Saturday, February 24, 2007

Guerilla Huggers in Valencia

I found this on YouTube. If you ignore the fuzzy love-fest, this video gives you a good sense of what a blurry, jiggly Valencia is like at night.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Ladies and Gentlemen...BOB LOG III!!

Bob Log III is coming to Barcelona next month. I am going to do what I can to make sure that I am there again front and center. It's been a couple of years, Bob and I have some catching up to do.
Enjoy

January/February 2007

Reading
Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig
Brooklyn Follies – Paul Auster
America – Franz Kafka
The Art of Stealing – Chris Brookmeyer
The Invention of Solitude – Paul Auster
Oracle Night – Paul Auster
Chis y Garabis – Paloma Bordons
Eats, Shoots and Leaves – Lynne Truss
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman – Ernest J. Gaines
Ghost Stories – Roald Dahl
The New Spaniards – John Hopper

Listening
Everything All the Time – Band of Horses
Irresistible Bliss – Soul Coughing
Kicking Television – Wilco
Dingly Dell – Lindisfarne
I’m Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass – Yo La Teng
Pearl Jam – Live at Benaroya Hall
The Shins – Wincing Away the Night
Norah Jones – Not Too Late
Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Love Bad News (archives)

In order to properly tell why Live at Benaroya Hall by Pearl Jam was a significant find for me, I’ll need to go back a number of years and introduce a new character. Go back to the late fall or early winter of 1992. I had recently acquired my driver’s license and had gone to Relics Records (when it was originally run by Jerry and the other guy whose name is escaping me) with D Moore. After doing some browsing we met back together to share our finds. D had come up with a Black Sabbath bootleg with some old Ozzy tunes and I had uncovered a Pearl Jam bootleg called “Black” which was the MTV unplugged performance. For reasons at which I’ve long lost track, I willingly swapped the Pearl Jam bootleg for the Black Sabbath bootleg. I think my logic was something to do with the fact that Ozzy was no longer with Black Sabbath and Pearl Jam at this time was still a bunch of young pups, so naturally the Sabbath disc would be better. We went back to D’s house where we listened earnestly to our new purchases, while undoubtedly thumbing through his collection of horror comic books or perhaps discussing the logistical differences in musicianship between Hank Sherman of Mercyful Fate and Andy LaRocque of King Diamond, or something equally tantalizing. The Black Sabbath album had turned out to be crap; the sound quality was terrible. D’s Pearl Jam album however had proven to be the better buy. At that point in time I had been minimally interested in Pearl Jam. I had bought the Ten album as was required by all angst ridden, long haired, pimply young lads. It was listening to it in D’s bedroom stripped away of from the studio magic and hearing the band rage through “State of Love and Trust” and “Alive” acoustically that made me sit up and take notice. The clincher was that particular version of “Black”, which on Ten had been one of the songs that was too slow and I would skip through. There was something raw about the acoustic version that got to me.
I immediately took my leave of D and drove through the snow and sub-zero temperatures the 20 minutes back downtown to Relics Records. I tried to exchange my Black Sabbath record for another copy of the Pearl Jam bootleg. As it turned out that was the only copy that they had, but he would happily buy back the Sabbath disc for 1/5 of what I had paid for it.
That was 1992 and as silly as it seems I have been seeking a proper Pearl Jam acoustic disc since then. I had come across a few other bootlegs over the years, but they were bad quality. Now, fast forward to late winter 2007 in Valencia, Spain where a happy-go-lucky, long haired, no longer pimply faced, man-child is browsing the shelves of El Corte Ingles’s Musical Pyramid shop in Nuevo Centro. I was looking specifically for either Modest Mouse or The Shins’ new albums. On my way from the M’s to the S’s, I saw the bright yellow and orange album cover under Pearl Jam. It wasn’t the 7 disc that D had bought several years back. This was a double disc with 26 songs, recorded in October of 2003. While its version of the song “Black” may not be quite as ambitious and fresh as it had been in ’92, but the acoustic versions “Nothing As it Seems”, “Man of the Hour”, “Sleight of Hand”, “Fatal” included alongside covers of Victoria Williams’s “Crazy Mary”, Johnny Cash’s “25 Minutes to Go” and Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” more than makes up for it.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Fallas 2007

March must be drawing near. Outside my window the more impatient Valencianos are already letting off their petardos (firecrackers). They’re warming up their wick-lighting thumbs. They’re shaking off the cobwebs of their throwing arms. I have tried unsuccessfully to explain fallas to those who have never experienced it. This year I hope to do a better job. I, myself have only experienced it firsthand once and I am dreading while at the same time a bit giddy by the experience that is going to overtake the communidad in two weeks.

How do you compare something to which there is no comparison? For instance, I know what fireworks and firecrackers are, but the prior knowledge that gives me an image of those does absolutely no justice to what fireworks and firecrackers are capable of being. Every day from March 1st to March 19th at 2.00 pm, the city lets off mascletas in the town center in front of the town hall. Every day at 2.00, hundreds sometimes thousands gather around the strings of firecrackers that explode with the ferocity and force of…



You see, this is where I trail off. What do they explode with the force of? I have nothing to compare it to. Fallas is like nothing that I had ever experienced. Instead I can only explain how the old lady next to me warned me not to close my mouth or the force would burst my eardrums. `…They explode with the force of ‘burst eardrums’´ (?) It doesn’t work, but you get the point that these things are seriously loud.



On or around March 1, various parts of the city of Valencia are closed to traffic as giant several storied-high papier mache sculptures adorn the streets and plazas. These sculptures are the fallas themselves. Artists spend an entire year creating and preparing these for their 5 day viewings. They are generally made to spoof global or local politics. Every year the city government sponsors a falla that is placed in front of the town hall. This is considered the grand falla of the celebrations. It is excluded from the contests that are held to determine which are the best fallas and is the last one to burn. Its incineration signals the end of fallas for that year. Last year I was fortunate enough to see the creation of the government sponsored falla, “Imagine”. “Imagine” was created by Ramon Espinosa, the father of a friend. His sculpture is on record as the largest falla ever created. It depicted a woman holding her newborn child towards hope and prosperity with evil and corruption at her back. His design had been inspired by both John Lennon’s song of the same title as well as the paintings of Gustav Klimt.



What is the most amazing part of this experience to me is the fact that these artists spend an entire year working tirelessly on these sculptures to see them burned to the ground in a pile of ash and cinders during La Crema on March 19th. On March 20th the artists go back to work to prepare for the next year. The history of this tradition goes back hundreds of years. March 19th is Dia de San Jose (St. Joseph´s Day). San Jose is the patron saint of carpenters and on this day the carpenters would do a little spring cleaning of their shops by bringing out all of their old scraps and useless bits which they would pile up and burn. Somewhere along the way someone got creative and molded those useless pieces into an effigy of sorts. From there it became an art form and developed into what it is today.

‘Los Castillos’ are essentially seven nights of fireworks displays. You have to understand that these aren’t quite the same as sitting on the bank of the Cedar River and watching the show from May’s Island choreographed to Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American”. While the synchronicity to Mr. Greenwood’s timeless ostracizing call to unnecessary arms is nothing short of… (there it is again, how do I compare levels of mediocrity in saccharine-sticky patriotic country songs?) Last year I tried desperately to capture it all on camera and finally gave up when I realized I was only capturing a fraction of the show. Los Castillos are set off from the original gates to the city, Las Torres Serranos, near the riverbed. The show lasts about 30 minutes and the colors that dance through the sky for those 30 minutes seem to disrupt any natural harmony in the heavens. I remember watching what appeared to be the sky being ripped apart above me, thinking that this is what the Apocalypse might look like. At times the smoke from the recently discharged explosions got so thick that there were just blasts of indistinguishable color erupting from behind the black shroud.

As if the din of Armageddon erupting in every direction wasn’t enough to keep you awake, every morning between 6 and 8 is what is called la despertá, which translates roughly as the wake-up call. It is this portion of the festivities that exits solely to make sure that if you did nod off for a quick nap, it won’t last long. Local falleros and falleras (the official celebrants of the festival) on their way home from the previous night´s festivities bring along a brass band and march up and down the streets with the horns and drums taking the lead while they toss off a few more firecrackers.




I have been told that Valencia did a major international push behind this year’s festival. America’s Cup will begin in the port of Valencia in April and go until July. The city sees this as their opportunity to put itself on the map. It has been estimated that close to one million people (these figures have been supplied to me by a group of 10th grade students, so do what you will with them) will come to visit Valencia for fallas this year, this is 1 million extra people being crammed into a city that is built to hold 800,000. The anticipation swells as I see them setting up the central plaza for the mascleta. But damn, that’s a lot of people.


http://www.fallasfromvalencia.com/
http://www.fallas.com/