Buffet of the saints

Friday was a fiesta day for San Valero (“Saint Valerius” in English), a bishop of Zaragoza who died in the 4^th century AD and who is now honored in part by the eating of roscón, a kind of cake.

I enjoy these little traditions for more than the days off and the chance to eat. For me, there’s a nurturing aspect to them, an idea I always feel the need to explain, maybe because I am the product of a very leftist education. We ultra-liberals are germophobes, double-checking the insides of the kitchen cabinets of culture and looking under the fridge of society for spots we might have missed, places where some infestation of oppression might still be lurking. We don’t get the chance to rubberstamp the validity of institutions and rituals enthusiastically because we are trained to be suspicious.

So maybe in the absence of believing in much of anything else, I turn to rituals as a way to commune with the rest of world, as a way to be a part of a larger circle than just me and the people I happen to like. I eat the cake and think back to the cakes eaten by those who are long gone, folks with whom I cannot even share time and physical space. And then maybe I'm ever so slightly more aware of humanity.

Coming up next week, on February 5^th, there’s another day for Santa Águeda (that’s Saint Agatha to you), who died around 251 AD, after suffering various tortures, including having her breasts cut off (according to tradition and Wikipedia). Spaniards eat a special food for her day, too, one that makes the connection so much more personal than the roscón eaten for San Valero.

Word to his mother (and grandmother)

I have a soft spot for absurdism, especially when it tosses together disparate cultural references willy-nilly. This week I discovered Rodolfo Chikilicuatre, who represented Spain in the 2008 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, a major international performance competition.

The song he won on, “Baila el Chiki Chiki”, is reggaetón, according to people who might know (not me), but the lyrics are a mish-mash of slightly off braggadocio and specific cultural citations. The main rhetorical thrust of the song is that a lot of people dance the Chiki Chiki, but the list of enthusiasts he claims is impossibly broad, including Hugo Chavez, his mother and grandmother, metal heads, and the Chinese. I can’t help myself – I’m a sucker for the wacko juxtaposition of pop culture crap (dance pop) with just about anything as banal as dictators and family members. But it gets better: in the international version of the song, he suggests (in case, I guess, none of the above are available) doing the dance with Pau Gasol of the L.A. Lakers or Pedro Almodóvar (although presumably only as a last resort). Then, near the end, he makes reference, for no particular reason, to an infamous incident where Spain’s King Juan Carlos I told Hugo Chavez to shut up. I don’t know why exactly, but this kind of allusion-heavy stuff is like manna to me.

The dance itself is four extremely abbreviated steps that are really just an incredibly simplified recombination of existing moves, so dumbed-down that you suspect the joke is partly that they couldn’t be more basic. Anyway, the steps include “el miquelyason” (say it aloud) and “el robocop”, which is really just the “robot” being trotted out again in the most water-down imitative form possible.

His appearance is also somehow strangely satisfying. Chikilicuatre was a character played by David Fernández, and in all the appearances I’ve seen, he’s always wearing the same slightly geeky disco outfit, a massive pompadour and a tiny plastic toy guitar. His voice is so nasal that it’s practically a musical tone, and oddly pleasant to listen to.

In the interviews I’ve watched, there’s a really dry absurdity that Chikilicuatre never really acknowledges or seems to get, one of the hallmarks of good absurdism. In one talk show appearance they show a clip submitted by a fan in which the guy sings and jumps back and forth in time to the song with the signature unprofessional quality of all similar videos. The only difference is, the video inexplicably cuts to unidentifiable furry house pets, which Chikilicuatre takes in without betraying any hint that there’s anything wrong. By the end of the show, the host is fed up with Chikilicuatre, but the audience roots for him, and Chikilicuatre responds by playing “Old McDonald” on his toy guitar, which is as unlikely a response as I can think of.

I watched the music video below several times before I realized that there was something strangely familiar about the dance: Chikilicuatre moves almost exactly as though he were a character in a video game, with the same awkward abbreviated approximation of real dancing. Also, the back-up dancers are actually worth paying attention to, since one of them is off enough to be noticeable but not so much that you’d realize it the first time you see it. (According to Wikipedia, the back-up dancers even have their own character names and traits.)

(Notes: This video is a later version of the Chiki Chiki and thus omitted some references mentioned above. Also, there are subtitles in English.)

Excuses and Promises

I have put off posting anything for months now. I have my list of excuses, if you care to hear them: I have a brittle right foot, my camera was stolen, and I find myself strangely put off by the prospect of barely following an interview that I myself am conducting.

And then there’s the abundance of free time, which comes with its own sorts of (minor, pleasant) obstacles. Once I opined to a retired person that not having work must give her lots of time to do things. “Less than you’d think,” she said. “We you can always do it tomorrow, it never gets done.” There are always distractions, including the epic saga of “Friends” – when will Brad Pitt show up, I keep asking myself – and podcasts in which smart people square off and NPR personalities charm you.

Then there’s my biggest excuse: a feeling that I need to wait until I have a real story to tell. I have been waiting to interview people, and then I have been waiting to interview interesting people, and then I have been waiting for my foot to heal to interview interesting people, and now I’ve worked myself into a corner.

So as of this week I’ll be posting three times a week. It is the job of creative writers to weave something out of nothing, and I could be in worse places to do that. Zaragoza feels busy, even more than it has a right to on paper. I’ve been claiming for months that Zaragoza is denser than Brooklyn, but Wikipedia says that isn’t true. Even so, the average block in Zaragoza is lined with apartment buildings seven or eight floors high, cheek to jowl, framing a narrow street. I often feel like I’m on an enormous movie set with extras constantly bustling around. Compared to Boston, where I was living until last summer, it feels like a piece of the Big Time, as long as I don’t wonder too far. (As one writer put it, Spanish cities don’t taper off, they just come to an abrupt end.)

And then there are the zaragozanos, who often go in for the slightly dramatic or colorful in conversation. Not during the day, when you go into the tailor’s or the bike repair shop and find people a bit colder than they would be in America. It’s after dark that everyone softens and casual interactions take on a kind of collusive quality. The camarera behind the bar laugh when the customer smacks the hanging light, sending it in circles. No pasa nada, the camarera says, chuckling at the lamp-knocking girl. Imagining the same scene in the U.S., I picture a flustered bartender swiftly silencing the lamp, trying not to look peeved. A country could do worse than no pasa nada for a mantra.