Academic's butt hole stuns Bogotá...years ago

Today I watched a Sundance documentary about Bogotá, famous for Pablo , cocaine, coffee and beautiful coffee colored women on coke. Anyway, the film follows Bogotá's transformation by an unlikely force - a politician.

Back in the mid-90s philosopher mathematician Antanas Mockus was the little known and less liked vice-chancellor of the Colombian National University in Bogotá. Antanas had been minding his own business doing the stuff that unpopular chancellors did when he was confronted by an angry mob of students fed up with his too clever by half, mathy, philosophicy ways. Unable to defend himself with fancy long words as someone had taken his microphone away, Antanas did what any cornered academic would...he mooned. Or, more specifically he turned around, dropped his pants, bent over, and very deliberately spread his cheeks flashing his arse to a stunned auditorium. Hours later the evening news had begun broadcasting his butt hole to a wider audience and within a matter of days the entire population of Columbia had become acquainted with his sphincter.

His bosses at the university weren't best pleased with his actions and despite protestations from his mother (whom Antanas still lived with) forced him to resign as vice chancellor.

So, without money, a job, or much prospect of finding one, the man notorious for flashing his butt at a bunch of students decided to run for election as Mayor of Bogotá and launched his campaign from the small apartment he shared with his mum. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fair and open-minded people of Bogotá chose to give poor Antanas a second chance and consequently elected him to office.

Early 90s Bogotá was a place consumed with violence. Controlled by crooked cops and politicians on the take, the city had become grid locked with corruption, but Antanas had other ideas.

First, he took on the culture of violence head on by convincing people that it was better to be a ‘carrot’ than a coke baron, which makes complete sense to me. Then, he moved against the city’s traffic congestion by handing out ‘thumbs up’ J stickers to drivers that yielded at traffic lights, and ‘thumbs down’ L stickers to those that didn’t. Sure, some would say that Antanas was struggling to shake the teacher in him, but who wouldn’t want to have a thumbs up sticker, eh?

Next, in the flowery firing line were Bogotá’s traffic police who were renowned for taking on the spot bribes. Mayor Antanas approached the city council with an ingenious plan, he would fire the lot of them, and naturally only re-hire those who’d agree to enroll in mime classes….yes, mime classes….mime, as in that form of painted face entertainment considered by most to be even duller than clowning, and thought to have only one performer that French bloke (the late) Marcel Marceau. Still, Bogata’s council members could see its brilliance and wasted no time voting the Mayor’s plan into law.

Most cops simply couldn’t face explaining to their wives that the bribe money had dried up, and that they’d getting home later than usual because of night school. After years on the take in one of the toughest urban environments on earth their badass gun wielding husbands were gonna enroll at school to learn how to mime around make belief sheets of glass. Of course, with the vast majority of the force refusing to go along with the Mayor’s demands, Bogotá was left with no traffic department.

Now, most industrial cities would be brought to its knees if its entire traffic department quit, but the core of Mayor Antanas’ plan was to replace the fired cops with professional mime artists. Immediately the media and the people saw the simple genius of the plan - professional mime artists needed no training, so they were a silent force ready to roll. What’s more, the fact they needed no training meant the city would save shit loads of cash too.

Within days the new and newly trained old police were at work on the mean streets of Bogotá pretending to sit on seats that weren’t there.

Mayor Antanas had managed to transform Bogotá from a vibrant, dangerously exciting city full of life and death to a bourgeois academic’s idyll of quiet streets policed by silent mimes, with fucking loads of clean parks, and silent libraries full of books about pottery, civil engineering and Ghandi, and it all started with some do-gooder math teacher flashing his shitty crack…..unbelievable, but TRUE!

and here's Antanarse...


Filmed by Andreas Møl Dalsgaard Bogotá is part of The Danish Film Institute's Cities On Speed series.