Saturday, May 9, 2009

Afterthoughts...

Sitting on a plane, with just an hour left till I arrive home to Chicago, I wake from a restful sleep and begin to reflect upon the stew of surreal impressions I’m carrying with me… After travel, I often find myself thinking about the Sufi word “Baqa”, which roughly translates to "perfection", but which I've also seen referred to as the “residue” that remains after perfection has been attained... according to my understanding it has to do with the spiritual traces of experience that cling to the soul and refine it through distillation... There are far more refined nuances to its definition, which I’m in no position to really explain, but it comes to mind because every place I’ve ever been has left a stain upon me…an ethereal tattoo in places unseen… and ultimately I spend the rest of my life trying to decipher the subtle hieroglyphs inscribed upon the sheaths that wrap my soul, scrawled by the guardians of every crossroads I’ve ever passed through…

…I’m left tracing over the inscriptions I can’t understand…


What do I take away from my week in Spain?


a savory taste in my mouth

on my lips

in my head

a mandate to beautify the world and to make that impulse spread

El Greco’s transcendent visions scarred into my psyche

A renewed appreciation for Picasso’s displaced politics

a refined sense of the plight of artists operating in exile

an affirmation of the subversive nature of the most potent styles

surrealist inclinations & flamenco feet

a new pair of badass distressed jeans and a stack of fresh beats

a riddle to pore over, in the pagan poetics of animal sacrifice

the paradox of imperialism’s darkest chapters versus its undeniable heights

an appetite to stand before more awe-inducing canvasses to learn

the greatest works of art capture flames of inspiration that eternally burn

picked up the names of a few vineyards worth knowing

basked in the collective creative fires of a company that’s growing

creased my brows concerning the inherent cruelty of the Inquisition

invigorated my focus on cultivating intercontinental aesthetic ambitions

surrendered to an influx of elegant and haunting Catholic images in my mind

& quickly acquired a taste for fine ham, that will most likely be left behind…

…so much beauty, grace, and affirmations all around

It’s getting clearer who I am, what I do, and where it is I’m bound

I take with me an awareness of Madrid as a center of gravity

A place full of possibilities that life might have for me

…Still…

I carry a creeping regret regarding how little time I spent with my friends

But also a pressing need to return to take it all in again…



The Most Interesting Man In The World

Have you seen this campaign for Dos Equis Beer?





I firmly believe the ad folks who dreamed up this campaign thought of it after crossing paths with Miguel Angel Furones, a man who exudes an effortless charm and immense but understated charisma in every situation he's put into... He enters a room and every woman in it gets a little bit more radiant... ....sigh... sadly, i did not get much of an opportunity to spend time with Miguel, but I've been lucky enough to wine and dine with him on several continents, so I can't really complain... Here he is in a candid photo with Rosalie, exiting the GPC after a loooooong week stuck inside a conference room... gracias, jefe, por siempre, por todo que eres...

La Emperatriz

Here's a candid pick of LB/Madrid's consummate hostess, Irene Vazquez, a stunningly beautiful and impressively patient woman who proved to be great dinner company, a magnificent tour guide, and surprisingly well-equipped to deal with all the neurotic headaches of shepherding 30+ creative directors who can't speak Spanish all over her city... She handled us with grace, elegance, and humor...no small feat...
Gracias para todo, Irene!

Friday, May 8, 2009

Carlos Sainz Racing...


Spent Friday evening at the Carlos Sainz Go Kart track with the gang. Driving around hairpin turns at high speeds, crashing, and entertaining foolish thoughts of myself as a race car driver. That was the most fun I've had in YEARS. THANK YOU RAFA!

...me and my signed waiver releasing legal liability...


The Winner's Circle...






(...i finished last, after crashing twice...sigh...)

The Winner's receiving their trophies, as "Eye of the Tiger" plays in the background... priceless...


this glorious evening called to mind the manifesto of the Futurist Society, founded in the early 20th century by the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti... This crew worshiped speed...and wrote about it in their "Futurist Manifesto" of 1909, which later became the incipient seeds of far uglier and more uncontrollable 20th century political movements:

"....`Come, my friends!' I said. `Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.'...
  1. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
  2. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit...."

Spanish Classical Guitar & Segovia...

So after reflecting on the musicianship of the flamenco group we saw last night, I thought it fitting to drop a quick note in about Spain's immense contribution to the body of work written for classical guitar. My first guitar was a classical, nylon stringed instrument, and the fingerstyle techniques I learned way back when on that instrument still color how I approach my electric guitar today. Somewhere along the line I was seduced by the stinging electric siren song of Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn, but any student of the guitar knows that where the instrument and its modern repertoire evolved from... Classical guitar owes a great deal to Andres Segovia (1893-1987), a Spaniard whose life work cast an enormous shadow over 20th century guitarists...
Here's Segovia playing Catalan composer Isaac Albeniz's famous piece "Asturias", originally written for piano....

Here's a snippet from Wikipedia to put Segovia's work in context...
"As Segovia's career and acclaim grew he determined "five purposes" as goals for his legacy. They were outlined by Segovia in Guitar Review No 32, Fall 1969:
  1. To extract the guitar from the noisy and disreputable folkloric amusements...
  2. I requested the living composers not in the field of guitar to write for me. This was the second of my purposes: to create a wonderful repertoire for my instrument.
  3. My third purpose was to make the guitar known by the philharmonic public of the world.
  4. ... to provide a unifying medium for those interested in the development of the guitar. This I did through my support of the now well known international musicological journal, the Guitar Review
  5. I am still working on my fifth and maybe the last purpose, which is to place the guitar in the most important conservatories of the world for teaching the young lovers of it, and thus securing its future."

Here's a video of him later in life, pushing past 80 years but still dropping gems....

From "Teoria & Juego Del Duende" - F.Garcia Lorca

The Flamenco performance last night reminded me of this passage from one of the most powerful, influential essays I've ever read, "Play & Theory of Duende" by the early 20th century poet, playright, and thinker F.Garcia Lorca... (a big belated thank you to my long lost friend Chaya for pointing me in his direction a decade ago...)

here's a passage that relates...(en espanol despues...)

"....Once, the Andalusian ‘Flamenco singer’ Pastora Pavon, La Niña de Los Peines, sombre
Spanish genius, equal in power of fancy to Goya or Rafael el Gallo, was singing in a little tavern in Cadiz. She played with her voice of shadows, with her voice of beaten tin, with her mossy voice, she tangled it in her hair, or soaked it in manzanilla or abandoned it to dark distant briars. But, there was nothing there: it was useless. The audience remained silent.

In the room was Ignacio Espeleta, handsome as a Roman tortoise, who was once asked: ‘Why don’t you work?’ and who replied with a smile worthy of Argantonius: ‘How should I work, if I’m from Cadiz?’

In the room was Elvira, fiery aristocrat, whore from Seville, descended in line from Soledad Vargos, who in ’30 didn’t wish to marry with a Rothschild, because he wasn’t her equal in blood. In the room were the Floridas, whom people think are butchers, but who in reality are millennial priests who still sacrifice bulls to Geryon, and in the corner was that formidable breeder of bulls, Don Pablo Murube, with the look of a Cretan mask. Pastora Pavon finished her song in silence. Only, a little man, one of those dancing midgets who leap up suddenly from behind brandy bottles, sarcastically, in a very soft voice, said: ‘Viva, Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here ability is not important, nor technique, nor skill. What matters here is something other.’

Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.

La Niña de Los Peines had to tear apart her voice, because she knew experts were listening, who demanded not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air. She had to rob herself of skill and safety: that is to say, banish her Muse, and be helpless, so her duende might come, and deign to struggle with her at close quarters. And how she sang! Her voice no longer at play, her voice a jet of blood, worthy of her pain and her sincerity, opened like a ten-fingered hand as in the feet, nailed there but storm-filled, of a Christ by Juan de Juni...."


La misma, en su lingua propia:

"...Una vez, la "cantaora" andaluza Pastora Pavón, La Niña de los Peines, sombrío genio hispánico, equivalente en capacidad de fantasía a Goya o a Rafael el Gallo, cantaba en una tabernilla de Cádiz. Jugaba con su voz de sombra, con su voz de estaño fundido, con su voz cubierta de musgo, y se la enredaba en la cabellera o la mojaba en manzanilla o la perdía por unos jarales oscuros y lejanísimos. Pero nada; era inútil. Los oyentes permanecían callados.

Allí estaba Ignacio Espeleta, hermoso como una tortuga romana, a quien preguntaron una vez: "¿Cómo no trabajas?"; y él, con una sonrisa digna de Argantonio, respondió: "¿Cómo voy a trabajar, si soy de Cádiz?"

Allí estaba Eloísa, la caliente aristócrata, ramera de Sevilla, descendiente directa de Soledad Vargas, que en el treinta no se quiso casar con un Rothschild porque no la igualaba en sangre. Allí estaban los Floridas, que la gente cree carniceros, pero que en realidad son sacerdotes milenarios que siguen sacrificando toros a Gerión, y en un ángulo, el imponente ganadero don Pablo Murube, con aire de máscara cretense. Pastora Pavón terminó de cantar en medio del silencio. Solo, y con sarcasmo, un hombre pequeñito, de esos hombrines bailarines que salen, de pronto, de las botellas de aguardiente, dijo con voz muy baja: "¡Viva París!", como diciendo. "Aquí no nos importan las facultades, ni la técnica, ni la maestría. Nos importa otra cosa."

Entonces La Nina de los Peines se levantó como una loca, tronchada igual que una llorona medieval, y se bebió de un trago un gran vaso de cazalla como fuego, y se sentó a cantar sin voz, sin aliento, sin matices, con la garganta abrasada, pero... con duende. Había logrado matar todo el andamiaje de la canción para dejar paso a un duende furioso y abrasador, amigo de vientos cargados de arena, que hacía que los oyentes se rasgaran los trajes casi con el mismo ritmo con que se los rompen los negros antillanos del rito, apelotonados ante la imagen de Santa Bárbara.

La Niña de los Peines tuvo que desgarrar su voz porque sabía que la estaba oyendo gente exquisita que no pedía formas, sino tuétano de formas, música pura con el cuerpo sucinto para poder mantenerse en el aire. Se tuvo que empobrecer de facultades y de seguridades; es decir, tuvo que alejar a su musa y quedarse desamparada, que su duende viniera y se dignara luchar a brazo partido. ¡Y como cantó! Su voz ya no jugaba, su voz era un chorro de sangre digna por su dolor y su sinceridad, y se abría como una mano de diez dedos por los pies clavados, pero llenos de borrasca, de un Cristo de Juan de Juni..."

Thursday, May 7, 2009

El Viajero

After spending a few hours watching Flamenco at al Corral de La Moreria, our hosts decided to take us for a little walk around old Madrid. Having spent the majority of our week at the office, we hadn't had an opportunity to see some of the historical parts of the city, so we walked past el Palacio Real, located atop a massive hill and right next door to the venue... Once a strategically placed Moorish fortress, the Palace guards the western approach to Madrid, and it's quite a view.
We also walked past el Teatro Real, the royal opera house, and then decided on one more drink and ventured in el barrio de La Latina, a hip, happening neighborhood a short walk away... Found ourselves on one of the famed terrazas, a terrace bar called El Viajero (The traveler), and tossed back a few more drinks while taking in the scenery... Had the pleasure of catching up with my long lost friend Sarah Okrent, of LB/Madrid, who was a partner in crime at these GPCs for years before disappearing for a bit to bring this adorable bundle of joy into the world...
It's a beautiful thing watching your friends become parents... Shared a few more drinks with the gang, then headed back to the hotel. Here's one for the ages. Stephan Ferens, Sarah Okrent, Rosalie and me al Viajero...



Flamenco al Corral De La Moreria

sipping the pressed juice
of aged grapes
the jam is both tight and loose
as sweat drips
down the nape of my neck
entre este tablao
the arab vocals
& african sources connect
polyrhythms
& fingerstyle variations
nylon strings swept
& strummed
with these foot falls falling hard
the form needs no drums
flamenco
the tension flows
from ascension and back
climaxes and crescendos
curled hands & heavy toes
taut dresses & warbling tongues
the aching need for redemption howled and sung
the intentions of the circle are sweeping
surrender to the swing
cerras tus ojos
the ritual begins
raw beneath wooden beams
a complicated beat evolves from this scene
certain of nothing but soothed by the sounds
my mind dissolves into grace
as the dancers feat pound...

Flamenco

...headed to a Flamenco performance this evening...

here's a clip from Pulse: A Stomp Odyssey, a crazy beautiful music documentary I was lucky enough to help promote in Chicago way back in 2005 on behalf of Six Degrees Records, a world music label I still occasionally promote for... This is Eva Yerbabuena dancing on the roof of the Alhambra...

I dunno what we'll see tonight...probably something a little more intimate, which is just as good, but here's a taste of the aesthetic i've been diggin' on this past week, as it relates to dance...

a passage from Orwell's Homage to Catalonia...











Here's a little passage from Homage To Catalonia, George Orwell's 1938 account of fighting as a Republican anti-fascist international volunteer during the early years of the Spanish Civil War... I read this a long time ago but it's stayed with me, as much of Orwell's work tends to do, seeing as how he was so far ahead of his time... I have to admit, though, that until recently, I had no idea Franco stayed in power for quite so long...lordy...40+ years till 1977!... I offer this up because I'm just appreciating how turbulent the 20th century was for this very old nation with its very ancient institutions...

"...There was no more to be said; it was time to part. Both of us bowed slightly. And then there happened a strange and moving thing. The little officer hesitated a moment, then stepped across, and shook hands with me.

I do not know if I can bring home to you how deeply that action touched me. It sounds a small thing, but it was not. You have got to realize what was the feeling of the time--the horrible atmosphere of suspicion and hatred, the lies and rumours circulating everywhere, the posters screaming from the hoardings that I and everyone like me was a Fascist spy. And you have got to remember that we were standing outside the Chief of Police's office, in front of that filthy gang of tale-bearers and agents provocateurs, any one of whom might know that I was 'wanted' by the police. It was like publicly shaking hands with a German during the Great War. I suppose he had decided in some way that I was not really a Fascist spy; still, it was good of him to shake hands.

I record this, trivial though it may sound, because it is somehow typical of Spain--of the flashes of magnanimity that you get from Spaniards in the worst of circumstances. I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards. I only twice remember even being seriously angry with a Spaniard, and on each occasion, when I look back, I believe I was in the wrong myself. They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope that in Spain even Fascism may take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs..."

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

El Centro de Arte Reina Sofia - Guernica & Mas

...put in a long, 11 hour work day...lucky for us, our generous hosts at Vitruvio/LBMadrid were kind enough to organize a 9pm, after hours visit to Madrid's preeminent modern art museum, El Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, which houses the largest collection of 20 century art in the country.
Today was the day I saw Picasso's Guernica up close for the first time. We studied it in AP European History in high school, but even knowing the background of this incredibly powerful piece doesn't really mean you can digest the scope, ambition, and potency of one of Picasso's most influential works... Here it is, in pint-sized glory....


We had a private tour with a lovely art historian, who told us gently that no photographs were allowed at all. After a long desconstruction session in which she explained countless symbolic details of the work, we followed her out the room. On the way out, I couldn't resist snapping this lil' moment, of me looking back at it...
Also saw the following paintings...
The Great Masturbator - Salvador Dali, 1929

La Maquina de coser electrosexual - Oscar Dominguez
(aka the Electrosexual Sewing Machine)

El cristo de la sangre (1911)
Ignacio Zuloaga


Pablo Picasso
La Mujer y La Mandolina

Garrote Vil
Ramon Casas
1894

....there was a lot more that we did see, but at the same time, we only skimmed the surface over the course of an hour... missed Joan Miro, whose wing was apparently closed for renovations... found this quote by Miro worth sharing...

"La inmovilidad me fascina. Esta botella, este vaso, una enorme piedra sobre una banca desierta. Estas son cosas sin movimiento, pero desencadenan grandiosos movimientos en mi mente. No siento ésto con las personas que cambian de lugar constantemente de manera idiota. La gente en movimiento bañándose en la playa me conmueve mucho menos que la inmovilidad de una piedra."

Joan Miró

...hope to make it back to El Centro at some point with a lot more time on my hands to fully soak it all in...

Jamon Iberico @ Sula

our good friends at Vitruvio treated us to a magnificent meal @ Sula following our short museum expedition...

What an unforgettable meal...raised in a Muslim family, I've never had much exposure to pork, so it was quite a treat to watch one of the master chefs carve up a huge, imposing leg of Jamon Iberico right in front of our tables... These Spaniards take their ham seriously...


































Angel, the Owner of Sula, with Carlos, the carving specialist...























this is a civilization with an evolved cuisine, a refined palette, and an appreciation for global flavors & subtle nuances... i hope to come back to this restaurant again someday, because this was the kind of meal you reflect upon after it's over and then consider ranking amidst the greatest dining experiences you've ever had... gracias, Rafa, Miguel, y Vitruvio...

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

F.Garcia Lorca quote of the day


"…The duende….Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things."

from "Play & Theory of Duende" by F.Garcia Lorca

...more on this soon..

a few thoughts on Ads for Yoga Studios...

...I saw some interesting work today worth sharing. Thought I’d take a minute and share some work for all my Yogi buddies. My girlfriend is a certified yoga instructor, and I’m almost certified, and most of my friends are yoga instructors and practitioners… In fact, two of my best friends just opened a new studio called Urban Lotus Chicago, and are offering free classes to everyone for the entire month of May. (Wasn’t that a slick little plug?) Anyhow, we saw some ads today from LB Greater China for Planet Yoga, a chain of studios in Hong Kong. They produced a couple of posters and a T-shirt, which are below.

















They’re interesting pieces. On our GPC scale from 1-10, the committee gave this poster a score of 5.1, and they scored the T-shirt as a 5.5. Apparently the T-shirt is a hot commodity in the Hong Kong yoga community, and the business results demonstrate that these pieces definitely succeeded in helping the client grow their business. I can believe it, it’s nice looking quality shirt with a visual on it that draws immediate interest, and upon examination, communicates that the person wearing it is a yoga devotee. Right? Who else can put their leg around their body in that kind of a position? For all intensive purposes, this is decent marketing. However, we’re not looking for just decent marketing. We’re looking for beautifully crafted work that clearly expresses a “product benefit,” and contains some powerful insights that help people understand what distinguishes this studio from others. This T-shirt reflects the idea that people who do yoga want flexibility. That’s absolutely true, but if you dig a little deeper (or find yourself in front of a room full of students teaching an asana sequence), you’ll realize that flexibility isn’t usually the primary reason why people practice yoga. Flexibility is a by product of the practice, but it’s not the goal. The more immediate goals are to cultivate self-knowledge, a healthy lifestyle, and to reduce stress. It’s preventative medicine for many, and a therapeutic practice for a lot more. This poster and this t-shirt don’t really address that. They show you that if you practice yoga, you can do crazy things with your body. But will that goal actually bring you into a studio and onto a mat? A stronger approach would be to focus on what yoga’s emotional benefits are to a human psyche, instead of expressly focusing on what kind of freaky positions yoga can enable you to put your body in….

So…have a look at the piece below. It’s one of mine, it’s not a 7, the typography is terrible, the photography and art direction are questionable upon initial viewing, but reflect the fact that the Yoga Now Studio this ad was developed for is a green, environmentally friendly studio constructed out of cob/clay/mud, and that’s one of their primary selling points. It’s part of the whole sustainability message they sell. So…this was a print ad I made for them, and the focus is not on the freaky things you can do with your body once you practice yoga, but what yoga does for you on an INNER level.


I offer this thought process up to the community at large because this is work I intend to do for the rest of my life, and I’m still figuring out how to do it right. I want to make ads for every yoga teacher and studio I know, because they’re all offering an invaluable product and service, and each teacher is a little bit different and each has their own personality and character, all of which deserve a unique art direction… Anyhow. Hope I haven’t irritated anyone by airing this out, but I figured I’d share. The Planet Yoga work is clearly solid, effective marketing for that chain of studios, and it’s worth honoring and sharing. The Yoga Now ad up above never ran, because Michelle, the instructor in the picture, skipped off to India and Amy Beth, the studio owner, wasn’t going to put a picture of someone who wasn’t actively teaching at her studio in her ads. Fair enough. But hey I made it, so I believe it’s mine to do what I like with…and Michelle, if you’re out there, drop me a line, I’m sad to say I’ve forgotten your last name… 

Anyhow, here’s one last yoga campaign from LB/Shanghai, from several years ago. It’s a poster campaign and one ingenious ambient piece, where images of people were printed along flexible drinking straws, so that when you bent the straws, it looked like the people were bending at the spine. That’s a nice, intrusive but amusing way to communicate the physical benefits of a yoga practice while people are drinking their Big Gulps… The posters are just as cool, because they’re double-sided images of the same person, and then they're half-pasted up against a wall. People walk by and see this image hanging off the wall, and are compelled to interact with them to see why these posters are falling off their mountings. After they get a good look, they realize the person in each poster is just doing a really nice backbend... Nice art direction eh? These last two actually did receive a 7+ score from back in 2005…

GPC Day One...Ouch...

The meeting started today.
Watched, deconstructed and critiqued about a hundred ads/posters/tv commercials/websites/ambient executions/virals/etc… It was a long day, made longer by the fact that a lot of what we saw was painfully incoherent or poorly constructed…
It was a mixed bag of work, but for the most part, a lot of it was indefensible crap…

I found myself getting more and more pissed off, because what we were looking at reflects nothing so much as people taking shortcuts, giving up, and essentially just phoning it in, which results in substandard work that's bad for both the client and the agency's reputation... At some level, when you witness people barely putting in any effort in a team-format, it’s insulting, irritating, and makes the task at hand harder for everyone else… I’m not in a place where I ought to be criticizing ad folks, but you can sense this kind of complacency in art too, and it’s just as bothersome… As a DJ, I’m always looking for powerful, compelling, interesting music that holds people’s interest. I’ll occasionally come across a song that starts off with an awesome groove, only to have the groove go on and on and on, for an eternity, without changing or becoming dynamic or adding anything that makes the piece the least bit more interesting. Basically, you can hear the fact that the producer just cut and paste a whole section of the song over and over because they didn’t have the willpower, time, or energy to refine it or add a new element or craft a more evolved composition. When you start making art you begin to see how the process works in other people’s art....

...Take poetry, for instance. Everyone, at some point in their lives, probably wrote some poetry, or strung together some confessional half-assed rhyme scheme in an adolescent diary. Say a loved one tells you they wrote a poem for you, and then intones: “roses are red, violets are blue, I think you’re awesome, and the world does too.” Are you gonna be bowled over by that wonderful poem? NO, because it’s crap that took no effort, no time, and any clown could do the same thing. That’s what I feel like when I see bad advertising. I think to myself, rather uncharitably, “how on earth does the sleepwalking, underachieving creative director who signed off on that still have a job?” It’s not a good feeling. But hey, YOU watch 200 forgettable ads in a day and see if it doesn’t affect YOUR mood…

Monday, May 4, 2009

Sky Night Bar







Skylines and soundtracks
we are only as wicked as the worldviews we hack
into the polyglot and out of the rot
fresh perspectives arise from transplanted thoughts
under this elegant Castilian sky
my consciousness slowly clots...

Sunday, May 3, 2009

El Tres de Mayo - by Goya

This famous painting by Goya, entitled Tres de Mayo 1808, documents the execution of a group of Spaniards resisting Napoleon’s imperial occupation of their land… This is one of a series of truly iconic paintings documenting the horrors of war, and its value has appreciated with time because the emotional impact it delivers has not diminished, and “the universality of its subject matter” places it squarely in countless syllabi documenting important art work that reflect Europe’s history of turbulent internecine warfare. The painting is fully 2 centuries old, and yet it’s part of a lineage of images that have refined our global understanding of what war does to people, and the mercilessness and savagery it engenders amongst human beings. Currently housed in el Museo del Prado, I had the pleasure of seeing this up close and personal yesterday… it brought to mind this iconic Pulitzer prize winning photograph I saw recently in Washington DC’s Newseum, that essentially captures the same moment, albeit thousands of miles away, in Vietnam, a good century and a half after the events of 3 de Mayo...



perhaps we haven’t come as far as we believe we have…

Silken Hotel Puerta America

I can't even begin to describe what a nutty hotel we're staying in...

Have a look at it's website, like the hotel itself, its web presence is a phenomenal piece of design work...
here are some images of the hallway of the first room they put me in...




it's a study in stainless steel space-age triangles...








































...pulled a primadonna move and asked to switch hotel rooms
Cause I was stuck in a room straight out of Star Trek
Something way too inhuman and way too high tech
It felt like a stainless steel space station dorm circumventing a distant moon
A study in sharply angled glass lines
A completely unnerving, uncomfortable, illogical design
dysfunctional mirrors, no floorspace, a stainless steel bathtub the size of a cattle trough
I don’t mean to be a critic detailing all the flaws I can rattle off
But there are certain basic laws to abide when it comes to hotels:
a) Build them for humans, not aliens
b) Prioritize what’s comfortable before getting conceptual
c) Make them functional and consider the basic lessons of feng shui
d) You might want some to use warm colors instead of cold steel gray

i had to get out of that room. It was like living in a room full of broken mirrors, and seeing multiple visions of yourself fragmented through a kaleidescope...

Modern design is pretentious when it intrudes upon my efficiency
I cannot be productive when my space is less than proficient
See
We behave according to our environments
And my space needs to make sense
I need to practice yoga for absolution
I need to perform rigorous ablutions
If someone’s claustrophobic they can’t be content
so I need a room where I can get bent and vent
…yogically speaking…
Vitality diminishes when you travel
In imbalanced situations our health quickly unravels
Unless we nurture it like a habit
Seed it like a virus
Clean minds only burn on clean fires
Trust in the techniques that teach sustainability and flow
We are only as good as the truths our bodies know
Inherent
And apparent
Applying yogic approaches to my strange surreal profession
Reveals
That at the heart of every piece of art there’s a therapy session…

I don’t want to live in someone else’s psychotic futuristic vision
Check out my new room:Made with more sympathetic grace and less mathematic precision… and there's actually some nice right angles and curved edges in it...

Peep the link above to the hotel’s website, it’s a colossal head trip. Every floor has been designed by a different team, and each room looks and feels completely different.
Countless aesthetics and compiled dreams
No two floors are the same
This hotel is a design vortex where many aesthetics reign…

…the art of digging…

found a music store to explore at the recommendation of my friend Pancho...
Did some serious damage to my bank account in a short span of time
Spent an inordinate amount canvassing a collection to expand mine
Its never a good thing to walk into a record store armed with plastic
Standing before a pile of sounds, some of us tend to go spastic
I have a problem, this I know
But every DJ i share tables with is chasing the same flow,
The same haunted feeling
The sense that the perfect mix is out there waiting for you
That every record store is a collection of priceless moments & opportunities
A spectrum of infinite possibilities
Waiting for you to spin them
Weaving together sounds
Around and around
I stumble across a glorious new track
Opening up entire new avenues of dub to attack
This TREASURE I’ll be bumping through speakers till the end of my days
In my experience,
gambling on random compilations in record stores pays…


here’s a sampling of new acquired titles:
Habitacion 312 – Nacho Larache
Elecro Jazz Divas (Vol II)
Acid Cabaret (volumen uno)
V de Vendetta: 12 Records
Creamfields Adalucia ‘06
Afro Dancefloor
Soulwax – The Remixes
Ibiza House (a 2 Euro bargain bin acquisition – worst case scenario, it’s unlistenable trashy trance)…

here's one of the songs off the SoulWax album, which I first heard at Burning Man this year out at Opulent Temple...



postdata:
...listening back to one of the Ibiza compilations I picked up, I figured I ought to offer up a plug for two of my best friends, VJs who operate under the moniker Stoptime341. Chris Andrew & Audrey Sica comprise Stoptime341, and Chris has spent the last 4 or 5 years touring the world as DJ Tiesto's videographer/live VJ. I bring this up because Tiesto is one of the recent architects of the sound of Ibiza, which colors a lot of the dance music coming out of Europe. He's also repeatedly been ranked by countless magazines as the world's best DJ, whatever that means... If you like trance music, Tiesto is the epicenter of it, but if you prefer music that's a little less...eurotrashy, for lack of a better word, then Tiesto's probably not even on your radar... Regardless, Ibiza is one of several largely autonomous islands off the coast of Spain, in the Mediterranean, and it's a Mecca for club kids worldwide. Like Miami and Goa, it's one of the epicenters of trance music and a haven for emergence of House and Trance as global Here's one of Tiesto's promo videos promoting one of his latest residencies in Ibiza...

Saturday, May 2, 2009

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...


postdata:

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

...El Buen Retiro...

Walked through El Retiro on the way home. This stretch of land is probably the most beautiful city park I’ve ever had the privilege of visiting. El Retiro sits on a huge plot of land just west of el Museo del Prado. Rosalie and I kind of stumbled upon it while looking to kill some time, and our subsequent walk proved to be two of the best hours I’ve ever had on one of these trips. What an amazing, beautiful green space in the middle of a city, filled with happy people, adorable dogs, blessed out children, elders strolling around blissfully, and hordes of happy madrileños enjoying a patch of inimitably pristine green earth... Although I knew nothing about it at the time, I came to the back to the hotel and did some digging around online to figure out exactly how that space came to exist. El Retiro was a playground for the royals and nobility, and for centuries was inaccessible to normal folks. About two hundred years ago King Carlos III opened up the park to the public, and the carefully tended gardens and sculpted landscape has been a treasured part of the city ever since. The place was full of people walking dogs, boating, drinking wine, sharing picnics, making memories, and examining the incredible architecture and monuments filling the park. Among the highlights: Europe's only statue honoring Lucifer as a fallen angel, a Crystal Palace for the King, insane oversized amusing cubist sculptures, and a boating lake filled with row boats and canoes. Spent a few idyllic hours here soaking in the warm sun and breathing the cleanest, most fragrant air I can remember...


...inhale...exhale...ahhhhhhhhhhhh..........