It’s taken me forever to sort out the travel pictures, although by the time you read this I should be done, and a nice selection should be on Facebook (the iPhoto-Facebook interface is peachy, although I hate admitting I use iPhoto when all the grownups use PhotoShop). Mostly it’s been pictures of Barcelona that have been slowing me down; it’s a truly photogenic city.
There’s a main thoroughfare called Las Ramblas which is packed with tourists and those who feed on tourists, including a lot of street performers, if you call dressing up like a car or a plant or a gorilla a performance. I will give them credit for remarkable outfits, although you have to wonder what mental processes led them to the decision to choose dressing up as a pirate and standing on a box and going Aaarrgh when someone tosses a coin in their hat as a career path. I mean, it’s a real commitment, because some of these outfits are incredibly detailed, and give you a sense that the choice of this way of life was both insane and irreversible. And there’s not just one or two of them, there’s dozens, each with presumably their own spot on the street, day in and day out. Anyhow, this street is the first magnet of the place, but one quickly learns to be attracted elsewhere. It’s like walking down Fifth Avenue. It’s the first thing that comes to mind, but there are better places once you find them. And, if you’re in town for any length of time, you will.
Occasionally our paths which were not beaten were exceptionally unbeaten, especially given their overall closeness to the middle of things. We’d be walking along some back street and we’d see nothing but people in Middle East or African outfits, and feel as if we’d somehow jumped continents. Cultural identities remained strongly original rather than melted in, apparently, a thoroughly non-American immigrant experience.
In terms of art, aside from the Gaudi and Modernist stuff, which is pervasive, you have the Catalan museum in the 1929 fair palace, which once again was wonderfully revelatory, plus the Miro and Picasso museums. As for Miro, this is one of those acquired tastes, and his career spans all sorts of styles, culminating in quite minimalist works about the gesture of the brushstroke, and there is no question that he challenges you and makes you think. If art can be about the moment of its creation, then Miro and Velasquez have very different things to say about what that means. In any case, Miro has to be one of the least accessible artists who nonetheless one believes is probably a good artist; I enjoyed the exposure (especially as I was reading the Dewey at the time; still am, for that matter). The Picasso museum concentrates mostly on his early work up to cubism, which means that it is his most esthetically accessible material, and I learned a lot about him. He was sort of born with a sketchpad in his hand; I hadn’t realized that he had been such a prodigy. And almost universally I love his early work, including much of the cubist stuff. And he did a whole series, which I mentioned before, of theme and variation on Las Meninas, which is great fun, because the man is such a chameleon and as he comes on this repeated subject he does so in so many different ways. Needless to say, this museum is a hot draw, but they keep the crowd manageable, so it’s easy to enjoy it. Realistically, the works that make Picasso Picasso are elsewhere, in major museums around the world, but this museum at least makes Picasso human, and that’s a very good thing indeed. You can even by a striped tee shirt, if you’re so inclined, so that you can look like the man himself. I’ve got the hairline, but I did manage to skip the temptation.
We did take one day trip to Monserrat, which among other things is where Parsifal/Percival is supposed to have found the Grail. It’s a great mountain structure, very photogenic (again) and you take a train up, and then a funicular, and then shank’s mare, until you get to the peak and you can see people in Florence waving at you from the top of the Duomo and people in Paris waving at you from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Given the weather (it is generally one cloudy or at least hazy country, especially in the spring) you get about three clear days a year; we were fortunate enough to be there on one of them. Fabulous stuff.
I’m sure other things will occur to me over the next few weeks, and I’ll mention them when they do, but that’s the main story. We can now get back to the business of being off for the summer, which means NatNats, Camp WTF, calendar juggling (which has indeed been going on with some interesting results), personnel changes (I’m waiting to hear about a couple of spots especially), gossip (I have to get together with O’C before he heads for the hills and updates every three minutes on who had the hot dogs in the institute cafeteria), and all the usual stuff that concerns us here. Meanwhile I have been keeping up the Coachean Feed, and once again I urge you to check it out. You need to know everything that’s in it. Really. I wouldn’t bother otherwise.
No comments:
Post a Comment