"que maravilloso exceso..."
But Last Friday was hardly supposed to be spectacular, and yet, and yet, and yet...
Every weekday morning, the busy streets of Madrid are flooded by its citizenry; people bustling to the Metro, people strolling to work, people climbing onto trains and hopping off of buses, people going to coffee shops, people dropping by the bank, people on walks of shame, people on gallant victory marches, people running horribly late to class. But, all of them, nonetheless, people - people on the streets of Madrid. And with them, at nearly every major Metro exit, on the most particularly traversed intersections or the most worn street corners, are the representatives of our lowest media estament - the morning free press.
Indeed, Madrid enjoys one of the most competitive free press markets, with literally (except not actually) thousands of different morning newsrags that are handed out in certain parts of the city proper, out of which four clearly stand out, in order from utterly worst to most acceptably best:
Qué! (see sample), or "WHAT!", is the worst of the worst; it is sensationalist, it is poorly edited, it has obnoxiously bright red headlines that trivialize the news, and it [in]famously led one morning's edition with a front-page picture of one particular pop diva and her vajajay, back when the here-unnamed harlot used to have a serious problem keeping such things safe covered by her knickers. While most of the morning papers have some sort of international connection, this is a purely Spanish newspaper and, within the national limitation, it is Spanish insofar as the most pedestrian, undignified Spanish is concerned. To be sure, if Qué! was had to be represented by a human embodiment, it would be the obnoxious tenement neighbour: the old woman always lounging about in flip-flops, a dressing-gown / moo-moo and the curlers in her hair, shouting the local gossip to you from a window across the alley-way. Sure, it's a fairly amusing read, considering that their leading city stories are overly dramatic stories (half of them supplied by readers) about ridiculous local issues, and at least twice a month they interview someone with Diogenes syndrome, but it's still a fairly frustrating paper, with half the information enclosed erroneous, delivered in the most tasteless way possible.
metro (see sample) is only slightly better than the aforementioned piece of shit; it's still sensationalistic, but it avoids using exclamation points in every one of its headlines and uses a more conservative yellow and green colour scheme. Moreover, it is part of an international press conglomerate with over 59 particular city editions in 19 countries, so it generally has a fairly better-researched international section than most of the other papers, mainly because it has "bureaus" in nearly all of the major cities. Despite this, each edition is localized, and so while the international news is better than, say, Qué!, we aren't talking about in-depth analysis at The Economist's level or anything like that. Instead, what you get is international news reported from that country's local perspective, which is oftentimes extremely limited and therefore not terribly great at all. But, to be fair, they do produce some great comparison articles every so often, including a recent one which studied the living conditions and average rent fees in each of the cities in which the paper is published (Madrid ranks within the comfortable international average, whereas New York is outrageously over three times that average, and an equal-sized / located flat in Buenos Aires will only set you back about half as much as it could over here). Their strong suit, tho, is this very local reporting, and they generally do a good job of keeping people up on what's going on in Madrid without being as idiotic as Qué!
20 Minutos (see sample) seems to be one of the older titans of this news genre but, again, experience doesn't really count for much when it comes to something that is handed out free as you exit the Metro. The stories are more conservatively written, less ridiculously sensational, etc., but the layout is outrageously outdated, and it generally comes off as a relic of the early 90's (font-wise and etc.) rather than something from our day and age. Finally...
ADN (DNA - see sample) is the best, and my favourite, of the free morning press. It's hip, it's sophisticated, it...honestly just has a really spectacular design staff (it also seems to be based in Barcelona, which might account for all of the aforementioned things). Out of all of them, this one most resembles a real newspaper; the reporting is, overall, pretty good, and, again, I really can't stress the great layout. Out of all of them, this is by far the best for international news, and has by far the most responsible reporting.
Anyway, as I mentioned, newsboys are stationed throughout well-trafficked parts of the city to hand out copies of these papers to passer-by's, and whether I walk or take the Metro to school I generally manage to grab at least two of the above mentioned editions, mainly because at least two are always stationed at the Ciudad Universitaria Metro stop, across the street from the School of Journalism. On some random days, however, all four papers are represented, and for some bizarre superstitious reason I've somehow gotten the idea that the days upon which I acquire fresh copies of all four papers are somehow lucky.
But I digress, enormously, because Friday was not one of those days. Indeed, as I exited the Metro station I noticed that there were but two of the newsboys present and even then, as I was running late, I only grabbed one of the copies and, incredibly, it was Qué!. But, oh my, for once it's tawdry quality was not an inconvenience because while reading it (with a frown) during one of the class breaks my eyes fell upon a small notice tucked between two very loud headlines on the 20-something-th page: Esta noche Jorge Drexler protagonizará un concierto en el Auditorio de CC.OO. Entradas: 15 Euros.
Now, for those of you who haven't received a mix-cd from me during the past three years, I love love love Jorge Drexler. Most everyone knows him somewhat as the guy who won the Oscar a couple of years ago for the song (Al Otro Lado del Río) in the Che Guevara movie (The Motorcycle Diaries - still haven't seen it); I actually caught onto him slightly before that, in Pamplona. The deal then was that I was living, as a couple of you might remember, in the flat on Calle Juan de Labrit with 3 girls, and one of them, Susana I (there were two Susana's there, and one Elisabeth), was gloriously sweet, but also hysterically aloof to the point of being obliviously inconsiderate (amongst other things, she was prone to eating all of your food in the fridge without actually realizing that it wasn't hers, apologizing profusely for it when you brought it up, promising to replace it, and then forgetting to do that as well), and all of us kind of cheerfully loathed her in the best, passive-aggressive way possible. This was made worse by the fact that she had the biggest room in the flat (an enormous spread, completely disproportionate to the rest of our tiny cells), to which the other roommates would make regular excursions every time she left the building. It all started because, in her aloofness, she would inadvertently horde all the cups in the flat by taking cups of water to her room, forgetting about them, and then going for fresh glasses, eventually having up to twelve different vessels with a variety of levels of liquids within them lying about her chamber. But she was a creative, and her room was kind of this little fantasy world, and so they eventually became group field-trips into her surreal little surroundings, with Liz standing as a look-out at the door and Susana II and I wandering about, laughing hysterically, picking up things and speculating for what fantastic purpose she might use them, taking pictures with outrageous poses on her bed (or desk, or bookshelf, or chairs) marveling over the randomly gathered objects, and generally having an incredibly good, if horribly invasive time. As the year went by, and our patience with Susana I's continuous lapses in memory / considerateness continued, these trips eventually turned into exploratory expeditions, and rather than just pose with objects...we started to borrow them. Susana II borrowed some spare pillows which Susana I had hidden in the depths of the closet, Liz eventually borrowed a couple of pens she really liked and I...I discovered her cd collection, and spent the rest of the year borrowing them and gradually burning quite a lot of her 500+ albums onto my computer (collection which was, sadly, lost in the great reformatting of winter 2006).
But I digress - again. Long story short: at some point during that year, I discovered a number of Jorge Drexler cd's within her arsenal, borrowed them, listened to them, digested them, loved them, married them, and we've really had quite an excellent relationship since then, enjoying an especially passionate period during the late summer of 2005. I had been wanting to see him live for years, and it really should have probably happened before (despite being Uruguayan, he spends most of his time in Madrid) but, alas, it had not panned out (a final exam stopped me from seeing him in Pamplona, excessive expenses stopped me from going to his concert last year). But Friday, Friday! Friday I was stunned to see that this concert was not only happening, but that it was happening for SO CHEAP!
But, TRAGEDY! I had an already-twice-postponed dinner date with Sophia that night. I would therefore probably not make the concert and, besides, there probably weren't tickets left. Still, I shot off a text asking her if she had heard of him / liked him / wanted to go see him that night, and class resumed and I kind of forgot about it between the new idiotic professors and drawing one of my classmates as a member of the Tercios.
So, right, I had forgotten about it...until about 1 p.m., when Sophia called me back, excited, effervescent even, wanting to go. Unfortunately, Sophia had no internet, I was on the street and neither one of us had the phone number to call for answers to persistent questions regarding the possibility of getting tickets (any left? where to buy them? when to get there?). But, but, but, somehow (Sophia broke into her roommate's office, shuffled through his drawers, unwrapped the yellow pages in one of them and called three different CC.OO listings before getting the place that could help us), I was soon texted with the address where ("after 2 p.m.") I could acquire the tickets.
Awesome - I had lunch plans with Carmen Luna, so I could attend to that, then get the tickets at the CC.OO Auditorium on the way to the Reina Sophia (second excursion of our "cultural Friday" outings), then probably run home and take a nap before the concert at 10:30. So, right, meet up with Carmen Luna, have some awesome calamari sandwiches and patatas by Plaza Mayor, around 2:20 we head down to the Auditorium offices, start to go in...and get stopped by a guard.
"Can I help you?"
"No need - on my way to the fifth floor to buy some tickets."
"You're out of luck."
Shit. Sold out?
"Nah. But they closed at 2..."
Shit!
"...but they open again at 8:30."
Brilliant. Ok, new plan: go to Reina Sofia for, um, ever, and then go get tickets at 8:30 and...do something for two hours. So, we went to the Reina Sofia.
Where photographs are strictly prohibited.
(But I took one anyway when the guard wasn't looking.)
And we saw the Guernica (which I had already seen in Guernica, so it was kind of old hat), but also a pretty spectacular exhibition on propaganda posters from the Spanish Civil War, a cool Chuck Close retrospective, and a Spanish surrealists, whom I like even tho half the time I feel that, in their early period, they were basically remanufacturing Dadaism, and in their later period they were just being, well, sell-outs (atleast in the case of Dalí). Still, the exhibition was mega-cool, with a screening of Buñuel's L'Âge d'Or (which was kind of hysterically funny in a great way, and visually awesome, what with the flappers and aristocrats and ridiculousness, oh my) a a large section of portrait of the surrealists photographed by Man Ray - a part that was individually amusing to me because all the other works were labeled like so:
AIDEZ L'ESPAGNE!
Joan Miro - París, 1930
and, alas, given that it apparently does not apparently have the same name-recognition as the city of lights, all of Man Ray's photographs carried the label,
RETRATO DE DALí
Man Ray - Filadelfia (PENSILVANIA, ESTADOS UNIDOS) 1929
Other things I liked: Pardo Barrero's Siege of Madrid pictures, Delauncay's advertisements, Barradas' stuff, the Minotauromaquia, and Close's fingerpainted stuff (esp. Fanny).
The museum so-dispensed, it was only four-thirty-ish when Claire called from Atocha and came through in a great way for a coffee chat that cheerfully filled in a few hours that would have otherwise been spent languishing in the center, waiting for it to be time for the tickets. Instead, aye, we hung out for a spell in the neo-colonial foreign-correspondent-in-the-East-Indies café above the rainforest rationally located within the station. We took tea; it was wonderful.
(Ok, here's where we speed things up by writing about wating.)
Around 8, I made my way to the CC.OO. place, where there were already a couple of people waiting; at 8:30, they opened, I went in, I bought the tickets.
"Doors open at 10," they said.
Now, let's take a second to point something out. CC.OO. stands for Comisiones Obreras ("Labour Commissions"), and it is Spain's leading union...of labour unions. As such, it should be no surprise that the Auditorium's full name is 'CC.OO. Auditorio Primero de Mayo', and that this is the same place that hosts the annual Communist Party of Spain conventions (as well as more culturally liberal events like the Madrid Gay and Lesbian Film Festival). In the grand spirit of class warfare and the abolishment of the estamental division of society, the tickets were not only cheap.
They were also unnumbered.
Meaning that, tho they had been on sale all week, seating was purely first-come, first-serve. Now, I'm a little weak in math (as we've established in the past), but I can figure out some basic things. It takes some 20-30 minutes to get from where I was to my flat, via Metro. It takes about the same amount of time to get to Sophia's place. Ergo, even if I left at that moment, at best I'd be able to be home some 15 minutes before I would need to hop back on the Metro and get back to make the show, and I'd probably end up with a shitty seat.
But, if I stayed...and started standing in line with the two other people who were already camped out in front of the door...
Long story short (too late), I called Sophia, let her know what was going on, and joined the two other people. Within half andhour there were some 40 people behind me, and by 10 there were some 250 people behind them.
And that glorious mass was behind Sophia (who brought me dinner, which we ate in line) and I when they opened the doors and (despite having paid only 12 euros [student reduction], and despite having only bought the tickets and hour and a half before) I obtained seats in the dead center of the front row, directly in front of the stage, the singer, the band, the wonderfulness of the evening.
And, indeed, it was WONDERFUL.
He sang a bunch of the songs off of his new album (12 Segundos de Oscuridad), a couple of them in total darkness, with a beam of light whirling about overheard every twelve seconds, like the beam of the lighthouse which inspired some of the new songs, but he was also really awesome by taking audience requests and singing a ton of his older songs, a few of them acoustically, amongst them "Mi Guitarra y Vos" (see clip), but most were with his amazing band - which, by the way, constitues Tango Club Bajo Fondo, whih is just great beyond words. My personal favourite is this particular fellow, Diego Valaz, who is a monster not only with the violin, the mandolin and the guitar, but also this thing, which I had never seen before:
Which Drexler called a "water violin", and looked essentially like a multi-funnelled bong that could be played with a bow...the sounds it made were crazy cool, kind of like a cross between a string instrument and a whale call.
At one point, after amusingly / unexpectedly singing a couple of verses of a Prince song after a kid in the audience shouted / asked why he had recently participated in a tribute to the other singer ("¿Qué les puedo decir?...Prince es un maestro...y un sexi motherfucker."); he also covered a couple of songs, including Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the End of Love and Radiohead's High and Dry (see clip - by the way, he did this in total darkness, for some reason, so rest assured the video feed is fine)...
At some point near the end he sang Todo Se Transforma, one of my favourite of his songs and kind of highlights my love of his stuff; rather than be a song exclusively limited to himself or his world, it ties everything together, from a kiss to what happens later, to Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794)...
...father of modern chemistry and victim of the Revolutionary Terror, who diluted life, existence, everything, into one briliant maxim:
"Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme."
And he finished his performance with a couple of songs dedicated to his son (who was watching from the wings) and one (El Pianista de Warsovia) to his grandfather - Drexler comes from an old Jewish family from Berlin that was forced to flee the country during the Third Reich. The grandfather, who was also a musician, was sent to a concentration camp, while the rest of the family flad in a merchant ship that was rejected from four ports before it was finally allowed to dock in Uruguay, where the family settled. That song reflects on how a mere generation seperated him from his granfather's fate, while his absolute final song, Memoria del Cuero, is about the voyage over (see clip)...
And with the conclusion of this most magnificent concert, and a few pints of cider afterwards, so too did this most busy day conclude and, likewise, this entry.
Night, kids!