Sunday, October 9, 2011
AUSTERITY MEASURES, part 2
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.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
AUSTERITY MEASURES
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.
Friday, October 7, 2011
SUPER SAD, PROBABLY TRUE
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.”
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.”
Thursday, October 6, 2011
(UNA SEMANA EN) MA VIE EN PISOS
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?
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?
Monday, October 3, 2011
HOW TO GRIN AND BEER IT -- OR WINE; or, CRUZCAMPO IS ONLY GOOD FOR BAD PUNS
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.
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.
Friday, September 30, 2011
TALK TO HIM; or, HOW TO SPEAK SEVILLANO
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.
como yo: speak sevillano. or try, at least! sink or swim, chicas. go ahead. talk to him.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
SON LOS TOREROS, part 2
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.
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.
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