I took a long weekend to go meet up with Brad and Juliane who were travelling in France & Spain and spending some time in Barcelona. Barcelona has moved into a tie with Amsterdam as my favorite city. Amsterdam is at the top because there’s more bikes than cars…that’s enough reason (but its also a pretty city with good art, good food and interesting history). Barcelona is paradise if you love art and artistic architecture, Spanish flag burning, anarchists, about a 1000 year history, archaeology…and theres a lot of bikes on the street and reportedly a very nice big beach. I was so intrigued with everything else I never laid eyes on the beach, or even the ocean until I flew home. I arrived sleepless because the light was on in the train all night and I was worried I might get rousted for laying down on the floor, so the next day was a bit of a dream state. The day was pretty much about the modernist architecture of Gaudi starting with the one I can’t remember the name of which is a homage to the legend of St. George (Jordi in Catalan) and the dragon. Next was la Pedrera, an apartment building with no straight lines, and a ridiculous amount of decorative details and natural forms. Then we hopped the metro to La Sagrada Familia cathedral, which has been under construction for over a century and is only about half done. This project turned Gaudi into a bit of a loon and one day he got run over in the street. Let this be a lesson to you. It was intended to be neo-gothic (its basic shape was in fact quite gothic with Ankgor Wat-like spires and an aged dark sinister look to it), but it is thoroughly encrusted with angels, apostles, natural undulating or even melting forms, and at least one frog. No shit. I think it must be the world’s only synthesis of art nouveau and gothic. The other side is being completed by another architect who nobody can seem to name (doomed to be “the other architect” his whole life, kind of an architectural George Harrison), and who has a very different aesthetic and style adding to the weirdness of the building. Nobody knows what Gaudi’s plans were for the rest of the building because they were destroyed by anarchists. When I first heard this I thought that despite all their talk and ideals, anarchists just stomped on in like a bunch of fascist goons and wrecked the place, depriving the world of an art treasure. But I guess you need to know a little context…Sagrada Familia symbolized expenditure of enormous funds to build a gift to god in a purposeful throwback to more conservation religious times (medieval in fact when you just paid the church to be accepted into heaven, oh…you’re poor, well you’re going to hell). So in other words it is and was a monument to wealth, the church, and conservatism (anti-anarchism)…there was also a festering multi-decadal resentment due to a military draft that was instituted to send catalunyan soldiers to fight for rich peoples interests. One of the men strongly benefiting happened to be the major financier of Gaudi, Guell. It is analogous to a draft to invade Iran to protect the interests of Chevron or something like that. So I guess we have to cut the anarchists at least a little slack, or at least try and understand the motives, but what a bummer Gaudi’s plans didn’t survive. I guess this history just makes the thing even more cool. I believe Barcelona was the only major city in the world to ever be controlled by anarchists, until Franco and the REAL Hilter-financed fascist goons stormed in and killed them all. The view of anarchists in the US is colored by the famous Sacco and Vanzetti trial and bombings conducted by anarchists using terrorist tactics. In Europe, the anarchists are viewed differently because they were a realized (not theoretical) movement toward human freedom, at at least for a while they successfully repelled the fascists, who are by almost everyones assessment clearly A-holes. So I’m writing too much already and its not even day 2. Day 1 ended with the Roman wall and aqueduct, Gothic neighborhood and its Dracula churches, and fantastic gargoyles, and an Ancient Roman necropolis unearthed when a developer was trying to build a parking garage. The Roman tombs used to line the road into the ancient walled city. Really all that in one day, and a perfect nights rest on the balcony despite reportedly raucous noise all night.
Day two we went to the Picasso museum in the morning, and the history museum in the evening. Both are excellent, but I have to point out that the history museum happens to have roman ruins in its basement. When I was telling my roommate what I liked so much about Barcelona he didn’t really understand why I didn’t just go to Rome if I like Roman ruins so much. Its not that the ruins were Roman that is so cool…its that that are buried under the city, encased in other buildings, recycled and built on, around, over, and in. Another example: one of my favorite small moments is when we lost juliane down a random alley and followed. Walking down the nearly deserted alley takes you to sort of a tiny indoor plaza inside an apartment building. There are four columns standing there which used to be a portion of the temple in the old Roman city. Its in an apartment complex for fucks sake. I like that a lot about Barcelona. My friends kindly let me crash on the floor of their hotel that night. Before bed I went out to book a hostel for the next night and happened to hear some kind of punk rock show. I figured I should check it out since this was anarchist city. It turned out to be an outdoor show in a plaza and it was free and they were selling enormous beers (I get so tired of tiny Spanish beers, you just end up ordering three instead of one). It turns out it was a benefit or rally to liberate Franki. I’m a bit ignorant about this so please excuse any inadvertent fabrications…but I think he is a catalunyan separatist imprisoned for burning the Spanish flag. I was waiting for another band to come on when about 20 masked people appeared and made a big show of torching the Spanish flag with roman candles and shit. Eventually there was no more punk rock, just a skinny mulleted kid who was spinning hip hop and reggae. So I realized I was getting loaded and decided to put myself to bed in the hotel.
Day 3 was entirely occupied by a trip to a small catalunyan town near France which happens to be the home town of Dali, and the site of the Dali museum which he designed himself. My dad is famous for asking “Have you ever seen a picture of Lincoln, dead?” (sorry you had to be there). To that I reply “Have you ever seen a picture of Lincoln with a nude woman on his face?” The Dali museum is in the foothills of the Pyrennees and is the largest surrealist object in the world. I guess you can think of surrealism as art’s reaction to Freud. The surrealists employed depictions of the dream state and Freudian symbols, especially Dali. I recently learned that the drawer symbol commonly employed by Dali (a drawer which opens form some point in the human body…often the forehead) is a direct reference to the impact of Freud upon our understanding of people. Two things are apparent about Dali from the museum: 1) he had a serious fear of sex and consequent obsession early in his life, 2) the guy loved his wife. One of the things I really like about him is the humor in his art, and the deadpan delivery exhibited by some of the titles of his works. Interestingly, his early interactions with Luis Bunuel, Spains greatest surrealist filmmaker are entirely blown off in Dali’s museum. I would guess this was because Dali became a bit of a nationalist (was even a Franco supporter) later in his life and disapproved of Bunuel’s communism. I wondered if the way he was signing his later work (a very official looking symbol featuring a cross over a crown) was a reflection of this. The night at the hostel was uneventful. There was four hilarious Finnish guys who sat in the lobby looking at a porno magazine and drinking about 20 tall boys of beer. They had a boom box and were playing some really shitty songs such as “Hold the Line” by Toto. They knew and sang every word, and one of them said “We do not approve of the new school rock”. They were just warming up for the bars and I went to bed early.
Day four I had just enough time for another taste of Gaudi, I went to Buell Park. This was supposed to be a fantastical place for stinking rich people to live. The project flopped and It is now an amazing city park just crawling with tourists. I can barely describe it, you should just go. More catalunyan art nouveau by the master, except this time it’s a giant sculpture posing as a park. In the tradition of Dali, here’s some pictures from the whole trip in no coherent order, figure it out…
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