Hive Mind Travels

Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands...It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family... - Barnaby Conrad III (via Wikipedia)

Outlawed in the early 1900's due to it's supposed deleterious and hallucinogenic effects, absinthe (pronounced "absenta" in Catalan) is back and legal in much of Europe.

Apparently, the art of absinthe manufacture was all but lost, and the distillers had to reverse engineer aspects of the process by chemically analyzing the residue of old casks, but they appear to have nailed it. Mark Linneman and I enjoyed several glasses at a small pub near our flat. (We spent a couple great days and nights hanging out with our friends from home, Mark and Kelly, who only semi-coincidentally were in Barcelona at the same time as we.)

Absinthe fills the glass clear, pale green when served, and comes over ice with a spoon, a sugar cube and a small bottle of water. We dipped the sugar cube in the absinthe, set spoon and soaked cube across the mouth of the glass and lit the cube on fire. In the rosy gloom and hum of the pub, the small, steady blue flame of the absinthe and caramelizing sugar was hypnotizing.

When it burnt completely, we dropped the cube down into the glass, added a few splashes of water (which turned the drink from clear to milky) and enjoyed. The flavor was like a strong, alcoholic licorice (fennel and licorice are the two main ingredients, along with grande wormwood, source of the supposed hallucinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals).

The quality of the drunk was definitely different. It's hard to characterize precisely. It's a strong drink, ringing in around 120 - 150 proof, so there's certainly a fair amount of just plain old drunkenness at work, but it's not like a beer drunk or a wine drunk. There was a loose giddiness about it, and conversation and laughter came quick and easy.

I wouldn't say it was hallucinogenic, but walking the street afterwards, things seemed a bit off-kilter and surreal. Of course, the streets of Barcelona at night can feel that way stone cold sober, so who's to say.

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Awesome, awesome graffiti in Barcelona. There are two types I've been enjoying: shop door and paste on.

All the shops of roll down metal door and, in an apparent attempt to discourage would be artless taggers, the owners have hired artful artists to spray quality designs on the doors. They are on nearly every door, it seems, and they're all very beautiful.

The second kind we saw in France, a bit, as well, and I guess it's not technically graffiti. Rather, it's pre-printed art that is cut out and glued to surfaces. Check it out.

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Visits to the Dali museum in Figueres and to Dali's house in Cadaques grew my appreciation for the artist. Previously, I'd regarded him as a bit of a niche artist, darling of the acid-trippers, but otherwise a one-trick pony.

So wrong.

Some of the standouts:

• The many works he's done in which he copies (parodies?) the styles of other artists. Perhaps it was practice and educational for him to try each style, but to see paintings in the style of Picasso, Matisse, Bosch, Van Gogh, Serat, Escher, rooms in the style of Versailles, all with a slightly surrealist twist seemed instead to say "I could do that!"
• The optical illusions and stereopticons were a joy. Kneeling down and staring into a mirror that allowed you to merge two nearly identical paintings into a third, or standing 3 meters and 9 meters away from a giant abstraction and see it melt into a tiger or "3 Lenins disguised as Chinese" or the paintings that were made to be viewed as a reflection in a round, silver bottle all positively made me giggle.
• The diversity of his work: paintings, drawings, kinetic sculptures, jewelry, holograms, and on and on...
• The room (not by Dali himself, but in homage) in which you walked to the top of a staircase and looked down and suddenly the couch and paintings and other furniture merged into a perfect face (of Mae West), framed by a gigantic wig.
• At his house, we saw that he always painted sitting down, and had rigged an easel that allowed him to lower a painting into the floor so he could reach the top.

The stroll to Dali's house through the old, peaceful little sea town of Cadaques (where we stayed for a couple days) was a warm, relaxing morning and put us in the mood to have to have a bit of fun once there. See if you can spot it.

Yay Dali! Yay Dali!

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If you've been to Barcelona, it's changed since you were here. Really. Even if you were here last week.

Of course, the old town is still an ant farm of twisting, impossibly narrow alley-like streets, a warren of canyons threading through leaning towers of laundry-filled balconies, gothic and baroque facades, grinning and snarling gargoyles, centuries-old walls, tiny, mysteriously misshapen plazas and each turn still leaves you delightfully lost, dismayed and bewildered.

The shops, though, are increasingly new. Where there used to be seed stores and butchers and mattress shops mixed in amongst the boutiques, galleries, cafes and restaurants, increasingly there are world-wide recognizable brand-names in the windows: H&M, Diesel, Levi's, Zara, and their European equivalents, Desigual, Springfield, C&A. Gelato shops have popped up by the dozens, high-end chocolate ("xocolati") shops crowd churro fryers, and the inevitable Starbucks has planted its flag.

I really don't mean to be one of those "it was cooler before it was discovered" hipsters, and I'm not. Barcelona is lively and awesome and we're having a great time. We gape in amazement at the doorways preemptively graffiti-ed with fantastic designs and scenes to ward off the taggers, thrill at the profusion of tiny, independent little shops crammed into every hole in the wall, stuff ourselves with the pintxos, tapas and bocadillos and simply wile away the days getting lost in the meandering bustle.

Burnt on the constant moving we did through France, we were enormously relieved to settle down in Barcelona. We spent one night when we first arrived with couchsurfing hosts, the affable, excitable Sven and Sybille, but have since spent seven days relaxed in our own studio flat, complete with our own bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room area, balcony, washer / dryer, all for a very reasonable 50€ / day.

The location is excellent. We're in the old section of town just 50m or so from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA, en Catalan), and an apparent mecca for skateboarders. At all hours of the night and day (more on that later), the square is filled with kids, ranging from barely old enough to walk to teenagers to thirty-somethings flipping their boards and twisting their bodies on the giant slate plaza.

It's been a source of great entertainment for us, always good for a brief watch on our way in and out. As a bonus, I'm able to cadge an open wifi network in one corner of the square, so it makes for good background while I check my e-mail in the evening.

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