// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

Quoting from De Landa’s “A thousand years of nonlinear history”:

Individual cities (and nation-states) are easier to visualize as encompassing a variety of communities within their borders, and if, as a matter of empirical fact, a city (or nation-state) displays a high degree of homogeneity, it becomes something to be modelled as the result of concrete historical processes. [...] Depending on the mixture of centralized and decentralized decision making behind a city’s birth an growth, we can expect different degrees of uniformity and diversity in its infrastructural layout. To this it must be added that, depending on the role that a city plays in the larger urban context in which it functions, the “cultural materials” that accumulate within it will exhibit different degrees of homogeneity and heterogeneity.

Broadly stated, Rio de Janeiro was a capital city from 1808 to the late 1960s. At one point it actually was the capital of the entire portuguese empire, which at the time encompassed colonies in Africa and Asia; it could be said that Portugal proper was in the 1810s and 1820s a colony of the Empire whose headquarters were in Rio. As the capital of the mid-19th century monarchic Brazil (”the Brazilian empire”), it rivalled Buenos Aires as the cultural capital of South America.

As the capital of an independent continent-sized Brazil, Rio underwent important planned restructuring placed on top of its organic growth (as opposed to a fully planned city like the new capital Brasília). A remarkable intervention is the forced removal, around the later 1900s (the early republican years), of lower-income communities from the downtown, “central” regions of Rio around the bureaucratic, commercial and cultural structures.

I’ve gotten to hate meta-considerations on a blog blog journal , but this is somewhat relevant in that it conveys information. I mostly dropped the ball on dayvan cowboy the blog journal because the whole idea of dayvan cowboy the book was conceived while manic and not noticing just how overcrowded the entire genre is. I did have the deleuzian angle going for me, but behind the bullshit, surfing the “plane of immanence” applied to my own particular story basically meant “trying to feel really — but really, deeply alive”. Most people don’t realize that to be alive they have to go for the plane of immanence — in a nutshell, constantly redefining themselves in order not to let the identity you contructed get in the way of actually experiencing the real. Whether going for deleuzian lingo and risking getting shot both from the Badiou and the De Landa camps further encumbered the pipedream project of a book I couldn’t manage to consistently write remains an open question.

But I still have a blog blog journal , you know. And letting it rot for such a long while owes in part to not wanting to admit the book project was a bad idea in first place and in part to pax seroquel. Sometimes you’re just too blissed out to care about projects — too alive in a way that skateboarding down the plane of immanence wouldn’t describe, but still too alive. But then I started to take some ritalin, which makes me more anxious and ends up with long, shapeless intellectualization of your issues, sometimes taking the form of long, weird dreams or some mild dr/dp while you try to analyze the background of what the hell is going on.

Sometimes a chat partner will illuminate a slice of it. And that’s how I got to sit down and write a damn blog journal post.