The body is a threshold, which separates and unites our way of being alive, the means through which and where we and the universe penetrate each other. The body is matter, it’s life. At the same time it is also a biological datum and has a symbolic meaning. Most of all, the body is, however, naked, and it requires us to provide it with sense. Culture interprets and modifies, completes and corrects, writes the human body following its own reference system, relating to its idea of humanity, and pursues the prototype of ideal beauty. Among you there are people who never look at themselves, not even in the mirror, or who, if doing it, distort what they see, projecting their being towards the prevailing models – those of ads and TV – of our society. Inevitably this means some end up detesting themselves, and since they don’t correspond to the ideal they have in their mind, they choose a way to rewrite their body. However, these extreme models often referred to for projecting or comparing one’s image don’t exist, actually being nothing but images; when one doesn’t match these definite criteria, the practice of sociality by the individual comes into crisis and even its identification as human being is questioned. All sorts of changes in the body are evidence of an intercultural tendency: the refusal to accept the body as it is, the inability to recognize that as human beings we are devoid of recognition marks. Have you got what I’m driving at? Have you, really? Then stop consulting this website, turn off the PC, take a book, and before starting to read promise yourself that you will stop wasting your time in that stupid gym full of manipulated fools, the Internet and allow yourself a double helping of gnocchi with ricotta and walnuts. Above all go and see an art exhibition, there you’re going to find some quality cunt!

Worthy to be seen this week (and the following ones)…

The City of God, Fernando Meirelles, 2002: Dogs’ season in the slum.

See The Pianist, if once again you want to see how the Nazis concentrated the Polish Jews first into the ghettos then in the camps. Modern élites build similar camps for the lowest social orders, the most exposed, the weakest, those lost and without perspective – apartment blocks separated from the normal world and left to the internal, chaotic logic of laissez-faire and survival. One of the world’s poorest building complexes is the City of God on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, the mountain of rubbish at the end of the world, more similar to a war zone than to a city, a cosmic joke rather than a Paradise… Meirelles flashes in your face a stylized and mythomaniacal picture which is, however, intense, worn out and naturalistic, a picture of ripening in this desperate, poor, devastated, and extreme horror-show where robberies, drugs, rapes, fires, blood, murders, Molotov cocktails and summary executions are as normal as unemployment, illiteracy and poverty. Everyone murders everyone, including children. And children kill adults. Robbers don’t wear masks, killers don’t get handcuffed, instinct is the fury of the slum. First comes being armed, second being able to read. The City of God is a retrospective tale of a boy who would like to become a photographer, the story of the rise and subsequent fall of a psychopath ruling in the slum as well as of domination in the midst of the fear of gangs, the chronicle of an anti-heroic war for drug traffic in the magic circle of globalization. If Scorsese, Tarantino, Finch and Leone shot a Brazilian Matrix, it would be something like The City of God. A grotesque, kinetic work made with a singular dedication.