doesn’t help her escape the transformation from DIANE to BETTY when the director feels like it. In the image culture we live in, “reality is becoming more and more visual, but that is also changeable, because we only trust in what we see; the appearance on top of everything else.” 34 Walking through the city center in a developed country in the last years of the 20 th century, one could have the impression of being in any other city center in the world: the anonymous skyscrapers with glazed curtain 30
Yorgos SIMEOFORIDIS, Notas para una historia cultural. Entre la incertidumbre y la condición urbana contemporánea. From VV AA, Mutaciones (Spanish Edition. Original title: Mutations), Actar 2001, BARCELONA, p 416. 31
Rem KOOLHAAS, Harvard Project on the city: RPD. From VV AA, Mutaciones (Spanish Edition. Original title: Mutations), Actar 2001, BARCELONA, p 322. 32
Pere Oriol COSTA, J. Manuel PÉREZ TORNERO, Fabio TROPEA, Tribus urbanas: El ansia de identidad juvenil, Paidós Ibérica 1996 BARCELONA, p 29. 33
Id, p 32.
34
Ángel ROMÁN, El infierno que baila conmigo (Spanish edition), Estudio Euroláser, 2005, p 92.
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walls that seem immutable, the sea of lonely businessmen in black suits in the rush hour, the faint greenish glow of the empty offices at dusk… In fact, one could think, as Thomas Anderson/Neo learns in “The Matrix”35, that he is actually living in the year 2199 in a computer generated reality that is abducting the real36. “Thanks to the documentary, successful from the end of the 20 th century, we can affirm that the real is in crisis. There is a never ending movement to try to understand reality as a unique fact, trying to open the doors to a diversity of realities. That is why reality is discredited, we no longer believe the image, because it can be altered, contaminated or twisted to make believe what it is not.” 37 Maybe this is the reason why Fred Madison in “Lost Highway” has so much trouble confronting a world where nothing is what it seems. He doesn’t like video cameras because he’d rather remember things “how I remembered them – not necessarily the way they happened.” 38 He relies too much on his capacity of analysis in an environment – the city – that constantly fools him. Leaving aside the contemporary taste for the dystopic and the conspiracy theories, this lack of freedom felt by the contemporary citizen makes reference to the idea of the script, which constitutes the blueprint of a classical movie. When we talk about the city we could translate this concept as the set of rules and practices that “an urbanistic system is supposed to administer or suppress.” 39 Thus, citizens are doomed to follow this script; and are not meant to improvise: when Adam Kesher in “Mulholland Drive” comes unexpectedly too early from the unsuccessful Castiliani’s interview he finds misfortune as he discovers his wife sleeping with other man. He will later have to stop “being a smart ass” 40 and learn to stick to the script (choosing the right actress – “this is the girl”) in order to find her new wife in the second part of the film. Citizens are also aware of the normalization of the cities as prohibitions multiply following the politically correct. In a “Sex and the city” episode, one of Carrie’s former friend who was asked to smoke her cigarette near the window complained: “This city used to be the most exciting city in the world and now it’s smoking near fucking open window. New York is over. O-V-E-R.” 41
35
The Matrix, Larry and Andy WACHOWSKI, 1999 USA.
36
Ángel ROMÁN, El infierno que baila conmigo (Spanish edition), Estudio Euroláser, 2005, p 96.
37
Id, p 127.
38
Fred lines from Lost Highway, David LYNCH, 1997, USA.
Michel DE CERTEAU, The practice of everyday life, University of California Press 1984 BERKELEY and LOS ANGELES, p 96. 39
40
Cowboy’s lines from Mulholland Drive, David LYNCH, 2001, USA/FRANCE, CIBY 2000.
Sex and the city. Episode 9, “Splat!”, 2004, HBO. Retrievable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-NZPXMoWqc 41
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Of course, as Adam Kesher, she is properly punished by the scriptwriters, falling from the open window far above the ground in Central Manhattan. The contemporary city is also interpreted as the place of technology. “(…) Living today amongst electronic appliances whose mechanisms we don’t understand (but we use anyway) is as common as inevitable.”42 This creates again a feeling of confusion, of an existence of other level of existence that secretly rules our existence, much like the mythological explanation of natural processes. In David Lynch’s movies this characteristic also emerges, like the mysterious phone calls that secretly take place within the city, suggesting the existence of a mafia (one of the metropolis most genuine by-products), creating a hidden network. In “Lost Highway” some electronic appliances seem to be “witched” allowing people, like the Mysterious Man “to be in different places at the same time.” 43 This can only mean that “media has destroyed the traditional architectonic and urban space, specially the difference between public and private.”44 New communication media lets us know “where we are and where do we want to go (…) they are a crucial part of our public space.” 45
More than ever, the city is becoming something intangible. When we are faced with the hard task of analyzing it, we quickly decompose it in flows, arrows, detours. The tagline for “Lost Highway” can give a good hint on why the qualities of the city seem so ethereal. Like Fred, living in the city we could suffer “a psychogenic fugue”, “a form of amnesia that becomes a escape from reality.” 46 ‘Psychogenic’ means literally “born in the brain”, while ‘fugue’ is a musical concept in which “a first theme ends , answered by a second theme (…) [however] the first is still there as a background” 47. Anyhow, it becomes clear that cities are something more than “a collection of streets and buildings”, becoming “a state of mind”. 48
42
Andrés HISPANO, David Lynch, Claroscuro americano (Spanish edition), Glénat 1998, BARCELONA, p 24.
Bart LOOTSMA, El nuevo paisaje. From VV AA, Mutaciones (Spanish Edition. Original title: Mutations), Actar 2001, BARCELONA, p 461. 43
44
Id, p 462.
45
Id p 471.
46
David Lynch por David Lynch, Chris RODLEY (ed.) (Spanish edition; original title Lynch on Lynch.) Alba Editorial S A, 2001 BARCELONA, p 376. 47
48
Ibid.
Ramesh Kumar BISWAS, A state of mind. From Metropolis Now!, Ramesh Kumar BISWAS (ed.), Springer-Verlag, 2000 WIEN p 4.
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THE INVISIBLE CITY. LIVING IN THE EDGE49. “Sure wanna thank you for coming all the way up here to see me from that nice little hotel downtown.” (“The Cowboy” talking to Adam Kesher in his ranch outside the city in “Mulholland Drive”.)
The Cowboy, a disturbing dwarfed character, thanked Adam Kesher for coming “all the way up there” to the ranch, in the edge of the city, where importants revelations were about to be made. These satellite urban areas that spin around the great metropolitan areas become an interesting border condition, escaping from the city center’s strict restrictions, it seems to develop more like “Jason Pollock’s ‘action paintings’ or even Andy Warhol’s ‘piss paintings’.”50 The unpredictability is hence a quality of these spaces, called sub-urban, regarded subordinate to the urban.51 Paradoxically, this are the areas of the cities that mostly resemble (at least a mirrored low-priced image) of the Modern movement urban ideas. The founders and colonizers of these new urban environments are actually the no-citizens. In a country like Spain, a great percent of rural population was forced to leave the countryside and look for a new life in the city from the mid-20 th century. More recently, the immigrant population has also seized some parts of the peripheral city. Most of this communities export the qualities of the village into the city, creating strong neighborhoods links, celebrating their own festivities and rituals.52 The exportation of this folklore into the strange, almost uncanny, outskirts of the city is one of its most descriptive features. These peripheral urban cultures seem to have a global resonance. Even though probably having many different inputs, the edges of most European cities look much alike. The peripheral neighborhoods of Madrid and Barcelona, two Spanish cities that struggle to differentiate themselves, could be practically interchanged. They even speak the same slang of Spanish, defying territorial and cultural barriers. The no-place becomes an any-place.
49
“… a world between a factory and an industrial neighborhood. A small, unknown, weird, silent, lost place in which there are small details and small afflictions. And people fight in the dark. They live in the edge, and that is the people that I like.” David LYNCH from David Lynch por David Lynch, Chris RODLEY (ed.) (Spanish edition; original title Lynch on Lynch.) Alba Editorial S A, 2001 BARCELONA, back cover. (Translated by the author). Bart LOOTSMA, El nuevo paisaje. VV AA, Mutaciones (Spanish Edition. Original title: Mutations), Actar 2001, BARCELONA, p 466. 50
51
Jordi BORJA and Zaida MUXÍ, El espacio público: ciudad y ciudadanía (Spanish Edition), Electa 2003 BARCELONA, p 131. In a city like Barcelona, some celebrations, like the Holy Week processions, only take place in the satellite cities, which bear a higher percent of Andalusian population. 52
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This new urban cultures have in fact some tribal reminiscences to them. Starting with the individuals, they normally belong to an urban tribe, a “symbolical social answer” 53 as a response to dislocation. They are more or less isolated communities, self-sufficient, which inhabit places only frequented by its own dwellers (they do not have, as city centers, tourism). As an independent territory, they have their own folklore. Car tuning as a national sport; they have their own music, either hip hop or hardcore electronic music and of course raves, marginal urban parties, which take place in these no-man’s land, an area halfway between the rural and the urban54 . This contact with the earth, with the natural, in parts of the city yet to be paved or urbanized, contrasts with the synthetic music that boosts out of speakers and the artificial state of consciousness that recreational drugs provide. This halfway quality between the urban and the rural, modern and past, artificial and natural is frequent in this kind of urban environments. The instructive rituals that precede the entering of most urban tribes recalls a fable-like past, but their looks and ideas question tradition. The ‘industrial’ subculture seeks to become a mechanical, artificial product of mass society; they dance like automats listening to electronic, repetitive music55. Nevertheless, the metaphors they created to describe their music keep having fantastic reminiscences: “… he was looking for a new sound, a new mix, he wanted to put a spell on the people, as if he was a magician…”56 The image of a DJ like an alchemist suits well in the seventies, when youngsters gathered in Stonehenge to dance together in a music festival, celebrating the summer solstice. They had become ‘technomads’.57 Struggling between a modern primitivism attitude and hyperurbanization, these unnoticed communities are becoming the focuses of contemporary culture. The reinterpretation of traditional folklores and attitudes appears as an unconscious attempt to create a new urban culture, far from the pretentiousness of city centers, which seem to be trapped in the loop of a nostalgic retro. While NorthAmerican tourist who visit Rome find it “just like L.A., but with ruins” 58, these anti-historical invisible cities are perhaps the ones who are able to reinterpret their own mythologies in a more intelligent way, distancing from an unnecessary mythification. Perhaps this is the place where the ‘soft city’ becomes firm Pere Oriol COSTA, J. Manuel PÉREZ TORNERO, Fabio TROPEA, Tribus urbanas: El ansia de identidad juvenil, Paidós Ibérica 1996 BARCELONA, p 11. 53
54
Ángel ROMÁN, El infierno que baila conmigo (Spanish edition), Estudio Euroláser, 2005, p 131.
55
Pere Oriol COSTA, J. Manuel PÉREZ TORNERO, Fabio TROPEA, Tribus urbanas: El ansia de identidad juvenil, Paidós Ibérica 1996 BARCELONA, p 106. Albert GOODMAN, Disco. Quoted from Matthew COLLIN, Estado alterado (Spanish Edition. Original title: Altered state: The study of ectasy culture and acid house), Alba Ed. 2002 BARCELONA, p 23. (Translated by the author). 56
57
Ibid.
58
Victor’s lines from The rules of attraction, Roger AVARY, 2002 USA.
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and tangible, stable. “The inhabitants of these cities, of these messy but lively landscapes contain the seeds of the new European city, whose inhabitants won’t need illusions or substitutes, but only define their very own exotic culture.”59
59
Bart LOOTSMA, El nuevo paisaje. From VV AA, Mutaciones (Spanish Edition. Original title: Mutations), Actar 2001, BARCELONA, p 466.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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