Picasso, et al.

The first thing I see when I walk in is a faceless, featureless Christ on the cross. Raised Jewish, it took some time to appreciate the powerful symbol that is christ on the cross. It´s become one of my favorites. I love new interpretations of that image.

Strange, this museum dynamic. `I have been here, and I´ve got the brochures to prove it!´ They, ha, we, move amongst these deified images searching for ones that are familiar to us so we can say Aha! That one! take a picture and move on. Then you get home and you can say, you know THAT one? I saw it! I did!

The fallacy in touring the museums of the world, going to each perhaps just once, is that most people are fitting it into a schedule. They don´t have to time to soak in everything. Fuck, even if they did I don´t know that they would have the desire to. Tourism is masturbation on an international scale.

Overheard: `Is Picasso the one that went crazy?´ hahahahahahaha!!!!!

Picasso is a dirty man. Some of these sketches are downright filthy.

But boy, he gets around, as far as trying everything once. Reminds me of what Hemingway and Faulkner talked about in their Nobel speeches, about going further with your art and pushing yourself to go to new places. Picasso is a case study in artistic development.

I love how he doesn´t commit himself to symmetry when painting humans forms, how he glorifies our quirks and celebrates the strangeness of our forms.

Basilica di Barcelona

Tourism turns everything into a business.

At the ticket window a group of obnoxious brits create a stir because they have nothing with which to cover their shoulders. I watch, appalled, as they look at the church employees and scream, ´That´s stupid! Stupid! Your church needs money and it´s not getting ours! Stupid! Bye bye! bye bye!´

I can understand amused disappointment perhaps, but red hot anger like this...jesus. I mean, it´s an issue of respect, no matter how much I think it´s silly that God doesn´t want to see female shoulders. Female shoulders can be quite beautiful, I think he´d be proud. Though, those brits had skin like Kentucky corn huskers that spent days getting sprayed by DDT in cropdusters.

Sitting in this pew I must say, they´re missing out.

I may not be a fan of the religions that spawned churches such as these but the structures themselves inspire both awe and respect in me. Somewhere far beneath the dogma and the closed-mindedness of it all, this was all born out of sheer amazement and delight in the strange mysteries of life. They named it God, that´s fine. All things end up with names. The mistake is when they began to decide that their way of knowing God was the right away. Jews, Muslims, Christians. All idiots in their own ways.

Still, these Cathedrals and all their symbols are undeniably beautiful to me. My friends and family are (and raised me to be) disilliusioned with and disinterested in faith, religion and spirituality. Here and now though, I am quite certain I have faith. I just choose not to delve into what my faith is about. It´s enough for me knowing that I have it. It isn´t in anything, it´s in everything. There is meaning wherever you choose to find it, and it is what you make of it.

Sagrada Familia

My second church of the day is Gaudi´s La Sagrada Familia. Amazing. A church for all human kind. I feel like I´ve travelled through time and philosophy and evlution from a bastion of antiquated Christian thought to a church for a future we´re still giving birth to. It is a church of shape and color, of curves. A cavern of light. A hall where right angels are eschewed in favor of organic melting walls. I love that it´s incomplete, still under construction. If I designed a church, it would be ever-changing and never meet a moment of completion.


Nighttime now. Once more I prowl Las Ramblas in search of eye contact. No idea how to make friends. I approach a man wearing a pinstriped Yankee Jersey and smile big and say Go Yankees! He looks at me like I´m fucking insane.

Later on I walk down a side street filled with Hip-Hop shops. Guess what the Hip Hop shops sell? More NY Yankees memorabilia than the NY Yankee store on fifth avenue. I realize my Johnny Damon shirt means something completely different in Barcelona and start laughing aloud on the street.

To the waterfront, and I buy an Estrella Damm, the only beer anyone seems to drink in this city. I love you can drink out in the open here. Beer on the waterfront.

There are tiny fish like little white maggots fluttering about near where the pier becomes the water, giving the illusion that it´s raining all around us, ripples exploding with their tiny movements. Peering closer there are darker, bigger bodies skimming the surface of the water, playing like they´re shadows of pedestrians walking the planks above. They suddenly dart towards the congregated aquamaggots, swallowing some and scattering the rest.

I sit here and then I walk the pier, all the while clutching this book like it´s all I have. Kind of refreshing. It´s been a while since words and paper felt this important.


Thought: The Sense of Self is an instinctual self-defense mechanism. Humans have developed such complex social habits and layers of consciousness that we develop our Selves as a preservation against simply going insane in the presence of It All. We are at an important juncture. Society is making it more and more possible to become who you want to be rather than fitting some sort of pre-conceived social mold. Yay Democracy. America. Fuck yeah.

So our brains have become sponges for information. We swallow everything we´re given, but I wonder how many of us really look at all that info with a critical eye. We´re losing our control over selves, losing it to advertising. This seems like old hat, rehashed lyrics lifted out of Chuck Palahniuk but it´s true. WHat´s sad is that we have a choice in all of it but our spongy brains, they just love shiny things, and TV and billboards fit that so perfectly, don´t they? A bunch of grown up baby clamoring for shiny things, that´s all we are.

Miller said AMerica would drag everyone down with her, I don´t know if I can make such a proclamation yet but we are surely on our way to being a failed experiment.

What to do, alone? Keep drinking. This shit will be illegibile soon.

Two whores come and share the bench with me. Out of the corner of my eye I see them trying to grab my attention, rubbing oils on their arms and smoking hash, blowing the smoke against the wind and towards me. Fuck if this city isn´t just filled to the brim with whores.

Sometimes it´s just right to be sad.

I come to the cafe at the Plaza Sant Antoni, around the corner from my flat, the buzz from the Estrella Damms wearing off. I sit and drink outside, and decide I´ll do so until they shut down for the night.

A lot happening in the brain, how will I ever be able to communicate all this?

Sometimes everything swells up with a song and energy just flushes all throughout me like a chakra overload and I look to the skies expecting the whole thing to just explode. I´m on my knees in my mind, speaking in tongues and crying out to gods both new and old and undiscovered, ready to go on. And of course it all just passes away into something else. One more song is one more breath is one more moment coming to an unbearably beautiful crescendo. Forever and forever, amen.