LA GASEOSA

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

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...?

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

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

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

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

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.