en la Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas

"Slaying sacred cows makes great steaks.” Dick Nicolosi

So Rosalie and I bought tickets to visit Las Ventas, a 25,000 seat bull ring in the Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid, to watch los toreros stick an assorted bunch of decorative knives and blades into the hides of hulking black bulls... Have a look at the attached film I recorded, it's pretty low quality and only captures about a minute of a show that lasted for 6 bulls and several hours... I must confess I found the whole thing a bit underwhelming. It’s ironic, I suppose, that my first post on this blog was a paean about maintaining a sense of transparency in other cultures, which is essentially about not bringing your judgments and prejudices into new environments. And yet…I found myself incapable of witnessing this bullfight without recurring thoughts surfacing, none of which were particularly positive. Over and over again, the thought arises...what the hell am I watching? Upon reflection, this seems essentially like serving up death as a spectator sport...

While I appreciate the ring, the matadors, the skills, the theater of it all, the magnificent poetry inherent in the premise of man vs. beast to the death, this still ultimately boils down to a half dozen armed men dispatching a dumb animal for the edification of a large crowd. Very strange…brutal, unjust, bloody, and very very...anticlimactic... have a look at the pics and some of the film and let me know what you think. I’ll try and write more about the experience later...

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In retrospect, the honor, skill ,and tradition inherent in the bullfight are not debatable. What I find unpalatable is the injustice, the undeniable cruelty, the self-assured bravado and theatrics employed...don't get me wrong, like many artists, I find death immensely attractive, there's a lure and aura to it that has a vibrancy all its own... but that doesn't mean I want to watch living creatures die for my own entertainment... but in truth, i know nothing about the bullfight, really, beyond the few minutes i sat and watched as a spectator, oblivious to so many of the underlying principles and traditions that surrounds this age-old event... I'll leave the conclusions to greater men who apparently have a deeper appreciation of what toreadors have to offer...

"Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor..." - Ernest Hemingway