Teatre Museo Dalí, [Or, I like writing on trains]

Some places make me wish I were just a brain attached to a pair of eyeballs, floating around unsupported like a little baby flying saucer, for the sole purpose of seeing, processing, memorizing, saving for later. Museums, particularly art museums, make me feel this way. After an hour or two, bodily needs begin to infringe on my experience--backache, sore knees, empty stomach, full bladder--and I just can't concentrate on the art anymore. [I think this might be the perfect metaphor for the state of the relationship between my mind and my body right now]. Furthermore, other people bodies become even more annoying than one's own, simply because of their bulk getting between you and what you're trying to look at. Huh. Poetic.

Anyway, the Dalí museum in Figueres (his hometown) is such a place. A place with the potential to blow my mind all the way to Saturn and back, somewhat robbed of its oomph by a long journey, long lines, and too many underwhelmed French schoolkids. Dalí designed the place himself, using an old theater building, and somewhere inside is his tomb. I may have been staring right at it, for all I know, without realizing, due to information overload. But not written information--there is no structured walkthrough of the Dalí museum, no explanations accompany any of the works. You're supposed to figure it out yourself. Lucky for me, I read a little before coming, so I knew that the giant mural on the ceiling of one of the rooms represented Dalí and Gala ascending to heaven with their feet extending gigantically down toward the viewer.

 

For some reason, Gala didn't merit arms, or a face, which I thought was strange, since she was so important to Dalí and integral to his work. She is represented by a crutch in many paintings (or so says Rick Steves) because Dalí depended on her for emotional support, and so on...not to mention the dozens of portraits of her he did.  But I think my favorite part of the collection might have been the video installation of Dalí's collaboration with Disney, the animated film "Destino".  Unfortunately, I kept remembering Dalí's questionable taste in politics... I guess that kind of goes well with Disney's sometimes unsavory business practices. But the work itself is so remote from these things that it's easy to appreciate on its' own merits. For me, Dalí is the complete epitome of perfect technical expertise combined with beyond-original ideas. Not only could he paint photo-realistically, he never did anything boring. I should be so lucky.

The two hour train ride back to Barcelona was a good chance to reflect on everything I saw and make some notes. The ride there was a little stressful (I almost always worry that I'm on the wrong train until I arrive at the right destination) and very long, but coming back gave me a chance to sit at my own little fold out table, look out the window and doodle. A quite seat on a train can be like a miniature, temporary office, and when you have nothing else to do for 2 hours except read or listen to music, it can be an excellent place to think, or even work. Maybe I would get more stuff done if I just rode trains back and forth all the time. Now that would be pretty surreal.

Toulouse and Tossa, slow and sweet

It is incredibly difficult to get work done in Barcelona. Honestly, it is nearly impossible to do anything at all here without an inordinate amount of incentive. The responsibilities of schoolwork lose their concreteness and fade into something insubstantial and ghostlike, simply because they don't fit with the atmosphere of this place. Barcelona is vibrant and a little seedy, jangly and slow, and absolutely not conducive to focus. I've never lived in the moment so much before...how am I supposed to think ahead in this state? It's all I can do just to keep still and watch everything moving around me.

Lately the only thinking ahead I've really done involves travel. I spent last weekend in Toulouse, with Pauline, in her family home. Her house isn't really in Toulouse, but in a little village about 40 minutes away, whose name I can neither pronounce nor spell. If Barcelona is a place of movement, Toulouse was refreshing, soothing calm. Land of violets and poppies, rolling hills everywhere, green wheat waving in the wind, bright sunlight saturating everything with color. Neon yellow fields of mustard flowers, apparently only used for animal feed and oil. Trees planted in the neat rows on either side of the road, creating a sort of corridor, everything very neat and orderly and French. Pauline's family were unbelievably sweet to me, introducing me to their friends, showing me around Toulouse, and feeding me some of the best food I've had in awhile. The cheese course comes after the main dish but before dessert, and really makes me wonder how the French keep their reputation for slender figures. I also tried real Parisian macarons thanks to Pauline's dad's work travels, as well as a couple duck meat creations that looked odd but tasted amazing. Toulouse is all pink and faded blue, slender bricks and painted wooden shutters, spring flowerbeds and fountains. I had fun trying to learn French from everyone... they flattered me and said I was a natural. I could have stayed forever.

But instead I rode the bus back to Barcelona, only to hop back on a day later for a spur-of-the-moment trip to Tossa de Mar with Logan. Everyone needs a break from Barcelona's fastslow, inefficiently headlong rush sometimes, and we wanted to clear our heads with some ocean air. So up Costa Brava we went, to stay in a cheap but clean little hotel and wander through the nearly abandoned streets of this still off-season little beach town.
I will never get used to all the older-than-my-entire-country stuff they have here. A citadel with crenelated towers crowning a hill that thrusts out into the aquamarine ocean like a fist. And further inland, the foundations of a Roman villa, sunken into a grassy hill. Is it the fact that I grew up looking at pictures of castles and reading about princesses and dragons that thrills me when I look at old rocks piled up this way? Or is it something else? All I know is that it feels like magic and makes me wonder. It's not old paint and old rock and old wood that's thrilling, but intent, and what's left of it. Also the unintended stuff, the natural surroundings, yellow cliffs and cypresses and the way that the cathedral eroded to look like a cracked eggshell overlooking the bay.
Also magic were the beaches. Logan and I found a small pebbly cove between cliffs, right below one of the citadel towers, and spent most of two days there, collecting sea glass, listening to the water, and soaking up some sun. We ate bad Spanish seafood dishes (too much mayonnaise, cheese, garlic...why, Spain? WHY?) and good pizza... and just took it real slow.

Now I'm back and hoping to take the train to Figueres tomorrow, to see the legendary Dalí museum, designed by the master himself. I'll also be heading to the MNAC soon, hoping for some information and inspiration with which to write a 15 page paper due by the end of my semester here. I could also use some help with my oil painting... I might need to leave some offerings near the works by Casas and Rusiñol, maybe their spirits will aid me. What might they like? I should have brought them something from Toulouse, they loved France so much... some violet infused mustard or absinthe or macarons. Oh well.

adieu mes aimes!

UB, Mills, Hate, Love

Up until a couple weeks ago, I'd been functioning under the belief that the realization about my not being in Kansas (read: Mills College sanctuary of estrogen) anymore had finally touched down in my psyche.
That is, until I had to confront the duct-taped hash of plumbing that is the Universitat de Barcelona in general and its art department in particular. I've already written about AWOL professors, but I hadn't yet gotten around to my two-week human anatomy course. The class had so many students that the professor morphed into a biter snake. Country mouse that I am, I kept approaching her with questions only to be forced to retreat from her snapping jaws.
Okay, exaggeration. Yes. She's calmed down and adjusted her expectations a bit since the first couple days of class. So have I. And that experience was nothing compared to what I went through the other day while trying to add a fourth class to my schedule. Lucky for me the professor took pity on me in the end and allowed me to register in his sculpture class. I guess even he couldn't stand to watch me get passed from person to utterly clue-less person any longer.

The sculpture class is more entry level than my other two classes, though no less based on student autonomy. Here in Barcelona, art school so far seems to be mostly about leaving you all alone with your muse. Only, I don't have a muse, I just have a lot of vague anxieties about my capabilities or lack thereof, and that makes it unbelievable hard to make stuff. Saying it makes me feel like a spoiled brat, but, well... I'm used to a more nurturing environment. I'll (probably) never complain about Mills classes ever again.

This sort of transplantation is especially rough on the introverted homebody bookworm type. For a person like me, living in my analysis of events rather more than in the events themselves, this heaping helping of perspective is a lot for my mind to chew on. Part of me hates, hates this experience with a totality that leaves me having rosy visions of perfectly ordinary home activities such as walking the dog or doing an English assignment.

But I'd like to believe that a bigger part of me is loving it. How else can I explain the high that sometimes rises in me just from walking down a street that is thousands of miles away from any other street I've ever walked down? What is it that I am recognizing in my fellow UB students? Is there some innate European quality passed down from my German/Italian/Argentine ancestry that makes me respond to them in a certain way? I'm not sure how else to explain the ease with which I've been able to befriend certain people (or maybe they've befriended me). It's not this easy for me in the States. Maybe if there were more cheek-kisses it would be.

I realize this post has a serious deficiency in the me-doing-cultural-stuff category. I'll try to correct that imbalance in the next one--Carnaval and Tarragona, anyone?

Besos.

El sur, Café Dole, bait and switch

Lately I've felt like I'm living Jorge Luis Borges' El sur. Especially when I'm lying in bed at night. Is this all real or just a hallucination produced by sepsis from an unfortunate head wound?
...just kidding, but I do sometimes feel like I'm existing in a state of almost constant disorientation, and it's a feeling only too similar to the one that story evokes. The protagonist dreams asleep and dreams awake, he dreams in his hospital bed and dreams on the train taking him away from it. It's too easy to convince myself, while falling asleep, that I'm in my dorm room at Mills or in my own bed at home. Part of my brain still thinks I have two realities to choose from--maybe because I spent so much time at home trying to picture what was waiting for me here, and I can still remember doing that so clearly.

So obviously I'm still waiting around for my sense of place. I'm also waiting around for my classes to finally begin. [Confidential to Type A people: DO NOT, under any circumstances, STUDY AT UB. You WILL have an aneurysm due to frustration.] I have shown up to two out of my three scheduled classes so far this week, and both professors have been AWOL. Or maybe they had leave, who knows, apparently nobody, and why tell the students anything ahead of time? It's not like there's been this recent invention that allows you send information almost instantaneously via electronic--oh, what's that? UB has online email service? Who knew? Apparently not PhDs they hired.

This morning I got up at 7. Tomorrow I'm supposed to get up at 6:30 for my 8 AM fotografía digital class. My digital photography professor most likely will not show up, just like my figure-drawing professor and my pictoric reality and space professor. But I think that'll be okay, because I discovered a place where I can soothe my pain. I wandered into Café Dole today as I was walking up my street. It's a narrow little corner place with metal counter-tops and pretty tiled walls, and the best café cortado and croissant I've had since I got here. That's where I'll be writing postcards from now on, kids. The coffee came with a little sprinkling of cocoa powder on top and a little square of dark chocolate to eat after--and the croissant was actually fresh, something I've learned you can't always count on. Their main menu item seems to be entrepans (classic Catalán/Spanish sandwiches), and I think the place also doubles as a bar at night. So, you can't break me, UB, I've got Café Dole! Ha.

Another plus side of getting stood up by my teachers is that I can make friends quicker by commiserating with my fellow students. I met a couple of chicos today that seem really nice. Also, it's a gorgeous day and Logan and I are going to the beach.  So maybe I should thank my professor for the bait-and-switch...

Barcelona y yo

Aire en la boca y agua en el alma

caldo al arroz y vinagre en la sopa

sal en la mar y sal en la tierra

“vos” en la cuna

y “tu” en Europa

leche en la jarra y vino en la copa

la luna que no brilla sin que el sol brille en ella

el poeta que escribe su poema y lo arruina

pies sobre baldosa, goma y gelatina

la vieja en su cueva

el catedral en una vela

el suave timbrazo de la palabra “ciutat vella”

él

y ella

Barcelona

y yo.

Homogenization, La Sagrada Familia, Pink Floyd

In my packet of information I was given to read before my trip here, I was warned that Spaniards are used to fairly homogenized surroundings, race-wise, and not to be surprised if we heard host family members or friends say things about non-Europeans that we Americans might consider, at best, politically incorrect. Imagine my surprise, then, when upon arriving I discovered that the population of Barcelona is anything but homogeneous. This past Friday my friend Logan and I stumbled into a Chinese New Year festival,  complete with an altar, dragon dancers, and children dressed as bunnies hopping in a parade. And I already told you about the indeterminately Middle-Eastern durums. I even walked past an Argentine-Japanese fusion restaurant (and yes, I love both those cuisines, but I can't say I ever wanted to see them combined). So what's the deal, Spain?
I heard it explained it like this: in the states we have a Mexican-immigration "problem". In Spain, they have that same problem with Pakistani, Moroccan, Indian, North-African, Chinese, and most other non-white immigrants. I can understand why Catalans might feel protective of their culture, considering how hard they have had to defend it for most of its existence, and I certainly don't know enough about the issue to unpack it here...but you'd think people would at least be used to folks from everywhere, considering how close together most places are around here.
Now let's just work on the milk-homogenizing thing and we're good. Homogenize milk, not culture! Seriously. "Natural" (their word) milk goes bad in 5 days around here. I'm starting to get why no one buys it.
The parade that Logan and I saw was in Barceloneta, the harbor area of the city. There is a gondola stretching out over the bay there that I am totally going to ride before I leave here. I am meeting many of Logan's Spanish and non-Spanish friends: Catalan and French roommates, an English-teacher from Boston and her friends from Manchester. You can walk into a bar here and suddenly be in England or Ireland whenever you like, all the way down to the bartender's brogue. I've even been to a pub quiz.

On Saturday I made it to el Templo de la Sagrada familia and a Pink Floyd cover band show. The former cost me 13 euros and was worth every penny, especially the cost of the elevator ride into the higher regions of the basilica. It was late afternoon and sunny and you could see the shadow of the church cast over the park across the street from the Nativity entrance. This entrance is the one most people will recognized from photos: from far away it looks like a very sophisticated drip-castle, but when you get nearer hundreds of plant, animal and human forms come into focus. It was the first façade to be built, though it is not the front door. The Passion entrance is currently acting like a front door, because the real portal (the Glory façade) isn't even close to completion. That entrance is starker, angular, and skeletal, executed not by Gaudi but by a sculptor named Josep Maria Subirachs following his design. Even the giant tower that I got to climb is small compared to those that are under construction. I spent almost two hours at La Sagrada Familia, even though it was freezing inside because all that stone acts like a giant refrigerator. I highly recommend a visit, and, if you really want to take your time, go alone.
Pink Floyd cover band was free. Luckily for me (because tickets were 20 euros), a man with a strong resemblance to the illustrations of Jesus I used to look at in Christian picture books had been given two tickets but only needed one. No catch. Ramon (for that was his name) proceeded to rock out with (but not creep out) us for the rest of the show. We then went to one of those bars that transports you to ye olde Englande and smells like a locker room, called La Ovella Negra. And, because Logan has a friends-making super power, we found a table and met some very strange Finnish men who then lost one of their very drunk buddies and had to go find him. That was the most fun Saturday I've had yet.

Things are about to get serious though. I have one class this week, the one required by my program, on Tuesday and Thursday. The rest of my classes start next week. Today I am going to stroll over to campus and scope it out so I don't get lost on my first day of real Spanish school.

I miss you all.

On tunafish, yelling, durums, and bomb shelters.

In my last post I promised info about college and living experience so far her in Spain. So here it is.
I now share a four-bedroom flat with two children, Carla (11) and Joffre (10), their mom, Teresa, and another exchange student, Pauline, who is 16 and French, sweet as a buttercup and infinitely more intelligent. Carla likes to wear Lacoste and waxes melancholy whenever we have meat products for dinner, and Joffre likes video games, teasing his mother, and getting up way earlier than actually necessary. I've stolen Carla's room at the back of the apartment. They both crack me up.

Every weekday I take the magical mystery metro to my intensive Spanish course at the main university building, about 25 minutes away. There are always musicians in the tunnels because the acoustics are excellent. Every so often one will play on the train. I've heard several guitars and accordians, a recorder, keyboards, even a one-stringed Asian instrument I couldn't identify but reminded me of Chinese restaurant ambiance music.
My new neighborhood is called Sarría; it consists of mostly upper middle-class apartment buildings with zigzaggy balconies that make them look almost pixelated. Also, bakeries, nose-bleedingly expensive boutiques, little plazas, and newsstands where I've been buying postcards. I found a great lunch-item today--finding a meal under 10 euro has become a kind of daily quest--in one of the bakeries on my block. It consisted of a large slice of francese-style bread, a tomato spread, a thick layer of tunafish, and green olives dotting melted cheese. Toasted.  For only £1.35. They have an unfortunate habit of YELLING! A LOT! ALL THE TIME! but I'll say one thing for Catalans--they know how to handle canned tuna. And tomato. And bread, and croissants. Though I'll never, ever understand the shelf-safe milk thing (it's been 70 years since WW2 you guys!), even if I am getting used to it.

Speaking of WW2, today we had a field trip to a bomb shelter in a part of town called Poble Sec (though the shelter is actually from the civil war in 1936). It was a lot like a human-sized rabbit warren, made of tunnels burrowed into the side of the mountain. We were told the architects of the tunnels where improvising, no one having ever dealt with warfare that included air-raids and attacks specifically on civilians before. The bomb shelters in Barcelona were community efforts, with many people contributing large amounts of their own money and time for their construction. If you hadn't donated or helped out in some way, it was unlikely that you'd be allowed to take shelter, in order to be fair to those who had and account for limited space. The tunnels were barely taller than my head, reinforced with brick and cement, and some of them were actually completed during Franco's regime for strategic purposes. The unfinished tunnels reveal hundreds of gouges from picks and shovels in the yellowish rock of the mountain.

But back to food! Another cheap delicious thing I've been recently introduced to is the durum. I guess you could call it the Middle-Eastern version of the burrito, though I don't know which particular nationality I got my first one from. They slice meat that's been sort of caked onto a metal pole and roasted and stick it in a flatbread like a tortilla, and if you order the works you also get lettuce, tomato, corn, red cabbage, goat cheese, shaved carrot, and yoghurt dressing. The whole thing is then swaddled up and toasted on the outside a little bit, turning into something the taco-bell crunch wrap only dreams of becoming. I'm not going to reveal what time of night I consumed this thing, but I hope I can find a place near the university that sells them for lunch as well.

Very soon I'll be done with the intensive-get-used-to-using-Spanish course, by the end of the week in fact, and then next week I'll start real UB classes. I'll be taking a human figure-drawing class, a digital photography class, a program-run class called Masterworks in Catalan Art (required), and a class called Reality and Space that also has something to do with art. Wish me luck!