In the 10th anniversary edition of the Guia da Folha, I was stunned to read that São Paulo had only 18 movie screens in 1997 (compared to 142 today). A lack of screens is the most common complaint you'll hear from executives in Brazil, but for the third-largest city in the world, 18 screens is downright absurd. Unfortunately, an increase in screens has also meant an increase in prices (tickets are roughly twice as expensive as they were ten years ago), which means that cinema is still unaccessible for the large majority of paulistanos. Brazilian movie theaters are still more or less an upper class affair.

Such upper class is, predictably, exactly what the NYT celebrates in its latest travel piece on São Paulo ("São Paulo's Concrete Jungle," by Jeffries Blackerby, and I'll be really happy if I never hear the "concrete jungle" SP cliché again). Blacerby makes an interesting point when he says that "São Paulo feels a bit like an urban artists' colony, a city that fosters pure creative expression without too much commercialism sullying the dream," but he loses me by falling back on the same incredibly elitist staples that NYT writer Dan Shaw limited himself to in his March 2006 piece. The accompanying photoshoot is stunning, but do models showing off the latest Calvin Klein collection have anything to do with what makes São Paulo unique?

Finally, the current issue of Vanity Fair has a lengthy feature on the gang violence that crippled São Paulo for a few days in May 2006, with photographs by Sebastião Salgado. No comment until I have a chance to read it.