"i shot an arrow into the air"
It has been a goodly, if strange few days. Autumn, it seems, lasted about only a week, as only a day after I published the entry talking about its wonders a cold front besieged the capital, the leaves on the trees committed mass suicide and rain and fog came to settle upon Madrid. In this dreary circumstance, meanwhile, my mood has been alternating between being happy and having droughts of depression, tho fortunately not so serious that a long pause of self-reflection could not clear. Still, strange, strange, strange, to alternate between the two so...noticeably (for me).
Today, tho, was really quite good, tho like the much the rest of the week it was filled with back-and-forths, beginning this morning when the alarm woke me at 7.50 and, feeling like death, I resolved to not get up and do the assignment I had left an hour before real-getting-up-time to do, and instead continued sleeping. At 8.30 I awoke again, on my own, but felt no better. Back to sleep. At 8.50 I awoke yet again, now knowing that I would have no time to do the assignment and still manage to attend to the normal morning routine and make it to school and print out the assignment and make it to class on-time. And so I read The New York Times for a bit. Only then, at 8.55, did my flatmate get up and audibly occupy the bathroom. Realizing I now had ten minutes in which I could absolutely do nothing, I pulled up Word and wrote the hour's assignment over the next few minutes. That done, I got up, put the kettle on, gathered my things and then hit the bathroom as soon as dear Joaquin left it; I took my time showering, patted down my hair (which I'll mention at length more a bit later, maybe) and dressed and transferred the assignment file onto my iPod, then swallowed down some corn flakes and poured the tea, squeezed the lemons, gulped that down, put on my coats (layers are necessary these days) grabbed my bag and left the flat.
The Line 7 Metro travelling towards Pitis pulled into Alonso Cano at exactly 9.32 a.m., which was precisely when I was coming down the escalator and onto the platform, permitting my timely boarding of said train; we pulled into Gúzman el Bueno at 9.40, and I was at the Line 6 platform at 9.42, which was fortunate as a mere few seconds after I boarded the doors shut on the train already there stationed. We came into Ciudad Universitaria at 9.49, and by 9.51 I was crossing the threshold of the School of Communications, reaching the [most-fortunately empty] copy room by 9.53, accessing my ipod on the computers a minute later, collecting my copies around 9.57, and making it into the classroom on the top floor of the building at exactly 10 a.m.
(So satisfied with all of this having gone off so...efficaciously that I wasn't at all annoyed when I realized that, for once, the professor was lat and that I well could have had atleast an extra ten minutes to accomplish all of it; as a test-run for the future, it more than sufficed.)
The real highlight of the day, tho, was that History of Madrid was cancelled, and with that hour and a half I first went to the regular School of Journalism library, where I generally go to draw while listening to music, only they did not have the books on Jugendstil that I wanted to consult, and so instead I decided to go to the perhaps better-equipped School of Beaux-Arts with the time that I had, and this, this was a lovely stroll. Indeed, the weather had largely cleared, and tho it was cold it was a pleasant sort of moody cold, and I was listening to a live concert recording of Jose Gonzalez done for NPR's All Songs Considered, a program I increasingly like.
It is a curious thing, new music and new artists, in that while generally I can fall in love with a new song that I casually hear, but it is very difficult to forcibly introduce me to a new artist or, indeed, the rest of songs from an artist who I only know through one single in particular because my mind generally needs time to process it, only casually - as in, if I sit down deliberately to listen to something, I will more than likely get bored and annoyed within a few minutes (to be sure, the worst thing you can do to get me to like someone is to play me one of their songs with you sitting there; it makes me uncomfortable and even if I genuinely like it I will feel obliged to laud it in a way that will almost certainly sound fake due to my discomfort). In contrast, one really fucking brilliant way for me to encounter music is to do so while doing something else, but necessarily something that is more mechanical than thought-based. The examples that come to mind right now are cleaning and painting, mainly - while cooking I like listening to podcasts, specifically, and while walking or running I like things that I can be sure of finding both pleasurable and rhythmic - which is not to say that either activity (cleaning, painting) is mind-less; on the contrary, painting atleast is constantly filled with a million decisions based on lines and erasing and etc., but there is less debating in my mind, less constant thought-fighting, and much of the action is completely interior and largely beyond my constantly-thinking-me, meaning that this part can tune off and half-focus on the music being played, but also be detatched enough to register only if I generally liked or disliked what I heard - essentially that's all I'll remember afterwards (not the artist or song title or tune or even style, particularly). Curiously, I find I like almost everything to which I listen while I draw, which leads me to wonder - am I just terribly fortunate with music choices then, or does a good drawing experience (as a bad one won't let me concentrate on the music) by proxy create affinity towards the music to which I listen during that time?
At any rate, tho Claire had passed me the CD earlier this fall, and tho indeed Justin had given me one of the songs during the summer, and tho I had heard both at some point or another, in passing, last year, it was really only today, during the stroll down to Bellas Artes, but particularly while I was drawing in that library, that I really processed the fellow and, hey, I really enjoy him. He's melancholic, and at times that can just be a bit too much for me, but in all it was really perfect music for both the weather and the art I was seeing (I got distracted and spent the time looking a big book of the collected sketches of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimmt), and his voice and guitar playing is just wildly beautiful - tho, again, so powerfully melancholic that I know that I must limit my listening to it in order to not fall into an obsessive melancholia myself. His song Remain, in particular, has been on loop all day, and this happens to me alot - I get fixated with a song and cannot stop listening to it, tho I know I must because eventually it will begin to give me a headache and it risks (generically speaking) becoming to deeply associated with a moment, which can be a bother if later that moment turns out to be an unpleasant one in retrospect, therefore making the music that is a vestige of it entirely unlistenable, if that makes any sense at all (to this day I cannot listen to Breakfast at Tiffany's comfortably for the memories it arouses from the Age of She-Whose-Name-Ought-Not-Be-Mentioned, and The House of the Rising Sun fills me to complete, not-fully-explicable dread - nay, terror - to this day).
(The concert, by the way, was featured on NPR's All Songs Considered, which I heartily recommend to everyone; you can subscribe to it for free and they constantly have both live shows and in-studio reviews from artists from all across the musical spectrum, and I've discovered quite a few bands [The Polyphonic Spree, The Halloways] that I've ended up liking a bit just from hearing them initially on the show.)
At any rate, Bellas Artes was kind of awesome, mainly because the inside was every bit as much of an "art school" as I would have expected, tho curiously it also kind of looked like a high school (ratty lockers line the hallways, tho more than a few are outrageously decorated on the outside with zebra stripes, sharp things, stickers, stencils, etc.), but with the amusing added quirk of having these interspersed with legitimate works of art apparently just hanging out there. What do I mean by this? I mean they have several legitimate works of art from the XIXth (including a couple of Sorollas), XVIII, XVII and XVI century just hanging about the building haphazardly, and on one floor they actually have an entire transported Renaissantine fresco from some palazzo. Featured at the end of a hallway full of, as I mentioned, busted lockers. The library was just lovely, tho - small, but quiet, and with a great collection of just art books. And, aye, an hours worth of scribbling with Schiele and Klimmt is enough to make any day pretty glorious, and I got to do some quite pleasing drawing, which I've been doing alot-of in class this week (I started a new moleskin last Friday), which makes me on the whole intensely happy and relaxed. I enjoy drawing. This hardly needs to be written, but I felt like doing so. It makes me happy. And relaxed. Intensely-so. And that's great. I want to do alot of drawing (And painting) when I get back to Miami, and I hope this is finally the season that I get done the large family portrait that I've been lackadaisically pre-sketching for two years now; most certainly I'll reserve some time for drawing my mother, and I'd like to also get down drawings of all of my siblings as well, but an ensemble piece would be nice as well. We shall see.
The digression aside, the rest of the day was also quite nice - Press Bureaus was fine, and History of Spanish Film delightful, with today's class finishing off the silent film era, first with this:
Click to view...and then with a lecture on vanguard movements in that same silent film era, which meant we watched a lot of shorts from Buñel and looked at how he repeated the same themes / objects that pop up in Un Chien Andalou throughout his entire film-making career, and we looked alot at Dalí, as well as stuff from a few other fellows and that was all lovely, and afterwards I went looking for yams and found them, which is great as tomorrow Sarah will be coming over in the afternoon to turn them into candied yams, and hoepfully they'll come out awesome, as we've signed up to bring them to Claire's thanksgiving free-for-all tomorrow night, which should be lovely and a most excellent venue at which to get sauced, provided my throat is feeling better by then.
And, what else?
Nothing terribly much, really. There shall be a second Thanksgiving on Sunday, hosted by a high-school friend of youngest-brother Xabi. I attempted to make canelones today but they tasted of rubber. My hair is growing increasingly longer and I don't know if I really will wait till it grows enormously long before running to the razor; sometimes I like it, but other times it really is a bother, so we'll see with that as well.
In terms of Movies:
¡Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall! - Wonderful movie from the 1950's about a poor Castilian town that hears that the Americans are coming and, having heard of the American tendency to give away free cash to Europeans (the Marshall Plan) the town goes all-out to receive them as they think the Americans will expect: as Andalusians, disguising themselves all as flamenco dancers. Extremely clever for the time, and really fantastically edited, I really recommend it.
Lili Marleen - Crap.
And, finally, some quotes:
"I miss your touch. (In a Caveau des Oubliettes kind of way.)"
- Our illustrious Prime Minister
"ALKOLISMO EN PERIODISMO!"
- Flyer advertising a botellón at the School of Communications on Friday
"Rico en Invierno y pobre en el estío, parezco en mi fortuna a Manzanares, que con agua o sin ella siempre es río."
- Felix Lope de Vega
Rocio:You should come down to Sevilla to get your Christmas present. It's so cool!
Me: What is it?
Rocio: (Sly laughter).
Me: Is it bigger than a breadbox?
Rocio: What?
Me: Is it bigger than a breadbox?
Rocio: What do you mean a breadbox?
Me: A breadbox -
Rocio: - A box of bread? My bread comes in plastic bags.
Me: No, it's a -
Rocio: - A box made of bread?
Me: No, I -
Rocio: Breadbox. You mean a lunchbox.
Me: No, I -
Rocio: Yeah, it's bigger than a lunchbox.
- Conversation with my sister, about an hour ago.
"Is he actually good looking? Or is he Asian?"
- JDB, referring to the Nedelcrush.
"Si te duermes, te crucifico en un altar pagano, o te miraré mal durante unos segundos cuando te vea. Bueno, tú intenta no estar tan agotado como para no poder imprimir los trabajos chorras estos (tanto el tuyo como el mío).
Un saludo desde el Ministerio de Educación.
P.D: No trabajes demasiado, que no es sano."
- E-mail from the Minister of Education
Over and out; Happy Thanksgiving, kids.