Oh, boy, here we go again...
One doesn't post on their own blog for a while, and suddenly there's so much to write about! So much happens in life!

Let's see here... I will start with a brief discussion on the topic of motorcycles...
Let me start by saying that I miss my babies back home!

As I mentioned previously, I can't really consider getting a motorcycle here in Spain until my residency papers are more in order. That is looking like it will be sorted out within 4-6 weeks from now, so... the idea is creeping in again. However, after having lived here a while now, I'm actually no longer sure it's worth it to get a bike.

• Public transport in this city is excellent; fast, easy, and good coverage.

• Bicycling is fun and even faster than public transport, unless you are going a long distance.

• I rented a moped (as mentioned here in this blog a while ago) and that was an illuminating experience. What I learned is that a two-wheeler is not a slam-dunk in the city. Badly-timed traffic lights, congestion, unruly pedestrians, difficult parking in my neighborhood, cops who love to ticket everyone for everything - all this makes for a sub-optimal riding experience. (And that doesn't even touch on all those issues I did not have to deal with when I had the moped, such as registration, fees, inspection, and insurance)

The flip side of the equation is that I think a bike would be excellent for getting OUT of town once in a while. I did ride up a mountain road when I had the moped, and although it was freezing cold, it was good for the soul. I am still considering a little 250 enduro-type bike.. something not too expensive that Christina could ride too, something I could ride out of town and on some dirt if I could ever find any dirt. 

So, who knows. We will have to see what happens.

Now, on to the art.

I'll start with some more street art. There's so much good stuff!

Here's one in the Poblenou district by the relatively famous Miss Van. I find it slightly sad, but also slightly funny, that something like this gets defaced by other, later "art", if you could call the weird crap that's painted over the face of the central figure "art". I guess it's a known risk that artists take. 

A few weeks ago, I saw a great little piece of street art hiding in a doorway and I thought to myself "I've got to photograph that, one of these days." It was of a poor-looking (refugee?) young girl looking out from behind the corner of the architecture, and there was so much detail, so much expression. Well, the next time I passed that doorway it was gone, painted over in flat black. This piece, above, is definitely by the same artist, so when I saw this one I wasted no time in getting out my camera. At first I thought it was a wheat-pasted print, but it's actually several layers of overlaid stencils. To the right of it, under all that pink and blue lettering, is another stenciled face. It's of a woman, and its difficult to say if it might be by the same artist. I wish I could see it better. I'm not a huge fan of the lettering, the "tagging." 

Back at the zoo... or rather, the wall behind the zoo, which is a place that is apparently sanctioned for graffiti / murals. (I posted a few pix from this same wall several months ago). I love the skull. 

And this is from the outside wall of a warehouse / art space called Nau Bostik. Nice color, nice narrative, I'm a fan.

OK, moving on. OPEN AIR MARKETS. Barcelona is full of them. I love them. and, they're big. To give you an idea of the sort of scale I'm talking about, here is a pic of a weekly book market which I just discovered. (books only - although amusingly there is a seller of toys prominently shown in this picture; I believe it was the only non-book seller in attendance)

But the most unique market in Barcelona (or perhaps it's the biggest? Or the weirdest? Or the sleaziest?) has got to be Encants.

 

It was quite hard to take a decent picture of Encants. The upper two levels, where I am standing as I take this picture, are full of established sellers with fixed locations and stalls. The downstairs area, what I like to think of as "the Pit", (shown here) is just a big asphalt slab, on which different sellers stake their claim. The market is open EVERY Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, and I learned the hard way that there are no fixed "claims" for these guys in the pit; they move around, they come and go. When I say that I learned the "hard way", what I mean is that I went there a few weeks ago looking for a mannequin head, but all I could find was a whole mannequin. After bargaining the price down about 50%, I paid in full and, knowing that I could not take the whole mannequin on my bicycle, I arranged with the guy that I would take the upper body "today, and come back for the legs on Friday".

Well, I went back on Friday and, guess who wasn't even there! I went back days in a row and those sellers never reappeared. In fact, I'm going back today, although not to look for my lady's legs. I've given up on seeing them again.

The mannequin head was for a mock-up of a new large-scale sculpture for a proposal to a festival here in Europe. Christina and I are slowly accumulating small tools, and doing more and more art projects here in the apartment. Of course I'm not ready to splash pictures of the proposal around just yet, but I'm excited about the possibilities. 

Oh, jeez, I've got so much more to blog about, but I've got to go over to Encants to buy a barbie doll as partial reference for a new sculpture, and you might be getting tired of all this by now. There's more street art, LOTS more sculpture (including more Frederic Mares, my new favorite Catalan sculptor Jassans, market and gallery objects of desire, Swedish nudes, funerary monuments, and more!), my new clay work (yes I'm being reasonably productive), and snapshots of this and that (including Sweden in Winter!)

It seems I've been ending my last few posts with random thoughts about city living, so why not start a pattern! (But don't hold me to it... I might not have anything smart to say one of these days). One thing I have noticed is the huge difference between Spain and many other "western" cultures I've visited in the cultural norms around eye contact on the streets between genders. I think I really first became aware of the enormous range of eye contact behaviors amongst humans when I was in college in New York City. I noticed that some people make eye contact, some don't, some hold it for a long time, and for others it's brief. In the USA, it often says a lot about the psychological state of the "looker." Confidence begets more eye contact, and the opposite holds true as well. Well, in Spain, you can't infer anything like that, because there is essentially no eye contact between genders on the street. I've looked online to find the reasons, but really the best explanation I've heard was provided by my friend Grey. Women, he explained, must not make eye contact with men for fear that this might be interpreted as romantic or sexual interest, thereby unleashing a torrent of unwanted attention. If true (and I see no reason why it wouldn't be) this certainly says a lot about the lack of boundaries on the part of Spanish men. In my online readings about culturally acceptable levels of eye contact, it has become clear that the norms I am observing here adhere more closely to those in the Muslim world than anything I've seen in America, England, Australia, Russia, or even Brazil. In that same conversation with Grey, he told me what a strange sensation it was for him, what a surprise and even a relief it was, to step off a plane in Holland and have a woman look at him. The few women who have looked at me, here in Spain, were either foreigners or prostitutes. And yes, it was jarring. 

Prostitution... that's another interesting topic. I don't know much about it, but what I'm able to observe is interesting. Basically, it's legal here, and it appears to be centered mostly here in our neighborhood of the Raval. The Raval seems to be the last part of the city center (perhaps with the addition of adjoining areas of Sant Antoni) which is still "gritty", not yet completely gentrified. But the forces of gentrification are moving in, slowly, inexorably. So you've got these little boutiques selling hand-printed t-shirts and greeting cards next to run-down bars, next to upscale new hotels, next to marginally legal phone-hacking shops and busy north-african fruit sellers. On the streets in front of all these places you've got street people, nice-looking Japanese tourists, homeless, police, thugs, drunks, couples out on dates, bicycle messengers threading through it all, and prostitutes. On some blocks, lots of prostitutes. And they are looking for eye contact. The Raval is an interesting place. 

So, until the next time, good night from the Raval. (Ha ha, it's not really night-time, but look at that sunset!!) 

So, I don't know if my last post got you thinking, but it got me thinking.

In a nutshell, it's this: When living in a city, it's not the city itself that causes you to gradually close down and carve out a private psychic space for yourself, inside your sunglasses and headphones... it's the people. It's the damn people.

Its the sideways glances (sometimes worse than sideways, but hey.. sorry you're such an unhappy person!), the offensive behavior (which is sometimes "universally" offensive, and other times it just points to a cultural difference), the traffic and the noise and the bustle. All because of people.

Now, don't get me wrong... Barcelona is what I would call an extremely "livable" city. These "people factors" I'm pointing out are really NOT all that bad here. Certainly not bad when compared to other cities in which I've spent time. And, I'm sure that these observations I'm having are not new, not even to me, but... one forgets after living in the desert for over a decade.

Something from Wikipedia caught my attention, something from the Spanish Language page "Arte Público de Barcelona" (Public Art of Barcelona). Here's the quote:

En el ámbito de convivencia urbana intervienen asimismo diversos factores, como los fisiológicos, los sociológicos y los psicológicos. En estos últimos cabría englobar las necesidades estéticas del individuo, la existencia en un entorno que procure una dimensión de retiro y descanso, de evasión de los problemas cotidianos, de un cierto componente de belleza que amortigüe la dureza de un entorno hostil como es a veces el ámbito urbano.

Translated (roughly):

On the topic of urban living, several other factors are involved, such as physiological, sociological and psychological. In the latter it would be necessary to include the aesthetic needs of the individual, the existence in an environment that seeks a dimension of withdrawal and rest, evasion of everyday problems, a certain component of beauty that softens the harshness of a hostile environment, as the urban environment sometimes is.

So, the urban environment, if it is beautiful and carefully curated, can have the capacity to act as a foil, a balance, to the stresses of urban life. (Maybe this is why places like Los Angeles, in which the interpersonal factors are significantly reduced by dint of the fact there is so very little urbanized interaction with actual people, can get away with being so ugly.) But Barcelona is people-dense. And luckily, also very beautiful.

So this points us in the direction of a certain balance that needs to be struck. How to protect oneself from the psychic onslaught of people, while remaining open to the city, AND to those (thankfully quite plentiful) interactions with people which actually turn out to be lovely, and rejuvenating? I think that finding that balance is probably one of the key ingredients to successfully living in a city. You know those people who "had to leave the city because it was getting too intense"? They couldn't find the balance. And I'm not saying it's easy, or that I have found it. Some cities are undoubtedly harder than others, and some people are more sensitive than others, which is not a bad thing.

Jumping backwards a few paragraphs, to the idea that a beautiful urban environment can help mitigate the difficulties of city living, seems as good a segue as any to get into some pictures of sculpture, and of Barcelona.

The "monumental nude", or "desnudo monumental", is quite popular here. These are all from Plaça Cataluña, Barcelona's de facto central square.

These three are also from Plaça Cataluña.

Mermaid in Sitges

While we're on the topic of boobs... This is somewhat typical fare on "regular" buildings...

(But don't be blinded by the boobs, this is fantastic first-rate relief sculpture, and it's everywhere!)

But the prize for the strangest boobs really must go to the caryatids on this Poseidon sculpture!

Or wait, maybe this one gets the prize....

The Palau de la Musica Catalana, an amazingly ornate building in the Born neighborhood. It was hard to get a decent picture of this building as the streets are all very narrow. I am sure there are better pix on Google. 

This is fairly standard stuff, I guess, for European cities. But it's beautiful, there is clearly a dramatic narrative being played out with the figures, and it obviously serves to connect the populace with the history of the place (if anyone ever stops to notice it, that is...)

Josep Granyer's "Meditación", or "Thinker Bull." A parody of Rodin's "The Thinker." Personally, I love it.

Another one by Granyer, "Coqueta", the flirty Giraffe.

Still outside, in the public realm... The outsides of churches are obviously full of sculpture, some of it quite spectacular. I'm not sure who this angel is supposed to be, but he looks serious. 

And speaking of churches, Barcelona's most famous church, La Sagrada Familia, is a bonanza of outdoor sculpture. The entire place is basically one huge sculpture, festooned liberally with smaller sculptures. I could write a whole blog post on it (which I may or may not do; I am sure the topic has been covered ad nauseum). I will post only this one picture for now, of this figure which I personally like because of the rough, blocky treatment he's received. 

Now let's go inside some churches...

For the most part, the churches and cathedrals of Barcelona seem to be open to the public, and as such are also part of the public realm. 

A seated bronze guy, who is also a chair? Love it. 

Very gothic. 

Wow. Very baroque.

OK, let's visit some galleries and museums. Here is Jaume Plensa's new work. He's a pretty famous Catalan sculptor. I must say, I do love it that I can just go to a gallery and see work like this in person, whenever I feel like it.

These two are the work of Gerard Mas, another super-talented Catalan sculptor. I happen to really love his work. Whenever it makes sense, I try to expose Kodiak to some of this culture which is so abundant here. 

One of my favorite places in the city, so far, is the Frederic Mares Museum. Mares was a Catalan sculptor who was associated with Barcelona his whole life. Several of his sculptures grace the streets and squares of the city. He was also, however, a prodigious collector of anything sculptural or beautiful, and in the 1940's he donated his enormous collection to the city. It is now a huge and fantastic sculpture museum in the heart of the Gotico, just behind the central cathedral. The photo above shows two of many marble sculptures from ancient times. I guess people have been doing this sculpting thing for a while now.

Stone tomb from the Mares Museum.

Woman with Ermine, Mares Museum.

Adam and Eve and... wait, isn't there supposed to be a snake in the tree? I guess this is a slightly different take on the "temptation" theme....  Mares Museum.

Juan de Juni, Mares Museum. This piece is quite small, about two feet across the base. But look at the dynamism and emotion packed into this small package!

And wow... talk about emotion and dynamism! Mares Museum.

This is a panorama of just one room among maybe 60 or 70 rooms in the Mares Museum. I think you'll have to click on this one to see anything.

The museum also houses a nice collection of Mares' own work...

Which includes all sorts of work, from portraits....

To monumental nudes. 

Let's allow Mr. Mares to take us back out onto the streets. Here is one of his, on Gran Via. (I must say, either boobs themselves were different back then, or some of these guys just never looked at them. Because they are not sculpted right. Leonardo Da Vinci was even worse. Look here if you don't believe me.)

OK, believe it or not I still have MORE pictures of sculptures that I would like to share with you, but I think this has gone on long enough. To bring things back around, I offer you one final picture on the theme of monumental sculpture improving the lives of city-folk....

Doesn't she look happy?

(Oh, and for those of you who are wondering what the hell we are doing over here... Christina is learning Spanish and Cello, I am brushing up on my Spanish, I'm working on a new clay portrait sculpture, we are finalizing some new ideas for proposals to European festivals, and nailing down new gigs for the summer months for some of the existing work. So there!) 

Wow... you let a few weeks go by without blogging and suddenly writing a new post seems quite daunting.

Looking through my pictures, the following topics present themselves for discussion:

• The City (pictures of Barcelona, especially parks and public spaces)
• The Christmas break
• My ongoing efforts to be creative, and find a space in which to work
• Sculpture
• Politics (or, the visual evidence of politics in the city)
• Miscellaneous

I think I can get through a lot of that stuff. If it all gets too long-winded, I will save some of it for another post.

1)  OK... the city!

This picture actually dates back to one of the first nights we were here in Barcelona. We were wandering around the Gotico, quite close to where we ended up finding our flat a few weeks later, and we stumbled upon this. These giant puppets are a feature of festivals all over Spain. Each puppet is controlled by a single person who is inside, basically wearing the puppet. We were pretty excited to come across these, and I still don't know at which particular festival we inadvertently found ourselves. 

There is an upscale hotel in the Raval, which seems to be almost universally hated by those who actually live in the Raval, but which has an open deck on the top floor that affords a 360º view of the city. Here, our friends Grey and Nova show us the sights...

One thing I enjoy about Barcelona is that there is an acknowledgement in the city planning of the fact that people want to be outside, and... might actually want to sit together! Outdoor seating is everywhere. It's not uncommon to find this kind of arrangement, two or three seats permanently affixed to the sidewalk in such a way as to encourage conversation. 

And I had to smile when I saw this... cast concrete, municipal-issue sunbathing chairs down by the beach.

And yes, we do go to the beach fairly regularly. It's awesome.

2)  OK, section number two of today's post.... the Christmas break. Kodiak had two-and-a-half weeks off of school for Christmas and New-Years, and we made pretty good use of the time, doing some things we wouldn't normally do. 

Santa was pretty good to Kodiak, bringing him, among other things, a Lego Millennium Falcon (for ages 8 and up!) 

We got out of town and visited the mountain hermitage of Montserrat ("serrated mountain"), where we did some reasonably challenging climbing. It felt good to breathe some mountain air.

We visited a pretty spectacular natural history museum. This was one of many pictures I had to choose from.

And, in keeping with a New-Year's Day tradition in Spain, we swam in the Mediterranean on January 1st.  You know you're in Spain when you will actually consider swimming in the ocean in January!

3) As far as finding a place to be creative, and try to make some new work... It's been a bit more difficult than I initially expected. Upon moving here, I was at first really excited to find that there are quite a few "open" studio sorts of places, where one can rent a studio among other artists and do what you want. Further inquiry, however, has revealed a slightly less rosy picture. First off, most of these places only want painting and drawing; sculpture makes noise and dust and no one likes noise and dust, right? Secondly, basically none of these places have any collectively available tools, which is a real problem. An open space is exciting, but if you have to pay rent for it, and then also have to buy all the same tools that you already own in the US, it's significantly less exciting. We did visit one "metal shop", with some tools available, but the tools were underwhelming and the rent was high. 

I did manage to find one shop that holds some promise, called Transfolab. Sorry for the lousy picture, there are better ones on their site. Despite their selling themselves as a "Center for Trash Investigation," I would more accurately call it a workshop, open to the public for fabrication in wood and metal, with nice wood tools and very basic metal tools. The fee to work there is €5 per hour, and the folks who run it are super nice. 

Not long ago, we had an idea to get a small breakfast table to put over by the windows, so that we could eat together in the morning in natural sunlight. The fact that IKEA had nothing suitable was a blessing in disguise, as it gave me just the right pretext upon which to visit Transfolab for my first visit. It took a little less than 5 hours to build this little table for 3. Not bad for €25.

This evening I will finally have time to attend a meeting which should be informative about yet another possible studio space...

While this space is quite large and promising-looking, it is unfortunately on the second floor and accessible only by a narrow staircase, which is a big strike against it. On the other hand, it is part of a socialist collective called Can Battló and the use of the space is free. And, there does exist the possibility of being able to move larger objects over the railing at the left, if I am not mistaken. Also, there is a separate workshop downstairs, run by a different department (Department of Infrastructure) which is better-equipped than any workshop I've yet seen in Barcelona (which is not saying much). They do have a welder, as well as a lathe and a horizontal mill. The meeting tonight should give me a better idea of what it's going to take to work here. 

Will update.

Well I guess that's about it for now. I don't have it in me to write much more, and you probably don't have it in you to read much more. So I'll leave you with a few thoughts that have rambled through my pre-frontal cortex on the topic of moving... I've noticed a subtle change occurring in me over the last 4-6 weeks, and I find it interesting. In the first month or two of being here in Barcelona, I was a wide-eyed tourist, always looking up, trying to take it all in. There's something lovely about that "tourist mind". It's very open. But eventually, and this is the part that I find so interesting, it starts to shift. I'm sure that you, my reader, can easily picture the difference between a tourist on the street (eyes up, mouth open, camera at the ready) and a weary urban city-dweller (eyes down or maybe covered by sunglasses, hands in pockets, earbuds in). Well, if we pretend that this seasoned city-dweller moved here to the big metropolis five years ago, let's say, we can then also imagine that he was not always that way. What changed? and when? and how? With me, I noticed at some point recently that instead of training my eyes on the faces of my fellow metro passengers, I started to carry my earbuds and listen to music on the train. Instead of rambling slowly down the street, eyes scanning for the next beautiful sculpture or significant cultural difference from the good old USA, I've started to walk a bit more quickly, eyes less frequently straying above the ground-floor level of buildings, mind wandering off somewhere (which incidentally makes you "blind", in a certain way). One interesting result of this process is that I think this subtle shift is perceivable by others. What I mean to point out is that it's more common now for passersby to speak to me in Spanish, mistaking me for a local, than it was in those first weeks, even though I dress the same and have not adopted any particularly "Spanish" physical or aesthetic attributes. But this minor and amusing side-effect notwithstanding, I think this subtle shift is basically a small tragedy. How many times have you asked a "local" if they've done all those amazing activities on offer in their own city, or been to all those amazing museums just around the corner, and been told "no, I haven't." I think that when one slowly and imperceptibly adopts the pace of the city, its basically a process of closing. Maybe it is too exhausting to us humans to be that open all the time. Maybe the energy of the city is too assaulting, too intrusive. Maybe we need to put the earbuds in, the sunglasses on, and pull the hood down just to maintain a little private space in cities. After all, I notice that when I am super-open to the world around me, I do tend to pick up on those sideways glances which are all too easy to interpret as "damn tourist, what are you doing in MY town?" A little personal shielding does help deflect all that bullshit. But then again, isn't that their problem? I realize now that I am starting to go around in verbal circles, throwing out a lot of ideas, but that is a testament, I would say, to the complexities of the topic. Let me just leave it by saying that I believe it's good to keep those eyes open. Have the eyes of a child. Don't change, baby.

Those thrilling topics of • Sculpture and • Politics (or, the visual evidence of politics in the city) will have to wait. 

And oh, just in case you forgot.... Dinosaurs evolved into birds.

                                

(Plaça Cataluña)