guirilandia

Guirilandia 2005-2008

2008-09-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

I have taken a break from blogging and now I am back under a new name: Unnatural Habitat. This blog will encompass a much wider range of interests, though from time to time I will mention a thing or two about Barcelona.

Hope to see you there. Adios.

Raptor Con in Action

2008-04-01T15:42:00.001-07:00

"Distraction" and "snatch"

Making off with the "goods"

"Vacay plans goes blooey"

Larry Kovaks revealed this dastardly technique in last February's crime report, Variations of the Gypmeister Raptor Con.

Also, check out his latest ultra-violent report, Small Time Crooks.

Photos from elPeriodico.

Everything you always wanted to know about Gypmeisters, JDLRs and transvestite distraction artists (but were afraid to ask)

2008-02-18T04:57:00.000-08:00

Larry Kovaks – Barcelona’s premier guiri detective – has posted two riveting new cases of dastardly deception.

Variations of the Gypmeister Raptor Con

The Cloaking Con

Kovaks baby, Kovaks

2007-11-20T03:36:00.000-08:00

Anyone who thought they could hold Kovaks down has got another thing coming - make that two. Kovaks has been absent for four months now. I was looking for him in the scummiest dive bars, in all the tapas joints I know he hangs in, I even emailed him - and nothing. But finally this morning he got back to me. Apparently he went “deep cover” for a case he was working on. I don’t know what that means, but I sure am glad he’s here again.

He just published two cases on his blog. One is the second part of The Danger of the Perfect Brunette, and the other is an all new case called The Upskirt Con.

M. L. Estefanía in The New Entertainer

2007-10-30T05:52:00.000-07:00

My article about Spain's most prolific author, Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, has been published by The New Entertainer, a newspaper published in Almeria, Spain (check out their website here).

Lenox, the editor, contacted me via email to see if he could publish this article, which was originally published on this blog. Of course I said yes, and I just got the paper a few days ago with my blog article printed in it – as a feature.

A lot of people think blogs and blogging are a waste of time. Well, for anyone that writes, here’s proof that it isn’t. Almost all of my writing gigs have come about as a result of Guirilandia. Who would have thought?

You can read my article on Estefanía on this blog, or download the pdf version here.

Si a todo

2007-10-25T01:04:00.000-07:00

“Si a todo” means, as you all know, “Yes to everything”. This video of Salvador Dali on the 1950s game show What's My Line? is great because of all the people they could have picked, they picked the one who could literally say “yes” to everything! A classic bit of subversion a la Daliniana.

Of course, the title of this post is ironic, because if you say “si a todo” to anyone in Spain they will probably start giggling. This is because in newspapers like La Vanguardia and El Periodico there are daily hundreds of classified ads for “erotic services” which use the term “si a todo”. These range from “massage” services to something called “relax”. The term “relax” means to engage in or solicit erotic services. By cleverly adopting an English word that doesn’t mean anything remotely close to “engaging in or soliciting erotic services”, the Spanish have dressed up licentious behaviour in the garb of European sophistication. Anglicize any word in non-English-speaking European countries and instantly you have sophistication. It’s like an American utilizing non-English terms. I myself am guilty of it a veces. It tricks your conversation partner into thinking you are much more profound than you really are, and impresses school children, blockheads and intellectuals.

So, instead of saying “Voy de putas” or “I go to the whores” a Spanish gent can say something like “I’m going to relax”. Pretty clever! Anyway, what I was getting at is that “si a todo” is the headline or selling point of all these ads. “Todo” – or “everything” – is a huge concept, but within this context I’ll leave the rest up to your filthy imagination. “Si todo” is the motto of every good libertine, or temp worker.

I bet Bill Gates didn’t realize this when he was developing the Spanish version of Windows, because every time you move files to another folder destination and the files already exist there, a prompt will ask you if you would like to replace that file. You can choose “si”, or you can choose “si as todo” to save time. Or so you thought!

In Spanish, unfortunately, you may be saying “si a todo” on a daily basis without even knowing what you are saying. Saying “yes” to everything in English is not a big deal, in fact it is quite common amongst Republican party hacks and street vendors in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

It’s easy to wrap this post up. So if you’re ever in Spain and you meet a guy who says, “Man, I’m going to relax”, or if they have the bad habit of saying “si” to everything, just watch out, or at least carry a jimmy hat.

I hope this was an edifying experience.

Those dirty cebolletas

2007-10-15T07:23:00.000-07:00

I know, it’s been a long time since my last post. I planned on retiring Guirilandia, but I couldn’t resist posting this video documentation of that disgraceful phenomenon called Rubbing the Little Onion, which I wrote about many months ago. Even Larry Kovaks is concerned. He might investigate.

Previously: Rubbing the Little Onion

***

Forgive me if this video has been blogged about before. I haven’t looked at any blogs for the last two months.

***

FYI, I will be blogging at my new domain unnaturalhabitat.com in the near future. I’m jumping into the world of open source code and it’s going to take me a while to get this thing ready for the public. Until then, I might post something every once in a while on Guirilandia. The truth is, I am sick of guiris and Barcelona in general. The idea behind starting Unnatural Habitat is to have a larger concept to play around with.

Barcelona in 1975 – Antonioni’s The Passenger

2007-07-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger - unimaginatively titled El Reportero in Spanish - is playing at Cinemes Meliès, Barcelona’s art house cinema. I just watched it yesterday and it is too fresh in my mind to properly critique. BUT, check it out if you can. Tomorrow is the last day it's showing at the cinema.

Antonioni, I admit, has put me to sleep a couple of times, but The Passenger is truly a gem of a movie. Starring Jack Nicholson and featuring the artistry of Michelangelo Antonioni, this movie had me marveling the whole way through. From the deserts of northern Africa, to Munich, to the south of

Spain

, this is an existential movie par excellence, perfectly playing on the theme of rootlessness and identity. Jack Nicholson is a disillusioned reporter who decides to switch identities with a dead man. But, the new identity brings with it some serious baggage, and this leads to danger and romance and a fantastic conclusion in the remote and dusty regions of Almeria

Spain

. My only complaint would be the acting of the female lead, Maria Schneider. She needed a little chispa – or spark – as they say here in Spain. Nicholson, however, is awesome as always.

A pleasant surprise for me was a twenty minute segment in Barcelona. The year is 1975 – that’s when old Francisco Franco kicked the bucket in case you didn’t know – and this is one of the best depictions of Barcelona I have seen on film. Of course there’s the Ramblas, the obligatory Gaudi architecture, Park Ciutadella ... but the great pre-EasyJet Barcelona is very palpable*.

The trailer doesn’t do the movie justice, but just check out this amazing shot from near the end of the movie (in Almeria Spain).

Cinemes Melies is a great – though slightly rundown – original version art house cinema in Barcelona. It’s also cheap at 4 euros a ticket.

* One hilarious thing is that Spaniards are constantly arguing in Antonioni’s Spain. It’s definitely a Spanish quirk that I’ve noticed, and for an Italian to depict Spaniards as loud-mouthed arguers is quite something!

Vacation is over

2007-07-12T05:17:00.000-07:00

Two recent movies that feed into the guiri phenomenon, this time from the point of view of xenophobic Americans.

HOSTEL

Synopsis:

3 backpackers are in Amsterdam where they get locked out of their youth hostel. They are invited into a man's house where he tells them of a hostel somewhere in eastern Europe where the women are all incredibly hot and have a taste for American men. When they get there, everything is too good to be true - the hostel is "to die for" Written by CROESKE (on IMdb)

TURISTAS

Synopsis:

John Stockwell's thriller Turistas begins when vacationers end up stranded in a little Brazilian village after a bus accident wipes out their transportation. Although many in the group are experienced when it comes to unusual travel destinations, none of them are able to get a handle on this strange village. They soon come to realize that they are stranded somewhere with something much more dangerous than they could have imagined. Josh Duhamel, Melissa George, and Olivia Wilde co-star. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

The best parts of the trailer are the intertitles:

THE ONLY THING WORSE
THAN NOT KNOWING WHERE YOU ARE
IS NOT KNOWING
IF YOU WILL SURVIVE

Guirilandia goes abroad

2007-07-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

An aptly named tapas bar across the big puddle is seeking help:

Assistant Manager for Spanish Wine & Tapas Bar (Greenwich Village

Seeking assistant manager passionate about Spanish wine, food, and culture for a small family owned tapas bar located in the heart of the village. We are looking for someone who is hard-working, committed, enthusiastic, honest, and always profesional.
Wednesday, July 11th 4-5PM
Thursday, July 12th 2-3PM

Las Ramblas
170 W. 4th St. (Bet. 6th & 7th Aves.)NYC

There, you can be sure, the beers will be extra large.

Woody never did this

2007-07-08T04:11:00.000-07:00

Sitting in Café Principal, watching the freak scene of Muntaner boy toys, micro skirts, computer geeks and Japanese guiris circling the block. Two Moritz, two Ambars, the afternoon winds into early evening and it’s hot and humid. Bochorno they call it, that sweltering summer heat, which never is that intolerable in Barcelona despite what some people say. It just makes folk slightly more violent and horny than usual. These five thick-wristed Dutch guys with scuffed work boots and matching black t-shirts sit at the table next to me. They all look the same with short cropped blond hair, chinos cut off right above the knee and military cargo shorts, dirty fingernails, and each with rolling tobacco on the table in front of him. They can’t speak a word of Spanish, and I’m amused at the little key phrases they have memorized. Of course, “Un cerveza, por favor” is one of them, then there’s “Un café americano, por favor”, or even better, “Un café negro, por favor” – which doesn’t go over too well with the Dominican waiter, but he’s used to the gaggle of guiris and freaks which take up temporary residence on the outside terrace. Suddenly, one guy hops by on one foot at incredible velocity; hops down the sidewalk and disappears behind the crowds of tourists out searching for authentic Barcelona and the locals buying 40 inch LCD televisions on credit (so they can spend their vacations at home during the month of August watching HD movies about the exotic lands and hot sex they will not have the chance to see or get). The Dutch guys are laughing so hard about the random hopping fellow that I start laughing too, signaling to them some kind of depraved alcoholic complicity. One of them turns to me and asks, “Perdone, sabes donde esta la casa putas, por favor?” Ah the bochorno! The gaggle of guiris, the city center. Oh how I can tell the summer is on. Those mythical euro-bringing-golden-egg-laying tourists will saturate puticlubs and chiringuitos, they will wander with their backpacks on reverse, maps in hand, I will sit back and enjoy it all – the cycle repeats.

An Indian guiri in Italy

2007-07-01T05:50:00.000-07:00

Indian is Indian, and Italian is Italian, and never the twain shall meet. That is, unless you happen to be dark-skinned and strolling through the streets of Italy – and are wearing more than a loin cloth. Indian-Canadian comedian Russell Peters talks about being a guiri in Italy, and how people assumed he was Italian because of his skin color and “western” sartorial style. I totally relate to him. I’m often mistaken for Mexican - or even Spanish or Moroccan - and when I tell people I’m American with Eurasian ancestry, they are always amazed. But Americans are supposed to be blonde and fat! Blonde and fat like the beer we swill when we are unleashed on the streets of Barcelona!

A funny story: a couple years ago I was on my way to the market in my old neighborhood of Sant Pere and coming down the street was this Moroccan guy. I had heartburn that day, and as we were about to pass each other I tapped my chest with my right hand. It was just a natural reaction to the pain in my chest. But the Moroccan guy, seeing me do this, also tapped his chest and said, “Salam Alaikum”. I looked behind me to see if there was anyone else there, but it was just me. Me and my heartburn. I said “Salam Alaikum” back to him and walked on down to the market.

You can't win

2007-06-16T05:13:00.000-07:00

The video below depicts Barcelona's variation of the shell game scam on the Ramblas. Although filmed on a cell phone, you can still see how the trilero* and his shills lure the tourists in:

From the video poster's own commentary:

I was tricked euro$100 [sic], and decided to video them 4 days later. I had seen some tourist even loss euro$300 per bet!

Larry Kovaks handled these guys a while back in THE AMERICAN TOURIST CON. The shills dress as tourists do, in order to lure the real tourists in. And of course you can't win. Why? Here's the explanation:

Here's a video of a professional doing another variation of this con, with cards. It's in Spanish, but even so, just watch the cards. He's good.

_

*trilero - Spanish for conman or thief, most often applied to three card monte and shell game con artists. The Spanish gent in the last video puts it best: "A trilero is he who confuses you in order to take your money."

Rubbing the little onion

2007-06-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

I really didn’t want to post about yet another form of deviant sexual behavior - after the motorized bed dude and the most unfortunate drive-by wank inicident I witnessed the other day - but I really think I am on to something. With the arrival of these torrid summer months, lusty, uninhibited behavior is becoming more and more a topic of relevant interest. Whether you like it or not, whether your mom or your dad think it is taboo or unworthy of “proper” conversational topic, something, yes something, is in the air. So fuck it, here’s another bit of titillating trivia from the annals of Guirilandia. We can call it rubbing the little onion, or, in Spanish argot, frotando la cebolleta. This is a real term, used by Spanish folk, for describing a common form of deviant sexual behavior.

No, rubbing the little onion is not a vanguarista cooking technique (with all due respect, maestro Adria). It is a form of frotteurism, which is a technique that viejos verdes - literally green men, in Anglo-American parlance dirty old men - use to garner fifteen or so seconds of glory with young and normally indifferent women. It happens on crowded buses or subways, and the frotador’s technique is to move close to a young woman and discreetly rub his groin area on her person. The frotador does this in a casual way, while looking distractedly in another direction. The young woman usually doesn’t say anything because a) she’s not sure if the heavily breathing man next to her is really doing what she’d rather not even think about, and b) she doesn’t want to make a scene, thereby attracting attention to the most disgraceful event of which she is unwillingly a part of. The frotador stalks, in serial fashion, the bus lines and subway labyrinths, in search of potential victims for his unwanted advances. Basically, they’re pervs who’ll do anything to get close to a young woman, even if it’s just a fleeting caress of their crotch area.

Frotar mean to rub, and cebolleta, according to the La Rousse’s Gran Diccionario del Argot, is slang for penis. Now, cebolleta – and I don’t have an expert on hand to corroborate this – most likely comes from cebolla, which means onion. By adding the suffix eta, you are basically a saying little onion. How that came to mean penis I don’t know. This could very likely be a conspiracy by frotteurism adepts in Spain to euphonize their disgraceful habit. Because, in all honesty, rubbing the little onion doesn’t sound like a very offensive thing at all. Previously, if someone had told me they were going to rub little onions, I would have thought they were a little strange, but never one of those sneaky individuals serially rubbing themselves on strangers. Thank you Miguel at work for confirming the usage of this Spanish phrase. Ah, frotando la cebolleta! What grand schemes I have for today!

I’m not making this up, and I’m sure many women can confirm similar experiences. Furthermore, El Periodico ran an article today about the arrest of a serial onion rubber.

Okay, I’m going to try to aim for “high seriousness” in my next posts. Seriously. Ciao.

Oh, these febrile summer days

2007-06-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

8:45 AM in the Eixample, corner of Provença and Aribau. Guy driving slowly in his white VW Golf, pulling up next to a young woman who is dressed like a school teacher in a jersey dress, carrying a large handbag. They exchange a few brisk words. This is about a block away, so I can’t hear what they’re saying. Suddenly she covers her face, as if she just saw something highly repugnant, and yells, in an English accent:

“NO! I don’t know!”

VW Golf guy says something that is inaudible to me. The woman strides forward, with the bounce and conviction of a runway model.

“I said NO! Leave me ALONE!”

The guy says something else. Now the woman is really powerwalking. The guy is still cruising beside her. She screams:

“I SAID NO!!!!”

Traffic surges forward. VW Guy gives up on the woman and accelerates. He reaches my corner of the street, from where I have been watching the whole thing. He takes the curve, and as he’s doing this I make the mistake of looking into the open driver’s side window. The dude’s red willy is sticking out of his open fly.

According to my girlfriend - who has had many unfortunate wanker encounters in Barcelona - the drive-by wank technique is common. They pull up, casually ask for directions and begin wanking.

Of course it’s not just a Barcelona thing. About fifteen years ago, on a beach in San Diego, I was with some friends and we caught a guy furtively fiddling behind a rock. I wish I could say we showered him in rocks and insults, but we were too disgusted and ashamed of the situation to do anything about it. One time, when I was valet parking at a department store in San Francisco, I had to escort several of the shopgirls to their cars because a vagrant was wanking in the alleyway. I remember these days were hot, like today.

Larry Kovaks vs. the Macho Ibérico

2007-06-10T05:31:00.000-07:00

Or at least that's what it looks like.

My friend Larry Kovaks is back. The summer months and the heat are bringing the "virulent criminal underbelly" out of the woodwork, and Kovaks is back in action.

Read part 1 of The Danger of the Perfect Brunette. A tale of violencia domestica, English teachers and blackmail. There's an awful lot to unravel here. Let's wish him luck, and hope when he's done with this case he'll get back to solving the petty theft crimes he seems to know so much about.

No se fia

2007-06-09T13:09:00.001-07:00

No se fia, do not trust

3 jokes about Catalans, and my reflections on very large cunts

2007-06-08T03:27:00.000-07:00

My translations of some jokes someone* sent to me:

A poor employee goes to the office of his Catalan boss and says to him:
- Excuse me, manager sir, but it’s been six months since I’ve been paid …
- You’re excused, Garcia.

Un pobre empleado se acerca a la oficina de su jefe catalán y le dice:
- Disculpe, señor gerente, pero hace seis meses que no cobro ...
- Está disculpado, García.

A Catalan who is tearing off the wallpaper of house is paid a visit by a friend:
- What, are you redecorating the house?
- No, I’m moving.

Un catalán que esta arrancando el papel pintado de su casa es visitado por un amigo:
- ¿Qué, redecorando la casa?
- No, de mudanza.

A Catalan on his deathbed whispers:
- Montse, Montserrat … Where are you, dear wife?
- Here I am, my husband … next to you.
- And my son Josep … where is he?
- Here I am, father … next to you.
- And my daughter Mercè ... where is she?
- Here I am, father … next to you.
- And my son Jaume … where is he?
- Here I am, father … next to you.
- Well then … why the fuck** is the light in the kitchen on?

Un catalán en su lecho de muerte susurra:
- Montse, Montserrat... ¿Dónde estás, esposa querida?
- Aquí estoy, esposo mío..., a tu lado.
- Y mi hijo Josep..., ¿dónde está?
- Aquí estoy, padre..., a su lado.
- Y mi hija Mercè..., ¿dónde está?
- Aquí estoy, padre..., a su lado.
- Y mi hijo Jaume..., ¿dónde está?
- Aquí estoy, padre..., a su lado.
- Y entonces... ¿Qué coño hace la luz de la cocina encendida?

* Before the angry emails start, it should be noted this was a Catalan someone

** I translated “qué coño” as “why the fuck”, but coño literally means cunt, and it’s used in everyday conversations, like “¡Que coñazo de dia!” which would translate to “What a fucking day!”. By adding the “zo” to the end of the word you are literally saying “very large cunt”, or “very big cunt”. “A very big cunt of a day” just sounds silly in English, so that’s probably why we would say “What a fucking day”, simply because it is more practical.

Palabrotas, or cuss words, are used on the radio and television in Spain all the time. Initially I was surprised, coming from the land of The Seven Dirty Words. I would translate everything literally, but soon I realized words like coño are merely expressions used to spice mundane sentences, like we do with fuck, only the Spanish don’t get hung up on the literal meaning of the word, like we do in the States sometimes.

This is something else I overheard recently: “¡¡¡El coño de tu madre!!! !Vete a chuparla al monte!” This actually means “Leave me alone and go do something else”, and not something about so ans so's mother's cunt and the sucking off of a mountain villager.

Basically, if you are a literal-minded person you will go mad if you live in Spain.

Cerveseria DNI

2007-06-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

DNI means Identification Card

“Hey, what the fuck should I call the bar?”

“Coño, I don’t know. Lo que le sale de los putos cojones.”

“I know. Why don’t I call it Bar Identification Card?”

“Yeah! That’s a great idea. I’d go there!"

Schopenhauer was right

2007-06-05T23:14:00.000-07:00

The most fundamental impulse is the sexual impulse, and if anyone doubts this I direct them to the case of Antonio Navarro*, arrested for driving his motorized bed “at a considerable velocity” on a highway in

Galicia

. This 42 year-old man, who is tetraplegic, told police after being arrested that he was on his way to a brothel. With his body 95% paralyzed, the only way he can operate the bed is by moving a joystick with his mouth. You can only imagine the bizarre spectacle of this guy cruising down a highway on a motorized bed, and, furthermore, what he planned on doing once he got to the brothel.

Anyway, I remembered this story when I re-read this passage from the great Arthur Schopenhauer:

The sexual impulse is proved to be the decided and strongest affirmation of life by the fact that for man in the natural state, as for the animal, it is his life’s final end and the highest goal. Self preservation and maintenance are his first aim, and as soon as he has provided for that, he aims only at the propagation of the race; as a merely natural being, he cannot aspire to anything more. Nature too, the inner being of which is the will-to-live itself, with all her force impels both man and the animal to propagate. After this she has attained her end with the individual, and is quite indifferent to its destruction; for, as the will-to-live, she is concerned only with the preservation of the species; the individual is nothing to her.

From the World as will and Representation, book I

In all seriousness I think Antonio Navarro is the apotheosis of mankind’s most fundamental impulse – the will to propagate. Antonio doesn’t dress up his intentions in pretty euphemisms or claims to a “higher calling”. In the end, you have to admire his tenacity and sincerity. Respect.

* For some reason the author of the article cites that Antonio was a gypsy (“This resident of the CAMF [a residency for handicapped people], originally from Valencia and of the gypsy ethnicity”). This is about as relevant to the article as saying that his blanket was made of 100% cotton. Of course, the article is implying that only someone of the dastardly “gypsy ethnicity” would drive a motorized bed to a brothel. I should direct the author of this article to the three block radius around my apartment in the Eixample, in which she will find at least three popular brothels. The Eixample is a middle class Catalan neighborhood and I can tell you the clientele drifting in and out of the brothels look more like "white", upper-middle class lawyer types than people of the “gypsy ethnicity”. You certainly don’t see dudes driving motorized beds to brothels around here, and, even if you did, those motorized beds wouldn't necessarily be owned and operated by someone of the “gypsy ethnicity”. I mean, who are we kidding? I’m amazed, sometimes, at the total lack of rigor in reporting.

(the picture is really Antonio, by the way. It was taken from this article in L'Absurd Diari. More information can be found here.)

Marcial Lafuente Estefania

2007-05-28T13:01:00.001-07:00

There was a time, not very long ago, when a little book stuck out from the porter’s lodge of a building, the glove compartment of a taxi or the pocket of a worker’s overalls, not a music player or a portable console …

From 'El mejor escritor del Oeste era español' in El Mundo

The other day I walked into a secondhand bookstore in the center and asked the owner if he had any copies of M.L. Estefania books, and he snorted in what only can be described as disgust. My request was so unworthy of his highbrow bookshop that he didn’t even answer me with a monosyllabic “yes” or “no”. Shelves upon shelves of fusty, crease-marked books, stretching to the back and up beyond my reach, and not one copy of M.L. Estefania! Second hand copies of tawdry romance novels, manifestos, historical tomes, garish Franco-era magazines, and not one copy M.L. Estefania, the man singularly responsible for 3,000 western novels, who continues to produce even after his death (with his son now writing under his name). 3,000 novels and counting after a 64-year legacy, and where was his work, in this tomb of resurrected books?

The Last Tequila

Marcial Lafuente Estefania was the son of a Spanish journalist and writer. In his youth he studied industrial engineering, and in the 1920s he visited the United States for work-related reasons. In the 1930s his work was interrupted by the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, in which he fought as a republican general. With the defeat of the republic he had the opportunity to escape, but he chose to stay in Spain, and it was the during his time in prison that he began to write on pieces of scrap paper. When he was released from prison he began publishing crime and romance fiction for a small editorial, but it wasn’t until 1943 that he published his first western, La Mascota de la Pradera, or The Pet of the Prairie. With this publication he became known for the “Estefania style” and as a skilled writer of the western genre, and this brought him a modest but important following. He dedicated the rest of his life to writing western novels.

Human Reptiles

He began publishing with the Bruguera Editorial (alongside writers like Francisco Ibáñez, of Mortadelo and Filemón fame). At a breakneck pace of one novel per week he continued turning out westerns – based partly on his experiences in the United States and on re-formulated plots taken from classic Spanish literature – until 1958, when his sons also began writing under the M.L. Estefania pseudonym. But, first they had to master Estefania’s style, which consisted of, “sentences full of challenges … of easy triggers, Colts and Winchesters shot at point blank, women of easy virtue and quarrelsome people that provoke the sheriff”. When they first started writing with their father they tried using more description – in contrast to Estefania’s trademark spare style – and people noticed. “That’s not Estefania,” they said, and his sons quickly had to adapt their style: less fluffiness, less elaborate descriptions and more action! 64 years later, with over 3,000 titles published, the Estefania legend continues.

The Madness of Betty

Almost all the books I’ve seen by Estefania are exactly 96 pages long, with barebones, action-packed and dialog-driven stories. One thing I’ve noticed is you can’t read them and look for deep meaning (if you do that, you will be extremely frustrated). Some of the stories are totally ridiculous, and lots of the time the plot will be shoehorned into a classic storyline and things will happen without any sort of explanation. What I look for when I read his stories are archetypes and style. The classic characters are all here, the fringe element, the frontiersmen, men of fortune and adventure, the noble and the wicked, the women of easy virtue, the conmen, gamblers and the righteous … It’s the romantic vision of the American wild west, through a European’s eyes. Interestingly enough, during Estefania’s publishing heyday in the 1960s, the best Spaghetti Westerns were being made in Spain, probably giving some of the most enduring – and attractive - impressions of that period of the United States. M.L. Estefania was easily part of this romanticizing movement.

"Pistol" Joe

The author of the article in El Mundo laments Spain’s inability to appreciate Estefania, citing American culture’s lionizing of authors like Hammett and Philip K. Dick. I wouldn’t put Estefania on that level, because both Hammett and Dick injected serious social commentary into popular fiction. Estefania has absolutely no social commentary that I can think of. His characters are cartoonish, and the situations he puts them in are arbitrary and conventional. For example, in El Rancho del Gringo, or The Gringo’s Ranch, the protagonist single-handedly fights a gang of quarrelsome roughnecks terrorizing a frontier town. In Rambo-like fashion he builds a bow and arrow and picks them off one by one. Of course, he’s tall, ruggedly handsome and irresistible to women. He’s also a man with principles and a bastion of macho iberico ethos:

She looked at him, astonished.

“Have you guys finished with Bonanza and his team?”

“Yes.”

“On the frontier, when they get news of this, they will raise a statue as proof of gratitude.”

“This nightmare is over. And it will be necessary to do the same with Clark and those that are like him.”

“Leave them alone.”

“Look, Sussie. The most hateful thing in a woman, is that she asks the man she loves to be a coward.”

Sussie’s mind went ‘white like the snow’.

She didn’t dare say anything.

From The Gringo’s Ranch

A friend of mine used to use the “Johnny Cash litmus test” on people, where he’d off-handedly ask whether someone liked Johnny Cash. “Yes” or “no” would decide that person’s friendship status. Take Estefania with you to a café, read his fictions of daring men and loose women, and observe people walking by. You can almost certainly tell what kinds of people you’re with by watching their reactions. Invite people to your house and watch their reactions to your strategically placed copy of Estefania on the coffee table. A snort of disproval or a word of appreciation will tell you much more about that person than a lengthy discussion of, say, Cortazar, where people usually dare not to disagree. To openly appreciate Estefania is un desafio, a challenge to the bookish elite. So, I pose the question: Hey guiri, hey artista, do you dig Estefania?

I Had to Kill Him

You’ll see his pulp fiction classics in flea markets, in discount trays in front of secondhand bookstores for 50 cents a copy, every so often in the grimy hands of an old man sitting on a bench, but you’ll never see them in bookstores which hold a pretense to “high art”, or on bookshelves next to Calderón, García Márquez, or, for that matter, Cervantes. One day that’ll probably change when someone discovers him. Quentin? If you read this, it’s all you.

Mincemeat swallowed whole

2007-05-20T04:26:00.000-07:00

In 1943 the body of Major Martin, a British serviceman, washed up on the shores of southern

Spain

. A local fisherman found the body, noticed the military attire, and the fact that a briefcase was chained to it. He decided to report it to the authorities.

Because Franco's government was in collusion with the Nazis, the body was turned over to the Abwehr, the Nazi's intelligence organization. The Abwehr examined the belongings found on the corpse, and what they discovered were documents too sensitive to send via regular courier, documents detailing plans for an allied invasion of

Italy

. The man had been wearing a life preserver and all clues pointed to an airplane accident at sea. Weary of a ruse, they examined and considered every last detail – things like love letters, theater tickets and overdue bills were enough to convince them that the corpse, and the documents it was carrying, were real.

It wasn't until well into the second week of the Allied invasion of southern Italy that they realized they had been duped. Major Martin was a fictitious character, and the documents he was carrying were part of an elaborate plan to divert the Axis powers' forces away from Sicily, where the Allies intended to land. "Operation Mincemeat" was a success.

That’s my quick summary of this fantastic article from Damn Interesting, one of my favorite websites. It's well worth the read.

More info on Wikipedia. And, for added trivia, here’s a link to a web page about Ian Fleming, of “shaken, not stirred" fame. According to this article Fleming himself directed “Operation Mincemeat”. This, however, contradicts both the Damn Interesting article and the Wikipedia article.

Aerofagia Verbal

2007-05-12T07:13:00.000-07:00

I love this quote from Jorge Moragas, the international relations representative of the Partido Popular:

La aerofagia verbal del caudillo venezolano apesta a totalitarismo.

The Cervantiesque elegance of the sentence could not possibly be translated into a non-romance language without mangling it, but I will try:

The verbal aerophagia of the Venezuelan caudillo [leader] stinks of totalitarianism.

Aerophagia is a term which literally means "to eat air". Aero for air, and phagy for eat, coming from the Greek language. If you were ever a kid you've played the belching game with your friends, where you drink soda and at the same time gulp down as much air as you can. The results of this are phenomenally scandalous burps which are great for disrupting classes. An unpleasant side effect of aerophagia is flatulence, because the air you don't belch has to come out somehow, and that means out of your ass.

So, the incredibly awesome term - I bet you Castro is pissed he didn't come up with it first - means something akin to verbal flatulence. My preferred term is verbal diarrhea, but aerofagia verbal is far more eloquent. In fact, I'm going to use it as much as possible from now on.

Like some cool guy who's talking about something he doesn't know anything about. I'll just say, hey asshole, you've got aerofagia verbal! I mean, there is no cool comeback to that. Like, oh yeah? You have aerofagia verbal! No you have aerofagia verbal!

The proclamation of aerofagia verbal is final. It's beautiful.

I also like how he ties up the metaphor with "stinks of totalitarianism". I wonder if this guy made this up himself? He definitely has talent.

Warning, the following can be considered blogorrhea, a close cousin of aerofagia verbal.

I'll admit, as much as I can't stand certain elements of the P.P., I totally agree with him. Chavez and his amigos are dangerous clowns masquerading as do-gooders. It's incredible, but the age-old comparison between real life and theater is increasingly obvious to me. I mean, look around you. Chavez. He looks and sounds like my 7th grade physical education teacher who sadistically made us run laps and do "cherry pickers" for hours on end. He was also pretty funny, but he was an asshole. His buddy Castro. Shrouded in a classic totalitarian cloak of mystery. We have no idea if he is even alive. Everything, in his mysterious missives, is the fault of Bush. I don't know about you, but I find it pretty convenient to blame everything on Bush. Your job sucks? Because of Bush. Your ass too big? Because of Bush. Aerofagia verbal? Because of Bush. Aznar. Giving classes at Georgetown for christ's sake, when his level of English hardly surpasses that of the average New York cab driver. Saying Muslims should be apologizing to the Spaniards for the conquest of Al Andaluz!* For that matter, the entire Iberian peninsula should apologize to the Greeks and the Romans for usurping their colonies! Karl Rove. A doughy, effeminate slime bag you would never leave alone with your children. Reminds me of Newman from Seinfeld. Bush. A natural comedian. A cheerleading frat boy. You can go on with Cheney and Ahmadinejad, and on and on ...

The strange thing is that all these freaks are highly entertaining. I find them all hilarious, actually, but it is really freakin scary that assholes like these have such sway with the masses. It's just my humble opinion, but we're doomed when the people leading world politics start to resemble the cast of a TV sitcom.

_

* This reminds me of a guy I used to work with, Paco. Paco was this hilarious frustrated middle aged white guy. His favorite phrase was, "El sexo es ... temendo!" He always talked about mujeres and swinger clubs and all that. He once told me he pardoned an American president. I said, what? He said, yeah, when Clinton apologized to the public and asked for forgiveness for his hand in the Lewinsky affair, he pardoned him. I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but then again, I was probably pretty drunk.

Catalans and Jews

2007-05-07T21:47:00.000-07:00

Here's a joke that someone sent to me, and here's my quick translation:

A Jew says to his Catalan friend:
- I have a trick to eat free.

- Great, tell me how you do it.

- I go to the restaurant, pretty late, ask for a starter, main dish, cheeses, dessert and I take my time to drink a coffee, a coñac and [smoke] a good cigar and I wait until they close. Since I don’t move, when all the tables are turned up, all the seats are placed on the tables to sweep, the busboy comes to ask me if I can pay because they are leaving, I then answer him: “But I already paid your colleague who left earlier”. It’s that easy.

The Catalan then says to him:

- That’s terrific. Should we try it together tomorrow?

- Ok, the Jew answers.

The next night the two buddies go to the restaurant: starter, main dish, cheeses, dessert, etc. It’s closing time, the busboy asks them if he can charge them and the Jew says:

- I’m sorry, but we already paid your colleague who already left.

And the Catalan adds:

- We have been waiting for a while for the change.

Un judio le dice a su amigo catalán:

- Tengo un truco para comer gratis

- Super, cuéntame como haces.

- Voy al restaurante, bastante tarde, pido un entrante, plato principal, quesos, postre y me tomo todo mi tiempo para tomarme un café,un coñac y un buen puro y espero a que cierren. Como ni me muevo, cuando ya levantaron todas las mesas, dieron vuelta las sillas sobre las mesas para barrer, viene el mozo a preguntarme si le puedo ir pagando porque ya se van, entonces le respondo: "Pero si ya le pagué a su colega que se fue antes". Es así de simple.

El catalán entonces le dice:

- Qué genial, ¿probamos juntos mañana?

- Ok, le contesta el judío.

La noche siguiente los dos compadres van al restaurant: entrada, plato principal, quesos, postre, etc. Llega el momento de cerrar, se acerca el mozo, les pregunta si les puede cobrar y el judio le dice:

- Lo siento, pero ya le pagamos a tu colega que ya se fue.

Y el catalán agrega:

- Estamos desde hace rato esperando el cambio.

Catalans are often called the “Jews of Spain”. I’ve heard this from people outside of Catalanya as well as inside of Catalunya. Since being a Jew in Spain is, unlike the United States, somewhat exotic, it doesn’t seem that offensive to call anyone a Jew here, as if being a Jew had certain indelible characteristics.

But why are Catalans called the Jews of Spain? What does Jew mean to a Spaniard? I mean, what is the tacitly accepted definition of the Jew “type”?

To figure this out I first asked a Catalan friend why Catalans are called the Jews of Spain. She said it is probably because they are “thrifty”, they are “investors”, and “tight with money”. Stereotypically, of course. But as with any stereotype, that is projected. Because to a Spaniard, another Spaniard who is thrifty and tight-fisted is merely thrifty and tight-fisted, but as soon that person is Catalan, they become the typical Catalan.

So then I asked a Jewish friend. He said it was probably because they were “clannish and proud”, were “tight/crafty with money”, had “long noses”, and shared a sense of “victimhood”. Since the exception always seems to prove the rule when you look for it, I would say that this does fit certain Catalans that I know, as well as Jews. But, then again, I know people that have all these characteristics (except perhaps for the clannish characteristic) and they are not Catalan or Jewish. My friend also pointed out that many were probably conversos, or Jews who converted to escape persecution from the Spanish Inquisition. Conversos are also known as marranos, which comes from swine. I wonder if more conversos stayed in Catalunya than in other parts of Spain? Or if Catalans are called the Jews of Spain because they apparently adhere to the Jewish stereotypes of being tight-fisted and clannish?

Although many people have no clue where their ideas of Jews and Catalans come from, they bandy about the concepts of “Jew” and “Catalan” on a daily basis, and it ends up meaning what I wrote about above. A group apart, exclusive, shrewd.

Groucho Marx, a post modernist?

2007-05-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

You figure it out:

Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know.

Groucho Marx

Pure madness

2007-04-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

Hey! I have not been slacking for the past twenty some odd days. I have been busy writing non-guirilandia-related material. And I have been reading the news with bewilderment. From a massacre in Virginia, to some idiots proclaiming it was because not enough students were armed ... to the crackdown on the Chinese markets opening up near Plaça Tetuan, to the ERC saying the city government should buy out 2,000 locals in the zone to stop the evil yellow invasion ... to the hysterical anti-marijuana campaigns currently under way, to the springtime weather which is distracting me and keeping me from writing this blog

Let's just go point by point (excuse the haphazard style of this entry):

ON WRITING. 20 Minutos - Spain's second best free newspaper behind ADN - has this interesting article about the dangers of blogging. Here are seven unscientifically-proven symptoms of blogging, all of which I have suffered. Especially in the three weeks I haven't been posting:

1) Madness. You go mad when you cannot access your blog.

This has happened to me numerous times. Not to mention the times I tinkered with the wrong codes and completely screwed up the design, only to have to spend hours afterwards trying to fix it, while at the same time putting on a cool, got-it-all-under-control exterior in order to trick those around me that I wasn't really that obsessed with my blog.

2) The future. You start to think of future articles in the middle of a date, of a movie ... also in the middle of a romantic moment.

Yes, sadly enough this has all happened to me. I recently saw The Other's Life. Awful. No wonder it won an academy award. Halfway through the movie I was thinking of writing a scathing review for the blog. Only I reconsidered because it wouldn't exactly fit the scheme of this blog (you know, Barcelona, sketchy situations, stupid nationalism). I remember ... oh, nevermind.

3) Days later. When you walk down the street you remember a commentary that someone made, you laugh.

Yes this has happened, although I don't allow comments anymore. The shocking truth is that sometime I laugh just thinking about my articles. This is embarrassing, but true. I remember watching a documentary about Robert Crumb who admitted to masturbating to his own comics. I feel somewhat the same, though I have yet to wank to my own stories or blog entries.

4) Anger. When your friends ask you, "What's new?", you get irritated because you have already written about it in you blog and they don't read it.

None of my friends read this blog. In fact, I've met very few people face to face who admit to reading it. I got over the fact a long time ago. I just write.

5) Curiosity. If someone leaves an anonymous comment you try to figure out who it is.

Doesn't apply.

6) Warnings. You have written posts only to say you are going to sleep.

Never. Many blogs have this annoying habit of constantly talking about themselves - like I am doing right now. They talk about boyfriends and girlfriends, about reasons why they haven't been posting, about their favorite music, why their country is better than yours, about people at work, about their idiot landlords ... like this for example:

Chapuza, or postmodern art subsidized by the Generalitat?

I haven't taken a proper shower in a month because the guy who replaced our water heater did a chapuza, which is a great Spanish word for shoddy workmanship. Our first heater broke, it took the landlord three weeks to send a guy to replace it, he did a shoddy job, and it broke again. Six weeks without hot water.

The one he replaced worked fine. Until it rained. Then it broke because water leaked in through the roof and ruined the electronics. Then they didn't want to replace it. Then the guy came and did what you can see above to our terraza roof. This my friends is due to amiguismo. Because the blockhead who put the water heater in and created the postmodern sculpture on my roof is a buddy of the landlord.

Nicholas Mead, fellow contributor at Barcelona Reporter, has water heater mishaps as well. Strangely enough, ours was a Junkers water heater as well. I will go on the record saying for the one week our Junkers heater was working it was wonderful. The fact that it broke is due entirely to the ineptitude of the installer.

7) Jealousy. You are jealous of people who are included on more blogrolls and have more commentaries than you.

Yeah, a little bit. A sad bit of news is that last month I reached a record number of hits (200+ in one day). The saddest part of all was that it was from freaks looking for pictures of six packs (abdominal muscles).

THE VIRGINIA MASSACRE. Some people at work wanted to know my opinion on it. They wanted know why. Why the massacre? Why are you Americans so fucked up? Why don't you guys control guns more? I thought long and hard for two seconds to come up with the obvious answer. It is not the fault of the easily bought guns. Yes, that's a problem. Especially when it's easier to buy guns than a harmless joint, or when it's less shameful to buy a gun than it is to by a pornography. But we all know it's not the guns that drove the kid to do it. He was probably autistic and had serious social problems. Many factors led up to this. Not just the guns. I can't explain this to people without them shaking their heads and thinking I'm the typical American dupe. So I just ignore them and write blogs about them.

But seriously, how can anyone say everything would be better if more students were armed? Who's to decide who should be armed? Imagine, a whole school of kids and faculty armed to the teeth. Quick, Takeshi Kitano, make a movie on this, because it would be brutal. Or for that matter, Chan-wook Park, the guy who made Old Boy. A wild western set in a school, on the big screen where it should be.

YELLOW FEVER. Big stink lately on the proliferation of Chinese markets near Plaça Tetuan, over by calle Trafalgar and Barcelona's "Arc de Trionf". Citizens are up in arms about the dastardly Chinese taking over their neighborhoods. Now, the ERC, Catlunya's "left wing" nationalist populists, are saying the government should buy 2,000 locals in order to prevent the wholesale buyout from the yellow horde.

I'm not exactly pro-chinese shops, in fact I find some of them a bit repugnant. Here is an example. Last Saturday I went to the Chino to buy some pots for my marijuana plants. While I was perusing the astonishing array of crappy knock-off products, I was subjected to the store owner hocking loogies into the trash bin, one after another, then while I was laughing silently to myself and thinking of how I could incorporate it into a post without it sounding racist, I spied this delectable selection of movies:

Among the choice titles: My mom has a dog, and My favorite pet

Next to innocuous stacks of blank DVDs and CDs is a lusty library of animal porn. If anyone is interested, you can go to calle Casanonova between Provença and Valencia, right in front of the market. Just past the guy hocking loogies into a trash can, past the plastic flowers is a collection of animal porn that will be sure to impress your freakiest friends.

Of course, I know I know, this is not exemplary of all Chinese shops. It's just an anecdote. Some of these guys pasa de todo, and I can see why some people are worried. But, then again, I wouldn't want some hysterical "left wing" nationalist populist government decreeing who can and cannot open a market. I say this with clenched teeth, because in all honesty I am disgusted at the amount of Starbucks cafes proliferating across the city. I detest Starbucks - I will not go into another diatribe on it - but I can't deny them the right to open one of their soul-sucking franchises. I just won't go. I believe in individual initiative. Not social engineering.

MARIJUANA HYSTERIA. Lately there has been an immense amount of ink on marijuana. Papers like la Vanguardia are claiming it is three times more harmful than it was in the 80s and 90s, la Vanguardia even going so far as to imply that it causes schizophrenia. And all this after last year's pathetic La Maria No T'Estima campaign.

2007. And we are still dealing with this. When everybody knows they'd rather be around a stoner than an alcoholic, and everybody knows that marijuana is far less addictive, than, say, an episode of House. By La Vanguardia's logic the streetlights turning on are the cause of the night, and putting a straight-jacket on is the cause of madness. Marijuana is the cause of all the problems, it will make you antisocial, schizo, possibly even gay or left wing. Oh boy we're in trouble.

Smooth criminals 2

2007-04-24T12:59:00.000-07:00

Wow, I haven't written about smooth criminals for two years now, so I am greatly pleased to bring you this little tidbit from the badlands of Badalona.

The US has white trash and Jerry Springer, but Spain also has its masterful contenders. Just check out the letter on the left.

Technically, this guy would be brown trash, and instead of living in a trailer and shooting cans of Coors Light in his spare time, he probably lives with his mama in a 20 square meter apartment.

Meet Marcos. We can call him Pablo Escobar "light".

He posted this letter all over town, to boost his hash sales, and this is my super accurate translation (all faults intentional):

Good dope

I sell dope of good qualities to cool dudes and minor do not come.

Wait next to the window behind my house and on the bench for sitting.

don't call attention or I will not sell yoo notin'.

you can whistle or yell for me and I go out of the window / my name is marcos

a little bar [of hachis]cost 20 urros.
is good. [I don't know what the last word is]

from elperiodico.com

UPDATE: The last words are “planos”, which I think is supposed to mean “maps”, and “tituto”, which is short for “instituto”, or “school”, which is where the “chabale rollaos” go.

And yes, this is real. Thanks Montse!

Big money. Big balls. Big scam.

2007-04-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

Every guiri with enough notches on the wall of their overpriced cell room* has experienced the boiler room.

Boiler rooms are basically sketchy telemarketing companies which sell stocks for dubious companies. For this explanation we’ll call the dubious company Company X. The boiler room says Company X is - according to “insider information” - going to go big and bring in vast sums of money to the lucky few who know about it beforehand.

Company X is usually an associate of the boiler room operators, and the idea is to inflate the price of its worthless stock so that Company X’s owners will have enough volume to sell their shares. The people who invested money with the boiler room operators are then left with a valueless stock. Company X and their boiler room associates fly off, so to speak, as a pack of vultures does after feasting on carrion.

Boiler rooms "cold call", that is, they compile lists of people with investing powers, together with their phone numbers, and call them and pitch their stocks to them. They pitch the positive side of Company X’s stock and exaggerate its money-making prospects. A typical pitch would be that Company X is a pharmaceutical firm that has a breakthrough drug which is about to go public. Shortly Company X’s stocks are going to go through the roof, so anyone investing with Company X is going to make massive profits.

The telemarketers, if they are good at their job, know how to tap into their client’s greed; they also know that these clients have surplus money they would like to see grow. So they sell the stock using high-pressure techniques, using sham terminology and overly positive predictions. The terminology and the predictions, as well as the replies to skeptical questions are all scripted and practiced beforehand.

The question is, is this illegal if they’re selling real stocks? Not really is the answer. It depends on where you are, because in some countries there are few prohibitions against insider trading. That’s why these operations work out of places like south east Asia and Spain.

I’ve seen quite a few ads recruiting for these shady telemarketing companies. Just do a daily search on sites like Craigslist and Loquo. Check these ads out, which I found today: here, here, here, here and here.

These were only the sketchiest looking ones. There are many more which are probably masquerading as serious companies, with actual domain names, but with the same pitch as the ads above. My favorites are the Barcelona Connect ads, with descriptions like:

“Are you a legend, or a legend in the making?”

“Big money. You want it, we’ve got it. All you need are big balls …”

They were much more abundant a few years ago, but as you can see they still operate around town. In Barcelona, due to its proximity to the UK, these scams are mostly run by Brits who take advantage of the legal loophole and the large potential workforce.

There is ripe labor force of desperate English-speaking guiris who will work as telemarketers. They will sell total crap - and knowingly do so - in order to pay the rent. So the shady “businessmen” come to places like Barcelona, open up their offices, and start their operations. There’s nothing remotely interesting or engaging about the job, besides the thrill of outwitting some rich sucker on the other end of a phone line and raking in a few thousand euros in profit. It’s all about greed and status – for the few who are the brains of the operation (Company X and their boiler room operators). The callers - that’s you guiri - working for the boiler room operators will not make much more than subsistence wages. They stay on with the promise of huge commissions in the near future. The reality is that in the near future the boiler room operators will disappear once they’ve “pumped and dumped” their stock.

Adios big commissions. You’ve just been scammed while scamming for someone else.

I’ve been so desperate for calés that I’ve waited for hours in Cash Converters to make a measly twenty euros for a dozen or so DVDs. A couple times I even answered those telemarketing ads. The idea of selling anything at all on a telephone was repulsive to me because one, I have a hard time getting enthusiastic about anything I don’t truly believe in, and two, because being on the telephone all day, in an office full of aggressive salesmen, is about as appealing to me as running an Epilady over my testicles.

My first encounter with these guys was about 5 years ago when I answered an ad I saw on Barcelona Connect. I called and was told to come down to their office that same day (it was downtown, just off Plaça Urquinaona). I hadn’t been working steadily for months at that time, and I decided to bite it and work as a telemarketing wage slave. I didn’t know it was a scam at the time; I was simply looking for a steady job other than teaching English.

The office - if I remember correctly - was on the second floor, just above a beauty college. You entered, and the immediate sensation was one of impermanence. The central room, where all the callers sat in a kind of big rectangle, was a slap dash affair of folding tables, criss-crossed wires and people pattering into telephones. With skill and practice, the entire office could be dismounted and moved in less than fifteen minutes.

I had an interview with an English guy who sported a Beckham-esque faux hawk and designer clothing. He pitched me the kind of job where - if I was good enough - I could make enough commissions to pull in six figures a year. Millions in a couple years. He had me sit with a guy from Australia who was cold calling, and who, if he hooked a potential client, would pass the client on to one of the higher ups (in this case the pseudo-Beckham who interviewed me). I listened in, saw the list that he pulled the names from, and went back to the English guy and told him I wasn’t interested. He asked me why, and I told him it was because it was against my principles to work with anyone who had a faux hawk - and that anyway the faux hawk was about to go out of style with the next economy flight of drunken hooligans landing in El Prat.

I left and became a roadie after that. After some desultory months - in which I roadied for the likes of Metallica and the Stones, and, the most satanic of all, Operación Triunfo - I become a virtual pimp for a porn site.

But being roadie and a virtual pimp don’t pay much. So, about a year ago I saw another ad, promising much of the same: gargantuan commissions for motivated and talented young English-speaking people. The same thing, selling “stocks”, and, of course, “no financial advisory experience or education” was required. What a scam I thought. Nevertheless, I immediately sent them an email, and a couple days later I got a telephone call.

The guy on the other end had an Irish accent, and he asked me a few things, like where I was from, was a I married, what I did exactly. He said he wanted to meet me for an interview and named a hotel downtown. The next day I went to the hotel and found the guy sitting in the lobby. He went over the enormous money potential involved in the job, and why I was a potential candidate. I was “relatively stable”, “older” than most of the candidates they had chosen in the past, and this made me attractive to them.

The yarn he spun was this: they had hired hotshot kids in the past who made astronomical amounts of money in just a few months, and who blew everything on putas and coke and exotic cars. Obviously, this was part of the ruse, to hook into my greed and make me think I could outsmart them. I was supposed to think that I was going to make tons of money in a few months, and would leave the job with massive savings, which I could put towards anything I liked. If I remember correctly, the pay came to seven or eight hundred euros a month, which is the absolute minimum anyone here can survive on. This, supposedly, would be augmented by massive commissions if you had the brains and the tenacity of “true sales demon”. He asked me, “Do YOU have what it takes?”

For a second testosterone-fueled fantasies of strippers and mountains of cocaine worthy of Tony Montana flitted through my brain …

The guy, who didn’t seem at all like a bad guy (in fact, he would have made a great Irish gangster for a Cohen brothers movie) paid for my coffee and told me his employer would call me within the net few days. He said it was to be the second interview, before actually going to the office for the third and final in-person interview. During this second telephone interview I was to “sell something”. He said this “something” would be at random, like an object in the room, and that this would be a test of my sales abilities.

The Irish guy, called me from a blocked number, by the way. The guy who called me next - let’s call him Gareth - also called from a blocked number. The emails they provided in their ads – and if you do a cursory check on this you will also find the same thing – were always hotmail or yahoo.uk accounts. (I've noticed that the ads are now providing phone numbers, some even have domains. This, of course, doesn't mean they are legitimate. They can just as easily buy an untraceable cell phone for this, and domains are easy to buy anonymously)

So Gareth called me, but by that time I had already decided I would rather sell roses or pirate DVDs on the Ramblas than work for some British scam artists in a boiler room. I’d spoken to some people about the telemarketing scene and they invariably told me the same thing. No one EVER sees a penny of those supposed commissions. They sell stocks or whatever (I’ve heard of scams involving fake homeopathic medicines), rip people off on the margins of the law, and adios, they’re off to some other faraway place with another large guiri community to set up another boiler room.

I took “Gareth’s” call anyway, just for the hell of it. His pitch was almost the same as the Irish guy’s, but more forceful, and definitely more studied. It basically went like this. I’ll be Mike for the sake of this conversation, but you could easily fill in your own name:

“… MIKE, you need to know that I am completely serious about this. I am not going waste your time. This is a chance to make upwards of six figures a year if you are skilled and dedicated enough. MIKE, DOES THAT INTEREST YOU? “

“Oh yeah, it does.”

“MIKE this is a SERIOUS offer. You start working with this firm and within three months you will be making over 20,000 thousand euros month. Within a year you will be making MORE MONEY THAN YOU EVER DREAMED OF! MIKE, do you want to make money and be SUCCESSFUL?”

“Oh YEAH!”

“The reason we are talking to you is …”

At this point he went into the same story as the Irish guy, about the hotshot Brit kids who came over here and who were making so much money they didn’t know what to do with it. They were buying powerful sports cars, spending everything they had on blow and prostitutes, and within a few months they were completely burned out. He really emphasized the point about women and drugs. Robert continued:

“Now MIKE …”

He, like the other guy, had this really annoying habit of repeating my name over and over again - an obvious sales tactic conceived to subtly manipulate me into thinking I was getting personal treatment. Words like success, money, women, cars … etc. next to my name were supposed to make me start believing that my interests were his interests.

“The other day I took my YACHT, with my wife and kids, to Menorca. In three years, MIKE, I’ve made a fortune which for most people takes a lifetime to achieve. MIKE does that sounds interesting?”

“Oh hell yeah, GARETH!!!!”

“Now I don’t want some STONED IDIOT who comes in and isn’t motivated. This isn’t a job for people interested in steady hours, or for people who ask how much vacation time they’ll get. This is for people who are motivated. MIKE, in a few year time you too can have a yacht in Masnou. You too can have a Maserati. Does being wealthy sound desirable to you MIKE?”

The same annoying rant went on for a few more minutes. He told me I was the perfect candidate because I had no training to be broker, therefore I could be trained by the company and not bring in any bad habits. My C.V. actually, was not tailored for their job advert at all. I just sent it to them out of sheer boredom one day while concocting money-making schemes. The fact that this guy wanted me to work as a broker for his firm was a dead give away that it was a complete scam. Here I was, obviously the stoned idiot he was ranting about, being pitched a job offer to make millions of euros in a few months.

I never actually had to “sell anything” to Gareth during that second interview. Gareth promised to call me in the next few days to arrange yet another interview, but by that time I had landed another job. Every time I saw a blocked number calling me on my cell, I ignored it. After about a week the freak stopped calling.

Interestingly, my friend Kovaks, the guiri detective, has been contacted about a similar incident. Some guy was getting threatening phone calls and emails from some boiler room scammers because of some comments he made on a blog.

* i.e. rented room

Italians take over a bar in the Eixample

2007-03-25T04:39:00.000-07:00

So I’m sitting at the bar in a place called Café Paris drinking my first coffee for the day. It’s the standard layout: huge plasma television above mounted on the wall to broadcast football games, aluminum bar, an array of tapas, everybody still smoking …

A group of Italians walk in. The guys are older, about forty to fifty, and have the aura of porn directors. Or maybe it’s just their cheesy Italian style. Soft leather boots, tight brand name jeans, greased back hair – basically the macho ibérico look but slightly more stylish. In tow are their girlfriends, easily half their ages, pretty like so many Italian women, yet somehow incongruous to their male counterparts. I wonder, how do these guys do it?

They order cappuccinos in a mix of Italian and English. The barmaid, a sour-looking woman with a stained, once-white smock, shakes her head and says she can’t do it. She can’t make a proper cappuccino she says. The Italians are adamant. They must have cappuccinos even if they're in the Café Paris in Barcelona. One of the Italian girls says - in Spanglish - that she works in a bar in Italy. This give her a certain aura of credibility. Like anything Italian designed is stylish, an Italian who works in the food industry is automatically a gourmand. She walks to the other side of the counter and proceeds to make four cappuccinos, the Italian way.

Which is not what I was taught when I worked in a bar here. It is not just espresso powder on top of a small coffee with milk, with lots of foam. The trick is, I observe, before pouring the foam, to add the espresso powder and then pour the foam on that. So she draws a heart shape with the powder and pours the foam on top of that. When the foam is poured there is a kind of bas-relief heart in the middle of it. It's slightly hortera, but since she's Italian she must be right.

Later, after finishing the paper, I asked the barmaid why she let the Italian take over the espresso machine. She said it was because she never went to cappuccino school. Really. She was supposed to, but she never attended, so when real Italians come in she refuses to make cappuccinos. She's had numerous complaints from them. She was merely preempting a barrage of "porca miserias"!

Travelers and tourists and some random thoughts

2007-03-25T04:17:00.000-07:00

Paraphrasing Manuel Vázquez Montalbán who in turn was paraphrasing Paul Bowles: the difference between travelers and tourists is that tourists visit faraway places, and therefore know when their visit begins and ends. Travelers, he said, only know when their voyage begins. They can feel at home in faraway places.

In this sense I'm a traveler, although I've been in Spain for almost seven years now. I have my residence permit, I can work and pay taxes, but I'm still a traveler. I will never consider myself Spanish or Catalan because I will never be allowed to consider myself Spanish or Catalan. I give my utmost respect to the mix of cultures and languages on the Iberian peninsula, but I'm not fooling myself - I will never be one of them. As anywhere else, the culture is defined by centuries of slowly changing demographics, by tradition, by language, by frontiers and by generations with strong attachments to the land. If you are born here you have a right to claim it as your homeland. If you come from outside the most you can hope for is a pat on the back for trying to speak their language. You will get tacit acceptance, but you will always be referred to as the Americano, for example.

To a certain extent I've also experienced this in the States; we also tend to search for our roots back in Europe or elsewhere. Because we need to differentiate ourselves we search and create myths about our roots. But since most of us are displaced, mixed, and essentially rootless, there is a common feeling of being American. People that go there to live, that weren't born there, will eventually call themselves American. It doesn't take generations, like it does here.

This has both its positive and negative aspects. I think in the end more positive. To try to arrest the flux of people and natural migratory tendencies smacks of essentialism. Can we really arrest our natural impulses, and will this make things any better? Are people really able to engineer the perfect society? Is the perfect society this perfect homogeneous group like the Nazis wanted to make, or is it heterogeneous like the United States? Would that make the United States a form of utopia (that is, of course, if you don't agree with the Nazis)? Post modernists hate the thought of that. That's why they don't believe in anything anymore. I don't go around waving a flag, or feeling ashamed of where I come from. I just try to keep my ear to the ground, that's all.

Paul Bowles is, incidentally, the man who inspired me to ditch everything I had in the States and become a traveler (at the time, I would have gone to India even ... I just wanted to get out). The year was 1999 and I had been working seven days a week, holding two different jobs, for almost a year. By summer of 1999 I had ten thousand dollars saved up and a one-way ticket to Spain, via Amsterdam. I gave away everything I owned, bought a North Face backpack and a couple good books to take along with me (one of them was Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, the other was Water Music by T.C. Boyle which is highly recommended, and coincidentally another traveler-themed book).

On my itinerary was Morocco, partly because I knew Paul Bowles was living in Tangier. Despite rumors of his rudeness to visitors, I wanted to pay him a visit. Unfortunately he died in between the time when I bought my ticket and my arrival in Europe. I went to Tangier anyway, and it was a a huge disappointment - a far cry from the intriguing international city found in Bowles' fiction. It was filthy and downright repulsive. To this day, in fact, I would have to say it's the absolute worst place I've ever been too. There isn't even anything romantically sordid about the place. It's just a filthy hole on the doorstep of Europe.

Bowles lived in Tangier for the last fifty years of his life. I have a feeling he did so because he knew he would be left alone there. Further south there are beautiful cities like Essaouira and Marrakesh, there's the Gorges of Toudra, and even Chefchaouen, which is renowned for the quality hash which can be bought there (Bowles toked, that's for sure, as can be surmised from some of his surreal, labyrinthine short stories). So, why would anyone take up permanent residence in a hole like Tangier? One thing's for sure, you will be left alone there.

But getting back to Montalbán, who started this whole rumination by paraphrasing Bowles ...

In my opinion he was a better writer than Bowles, and I feel really fortunate that I can read him in Spanish. They were both travelers and both wrote about it, but if I had to compare them I would say Montalbán achieved two things that Bowles never fully achieved in all the books I've read by him: humor and a sense of humanity. Also, Montalbán's writing is clear, whereas Bowles' writing sometimes has a strangulated feel to it.

I'm on my second book by Montalbán, Milenio Carvalho, which is his swan song. Pepe Carvalho, -the detective/protagonist of many of his novels - has been implicated in a murder while he's on his self-proclaimed last trip around the world, accompanied by his sidekick Biscúter. They eat and philosophize most of the time, in between bursts of intrigue - in Genoa, in Athens, Alexandria, Ramallah, Jerusalem, the Bosporus straight ... I'm still reading it so I can't say where they'll end up.

Philo/political observations and eating easily take up half the space of the book. Whereas most fictional characters seem to have a superhuman ability to survive without eating, Carvalho is obsessed with filling his fat Iberian tummy. That's the great thing about Montalbán's Carvalho versus Hammett's Continental OP, Chandler's Marlowe, or Spillane's Hammer - more than a detective he's a pioneer of the palate, something we can relate to more than the archetypal badass found in most detective fiction. Carvalho is a traveler and a bon vivant above all else.

Both Bowles and Montalbán were travelers in real life (Montalbán lived out his remaining days in Bangkok), and they both injected their experiences into their fiction. The underlying idea is this: travelers uproot themselves and make the world their home. I can't say I regret anything about my decision to leave the States. Attachment to land, to a supposed identity, is illusory. Once you get out there you realize people have pretty much the same motives everywhere you go. Architecture changes, eating habits get better or worse, but people are always the same. At least from my limited experience so far.

Random pics around town

2007-03-16T04:52:00.000-07:00

"Go Spain" or "Hit Spain"?

From La Rousse's Gran diccionario del Argot
caña - a glass of beer
2. dar caña - to hit, to scold or tell off
4. to put pressure on, to obligate, to force

This is graffiti you can find all over Barcelona, usually in bathroom stalls in the Raval and Gracia. Caña or its Catalan variant canya both mean the same thing, in all their various definitions (at least the ones I've heard). To da caña to something means to push it to its limits (driving a car real fast, putting pressure on an opposing team, for example). What's interesting about this graffiti is that because it's written in Catalan it has clearly negative connotations. It would mean something like like Hit/nail Spain (as bad as that sounds). On the other hand, if it were written in Spanish it would most likely mean something like Go Spain. I prefer the drinkable variety of the word.

Still smokin'

In 2006 the no smoking ordnance was passed. It hasn't been very effective.

Vertigo-inducing stairwell

I love these rickety little stairwells. Who need gyms when you have to climb these? And it would be the perfect location for a noir film shoot out. I should look into this.

Pornographic coffee device

Nationalist bread. Very good, actually.

A really long and depressing wait in the metro

If they don't give us bike lanes we'll make our own

No service if football is on. Una canya si us plau!

Rain is good

2007-03-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

It forces me to blog and destroys the temptation to sit on a sun-bathed terrace and eat chocos and pulpitos and drink ice cold Moritz.

Here's a couple anecdotes:

Jetas

From Real Academia Española

jeta

1. Protuberant mouth due to its configuration, or because of having big lips.

5. colloquial. Shamelessness. "You've got a lot of shamelessness."

8. colloquial. A shameless person.

This is a story of a jeta. There is no good English equivalent to this fantastic Spanish word.

Brits would probably say “cheeky bastard” and Americans would probably say “prick” or “jerkoff”. Admittedly, though, neither of these do the word justice. “Prick” and "jerkoff" are too harsh, and "cheeky bastard” is too light.

When someone says, “Tú tienes mucha jeta,” what they’re implying is that you act shamelessly.

My portero, or doorman, told me a story the other day which perfectly illustrates what a jeta is. It is a story of latin loving and double crossing; a story of blind lust and betrayal. It is also the story of the previous tenant who lived in our apartment. A fellow who left us with unpaid gas and water bills that we had to pay for, under threat of having both utilities cut off*.

That’s not the only thing. Before I get into the story I should explain the state the guy left the apartment in.

I think the reason we got the apartment was because it took a lot of imagination to see the potential in it. It was a wreck. And that probably cut in half the number of people who even considered it. It was painted in fluorescent green (no exaggeration), and had what looked like a DIY parquet job in the “lounge” area. Let’s just say the boards, which we can’t afford to replace right now, aren’t very straight. Our little 5 sq meter terrace was used for trash and discarded furniture, and the whole apartment had a kind of stressful, psychotic feel about it. I mean, fluorescent fucking green!

We always laughed about what this guy must have been like. Without ever seeing or hearing him, we had this vague ghostlike image of him. We called him a cutre**, as they say here. Just an all around louse. Every lousy bad-taste-having person I’ve ever known rolled into one.

So I was talking to the portero the other day and he told me about the guy that used to live in our apartment. He was a jeta, he said, while shaking a limp right hand, which is Spanish body language for implying that this guy was an extreme jeta.

What happened was this: about ten years ago a couple moved into what is now our apartment. The couple was a Cuban man and a Spanish woman. According to the portero everything was in the Spanish woman’s name. The apartment, in reality was entirely hers. All he said about her was, “No era muy agraciada pero eso no quita que fuera buena persona.” Translated that basically means she was not the most attractive person, but she was good natured. He said she was from a small town outside of Barcelona, and that she worked as a professor.

The Cuban didn’t do anything apparently, besides latin loving.

The portero shook his head at this point and told me what happened next. A mere two months after moving in, la no muy agraciada came home and found the Cuban “hasiendo” el amor in their apartment with another woman. That is, she caught him and another woman in flagrante. The poor girl left, shattered, and never returned. The portero has no idea what happened to her.

Ten years later the Cuban was still living in the apartment which was technically in her name. She never returned. He had, after conquering her heart, conquered for himself a nice little apartment in the Eixample.

“Es que el tío tiene mucha jeta,” said the portero.

This guy is really the best definition for this great Spanish word. We’ve all had experiences with jetas. Charmers in the guise of men or women who know how to talk themselves into advantageous positions.

* As incredible as it sounds, you can do that here. With complete impunity you can leave unpaid bills in a certain domicile, and be sure that the next unfortunate tenant will have to pay for them. Of course, you can have the gas or water company cancel the service and then activate it again in your name, but that costs a lot of money, and in this case, it was more than what this jeta owed. So I ended up paying for three months of his gas and water. I have no idea if this can happen in the States. I never had to deal with anything like it.

** cutre – another one of those cross-dressing adjectives which occasionally moonlights as a noun. It means shabby and tacky, and when you call someone a cutre it means that they’re a tasteless person. It’s one of those great inner-circle words you can use among friends, and, without really saying anything, mean a whole lot. That movie is cutre; that guy is cutre; my job is cutre … it’s not anything specific. Cutre is a way of life. For some people. Stay away from them.

Crime in Sant Pere & The Sick Obsession for Ordnung

A friend of mine from Berlin came to Barcelona a couple weeks ago. He’s free thinker, and is never bogged down by the usual preconceptions I find in so many people. That’s why I liked hearing his observations, brief as they were, about Barcelona.

One was about a visit he paid to my old neighborhood in Sant Pere. While walking down Via Laietana, the main artery which divides the Gòtic and Sant Pere, he heard a woman screaming.

When he told me this, I already knew what was coming next …

He turned around and about a hundred meters away there was a guy trying to yank a purse from a young woman who was on the ground screaming, yet still clutching her purse. According to my German friend she was dragged some meters before releasing her purse.

The snatcher then ran off, cutting across Laietana and into Sant Pere Mes Baix. At this point in the story I was guessing from there the snatcher ran down Verdaguer i Callís, then turned on San Pere Mitja. After two short blocks - past the Pakistani market and Cervantes elementary school - i imagined him ducking into a building right above the Halal butcher. Thing is, I’ve seen these guys many times from my window, taking this same route. But, of course, this is just past experience which in no way means this guy was part of the same group. In fact, my guess was probably wrong because this is what my friend said next:

He described the bag snatcher as “very sporty looking” (with a heavy enunciation on the “t” due to his German accent) - wearing a Nike track suit, or something like it, and “spor-tee” shoes. He was also “very blonde”. This certainly threw a new element into the equation. It’s been a nearly nine months since I left Sant Pere, so things might have changed. “Blonde” bag snatchers. Interesting. Of course, that could mean any number of things, from a guy dying his hair blonde, to a desperate guiri-gone-bad as my friend Kovaks would no doubt say.

Add this to the annals of Guirilandia.

My Berliner friend also told me he was surprised at how “popular” bikes seemed here. He astutely observed the fashionable element in all this. There’s definitely a bike riding trend, but the number of serious riders is probably less then it would appear. He noted how many of those collapsible bikes he saw, for one. Which is telling, because one only has to sit on a bench on Diagonal - that avenue that cuts across the Eixample - and watch how ridiculous people on those collapsible bikes look. Because of their tiny wheels one is obliged to pedal like a maniac in order to achieve anything like a reasonable speed. Now, anyone who's had experience with them will have to admit that these collapsible bikes might look neat and cute, but they are the most unwieldy and arguably dangerous of all types of bikes.

Yes, I digress! So my friend goes on:

He said he could understand, in a way, that some people were pissed at bike riders for not following “the rules”. There are a lot more bike riders in the city, that’s true. But he also said that breaking the rules is difficult to avoid in Barcelona; there just aren’t that many bike lanes, and where there aren’t bike lanes there’s the bus and taxi lane – but, sometimes, especially at rush hour, riding in a lane with psychotic, stressed-out taxi drivers and two ton buses isn’t exactly appealing.

He read my story about the bike vigilante in my neighborhood who viciously stabbed my tire (he struck again, actually, but I didn’t write about it the second time because I didn’t want to be a douchebag about it). He said the guy reminded him of the Ordnungsamt, which are a form of citizen’s police force in Germany. The Ordnungsamt are a truly despicable cross section of humanity.

The Ordnungsamt patrol the streets and have the power to stop you if they see you committing an infraction (jaywalking, for example). They can also fine you, on the spot. The Ordnungsamt stopped my friend for crossing a red light on his bike even though there were no cars or people around. The Ordnungsamt, incredibly enough, was staking out the intersection in order to catch law breaking citizens.

Of course, everybody’s heard the urban legend about Germans not crossing the street when the light is red, even if it’s three in the morning, the streets are empty, and there is not one car in sight (I’m talking about people on foot, or on a bike – not driving).

It’s not an urban legend.

People just don’t do it, and it’s largely due to the sick obsession of people like the Ordnungsamt. They fined my friend 15 euros for committing the grievous offense of crossing a red light – through an empty intersection - on a bike. A few months after this he and a friend were fined again for riding on the sidewalk (he said the road was obstructed, forcing him to ride on the sidewalk).

Menos mal, I thought, that I live in Spain, where hysterical ordnung maniacs will never become the norm. They’re out there, but they seem to be a radical minority.

What I need ...

2007-02-23T11:25:00.000-08:00

... is one of these bad boys:

Or this, which came out a few years earlier:

I’d just like to know who’s infringing on whom. I’ve already studied the relationship between increasing Viagra usage and decreasing macho ibérico lovage, so this might be an interesting investigation topic. Who's stealing whose humor? In this case I will assume, being an arrogant American, that somebody stole this idea from the American original. The Keledén* ad is a somewhat crappier looking, pretty much word-for-word copy of Fukitol's. Fukitol should file an infringement lawsuit against Spanish imposter Keledén.

Here’s a couple links someone sent me with jokes in MP3 format from late Barcelonan comedian Eugenio. Here and here.

And here’s a link to my translated version of his "do you know why the monkey put his balls in my glass of whiskey" joke.

* "Keledén" comes from "Que le den", or "que le den por culo", which translated means "Up his ass". In colloquial English I think this would best be translated as "Fuck 'em".

The macho ibérico, endangered species

2007-02-15T22:15:00.000-08:00

It was inevitable. The slow march of progress - democracy, the euro, Burger King’s XXL hamburgers, the 8x8x8 workday, sin siesta - is feminizing

Spain

The emerging effeminate culture directly challenges the dominion of one of Spain’s most predominant archetypes. Next to el toro, paella, flamenco, playa and sangria, the macho ibérico is one of those indelible symbols marking the Iberian peninsula. Or so we thought.

Dan Bilefsky, writing for the New York Times, has an interesting article about the increasing use of Viagra in Spain. According to sources he cites, this increase is linked to rising male impotency due to stress, which is the direct result of shorter and shorter siestas. According to Pfizer, the masterminds behind the blue pill, 1 million boxes of Viagra were sold last year in Spain alone.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. A couple months ago in Madrid a man held up a pharmacy with two toy guns, demanding all the Viagra they had in stock. Bilfesky tells how the man returned two hours later with a bouquet of roses as a show of gratitude. He was subsequently arrested.

Two hours is probably enough time to pop a couple Viagras and visit a mistress or a puticlub. But the inexplicable, decidedly unmacho act of buying a bouquet of roses for the pharmacy attendants is telling. Even el sexo azul, as Viagra is sometimes called here, can’t save the last of the macho ibéricos.

I made a scientific, multi-axis graph to illustrate this trend:

Here’s some snippets from Bilfesky’s article:

Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, says Spain has moved into the vanguard of a European Viagra trend in part because economic prosperity has transformed the country from a relaxed Mediterranean culture, where the siesta was sacrosanct, into an Anglo-Saxon-style, workaholic nation.

This new stress, said Belén Alguacil Arconada, a Pfizer spokeswoman, is wreaking havoc with the Spanish male’s libido.

“We used to have a siesta, to sleep all afternoon, to eat well,” she said. “But now we have become a fast-food nation where everyone is stressed out, and this is not good for male sexual performance.”

[…]

Sociologists say that an increased willingness to address sexual problems reflects Spain’s sexual liberation after the repressiveness of the Franco years. Once one of the most conservative Catholic countries in Europe, Spain is now among the most liberal, with gay marriage, legalized abortion and one of the highest divorce rates on the Continent. The country’s freewheeling party culture also has played a role.

Tell me it ain’t so!

Anda guapa!

Further research brought me to this documentary on the macho ibérico. Sorry, it’s in Spanish without subtitles. But there’s plenty of ass slappin’ to back up the scientific babble. Enjoy.

Despite the demise of this singular Spanish phenomena, there is hope. Coming straight from the mean streets of Barcelona. Larry Kovaks in the Fake Baby Con. Back in full form, it seems, after an inexplicable lapse into cooking. I guess even he is not impervious to the feminizing incursions democracy.

I couldn't figure out what I would dress as for carnaval ...

2007-02-13T12:55:00.000-08:00

A geriatric cross dressing king, a little girl with an ulcer on her forehead (or is she "supposed" to be of the Hindu ethnicity?), or a guardia civil with aviator glasses reminiscent of Franco and a well-groomed mustache reminscent of Hitler ... Thank you ajuntament for your perspicacious insight into these matters! I was thinking of dressing up as an etarra, someone of the Catalan ethnicity, or a repellent queen with a crown from a tot a cent.

Chapuza lingüística

2007-02-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

Spanish water bottle mystery - update

2007-02-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

It’s still shrouded in mystery, but most people agree: water bottles are supposed to stop animals from wizzing on your domicile. The glinting water sends out danger signals which animals instinctively recognize. The danger signal says, “Do not commit civil disobedience or you will be shined upon.”

But I wonder: are plastic water bottles littering the streets better than a little cat pee?

Link to my earlier post on this subject.

Here are some replies:

They do it in Italy too--I asked a woman in Venice once and she said it stops cats pissing on the front door step (lots of those in Venice) They also put basil plants on the window ledges to keep flies away.

Hope that helps--I am pretty sure I have seen it in Greece too so it must be a Med thing

Suzanne

Nicki in Positano says:

If you walk around any small town or village in South Italy you will find full water bottles gracing many a doorstep. My brother when he came to visit thought that the kind locals left the water there for any thirsty passerby to swig from. But, alas, he was wrong. The locals couldn't give a damm about the weary travellers. All they really want is to deter those pesky stray cats from peeing on their doorstep. I am sceptical to whether this method works or not, but the locals obviously believe in the powers of the full water bottle deterring needy cats from weeing there.

After all, if you were a cat would you wee next to a humans drink?

Positano’s a nice little town, by the way.

Some guy calling himself “one two” says:

Water bottles do keep from dogs and other animals as well from pissing on store fronts. Ever been to Paris? Lots of dog shit, no pissing though.

Yup. But they don’t keep humans from doing it. Multas from the ayuntamiento do!

Via barcelonareporter.com, who kindly linked to the original post:

My Girlfriend has always told me it is to scare the dogs away. She says it is just normal water and that the top should be on the bottle. Apparently the dogs are scared of the reflections made by the water.

I have another theory; the dogs like to wee on the bottle (because they like the reflections) so at least they dont do it on the wall.

Jim Morrison

Nice of Jim to make it back from the other side to illuminate us on these matters. How is it over there?

This has confounded me for years as well! I've got it down to two possibilities: it is the collected runoff from air-conditioning units (left on the street) and/or the containers are filled with bleach (or some other noxious substance) to deter dogs. Has anyone tried a sniff test?

Guiripoyas

Thank you, guiripoyas. And an elegant moniker, indeed, as my offshore islander friends might say. I haven't sniffed th bottles yet. Have you?

Rebellion in the zoo 3

2007-01-30T14:06:00.000-08:00

So I did a vanity search, not in the mirror, mind you, but on the best of all nets, the internet, by looking for Guirilandia*.

From Frikipedia’s entry on Guirilandia (my translation follows):

Guirilandia

Country with absolute monarchy, formerly known as the United Kingdom, governed by queen Isabelita II. Since the former German country is inhabited in its majority by guiris, this country has been incorporated into the lands of Guirilandia. In the year 1950, the hegemony of this empire began, creating the all-powerful Guiri Army of Tourists. These invaded and conquered large areas, converting them into Colonies of Guirilandia. Among the conquered territories are:

The entire Costa del Sol, including Marbella, Malaga and the regional economic superpower, Ronda.

Canary islands and Balearic islands

The entire Costa Blanca

They are beginning to send sectors of their elite army to Galicia and the north of Spain, but they have encountered strong resistance in this region of the peninsula. Madrid will soon fall into the hands of the invading army, but thanks to the inexistence of beaches in Madrid, the tourist army of Guirilandia is not that interested in this central part of the peninsula. The situation in Portugal is unknown.

Guirilandia has begun exporting products from its colonies back to its queen, for example la Paella Valenciana and cheap Spanish beer.

Guirilandia has grand ambitions. In the first place, it wants to extend its moreno centollo** across the whole world, beginning with Spain, but without having achieved definitive victory.

(see the video documentation I have encountered in my research here and here - real footage shot by guerilla forces of the Fauna Ibérica)

The definition of guiri lists certain “peculiarities”. Quite illuminating:

They usually buy sombreros in the souvenir shops, typical Spanish product, por excelencia.

Because their skin is extremely sensible and is prone to reddening (a product, without a doubt, of the sun which revolves around their own world [this must refer to one genus of guiri, the guiri solipsisus), they frequently wear sandals with socks as if it was totally normal, for the pleasure of the natives.

They have bodily appendages commonly called photo cameras, which are in the habit of photographing the most monumental nonsense or the most nonsensical monuments like broken streetlights, local clothing, crap in the middle of the sidewalk, etc.

They are naive and tend to fall in the clutches of juvenile delinquents.

They are accustomed to going to the beach to sunbathe without sunscreen (something that any mortal with a well-ordered head does, which supports the theory that guiris are from another, parallel universe), something that the experts call “shrimp effect” or even “lobster effect”

They accompany paella with Coca-cola, which they curiously denominate Coke.

They are known for their capacity to avoid learning the languages of the countries they visit, although they are capable of obligating any human being (imbecile and/or half-imbecile) to speak English even if they haven’t any knowledge of this language.

They create communities of like minded folk in large regions of the world, standing out among them are Cancún, Polynesia, Italy, the Costa Brava and the Greek islands. In some cases (especially on the Costa Brava), a rich guiri magnate buys a town or an urbanization and populates it with guiris from his or her own world. These towns are only inhabited in the summer, and there they go on binges and throw house parties that are attended by famous personalities of the country, like Pocholo, Yola Berrocal or Nacho Vidal.

[…]

Due to their ignorance of the normal economic system and their insistence on using foreign currency, the wise sellers and shopkeepers of the countries being visited, above all in the Costa Brava and Barcelona, sell them crappy things and useless objects at the price of gold. They think that in this country we are all bullfighters, that we subsist on wine and paellas, that we dance sevillanas and sing flamenco, and that we are incredibly funny [I have know idea, really, what llevamos curras hasta la rodilla means].

Not enough? The Efecto Guiri:

Said of the gravitational attraction between the English (or any other super rich blonde of Anglo-Saxon origin) and the Spanish (or any other smart ass in need of money).

Origins

This phenomenon originated back in the 17th century, when the English, on board ferries, arrived on the Iberian peninsula and invaded the beaches like madmen, greasing themselves with necessary creams and sweeteners[?] to maintain their artificial color. The English dedicated themselves to walking the streets with their shopping carts [I think that’s what they meant by carratillas], while the Spanish observed them thinking about a way to make it to the end of the month.

While the English laughed their asses off doing the Corte Ingles [English Court, a department store], the ibéricos constructed little houses of wood and put sea water in barrels where they put fizzy soda. This is how the renowned business of the Chiringuitero*** started.

The English, attracted to the smell of something new, arrived en masse to the chiringuitos where they ordered huge amounts of fizzy soda to refresh their heads.

Then Super López appeared with his super cape […] and he set about going from table to table asking for a 2€ guiri tax. The English, fascinated by the enormous fluency of this chap and because his cape had the logo of Corte Ingles, accepted. From this moment they had earned the honorable title of guiri.

[…]

Important drinks for guiris:

Whiskey, vodka (black if it is available), beer, and the other varieties.

* I think I might have been one of the first to start using the term guirilandia, though admittedly I did not invent it. I stumbled across it while perusing LaRousse’s Gran Diccionario del Argot. I used the term on people and many claimed to have never heard of it, but admitted that it sounded like a plausible Spanish word. Now guirilandia is used more and more in newspapers, on the net, in everyday conversations. I really don’t have huge amounts of traffic, nothing that would merit me the title of “influencer”, but there is a curious and seemingly causal connection. It started with my short movie, and continued with this blog. The whole intention was twofold: to have a medium in which to tell stories, and also to expropriate the derogatory term guiri and make it my own.

I would like to add that should anybody want to buy the rights to guirilandia.net for 300,000 euros, or the average price of a 50 square meter apartment in Barcelona, you can contact me here: helpguirilandia@gmail.com . As a bonus, I will personally write a 5,000 word essay or short story on any subject you like. Thank you.

For more info, check out my article on the etymology of the word guiri on barcelonareporter.com

On a further note, I was also privy to the Guirilandia Statute of Autonomy, purportedly drafted by radical guiris romanticizing an unrealizable ideal form of perfect guiridom. This is a reactionary movement instigated by a few disgruntled tourists with decidedly undemocratic and populistic tendencies. Albeit, I think they have "good" intentions. But that can be said about anything before the proverbial last words “it seemed like a good idea … at first”.

** moreno centollo – somewhat of a misnomer, it literally means “lobster brown” or “lobster tan”. There is an English equivalent, “red like a lobster”, as in being embarrassed or, more appropriately in this case, badly sunburnt. The moreno centollo is the bane and stigma of guiridom.

*** chiringuito – open air bar. In Barcelona they’re found on the beaches. They serve overpriced drinks and sometimes feature dj so-and-so playing a variety of house music. They are a last resort, infested by fresh-off-the-boat guiris.

Es vicio, es alquiler

2007-01-27T09:56:00.000-08:00

It's vice, it's renting. I'm not sure but at the top I think it says "gay". You figure it out.

A story of verguenza

2007-01-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

Looks like Larry Kovaks has finally wrapped up the case of La Isla de los Melocotones - the bordello in the Raval that went down a couple months ago in the big hooker round up.

I'm glad too. It's about time he started solving those dastardly guiri crimes again.

Check it out: Shame, shame, shame (part VI)

Homage to Guirilandia

2007-01-20T09:10:00.000-08:00

Where else can you walk in a bar called Braseria la Tasqueta, speak to a Chinese waiter in Spanish, get a beer served in a wine glass, and eat a kebab?

That's right friends. Remember this. Globalization kicks ass.

Interesados

2007-01-18T22:21:00.000-08:00

More sketch art from Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi

From the dictionary of the Real Academia Española:

interesado, da.

2. adj. Que se deja llevar demasiado por el interés, o solo se mueve por él.

From the Oxford Spanish-English Dictionary:

interesado, -a nm-nf

1. Person concerned

From Merriam-Webster:

opportunist

Function: noun

One who does things only for his own benefit and with little regard for right and wrong

Interesado,in its noun form, is a great word in Spanish. But it has always confused me that it’s defined in English as “interested person”. When you call someone an interesado, like “Este tio es un interesado”, you are saying they’re not the kind of person you want to hang out with. The word means someone who is superficial and calculating. Slimy. Slick. All rolled in one. That’s why I think the word opportunist, which in English has negative connotations and basically means the same thing, is the best one word translation we have for interesado.

Interesados are everywhere. People masquerade as do-gooders or fighters for social justice, when in reality they are pushing a very different agenda, often times ridiculously individualistic, often times completely contrary to the general concept of “good” they are supposedly espousing. Paz, or peace, is a noble word that nobody can disagree with. Most people want to live in peace. Granted, through the ages their have been people who genuinely wanted the contrary, but on the whole, you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who wanted war for war’s sake, as much as that irritates anybody who finds themselves in disagreement with the aims of a certain war. Because, going to war, for most people, is a last resort (or at least it should be). It is supposed to, according to those who find themselves aligned with its cause, bring about a greater good in the world. The frustration arises because those who oppose the war can’t see why anyone could support a war, because war is almost unanimously considered a bad thing. How could anyone be in favor of say, cancer? Or senile dementia? Or flies and mosquitoes? Long lines in the super market? People shouldn’t get their concepts mixed up. There are universal evils and irritants for mankind, those that harm us all. War on the other hand is often the result of one side’s idealism. The vanquished aren’t expected to reap the rewards of the war. They may take part, but they have to submit. But an idea of good comes out of it for the conquerors. Good being a better way of life for los interesados. Can there be exceptions? I really don’t think so. Even Nazis were fighting for an ideal, for a national socialist utopia. They weren’t monsters, they certainly didn’t see themselves as monsters, and they were fighting for what they perceived as a common good.

And these peace marches against ETA. They are marching for peace. If you don’t march, according to confused logic, therefore you must be against peace. Perhaps people have different ideas on how to arrive at that peace? But that aside you have to look at the Popular Party’s stance on this as political posturing. For me, they’re acting like petulant schoolchildren who simply quieren llevar lo contrario, or do the opposite. They obviously have valid points when talking about ETA, but for one moment of solidarity they could have worked with the socialists, because, really it was nothing other than symbolism, and they are supposed to govern together. They’ve demonstrated exactly the kind of partisanship, selfishness, and immaturity that they like to criticize the left with (take ERC for example, which openly states its refusal to ever negotiate with a “conservative” party). For some more on this, check out my favorite paranoid commie, the bad rash, who’s generally insightful, but occasionally a little too righteous for my taste.

Mariano Rajoy – a contemptible man who proclaimed that his newspaper of choice is La Marca, a sports rag, who said he has no books on his nightstand – is an interesado, and one stupid and boring politician. Rajoy is the same interesado who, oddly enough, said it was “understandable” that the Spanish government sent a doctor to treat Fidel Castro. Very odd indeed, coming from a right wing politician. Despite some initial criticism from other members of his party, and what could easily have been blown up by the PP, mysteriously fizzled into nothing. Well, not so mysterious, when you realize that the doctor who went to Cuba is also Rajoy’s personal doctor. His lofty ideals of justice obviously have a barrier. Himself.

An interesado is Madrid’s mayor, Ruiz-Gallardon, who instead of joining a march which should have been about solidarity, went for a photo op with a bewildered and visibly irritated Tim Robbins. He of course had every right to meet him, being the mayor, but his timing couldn’t have been less tactful. Not to mention doing it with someone who is a vociferous critic of anything “right wing” (which, by the way, I think is a stupid stance to take). Robbins said he felt “used”, and went into a diatribe on Bush’s politics. And you know what, he has a legitimate right to be angry with Bush’s mangled politics. Many Americans, including myself, are disillusioned. For another view on this, check out my favorite right wing whack job, Iberian Notes, who’s generally insightful but occasionally gets carried away with bloodlust.

Curiously enough, while most of last Tuesday’s papers were suffused with news relating to the PP-PSOE standoff, this small item in la Vanguardia went by relatively unnoticed. Íñigo Méndez de Vigo, the Popular Party’s representative in the European parliament, had this to say about the alarming re-emergence of extreme right wing parties in Europe:

A la extrema derecha hay que vencerla con ideas y debates, y no intentando crear cordones sanitarios.

Es un error político que le permitirá presentarse como víctima del sistema".

[…]

Intentar taparlos, como pretende la izquierda, es un error político de una ceguera monumental. Aislándolos, al final lo único que haces es crear víctimas.

You have to beat the extreme right with ideas and debates, and not try to quarantine them.

It’s a political error that allows them to act like victims of the system.

[…]

Trying to cover them up, like the left wants to do, is a political error of monumental blindness. By isolating them, ultimately you will only create victims.

Sounds like a sensible idea. Now why doesn’t his party apply the same strategy to the extreme left? Even if they are repellent communists? If they really backed up their words, meant what they said, wouldn’t that apply to everyone else, granted we are working within the margins of the law? It’s so easy to talk about dialogue without actually doing it.

Crosstown traffic

2007-01-16T12:41:00.000-08:00

An angry blogger – and, I suspect, the author of some incomprehensible emails which have been sent my way - has linked to my last blog entry in a post entitled “Racisme, alcohol i l'anglosaxó anticatalanista”, or “Racism, alcohol, and the anti-catalanist anglosaxon”.

Hi ha un anglosaxó a Barcelona que no entén que els gossos no entenguin el català. Aquest anglosaxó odia els catalanistes i no ho acabo d'entendre, perquè, segons ell, està casat amb una catalana.

There is an anglosaxon in Barcelona that doesn’t understand why dogs don’t understand Catalan. This anglosaxon hates catalanistas [catalan nationalists] and I don’t understand, because, according to him, he is married to a Catalan woman.

I never said “I don’t understand why dogs don’t understand Catalan”. That’s completely beside the point. In fact, I know a very friendly Golden Labrador who is fluent in Catalan and goes nuts when you play the first part of Jane’s Addiction’s “Been caught stealing”. I know of a bilingual cat who survived a four-story fall onto the mean streets of L’avinguda Verge de Montserrat (The Avenue of the virgin of Serrated Mountain). He usually keeps to himself but has been known to speak both Catalan and the invader language of Castellano depending on who will give him food. I even know of an iguana who speaks Catalan and some English (some say Catal-english). And finally there’s the sad story of the monolingual Catalan ferret who was struck by lightning and now, for some inexplicable reason, can only speak Chinese.

Another strange fact …

My girlfriend’s grandmother, or la iaia, as they say around these parts, told me of how she used to sing for Catalan folkloric choirs after the civil war (in Catalan, by the way). But she also sang in Falangist choirs because they were handing out much-needed clothes.

And it’s another fact that she was married to an ex republican soldier.

And please man, stop being so solipsistic. Catalan does not equal Catalanista. And Catalanista doesn’t mean “good” or “savior of the Catalan people”, unless you’re defining it according to your own ill-begotten axioms. It’s an ideology like any other, and it shamefully excludes the interests of Chinese speaking ferrets.

Don’t miss the first part of Trajecte’s post:

L'altre dia hi pensava: si a mi no m'agrada anar amb gitanos ni moros, però tampoc els vull cap mal, sóc racista? Jo no els vull pas cap mal, però no m'agradaria pas de barrejar-m'hi. Clar, dir això, o tan sols insinuar-ho públicament, em pot comportar molts problemes, i seriosos. Però en el fons, no sóc racista. A més, no vol dir que acabi casant-me amb una musulmana, tot podria ser. Però el fet és aquest: ara per ara, a Catalunya, són una classe marginal i, com totes les classes marginals d'arreu, de totes les èpoques, són potencialment més perilloses que les altres classes de la societat. Afirmar això és racisme?

The other day I thought: if I don’t like hanging out with gypsies or moros [somewhat derogatory term that refers to people from Morocco … which would never be used in their presence unless you wanted a beatdown], but neither do I wish them any harm, am I a racist? I don’t wish them any harm, but I wouldn’t like to mix with them at all. Sure, saying this, or simply insinuating it publicly, could bring me lots of problems, and serious ones. But deep down, I am not racist. Furthermore, I don’t want to say I will end up marrying a muslim woman, everything is possible. But the fact is this: nowadays, in Catalunya, they are a marginal class and, like all marginal classes everywhere, from every epoch, they are potentially more dangerous than the other classes of society. To state this is racism?

As you can see, that really wasn’t even worth the time it took to translate it, except for the choice part about marginal classes being potentially more dangerous than other classes of society (that is, within this mindset, moros, gypsies, the invading Spanish hordes, guiris, and Chinese speaking ferrets). The awe-inspiring power of trajecte’s illogic is making my brain reel.

Flipo, tio.

This is a great new entry from Urban Dictionary:

blogorrhea

To write a blog entry just for the sake of posting an entry, not because you have done anything interesting today.

I couldn't really think of anthing good to blog about, so my last post was real blogorrhea.

Posts aleatorios

2007-01-13T00:50:00.000-08:00

A strange fact post

I mentioned before that my neighbor is one of those 80 year old Catalan burguesas, rubia de pote. Big hair, heavy on the make up, always looking like she’s in her Sunday best. I can imagine her having thousands of euros, or even pesetas, hidden under her mattress.

She has this collie that must be inbred. It’s a seriously stupid beast. It still doesn’t recognize me after more than six months of daily encounters. It goes nuts every time it sees me, then hides behind her. Just passing in front of her door is enough to set the dog off barking for hours on end.

I often encounter my neighbor and her bemuzzled collie in the street. Oddly enough, her dog walks her. She follows the dog’s whim, whatever that is. One smell after the other, zig zagging through the Eixample, pulling her on its leash. This is true. I followed them once.

That’s not the strange fact, however.

Sometimes I overhear her speaking in Catalan to the portero*, something like “Surto a passejar el gos! Surto a passejar el gos!” (which means, “I’m going out to walk the dog! I’m going out to walk the dog!”). The portero thinks she’s a bit whacky as well, because he usually rolls his eyes at me at this point, and says something ingratiating to her as she walks away.

When she gets to the door her dog is already skittish, afraid of all the people outside. “Vamos! Vamos!”, "Let's go! Let's go!" she says, in Spanish, not Catalan.

I mentioned this strange fact to people - that she speaks Catalan to humans but Spanish to her dog. Apparently, and I kid you not, for I’ve heard this from authentic Barceloneses, speaking Spanish to dogs while speaking Catalan to people is quite common among the older generation.

Check this site out post

Roadside Jesus is now taking questions. He’s also selling some mighty fine looking T shirts with his Jesusness depicted on them. Roadside Jesus’s sagacity is unparalleled. Read this sample, or check out his site.

Do you trust commas? Some people mostly foreigners use them to tabulate money. I could blame the person. I blame the comma.

-Paranoid - Indiana 1/06/07

[...]

I fear from your tone that you may have had an unfortunate experience with a comma in the past. Did a comma hurt you as a child? Perhaps it touched you somewhere inappropriate? Just so you know, it may have been an apostrophe masquerading as a comma to fufill its perverted desire. Apostrophes consider themselves better than lowly commas, when in reality, the only difference between the two is their height. Damn the apostrophes. They are possessive bastards.

And please my friend, may the only foreigner you malign be the band.

Wise words from Roadside Jesus. I wonder, however, if he’s related to “de Jesus”, the pedophile bowler in the Big Lebowski, or if he’s one and the same person. I ought to ask him.

"You don't fool Jesus."

Plugging my friend's blog post

Warning, gypmeisters, private detective up ahead.

Larry Kovaks vs. the bad guys in the penultimate chapter of Shame, Shame, Shame. Check out part five here.

They didn’t count on coming up against someone like me. A chump who’s been around the world five times and seen it all. From mujerones in Rio to flower blossoms in Klang that fit in the palm of your hand. The stories I could tell you.

Interesting videos post

Fascinating short documentary about the effects of drugs on spiders.

Hilarious remix of Mary Poppins.

Fast Film. This could be one of the coolest, most ingenious short movies ever.

Open letter to a jackass who apparently stabbed my tire post

Some creep sent me an email stating the following:

Your bicycle was not stabbed. It was slashed, I know. I did it. Maybe if they sidewalks wider than a tire people would not complain.

No man. It was stabbed. Using the word "stab" effectively anthropomorphizes my bike, therefore giving more impact to my sentence. English is nice like that.

And if you are the evil person who stabbed my tire, I hope you slip on a steamy turd and get laughed at next time you stroll about town. Sidewalk fascist.

I should’ve been posting but … post

What can I say? I could think of innumerable excuses for not updating my blog this week. I could have been trying to prove a priori the existence of god according to Kant’s theory of Sufficient Reason. Telefonica could have accidentally cut my phone lines. I could have been at the dog races. Soy un vago, a veces.

*portero – doorman. Most buildings here have them; it’s not as fancy as it sounds. They listen to badly-tuned radios, and many take two hour breaks in nearby bars. Mine is super portero. Don’t mess with him. He showed me this metal rod he’s got, for defense purposes. He slammed it down on his desk to demonstrate its effectiveness. It was loud. It scared me all right.

Marseille

2007-01-02T11:31:00.000-08:00

Marseille reminded me of Barcelona six years ago when they started to clean up the Raval. It's a mixture of sleaze and old world charm, and it's obvious a lot is going to change in the next few years.

The whole center of the town was under construction, with every street lined with sleepy bulldozers, chain link fences, and sacks of debris. No street cars were running, and unless you took one of the two subways, you had to walk everywhere.

Where we stayed - off the Canebière, in what seemed like a medina - we witnessed a bag snatching from our balcony five minutes after checking into our hotel. Not only was it reminiscent of Barcelona's Chino, it was probably the most exciting thing we witnessed during our stay.

I have a feeling everybody left Marseille and went to the rave in Barcelona for the New Year's celebrations. Everything was closed and muy tranquilo; except for a little bit of excitement after midnight, things were a far cry from the revelry that usually accompanies the changing of the year in Barcelona.

Unfortunately, about half of the bars and restaurants were closed, even in the livelier looking neighborhoods. Looking for some life, about 12:30 on new year's eve we wandered into this bar in the Cours Julien area, thinking we'd hear some rock n roll.

Rawkin' shortly before midnight

None of that, unless you call Phil Collins and Fine Young Cannibals rock n roll.

While contemplating the depressingly empty dance floor, a Houellebecquian phrase came to me: "Il est évident. L'humanité est condamnée à la dépression total." (OK, it was funny at the time ... and excuse my bad French)

Before we were subjected to more 80s soft rock we got out of there.

Thankfully we found something, right before the strike of midnight: an Irish pub where the music was equally bizarre: a schizophrenic mixture of nineties euro-techno, U2, and the White Stripes. Being guiris we acted like guiris and had an oblivious good time. The champagne helped. We left a couple hours later and walked towards the center. Like Barcelona, just go downhill and eventually you'll get to the center. In Marseille this happens to be the port - pretty much the Ramblas of Marseille, as far as the kinds of people are concerned.

On the way we met these drunken buskers. They played us a song, which I know from the Kusterica movies, though I have no idea what it's called. They said they were Yugoslavian.

As expected, the port was filled with leather-backed lotharios trying to faire l'amour with tipsy tourists. In the freakiest bar we could find we met a French version of Torrente who told us he was working as an undercover cop. While he desperately tried to pick up my girlfriend I witnessed a very obvious drug deal ... a furtive handshake, and a guy looking into a cellophane wrapper, then making a beeline to the bathroom. I guess, if French Torrente was an undercover cop, he had other priorities. He seemed like he was wired on coke anyway.

Since the nightlife seemed to have moved to Barcelona, we didn't really get to experience the city, which was a shame. I'd been there before, six years ago, for carnival, and left the city dazed and very confused after four days of beer, pastis and poulet frites.

The city is one of contrast, with old Spanish-speaking locas that look like ex prostitutes amidst the bustle of the medina-like center; then there's the cleaner, tourist-friendly port area just a stones throw away, with its sweater-scarved yuppies. That, and the hipper neighborhoods further up the hill, and the obvious face-lift the city is receiving, and you have a feeling Marseille is going to be something distinctly different, very soon. It certainly is a far cry from the days of the French Connection.

On new year's day we walked up to the Notre Dame de la Garde, from where you can see the entire city. Everything looks a lot cleaner from there, and the sprawl of the city with its tiled rooftops stretching from the Vieux Port to the rolling hills is impressive. Marseille is definitely a place to get to know. I'll go back again in the summer when the construction will be over in time for the tourist season. When everything comes back to life.

coda

On the train ride back their was heavy security at the borders. They delayed the train by about 40 minutes. My guess is they were looking for etarras.

At one point I wanted to open a bottle of Bordeaux and went to the bar at the back of the train for a corkscrew. In the wagon adjacent to the dining car, if you could call it that, there were two guys with two half empty bottles in front of them on their trays. Just behind them was a group of drunken Italians laughing and passing around their open bottles. I asked the two guys for their corkscrew and they lent it to me. From their accents I could tell they were American.

The wine was good. Almost as good as Spanish wine.

See you in 2007

2006-12-29T15:12:00.000-08:00

The news is that Barcelona's hotels are at 90% capacity with guiris of all nationalities coming here to celebrate the New Year.

What better time to skedaddle ...

I'm in Marseille, the ancient French port town. I won't be back until early next year.

Meanwhile, you can check out my new webpage. It's a book I wrote three years ago, and after some requests for the html version (which I never actually had) here it is in its entirety. The Bedroom Revolutionary. My little roman à clef, my first stab at the novel form, my blending of fact and fiction, free for anyone to peruse.

Feliz año nuevo, Feliç any nou

Obesity kicks ass

2006-12-28T01:54:00.000-08:00

“Big” news lately with Burger King’s XXL hamburger ads. The Spanish Ministry of Health is throwing a fit over the American fast food chain’s aggressive, politically incorrect marketing approach. While McDonald’s is promoting its healthier side, Burger King is putting up posters with gargantuan hamburgers: the XXL burger for big boys.

I'd barely be able to eat one of these. On the other hand, I bet my cuñaooo* could eat one easily. He’s got an impressive stomach, almost shelf-like, which no doubt has grown a couple sizes after the quantity of food he scarfed down over Christmas.

I have no desire to eat an XXL burger. And I wasn’t magically hypnotized into wanting to eat an XXL burger by the advertising either.

I would expect to get fat after regularly eating these, and I wouldn’t go around blaming anyone but my fat ass self. It’s quite simple, really, if you don’t want to gain weight. Don’t stuff yourself. Move a little. If not, you’ll become a sedentary slug somewhat reminiscent of Jabba the Hut. I work all day in front of a computer, but I ride a bike, I generally eat what I want to, and I don’t gorge myself. Fish, for example, have eight second memories, and have been known to eat themselves to death. The more food you throw at them, the more they eat. That’s a fish, with absolutely no capacity for abstract thought. To relegate humans to the intellectual level of a fish is insulting and patronizing.

That’s one of the things I hate about the United States. Ridiculous litigations against fast food and tobacco companies are convincing the more impressionable element of the population that they themselves are responsible for absolutely nothing. Successful lawsuits against fast food chains for making you fat, lawsuits against tobacco companies for giving you lung cancer … hey I’m not saying your path is an easy one, but you chose it, and you shouldn’t be treated as a victim. This mentality produces babies in the bodies of men. Or rather men with michelines**.

Most of the people in Spain scoff at such stupidity, and this is why I’m shocked that such a fuss is being made over Burger King’s polemics. If anything, this is giving them more publicity. And it also might mean, ironically, more of an Americanization in terms of mentality. Let’s not take individual responsibility and blame it all on the hypnotic effects of some advertising exec’s nocturnal emission.

Like fatty foods have never existed in Spain. Bars all over the city sell patatas bravas, chocos, frankfurters, patatas fritas, salchichas. All of this, and more, swimming in oil and fat. On any given day you can walk into a bar and see a portly cigar-smoking gentleman drinking a beer and eating these tapas.

The average menu in Spain looks like this:

(click on the image for more succulent detail)

I bet you any one of these platos combinados has as much calories as Burger King’s XXL (which purportedly has 941 calories, or the equivalent of 7 fried eggs). In other words, fatty food is not an American phenomenon.

They put fried eggs in everything here. They put fried eggs on pizzas, as disgusting as that sounds. I have even grown rather fond of the legendary Hamburguesa Reloj, which consists of a hamburger patty, bacon, lettuce, onion, tomato, and a fried egg. It sounds awful, I know, but try one out at Reloj, on via Laetana. Really, not bad. My personal favorite is the Super Kentucky, which you can get at Frankfurter on carrer Urgell. This consists of diced chicken, a fried egg, jamon serrano, lettuce, and salsa rosa.

There’s so much paranoia about obesity and anorexia, and it’s always the fault of some outside entity. An evil eminencia gris. No blame is ever put on the individual. It’s always a conspiracy … I can’t find the article, but a few months ago a girl brought a lawsuit against a clothing store here in Spain that wouldn’t hire her because she was overweight. The store, I believe, was Mango, or Zara, both of which are very popular with young women. First of all, being overweight, why would you want to work in a store where your coworkers are a bunch of superficial and skinny little tarts? Are you masochistic? And second of all, why would a store which is all about image, and the “ideal look”, want to hire someone who decidedly deviates from this “ideal”? It doesn’t make sense economically. It’s not a conspiracy against obese people.

And to add to this, now that I’m going on about the subject, there’s the flipside of women starving themselves to death. Models in Brazil literally dying for the catwalk look, models in Milan fainting in the streets from malnutrition ... And it’s always implicated that it’s the fault of the media, of some misogynistic conspiracy setting unrealistic standards for women. Here’s a big secret: most men don’t like waifs. They’re not sexy. Skinny runway models are not what men look for. Voluptuous, curvy, yes, maybe even with a little baby fat, but not a reed of a woman. The fashion industry is not a good barometer of men’s tastes. And, as if the pressure wasn’t on men as well. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to hear women go on about some guy's “six pack” (that’s not beer, by the way, or the Kenny Roger’s movie from the eighties). Or be subjected to a secretary's George Clooney screen saver. Or hear women gasp at the mere mention of Brad Pitt. We’re all supposed to be tall and built like firemen. How many men fall into that category (and have a job pulling in six figures a year, and are sensitive, well-coiffed and intelligent – and not gay)? I’m not gonna go around crying about it. I’m not going to get angry if I’m turned down for a job as a receptionist at DiR because I don’t have a “six pack”. I’ll deal with myself, gracias.

* cuñao - brother in law. Also a popular television personality in Spain.

** michelines – rolls of fat. Some people are big, naturally big, and there is nothing wrong with that. But when people are obese they tend to grow rolls of fat, sometimes called "love handles". Here they are called michelines. Not surprisingly, the name comes from the Michelin Man, the roly poly icon of the tire company.

R.I.P. James Brown

2006-12-26T11:47:00.000-08:00

Oil discovered in the Eixample

2006-12-23T01:59:00.000-08:00

Menace to society

2006-12-21T13:53:00.000-08:00

The sidewalk vigilantes strike again. These cowardly little men think they can take it upon themselves to rid the illustrious Ciutat Condal of the “menace”.

That’s right. “Menace to society”.

A term I’ve heard personally - which was used to refer to us bicyclers by a long time resident, and anglophone, of this city. But his sentiment seems to reflect the general climate of anti-bicycle hysteria.

Before I get to the contingent events that lead up to the damning label of “menace” I’d like to point this out:

My bicycle tire was stabbed.

Someone maimed my bike. Not realizing the full extent of the damage, I went to a regular gas station and tried to pump the tire (I thought it was a simple flat, not a stab wound. I suspected foul play at first, but then decided I was being paranoid – until I saw the gash …).

I ended up going to Probikes on Villarroel 184, which is a great bike shop, should you ever need one, and they were kind enough to give me a second-hand tire for free, and to replace the tube for 8 euros, labor included.

Two days later, paranoid delusions overwhelming me, I have my bike sitting right in front of my apartment door, in my building, when at 1 in the morning I hear a loud hissing noise. About 2 seconds approximately. Sure enough, when I open my door, I realize my back tire, the same one that got stabbed, has blown out. Completely. The same moment that I opened my door I heard the downstairs neighbor’s door shutting. Without any solid evidence, but merely using what I thought was logical deduction, I envisioned my neighbor sneaking up the stairs and stabbing my bike tire. Maybe I almost ran into her one day. Maybe she hates guiris. Maybe she's a mal follada with a thing for bike tire stabbing.

The problem is she’s a typical 80 year old burguesa Catalana, rubia de pote* Her insane collie – I kid you not – takes her for walks. She’s so slow that the dog leads her on their strolls through the Eixample. Logically deducing, once again, I would have to say the possibility of her sneaking up 20 or so steps, stabbing a bike tire, and sneaking back down those 20 steps in time to slip back in her apartment before I opened my door are almost impossible (hissing noise-to-door opening about 20 seconds, approximately).

Crazy next door dog lady is not the culprit, after all. I went back to Probikes the next day and found out the culprit was a defective valve on the tube, which they promptly replaced.

Of course, this doesn’t solve the mystery of the stabbed bike tire.

Since the bike ordnance laws, the hostility to bikers has been palpable, as if, suddenly, we were aggressors in a city full of garullos driving scooters and two ton Seats and trendy Minis bought on credit. As if we were “menaces” to society.

Meanwhile, the sidewalk hero still roams the neighborhood, as do his minions:

The sidewalk hero. His shirt reads: BIKES on the sidewalk. NEVER AGAIN.

The bus drivers, I suspect, are also angry because I, out of sheer necessity, have to ride in their lane. I have also locked my bike to the post of their bus “counter”. This is where, at the end of their routes, they tick off a little contraption in a box, mounted to a pole (yes, my apartment is at the end of the bus line). This hadn’t been a problem before, but since the bus counter thing is probably considered a mobiliario urbano, that is urban furniture (how's that for abstract legalese), it’s illegal to lock your bike to it. And my bike was never in the way. Really. No pictures, unfortunately.

I swear I could go on. There are other people I could suspect, and more bizarre stories. But, alas, I have no concrete evidence. I carry my bike up to my apartment now.

Luckily the bike ordnance laws have eased up. I guess people are complaining.

They are going to install new bike stands. Soon, hopefully. And it is now “permissible” to “zigzaguear”, or zig-zag - i.e. swerve between obstacles. That’s what you do on a bike anyway, right? A car in front of you: you ZIG. Then ZAG. It’s as easy as that. Who the hell would stay behind a car that's spewing out smoke when you could just zig ... and then zag? Who’s the genius who tried to prohibit zigging and zagging? And for that matter, I’m sorry, I’m not two tons of steel barreling through the streets, I’m not a menace to society, and if I see a red light, and no one at the intersection, you know what? Fuck it, I’m going through it.

One day bicyclers will get fed up with this anti biking crap and do a Critical Mass. I witnessed one of the first gatherings in San Francisco. From the intersection of Kearny and Broadway, down to Market, there was nothing but cars honking and people yelling. Throughout the city bicycles had reclaimed the streets. Apocaliptico. I saw a guy jump out of his Mercedes and attack a bike messenger, because he was late. Other bikers retaliated by slamming their U locks on the hood of his 500SL. A friend of mine lead a charge to the Bay Bridge, which later backed up with miles of traffic. I only wish I was in on it. I was working, sadly enough, but could see it all.

* rubia de pote - Peroxide blonde. Very common here, as there are few natural blondes, and the common supposition is that "blondes have more fun". Therefore, many brunettes dye their hair in pursuance of this elusive state of "fun".

UPDATE: originally I put rubia de botella, and someone corrected me. They said, "what botella?"

Puta por una noche?

2006-12-18T11:59:00.000-08:00

Mileurista. There's a word for it because that's what everybody earns.

It means someone who earns one thousand euros or less a month. Usually it's 1000 euros brutos a month. Or 1000 sucios ... that is 1000 before taxes, or about 850 after taxes. Try to find, mi amigo, mi amic, an apartment in Barcelona that you don't have to share with a bunch of hippie burn outs for less than 900 euros a month.

Anyway, this link was passed to me, and I thought it might be of interest to some of you. From Loquo, Spain's Craigslist (caps are his):

51 YEAR OLD EXECUTIVE FROM BILBAO SEEKS FOR TONIGHT AT 8PM AN ELEGANT AND VERY ATTRACTIVE WOMAN TO BE COMPANION IN A DINNER SHOW IN A CENTRIC HOTEL IN BARCELONA PAYMENT AROUND 1500 € THOSE INTERESTED SEND ME CONTACT INFORMATION AND A FOTO PLEASE

EJECUTIVO DE BILBAO DE 51 AÑOS BUSCA PARA ESTA NOCHE A LAS 8H PM MUJER ELEGANTE Y MUY ATRACTIVA PARA ACOMPAÑANTE EN CENA ESPECTACULO EN UN HOTEL CENTRICO DE BARCELONA RETRIBUCIÓN ALREDEDOR DE LOS 1500 € INTERESADAS MANDARME POR FAVOR DATOS FORMA DE CONTACTO Y UNA FOTO

Uh. Right dude. First off, nice try trying to take advantage of the desperate mileurista masses, but the all caps and lack of punctuation pretty much scream PSYCHO. Anyway, if you are legit, I don't really see this as a bad thing. Joder el sueldo de más de un mes por solo una noche?

La Moustache

2006-12-12T23:46:00.000-08:00

(No, this won't be a post about Carod-Rovira's well-groomed mustache, so you can hold back on the angry emails, ERC fanatics.)

Yesterday I had two pleasant discoveries. The first was the Cinema Casablanca-Gràcia at Carrer de Girona 173-175. It's another V.O. cinema for anybody who's interested, and the programming is "alternative". For some that means pedantic art house fare, for others it's a welcome break from the flurry of cookie cutter mainstream movies. The last mainstream movie I saw was "The Departed" by Scorcese, which was abominal. Scorcese did the unthinkable and parodied himself. An atrocious movie by his standards, though somewhat entertaining and with a surprisingly good performance by DiCaprio. And everybody's talking about Borat, the big mainstream hit in the U.S., but I'll pass on that. I saw some clips on youtube and thought it was only slightly funny. The protag, Sasha Cohen, strikes me as a blowhard, and his gags get old after the first 30 seconds. The anti-jewish satire rubs me the wrong way, as does his blanket portrayal of Muslims as ignorant jew-haters. I like wicked jokes, I like my Lenny Bruce, my Richard Pryor, but this dude isn't really that funny. It's elitist humor and I hope this guy goes the way of the dodo.

So now that you know where I stand, I'm sure most of you would never take a movie recommendation by me seriously. But if you do, go check out La Moustache, a movie by novelist and filmmaker Emmanuel Carrère (this was my second pleasant discovery yesterday). This is dark comedy - equal parts Polanski, equal parts Kafka, maybe a little Houellebecq thrown in for good measure. La Moustache is about, well, a mustache, or the the lack of a mustache, depending on which character you side with in the movie.

The protag, Marc Thirez, a succesful architect with a doting, football-loving wife, seems to have the ideal life. One day he decides to shave off his mustache, and, much to his bewilderment, no one notices. His wife, his friends, his coworkers, don't say a thing. At first he thinks it's a prank, initiated by his wife. Soon he realizes it's not, and this sets off a major identity crisis. We're sympathetic to Marc, because we know he's telling the truth, but the rest of the cast are just as sincere in their denial, and soon we're pitting one man's opinion against the the rest of his social milieu.

Add to this a hypnotic soundtrack by Philip Glass, and it's hard not to get lost in Carrére's excellently crafted tale of ordinary madness. Perception of peers, personal integrity, are just a couple of the abstract concepts tackled in this movie. It doesn't resolve as nicely as some people might want it to (at least there's no baguette spilled on the floor with a rat in the background to symbolize a rat, as in end of Scorsese's craptastic dud), but if you want thought-provoking and quality filmmaking without frills, this is something to check out.

Bad dreams

2006-12-10T09:08:00.000-08:00

This sounds like the stuff of urban legend, but apparently two men from Leon and Oviedo have concocted a substance that puts you to sleep in order to rob you.

The incident occurred on the Barcelona-Gijon train this past November 23. Various women, who had been traveling in the sleeping cars, reported to the police that they had been “narcotized” and robbed. They woke up dizzy and vomiting, with dry mouths.

The bizarre experience upon waking up, plus the subsequent discovery of missing valuables, led them to the conclusion that they had been the victims of a most insidious robbery.

The police investigation initially focused on two men who had been using the sleeping cars. Some days later, after searching their houses, they discovered almost all of the valuables that had been stolen from the women. They also discovered yellow wrappers containing white powder, as well as two sprays, whose compositions are being analyzed. Investigators suspect the powder and the spray might be the narcotic substance and the delivery device used in the robbery.

This reminds me of what happened to Kovaks in the latest installment of Shame, shame, shame. Maybe he should investigate this before it is used on unsuspecting guiris.

1 AM, biking through Barcelona

2006-12-10T08:16:00.000-08:00

The new utopianists

2006-12-10T03:48:00.000-08:00

Every attained end is at the same time the beginning of a new course, and so on ad infinitum.

Arthur Shopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation.

Fidel, 80 more years

I’ve seen this graffited on at least 3 banks in the last 6 months, ever since the ailing demagogue, know-it-all, yet admittedly charismatic leader, was hospitalized. Castro apologists, stuck in their hall of mirrors, their own logic far removed from the original concept, sneezing from the dialectic dustbins of history, don’t get it at all. The new utopianists think they know something about freedom and justice. But if they get off their high horses, they might realize their concepts of negating the negation - which in simpler straight forward language means their negation of an open society’s denial of the possibility of a utopia - is in fact not a positive concept. The halos would fall from their hipster heads if they just thought about it. Just a little bit. Their concept of the positive presupposes the negative - that is, what is bad, or what is not their idea of utopia. Once their dear leader - in this case Castro, maybe in the future Chavez - has seized power, he then becomes the oppressor. The former oppressors become the oppressed, and so on and so on. The new utopianists might feel good about themselves while spray painting their pithy slogans on the façade of the great enemy, but they don’t get it. Not at all. They’re as intolerant as the next. Their idealism is spent uselessly, and in the end it will work against them.

I believe in Marx ...

2006-12-06T04:21:00.000-08:00

Groucho Marx.

Paraphrasing Woody Allen, who in turn was paraphrasing Groucho Marx, who in turn was paraphrasing Sigmund Freud:

“I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for member.”

Does this blog make sense now?

Ancient civic ordinance method?

2006-12-04T13:56:00.000-08:00

This has perplexed me for six years now. The full water bottle in front of a building. Why? What could it possibly mean?

I’ve asked many locals in Barcelona and no one has a definite answer. Apparently it is a common practice in other parts of Spain as well. Many say it prevents dogs from pissing on stoops and store fronts. Somehow, the presence of water enclosed in PVC plastic, in front of a building, is supposed to stop a bloated canine from pissing …

I know what you’re thinking. That’s total bullshit. Yet, I can’t think of any reason for the water bottle phenomenon. Just walk around Barcelona (and I imagine many other Spanish cities) and you will see filled water bottles, capped-off, in front of countless buildings. Could it be a civic gesture to thirsty homeless people? The down and out, the downtrodden, in need of replenishing water? Or maybe it’s a kindly gesture to the drunks stumbling home late at night, who need to be rehydrated after shots of fake absinthe, ron Havana, and canyas? Or could it be a deterrence for madly urinating tourists? I mean, for some mysterious reason, I would avoid pissing on a water bottle. It doesn't seem right ... but could that really be the reason?

Really. It defies my capacity for logic, which isn’t much. The water bottle in front of the apartment thing. No one questions it. They just do it. I wonder how far this tradition goes back; if before the plastic water bottles they used glass, and before that clay ...

If you know why, please send an email to spanishwatermystery@gmail.com. Gracias.

I just did a quick search on google and found nothing except this article on SalDeTraglia's blog. This guy had about as much luck as I did.

Gypmeisters beware. Kovaks is back

2006-11-28T10:23:00.000-08:00

I finally met up with Larry Kovaks yesterday. We knocked back some Havana ron, and bullshitted over a couple Reig cigars. He told me after his investigation of Socrates Sanchez's brothel in the Raval he had an existential crisis. It was some pretty heavy stuff apparently.

But that didn't stop him from working. He gave me a head's up on the latest installment, Shame, Shame, Shame Part II (of VI, apparently).

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the dope on what went down a couple weeks ago in the giant hooker roundup.

Kovaks wants it to be known: he may be investigating outside the realm of guiri robberies, but he is back in full form. After the six installments of Shame, Shame, Shame, he'll be back with the latest scandalous method of gypmeisting. He calls it the Fake Baby Con.

Glad to have him back.

On a side note, he mentioned his gratitude for the letters of inquiry, and the true-life stories of woe people sent to him. He also enjoyed the "more salacious" emails. Purportedly these contained some pretty sexy material. Ladies must know that Kovaks has one true love, however. But he didn't really want to talk about it.

The Moritz Mobile

2006-11-24T02:07:00.000-08:00

Some weeks ago I wrote about the Seat 600, the iconic car of the Spanish Miracle. I mentioned there was one going around town all done up with the Moritz logo, and I finally got a couple pictures of it:

Pretty cool. I'd drive it.

Breakin' the law

2006-11-23T08:52:00.000-08:00

So I got a "new" bike. It's a frankensteined little beast, made of discarded parts from various models, and it has to have one of the worst paint jobs I've ever seen. So come on ladrones! I dare you steal it!

Today I felt like living on the edge. That's why this morning, before I went to work, I decided to break as many civic ordnance laws as I could. The result is probably a first in the history of this illustrious and increasingly anal city. Hell, if I wanted ordnung I would have gone to Bavaria!

So. Ladies and gents, the backlash has begun.

I hopped on my squeaky beater bike and rode down sidewalks wherever I could, making sure they were all less than 3 meters wide. I went a reckless 12 km an hour, of course (which is 2km an hour over the speed limit when on a congested sidewalk. Luckily I have an innate sense of speed, because my bike doesn't have an speedometer).

While riding as close as I could to the storefronts, I headed towards the nearest high school, zigzagging perilously through the mileurista masses. Then, still on my bike, I lit up a cigarette, began urinating, and began prostituting myself in a scandalous way while speaking in Spanish. Afterwards, I shamelessly locked my bike to a tree and went to a market and bought some piss-water wine and some Coca Cola. I dumped out half of the Coca Cola and poured in the wine and did a one-man botellon with my kalimocho* in front of the store. It was a liberating experience. At least until I realized my cataplines were swinging in the November wind (cold equals shrinkage). And in my wine-stained hands I had a five euro bill and I couldn't figure out how I got it. So much for being a rebel.

Speaking of law breaking, my friends and partners in crime The Gangsters of Love are playing tonight at Gracia's emblematic Heliogabal bar (c/ Ramon i Cajal 80) at 10:00 pm. Come hang out with anarchists and guiris and other low-life degenerates while we celebrate this day of thanks.

Full disclosure: Dan, the singer of the Gangsters, gave me the bike. This, however, in no way means I'm plugging his band because of his gift. They play rock & roll. No DJs or fancy shit like that. Good to bawl and brawl to. That's it.

Salut!

_

* kalimocho – is a mixture of cheap red wine and Coca Cola, popular with kids and reckless bike riding rebels like me. The coke masks the terrible taste of the wine and gives you an extra boost.

Rebellion in the Zoo 2

2006-11-15T01:15:00.000-08:00

The Fauna Ibérica are at it again. Seeing their territory invaded by an alien species, they go out -usually after nightfall - armed with cell phone cameras. The following videos are a unique experience in which you can witness life through the eyes of authentic Fauna Ibérica, uncensored and raw.

This is what I found on youtube (click on the titles for a link to the video):

***

Guiris popo

Perhaps one of the great documents of our time. We have here an extended encounter between several specimens of Fauna Ibérica and the genus Guiri Popo. The Guiri Popo are in a state of inebriation and the Fauna Ibérica, realizing the Guiri Popo can’t understand their method of communication, proceed to taunt them. The Guiri Popo then try to ingratiate the Fauna Ibérica by finding common ground. As is usual amongst males of both species, they talk about football. One of the Guiri Popo talks about Barça. The only problem is this is the south of Spain and he fails to bond (Barcelona, for those who may not know, is in the north. The arbitrary geographical delimitation apparently affects many people here ). Guiri Popo, if he is not too inebriated, may learn a valuable cultural lesson.

***

Los guiris salen del corral

6 in the morning, possibly the Balearic Islands. Los guiris salen del corral, or the “guiris leave the pen”. Intrepid specimens of Fauna Ibérica risk their suntans by waiting, cell phone cam in hand, by the gates of a typical guiri establishment. Watch as a spectrum of guiris stream out of the hotel, both female and male, young and old. An impressive, never-before-seen documentation of the 6 am beach departure ritual.

***

Crazy Guiri

A typical example of the genus Guiri Discombobulus. The Ramblas plays host to many of them. There are watering holes nearby, where this specimen most likely drank fermented wheat water, thereby inducing a state of inebriated stupefaction. Many things happen in the inebriated state. If one is careful, on some nights you can spot the Guiri Discombobulus urinating furtively in corners, even on withered trees, thereby providing valuable nitrates to the top soil and continuing the cycle of life. What we have here, in Crazy Guiri, is a Guiri Discombobulus who has stripped all his clothing off. He is standing on the Ramblas, and other guiris and a smattering of Fauna Iberica look on. Eventually the elite Fauna Ibérica, Los Mossos, put a stop to this behavior.

***

Guiri los cancajos

An older Guiri Classicus shows signs of stress and possible senile dementia. As he runs within an imaginary cage the Fauna Ibérica stealthily film him. Accompanying this video is the haunting Vangelis theme to Chariots of Fire.

***

El jabonazo

A particularly vicious specimen of Fauna Ibérica in this one. El jabonazo, or the soaping, is a rare glimpse into the psychology of young Fauna Ibérica. From a perch, about three stories up, this young male throws a wad of wet, soapy tissue at what I presume are members of genus Guiri Estudiantus.

***

guiri borracha

In guiri borracha, or drunken girl-guiri, we witness a typical mating ritual tactic. She finds herself surrounded by male natives who, taking advantage of her ignorance of the native tongue, have her say, more or less, “I want to eat your genitalia” – in their variant of Spanish, of course.

Gay animal spanking?

2006-11-12T10:04:00.000-08:00

Time for fun with stats ...

Leave it to the Italians to search for "drench ass coming slap girl story OR stories OR spank -gay -animal".

Leave it to Google to direct them to my blog.

The link he followed (I'm assuming it's a he) led him to one of the first blog posts I wrote called No More Cheap Tickets, Please. No doubt an edifying experience for this shameless gay-animal-spanker.

Orwell on nationalism

2006-11-08T01:27:00.000-08:00

George Orwell, a man of experience and wisdom, left us a fantastic essay on nationalism. Below are a couple of snippets, but I think reading the whole thing is worthwhile.

The definition of nationalism according to Orwell:

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'. But secondly--and this is much more important--I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, NOT for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

On what he calls "transferred nationalism":

In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion--that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware--will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack--all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct.

Tripartit 2: The Electric Boogaloo

2006-11-08T00:53:00.000-08:00

I’m sure no one outside of Spain really cares about the new tripartit. It’s so convoluted and regional that any of the regulars to my little soap box in cyberspace could probably care less.

Yup, this is about the regional elections in Catalunya – or should I spell that Catalonia, or, god forbid, CATALUÑA. The “Ñ” is considered downright evil by some in Catalunya, meaning by extension español, therefore, españolista, therefore, centrista, therefore FASCIST.

Let’s bandy that word about a bit more until it means nothing, why don’t we?

I guess my circle of friends and acquaintances is pretty small, because everyone spouts the same rhetoric. No one would ever, and I mean ever, vote for a party that was conservative. That means the PP, former party of Aznar (who I will proudly and loudly assert is one of the globe’s biggest fools). Which is a shame, because despite those morons Acebes and Rajoy, the PP's regional candidate, Josep Piqué, comes off in debates and interviews as a reasonable human being. And there's Ciutadans de Catalunya, a new political party of progressive -thinking anti-nationalists. Because they are anti-catalanista - that is, anti-nationalist - they are considered conservatives. This, despite the fact that they are not anti-catalan.

So, that’s democracy. The majority vote, even if it went to the CiU (the faux-nationalist conservative party), counts for nothing. Because of a pact between the "left wing" parties, and a slim coalition lead - about as slim as Judith Mascó - the new tripartit is born. Oh, sorry, it's now called the govern de entesa according to the ERC. I’m glad their clever PR people fooled me and the rest of Catalunya into thinking this wasn’t the tripartit again! If there’s one thing I believe in, it’s the power of suggestion.

The govern de entesa = tripartit with a disgruntled Montilla as president and an elated Carod-Rovira as vice president. The ERC will also be in charge of the culture department. It’s a good thing too. For example, it’s a good thing they forced the Festival Internacional de Cine Erótico to leave Barcelona. What an evil and degrading thing sex is for women! And shocking too. Ah, it’s understandable. Like porn director Conrad Son’s Les exxxcursionistes calentes, which was given subsidies by the Generalitat because it was - despite its being porno - dubbed en la llengua català (the movie was also dedicated to Carod-Rovira “el català més trempat” or "the horniest Catalan”). Then there’s Conrad Son’s next ode a la femme, El mar no es blava. Given subsidies, again, because it was dubbed into Catalan. I wonder if Sr. Son still considers Carod the horniest man in Catalunya, or if he'll still get his subsidies.

I have no ethical qualms about porno being dubbed, by the way. Just to clarify that. It just doesn’t make much sense unless you’d rather hear your groans and moans in dubbed català.

Well, they’re handing a vote to the PP is all. Rajoy, Aznar’s minion, is rubbing his sweaty palms in supreme satisfaction. Carod, the kingmaker, and therefore real president of Catalunya, is handing him the next national elections. Besides the ERC’s 300,000 thousand strong, he is reviled throughout Spain and large parts of Catalunya. Power is a nice thing, ain’t it?

I shouldn’t even get worked up about politics, because the intention of this blog was to talk about the seamy side of Barcelona. It was also to self-deprecate my status as guiri. The guiri term is pretty much played out now and holds no comedic value. And, robberies and such: since I moved out of Barri Sant Pere, I haven’t witnessed one robbery or one furtive pissing, not even an exhibitionist. Yes, what was once a daily occurrence in my old neighborhood is now stripped from my life. It’s so quiet here in the Eixample. About the only distraction I have is the neighbor’s border collie howling for hours on end. That, and the odd car accident, and the doppler shifts of sirens and super-tuned scooters wheezing by.

Jolines, I need some grit.

I need a party, and not no electric boogaloo (actually the sequel to 1984’s classic Breakin’ … kids don’t forget to chop the “g” off the gerund to make it cooler sounding). Unless Montilla and Carod perform the “rotating room” breakdance scene, replete with techno-fied sardanas blasting in the background, I think the next months to come are going to be redundant, to say the least. Oh well, it’ll give the pundits something to bitch about. I'll do my best to stay away from politics - that is unless another drunken ERC militant belligerently calls me a fascist simply for disagreeing with him ... oh, that's another story.

But, speaking of grit. Maybe I can find some on the trains. Check out this disturbed citizen’s letter to the editor in yesterday's 20 Minutos (the letters to the editor, by the way, are the best part of that free newspaper):

Fiesta en el tren

El día anterior a Todos los Santos, a las 11.30 de mañana y después de una larga jornada laboral, me encuentro en el tren de cercanías con destino a Sant Celoni el siguiente panorama vergonzoso: seis jóvenes fumando porros, una chica meándose, dos jóvenes dando patadas a la puerta del baño, una chica en sujetador andando por el vagón, gritos y risas de todo tipo, sin ningún agente de seguridad. ¿Cómo puede ser que después de pagar mi billete me encuentre este panorama?

Party in the train

The day before the Day of all Saints, at 11:30 in the morning and after a long day of work, I find myself in the regional train with the destination of Sant Celoni the following shameful panorama: six teenagers smoking joints, a girl pissing, two teenagers kicking the door to the bathroom, a girl wearing a bra walking through the train wagon, screams and laughs of all types, without one security guard. How could it be that after I pay for my ticket I encounter this panorama?

Since I’ve been relegated to walking and taking subways again after my second bike got stolen, this gives me hope. Girls in bras! Porros! Who would have thought!

On language

2006-10-26T04:11:00.000-07:00

Warning: the post below is 90%, political, 10% smart ass, when normally I do the opposite, if not excluding politics all together. You could say I was inspired, or uninspired. However you want to look at it.

In these pre-election days, La Vanguardia has been running numerous profiles and interviews with the contenders for Barcelona’s regional government. Quim Monzó, novelist and regular contributor to La Vanguardia, makes the odd commentary now and then, and yesterday’s edition contained a priceless one.

Monzó took to task ICV [green party] candidate Joan Saura and his reluctance to use the word “immigrant”. Instead, Saura softens the emotive blow of “immigrants” and calls them “of the class of the immigrants”. Of course, only a heartless PP [conservative party] candidate like Piqué would dare call them “immigrants”! But since Saura is sensitive, and an adamantine leftwinger, he can’t be caught saying anything politically incorrect, whatever his intentions are.

The article continued (translated by me):

“Of the class of the immigrants”! Congratulations. If the progressive correction obligates one to talk about “people of skin aesthetic” instead of skinhead, if radios and televisions say “person of gypsy ethnicity” instead of gypsy (as if gypsy were derogatory), how can we heedlessly say immigrant? Call them, then, “person of the immigrated class”. And, above all, let no one get confused and talk about a person of the gypsy class, a person of the skin ethnicity, and a person of the immigrant aesthetic. The boys with the boys, the girls with the girls and every noun with the adjective that the prudishness has well appointed."

And there’s the controversial CiU [Catalan nationalist conservative party] plan put forth by their rock-jawed candidate for president, Artur Mas. Essentially it boils down to a points for prizes system in which immigrants (he has no qualms about saying it) are rewarded based on their degree of assimilation - and as is the usual case in Catalunya, that means learning Catalan. The other parties fired back, and angry readers (probably party hacks) are writing into the daily papers, accusing them of hypocrisy. I don’t see what the big deal is, personally. It’s merely another way of saying the same thing: “Learn Catalan, or else.” Whereas the ERC [Catalan nationalist left wing party] - which has an indelibly elitist aura about it - would like to fine or exclude you for not speaking Catalan, the CiU is now proposing benefits for people that are speaking it (and can pass a standardized test to prove it). That means that anyone without the proven linguistic credentials is not eligible for these benefits. It’s just another way of saying the same thing – but, in my opinion, far more intelligent than the ERC’s strategy. If done right, it will attract people rather than repel them. And let’s face it, the issue of Catalan is here to stay. No wishful thinking or liberal democratic posturing will erase this hotbutton issue.

Speaking of the ERC and language: their campaign slogan has now transformed into “Humans com tú” or “Humans like you”. This from “Som com som” or “We are like we are”, which, in my humble opinion, is a far more accurate way to describe the party. The greatest common good, demographic realities, are not their concerns. It’s power and whatever cheap symbolism it takes to retain it.

So, “We are like we are” and if you don’t like it fuck off is the basic message. Realizing their pithy slogan was bound to raise undesirable controversy, they soon changed it to “Som com tú”, or, “We are like you”, which also rubbed the wrong way, especially here in Spain where “no me toques los cojones” or “don’t bust my balls” is about as close to the national sentiment as you can get. And the ERC does nothing but bust balls, constantly. If it’s not Carod-Rovira taking it upon himself to secretly meet with armed terrorist groups to single handedly bring about peace, or posing for a photo with a crown of thorns on his head, or bringing about a boycott of all Catalan products because of his call for the non-endorsement of the Madrid 2012 Olympic games, it’s Carod-Rovira stirring up support and indignation with emotive revolutionary language. No, aside from their minority of supporters, “you are not like me”, says the average citizen here. “I don’t want to secede from Spain. I just want to be able to pay my rent, and one day make above 1000 euros brutos a month.”

Realizing their language needed to be subtly manipulated again in order to placate the mileurista masses, they changed their slogan to “Humans like you”. And now suffusing subway station walls all over the city is Carod-Rovira’s giant mug covered in shaving cream. “See?” - their marketing strategists think they’re saying - “he’s just an average guy like you”. Oh yeah, despite the fact that his politics are far from pragmatic (i.e. considerate of the whole). I’m not sure if these guys really dream of an independent Catalunya, or if their whole strategy is cynical and dialectic, an attempt to swing things in their favor by further polarizing the electorate. Either way, these guys are not fun to party with unless you adhere to the party line. Sound familiar? Ultra-derechas, ultra-izquierdas, two sides of the same coin. They both scare me.

Carod being “Human like you” is something I entirely agree with. But why Carod’s smug mug on a poster, shaving? Is he human like his upper-crust, university-educated bedroom revolutionary supporters, grizzled and mustachioed? Aren’t you leaving out the rest of the humans? A large part of their constituency probably don't even have to shave! More appropriate would have been a snapshot of him taking a dump. Yeah, we’re all human, we all defecate, we all stink from time to time. It’s a fact of life. He wouldn’t win my vote, if I could vote, but he’d gain my sympathy.

By manipulating language the ICV, CiU, and the ERC are fooling absolutely no one besides their own fanatical militants. I’m not talking about people like my ERC-voting Catalan conversation partner, or my PSC-voting girlfriend, or my CiU-voting ex-bosses, who, in the end, are voting for their own self interests. Calling immigrants “the people that belong to the class of the immigrants” might appease sensitive types who want to fool themselves with faux-solidarity and euphemisms. But, no doubt, these are the same folks who get fired up when the American military behemoth proclaims death by “friendly fire” or “collateral damage”. Neither side is fooling anyone. What this does is further polarize people. Average Jordi is thinking “me están tratando como a un idiota”, or, “they’re treating me like an idiot”, and fuming with rage Average Jordi is even less disposed to commit to intelligent dialogue.

The Spanish Miracle Mobile

2006-10-18T00:35:00.000-07:00

A "Seis Cientos", circa 2006.

The SEAT 600 is an iconic Spanish car whose 17 year production span coincided with what is called the Spanish Miracle (1959-1973). This was a period when a new breed of Spanish technocrats began making reforms to the infrastructure, and opened Spain to the lucrative guiri economy.

Based on the Italian FIAT 600, the SEAT 600 sold for 70,000 pesetas, or about 420 euros. The modest price tag made it hugely popular with Spain's working class families.

The first version had a 633 cc rear-mounted motor and boasted a top speed of 95 km per hour (that's a mere 59 mph). Not exactly a hotrod. But the 600 is like the tortoise that keeps going while the hare sleeps by the roadside. Despite its wimpy engine and its stripped-down, no-frills package, the 600 was a reliable and unstoppable workhorse. In its 17-years of production - between 1957 and 1973 - about 800,000 models were sold.

Every once in a while you'll see one of these classics.

There's even a bright and shiny Moritz-sponsored 600 tooling around town. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of the actual car, but I do have the miniature 1/43 scale version that came free with my 6 pack of Moritz:

A mini-Moritz mobile, pimpin' 9 stories above Barcelona.

A witness to the 21st century

2006-10-07T01:22:00.000-07:00

Houellebecq’s, “The Possibility of an Island”

Much has been written about Michel Houellebecq, and much of it isn’t true. Headlines and past critiques often refer to him as a misogynist, an islamophobe, a misanthrope, or even a nihilist - but all this amounts to is a snowball of politically correct epithets - often copied, and without much insight. Yes, he’s more than a brutally honest and provocative writer. He's also - contrary to popular belief - a spiritual soul. He speculates on our interconnectedness, and the possibility of love in the 21st century and beyond.

The Possibility of an Island, his latest novel, touches on these themes, and more.

Daniel, the protagonist of this book, is a well-known comedian at terminal velocity in both his career and his spiritual life. As a comedian he’s a “cutting observer of contemporary reality”. But he’s reached a point where he’s done it all:

“I had dismantled the cogs in the machine, and I knew how to make it work, whenever I wanted. Every evening, before going on stage, I swallowed an entire Xanax. Every time the audience laughed (and I could predict it, I knew how to dose my effects, I was a consummate professional), I was obliged to turn away so as not to see those hideous faces, those hundreds of faces moved by convulsions, agitated by hate.”

Daniel’s ennui is pulling him back from the game of life. Through the course of his career he’s become a millionaire and a controversial celebrity, but something essential is missing.

Two thousand years later, after wars and drought have decimated mankind, Daniel 24 - his cloned descendant - lives isolated in a compound while savages roam the ruins of the earth. He spends his time with Fox - the cloned descendant of Daniel’s dog - in contemplative tranquility, reviewing and discussing Daniel’s life story.

And here we have another running thread in The possibility of an island. What is immortality? Is cloning a way to achieve immortality? Or is it something more than a fortunate genetic repetition? What about our memories? How do we transmit memories to future generations?

In Ethics, Spinoza writes, “The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal.” This is the essence of the life story, of writing, in The possibility of an island. Daniel, a comedian, and not a writer by trade, takes up the pen to transmit his life story to his future cloned reincarnations. This, finally, is a form of immortality. It also becomes his reason for doing a literary striptease.

Daniel 1, after meeting Isabelle, an editor for a teen magazine called Lolita, moves with her to Almeria, is Spain’s dusty south. There they continue a love affair doomed to end because of lack of physical contact. This is middle-aged Daniel’s first great love, but it is more about a complete connection on a mental level. The relationship deteriorates, ultimately, because there is no “concupiscence”. Sex plays a pivotal role as it does in his other works, notably Platform - his controversial and prescient novel about sexual tourism and terrorism.

Sex, acerbic humor and clear writing. These things keep the pages turning in this complicated, yet engaging read. In one chapter, after his relationship with Isabelle ends, he describes a fellow patron’s car parked outside a sleazy whorehouse:

“Out of all the sports cars available on the market, the Chevrolet Corvette, with its uselessly and aggressively virile lines, with its absence of true mechanical nobility wedded to its overall modest price, is undoubtedly the one that corresponds best to the notion of pimpmobile; what sort of sordid Andalusian macho type was I going to bump into?”

Eventually he meets Esther, a young actress from Madrid, and the tables are turned. Whereas an aged Isabelle had an obsession with a “plastic beauty” which she would never be able to recuperate, and an inability to surrender to “pleasure and ecstasy”, Esther is the opposite. She’s an “amoral animal”, full of lust, youthful vigor and beauty, and Daniel falls deeply in love with her. Whereas one gave him love without sex, the other now gives him sex without love.

The age difference provides for ruminations on today’s youth-obsessed culture. It’s a very personal and at times exaggerated view of the way society treats the elderly, yet at the same time Houellebecq is a keen, involved observer. He understands cultural trends in Spanish kitsch culture, and even tears apart Larry Clark’s misconceived dud, Ken Park. He is, again, a cutting observer.

Esther, the young vivacious beauty, is the stronger of the two, and because of her he thoroughly degrades himself – even, at one point, waking up in vomit and cum-stained pants. Houellebecq isn’t painting an ideal picture of love, or purposely shocking his audience to make his plight more believable. Rather he describes the full spectrum, from its high points to its most miserable depths, in a consistently detached manner through both Daniel 1 and his later commentators, Daniel 24 and Daniel 25.

And that brings us back to the aforementioned “life story”. Interspersed between Daniel’s chapters are commentary by his future manifestations, Daniel 24 and 25. They are genetic clones originating from the founders of the Elohimite church, who Daniel encounters early in the book. Based largely on the real-life Raelian movement, they believe in our origins from space aliens, and the eventual coming of the “future ones”. They are also on the verge of cloning, for the first time, a human being. Cloning is, they believe, the path to immortality.

His encounter with the Elohimites is seemingly ripe with comedic material, but he rightly observes that when something, such as a cult is so deeply faith-driven, comedy just doesn’t have an effect (he somewhat contradicts himself by satirizing the monotheistic religions in Daniel’s comedic sketches, but he is more of an iconoclast who enjoys tipping our holy cows. The Elohimites would be too obvious).

He writes that the Elohimites “didn’t place much importance” on the extraterrestrial origins of humans, but rather on the idea that “the human being was going to disappear, and that it was necessary to prepare for the advent of its successor.” This is the idea of immortality all over again, and the astute recognition of a spiritual void in modern life. But this is a spiritual void that must be bridged by positivism - that is, a spirituality with empirical predominance, and this is how the Elohimites fit in.

Daniel 1 probably reflects Houellebecq himself as a writer, and his own impasse after a decade of provocation and revelation since the publication of Whatever and Atomized. What else is there to do? In this day and age, post September 11, with reality television, internet portals where just about anything can be watched … what is there, for a cynical comedian - a cutting observer - to exploit? Are there anymore taboos?

Houellebecq, in his characteristic voice, says: “To sum up, like all clowns since the dawn of time, I was a sort of collaborator. I spared the world from painful and useless revolutions – since the root of all evil was biological, and independent of any imaginable social transformation: I established clarity, I forbade action, I eradicated hope; my balance-sheet was mixed.”

Houellebecq seems to me a complicated and at times comical character. The dust jacket to Possibility describes him as “The best selling author of Atomised, Platform, Lanzarote and Whatever. He is also a poet, essayist and rap artist.” I can’t help smirking when imagining this slight Frenchman rapping, but at the same time it deepens my respect for what he’s trying to do. He’s not easily pinholed into the category of crude provocateur. His ideas go beyond dogma, whether it is religion or intellectual snobbery. They cut to the essence of who we are today. He’s both ridiculous and profound (that said, I haven’t heard him rap).

If you are to understand this book, or any other by Houellebecq, it’s that his answers are normally negative, in the sense that they do not point to a heroic ideal, which he recognizes as impossible. It’s about getting grounded in this reality, without illusions, and without bringing on any more suffering than is absolutely necessary. Only from there can you find true spirituality. And possibly deliverance.

At one point in Possibility the protagonist muses on maps. At 1:200 000 the whole world seems “happy”. Zoom into 1:1 “and you find yourself back in the normal world, which is not very pleasant; but if you increase the scale even more, you are plunged into a nightmare …” In this sense, Houellebecq also increases the scale with his writing. It’s not poetic justice he’s interested in. He’s interested in the truth, however ugly it sometimes gets.

***

A slightly different version of this review has been accepted for publication in a future edition of 3ammagazine.com. I'd like to thank the editors for permission to simultaneously publish.

Graffiti in the Born

2006-09-22T06:53:00.000-07:00

Stoned in front of the idiot box

2006-09-21T04:17:00.000-07:00

So last night I was enjoying this year’s excellent harvest, and ended up watching Localia (channel 8). After midnight it starts broadcasting soft porn with cheesy playboy vignettes, then after that there’s a program called Strip Poker. The women always conveniently lose to the host of the show. Oh you got four of a kind? That doesn’t beat my royal flush! The woman feigns coyness, then strips gracefully and steps aside for the next nubile contestant.

After this show there are commercials for downloadable porno clips for your cell phone (jovenes – teenagers, maduras – older women, tetas – tits, transex, etc.), then after that a commercial for this apparatus called Andro-Pene which looks like a tube with a cinching device that stretches your penis. It's the same concept as the racks they used to torture people with in medieval England, only on a smaller scale and exclusively for your penis. And, according to the infomercial, it can be discretely worn underneath you clothes. This, gentlemen, is the last step to loserdom. I swear to god, man, if I start downloading cell phone porn (bouncing titties, hooray!), and spend 250 clams on an Andro-Pene I'd deserve to be weeded out of the evolutionary gene pool. Just fade away into an oblivion of soft core porn and late night wank fests.

There’s another channel called TT that broadcasts latin hip hop videos and r&b dancefloor sleaze. Underneath the screen there’s a lower third where you can send SMS messages that appear live on TV. The purpose of this is to hook up with singles or naughty people in your area. I know this guy (actually, my girlfriend’s brother) who met a married woman like this. Turns out she was a total freak who wanted to involve a dog in their intimate moments. He broke it off after she solicited the randy canine, but here’s the funny part. Not only was she married, into bestiality (all this without her husband knowing) but she also worked as a secretary in the Generalitat, Barcelona’s city council. As Paris Hilton says: “That’s hot”!

There’s also a program called Pocholo in Ibiza on la Sexta (channel 6). Pocholo (real name Jose María Martínez-Bordiú) is the son of a Spanish baron, and he has an uncle that married Franco’s daughter. So this specious blue blood is a celebrity in Spain. He has no known talents, nor does he have latin lover appeal, nor does he have a seductive charisma. He is simply what they call here a friki - a freak. Hence his own TV show, and appearances on shows like Chronicas Marcianas (former late night show which consisted of coke-addled pseudo-celebrities sitting around yelling at each other) and Hotel Glamour (former big brother type show with ex-escort girls, coke addled pseudo celebrities in a “glamorous” hotel sitting around yelling at each other).

Pocholo – it’s totally obvious – snorts enough blow to put Tony Montana to shame. In between mandible grinding madness and constant fidgeting, Pocholo (name derived from his childhood nickname, Pocho-Pocho - which supposedly means sickly) drives vintage cars, throws rave parties in Ibiza, and gets lost in the wilderness with porno actresses. Yes, all on his very own reality show, Pocholo in Ibiza - on late night Spanish television, of course. He’s entertaining in the same way that Paris Hilton is entertaining. He is a cultural phenomenon. You just kind of sit back and watch in disbelief.

Now, that's hot!

Like Paris Hilton, Pocholo is only known for being himself. Check out his bio on imdb. Supposedly he was an extra in a couple episodes of Miami Vice. But, other than that, in every program he’s ever appeared on, he’s credited as “himself”. This begs the question: could Pocholo and Paris be made for each other? Shocking, terrifying images flit across my mind. Imagine the consummation of these two figuras … what could possibly be more ridiculous than that?

One man's crusade

2006-09-09T15:22:00.000-07:00

He's in the Eixample. He's angry.

This is a man on a mission. His shirt reads, BICIS per la borera, NUNCA MÁIS, or BIKES on the sidewalk, NEVER AGAIN.

He walks through my neighborhood spewing bile on bike riders who get in his way on the sidewalk. Stalky and somewhat round-shouldered, he’s got a face like a bullfrog; two hard, dull eyes; two deep creases pointing up in an inverted V from the corners of his tightly pursed lips.

I’ve crossed him a couple times right in front of my apartment. I’d be in the process of looking for a place to park my bike, when he’d walk by and yell “Capullo! Mamón!”, or “Dickhead! Prick!” Spittle would spray out of his mouth as he continued his rant - something about sidewalks and bikes.

He’s not the first angry pedestrian I’ve encountered on the sidewalks. There are some parts of this city - particularly in the center, or in Gracia - where at certain times of the day it is simply impossible to ride your bike on the street. With the exception of some of the main arteries like Diagonal, Gran Via, Passeig Sant Joan, even half of carrer Provença, many parts of this city are difficult to navigate on a bike during rush hours. Angry sidewalk vigilantes have admonished me in colorful Spanish and Catalan, and I usually told them to “Fuck off” and went on my way. But the Nunca Máis fellow would get on my case right in front of my apartment, where inevitably I had to use the sidewalk to lock up my bike. Even after I told him the first time – “Vivo aqui, I live here …” – a few days later I heard “Capullo! Mamon!” and there he was, stomping away.

So the other day when I saw this snarky fellow dragging himself around the neighborhood I just had to laugh. He actually went through the trouble of making a T-shirt that said, BIKES on the sidewalk. NEVER AGAIN. Not only that, but instead of writing NEVER AGAIN in Catalan like the rest of his shirt, he wrote it in Galician: NUNCA MÁIS. Nunca Máis arose as a slogan and a protest movement after the Prestige oil spill in 2002, reflecting the discontent with Aznar’s government. Nunca Máis, then, has emotive and almost righteous connotations. This guy, with his particular hatred of bikes on sidewalks, obviously feels very strongly about about this phenomenon. Watch out for him. He’s not a big guy, but he’s loco. Batshit.

I wonder where his anger comes from.

At the risk of sounding solipsistic, my second bike in a month has been stolen. This happened a few days ago in one of the most irritating neighborhoods of Barcelona, the Born. It’s a beautiful neighborhood right in the middle of Guirilandia, but it's overrun with tourists and fashion victims. I went for a couple drinks with a friend of mine, and an hour later I found a sliced lock where my bike should have been.

2 in the morning, and I found myself walking back from guiri-fashion-landia. I stopped in Plaça Catalunya, bought a beer from a Pakistani guy, sat on a bench, and watched these Moroccan kids shaking down drunken guiris. The kids approached me at one point, thought better of robbing me, and said “Salam malikum.” (It’s not the first time someone has thought I was Moroccan). I drank the rest of my beer and walked the rest of the way home.

If you see an ugly matte black mountain bike with fucked up brakes, send me an email: somejackassstolemybike@gmail.com. Or if you have a bike and want to get rid of it, or even trade for something, let me know as well.

Salut.

Tourist vs. Tourist

2006-09-09T03:29:00.000-07:00

Sketch art bv Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi, no doubt inspired by Barcelona's center

Notes for the underground

2006-09-08T06:02:00.000-07:00

The internet is a fountain for serendipity, if nothing else. Certainly from my side there has been no money to be made. But every once in a while you have stimulating dialogues, or even nascent projects as a result of a random search and the right combination of hypertext.

So, a story I wrote a few years ago - transposed from another story I personally experienced a few years before that - is now making its way through London’s subway system. I’ve never even been to London, but thanks to the editor of Litro, who found my story on 3ammagazine.com, somebody in that illustrious city might be reading it - some dude might even be wiping his ass with it for all I know. But I like the idea of random commuters picking up a copy. There’s always the off chance someone might actually dig it.

No I didn’t get paid for it (neither of the two times the story got published). But that’s not the point.

You can download it and comment on it via their website. Here's the link to the pdf. This zine is literally and figuratively underground. They hand out a different story every Friday morning to commuters entering the subway (be sure to check out past editions). It is a labor of love. My hat is off to them for starting it.

Of course, labor of love is something alien and frightening to many people. How on earth can you do something without monetary reward? “Like dude,” people tell me, “you gotta make your web a portal, put banners and shit on there ….” Well, no, quite frankly I think that kind of thing would be tacky. I’m not against making money, but there’s a difference between inspired craftsmanship – be it painting, or music, or writing – and what simply is advertising.

Advertising is not art. Marketing is not art. For example (this is a based on a conversation I had the other night), I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people tell me they make commercials as an inroad to make movies. As if the one had to do with the other. The problem is most people in advertising, because of the common medium being used – print, multimedia, television – think they are creating art. I’ve worked with these people, I’ve even edited commercials, and I can tell you from experience that they are among the most clueless individuals I’ve ever encountered. Fueled by a desperate need not to feel superfluous, they trick themselves into thinking they are creating art – i.e. something transcendent. My friends, if you are making a commercial for Coke, no matter how hip are snappy it is, no matter how many Argentinian tap dancers you throw in there, it is still a vision distilled through the eyes of people that think about one thing and one thing only, and that is to make money.

It is parasitic really. They see an idea that is becoming universally accepted or appreciated and exploit it. They take no risks. I can’t respect a drone, which is what most of the people in advertising are. Yes, I suppose there’s an art in everything, and they are artists in making money. But they do not create, or sacrifice. Everything is too calculated for that. Self-delusion, desperate hipness, tacit acceptance of the norm – this defines their little subculture.

I prefer someone who is straight up about what they do. You make money. You advertise. You consult. Whatever. Just don’t be pretentious about it..

Anyway, that’s why I appreciate what they’re doing with Litro Magazine. I’m sure it will form into something and pay for itself one day.

Excuse my little rant. Actually I have some friends in advertising, but they probably won’t even read this post.

Quin bon rollo aquests catalans!

2006-08-22T12:33:00.000-07:00

I just got this email:

para el que le robaron la bici

hola!
a casa tenim una bici que no fem servir i te la podem donar però no és una gran bici, està vella i a més no va molt bé, però funciona. Se l'hauria d'arreglar i posar a punt, però es pot fer. Tu mateix. Tens aquesta opció.

Salut!

For the one who had his bicycle stolen

At home we have a bicycle that we don't use and we can give it to you but it is not a great bicycle, it is old and furthermore doesn't operate very well. It would be necessary to fix and tune it up, but it is doable. Your call. You have this option.

I love random acts of kindness and I would gladly have taken up on his offer had I not bought a bike yesterday for 40 euros. I've been thinking of ways to make it totally unnattractive to thieves and besides painting it hot pink or fucsia or some equally hideous color, I can't think of any. I'm not about to ride around on a pink bicycle either.

Thanks just the same!

Kovaks guest blogs on Notes From Spain

2006-08-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

Looks like Larry Kovaks, Barcelona's premier (and possibly only) guiri detective, is back from vacation. He's guest blogging today on Ben Curtis' excellent Notes From Spain.

An open letter to the asshole who stole my bike

2006-08-18T07:18:00.000-07:00

I hope you enjoy the bike I bought for 50 euros - the cheap beater bike that was so ugly I thought no one in their right mind would steal it. I thought wrong.

I hope you get plastered to the street by a neng driving a super-tuned Seat you unscrupulous bad-taste-having jackass.

best regards

Cerveceria Escorpio

2006-08-09T12:42:00.001-07:00

If you look at the enlarged photo you’ll notice the guy is wearing snakeskin boots.

Here’s an interesting dive. The other day, on my way to Cine Verdi in Gracia, I walked by this place and couldn’t resist the temptation to walk in. Well, I got in, and, as expected, it was the typically sordid macho ibérico purgatory replete with cigarette strewn floors, sticky aluminum bar …. and porno magazines. That’s right, instead of 20 Minutos, or Metro, or even el Periodico, these guys had skin magazines, y nada mas. Understandably, because there was not a woman in sight. And from the looks of it, Cerveceria Escorpio hadn’t played host to one in decades.

Back for more

2006-08-08T05:23:00.000-07:00

Catalonia is not Spain or France.

What is this place anyway? I'm really confused. Stop telling me what this place isn't si us plau, por favor, please, s'il vous plait ... too much negative energy.

Due to a move and Telefonica’s ineptness I have been without internet for over a week. I won't bitch anymore, since bitching about Telefonica is so commonplace it's actually a cliché, and there's probably enough clichés in this blog already ...

Anyway, I’m back.

I noticed Iberian Notes has accused me of hostility towards tourists. That is simply not fair. I was a tourist once … not anymore. But I will say this:

I don’t hate tourists. I just seem to feel better when they’re not around.

John at Iberian Notes obviously doesn’t live in the center. I no longer do, fortunately, but I did drive down the Ramblas last Saturday and was appalled at the amount of tourists gawking and stumbling around.

You can hardly drive, let alone walk that drag. It’s a money-making machine for tourists. Luxury liners arrive so often you could set a clock to them. Easyjet and Ryanair constantly roar in and out of El Prat with bleary-eyed stag and hen parties …

I wasn't sure what subtitle to use: Lost Highway, The Road to Perdition, or Beer and Loathing in Lloret. Take your pick.

The center of Barcelona is almost exclusively comprised of tourists, especially this time of year. So anybody looking for the world’s biggest drunken Erasmus party can start on las Ramblas, then move on to Lloret. Good luck finding Spain.

The solution is simple: build an Easyhotel on the Forum site, construct a small world version of Spain complete with animatronic bullfighting and flamenco, and hype the encantos of “Chernobyl beach" (which is right next to a giant water-filtering plant, a short walk from the Forum site). Send all the tourists there. After a week, ship them back out …

The view from my terrazita, 9 stories up (sobre-sobre atico). Paz.