Art Battles Part II: Barcelona

I find that I do a weird thing in my head when traveling from one city to the next.  I mean, I hope it's not just me, but most people have a few distinct voices chattering away in their heads, no?  Tu sabes, the voice of reason, for instance, seems to be in constant discussion (and conflict) with the voice of primal urges. Well, I've noticed one of the voices in my head likes to stick loyal to a place to such a degree as to be fully prepared to not like anything else quite as much.  I think its a Taurus thing.  It's incredibly unreasonable I realize, but in the end how much control do we really have over what is being discussed inside our heads? So, upon leaving Madrid, I was quite enamored with the place and was of course fully prepared to like Barcelona - just not as much.

I guess I've always had that lame "root for the underdog" fixation where if something is extremely popular and well liked, I think there must be something wrong with it.  But can you blame me?  I mean, it's simply an over-reaction to looking around at popular culture and seeing nothing in the realm of the 'widely-celebrated' but a huge steaming pile of mierda.  However, I think this general theory of mine that says 'popular shit sucks' has been fading a bit with time.  I remember when the White Stripes came out and everybody was talking about them.  I thought, "If they're so popular they must really suck," and I never bothered to buy a record.   For years I blew them off, actually kinda liking the music when I heard it, but never allowing myself to fully appreciate it.  Here we are a decade later and I have every album and love every song.  What a jackass.

So I arrived in Barcelona deeply unimpressed.  Of course it only took a stroll through town for me to recall my last visit and fall completely back in love with the place. Yes, I did love Madrid!  I'm sorry, it's true.  I love you both!!  And Granada, si, tu tambien!  Oh boy, I'm in trouble now.  Well, here's a concept...  maybe it's ok to love them all in different ways.  There are endless ways to love.  I love Oriah. I love my mama. I love my brother and sister and their kids. I love (they only say this in America I think) a good coffee and a home-cooked meal.  These are all different kinds of "love" and they are all OK.

For the first few days we would stay at the hotel at La Maquinista - a monstrous mall complex that loomed like a corporate space station, all futuristic and gleaming in the sun. Its spanning walkways were open to the sky, lined on all sides with infinite troves of the American crap every Spaniard seemed aching to own. This is where the battles would take place and the hotel was part of it.   Once again, as upon our arrival in Madrid, I had to ask myself, "Why a mall?"

Suddenly I had an answer. I knew I was sent here for a reason and that I needed to learn or see something... this is always true.  But sometimes you really have to ponder it and who knows if that truth will remain as such through time, cause it rarely does.  But for now, true it was.  Es verdad. So what did I see when I looked out across the thousands of beautiful Spanish faces that pushed their way to the stage to see us perform on the massive circular stage in the center of La Maquinista?  Well, aside from it being a particular segment of the population - that is, the mall-going segment - resplendent with spiked Guido haircuts and pierced ears, eyebrows and lips, I saw a teeming throng of fully active consumers.

Here we were in proud España in the midst of it's great economic crisis and what did we see all around us? Literally thousands and thousands of people of all ages, dressed to the tee (albeit an odd off-kilter euro version of the Jersey Shore aesthetic) in crisp new expensive brand name clothes.  People were here spending lots of money. This "centro comercial" was a very popular place on the weekends. We could barely make our way to the stage.  And everyone, yes everyone, was there spending gobs of their hard earned Euros.

Crisis, shmisis!  Recession, reshmession!  Sure, some folks were having a hard time.  But exactly how accurate are the fear-driven facts that we are being so pumped full of?  Well, let me be clear. I am not an economist but to my uninformed eye, this particular economy was swinging. And in the city, were people complaining about the crisis?  Well, you bet they were!  People everywhere seem to bitch about money even when there ain't no recession.  But aside from that, what were the signs of crisis that we saw in Spain?  Not one.  There was not an excess of homeless people - by any means.  Everyone we spoke to spent what seemed like very little for their flat - and were all quite happy about it. They didn't work too hard - they're European after all and know from a good way of life.  So where was the crisis?  The trash was being picked up and the streets were squeaky clean.  The metro ran like clockwork with it's gleaming new trains arriving on the second - never late, never dirty or loud.  Everyone we encountered in every shop or bar seemed pretty damn happy.  Of course they did struggle at times, but things were okay.  Everybody struggles, right?

I really began to question this crisis.  Clearly there was a crisis somewhere - well, city hall, right?  But it wasn't on the streets.  People in Spain - at least the handful of cities and small villages we went to, were living a good life.  I'm sure there are areas that are harder hit, most likely the outlying towns probably in the south - but I think recession in Europe is different than in developing countries.

What this came down to for me was something I already knew but apparently needed to have reenforced in my psyche. It is the simple understanding that very few truths are universal.  Truth is individual.  Everyone has their own view of life, based on the standards they have established and set in their cranium and hence their own personal version of the "truth".  Once again, EVERYTHING comes back down to my favorite word: perception.  This has been the most persistent lesson for me over the past decade: that everything we experience as unique individuals is susceptible to the whim of our perception. And so we must learn to guide our perceptions in order to create a better life for ourselves.  Call it faith or belief or whatever you want but what it means is that you can create, recreate and completely rearrange your life, your situation for better or worse depending upon your thoughts, words and inner dialogue. For me - this is one universal truth.  And in keeping with my philosophy on the matter, I suppose it may not be true for everyone.  Well, let's just say I'm open to the possibility of that, although in this instance I believe this to be a law of nature and there's no way around it. But that's just my own experience and although I see the same causes and effects in other people's lives, I'm just a tiny bit open to the possibility of learning otherwise at some point.  I mean, we have to stay open to everything just a little bit, right?

But this is supposed to be about Barcelona. And so far we haven't even left the mall.  But we did in fact leave the mall.  Yes!  We crossed the bridge out of the bizarre, industrial pre-suburban sprawl surrounding La Maquinista into a lovely little barrio called Sant Andreu. We had the option of hopping the metro to the centro but decided we may as well walk and have a bite along the way. We walked all day - more than eight hours on foot.  We stopped for comida y cervezas along the way and slowly made our way to the center of the city.  My impressions of Madrid seemed to fade and blur in my memory as if there were only room for one city in my head.  I struggled to recall what it was I loved so much about Madrid, and I could remember places, faces and moments but the grip I had on it's essence began to fade as I became immersed in the bat-gothic, art nouveau elegance of beautiful Barcelona.

We walked and walked and walked until suddenly we turned a corner and bam! - on the horizon the surreal steeples of the insanely beautiful Gaudi masterwork, Sagrada Familia, loomed with powerful whimsical majesty above our heads.  If you've never been there, look it up - go there if you can. It's beyond belief of course, as with all of Gaudi's works, but this is his masterpiece, his life's culmination, and his theories on nature as the quintessential source of form are nothing less than pure genius.

We circled this grand 'cathedral on acid' in awe, the facade melting like an other-worldy drip-castle oozing through the stone impermanence of reality. We fought our way through the throngs of tourists, their naive comments topped by one Midwestern housewife who's stunningly cultured reaction to the cathedral was (in a heavy Chicagoan accent), "Oh it looks like the Magic Kingdom!"  Um.  Lady, you're lucky I'm a pacifist or I'd rip your friggin head off!  This is high art, not friggin Disney!  Joder!!!

After a few days of ArtBattles at La Maquinista, we were fortunate to be moving into a killer apartamento on Carrer de Ferran, right in the center of El Barrio Gotico just off La Rambla. This was Barcelona. This was where we had been taking the metro to every day now. And ahora - we lived here!   It was a huge flat, painstakingly decorated by our host who was, as I had been for years in NY, in the habit of renting her place out to tourists. It's a good racket. I lived off it for quite a while myself. (Don't tell anyone.)  And she did it right! There were different colored rooms with exotic mod light fixtures and artwork, not to mention the 2 bottles of champagne and the Belgian chocolates in the fridge. Nice touches.

We were on the top floor overlooking from our balcony the busy, touristy street below.  We also had rooftop access and could look out over much of the city. It was perfect and we all felt very much at home there. I admit, I liked it a bit less when I started waking up with bites on my legs from some hungry critters lodging in the couch that served as my bed, but you take the bad with the good and then you take all of your clothes to the sweet little old lady on the little tiny cobblestone street that's impossible to find and you thank the bedbugs for bringing you to meet such a cute friendly being who was sad to hear I wouldn't be coming to see her every week. She had a blind old dog and she waved, "Buenas tardes, Zito!  Buenas!  Zito!" as I ducked out of her little shop. As long as I remain uninfested, I like the places that bedbugs send me. That's just my way of looking at it. Maybe its not the popular view but its my perception.  Who knew you could be thankful for blood-sucking insects?  La vida es estraneo, no?

(Gracia, Barcelona)

I remembered a cool little plaza from my last visit and, with some help from my friend Mercedes, the local, raven-haired, Catalan goddess, we found it again.  It was a beautiful seedy little spot in the center of what would become our favorite barrio de Barcelona: Gracia. Gracia was up the hill from La Rambla y Placa Catalunya. It was out of the touristy fray and reminded me a lot of the old East Village. It was colorful, ragged and full of life. We sat in that plaza all night and partied with the locals. Our first night in Barcelona was a lot like our time in Madrid, just hangin out in plazas. But everybody knows, that's where life in the city is... in la calle.

(our new Moroccan friends)

We entered the Art Battles arena every Thursday, Friday and Saturday and to our amazement, thousands of people showed up to watch.  It was a large circular red stage in the center of the bewilderingly humungous complex and we looked up at two levels of audience far above the main crowd on all sides. It was nuts.  Everyone on stage was spraying aerosol except me. So I had the run of the acrylic paint surplus to my own damn self.  A battalion of easels supported the several large canvases that stood in the spotlight and every night (and twice on Saturdays) we painted our way through two 40-minute sets.  One evening we set 4 huge canvases on the stage in a giant cube. It was a solo battle (as opposed to a team collaboration) and I was fully prepared to kill. I decided to come on stage wearing my long-beaked carnivale mask that I had picked up the day before and painted with Poscas. When Flaco, our mildly jaded, extremely hyper Neuyorican MC, called me to the stage, "Representando Nueva York... El unico!  El Peligroso!  Zito!", I jumped up from no-where with my creepy shnozz mask under a black hoody and boy, I must have freaked a few kids out.

I had earned the name Peligroso in Madrid because I'd recently become a complete spazz during live painting events and, sorry everybody but please step back cuz the paint does get to flyin pretty regularly.  When I walked off the stage after the first set, I had already left a massive, multi-colored footprint in front of my painting.  By the end of the second set, I was usually swimming in my shoes and there were angry Spanish djs with newly-spattered, expensive jackets cursing my name: ¡El Peligroso!

I had been to Encants, a wonderfully seedy open market in Glóries, just before the show and had found a little stack of old Catalan books that I brought with me to the stage.  The books were yellowed, old children's fables of a Christian bent and their crumbling pages lifted from the spine with ease.  As i flipped through them trying to determine their usefulness, a couple of Moroccan guys blasted past in a hurry, frantically shooting glances over their shoulders.  Just as they disappeared, a couple of uniformed members of La Guardia Urbana bolted off in the same direction.  Of course, I rooted for the criminals, whose crimes I assumed were petty mercado ones and as they faded into the crowd, I returned to my excavations. I unearthed a big, disheveled, three-ring binder that had obviously been put together by some old Catalan abuelita. It was full of images of the Virgin Mother that I imagined her collecting and clipping out of magazines. There were funerary announcements, likely of her friends and family, and strange Catalan words printed poster style on sheets of white paper.  I wasn't sure of the meaning of the Spanish word 'oculto' which appeared throughout, but it seemed most certainly old world Catholic and, with most of that stuff, it creeped me out a bit.  It just reeked of Inquisition.  Irony intact, I took all this beautiful collage material with me to the stage.  Sean, in an effort to keep the tour afloat, had bought clear acrylic gel medium which he asked me to use on my canvases to mix down with the paint - to get more mileage out of what we had. But there was no stopping me. Once I got up there, I was full-throttle and everybody ran for cover.  I'm not exaggerating.  The dj had a plastic dropcloth over his turntables and was no longer sporting his Sunday best. Flaco would flinch, duck and run every time I turned around.  Of course that only made me want to get him.

(detail from my first live collage painting)

But the gel medium really did come in handy. The day I decided to first bring the collage element into the live pieces, I grabbed up two large clear catsup bottles of gel and, wielding them like six-guns, I sprayed the canvas with them from ten feet away.  They made a furious splashing and splattering causing the crowd to whoop and leap back with fright.  At the last minute I had decided I would paint from one of the photos from the abuelita's book.  It was a shot of one of those overblown Spanish madonnas, with more bling on her halo than half of Brooklyn.  I sketched out a basic layout of 'madonna and child' then started ripping pages from the book and pasting these wonderful bits of Catalan catholic schoolin up onto the canvas as flesh tone where their faces would be.  And the gel held the pages safely in place.  Once I'd filled those areas, I got back to the brushes and started hefting great gobs of azure at the canvas like if I didn't cover it quick it would destroy us all.  It was super fun, that's for sure.  The halo was going on thicker and thicker - layers of yellow, ochre and white were sticking out from the surface by a full inch.  I hadn't considered the top right corner of the piece but suddenly decided to throw a very heavy cloud up there and then draw an all seeing eye in it with the handle of the brush.  It was as thick as cake frosting - a big eye in a cloud of whipped cream floating above our favorite single mother.  It was for me, so far, the best piece of the tour. I had a lot of fun painting it and was happy when it was all over to look at the thing and say, "Hey. That's actually alright." Because believe me, when you're up there just slinging goo, you really have no concept of how these things really look.  And afterwards, when you do you see the "finished" piece, sometimes you hardly recognize it.  And sometimes parts of it are just flippin awful.

For whatever reason, we moved back to the hotel at La Maquinista after 10 wild and crazy days on Carrer de Ferran. The last night there, while everyone else dozed in their beds, my old NYC pal Ally and I painted with Poscas on a mannequin far into the sunrise. She had been living in Andalusia for the past 11 years and we had a lot of catching up to do. We listened to old Bowie and drew all sorts of colorful weirdness all over that poor torso.  Of course we left it, along with a handful of other paintings, for our host who seemed genuinely thrilled by our gifts.

After 2 nights back in the plasticky hotel, we were once again thrilled to be packing and moving back to the barrio. I couldn't have been more pleased at where we would spend our last week. We were a few floors up on a tiny quiet street deep in El Barrio Gotico and we all loved it. There were two adjoining apartments there with two amazing balconies outside tall glass doors with wooden shutters on the inside. Across the narrow way, we looked right into the neighbors homes. I gawked fascinated as I became an involuntary voyeur of a perfect little Barcelona apartamento. An adorable little Spanish girl, her dark curls flying behind her, swung happily on a hammock.  A stunningly elegant, black-haired, Catalan woman leaned over the plants of her balcony chatting on the phone in a lacy black blouse with several large silver rings on her tan fingers. A colorful house cat strolled softly through the bars of the balcony rail amidst the plants and the legs of the young mother.  In the window below, a dread-locked artisan girl worked steadily at weaving shawls on a triangular loom. I watched her day after day weaving away in her little "taller". Another window exposed a group of dark haired tourists, clicking away at their laptops and smoking cigarillos on the balcony. As with everywhere there were banners and flags of the Catalan independence movement draped from the rails. Up from the corners of the street the jubilant voices of tipsy bar patrons echoed off the stone walls and into our balcony. Our last place, on Carrer de Ferran, had been a busy street crowded with tourists at most times. But here, on the tiny, block-long bit of street named Carrer de Milans, we were really in the heart of old Barcelona.  I couldn't have dreamed it any more perfect.

But we rarely stayed in. Although there was quite a bit of rain during our final week, we walked the ancient streets incessantly. We had been in Spain so long now - more than a month - that the novelty of it almost lifted from time to time and I almost glimpsed the whiff of jadedness that comes with being in a place for a while. You can get used to anything over time and it's a little sad when that fresh unfettered enthusiasm inevitably fades. But it didn't really.  I only noticed myself imagining what it would be like.

I began chatting with Oriah in NY about possibly moving to Barcelona for a few years. She heard in my voice how much I loved it and she agreed that she would probably feel the same about it. We were lucky that we appreciated many of the same things. Over and over I wished she were there with me to experience all this great city had to offer.  But it was what it was, so I would scout it out and bring her there to see it for herself someday soon.

The battles at Maquinista raged on. Week after week, I would suit up in my dearly departed friend Lincoln's striped trousers and my white sleeveless tee with eyes painted on the front and back, with my paint spattered (um... covered) formerly black chucks and bizarre beaked masquera to take the stage as El Peligroso.  I felt very at home on stage doing my thing. And I truly made the most of it.  Aside from the live paintings we all were racking up from our performances, we would constantly be taken outside the city by our new Spanish friend, El Nino de las Pinturas, and the other graffiti writers from the area to paint massive pieces on concrete walls. This was not illegal activity though. So many areas in Spain were heavily covered with graff pieces and we drove out to these spots in a haze of hashish smoke and painted these huge integrated murals into nightfall. We left many a mark across the Spanish countryside and these were some of the most vividly memorable moments of an insanely colorful journey. I remain eternally thankful to El Nino and all his buddies for being our truest guides through their beautiful country.

I only hope that when El Nino makes it to NY as a result of winning the most battles in Spain, that I can return the favor. But as of now, I'm wracking my brain trying to come up with something just half as cool. Luckily everyone from Europe seems wildly impressed with NYC so I guess that will work in our favor. But I get the feeling that even in my own city, El Nino will be showing me around a little bit.