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.

'til the break of dawn

I’ve been meaning to write a post about how late Spanish people stay up, and I think a breakdown of Thursday night would illustrate it nicely.

11ish I leave my house, where my roommates are pre-partying and planning to go out later. I bike to Bull McCabe’s, an Irish bar in the center of town where they have a language exchange night every Thursday. The place is still packed at midnight. It’s true that tomorrow, March 5^th, is a holiday, but I was here last week at the same time, and the place was packed then, too. I end up staying until 2ish debating the merits of strong leadership with a Venezuelan.

2ish A Spanish friend of mine texts me, and half an hour later I’m at Erasmus, which presumably steals its name from the European international student exchange program.

3ish We finish up at Erasmus…and head to another bar.

3:15ish The next bar turns out to have a cover, and it looks my group is going to break up and go home, but my friend has someone visiting from Madrid, and he says they’re going to stay up until eleven the next morning. The truth is, I don’t know if he’s joking or not; in Spain, this is not an entirely unreasonable proposition.

3:30ish My roommate finally texts me to tell me what bar he’s at, but I’ve already decided to go home, where I hit the sack at 4:30 so I can wake up at 9:30 to make a 10 am private lesson.

7ish I am woken up from a deep sleep by my roommates, who are chatting about as loudly as church mice in the living room, clearly making an effort not to wake me up, bless their hearts, but failing. I am immensely irritable. I want to tell them off – What kind of hour is this, anyway? Shouldn’t they be in bed? – but they are within their rights and have effectively outvoted me.

Moreover, there’s a cultural component to the situation. For Americans, even if you’re a partier, chatting in the living room at seven o’clock in the morning is stretching it. For Spaniards, though, it’s totally acceptable, even normal. I probably realize this fact, but, then again, I’m a man who’s been woken up at what feels like an unseemly hour. Abstract notions of multiculturalism are taking a backseat to indignation, which is ultimately a very comforting emotion.

Now my problem is that I have to go to the bathroom, which means seeing the people who are irritating me, and I’m in little mood to put on a friendly face. So, I as slip from my room into the toilet, I compromise: I give Fernando a dirty look and a kind of abbreviated Bronx cheer, the combination of which is probably, more than anything, simply ambiguous.

I go back to bed and put in my earplugs and promptly fall back asleep.

9:30ish I wake up from a slumber so deep that I’m woozy getting out of bed. Somewhat better rested, I reconsider the Bronx cheer. Whatever the questionable merits of my case, my roommates are quite thoughtful people. They’re easily the best roommates I’ve had since freshman year of college. One night years ago, I couldn’t get to sleep on a weeknight at one in the morning because a roommate was talking at full blast a few feet from my door. I screwed up my courage – I’m terribly timid about this sort of thing – and asked if he could quiet down or something. “Sorry man, I can’t help you,” he said simply.

To put it more hyperbolically: I have been traumatized.

I slip a little note apologizing to Fernando and slip it under his door before I leave.

3:30ish After a nap, I run into Fernando, who is going back to his pueblo for the night, and he apologizes in turn for waking me up. We are right again, and he says, wrapping the matter up, “It’s no big deal if roommates get in a little dispute. Just like any married couple.” My thoughts exactly.

unemployment as abstraction

The other day I was reading the New York Times and I spotted an article about Spain’s unemployment. Seeing it was like noticing an acquaintance mentioned in the newspaper – I wanted to show somebody, and point to it, shouting “I know that country! I’m living there right now!” – but I was alone. The article explains that “Joblessness has climbed to 19 percent in Spain, the highest in the euro zone,” and is up to 29 percent in Cádiz, the city in the south of Spain where the story was written.

There is a lot of threat implied in economic statistics. Numbers are cold and discreet, and it’s easy to see them as a report card on a country.

I remember my first long stint in Europe – a semester studying abroad in southern France – and how the numbers began to seem a little more more abstract. The study abroad program took us to a center for the unemployed, where we sat in on a lunch whose main person, it seemed, was to foster even more solidarité, which already seemed abundant. In France, unemployment seemed like just another thing, more like an inconvenience than a death sentence. It was almost as though you could do something about your employment status by just sitting around and communing.

It all seemed a little alien to me at the time, but since then, I've realized that when something about a culture strikes you as strange, it means you're understanding "cultural difference" on a whole visceral level that you can't get by just chanting to the word.

Anyway, after having seen and experiencing all that, unemployment numbers began to seem a bit more unreal. I couldn’t pick the statistics up with my hands or hold them; they were more like an abstract notion I could take or leave.

According to the article:

Elsewhere in Europe, such high numbers would lead to deep social unrest. Not so in Cádiz. Here, as across the Mediterranean, life remains puzzlingly comfortable behind the dramatic figures, thanks to a complex safety net in which the underground economy, family support and government subsidies ensure a relatively high quality of life.

at least it's not his trigger finger

Last week, José María Aznar, the former President of Spain and a conservative, flipped the bird to a group of protestors who had been shouting at him. I can’t help but think this never would have happened in the U.S., but then, in the U.S. people bring guns to presidential appearances, which makes the finger almost seem quaint. Still, it’s a hateful gesture, and the kind of thing you probably wouldn’t do if you thought your mother were watching, but there he is, smiling smugly.

I think when you smile and flip your target off simultaneously, it’s kind of like saying, “Not only do I hate you, hating you doesn’t even put me in a bad mood.” It’s saying that you can hate them without even really being affected. It’s a sort of cheap pose, but, then, you’re already giving them the finger. (Strangely, in El País, they refer to his middle finger as his dedo corazón, “heart finger”.)

There are two ways I can give the middle finger, one with a kind of fist and one with the fingers tightly curled at the knuckle. I’ve been sitting at my desk making the two, trying to see if there’s some kind of psychological difference, and I realize that the fisted-finger is the first one I learned as a kid when it was all a new idea. The second middle finger, the curled-knuckle, looks distinctly cooler, and I learned it later, from the kids at school. Our ideas of cruelty were almost all limited to making people feel bad, and I don’t think we realized what real hate was and what real damage it could do. The spiritual peril of trying to look cool and hating someone at the same time was lost on us.

Anyway, Aznar is doing that second finger, the curled-knuckle one.

It wasn't enough for this post to be possible.

Yesterday morning, for the first time in many months, I flipped through the first Spanish book I bought, back before I knew how to conjugate the verbs in Spanish for be. It was a collection of “stories” by Jorge Luis Borges. I put “stories” in quotes because it doesn’t seem like the right word. They are short, yes, and they are fictional, yes, but they read more like essays from an alternative reality.

The first story I read was La lotería en Babilonia, a kind of reminiscence of a narrator who lives in a world where everyone plays a lottery whose consequences are all-consuming. Among others, “For one lunar year, I was declared invisible: I screamed and no one responded, I stole bread and they didn’t decapitate me.” In other pieces, Borges reviews works by non-existent authors and invents other fictional worlds.

These kinds of conceits could be terribly cutesy in another author, but Borges is really good at tossing off little lines that seem to say so much. “It is enough for a book to be possible for it to exist,” he writes in a story about an infinite library. And that’s in a footnote.

These kinds of perfectly crafted little epigrams are why I don't mind all the looking-up and the confusion. When I tell people that I started reading Spanish with Borges, they usually tell me I’m crazy, but I think they don't realize how patient I can be with a text if I think there's some reason to get there. Admittedly, though, I don't know if I could summon this kind of patience again:

Benefit concert tonight

Tonight there’s a benefit concert called Buena Chen whose proceeds will go in part to developing an office of Derechos Sociales (Social Rights) in conjunction with the Red de Apoyo a Sin Papeles de Aragón (“Network of Support for People with Papers in Aragón”). The other day I met José Luis Martinez, who has been helping to coordinate volunteers for the concert. He explained that the economic crisis has been especially hard on sin papeles, people without official papers to live or work in Spain. The traditional left and sin papeles aren’t necessarily always well-connected, he said, even though they have common interests.

The concert is the second in what is planned to be a yearly event. José Luis was involved last year, as well, and he remembers it very fondly. “It was an absolute success,” he said. “There were no problems,” and no graffiti, which is very common at shows here. “People showed a lot of solidarity and engagement,” he said.

The acts this year are very diverse, including the local band Lurte, who play traditional music from Aragón (the communidad Zaragoza is in) and who totally look the part.

My dirty laundry

I only host one of my private students at my house, and she came by this morning for a lesson. When you are a man living with other men, the imminent arrival of a woman on the scene forces you to look around and size up things that might normally go unnoticed. Will the clothes drying on the heaters be acceptable? Is the table a wee bit too dirty?

I noticed, in the bathroom, a towel I had bought about four months ago which had started out pure white and was now half grey. When you are assessing your own stuff, a hand towel that is merely gross becomes the most wretched hand towel that has ever existed.

I have been meaning to wash it for awhile, but clothes-washing here in Spain is more of a production than at home. (Notice my limber somersault into blog-relevant content.) What I was doing at home already seemed taxing, and now I have moved to an apartment with no dryer, which requires me to hang up all my clothes on a make-shift rack I have made out of the thing that used to go under my mattress. There’s limited room on it, so I need schedule two days (estimated) of drying for every load, and that means I can’t do two loads on the weekends, and, well, it’s just a shit show.

It seems that not only is there no dryer in this apartment, nor is there a dryer anywhere. The clothes dryer is a convenience that has passed the country by, for better or worse. The positive points here are that a) it saves energy, and don’t we all want to do that and b) apparently, according to an ex-girlfriend, air-drying your clothes keeps them looking better longer.

Whatever the energy savings, us do-gooders, in our little hearts, really just want to stick the clothes in the dryer, and just take our lumps guilt-wise. I’m beginning to find, though, that I’m getting used to not having a dryer, and I’m even fantasizing about doing this at home. I’ll save energy! My clothes will stay looking new! It’s a pleasant flight of fancy, this idea of going native and never going back, and it will end as soon as I get back, probably, but let me sit in my little bubble for now.

Language and the law

On February 1^st, many of the theaters in Barcelona went on “strike” for a day. According to Variety.com:

Cinema loops are protesting Article 18 of a wide-ranging Catalan Audiovisual Bill that obliges half a film's print-run to be dubbed or sub-titled into Catalan for their release in Catalonia. Ruling does not apply to small print runs of 16 copies or below on European movies.

The new law would be “catastrófica y apocalíptica”, said Camilo Tarrazón, the president of a group of cinema businesses, the Gremio de Empresarios de Cine de Catalunya. (Perhaps apocalíptica is a somewhat more staid adjective in Spanish.) Mostly because of the economics: Josep Maria Gay, profesor de Economía Financiera y Contabilidad de la Universidad de Barcelona, suggested that with the cinema industry already weak, “such as the sector is, this law would be a death sentence.” A major Catalonian newspaper, El Periódico, cites figures that suggest audiences would be cut in half if half of all films were in Catalan.

On the other side, people supporting the law seem to be suggesting that the demand is actually there for this change, since in other media Catalan-language material has larger slices of the market. (Currently, the films released that are dubbed or subtitled in Catalan are a small slice of the market, something below 3% of foreign films.)

I have to admit, when I first heard about this I was skeptical. As an American, even a liberal American, my default position is to keep government out of business. It seems to me, though, that Catalan is worth preserving – I have a tendency to favor the local culture, and Catalan is already a language that has profound support and is used widely. For Catalan, duking it out with Spanish and globalized culture might keep it more marginalized for years, when it could be developing and becoming an ever-more articulated trove of literature and culture. So why not dig in now and reinforce the language?

Unidentifiable old men and elevator etiquette (say it three times fast)

I’m the proud father of a massive bicycle, a fancy-pants deal that does not fit into my elevator (I live on the sixth floor) without some creative geometry and a lot of hoisting. The other day I took ten minute trying to see if I could get the bike in with the kickstand down to save some time.

When I finally got out with the bike on the bottom floor, an old man was coming down the stairs just in time to chew me out for hogging the elevator. He did it in stride, as he was walking by, like really good players do in first person shooters – firing in one direction and moving in another. I think I stammered something in my defense, but I felt bad about it even though he was being a jerk, and it was all over in seconds.

You might think I would remember this guy, but I couldn’t quite recall his face or whether he had glasses, so over the past week I’ve had to size up every old man I see in the elevator, trying to remember if we have a contentious relationship or not. It’s a situation worthy of Seinfeld.

Elevator etiquette is different here, so you have more potential interactions with the people in your building than you would in Boston, where I was living before I moved here. In my building, every time someone gets off the elevator, we say hasta luego, even when we haven’t looked at each other over the entire ride. That little hasta luego can carry a lot of meaning, if you’re the kind of person who analyzes these things, and I am and I do. They can say it slowly or quick, clearly or indistinctly, late or early. There’s one older man I can only think of as a gentleman, because he dresses sharply and his hasta luego is always a little late, as though he were obliged to say it but didn’t want to deign to acknowledge my existence. Other people say it loudly and clearly and early, and it seems like they’re really saying “goodbye”, even if they’re not looking you in the face, which they often don’t.

I’ve been trying to figure out what these two little words mean when you say nothing else to someone. It probably means nothing to anybody else, but to me, it’s kind of a verbal acknowledgment that whenever we share space we are actually communicating and interacting, even if only through a lack of explicit communication. It’s like saying, “I know you’re there, I just didn’t have anything to say today.”

Where do you go when there's no such thing as a Starbucks?

I asked a group of my adult students yesterday about what they do when they want to read a book in public, and they all seemed nonplussed by this idea, not having gotten much into the idea of coffee shopping. I didn’t either, until a friend suggested it so many times that it seemed like he must be on to something, and I noticed how much more stimulating it was being intelligent in public. It’s easier to feel as though you are in a thriving center of thought when you sit among a bunch of other people quietly polishing some thought or trying to suck up some idea.

But people don’t do that here, at least not in cafés. You can find people in the local bar reading newspapers, but, as one of my students explained, this is just a way to pass the time, and you can’t just replace the newspaper with a book, because a book takes real concentration. As for laptops, I’ve never seen one in a café here.

For that kind of serious public concentration, you need to go to the public library. The Biblioteca Pública de Zaragoza is the kind of building where you can tell that, when they were designing it, somebody mentioned at some point a concern about “using the space”. The big room with arched ceilings is broken into two levels: the lounge area, where the chairs are designed for semi-inclined napping, and the reading room, where ample light is provided and people look serious about the rules forbidding noise.

I went in the reading room this evening for the first time, just to check if the silence wasn’t just a product of my imagination, but when I opened the door, the fear crossed my mind that everybody would know that I was entering with nefarious purposes, to observe people reading rather than actually get work done myself. I briefly strode up the aisle and made cursory glances at books to present the illusion that I was there in the sacred room on legitimate business, but people looked up from their reading anyway, they looked right at me, and I wondered if they had pierced my illusion or they were simply bored. David Foster Wallace, in an essay about the problem of being a fiction writer, “E Unibus Plurum”, has a dim view of the writer:

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow.

I don’t do fiction, but I know the feeling.

(A note: the hemeroteca in a library in Spain is not, in fact, the homoerotica section, as some (me) had speculated, but the newspaper archives.)

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.