Art for all

Once there was a small, lost boy. He searched under rocks and beyond his shadow, but he never found himself. He played with the stars and whispered secrets to the clouds, kept by the wind. He called out to the tallest mountains and the oldest elders, but no one answered.

One day he was leaping planet to planet collecting dreams when he tripped over a can that rang like a bell. He took it and pressed its head, and a big flame of color flooded everything, and the ground was no longer the ground, nor the sky the sky, everything was color, color was everything. He looked at it and went blind from it. The boy was amazed. Suddenly a brightness made him close his eyes, and when he opened them again he saw a small boy in front of him, watching him.

"Who are you?" he asked. The small boy smiled and touched his hand.
"I'm your smile," he said gently, becoming light and melting into his arm, his shoulder, into him. The small, lost boy took a breath and looked up, smiled, and heard the wind tell him something beautiful.

Ever since that day, the boy has leaped from planet to planet hunting dreams and painting his path, and in this way reflects himself
searches for himself
finds himself.

The modern little prince in question is not a storybook character, but rather Granada-based graffiti artist Raúl Ruiz, commonly known by his nom de plume, el niño de las pinturas (the boy of the paintings). The niño, or Sex, as he also signs his name, is responsible for much of the graffiti in and around Granada.

Walk anywhere in the city, and you're likely to notice the art in the unlikeliest of places... beside the windows on gray stone shops, on the sides of houses, along roadside walls, among the winding streets of the ancient Albaicín neighborhood...

The city as museum.

Graffiti art is, by its very nature, ephemeral, fragile. The scrawled names of urban travelers, messages waiting to be deciphered, drawings, paintings, portraits, there one day, the next painted over with a fresh coat of paint, washed away with rain, faded by pollution.

It is subversive, challenging traditional definitions of public and private space, and how we use them. Its artists, urban guerrillas painting the city under the cover of night, fleeing policeman and thousand euro fines.

But if the city is a gallery, it's one with no explanatory labels and no artist biographies. The art must speak for itself ... not as a monologue, but in dialogue with those who view it. Perhaps it is for this reason that el niño has said that "it is the onlooker who makes the painting." After all, urban spaces are not static nor uniform: they are constructed by each individual as he experiences them. An artist can paint the city with his lived experiences, but once he has gone, it is up to the passerby to interpret what he sees, through a worldview that's his own.

Now it's your turn: take a digital stroll through some of el niño's art, and if you have the chance, come to Granada to make your own path through the museum.

"Making things I break, to put them together again, and to break them again, that's how I spend my time... and time runs out ... and life doesn't wait."

"Time doesn't exist."

Is it art, a social project, an act of rebellion...?
It's up to us to decide.

Check out more of el niño's graffiti on the obras section of his website, and don't miss the neat panoramas.

Carnaval Aguileno

It’s Saturday afternoon and there are at least two loud dance remixes blasting through the streets to accompany the dancers in the parade. It’s the fourth time the parade has passed down our street (the same people in the same costumes as far as I can tell) and we have to watch because the volume of the music makes doing anything else impossible. Carnival has once again returned to Aguilas.

Carnival started Thursday night, February 19 and has lasts until the last day of February. On the first night everyone in Águilas goes up to the castle on the hill overlooking the sea to lure down the musona, the muse of Carnival. The muse is a fantastic creature, half human, half animal, who must be led down to the center of town by her tamer. The tamer has a difficult job keeping the muse from running off the path and into people’s homes, and keeping her from “attacking” the children. She is a wild animal, after all. Meanwhile, all the Aguileños want to start getting drunk but the party can’t start until the muse reaches the Plaza de España, or “la Glorieta” as it’s referred to locally. Therefore, everyone makes it their personal responsibility to help bring the muse down by chanting, blowing conch shells, and ringing bells. The townspeople dress up in fur, feathers, shells, and a local sea grass called esparto.

La Musona

I was invited to participate in all this by my friend Violeta and her mother. We decked ourselves in esparto, potato sacks, and shell-adorned hats and hiked up the hill chanting and drinking cuerva out of plastic bottles. Cuerva, not to be confused with Cuervo, is a local specialty served only during Carnival. It’s something between jungle juice and sangria. Everyone has their own recipe, but most include red wine, lemon Fanta, cinnamon, sugar, and a mix of other liquors. Violeta’s grandmother had an excellent recipe with gin and cognac that I enjoyed a little too much.

For about the nine days of Carnival the Aguileños drink, dance, and wind their way through packed crowds thumping with the bass of house music. La Glorieta transforms from a quiet plaza with a fountain surrounded by shady palm trees and bougainvilleas to an outdoor dance club. Tents and bars- “chiringuitos”- are set up on the sidewalks. Everyone is in costume and it’s hard to tell if you’re looking at a man or a woman, a child or an adult, a white or a black person, a king or a beggar. The ironic thing about this is that Spain borrows many of its Carnival elements from Brazil, where the biggest party in the world is held every February in Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil, white people paint themselves black and black people paint themselves white to release some of the social tensions surrounding the role of race in daily life, or so say the anthropologists I studied in college. Brazil is similar to the U.S. in that it has a history of slavery and a legacy of social inequality. Therefore, in Brazil, when people play with racial identities during Carnival it has a purpose. In Spain, where that legacy of slavery doesn’t exist, it’s hard to justify or understand why it’s still okay for white people to pretend to be black. I chalk it up to a lack of political correctness and strict social rules about respect and diversity. In any case, during Carnival everything is turned upside down and inside out, and the alcohol doesn’t help.

Two in one: a white man becomes a black woman

On Friday night I was invited to participate in a parade/mob with my Spanish friends. My friend Ana’s brother played Don Carnal, another important character in the celebration. Don Carnal represents all the carnal pleasures of Carnival- the drinking, dancing, and crazy costumes- while Doña Cuaresma represents the sacrifices of Lent. The federation of Carnival associations elects the person from the best peña, or Carnival school, that will play each of these characters. Ana’s brother was chosen, so he hosted a big party at his home where friends and family gathered to start his parade/mob. Meanwhile, Doña Cuaresma had her own party and mob parade, and the two groups met in the main plaza to battle it out, the usual Temporary Pleasure vs. Eternal Salvation debate. Natch, I was in the Pleasure camp with Don Carnal.

Ana and her brother, Don Carnal

On Saturday the first big parade marched through the streets. This is the sort of thing you’ve probably seen in pictures of the Brazilian Carnival: beautiful ladies with lots of makeup and glitter, tight costumes, and huge feather headdresses. The Saturday night parade lasted five hours, and smaller versions were performed the following two days. Suffice it to say I was sick of the same four dance hits by the end of the weekend. Overall it was fun to see, and even more fun to participate in. After hearing “Just wait ‘til Carnival comes!” for five months, I can finally understand the excited anticipation.

Going Crazy with the Wind

In Cervantes´famous novel, the delusional Don Quijote wages battle against the windmills of central Spain, convinced that they´re giants. Probably owing to this story, the iconic Spanish windmill always seemed partly mythical to me, a creative device of an imaginative author, not necessarily something to be found in real life.

Here in Andalucía, however, it´s hard to ignored the windmills' existence since they crowd the rolling green hills as much as the orange and the olive.

Even harder to ignore is the wind itself, especially in Cádiz, whose proximity to the ocean only intensifies the air currents. The weight of the wind here is reflected in the language; locals have words to describe it from all four cardinal directions. It's never the viento, or wind, that's bad today, it's the levante, the wind from the East.

For better or worse, the wind is undoubtedly a key element of the local experience. This winter, for example, I've gotten used to feeling permanently off-balance. Even if I manage to adjust my body in such a way as to remain upright, a single turn down a different street means I've got to start the balancing act all over again. When I run on the beach I'm either twice as fast as usual with the wind at my back or five times as slow, as it pushes against my face and chest. After only a few minutes outdoors, my hair inevitably looks teased.

But none of these problems compares to the challenge of dealing with the wind when it's raining. In Cádiz, the rain doesn´t fall from above, it attacks from the side. This tends to render the umbrella a completely useless invention. 

Most natives forgo it all together, resigning themselves to the fate of getting wet. The alternative is to keep it pointed directly into the wind and adjust for its endless shifts in direction but in this case, the umbrella usually ends up serving more like a parachute before turning completely inside out and you end up resembling Don Quijote, fighting your own invisible giant.

As far as I can tell, there are two main ways of adjusting to this blustery environment. The first is to fight against it, whether that means moving your running route inland, plastering your head every morning with firm hold hair spray, or bulldozing the evermore dramatic dunes on the beach, all common practices in Cádiz.

The second is to take a cue from the windmills and harness the energy coming at you. 

Run three times as fast when you´re lucky enough to have a current pushing you from behind, learn how to wind surf or kite surf or fly a kite, meditate on the waves whose moods, dependent on the wind´s every whim, you might be surprised to find as infinite as your own. 

Most importantly, don´t worry too much when you´re told that today's levante is the kind that drives people crazy.

 

Short video clip of wind on the beach, courtesy of Russ Payne

el día de la investidura

Today marks a wonderful moment in US history. It is a day that I know I will look back on in the years to come and be glad that I was somwhat a part of it, as one of the "fellow Americans," albeit not present and if only as a spectator, watching the procession from miles and miles across the Atlantic Ocean (al otro lado del charco, as the Spanish say, their version of "other side of the pond").

After a long day of work, both in class and out of class, during the school day and after, I raced down at 6:00 PM local time (midday in Washington) to the sala de profesores where the rest of the profesorado was currently on break from the first of their once weekly marathon sessions of English learning that they are obliged to take as a part of the EU's bilingual school plan, and asked where the nearest available television was located). I dashed to the multipurpose room and turned on TVE 2, and right at that moment Mr. Obama was about to begin his speech.

As he spoke, a newscaster translated his address, and yet I did not find it anymore distracting nor too difficult to listen instead to the English behind. I will say that I was humbled and moved by his speech, and I will also say that I commend him for his own humility and the very effortless way he does seem to be able to unite traditional views and feelings with a sense of reknewed sincerity, security, and solidarity. It was a momentous occasion to be sure.

And to wrap up the day, I participated in a three person interview with the local Cadena SER that was doing a piece on reactions from different perspectives, in this case one recent cubano import and  local balonmano sports hero, one ciudadrealeño living in Miami, and myself, one estadounidense currently living in the Ciudad. 

He is a man with whom people feel comfortable. In whom they can put their trust. In whom they want to put their trust. It is not wholly new, but rather is a calculated and magistral union of real and current views with more traditional and deeply rooted US of American ideals. And just about wherever one goes, the salient message and feeling seems to be everywhere and in every corner of the world: something different and good is in the air.

felíz año nuevo, y que les pase bien!

Flamenco and Fiction

Having a house guest has made my life busy this week; it also has sent me on adventures around Granada rather than sitting around on someone's sofa eating chocolate and immersing myself in the fictional lives of the characters on the American TV shows we watch on DVD.

Last night, I went to a flamenco show with my out of town guest, LL. The venue was cave-like, in one of the oldest areas of the city, and there were under 15 people in the audience, all perched on little stools. LL and I nursed our complimentary drinks and waited for the show to start. As we chatted about post-college life, I wondered what to expect from the performance. Most of my knowledge of flamenco came from television specials featuring dramatically made-up women, an Andalusian exchange student in high school, and a strange Lorca play I'd seen in DC.

When the artists came out, they weren't any different than the ordinary Spaniards I see on the street: a youngish man with dark spiked hair, skinny jeans, and sleek track shoes; a guitarist with hair tied back in a ponytail, a hoop earring in one ear. The performance was unpretentious, but the musicians were skilled and the music impressive, filling up the tiny room with elaborate finger-picked patterns, vocal trills, and nostalgic poetry that didn't strike me as so different from the dolorous tango lyrics I'd heard in Buenos Aires. Every time the music crescendoed suddenly, the British lady sitting next to me got a startled look on her face.

After the opening number, two other men (the rhythm section) and a young woman (the dancer) went to the stage, and the five of them arranged themselves to fit in the small space. The performance continued, now with intricate clapped, stomped, and snapped rhythms. The lyrics slid together into a string of sounds, but I could still interpret the emotion they expressed: raw, despairing, occasionally hopeful. I found myself staring at the faces of the performers: the dancer with her rigid, anguished expression; the guitarist, his face lit from time to time with a goofy, delighted smile; and the singer, his mouth in a perpetual smirk, his eyes fixed on the dancer. You know that expression: "eating someone up with your eyes"? Yeah, it was kind of like that. Despite the lack of rings on the appropriate fingers, I imagined that both were in committed relationships with other people, but were sleeping together.

After the show, I asked LL what she had thought of the performance, and whether she'd noticed the charge between the singer and dancer. She hadn't. I admitted that I wasn't sure what the narrative of flamenco is, whether that tension was part of the performance or the private lives of the performers, and she nodded, mumbling a polite response. We moved on to other topics.

Nevertheless, the impression has stuck with me, and I'm still thinking about those strangers on stage -- not my invented story, but that act of creation we take part in every day in every one of our interactions. It's the haziness between acting and reality, fiction and truth, following me around even when I'm not studying literature.

Valencia

After two and a half short months in Spain my Christmas vacation started this past Friday. After a rowdy faculty Christmas dinner and few hours of sleep Brandon and I headed up to Murcia where we joined Anna, another auxiliar, and left for Valencia. After some initial confusion while checking into the hostel and trying to establish that Brandon wasn't a wanted criminal we headed out into the historic heart of the city for pizza and a night tour.









The next day we did a marathon tour of the same area, the central market, the restaurant/bar neighborhoods, all the little stands selling local products and handicrafts, all the big plazas, and all the crucial monuments. We enjoyed breakfast at Starbucks (I missed American coffee) and a lunch of paella, cerveza, and pollo. At night we did a DIY bar crawl with some Australians we met in our hostel and some Spanish kids we met on the street. The bars are more expensive than in Aguilas but definitely more fun. There was a Brazilian band playing and I got to sing along to some songs in Portuguese (not to brag about my polyglotism or anything). On the way home I learned the word "battler," Australian slang for someone between a loser and a trooper.









The next day I somehow was the only one with a hangover after a mere four or five drinks. My body rejects alcohol I guess. As a real battler I carried on to the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciencies. The name is in Valenciano, the local language. This place was amazing. If you are ever in Valencia, go just to see the architecture. Inside there is a theater, a science museum, and an aquarium. We only went into the aquarium because the place is so expensive. Admission there was over 18 euros with a student discount.









In brief Valencia is fantastic because of the following reasons: horchata, paella, seafood, beaches, architecture, nightlife, shopping, linguistic diversitry, and a dried riverbed that has been converted into a park. Go there.

Click on the title of the blog to see my facebook photo album.

Let it snow(ish)

I’m writing this from my living room in Granada, the electric heater blowing warm air down on me as I sit on the sofa, bundled up with tights under my jeans and a heavy sweatshirt. Our table wears its three layers of winter tablecloths, and underneath the space heater is chugging away. The windows are fogged up, but if I get up close or crack one open—as my flatmate did just moments ago—I can see the sleet, yes, sleet falling outside.

Welcome to southern Spain in the winter.

The other day I received an email from my best friend’s father, and he said, and I quote: “Baltimore is rainy and cold today-I’m picturing [you] warm and sunny in the south of Spain. You needn’t correct me if that’s wrong.”

I won’t correct him (though he may be reading this, and if so, I offer my apologies), but I think that you all have the right to know the truth: Granada in the winter is not warm, nor exclusively sunny. This city, located in a valley surrounded by the Sierra Nevada, is known for the most extreme temperatures in Spain, according to my flatmate. In the summer, I’m told, the heat is often unbearable, and in the winter, it’s not uncommon for temperatures to dip below freezing.

Though the weather here is positively mild when compared to the Midwest or northern Europe, the almost universal lack of central heating does require some rather creative solutions to the cold. One is the use of long, heavy tablecloths, under which hide legs and space heaters. Sometimes, the heater is built into the table. I’m also a fan of the electric blanket (perfect when switched on fifteen minutes before bedtime), and have taken to going for a run when I need to get the blood running to my frozen hands and feet. When you add to these the ordinary techniques—coats worn inside, tights or leggings layered under pants, laptops lying on one’s lap, cramming onto small sofas with three of your closest friends, imbibing a constant stream of hot beverages—it makes for a rather comfortable winter, overall. Still, waiting while the laundry hangs to dry is a rather long and laborious process.

The sun’s supposed to reemerge tomorrow, and by midweek the temperature’s predicted to reach fifty again: more normal weather for December in Granada. Until then, however, I’ll keep layering on the clothes and tablecloths, and hope that the freezing rain doesn’t make the paving stones too slippery. You can bet they’re not salting the pavement.