milonga
Firstly, I meant to post these (and finally get them off my computer) a month ago.
1) Part one of pictures are from the Night of the Museums, an awesome cultural event in which most-all of Europe participates in May, during which museums smash open their doors and let visitors wander about for free, late into the night just that once. Last year I hung out with the mummies at the Archeological Museum, but this year's night coincided with the birthday of one of the peripheral members of the Journalism Gays tribe, and given that I was obliged to attend a party chez lui near the center that very evening, I ended up checking out the Sorolla Museum which was only a few blocks away.
I stood in line forever and developed a crush on the girl who was in line next to me, and kept entertained listening to the old women behind me gossip about their neighbours and then make a big dramatic hullaballoo after a pidgeon chose to take a MASSIVE dumb on one of them, who spen the following twenty minutes about how the bombardment had actually hurt and how maybe she might need to have a doctor look on it (as massive as it was I'm skeptical that bird shit might really cause irretrievable muscle loss or anything, so it seems that this lady was full of shit, both within and without).
Right, now: Sorolla: Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida was Spain's answer to John Singer Sargent, and on the whole he's a pretty smashing post-impressionist who does really lovely, light, airy works. Upon his death in 1923, his widow was thoughtful enough to spend the rest of her own life conserving his home exactly as it was when he summarily bit the dust, and this charming estate passed to the Spanish State in 1932 and became the Sorolla Museum.
The Sorolla Mansion is a lovely building in centermost Madrid, with an excellent garden that sorrounds a house which, like Sorolla's paintings, is all about grace, grace, grace.
Night of the Museums, meanwhile, is the opposite: it is a free ticket to everyone in the city to storm the place, and the Spanish Cultural Ministry, finally, is awesomely hilarious, because it decided to select the Sorolla House as one of the participating Museums in the event, and thus turned a place that normally sees very small crowds during very select hours of the weeks into, basically, an open-house party on a Saturday night.
Nonetheless, the place was fucking lovely, as were the paintings.
(Alfonso XIII, one of our least popular kings; he was kicked out in 1931 when the monarchy was abolished and the Republic founded.)
The gardens were pretty awesome, too.
Right. So after that, and about ten minutes away, I called upon the Journalism Gays, who were celebrating the birthday of Javi, not himself a Journalism Gay, but certainly a peripheral member of that tribe.
Now, I met the Journalism Gays last year, and they are some of the most delightful kids I know in Madrid, if not also, to a certain extent, the most overwhelming. They've rescued me numerous times, both from boredom and in exam season (coming through with missing notes and so forth), and they're just earnestly good hearted kids. Their leader is Jose,
...Who, is, again, probably one of the most good-hearted kids I know, if not also one of the most exhausting ones, just in the manner that he is - which is to say, overwhelming, in every possible context of the word. Arrogant? Yes. Loud? Totally. Flamboyant? Absolutely. Tactless? 100%. Rude? Quite often. But he's also hilarious, and tho at times he seems to be a cartoon combination of your classic sassy gay stereotype with the pastoral bawdy-provincial-that-knows-more-than-one-might-think archetype, he is integrally one of the best human beings I know, very much the sort that will give you the shirt off his back should ever you need it and never bring such a thing up again; indeed, despite his at-times overpowering personality, few kids are more singularly caring and interested in obtaining the best for their friends and this kid might be.
Even with all that good stuff, however, at absolute most I see him and the gaggle of Journalism Gays once a month because, on a whole, an evening with them is more overpowering than a month with any other group. Quite honestly, after my immediate family they are perhaps the most ridiculous people that I love dearly-and-at-a-distance, and an evening with them, as entertaining as they might be, leave me feeling...more than a little overwhelmed for ages. Maybe it's that they frequent places that remind me of those in late-80's Almodovar flicks, or that they spend more time on their hair than I spend preparing for my finals, or that they seem to be so seriously connected to a subculture that I find so humorously absurd. I love, them, they are my kids, I care for them, etc., but an outing with them is an outing, a visit, an adventure, a delve into one of the many little groups I hang with, but certianly not my main standard and emblem - a monthly trip is more than enough.
This visit, in particular, was arranged a couple of days after my birthday, when said head-of-the-Gays called.
"You have a birthday this weekend."
"Oh...uh...cheers, but it was on the 10th actually...I can't believe you remembered!"
"...No, it's this Saturday."
"...I think I know when my own birthday is?"
"That may be so, but I'm calling you about Javi's birthday...on Saturday."
"...OH!"
And so my attendance had been requested, and having not yet kept up the monthly quota, I was obliged to accept, and it was an interesting event, all-in-all, given that it was by far the most homosexual thing I've attended in recent memory.
(And there are photos.)
Foreground fellow: Alejandro, who was in my class last year and is Jose's flatmate. Really nice, quiet kid who has a fairly hilarious relationship with Jose, who refers to him affectionately (seriously) as "the fat, ugly one". Indeed, Jose is famous, again, for being rude - despite the fact that he saves his most savage diatribes for the people he likes most (like poor Alejandro). With me: he does not hide his active confusion at my aversion to pomading my hair into epic pompadours, and he enjoys suggesting that my grades are earned by talents other than those I put forth when writing exam essays.
The fellow standing in the center (don't recall the name) is some fashion designer. Whenever he left the room the rest of the people present would immediately start hissing amongst each other, discussing how he was apparently quite hot but more than equally stupid. A number of theories were to presented to that respect, some suggesting that he was not quite as dumb as we thought, while others countered that also really wasn't all that pretty attractive pretty (the people in the room were really feminine enough to merit the word). The fellow on the left making a random "casual" pat of designer-boy's waist is Javi's totally lecherous roommate, a protocol major (indeed, he's investing four years of his life to make really, really sure that there's a salad fork there when the Princess of Asturias needs one).
This photo: quite possibly the most fag-haggy fag-hag I've ever met, addressing the birthday couple.
The actual birthday boy is the one in black; 'tis Javi, also a most-excellent chap, very good-hearted, and grew up about five minutes from where my family summers near Seville. His boyfriend, whose name escapes me, is the fellow embracing him (obvious enough, yes), a pretty-good kid who is nice enough, tho when they stepped out of the party for a second all those left present scrambled to quickly hiss that he had apparently said something that suggested that he might actually be conscious of the fact that he was pretty, thus substantially diminishing his actual pretty-ness, now that he no longer presented the illusion of being oblivious to his being pretty.
(Indeed, this gathering was no salon of XVIIIth-century Paris; political theory, literature, philosophy - these subjects, amongst many others, were quite actively not discussed over the course of the evening.)
Then cake...
A group pick (from upper left: lecherous flatmate, Alejandro, the fashion-designer-kid, some hair-stylist (apparently, from what was said), Jose's boyfriend-whose-name-I-don't-recall, Jose, Javi's boyfriend, Javi, and the fag-hag's arm), and we all made non-commital plans to meet again soon, which happened, as was the norm, sometime during the following month of June.
But that's another story / entirely different set of pictures.
2) The past week has been really (really) cool.
3) 2 weeks after Mariesa Weber’s family reported her missing; her sister discovered her corpse lodged upside down behind a bookshelf in the family home. Authorities believe that Weber tumbled headfirst into the space from the top of a dresser and suffocated.
I read about this on
useless_facts, and was so intrigued that I looked it up, and I append this magnificent article immediately below:
She was reported missing, but she never left home
THOMAS LAKE
Published November 25, 2006
NEW PORT RICHEY - Mariesa Weber vanished three days before Halloween, leaving her purse and new suede jacket. She was 38, loved rock 'n' roll, lived with her sister and parents. She left the bedroom light burning.
Her family thought she had been kidnapped. They called the Pasco County Sheriff's Office and put out fliers that said MISSING PLEASE HELP. They posted her description at SomeoneIsMissing.com. They appealed to Nancy Grace on CNN.
Days passed with no clues except for a strange smell coming from Mariesa's bedroom. They turned it inside out. Nothing. They blamed it on Norway rats, gorged on poison, dead behind the wall.
Mariesa turned up nearly two weeks after she disappeared. She was not pulled from a culvert or fished from a cypress swamp. For the people who loved her, it was even worse.
"I'm sleeping in the same house as her for 11 days, looking for her," said her mother, Connie Weber. "And she's right in the bedroom."
Hidden in plain sight
The Webers live on Osceola Drive, behind a jungle of oak trees and shrubbery, in a ranch house with a facade of brown stone. They came from Brooklyn nearly 30 years ago. Mariesa went to Ridgewood High School, cared for her grandmother, worked the registers at Kmart and Winn-Dixie. She had posters of Kurt Cobain and the Doors on her walls. Her ankle tattoo said Hutch, in memory of Michael Hutchence, the late frontman of INXS.
Mariesa loved to debate current events. She spent hours in her bedroom watching CNN. She came home the afternoon of Oct. 28 and saw her mother in the kitchen.
"Is Gina home?" Mariesa said, referring to her younger sister. It was the last time Connie Weber saw her alive.
The detectives had no answers on Mariesa's whereabouts, but the family guessed that she answered the door and got snatched by a stranger. Still, they kept scouring her room for clues.
Late one night - they think it was Nov. 9 - Gina went in her sister's bedroom one more time. Something told her to look behind the bookcase.
And she screamed.
"It's a foot," she said, as Connie remembers it. "It's soft, Ma. It's soft. It feels like rubber."
Connie woke up her husband, Jack Weber. He ran into Mariesa's room and pointed a flashlight into the crevice. He saw the ankle, the Hutch tattoo, and the truth hit him like a hurricane.
His daughter was upside down, wedged between the bookcase and the wall, dead and decomposing.
As they searched far and wide, she was a few steps away.
'She couldn't get out'
Mariesa's death is not suspicious, said Kevin Doll, a spokesman for the Pasco County Sheriff's Office, which investigated the case. He couldn't provide details, but he said she appeared to have died from positional asphyxia, which occurs when the position of someone's body prevents them from breathing.
Her family has a theory:
Mariesa's television was plugged into a power strip that ran to an outlet behind a tall wooden bookshelf with a solid back. Whenever something went wrong with a plug, she or Gina stood on a bureau next to the shelf and leaned over the top to make an adjustment. Maybe this time she leaned too far and pitched headfirst over the edge.
She was 5-foot-3, barely 100 pounds.
"She's a little thing," Connie said. "And the bookcase is six feet tall and solid. And she couldn't get out."
The family held a closed-casket funeral last Sunday. But before that, Connie went to the morgue to have a look. First she had to sign a paper that said something like, "We strongly advise you not to view these remains."
Mariesa's skin was dark brown and coming off her face. She was barely recognizable. But her mouth was wide open, as if she had been struggling to breathe or screaming for help.
One day, when Connie was going through Mariesa's things, she found a poem inside a small photo album. It was clipped from a newspaper dated 1997, and the author was unknown. It was called Little Girl in a Box.
To Connie, it was a premonition:
Little girl in a box
trying to break free
she's screaming out
hear her voice
it's a desperate plea.
Reaching out's too dangerous
But reaching out's the key
She cannot do this all alone
With help she will be free.
No one knows exactly when Mariesa died, but Connie may have been in the house when it happened. She wonders: How long did Mariesa struggle? Did she moan? Bang on the walls? Could she have been saved?
Alone in the house during the day, Connie asks her dead daughter these haunting questions.
Almost as good as poor Aeschylus dying when his bald head was mistaken for a stone and an eagle dropped a turtle 'pon it.
Night, kids.