The Point At Infinity

Am now back in the apartment I call home until I find a better name for it or find a better place.

When I awake, remind me to
1) Sort my mail
2) Find a charger for the other cell phone; apparently, the one I thought was my charger...has a European plug. No, not what I need now.
3) Fix my old netbook's operating system; also, optionally, my new netbook's operating system.
4) Tell the story of (a) the sangria (b) the customs adventures on both sides of the Atlantic (c) the race car driver.

For now, sleep time, for it is 4 am in Spain, and I need to persuade my brain not to wake up until the fairly godly time of 6:15 am Eastern Prevailing, you hear me, body, Eastern Prevailing!

Good night.

Thinking of getting paella, just to say that we did, for our last dinner in Madrid, we asked the concierge downstairs to recommend good restaurants close by. Of course, he recommended the one in the hotel as being close by and pretty good, and then, one called La Finca de Susana, on the next block.

We went to La Finca; its menu showed surprisingly adequate prices --- nothing above 10 euros. If we assume that the prices in Spain are just like Canada, only in euros, food is amazingly cheap; for a restaurant of that class and style in Toronto or Ottawa, I would have assumed a menu ranging from $9.95 to $35.95 or so (which proves that I've spent too long in Toronto with a meal allowance and a thirst for various ways to spend it, which is another story.)( Read more... )

 The vacation is winding down. We slept in for a while, because my brother went clubbing last night --- I had been up at seven so I did not go by that point, as I cannot afford to adapt to the Madrid lifestyle clock as well as its timezone; instead I was already in bed, because I am so boring, and read Soldier of Fortune magazines.

Yeah, their political alignment is so far from mine it is ridiculous, but I have to admit that there is some sense to the value system they operate from. And the ads are fun. There is an interesting serial column on law enforcement in the magazine that I found well worth reading. 

Today we went grocery shopping, ate, and then went back to the park and rented a rowboat again. However, this time our ride was earlier, the sun was higher in the sky, and even though I was wearing a hat, I got a headache. I used to know the symptoms of sunstroke and heat exhaustion, but that was a long time ago. Rest assured that I am drinking lots of water, and will probably be fine. 

So, general observations on Madrid:

Old Madrid seems to have the circular-radial spiderweb layout, but unlike Moscow, the classic example of this layout, there is no one hub to the spiderweb, but multiple ones, the various plazas and puertas of the old city, leaving to a tangled cobweb of streets, with turns at the oddest angles. Except in the Salamanca region; looking at the map of Madrid, I quipped that the Salamanca region is where the urban planners actually found themselves some graph paper and put it to good use.

The people adapt to the summer heat not by dress so much as by very tactical use of the shaded sides of the street. In an effort to emulate them, my brother particularly grew quite adept at navigating the narrower alleys of the cobweb, where they were narrow enough to be shady on both sides.

There are a lot of beggars, particularly people who are visibly disabled, and it makes me sad. In the Canadian cities I have lived in, panhandlers generally look able-bodied, and from what I have heard, tend to be addicts or mentally ill. Here it is the physically disabled who seem to fall through the social cracks; Spain has a socialist system, but not enough, it seems, probably particularly at this time, when unemployment overall is sky-high.

There are also a lot of buskers, ranging across karaoke, classical guitar, erhu, cello, electric guitar, drums, jazz clarinet, or jazz trumpet. My brother tells of an eighty-year-old woman played "Besame Mucho" on the violin in Puerta del Sol at one in the morning. We passed an accordeon and a violin playing the "Habanera" from Carmen when we were on the way to the Royal Palace. I almost sang along, but my brother asked me to stop. The buskers seem to be enjoying themselves more, and are generally pretty good; some sell CDs.

There is a LOT of graffiti. Including in weird places like on bushes, on the domes of buildings, and, I swear, on the wheels of subway cars. There are signs that the street cleaners attempt to remove it, but not enough. Mostly slogans; not a Banksy among them; we did once encounter a couple of rather poetic ones by someone apparently lovestruck: "You exist, you are, I believe in you; that is enough for me." And I noted the supreme irony of a graffito on a public park bench saying "Madrid bonito," pretty Madrid. But mostly, they're illegible, just annoying. 

Ham is, indeed, assumed to be part of the diet. We mostly, as I said, bought groceries and assembled sandwiches, but I can see how eating out for a vegetarian, or someone who keeps kosher or halal, would be quite challenging. The hotel continental breakfast, though well-served, was monotonous, and generally carb-heavy, although it also included ham.

 We stopped back at the hotel and decided to go to the Archeological Museum, and as the National Library is in the same building, and apparently my brother is already a fan of Spain's National Library, we will visit that as well.

The National Library's Museum entrance also featured a security scanner, and a receptionist who tried speaking to me in halting English before discovering to her relief that I understood Spanish pretty well.

So there was an exhibit on the Moriscos, the Moors in Spain who had been forced to convert or be exiled by the Christians after the conquest of Granada.

The exhibit was mostly books, and books in Arabic to boot, but I thoroughly (for once) read the Spanish texts above them. It's a library; you gotta read, right? Even though I am aware that I read Spanish much more slowly than English or Russian, and it frustrates me. But I learned some interesting things, like the fact that there were networks smuggling forbidden books around Morisco communities when all books in Arabic script were prohibited and many were destroyed --- even though many of those books were Spanish transliterated into Arabic script, the so-called 'aljamiados', as the Moors living in Andalusia gradually forgot how to speak Arabic fluently. The Toledo guide had pointed that out too, that at the time of the Reconquista, the Moors were not Arabic; they were not African; they were Spanish.

From the exhibit, we went to the display of the library museum proper. The history of writing across various languages (Baruch Hashem, their Hebrew was displayed right side up) including, cool, Phoenician. A display on Braille text and the writing boards used for that. A really neat display on old music recording and playback devices, which allowed you to listen to each of them. Antique typewriters that had only 22 letters for Spanish and were not QWERTY. Printing presses and their history, including Gutenberg typecases. A display of the bookbinding art, including gorgeous books that had won the National Bookbinding Competition in 1995 and 1996 (which supports my thesis that whatever you can possibly imagine, there are people who do it very very well, and there is a competition in it.) A 1989 Macintosh that looked hopelessly quaint. 

Fascinating.

The Archeological Museum is on the other side of the building, but there is no way through, so we had to go around.

The Museum was a little bit of a disappointment, because, alas, I've been to the British Museum and more than once. We did not find a replica of the caves at Altamira, which was what I had been hoping to see; we did see the Lady of Elx and the other Roman ruins (sorry, it seems that seeing Numancia has soured me forever from enthusiasm about Romans in Spain, which is no good). They had a lovely collection of Greek vases, as well as 17th and 18th century porcelain; some beautifully preserved gold coins of Greece, Rome, and Iberia; and some lovely Visigothic jewelry. But all in all, it was smaller than I had thought. Oh well, it was free, and I did learn something.

 It's no longer my feet, it's my knees and back. At least in both of these cases I can tell it's muscles and tendons hurting --- ligaments and spine would have been way worse. 

My brother and I spent five hours walking around the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art. 

First of all, I LOVE the architecture of the Reina Sofia, even though it is one of those buildings where an old building got a glass-and-steel structure built next to it and moulded with it. The glass-and-steel part is awesome, even though the elevators, within columns of glass, gave me vertigo. I took a lot of photos just of it. 

The SITE building at the University of Ottawa tries to imitate this style, I think, and I think I appreciate the architecture of that building more now that I am no longer a student there.

First of all, we went into the exhibition on The Potosi Principle. In short, it is about exploitation of workers by the capitalist system. In long...it is a series of 32 exhibits in various media, from oil paintings to videos to glass bottles to interactive computer maps to texts, ordered in a knotwork pathway around a room that you need a program book with commentary to go through. Sometimes the program book makes you return to a previous exhibit to look at it a bit more. It covers silver mine workers in Potosi, Bolivia, throughout history; migrant workers in China, illegal immigrant workers in Dubai, the influence of the Catholic church, the plight of women, the destruction of quipu and the knowledge of reading them, the way Russians were taught English using the writings of Karl Marx, etc. etc.  changeofthemoon would have enjoyed it a great deal, I think. 

My favourite part of it was a Russian film with Spanish and English subtitles, a Brechtian songspiel on the proposed building of a 403-metre skyscraper by Gazprom in St. Petersburg, in imitation of Dubai. And the film is available online (I haven't checked if the subtitles are there, due to bandwidth limits, but given that the blog entry is in English, they should be). Thirty minutes. Recommended. 

Out of there we went into the modern art itself, displayed in somewhat more traditional format.
( Long discussion of Picasso and other modern art and what it measn to me )

"One thing I'm wondering," I said on the walk back, "all those paintings, sculptures, photographs --- and there is not a single item of digital art? Why not?"

Well, there were a couple of exhibits in the Potosi Principle that could sort of count, but not really. Really, there are absolutely stunning digital artworks being created out there. Is even the modern art scene conservative? Anyone closer to it than I am that can tell me where there are physical galleries of stunning works of Photoshop and Corel Draw? 

So...as soon as I post about being an Internet ganglion again, my Internet conkers out.

So a lot of yesterday and today was spent trying to figure out what's wrong, without using the Internet.
( Read more... )

 This was written in near real time yesterday. I will need to go back and fix the special characters later:
( The World Cup Final in Madrid )

My feet were beginning to complain by the time we went to the Prado, which is a pretty good walk from the Royal Palace.
( Read more... )

Paintings that I wrote down that I liked:

Nicholas Poussin's Saint Cecilia
Miichel Coxcie, Saint Cecilia also (I like music, in case you haven't noticed)
Mor, Pejeron the Buffoon (somehow the court paintings of the buffoons made them very sad people)
Quentin Massys, Christ Shown To The People
Joaquin Sorolla, And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive  (it shows two fishermen trying to revive a dying young fisherman)
Antonio Gisbert, The Execution of Torrijos
Raimundo de Madrazo, Aline Masson (there were two portraits of her I liked; Wikimedia only has the one with a white mantilla)
Emilio Sala, Expulsion of the Jews (this was the first time a painting conveyed to me how the Catholic kings actually felt when they did it, and how did Torquemada feel; it does not excuse the act, but...)

and some others I can't find on Wikimedia right now.

Please let me know of any mistaken links.

But yes, I can say I've seen Titian and Tintoretto and Rembrandt and Caravaggio.

And Goya's Black Paintings.

Goya ended up going the same way Turner did; I first met Goya when one of the things I brought back from my first trip to Spain was a stationery set featuring his paintings, on sale. By the end of the Museo del Prado, I can recognize a Goya dead on at twenty paces --- and I skipped ten rooms of Goya.

At Segovia, those of the tour people who would be provided with lunch broke off to the designated restaurant, while the rest of us were given a generous hour and a quarter to find lunch ourselves as we please and then meet in the shade by the aqueduct. My brother's and my tour package not including the lunch option, we had the foresight to pack sandwiches.

The aqueduct:

The aqueduct seems to be Segovia's most famous  landmark. A stunningly well-preserved artifact of Roman times, it was built mortarless (except for at the top where there is new construction with mortar) and t rises gracefully over the eighteenth-nineteenth-century buildings of that area of Segovia. Looking at it through the alleys, a series of arches framing empty space, obviously alien...

"It's a stargate!" I burst out.

My brother later admitted that the alienness of the thing made him feel annoyed at the Romans for plonking it down in the middle of the city where it doesn't belong. I grinned and told him of the Viennese palace,  that I had brought up in conversation a couple of weeks before, that has Roman excavations going on in its courtyard, and how my first thought was, "Dumb Romans, to go and build stuff right in the courtyard of a Viennese palace."

( More on the aqueduct, the Cathedral of Segovia, and how I learned to stop worrying and respect castle moats )

My legs were aching on the descent down to the bus, and there ends my summary, without pictures that, even with my meager photography skills, can tell a thousand words, of our visits to Avila and Segovia.

Besides our logistics, my brother and I are actually doing cultural-type things.

On Wednesday, we went to the museum at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Unfortunately, I admit I could not find my camera in my handbag and thought that I forgot it, so I did not take any pictures. But there was a fascinating exhibition showing the process of restoring various sculptures and drawings --- each work of art will be shown with a poster about its restoration process right beside it. You definitely look with new eyes at the more traditional art in the rest of the gallery once you have some idea (some, because the posters were all in Spanish) of the backbreaking work that goes into turning back the clock and making it look like it was only recently done.

Of the paintings in the rest of the exhibition, my favourites were that of the Marquesa de Llano, of the great soprano castrato Farinelli, which actual painting I cannot find online at the moment, and the Knight's Dream; the latter strongly reminded me of the Flanders Panel book that Ms_danson gave me; it is just asking to have a novel written about it. My brother, too, found the Knight's Dream quite impressive.

So learning about the restoration techniques made me far more impressed when we saw El Greco's masterpiece The Burial of Count Orgaz today in Toledo, and learned that it has never been restored; it looks just like that. I carefully refrained from illicitly taking photos, aware of how much damage a painting can suffer. Four by three metres, that painting really is impressive in the flesh, even though I had seen reproductions many times before.

( More on Toledo, egregious errors, and soul searching )