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"No one sees me changing. But who sees me? I am my own hiding place."
April 7, 2012
April 1, 2012
Want to make an extra $5 thousand/a month?
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June 27, 2011
Another year, another homecoming
Back in the land of cheesesteaks, oversized cars, drive-thrus, excessive electronics, cereal aisles… Every time I leave Madrid for native lands it’s as if I’ve stepped into another dimension, as if the excruciating plane ride across the Atlantic were really a reality warp. Finally there are people who speak the language of sarcasm. Who say “water ice” the correct way and like eating greasy food. Funny that my first outing here was a reunion with my cousins at PYT Burger in Northern Liberties, complete with longed-for entire bottles of ketchup, shoestring fries, and juicy gourmet burgers.
Of course, actually being inside my home is my own brand of reality. Enough tv screens to confuse the already attention-deficit mind. Back-to-back episodes of Sex and the City. Home-made chicken wings and Shanghai vegetables. New animal additions to the household: Hermione the cat and Rudy, my sister’s dog. New human addition to the household: my sister, recently back from Chicago.
And of course there’s always the reoccurring existentialist doubts which plague the months of May through August. Extra time makes the mind wander, mostly in circles. There are always so many things I COULD be doing that on some days I end up choosing the vegetable path. This summer, it’s down to business:
- Some travel article and essay writing. Check out my page and articles on the Hedgehog Guides Madrid page
- Stay tuned for The PLUM plum, a new online ´zine under construction, brought to you by the tumor twins
- It´s time to polish up some poems long kept in the shoebox part of the computer and send them to some literary magazines
- Studying for the Spanish DELE diploma
- Reading and blogging and reliving old memories with my sister
Up and coming: Turkey trip log. Some new poems. New essays. Mind mush.
Happy summer all!
June 8, 2011
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams
W.B. Yeats
Kris Hollingsworth constructed an amazing self portrait that includes an entire poem captured, one word at a time, with long exposure light writing.
Entire Poem Written in Light Painting
This post is by Haley Luna as part of Photojojo’s Show & Tell week.
June 7, 2011
Los libros y la noche
“The universe, (which others call the Library), is made up of an indefinite, and perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal corridors, with shafts of ventilation in the center enclosed by very low rails. From any corridor, one can see the floors above and below, interminably…
Like all men in the Library, I’ve traveled in my youth; I’ve made pilgrimages in search of a book, perhaps from catalogue to catalogue; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I prepare myself to die only a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born.”
In honor of the 25th anniversary of the death of Jorge Luis Borges, the Casa de América will be screening “Los libros y la noche,” a documentary/fictional movie based on the works of the Argentinian writer.
I watched this little clip of the film, a reenactment of one of his most famous stories, “The Library of Babel”, in which Borges creates an elaborate and chilling metaphor for the universe. I had only ever imagined in my head those hexagons, which contain 20 bookshelves, 5 on each side, each shelf containing 32 books exactly, each book enclosing 410 pages, each page with 40 lines, and each line containing 80 black letters… The film creates well that atmosphere of horror and wonder that I always feel reading his stories.
My relationship with Borges began last summer in Vermont on the island campus of Middlebury, where I was ushered into his world of labyrinths, infinite structures, vertigo, dreams within dreams… His stories are akin to those feverish dreams and hallucinations you have while tossing in bed, whose extremity and element of infinite-ness makes them so horrifying, whose sudden moment of heightened consciousness makes it seem as if you have accessed another dimension too fleeting to grasp.
Borges’ infinite Library not only contains all the possible (even uninteligible) combinations of all the “25 orthographic symbols” but also all the misprints possible varying by one or two letters. Some fun facts from Wikipedia about the Library as a mathematical thought experiment:
The Library contains at least 
books.(That is, 25 orthographic symbols and 1,312,000 letters in each book…then the use of logarithms which beats me.)
(The average large library on Earth at the present time typically contains only several million volumes, i.e. on the order of about 
books. The world’s largest library, the Library of Congress, has 
books.)
Just one “authentic” volume, together with all those variants containing only a handful of misprints, would occupy so much space that they would fill the known universe.
- Authentic volume: 1
- Variants with one misprint:
= 31,488,000 - Variants with exactly two misprints:
= 495,746,694,144,000 - Variants with exactly three misprints:
= 5,203,349,369,788,317,696,000 - Variants with exactly four misprints:
= 40,960,672,578,684,980,713,193,472,000
The number of different ways in which the books could be arranged is 
.
What an awful beast of a library…shudder. Okay, that’s enough nerdity and numbers for the day. Go read Borges! He’s good for the soul and for some boggling of the mind.
June 5, 2011
Que nadie calle tu verdad
que nadie te ahogue el corazon
- Manuel Carrasco, “Que Nadie”
June 2, 2011
The surprise trip turned out to be…
….drumroll…Oporto, Portugal!
In Portuguese, it´s Porto, which translates as “port.” Apt name, as its coastal location and its river Douro lend to the city some beautiful views and beaches within a metro-ride away from the center. Even though “charming” is an over-used word to describe most small cities and towns in Europe, Porto really was exactly that, but with many ruined buildings and old grungy neighborhoods thrown in the mix. Adds to the historic charm.
Red rooves, the up and down of hilly cobble-stoned streets, small French-style cafés everywhere…
We finally managed to locate a world-famous bookstore, Livrería Lello, where some of the scenes from the Harry Potter movies were shot. One can see its resemblance to Hogwarts; its snaking ornate wooden staircase is its prize attraction.
FOOOOOD. How can one ever write about a destination without mentioning the food? Especially Portuguese food, with its amazing seafood dishes — codfish, bass, sea barnacles, octopus, shrimp, you name it. The salt taste of the sea makes it seem as if these sumptious creatures were caught only minutes ago. Also, good food is much cheaper here than it is in Spain.
We decided to splurge and order the most expensive fish I’ve eaten ever, a huge oven-baked sea bass buried in sea-salt. Even though the fish alone was 46 euros, the entire meal was actually pretty reasonable, considering it was also my first time trying barnacles fresh out of the sea and seasoned by mother nature. They look pretty weird but are mighty tasty.
Javi putting on his photo-face. The fish was accompanied by a stewy rice with spinach, beans, and a delicious red sauce. After paying the bill, we took a stroll in an attempt to digest the entire fish that we had just eaten, and decided it might have been better if we had gone instead to this restaurant here:
A trip to the beach and bike-riding. Sun, breezes, a long boardwalk, exercise… The weather was perfect, water was cold.
Cabeleireiro = Hair salon. These were everywhere, which led to our non-stop repetitions of “Cabeleireireireireireiro.”
We went on a small cruise of the Douro and got to see some of the bridges connecting both sides of the city and the pretty houses overhanging the water. Also enjoyed just lounging on a bench by the riverside, watching the gondolas drift by, sipping on iced cafe con leite, observing the cable car going up and over the river.
The notable difference between the Portuguese and the Spanish surprised me a bit, in our interactions with waiters, tourist information points, hotel clerks, and even strangers. I mean, they do live on the same península and speak similar languages. But the Portuguese seem much more reserved and professional and speak English exceptionally well. The Spanish generally give off much warmer personalities and love to chit-chat; it only took a funny comment or a thumbs-up from a Spaniard like Javi to get the waiters to crack a smile and show their neighborly hospitality.
Porto’s also home to some interesting ceramic art. We popped into a small ceramics workshop in a little alleyway manned by a busy Portuguese lady. Some of the tile art was quite beautiful, with simple scenes of the city and its river.
Who can resist a city where old trolleys still run regularly?
May 24, 2011
The Art of Letter Writing
Photo: Letter from Federico García Lorca to his friend Melchor, about his “poetic mission”
Good movies inspire the kind of conversation which make afternoon walks seem airy and timeless. Especially through the charming neighborhood of Chamberí, past its old-fashioned bars and its streets full of madrileños going about their Sunday routines. We had just seen Woody Allen´s latest film “Midnight in Paris” with José and Juani, a Spanish couple in their 50´s who have never missed a single good movie.
Speaking of being transported to the past, the nostalgia of previous epoques, a city whose heart in its younger times sparked a special and intimate fondness that is sometimes difficult to revive… Jose talked about a Madrid that was his, some twenty-odd years ago, when he first moved here in his youth. He also talked about the desire to write, which in his younger days was something so essential and yet whose flame is unsustainable these days in his life as a family man. Put out by a lack of inspiration, by the greater necessities of adulthood. The balance that living life with another person can give you, so that the alone-ness, the melancholy doesn’t urge itself anymore onto paper.
How did you two meet? I find that that is always an interesting question.
One day 26 years ago, Juani randomly caught a train to Aranjuez with some friends, where José was living at the time, a grungy teenager with long hair and a rebellious soul, like all teenagers. He was lounging around the streets with his friends that Saturday afternoon. Juani and her friends asked his group of friends for sight-seeing suggestions around the city. They walked around together, had a coffee, and became immediate friends. Before Juani departed on her train to Madrid, they exchanged mailing addresses.
I always find it difficult to imagine these past encounters; the images are always lit with a movie director’s videocamera, the hairstyles and clothes and actions are all props created for the spectator, who never will have seen this moment. Their friendship continued with letter writing, long letters with multiple pages, back and forth between Madrid and Aranjuez. José was a writer and idealist. He believed in this singular necessity.
Lord how times have changed…even in my days as a kid I still received handwritten letters and postcards in the mail, I sent cards and parodies of newsletters to my best friends, I kept everything safe in my small world of shoeboxes and drawers. Now we hardly have time to respond to emails, and the pressure of speed defeats the purpose of snail mail.
José talked about lacking a driving force which compels him to write these days. I said writing isn’t only about creativity and moodswings, it’s also time and work. Not the sludgery of a job in writing but the consistency that’s always needed to progress in anything. I believe in Muñoz Molina’s blank page of the notebook which is always kept close at hand, and which is like “the negative of the printed page:” that one writes because the necessary tools are within reach, because “the white pages inspire the desire to write, to anotate, to discover.”
I’m on a mission to keep handwritten pages alive, and traveling.
May 21, 2011
Taken from El Pais. 25,000 people in Puerta del Sol on the sixth day of the protests. Today is the so-called “Day of Reflection,” when all activities of the electoral campaigns should come to a halt before election day tomorrow. There’s a whole make-shift city inside the plaza, complete with a kid-zone, food and drinks stand, musician sign-up lists, a whole living room with half a dozen couches, information tables, and written signs covering every inch of open space with messages of indignance. Reflect on that!
May 20, 2011
Things are heating up in Spain
After grabbing a coffee next to Retiro Park yesterday I decided to wander on down towards the center, was about to bypass Sol to catch the bus back home, but decided to do a little more walking towards the heart of Madrid, site of the famous (and adorable) Madrid bear statue.
I wasn´t really surprised to see a mass of people gathered with big signs and some guy on a microphone heating up the crowd. Manifestations like this are quite common in this part of town, and I usually never know what they are for. This time I decided to stop and look carefully; people seemed more indignant than usual, there were hordes of photographers and journalists, and the big glass hub covering the entrance to the metro station was covered with handwritten signs: “Spanish Revolution,” “Real democracy now”, “It´s not a crisis, it´s fraud”, “A roof and a job, without being a slave!” “There´s no lack of money, only too many thieves.”
On the other side of the plaza was something I’d never seen before in Sol: an entire camping ground of tents, cardboard, battered sofas, make-shift rooves. Wow…somebody has really started something. This Sunday are the elections for the City Councils and the Spanish Autonomous Communities. Huge overblown posters for candidates of both the PP and the PSOE have plagued the walls of the Metro and have lined the streets. This is the first time I’ve seen such a large and angry gathering to protest the shit politics and economy which have been the cause of the highest unemployment rate in Europe. And never a better time than now.
The manifestation started with only 20 young people who began camping out on Sunday. It snowballed, began attracting a huge crowd and even triggered similar protests in Valencia, Bilbao, Barcelona, and other European cities. A big sign read: “In this country, you can camp out for a Justin Bieber concert and the last of the Twilight series, but not to defend your rights??” And I thought YES. Thank god somebody has realized something because for a while I’ve been tired of the way things are done in this country, the lack of seriousness and responsibility, the discrepancy between the salaries that big bosses take home plus the benefits they reap on top of that vs. the measly 700 euros that immigrants can make after working hours that some people haven´t worked in an entire lifetime.
There´s a reason why I have to bat the Corte Inglés employees off me like flies everytime I want to buy a chapstick (when they are not engaged in an intense debate about where the Bardem family should settle) whereas I almost have an aneurism each time I try getting serviced at a bank or when I try getting through for the 11th time in a row to any government office - maybe because it´s 1:50 and they all actually close at 2:00 so that these hard workers can savour a long lunch with some Ribera wine, and take a well-deserved long nap before calling it a day.
Generalizations are always generalizations, but people here want to live well without working hard and without aspiring to bigger things, especially these ridiculous politicians who only have their own agenda in mind, and whose promises run more freely from their mouths than the government money used to finance their idiosyncracies.
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