an uphill battle

(Photos courtesy of Impacto Producciones, Saragossa, Spain)

Recently I stopped by Impacto Producciones to talk shop with Javier Millán, a producer, and Robert Torrado, a digital effects artist. They were excited about Amores Ciegos, a short they made late last year with director Marise Samitier.

Amores Ciegos, which is about two couples and their interpersonal struggles, was an unusually hands-on project for Javier because Samitier wasn’t in Spain: “I was her eyes and made decisions because she was in L.A.” This meant he got to chose crew, locations, and some actors. Roberto, on the other hand, had less to do than normal, because there was very little that needed to be digitally altered, one of his domains of expertise. “Are you happy when you have problems to correct?” I asked. “No,” he said, “but I’m happy when I find them in big-budget productions, because they aren’t supposed to be there.”

Short films like Amores Ciegos, Javier explained, are like the CV of a director who is attempting to get financing for a feature-length film. This is especially difficult in Spain, because American films occupy so much theater space. “Normally, of 5 or 6 movies coming out, half are American,” he estimated, and not every one of the others is even Spanish – there are also movies from other parts of Europe and South America to contend with.

Because of lower budgets, Spanish movies tend to be about more intimate, personal topics, which can turn people off, and it can be hard to find an audience for this kind of film. “People prefer American movies,” Javier explained. “They don’t like Spanish films. They prefer to disconnect…The Spanish films that do succeed are similar to American films.”

choose your gravestone wisely

Occasionally, in order to break routine, I pick a spot on the map I’ve never been and make it a point to go there. A few weeks ago, it was the cemetery of Zaragoza.

It wasn’t by chance that I chose a cemetery -- I’m a kind of cemetery tourist, which means I visit them for no other purpose than Comparative Cemetery Studies. I especially like the largest ones, and the Cementerio de Zaragoza turned out to be one of those cemeteries that’s so big that it has its own streets, as though it were a town of the afterlife or something.

I’ll admit, it’s hard to really get much out cemeteries. After spending a fair amount of time in them, though, I’m more attuned to some of the more subtle effects. I’ve begun to see each plot as its own dramatic presentation. It could be plain or fancy, but it’s a point of focus for attention, and if I pause and ponder, I get a particular kind of feeling, like the weight of biography is upon me. This is a little easier to do if the marker is simpler, and isn’t dated by arcane iconography or any hints about the personal idiosyncrasies of the deceased.

When they are, it can be hard not to be pulled from the abstract and poetic back into the banal and silly. In a major Boston cemetery, there’s a sepulcher for a man who designed the machine that made sowing shoes uppers onto soles much quicker; over the entrance there is a depiction of it in low-relief that makes it look like a high-powered microscope as drawn by Jack Kirby. It’s hard to look at it and think about the man as anything more than an industrialist.

Then there’s dated imagery. In the oldest graveyards in Boston, just the way the markers look can remind you how remote the long-dead of history are. One common theme from Boston’s earlier cemeteries is a stylized skull that brings to mind the Mexican Day of the Dead more than New England, and then there are also often weeping willows and other outdated, now-meaningless signs. They all put the person in a time and place, and make it harder to relate to them.

The conclusion I draw here is that graves just don’t age well. Why would they? They are supposed to be an everlasting representation of you, but what, really, is going to do that adequately? That’s why I want to be cremated. That way, there won’t be any chance that a passerby might stop at my eternal resting place a hundred years from now and mutter to themselves, “Gosh, isn’t that tacky.”

Anyway, judge for yourself.

here's my attempt to describe a very specific feeling

Here in Spain, last week was Semana Santa, the Holy Week before Easter. I had heard that Granada was beautiful, and had heard that there were processions there, but this was about all I had bothered to learn before going.

As it turned out, they were something less and more than a parade. For several nights in a row, religious groups called cofradías were marching through town, often simultaneously, and with a lot of the same basic ingredients – brass bands, women in black dresses, and men in nazareno robes wearing the same pointed hood that the Ku Klux Klan appropriated. Probably most importantly, though, there were the pasos, which are elaborate regal floats depicting Jesus or Mary.

The pasos were carried, slowly, by groups of costaleros, who were hidden beneath the paso and moved it forward in stages, setting it down after a few minutes moving it forward. After a stop, they would all stand at the same time, and the paso would pop up and shudder forward, as if on its own. The musicians looked forward rather intently, playing songs that were mournful and foreboding, with the drums at their most threatening.

The first night I was in Granada, as the processions crawled through the city, I jumped into a bar that looked out onto a tight alley where a procession was about to pass. The pasos came by, barely fitting in the street, and as they passed the bar, I could only see a section of the paso framed by the bar doorway, making it seem even just a bit larger than it already was. I stepped into the street, and the women in their black dresses were stopped there, and the crowd watched. The atmosphere was charged with the moment.

As the women stood there, their long, thick candles burned and children tried to catch what was dripping off. Most of the women did not notice. They were looking off into the middle distance, and I saw that this was not a fiesta but a rite.

the healthcare conversation

It’s a commonplace that going abroad makes you think more about your own culture, but I thought I had already had my fill of that before I even stepped foot in Spain. I had studied and lived in France, and I had taught English to people from around the world. In short, I thought I already knew what I thought.

And what I thought was: every country has things wrong with it, and America’s no different, and probably better than a lot of places. I thought that way coming here, and I still do. Instead of what I thought about America changing, it’s how I felt about it that changed.

Before, the U.S. had always seemed like a pretty good place, even if it did have some gun violence, missing healthcare, and inequality. But the more people asked me about it, the more I began seeing my own country from the objective view of someone who doesn’t have to live there. I began to see it from their perspective, even when they couldn’t see it from my perspective. And America began to seem like a distinctly unforgiving place, where economic priorities were more important than making sure people were taken care of. When I thought of it, I thought of the wild west, a place where people occasionally help others but mostly fend for themselves.

One time I was talking to my tailor, whose wife had just gotten a new kidney, and the conversation turned naturally to healthcare in America. He asked about what happened to people who didn’t have insurance because they were poor. “What, do you kick them out on the street like garbage?” Well, not exactly, there were some provisions for helping the destitute, but I hemmed and hawed. When someone puts it that way, you don’t want that phrase to be anywhere close to an accurate characterization of your people.

The new legislation passed yesterday doesn't make healthcare perfect, but it makes it a better, and the country I will be going back to doesn't seem quite as heartless a place. I will still have to hem and haw a little in the future when people ask, but less so. For that, I am thankful.

what kind of bike would a ladybug ride?

If you want to think about how arbitrary categories can be, think about this: one little top tube is all that separates men’s bikes from women’s in the United States. (The “top tube” is the metal tubing that runs from the head tube to the seat tube. Google has informed me that, technically, it is referred to as…“the tope tube”.) When I arrived here in Zaragoza, however, I noticed that there were guys riding around with what I considered women’s bikes. I consulted the high command of the Roommate Council. Indeed, they said, it would be acceptable to ride a bike with no top tube. But was there anything I needed to watch out for, some tell-tale sign that my bike “a woman’s bike”?

Yes. A basket.

My roommates aren’t often terribly serious, so we joked around a few more minutes about how unmanly I am in general (I am called mariquita -- “ladybug” -- a lot in my house, which is kind of like being called a pansy boy, and have taken the mantle up with pride.) Then, as a kind of summary statement, David got a little quiet. “No, seriously, the only thing you can’t do is have a basket.”

He looked at Fernando. “I think he’s going to come home with a basket on the bike.”

I didn’t get a basket, but I did get a bike that would be a “lady’s bike” in the U.S.

that looks like it hurts

On Saturday night, I went with some friends to El Plata, a restaurant/bar that is well known in Zaragoza for its cabaret show. It was, in a sense, a greatest hits of Spanish attitude – both funny and sexy all at the same time.

First, the sexy: although it didn’t always quite hit the “erotic” register, there were definite moments, including a woman who belly-danced walking around through the crowd with a sword balanced laterally across her head. Then there was the woman who picked out men from the crowd to take body shots off her, before she did a good ol’ striptease. It was sassy, not cheap, and it really was sexy.

I feel like I need to stop here and defend the distinction between “eroticism” and something that merely arouses you. Just think of the difference between mainstream actors doing a sex scene, especially one that has psychological overtones, and porno. One is erotic, one just gets you off, and this show was the former.

I have to admit, although intellectually I can understand why you might enjoy eroticism, I’m not terribly interested in it myself. My reasoning is, If I’m not going to have sex, why worry about the aesthetics of it or think about it in anything other than an analytical mode? This is why I don’t understand why men go to strip clubs.

Anyway, besides being sexy, the show was also genuinely funny and creative, or some nebulous combination of the three. For example: the young guy who slid around on rollerblades skates with his penis all out and exposed, eventually going into a spin, and, later, grabbing onto a harness that pulled him into the air as he spun. Later, a pair of woman who were almost entirely in naked, including all the rated R stuff, did a little dance to “I Love Rock ‘N Roll”. Then the song turned into “Yo Amo El Jamon”, the Spanish version that goes to the same tune, but with the lyrics swapped out for an ode to jam with tomato; the girls each took a big leg of pig and pumped it in the air over their heads, much to the audience’s delight.

And then there was the naked break dancing.

the curse of the contaminated hand

An incomplete list of restroom experiences, all drawn from recent experience:

1) A bathroom where the urinal is so high that I, a man of 5’8”, can barely fit my diddle over the lower edge of the thing, and if I can’t, what are short guys supposed to do?

2) A bathroom stall where the door lock is broken and the light only works when the switch is pressed down, all of which requires me to practice door/light switch yoga while I do my número dos.

3) Lots of bathrooms without toilet paper. This is especially dispiriting when one has already ordered a bocadillo at a bar, only to find that the men’s room is out of toilet paper (and, one suspects, has never had any), leaving one without any good options. Probably the only thing worse than Contaminated Pants would be a Contaminated Hand, especially if one has to consume a meal after contaminating it, and have an already-incredulous-looking bartender eyeball one while one eats with only one’s left hand. One can only speculate about the women’s bathroom, which one suspects is stocked with toilet paper out of some sexist sense of decency, but one is too self-conscientious to peak in.

4) A restroom where the male/female symbols are half-rotted away so that the only way to tell which bathroom you’re entering is to wait for somebody to come out…and what if they got it wrong? Plus you look like a pervert expectantly staring at everybody coming out of the bathroom.

5) Lots of bathrooms where the lights automatically turn off after just a couple of minutes, meaning I have to press them several times for what I consider to be a normal-length throne session.

6) Lots of bathrooms without hand soap. I found this out the hard way once at a gym I used to go to, when I had already produced a duce and tidied up back there, only to find that there was no soap. So I did a workout with a Contaminated Hand, something I will never, in my heart of hearts, be able to forgive the owner for, no matter how many perfume-laced Hallmark cards he sends me.

(The only thing worse than no soap? Faux soap, a phenomenon I recently discovered. The translucent pump appears to be holding a good centimeter of liquid soap, but, when you already have a Contaminated Hand and there’s no turning back, it turns out that this was merely a film of soap which cannot be pumped out no matter how hard you try. And then you cry.)

Finally, a bathroom sign that isn't afraid to tell it like it is.