Looking Good In Pants

A TALE OF TWO CHAUVINISMS

2012-02-23T12:31:00.003-08:00

the beer is better in portugal. ...right: the beer is better in portugal than in spain. or, rather: the worst beer available in any given restaurant in lisbon is much better (and more varied, which is to say there exists a variety) than the only thing they're probably serving (which is to say cruzcampo) at any restaurant in seville. and in portugal they'll serve you your better than bad beer -- which does have the potential to be very good -- in a u.s. pint glass (and for no more than twice -- but probably much less than -- what they'd charge in seville for your eight ounce glass of mostly cruzcampo foam). just don't try to order it in spanish, because that's not what they speak in portugal (even if they'll tell you in spanish that, no, they speak portuguese). and of course they shouldn't have to, but one might be hard pressed not to be nonplussed at why english passes more easily on the streets than that other unspeakable language from the peninsula. (you can also try your hand at butchering french, the older portuguese understand it well.) for their part, the passing spanish tourists (and the andalucians are particularly unmistakable) are happy not to speak anything at all.

the coffee, i have to admit, is better in portugal as well. they must just make it better -- or it might just be fresher in the cafés in the port city than in the cities of inland spain. after all, the coffees produced in the countries of either former colonial empire have their respective merits. no, portugal did not invent the astrolabe, but the portuguese certainly used it to amazing effect. and alfonso x (the wise) knew that there was going to be some serious competition on the peninsula and ordered the construction of the reales ataranzas in seville for the building of his fleet -- the year before he captured the algarve (and gave it back as soon as portugal acceded to marrying his daughter), and well before spain (no, it was portugal!) discovered most of the rest of the fucking world. as soon as the moors were out, the race was on to see which emerging nation could make itself the better, grander, more sophisticated -- while also the most artisanally authentic -- even if it was impossible to distinguish the two on the basis of sovereign ruler. the king of spain and portugal was half the time getting elected the king of germany too, but that's just christendom for you. the people on the ground were still busy making their daily bread the best they could, regardless of who was sitting on which throne (and i have to admit that the bread is much, much better in portugal).

it makes a kind of funny sense that it was the treaty of lisbon that established the most recent constitutional basis for the european union, the establishment of which was based on the hope that europe shouldn't have to fight within itself any longer, and the result of which on the iberian peninsula appears to have been a simple shift away from the game of kings to a game of passive aggressive economic and cultural one-upmanship. spain pretends not to care. that's the privilege of the wealthier player (and spain should know because it's playing on the opposite side in a similar game with france). but the two newest democracies of western europe do seem to have something especially bitter behind their disregard for each other, and if portugal has been generally poorer, maybe that's just the price it's had to pay for being proud of actually deposing its dictatorship instead of just letting it die and then passing the reins. lisbon, as it were, has the better view.

this is dinner conversation. and yes, the food is good in portugal, but it isn't exactly what you could call cuisine, and i make that appeal to reason to the frenchman across from whom i'm dining, but he refuses to acquiesce. i don't care, he's only been to barcelona, and we all know that catalonia might as well be france (or portugal). but surely he must understand my point. that restaurant on the alameda, i tell him, was perfectly fine, it was even rather good. the portuguese were only complaining to complain (and even the portuguese said so). but no, he complains, he's tired of being greeted and thanked in spanish because that really isn't at all what he speaks (although he does speak all three languages of portugal). ok. i just thought he should know, you know, because chauvin was french. and we decamp.

later, on the streets of bairro alto, it's true: the spanish aren't doing much to make a better reputation for themselves. the neighborhood is still, in general, a bit shabby (if charmingly so), and the andalucians have felt enough at home comport themselves that way and disturb the native calm. but it might not be long before the neighborhood gets the treatment. for their part, the portuguese seem to have fostered a national complex after the earthquake that leveled the central flats of lisbon in 1755. the city and the country might need to be rebuilt at any moment, and so the city and the country are full of architects. but the frenchman doesn't find it at all funny when i point out that for all its english education and proud internationalism portugal wasn't able to supply its national association of architects with a design consultant that could keep it from emblazoning its headquarters all over with such suspectly nondescript aa's.

ugh. so not that i really have any allegiance one way or the other, but when the man trying to sell me oversize sunglasses between the bars hears mention of seville and smiles "de mi alma" in my direction i decide to give him two euro just because. it might not have been quite the grand gesture in spain, but at the bars in bairro alto two euro can buy quite a bit of better than bad beer. and after a couple of hours of drinking on the people watch, the borrowed rivalry between the frenchman and i is friendly again, but it doesn't mean that the game isn't still on. ultimately, what's two euro to me. i mean, you're the ones who didn't have fireworks at christmas.

maybe it's because it's carnaval weekend and the harder party-ers are off in setúbal or sesimbra, but the crowded, narrow streets of bairro alto on a saturday night are strangely bucolic. i wonder out loud if in a similar situation of drunken outdoor proximity there wouldn't already have been a riot were we in spain. but it isn't as if the portuguese are silent, and there are signs of protests and demonstrations planned for throughout the weekend. beer may still be cheap in portugal, but that's not exactly the reality of the austerities. lisbon isn't just taking to the streets at night. and neither, for its part, is spain. even beyond the noise of the valencian spring, sanitation workers are fighting city hall in seville and the agricultural unions are demonstrating for strict control of the use of transgenic seeds in front of the andalucian parliament building. not that the portuguese and the spanish are so ready to admit that they might be in the same boat (or to agree on which is the better boat builder), but there's no denying that french-portuguese or american-spanish, we might all soon be greek.

MORNING WOULD

2012-02-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

"in spring it is the dawn," begins the pillow book, "[it is the dawn] that is most beautiful. as the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them." it goes without saying that sei shōnagon, the court lady who served empress teishi in heian japan at the turn of the eleventh century, had never seen the light of dawn creep over the hills of lisbon. she wouldn't have known lisbon at all -- but then neither had i apart from having heard more than once that it was a city in which to lose oneself. and so i did. and i started early, so to speak, as the light of dawn was creeping over the hills, dying them a faint red as they were, at the same time, trailed over by wisps of purplish cloud making their way toward the other side of the water. the night bus is always a risky proposition as the promise of saving time by sleeping en route to the bus' destination is, at best (usually -- which is to say if you're lucky), only restlessly fulfilled, and the afternoon hours of the following day are spent wondering whether it would have been better to have wasted the afternoon of the day before in transit instead of having to agonize over rallying the strength to stay awake and enjoy the one in front of you. and then enjoying the night might mean a next morning even more vicious than the previous afternoon. but in spring (and for sei shōnagon, whose writing was done under the influence of the lunar calendar, the spring meant february), it is the dawn that is the most beautiful; and even if the weather isn't permitting of literary analogies, the night bus is, for all of its potential hazards, always the perfect way to meet the city at dawn. and even if on through successive encounters she turns out to be not exactly what you'd thought her to be at first, the city at dawn is yours for falling in love (with), with all the naivety of wanting just to fall in love. and in the dim light of dawn, with hardly anyone else on the streets to interrupt the playing out of her fantasy, she accepts you touching her, clumsily, perhaps, but well intentioned -- excited but respectful -- before any of her better acquaintances (or the internet) have a chance to fill you in on her history and her reputation and perhaps thereby ruin the better image of herself she'd helped you create in your shared romantic imagination. that image, of course (of course), could get better too in time, but for the time it's nice to imagine. to fall in love with...anything. and although the hilled streets that every so often (but each time sooner than you would have expected) open onto narrow vistas of the water, and the streetcars, and the big, red suspension bridge that leads over onto the wooded hills across the water are all reminiscent of past romances (not to mention the open arms of the redeemer), i try to keep myself to the possibilities of the moment. and that moment is silent in the glow of the creeping light until the silence is gradually broken as i approach someone playing his guitar at the edge of a ridge that drops from one neighborhood onto another. then the guitar player too falls into silence as i accidentally kick an empty glass bottle over the paving stones of the park and off the ridge. then a group of three passes behind me and in front of the art nouveau lampposts outside the gate of the whatever building and i take that as a cue to take myself down another hill. and the two policemen at the top of the hill above the tiered staircase where i stop to take a picture of my shadow in the faint red light think i'm suspicious. i would like, anyway, to think that they think i'm suspicious. i would be anything for love. but the light is getting stronger and there are more people on the streets, one of which i take and it takes me in front of the four seasons, and i wonder if i'm not too poor to be going for a love like this one, or maybe, rather, that my love is cheap. there is, however, enough exuberance left in the morning -- or just enough, rather -- to keep hope alive. before the gathering crowds on the streets remind you that you've only dismissed the pain in your feet for the aching in your knees and that your face has been all night on the night bus and wouldn't stand for loving anywhere, before your image of that very real love -- even if it was only imagined -- is ruined (and it's possible that it will be ruined by you, that you are ruining it), you need to immortalize it in correspondence. before it's ruined, you can tell them that it was beautiful to be in love with the city before it was ruined. there are places selling cards and places to sit, and inside you can't see that the hills are completely illuminated, but you can imagine it, and the contrast of the full morning light with the faint red and the purple wisps of your clumsy good intentions fills the morning now completely with the exuberance of a fond -- if clusmy (but well intentioned) -- longing. a dawn like that one could only give way to a morning like this one, even if its exuberance doesn't stand a chance against the afternoon. and this kind of morning would -- it can't but not, because this is your love story -- be conducive to grand, sweeping lines. they'll believe them if you do, even if you won't later believe them yourself. but this morning would. and in spring, i hear myself say it knowing that i might wish the line annihilated later along with my exuberance. in spring...cruzes credo...in spring it is the dawn.

MEN AT WORK

2012-02-16T13:37:00.001-08:00

comparative chauvinism contest. who ruled the world first? who can name the face? details after the weekend.

HOW TO SURVIVE THE GREAT SOUTHWEST FREEZE

2012-02-10T14:33:00.000-08:00

of course the swedes insisted that the weather was fine -- it's been an average of minus twenty where they had come from -- and their countrypeople, or at least the people of whatever countries send their rowers to train on the guadalquivir in the winter, were out training today like on any other on the river that never freezes. still, even if the southwestern end of the iberian peninsula wasn't blessed with the curse of unexpected snow, the second siberian cold front did have temperatures below freezing for the second consecutive weekend in seville, which was enough to get the people talking about the freakish weather -- and talking, freakishly, inside. so maybe it was just the freak coincidence of so few people being out on the streets that made the trip so lonely for the woman from bilbao last weekend, but it is also true that it can be difficult to get sevillians to open up and talk about anything but the weather -- even under non-freak circumstances. and so she talked to the "interesting" looking...american (was what he turned out to be)...at the cafe. she's gone back to the basque country, though (where it actually did snow), leaving seville behind to talk with itself about the weather. sometimes there's just not much else. the dance show at cicus on thursday, even if the dancer was undeniably talented and the choreography undeniably "interesting," was just too reminiscent of the cliched modernism of the cafe scene from "funny face." (although you know you know people who would have really liked it.) he was even in all black, just like the swedes when they left for the rock show at fun club (jesus christ, seville), but it's only fair to suppose that maybe the dancer's palette was an aspect of the flamenco he incorporated into his performance. and, undeniably, the flamenco touches worked in places, although the symphonic piece to which the choreography was set seemed to limit a flamenco interpretation rather than encourage it. and what was the music, they ask when you say that you might rather have listened to a symphony play it than watch the dancer dance to a recording. but although the performance was titled "le badinage," the music as you recall it wasn't anything like the baroque piece by that same title by marin marais. not to worry, because it suffices to say that the performance wasn't bad, and it also happens to happen that the discovery of marais turns out to be the perfect soundtrack to another cold friday night at home.

EN TORNO DEL ARTE...Y COSAS; or, SIN TÍTULO (subtítulo: LAS ADICCIÓNES)

2012-02-06T10:51:00.000-08:00

por casualidad, yo estoy en girona con un amigo arreglando unas cosas de su herencia, y como hace unos años que no hemos quedado, llamo a javier cercas para pedirle una reunión. nos conocimos en el funeral de roberto bolaño, y aunque no puedo decir que seamos amigos, él siempre ha estado dispuesto a responder a mis peticiones de consejo. él contesta al teléfono. ya sé que va a decirme que tiene mucho que hacer para preparar para sus clases en la universidad, pero sé también que él nunca va a rechazar una invitación para ir a le bistrot.

cuando llego después del mediodia del día siguiente, cercas ya está sentado en un velador con una cerveza en la mano. hace sol en la escalera que sube hacia la universidad, y yo le pido si podemos sentarnos un rato afuera. me dice que sí. la verdad es que me molesta el sol del mediodia en la cara, y aunque he oido que cercas sigue intentando dejar de fumar, yo sé que voy a querer un cigarro cuando el camarero me traiga el café. yo lo enciendo mientras cercas está diciendome algo sobre un estudiante suyo que le parece completamente inutil para hacer un curso de literatura. no he fumado desde que vine a girona y sé que probablemente el cigarro va a ponerme nervioso. tampoco he tomado cafeina. pero de todas formas me pongo nervioso pensando en que probablemente voy a parecerle tan inutil como su estudiante cuando le diga a cercas que de repente he vuelto incapaz de escribir. así que, pienso, por qué no con el cigarro? de hecho, con mi café y el cigarro podría desempeñar mejor el papel del artista frustrado, y luego puedo unirme a cercas en unas cervezas. hoy me da igual la comida.

todavía no se ha consumido la mitad del cigarro cuando cercas me dice que ha invitado a otra persona, a una amiga suya que también se queda en girona unos días por casualidad. pfft. qué…casualidad? pero no. yo no conozco las peliculas de isabel coixet. y no: “vicky cristina barcelona” es de woody allen. mierda. eso yo lo sabía. menos mal que he preguntado de antemano. ¿pero qué voy a hacer con mis consultas cuando llegue ella?

y cuando hace su aparición bajando la escalera yo inmediatemente lamento haber llevado mis gafas. estoy seguro de que le parezco como uno de los pateticos artistas frustrados que quieren afectar un aire como el de la directora española isabel coixet. me levanto y le doy la mano. lo lamento inmediatemente y me disculpo. soy americano. me siento y después de pedir una cerveza al camarero fumo otro cigarro. y después de llegar la cerveza fumo un otro.

hablamos. hablamos sobre el arte y…cosas. pero en realidad estoy sentado, callando mientras hablan los dos. de la nada cercas me pregunta si puede usar mi nombre para algún personaje en una nueva obra. no sé si ha intentado asustarme o si quiere que contribuya más a la conversación, pero no quiero discutirlo y así que le digo que sí. coixet bebe un trago de su vino. yo pido otra cerveza.

vamos dentro para coger un sitio para comer antes del café se llene de los colegas de cercas. coixet pide otro vino del camarero. yo pido otra cerveza y dejo a cercas pedir la comida. cercas y coixet conversan hasta que coixet, que debe haber sabido por cercas que yo vivía en japón, me pregunta qué pienso sobre los japoneses, pero yo no sé qué piensa ella ni he visto su película sobre ellos y por eso le digo que no mucho. la comida tarda mucho tiempo llegar. yo estoy sentando, callando, mirando uno de los grandes espejos y pensando en por qué no he podido responder a una cuestión tan simple y seguir con la conversación.

llega más gente y llega la comida. no voy a poder consultar a cercas sobre mis problemas pero, bueno, la comida está muy rica, y si de todas formas yo voy a tener que pagar la comida debo poder sentirme cómodo. voy a disfrutar lo que pueda. pienso, pero tan pronto como he tomado esa decision, coixet me pregunta otra cosa. me dice que como yo había llamado a cercas porque quería pedirle su consejo, me deja con él a solas. ¿no? te dejo hablar un rato con él, dice. pero no, digo, no hace falta, es que…es que…no sé. y ahora el camarero le trae otro vino y lo pone sobre la mesa enfrente de coixet. y ella bebe un trago grande. me dice: ya eres demasiado viejo para morir joven. si tú quieres hacer algo, cualquier cosa, tienes que quitarte ese estúpido miedo.

"LO VERDADERO Y LO VEROSÍMIL"; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO: CODA

2012-02-01T11:43:00.000-08:00

the curbside parking spaces are too large to think that drivers should need help managing their vehicles into any one of them (especially drivers accustomed to driving in central seville), but the aparcadores are busy directing the drivers into the spaces nonetheless, and they collect a few coins in finders' fees for their halfhearted gestures of guidance as the drivers walk away from those spaces that they could have easily found themselves, understanding that the situation with the aparcadores is one from which it's better just to pay and walk away. later, a pile of coins will hold up the closing time line at the grocery store as a cashier totals the change to see how many liter bottles of beer the pile will buy. it's interesting to wonder about the same as i'm on my way to the import bottle shop. but there isn't space for street parking on that stretch of jesús del gran poder. one twelve ounce bottle of american ipa costs about the same as six liters of the grocery store's off brand lager. i need two for the picnic.

we're walking on the east bank of the river looking for a spot to lay the blanket, and i ask what's taking the new public library so long to open as we pass it. she says there's a problem with the name. felipe gonzález márquez is sevillano, but the spanish president was also the secretary general of the socialist party, and the psoe no longer controls city hall. it's a curious coincidence to see gonzález a few hours later at the contemporary art center, speaking with the king seated next to him in a video taken at the universal exhibition of ninety-two for which the city developed the isla de cartuja. before the exhibition site was developed, cartuja was only the monastery, which was then a ceramic factory and is now the contemporary art center. most of the exhibition site remains a modern ruin, but the video of gonzález is not being projected in the lara almarcegui exhibit on urban wild spaces but in the larger, general exhibit on contemporary urbanism. who knows what would have happened after franco if juan carlos hadn't supported the transition to democracy (which included the legalization of the communist party in 1977), but it also isn't difficult to imagine that he and gonzález might have had different ideas on how to manage the fears of the people as they sat next to each other on that stage in cartuja on that day in nineteen ninety-two.

it's too dark to see much on the walk back, but the walls on the east side of the east bank esplanade are covered in street art. some of it was even sponsored by the city. the police that guard the closed gates around the felipe gonzález márquez library by night don't hassle the taggers by day, even now after the keys to the city have been passed. the tags on the buildings in the city center are much cruder. they're graffiti. if things hadn't gotten so difficult in the rest of the world, maybe things wouldn't have gotten so hard for zapatero. the warning that socialism lies isn't far down the street from the reproof that seville was a slave to the psoe (and somewhere along the way anarchism won as well). i would like maybe to be thinking something insightful about, say, the aparcadores when she asks me about the primaries in the united states, but i'm focused on something else. there's another piece of graffiti, and even if it has nothing to do with the others and it's not at all reflective of any sevillian or spanish sentiment in general (which, most likely, it's not), it's horribly unamerican. maybe it was gonzález, and maybe that's why they won't let his library open. and he was speaking so optimistically in that video. i don't want to call her attention to it although i do think it might be funny. yes. i do. "it's my fault."

PRINCESS PANCAKES PARTY; or, ALL ABOUT THE BUTT; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO, part 4

2012-01-28T13:48:00.000-08:00

cicus (centro de iniciativas culturales de la universidad de sevilla) screens international films for free. who knew? that finnish girl that everyone seems to know. she tells everyone that she knows that cicus is screening a series of finnish films throughout the month of january. they are a date! and then there is a party, because the finnish girl goes home after the movie about the woman who refuses to go on strike with the other cleaning women but then loses her scab position anyway and makes pancakes (the finnish girl, not the finnish woman in the movie). communism had its "golden age" in finland during the hottest years of the cold war, but even though the party participated in a number of cabinets, it never made president or prime minister. it didn't seem to be of any help to the cleaning women fight their case after coincidence and necessity convinced the ex-scab to give her lawyer acquaintance a chance to litigate helsinki city hall. the finnish girl would need to make a party of her own. and something about pancakes. that she made them after the film. and that she realized their curative power in the depressing wake of it. or something. but everyone goes to the party because everyone seems to know her, not because she knows about pancakes. they say, however, (as they say) that the pancakes are good. the idea for the pancake party was good. the finnish girl (who also makes a swedish pancake) knows everything about pancakes, they say. she smiles when they say this, but this is mostly because she is mostly smiling. once people showed up to the party the finnish girl was thinking about going dancing -- but not about going to class, although she had learned some fun things at a contact workshop in málaga. it was funny that it's all about the butt. she wants to make jackets. what a smile. then, on the heels of the arrival to the buffet table of the swedish pancake arrives the swede. she lives downstairs. downstairs she had made a chicken curry and a thick chocolate sauce with nuts. they're for the pancakes, so she puts them on the table with her countryfood. her smile is smaller. at breakfast in the morning the tube of caviar she brought the last time doesn't leave the fridge. both she and the finnish girl need to get to dance. but it would be nice to have a walk and a sit. as naturally as a prop cigarette can be smoked over a cup of coffee the swedish girl naturally holds her prop cigarette next to her cup of coffee. after the studio she's going to go home and eat the nutella she didn't use in the chocolate sauce with a spoon, "like the italians." something passes. "it's all about the butt." big smile.

I DIDN'T THINK SO; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO, part 3

2012-01-22T12:43:00.000-08:00

i think that i had meant to go. the posters were up in the streets of the macarena at least two weeks before the event, but the sixteenth of december came and went, not without fanfare, because it was probably for too much of it that passing a friday evening at wherever it was that the event was being held seemed insufficiently attractive. the cause could have used some bedazzling of its advertisement. with everything else assumed to be happening in december, that poster really should have tried for something more than the tired old faces of lenin, stalin and chairman mao. "qué ha pasado con el comunismo?" the sixteenth of december is well behind us: it's a thing of the past. but its reminders still decorate the macarena, and watching a scrap collector push by under a ragged array of those posters that covers almost the entire street level wall of a building off of san luis, i wonder how anyone here manages to secure themselves a shopping cart. maybe the ones in circulation have just been passed down or over since before security was increased to its current levels at the grocery stores. (and that is, at the groceries stores that still have them.) the cart at her apartment on twelfth avenue ultimately went back to the streets without her finding a friend who wanted to inherit it. so it was left, filled with skeins of her less expensive yarn and piloted by two cabbage patch dolls (and filled still with the skeins of the expensive yarn that she couldn't take). it was left for someone to push, as a friend held the door, still piloted by the two cabbage patch dolls through the deliveries door of the design firm that had opened on the other corner of that block of twelfth avenue. but before it was the depository for those shoes of hers that she couldn't throw out but wouldn't wear except around the building and across twelfth avenue to the grocery store owned by the femmalien (she called her) -- which was before she threw out those shoes to store her yarn -- the cart had once (at least that once) seen its purpose fulfilled for shopping. the shopping had actually been done, but with two bags each on both arms each, she said she wouldn't be able to walk the ten blocks back to the apartment on twelfth avenue. but look, a shopping cart. it's probably someone's, because shopping carts that have made their way out of somewhere anywhere have, anymore, had intentional help. but she's already putting her bags inside. the bikini she knit herself didn't work out for her so well at the beach, but she looks not so surprisingly appropriate test piloting the cart for the cabbage patch dolls in her miniskirt and the leg gauntlets she sewed for herself out of a purple vinyl coat. and she looks now not surprisingly inappropriate struggling for the cart with the man who's trying to wrest her hands off of the push bar. she shakes his hands off of her instead. then it's him her hands are pushing as he's screaming that the shopping cart is his. "is your name walgreens pharmacy?" she says and then he slides down the tree that's planted in the sidewalk somewhere along tenth avenue. and i look at the scrap collector and wonder if i shouldn't reevaluate missing events like the one that passed on the sixteenth of december instead of chasing the tails of phantom banalities through streets of a city they'll probably shouldn't see. but she's still talking to that man on the ground. "i didn't think so."

LOVE ME OR KILL ME; or, AS COOL AS BERLIN; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO, part 2

2012-01-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

but we have so many friends, she says. sure they may not be as reflective as we would like them to be, but what do we do to make them so supportive? what do we do? reflect, probably. and that does make you interesting, but it also makes you wonder why sometimes people aren't very reflective. "i wanna be future with a history, out of tune but in my melody; je m'en fous...but very trendy." not necessarily the last one, but those are the words. and berlin is really cool. really, really cool. except for its capitalizing on its communist past, although that past has undeniably played a part in making the city an interesting place to live, even if a handful of years was enough for her to know that maybe she didn't want to live its capitalist future. for now. actually, she says, it sounds like portland is a lot like berlin. or that berlin is a lot of little portlands with different architecture. that's why you leave after the first decade of the twenty-first century. hardcore vintage is over, so why put up with the rain? you're probably getting priced out of the architecture you liked anyway. (the communist portland is probably super easy to spot, and the authenticity of the industrial design probably makes the coffee even better.) but he doesn't follow. he doesn't even make a show of pretending to try. but it isn't like you leave for somewhere else just to roll over and die. that's not even intimated, and any intimation would just be a matter of reflection. she can be urban poetry, young and wild and free, a friendly kind of freak somewhere else. love me or kill me, she might say, but that would just be to impress, um, maybe the irony of feeling it so hard that you want to go on living to figure it out. or to find someone more worthy of killing you. and in the end it isn't the death that kills you but that the audience doesn't get it. they might get it somewhere else (but not back in bavaria). of course there's flamenco in berlin, but it's not like she's dancing here in hopes of going back to start a school in berlin. and she explains that in her andalucian spanish, which only ever echoes the standard idiom of the central iberian plateau when her mother german makes it too easy for her to distinctly voice the hardness of her soft j's and g's. she doesn't hear it. but she will reflect. "y de algún modo de algún modo de algún modo comunicar algo del abrumador inmortal irrefrenable incondicional omniabarcador enriquecealma abreconsciencia constante inagotable amor que tengo." para ti. "i wanna be, i wanna be."

HIJA DE PIJO; or, GAS WHORE; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO?

2012-01-17T03:19:00.000-08:00

in the best way. in the best way. you're assured. but there hadn't been gas for days. days! (two.) and then there was the gas man. the gas man. she might have done anything for him after all those days -- and he brought the gas. the line between reasoned sophistication and intolerance might not be so fine as the one between genius and insanity, but we shouldn't deny it its reasoned sophistication. and as she explained to her audience in the kitchen (which included the man who would later be designated sex god on the kitchen chalkboard), if those nineteen year old moroccan girls were trying to throw a benefit then they were pijas. they go to the university? pijas. the division of wealth in morocco is so extreme it's incomparable. if someone has enough money to send their kids to university in spain they're fucking pijos. you're a pijo or you have nothing. nothing. there are maybe a few middle class families, including my family, in morocco. oka-y. so maybe i'm a little bit pija too, but c'mon, not really, i mean my father was a communist. both sides of the line between reasoned sophistication and intolerance are egalitarian. hija de pijo! the sex god tried (tried!) to get it out, but it doesn't really roll off the back of the throat. and whatever about the sex god. we are sex goats. MEAAHHH. the sex god had been incredulous about the flying goats, but all doubts had been put to rest by the pictures of the goats in the trees. and although the trees exist at the same latitude in mexico, the goats only fly into them in morocco. then they shit (or spit, if it eases your stomach) the stuff you need to make the delicious oil that you mix with the honey that the diabetic refused until he realized that the orange juice was all gone. sex goats. MEAAHHH. we're all sex goats here. and by then the sex god's infamy had been chalked up on the board. that didn't, however, resolve the question of whether sex gods or sex goats had the appropriate prowess to seduce a merman or maid (fucking pijos all of them). but a mermaid, that's just like a woman with one leg, right? the sex god's prowess wasn't at all promising. luckily, the gas whore was saved that ignominy. but the knocking at the door wasn't going to be the gas man at this hour. somehow those fucking goats flew their way all the way across the mediterranean.

this character sketch (and others), copyright 2012 looking good in pants, is for sale. contact our agent for expansion possibilities. and please, oh my god, don't go into too much detail about the gas whore thing because she might already be really pissed off that we wrote about it.

STOP THINKING ABOUT TOMORROW; or, ONE MORE THING, part 2

2012-01-10T10:31:00.000-08:00

they came. late, but anyway. i thought i’d already been given the gift of the magi that night that i lost the key to my spanish boyfriend’s heart on the floor of that gay disco in chueca, that night that I went to that disco to show him that i was available to unlock it, and the same night that my spanish boyfriend stayed home to show that he could sit and read quietly despite the party. and the plot lines would diverge if i were to suggest that the key might have been stolen (although maybe that’s just the modern twist), or maybe not, because my sad, ironic gift would have been offered up nonetheless. but that mamma bear and her family standing on the corner near the star café in the small hours of the thirty-first were a measure of hope. (that is, they hoped: “and my what big balls you have, my dear.”) and, besides: whatever, i didn’t really believe in those silly clowns with their cakes and their candies. but, as the footballers’ agent i ran into again by chance so appropriately noted, we’re all catholic around here, believe it or not (because your mother and your uncle and your grandfather do). and when in spain, do like the romans. i probably also got some credit for the international publicity i gave them, and so it is that they brought me michel houellebecq, flannery o’connor and roberto bolaño (in the elegant shadow of lorin stein) to keep me company for the month of austerity. (resolution: frugality, or stop doing the books).

and all of a sudden mamma started to dance. she said it had something to do with the moon.

ENDING START

2012-01-06T15:32:00.000-08:00

and so i found myself running again to el faro de triana. i had heard the cabalgata pass along resolana and then turn the corner of the block next to mine onto feria, where, had i actually caught it -- or, rather, had it stopped me down the block from my building -- i likely wouldn’t (couldn’t) have continued my progress; but as it was i seemed to have timed my departure perfectly to make my scheduled dash to catch the three kings and their cavalcade as they crossed the isabel ii bridge, on schedule, at seven-thirty. i knew my way.

the previous saturday, the thirty-first, i’d made my last of the same dash of the old year. the portuguese delegation (from faro) was scheduled to meet us there in the early afternoon, and i’d had just enough time to make the end of the beginning of the meeting having woken late from a five hour nap necessitated by too much not enough sleep on my overnight bus from madrid. luckily, when i arrived i’d only been preceded by one member of the foreign delegation and -- a double stroke of luck -- she appeared to have been thoroughly engaged by an englishman named trevor. (lucky for us or not, el faro de triana is full of those, and the local delegation seems to attract them.) in short order, which is to say two (more orders, that is), the rest of her contingent had joined us and we were on our way.

and our way stopped us at quite a few places more, doubled back, doubled back again, stopped, tried to dance before doubling back once more to try to dance again, lost a credit card, finally danced, and sang a festive (but totally unironic) choral rendition of “summertime” before putting us in the path of that family of amantes on a corner near the star café -- where the one of the portuguese still in conference invited the thirteen year couple and their three shared lovers to visit her apartment near the beach (as she had done with most of the people we’d encountered in the previous three hours. and had we not dallied for forty-five minutes on that corner, we might have made it into vintage before it closed instead of having to take refuge from the cold in the bar next door where the progeny of better heeled seville were still carousing (and the bouncers politely resetting the overturned tables as they fell). at that point, however, we were really just headed for home, or for triana, that is, where that first and last portuguese was staying with one of our own, and vintage just happened to be near one side of the isabel ii bridge. el faro de triana is at the other, and on that other side it was cold, so i stayed.

the next day, i was firmly resolved to…something. but as i couldn’t quite pin that something down -- and as christmas still had five days left in it anyway -- i thought it might be wise to give the resolution some time. what’s more, if it got dark again, people might not notice that my cuffs were soiled and my patent leather scuffed, so after the portuguese had agreed to terms and left (we’re to meet once a month for the duration of 2012), we camped out at our faro on this side of the border until, well, a few hours after dark and i was sure it was safe to make the return trip.

when i passed el faro de triana yesterday evening, still well ahead of the kings, the crowds had already gathered along the bridge and along the wider part of san jacinto, so i was confused as to why my friend was still at home. making dinner. apparently enough time had passed since our last conversation about the parade that she thought i wasn’t coming, she said over the phone. but i was there, so i decided to join her in her apartment for a cup of tea.

and it was over that cup of tea that i heard the cabalgata pass, and neither i nor my friend made any move away from the kitchen. so the three kings passed, throwing candy to the crowds, and their entourage trampled the candies not foraged by the trampling crowd, and the quickest way home after i’d decided that i was finally over the holiday took me right through the sticky upshot of christmas. maybe because i missed their big moment, or maybe because i swore at them with every gummy step i took up the staircase of my building, but i woke up this morning to find that the kings hadn’t left me a thing in the night. but on the beach in conil this afternoon, it was hard to remember what exactly had been so interesting about their coming in the first place, and if i hadn’t had the shocking reminder of soaking my head in the salt water in an attempt to clear up the congestion of my lingering cold, i might have forgotten the mad dash to the parade all together. but there’s always tomorrow. and by then the decorations should be down.

merry christmas.

DONDE ESTAN LOS TODOS CHICOS AT, part 3

2012-01-05T07:03:00.001-08:00

we stood in front of las meninas for, let’s say, an hour (let’s say), because our attendant late renaissance art history phd-in-progress had something to say about it. a few things, even, about why it might be the most important painting in the place. and we were proud, because you can understand the garden of earthly delights without understanding it (or so we fancied ourselves led to believe), but to be a successful voyeur in the chamber of the infanta margarita is something that requires a more, well, delicate sensibility -- as they say.

the surrender of breda was a similar story, but velazquez had played different tricks than with the attendants of the infanta. it might have just been the lingering effects of the night and the morning, but the museum guests with their ears pressed to the black sound clubs giving them their recorder tours seemed not to hide their jealousy over our access to javier’s private lectures. that i was looking around was definitely a result of those lingering effects. in other words, it’s possible that halfway through our several hours long private tour of the prado, it’s possible that i was still, well, drunk -- as they say. (although they don’t say that it might have been on attention.)

they say that you can’t do better cruising in spain than on gran vía, that gran vía smack dab (wink) in the middle of Madrid, and it would seem to be true: there’s a decision over whether or whom to follow at every crossing where two (or four or a dozen) pairs of eyes have had that extra moment to linger. but i say that if you want to know what delicious piece of eye candy is going to be wondering if you have any drugs at five-thirty the next morning in chueca, get yourself man to the prado on a friday afternoon.

this is the thought that i have on a friday afternoon at the prado as i catch my second second wind of giddiness. my bus back to seville leaves in seven hours, which won’t be enough time to collect on my investment at the museum (still drunk, as they say, i’ve probably invested sloppily anyway), but it’s still long enough that i might die at dinner. we’re meeting other friends.

i try to revive myself again with the same bit of whimsy (which is a phrase i think is fucking ridiculous now that i am no longer drunk but being encouraged again to drink) as we’re snacking at the market, but it doesn’t have the same effect as at the museum. our guide is still with us, but the fare at the market doesn’t look so great.

i’m not at all able to hide my jealousy as we cross gran vía toward the comic book store owned by one of our other friends. i could have died, but i’m saving that for dinner. dinner, however, turns out to be more than pleasant, because i like our other friends. i can die at the tiki bar we’re going to afterwards if it sucks. but the tiki bar doesn’t suck. the interiors of tiki bars in madrid are decorated in hipster rockabilly nostalgia, and the drinks they serve in their huge tiki mugs come with a free third second wind of giddiness.

i am taking my time getting my bag from the hotel, but i don't yet know that the metro route i’ve mapped to the bus station requires me to change trains at a stop that has just closed for the night because of a special holiday weekend schedule. when i come up from the metro wherever it is that i come up from the metro, i’m able to quickly catch a cab, but i regret catching the one that i do because it’s the one driven by the guy who can’t stop telling me that the last buses leave from that bus station at one and it’s already twelve-fifty. we arrive at the bus station some time after twelve-fifty, and i die at one o’clock, precisely as my bus is pulling out of the station in madrid to take the living passengers back to the madness in seville.

the resurrection doesn’t normally figure much into the christmas story, but what can i say, it was a christmas miracle. and in seville, tonight, the penultimate (but isn’t it always here), the eve of the last day of christmas, the magi are on parade. they’ll be in the neighborhood around seven. but what of it? we didn’t spend any time at all at the museum on the adoration of the magi or the triumph of bacchus. to be honest, i don’t even remember seeing them. apparently, as they say, they really aren’t that important.

STRANGE DAYS; or, SICK, SICK S**T

2012-01-04T12:12:00.000-08:00

on the hundred and first day of christmas, you are not surprised to wake up sick. in fact, you have already woken up sick so many times since falling asleep that the story is old, and it doesn’t at all inspire you to get out of bed when you wake up for good, so you lay there, sick, until just after that one moment, the moment after which, if you get out of bed any later, you will no longer be able to make your appointment on time. but you hadn’t yet seen your hair, so you take an extra moment to somehow make it look even shittier than it did when you first saw it. you decide on a hat, which you know will just let everyone know that you somehow managed to make your hair look even shittier than how it looked when you woke up sick. but you are sick, so that should be expected. what you hadn’t expected when you woke up sick and gave yourself just a little bit less than enough time to make your appointment was that the utility company had left you a notification of suspension of service in the foyer on the ground floor, which, when you find it, insists that you contact the company by the impossible hour of one hour from now to avoid having your water cut. you think that maybe you should have gotten out of bed to answer the bell when it kept ringing, but then decide that the problem is the landlord’s to deal with within the hour and that you couldn’t have possibly dealt with the utility company with your hair looking like it did, especially before you would have known it looked that way, and, besides, it’s bad enough that you have to make your appointment in this hat. you send a text and make your appointment. afterwards, despite having been told that you look sick and should go back to bed, you meet friends for coffee. but you should do something other than just be sick today, even if that something is just having coffee. a new acquaintance introduces you to the footballers’ agent who shows up to the table after about an hour of your trying to convince yourself to go home as someone who writes, but writes something strange. you wonder if you haven’t been given too much credit (you had told the new acquaintance that what you do is what he sees you doing), but then are distracted by the thought that the sun is probably making you look worse than just the sickness had been doing and decide on getting home. you are sick and might as well sit at home trying to write something worthy of your reputation.

but you already knew that the trip to madrid would be a strange one when your first interaction after coming up from the metro at six-thirty in the morning on the twenty-eighth of december is with a prostitute to whom you try to explain politely (where politeness probably isn’t due) that you’re not interested in the ladies. she is asking you (in a shouty voice) if you are some kind of fag or something as you walk away, and it makes you feel a little better to be able to give thirty cents to the man struggling with the cigarette machine. it is six-thirty in the morning on a wednesday, and the streets of the capital of spain are strangely deserted. you make it from the gran vía metro stop all the way to the royal palace and back in a meandering figure eight without seeing even one hundred people. the plaza in front of the palace is empty except for two guardsmen. it is satisfying to walk the entire north-south stretch of the palace alone (except for the guardsmen, who think that you are suspicious). you decide not to take the guardsmen’s picture because you don’t feel like running, but you regret not having to run from the guardsmen because you would like to be able to tell that story. you actually feel like sitting, so you find a convenience store that has postcards, buy a million of them and then go to the first place with coffee that looks decent. you happen to have found your way to chueca, but this place could be anywhere in the city (or in yours, even). they do not have what you ask for (and you kick yourself for asking for something so obviously southern), but you drink two coffees while writing half a million postcards and watching snow white’s funeral procession on the morning television news. some kind of fags or something have since come in too. you leave. the light is nice (you think it’s nice), so you walk the opposite direction down gran vía taking pictures. you had made sure to buy only postcards with pictures of places that you had already visited (gran vía, the plaza de españa, the royal palace), but now that you have ostensibly been to chueca and the retiro, you buy a few hundred thousand postcards representing those two places and go to the café that you’d passed on your way away from the first one, the café that didn’t open until eleven. it is now eleven, and you can get into your hotel room at twelve. your third coffee almost helps you forget that you didn’t sleep on the overnight bus from seville, but not really because the fact of your having already had three coffees reminds you that you didn’t sleep on the overnight bus from seville. it does, however, help you quickly finish another half a million or so postcards. several tens of thousands of people have now already been written twice. you are in good shape.

you are in good shape, but not in the shape of any of the grey coats available in any of the stores in central madrid. you give up looking for a grey coat after the second millionth time that you are told that the clothes in the display window are no longer available anywhere in the city. you have since checked into your hotel, to which you return after your last straw letdown only to ask for directions to the nearest post office. at the post office, you are impressed with yourself, but the man on the other side of the counter is only put out by having to sort your postcards into so many different piles of so many dozens of different countries. you are put out to pay, but you put out anyway. then you take more pictures. it’s true. the cathedral in madrid is ugly. whatever, you think (and you think yourself abandoned, wildly and recklessly), now it’s too dark for taking too many good pictures.

as you are falling asleep in the bathtub, you think that you should really go out. you’re going to be hanging out with your friend and her boyfriend the next evening (and the next), and you’re not sure if you’ll have the chance to have it your way in madrid any night but this one. and oh. dios. mio. you fall asleep for a moment on the bed in your room while letting your hair dry to a spanish dubbed episode from the first season of “gossip girl.” you are going out. who goes on vacation and pays for a hotel just to sleep there all night? not you, anyway. and anyway, you need to eat. you put on clothes and leave your key at reception.

you wander your way north of chueca and find a restaurant. you hate that restaurants “seem nice” to you because they look like they might be trying to do something that a restaurant that you tried to like what they were trying to do had done in the past. but once you’re inside, you like that you’ve found a restaurant that serves spanish craft beer. you didn’t think that existed. (where there’s a cruzcampo tap handle in seville, there’s one from mahou in madrid.) you’d say something about the beer (or simply name it) or say something about the food, but you’re sick today and don’t feel like finding the yellow napkin that you used to write down whatever pretentious things you wrote while at that restaurant that night. mostly you think that you are happy to be sitting somewhere safe after having earlier realized that you had wandered into the parking lot of the palace of justice with your beer and that the guardsmen were only waiting to approach you out of dumb surprise.

the next afternoon when your friend calls you as you’re trying to find your way to a metro stop, you think that you’re probably going to get sick in a few days. how clean are the assholes in the civil guard? you don’t know how far you are from your hotel, you say, but you’re sure that in three hours you’ll be able to get there, shower and meet your friend and her boyfriend wherever they’d like you to meet them. when you get back to your hotel, it has somehow been possible that the woman who was at the desk when you left at dinnertime the night before is still sitting there. you imagine that she thinks you’re a spy. at best, she thinks you’re a prostitute. but maybe she’s bored, has imagination, and wonders if you’re not a spy forced to work undercover as a prostitute. you take your key and take a shower. you still have time for a coffee at that second café.

you are very happy to see your friend when she and her boyfriend arrive up the stairs from the gran vía metro stop. you didn’t even have too look for them on the other side of the street. they came up the right exit on the first try. unfortunately, you see that your friend is not carrying a bag. your friend is a friend who would carry a bag, and if you hadn’t thought so, you wouldn’t have brought these sweets that you bought for her boyfriend’s mother in seville, because the sweets are in a wooden box. now you are the guy who meets your friend’s boyfriend for the first time and makes him carry a wooden box in an ugly plastic bag all around central madrid (you thought she’d have a bag!). maybe he gives you the benefit of the doubt and assumes that you are just tired from being a prostitute-spy. but the boyfriend carries the wooden box in the ugly plastic bag to where you have dinner and later to the bar where his friend is “spinning” where the three of you have drinks. you make fun with your friend, and before she and her boyfriend head to the train that will take them home, her boyfriend tells you to follow the street you’re on until you get to the next major intersection, at which point you should go right to your hotel or left to fun. and who, given that invitation, wouldn’t choose fun? you do, anyway. and anyway, you’ll see your friend and her boyfriend tomorrow. this is your last chance not to sleep at your hotel in madrid, and you’re probably going to be sick in a few days so you should have your fun while you can. those enterprisers selling singles from convenience store bought six packs on all of the street corners are tonight a blessing, tomorrow a curse.

you ask the group standing outside the electro video bar if they’re from the city and if they can recommend a place to go after this one, and you’re only a little surprised that you follow them to a club from the night before. you go inside and decide not to ask any of the bartenders if they found any of the things that were on the chain you found broken and dangling from your collar the last time you left. you are satisfied with the poesy of having lost your half of the promise rings that a jeweler friend made for you and your last wife and the key to your spanish boyfriend’s heart on the floor of a gay disco in madrid. you do, however, think to ask after the scarf you also lost because it was a gift, and expensive, reclaimed by a friend from the lost and found at the bar where she worked in the old country. but you don’t, and you dance, and later, the day before you wake up sick, you regret that you’ve forgotten the name of the portuguese man who was only interested in talking and invited you to visit him in lisbon.

detour. there are thousands of jon kortajarenas in madrid, but when you meet them all you understand that they won’t have careers as models because they’re short and that the young ones probably won’t get any taller because they’re all on coke. this thought is tickling you as the first wave of giddiness hits at eight-thirty. you’ve decided it’s probably not a good idea to try to sleep before your checkout at eleven, so you’re taking another walk in the (general) direction of the retiro. you pass the prado, which is on the itinerary for your day with your friend and her boyfriend, and you think that you should probably shower and change clothes before you have to meet them to go there. you have an awful sandwich at the first place you find open and probably should have acceded to the server’s offer of an orange juice. you’re too tired to care what the man at the reception desk thinks about your career choices when you pick up your key, and oh. dios. mio, you’re asleep again, and it’s a quarter past eleven but you decide that a shower is worth the possible penalty. you pack your things and leave them at the reception desk, where you also return your key. you’ll be back to collect them later, and it’s really the least the hotel can do after the prostitute-spy who only slept three odd hours there sings the credit card receipt for a two night stay (although when they made your bed on morning two they did refrain from stealing any of the things you refrained from putting in the safe).

your friend calls and tells you that she’s going to need an extra hour before meeting you, so you have time for another coffee at that second café, which is where you decide that the day will be fine because you really only have two options: make it onto the bus that will take you back to seville in thirteen hours or die; so your only responsibility is to end up at one of those conclusions. you meet your friend and her boyfriend in front of city hall after your coffee and three liters of water, wondering how quickly the line at the prado will allow you into the bathroom.

on the hundred and first day of christmas, you are not surprised to wake up sick, but you had managed to pretend that you somehow might avoid it. but had you avoided it, you might not have had your mandate to sit at home making strange stories, to pass the time at least, until the water came back on and you could have a shower and drink some tea.

ON THE HUNDREDTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS

2012-01-03T11:32:00.000-08:00

maybe it’s possible (let’s imagine by the graces of inculpable hindsight) that, back on the inmaculada, i actually considered what i said about the nonstop christmas march that would carry the country -- partying – through the arrival of the magi on the sixth of january to be a joke. (it couldn’t possible rage an entire month.) in any case, however, i considered the possibility to be a sensational one, at least until i found myself participating in the efforts for its realization, which might well have failed at any point, but none of the participants ever seemed to let that daunt them, probably because, well, whenever any one of us went belly up, that one of us had the out of insisting that it was all only a joke. but now, with just four days to go until victory, who isn’t completely over christmas? in all honesty, had the portuguese not invaded seville to celebrate the new year, the party might not have even lasted that long -- and we might have even stayed on in madrid, where, although christmas followed, there was a short respite from the demands of the season at home (although, admittedly, not from the parties).

so it was that seville was introduced to the walk of shame (or that term in english anyway) by the sight of mine on the first of january, which truly shamed me for the fact that the person with whom i had slept was a friend and that our activities in her bed were severely limited by my acceptance of her terms for sharing it, namely that i stay on my side and not shift the covers too much. and all the shame of christmas would have been gratefully forgotten by the time i’d finally made it almost home around eleven that night but then ran into two friends on the alameda -- two friends whom i joined for a tea in an outfit that might even have regained some of its elegance of the night before for its brazen shabbiness (it helped me to think). and christmas could have been forgotten by the early afternoon of the next day, and it might have been, if only i hadn’t run into my friend on her own walk through the streets of my neighborhood and sat down with her for a coffee. she’d been away since the twentieth or so, and, although we’d weathered the portuguese invasion together, we hadn’t yet had an opportunity to catch up. so we talked. and i told her what i’d been told to expect myself before leaving the city for the capital the previous week. it’s true. the cathedral in madrid is ugly.

it isn’t, at any rate, the cathedral of seville, which is where i went with two friends to see the midnight vigil mass on christmas eve. maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity. but sitting there, drowning the shame of christmas in my burned coffe across the table from my friend (who admitted that she’d been a bit envious to hear that those were my plans for the night of the twenty-fourth), the grace of inculpable hindsight intervened again, and i admitted that i shouldn’t have expected anything but the drudging formality that the mass was (and that i had felt bad for having had subjected friends to it), but that i really had thought there would be more singing. i thought there would have been more singing of songs that we could have sung anyway, but apart from the adeste fideles that i belted out (in latin of course) while the better catholics went up to the altar for communion, there wasn’t a thing in which the cantor could get all but a few in the cavernous cathedral to join him while the organ thundered out the opening salvos of the dirge to the crucifixion.

i certainly make no pretensions to poetry -- and all that any of us can hope for youth is that it remain generously relative -- but i was obliged to read those letters of rilke’s to that young poet on the night of the twenty-fifth, and in the second, my hesitation over describing that mass:

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of fife. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless.

again, granted, i didn’t consider myself rilke’s intended demographic and so neither did i consider myself compelled to follow his injunctions to the letter. as it were, maybe i was well beyond help. but still, in thinking about treating that mass given by the bishop (or the archbishop maybe) in that biggest of the world’s gothic cathedrals i felt grateful for rilke’s caution as i found myself confronted with the possibility of a very great irony, and one that might even have allowed an ironic reading of that second letter. there were at least fifteen clergy and servers sitting and standing around the bishop (or archbishop) where he sat behind the altar (the ornate resplendence of the decorations around the altar and of the towering altarpiece i couldn’t hope to describe). apart from the cantor and one very talented young clergyman who chanted the intentions, the rest of the ordained appeared disinterested or ailing, biding their time on the fast track to heaven or, better, a promotion. most of the latin part of the mass seemed to center around the removal and replacement of the bishop’s (or archbishop’s) sparkly hat, one of which the proceeds from the collection couldn’t hoped to have purchased. the ironic interpretation of the bishop’s (or archbishop’s) standard issue homily: spread the word.

our spirits were slightly lifted by our singing of the communion carol, and we might have made our peace with our misexpecations for midnight mass at the cathedral in seville had we not been stayed after the bishop (you get it) officially dismissed us by the recessional, which stopped the crowd from its retreat when it paused at the entrance to the huge ironwork cage that surrounds the platforms that surround the altar. baby jesus, who had been biding his time in front of the altar embarrassedly (though probably not for his nakedness), was taken up into the arms of one of the clergymen, and one by one after the bishop the other clergymen proceeded to put their lips to the statue’s feet as a server wiped them clean between kisses. the clergy recedes, and the crowd follows. not out, however, but up to the cage to leave kisses of its own.

and yes, we stayed, but let that be out of deference to the faithful (who, granted, had us kind of trapped), but let that sentiment have aspersions fall where they’re due. i’m sorry sir, but irony fails to fall away, to become either small or helpless. in all its great seriousness, the church is neither serious nor great. it didn’t even give a good show. and maybe that’s just here in spain, or even just here in seville. i don’t know what midnight mass was like at the ugly cathedral in madrid, but the people pouring out onto the square from the doors of st. mary’s in krakow those years ago had some spirit. seville is, however, undeniably poetic at night, even tonight after more than a week of the children and the idiots setting off those blasted fireworks that could hardly be said to make much fire but certainly make themselves heard. and it was probably because we were out of there, or because we were on our way to recuperate (from which we’d need to recuperate the next day), but as the exploding of the fireworks in the early morning of the twenty-fifth scared the doves away from their perches in the nooks of the cathedral roof and those doves flitted up into the artificial orange light that lit it, there did seem to be, if not sacred, then something romantically marvelous in the air.

it’s too bad those same fireworks didn’t provoke a similar effect in that plaza on san luis as dusk was falling yesterday. they surely couldn’t have unburned the coffee. eyes rolled, eyes narrowed, and another story.

PUEDE SER

2011-12-27T11:27:00.001-08:00

that when i went back to the christmas miniatures market next to the cathedral on december twenty-seventh to find the stalls being emptied out into trucks without ever having purchased a miniature christmas jamón for myself (although there’s no reason i shouldn’t have noticed the giant banners advertising the market through the twenty-third before then) -- that, in other words, the true meaning of christmas could be so simply elusive -- should be read as an omen…although whether that omen be good or bad remains to be read. and there, having been admonished by rilke on the evening of christmas day not to write if i could imagine life without writing, i was forced to wonder about the corollary of whether life should cease to exist for someone who couldn’t imagine life without writing but for whom it had been difficult to find the time. for example, if, say, a certain blog that had been building up to the holiday then found itself floundering at the holiday’s first peak, should that blog deserve its persistence. in other words, that we may not make it into the new year. or, that the mystery has just been too elusive to allow itself to have been so simply elucidated (compounded now by the impossibility of the jamón). so, you know, it’s possible. whatever that is.

UNA CHUPA GRATIS; or, WE SEVEN QUEENS

2011-12-21T14:21:00.000-08:00

after the master of ceremonies (whose group had added our number to its own as bobo was closing) had finished another song, there was a round of applause for the two women left to close café hercules, who had let the fifteen or so of us in for a round (of singing) just as they were starting to pull the shades down over the doors. (they pulled us some drafts and poured us some drinks, too.) but we only got one round before we had to go back out into the cold (because baby it’s been cold outside in the valley of the guadalquivir the last several days), and we counted seven of us sisters in the group before we headed to the alameda to go that one place – that one place that everyone loves because it’s past closing time on a sunday and the place is still open. then we’d lost two of us – along the short way? – but the girls were still fun, and i’m not sure how many made it to the party at the troop leader’s house because i wasn’t one of the ones who went with them after the other place finally closed and that one female friend of the leader’s (who hadn’t been singing in front of bobo or at café hercules) was making an attempt at a fandango she said she loved but couldn’t remember with the help of that guy with the glasses who’s always asking for money on one knee around the alameda.

it’s a shame that the two who had left the group before our penultimate stop had gone when they did because they really had set the tone of our story (even if they weren’t the ones setting the pace). plus, i probably won’t get another spanish lesson like the one i did when we were seven sisters on that street corner any time soon (the poor French girl), and i’ve no doubt that those two could have gotten something for all of us out of that last bartender for free. una chup(it)a? everyone laughs. at the ambiente. en el aire. everyone laughs.

ironically, if it hadn’t been for all the distraction of the holiday spirit (and the espresso machine being out at la travíesa last wednesday), i might have remembered to mention that the scenes of the christmas story in the display windows at the corte inglés are actually accompanied by a flamenco soundtrack. but there isn’t a leg of ham in sight. and one of the giant snowflakes on the eastern façade of the department store is missing some lights. but the spirit has been distracting enough for most people to forget the crisis for a while. (and on the television the gallego announces his new government.)

it’s distracting enough, and sometimes too much after ten-thirty, but sometimes too you just need to get out to get cozy, because sevillian apartment buildings aren’t really equipped to be accommodating in real winter cold, and you remember that it’s probably warmer in the streets – and even more among all the people in the bars. that’s the excuse of the season.

for better or for worse, at least we know that the nights won’t get any longer, and even if people might come back around to feeling the crisis once the spirit ebbs, you still have time to get one for free.

you read this and think, “this sucks.” everyone laughs. yeah. but it isn’t my fault. it was my sisters’.

O LITTLE TOWN OF SEVILLE/BELEN

2011-12-15T05:52:00.000-08:00

now the city's been inseminated with the spirit (inmaculadamente of course), it really is on all over the city. and all over city hall. the flags over the doors of the more, amen, celebratory churches have nothing on the nightly light show projected on the plaza de san francisco side of the ayuntamiento building. what you thought was just another parish marching band having an evening rehearsal turns out to be the bombastic soundtrack to a surprisingly impressive spectacle that narrates the history of the city from the pillars of hercules to its present position, which is, of course (and well after the show depicts the renaissance), at the center of the nativity scene.

and the nativity scene is at the heart of the home again this christmas in sevilla. you can get yourself a cheap and easy portal de belen at the chino store downstairs, but if you're serious (and they are) you go to the stalls of the christmas market between the cathedral and the archive building and get yourself a proper one. but where to start? i couldn't have told you the first time i came across the stalls. other than that there were some nativity related miniatures (and not so miniatures) for sale, i probably wouldn't have said the thing had anything to do with bethlehem. i was, however, excited to see the miniature legs of ham and the flayed and salted codfish, because even if they had nothing to do with christmas, they were good enough as christmas novelties for people outside of spain who obviously hadn't been good enough for the three kings to bring here for tastes of the real thing. and with all the spirit flying around, who has time to care one way or another? what says jesus like selling things outside of a catholic church? should it matter what they're selling?

but then a christmas miracle. and on the night of the inmaculada no less -- at least as far as mine eyes recall the glory. it happened that my angel gabriel was a serbian flamenco percussionist, but as they say, god has a mysterious management philosophy. and a revelation is a revelation. "so people are buying things for their nativity scenes. why are they selling jamón? there wasn't any jamón iberico in bethlehem," objects the non-believer. "of course there was jamón in bethlehem in seville." "and the rest of the stuff? why would anyone need the indian chief?" the angel is confounded for a moment -- or feigns it -- but responds spiritedly, because the answer is the spirit. you have your baby jesus and your jamón and, sure, that's all you really need for the nativity scene. but what fun to go back to the christmas market year after year to collect the rest, knowing with each passing year that you're getting closer and closer to having that third king. and then you're at the market with your grandchildren and want to take them home to show them how fine your portal has become over the years and, yeah, what it's still really missing are the indian chief and the rasta guy and the waterfall. "and you know that god would have invited everyone to his son's birthday. even if he didn't really like them, there needed to be people to serve drinks and the jamón."

i was counting my blessings that night. no way i could have expected such a revelation from city hall. when i saw that light display nearly a week later, i was almost shocked to see that its nativity didn't include much more than a baby jesus, the virgin and joseph. but i knew. and, really, even with all that spirit flying around, what could i expect? the municipal government is a secular institution. and i'm sure it meant well.

HAUL OUT THE HOLLY. PRONTO.

2011-12-09T03:39:00.000-08:00

it was a catholic feast day yesterday, although i wasn't sure of which one while the festivities were happening. and they really were happening, although they also all seemed to finish in time for lunch, maybe so that everyone not taking the "bridge" day over to the weekend could enjoy themselves in time to get to bed before they had to be up for work on friday. at one o'clock in the afternoon, it seemed like every parish marching band in the city was out playing somewhere, some of them (several, it seemed from the crowd) even at the south end of the solidly secular alameda. i had a vague recollection that the christmas season in poland started sometime around the end of the first week of deeember with what i thought i even more vaguely remembered was the feast of saint stephen, but the explanation given to me by the owner of the restaurant at number six calle regina was to do with the inmaculada, the celebration, per his telling, of one of the sevillian pantheon's many virgins. jesus is conceived! but essentially, he told me, people in spain celebrate the day like "la navidad pronto." and wasn't it festive. (whether he meant that genuinely or in exasperated irony, his place was packed.) for me, the spirit was contagious -- once i'd managed to escape the crowds on the streets and had found a place to park myself to watch them. i completely understand that sometimes you just need a little christmas -- and right this very minute as, apparently, they also say in spain on the eighth of december. and like they also -- also -- say, when in spain, do like the romans do. so it seems like it's going to be a nonstop party until the magi bring us our presents on the sixth of january. haul out that holly, baby. pronto.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

2011-12-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

when the ladies came to pick us up at the bus station in ayamonte, the weekend, which we'd started early with a friday departure but which had only begun a handful of hours before with a leisurely coffee and then a mad dash to the bus station, was already boding very well for itself. it had been drizzling on the homestretch of that mad dash, but by the time our bus had stopped in huelva we'd broken out of the clouds, and at ayamonte the sun was hanging, unhurried, just above the facade of the station, remarkably warm for the second of december and strangely somnolent for only half past noon. we were still on the spain side of the border in ayamonte, but it boded very well, and it was at once a matter of course and a welcome forewarning that our hostess announced that portugal was a country of calm as she drove us across the bridge (by calatrava) away from spain.

it was a matter of course, because we couldn't have failed in already having sensed it, and we'd have found out soon enough anyway when we stopped in monte gordo altura, that spot on the algarve that the arabs are said to have conquered just for its beauty. they also say that the french now own most of the waterfront property there (and we joked about the british owning the most of malaga). and the french have built houses where they arabs left the land to its beauty and they leave their boats to be grounded when the waters of the lagoon recede away from the cliff and back over the beach. there is poetry, both official and more extemporaneous, written on the whitewashed walls of the little stand of buildings at the lookout point. there are a church and a cemetery. and a printed sign in a window in english advertising one of the buildings as available to rent.

there is a two-thousand year old olive tree in the side yard of one of the houses in the development through which we passed to park nearer our next destination, a beach whose name i don't recall being told. although we opted for it on our way back to the car, we chose to walk to the beach instead of taking the little shuttle train, and maybe that made our catching sight of the ocean the more exciting, or maybe just the opposite and it got us better acclimated to the calm. portgual may be a country of calm, but our hostess told us that the atlantic was a different story and that the waters weren't usually so still in the winter. they were, however, still, and the only sign of their movement beyond the lapping of the surf were the long horizontal lines of shells left in the sand by the tide. braver visitors swam (they were on the shuttle train with us later still in their swimsuits), but we relaxed with a snack at a beachfront restaurant. a snack and beers, which were remarkably better than anything available in spain, as was the bread, which the portuguese seem to take as seriously as the calm, and which we savored with our salted tuna while bewailing the poor excuse that we dealt with daily in sevilla.

and we had another beer on the seawall at olhão before heading to the store to buy what we needed for a dinner to go with the wine that the friends of our hostess would be bringing with them later to her home. carlos deals in wine, and he brought at least a case of it to rosie's; but as i rationalized to him a bit shamefully (but only a bit shamefully) later when he inquired after my apparent aversion for it, maybe a confident sensibility for drinking bad beer was better than wasting something good of something else. maybe. but like what we'd had at the ocean, whatever it was that the ladies brought the two of us who waited at the seawall while the business in olhão was finished was much better than the family of cruzcampos available in spain (even if i can't remember the name of whatever it was or whatever were the others i had that day or the next), although that beer at the seawall was probably given an edge by the sunset. and there won't ever be a shortage of renderings, tritely artistic, of sunsets over the ocean, how the light and the colors change gradually but perceptibly, in the sky and in the water, and reflected until the sunlight is gone and the water is an almost black shade of purple, imperceptible to anyone who didn't watch the entire transition. but our sunset, which had given an edge to our beers, had a special edge of its own, for the beer and the rest, yes, but more so for the lighthouse, which rosie had pointed out earlier (and i'd mistaken the name of the object for the name of the island where it was located), but which hadn't been lighted (or anyway it seemed) until exactly the moment when the two of us waiting at the seawall had noticed the light and the colors changing.

and then we were at the seawall in olhão again. the market had closed at one, but even a two-thirty breakfast didn't make it too late for meeting the group for coffee nearby. the place where we'd sat the previous evening as the sun set wasn't far. in fact, that place was only a short walk both from where we had our coffees and where we caught the water taxi to farol island. it wasn't exactly clear where they'd met rosie, but the friends of hers who had joined us for dinner the previous night had originally met on the island. and the island was where we were going to meet he rest of them, except for carlos, who came with us and our bag of jackets on the water taxi (with his two giant bottles of wine).

the walk from the docking area for the water taxis to the lighthouse on farol island takes about as long as the ride from the seawall to the island. in other words, they're both over too quickly. but there's more to walk to the end of the jetty after the island path passes the lighthouse. and that walk -- and the one back -- we passed much more deliberately. or it seemed that we passed them much more deliberately because we were suddenly caught again in the sunset. up and back the jetty, which was increasingly haunted by fishermen as it got darker, twice past the spot where a ten foot slab of concrete had been torn out of the pathway and deposited half in the water on the other side. the atlantic, however, was still weirdly calm. one of the portuguese joked that one of the would be spaniards must have brought the stillness of the mediterranean. the peacefulness of the water seemed to unsettle the native calmness of the land. but that concrete slab thrown over onto the one side of the jetty was a sign from the sea that it had once moved there, just like the arabs had once been at monte gordo, even if the latter hadn't left so much trace.

the sun had done most of its setting on our journey out, and by the time we'd nearly made our way back off the jetty (which was nearly as long as the breadth of farol island), the last light of the day was nearly gone. but the corona of the sun was still visible over the strip of fishermen's huts on the (nearly) deserted island (that's the only name they have to call it) across the water to the west. it was to the two adjacent and conjoined ones at the rightmost end of the strip that we were going for dinner, but we stopped to wait for our ride at the restaurant near the base of the lighthouse. we didn't eat much because we had plans to eat at that other island, but we did order snacks to go with our beers and ate them (quickly, our ride was coming) while we drank behind the sheets of plastic that protected the covered patio of the restaurant from the wind at night and in winter.

the sunlight had completely gone when the last of us took our turn in the smaller boat that took us from the one island to the other, an even shorter trip than the first one and even closer to the water. then, up on the jetty on the other side of the water people start making comparisons to the movies because in moments like the one they're experiencing that's the easiest unreality to reference. true, though, up ahead, lit on the outside only by two long, bald, yellowish fluorescent bulbs, the blue-green of the fisherman's huts looked especially blue-green as through a lens and from behind a filter, and the strip of huts in the foreground of the darkened and otherwise deserted island was extraordinarily scenic as if the scene had been set.

the fisherman himself was quite the character, suntanned and wrinkled like older fishermen are expected to be, but jolly -- and that jolliness was expected of someone who had spent decades living at those huts on the water and then also surprising in someone who had done the same. his inventions were everywhere and included a system for alerting him when the water had been heated in the outbuilding that housed the toilet and the shower. he had electricity from somewhere, probably the place making the generator noises in the dark about thirty yards behind the outbuilding. there was a wood plank path that led back away from the strip of huts, and it forked not far from where it started, one way leading onto a nearby beach and the other past the recess in the sand that was making the humming noises (that was probably the somewhere making the electricity) and off through the brush to the interior of the island.

the sunlight was long gone, but there were the stars. and like the type of people put stupid by the surreality of being invited to dinner at a fisherman's hut at one end of a strip of fishermen's huts on an otherwise deserted island, we remarked that it was almost more difficult to locate the constellations when they were visible because all of the rest of them were getting in the way. and that larger one near the horizon isn't a planet, it's a signal tower, although we were sure of the moon, half full, and the moonlight more than adequately lit that wood plank path, which we used at intervals to get away from the populated part of the island at the huts and ponder our ignorance of the stars.

there was fish for dinner. and rice. and a salad. and we managed, the eleven of us, to fit inside the hut that wasn't the fisherman's sleeping quarters to eat. the fisherman sat with his back to the sinks and the stove, and on the wall across from him, across the table and all ten of his guests, were hung a sampling of his press highlights. he told the story of his interview for a german television program to the one of us who asked him after dinner about the ethicality of eating those little calamari. (she wasn't happy to find out that the ones she'd been eating were in fact baby squid and not a unique species, but she was glad she asked.)

dinner was simple, and so also, it seems now, was our conversation, both at dinner and afterwards. or maybe it's just that what seemed remarkable then would only be worth remarking upon after sharing another couple of oversized bottles of wine. there was that spirit too, clear and sweet and nameless (forgotten literally in spite of itself), which we poured into each other's shot glasses from that unmarked bottle. it's made from some fruit they collect in the mountains. and it made things easily remarkable. or so i can try to excuse our taking of simple pleasures.

it isn't, however, our fault that our setting was so perfectly cliché. some things are too good to be true, and other's are too clichéd to be taken as good anymore, but we couldn't help the sunsets or the water or the impossibly idyllic scenery. who knows, maybe we'd have experienced that same feeling of a long anticipated reunion (although we'd only all just met and had all just been together less than twenty-four hours earlier) even without the fisherman and without the island that would have been completely deserted without him. but it's also possible that we wouldn't have shared the same camaraderie that we did that night (both for better and for worse) had the scene not been set so perfectly for the comedy.

but no. ours was special. that second night too we had the lighthouse to keep us sure of our bearings, and from its position across the water on farol island we could locate the seawall at olhão and then the city of faro further up the coast, which made amusing allusion to rosie's house in montenegro and our night before. and it was the lighthouse that kept us walking through the semi-darkness toward where the water taxi was waiting after we eventually left the fisherman to his inventions and his huts.

who knows if portuguese water taxis run all night, but one-thirty was late enough for those of us who had taken our dinner early at seven -- not to mention that our return load was several liters of wine lighter than what we'd taken to the fisherman's. we did, however, somehow manage to acquire a guitar.

and then we were back again at the seawall, though not entirely so quickly. none of us knows, actually, why the boat was idling for so long, adrift off the dock at the north end of farol, the opposite end of the island from where the lighthouse was shining. we were tired, but we were lucky. by the time we started up again the half moon had positioned itself low on the horizon, now larger and brighter than before, and as our taxi moved closer to our destination the moon seemed to set its pace to ours, its reflection in the water becoming less and less diffuse until both the half moon and its reflection finally disappeared into a line of boats moored in the distance in the same moment as our taxi pulled up at olhão, the lighthouse still blinking back from farol.

it was something special. maybe you wouldn't, however, suspect it from the tritely artistic renderings. still, it is true that the unhurried sun in ayamonte had boded well for our weekend in the land of calm, even if that isn't the whole truth. but as they say, something always calls you back to the algarve, and what happens on the islands...

if that lighthouse could talk.

NOVEMBER TO REMEMBER

2011-11-30T02:36:00.000-08:00

three consecutive days of mail, including a box from montpelier with a package of navettes de provence and a card, which was correct in reminding me that i'm lucky to be here.

LO QUE DUERME EN EL CUERPO DE LOS GITANOS

2011-11-29T03:42:00.000-08:00

the truth, to admit it from the beginning, is that i didn’t do my (any) research. and my excuse, to allow myself at least the one for having admitted the truth from the beginning, is that i thought i’d have more than enough time to myself in lebrija to discover something appropriately historical or to wander myself into an interesting anecdote. but the truth is that i needed something, because i hadn't done much investigation into the show. and i should have had all night, because the last train from lebrija for sevilla leaves nightly at nine fifteen (fifteen minutes before the show was scheduled to start), and the first one out on a saturday morning wouldn't have come for me until seven fifty-four. the night didn't, however, end up as i'd foreseen it, because i was offered at seat in a car at (almost exactly) the eleventh hour of the night before. of course, i was happy at the prospect of company, and also for the excuse -- and i let my nursing a sore throat that found me off my guard on friday morning and threatened my passing of the night with excitement (company or not) excuse me from buckling down to any research before i needed to meet my ride at the arch of the macarena at seven. the truth is...something like that.

and of course i wasn't at all unhappy when my ride turned out to be the angolese portuguesa to whom i was introduced (as a friend of hers) the night that i met lakshmi. (maybe it was because i'd left her that night expecting to see her again sooner than later that, when i didn't, i expected that i might not see her again.) but she was the one who got out of the driver's seat of the car that pulled up next to the arch, in front of the basilica. she then got on her phone to find out what none of the rest of us did, which, outside of a bus or a train car, was the way to lebrija.

the way seemed clear enough, though, for the person with whom she had a brief conversation in portuguese, and it wasn't too much past seven thirty when we crossed the river on our way out of town and made our way onto the highway. from there, i can't say exactly how long it took us to arrive at our destination, but it's about an hour by train, and i think it must have taken us about the same. i thought we'd arrived earlier when i saw that church lit up on the hill above that town just off the highway to the left. that was about where we exited, but then we took a road that veered off to the right and left what, from the road signs i could see, i took to be las cabezas de san juan behind us.

it didn't seem that anyone in the car had been to lebrija before, so when we arrived a dozen or so minutes later, we didn't know either which way it was to the theater. and after we did find it, it turned out that we didn't see much of the city other than what was on the path between it and the car, although it was possible to see a lighted minaret of pre-reconquista arab design from road that sloped upwards from a larger plaza to where a crowd was gathered around the box office. i probably wasn't incorrect to assume that it was smaller than the giralda, but i hadn't done any research, and that vista, which i could see during my wait with the group in front of the theater and then saw briefly again on my way out, was all of the geographical history of lebrija that i got.

but there's definitely a strong gitano tradition in the city, and there was a beautiful history excerpted on the front of the programs for the show, "zarabanda: lo que duerme en el cuerpo de los gitanos." i'd missed the homenaje in jerez the previous friday (although jerez seems to like to throw those and there will surely be others), but i hadn't any idea about the singer who was being tributed and had been mostly enticed by the idea of staying with the family of a friend. i did, however, know of lakshmi, even from before coming to andalucía, and had, even, met her on that one occasion (or rather had introduced myself after recognizing her by reputation), and it was her show that was being given in lebrija. or, at least, it was lakshmi that most of the people that i recognized from sevilla seemed to be in lebrija to see.

unfortunately, i can't tell you much about the dancer herself. (no research.) but i do know, beautiful program histories aside, that she isn't gitano. she's from san diego maybe? that seems right when try to remember what people told me about the workshops she gave in portland. other than that she was gorgeous. and that she was, gitano or not, for her show in lebrija. the singing and the guitar and the percussion should be as closely followed as the dancing in any flamenco show, but it's still usually the diva that steals the show when she's on the stage. granted, the standing ovation started when the older man who had set the scene for each segment of the show with his spirited narrations took his bow, but only lakshmi took a bouquet -- and i doubt that anyone else's could have been bigger.

that isn't, however, to say that she didn't earn it. gitano or not, lakshmi does seem to know what sleeps inside the gitanos' collective body. or, maybe i was just been taken by the exotic charm of the program -- or should be giving more credit to the stagecrafters and the directors. but, with all due credit given, the spirit of the show still moved essentially through the dance, which every other element was designed to showcase in a cycle of segments that moved the dancer through a full array of moods and styles but placed her at the end of her soleá in exactly the same spot as where she had begun the sigueriyas amid the storm that opened the show.

the zarabanda was arguably the most gitano of the dances, and lakshmi's adornments and phrasing for that segment were the most similar to the picture of the dancing woman on the eighteenth century advertisement for "Bayles de JITANOS" reproduced on the program. nonetheless -- and maybe even a bit ironically -- it was the alegrias that best demonstrated lakshmi's talent for interpreting flamenco as a form in general. her footwork sections weren't anything to criticize, but despite the (expectedly) spirited tempo of the percussion and the song, lakshmi danced the dance almost subtly, although the overall essence of her interpretation might be better described as simply controlled -- and impeccably -- to imply that no movement or set of movements was allowed any special explosion, even as, at the same time, nothing was held back. and the dance's captivating synthesis -- by way of its seeming contradictions -- with the music was nowhere more visible than in the simple but careful movements of lakshmi's shoulders and hips as she made her way through her paseos, defiantly compliant with the style of the palo.

so i was only expecting the best when, near the end of the soleá that closed the show, lakshmi fell. which is to say that i didn't recognize the fall when i saw it, especially for lakshmi's quick recovery which, as the friend who confirmed to me after the show that the dancer had in fact fallen pointed out, was a physical feat unto itself and executed perfectly in compas at that.

and that is what must be sleeping inside the body of the gitanos. or else it probably came out at the reception after the show (for the artists, friends, family and anyone who'd come from sevilla apparently), or at the juerga that followed the reception in the same reception space in the restaurant behind the theater. it was obvious, at least, that whatever sleeps inside the gitanos sleeps during the day. after we'd had our fino and had a wary laugh over deciding that any one of the displaced or expatriated of our group could easily be the spy, we waved goodbye to the bit of lebrija to which we'd become acquainted and headed back to sevilla by the still unfamiliar road by which we'd come.

from what i'd seen, i wouldn't have had any easy time finding my way into an anecdote after three thirty en lebrija, but the new flamenco club in triana was full when we got there sometime after four. the portuguesa wondered how long the place would be around after our interaction with the bar staff, but later it seemed certain that our drinks were paying for the sharply dressed security crew which did end up breaking up a fight and ejecting one patron in the after after hours, about a half an hour before the lights came on and everyone had to leave. thankfully, the night itself had the consideration not to break into daylight until after the breakfast group had gone on its way and the windows were shuttered, twenty minutes or so from when my train would pull in from lebrija.

F*CK U JIMMY FALLON; or, AUSTERITY MEASURES, part 5

2011-11-23T02:49:00.000-08:00

the guy who does jimmy fallon during the “f*ck u jimmy fallon” segment of “otra movida” doesn’t look especially like the american late night host. (from what i saw of both men during the one episode of “otra movida” that i’ve seen, the spanish comedian’s suits fit much better.) but, i haven’t seen enough of the american late night host’s late night show to know whether the “otra movida” segment is a good send up or not, but after i’d stayed a moment on the channel airing the show to appreciate one of the hosts, the name of the segment alone was enough to keep me there. that and the perfect maintenance of that one host’s and the other guy’s stubble.

i heard it recently proclaimed -- by a television personality -- that the social force of television (in spain) was fundamentally democratic, so it’s good to be watching lately as we wait to see how sunday’s historic electoral victory for the popular party of spain affects the democracy. already on sunday, when the socialists were outvoted by nearly four million votes and ceded its legislative majority to the wave of “popular” support, there were cries from the opposition camp that rajoy’s succession to the presidency signified a return to franco. granted, a conservative shift in spain might not be as drastic a transition to the right as it might mean elsewhere, but rajoy’s election night rhetoric of “a government for all” on the verge of certain cuts to federal social programs definitely sounded the charge for a return to politics as usual.

there were those sevillanos who celebrated the popular victory with champagne, even as the province of sevilla, joined only by the province of barcelona, awarded the majority of its seats in the legislature to the socialists…although the majority of historically socialist andalucía voted for the populars. elsewhere, only the nationalist parties in cataluña and país vasco were able to take more seats in their autonomous communities than the popular party.

who can say whether there will be more or fewer champagne toasts under rajoy than under aapatero. we’ll just have to stay tuned. It should be an interesting several months as the variety show regulars hone their rajoys. and sure, those will get old at some point, but democracy will always have something to beg our participation, and, sure i’ve only seen it once, it’s probably a while until people get tired of that beaming picture of jimmy fallon riding that middle finger.

CHRISTMAS IN JULY

2011-11-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

it was a good thing that there was quite a bit of reading that needed doing this week, because there was quite a bit of recovery that needed doing after friday’s early christmas meal. granted, we were still in the first part of november -- and not in winter proper -- when the group convened at the bodega across the street from the restaurant for drinks at two, but the sun was shining and had warmed the air to a degree at which it might have been summer -- not summer here, of course, but imaginably somewhere else -- and the pleasant temperatures held well after we had finished the comida de la navidad itself and moved to the covered patio of one of the cafés on the alameda. And hence the joke, which was toasted with coffees and digestifs to spirited rounds of “merry christmas.” twelve hours later, as i was putting the mistress of ceremonies into a cab at close to five, i had long since regretted my choice of footwear, but my short walk home wasn’t going to do anything worse to my feet than had already been done, and my socks had already been well ruined with blood. and it was from that observation that i planned to write something about our christmas in july the next morning, an observation that i made around three-thirty at our final stop, a venue off of calle calatrava that i knew hosted regular flamenco shows but had no idea drew a more standard dancing crowd afterhours on weekend nights. at the time i made it, that observation seemed to me intensely charming, not to mention evocative of the valiance of my efforts to give myself over to the spirit of the day and night as it moved me from place to place. so i was smiling as i danced where i could amid the tightly packed crowd and as the conversation permitted. Before it was just the two of us we were three, accompanied by a german man, “lolita,” who produces the most prominent flamenco periodical in his country and who was in sevilla for the weekend for an international flamenco conference. at the previous stop (where most of the rest of the group had ledft us), the subject of our conversation had somewhere turned to semiotics, and i’d flailed, literally, in spanish and body language to depict an epic conflict between roland barthes and noam chomsky to the german. so, although i did enjoy his company, i was relieved when he excused himself to get whatever sleep he could before his morning business and left me alone with my hostess to not much talking at all. besides, the two of us had charmed each other enough already, and it was time to relax and enjoy not really being able to enjoy any more drinks. but that didn’t stop them from coming. maybe it was just our proximity to the bar -- and that we weren’t showing signs of instigating an end from our side of it -- but both of the bartenders came around whenever there was a lull in orders to join us in rounds of shots on the house. and whether they were tequila or honeyed rum, most of the second halves of my companion’s shots ended up in what was left of my glass of cruzcampo, possibly as a jesting challenge to an earlier assertion i’d made that someone who’d lived in portland for as long as i had could keep downing beers unto forever. but, i’m chalking the hospitality up to the presence of my companion. i can attest that the charms of a woman from san sebastian who neither dances nor plays the guitar nor sings and who owns a flamenco school in sevilla are endless, and when i kissed her into her cab, none of those charms showed any sign of waning, even for the hour or the alcohol. when i made the observation that had kept me smiling until we parted ways and i walked my ruined socks home two hours later, i had planned to use it as the departure for what i would write about the festivities in the morning. but there aren’t really mornings where a day and a night like those ones come from. luckily, the postal service had made a visit while i was gone. i don’t have a chimney, so someone must have buzzed them in. in any case, i had a box, and in that box i had some books. i was given quite a bit of advice on a variety of different subjects over the course of that first day (and night) of christmas, but “live it” is the only one that i feel compelled to recount so long after the fact. i can’t say whether my participation in the comida or the long hours of reading that have followed is the better example of following that advice, but to say so is, i suppose, to acknowledge the possibility that it might be both. or so i’d like to think on the eve of another friday. hmph. so it is written; and so it might be done. live it. and keep reading. merry christmas. and stay in school. you never know when that anecdote is going to come in handy.

ONCE...

2011-11-11T02:07:00.000-08:00

if the proprietors of the discount furniture superstore next to the hotel macarena had made it just a few more hours, they might have had the luck to avoid the fire or whatever it was that brought all of those patrol cars and fire engines (and the one news van) out last night to block the traffic running west toward the andalucian parliament building just down the street, in the anterior gardens of which, just like on every other weekday evening, the marching band of the hermandad of the basilica of the macarena was practicing for the next time it would accompany the city’s favorite virgin into the streets for the night. and the band made itself heard, just like on every other weekday, even above the noise of the sirens, which might not have had to announce the hurry of so many emergency response vehicles to the discount furniture superstore had whatever it was befell the proprietors not befallen them until this next, more auspicious day: today, the much anticipated eleventh day of the eleventh month of 2011.

i suppose, at least, that this day has some significance elsewhere, because when i went searching last night (just before passing the fracas next door to the hotel macarena) for the time of the special lottery drawing to find out if i still had time to buy a ticket this morning, the “news” articles to which i was directed were generally bent toward the same vague dime store numerology that insisted on the universal luckiness of the numbers one and eleven. but, cosmic or esoteric significance aside, el once del once del once will certainly be a lucky day for a lucky twelve people here in spain, because those twelve were lucky (or just foresighted) enough to have bought tickets for the special ONCE lottery, which will award eleven million euros to one lucky contestant and one million euros to each of eleven others. and, apparently, as of yesterday morning, tickets were all but impossible to find, sold out from nearly every ONCE lottery outlet in the country.

which, i suppose, should be seen as auspicious for the issuing organization itself, as we can expect that ONCE (organización nacional de ciegos españoles, the national organization of spanish blind people) will have made more than enough from ticket sales for this special drawing (it runs other -- some of them daily – lotteries, all of which offer tax exempt prizes to winners, throughout the year) to cover paying the lucky winners and then to devote a sizeable amount to its social and cultural projects. and who could begrudge them the opportunity to capitalize, since, as the news has pointed out, they won’t have another opportunity for benefiting from the synonymity of a date for another thousand years.

the essential thing is, however, that i don’t think anyone here would think to begrudge them. like any charity, ONCE, founded in 1938, has surely had its share of intrigues, ethical inquiries and administrative snafus. or not. the most i know of the organization is from the commercials for the special drawing -- and as a result of those, which include spanish subtitles to accompany the voice describing the collective celebration that is to be 11/11/11, i can only say that the organization has been nothing but helpful in my personal experience. and from what i can tell from the action in the streets, many of those who participate in the daily drawings do so because they want to support the ONCE staff that sell them their cupóns, many of whom are visually impaired or otherwise disabled.

the secret of spain’s dual economy -- the one legitimate and the other, no less pervasive and functional, but illegitimated by the legitimacy of the first -- is pathetically poorly kept; and if international monetary policy is the means by which the two could be rationalized and everyone brought into the fold, then perhaps spain should be left to its own devices. here, the other half may not live at the top of the world economy, but it does, if simply, live well. of course (of course), there are still the homeless and the extremely impoverished (although international monetary policy would have little to offer those people in any consideration), but that essential thing is that those lucky twelve ticket holders probably did want to help (regardless of how they might end up spending their winnings once they find themselves legitimated). nowhere else have i seen such genuine respect for and desire to assist -- publicly, in all senses -- the disabled, the elderly, the infirm and those friends in need, or such clear absence of guilt or vanity in the provision of that help, especially for its regular public display. (and the spanish call themselves catholics!) on average, it may never get that second flat screen television -- or the first, but it would seem that most of spain can expect to be fed -- or at least given a drink so as to share in the spirit of the rest of the people in the plaza.

so, as luck would have it, maybe the proprietors of the discount furniture superstore didn’t need to be thinking about luck after all. it’s likely that someone would have been there after the fact to help, in some simple but significant way, even if the emergency response could do nothing to prevent the fire or whatever from spreading to the hotel and razing the whole block as the band played. that’s what i’ve been thinking, anyway, this morning of el once del once del once, which, for me, will soon turn into the afternoon of the season’s first christmas party. and maybe it’s just the spirit of the impending season that’s clouding a feeling that would otherwise be something, if not guiltier, then certainly much vainer; but it’s also for wondering as much that i wonder if i haven’t already shared in the celebration of the day for thinking that, yeah, we should all be so lucky.

FLAMENCO, FLAMENCO...REPRISE

2011-11-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

on a corner near the end of where calle vascondagas goes nowhere, there’s a fun bit of graffiti that reads, from about knee level, “i hate flamenco music [signed] - seville.” and the not so cryptic message written into that bit of graffiti near that not so hospitable cul de sac probably isn’t far from expressing the sentiments of many of the locals here, especially those of theirs that surface when they’re confronted with the fawning adoration of so many of the visitors. it must feel at times like working at the mall at christmastime (which season has already started here, by the way, company parties and all -- but certainly not to any complaints from this visitor), and it’s understandable that there are those (if not the most of them) who are simply doing their time because they have to until they can put something else on. and, for their part, there are even those visitors who have been at it long enough in the vacated posts of the locals to have learned to request something else from the dj before the party.

but -- and maybe it’s just the early spirit of christmas (which, here, es una cosa, en serio) -- the calling of whatever it is that moves people into and inside of the sphere of flamenco (and there beyond overly earnest conversations on arte and ambiente) still makes its proud appearance in the streets -- at least in those others away from that dead end of calle vascondagas. and it was there in the plaza de la gavidia the other day when the spare changer put that empty fruit box between his legs and started playing it like a cajon, and then singing; and then some of the diners at the edge of the patio of the dos de mayo started singing with him, and then the man who had brought his guitar (there was actually a man who had brought his guitar) started playing as some of his friends danced (or at least moved) to the music with some of the children who had been playing in the plaza. or maybe they hadn’t been called by anything and they’d just had enough to drink; but, then again, so probably had the rest of the patrons of the restaurant and the one next door (and everyone sitting at any of the benches in the plaza), enough at least to ignore the group of impromptu flamencos if they’d had enough.

FLAMENCO, FLAMENCO

2011-11-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

the group that gathered for lunch yesterday at number 12 calle duque cornejo was mixed, although we invitees were all common in our foreignness. luckily, by the time that the french woman, the dancer, arrived with her polish friend, the guitarist, i’d already made my regular mistake of offering my hand to the female roommate of our host and did the cheek kissing thing with the appropriate newcomer.

the lunch itself was far grander than i’d expected, and of extraordinarily bohemian proportions: a giant stew of lentils and tomatoes and chorizo that went by some andalucian name that i’ve already forgotten, with sandwiches of sliced chorizo and jamón iberico to necessitate washings down with beer, followed by a round of tea and cakes, which were prepared and served during the rolling of cigarettes and the sipping of digestifs. (and all of it sustained with much less pretension that all that.)

i’d expected to be alone with the host, but with the french woman and the polish man and the two roommates we were six, and my spanish was by far (by far) the worst of the group, and i was, even for the comfort of the food and the drinks, even more afraid of sharing with the group than i’d already expected to have been when i thought i’d be in the situation one on one. but i could listen; and yes, i had seen “flamenco, flamenco,” and i’d seen “flamenco” too, but i didn’t contribute my opinion on either, although the conversation was familiar.

the guitarist thought “flamenco, flamenco,” the latter of those two of carlos saura’s films, a work of kitsch that seemed intended for viewers outside of the world of flamenco, and our host, who had worked as an assistant on the film after finishing film school in madrid, did his best to justify the elements of it that he thought justifiable. it’s true, the film absolutely did not need those long close-up shots of farruquito’s face as he was just kind of jiving to the playback. and it may not be true that farruquito is handsome, but the film does also (although perhaps not for self-described “purists”) have justifiable elements. like i said, i didn’t contribute my opinion this time around. but i was charmed and humored, nonetheless, and not just by the graciousness of our host and the fine meal -- and not only because the french woman at one point inexplicably broke my silence to compliment my posture.

it was the atmosphere, and that the group was talking about art and atmosphere, and about art films and whether a film expressly about flamenco should be one or not, and about whether it needed any affected atmosphere in addition to what the art itself already had. and amid all of that i smiled to myself while musing on arte and ambiente and informal spanish lessons from get-togethers past, and thinking to myself what you’re probably thinking about all this description of it. that’s right. this is really gay. And nobody ever suspects la mariposa.

GUADALQUIBEAR…ES UNA COSA

2011-10-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

and the basketball game, it was a strangely metaphysical experience, a demonstration of the (sometimes upsettingly) easy facility by which “the mind to quit the body is manifest” as virginia woolf once put it, to see my name on a envelope of tickets -- to which i had to struggle my way in spanish because i never would have expected it to be at the press entrance (although that’s now being done at least a petty justice) -- given to me by a friend of a sister, a woman married to a basketball player whom i’d known absolutely almost not at all -- and in an absolutely different context -- and who now plays for a basketball team in some other place in spain, and whom, on saturday, i watched play a game of basketball at a stadium somewhere in spain.

afterwards, i acceded to one (in so many words) because i felt i wasn’t in a position to be inhospitable after (having been so graciously guided to) my free tickets, and the jeers of disbelief that i got in response weren’t at all in jest. and, true, it didn’t even take those jeers to convince me past that first one, especially since the people watching on the alameda was so what it was, which was exactly what you would have expected from the posters advertising “guadalquibear*,” posters of that da vinci man in the circle with the radial lines and with his limbs splayed except that the “fit” man (it’s a question of body image and internet dating site deceit) had been replace with a bearded one with a full belly -- although without as much other hair as might have been expected.

and the bears were definitely on parade around – and in front of and everywhere else about -- the bars on the alameda, gay or not, that night, and, strangely, it was i who had to explain the phenomenon, and it gradually became the joke of the night that the bears were parading, because this halloween weekend, well, it was a thing. the thing itself became the next joke, because something being a thing wasn’t yet a thing in spain, and then it was as we made our way to the gay bars where guadalquibear was DEFINITELY a thing, even more so than usual -- or at least more so than usual outside of those couple of bars.

then, at one of the others, someone remarked on how many beards there were beyond what seemed to be the men participating in the weekend’s particularly special activities, and, since it had been where i’d been living, i had to explain that, well, “es una cosa,” which, by that point, could have been said about anything to elicit a round of laughs.

and if not for this year’s calendar i might have been damned. but, fortunately, the weekend was followed upon by a monday that wasn’t really a monday, being as it was both halloween and the one day before the national holiday of the feast of all saints. so i was able to endure the pain of the shave, knowing that i was essentially responsibility free until wednesday. so after half a day of compulsorialty, i quit. and it hurt, after nearly eight weeks this time, but i shaved. you get used to things, and, well, that’s what they become. just like the parade that one night of guadalquibear.

but now, for better or for worse, my beard is gone. and, well, it’s a thing.

*the guadalquivir is the river that runs through sevilla.

THE RAIN IN SPAIN, part 2

2011-10-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

the season has now certainly changed. after one week of autumn gave us respite from the oppressiveness of late summer, the winter-- as it seems here -- seems here to stay. that’s what they told us would happen, and, sure enough, now the thermometers dip under fifty during the night (if the thermometers here work, which isn’t to be expected because none of the clocks do), and even the midday sun can’t raise temperatures much above eighty. but there are chills in the air (if exaggerated to justify a citywide change of wardrobe), and, even if they don’t ever manage to stick around for the entirety of a day, there are clouds, and those clouds, the winter clouds of which we were warned, make rain.

monday morning, it squalled until almost noon, and the sun wasn’t able to reassert itself until after two o’clock, at which time it had already had to resign itself to being the background image for the day’s entry in the weather tables. but the rain stayed away on tuesday -- perhaps because the home team had another late away game. on wednesday though, despite a clear and brisk morning that warmed into a perfect afternoon, the rains made a late evening appearance, and, since those rains weren’t of the southern spanish variety as we’d come to know them but rather more akin to an all too familiar lingering spray, we walked.

and on the way down calle san luis, a friend, and it was one of those nights on which you would have needed one; or i did, anyway, and this one, from paris, invited me into her nearby apartment for tea, tea and cookies, french ones flavored like orange flowers, which were the perfect compliment to her artistically rustic apartment, straight out of montmartre, at least as far as I knew from that movie, having never actually been inside an apartment in montmartre. But we did talk about movies, the spanish ones she’d bought that day along with some books of spanish poetry, although none by poets with whom i was familiar.

we did, however, get around to one I knew, or, rather, we’ll get around to him here, because in that conversation with that parisian friend i hadn’t the temperance (mind you, though, we were only drinking tea) to admit that i hadn’t much enjoyed paris the one time that i had been there, if only because on my self-guided the-life-and-times-of-andre gide reality tour i’d been so disappointed not to find any sort of commemoration in the rue de…medici?...where gide was born that I’d spent most of the rest of my time there reading (holding strong to a twenty-two year old’s prideful grudge) in the luxembourg gardens in (both the good and the bad kinds of) ironic protest.

and it happened this week that i spent a considerable amount of time looking for a book, a book called ocnos by an author named luis cernuda who was born in sevilla, had been a colleague of lorca’s and all the rest of those, had gone into exile after the beginning of the civil war and taught in the united states, but most applicably had been an avid admirer of gide’s and whose work, as a result, was typified by an undeniable frankness when it came to matters of desire. (i was assured by a friend after complaining that i hadn’t been able to find the book at any of the stores i’d visited that no bookstore in sevilla didn’t have a copy and that i all i needed to have done was ask. i did end up asking, and in fact there wasn’t a copy at the bookstore where i swallowed my pride and asked after book in spanish with demonstratedly poor communication skills in that language. the book wasn’t there, but i did manage to gather that cernuda was a poet and not a novelist -- as i’d assumed when whoever it was had made me the recommendation -- and then found ocnos -- granted, a collection of poems in prose -- at the next bookstore i tried.)

but it wasn’t until this morning that i realized what i hadn’t realized until then, that i’d known cernuda’s name before i’d known it, or had read it at least, when i’d happened on a commemorative plaque in calle acetres weeks before and stopped to attempt a read, if only out of respect for the city’s efforts to commemorate things with plaques. when i saw the same plaque today, having set out with an address specifically with a mind to laying eyes on the commemoration before writing anything about it, i recognized it, and the sign for the crystal dealer above it, and then nothing, i guess, nothing except for the ridiculously unprofound realization that i would have remained in the city to read my copy of ocnos had sevilla been proud of its significance or not -- and then a bit of embarrassment at my poor treatment of paris.

or maybe i won’t read my copy of ocnos, because in my excitement over having found one i bought it without much consideration, and the one that i bought is spectacularly white with luxuriously wide margins. for what it cost, i’d already decided not to mark it up, even for the sake of exercising my spanish education, and i’m at a complete loss as to how to keep myself from soiling that spectacular whiteness (the bad kind of ironic protest), especially since i’ve become accustomed to reading in parks, which, here, don’t provide any shelter from the rain.

somehow, though, (ironically?) the rains and the winter have brought the parrots back to town, parrots about which we were also warned, but weren’t prepared to be prepared for until april when they come back north and are said to occasionally drop lucky feathers from the trees. and the palm trees in the plaza de san lorenzo were full of them this afternoon, although they weren’t dropping any feathers. now, in the present season, they’re on their way out. the parrots have to leave. and if i wasn’t struck by any profundity other than that of my own silliness at seeing cernuda’s commemorative plaque earlier in the day, i did open my notebook to where i’d copied its inscription and thought about…something. “el poeta ejemplar de amor, el dolor y exilio.” what’s someone have to do to get remembered with words like those? And i thought…something, something much better than simpering about those stupid birds.

THE RAIN IN SPAIN

2011-10-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

sevilla f.c. didn’t beat f.c. barcelona last night, but they didn’t lose, and that seemed to be victory enough for many of the fans watching the game on the television outside of the bar/restaurant next to the alameda cineplex. and sevilla certainly had a fantastic opportunity for losing: in the second of the four overage minutes of the second half, barcelona was awarded a penalty shot for a double foul on the striker responsible for most of its shots in that half, which for the most part saw sevilla on the defense. the shot was blocked, but only after a fight had broken out between the penalty box and midfield over the calling of the foul and one of sevilla’s was sent of the field with a red card. the shot was blocked in the fifth of four overage minutes, and the game was finally called in the seventh at a nil-nil tie. and that seemed to be victory enough for many of the fans. (sevilla, with one recent liga championship, is one of the few teams in seasonal competition to bust the monopoly of barcelona and real madrid over the league.) the forecast had been for rain all weekend, but that rain held off all of yesterday and let those sevilla fans cheer their team to a non-loss to barcelona (at barcelona) in front of an outdoor television for the entirety of the match, which ended just before yesterday did. but the forecast kept its promise for today, and the clouds that had been gathering throughout the morning started sprinkling in the early afternoon and then let it all out in torrents between three and four. by six there wasn’t left any trace of the storm – except that the air was fresher and crisper. and damn, had it needed the clearing.

AUSTERITY MEASURES, part 4; or, PAGAN SPAIN, part 3; or, HOW (TO) CHRISTOPHER GOT HIS GROOVE BACK…ONCE AGAIN

2011-10-22T10:04:00.001-07:00

no more eta violence. that was yesterday’s big official news, and today’s diario de sevilla ran a political cartoon that featured a hooded caricature of an eta representative on a small deserted island throwing his gun into the ocean and reflecting that his surrender of his weapon was better than suicide. and what sage, sage advice for all of us, although there’s still much work to be done for peace as all of the papers and television news programs have recognized. last night, at the party, the party to which, incidentally, we wouldn’t have been extended an invitation had it not been for an acquaintance from the basque country, there wasn’t any talk of terrorism, but had there been it would surely have been about the various sevillanos lost to the violence and not about its implications for the legitimacy of the central government’s control of the various autonomous communities of spain. or so we can assume if my conversation with maría, a high school friend of the host’s, was of any significance. maría was a native and had spent some time in japan, so i remarked to her what i’d been thinking for a while about the similarities between the dispositions of the people of sevilla and the ones of kyoto. she didn’t disagree when i said that i respected the strong prides that both peoples held for their cities, not the most cosmopolitan or contemporarily savvy in their respective countries, but both of them their historic capitals and undeniable centers of certain “native” cultural traditions. i didn’t go on to voice my suspicion that those strong senses of pride were what had made the peoples of both cities so stubbornly insular, but maría supplied that point for me and (probably just for gracious sake of the conversation) warned me that i might not be so enamored of the local color after it had had a chance to put me at its disadvantage. and then there was talk of the church, which, with the top of the basilica just a block away and easily visible from the roof of the house where the party was being held, was probably inevitable in a conversation about basic sevillian values. just a day earlier a friend had responded to my challenge that i had no interest in getting married but that if i were to make a play for marriage i would insist on doing so in front of the virgin by saying that she had no plans to be married but that if she were she too would insist on having her wedding in a church because she believed more in god than she did in zapatero. touché. maría, for her part, didn’t think much either way, but assured me that even if the church (as it were at large) hadn’t found many official parts to play for homosexuals that for the most part spain in general and sevilla in particular didn’t bother to make distinctions because the tenacity of the church on both scales was more a point of the stubbornness of a folkloric tradition than a matter of dogma. (the pope might have something to say, but as for the virgin, as far as she was concerned you were a friend.) and so, appropriately, i left the party for a flamenco show (if ever there were a more fitting metaphor for the pageantry of the andalucian church…) at which i finally made acquaintance with lakshmi, whose workshops i hadn’t been able to take in portland but who easily offered up that she was doing her best to go back to give more. and if i can be permitted the sidebar i’ll say that i learned last night that there are in fact people in the world so beautiful that you can recognize them by reputation. she introduced me to her friend, an angolan woman who lived in portugal and in town visiting for the weekend, and maybe it was my familiarity with the two of them that launched the cavalcade, but for the rest of the night i was the uncomfortable beneficiary of more than my share of the venue’s female attention. a miraculous attempt at evangelical conversion? if so, then the holy spirit’s cupid’s arrow went astray. i could have named it a dozen better marks. but i’ll take it nonetheless. it’s a funny kind of stubbornness, but I’m throwing down my arms. it’s better than suicide, and we do know, those of us who know her, that the virgin hates that. and if not the rest of them, at least i can be a friend of mary’s.

PAGAN SPAIN, part 2

2011-10-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

on saturdays, come mid-afternoon, the streets outside of the historic churches of the city overflow with wedding guests, the men dressed smartly in lightweight grey and blue woolen suits (this summer is poised to continue well into november) and the women, they’re dressed of course, but these weddings are much less about their dresses and their shoes (in which they do miraculously -- glory be! -- manage not to have to hobble over the cobblestones) as about their hats. they’re really, REALLY something. and the trails of them through the center of the city come mid-afternoon on any given saturday will almost invariably lead you to a set of studded doors in front of which a bride waits patiently with her father while, inside, a vaulted hall full of guests waits, turned towards the doors, less in expectation of the beginning of the familiar wedding march than in anticipation of the procession of latecomer hats that have yet to make their formal debuts in front of the virgin. accustomed to the ceremonial lack of ceremony (as such), some dozens of the guests mill under the umbrellas on the patios of the nearby bars even as the bride waits.

and such was the case at the church of san juan bautista (de palma is apparently his mor vulgar moniker) yesterday afternoon, where at half past noon a young wife to be waited patiently (her father probably wanting to be with his brothers and cousins at the bar across the street) for her friends or their wives or girlfriends to make their plays to show her up in front of the crowd. but at eleven o’clock mass this morning, the same grand church was occupied by only twenty or so of the devoted, at least a quarter of which were elderly and enfeebled and waited of their own volition, unacknowledged, to go to the end of the communion line so that they’d need to spend less time on their canes. there were neither a processional nor a recessional of the priest -- he had no attendants to escort him in any case -- and the luster of the church’s obvious historical and art historical importance was obscured by the motion of the four sputtering wall mounted oscillating fans that protruded from the below the red velvet that covered the top halves of the pillars located closest to the apse.

as soon as the mass was finished (and after the priest had retreated backstage and cut the brighter of the lights that had lit the altar), a crowd rushed in to take pictures of the statue of our father jesus del silencio (located in the alcove to the left of the altar, the right hand of the cross), have their pictures taken with the virgin and her attendant saint john and then to line up at the back of the church to be shown into the reliquary by the male parishioner who had so wholeheartedly appealed the devotions to the faithful few twenty minutes before. it’s difficult not to marvel only at the brilliance of the art in the church of san juan bautista in sevilla, and i was personally rapt by the statues of the two angels that guarded the stairs to the apse, symmetrically suspended by no apparent system of suspension as they themselves held pendant two giant lanterns -- the only two lighting fixtures in the church not to have been converted to electric. and those elderly who had struggled through the communion rite were probably the most disserviced by the catholic hierarchy of all of those who stood in line for the sacrament. but even so, as it was, caught between those wedding hats and the gaggles of tourists, i couldn’t help but feel for the parish of san juan bautista. even for all of the gold (and the apse of the church is glutted with it), i couldn’t help but pity the poor, meek catholic church. but then also to wonder, if by some cosmically beatific irony, it might not, after all, end up inheriting the world.

PAGAN SPAIN

2011-10-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

sometimes the smoke turns out to have been coming from a chestnut roaster’s cart, which was the case the other night with the smoke cloud that was hovering below the tenting at the entrance to the pedestrian shopping promenade that begins at the zara store nearest el corte ingles. but sometimes the smoke isn’t floating the smell of charred chestnuts (which don’t seem to have a season here), but instead is carrying the unmistakable fragrance of frankincense, which was the case with the cloud that led me onto the crowd that filled the one narrow intersection on calle regina between the plaza mayor and the church of san juan de palma. and the smoke cloud was just a prelude to the chanting and the clanging of the baubles on top of the staffs that her attendants pounded against the ground to announce the resumption of the virgin’s procession through the intersection atop her seriously ornately gilded palanquin. i can’t say to which church the image belonged, but, probably, neither could most of the other people who had stumbled across the procession and were doing their best to snap photos of the image as she moved through the smoke. and for the smoke, it was difficult to tell if our lady of last night was decorated, under her outsized and resplendent crown, with the crystalline tears that appear on the faces of the virgins in the photographs advertising special viewings or the faded ones that decorate walls of the older cervecerias (or of any older retail establishment for that matter). the virgin passed, and the crowd closed around her attendants behind her. once before, i’d happened upon the carrying of the virgin de la esperanza (the second most celebrated in the city after the virgin de la macarena) back into the santa ana church in triana as a saturday night was turning into an early sunday morning. i’d no better idea of what feast (or whatever other event) she’d been brought out to celebrate that night than i did in regards to the virgin whose path i crossed on my way up calle regina towards home. but no bother. those things are better left to the krewes of parishioners who enjoy the image’s patronage. and they likely prefer it that way -- like those bearers of the portable shinto shrines that carry whichever of those deities through the crowds during festivals in japan -- to be the sole protectors of the gallant and dazzling rites that every so often take their virgin to the streets. i didn’t buy that copy of richard wright’s pagan spain when it was available at powell’s because it had been so severely marked up, and i never found another one. but i think i’ve gotten the gist of it by showing up. and it’s nice to be home.

AUSTERITY MEASURES, part 3

2011-10-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

it seemed possible to easily quit the daily caffeine habit that i'd resumed here after a year and a half of abstinence and then just as much time on a more psychologically and metabolically manageable routine of two cups of coffee on each of three days a week. what the coffee in the pacific northwest had done to my nervous and endocrine systems over years couldn't possibly have been replicated by a month of daily single americanos outside the land of narcotic quality microroasts, could it? well, something happened. and after deciding yesterday to tighten my belt -- or for deciding that i should lower my profile in the cafes for the week, one of the two -- there's been hardly an unobligated hour that i haven't spent asleep. i'd have liked to replace my americanos (even if they should only be replaced temporarily) with some of the american beer that i found in the newly opened import bottle shop at 32ac calle jesus del gran poder (i stumbled into the grand opening reception after a wonderfully caffeinated afternoon walk), but paying twenty euro for a six pack of sierra nevada would hardly let me hide behind my belt tightening excuse. and so i've slept. run and slept and slept. and been told that i look tired when the obligated hours have come around. and with no hoppy consolation from the old country (although i definitely don't need any help getting to sleep). it would, however, have been some consolation. instead, all i have is my 750 gram tub of chocolate hazelnut spread, purchased last night, almost all gone, eaten in those short bursts of momentary motivation between naps, (coffee stirring) spoonful by spoonful. and, of course, off brand.

UN PASEO POR EL BRONX

2011-10-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

it was actually on a morning run that i found all of the places that i later revisited in order to spend more to spend more time investigating them (and photojournalizing for the backhanded appeasement of some relations back in the old country) early this afternoon. and early this afternoon it was already too hot and too sunny (yes, portland, those are things) to really enjoy the walk. but i did get inside that cavernous shell of an abandoned edifice that stands -- not entirely bricked up, but almost -- just north of the macarena on the opposite side of the road that follows the western bank of the river through the city. it's full of trash. and lizards. but there was at least one man in there today who seemed to be living in the "room" with the tree in it at the northern end of the smaller of the two connected buildings. aside from rubble (i'll admit to having been a bit scared because i couldn't tell if what was left of the ceiling had done all of the falling it was going to do), most of the trash -- mattresses and plush toys and gutted home electronics -- looked like leftovers from previous squatters. on the old map i checked later in the day, the lines running away from the spot of what were now those ruins seemed to imply that they had once been a train station. on that map, there were also still train lines running away from the plaza de armas, which was replaced as sevilla's main train station after the completion of santa justa station, which was built, along with the the expansion to the airport, for the expected increase in visitors to the city for the celebration of the quincentennial of spain's opening of the americas to european exploration. i'd decided to run further in that direction that i ever had before because i'd spied the steeple of what i assumed to be an older church in the distance (and historic, monumental architecture isn't what you expect to see in el bronx). later, when i took more time to try to find access onto the grounds, i thought i'd seen a sun faded sign describing the rehabilitation of the monastery of some or another saint del buenavista; but the map said it was a cemetery, which i suppose wouldn't keep the building with the steeple from being a church or a monastery, but there was a security patrol along the outer wall with the only apparent access points to the building when i was back on my walk in the early afternoon, and i thought it better to do any more poking around at an odder hour. plus, it was still almost half of my walk to get back to that giant egg. i'd nearly laughed out loud when i'd first seen it earlier in the morning, and seeing it appear over the horizon was even more unexpected than the steeple. the probably hundred foot and hollowed out spheroid protects a huge statue of christopher columbus, who five-hundred and nineteen years ago came to sevilla to secure funds and three ships for his journey around the world to india from the monarchs of a recently united proto-spain (but only the name of the santa maria -- and the strange date of 12/X/1492 -- appear on the egg). and in the end, for the increasing intensity of the sun and the waning of my interest with the depletion of my water, i didn't end up walking all of the way back to it. of that, i didn't really need pictures. but the sevillian celebrations of 1492 were much more successful than the ones held in sevilla's sister city of columbus, ohio, u.s.a., and the continuing presence of the giant egg is testament to that, even if the central expedition site for the celebrations (located on the opposite side of the river and closer to the center of town) are now more scarcely frequented than even those ruins with their one remianing squatter. strangely, spain didn't get the day off today. there are certainly more publicly recognized religious holidays, but columbus day is not celebrated here. wednesday, however, is armed services day, and i've been told that absolutely nothing will be open. nothing other than ikea, that is, which in perfect american form is where (i've been told) the entire city of sevilla will be that day.

that's why we're going early. greetings from the new world.

AUSTERITY MEASURES, part 2

2011-10-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

juan jose padillo got himself gored in the face yesterday after popping two banderillas into the back of a bull named marques during a fight between the two in zaragoza. i hadn't heard of the man before yesterday evening when the news of his goring topped all of the news bulletins: "Television images showed the moment when the bull’s left horn ripped into Juan Jose Padilla’s lower jaw to emerge beside his protruding eyeball." a picture of the same occupied the entire front page of this morning's diario de sevilla, and even for the closeness of the zoom, it was difficult to tell the tip of the protruding horn from the white bulge of the eye that it was pushing out of padilla's face. so the stage was set for a big sports news sunday, until i realized from checking the printed soccer stats that the game i'd seen on television yesterday evening between bulletins in which sevilla won two to one over barcelona had been a recording. oh well. i'm not taking all of the responsibility for the error, because, after all, i just don't work here. and that goring is more than enough to compete with this morning's cyclocross spectacle back in the old country, which could only triumph for sensationality if someone there were to in fact get gored. are unicorns still a thing? no. never mind. i don't care. here i am wasting time that i could be using to check on the success of padillo's surgery. and in deference to his courage and sacrifice, i won't buy el país like i'd planned, even if i've been told that the sunday culture supplement is a must have for my look this season. and who has the five (six?) euro to give to frivolity at a time like this. una. grande. viva. in solidarity, and out of battery.

AUSTERITY MEASURES

2011-10-08T02:48:00.000-07:00

thanks to the group of twenty year old italian girls who stopped me on the street at two-thirty in the morning to ask me directions, with special kudos to the one of them who happily struggled with me in halting spanish back and forth to finally arrive at the mutual understanding that she and her friends were looking for a place on calle adriano and that i did not know where that was. her dress probably wasn't prada, but it's designer had definitely noticed all the brightly colored stripes in the 2011 spring collection. and then taken them once by mondrian and then by warhol. that's the kind of thing the kids are thinking these days between the bars. what sovereign debt crisis? we've got star power. it was the confidence inspired by that interaction that had me actually offering suggestions two hours later when a man from an early middle aged trio asked me where they should go for one more drink. luckily, it wasn't quite enough for me to grab the lapels of the man who screamed what i thought was a compliment in my face a bit later and toss him out of my way. although it felt like i should have as soon as i was home. the police were busy clearing out the alameda and breaking up the fight behind the fish market.

SUPER SAD, PROBABLY TRUE

2011-10-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

the first several pages had me already suspicious that i’d missed the boat, but of course the boat was full anyway, as the american repatriation authority constantly reminds immigrants in the book and as its author is constantly intimating about the real life (as in outside his book) accessibility of lifestyle hub new york. all of the important media bits on super sad true love story (i.e. the ones that had any chance of getting noticed) went up or out last year (and the originators of the unnoticeable ones that circulated at the same time could console themselves that they’d been involved in the moment, if however insignificantly). but there are those people occupying [ref. my hesitation to put that in quotes] wall street and the streets of all those other cities in the states to protest the corporate ownership of the united states government; and maybe that means the beginning of a real life rupture, that we’re finally at a tipping point -- and maybe the spoils will topple down on the side of the low net worth individuals (unlike in the book), since (unlike in the book) they were the instigators of the conflict when things came to blows. dunno. i’m not there. for richer or poorer, i’ve put myself on another boat.

but, last week, super sad true love story was the only book left in the apartment in a language that i could read, in other words the last book immediately available to me that i wouldn’t have to pay for; the last book aside from that one on the development of the japanese new wave and the birth of the art theater guild by toshio matsumoto that i should have passed on to someone who would have read it after nearly a year of letting it sit face down, open to page three on the filing cabinet that was my nightstand at the apartment in the old country. the idea, however, of reading a book in japanese that described the histories of the french and italian new waves at a beach on the coast of spain -- and the idea of being able to talk about that idea -- was enough for me to accept the extra weight in my suitcase. it was enough, even for knowing beyond most foreseeable doubts that the book would probably stay unread, and that if the computer somehow found its way to the beach that there probably wouldn’t be a wireless signal for gloating. but i could still gloat at being in possession of such an erudite “media artifact” as the one(s) i had, and for that i could also sympathize with lenny abramov’s anachronistic fondness for his books in super sad true love story.

of course, super sad true love story, as a depiction of a near future (credit score and streaming media driven) dystopia, is supposed to make you smile and nod at how similar (if in some cases farcically so) the lives of its characters are to your own. (the copy i read went to italy early this morning, but i think i remember something on the jacket positioning the book as if nabokov had written 1984.) the problem is that the future gets old, or any one future does, as soon as the future comes to take its place, and once that happens (and i feared within the first several pages of super sad true love story that it might already have) a book like this one can’t hold on to its urgency and, without its timeliness, loses itself until the discussion on it is reopened a decade and a half later as a way of understanding the intellectual history of the past (which is actually how the unnecessarily sentimental epilogue to super sad true love story positions the story of the book). the future gets old, and the future gets old at the same speed as we canonize a fancifully nostalgic image of the past.

and so I put myself on that beach in hindsight, and it was a greater moment even that it ever could have been in anticipation. the protagonist of (the other) murakami’s almost transparent blue gets things on in that book with an american named lily, the woman who writes the protagonist the letter that comprises the final text of the novel. lily has gone off, and there’s something in her letter about a beach, or at least there’s something suggested in reference to something from earlier in the book, and that’s why murakami’s second novel is loosely considered a sequel to his first, because it begins with a description of a woman on a beach, a redhead like lily who’se thinking or reading or doing something pensive like lily would probably do (and i’m sure that there’s something more concrete to the connection, but neither of the books came with me, and we’re going to go with that there isn’t a wireless signal at the beach). but the exact connection isn’t all that important, because the woman at the beach isn’t all that important to the book except that hers is the perspective and imagination from which things start happening across the ocean in front of which she’s sitting. and there i was at the beach, a detached and pensive secondary character in my own story, reading my book on the japanese new wave and watching a war break out across the ocean (the title of murakami’s second book) just like lily had, in my case a rupture similar to the one in super sad true love story.

and from there? in murakami’s book, the perspective on the action jumps its way around to finally find lily back at the beach, which is where it finds us -- i suppose we never left me there -- still thinking about how to talk about a book that probably isn’t worth talking about anymore. except (except!) for about that yearning nostalgia for an intelligent america in which reading was valued and new york city was an unassailable beacon of honest ambition. even i shed a tear for that place i visited that one time only for how i imagine myself to have been feeling at the time that was that one only time. but who was i to judge, sitting on that spanish beach pondering the value of literary fiction for the here and now in the ugly -- and lengthening -- shadow of gertrude stein and ernest hemmingway.

so away from the beach. but there isn’t an open internet signal here at the metropol parasol in the plaza de la encarnacion either, and, as one of the self-inflicted casualties of the rupture in super sad true love story writes in his suicide note, without connectivity we’re stuck with just “walls and thoughts and faces.” lenny abramov tells his diary about the honest sympathy he felt for that sentiment, even as (or because of being?) a lover of introspection and media artifacts. too bad the feel good sentiments of the epilogue, which takes place after lenny’s diary has been published, have to rob that sympathy of its vulnerable dignity. or something like that, stark and poignant like the end of super sad true love story isn’t. but then who cares? that boat was already full, and i’d long since missed it anyway. better not to draw attention to my lateness in coming. better next time just to buy what i’d prefer to read, timely or not and shut up about it. so i take my headphones out of my ears to be able to put the computer in my bag with my notebooks and things (but not the copy of super sad true love story that i read, because it went to italy this morning). and i fucking shit you not: in the plaza, bruce springstein is singing “born in the u.s.a.”

(UNA SEMANA EN) MA VIE EN PISOS

2011-10-06T03:37:00.000-07:00

inspirado en una historia verídica...

no recuerdo cuantos dueños yo llamé la semana pasada. demasiados. no recuerdo cuantos pisos yo fui a ver con mi compañera. no, sí Recuerdo, fueron siete. y había algo mal con todos. el primero piso era bonito y el precio por mes era más barato que la mayoría, pero cuando yo lo visité, el dueño dijo algo sobre una nómina. ¿qué fue? no entendí. despues de nuestra conversación, me preocupaba que mis documentos no fueran suficiente para ese dueño, y por eso yo no traté de alquilar su piso. (¡y qué pena! el dueño era guapo…) los otros pisos eran feos, o si eran bonitos no estaban amueblados, o en el caso de uno, estaba manejado por una mujer muy loca y glotona. y el vencimiento de mi arrendamiento se estaba acercando… Hasta con la ayuda de mi amiga – que llamaba a los dueños por teléfono y me servía de matona – no podía encontrar una situación ideal. en el fin, yo tomé el piso de algunos amigos de mi amiga. ellos pueden hablar inglés, y yo podría haber evitado todas las dificultades con los dueños y sus pisos si en el principio hubiese tomado ese piso. bueno. por lo menos, yo he podido practicar mi español. ¿dónde fue el dueño de ese primero piso?

HOW TO GRIN AND BEER IT -- OR WINE; or, CRUZCAMPO IS ONLY GOOD FOR BAD PUNS

2011-10-03T02:12:00.000-07:00

the beer in spain would be awful. we knew that. unfortunately, knowing wasn't much of the battle when it came to experiencing and accepting the reality of the situation. and the reality of the situation is that spain only seems to have one beer, a "premium lager" of the quality that you'd expect from a beer with that written on the label. the labels sometimes say cruzcampo, but they sometimes also say alhambra or estrella del sur. dia even sells bottles of its own brand for significantly cheaper than the rest, and you might as well get your liters of that if you're buying beer at dia, because all of the brands taste the same: not great. there's probably just the one big beer factory somewhere that makes bottles and bottles of all of spain's premium lager and then ships them to the different labeling factories. there's a place on feria that has a few taps of somethings german, but if glasses (glasses!) of cruzcampo are one euro fifty, who knows what a place would charge for a pint of premium lager imported from two countries away. anyway, you can get a glass of house wine for a euro ten. it isn't much against the heat, but it does some kind of job. maybe not the best for enjoying the thursday garbage picnic at midday, but there's a dia right near the picnickers, only then you still have to do the chilling yourself.

those glasses of house wine have heard more than their share of sighs. it's not even their fault. and of course the old country is completely out of mind when we're walking back to stick those warm bottles in the freezer. the old country was nothing but strife. this new world of unemployment has everything more exciting to offer in the way of bohemian vogue. but if someone wants to send a bottle of super dog, i wouldn't consider it a backward step to drink it. we're moving to calle becquer. you can have the address as soon as i have it exact.

TALK TO HIM; or, HOW TO SPEAK SEVILLANO

2011-09-30T02:19:00.000-07:00

never lapse from the imperative. and keep everyone involved in the conversation spitting your game. use: "mira!" "oye!" and make sure that everyone knows that what you're doing is for everyone's benefit (which, of course, includes yours, but don't say so in so many words). don't ask: tell. remind them that you're the cousin or the neighbor or the ex-lover of the niece's best friend's godmother's children's piano teacher and that you're more than entitled to a discount or an exclusion or just this little exception just this once. then reason if necessary: use "hombre" (if you haven't already and forgetting for once to pay attention to gender) to let whoever it is that might be doubting you know that you're on equal footing, that you're on the level -- and that you couldn't possibly get by with anything less than what you're asking. (just don't use it like "dude" unless that's what you're trying to mean.) and don't waste your time with pleasantries, because you'll just be wasting the time of the people who really just want to know what it is that you want. don't, that is, until you're saying goodbye, at which time spread those pleasantries thick like sobrasado. make your interlocutors hang up, leave you first. add another "ciao" or another double aspirated "adios." make them want it. and keep them wanting more. just don't forget the balance of accounts: that is, take care to keep that footing equal, on the level.

como yo: speak sevillano. or try, at least! sink or swim, chicas. go ahead. talk to him.

SON LOS TOREROS, part 2

2011-09-27T02:46:00.000-07:00

yesterday, the front page of el país (i inadvertently stole it -- it was inadvertent, i swear -- from the cafe when i thought that i was in fact helping the staff by removing for them some of the garbage left behind by another customer) featured an article on the end of the bullfighting season in catalonia, which this year also marked the death (as the paper put it, although i didn't get much further than the headline) of bullfighting in that autonomous community as a result of the catalonian parliament's having voted to ban it earlier this summer. the front page photo, which occupied most of the space on the page above the fold -- and relegated an article on the left taking the french senate for the first time since 1958 to a narrow column on the right -- showed a jubilant crowd carrying a smiling matador out of the bullring, behind him a large flag demanding (in catalan of course), "libertat per a la nostra cultura."

it was clear from his fight with his first bull that josé maría manzanares wasn't likely to win the honor of being carried out of the real maestranza on sunday evening, be damned the expectations and excitement of the end of the season, even at this, the oldest ring in the country. although he was not to be outdone for style in his suit of maroon, manzanares almost completely missed his mark when he went in with his sword for the kill, and his adversary, though wounded, bucked the blade out of its back and stumbled pathetically toward another charge, its miserable condition a certain reflection of the matador's poor technique, which ultimately required that the bull be taken down unceremoniously with a stab to the head by an attendant. the bands didn't play nearly as triumphantly as they had after the first two fights, even for the three swords it took matador number one to finish his job (which, it seemed, we should have assumed to be done less spectacularly than those of the men with the better billings).

but there was certainly no love lost for manzanares over his initially poor showing. in definitely didn't keep us from leaving our seats in the alto sol section across from the royal box -- which we couldn't actually see from where we'd been sitting for the imposition of the pillars of the eave over our section -- to squeeze ourselves behind the security guards protecting one of the portals onto the lower, better seats in hopes of being able to better see his face as he faced off against his second bull.

by the time of that fight, at roughly eight, the sun had set to where it was just barely visible over the upper edge of the maestranza on the opposite side of the ring. we weren't able to see as much of the action at large as we had been from a higher vantage, and that was no doubt in large part due to our having to stretch up to grab the railings beside the the stairs of the portal to keep ourselves on tiptoe and as much of a head as possible above the other spectators crowded behind the guards. (graciously, when they realized it was for a photo opportunity, they did allow us momentary access onto the aisle to get a picture of the big hat under the waning sunlight, that hat that had been come by through so much difficulty only to find itself solidly in the shade when we found our seats.)

it seemed obvious that it should when presented with the reality -- they are, after all, called suits of lights -- but from closer on it was actually possible to see that maroon suit of manzanares' shine, its adornments of mirrored glass sparkling toward every direction even when the matador appeared to be completely still. and even if parts of that last fight were obscured (although probably no more than other parts would have been obscured by those pillars up in alto sol), our position for bull number six and for manzanares' redemption couldn't have been better, if only for understanding (or deciding to appreciate, maybe) the spectacularity of the spectacle of the bullfight. the sparkling matador as he struts around the ring, especially when with his back to the bull after having led it through a half dozen passes, the crowd having risen from its hush to clap and cheer only to be hushed again by an ardent insistence from within its ranks as the matador replaces his sword behind the muleta and stares down the bull for another go. and the bull seems then to be just a given in the setting of the scene, the setting for the real spectacle, which is played out between the matadors and the fans in the crowd. and there's a pun there, at least for talking about the bullring in sevilla where, shade or sun, at least half of the crowd seems to be fanning itself at all times, which is a sight to see in itself -- and perhaps one of the only things seen best, in wide angle panorama, from the cheap seats highest up. and at least in sevilla the popular claim by bullfighting opponents that the spectacle is favored principally by foreign tourists is proven entirely untrue. maybe it was just for manzanares and only for the social cachet of having seen him fight at the maestranza at the close of this historic season, but the identifiable tourists seemed all to have left the ring by bull number four, and that left the maestranza still looking completely full, full of fans with their fans, many of them dressed -- not to rival the matadors -- but still to kill; many of them minors, and all of them with rapt attention for their next cue of the show.

and we followed the most devoted (or maybe just the most enchanted) of them to the gate from which the matadors would leave after the sixth bull went down. manzanares wasn't going to be carried out, but he'd still have to leave, and we were there with the others pressing the shutter buttons of our digital cameras in rapid fire succession when he did. neither of us were so bold as to grab one of his arms to pull him into the frame of a photograph, or we didn't realize that we could have been so brazen until after the crowd had swelled around him and we were being pushed to its periphery as manzanares' entourage pushed him toward the mercedes van that was waiting to collect him at the end of the street, the van out of which one of the entourage was passing photographs of the matador staring down a bull, promotional materials for the new www.josemariamanzanares.com. we were among the devoted who pushed our way back to the center of the crowd and up to the window of the van to fight the flurry of hands to grab our trophies, which we then carried proudly through the crowded, twilit streets of santa cruz, the bars and restaurants of which, already dense with the impeccably groomed heirs to the sevillian upper crust (the ones who hadn't chased manzanares to his van had apparently gone ahead to save seats), seemed to be caught somewhere between the spanish versions of a derby party and the prom. it was lucky we had the hat.

i didn't get far enough into that article in el país to find out if the air around the ring in barcelona was so rarified, but it probably didn't say. no doubt there were confrontations between the saddened supporters of that last fight and their detractors outside of the ring. ironically, had they all been in sevilla, where the bullfight seems to be entirely safe from assault, there would have been shit aplenty for them to hurl at each other, even on the streets of santa cruz. in that front page photo, the matador being carried out of the ring in barcelona is smiling, but his smile seems already tinged with nostalgia, even if he still has the chance to be carried out of other fights during other seasons at other rings. and the sevillanos will be happy to do the carrying. that's the feeling that the price of admission to the plaza de los toros la maestranza bought us, anyway. or maybe we'd just been blinded by the brilliance of the light from those suits. son los toreros. looking damn fine in those pants.

LA GASEOSA

2011-09-25T03:04:00.000-07:00

the streets were particularly shitty this morning -- littered with specimens of all varieties -- but people would have been understandably tired this morning as most of the city seemed to have been out last night. not that the heat has ever seemed to keep people inside after nightfall, but the overtones of fall that were everywhere in the air yesterday evening did seem to have ignited something in the sevillian populace. maybe it was just the incitement to dress for fall. and maybe it was the cooler air that made this morning's first-step-onto-the-street blast of crap-fresh air so assaulting, though it's also true that there's no reason to think that the sidewalks would have been any cleaner had the city retired early. had i not been on the other side of the street from him i would have asked the man i saw picking up after his dog the other day if he didn't realize that he didn't have to.

but who could have been upset with this easy sunday morning, which has now given itself over to an equally mild afternoon. it's probably still too early in late summer for it not to be oppressive under the direct sun at one, but hopefully that will have changed by six for the start of the bullfight (manzanares or not, the tickets in the shaded sections are expensive). granted, after two consectutive nights of trying (with middling success) to find a spanish social life, the morning could have gone either way, regardless of how permissive the climate (social or meteorological). in attempts not to repeat the failures of the two previous weekends, which saw us heading home tired just when the action on the streets was picking up, the last two nights we've committed ourselves to bed at nine p.m. so that we could head out after midnight and rested. but getting up from a late evening nap isn't the easiest thing to do if you're not used to it, particularly if what's waiting for you outside of bed is...well, you don't know what's waiting for you, and so maybe you should stay in bed, even if so far your nights out have been encouragingly informative and inexpensive despite their early termination. but you get yourself out of bed and shower with the slightly stomach sick and drowsy foreboding of having to catch an early flight before which you'd decided not to sleep but then couldn't imagine having to face without a little rest for your eyes. having to look good in pants all day (which in late summer still chafes under the midday sun) and then doing it all night knowing that it's going to be expected of you tomorrow is hard work.

of course, there are ways to make it easier. working harder and smarter, although it's still up in the air as to whether the nine to eleven second siestas are very smart, especially since the hard part of making things easier is downing the first couple of rounds at home after that shower (or maybe during if you're short on time). you don't get away with having a full night out on a handful of coins by paying for a bunch of drinks at the bars. luckily, there's a dia right down the street from the apartment. it doesn't seem possible to get a complete haul of groceries from any of the stores of that particular chain supermarkets (or even the makings of a complete meal), but most people do seem just to use them to get what they forgot at the fresher markets. i thought that perhaps that the staff was looking down on me for only ever buying cartons of orange juice and two liter green plastic jugs of tinto (and tinto now refers not to red wine in general but to the stuff that comes in those jugs) until i saw a man whose complete purchase consisted of six forties, a bag of dog food and an economy sized package of toilet paper. (i nearly lost my dia privileges when i burst into unsuppressible laughter at seeing him unload his basket, but really, imagine how much he must shit after chasing all that dog food with all of that beer!)

my standard order increased by one item last night when i found the shelf of dia brand sparkling water at the end of the dairy aisle. one euro seventy-eight is a steal for two liters of tinto, but twenty-eight cents for one and a half of bubbly mixer isn't too shabby either. and you'll probably have to see it yourself to believe that it's called gaseosa. and that's appropriate, probably, because after a couple of mugs of it mixed with that orange juice and that tinto, the gaseosa will be moving in you too. maybe that's what they're giving to the dogs. (w)oof. it did the trick, even if last night didn't end any later than any of the others. we've got dancing we can do on our own, anyway, and at least some new inspiration. la gaseosa. alone in front of the mirror in between third siesta and the coming morning, i think i'd found my flamenco name.

GARBAGE PICNIC ESPAÑOLA

2011-09-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

although its posted hours do include thursday mornings after ten, the bicicleteria wasn’t open this morning when i went with hopes of getting a coffee and the low down on the wi-fi situation for club members -- and also maybe on the situation with the apartment upstairs. then again, neither had either of the bars that we wanted to check out been open when we visited them last night, so i’d already decided to expect a shuttered entryway. what was this, though, that was blocking traffic up and down three blocks of calle feria and into the plaza next to the dia supermarket?!? no! could it possibly…?

a huge neighborhood yarsel! complete with old typewriters and televisions, vhs camcorders and cassettes, and furniture and glassware that surely looked better inside of whatever apartment it came from than it did out on the street next to all the piles of trash. oh the irony of having given all of ours away that we couldn’t sell at our own garbage picnic just to have enough to scrape by, to look at all of the wonderful things on offer at this new world yarsel but not to buy.

and what a land of plenty. every rusticated iron key and pre-euro coin on the continent must have been on those tables and blankets, just waiting for the right aspiring jeweler to remove them to brooklyn. and you know that you’ve wanted a gaudy wooden crucifix ever since you saw the robin williams version of “the bird cage.” well you’d have had your pick of dozens. and novelty key rings, vintage photographs and sun faded posters announcing bygone bullfights and ferias. no, i don’t have forty-five euro to pay for that poster if it isn’t sold. but how am i supposed to look at them if i can’t leaf through them? i was, however, respectful of the event and just waved my hand not with a dumb, happy grin.

the stuff was good but not necessarily cheap. still, i managed to find a rusted old key for just a euro, which was three or five times less than most of them were going for (the yarselers here seem know their business and their customers well). i can only imagine what the key was for, but i did appreciate imagining as i handed over my one euro coin to the man behind the table: it would be the first key i’d have of my own since leaving those to the old apartment and my bike lock back west and selling nearly everything else. and i let myself entertain the thought that the man had given me a special price so that he could make this one special sale that would let him share in a special moment with a hopeful stranger. then i took my key and walked away down the block and stepped in some shit.

if the man with the posters could have seen, i’ll bet he was laughing.

SOMOS LOS GAFAPASTAS...?

2011-09-21T02:45:00.000-07:00

carmela hadn't heard of "woman without piano," which i offered by way of response when she asked us which spanish movies we'd seen. and apparently a film about a woman walking around madrid at night (largely without a piano) seemed uninteresting unto pretension, or just too arty -- and maybe i dug myself into that hole by trying to justify the movie's worth by saying something about its colors (which were striking). but if i hadn't brought up "woman without piano" then carmela wouldn't have snickered and called me what she did, which, judging now in retrospect the way she said it, must be the same kind of only kind-of insult that it is in the states, and we wouldn't have learned the word. they wear thick framed glasses, the gafapastas, and like to talk about el arte, and, you know...stuff. (gafapastas love art and stuff, which will surely make their inclusion in the gay or european game all the more interesting.) were we gafapastas? carmela said we didn't dress like them. (ever since the spanish class got pared down to just the three of us, a daily showdown between carmela and moniquipher, we've been happy to accept what we don't get done together as homework and make us of our time to talk.) then i got ratted out about my glasses. unfortunately, i didn't have the words to make a clear explanation about character variations across the eyewear spectrum, and carmela hadn't heard of jonathan franzen when i mentioned him the day before anyway. i would have returned the favor and exposed monique if she hadn't left her pair of thick, black framed gafas in a free box back in la ciudad de gafapastas in the old country.

and where were the gafapasta bars in sevilla? one of the best things about her city, carmela said, was that people didn't segregate themselves into specific groups and that the gafapastas intermingled with everyone else just like everyone else did. oof. the sevillanos like to make it difficult. although i suppose that everyone should have equal opportunity to snub us and not just one self-insulated group (carmela suspected -- and most likely and frustratingly correctly -- that everyone on the alameda assumed moniquipher was a couple couple).

but then on came the glasses. maybe not, because the experiment wasn't very well controlled, but the first night that i wore them out was also the night that we were invited to join the club. true, the bicicleteria had never been open when we'd passed it before, and it's designation as a private club was probably just the necessary means for the place to allow patrons to smoke inside -- and to confound americans who walked it from the street expecting a bar but not exactly finding one. still, we signed the book and we were in, and even though none of the other members there that night looked to be gafapastas (granted, we couldn't understand what kind of art and stuff they might have been talking about), i'm sure that the glasses had something to do with the ease with which we were accepted into the fold. the glasses and that andres, the proprietor of the club, spoke impressively fluid english.

so i probably should have put the glasses on again this morning. it's possible that they might have helped smooth over whatever faux pas i committed at ciudad condal that caused the morning server, usually so smiley when he takes my order for the americano he knows i'll be getting, to completely ignore me, even after i'd attempted to go sevillano and just bark at him (to which task i thought he might have been challenging me). i'll admit that my bark was more of a squeak accompanied by a weak gesture of my hand, but i was too scared to muster much more, and after that gesture failed i packed my shame back into my bag with my laptop, squared my shoulders and set off back up the alameda. the two older men i passed less than a minute later were definitely into art and stuff (and obviously suspected that i might be too), but i'd spent all of my day's courage in those fifteen minutes at ciudad condal and couldn't stand to be anything but alone, walking. damn the heat for making it impossible to wear my glasses during the day without them sweating off my face, i thought as i walked, and walked, wondering if the mean girls were working at cafe piola, and entirely without piano.

DONDE ESTAN LOS TODOS CHICOS AT, part 2

2011-09-19T04:36:00.000-07:00

concha vargas -- you did your research, right? -- gave a free class at flamenco de sur a sur on saturday evening. la estefanía knew about it, and she was visiting from jerez, where the festival de la bulería was happening, but so, per her telling, were demonstrations for the rights of the trabajadores which threatened to shut the festival down. (i should really start trying to pretend to read el país.) concha was concha, also per stephanie's telling, and i probably should have just participated in the forty-five minute teaser class without my boots, because asking to sit and spectate seemed to put her at disease, and she was much warmer with the ladies who followed who through the introduction to a choreography that concha will be teaching at sur a sur over the next three months. that introduction was just what i would have expected -- and what, in fact, i had hoped to see -- after having seen videos of concha vargas online, my fascination with which concha seemed completely uninterested in listening to if i was just going to steal space from her dancers by sitting in the back of the studio.

so it was nice to have a familiar companion, at sur a sur for the teaser class and to find out if the flies on the alameda really only harass non-sevillanos (or if some lingering odor of the old country just draws them to me); but stephanie even learned us a few simple gitano recipes and introduced us to another good-to-know expat who was gracious enough to wait over an hour for us to arrive on the other side of the puente isabel ii in triana as we leisurely finished our dinner and walked our way through town. miriam might have liked to stay out later -- although she'd also tied a few the evening and night before -- but i used stephanie's early morning departure as cover for my own flagging energies and suggested that we forgo another glass of wine and walk home. we may not have been leaving as early as stephanie, but the plan was to spend the next day at the beach, and at one thirty we still hadn't decided on a beach or a way to get there.

we arrived in cádiz ten hours later having spent one and a half of those on the train from santa justa station, which of course presupposed our successful purchase of tickets for the nine forty-five train -- which had been in very certain question when we'd left for the station twenty minutes before. we'd opted for cádiz over málaga and el palmar for its proximity (and the relative cheapness of the tickets to which that proximity corresponded) and because we hadn't the courage to figure out how to arrive at the latter by bus. but we could have also pretended historical importance: cádiz is the oldest continuously inhabited city in europe...and something about hannibal and christopher columbus and sir frances drake and the spanish armada. it's probably much less faggy than málaga -- or at least torremolinos -- but as it's still almost impossible for us to make confident calls one way or the other, cádiz presented a much better opportunity to practice the game. and whatever, it looked like sunshine and there are miles of beach.

and the water at the beach was still relatively warm (particularly for the atlantic), and even if we didn't have much interest in the cathedral when we passed through the square in front of it trying to find our way to the beach from the train station, the view of its dome and its bell towers in the distance made for a magnificent backdrop for our camp on the sand. the parade of other bathers in front of our picnic on top the duvet cover we found in one of the closets in the apartment was good for the rest (although admittedly bad for studying at any of the materials we'd carried with us -- and with such good intentions -- on the train).

come two thirty we decided to head up the beach to find another spot. there wasn't reason to expect that there would be any fewer rocks in the shallows of that other spot than at the one where we started, but i did want to get back in the water to rinse out the cut i'd gotten on my foot the first time i swam and which had since been filled uncomfortably with sand. plus, there was the opportunity for new adventures in leering, and that alone seemed worth a relocation.

it might be that we're simply stained by the experience of american prudishness, but both of us were made uncomfortable by frequent sight of the middle aged so closely hugging the girls who seemed to be too late in their preteens to be running around with the children without their bikini tops. still, the parents at the beach at cádiz were admirably affectionate with their children, and if we had no problem with the nakedness of the torsos of the adults, then it must have just been that prudishness that caused us to bristle at the rest. perhaps, however, we were at our most american when on our relocation walk we laughed out loud after a father who had been chasing his son of maybe nine years old down the beach pushed him face forward into the shallows. that it happened at all was funny enough, but that the push was strong and seemed intended to make the boy fall was more than we could ignore, cultural sensitivity be damned. the spanish have a reputation for being fiery and passionate, but we'd had no idea to what extremes.

there were three men sitting under an umbrella decorated with a flower pattern near where we relaid the duvet cover, and if not all of them, then the one in the rolled green shorts seemed especially not just european. i swore that he'd been staring when his friends went to cool off in the water and when i came back up to the duvee cover from the surf after doing the same a little while later. but she swore that he'd had his eyes on her when she'd walked past the flower umbrella both to and from where she'd gone to sleep in the shade while i finished my book. it made sense then that he suggested what he did later, our second invitation in a week, and this one much more flattering than the first. but he lived in cádiz, and we'd already paid to get home on the last train, which for being the last train didn't leave so late. (time to muster the courage to brave the bus.)

we slept almost the entire way back to santa justa station, but that was probably for the better given that all of them on the train were too young or too girlfriended. and despite having no urgent plans for monday morning, the spanish customs that pertain to sundays made it impossible for us to feel anything but that it was one, and the thing to do once dark had fallen seemed to be to just let the day pass. we could let saturday's dishes and the sandy duvet cover be monday's urgent plans.

greetings from europe. the real thing, even if we can't yet figure out which thing that is.

HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND INTIMIDATE PEOPLE

2011-09-17T04:49:00.000-07:00

the man who followed us from itaca, where we arrived after two hours of prepartying at the apartment and then two and a half more on the streets trying to walk off some of the preparty and figure out where we'd be spending the rest of our night out (never having figured out the situation with the flamenco show that was supposedly happening late in the plaza de san marcos), that man, he followed us to a place called utopia that seemed to have much more potential than itaca -- a big, late, spanish c.c. slaughters -- stopped us at a corner and asked us first if we were the police. i guessed at first that his tapping on his forearm meant that he wanted to sell us drugs, but then i wasn't sure whether the number he was giving us was a price or a measurement because he grabbed himself at me and asked what exactly it was we were looking for when we passed by and passed on the other club. did we like men? or was she a lesbian? not tonight? (the game of gay or gay-not-gay that we played so often in portland has translated well into the game of gay or just european that the kids play here -- and that apparently i'm losing.) but if tonight we both like men then we should both join him, he said, and grabbed himself again, so it might have been drugs AND sex that he was offering us, or maybe one for the other.

at that point, she was already trying to talk to the perfectly vapid looking guapo sitting nearby on one of the pylons that mark the borders of the roads on and around the alameda, but as soon as he responded he got up and pushed his way inside utopia, which, through the door that the bouncer opened to let the guy in, looked too closely packed to accommodate her upset stomach (some of the fashion choices here are dubious at best, and this place was looking more and more like a pair of jeggings: tight and unflattering), but at least our tail from itaca had given up and went in search of other prospects.

what can we say except that we'll know better how to try the next time? or that we know how we're going to try to try better the next time. but before then we have a man to contact about a room, because the principle lesson learned last night was definitely that it can be dangerous to mix business and pleasure, and the office was completely ruined by the preparty.

PARA CANTARTE NUESTRO DOLOR

2011-09-16T02:55:00.000-07:00

after just one week as obviously not sevillanos, we've still managed to develop a regular routine of caffeine and wi-fi consumption, which required much less trial and error than it easily could have (although the limited number of establishments with wi-fi signals certainly helped that), and having steadied ourselves after the bump in the search at café piola, we've settled more or less happily into seats at the patio of the café ciudad condal (the name of which is, ironically, an antiquated appellation for the city of barcelona). but the alameda de hercules has very definitely become our go to promenading ourselves as well as for sitting and watching the promenade, if for no other reason than its proximity to the apartment, which isn't its only similarity with mississippi/albina back in the old country, or doesn't have to be if we felt like drawing comparisons, which we probably shouldn't, because we left that other land of unemployment to find new opportunity in this one, and so we'll draw no further. besides, there's no whorehouse that we know of around mississippi that offers ladies with such defiant dye jobs.

yesterday afternoon, it was on the alameda, at the bar de los columnas, that i met with a friend of a friend from portland who was in sevilla for a couple of days to renew her student visa. sachiko is spending the month in lebrija (not far from jerez de la frontera) studying with concha vargas, who you should search on your own because i don't have the words to do her justice, at least not in this post, which should focus more on her sister, angelita, whose classes sachiko was taking when she met my friend danielle. and it was angelita's untimely stroke (it happened only a week into the beginning of the class) that caused sachiko to recognize the importance of refocusing her studies on the gitano tradition as opposed to the more strictured formalities of the flamenco academies where she'd spent most of her dancing career. before her stroke, angelita had been teaching the soleá, which sachiko said she just walked. or, rather, that angelita vargas' soleá, the one she was teaching sachiko and danielle and probably the only choreography for that palo she had, was just walking. but walking that was dancing the soleá.

o-ho! there's a moral to this story. or a reflexive directive that i've decided to share in lieu of enumerating all of the possible comparisons that we might draw between the new neighborhood and the old one. i'm sharing it even though i'm not quite sure what it is; but it has something to do with walking, but learning to walk somehow differently -- or learning how to walk a walk that's something else...or just to keep walking until i come to the dramatic epiphany that i've never really walked before (and hopefully that will be near one of the grander plazas in the santa cruz neighborhood for the benefit of the cameras). then again, maybe the secret of the best gitano flamencos is to convince foreign students to pay top dollar for a mystical experience that is conjured just to satisfy their desires for it and to lead the other bees back to the honey. and that's the secret that will pass when angelita vargas' generation does. the new world of unemployment is for real, so that's a secret that i'd very much like to learn.

the apartment is on a narrow street in la macarena about half a mile from the northern tip of the alameda, and the narrowness of the street causes every street noise to echo up the walls of the buildings on either side and on into the open windows of the apartment. and with the windows open, it's impossible not to hear everything being said in each of the other apartments, which are arranged around an air shaft with courtyard pretensions that opens out at the center of the rooftop terrace. that looming epiphany. but i wonder: will i be more or less annoyed at night when i can finally understand what what everyone's saying.

HOMENAJE; or, TO LOOKING GOOD IN PANTS

2011-09-14T03:58:00.000-07:00

tuesday, 13 september, 2011, 10:28 p.m.

although all tacit communication so far has implied that we both can and have been, it still remains to be seen how good in pants it’s possible for a couple of americans to look in southern spain. do the pants make the man, or is it (figuratively) the other way around? and on what scale and to what extent and so on. four days just isn’t enough time to call the game won or lost, and the rules don’t as yet appear to be as straightforward as they were in the rose city -- where we’re sure it’s still true that none of the shit stinks, at least not to anyone still there. in any case, we’re too far away now to sniff for it ourselves, plus we’ve encountered an entirely new world of odors in which to delight or wallow, and, moreover, we just don’t have the time -- if only for the fact that none of the clocks in sevilla seem to work. and so, it also remains to be seen whether this blog has outlasted its raison d’etre, being both that its namesake is in question and it has very certainly distanced itself from the comedic setting that warranted its inception.

then again, it might be that the joke had gotten so long in the tooth as to have been completely played out anyway, in which case the change of direction should reflect an effort to save the mission instead of giving in to its (not -- yet -- necessarily justified) abortion. besides, insofar as the connections between the portland flamenco scene and the one here in andalucía played a part in the decision of our point of relocation, the storyline of looking good in pants hasn’t been cut short so much as reimagined. maybe even evolved. the heretofore could actually be seen as an extended introduction (we obviously love those), or even just as a practice…or even completely irrelevant, because who knows when whatever reader might be picking up the story, and it’s the story that’s important in both ways about it; and a story is certainly what i got from letting myself be convinced by portland to leave sevilla on my second and a half day in spain to go to jerez de la frontera for a show to benefit the recovery of the gitana flamenco singer la chiqui de jerez.

the young woman seated next to me on the train was listening to music from the time she boarded in sevilla until i got off at the station in jerez. she was wearing headphones, but her music was nonetheless audible, at least to me, and maybe i only noticed because i recognized two of the songs she listened to -- a song by otis redding and that one by eminem and rihanna that won a grammy this year -- but i didn’t say anything regardless; and i’d like to say that was because the views of the rolling hills and the whitewashed hilltop towns with their enchantingly decomposing cities were so relaxing, but the truth is that i would have been ashamed to call attention to myself after the girl had deferred to the obvious horror in my eyes as she was telling me in words that i couldn’t understand (although her meaning was no less obvious than my discomfiture certainly was) that i was in the wrong seat and gave up her window to me to sit along the aisle.

…i’d intended to segue from my seat there on that train next to that girl into something about the ironic juxtaposition of that so very imported music in the ears of that spanish girl riding that train through andalucía while the american (smug, but still making a good showing in his pants) was on his way to a concert that promised something so much more fleetingly indigenous and authentic. and then to something about the cab ride from the casino where the boyfriend of the friend who picked me up from the train station begged out a giant bag of one euro coins in exchange for the stack of bills that wouldn’t have been any use to the volunteers manning the bar at the event. and to something about passing the photo opportunity stack of tio pepe casks in the city center and how the name of that sherry by which jerez makes its living was funny to me because i actually have an uncle joe and then bitterly nostalgic because the people leaving the wedding at the church up the street reminded me of the ones at his daughter maria’s wedding. then from there to the benefit itself, which started accepting guests at eight, started at ten and lasted until three in the morning, during which time the ladies next to me, cousins of la chiqui (everyone at the benefit seemed to be saying that they were some kind of cousin of la chiqui), took my fifty euro bill in exchange for kisses and incomprehensible promises, returned me thirty and a plate of sandwiches in exchange for which i cursed my stupidity and entertained a pathetic cliché about gypsies (the word itself is ugly and passé), but was then given no less than six half bottles of tio pepe and an invitation (painstakingly understood) to join the group at the clubs after the show. i would have gone from there to something about how unbelievably inspiring the series of acts and the even more inspiring participation of the crowd: every member of the family (and there were at least a thousand, which is quite a benefit at twenty-five euros a head not counting the take from the bar) seemed to have lived the music. [an aside about being moved to tears by the four year old who danced in the fin de fiesta.] from there to the impromptu song and dance sessions in the streets around the cine astoria after the show, and then from there to the unbelievability of the fact of hipster bars and dance clubs in the middle of old town jerez. at that point it would have been after five in the morning, and you’d think me lucky to have been with locals who could get me into closed bars to keep me awake until nearer the departure of my return train at half past seven. but from there i would have taken us unexpectedly up a hill and away from the train station for a last glass of tinto at the home of my friend’s boyfriend, who would, in fact, have been offended if i walked back down the hill in time to make my train given the perfect timing (i’m glad i asked my friend to ask). and from there to my happiness at having stayed the, well, morning, to see the whitewashed houses dripping with bougainvillea branches in the sunlight. and to walk the city in a such a state that i couldn’t do anything but give myself over to dependence on friends. but a caution, because where the walls of the old city of sevilla are more creatively and cosmopolitanly tagged, the walls of the old city of jerez de la frontera scream that the workers just want opportunities to earn and that no one can eat on promises. and then the ride back home [and the anecdote about the man seated next to me whom i saw the next day at a café in the city with his yesterday stubbly legs freshly shaven].

i would have segued into all of that and the others except that up here on the rooftop terrace -- even now the apartment is too hot for setting to business undistracted -- the big family birthday dinner happening on the terrace next door distracts my business. they’re singing the birthday song now in english, and the whole thing smacks me in the face as a reminder of the silliness of pretended exceptionality. or maybe of its importance. la chiqui doesn’t know us from the rest of the family, but i’m sure she’d be glad to know that the benefit for her rehabilitation benefited our own. humility looks good in pants. maybe we’ll try on the whole suit one day, because if nothing else, the beauty of that paradox should signify that even if we’ve lost our place and our way, we haven’t lost our voice. and, bitches, you can’t, as they say, take that away from me.

GOODBYE PDX, REALITY CHECK; or, HOW TO KEEP IT THAT WAY

2011-09-09T04:44:00.000-07:00

it’s twenty-four hours since i should have met joel downtown for the coffee and breakfast he promised me when he left the trash pile party just before midnight on tuesday. unfortunately, although joel had told me four, he didn’t show up to the courier cafe until ten minutes after the hour (made clear in a text exchange that occurred after I’d already left for the airport), so I didn’t get a final dose of joel’s drugs before getting on my plane. also unfortunately, the free internet at the Barcelona airport requires users to input a phone number to which an access code can be texted to them, so who knows when this post will finally see its posting, and by that point, who knows how far our memory of portland will have faded. i’ll admit that i was sure the spell of the place would have been broken by the time we deplaned in philadelphia, but it ended up taking another eight hours for portland to finally give up and relinquish its hold. when I woke up at the end of the next leg of the trip, however, it was completely outside of portland’s influence -- even if i was still feeling the effects of another hypnotic, that one intentionally ingested at the beginning of the flight.

and even if I couldn’t meet joel for that final coffee, i did leave with a solid memento: a half porcelain, half metal crown, specially made for me by a friend to cap and close off the right rear molar of my lower jaw, the decay of which was no doubt aided by my indulgence in too many portland microroasts and microbrews. would any of the staff at any of the airport cafes understand "single origin" if i could manage it in spanish?

...i thought, and then i fell asleep again on top of my computer. and again as the plane to sevilla was taking off.

we took a cab from the airport into the city, but i had the opportunity to learn the necessary bus route as well when i went back to pick up the bag of mine that i'd left on the carousel. everything is more exciting in an unfamiliar language. until it's not. but we'd long since conquered that bastion of europeania in the states, so it was well past time to make a go at the real thing. and the real thing is checking our reality real quick. but check yourself, too, portland. this time it's not just for a weekend. and don't think you can charm us back again this year with that pretty face we all know will turn ugly again come october. of course we'll stay in touch, but the separation is better for all of us. and this time is for real. oh so real: so expect to hear from us about the alimony payments.

KISSY BOOTS AND TELL

2011-09-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

the greatest band that never was is breaking up to pursue other projects together. the secret to marital bliss is not giving in to the delusion that there's any such thing. relationships outside of the relationship make it stronger. and if you've read anything about relationships in the last year, you know that non-monogamy is all the rage, and even if they say we're young and we don't know, they won't ever say that we were unfashionable. (sex at dawn happened last night up against the front door.) they say our love won't pay the rent, before it's earned out money's all be spent. so we're asking you for your help. buy your way into the moniquipher connubial bed today at fremont and mississippi. just $5 for french style. that's what the sign says. the bands are going on the road. come kiss us buen viaje.

HOW TO GET GOOD STUFF CHEAP

2011-08-28T08:09:00.000-07:00

come to the yarsel. the signs will be up all over mississippi. and when the king and queen of the avenue (let's be honest, that's what they were all thinking on the ride through friday morning) saw the wide patch of shade cast by the tree in the empty lot at the intersection with fremont, they knew it would happen there.

who owns the lot? who knows. but if people can have their precious wedding photos done at that tire swing, then it has to be okay to set up our living room for sale. and drink rosé. someone has to demonstrate the effect of the glassware. in a simulated cocktail party environment. nora from toronto already got the set of four champagne bowls, and the rest, instead of being repatriated for comedic effect documented photographically at the scenes of all of those crimes they'll be sold. cheap. you won't find a better deal for what you're getting unless you steal it yourself.

no, "the cops," this can't be illegal. (and neither of the two patrol cars that passed through the intersection yesterday afternoon stopped to hassle us.) the time based art festival just started early. yarsel. an exciting preview for the fall art calendar. of all of the portland that portland has to offer after the king and queen are gone. this weekend only. nora paid good hard greenbacks for those glasses, so no one (unbelievably!) was able to muster the audacity to rebuff her comment about her own city's unarguable inferiority to our silly kingdom when we made our introductions. ha. we're abdicating as soon as the throne sells.

HOW NOT TO

2011-08-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

"think of the blog post," she said once i'd had time enough to calm down after walking back to the wapato access greenway parking lot to find the passenger side front window of the imapala smashed in. i didn't. nor had i until after the mexicans (her affectionate sobriquet) at 15th and alberta had already replaced the window and fixed the damage to the door frame and i had the wherewithal to think about blogging, having also, after all, had a dental appointment scheduled for the following morning, and if not for the pain of the inconvenience, then the thought of the expense had been more than enough to distract me from making interesting out of another stupid setback. it wasn't enough that it happened the same day as the car went up for sale, but it was also a sunday, and for whatever reason it seems like that should have some emotional sway for anyone who's ever had to wake up for work on a monday knowing that the dentist would be collecting the next day. bad enough that the impala had to close parents' week during that same a.m., but then who knew if the mexicans would even be able to take the car? but they could, and then they numbed you anyway, and the funny thing (they numbed you) is that this guy has his finger in your mouth and you can't even feel it. listening to down tempo electronica after having been anesthetized probably wasn't the best way to stay awake, but when you snap to, you marvel that you've never fallen asleep at work before now. and then you think of the blog post. because really, there isn't any point in trying to work after that scene.

PARENTS' WEEK

2011-08-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

at the cafes, and in the restaurants, and on the boulevards -- they're unmistakable. they marvel at all of the bike parking and at the beer selections. and they marvel at their guides, those precious ingenues they were forced to abandon to the not so big city and the promise of enough time off to perfect their "young creative" wardrobes (which they share, of course, through portland's highly sophisticated and streamlined system of second hand retail).

so the proud midwestern parents are always easily identifiable by the contrast they strike with their transplanted children, but they're nonetheless dutifully chaperoned through all the famous quirks of the rose city, and if they haven't been footing the bill up until now, they'll be more than happily shelling out this week for the privilege of experiencing the sights, tastes and provocations of their children's adopted home in the company of a worldly non-native (which of course connotes having more knowledge about what makes portland portland than anyone who was actually raised here).

it's parents' week in portland! don't know anyone in the city over fifty? neither does anyone else (except, of course, their own parents). get out and say hello! the only thing cooler than meeting your friends' mothers and fathers is showing your own around with that devil may care nonchalance that erected a thousand pabst billboards and made this city great -- with the sure protection of knowing that everyone knows that we're all in the same boat. and dads, as we've now all been reminded, are the original hipsters. (the perfect accessory!) so if yours is still around and still likes your mother, they deserve a chance to come and see what they did to the world. and they'll pay for it in one way or another. go on. get in on the fun.

CHICKEN HELL

2011-08-15T14:30:00.000-07:00

among the works included in the inaugural edition of monkey business: new writing from japan is a collection of vignettes by hiromi kawakami, and the first of those is a short, short story called "chicken hell." as the first person narrator of the piece has described to her by an old man in her neighborhood, the chicken hell is the one reserved for people who are unkind to chickens. and in chicken hell, the damned spend one of their afterlives being tortured by a giant, vengeful chicken.

chelsea hasn't stopped torturing either of the other backyard chickens since asshole died and left her at the top of the pecking order. (you should see the bald patch she's pecked into the smaller speckled chicken's back!) it's possible that our inability to end chelsea's rampage of terror might land us, as the other backyard chickens' stewards, in chicken hell ourselves, but the more interesting question is where the cosmos is going to send chelsea.

is the situation in the coop a chicken hell unto itself wherein the tortured chickens are reincarnations of chicken torturers who have been condemned twofold to suffer the tortures of chelsea while existing as an object of revulsion from their past lives? or, is there a special chicken hell reserved for chelsea? we'd thought of slaughtering her and taking her to the table (something will have to be done with all of the backyard chickens before there's no one left at home to take care of them), but that was before we realized that we might come to embody chelsea's attributes were we to eat her. even though the worst of those might just be insecurity -- not being able to stand having to share the coop and the run with a chicken prettier than herself -- we weren't about to run the risk, regardless.

if one thing's for sure, it's that things are hell for chelsea. the beauty of that circular argument just goes to show the viciousness of the entire universal process. sure, you could change hands, but there's going to come a point when nobody's going to want to eat you, chelsea, and it's not because the entire city went vegetarian. and portland, you take this as guidance come the days we won't be around to advise you. be nicer. from what we can tell, that vengeful chicken is fierce, and you don't want to be anywhere near chicken hell when chelsea picks a fight with it.

BRIGHT LIGHTS AND PROMISES; or, THE STYLISH URGENCY OF SECOND PERSON PRESENT TENSE, part 2

2011-08-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

and lo, it came to pass that something on the summer reading list was read. the list, it would seem, although still fated to near fatal procrastination, was not destined to pass the season as just a convoluted "gossip girl" reference and an even more abstruse paean to the better half of moniquipher's detour away from new york. ultimately, though, and judging from our list of bibliophiles, speculators and devotees, bright lights, big city is a book that people like ourselves should certainly want to read, or at least a book that people like ourselves would be assumed to appreciate, an assumption which was reified when a friend of mine recently returned to me "my" copy of the book with another one that i had actually lent her. and i decided to interpret that event ominously, if only so as to free myself of responsibility for neglecting this year's published reading list out of sheer laziness. in other words, i had the book so i read it.

read from the midst of the creative cultural crisis that is the city of portland, oregon in its twenties, bright lights, big city is an interesting bit of nostalgia. jay mcinerney's boozing, vacuum nosed, twenty-four year old fact checker would rather be in the fiction department, but at least he can conflate his own name with the name of the esteemed magazine where he works -- or at least until the boozing and the coke snorting and the party going get completely in the way of his being able to show up at the magazine's offices near times square. the opening of his story, which he tells (about himself) in second person present tense, shouldn't be all that unfamiliar to the creatively ambitious twenty-somethings playing the game of going-out-informs-artistic-experience in america's contemporary hot spots:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy...The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings.

indeed, the narrator of bright lights, big city is the quintessence of the quarter life crisis that has, over the past few years, been so frequently cited as the endemic affliction of the current generation of emerging adults (wherein that emergence might last until the early thirties). but whereas the sense of looming existential catastrophe that the narrator tries to ride out on a succession of fat lines is itself the central revelation of the book, it would seem that the sympathy that contemporary young readers feel for the narrator is more akin to aspiration. the disillusion that the "you" of bright lights, big city experiences is now an admirable and artistic mode of disillusionment. "You could start your own group -- the Brotherhood of Early Unfulfilled Promise," has become, instead of a statement of reflexive sarcasm, a proud motto for the self-designated initiates of that very group. delusional hipsterity: the glorious martyrdom of wasted talent.

or maybe it's just here in portland that over-intoxicated bar talk about lack of opportunity has become ambition itself. for all you know, as it were, this post could be nothing more than a statement of reflexive sarcasm. ("Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and climbing out of bed became harder and harder. You were gathering experience for a novel.") brooklyn may be dressing itself in our love more than ever, but i hear that brooklynites still go in for interviews -- and unemployment where they're trying is even higher than it is here. plus, they're right next to that big city. inasmuch, maybe the promise of the dream is, for them, tangible beyond the pages of a work like mcinerny's and doesn't, as a result, end with just the dreaming. or maybe they're just as desirous of a beautiful reason to soak themselves in dopamine as we are and we're actually all just nostalgic for a new york that's been long since impossible, except that the brooklyintes just have more expensive rent.

so, again, no "new york" for us (just yet?), be that for expense or other impossibility...but less and less portland either. that's a somewhat painful recognition, but maybe to acknowledge that is the better exegesis of mcinerny's book, a book that we can regardless keep on our bookshelves, and maybe visitors to wherever those bookshelves are will give us the benefit of the doubt. after all, "You read the bookshelves. In the examination of personal libraries is an entire hermeneutics of character analysis."

against delusional hipsterity -- or not.

HOW TO LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, part 3; OUR GENERATION

2011-08-06T08:15:00.000-07:00

the weather wasn't cooperating yesterday morning as we were trying to get ourselves excited for going to spend the day at the washougal river, a trip that had to happen yesterday if it was going to happen this weekend, because moniquipher's social calendar for this summer is almost uncomfortably cramped -- not to mention the separate social calendars of the couple's constituent parts (sorry tom!).

it was still cloudy when we put down our towels on top of a dry span of rock between those two waterfalls. was one of them dougan? that was the namesake of the dirt road we took to get to our spot, but we'd parked at least a mile from where the dirt road split off from the last paved one, and there had been at least three other waterfalls visible through the foliage between the road and the river ravine as we were driving in.

the sun came out by three, but i'd already decided not to hold out for it and to go for a swim, so i was more than acclimated to the cold when the day finally got warm. at least i'd dry more quickly, which was incentive enough for me to go for another dip in the deeper pools under the bridge up the road from where we parked and just downriver from one of the waterfalls. i didn't, however, attempt the jump from waterfall number two that all of the high school kids were making when we arrived.

the day wasn't dissatisfying, but moniquipher and company all expected to be as heat and sun exhausted from the trip to the washougal as we had been after getting back to the city from rooster rock the week before. luckily, we'd had our day made for us in the parking lot of new seasons before leaving to the river. 12:30 p.m. is an unarguably decent hour. and it was lucky for all of us that the hair of the dog had been necessary for heather's morning recuperation. those little bottles of stoli are so cute! and new seasons had sparkling water and organic grapefruit juice on sale (it was summer inside the store, even if it wasn't outside).

that woman in the old lime green hatchback didn't know what she was getting herself into when she came over to ask through the cracked right rear window how long we were planning to sit in that parking space, which was apparently hers. i don't know why she thought that i would be driving miss daisy and that the two of us in the car weren't waiting for friends, but she could have used a driver herself. and that's certainly not agism, she just seemed like she could have used some stress relief (her social calendar must be tight as well), and she was the one who blamed the mindset of our generation for her escalation of the conflict.

stress relief certainly wasn't what the lady got when heather got out of the car. you would think the lady would have expected something after the call out she made, but she was running back to her hatchback after the first swing. she didn't even stick around to get her parking space when we finally pulled out. we may not have had sunshine at the river, but heather's sparkling, vitamin enriched sunshine in a bottle brightened all of our days. new seasons may be the friendliest store in town, but that lady might be keeping her distance for a while. more friendship for us. and deals on whoop ass for the rest of the summer.

SON LOS TOREROS: TAKING THE BULL BY THE HORNS

2011-08-02T22:27:00.000-07:00

on monday, in a decision that has exploded comments sections across the left liberal blogosphere, the spanish government declared bullfighting "an artistic discipline and cultural product" and transferred its administration from the ministry of the interior to the ministry of culture, which will henceforth be responsible for the "development and protection" of bullfighting across mainland spain -- except, that is, in catalonia, where a bullfighting ban passed last year will take effect in january 2012. (bullfighting has been illegal in the canary islands since 1991.)

for a stirring, informative and (in most cases) intelligent discussion of the ethical implications of the designation of bullfighting as an art, visit the comments at mary elizabeth william's article on the spanish government's announcement at salon.com. william's piece is decidedly more opinion than reportage, but it isn't nearly so one-sided and dubiously researched as a similar article at care2 (which seems to imply that bulls are jumping into stands and injuring spectators during most every fight).

but let's leave it to those comments sections to decide whether the bullfight is art or simple cruelty. after all, vitriolic, hypothetical arguments with other guests of the ethical vacuum of cyberspace are an important american cultural product, and one that deserves to be protected. hey! teetering socialist government of spain: that's what we call the first amendment. listen up...or something.

it's speculated that the decision to ban the bullfight in catalonia was more an attempt to distance the catalonian autonomous community from madrid and "spanish" culture than a stance on the fight itself. similarly, it's not inconceivable that madrid's decision to enshrine bullfighting as an essential part of spanish heritage and national identity was a conscious attempt by the incumbent socialist prime minister to ingratiate himself with those spaniards who appear to be leaning right ahead of the general elections scheduled for november 20, elections in which the conservative popular party is expected to take control of the government. in other words, the toro bravos might have now become victims of cultural manipulation on multiple levels. still, it's sad to think that the bullring in barcelona will never see another fight after the end of the current season in september.

that sadness should be tempered, however, for the fact that jose maria manzanares will be closing the season in a fight at the real maestranza de caballería in seville on september 25, and the knowledge that bullfighting won't soon exit the cultural stage in the autonomous community of andalusia. a distaste for hemmingway is only part of why death in the afternoon won't make it into this year's summer reading pile (although into the arena might), but at least there will still be opportunities to see jose maria looking damn fine in the pants of his traje de luces -- and maybe even an opportunity for a touch if he can grab a couple of trofeos and win the honor of being carried out of the maestranza.

that the spanish bullfight is a holdover from the bull sacrifices of greco-roman mithraism, and that mithraism has been termed a dress rehearsal for christianity seem particularly applicable to the heritage and national identity of spain, at least as far as the light of richard wright's pagan spain is cast -- or at least as far as can be inferred from the publisher's synopsis of that book and the excerpt from it available in richard wright reader, which is the one of the two books available from the multnomah county library.

that association with the pagan inclinations of roman catholicism might be what attracted madonna to the bullfight, although it might have just been the matadors and their trajes -- or maybe just emilio muñoz, the one particular matador that figures as the center of the motif for the video of her 1994 song "take a bow." throwing madonna into the mix will no doubt raise other, even more polarizing arguments over the designation of certain cultural products as art, but the goal of introducing her to the discussion is to indicate that madonna started it. she was into matadors when jose maria manzanares was just twelve (the age, incidentally, at which he fought and killed his first bull). madonna did everything before anyone else did it. it can't be long before lady gaga does the bullfighter thing too, and bruce weber can probably introduce her to jose maria.

the other week at the albina press, the ownership and management of toro bravo and tasty n' sons were arguing not so discreetly over a request for a raise made by one of the men present. profits are, apparently, flat, but the chef or manager or whoever he was stood his ground. he left, not in a huff, but with an obvious, stylistic fury and with his one supporter in the argument humbly in tow. that's the art of the bullfight. the name of the first of those restaurants just happens to work well as a metaphor -- needless to say that the menu makers and management there would probably pay top dollar if they could get their hands on the post-fight meat of a real toro bravo. let's hope they've switched out the number for the spanish ministry of the interior with the one for the ministry of culture in the office rolodex.

BROKEBACK ISLAND

2011-07-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

it's true, that things have been getting pretty gay around around here, but that's how things have been getting around portland, and we've just followed suit.

to mark the beginning of summer, which finally got around to making an appearance on july 29, we took a river trip, and being careful to stay on trend (after thursday night's enrampagement we acknowledged that it would be good for us to mingle), we decided to try our luck at rooster rock state park on the columbia, the east end of which is synonymous with summertime portland faggotry.

the beaches at the east end of the park are about a half mile from the clothing optional signs at the east edge of the parking lot at the entrance to the park (where we warned the woman who stopped us that we might tell the state that she was charging people to get in). none of us having been to the park before, we'd no visual cues for when to turn off the east-west trail from the parking lot and go north toward the river and ended up slogging through the mud that the clothing optional men we met along the trail told us we could avoid if we went one or another way.

luckily, we found a dry patch of sand in the sun by the edge of the river without having to search for too long. the late middle aged clothing optional man sitting in a lawn chair on a rise just above where we laid down our blankets told us that there's usually more beach. the wide and rolling dunes at the aptly named sand island -- which is separated from the oregon side of the river by about a quarter mile of water -- were in full sun, but they seemed only accessible by boat when we decided to settle on our spot.

our group was mixed and included some first encounters, so we didn't get completely clo-op ourselves (use it: on trend), but there was a regular stream of unclothed guys (we wouldn't see a naked woman until we were leaving) walking near the water, cruising for a spot of their own.

oh, hey, tranny -- but for realsies. her name is alex, and we were introduced to her at least once before by sebastian, who has since the inception of our friendship come to himself by that same way. one of our group mentioned after alex's had passed that alex had been a part of the organizing force behind the big gay warehouse in san francisco. but apparently no longer -- and no surprise: a hundred make out rooms wouldn't have gotten us on that shuttle to south san francisco for the warehouse pride party with no guarantee of safe or easy passage back to the city.

get to the point already! is what we were all thinking when it was proposed that maybe i could make it to sand island if i weren't swimming alone. and, sure enough what had escaped me the other three times i'd gotten into the water came to easy yet wholly unexpected (but definitely hoped for) fruition with a companion. the view of the gorge from the other side of the island was worth the adventure, and the water in the shallow pools just off the beach was much warmer than at where we'd laid our blankets.

my girlfriend knew the score when i swam back to where she was waiting with the group. the return was significantly more difficult than the swim out, and not just for the energy we'd expended since setting out, but for having to swim against the current as we recrossed the eddies in the center of the water between the blankets and the island, the renaming of which we were notified immediately after our return. damn it, oregon. why can't i quit you.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

2011-07-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

portland may have forgotten the memorial day of st. christopher (feast of, really...bastards!), but the rose city is definitely showing the bens of the city some love tonight. and duly so, because a certain five of them make us some of the better beer that allays our distress over the gloom year in and year out (and in particular this year, the year that summer never came). we're an hour away from the conclusion of the first annual benfest, july 25, 2011, held at the new(ish) grain & gristle on ne 15th ave and prescott.

the lineup (in no order of obvious importance):

the ben-alt-imate, a german style alt bier from ben engler of occidental brewing...done by eight when the christophers got here.

the friends with benefits, a three year aged russian imperial stout with black benberries from ben dobler of widmer brothers brewing.

the peach hefeweissben, an unfiltered wheat beer with peaches from ben edmunds of breakside brewing.

ben & jerry's ice cold cream ale, a collaboration between ben flerchinger of lucky labrador brewing and jerry fechter, the owner of lompoc brewing.

the bourben de ieso spades, a bourbon barrel aged version of hopworks urban brewery's ace of spades by ben love.

...and a bonus ben beer from outside of portland (although arguably from the pacific northwest), the midnight benshine, a black imperial steam beer aged in oak with brettanomyces from ben johnson of midnight sun brewing and ben millstein of kodiak island brewing in alaska.

maybe going for pints wasn't such a good idea. i've only had a chance to try numbers five and six, and the abvs of both are working along with my empty stomach to convince me not to have a third. coming directly from a ride might not have been the best idea, but now i know to stop by the occidental tap room then next time i'm taking the longer way home through st. johns.

far be it from me to comment on any of the beers on offer with such distinguished palates breathing over my shoulder, especially when more than one of them is going to be blogging about this tomorrow. i just wanted to start early enough to stake claim on my title. and anyway, i don't need to have an opinion on the beer. someone mistook me for jeff alworth.

HOW TO GRACEFULLY COUNTENANCE AN OBVIOUS SNUB, AGAIN

2011-07-25T16:39:00.000-07:00

from the "catholic encyclopedia":

The legend says: A heathen king (in Canaan or Arabia), through the prayers of his wife to the Blessed Virgin, had a son, whom he called Offerus (Offro, Adokimus, or Reprebus) and dedicated to the gods Machmet and Apollo. Acquiring in time extraordinary size and strength, Offerus resolved to serve only the strongest and the bravest. He bound himself successively to a mighty king and to Satan, but he found both lacking in courage, the former dreading even the name of the devil, and the latter frightened by the sight of a cross at the roadside.

For a time his search for a new master was in vain, but at last he found a hermit (Babylas?) who told him to offer his allegiance to Christ, instructed him in the Faith, and baptized him. Christopher, as he was now called, would not promise to do any fasting or praying, but willingly accepted the task of carrying people, for God's sake, across a raging stream. One day he was carrying a child who continually grew heavier, so that it seemed to him as if he had the whole world on his shoulders. The child, on inquiry, made himself known as the Creator and Redeemer of the world. To prove his statement the child ordered Christopher to fix his staff in the ground. The next morning it had grown into a palm-tree bearing fruit. The miracle converted many. This excited the rage of the king (prefect) of that region (Dagnus of Samos in Lycia?). Christopher was put into prison and, after many cruel torments, beheaded.

The Greek legend may belong to the sixth century; about the middle of the ninth, we find it spread through France. Originally, St. Christopher was only a martyr, and as such is recorded in the old martyrologies. The simple form of the Greek and Latin passio soon gave way to more elaborate legends. We have the Latin edition in prose and verse of 983 by the subdeacon Walter of Speyer, "Thesaurus anecdotorum novissimus" (Augsburg, 1721-23), II, 27-142, and Harster, "Walter von Speyer" (1878). An edition of the eleventh century is found in the Acta SS., and another in the "Golden Legend" of Jacob de Voragine. The idea conveyed in the name, at first understood in the spiritual sense of bearing Christ in the heart, was in the twelfth or thirteenth century taken in the realistic meaning and became the characteristic of the saint. The fact that he was frequently called a great martyr may have given rise to the story of his enormous size. The stream and the weight of the child may have been intended to denote the trials and struggles of a soul taking upon itself the yoke of Christ in this world.

(the historical martyr seems to have volunteered himself to the wrath of emperor diocletian after the man who is now honored as st. george proclaimed himself a christian and was tortured and killed by the same.)

the church did remove the feast of st. christopher from the calendar of saints in 1969, so it's understandable that the socially discriminating would want to avoid committing any possible faux pas by not too ostentatiously celebrating, but july 25 does remain the memorial day of st. christopher, so tributes and gifts of service, however belated, will still be accepted discreetly by us in the saint's memory and on behalf of those individuals who were given his name in recognition of this their gosh darn name day.

cash will gratefully be accepted in place of gold should the acquisition of the latter pose any significant obstacle to the presentation of the gift or its bearer. i'm sure that my dead godmother would have wanted it that way.

CRASHING THE TOUR

2011-07-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

late evening coffee ain't no friend of easy sleep or early rising. and so i didn't make it to oblique coffee roasters or to st. honoré for a morning cup and to watch the climb up the "iconic mountain" between modane valfréjus and alpe-d’huez. i did, though, manage to drag myself to the computer in time to catch the rear of the group rolling through the finish of the stage on a live stream. "an amazing bit of sporting spectacle." tour commentary is almost more stirring than the race itself. here comes the stage recap montage set to "ain't no mountain high enough"! word is they're considering having a national holiday down under should cadell evans end up taking an overall first, but the yellow and green jerseys are both still in doubt. can voeckler do it for the french? talk to the guys talking on british eurosport. maybe it's just the accents, but they could probably get me excited about anything. tour! tour! tour! whoa: there's a game app? i wonder if it includes the frenzied spectators waving hands and flags and running up around the riders. the guys on british eurosport are surprised they don't cause more riders to go down. maybe if i actually watch one of the last two stages i can see a crash.

HOW TO GET STARTED WITH ADOBE INDESIGN CS5

2011-07-21T21:36:00.000-07:00

you pay adobe some hundreds of dollars. you see, adobe doesn't care that you only have a week left in your online class.

so it happens that, despite your pretensions to responsibility, you turn to the neglected distraction of the pile of books on the file cabinet. confessions of the letter closet has arrived to the apartment in all of its 290 pages and sits atop the pile. (for its recent arrival, reading it won't actually rectify the neglect of the rest, but what helps is helpful.) ironically, you've recently sold your copy of the first volume of foucault's history of sexuality -- the one you bought because it was cheap and forgotten at the seattle public library book sale -- a reading of which would have been indispensable in taking the most from the introduction of the book you're now trying to engage. the book you bought with the store credit you got for the other one was vaguely epistolary, but it had nothing to do with queer desire, so having read it doesn't really inform your understanding of the letter closet. had you not read it, however, you wouldn't have come across that interview with the woman who translated it in which she talks about translation as a layering of subjectivities and the intrinsic nature of the translating act to render contexts relative. you think, at least, that foucault would have liked that.

for all of this thinking, you think that some program somewhere would probably put you on track for an accelerated graduate degree. you and the basis of cultural criticism are already so tight. that's what he said, anyway. earlier. really. and you probably should have asked him to stay, but you thought it would be funnier to have something to write about expounding, loudly, as he left, on the uncertain space between encouragement and patronization. and a discursive conversation is only fun to talk about, not actually to talk. so you hugged and laughed about being over that dead end self-awareness, especially since criticizing it recently got you punched in the mouth.

so much coffee so late in the evening turns out not to have been any boon for productivity, although you might not have drank so fast had your internet connection not been suspiciously in favor of adobe's resistance to your signing up for another indesign trial. you know you're not going to cough up those some hundreds of dollars, but you know that you're thinking about it.

do not TELL me that the connection restarted again. not helpful. really. don't start with me, bitch.

(SUMMARY) ACTIVIST JUDGMENT

2011-07-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

the fags are all up in portland, like they followed us back from san francisco or something. (and we use that once derogatory term only to indicate that the same-sex loving going on between the new arrivals/permanent visitors is generally presenting male). and it's not just a new generation, unless you consider that maybe "our" efforts to promote and attend wild polyamorous dance nights have made it easier for older, once cloistered gay men to walk down the street hand in hand.

at the final race of the mt. tabor road series on wednesday evening, seeing the fag himself (although he's a fag in name only and that name can no longer be mentioned here) made us wonder which of the shiny legged and spandexed warriors ripping around the mountain might have tastes for other than their cheering girlfriends. sadly, that wondering came to a negative result (excepting, of course, the constant summary conclusion that all of them must -- frame of reference and all that). bicycle racers are always the last to know, and in this case, they probably just haven't taken the time to get down from their bicycles to see how they might like finally walking the walk (hand in hand).

not that seeing fags downtown is ever any surprise, but they do tend to be of a certain ilk (the eponymous "downtown gays," who have, in fact, been showing up more and more often outside of their reserve lands near the west side waterfront). and it was a surprise to realize that three of the four sitting at the big table at central (shh! it's a secret!) on thursday evening weren't there for the photo shoot the rest of the patrons probably assumed, but had simply arrived for cocktails and crepes in, not matching, but exactly coordinated purple gradient plaids. not that any one of those shirts would have been unattractive (or off trend) on any one of the individual men, but the gathering of them all together was enough to convince us to take our fingers off of that weakening pulse. at least the odd man out was the one we knew.

friday presented similar frustrations but from the opposite end of the spectrum, although that's just portland: sure he's sitting close with that girl, but that's not beyond the bounds of friendship, and no, no one cares who you saw staring at what, unless you're accusing him, because we thought so, too -- and besides, you understand full well the assumptions that come along with living too long in this city. downtown excepted, the obvious ones must have been observing the sabbath.

the odd man out at central was in impressive form (and character) at the booty reunion at branx on saturday, where the odder were the expected and most welcome, and which we felt obliged to attend to congratulate puppet, who was in part responsible for the creation of booty back in the days before porky's became the eagle and who had actually followed us back from san francisco (if only for a weekend). our visit to bunk bar earlier that night isn't even worth mentioning. the gay not-gays and the general confusion caused by their proliferation in portland was friday's topic, anyway, which on friday had taken an entire tray of e.l. fudge cookies to put out of mind.

it was just as well that we were trapped in a classroom all day sunday as it was pouring rain from morning until afternoon. so maybe it was for the best that someone caught the cop punching on video (although you can't detect the pcp on screen). the topic of personal video histories by anonymous documentarians (and the regrettably recent origin of the technology responsible for their current ubiquity) came up afterwards at dinner, as well as did the persistence of traditional publishing and the physical book market. who would want to read something like confessions of the letter closet: epistolary fiction and queer desire in modern spain (gays in spain!) as an ebook? right. no one. that's why it's coming to the apartment in 290 actual pages delivered by actual courier -- from somewhere in california. you see, it's not just with the fags, although it's just basic kindness to show the newcomers some portland hospitality, and our commitment to that responsibility has been unexpectedly consuming. moniquipher has been busy. as far as this summer's reading list goes, we've already strayed dreadfully far afield of goodbye, columbus. we just hope you'll understand when we don't have much time to share.

GOODBYE PDX, THE VANISHING

2011-07-12T23:22:00.000-07:00

we gave away the chicken paw we brought home from wong's king seafood restaurant on sunday too early to find out if it might actually grant us our wish of wishes of this week and keep the teenager with us. her mother wants her back?!? what a system. and what about the stress of uprooting her again? especially now that she's finally adapted to the rhythm of the life and style of moniquipher. how can she possibly cope with arizona again knowing that everyone on the avenue is waiting to see her on her next walk?

cathedral park was deserted on tuesday evening except for some dog walkers and a couple of men fishing off the jetty at the river. the mood on the free box blanket on the lawn under the st. johns bridge was melancholic, a jaded nostalgia for the view of the north end of forest park across the river and a sad warmth -- despite the chill -- that seemed intentionally cultivated to shield the picnic from the looming sadness of the coming morning. then there were the meth fags (conjured, perhaps, by some serious wondering over which van sant film had included a scene in the park), and that's a piece of sentimental education that our fourteen year old would never have taken in had she not come to portland. who cares now what she's done for our image, but who could question what she's done for portland's collective heart?

before one last portland ice cream, we made sure to mess up the sidewalk on mississippi with one last family walk. if she's leaving anyway, she might as well make a scene. and notoriety is what gets you covers. at least that's what our agent said when he asked us for the video to leak to vanity fair. hugs. get what you want. and don't worry. just let those tears come.

AVIAN AUTOPSY, A DISTANT SECOND

2011-07-10T22:33:00.000-07:00

when portland's chinatown started coming up, chinatown moved to 82nd. there's still a block of chinese restaurants on sw 4th between davis and everett, but portland's oldest, hung far low, hasn't been open in chinatown since 2005, and the space it used to occupy on 4th and couch now houses a hyperreal disney land of a pan asian place. hung far low reopened as a bar at the northeast corner of 82nd and division, and a few blocks east of there is wong's king seafood restaurant, the place in portland to go for dim sum.

after coming back from a late lunch at wong's king i couldn't look at the hens in the backyard without feeling somewhat guilty -- or without a curious pang of appetite. they don't grant wishes like the one from the monkey in that w. w. jacobs story, and they don't represent such an enduring cultural archetype either, although they do enjoy a special cultural status among certain groups of non-chinese around portland. among the many fantastic meats on offer from the dim sum carts at wong's king, the aspics and the fried things wrapped in rice oblaats or baked into dumplings, the most exotic and challenging is the chicken paw. just try saying the words without wanting to try one. the mantra is a wish granted unto itself. and you get to say it every time you smile and hand over a takeout box. the paws are served in fours.

THE TROUBLE WITH DIVERSITY

2011-07-08T09:07:00.000-07:00

there's a man at the albina press (the one on albina) reading a book by that title. i've confirmed that the book isn't so rabidly xenophobic as it might have been (it's about how america's celebration of "differences" too often ignores socioeconomic inequalities), but the title itself could very well mean something bizarrely orwellian in a coffee shop in the white-left paradise of portland, oregon, "the city that works," and that works because it's not that difficult to make things work when everyone wants the same things.

but we stay and drink the coffee anyway -- at least until we turn thirty-five, when we'll be evicted unless we've had children or purchased property or are maintaining a committed relationship with a tattoo artist -- so for the time being, even if we've now confirmed through biased and unscientific testing that the coffee is better in, say, san francisco.

that was more or less the spirit of the introduction i gave to the envoys from vancouver that stopped here after a brief visit to seattle and before kicking off their good will tour of the oregon and washington coasts between nehalem and victoria. after the bloc cascadian planning committee staff meeting (to have been held this month between peak's pub in port angeles, washington and the bar at the empress hotel in victoria) was canceled due to the incapacitation or forced overseas asylum of key committee members, it was the least i could do to express portland's own good will and dedication to the cause by entertaining the two mcgill trained cultural theorists and the albertan cowgirl, now all residents of british columbia.

the envoys were gracious beyond their responsibility and greeted me warmly even after i failed to make clear that albina turned into mississippi south of prescott, which confused my instructions to meet me along the former as i walked toward where they took dinner on wednesday evening near the intersection of albina and alberta. when we did finally find each other (none of us with a gps equipped device but the ever gracious and intrepid vancouverites having easily gotten directions from a passing local), there were smiling introductions for the unacquainted (embraces for the rest), which kicked off a pleasant walk through the coolness of the twilight to the sushi and fried chicken place on between shaver and failing (really, people, portland is burning).

the beginning of the good will tour was scheduled for early the next morning, so we had neither sushi nor chicken -- anyway the envoys had just eaten -- but we did drink, northwest microbrews for all of us but the one of the researchers with the gluten intolerance. we raised glasses to seattle with a round of jasmine ipa from elysian brewing, which made for an easy segue into our necessary conversation on microroasted coffee, the best of that in vancouver being, as it is, available from elysian (unaffiliated with the seattle brewery). i remarked at the attractiveness of one of the baristas at the cafe on broadway and ash and then confessed that i'd suggested we try the sushi and fried chicken place in hopes that we'd get to order from a certain bartender who doesn't come around the albina press anymore. yes, we are. so precious! not to worry, i was reassured; it would have been nice had there been a table open outside, but the general ambiance of the avenue and the calmness of the evening seemed to suit my guests, and their apparent satisfaction greased the wheels of our discussions.

i knew it already, but it was nonetheless surprising to be reminded in so many words that portland may not have many brown people, but there were more than in vancouver. of course, they have more asian residents and a large population of first nations people. and what to do about gentrification? that word that is inherently double spoken whenever it's voiced by most of the people who got to stick around long enough to see its effects, especially those latecomers so conscious of our gentrifying neighborhoods' lack of diversity. and on that, myself and all of the envoys from vancouver could agree. our work was done. and during our brief meeting we even had time to touch on poetry and television. praise be the cultural omnivores! white people, you're killing yourselves! at least the end of the world will be uniquely catered.

PORTLAND IS BURNING, part 2

2011-07-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

the residents of close-in portland aren't probably the most patriotic of americans (because, after all, portland is so european!), but they don't let on to any distaste for their country on it's birthday. you can't choose your family, and all that. and if you're around, you show up for their birthday parties.

most of what people in portland set off on the fourth isn't legal in oregon, but that doesn't keep every street in the city from lighting up with mortar bursts as soon as it's almost dark, and despite our vainglory for our environmental friendliness, the sun rises on the fifth to reveal the streets full of burnt out debris.

at the barbecue we visited before heading to the knoll at the southwest corner of mississippi and fremont to watch the pyrotechnic shows around our neighborhood and beyond (as far as lake oswego!), another of the guests said something about the fireworks she saw during the feria in seville, fireworks set off haphazardly by celebrating families with no concern for the proximity of other celebrants. one of her anecdotes resonated with our own experience later in the evening when one of the mortars launched by the man putting on the show on top of the knoll exploded at about only thirty feet and rained its contents over the nearby spectators.

the ones around the neighborhood far outshone the fireworks visible from downtown -- and they lasted longer too. and just as they started to taper off in frequency, lo, up the hill from interstate avenue came a dozen cyclists, half of them with their front racks stacked with boxes of roman candles, at least one of them a working courier. when they got to the top of the hill and the intersection they unpacked and started their fight. when they'd finished they put themselves back on their bicycles and headed east on fremont, probably (hopefully) to repeat their performance for another crowd. they'd had absolutely no consideration for traffic or bystanders as they dueled, and as the bursts from their weapons bounced off the pavement of the road and ricocheted of street signs and flew over the heads of the people sitting on the knoll, our so wonderfully unprecocious fourteen year old whispered harry potter curses.

it was heartwarming, really, witnessing the city at its best, proudly come together to celebrate its similarities. but then that group of idiots decided to use a sparkler to fire up a show poster that was stapled along with dozens of others to the electrical pole at the southeast corner of the intersection. it didn't take long for the fire to spread to the other posters and then to the creosote soaked pole itself. idiots. and wasn't that casey's old roommate? like they say, the more things stay the same...

THE LEGEND CONTINUES

2011-07-03T23:04:00.000-07:00

we have a teenager! moniquipher skipped the easy nonsense of the early years. we're raising ours from fourteen, because everyone knows that babies are ugly!

we are still learning, though. it wasn't a very good idea to let the fourteen year old go off on her own in powell's on a sunday afternoon with a promise to find her later. that store is full of black haired females hunched over books in the aisles. but that's what the paging system is for.

and fourteen year olds eat. we feed ours b.l.t.s and ice cream. she likes walking the boulevard and watching the people in the neighborhood. and the people in the neighborhood see her eating her ice cream. there's a come and get it photo opportunity on every block. our agent says it's good for our image.

HOW TO LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, part 2, the BRIGHT side

2011-07-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

of course it was on the first both warm and sunny day that portland has seen in weeks that i had an appointment and the eye doctor, and having not been to the eye doctor in enough years to forget how significantly dilation of my eyes affects my vision i let dr. ezra go for it and significantly complicated the rest of my afternoon. it wasn't for vanity that i didn't wear the disposable, roll-up sunglasses that dr. ezra gave me but for principle, the principle that if i'd shelled out so much for new frames at an eyewear boutique on mississippi avenue then i'd already justified being vain. and so i left the sunglasses rolled in my right hand and used my left to trace my way along the storefronts between dr. ezra's and fremont, and then a right turn and then a left onto missouri and to home, crossing each street at a squinty eyed dash.

i was fine watching the full sun from inside the apartment, through the open door across the shaded porch, but direct sunlight was completely debilitating. unfortunately, i needed to visit another doctor across town before his office closed at five. i did, however, have proper sunglasses at home. unfortunately, although my darkest pair made the effects of the dilation nearly unnoticeable even when i stood directly under the two o'clock sun, proper sunglasses have the unfortunate effect of disorienting me. (please ask me to take mine off if ever you see me wearing them and about to climb a flight of stairs.) but there weren't two ways about it, only the way to the second doctor's office, eyes dilated and disorienting glasses on and of course with my distracting ear buds in, because you can't ride on a day like yesterday without nicki minaj spitting in your ear. the pathetic irony of the situation was that my goal in visiting doctor number two was to collect my medical records from the follow up care i received after being hit by a car on my bicycle five years ago, and even the fact that i was collecting the records to have reference for continuing care after a more recent accident threw me over my bars and onto all of the joints that i injured that half decade ago didn't deter me from putting up every possible obstacle between myself and a safe ride.

i made it to 39th and division without incident, and the woman at the richmond neighborhood ohsu family health facility was pleasant and accommodating in assisting me with my request. i didn't put her in the awkward position of having to ask me to take off my sunglasses -- or of having to ask me why i couldn't open my eyes -- because after a self-imposed two hour timeout at home and my half pace, not cautious but worried ride, my eyes had improved to the point of my being able to use them without issue under the fluorescent lights of the health facility's reception area. and by the time i made it downtown to sell my penguin classics editions of in search of lost time and chat with the man who gave me my powell's store credit about the literary theme of not reading proust, my eyes had corrected themselves, which meant a renewal of my interest in a meeting i'd planned for the early evening at the bluffs.

but after sitting in it half naked and unprotected for an hour the sun lost the scintillatingly elusive charm it had had for me when i left dr. ezra's. and good riddance, i was happy to see it start to set, because i wouldn't have tried to ride out to 81st avenue for that artist's reception had the full sun been on top of me again. even as it set, however, i had enough light to get myself out to milepost 5 without thinking too much about the potential hazards of riding on a friday night in the no man's land that is central northeast portland past 60th avenue. i still had light when i rode past the intersection of 74th and glisan, the southern approach to which is where i was hit by that car. that intersection should have been at the front of my mind after having been to get my records, but i hadn't visually recalled the accident until i revisited the scene. i was happy to have had a helmet this time.

i did not, however, have working lights, the danger (but not the illegality) of which i was reminded later by the police officer who nearly pulled off of se 9th avenue on top of me as i was riding, ironically, far from the unmarked intersections of the no man's land, down the bike lane on madison toward the hawthorne bridge, then at least without my ear buds in so that i could hear myself being chastised (and not encourage a ticket). the encounter shook me, so of course i had to get something to drink, not that riding, shaken, without lights and under the influence was any safer than how i'd gotten myself around the rest of the day, but i just needed a moment, had half a six pack in my bag, the night air was pleasant, and there was enough light under the highway overpasses near the base of the bridge for reading the continuation of that bolaño novel that's being serialized in the paris review. the summer 2011 issue includes part two.

that cop had made me feel silly and childish, but the feeling was so keen probably because that's how i saw my entire day in retrospect, typified by my giving the cop the implausible excuse that both my front and rear lights were in my bag, their batteries having simultaneously failed earlier in the evening. (my rear light was actually stolen, but cops get that excuse all the time.) reading under the overpass, i probably looked just as silly as i felt as the jazz festival attendees walked past me on their ways back from the west bank of the river to where their cars were in the lot by where i was sitting. but my magazine was consolation, and not so much for the bolaño novel, of which i only read a few pages, but for the sudden but welcome reminder that if i moved to new york i could actually marry lorin stein.

DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU

2011-06-28T23:04:00.000-07:00

from a post at mobylives: "At The Millions Lydia Kiesling has written an article that expresses displeasure with the current cultural fondness for acts of curation." in this, the age of the internet, curation isn't just hip, it's ubiquitous. we could have told you so last year. (and we did.) anyone can make a playlist, but it takes some skill to actually spin records. the blog post at moby lives uses books and authorship as the subjects of its argument, but the points of there being the good and the bad and of the inevitable ubiquity of the act are the same regardless of medium or form. curatorial instinct isn't new and isn't going anywhere, but digital technology certainly has made the production of more and shoddier works of curating much easier. really though, the most annoying aspect of the issue is the buzzword (and all of its conjugations). and they're obviously not going anywhere either.

what's next? inline skating. no joke. mark our words.

AND ON THE FIFTH DAY THEY RESTED

2011-06-27T23:10:00.000-07:00

the balenciaga exhibit at the de young museum was divided thematically into about a half dozen displays, each of them representative of an aspect of spanish culture and its particular influence on the designs of cristóbal balenciaga, and each of them introduced by an explanatory written statement. scattered in between the different groupings were single pieces -- or groups of two or three -- that were of special import (the dress in black silk gazar that when viewed from above recalled a shape from the painting "blue" by joan miró, for example) or pieces that seemed to have been too nebulously inspired to warrant classification under a single theme, the identification of which must have been an exciting task for the exhibit's curators as many of the pieces on display straddled multiple realms of influence and inspiration.

but the show really stopped for the brown silk gauze evening dress from 1962 that was displayed with the other pieces that were notably influenced by spanish dance. the skirt of the dress ended in a foot and a half of ruffle and was asymmetrically gathered up and secured at its left hip, mimicking the look of a flamenco dancer who had picked up and held her skirts to display a set of footwork. in front of a reproduction of john singer sargent's "el jaleo," which depicts a dancer at just such a moment in her dance, and the reproduction of which filled a large part of the wall behind the display on dance, the effect of the brown dress on its mannequin with arms akimbo and chest thrust forward was expansive -- and so a premature ejaculation of excitement on the afternoon of friday, day two.

the walk from the de young in golden gate park was pleasant, even for the wind, and it wasn't long after the exaltation of the exhibit that the group found itself together again in dolores park for the party before the trans march, which marched without them, and probably for the better since the sun made it difficult to gauge the time and it was already certain to be dark (and that much later) by the time the train made it back to neighborhood of the crash pad, where there were necessary costume changes to be made before public transportation marooned anyone outside the city and away from the parties.

the parties carried day two into three, and although no one caught the drag show at the stud, it was enough for them to have arrived to make their connection to the after hours speakeasy some blocks away. the music and the decor were remarkable (as the three who made it there remarked to the people from the party they ran into the next day), but time changed there, and that's where the morning was met, a harrowed morning once the sun started showing itself (this time very much betraying the time), a morning (or early afternoon for one of the group) that meant another two trips on the train, one back out to the costume department and the other back in to the park.

the dykes were marching from the park on saturday so the dykes marched, leaving the rest of the group sitting on its borrowed sheet on the grass of the slope in the northwest part of the park. the venezuelan princess who joined them "wasn't that kind of girl" who would use the tracks behind the park and so delayed the group in meeting the lesbians on valencia by insisting on waiting in a ridiculous line to relieve herself. those kinds of girls don't have any interest in what was happening in the mission, so she didn't last much longer than it took to leave the park, and that was definitely for the better.

had she continued on she would have had to witness the raid on taqueria el toro, which, for the record, may not have happened exactly as it was described, but also just like at stonewall, the people inside held their ground against the police officers come to take them away. the cops came to break up the party and the queens said "no more." after all, the diners at el toro were already on edge when the officers arrived from the station across the street. the wait for food was understandable, but the line for the bathroom was ridiculous. the shit show in the castro couldn't have been much worse, except that it was. who would go there during pride? the fun's more casual in the mission.

sunday morning, day four, the fag and the pansexual beauty queen left nothing incriminating with the animals at the crash pad and left it. no last train: pickups would be done in the city -- but in a car and only to drive home. despite that the ritual cafe in the mission only does $3.50 plus pour overs, that's where the two went for coffee and postcarding before rounding up the rest. ritual serves it up strong, rich and sumptuous, and what the baristas were slinging on sunday morning was absolutely necessary for coming up with the other euphemisms that would be the most of what went down on the postcards. the same amounts of sex and drugs don't work for everyone, and the recipients of those postcards weren't any exception. sometimes you have to downplay the size of the baby's arm.

already over caffeinated, the duo stopped at four barrel on the way to the car to fill up a travel mug. (ritual's post-divorce competition still serves french press.) that guy from the fresh pot on mississippi in portland was behind the counter (and that guy from the acorn works in the back). what a mess. worse than that shit show in the castro, but not enough to affect the sparkle of the rest. the two impeccably styled men sitting together near the door looked like they might have lived in portland too. unfortunately, even knowing it was pride, they didn't have the decency to hide their lust for the beauty queen. shock and awe. but not really.

the drive home was uneventful. after so many euphemisms, there wasn't much left among the people in the car for excitement. there was, however, a diversity of dead animals on the sides of the highway, and now moniquipher has a roadkill raccoon staked up in the backyard to warn raiders away from the chicken coop.

the impala rolled into portland close to two o'clock on monday morning. it made a round of drop offs and drove over a curb.

monday morning, after a long long weekend of euphemisms, not one of the pilgrims had any problem checking back into celebrity rehab.

MODERN FOLKLORE, part 2; or PUT THAT IN YOUR PRIDE AND SMOKE IT...AGAIN

2011-06-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

thursday morning, they exited the albina press, piled into the forest green impala parked across the street and got on the road, the fag, the lesbians, the trans man and the pansexual beauty queen, headed south toward the promise of sun and sex, a promise they hoped would be fulfilled in exchange for their dutiful (if perfunctory) homage to the unity of diversity.

overheard on mississippi avenue during a portland pride event last weekend: that you could find a kind of fun at the clubs downtown, but that you’d find more diversity if you stayed on this side of the river. and, to wit, yes, maybe if you’re considering hobbies (at least we’re self aware), but that the visitor whose inquiry started the conversation wasn’t distinguishable by the trappings or proclivities of his orientation from his hosts or from the rest of the bar should have been telling enough.

but there! at the end of the 80, and 80 miles out from the valley, the rainbow flags were blowing in the wind on every street of that beacon in the bay. “i’ll drink my ovaltine, and you drink your decaf latte, faggot.” (the jewel lilt in her voice implied an acoustic guitar.) an impromptu song of acceptance and inclusion burst forth from one of the group as the impala rode down van ness between city hall and the war memorial opera complex. in san francisco, you can sing songs that were only acceptable to sing in the early nineties. that’s when gay was born on television after all, and like all of us, thanks to television, it never had to grow up. in san francisco, you can even shop at barney’s or neeman marcus, and the residents love to celebrate that anything goes.

sutter street is marked twice, but the first of the signs on geary marks only a walgreens parking lot with no way out but the only way in, and that’s where the impala turned so that its passengers to pause for a moment of reflection after their arrival to the city, and also amid screams and laughter, more even than for the spider at lake shasta, because if there’s one thing that san francisco doesn’t tolerate it’s bad driving.

the mission was packed and dirty on thursday night, and the consensus among the pilgrims was that if a place was full then it definitely wasn’t the one the happening place. but the skylark near pancho villa taqueria still had a table available at ten, and the smell of the place from the street was the big city. portland kept to itself at its table, but only for fatigue and amazement -- and the sex wasn’t where it wasn’t happening. half a dozen brown people in the same room, and half the room over forty. shock and awe and inspiration. but also intimidation, though none of which the group belied before leaving to disperse until the joining the throngs at dolores park the next day.

and where were the one’s we’d recognize? had the bay’s catalogue of aging hipsterdom all moved to oakland? it wasn’t, at least, on display anywhere near the crash pad loft across the bay where the fag and the queen refused to share a bed but shared a fitful night of sleep. their anxiety wasn’t exactly anticipatory (although it wasn’t completely not, either), but for the lack of sleep they would have liked to have had a preliminary boost before going to coffee proper back in the city. the east bay certainly beats portland in diversity, but it’s no rival on the coffee scene. it was locally roasted, yes, in san rafael, but the coffee at that café (it took an hour to find it) was weak, as was their trying to mask the shock and awe and intimidation with faggy foodie pretensions, but their dissatisfaction went unvoiced. after all, the woman had been nice, and probably didn’t café.

a text message. blow pony? portland was “bringing it hard” this year, and san francisco had had enough time since the last one to become newly enamored. (it never goes to visit, but it’s only codependence if you’re in love.) another consensus. the grass is definitely always greener where there’s something else. what about that promise? a portland party? definitely…perhaps.

HOW TO STOOP TO THE OCCASION

2011-06-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

it's happening: the pilgrimage to san francisco. and it's happening tomorrow. there's almost no more time for putting it off. the "balenciaga and spain" exhibit at the de young museum closes on july fourth, and this is our last weekend to travel before the traffic that will no doubt frustrate travel on the holiday. (and, we'll have guests.)

the exhibit, originally shown at the spanish institute in new york -- and shown there as a result of a request by oscar de la renta to hamish bowles, european editor at large for vogue, to dip into his personal collection of balenciaga couture and curate a gala exhibition to raise funds for the institute -- examines the influence the designer's native culture on his designs. we're particularly excited to see to what extent that spanish influence included inspiration from the world of flamenco, although it should be enough just to see up close those bullfighting inspired bolero jackets, photos of which have been featured in so many write-ups on the exhibit. it's none of that faggy matador stuff that gaultier did in 2003, either. not that there's anything wrong with gaultier style fagginess. it certainly has it's place and time. in fact, we hear there's some kind of pride event happening in the city this weekend as well, and we'll probably stop by to have a look at that, too.

but countess mona will have her couture gowns first. on friday afternoon, we'll head directly to golden gate park from the end of a long morning of reflection at ritual coffee roasters on valencia, and any other pilgrims in the area are welcome to join us.

"Even in the costly realm of couture, his prices were exceedingly high, but that didn't dissuade the worshipful. Countess Mona Bismarck [no relation to our own], one of his most devoted clients, reportedly locked herself in her bathroom for three days after he closed his atelier in 1968. He died in 1972.

In these kinds of shows, there's a subtext, rarely if ever addressed, of class, envy and the vicarious experience of a lifestyle and tax bracket beyond the reach of mere mortals; however, this hasn't prevented them from being extremely popular."

damn straight...although the bay area reporter doesn't mention the twenty-five dollar admission fee in its review of the exhibit. but, alas, the cost of salvation isn't cheap, in this case a testament to the enduring influence of the (spanish) catholic church, the ceremonial pomp of which was also a strong influence on balenciaga.

a subtext of class and envy, also unaddressed, although directed downwards instead of up, was palpable at sloan's last night, where we went after dinner to catch a record release party for the band of some friends. my embarrassment at having had to admit that i hadn't realized all of those friends were in the same band (and not different bands with the same name) was doubled by my having casually shown up to a rock show in my dinner clothes. the truth is, we'd stopped at home before going out again, and only a hastily composed invitation by text that arrived as we were leaving had diverted us from our other plans, for which countess mona had taken the opportunity to change.

for my mounting embarrassment, i'd have required more than i wanted to drink to join in the dancing at the show. plus, the dancing was of a sort that i'd have needed to stay far enough from some of the dancers -- and one girl in particular -- to make sure that my drink (or someone else's) wasn't emptied on my shirt, the thought of which just embarrassed me more for knowing how un-rock show it would have been to make someone assume responsibility for my dry cleaning bill.

fortunately, the band drew a crowd that might also be heading down to san francisco this weekend (the band itself will be playing there at a pride event on thursday), and so it's not impossible that i'll be afforded the opportunity to redeem myself in short order.

bullshit. you're right. all of the stares were welcome. and as i was escorting countess mona away, a discreet but apparent wave. but we should practice our humility now before it's handed to us with our tickets in exchange for twenty-five dollars a person at the de young museum on friday. at least for that much, the pat downs and fingerprintings will probably be free.

HOW TO ASK SOMEONE OUT IN SWEATPANTS

2011-06-19T15:29:00.001-07:00

change into your street clothes.

MY PORTLAND TIS OF THEE, SWEET LAND OF BEER FOR FREE, part 2

2011-06-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

the food and the beer were, as expected, delicious at the lucky labrador beer hall brewer's dinner held at wildwood restaurant and bar last night, but the pleasure of the event for me was of another order, as the other guests had made the erroneous but uncorrected assumption that i was lucky labrador beer hall brewer casey lyons' boyfriend. the night's menu was developed by lyons and paul kasten, wildwood sous chef and craft beer aficionado, and featured six courses, each of them carefully paired with a beer from the lucky labrador. despite my questionable ability to verbalize the sensations of my palate, i was graciously allowed to participate in scrutinizing the product of the pair's ingenuity as lyons' guest, and was seated next to him at one of four tightly seated tables in a private dining room at the rear of the restaurant. before each course, as the servers went around the dining room pouring, lyons was responsible for describing each beer before kasten explained the reasons why the beer had been paired with the food about to be served. even before the first pour, lyons confessed to the seven others at our table to having been anxious over his part in the staging of the event since that morning, and my encouragement, which, with each new glassful from the servers, became increasingly tactile (as lyons' explanations also became more relaxed), must have seemed particularly doting.

lyons' description of the zingerbier, which accompanied the salad course, was brief and cutely halting. the guests, among them a contributor to the times, could probably have determined for themselves that the beer was a brown ale infused with ginger, and when lyons sat back next to me the woman sitting to my right asked him if he wouldn't say a bit more about the next one. she was in marketing -- and she was right about the salad bringing out the ginger in the beer, which had only a subtle zing out of combination with the asparagus and carmelized garlic vinaigrette. she wanted to know alcohol contents, too, and unlike her i hadn't brought a pen and so don't have those numbers marked on my menu, but i will allow myself to claim incapacitation as justification for not articulating the strengths and weaknesses of every course for my knowledge that with each one the alcohol by volume in the beers increased.

i do remember taking notice of the sherry notes in the 5-ton strong lager, which was paired with a farro and garlic stuffed porchetta, after i was given the words by kasten in his description of course three. i also took a moment to aprpeciate the floral qualities of the super dog ipa for the first time after lyons explained the effects of dry hopping before course two, and explanation he reprised in more detail for me when he rejoined the table. the woman to my right also liked hops (she had them in gold cast on her necklace and earrings), but she didn't like that the squid and chiles were deep fried.

the couple to lyons' left looked to be the youngest in the room and were particularly portland: an intel worker in flip flops with a striking and well poised lady companion. in the course of the table's conversation we found out that she was half italian -- her first generation father distills grappa back in chicago -- and her delicate toga dress, which tied loosely over her right shoulder, very much suited her roman features and willowy frame. if her boyfriend (although i should probably permit them the possibility of having been just friends) could have benefited from a more careful styling, then at least she had done her best to compensate through attention to her own. or so i thought until i suspected the couple to be discussing my relationship with the brewer behind cupped hands, at which point i gave myself over to my disappointment at the woman's hair, which, above a discreetly made up face, was held in place by a now glaringly shoddy hairpin. and she didn't seem to like beer.

the woman two seats to my right, however, did. she was a friend of the woman directly next to me, and in their opening conversation i overheard the farther one mention her book project, regarding which she'd recently had a meeting with her publisher. she was to be responsible for writing amusing, state by state anecdotes for a book on liquor laws throughout the country, and the project, would, she said, involve a significant amount of internet research, but she could get some of that done on her upcoming trip to germany, spain and morocco with her husband, another intel employee, him about to go on his second triennial sabbatical, who sat to the right of his wife, almost directly across the table from me, largely unaddressed.

after courses four and five, paired with the 2010 stumpy jack bourbon barrel aged imperial porter and the 2010 old yeller barleywine, respectively, i'd had enough that i finally threw in my two cents, which i'd felt somewhat obliged to pay from the beginning for not being asked to pay for my seat. (meanwhile, the woman to my right had complemented lyons for delivering an anecdote about the naming of barleywines in his explanation of the old yeller.) it was not, in fact, possible to distinguish the coffee bitterness from that of the hops in the coffee imperial porter served with desert, and the woman with the book deal was quick to correct me, confirming with the brewer, passing over the man who for all she knew was his simpleton lover, that porter didn't have a detectable hoppiness at all. i respected her pluck, and i won't buy her book but am sure that's how she got her deal. we arranged a passive detente by agreeing to the woman between us that we didn't care for the cocoa braised cured bacon. after the stupefacient richness of the blue cheese butter that accompanied the roasted ribeye filet, course five, i could have gone without desert anyway.

the dining room cleared quickly after dinner, beginning with the quick exit of the young couple from our table. there was a half pitcher of the coffee porter left, and i joined kasten's wife nicole, who was wearing a super dog t-shirt with her black suit, in another glass. only two gallons of the beer had been made, and specially for the event, so it seemed a shame to let it go unfinished, even if the combined punch of the caffeine and extra alcohol might have been ill advised at eleven o'clock after four hours of steady drinking. but isn't that always when the good stuff comes out?

nicole gave me the early edition summary from the press table. apparently the times writer had thought the food portions too large. i couldn't help thinking that he'd just needed some sour grapes to mash knowing that someone else was going to leave with the man of the hour, who after course four got up the courage to make a smiling round of greetings at all the tables. and who could blame him. lyons was definitely looking good in those pants.

2011 BONNIE AND CLYDE

2011-06-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

the metaphysical pet project was originally conceived as a regular salon on culture, etc., but poor attendance unfortunately relegated the better parts of its activities to a private chronicle in three notebooks, the contents of which run the gamut of early twenty-first century graphic design and prose and poetic style, but which were also only publicly represented on one occasion. the "pop culture pantheon" was performed only once at the waypost on north williams avenue on an early fall evening three years ago. unfortunately, for all its brilliance and necessary bravado, that performance predated the formation of moniquipher, the definitive manifestation of looking good in pants in portland, or, and as a result was not able to garner for the metaphysical pet project the authority that it might have commanded had the height of its activity been during the reign of portland's finest -- but also most elusive -- power couple.

but hark! (and irony of ironies), rumor has it that the two might split, and not from each other but from the city of their birth. the shining princ(ess)es apparent to the throne left woefully unoccupied by elizabeth taylor and burt reynolds (charlie sheen having proven to be an unfit heir) seem intended to rebuke their celestial birthrights and flee. who knows what record of reckless abandon and illicit sex the police will find on the film rolls left behind at their north portland hideout...and is there a local musical act ready to assume the responsibility of immortalizing their portland story in the long shadow cast by serge gainsbourg and brigitte bardot?

and their reasons? their intentions? the truth? none of that here, of course. only the laugh of recognition. "if we've gotta walk away, we've gotta hold our heads up high." portland is burning. but there's the dream. no me ha dejado.

SUMMER READING LIST, YEAR 2

2011-06-14T23:31:00.000-07:00

it's been a while that i've thought i should read goodbye, columbus (if only just for the title story) and bright lights, big city. (read into both of those titles as much as you should.) and for a look at the other side of the same coin, i should probably refresh myself on the beautiful and the damned as well. fitzgerald isn't at all bad. good thing, too. we wouldn't want this year's list to fall to the same fated procrastination as the one from last year. but it's ultimately the thought that counts, right? and the thought is to express it now before the fifth season of "gossip girl" starts this fall and i'm improperly thought of as just another wannabe dan humphrey. no way. the world can still wait for this lonely boy.

PORTLAND IS BURNING

2011-06-13T13:58:00.000-07:00

that should have sufficiently apparent two years ago when our letter to sam adams asking that he use his mayoral clout to get courtney love cast as dazzler in one of the x-men movies never received a response. even if adams never knew love on the portland music scene in the late eighties, he could have tried something. and if he wasn't going to try then, hell, we would have been satisfied with a condescending letter. our mayor doesn't seem to know who his constituents are anymore, and that's not surprising: portland is forgetting itself.

perhaps that's too strong. it's just easy to resort to polemics after having our expectations and anticipation so thoroughly crushed. and no, not exactly by adams, although the depressing scene at the cirque du cycling criterium yesterday evening was what prompted us to see in better relief the sign that the courtney affair should have sent us so clearly all that time ago. maybe it's not that everyone forgot, or that no one cared. this year's race was on a cool and drizzly sunday, not exactly prime conditions for attending a street fair and spectating a bicycle race -- even if the drizzle did increase the possibility of spectating the splintering of more carbon fiber.

the event organizers should have kept the criterium on a saturday, and if they had, we all would have been treated to much better weather, conducive both to encouraging a greater turnout of spectators and assuring that those spectators were in need of liquid refreshment. the sun might also have encouraged more post-race strip downs, although the best of the eye candy from the categories one and two race had dropped out before the finishers made it into their final ten laps. granted, a saturday race would have conflicted with the heartbreaker at the alpenrose velodrome, the annual track racing event hosted by the gentle lovers, and what's the cirque crit without them? still (fatigue? come on! the lovers showed), the fields on sunday did seem to be smaller than in past years, and so the race wasn't much with them, either.

perhaps, though, there weren't any fewer riders than last year or the year before, but the event definitely seemed smaller and more controlled, which was no doubt due in large part to the tameness of the lawn parties on the course where it wasn't on mississippi. the bike messenger house on michigan between fremont and beech had a healthy showing for it's front yard barbeque, but other than there and at a couple of houses on albina between failing and shaver the crowds on the back streets were pathetic, and the partygoers could hardly raise cheers amongst themselves. people raised their voices more in conversation than in encouragement for the riders. hardly anyone noticed the crash.

what good are a stocked refrigerator and a brigade of mason jars in the face of all that? portland needed something dazzling at the cirque du cycling criterium yesterday evening, and no one in the entire boise-eliot neighborhood felt like stepping up to dazzle. it was the end of the weekend, sure. the parties were over. but it was the end of spring, too, and it was still cold and rainy, and everyone also suffered from remembering that we'd had at least a few solid weeks of semi-inspiring weather before the criterium last year.

it's possible that it was just a bad idea to go out after an afternoon nap. but surely the anticipation and the mason jar brigade should have helped dispel any lingering irritability? too bad the irritability was lingering outside in the neighborhood. it might have been better to have not gotten up at all, except maybe to go get a rental to take back to the couch. something fluffy and full of action -- but definitely not an x-men movie with courtney love playing dazzler. that never happened, and our eyes can no more pretend to see the glory.

it's the end of the metaphorical weekend, portland. the party's over. portland is burning, and we're all all wet.

christ. that stupid nap.

THE FARMERS IN THE DELL

2011-06-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

the hood river valley chamber of commerce must train the proprietors of every stop on the fruit loop in a standard welcome spiel. the greeters -- owners, volunteers or something in between -- all ask the same questions, starting with "where are you from?" it was after answering that question at the alpaca farm that we learned from the alpaca farmer that, among the states where alpacas are raised, ohio leads the country in number of alpaca farms and also in number of alpacas raised and that china has of late been buying south america out of all of its alpacas in attempts to surpass the united states in worldwide market share.

the alpaca farm that services foothills yarn and fiber isn't far from odell, the small community in the hood river valley between highways 35 and 281. following the fruit loop map that we found in the not primarily resale bookstore in hood river, we passed through that community on our way from the hood river lavender farms to where we met the alpacas, and on our way back, the charm of the local high school convinced us to turn down the main drag of the town on our way back toward the columbia river and highway 84.

if you're looking for authentic mexican food, odell is an incredible, if unlikely, foodie dream. the michoacan sports bar and grill is right there on the odell highway, but for those not simply wooed by its contemporary industrial design and neon signage there's the taqueria los amigos, where there's not just a full menu of reasonably priced and traditionally prepared mexican (american) favorites but also a quarter machine full of authentic-y temporary tattoos. if you're lucky you'll get the "smile now cry later" styled virgin of guadalupe. you couldn't not lean like a chola with that on your neck. there are also three television screens, all of them showing the same mexican news program, a program hosted by a tall, faintly brown anchor who must have used the same plastic surgeon as michael jackson. we watched her deliver the news until our tortas arrived, at which point we realized that there was a food cart across the road (a cart! in the hood river valley!), a cart called the snack shack, which was next to "espresso your love," central odell's only apparent public wifi hotspot. our tortas, cubano and jamon, were delicious. the fresh guacamole and specially curated salsa tray were worth the wait, even if we were the only customers at los amigos at two-thirty on that friday afternoon. (we also acknowledged that the three ladies we found sitting by the register when we went in probably had no idea how to treat our completely unexpected arrival.)

"is it racist of me to wonder why there are so many mexicans up in the hills of this part of oregon?"

"um, you haven't lived on the west coast, but no. that's just observation."

after lunch, and just north of los amigos on odell highway, we spotted what looked to be an abandoned warehouse complex on the left side of the roadway.

"ooh. old abandoned buildings. i'm turning."

"i don't think they're abandoned. it's just not fruit season." (the hood river valley might get more sun than portland, but the sun's general elusiveness has been a statewide phenomenon this year.) "besides, they probably find a way to use the buildings the rest of the year. you shouldn't get too close. there are cars parked. they're probably having illegal cock fights in there."

"now that's racist."

"you're right. it could be dogs."

"now that's love."

bon appetit.

SYMPOSIUM

2011-06-10T15:46:00.001-07:00

spotted: couples, all out man/boy love at every pub and cafe in town. is there a new non-profit on the scene pairing stylish men in their twenties with men of late middle age for board game fun? are we witnessing the beginning of a new trend in geeky rent boying geared toward portland's black plastic bespectacled creative elite? they're playing chess and scrabble and some strange variation of go using pennies and dimes all across the city. and they're wearing their wedding rings. sometimes both of them. surely no one's fooled? ok. maybe it was just regular old go and neither the man nor his boy had yet decided to consummate the relationship with a proper board. but no. of course not! it couldn't be his father.

I MET HER IN A CLUB DOWN IN OLD SOHO, WHERE YOU DRINK CHAMPAGNE AND IT TASTES LIKE CHERRY KÖLSCH

2011-06-08T11:30:00.000-07:00

beer releases in portland, oregon are star studded events, even if only a thousand or so people can actually identify the stars -- although it should also be said that the people who would recognize the names of their craft beer blogs are far flung. save one notable but unmentionable exception (i don't remember his name from the bits of conversation on which i was able eavesdrop), the best of the best were gathered at the lucky labrador beer hall in northwest portland yesterday evening for the release of a new kölsch made by lucky labrador brewer ben flerchinger in collaboration with lola, the ladies of lagers and ales, a local, all female powerhouse of beer expertise and homebrewing knowhow.

lola began its activities in late 2010 as a casual drinking meetup between friends, but has since expanded its purview beyond just the social realm. the members of lola (and if you're a lady in portland who's interested in craft beer then you already are one) may not be industry professionals, but their passion for good beer and their regular proximity to experienced brewers and local beer connoisseurs have garnered the group increasing recognition as a tastemaker unto itself -- and literally, now that lola has made its official on-tap debut.

working on the lucky labrador's seven barrel system was a first for most of the ladies, a homebrwer's dream per the statements of one lola member, and if the line of pubsters waiting at the kölsch tap was any indication, the product of the ladies' labor was a wild success. that success surely won't be one off, either: lola already has plans to craft another collaborative brew with the people at coalition.

the kölsch itself? looking good in pants doesn't necessarily mean being able to articulate your palate, but the beer definitely would have been a refreshing companion to the heat and the sun this past weekend. aromatically sweet, with a distinctly dry finish, but also particularly effervescent. the ladies of lola, that is. it's indiscreet pass judgment on a friend's beer either way, the recognition of which should be exonerating, even if it means admitting to being friends with ben. try the beer for yourself -- while you can -- at the lucky labrador beer hall, 1945 nw quimby st, or sample a special cherry variation in the rare beers section at the portland fruit beer festival this weekend at burnside brewing, 701 e burnside ave.

three cheers, lola. and well played. it was nice of you to let ben take so much credit.

JUNE, BUSTIN' OUT ALL OVER SINCE 1945

2011-06-06T21:04:00.000-07:00

deer corpse. just off the bike lane on highway 30 about a mile north of the merger of nw yeon and st. helens road. pulled over by the train tracks. it was open at its rear and spilling bloated organs. a big one (the liver?) looked about to pop. had it popped, my next retch would have brought something up. i thought of the old, overalled man who i'd seen a couple of days earlier sitting, on the opposite side of the same road, in front of a seemingly one-off stand that advertised elk jerky. the deer probably died that same day. on the third day of sunshine, it was leaking and bloated.

after a hazy morning, the sunshine was bright on sunday afternoon. it had been since two summers ago that i'd ridden to the beach at the northeast end of sauvie island, which was apparently a long enough time for me to forget how uncomfortable the ride back can be after hours in the sun and too little nourishment. two vitamin waters didn't turn out to be enough for forty miles. if the stand had still been up, i might have thought to get some elk jerky.

i leave for the beach and i understand that getting to the island is only half the trip, but i'm always able to imagine that the ride on the island itself is going to be easy because of the scenery. but the scenery, and it was beautiful on sunday, didn't put me in the padded shorts that i should have worn for that many miles and such bumpy roads, including reeder road, which gets significantly more bumpy at the exact point of the road sign that marks the border between multnomah and columbia counties. also on the bumpy roads of sauvie island: a dead mole and a dead snake. seeing the snake reminded me of the fact of snakes and that the fact of snakes on the road might mean snakes on the trail through the woods between the road and the beach.

i was still on the happy part of my ride -- the ride out -- so i didn't let the snakes deter me. it was all the same anyway, because the trails between the road (where reeder turns to gravel near its terminus) and the nude (queer) beach were flooded, which probably meant that the beach was flooded, too. one of the punk fags who were buying corn dogs at the seven eleven where i bought my vitamin water shouted the score at me as he was getting back into his car, and i didn't bother to get off my bike to see for myself.

the beaches along reeder before the road turns to gravel aren't so pretty. still, i gave one a try to get some sun on my shoulders while i got some reading done. the clothing not so optional beaches are separated from the road by a weedy hillock that rolls down into beach scrub and sand on the side of the water. easy snake spotting, especially for the regularly spaced cement stairways that lead up the hill from the road. i couldn't concentrate on house of the fortunate buddhas. this beach was more crowded than the one at the island where i last remembered spending time with a book. but maybe my mood on that other day was just more conducive to reading. it was breezier, and it was maureen medved's novel.

i left after less than an hour, anxious about the ride back into town, though apparently not trying to delay it. the sun was still a long time from down, but it had gone behind clouds by that point. they'd have calendula flowers at the blue heron herbary, and the thought of making a tea of them and drinking it in the bath later made it easier to get back on the bike. the sign must not be as easy to see as from the opposite side of the road and when going in the direction of the beach because i missed it. dead rabbit. i hadn't noticed it on the way out. there was a chipmunk that ran across the road ahead of my front tire that might have been dead if it had been two seconds later.

the pain in my ass. i don't believe that lance armstrong ever rode a tour on that saddle, so i can only conclude that "replica" isn't a very carefully regulated standard within the bicycle component manufacturing industry. it was a gift. and it matches my other components. it wouldn't have been a problem had i thought more about appropriate attire. i could still appreciate the smell of the wild roses, which was impossible to ignore, but did nothing for the pain in my ass. no honeysuckle yet. not enough sun this year. will there be a shortage of honey sticks at the farm stores this year?

having realized that i missed the turn for the herbary, i stopped for a recovery beer (don't ask me which style i chose) at the captured by porches beer bus by the kruger's farm market, just a mile from the bridge to highway 30. the barbeque vendor was out of everything, and the market was out of kale. $1.25 a bunch is a steal. even after the beer, the approach to the bridge wasn't fun. but then it's just another ten miles to the center of the city. once i was under the st. john's bridge, the ride back from the beach didn't seem like such a pain in the ass. and there's even more beer to be had back in town. and there's that dead deer. disgusting. we've had our differences, portland -- and i really don't know if we can make it work -- but sometimes i do remember exactly why i fell in love. it's sore, has a bloated liver, and it smells like wild roses.

SQUIRREL VS. CROW

2011-06-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

it happened this morning. at peninsula park. and at the very same time as i was listening to "stadium love." no kidding. no set up. the crow was after it. that squirrel ended up a corpse by afternoon. no doubt. that's not why i had that napkin on the desk, but it still served for cleaning up the drippings of the chicken soup. "wanna make a trade, cougar for a snake, wanna fall in love. ¶ wanna make a deal, angel vs. eel, owl vs. dove."

those dead squirrels. let's hope that their increasingly ubiquitous bike lane corpses will be, on the reverse side of the calendar, a harbinger of sunshine and clear, the succession of a cycle at the beginning of which their appearance last fall marked the onset of a long, long, grey and rainy winter. "no one's getting out."

"every little thing, pushed into the ring, fight it out to wow the crowd... ¶ guess you thought you could just watch. no one's getting out without stadium love."

girlfriend out of town - m4m - (pdx)

Date: 2011-06-02, 10:24PM PDT
Reply to: ᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆᄆ

hi. girlfriend gone to visit family for the week. looking. hit me up.

"no one's getting out."

crow was fucking up that squirrel.

HOW TO MAKE CULTURE, part 2

2011-05-31T23:43:00.001-07:00

"I believe in each scene of this Autobiography, I'm proud to say. I'm happy with the results...A busy life, happy. Sure, I broke the rules by revealing some of my suffering and anxieties. But the times we live in demand a little pathos. I had to make myself seem believable." - pg. 319

"I never want to buy drugs from the police again. Only from real, safe, sane, professional drug-dealers." - pg. 259

"...but what strikes you as banal is in actuality a series of potentially lethal traps. They want to catch you by any means necessary. One way or the other, to expose you." - pg. 249

"The most hated men in history become myths. Everybody's afraid of them, secretly wants to be them. I'd love to see normal people be uneasy when I approach. Good men are inevitably forgotten. Saints are monotonous." pg. 235

"Without monumental egos
art is no better than housework" - pg. 164

"It's enough to know I'm cold. The politics of apathy. No one knows how much work this takes. They don't know the effort I make to repress myself. It borders on self-mutilation." pg. 146

make culture. rescue the anonymous.

Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola. Anonymous Celebrity. Trans. Nelson H. Vieira.
Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009.

"THE FIRST IMAGINARY AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE WORLD"

2011-05-31T21:45:00.000-07:00

this one is not it. someone beat us there. someone unnamed, obviously, but whose story was chronicled nonetheless -- and whether to call that chronicle fiction is, given the topic, beside the point. the resolution of ignácio de loyola brandão's anonymous celebrity was disappointing as compared to the originality of its titular personality's voice and narrative mode (the latter frustratingly reminiscent of a tabloid weblog), but even for its cop out conclusion, that autobiography-cum-case file -- and especially for all of its formulations and recommendations) still annuls the originality of our own.

"Scurrilous" is a great word.

Creation and dissipation. "Dissipation" is another good one. A word with many connotations. You can dissipate your health through drugs, orgies, alcoholism -- hedonism. Or else, in perfect tranquility an with an untroubled conscience, you can dissipate your talent. Wasteful expenditure [delusional hipsterity].

I used these and other words quite often in my imaginary autobiography (a genre I've invented myself, and which I hope secures me a place in the history of literature.)

to think that we've supported the cause of literary translation with such dedication, only to find out that had we been spared the translation of this one title we wouldn't now be faced with having to give up the game. "a good imaginary autobiographer has to be comfortable starting from scratch every once and a while if his sculpture begins to fall apart."

i wrecked over the weekend on the east bank esplanade. a design failure, and the reason that i generally avoid the esplanade. i met the path with my right hand, and for the second time in six months my gloves saved me, at least from road rash (which i admit is too noble sounding a phrase for describing any injury i might have sustained from a crash like mine the other day). i did not, however, walk away without a noticeable amount of bruising. one of the two men who got off of their bicycles to check after my well being as i sat on the path with my right knee and shoulder numb from the blunt trauma of the crash knew the score. "i know how it feels. it's more of an ego blow than anything." so he understood when i asked him and the other guy to leave me alone.

I have trained myself to think perfect thoughts -- sequences constructed with loving care and then saved, frozen in special compartments of my memory set aside for just this purpose. I stage a scene and then redo and correct it, change details, adjust its contours, colors, details. i bridge gaps, cut together the final print.

thankfully, the sore throat i developed later wasn't gonorrhea.

HOW TO LOOK REALLY, EXCEPTIONALLY, IMPOSSIBLY GOOD IN PANTS, part 2

2011-05-27T09:57:00.000-07:00

prom! we took friends, or sophomores or went with a classmate who couldn't take his freshman girlfriend (it was the seventies) and couldn't keep from the self-mutilation of standing by and watching, alone, as the other juniors and seniors gathered with their dates in the school parking lot across the street, him with his freshman girlfriend, getting ready for the post-prom sunday picnic. no fun. who wouldn't relish the opportunity for a do over?

portland has proms, because portlanders love theme parties. or, rather, portlanders love reasons to set up a photo booth (those of you who have lived in austin will understand). unfortunately, too many of the portlanders who lust after post-party facebook réclame in the click of the photo booth flashbulb don't have any grown up clothes. it's no trivial perquisite of working in portland, oregon that employers of anyone who might be considered a cultural creative make it so that those of their employees needn't own a suit. but it's no trivial oversight of civility that most of the gay men at the prom themed queer dance night on thursday night showed up in their work clothes. hoodies over plaid button ups might pass muster behind the computer, but is that really how we want to our only prom (this month)?

that's of particular consideration when it's considered that portland has so many fine local tailors -- and in particular the ladies of duchess clothier. it's a very fine thing to have quality local designers available for ordering creatively devised custom garments, but it's of an entirely different order of fineness to have available a group of stylish and knowledgeable local women who have dedicated themselves to men's fashion.

duchess was founded by lady seyta selter (the aptly handled "founding duchess") as a small vintage reproduction boutique for portland's ladies in 2005, but the company has since metamorphosed into an (only somewhat larger) operation committed to outfitting the men of portland in the most dapper suits, shirts and accessories -- and ms. selter's uniquely cool, vintage sensibilities deliver a high standard of dapper, indeed. today, duchess occupies the entirety of the showroom at se 11th ave and division that it used to share with haberdasher winn perry, and duchess' offerings have come to include not just its exquisite -- if under reputed -- custom garments, but also a head to toe line of ready to wear pieces.

the duchess concept is simple: every man looks good, not necessarily in a suit, but in a suit that was made to measure. and the duchess experience begins with the measurements. if it feels good to be wearing (and to be seen wearing) a duchess creation (and people at thursday's prom were definitely looking at the two button duchess two piece with the satin lapels), then it's because lady ariel arrow, the duchess of fit, got it right when she asked you up from the plush leather couch across from her consultation table and took to you with her tape measure. she asks your age. your age informs your carriage, and that number goes down with all the others -- and the photos she's taken -- in your file, which is kept on file, because once you've had yourself made a duchess suit you'll be back for others.

the concept is simple, but making an order isn't easy. anything but. even if you're only ordering from the scotch basic menu, which limits you to choosing one of five styles preselected by the ladies from some two dozen total patterns that uniquely represent the best of "classic" taste from the victorian era to the present, you'll still have to decide on color, fabric (those two choices are especially daunting when you're ordering custom shirts)...a vest? a silk jacket lining? hand-stitched lapels? the exact fit of the final suit is up to the customer as well, and although ariel is happy to lend her expertise to your decision through suggestions, she's just as willing to encourage your creativity and push you, with a patient smile and silence, toward an assertion of your personal style. the combination of luxury and coziness that characterizes ariel's consultations can be confounding. the duchess showroom -- and that leather couch in particular -- are inviting, as are all of the ladies (and the one gent) of duchess, but, but...no kid in any candy store has ever had this much fun, or was ever faced with such a complication of choices.

the cultural lexicographers should change the idiom. the image of a dandy gone to duchess is so much more evocative, and if it weren't for the pecuniary limitations that might restrict said dandy's ability to order each and every one of the outfits he'd imagined out of the infinite possibilities of duchess' offerings, that phrase would exemplify absolute bliss. now it just lies with we evangelists to spread the word, get the phrase to catch. spread the word by wearing the clothes. by making orders, as difficult as that task can sometimes be. and not that you won't do whatever it is you can to have all of your suits and shirts made by duchess after you're first glamoured by the duchess magic, but it's worth mentioning that custom garments from duchess are almost indecently affordable for the order of quality and design savvy that they represent. but you're right. it's uncivil to talk about price. you can find pricing information along with style menus at the duchess website.

and pictures? find those at the website, too. the ones from prom aren't ready yet. and if they don't turn out -- the mood was so uninspiringly under dressed -- we'll just have to throw another do over. but in another suit, of course. unfortunately, that means a wait. but it's never not worth it. those ten weeks are always the sweetest sorrow.

OH, AND ONE MORE THING

2011-05-25T23:50:00.000-07:00

on the approach to the coffee shop:

"he's one of the gay ones, for sure."

"but he's always with a really pretty woman."

"what is it that you see going on here, monique?"

"you're right. they're like us in ten years. we should all get a picture together."

"twenty years, maybe."

"i don't want to be here in twenty years."

"yeah, neither do i."

last night we were trying to remember what it was we thought we should have put up for the opening post of "sex and compromise" but knew that nothing we were coming up with was as good as what we were sure we had that other night. in any case, she's not the stupid girl who doesn't know about her boyfriend.

ONE MORE THING

2011-05-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

there were so many today that i can't remember which one we didn't share with you to remind you of it, but i did finally remember that i'd meant to announce that the bike fag moved to portland. i didn't think he was really going to do it, but his blog says it's so. that blog, incidentally, hasn't been updated since april 15, the day on which the fag announced his arrival. as such, i will no longer list that blog here as a devotee. (nor, for the same reason, will you find a hyperlink to it anywhere in this post.) the biggest pond of american cycling (where he'd tested the water for a barista position before moving!) has apparently proven too challenging a milieu for the fag to keep confidence in his routine. i didn't think it would be so easy. my condolences. now that's over, tomorrow the world.

"HOW TO BE HAPPY"

2011-05-24T22:42:00.000-07:00

the ten-day forecast is for rain, and only the completely witless among us here in portland could honestly expect for that to change before july if at all, but that doesn't stop any one of us from manifesting our witless hopes for an early and consistent summer by preparing our swimsuit bodies. so there wasn't to be any drinking until the party on friday, and only then because it would be ungracious as a co-host to abstain completely, but then not again until at least another week later. we're considering throwing an underwear party for the beginning of june just to steel our resolve. nothing to drink and extra miles in the mornings.

i realized that my plans must have been for another night when i arrived at the whiskey soda lounge, but having planned to be in southeast i took the opportunity to ride up the back side of mount tabor before heading to 32nd and division. extra miles. and uphill. plus, the whiskey soda lounge serves tasty and refreshing drinking vinegars, so i could consider the possible difficulty of teetotaling at the center of a party avoided. but then there was no party, and it seemed silly to spend on drinking vinegars, sitting alone at the lounge, if i still had time to make it home, to the laundromat and to get some underwear cleaned before the laundromat closed. i could hang them dry myself.

i took anonymous celebrity by ignácio de loyola brandão with me for the wash cycle. "i now read books and have stopped drinking. i have become boring, but i feel good -- even though i'm philosophically against not drinking." thanks lars von trier. i don't suspect you've ever cared much about your swimsuit body, but damn if that press conference on "melancholia" at cannes doesn't keep on giving. i'm of a similar philosophy.

brandão was in on my delinquency as well. anonymous celebrity is, a novel, yes, but it's also a guidebook of sorts, intended to help the faceless masses rescue ourselves from the death sentence of our obscurity. and damned if i didn't come to the section entitled "how to be happy" while my underwear were spinning.

"people live with a constant fear of transgression...what frauds. there's only one way to be happy: to lose it...to push everything around you into anarchy...

pleasure."

i got off on the serendipity. the serendipity and the easy inspiration. and the validation of my efforts to keep pushing everything around me into anarchy for the sake of the how-to autobiography. maybe that was enough. you won't know. anyway, extra miles in the morning. forecast: cloudy.

FROM THE ASHES

2011-05-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

our will towards looking good in pants is a flagrant promotion of vanity. no one here expected to be saved. but, as may twenty-first approached, we also didn't spare ourselves the vain hope that something might happen on saturday to save us from having to think about how much better in pants we'd have to look for year number two.

it's difficult enough to optimally fill a social calendar in order that our own fulfillment and non-disappointment be maximized, but now we also find ourselves under an obligation to an audience, and it isn't clear whether discussing an entirely new set of events and topics or simply re-covering the same ones from last year in sequence one year later would be to the highest benefit for all parties. the latter course seemed initially appealing -- although admittedly shticky -- for its potential to help us address any lingering (or looming) questions surrounding our diaphanous relationship to metablogging. however, that relationship can be just as easily addressed in brief, and immediately: this isn't a metablog, but rather a blog that occasionally adopts the discursive modes usually associated with that medium in order to comment on it; i.e. not so much a blog about blogging as a blog that sometimes (and sometimes implicitly) discusses the idea of the metablog. and that, of course, certainly isn't our saying that there's anything doubly meta going on either. we might be musing over the corpse of postmodernism, but we're not the ones who killed ourselves. it's just like with the hipsters, except that, well, they (we?) managed to be both the obituarist and the hand holding the smoking gun (cold and lifeless after the suicide) until the meta-meta-self-aware elephant in the room sat on the party. and portland didn't learn a thing, even if some of us managed to dive off before the shark got jumped (virtually, by identity thieves in a gentrified former warehouse district), which is the reason that the other plan won't work either. this town is damn near finished. luckily, we won't have to worry about that or anything for too much longer since the world is ending in five months. and lucky for portlanders, where we live is a lot like hell: the weather is awful, but all of your friends are there.

so yesterday, instead of letting myself get down about my indecision -- or the ultimate futility of deciding -- i let myself stay down about the outcome of the soccer game. none of the starting members for columbus got raptured, but that still didn't help the team break portland's inaugural season at-home winning streak. the game's only goal scorer was a former columbus player who was brought over to portland in last year's major league soccer expansion draft. columbus' best scoring opportunity? narrowly foiled by portland's keeper, who went to my high school. my memory wants to put him on the junior varsity team freshman year.

i won't be watching any of the mtv remake of "skins," but the bbc version is brilliant (as they'd say in the bbc version). video verite finally has the third season, which isn't on the shelf at the store because the store's one copy came home with me yesterday. (spring fever.) i spent my entire afternoon wondering over the benefits of different designer sparkling waters, commiserating with a beautifully wrecked cast of wasted british youth. you wouldn't think that would have afforded me much time for anything else, but even for my lowered spirits i still attacked the four sunday crossword puzzles that i'd neglected during the lead up to the anniversary party. who's wasted now? three and a half finished before riding to namaste for the dinner buffet. that's productivity.

i had no idea there was a dance floor in the lounge, and i'm confident that the party of thirty sitting at the lofted level brought it after i left. the staff had only just started delivering the group's cocktails by pitcher. i, however, had planning to do. get ready for another year.

BUY MY BOOK, AGAIN

2011-05-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

there wasn't an accessible wifi signal at the united methodist church in worthington, ohio on saturday, so circumstance -- and certainly not any shortfall in preparation -- stayed the promise and the dream of live blogging the timara wedding (the ceremony that officially sanctioned the union of king county's cutest power couple was held in the couple's hometown). however, as if to compensate for the less favorable conditions inside the church, the sun had broken completely through the forecasted clouds and was shining fully through the windows of the new sanctuary by the time that tim and mara exchanged rings and the organ hit the chord that cued their first kiss as married people. (you know that you're someone in the pacific northwest if you have a picture.) brooklyn, chicago, dc and tokyo bore witness among representative dignitaries from other far flung places around the country and the globe. the marriage was officially certified by you know who in a closed door meeting after the kiss. central ohio now boasts the founding of what will surely be one of the seattle area's finest lineages, although comparisons to any royal wedding were forbidden by implicit decree for the entirety of the wedding weekend -- and, even after the fact, a comparison here would be too hackneyed to lend itself to anything but disgrace. (mara only woke up to watch "the" royal event on television to practice her magnanimity in the face of poor taste.)

later, dinner and dancing, but the groomsmen had been directed into a bar by the photographer's assistant three hours before they were scheduled to walk the aisle. it was also for photographs that the entire bridal party returned to that same bar, where the groomsmen were obliged to toss back another round for posterity. although the bride and her attendants were allowed to raise just masquerade cocktails then, they did help with finishing the bottles that had been set aside for the pre-party faux-toast photo shoot outside the reception tent. it's no surprise that the cops got called before the dance floor showed any signs of dying down.

and as the party made its way into sunday, then slept, and then reconvened for an early brunch in order to make enough time for another rally before most of its members' evening departures, it's no surprise that it took two days' recovery time before we could make our apologies for not delivering on the live blog and then also make mention of the event, which, incidentally, appears no less enchanted and majestic in the more sober light of measured hindsight. and that merits mention. plus, it's finally come time to thank timara for choosing to fete the birthday of this blog with such an elegant party as was their wedding's, the event of which coincided exactly with our first anniversary. thankfully, no one was so gauche as to mention the dual birthday on saturday and offend our shared senses of discrimination. it was enough that everyone in attendance knew.

some 100,000 words. they say that's where they're capping dissertations lately. academic publishing has been as susceptible to the demands of dwindling attention spans as its counterpart in mass market trade. so a medium length novel, then. that comparison is more apt anyway, since most of what was posted here during that first year probably seemed of dubious validity, or made up...complete phixion. that's nonetheless cause for celebration. can we get two more cheers? (and by all means try to top the newlyweds.)

want to know the truth? buy my goddamn book.

TRADITION(,TRADITION!)

2011-05-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

"matchmaker, matchmaker, i'll bring the veil; you bring the groom, slender and pale."

it's a new tradition, so it's no less false right now than the made up tradition in aleksei fedorchenko's "silent souls" in which a bride-to-be has colored threads tied to her pubic hair by her girlfriends, threads that will be removed by her husband on her wedding night and tied by him to an alder tree on their wedding night. the finnic border culture in the movie doesn't exist, and neither does any irish culture for which the shearing of a groom's facial hair by his best man is a (pre-)nuptial custom. but that's art for you. the best of the best men in the world should be expecting to be held to that obligation from tonight on. grow a beard and get good with those clippers.

accentuating the jaw line is always slimming, and tonight's groom was irish, so he was already pale.

"night after night, in the dark, i'm alone; so find me a match of my own."

irony. r.i.p.

ASSHOLE(S)'S BRUNCH

2011-05-10T22:37:00.000-07:00

that the chickens had been producing so many eggs lately was the ostensible justification for the gathering, and that the one of the three chickens currently in the backyard who was also one of the five originals was originally named asshole seemed like reason enough to name the gathering after her, because, well, the gathering was justified by the chickens. a superfluity of eggs is good enough reason for brunch, and mother's day is more than enough reason to have sunday brunch at home. and when monique searched the internet for details on brunch and white people (they love it, and she wanted to understand), she found a picture of a t-shirt advertising the message that brunch was for assholes. after that revelation it was impossible not to call the brunch after asshole, especially since so many white people were coming. so the question then became whether the descriptor in the title of the event should be pluralized to describe our guests or left singular to pay tribute to the chicken. not many of the guests would know the hen, and the event was going to be advertised via social media -- the principle venue for white people's advertising where they're taking their sunday brunches. monique can't be racist because i'm white, in the same way that i can't be a sexual orientationist because monique is straight. assholes, see?

i knew that i wasn't going to be able to make it for the entire dozen of the deneuve films, but i didn't think i'd have to make that confession until i made my scheduled trip out of town on wednesday. rather, i thought i'd make it solidly through the first six and then make up a delicious story. if only it hadn't been for those assholes -- or just the one. i'd already missed the screening of "the young girls of rochefort" when we cleaned the corner store out of crappy brut at six p.m., and it wasn't likely that i was going to make the seven o'clock screening of "mississippi mermaid." most of the food had been eaten by two (and what hadn't was what mismatched little the guests who came after that had brought), so we also needed to think about what we were going to eat before our evening obligations outside the house. just sustenance: nothing could possibly have topped those quinoa cakes.

needless to say, it took some time to recover from brunch, although i did make it through all of "the last metro" on monday evening -- and didn't once give myself over to the arrant seductions of sleep. you should understand why i haven't had the wherewithal to post anything more substantial on the films. it's tiring, being a host. making sure the drinks are full and all. and the unexpected chafing. i mean, those assholes kept me up. asshole, i mean. kept me up, that is. when there are only hens in the coop, one of them starts taking on the role of the male, which means frequent awkward crowing.

the last brunch guests to leave left twenty-one hours after the first ones were asked to arrive, and they left without drinking the breakfasts we'd poured for them before tucking them in. some people do have to work on mondays. those guests should have understood why we weren't going to go to the trouble in the morning.

and so it comes to pass that there will be only four in our deneueve dozen, but supplemented with dozens of eggs, all of them from assholes -- and some of them from the chicken with that name.

singular.

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

2011-05-07T14:08:00.000-07:00

you can buy me a vintage 1965 poster from the japanese theatrical release for only three-hundred twenty-five euros here. the film is just as charming -- and definitively new wave-y -- as it should seem from the poster. in case you don't read japanese: it won the palme d'or at cannes, and it's a musical. what the poster doesn't tell you is that "the umbrellas of cherbourg," directed by jacques demy, was a certain influence (and a strong one) on the work of contemporary french director christophe honoré. (it's understandable. after all, honoré wasn't born until five years after "the umbrellas" was released in japan.) honoré's "love songs" takes both its narrative structure and many of its technical elements directly from demy's film. in fact, i think i'm obliged to admit that i couldn't have been a true fan of honoré's until i saw "the umbrellas," which kicked off the northwest film center's "deneuve dozen" series last night. i think i'm also obliged, now that i'm properly informed, to suggest that honoré probably should have followed demy's lead in simplifying his lyrics. the english subtitled version of "love songs" requires some serious suspension of disbelief -- or at least a generous grant of poetic license to its translators. then again, demy did have agnes varda working as one of his, so maybe a comparison isn't fair. the matter might possibly have been out of honoré's hands. (incidentally, demy and varda's "the young girls of rochefort" screens tomorrow at four.) but demy also has that breathtaking shot of catherine deneuve, in a pale blue twin set (or was it white? or was it even twin?), reading a letter from her absent lover (gone to algeria) as she walks (and the camera moves! a la france, 1964) from one side of a blue wallpapered room to stop (but doesn't stop singing) in front of a window where she's almost completely whitewashed from the frame by the light and the snow outside as they blend with her blond hair, her pearly complexion and her ensemble. and nino castelnuovo looks damn fine in pants throughout. even so, deneuve doesn't wait. is love more than a handsome face? you don't care: you just want to be at the movies. one down, eleven to go.

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL

2011-05-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

dance class gets more difficult starting in the spring because of the heat, but not necessarily because the studio is any hotter -- the jungle swelter that builds up in front of the mirrors during class is a year round phenomenon -- but because i always dance next to the windows at the southwest side of the room. on days like yesterday, when the windows are open because the day has been hot but the air has already started to cool by the time class begins, the temperature at the windows is probably cooler than at any other spot in the studio, especially once people start pushing their feet toward full tilt.

but the windows face across twelfth avenue from where solo flamenco is located on southeast division street, and next to the taquería there is a beer bar called apex. i've only been once, and that visit was short, ended when the bartender told me that the bar was cash only and i realized that i couldn't use the atm because i'd lost my debit card, which i immediately left to find. somehow, i made it across town on my bicycle to check the balance of my account on my home computer and call each one of the stores i'd been to that day and then rode back to twelfth and division in the hour i had before the performance at the studio started.

class at the studio gets more difficult as the weather gets warmer because apex has so much outside seating. it also has parking for dozens of bikes, and when the sun comes out the tables on the apex patio are full with interesting haircuts in less and less clothing as the season pushes toward full tilt. i didn't even attempt the series of vueltas in the first half of the farruca yesterday, instead just taking note of the guitar and walking toward the windows to stare. the same thing every time i confused the footwork before the second llamada. i benefited from having practiced the farruca choreography over the weekend. not so with the soleá in hour two. the class marked, and i stared. there were a few exceptional ones. facebook thinks that the busser and i should be friends.

"I'm going to talk about something weird that I do." that's how patrick dewitt, who is guest blogging at powells.com this week started his post for today. i don't think that staring at pretty things when my mind should be on the instruction that i'm paying for is weird. juvenile maybe, but nothing like what dewitt talks about in his post. this post is about bars that i don't go to. one of them is apex, and another one is the bar where i second met patrick dewitt.

dewitt's first novel, ablutions, is about an alcoholic. that alcoholic has dreams, and he lives in los angeles, a city where people with dreams go to think about them while they serve drinks at bars like the one where the protagonist of ablutions works. the novel is gritty and urgent and painfully hopeful. while i was having my copy of ablutions signed at a reading a couple of years ago, i asked dewitt where he liked to drink in portland. i can't remember if he told me whether or not he drank, but he told me that he liked to take his family to the liberty glass (it's also a restaurant), which is where i said hello to him and his family not long after the reading when i recognized the author there one night.

a couple of years ago the liberty glass was not so close to my house as now that i've moved to north missouri and fremont streets, just a few blocks away from where the bar is on cook. the patio at the liberty glass is not so large as the one at apex, but it's just as full when the weather is nice (and also, actually, when it's not, because the patio at the liberty glass is covered and has a wood stove). but now it's just looking at the liberty glass, too. we don't go there anymore. not dewitt, i think he's fine, but i have no way of saying whether he's been there lately. maybe the patio is a minefield for him too (seven, and all of them deadly). but he's probably able to brave it, what with the confidence of having recently released another book.

the sisters brothers is about old west grit and hired guns. good for nothings and cheaters. i'll recommend it to caroline. i'll read it too, but she's much more gracious with americana than i am. plus, she's a good for nothing cheat. and a gun for hire if you're really in a bind. she likes the liberty glass. in fact, she introduced us. now she's in the wives club. she can do whatever she wants there, so i'll ask her to tell dewitt what i thought of his book. she should invite him to the inaugural bloc cascadian national convention as well. we can find someone to watch his kid while he's in port angeles. i know that i can forgive him having once been a californian for knowing that he was born in british columbia. with me? this summer's going to be hot.

BLOC CASCADIAN

2011-05-03T12:28:00.000-07:00

osama bin laden is dead. that fact seems to be the only news that's fit for consumption in the united states for the past couple of days. it's a political victory for the obama administration, for sure, and it might help the administration ride its wave of hopeless liberalism into another term (i can only cringe at the thought of the alternative). but no americans seem to be concerned about where they'll run when they're trying to dodge their reluctant commitment to our country's next episode of foreign military adventurism. (surely, though, they can't have ignored the implications of the jingoistic response to the assassination.) regardless, the die is cast, and hardly a peep from the national press about the fall of the sanctuary to the north: last night, while america continued to rattle its sabers and clutch its pearls, canada gave itself over to a conservative parliamentary majority.

i'd like not to think that the media here might have intensified the rattling in order to draw attention away from the dirty tricks played on some voters in key swing constituencies (ridings), tricks that have marked (and sullied) the face of the american electoral process throughout the twenty-first century. has big brother been a naughty influence? from the canadian broadcasting corporation on sunday: "Spokeswoman Francine Bastien said Elections Canada has had reports from several ridings of voters being given false information directing them to the wrong place to vote. Most, but not all, are in Ontario." i don't know whether the affected ridings were essential to the conservative victory, but the tactic bears a close resemblance to the republican style frauds perpetrated on voters since the george w. bush years in the united states.

it doesn't look like elections canada plans to investigate, and now stephen harper, the leader of the conservative party and the continuing prime minister of canada, has seen his longtime wish of breaking the liberal party's hold on politics realized. the liberal party lost more than half of its seats in parliament (down from 77 to 34) in yesterday's election while the conservative party grew its membership in parliament from 143 to 167. as was reported in the christian science monitor today, "A party with socialist roots in the Great Recession, the New Democratic Party, essentially grabbed the left-of-center votes from the Liberals." the ndp surged from 35 seats to 102 and took 31 percent of the popular vote. "The NDP, long a small minority, is now the official opposition party for the first time in Canada’s history, with the charismatic [and dashing] Jack Layton at its helm."

what of the separatists? bloc québécois lost nearly all of its seats in parliament to the ndp, and with only four seats remaining in the house of commons will lose its designation as an official party and will no longer receive public money to fund the staffs of its legislators. jack layton has purportedly promised to reopen discussions on the canadian constitution that would address demands from quebec for more power. the ndp took 60 of 75 seats in that province.

despite the hopes raised by the relative success of layton's party, the glimmer of those hopes is still only visible at the end of the long tunnel of a depressing new mandate. this victory by harper's conservatives isn't in itself a demonstration of the prime minister's belief that liberalism isn't the natural course of canada. it should, however, be a wake up call to those of us who understand that "kids in the hall" could never have happened under a convservative majority, and those of us in particular who live in cascadia. the apparent failure of french canadian separatism shouldn't be any deterrence. rather, it should serve as a testament to the imperative seriousness of our ambitions.

it's time for action. secession now! oregon, washington, british columbia (where the green party managed to win its first seat in parliament in this election). we've got nowhere else to go. well, we americans, anyway. we always assumed we could run away north. nonetheless, we can all agree that things in our respective countries are bad -- and that craft brewing is an important part of our heritage and identity as a nation. the first meeting of bloc cascadian (a party in more ways than one) is to be held in july at peak's pub and brewery in port angeles, washington (date yet to be determined). i've been nominated to act as our nation's first prime resident, so i won't be paying for any drinks. i think we can get seattle to leave its card at the bar. oh, dammit, seattle! stop clutching your pearls!

FORGET FORGETTING; or, HOW TO ESCAPE INTO LITERATURE (i.e. MOVE TO BERLIN)

2011-05-02T11:46:00.000-07:00

jeffrey rosen's article "the web means the end of forgetting" sat on the coffee table for a month because the images that accompanied it in the new york times magazine last july were, as i wrote, cute. (they're not included at the article behind that first link, but they are still up at nytimes.com for anyone with a subscription.) i do remember that i got around to reading it, but i don't remember anything specific from the contents beyond the ideas that are inferrable from the graphics. nonetheless, i remember the gist, and i don't regret not taking the pictures' words at face value and ultimately reading the article -- although i'm not going to read it again.

the gist of the irony implicit in the "ctrl identity" and "delete adolescence" keys and the surge protector with "reset reputation" written above its lit red toggle is the title of the article: the web means the end of forgetting because everything on the internet is saved. and that makes it seriously difficult (if not all but impossible for the more invested) to disestablish a reputation. no recantations of opinion, no cleaning the slate. no rewritings of personal histories, especially if you use the internet to write, and even less so if people use the internet to write about you. the library of congress started archiving every public post on twitter just over a year ago. the t-shirt aphorism of "you are what you tweet" couldn't be more groan inducingly true.

joshua cohen is a writer, and he wrote a short story about it. the title of the story is "emissions," which is also the title of a blog in the story, which was published in the spring 2011 issue of the paris review. (that link of course makes it easy for you to share the blurb with your friends and followers online.) in addition to the topic of online reputations, "emissions" is also about dealing cocaine and a frustrated labor market. we shouldn't even begin to assume, however, that joshua cohen has dealt cocaine for lack of other employment options, because even if we take the easy road of equating his narrator with himself, "This isn't that classic conceit where you tell a story about someone and it's really just a story about yourself." cohen delivers that disclaimer in sentence one, and thereby removes himself twice.

"emissions" tells a story about a young man named richard monomian (mono), but that story is told by an unnamed man (less likely a woman but not impossible) who met mono at a biergarten in berlin before the former moved back to new york. mono had been a coke dealer in new jersey. he'd wanted something else, but hadn't had any luck, even after falsifying his educational and employment information on his various applications to the entry level. one day, he gets a call. he didn't get the job. "are you aware of your Internet?" he wasn't, but it takes him only one quick search to find out that his reputation is a mess, and the mess was made -- well, by him at first, but then related -- at "emmissions," one of "upwards of thirty anonymous weblogs...all irregularly updated, but all updated," by one of his customers. then the action. it's not easy to redact the online record. and that record is permanent. a banner ad in one of my open windows reassures that "online rants can ruin reputations," but the ad by reputation.com looks wildly uninteresting compared to cohen's story, so i'm not clicking through.

as with writing about sex that isn't erotica, writing about the online world for venues that aren't strictly for techy audiences can be tricky, especially as fiction. just like with sex, the internet and our tools for accessing it might be everyday -- even pedestrian -- but they can seem completely out of their milieu when they appear on the page. not in "emissions." cohen's introduction of the problem blog is executed naturally, and his descriptions of the proliferation of the offending information on mono across the internet as well as of a gaming session that mono has with his dealer boss are incorporated seamlessly into the physical world of the text. they're exceptional exactly because they don't stand out of the story like some kind of eye-popping sci-fi interfacing.

does cohen blog? play video games? does it matter? only to the extent that his refreshingly deft treatment of the increasingly ubiquitous experience of tech might be the result of his generational experience (he was born in 1980). in other words, maybe the worst is behind us as far as technology in fiction goes. probably, though, cohen is just a skilled writer. if one thing's for sure, we definitely shouldn't assume that he ever sold cocaine in new jersey. after all, i understand my responsibility to cohen's online reputation. i expect that he'll return the favor and write something nice about me down the road. if not, i can change my name and move. just not to berlin. my mother's maiden name is german. who knows what's already online about my new handle. berlin might be too similar to portland anyway: as cohen's narrator states early, "nobody in Berlin works."

tired of it all? just scared? get offline. get out while you still can. reading away from the internet can be just as fulfillingly distracting. i know a guy named joshua cohen has written some stuff.

WHITE FLAG

2011-04-29T15:37:00.001-07:00

"the gays do not need lil b on their side. that man is trouble." she was there last night. she knows.

DEATH IN SPRING, part 3

2011-04-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

there's a habit i have -- and it's a bad one -- of putting off reading at the many websites and blogs that i should be -- and honestly do like -- following until i've accumulated a day's worth of reading covering two weeks of nearly lost (and impendingly irrelevant) information. i don't spend any less time on the internet as a result, and i probably have less fun too. even if it promises to be interesting, if the reading seems also important, i'll put it in the queue (and then visit brownpapertickets.com one more time to wonder again over whether i should shell out for the erotic memoir writing workshop). acknowledging that one of the benefits of keeping up with reading online is keeping up, i have to admit that mine is a particularly futile and dead end brand of procrastination.

i knew that i wanted to read arthur phillips' guest blogs at powells.com when i noticed his picture at the left side of the site last week, but i still hadn't gotten rid of a note to myself to read an older guest blog on dangerous writing at the same site. so i put phillips off. i never did read the dangerous writing post, but i did finally get around to reading (the first two of) phillips', and on top of the relief that came with catching up to where i could see the present just a few steps ahead of me, one of phillips' posts echoed a recent sense of mine as regards reading, and the validation was enough to help me keep on not keeping up.

i can tell you the story of death in spring by mercè rodoreda, but i can't say that i could tell you what it's about. shit is weird in that village. deformity is terrorized, and so is dissent. but there's chaos in the execution of the terror as well, and it was impossible for me to identify any defensible analogues between the individuals in that society and any historical one that the author might have known. a knowledge gap on my end, maybe. i don't know. i stopped trying. which doesn't mean that rodoreda didn't write death in spring about something specific, but the book is so sensually and evocatively written that it stopped mattering to me whether i got any possible point and had to let myself appreciate it anyway.

i consider myself a careful reader, so i was hesitant to engage anyone in conversation on the book: despite having been captivated by its language, i wasn't sure i had anything appreciable to say. for shame. although the second of arthur phillips' blog posts that i read was incredibly validating of that strife, i also couldn't help but feel chastised.

There is such thing as didactic literature, of course; I can't deny it. I even love some of it. But that hardly means that all literature is didactic. Animal Farm is certainly saying something beyond the story of a pig or two, but that doesn't mean Lolita is saying anything beyond the story of Humbert and Lo. (Molestation is bad? I think we could have expressed that in some other form than Lolita, whereas the magic and wealth of Lolita cannot be expressed in any other form than itself.)

if we decide to read death in spring allegorically, should we end up with just the simple conclusion that oppression (specifically the francoist brand) is bad? that certainly could have been expressed in some other form than rodoreda's book. in other words (and rodoreda's are truly brilliant), "the point" of the book is beside the point.

But the payoff, the beauty of reading non-didactic literature, and reading it non-didactically (reading it without asking what the author is saying), is that you can nevertheless extract something from your reading, something that feels not like a lesson or a moral, but like a communication devised -- in great detail and astonishing specificity -- just for you. As if the author has intended to say something to you about your very specific thoughts, life, actions, aspirations. When the writer lets the moral go, gives up on relevance or applicability -- stops trying to say something easy or hard or true or distillable about life, the country, capitalism, health care, molestation, war, etc. -- then, magically, a spontaneous moral education is possible, brought out of the reader by a unique reaction between text and that one unique reader, a magic from which the imaginary notion of a "writer," a writer trying to "say" something, is totally removed, and totally unnecessary.

thanks, arthur. i almost want to cry. i did cry, actually, the day i read most of death in spring, which seemed particularly poignant after hearing the stations of the cross delivered on the first sunny day of the season. rodoreda's lush prose, which quietly and impressionistically layers its images of violence over equally febrile descriptions of the natural environment and its cycles, was just the sympathetic hand in a certainly contemplative mood. "for a time that was not time, i lay with the cold and heat, a rattle in my throat, on top of the rock, as if i had turned to rock...during that time when Time did not exist, the pain in my forehead had grown." something like that. rodoreda's way with words makes it possible to read profundity into even her simplest descriptions, although those descriptions do lose some of their force when they're removed from the total emotion of the ("musical," "rhythmic") whole.

i hope that lets me off the hook for not giving more examples and, in general, for not having said anything about what death in spring is trying to say. i'd appreciate the favor, because i still have quite a bit of reading to do -- as always, but now with my resolve maybe somewhat renewed.

you all found out last week when the deal was announced, but i was excited this morning to read that elif shafak will be putting out a new book. i bet it's about ethnic identity.