Blackening Beasts and Paling Beggars

Map from Mauricio Arango's 'Vanishing Point' project

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography. (Borges, 'Of Exactitude in Science')

Perhaps the only perfect map ever made is that created by Borges in his famous story. As his tale makes clear, in order to achieve an exactitude of perfection the map must have a form which renders its very making pointless, as it needs to be of a scale to match or surpass that which it imitates- thus making it no greater task to simply read the land itself.

The flat and shrunken, more pocket-friendly form of maps as we commonly use them allow nothing more precise than skewed approximations in their imitations of the world. And, of course, any replica of reality with gaps or shorthand requiring interpretation inevitably opens its contours to the slippery conquest of ideology.

The traditional Mercator map, which I was familiar with at school as a picture of exotic lands as they Really Are, was on reaching university History classes unveiled to me as a pernicious diagram of Eurocentrism. But has the Discipline of Geography really been tattered beyond repair? In this day and age, a journey of navigation is generally deemed successful if you are even able to locate your own house using GoogleEarth, and as I read in this article of pious X-marking, even never-be-thwarted Christian missionaries are taking directives from the ivory tower in their struggle to find a map adequate enough to locate spots previously hidden from their clutches :

The Peters Projection map will help us locate places indicated in "world reach." Orality and Text have a place here, because in 1569, Gerardus Mercator gave us the maps we are familiar with in our geography books, if anyone can remember when geography was taught in public school, or that we collected through the years from the National Geographic magazine. Orality, unwritten communication, is transmitted by visibility; namely, the superiority complex of Europeans. The Northern Hemisphere dominates the map and therefore our thinking about the world. By placing the equator two-thirds of the way down the map, Mercator made it possible to see better his little homeland of Flanders. The further you go north, the bigger the countries get. The Congo, formerly Zaire, is nearly five times as big as France and seventy-five times as big as Belgium, but you can't tell that from Mercator's map. India is one and a half times bigger than Greenland, but the old maps show Greenland far bigger, about as big as all of Africa. The Middle East looks insignificant. Brazil, as big as the United States, looks much smaller.

Of course, the ideological mapping of the planet is now determined not so much by physical landmasses sketched on paper, but by the abstract conceptualisation of place through the mediation of accessible systems of information.

Mauricio Arango's Vanishing Point project explores whether a new cartography is being created by a fresh generation of influential mapmakers: the news media. It also employs the Peter's Projection, the equal area map which shows countries in proportion to their actual size. However, in this project, nations also loom and pale in visible importance according to a cartographic homing pencil- wielded this time not by Mercator, but by a network of industrious journalists:

Vanishing Point consists of a map of the world connected to a database fed by news coming from several international newspapers. The visibility of each country on the map results from the quantity of media coverage the country receives, so those countries that do not make the news disappear progressively.

The newspapers selected are some of the most widely-read from countries that make up the Group of Seven (G7), the seven most industrialized nations in the world.

The G7 countries represent the ‘focus group’ of this project since by great measure, their unilateral and collective influence affect fundamental aspects of most countries’ social and economic fates.

A ghostly phantom smudge in the bottom corner of Arango's map, my little homeland New Zealand appears to be close to obliteration. The forgotten afterthought of both Mercator and newsgatherers alike, and statistically already conquered as Christian although most of our churches are empty, the safety of not being noticed is perhaps not the condemnation some would make it.

The link, thanks to Ponchorama.

THE VIEW INTO 2046

2046, the new film from Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, is currently showing in Buenos Aires. As its title suggests, it's a kind of futuristic fantasy, although on terrain vastly different to that of typical sci-fi fare. Far from being a sleek vehicle for an imagined vista of technological progress, its special effects are merely cursory, hazy cues for the real orientation of the film: to mourn the inevitably doomed pursuit of the everlasting moment.

Wong enjoys a high profile in Buenos Aires, not least because his earlier film Happy Together- the story of two lovers who move from Hong Kong to Argentina to start over- was shot here. Wong says he was inspired to make Happy Together in Latin America as a result of the strong influence its writers have had over his work (the working title for the film was Buenos Aires Affair, after a story by Manuel Puig), although residents of Buenos Aires tell me he came to their city to make his film because it is the farthest geographical point from Hong Kong on the world map. While this last explanation seems to be nothing more than a romanticising urban myth, it fits well with the conception of love Wong's films, which often plays out like exotic tourism- glimpsed and fetishised moments which always ultimately reside elsewhere.

2046 is strung together by the various amorous encounters of Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a resident of the Oriental Hotel, and scenes from one of the stories of erotic fiction he is writing based in blurred echoes upon his trysts. Time past provides nothing but unstable footing for Chow when he attempts to cloister himself within its decor. Upon moving in to the Oriental Hotel with the intention of renting Room 2046, in which he'd recently had an encounter with an old flame who'd forgotten him, he's told that it's being redecorated so he'll have to settle for 2047. This number also signifies a desired location in Chow's story, in which characters take a train to the year 2046 to recover their lost memories, as it is said that here nothing ever changes.

This magic number makes reference to the hand-over of Hong Kong in 1996, during which the Chinese promised 50 years of no change- a kind of marital vow with little hope of fulfilment. The journey painted by Wong to the end-point of this promised era is arduous and unpredictable, with a destination even more distant from today's Hong Kong than unknown cartographical points such as Buenos Aires were to the protagonists of his earlier filmic projects. Even when they arrive to 2046, travellers do not encounter a solid base of history from which to flourish, but rather a recall which is stagnant and broken. Their enamoured declarations are met by fatigued androids with delayed reflexes or pre-occupied hearts incapable of responding, mirroring the reluctant tenants of the film's present day- emotionally impeded by their memories, and simply going through the motions with their current lovers. In this film, even the most ardent of lovers can rarely hope to be much more than the collectors of moments, often reified into tokens of fruitless investment: a prolific stack of letters sent to the hotel-owner's daughter Jing (Faye Wong) by her forbidden Japanese paramour over six years of waiting, or the accumulating stack of $10 bills paid by Chow to Bai Ling (Ziyi Zhang) for each sexual encounter as the result of a playful deal, which she stores away in a box.

2046 paints a view of love which could almost be called 'formalist': the power of beauty in a surface moment which creates a depth of obsession and monastic emotional fidelity to a past that can never be recaptured. In this, the departure of the object of desire is not so much lamentable as necessary to the maintenance of the perfect illusion. As Chow's voice-over tells us, 'love is a matter of timing', and in it 'there are no substitutes'.

The film itself is structured as a silk-coated box of hazy recollected images- gloved hands or curving hips shown in slow-motion, fetishising close-ups in their decisive parting gestures. It's drenched in raw outbursts of indignant slaps and tears, with a beautifully rich veneer of decor and attire clung all over, yet the framing of walls, doors and grates constantly restricts any possibility of accessing a scene in its entirety. In this, Wong interlaces story and structure in a manner he professes to be a souvenir acquired from the Latin Americans:

"In Chinese literature the most important thing is the theme, what the story is about. But how to tell the story, I learned this from Puig and Marquez, because the form is sometimes very much related to the theme, and the theme can sometimes be the form and the form can sometimes be the theme."

While being left struck down and spartanly weeping for six years hence from a fatal cupid's arrow may seem ridiculously outdated as cultural psychology, it still makes for striking cinema, with 2046 best glimpsed as an exotic ticket to the old geography of love stories in a time before the cynical hand-over.

JUST CRIMINAL

"...the yellowish dusty wall-paper peeling off the walls gave it a wretchedly shabby appearance..."

Not enough: Yes, it's been a while since I last made any renovations around here. And surely you've been thinking that, horror of horrors, that's just not good enough. The wallpaper is so Last Month, and there's barely anywhere to ogle that's not become sallow with its own neglect.

I'm sure you don't need me to dwell on the surroundings. After all, we're not living in the sprawling 19th Century, with its painstakingly dallied over tenement stairwells and carriage upholsteries, when it wasn't frowned upon for writers to take a year or so between instalments. Now, details aren't important, although it IS the thing to explain just where it was you were, when you've been away for a while- and my my it better have been impressive.

But what if 1,500 pages really is still the ultimate in 'impressive': Ah, the 19th Century... Sure, it's not so hip to admit you've been poking around there these days, rather than paying a fortune for trendy Asian decor. But you have to admit it was easier to get drawn in to writingscapes back then. They didn't just flit over settings willy-nilly. You were forced to get acclimatised- or declimatised- as the case may be... to a place like that of Crime and Punishment. There, the surroundings are suffocating, in part due to the unbearable amount of sickly yellow Dostoevsky intentionally swathed everyone in (see the above excerpt for but one of a sallow quagmire of hangings and fixtures). Dire Feng Shui, and all because his starring anti-hero Raskolnikov dared to dispatch a money-lender with an axe...

And where have I been? Well, thank god I've not been there. Yes I like a bit of goss but really nothing so metaphysical or bloody, it's all a bit old-world Russian and I'm strictly covering this-minute Latin America don't you know... Besides, unless you work in product placement, it's hard to sneak such brainwashing into contemporary decor.

Too much: For my glamorous come-back post, I'd like to confess that I've been with *Dick El Demasiado*, a more contemporary breed of urban anti-hero, whose garishly hung web-site can blind you here. Lamentably, we don't know too much about his private life and such dizzyingly humanising details as whether or not he gets panicky on the stairs. We just know his Act. For him, this means Dutch emigré electro-Cumbia, to be played in the synagogues and bookstores of Buenos Aires whilst wearing a trademark torso-hugging flourescent skeleton top. Even his name, which was doubtless launched as 'on the edge of grammar' but just sounds wrong, aptly translates as Dick the Too Much. Thinking his mish-mashed persona sounded like an eerie rip-off of Mucho Maas (Much Moore), the washed-up radio DJ and acidhead of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, I went to see El Demasiado perform the other week underneath bookstore Liberarte. And yes, it made me claustrophobically averse to foreigners' notions of Zany Linking, a trauma which could be related to my temporarily stopping this blog (another glowing skeleton with bits of synagogue and bookstore hung all over it, it made me ashamed to be another foreign emigré).

But is it really too much?: Part of a rash of cultural appropriation which could be termed the contemporary version of taking to a money-lender with an axe, Dick's act bases itself on Cumbia, a music which typifies the Argentine lower classes here, and which big-wigs such as Cabinet Chief Alberto Fernandéz generally associate with the kind of streets they wouldn't want to walk down at night. Last year, Fernandéz was plastered through papers saying that Cumbia and the 'cultural movement' it represents promote 'criminal action', and that they are in part to blame for the insecurity wave which has hit Argentina. So where does this brand of dashing infamy leave Dick? While it seems undeniable that Cumbia did provoke him, I'm more inclined to blame the Netherlands for what happened in Liberarte that night, as it's obvious that the free and easy ways of the Dutch are unleashing monsters. That they need to look back to the 19th Century, and paint their streets in a more oppressive predominance of yellow- to look something like this:

Agent Yellow: The project pictured above, by artists DELETE (which I first spied on the Wooster Collective) is ostensibly intended to free the populace of various world cities from the bombardment of consumer messages by plastering over them monochromatically. All well and good if it weren't for the fact that, suspiciously, they chose Yellow. Hardly a neutral choice. Rather than evoking the clear skylines of a utopian pre-advertising tranquility, it evokes hints of psychedelic canaries which have splattered down from above during some kind of disquieteningly cheery axe-massacre. Of course, the always rumoured-to-be-sadistic Austrian authorites of Vienna gave them the go-ahead to enact this on Neubaugasse, a popular Viennese shopping street, with the unsettling results as you see them. And at least some citizens were indeed disturbed, evidenced in some desperate graffiti captured on Ponchorama which whimpers 'Wouldn't blue have been nicer?'

And who is provoking me? If not writing every day is indeed a crime then please, I promise I'll make amends. Perhaps even the contemporary way. Not by facing a firing-squad in Siberia or even with filling in the empty entries in my blog archives, but just by consulting Fixr, the lazy photographer's companion to Flickr which advertises itself:

No more worries about forgotten cameras and missed picture opportunities: Fixr offers you the unique opportunity to close the gaps in the digital record of your life.
If you want to post those perfect shots you couldn't take, here's the solution: just submit a detailled description of the moment you missed to us and we'll do our very best to provide you with an image to fit your needs.

Hmm... a detailled description... who knows how to write those anymore? Just give me something yellowish, dusty, and wretchedly shabby every month or two to control my readers, and leave the 1,500-breadth settings to their day.